The achievement gap is very prevalent in my school on a day-to-day basis. From the lack of minority students taking honors classes, to the over abundance of minority students occupying the hallways during valuable class time, the continuously nagging minority achievement gap prevails.
Upon entering LaFollette High School, there are visible traces of the achievement gap all throughout the halls. It seems as if there is always a presence of a minority student in the hallway no matter what the time of day. At any time during the school day there are at least 10 to 15 students, many of whom are minorities, wandering the halls aimlessly. These students residing in the halls are either a result of getting kicked out of class due to behavior issues, or for some, the case may be that they simply never cared to go to class at all. This familiar scene causes some staff to assume that all minority students that are seen in the halls during class time are not invested in their education. These assumptions are then translated back to the classroom where teachers then lower their expectations for these students and students who appear to be like them.
While there are some students of color who would rather spend their school time in the halls instead of in the classroom, others wish for the opportunity to be seen as focused students. Sadly many bright and capable minority students are being overlooked because teachers see them as simply another unmotivated student to be pushed through the system. Being a high achieving minority student in the Madison school District continues to be somewhat of a rarity--even in 2014. Three out of the four classes I am taking this semester at La Follette High School, which uses the four-block schedule, are honors or advanced courses. Of the 20 to 25 students in those honors classes, I am one of a total of two minority students enrolled.
Even though a large percentage of the student body is made up of minority students, very few of theses students are taking honors or advanced classes. These honors courses provide students with necessary skills that help prepare them for college. These skills include: critical thinking, exposure to a wider variety of concepts, and an opportunity to challenge their own mental capacities in ways that non-honors courses don't allow. This means that the majority of the schools' population is not benefiting from these opportunities. Instead, they are settling for lower-level courses that are not pushing them to the best of their abilities.
It is unfortunate that so many of our community's young people are missing out on being academically challenged in ways that could ultimately change their lives. This all too familiar issue is a complex community problem with no simple solutions. However it is one that should be addressed with the appropriate sense of urgency.
Robin Mwai is a Sophomore at LaFollette High School and serves as a staff writer for Dane County's Teen Newspaper Simpson Street Free Press. Deidre Green is a LaFollette High School Graduate and is now a UW-Madison Senior. She is also a graduate of Simpson Street Free Press and now serves as Managing Editor.
Re "Even Gifted Students Can't Keep Up" ("Numbers Crunch" series, editorial, Dec. 15): Educators know that when the curriculum is set at an optimal difficulty level, students learn to persist, attend carefully and gain self-confidence. For mathematically gifted students, the curriculum must move more quickly and in greater depth so that they can become disciplined, resilient students.
When the mathematically gifted sons and daughters of affluent, well-educated parents are not challenged, their parents spend considerable amounts of time and money finding tutors, summer programs and online courses. As a psychologist who has worked for more than 20 years with the families of gifted students, I have seen how much time and money is required for this effort.
For mathematically gifted students from poorer families, there is neither the time nor the money to seek educational opportunities outside the public schools. A weak public school system without flexibility or adequate challenge can seriously limit the educational experiences and lifetime employment opportunities of these students. A weak public school system ultimately limits quality education to those few whose parents can pay for it privately.
The College Board, sponsor of the SAT, says that roughly six out of 10 college-bound high school students who took the test were so lacking in their reading, writing and math skills, they were unprepared for college level work.
The College Board is calling for big changes to better prepare students for college and career.
Stagnant Scores
The average SAT score this year was 1498 out of a possible 2400. It's been roughly the same for the last five years.
"And we at the College Board are concerned," says David Coleman, the board's president.
In a conference call with reporters, Coleman said his biggest concern is the widening gap in scores along racial and ethnic lines. This year Asian students had the highest overall average scores in reading, writing and math, followed by whites, and then Latinos. Black students had the lowest average scores. Coleman said it's time to do something about it, not just sit back and report how poorly prepared students are for college and career.
"Simply put, the College Board will go beyond simply delivering assessments to actually transforming the daily work that students are doing," Coleman says.
Coleman wants to work with schools to make coursework tougher and make sure students have access to more demanding honors and advanced placement courses, because right now, most students don't. Most worrisome of all, Coleman says, "minority students, underrepresented students, have less access." more
When Parker Sheffy, a first-year teacher in the Bronx Leadership Academy II, a high school in the South Bronx, talks shop with friends who are also new teachers, he often hears about the problems they are facing: students not showing up to class on time, not understanding their work, not doing homework. "I'm thinking: I don't have that problem... I don't have that problem..." Sheffy recalled. In his ninth grade integrated algebra class, he estimates that 80 to 90 percent are on track to pass the Regents exam, more than double last year's figure.
"But I have to remind myself that this is not just because of me," Sheffy said. "I'm one of six people who have created this class."
Sheffy's school is one of three New York City public schools working with an organization called Blue Engine, which recruits and places recent college graduates as full-time teaching assistants in high schools, helps teachers shift to a small-group classroom model with a ratio of one instructor for roughly every six students, uses data tracking to generate rapid-fire feedback so problems can be quickly addressed, and provides weekly instruction in "social cognition" classes, where students are introduced to skills and concepts -- such as the difference between a "fixed" and a "growth" mind-set -- that can help them grasp their untapped potential.
Blue Engine also targets algebra, geometry and English language arts in the ninth and 10th grades because performance in these so-called "gateway" courses is associated with college success.
Despite its modest size and short track record, Blue Engine has already seized the attention of educators and attracted notice from President Obama. Last year, in its schools, as a result of the program, the number of students who met the "college ready" standard -- scoring above 80 on their Regents exams in algebra, geometry or English language arts -- nearly tripled, from 49 to 140.
Katherine Callaghan, the principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy II, who has worked in the school for more than 10 years, said: "Blue Engine has moved a huge number of our students in a way that nothing else that we've ever tried has been able to do." She added: "Last year we had a 44 percent pass rate on the integrated algebra Regents, with two kids scoring above an 80. This year, we're on track for 75 or 80 percent passing, with 20 kids hitting the college-ready mark. We're close to doubling our pass rate and multiplying by a factor of 10 our college-ready rate."
Gains like this are not often seen in education. So it's worth taking note. What's happening?
Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.
Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.
What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children's success in school than race.
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In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
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If not the usual suspects, what's going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
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But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and "improving teacher quality," but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children's earliest environments may be even more important. Let's invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
In this climate of economic uncertainty, America is once again turning to innovation as the way to ensure a prosperous future. Yet innovation remains tightly coupled with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - the STEM subjects. Art + Design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century just as science and technology did in the last century.
We need to add Art + Design to the equation -- to transform STEM into STEAM.
STEM + Art = STEAM
STEAM is a movement championed by Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and widely adopted by institutions, corporations and individuals.
The objectives of the STEAM movement are to:
transform research policy to place Art + Design at the center of STEM
encourage integration of Art + Design in K-20 education
influence employers to hire artists and designers to drive innovation
Wisconsin student test scores released Tuesday look very different than they did a year ago, though not because of any major shift in student performance.
Similar to recent years, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam results show gains in math and reading over the past five years, a persistent and growing performance gap between black and white students, and Milwaukee and Racine public school students outperforming their peers in the private school voucher program.
But the biggest difference is the scores reflect a higher bar for what students in each grade level should know and be able to do.
Only 36.2 percent of students who took the reading test last October met the new proficiency bar. Fewer than half, 48.1 percent, of students were proficient in math. When 2011-12 results were released last spring, those figures were both closer to 80 percent.
The change doesn't reflect a precipitous drop in student test scores. The average scores in reading and math are about the same as last year for each grade level.
Instead, the change reflects a more rigorous standard for proficiency similar to what is used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is administered to a sample of students in each state every other year and is referred to as "the nation's report card."
The state agreed to raise the proficiency benchmark in math and reading last year in order to qualify for a waiver from requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The benchmark did not rise for the language arts, science and social studies tests.
"Adjusting to higher expectations will take time and effort," State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said. "But these are necessary changes that will ultimately help our schools better prepare all students to be college and career ready and link with work being done throughout the state to implement new standards."
Evers also called on the Legislature to include private voucher schools in the state's new accountability system.
He highlighted that test scores for all Milwaukee and Racine students need to improve. Among Milwaukee voucher students, 10.8 percent in reading and 11.9 percent in math scored proficient or better. Among Milwaukee public school students, it was 14.2 percent in reading and 19.7 percent in math.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed expanding the state's voucher program, including to such districts as Madison.
Changes in Dane County
The state previously announced how the changing bar would affect scores statewide and parents have seen their own students' results in recent weeks, but the new figures for the first time show the impact on entire schools and districts.
In Dane County school districts, the percentage of students scoring proficient or better on the test dropped on average by 42 percentage points in reading and 25 percentage points in math.
Madison schools had one of the smallest drops compared to its neighboring districts.
Madison superintendent Jennifer Cheatham noted schools with a higher number of students scoring in the "advanced" category experienced less of a drop. Madison's smaller drop could reflect a higher proportion of students scoring in the top tier.
At the same time, Madison didn't narrow the gap between minority and white student test results. Only 9 percent of black sixth-graders and only 2 percent of sixth-grade English language learners scored proficient in reading.
"It reinforces the importance of our work in the years ahead," Cheatham said. "We're going to work on accelerating student outcomes."
Middleton-Cross Plains School Board president Ellen Lindgren said she hasn't heard many complaints from parents whose students suddenly dropped a tier on the test. Like Madison and other districts across the state, Middleton-Cross Plains sent home letters bracing parents for the change.
But Lindgren fears the changing standards come at the worst time for public schools, which have faced tougher scrutiny and reduced state support.
"I'm glad that the standards have been raised by the state, because they were low, but this interim year, hopefully people won't panic too much," Lindgren said. "The public has been sold on the idea that we're failing in our education system, and I just don't believe that's true."
Next fall will be the last year students in grades 3-8 and 10 take the paper-and-pencil WKCE math and reading tests. Wisconsin is part of a coalition of states planning to administer a new computer-based test in the 2014-15 school year.
The proposed state budget also provides for students in grades 9-11 to take the EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT college and career readiness tests in future years.
Superintendent Cheatham is to be commended for her informed, intelligent and honest reaction to the MMSD's results when compared to those of neighboring districts.
ALONG his block in Newark's West Ward, where drugs are endemic and the young residents talk about shootings with alarming nonchalance, Najee Little is known as the smart kid. He got all A's his sophomore year, breezing through math and awing his English teachers. His mother, a day care worker, and father, who does odd jobs to make ends meet, have high aspirations for him. They want him to earn a college degree.
So last year, when Bard College opened an early college high school in Newark for disadvantaged students with dreams of a bachelor's degree, he was sure he'd do well there. He wrote his first long paper on Plato's "Republic," expecting a top grade. He got a D minus. "Honestly," he recalled, "I was kind of discouraged."
That paper marked the beginning of a trying academic path that would both excite and disillusion him. The past two years have been peppered with some promising grades -- an A in environmental science -- and some doozies. He failed "Africa in World History" and squeaked by in calculus. Mostly, he came to realize that getting into college and staying there would be a herculean task. There was tricky grammar, hard math and tons of homework. There was the neighborhood cacophony to tune out and the call of his Xbox. And there was the fact that no one in his house could help him.
"My work is more advanced than anyone at home has experienced," he said. And that, it turns out, is why the school had accepted him.
High poverty, high ability, high expectations, high achievement.
Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Students who fail to reach this critical milestone often falter in the later grades and drop out before earning a high school diploma. Now, researchers have confirmed this link in the first national study to calculate high school graduation rates for children at different reading skill levels and with different poverty rates. Results of a longitudinal study of nearly 4,000 students find that those who don't read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers. For the worst readers, those who couldn't master even the basic skills by third grade, the rate is nearly six times greater. While these struggling readers account for about a third of the students, they represent more than three fifths of those who eventually drop out or fail to graduate on time. What's more, the study shows that poverty has a powerful influence on graduation rates. The combined effect of reading poorly and living in poverty puts these children in double jeopardy.
The study relies on a unique national database of 3,975 students born between 1979 and 1989. The children's parents were surveyed every two years to determine the family's eco- nomic status and other factors, while the children's reading progress was tracked using the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) Reading Recognition subtest. The database re- ports whether students have finished high school by age 19, but does not indicate whether they actually dropped out.
For purposes of this study, the researchers divided the children into three reading groups which correspond roughly to the skill levels used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): proficient, basic and below basic. The children were also separated into three income categories: those who have never been poor, those who spent some time in poverty and those who have lived more than half the years surveyed in poverty.
The findings include:
-- One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers.
-- The rates are highest for the low, below-basic readers: 23 percent of these children drop out or fail to finish high school on time, compared to 9 percent of children with basic reading skills and 4 percent of proficient readers.
-- Overall, 22 percent of children who have lived in poverty do not graduate from high school, compared to 6 percent of those who have never been poor. This rises to 32 percent for students spending more than half of their childhood in poverty.
-- For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently in third grade, the proportion that don't finish school rose to 26 percent. That's more than six times the rate for all proficient readers.
-- The rate was highest for poor Black and Hispanic students, at 31 and 33 percent respectively--or about eight times the rate for all proficient readers.
-- Even among poor children who were proficient readers in third grade, 11 percent still didn't finish high school. That compares to 9 percent of subpar third grade readers who have never been poor.
-- Among children who never lived in poverty, all but 2 percent of the best third- grade readers graduated from high school on time.
-- Graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students who were not proficient readers in third grade lagged far behind those for White students with the same reading skills.
Earlier this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, "How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?"
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This is not just about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on education -- about the same percentage as the United States. And it's not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read.
But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher's training.
David Kirp
WHAT would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. -- bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream -- argues for reinventing the public schools we have. Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It's a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.
Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From third grade through high school, students' achievement scores now approximate the statewide average. What's more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent -- roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.
As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I've never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers a nationwide strategy. Ask school officials to explain Union City's success and they start with prekindergarten, which enrolls almost every 3- and 4-year-old. There's abundant research showing the lifetime benefits of early education. Here, seeing is believing.
One December morning the lesson is making latkes, the potato pancakes that are a Hanukkah staple. Everything that transpires during these 90 minutes could be called a "teachable moment" -- describing the smell of an onion ("Strong or light? Strong -- duro. Will it smell differently when we cook it? We'll have to find out."); pronouncing the "p" in pepper and pimento; getting the hang of a food processor ("When I put all the ingredients in, what will happen?").
Cognitive and noncognitive, thinking and feeling; here, this line vanishes. The good teacher is always on the lookout for both kinds of lessons, always aiming to reach both head and heart. "My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my own children," the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. "It's all about exposure to concepts -- wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different countries. 'Let's do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.' I don't ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 -- I could teach a monkey to count." From pre-K to high school, the make-or-break factor is what the Harvard education professor Richard Elmore calls the "instructional core" -- the skills of the teacher, the engagement of the students and the rigor of the curriculum. To succeed, students must become thinkers, not just test-takers.
When Alina Bossbaly greets her third grade students, ethics are on her mind. "Room 210 is a pie -- un pie -- and each of us is a slice of that pie." The pie offers a down-to-earth way of talking about a community where everyone has a place. Building character and getting students to think is her mission. From Day 1, her kids are writing in their journals, sifting out the meaning of stories and solving math problems. Every day, Ms. Bossbaly is figuring out what's best for each child, rather than batch-processing them. Though Ms. Bossbaly is a star, her philosophy pervades the district. Wherever I went, these schools felt less like impersonal institutions than the simulacrum of an extended family.
UNTIL recently, Union City High bore the scarlet-letter label, "school in need of improvement." It has taken strong leadership from its principal, John Bennetti, to turn things around -- to instill the belief that education can be a ticket out of poverty. On Day 1, the principal lays out the house rules. Everything is tied to a single theme -- pride and respect in "our house" -- that resonates with the community culture of family, unity and respect. "Cursing doesn't showcase our talents. Breaking the dress code means we're setting a tone that unity isn't important, coming in late means missing opportunities to learn." Bullying is high on his list of nonnegotiables: "We are about caring and supporting."
These students sometimes behave like college freshmen, as in a seminar where they're parsing Toni Morrison's "Beloved." They can be boisterously jokey with their teachers. But there's none of the note-swapping, gum-chewing, wisecracking, talking-back rudeness you'd anticipate if your opinions about high school had been shaped by movies like "Dangerous Minds." And the principal is persuading teachers to raise their expectations. "There should be more courses that prepare students for college, not simply more work but higher-quality work," he tells me. This approach is paying off big time: Last year, in a study of 22,000 American high schools, U.S. News & World Report and the American Institutes for Research ranked Union City High in the top 22 percent.
What makes Union City remarkable is, paradoxically, the absence of pizazz. It hasn't followed the herd by closing "underperforming" schools or giving the boot to hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and there are no charter schools. A quarter-century ago, fear of a state takeover catalyzed a transformation. The district's best educators were asked to design a curriculum based on evidence, not hunch. Learning by doing replaced learning by rote. Kids who came to school speaking only Spanish became truly bilingual, taught how to read and write in their native tongue before tackling English. Parents were enlisted in the cause. Teachers were urged to work together, the superstars mentoring the stragglers and coaches recruited to add expertise. Principals were expected to become educational leaders, not just disciplinarians and paper-shufflers. From a loose confederacy, the schools gradually morphed into a coherent system that marries high expectations with a "we can do it" attitude. "The real story of Union City is that it didn't fall back," says Fred Carrigg, a key architect of the reform. "It stabilized and has continued to improve."
To any educator with a pulse, this game plan sounds so old-school obvious that it verges on platitude. That these schools are generously financed clearly makes a difference -- not every community will decide to pay for two years of prekindergarten -- but too many districts squander their resources. School officials flock to Union City and other districts that have beaten the odds, eager for a quick fix. But they're on a fool's errand. These places -- and there are a host of them, largely unsung -- didn't become exemplars by behaving like magpies, taking shiny bits and pieces and gluing them together. Instead, each devised a long-term strategy reaching from preschool to high school. Each keeps learning from experience and tinkering with its model. Nationwide, there's no reason school districts -- big or small; predominantly white, Latino or black -- cannot construct a system that, like the schools of Union City, bends the arc of children's lives.
BARACK OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools.
Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.
Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we've failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.
Public education's neglect of high-ability students doesn't just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country's future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.
Today's systemic failure takes three forms.
First, we're weak at identifying "gifted and talented" children early, particularly if they're poor or members of minority groups or don't have savvy, pushy parents.
Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don't have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has "zero-funded" the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington's sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music.
Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.
Here and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability, highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati's Walnut Hills, Austin's Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A. Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.
In a country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these schools, known as exam schools. They educate about 1 percent of students. Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants than they can accommodate. Hence they practice very selective admission, turning away thousands of students who could benefit from what they have to offer. Northern Virginia's acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for example, gets some 3,300 applicants a year -- two-thirds of them academically qualified -- for 480 places.
We built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. We learned a lot. While the schools differ in many ways, their course offerings resemble A.P. classes in content and rigor; they have stellar college placement; and the best of them expose their pupils to independent study, challenging internships and individual research projects.
Critics call them elitist, but we found the opposite. These are great schools accessible to families who can't afford private schooling or expensive suburbs. While exam schools in some cities don't come close to reflecting the demographics around them, across the country the low-income enrollment in these schools parallels the high school population as a whole. African-American youngsters are "overrepresented" in them and Asian-Americans staggeringly so (21 percent versus 5 percent in high schools overall). Latinos are underrepresented, but so are whites.
That's not so surprising. Prosperous, educated parents can access multiple options for their able daughters and sons. Elite private schools are still out there. So are New Trier, Scarsdale and Beverly Hills. The schools we studied, by and large, are educational oases for families with smart kids but few alternatives.
They're safe havens, too -- schools where everyone focuses on teaching and learning, not maintaining order. They have sports teams, but their orchestras are better. Yes, some have had to crack down on cheating, but in these schools it's O.K. to be a nerd. You're surrounded by kids like you -- some smarter than you -- and taught by capable teachers who welcome the challenge, teachers more apt to have Ph.D.'s or experience at the college level than high school instructors elsewhere. You aren't searched for weapons at the door. And you're pretty sure to graduate and go on to a good college.
Many more students could benefit from schools like these -- and the numbers would multiply if our education system did right by such students in the early grades. But that will happen only when we acknowledge that leaving no child behind means paying as much attention to those who've mastered the basics -- and have the capacity and motivation for much more -- as we do to those who cannot yet read or subtract.
It's time to end the bias against gifted and talented education and quit assuming that every school must be all things to all students, a simplistic formula that ends up neglecting all sorts of girls and boys, many of them poor and minority, who would benefit more from specialized public schools. America should have a thousand or more high schools for able students, not 165, and elementary and middle schools that spot and prepare their future pupils.
With their support for school choice, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama have both edged toward recognizing that kids aren't all the same and schools shouldn't be, either. Yet fear of seeming elitist will most likely keep them from proposing more exam schools. Which is ironic and sad, considering where they went to school. Smart kids shouldn't have to go to private schools or get turned away from Bronx Science or Thomas Jefferson simply because there's no room for them.
Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author, with Jessica A. Hockett, of "Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools."
Many students in American classrooms don't feel challenged enough. That's according to new analysis of federal data (pdf) conducted by the Washington think tank American Progress.
The organization, which promotes "progressive ideas and action," came to that conclusion when it analyzed surveys given to students by the Department of Education for its National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In its press release, American progress says its analysis found that the popular images of students overburdened with work and keeping "the hours of a corporate lawyer in order to finish their school projects and homework assignments" are quite simply off base.
"Many students are not being challenged in school," the organization says. USA Today dug through the report and finds:
-- "37% of fourth-graders say their math work is 'often' or 'always' too easy;
-- "57% of eighth-graders say their history work is 'often' or 'always' too easy;
-- "39% of 12th-graders say they rarely write about what they read in class."
USA Today spoke Florida State University English education professor Shelbie Witte who said students are likely bored by an education system that puts too much emphasis on standardized testing and "when they're bored, they think the classes are easy."
Another interesting find from the report is that lower-income students reported that they comprehended their teachers less than their more affluent classmates.
American Progress points out that student surveys have been shown to be accurate predictors of a teacher's performance. It's the reason they decided to look at this set of data.
Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say
Sabrina Tavernise
Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education's leveling effects.
It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.
Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.
"We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race," said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion -- the single most important predictor of success in the work force -- has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession's full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.
"With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there's a good chance the recession may have widened the gap," Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income -- the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted -- and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, "Whither Opportunity?" compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality has been a central theme this election season.
The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children's schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today's economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
"The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation," said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child's cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.
"Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role," he said. "The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it's a mistake."
Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010," was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as "more of a symptom than a cause."
The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.
"When the economy recovers, you'll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture," he said.
There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
The problem is a puzzle, he said. "No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare."
Students could enroll outside their home districts, and public tuition dollars would flow to private religious schools, under education reforms laid out by the LePage administration in Skowhegan this morning. Besides expanded school choice, the administration is also pushing legislation to toughen and standardize teacher and principal evaluation statewide and expand career and technical education. Some praise the proposals as bold and innovative, but others dismiss them as divisive and unfair.
The scene of the big announcement invoked a part of the governor's education agenda that pretty much everyone seems to agree with. At just after 9 a.m., LePage welcomed guests assembled inside an automotive garage at a Skowhegan technical school, then turned the podium over to his education commissioner.
Stephen Bowen turned and marveled at the hydraulic lifts and other machinery. "It's great to be in this facility," he said. "I love this backdrop back here. I have a car, by the way, that I may bring in here later, 'cause there was something rattling on my way up here."
The College Board AP Report to the Nation shows that students who earn advanced placement credit in high school typically experience greater academic success in college, are better prepared for coursework, and are more likely to earn a college degree than their peers.
In 2011, 903,630 seniors took an AP exam before leaving high school with 540,619 scoring a three or higher. That doubles the 431,573 who took the exam in 2001 when only 277,507 scored a three or higher. In all, 62,068 students across Wisconsin took AP exams in 2011.
Joanne Berg, University of Wisconsin-Madison vice provost for enrollment management, says that "students who took AP credits were able to graduate sooner than other students, were able to start advanced courses sooner, and actually free up courses for other students who weren't able to take AP credits."
Along with the release of the report, representatives from the UW-Madison are also featured in several videos speaking to the value of the AP program. The videos can be viewed here.
The 8th Annual AP Report to the Nation (.pdf/1.7MB) reports on each state's efforts to improve high school achievement by involving greater segments of the student population -- and traditionally underserved minority students in particular -- in rigorous AP courses.
Deborah Gist, Rhode Island's Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, has implemented some major reforms since assuming her role in 2009. She has raised the score required to pass teacher-certification tests and allowed a superintendent to fire all of the teachers at a school that was resisting reforms. Perhaps most notably, she has overseen the implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system. The Hechinger Report recently interviewed Gist about her state's new approach to evaluating teachers.
Since changing your teacher-evaluation process in 2009 to include students' standardized test-scores and yearly evaluations of teachers and administrators, what has the feedback been? Where are you at as far as implementing the changes, how is it going, and what have you learned?
I started Apps for Kids because my 8-year-old daughter Jane and I like to play games on the iPhone and iPad together. We have a lot of fun checking out new apps, and then seeing if we can beat each other's high scores. My friends who have kids of their own were always asking Jane and me what apps they should download, and so I thought maybe we should share that advice to a larger audience. So we started Apps for Kids, and people seem to really like it
California voters made a pact in 1988 when they approved Proposition 98.
The state would provide a guaranteed minimum level of funding for public schools. In exchange, schools would be held "accountable for the job they do and the tax dollars they spend." Every year each school would publish a School Accountability Report Card - the SARC.
A generation later, that report card still is not very readable and has little role in driving school improvement. A 2004 UCLA report concluded, "Running the school system without a useful and understandable SARC is like driving a $100,000 sports car with a broken speedometer, temperature gauge and gas gauge."
Unfortunately, political leaders faced with the overly complex, confusing system seem to lunge in opposite directions.
Gov. Dannel Malloy has indicated that he plans to make good on his promise to enact education reform -- he has announced a series of legislative proposals over the past week aimed at improving and expanding schooling opportunities in Connecticut.
Malloy's proposals, if enacted by the state's General Assembly convening for its legislative session today, would affect students in levels ranging from preschool to professional job training programs. Last Thursday, Malloy proposed allocating an additional $12 million of the state budget to boost the quality and accessibility preschool education in the state. The next day, the governor announced that he will propose legislation to change the Connecticut Technical High School (CTHSS) system to tailor its curricula to the needs of the state's employers so that students will be better prepared for employment upon graduation. On Monday, Malloy put forth a legislative proposal to improve low-achieving schools and increase charter and magnate school funding.
"We made a promise to our kids that education will prepare them for college or the workforce," Malloy said in a Feb. 6 press release. "Transforming our educational system -- fixing the schools that are falling short and learning from the ones that are graduating high-achievers -- will help us develop the skilled workforce that will strengthen our state and our economy."
How would you like to go to MIT - for free? You can now. Starting this spring, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be offering free online courses to anyone, anywhere in the world, through its new digital arm, MITx. These courses will be much more than lectures on videotape. Students will be able to interact with other students online and have access to online labs and self-assessment tools. And here's the really revolutionary part: If you can show you've learned the material, for a small fee, MITx will give you a credential to prove it. No, it's not a full-blown MIT degree. But employers will probably be impressed.
For more than 100 years the standard view among traditional language theorists was that, with the exception of onomatopoeia like "fizz" and "beep," the sound of a word tells us nothing about how it is used. This seemingly arbitrary relationship between words and their meaning in human language is hailed as singular to our species.
definition or risk to illustrate noun-verb connection
A new Cornell study takes that view to task.
"What we have shown is that the sound of a word can tell us something about how it is used," said Morten Christiansen, associate professor of psychology at Cornell. "Specifically, it tells us whether the word is used as a noun or as a verb, and this relationship affects how we process such words."
Christiansen, along with Thomas Farmer, a Cornell psychology graduate student, are co-authors of a paper about how the sounds of words contain information about their syntactic role. Their work will be published in the Aug. 8 print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
How is your new year's resolution to read more and write better holding up? After tracing the fascinating story of the most influential writing style guide of all time and absorbing advice on writing from some of modern history's most legendary writers, here comes some priceless and pricelessly uncompromising wisdom from a very different kind of cultural legend: iconic businessman and original "Mad Man" David Ogilvy. On September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled "How to Write":
If ramen noodle sales spike at the start of every semester, here's one possible reason: textbooks can cost as much as a class itself; materials for an introductory physics course can easily top $300.
Cost-conscious students can of course save money with used or online books and recoup some of their cash come buyback time. Still, it's a steep price for most 18-year-olds.
But soon, introductory physics texts will have a new competitor, developed at Rice University. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers' offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College.
It's prelim week at Cedars. In Scotland, pupils with additional needs can use a "Digital Question Paper" to complete their exam.
A DQP is a PDF with embedded forms. The pupil sits at a computer and fills in the form to answer the questions. For exams involving graphs, equations or other hard-to-do-on-the-computer things, they can also switch to working on paper. At the end of the exam, the PDF is printed out and the exam goes away on paper with the rest to be marked.
So this week it's been my job to get this going. I thought it would be useful to write down the process and considerations for doing this on our computer infrastructure.
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad packed the house Monday night for what he termed "a call to action" to the community to join his administration in a strategy to close the racial achievement gap that has haunted the school district for decades.
His blueprint for change, "Building our Future," weighs in at 100 pages and took an hour to outline with a Power Point presentation to an audience of about 200 at the Fitchburg Community Center. The proposal will be digested, dissected and debated in the weeks to come, including at a series of community meetings hosted by the school district.
But one thing is clear: from Nerad's point of view, the future of children of color in our city lies not only in the hands of the teachers and administrators who shape their lives at school, but also in the hands of their families, their neighbors, and members of the community who live and work all around town.
"It can't be the schools alone; it has to be the schools working with the community if we're going to have outcomes," he said.
Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad unveiled his long awaited, and much anticipated plan (mp3 audio) to close the district's more than 40-year-old racial achievement gap Monday night before the full school board and around 75 citizens who packed into a room inside the Fitchburg library.
The 109-page plan, titled "Building Our Future: The Preliminary Plan for Eliminating Gaps in MMSD Student Achievement," makes about 40 recommendations at a cost of $60.3 million over the next five years.
Several recommendations called for building on existing programs, like AVID/TOPS, an acclaimed program that focuses on students in the academic middle.
Others, like a "parent university," a model school for culturally relevant teaching, career academies within the high schools and a student-run youth court, would be new to the district.
Ideally, substantive program review in necessities such as reading and math would occur prior to the addition of new spending.
As the Chicago Public Schools begin what are certain to be contentious contract talks with the Chicago Teachers Union, Mayor Rahm Emanuel emerged as the star of a new online video criticizing the union and promoting charter schools, whose teachers mostly are not unionized.
An interview with Mr. Emanuel is a highlight of the 35-minute video, produced by the Michigan-based Education Action Group Foundation and the Fox News political analyst Juan Williams. Mr. Williams narrates the video, saying the union is "radically politicized" and is "repeatedly providing terrible examples for Chicago's schoolchildren."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Emanuel said last week that the mayor did not share those views of the union, and his comments in the video were more measured, but union officials were still upset. The mayor discussed how he faced union opposition to some of his education proposals, such as extending the length of the school day this year.
I hated homework when I was a student, I hate the battle of wills I have with my second-grader and I hate seeing my middle-school-age son miss out on the afternoons of his childhood.
But most of all, I hate being a hypocrite. So it's time to come clean: I am a teacher, and I assign homework.
I have always assigned homework because that is what teachers do; if I didn't, word would get around that I am a pushover, or don't care enough about my students to engage their every waking moment with academics. When I first started teaching, I assigned homework liberally and without question, and scoffed at my students' complaints about their workload. I expected them to keep quiet, buck up and let me do my job.
Research supports parental involvement as a viable means of enhancing children's academic success. Once again, Michelle Belnavis, a cultural relevance instructional resource teacher (K-5) for MMSD, has organized an event that brings African American community leaders, families, staff, students, and neighborhood organizations together to provide inspiration and information to schools and neighborhoods in honor of National African American Parent Involvement Day.
"We have been doing a lot of research in looking at the effect of having parents' actively involved in their children's education and a big part is that relationship-building," Belnavis tells The Madison Times. "This gives an opportunity for teachers and families and parents to come together for the purpose of celebrating unity. I think a lot of times when parents come into school there's a feeling like, 'I don't really belong here' or 'My children go to school here but I don't really have a connection with the teacher.'
Los Angeles Unified School District is embroiled in negotiations over teacher evaluations, and will now face pressure from outside the district intended to force counter-productive teacher evaluation methods into use. Yesterday, I read this Los Angeles Times article about a lawsuit to be filed by an unnamed "group of parents and education advocates." The article notes that, "The lawsuit was drafted in consultation with EdVoice, a Sacramento-based group. Its board includes arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad, former ambassador Frank Baxter and healthcare company executive Richard Merkin." While the defendant in the suit is technically LAUSD, the real reason a lawsuit is necessary according to the article is that "United Teachers Los Angeles leaders say tests scores are too unreliable and narrowly focused to use for high-stakes personnel decisions." Note that, once again, we see a journalist telling us what the unions say and think, without ever, ever bothering to mention why, offering no acknowledgment that the bulk of the research and the three leading organizations for education research and measurement (AERA, NCME, and APA) say the same thing as the union (or rather, the union is saying the same thing as the testing expert). Upon what research does the other side base arguments in favor of using test scores and "value-added" measurement (VAM) as a legitimate measurement of teacher effectiveness? They never answer, but the debate somehow continues ad nauseum.
It's not that the plaintiffs in this case are wrong about the need to improve teacher evaluations. Accomplished California Teachers has published a teacher evaluation report that has concrete suggestions for improving evaluations as well, and we are similarly disappointed in the implementation of the Stull Act, which has been allowed to become an empty exercise in too many schools and districts.
Luke Chung, president and founder of a software development company in Tysons Corner, volunteered many times to help the Fairfax County school system with computer and business issues. He was a nice guy, so when the county needed to fill two slots reserved for outsiders (what educators often call non-educators) on the Teacher Performance Evaluation Task Force, he was appointed.
He might have seemed to some a genial innocent who would not get in the way of the teachers, principals and administrators who were the majority. But Chung was an experienced manager motivated to nudge the task force in new directions. He revealed in his company blog his astonished reaction to the key issue:
"As an outsider who has never been evaluated as a teacher, you can imagine my surprise to discover that although principals were judged by their school's student performance, student performance is not part of a teacher's performance evaluation in our county," he wrote. "Are you kidding me?" Chung's italics, not mine.
He got the basics. "Not all students are equal, and we don't want to have a system where teachers are evaluated solely on student performance because the incentive would be to only want to teach good students," he wrote. He saw some sense in value-added measurements, rating teachers on how much their students improved. But there were practical problems, he said, "such as kids moving in and out of classes within the year, impacts on kids outside teacher control, whether the test is a good measurement, multiple teacher collaborative environments, etc."
Altogether, Nerad makes about 40 recommendations in six categories -- instruction, college and career readiness, culturally relevant practices, school environment, family engagement and staff diversity.
"The plan is based on the view that there isn't one thing alone the school district can do to eliminate achievement gaps," Nerad said. "We're attempting to be comprehensive with the proposal."
The plan's projected cost for next year is $12.4 million, which Nerad is recommending come from the district's untapped property taxing authority under state-imposed limits. The amount includes adding about 67.5 positions, including behavioral support staff, reading specialists and parent liaisons.
Some recommendations wouldn't take effect until future years. The district estimates they will cost $20.9 million in 2013-14 and $26.6 million by 2016-17. The district doesn't have the authority to raise property taxes by that amount, though Nerad said part of the discussion in coming months will involve whether the private and nonprofit sectors can help fund the strategies.
"We're going to have to struggle through the conversation of how to get it done," Nerad said.
While we are pleased that our advocacy over the last 19 months has resulted in the District developing a plan to address the gap, we are also mindful of history. Our organization has pushed hard for our public school system to embrace change, address the gap and expand educational opportunity many times before.
In the 1960s, Madison learned that a wide gap existed between black and white students in reading, math and high school completion in Madison's public schools. In the 1970s, the Urban League of Greater Madison reported that just 60% of black students were graduating from the city's public high schools. In the 1980s, ULGM released a widely reported study that found the average GPA for a black high school student attending the city's public high schools was 1.58 on a 4.00 scale, with 61% scoring below a 2.0 GPA. It also found that a disproportionate number of black students were enrolled in remedial math and science classes, and that black students were significantly over-represented in special education and school suspensions. Then, in the 1990s, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute issued a report that stated there were two school districts in MMSD, one that poorly served black children and one that served everyone else.
Today, just 48% of black and 56% of Latino students are graduating from high school. Just 1% of black and 7% of Latino high school seniors are academically ready for college. Nearly 40% of all black boys in middle school are enrolled in special education, and more than 60% of black and 50% of Latino high school students earn below a 2.0 GPA.
Over the years, several district-wide efforts have been tried. Unfortunately, many of these efforts have either been discontinued, unevenly implemented, ineffective, lacked the support of parents/community/teachers, or failed to go far enough to address the myriad needs of students, families, teachers and schools. Madison also has a well-documented history of not heeding the advice of leaders and educators of color or educational experts, and not investing in efforts to codify and replicate successful strategies employed by its most effective educators. MMSD also has not acted fast enough to address its challenges and rarely looks beyond its borders for strategies that have proven effective elsewhere in the country.
The stakes are higher now; too high to continue on our present course of incrementalism rooted in our fear of the unknown, fear of significant change, and fear of admitting that our view of Madison being the utopic experience of the Midwest and #1 city in the U.S. doesn't apply to everyone who lives here. We no longer have the luxury of time to figure out how to address the gap. We cannot afford to lose nearly 300 black, 200 Latino and an untold number of Southeast Asian and underprivileged white students each year from our public schools. And we cannot afford to see hundreds of students leave our school system each year for public and private schools outside of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
We must embrace strategies that work. We must also behave differently than we have in the past, and can no longer afford to be afraid of addressing intersection or race and poverty, and how they are playing out in our schools, social relationships and community, and impacting the educational success of our kids.
Furthermore, we need all hands on deck. Everyone in our community must play a role in shaping the self-image, expectations and outcomes of our children - in school, in the community and at home. Some children have parents who spend more quality time with their career and coworkers than with their family. Some children have a parent or relative who struggles to raise them alone. Some have parents who are out of work, under stress and struggling to find a job to provide for their family. And unfortunately, some children have parents who make bad decisions and/or don't care about their well-being. Regardless of the situation, we cannot allow the lack of quality parenting to be the excuse why we don't reach, teach, or hold children accountable and prepare them for the future.
As we prepare to review the Superintendent's plan, we have developed a rubric that will allow for an objective review of his proposal(s). The attached rubric, which you can access by clicking here, was developed and informed by members of the staff and Board of Director of ULGM, business and community leaders, and teachers and leading experts in the field of K-12 and higher education. The tool will be used by an independent Community Review Panel, organized by the Urban League. pver the next several weeks to vet the plan. The intent of this review is to ensure MMSD has an optimal plan for ensuring that all of the children it serves succeed academically and graduate from high school prepared for college and work.
Specifically, our reasons for establishing this rubric and a Community Review Panel are four-fold:
Develop an objective and comprehensive understanding of the plan and its many elements;
Objectively review the efficacy of the plan, its goals and objectives, and desired outcomes;
Formally communicate thoughts, concerns and ideas for supporting and/or improving the plan; and
Effectively engage the Madison community in supporting and strengthening its public schools.
We have high expectations of the Superintendent's plan. We hope for a bold, transformational, aggressive and concise plan, and stand ready to assist the Superintendent and his team in any way we can. We hope you will be standing their with us, with your arms outstretched and ready to uplift or babies - the next generation.
Here are things that impressed Desiree Pointer Mace when she and her husband were considering where to send their first child for school: The seventh and eighth graders at Woodlands School, 5510 W. Blue Mound Road, held the door for guests, said hello and shook hands. And you could ask a student in any class what he or she was working on and get a good answer.
Pointer Mace is not your typical parent. She is associate dean for graduate programs in education at Alverno College.
But if her credentials are distinctive, the goals she has for school for her children are not unusual: A place where they thrive and develop, both in academics and in personal traits.
Only some of the things she - or any good parent - want can be reduced to numbers or grades. A lot of important aspects of a school involve quality, not quantity. They can be put under the broad label of "school culture."
Show me a good school and I'll show you a place where kids not only get good grades and scores, but a place where relationships of all kinds matter and are healthy.
If there was ever a movie to make you laugh to keep from crying, it's this one.
Austin, an intrepid young student-reporter, embarks on the noble mission of answering the question, "How much basic knowledge do American high school students really have?" The answer, however, may not be exactly what you want to hear.
"Do you know the vice president of The United States?" Austin asks.
"I don't know who it it's, it's, it's somebody....Bin Ladin," one student responds.
The video continues in similar fashion, asking everything from, "In what war did America gain independence?" (which no one answered correctly without a hint) to "What countries border America?"
This is my third and (I hope) last column in a series on education. If things work as planned this is where I'll make some broad generalizations that piss-off a lot of people, incite a small riot in the comments section, after which we'll all feel better and switch to discussing the Facebook IPO. So let's get to it. I believe that education is broken in the U.S. and probably everywhere else, that it is incapable of fixing itself, and our only significant hope is to be found in the wisdom of Sharon Osbourne.
These conclusions are based on my experiences as a teacher, a parent, on the content of those two previous columns, one visit to OzzFest, and on my having this week read a couple books:
Mary Battaglia kindly forwarded this email sent to the Madison School Board:
The high school graduation racial gap has been in the Madison news as though it only affects our fair city. It does not require much research, something the local media has failed to do, to see this is a national concern. According to an analysis called "Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education," nationally only 47% of black males graduated from high school in 2007. (1) It has been reported that Madison's graduation rate for black males is 50%. Obviously a pathetic rate compared to the 87% for whites, but what has not been a part of the local conversation is how Madison compares in relationship to the rest of the nation, and perhaps figure out where black males are graduating at a higher rate, and why. The Schott's report, revealed two communities with large minority populations with much better graduation outcomes than the rest of the nation, Baltimore and Fort Bend, Texas. What MMSD should be looking into is what are these cities doing, and what curricula or community effort has made them successful? One interesting part of the gap for Madison and the state of Wisconsin is the high rate of whites graduating. While Wisconsin is the worst defender in the racial gap, the states total graduation rate is one the highest in the nation.
When you read various assessments of the "reason" for the gap nationally, the theories include the lack of financial investment, lack of good teachers, and the lack of community structure. While I find these proposals reasonable, I fail to understand how in this community they are relevant. MMSD spends well over $13,000 per student, lack the overwhelming urban problems of Milwaukee and Chicago, and have many fine teachers that somehow get non-minority students educated. These excuses ring hallow as to why MMSD has such a poor rate. What does ring true is we are not educating the population as it exist today. In the last 25 years the MMSD's minority rate has increased from 20% to one closer to 48%. (2) In the last 25 years MMSD has changed from a district of less than 25% free and reduced lunch to one that is closer to 50%. (3)Madison is still teaching to the population of 25 years ago, the students have changed, but the curriculum has not.
Perhaps, MMSD could improve the graduation rate for all students, with a significant change of focus. For example, MMSD's high school's emphasize 4 year college candidates when many of the students would do better in a 2 year or technology school focus. There has been an increased coordination with MATC, but what would be beneficial is to offer a dual graduation for students, so as they graduate from MMSD, they also have a 2 year degree or a certificate from MATC. This is a system that has been successful in a high school in North Carolina. (4) A student that wants to head to college still has that opportunity and perhaps a chance to make some money to support the effort. Perhaps, another way to improve graduation outcomes would include an overhaul of the summer school program. Currently, MMSD summer school staff are paid poorly, the programs focus is mostly on students that have flunked their classes and need a recovery grade, and the programs poor reputation have lead many staff to discourage students from participating. (5) Why not invest in a comprehensive retooling of the summer program that provides a better salary for staff, and includes enrichment, regular classes, as well as recovery options. Let's find a creative summer program with smaller class sizes and build a program that is the envy of the country and one that works. If summer school is going to be provided, then make it an awesome program, not just a warehouse for failing kids. Perhaps, as most research reveals, early education is a key component to better graduation outcomes, and the district finally is getting a 4K program up and running after a decade long battle with the union.
Madison Prep was an idea, but it is a unique group of students that would select to participate in such a rigorous program, which means an already motivated student or parents with very high expectations, both factors that frequently mean a student would do well anyway. MMSD needs to look at students that may not be that motivated or academically talented and assess what works to keep them engaged. The one thing MMSD has no control over is probably the most important issue for a students outcome. Research concludes the number one predictor of a students academic success is parental expectations. (6) Our schools cannot change parental expectations, however, they can change what a student expects. MMSD students need to expect a positive future, a purpose and a reason to stay in school. Not all kids will succeed but more than half of the black male students should. Let's develop a district that gives all the students the opportunity to succeed.
This statement is based on personal experience of having many staff, from middle school up to high school, discourage my daughter who struggles in math from attending summer school. I have also spoke to many parents with the same experience.
*** Of note the data of graduation rate is debated in academic circles as the data is not always standardized. Some data includes GED and 5 year rates others include only 4 year rates.
We envision a writing community for students in Denver where they can enjoy writing. More often than not, schools cannot provide a place in which creativity and discovery receive one-on-one attention. Students too often view writing as yet another task for which they will be assessed and graded. We hope to help them understand that writing is a vehicle for expression and communication, for publication and storytelling.
When Christopher Chamness entered the third grade last year, he began to get stomach aches before school. His mother, Edy, said the fire had gone out of a child who she said had previously gone joyfully to his classes.
One day, when he was bored in class, Christopher broke a pencil eraser off in his ear canal. It was the tipping point for Ms. Chamness, a former teacher, and she asked to observe his Austin elementary school classroom. What she saw was a "work sheet distribution center" aimed at preparing students for the yearly assessments that they begin in third grade and that school districts depend upon for their accountability ratings.
Arizonans cannot afford to wait for better education. Although Arizona is one of the fastest improving states in education, at the current rate, it would take decades for our students to catch up with those in the number one state in the country, Massachusetts.
Arizona students continue to lag their national and international peers in academic performance, high school graduation rates and degree attainment. With 74 percent of Arizona fourth graders below proficient in reading and 69 percent of our eighth graders below proficient in math, the gap is only widening between the preparedness of our graduates and the skills and knowledge Arizona employers require.
Fortunately, Tucson has many examples of bright spots that show all of us the potential for Arizona education. Tucson Unified School District's University High School was recently named a 2011 Higher Performing School by the National Center for Education Achievement; Vail Unified School District is nationally recognized for its use of technology to engage students and raise student achievement; BASIS Charter School, which started in Tucson and has grown to other parts of the state, was named a top high school by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report; and the University of Arizona is ranked among the top public research universities in the nation. All of them embrace a culture of high expectations and are working to ensure all students graduate ready to compete and succeed in the 21st century global economy.
SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics's equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.
It did. More than 2,700 researchers from around the world have so far signed an online pledge set up by Tyler Neylon, a fellow-mathematician who was inspired by Dr Gowers's post, promising not to submit their work to Elsevier's journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them. That number seems, to borrow a mathematical term, to be growing exponentially. If it really takes off, established academic publishers might find they have a revolution on their hands.
The eighth-graders sat hunched over photos of European art, looking for a single painting to emulate for a class project.
But only one student cracked open an actual art history book; the rest slid their thumbs across vivid photos on iPod Touches, or clicked through Google image files on laptops or netbooks they'd brought from home.
In an attempt to bring more technology into the classroom without investing in school-funded 1-to-1 laptop initiatives, more school districts like Erin are experimenting with "bring your own device" opportunities, in which teachers adjust curriculum to leverage whatever hand-held or portable computing device children's parents allow them to bring to school.
The first "BYOD" day at Erin School was an experiment undertaken in honor of Wisconsin's Digital Learning Day, part of a national initiative Wednesday spearheaded by the nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education marked by real-life activities in 39 states and virtual participation in online forums.
Last year my commenters and I discussed Ed Glaeser's claim that the way to create a great city is to "create a great university and wait 200 years."
I passed this on to urbanist Richard Florida and received the following response:
This is a tough one with lots of causality issues. Generally speaking universities make places stronger. But this is mainly the case for smaller, college towws. Boulder, Ann Arbor and so on, which also have very high human capital levels and high levels of creative, knowledge and professional workers.
For big cities the issue is mixed. Take Pittsburgh with CMU and Pitt or Baltimore with Hopkins, or St Louis. The list goes on and on.
Kevin Stolarick and I framed this very crudely as a transmitter reciever issue. The university in a city like this can generate a lot of signal, in terms of innovation or even human capital and the city may not receive it or push it away. A long ago paper by Mike Fogarty showed how innovations in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, by universities in these communities, tended to be picked up in Silicon Valley or even Tokyo.
I responded: Another factor in the interaction is: how good does the university have to be? Glaeser cited UW and Seattle, but that's kind of a funny example, because I don't think UW was such a great university 30 years ago. On the other hand, given the existence of Boeing and Microsoft, UW is good enough to do the job of providing a center for the creative class. Perhaps Ohio State (another good but not great university) has played a similar role in Columbus.
The dangers which Peter Wilby points out (Does Gove realise he is empowering future dictators?, 31 January) were recognised 70 years ago. Unfortunately secretaries of state know very little history. The Oxford historian Dr Marjorie Reeves, when invited to be on the Central Advisory Council For Education (England) in 1946, was told by the permanent secretary, John Redcliffe-Maud, that the main duty of council members was "to be prepared to die at the first ditch as soon as politicians try to get their hands on education".
A war had been fought to prevent the consequences of such concentrated power. The 1944 Education Act, hammered out during the war years, created a "maintained system" of education as a balance of power between central government, local government responsibility, the voluntary bodies (mainly the churches) and the teachers. That balance is now disappearing fast, without the public debate it needs and with hardly a squeak from Labour. The existing education legislation refers to the fast-disappearing "maintained schools", leaving academies and free schools exposed, without the protection of the law, to whatever whimsical ideas are dreamt up by the present or future secretaries of state, to whom they are contracted with minimal accountability to parliament.
Professor Richard Pring
Green Templeton College, Oxford
• The removal of 3,100 vocational subjects from the school performance tables from 2014 (Report, 31 January) has major implications. It is certainly the case that "perverse incentives" were created by the league tables to use soft options to boost school league table positions - the phenomenon known as gaming. However, the cull to 70 accepted vocational subjects, with 55 allowed on the margins, essentially destroys vocational and technical education. Given that the old basis is the one for the current (2012 and 2013) tables, a whole raft of students are on worthless courses.
Unlike many of my colleagues and friends, I personally support the use of standardized testing results in education policy, even, with caution and in a limited role, in high-stakes decisions. That said, I also think that the focus on test scores has gone way too far and their use is being implemented unwisely, in many cases to a degree at which I believe the policies will not only fail to generate improvement, but may even risk harm.
In addition, of course, tests have a very productive low-stakes role to play on the ground - for example, when teachers and administrators use the results for diagnosis and to inform instruction.
Frankly, I would be a lot more comfortable with the role of testing data - whether in policy, on the ground, or in our public discourse - but for the relentless flow of misinterpretation from both supporters and opponents. In my experience (which I acknowledge may not be representative of reality), by far the most common mistake is the conflation of student and school performance, as measured by testing results.
I am running for the Madison School Board because I care about the state of our public schools and this community.
The facts are: I am employed at the Urban League of Greater Madison and spoke in support of Madison Prep as a parent and citizen. Am I running because Madison Prep was voted down? No. My focus is broader than the charter school proposal, but the Madison Prep vote was a defining moment in my decision to declare candidacy.
It became apparent to me as I sat in the auditorium that night that we can no longer afford to wait for our district to take the casual approach to the urgent matter of minority under-achievement. Our entire community is affected by the failure to do so.
Every child in this district -- from the at-risk, the middle-of-the-road student, to the most academically talented -- should have an equal opportunity to thrive in our school system. And here's the reality, Madison -- we are not delivering.
It's been hard for us to accept that we are a different community than we were 10 years ago, but we are. If we move beyond politically correct conversations about race and poverty, we'd readily realize that we cannot go about "business as usual."
Are hardbound textbooks going the way of slide rules and typewriters in schools?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski on Wednesday challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years. The Obama administration's push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet.
Digital books are viewed as a way to provide interactive learning, potentially save money and get updated material faster to students.
On Friday night, January 20th, my friend and fellow conservative blogger Mr. Chandler of Buckhorn Road zipped down to the Sacramento Convention Center to hear a talk by noted "education historian" Diane Ravitch. I didn't realize it was sponsored by a bunch of teachers unions; I thought it was going to be an intellectual talk by someone who used to agree with me but now has switched sides. I thought I was going to get some really good information that would "challenge my assumptions" and make me think. Instead, what I got was, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor, a liberal red-meat bacchanalia. As Mr. Chandler described it, we were "pilgrims in an unholy land".
What is this?
A new teaching with authority.
-- Mark 1:27
Over the last few weeks, we've been processing student assessments from fall semester. Reading student comments about my course and other profs' courses has me thinking about the different ways in which students "see" their instructors. Two profs can be equally knowledgable in an area yet give off very different vibes to their class. The vibe has a lot to do with how students interpret the instructor's behavior. It also affects student motivation and, ultimately, student learning.
Daniel Lemire recently offered two rules for teaching in the 21st century, one of which was to be an authentic role model. If students know that "someone ordinary" like a professor was able to master the course material, then they will have reason to believe that they can do the same. Authenticity is invaluable if we hope to model the mindset of a learner for our students.
It is also a huge factor in the classroom in another way as well. Students are also sensitive to whether we are authentic users of knowledge. If I am teaching agile approaches to software development but students perceive that I am not an agile developer when writing my own code outside the course, then they are less likely to take the agile approaches seriously. If I am teaching the use of some theoretical technique for solving a problem, say, nondeterministic finite state machines, but my students perceive that I do something else when I'm not teaching the course, then their motivation to master the technique wanes.
You work immense hours and subject yourself to scathing criticism all in the pursuit of better serving children. I know a few of you--and without fail you are all passionate about your work. In short, I'm a fan. So know that I'm not writing this letter to attack anyone--rather, I aim to offer advice, which I hope some of you accept.
In the following letter I aim to convince you of this: the single most important reform strategy you can undertake is to increase charter school quality and market share in your city--with the ultimate aim of turning your district into a charter school district.
In other words: rid yourself of the notion that your current opinions on curriculum, teacher evaluation, technology, or anything else will be the foundation for dramatic gains in student achievement. If history tells us anything, they will not be:
They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They knit. Now a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their own kids.
In the beginning, your kids need you--a lot. They're attached to your hip, all the time. It might be a month. It might be five years. Then suddenly you are expected to send them off to school for seven hours a day, where they'll have to cope with life in ways they never had to before. You no longer control what they learn, or how, or with whom.
Unless you decide, like an emerging population of parents in cities across the country, to forgo that age-old rite of passage entirely.
When Tera and Eric Schreiber's oldest child was about to start kindergarten, the couple toured the high-achieving public elementary school a block away from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near the University of Washington. It was "a great neighborhood school," Tera says. They also applied to a private school, and Daisy was accepted. But in the end they chose a third path: no school at all.
In the Wild West of college admissions, there is no Data Sheriff.
The latest reminder arrived on Monday when Claremont McKenna College announced that a senior administrator had resigned after admitting to falsely reporting SAT statistics since 2005. In an e-mail to the campus, Pamela B. Gann, the college's president, said an internal review found that scores for each fall's freshman class had been "generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each." The apparent perpetrator was Richard C. Vos, long the college's dean of admissions and financial aid, who has resigned from the college.
The announcement has shaken those who work on both sides of the admissions process. In the span of 24 hours, Mr. Vos, described by several colleagues as an engaging and thoughtful dean, has become a symbol of the pressures that come with top-level admissions jobs. As one mid-career dean said on Tuesday, "I just keep thinking about how much pressure an experienced and mature admissions professional must be under to do whatever he did."
In a dim, windowless classroom at GMS Moradbas school in rural Haryana state in north India, 40 young girls in their dark blue uniforms crouch on the floor in four straight lines.
Each is following a monotone reading by one of their classmates from a history book about one of India's liberation heroes. Not a computer, let alone a desk is in sight. Outside, beyond a field of yellow mustard seed and sparring goats, a new high-rise medical college rises above the mist on the edge of the town of Nuh, an hour's drive from Gurgaon, a new city born out of India's IT outsourcing boom.
Madison Public Schools' Superintendent Nerad's request community input into his plan to eliminate the long-standing Racial Achievement Gap
via email:
Below is a letter from Dr. Daniel Nerad, Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District. Please show up on Monday, February 6 to learn about his plan and register to participate in an input session. We need you to exercise your voice, share your view and speak to our children's needs. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
-- "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963
February 2, 2012
RE: Invitation to attend Board of Education meeting on Monday, February 6, 2012
Dear Community Leader:
As you may know, this Monday, February 6, 2012, we are poised to present to the Board of Education a significant and system-wide plan to close the achievement gaps in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Building Our Future: A Plan for Eliminating Gaps in MMSD Student Achievement
We invite you to attend Monday's Board of Education workshop at the Fitchburg Public Library, 5530 Lacy Road in Fitchburg beginning at 6:00 p.m. This workshop is for presentation purposes only. Members of the public will not have the opportunity to speak. However, Monday's workshop marks the beginning of a two-month, community-wide engagement process. We invite parents, students, and residents concerned about the future of our children to join one or more of the many sessions held throughout Madison to learn about the achievement gaps in the MMSD and discuss and provide input into the plan.
I have greatly appreciated your concern, commitment, and willingness to challenge us to provide the kind of education that every child deserves and is due. Together, we must eliminate our achievement gaps.
The Board of Education workshop on Monday, February 6th is just the beginning. Please consider participating in one of the upcoming information and input sessions. To register for a session, go to: www.mmsd.org/inputsession
Beginning Tuesday, February 7, go to: www.mmsd.org/thefuture to read more about the Plan.
Sincerely,
Daniel A. Nerad
Superintendent of Schools
Reprinted from a letter sent to community leaders today by Superintendent Nerad. We are sharing this to inform you and help the Madison Metropolitan School District get the word out. We have not yet seen the plan and therefore, this email should not viewed as an endorsement of it. We will reserve judgment until after the plan is released, we have had a chance to review it, and the public has responded.
Question 23 has implications for the future of our public schools, along with the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school:
Given Act 10's negative Impact on Collective Bargaining Agreements, will you introduce and vote for a motion to adopt the Collective Bargaining Agreements (182 page PDF Document) negotiated between MTI and The Madison Metropolitan School District as MMSD policy?
I suspect that at least 60% of Wisconsn school districts will adopt their current teacher contracts as "handbooks". The remainder will try different approaches. Some will likely offer a very different environment for teachers.
lot is riding on Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's upcoming plan for improving low-income, minority student achievement.
The plan is billed as a blueprint for addressing an intractable, divisive issue in Madison, and it could also factor into the upcoming School Board discussion of Nerad's future in Madison.
The United Way of Dane County has made closing the achievement gap one of its primary issues for more than 15 years through the Schools of Hope tutoring program. But president Leslie Howard said the recent debate over the proposed Madison Prepatory Academy charter school has drawn more public attention to the issue than ever before.
"I don't want to say something so grandiose that everything's at stake, but in some ways it feels like that," Howard said.
Wisconsin is fortunate to have many fine K-12 schools educating our young people. The quality of this state's educational system is among the best in the United States, and the same can be said for Wisconsin teachers.
Those accolades notwithstanding, there is one area in which Wisconsin schools should consider focusing some of their educational muscle: personal financial literacy.
More than ever before, our children -- by the time they graduate from high school -- need to be able to cope in the increasingly fast-paced world of financial services.
Today, many young people rarely handle cash, opting instead for the use of debit cards, credit cards and smartphones to make purchases. Those who have jobs probably never see a paycheck because most employers use direct deposit for their payrolls. And, most teens probably have never read the fine print of the contract for their mobile telecommunications devices.
States are now working intently on developing plans that will make new, common standards a reality. A recent report from Education First and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center concludes that that all but one of the 47 states adopting the Common Core State Standards is now in the implementation phase. Seven states have fully upgraded professional development, curriculum materials, and evaluation systems in preparation for the 2014-2015 school year.
Nary a word has been spoken about how to prepare teachers to implement common standards appropriately in the early childhood years. Although the emphasis on content-rich instruction in ways that builds knowledge is an important one, standards groups have virtually ignored the early years when these critical skills first begin to develop.
Young children are eager to learn about the sciences, arts, and the world around them. And, as many early childhood teachers recognize, we need to provide content-rich instruction that is both developmentally appropriate and highly engaging to support students' learning.
"And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault' - not 'leadership'."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, as told to Emmet John Hughes, for "Re-Viewing the Cold War: Domestic Factors and Foreign Policy in the East-West Confrontation"
Last year, someone said to me: "Laurie, I heard you're a nut job. So tell me, who are you, really?" I said: "You've heard me talk. What do you think?" The person chuckled and said: "I kind of like you. I think you care."
I do care. I have a fierce protective instinct toward the community, the country, and the children. I'm a patriot, but no politician. I'm not interested in making money or gaining political allies through District 81, the union or the media. I was trained as an old-style reporter, with an eye to supportable facts and a determination to know and report the truth. I'm not a natural extrovert, but five years of dealing with administrators and board directors have turned me into a fighter. I'm not a liar, and I'm no quitter, and I don't know how to do just the bare minimum of anything (except dusting).
We're teachers who believe that teacher evaluation, including the use of reliable test data, can be good for students and for teachers. Yes, yes, we know we're not supposed to exist. But we do, and there are a lot more of us.
In February the membership of United Teachers Los Angeles will vote on a teacher-led initiative urging union leaders to negotiate a new teacher evaluation system for L.A. Unified. The vote will allow teachers' voices to be heard above the din of warring political figures.
Although LAUSD and UTLA reached a contract agreement in December that embraced important school reforms, they haven't yet addressed teacher evaluation. Good teaching is enormously complex, and no evaluation system will capture it perfectly. But a substantive teacher-led evaluation system will be far better for students and teachers than what we have now, a system in which virtually all teachers receive merely "satisfactory" ratings from administrators.
These are interesting times to be a Stanford professor. Or to stop being a Stanford professor, as the case may be...
Last week, news broke that Professor Sebastian Thrun would be stepping down from teaching at Stanford to launch an online learning company called Udacity. Udacity is an outgrowth of his incredibly popular Artificial Intelligence class offered through Stanford last fall.
Now it appears that two other Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (Ng taught last term's massive Machine Learning class) have started their own company, Coursera, one that offers a very similar service as Thrun's.
According to the startup's jobs page, the two are "following up on the success of these courses to scale up online education efforts to provide a high quality education to the world. Out platform delivers complete courses where students are not only watching web-based lectures, but also actively participating, doing exercises, and deeply learning the material."
Education is undergoing a revolution (curricular deliver, opportunities for students, high and low cost delivery). Will Madison be part of it? We certainly have the resources and infrastructure. Will intransigence reign?
Newt Gingrich wants the U.S. to return to the moon, but as challenges go he has nothing on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's school reform plans.
Mr. Jindal wants to create America's largest school voucher program, broadest parental choice system, and toughest teacher accountability regime--all in one legislative session. Any one of those would be a big win, but all three could make the state the first to effectively dismantle a public education monopoly.
Louisiana is already one of 12 states (including Washington, D.C.) that offer school vouchers, but its program benefits fewer than 2,000 students in New Orleans. Governor Jindal would extend eligibility to any low-income student whose school gets a C, D or F grade from state administrators. That's almost 400,000 students--a bit more than half the statewide population--who could escape failing schools for private or virtual schools, career-based programs or institutions of higher education.
The very broad, capacious form of education that we call the liberal arts is rooted in a specific curriculum in classical and medieval times. But it would be wrong to assume that because it has such ancient roots, this kind of education is outdated, stale, fusty, or irrelevant. In fact, quite the contrary. A liberal-arts education, which Louis Menand defined in The Marketplace of Ideas as "a background mentality, a way of thinking, a kind of intellectual DNA that informs work in every specialized area of inquiry," lends itself particularly well to contemporary high-tech methods of imparting knowledge.
In 2011 Kaleem Caire, President and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, reintroduced the topic of the Academic Achievement Gap that exists in theMadison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). As reported, just 48% of African American students and 56% of Latino students graduated on time from MMSD in 2010.
Just as staggering as these statistics is the fact that until the conversation was reintroduced, a large majority of our community was not aware that the academic achievement gap even existed. Why is that? Four more important questions may be: How did we get here?What have we proposed before? Why has this problem persisted? AND - What should we do now? To answer these questions, and many more, the Urban League of Greater Madison would like to invite you to participate in a community forum moderated by Derrell Connor.
Wordpress.com: Academic Writing is Really Academic Reading--Blogs Vs. Term Papers
Is a writing a blog as valuable a writing experience as writing an academic term paper? Can the writing of a blog be made academically more rigorous in order to compete with the more traditional term paper? Or does the blog vs. term paper argument cloud a more critical academic problem... that our students do not read well enough to write in either format?
Matt Richtel, a reporter who writes about technology in education in the New York Times, recently published a piece, Blogs vs. Term Papers (1/20/12) regarding Duke University's English professor Cathy N. Davidson's embrace of the blog in place of the traditional term paper. He writes that, "Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog and the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. Instead of writing a quarterly term paper, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog about the issues and readings they are studying in class, along with essays for public consumption."
The traditional term paper in any number of disciplines of prescribed lengths of 5, 7, 10 or more pages has been centered for decades on a standard formula incorporating thesis, evidence, argument and conclusion. In the article, Davidson expresses her dislike for formula writing, including the five paragraph essay taught in middle and high schools and claims that, "This mechanistic writing is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers." She notes that, "It's a formula, but good writing plays with formulas, and changes formulas."
Davidson is not alone. Ritchel claims that "across the country, blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses." This movement from term paper to blog has many academics up in arms.
Running parallel to this argument of academic writing was the position offered by William H. Fitzhugh, author and founder of The Concord Review, a journal that publishes high school students' research papers. In the NY Times article, Fitzhugh discussed how high school educators "shy away from rigorous academic writing, giving students the relative ease of writing short essays." Fitzhugh makes the argument that students are required to read less which directly impacts their ability to write well.
Fitzhugh wrote about academic writing in Meaningful Work for American Educator (Winter 2011-2012) taking the position that reading is at the core of good academic student writing; "To really teach students how to write, educators must give them examples of good writing found in nonfiction books and require students to read them, not skim them, cover to cover." Good writing reflects knowledge and understanding that comes from reading, not skimming. Fitzhugh recommends that, "Reading nonfiction contributes powerfully to the knowledge that students need in order to read more difficult material--the kind they will surely face in college. But more importantly, the work of writing a research paper will lead students to read more and become more knowledgeable in the process. As any good writer knows, the best writing emerges from a rich store of knowledge that the author is trying to pass on. Without that knowledge and the motivation to share it, all the literacy strategies in the world will not make much difference."
From my experiences in the classroom, I see the veracity of both Davidson and Fitzhugh's positions. I believe that the form of student writing is not the problem, and the blog vs. term paper debate, at least at the high school level where I teach, is not as controversial as at the college level. My job is to teach students to write well, and a great deal of my average school day is currently given to encouraging students to write in these multiple formats in order to prepare them for the real world. I know that students can be taught to write well in term papers, blogs, essays, letters or any other format. However, the students need to read well in order to write well about a topic. The conundrum is that unless today's high school students are provided time in class, they do not read the material.
A student's inability to read independently for homework results in a reduction in both the amount of reading assigned and the class time to process the reading. Students who do not read well at the high school level are unprepared for the rigors of college curriculum which requires much more independent reading in non-fiction. Ultimately, the problem for teachers in high school is not the form in which students write. The problem is getting students to both read and understand assigned readings that come from many disciplines-fiction and non-fiction. Only then can the blog vs. term paper debate be addressed as a measure of academic writing.
In a well-publicized paper that addressed why some students were not learning to read, Reid Lyon (2001) concluded that children from disadvantaged backgrounds where early childhood education was not available failed to read because they did not receive effective instruction in the early grades. Many of these children then required special education services to make up for this early failure in reading instruction, which were by and large instruction in phonics as the means of decoding. Some of these students had no specific learning disability other than lack of access to effective instruction. These findings are significant because a similar dynamic is at play in math education: the effective treatment for many students who would otherwise be labeled learning disabled is also the effective preventative measure.
In 2010 approximately 2.4 million students were identified with learning disabilities -- about three times as many as were identified in 1976-1977. (See http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/xls/tabn045.xls and http://www.ideadata.org/arc_toc12.asp#partbEX). This increase raises the question of whether the shift in instructional emphasis over the past several decades has increased the number of low achieving children because of poor or ineffective instruction who would have swum with the rest of the pack when traditional math teaching prevailed. I believe that what is offered as treatment for math learning disabilities is what we could have done--and need to be doing--in the first place. While there has been a good amount of research and effort into early interventions in reading and decoding instruction, extremely little research of equivalent quality on the learning of mathematics exists. Given the education establishment's resistance to the idea that traditional math teaching methods are effective, this research is very much needed to draw such a definitive conclusion about the effect of instruction on the diagnosis of learning disabilities.1
IN recent years, a trend has emerged in the behavioral sciences toward shorter and more rapidly published journal articles. These articles are often only a third the length of a standard paper, often describe only a single study and tend to include smaller data sets. Shorter formats are promoted by many journals, and limits on article length are stringent -- in many cases as low as 2,000 words.
This shift is partly a result of the pressure that academics now feel to generate measurable output. According to the cold calculus of "publish or perish," in which success is often gauged by counting citations, three short articles can be preferable to a single longer one.
But some researchers contend that the trend toward short articles is also better for science. Such "bite size" science, they argue, encourages results to be communicated faster, written more concisely and read by editors and researchers more easily, leading to a more lively exchange of ideas.
Like many people, I am appalled at how little writing American students are asked to do. But when we crotchety advocates complain about this to teachers, we have to shut up when they point to a seemingly insoluble problem.
If we required students to write a lot, teachers would have to do many extra hours reading and commenting on that work. They would have no lives and would have to quit. If we could cut English class sizes in half, the teachers might be able to handle the load, but that won't happen unless oil is discovered under the football field.
A 21st-century solution, proposed by former Gates Foundation education executive director Tom Vander Ark, is to let computers read and grade the bumper crop of essays. Assessment software, already used to grade essays on the GMAT business school entrance test and other standardized exams, doesn't need a life and doesn't cost as much as breathing, pencil-wielding English teachers.
The Florida Department of Education today released a numerical ranking of the state's 3,078 public and charter schools, grouped by elementary, middle, high and combination schools. This ranking coupled with the district rankings, makes it easier for parents and taxpayers to view information about Florida's education system.
During the past decade, New York City undertook a district-wide high school reform that is perhaps unprecedented in its scope, scale, and pace. Between fall 2002 and fall 2008, the school district closed 23 large failing high schools (with graduation rates below 45 percent), opened 216 new small high schools (with different missions, structures, and student selection criteria), and implemented a centralized high school admissions process that assigns over 90 percent of the roughly 80,000 incoming ninth-graders each year based on their school preferences.
At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district's most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. MDRC researchers call them "small schools of choice" (SSCs) because of their small size and the fact that they do not screen students based on their academic backgrounds.
Wisconsin's science standards--unchanged since 1998, in spite of much earlier criticism, ours included--are simply worthless. No real content exists to evaluate.
In lieu of content, the "authors" have passed the buck by merely citing unelaborated references to the now outdated National Science Education Standards (NSES). Rather than using the NSES as building blocks for a comprehensive set of science standards, however, Wisconsin has used them as an escape hatch to avoid hard work and careful thought
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad says the state already has plans to review its standards in all areas.
"I think we have to be cautious not to look at the current state because it is very much in flux right now," Nerad says. "Things are going to change. it doesn't makes sense to look backwards as it does to look forward."
Claremont McKenna College, a small, prestigious California school, said Monday that for the past six years, it has submitted false SAT scores to publications like U.S. News & World Report that use the data in widely followed college rankings.
In a message e-mailed to college staff members and students, Claremont McKenna's president since 1999, Pamela B. Gann, wrote that "a senior administrator" had taken sole responsibility for falsifying the scores, admitted doing so since 2005, and resigned his post.
People briefed on the matter said that the administrator was Richard C. Vos, vice president and dean of admissions, whose name was removed in the last few days from the college's online list of top officials.
Mr. Vos, reached at his home Monday night, said: "No comment. It's an internal personnel matter."
Sixty-two New York City schools are on a path to be closed or otherwise re-shaped this year. Here's a score card to help you keep track of what schools are affected and how.
This post lists the 19 schools that the Department of Education wants to phase out, along with the six that will have their middle school grades removed (that's called truncation).
Until Feb. 9, when the Panel for Educational Policy votes on the changes, hearings are going on almost every night at the schools that are to be phased out or truncated. You can find the calendar of hearings here.
Do you hold a consistent mental model of the world? For many of us (though less likely for the readers of this blog), the answer is "no." That's troubling. It's hard to be correct, if your world-view doesn't even type check. [1] People are entitled to opinions. But hold them in a state of contradiction, and they're wrong.
Though it's easy enough to apply consistency checks, inconsistent world-views abound. I suspect it's because people never learn to be consistent. Education under-represents logic and reason in the classroom. High school math class is the closest many people come to an education in rationality, and math is "just too abstract."
The Janesville Gazette reported last week that principals at some of the city's public elementary school are attributing some major positive academic and behavioral trends to a relatively minor change: moving recess from after to before lunch.
I remember the post-lunch recess -- chasing girls, pick-up football, the bloody nose I gave my best friend.
In fact, I remember school-day and school-year schedules being much the same as the ones my 5-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son experience at their Madison public elementary school -- from the timing of recess, to summer vacation, to days off to honor such notables as Polish-born Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski (keep in mind this was the Chicago area, which has a large Polish population).
I suppose that could be because at some point decades ago, the public education establishment discovered the perfect academic schedule and, well, why tinker with something that works?
Janesville's experience suggests something else, though: that post-lunch recess is just another public education tradition among a slew of public education traditions that could benefit from a fresh pair of eyes.
Last week, Apple unveiled two new education-related products: iBooks textbooks and the new iTunes U courses. While both interest me, I was particularly fascinated by the new iTunes U courses and how they bundle information together. I converted my existing Advanced iPhone Development iTunes U class into a full course (which you can subscribe to for free) a few days ago. I wanted to write about what I learned in the process of doing this.
As I mentioned, I taught a course in 2010 at the Madison Area Technical College on advanced iPhone (now iOS) development. We recorded this course and made videos of the sessions available for free on iTunes U. Both the spring semester and fall semester of 2010 can be found as video collections in 720p HD on iTunes U. Each class session is roughly three hours long, because they were part of a once-a-week professional development course.
Madison Preparatory Academy doesn't have the money to open as a private school next fall and its future is in the hands of the Madison School Board, according to a lead supporter of the charter school proposal.
Supporters still want to open Madison Prep in the fall but haven't been able to raise about $1.2 million needed to run the school because its future beyond next year remains uncertain, Madison Prep board chairman David Cagigal said last week; moreover, a key donor said her support is contingent on School Board backing.
Cagigal said the private school option was never intended to be more than an interim plan before the school opened as a public charter school. One of the most common reasons charter schools fail is lack of funding, he added.
"We can't approach these donors unless we mitigate the risk," Cagigal said. "The only way we can do that is seek a 2013 vote."
Cagigal acknowledged that if the School Board doesn't vote on opening Madison Prep as a charter school in 2013, "then we may have to wait."
Charter schools: The Oakland school board rejected the charter school petitions submitted by the faculties of ASCEND and Learning Without Limits, public elementary schools in the Fruitvale area that want to secede from the school district. The district's charter schools office recommended that the board approve the request, but Superintendent Tony Smith took a different stance, pointing to the financial investment the district has made in the schools since they opened.
This section of a staff resolution seems to sum up the superintendent's position: "Whereas, the District cannot succeed at its strategic plan to create a Full Service Community School District that serves the whole child ... if after millions of dollars in investment, individual schools that have achieved because of the District's investment can separate and opt out of the District, with the consequence that the District loses its collective identity as a school system serving children in all neighborhoods in
For the first time this year, LAUSD has prepared reports for teachers that rate their effectiveness. When I received an email saying I could now view my own personal "Average Growth over Time" report, I opened it with a combination of trepidation, resignation and indignation.
First, the indignation. It is, I think, the key factor that has kept me teaching past the five-year mark, when most new teachers quit the profession. I am in my sixth year of teaching after a nearly 20-year career as a professional writer. I know that I am smart, hardworking and competent, and despite the many frustrations of teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I have refused to throw in the towel -- as so many do.
Indignation is also what fueled my reaction when I saw the rating the school district sent. It showed me to be on the low side of average for high school English teachers in the district.
The 7th Inter-Schools Mathematics Olympiad 2012 was organised on Sunday at the Pak-Turk International School Campus. Over 3,000 students from 470 schools of Jhelum, Attock, Chakwal, Rawalpindi and Islamabad participated in the mega educational competition. In order to evoke interest among the students, Pak-Turk International schools and colleges have been arranging the ISMO competition for the last six years. Speaking at the event, educationists said that there are not enough chances for student to exhibit their talent to the world. There is an immense need of such programmes for the brilliant youth, they added. This unique competition provides a great chance for the students of 5, 6, 7 and 8 classes or grades to show their incredible potential and win handsome prizes.
As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.
This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.
It begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors write:
School principals, including some who back more rigorous review of teachers, are balking at education reforms required by Race to the Top. New teacher evaluations are all-consuming, they say.
Sharon McNary believes in having tough teacher evaluations.
But these days, the Memphis principal finds herself rushing to cram in what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers - including those she knows are excellent - sometimes to the detriment of her other duties.
"I don't think there's a principal that would say they don't agree we don't need a more rigorous evaluation system," says Ms. McNary, who is president of the Tennessee Principals Association as well as principal at Richland Elementary. "But now it seems that we've gone to [the opposite] extreme."
In New York, which is also beginning to implement a new teacher evaluation system this year, many principals are even less constrained in their opinion
ONLY 21 states require students to attend high school until they graduate or turn 18. The proposal President Obama announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address -- to make such attendance compulsory in every state -- is a step in the right direction, but it would not go far enough to reduce a dropout rate that imposes a heavy cost on the entire economy, not just on those who fail to obtain a diploma.
In 1970, the United States had the world's highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we've slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.
On primary and secondary education, Obama essentially advocated three directives: raise the dropout age to eighteen, continue his Race to the Top program, and loosen the standardized restrictions on teachers. Obama is right to say that the minimum requirements set by No Child Left Behind, in the ten years the law has been in effect, have done little to shrink the achievement gap, and to consider an alternative. But it's too early to know if Race to the Top is the right one. The first, sufficiently rigorous evaluation will begin in March, and will only be completed and released two years later. He's also right to say that "teachers matter," and that good ones ought to have the freedom and income to do their job well.
That education cannot be treated in a bubble is an important truth that should not be missed. And yet, while the President's diagnosis--even with its simplifications--was accurate, his prescriptions were light on details. "Challenges remain," he said, but "we know how to solve them." Do we? It was not even clear how to resolve tension between his stated desire not to confine educators to "teaching to the test" and the way the Race to the Top rewards testing, aside from handing it off to individual states. Injunctions like "more competition" miss the wide scope of the problem. Indeed, in a country where the fault lines in education align so neatly along economic, racial, and geographic divisions, there's almost an urge to accept rhetorical shows of confidence, and not look too far beyond them.
What if you suddenly found out that half of the eighth-graders in Wisconsin, all kids you thought were highly rated readers, really didn't merit being called proficient? That instead of four out of five being pretty decent in math, it was really two out of five?
You better start thinking how you'd react because it's likely that is what's coming right at us. That's how dramatic a proposal last week by the state Department of Public Instruction is.
As parents, teachers, school leaders, politicians, community leaders and taxpayers, will we be motivated to do better? Will we see the need for change? Will we rise to the occasion? Or will we settle for being discouraged and basically locked into what we've come to expect?
Here's what's going on: With Congress failing to pass a revision, originally due in 2007, of the education law known as No Child Left Behind, the U.S. Department of Education has begun issuing waivers from the enforcement program of the increasingly dysfunctional law. Wisconsin wants a waiver - it's one of the things people such as Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic-oriented Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers agree on. So a task force developed a proposal. People have until Feb. 3 to react to the proposal and the application is to be submitted Feb. 21.
The plan will change a lot of important dynamics of what students and schools in Wisconsin are expected to accomplish. It calls for publicly rating all schools on a 1 to 100 point scale, with student outcomes as a key factor. Schools that score low will face orders to improve and, possibly, closing. And that goes for every school with students whose education is paid for with public dollars - in other words, private schools in the voucher programs for Milwaukee and Racine kids are included.
Overall, the waiver plan means we are at the point where Wisconsin gets serious about raising expectations for student achievement. Wisconsin is regarded as having one of the lowest bars in the U.S. for rating a student as proficient. No more, the proposal says.
....
Eighth-grade reading: Using the WKCE measuring stick, 86% of students were rated as "advanced" or "proficient." Using the NAEP measuring stick, it was 35% - a 51-point difference. At least as vivid: Using the WKCE measure, 47% of eighth-graders were "advanced," the top bracket. Using the NAEP measure, it was 3%. Three percent! In other words, only a handful of kids statewide would be labeled advanced under the new system, not the nearly half we're used to.
Fourth-grade reading: On the WKCE scale, 82% were proficient or advanced. On the NAEP scale, it was 33%.
A substantial improvement in academic standards is warranted and possibly wonderful, assuming it happens and avoids being watered down. The rightly criticized WKCE was an expensive missed opportunity.
The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here). It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative -- all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog.
I do however have a major quibble. At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work. He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established. But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.
UW campuses issued identically worded denials of our requests for course syllabi, which is one of the many sources of information we use to rate programs for the National Review of teacher preparation programs. They argue that "syllabi are not public records because they are subject to copyright" and therefore do not have to be produced in response to an open records request.
We believe that the University's reading of the law is flawed. We are engaged in research on the quality of teacher preparation programs, and so our request falls squarely within the fair use provision of copyright law. What's more, these documents were created at public institutions for the training of public school teachers, and so should be subject to scrutiny by the public.
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town are "above average." Well, in the School of Education they're all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW's schools. Scrolling through the Registrar's online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C's and only the really high performers score A's.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody's a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that's the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A's and a handful of A/B's. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.
The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.
Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.
The small schools initiative that has been the hallmark of the Bloomberg administration's schools policy seems to be working, a new study has found.
Winnie Hu reports in The New York Times on Thursday that the study found that students who attend public high schools that have about 100 students in each grade were more likely to graduate.
The continuing study is described as "one of the largest and most comprehensive reviews of the impact of small schools on learning." Its $3.5 million cost is covered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the study is conducted by MDRC, a nonprofit education research group based in Manhattan.
The study found that students at small high schools were more likely to earn a diploma than students who attend larger schools, The Times reports.
Steve Jobs didn't think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It's worth remembering that in the wake of last week's breathless coverage of Apple's new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple's plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook -- including highlighting passages, making notes and pulling out passages or chapters that are especially important to them. Apple says it also plans to cap the price of textbooks available through iBooks at $14.99, a significant departure from the price of many textbooks now.
Critics were quick to pounce that Apple wasn't being revolutionary enough. Former school superintendent and current ed-tech investor Tom Vander Ark chided Apple for not thinking past textbooks, which he considers hopelessly 20th century. Others worried that Apple's real goal wasn't to open up the textbook industry but to control it and profit from it through restrictive licensing agreements and a platform that dominates the market. I'm sure the for-profit company's shareholders will be horrified at that news.
MG Siegler in his latest TechCrunch article posits that although Apple's new iBooks strategy is admirable in its effort to fix problems in public high schools, that it's not realistic and that their market strategy should revolve around colleges and college textbooks.
On the surface, which seems logical enough, his argument is sound. But It ignores the one, HUGE driving force in education: money.
Nearly all high schools are public, or receive public funding in one way or another and help to satisfy the law which states that students of high school age must attend school. Textbooks are merely a means of teaching these students topics which help these schools qualify for their funding.
Education was the topic of discussion in northeast Louisiana Thursday as Governor Bobby Jindal and the state's new Superintendent of Education John White visited the area.
Jindal spoke to the Monroe Chamber of Commerce about what he called a "critical time" in Louisiana's history and the role his aggressive education reform package will play in the state's continuing journey to improvement.
White joined Jindal at the Monroe Chamber of Commerce but spent most of his visit in area schools observing teachers and students.
First Niagara Bank has pledged $3 million to support a nonprofit group that is representing business interests in Connecticut's education reform debate.
The money will go to Hartford's Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER), which is led by a group of prominent Connecticut business leaders including former Hartford Financial Services Group CEO Ramani Ayer, and Peyton Patterson, the former chief executive of NewAllinace Bank, which was acquired by First Niagara Bank last year.
The Connecticut Council for Education Reform also unveiled Thursday its education agenda for the upcoming legislative session, which includes urging the state to adopt:
--Teacher and leader employment and retention policies that attract the highest quality professionals and insist upon effectiveness as defined by their ability to demonstrate improvement in student performance, not seniority, as the measure of success defined by redesigned evaluation systems.
A University of Missouri researcher and his colleague have conducted a review that casts doubt on the accuracy of a popular theory that attempted to explain why there are more men than women in top levels of mathematic fields. The researchers found that numerous studies claiming that the stereotype, "men are better at math" - believed to undermine women's math performance - had major methodological flaws, utilized improper statistical techniques, and many studies had no scientific evidence of this stereotype.
This theory, called stereotype threat, was first published in 1999 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Essentially, the theory is that due to the stereotype that women are worse than men in math skills, females develop a poor self-image in this area, which leads to mathematics underachievement.
A committee tasked with mapping out the controversial introduction of compulsory national education in all Hong Kong government schools has suggested it be delayed until as late as 2015.
The Education Bureau last year proposed introducing the curriculum into primary schools as early as September this year, and into secondary schools in the 2013-14 academic year.
However, a source said the Moral and National Education Ad Hoc Committee had now proposed postponing full introduction of the subject - which critics have labelled as brainwashing - until the 2015-16 academic year.
The source said schools would be given three years to get ready for the new curriculum, and it would not specifically cover sensitive topics such as the June 4, 1989, crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Schools could start teaching the subject before then if they were ready.
Björk turned her last album into an app. Now she's turning her music into a science exhibit for city students, with an unusual three-week run at a Queens museum better known for its molecule models and retired spacecraft.
The singer arrives at the New York Hall of Science next month to hold a series of classes for middle school students, as well as six open-to-the-public concerts in the museum's Great Hall. Björk will also stage four shows at a more conventional concert venue: Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom.
"The whole idea is to take music education out of a bookish, academic thing and into a more physical, tactile experience," said Björk, 46 years old, in an interview as she was preparing for the event.
n recent listening sessions with Madison parents, I heard how we can improve our schools, what we can be really proud of and stories about our wonderful teachers. In these discussions and in others, people have talked about addressing the racial achievement gap and shared concerns about Madison Prep.
For the 12 years I have been involved in Madison schools, I have been championing education and addressing the racial achievement gap. An East High teacher and I co-founded the AVID/TOPS program, which I also supported financially and continue to co-chair. This program has increased the number of students graduating and going on to post-secondary education. But AVID TOPS alone is not enough. We need to do more.
When Madison Prep was discussed last fall, it was the only proposal put on the table in the last five years to significantly address the racial achievement gap. At that time the teachers union and the planners of Madison Prep were in agreement that the school would run with Madison School District employees, union teachers and under the leadership of the district (as an instrumentality). A major concern raised was that Madison Prep would pull resources needed by existing schools.
Learning to Write Teaches Westerly Students Science "Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice."
Back in December 2009, excited 4th graders at Westerly's State Street School (http://sss.westerly.k12.ri.us/) sat down to take a practice science test. Like little sports jocks, the kids approached the task as if it were training for the big game coming in the spring, the statewide science NECAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NECAP).
In 2008, the whole Westerly district had performed so poorly on that test that teachers actually volunteered their time to form a K-12 Science Task Force focused on redeeming their sullied academic reputation. (See last week's column about this Task Force (link to my column from last week) .)
Then, insult to injury, in 2009 State Street's scores tanked again.
The heat was on. State Street had already started implementing the Task Force's recommendations, including its strong emphasis on teaching writing.
Wait. Writing? That's English, not science. But more on this in a moment.
Westerly's students had struggled particularly with the "inquiry" part of the NECAP, where kids to do a hands-on task and draw conclusions from what they see in front of them.
State Street's Principal Audrey Faubert says, "Science (NECAP) is only given at the 4th grade (and later at 8th and 11th), so K-3 weren't exposed to the rigors of testing. We decided to give all the kids an inquiry task to complete. And the faculty also took some of the released test items from the RIDE website. (http://www.ride.ri.gov/assessment/necap_releaseditems.aspx) Even though they'd been teaching inquiry with the science kits (http://www.uri.edu/hss/education/GEMSNET-URI/index.html) , it was interesting for the teachers to be on the other side of a test."
But the spotlight's glare was on those 4th graders.
Faubert smiled sadly, "The room was buzzing. The kids thought they did fantastic."
Working in pairs, the school's entire teaching staff scored the kids' work. The results were enough to induce clinical depression.
But as it turns out, the school's good efforts hadn't quite paid off yet. The Task Force was onto a good thing when they decided writing was key to learning science. State Street's instruction had only just started to take root.
Here's the problem: Old science was about answers. When a test asks a question like: "How does wind change sand dunes?" somewhere in the science textbook was an answer that the kid was supposed to have memorized.
New science is about thinking and reasoning. The way Faubert puts it is: "The (NECAP) science test is a thinking test, not a knowledge test. Science isn't about recall any more, but about synthesizing information." New science poses essential questions, such as the sand dunes example, but now the kids need to derive the answer themselves, by sorting through data. Teachers provide techniques, tools, research methods, and experiences. But like scientists themselves, students must do their own research and figure out what their discoveries mean.
Writing is always the product of thinking. Writing forces a kid to organize her thoughts to be expressive and communicate clearly.
Middle-school principal Paula Fusco says "Prior to the work of the Task Force, we'd left writing up to the English teacher. But whatever the kids did or didn't know, they weren't able to communicate their understanding of science."
To work on that understanding, Fusco says, "we've been taking the vocabulary out of NECAP--infer, predict, explain. So the kids aren't afraid of the words they're encountering."
The ability to define "predict" doesn't help at all if the ability to MAKE a prediction isn't also a familiar habit. Kids need to demonstrate, by their writing, that they understand what they need to DO when the test asks them to predict, infer or explain.
Similarly, Fusco's teachers began to work with the kids on "sentence starters" to guide their thinking--However, In conclusion, Whereas, Therefore.
Fortunately, Westerly's students were in the habit of writing in science journals. But they had used them mainly to record observations. Faubert says, "Every teacher brought in examples of their students' science journals. Oh, here are the strengths and weaknesses right in our own notebooks. We'd never had the kids prove their thinking in their journals. Think like a scientist, based on what's in front of you. Prove your thinking. Prove your thinking. We said that so many times."
At the end of the day, teaching the kids to EXPLAIN their predictions and reasoning was the clearest way to teach them habits of scientific thinking. And those explanations also helped the teachers assess kids' understanding and misunderstanding.
By February, State Street dared to try another practice test with the 4th graders. Again, the staff scored it together. Ahhh, much better. So much so, Faubert felt more confident about improving on the 49 percent proficiency they'd managed in the prior year's test.
In fact, when the results were released last Fall, State Street kids hit 80 percent proficiency, 8th highest in the state, out of over 150 schools that take that test. (And Westerly is the 8th lowest-income community in the state.)
Superintendent Roy Seitsinger's take on the situation is this: "Nobody (meaning veteran educators) signed up for what we're doing now. Most of the people weren't trained to bring students through a thinking process. Now the educators' job is to teach kids how to sift through all that information and to be critical, reflective and make decisions. We have too much information and not nearly enough sorting skills."
Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice.
Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at EducationViews.org and GoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.
he Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience.
Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital - Life - Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.
During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than "a camera, a pen and a napkin." Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course's popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.
Bill Cosby and Dick Morris presumably disagree about most things, so it's instructive to note that both have officially endorsed "School Choice Week," which began yesterday with a series of rallies and events around the country celebrating the idea of parents being able to decide where their children go to school. Indeed, school choice seems like such an obviously good idea that the most interesting thing about School Choice Week is why it exists at all.
That school choice is valuable is beyond dispute. That's why there's a multi-billion dollar private school industry serving millions of students. And it's why there is a much larger system of school choice embedded in the American real estate market. While some parents pay school tuition directly, many more pay it through their monthly mortgage and property tax bills. Anyone who has deliberately purchased a home in a "good" school district is, by definition, a beneficiary and supporter of school choice.
Absent the glamour of the black mock turtleneck, Apple's Thursday event, held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, still came bearing flowers of rhetoric, lovingly transplanted from their native soil in Cupertino's sunny clime. One such rhetorical staple, the feature checklist, made its appearance about nine minutes in. Usually, the checklist is used to contrast Apple's latest magical object with the feature set of lesser smartphones or other misbegotten tech tchotchkes; it was more than a little eye-popping to see the same rhetoric of invidious comparison used against the book in full -- that gadget which, as senior VP Phil Schiller reminded us, was invented (in its print incarnation) back at the end of the Hundred Years' War.
A week ago there was an article in the Seattle Times describing a large drop in applicants to the UW this year. Considering that other WA State schools have not seen a similar decline and all state colleges are experiencing essentially the same tuition increases, why are UW applications down?
Could it be the incessant articles and editorials by the Seattle Times about how the UW is turning down strong applicants to let in more out of state students? How about this Seattle Times headline last spring:
"Why straight-A's may not get you into the UW this year"
which suggested that
"High-school seniors with top test scores didn't get in.
Students who got into more prestigious schools were wait-listed at the UW.
Valedictorians with straight-A's were denied admission, while out-of-state students with lower grades were accepted."
The most important domestic subject that I FAIL to adequately cover is K-12 education. It's potentially the most effective tool we have for increasing vertical mobility in our society -- and hence is currently misused as the best single method to repress disadvantaged minorities.
What the education unions and their bought-and-paid-for Democrat allies have done to inner city black and Hispanic kids would warm the cockles of any KKK Grand Dragon. The Progressives' steadfast opposition to improving education angers me every time I think about it.
Thus I include intact below an excellent op-ed on the topic from the LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS. It's upbeat -- giving the growing success of the school choice movement in all its many flavors.
Sadly, California is one of the least successful states in this effort to improve education. All we hear from CA liberals is that we don't spend enough. But the growing popularity and acceptance of school choice in other states is going to make it more and more difficult for our voters to ignore this innovation.
The top priority facing southeastern Wisconsin - and, indeed, the biggest challenge for the entire state - is the creation of more new jobs.
There are many good ideas for creating new jobs, and many deserve further consideration. The creation of new venture capital funds, tax breaks for industries and workforce training incentives for companies that locate in Wisconsin are all worthy of further consideration and possible action.
But the best strategy for creating new jobs is to look at what companies want when deciding where to expand a plant or locate a production facility. No doubt, they look at quality of life, housing, transportation, the overall community and other factors.
However, time and again, one of the top assets that attracts new jobs is a quality education system at all levels that produces bright, articulate and engaging future workers who accept the challenge of the new international economy and the interdependent global economic landscape. That starts at kindergarten and continues beyond high school. Gone are the days when a student could graduate from high school and move to a job that could last a lifetime.
Britain is about to fall in love with maths. Well, that's the dream. Yesterday one of the government's top advisers on further education said that maths should be compulsory for all students until 18 or 19 - no matter what else they are studying. Professor Steve Sparks, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, also said that he wants a new maths qualification between GCSE and AS-level to be introduced by 2016.
Maths is justified in this country because it is useful. Sparks said his proposals were necessary because young people need a better grasp of maths to compete in the job market, where an understanding of technology and numeracy are increasingly important.
As Highland Park schools officials pleaded their case against an emergency manager to officials in Lansing on Friday, Gov. Rick Snyder sent a letter to the district's parents informing them that without state intervention there would be no district by the end of next month.
Parents of Highland Park School District students told district officials today they received a letter from the governor informing them of the school district's dire financial situation.
In a letter dated Jan. 20, Snyder told parents finances for the school district have reached a crisis stage and during the 2010-11 school year, the district was $3 million over budget.
The letter also mentioned the state forwarded an emergency advance of $188,000 to the district on Jan. 13.
Many of us don't learn in optimal ways. We know that we forget new material, neglect to review older material, and study in ways that elevate cramming and procrastination to art forms. But there is research about how to be more efficient in these things. For example, dating back to 1885, there is a rich literature that explores how timing our learning of new and old material can affect education.
For a long time, these theories were only loosely applied. They couldn't be put into quantitative practice because of the difficulty of carefully implementing them. But with the ability to create educational software, customized to ensure a student has an optimal learning experience, we have a wonderful opportunity to actually employ this knowledge. Unfortunately, there are so many competing concerns, it's far from trivial: We need to begin constructing new algorithms to figure out how best to learn.
My younger daughter is nine. After watching me sit with a laptop all term preparing material using Scheme, she wanted to know something about it. She is self-taught on the application side of computing (browsers, paint programs, word processing) but knows nothing of computation itself. So I opened up a DrScheme Interactions window. "You add like this," I said, typing in (+ 3 4). No problem. "Try some other operations, some bigger numbers." It looks like a calculator without a ten-digit limit.
I wrote out some arithmetic expressions for her to convert to Scheme. She had difficulty with them, but not with Scheme: I had forgotten how much algebraic notation is taught later. She didn't understand concatenation for multiplication, / for division, or putting two expressions one above the other with a horizontal line in between. Once I explained those, she converted them into Scheme expressions very quickly.
The way Florida grades its public schools will soon be changing.
On Tuesday, the state Board of Education heard an extensive presentation on proposed changes to the school grading formula.
The ideas ran the gamut, from incorporating the test scores of children with disabilities, to giving extra points to students who boost their test scores into the highest range.
Of course, high school grades will have to take into account the new end-of-course exams, which are being given this year in algebra, geometry and biology. Some middle-school students will also be taking the exams -- and the grades given to middle schools need to reflect that, too.
Learning about southeast Asia from a teacher in Thailand is making the curriculum come alive for Lodi High School students.
Every morning, the students receive instruction via Skype from Tuke-Karnteera Ingkhaninan, a teacher from the Sa-nguan Ying School in Suphanburi, Thailand. Then early in the evening, Mark Kohl, a Lodi High School teacher, instructs students at the Thailand school about United States history.
"We can see it a lot more clearly instead of reading about it in a textbook," said Lodi senior Becky Thuot, 18.
Senior Savannah Sundt, 17, agreed, noting that is was meaningful when Ingkhaninan talked about a festival she would attend that evening and the Lodi students could hear fireworks going off as part of it.
The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world--for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."
Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.
People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.
In a hushed first-grade classroom at Public School 55 in the South Bronx, Edward Muñoz, a bashful 7-year-old in scuffed sneakers and a worn hoodie, was sounding out tricky words with his tutor.
Together they plowed through a book about a birthday barbecue, tackling the words "party" and "presents." Then they played a rousing game of word-based tic-tac-toe, with Edward eventually declaring victory.
Exchanges like theirs take place every day in classrooms around the country, now that links between early literacy gains and later school success have been clearly documented.
But Edward's tutor was not in the classroom. His school, a 20-minute walk from the nearest subway stop in a crime-plagued neighborhood, has long had trouble finding tutors willing to visit. "It is hard to get anyone to volunteer," said the school's principal, Luis Torres, who sometimes cancels fire drills because of the gunfire he hears outside.
The state could more aggressively intervene in the lowest-performing publicly funded schools under a proposed accountability system unveiled Monday.
The system would rate schools on a scale of 0 to 100 based on student performance and growth on state tests, closing achievement gaps and preparing students for college and careers. Ratings also would be tied to dropout rates and third-grade literacy levels.
The http://dpi.state.wi.us/esea/pdf/eseawaiver_coverletter.pdf">http://dpi.state.wi.us/esea/index.html">Department of Public Instruction released a draft application to the U.S. Education Department for a waiver from the 10-year-old federal No Child Left Behind Act, which State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said "has shackled schools by being overly prescriptive and prohibiting creative reforms."
"Wisconsin's request for flexibility from NCLB is driven by the belief that increasing rigor across the standards, assessment and accountability system will result in improved instruction and improved student outcomes," Evers said
Raising Expectations, Increasing Rigor
As noted in Principle 1, DPI has significantly raised expectations for schools and the proportion of students who graduate ready for college and career, as indicated by the adoption of rigorous academic standards, higher cut scores based on NAEP as the state transitions to SBAC, increasingly rigorous and adaptive assessment systems, and increased graduation requirements. The new accountability report card and the new system of support, rewards, and recognition will reflect these new expectations. While the state has previously emphasized graduation rates (and boasted one of the highest in the nation), DPI also recognizes the state has significant achievement and graduation gaps. The accountability index prioritizes achievement and attainment using measures which emphasize not only graduation, but also the proportion of students graduating college and career ready. Additionally, the system examines achievement gaps within and across schools as a means to address the state's existing gaps. Using a multifaceted index will help pinpoint areas of need within a school, as well as areas of strength, and help schools track their progress at meeting the needs of all student subgroups. Within the system of support, identified schools will participate in diagnostic reviews and needs assessments (Priority and Focus Schools, respectively) to identify their instructional policies, practices, and programming that have impacted student outcomes and to differentiate, and individualize reforms and interventions. While planning and implementing reforms, schools and districts will have access to increasingly expansive and timely data systems to monitor progress. Additionally, the state will require Priority and Focus Schools to implement RtI (with the support of the Wisconsin RtI Center and its resources) to ensure that all students are receiving customized, differentiated services within a least restrictive environment, including additional supports and interventions for SwDs and ELLs as needed, or extension activities and additional challenge for students exceeding benchmarks.
Hold district accountable for deceit, academic failure and questionable activity "Where ignorance is bliss, ignorance of ignorance is sublime." - Paul Dunham
Last week, I went to a Spokane Public Schools math presentation at Indian Trail Elementary School. It was billed as a forum in the school newsletter and on the reader board outside of the school. It was not, in any way, a forum. It was a tightly controlled 20-minute presentation that offered no data, little information, allowed for no parent input and was patronizing in tone.
At one point, parents were asked to define math to the person next to us. (The principal said he would not offer his definition.) We also were told to describe to our neighbor a math experience we'd had. These conversations ended right there, thus being pointless. We watched a video of several small children talking about the importance of math. The kids were cute, but the video was long. It was made clear to us that math is hard, parents don't get it (see slide 7 of the presentation), "traditional math" is no longer useful, and math is intimidating to all. Printed materials reinforced the idea of parent incompetence, with students supposedly "taking the lead" and teaching their parents.
Parents were warned to stay positive about math, however, despite our supposed fear and lack of skill, and we also were told what a "balanced" program looks like - as if that's what Spokane actually has.
ALEC's 17th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.
Focusing on the reforms recently enacted in Indiana, and with a foreword by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, this Report Card on American Education examines the experiences other states can learn from the struggles and triumps in Indiana.
Authors Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips analyze student scores, looking at both performance as well as how scores have improved over recent years. Additionally, each state is graded based on its current education policies.
Value added" or "VA" refers to the use of statistical techniques to measure teachers' impacts on their students' standardized test scores, controlling for such student characteristics as prior years' scores, gender, ethnicity, disability, and low-income status.
Reports on a massive new study that seem to affirm the use of the technique have recently been splashed across the media and chewed over in the blogosphere. Further from the limelight, developments in Wisconsin seem to ensure that in the coming years value-added analyses will play an increasingly important role in teacher evaluations across the state. Assuming the analyses are performed and applied sensibly, this is a positive development for student learning.
The Chetty Study
Since the first article touting its findings was published on the front page of the January 6 New York Times, a new research study by three economists assessing the value-added contributions of elementary school teachers and their long-term impact on their students' lives - referred to as the Chetty article after the lead author - has created as much of a stir as could ever be expected for a dense academic study.
Eliminating high school athletics during a school year is unusual, especially in a sports-loving state such as Texas.
But that's exactly what's happening in this small ranching community where the school district is taking desperate measures to prevent a state-mandated closure due to poor academics.
The Premont Independent School District is even deploying its superintendent, a constable and high school principal to the homes of truant students in an effort to improve dismal attendance.
Missouri lawmakers are facing increasing pressure to deal with a potential flood of student transfers stemming from the loss of accreditation in urban school districts like Kansas City's.
But looming over this year's legislative session is a pledge by House Speaker Steve Tilley, a Perryville Republican, that any plan to deal with school transfers to suburban districts, or adjustments to the state's school funding formula, be coupled with ideas that have doomed previous reform efforts.
Those include controversial measures such as expanding charter schools, eliminating teacher tenure, basing teacher pay on student achievement and offering tax credit vouchers to parents who want to send children to private schools.
MADISON -- Wisconsin's request for waivers from several provisions of federal education law creates the expectation that every child will graduate ready for college and careers by setting higher standards for students, educators, and schools.
"Education for today's world requires increased rigor and higher expectations," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has shackled schools by being overly prescriptive and prohibiting creative reforms that would help more students gain the skills needed for further education and the workforce. Wisconsin's request for flexibility from NCLB is driven by the belief that increasing rigor across the standards, assessment, and accountability system will result in improved instruction and improved student outcomes."
To receive waivers, state education agencies must demonstrate how they will use flexibility from NCLB requirements to address four principles: transitioning to college- and career-ready standards and assessments; developing systems of differentiated recognition, accountability, and support; evaluating and supporting teacher and principal effectiveness; and reducing duplication. The Department of Public Instruction has posted its draft waiver request online and is asking for public comment through a survey. After the two-week comment period, the agency will revise the waiver request and submit it to the U.S. Department of Education by Feb. 21.
In the world outside public education, people apply for a job they want, interview with their potential boss, compete against other applicants and are ultimately selected if they look like a good fit for the position.
It doesn't work that way in public education.
In schools, teachers do all the normal things to get hired, but when it comes to placement, seniority is what counts, not the perfect fit. The teacher with the longest tenure in a district gets first dibs on any available job at a school, with the principal - the school's boss - getting little or no input.
School district officials in Oakland want to change that, believing that it's in the best interests of students when a teacher - new, veteran or in between - wants to work at a school and the school wants that teacher.
Schools minister Nick Gibb has said he wants to stop schools prioritising their rankings in exam league tables over ensuring a good education for all their pupils.
New league tables for England, out next week, show which schools boost pupils' progress from ages 11 and 16.
Mr Gibb said the old system allowed schools to exploit tables, and some used it to help boost their rankings.
Kai Ryssdal: However students get their textbooks -- on an iPad or the old-fashioned way -- those books don't do any good unless they're actually used.
There are 37 million people in this country who've started college, who have some credits -- but never finished. When they do that, when they drop out, there are costs -- to them, and to the rest of us, in the billions of dollars, in wasted loans and grants and lost opportunities. Those costs are one reason college dropouts are starting to get more attention from the Obama administration on down.
But finding ways for people to finish their degrees might mean rethinking the way Americans go to college. Emily Hanford of American RadioWorks reports.
Charter schools are public schools. Historically, however, the relationship between school districts and charters has been nonexistent at best, antagonistic at worst. As the charter sector continues to grow steadily, an analysis of the national landscape explores how that relationship needs to start changing--and where it already has.
This year's 6th annual edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality provides a clear roadmap for school districts and charter schools interested in working together to improve education options. The report explains the risks and technical challenges behind charter-district collaboration and provides powerful examples of how they can be overcome.
Where will the thin blue line lead these children? What will their path mean to Milwaukee's education scene?
I'm talking about the 330 kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Milwaukee Scholars Charter School.
The corridors of the school's new building at 7000 W. Florist Ave. have gray carpeting - except for blue stripes near each wall.
When students pass in the halls, whether in groups or solo, they are required to walk only on the blue stripe on the right side of the hall as they face it. Get caught off that stripe and you can get marked down in the school's discipline system.
Minus the blue lines and with a discipline system that isn't structured quite so firmly, Milwaukee Math and Science Academy, a charter school at 110 W. Burleigh St., brings to mind the same questions for its 160 kindergarten through fifth-grade pupils.
There used to be a time when Milwaukee was considered one of the most active education reform cities in the country. The City's private school choice program, the oldest and largest in the country, was our ticket to fame (or infamy, depending on who you ask) through most of the 1990's. The choice program was supposed to be a game changer to public education. It was supposed to set off a chain reaction of innovation and competition that would not only improve the lives of children, but change the way we configured our education policy for the City of Milwaukee. In short, we were going to be the hotbed of the reform movement for decades to come.
Sadly, the game changing education movement we expected didn't come to pass. There is no doubt, however, that the existence of parent choice in Milwaukee has changed the lives of thousands of kids. The movement that created and protected the choice program fostered the development of two of the City's best charter schools and promoted a small sector of independent charters authorizers and schools. Unfortunately, aside from these developments there has been little large-scale reform in Milwaukee since the mid-1990's. Instead of a catalyst, the choice program became a scapegoat for both political parties and many status quo stakeholders. The failing public school district in Milwaukee has been allowed to sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand while union interests and their status quo Democrats blamed the choice program for all the public schools considerable ills. The GOP used the choice program as the be-all-end-all urban education solution, and was happy to let thoughtful public school policy and funding fall by the way side. The independent charter school community put their heads down and tried to stay out of the political fray - they served small pockets of kids very well, but without the ability or the will to take their model to scale. As a result, Milwaukee, not only fell behind, we fell off the map entirely.
It's not the iPhone 5, it's not the iPad 3, but there was a big Apple product announcement today. A new version of its iBooks software geared at providing interactive student textbooks, which would be read -- of course -- on the iPad. The potential hurdles are many, including the fact that iPads still cost around $500.
We wanted to get away from the business case study, though, and explore what this might actually eventually mean in the classroom. So we called Katie Cohen. Until June of last year, she was a high school science teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Katie, thanks for being with us.
Katie Cohen: Thank you very much.
Ryssdal: So listen, in any ideal world, if all of your had had iPads, what would that have meant for you as a teacher?
The move comes 10 months after a USA TODAY investigation found high erasure rates on standardized tests in many District of Columbia public schools, and six months after Georgia's governor released findings of a major investigation that found widespread cheating in Atlanta public schools.
The U.S. Department of Education says it will host a symposium on cheating and publish "best practices" recommendations on how to prevent, detect and respond to cheating in schools.
Companies like Apple "say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force," said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor's degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. "They're good jobs, but the country doesn't have enough to feed the demand," Mr. Schmidt said.
Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device's software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.
But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple's North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.
....
"We shouldn't be criticized for using Chinese workers," a current Apple executive said. "The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need."
Well worth considering from a curricular, finance and social perspective.
Pilot study finds students in Riverside Unified School District who used Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's HMH Fuse™: Algebra 1 app were also more motivated, attentive, and engaged than traditionally educated peers.
Global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the results of a yearlong pilot of HMH Fuse: Algebra I, the world's first full-curriculum Algebra app developed exclusively for the Apple iPad, involving the Amelia Earhart Middle School in California's Riverside Unified School District. The pilot showed that over 78 percent of HMH Fuse users scored Proficient or Advanced on the spring 2011 California Standards Tests, compared with only 59 percent of their textbook-using peers.
The pilot showed that over 78 percent of HMH Fuse users scored Proficient or Advanced on the spring 2011 California Standards Tests, compared with only 59 percent of their textbook-using peers."
The first assessment of the pilot-- Riverside's district Algebra benchmark -took place during the second trimester of the 2010-2011 year. Students using HMH Fuse scored an average of 10 percentage points higher than their peers. The app's impact was even more pronounced after the California Standards Test in spring 2011, on which HMH Fuse students scored approximately 20 percent higher than their textbook-using peers.
Throughout my years of being an educator in a traditional school setting, the most challenging aspect has been dealing with the adults, not the students. My views were often those of the minority and consistently clashed with the culture of failure that had been developed over the decades.
One opinion of mine in particular that seldom receives little to no kudos, and is often met with anger and opposition, is that our children do not need sympathy. And when it came to school work, believe me, I gave very little sympathy, if any at all.
"So harsh," one might say. Well, I have been regularly accused of being unfeeling, insensitive and even heartless. Nevertheless, my students were successful for the most part.
They passed because they knew the material, not because I felt sorry for them. In my classroom, I refused to allow feelings of sympathy to override my charge as an educator. It was my duty to educate students to the best of my ability, regardless of their race, culture, socioeconomic status or family or living situation. My standards were high, and I expected my students to rise to the occasion.
Before a crowd of hundreds of school district officials and school board members in Milwaukee, Gov. Scott Walker announced Thursday that recommendations from a variety of state education task forces will soon be solidified in formal legislation.
The work of three main groups spearheaded by Walker over the past year - a reading task force, a team that's looked at how to design a statewide teacher and principal evaluation system, and a group figuring out how to rate school quality - will make up a reform package of education legislation, Walker said.
Meanwhile, some critics questioned the governor's tone of collaboration and cooperation Thursday, saying that after cutting education spending and limiting collective bargaining, he's trying to play nice now only because he's likely facing a recall election.
Even state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, who has worked closely with Walker on the task forces and praised the work of those involved, made it clear he was concerned about being left out of the legislation-drafting process.
The proposed legislative reforms have been developed over the past year by three statewide task forces working separately on improving literacy, developing a teacher evaluation model and creating a school accountability system to replace No Child Left Behind.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, who helped lead all three groups, said he wasn't involved in drafting the education legislation, but would support any actions that are the direct product of the task forces "and deliver on the intent of these collaborative groups."
"Many students' schools are already planning for more budget cuts next year on top of cuts made this year," Evers said in a statement. "Education reforms must be fully funded and not simply be more unfunded mandates that result in further cuts to educational programming for our students."
Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, ranking Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said in a statement she has concerns the work of the task forces was "being hijacked for political gain."
"It is unnerving to hear that (Evers) was not consulted during the drafting of this legislation," Pope-Roberts said. "Cutting our state's foremost education experts out of the process at this time is very shortsighted and reckless."
Online education will turn the academy inside out, argue US authors. Sarah Cunnane reports
Graduation rates in the US have fallen, and states have slashed funding for higher education. As a result, public universities have raised tuition fees, and many are struggling to stay afloat during the recession. But two authors working in the US higher education sector claim that the academy has a bigger battle on the horizon: the "disruptive innovation" ushered in by online education.
This disruption, they say, will force down costs, lure prospective students away from traditional "core" universities, transform the way academics work, and spell the end for the traditional scholarly calendar based around face-to-face teaching.
Clayton M. Christensen, the Kim B. Clark professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Henry J. Eyring, advancement vice-president at Brigham Young University-Idaho, outline their ideas in The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.
On the heels of Apple's big education and iBooks event, it's worth taking a quick snapshot of the education publishing industry as it stands today.
Not because the tools announced today will inevitably transform the future of education the way iTunes and the iPhone did the music and smartphone industries -- however fun that may be to imagine.
Rather, you simply can't understand Apple's interest in breaking into the education market without at least a little understanding of that market's scope. And you can't understand why Apple's adopted the approach that it has without understanding that market's connection to our wider media ecosystem.
In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations -- shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade -- often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.
The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced -- keeping many people out of the market -- and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms -- with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.
It happens more often than you'd think, but it needs to happen more often than it does," says Mark A. Elgart, president and CEO of AdvancED, a private Atlanta-based accreditation agency that works with about 30,000 schools. In the past five years, the organization has pulled accreditation on four school systems and a dozen private schools, for reasons ranging from poor academic performance to governance to financial fraud.
"It's become more rigorous," says Terry Holliday, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education. "I think there was a time accreditation just meant you had a certain number of library books and staff." Now, he says, "accreditation does look at outcomes."
Accreditation, sort of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for schools, matters to districts because losing it can lead to a state takeover or an exodus of students. For individual high schools, it can mean that students lose a competitive edge as they apply to college.
Just when all signs indicated that supporters of Madison Preparatory Academy were abandoning hope of joining forces with the Madison school district, they've decided to give it one more shot. They're seeking another vote on the controversial charter-school proposal in late February.
Urban League of Greater Madison CEO and president Kaleem Caire says Madison Prep will open this fall as a private entity, but hopes it will transition into the district in 2013, once the district's union contract expires.
Board members who voted against the charter school in December expressed concerns that it would put the district in breach of its contract with Madison Teachers Inc., due to a provision requiring district schools to hire union staff.
School board president James Howard, who voted for Madison Prep, says the board may not have time to address the proposal in February.
Whether the Urban League -- which proposed Madison Prep as an ambitious step toward closing the district's decades-old achievement gap -- can recapture its earlier momentum is uncertain, considering that Superintendent Dan Nerad and school board members seem particularly excited about their own plans to address the issue.
"We're going at it from so many different angles right now," says board member Beth Moss. "I can't see how we can't make some improvement."
We produced the above piece for PBS NewsHour in November of 2011; the focus was on new school choice initiatives in Indiana and the backlash they're receiving. School choice remains a major issue in education as 2012 begins, so we wanted to convene several experts for a discussion on the topic. Feel free to add your own comments below, as well.
Two decades after it was first devised at Princeton's Center for Creative Leadership, the learning development concept known as 70/20/10 is transforming Melbourne Business School's approach to workplace learning.
The concept has spurred Mt Eliza, the executive education arm of MBS, to develop an interactive online tool called Thread, which is due to be launched this month. Mt Eliza has high expectations for Thread, with hopes that it can transform the executive education provider in Victoria, Australia, into a world leader in e-learning.
It is canvassing for a partnership with Ashridge - the UK business school that provides Mt Eliza with online modules through Virtual Ashridge - as well as with other international business schools.
While Mt Eliza will not comment on the talks, Matt Williams, design manager for Thread, says: "Whenever we need to partner with a European institution, it tends to be Ashridge". The two schools collaborate on a Masters of Management programme and several executive education courses.
The quality of elementary education is falling in rural schools almost two years after education was made a fundamental right in April 2010.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2011, a survey of government and private schools in rural areas conducted by the NGO Pratham, shows a decline in schoolchildren's "learning outcome levels" compared with the previous year, whether in reading or arithmetic skills. (See chart)
However, students of private schools have done slightly better than those of government schools, reveals the annual survey, started seven years ago and considered most authoritative.
For example, 56 per cent Class V students at government schools were unable to read Class III-level text but the figure was 38 per cent in private schools.
When Gov. Bobby Jindal pushed through New Orleans' school voucher program four years ago, political interest in using taxpayer money to send students to private schools had waned across the country. School choice advocates had suffered several stinging defeats, causing some to throw their weight behind charter schools, which generally receive more bipartisan support.
In 2009, St. Joan of Arc School in New Orleans had more than 80 students receiving vouchers.
Now, as officials expect Jindal to begin an effort to expand Louisiana's voucher program, the national landscape has changed dramatically.
Although charter schools continue to dwarf vouchers in terms of overall growth, voucher programs have rebounded on the national political and educational scene in the past year. In 2011, more than 30 states introduced bills that would use taxpayer dollars to send children to privately run schools, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That's up more than 300% from the previous year, when only nine voucher bills were introduced.
Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday proposed an overhaul to the state's pension system and new teacher evaluation system while presenting his $132.5 billion budget plan for the next fiscal year.
The plan reduces overall spending by .2 percent from last year.
In a PowerPoint presentation, Cuomo said his executive budget includes no new taxes, one shot revenues or gimmicks.
It also closes a budget gap of $3.5 billion.
However, while the governor plans to increase education spending by 4 percent or roughly $805 million, he also plans to make that increase contingent upon real reform and, specifically, teacher evaluations.
He's giving the state's teachers 30 days to come up with a statewide evaluation system or he will write his own into the budget for the legislature to approve.
Districts would have one year to get the new system up and running or the state would withhold the promised 4 percent increase in school aid.
The analysis draws on a variety of data, some of which are a couple of years old, so it doesn't reflect changes in the past year under Gov. Scott Walker.
The report rated Wisconsin in six categories: chance for success; K-12 achievement; standards, assessments and accountability; teachers; school finance; and transitions and alignment.
The state scored highest in school finance, ranking ninth nationally. The lowest marks came in standards, assessment and accountability, where Wisconsin ranked 46th.
It's fair to say that improved teacher evaluation is the cornerstone of most current education reform efforts. Although very few people have disagreed on the need to design and implement new evaluation systems, there has been a great deal of disagreement over how best to do so - specifically with regard to the incorporation of test-based measures of teacher productivity (i.e., value-added and other growth model estimates).
The use of these measures has become a polarizing issue. Opponents tend to adamantly object to any degree of incorporation, while many proponents do not consider new evaluations meaningful unless they include test-based measures as a major element (say, at least 40-50 percent). Despite the air of certainty on both sides, this debate has mostly been proceeding based on speculation. The new evaluations are just getting up and running, and there is virtually no evidence as to their effects under actual high-stakes implementation.
Wolfram has long been a trusted name in education--as the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, we've created some of the most dynamic teaching and learning tools available. We are pleased to offer the best of all of our technologies to you here in the Wolfram Education Portal, organized by course. In the portal you'll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more built by Wolfram education experts. You can take a look at the types of materials we offer below, but to get full access to all materials, you need to sign up for a free account.
Time magazine this week has an article about the failure of No Child Left Behind, and it highlights the failure of the Rachel Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia, to get the last 5% of its student body to achieve grade-level competence in math and reading. This outcome stems from the failure of the teachers, the principal, the counselors, the special needs teachers, the curriculum coordinators, the reading specialists, the math specialists, the superintendent, the state department of education and its staff, the governor, and, of course, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia. While others, such as the federal government, publishers, professional development specialists and the like might share some of the blame, the first group is to be held mainly responsible for the failure of that 5% of the students at the school in question.
Is anyone left out of this analysis, which is the current analytic wisdom available for all school failures in the United States at present? Some might suggest some responsibility on the part of parents, but there is one group which always is, it seems, held blameless and harmless. The students.
I have heard of a time in this country, and even in some other countries, when, if a student failed in school, the failure was the student's. Indeed, even now in Japan, according to Marc Tucker's Surpassing Shanghai, there is the view that if a student fails academically, it is because he has not worked hard enough.
However, it is no longer possible to entertain the idea that a student is responsible for his or her own learning and academic progress in the United States. We like to think of a student in our schools as if under anesthesia on a classroom operating table, being operated on by our surgeon-teachers who are wholly responsible for the success or failure of the operation. Our passive students can not be held responsible for any part of their own education, because if failure occurs, it cannot be theirs. Our children cannot fail at anything, so if there is failure, as, apparently, there is, it must be ours--that is an axiom of our educational philosophy.
There are consequences that flow from this axiom, of course. Students who fail (my mistake)--students whose academic work is failing, understandably come to believe that the school and the teacher are supposed to "do" education to them, and that they have no responsibility for the outcome--whether they learn anything or not is not their problem.
Of course it is their problem, as they will discover when they go to community college or try to find a job, but we feel it is our duty to keep them from knowing that as long as we can.
Naturally, there is a sense of power and control for educators in accepting all the responsibility for student learning, and a noble sort of martyrdom when, in spite of all our efforts, students fail anyway. But in the process students are deprived of ownership of their own education and their own learning.
It was probably Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that "For an education, a man's books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his." How quaint that idea seems to us, that the student must study or the failure will be his, not ours. How we, as legislators, educational leaders, teachers, etc., would hate to have to give up any of "our" territory of study and learning to mere students. What do they know?
Perhaps this folly will soon run its course. One is permitted to hope. Perhaps we will take another look and see that it is the student who decides whether to come to school or not, whether to pay attention or not, whether to do the homework or not, whether, finally, to take his education seriously or not.
You can tell a born teacher by the earnest way he or she turns to a serious student who has a question, and, yes, "a teacher affects eternity." But as Buddha pointed out 2,500 years ago, the student who makes the most progress "must be anxious to learn." He was a good teacher and affected lots of people, but he knew better than to try to outlaw failure by removing all responsibility for learning from the students themselves, as we have seemed so dumbly determined to try to do in recent years.
For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates -- but few, if any, academic gains.
Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments. Consider teacher Shar Hellie's new approach in Montgomery County.
To get students through the shaky first steps of Spanish grammar, Hellie spent many years trying to boost their confidence. If someone couldn't answer a question easily, she would coach him, whisper the first few words, then follow up with a booming "¡Muy bien!"
During graduate school, I participated in an experimental seminar, "Literature+: Cross-Disciplinary Models of Literary Interpretation," taught by Alan Liu. He asked students to form groups around topics of their choosing and perform analyses using digital tools on their materials. Most students shared similar research interests and organized their projects around a content-based theme. Our group represented four different disciplines and formed around our interest in digital tools, rather than content. Professor Liu created a toybox of links to various textual analysis tools that generated visualizations, translations, data about word counts, etc. Each of us took a tool in which we were to become "expert," and applied that tool to data we had collected for our research.
Unsurprisingly, the new WPRI report on reforming teacher compensation (authored by yours truly) has some critics. The response from the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) in today's Journal Sentinel was disappointing, but totally expected. WEAC calls my proposal a distraction. President Mary Bell states it is unfair to administrators who, among other things, do not have time to "develop a system for distributing funds."
Opposition from WEAC to $50 million in new funding for teachers on the grounds that administrators will not have the time to find a way to spend it was a surprise. The real threat of the proposal, I imagine, is that it ties additional funding to school performance, and allows principals in successful schools to manage as they see fit.
Almost all of us say that as a nation we should work out our differences and unite to solve our problems. But we don't mean it.
Exhibit A is the bad blood between the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union, and Teach for America, the most popular public-service option for graduates of selective colleges.
The NEA has been at odds with TFA since the teacher recruitment program began. NEA leaders dislike the idea, conceived in 1989 by 22-year-old Princeton undergraduate Wendy Kopp, of giving young people selected for academic achievement and ambition just five weeks of summer training before having them teach in some of our lowest-performing urban and rural public schools. TFA's steady growth and rising status at prestigious universities has not soothed NEA's distress.
This is both a national and a local issue. The NEA's national headquarters is in the District. One of the largest contingents of TFA teachers works in the District and Prince George's County.
Emergent Spanish for Educators @ Madison's Cherokee Middle School
Rafael Gomez, via a kind email:
Dear Cherokee Staff:
We have an opportunity to have Emergent Spanish for Educators (Jan. to April 2012) The class will take place at Cherokee every Mondays starting Jan. 23 at 3:30 to 5:45 except the session it will be from 3:45 to 4:45.
All participants will get 3 PAC credits. It is 30 hours of instruction.
Description of the course:
This course will provide participants with skills needed to make an easy transition from English only into Emergent Spanish and have fun while doing it. Participants will be assisted to become more comfortable using their Spanish pronunciation, construction of basic statements and conversing in Spanish with instructor and/or participants.All participants will end up with a learning center to continue learning Spanish.
Objectives:
1. Acquire a repertoire o Spanish vocabulary
2. Increase comfort level to use Spanish
3. Increase awareness of culture and language
4. Gain skill to use their learning center.
Ritual:Participants will interact with parents and students who are native Spanish speakers.
Alison Head, who is at the Berkman Center and the Library Information Lab this year, but who is normally based at U of Washington's Info School, is giving a talk called "Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students." (I did a podcast interview with her a couple of months ago.)
Project Information Literacy is a research project that reaches across institutions. They've (Michael Eisenberg co-leads the project) surveyed 11,000 students on 41 US campuses to find out how do students find and use information. They use voluntary samples, not random samples. But, Alison says, the project doesn't claim to be able to generalize to all students; they look at the relationships among different kinds of schools and overall trends. They make special efforts to include community colleges, which are often under-represented in studies of colleges
ON NOVEMBER 10th South Korea went silent. Aircraft were grounded. Offices opened late. Commuters stayed off the roads. The police stood by to deal with emergencies among the students who were taking their university entrance exams that day.
Every year the country comes to a halt on the day of the exams, for it is the most important day in most South Koreans' lives. The single set of multiple-choice tests that students take that day determines their future. Those who score well can enter one of Korea's best universities, which has traditionally guaranteed them a job-for-life as a high-flying bureaucrat or desk warrior at a chaebol (conglomerate). Those who score poorly are doomed to attend a lesser university, or no university at all. They will then have to join a less prestigious firm and, since switching employers is frowned upon, may be stuck there for the rest of their lives. Ticking a few wrong boxes, then, may mean that they are permanently locked out of the upper tier of Korean society.
Making so much depend on an exam has several advantages for Korea. It is efficient: a single set of tests identifies intelligent and diligent teenagers, and launches them into society's fast stream. It is meritocratic: poor but clever Koreans can rise to the top by studying very, very hard. The exam's importance prompts children to pay attention in class and parents to hound them about their homework; and that, in turn, ensures that Korea's educational results are the envy of the world. The country is pretty much the leading nation in the scoring system run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2009 it came fourth after Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong, but those are cities rather than full-sized countries.
The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.
Its origins are prosaic: it was invented by accountants, not poets, in the 4th millennium BC, as a spur of the counting system with which farming societies kept track of agricultural goods. At first transactions were recorded by storing groups of shaped clay tokens - representing wheat, cattle or textiles - in clay envelopes. But why use tokens when pressing one into a tablet of wet clay would do instead? These impressions, in turn, were superseded by symbols scratched or punched into the clay with a stylus. Tokens had given way to writing.
As human settlements swelled from villages to the first cities, writing was needed for administrative reasons. But it quickly became more flexible and expressive, capable of capturing the subtleties of human thought, not just lists of rations doled out or kings long dead. And this allowed philosophers, poets and chroniclers to situate their ideas in relation to those of previous thinkers, to argue about them and elaborate upon them. Each generation could build on the ideas of its forebears, making it possible for there to be species-wide progress in philosophy, commerce, science and literature.
On Thursday, Jan. 12 the University of Michigan School of Education launched TeachingWorks, a program designed to improve teacher education in America.
TeachingWorks centers on the premise that "Great teachers aren't born, they're taught." But too often when great teachers are asked to describe what makes them great, the answers that come involve style, personal traits, and experience, none of which do much for a first-year teacher with little experience or style to work from.
"The training of the professionals who work with youth is fundamentally important to their life changes, and that includes teachers," Deborah Ball, dean of the U-M School of Education, said in her opening remarks.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined the ceremony and gave extended remarks, via video message. Duncan visited the University of Michigan in September and praised U-M's contribution to teacher education. During his address on Thursday, Duncan hailed U-M for its leadership in advancing a program to teach the teachers of teachers.
In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular - and incredibly funny! - TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls "a crisis of human resources" (Click here for the RSA talk from the same speaker which has been animated in a highly educational fashion). At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that "we make poor use of our talents." Indeed, in the same way that we misuse the talents and training of doctors, I believe we misuse the talents and training of teachers.
I want to comment on what I consider a far greater misuse of talent and training: that of our children/students, mostly here talking about high school education. We have focused so much of our education system on children attending primary school, then middle school, then high school, all with the objective of attending university. This is a progression that still remains unchanged and largely unchallenged. Yet, this system is completely linear and, most tragically, unwaveringly standardized not only through instruction methods, but also through testing. Worse, it is mostly what I call "fixed time, variable learning" (the four-year high school) instead of "fixed learning, variable time" to account for individual students' capabilities and status.
Identifying Emerging Trends In Education
There are new key trends that I see emerging in education enabled by advancing technology: namely decentralization and gamification. By understanding these trends, it is much easier to imagine why we won't need teachers or why we can free up today's teachers to be mentors and coaches. Software can free teachers to have more human relationships by giving them the time to be guidance counselors and friends to young kids instead of being lecturers who talk at them. This last possibility is very important--in addition to learning, schools enable critical social development for children through teacher student relationships and interacting with other children--classrooms of peers and teachers provide much more than math lessons. And by freeing up teachers' time, technology can lead to increased social development rather than less as many assume.
This is a cross-post of something I wrote for The Guardian, but just thought would be handy to have on the blog over here. It is also a small update from an old post: How to teach kids, or anyone, how to code - that's the history bit done! Now the science...
The beauty of programming is that it does not matter how old you are (within reason - under 7 is possibly a bit optimistic) you can learn using exactly the same, mostly free resources to be found on the Internet. You can learn basic programming easily within a year and then you can choose to hone and refine whichever aspects of coding most excite you. Done! It's not hard.
For the purposes of this post I have referred to resources aimed primarily at younger people - but they are all useful for the beginner.
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city's first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York's elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.
I'm on the board of advisors of the new school, which plans to accept ninth graders for fall of 2012. Here's why I'm excited about this new school:
Naomi Lemberger says the way she takes notes in class helps things stick in her brain. She doesn't use the usual approach (scribble for page after page, then promptly forget - I've been doing it all my life).
In a typical instance, she takes those conventional notes within a box covering the upper right section of a sheet of paper and equal to about half the sheet. In a column on the left side of the paper, she writes down questions or sometimes phrases that her main notes cover. And, after a class or at the end of a unit, she writes in a box across the bottom of the sheet a reflection - basically, a summary of what she thinks she learned. She reviews the overall results, especially when she's preparing for tests. Teachers frequently review her notes.
It's a system called Cornell Notes. It goes back more than half a century and has been used (and often dropped) in many schools, including several in the Milwaukee area.
At Brookfield East, where Lemberger is a junior, Cornell Notes is a key element of the education program - and a key, in the opinion of school leaders and many teachers, to why the already high-performing school has seen an uptick in overall student success in recent years.
School principals then would have discretion over how to use those funds, as long as they go to teachers. Those dollars could be spent on one-time teacher bonuses, teacher development projects or however the principal sees fit. "The idea is to give principals more power and to help them create a culture of success," says Ford.
To be eligible to participate in the program, schools also would have to agree to eliminate the traditional teacher pay schedules that mainly reward longevity on the job.
"The No. 1 goal of public education in everything we do is raising academic achievement," says Ford. "So in the report I propose a framework that takes into account the views of teachers and the existing research on what motivates teachers."
It's certainly an interesting concept. But would it work?
Adam Gamoran, a UW-Madison professor of sociology and educational policy studies, says that while research clearly shows some teachers are much more effective than others, what's not so clear is which attributes these top educators share and whether or not it's even possible to lead them to teaching more effectively with incentives.
If affirmative action results in minority students at elite schools having much potential but weak preparation, then we may expect minority students to start off behind their majority counterparts and then catch up over time. Indeed, at the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. However, this convergence masks two effects. First, the variance of grades given falls across time. Hence, shrinkage in the level of the gap may not imply shrinkage in the class rank gap. Second, grading standards differ across courses in different majors. We show that controlling for these two features virtually eliminates any convergence of black/white grades. In fact, black/white gpa convergence is symptomatic of dramatic shifts by blacks from initial interest in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics to majors in the humanities and social sciences. We show that natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult, associated with higher study times, and have harsher grading standards; all of which translate into students with weaker academic backgrounds being less likely to choose these majors. Indeed, we show that accounting for academic background can fully account for differences in switching behaviors across blacks and whites.
In the spring of 2004 the faculty adopted by a two-thirds majority vote a set of simple guidelines regarding the grading of undergraduate academic work. Of all the policies I have overseen in my 10 years as president, this has been the most contentious and misunderstood among students, parents and alumni. With the policy now seven years old, I thought it might be helpful to review its original rationale and update you on its impact on grading at Princeton.
Prior to 2004 there was no policy to guide faculty in awarding grades, and over time two worrisome trends became apparent. First, the percentage of "A" grades for coursework rose over the past four decades, from 30% in the 1970s to 32.5% in the 1980s to 43% in the 1990s and 47% in 2001-04. As much as we like to claim that each new class equals or surpasses the talents of the previous class, this increase was not unique to Princeton, but was happening in many secondary schools, colleges and universities. If left unchecked, grades would soon cease to be a meaningful way to provide feedback to students about their academic progress.
More troubling to me was the fact that the rate of inflation was not uniform throughout the curriculum. As shown in the orange bars in the figure here, "A" grades awarded by departments ranged from 67% at one end of the scale to 35% at the other. The impact of this disparity was clear--students concentrating their academic work in departments at the higher end of the scale had a significant advantage over those at the lower end. This struck many of us as deeply unfair to our students.
"Americans don't learn about the world, they don't study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don't study geography," Brzezinski says. "In that context of widespread ignorance, the ongoing and deliberately fanned fear about the outside world, which is connected with this grandiose war on jihadi terrorism, makes the American public extremely susceptible to extremist appeals." But surely most Americans are tired of overseas adventures, I say. "There is more scepticism," Brzezinski concedes. "But the susceptibility to demagoguery is still there."
Teachers are the most important factor in determining the success of students. No technology, curriculum, or standard can supplant the need for a quality teacher in every classroom. We know children learn differently, we know there is no single recipe for a successful teacher, yet we continue to pay teachers as if they are interchangeable assembly-line workers producing an identical commodity called education.
In a report released this week I propose dumping district-wide lock-step pay schedules that reward only formal education and years on the job in favor of a compensation reform that rewards and motivates teachers in a way conducive to raising the academic achievement. I do not propose a merit pay system that gives bonuses to individual teachers in return for raising test scores.
Why? The track record of such systems can at best be called uneven. Teachers are not uniformly motivated by monetary compensation. Research by UW-Madison professor Allan Odden and others shows teachers value collaboration and student success above other factors. Any reform that does not recognize this is doomed to fail. No less important, students need schools that deliver consistent teacher quality from start to finish so that the work of a good teacher in one grade is not undone by a sub-par teacher the next.
The proposals would allow charter schools in the state, establish a process for failing schools to be taken over by outside organizations and continue an overhaul of the way all teachers and principals are evaluated.
Charters, which are public but independent schools allowed to use unconventional techniques, would be closely monitored by a state board, lawmakers said. Only 50 would be allowed in the state - with no more than 10 new ones authorized each year. Each would be required to adopt a specific plan to serve educationally disadvantaged children.
The evaluations, which would include student test scores and classroom observations, would build on a pilot system already used in several districts in the state, lawmakers said.
Poor performance on the evaluations could lead teachers to lose their tenure, but the focus would be on improvement of teaching methods.
When asked why he didn't second Ed Hughes' motion at the Dec. 19 meeting to delay the schools' opening until 2013, Howard replied, "We had not discussed the implications of what that means. I think we have time if we're talking about 2013, to make sure we do it correctly, because we don't know what the rules of the game will be in 2013."
Superintendent Dan Nerad said, "Whether it will move forward I don't know. That depends on whether the motion gets on the floor. I don't have a read on it at this point."
Others aren't as diplomatic. "This is a waste of time and money for all involved," said TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College professor and district watchdog who is among Madison Prep's most ardent critics.
"The votes are not there and will not be there," he continued. "It distracts from the essential work of addressing the real issues of the district, including issues of achievement for students in poverty."
A merit pay program that incentivizes teachers is about to get a test run at the local level. Two Wisconsin school districts are moving forward with a plan that would reward good teachers with salary bonuses in the 2012-2013 school year.
The Cedarburg and Hartland-Lakeside School Districts will be amongst the first to institute merit pay programs for educators in the Badger State. Bonuses will be tied to teacher evaluations - instructors that earn high marks from administrators will be eligible for extra compensation in the following school year. In Cedarburg, these additional payments range from $1,700 to $2,200.
The ability to institute bonus systems on a district-to-district basis is a new one in Wisconsin. In previous years, most plans would have been wiped out by collective bargaining between the school district and their local teachers' union. Since Act 10 removed most of these bargaining scenarios, school boards now have more freedom to enact reforms like merit pay in their classrooms.
Cecelia Thornton sets up a makeshift classroom at her kitchen table every day after school to tutor her grandchildren in reading and writing with materials she buys at the local thrift store in the Mojave Desert town of Adelanto (San Bernardino County).
That's the key reason why she and a band of other parents and guardians filed a petition Thursday under California's "parent trigger" law to demand reforms at the K-6 school where just 35 percent of pupils last year tested proficient in reading and 46 percent in math.
The Times and a host of otherpublications heralded last week's new study extolling the lifelong money-earning benefits of having a good primary/middle-school teacher. Oh, yay! Let's do what these economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggest, right?
Actually, ugh, no. What economists Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia want to do, apparently, is to identify and fire "weaker" teachers, for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students' "lifetime income." Nobody has actually tried this yet; the report doesn't describe an experiment. It's just the conclusion they draw from their analysis of massive amounts of data gathered from public schools in New York City and cross-referenced against IRS records and the like.
Here's a bit from the summary of the original paper. Note that a "high-VA" ("value-added") teacher is a "good" one--meaning by this, solely, that the teacher in question has succeeded in raising standardized test scores.
Our faltering education system may be the most important threat to our economy and well-being, writes Nicholas D. Kristof, so it's frustrating that the presidential campaign is mostly ignoring the issue. The obvious policy solution is more pay for good teachers, more dismissals for weak teachers.
Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do?
The correct answer? Panic!
Well, not exactly. But a landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime -- or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class -- all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That's right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year's students, just in the extra income they will earn
Are we offloading our brains onto the web? Are programs better than teachers at knowing what we know? Do virtual badges motivate more than grades? What is it about cartoon foxes that helps us learn to code? As you can read in our piece "How the Internet Revolutionized Education", we've been tracking on-line education closely for some time now- talking to experts and keeping tabs on an industry that's exploding as predicted. Over here at the science desk, recent developments on the learning brain are meshing with what we already know of the web's power to teach.
We've analyzed here four different special powers of online teaching that make brains very happy. Read on to see why curing code-o-phobia is just the beginning...
The latest installment of the Fordham Institute's Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online-schooling experts to estimate today's average per-pupil cost for a variety of schooling models, traditional and online, and presents a nuanced analysis of the important variance in cost between different school designs. These ranges--from $5,100 to $7,700 for full-time virtual schools, and $7,600 to $10,200 for the blended version--highlight both the potential for low-cost online schooling and the need for better data on costs and outcomes in order for policymakers to reach confident conclusions related to the productivity and efficiency of these promising new models. Download "The Costs of Online Learning" to learn more.
Barack Obama has been accused of "class warfare" because he favors closing several tax loopholes -- socialism for the wealthy -- as part of the deficit-cutting process. This is a curious charge: class warfare seems to be a one-way street in American politics. Over the past 30 years, the superwealthy have waged far more effective warfare against the poor and the middle class, via their tools in Congress, than the other way around. How else can one explain the fact that the oil companies, despite elephantine profits, are still subsidized by the federal government? How else can one explain the fact that hedge-fund managers pay lower tax rates than their file clerks? Or that farm subsidies originally meant for family farmers go to huge corporations that hardly need the help?
Actually, there is an additional explanation. Conservatives, like liberals, routinely take advantage of a structural flaw in the modern welfare state: there is no creative destruction when it comes to government programs. Both "liberal" and "conservative" subsidies linger in perpetuity, sometimes metastasizing into embarrassing giveaways. Even the best-intentioned programs are allowed to languish in waste and incompetence. Take, for example, the famed early-education program called Head Start. (See more about the Head Start reform process.)
The idea is, as Newt Gingrich might say, simple liberal social engineering. You take the million or so poorest 3- and 4-year-old children and give them a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them; if it works, it saves money in the long run by producing fewer criminals and welfare recipients -- and more productive citizens. Indeed, Head Start did work well in several pilot programs carefully run by professionals in the 1960s. And so it was "taken to scale," as the wonks say, as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
That Kaleem Caire, the charismatic champion of the Madison Preparatory Academy, is frustrated by the proposal's defeat before the Madison School Board last month should surprise no one.
But the prospect that resentment over the defeat of the proposal runs so deep that it could poison the initiative's future prospects as a private school or public charter -- that's a distressing possibility whose existence is just now emerging.
The proposal for the school by the Urban League of Greater Madison has won many supporters because of the embarrassingly persistent achievement gap between whites and minorities in the Madison School District, but when Caire spoke Monday to Communities United, a community group dedicated to social justice, his passionate appeal to go beyond the district's existing model was laced with anger towards the School Board members who voted down the plan.
Much of the discussion Monday between Caire and a handful of staffers from the Urban League -- where he is president and CEO -- and those at the Communities United meeting centered around the ultra-sensitive topics of race and racism.
Even in that friendly environment (the informal, nonpartisan coalition was already on record in favor of the school), Caire's accusations against school officials were rejected as political spin by a Madison City Council member on hand and criticized as more of the "race card" by an African-American activist who has skirmished with Caire before over Madison Prep. But a Latina parent and activist greeted his words as an apt assessment of the situation in Madison schools.
Take advantage of great dual credit courses at your high school! Many of Minnesota's high schools offer Dual Credit programs that allow qualifying students to earn college credit while still in high school at little or no cost. Dual Credit programs are a great way for high school students to challenge themselves academically, earn college credit, and save time and money. Eligible high school students can choose to participate in the following dual credit programs: Postsecondary Enrollment Options (PSEO),Concurrent Enrollment (CE), Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB).
After more than a decade (and four years behind schedule) Congress finally seems ready to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. For years, critics have complained that the law's focus on test scores offers far too narrow a picture for judging school quality. There is also concern that the "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, formula is too inflexible to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of schools.
The track record of NCLB also suggests that it hasn't been especially successful in turning around the most troubled schools. In fact, among the 1,200 schools identified for "corrective action" in 2005-06, fully 70 percent were still under an improvement category three years later.
When a fledgling charter school took over the Cottrell Elementary building this fall, district administrators didn't worry about losing per-pupil state funding, and there were no protests decrying the move as a threat to public education.
That's because the Oregon Trail School District created the charter school.
Amid increasing budget constraints and continued pressure to reform public education, some savvy educators are taking advantage of federal charter school grants of up to $500,000 to create a hybrid: the district-initiated charter school.
In Oregon, taxpayers finance charter schools, which are typically run by organizations independent from school districts. But two Clackamas County districts have discovered the Oregon charter school law can provide extra funds and flexibility for their own innovative programs.
More than 125 high school students from the Madison area showed off their financial savvy Tuesday at the Finance and Investment Challenge Bowl.
The contest pitted teams from 32 local schools against each other, two teams at a time, with experts in the financial industry serving as moderators and judges.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just came out with its latest advice for how to improve schools. As the foundation sees it, districts don't have a good sense of who their good and bad teachers are, and need better evaluations. But is this really the problem?
Ever since it abandoned its former educational preoccupation, small schools, the Gates Foundation has hit upon stellar teaching as the key to transforming the nation's schools. It's not exactly a new idea, but it's one worthy of rediscovering.
A Stanford economist named Eric Hanushek has put into numerical terms a concept that most people know with their gut. A New Yorker story on the matter a few years ago summarized his findings: "Students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material."
Historian David McCullough was asked by a reporter recently if he started writing any of his books with a theme. He said that when he became interested in a subject he started reading to see what he could find out about it, but he had no advance idea of what would result.
Even those of our teachers who do work with students on research papers too frequently indulge in the science envy of requiring them to have a thesis. Students are asked to have some prior notion of the history they will read which they will test to see whether it is falsifiable or not.
Science is rich, famous and powerful, so it is not surprising that it is envied in our culture, but it should be remembered that its practice is to reduce, as much as possible, reality to numbers.
History does not lend itself well to a reduction to numbers, as it is about human beings, who also cannot very well be competently encompassed by numerical descriptions.
Words are the numbers of history, and words connote as much as they denote, they contain and evoke possibility and ambiguity in ways that the number users of science sometimes find annoyingly imprecise and quite uncomfortable.
The study of history should begin with curiosity about people and events: What was that person really like? How did that event come to happen and what resulted from it? These are the sort of non-thesis questions that our students of history should be asking, instead of fitting themselves out for their journey of learning about the past hampered with the straitjacket of a thesis.
Serious history students are often curious over something they have read about. They want to know more, and, when they have learned quite a bit, they frequently want to tell others what they have discovered. Like scientists, they are curious, but unlike them, they are willing to live with the uncertainties that are the essential ingredients of human experience.
Science has earned our admiration, but its methods are not suitable to all inquiries and we should not let envy of the success of science mislead us into trying to shrink-wrap history to fit some thesis with which students would have to begin their study of history.
David McCullough has reported that when he speaks to groups very often he is asked how much time he spends doing research and how much time he spends writing. He said he is never asked how much time he spends thinking.
The secondary students of history published in The Concord Review do not generally begin their work with a thesis to prove or disprove, but rather with wonder about something in history. The quality of their papers reveals that not only have they done a good deal of reading and research--if there is any difference there--but that they also have spent some serious time thinking about what they have learned, as well as how to tell someone else about it.
They have inevitably encountered the complex causes of historical events (no control groups there) and the variety of forces and inclinations both within and without the historical figures they have studied.
Some of these students are very good in calculus, science, and so forth, but they realize that history is a different form of inquiry and provides a non-reductionist view of the truth of human life, but one that may be instructive or inspiring in several ways.
So I urge teachers of students of history, who are asking them to write serious research papers, to let them choose their own topics, based on their own wonder and curiosity about the past, and to relieve them of the science envy of a thesis requirement. Let them embark on their own study of some part of the immense and mysterious ocean of history, and help them return with a story and an understanding they can call their own and can share, through serious research papers, with other students of history.
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"Teach by Example"
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
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978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
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Accountability for significantly narrowing the achievement gap must be at the top of the Madison School District agenda in 2012. How long should the current members of the School Board, Superintendant Dan Nerad, the administration and staff have to demonstrate gains in narrowing the gap?
In 2010 a five-year strategic plan was implemented with narrowing achievement gaps as the number one priority, and we are now starting to get results from the initiatives in the plan.
What will the level of accountability be for those of us who approved the plan? What will the level of accountability be for those of us who have responsibility for implementing the plan?
The question must be: Have we achieved the desired results or educational outcomes demanded by the taxpayers?
Click here to watch Sunday's "For the Record" on WISC-TV (Ch. 3) with Neil Heinen. Panelists include State Journal editorial page editor Scott Milfred, Republican insider Brandon Schulz and The Progressive editor Matt Rothschild. They bantered about the recent Iowa caucus results, the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin, the likely gubernatorial recall and the coming Madison School Board elections, which Milfred argues are likely to decide whether a charter school called Madison Preparatory Academy opens its doors."
Recently Stanford has started a new initiative to bring free classes to the public. From what I've seen from statistics, this venture has been extraordinarily successful with over 100,000 sign ups. Most likely only a fraction went through with the class, but that's still a lot of people, especially for the first time. There has been quite a lot of press about these classes, but none seem to take into account the effects it has on the students that attend Stanford. Despite the success and the raves of great reviews, I was not at all satisfied by the CS229a: Applied Machine Learning, one of the three courses offered to the public fall quarter. Before I begin though, I want to say that I completely agree that education should not be locked up for only a few to use and I also agree that since education, in my mind, is a right, then it should be provided for free. Thus the Stanford initiative to do this is a great thing. However, there are quite a few things that hopefully Stanford will change in the future.
Jeff Skiles, one of the cockpit crew who safely landed a disabled US Airways plane on the Hudson River three years ago, shared the exciting tale when he spoke to Edgewood High School students recently.
Skiles, who was first officer on the last leg of his first assignment in the Airbus A320 when it struck a flock of Canada geese Jan. 15, 2009, encouraged students in the Aviation I and II classes to consider a career in the field.
"It's an exciting life," he said. "I could have never chosen a better thing for my life."
One of the students, Ava Janssen, 16, a junior at Verona Area High School who comes to Edgewood to learn about aviation, is looking at a career flying medical flight helicopters and found Skiles' talk inspiring.
In 1998, Massachusetts debuted a set of tests it created for people who wanted teaching licenses. People nationwide were shocked when 59% of those in the first batch of applicants failed a communications and literacy test that officials said required about a 10th-grade level of ability.
Given some specifics of how the tests were launched, people who wanted to be teachers in Massachusetts probably got more of a bum rap for their qualifications than they deserved. But the results certainly got the attention of people running college programs to train teachers. They changed what they did, and the passing rate rose to about 90% in recent years.
One more thing: Student outcomes in Massachusetts improved significantly. Coming from the middle of the pack, Massachusetts has led the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade scores in reading and math on National Assessment of Education Program (NAEP) tests for almost a decade.
Could this be Wisconsin in a few years, especially when it comes to reading?
Gov. Scott Walker and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers released last week the report of a task force aimed at improving reading in Wisconsin. Reading results have been stagnant for years statewide, with Wisconsin slipping from near the top to the middle of the pack nationally. Among low-income and minority students, the state's results are among the worst in the country.
JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, putting a price on the value of good teachers. A large and new study addresses just that.
Ray Suarez has the story.
RAY SUAREZ: The debate over testing in schools, and whether students' scores adequately reflect a teacher's performance, has been raging for well over a decade. Now a new study has tracked more than two-and-a-half million students over two decades.
It found test scores are indeed a good gauge for evaluating student performance. And the study found replacing a bad teacher with an average or a good one can translate into a huge economic difference. Combined, the students could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their working lifetimes.
We look at the study and the response it's stirred with Harvard economist Raj Chetty, one of its three authors. And we hope to be joined by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union.
Some 160 high school math and science students from across the state will be competing this month in a regional Science Bowl in St. Paul.
They'll be vying for the chance to represent Minnesota in the national competition in Washington, D.C. The event is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Students compete in teams of five to solve technical problems and to answer questions in all branches of math and science, including astronomy, biology, computer science and physics. The tournament is conducted in a fast-paced question-and-answer format.
Instead of discussing the myriad legal and academic issues currently surrounding Spokane Public Schools, the editors for the daily newspaper The Spokesman-Review and the weekly publication The Inlander seem determined to drum up stray rumors and unsupported accusations against AP English teacher Jennifer Walther, who perhaps was caught TWC (Teaching While Conservative).
In October 2011, Walther's Leadership Class at Ferris High School put on the annual political forum "Face-Off at Ferris." Writers for The Spokesman-Review (SR) and The Inlander have since accused Walther of allowing her political views to sway the Ferris forum in favor of mayoral and school board candidates who are thought to be politically conservative.
The accusers have not been able to support their claim by pointing at actual questions that were asked. Sitting at the Ferris forum last October, I heard people all around me saying, "Those are great questions." What does a conservative question even look like? Are only conservatives concerned about accountability, transparency, outcomes, Otto Zehm's death, water rates, union clout and misspent finances? I know plenty of Democrats and progressives who are concerned about these issues.
Bashing the No Child Left Behind Act has become so politically popular that it's easy to forget how overwhelmingly bipartisan it was -- the legislation passed the House with 384 votes and the Senate with 91. As the law marks its 10-year anniversary on Jan. 8, it's important to look at both its successes and its failures. Did NCLB solve all of our public education problems? No. But it set a lot of good things in motion and was specifically designed to be revised after five or six years (in a reauthorization that has yet to happen and is unlikely to before this year's election.) The No Child law didn't get everything right the first time, but that's the wrong yardstick. If we held other policy areas -- think food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security -- to the same standard No Child is held to these days, i.e., flawlessness, then we would have jettisoned those and many other worthy programs long ago.
No Child Left Behind was designed to bring accountability into public schools. It is not a new federal program. Rather, it is the latest modification to the mammoth Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the omnibus law that governs most federal involvement in public schools. The No Child revisions built on President Bill Clinton's 1994 Improving America's Schools Act, which built on the lessons learned during the Reagan years. As former governors, both Clinton and President George W. Bush shared a commitment to having specific standards for what skills children should be learning and holding schools accountable for teaching them. By the late 1990s, key organizations including the Education Trust and the Citizens Commission for Civil Rights were calling for stricter accountability measures, and Democrats on Capitol Hill -- including California Representative George Miller, a key player on education policy in the House -- were responding. When Bush became President and got recalcitrant Republicans to fall in line and support his accountability measures, it was a Nixon-to-China move on education policy.
California calls its "Academic Performance Index" (API) the "cornerstone" of its accountability system. The API is calculated as a weighted average of the proportions of students meeting proficiency and other cutoffs on the state exams.
It is a high-stakes measure. "Growth" in schools' API scores determines whether they meet federal AYP requirements, and it is also important in the state's own accountability regime. In addition, toward the middle of last month, the California Charter Schools Association called for the closing of ten charter schools based in part on their (three-year) API "growth" rates.
Putting aside the question of whether the API is a valid measure of student performance in any given year, using year-to-year changes in API scores in high-stakes decisions is highly problematic. The API is cross-sectional measure - it doesn't follow students over time - and so one must assume that year-to-year changes in a school's index do not reflect a shift in demographics or other characteristics of the cohorts of students taking the tests. Moreover, even if the changes in API scores do in fact reflect "real" progress, they do not account for all the factors outside of schools' control that might affect performance, such as funding and differences in students' backgrounds (see here and here, or this Mathematica paper, for more on these issues).
The education reform package advanced Tuesday by the state's largest teachers' union would speed up the dismissal process for poor teachers, but would not strengthen the link between job security and how well students do on state tests.
Mary Loftus Levine, executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, said student achievement has always factored into teacher evaluations.
"There are multiple indicators. It's not just about test scores," she said, adding true reform would be to streamline the dismissal process for bad teachers and do more to make sure teachers have proper training before and once they get into the classroom.
The CEA package, called A View From the Classroom, contains a number of other suggestions to provide universal preschool and all-day kindergarten and increase state funding for local education expenses.
In the early 20th century Helen Todd, a factory inspector in Chicago, interviewed 500 children working in factories, often in dangerous and unpleasant conditions. She asked children the question: "If your father had a good job and you didn't have to work, which would you rather do--go to school or work in a factory?" 412 said they would choose factory work. One fourteen year old girl, who was interviewed lacquering canes in an attic working with both intense heat and the constant smell of turpentine, said "School is the fiercest thing you can come up against. Factories ain't no cinch, but schools is worst."
The recent expansion of the "ASER-like" simple assessments of literacy and numeracy skills of all children in a village based approach provides an accurate, and chilling, picture of just how little learning is going on inside schools in many poor countries. The ASER data can show the learning profile, the association of measured skills and grade completion, by showing what fraction of children who have completed which grade can read a simple story (expected of a child in grade 2) or do simple arithmetic operations. Take Uttar Pradesh in 2010. By the end of lower primary school (grade 5) only one in four children could divide. Even by grade 8, the end of upper primary only 56 percent could. Similarly, by grade 5 only 44 percent could read a level 2 paragraph and by grade 8 still only 77.6 could. A large plurality of children, even of those that had persisted and been promoted through eight full grades or primary school--roughly 8000 hours of available total instruction--were either illiterate or innumerate or both.
Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students' standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students' lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.
The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, all economists, examines a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term.
"That test scores help you get more education, and that more education has an earnings effect -- that makes sense to a lot of people," said Robert H. Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which studies teacher measurement but was not involved in this study. "This study skips the stages, and shows differences in teachers mean differences in earnings."
Priscilla Castro grew up enthralled with French culture despite understanding few words of the movies and music in which she delighted.
Now Castro's facility with Spanish, which her family spoke at home, is serving as an unlikely bridge to mastering le Français in a unique Cal State Long Beach program designed to exploit Spanish speakers' existing language skills.
"I'm not 100% fluent, but I can hold a conversation," said Castro, 21, a journalism major. "A lot of things in Spanish are very similar, although because I learned Spanish at home, I didn't know a lot of the grammatical rules. So learning French is actually helping me to improve my Spanish grammar."
The French for Hispanophones program was developed more than five years ago but recently surged in popularity at the Long Beach campus, where more than 30% of students are Latino.
Folks over at Lake Superior State University, however, have a new protest and it's one of words they want banished in 2012 because of their over usage.
Like this one: "occupy (vb) 1. to be a resident or tenant of, to dwell in."
"I hear that word thrown around all the time," Allison Wegren said. "People using it seriously talking about the Wall Street occupation as well as using it jokingly. Like something to carve into a pumpkin."
Or how about "ginormous (adj) 1. an adjective combining the words giant and enormous."
Some math classrooms are so quiet you can hear the sound of pencils on paper.
Robert MacCarthy's class at Willard Middle School in Berkeley has a different soundtrack. His sixth-graders problem-solve out loud -- sometimes into a big blue microphone -- and applaud each other afterward. They take on lively games and challenges that mix math with art.
Maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get to star in a math music video produced by their teacher and classmates under the label mathisnotacrime productions. "Integer Eyes" is the latest hit. "Math Hustla," released in 2009, quickly became a Willard classic.
"I never met an expression that I couldn't simplify. I never met a problem that I couldn't solve," two students rap, alternating lines, as they move to the beat.
Math can be a tough sell for adolescents. When students hit middle school, they often grow frustrated with math and begin to question the importance of knowing how to isolate a variable or graph an equation. Some end up failing the same courses again and again and eventually drop out of school -- even as their schools devote more time to the subject, said Harold Asturias, director of the Center for Mathematics Excellence and Equity at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science.
Thomas Kuhn wouldn't be impressed with the hordes of MBAs departing from top tier business schools to start new media companies, build the next big mobile gaming company, or launch another clone daily-deal site. But that's not where Kuhn's disappointment would end. Kuhn would probably be disheartened by the slew of intelligent students learning to code in computer science programs instead of pursuing degrees in electrical engineering or computer engineering degrees. In short, despite the fact that technology is one of the last bright spots in an otherwise stagnating economy, Kuhn would argue that we're encouraging the wrong types of innovation in the sector. Kuhn would push the best and brightest in our society away from building Birchbox for Baby Products and ask them to start innovating to enable less qualified builders.
At universities, educational software largely means enterprise-scale, expensive, feature-stuffed "learning management systems." Blackboard has the majority of the market, but professors and students are about as enthusiastic about its various updates, crashes, and bugs as people are with the latest version of Windows (Blackboard scores a whopping 93% "hated" rating on website Amplicate).
Last week, a new alternative was launched--built by students--that looks and works a lot more like the social platforms people actually choose to use in their spare time. The core of the site is a constantly updated social Stream where instructors and students can conduct discussions or easily post rich media. Picture a cleaner-looking Facebook news feed, centered on a single academic theme, or a group Tumblr blog where each picture, question, or video can accumulate its own discussion in the attached comment thread.
"We wanted to create a simple, elegant LMS that covers 95% of instructors' needs, like grading, file management, calendaring, submitting assignments, and emailing with the class," says Joseph Cohen, 19, who left Wharton after his sophomore year when he scored $1 million in seed funding this past June to start Coursekit. "Blackboard covers 100%-- that's why it's such a cluttered platform."
MTEL 90: Teacher Content Knowledge Licensing Requirements Coming To Wisconsin....
The Wisconsin adoption of teacher content knowledge requirements, on the form of MTEL 90 (Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure) by 2013-2014 would (will?) be a significant step forward via the Wisconsin Read to Lead Report), assuming it is not watered down like the oft criticized (and rightfully so) WKCE.
There are significant implications for :Education School preparation/curriculum with the addition of content knowledge to teacher licensing requirements.
Former Glades Central football coach Jessie Hester resigned Thursday as coach at Suncoast after just 10 months at the school.
Hester, 48, said the job at one of Palm Beach County's top academic public schools "wasn't the right fit" for him. The academic pressures the students faced made it difficult for the football team to practice and prepare for games, Hester said, adding that his team would go weeks without a full practice because his players had other school obligations.
The Chargers finished 4-6, missing the playoffs and tying for third in a five-team district.
"There are great, great people at the school, and great kids," Hester said, "but it was just not a good fit for me. It was too difficult to do the things I wanted to do in that situation."
It was no secret that Suncoast, with its nationally ranked academic programs and rigorous academic requirements, would be a more challenging job than Hester's previous job at his alma mater.
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves. I took pride in my scientific literacy, when I was nine years old.
When I was older, and I began to read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I ran across a gem called "the wave equation". I could follow the equation's derivation, but, looking back, I couldn't see its truth at a glance. So I thought about the wave equation for three days, on and off, until I saw that it was embarrassingly obvious. And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word "wave" meant to a physicist.
There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says "light is made of waves", and the teacher says "What is light made of?", and the student says "Waves!", the student has made a true statement. That's only fair, right? We accept "waves" as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn't it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer "Waves!" is either true or false, right?
A secondary school teacher recently consulted me on how to manage a student's problematic behavior. The 13-year-old boy, with issues on the autism spectrum, had been wreaking havoc in class with inappropriate comments.
It had started out mildly with his blurting out "I hate so and so" in front of the whole class. However, his latest and most provocative comment was "I want to touch your breasts" - to female students.
The boy would usually broadcast the statement a few more times before terminating the interaction with a pointed look and a triumphant smirk.
The teachers were already busy with the girls, who were obviously upset by the sexually charged statement.
In each of the past five years, IBM has come up with a list of five innovations it believes will become popular within five years. In this, the sixth year, IBM has come up with the following technologies it thinks will gain traction. Hold on to your sci-fi novels, because some of these are pretty far out there. And some of them, well, I wish we had them today.
People power will come to life. Advances in technology will allow us to trap the kinetic energy generated (and wasted) from walking, jogging, bicycling, and even from water flowing through pipes. A bicycle charging your iPhone? There's nothing wrong with that, though I think it might be a while before we see this actually become a mainstream practice.
You will never need a password again. Biometrics will finally replace the password and thus redefine the word "hack." Jokes aside, IBM believes multifactor biometrics will become pervasive. "Biometric data--facial definitions, retinal scans, and voice files--will be composited through software to build your DNA-unique online password." Based on the increasing hours we spend online, I would say we need such solutions to come to market ASAP.
In Madison, the influx of poor people from Chicago is testing the city's historical liberalism. About one-quarter of the 3,300 Madison families receiving welfare are former Illinois residents.
Even Mayor Paul Soglin, who earned his liberal stripes in the anti-establishment politics of the 1960s as a Vietnam War protester, now talks of "finite limits of resources" for the poor.
"We're like a lifeboat that holds 12 people comfortably," Mr. Soglin said. "We've got about 16 in it now, and there's a dozen more waiting in the water. Since we're already in danger of going under, what can our community be expected to do?"
A vibrant economy in Wisconsin accounts for much of the migration among poor people, most of them looking for jobs. The state's unemployment rate has dipped below 4 percent while that in Illinois is 4.4 percent.
my correspondent notes:
Here is an interesting article from 1995. Worth revisiting with Soglin back in office (just because he is the mayor quoted at the time), but mostly as it pertains to our discussions around Madison Prep. What are the unique attributes and qualities that make up both our white population and our minority population?
Summary of the Wisconsin Read to Lead Task Force Recommendations, January, 2012
Teacher Preparation and Professional Development
All teachers and administrators should receive more instruction in reading pedagogy that focuses on evidence-based practices and the five components of reading as defined by the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension).
There must be more accountability at the state level and a commitment by institutions of higher education to improving teacher preparation.
Licensure requirements should be strengthened to include the Massachusetts Foundations of Reading exam by 2013.
Teacher preparation programs should expand partnerships with local school districts and early childhood programs.
Information on the performance of graduates of teacher preparation programs should be available to the public.
A professional development conference should be convened for reading specialists and elementary school principals.
DPI should make high quality, science-based, online professional development in reading available to all teachers.
Professional development plans for all initial educators should include a component on instructional strategies for reading and writing.
Professional development in reading instruction should be required for all teachers whose students continually show low levels of achievement and/or growth in reading.
Screening, Assessment, and Intervention
Wisconsin should use a universal statewide screening tool in pre-kindergarten through second grade to ensure that struggling readers are identified as early as possible.
Proper accommodations should be given to English language learners and special education students.
Formal assessments should not replace informal assessments, and schools should assess for formative and summative purposes.
Educators should be given the knowledge to interpret assessments in a way that guides instruction.
Student data should be shared among early childhood programs, K-12 schools, teachers, parents, reading specialists, and administrators.
Wisconsin should explore the creation of a program similar to the Minnesota Reading Corps in 2013.
Early Childhood
DPI and the Department of Children and Families should work together to share data, allowing for evaluation of early childhood practices.
All 4K programs should have an adequate literacy component.
DPI will update the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards to ensure accuracy and alignment with the Common Core State Standards, and place more emphasis on fidelity of implementation of the WMELS.
The YoungStar rating system for early childhood programs should include more specific early literacy criteria.
Accountability
The Educator Effectiveness Design Team should consider reading outcomes in its evaluation systems.
The Wisconsin School Accountability Design Team should emphasize early reading proficiency as a key measure for schools and districts. Struggling schools and districts should be given ongoing quality professional development and required to implement scientific research-based screening, assessment, curriculum, and intervention.
Educators and administrators should receive training on best practices in order to provide effective instruction for struggling readers.
The state should enforce the federal definition for scientific research-based practices, encourage the use of What Works Clearinghouse, and facilitate communication about effective strategies.
In addition to effective intervention throughout the school year, Wisconsin should consider mandatory evidence-based summer school programs for struggling readers, especially in the lower grades, and hold the programs accountable for results.
Family Involvement
Support should be given to programs such as Reach Out and Read that reach low-income families in settings that are well-attended by parents, provide books to low-income children, and encourage adults to read to children.
The state should support programs that show families and caregivers how to foster oral language and reading skill development in children.
Adult literacy agencies and K-12 schools should collaborate at the community level so that parents can improve their own literacy skills.
Improved Videos of December 19 Public Appearances and Vote on Madison Prep Are Available
MMSD has now posted the videos from the December 19, 2011 meeting at which the Board of Education voted on the proposed Madison Preparatory Charter School. The first video contains the public appearances statements; the second contains the board comments, vote, etc., through the vote to adjourn.
The versions that are now posted are much improved - the video that was originally posted had issues with sound quality and ended abruptly during board statements. The new videos have terrific sound quality and contain the full meeting. (Thanks to MMSD staff for the work that went into this.)
It has been a great "trip," so to speak, and it isn't over yet. It was 61 years ago when I stepped into my first classroom as the teacher. During these past 61 years, I have thoroughly enjoyed my work as an educator, every day ... well, nearly every day.
Much has happened in education over that period of time. I have seen schools from nearly all levels: from that of a classroom teacher, university demonstration teacher, school administrator, professor of educational administration, and university administrator. I have seen schools from the standpoint of a school board member, a school board trainer, and a parent and grandparent. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I have seen education vicariously: as many of my readers know, my wife is a retired teacher of 34 years, and my son and daughter-in-law are teachers.
This columnist has a great respect for education and learning. A well known Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget said it well: "the principal goal of education is to develop within people the capability of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done." Piaget's statement is smartly relevant and applicable as applied to all levels of education.
My entry into the field of teaching had its beginning in September, 1951. It was preceded by generations of some of the most conscientious, dedicated, and competent of teachers, many of whom, received little honor or aggrandizement, but whose influence was monumental. The strength of America's school and of America's teachers is seen in the annals of American Exceptionalism.
In my hand I have a hefty article on a canonical English poet, published 10 years ago in a distinguished journal. It runs for 21 pages and has 31 footnotes, with extensive references to philosophy and art. The article is learned, wide-ranging, and conversant with scholarship on the poet and theoretical currents in literary studies. The argument is dense, the analysis acute, on its face a worthy illustration of academic study deserving broad notice and integration into subsequent research in the field.
That reception doesn't seem to have happened. When, on May 25, I typed the title into Google Scholar, only nine citations of the original article showed up. Of those nine, six of them make only perfunctory nods in a footnote, along the lines of "Recent examples include ... " and "For a recent essay on the subject, see. ... " The other three engage with the essay more substantively, but not by much, inserting in their text merely two or three sentences on the original essay. Additionally, in books on the English poet published from 2004 to 2011 that don't show up on Google Scholar (the search engine picks up most major humanities journals but is sketchy on books), the original article receives not a single citation.
With a unanimous vote Monday, the State Board of Education approved a tougher scoring system for the FCAT, the state's standardized reading and math exam.
The change is meant to raise the academic standards for Florida students. Last year, state officials rolled out the FCAT 2.0, a new version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. A new scoring system is needed for the new test, state officials have said.
However, many students are expected to score lower under the newly approved grading system, which determines the "cut scores" or the scores that determine failing and passing grades. State officials estimate:
Among the "open courseware" projects at elite U.S. institutions, MITx will be the first to offer an institutional credential -- albeit not from MIT proper but from MITx, which will exist as a nonprofit apart from the university. (The Stanford professors who offered an interactive open course in artificial intelligence to all comers in the fall plan to send each non-enrolled student a certifying letter with their cumulative grade and class rank, but Stanford itself is not recognizing them.)
But MIT stamp or no, that is still a big step, says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a D.C. think tank.
"I think this is the future," says Carey, who has written on the emerging relevance of nontraditional credentials. "It's just the logical next step for the ethic behind the [open educational resources] movement," he says.
In interviews, MIT officials took care to emphasize that MITx is not meant to supplant the traditional "residential education" that the university cultivates in its Cambridge, Mass., enclave.
Kimberly Lynch, a redhead with freckles, had a keen interest in sunblock. So much so that she spent the past year developing a new method to test the effectiveness of sunscreens and recently submitted the results to a medical journal.
The 17-year-old senior at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, N.J., is quite a bit younger than most scientists submitting papers to accredited medical journals. Then again, Lynch doesn't go to a typical public high school.
Bergen Academies, a four-year high school, offers students seven concentrations including science, medicine, culinary arts, business and finance, and engineering. It even has its own stem-cell laboratory, where Lynch completed her experiments under the guidance of biology teacher Robert Pergolizzi, a former assistant professor of genetic medicine at Cornell University.
WASHINGTON -- During her first six years of teaching in this city's struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.
That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated "highly effective" two years in a row under Washington's new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.
"Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay," said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. "I know they value me."
MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called "MITx." MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:
organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
allow for the individual assessment of any student's work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.
MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino has appointed the founder of a Dorchester charter school to the School Committee, in the latest signal of warming relations between Menino and the independently run institutions.
The appointee, Meg Campbell, is founder and executive director of the Codman Academy Charter Public School. The school has been noted for its good track record for college admissions, the mayor's office said yesterday in a prepared statement.
Campbell said last night in a telephone interview that she believes Menino made a bold choice by appointing her to the panel, given her leadership position at a charter school.
"I think it's a tribute to the mayor's overriding commitment'' to education, she said. "It doesn't matter to the mayor where you go to school. It matters that you get a phenomenal education.''
Data driven teaching and research at Duke keeps growing and Perkins Data and GIS continues to increase support for researchers and classes employing data, GIS, and data visualization tools. Whether your discipline is in the Humanities, Sciences, or Social Sciences, Perkins Data and GIS seeks to support researchers and students using numeric and geospatial data across the disciplines.
Editor's note: This is the second in a two-part series discussing the presidential candidates' views and likely policies toward higher education. This part focuses on the Republican candidates' positions. On December 12, Jay Schalin presented the higher education track record and statements of Barack Obama.)
For the most part, the Republican primary has focused on economic issues such as employment, taxation, and government spending. Higher education hasn't been a prime topic.
But for future students, taxpayers, and university officials, the presidential hopefuls' higher education policies could loom large. Decisions at the top could further inflate the higher education bubble or, alternatively, spur educational innovations. A look at the Republican field (in alphabetical order) reveals a variety of policy choices gleaned from their websites, statements, and debates.
When Cristina Vicini, chairwoman of the Executives' advisory board of Boston University in Brussels was in the early years of her career, in the late eighties, she had the impression that gender imbalance - a much debated topic at the time - was changing and would soon be resolved. "I cannot believe we are still talking about this in the twenty-first century," she says today.
The discussion is indeed continuing, which is why some of Europe's leading business schools have published a Call to Action designed to increase the number of women on company boards.
Written with the support of European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding, who appealed to European schools for help in September, the seven-page manifesto has four pillars:
Only a few logs remain of Eadsville, a mining camp where people worked, lived and raised families on Casper Mountain. A handful of children learned there in a log schoolhouse.
A century later, another school uses computer technology to learn about the natural features and history there. The Casper Mountain Science School (CMSS) teaches K-12 students on that very site as an enrichment program.
A group from Casper College's advanced GIS (geographic information system) class created a layer of digital, interactive maps complete with pictures and historical information about Eadsville for those students. Each year, groups from the college class complete real projects for various local organizations. Three students braved wind and cold on four trips to Casper Mountain. There, they mapped the CMSS property boundary along with historical mine sites and buildings in and around the old mining town of Eadsville using GPS (global positioning system). Those three, Crocker Hollis, Karen Sue McCutcheon and Nancy Doelger, also saw leftovers of a mountain lion's skunk and bird meals.
The American Chamber of Commerce has warned the chief executive that Hong Kong's status as a world-class city is under threat because the shortage of international school places has reached a "crisis point".
In a paper submitted to Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's government, the business organisation said it wanted a permanent committee to be established to ensure schooling would be available for children of foreign investors and professionals.
"We feel that the situation is hitting a crisis point now," the paper said. "The government urgently needs to work with the private sector to set coherent and long-term, sustainable policies to support Hong Kong's education and talent development."
The chamber, or AmCham, released the paper - sent to the government in August - to the South China Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) last week.
New York State's education commissioner threatened on Tuesday to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to struggling schools in New York City and nine other districts statewide if they do not prove by Saturday that they will carry out new evaluation systems for teachers and principals.
Officials and union leaders in each district must first agree on the details of the evaluation systems, like how much weight students' standardized test scores will have on the annual ratings that teachers and principals receive. Compromise has thus far proved elusive.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national database, to be funded by the Gates Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation. Other states that have already agreed to share this data, according to the NY State Education Department, include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana and Massachusetts.
All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability, which in July was awarded $76.5 million by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months. According to an earlier NYT story, $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.
I'd say that it probably will be, yes, and I've been saying so for some time. Think about it for a moment, we still use the educational techniques of the Early Middle Ages.
I first saw this point at Brad DeLong's place. When books are hand written, extremely expensive (as in, more than a year's wages possibly) then it makes sense for students to gather in one place and listen to the book being read to them.
Thus what we call a lecture. However, once printing has made the book cheap there's really not all that much point to such a gathering. Classes, OK, that's different, they're more interactive. And yes, of course, there's more to college than just the lectures and the education.
Schools which fail to improve within six years of being classed "satisfactory" should be relabelled inconsistent and pushed harder to improve, a report says.
The Royal Society of Arts report says half of the 40% of England's schools classed as "satisfactory" failed to improve within two Ofsted inspections.
Last month Ofsted said nearly 800 schools were "coasting" in this way.
The report says such schools are more likely to be in poorer areas.
The RSA report , published jointly with Ofsted, focused on the 40% of secondary schools in England rated as "satisfactory".
It noted that half of these schools remained "satisfactory" for at least two inspections and about 8% declined to an "inadequate" rating.
New Jersey lawmakers are rightfully concerned about the proliferation of applications for new charter schools and their subsequent lack of effective oversight, but legislation proposed by Assemblywoman Mila Jasey requiring proposed charter schools to be approved at the polls is thoroughly misguided and symptomatic of a disappointing trend in how we view charter schools and the role they play in addressing the horrible inequities in our state.
I am disappointed by what is said by many of those who will establish recently approved charters. When asked what is special about their school's program, they often say something like: "We plan to hire high-quality teachers and have longer hours." My former students would call that a "duh" statement -- their fancy term for a tautology.
The Mind Trust's plan for transforming Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) would dramatically shrink the central administration, send about $200 million more a year to schools without raising taxes one cent, provide pre-k to all 4-year-olds, give teachers and principals more freedom, hold them accountable for student achievement gains, and provide parents with more quality school choices. It is the boldest school reform plan in the country.
An Indianapolis nonprofit has unveiled an ambitious 160-page reform proposal to completely overhaul Indianapolis Public Schools.
If it came to fruition, the sweeping proposal offered by the Mind Trust would create one of the nation's most radical new organizational approaches to public education.
"If we're going to be serious about doing something transformational, we need an aggressive plan," Mind Trust CEO David Harris said. "Incremental reforms haven't worked here, and they haven't worked in other parts of the country."
It's that the new Mind Trust report that calls for a sweeping overhaul of the way Indianapolis Public Schools operates will not turn into another tired battle over turf, pride and special interests. Instead, my hope is that it will lead to a broad and much-needed communitywide discussion about the future of the state's largest, and in some ways most important, school district.
The thorough, sensible and provocative report should spark the same kind of urgent discussion and action that we're seeing over mass transit, and that we've seen for decades over sports stadiums.
Those other issues are important. The education debate is vital.
We're meeting for lunch at a restaurant in Canary Wharf, where many of the major global banks are located. He is a man in his late 40s, inconspicuously dressed, and in possession of a firm handshake. He orders a Coke, and then a pasta dish he will dig in with great relish. In his volunteer email he said he was with a software firm (working in investment banking). When asked for a job description, he simply says he is a "quant".
"My parents discovered that I was of a mathematical bent aged three when I was apparently lining up my toys in order of size and then colour. I was one of these terrible, precocious kids who did their mathematics O-level aged 12. After a long academic career I ended up doing theoretical physics for my PhD, and spent a couple of years at Cern in Geneva. Many people I know from back then are still at universities, doing research and climbing the slippery slope to professorships and fellowships. They work the same astonishing long hours as I do, yet get paid a fraction and, from a purely scientific perspective, get to do some really, really interesting science. I often say (only half jokingly) that I "sold my soul" - I make a little over £200,000 a year, including my bonus.
"I am in a world of data, and I build all sorts of models for banks. For instance, one that helps a bank decide whom to lend a mortgage to. You have all this data about the person who is applying, and then the model works out the risk of lending to that person. You look at both the probability of this happening, and at the size of the loss in such an event.
CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a secular saint. Though he never performed the kind of miracle needed to be officially canonised, his power was close to unearthly. Mezzofanti was said to speak 72 languages. Or 50. Or to have fully mastered 30. No one was certain of the true figure, but it was a lot. Visitors flocked from all corners of Europe to test him and came away stunned. He could switch between languages with ease. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their sins the next morning and saved them from hell.
Or so the legend goes. In "Babel No More", Michael Erard has written the first serious book about the people who master vast numbers of languages--or claim to. A journalist with some linguistics training, Mr Erard is not a hyperpolyglot himself (he speaks some Spanish and Chinese), but he approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of scepticism.
Nichols said though she disagreed with Silveira's vote, "This is bigger than Madison Prep."
"My motivation comes from listening to a lot of the community dialogue over the last year and hearing the voices of community members who want greater accountability, who want more diversity in the decision-making and just a call for change," Nichols said.
Silveira did not return a call for comment Friday.
Two candidates have announced plans to run for the other School Board seat up for election next spring, which is being vacated by Lucy Mathiak. They are Mary Burke, a former state commerce secretary and Trek Bicycle executive, and Michael Flores, a Madison firefighter, parent and East High graduate.
A global study of learning standards in 74 countries has ranked India all but at the bottom, sounding a wake-up call for the country's education system. China came out on top.
1. A big chunk of India is still at the margin where malnutrition and malaria and other negatives matter for IQ. Indian poverty is the most brutal I have seen, anywhere, including my two trips to sub-Saharan Africa or in my five trips to Haiti. I don't know if Pisa is testing those particular individuals, but it still doesn't bode well for the broader distribution, if only through parental effects.
It's dangerous to be away. I briefly left the country a few weeks ago, and while I was gone, the district superintendent announced her retirement and The Spokesman-Review (SR) launched what I see as a media "lynching" of a local high school teacher.
Did you read about the attack on Jennifer Walther, an Advanced Placement English teacher (news.google.com search) at Ferris High School in Spokane, WA? Are you shocked by the newspaper's biased coverage? I'm not shocked. Nowadays, the SR doesn't bear much resemblance to the newspapers I've enjoyed reading. Smaller, thinner and nastier, it contains less content, less local news and more ads. Often biased, incomplete or hypocritical, the paper tolerates questionable material that fits an editorial agenda.
I'm an avid newspaper reader, but I canceled the SR in 2008 when it kept quoting unsubstantiated rumors from the ex-boyfriend of the daughter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Things have not improved since then.
Now, the SR is using its bully pulpit to accuse Walther of doing something the SR appears to do nearly every day of the week - pursue a biased political agenda. Evidence suggests that, rather than stand up for this teacher, the school district and teachers union initiated or are assisting with the pile-on.
Earlier this year, two top Delaware State University officials visited two colleges in Ohio.
President Harry L. Williams and Provost Alton Thompson took the trips not to meet with fellow leaders in higher education. They wanted to see two high schools -- operated by and located on the campuses of Akron University and Lorain County Community College.
The model they saw in action on their visits is known as "Early College High School." And if the state approves its charter school application, DSU will open the first school of that type in Delaware on its Dover campus by the fall of 2013.
Educators forced out or disciplined by local districts over cheating and other state testing violations continued working in schools or administering state exams as their cases languished in Springfield without investigation, the Tribune has learned.
Contrary to Illinois law, state officials for years didn't investigate or pursue discipline of educators reported for testing misconduct -- from excessive coaching to giving students answers to prepping them with actual test questions, a Tribune investigation found. Some may have been allowed to keep teaching even if the state had investigated, but in the meantime, educators were allowed to jump easily to new jobs while the state delayed.
Illinois State Board of Education officials say they were instead focused on higher-priority discipline cases because of limited resources, though lawmakers have given the agency $1.3 million since 2008-09 to pursue educator misconduct. Typically, they addressed violations by throwing out test results and letting local officials discipline educators.
Buffalo's Promise Neighborhood project was one of five in the nation to secure federal funding to provide "cradle to career" services for children in an effort to improve educational outcomes among low-income areas, federal officials announced today.
The local initiative will receive five years of funding from the federal government, including $1.5 million in its first year. M&T Bank this fall pledged to match the federal funds and to raise an additional $9 million in private funding.
The initiative is largely modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, where families in a 100-block area receive wraparound services, from health care to educational support, beginning with prenatal care and leading through high school graduation.
Buffalo's Promise Neighborhood will focus on the 14215 ZIP code, building on the success that has been realized in the Westminster Community Charter School. The plan seeks to stabilize the neighborhood, increase services to families, and ultimately improve the education at three schools in that area: Bennett High School, Highgate Heights Elementary and Westminster Community Charter School.
When asked to identify the qualities that lead to success in life, experts often list the ability to overcome obstacles. Pushing past adversity, through determination and persistence, is the hallmark of the greatest leaders, the most successful parents, the most prized employees, we are told. Those who make no excuses, who do whatever it takes to get something done, are the ones who have the capacity to achieve greatness.
In education, we focus a lot on accommodating our student's needs. We have English Language Learners (E.L.L.s) and special education students. We have kids with emotional disturbances and anger issues. We have kids who are acting out, and kids who are uninterested or bored.
It's our job to teach them no matter what. We are often the adults that children see with the most consistency and frequency, and we are responsible for their educations, in the broadest sense of that word. But to truly help them be successful, we ourselves have to embody the "no excuses" attitude.
The director of the Iowa Department of Education said he's willing to be patient with his plan to overhaul the state's public school system, acknowledging that many people aren't ready for changes he thinks are essential.
Gov. Terry Branstad chose 40-year-old Jason Glass largely because of his background in education reform, and since coming to Iowa he has been leading the push for dramatic changes to the state's public schools.
Because he began his job only a couple weeks before the last legislative session began, this was supposed to be the session where Glass would see his ambitious plans enacted. He proposed a 15-page package of proposals that would shake up the state's schools, changing the way they do business on everything from paying teachers to opening the profession to non-traditional educators.
That still may happen, but Branstad has temporarily shelved a proposed tiered system of teacher pay that increased salaries for beginning teachers and let teacher move through a series of pay grades based on performance in the classroom.
Fordham's latest study, "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," is the first to examine the performance of America's highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and "leaving no child behind" coming at the expense of our "talented tenth"--and America's future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.
African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home -- typically immigrants or refugees -- according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools.
District officials, who presented the finding at a recent community meeting at Rainier Beach High School, noted the results come with caveats, but called the potential trend troubling and pledged to study what might be causing it.
Michael Tolley, an executive director overseeing Southeast Seattle schools, said at the meeting that the data exposed a new achievement gap that is "extremely, extremely alarming."
The administration has for years analyzed test scores by race. It has never before broken down student-achievement data by specific home language or country of origin -- it is rare for school districts to examine test scores at that level -- but it is unlikely that the phenomenon the data suggest is actually new.
Sweeping education reforms proposed by Gov. Terry Branstad are likely to include the creation of a task force that would consider extending the amount of time Iowa students spend in school.
Branstad announced in October that he'll ask lawmakers to approve reforms aimed at improving education for Iowa's 468,000 students and better the quality of the state's teachers.
Class-time extensions were not included in his original plan.
But Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, last week told an advisory group of school superintendents that Branstad is expected to add the creation of a task force to consider such extensions. The task force would likely consider adding 10 days to the school year, lengthening school days and requiring struggling students to go to school on Saturdays or take summer classes, the Des Moines Register reported ( http://dmreg.co/rFkPsg).
Iowa currently has a 180-day school year. State law mandates that each school day last at least 5.5 hours, but most students are in class an average of 6.5 hours.
Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, and national expert on why schools in Finland are so successful, visited Anchorage and Bethel area schools last month, ate the lunches and sat in on classes.
Some things impressed him, and others illustrated problems that schools face across the U.S., he said.
Abrams was here to participate in a conference on how to improve Anchorage schools that was sponsored by Mayor Dan Sullivan.
Before and after the November conference, Abrams went to King Career Center and William Tyson Elementary in Anchorage for half-day each, and spent full days at Denali Montessori, Begich Middle and East High in Anchorage. He also observed classes at a school-within-a-school run by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council at Bartlett High.
It would be easy to be shocked by The Daily Telegraph's revelations about exam boards - but the truth is that Britain's examination system has been heading for a crash for years. The culprit? The process that saw it transformed from a national treasure to a profit-driven industry. Today, examining is not an extension of teaching and learning, but a career in itself - one that has, on occasion, meant acting as little more than an arm of government.
The first mistake was to divorce the examination system from its end-users. In the past, academic exam boards were not only named after leading universities, but had a significant number of dons actually marking scripts. Today, the boards' management structures hardly have any connection with the universities. Control of the content and structure of the examination system needs to be placed firmly in the hands of universities - and, in the case of vocational training, of employers - so they can ensure that students possess the knowledge and skills their bosses or lecturers require, not what is cheapest, most convenient or most politically correct.
The Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union opened negotiations earlier this month on a state-mandated requirement about what should-and should not-be included in teachers' performance evaluations.
CPS and the union have until March to grapple with the specific terms, such as what tests to use for measuring academic growth, how much the results should factor into the evaluations, and how to measure the performance of teachers whose subjects are not tested on state exams.
To add to the mix, an organized group of public school students, the Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), are preparing a formal request to CPS in the coming months to include student input in the new teacher evaluation system.
Some teachers want their students to weigh in on their performance.
Gregoire: What is it? You'll have to help me on that.
PubliCola: It seems more aggressive than the one you laid out. [Gregoire announced a reform proposal last week - AP report here - that will put a pilot project of 4-tiered teacher evaluations in play statewide]. It ties teacher evaluations to student test scores, calls for charter schools, and allows the state to step in and take over failing schools. It's in sync with President Obama's education reform agenda. The proposal you came out with last week seems like a "lite" version of that to education reformers [because the evaluations aren't tied explicitly to "student academic growth"].
Gregoire: I don't really think so. I think what it is is a Washington reform. The most recent studies on charter schools come out of Stanford. And there's no guarantee of anything there. As many as there are doing OK, there are an equal number that are not. ... Why would we go down a path where there's no big success to be had? And our voters have already turned [charters] down three times.
I developed this lab school idea, which serves two purposes: One, you have our four-year university schools partner up with one of our bottom five percent schools and really run the school and get them to transition out of their low performance. And two, you really do take your schools of education and improve them dramatically, because if they're going to train teachers, what better training for them than to be inside a classroom and see what works and what doesn't work?
PubliCola: What about tying test scores to teacher evaluations?
There is little love for the SAT. How little, you ask? When a massive cheating scandal erupted this fall, fewer people rushed to defend the test than rose to defend Penn State officials for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse of children. But as unpopular as the iconic SAT may be - among students and many educational activists alike - it's actually pretty good at what it's designed to do, which is to serve as a common measure across the hodgepodge of academic standards, grading systems and norms being used by America's sprawling 25,000 high schools.
Unlike many of the tests that the education world loves to argue about, the SAT is an optional test; students choose to take it if they want to attend schools that require it for admission. So SAT angst is limited to the college-bound. (The test is administered by the New York-based nonprofit College Board, which is also in charge of high school Advanced Placement tests.) And although its only true fans are the intellectually insecure, the SAT, which used to be an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test, doesn't show how smart or savvy students are or how successful, happy, or impactful they're likely to be in life. But on average, it does fairly accurate gauge on how well students will do in their first year of college. That's something admissions officials want to know. And that's why good scores can boost an applicant's chances of getting in and low scores can torpedo them.
The data presented in this combined report―Rankings & Estimates―provide facts about the extent to which local, state, and national governments commit resources to public education. As one might expect in a nation as diverse as the United States--with respect to economics, geography, and politics--the level of commitment to education varies on a state-by-state basis. Regardless of these variations, improvements in public education can be measured by summary statistics. Thus, NEA Research offers this report to its state and local affiliates as well as to researchers, policymakers, and the public as a tool to examine public education programs and services.
Part I of this combined report--Rankings 2010--provides state-level data on an array of topics relevant to the com- plex enterprise of public education. Since the 1960s, Rankings has presented facts and figures useful in determining how states differ from one another--or from national averages--on selected statistics. In addition to identifying emerging trends in key economic, political, and social areas, the state-by-state figures on government financing, state demographics, and public schools permit a statistical assessment of the scope of public education. Of course, no set of tables tells the entire story of a state's education offerings. Consideration of factors such as a state's tax system, pro- visions for other public services, and population characteristics also are needed. Therefore, it is unwise to draw con- clusions based solely on individual statistics in this report. Readers are urged to supplement the ranked data with specific information about state and local service activities related to public education.
Part II of this combined report--Estimates 2011--is in its 67th year of production. This report provides projections of public school enrollment, employment and compensation of personnel, and finances, as reported by individual state departments of education. Not surprisingly, interest in the improvement and renewal of public education continues to capture the attention of the nation. The state-level data featured in Estimates permit broad assessments of trends in staff salaries, sources of school funding, and levels of educational expenditures. The data should be used with the un- derstanding that the reported statewide totals and averages may not reflect the varying conditions that exist among school districts and schools within the state.
Public education in the United States is a joint enterprise between local, state, and federal governments. Yet, progress in improving public education stems primarily from the efforts of state education agencies, local districts, and indi- vidual schools. These public organizations deserve credit for recognizing that spending for education needs to be ac- knowledged as an investment in our nation's most valuable resource--children. Similarly, this publication represents a collective effort that goes well beyond the staff of the National Education Association. Individual state departments of education and the NEA's state affiliates participate in collecting and assembling the data shown here. As a result, the NEA appreciates and acknowledges the cooperation it receives from all those whose efforts make this publication possible.
Wisconsin ranks 21st in average teacher salaries (page 35), 10th in property tax revenue as a percentage of total tax revenue (page 52), 16th in per capita state individual income tax revenue (page 53) and 15th in public school revenue per student.
The American Federation of Teachers, vilified by critics as an obstacle to school reform, is leading an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system in a place where deprivation is layered on heartache.
The AFT, which typically represents teachers in urban settings, wants to improve education deep in the heart of Appalachia by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County.
The union has gathered about 40 partners, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, IBM, Save the Children, foundations, utility companies, housing specialists, community colleges, and state and federal governments, which have committed to a five-year plan to try to lift McDowell out of its depths.
The McDowell Initiative, to be announced Friday, comes in the middle of a national debate about what causes failing schools in impoverished communities: the educators or the environment?
AFRICAN-American students are lagging behind other students, including other black ethnic students whose home language is not English, according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools. ["'Alarming' new test-score gap discovered in Seattle schools," page one, Dec. 19.]
This is an important problem that other cities have confronted head-on. First, they have admitted they really don't know how to solve the problem. Second, they acknowledge that the normal remedies school districts use to solve achievement problems are too weak to work.
These admissions have led other cities to open themselves up to experimentation in schools serving the most disadvantaged: longer school days and years; no-excuses instructional models; new sources of teachers; partnerships with businesses and cultural institutions that can provide enrichment and role models; use of online instruction to teach subjects like science where school staff are often not qualified; new schools run by national institutions with track records of improving achievement for the most disadvantaged.
Professors are AWESOME!
The exercises are AWESOME!
The classes are AWESOME!
But then they send you the Statement of Accomplishment. This was obviously done by engineers with no knowledge of public relations, marketing or people feelings. And maybe under the pressure of Stanford (lawyers?) to clarify that this wasn't a Stanford class.
Before the course started they promised the Statement of Accomplishment as an incentive to get you in the course.
When they got a lot of users they said "You will receive a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, which will include information on how well you did and how your performance compared to other online students. Only students admitted to Stanford and enrolled in the regular course can receive credit or a grade, so this is not a Stanford certificate."
At the end they send you a pdf file that says something like this: hey you didn't complete any Stanford course, you were just part of an experiment and this is an automated message.
Pierre "Nic" Antoine, principal of two Catholic schools in Racine formed by school mergers, understands the pain families feel when their schools are closed.
But with the expansion of private-school vouchers to Racine, Antoine believes Catholic education has been reinvigorated this year. Enrollment is stable at Our Lady of Grace Academy, which added 30 voucher students this year, and up by about 20% at John Paul II Academy, which added 40 voucher students.
"We went from being 70% full in 2010-'11 to being 95% full this year," Antoine said of John Paul II Academy.
The boost in student enrollment is part of a larger trend in the Milwaukee Archdiocese this year - enrollment is up for the first time in 13 years, driven by voucher student enrollment that increased from 7,502 students last year to 8,831 students this year.
Nationwide and in Milwaukee, Catholic school enrollment has decreased over the years. After the recession caused families to tighten their budgets, some private schools' enrollment figures dropped even further, prompting mergers and closures.
Kansas City, Mo., schools are losing their accreditation on Jan. 1. Missouri law allows students from unaccredited districts to enroll for free in nearby school systems, so the suburban districts outside Kansas City are bracing for an influx of students.
Two of our overriding efforts in Lower Education in recent years have been: 1) raising the low math and reading scores of black and Hispanic students, and 2) increasing the number of our high school and college graduates capable of employment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM}.
Very recently evidence has been allowed to surface pointing out that while students in the bottom 10% of academic performance have indeed improved, students in the top ten percent of academic performance have stagnated, where they have not dropped out from boredom. Related evidence now suggests that complacency with secondary public education in our more affluent suburbs may have been quite misplaced as well.
As Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum point out in their recent book, That Used To Be Us, "average is over." That is to say, students in other cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai) and countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan) take their educations so much more seriously than our students (and teachers) do that their economies are achieving gains on our own that are truly startling, if we take the time to notice.
If we are to retain good jobs, restart our manufacturing, and otherwise decide to compete seriously with others who seem to take both education and work more seriously than we have come to do, it might be wise to increase the interest of our students in STEM fields. According to the Kaiser Foundation, our students aged 8-18 are spending, on average, more than seven hours a day with electronic entertainment media.
Now of course we want our young people to buy our electronic entertainment hardware and software and we definitely want them to have a good time and be happy, but probably we would like them to be employable some day as well. Friedman and Mandelbaum point out that not only blue collar jobs and white collar jobs, but increasingly sophisticated professional work can be done to a high standard at a much lower cost in other countries than it can be done here.
Having our students spend 53 hours a week on their electronic entertainment media, while their high school homework tops out, in many cases, according to ACT, at three to four hours a week, is not a plan that will enable us to resume our competitive position in the world's economies.
So perhaps we should assign students in high school 15 hours a week of homework (which would reduce their media time to a mere 38 hours a week) and pass on to them the information that if they don't start working to a much much higher academic standard they will probably face a more depressing future in a greatly diminished nation than they currently imagine they will have.
But, is STEM enough? I remember the story told about a visit Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, made to the gleaming new Salk Laboratory in La Jolla. A young biologist, thrilled to be a guide to the Nobel Prize-winner, was very proud to be able to show off all the bright new spotless expensive state-of-the-art research equipment. When they finished the tour, the young man could not stop himself from saying, "Just think, Sir Alexander, with all this equipment, what you could have discovered!" And Sir Alexander said, "not penicillin."
Because the discovery of penicillin relied on serendipity and curiosity. Fleming found some petri dishes contaminated by something that had come in, probably, through one of the dirty old badly-closed windows in his lab in England. Instead of washing the dishes so he could start over with them, as most scientists would have done, he asked himself what could have killed off those bacteria in the dishes. And a major breakthrough was made possible.
Just in passing, amid the rush for more STEM, I would like to put in a word for serendipity, which often fuels creativity of many kinds, by making possible the association of previously unrelated ideas and memories when in contact with a new fact or situation not deliberately sought out.
I argue that serendipity is more likely to occur and to be fruitful if our students also have a lot of experience with the ROOTS of civilization, that is, the history, literature, art, music, architecture and other fields which have provided the background and inspiration for so much that we find worthwhile in human life. Steve Jobs found his course in calligraphy useful when he came to think about Macintosh software, but there are countless examples of important discoveries and contributions that have been, at least in part, grounded in the ROOTS of civilized life. So let us push for more STEM, by all means, but if, in the process we neglect those ROOTS, our achievements will be fewer, and our lives will be the poorer as a result, IMHO.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, second biggest in the United States with some 700,000 students, located in the center of the most segregated area in the country for Latino students, is a place where students of color are very often denied any opportunity to do any meaningful preparation for college and are often attending dropout factory high schools. In this system, where mandatory desegregation was abandoned in 1981, there's one small place where's there some racial and economic diversity and special programs offered for students who choose to participate in them.
More than 170 magnet school programs exist in the Los Angeles Unified School District. They have been funded with billions of dollars of state money for desegregation assistance. The strong magnets are one of the last vestiges of middle class education that exist in the City of Los Angeles and one of the few places where students from really disadvantaged backgrounds can come to classes with students from more advantaged backgrounds, in schools where the teachers want to participate in those schools and where there's a special curriculum offered to draw them there. Not all of these schools are great schools. Some of them are phony magnets, and some of them are wonderful schools. But they are a really important option for the City of Los Angeles. When a student can transfer from a dropout factory school to one where many students go to college, a bus is a great educational investment.
Here's how five people answered this week's question posed by Capital Times freelancer Kevin Murphy. What do you think? Please join the discussion.
"I don't agree with that decision. We need something to close that achievement gap and this was something that could have closed that gap and they won't even take a chance with it. It's the best idea to come forward so far and it should have been tried."
Easter Carson
retired school district employee
Madison
"It was a good idea and I think anything new in the way of education needs to be tried. Give it a try. It was a pretty proposal with non-coed instruction, uniforms for students, minority staff. It certainly is worth a try given the track record the school district has had with minority students so far."
For most people, the word "algebra" conjures classroom memories of Xs and Ys. Weekend Edition's math guy, Keith Devlin, says that's because most schools do a terrible job of teaching it. He talks with host Scott Simon about what algebra really is. Plus, Devlin explains how algebra took off in Baghdad, the Silicon Valley of the ninth century.
I can't shake the feeling that something important was going on at our School Board meeting last Monday night to consider the Madison Prep charter school proposal, and that the actual School Board vote wasn't it.
The bare-bone facts are that, after about 90 public speakers, the Board voted 2-5 to reject the Madison Prep proposal. I reluctantly voted against the motion because I was unwilling to violate the terms of our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.
After the motion failed, I moved that the Board approve Madison Prep, but delay its opening until the fall of 2013. My motion failed for lack of a second. (And no, I don't have an explanation for why neither James Howard nor Lucy Mathiak, who voted in favor of the first motion, was willing to second my motion.)
Probably like most who attended Monday night's meeting, I have thought a lot about it since. People who know I voted against the proposal have come up to me and congratulated me for what they say was the right decision. I have felt like shaking them and saying, "No, you don't understand. We blew it Monday night, we blew it big time. I just hope that we only crippled Madison Prep and didn't kill it."
I appreciate that that's an odd and surprising place for me to have ended up. To echo the Talking Heads, "Well, how did I get here?" I'll try to explain.
In a bold move that is generating controversy within its own ranks, the California Charter School Association is urging that 10 of the 145 charter schools up for renewal this year be denied their charters because they failed to meet academic performance benchmarks set by the association.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hailed the association for its "courageous leadership" in attempting to "hold schools accountable." "This is an important conversation for California to have, and one that we need to have across the country," Duncan said, echoing remarks made by several charter school leaders.
But the association's action has also provoked fierce criticism from schools it has recommended for closure, as well as from some long-time supporters of the charter movement.
Ladd and Fiske's essay was one of those broadsides that spreads through the teacher ranks like a brush fire. I received my email copy from one of our district's veteran teachers, a hard-working, dedicated woman who rarely misses an opportunity to remind me that she and her colleagues would be doing a fine job were it not for unmotivated kids and their irresponsible parents. And Diane Ravitch weighed in, calling to mind, in tune with the season, the story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, offering to "update this tale for today's school reformers" by calling attention to Ladd and Fiske's op-ed. (Ravitch says she uses Ladd'sEducation and Poverty paper in her post.)
What I don't understand in all of this is who exactly is claiming that class (or poverty or parents or kids) doesn't matter? Ladd and Fiske spend most of their essay stating the obvious: that socio-economic circumstance matters to education outcomes. The evidence that our policymakers and reformers are in denial of this salient fact?
As concerns mount over the costs and benefits of higher education, it may be worthwhile to glance at the benefits of high school education at present as well. Of course, high school costs, while high, are borne by the taxpayers in general, but it is reasonable to hope that there are sufficient benefits for such an outlay.
In fact, 30 percent of ninth-grade students do not graduate with their class, so there is a major loss right there. In addition, it appears that a large fraction of our high school graduates who go on to college leave without taking any credential or degree within eight years. On November 17, 2008, the Boston Globe reported, "About two-thirds of the city's high school graduates in 2000 who enrolled in college have failed to earn degrees, according to a first-of- its-kind study being released today."1 The fact that this is a new study shows that the days of taking not just college, but high school education for granted may be ending as well. If public high schools were preparing their graduates (the 70 percent) adequately, they should be able to read and write in college.
Alternatives to high school are coming only slowly. Charter schools, some good and some bad, are being tried. Homeschooling serves some 1.5 million students, and some edupundits (and computer salesmen) are pushing for ever more use of virtual distance learning at the high school level.
The most straightforward, clear and dispassionate vote taken on the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school proposal at last Monday's Madison Metropolitan School District Board meeting didn't even count. It was the advisory vote cast by the student representative, Philippo Bulgarelli.
The School Board turned down the controversial proposal on a 5-2 vote, and after nearly five hours of public testimony, all the school board members gave speeches explaining how they arrived at their decisions. In addition to being the most succinct, Bulgarelli's statement penetrated all of the intense emotions and wildly divergent interpretations of data and personal anecdotes used to argue both for and against the proposal. Bulgarelli said that the students for whom he speaks did not have enough information to make a reasonably good decision, so he voted to abstain.
Students in Democracy Prep High School's Korean classes typically learn words that boost their vocabulary and develop basic grammar -- standard fare for introductory foreign language instruction. But this week the lessons took a turn for the geopolitical.
Youngjae Hur greeted his students yesterday with an unusual pop quiz in English and asked them to define words such as "despotism," "denuclearize," and "repressive."
For Hur, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's abrupt death over the weekend offered the school a unique opportunity to infuse what students learn about the South Korean language and culture every day with the politics that have shaped life on the Korean Peninsula for decades.
"It's important to let them know not just the skills to understand the language, but also the culture, the history, the politics," said Hur, a first-year teacher who moved to the United States from South Korea three years ago. "Especially at this special moment."
The five-member majority of the board blew it this week by voting down the Urban League of Greater Madison's request for an unusual charter school called Madison Prep
The school would have offered a longer school day and year, higher standards and expectations, uniforms, mandatory extracurricular activities, same-sex classrooms, more minority teachers as role models, and stepped-up pressure on parents to get involved in their children's education.
Madison Prep represented a huge opportunity -- with unprecedented community support, including millions in private donations -- to attack the stubborn achievement gap for low-income and minority students.
But a majority of the School Board rejected Madison Prep, citing excuses that include a disputed clause in its teachers union contract and a supposed lack of accountability.
Wracked with frustration over the state's legions of unprepared high school graduates, the California State University system next summer will force freshmen with remedial needs to brush up on math or English before arriving on campus.
But many professors at the 23-campus university, which has spent the past 13 years dismissing students who fail remedial classes, doubt the Early Start program will do much to help students unable to handle college math or English.
"I'm not at all optimistic that it's going to help," said Sally Murphy, a communications professor who directs general education at Cal State East Bay, where 73 percent of this year's freshmen were not ready for college math. Nearly 60 percent were not prepared for college English.
"A 15-hour intervention is just not enough intervention when it comes to skills that should have been developed over 12 years," Murphy said.
The remedial numbers are staggering, given that the Cal State system admits only freshmen who graduated in the top one-third of their high-school class. About 27,300 freshmen in the 2010 entering class of about 42,700 needed remedial work in math, English or both.
Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire fought hard to win approval of his Madison Prep project. But the Madison School Board ultimately rejected a plan that would have steered tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into a project that board members felt lacked sufficient oversight and accountability.
The response of Caire and his fellow Madison Prep advocates was to suggest a variety of moves: the filing of a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, or perhaps a request for state intervention to allow the project to go forward without state approval.
We would suggest another approach.
Caire has succeeded in garnering a good deal of support for Madison Prep. He could capitalize on that support and make a run for the School Board.
Changing the school board would either require: patience (just two of seven seats: Lucy Mathiak, who is not running after two terms and Arlene Silveira, who apparently is seeking a third term) are up in April, 2012 or a more radical approach via the current Wisconsin method (and Oakland): recalls. Winning the two seats may not be sufficient to change the Board, given the 5-2 no vote. Perhaps the "momentum", if realized, might sway a vote or two?
Madison Preparatory Academy Board Commits to Establish Madison Prep as an Independent School in Fall 2012 and address the Achievement Gap in Madison's Public Schools
Kaleem Caire, via email
For Immediate Release: December 21, 2011
Contact: Laura DeRoche-Perez
Director of School Development
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 S. Park St., Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Lderoche@ulgm.org
608-729-1230 (office)
608-556-2066 (cell)
Madison, WI - This morning, the Board of Directors of Madison Preparatory Academy unanimously decided to pursue a set of actions that will assist with eliminating the racial achievement gap in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). These actions are consistent with the objectives of the Urban League of Greater Madison.
Specifically, Madison Prep's Board has committed to partnering with the Urban League of Greater Madison to:
Work with the Madison Metropolitan School District to ensure MMSD has a bold and effective plan for eliminating the racial achievement gap that embraces innovation, best practices and community engagement as core strategies.
Evaluate legal options that will ensure MMSD affirmatively and immediately addresses the racial achievement gap.
Establish Madison Preparatory Academy as an independent school within the boundaries of the Madison Metropolitan School District in August 2012 as a model of whole school reform and a necessary education option for disadvantaged children and families.
David Cagigal, Chair of Madison Prep's Board, shared that "Madison Prep is a necessary strategy to show how our community can eliminate the achievement gap and prepare our most vulnerable students for college. MMSD's rejection of our proposal does not change this fact."
Cagigal further stated that, "We look forward to engaging the Greater Madison community in addressing the racial achievement gap in Madison's public schools and supporting the establishment of Madison Prep next fall."
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez, Director of School Development, Urban League of Greater Madison, at Lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1230.
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I am ambivalent. My state, Tennessee, is the first state that has implemented the annual teacher and principal evaluations as required by Race to the Top (RTT). In 2010, I was involved with writing Tennessee's successful RTT application, especially the section on "great teachers and leaders." In my state role, I celebrated the RTT requirement for annual teacher and principal evaluations based substantially on student growth as one of the most important levers to accelerate student achievement.
Now, in 2011, I am at the local level watching the fall-out. Although I still support annual teacher evaluations that include student achievement growth and regular teacher observation scores, it is clear that the initiative is off to a rocky start. And this has implications for more than just the educators and students in Tennessee. As noted in Education Week, many policymakers are concerned that the rocky implementation of Tennessee's new teacher evaluation system may hinder efforts in other states.
Supporters of a controversial charter school proposal geared toward low-income, minority students said Tuesday they will continue to fight to establish it next fall -- including possibly as a private school.
Their comments came Tuesday after the Madison School Board voted 5-2 early that day to reject a proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy, which would offer single-sex classrooms and a college preparatory curriculum.
The board didn't vote on an alternate proposal to approve the school but delay its opening until 2013.
David Cagigal, president of the Madison Prep board, said a private school would be expensive because the school's target low-income population wouldn't be able to afford tuition. Instead, the board would ask private donors to replace the roughly $9,300 per pupil it had sought from the School District.
"Maybe money is not the issue if we want to go ahead and prove our point," Cagigal said. "I can assure you we will persist with this idea of closing the achievement gap."
The proposed Madison Prep Charter School was voted down by the Madison school board on Monday. A bold proposal to address the achievement gap in Madison, Madison Prep supporters have a very good point- the status quo is not working for minority students.
There wasn't any magic to the Madison Prep proposal: longer school year, extended school days, smaller class ratios, additional support services, we know these things work, and taken together these things would likely make a significant impact on student achievement. But all these things cost significant amounts of money which is ultimately the problem. What distribution of resources is the most effective and fair?
Sometimes it's possible to be absolutely right on the specifics of a thing and totally wrong about the big picture.
That's what can be said about the Madison school board's decision the other night to reject the proposal for the Madison Preparatory Academy. Board members were correct to be concerned that their support for the academy could have violated their contract with the Madison teachers union, and they were right to be concerned about lack of oversight over public funds.
But what the Urban League was saying about the big picture remains paramount:
Last week I wrote that it seemed hypocritical that average Madisonians and other liberals in city government and the left-leaning Madison press haven't been beating the drum for proposed charter school Madison Preparatory Academy.
The school's target clientele, after all, is one the left usually considers sympathetic: poor, disenfranchised minority youth historically denied access to educational opportunity.
But it took a reader to point out an even bigger elephant in this oddly somnolent room: UW-Madison.
It was only a few months ago that Madison's prime educational attraction and the jewel of the UW System mounted a vigorous and very public defense of attempts to create a more diverse student body through its affirmative action policies.
You'd think this powerful institution might also be showing a little love for a similar social justice cause in its own backyard.
The donor whose $350 million gift will be critical in building Cornell University's new high-tech graduate school on Roosevelt Island is Atlantic Philanthropies, whose founder, Charles F. Feeney, is a Cornell alumnus who made billions of dollars through the Duty Free Shoppers Group.
Mr. Feeney, 80, has spent much of the last three decades giving away his fortune, with large gifts to universities all over the world and an unusual degree of anonymity. Cornell officials revealed in 2007 that he had given some $600 million to the university over the years, yet nothing on its Ithaca campus -- where he graduated from the School of Hotel Management in 1956 -- bears Mr. Feeney's name.
The $350 million gift, the largest in the university's history, was announced on Friday, but the donor was not named. Officials at Atlantic Philanthropies confirmed on Monday evening that it was Mr. Feeney, a native of Elizabeth, N.J., who is known for his frugality -- he flies coach, owns neither a home nor a car, and wears a $15 watch -- as well as his philanthropic generosity, particularly to medical research.
Shocking outcome of School Board vote: MMSD says NO to Madison Prep
Kaleem Caire, via email:
Dear Madison Prep,
First, thank you to all of you who have supported the Madison Prep effort to this point. Your volunteer hours, work on Design Teams, attendance at meetings, letters to the district and media, and many other acts of support have not gone unnoticed by the Urban League and Madison Prep.
In earlier morning hours today, the MMSD Board of Education voted 5-2 AGAINST Madison Prep. This outcome came after hours of testimony by members of the public, with Madison Prep supporters outnumbering opponents 2:1. Lucy Mathiak and James Howard voted YES for Madison Prep; Ed Hughes, Arlene Silviera, Beth Moss, Maya Cole, and Marj Passman voted NO. After the vote was taken, Ed Hughes made an amendment to the motion to establish Madison Prep in 2013 (rather than 2012) in order to avoid what some see as a conflict between Madison Prep and the teachers' union contract. Mr. Hughes' motion was not seconded; therefore there was no vote on establishing Madison Prep one year later.
While the Urban League and Madison Prep are shocked by last night's outcome, both organizations are committed to ensuring that Madison Prep becomes a reality for children in Madison. We will continue to press for change and innovation in the Madison Metropolitan School District and Dane County to ensure that the racial achievement gap is eliminated and that all children receive a high quality education that adequately prepares them for their future.
We will advance a number of next steps:
1.We will pursue different avenues, both public and private, to launch Madison Prep. We are still hopeful for an opening in 2012. There will be much the community will learn from Madison Prep and our children need this option now.
2.We will continue to coordinate community support and action to ensure that the Madison Metropolitan School District is accountable for eliminating the racial achievement gap. We will consider several strategies, such as implementing a Citizen Review Board that will hold the school board and district administration accountable for good governance, planning, implementation, execution, community engagement and student achievement results. We will also consider legal avenues to ensure MMSD understands and responds to the community's sense of urgency to address the sizable and decades-long failure rates of Black and Latino children.
3.We must also address the leadership vacuum in K-12 education in Madison. Because of this, we will ensure that parents, students and community members are informed of their rights and responsibilities, and have a better understanding of promising educational strategies to close the achievement gap. We will also work to ensure that they have opportunities to be fully engaged in planning, working and deciding what's best for the children educated in our public schools.
4.We will continue to work in collaboration with MMSD through our existing partnerships, and hope to grow these partnerships in the future.
Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do to ensure that children in our schools and families in our community have hope, inspiration, support and opportunity to manifest their dreams and make a difference in their own lives and the lives of others.
As expected, the Madison Metropolitan School Board voted 5 -2 last night against authorizing the Madison Prep charter school. Only two board members overseeing a school district with an African-American graduation rate below 50% saw fit to support a new approach
Those voting against the school did offer reasons. Board member Beth Moss told the Wisconsin State Journal she voted no because of concerns about the school's ability to serve students needing more than one year of remedial education. Board member Ed Hughes said he could not support the school until after the Madison teachers union contract expires in 2013.
But no worries, Superintendent Dan Nerad told the Wisconsin State Journal he has a plan:
There's nothing like standing in the schoolhouse door.
For me, the Madison School Board's 5-2 vote to shoot down Madison Preparatory Academy, a proposed charter school specifically designed for low-income minority students, brings to mind images of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to block the integration of the University of Alabama, or state officials blocking James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi.
If you think that's harsh, remember that those pieces of history were not only about Civil Rights and desegregation, they were about every person's right to pursue a quality education.
In the Madison Metropolitan School District, a 48% graduation rate among African American students indicates that quality has not been achieved. Not even close.
Fortunately, this is one dream that's not going to be allowed to die. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is the driving force behind Madison Prep, and he isn't ready to wave the surrender flag.
Following the school board vote, Caire vowed to file a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice, and he also urged supporters of Madison Prep to run for school board.
Love it, love it, love it.
At one point in the development of Madison Prep, Caire sounded optimistic that the school district was a real partner, but the majority of board members had other ideas. Caire and the Urban League did their best to address every objection critics put in their way, and now it's clear that the intent all along was to scuttle the project with a gauntlet of hurdles.
Kai Ryssdal: For those who haven't been in a modern public school classroom lately, there have been some changes since the days you had to whack the erasers together after class to clean them out. Chalkboards have been replaced not just by whiteboards, but by high-tech "smart" boards. Students are using laptops and iPads all over the place. In all, public schools spend roughly $3 billion a year on education technology -- things meant to make teaching faster, easier and better.
Change can be hard, but companies are trying to ease the transition. From the Marketplace Education Desk at WYPR, Amy Scott reports.
Q. What were some early management challenges for you?
A. At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.
Q. How big a group was this?
A. There were about 25 teachers and instructors and others. And very quickly I went from being this wonderful person, "Geoff is just so nice, he's just such a great guy," to: "I cannot stand that guy. He just thinks he's in charge and he wants to do things his way." And it was a real eye-opener for me because I was trying to change something that everybody was comfortable with. I don't think we were doing a great job with the kids, and I thought we could perform at a higher level.
Educators from across the state made a last-ditch effort Thursday to sway the state Education Board toward adopting their favorite of three teacher evaluation systems that next year will be used to evaluate every teacher in Oklahoma.
In the end, the board decided not to decide.
After an almost equal amount of support was expressed for two of the three systems, the board voted to adopt all three models for a one-year pilot.
School districts will be able to select any of the three models and will receive a portion of approximately $1.5 million in funding for the evaluation system based on student enrollment numbers.
"When I hear the dialogue back and forth about the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, I wonder if it's really about the strengths and weaknesses of these systems or if it's about who gets the money to further develop their model," said state Education Board Member Lee Baxter, of Lawton. "I'd like to find a way to not make this decision. I'd like to find a way to go through the pilot program and allow the districts to be involved with the evaluation system that they want to over a year's period of time."
Proponents of the Madison Preparatory Academy said they're looking to take legal action against the Madison Metropolitan School District after the school board voted against the proposed charter school.
The Madison Board of Education put an end to the Madison Prep proposal with a 5-2 vote early Tuesday morning, and reaction was swift.
"Because (the school board members) don't take us seriously -- they will sit right up here and look in our face and not even know they're insulting us with the things that they say," said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League Of Greater Madison President, shortly after the vote. "We are going to turn our attention immediately, immediately, to address this legally."
In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children's academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York's long march to a new age of accountability.
DECEMBER 2002 The state's education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reports to the state Regents: "Students are learning more than ever. Student achievement has improved in relation to the standards over recent years and continues to do so."
JANUARY 2003 New York becomes one of the first five states to have its testing system approved by federal officials under the new No Child Left Behind law. The Princeton Review rates New York's assessment program No. 1 in the country.
The donor whose $350 million gift will be critical in building Cornell University's new high-tech graduate school on Roosevelt Island is Atlantic Philanthropies, whose founder, Charles F. Feeney, is a Cornell alumnus who made billions of dollars through the Duty Free Shoppers Group.
Mr. Feeney, 80, has spent much of the last three decades giving away his fortune, with large gifts to universities all over the world and an unusual degree of anonymity. Cornell officials revealed in 2007 that he had given some $600 million to the university over the years, yet nothing on its Ithaca campus, where he graduated from the School of Hotel Management in 1956.
The $350 million gift, the largest in the university's history, was announced on Friday, but the donor was not named. Officials at Atlantic Philanthropies confirmed on Monday evening that it was Mr. Feeney, a native of Elizabeth, N.J., who is known for his frugality -- he flies coach, owns neither a home nor a car, and wears a $15 watch -- as well as his philanthropic generosity, particularly to medical research.
On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)
The Madison School Board voted early Tuesday morning against a charter school geared toward low-income minority students.
Moments later, Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire announced to a crowd of emotional supporters that he planned to file a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department. He also urged the supporters to run for School Board.
"We are going to challenge this school district like they've never been challenged before, I swear to God," Caire said.
The School Board voted against the plan 5-2, as expected, just after midnight. In the hours leading up to the vote, however, hundreds of Madison Preparatory Academy supporters urged them to change their minds.
More than 450 people gathered at Memorial High School for public comments, which lasted more than four hours.
It was the first School Board meeting moved to Memorial since a 2001 debate over the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.
But the night's harshest criticism was leveled not at the proposal but at the board itself, over a perceived lack of leadership "from the superintendent on down."
"You meet every need of the unions, but keep minority student achievement a low priority," said one parent.
Others suggested the same.
"This vote is not about Madison Prep," said Jan O'Neill, a citizen who came out to speak. "It's about this community, who we are and what we stand for -- and who we stand up for."
Among the issues raised by opponents, the one that seemed to weigh heaviest on the minds of board members was the non-instrumentality issue, which would've allowed Madison Prep to hire non-union staff.
A work preservation clause in the district's collective bargaining agreement with the teacher's union requires the district to hire union staff. Board member Ed Hughes said he wanted to approve Madison Prep, but feared that approving a non-instrumentality school would put the district in breach of its contract with Madison Teachers, Inc.
"It's undeniable that Madison school district hasn't done very well by its African American students," he said. "But I think it's incumbent upon us to honor the contract."
(new charter school being opened in the MASH [Middleton Alternative Senior High School] building. This proposal got started less than a year ago, got a planning grant from DPI in August, and will open in the fall.)
It's Thursday morning and a group of students are seated around an oblong table in a classroom at Middleton High School.
Most of the students are black. A few are white. Together they make up the school's Black Student Union (BSU), which was founded last year thanks in large part to the work of a few dedicated teen-agers. Today they are passing around a small toy, a black and white Holstein cow (the student holding the cow has the floor), and talking candidly about issues of race.
"I don't want us to be a joke," said one student. "I don't see other student organizations treated like a joke, and I want this one taken seriously, too."
Another turns her criticism inward, saying she feels it is important that African-American students not perpetuate negative stereotypes about themselves in the school's corridors.
Yet another suggests holding more public events and charitable activities, prompting one young woman to volunteer to prepare food for a bake sale.
Part 1 here, (the introductory material is copied from there).
The discussion around the Madison Preparatory Academy (MPA) proposal and the related events and processes has been heated, but not always grounded in reality. Many have said that just having this conversation is a good thing. I don't agree. With myths being so prevalent and prominent, a productive conversation is nearly impossible. Since the vote is scheduled for Monday (12/19), I thought it would be good to take a closer -- fact based, but opinionated -- look at some of the myths. This is part two, although there are plenty of myths left to be examined, I've only gotten one up here. I may post more separately or in an update here on Monday.
Three things to get out of the way first.
One is that the meeting is now scheduled to be held at 6:00 Pm at the Memorial High School Auditorium and that for this meeting the sign up period to speak will be from 5:45 to 6:00 PM (only).
Second, much of the information on Madison Prep can be found on the district web page devoted to the topic. I'm not going do as many hyperlinks to sources as I usually do because much of he material is there already. Time constraints, the fact that people rarely click the links I so carefully include, and, because some of the things I'll be discussing presently are more along the lines of "what people are saying/thinking," rather than official statements, also played a role in this decision. I especially want to emphasize this last point. Some of the myths being examined come straight from "official" statements or sources, some are extensions of "official" things taken up by advocates, and some are self-generated by unaffiliated advocates.
Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses--and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them.
The credentials are part of a new, interactive e-learning venture, tentatively called MITx, that is expected to host "a virtual community of millions of learners around the world," the institute will announce on Monday.
Here's how it will work: MITx will give anyone free access to an online-course platform. Users will include students on the MIT campus, but also external learners like high-school seniors and engineering majors at other colleges. They'll watch videos, answer questions, practice exercises, visit online labs, and take quizzes and tests. They'll also connect with others working on the material.
The first course will begin around the spring of 2012. MIT has not yet announced its subject, but the goal is to build a portfolio of high-demand courses--the kind that draw more than 200 people to lecture halls on the campus, in Cambridge, Mass. MIT is investing "millions of dollars" in the project, said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, and the plan is to solicit more from donors and foundations.
Carolyn Bucior now has greater respect for classroom teachers.
She also has a greater sense of annoyance at some teachers.
And she has a grasp on a generally ignored issue in education that has led to her voice being heard nationally.
Substitute teaching is usually looked at somewhat benignly as one of those things that is part of school life. Like everyone else, teachers get sick sometimes or have other reasons to be absent. So someone gets called in to fill in.
I suspect everyone knows this is unlikely to be productive. Goofing off (or worse) when a sub is in the classroom has been a staple of student life since schools were invented.
You have to have an adult keep an eye on what kids are doing, but to expect education to move forward when someone steps in cold is rarely realistic. Well, maybe to watch a video the teacher left behind.
A majority of the Madison School Board won't support opening next fall a controversial, single-sex charter school geared toward low-income minority students.
But it's unclear whether a compromise proposal to start Madison Preparatory Academy in 2013 will gain enough votes Tuesday night when the board meets.
School Board members Beth Moss and Arlene Silveira were the latest to publicly express their opposition to the current proposal for the school.
The motto of fee-paying Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen is: "Now you should use all your masterly skills" (Omni nunc arte magistra).
Michael Gove, the education secretary, is a former pupil. Since his appointment, he has given every sign that he has taken the motto to heart. In a blizzard of reforms, his skill has been to appear charming, collaborative and collegiate, while exercising a determination to do it his way, "it" in this case being the radical remodelling of the education system.
Yesterday, a glimpse of how his affability camouflages an iron resolve was again revealed when it was announced that the final results of an independent review of the national curriculum, expected in the new year, will now be delayed for 12 months. Critics say the delay is driven by the minister's desire to stamp his authority on the review process.
The main principle of the Harlem Children's Zone is simple: When failure is not allowed, success prevails.
"Are your kids graduating high school? No. Are your kids going to college? No. That's not success," Geoffrey Canada, president and chief executive officer of the Harlem Children's Zone, asked a Buffalo audience Friday.
Entitled "Power of Education -- Children First," the summit was held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in downtown Buffalo. The purpose was to advance the cause of educational reform in the interests of children across Western New York and explore how to create those opportunities. About 300 people attended.
The other day AP published an article titled, "Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income," which pointed to a US Census Bureau report showing that half of all households earn less than the median national income. Yes, you read that correctly.
The AP's Hope Yen reported:
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans -- nearly 1 in 2 -- have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The Census Bureau's definition of a 'low-income household' is less than $45,000, as the AP's Yen wrote:
Many middle-class Americans are dropping below the low-income threshold -- roughly $45,000 for a family of four...
As No Child Left Behind becomes an ever bigger disaster, Secretary Duncan faces a major dilemma. How can he continue to enforce this law he has declared a train wreck?
Last spring, in an attempt to goad Congress into accepting his formula for revising No Child Left Behind, Education Secretary Arne Duncan made some dire predictions.
In his testimony, he said:
...we did an analysis which shows that -- next year -- the number of schools not meeting their goals under NCLB could double to over 80 percent -- even if we assume that all schools will gain as much as the top quartile in the state.
So let me repeat that: four out of five schools in America many not meet their goals under NCLB by next year. The consequences under the current law are very clear: states and districts all across American may have to intervene in more and more schools each year, implementing the exact same interventions regardless of the schools' individual needs.
No matter where the votes fall Monday when the Madison School Board decides whether to OK a charter school proposal for the controversial Madison Preparatory Academy, the idea of a buttoned-down, no-nonsense alternative to the city's public schools already has entered the local popular culture. It is not only a beacon of hope in efforts to end a lingering race-based academic achievement gap, but also has become an emblematic stick to nudge underperforming kids into line.
As high school senior Adaeze Okoli tells it, when her little brother isn't working up to his potential, her mom jokingly threatens to send him to Madison Prep.
That anecdote says a lot about how distinct a presence the proposed school already has become in local communities of color. It makes me wonder how kids would feel about attending a school that is boys-only or girls-only and requires uniforms, longer school days, a longer school year and greater parental involvement.
Put the kids first for a change, Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire, the architect and unflagging advocate of the school plan, chided school district administrators after they declared that his proposal would violate the district's union contract with its teachers and provide inadequate accountability to the School Board. But for all the analysis and debate about the Madison Prep plan, I haven't heard much from young people about how they would like to go to such a school, and how they think the strict rules would influence learning.
To sound out some students, I turned to the Simpson St
Superintendent Dan Nerad acknowledged last week that existing Madison School District programs aimed at boosting minority achievement "are not having the impact we need for our kids."
"The data is telling us we need to do different things," Nerad added.
And the Urban League of Greater Madison's proposal for an unusual public charter school catering to low-income blacks and Latinos "has elevated the conversation, and I appreciate that," the superintendent said.
"I'm not raising any concerns about the programming side of it," he told the State Journal editorial board.
It sounded like a windup to endorsing the Madison Preparatory Academy, which faces a final vote by the Madison School Board on Monday night.
Instead, Nerad is recommending the School Board reject the academy, primarily because of complicated contract language.
The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors met on December 15, 2011, and adopted the following resolution:
Motion: The Board of Directors encourages a comprehensive approach to eliminate the student achievement gap currently present in Madison schools.
The Board strongly endorses the advancement of the Urban League of Greater Madison's proposed Madison Preparatory Academy. The Board also acknowledges and endorses the continued investment in successful strategies already employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District and the United Way of Dane County.
Comments:
The Chamber Board recognizes that there is no panacea or singular solution to eliminating the student racial achievement gap. Rather, a comprehensive approach should be employed utilizing multiple strategies to address this problem.
The Chamber Board acknowledges the work of community and school leaders who have worked tirelessly on this issue. In particular, the United Way of Dane County has demonstrated tremendous leadership to ensure all struggling students achieve better results. The GMCC is a partner in Schools of Hope, a collaborative community initiative aimed at reducing the achievement gap. In addition, the United Way is committing more than $2 million over the next year for programs to address this issue.
The Madison School Board Monday night needs to work out the necessary details to make the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy a reality.
There's absolutely no question that our school system, long deemed to be one of the best in the country for a vast majority of its students, is failing its African-American students and, as board member Ed Hughes recently pointed out, we need to accept that fact and be willing to give the Urban League an opportunity to show us a better way.
Still, it needs to be done carefully and not by yielding to heated tempers and ill-informed finger-pointers. This, after all, is not about conservatives vs. liberals, as some would gleefully proclaim, or even union supporters against those who believe unions lurk behind every failure in American education. It's about honest philosophical differences among well-meaning people on how best to educate our children during troubling economic times.
Yet, more importantly, despite the enormous hurdles, it has got to be about the kids and finding a way for them to succeed.
Though there are difficult issues to overcome, there's no need for the board and the Madison Prep advocates to draw lines in the sand. There surely is a middle ground that can honor the union contract, maintain a level of accountability at an acceptable cost to the taxpayers, and give the final OK to open the school.
One of the last remaining opportunities for a locally-elected government body to stop the increasing spread of the entitlement society and the dumbing down of education will occur Monday when the Madison School Board, together with their highly paid educational professionals, will determine the fate of Madison Prep Academy.
Based on news reports, the local teachers union and its always pushy head, John Matthews, oppose the venture. Why? Because the proposal advocates flexibility by hiring non-union teachers at a cost savings of millions!
To Matthews and MTI, your argument that "it's all about the kids" rings hollow and empty again.
Even though I am not a member of a minority and I dislike paying more real estate taxes for unnecessary projects, this non-union driven proposal by Kaleem Caire deserves approval for the future benefit of Madison's kids and residents.
Yesterday, the California Charter Schools Association caused a stir. The pro-charter group came out with a list of 10 independently-run schools it deemed underperforming -- and encouraged their respective school districts to close them when their 5-year contracts expire!
That list included West County Community High in Richmond, as my colleague Hannah Dreier reported in today's paper. Leadership High in San Francisco was also on it.
The complete list included 31 schools, but the association only published the names of those that are nearing the end of their 5-year terms and seeking a charter renewal.
Here's the reasoning behind the mov, from the news release:
When the Obama administration was seeking to drum up support for its education initiatives last spring, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Congress that the federal law known as No Child Left Behind would label 82 percent of all the nation's public schools as failing this year. Skeptics questioned that projection, but Mr. Duncan insisted it was based on careful analysis.
President Obama repeated it in a speech three days later. "Four out of five schools will be labeled as failing," Mr. Obama said at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Va., in March. "That's an astonishing number."
Now a new study, scheduled for release on Thursday, says the administration's numbers were wildly overstated. The study, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group headed by a Democratic lawyer who endorses most of the administration's education policies, says that 48 percent of the nation's 100,000 public schools were labeled as failing under the law this year.
More schoolchildren than ever are taking their classes online, using technology to avoid long commutes to school, add courses they wouldn't otherwise be able to take -- and save their school districts money.
But as states pour money into virtual classrooms, with an estimated 200,000 virtual K-12 students in 40 states from Washington to Wisconsin, educators are raising questions about online learning. States are taking halting steps to increase oversight, but regulation isn't moving nearly as fast as the virtual school boom.
The online school debate pits traditional education backers, often teachers' unions, against lawmakers tempted by the promise of cheaper online schools and school-choice advocates who believe private companies will apply cutting-edge technology to education.
Is online education as good as face-to-face teaching.
Online learning--for students and for teachers is one of the fastest growing trends in educational uses of technology. The National Center for Education Statistics (2008) estimated that the number of K-12 public school students enrolling in a technology-based distance education course grew by 65 percent in the two years from 2002-03 to 2004-05. On the basis of a more recent district survey, Picciano and Seaman (2009) estimated that more than a million K-12 students took online courses in school year 2007-08.
Online learning overlaps with the broader category of distance learning, which encompasses earlier technologies such as correspondence courses, educational television and videoconferencing. Earlier studies of distance learning concluded that these technologies were not significantly different from regular classroom learning in terms of effectiveness. Policy makers reasoned that if online instruction is no worse than traditional instruction in terms of student outcomes, then online education initiatives could be justified on the basis of cost efficiency or need to provide access to learners in settings where face-to-face instruction is not feasible. The question of the relative efficacy of online and face-to-face instruction needs to be revisited, however, in light of today's online learning applications, which can take advantage of a wide range of Web resources, including not only multimedia but also Web based applications and new collaboration technologies. These forms of online learning are a far cry from the televised broadcasts and videoconferencing that characterized earlier generations of distance education. Moreover, interest in hybrid approaches that blend in-class and online activities is increasing. Policy makers and practitioners want to know about the effectiveness of Internet based, interactive online learning approaches and need information about the conditions under which online learning is effective.
Chicago Public Schools is floating a plan to phase out one of its most popular magnet schools.
LaSalle Language Academy magnet school in Old Town gets 1,500 applications a year for around 70 openings.
Now, CPS wants to slowly convert the magnet to a neighborhood school that draws from the immediate area, one of the ritziest in the city. The school would take no new magnet school kindergartners in the fall, unless they already had a sibling enrolled in the school. Instead, the kindergarten would be filled with neighborhood children.
The change would relieve overcrowding at nearby Lincoln Elementary, where rising test scores have made the school a popular option for Lincoln Park families.
But LaSalle parents say the change would also dismantle their school's diversity, achieved from 30 years as a desegregation school.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said Wednesday he will unveil next month a new plan for improving the achievement of low-income minority students.
The plan will summarize the district's current efforts as well as put forth new approaches, such as a longer school year and opening magnet schools, Nerad said.
One drive back from Dallas on Interstate 30 is indelibly etched into my memory. I was in the center lane. And just forward of me in the right lane, a soft-top Jeep slowly started drifting across all three lanes of traffic, never slowing down. I honked my horn to alert the driver, but the Jeep left the highway and slammed into the first wooden pike in a crash barrier, throwing the vehicle's rear end so high that I thought it might flip over.
Pulling onto the shoulder 50 or so feet ahead of the Jeep, I ran back, expecting the worst. But, while the driver was certainly going to be bruised, she was actually all right. So was her dog, in the front passenger floorboard. When I asked what had happened, she said she'd leaned over to pour some water into her dog's bowl on the floorboard and just wasn't paying attention. But I'd watched this accident unfold over five to seven seconds: She didn't just lean over for a second, she was completely oblivious to her loss of control of her vehicle until it crashed. I couldn't help but notice all the prescription bottles littering the Jeep's interior; one, filled the day before, was for Valium.
Because I had my cell phone with me, I had called Arlington 911 before I ever made it to her wreck.
The Madison Metropolitan School District has a problem educating minority pupils. Less than 50 percent of African-Americans graduate in four years and only 31 percent even take the ACT, an important prerequisite for admittance to four-year colleges. Yet the Madison School Board appears poised to vote down Kaleem Caire's promising proposal to educate the very demographic the district has proved incapable of reaching.
Caire's proposed school, Madison Prep, has several attributes that differentiate it from traditional MMSD schools. Among other things the school would have an extended school day and offer an International Baccalaureate program. Both features have proven track records in schools in Milwaukee.
Much has been made of the fact that there is no guarantee that Madison Prep would be successful. Well no, but the strength of the charter model is that, if the school is unsuccessful, the MMSD board is empowered to terminate its contract. Given the achievement levels of Madison's minority students, any hesitation of the board to try the innovative model is inexplicable.
Worse yet, the reasons for rejecting Madison Prep are divorced from education. The proposed school is a non-instrumentality charter, meaning the School Board authorizes the school but the school is not required to use MMSD employees, including union teachers. Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews finds this problematic, telling The Capital Times that the Madison Prep proposal could "easily be implemented" if it was an instrumentality school employing union teachers. Perhaps it would be easier, but it would also take away from Caire's goal of raising minority student achievement. There are key advantages to the non-instrumentality structure, most notably the ability to assemble and compensate a staff free from the pay schedule and work rules contained in the MTI contract.
Inside Chicago Public Schools, the joke long has been that when a school gets a fresh coat of paint and new windows, you can expect the central office to shut it down and open a charter in the building.
On Thursday, as Chicago Public Schools released a detailed list of $660 million in capital construction projects for the coming year, the district's top financial officer acknowledged, for perhaps the first time, that there's a kernel of truth in that.
"If we think there's a chance that a building is going to be closed in the next five to 10 years, if we think it's unlikely it's going to continue to be a school, we're not going to invest in that building," Chief Operating Officer Tim Cawley said.
Electronic Slide Show, Animation, Podcast: ABC-CLIO to Award More Than $60,000 in Cash & Prizes to Teams Researching Top 10 People, Events, Places Shaping History
HOUSTON, TX -- November 14, 2008 This week ABC-CLIO will launch its new annual research competition for secondary students at the National Council for the Social Studies 88th Annual Conference in Houston. The award-winning developer and publisher of history research databases will award more than $60,000 in cash and prizes in this unique competition for teams of secondary students working in collaboration with their social studies teachers and school library media specialists.
The topic for the inaugural competition is "Select the top 10 people, events or places that have shaped the course of history." Coached by their teacher and/or school library media specialist, student teams will identify their choices and then defend them and present their research findings to ABC-CLIO in an electronic format such as a slide show, online essay, video or animation, or an audio podcast. Entries should be submitted in standards-aligned curriculum categories for high school and middle grades. For high school, the categories are U.S. History, Ancient World History, Modern World History, U.S. Government and Civics, and Geography. For middle grades, the categories are Ancient Civilizations, World History and U.S. History and Government.
"We launched this competition to support ABC-CLIO's overall commitment to helping students develop critical-thinking skills, as well as the ability to think historically," said Becky Snyder, president, ABC-CLIO. "Our competition is unique because it maps closely to the topics that history educators are already teaching in their middle grades and high school classrooms. They can easily integrate it into instruction, assign it as a project or offer participation as an extra-credit opportunity. We are excited to see the innovative and creative approaches in the student team projects."
To conduct their research, teams must use and cite one or more of ABC-CLIO's eight online history databases. For schools not currently subscribing to the databases, free access to all eight databases is available for 90 days. Entries will be judged in April 2009 by a panel of leading historians and history educators, and grand-prize winners will be announced in May 2009.
I want to support the Urban League's Madison Prep charter school proposal. It is undeniable that the Madison School District has not done well by its African-American students. We need to accept that fact and be willing to step back and give our friends at the Urban League an opportunity to show us a better way.
The issue is far more complicated than this, however. There are a number of roadblocks on the path to saying yes. I discuss these issues below. Some are more of an obstacle than others.
The biggest challenge is that a vote in favor of Madison Prep as it is currently proposed amounts to a vote to violate our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers. I see no way around this. I believe in honoring the terms of our contracts with our employees. For me, this means that I have to condition my support for Madison Prep on a one-year delay in its opening.
Most other obstacles and risks can be addressed by including reasonable provisions in the charter school contract between the school district and Urban League.
One wonders what additional hurdles will appear between now and 2013, should the District follow Ed's proposal. Kaleem Caire:
For the last 16 months, we have been on an arduous journey to develop a public school that would effectively address the educational needs of children who have under-performed or failed to succeed in Madison's public schools for at least the last 40 years. If you have followed the news stories, it's not hard to see how many mountains have been erected in our way during the process.
Some days, it has felt like we're desperately looking at our children standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, some already fallen over while others dangling by their thumbs waiting to be rescued; but before we can get close enough to save them, we have to walk across one million razor blades and through thousands of rose bushes with our bare feet. As we make our way to them and get closer, the razor blades get sharper and the rose bushes grow more dense.
Fortunately, our Board members and team at the Urban League and Madison Preparatory Academy, and the scores of supporters who've been plowing through the fields with us for the last year believe that our children's education, their emotional, social and personal development, and their futures are far more important than any pain we might endure.
Monday's vote will certainly reflect the District's priorities.
President Obama's remarks on inequality, stoking populist anger at "the rich," suggest that the theme for his reelection bid will be not hope and change but focus on reducing class disparity with government help. But this effort isn't limited to economics; it is playing out in our nation's schools as well.
The issue is whether federal education efforts will compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students. One might assume that a president determined to "win the future" would make a priority of ensuring that our ablest kids have the chance to excel.
To Obama, however, as for President George W. Bush, such concerns are a distraction at best. Last year the Education Department's civil rights division announced that it would investigate local school policies that have a "disparate impact" on poor or minority students -- signaling a willingness to go to court if department officials think that school systems have too few of such children in gifted programs or Advanced Placement courses. This bit of social engineering ignores the unseemly reality that advantaged children are statistically more likely to be ready to succeed in tough classes than are low-income children raised in households with fewer books and more television.
The result is a well-intended but misguided crusade to solve via administrative fiat the United States' long-standing achievement gap: the dramatic differences in test scores between white and minority students and between middle-class and poor youngsters. The message to schools was unmistakable: Get more poor and minority children into your advanced courses or risk legal action by Uncle Sam.
Then, in September, the president offered states and school districts flexibility around onerous provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act -- linked to certain conditions. Among these: States must explain how they are going to move more students into "challenging" courses. The effect will be yet another push to dilute high-level classes.
The goal of helping more young people succeed in challenging coursework is laudable. But pushing ill-prepared students into tougher classes without adequate preparation isn't doing anyone any favors. Indeed, the administration's strategy has been tried. Nationally, the number of graduates who had taken Advanced Placement exams rose from 1 million students in 2003 to 1.6 million in 2008. In a 2009 study of AP teachers, just 14 percent of educators said that the growth stemmed from an increase in the pool of qualified students. Half of the AP teachers in high-poverty schools said that their African American and Hispanic students were not prepared for AP instruction. Fifty-six percent said that too many students were in over their heads, with adverse consequences for those students and their better-prepared classmates.
Our single-minded focus on closing achievement gaps has almost certainly hurt our top students. In 1996, Rand Corp. scholars determined that low-achieving pupils benefit when placed in mixed-ability classrooms, faring about five percentage points better than those placed in lower-track classes, but that high-achievers score six percentage points worse in such general classes.
In 2008, six years after No Child Left Behind became law, a survey of teachers found 60 percent saying that struggling students were a "top priority" at their schools, while just 23 percent said the same of "academically advanced" students. Eighty percent said that struggling students were most likely to get one-on-one attention from teachers; only 5 percent said the same of advanced students.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association released a study in September that tracked more than 100,000 high-achieving pupils over time and found that more than one-third lost steam as they progressed through school. The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless has reported that, while the nation's lowest-achieving students made significant gains in reading and math between 2000 and 2007, top students' gains were "anemic."
There are trade-offs here. But the possibility that what's best for our worst-off students is bad for high achievers is blithely ignored by the Obama team and many other school reformers. (To be fair, it was ignored by the Bush team, too.) Advocates with a single-minded focus on closing achievement gaps have insisted that what's good for the neediest kids is best for all kids. Those who question this mantra risk being labeled racist.
It's not like we can afford to coast. Just 6 percent of U.S. eighth-graders scored "advanced" on the 2007 international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessment, while many nations fared at least twice that well.
Implemented thoughtfully, a commitment to getting more students into advanced classes is an objective worthy of a great nation. But it's not going to happen overnight -- not without defining "excellence" down.
At this very moment, millions of high-achievers are waiting to be challenged. Meeting their needs is another objective worthy of a great nation. They deserve our encouragement, not our indifference.
Michael J. Petrilli is executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Our Achievement-Gap Mania," an article published in the journal National Affairs' Fall 2011 edition.
The public debate about the success and expansion of charter schools often seems to gravitate toward a tiny handful of empirical studies, when there is, in fact, a relatively well-developed literature focused on whether these schools generate larger testing gains among their students relative to their counterparts in comparable regular public schools. This brief reviews this body of evidence, with a focus on high-quality state- and district-level analyses that address, directly or indirectly, three questions:
Do charter schools produce larger testing gains overall?
What policies and practices seem to be associated with better performance?
Can charter schools expand successfully within the same location?
The available research suggests that charter schools' effects on test score gains vary by location, school/student characteristics and other factors. When there are differences, they tend to be modest. There is tentative evidence suggesting that high-performing charter schools share certain key features, especially private donations, large expansions of school time, tutoring programs and strong discipline policies. Finally, while there may be a role for state/local policies in ensuring quality as charters proliferate, scaling up proven approaches is constrained by the lack of adequate funding, and the few places where charter sectors as a whole have been shown to get very strong results seem to be those in which their presence is more limited. Overall, after more than 20 years of proliferation, charter schools face the same challenges as regular public schools in boosting student achievement, and future research should continue to focus on identifying the policies, practices and other characteristics that help explain the wide variation in their results.
The Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education vote on the proposed charter school, Madison Preparatory Academy, is just around the corner.
We have heard from school board members, business leaders, teachers and other members of the community. It's safe to say that this is one of the most important issues in this city's history. While I am happy that Madison is finally having the long overdue conversation about how we educate our students who are falling through the cracks, I am not happy that the Urban League of Greater Madison and the school district couldn't come together to agree on a solution. In fact, it bothers me greatly.
It is a huge mistake to have this yearlong discussion come down to a contentious school board vote on Dec. 19. Both sides needed to come together to figure out a way to make Madison Prep a reality before that meeting.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad and various members of the school board say approving Madison Prep would violate the current contract with Madison Teachers, Inc. So, if 2012 isn't feasible, committing to a date to open Madison Prep's doors in 2013, and using the next three to six months to figure out the terms of that agreement should have been an option. But, unfortunately, that's not going to happen. Instead we have a school district and a civil rights organization arguing over ways to address the achievement gap and graduation rates. Not a good look. And the future relationship between the MMSD and the African American community could hang in the balance.
The Michigan House of Representatives voted Wednesday night to approve Senate Bill 618, which will lift the state's various caps on charter schools, House sources have confirmed. If and when the bill is signed by Governor Rick Snyder, it will go into law. The bill was passed 58-49, according to the Michigan Information & Resource Service (MIRS).
SB 618 had been tie-barred to a group of other Senate bills in the so-called "parent empowerment package," which means they all would've had to pass for any to take effect. But that tie-bar was broken when the House Education Committee approved SB 618 at its Nov. 30 meeting.
Some 35 amendments were offered, according to a House source. Several were approved. Perhaps the most consequential among the amendments phases in the lifting of the cap on charter schools, allowing up to 300 to be established through the end of 2012, 500 through 2014, and starting in 2015, no cap at all.
State Rep. Jeff Irwin, who represents Ann Arbor in Lansing, said that the "huge, gaping problem" in the bill, lifting the cap all at once, was addressed but he still wasn't happy with the way the bill turned out. None of the amendments proposed by Democrats passed, Irwin said; they weren't even brought to a vote.
As students gain access to sophisticated gadgets both at school and at home, educators are on the lookout for new kinds of cheating. From digitally inserting answers into soft drink labels to texting each other test answers and photos of exams, kids are finding new ways to get ahead when they haven't studied.
YouTube alone has dozens of videos that lay out step-by-step instructions: One three-minute segment shows how to digitally scan the wrapper of a soft drink bottle, then use photo editing software to erase the nutrition information and replace it with test answers or handy formulas. The video has gotten nearly 7 million hits.
George W. Bush is writing a sequel to his big education act. The No Child Left Behind law was signed almost a decade ago, with overwhelming approval from Congress (384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate). Now, amid a bipartisan effort to gut its accountability measures, the former President is quietly pushing new education-reform initiatives aimed at improving and empowering school principals, who too often lack the training or authority to effectively run their schools. And once again, he's approaching this massive education problem by blurring political lines.
I was invited in my role as TIME's education columnist to sit in on a small meeting this week that Bush organized in New York City, and I was struck by the roster of advisers he had assembled to guide the George W. Bush Institute's education work. The group included some big names in the education non-profit world as well as leaders of traditional public schools and charter schools. But by my informal count, most of the 10 people around the table were Democrats, including Clinton and Obama administration alums. "He cares about education deeply, and he gets it," one staunchly Democratic education consultant, who now works with the institute, told me. The former President has already recruited officials from his administration as well as liberal stalwarts like Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust and Democratic education leaders like former North Carolina Governor James Hunt.
The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will vote December 19, 2011, on the Madison Preparatory Academy proposal for non-instrumentality charter school authorization. Active Citizens for Education endorses and supports the approval of the proposal.
In addition to the rationale and data cited by the Urban League of Greater Madison, and significant others throughout the Madison community, supporting the curricular, instructional, parental and behavioral strategies and rigor of the school, ACE cites the following financial and accountability support for approval of the Academy as a non-instrumentality charter school.
Financial: Should the Board deny approval of the proposal as a non-instrumentality the District stands to lose significant means of financial support from state aids and property tax revenue. The District is allowed $10,538.54 per student enrolled in the District the 2011-12 school year. With the possibility of Madison Prep becoming a private school if denied charter school status, the 120 boys and girls would not be enrolled in MMSD; therefore the District would not be the beneficiary of the state and local revenue. The following chart shows the cumulative affect of this reduction using current dollars:
2012-2013 6th grade 120 students @10,538.54 = $1,264,624.80
2013-2014 2 grades 240 students @10,538.54 = $2.529,249.60
2014-2015 3 grades 360 students @10,538.54 = $3,793,874.40
2015-2016 4 grades 480 students @10,538.54 = $5,058,499.20
2016-2017 5 grades 600 students @10,538.54 = $6.323.124.00
2017-2018 6 grades 720 students @10,538.54 = $7,587,748.80
2018-2019 7 grades 840 students @10,538.54 = $8,852,373.60
This lost revenue does not include increases in revenue that would be generated from improved completion/graduation rates (currently in the 50% range) of Black and Hispanic students resulting from enrollees in a charter school arrangement.
Accountability: The MMSD Administration and Board have been demonstrating a misunderstanding of the terms 'accountability' and 'control'. The State charter school law allows for the creation of charter schools to provide learning experiences for identified student groups with innovative and results-oriented strategies, exempt from the encumbrances of many existing state and local school rules, policies and practices. Charter schools are authorized and designed to operate without the 'controls' which are the very smothering conditions causing many of the problems in our public schools. The resulting different charter school environment has been proven to provide improved academic and personal development growth for learners from the traditional school environment. Decreasing impediments and controls inhibiting learning increases the requirements for 'accountability' to achieve improved learner outcomes on the part of the charter school. Should the charter school not meet its stated and measurable goals, objectives and results then it is not accountable and therefore should be dissolved. This is the 'control' for which the Board of Education has the authority to hold a charter school accountable.
Let us describe an analogy. Private for-profit business and not-for-profit organizations are established to provide a product and/or service to customers, members and the public. The accountability of the business or organization for its continued existence depends on providing a quality product/services that customers/members want or need. If, for whatever reasons, the business or organization does not provide the quality and service expected and the customer/member does not obtain the results/satisfaction expected, the very existence of the business/organization is jeopardized and may ultimately go 'out of business'. This scenario is also absolutely true with a charter school. It appears that the significant fears for the MMSD Administration and Board of Education to overcome for the approval of the proposed non-instrumentality Madison Prep charter school are: 1) the fear of loss of 'control' instead of accepting responsibility for 'accountability', and 2) the fear that 'some other organization' will be successful with solutions and results for a problem not addressed by themselves.
The MMSD Board of Education is urged to approve the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy non-instrumentality charter school proposal; thereby, relieving the bondage which grips students and sentences them to a future lifetime of under-performance and lack of opportunities. Thank you.
Contact: Don Severson, President, 608 577-0851, donleader@aol.com
ACE Media Conference 12/15/2011 12:30p.m. Financial and Accountability Issues Facing MMSD Board of Education
Don Severson, via a kind email:
(Madison, WI) The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will make a decision at its regular meeting December 19th regarding the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) proposal for a non-instrumentality charter school. Active Citizens for Education (ACE) has discussed several issues related to the proposal with the Board of Education, administration and with ULGM.
The Board of Education, in its deliberations, must weigh several implications and consequences for the schools, students, parents and the taxpaying public.
In its public statement, ACE will announce its position on the
financial implications of the proposal for future MMSD budgets and the taxpayers; how the issues of "control" and "accountability" relate to the authority of the Board of Education regarding approval or non-approval of the charter school proposal; and Madison Preparatory Academy over-all proposal.
The media conference will be held
December 15, 2011 (Thursday)
12:30 PM, Conference Room
Genesis Enterprise Center (GEC)
313 West Beltline Highway (off Rimrock Road to the west)
Mr. Severson will be available for questions and comments following the media conference.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said Wednesday he will unveil next month a new plan for improving the achievement of low-income minority students.
The plan will summarize the district's current efforts as well as put forth new approaches, such as a longer school year and opening magnet schools, Nerad said.
Nerad discussed the plan in a meeting with the State Journal editorial board less than a week before the School Board is to vote on Madison Preparatory Academy, a proposed charter school geared toward low-income, minority students.
Nerad said he opposes the current proposal for Madison Prep primarily because it would violate the district's contract with its teachers union, but that he agrees with the charter school's supporters in that a new approach to close the achievement gap is necessary.
"I made a purposeful decision to not bring (a plan) forward over the past several months to not cloud the discussion about Madison Prep," Nerad said. "It's caused us to take a step back and say, 'We're doing a lot of things, but what else do we need to be doing?'"
Superintendent Nerad's former District; Green Bay offers three "magnet options":
Here's a quote from an on-line comment of a Madison Prep opponent responding to one of the several op-ed pieces posted in the Cap Times in recent days: "There are barriers to students with special education needs, barriers to students with behavioral needs, and barriers to kids who rely on public transportation. These children are simply not the 'right fit'. It is Madison Prep's proposal to leave these kids in their neighborhood schools."
The notion seems to be that Madison Prep may not be welcoming for students from all points along the spectrum of educational needs, even though our neighborhood schools are obligated to serve everyone.
I think the self-selection process for Madison Prep should be taken into account in assessing how its students perform. But it does not trouble me that the school is not designed to meet the needs of all our students. No one need apply to attend and no student will be denied current services or programs if Madison Prep is authorized.
Thirteen high schools won high praise for their soaring graduation rates during the Miami-Dade School Board's last meeting for the year Wednesday.
Overall, Miami-Dade County's public schools hit their highest graduation rate ever, nearly 78 percent -- higher than Broward County's and just shy of the state's 80 percent rate.
But the celebration came with a warning: Next year could be very different.
There is a new FCAT 2.0 and, in the pipeline, a new scoring scale for that exam, plus more weight on reading and a new grading model for state-issued letter grades. Other changes in 2012: More tests will be administered via computers and new end-of-course exams will be given in geometry and biology.
"As we celebrate this year's outstanding graduation accomplishments, it's important to inform the community what's happening in Tallahassee and across our state," said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. "The new standards are going to change the game for all of us."
Parts of the new standards are still being developed. On Monday, the State Board of Education will consider proposed new scoring levels for the FCAT 2.0 and the algebra end-of-course exam.
Welcome to the third edition of the relaunched Learning Matters podcast. In this episode, Learning Matters web producer Ted Bauer speaks with UPenn vice dean and professor Doug Lynch about various issues in education, including his business plan competition. Lynch draws pointed contrasts between corporate education and public education, and is candid about the notion of success and failure within the field. Enjoy the conversation.
School districts across Wisconsin have made strides toward reforming the state's teacher evaluation process by implementing new merit-based salaries for teachers under new powers provided by the budget repair legislation.
Under Gov. Scott Walker's controversial legislation, bargaining units for teachers are still able to negotiate base wages, but cannot negotiate other areas, including certain funds allocated for teacher performance. The bill now gives more authority to district leaders to make changes in working conditions, hours and compensation systems for teachers and staff.
Cedarburg School District in eastern Wisconsin is one of many schools making a move toward the merit-pay system for teachers. The district's superintendent, Daryl Herrick, said the new criteria for pay would be based on a new evaluation model.
"There would be teachers in three-year cycles," Herrick said. "There will be varied activities in the cycles where both the evaluator and the teacher provide direct observations to indicate their performance levels. We'll also have a goal-setting process in order to determine performance."
My decision to vote against the Madison Prep proposal is very difficult. I pushed for the planning grant over a year ago when only one other School Board member would sponsor the proposal.
I raised many questions because of the complex scope of the Urban League's proposal for a charter school that aims to reduce the achievement gap between white and minority students. My concerns come down to this: Will this proposal be the best investment for the most students? Is this college-prep program the area of focus that would best serve the many struggling students in our district?
The fundamental conclusion I came to over the course of a year is that this proposal would put the district at risk legally and would challenge our district philosophy pertaining to special education students. Perhaps more importantly, the proposal constructs undue barriers such as mandatory information meetings, fundraising and parent contracts. These admission policies would have the effect of excluding students based on language background, prior academic performance, or parental self-selection.
My decision has nothing to do with defending the status quo or protecting the union. However, as a School Board member, parent and neighbor to many children in our district, I believe we have some of the most dedicated and knowledgeable staff in education today.
Last week, I posted an item that asked readers for their suggestions on how to reform Michigan schools. It drew a good number of comments, and I'll be posting some of them later this week.
But today I'm offering offering more food for thought, in the form of a memo written by my good friend Tim Bartik, an economist for the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and a former school board president for Kalamazoo Public Schools. Through his work as an economist and as a school board member, Bartik is one of the best-informed people around on best-practices in education and here's what he has to say:
The Urban League's proposal to create a Madison Preparatory charter school is, at its heart, a proposal about public education in our community. Although the discussions often boil down to overly simplistic assertions about whether one position or the other is supportive of or hostile toward public education, it is not that simple. What we are facing is a larger and more fundamental question about our values when it comes to the purpose of public education and who it is supposed to serve.
I am voting "yes" because I believe that strong public education for all is the foundation for a strong society. While our schools do a very good job with many students who are white and/or living above the poverty line, the same cannot be said for students of color and/or students living in poverty. The record is most dismal for African American students.
The Madison Prep proposal is born of over 40 years of advocacy for schools that engage and hold high academic expectations for African American and other students of color. That advocacy has produced minor changes in rhetoric without changes in culture, practice, or outcome. Yes, some African American students are succeeding. But for the overwhelming majority, there are two Madison public school systems. The one where the students have a great experience and go on to top colleges, and the one that graduates only 48% of African American males.
The individual stories are heartbreaking, but the numbers underscore that individual cases add up to data that is not in keeping with our self-image as a cutting edge modern community. We ALL play a role in the problem, and we ALL must be part creating a sound, systemic, solution to our failure to educate ALL of our public school students. In the meantime, the African American community cannot wait, and the Madison Prep proposal came from that urgent, dire, need.
Our track record with students and families of color is not improving and, in some cases, is going backward rather than forward as we create more plans and PR campaigns designed to dismiss concerns about academic equality as misunderstandings. To be sure, there are excellent principals, teachers, and staff who do make a difference every day; some African American students excel each year. But overall, when presented with opportunities to change and to find the academic potential in each student, the district has failed to act and has been allowed to do so by the complicit silence of board members and the community at large.
A few turning points from the past year alone:
The Urban League - not MMSD administration or the board - pointed out the dismal graduation rates for African American students (48% for males)
Less than 5% of African American students are college ready.
AVID/TOPs does a terrific job with underrepresented students IF they can get in. AVID/TOPs serves 134 (2.6%) of MMSD's 4,977 African American secondary students.
The number of African American students entering AVID/TOPs is lower this year after MMSD administration changed the criteria for participation away from the original focus on students of color, low income, and first generation college students.
Of almost 300 teachers hired in 2011-12, less than 10 are African American. There are fewer African American teachers in MMSD today than there were five years ago.
Over 50 African Americans applied for custodian positions since January 1, 2011. 1 was hired; close to 30 custodians were hired in that time.
4K - which is presented as a means to address the achievement gap - is predominantly attended by students who are not African American or low-income.
In June, the board approved a Parent Engagement Coordinator to help the district improve its relations with African American families. That position remains unfilled. The district has engagement coordinators working with Hmong and Latino families.
The single most serious issue this year, however, came in May when MMSD administration was informed that we are a District Identified for Improvement (DIFI) due to test scores for African American students along with students from low income families and those with learning disabilities. This puts Madison on an elite list with Madison (Milwaukee?) and Racine. The superintendent mentioned DIFI status in passing to the board, and the WI State Journal reported on the possible sanctions without using the term DIFI.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with NCLB, DIFI status is a serious matter because of the ladder of increasing sanctions that come with poor performance. In an ideal world, the district would have articulated the improvement plan required by DPI over the summer for implementation on the first day of school. Such a plan would include clear action steps, goals, and timelines to improve African American achievement. Such a plan does not exist as of mid-December 2011, and in the most recent discussion it was asserted that the improvement plan is "just paper that doesn't mean much." I would argue that, to the African American community, such a plan would mean a great deal if it was sincerely formulated and implemented.
At the same time, we have been able to come up with task forces and reports - with goals and timelines - that are devoted to Talented and Gifted Programing, Direct Language Instruction, Fine Arts Programing, and Mathematics Education to name a few.
Under the circumstances, it is hard to see why the African American community would believe that the outcomes will improve if they are 'just patient' and 'work within the existing public school structures to make things better.' Perhaps more accurately, I cannot look people in the face and ask them to hope that we will do a better job if they just give up on the vision of a school structure that does what the MMSD has failed to do for the African American community since the advocacy began some 40 years ago.
Join us for an evening with one of the country's most notable figures in public education. Labor lawyer, former President of the United Teachers Federation and current President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten discusses the challenging terrain of our public education system.
Burke, who made headlines recently for pledging $2.5 million to Madison Preparatory Academy, a controversial charter school proposal, plans to run for the seat being vacated by Lucy Mathiak.
Burke also served as president of the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County for nine years and along with the Burke Foundation has donated about $2.6 million to the AVID/TOPS program, which has shown promising results in improving achievement among low-income, minority students.
Burke emphasized closing the district's racial achievement gap as a motivation for her decision to run.
Several others have expressed interest in running for the seat, including Joan Eggert, a Madison schools parent and reading specialist in the McFarland School District, who issued an official announcement last week.
Others who said they are considering a run include parents Jill Jokela and Mark Stokosa. Tom Farley, who ran unsuccessfully in 2010 against James Howard, said Monday he is no longer interested in running and Burke's entry in the race makes him confident in that decision.
Mr. Ed Hughes
Board of Education
Madison Metropolitan School District 545 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53713
Dear Mr. Hughes:
This letter is intended to respond to your December 4, 2011 blog post regarding the Madison Preparatory Academy initiative. Specifically, this letter is intended to address what you referred as "a fairly half-hearted argument [advanced by the Urban League] that the state statute authorizing school districts to enter into contracts for non-instrumentality charter schools trumps or pre-empts any language in collective bargaining agreements that restricts school districts along these lines." Continuing on, you wrote the following:
I say the argument is half-hearted because no authority is cited in support and itjust isn't much ofan argument. School districts aren't required to authorize non-instrumentality charter schools, and so there is no conflict with state statutesfor a school district to, in effect, agree that it would not do so. Without that kind of a direct conflict, there is no basis for arguing that the CBA language is somehow pre-empted.
We respectfully disagree with your assessment. The intent of this letter is to provide you with the authority for this position and to more fully explain the nature of our concern regarding a contract provision that appears to be illegal in this situation and in direct conflict with public policy.
Background
As you are aware, the collective bargaining agreement (the "CBA") between MMSD and MTI Iprovides "that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certificated teacher, shall be performed only by 'teachers."' See Article I, Section B.3.a. In addition, "the term 'teacher' refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit." See Article I, Section B.2. You have previously suggested that "all teachers in MMSD schools-- including non-instrumentality charter schools- must be members of the MTI bargaining unit." As we indicated in our December 3, 2011 correspondence to you, under a non-instrumentality charter, the school board may not be the employer of the charter school's staff. See§ 118.40(7)(a).
Under Wisconsin's charter school law, the MMSD School Board (the "Board") has the exclusive authority to determine whether a school is an instrumentality or not an instrumentality of the school district. See§ 118.40(7)(a). That decisio n is an important decision reserved to the Board alone. The effect of that decision drives whether teachers and staff must be, or cannot be, employees of the Board. The language of the CBA deprives the Board ofthe decision reserved to it under the statute and that language cannot be harmonized to give effect to both the statute and the CBA. Alternatively, the CBA language creates a situation whereby the Board may exercise its statutory authority to approve a non- instrumentality charter, but it must staff the school with school district employees, a result clearly prohibited under the statute. For reasons that will be explained below, in our view, the law trumps the CBA in either of these situations.
Analysis
Under Wisconsin law, "[a]labor contract may not violate the law." Glendale Professional Policeman's Ass'n v. City ofGlendale, 83 Wis. 2d 90, 102 (Wis. 1978). City ofGlendale addressed the tension that can arise between bargained for provisions in a collective bargaining agreement and statutory language. In City of Glendale, the City argued that a provision dealing with job promotions was unenforceable because it could not be harmonized with statutory language. Specifically, the agreement in question set forth parameters for promoting employees and stated in part that openings "shall be filled by the applicant with the greatest department seniority..." City of Glendale, 83 Wis. 2d at 94. Wisconsin law provided the following:
The chiefs shall appoint subordinates subject to approval by the board. Such appointments shall be made by promotion when this can be done with advantage, otherwise from an eligible list provided by examination and approval by the board and kept on file with the clerk.
Wis. Stat.§ 62.13(4)(a).
The City contended that "the contract term governing promotions is void and unenforceable because it is contrary to sec. 62.13(4)(a), Stats." City ofGlendale, 83 Wis. 2d at 98. Ultimately, the court ruled against the City based on the following rationale:
Although sec. 62.13(4)(a), Stats., requires all subordinates to be appointed by the chief with the approval of the board, it does not, at least expressly, prohibit the chief or the board from exercising the power of promotion of a qualified person according to a set of rules for selecting one among several qualified applicants.
The factual scenario in City ofGlendale differs significantly from the present situation. In City of Glendale, the terms of the agreement did not remove the ability of the chief, with the approval of the board, to make promotions. They could still carry out their statutory duties. The agreement language simply set forth parameters that had to be followed when making promotions. Accordingly, the discretion of the chief was limited, but not eliminated. In the present scenario, the discretion of the Board to decide whether a charter school should be an instrumentality or a non-instrumentality has been effectively eliminated by the CBA language.
There is nothing in the CBA that explicitly prohibits the Board from voting for a non-instrumentality charter school. This discretion clearly lies with the Board. Pursuant to state law, instrumentality charter schools are staffed by District teachers. However, non-instrumentality charter schools cannot be staffed by District teachers. See Wis. Stat.§ 118.40. Based on your recent comments, you have taken the position that the Board cannot vote for a non-instrumentality charter school because this would conflict with the work preservation clause of the CBA. Specifically, you wrote that "given the CBA complications, I don't see how the school board can authorize a non-instrumentality Madison Prep to open its doors next fall, and I say that as one who has come to be sympathetic to the proposal." While we appreciate your sympathy, what we would like is your support. Additionally, this position creates at least two direct conflicts with the law.
First, under Wisconsin law, "the school board of the school district in which a charter school is located shall determine whether or not the charter school is an instrumentality of the school district." Wis. Stat. § 118.40(7)(a) (emphasis added.) The Board is required to make this determination. If the Board is precluded from making this decision on December 19"' based on an agreement previously reached with MTI, the Board will be unable to comply with the law. Effectively, the instrumentality/non- instrumentality decision will have been made by the Board and MTI pursuant to the terms and conditions of the CBA. However, MTI has no authority to make this determination, which creates a direct conflict with the law. Furthermore, the Board will be unable to comply with its statutory obligation due to the CBA. Based on your stated concerns regarding the alleged inability to vote for a non-instrumentality charter school, it appears highly unlikely that the Board ever intentionally ceded this level ofauthority to MTI.
Second, if the Board chose to exercise its statutorily granted authority on December 19th and voted for a non-instrumentality charter school, this would not be a violation of the CBA. Nothing in the CBA explicitly prohibits the Board from voting for a non-instrumentality charter school. At that point, to the extent that MTI chose to challenge that decision, and remember that MTI would have to choose to grieve or litigate this issue, MTI would have to try to attack the law, not the decision made by the Board. Pursuant to the law, "[i] f the school board determines that the charter school is not an instrumentality of the school district, the school board may not employ any personnel for the charter school." Wis. Stat.§ 118.40(7)(a) (emphasis added). While it has been suggested that the Board could choose to avoid the legal impasse by voting down the non-instrumentality proposal, doing so would not cure this conflict. This is particularly true if some Board members were to vote against a non-instrumentality option solely based on the CBA. In such a case, the particular Board Member's obligation to make this decision is essentially blocked. Making a decision consistent with an illegal contract provision for the purposes of minimizing the conflict does not make the provision any less illegal. "A labor contract term whereby parties agree to violate the law is void." WERC v. Teamsters Local No. 563, 75 Wis. 2d 602, 612 (Wis. 1977) (citation omitted).
Conclusion
In Wisconsin, "a labor contract term that violates public policy or a statute is void as a matter of law." Board of Education v. WERC, 52 Wis. 2d 625, 635 (Wis. 1971). Wisconsin law demonstrates that there is a public policy that promotes the creation of charter schools. Within that public policy, there is an additional public policy that promotes case-by-case decision making by a school board regarding whether a charter school will be an instrumentality or a non-instrumentality. The work preservation clause in the CBA cannot be harmonized with these underlying public policies and should not stop the creation of Madison Preparatory Academy.
The Madison Prep initiative has put between a rock and a hard place. Instrumentality status lost support because of the costs associated with employing members of MTI. Yet, we are being told that non-instrumentality status will be in conflict with the CBA and therefore cannot be approved. As discussed above, the work preservation clause is irreconcilable with Wisconsin law, and would likely be found void by acourt of law.
Accordingly, I call on you, and the rest of the Board to vote for non- instrumentality status on December 19th. In the words of Langston Hughes, "a dream deferred is a dream denied." Too many children in this district have been denied for far too long. On behalf of Madison children, families and the Boards of the Urban League and Madison Prep, I respectfully request your support.
Respectfully,
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
cc: Dan Nerad, Superintendent
Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel
MMSD Board ofEducation Members
ULGMand Madison Prep Board Members and Staff
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
As schools across California bemoan increasing class sizes, the Alliance Technology and Math Science High School has boosted class size -- on purpose -- to an astonishing 48. The students work at computers most of the school day.
Next door in an identical building containing a different school, digital imaging -- in the form of animation, short films and graphics -- is used for class projects in English, math and science.
At a third school on the same Glassell Park campus, long known as Taylor Yards, high-schoolers get hands-on experience with a working solar panel.
These schools and two others coexist at the Sotomayor Learning Academies, which opened this fall under a Los Angeles school district policy called Public School Choice. The 2009 initiative, the first of its kind in the nation, has allowed groups from inside and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District to compete for the right to run dozens of new or low-performing schools.
As a fledgling voice of reform in higher education, Salman Khan is an oddity. He cannot name any higher education accrediting agencies off the top of his head. He advocates for competency-based credentialing, but has never heard of Western Governors University. He is capable of talking on the phone for a full hour without using the word "disruptive" once. Until recently, he was an analyst for a hedge fund.
Here is what Khan does know: algebra, statistics, trigonometry, calculus, computer science, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, economics, and finance -- well enough, at least, to demonstrate the concepts via brief video tutorials on Khan Academy, his free learning website. What began in 2006 as an attempt to tutor his young cousin from afar has evolved into a 2,700-video library with millions of monthly visitors.
Many have lauded Khan's natural skill as a teacher. Khan's charmingly unpolished home recordings form the public face of the organization and provide a peg for media narratives about online learning and the YouTube-ification of the textbook in an era where the rising prices and demand for higher education has collided with the Internet's culture of free.
What does the Hillsborough County, Fla., school district have that Milwaukee Public Schools doesn't? What about Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina?
Much better overall scores in reading and math, for one thing. They were at the top of the list of 21 urban school districts in results released last week as part of the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. Milwaukee was near the bottom.
But here's something else Hillsborough County - which is the Tampa school district - has: Among its 193,000 students, 57% are from low-income homes. For Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the percentage of low-income students among its 136,000 students is 52%.
For MPS, with 80,000-plus students, the low-income rate is 83%.
Each of the four urban districts that scored the best in fourth-grade reading had a low-income rate of 61% or less. Among the four with the worst results, MPS was the lowest with its 83% rate. Detroit, with the worst scores, was listed in the NAEP report at 87%, Cleveland at 100%, and Fresno, Calif., at 93%.
Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his push for overhauling the state's public education system, asking a handful of lawmakers and some members of the state's chief school board for their input Friday. Jindal, who has targeted "education reform" as his chief agenda item for his second term, met with several veteran and rookie lawmakers and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education members behind closed doors at the Governor's Mansion for 90 minutes to get their thoughts on potential programs and legislation.
"We are open to listening to people's ideas," Jindal told reporters after the meeting. "But we will not tolerate those who defend the status quo and (want to) keep doing what we have been doing and expect different results.
And no matter which way the Dec. 19 vote goes, there's no way to know now whether the school will be entirely effective.
"This is the most difficult decision I will ever make on the School Board," said Marj Passman, who plans to vote against the proposal. "It has the potential for polarizing our community, and that's the last thing I want to happen."
The vote comes more than a year after the charter was proposed and in the wake of a School District report outlining its opposition to Madison Prep. The school would violate the district's contract with its teachers and preclude sufficient oversight of the $17.5 million in district funds the school would receive over five years, the report said.
District opposition likely will lead the board to reject the proposal, said School Board president James Howard.
"I don't see how it can pass," said Howard. He and Lucy Mathiak are the only two board members who said they will vote to approve the school.
In interviews last week, Passman, Maya Cole and Ed Hughes said they expect to vote against the proposal. Arlene Silveira and Beth Moss declined to disclose how they plan to vote.
Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire, the lead proponent of the charter, acknowledged he doesn't have the votes. But he's engaged in a full-court press to generate public support for the proposal.
"We have a moral obligation to do whatever it takes to support our children and special interest of adults should not come before that," Caire said last week.
Two School Board seats will be on the Spring, 2012 ballot. They are currently occupied by Lucy Mathiak, who is not running again and Arlene Silveira. I suspect the outcome of this vote will drive new candidates, and perhaps, even recalls.
In research organizations that have been "captured" by vested interests, the scholars who receive the most attention, praise, and reward are not those who conduct the most accurate or highest quality research, but those who produce results that best advance the interests of the group. Those who produce results that do not advance the interests of the group may be shunned and ostracized, even if their work is well-done and accurate.
The prevailing view among the vested interests in education does not oppose all standardized testing; it opposes testing with consequences based on the results that is also "externally administered"--i.e., testing that can be used to make judgments of educators but is out of educators' direct control. The external entity may be a higher level of government, such as the state in the case of state graduation exams, or a non-governmental entity, such as the College Board or ACT in the case of college entrance exams.
One can easily spot the moment vested interests "captured" the National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA). BOTA was headed in the 1980s by a scholar with little background or expertise in testing (Wise, 1998). Perhaps not knowing who to trust at first, she put her full faith, and that of the NRC, behind the anti-high-stakes testing point of view that had come to dominate graduate schools of education. Proof of that conversion came when the NRC accepted a challenge from the U.S. Department of Labor to evaluate the predictive validity of the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) for use in unemployment centers throughout the country.
Diane Ravitch, an American historian of education, wrote a col- umn in The New York Times in 1985 about the ignorance of his- tory among 17-year-olds in the United States, based on a study of 7,000 students. As a history teacher myself at the time, I was interested to see that what concerned me was a national problem, and I began to think about these issues. It occurred to me that if I had one or two very good students writing his- tory papers for me and perhaps my colleagues had one or two, then in 20,000 United States high schools (and more overseas) there must be a large number of high school students doing exemplary history research papers. So in1987, I established The Concord Review to provide a journal for such good work in his- tory. I sent a four-page brochure calling for papers to every high school in the United States, 3,500 high schools in Canada, and 1,500 schools overseas. The papers started coming in, and in the fall of 1988, I was able to publish the first issue of The Concord Review. Since then, we have published 89 issues.
Editor's Note: Once again, I have to thank NAS for providing the opportunity for meeting contributor Will Fitzhugh. Will has an AB in English Literature and Ed.M. in Guidance from Harvard. After a number of years in industry, he taught high school for ten years in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1987 he started The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, which has now published 978 history essays from 44 states and 38 other countries. These essays truly are examples of outstanding writing and scholarship. Most of us who teach at the college level wish all high school teachers would heed Will's advice.
What follows below is a speech given at the 2010 meeting of NACAC, prefaced by his introductory note.
by Will Fitzhugh
At the 2010 Conference of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, the primary organization for admissions professionals, I spoke about the way the emphasis on little 500-word personal "college" essays erodes students' chances to learn to do actual academic term papers at least once before they get to college.
"The College Essay"
I propose a thought experiment for what it may be worth:
What if we change the name of our organization from the National Association of College Admissions Counselors to: The National Association of College Completion Counselors?
Note that the new name is more comprehensive, as Completion presupposes Admission, but, as is all too obvious these days, Admission cannot assume Completion.
You are all at least as aware as I am of the numbers about the need for academic remediation in Higher Education and the numbers of dropouts from college, but I will review a couple of them. Tony Wagner of Harvard reports that in general, including community colleges, half of college freshman do not return for a second year, and a huge percentage of our high school graduates take six years or more to complete a Bachelor's degree, and four years or more to complete an Associate's degree.
Students who need remediation in basic academic skills are more likely to drop out, and the more remedial courses they have to take, the more likely they are to drop out.
The California State College System reported at a conference last Fall that 47% of their Freshman students are in remedial reading courses.
Does anybody read any more?
We may assume that these students have had 12 years of reading in school already, but they still can't read well enough to do college work, at least by California standards.
Reading is not calculus or chemistry, it is just a basic academic skill in which we expect that the schools have offered practice for 12 years.
Now, a youngster can start to play Pop Warner football at age 6. By graduation from high school, he could have had 12 years of practice at the basic skills of football. Imagine athletes reporting for a college football team, only to be told that they need a year of remedial blocking and tackling practice before they can be allowed to play. It seems unlikely that they would not have learned basic blocking and tackling skills in their previous 12 years of playing football.
I am not just talking about improvement here. Of course, students in college can learn to read more difficult material in new academic subjects. And of course college athletes can get better at all the skills needed for success in their sports.
But we are talking about basic, entry-level academic skills. 47% of freshmen in the California State College System don't have them in reading, after 12 years of practice in school.
When I went into the Army in 1960, I had never fired a rifle before, but in a week or two on the range in Basic Training, I was able to meet the standard for "Sharpshooter." I missed "Expert" by one target.
I am convinced that if I had had 12 years of practice with my M-1 Garand, I really could have scored "Expert"--perhaps even by the higher standards of the U.S. Marine Corps.
I have to confess I am stunned that so many of our high school students, having been awarded one of our high school diplomas, and having been accepted at one of our colleges, are found [by ACT] to be unable to read well enough to do college work.
The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are now in remedial courses each year when they get to college.
It also notes that these students, having satisfied our requirements for the high school diploma, and graduated--having applied to college and been accepted--are told when they get there, that they can't make the grade without perhaps an additional year of work on their academic fundamentals. Naturally this experience is surprising to them, given that they satisfied our requirements for graduation and admission to college, and embarrassing, humiliating and discouraging, as well.
As you may know, my particular interest since 1987 has been in student history research papers at the high school level. I have published 978 essays by secondary students from 44 states and 38 other countries over the last 25 years.
Start young!
Some of the students who wrote the required Extended Essays for the IB Diploma and were published in The Concord Review, and some of our other authors as well, have told me that in their freshman dorms they are often mobbed by their peers who are facing a serious term paper for the first time and have no idea how to do one.
It is absurd to contemplate, but imagine a well-prepared college basketball player being mobbed for help by his peers who had never been taught to dribble, pass, or shoot in high school.
If even colleges like Harvard and Stanford require all their Freshmen to take a year of expository writing, that may not exactly be remedial writing, but I would argue that a student who has completed an Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate Diploma, and a student who has published a 12,000-word paper on Irish Nationalism or a 15,000-word paper on the Soviet-Afghan War for The Concord Review, should perhaps be allowed to skip that year of remedial writing. The author of the Soviet-Afghan War paper, from Georgia, is now at Christ Church College, Oxford, where I believe he did not have to spend a year in an expository writing course, and the author of the Irish Nationalism paper is at Princeton, where she may very well have been asked to spend a year in such a course.
If so many of our students need to learn how to do academic writing (not to mention how to read), what are they spending time on in high school?
I believe that writing is the most dumbed-down activity we now have in our schools. The AP program includes no research paper, only responses to document-based questions, and most high school Social Studies departments leave academic writing tasks to the English Department.
Now, in general, English Departments favor personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, but college admission requirements have given them an additional task on which they are working with students. Teaching writing takes time, not only in preparing and monitoring students, but more especially in reading what students have written and offering corrections and advice. Time for one kind of writing necessarily means less time for another kind.
Personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay have already taken a lot of the time of English teachers and their students, but as college admissions officers ask for the 500-word personal essay, time has to be given to teaching for that.
While high school English departments work with their students on the 500-word personal essay, they do not have the time to give to serious term papers, so they don't do them, and I believe that is why so many students arrive in our colleges in need of a one-year course on the expository writing they didn't get a chance to do in school.
Lots of the public high school students whose work I publish simply do their papers as independent studies, as there is no place for serious academic writing like that in the curriculum.
I would suggest that college admissions officers ask for an academic research paper from applicants in place of the short little personal essay; while it would be more work for them, it would make it more likely that students would arrive ready for college work.
Making sure that our high school students arrive in college able to manage college-level nonfiction reading and academic expository writing might really help us earn our new credential as professionals who work not just to help students get accepted at college, but to help them complete college as well.
Will Fitzhugh's website is www.tcr.org, and he can be reached at Fitzhugh@tcr.org
Every year, the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan hires the Gallup Organization to survey American opinion on the public schools. Though Gallup conducts the poll, education grandees selected by the editors of the Kappan write the questions. In 2007 the poll asked, "Will the current emphasis on standardized tests encourage teachers to 'teach to the tests,' that is, concentrate on teaching their students to pass the tests rather than teaching the subject, or don't you think it will have this effect?"
The key to the question, of course, is the "rather than"--the assumption by many critics that test preparation and good teaching are mutually exclusive. In their hands, "teach to the test" has become an epithet. The very existence of content standards linked to standardized tests, in this view, narrows the curriculum and restricts the creativity of teachers--which of course it does, in the sense that teachers in standards-based systems cannot organize their instructional time in any fashion they prefer.
A more subtle critique is that teaching to the test can be good or bad. If curricula are carefully developed by educators and the test is written with curricula in mind, then teaching to the test means teaching students the knowledge and skills we agree they ought to learn--exactly what our teachers are legally and ethically obligated to do.
In an earlier comment thread someone asked whether Asian-American college performance is commensurate with their SAT scores. If A-A SAT scores are artificially elevated by cramming then one might expect it to under-predict college GPA. (On the other hand, if Asians are more conscientious and hard working overall, one might* expect both SAT scores and college GPA to be elevated relative to other groups.) This data from the College Board shows that the validity of SAT as a predictor of college GPA is about the same for whites and Asians.
*Regarding cramming, I have yet to see any data which shows that large groups of people can significantly elevate their SAT scores through preparation. Test prep companies will claim this is possible, but detailed studies by ETS suggest otherwise. In our U Oregon data set (covering all students at the university over a 5 year period) it is quite rare to see a change of 1 population SD between max and average score for individual students who take the SAT multiple times.
(Click for larger version. FYGPA = Freshman Year GPA.)
A technology shift is underway. The PC's promise to transform how learning happens in the classroom is being realized by Apple's iPad. Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks.
The iPad is especially helpful for students with special needs. Its simplified touch interface and accessibility features help these children learn more independently; aftermarket accessories assist in making the iPad more classroom-friendly.
In March, I wrote about how my mother learned how to use her iPad for basic stuff-like checking e-mail and browsing the Web-without ever having used a PC in her life. Students at all grade levels are finding it just as easy to use.
Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, NJ, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn't need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says.
It is simply time to be honest. If you are sincerely concerned about the educational problems in Milwaukee and want to see real solutions implemented, then it is time to take a look at the truth. The desire to be politically correct for some and the reluctance to accept reality for others is what has delayed real progress in Milwaukee.
So, here it is point blank:
Wisconsin - not just Milwaukee - has a problem educating African-American youths.
According to the recent test scores reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap continues to widen. In other words, white students continue to outperform minority students, especially African-Americans. In fact, Wisconsin has the largest white-black achievement gap in the nation and continues to be the only state with a gap well above the national average.
Basically, white students have an 86% high school graduation rate, while African-American students graduate at a rate of 49%. So, quality education is not difficult to find in Wisconsin, but for some reason African-American youths are not getting it.
Madison Public Schools: A Dream Deferred, Opportunity Denied? Will the Madison Board of Education Hear the 40-year long cries of its Parents and Community, and Put Children and Learning before Labor and Adults?
Kaleem Caire, via email:
December 10, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
For the last 16 months, we have been on an arduous journey to develop a public school that would effectively address the educational needs of children who have under-performed or failed to succeed in Madison's public schools for at least the last 40 years. If you have followed the news stories, it's not hard to see how many mountains have been erected in our way during the process.
Some days, it has felt like we're desperately looking at our children standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, some already fallen over while others dangling by their thumbs waiting to be rescued; but before we can get close enough to save them, we have to walk across one million razor blades and through thousands of rose bushes with our bare feet. As we make our way to them and get closer, the razor blades get sharper and the rose bushes grow more dense.
Fortunately, our Board members and team at the Urban League and Madison Preparatory Academy, and the scores of supporters who've been plowing through the fields with us for the last year believe that our children's education, their emotional, social and personal development, and their futures are far more important than any pain we might endure.
Our proposal for Madison Prep has certainly touched a nerve in Madison. But why? When we launched our efforts on the steps of West High School on August 29, 2010, we thought Madison and its school officials would heartily embrace Madison Prep.We thought they would see the school as:
(1) a promising solution to the racial achievement gap that has persisted in our city for at least 40 years;
(2) a learning laboratory for teachers and administrators who admittedly need new strategies for addressing the growing rate of underachievement, poverty and parental disengagement in our schools, and
(3) a clear sign to communities of color and the broader Greater Madison community that it was prepared to do whatever it takes to help move children forward - children for whom failure has become too commonplace and tolerated in our capital city.
Initially, the majority of Board of Education members told us they liked the idea and at the time, had no problems with us establishing Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality - and therefore, non-union, public school. At the same time, all of them asked us for help and advice on how to eliminate the achievement gap, more effectively engage parents and stimulate parent involvement, and better serve children and families of color.
Then, over the next several months as the political climate and collective bargaining in the state changed and opponents to charter schools and Madison Prep ramped up their misinformation and personal attack campaign, the focus on Madison Prep got mired in these issues.
The concern of whether or not a single-gender school would be legal under state and federal law was raised. We answered that both with a legal briefing and by modifying our proposal to establish a common girls school now rather than two years from now.
The concern of budget was raised and how much the school would cost the school district. We answered that through a $2.5 million private gift to lower the per pupil request to the district and by modifying our budget proposal to ensure Madison Prep would be as close to cost-neutral as possible. The District Administration first said they would support the school if it didn't cost the District more than $5 million above what it initially said it could spend; Madison Prep will only cost them $2.7 million.
Board of Education members also asked in March 2011 if we would consider establishing Madison Prep as an instrumentality of MMSD, where all of the staff would be employed by the district and be members of the teacher's union. We decided to work towards doing this, so long as Madison Prep could retain autonomy of governance, management and budget. Significant progress was made until the last day of negotiations when MMSD's administration informed us that they would present a counter-budget to ours in their analysis of our proposal that factored in personnel costs for an existing school versus establishing a modest budget more common to new charter schools.
We expressed our disagreement with the administration and requested that they stick with our budget for teacher salaries, which was set using MMSD's teacher salary scale for a teacher with 7 years experience and a masters degree and bench-marked against several successful charter schools. Nevertheless, MMSD argued that they were going to use the average years of experience of teachers in the district, which is 14 years with a master's degree. This drove up the costs significantly, taking teacher salaries from $47,000 to $80,000 per year and benefits from $13,500 to $25,000 per year per teacher. The administration's budget plan therefore made starting Madison Prep as an instrumentality impossible.
To resolve the issue, the Urban League and Board of Madison Prep met in November to consider the options. In doing so, we consulted with every member of MMSD's Board of Education. We also talked with parents, stakeholders and other community members as well. It was then decided that we would pursue Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality of the school district because we simply believe that our children cannot and should not have to wait.
Now, Board of Education members are saying that Madison Prep should be implemented in "a more familiar, Madison Way", as a "private school", and that we should not have autonomy even though state laws and MMSD's own charter school policy expressly allow for non-instrumentality schools to exist. There are presently more than 20 such schools in Wisconsin.
What Next?
As the mountains keep growing, the goal posts keep moving, and the razor blades and rose bushes are replenished with each step we take, we are forced to ask the question: Why has this effort, which has been more inclusive, transparent and well-planned, been made so complicated? Why have the barriers been erected when our proposal is specifically focused on what Madison needs, a school designed to eliminate the achievement gap, increase parent engagement and prepare young people for college who might not otherwise get there? Why does liberal Madison, which prides itself on racial tolerance and opposition to bigotry, have such a difficult time empowering and including people of color, particularly African Americans?
As the member of a Black family that has been in Madison since 1908, I wonder aloud why there are fewer black-owned businesses in Madison today than there were 25 years ago? There are only two known black-owned businesses with 10 or more employees in Dane County. Two!
Why can I walk into 90 percent of businesses in Madison in 2011 and struggle to find Black professionals, managers and executives or look at the boards of local companies and not see anyone who looks like me?
How should we respond when Board of Education members tell us they can't vote for Madison Prep while knowing that they have no other solutions in place to address the issues our children face? How can they say they have the answers and develop plans for our children without consulting and including us in the process? How can they have 51 black applicants for teaching positions and hire only one, and then claim that they can't find any black people to apply for jobs? How can they say, "We need more conversations" about the education of our children when we've been talking for four decades?
I have to ask the question, as uncomfortable as it may be for some to hear, "Would we have to work this hard and endure so much resistance if just 48% of white children in Madison's public schools were graduating, only 1% of white high school seniors were academically ready for college, and nearly 50% of white males between the ages of 25-29 were incarcerated, on probation or under some form of court supervision?
Is this 2011 or 1960? Should the black community, which has been in Madison for more than 100 years, not expect more?
How will the Board of Education's vote on December 19th help our children move forward? How will their decision impact systemic reform and seed strategies that show promise in improving on the following?
Half of Black and Latino children are not completing high school. Just 59% of Black and 61% of Latino students graduated on-time in 2008-09. One year later, in 2009-10, the graduation rate declined to 48% of Black and 56% of Latino students compared to 89% of white students. We are going backwards, not forwards. (Source: MMSD 2010, 2011)
Black and Latino children are not ready for college. According to makers of the ACT college entrance exam, just 20% of Madison's 378 Black seniors and 37% of 191 Latino seniors in MMSD in 2009-10 completed the ACT. Only 7% of Black and 18% of Latino seniors completing test showed they had the knowledge and skills necessary to be "ready for college". Among all MMSD seniors (those completing and not completing the test), just 1% of Black and 7% of Latino seniors were college ready
Too few Black and Latino graduates are planning to go to college. Of the 159 Latino and 288 Black students that actually graduated and received their diplomas in 2009-10, just 28% of Black and 21% of Latino students planned to attend a four-year college compared to 53% of White students. While another 25% of Black and 33% of graduates planned to attend a two-year college or vocation program (compared to 17% of White students), almost half of all of all Black and Latino graduates had no plans for continuing their education beyond high school compared to 27% of White students. (Source: DPI 2011)
Half of Black males in their formative adult years are a part of the criminal justice system. Dane County has the highest incarceration rate among young Black men in the United States: 47% between the ages of 25-29 are incarcerated, on probation or under some form of court supervision. The incarceration phenomena starts early. In 2009-10, Black youth comprised 62% of all young people held in Wisconsin's correctional system. Of the 437 total inmates held, 89% were between the ages of 15-17. In Dane County, in which Madison is situated, 49% of 549 young people held in detention by the County in 2010 were Black males, 26% were white males, 12% were black females, 6% were white females and 6% were Latino males and the average age of young people detained was 15. Additionally, Black youth comprised 54% of all 888 young people referred to the Juvenile Court System. White students comprised 31% of all referrals and Latino comprised 6%.
More importantly, will the Board of Education demonstrate the type of courage it took our elders and ancestors to challenge and change laws and contracts that enabled Jim Crow, prohibited civil rights, fair employment and Women's right to vote, and made it hard for some groups to escape the permanence of America's underclass? We know this is not an easy vote, and we appreciate their struggle, but there is a difference between what is right and what is politically convenient.
Will the Board have the courage to look in the faces of Black and Latino families in the audience, who have been waiting for solutions for so long, and tell them with their vote that they must wait that much longer?
We hope our Board of Education members recognize and utilize the tremendous power they have to give our children a hand-up. We hope they hear the collective force and harmony of our pleas, engage with our pain and optimism, and do whatever it takes to ensure that the proposal we have put before them, which comes with exceptional input and widespread support, is approved on December 19, 2011.
Madison Prep is a solution we can learn from and will benefit the hundreds of young men and women who will eventually attend.
If not Madison Prep, then what? If not now, then when?
JOIN US
SCHOOL BOARD VOTE ON MADISON PREP
Monday, December 19, 2011 at 5:00pm
Madison Metropolitan School District
Doyle Administration Building Auditorium
545 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53703
Contact: Laura DeRoche Perez, Lderoche@ulgm.org
Phone: 608-729-1230
CLICK HERE TO RSVP: TELL US YOU'LL BE THERE
Write the School Board and Tell Them to "Say 'Yes', to Madison Prep!"
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
OUR RESPONSE TO MMSD'S NEW CONCERNS
Autonomy: MMSD now says they are concerned that Madison Prep will not be accountable to the public for the education it provides students and the resources it receives. Yet, they don't specify what they mean by "accountability." We would like to know how accountability works in MMSD and how this is producing high achievement among the children it serves. Further, we would like to know why Madison Prep is being treated differently than the 30 early childhood centers that are participating in the district's 4 year old kindergarten program. They all operate similar to non-instrumentality schools, have their own governing boards, operate via a renewable contract, can hire their own teachers "at their discretion" and make their own policy decisions, and have little to no oversight by the MMSD Board of Education. All 30 do not employ union teachers. Accountability in the case of 4K sites is governed by "the contract." MMSD Board members should be aware that, as with their approval of Badger Rock Middle School, the contract is supposed to be developed "after" the concept is approved on December 19. In essence, this conversation is occurring to soon, if we keep with current district practices.
Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA): MMSD and Madison Teachers, Incorporated have rejected our attorney's reading of ACT 65, which could provide a path to approval of Madison Prep without violating the CBA. Also, MTI and MMSD could approve Madison Prep per state law and decide not to pursue litigation, if they so desired. There are still avenues to pursue here and we hope MMSD's Board of Education will consider all of them before making their final decision.
If 2010 was the year of the bombshell in research in the three "major areas" of market-based education reform - charter schools, performance pay, and value-added in evaluations - then 2011 was the year of the slow, sustained march.
Last year, the landmark Race to the Top program was accompanied by a set of extremely consequential research reports, ranging from the policy-related importance of the first experimental study of teacher-level performance pay (the POINT program in Nashville) and the preliminary report of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project, to the political controversy of the Los Angeles Times' release of teachers' scores from their commissioned analysis of Los Angeles testing data.
In 2011, on the other hand, as new schools opened and states and districts went about the hard work of designing and implementing new evaluations compensation systems, the research almost seemed to adapt to the situation. There were few (if any) "milestones," but rather a steady flow of papers and reports focused on the finer-grained details of actual policy.*
A nice analytic giblet from a Times profile of new Nobel economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims:
Because of his father's College Board connections, Mr. Sims got hold of an old SAT exam, which he and Mr. Willoughby used to conduct a statistical analysis. They found that on multiple-choice questions in English and social studies, the "longer answers tended to be correct." In math, they determined that the number that was "closest to all of the other numerical choices" was probably the right one.
Madison Metropolitan School District was provided an award from the Microsoft Cy Pres settlement in the Fall of 2009. Since that time the district has utilized many of these funds to prorate projects across the district in order to free up budgeted funds and to provide for more flexibility. The plan and process for these funds liquidates the General Purpose portion of the Microsoft Cy Pres funds, provides an equitable allocation per pupil to each school, and is aimed at increasing the amount of technology within our schools.
The total allocation remaining from Cy Pres revenues totals $2,755,463.11, which was the target for the technology acquisition plan. Two things happened prior to allocating funds to schools: first was to hold back $442,000 for the future purchase of iPads for our schools (at $479 per iPad this equates to a 923 iPads), and second was to hold back $200,000 necessary for increased server capacity to deal with the increase in different types of technology.
The final step was to allocate the remaining funding ($2,113,463.11) out to the schools on a per pupil basis. This was calculated at $85.09 per pupil across all schools within the district.
I found the device distribution to be quite interesting. The iPad revolution is well underway. Technology's role in schools continues to be a worthwhile discussion topic.
Madison Teachers, Inc. on The Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School
John Matthews, Executive Director of Madison Teachers, Inc., via email:
The Urban League proposes that Madison Prep be operated as a non-instrumentality of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Urban League's proposal is unacceptable to Madison Teachers, because it would effectively eliminate supervision and accountability of the school to the Madison School Board regarding the expenditure of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, and because it would also violate long-standing terms and conditions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Madison Metropolitan School District and MTI.
The Urban League proposes to use District funds to hire non-District teaching staff at lower salaries and benefits than called for in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. It was recently stated in a meeting between representatives of Madison Prep, the School District and MTI that the Urban League plans to hire young African-American males and asks that MTI and the District enable them to pay the teachers they hire less than their counterparts, who are employed by the District. MTI cannot agree to enable that. We believe that such is discriminatory, based both on race and gender. The MTI/MMSD Contract calls for teachers to be compensated based upon their educational achievement and their years of service. MTI and MMSD agreed in the early 1970's that the District would not enable such undermining of employment standards. The costing of the Contract salary placement was explained by both Superintendent Nerad and John Matthews. Those explanations were ignored by the Urban League in their budgeting, causing a shortfall in the proposed operational budget, according to Superintendent Nerad.
It is also distasteful to MTI that the Urban League proposes to NOT ADDITIONALLY pay their proposed new hires for working a longer day and a longer school year. Most employees in the United States receive overtime pay when working longer hours. The Urban League proposes NO additional compensation for employees working longer hours, or for the 10 additional school days in their plan.
Finally, the Urban League is incorrect in asserting that MTI and the District could modify the MMSD/MTI Contract without triggering Act 10, Governor Walker's draconian attack on teachers and other public employees. The Contract would be destroyed if MTI and the District agreed to amend it. Such is caused by Walker's Law, Act 10. MTI is not willing to inflict the devastating effects of Act 10 on its members. The Urban League states that Walker's Act 65 would enable the Contract to be amended without the horrible impact cause by Act 10. That claim is unfounded and in error.
The Madison Prep proposal could easily be implemented if it followed the Charter Plan of Wright School, Nuestro Mundo, and Badger Rock School, all of which operate as instrumentalities of the District, under its supervision and the MMSD/MTI Collective Bargaining Agreement.
But the current proposal is "unacceptable" to Madison teachers because it would "effectively eliminate School Board oversight of the expenditure of millions of dollars in taxpayer money" and violate the district's contract with its union, Matthews said.
Matthews initially declined to comment on Madison Prep when I contacted him yesterday, but later responded in an e-mail.
In his response, Matthews criticized Madison Prep's plan to pay its teachers lower salaries and benefits than other district teachers, and not offer overtime for working longer days.
He also said the Urban League is incorrect in asserting that the current union contract can be modified without nullifying it under the state's new collective bargaining law.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
Disclaimer: I write this as a university student. Some of my points may or may not be applicable in a high school environment.
The grading system in schools and universities has a long history of opponents and criticism. I won't go into the arguments here because, quite frankly, I don't have anything new to say about it. In short: the system sucks. It encourages memorization and frenzied, last-minute studying, can be played in a variety of ways, etc. Educators can debate the alternatives and run pilot projects, and that's all well and good. But what can we - the students - do about it?
My answer: Don't Worry About It.
Of course, this could easily be interpreted as a call to rebel against the system, forget grades entirely, and party night and day. So let me expand on that:
Pick courses that interest you, and focus on learning. And don't worry about the grades - they will come with the territory.
Supporters of a controversial, single-sex charter school Thursday blasted the Madison School District for its opposition to the proposal and said the teachers union is an impediment to improving student achievement.
At a news conference, the Urban League of Greater Madison's president, Kaleem Caire, also said the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, which would target low-income, minority students, isn't dead and called on the School Board to put "learning before labor" when it votes Dec. 19 whether to approve the charter.
"Our children aren't there to be subjects of teachers and teachers unions," Caire said. "But the decisions that have been made in the Madison Metropolitan School District for a mighty long time have been determined by adults getting what they need first before kids."
Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews declined comment Thursday.
WHERE: Urban League of Greater Madison, 2222 S. Park St., Suite 200, Madison, WI 53713
WHO: Kaleem Caire, Urban League President & CEO Urban League of Greater Madison Board of Directors Madison Preparatory Academy Board of Directors Community Leaders and Parents
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez, Director of School Development, Urban League of Greater Madison, at lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1235.
Fellow members of the Electronic Educational Entertainment Association. My remarks will be brief, as I realize you all have texts to read, messages to tweet, and you will of course want to take photos of those around you to post on your blog.
I only want to remind you that the book is our enemy. Every minute a student spends reading a book is time taken away from purchasing and using the software and hardware the sale of which we depend on for our livelihoods.
You should keep in mind the story C.S. Lewis told of Wormwood, the sales rep for his uncle Screwtape, a district manager Below, who was panicked when his target client joined a church. What was he to do? Did this mean a lost account? Screwtape reassured him with a story from his own early days. One of his accounts went into a library, and Screwtape was not worried, but then the client picked up a book and began reading. However, then he began to think! And, in an instant, the Enemy Above was at his elbow. But Screwtape did not panic--fortunately it was lunchtime, and he managed to get his prospect up and at the door of the library. There was traffic and busyiness, and the client thought to himself, "This is real life!" And Screwtape was able to close the account.
In the early days, Progressive Educators would sometimes say to students, in effect, "step away from those books and no one gets hurt!" because they wanted students to put down their books, go out, work for social justice, and otherwise take part in "real life" rather than get into those dangerous books and start thinking for themselves, for goodness' sake!
But now we have more effective means of keeping our children in school and at home away from those books. We have Grand Theft Auto and hundreds of other games for them to play at escaping all moral codes. We have smartphones, with which they can while away the hours and the days texting and talking about themselves with their friends.
We even have "educational software" and lots of gear, like video recorders, so that students can maintain their focus on themselves, and stay away from the risks posed by books, which could very possibly lead them to think about something besides themselves. And remember, people who read books and think about something besides themselves do not make good customers. And more than anything, we want and need good customers, young people who buy our hardware and software, and who can be encouraged to stay away from the books in libraries, which are not only free, for goodness's sake, but may even lead them to think. And that will be no help at all to our bottom line. Andrew Carnegie may have been a philanthropist, but by providing free libraries he did nothing to help us sell electronic entertainment products. We must never let down our guard or reduce our advertising. Just remember every young person reading a book is a lost customer! Verbum Sap.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
I recently received a history paper submitted by a high school Junior who was kind enough
to enumerate the hours he has spent on athletics in a recent year:
Football: 13 hours a week, 13 weeks per year. (169 hours)
Basketball: 12 hours a week, 15 weeks per year. (180 hours)
Lacrosse: 12 hours a week, 15 weeks per year. (180 hours)
Summer Lacrosse: 10 hours per week, 15 weeks per year. (150 hours)
This yields a total, by my calculations, of
169 + 180 + 180 hours = 529 hours + 150 in the summer, for a new total of 679 hours.
We are told that there is no time for high school students to write serious history research papers, which they need to do to prepare themselves for college academic requirements. It seems likely that this young man will be better prepared in athletics
than in academics.
If it were considered important for all students to read history books and to write a serious history research paper, 679 hours (84 eight-hour days) might just be enough for them to manage that.
This particular young man made the time on his own to write a 28-page history research paper with a bibliography and 107 endnotes and submit it to The Concord Review, but this was not his high school requirement.
===============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
* Please see TJ Mertz's comment below. A link to the document was forwarded to me via a kind reader from Madison Teachers, Inc. Twitter Feed (a "retweet" of Karen Vieth's "tweet"). Note that I enjoyed visiting with Karen during several Madison School District strategic planning meetings.
A screenshot of the link:
The outcome of the Madison Prep "question" will surely reverberate for some time.
As a fledgling voice of reform in higher education, Salman Khan is an oddity. He cannot name any higher education accrediting agencies off the top of his head. He advocates for competency-based credentialing, but has never heard of Western Governors University. He is capable of talking on the phone for a full hour without using the word "disruptive" once. Until recently, he was an analyst for a hedge fund.
Here is what Khan does know: algebra, statistics, trigonometry, calculus, computer science, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, economics, and finance -- well enough, at least, to demonstrate the concepts via brief video tutorials on Khan Academy, his free learning website. What began in 2006 as an attempt to tutor his young cousin from afar has evolved into a 2,700-video library with millions of monthly visitors.
Many have lauded Khan's natural skill as a teacher. Khan's charmingly unpolished home recordings form the public face of the organization and provide a peg for media narratives about online learning and the YouTube-ification of the textbook in an era where the rising prices and demand for higher education has collided with the Internet's culture of free.
Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday became the latest large urban district to sign a compact agreement with the education-reform powerhouse Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pledging greater cooperation and collaboration between the city's charter and traditional neighborhood schools.
The agreement allows Chicago to compete for a piece of a $40 million grant from the Gates Foundation, aimed at building relationships between charters and neighborhood schools and allow for the sharing of innovative ideas.
Most Atlantic readers know that, although the U.S. spends more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg, students in a growing number of nations outperform our own. But think about this: Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Even if we find a way to educate our future work force to the same standards as this latter group -- and we are a very long way from that now -- wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages. That is a very tall order.
You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.
Kaleem Caire has only been back in Madison for less than two years, but he sure has grabbed our attention.
Caire didn't waste any time after coming home from a successful private sector career on the East Coast to be the new president for the Urban League of Greater Madison, starting to shake up the local establishment more or less immediately upon arrival. He has been pushing a bold proposal to attack the long-standing issue of minority underachievement in the Madison public schools. His idea for the Madison Preparatory Academy was vetted well in Nathan Comp's cover story for Isthmus last week.
For well over a year now, Caire has been shuttling between the district administration, Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) union leaders, school board members, parents, editorial boards and community meetings fighting for this idea.
In response to union and district administration concerns, he changed the proposal to make the school an "instrumentality" of the district, meaning it would be under school board control and be staffed by MTI member teachers. But that proposal came in at a cost for the district of $13 million over five years. Superintendent Dan Nerad, for whom I have a lot of respect, told the League that he couldn't support anything over $5 million.
Oregon plans to recruit and hire a new "chief education officer" who will have unprecedented power over education, including control of the chancellor of higher education, the next superintendent of Oregon's public schools and the state community college commissioner.
Gov. John Kitzhaber's new overarching education board, with control over preschool through universities, unanimously endorsed the general job description for that education officer Thursday.
Kitzhaber said he hopes to have the right person in the job by April.
The chosen leader will need the vision to help Oregon streamline, improve and connect all the education programs and institutions that serve or should serve learners from birth through college, he said. He or she will also have to be an education expert, plus be able to motivate those who work in the current system to embrace change. The political challenges will be huge.
If policymakers (see Brown, Jerry) still aren't convinced that education data matters, two reports released this week demonstrate that high quality, actionable information about schools and students is vital in efforts to improve education and student outcomes.
Bill summarized the important work of the Data Quality Campaign yesterday. More states than ever are collecting the information educators and policymakers need to make informed decisions about what's working and what isn't in schools. But just because the data can be collected, it doesn't mean that states' work is complete. Data for Action 2011 identifies four challenges - turf, trust, technical issues, and time - that continue to hinder states' efforts to utilize the full potential of their data (shameless plug: you should read my report, Data That Matters, for another set of 4 Ts that all states should follow to make their data user-friendly and actionable for school leaders).
Millions of students attend abysmally weak school systems that leave them unprepared for college, even as more jobs require some higher education. The states have an obligation to help these students retool.
More than 35 percent of students need remediation when they reach college, according to the federal government. A study by the organization that administers the ACT, the college entrance exam, finds that only a quarter of the 1.6 million 2011 high school graduates who took the exam met college-readiness benchmarks in English, reading, math and science.
Some students need one or two remedial courses before they can enroll in credit-bearing college classes. Others need so much remedial work that they will exhaust state and federal student aid without ever getting a degree. This is especially troubling because many of these students have passed state exams that are supposed to certify them as ready for college.
The debate over whether the Madison School Board should give the final OK to the Madison Preparatory Academy is getting a bit nasty.
And that should not be.
While the passion on the part of the advocates for the school, led by the energetic Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire, is perfectly understandable given our schools' dismal record on minority achievement, so is the questioning from those who aren't convinced the prep idea will solve that problem.
Now, on the eve of a vote on that final approval, is not the time to point fingers and make accusations, but to come together and reasonably find ways to overcome the obstacles and reassure those who fret about giving up duly elected officials' oversight of the school and the impact it will have on the entire district's union contracts if not done correctly.
The union problem is not the fault of the union, but stems from Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature's action to dramatically change public employee collective bargaining in Wisconsin. If the union or the School Board makes concessions for Madison Prep, the collective bargaining agreement for the entire district, which is to expire in June 2013, could be negated.
The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers "come from the bottom third" of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates.
All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the "quality" of applicants to the profession.
Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so.
Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it's worth taking a quick look at where the "bottom third" claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.
Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.
He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.
Each student's math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers.
The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.
About 12 percent of all charter schools have bargaining agreements. Why do charter schools unionize? What is in these charter school contracts? Can they be considered innovative or models for union reform? And how do they compare to traditional district/union teacher contracts? Center on Reinventing Public Education legal analyst Mitch Price investigated those questions in his study of charter school collective bargaining agreements.
Price examined nine charter schools unionized either by management design or by teacher vote. For comparison, he examined traditional district contracts and analyzed data from non-unionized charter schools as well. He found that the new contracts can be crafted in ways that respect the unique missions and priorities of charter schools, provide teachers with basic protections, and maintain organizational flexibility. However, while these new contracts innovate in many ways, they could go much further given the opportunity to create contracts from scratch.
Prior to the Thanksgiving break, we administered a survey asking for feedback from families about their knowledge and thoughts on the changes we are making to the curriculum delivery model at Wedgwood. Thank you to the 259 families who responded to the survey. We have 449 students currently enrolled at Wedgwood, 185 of whom are siblings. If respondents only completed one survey per family, as requested, our sample is quite accurate.
Overall, families want more information about what cluster grouping is. This was expressed in a variety of ways by families of general education, spectrum and special education students. I will attempt to clarify what it is here and how Wedgwood staff is using this information to move forward.
For those who do not know, cluster grouping is a method of grouping gifted students (gifted being identified as students who score in the 98th - 99th percentile on a cognitive ability test) into clusters of 6 students in one classroom that also include high achievers and above average students. The remaining students would be clustered so that the highest achieving students and lowest achieving students are not in the same classroom. With that as a guide, Wedgwood is developing plans to move from having self-contained spectrum classrooms to integrated classrooms using an interpretation of this model. We are already doing this in 1st grade, albeit more heterogeneously than what the research we based our 1st grade model on suggests.
Are you confused about what Wedgwood is doing with their Spectrum program? Join the club. Everyone is confused about what Wedgwood is doing with their Spectrum program. The president of the confusion club appears to be the school's principal, Chris Cronas.
In another issue, Sam Castaneda Holdren, a spokesman for Stand for Children, said the organization collected about 100,000 voter signatures for a ballot question that would codify into law new educator-evaluation regulations approved in June by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The new state regulations call for evaluating teachers and administrators partly by the scores of their students on the MCAS statewide tests, feedback from students and parents, by state and local observations in classrooms and other measures.
The ballot question would go beyond the state regulations in some respects, said Jason Williams, executive director of Stand for Children in Massachusetts. For example, the question would mandate that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education approve evaluation plans developed through bargaining with unions in school districts if those local plans differ from a state model that will eventually be developed. Right now, the department could only review those local plans, not reject them, Williams said
The Urban League's Madison Prep proposal continues to garner attention as we draw closer to the School Board's December 19 up-or-down vote on the proposal.
This weekend the news has been the school district administration's analysis of the Urban League's current proposal for a non-instrumentality charter school (i.e., one where the teachers and other school staff would be employees of the Urban League rather than the school district and the school would be free of most administrative oversight from the district).
The analysis recommends that the School Board reject the Madison Prep proposal, for two principal reasons.
The first is that, as a matter of policy, the administration is opposed to non-instrumentality charter schools because of the lack of day-to-day oversight of their operations. The second reason is that there does not seem to be a way the school district could enter into a contract for a non-instrumentality charter school without running afoul of our collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI).
America now finds itself at an interesting crossroads. Over the next few years, it is estimated that this country will need one million new teachers, as more and more baby boomers begin to retire. (A baby boomer is a person who was born during the demographic Post-War II baby boom and who grew up during the period between 1946 and 1964.)
This impending shortfall of public educators is further exacerbated by the disturbing national trend that has severely undermined job security for many public-sector employees by restricting, or outright prohibiting workers from engaging in the collective bargaining process.
As we have seen, Wisconsin has become the embarrassing leader of the political attack now being orchestrated against the poor and working-class families in this country. But vilifying teachers is nothing new for the Badger State. Former Governor and now U.S. Senate hopeful, Tommy Thompson used teachers and its union (WEAC) as convenient political scapegoats back in the 1990s. He succeeded in making the case that state property taxes were so out of whack, solely as a result of the exorbitant salaries and benefits being afforded to teachers. Talk about pure political demagoguery!
The Virginia Beach, Va., school district believes its own system is worth about $1.53 for every $1 spent from the 70,000-student district's operating fund.
Not content with making an argument that good schools have an economic value that is unmeasurable, the district asked a university economist to calculate just what it brings both to the city and the Hampton Roads region in southeastern Virginia.
The report generated for the district, the third-largest in the state, is more than an academic exercise for James G. Merrill, the Virginia Beach superintendent. The district is one of the few in the state that receive money from local taxpayers based on a revenue-sharing formula, which is currently under fire. As the city and the school district head into budget season, Mr. Merrill said he wanted to make an argument for school funding based on business principles.
Roughly one-third of students in Harris County's public schools leave without a diploma, according to a new analysis from Children at Risk.
The Houston-based research and advocacy nonprofit calculated for the first time a decade of average graduation rates for Harris County. It also calculated graduation rates for all the public high schools with available data in Harris, Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Liberty, Montgomery and Waller counties for the ninth-grade class of 2004-05. The rate reflects students who graduated within six years.
As the graphic below shows, the percentage of students graduating high school has increased over the decade, but black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families graduate at much lower rates than their Anglo, Asian and more affluent classmates.
There's a debate brewing - mostly via keyboards - about whether schools still need to teach cursive writing to classrooms of digitally wired kids.
I'd be a better defender of beautifully flowing handwriting if my own hadn't deteriorated over the years to a hybrid of cursive, printing, squiggles and shorthand. My wife nudges me out of the way every time we step up to sign a guest book. My lame defense is that I'm left-handed.
Still, I'm glad I learned cursive at Our Lady of Sorrows, my Catholic elementary school where every classroom came with a strip of capital and lowercase letters above the blackboard. Even if a person doesn't write that way very often - thank-you notes and postcards come to mind - it's nice to be able to decipher other people's hen-scratching.
Wisconsin is one of more than 40 states that don't require cursive in their core curriculum standards, though the state Department of Public Instruction doesn't have any data on schools or districts that have actually dropped it in favor of spending more time on other subjects. Cursive may indeed fade away, but who wants to jump first?
What's most important, said DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper, is learning the various types of writing - persuasive, storytelling, speeches and so forth - and not whether it's written, printed or typed.
If we don't change the way ICT is thought about and taught, we're shutting the door on our children's futures
So, in the immortal words of Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, coding (ie computer programming) is "the new Latin". This was the headline on his blog post about the burgeoning campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills in UK schools.
Dedicated readers will recall that it is also a bee in the bonnet of this particular columnist. The ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum in our secondary schools has been a national disgrace for as long as I can remember. This is because it effectively conflates ICT with "office skills" and generally winds up training them to use Microsoft Office when what they really need is ICT education - that is to say preparation for a world in which Microsoft (and maybe even Google) will be little more than historical curiosities, and PowerPoint presentations will look like Dead Sea scrolls.
Rory Cellan-Jones's blog post was prompted by signs that the campaign to rethink ICT education is gathering momentum. It was first given a boost by a report written by two elders of the computer games world, Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, on the need to transform the UK into "the world's leading talent hub for the video games and visual effects industries". Their report recommended, among other things, that computer science should become part of the national curriculum.
The labor market continued to expand at a modest pace last month, according to today's employment report. Payroll employment increased by 120,000 jobs in November, and the fraction of Americans with a job ticked up. Including revisions to previous months, total employment was 192,000 higher in November. Private employment increased by 140,000 jobs last month while governments continued to shed jobs. While the unemployment rate jumped down to 8.6 percent, some of the reduction reflected lower labor force participation rather than increases in employment.
While overall job creation has improved slightly, many American workers continue to face serious difficulties in the labor market. These workers tend to have less formal education and/or fewer job-relevant skills. For less-educated workers, the Great Recession has only exacerbated a longer-term trend of diminished earnings and job opportunities.
It's weird how you can lose track of our ever-changing world. For instance, until recently, I thought "reality TV" meant games about people who were stuck on an island or locked in a house together for the summer. Then, suddenly, I noticed that there were seven different regularly scheduled shows about real housewives, three about people who bid on abandoned storage lockers and two about people who kill wild hogs for a living.
And then there was online education. (Confession: This entire column is actually going to be about online education. I just used the wild hogs to reel you in.)
I always thought that the only kids getting their entire public schooling online were in the hospital, living in the Alaskan tundra, or pursuing a career as a singing orphan in the road company of "Annie." Not so. There are now around 250,000 cyberschool students in kindergarten through high school and the number is growing fast.
Nobody is forced to go to Dr. Brenda Noach Choice School. The 87 students enrolled this September were there because their parents chose the school.
So why should we be concerned about how the students are doing? None of our business, right?
I would disagree for two reasons: One, those 87 students mean the school is in line to receive more than $500,000 this year in public support. And, two, results for the school's students a year ago on the state's standardized tests were bad.
How bad?
A few slices of an answer: Only 18% of the school's students were rated proficient in reading. None - that is, zero - were proficient in math. There were only a handful of 10th-graders last year, and among them, none scored as proficient in reading, language arts, math, science, or social studies. Zero.
The Brenda Noach school, 3965 N. 15th St., is among a handful of schools at the bottom of the spectrum (judging by test scores and other indicators) of the 106 schools in Milwaukee's nationally important private school voucher program.
Citing a critical need to not underestimate the stakes at hand, Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro presented to the State Board of Education today her analysis of ways the state could assist the Kansas City Public Schools in regaining accreditation.
The State Board met in Branson on Dec. 1-2, where discussion of the Kansas City Public Schools was part of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's recommendation for revamping a statewide system of support. This system would identify risk factors and target limited resources to assist unaccredited school districts and those that are at risk of becoming unaccredited. Currently, nearly one dozen schools would receive focused attention.
Here's the bottom line on public schools in Wisconsin after a big cut in state aid to K-12 education:
• The kids are mostly all right.
• The teachers are smarting from smaller paychecks.
• The full impact of the two-year, $750 million cut won't be known until next school year.
That's what a recent survey of Wisconsin school administrators suggests.
The Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators surveyed more than 80 percent of districts across the state in early fall. The results are being cited -- and exaggerated -- in a variety of ways. The Democrats and unions suggest the sky is falling. Republican Gov. Scott Walker pretends all is well.
And the political spin will only speed and sharpen if Walker faces a recall election next year as expected.
Moving from elementary school to middle school, or from middle school to high school, was simple once. A counselor, principal, or teacher informed the student which school she would attend when summer ended. And the parents got their children to the right school on a specified day at the end of August.
No choices.
No decisions.
Public education long ago parted ways with the one-size-fits-all approach, particularly in urban or suburban school districts large enough to design schools focused on particular areas of student interest. We have moved on to science magnets, liberal arts and fine arts academies, performing arts institutes, and single-gender schools.
The single-gender model for girls has been around for more than 100 years, mostly in parochial and private schools where they have done remarkable work educating young women. They are a novelty in public education. And an all-girls school is the new kid on the block in the Austin school district -- and in other districts in Texas.
Recommendations:
We are in agreement that the achievement gaps for low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners must be eliminated. The Administration agrees that bolder steps must be taken to address these gaps. We also know that closing these gaps is not a simple task and change will not come overnight, but, the District's commitment to doing so will not waiver. We also know that to be successful in the long run, we must employ multiple strategies both within our schools and within our community. This is why the District has held interest in many of the educational strategies included in the Madison Prep's proposal like longer school days and a longer school year at an appropriately compensated level for staff, mentoring support, the proposed culture of the school and the International Baccalaureate Program.
While enthusiastic about these educational strategies, the Administration has also been clear throughout this conversation about its concern with a non-instrumentality model.
Autonomy is a notion inherent in all charter school proposals. Freedom and flexibility to do things differently are the very reasons charter schools exist. However, the non-instrumentality charter school model goes beyond freedom and flexibility to a level of separateness that the Administration cannot support.
In essence, Madison Prep's current proposal calls for the exclusion of the elected Board of Education and the District's Administration from the day-to-day operations of the school. It prevents the Board, and therefore the public, from having direct oversight of student learning conditions and teacher working conditions in a publicly-funded charter school. From our perspective, the use of public funds calls for a higher level of oversight than found in the Madison Prep proposal and for that matter in any non-instrumentality proposal.
In addition, based on the District's analysis, there is significant legal risk in entering into a non- instrumentality charter contract under our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.
In our analysis of Madison Prep's initial instrumentality proposal, the Administration expressed concerns over the cost of the program to the District and ultimately could not recommend funding at the level proposed. Rather, the Administration proposed a funding formula tied to the District's per pupil revenues. We also offered to continue to work with Madison Prep to find ways to lower these costs. Without having those conversations, the current proposal reduces Madison Prep's costs by changing from an instrumentality to a non-instrumentality model. This means that the savings are realized directly through reductions in staff compensation and benefits to levels lower than MMSD employees. The Administration has been willing to have conversations to determine how to make an instrumentality proposal work.
In summary, this administrative analysis finds concerns with Madison Prep's non-instrumentality proposal due to the level of governance autonomy called for in the plan and due to our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers. Based on these issues, we cannot recommend to the Board that Madison Prep be approved as a non-instrumentality charter school.
We know more needs to be done as a district and a community to eliminate our achievement gaps. We must continue to identify strategies both within our schools and our larger community to eliminate achievement gaps. These discussions, with the Urban League and with our entire community, need to continue on behalf of all of our students.
The problem concerns a "work preservation" clause in the Madison Teachers Inc. contract that requires all teaching duties in the district be performed by union teachers.
Exceptions to the clause have been made in the past, such as having private day-care centers offer 4-year-old kindergarten, but those resulted from agreements with the union. Such an agreement would nullify the current union contract under the state's new collective bargaining law, according to the district.
Caire said a recent law signed by Gov. Scott Walker could allow the district to amend its union contract. However, School Board member Ed Hughes, who is a lawyer, disagreed with Caire's interpretation.
Nerad said even if the union issue can be resolved, he still objects to the school seeking autonomy from all district policies except those related to health and safety of students.
.....
Caire said Madison Prep's specific policies could be ironed out as part of the charter contract after the School Board approves the proposal. He plans to hold a press conference Tuesday to respond to the district's review.
"The purpose of a charter school is to free you from red tape -- not to adopt the same red tape that they have," Caire said. "We hope the board will stop looking at all of those details and start looking at why we are doing this in the first place."
Over the last several months it's been a pleasure to witness the easing of ill will between the leadership of NJ's primary teachers' union, NJEA, and members of Gov. Christie's educational team. After several years of bitter recrimination from both sides of the table, everyone seems to have moved on from the trauma of our botched Race To The Top application and former Comm. Bret Schundler's resignation. Sure, the sting of last Spring's health and benefits reform bills, championed by Gov. Christie, must be a sore spot for union leadership, but there appears to be a shared recognition that we should recalibrate the balance between the needs of schoolchildren and the needs of teachers. Suddenly NJ's 100-year old tenure law is on the table - a boon for both student and professionals - and Ed. Comm. Cerf 's speech at NJEA's Annual Convention earlier this month and was courteously received (except for a few nasty tweets).
So we'll hold onto the progress and roll our eyes at the retro and reactive press release just out from NJEA President Barbara Keshishian, in which she claims, in outraged tones, that NJ's alleged achievement gap among black, white, Hispanic, and poor kids is a "classic strawman" on the part of Gov. Christie and "based on a deliberate misuse of the data."
Authorizers don't run charters; they oversee the administrators and school boards that handle day-to-day operations of a charter school. Authorizers are also primary decision makers on which schools to sponsor.
During the 20-year history of charter schools there have been examples of teachers starting schools, and some charters have unionized teachers.
MFT will be the first union to serve as a charter sponsor. Formally, it has created an organization called the Minnesota Guild of Charter Schools (informally 'the Guild') that will serve as authorizer.
This makes sense. I hope we see much more of this.
Elementary Support & Services
National Novel Writing Month
Future Problem Solving
Math enrichment
GEMS
William & Mary Literature groups
M2 and M3 Math groups
American Math Competition 8
Science enrichment pilot College for Kids I (support)
Middle School Support & Services
WCATY courses
Future Problem Solving
Online courses
Advanced Math courses
Assistance with Science Symposium
American Math Competition 8
College for Kids II (support)
Great Books Pilot
Hybrid Geometry Pilot
High School Support & Services
College Matters at UW Madison
Math Meets (competitions)
Respectful Relationship days
Leadership Conference (pilot, grant application in progress)
Assistance with High School Science Symposium
Mentor Services
1. Falk- Working with students in a writing group
2. Stephens- Working with a group of students in math
3. Lapham-1'1/2"dgrade-Math
4. Schenk- Science/math enrichment
5. Crestwood- Math enrichment
6. Crestwood- Math enrichment
7. Crestwood-Math enrichment
8. Franklin- Math enrichment
9. Randall- Math enrichment
10. Randall - Math enrichment
On Dec. 19, the Madison school board is scheduled to vote on whether to approve Madison Preparatory Academy, a charter school that would target at-risk minority students.
For more than 18 months, the proposal -- drawn up by the Urban League of Greater Madison as an ambitious step toward closing the district's racial achievement gap -- has polarized the community, with a broad range of critics taking aim on multiple fronts.
The proposal, at least by local standards, is a radical one, under which the Urban League would operate two largely taxpayer-funded, gender-specific secondary schools with an unprecedented level of autonomy. If approved, Madison Prep would open next fall with 120 sixth-graders and peak at 840 students in grades 6 through 12 by its seventh year.
Opponents say the Urban League's proposal combines flawed educational models, discredited science, fuzzy budgeting and unrealistic projections of student success. While some applaud certain elements of the proposal, like longer school days and academic years, they maintain that Madison Prep won't help enough students to justify the $17.5 million cost to the district over its first five years.
Madison schools aren't failing, by any stretch of the imagination, for many students.
In fact, if you're a white, middle-class family sending your children to public school here, your kids are likely getting an education that's on a par with Singapore or Finland -- among the best in the world.
However, if you're black or Latino and poor, it's an unquestionable fact that Madison schools don't as good a job helping you with your grade-point average, high school graduation, college readiness or test scores. By all these measures, the district's achievement gap between white and minority students is awful.
These facts have informed the stern (and legitimate) criticisms leveled by Urban League President Kaleem Caire and Madison Prep backers.
But they doesn't take into account some recent glimmers of hope that shouldn't be discounted or overlooked. Programs like AVID/TOPS support first-generation college-bound students in Madison public schools and are showing some successes. Four-year-old kindergarten is likely to even the playing field for the district's youngest students, giving them a leg up as they enter school. And, the data surrounding increasing numbers of kids of color participating in Advanced Placement classes is encouraging.
Stepping back from the local district and looking at education through a broader lens, it's easy to see that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have aimed to legislate, bribe and punish their way toward an unrealistic Lake Wobegon world where all the students are above average.
Remarkable. Are there some excellent teachers in Madison? Certainly. Does Madison's Administration seek best in the world results? A look at the math task force, seemingly on hold for years, is informative. The long one size fits all battle and the talented and gifted complaint are worth contemplating.
Could Madison be the best? Certainly. The infrastructure is present, from current spending of $14,963/student to the nearby UW-Madison, Madison College and Edgewood College backed by a supportive community.
How Madison Prep Can Be a Non-Instrumentality (Non-Union)?
Kaleem Caire, via email
December 2, 2011
Greetings Madison Prep.
Tomorrow afternoon, we are expecting to learn that MMSD's Administration will inform the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education that Madison Prep should not be approved. A possible reason we expect will be MMSD's concern that the current collective bargaining agreement between the District and Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) has a "work preservation clause" which the teacher's union advocated for long ago to ensure that it was the only game in town to represent public school teachers in Madison.
Below, is the cover note that I forwarded to Ed Hughes of the Board of Education and copied to a number of others, who had asked a thoughtful question about our proposal to establish Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school, we hope, in fall 2012. Also see the letter attached to this email.
---------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 2, 2011
Greetings Ed.
Attached, please find a letter that contains the answer to your question referenced in your email below. The letter contains the explanation of a path to which Madison Prep could be established as a non-instrumentality public charter school, under Wisconsin law, and in a way that would not violate the current collective bargaining agreement between MMSD and Madison Teachers Inc.
We look forward to answering any questions you or other members of the Board of Education may have.
Thank you so much and Many blessings to you and your family this holiday season.
Onward.
cc: Daniel Nerad, MMSD Superintendent
Dylan Pauly, MMSD Legal Counsel
MMSD Board of Education Members
ULGM Board of Directors
Madison Prep Board of Directors
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
Steve Goldberg, CUNA Mutual Foundation
This letter is intended to respond to your November 78,207I email and to suggest that there is a viable option for moving forward with Urban League's proposal for the Madison Preparatory Academy ("Madison Prep") that: [i) will reduce cost; and (ii) will not sacrifice the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement "Agreement" or "Contract") between the Madison Metropolitan School District ("MMSD" or "District") and Madison Teachers, Inc. ("MTI").
Your email asks for a response to a question concerning how the school district could authorize Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter without thereby violating the terms of the District's Agreement with MTI. Your email references a provision in the MTI Agreement that provides "that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certifìcated teacher, shall be performed only by'teachers."' .See Article I, Section 8.3.a. In addition you note that "the term 'teacher' refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit." See Article I, Section 8.2. You conclude your email by stating that "it appears that all teachers in MMSD schools -- including non-instrumentality charter schools - must be members of the MTI bargaining unit."
The Urban League is aware of the Agreement's language and concedes that the language, if enforceable, poses an obstacle as we look for School Board approval of the plan to open and operate a "non-instrumentality" school. Under an instrumentality charter, the employees of the charter school must be employed by the school board. Under a non-instrumentality charter, the school board may not be the employer of the charter school's staff. See S 118.40(7)(a). Thus, the statement in your email that all teachers, including those in a non-instrumentality charter school - "must be members of the MTI bargaining unit" and, presumably, employed by the school board is not permitted under Wisconsin law.
Under Wisconsin's charter school law the School Board has the exclusive authority to determine whether a school is an instrumentality or not an instrumentality of the school district. .See S 118.40(7)(a). That decision is an important decision reserved to the School Board alone. The effect of that decision drives whether teachers and staff must be, or cannot be, employees of the School Board. The language of the Contract deprives the School Board of the decision reserved to it under the statute and that language cannot be harmonized to give effect to both the statute and the Agreement. Alternatively the Contract language creates a situation whereby the School Board may exercise its statutory authority to approve a non-instrumentality charter but it must staff the school with school district employees, a result clearly prohibited under the statute. In our view the law trumps the Contract in either of these situations.
The situation described above could likely only be resolved in a court of law. The Contract includes a "savings clause" that contemplates that where a court invalidates a provision in the Agreement, the invalid provision is deleted and the remainder of the contract remains intact. See Article VIII, Section E.
The Urban League is, however, mindful that litigation is both expensive and time consuming. Moreover it is clear that the Contract language will become a prohibited subject of bargaining in the near future when the current Agreement expires. Unfortunately, the children we seek to serve, do not have the time to wait for that day.
Our second purpose in writing is to make you aware of a possible solution to a major obstacle here. One of the major obstacles in moving forward has been the cost associated with an instrumentality school coupled with MTI's reluctance to work with the District in modifying the Contract to reduce costs associated with staffing and certain essential features of Madison Prep, like an extended school day, As we understand it MTI does not want to modify the Contract because such a modification would result in an earlier application of 2077 Wisconsin Act L0 to the District, members of the bargaining unit and to MTI itself.
We understand MTI's reluctance to do anything that would hasten the application of Act 10 in the school district, With the passage of 2011. Wisconsin Act 65, that concern is no longer an obstacle.
Act 65 allows the parties to a collective bargaining agreement to enter into a memorandum of understanding that would run for the remaining term of the collective bargaining agreement, for the purpose of reducing the cost of compensation or fringe benefits in the collective bargaining agreement,
The Act also provides that entering into such a memorandum would not be considered a "modification" of the collective bargaining agreement for the purposes of Act 10. Act 65 was published on November 23,2077 and took effect the following day. The law allows the parties to a collective bargaining agreement to enter into such a memorandum no later than 90 days after the effective date of the law.
The Urban League believes that Act 65 gives the Board and MTI the opportunity to make changes that will facilitate cost reductions, based in compensation and fringe benefits, to help Madison Prep move forward. And, the law allows the parties to do so in a way that does not adversely impact the teachers represented by MTI or the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
For example, the parties could agree to reduce the staffing costs for Madison Prep, The parties could also agree that a longer school day would not have to cost more. And, the parties could agree that the work preservation clause referenced in the first part of this letter does not apply where the School Board has determined a charter school willbe a non-instrumentality of the District, a move that would also most certainly reduce costs. These changes would not be forced upon any existing MTI represented teacher as teachers would apply for vacancies in the school.
We hope that the School Board will give serious consideration to the opportunity presented by Act 65. 0n behalf of the Urban League of Greater Madison and Madison Preparatory Academy, we thank you for your support of Madison Prep.
Value-added and other types of growth models are probably the most controversial issue in education today. These methods, which use sophisticated statistical techniques to attempt to isolate a teacher's effect on student test score growth, are rapidly assuming a central role in policy, particularly in the new teacher evaluation systems currently being designed and implemented. Proponents view them as a primary tool for differentiating teachers based on performance/effectiveness.
Opponents, on the other hand, including a great many teachers, argue that the models' estimates are unstable over time, subject to bias and imprecision, and that they rely entirely on standardized test scores, which are, at best, an extremely partial measure of student performance. Many have come to view growth models as exemplifying all that's wrong with the market-based approach to education policy.
It's very easy to understand this frustration. But it's also important to separate the research on value-added from the manner in which the estimates are being used. Virtually all of the contention pertains to the latter, not the former. Actually, you would be hard-pressed to find many solid findings in the value-added literature that wouldn't ring true to most educators.
This past weekend the New York Times devoted two big op-eds to the decline of the suburb. In one, new urban theorist Chris Leinberger said that Americans were increasingly abandoning "fringe suburbs" for dense, transit-oriented urban areas. In the other, UC Berkeley professor Louise Mozingo called for the demise of the "suburban office building" and the adoption of policies that will drive jobs away from the fringe and back to the urban core.
Perhaps no theology more grips the nation's mainstream media -- and the planning community -- more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration's housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, "We've reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities."
Yet repeating a mantra incessantly does not make it true. Indeed, any analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census would make perfectly clear that rather than heading for density, Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities. During the 2000s, the Census shows, just 8.6% of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6% represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4%.
PHILANTHROPY: Are you as paranoid about vocational education as you were about business?
MR. GROVE: The details are of course different, but in this way, they are very similar. Paranoia in management involves trying to anticipate who intentionally or unintentionally will slow you down, or who will derail you. Usually this attitude is not taught in school, which is why I wrote my book. Now, as for vocational education, do you recall the words of the presidential report on education [A Nation at Risk] from 1983? It started out by saying, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Is this paranoia?
Well, the same thing applies to vocational education--only doubly so. Most people don't even realize the need for more highly trained workers. The assumption remains that technical education is for less intelligent people. The first item cut from educational budgets is vocational education. People are required to be suitably trained for their work requirements, and yet the classes that are required for this are cut to the bone. In some instances, students are halfway through the course when funding is cut and then they are sent home. We create a damned obstacle course for people who want to work!
Bernie Marcus is a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Sure, he knows his way around sheetrock and, yes, he can talk in great detail about remodeling a bathroom or putting in a backyard deck. But for Marcus, home improvement projects represent a part of something much more profound. Doing it yourself means being able to take control of your own life, shaping your own destiny, daring to accomplish more than you imagine possible. It's an essential part of being an American. After all, it's what inspired his signature project. He built a company from scratch, and turned his idea into a household name with a $60 billion market cap. Bernie Marcus built Home Depot.
"It happened because of us," says Marcus. "I mean, we had no money. When we opened Home Depot in 1979, we were broke. I had just been fired. Some of us were on the verge of bankruptcy. But we had a great idea, and we had some people who were willing to support us. And we put in the work--we put in sweat and tears, our hearts and souls. But today Home Depot has more than 300,000 people working for it. We built it all."
Two Madison School Board members who say they are likely to vote no on Dec. 19 when the Madison Preparatory Academy proposal comes before the board for final approval or denial have some ideas they believe would better serve all of Madison's students.
Marj Passman, School Board vice president, says she hopes the local Urban League and its president, Kaleem Caire, will pursue funding for Madison Prep as a private school if the proposal fails to gain approval from a majority of board members. Passman says it's likely she will vote against Madison Prep as a public charter school, although she will look at an administrative analysis due by Dec. 4 prior to making her final decision.
"There's been a lot of community support and I'm sure he (Caire) can come up with the money for the school as a private academy," Passman told me in a recent phone interview.
"Then he could pursue the school in its purest form, he won't have to compromise his ideas, and he can showcase how all these elements are going to work to help eliminate the achievement gap, increase graduation rates and raise GPAs for minority students," she says.
...
Board member Maya Cole also tells me she is a "pretty firm no vote" against the Madison Prep proposal. What Cole would like to see as an alternative is a charter school embedded within an existing district middle school like Wright or Toki, using district staff.
Black and Hispanic students in a special Madison School District college preparatory program have higher grade point averages, attendance rates and test scores than their peers who aren't in the program, according to a UW-Madison analysis.
The study of the AVID/TOPS program -- geared toward preparing low-income, minority students for college -- comes as the Madison School Board contemplates a proposal to create Madison Preparatory Academy, a controversial charter school with similar goals.
Some opponents of Madison Prep argue the AVID/TOPS program is a proven way of helping close the achievement gap between white and minority students.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the district is pushing ahead with a proposal to expand the program in middle school. It currently serves 491 students at East, West, Memorial and La Follette high schools and Black Hawk Middle School.
"I would not tell you that AVID alone will make the difference," Nerad said. "But it's a very important piece for us."
The new Brookings index on school choice is interesting and worth a look but as I go through it two things seem to jump out. First, despite the rhetoric in the public square there still isn't a great deal of real choice in education. And second, the index seems to reward places (relatively speaking) that have limited choices but still do all the things you should do (information, transportation etc...nonetheless). That's like having an incredible restaurant with easy valet parking, wonderful fresh food, great service, and lovely ambiance - but that can only seat four people a night. Nice but limited.
Lately David Foster Wallace seems to be in the air: Is his style still influencing bloggers? Is Jeffrey Eugenides' bandana-wearing depressed character in The Marriage Plot based on him? My own reasons for thinking about him are less high-flown. Like lots of other professors, I am just now sitting down to write the syllabus for a class next semester, and the extraordinary syllabuses of David Foster Wallace are in my head.
I am not generally into the reverential hush that seems to surround any mention of David Foster Wallace's name by most writers of my generation or remotely proximate to it; I am not enchanted by some fundamental childlike innocence people seem to find in him. I am suspicious generally of those sorts of hushes and enchantments, and yet I do feel in the presence of his careful crazy syllabuses something like reverence.
Wallace doesn't accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. "Even in a seminar class," his syllabus states, "it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can't always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof --- points out supra, our class can't really function if there isn't student participation--it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways."
The Obama administration's decision to allow states to request waivers from No Child Left Behind was a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. Four in five schools across the country will be deemed "failing" this coming year if nothing stops the "train wreck" that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will inflict upon the nation's schools. These include schools in which the vast majority of students are proficient in math and English, as well as schools in which students, teachers, and principals are making real progress in the face of formidable challenges: concentrated poverty, large numbers of students with special-needs, and state budget cuts that have severely reduced the resources needed to address the obstacles to learning.
Duncan's characterization of NCLB is apt; a recent National Research Council study found that 10 years of test-based accountability "reform" has delivered no significant progress for students. Throughout the country, pressure to improve test scores has led to an increase in intense test preparation. In many cases, this has led to less time for actual learning and reduced the ability of schools to respond to the learning needs of the most disadvantaged students. Instead of focusing on how to deliver high quality instruction schools have become preoccupied with how to produce increases in test scores. Reports of widespread cheating on state exams appearing in city after city are increasingly viewed not as isolated instances of teacher misbehavior, but as a consequence of high-stakes testing.
Parents gathered in the auditorium of the Talented and Gifted School for Young Scholars on Tuesday morning were not happy.
Their school, one of only three citywide gifted and talented programs in Manhattan, shares space in an East Harlem building with three middle schools. They learned recently that one of the schools, Esperanza Preparatory Academy, wants to expand to a high school, and they are concerned that the expansion will cause overcrowding and bring other problems.
Tuesday's meeting was called by the Education Department last week after parents flooded the office with calls and e-mails expressing concern about the addition of high school grades when their school has children as young as kindergarten.
Colleges should examine a wider set of social, economic and personal characteristics to determine how they can help students remain in school and graduate, a new report has found (PDF report link).
Aside from SAT scores and high school grade point averages, students' success in college relies on a number of other factors -- often overlooked -- that more accurately predict whether they will stay in school, according to the report scheduled for release Tuesday by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.
Using information from a national survey of college freshmen in public and private institutions as well as graduation data, the report found, for example, that students who visit a college before enrolling, participate in clubs and other activities and those who have used the Internet for research and homework are more likely to complete a degree earlier than others. The costs of attending a college and the institution's size also contribute to students' success, the report found.
Chicago Public Schools officials plan to overhaul 10 schools next year, six of which will be managed by a private organization in the latest move by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration to turn to the private sector to aid poorly performing public schools.
The proposed overhauls--commonly called turnarounds--involve the firing of existing staff and improvements to school curriculum and culture. Turnarounds are the first step in a series of school actions that include consolidating and closing underperforming schools.
A new state law requires CPS to announce all school closings and turnarounds by Thursday. There was vociferous opposition to any proposed closings at recent public hearings, which were also required by the law, even though though the list of targeted schools had not yet been released.
The elementary schools slated for turnaround are: Pablo Casals, 3501 W. Potomac Ave.; Melville W. Fuller, 4214 S. Saint Lawrence Ave.; Theodore Herzl, 3711 W. Douglas Blvd.; Marquette, 6550 S Richmond St.; Brian Piccolo, 1040 N Keeler Ave.; Amos Alonzo Stagg, 7424 S Morgan St.; Wendell Smith, 744 E 103rd St. and Carter G. Woodson South Elementary Schools, 4414 S Evans. The Chicago Vocational Career Academy, at 2100 E 87th St., and Tilden Career Community Academy, 4747 S Union Ave., high schools also are targeted for turnaround.
In his first algebra class last year, Mani Chadaga slumped low in his front-row seat and pretended to read his new textbook intently.
Mani could make himself only so inconspicuous: He was, after all, a second-grader in a junior high class at St. Paul's Capitol Hill Gifted and Talented Magnet School.
So he stopped trying.
Soon, he was piping up with solutions to the teacher's questions and standing before his stumped classmates, explaining how he arrived at them. These days, as a third-grader juggling Algebra II and geometry, he kneels in his seat, only a smidgen of his early shyness and all his humility intact.
The Madison School District has agreed to terms for releasing more than 1,000 sick notes submitted by teachers who missed work in February during mass protests over collective bargaining.
The district will remove the teachers' names and other identifying information from the notes, under an agreement reached Monday with the Wisconsin State Journal, which requested the records under the state's Open Records Law.
"It's essentially what we asked for in May," State Journal Editor John Smalley said Tuesday. "It was never our intention to publish any names or individual situations, but to look at the collective situation of all of these sick notes and how the district as an institution handled it."
School Board President James Howard said the agreement protects teachers while complying with the newspaper's needs and a Nov. 21 court ruling ordering the district to turn over the notes. The newspaper sued the district for the records after the district denied requests for them.
Many friends of mine are upset with the legal battle the Wisconsin State Journal waged to obtain the 1,000 sick notes Madison teachers used to get off work during the union protests in February. My own radio host and boss, Kurt Baron, referred to the paper as the "Wisconsin State Urinal" in describing his decision to no longer have the paper as his home page online. Some called into the show and promised to cancel their subscriptions.
Teachers should have a right to individual privacy over their medical records. We shouldn't know whether John Q. cited herpes or hemorrhoids on his doctor's note.
I am less sympathetic, however, to the teachers' right to collective privacy. As long as their names are redacted, the public has the right to know if 273 teachers cited malaria and 345 claimed to suffer from ebola.
Unfortunately the recent ruling will violate individual privacy by allowing the State Journal to see the names of the teachers on the sick notes.
No one wants to see the Kansas City School District recover just enough to regain provisional accreditation and limp along in wounded form for another decade or so.
Kansas Citians are looking for an administrative structure capable of running schools that meet the state's expectations and prepare students for college and jobs.
With the school district scheduled to become unaccredited on Jan. 1, the Missouri Board of Education is contemplating structural changes. Chris Nicastro, the education commissioner, has spent considerable time trying to figure out what to recommend to the board when it meets Thursday and Friday. At one point, she asked members of the Kansas City school board if they'd be willing to step aside in favor of an appointed board. Most would prefer to remain in charge.
School board governance has not served Kansas City well in recent decades. Candidate choices have mostly been weak. Voter participation in elections has been abysmal. Boards have been factious and meddlesome.
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
A Virginia company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers -- in which children as young as 5 can learn at home at taxpayer expense -- is facing a backlash from critics who are questioning its funding, quality and oversight.
K12 Inc. of Herndon has become the country's largest provider of full-time public virtual schools, upending the traditional American notion that learning occurs in a schoolhouse where students share the experience. In K12's virtual schools, learning is largely solitary, with lessons delivered online to a child who progresses at her own pace.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she's concerned about the economy, the deficit, and the "jaded" nature of American politics - but she says the country's "biggest single problem" is with the public school system.
Rice, speaking to CBS' Bob Schieffer on a special Thanksgiving edition of "Face the Nation," argued that the nation's educational system is failing crucial populations, and that "it's gonna drive us into class warfare like we've never seen before."
Responding to a question about the current state of American politics, Rice argued that "we've become a bit jaded as a country."
But she said that wasn't her biggest concern with the future of America right now.
"I think we've got a deeper problem," she said. "It speaks to the way that, for instance, I and my family got ahead. I think the biggest single problem we've got is the K-12 education system."
English class is about to start, and Taneli Nordberg introduces the day's guests: a row of fresh-faced university students sitting in the back of the classroom. They're training to be teachers at the University of Helsinki.
Nordberg, 31, wants the eighth-graders to become teachers for a moment.
"I want you to tell the teacher trainees something you would like them to do when teaching and something you want them to avoid doing," he explains. "In English, please."
The students tumble up to the chalkboards and start writing. Some of the advice is predictable - "not too much homework" - but much of it is insightful.
The exercise, though short and light, is something of a microcosm of the Finnish educational approach - engagement and collaboration between teacher and student, a comfortable atmosphere, and the expectation of quality in how students express themselves.
Over the past decade, students in Finland have soared on international measures of achievement. They've continued to post some of the best scores in the developed world in reading, math and science, according to a respected international exam. The country has one of the narrowest gaps in achievement between its highest and lowest-performing schools, and on average spends less per pupil than the United States.
Students in the Madison School District's dual-language immersion program are less likely than students in English-only classrooms to be black or Asian, come from low-income families, need special education services or have behavioral problems, according to a district analysis.
School Board members have raised concerns about the imbalance of diversity and other issues with the popular program.
As a result, Superintendent Dan Nerad wants to put on hold expansion plans at Hawthorne, Stephens and Thoreau elementaries and delay the decision to the spring on how to expand the program to La Follette High School in 2013.
"While the administration remains committed to the (dual-language) program and to the provision of bilingual programming options for district students, I believe there is substantial value in identifying, considering and responding to these concerns," Nerad wrote in a memo to the board.
In Madison's program, both native English and Spanish speakers receive 90 percent of their kindergarten instruction in Spanish, with the mix steadily increasing to 50-50 by fourth grade.
Parents across the Washington region will soon have more readily available -- and useful-- information about how their public schools are doing, the result of new initiatives underway at the local and state level for reporting and displaying education data.
The District, Maryland and Virginia are pledging some changes as part of their applications to the Obama administration for exemption from unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, among them the mandate for 100 percent proficiency by 2014 on standardized reading and math tests.
Alas, Milwaukee Public Schools: The School Board and administration will never take the kind of bold action that's needed to stabilize the financial picture. The system is awash in empty buildings, and they won't do anything about it. They'll never take real action to improve what goes on in classrooms. It's hopeless.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. And maybe wrong about the fourth one.
Without much fuss or attention, this has been an autumn of big change in the way MPS is run. It is still a highly troubled system, but it's time to give credit to the leaders for taking action on some of the things that most threaten MPS. You can criticize them for not acting sooner or for other things, but let's take advantage of some holiday cheer to look at recent events. There's still life in the lumbering giant.
If you ask Superintendent Gregory Thornton, he'll tell you what's under way is "a quiet storm, and, when we wake up, the flowers will have bloomed."
(Thornton, by the way, seems to be talking like a guy who isn't going to pack up and leave soon, which has been a matter of speculation since shortly after he arrived 17 months ago.)
I have been taking an Under-Graduate Course in Computer Science and Engineering(in short B.Tech CSE) in a reputed Private Engineering in India for one and half years.My college has given me 7.5 grades till now. I would rate them 5/10. I wanted to give them 2 or 3 but presence of Infrastructure and some encouraging professors saved them.
Every day when I go to college I expect to learn something new that would encourage me for research and thinking. And after coming back to my hostel room, I do have something new that make me thinking. But mind you its not because of the college or their intensive study program that I'm paying high fees for; but it is the Internet, the articles at Hacker News and Reddit and other sites that does this. Whenever I get time I tend to open these sites on my not so good Nokia touchscreen phone. It doesn't have much of features that i can boost of but it does my work. That is the state of our private Universities.
Well I agree with my college friends that most of the students that come to private universities don't want education but a degree, a campus life and guys they can hook up with. They have their contacts and their Dad's business after that. Most of the students that come here want spoon feeding. Tell them what is important and coming in exam and they will cram it, cram it so much they can recite it word to word. But still it doesn't mean professors also does spoon feeding for them and come here for high salaries, comfort and increasing their teaching experience so that later on can go to some Top Government College.
Wisconsin needs a new system of school accountability, but implementing effective measures will be difficult because there are so many different ideas about what it takes to make a good school.
The best schools have high standards in the basics - reading, math, science and writing. But they also excel at art, music and gym. They are places with strong leadership, inspired teachers and an organic system of training and mentoring.
To create more such schools and hold all schools accountable in a fair manner, though, requires all those with an interest in that issue to be at the table. Unfortunately, that's not the case now.
When Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers formed a team to improve school accountability, the Wisconsin Education Association Council chose to sit this one out.
We get it: The state's largest teachers union has plenty of reason to be upset with Walker for stripping it and other public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights - and for cutting funding to schools. But we still think the union's refusal to take a place at the table was a mistake. The union needs to be involved in such efforts. Now, it's on the outside looking in.
Wisconsin's current assessment system is the oft-criticized WKCE, which has some of our nation's lowest standards.
A Pivot (someone who works for Pivotal Labs) gave an excellent presentation on observational astronomy the other day. The presentation was so well done that I think it could easily inspire people to learn more about astronomy.
This is one of the questions I think about a lot. I truly believe that for education to be effective you need to tap in to intrinsic motivation. You can't rely on extrinsic motivators like grades otherwise you run the risk of losing all motivation once the extrinsic motivators are removed.
Passion is a vague term, but it's often to used to identify some subject or activity that people are strongly intrinsically motivated to do. You never hear people talk about passions rooted in the desire to get a good grade or a big bonus or the chance of promotion. People talk about being passionate about something because of the importance it plays in the world or how it makes them feel at fundamental level.
The new Advanced Learning Task Force (or Steering Committee or Advisory Committee or whatever) has had its first meeting. It's kind of a mess.
I'm on the committee. So is Melissa. So are Dr. Vaughan and Dr. Thompson. There are principals, central staff, teachers and community members. The committee is too big for any real discussion. It will be almost impossible for it to reach any authentic consensus. I suspect that staff will just write our conclusions for us and then allow us a final meeting to argue for small edits - which they will unilaterally decide to accept or reject. That's how the Demographic Task Force worked.
The committee met once in November and will meet again in December. By that time we will already be overdue with our recommendation to FACMAC on the placement of elementary north-end APP. FACMAC needs it now. Without it, they will just move forward with their decisions without input from the Advanced Learning Committee.
Eric M. DeHays has a vision -- a vision of every elementary student in the Ashburnham-Westminster Regional School District holding an iPad.
And, like most visions, he had to start small -- kindergarten small.
He first introduced his idea earlier this year to the School Committee. His proposal sought to implement a pilot program that would put an Apple iPad2 in the hands of every kindergartner in the district this fall.
As technology coordinator for the district, Mr. DeHays said he knew it was the way to go. He drew partly on firsthand knowledge, he said.
"Kids are using them earlier and earlier in life," he said. "My son Kenyon was a kindergartner last year and I looked at the way he would use the technology (iPad). He was not trained properly. He was trained to see it as a gaming system, but it is more than that."
When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released their 2011 results, things seemed to be working out well for Wisconsin's public schools. The state posted above average numbers in key subjects like reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grade.
However, a deeper look into those numbers exposes some troubling trends. Namely, Wisconsin's Hispanic students are regressing when it comes to reading in the state's classrooms.
The state's 2011 results held steady at 202 points for fourth-grade reading amongst Hispanic pupils. This was down from a score of 208 in 2007 and less than the state's score of 209 in 1992, the first iteration of the test. In eighth grade, the average score dropped from 250 to 248. This is a decrease from 1998's average of 256 - the first year the test was recorded for the group.
These results highlight a grim trend. Over the past two decades, reading achievement amongst the state's Hispanic students has regressed. While national averages have seen a growth of 5.7 percent in fourth grade reading and 5.5 percent in eighth grade reading amongst Hispanic test takers, Wisconsin has posted losses. The state's scores dropped by 3.4 percent and 2.8 percent in the two grades, respectively.
Earlier this year Wisconsin teachers and their supporters compared Wisconsin and Texas academically and claimed that Wisconsin had better achievement because it ranked higher on ACT/SAT scores. The fact that this claim ignored the ethnic composition of the states, prompted David Burge to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to compare educational achievement within the same ethnic groups. His conclusion, based on the 2009 NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (3 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 18 comparisons), was Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
The 2011 NAEP results are now available for Reading and
Mathematics. The updated conclusion (2 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 12 comparisons) is Longhorns 12 - Badgers 0. Not only did Texas students outperform Wisconsin students in every one of the twelve ethnicity-controlled comparisons, but Texas students exceeded the national average in all 12 comparisons. Wisconsin students were above the average 3 times, below the average 8 times, and tied the average once.
Charter schools, once considered the experimental outliers of public education, are poised to go mainstream in Santa Clara County.
That's due in part to sheer numbers. Eight new charter schools opened this school year, taking in 1,600 students. Last week alone, five charter schools were approved to open next August in the county. But perhaps more important, key places in the county have seen a transformation in attitude, from hostility and suspicion to acceptance and collaboration.
The growing number of charters cements the county's reputation, along with the giant Los Angeles Unified district, as the most charter-friendly place in the state. In a month or so, the county school board will consider approving 20 more charters schools for Rocketship Education. The increase comes amid widespread growth of charter schools in California. Today about 7 percent of the state's public school children attend a charter, which are public schools operating independently from local school boards and most of the state Education Code.
Scott Walker is now waging his war on public education by coming up with accountability standards that favor charter and private schools. His School and District Accountability Design Team consists of thirty business and education professionals from across the state.
The Design Team is led by "Quad-Chairs" Governor Scott Walker, Senator Luther Olsen, chair of the Senate Education Committee, Representative Steve Kestell, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, and Tony Evers, State Superintendent of Schools in Wisconsin. The proceedings are being facilitated by a team of high-paid consultants working with the American Institute for Research (AIR), a company that racked up $299 million in revenue for the 2009 fiscal year.
College students wait in line to hand in their resumes to get interview opportunities from a company at a job fair held on the campus of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in Shanghai, China.
Much like the U.S., China is aiming to address a problematic demographic that has recently emerged: a generation of jobless graduates. China's solution to that problem, however, has some in the country scratching their heads.
China's Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.
Dear Colleague: I am writing this letter because I sincerely fear that the future of our children and grandchildren could be in jeopardy. While there are numerous important issues facing America today, one continues to be high on my priority list, K-12 Math and Science. What scares me the most is that no one seems to care - not parents, teachers, administrators, politicians or business people - that we have FALLEN TO 25th GLOBALLY IN MATH.
It has been our strength in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and the resultant innovation that fueled the great businesses of the 20th century. Automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, space travel, telecommunications and the Internet are just a few industries that are reliant on strong Math and Science skills and have produced a significant number of good jobs. There is a very good chance that our personal good fortunes can in some way be tied to the early innovation of our grandparents.
This comparative table needs no detailed explanation. Based on 2009 statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), it clearly shows how far we have fallen and how competitive the rest of the world has become
If you spend any amount of time on Facebook, eventually you'll see a copied-and-pasted status update that looks something like this: "If you learned long division by hand, bicycled to school in the rain, drank lead-tainted water directly from the hose, played fast-pitch baseball in the dark with shiftless strangers, skinned your knee and ignored it until it became infected and led to a series of painful brain hemorrhages, sucked mercury from thermometers like marrow from the bones of dead hobos, and lived to tell about it, repost this and be thankful for the good old days."
The implication, of course, is that kids are too mollycoddled these days, and we're overthinking their upbringing - why can't we just do things the way we used to? After all, we turned out fine.
I can't help but believe that this notion - as well as sharp resistance to it - has contributed greatly to the statewide rift over collective bargaining that's culminated in the current gubernatorial recall effort.
After all, in the past, kids did just fine under the tutelage of bitter, underpaid nuns and schoolmarms. Why spend more money for worse results? Teachers deserve a pay cut. They're not holding up their end of the bargain.
I suspect that this attitude is actually fairly pervasive. Commenting on one of my recent blog posts, a reader said this: "Go back to teaching math, science, history and [E]nglish the way it was taught in the 50's. Students either passed or failed based on work not on some stupid self-esteem."
What is it about academics and Lady Gaga? Last year it was a freshman writing course at the University of Virginia titled "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity." This fall there's an upper-division sociology course at the University of South Carolina titled "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame." Meghan Vicks, a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Colorado, co-edits a postmodernist online journal, "Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga," in which the names "Judith Butler" and "Jean Baudrillard" drip as thickly as summer rain and the tongue-tripping sentences read like this: "And her project?--To deconstruct the very pop culture that creates and worships her, and to explore and make problematic the hackneyed image of the pop icon while flourishing in the clichéd role itself."
And now Gaga has reached the very pinnacle of academic recognition: a Harvard affiliation. On Nov. 2 she announced that she and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Society will launch a nonprofit foundation, to be called Born This Way (after one of Gaga's songs), which will focus on mentoring teenagers and combating bullying.
What is fascinating is how, well, gaga the tenured scholars and highly placed academic administrators are for the 25-year-old singer whose main claim to fame is her rise from unknown to superstar and multiple Grammy winner in just three years. She managed this feat mostly on the basis of outré costumes and transgressive dancing--plus her world-class flair for self-promotion--rather than her ho-hum musical ability. Mathieu Deflem, the sociology professor who is teaching the Gaga course at South Carolina, for example, owns more than 300 of her records, maintains a fan website called gagafrontrow.net, and (according to a 2010 New York Times article) has attended more than 28 of her live concerts, following her from city to city around the world. Similarly, Harvard's Berkman Center is a well-funded interdisciplinary think tank whose faculty consists of prestigious professors of law, engineering, and business at Harvard (two of the biggest names are Lawrence Lessig and Charles Ogletree). But when the forthcoming Gaga-Berkman partnership went public last week, the center's mental heavyweights sounded as besotted as the teen-age girls and starstruck gays who hang onto every Gaga Twitter tweet. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who is the Berkman Center's co-director, praised as "impressive" the "research" that Gaga had done and hailed the forthcoming partnership as "a good chance for Harvard to be one University."
Gaga's faculty fans like to clothe their obsessive interest in her with a dense coat of academic-speak. Christa Romanosky, the graduate student at U.Va. who made Gaga the centerpiece of her freshman writing course last year, told the student newspaper, the Daily Cavalier, "We're exploring how identity is challenged by gender and sexuality and how Lady Gaga confronts this challenge." The reading list for Deflem's course at South Carolina includes several articles about Gaga by Victor Corona, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Corona's writing is a kudzu-like tangle of po-mo jargon: "Gaga's hypermodern gospel of liberation hints at the irrelevance of truth or, rather, the creation of one's own truth, a performance that is relentlessly enacted until some version of it becomes true."
Yet Corona has nothing on Judith "Jack" Halberstam, English professor and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. In an essay analyzing Gaga's Grammy-nominated 2010 music video "Telephone" for Gaga Stigmata, Halberstam drops trendy poststructuralist surnames like coins into a wishing well: "[I]t is a [Michel] Foucaultian take on prison and 'technological entrapment'; here... it has been read as the channeling of [Judith] Butler's 'Lesbian Phallus'; it is obscene, murderous, cruel to animals, misogynist, man-hating, homophobic and heterophobic; and I think you could safely place it as a [Gilles] Deleuzian exploration of flow and affect not to mention an episode in Object Oriented Philosophy. So whether the philosophy in question is drawn from [Slavoj] Zizek on speed, [Avital] Ronell on crack or [Quentin] Meillassoux on ecstasy, this video obviously chains a few good ideas to a few very good bodies and puts thought into motion." Neither Halberstam nor Corona permit any negative assessments of their idol. Corona characterized a recent critical biography, Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga, as "embittered."
Since Gaga's academic fan base indulges heavily in "theory," as the po-mo types like to call it, allow me to indulge in my own "theory" about why college professors and other self-proclaimed avant-garde intellectuals have taken her to their bosoms. Take note of the academic fields represented by the scholars I have quoted above: sociology (Deflem and Corona), English (Halberstam), comparative literature (Vicks), and creative writing (Romanosky). Once those were real fields, with genuine bodies of knowledge to be studied and then enlarged by their scholarly practitioners. English professors taught and wrote about the literature of English-speaking nations. Sociologists studied the writings of Emil Durkheim and C. Wright Mills and built upon their paradigms for understanding how human beings function in social groups. Instructors of freshman writing focused on teaching their students how to write, often using models of particularly effective rhetoric and style.
Now, it seems, professors and their graduate students want to do anything but teach or do research in the fields with which they are supposedly affiliated. Sociologists want to devote class time to their record collections. English professors want to gush on about music videos. Writing instructors want to immerse their students in "gender and sexuality," not the mechanics of constructing a coherent term paper. In short, professors want to teach pop culture and nothing but pop culture. Christa Romanosky, for example, was hardly unusual in turning her freshman writing class into a class about something else besides writing. The freshman writing course list for this fall at U.Va. includes sections titled "Gender in Film," "Graffiti and Remix Culture," "Cinematic Shakespeare," "Queer Studies," "Race Matters," "Pirates," and "Female Robots." Fortunately for themselves, those professors who have turned the humanities and social sciences into vehicles for indulging their hobbies have the vast and unintelligible apparatus of postmodern theory to give their fanboy preoccupations intellectual respectability. Or at least to make it look that way to outsiders--such as parents--who might wonder why they are spending up to $6,000 per course so that little Johnny or Jenna can write an essay about "Telephone."
I admit that I'm not much of a fan of Lady Gaga. I find her music monotonous, although she cleverly camouflages that defect with histrionic visuals and shocking costumes. I give her an A+, however, for brains, a sure market sense, and an entrepreneurial spirit worthy of Henry A. Ford. She has also snookered an entire generation of academics into deeming her profound. The Harvard Business School has just added Lady Gaga to its curriculum, with a case study of the decisions she and her manager made that catapulted her to fame. Now that's where Lady Gaga belongs as an object of scholarly study.
Reading science books for the general public, you'll often find physicists talking about elegance, beauty and words of the like describing laws or theories.
The Wikipedia has an entry for "Mathematical Beauty". Another entry says "Many mathematicians talk about the elegance of mathematics, its intrinsic aesthetics and inner beauty. Simplicity and generality are valued. There is beauty in a simple and elegant proof [...]".
The Spanish journal El Pais is publishing each week a mathematical challenge to its readers to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Royal Mathematics Society.
Last week's challenge was to solve the sides of the different inner squares that compose the following rectangle, knowing that the red one has a side of 3.
As my previous post described, things are looking up at Leopold Elementary School. Leopold, the largest elementary school in Madison, has strong leadership and a talented and hard-working staff. Their efforts are paying positive dividends for the school's 700+ young students.
There's a millstone around Leopold's neck, however, and it's called No Child Left Behind. According to that much-maligned federal law, Leopold is a "School Identified for Improvement" (SIFI).
What gives? If so many signs point toward Leopold succeeding, why do the feds consider that it is falling short.
While many criticize the Ted Kennedy / Bush No Child Left Behind initiative, we parents certainly have a great deal more information on our publicly financed schools than before. For that, I am thankful. I am also thankful that NCLB has, to some extent, increased attention on our schools, including curricular issues.
For the past five years, ConnCAN has analyzed the state's graduation rates; this Issue Brief provides a more detailed examination of the latest data. In addition to relatively flat graduation rates across the board in Connecticut, the data reveal dramatic, persistent gaps by race.1 These numbers point to an urgent need for policy change to reverse these trends. By 2020, nearly one-third of Connecticut's population and nearly half of the youngest workers (25-29 year olds) will be non-white.2 If we fail to increase graduation rates significantly, especially for students of color, we risk seeing a continued increase in the proportion of children who are not prepared for success in our state--and we put our state's economic future in peril.
As with previous years, our analysis also reveals that Connecticut State Department of Education graduation rates are significantly higher than the rates reported in Education Week's Diplomas Count report. Edu- cation Week uses a more accurate cohort method to calculate these rates. Connecticut plans to use this method beginning with the class of 2009.3 The analyses in this report draw on data for the Class of 2008, which is the most recent data available from both the Connecticut State Depart- ment of Education and from Education Week's Diplomas Count report.4
The Baltimore school system will launch its first districtwide Saturday School initiative in December, a program promised by city schools CEO Andrés Alonso to help remedy declining scores on state tests.
The $3 million Saturday School program will run for 10 weeks, primarily targeting students who scored basic in math on the 2011 Maryland School Assessments. Students in grades four through eight are eligible for the program, which will offer between 20 and 30 hours of additional math instruction for up to 7,000 students before the 2012 assessments in March.
A principal whose school will host one of the programs said she is convinced that the additional instructional time will benefit her students.
Back in January, we launched the Get Smart Connecticut campaign, calling on our state leaders to staff smart (improve the way we evaluate and retain teachers) and spend smart (fix our broken school funding system). This is our report
to you, the people who seek meaningful education reform in Connecticut, about what happened during the 2011 legislative session.
To be sure, the legislature made some modest gains on the education front. But as an advocacy movement, we hold our leaders and ourselves accountable for meaningful policy change, the kind of change that will close our state's achievement gap and improve opportunities for even our highest performing students. How did we do on our two legislative goals? Well, to put it plainly, we got bupkis. That's right--the legislature did not pass any legislation to improve Connecticut's teacher evaluation and layoff policies or to fix our broken school finance system.
We could look at that and say, wow, nothing happened, so let's just pack it up and go home. But we have no desire to call it quits. In fact, we're more motivated now than ever to push forward. Despite the fact that legislation on these two issues was not enacted, we're proud that the statewide conversation about wholesale education reform has changed dramatically during this campaign. When we consider the public dialogue around fixing the education funding system and effectively evaluating teachers, we are incredibly hopeful.
Washington state education officials know a lot more about your kids than they ever knew about you.
They can now track a child from kindergarten through college enrollment and soon will be able to tell you everything about every kid who has gone to school in Washington from preschool through their first job.
Everything includes every school they attended, every achievement test they passed or failed, their ethnic identity, whether they qualified for free lunch, what college they chose, if they had to take remedial courses, when they started college, and more.
Of course this information is anonymous to outside viewers, including researchers and the public, but it gives local school officials a lot to comb through to find ways to improve their preparation of students for college and the world.
Last week, I posted a quick and dirty reading of the DPI/WASD survey on the impact of the biennial budget on school districts. I thought that the survey needs a more thorough vetting but that it seemed to be a polemical document and did not support the claims of disaster that some are making in response to it.
Jay Bullock tries to defend the survey but I am afraid that he totally misses the mark. I have no reason to doubt that a number of districts had some kind of staff reduction. Most did not but it appears that somewhere in the neighborhood of 42% of the surveyed districts did.
But the doesn't tell us much. How deep were the reductions? How do they relate to changes in enrollment? What impact, if any, do they have on the delivery of services. Jay thinks that any reduction in staffing is a catastrophe, writing "[s]o, yes, a lot of districts were able to stave off disaster in this area but, you know, a full third didn't. " (emphasis in original)
Although he didn't ask for it in his re-election campaign, Mayor Greg Ballard could become the boss of Indianapolis Public Schools in the coming year.
The most likely plan would include mayoral appointment of the School Board, combined with a decentralization of IPS. Schools would have an independence similar to what charter schools have, along with strict accountability to the mayor for performance.
A formal proposal along these lines will come from The Mind Trust, a local education reform organization led by David Harris, who was the city's charter school czar during Bart Peterson's administration. A shift in oversight of IPS would have to be approved by the General Assembly and Gov. Mitch Daniels. Informal talks about IPS reform took place earlier this year among Republican and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly as well as Indianapolis civic leaders.
Newt Gingrich has some unconventional ideas about education reform. He wants every state to open a work-study college where students work 20 hours a week during the school year and full-time in the summer and then graduate debt-free.
In poverty stricken K-12 districts, Mr. Gingrich said that schools should enlist students as young as 9 to14 to mop hallways and bathrooms, and pay them a wage. Currently child-labor laws and unions keep poor students from bootstrapping their way into middle class, Mr. Gingrich said.
"This is something that no liberal wants to deal with," he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on Friday, according to Politico.
Let's see: Longer school year, parent report cards, meaningful teacher evaluations and bonus pay, union staff, teacher compensation of between $60,000 and $65,000.
Sounds about right to me. Where do I sign up?
Unfortunately, I can't, because while this seems like a pretty good model for a proposed charter school targeting under-performing, low-income minority students -- really, for any public school -- it was looking less and less possible last week.
The sticking points are an overly rigid Madison teachers union contract and a punitive new state law that pretty much makes tinkering with that contract tantamount to killing it.
Or, to put it another way, the issue, as it so often is, is money.
Under the proposal released last month by the backers of Madison Preparatory Academy, the school would employ union teachers at salaries of about $47,000, with benefits bringing total compensation to between $60,000 and $65,000.
In its own analysis of Madison Prep's financials, though, the district found the school would be required to pay about $76,000 per teacher, with benefits bringing total compensation to about $100,000.
As California's budget crisis deepens, many fear that education funding could soon be placed back on the chopping block. Per-student funding of K-12 schools has already been reduced by more than 20 percent. If budgets are cut further, will it even be possible to get a high-quality education in California public schools?
The simple answer is yes. A high-quality education might be priceless in today's economy. But it doesn't have to be overly expensive to provide.
In this recession, nearly every state has already cut services. In fact, "elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states," according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
But if we operate under the assumption that primary and secondary education have to be expensive to be good, we will be needlessly trading quality for austerity and thereby shortchange students.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has declined to release to The Times the names of teachers and their scores indicating their effectiveness in raising student performance.
The nation's second-largest school district calculated confidential "academic growth over time" ratings for about 12,000 math and English teachers last year. This fall, the district issued new ones to about 14,000 instructors that can also be viewed by their principals. The scores are based on an analysis of a student's performance on several years of standardized tests and estimate a teacher's role in raising or lowering student achievement.
While giving tours of Leopold Elementary to prospective area home buyers, Principal John Burkholder counters "myths" about overcrowding, chaotic hallways and "that we are a black hole when it comes to education."
"I always give them a challenge when I take the tour to find a chaotic hallway." Burkholder said, noting the school is at 82 percent capacity this year and calmer than it was as recently as five years ago.
But some parents also ask about one stigma that's harder to dispel -- Leopold is designated as a failing school under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The designation and related sanctions, which cost the Madison School District nearly $300,000 this year, were imposed despite a UW-Madison analysis showing Leopold students made some of the biggest improvements in the district on state test scores last year.
The unseen academy: As officialdom's demands for meaningless Transparency and Information multiply, Thomas Docherty asks: has clandestine scholarship become the only way to carry out real research and teaching?
For a number of years, the university, in common with much of public life in general, has become obsessed with the need to present itself to the world through the twin pillars of Transparency and Information. It is taken for granted that we will piously revere, and robustly comply with, the demands of these iconic towers. Ostensibly, demands for Transparency and Information are positively good: after all, who would want important decisions to be based on a lack of information; and who would want procedures to be covert, operated according to unspoken laws or whimsy, and governed by secretive cabals?
But Information and Transparency are not as innocuous as they seem, especially in the university. When unquestioning respect for them is simply taken for granted as an axiomatic good, they start to assume the power of the obsessive fetish, and the price of fealty exacted is high. Transparency and Information become the means of securing the university's official conformity with the prevailing social or governmental orthodoxy and dogma. When they assume a primary importance, they govern the official identity of the university, and they thereby deprive the institution of the capacity to make any serious claim for a cultural function beyond the society's or the government's official views of the academy.
The following noncredit free Harvard courses are offered online by Harvard Extension School's Open Learning Initiative. Featuring Harvard faculty, the courses are open to the public.
Keith Nelson says it has been a godsend for Wisconsin Academy to take part in Milwaukee's school voucher program. Thirteen voucher students are enrolled this fall, which stands to bring the school more than $83,000 in public money this school year.
The 13 students are less than a thousandth of the 23,198 city of Milwaukee residents whose education in private schools - the vast majority of them religious - is being supported by tax dollars this fall.
But the Wisconsin Academy involvement is eye-catching: The coed boarding high school with about 100 students is in Columbus, northeast of Madison and more than 70 miles from Milwaukee.
And the school's involvement illustrates the core essence of the voucher program. Whether you find it wonderful, enraging or simply really interesting, it is (best as I've ever figured out) a fact that nowhere in America, present or past, has so much public money been spent on sending children to religious schools. Both the Wisconsin and United States supreme courts have found this constitutional.
IBM has explained the principles behind how its Watson machine bested the world's finest Jeopardy players, even if it can't handle Siri.
In a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, IBM research scientist Eric Brown outlined the history of the project, and provided some details about how Watson was able to sort through a variety of structured and unstructured data in the fastest time possible. His team of 30 engineers spent four years designing the current system, and believe it has great potential for non-gimmicky purposes.
Watson runs on 90 IBM 750 servers, with 2,880 Power7 cores running on 3.55GHz processors. It has 15TB or memory and can pump out 80 teraflops. This is a commercially available configuration, but Watson's secret sauce is IBM's DeepQA data-handling software. Brown said that to answer a question on this rig eventually took under three seconds, compared to the two days it would have taken a single processor.
Does FERPA ban schools from allowing students to post their schoolwork on the open Web?
Of the trio of laws that address children's and students' privacy and safety online, FERPA is often the one least cited outside of educational circles. The other two, COPPA and CIPA, tend to be in the news more often; the former as it relates to some of the ongoing discussions about privacy and social networking, the latter as it relates to BYOD and filtering programs. But in all cases, there seems to be a growing gulf between the laws and their practical application or interpretation, particularly since these pieces of legislation are quite old: COPPA was enacted in 1998, and CIPA in 2000. FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, dates all the way back to 1974.
FERPA is meant to give students control over access to and disclosure of their educational records. This prevents schools from divulging information about a student's grades, behavior or school work to anyone other than the student without that student's consent (with some exceptions, such as to parties involved with student aid or to schools to which students are transferring). The classic example used to explain how FERPA works: you can't post a list of students' names and grades on a bulletin board in the hallway.
Teachers and principals are worrying more about their own report cards these days.
They're being graded on more than student test scores. The way educators are evaluated is changing across the country, with a switch from routine "satisfactory" ratings to actual proof that students are learning.
President Barack Obama's recent use of executive authority to revise the No Child Left Behind education law is one of several factors driving a trend toward using student test scores, classroom observation and potentially even input from students, among other measures, to determine just how effective educators are. A growing number of states are using these evaluations to decide critical issues such as pay, tenure, firings and the awarding of teaching licenses.
There is a great interview on leadership with Jim March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist) by Joel Podolny (current head of HR at Apple, but also a very accomplished academic researcher) in the current edition of the Academy of Management Learning and Eduction journal (Vol. 10, No. 3, 502-506.) The link is here, but someone will likely make you buy it.
March, as always, looks at things differently than the rest of us. For example, he does a lovely job of arguing -- using historical figures like Aristotle and Alexander the Great -- that the time frames used in most leadership research are often too short to be useful. But what really caught my eye was a line that reminded me of that old Pink Floyd song :
There are some questions every school leader should be able to answer: Are my teachers helping their students learn? Who are the outstanding teachers I need to fight hard to keep? Which teachers aren't meeting my expectations? How can I help my good teachers become great?
As the superintendent of one of the nation's largest school districts, I believe helping our campus leaders answer these questions is the most important part of my job. After all, decades of research show that nothing we can do to accelerate student learning matters more than ensuring a great teacher leads every classroom.
Unfortunately, the teacher-evaluation systems that should help principals answer such questions are often useless. Most evaluation systems rate nearly all teachers "satisfactory," based on infrequent and cursory classroom observations, and they rarely consider how much students are actually learning.
I recently read an editorial piece by Arlene Ackerman, former Philadelphia public schools superintendent and longtime educator, on how she came to the realization that our public education system will not improve on its own. I have come to the same realization, because among other reasons, there is no indication school districts are suddenly going to hold themselves accountable for elevating the academic achievement of all students; or take every step necessary to ensure all students only have effective teachers. There are also just too many people who have a vested interest in keeping the current system intact, who are resistant to even the smallest of changes - let alone the dramatic improvements most of us recognize must be made in order for the system to succeed.
The traditional school establishment and its supporters know if you change the ingredients, it likely changes the recipe. If you change the recipe, you get a different dish; and, there are no real internal motivators to change a system that has served a whole bunch of adults so well for such a long time.
Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously conceived of schools as ladders on which the industrious poor would ascend to a better life, and he spent a good bit of his fortune laying the foundations for such an education society. After World War II, policy makers who believed in the education gospel grew numerous enough to fill stadiums. One by one, the G.I. Bill, the Truman Commission report, and the War on Poverty singled out education as the way of national and personal advance. "The answer to all of our national problems," as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, "comes down to one single word: education."
The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary -- and perhaps the only -- road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems -- drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest -- by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. No wonder President Obama and Bill Gates want the country to double its college graduation rate over the next 10 years.
It's easy to get angry at banks and CEOs, especially as more Americans slip below the poverty line while the rich keep getting richer. But if the goal of Occupy Wall Street is improving social mobility in this country, then the movement really needs to focus as much on educational inequality as it does on income inequality. There is perhaps no better example of how the system is rigged against millions of Americans than the education our children receive.
Public schools are obviously not to blame for the mortgage crisis, over-leveraged investment banks or the other triggers of our current economic woes. But when it comes to giving Americans equal opportunity, our schools are demonstrably failing at their task. Today zip codes remain a better predictor of school quality and subsequent opportunities than smarts or hard work. When you think about it, that's a lot more offensive to our values than a lightly regulated banking system.
Smaller schools? More charters? Those are yesterday's headlines in the world of school reform. The hot-button topic now is the inclusion of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Yet as school administrators and the teachers union battle it out in current contract negotiations in Los Angeles, who would have guessed that state law addressed this issue long ago?
A lawsuit filed by a group of parents, aided by the reform group EdVoice, claims that the Los Angeles Unified School District must include standardized test scores or some other measure of student progress to comply with the 40-year-old Stull Act. Though filed only against the district, the suit has statewide implications.
The Stull Act mainly concerned itself with the appeals process for teachers who had been fired. But it included some common-sense language about teacher evaluations, instructing school districts to make student progress one of many factors in teachers' performance reviews. In 1999, specifics were added to the law, requiring teacher evaluations to measure that progress in part through state-approved assessments.
November 17, 2011 Madison, Wis. - Last night, by unanimous vote, the Board of Directors of Madison Preparatory Academy announced they would request that the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education approve their proposal to establish it
The Urban League of Madison, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:
November 17, 2011
Madison, Wis. - Last night, by unanimous vote, the Board of Directors of Madison Preparatory Academy announced they would request that the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education approve their proposal to establish its all-boys and all-girls schools as non-instrumentality public charter schools. This means that Madison Preparatory Academy would employ all staff at both schools instead of MMSD, and that Madison Prep's staff would not be members of the district's collective bargaining units.
If approved, the Board of Education would retain oversight of both schools and likely require Madison Prep to submit to annual progress reviews and a five year performance review, both of which would determine if the school should be allowed to continue operating beyond its first five-year contract.
"We have worked for six months to reach agreement with MMSD's administration and Madison Teachers Incorporated on how Madison Prep could operate as a part of the school district and its collective bargaining units while retaining the core elements of its program design and remain cost effective," said Board Chair David Cagigal.
Cagigal further stated, "From the beginning, we were willing to change several aspects of our school design in order to find common ground with MMSD and MTI to operate Madison Prep as a school whose staff would be employed by the district. We achieved agreement on most positions being represented by local unions, including teachers, counselors, custodial staff and food service workers. However, we were not willing to compromise key elements of Madison Prep that were uniquely designed to meet the educational needs of our most at-risk students and close the achievement gap."
During negotiations, MMSD, MTI and the Boards of Madison Prep and the Urban League were informed that Act 10, the state's new law pertaining to collective bargaining, would prohibit MMSD and MTI from providing the flexibility and autonomy Madison Prep would need to effectively implement its model. This included, among other things:
Changing or excluding Madison Prep's strategies for hiring, evaluating and rewarding its principals, faculty and staff for a job well done;
Excluding Madison Prep's plans to contract with multiple providers of psychological and social work services to ensure students and their families receive culturally competent counseling and support, which is not sufficiently available through MMSD; and
Eliminating the school's ability to offer a longer school day and year, which Madison Prep recently learned would prove to be too costly as an MMSD charter school.
On November 1, 2011, after Madison Prep's proposal was submitted to the Board of Education, MMSD shared that operating under staffing and salary provisions listed in the district's existing collective bargaining agreement would cost $13.1 million more in salaries and benefits over five years, as compared to the budget created by the Urban League for Madison Prep's budget.
Cagigal shared, "The week after we submitted our business plan to the Board of Education for consideration, MMSD's administration informed us that they were going to use district averages for salaries, wages and benefits in existing MMSD schools rather than our budget for a new start-up school to determine how much personnel would cost at both Madison Prep schools."
Both MMSD and the Urban League used the same district salary schedule to write their budgets. However, MMSD budgets using salaries of district teachers with 14 years teaching experience and a master's degree while the Urban League budgeted using salaries of teachers with 7 years' experience and a master's degree.
Gloria Ladson Billings, Vice Chair of Madison Prep's Board and the Kellner Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison stated that, "It has been clear to all parties involved that the Urban League is committed to offering comparable and competitive salaries to its teachers but that with limited resources as a new school, it would have to set salaries and wages at a level that would likely attract educators with less teaching experience than the average MMSD teacher. At the budget level we set, we believe we can accomplish our goal of hiring effective educators and provide them a fair wage for their level of experience."
Madison Prep is also committed to offering bonuses to its entire staff, on top of their salaries, in recognition of their effort and success, as well as the success of their students. This also was not allowed under the current collective bargaining agreement.
Summarizing the decision of Madison Prep's Board, Reverend Richard Jones, Pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church and Madison Prep Board member shared, "Our Board has thought deep and hard about additional ways to compromise around the limitations that Act 10 places on our ability to partner with our teachers' union. However, after consulting parents, community partners and the MMSD Board of Education, we ultimately decided that our children need what Madison Prep will offer, and they need it now. A dream deferred is a dream denied, and we must put the needs of our children first and get Madison Prep going right away. That said, we remain committed to finding creative ways to partner with MMSD and the teachers' union, including having the superintendent of MMSD, or his designee, serve on the Board of Madison Prep so innovation and learning can be shared immediately."
Cagigal further stated that, "It is important for the public to understand that our focus from the beginning has been improving the educational and life outcomes of our most vulnerable students. Forty-eight percent high school graduation and 47 percent incarceration rates are just not acceptable; not for one more day. It is unconscionable that only 1% of Black and 7% of Latino high school seniors are ready for college. We must break from the status quo and take bold steps to close the achievement gap, and be ready and willing to share our success and key learning with MMSD and other school districts so that we can positively impact the lives of all of our children."
The Urban League has informed MMSD's administration and Board of Education that it will share with them an updated version of its business plan this evening. The updated plan will request non-instrumentality status for Madison Prep and address key questions posed in MMSD's administrative analysis of the plan that was shared publicly last week.
The Board of Education is expected to vote on the Madison Prep proposal in December 2011.
Copies of the updated plan will be available on the Urban League (www.ulgm.org) and Madison Prep (www.madison-prep) websites after 9pm CST this evening.
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez at Lderoche@ulgm.org or 608.729.1230.
A Madison School Board vote to approve Madison Preparatory Academy has been delayed until at least December after the proposed charter school's board decided to amend its proposal to use nonunion employees.
The Madison Prep board voted Wednesday night after an analysis by the school district found the pair of single-sex charter schools, geared toward low-income minority students, would cost $10.4 million more than previously estimated if it were to use union staff.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the district would have to update its analysis based on the new proposal, which means a vote will not happen Nov. 28. A new time line for approval has not been established.
In announcing Wednesday's decision, the Madison Prep board said the state's new collective bargaining law made the school district and teachers union inflexible about how to pay for employing teachers for longer school days and a longer school year, among other issues.
Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy are now recommending establishing the proposed single-sex public charter school as what's known as a "non-instrumentality" of the district.
Ultimately, that means the school's staff would be non-union, and the Urban League-backed charter school would have an unprecedented degree of autonomy in its operations, free from district oversight.
With the recommendation, made at a meeting Wednesday, Madison Prep supporters, the school district and the local School Board wade into uncharted waters.
Because of the change, school officials will need to revise their administrative analysis of the charter school proposal in advance of a School Board vote on whether to approve the Madison Prep plan.
It looked like a typical Friday reading block in Stephanie Jierski's third-grade class at Van Winkle Elementary.
The students were divided into groups with some reading on their own, some paired to finish assignments and others working with the teachers. Those gathered by Jierski received remediation on compound words.
What a visitor to the Jackson school wouldn't see - the related planning behind the scenes - helps explain why Principal Wanda Walker-Bowen says Jierski is a good teacher.
For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain's talent for learning new tasks.
MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory.
With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse -- a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
High School teacher Joseph Thomas, suspended for refusing to meet with a district-assigned peer evaluator, said he hopes for a compromise that will put him back in the classroom.
Thomas said he met with school district officials for more than an hour Monday and told them he would be willing to be evaluated by a middle school teacher with experience in grades 7 through 12. "As long as they're playing by the rules, I fell that I should too," said Thomas, an 18-year teacher.
If that cannot be arranged, Thomas was told he could be suspended without pay, fired and have 10 days to appeal. There was no comment Monday from the district, which suspended Thomas with pay pending an investigation into behavior officials are calling insubordinate.
News of Thomas's suspension generated a variety of reactions.
We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google's results list.
But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren't assessing information sources on their own merit--they're putting too much trust in the machine.
Students may covet seats in Stanford's popular iPhone and iPad application development course, but you don't need to be in the classroom to take the course.
Anyone with app dreams can follow along online.
Stanford has just released the iOS 5 incarnation of iPhone Application Development on iTunes U, where the public can download course lectures and slides for free. Some of the most talked-about features of Apple's latest operating system include iCloud, streamlined notifications and wireless syncing.
When Stanford's first iPhone apps course appeared online in 2009, it made iTunes history by rocketing to a million downloads in just seven weeks.
Alberto Martín is an engineer and independent iOS developer in Salamanca, Spain. He has been a diligent student of the online app development class since it first appeared.
In general, I agree entirely with the many commentators who have argued that the United States needs to produce more STEM graduates. But I also take note of the many people who have written to me to argue that the only truly employable STEM fields at the moment are engineering and computer science, and only certain disciplines within those. (I.e., I take the point made by many commenters that STEM graduates are not doing all that well in this economy either -- when we say STEM = employment, so commenters point out, we don't mean scientists or mathematicians as such, we mean particular fields of engineering and computer science. I can't vouch for that but do accept it.)
It's also worth keeping in mind that the United States could easily produce an excess of engineers -- yes, even engineers. The labor market of a complicated, division-of-labor society means many, many specializations, and most of them are not STEM. We need lawyers, human resources staff, janitors, communications specialists, and many things that too-reductionist a view might lead one to believe are purely frivolous intermediary occupations. Maybe they are parasitical, and maybe they will get squeezed out of existence over time. But there is a sometimes incorrect tendency these days to believe that since innovation is the heart of all increases in productivity and hence in long run growth and wealth, STEM must be responsible for it and that because STEM is the root of innovation, only STEM jobs are truly value added. I exaggerate for effect, but you see the point.
For the first time next year, thousands of Chicago Public Schools teachers will be evaluated based partly on how well their students are doing academically. Many fear they will face dismissal if the standards are not applied fairly.
"It's going to make people really angry," said Ruth Resnick, a librarian at O'Keefe Elementary School, who spoke last week at a public forum about carrying out a new state law that changes how teachers, principals, librarians and other staff are graded.
But state and district leaders say the new evaluations will be better than the decades-old system now in use. They say more thoughtful and effective evaluations will not only increase student achievement, but also provide teachers with better feedback for how to improve.
During the past three decades, Milwaukee no doubt has led the nation in the number of plans advanced to improve K-12 education. With another initiative announced last week, Journal Sentinel readers can be excused for feeling they've heard this story before.
New recommendations - from the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce - are encouraging in one important area. MMAC and its allies have convinced innovative educators from elsewhere to open schools in Milwaukee. Two years ago, I visited a Rocketship charter school in San Jose. It's great news that impressive operation is coming here.
However, the worthwhile goal of adding high-quality charter schools stands in contrast to other aspects of the MMAC plan. Business leaders who will be asked to finance it should apply the kind of scrutiny required in the world where they operate.
The plan comes up short in two major areas. First, it relies on a dated, narrow and misleading description of the major problem. Second, it walks back from the organization's historic commitment to creating a real education marketplace.
Peter Thiel, founder of Clarium Capital and The Thiel Foundation, explains why young Americans need to be encouraged to take on more risk to spur innovation and why the cost of a U.S. education is hindering that.
Every week, middle and high school students are invited to the UW Madison campus to hear a talk designed to stimulate their interest in math and science and then to mingle with professors and their peers over pizza.
Called Madison Math Circle, the activity was started this fall as a replacement for the former High School Math Nights previously run on campus every other week. Organizer Gheorghe Craciun, associate professor in the math and biomolecular chemistry departments, said middle school students are now included because he found high school students are often too busy with other activities to attend.
Kevin Zamzow, who attended the Nov. 7 Madison Math Circle with his son, Noah Zamzow-Schmidt, approached the UW Madison math department about organizing the activity. Math circles are held at campuses around the country although Zamzow doesn't know of another one in Wisconsin.
"I enjoy math," said Noah, 12, a seventh grader at Edgewood Campus School who is taking 10th and 11th grade math classes at Edgewood High School. "I really enjoyed the topic tonight."
If the home-schooling anarchist parents in the Sunday Magazine played to a fantasy of what home schooling could be -- the traveling, the rebellion against the authority of the classroom, the rugged individualist children -- then The Wall Street Journal's counterpoint, "My Teacher Is an App," is the disillusioning reality for many.
The article reports that an estimated 250,000 students in 2010-11 attend school online, sometimes in the form of full-time public cyberschools, sometimes in a cyber "hybrid" school. These children aren't "home schooled" from a statistical point of view; they're enrolled in schools with names that sound like online degree factories (Georgia Cyber Academy, Florida Virtual School), but are legitimately run by states and districts or outsourced to for-profit corporations. They're going to school. At home.
The problems facing the children attending Buffalo's public schools are supposed to be addressed by the School Board. The nine members ran for office because they felt they were the best able to take care of our kids.
The fact is they are not getting the job done; student achievement and graduation rates are both far too low. Board members need to act in new ways and not get bogged down with the same failed ideas. And if they are incapable of seeing that our kids get the education they are entitled to, the state must step in and take over.
The district faces many problems, but the most immediate one is how to turn around its seven failing schools. A total of $42 million is available -- $2 million a year for each school for three years -- to turn those schools around. But first the district must come up with a turnaround plan for each school that is acceptable to the state Education Department. The district must choose from three models outlined by the state. The state also says, for reasons never explained, that the same model can't be used for all seven schools.
Both exams, that is the midterm and final exam for the online course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, can be taken at the University of Freiburg, supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard. For both exams, you will have to be physically present at the location mentioned below. If you should be unable to come to Freiburg for both exams, you cannot receive the certificate.
Why you would want to do that, if you can do it at home, too? Because if you will pass the exams, you will get a certificate (in German: Schein) signed by Prof. Wolfram Burgard that you have passed the exam of the course and that this is equivalent to the AI course at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Freiburg. Typically, German and many international Universities accept such a certificate.
If you would like to take part in the exams at the University of Freiburg, please write an e-mail to Prof. Dr. Burgard to enroll:
burgard@informatik.uni-freiburg.de. Please use the subject "Stanford AI Course Exam Registration" for your email.
The federal Elementary/Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that districts and schools make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward state-established benchmarks in four areas: test participation, reading proficiency, math proficiency, and the other academic indicator: attendance or high school graduation.
This letter is to inform you that your district, or one or more of your schools, has either missed AYP; is identified for improvement; is no longer identified for improvement status; or missed AYP in the prior school year bnt remains in satisfactory status by meeting AYP for the current school year: 2010-11.
The enclosed Preliminary Annual Review of Performance report(s) are color coded according to the following:
A new analysis (PDF) by the Madison school district shows that the budget submitted by the Urban League of Greater Madison for a pair of sex-segregated charter schools could potentially cost the district an additional $13 million over the schools' first five years.
The new numbers came as a shock to Urban League president Kaleem Caire, who says that Madison Prep may pull out of a tentative agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc., that would require Madison Prep to hire mostly union staff.
"It's become clear to us that the most reasonable path to ensure the success of these kids is as a non-instrumentality," says Caire. "Others on our board want to look at a couple of other options, so we're looking at those before we make that final determination."
One of those options would be to scale back the program, including the proposed longer school days and extended school year.
On Nov. 10, Spokane Public Schools hosted a lovely “Breakfast for Community Leaders.” The district’s goal was to assure well-connected and like-minded folks in the city that – as the district put it – it’s “better preparing all students for success after graduation.” A few students also were brought in to “share their stories about the effectiveness of that preparation and what high school is like today.”
Superintendent Nancy Stowell began the breakfast by saying she wanted to “put to rest” the “fingerpointing and blame” the district faced during the 2011 board election. Here are a few examples of how she put things to rest.
Stowell praised the district for higher graduation rates, saying the next challenge is college readiness. Wasn't college readiness always the goal? Most parents think so. So, the district is letting more of the kids leave, and at some point, they'll start getting them ready for postsecondary life? How does that work?
In one of my previous post entitled what every teacher should know about google. reference was made to the notions of the 21st century learner and how these learners depend wholly on media and social networking to live in this fast_paced world. In today's post i will present two short videos that will hopefully change what some think about teaching. The following videos are among the top educative videos online .
With the advance of technological innovations into our lives , education has been radically transformed and teachers who do not use social media and educational technology in thier teaching no longer fit in the new system.That's why every educator and teacher should reconsider certain values and principles . watch this first one minute 40 seconds video to see the negative side that every teacher must not have
Some of England's most prestigious universities, strapped for cash after deep cuts in government subsidies, are to step up fund-raising drives in Hong Kong and the mainland.
While Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics say government grants will still make up the bulk of their income, these elite institutes are increasingly looking eastward to diversify funding.
And the amount donated by Hong Kong philanthropists is expected to rise this year, with new scholarships and projects to be announced.
"Oxford University has put an increasing emphasis on our relationship with China and Hong Kong," a spokesman for the English-speaking world's oldest university said. "We are looking more to philanthropy."
Where can today's students go to learn how to make an app? That's the question Thomas Suarez, a sixth-grader from suburban Los Angeles, asked himself after realizing that most of his peers like to play games and use apps, but schools don't teach the basic programming skills needed to make them. So Suarez, who taught himself how to make apps using the iPhone software development kit--he created the anti-Justin Bieber, Whac-a-Mole-style game "Bustin Jieber"--decided to start an app club at school.
Suarez has been a technophile since kindergarten, and he already knows several programming languages. At a recent TEDx conference, he explained how students in the app club get the opportunity to learn and share their app making with each other. The club even asked the school's teachers what kinds of apps they could use in the classroom and then set out to design them.
Not the food. That would be just fine. The course is the problem.
It passed the committee level this past Monday and on the 14th it goes to the full board.
Problem #1
Here's our first problem. This is a major shift; an introduction of a whole new language. One with a plan to offer II,III, and IV plus AP all in the next several years. Yet, it's lumped in with 7 other courses within the agenda heading, where you vote Yes/No on the entire suite: 2012-2013 New Courses: AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination); Chinese I; Arts of Industry; African Literature; Native American/Latin American Literature; Science of Motion; Weather and Climate
Solution: It takes a board member motion to pull out the Chinese I for a separate discussion/vote.
It was nearing lunchtime on a recent Thursday, and ninth-grader Noah Schnacky of Windermere, Fla., really did not want to go to algebra. So he didn't.
Tipping back his chair, he studied a computer screen listing the lessons he was supposed to complete that week for his public high school--a high school conducted entirely online. Noah clicked on his global-studies course. A lengthy article on resource shortages popped up. He gave it a quick scan and clicked ahead to the quiz, flipping between the article and multiple-choice questions until he got restless and wandered into the kitchen for a snack.
Noah would finish the quiz later, within the three-hour time frame that he sets aside each day for school. He also listened to most of an online lecture given by his English teacher; he could hear but not see her as she explained the concept of a protagonist to 126 ninth graders logged in from across the state. He never got to the algebra.
The Star article, "Poverty tightens its grip in cities," described a recent Brookings Institution study on the increasing concentration of poverty in cities, including Kansas City.
Poor public schools, such as the Kansas City School District, are a major factor in creating pockets of poverty. Those with enough resources move out of underperforming districts leaving the poorest of the poor behind.
Reversing this trend requires, among other things, fixing the school district problem. A number of solutions have been proposed, most of which will be as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Real change requires something more fundamental: What the left calls giving "power to the people" and what the right calls being "free to choose."
The Madison Metropolitan School District is one of fewer than 400 public school districts in the nation being honored by the College Board with a place on the 2nd Annual AP® Honor Roll, for simultaneously increasing access to Advanced Placement coursework while maintaining or increasing the percentage of students earning scores of 3 or higher on AP exams. Achieving both of these goals is the ideal scenario for a district's Advanced Placement program, because it indicates that the district is successfully identifying motivated, academically-prepared students who are likely to benefit most from AP coursework.
Since 2009, the MMSD increased the number of students participating in AP from 692 to 824 (up 19 percent), while maintaining the percentage of students earning AP Exam scores of 3 or higher above the 70 percent criteria threshold (87% in 2009, 79% in 2011). The majority of U.S. colleges and universities grant college credit or advanced placement for a score of 3 or above on AP exams.
"We are thrilled with this recognition for AP access and student performance," said Superintendent Dan Nerad. "Obviously, credit goes to the students who score well on AP Exams, and parents and guardians, teachers and other MMSD staff share in this Honor Roll placement. This shows that the Madison School District is on the right path with our work to elevate the performance of all students, but we have much more work to do."
How important are museums, TV shows and after school clubs to teaching kids science? Ira Flatow and guests look at "informal science education" and what researchers are learning about learning science. Plus, what's the best way to keep undergraduate science majors in science?
IRA FLATOW, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're going to be hearing President Obama talking about the need to help kids learn science in places other than the classroom.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it's science festivals, robotic competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent, to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.
FLATOW: And we keep hearing about how American students are falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to math and science, but new studies are showing that the places to teach science, places where kids will soak up science, are not in the classrooms, but museum trips, TV shows, afterschool clubs, even radio shows about science. Has that been your experience, too? What do you think? How much of what you know about science comes from your experience outside of a classroom?
The growing popularity of online public schools lets states and local school districts effectively outsource some teaching functions--to parents.
Students enrolled in an online school full-time are required to work closely with a "learning coach," usually mom or dad, to ensure that they are staying on track in their studies.
For younger students, the learning coach becomes the primary teacher. A typical first-grade language arts lesson, for instance, asks the student to brainstorm a list of words about her favorite place, then write three complete sentences. Parents go online to certify that their child has done the work and to answer questions about its quality--for instance, did the child use proper punctuation?
"It's not about just putting them in front of a computer and saying, 'Here, get this work done,'" says Allison Brown, who has three young children attending Georgia Cyber Academy, a statewide online charter school run by the private firm K12 Inc.
Ask hedge fund manager Daniel Ades about the future for recent college graduates and he likes to draw a picture, a very ugly picture. He sketches out a bell curve mapping the historical default rate on student loans - then he draws another curve much higher to show the likely default rate for the Class of 2011.
Mr. Ades has become an expert in the $242 billion market for bonds backed by bundles of student loans, delivering consistently strong returns by trading hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the debt over the past four years. "We know all these deals inside out and we know their default rates," he said.
But when it comes to the loans banks made to students who graduated in 2010 and 2011, the 31-year-old investor is steering well clear, "because we can't quantify the risk," he said.
Wisconsin (and just about every other state) is involved in developing new state tests. That work is one of the requirements of getting a waiver and, if a bill ever emerges form Congress, it will almost certainly continue to require every state to do testing.
But the new tests aren't scheduled to be in place for three years - in the fall of 2014. So this fall and for at least the next two, Wisconsin's school children and schools will go through the elaborate process of taking a test that still gets lots of attention but seems to be less useful each year it lives on.
I remember a conversation with a well educated Madison parent earlier this year. "My child is doing well, the WKCE reports him scoring in the 95th percentile in math"......
Critique of the District (MMSD)
Page # 23: MPA - No College Going Culture among Madison's New Student Population
The data on student performance and course-taking patterns among students in MMSD paint a clear picture. There is not a prevalent college going culture among Black, Hispanic and some Asian student populations enrolled in MMSD. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. The majority of these students are failing to complete a rigorous curriculum that would adequately prepare them for college and 21st century jobs. Far too many are also failing to complete college requirements, such as the ACT, or failing to graduate from high school.
Page # 23: No College Going Culture among Madison's New Student Population -
MMSD Response
MMSD has taken many steps towards ensuring college attendance eligibility and readiness for our students of color. Efforts include:
AVID/TOPS
East High School became the first MMSD school to implement AVID in the 2007-2008 school year. Teens of Promise or TOPS became synonymous with AVID as the Boys and Girls Club committed to an active partnership to support our program. AVID/TOPS students are defined as:
"AVID targets students in the academic middle - B, C, and even D students - who have the desire to go to college and the willingness to work hard. These are students who are capable of completing rigorous curriculum but are falling short of their
potential. Typically, they will be the first in their families to attend college, and many are from low-income or minority families. AVID pulls these students out of their unchallenging courses and puts them on the college track: acceleration instead of remediation."
The MMSD has 491 students currently enrolled in AVID/TOPS. Of that total, 380 or 77% of students are minority students (27% African-American, 30% Latino, 10% Asian, 10% Multiracial). 67% of MMSD AVID/TOPS students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The 2010- 2011 school year marked an important step in the District's implementation of AVID/TOPS. East High School celebrated its first cohort of AVID/TOPS graduates. East Highs AVID/TOPS class of 2011 had a 100% graduation rate and all of the students are enrolled in a 2-year or 4- year college. East High is also in the beginning stages of planning to become a national demonstration site based on the success of their program. This distinction, determined by the AVID regional site team, would allow high schools from around the country to visit East High School and learn how to plan and implement AVID programs in their schools.
MMSD has a partnership with the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE) and they are conducting a controlled study of the effects of AVID/TOPS students when compared to a comparison groups of students. Early analysis of the study reveals positive gains in nearly every category studied.
AVID pilot studies are underway at two MMSD middle schools and support staff has been allocated in all eleven middle schools to begin building capacity towards a 2012-2013 AVID Middle School experience. The program design is still underway and will take form this summer when school based site teams participate in the AVID Summer Institute training.
I found this commentary on the oft criticized WKCE exams fascinating (one day, wkce results are useful, another day - this document - WKCE's low benchmark is a problem)" (page 7):
Page # 28: MPA - Student Performance Measures:
85% of Madison Prep's Scholars will score at proficient or advanced levels in reading, math, and science on criterion referenced achievement tests after three years of enrollment.
90% of Scholars will graduate on time.
100% of students will complete the SAT and ACT assessments before graduation with 75% achieving a composite score of 22 or higher on the ACT and 1100 on the SAT (composite verbal and math).
100% of students will complete a Destination Plan before graduation.
100% of graduates will qualify for admissions to a four-year college after graduation.
100% of graduates will enroll in postsecondary education after graduation.
Page # 28: Student Performance Measures - MMSD Response:
WKCE scores of proficient are not adequate to predict success for college and career readiness. Cut scores equated with advanced are needed due to the low benchmark of Wisconsin's current state assessment system. What specific steps or actions will be provided for students that are far below proficiency and/or require specialized support services to meet the rigorous requirements of IB?
Recommendation:
No Child Left Behind requires 100% proficiency by 2014. Madison Prep must be held to the same accountability standards as MMSD.
Single-gender classrooms, and, to a lesser degree, single-gender schools, are a hot trend in education circles. In less than a decade, Wisconsin has gone from zero classrooms segregated by gender to more than a dozen scattered across the state. That mirrors increasing numbers throughout the country.
But there's growing pushback from researchers, who claim the desire to separate boys from girls in school is based on what they call "pseudoscience."
In September, the prestigious journal, Science, published results of a study that showed sex segregation did not contribute to increased academic performance and harmed students by making sex stereotypes acceptable. Seven well-regarded researchers, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde, write in the article, "A new curriculum, like a new drug or factory production method, often yields a short-term gain because people are motivated by novelty and belief in the innovation. Novelty-based enthusiasm, sample bias and anecdotes account for much of the glowing characterization of (single-sex) education in the media."
In addition, the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully sued on the basis of sex discrimination, recently forcing a public high school in Pittsburgh to abandon its single-sex classrooms and a school board in Louisiana to end its practice of separating boys and girls at a middle schoo
The Wall Street Journal's excellent series on jobless young people features an article today on why students study liberal arts in college over STEM subjects, and why so many would-be STEM majors shift to liberal arts, despite the apparent loss of career prospects. Larry Ribstein follows up with commentary suggesting that law school becomes a logical option for students who were badly guided in their choices of majors -- leading them to liberal arts with few skills and few prospects in today's world.
I want to reiterate something I wrote about a few weeks ago about the incentive structures for students. I'm basing this on my current experience as a law professor who talks a lot with students at a mid-tier law school and what led them there, as well as my experience as a parent of a student who will be doing humanities as her major at Rice, a school with world class STEM and world class humanities.
There are a lot of smart students out there who will nonetheless not be able to compete in world class institutions in STEM. Why? They might have, say, near 800s in verbal and writing, and mid 600s in math on the SAT. (This matches up, btw, to Gene Expression blog's mapping of the GRE scores of various college majors for the highest testing of the humanities majors -- the philosophy students, who have about exactly those scores. I'll put up the charts in a later post, but very roughly the verbal and math scores flip for the highest scoring of the sciences -- physics, and are somewhere in the middle for the highest scoring of the social sciences, economics.) At a school like Rice -- and any university ranked above it -- specialization has already taken place, sorting by subject area. A tiny handful of students can be true polymaths, but that's hardly the norm. Instead, the STEM students are sought competitively on a world-wide basis, and it will be academic suicide and frankly impossible for a student who is not at the top of those competitive areas even to pass the classes.
Students at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences who received A's for two courses that were never taught will get their money back, but they'll still get to keep the academic credit, an administrator reported on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the university is investigating what it referred to as "egregious breaches of professional ethics and academic standards" that led to last month's resignation of Venetia L. Orcutt, department chair and director of the physician-assistant-studies program.
According to a statement released by the university on Wednesday, Ms. Orcutt had been assigned to teach a sequence of three one-credit courses in evidence-based medicine over three semesters last year. The first semester of the required course was face to face, and she showed up for that. But according to three students who complained to the university's provost last month, Ms. Orcutt went missing when the course sequence shifted online.
It's time to restructure all of our schools to become inclusive of all of our children.
We have reached the tipping point where it is no longer educationally or morally defensible to continue to segregate students with disabilities. We shouldn't be striving to educate children in the least restrictive environment but rather in the most inclusive one.
Inclusion is founded on social justice principles in which all students are presumed competent and welcomed as valued members of all general education classes and extra-curricular activities in their local schools -- participating and learning alongside their same-age peers in general education instruction based on the general curriculum, and experiencing meaningful social relationships.
Cheryl M. Jorgensen, Ph.D., is a member of the affiliate faculty with the National Center on Inclusive Education at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. In 2008 she received the National Down Syndrome Congress Education Award for her leadership and pioneering research supporting the inclusion of students with Down syndrome. She has written this open letter to Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer for New York City schools.
Excellent teachers and excellent education are inseparable. In fact, teacher quality is one of the most important determinants of whether a child succeeds in school and continues to college.
A handful of states have been working hard to recruit and nurture great teachers -- starting with strong, effective evaluation systems. Tennessee has led the charge.
When it comes to improving public schools, ideas can only take us so far. It's effective implementation of those ideas that yields results. Last year, the state passed bold, bipartisan legislation, the First to the Top Act, to create a rigorous teacher and principal evaluation system that has the potential to set an example for the rest of the country. The legislation was supported by the teachers' union, the business community and a wide range of education stakeholders.
It was encouraging to see the state Department of Public Instruction release a framework for evaluating public school teachers that is the product of much time and thought by a broad array of smart people.
I can even ignore that it took until now to devise such a framework when the quality of public school teachers and, indeed, public education itself have been among the hottest of public policy topics since, well, forever.
Harder to ignore is that while the state took a decidedly top-down approach to grading teachers, it's taking a decidedly hands-off approach to how districts use the grades.
DPI's 17-page "preliminary report and recommendations" employs plenty of euphemisms and academia-speak to go into great detail about technical aspects of the proposed evaluation system without saying how the evaluations should be used when it comes to paying teachers -- or dismissing bad ones.
Over the past few years, a new approach to signaling individual skills and competencies has emerged the cutting edge of the education sector. Badges, already used successfully in games, social networking sites and youth development groups such as the Girl Scouts and 4-H, are now being developed in digital form to represent the wide range of non-traditional learning experiences critical to success in a global society.
Digital badges can showcase learning that takes place outside of traditional school structures, such as that of a high school student studying physics via MIT's OpenCourseWare or a middle schooler that has taught himself how to design and program educational games. What's more, so many of the skills that we rely upon for success in our global knowledge economy are not captured well by a traditional resume.
Kevin Carey has written here and elsewhere about the importance of expanding systems that rely on open education resources. And Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently said, "Today's technology-enabled, information-rich, deeply interconnected world means learning not only can - but should - happen anywhere, anytime. We need to recognize these experiences, whether the environments are physical or online, and whether learning takes place in schools, colleges or adult education centers, or in afterschool, workplace, military or community settings."
This week the Montana Board of Education voted to become the 45th state to adopt the national Common Core standards. Standards, of course, don't matter at all if they just sit on shelves. If they're serious about ensuring that more students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college or postsecondary training programs, states and school districts have to see them, and the curriculum associated with them, as the organizing principle of public education. Decisions about accountability, teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, technology, teacher evaluations, class size, how to use time and even how money is spent have to be made with the standards in mind. They aren't a program. They are the program.
Except, apparently, in California. There the standards, which the state board of education voted to adopt in August of 2010, are being treated as an add-on, an unfunded mandate, an optional program.
Address the fundamental teaching and learning needs of schools in the Local Education Agency (LEA), especially the academic problems o f low-achieving students.
MMSD has been identified by the State of Wisconsin as a District Identified for Improvement, or DIFI. We entered into this status based on District WKCE assessment scores. The data indicates that sub-groups of students-African American students, English Language Learner Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged -did not score high enough on the WKCE in one or more areas of reading, math or test participation to meet state criteria.
Under No Child Left Behind, 100% of students are expected to achieve proficient or advanced on the WKCE in four areas by 2014. Student performance goals have been raised every year on a regular schedule since 2001, making targets more and more difficult to reach each year. In addition to the curriculum changes being implemented, the following assessments are also new or being implemented during the 2011-12 school year (see Attachment 1):
Updating the 2009 Scholastic Bowl Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1; Thrive's "Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report"
Peter Theron via a kind Don Severson email:
Earlier this year Wisconsin teachers and their supporters compared Wisconsin and Texas academically and claimed that Wisconsin had better achievement because it ranked higher on ACT/SAT scores. The fact that this claim ignored the ethnic composition of the states, prompted David Burge to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to compare educational achievement within the same ethnic groups. His conclusion, based on the 2009 NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (3 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 18 comparisons), was Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1.
The 2011 NAEP results are now available for Reading and
Mathematics. The updated conclusion (2 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 12 comparisons) is Longhorns 12 - Badgers 0. Not only did Texas students outperform Wisconsin students in every one of the twelve ethnicity-controlled comparisons, but Texas students exceeded the national average in all 12 comparisons. Wisconsin students were above the average 3 times, below the average 8 times, and tied the average once.
Again, as in 2009, the achievement gaps were smaller in Texas than in Wisconsin.
Thrive released its "Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report," which compares the Madison Region to competitors Austin, TX, Des Moines, IA, and Lincoln, NE, across the major areas of People, Prosperity and Place, 3MB PDF via a kind Kaleem Caire email.
Lots of kids have tried lentils. But what about Ethiopian-style lentils, accompanied by injera bread, couscous and cucumber salad?
Fourth graders in Santa Fe, N.M. prepared this lunch feast themselves as part of a nutrition education program called Cooking with Kids. And nutrition experts say programs like this one are not just about expanding timid kids' palates.
Even as home economics classes have been phased out in recent years, some schools are bringing cooking back. And a new study that evaluates cooking curriculum says these hands-on classes do more than just prepare students to cook a decent meal.
"Teachers and principals are seeing how the classroom cooking experience helps support critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving skills," says study author Leslie Cunningham-Sabo, a nutrition researcher at Colorado State University. The study appears this week in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
Biyan Zhou wanted to major in engineering. Her mother and her academic adviser also wanted her to major in it, given the apparent career opportunities for engineers in a tough job market.
Robert Pizzo
But during her sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Zhou switched her major from electrical and computer engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management. Workers who majored in psychology have median earnings that are $38,000 below those of computer engineering majors, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Georgetown University.
"My ability level was just not there," says Ms. Zhou of her decision. She now plans to look for jobs in public relations or human resources.
Ms. Zhou's dilemma is one that educators, politicians and companies have been trying to solve for decades amid fears that U.S. science and technology training may be trailing other countries. The weak economy is putting those fears into deeper relief.
Today, I walked my first-grade son to our neighborhood public school before joining over 500 leaders converging on New York City to make tangible commitments to promote economic mobility in America at the Opportunity Nation summit. I told Matthew that people were coming virtually every sector -- business, education, non-profit and community organizations, religious institutions and the military -- to focus on how to provide him and his peers from every background a great education and a shot at the American dream. When I dropped Matthew off at his school's front door, he looked at me and warned me with a big smile not to follow him inside -- something I occasionally do partly to make him laugh and partly out of that desire to support him wherever he goes.
I didn't follow my son inside that schoolhouse door. But I have been working hard to determine what commitments I can personally make to provide our kids and all of America's children with tools they can use to create opportunity once they walk as young adults out of our sight-line into America's future.
One must know where one is in order to determine where to go and how to get there, but today's parents face significant challenges in that regard.
XIAO HUA Interview; Chinese International School, Hong Kong
William Hughes Fitzhugh, Founder & Publisher, The Concord Review
1. Please tell us about yourself. What inspired you to start The Concord Review?
Diane Ravitch, an American historian of education, wrote a column in The New York Times in 1985 about the ignorance of history among 17-year-olds in the United States, based on a recent study of 7,000 students, and as a history teacher myself at the time, I was interested to see that what concerned me was a national problem. I did have a few students at my high school who did more than they had to in history, and when I began a sabbatical leave in 1986, I began to think about these issues. In March 1987, it occurred to me that if I had one or two very good students writing history papers for me and perhaps my colleagues had one or two, then in 20,000 United States high schools (and more overseas) there must be a large number of high school students doing exemplary history research papers. In June of 1987, I incorporated The Concord Review to provide a journal for such good work in history. In August 1987, I sent a four-page brochure calling for papers to every high school in the United States, 3,500 high schools in Canada, and 1,500 schools overseas. The papers started coming in, and in the Fall of 1988 I was able to publish the first issue (of now 89 issues) of The Concord Review.
2. What makes for a great history research essay?
In order to write a great history essay it is first necessary to know a lot of history. Students who read as much as they can about a historical topic have a better chance of writing an exemplary history paper. Of course they must make an effort to write so that readers can understand what they are saying and so they will be interested in what they are writing, and they must re-write their papers, but without knowing a good deal about their topic, their paper will probably not be very interesting or very good.
3. Please tell us about some of the most outstanding essays you have received. What made them special?
In 1995, I as able to begin awarding the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes for the best few papers from the 44 published in each volume year of The Concord Review. Many of these papers are now on our website at www.tcr.org, and students and teachers who are interested may read some there. I have several favorites and would be glad to send some to anyone who asks me at fitzhugh@tcr.org.
4. Please tell us about some of your most interesting authors. Where did they go to college, what did they study, and what are they doing now?
About 30% of our authors have gone to Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Yale, and many have gone to other good colleges, such as those at Cambridge and Oxford. Three, that I know of, have been named Rhodes Scholars. I work alone, so that I am not able to follow up on authors very well. I know that many are doctors and lawyers and some are professors and entrepreneurs, but I have lost track of almost all of them, for lack of funding and staff to help me keep in touch with them.
5. Please tell us how you evaluate and select essays for publication in The Concord Review.
The purpose of The Concord Review is two-fold. We want to recognize exemplary work in history by secondary students (from 39 countries so far) but we also want to distribute their work to inspire their peers to read more history and work harder on their own research papers, because being able to read nonfiction and write term papers are important skills for future success in college and beyond, and also because students should know more history if they want to be educated. So I look for papers that are historically accurate, well-researched, serious and worth reading.
6. What are your favorite books and why?
I was an English Literature major at Harvard College and I read English Literature at Cambridge for one year, and I still enjoy Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and so on, but I also have a number of favorite historians, such as Martin Gilbert, David McCullough, David Hackett Fischer, James McPherson, G.M. Trevelyan, John Prebble, Max Hastings, and others. I also read a fair number of books on education and contemporary intellectual culture.
7. Do you have any advice on how to write well?
As I suggested, there is no substitute for knowing a lot about the subject you are writing about. I think it helps to read your drafts to a friend or family member as you go along as well. You will find all sorts of things you want to improve or correct as you offer what you write to another person. So, read (study), write, and re-write...that is about it. And read the good writing of other authors.
8. Do you have advice on how students can best prepare themselves to do well in college?
There is a great deal of emphasis, at least in the United States, on math and science, but, in my view, there is much too little attention here on the importance for secondary students of being able to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious (e.g. 6,000-word) research papers. I have heard from a few of my authors that they are mobbed when they get to college by their peers who never had to write a research paper when they were in high school and so have no idea how to do it. Students who write Extended Essays for the International Baccalaureate Diploma have an advantage, as do the many students from all over the world who write history research papers on their own as independent studies and send them to The Concord Review.
When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38 years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job as a public school principal to head an all-white private school and later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district next door.
Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being dissolved into the majority-white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is on the new combined 23-member school board overseeing the marriage. And he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts.
"There's the same element of fear," said Mr. Clayton, 79. "In the 1970s, it was a physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline of the Shelby schools."
For years, this veteran teacher had received exemplary evaluations but now was feeling pressured to raise her students' test scores. Her principal criticized her teaching and would show up to take notes on her class. She knew the material would be used against her one day.
"My principal told me right to my face that she -- she was feeling sorry for me because I don't know how to teach," the instructor said.
The Los Angeles educator, who did not want to be identified, is one of about three dozen in the state accused this year of cheating, lesser misconduct or mistakes on standardized achievement tests.
Marla Sole recognizes the positive success stories of many charter schools ("approximately four times as likely as public schools to be ranked in the top 5%"), but then she comments that charter schools "were approximately two-and-a-half times as likely as public schools to be ranked in the bottom 5%" (Letters, Oct. 31).
What Ms. Sole fails to mention is that when a charter school is failing, its charter can be revoked. The parents also have the opportunity to send their children to a different school, possibly one of those in the top 5%. When the public school is a failure, we do not close it. Instead we hear calls demanding even more money to fix the failure, and we continue to force the children to attend that failing school, with no other opportunities for an education. Charter schools have that flexibility to be reformed and if that fails, the school is shut down.
One of the priorities of the Department is to provide a challenging, yet customized education for Florida's students and families. To deliver this type of education system for our individual students, the Department is able to showcase a variety of school choice options offered statewide.
Florida's public schools offer a wide variety of curriculum options. Some of these aim to strengthen the availability, accessibility, and equity of educational options for parents including Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual enrollment and Advanced International Certification of Education, just to name a few.
While many gifted students may enroll in these options, I want to stress that any qualified student can take advantage of these options. These school choice options have demanding, personalized curriculum. I have heard many stories about students who struggled in traditional classes but excelled when they entered a more challenging program that focused on their needs and strengths.
LAST FALL, President Obama threw what was billed as the first White House Science Fair, a photo op in the gilt-mirrored State Dining Room. He tested a steering wheel designed by middle schoolers to detect distracted driving and peeked inside a robot that plays soccer. It was meant as an inspirational moment: children, science is fun; work harder.
Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? The president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. All the Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade -- the pipeline, as they call it -- under a microscope. And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the rise.
DFER Wisconsin headed into the fall of 2011 with three major objectives: two of objectives required action by the state legislature (a phrase that is oxymoronic at best right now) and the third required action by the Milwaukee City Council. I'm happy to say we won more than we lost, but there is plenty of work left to be done.
Six million, give or take. That's how many children are in public school in California.
Arguably, we won't have a strong economic future if they don't get a good education.
But boy, do the grown-ups love to muck things up for the kids.
Politics, ego, endless skirmishes between school districts and teacher unions -- it all gets in the way of the kids' best interests. And California spends less per pupil than all but a few states when you adjust for regional cost-of-living differences, leading to an annual ritual of laying off thousands of teachers and other staffers.
But in Los Angeles, the status quo is under attack.
Parents and education advocates are suing L.A. Unified in an effort to enforce an overlooked state law that requires teacher and principal evaluations to be linked to student achievement.
The Design Team believes that the successful development and implementation of the new performance-based evaluation system is dependent upon the following guiding principles,
which define the central focus of the entire evaluation system. The guiding principles of the educator evaluation system are:
The ultimate goal of education is student learning. Effective educators are essential to achieving that goal for all students. We believe it is imperative that students have highly effective teams of educators to support them throughout their public education. We further believe that effective practice leading to better educational achievement requires continuous improvement and monitoring.
A strong evaluation system for educators is designed to provide information that supports decisions intended to ensure continuous individual and system effectiveness. The system must be well-articulated, manageable
Four years ago Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen predicted that online education would take off slowly and then hit everyone by surprise: the S-curve effect. And indeed, while it initially grew slowly, online education has exploded over the past several years. According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, approximately 5.6 million students took at least one web-based class during the fall 2009 semester, which marked a 21% growth from the previous year. That's up from 45,000 in 2000 and experts predict that online education could reach 14 million in 2014.
Consider a recent Economist article featuring Bill Gates's educational poster child: Khan Academy, founded by Salman Khan in 2006. Khan's business model is simple, yet impactful. As The Economist noted, it flips education on its head. Rather than filling the day with lectures and requiring students to complete exercises after school, Khan focuses on classroom exercises throughout the day and allows students to download more lectures after school. When students arrive at their Silicon Valley suburb classroom with their white MacBooks, they begin their day doing various online learning exercises. The teacher, aware of what her students are working on based on her own monitor screen, then approaches students and provides one-on-one feedback and mentoring, tailoring her message to students' particular learning paces and needs.
THERE are many ways to interpret the Education Ministry's latest solution to its controversial policy with regard to the teaching of Mathematics and Science in schools.
Many parents would applaud the ministry's decision to allow children currently learning the two core subjects in English to continue doing so until they reach Form Five.
The "soft-landing" approach may be the best way out of this contentious issue and gradually pave the way for Bahasa Malaysia to be fully reinstated by 2016 at the primary school level and 2021 at the secondary school level.
Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, who went to great lengths to explain to editors on Friday why the six-year-old policy was unsustainable, insisted that the soft-landing approach was necessary.
"It is a fair decision. We are very considerate," he said.
Among the many new program integrity rules the U.S. Education Department issued a little over a year ago was one that went relatively unnoticed at the time: a rule that defines the "last date of attendance" for students who withdraw from online programs more stringently than in the past, and differently than for students in a traditional classroom.
At the time, the rule was lost in the hubbub over state authorization rules, the definition of a "credit hour," and other, more controversial, regulations, some of which colleges challenged in Congress or in court. But before the program integrity rules took effect in July 2011 -- and even before they were published publicly, in October 2010 -- the Education Department was already using the new definition of "last date of attendance," which varied considerably from the previous version, to begin investigations and, in some cases, collect financial aid refunds for students who dropped out.
When the Education Department began using the "last day of attendance" rule to evaluate colleges in audits, it had never been publicly announced. In effect, a group of higher education associations has argued, the department was expecting institutions to play a game without knowing the rules.
American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.
Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that's entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice--and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.
Teachers have been under a hot spotlight in recent years, blamed for public education's shortcomings. Now the colleges that train them are feeling the heat.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is calling for reforms in the nation's education schools, arguing too many are "mediocre" and send out graduates who aren't ready to teach.
In a speech last month, Duncan noted 62 percent of new teachers reported feeling unprepared. He called that figure from a 2006 study "staggering."
The Florida Department of Education (Reports) has crunched student-test-score data and tied results back to teachers' education schools, looking to tease out which institutions are best. That effort could ramp up into a more-detailed rating system for all Florida's education schools.
The most intense, and controversial, scrutiny likely will come when teacher colleges find themselves graded A to F next year, with the results posted in U.S. News & World Report.
In the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey characterizes job tasks as either important or urgent. We desire to focus our time on important activities; the urgent ones are the persistent fires we must extinguish in order to focus on those important projects. The dissonance between putting off important work because of the need to tackle urgent tasks often causes people to become dissatisfied in their job performance. Hence, I've been thinking about Covey's book a lot lately as I question whether essay grading is an important or urgent part of my job.
In addition to Covey, my latest copy of Rutgers magazine features an article on giving great lectures. The article presented several members of the university faculty describing how they engage a classroom while lecturing. Reading through the lengthy article leaves me to ponder - am I doing too much in my classes? Why don't I just lecture?
My creative writing time has been sparse these past few months because my current courses involve grading 50-75 essays per week, along with fulfilling my university service requirements (another story for another day). I have spent around 20 hours per week grading essays, and my cost-benefit radar is telling me to question whether such assessments are worth it. Some readers may wonder why I am not more efficient, but I do aim for efficiency- I even stagger submission dates.
A controversial bill that would have established a state-run authorizing board to help expand the number of independent charter schools in Wisconsin was not able to gather the 17 votes necessary for passage in the state Senate by the end of the day Thursday.
Now, with the current floor session complete and legislators heading home until January, the bill, at least in its current form, is dead.
Whether the bill -- first introduced early last spring -- comes back with enough adjustments to make it palatable during the spring session remains to be seen.
Sources close to Republican legislators at the Capitol say that several GOP senators raised questions about a number of elements of the bill, suggesting it could be difficult to rework it sufficiently to pass muster in a chamber where Republicans have a razor-thin 17-16 majority and Democrats have indicated their opposition.
There is little question in my mind that national standards will be a blessing. The crazy quilt of district and state standards will become more rational, student mobility will stop causing needless learning hardships, and the full talents of a nation of innovators will be released to develop a vast array of products and services at a scale that permits even small vendors to compete to widen the field to all educators' benefit.
That said, we are faced with a terrible situation in mathematics. In my view, unlike the English/language arts standards, the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative are a bitter disappointment. In terms of their limited vision of math education, the pedestrian framework chosen to organize the standards, and the incoherent nature of the standards for mathematical practice in particular, I don't see how these take us forward in any way. They unwittingly reinforce the very errors in math curriculum, instruction, and assessment that produced the current crisis.
With only 24 days remaining till the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will vote on the Madison Preparatory Academy charter and only 9 days until the MMSD administration is required to issue an analysis of their proposal (and that is assuming the analysis is issued on a Sunday, otherwise we are talking only one week), there are still many, many unanswered questions concerning the school. Too many unanswered questions.
Where to start?
All officially submitted information (and more) can be found on the district web site (scroll down for the latest iterations, and thanks to the district public info team for doing this).
The issues around instrumentality/non instrumentality and the status of staff in relation to existing union contracts have rightfully been given much attention. It is my understanding that there has been some progress, but things seem to be somewhat stalled on those matters.
Charter schools--public schools of choice that are operated autonomously, outside the direct control of local school districts--have become more prevalent over the past two decades. There is no consensus about whether, on average, charter schools are doing better or worse than conventional public schools at promoting the achievement of their students. Nonetheless, one research finding is clear: Effects vary widely among different charter schools. Many educators, policymakers, and funders are interested in ways to identify and replicate successful charter schools and help other public schools adopt effective charter school practices.
Charter-school management organizations (CMOs), which establish and operate multiple charter schools, represent one prominent attempt to bring high performance to scale. Many CMOs were created in order to replicate educational approaches that appeared to be effective, particularly among disadvantaged students. Attracting substantial philanthropic support, CMO schools have grown rapidly from encompassing about 6 percent of all charter schools in 2000 to about 17 percent of a much larger number of charter schools by 2009 (Miron 2010). Some of these organizations have received laudatory attention through anecdotal reports of dramatic achievement results.
Education think tanks and reformers have been abuzz today with the release of NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores — also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.” The biennial release charts student achievement in math and English in fourth and eighth grades. (For an explainer on all things NAEP, go here.) The 2011 stats showed slight improvement in math across both levels, but reading scores among fourth-graders remained stagnant.
NAEP provides us the data, but officials do not surmise causes or reasons for growth – or lack thereof. That’s why we have eduwonks. Here’s what they had to say (in no particular order):
Address the fundamental teaching and learning needs of schools in the Local Education Agency (LEA), especially the academic problems o f low-achieving students.
MMSD has been identified by the State of Wisconsin as a District Identified for Improvement, or DIFI. We entered into this status based on District WKCE assessment scores. The data indicates that sub-groups of students-African American students, English Language Learner Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged -did not score high enough on the WKCE in one or more areas of reading, math or test participation to meet state criteria.
Under No Child Left Behind, 100% of students are expected to achieve proficient or advanced on the WKCE in four areas by 2014. Student performance goals have been raised every year on a regular schedule since 2001, making targets more and more difficult to reach each year. In addition to the curriculum changes being implemented, the following assessments are also new or being implemented during the 2011-12 school year (see Attachment 1):
The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP): Grades 3-7. MAP is incorporated into the MMSD Balanced Assessment Plan as a computer adaptive benchmark assessment tool for grades 3-7. Administration of the assessment was implemented in spring, 2011.
Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT): Grades 2 and 5. As proposed in the Talented and Gifted Plan approved by the Board of Education in August, 2009, the district requested approval of funds to purchase and score the Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT) which was administered in February, 2011, to all second and fifth graders.
The EPAS System: Explore Grades 8-9, Plan Grade 10, ACT Grade 11. The EPAS system provides a longitudinal, systematic approach to educational and career planning, assessment, instructional support, and evaluation. The system focuses on the integrated, higher-order thinking skills students develop in grades K-12 that are important for success both during and after high school. The EPAS system is linked to the College and Career Readiness standards so that the information gained about student performance can be used to inform instruction around those standards.
Attached are six documents describing programs being implemented for the 2011-12 school year to address the needs of all students.
1. Strategic Plan Document: Year Three (Attachment 2)
2. Strategic Plan Summary of Three Main Focus Areas (Attachment 3)
3. Addressing the Needs of All Learners and Closing the Achievement Gap Through K-12 Alignment (Attachment 4)
4. Scope and Sequence (Attachment 5)
5. The Ideal Graduate from MMSD (Attachment 6)
6. 4K Update to BOE- Program and Sites- (Attachment 7)
Madison School District administrators aren't keeping track of the best classroom instruction. Not all principals create a culture of high expectations for all students. And teachers aren't using the same research-based methods.
Such inconsistencies across the district and within schools -- stemming from Madison's tradition of school and teacher autonomy -- are hurting student achievement, according to a district analysis required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"There are problems within the entire system," Superintendent Dan Nerad said. "We do have good practice, but we need to be more consistent and have more fidelity to our practices."
Inconsistencies in teaching and building culture can affect low-income students, who are more likely to move from school to school, and make teacher training less effective, Nerad said.
The analysis is contained in an improvement plan the district is scheduled to discuss with the School Board on Monday and to deliver next week to the state Department of Public Instruction.
About 5,500 students at Milwaukee Public Schools are on a path that research shows leads to better understanding of science, engineering and math, more engagement in school and improves their academic performance. Project Lead the Way does all that.
Which is why William Symonds thinks more kids should have such "apprenticeship" opportunities.
And we think he's right.
Symonds, head of the Pathways to Prosperity Project at Harvard University, says kids need to be more firmly connected to the workplace - at a younger age. His message: Four-year college degrees aren't for everyone, and by overemphasizing that goal, parents, schools and businesses have left a huge swath of kids behind. There is certainly evidence of that in Milwaukee.
And while it's a fact that southeastern Wisconsin needs more college graduates, the goal of more baccalaureate degrees is not incompatible with the idea of offering high school students multiple pathways to careers.
The two most common criticisms about charter schools are that A) many of them aren't that good and B) the good ones can't be replicated to serve enough kids to really make a difference. TIME got an exclusive first look at the most comprehensive evaluation of charter school networks ever, and although the study, which will be released on Nov. 4, underscores the challenge of creating quality schools, it also makes clear that it is indeed possible to build a lot of schools that are game-changers for a lot of students.
The study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education, examined networks of affiliated charter schools, which in the education world are referred to as charter school management organizations (CMOs). There are more than 130 of these non-profit networks serving about 250,000 students nationwide. I was on an advisory board for the early conception and design of this study, the goal of which was to better understand how CMOs operate and how effective they are. The study is filled with valuable data about how CMOs manage their teachers, how much funding they get and how they use it and what kinds of students they serve. But I'm focusing here on student achievement, which is, of course, the most contentious issue in the national debate about charter schools.
Charter schools, publicly financed but independently operated, have encountered fierce resistance in many suburban communities, criticized by parents and traditional educators who view them as a drain on resources.
The district, in Westchester County, sued the State Education Department and the Amani school this year, calling the approval an "arbitrary and capricious" decision, and sought to block Amani from moving forward. It has refused to turn over state, federal and local aid money to Amani, so the state has begun paying the charter directly. During the summer, district workers were sent to knock on the doors of Amani students to check that they lived in the district, a tactic that angered some parents. And in recent weeks, the district has delayed providing special education services to Amani students.
Everything you wanted to know about urban education and its solutions!
Dr. Armand A. Fusco, via a kind email:
"No one has been able to stop the steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss." Bob Herbert / Syndicated columnist
Everything you wanted to know about urban education and its solutions!
For over 50 years this shame of the nation and education has remained as a plague upon its most vulnerable children. All reform efforts involving billions of dollars have not alleviated this scourge in our public schools. The rhetoric has been profound, but it has been immune to any antidote or action and it is getting worse; but it doesn't have to be!
The following quotes summarize the 285 pages and over 400 references from my book.
Edited Insightful Quotes
The explanations and references are found in the contents of the book.
School pushouts is a time bomb exploding economically and socially every twenty-six seconds
Remember what the basic problem is--they are in all respects illiterate and that is why they are failing.
Every three years the number of dropouts and pushouts adds up to a city bigger than Chicago.
Politics trump the needs of all children to achieve their potential.
One reason that the high school dropout crisis is known as the "silent epidemic" is that the problem is frequently minimized.
Simply stated black male students can achieve high outcomes; the tragedy is most states and districts choose not to do so.
In the majority of schools, the conditions necessary for Black males to systematically succeed in education do not exist.
While one in four American children is Latino--the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States--they are chronically underserved by the nation's public schools and have the lowest education attainment levels in the country.
Miseducation is the most powerful example of cruel and unusual punishment; it's exacted on children innocent of any crime.
Traditional proposals for improving education--more money, smaller classes, etc.--aren't getting the job done.
The public school system is designed for Black and other minority children to fail.
The U.S. Department of Education has never even acknowledged that the problem exists.
Though extensive records are kept...unions and school boards do not want productivity analysis done.
Educational bureaucracies like the NEA are at the center of America's dysfunctional minority public schools.
Does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes? We found that it does not.
Performance pay is equivalent to "thirty pieces of silver."
Data necessary to distinguish cost-effective schools are all available, but our system has been built to make their use difficult.
Districts give credit for students who fail standardized tests on the expectation that students someday will pass.
We saw some schools that were low performing and had a very high parent satisfaction rate.
We're spending ever-greater sums of money, yet our high school graduates' test results have been absolutely flat.
America's primary and secondary schools have many problems, but an excess of excellence is not one of them.
Not only is our use of incarceration highly concentrated among men with little schooling, but corrections systems are doing less to correct the problem by reducing educational opportunities for the growing number of prisoners.
Although states will require school districts to implement the common core state standards, the majority of these states are not requiring districts to make complementary changes in curriculum and teacher programs.
We can show that merit pay is counterproductive, that closing down struggling schools (or firing principals) makes no sense.
The gap between our articulated ideals and our practice is an international embarrassment.
It's interesting to note that despite the growing support by minority parents for charters, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and other civil rights groups collectively condemn charter schools.
Public schools do respond constructively to competition by raising their achievement and productivity.
Gates Foundation has also stopped funding the small school concept because no results could be shown.
The policies we are following today are unlikely to improve our schools.
Our country still does a better job of tracking a package than it does a student.
Indeed, we give these children less of all the things that both research and experience tell us make a difference.
Reformers have little knowledge of what is working and how to scale what works.
The fact is that illiteracy has persisted in all states for generations, particularly among the most vulnerable children, and getting worse is a testament that national policy and creative leadership rings hollow.
We can't change a child's home life, but what we can do is affect what they do here at school.
Only a third of young Americans will leave high school with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
Black churches can no longer play gospel in the sanctuaries while kids drop out into poverty and prison. They must embrace school reform and take the role that Catholic churches have done for so long and for so many.
There is only one way to equalize education for all--technology.
Whatever made you successful in the past won't in the future.
The real potential of technology for improving learning remains largely untapped in schools today.
Can't read, can't learn, can't get a job, can't survive, so can't stay within the law.
Of the 19.4 million government workers, half work in education, which rivals health care for the most wasteful sector in America.
The only people not being betrayed are those who feed off our failing education system...that group gets larger every year.
Mediocrity, not excellence, is the national norm as demonstrated by the deplorable evidence.
Parents are left to face the bleak reality that their child will be forever stuck in a failing school and a failing system.
The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system.
The very public institutions intended for student learning have become focused instead on adult employment.
We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States.
No reform has yet lived up to its definition!
Minority males don't get the beef, they get the leftovers.
The cotton plantations have become the school plantations (children held in bondage of failing schools) and the dropouts move on to the prison plantations.
Guest Speaker Mark Seidenberg (Donald O. Hebb and Hilldale Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, UW-Madison): Professor Seidenberg gave an excellent presentation on the science of reading and why it is important to incorporate the findings of that science in teaching. Right now there is a huge disconnect between the vast, converged body of science worldwide and instructional practice. Prospective teachers are not learning about reading science in IHE's, and relying on intuition about how to teach reading is biased and can mislead. Teaching older students to read is expensive and difficult. Up-front prevention of reading failure is important, and research shows us it is possible, even for dyslexic students. This will save money, and make the road easier for students to learn and teachers to teach. Seidenberg endorses using the Massachusetts model exam for teachers of reading (MTEL 90), which was developed with input from reading scientists. He also supports universal assessment to identify students who are at risk, and he mentioned the Minnesota Reading Corps as a model of reading tutoring that would be good to bring to Wisconsin.
Lander: Can Seidenberg provide a few examples of things on which the Task Force could reach consensus?
Seidenberg: There is a window for teaching basic reading skills that then will allow the child to move on to comprehension. The balanced literacy concept is in conflict with best practices. Classrooms in Wisconsin are too laissez-faire, and the spiraling approach to learning does not align with science.
Michael Brickman: Brickman, the Governor's aide, cut off the discussion with Professor Seidenberg, and said he would be in touch with him later.
Particularly in rough economic times, states must make hard choices about resources. But there is one targeted investment that mayors, business leaders, educators, and parents are crying out for, and that states have already initiated. It is reports for high schools on their students' postsecondary performance, answering the critical questions: Do students enroll in a postsecondary institution? Do they pass their non-remedial courses? In which academic areas are they thriving, or struggling? These data will enable high schools everywhere in a state to find out how their graduates are doing anywhere in the state. Without this information, high schools are handicapped in their ability to prepare students for college and career.
Indeed, too many students, especially low-income students, are not prepared. In the last decade, Americans have enrolled in college in record numbers. But once there, they are stumbling at alarming rates and at enormous cost to themselves, their families, and their city and state tax bases. By one estimate, the lost personal income for one year of one class of these students is $3.8 billion; the federal government loses $566 million and the states lose $164 million in taxes from this cohort of college students who should have graduated and the numbers multiply each year. 1
Superintendents and principals are desperate to know what went wrong. Business leaders anx- iously hope for employees who are ready for 21st century work. Governors, too, know that above all they need an educated workforce to compete in the national and global marketplace.
States are making progress toward producing the high school postsecondary performance data these stakeholders need. But in the meantime, the stakeholders are restless.
Students across the country have settled into another school year and many prospective teachers are in their first year of student teaching experience. Student teaching gives prospective teachers the opportunity to put theory into practice and ideally to learn the art of teaching from a skilled educator. Despite the importance of the student teaching experience, in some cases too little attention is paid to the quality of these programs. Some states are bravely tackling the arduous task of developing and refining teacher evaluation systems, but have yet to look carefully at the institutions and pre-service experiences that have the ability to deliver either exceptional or failing teachers. Rather than struggling to find the fairest way to identify, remediate, or ultimately remove bad teachers, wouldn't it be far more beneficial for the profession and for students' learning to ensure that only the very best teachers are earning certification and entering the classroom? (See DFER's white paper, Ticket to Teach, to read some of our recommendations on reforming the profession here.)
In an attempt to more carefully examine the quality of pre-service training and education for teachers, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has begun a review of teacher preparation. In July, they released "Student Teaching in the United States." The report and the larger review are controversial and have generated some backlash. But, if one can look past the defensiveness and posturing on all sides, the report suggests some helpful guidelines for teacher preparation programs and states to begin setting clearer and more rigorous training criteria for the benefit of students.
Value-added measures are often criticized for providing a narrow view of a teacher's performance. Conversely, broader measures like observations are seen as too subjective. A new study shows--happily--that both types of evaluations are consistent and complementary: they predict future students' achievement. Teachers who score well on one also score well on the other. Best of all, combining them produces a stronger and more accurate measure of a teacher's effectiveness than using either alone.
Jonah E. Rockoff and Cecilia Speroni of Columbia University looked at the ability of three measures to predict teacher effectiveness: a rigorous job application process, observations and ratings by trained mentors, and value-added calculations based on students' math and English scores.
Nicole is a teacher's dream student. Bright, curious and hard-working, she has high expectations for herself and isn't satisfied with anything less than A grades. In fact, her mother says, she sometimes has to be told not to take school too seriously.
But when Nicole was tested in seventh grade to see if she'd qualify for an eighth-grade algebra course that would put her on track for advanced math courses in high school, her score wasn't top-notch. She assured the teacher she wanted to tackle the course anyway. He turned her down.
In fact, her score could not predict whether she'd succeed. Neither could the color of her skin.
As an African-American girl, Nicole didn't look much like the high-flying students her teacher was accustomed to teaching in his accelerated math classes at a Madison middle school. But instead of backing off, Nicole and her family challenged the recommendation. Somewhat grudgingly, her teacher allowed her in the class.
Fast forward a year: Nicole and one other student, the two top performers in the eighth-grade algebra class, were recommended for advanced math classes in high school.
Following is commentary on Wisconsin's NAEP reading scores that was sent to the Governor's Read to Lead task force by task force member Steve Dykstra.
2011 NAEP data for reading was released earlier than usual, this year. Under the previous timeline we wouldn't get the reading data until Spring.
While we returned to our 2007 rank of 25 from our 2009 rank of 30, that is misleading. All of our gains come from modest improvement among Black students who no longer rank last, but are still very near the bottom. The shift in rank is among Wisconsin and a group of states who all perform at an essentially identical level, and have for years. We're talking tenths of points as the difference.
It is always misleading to consider NAEP scores on a whole-state basis. Different states may have very different demographic make-ups and those difference can either exaggerate or mask the actual differences between the two states. For instance, the difference between Florida and Wisconsin (all scores refer to 4th grade reading) at the whole-state level is only 3 points. In reality, the difference is much greater. Demographic variation masks the real difference because Florida has far more minority students and far more poverty than Wisconsin. When we look at the subgroups, comparing apples to apples, we see that the real differences are vast.
When we break the groups down by gender and race, Florida outperforms Wisconsin by a statistically significant margin in every group. The smallest difference is 8 and some are as large as 20. If we break the groups down by race and school lunch status Florida outperforms Wisconsin by a statistically significant margin in every group, except black students who don't get a free lunch. For that group Florida does better, but not by enough to declare statistical certainty. The smallest margin is 9, and many are at or above 15.
10 points are generally accepted as a grade level for this range of the NAEP. Every Florida subgroup except one exceeds it's Wisconsin counterpart by a nearly a full grade level, and most by a lot more.
When we compare Wisconsin to Massachusetts the story is the same, only worse. The same groups are significantly different from each other, but the margins are slightly larger. The whole-state difference between Wisconsin and Massachusetts (15+ pts) only appears larger than for Florida because Massachusetts enjoys many of the same demographic advantages as Wisconsin. In fact, Wisconsin students are about the same 1.5 grade levels behind both Florida and Massachusetts for 4th grade reading.
If you want to dig deeper and kick over more rocks, it only gets worse. Every Wisconsin subgroup is below their national average and most are statistically significantly below. The gaps are found in overall scores, as well as for performance categories. We do about the same in terms of advanced students as we do with low performing students. Except for black students who don't get a free lunch (where the three states are in a virtual dead heat), Wisconsin ranks last compared to Florida and Massachusetts for every subgroup in terms of percentage of students at the advanced level. In many cases the other states exceed our rate by 50-100% or more. Their children have a 50 -100% better chance to read at the advanced level.
We need a sense of urgency to do more than meet, and talk, and discuss. We need to actually change the things that will make a difference, we need to do it fast, and we need to get it right. A lot of what needs to be done can be accomplished in a matter of days. Some of it takes a few hours. The parts that will take longer would benefit from getting the other stuff done and out of the way so we can devote our attention to those long term issues.
Our children are suffering and so far, all we're doing is talking about it. Shame on us.
Comparing Rhetoric Regarding Texas (10th) & Wisconsin NAEP Scores: Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank second on eighth-grade NAEP math test
Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank
second on eighth-grade NAEP math test
Texas Hispanic and African-American students earned the second highest score among their peer groups on the 2011 eighth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics test. The state's white eighth grade students ranked fourth, missing out on the second place position themselves by less than one point.
Only Hispanic students in Montana earned a higher scale score on the math test than did eighth-grade Hispanic Texans. Only African-American students in Hawaii earned a higher average score than did their counterparts in Texas.
White students in the District of Columbia earned an average scale score of 319, the highest score for that ethnic group. Texas students ranked fourth, with less than a fraction of a point separating this group from students in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Massachusetts students had the second highest scale score at 304.2876, while Texas received an average score of 303.5460.
Overall, the state ranked 10th among the states with an average scale score of 290, substantially above the national average score of 283.
NAEP math on upward trend, state reading results stable
Wisconsin's biennial mathematics and reading results held steady on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card. The state's overall trend in mathematics is improving.
For fourth-grade mathematics, the state's 2011 scale score was 245, up one point but statistically the same as in 2009, compared to the national scale score of 240, a one-point increase from 2009. Wisconsin results for fourth-grade math are significantly higher than in 2003 when the average scale score was 237. At eighth grade, the Wisconsin scale score for mathematics was 289,
the same as in 2009 and up five points from 2003, which is statistically significant. For the nation, the 2011 mathematics scale score was 283, up one-point from 2009. State average scale scores in mathematics at both grade levels were statistically higher than the national score.
The Illinois State Board of Education issues School Report Cards each fall for all public schools and school districts in the state. The reports include data on school finances, demographics, instruction and student assessments, which are based on student testing done during the 2010-2011 school year.
York High School and Churchville Middle School failed to meet adequate yearly progress as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which stipulates 100 percent of students must meet AYP by 2014. If any subgroup of a school fails to meet AYP, then the whole school does not meet AYP.
On Tuesday, the Milwaukee Common Council will consider the Charter School Review Committee's recommendation that the City of Milwaukee contract with Rocketship Education to open a network of independent charter schools.
Rocketship Education selected Milwaukee as its first expansion city outside of California because it saw great need but also because it sees the opportunity to be part of a systemic change in a community that desperately needs it. Rocketship has never promised miracles. It does promise a chance - a chance for children and a chance for Milwaukee.
Milwaukee has serious challenges and an urgent need to grow, develop and attract more schools that are effective in educating low-income children. Closing the gap in educational achievement for all 127,000 of the city's K-12 schoolchildren is a community-wide responsibility.
There are no miracles, and we cannot wait for Superman. What we can do is expand our best-performing schools and work to improve our high-potential schools that operate as Milwaukee Public Schools or under the charter and choice programs. This requires the development of quality teachers and school leaders.
Editor's Note: Scroll down to the bottom to view OnlineCollege.org's infographic about rising costs and the $10,000 degree.
The latest news on Wall Street is that the occupiers want forgiveness of student debt. And while President Obama didn't meet their demands in his recent speech, he is still focusing on the same side of the equation: more money for higher education.
But down the road, the best way to deal with the high cost of college education is to reduce it! And Texas governor Rick Perry has thrown out the gauntlet by demanding that his regents come up with a plan for a $10,000 degree--not $10,000 per year but $10,000 for a full degree.
Is such a price possible? At the Pope Center, we've looked at affordability--and the innovation that will be required to get prices to that level--from many angles. My view is that extreme reductions are possible, but they may be far in the future. Meanwhile, however, you can save a lot of money if you take care.
There are 19 gym teachers in the Farmington School District who make more than $85,000 a year each. The average gym teacher's salary in Farmington is $75,035. By comparison, the science teachers in that district make $68,483 per year on average.
That's not unusual in Michigan schools, according to Freedom of Information Act requests received from around the state.
In the Woodhaven-Brownstown district, 18.5 (FTE) science teachers average some $58,400 per year in salary, while 12 gym teachers averaged nearly $76,700. In Harrison, science teachers earned $49,000 on average while gym teachers averaged $62,000.
This is not unusual, because school districts don't differentiate what a teacher does when considering compensation, regardless of the district's educational needs. Teachers are paid on a single salary schedule based on seniority and education level.
Racine Unified School District (RUSD) implemented a district-wide vision for improvement in March 2009. Called the North Star vision, it is intended to specify "the path to successful completion of high school for all RUSD students with an ultimate goal of every graduate being ready for a career and/or college." It includes performance targets at each grade level to be used in creating school improvement plans and in setting school-level learning targets.
The vision is the result of a collaborative effort by the school board, district administrators, the teachers and administrators unions, and the support staff union. A simple graphic illustrating the measures of focus at each grade level has been widely distributed to parents, teachers, and district stakeholders.
For dedicated readers, this 14th Annual Comparative Analysis of the Racine Unified School District will look quite different from the previous 13 reports. For the first time, we compare the district's performance to its own goals, as well as to its peers and to its past performance. The peer comparison tables, which have been the hallmark of previous reports, appear in Appendix I. The body of the report is focused on the district goals established in 2009 as the North Star vision, which according to the district, "is a shared vision that clearly identifies the path to successful completion of high school for all RUSD students with an ultimate goal of every graduate being ready for a career and/or college."
As in previous reports, we also present contextual information about the Racine community and student body. RUSD has experienced many changes over the past 14 years, including: slipping from the third largest district in the state to the fourth largest, becoming a majority minority district, and now having most of its students quality for free or reduced-price lunch. The community has also become less wealthy during this time and seen fewer adults obtain college degrees. It is clear that RUSD has many challenges to overcome and a loss of significant state aid for this school year is yet another challenge. Consequently, this year's report also includes a more in-depth analysis of the district's fiscal situation.
Sometimes you find yourself part of a trend accidentally: Some old, beloved jacket in your closet becomes fashionable, or your private, favorite novel is discovered by the world. Having written four books of fiction for adults, I wrote a novel for kids, and looked up from the first draft to find that other writers were doing the same thing--and adults were reading the books.
My plunge into the world of children's publishing surprised my friends as much as it surprised me. One asked, "How did you make the change? Did you have some kind of magical elixir?" I did, if you consider that magical elixirs are slow and difficult and sometimes frustrating to make, and involve wrong turns and unexpected discoveries. But here's the basic recipe:
1. Don't worry about what category the book belongs in. I thought I was writing a young adult novel and discovered that there was a type of book called "middle reader" only when my publishers told me I'd written one. I worked in a state of utter naïveté about what the rules are for writing children's books, which was liberating.
Madison Preparatory Academy would open next fall in a former church on the city's Near West Side if the School Board approves a contract for the controversial charter school.
The non-profit organization that would run the school has signed a letter of intent to lease the former Mount Olive Lutheran Church at 4018 Mineral Point Road, according to a business plan for the school released Saturday morning.
The site is on a Metro bus route and includes a 32,000-square-foot facility and 1,200-square-foot house. It also achieves the school's goal of being located near the Downtown, said Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire.
"It's a good neighborhood," Caire said. "We would hope the neighbors would want to get involved with the kids in the school."
The business plan lays out several other new details including a daily schedule from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 90-minute classes, report cards for parents and performance bonuses for staff.
Meanwhile, Progressive Dane announces its opposition to the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.
Recently there has been a significant move among Chinese educators to provide better sex education to students in college, primary schools and even kindergartens.
The Ministry of Education recently issued a circular requiring colleges to make courses on reproductive physiology and sex psychology part of the standard curriculum.
This kind of education as a rule is included in courses known as physiology and hygiene in middle schools, but in actual practice some more sensitive topics are either not addressed or glossed over by instructors who consider them embarrassing and not essential.
In the past, this kind of information about sexuality was generally passed on informally outside the schools, by young people.
One of the many stated reasons for offering formal, medically accurate instruction is to protect children from sex abuse, and to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was shared between three scientists - Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss - for discovering, through their research on supernovae, that the universe's rate of expansion is accelerating.
Yet, as the plaudits for the winners began to flow, one or two of their peers sounded notes of caution. Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society, suggested that this was an instance where the Nobel committee had been "damagingly constrained" by its convention of not honouring more than three individuals at one time.
The prize-winning work had been carried out by two groups, each made up of a dozen or so scientists. "It would have been fairer," Rees argued, "and would send a less distorted message about how this kind of science is actually done, if the award had been made collectively to all members of the two groups."
Madison Preparatory Academy's educational program has been designed to be different. The eight features of the educational program will serve as a powerful mix of strategies that allow Madison Prep to fulfill its mission: to prepare students for success at a four-year college or university by instilling Excellence, Pride, Leadership and Service. By fulfilling this mission, Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst of change and opportunity for young men and women who live in a city where only 48% of African American students and 56% of Latino students graduate from high school. Madison Prep's educational program will produce students who are ready for college; who think, read, and write critically; who are culturally aware and embrace differences among all people; who give back to their communities; and who know how to work hard.
One of the most unique features of Madison Prep is the single gender approach. While single gender education has a long, successful history, there are currently no schools - public or private - in Dane County that offer single gender education. While single gender education is not right for every student, the demand demonstrated thus far by families who are interested in enrolling their children in Madison Prep shows that a significant number of parents believe their children would benefit from a single gender secondary school experience.
Madison Prep will operate two schools - a boys' school and a girls' school - in order to meet this demand as well as ensure compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The schools will be virtually identical in all aspects, from culture to curriculum, because the founders of Madison Prep know that both boys and girls need and will benefit from the other educational features of Madison Prep.
The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is one of those strategies that Madison Prep's founders know will positively impact all the students the schools serve. IB is widely considered to be the highest quality curricular framework available. What makes IB particularly suitable for Madison Prep is that it can be designed around local learning standards (the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the Common Core State Standards) and it is inherently college preparatory. For students at Madison Prep who have special learning needs or speak English as a second language, IB is fully adaptable to their needs. Madison Prep will offer both the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP) to all its students.
Because IB is designed to be college preparatory, this curricular framework is an ideal foundation for the other aspects of Madison Prep's college preparatory program. Madison Prep is aiming to serve a student population of which at least 65% qualify for free or reduced lunch. This means that many of the parents of Madison Prep students will not be college educated themselves and will need the school to provide considerable support as their students embark on their journey through Madison Prep and to college.
College exposure, Destination Planning, and graduation requirements that mirror admissions requirements are some of the ways in which Madison Prep will ensure students are headed to college. Furthermore, parents' pursuit of an international education for their children is increasing rapidly around the world as they seek to foster in their children a global outlook that also expands their awareness, competence and comfort level with communicating, living, working and problem solving with and among cultures different than their own.
Harkness Teaching, the cornerstone instructional strategy for Madison Prep, will serve as an effective avenue through which students will develop the critical thinking and communication skills that IB emphasizes. Harkness Teaching, which puts teacher and students around a table rather than in theater-style classrooms, promotes student-centered learning and rigorous exchange of ideas. Disciplinary Apprenticeship, Madison Prep's approach to literacy across the curriculum, will ensure that students have the literacy skills to glean ideas and information from a variety of texts, ideas and information that they can then bring to the Harkness Table for critical analysis.
Yet to ensure that students are on track for college readiness and learning the standards set out in the curriculum, teachers will have to take a disciplined approach to data-driven instruction. Frequent, high quality assessments - aligned to the standards when possible - will serve as the basis for instructional practices. Madison Prep teachers will consistently be analyzing new data to adjust their practice as needed.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of young men and women of color is uncertain.
Black and Hispanic boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Hispanic girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League of Greater Madison by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their White peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
Both schools will be administratively separate and operated by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. (Madison Prep), an independent 501(c)(3) established by the Urban League of Greater Madison and members of Madison Prep's inaugural board of directors.
The Urban League of Greater Madison, the "founder" of Madison Prep, understands that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, limited access to schools and classrooms that provide academic rigor, lack of access to positive male and female role models in different career fields, limited exposure to academically successful and achievement-oriented peer groups, and limited exposure to opportunity and culture experiences outside their neighborhoods contribute to reasons why so many young men and women fail to achieve their full potential. At the same time, the Urban League and its supporters understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to specifically address these issues.
Madison Prep will consist of two independent public charter schools - authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education - designed to serve adolescent males and females in grades 6-12 in two separate schools. Both will be open to all students residing within the boundaries of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) who apply, regardless of their previous academic performance.
Lawsuits for School Reform?: Parent Power May Insert Itself in L.A. Unified's Teachers' Contract; Demand that the LAUSD Immediately Comply with the Stull Act
Earlier this year, Dropout Nation argued that one way that school reformers -- including school choice activists and Parent Power groups -- could advance reform and expand school choice was to file lawsuits similar to school funding torts filed for the past four decades by school funding advocates. But now, it looks like Parent Power activists may be filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles on a different front: Overhauling teacher evaluations. And the Los Angeles Unified School District may be the place where the first suit is filed.
In a letter sent on behalf of some families Wednesday to L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and the school board -- and just before the district begins negotiations with the American Federation of Teachers' City of Angels unit over a new contract -- Barnes & Thornburg's Kyle Kirwan demanded that the district "implement a comprehensive system" of evaluating teachers that ties "pupil progress" data to teacher evaluations. Kirwan and the group he represents are also asking for the district to begin evaluating all teachers "regardless of tenure status" and to reject any contract with the American Federation of Teachers local that allows for any veteran teacher with more than a decade on the job to go longer than two years without an evaluation if they haven't had one in the first place.
We represent minor-students currently residing within the boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District (the "District" or "LAUSD"), the parents of these students, and other adults who have paid taxes for a school system that has chronically failed to comply with California law.
Our clients seek to have the District immediately meet its obligations under the Stull Act, a forty year old law that is codified at California Education Code section 44660 et seq. (the "Stull Act").
In relevant part, the Stull Act requires that "[t]he governing board of each school district establish standards of expected pupil achievement at each grade level in each area of study."
Cal. Educ. Code § 44662(a). The Stull Act requires further that "[t]he governing board of each school district ... evaluate and assess certificated employee performance as it reasonably relates to ... [t]he progress of pupils toward the standards established pursuant to subdivision (a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments ...." Cal. Educ. Code§ 44662(b)(l).
In the forty years since the California Legislature passed the Stull Act, the District has never evaluated its certificated personnel based upon the progress of pupils towards the standards established pursuant to Education Code section 44662(a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by the state adopted criterion referenced assessments; never reduced such evaluations to writing or added the evaluations to part of the permanent records of its certificated personnel; never reviewed with its certificated personnel the results of pupil progress as they relate to Stull Act evaluations; and never made specific recommendations on how certificated personnel with unsatisfactory ratings could improve their performance in order to achieve a higher level of pupil progress toward meeting established standards of expected pupil achievement.
Are Quebec schools embracing computers too zealously? I don't know the answer - I'm no pedagogue - but it's a question worth asking.
Two things are clear.
One is that most parents, school officials and politicians see children's familiarity with computers at an early age as desirable - nay, imperative - for successful individual careers and for society's prosperity in a "knowledge economy." The English Montreal School Board, for one, even provides laptop computers as a teaching tool in pre-kindergarten (where the 4-year-olds use them for recognition of numbers and letters and to do puzzles). In response to strong public support for this trend, Premier Jean Charest promised a few months ago to put a smart whiteboard (a front-of-the-class board that allows for digital touch interaction) in every primary- and secondary-school classroom across the province.
Adrian of OpenClass responds to our questions. See our responses below:
Adrian writes:
@Nixty, a competitor to OpenClass, asks:
What happens when readily available free courses/texts help students learn better than Pearson's closed expensive courses/texts?
What happens when we have clear research support that shows how students taking the open and free course learn more than students taking Pearson's closed and expensive course?
Pearson's stated aim is to make the LMS a commodity so they can sell more of their closed content and course tools. What happens when Pearson isn't selling enough of their closed content and course tools?
Adrian's Answer: Is this a trick question? Doesn't this boil down to the more general question -- What happens when a free product is better than one you pay for? There's only one conclusion I can come to - free wins that round. And 'for pay' has to come up with something worth paying for, which is the essence of competition, the arms race that drives economics to produce improvement. I believe Pearson has proven it is up to that challenge for the long haul.
On a humid Monday in late September, a wonky entrepreneur named Salman Khan visited New York City. Khan, a 35-year-old American of South Asian descent with bushy black hair and a nerdy affect, was in town to promote his Silicon Valley startup. He stayed at the London NYC, an upscale hotel just south of Central Park, and dined at Maze, the Gordon Ramsay restaurant off the lobby.
But that night, instead of seeing the sights or going out with friends, Khan holed up in his hotel room, fiddled with his laptop, and produced a series of amateurish videos about geometry. They are disarmingly simple - Khan's deep voice talks over a black screen, where he draws shapes and writes out questions and equations in multiple colours. One, a six-minute clip called "Congruent triangle proof example", shows a proof that a point on a line is the midpoint, using two triangles. Another, "Finding congruent triangles", establishes why four related postulates are all equally reasonable. When he was finished, he uploaded them to YouTube and went to sleep.
I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.
Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.
Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
What was most fascinating to me and an absolute pleasure is that here was a educator who made no apologies for wanting to serve gifted students. She gave a PowerPoint and several times talked about the need to serve these students needs as a district would any other student with a special need like ELL or Special Education. It was very refreshing and I have never, in all my years in SPS, heard any SPS principal or Board member or staff member or Superintendent speak in this manner.
She started out by showing a list from J. Skabos about differences between gifted children and bright children (and I note that she believes both groups need to be served). I couldn't find the exact list but here is link to one that is quite similar.
Ah, the achievement gap. So much trouble to fix, so why bother trying? That seems to be the attitude in Washington, where pundits have spent the last several months ripping the current focus on improving the low end of student performance in our nation's schools. In September the Obama Administration put forward a plan to offer waivers to states that want more flexibility -- i.e., less ambitious targets -- under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week the bottom really fell out when the Senate committee that handles education passed a rewrite of the No Child law basically leaving it to states to figure out how (and probably, in practice, even whether) to close the gaps. In other words, a decade after an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort to get serious about school accountability, it's open season on a strong federal role in education. How did we get here?
Let's start with the pundits. Leading the charge is the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess, who, in the fall issue of National Affairs, launched a contrarian broadside against NCLB's focus on low-achieving students. "The relentless focus on gap-closing has transformed school reform into little more than a less objectionable rehash of the failed Great Society playbook," Hess wrote. Next came a September report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, another conservative think tank, claiming that the current focus is shortchanging high-achievers. Yet the data in the Fordham report didn't support its alarmist conclusions that high-achievers were being hurt by today's policies. The truth is, according to Fordham's own data, that high-performers didn't fare that badly overall. Other evidence bears this out. None of that slowed down the pundits.
After years of futility inside the classroom, Chicago Public Schools soon will adopt a more rigorous internal evaluation system that judges schools on how well they prepare students for college, a move that could lead to more school closings in the years ahead.
This stricter method of evaluation promises to be an eye-opener for many parents, considering the current process used for years already paints a bleak picture of the district: 42 percent of schools -- 207 elementary and 76 high schools -- are on probation for low-academic performance and poor attendance.
Seventy-two schools have been on probation for five consecutive years, and 16 of them for 15 years in a row.
Approximately 123,000 students are in underperforming schools, officials said, prompting parents in large numbers to uproot their families for neighborhoods with better schools inside or outside the city. Maps presented to the school board Wednesday showed a correlation between some of the city's poorest-performing schools and schools that are most underenrolled.
A parent requested a conference with a teacher I know during conference time. This parent began yelling and gesticulating wildly during the conference, until the teacher asked the parent to leave. By the way, the teacher in question is so calm, he's practically a reincarnation of the Buddha. Parent stormed off and went to an administrator and made a bunch of wild claims about the teacher and then stormed out of the administrator's office.
So far, not all that unusual, right?
Here's where it gets interesting: the parent's kid approached the teacher a few days later, accused him of threatening the mother, and then threatened to attack the teacher. This was done IN FRONT OF WITNESSES.
Wow. Makes Race to the Top seem kind of insignificant and out-of-touch, doesn't it?
The Department has identified the following constituencies as having interests that are significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations. The Department plans to seat as negotiators individuals from organizations or groups representing these constituencies:
Postsecondary students, including legal assistance organizations that represent students.
Teachers.
Financial aid administrators at postsecondary institutions.
Business officers and bursars at postsecondary institutions.
Admissions officers at postsecondary institutions.
State officials, including officials with teacher preparation program approval agencies, State teacher licensing boards, higher education executive officers, chief State school officers, State attorneys general, and State data system administrators.
Institutions that offer teacher preparation programs, including schools of education.
Institutions of higher education eligible to receive Federal assistance under Title III, Parts A, B, and F, and Title V of the HEA, which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, American Indian Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian- Serving Institutions, Predominantly Black Institutions, and other institutions with a substantial enrollment of needy students as defined in Title III of the HEA.
Two-year public institutions of higher education.
Four-year public institutions of higher education.
Private, non-profit institutions of higher education.
Private, for-profit institutions of higher education.
Operators of programs for alternative routes to teacher certification.
Accrediting agencies.
Students enrolled in elementary and secondary education, including parents of students enrolled in elementary and secondary education.
School and local educational agency officials, including those responsible for hiring teachers and evaluating teacher performance.
The topics the committee is likely to address are as follows:
The requirements for institutional and program report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(a) of the HEA);
The requirements for State report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(b) of the HEA);
The standards to ensure reliability, validity, and accuracy of the data submitted in report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(c) of the HEA);
The criteria used by States to assess the performance of teacher preparation programs at higher education institutions in the State, the identification of low-performing programs (Section 207(a) of the HEA), and the consequences of a State's termination of eligibility of a program (Section 207(b) of the HEA);
The definition of the term ''high quality teacher preparation program'' for the purpose of establishing the eligibility of an institution to participate in the TEACH Grant program (Section 420L(1) of the HEA);
The definition of the term ''high quality professional development services'' for the purpose of establishing the eligibility of an institution to participate in the TEACH Grant program (Section 420L(1) of the HEA); and
The service and repayment obligations for the TEACH Grant Program (Subpart E of 34 CFR 686).
In Calculus, we just finished our limits unit. I gave a test. It had a great question on it, inspired by Bowman and his limit activity.
Without further ado, it reads:
Then I ask part (b)...
Which reads: "Scratch off the missing data. With the new information, now answer the question: What do you think the limit as x approaches 2 of the function is (and say "d.n.e." if it does not exist)? Explain why (talk about what a limit is!).
Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.
Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
This jumped out to me after watching Steve Job's 2005 Stanford graduation speech; the biggest thing to make sure not to take for granted at college is how easy it is to meet so many different & amazing people. You get 4 years to live on a student campus full of dots waiting to be connected ( in the words of Steve ) you must take advantage of every possible moment to connect dots. Especially if you want to start a startup. Looking back I wish I would have hung out a ton more in the C.S. Lab instead of doing my comp sci hw in my dorm room lounge in between switching off games of call of duty with my roommates.
I'm dying for an awesome co-founder right now!! More than anything, and it would have been awesome to be able to go to a college buddy with the same interests as I have. A college campus represents the easiest and most abundant source for finding a Co-Founder. Everything I've done until now I've done alone out of necessity b/c it's been extremely hard to find a good co-founder.
Don't take that barrier free access to tons of new friends & potential co-founders for granted!! That's my single most important advice to any college student that wants to start their own company. I took it for granted and it's making my startup career 100 times more difficult, trust me.
Only one in four students who enter high school in New York City are ready for college after four years, and less than half enroll, according to the A-through-F high school report cards released on Monday.
Those numbers, included for the first time in the report cards, confirmed what the state suggested several months ago: the city still has a long way to go to prepare students for successful experiences in college and beyond. And they were a signal that graduation rates, long used by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as a validation of his education policies, were not as meaningful as they seemed.
"There's a huge change in life chances for kids who are successful in post-secondary education," the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said. "We really have a task to prepare kids for that, and the data is one of the most motivating tools."
Is Denver going to follow in the footsteps of other reform minded urban school districts that saw momentum, change, and improvement fade away? Or will we be one of the few cities to sustain and even accelerate effective school reform?
In less than two weeks, the most hotly contested and expensive school board race in the history of Colorado will come to an end. It looks like nearly $1 million will be spent by both sides in this election by the time Election Day arrives on November 1st.
Denver has a seven-person school board with four members currently supporting the Superintendent Tom Boasberg and a broad set of reforms while the remaining three board members have relied upon Diane Ravitch to try to thwart nearly every reform initiative. Needless to say, if two of the three seats go to anti-reform candidates, Boasberg will need to look for another job and the Colorado reform community is going to have to look to some other districts for bold leadership.
Denver has been the epicenter for reform in Colorado since Michael Bennet took the helm of Denver Public Schools (DPS). Most of the reforms, which were highlighted in Colorado's Race to the Top application and elsewhere, are dependent upon Denver leading the charge.
We applaud the Urban League's energy and persistence in identifying the significant achievement gap that remains in Madison schools. We welcome the fact that the Urban League has helped focus broader community discussion on this issue, and the need to serve more effectively and successfully African-American and Hispanic students. The achievement gap is real and must be addressed.
While the Madison Preparatory Academy may provide a fine educational experience for 840 students, the Madison Metropolitan School District is charged with improving outcomes for more than 12,000 children of color. We may be better served by using our limited and diminishing resources:
1. To increase the number of students in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) by expanding this nationally proven and successful program, now in all four high schools, to lower grade levels. AVID is a college readiness system that accelerates learning for students in the academic middle who may not have a college tradition in their families. Ultimately, AVID uses research-based instructional strategies to increase academic performance schoolwide. East High, the first Madison school to implement AVID, has had two graduating classes. These graduates, who attend a variety of Wisconsin colleges and universities, are 90 percent students of color and 74 percent low income; 52 percent of these graduates speak a language other than English as their first language.
I will not be working in the office Thursday. I have to care for my kids, two of whom, like lots of other Wisconsin public school students, have the day off.
Why, you ask, are classes canceled on this entirely unremarkable Thursday the week before Halloween? On a day not set aside for any national holiday, nor part of any traditionally recognized vacation season, nor beset by record-breaking snowfall or some other natural cataclysm?
Well, because historically, a couple of consecutive weekdays in October have been something of a Wisconsin public schools-recognized holiday -- the traditional time for the annual convention of the statewide teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
I know what you're saying: "Don't be ridiculous. Teachers have two and a half months in the summer to hold their convention! Why wouldn't they have it then?"
And I hear you; an October teachers convention does defy logic. Yet, that's been the case until this year, when things managed to get even more illogical.
The case of turnover in the Harlem Success schools is only the latest example of this issue, but it's a striking one. Over a third of the teachers at Harlem Success 3 have chosen to leave the school in the past few months, a decision Moskowitz describes as "frankly, unethical." At the same time, however, Moskowitz chooses to employ her staff with a policy of "at will employment" rather than a negotiated contract. Under this model, she and her principals have the right to terminate teachers' service at the school at any time, for any reason. In fact, Steven Brill's Class Warfare describes the case of one new teacher who was "forced out" only a few months into the school year when a young principal at Harlem Success decided she wasn't a "good fit" for the school.
It was the kind of memo that high school students would dream of getting, if they dreamed in memos.
Lisa Waller, director of the high school at Dalton, a famously rigorous private school on the Upper East Side, sent a letter to parents this summer announcing that tests and papers would be staggered to make sure students did not become overloaded. January midterms would be pushed back two weeks so students would not have to study during vacation.
Across town at the Trinity School, another of Manhattan's elite academies, the administration has formed a task force to examine workload, and the upper school, grades 9 to 12, has been trying ways to coordinate test-taking with papers, labs and other projects.
Horace Mann School, in the Bronx, opened a tutoring center this year to help students manage their work. Hunter College High School, which has a tough admissions exam, is for the first time this year offering homework holidays, on Halloween, the Chinese New Year (Jan. 23) and a day nearer spring, March 14.
Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.
Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
While a small number of cynics out there still argue that classroom teachers are not really an important ingredient in a child's overall education recipe, one of the most important developments in K-12 education policy in the last few years has been the recognition that decades-old teacher evaluations (where the best a child can hope for is a 'satisfactory' teacher over an 'unsatisfactory' teacher) aren't up for the task of recognizing which teachers are hitting the ball out of the park with their students.
At DFER, we've long believed that the widespread irrelevance of excellence itself in the K-12 world has created a culture that has actively done damage to the lives of too many children who deserved much, much better from our nation's most important public institution.
But there have been a lot of positive developments in this area of late. There's obviously a long way to go, and surely some of what has been done to-date will need to be changed/enhanced/expanded, but we are clearly closer to a day where the link between teaching and learning is more clear in workplace evaluations for educators. (And we continue to hope and believe that this will usher in a new era where successful teachers are treated more like the community heroes that we believe they are.)
An independent charter school program would expand to medium and large school districts around Wisconsin, under a bill passed Wednesday by Republicans on the Legislature's budget committee.
The proposal passed 12-3 on a party-line vote, with Republicans voting in favor and Democrats voting against.
The bill would take an independent charter school program currently operating in only Milwaukee and Racine and extend it statewide to districts with more than 2,000 students. That would apply to roughly a quarter of the state's districts.
Republicans said it would help provide another options for students whose schools are failing them.
"The bill we are taking up today is truly something that is going to help the long-term prospects of Wisconsin," said Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington), a co-chairman of the committee.
But Democrats said that the program would undermine local control of schools by elected officials in favor of an unelected board. They said the proposal could also prove another financial blow to regular public schools that are losing nearly $800 million in state aid over two years as part of the state budget and having tight state caps placed on their property tax levies.
Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?
Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth- based methods, this analysis infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance.
Focusing on math and reading scores, the authors find compelling evidence that charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations, grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects. However, important exceptions include elementary school reading and middle school math and reading, where evidence suggests no negative effects of charter schools and, in some cases, evidence of positive effects. Meta-analytic methods are used to obtain overall estimates on the effect of charter schools on reading and math achievement. The authors find an overall effect size for elementary school reading and math of 0.02 and 0.05, respectively, and for middle school math of 0.055. Effects are not statistically meaningful for middle school reading and for high school math and reading. Studies that focus on urban areas tend to find larger effects than do studies that examine wider areas. Studies of KIPP charter middle schools suggest positive effects of 0.096 and 0.223 for reading and math respectively. New York City and Boston charter schools also appeared to deliver achievement gains larger than charter schools in most other locations. A lack of rigorous studies in many parts of the nation limits the ability to extrapolate.
Charter schools provide plenty of compelling news. Often the coverage is of great schools producing amazing outcomes for kids. But too often the stories are more tragic or sordid. A school's governing board becomes mired in dysfunctional arguments; a school's students are performing badly on state tests for several years running; somebody absconds with money; or a student with disabilities is discouraged from enrolling in a school.
Facing these unfortunate circumstances, a person is likely to shout, "Somebody should do something!" The outraged observer is correct. Generally, the "somebody" that ought to act is a charter school authorizer. Strong charter school authorizers screen initial applicants to avoid future failures. They also implement practices that respect each school's autonomy while also protecting against abuses and ensuring that floundering schools close. Twenty years into the charter school movement, it appears that it will be difficult to hold all charter schools accountable unless we start to hold authorizers accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities.
Two out of three children in Africa are left out of secondary school
Governments are struggling to meet the rising demand for secondary education, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are enough school places for just 36% of children of age to enrol, according the latest edition of the Global Education Digest.
Globally, secondary schools have been accommodating almost one hundred million more students each decade, with the total number growing by 60% between 1990 and 2009. But the supply is dwarfed by demand as more countries approach universal primary education.
In 2009, 88% of children enrolled in primary school reached the last grade of this level of education, compared to 81%. Yet, in 20 countries -- mostly in sub-Saharan Africa -- a child in the last grade of primary school has a 75% chance at best of making the transition to lower secondary school.
The path to prosperity
"There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education. This is a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today's globalized world. It is going to take ambition and commitment to meet this challenge. But it is the only path towards prosperity," said UNESCO's Director-General Irina Bokova.
"An educated population is a country's greatest wealth," she added. "The inequalities signalled in this Report, especially in relation to girls' exclusion from secondary education in many countries, have enormous implications for the achievement of all the internationally agreed development goals, from child and maternal health and HIV prevention to environmental security."
In terms of enrolment, sub-Saharan Africa has made the greatest gains of all regions, with gross enrolment ratios rising from 28% to 43% for lower secondary and from 20% to 27% for upper secondary education between 1999 and 2009. Nevertheless, more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age remain excluded from education across the region and many will never spend a day in school.
With increasing pressure over the last decade to improve student achievement, a growing body of research highlights the crucial role school principals play in creating good environments for learning.
But in Minnesota, there is no uniform method to evaluate the state's roughly 1,700 principals. That's about to change, due to a law passed this summer, and a group of educators who will develop the evaluation criteria and method.
In the state education budget that passed this summer was a requirement that every principal be evaluated starting the 2013 school year. The law also lays out what must be measured.
At Nicolet Union High School, science teacher Karyl Rosenberg keeps the evaluations she's received over the past 21 years in neat files: one for each of her first three years of probationary teaching, and one every third year after that.
So far this year, she's been observed twice briefly by a principal. But how she will be formally evaluated in years to come is still unclear.
That's because many districts across the state, including Nicolet, are developing new systems for measuring teacher performance that aim to better distinguish superior educators from those who are average or below par. They will likely use student achievement growth as one measure of performance, and the results of the evaluation may help administrators decide whom to promote, dismiss or provide with more targeted help.
Research continues to show that the most significant in-school factor to improve student performance is teacher effectiveness, but Wisconsin districts such as Nicolet have been spurred to action by another factor: the Act 10 legislation signed by Gov. Scott Walker.
The legislation has dramatically limited collective bargaining in about two-thirds of the state's districts so far, and it allows for pay structures and staffing decisions based on factors other than seniority. But for quality rather than years of experience to be used as a determining factor in such decisions, administrators need an accurate tool to assess it.
The first edition of this book appeared in 1946. Eight translations were made of it, and there were numerous paperback editions. In a paperback of 1961, a new chapter was added on rent control, which had not been specifically considered in the first edition apart from government price-fixing in general. A few statistics and illustrative references were brought up to date.
Otherwise no changes were made until now. The chief reason was that they were not thought necessary. My book was written to emphasize general economic principles, and the penalties of ignoring them-not the harm done by any specific piece of legislation. While my illustrations were based mainly on American experience, the kind of government interventions I deplored had become so internationalized that I seemed to many foreign readers to be particularly describing the economic policies of their own countries.
Nevertheless, the passage of thirty-two years now seems to me to call for extensive revision. In addition to bringing all illustrations and statistics up to date, I have written an entirely new chapter on rent control; the 1961 discussion now seems inadequate. And I have added a new final chapter, "The Lesson After Thirty Years," to show why that lesson is today more desperately needed than ever.
Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale."
People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.
Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.
Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany.
The Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif., is a public charter school. It must hold a random lottery when it has more applicants than vacancies. It is not supposed to be selective.
Yet somehow its average SAT score has risen to the top 10th of 1 percent nationally. Less than 10 percent of its students are from low-income families, compared with 40 percent in its city. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the school is allowed to ask (not require, it emphasizes) that every family donate $3,000 and 40 hours of volunteer time a year.
As a supporter of the charter school movement, I get grief from people who say that charters -- independent public schools using tax dollars -- are private schools in disguise. They are almost always wrong about that, but there are enough Pacific Collegiate situations to make me wonder whether the rules need revision.
Earlier this year, I said educators should try eliminating grade-level courses in high school and move everyone into honors or AP courses. Did I think anyone would actually do that? No.
Wrong again. As some upset e-mailers have been telling me, the Anne Arundel County schools are going ahead with such a plan, in a slapdash way made worse by not preparing parents for the change.
Karen Colburn, who has a seventh-grader at Central Middle School in Edgewater, said her advanced-track son found himself in mixed math and English classes slowed to a crawl so non-honors students could catch up. "Kids are repeating things they learned in elementary school," Colburn said. "Also, supports are not in place for special education children and some standard-level children."
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don't mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
Considerable research confirms the relationship between school start times, sleep deprivation, and student performance, truancy, and absenteeism, as well as depression, mood swings, impulse control, tobacco and alcohol use, impaired cognitive function and decision-making, obesity, stimulant abuse, automobile accidents, and suicide. Mounting evidence about the biology of adolescent sleep, and about the impact of later start times, shows that starting school before 8 a.m. not only undermines academic achievement but endangers health and safety. Because logistical and financial issues prevent local school systems from establishing safe and educationally defensible hours, however, federal legislation mandating start times consistent with student health and educational well-being is essential.
As the parent of two former and one current Severna Park High School student, I've been living with the issue of early high school start times for years. Although the consensus of scientific opinion is that teenagers (and young adults) would be better off if school hours were better aligned with their biological clocks, the possibility of changing school hours inevitably sparks raging controversy, both here and across the country.
Changing school hours costs money, and we all know school systems don't have a lot of that on hand. It also means changing the way we do things, and most of us don't like doing that much either. On the other hand, Moses didn't come down from Mount Sinai with commandments that schools must start at 7:17 a.m. and end at 2:05 p.m.
Surely if we know students learn better, and are healthier and safer, with different hours, we should make that our number one priority. Shouldn't we?
The Severna Park High School CAC (and the now defunct countywide CAC) have been working on the issue of high school start time for years, decades even - to no avail. Many of us have become convinced that the only solution to the problem is a national mandate. That's why I created a petition on We the People on WhiteHouse.gov, a new platform that allows anyone to create and sign petitions asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues.
I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook -- invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don't have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren't traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
This summer I moved back to my boyhood house in San Mateo, California, after 48 years living elsewhere, mostly on the east coast and in China. My California-born wife and I are Golden State chauvinists of the sentimental kind. We have framed orange crate labels on our walls. We choke up when we hear "California Dreamin'" on the radio.
San Mateo looked pretty much the same. But I found I wasn't recapturing the simpler days of my youth. When I started reconnecting with favorite spots like my old high school, I encountered complexities and advances I had not expected, particularly after the many headlines about California in decline.
The little house where I grew up on Voelker Drive still has no garbage disposal, no dishwasher, and no air-conditioning. But my brother Jim, the computer teacher at Baywood Elementary School, set up a Wi-Fi system and satellite TV. I felt up-to-date until I visited my alma mater, Hillsdale High School, a sprawling campus two blocks away on Alameda de las Pulgas.
Finland is dominating my educational radar screen.
When I read Linda Darling Hammond's excellent "The Flat World and Education" (2010) a few months ago, her description of "The Finnish Success Story" fascinated me. Watching the film American Teacher last month, the most hopeful piece of information for me was that in Finland teaching is the most admired job by college students. In the Q and A that followed a local showing of the movie, questions and comments about the Finnish system dominated. A few days later The Answer Sheet reprinted a compelling letter from Diane Ravitch to Deborah Meier reporting on her visit to Finland and on the Finnish system of education. Finland. Finland. Finland.
And now comes a book by Pasi Sahlberg, the leading authority on Finland's educational reform strategy, "Finnish Lessons," to be published next month by Teachers College Press. A former teacher, leader of professional development for the Ministry of Education and then with the World Bank, where he wrote a definitive report on Finnish education, Sahlberg is now the leader of one of Finland's major organizations in the field of innovation.
A tragedy of American politics is that civil rights groups like the NAACP oppose education reform, even as reform's main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans. The latest evidence comes in a study showing that black students in charter schools outperform their peers in traditional public schools.
The California Charter Schools Association looked at the state's Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that the average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data.
In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.
America's schoolteachers are some of the most brilliant, driven and highly skilled people working today--exactly the kind of people we want shaping young minds. But they are stuck in a system that doesn't treat them like professionals.
In most workplaces, there is an implicit bargain: Employees get the support they need to excel at their jobs, and employers build a system to evaluate their performance. The evaluations yield information that employees use to improve--and that employers use to hold employees accountable for results.
At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we insisted on success. We measured excellence, rewarded those who achieved it and were candid with those who did not. Teachers don't work in anything like this kind of environment, and they want a new bargain.
After a bleak State of the Schools Report was released Wednesday by Nebraska's Department of Education, many are wondering what needs to be changed in our schools to improve student scores. One special Omaha Public Schools teacher is not discouraged.
The Nebraska Teacher of the Year was awarded Tuesday at Liberty Elementary School at 20th and St. Mary. She has been a kindergarten teacher there for the past eight years. Despite the report, which some would say is disappointing, Luisa Palomo has a lot of hope for our students.
Palomo made her first official address under her new title Thursday at UNO to high school students interested in becoming future educators. "I did not see it coming, but I'm thrilled, I'm thrilled that I get to share the good things that are happening at our school and in Omaha with people around the country."
Some of the alarming statistics outlined in the report show that Nebraska is falling behind, particularly in math scores. Palomo says steps are being taken to improve Nebraska's education scores, including here in Omaha.
As the Senate moves forward with Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-Iowa) bill to overhaul U.S. K-12 education, with a greater emphasis coming on the side of local control and funding flexibility, states are still shouldering federal expectations that aren't expected to go away any time soon.
Here are two education funding obligations states have to the federal government -- even as the country moves beyond NCLB -- and one way for states to increase its funding flexibility.
One obligation to have persistently earned the ire of education advocates is test funding, with repeated critiques coming down on "billions" spent on assessments and test preparation. Sure, billions are being allocated, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to overall education spending.
Before NCLB, most states already had some form of student assessment in place. The 2002 law mandated no fewer than nine grades be monitored for student proficiency and improvement -- a six grade jump from what was required previously. The costs of implementing, issuing, grading, and analyzing those assessments makes up a soupcon of total education spending.
The age-old tension between federal authority and states' rights is back in a big way in this year's presidential campaign, with Republican candidates taking the let-the-states-handle-it position on everything from environmental regulation to health-care reform.
Now President Barack Obama's education policy, a rare bipartisan winner, may also be headed back to the states, which were collectively responsible in recent years for dumbing down standards, ignoring obvious failure and otherwise jeopardizing the whole future of the country.
With the support of Republicans, Obama over the past three years has moved aggressively to set high education standards from Washington and let states and localities figure out how to meet them. But now the Tea Party is pushing Republicans to abolish the Department of Education and resist any federal "intrusions" into education.
Legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law finally gained traction this week, and the Senate Democrat whose committee passed the bill said on Friday that progress became possible because lawmakers were irritated by the Obama administration's offering states waivers to the law's key provisions.
"Some of us on both sides of the aisle were upset with them coming out with the waiver package that they did, so that spurred us on," Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who heads the Senate education committee, said in an interview. "It gave us a sense of urgency."
Mr. Harkin's committee voted 15 to 7 on Thursday to approve a bill that would greatly reduce Washington's role in overseeing public schools. It was co-sponsored by Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee's ranking minority member. Mr. Harkin called it "a good compromise bill" that would have bipartisan support in the full Senate.
To note; again, not hugely comprehensive but a look at what the basic history is of charter schools. I think the history can best be summed up by saying the charter schools idea started as one thing and spread, like cracks on a windshield, in all directions. This is not to say that there are not some charters that are innovative. (I still need to do research to see if I can find even one charter that reflects the earliest thinking.)
Like NCLB, where we have 50 different tests and no real way to prove how American students are doing as a whole, there is charter law in 41 states and the District of Columbia and every single law is different, the numbers of allowed charters is different, the accountability is different and yet, the movement grows. When I get to the Landscape Today, I have some thoughts on why that is (and it's not because charters do well).
Higher standards, expectations and school uniforms.
Mandated extracurricular activities.
Grades for parents based on their involvement at the school.
More minority teachers as role models.
More connections and internships with local employers.
Millions in private fundraising.
If the Madison Preparatory Academy can pull off all of that, how could it not improve the academic success of its largely black and Latino students?
That's the big picture view Madison should adopt as it considers the Urban League of Greater Madison's intriguing charter school request. Instead, a disproportionate amount of time and concern has been spent on a final part of the proposal:
When the notice went out that there would be a facilities planning meeting at Reagan High School a few weeks back, the rumor shot around that the administration was considering closing Reagan and that people should pack the meeting to protest such a move. In reality, facilities planning meetings were being held all over the school district, including most high schools, to figure out the direction for the entire district. Milwaukee has more school buildings than what it needs, and we need to close some of our oldest buildings, but that does not mean Reagan is on the chopping block.
When the school year began this fall, school officials at both Rufus King and Riverside high schools discovered that each school was about a hundred students short. When they contacted the missing students, they discovered that many of them had elected to attend suburban and private high schools after hearing the dire predictions of overcrowded classrooms and cancelled programs.
Make no mistake about it, both schools took a financial hit, but the death of either school was wildly exaggerated. Both schools had to dig deeply into their waiting lists to fill up their student ranks this fall. Fortunately both schools report that recent orientation sessions for prospective students and parents were once again filled, and both schools will have little trouble filling their school with new students next school year.
When a prominent educational figure remarked that, "a lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent," it was a rare candid statement about teacher quality. The comment arguably overstates the problem and -- in fairness -- he was also quick to point out that with several million teachers there would of course be some lousy ones, just as there would be in any field. Still, it was a jarring thing to say.
Education policy debates are often like an argument between a couple in a bad relationship -- about everything except the actual problems. Our leaders seem congenitally unable to lead a difficult but honest conversation about our nation's teaching force that acknowledges that several things are all true at once -- we have a teacher quality problem and a management problem, teachers are not to blame for all that ails our schools, we can't fire our way to better schools, but removing some percentage of low-performers would be quite good for students. Instead we have a shallow debate dancing around the thing that matters most in schools: instructional quality.
Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform
One of the greatest public education challenges in California--and the nation--is the achievement and opportunity gaps between African American students and their White and Asian peers.
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has an interest in understanding how the state's charter public schools can accelerate closing achievement gaps for African American students, while at the same time advancing educational innovation that improves teaching and learning for all public school students.
The Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform report, released by CCSA in October 2011, details the performance and enrollment trends of African American students in both charter public and traditional public schools. The results show that California charter public schools are effectively accelerating the performance of African American students, and that African American students are enrolled at higher percentage in the state's charters, among other findings.
Since the inception of the Charter Schools Act in California in 1992, charter schools have become an important part of the public education system, opening their doors in both urban and rural areas, in order to provide quality educational options for families. Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform demonstrates that as laboratories of innovation, California's highly effective charter public schools can demonstrate proven paths to success that should be replicated nationally.
If you take the picture the media paints to heart, you are likely to feel very depressed. Eurozone is in trouble, there are protests all around the world, global warming is likely to get worse - the world is in crisis. Everything is getting worse.
I thought I'd flip it around.
This is truly an incredible time to be alive, isn't it?
The world is flat, connected and extremely personal.
"The next twenty-five years offer an opportunity to transform the way students have learned for centuries. We will be able to deliver education to students where they are, based on their specific needs, desires, and backgrounds."--Andrew S. Rosen
Imagine a university where programs are tailored to the needs of each student, the best professors are available to everyone, curriculum is relevant to the workplace - and the value of the education is demonstrable. In Change.edu, Andrew S. Rosen shows how that future is possible but in danger of being stifled by a system of incentives that emphasize prestige and tradition, rather than access and outcomes.
The U.S. higher education system has historically been considered one of the best in the world. This thought-provoking story presents the imperative for transforming that system for the 21st century and beyond. Rosen takes on the sacred cows of traditional higher education models, and calls on the country to demand the changes we need to build a qualified workforce and compete in a global economy. Change.edu is sure to open minds -- and open doors to a wealth of opportunities.
New York University pulled out of the National Merit scholarships, becoming at least the ninth school to stop funding one of the largest U.S. merit-based aid programs, because it doesn't want to reward students based on a standardized test.
The National Merit Scholarship Corp. distributed more than $50 million to students in the 2009-2010 year based on the PSAT college entry practice exam. Most of the money comes from almost 200 colleges, including Northwestern University and University of Chicago, to fund awards of as much as $8,000 over four years. Companies such as Boeing Co. and Pfizer Inc. also sponsor the program, primarily to benefit their employees' children.
NYU's withdrawal is another blow to National Merit, already ignored by many elite colleges and a subject of a critical report by a Harvard College-chaired commission. Schools are debating how to allocate scarce financial-aid dollars as tuition costs rise and the economy remains sluggish. While high schools trumpet National Merit winners, relying heavily on a standardized test is a flawed way to evaluate students, said Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president of admissions at NYU.
..........
National Merit hasn't collected any fees from the PSAT for the past 14 years, though it is entitled to a "nominal percent" of revenue under their contract, Kauffmann said. Instead, it has reinvested the funds into the program to keep test fees low and expand access to fee waivers, he said.
The College Board gains a marketing benefit from its association with National Merit when school districts or states consider using public funds to pay for the PSAT in 11th grade or ACT Inc.'s 10th-grade test known as PLAN, according to Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, a nonprofit group in Boston that works to end the misuses of standardized testing. Almost 1.3 million 10th-graders nationally took the PLAN test in the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the nonprofit ACT.
High School Students--please study less, if you can. As you should know, jobs and our economy depend on consumers buying goods and services, and the time you spend reading and writing, doing math and science problems, and the like, is simply time spent out of the economy and contributes nothing to the effort to sell products and provide jobs for the American people.
You could consider your time away from studying as part of your community service, putting the needs of the economy ahead of your own selfish desire to learn and grow by doing homework for yourself alone. By spending more time buying and using goods produced by America's workers, you are making a contribution to the community in which you live.
If you have to do three or four hours of homework a week, at least do it using a computer and software which you or your family have purchased. If you do it that way, naturally you will find it easier to play the games you have bought, spend time with social media, and to listen to the songs you paid for at the same time, and you can also surf the Web for products on which you may wish to spend more money in the future.
While in the short term you may do less well in school by combining your schoolwork with your commercial obligations, at least you will be helping to keep our economy going and providing jobs for our unemployed workers.
It is possible that when it comes time for you to look for a job, you may not have the knowledge, skills, and general educational background to qualify for the ones on offer, but that is not your problem in the present.
If you need to learn something in the future, there will always be digital learning and online classes for you to buy. There will be no need to go to the library or read on your own. We expect young people to make sacrifices and to do community service, and refraining from studying is one painless and very useful way for you to work on behalf of those in your country who need jobs now, so that our economy can get help in its recovery on the backs of those of our students who have decided to study even less than they usually do.
The main thing is not to let your schoolwork interfere with your own purchases or with influencing as much as possible the purchases of your parents and friends.
As our President has told us, we need more jobs right now, and if you spend too much time on reading books, writing term papers, and stuff like that, you will be basically just more of a drag on our economy than you should be, so please study less, or if possible, not at all, and help keep our economy growing. You will learn less, but someone somewhere in our economy will thank you for spending more time away from those old printed school books and term papers!
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
School officials could use standardized tests to help decide whether to discipline or fire a teacher, under a bill passed by the state Senate Thursday.
The bill passed 17-16 on a party-line vote, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats in opposition.
Current law allows school administrators to use standardized tests as one of multiple criteria to evaluate teachers' performance but prohibits school districts from using the test results to fire or suspend a teacher. The bill would allow such actions as long as the test results weren't the sole reason for removing, suspending or disciplining a teacher.
Democrats urged senators to hold off on the bill and wait for an effort by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and state schools Superintendent Tony Evers to finish its work developing a system to better evaluate student learning.
"This is a very unfair position that we're putting teachers in," Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said.
Black and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Latino girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their white peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
School board elections in Wake County (Raleigh) North Carolina delivered an important victory for proponents of integration last week as Democrats swept four of five contested school board seats and led substantially in a fifth race headed for a runoff. Most importantly, board chairman Ron Margiotta, who had led the effort to dismantle a nationally acclaimed socioeconomic school integration plan in North Carolina's largest school district, was defeated, denying conservatives a majority on the nine-member school board.
The vote has national significance because it demonstrates that if school diversity policies are pursued through choice, rather than compulsion, they can draw strong public support.
Wake County's widely lauded school integration plan sought to give all students a chance to attend solidly middle-class public schools by limiting the proportion of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch at 40% in any one school.
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.
These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City's special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002.
They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 accusations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools -- most are handled by the Education Department, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its investigations.
Bert Grover, a pistol of a state legislator from the '60s who became a prominent state educator and then was elected superintendent of Wisconsin's public schools, has been battling some health issues the past several months -- not the least of which was a severe staph infection following some knee surgery -- but he's doing quite well these days, thank you.
I called Bert (actually Herbert J. Grover, Ph.D., but he has never been much for formalities) at his Gresham home last week not only to check in, but to get his take about what's been happening to Wisconsin's public education system now that Gov. Scott Walker and his gang have taken over state government.
"Well, let's just say this. Public schools are supposed to be places that are bubbly, enthusiastic, optimistic, hopeful," the 74-year-old educator remarked. "Sad to say, Walker has removed most of that."
Six of every 10 Illinois public schools failed to meet federal test targets this year and risk federal sanctions as a result, according to information released Thursday by the Illinois State Board of Education.
High schools fared the worst.
Statewide, 656 of the 666 public high schools fell short of the proficiency standard on math and reading tests that students take every spring. Only eight high schools where students take the exam in 11th grade met federal standards. Two more high schools made it based on participation and student performance on other state exams.
I am writing to thank you for your encouragement and support in my decision to seek election to the MMSD Board of Education in late fall 2005. Your help in getting elected, your support during tough times, and your help in finding solutions to problems, have made a great difference to my service on the board.
I am writing to let you know that I will not seek re-election in 2012. I continue to believe that the Board of Education is one of the most important elected positions for our community and its schools, and encourage others to step forward to serve in this capacity. MMSD is facing significant challenges, and it is more important than ever that thoughtful citizens engage in the work that will be needed to preserve the traditional strengths of our public schools while helping those schools to change in keeping with the times and the families that they serve.
At the same time, I do not view school board service as a career, and believe that turnover in membership is healthy for the organization and for the district. I have been fortunate to have had an opportunity to serve on this board, and to work with many fine community organizations in that capacity. For that I am grateful.
Again, thank you for your interest, support, and collegiality.
Lucy J. Mathiak
716 Orton Ct.
Madison, WI 53703
Madison School Board
Seat #2
I am appreciative of Lucy's tireless and often thankless work on behalf of our students.
Every organization - public or private, deteriorates. It is often easier to spend more (raise taxes), raise fees on consumers - or a "rate base", reduce curricular quality and in general go along and get along than to seek substantive improvements. Change is hard.
In closing, I had an opportunity to hear Peter Schneider speak during a recent Madison visit. Schneider discussed cultural differences and similarities between America and Germany. He specifically discussed the recent financial crisis. I paraphrase: "If I do not understand a financial vehicle, I buy it". "I create a financial product that no one, including me, understands, I sell it". This is "collective ignorance".
Schneider's talk reminded me of a wonderful Madison teacher's comments some years ago: "if we are doing such a great job, why do so few people vote and/or understand civic and business issues"?
What, then, is the payoff of increased rigor and the pursuit of high standards throughout an organization? Opportunity.
I recently met a technical professional who works throughout the United States from a suburban Madison home. This person is the product of a very poor single parent household. Yet, high parental standards and rigorous academic opportunities at a somewhat rural Wisconsin high school and UW-Madison led to an advanced degree and professional opportunities.
Nick Jensen, a graduate of Madison's LaFollette High School, has been named one of 117 top students at the national level for his performance on Advanced Placement courses while in high school.
The College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Program also honored Rachel Sobel, a Brookfield Central High School graduate, for her performance on high school AP classes.
The two Wisconsin scholars are among just 117 students chosen from across the U.S. and the District of Columbia, according to a news release from the Department of Public Instruction.
This is the 21st year that the organization has granted State AP Scholar Awards, with the distinction going to one male and one female student from each state and the District of Columbia.
A young and tech-savvy charter school network that's gotten attention for reducing the achievement gap in San Jose, Calif., got the green light from a Common Council committee Tuesday to bring the model to Milwaukee.
Rocketship Education, a nonprofit management company, has applied for a charter from the City of Milwaukee that would allow it to open a publicly funded school in the fall of 2013, with the eventual intent to serve up to 4,000 children in eight K-5 schools by 2017. Each school would have to show measurable progress before subsequent schools could open.
The organization, started in 2006, currently serves about 2,500 students in five San Jose area elementary schools.
A majority of members on the Steering and Rules Committee on Tuesday approved sending Rocketship's application to the full council for consideration.
Rocketship CEO and co-founder John Danner explained the organization's three areas of emphasis: engaging parents through teacher-led home visits and training them to advocate for their children; developing talent by growing a pipeline of teachers who can become school leaders; and giving all students individualized learning plans that blend six hours a day of face-to-face instruction with two hours of lab time spent working with online computer programs and low-cost tutors.
India and Bangladesh have launched their own brands of tablet and laptops, at unthinkably low prices.
Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina launched Doel, a brand of netbooks and laptop that will be manufactured entirely in Bangladesh, on October 11. Distribution will reportedly start this week. They will be available from 10,000 takas (US$131), according to the Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency.
"This is a big step towards building a digital Bangladesh," Mohammad Ismail, managing director of state-owned Telephone Shilpa Sangstha (TSS), which is in charge of making the gadgets, said following Doel's launch. At present, 90% of the laptop equipment is imported, "but within six months we will be able to produce 40% of the components," he said.
"Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report's release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven't pointed to a single one. "That would be laughable if the results weren't so tragic for our nation's children," Duncan said.
The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.
These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City's special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002. They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 allegations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools -- most are handled by the Department of Education, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its probes. But as cheating scandals have engulfed school districts in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a review of this relative handful of substantiated local cases shows that cheating schemes can be mundane or audacious, with motivations that include inflating the statistics that are used to evaluate a school, and helping a favorite student become eligible to graduate.
In an ideal world, you might imagine that scientific papers were only cited by academics on the basis of their content. This might be true. But lots of other stuff can have an influence.
One classic paper from 1991, for example, found that academic papers covered by the New York Times received more subsequent citations. Now, you might reasonably suggest a simple explanation: the journalists of the Times were good at spotting the most important work. But the researchers looking into this were lucky. They noticed the opportunity for a natural experiment when the printers - but not the journalists - of the Times went on strike.
The editorial staff continued to produce a "paper of record", which was laid down in the archives, but never printed, never distributed and never read. The scientific articles covered in these unprinted newspapers didn't see a subsequent uplift in citations. That is, if we can take a moment, a very clever piece of opportunistic research.
Today, full page ads appear in the L.A. Times, Daily News and La Opinion taken out by Don't Hold Us Back -- respected organizations calling out United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD for letting kids fail. The new supergroup includes The United Way, The Urban League, Community Coalition, Alliance for a Better Community, Families in Schools, Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Communities for Teaching Excellence.
The ad's bland wording at first seems a bit "so what?" but it's actually written in code to UTLA leaders, who have helped the local teachers union gain a reputation as one of the most anti-reform big-city education unions in the U.S. Here's a translation:
In one line, the ad says teachers should "be rewarded for academic excellence."
That sounds normal, right?
But in fact, that idea has for years been vehemently opposed by UTLA. UTLA has fiercely fought efforts to reward the most effective teachers, or the teachers who take on the toughest assignments, by giving them financial sweeteners -- merit pay.
Shannon Maloney had already earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but she returned to Lehigh University for a fifth year to complete a second major she knows will make her more employable:
Philosophy.
Yep, philosophy.
Though philosophy is routinely dismissed and disparaged - as useless as English, as dead as Latin, as diminished as library science - more college students are getting degrees in that field than ever before.
Though the overall figures remain small, the number of four-year graduates has grown 46 percent in a decade, surpassing the growth rates of much bigger programs such as psychology and history.
In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." I've come to embrace Huebler's idea, though it might be retooled as: "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."
It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information--how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it--is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius--a romantic, isolated figure--is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.
D.C. teacher Stephanie Black sent me an absorbing e-mail that began with a favorable review of my book "Work Hard. Be Nice" on KIPP school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Then she explained why her positive feelings about the KIPP charter school network had deepened her distaste for the D.C. teacher evaluation program, IMPACT.
I have not taken a strong stand for or against IMPACT, other than to say it is better than the weak evaluation systems in many districts that give almost all teachers satisfactory ratings. Black's personal reaction to what happened at her school is moving and persuasive. I am going to ask a D.C. school official to respond.
From the dawn of institutionalized schooling until now there have always been reformers, who want to modify the way schooling is done. For the most part, such reformers can be scaled along what might be called a liberal-conservative, or progressive-traditionalist, continuum. At one end are those who think that children learn best when they are happy, have choices, study material that is directly meaningful to them, and, in general, are permitted some control over what and how they learn. At the other end are those who think that children learn best when they are firmly directed and guided, by authoritative teachers who know better than children what to learn and how to learn it. Over time there has been regular back-and-forth movement of the educational pendulum along this continuum. But the pendulum never moves very far. Kindhearted progressives, viewed as softheaded by the traditionalists, push one way for a while, and that doesn't work very well. And then hardnosed traditionalists, viewed as petrified fossils by the progresssives, push the other way for a while, and that doesn't work very well either.
Kaleem Caire is feeling pretty confident that the Madison school board will approve Madison Preparatory Academy in late November. After all, he's made substantial concessions to appease his most influential critics, and support for the charter school, which would target at-risk minority students, appears to be gaining momentum.
Still, Caire, who is CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, the nonprofit agency that would run the school, faces a dedicated opposition that remains unflinching in its wide-ranging criticism, some of it highly personal. Some opponents have called Caire an "enemy of public education."
"The fact that people scrutinize us isn't the issue, but it gets to the point where some of this borders on ridiculous," he says.
Caire proposed the school last year, calling it an important first step in closing the minority achievement gap, a problem first documented by the Urban League in 1968. Supporters say that after four decades of doing little, the time has come for a more radical approach.
"Can you imagine this city if 48% of the white kids were dropping out?" asks Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education professor at UW-Madison and Madison Prep board member. "I don't get why that kind of failure is tolerable."
It has become fashionable for our most selective colleges to worry about becoming as representative of American diversity as suburban country clubs.
College admissions experts conferring at the University of Southern California this year were so alarmed that they suggested our most prestigious campuses add space for another 100 students in each class and fill those slots with low-income kids.
Why are our choosiest colleges so dominated by affluent white or Asian students? The explanations are many: not enough financial aid, inadequate preparation in inner-city high schools, poor students' discomfort mixing with rich kids.
But a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona suggests something different. Great high schools and families like those in the Washington area may be at fault, at least in part. In the last 32 years, low-income students have significantly raised the grades and test scores that affect college admissions, but have made little headway because students from affluent families have improved even more.
When the United States took control of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century, one of the first things the U.S. did was send in American teachers. The goal was to establish a public school system and turn the Philippines into an English-speaking country.
It worked so well that two centuries later, American schools started traveling to the Philippines to recruit teachers to come here.
In a new documentary called The Learning, filmmaker Ramona Diaz follows four teachers on their journey from the Philippines to classrooms in Baltimore, where 10 percent of the city's teachers -- about 600 -- were Filipino in 2010.
"At the height of the recruitment, which was in '05, '06 and '07, they were recruiting from overseas because there was a shortage of math and science and special-ed teachers," Diaz tells Rebecca Roberts, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered.
Frederick M. Hess's long essay in the latest issue of the quarterly National Affairs pleased those of us who share the American Enterprise Institute scholar's dislike for politicians' fixation on closing the achievement gap. Reducing the gap sounds good until you realize that means it is okay for high achievers to stagnate so that low achievers can catch up.
I have been venting about this for several years and getting only puzzled looks. Hess's piece -- the most detailed and vehement ever on the subject -- will hopefully lead to more discussion of better ways to deal with the different average achievement levels of poor kids and affluent kids.
I think we have borrowed language from another issue, the income gap, and shoved it into the education debate, where it doesn't belong. Making money and learning about the world are not similar enterprises. If someone accumulates $1 billion and spends it on Rolls-Royces and gold bathroom fixtures, that is very different from fixating on learning something new about solar energy and making the world a cleaner place.
In a move that has startled many on the left and the right, Iowa Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made public his new 18-page education reform bill titled "One Unshakable Vision: World-Class Schools for Iowa." The plan, officially released Oct. 3, makes sweeping changes to the Iowa public education system, as well as to the process for becoming a teacher in Iowa, which could substantially affect aspiring teachers at Iowa State and other colleges and universities in Iowa.
Under this new education bill, students in K-12 public school will be subjected to a more intense Iowa core curriculum, third graders will be required to take a reading test in order to move on to the fourth grade, ninth graders will be asked to take a standardized test that would compare them to other students on an international basis, and 11th graders will be required to take a college entrance exam.
As for teachers, the required grade point average for admission into teaching programs at Iowa universities will be raised from a 2.5 to 3.0, core content coursework may be increased, new teachers will enter into an apprentice program in which they will be mentored and trained by distinguished veteran teachers, and a new pay ladder will be implemented from which pay will be tied to both performance and experience. Many believe that these new ambitious approaches are needed to make Iowa a leader in education again, but many still remain wary of some of the ideas proposed in the bill, especially the new standards for prospective teachers at Iowa universities.
My high school algebra 2 class which I had in the fall of 1964, was notable for a number of things. One was learning how to solve word problems. Another was a theory that most problems we encountered in algebra class could be solved with arithmetic. Yet another was a girl named Fran who I had a crush on.
Fran professed to not like algebra or the class we were in, and found word problems difficult. On a day I had occasion to talk to her, I tried to explain my theory that algebra was like arithmetic but easier. Admittedly, my theory had a bit more to go. She appeared to show some interest, but she wasn't interested. On another occasion I asked her to a football game, but she said she was washing her hair that day. Although Fran had long and beautiful black hair, and I wanted to believe that she had a careful and unrelenting schedule for washing it, I resigned myself to the fact that she would remain uninterested in me, algebra, and any theories about the subject.
My theory of arithmetic vs. algebra grew from a realization I had during that the problems that were difficult for me years ago when I was in elementary school were now incredibly easy using algebra. For example: $24 is 30% of what amount? In arithmetic this involved setting up a proportion while in algebra, it translated directly to 24 = 0.3x, thus skipping the set up of the ratio 24/30 = x/100. Similarly, it was now much easier to understand that an increase in cost by 25% of some amount could be represented as 1.25x. What had been problems before were now exercises; being able to express quantities algebraically made it obvious what was going on. It seemed I was on to something, but I wasn't quite sure what.
This group was created by a community of people brought together on the 12th October 2011 at the Guardian, York Way, London - made up of young people, teachers, ex-teachers, developers, parents and industry with the purpose of finding ways to support education of programming and computational thinking for the current and next generations in the UK. Whether this be through traditional education methods - or other stuff.
One of the catalysts was a speech by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which he said the country that invented the computer was "throwing away your great computer heritage" by failing to teach programming in schools. "I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools," he said. "Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made" (Full text of lecture], view lecture online).
New York state officials say cheating on state Regents exams is a growing concern but just a fraction of the cases are being discovered as the tests are being used more to evaluate schools and teachers.
State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. says New York's system is missing many more cases in public, private and public charter schools. He is expected to announce on Monday several measures aimed at discouraging and catching cheats.
Cheating is often reported by students and parents, officials say, and the number of confirmed cases remains a fraction of the 222,000 teachers in the state's classrooms. Data obtained by The Associated Press shows just 50 cases were confirmed in the 2009-10 school year and 41 in the 2010-11 school year.
The data gives an incomplete picture of a problem that also concerns the state teachers' union.
The first class of sixth-graders in the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy would attend school nearly year-round, be in class from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and participate in mandatory extracurricular activities.
Parents would take classes in how to prepare their students for college while the school would aim to enroll at least 70 percent minorities and 65 percent low-income students.
Those and other new details about the controversial charter school proposal are included in a draft business plan the Urban League of Greater Madison provided to the Madison School Board this week. The School District provided a copy to the State Journal at the newspaper's request.
The business plan is incomplete. More details will be shared with the board by the end of the month, Urban League President Kaleem Caire said.
Before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of children in New Orleans attended a failing school. Now, only about 18 percent do.
Five years ago, less than a quarter of the children in a special district set up by the state to manage the lowest performing schools scored at or above the "basic" level on state tests. Now, nearly half do.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the progress made by New Orleans's school reform effort in the six years since Hurricane Katrina has been "stunning." And there are many reasons for optimism about a system that is overwhelmingly made up of poor and minority students -- just the sort of place where optimism is in short supply.
There are three important things to consider about the New Orleans experience: Many of the structural changes occurred because the hurricane essentially destroyed the old system, allowing the city to begin fresh. Charter schools, while a foundation of the system now, did not by themselves improve achievement. And finally, New Orleans has done the hard work of changing the school culture while embracing new instructional methods.
In his recent post on this blog, Lessons From Finland #1 - Teacher Education and Training, Bob Compton states that the quality crisis in the US education system can be solved by changing teacher's educational requirements to stipulate higher levels of education, specialization in the fields teachers teach, and an increase in the amount of time student teachers spend in classrooms under the guidance of experienced master-level teachers, rather than just in online courses or teacher training. He notes that these educational changes require the action of each state's governor and its legislature, and further states "All it takes is courage to withstand the screams from colleges of education - the sacred cash cow of most universities." At the heart of this issue is the question: "what does it take to effect political change?"
Actually making political changes, of course, is for better or worse ultimately in the hands of our elected officials. Unfortunately the primary concern for many politicians becomes getting elected, even if their motivations are purely to serve their constituencies. We must also recognize that their constituencies are comprised of both individuals and businesses or other organizations, some of which often have very different priorities. Because corporate entities are frequently the largest political donors, their needs are often addressed first. Call it corruption or simply the nature of democratic government; either way, corporate contributors' interests often lead politicians to prevent legislative changes that might threaten business. Education reform is no exception.
So what can be done to spur the process? Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for creating the political will to change educational performance standards in this country. However, there are steps that can be taken to slowly turn the political behemoth in the right direction.
Here's a blast from the somewhat-recent past: a set of five lectures I gave at CERN in 2005. It looks like the quality of the recording is pretty good. The first lecture was an overview at a colloquium level; i.e. meant for physicists, but not necessarily with any knowledge of cosmology. The next four are blackboard talks with a greater focus; they try to bring people up to speed on the basic tools you need to think about modern early-universe cosmology.
Obviously I'm not going to watch all five hours of these, so I'll just have to hope that I'm relatively coherent throughout. (I do remember being a bit jet-lagged.) But I do notice that, while it was only a few years ago, I do appear relatively young and enthusiastic. Ah, the ravages of Time...
But the center's director, Dan Goldhaber, cautioned that the study is just a first step toward determining what kind of training -- not where the training occurred -- best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom.
Even so, it's the kind of information U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would like every school to have access to and that's why he recently announced a new program to use federal dollars to pay for similar research.
Washington state schools are among the first to see which teacher training programs seem to result in the best student test scores, but 35 states now have the means to do similar research, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization formed by education and business groups to track state progress on collecting data about students and schools.
If Milwaukee needs a big, well-crafted, we're-all-in-this-together effort by a wide-range of power players working on meeting the educational needs of so many thousands of our children, why do I sense so much reluctance to be enthusiastic about an effort that aims to be all of those things?
Two simple answers:
Because we've been down roads like this before and nothing much came from them.
Because a lot of people, including some of those power players, are skeptical about our collective ability to make real progress.
I'm sympathetic with both of those points.
For years, I've seen community leaders of all kinds say good things (and often mean them) and come up with no consequential results.
I, too, suffer from oh-no-not-another-big-initiative syndrome. And we all know how deeply entrenched our problems are.
But overall, I say: It's time to get moving, folks.
But it's clear that teachers are doing their part to keep one small, if important, piece of the public education reform movement alive: making sure they have an organized voice.
Now we should do ours.
Say what you want about his approach, Walker basically gave reform-minded school districts their chance by ramming through a collective bargaining law that drastically limits what's subject to negotiation.
So, if you think the school year should be longer, if you'd like to see your district have an easier time keeping that awesome first-year teacher and ditching the underwhelming 20-year vet, if you want more money put into recruiting minority teachers and less into teachers' generous health care and pension benefits -- now's your chance.
For despite what you might have heard from union backers, teachers union priorities and students' needs are not always the same thing.
Unions exist, appropriately, to protect their members. You can quibble about whether Walker went too far in lessening their power. But a grudge against a transitory public figure shouldn't take precedence over trying something new to improve public education.
Besides, it's not as if teachers won't have a seat at the reform table.
As a disruptive innovation--an innovation that transforms a sector from one that was previously complicated and expensive into one that is far simpler and more affordable--the rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize her fullest potential.
Whether it does this in the coming years will depend on several variables.
Entrepreneurs and investors--both for-profit and non-profit--are doing their part, as they seek to fashion the future by solving the problems they see students and teachers struggling with today.
Some, like those at Los Altos School District and Rocketship Education, are creating new learning and schooling models and liberating students and teachers.
These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.
In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.
At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, "We shall prevail," she hurls her hammer through the screen.
A plan to provide vouchers to students from low-income families and are enrolled in failing schools is at the center of a four-point education reform agenda, but the Corbett administration declined to state how much these reforms would cost taxpayers.
Calling on lawmakers to give students and their families access to the widest variety of educational options, Gov. Tom Corbett announced Tuesday a plan that would:
Offer a voucher program;
Expand the educational tax credit program;
Create a new statewide commission to oversee and evaluate charter schools;
Gov. Terry Branstad received a standing ovation when he took the stage in Ankeny High School's auditorium to talk education reform Wednesday night.
He left the stage about 90 minutes later, to another round of applause, although the crowd stayed their seats this time.
It was the governor's fourth community forum since he unveiled his education blueprint last week. The blueprint will form the basis of a legislative package for education reform in the state that the governor plans to send to the General Assembly when it reconvenes in January.
The blueprint calls for changing the way teachers are paid and evaluated, institutes a third-grade reading test students must pass to reach the fourth and a calls for a series of the end-of-course exams high school seniors must pass to graduate, among its biggest changes.
And at least to the 120 or so that came out to the Ankeny forum, those changes are sitting well, for the most part.
Gov. Jerry Brown's message accompanying his veto of legislation to overhaul California's system of measuring the performance of students and their schools was blunt, iconoclastic and witty. In disputing the conventional wisdom emphasizing the importance of testing, the governor invoked Greek mythology - mocking the "siren song" of the latest trends in education reform - and quoted Albert Einstein - "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
But his veto message raised larger questions: Is Brown rejecting the value of testing in general or just attempting to play the role of a policy provocateur?
In a phone interview this morning with a U-T editorial writer, the governor said it was "neither a rejection of testing or a spur to debate." Instead, Brown said, it was "critical reflection" on the bill by Senate President Darrell Steinberg and its addition of more vague measures of student and school performance, which he called "a fool's errand."
"I believe [in] a certain amount of testing," Brown said, calling the existing Academic Performance Index "a good metric." But he said it shouldn't crowd out "other good measures" of student performance.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinelrecently reported on a new civic effort to improve K-12 education in Milwaukee titled "Milwaukee Succeeds." The effort is certainly ambitious. Erin Richards and Tom Tolan report that it is "focused on large, big-picture ideas that are easy for folks to stand behind, such as making sure all children are prepared to enter school, succeed academically and graduate, take advantage of postsecondary education or training, and contribute to the Milwaukee community."
It is ironic that the Journal Sentinel also recently ran a profile of former Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) superintendent Lee McMurrin. It was McMurrin who in 1975 unveiled his own ambitious ten-point plan for fixing K-12 education in Milwaukee. His goals, according to an August 6, 1975 Milwaukee Journal story, included improving attendance, achievement, job placement for graduates, and the creation of a plan to engage staff in school improvement.
Ten years later McMurrin's plan was replaced by a new plan from Milwaukee school board members Joyce Mallory, Mary Bills and David Cullen titled "A Plan for the Future and a Plan for Now." Their plan, according to a November 17, 1985 Milwaukee Journal article, called for the creation of a 20-member committee of community leaders "to look at the work of futurists and strategic planners and come up with new ideas for running the schools here." Their committee was to include "religious and business leaders, college educators, legal officials and public officials."
Imagine a world, in which when you teach something to someone the knowledge is considered your "intellectual property". Your students are not permitted to teach the things they have learned from you to anyone else, neither for money, nor even for free.
To become a teacher, one must buy into the guild for a lot of money, inherit rights from someone who was a teacher, or teach something that hasn't been learned from anyone, i.e. something newly invented.
Being a teacher was a very powerful position. Having a monopoly to teach and usually even your own districts to educate exclusively, a teacher could charge any price. Furthermore, teachers even had the right to dictate the purpose and conditions on which the knowledge they taught was allowed to be used.
Abby Ramirez wants other people to come to - and act on -- the same beliefs she has: That a large majority of low-income children can become high-performing students and that the number of schools where such success is widespread can be increased sharply in Milwaukee.
In an "On the Issues" session with Mike Gousha at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday, Ramirez described the work of Schools That Can Milwaukee, a year-old organization that has the goal of increasing the number of students in high-performing schools to 20,000 (more than twice the current total) by 2020. Ramirez is executive director of the organization.
"If you haven't seen a high-performing school, go visit one because it will change your belief in what's possible," she told about 150 people at the session hosted by Gousha, the Law School's distinguished fellow in law and public policy. She said you can tell in such a visit that the program is different - more energetic, more focused, more committed to meeting ambitious goals - than in schools where there is an underlying belief that the students aren't going to do well because of factors such as poverty.
Computer Science doctoral student Kristine Monteith pulls out her laptop and asks, "What are we feeling like?" With 30 seconds and a click of the mouse, her ThinkPad becomes a regular Beethoven, composing original songs based on any emotion she chooses.
Monteith is a left and right brain kind of person. She came to BYU with a bachelor's degree in music therapy, a passion for voice, piano and guitar, and is now preparing to defend her doctoral dissertation on her computer program that can generate original music.
Since the beginning of her graduate work, Monteith has been trying to answer a golden question - can machines be creative like humans?
A classic issue in machine learning is developing ways for computers to act like humans. Can computers be so humanlike as to fool us? For Monteith, her question was "Can a computer act like a human in composing music?"
When it comes to creditworthiness, it's hard to top the consumers of Wisconsin.
Four Wisconsin cities - including Wausau at No. 1 - are among the 10 communities in the nation with the highest average credit scores, a new survey shows.
Wausau residents posted an average credit score of 789 in the survey conducted by the credit-rating agency Experian. Madison was third, at 785; Green Bay sixth, at 780; and La Crosse 10th, at 777.
Milwaukee, with a score of 765, was 33rd of 143 cities included in the survey.
"Wisconsin residents remain among the nation's most fiscally responsible," Experian stated Tuesday in announcing the survey results.
Higher credit scores generally give consumers the ability to borrow money at lower interest rates.
We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good--for the child, the parent, the family, and society.
We begin with the delicate subject of authority--that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.
Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.
Is United States Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) gearing up to take away a lot of rights from students with special needs and return decision-making about their education to states and localities?
Of course not, he's a leading advocate for special education on Capitol Hill. But given how his proposed rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would leave most school accountability decisions to states and localities (Update: Full text now online here (pdf)) it's a question worth asking. After all, like special education students a generation ago the needs of poor and minority students are systematically overlooked by states and local school districts. You see this in access to resources like curriculum and effective teachers, you see it in the flows of public dollars to schools, and you see it in areas of emphasis.
What's different for special education students today? Well, for all of its ongoing problems and friction points the federal "IDEA" special education law is widely credited with a substantial leap forward for students with special needs. Why? It established standards and legal recourse when special education students were being shortchanged. Hasn't always been pretty and is far from perfect but has resulted in real progress for kids in special education. The obvious counterfactual is how much progress would have been made for special education students absent IDEA? I'd argue some, sure, but not as much and not as systemically.
The list of words that was considered while producing DictionUp. About a 1000 words from this list are on DictionUp. Please feel free to print and use this word list while listening. This list can be used for GRE, SAT, CAT and IELTS preparation
Florida's unpopular tea party governor, Rick Scott, wants more of the state's youths to pick up college degrees... but only if the degrees are useful to corporations and don't teach students to question social norms. "You know what? They need to get education in areas where they can get jobs," Scott told a right-wing radio host Monday morning. He continued:
"You know, we don't need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It's a great degree if people want to get it, but we don't need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That's what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on. Those type of degrees. So when they get out of school, they can get a job."
It's no idle sound bite. The governor, an ex-corporate CEO with a checkered business past, is pushing a plan that would all but kill liberal arts and social sciences at the Sunshine State's public universities--and he's got support from the Legislature's psychology-hatin' GOP majority. He explained the strategy Monday in a separate interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
No factor is more important to the quality of education than the quality of the teacher. With so much at stake, it would be good to know just how well teacher preparation programs are equipping tomorrow's teachers -- and their students -- up for success.
To answer this question, the National Council on Teacher Quality has partnered with U.S. News & World Report to launch a review of the more than 1,400 teacher preparation programs around the country. NCTQ will look at whether the programs select academically capable students, ensure they know the subjects they will teach and equip them with the techniques they need to help their students achieve. The review will let aspiring teachers know where they can get the best preparation, and encourage other programs to emulate the models of their field.
In the 2008-09 academic year, the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development produced more than 300 of the 4,500 new teachers who graduated in Minnesota. Yet despite its key role in filling the state's ranks of educators and despite being sent a formal request to participate in July, as of this week, CEHD has not indicated that they will cooperate with the review.
The system's corps of lecturers feels this threat sharply. "We believe that if courses are moved online, they will most likely be the classes currently taught by lecturers," reads a brief declaration against online education on the website of UC-AFT, the University of California chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, "and so we will use our collective bargaining power to make sure that this move to distance education is done in a fair and just way for our members."
As your editor expected, the waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act being pushed by President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, aren't worth the paper upon which they are written.
Under the Obama plan, states will be allowed to evade the aspirational 100 percent proficiency provision with a vague set of "ambitious but achievable goals" and an equally amorphous requirement that states must put "college and career-ready" curriculum standards in place. Many surmise the latter means implementing Common Core standards in reading and math -- something that 45 states have done so far. But Duncan has had to avoid making such a public statement means in order to avoid the full wrath of congressional Republicans and some reformers who essentially declare that doing so oversteps the Department of Education's authority. As a result, a state can probably come up with some mishmash, call it college- and career-ready, and easily get it past federal officials.
Welcome to Fantasyland. Eric Welch just sent me a detailed plan for a public charter school in Fairfax County. He and several other people on the board of what they call the Fairfax Leadership Academy say they want to help low-income families with a school unlike any local students have had before.
They are deluded to think this would ever be approved, although Welch, much-honored as an educator, knows a lot about kids and teaching. We met several years ago when I visited his class at J.E.B. Stuart High School, where he used a program known as Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) to prepare average students for challenging courses. He is now the executive director and board chairman of the planned academy.
Counting him, the 17-member board includes 12 current or former Fairfax school educators, plus state Del. Kaye Kory (D-Fairfax). I expected more sense than this from such capable people, well-versed in the ways of public school politics. I hope they read the next few sentences carefully.
I lied. My smartphone isn't a microscope -- yet. But there are some smart physicists who want to make that transformation possible very soon, if not for you and me at first, then for doctors who don't have easy access to laboratories.
There are a lot of ways to trick out your smartphone. And if you're an eager Apple fan, the brand-new iPhone 4S will come with fancy apps that use its increasingly sophisticated camera to scan and image the world. A smartphone camera lens can measure objects, help translate words, and even tell you whether your potato chips have been caught in a food safety recall.
But Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu and colleagues at the Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis say a smartphone's camera lens can also serve as a microscope and a spectrometer, which both could be pretty handy for looking at blood samples.
To bolster their case and push their agendas, advocates for market-based education reform and market-based policies in general tout “miracle schools” that have supposedly produced amazing results . Urban Prep in Chicago is often exhibit A.
As Diane Ravitch wrote of Urban Prep and other ed deform favorites ” the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations.”
Locally, backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy have incorporated much of the Urban Prep model in their plan and have repeatedly cited the “success” of that school as evidence of the soundness of their proposal. Just this weekend Derrell Connor was quoted as saying in relation to Madison Prep “We are using Urban Prep (in Chicago) as an example, which for the last four years has a 100 percent graduation rate and all those kids have gone on to college.” As I pointed out in a back-and-forth in the comments on that interview, the actual Urban Prep graduation rate is far below 100% (62.6% is the correct figure, my mistakes in the comments, also there have only been two graduating classes, not four) .
"Because we're in that position is exactly why we thought we could ask those questions," said Smith College President Carol Christ. "We aren't worried about what's going to happen next year."
And Smith isn't alone. In the past year, presidents of several elite liberal arts colleges have questioned whether the financial model underpinning their institutions - one relying on high tuition costs and student aid paying for expensive instruction and residential life on beautiful campuses -- is sustainable over the long term. They have also begun to question whether the education they offer, with small classes, relatively rigid schedules, limited course and major offerings, and intense academic rigor, is going to continue to appeal to students.
"The model - if it's not breaking - it's showing signs of age," said Richard Kneedler, former president of Franklin and Marshall College, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and a consultant with Ann Duffield and Colleagues, a presidential consulting firm. "The price has been pushed up at a number of the top institutions. It's gotten to the point where people are asking a lot of questions about it, and this high price is creating a sense in part of the public that higher education is becoming a commercial exercise."
A system that trains your brain to overcome degrading vision as you age will soon be available as an iPhone app
WE HAVE gotten used to the idea that smartphone apps can substitute for devices like GPS navigation systems or portable music players. But the latest item on the list may come as a surprise: reading glasses.
Early next year, a company called Ucansi will launch GlassesOff, an iPhone app that could help older people shed their reading glasses for at least part of the time - and may allow others to carry on reading without optical aids for years longer than would otherwise be possible.
The app helps people compensate for deterioration in their eyes' ability to focus on nearby objects by training the brain to process the resulting blurred images. "We're using the brain as glasses," says Uri Polat of Tel Aviv University in Israel, and co-founder of Ucansi.
Maryland has long been a leader in the field of educational accountability, and the Baltimore City school system took a crucial next step last year with a new teacher contract that will directly tie promotion and advancement to student outcomes. So it's mystifying that so little effort is being made to hold the private tutoring groups that are getting millions of dollars a year to help students from Baltimore's worst-performing schools accountable for the results they promise, or even to know whether they're making a difference.
As part of the No Child Left Behind law, districts were required to set aside part of their federal Title I money to pay for free private tutoring for poor students at failing schools. Since Baltimore City has such a high proportion of students from poor families, and because the school system historically has struggled to meet NCLB's progress requirements, the city has been obliged to spend some $55 million on private tutors over the last nine years, with little oversight by the school system or the state.
That paradox arose because the NCLB law specifically forbade city school officials from vetting or ranking the private tutoring companies for effectiveness, on the theory that schools that were already judged to be failing should not be allowed to interfere with parents' decisions about what was best for their children. At the same time, the law required school systems to fully inform parents about the availability of such services and pay for whatever programs the parents chose. That prompted hundreds of tutoring outfits to emerge in hopes of capitalizing on the federal largesse. Some had established records of excellence, but many did not.
Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips -- some have called them junkets -- for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips -- to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland -- they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools.
Rarely do they mention that they also meet with top executives of the Pearson company.
The foundation's officials say the free trips are solely educational and have no business purpose. On the foundation's tax forms for the last two years, the line for listing "payments of travel or entertainment expenses for any federal, state or local public officials" has been left blank.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is one of the most powerful anti-student testing politicians in the country. So, when given the chance to sign into law a new system of education accountability that would place far less emphasis on test scores, what did Brown do? He vetoed it. In his veto message over the weekend he called the bill "yet another siren song of school reform" that "relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system."
California Senate Bill 547 would have replaced what is known as the Academic Performance Index, which dates to 1999 and is based entirely on test scores, with the Education Quality Index, which, as the name implies, incorporated a broader range of measures. Schools' graduation rates, for example, as well as new indices of college preparedness and career readiness, would have been factored in. So would the availability and participation in extracurricular and enrichment opportunities. As for test scores, they would contribute no more than 40 percent of the value of the EQI for high schools and no less than 40 percent for elementary schools.
This week's Isthmus includes an opinion column by Larry Kaufmann entitled "What's So Bad About School Choice?" Mr. Kauffmann is identified as "an economic consultant based in Madison." I bet Mr. Kaufmann is really smart in a lot of ways. But this column of his seems strikingly misguided.
In a nutshell, Kaufmann argues that our public schools have failed. Public education "is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America." Spending on schools has gone up but "students' combined math and reading scores have been flat." Hence, our educational productivity "has fallen by 50% since 1970."
If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Kaufmann apparently is an economist and his preferred solution to what he sees as the underperformance of the educational-output industry is to unleash the magic of the market.
Specifically, his answer is unfettered school choice. Instead of shoveling money down educational sinkholes, parents should be given vouchers to purchase educational services from whomever they choose. Kaufmann assumes that parents as consumers will choose wisely; innovative and efficient schools will flourish; less effective schools will exit the market; and math and reading scores will soar.
As a senior, I am at a critical point in my high school career, arguably the most significant, the college application process.
It is a long, strenuous process that will determine not just the next four years, but also set the stage for the rest of my life. Yet as I look around in class and read the news, I have to wonder are we really being prepared for the future?
I'm not sure exactly when it happened but somewhere along the way as I saw our economy declining and educational budget cuts being made nationwide, I realized just how difficult it is becoming for students today to attain a higher education and to acquire a job in today's competitive and ever demanding labor market.
The British are coming! The British are coming!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Public education needs more money! Public education needs more money!
One of these statements (had Paul Revere actually said it) was true. One of these statements is obviously false. And the third, well, skies don't fall, silly.
Taxpayers keep hearing how the funding for public education has been cut. We're constantly barraged with: "Money is tight." "We've cut the budget to the bone." "We're running out of options." "We've done all we can; now we have to cut programs and teachers." These claims defy explanation. They aren't true in Spokane. They aren't true in Washington State. They aren't true in most other states, and they aren't true at the federal level. Unfortunately, many people believe them.
A city council candidate insisted recently: "We can't gut education!" Last week, a Spokane reporter wrote: "Since 2002, Spokane Public Schools has cut $45 million from its budget..." In its budget forums last spring, district administrators and board directors told the public that since 2002, the district has cut $54 million from its budget. Spokane school board candidate Deana Brower has repeatedly said that the district needs more money.
Let's look at some numbers. Follow the links to the budget documents. See how the budget has grown, and see the district's tendency to budget for greater expenditures than it has in revenues.
I am returning Senate Bill 547 without my signature.
This bill is yet another siren song of school reform. It renames the Academic Performance Index (API) and reduces its significance by adding three other quantitative measures.
While I applaud the author's desire to improve the API, I don't believe that this bill would make our state's accountability regime either more probing or more fair.
This bill requires a new collection of indices called the "Education Quality Index" (EQI),consisting of "multiple indicators," many of which are ill-defined and some impossible to design. These "multiple indicators" are expected to change over time, causing measurement instability and muddling the picture ofhow schools perform.
SB 547 would also add significant costs and confusion to the implementation of the newly-adopted Common Core standards which must be in place by 2014. This bill would require us to introduce a whole new system of accountability at the same time we are required to carry out extensive revisions to school curriculum, teaching materials and tests. That doesn't make sense.
Finally, while SB 547 attempts to improve the API, it relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system. The criticism of the API is that it has led schools to focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other subjects and matters that are vital to a well-rounded education. SB 547 certainly would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools.
Adding more speedometers to a broken car won't tum it into a high-performance machine.
Over the last 50 years, academic "experts" have subjected California to unceasing pedagogical change and experimentation.
The current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing indicators of performance to distinguish the educational "good" from the educational "bad." Instead of recognizing that perhaps we have reached testing nirvana, editorialists and academics alike call for ever more measurement "visions and revisions."
The University of Wisconsin System is trying to help transfer students get a degree quicker and cheaper as part of its effort to increase the number of college graduates in the state.
Transferring credits from one school to another often means wasted time and money because course requirements don't match. With some 17,000 students - the equivalent of two small UW universities - transferring into and within the UW system each year, making the process more efficient could have a dramatic effect on retention and graduation rates.
Such a step might not seem like an economic driver, but boosting the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have a college degree could help lure companies to the state, system officials reason. That, in turn, could stimulate the economy.
Many college students today aren't dropped off at one school as freshmen and picked up at the same school four years later with a degree, said UW System President Kevin Reilly. It's more of a "swirl," he said, with students leaving college for a number of reasons, then returning to school somewhere else with credits to transfer.
During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure for the appropriateness of the match between qualification and the job. We therefore define three groups of graduates: matched, apparently over-educated and genuinely over-educated; to compare pre- and post-expansion cohorts of graduates. We find the proportion of over-educated graduates has doubled, even though over-education wage penalties have remained stable. This suggests that the labour market accommodated most of the large expansion of university graduates. Apparently over-educated graduates are mostly undistinguishable from matched graduates, while genuinely over-educated graduates principally lack non-academic skills such as management and leadership. Additionally, genuine over-education increases unemployment by three months but has no impact of the number of jobs held. Individual unobserved heterogeneity differs between the three groups of graduates but controlling for it, does not alter these conclusions.
AMONG the episodes in his life that didn't last, that were over almost before they began, including a spell in the army and a try at marriage, Michael Hart was a street musician in San Francisco. He made no money at it, but then he never bought into the money system much--garage-sale T-shirts, canned beans for supper, were his sort of thing. He gave the music away for nothing because he believed it should be as freely available as the air you breathed, or as the wild blackberries and raspberries he used to gorge on, growing up, in the woods near Tacoma in Washington state. All good things should be abundant, and they should be free.
He came to apply that principle to books, too. Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, "Moby-Dick", pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the "Kama Sutra"). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha". The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over. He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand, to a billion people all over the globe--a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.
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Representative Michele Bachmann promises to "turn out the lights" at the federal Education Department. Gov. Rick Perry calls it unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, would allow it to live but only as a drastically shrunken agency that mainly gathers statistics.
Even Mitt Romney, who in 2008 ran for president defending No Child Left Behind, the federal law that vastly expanded Washington's role in public schools, now says, "We need to get the federal government out of education."
For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation's 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards.
The Web site of Carnegie Learning, a company started by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that sells classroom software, trumpets this promise: "Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results."
The pitch has sounded seductive to thousands of schools across the country for more than a decade. But a review by the United States Department of Education last year would suggest a much less alluring come-on: Undistinguished math curricula. Unproven results.
The federal review of Carnegie Learning's flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had "no discernible effects" on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor, "did not have statistically significant effects on test scores."
Amid a classroom-based software boom estimated at $2.2 billion a year, debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of technology on learning and how best to measure it. But it is hard to tell that from technology companies' promotional materials.
Consider three anecdotes from Mary Diez, dean of education at Alverno College:
Several years ago, she was walking up to the door of a Milwaukee high school. A student told her, "Lady, you don't want to go in there. It's not a nice place." Unfortunately, she said, he was right. Too many staff members didn't really care about the kids, and you had the feeling the place could go out of control at any time. Is that the formula for a successful school?
While Diez was involved in an effort to help 11 specific schools in the city, a principal showed her a six-page document, listing rules and the consequences for violating them. Her response: "You think, if you had more engaging classes, you would need all that?"
Students at one school were telling her about their favorite teacher. "She respects us and we respect her back," one said. The teacher had found something you don't learn from a course or a manual: the right mix of caring for kids and demanding educational progress from them that brings good outcomes, even with high-needs youths.
Diez is one of the leading figures in the Milwaukee area in what I believe (and this may be hopeful thinking) is a growing commitment by schools and educators to strengthen their work on improving the character traits of their students - and of staff members.
Have you ever experienced an online course ? If you are reading this article, I'm presuming the answer is yes. Whether you are the teacher or the student, you probably thought, at one time or another: the experience could have been better if... Maybe it wasn't exactly those words, but I'm sure you found out that the Learning Management System (LMS) you were using - or the course material you were producing/looking at - wasn't as hot as you expected.
This is quite common. In the beginning of this century, LMSs are only starting to be usable by the mainstream. What we're asking teachers is to create online material without, sometimes, any knowledge of computers or the LMS itself.
How can the experience be better? LMS can be simpler if online material can be produced without requiring a degree in computer science... and in a reasonable time frame.
The Big Easy's School Revolution John White, superintendent of New Orleans' public schools: 'In other cities, charter schools exist in spite of the system. Here they are the system.'
At John McDonough High School in this city's Esplanade Ridge district, the new superintendent points to a broken window boarded up with plastic. Nobody thought to fix it properly. "Why? Because these are the poor kids," says John White, who arrived in New Orleans this spring. "The message is: 'We don't care.'"
John Mac is one of the worst schools in New Orleans, which makes it one of the worst in America. It scored 30 out of 200 on a statewide performance scale when 75 counts as "failing." In a school built for 800 students, 340 are enrolled. Virtually all are African-American. A couple years ago, an armed gang burst into the cafeteria and assassinated a student.
Mr. White looks in on classrooms. In one, groups of seniors chat loudly and puzzle over a basic algebra problem. In another the teacher struggles to start a conversation about a USA Today article that few students had read. A girl in the corner sits with a jacket over her head, headphones in both ears.
Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison School Board members appear to have ironed out some of the major wrinkles in the plans for the controversial new charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of minority students.
But the devil remains in the details, board members say. Bringing several issues into clearer focus and then getting agreement will be essential to move the project forward. A final vote by the School Board will take place before the end of the year.
Details to be examined include the fine print on a broad agreement announced last week between the Madison teachers union and organizers of the Urban League-sponsored charter school.
"There are still some tremendously big questions that haven't been answered about how this agreement would actually work," says Marj Passman, School Board vice president. "It's not clear to me that all the parties are on the same page on all the issues, large and small."
How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced "Mona Lisa," as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, daVincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?
For years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.
Academics also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ of 228 is the highest ever recorded, has not exactly contributed much to science or art. She is, instead, a question-and-answer columnist for Parade magazine. Run-of-the-mill physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122).
Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily high I.Q., or even about being smart. After considerable debate initiated by J. P. Guilford, a leading psychologist who called for a scientific focus on creativity in the sixties, psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.
Today, Madison Preparatory Academy Board Chair, David Cagigal, announced a gift of $2.5 million presented to the public charter school from Madisonian Mary Burke.
Ms. Burke, a retired business executive whose family owns Trek Bicycles and who served as Wisconsin's Secretary of Commerce during the Doyle Administration, described the reason for her gift.
"We all know Madison can do better. I am happy to do my part to invest in our community and the future of all of our youth. Madison Prep is a powerful idea backed up by a powerful and cost-effective plan. It offers real hope to Madison students, teachers and families who want to realize their expectations and dreams."
Ms. Burke also shared, "I understand we are in tight budget times and don't want concerns about the cost of Madison Prep or the availability of public funding to supersede the real need for the School Board to support it. I am confident Madison Prep will be a great opportunity for children and want to see it happen. I hope my gift helps the School Board overcome its financial concerns."
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Vice Chair of Madison Prep's Board and the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sees Ms. Burke's gift as an investment in innovation and human potential.
"We need to search for new solutions to solve the achievement gap in our Madison schools. To do this, we must be willing to innovate. Madison can be a perfect incubator for new educational methods and approaches. Mary Burke's gift is stunning in its generosity and powerful in its potential."
Mr. Cagigal sees the gift as the start of an important trend in the region. "Mary is absolutely committed to eliminating the achievement gap and is investing her resources in multiple approaches to achieve this goal. Whether it's Madison Prep or the Boys & Girls Club's AVID/TOPS program, Mary believes that supporting such efforts will ultimately benefit our entire community in the future. She is setting a great example for others and we are very thankful to have her in our corner."
With Ms. Burke's gift, the Urban League of Greater Madison will further reduce its request for per pupil funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District from $11,471 per pupil to $9,400 in the school's first year, and $9,800 per pupil in years two through five of the school's proposed five year budget. The Madison district currently spends $13,207 per pupil to educate students in middle and high schools.
Madison Preparatory Academy plans to open two college preparatory public charter schools in the fall of 2012, one for boys and one for girls. Their mission will be the same: to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. Both academies will be tuition-free, offer an identical curriculum in a single-sex education environment, and serve as catalysts for change and opportunity, particularly for young people of color.
Beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the Academies will serve 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls when they open next year, eventually growing to serve 820 students total.
Madison's Board of Education will vote next month on the new charter schools.
SJ: You need a person. Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but they're not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don't need an assistant. I think we have all the material in the world to solve this problem; it's just being deployed in other places. I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn't what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.
DM: This question was meant to be at the end and we're just getting to it now.
SJ: One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.
Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing people buy in their lives is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually, and an average car costs approximately twenty thousand dollars. And an average car lasts about eight years. Then you buy another one. Approximately two thousand dollars a year over an eight year period. Well, your child goes to school approximately eight years in K through 8. What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About forty-four hundred dollars. Over twice as much as a car. It turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. They are advertising to you like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people. So that everybody knows about all these cars and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.
Monopolists hate competition, and they'll say almost anything to prevent it. When natural gas competition was introduced in the mid-1980s, pipeline executives told regulators it would lead to gas explosions throughout Manhattan. As implausible as that tale was, it pales in comparison to the misinformation campaign waged by the public school monopoly against school choice.
The school choice movement is gathering steam because of one simple fact: Public education is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America. Since 1970, spending on public schools (per student, in inflation-adjusted terms) has more than doubled. Over the same period, students' combined math and reading scores have been flat, and the U.S. has fallen behind most other industrial nations on standardized tests.
Educational productivity can be measured as the "output" of educational achievement for each inflation-adjusted dollar spent per student, and by this measure, the productivity of American public schools has fallen by 50% since 1970. A dollar invested in public schools in the U.K., Ireland and New Zealand now yields nearly twice the educational achievement as the same dollar spent in U.S. public schools.
These results cannot be explained by the efforts made to educate the disadvantaged, or by "exit exams" that reduce the pool of high school graduates in some countries. America's public schools clearly need to be improved but, in spite of receiving a massive increase in resources, have consistently failed to do so. Given this dismal performance, the current calls for fundamental educational reform are natural, healthy and long overdue.
A college professor looks at the forgotten victims of our mediocre educational system--the potentially high achievers whose SAT scores have fallen, and who read less, understand less of what they read, and know less than the top students of a generation ago.
Two crises are stalking American education. Each poses a major threat to the nation's future. The two are very different in character and will require separate strategies if we wish to solve them; yet to date, almost without exception, those concerned with restoring excellence to our schools have lumped them together.
The first crisis, which centers on disadvantaged minority children attending inner-city schools, has received considerable attention, as well it should. Put simply, it involves students whose habitat makes it very difficult for them to learn. The key issues are more social than educational. These children clearly need dedicated teachers and a sound curriculum, the two staples of a quality school, but the fact remains that most of them will not make significant progress until they also have decent housing, a better diet, and a safer environment in which to live.
At the time, Julie Fitzgerald didn't know much about standardized testing or the laws in place that promote it. She just saw her young child crying.
"He was trying to do his math homework, which is a subject he usually enjoyed," she recalled. "He was really struggling, and he put his head down on the counter and started to cry. He said, 'I'm stupid.'"
Fitzgerald learned that her son, then in the second grade, had taken an assessment test that day in school and had become overwhelmed by it. A year later, she has informed Portland school officials in writing that she's opting both of her kids, students at Hall Elementary School, out of standardized testing.
She's one of few parents in Portland to take that step, but represents a local tie to a growing nationwide movement of parents dissatisfied with assessment tests mandated by state and federal education laws.
A week after President Obama said he planned to rollback No Child Left Behind requirements, a majority of states have indicated they're on board with the plan, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is encouraging others to do the same.
In a recent appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Duncan said that he wants "to get out of the way of the states," and that teachers need "room to move and we can't keep beating down from Washington."
In a letter to state education officials, Duncan stated that he was encouraging state and local government agencies to request waivers to NCLB, which Duncan says he is able to enact through a section in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The new waivers will provide flexibility to school curriculum, provided that the governing bodies meet certain requirements.
It appears that the one thing holding down student achievement was the jeans the teacher wore to class. Oh, if only we had realized that unless the teacher was wearing a tie while dodging spitballs from his class of 60 kids, that would make all the difference as to whether or not Johnny could read.
No one cares to lower class sizes, and heaven forbid we should give teachers the opportunity to have any say in their workplace. So let's enact dress codes for teachers. No one is saying where the teachers are going to get the money for all these clothes, but I guess Goodwill might be high on the list.
What an interesting paradox to read the Oct. 2 article on dress codes for teachers in the same newspaper that carried the lament that we need more people with manufacturing skills such as machinists and CNC operators. Does anyone remember that some people who work with their hands are the ones who are actually helping the economy along? I mean, are we so blinded by the thought that we all want everyone to be a doctor, lawyer or MBA that we have forgotten that some people are amazing at doing jobs that don't require wearing a suit?
In this era of tumult and freefall for teachers in public schools, the imposition of a teacher dress code seems almost over the top. At first glance, it appears heavily dredged in the flour of unbounded management power.
A number of public school districts in the metro area have imposed dress codes on their teaching staff. While the codes vary in detail, they seem to center around a neat, casual appearance for the teachers.
Politics aside, when one steps back and examines the strengths of the policy, it is a good idea. Teachers quoted in an Oct. 2 Journal Sentinel article, for the most part, appear to be supportive. In my experience, most teachers already dress this way, what I call "respectfully comfortable."
The key issue to me is that teachers not be mistaken for students because of lax appearance. Clothing is a powerful symbol in all areas of life; it makes announcements as to how a person wishes to be perceived. Teachers do and should occupy an arena of esteem and authority. This can be diminished if a teacher shows up in class wearing clothes so informal as to send a message to students that, hey, we're all buddies and I want to be your friend.
"Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report's release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven't pointed to a single one. "That would be laughable if the results weren't so tragic for our nation's children," Duncan said.
The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
Measuring teacher performance has been a focus for Duncan, who last year upset many programs by suggesting that master's degrees in education should not automatically merit higher paychecks, saying that money should be redirected to teachers who either prove their ability to perform or work in high-needs areas such as low-income districts. The new federal proposal, which Duncan announced here on Friday, was widely praised for its goal of improving student outcomes. But it also prompted some skepticism from teacher education groups questioning its feasibility.
The Top 400 outcomes will and should be debated, and people will be curious about the relative place of their universities in the ranked list, as well as about the welcome improvements evident in the THE/Thomson Reuters methodology. But don't be invited into distraction and only focus on some of these questions, especially those dealing with outcomes, methods, and reactions.
Rather, we also need to ask more hard questions about power, governance, and context, not to mention interests, outcomes, and potential collateral damage to the sector (when these rankings are released and then circulate into national media outlets, and ministerial desktops). There is a political economy to world university rankings, and these schemes (all of them, not just the THE World University Rankings) are laden with power and generative of substantial impacts; impacts that the rankers themselves often do not hear about, nor feel (e.g., via the reallocation of resources).
t sounds so democratic, a very American idea: break down the walls of "remedial," "average" and "advanced" classes so that all students in each grade can learn together, with lessons that teachers "differentiate" to challenge each individual. Proponents of this approach often stress that it benefits average and lagging students, but a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that the upsides may come at a cost to top students -- and to the international competitiveness of the United States.
Everybody hates the No Child Left Behind Act. In the last few weeks, both conservative Republicans and President Obama have announced plans to overhaul George W. Bush's signature education law by sending power over K-12 schooling back to the states. On the surface, this might seem like a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. Don't believe it. The two plans actually represent radically different views of the federal government's responsibility for helping children learn.
To see why, it helps to understand some common misconceptions about NCLB. The law requires schools to administer annual reading and math tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and it holds schools accountable for the percentage of students who pass the tests. That target percentage increases steadily over time, to 100 percent in 2014. Since universal proficiency is obviously impossible, the law has been cast as a malevolent force designed to tar public schools with "failing" labels as a prelude to corporate takeover and/or conversion to the free-market voucher nirvana of Milton Friedman's dreams.
There are, however, three aspects of NCLB that render this scenario very unlikely. First, states were given total discretion to set their own academic standards, pick their own tests, and decide what scores on the tests count as passing. Last year, for example, Alabama reported that 87 percent of its fourth graders had passed the state's reading test. Yet Alabama is, by all available measures, one of the most academically low-performing states in the nation. According to the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, only 34 percent of Alabama fourth graders are proficient in reading. The lesson: Give state education officials the ability to decide how their performance will be judged, and they'll respond in predictable fashion.
Seventh-grade history teacher Mark Stevens bellowed a set of 21st-century instructions as students streamed into class one recent Friday at Fairfax County's Glasgow Middle School.
"Get a computer, please! Log on," he said, "and go to your textbook."
Electronic books, having changed the way many people read for pleasure, are now seeping into schools. Starting this fall, almost all Fairfax middle and high school students began using online books in social studies, jettisoning the tomes that have weighed down backpacks for decades.
It is the Washington area's most extensive foray into online textbooks, putting Fairfax at the leading edge of a digital movement that publishers and educators say inevitably will sweep schools nationwide.
But questions remain about whether the least-privileged children will have equal access to required texts. Many don't have computers at home, or reliable Internet service, and the school system is not giving a laptop or e-reader to every student.
Science will soon join the short list of K-12 subjects for which American states, districts, and schools will have the option of using new, multi-state (aka, "national") academic standards rather than standards developed by individual states. One can reasonably surmise that new assessments aligned with those standards will follow in due course, as will curricula, professional development, textbooks, and much more.
Is this a good thing for American students and teachers--and for the nation's future? It depends, of course, on whether the new standards (and ensuing assessments, etc.) are better than those that states have been devising and deploying on their own. Today, every state has its own unique version of K-12 science standards. A year or so from now, however, many of them are apt to be deciding whether to replace their individual standards with the new multi-state standards that a (privately funded) consortium of organizations (led by Achieve, Inc.) recently began to draft.
Business schools are under the microscope again, their relevance and value questioned in many quarters. The financial crisis has triggered a self-examination of their raison d'etre.
However, before we can decide whether and how business schools need to change, it is worth pausing to consider how and why business schools have evolved as they have.
Certainly not for the many young Americans being graduated from colleges that have prepared them inadequately for the competitive marketplace. The failure of colleges and universities to teach basic skills, while coddling them with plush dorms and self-directed "study," is a dot-connecting exercise for Uncle Shoulda, who someday will say -- in Chinese -- "How could we have let this happen?"
We often hear lamentations about declining educational quality, but the focus is usually misplaced on SAT scores and graduation rates. Missing from the conversation is the quality of what's being taught. Meanwhile, we are mistakenly wed to the notion that more people going to college means more people will find jobs.
Obviously the weak economy is a factor in the highest unemployment rate for those ages 16 to 29 since World War II. But there's more to the story. Fundamentally, students aren't learning what they need to compete for the jobs that do exist.
These facts have been well documented by a variety of sources, not to mention the common experience of employers who can't find applicants who can express themselves grammatically.
Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.
I suppose this is, officially speaking, the end of the tennis season. Djokovic and Nadal - a raging bull tamed by a matador of superhuman reflexes and speed - fought out their thunderous final in New York a month ago and our end-of-season party at the club took place not long afterwards. As far as I'm concerned, though, there is no end to the season; I was brought up to play in light snow and some of our most exhilarating battles have been joined on crisp winter evenings with the temperature close to zero.
Perhaps the best moments of my tennis year, so far, came just as the autumn leaves started to strew the courts, just before the nets and posts of the grass courts were taken up for the last time. There were some good late-season games - but even better than the games were flashes of insight, not just into technical aspects of the game but more particularly into the true nature of mentoring.
Our club is a place where people of different generations come regularly and naturally together, from the senior members, a little creaky in the limbs, to very young children just beginning to swing racquets (you hope not in the direction of their brothers and sisters), and that in itself is unusual in a world that is more and more stratified in terms of age - and not just age.
The Chicago Teachers Union's closed-door "policy briefings" for aldermen Monday were as much about public relations as they were about school policy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's unofficial City Council floor leader, Ald. Patrick O'Connor (40th Ward) said after attending one of the three sessions.
For weeks, the union and Emanuel have been locked in a war of words over the mayor's push to immediately extend the school day by 90 minutes. On Monday, the union's leaders made their case instead to 25 of the council's 50 members, with eight other aldermen sending aides to the meetings.
"They're trying to win a little more sympathy from the public and the City Council, and this was their effort to do that," O'Connor said. "I think today was an attempt by the Chicago Teachers Union to basically say, 'We don't like to be vilified. We don't want to be in a position when people are upset with us as being an obstruction to a longer school day.'"
It all seemed like a good idea at the time: give students an option to attend school online rather than through traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions.
The concept launched in Colorado in 1995 was intended to help at-risk students who struggle in traditional settings and to provide a choice for students and parents looking to reap more from their educational experiences.
Here in Poudre School District, its online school, the Global Academy, is controlled with much the same accountability as other PSD schools, including regular audits and monitoring for achievement and standardized testing.
DATE: October 3, 2011
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Don Severson, President, 577-0851, donleader@aol.com RE: Madison Preparatory Academy Hearing
Notes: For public appearance
The actions of the past few days are stunning, but not necessarily surprising ULGM (Madison Prep) and MTI have made working 'arrangements' regarding employment of teachers and staff and working conditions, the details of which have yet to be made public.
Major issue: 'negotiations/arrangements' have been made between MP & MTI without MMSD BOE nor administration at the table--both observed and verified by parties not involved.
In other words, MTI is the de facto negotiator for the Board and NOT the elected BOE, nor specified as its representative
ACE has publicly stated its support of MP. We must now withhold affirmation of that support until and unless major, systemic changes occur in how the proposal process and plans (both academic and business) play out.
By design, default, benign neglect or/and collusion the BOE has abdicated the authority vested in it by law and the electorate of the District with regards to its fiduciary irresponsibility and lack of control for policy-making.
Lest you are OK with your past and current operating methods; have forgotten how you are demonstrating your operating methods; or don't care, you have been elected to be the leader and be in charge of this District, not MTI.
By whatever BOE action or in-action has thus far been demonstrated, the proposed operational direction of MP has been reduced to appearing and acting in the mirror image of the District. This is inappropriate to say the least. The entire purpose of a charter school is to be different and to get different results.
How is forcing MP to operate in essentially the same fashion as the District and at a cost of more money....any different from....operating the District's nearly 30 current alternative/innovative programs and services for 800 students, at millions of dollars, taking away from other students in the District? And, you can't even produce data to show what differences, if any, are being made with these students.
This current Board, and past Boards of Education have proven over and over again that spending more money and doing essentially the same things, don't get different results (speaking here essentially about the 'achievement gap' issue)
Continuing to speak bluntly, the Board's financial and academic philosophies, policies and actions are inconsistent, phony and discriminatory.
Let us be clear...
The process for consideration of the Madison Prep charter school proposal must
be open and public
be under the leadership of the BOE
be accountable to the BOE and the public
have ALL stakeholders at the same table at ALL times
Late last week the proposal cleared a major hurdle with the announcement that the Urban League had struck a deal with MTI to employ unionized teachers, nurses and clerical staff.
AFSMCE Local 60 President Tom Coiyer asked the district to use its own unionized custodial staff rather than allow them to be contracted. And Don Severson, president of a conservative district watchdog group, withdrew his previous support because of the deal struck between the Urban League and MTI, which didn't involve the School Board.
MTI executive director John Matthews, who attended but did not speak at the hearing, said the union would no longer oppose the proposal. However, he remains skeptical that Madison Prep would be more successful than the district's high schools at closing the achievement gap.
At this time of year there is always talk of education. The autumn term has started; some children are entering school for the first time; others are making the transition from primary to secondary; young adults are being driven, with bulging bags and cases, to halls of residence by parents who may be more traumatised than they are. And this year, at least in the UK, there is more talk than ever, because education is being "shaken up" by Michael Gove, a notably driven and idealistic, and ideological, education secretary; and also by a universities minister, David Willetts, of legendary intellectual firepower. A new class of "free schools" has been created; the whole system of university education has been rethought, or at least put on a different financial footing.
Of course the idea of free schools sounds grand - but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what? Trying to get some perspective on what this idea of freedom might mean, I found myself looking back to two inspiring experiments in education, both of which were conducted in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War.
The more famous of the two was the Residencia de Estudiantes - the arty version of an Oxbridge college at which Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, Falla and others spent time in the 1920s and 1930s, and which served as a seedbed for much of the burgeoning artistic creativity of that brilliant, short-lived time.
But the less well-known Institución Libre de Enseñanza, or Free Institute of Education, founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, is possibly more relevant to my theme. In this case the word "free" meant very specifically free from the dead hand of state and religious control. The Spanish "Glorious Revolution" of 1868 had promised a more modern, secular, scientific model of education; but the Restoration of 1874 brought back not only the Bourbons but a repressive, state-controlled education system in which the minister dictated the choice of textbooks and curriculum, and forbade the teaching of non-Catholic religious doctrine or critical political ideas.
Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students -- the "smart kids" -- were capable of advanced coursework.
But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom's school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.
South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.
Most principals can't identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less help teachers improve, according to a new book.
It's happened hundreds of times. An audience of principals, superintendents and instructional coaches is shown a short videotape of a classroom lesson and asked to score it from 1 to 5. It would seem straightforward: The teacher is good, bad or somewhere in-between. But invariably, the scores come in all over the map, with high and low in fairly equal numbers.
Having toured the United States with those videotapes, two leaders of the University of Washington's Center for Educational Leadership conclude that most school leaders can't identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less come up with helpful suggestions for improvement.
There is little question in my mind that national standards will be a blessing. The crazy quilt of district and state standards will become more rational, student mobility will stop causing needless learning hardships, and the full talents of a nation of innovators will be released to develop a vast array of products and services at a scale that permits even small vendors to compete to widen the field to all educators' benefit.
That said, we are faced with a terrible situation in mathematics. In my view, unlike the English/language arts standards, the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative are a bitter disappointment. In terms of their limited vision of math education, the pedestrian framework chosen to organize the standards, and the incoherent nature of the standards for mathematical practice in particular, I don't see how these take us forward in any way. They unwittingly reinforce the very errors in math curriculum, instruction, and assessment that produced the current crisis.
One wonders what became of the Madison School Districts Math Task Force?
The ongoing debate over whether using student test results on standardized exams is a good way to evaluate a teacher's effectiveness just took a new twist.
The U.S. Department of Education on Friday released a report calling for new regulations designed to link federal funding for teacher-education programs to the test scores of students.
"While there are many beacons of excellence, unfortunately some of our existing teacher preparation programs are not up to the job," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says in the forward to the report. "They operate partially blindfolded, without access to data that tells them how effective their graduates are in elementary and secondary school classrooms after they leave their teacher preparation programs. Too many are not attracting top students, and too many states are not setting a high bar for entry into the profession."
The report, which outlines the Obama administration's proposals for teacher education reform, also calls for additional funds for teaching scholarships and expanding efforts to create more minority teachers. It's mainly catching the eyes of higher education officials nationally, however, for proposing ways to hold colleges, universities and programs that produce teachers accountable for those they send into the classroom.
Some of you have noticed there is something buzzing among your Dutch friends. It has to do with education, Silverlight, open standards and being obese. I've been asked to write about it in English so you all can get on the same page as us, and sign a petition to show your support for our campaign to make the use of open standards in education mandatory.
What came first?
At first there was a problem, and the problem is called Magister. Magister is software for the school administration but it also expanding it's reach to serve as an education learning environment and a license-tool for educational materials. When a school deploys Magister students are required to go online and use Magister via their browser. For them the tool is web-based. Till 2008 there where no issues, but in 2008 Schoolmaster, the company behind Magister, partnered with Microsoft and Siverlight was chosen as the tool of choice. Since Magister 5.x problems have been mounting for students using other browsers than Internet Explorer or another operating system than Windows. Microsoft and Schoolmaster state that Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Well, as most Linux fans and users know, there is an open source implementation for Silverlight. It's called Moonlight and to call it a crappy implementation would be giving it too much credit. Students using Moonlight can't get Silverlight to work.
We have historically been uncomfortable with so-called "charter" schools, which too frequently sacrifice the principle of providing all students with a well-rounded education in favor of narrower experiments.
And we have never had any taste for separate-but-equal -- or more usually separate-and-unequal -- schemes that divide students along lines of race, class and gender.
The proposal to create a charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students has been sincerely and generally well presented by Urban League President Kaleem Caire. We respect that Caire is attempting to address serious issues, including a lingering frustration with the Madison Metropolitan School District's responses to the achievement gap that has plagued the district for many years.
Cognitive psychology is, broadly, the study of mental processes almost as if the human mind was a type of computer. It is generally a highly empirical academic discipline relying on experimentation to study faculties such as language, attention and memory. It could be revolutionized by smartphones.
The current problem, according to a paper in peer-reviewed publication PLoS One, is that experiments usually rely on groups of volunteers coming to a research facility. By using smartphone technology instead, data could be collected from thousands of subjects across the world.
The paper comes from an international group of researchers who have been running a classic experiment which asks users to distinguish rapidly between words and non-words. (Its results can be used, for example, in the diagnosis of reading impairments.) Participants in the experiment downloaded a free app from iTunes to use on their iPhone or iPad.
Tim Comer says when his son moved from a mostly black magnet school in Chicago to the Madison School District in 2006, "he went from sharp to dull."
Comer, 45, a black father and unemployed electronic engineer, said the difference was that Madison was "laid back" while the Chicago school pushed students to work extra hard to succeed.
"In Chicago he was always a frontrunner," Comer said. "But here, he's always on the back burner."
Comer's dissatisfaction is shared by many black parents in Madison where, despite decades of efforts, a significant gap persists between white and black students' academic performance and graduation rates.
Although the gap is closing among students completing algebra by the 10th grade, it has widened on 4th grade reading tests and in high school graduation rates since 2003. Those changes have come as the number of black students in the district has increased and the number of whites has declined.
"We know that we're not pushing the needle significantly," Superintendent Dan Nerad said about what he considers "the most significant social justice issue in America."
Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you're not doing your job.
Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those services, but rarely am I asked for them.
A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. That's right: I am doing graduate advising for pay. I am teaching your Ph.D. students to do things like plan a publishing trajectory, tailor their dissertations for grant agencies, strategize recommendation letters, evaluate a journal's status, judge the relative merits of postdoctoral options, interpret a rejection, follow up on an acceptance, and--above all--get jobs. And business is so good I'm booked ahead for months.
State leaders have created at least five task forces over the past three decades to provide recommendations for overhauling Iowa's education system. The groups produced at least six reports with their ideas for changes. These are the highlights of the proposals.
"First in the Nation Education," 1984
Implement an effective evaluation process for teachers, administrators and support services staff.
Give all educators 12-month contracts and use time for planning, developing, implementing and evaluating programs, staff development and more instruction time.
So after waves and waves of reform, you thought Chicago public elementary schools had made tremendous progress in the last 20 years?
Think again.
Despite millions of dollars in fixes and programs, Chicago's elementary grade reading scores have barely budged over the last two decades, a new report by the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research has found.
Math scores improved only "incrementally" in those grades, and racial gaps in both subjects increased, with African American students falling the most behind other groups, especially in reading -- an area pushed heavily under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.
But the good news in a unique study called "Trends in Chicago's Schools Across Three Eras of Reform: Summary of Key Findings" is that Chicago Public Schools made "dramatic improvement" in its high school graduation rate over almost two decades. Less than half of CPS freshmen graduated by age 19 in 1990, compared to about two thirds today, the study said.
In 20 years of near-constant reform efforts, Chicago's elementary school students have made few gains, high school students have advanced, and the achievement gap between poor and rich areas has widened, a major University of Chicago study found, contradicting impressions created by years of Chicago Public Schools testing data.
The report examined performance across three eras of reform over the last two decades -- a span including the Argie Johnson, Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan regimes. Researchers for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that most publicly available data measuring the success of public schools in Chicago did not provide an accurate picture of progress.
One of the most striking findings is that elementary school scores in general remained mostly stagnant, contrary to visible improvement on state exams reported by the Illinois State Board of Education. The consortium study used a complex statistical analysis of data from each state-administered test over the last 20 years, controlling for changes in the test's content and how it was scored, said Stuart Luppescu, a lead consortium researcher.
After a two-hour meeting and four months of ongoing discussions, MTI agreed to work "aggressively and proactively" with Madison Prep, through the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, to ensure the school achieves its diversity hiring goals; educational mission and staff compensation priorities; and staff and student performance objectives.
Where we started.
In March 2011, we submitted a proposal to MMSD's Board of Education to start an all-boys public charter school that would serve 120 boys beginning in the 2012-13 school year: 60 boys in sixth grade and 60 boys in seventh grade. We proposed that the school would operate as a "non-instrumentality" charter school, which meant that Madison Prep would not employ teachers and other relevant support staff that were members of MTI's collective bargaining unit. We also proposed a budget of $14,471 per pupil, an amount informed by budgets numbers shared with us by MMSD's administration. MMSD's 2010-11 budget showed the projected to spend $14,800 per student.
Where we compromised.
A. Instrumentality: As part of the final proposal that the Urban League will submit to MMSD's Board of Education for approval next month, the Urban League will propose that Madison Prep operate as an instrumentality of MMSD, but have Madison Preparatory Academy retain the autonomy of governance and management of both the girls and boys charter schools. MTI has stated that they have no issue with this arrangement.
What this means is that Madison Prep's teachers, guidance counselor, clerical staff and nurse will be members of the MTI bargaining unit. As is required under the current CBA, each position will be appropriately compensated for working extra hours to accommodate Madison Prep's longer school day and year. These costs have been built into our budget. All other staff will employed by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. and the organization will contract out for some services, as appropriate.
B. Girls School Now: When we began this journey to establish Madison Prep, we shared that it was our vision to establish a similar girls school within 12-24 months of the boys school starting. To satisfy the concerns of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction about how Madison Prep complies with federal Title IX regulations, we offered to start the girls school at the same time. We have since accelerated the girls school in our planning and look forward to opening the girls and boys schools in August 2012 with 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls. We will add one grade per year in each school until we reach a full compliment of 6th - 12th grades and 840 students total.
C. Costs: Over the past six months, we have worked closely with MMSD's administration to identify an appropriate budget request for Madison Prep. Through an internal analysis of their spending at the secondary level, MMSD recently reported to us that they project to spend $13,207 per pupil on the actual education of children in their middle and high schools. To address school board members' concerns about the costs of Madison Prep, we worked hard to identify areas to trim spending without compromising our educational mission, student and staffing needs, and overall school effectiveness. We've since reduced our request to $11,478 per pupil in Madison Prep's first year of operation, 2012-13. By year five, our request decreases to $11,029 per pupil. Based on what we have learned about school spending in MMSD and the outstanding educational needs of students that we plan to address, we believe this is a reasonable request.
Why we compromised.
We have more information. After months of deliberation, negotiation and discussion with Board of Education members, school district administration, the teacher's union and community stakeholders, we've been able to identify what we believe is a clear path to getting Madison Prep approved; a path that we hope addresses the needs and interests of all involved without compromising the mission, objectives and needs of our future students.
We believe in innovation and systemic change. We are very serious about promoting change and opportunity within our public schools, and establishing innovative approaches - including new schools - to respond to the educational needs, interests and challenges of our children, schools and community. Today's children are tomorrow's workforce; tomorrow's leaders; tomorrow's innovators; and tomorrow's peacekeepers. We should have schools that prepare them accordingly. We are committed to doing our part to achieve this reality, including finding creative ways to break down boundaries rather than reinforce them.
The needs and desires of our children supersede all others. Children are the reward of life, and our children are our first priority. Our commitment is first and foremost to them. To this end, we will continue to seek ways to expand opportunities for them, advocate on their behalf and find ways to work with those with whom we have differences, even if it means we have to compromise to get there. It is our hope that other organizations and individuals will actively seek ways to do to the same.
We see the bigger picture. It would not serve the best interests of our community, our children, our schools or the people we serve to see parents of color and their children's teachers at odds with each other over how best to deliver a quality education to their children. That is not the image we want to portray of our city. We sincerely hope that our recent actions will serve as a example to areas businesses, labor unions, schools and other institutions who hold the keys to opportunity for the children and families we serve.
Outstanding Issues.
Even though we have made progress, we are not out of the woods yet. We hope that over the next several weeks, the Board of Education will respond to your advocacy and work with us to provide the resources and autonomy of governance and leadership that are exceedingly important to the success of Madison Prep.
We look forward to finding common ground on these important objectives and realizing our vision that Greater Madison truly becomes the best place in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn and work.
Thank you for your courage and continued support.
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205 www.ulgm.org
Big news over the weekend in the Madison Preparatory Academy saga. There has been significant and positive movement on four issues by the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM). First, they have changed their request from non-instrumentality to instrumentality, increasing control by and accountability to the district. Second, they have agreed to be staffed by teachers and other educators represented by Madison Teachers Incorporated (MTI) and follow the existing contract between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District (the memo on these two items and more is here). ULGM has also morphed their vision from a district-wide charter to a geographic/attendance area charter. Last, their current budget projections no longer require outrageous transfers of funds from other district schools. Many issues and questions remain but these move the proposal from an obvious red light to the "proceed with caution" yellow. It is far from being a green light.
Before identifying some of the remaining questions and issues, I think it is important to point out that this movement on the part on the Urban League came because people raised issues and asked questions. Throughout the controversies there has been a tendency to present Madison Prep as initially proposed as "THE PLAN" and dismiss any questioning of that proposal as evidence that the questioners don't care about the academic achievement of minorities and children of poverty. This has been absurd and offensive. Remember this started at $28,000 per/pupil. Well, ULGM has moved this far because people didn't treat their proposal as if it had been brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses; if the proposal is eventually approved, MMSD and likely Madison Prep will be better because these changes have been made. As this process enters the next phases, I hope everyone keeps that in mind.
Many sets of state and national mathematics stan- dards have come and gone in the past two decades. The Common Core State Mathematics Standards (CCSMS), which were released in June of 2010,*have been adopted by almost all states and will be phased in across the nation in 2014. Will this be another forgettable stan- dards document like the overwhelming majority of the others?
Perhaps. But unlike the others, it will be a travesty if this one is forgotten. The main difference between these standards and most of the others is that the CCSMS are mathematically very sound overall. They could serve--at long last--as the foundation for creating proper school mathematics textbooks and dramatically better teacher preparation.
Before the CCSMS came along, America long resisted the idea of commonality of standards and curriculum--but it did not resist such commonality in actual classrooms. Despite some politicians' rhetoric extolling the virtues of local control, there has been a de facto national mathematics curriculum for decades: the curriculum defined by the school mathematics textbooks. There are several widely used textbooks, but mathe- matically they are very much alike. Let's call this de facto math- ematics curriculum Textbook School Mathematics (TSM).1
Since January 2007, I've attempted repeatedly and in myriad ways to persuade Spokane Public Schools' leadership to provide teachers with good math materials so that our children will gain sufficient basic math skills. It's an effort you'd think would be welcome, respected, and relatively painless. Alas.
In 2008, after repeated failed efforts to get a conversation going with the district or with the daily newspaper, I decided to take that conversation public. Thus was born my blog, Betrayed. Shortly after that, I began writing my book, Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it. The book was published in January 2011, and shortly thereafter, I worked with two professionals to hold public forums in Spokane and talk directly with the people. The district leadership does not appear to appreciate my efforts to inform the people and try to get the children the mathematics they need.
A school district's activities should be an open book to the community that pays for them. My blog, book and advocacy all required thorough and accurate information. Therefore, over these nearly five years of effort, I've had to file public records requests with the district in order to obtain pertinent information that wasn't available in any other venue. For records other than internal district communications, my searches usually went like this:
Last year, 120 students took 223 Advanced Placement exams from 15 different exams last year. Congratulations to all of our faculty and staff who contributed to our students' success.
34% of juniors - over 40% of seniors and over a quarter of juniors took at least one AP course and exam in 2010-2011. The most recent report available shows the national figure in 2010 was 2010 was 26% for Wisconsin.
86.7% of EHS students who took an AP course scored a 3 or higher (passing), compared with 69.9% in the State of Wisconsin and 60.2% globally.
38.2% of the EHS graduating class passed (scored 3, 4 or 5) at least one AP exam. According to the 2010 AP report, the national average was 16.9% and Wisconsin average was 18.3% for any time during high school.
EHS offers one AP course for every 13-14 seniors.
For the period 1997-2011:
Edgewood's average ACT score rose about 2 points to 25.0 with an average of 96% of EHS students taking the test over that period. During the same period, state and national averages remained essentially unchanged from the low 22s and about 21, respectively. In 2010-11, 71% of Wisconsin students and 49% of all US students took the test.
The total number of students taking Edgewood's AP courses more than tripled.
The average number of tests taken per EHS AP student per year rose from 1.34 to 1.86.
The percent of students receiving passing scores (3, 4 or 5) rose from 54% to 87%.
Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Massachusetts's successful pitch for $250 million from the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, Gov. Deval Patrick, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and state Education Secretary Paul Reville on Wednesday touted the efforts the state has made to improve innovation and student performance in public schools.
The anniversary comes as state education officials indicate they plan to seek a waiver from key provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that require 100 percent of students to be proficient in English and math by 2014. Obama announced the opportunity for states to apply to opt out of portions of NCLB last Friday.
Duncan credited Massachusetts with setting "a great example for the country," despite Reville acknowledging that under No Child Left Behind over 90 percent of Massachusetts schools have been categorized in some way as "underperforming" based on the most recent MCAS scores.
How does Wisconsin compare to Massachusetts? Find out, here.
I've been something of a pessimist when it comes to the general state of public education.
But I'm coming around. I'm coming around to the view that big, important, disruptive -- and positive -- changes are coming; and they're coming faster than many might think. I've concluded that those who see online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.
The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they'll do it in a matter of years, not decades.
Someone PLEASE explain to us the fascination the district (or a portion thereof) has with the need for Mandarin Chinese in the curriculum!
We hear the argument, "China is the second largest country by size and most populous--and therefore the ability to speak Chinese will ultimately have value".
Right. And property values always rise. And 100-year storms only occur once in one hundred years.
Teacher preparation programs play an essential role in our elementary and secondary education system, which relies on them to recruit, select, and prepare approximately 200,000 future teachers every year.1 Strong programs recruit, select, and prepare teachers who have or learn the skills and knowledge they need to be hired into teaching positions, be retained in them, and lead their students to strong learning gains. Weak programs set minimal standards for entry and graduation. They produce inadequately trained teachers whose students do not make sufficient academic progress.
Unfortunately, while there are shining examples of strong programs throughout the country, too many of our teacher preparation programs fall short. As a whole, America is not following the lead of high-performing countries and recruiting the nation's best and brightest into teaching. Instead, only 23% of all teachers, and
only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates.2 Our differences with other nations are not due to teacher preparation alone. We must do more to support and reward excellent teaching at various stages in the education system. However, we can do more in the area of preparation. After admission, too many programs do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work. Only 50 percent of current teacher candidates receive supervised clinical training. More than three in five education school alumni report that their education school did not prepare them for "classroom realities." 3
Many Americans, having grown accustomed to Caesarism, probably see magnanimity in that front-page headline. Others, however, read it as redundant evidence of how distorted American governance has become. A president "gives" states a "voice" in education policy concerning kindergarten through 12th grade? How did this quintessential state and local responsibility become tethered to presidential discretion? Here is how federal power expands, even in the guise of decentralization:
Ohio Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953) was "Mr. Republican," revered by conservatives chafing under the domination of the GOP by Eastern money that preferred moderates such as New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the GOP's 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee. In "The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party," Michael Bowen, historian at Pennsylvania's Westminster College, recounts how Taft leavened his small-government orthodoxy with deviations, including federal aid to primary and secondary education.
In the 79th Congress (1945-47), Taft sponsored legislation to provide such education more than $8 billion over 25 years. The sum was huge (the 1947 federal budget was $34.5 billion), and the 25-year horizon said that federal intervention would not be temporary. Taft drafted his bill with help from the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union that today is an appendage of the Democratic Party, except when the relationship is the other way around.
It started with a partnership between the school district and the teachers' union.
Next came $100 million in grant funding from Bill and Melinda Gates, then the arduous job of explaining the Empowering Effective Teachers plan to more than 11,000 teachers.
On Monday night, a small group of parents braved heavy rains for its chance.
Turnout at Chamberlain High School to hear Hillsborough County school officials explain and answer questions about the program was sparse. But Melissa Erickson, president of the county PTA council, didn't mind.
Fordham's latest study, "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," is the first to examine the performance of America's highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and "leaving no child behind" coming at the expense of our "talented tenth"--and America's future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.
There are few sure investments in this chaotic economic climate, but on a national level, education has proven to pay off big down the road. As tight economic times have put the squeeze on education budgets here in the U.S., a new report shows the big benefits of even small investments in early education worldwide.
For every dollar invested in boosting preschool enrollment, middle- and low-income countries would see a return of some $6.40 to $17.60, according to a new analysis published September 22 in The Lancet. "Early childhood is the most effective and cost-effective time to ensure that all children develop to their full potential," noted the authors, led by Patrice Engle, of California Polytechnic State University. "The returns on investment in early child development are substantial."
Like most of his fellow school board members and practically everyone else in Madison, he was bowled over by Urban League president Kaleem Caire's vision for Madison Prep, a charter school that would aggressively tackle the school district's entrenched minority achievement gap.
"The longer day, the instructional focus, and the 'no excuses' approach appealed to me," Hughes says.
But as he looked into the details, Hughes became more and more concerned about the cost of the school and "whether there is a good match between the problem we are trying to address and the solution that's being proposed."
Caire is a superstar who has galvanized the community to get behind his charter school. At school board hearings, only a handful of speakers express any reservations about the idea, while an overwhelming number speak passionately about the need to break the school-to-prison pipeline, and about Madison's moral obligation to do something for the kids who are not being served.
Hughes listens respectfully. But, he says, "for Madison Prep to be the answer, we'd need to know that the students it was serving would otherwise fall through the cracks."
.....
But Hughes' big problem with the Urban League's draft proposal, submitted to the district last February, is cost. The total cost to the school district of $27 million over five years is just too much, he says.
I don't know if the Urban League's plans for Madison Prep will come to fruition. If they do, I predict here and now that the school will have a higher graduation rate than the Madison school district as a whole for African-American students and probably for other groups of students as well. I also predict that all or nearly all of its graduates will apply to and be admitted to college. What is impossible to predict is what difference, if any, this will make in overall educational outcomes for Madison students.
Of course charter schools like Madison Prep will have higher graduation rates than their home school districts as a whole. Students enrolled in charter schools are privileged in one clear way over students not enrolled. Each student has a parent or other caregiver sufficiently involved in the child's education to successfully navigate the process to get the student into the charter school. Not all students in our traditional neighborhood schools have that advantage. Other things equal, students with more involved parents/caregivers will be more likely to graduate from high school. So, one would expect that charter schools will have higher graduation rates.
Those of us who inhabit the core of the university's academic environment share the enthusiasm for measuring and evaluating the quality of our institutions, although we have less enthusiasm for the endless ranked lists that appear in popular publications.
While some dote on the U.S. News rankings, which like their BCS counterpart rely on hugely unreliable opinion surveys, we, however, prefer our own system for evaluating the Top American Research Universities that recognizes the importance of successful performance among highly competitive institutions without requiring a simple top to bottom ranking that often distorts more than it informs.
For over ten years, The Center for Measuring University Performance, now located at Arizona State University, has produced an annual report on the Top American Research Universities that uses objective data on nine measures to put universities into categories according to their performance.
Shaun Johnson is a blogger and assistant professor of elementary education at the College of Education at Towson University in Maryland. He has been active in the movement to protest overuse of standardized tests by persuading parents to opt their children out of the testing, an option few exercise or even know they have.
I told him I thought that was a bad idea. He agreed to debate the issue here. I start:
Mathews: You realize, I assume, that the vast majority of parents approve of testing and want their schools to be accountable in this way. Politicians who embrace the notion that we have to junk standardized tests don't go far. You are never going to get much support for an opt-out. Why do it? Why not instead come up with an alternative that makes sense to most parents? You don't have that yet.
Johnson: There's a lot of assumptions being thrown around here. I think you assume incorrectly that a vast majority of parents approve of testing and want "schools to be accountable in this way." It's the only "way" that's been offered to them within the mainstream conversation on education. As a result, parents, and even many educators, don't necessarily receive the perfect information to make rational decisions. The test-driven mandate is what predominates in educational discourse in both traditional and non-traditional media.
Two years ago in a column on how schools could save money, I suggested replacing elementary school homework with free reading.
"Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects," I wrote. "Eliminating traditional homework for this age group will save paper, reduce textbook losses and sweeten home life. Students should be asked instead to read something, maybe with their parents -- at least 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 20 minutes for second-graders and so on."
Many readers liked the idea, but they and I were sure it would go nowhere, particularly in the Washington area. Many children here see homework as a welcome rite of passage, like getting a library card or being allowed to watch the seamier shows on the CW. Many parents equate heavy homework with good teaching.
In honor of the National Book Festival, running Sept. 24 - 25 on the National Mall, we asked some of the authors participating to share their thoughts on a few writerly subjects.
What do writers think about writing? Here's a small selection of what they had to say.
THE THING I'M HAPPIEST ABOUT IN MY WRITING CAREER IS . . .
That rarest of occurrences: being able to finance my writing life with the writing itself.
-- Russell Banks
The sound of my father's voice on the telephone when I told him that I had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. That the book, "Thomas and Beulah," dealt with my home town and was about my maternal grandparents made the announcement that much sweeter.
We have had a lively debate in the Washington area, and other regions blessed with competitive high schools, about the demands we make on students.
Much of the talk has been about the documentary "Race to Nowhere." The film's creator, Vicki Abeles, told me its popularity is proof of a "silent epidemic" of "pressure-cooker education" nationally.
How much academic stress do students feel? Hart Research Associates just asked them. The answer was: not a lot. Of a representative sample of the high school Class of 2010, 69 percent said the requirements for graduating, including tests and courses, were "easy" or "very easy." And 47 percent said they totally or mainly wish they had worked harder in high school. An additional 16 percent partially feel that way.
The Hart poll, done for the College Board, was not inspired by discussions of "Race to Nowhere," College Board officials say, but it is relevant. It includes a question about the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs; those college-level courses and extra-long final exams that are often said to be crushing our youth.
ImagineK12, an incubator modeled after Y Combinator to help education startups "get it right and get funded," held its first demo day for its first cohort of 10 companies Sept. 9 in Palo Alto, Calif., and a week later the companies presented at TechCrunch Disrupt.
The companies' pitches were crisp and intriguing, and I was struck--and encouraged--by how many of them are attempting disruptive strategies. Who knows how many in the cohort will be successful of course--they are all heading into notoriously choppy waters in a space that, as I've written about, feels a bit overheated at the moment--but by going this route, they do improve their odds.
Here is a rundown of just some of the things that struck me.
GoalBook: The company's mission is to create a personal learning plan for every student. So where are they starting? Special education. Why? The law requires students to have individual learning plans (ILPs). Goalbook can create help a teacher and school create these way more affordably--not a bad thing in times of budget cuts when less expensive (think low-end disruption) could be critical to allowing districts to continue to fulfill their legal mandate.
Anthony Cody's recent reflection on this year's Education Nation program on MSNBC offers an important caution to those trying to develop "multiple measures" for student learning and effective teaching. If the decision to use a given measure is determined solely by whether or not it's linked to higher standardized test scores (as with the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching study), then you don't really have "multiple measures."
Tracking test scores can be an important tool in helping students make progress, and it is useful to know which elements of classroom practice have a significant impact on students' performance on end-of-the-year tests. For example, teachers in Chicago who had high ratings on Charlotte Danielson's framework for evaluating effective teaching have also been shown to have higher value-added scores. However, when test scores are used as the sole measure of effective teaching and learning -- or when valuable aspects of effective teaching and important types of student learning are discarded or ignored because they don't align with standardized test results -- our students are the ones who ultimately pay the price.
Do you notice what is bothering me? Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score -- or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students “learned the material at the end of the year.”
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, co-authored with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, pushing "Digital Promise," a new program to use technology to "revolutionize" K-12 education.
It was published the day after Hastings sent an email to Netflix customers informing them that, in addition to having just ticked them off by both limiting their choices and hiking rates, he also planned to split the company into two separate and unrelated entertainment services.
TWO plus two equals four: nobody would argue with that. Mathematicians can rigorously prove sums like this, and many other things besides. The language of maths allows them to provide neatly ordered ways to describe everything that happens in the world around us.
Or so they once thought. Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can't actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it's an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.
Mathematics has always been considered free of uncertainty and able to provide a pure foundation for other, messier fields of science. But maths is just as messy, Chaitin says: mathematicians are simply acting on intuition and experimenting with ideas, just like everyone else. Zoologists think there might be something new swinging from branch to branch in the unexplored forests of Madagascar, and mathematicians have hunches about which part of the mathematical landscape to explore. The subject is no more profound than that.
In part, that was down to a wonderfully diverse range of ideas and participants. Vidal Sassoon's touching monologue about his journery from orphan to perhaps the most famous hairdresser in the world sat seamlessly beside Marcus du Sautoy discussing multi-dimensional symmetry. Alan McGee's tales of launching Oasis into super-stardom and his battles with drug abuse somehow beautifully complemented Aubrey de Grey's explanations of the complexities of regenerative therapies for ageing. Even cybernetic professor, Kevin Warwick's description of a future where our bodies are augmented and invaded by technology managed not to feel at odds with Charles Roberts' inspirational not-for-profit project Greeenstar, which aims to help consumers make green choices by including environmental weightings in internet searches.
Such cohesion is no mean feat, and successfully achieving it made for a relentless yet inspiring day - a sentiment echoed by the attendees I spoke to. "I just love the fact that there are talks on such a wide range of topics," one of them told me. "I'm learning about areas I would never sit down and read about. It makes you value the overlap between topics in a whole new way."
Blurring of boundaries was celebrated by du Sautoy, too, who took time to probe the fallacies of the science-humanities divide. "When I was at school I was frustrated by the idea of being put in an arts or science box," said du Sautoy. "But mathematicians often talk of beauty and aesthetics. The mathematics I do, I do because it tells an interesting story." A refreshing alternative to conventional career advice, and an important point to remember: a career in science needn't mean you can't dabble in the arts, and vice versa.
If the teachers union is as wonderful as it claims, then it should have no problem attracting members, without the need to force teachers to join. How is this any different from any other professional organization that teachers, as professionals, may choose to join? It's a question I have been pondering since I became a public school teacher in Wisconsin.
For years, I have chosen not to be a member of the union. However, this is a choice I didn't exactly have before Gov. Scott Walker's collective-bargaining bill became law. As a compulsory union state, where teachers are required to pay union dues as a condition of employment, the most I could hope for was a "fair share" membership, where the union refunded me a small portion of the money that was taken from my paycheck that lawyers have deemed "un-chargeable."
Every September, after lengthy, bureaucratic and unadvertised hurdles, I would file my certified letter to try to withdraw my union membership. Then, the union would proceed to drag its feet in issuing my small refund. I often wondered why this kind of burden would be put on an individual teacher like me. Shouldn't it be up to the organization to convince people and to sell its benefits to potential members afresh each year?
Why should I have to move mountains each fall to break ties with this group that I don't want to be a part of in the first place? Something seemed dreadfully wrong with that picture.
Union's efforts help all students, educators and schools
I became a Wisconsin teacher more than 30 years ago. I entered my classroom on the first day of school with my eyes and heart wide open, dedicated to the education of children and to the promise public schools offer. I was part of our state's longstanding education tradition.
Like many beginning teachers, I soon encountered the many challenges and opportunities educators face every day in schools. About 50% of new educators leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. New teachers need mentors, suggestions, support and encouragement to help them meet the individual needs of students (all learning at different speeds and in different ways) and teach life lessons that can't be learned from textbooks.
That's where the union comes in. In many ways, much of the work the Wisconsin Education Association Council does is behind the scenes: supporting new teachers through union-led mentoring programs and offering training and skill development to help teachers with their licenses and certification. Our union helps teachers achieve National Board Certification - the highest accomplishment in the profession - and provides hands-on training for support professionals to become certified in their fields. These are efforts that benefit all Wisconsin educators, not just a few, and no single educator could accomplish them all alone.
When Debbie Sumner Mahle, an Atlanta mother, wants to know what her sons, ages 6, 7 and 10, are working on in school, she turns on her computer and logs into NetClassroom. The portal lets her see not just their school assignments but also their attendance and grades.
More public and private school systems are wiring up data-management systems, and school work is just the tip of the iceberg. Parent-accessible websites and "learning community management systems"--or LCMSs, in the age of no jargon left behind--are increasingly handling schools' scheduling, emergency contacts, immunizations, academic assessments and even meals, with some offering a daily nutritional breakdown of lunch.
Ms. Sumner Mahle receives email reminders to place her sons' requests at orderlunches.com, which manages the meal program at their school, the Davis Academy. If she wants to work a shift as a cafeteria monitor, or bring cupcakes to a Halloween party, she signs up at volunteerspot.com.
On the first day of school I begin my classes with John Coltrane's "Welcome," at the closing bars of which a palpable attentiveness comes over my chattering students, proof of what I've always believed about the source of Coltrane's genius and the wellspring within even the dopiest-seeming kid. "This is nice music," one boy remarks, and no one sneers. As I will do with the other musical introductions I play throughout the year, all chosen to fit the interval between passing bells, I key in my selection on a purse-size CD player, as quaint to the iPod generation as a Victrola is to me. I write the name of each artist and piece on the blackboard, including the date of composition when I can find it, usually a year predating that of my students' birth (circa 1995).
I wear a jacket and tie almost every day, one of the few adults at school who do. To these I add a pair of well-oiled work boots, an offhand expression of solidarity with the parents of our community but mostly a concession to my falling arches. For the first time in many years I have what can be called a "look"--like me and like the white-collar trade of teaching itself, a strange amalgam. A girl passing in the hall remarks that I always look "spiffy." I reply that I would have thought I looked old. "Hey, how old are you?" she counters. "Thirty?" I take this as a compliment and beam accordingly, though on reflection I wonder if she is simply trying to agree that I am old.
The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, and the governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, were both in New York City earlier this week for a Manhattan Institute conference about a "new social contract" with public employees.
Mr. Walker spoke first. He said the changes enacted in Wisconsin that had opponents sitting in and sleeping over in the state capital in protest earlier this year had saved $1.44 billion for state and local governments combined. He said school districts had used the savings to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes and to offer merit pay.
Mr. Walker said voters are looking for "not Republican leadership, not Democrat leadership, they just want leadership."
Mr. Walker contrasted his approach with that of Governor Patrick Quinn, a Democrat, of Wisconsin's neighbor Illinois, who "laid off thousands" of state workers after "massive tax increases."
Humanities research is often derided as gauzy and esoteric, and therefore undeserving of tax dollars. Amid financial crises, humanities departments at many public universities have been razed. But even amid cuts, there has been a surge in interest in the digital humanities -- a branch of scholarship that takes the computational rigor that has long undergirded the sciences and applies it the study of history, language, art and culture.
"While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them," wrote Stanley Fish, the outspoken professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, on his New York Times blog in June.
"Everyone loves digital humanities this year," said Bobley, citing the praise from Fish as the cherry on top of a steady stream of positive media coverage that has buoyed public interest in humanities research that uses new, technology-heavy approaches to distill meaning from old texts and artifacts.
Growing numbers of college students are in school part time, and they face increasingly long odds of ever graduating, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report, Time is the Enemy, by the nonprofit group Complete College America, includes data on full- and part-time students at public colleges and universities in 33 states, including California. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation and others.
"There is a new generation of students who are poorer, more likely to be a minority, working and with families," said Stan Jones, the organization's president. "The graduation rates are very low, so that even though more people are going to college looking to better themselves and better their economic circumstances, those goals are not being realized because the system is failing them."
Further Commentary on the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School: Gender discrimination likely a red herring in charter school discussion
The Madison School District now has another justification for killing a charter school aimed at doing what the district hasn't: consistently educate minority students.
Last week, the state Department of Public Instruction said the first half of a planning grant for Madison Preparatory Academy would be released. Madison Prep would focus on low-income minority students and was originally just for boys but has since been revamped to include girls in separate classrooms.
But DPI had a catch: In order to get the rest of the grant, the school must provide scientific research that single-gender education is effective. If you're going to discriminate by gender, DPI is saying, at least have a good reason for it.
I can't help but wonder: Is this the best DPI can do?
I don't know much more than what I've read in this newspaper about how Madison Prep would organize itself, what kinds of educational approaches it would use or how capable its sponsor, the Urban League of Greater Madison, would be.
ewsletter (as of this writing PD has not taken a position on the Madison Prep proposal). I've only changed minimally for posting here; one thing I have added is some hyperlinks (but I did not link as thoroughly as I usually do), another is a small "For Further Reading" set of links at the end," and of course the song. This is intended to be a broad overview and introduction to what I think are some of the most important issues concerning the decision on the Madison Preparatory Academy presented in the context of related national issues. Issues raised in this post have been and will be treated in more depth -- and with hyperlinks -- in other posts]
For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. In the coming weeks the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will decide whether to approve a proposal for the Madison Prep Charter School. This proposal and the chief advocate for it - Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison - have their roots in the Bradley/Walton/Koch movement, and like much of that movement they offer false promises of educational progress in order to obscure the damage being done to every child in our public schools.
The very subject of giftedness is fraught with contradiction and controversy. On the one hand, we often encounter misunderstanding, envy, and perceived elitism--and on the other, admiration, dependency, and respect. Little wonder that our K-12 education system has not yet determined how best to nurture extraordinary individuals so that they can become extraordinary contributors to society--and feel rewarded in doing so. Unfortunately, it is not simply the gifted who are underserved by most of our nation's 14,000 public school systems; that group is just more acutely neglected, along with the economically less fortunate, than the nation's student population as a whole.
In early August, Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, made an acquisition that is small compared to the billion-dollar deals common to high-tech industries. Apollo paid less than $100 million to acquire Carnegie Learning, a provider of computer-based math tutorials. Such technology acquisitions are rare in higher education, to say the least. Yet this seemingly small deal is a signal of disruptive revolution in higher education.
Carnegie Learning is the creation of computer and cognitive scientists from Carnegie Mellon University. Their math tutorials draw from cutting-edge research about the way students learn and what motivates them to succeed academically. These scientists have created adaptive computer tutorials that meet students at their individual level of understanding and help them advance via the kinds of exercises they personally find most engaging and effective. The personalization and sophistication is hard for even an expert human tutor to match. It is a powerful, affordable adjunct to classroom instruction, as manifest by Carnegie Learner's user base of more than 600,000 secondary students in over 3,000 schools nationwide.
The Global Report Card was developed by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee as part of the George W. Bush Institute's Education Reform Initiative. The Bush Institute works to increase dramatically the number of American students who graduate high school ready for college or prepared for a good career by:
cultivating a new generation of principals
implementing cutting edge research
advancing accountability
Driven by accountability and data, these initiatives challenge the status quo and lead a wide range of partners to share goals and use clear metrics tied to student achievement.
Summary of Methodology
The calculations begin by evaluating the distributions of student achievement at the state, national, and international level. To allow for direct comparisons across state and national borders, and thus testing instruments, we map all testing data to the standard normal curve using the appropriate student level mean and standard deviation. We then calculate at the lowest level of aggregation by estimating average district quality within each state. Each state's average quality is evaluated then using national testing data. And finally, the average national quality is determined using international testing data. Essentially, this re-centers our distribution of district quality based upon the relative performance of the individual state when compared to the nation as a whole as well as the relative performance of the nation when compared to our economic competitors.
For example, the average student in Scarsdale School District in Westchester County, New York scored nearly one standard deviation above the mean for New York on the state's math exam. The average student in New York scored six hundredths of a standard deviation above the national average of the NAEP exam given in the same year, and the average student in the United States scored about as far in the negative direction (-.055) from the international average on PISA. Our final index score for Scarsdale in 2007 is equal to the sum of the district, state, and national estimates (1+.06+ -.055 = 1.055). Since the final index score is expired in standard deviation units, it can easily be converted to a percentile for easy interpretation. In our example, Scarsdale would rank at the seventy seventh percentile internationally in math.
Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system. On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change -- more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them.
So what exactly do test scores tell us?
Poor test scores are the initial premises in most current arguments for educational reform. At the end of last year, reading scores that showed American 15-year-olds in the middle of an international pack, led by Asian countries, prompted calls from researchers and educators for immediate action. This year two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, showed that 45 percent of students, after two years of college, have made no significant gains on a test of critical thinking. Last week's report of falling SAT scores is the latest example.
Public and private school teachers will explore the shifting line between "mainstream" students and special education students during a two-day special education summit at The Martin Institute that begins Tuesday, Sept. 27.
The session is for special education teachers. The Wednesday session is for teachers outside the specific special education area. Both are on the Presbyterian Day School campus in East Memphis.
The summit and an 18-month focus on special education that follows arose from a series of luncheons and discussions Institute director Clif Mims had last spring with special education teachers.
The teachers and school system administrators cited "inclusion teaching" as both a trend and a challenge for all teachers.
Bill Gates has donated more than $5 billion to improve U.S. schools. But he sees little bang for all those bucks. What do other philanthropists--and the school systems who've benefited from them--think they have to show for what's been spent?
Two months ago, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal that private money--including upwards of $5 billion in Gates foundation funding--"didn't move the needle much," in terms of substantial, measurable improvements in student achievement and graduation outcomes.
"It's hard to improve public education--that's clear," Gates said. "If you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one."
A month ago, I suggested that readers stop asking me what's a good school and come up with their own ideas. I wanted fresh concepts, including some that were already operating and producing better achievement without putting too much strain on staffs and students.
I gave two thriving models as examples, the New York Performance Standards Consortium and the KIPP schools. Reader suggestions poured in. Some were crazy, but so what? Look for details on my blog on Friday. Here are the ones I thought most interesting. What do you think of them?
Quest Early College High School, Houston (submitted by Katie Test of the ASCD educational leadership organization). This 16-year-old public high school focuses on both academic and emotional needs with an advisory program that keeps students in regular contact with educators and emphasis on health, including a personal wellness plan. They start college courses freshman year and do community service every Friday.
A 3,000 plus word article by Bill Lueders in the Capital Times today questions the motives behind legislators that support the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Specifically targeted is Rep. Howard Marklein, a freshman legislator from Spring Green who had the gall to not only support school choice in Milwaukee but also to introduce legislation to improve the program.
Lueders quotes Rep. Sandy Pope-Roberts as asking: "What's in this for Howard Marklein?...If it isn't for the campaign funds, why is he doing this?"
Perhaps he is doing it because it benefits taxpayers in the 51st Assembly district. As Marklein points out to Lueders, an analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau shows the MPCP is a benefit to his constituents. Without the MPCP, the 15 school districts represented by Rep. Marklein would lose $1.3 million in state aid. The estimate assumes that 90% of students in the MPCP would have no choice but to return to the more expensive Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system if the MPCP was ended. The 90% figure is the number used by the official state evaluators of the MPCP and is based on evidence from choice programs around the country.
This is Take Two in a series. Take One, with a fuller introduction, can be found here. Briefly, the idea of the series is to counter anti-teacher and anti-teachers' union individuals and "reform" groups appropriation of the phrase "it is all about the kids" as a means to heap scorn and ridicule on public education and public education employees by investigating some of the actions of these individuals and groups in light of the question "is it all about the kids?" In each take, national developments are linked to local matters in relation to the Madison Prep charter school proposal.
Take Two: A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: Public Lotteries and the Exploitation of Families and Children
This interactive timeline digs deep into the Education Week archives to tell the story of U.S. education and the changing policies, theories, and perspectives that have influenced it since 1981, the year the publication began.
We all owe Stella Lohmann of Atlanta, Georgia thanks. Ms. Lohmann is the substitute teacher who via video asked GOP candidates in last night's debate:
What as president would you seriously do about what I consider a massive overreach of big government into the classroom?
Prior to asking the question, Ms. Lohmann offered some important context to show her credibility:
I've taught in both public and private schools, and now as a substitute teacher I see administrators more focused on satisfying federal mandates, retaining funding, trying not to get sued, while the teachers are jumping through hoops trying to serve up a one-size-fits-all education for their students.
Next time I visit Georgia, I would not mind shaking Ms. Lohmann's hand for posing such an interesting and illuminating, albeit extremely loaded, question.
Then I would ask whether she happens to be the same blogger and communications consultant found at stellalohmann.com wearing a "Freedom Czar" baseball hat. And how Fox happened to find her?
THOMAS NAGEL, an American philosopher, wants to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Ian Anderson, a Scot who performs with the band Jethro Tull, sang of a slightly less intractable difficulty: "wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." In "School Blues" Daniel Pennac, a prize-winning French writer, describes what faces a school dunce when the teacher before him cannot recall what it felt like to be ignorant.
Mr Pennac was once such a child (he uses the French cancre, as in Cancer, the crab: a creature that scuttles sideways instead of advancing forwards). But despite becoming a teacher, he can remember what it was like not to understand lessons. The voices in his head remind him of it. They taunt him throughout his semi-autobiographical novel, which partially traces his sorry academic career as the child of high-achieving parents whose three older brothers excelled at school. Luckily for him, his parents did not let him flee the system but instead persisted in finding a teacher who would help him to succeed. The breakthrough came aged 14 when his latest tutor--"no doubt amazed by my increasingly inventive excuses as to why I hadn't done my homework"--commissioned him to write essays and then a novel.
With the help of some Republican governors and school board members, the Obama Administration is on the verge of taking over education.
Common Core is the latest attempt to expand the reach of federal government even more broadly into our daily lives. Common Core, which was reportedly conceived by the National Association of Governors, was originally presented to the states as an effort to develop consistency in state curriculums for college and workforce readiness. Theoretically, the Common Core standards will improve education outcomes and increase transparency and accountability.
One problem with the new Common Core standards is that they are almost indistinguishable from the old state standards they are supposed to replace. According to an Education Week blog by Catherine Gewertz, many teachers and administrators don't see any difference between their old state standards and the Common Core standards. The fact is, state boards of education have bought into something that most of them had little or no input in and that many of them really do not fully understand and that will inevitably lead to having federal government bureaucrats setting education standards for Alabama's children.
On a recent school day, sixth-grader Cassidy Wimmer places surveyors' flags in spots where runoff water from the Beltline, other roads and parking lots flows toward the wetlands of Indian Springs south of Madison.
She and her classmates are part of a field biology class at Badger Rock Middle School and they're learning a hands-on lesson about water quality and the environment in the neighborhood that surrounds their school.
"It's interesting to see where the water travels," she says. "It probably has a lot of pollution in it."
Meanwhile, other students from Badger Rock are studying an enormous burr oak tree, and estimating its age. Still other sixth-graders are helping move a giant compost pile toward a community garden at their school that they help tend. Their lesson today is on improving soil to nourish growing plants, and learning the ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen to create the best compost.
Chicago's charter school advocates could have reason for unprecedented optimism, given that new Mayor Rahm Emanuel frequently praises their efforts - and that a prominent charter-school executive was Emanuel's election campaign co-chairman.
Yet, rather than assume that they will reap the benefits of firm political backing, charter advocates say they are organizing a show of support from parents to help convince the new mayor and other leaders that they deserve more funding.
A rally on Saturday, billed as the "Charter schools Day of Action," is among the first public displays of a new public-relations push. The New Schools for Chicago group, which is devoting tens of millions of dollars to scores of new charters, has entered into a $250,000 contract with the United Neighborhood Organization to organize public support, said Juan Rangel, UNO's chief executive officer.
When Steve Jobs introduced the "Think Different" advertising campaign on his return to the helm of Apple, in 1997, the slogan was not just aimed at consumers. It was also meant to inspire those inside the struggling company to innovate for the future.
Of course, what followed is now the story of one of the most successful companies in American history: a decade when Apple transformed the music industry with the iPod, the mobile-phone industry with the iPhone, and now the publishing industry with the iPad.
Apple succeed partly because it decided to take a different path than its competitors in the tech industry, and consumers followed. The history of business is filled with similar tales. Just look at what happened to Detroit's Big Three after the arrival of Japanese automakers in the United States.
WORTHINGTON, Minn. (AP) -- Perla Banegas arrived in Worthington a decade ago, on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles. Her single mom had heard about a safe, quiet town in the upper Midwest and steady jobs at its meatpacking plant.
In sixth grade that year, Banegas quickly got a reputation as a painfully shy kid -- and a talking-to for taking too many bathroom breaks. She wasn't shy: She just didn't understand a word of English in class. In bathroom stalls, she'd have a good cry and then give herself a pep talk: "You have to go back and try."
Think of American education as a house of many rooms, each with a distinct function but taken as a whole, this house is shelter against the winds of change buffeting the world and threatening our future.
Any objective analysis of that shelter comes to the same conclusion: we have work to do to be sure we're secure and able to hold our own against whatever this new global climate sends our way.
That's the unsettling news. The good news? Work is under way, from the most remote school districts in rural America, to the inner city of our largest urban areas.
There has been plenty of chatter in the past weeks about Chicago's plans to extend its school days by 90 minutes. An editorial in today's Washington Post asks why won't the Chicago Teachers' Union support a longer school day? Well, they are a union, which is designed to protect teachers pay and work. But this aside, how many people do you know that would accept 2 percent more pay for more than 20 percent more work?
Teachers at more than a dozen CPS schools have agreed to the terms, and more will likely sign on in the coming weeks. They are the heroes of this editorial because they are "willing to buck the union leadership" and because, we are reminded, it's all about the student. Except it's not just about the student. Remember that most important in-school factor for student learning that needs better systems for evaluation, training, support, promotion and pay? We held a focus group recently with about a dozen teachers from Chicago-they were open to talking about evaluation reforms and career ladders and differential pay structures. But the 2 percent for 90 more minutes a day? At least this one small group was entirely against it.
In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others -- nearly 1 in 5.
New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.
"We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers," said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.
A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: "Achievement gaps" became reformers' catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.
Today, the notion of "closing achievement gaps" has become synonymous with education reform. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation's most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains: "Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement." The National Education Foundation has launched its own "Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative." The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to "eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education." Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running "outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college." Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning "achievement gaps" in the first six months of this year.
The No Child Left Behind Act's signal contribution has been this sustained fixation on achievement gaps -- a fixation that has been almost universally hailed as an unmitigated good. Near the end of his presidency, George W. Bush bragged that NCLB "focused the country's attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that -- you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids. And that's unacceptable for America." Margaret Spellings, Bush's secretary of education, said last year, "The raging fire in American education is the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers."
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said Friday that Wisconsin will seek waivers to avoid having to meet basic elements of the federal No Child Left Behind education law at the "first possible moment."
Evers spoke during a conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shortly after President Barack Obama announced that he was allowing states to seek the waivers.
"This is absolutely outstanding news," said Evers, who has long advocated for states to be given the ability to get out of meeting some parts of the law.
Obama is allowing states to scrap the hugely unpopular requirement that all children must show they are proficient in reading and math by 2014 if states can meet conditions designed to better prepare and test students.
Education chiefs from more than 20 states gathered at the White House on Friday morning to hear President Barack Obama formally propose relaxing certain tenets of the No Child Left Behind act for states that agree to meet a new set of standards he called more flexible.
In characterizing the nearly 10-year-old act as too rigid, the president appeared to strike a chord with school administrators across the country. How much enthusiasm his solution will generate remains to be seen. It calls for evaluating teachers in a way that wouldn't be legal in California, for example, a state that very much supports amending the No Child Left Behind Act.
"It's problematic," Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education, said of a condition that would require states to set specific policy on teacher evaluation, something that in California currently can be done only at the local level. To comply, he said, "we would need legislation passed."
My training as a historian has taught me that all knowledge is tentative and that this is especially true when it comes to assigning motives to people's actions. It has also taught me to not accept self-proclaimed motives at face value , to only state an opinion about the motives of others when there is a preponderance of evidence, and to look at actions and consequences as well as rhetoric when trying to make sense of things.
With those caveats, I think it is worthwhile to investigate the motives, actions and the consequences of the actions of Kaleem Caire and some of others associated with the Madison Prep proposal and the Urban League of Greater Madison in relation to public education.
Enemies of teachers and teacher unions have seized upon the phrase "it is all about the kids" to ridicule and attack teachers and their representatives. With union and (almost all) others, of course it isn't "all about the kids." Interestingly, those who blame unions for some or all of the ills of public education -- like many of the proponents of Madison Prep -- often offer their own versions of "it is all about the kids." Examples include Michelle Rhee who named her group Students First (Valarie Strauss pointedly offered a column on Rhee's organization titled "Rhee's campaign is not about the kids.") and the anti-Union political bribery has been done in Illinois (and elsewhere) under the banner of Stand for Children ( a must-see video here).
While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.
Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he's not likely to promise to take over the nation's schools. On the contrary, he'll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush's signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.
"Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric," he told the Dallas Morning News. "One size does not fit all, unless you're talking tube socks."
Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation's most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California's Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday.
The upshot is that regions with the most skilled and highly paid workers continue to widen their advantages over less well-endowed locales.
"In a knowledge economy, success breeds success," said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, those with the highest percentage of college graduates in 2000 outpaced in education gains areas with lower percentages of college grads. For instance, the 10 cities with the highest share of their population holding a bachelor's degree or higher saw that share jump by an average of 4.6 percentage points over the decade, while the bottom 10 saw their share grow 3.1 percentage points.
The worth of education cannot be determined solely by marketplace logic. Hong Kong needs to reflect on the true mission of a university to avoid failing its future generations
While money does not work miracles (as the saying goes, any problem that money can solve is not a problem), it is a necessary ingredient of many solutions to our problems. Without money, many poor countries and rural communities simply cannot provide basic education to improve literacy and promote life skills, never mind consider the quality of education. Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, calls on all governments to invest in education, to provide "education for all".
Having said that, education should not be seen as just an investment business in the sense that we look for money indicators to measure performance - for example, if we invest so much in a law degree student, how much will he or she earn upon graduation - as if justice can be measured by earnings.
Advocating for the value of online education, Angel Cabrera told us that he takes issue with those who are concerned that online education will dilute quality. In fact, says Cabrera, "online eucation can dramatically improve quality." Cabrera is President of Thunderbird School of Global Management that was ranked #1 Best in International Business Full-Time MBA by The Financial Times 2011 for the fifth consecutive year, and #1 by U.S. News and World Report 2012 for the sixteenth consecutive year; the list goes on. "The traditional campus, centered around large lecture halls, will have to reinvent itself." Thunderbird offers a variety of educational models, including distance-learning.
"Online education will move from the add-on to the centerpiece," Cowen told me. "Higher education will move towards a hybrid approach with top faculty teaching online, and motivational coaches working with students on a personal level." Cowen sees the hybrid model making college education more affordable. He envisions new job opportunities in statistics, search, programming, and logic, "since you need people behind smart machines." Cowen also envisions job growth in the motivational sector.
The 18-year-old Drexel University student in Philadelphia buys cheap tickets and takes "mileage runs" solely to build up frequent-flier account balances. Then, he cashes in the miles for expensive, far-flung journeys. Once there, he buys rail passes and catches the first train that comes along--doesn't matter where it's going--just to see some of the city. "It's hard for me to stay home. I just want to go," said Mr. Nguyen, who is from Seattle.
Mr. Nguyen is among a growing number of 20-somethings mastering the calculus of frequent-flier miles, making globe-trotting their hobby. It's a generation that has grown up with airline deregulation, discount airlines, global airline alliances and "open skies" treaties that make flying between countries easier. They're also at an age when they have time and flexible schedules. As a result, many have become ferocious travelers.
In a recent eduwonk post regarding NCLB's complex and controversial school restructuring options, Andrew Rotherham wrote, "When it comes to tackling these problems, we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and, of course, political will. That's not this law's fault, and it's not going to be solved by any future law. Rather, it's cultural, deep rooted and demands real leadership..."
He has a point. However, the restructuring project is pretty daunting and beset with real practical constraints. Take the staffing issue. Which staff would you replace if the achievement failure is limited to the Hispanic subgroup within the school, but two-thirds of the students are Hispanic? What do you do if you are having difficulties with second-language learners, but your school has kids who speak fifteen different languages? Would you really fire all of the special education staff, even if there is no hope of hiring more?
The education establishment commits to fads like group and collaborative learning, but Garelick says they shouldn't ignore and misinterpret traditional math.
Most discussions about mathematics and how best to teach it in the K-12 arena break down to the inevitable bromides about how math was traditionally taught and that such methods were ineffective. The conventional wisdom on the "traditional method" of teaching math is often heard as an opening statement at school board meetings during which parents are protesting the adoption of a questionable math program: "The traditional method of teaching math has failed thousands of students." A recent criticism I read expanded on this notion and said that it wasn't so much the content or the textbooks (though he states that they were indeed limited) but the teaching was "too rigid, too inflexible, too limited, and thus failed to adequately address the realities of educating a large, diverse, and rapidly changing population during decades of technological innovation and social upheaval."
There is some confusion when talking about "traditional methods" since traditional methods vary over time. Textbooks considered traditional for the last ten years, for example, are quite different than textbooks in earlier eras. For purposes of this discussion, I would like to confine "traditional" to methods and textbooks in use in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s. And before we get to the question about teaching methods, I want to first talk about the textbooks in use during this time period. A glance at the textbooks that were in use over these years shows that mathematical algorithms and procedures were not taught in isolation in a rote manner as is frequently alleged. In fact, concepts and understanding were an important part of the texts. Below is an excerpt from a fifth grade text of the "Study Arithmetic" series (Knight, et. al. 1940):
At its next general session, the Legislature will be considering a bold plan that would put a new face on public education in Utah and dramatically alter the relationships between school districts, individual schools and students.
The question being asked now: Will the plan propel individual student achievement or stunt it?
Legislation proposed by Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork, would give each high school student in Utah an individual education savings account, sort of like a debit card, and that student could use that money any way he or she wanted toward earning a diploma.
The plan would be unique in the United States and, just like initiatives from the Utah Legislature on public employee pension reform and Medicaid reform, could become a model for other states, its supporters boast.
Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are scheduled Friday to detail plans to waive some of the law's toughest requirements, including the goal that every student be proficient in math and reading by 2014 or else their schools could face escalating sanctions.
In exchange for relief, the administration will require a quid pro quo: States must adopt changes that could include the expansion of charter schools, linking teacher evaluation to student performance and upgrading academic standards. As many as 45 states are expected to seek waivers.
For many students, the most tangible impact could be what won't happen. They won't see half their teachers fired, their principal removed or school shut down because some students failed to test at grade level -- all potential consequences under the current law.
Wisconsin has moved to take authority away from local elected school boards and parents and to rest it with political appointees who respond to Gov. Scott Walker and out-of-state groups that are spending millions of dollars to undermine public education.
Wisconsin's best and brightest teachers -- the Teacher of the Year award winners -- have joined mass demonstrations to decry the assault by politicians and their cronies on public education.
What's Walker's response? He wants to tell the nation how to do the same.
The state Department of Public Instruction is requiring backers of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy to provide scientific research supporting the effectiveness of single-gender education to receive additional funding.
The hurdle comes as university researchers are raising questions about whether such evidence exists. In an article published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers also say single-gender education increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Efforts to justify single-gender education as innovative school reform "is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence," according to the article by eight university professors associated with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde.
The Urban League of Greater Madison originally proposed Madison Prep as an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities. But after a state planning grant was held up because of legal questions related to single-gender education, the Urban League announced it would open the school next year with single-gender classrooms in the same building.
A newly published article by child development experts and neuroscientists blasting the trend toward single-sex education as "pseudoscience" won't help the cause of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy.
Neither will the continued opposition of the South Central Federation of Labor, which reiterated its opposition to the Urban League-sponsored proposal this week because teachers at the school would not be represented by a union. The Madison Metropolitan School District has a collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers Inc. that runs through June of 2013, and Madison Prep's plan envisions working conditions for its staff -- a longer school day and a longer school year, for example -- that differ substantially from the contract the district has with its employees.
With a public hearing on the charter school scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, the debate surrounding Madison Prep is heating up on many fronts. The Madison School Board must take a final vote giving the charter school a go or no-go decision in November.
Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Urban League and a passionate proponent for the separate boys and girls academies aimed at helping boost minority youth academic performance, says he is unimpressed by an article published in the prestigious journal, Science, on Sept. 23, that says there is "no empirical evidence" supporting academic improvement through single-sex education.
Are other DPI funded initiatives held to the same "standard"?
The timing of these events is certainly interesting.
14mb mp3 audio. WORT-FM conducted an interview this evening with Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the authors. Unrelated, but interesting, Hyde's interview further debunked the "learning styles" rhetoric we hear from time to time.
In attempting to improve schools, it is critical to remember that not all reforms lead to meaningful gains for students. We argue that one change in particular--sex-segregated education--is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence. There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students' academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Single-sex education is ineffective, misguided and may actually increase gender stereotyping, a paper to be published Friday asserts.
The report, "The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling," to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.
It asserts that "sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence."
By Reihan Salam
I've been eagerly awaiting the release of the latest issue of National Affairs, which includes Rick Hess's fascinating and at times provocative discussion, or perhaps I say "devastating takedown," of "achievement-gap mania." The following paragraph gives you a hint as to Hess's conclusion:
In essence, NCLB was an effort to link "conservative" nostrums of accountability to Great Society notions of "social justice." The result was a noble exercise hailed for its compassion. The sad truth, however, is that the whole achievement-gap enterprise has been bad for schooling, bad for most children, and bad for the nation.
I found his discussion of the neglect of advanced and gifted education particularly convincing, as well as his recounting of how the "delusion of rigor" has undermined quality control across many domains. Hess ends his essay with an accounting of where "achievement-gap mania" has left the politics of K-12.
(1) Reforming education has become someone else's problem:
First, achievement-gap mania has signaled to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn't about their kids. They are now expected to support efforts to close the achievement gap simply because it's "the right thing to do," regardless of the implications for their own children's education. In fact, given that only about one household in five even contains school-age children -- and given that two-thirds of families with children do not live in underserved urban neighborhoods, or do not send their kids to public schools, or otherwise do not stand to benefit from the gap-closing agenda -- the result is a tiny potential constituency for achievement-gap reform, made up of perhaps 6% or 7% of American households.
Because middle-class parents and suburbanites have no personal stake in the gap-closing enterprise, reforms are tolerated rather than embraced. The most recent annual Gallup poll on attitudes toward schooling reported that just 20% of respondents said "improving the nation's lowest-performing schools" was the most important of the nation's education challenges. Indeed, while just 18% of the public gave American schools overall an A or a B, a sizable majority thought their own elementary and middle schools deserved those high grades. The implication is that most Americans, even those with school-age children, currently see education reform as time and money spent on other people's children.
(2) Reforming education for the majority of students who come non-poor families is seen as somehow unnecessary:
Second, achievement-gap mania has created a dangerous complacency, giving suburban and middle-class Americans the false sense that things are just fine in their own schools. Thus it's no surprise that professionals and suburbanites tend to regard "reforms" -- from merit pay to charter schooling -- as measures that they'll tolerate as long as they're reserved for urban schools, but that they won't stand for in their own communities. ...
Gap-closing strategies can be downright unhelpful or counterproductive when it comes to serving most students and families, and so can turn them off to education reform altogether. Longer school years and longer school days can be terrific for disadvantaged students or low achievers, but may be a recipe for backlash if imposed on families who already offer their kids many summer opportunities and extracurricular activities. Policies that seek to shift the "best" teachers to schools and classrooms serving low-achieving children represent a frontal assault on middle-class and affluent families. And responding to such concerns by belittling them is a sure-fire strategy for ensuring that school reform never amounts to more than a self-righteous crusade at odds with the interests of most middle-class families.
This is one reason why Hess rightly bristled at the crusader mentality that informs films like the recent Waiting for 'Superman.'
(3) Education reform has come to be associated with metrics that aren't particularly helpful for schools that serve non-poor students.
Third, achievement-gap mania has prompted reformers to treat schools as instruments to be used in crafting desired social outcomes, capable of being "fixed" simply through legislative solutions and federal policies. This tendency is hardly surprising, given that most of the thinking about achievement gaps is done in the context not of education reform but of "social justice." Thus gap-closers approach the challenge not as educators but as social engineers, determined to see schools fix the problems that job-training initiatives, urban redevelopment, income supports, and a slew of other well-intentioned government welfare programs have failed to address.
With the social engineer's calm assurance that there are clear, identifiable interventions to resolve every problem, today's education reformers insist that closing the achievement gap is a simple matter of identifying "what works" and then requiring schools to do it. And integral to determining "what works" has been evaluating different strategies in terms of their effects on reading and math scores and graduation rates. This approach has been especially popular when it comes to identifying good teachers. But while the ability to move these scores may be 90% of the job for an elementary-school teacher in Philadelphia or Detroit, it doesn't necessarily make sense to use these metrics to evaluate teachers in higher-performing schools -- where most children easily clear the literacy and numeracy bar, and where parents are more concerned with how well teachers develop their children's other skills and talents.
As Hess has argued elsewhere, what we really need is a more diverse ecology of specialized instructional providers tailored to meet the needs of individual students, including advanced and gifted students, rather than rigid carrot-and-stick systems designed to "fix" centralized command-and-control systems not by making them less centralized and command-and-control, but rather by issuing new commands from the center.
(4) This "what works" mentality, which implicitly assumes that there are a few simple nostrums that "work" in every or at least most cases, has proved a barrier to innovation:
Fourth, the achievement-gap mindset stifles innovation. When a nation focuses all its energies on boosting the reading and math scores of the most vulnerable students, there is neither much cause nor much appetite for developing and pursuing education strategies capable of improving American schools overall.
Consider the case of school choice. Today, for all the vague talk of innovation, charter schools and school vouchers rarely do more than allow poor, urban students to move from unsafe, horrific schools into better conventional-looking schools. The leading brands in charter schooling, for instance, almost uniformly feature traditional classrooms; an extended school day, school year, or both; and a reliance on directive pedagogy attuned to the needs of disadvantaged students. In other words, these are terrific 19th-century schools. One has to search long and hard among the nation's more than 5,000 charter schools to find the handful that are experimenting with labor-saving technologies, technology-infused instruction, or new staffing models better suited to the 21st century.
Furthermore, the intense focus on gap-closing has led to a notion of "innovation" dedicated almost entirely to driving up math and reading scores and graduation rates for low-income and minority students. Promising innovations that promote science, foreign-language learning, or musical instruction have garnered little public investment or acclaim. Even in terms of math and reading, there is not much interest in interventions that do not show up on standardized state assessments.
(5) And interestingly, Rick argues that gap-closing has dimmed interest in promoting racially and socioeconomically integrated schools.
As always, the essay is worth reading in full. I haven't done it justice.
In the spirit of the new school year, here's a quiz for readers: In which of the following subjects is the performance of American 12th-graders the worst? a) science, b) economics, c) history, or d) math?
With all the talk of America's very real weaknesses in the STEM subjects (science, technology, English and math), you might be surprised to learn that the answer--according to the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress--is neither science nor math. And despite what might be suggested by the number of underwater home loans, high-school seniors actually fare best in economics.
Which leaves history as the answer, the subject in which students perform the most poorly. It's a result that puts American employers and America's freedoms in a worrisome spot.
But why should a C grade in history matter to the C-suite? After all, if a leader can make the numbers, does it really matter if he or she can recite the birthdates of all the presidents?
Well, it's not primarily the memorized facts that have current and former CEOs like me concerned. It's the other things that subjects like history impart: critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to communicate clearly and cogently. Such skills are certainly important for those at the top, but in today's economy they are fundamental to performance at nearly every level. A failing grade in history suggests that students are not only failing to comprehend our nation's story and that of our world, but also failing to develop skills that are crucial to employment across sectors. Having traveled in 109 countries in this global economy, I have developed a considerable appreciation for the importance of knowing a country's history and politics.
The good news is that a candidate who demonstrates capabilities in critical thinking, creative problem-solving and communication has a far greater chance of being employed today than his or her counterpart without those skills. The better news is these are not skills that only a graduate education or a stint at McKinsey can confer. They are competencies that our public elementary and high schools can and should be developing through subjects like history.
Far more than simply conveying the story of a country or civilization, an education in history can create critical thinkers who can digest, analyze and synthesize information and articulate their findings. These are skills needed across a broad range of subjects and disciplines.
In fact, students who are exposed to more modern methods of history education--where critical thinking and research are emphasized--tend to perform better in math and science. As a case in point, students who participate in National History Day--actually a year-long program that gets students in grades 6-12 doing historical research--consistently outperform their peers on state standardized tests, not only in social studies but in science and math as well.
In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80,000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers--but the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.
Now is a time to re-establish history's importance in American education. We need to take this opportunity to ensure that today's history teachers are teaching in a more enlightened fashion, going beyond rote memorization and requiring students to conduct original research, develop a viewpoint and defend it.
If the American economy is to recover from the Great Recession--and I believe it can--it will be because of a ready supply of workers with the critical thinking, creative problem-solving, technological and communications skills needed to fuel productivity and growth. The subject of history is an important part of that foundation.
Mr. Augustine, a former Under Secretary of the Army, is the retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin.
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Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be took home the national Lane Anderson Award as the best Canadian science book for young readers at an award dinner in Toronto last night. The win was reported today by the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Quill & Quire, the Canadian Children's Book Center and other media. It was published by Canadian publisher Kids Can Press. But it's not for lack of trying that a Canadian publisher rather than American publisher issued this book.
According to author Daniel Loxton, US publishers wouldn't touch it.
"It's important to realize that most of the publishing professionals I dealt with in the US were lovely and encouraging. They all said "no," but some recommended smaller, artier presses they felt might consider Evolution.... [S]ome of America's top children's publishing professionals rejected Evolution, some citing concerns that it was too controversial, too much of "a tough sell," or ("in today's climate") too likely to find needed distribution channels closed.... It was certainly frustrating to knock on cold doors, but I am sympathetic to publishers. [I]t's a tough time for book producers, and they need to work hard to mitigate risk. Publishers face the on the ground reality that almost half of American adults--many of them reviewers, librarians, booksellers, or teachers--believe that evolution did not happen at all.
As more Chicago public schools cash in on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's longer-day financial incentives by adding 90 minutes to their school day, the previous votes by a dozen schools to add about a half hour to the day by bringing back recess are going unnoticed.
Restoring recess is part of a broader health push by parents, advocacy groups and some city officials to bring more exercise and better nutrition to both schoolchildren and preschoolers.
Beginning in November, the city's Department of Public Health will require children who attend preschool or day care centers in Chicago to spend less time in front of television or computer screens -- 60 minutes or less -- and more time, at least an hour a day, participating in physical activity. At snack or meal time, milk cannot have a fat content higher than 1 percent, unless a child has written consent from a doctor. Only 100 percent juice can be served.
In Chicago, 22 percent of children are overweight before they enter school, more than twice the national average, according to research compiled by the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, a group of organizations and health advocates.
The accurate, independently verified data for the class of 2014's Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores and grade point averages (GPA) are as follows: median LSAT, 163; median GPA, 3.70. Information originally posted on the College of Law website last month inaccurately listed the median LSAT score as 168 and the median GPA as 3.81.
A Michigan-based legal group said Monday that it would petition the full U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a three-judge panel's ruling that a San Diego-area teacher does not have the right to display banners that mention God in his classroom.
A three-judge panel of the court ruled last week that Bradley Johnson's right to free speech was not violated when the school district told him to remove the banners from his classroom.
Johnson, a high school mathematics teacher in the Poway Unified School District, had hung banners in his classroom for more than two decades with phrases such as "In God We Trust," "One Nation Under God," and "God Bless America."
But in 2007 the principal of Westview High School in Rancho Penasquitos said the banners' size made them into a "promotion of a particular viewpoint." Johnson took down the banners and filed a federal lawsuit.
As students walk through the halls of Zeeland West High School, their backpacks are a little lighter. Stacks of paper and some textbooks have been replaced by the Apple iPad -- one for every high-schooler in the district. That's 1,800 iPads between the two high schools.
And it's just the beginning for Zeeland Public Schools, which embarked on an ambitious project this fall that will give a tablet to every student in grades 3-12 -- the only district in Michigan to do so.
The program represents one of the most aggressive in the country and has garnered national attention. With each student taking responsibility for one, the school uses the iPad for assigning classwork, testing and communicating with students. Some teachers have gone paperless.
Gov. Scott Walker will be featured as part of a bipartisan slate of governors during a panel discussion of The State of Education during NBC News' 2011 "Education Nation" Summit on Monday, Sept. 26. The annual summit will continue on Sept. 27 as well.
NBC News' Brian Williams will host the discussion, which focuses on education and economic competitiveness.
In a press release sent from the governor's office Tuesday, Walker says "I believe we have a great story to tell about our reforms and our bipartisan collaborations to further improve our schools. ... Improving education is a key to ensuring we have a talented workforce that will grow and attract jobs."
According to the release, among the topics to be discussed are some highly controversial, hot-button Wisconsin issues, including budget cuts, the role of teachers unions, teacher effectiveness, charter schools and online learning. Other issues include college and career preparation, Common Core standards, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
"School choice" is a broad term that refers to a wide range of alternatives, including themed charter schools that are entirely under the control of their home school districts. Forty states and the District of Columbia have those in place, according to the American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group.
But it is the voucher programs, in which public funds are used to send children to private schools, that are the focus of much of the energy around the choice movement. Seven states and the District of Columbia have those, and Milwaukee's voucher program is the first and largest of its kind in the country. That makes Wisconsin a key national battleground.
"Wisconsin has a high level of value to the movement as a whole," says Robert Enlow, president of the Indianapolis-based Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a nonprofit group that advocates for school choice. The state, he says, is notable for "the high level of scholarship amounts that families can get."
Milwaukee's voucher program had 20,300 full-time equivalent voucher students at 102 private schools in 2010-11, compared to about 80,000 students at Milwaukee's public K-12 schools. The total cost, at $6,442 per voucher student, was $130.8 million, of which about $90 million came from the state and the rest from the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Critics see the school choice program as part of a larger strategy -- driven into high gear in Wisconsin by the fall election of Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans -- to eviscerate, for ideological and religious reasons, public schools and the unions that represent teachers.
It would be interesting to compare special interest spending in support of the status quo, vs groups advocating change, as outlined in Bill Lueders' article. A few links:
How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state's largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
That's how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected - enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an "all in" bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
In an Oct. 25 report to the Government Accountability Board, the 98,000-member union reported that it will independently:
WEAC is always one of the top spending lobbyists in the Capitol and they took a central role this year fighting Gov. Scott Walker's plan curbing public employee union rights, including teachers.
Back in 2009, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor and Democrats controlled the Senate and Assembly, WEAC wasn't helping to organize massive protests but it was a regular presence in the Capitol.
Spending in the summer's recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.
The struggling Kansas City, Missouri School District was stripped of its accreditation on Tuesday, raising the possibility of student departures and a state takeover. The action follows weeks of tumult that included another round of turnover of top leadership.
Though not entirely unexpected, the move was a painful return to reality for the city after a period of optimism that difficult choices were finally being made to confront longstanding problems in the school district, most notably the closing of nearly half the schools in response to a huge budget deficit.
The Missouri Board of Education cited the continued failure to improve academic performance and the continued instability in district leadership as driving its decision. The district has been provisionally accredited for nearly a decade after a two-year period during which it was unaccredited.
"We've given Kansas City more time than maybe we should have to address the problems," said Chris L. Nicastro, the state education commissioner, who had recommended the move. "Over a sustained period of time, student performance has not met state standards."
THE latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered.
This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to hold down a job. It also predicts future income.
The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism -- the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.
I have attended dozens of legislative hearings, community meetings, and board meetings where the problems related to public education are discussed. Not to mention the numerous one-on-one conversations I've had with adults who are usually middle or upper class, where the subject of parental involvement in children's education is raised as a major factor contributing to the ills of public education. Educators who work in urban areas are quick to point out how negligent their students' parents are and are eager to recite anecdotes to illustrate their case. What is not said, but clearly implied is this: if the parents of these children in low-performing schools would do their jobs as parents, these children would not be failing.
Every time I hear someone raise the issue of parental involvement, I can't help but think of the parents in the latest "education" movies: The Lottery and Waiting for Superman. What good did "parental involvement" do for their children that didn't get accepted into a charter school? If they were not lucky enough to have their number called, they were still stuck in bad schools with educators who, for the most part, had given up on them. What good did "parental involvement" do for them?
Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.
Indeed, I'm gratified and surprised that so many people are interested in dinosaurs, the Large Hadron Collider or alien life - all blazingly irrelevant to our day-to-day lives. We should be grateful to David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Brian Cox and other popular writers and television presenters for generating such interest. But it's depressing that all too often this natural enthusiasm of the young has been stifled by the time they leave school.
That's sad, because science is important for its own sake. It is a cultural deprivation not to appreciate the wonderful panorama offered by modern cosmology, DNA and Darwinian evolution. This common understanding should transcend all national differences - and all faiths, too. It should be part of global culture; but even in the UK a group of scientists including Attenborough has this week felt the need to reassert this.
Pearson PLC on Thursday said it has acquired U.S.-based online schooling network Connections Education for $400 million in cash, as the U.K.-based publishing giant ramps up its extensive North American education operations.
Pearson acquired the company from an investor group led by private-equity investment firm Apollo Management LP.
"Virtual schooling is an attractive choice for a growing group of American parents and in the next decade it will take off in other countries," Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said.
Connections Education supplies "virtual" education services to students in grades K-12 and learning programs to educational institutions globally. It operates online public schools accredited in 21 U.S. states, serving more than 40,000 students who choose not to attend traditional schools, Pearson said.
If people want a charter school to be an inspiration to other youngsters in the community, here's a better way to do it. Instead of building an entirely new school, which costs a ton and isolates the kids from the rest of their peers, why not go with the school within a school model, in which a charter is operated within an existing public school?
That's the only original idea I have. Now here is my two cents on the rest of the plan.
I believe Kaleem Caire knows what he is talking about though. It's frustrating to see a debate on the crisis facing minority students as polarized between the know-nothings on the right who believe the only issues facing blacks are self-inflicted cultural ones and the lefties who refuse to accept that anything besides racism and poverty are responsible for the poor performance of black males in America.
Spending in the summer's recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.
Put in perspective, the $43.9 million spent on the recalls more than doubled the previous record for spending by candidates and groups in legislative races, which was $20.25 million for 99 Assembly seats and 16 Senate seats in the 2008 general elections, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
A controversial bill that would create an independent, statewide authorizing board for charter schools is facing a tougher path now that Republicans have a razor thin 17-16 edge in the Wisconsin Senate. The legislation is designed to expand charter school choice in Wisconsin and to allow charters to be formed even in communities where they are not approved by local school districts.
Although the bill, introduced by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, last spring, has been modified from its original form, the amended Senate Bill 22 still doesn't pass muster with the Department of Public Instruction. Perhaps more importantly, moderate Republican Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, says he continues to have "more concerns than enthusiasm" for the legislation.
If he, or one of the Senate Democrats that opposed the earlier legislation, can't be persuaded that more independent charter schools would benefit Wisconsin students, SB 22 will be in trouble if it moves from the Joint Finance Committee to a vote in front of legislators, likely in October.
Do some students really need a 4.0 GPA? Isn't that "excessive"? Let's make it a 3.80 and redistribute those extra GPA points to another student who's struggling to graduate.
The great schools revolution Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned
FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.
Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA's latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.
That's Kaleem Caire. He said it not recently but in 1998 in an op-ed questioning why his hometown wasn't paying more attention to the poor educational outcomes and high incarceration rates of black males.
"I'm asking Madison to be your best self and get this done!"
That's also Caire, in an interview this week about his proposal for a publicly funded charter school designed to improve educational outcomes of low-income minority students.
What hasn't changed, then to now, is Caire's conviction that Madison's public schools are failing minority students and his willingness to force issues that cause some distress to the city's white liberal establishment.
What has changed is Caire's clout. He returned to his hometown in 2010 after a decade long detour with his family to the East Coast. As president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, and public face for the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, his profile has skyrocketed. But with it has come criticism and skepticism over a plan that challenges Madison's longstanding commitment to inclusive learning.
Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned
FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.
Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA's latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.
One of the most frustrating aspects of working on the improvement of math education is dealing with an educational establishment that makes decisions based on fads and opinions rather than empirical facts.
Now, let us accept that there are different approaches to teaching mathematics, with a major divide between the "reform, discovery approaches" and the more "traditional, direct instruction" approaches. Reform/discovery approaches became the rage among the educational community in the 1990s and I believe it is a major, but not sole, reason that math performance has lagged.
As a scientist, it would seem to me that the next step is clear: test a variety of curriculum approaches in the classroom, insuring the class demographics are similar, and find out what works best. In short, do a carefully controlled experiment with proper statistics and find the truth in an empirical way. But what frustrates me is that such experimentation is virtually never done by the educational bureaucracy. They seem to go from fad to fad and student progress suffers. Reform math, Integrated Math, Teach for America, Whole Language, and many more.
Before I jump into an argument about how we teach history, I want to make we don't lose the point that Charles Mann's 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created is a wonderful book.
A modern updating of Crosby's classic The Columbian Exchange, Mann traces the biological, epidemiological, and agricultural impact of trade between Europe, Asia and the America's after 1493.
1493 is a book for fans of Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and Morris' Why the West Rules -- for Now.
If you like your history to be big, the scope to be wide, but to be tied into how you eat and pay your way in the world, then 1493 is probably perfect.
America's school system is broken. On that the Forbes 400 can agree. America's richest give more to education-related causes than to any other issue. But in terms of how best to reform education, there is little consensus.
Education-related causes that have materially benefited from Forbes 400 wealth vary from Michael Moritz's $50 million check to his alma-mater Christ Church to Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark's public schools. Bill and Melinda Gates have focused their efforts on reorganizing high school curriculum, while Eli Broad believes our educators would benefit from managerial expertise. Their ideas are so divergent that this year, my colleagues and I reached out to a few billionaires, as well as a few recipients of their charity, to solicit their best ideas for K-12 education reform.
In my back-to-school column two weeks ago, I wrote that parents ought to look in the mirror before pinning all the blame for the state of education on schools and teachers.
Readers were with me on the idea that parents ought to be more engaged in their children's education, whether they do so at home, on campus or by marching on Sacramento. But reactions split over my suggestion that parents who make no effort to learn English aren't helping their kids or themselves.
As promised, here's the follow-up.
And let me begin by saying that lack of parental involvement is a problem regardless of income or race. Are any parents more annoying than those who impose no discipline at home, then blame their child's disruptive antics or lousy grades on the school, the curriculum or the teacher's inability to recognize what a genius the child is?
Larry J. Crockett's nostalgic commentary ("Online education doesn't measure up," Aug. 23) reminded me of a critique that might have been made by medieval apprenticeship guilds about the emergence of renaissance universities.
The world is changing; we no longer live in a prewired society where colleges act as "finishing schools" teaching table manners and deportment to impressionable youths. The modern world has become heavily virtualized, and education is no exception. The online medium actually enhances education in a number of ways:
1) No one can hide in a virtual classroom -- all have opportunity to participate and are expected to do so, and everyone has ample time to make contributions to class discussions, to look up citations and compose their arguments.
Class discussion occurs in threaded discussion posts, meaning everyone participates and has time to read and respond to others, cite what others have said, look up reference material, and proofread their statements, all of which generally enhances the quality of class interaction.
Peg Tyre is the author of "The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve."
THE school year is in full swing and, if you are the parent of a school-age child, you've probably figured out how to get your children up each weekday morning, dressed and out the door -- toast in hand -- in order to catch the school bus. Good for you.
If you've met and exchanged contact information with your child's homeroom teacher or gone the extra step and volunteered to become the class parent, give yourself a pat on the back. You're on your way to becoming an engaged parent -- the kind of adult, education researchers say, who helps children to be the best they can be in school.
Now, steady yourself. New legislation, called the parent trigger, which is being proposed in more than 20 states, including New York, is about to make your role as an engaged parent a lot more complicated.
California Gov. Jerry Brown already anticipates relying on spending cuts and forgoing higher taxes to balance his state's budget next year, sobered by his deadlock with Republicans over revenue issues this year.
"There will be no taxes, as far as I know, by the legislature," he said in an interview this week.
The Democrat also said he hasn't decided whether to seek a ballot measure next year that would allow him to bypass the legislature and ask voters to boost taxes--apparently backing off earlier plans to do so. "I'm talking to groups...but we don't have a clear path forward," he said.
On Sept. 9, the last day of the legislature's eight-month session, Mr. Brown failed to pass a plan to rework state tax breaks after GOP senators balked. It was the 73-year-old's latest letdown after he unsuccessfully tried to pass a budget pairing deep cuts with the extension of some expiring tax increases. Those higher taxes would have been subject to voter approval.
Friday was graduation day for Brian Steven Hernandez, a goal that was never a sure thing growing up in his tough North Hollywood neighborhood.
At Jack B. Clarke High School, within the locked gates of a state youth correctional facility in Norwalk, Hernandez realized he could turn his life around.
But Hernandez and his 22 classmates, proudly wearing maroon caps and gowns, are the last graduates to receive diplomas at Clarke, which is closing at year's end due to state budget cuts.
"This is the place where I learned I could change if I wanted to," said Hernandez, 20, who has been in juvenile detention for 5 years after being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. "It sucks for the other kids that have to go to other places that are much harder places to be in to learn."
Operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center and Clinic will be the third such facility to close since 2009. Shuttering the facility will save the state about $44 million annually, officials said.
Milwaukee's private school voucher program, now in its twelfth year, is dwarfed by the 30-year-old voucher program in Chile, where almost half of all students attend private voucher schools. The Chilean program is therefore of significant interest to school reformers and researchers looking to make voucher and charter schools a success in the US.
The most recent research, published by the Cato Institute, finds that when the Chilean public school test scores are compared with those of independent private schools and with those of private schools that are part of multi-school networks or franchises, the students in the franchised private schools perform best. (The independent, mom-and-pop private schools do about the same as the public schools.) In addition, the Chilean research indicates the more schools there are in the franchised networks, the better they outperform the others.
The researchers note that in Chile, "The private voucher school sector is essentially a cottage industry. More than 70 percent of private voucher schools are independent schools that do not belong to a franchise." The franchised schools are either owned by for-profit school management companies; affiliated with non-profit, secular organizations; or part of the Catholic or Protestant school systems.
Do these findings reflect what we know about Milwaukee's program? Its hard to say, since only one year of comparative data on student performance in voucher schools is available and it does not differentiate between the various types of private schools. However, those data do indicate considerable variability in performance across Milwaukee's voucher schools--some are producing high scoring students and some are no better than the worst public schools. It would be nice to know if all the high performing private schools had something in common besides the fact they participate in the voucher program.
Nashville bills itself as Music City-now it's trying to lock in the future of that status. The city is overhauling its music education program across all 144 public schools, Mayor Karl Dean announced today at a press conference at the Ryman Auditorium, downtown Nashville's temple of country music.
Classes in country, rock and rap will supplement the traditional curriculum of orchestra, choir and band. Instruction in songwriting, production and other skills such as DJ-ing will also be added to music theory and other existing offerings. The new program, dubbed Music Makes Us, will be funded through a mix of public and private funds, primarily commitments from Nashville's deeply embedded music industry, which includes hundreds of record labels, publishers and venues, plus countless professional musicians.
"The music industry has picked this as their cause," Mr. Dean said yesterday in an interview. "It just makes sense to take advantage of this asset we have here."
Student achievement and educational attainment have stagnated in the U.S., and a host of our leading economic competitors are now out-educating us. In a knowledge economy, such stagnation is a slow-acting recipe for obsolescence.
Imagine, though, an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students' levels of knowledge. All of this will happen. The only question is: Will the U.S. lead the effort or will we follow other countries?
In the past two decades, technology has revolutionized the way Americans communicate, get news, socialize and conduct business. But technology has yet to transform our classrooms. At its full potential, technology could personalize and accelerate instruction for students of all educational levels. And it could provide equitable access to a world-class education for millions of students stuck attending substandard schools in cities, remote rural regions, and tribal reservations.
Other countries are far ahead of us in creating 21st-century classrooms. South Korea, which has the highest college attainment rate in the world, will phase out textbooks and replace them with digital products by 2015. Even Uruguay, a small country not known for leadership in technology, provides a computer for every student.
If people want a charter school to be an inspiration to other youngsters in the community, here's a better way to do it. Instead of building an entirely new school, which costs a ton and isolates the kids from the rest of their peers, why not go with the school within a school model, in which a charter is operated within an existing public school?
That's the only original idea I have. Now here is my two cents on the rest of the plan.
I believe Kaleem Caire knows what he is talking about though. It's frustrating to see a debate on the crisis facing minority students as polarized between the know-nothings on the right who believe the only issues facing blacks are self-inflicted cultural ones and the lefties who refuse to accept that anything besides racism and poverty are responsible for the poor performance of black males in America.
I saw the intersection of both the cultural and economic aspects that bring black guys down. At my high school, in Montclair, NJ, which was slightly majority-minority, blacks were not only much more likely to come from poor or uneducated backgrounds, but many black kids from well-to-do or educated families felt pressure to conform to the mainstream image of black Americans. To not be "oreos." This, according to friends who spent their whole lives in Montclair, was one of the reasons why groups of friends were generally more integrated in grade school and middle school than in high school.
Whoever thought before this year that Illinois would be held up as a model over Wisconsin of people - politicians, specifically - playing nicely together and making forward-thinking change?
But you hear that fairly often when it comes to education policy. It's one of the things U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in Milwaukee on Sept. 9.
He criticized the way Gov. Scott Walker and legislative Republicans kiboshed teachers union rights and said Illinois did much better by coming up with bold changes that were passed by the legislature with support from both political parties, business and civic leaders, education activists and many (but not all) union leaders.
What Illinois did is noteworthy, especially if you consider what would have seemed doable anywhere in the United States five years ago.
Beginning with steps taken in 2010, Illinois' Democratically controlled legislature is now mandating that a teacher's actual performance be a key in assignments, tenure decisions, firing decisions, and, when necessary, layoffs. How students are progressing will be central to determining a teacher's rating.
Upstairs in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, scientists toil away in their labs researching everything from stem cells to viruses.
Downstairs, you'll find a very different kind of laboratory. In cubicles and makeshift computer labs, a number of people sit behind their screens -- playing games. They're not nerds, they're researchers.
OK, they are a bit nerdy and seem as glued to their screens as any game-crazed teenager. But there is science being done here, too. This is Susan Millar's computer lab, the Educational Research Integration Area in the Morgridge Institute for Research, where researchers design and build games that help teach and communicate science -- everything from the formation and perils of blue-green algae to the workings of viruses.
On a recent afternoon, in a darkened conference area, several programmers, designers and artists worked in the reflected blue light from their machines, racing to finish the newest version of one of the lab's most successful and popular efforts, a game called Virulent that can be found in the iTunes store and boasts 2,000 downloads.
And it's a game that doesn't involve guns or race cars or football players. It's about viruses.
The phone rang, and my stomach clenched when I heard her voice. "Daddy? I want to go home," said my 8-year-old daughter, Arden. Two hours earlier, I dropped Arden and her two siblings off at their new school in a squat building in a forest of Soviet-era apartment blocks on Krasnoarmeyskaya (Red Army) Street in Moscow. They hugged me goodbye, clinging a little too long, and as I rode the metro to my office, I said a kind of silent prayer to myself that they would get through the day without falling apart.
But Arden had just spent the minutes between class periods hiding in the bathroom so no one would see her crying. Finally, she composed herself, found her teacher and pantomimed that she needed to talk to me. "I don't understand . . . anything," she told me. I tried to respond with soothing words, but I had no idea what to do. You can tell your kid to tough it out when she transfers from one school to another in your hometown. This was different.
A dozen students in uniforms of white-collared shirts and blue slacks looked up attentively at their sixth-grade teachers at the Brennan Rogers School on the first day of school this year.
"We will never make you do something that doesn't guide you to a purpose, we're not here to waste your time," said second-year teacher Kimberlee Henry. Her students nodded. "Everything you will do this year will prepare you for something else, giving you the skills you need to go on to high school, college, and excel at life."
The school's focus wasn't always as sharp. Brennan Rogers, which has about 360 kindergarten through eighth-graders, spent decades failing its students. Parents commonly campaigned for transfers to other schools that weren't plagued with violence and lagging from inattention.
Now, the school serves as the centerpiece of a sweeping reform effort launched three years ago by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano to turn around this inner-city district, where one in four children drops out every year and test scores have languished for decades.
Many years ago, I attended a public high school student's graduation ceremony out in what I consider the sticks.
I was amazed at the overt Christianity. There was a prayer at the beginning, and again at the end. The commencement speeches were full of references to God.
My own public high school was roughly one-third Jewish, so this wouldn't have flown. Someone would have sued, and rightfully so. A Jewish student should be able to go to his own public high school graduation without being told he needs to pray to Jesus Christ.
But out in the sticks, I guess, that sort of thing was okay.
Being a lawyer, I approached the father of the graduate, knowing he was not religious, and asked if he would like to bring a lawsuit against the school district. He said he found the ceremony offensive, but that he owns a business in that town, and he was certainly not going to bring a lawsuit just because they turned his son's graduation ceremony into a revival meeting. Fair enough. I let the matter drop.
Bello and former USA Today reporter Jack Gillum exposed test security problems in the D.C. schools. Now, we learn that most states are even worse than D.C. because they don't bother even to look for evidence of unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures.
USA Today reports that only 20 states and the District do any erasure analysis. Four others give tests online (a good way to prevent principals from changing answers after the kids go home) and so don't have erasures to check. It said five other states, including Maryland, plan to check erasures next year because of the outbreak of cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and the District. New York may do the same.
SAT scores for the high-school graduating class of 2011 fell in all three subject areas, and the average reading and writing scores were the lowest ever recorded, according to data released on Wednesday.
The results from the college-entrance exam, taken by about 1.6 million students, also revealed that only 43% of students posted a score high enough to indicate they were ready to succeed in college, according to the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the exam. Students had to score a 1550 out of a possible 2400 to meet that benchmark, which would indicate a 65% chance of getting at least a B-minus average in the first year of college, the Board calculated.
The report on the SAT, long known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, comes on the heels of results from the ACT college-entrance exam that suggested only 25% of high-school graduates who took that exam were ready for college. And results from national high-school math and reading exams show only modest progress over the past five years. The data highlight the difficult task faced by the Obama administration in pursuing education policies to help Americans remain globally competitive.
SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation's leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.
The most striking thing about Tuesday's press conference on UW-Madison's alleged affirmative-action-driven bias against white and Asian applicants was not the loud, mildly violent protest that overran it.
It was the university professor who publicly touted the rising admission rate for white students and the declining rate for blacks. This from an institution that only 11 years ago was so worried about its less-than-diverse image that it Photoshopped a black student onto an admissions catalog.
That aside, nothing about the presser/protest was all that ground-breaking, and Roger Clegg, president of the conservative outfit that did the study showing UW's bias, got to the nut of the whole affair in only about 35 minutes.
"I view discrimination as something that happens to individuals, rather than something that happens to aggregate groups," he said.
there's been a lot going on recently with books. i've been watching eric ries and i'm blown away by how successful he's been at promoting his book the lean startup. i saw that @dharmesh wrote about it at onstartups.com, and tweeting out small agreeable little tidbits from the book is genius--i don't know whether this was intentional or not, but that's an awesome idea.
i met noah kagan last friday to catch up over drinks at showdown in sf, and i met someone interesting there: laura roeder. i usually meet people who claim to be "social media experts" (as every hacker reading this rolls their eyes) but this woman actually had a significant following and presence on twitter and facebook, and not one of those fake "follow me and i'll auto-follow you back" type of things. i dropped in on a small video conference she was doing today corresponding to her book launch, which i had not realized she was working on (for some reason, she didn't mention it when we met, even though i had mentioned startups open sourced was paying my rent at this point).
As noted in a previous entry ('Visualizing the globalization of higher education and research'), we've been keen to both develop and promote high quality visualizations associated with the globalization of higher education and research. On this note, the wonderful Floating Sheep collective recently informed me about some new graphics that will be published in:
Journalists like me get into ruts. We pick one way of describing data and stick with it. I tell myself that I would confuse readers if I made changes. That might be an excuse for laziness and lack of imagination.
A habit I share with many education writers is presenting school test results one way: the percentage of students who score proficient or above. I ignore a subset of that proficient group, the percentage who achieve at the higher, advanced level.
The advanced percentages are impressive in the Washington suburbs, because they have some of the highest average family incomes in the country. The District is different. Most of its public school students are from low-income families. But I have been noticing some D.C. schools with impressive percentages of students scoring not just proficient but advanced. What would those schools look like if we reported that higher order of achievement? In the long term, don't we want as many students as possible to be learning at the advanced level?
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.
I won't be celebrating.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.
The number of Arkansas students taking Advance Placements tests in math, science and English has risen 32 percent in the past five years and there has been a nearly 50 percent rise in the number of students receiving qualifying scores, state education officials heard today.
Also, the state Board of Education learned of an academic turnaround for a Fort Smith elementary which last year ranked among the lowest performing school in the state.
Tommie Sue Anthony, president of the Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Sciences, which is funded primarily through a grant from the national Math and Science Initiative, told board members that the number of students achieving scores of 3 or better on AP math, science and English scores -- the highest possible score is 5 -- increased in Arkansas by 46 percent from 2007 to 2011.
Last Thursday, Dr. Christopher Sutton, professor of geography at Western Illinois University, delivered the ninth annual John Hallwas Liberal Arts Lecture, entitled "Geography Matters! The Importance of Geographic Literacy in Liberal Arts Education."
"Everybody views the world in a geographical context," he said. "We do it all the time in our everyday pursuits."
Sutton believes that geography has escaped public interest due to a lack of mainstream understanding.
"We seem to not have a good sense of what it is, who does it, and why in the world we actually do it," he said.
At its simplest, he explained, the study of geography is devoted to further understanding the connections between humans and the world around them.
"We're interested in understanding the links between humans and their natural environment," he said. "We're interested in the linkages that exist between people, and how our connections that exist between people and cultures and governments and the economies affect one another."
Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School -- which is odd, because he's the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly "TT" (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled "2T" (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city's private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that's for prekindergarten.
Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the '80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.
For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are "a patently unfair system" because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. "This push on tests," he told me, "is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human."
People with university degrees have suffered far fewer job losses during the global economic crisis than those who left school without qualifications, according to the latest edition of the OECD's annual Education at a Glance. Good education and skills are crucial to improving a person's economic and social prospects.
Unemployment rates among university graduates stood at 4.4% on average across OECD countries in 2009. But people who did not complete high school faced unemployment rates of 11.5%, up from 8.7% the year before. This adds to the huge problem of youth unemployment that today exceeds 17% in the OECD area.
"The cost to individuals and society of young people leaving school without a qualification keeps rising," said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. "We must avoid the risk of a lost generation by all means. Despite strained public budgets, governments must keep up their investment to maintain quality in education, especially for those most at risk."
Recently I interviewed many experts to find out how they got to where they are. They ranged from world champion arm wrestlers to New York Times bestselling authors. I wanted to know what made them tick and if they were really any different from you and I.
The first thing I did was to redefine what an expert is. Often we hear the word expert and we think of one person who is unique above any other person. He or she has developed qualities and skill that surpass the average person, but that is not what it means to be an expert.
An expert is someone who has tested or tried, a person who is wise through experience.
One of the world's oldest publishing companies brought in a ringer to revolutionize the way the company does business. The result? The first fully-interactive textbook
Nature Publishing Group, which publishes several highly regarded scientific journals and textbooks, was founded in England in 1869, eight years before electric lights illuminated the streets of London. Now, 140 years later, with the help of Harvard Classics scholar Vikram Savkar, the company is beginning to disrupt the traditional textbook model that it helped to create. This month at California State University, the company released Principles of Biology, an interactive, constantly updating biology textbook that retails for less than $50. Like most digital textbooks, the software is accessible on laptops and tablets, but unlike most digital textbooks, it's not just a scan of a .pdf. The company calls it a "digital reinvention of the textbook," meaning that students can interact with the material; they can literally match amino acids and corresponding DNA with their fingers. Inc.com's Eric Markowitz spoke with Vikram Savkar about what it takes to create a culture of innovation in an old-school company.
It's not supposed to be a competition among schools or states, or anything beyond the recognition of individual academic excellence. But the numbers of students from West High School ranking as semifinalists in the annual National Merit Scholarship Program are always impressive, and this year is no exception.
Twenty-six West students are on the list, announced Wednesday. Other Madison students who will be now eligible to continue in the quest for some 8,300 National Merit Scholarships, worth more than $34 million, include 10 students from Memorial, six from Edgewood, five from East, one from St. Ambrose Academy and one home-schooled student. Winning National Merit scholars will be announced in the spring of 2012.
Other area semifinalists include 20 additional students from around Dane County, including seven students from Middleton High School, four from Stoughton High School, three from Mount Horeb High School and one student each from Belleville High School, DeForest High School, Monona Grove High School, Sun Prairie High School, Waunakee High School and a Verona student who is home-schooled.
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
Using the elite private school where Mayor Rahm Emanuel now sends his kids as a starting point, Chicago Teachers Union officials have crafted a proposed schedule that adds 75 minutes to the typical public elementary school student's day.
The union's latest salvo in the battle over a longer school day uses as a comparison point the schedule of one third-grade classroom at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, union officials said Tuesday.
Just like at what U of C kids often call "the Lab School,'' the CTU proposal offers a well-rounded curriculum featuring far more art, music, physical education and other extras than most CPS kids now get and even includes the study of a second language.
Ultimately, the proposed CTU schedule would provide an even longer school day than the Lab School , where a third-grader's tuition is $21,876. And it does so without requiring Chicago Public School teachers to add any minutes to their work day.
During a recent discussion on Channel 10's "News Conference" about efforts to expand charter schools in Rhode Island, James Parisi, field representative and lobbyist for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, challenged the notion that charter schools improve student performance.
"I think one of the studies that I pay most attention to," Parisi said, "indicated, on a nationwide basis, looking at two and a half thousand charter schools around the country, maybe 20 percent do better than the community public schools, 40 percent or so do worse and the rest are not having any significant difference."
Rhode Island has 16 charter schools, including a new one opening Sept. 7, and more are expected to open soon. The state has a three-year, $9.4-million federal grant to expand existing charter schools, open additional ones and build partnerships between charter and traditional public schools.
For most of the 20th century, California led the nation -- and the world -- in the number of high school graduates who went on to college and earned degrees. Its famed public higher education system profoundly shaped the aspirations of the state's citizens and, ultimately, their views on what it meant to be a Californian. That system also attracted talent from throughout the nation and the world, and it helped build and sustain an entrepreneurial spirit that shaped new sectors of the state's economy -- from microchips to biotechnology.
California's higher education system will help define the state's future too. However, the next chapter may be much less positive. The danger signs are numerous: falling public funding on a per-student basis, unprecedented limits on new enrollments, cuts in faculty positions and relatively low degree-production rates compared with economic competitors in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. Whereas California was always among the top states in degree-completion rates, it now ranks among the bottom 10. And yet educational attainment levels are exactly what predicts the overall economic performance of states and nations.
Madison Preparatory Academy today announced its inaugural Board of Directors. Board members represent a diverse cross-section of corporate and community leaders from the Greater Madison area who are all passionate about and dedicated to ensuring Madison Prep becomes a reality for young men and women. They are:
Tyler Beck, Undergraduate Student, UW-Madison
Dave Boyer, CEO, MCD, Inc.
David Cagigal, Vice Chair, Urban League of Greater Madison
Elizabeth Donley, CEO, Stemina Corporation
Rosa Frazier, Clinical Professor/Immigration Law, UW-Madison Law School
Dennis Haefer, Vice President of Commercial Banking, Johnson Bank
Donna Hurd, Executive Director, Boardman Law Firm
Torrey Jaeckle, Vice President, Jaeckle Distributors
Rev. Richard Jones, Pastor, Mount Zion Baptist Church
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Chair of Urban Education and Professor of Curriculum & Instruction and Education Policy Studies, UW-Madison
Maddy Niebauer, Managing Director of Strategy & Human Assets, Teach for America
J. Marshall Osborn, Retired Math Professor, UW-Madison
Fran Petonic, President, Meriter Foundation
John Roach, Owner & CEO, John Roach Projects
Mario Garcia Sierra, Director of Programs, Centro Hispano
Derrick Smith, Area Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation
Terrence Wall, President, T. Wall Properties
About Madison Preparatory Academy:
Madison Preparatory Academy (Madison Prep) is a tuition-free public charter school that will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly for young people of color. Its mission is to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership, and service. The school will open in the Fall of 2012 to students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, pending approval from the Board of Education in the Fall of 2011.
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche-Perez at 608-729-1230 or Lderoche@ulgm.org
Is your child ready for first grade? Earlier this month, Chicago Now blogger Christine Whitley reprinted a checklist from a 1979 child-rearing series designed to help a parent figure that one out. Ten out of 12 meant readiness. Can your child "draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored?" Of course. Can she count "eight to ten pennies correctly?" Heck, yeah, I say for parents of kindergarteners everywhere. "Does your child try to write or copy letters or numbers?" Isn't that what preschool is for?
"Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend's home?"
It's amazing what a difference 30 years have made. Academically, that 1979 first grader (who also needed to be "six years, six months" old and "have two to five permanent or second teeth") would have been considered right on target to start preschool. In terms of life skills, she's heading for middle school, riding her two-wheeled bike and finding her own way home. It's not surprising that I came to this link via Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog. What is surprising is just how shocking a jolt it is to realize how stark the difference is between then and now.
To be sure, the Task Force recognizes, these are not always easy lines to draw. How do we define the level of school failure that is sufficiently injurious to children that we can no longer afford to "empower" districts with the authority to be the primary decision-maker? In addition to the core duty of setting goals and enforcing a schedule of consequences for failure, are there other areas that are so central to success that a state should continue to hold them "tight" rather than devolve them to local control?
(Examples might include teacher certification and evaluation criteria, requirements that schools have systems and processes in place to enable data driven decision-making to adjust instruction and address deficiencies, or matters related to health and safety.) As the entity ultimately responsible for the fiscal health of the State and the legal distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funds, should state authorities reserve a larger measure of involvement to assure that districts are responsible wards
of taxpayers' money?
These are difficult questions, which the Task Force will continue to wrestle with throughout its tenure.Whatever the answer in these more nuanced areas however, the Task Force believes that there is much that can and should be accomplished as quickly as possible with respect to the two inextricably connected elements of the Governor's charge: 1) an evaluation and redesign of the State's accountability system, and 2) reduction of "empowerment - restricting" red tape.
With respect to the first, the Task force has concluded that the State's accountability system warrants significant revision. More likely to frustrate than positively affect behavior, the system is a patchwork of essentially unconnected, sometimes contradictory, federal (No Child Left Behind) and State (QSAC, etc.)mandates.
THE idea of moving objects with the power of the mind has fascinated mankind for millennia. At first it was the province of gods, then sorcerers and witches. In the late 19th century psychokinesis, as the trick then came to be known, became a legitimate object of study, as part of the nascent field of parapsychology, before falling into disrepute in the arch-rationalist 20th century. Since the 1990s, however, it has seen something of a revival, under a more scientifically acceptable guise.
There is nothing particularly magical about moving things with thoughts. Human beings perform the feat every time they move a limb, or breathe, by sending electrical impulses to appropriate muscles. If these electrical signals could be detected and interpreted, the argument goes, there is in principle no reason why they could not be used to steer objects other than the thinker's own body. Indeed, over the past two decades brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) which use electrodes implanted in the skull have enabled paralysed patients to control computer cursors, robotic arms and wheelchairs.
Teacher evaluations for years were based on brief classroom observations by the principal. But now, prodded by President Barack Obama's $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, at least 26 states have agreed to judge teachers based, in part, on results from their students' performance on standardized tests.
So with millions of teachers back in the classroom, many are finding their careers increasingly hinge on obscure formulas like the one that fills a whiteboard in an economist's office here.
The metric created by Value-Added Research Center, a nonprofit housed at the University of Wisconsin's education department, is a new kind of report card that attempts to gauge how much of students' growth on tests is attributable to the teacher.
For the first time this year, teachers in Rhode Island and Florida will see their evaluations linked to the complex metric. Louisiana and New Jersey will pilot the formulas this year and roll them out next school year. At least a dozen other states and school districts will spend the year finalizing their teacher-rating formulas.
"We have to deliver quality and speed, because [schools] need the data now," said Rob Meyer, the bowtie-wearing economist who runs the Value-Added Research Center, known as VARC, and calls his statistical model a "well-crafted recipe."
f you discovered that only one in four graduates from your neighborhood high school would earn a college degree, would you be alarmed?
For decades, there has been a laser-like focus in education reform on the lowest-performing students and schools. This focus continues to be critical for maintaining America's social fabric and ensuring that all children have an opportunity to succeed, but it is not enough. In this paper, we urge that America must embark upon a second phase of education reform that squarely focuses on dramatically improving achievement in the middle-class schools that the majority of children attend.
Our findings show that middle-class schools seem to be forgotten in the education debate. There is a paucity of academic literature on their performance, expectations, and on ideas for reform. Yet, they produce the students who are the backbone of the U.S. economy. Among parents of school-aged kids in middle-class jurisdictions, there is a strong belief that these schools are educating students at the highest levels. More than seven of ten parents with children in the public schools grade their kids' schools as either an A or a B,1 and nine of ten parents of school-age children expect their kids to go to college.2 But that is far from the reality. Middle-class schools are falling short on their most basic 21st century mission: to prepare kids to get a college degree.
In order to maintain a prosperous middle class, grow our economy, and foster a public education system that taxpayers deserve, it is necessary to shine a light on the experience of middle-class students. These are students that don't attend America's best schools but also don't attend the worst. They attend the schools that are in every city, town, and suburb. For our nation to succeed, their schools must be college factories--graduating high school students who are prepared to get to and through college.
The new school year begins in Seattle today, with the superintendent feeling "excited and hopeful that anything is possible" in the year ahead.
I'm not as confident, yet.
My daughter starts her junior year of high school. She's enthusiastic, optimistic and one of those students who always gets a "she's a delight to have in class" comment on her report cards. She has the school system figured out. Today she's on the team who will help incoming, possibly nervous, freshmen. Have a great day sweetie; I know you will.
This is not a routine day for my son. He's making the transition from elementary to middle school. No more bubbly fish tank in the school lobby, little kids' artwork on the walls and shock absorbing wood chips on the playground. Instead, he'll be surrounded by the echoing thud of steel locker doors slamming, the shuffle of grown up-sized tennis shoes tromping through the halls and concrete sidewalks with weeds growing through the gaps. Have a great day son; I don't know how your day will go. I can't wait to find out this afternoon.
Value added is the use of statistical technique to isolate the contributions of schools to measured student knowledge from other influences such as prior student knowledge and demographics. In practice, value added focuses on the improvement of students from one year to the next on an annual state examination or other periodic assessment. The Value-Added Research Center (VARC) of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research produces value-added measures for schools in Madison using the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) as an outcome. The model controls for prior-year WKCE scores, gender, ethnicity, disability, English language learner, low-income status, parent education, and full academic year enrollment to capture the effects of schools on student performance on the WKCE. This model yields measures of student growth in schools in Madison relative to each other. VARC also produces value-added measures using the entire state of Wisconsin as a data set, which yields measures of student growth in Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) relative to the rest of the state.
Some of the most notable results are:
1. Value added for the entire district of Madison relative to the rest of the state is generally positive, but it differs by subject and grade. In both 2008-09 and 2009-10, and in both math and reading, the value added of Madison Metropolitan School District was positive in more grades than it was negative, and the average value added across grades was positive in both subjects in both years. There are variations across grades and subjects, however. In grade 4, value-added is significantly positive in both years in reading and significantly negative in both years in math. In contrast, value-added in math is significantly positive--to a very substantial extent--in grade 7. Some of these variations may be the result of the extent to which instruction in those grades facilitate student learning on tested material relative to non-tested material. Overall, between November 2009 and November 2010, value-added for MMSD as a whole relative to the state was very slightly above average in math and substantially above average in reading. The section "Results from the Wisconsin Value-Added Model" present these results in detail.
2. The variance of value added across schools is generally smaller in Madison than in the state of Wisconsin as a whole, specifically in math. In other words, at least in terms of what is measured by value added, the extent to which schools differ from each other in Madison is smaller than the extent to which schools differ from each other elsewhere in Wisconsin. This appears to be more strongly the case in the middle school grades than in the elementary grades. Some of this result may be an artifact of schools in Madison being relatively large; when schools are large, they encompass more classrooms per grade, leading to more across-classroom variance being within-school rather than across-school. More of this result may be that while the variance across schools in Madison is entirely within one district, the variance across schools for the rest of the state is across many districts, and so differences in district policies will likely generate more variance across the entire state. The section "Results from the Wisconsin Value-Added Model" present results on the variance of value added from the statewide value-added model. This result is also evident in the charts in the "School Value-Added Charts from the MMSD Value-Added Model" section: one can see that the majority of schools' confidence intervals cross (1) the district average, which means that we cannot reject the hypothesis that these schools' values added are not different from the district average.
Even with a relatively small variance across schools in the district in general, several individual schools have values added that are statistically significantly greater or less than the district average. At the elementary level, both Lake View and Randall have values added in both reading and math that are significantly greater than the district average. In math, Marquette, Nuestro Mundo, Shorewood Hills, and Van Hise also have values added that are significantly greater than the district average. Values added are lower than the district average in math at Crestwood, Hawthorne, Kennedy, and Stephens, and in reading at Allis. At the middle school level, value added in reading is greater than the district average at Toki and lower than the district average at Black Hawk and Sennett. Value added in math is lower than the district average at Toki and Whitehorse.
3. Gaps in student improvement persist across subgroups of students. The value-added model measures gaps in student growth over time by race, gender, English language learner, and several other subgroups. The gaps are overall gaps, not gaps relative to the rest of the state. These gaps are especially informative because they are partial coefficients. These measure the black/white, ELL/non-ELL, or high-school/college-graduate-parent gaps, controlling for all variables available, including both demographic variables and schools attended. If one wanted to measure the combined effect of being both ELL and Hispanic relative to non-ELL and white, one would add the ELL/non-ELL gap to the Hispanic/white gap to find the combined effect. The gaps are within-school gaps, based on comparison of students in different subgroups who are in the same schools; consequently, these gaps do not include any effects of students of different subgroups sorting into different schools, and reflect within-school differences only. There does not appear to be an evident trend over time in gaps by race, low-income status, and parent education measured by the value-added model. The section "Coefficients from the MMSD Value-Added Model" present these results.
4. The gap in student improvement by English language learner, race, or low-income status usually does not differ substantively across schools; that between students with disabilities and students without disabilities sometimes does differ across schools. This can be seen in the subgroup value-added results across schools, which appear in the Appendix. There are some schools where value-added for students with disabilities differs substantively from overall value- added. Some of these differences may be due to differences in the composition of students with disabilities across schools, although the model already controls for overall differences between students with learning disabilities, students with speech disabilities, and students with all other disabilities. In contrast, value-added for black, Hispanic, ELL, or economically disadvantaged students is usually very close to overall value added.
Value added for students with disabilities is greater than the school's overall value added in math at Falk and Whitehorse and in reading at Marquette; it is lower than the school's overall value added in math at O'Keefe and Sennett and in reading at Allis, Schenk, and Thoreau. Value added in math for Hispanic students is lower than the school's overall value added at Lincoln, and greater than the school's overall value added at Nuestro Mundo. Value added in math is also higher for ELL and low-income students than it is for the school overall at Nuestro Mundo.
Year four of the five-year REaL Grant has several key areas of focus to support our three grant goals:
Increase student achievement for all students
Strengthen student-student and student-staff relationships
Increase post-secondary outcomes for all students
Following the completion of the K-12 Literacy Evaluation during the 2010-2011 school year there is a renewed commitment and expectations to develop core practices in literacy across the content areas. Professional development around literacy has been scheduled for the 2011-2012 school year and includes: instructional resource teachers, reading interventionists, learning coordinators, literacy coaches. Data from WKCE and EXPLORE indicate the need to improve core practices in literacy.
The division of Curriculum and Assessment has structured the entire 2011-2012 school year with high school department chairperson meetings across the district. The central purpose of this important dialogue is to build consensus around a curriculum scope and sequence that is aligned to both the ACT Career and College Readiness Standards and the Common Core State Standards. Much progress has been made with the adoption of common course names and numbers throughout our high schools.
AVID/TOPS has increased in capacity throughout the high schools and preliminary data indicates continued significant differences in the success of our AVID/TOPS students and their comparison group counterparts. Several teachers and departments outside of our AVID/TOPS classrooms have adopted the AVID/TOPS strategies and we look forward to supporting this demand helping our schools develop consistent systems of support and shared high expectations for all students.
Several professional development opportunities over the summer were supported by the REaL grant. Examples include: Critical Friends, Adaptive Schools, AVID Institute, and Align by Design. Additionally, school leadership teams under the direction of principals, REaL grant coordinators and literacy coaches met to create the Welcome Back Conference sessions for their respective schools.
Principals and teacher leaders continue to increase their capacities as instructional leaders. This year we also have in place a coordinated plan to help assistant principals progress their roles as instructional leaders. This has been an area clearly lacking in the first three years of the grant. Principals and all assistant principals will receive the same professional development each month.
The four high schools received a significant grant from the DPI to support safe schools. These added resources and action plans will compliment the REaL grant goals of improved relationships. High schools continue to address critical student behavior issues with a greater systematic approach. Two areas identified district wide based on the success in one school are: Youth Court and Restorative Justice classes.
Arne Duncan ended a week-long education and jobs stump speech bus tour in Chicago this week. And he had plenty to say about what is going on in his old stomping grounds at CPS. Some of what he had to say was undoubtedly music to the ears of the Chicago Teachers Union, given the weird and ugly battle brewing with the Emanuel administration (complete with a curious mix of F-bombs and hugs). Friday, he called for a doubling of teacher salaries nationally:
Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously measure the location of a particle while also measuring the momentum of that particle. When you apply this principle to schools, it's a little disheartening--if we attempt to measure where we are now, we are no longer certain how fast we're improving. If the environment in which the measurement is taking place is also moving (think of the vast legal and budgetary changes at the state level), the uncertainty is all but overwhelming.
Thus, this year's analysis of public school data in southeast Wisconsin heeds Heisenberg and emphasizes the use of the 2010-11 data as a baseline. Knowing that all Wisconsin school districts will be in a state of flux over the next few years due to changes in contractual bargaining legislation, the state budget, a slow economic recovery, a new standardized testing system, and new standards for curriculum, in the future we hope to measure their improvements over time as these various "new normals" kick in. For now, we emphasize where they've been and where they are currently.
Employment in metro Atlanta has been hurt in recent years by the area's dependence on troubled job sectors, including administrative and support services, and specialty trade contracting. One thing that's helped the employment rate has been a relatively strong supply of educated workers.
But a new report from the Brookings Institution says the area's "education gap" is growing and could become a problem if the trend is not reversed. The education gap refers to the difference between local employer demand for educated workers and a community's ability to provide enough of them.
Metro Atlanta had the nation's fifth-largest increase in education gap from 2005-2009, the study found. No market of comparable size was in the top 10.
For our Sept. 13 public affairs forum with Chicago schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard and teachers union leader Karen Lewis, we asked Trib Nation to write an essay on what makes public education succeed or fail.
Here are the contributions from winners Ray Salazar, G. A. Finch, Trevon Martin, Eva Delgado, Cassandra Eddings and Devyn Rigsby, along with two other noteworthy essays from Gary Lawson and Ron Barker:
G. A. Finch, parent:
I chair the LSC at Decatur Classical, an obscure selective enrollment school that the Tribune, Sun-Times, and Chicago Magazine have ranked the highest performing elementary school in Illinois. Despite its diversity in income, ethnicity, race and religion, it consistently exceeds state testing standards.
Although, the majority of Thai children have access to basic education, as net enrolment for primary and secondary schoolage children increases, people still question the quality of education being provided as international learning assessments show Thai students' performances lag behind most Asian countries.
So, the Office of the Education Council (OEC) is preparing to propose government strategies to enhance the teaching levels and ensure quality education for all children in collaboration with the United Nations Country Team (UNCT).
The net enrolment for primary schoolage children in Thailand increased from 81 per cent in 2000 to 90 per cent in 2009. And, net enrolment for secondary schoolage children increased from 55 per cent in 2000 to 72 per cent in 2009, according to UN Data Online and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Education for All Monitoring Report.
[Note from Laurie Rogers: Recently, results from the 2011 state standardized test scores came out, and the general impression given to the public -- for example from the state education agency (OSPI) and from media in Seattle and in Spokane -- was that improvements had been made. It's all in the definitions: How do you define "improvement"? Did some of the numbers go up? Assuredly. Did that mean that real improvments in real academic knowledge had been made? It's best to remain skeptical.
Most students in Spokane are as weak in math skill this year as they were last year. Given a proper math test that assesses for basic skills, many high schoolers still test into 4th or 5th-grade math. College remedial rates are still high. Parents are still frantic, and students are still stressed out about math. So ... what do those higher scores actually mean? I've been trying to find out. It's hard to say.
Many people are familiar with the SETI@home project: a very large scale effort to search for patterns from alien civilizations in the ocean of data we receive from the sky, using the computing power of millions of computers around the globe ("the grid").
SETI@home has been a success, obviously not in finding aliens, but in demonstrating the potential of large-scale distributed computing. Projects like BOINC have been expanding this effort to other fields like biology, medicine and physics.
Last weekend, a team at Joshfire (Thomas, Nathan, Mickael and myself) participated in a 48-hour coding contest called Node Knockout. Rules were simple: code the most amazing thing you can in the weekend, as long as it uses server-side JavaScript.
No statistic about higher education commands more attention--and anxiety--among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only "cigarettes and other tobacco products" have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids' educations better--to say nothing of three times better.
Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer--admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like--for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.
In an attempt to counter Mayor Rahm Emanuel's relentless campaign for a longer school day, the Chicago Teachers Union claimed Friday that 30 elementary schools have voted to reject the city's offer to extend the school day in exchange for financial incentives.
Emanuel and the Chicago Public Schools have offered up to $150,000 in discretionary funds and a roughly 2 percent raise for teachers at city elementary schools that elect to waive a portion of the union contract and add 90 minutes to the day. CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll told the Chicago News Cooperative that the union's list is not accurate. She said the only schools that have voted are the four elementary schools that have accepted the district's deal.
"Not a single school voted down waivers. Not true," Carroll said in an email. "Only four have voted on waivers and they all supported them."
rne Duncan has the across-the-spectrum appeal to make just about everybody on the Wisconsin education scene eager to be in the room with him, and the political guts to tell Gov. Scott Walker face-to-face and in front of all those folks that he was wrong to kibosh collective bargaining in Wisconsin.
In short, he is about as interesting and significant a person as anyone in American education.
The U.S. secretary of education stopped by the Milwaukee School of Career and Technical Education (that's the new version of Custer High School) for an hour and a half Friday, enough time for several hundred people, from big shots to students, to get a dose of the highly demanding form of optimism that is a key to Duncan.
You want to get some positive re-enforcement for the things you're doing, Duncan is your guy. You want to hear how what you're doing isn't anywhere near enough, Duncan is your guy.
There is a great deal of debate going on over whether or not you should go to college. Is it worth it? You will enter a difficult job market deeply in college loan debt. Despite your degree, your job prospects will be slim. And nobody can quite figure out what the future really holds for college grads' futures.
Here's another question: Why bother graduating from high school?
An annual report on Iowa public schools shows students in 30 districts aren't making the progress required by the federal No Child Left behind law, triggering required actions such as changing staff members.
Most college students studying for degrees in science, technology, engineering or math make the decision to do so in high school or before -- but only 20 percent say they feel that their education before college prepared them "extremely well" for those fields, according to a survey released today by Microsoft and polling company Harris Interactive.
The survey, which asked college students pursing STEM degrees and the parents of K-12 students about attitudes toward STEM education, also found that male and female students enter the fields for different reasons: females are more likely to want to make a difference, while males are more likely to say they've always enjoyed games, toys or clubs focused on the hard sciences.
Cambridge has topped a league table of the world's best universities, with Harvard and MIT ranked second and third.
The annual QS World University Rankings remains dominated by US institutions, which took 13 of the top 20 places.
There are five British universities in the top 20 - Oxford ranks fifth, Imperial sixth, UCL seventh and Edinburgh 20th. The only university in the top 20 which is not from the English speaking world is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, at 18. The highest ranking Asian universities are Hong Kong at 22, Tokyo at 25, and the National University of Singapore at 28. King Saud University, in Saudi Arabia, made the top 200 for the first time. At 200, it was the highest rated institution in the Arab world.
It is the second year running that Cambridge University has taken the top spot.
A group of business and philanthropic leaders appointed by Governor Dannel P. Malloy presented their education reform proposals to the state Board of Education Wednesday, pitching changes to teacher certification requirements, preparation programs and evaluations to help close Connecticut's dramatic achievement gap.
Members of the Connecticut Council on Education Reform said they considered the timing appropriate, coming as Malloy introduced his new education commissioner and reiterated that education will be a priority in next year's legislative session.
"We think next year could be the lynchpin," said Steve Simmons, vice chair of the council and CEO of Simmons/Patriot Media and Communications. "The governor has said that this first year was focused on the budget crisis and the second year was going to be education reform. I think we have a great chance here over this next nine or ten month period to really push for change."
China is a united multicultural country. The development of each national minority (with its unique language, culture, location and shared experience) has different requirements and the educational needs of each nationality within China involve unique challenges.
What is the best way to renew thinking about education for minority nationalities and improve multicultural education in ethnic minority areas?
Madison Preparatory Academy will receive the first half of a $225,000 state planning grant after the Madison School Board determined Thursday that the revised proposal for the charter school addresses legal concerns about gender equality.
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad announced the decision following a closed School Board meeting.
Questions still remain about the cost of the proposal by the Urban League of Greater Madison, which calls for a school for 60 male and 60 female sixth-graders geared toward low-income minorities that would open next year.
"I understand the heartfelt needs for this program," Nerad said, but "there are other needs we need to address."
The school district does not have a lot of spare money lying around that it can devote to Madison Prep. Speaking for myself, I am not willing to cut educational opportunities for other students in order to fund Madison Prep. If it turns out that entering into a five-year contract with Madison Prep would impose a net cost of millions of dollars on the school district, then, for me, we'd have to be willing to raise property taxes by that same millions of dollars in order to cover the cost.
It is not at all clear that we'd be able to do this even if we wanted to. Like all school districts in the state, MMSD labors under the restrictions of the state-imposed revenue caps. The law places a limit on how much school districts can spend. The legislature determines how that limit changes from year to year. In the best of times, the increase in revenues that Wisconsin school districts have been allowed have tended to be less than their annual increases in costs. This has led to the budget-slashing exercises that the school districts endure annually.
In this environment, it is extremely difficult to see how we could justify taking on the kind of multi-million dollar obligation that entering into a five-year contract with Madison Prep would entail. Indeed, given the projected budget numbers and revenue limits, it seems inevitable that signing on to the Madison Prep proposal would obligate the school district to millions of dollars in cuts to the services we provide to our students who would not attend Madison Prep.
A sense of the magnitude of these cuts can be gleaned by taking one year as an example. Since Madison Prep would be adding classes for seven years, let's look at year four, the 2015-16 school year, which falls smack dab in the middle.
Last night I (TJ) was asked to leave the meeting on African American issues in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) advertised as being facilitated by the Department of Justice Community Relations Service (DOJ CRS) and hosted or convened by the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) with the consent and participation of MMSD. I was told that if I did not leave, the meeting would be canceled. The reason given was that I write a blog (see here for some background on the exclusion of the media and bloggers and here for Matt DeFour's report from outside the meeting).
I gave my word that I would not write about the meeting, but that did not alter the request. I argued that as a parent and as someone who has labored for years to address inequities in public education, I had both a legitimate interest in being there and the potential to contribute to the proceedings. This was acknowledged and I was still asked to leave and told again that the meeting would not proceed if I did not leave. I asked to speak to the DOJ CRS representatives in order to confirm that this was the case and this request was repeatedly refused by Kaleem Caire of the ULGM.
An idea hatched in Madison aims to give parents with boys in Wisconsin's second-largest city another positive option for their children. It's an idea that ought to be channeled to Milwaukee.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men would feature the rigorous International Baccalaureate program, longer days, a longer school year and lofty expectations for dress and behavior for boys in sixth grade through high school. And while it would accept all comers, clearly it is designed to focus on low-income boys of color. Backers hope to open a year from now.
One of the primary movers behind Madison Prep is Kaleem Caire, the head of the Urban League of Madison, who grew up in the city and attended Madison West High School in 1980s, Alan J. Borsuk explained in a column last Sunday. Caire later worked in Washington, D.C., as an education advocate before returning to Madison.
Caire saw too many young black men wash out and end up either dead or in jail, reported Borsuk, a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. And Caire now is worried, as are we, about the atrocious statistics that place young black boys so far behind their white peers.
The Department of Justice official explained the shadowy, confidential nature of the Community Relations Service to the audience by describing the kinds of situations it intervenes in, mostly having to do with hate crimes and rioting. He said in no uncertain terms, "We are not here to do an investigation," and even asked for the audience members to repeat the sentence with him. He then went on to ask for people to respect the confidentiality of those raising issues, and laid out the structure of the meeting: 30 minutes for listing problems relating to the achievement gap and 45 minutes generating solutions.
I will respect the confidentiality of the content of the meeting by not repeating it. However, I will say that what was said in that room was no different that what has been said at countless other open, public meetings with the School District and in community groups on the same topic, the only difference being that there were far fewer parents in the room and few if any teachers.
It turned out that the Department of Justice secretive meeting was a convenient way to pack the house with a captive audience for yet another infomercial about Madison Prep. Kaleem Caire adjourned the one meeting and immediately convened an Urban League meeting where he gave his Madison Prep sales pitch yet again. About 1/3 of the audience left at that point.
very principal looks forward to the first day of school when students return with fresh minds eager to learn and ready to work. But as students prepare to hit the books in the next couple weeks, some of them won't have to take the bus to school, wander the halls looking for their classroom or search rows of desks to find their seat.
Virtual schooling with Wisconsin Connections Academy (WCA) allows students to receive a top-notch public education online from the comfort of their homes. Virtual education is an increasingly popular alternative to the traditional brick and mortar classroom, but many parents still don't fully understand online learning and how it works.
Virtual public schooling is not homeschooling. In fact, the two are quite different. Virtual public schools deliver public education to a student's home at no cost that combines state-certified teachers and a rigorous curriculum that correlates to state standards. At WCA, students learn at home under the guidance of a Wisconsin certified teacher. A Learning Coach, typically a parent, assists the student in day-to-day activities. Our teachers work directly with both the student and Learning Coach to develop an individual learning plan, provide instruction and evaluate assignments.
While they say that all politics is local, Colorado seems to be national news, yet again. Our state is featured prominently in Steven Brill's new book, Class Warfare, which is receiving a lot of press from national news outlets.
Weaving a narrative around the passage of Senate Bill 10-191 in Colorado, Brill tells a good story, replete with heroic figures like Senator Mike Johnston. I worked closely on SB 191 from its inception to passage, I can tell you that the on the ground details of its success are even more interesting than what's depicted in Brill's account.
Please see DFER's case study on SB 191 here for a close examination of the strategy, the broad coalition, and the bipartisan champions that helped make SB 191 a reality. Without the active support of the sophisticated coalition of political leaders on both sides of the aisle, including House sponsors Rep. Christine Scanlan and Rep. Carole Murray, non-profit organizations such as Stand for Children Colorado, civil rights groups, and business leaders that worked with the media, spoke with legislators, and reached out to their communities, the bill would not have passed. For further reading, Van Schoales, a DFER-CO Advisory Committee member, has written a review of Class Warfare: available here.
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
So will we open a bunch more campuses? Put all our classes online? Start training executives? We don't know. Right now we're singularly focused on continuing to create a great, meaningful experience at our New York campus. That said, we see the bigger picture: there is immense demand for social, application-driven education in technology, design, and entrepreneurship, and we're committed to addressing this real need.
ESF school offers fast-track way in for HK$400,000 Discovery College has introduced a priority waiting list - but not all parents are happy about the scheme
The English Schools Foundation (ESF) has angered parents by introducing a fast-track system for its private school in Discovery Bay, in which parents can get priority on the waiting list by agreeing to pay HK$400,000 if their child is accepted.
The ESF started the system for "nomination rights" on Thursday and said it had been introduced for parents seeking to enrol children at Discovery College from the next academic year.
A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.
Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work--they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.
Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.
Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
Oregon's public schools are stuck in an old-fashioned way of doing business, Gov. John Kitzhaber said Tuesday, telling an audience of school teachers and administrators that improving education "requires the courage to change."
He laid out a vision of an education system that identifies at-risk children from birth, gives their parents the tools they need to help children be ready to read by kindergarten, and helps students transition through the education system without falling behind.
"The path forward in this new century requires innovation, requires the willingness to challenge assumption, requires the courage to change," Kitzhaber said at the annual back-to-school event for Springfield Public Schools employees.
As students in much of the state returned Tuesday to classrooms more crowded than last year, Kitzhaber said education is underfunded at all levels. But he said the lack of money makes it even more important to overhaul the education bureaucracy and turn "islands of excellence" into a "culture of excellence."
Going online to get a college degree has been championed as a cost-effective way to educate the masses and challenged as a cheapening of academia. Now, the online classroom is coming to the vaunted University of California system, making it the nation's first top-tier university to offer undergraduate credit for cyberstudies.
By dislodging education from its brick-and-mortar moorings, the University of California - short on money and space - hopes to ease the path to a diploma for students who are increasingly forced to wait for a vacant seat in a lecture hall. Especially in high-demand "gateway courses," such as chemistry, calculus and composition.
This summer, UC Berkeley tested its first pilot course: Chemistry 1A. For one student, working as a lifeguard in San Rafael, it accelerated her progress toward a joint degree in biology and economics. Another was able to live at home in Sacramento, because she registered for summer school too late to get dorm space.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel focused on parents Tuesday in his quest for a longer school day, saying they should demand the extra hours teachers already approved outside the Chicago Teachers Union contract at STEM Magnet Academy and two other schools.
"Three schools took this step forward. We hope other schools will do the same," Emanuel said as he kicked off a new school year at STEM, a new magnet school in an old Chicago Public School building.
"Most important, the parents want this," said Emanuel, whose campaign promises included a longer school day. "Parents need to ask their schools, 'How can we get the same thing?'"
Meanwhile, CPS officials Tuesday invited all elementary schools to join the "Longer School Day Pioneers Program," which adds 90 minutes of daily instructional time this school year in exchange for pro-rated teacher raises of 2 percent. Plus, schools that join in September will net an extra $150,000; those that start in January will get $75,000, a CPS news release explained.
With the institution she leads, the University of Miami, in the midst of a football scandal that threatens to be among the worst in National Collegiate Athletic Association history, Donna E. Shalala might be forgiven for trying to change the conversation about Miami's sports program away from acknowledged rule breaking by current and former players, possible wrongdoing by university employees, and the potential imposition of the NCAA's "death penalty."
In the latest in a series of public statements she has made since the controversy broke several weeks ago, Shalala shifted the focus this week to the academic performance of Miami's athletes. In doing so, however, she engaged in some hyperbole about the institution's standing and the company it keeps.
Nicolaus Copernicus, the man credited with turning our perception of the cosmos inside out, was born in the city of Torun, part of "Old Prussia" in the Kingdom of Poland, at 4:48 on Friday afternoon, February 19 1473. By the time his horoscope for that auspicious moment was created - at the end of the astronomer's life - his contemporaries already knew that he had fathered an alternative universe: that he had defied common sense and received wisdom to place the Sun at the centre of the heavens, then set the Earth in motion around it.
Copernicus grew up Niklas Koppernigk, the second son and youngest of four children of a merchant family. He was raised in Torun, in a tall brick house that is now a museum to the memory of the town's famous son. From here, he and his brother, Andrei, could walk to classes at the parish school of St. John's Church or to the family warehouse near the river Vistula. When Niklas was 10, his father died, and he and his siblings came under the care of their maternal uncle, Lukasz Watzenrode, a minor cleric, or "canon", in a nearby diocese. He arranged a marriage contract for one niece and consigned the other to a convent, but his nephews he supported at school, until they were ready to attend his alma mater, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. By then, Uncle Lukasz had risen to become Bishop of Varmia.
On Thursday, August 25, 2011, leadership of the Urban League of Greater Madison, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the Madison Metropolitan School District met at DPI's Madison offices to discuss how the Urban League and MMSD would address DPI's concerns that a comparable option to Madison Prep's charter school for boys also be available to girls at the same time the boys' school would open in August 2012.
During that meeting, all three parties discussed ways "comparability" could be achieved. DPI suggested and the Urban League agreed that starting the girl's campus at the same time as the boy's campus would be the best way to achieve comparability and sufficiently comply with state law and federal Title IX regulations that address single-sex public schools.
Initially, the Urban League planned to wait 12-24 months to start the girls' campus of Madison Prep. However, given DPI's concerns, we saw this as the perfect opportunity and argument to serve girls right away, and subsequently adjusted our plans to include a girls' campus of Madison Prep last week. You can review a copy of the proposal we submitted last week to DPI and MMSD that explains how we'll adjust our plans and add the girls' campus in 2012 by clicking here. We have also attached the document to this email here.
Today, we were excited to learn from a DPI official, Mr. Bob Soldner, that our proposal for adding the girls' campus now satisfies DPI's concerns that a comparable option would be available for boys and girls at the same time. Mr. Soldner also said he was awaiting a response to our plan from the Madison Metropolitan School District before releasing our $225,000 charter school planning grant, which DPI put on hold two weeks ago.
I just learned 2 hours ago from MMSD Superintendent, Dr. Daniel Nerad, that the Board of Education decided today to hold an executive session tomorrow at 4:30pm at the Doyle Administration Building to "discuss the legal implications of Madison Prep and the potential for litigation." Dr. Nerad said that immediately following their executive session, the Board of Education would also hold a "special public meeting" to discuss Madison Prep.
Unfortunately, the Urban League of Greater Madison and the Board members of Madison Prep will not be able to attend the public meeting on Madison Prep tomorrow as we are attending a long-scheduled fundraiser for the school at the same time tomorrow - 5:30pm. This will be the first major fundraiser for the school, and is being hosted by four prominent leaders and advocates for children in Greater Madison.
We hope that those of you who support Madison Prep and are not attending our fundraiser tomorrow night will be available to attend the public meeting of the Board of Education tomorrow to express your support for our proposal to establish Madison Preparatory Academy campuses for boys and girls. We assume a critical decision regarding our charter school grant application will be decided tomorrow. You can find the agenda for the Board of Education's meeting by clicking here.
For more information about tomorrow's Board of Education meeting, please contact the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education at board@madison.k12.wi.us or 608-204-0341. For more information about our updated Madison Prep proposal, please contact Ms. Laura DeRoche Perez at Lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1230.
We intend to host our own public forum on Madison Prep in the near future. More details and information will be shared with you soon.
Thank you so much. It's all about the future of our children.
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205 www.ulgm.org
A Madison charter school geared toward low-income, minority students would include single-gender classrooms for both boys and girls in 2012 under a revised proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy.
The new proposal from the Urban League of Greater Madison would nearly double the contribution required by the Madison School District in the fifth year -- from $4.8 million in the original plan to $9.4 million -- but the net cost to the district remains unclear.
The Urban League submitted the proposal to the school district and the state Department of Public Instruction on Friday, and it was made public by the district Wednesday. The revision came after DPI withheld support for a $225,000 planning grant for an all-boys charter school that the Urban League had discussed creating for more than a year. State officials said that such a school would discriminate against girls and that if they open an all-male school, they must open a similar school for girls at the same time.
The Madison School Board has scheduled two meetings for Thursday, one in closed session at 4:30 p.m. to discuss legal issues related to the new proposal and the second in open session at 5:30 p.m., Superintendent Dan Nerad said.
A meeting Wednesday to discuss the minority achievement gap in the Madison district will be closed to the media, even if that means kicking School Board members out, the organizer said Monday.
The Urban League of Greater Madison invited Madison School Board members to its meeting facilitated by an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, but if four board members attend, it would be considered a quorum of the school board and need to abide by the open meetings law.
Four of the seven school board members confirmed with the State Journal Monday that they plan to attend the meeting.
"We'll have to kick one of them out," said Urban League President Kaleem Caire, laughing. "I'm serious."
In the camp of free online learning, Irishman Mike Feerick believes his Alison.com has more to offer than the buzz-heavy Khan Academy. Feerick, a Harvard MBA and serial entrepreneur, has an impressive track record at several startups including his current project: Alison.com. It offers 300 free courses online that lead to training certificates and it has nearly 700,000 people taking the courses globally. Mr. Feerick, an Ashoka Fellow, says the enterprise has turned the corner on profits in recent months. "I think we're proving there is a market for education online," he said recently over coffee in Berlin. He points to the United Nation's 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26, as justification for his business model: "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free..." He's a key figure in the open-source learning world and a rival of sorts to Salman Khan. Wired Academic editor Paul Glader recently interviewed Mr. Feerick:
WA - How did you first decide to become a social entrepreneur in the education space?
MF - I've always been interested in social enterprise. Part of that came from working with Chuck Feeney - an american philanthropist [and founder of the Duty Free Shoppers Group]. I worked closely with him as an assistant 20 years ago. He's been a huge funder of education. You can't spend too much time with him without feeling responsibility for the world and wanting to do something about it... The wonderful thing about education is that it really underpins progress on nearly everything - from climate change, to ecology to economics. It's all about people learning and teaching and improving. If I could make quality education free online, than I could be making my contribution to society.
Largely ignored during the past 30 years of efforts to reform K-12 schools, the higher education community is about to feel the glare of the public spotlight on its work -- and that attention is causing concern and skepticism.
In January 2011, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), an independent, nonprofi t group that advocates for reforms in teacher policies, said it would rate all teacher preparation programs and publish the results next year in U.S. News & World Report. The announcement has rankled many, even in the teacher reform movement, and highlights in sharp relief the divergent factors and strategies at play. Most school reform efforts have focused on schools, districts, and communities. But the move to assess teacher education and publicize the results puts higher education under a spotlight that it has rarely experienced.
Schools of education have responded to the news with alarm, describing the national review of teacher preparation as "flawed," "unnecessary," and "a violation of sound research." The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a national alliance of educator preparation programs, found in a recent survey that only 12% of its member institutions plan to participate willingly.
MILLIONS of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university--and accumulating huge debts in the process--will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job.
Their elders have always told them that education is the best way to equip themselves to thrive in a globalised world. Blue-collar workers will see their jobs offshored and automated, the familiar argument goes. School dropouts will have to cope with a life of cash-strapped insecurity. But the graduate elite will have the world at its feet. There is some evidence to support this view. A recent study from Georgetown University's Centre on Education and the Workforce argues that "obtaining a post-secondary credential is almost always worth it." Educational qualifications are tightly correlated with earnings: an American with a professional degree can expect to pocket $3.6m over a lifetime; one with merely a high-school diploma can expect only $1.3m. The gap between more- and less-educated earners may be widening. A study in 2002 found that someone with a bachelor's degree could expect to earn 75% more over a lifetime than someone with only a high-school diploma. Today the premium is even higher.
The Case For Change. We live in extraordinary times. The Internet began as a communications link to enable information sharing and collaboration between universities, research centers, and other institutions of higher learning. The World Wide Web began for many of the same reasons. Both are now a primary means of communication on the planet, with an unprecedented speed, reach, and multimodal capacity born of the computer's inherent property as a "universal machine," a machine that can simulate or model any other machine. These advances have come within an astonishingly short time frame. Interactive computing is about fifty years old. The concept of personal computing emerged a little less than forty years ago, at a time when notions of personal computers seemed laughable to many people. Within the last thirty years we have moved from slow desktop computers with dual floppy disk drives to powerful laptops to sophisticated smart phones that are essentially full-featured, always-connected pocket computers that also do telephony, audio-video recording and editing, and geo-location. Moreover, some believe that we will soon be carrying web servers around in our pockets, context-sensitive machines that can seamlessly link us to many types of devices in settings ranging from offices to trains, planes, and automobiles--and everywhere in between.
That's what President George W. Bush had in mind when he signed "No Child Left Behind" into law in 2001. Signaling his strong concerns about that legislation's shortcomings, it is also why Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced earlier this month that he would override the requirement under No Child Left Behind that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
Mr. Duncan said he is waiving the law's proficiency requirements for states that have adopted their own testing and accountability programs and are making other strides toward better schools. Without the waivers, he said, 80 percent of American schools would get failing grades under the law.
But No Child Left Behind has an even more pernicious effect - it is discouraging the teaching of science courses, particularly at the elementary level, at a time when America needs them the most. What is more central to our current economy, security and core values than science? Where would we be without Google and Apple, stealth technology, gene-based therapy, and high-tech prosthetics?
British science fiction author and futurist Arthur Clarke once said: "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars."
He was referring to competing human space programmes, but the quote may be seen to have some relevance to the debate over the proposed "national education" of Hong Kong school pupils.
To many the question is simply whether Beijing-style propaganda should be introduced through the public education system in what has remained largely a free city in the 14 years since the handover of sovereignty from Britain in 1997.
Conflict has erupted in the Legislative Council, in public forums and on the street, with one faction accusing the government of sacrificing personal liberty and the other saying it has sacrificed national unity by not introducing the subject earlier. A public consultation ended on Wednesday.
This fall more than 19 million students will enroll in the 4,000 or so degree-granting colleges and universities now operating in the United States. College enrollments have grown steadily year by year, more than doubling since 1970 and increasing by nearly one-third since the year 2000. More than 70 percent of high school graduates enroll in a community college, four-year residential college, or in one of the new online universities, though only about half of these students graduate within five years. The steady growth in enrollments is fed by the widespread belief (encouraged by college administrators) that a college degree is a requirement for entry into the world of middle-class employment. A college education is now deemed one of those prizes that, if good for a few, must therefore be good for everyone, even if no one in a position of academic authority can define what such an education is or should be. These conceptions are at the heart of the democratic revolution in higher education.
The beginning of a freshman's college experience is an exciting time. Dining halls! No bedtime! Taunting your RA! Exorbitantly expensive textbooks!
Wait, that last one is no fun at all. It's hard to make that first trip to the college bookstore for required texts without leaving with a bit of sticker shock. Why are textbooks so astonishingly expensive? Let's take a look.
Publishers would explain that textbooks are really expensive to make. Dropping over a hundred bucks for a textbook seems like an outrage when you're used to shelling out $10 or $25 for a novel, but textbooks aren't made on the same budget. Those hundreds of glossy colorful pages, complete with charts, graphs, and illustrations, cost more than putting black words on regular old white paper. The National Association of College Stores has said that roughly 33 cents of every textbook dollar goes to this sort of production cost, with another 11.8 cents of every dollar going to author royalties. Making a textbook isn't cheap.
There's certainly some validity to this explanation. Yes, those charts and diagrams are expensive to produce, and the relatively small print runs of textbooks keep publishers from enjoying the kind of economies of scale they get on a bestselling popular novel. Any economist who has a pulse (and probably some who don't) could poke holes in this argument pretty quickly, though.
Teachers at 3 small schools act early to approve longer school day By opting out of union pact, teachers will get bonuses and schools will get discretionary funds
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard landed a pre-Labor Day body blow in the fight over longer school days, getting three small CPS elementary schools on Friday to sign waivers opting out of their teachers union contract and extending their school day 90 minutes.
The teachers will be rewarded with bonuses and the schools with discretionary funds for agreeing to the changes before a new state law allows CPS to institute a longer day without union agreement.
The votes are "a historic step forward in bringing the kind of change we need in the classroom to help our children get the world class education they deserve," according to a written statement issued by CPS and attributed to Emanuel and Brizard.
Why should mathematicians be in- terested and involved in pre-K-12 mathematics education? What are the benefits of mathematicians working with school teachers and mathematics educators?1 I will answer these questions from my perspective of research math- ematician who became interested in mathematics education, wrote a book for prospective elemen- tary teachers, and taught sixth-grade math a few years ago. I think my answers may surprise you because they would have surprised me not long ago.
It's Interesting!
If you had told me twenty-five years ago, when I was in graduate school studying arithmetic geometry, that my work would shift toward improving pre-K- 12 mathematics education, I would have told you that you were crazy. Sure, I would have said, that is important work, it's probably hard, and somebody needs to do it, but it doesn't sound very interesting. Much to my surprise, this is the work I am now fully engaged in. It's hard, and I believe what I'm doing is useful to improving education, but most surprising of all is how interesting the work is.
Yes, I find it interesting to work on improving pre-K-12 math! And in retrospect, it's easy to see how it could be interesting. Math at every level is beautiful and has a wonderful mixture of intri- cacy, big truths, and surprising connections. Even preschool math is no exception.
In college, I pumped my fist at a rally against standardized testing. I'd never seen the exam I was protesting, but stood in solidarity with educators and labor organizers who felt the testing movement was an attack on teachers, particularly those working in poor public schools. My opposition grew when I became a teacher in the South Bronx, one of America's poorest communities. I wanted to uplift my students and resented the weight of a looming high-stakes test.
Besides, I thought good teachers should be left to their own devices. And, I was certain that I was a good teacher. For the most part, my students were punctual, respectful, and engaged. It wasn't until my second year in the classroom that I began questioning this assumption.
In a routine evaluation, my principal praised my organization, management, and facilitation, but posed the following question: "How do you know the kids are really getting it?" She urged me to develop more-rigorous assessments of student learning. Ego and uncertainty inspired me to measure the impact of my instruction. I thought I was effective, but I wanted proof.
The college class of 2011 just graduated into one of the worst job markets in recent history. Twenty-four percent of 2011 grads had a job offer in hand by graduation, compared with 51 percent of students graduating in the prerecession year of 2007. As these recent college grads move back in with their parents, and as student loan bills come due, many will wonder--was college worth the money?
The short answer is: probably. While studies of past recessions suggest that the unlucky Great Recession grads will do less well economically than those graduating during better times, they are still likely to earn more and have better job prospects than their peers who lack college credentials. The June 2011 unemployment rate for those with only a high school diploma, for example, was 10 percent, as opposed to 4.4 percent for those with a college degree. And earnings for college graduates were 66 percent higher in 2010 than for high school graduates. Moreover, the benefits of a college degree are not just financial: college graduates tend to lead healthier lives, have lower divorce rates, and have children who are better prepared for school. On average, a college degree is a worthwhile, if increasingly expensive, investment.
Your school days and years are strikingly longer than Chicago's -- a bit more than an hour more instructional time per day and 10 additional instructional days on the annual calendar, according to calculations by the Chicago Teachers Union.
That's about 250 extra hours in the classroom per year, which is roughly equivalent to three extra school years from first grade through 12th grade. That eye-opening number is figuring into the debate here about increasing classroom time for Chicago's students, as Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel has said he wants to do.
So, Houston, is all this extra schooling paying off?
The average ACT score for Houston's public high school students is 19.7, compared with 17.3 in Chicago, according to state report-card figures. From 2002 to 2009, your average eighth-grade reading scores inched up 4 percent while our scores were flat, and your average eighth-grade math scores rose 13 percent compared with our 9 percent increase, according to the National Association of Educational Progress.
On the other hand, Houston's four-year graduation rate is basically the same as Chicago's, depending on who's crunching the numbers. And 87 percent of Chicago's pupils are classified as "low income," compared with 79 percent of pupils in Houston labeled "economically disadvantaged."
Kaleem Caire knows what it is like to be a young black man growing up in Madison and going on to success. A troubled kid when he was a student at Madison West High School in the 1980s, he went on to become a nationally known Washington-based education advocate before returning in 2010 to head the Urban League of Greater Madison.
Kaleem Caire knows what it means to be a young black man growing up in Madison and going on to failure. He saw what happened to many childhood friends who ended up dead or in prison. He sees it now in the disturbing statistics on African-American education outcomes and unemployment.
And Kaleem Caire has an eye-catching idea he thinks will put more black and Latino youths on the path to success - enough to make a difference in the overall troubling picture of minority life in the state's second largest city.
The idea? An all-male charter school for sixth- through 12th-graders with longer days and longer school years than conventional schools, an International Baccalaureate program, and high expectations of students and teachers, including academic performance, the way they treat others, and the way they dress.
Kaleem Caire says there's a simple fix for concerns that a proposal for an all-male charter school in Madison would discriminate against girls.
"If it's a problem, we'll introduce a single-sex charter school for girls at the same time we start the boys' school, in the fall of 2012-2013," Caire said in an interview Friday.
Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, first began talking a year ago about creating a rigorous, prep-style public charter school for boys aimed at improving minority student performance. With its single-sex approach, International Baccalaureate curriculum, emphasis on parent involvement and expanded hours and days, Madison Preparatory Academy would not only be unique in the Madison district, but also unique in the state.
The fate of Madison Preparatory Academy will be a defining moment for our school climate.
Today begins school in Ripon and in most of Wisconsin. So parents breathe a sigh of relief that the kids are finally out of the house, until they realize that now they have to get their children to their various after-school activities.
This has been an unusual summer for one glaring reason, and yet it hasn't been unusual in the day-to-day things. All three kids went to summer school. All three played baseball (T-ball in Shaena's case). All three went to church camp, Shaena with me. (Which was not how I expected to spend her summer vacation, although those three days were far from summerlike.) All three visited their grandparents, and we got back reports that made us wonder whose children they had. We didn't go on vacation, in part for the aforementioned glaring reason, but I'm not sure the family is up to being locked inside a van for extended periods of time anyway. More than once, in fact, I've wondered how everyone would have gotten to everything had there been two working parents, particularly with the occasional added complication of orthodontist and veterinarian appointments.
This post is not going to promise dramatic learning gains from using a new technology. It's not one of those stories where at first a teacher was skeptical, but in the end, the classroom was like a sports movie where the technology scored the winning homerun. I feel skeptical when I read those stories. I don't doubt the success, but I wonder whether the learning gains, increased student interest/participation, or higher levels of reported satisfaction have less to do with the iPad, blog, twitter stream, or virtual environment and more to do with who is in the classroom.
Cathy Davidson recently described an idyllic experience of teaching a course in which she and the students shared in the discovery of new applications of technologies for learning. She describes the process of developing the course, the thrill when the students actually invited and facilitated a guest lecture, and the ways in which the students challenged her to really be collaborative, even in grading.
If we step back for a moment, though, and consider a class with Davidson and those same students without the new technologies, what would the learning experience be like? I imagine it would still be exceptional, because Davidson is an obviously engaged teacher and the students are obviously engaged learners. She employs teaching strategies that were effective before the new technologies she describes. In particular, she encourages students to take ownership of their learning experience and creates a flexible environment to support whatever direction they take. When developing assignments, Davidson incorporates research in motivation, particularly students' likelihood to put more effort into writing for an authentic audience. She also has deep experience with her topic and an obvious enthusiasm for both the content and the teaching. These factors are consistently linked to positive learning experiences in educational research. Additionally, the students clearly seem motivated to learn. She describes the class list as a diverse collection of disciplines, so the students appear to be choosing the course. They demonstrate active involvement with the assignments and content and even provide substantive feedback for future courses.
Do you know who is responsible for collecting fuel wood and water for families in East Africa?
Can you identify South America by looking at a diagram of its elevation changes in profile?
Those are sample questions found on the National Assessment of Educational Progress geography assessment test for 12th-grade students this year.
If you don't know the answers, you're not alone. Only 25 percent of American students passed the test.
It's a far cry from most people's perception of geography skills, such as identifying a river or mountain range on a map. It's one of the main reasons the subject doesn't get the same attention as others, such as math and English.
Instructors have to spell out every detail for today's students, and do some of their thinking for them.
When I was an undergraduate at UCLA in 1972, I was enrolled in four classes. On the first day of the term, each instructor went through the ritual of introducing the course and handing out the syllabus, if there was a syllabus. In the freshman composition course, taught by a man who later distinguished himself as a James Joyce scholar, I remember no syllabus at all, only the comment that we would be writing a number of formal papers.
In Cultural Anthropology there was a syllabus--a single mimeographed sheet with a few dates on it (exams, deadlines for papers) and the mandatory bibliography. In first-term German, as in freshman composition, the teacher issued no syllabus. The chapters of the primer were syllabus enough. For my fourth course, a survey of ancient civilizations, the textbook's table of contents served as the syllabus.
Admission to UCLA in the mid-twentieth century was still rigorous and exclusive; our preceptors rightly took for granted that students understood that the ten weeks of the term would correspond to a structure. Students would expect regular quizzes, that they would have to submit formal essays at the midterm and at the end of the quarter, and that they would have to keep up with the reading.
In the course of a column blasting media entrepreneur Steven Brill's new book on the school reform movement, New York Times reporter Michael Winerip inadvertently sets out his economic assumptions. A revelation of an entire world view does not get any more crystalline than this. (Regarding education, Winerip almost equally tellingly criticises Brill for not showing enough respect to teachers and teachers unions.)
Winerip lists several of Brill's sources -- the "millionaires and billionaires who attack the unions and steered the Democratic Party to their cause" -- then adds:
Toby Young is not nervous about publicity. I first met him at last year's Conservative party conference in Birmingham. The journalist and author approached me in a bar, pretended to punch me in the stomach several times, then looked up and asked: "Why haven't you written about my school yet?"
Young, 47, is chairman of the governors at the West London Free School, a new secondary school in Hammersmith, which will welcome its first pupils (120 children aged 11) next month. It is a high-profile project that has made Young a regular participant in debates about education in Britain.
The school is one of the first wave of "free schools", funded by the state but founded by private groups such as churches or community groups (in Young's case, local parents), intended to bring new providers into the education system.
What makes the West London Free School particularly unusual is the celebrity of its chairman. Young first attracted attention in the early 1990s as the bumptious co-founder and editor of the Modern Review magazine before moving to the US. In New York he worked as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine where he was not a success and fell out with Graydon Carter, its editor, though subsequently Young managed to convert the experience into a successful book, play and film, all called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Before classes began at Spring Creek School near Decker, Mont., community volunteers cut back the grass, cleared tumbleweeds and made sure there were no rattlesnakes around the playground. Last week, the one-room schoolhouse opened for its six K-5 students.
"We all pitch in out here to support the school," says Loren Noll, a neighbor who showed up to dig weeds. Even though his 4-year-old daughter isn't old enough to attend, Mr. Noll volunteers as chairman of the school board.
In the U.S., 237 public schools had only one teacher, according to 2009 federal data, down from 463 in 1999. Most are located in remote areas. And while conditions are far from the rough-hewn rooms of "Little House on the Prairie," such schools often lack the amenities typically associated with high-quality schooling, such as computer labs, libraries, sports, art, music, nurses and psychologists.
In Canada the rise of the incubator choices is quite noticeable. The success of the Y-Combinator (YC) model is hard to ignore, it seems to be the accepted way to grow young tech companies at the moment. However, it isn't clear if the model works anywhere but YC and TechStars, these programs cost a lot of money to run so does the math hold up for everyone?
How many companies make it a big enough exit (assuming you need a $30 million exit per incubator) and in what time frame? In Canada there is a trend that shows some crazy growth in exits but how many are in that 'big enough' range or more that haven't been around for 5-10 years or more? I think one maybe two. It isn't just Canada though, how many exists are there in a year for any tech startup anywhere? Likely not enough to sustain the current number of incubators globally.
Every child deserves a great teacher. New Jersey -- which ranks among the top states in the nation in student achievement -- is making great strides in delivering on that promise.
Research shows that the effectiveness of the teacher in front of the classroom is the most important in-school factor affecting student learning, and we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our teachers for our children's success.
Precisely because teaching is an honored craft, we must recognize and respect effective educators, support teachers in their efforts to continue to develop their skills and ensure that those comparatively few individuals who are unable to improve no longer remain in the classroom.
The former president of the teachers union in the nation's second largest school district is moving on to a new job that might surprise many: He is launching a charter school organization after often criticizing such schools in his previous role.
If approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District, the schools are planned to open next year, possibly as soon as February or in September at the latest, with campuses in South Los Angeles, he said.
The model he wants to create will be a radical departure from both traditional and charter schools, promised Duffy. "We want to create a system that's not just good for kids and fair to teachers, but that's revolutionary," he said.
Being an artist seems to require a magnification of ego, but being a craftsperson involves its diminution.
Art and craft might be in their origins indistinguishable - the Greek word techne means art, and craft, and technique - but artists and craftspeople, at least in the past 100 years or so, have developed very different ways of behaving. The cartoon series Young British Artists in the satirical magazine Private Eye, featuring a group of foul-mouthed, self-obsessed and self-promoting yahoos, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called Young British Craftspeople.
For those who want to promote craft, I was thinking as I attended two craft-oriented events in recent weeks, this presents both an opportunity and a problem. Craftspeople are just too modest and self-effacing and even nice to be obvious subjects for the contemporary media circus, with its taste for extravagant and self-destructive lifestyles. Craftspeople are somehow less likely to produce scores of illegitimate children, in the manner of Lucian Freud, or to die in unexplained circumstances at 27, in the manner of Amy Winehouse, than artists. You might think that was a salutary thing but try telling that to a tabloid newspaper editor.
Let me speak for all public school educators when I say unequivocally: We will. We say send us your poor, send us your homeless, the children of your afflicted and addicted. Send us your kids who don't speak English. Send us you special-needs children, we will not turn them away.
But I tell you today, public school teacher, you will fail to take the shattered children of poverty and turn them into the polished products of the private schools. You will be unacceptable, public school teacher. And I say that is your badge of honor. I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children they will not educate.
Day after day I take children broken by the poverty our leaders are afraid to confront and I glue their pieces back together. And at the end of my life you can say those children were better for passing through my sphere of influence. I am unacceptable and proud of it.
More heat on Hong Kong national education: Controversial plan suffers a fresh blow with a pro-government teachers' body raising objections and calling for a trial scheme first
The government faces mounting pressure to scale back its controversial plan to introduce national education to all schools within two years. Many teachers have raised objections during the four-month public consultation which ends today.
The plan to require all primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong to include national education as a study subject has triggered heated debate in the city. It is one of the key political objectives for Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, who step downs as chief executive next year.
For years, the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong have been critical of schools' lack of efforts to instil a sense of national identity in students, and feared it would alienate them from the rest of the country. The opposition worried compulsory national education would be used to rationalise autocratic rules on the mainland and become a "brain-washing" tool.
The Madison School District is on pace to add 300 new teachers this year -- the most in at least 19 years.
Already this year, the district has hired 260 new classroom leaders, largely a response to a wave of teacher retirements prompted by a new law curtailing collective bargaining by public employees. Another 40 or so could be added throughout September.
For the thousands of students heading back to school Thursday, the turnover means both the loss of institutional memory and the potential for fresh ideas to reshape the classroom experience, Madison principals say.
"You lose a lot of knowledge around education that's critical to helping kids be successful," said Bruce Dahmen, principal at Memorial High School, which hired about 30 new teachers, including 12 first-timers. "With that change comes new opportunities. (New teachers) sometimes bring a different energy."
The Obama administration recently attempted a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry by unleashing Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas' record on education. Duncan's arguments have generated a lot of useful discussion across the web, but Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, throws some rudimentary data analysis into the picture.
If you look at Texas' simple average test scores in reading and math for fourth and eighth grade students, they're about average. But Texas' schools serve a population with several challenges, in particular many low-income and Spanish speaking children.
An arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that mediates racial tension in communities is intervening in the debate over the achievement of racial minorities in the Madison School District.
The Justice Department's Community Relations Service won't discuss its role.
But in an email announcement this week, the Urban League of Greater Madison said DOJ this summer "raised concerns about academic achievement disparities among students of color in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) to the District's administration."
DOJ officials will participate in a meeting Wednesday called by the Urban League to discuss minority achievement, graduation rates and expulsion rates in the Madison district, according to Urban League President Kaleem Caire.
Ariana Taylor thought she was ready for college after taking Advanced Placement physics and English at her Chicago public high school and graduating with a 3.2 GPA.
Instead, at Illinois State University, she was overwhelmed by her course load and the demands of college. Her GPA freshman year dropped to 2.7 -- and that was significantly better than other graduates from Morgan Park High School, who averaged a 1.75 at Illinois State.
"It was really a big culture shock," said Taylor, 20, now a junior who has started a mentorship program for incoming freshmen. "I had no idea what it would be like."
A Tribune analysis of data available to Illinois citizens for the first time raises fundamental questions about how well the state's public high schools are preparing their students for college. The data show these students struggle to get a B average as freshmen at the state's universities and community colleges, even after leaving top-performing high schools with good grades. In fact, public school graduates at 10 of the state's 11 four-year universities averaged less than a 3.0 GPA their freshman year.
First-year performance at Illinois public universities and colleges
The newly-released High School-to-College Success Report shows how Illinois public school graduates fared when they became freshmen at the state's universities and community colleges. The ACT company tracked more than 90,000 students who graduated from public high schools between 2006 and 2008, and then enrolled full-time at an Illinois university or community college that fall. The data do not include students who went to a private college or out-of-state. For each high school, families can look up average high school GPAs and grade point averages earned at each public university and community college that students attended.
The fifth meeting of the Read to Lead task force was held on August 25, 2011, at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Governor Walker was delayed, so State Superintendent Tony Evers opened the meeting. The main topic of discussion was accountability for reading outcomes, including the strategy of mandatory grade retention. Troy Couillard from DPI also presented an overview of reading reform in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Accountability
Superintendent Evers said that Wisconsin will seek a waiver from the No Child Left Behind proficiency requirements by instituting a new system of accountability. His Educator Effectiveness and Accountability Design teams are working on this, with the goal of a new accountability system being in place by late 2011.
Accountability at the educator level:
The concept of using student achievement or growth data in teacher and principal evaluations is not without controversy, but Wisconsin is including student data in its evaluation model, keeping in mind fairness and validity. The current thought is to base 50% of the educator evaluation on qualitative considerations, using the Danielson Frameworkhttp://www.danielsongroup.org ("promoting professional learning through self assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversations"), and 50% on student data, including multiple measures of performance. 10% of the student data portion of the evaluation (5% of the total evaluation) would be based on whole-school performance. This 5% would be based on a proficiency standard as opposed to a value-added measurement. The 5% is thought to be small enough that it will not affect an individual teacher adversely, but large enough to send a message that all teachers need to work together to raise achievement in a school. The task force was asked if it could endorse whole-school performance as part of teacher evaluation. The task force members seemed to have some support for that notion, especially at the principal level, but had some reservations at the level of the individual teacher.
Kathy Champeau was concerned that some schools do not have the resources to serve some children. She also felt it might not be fair to teachers, as they have no control over other teachers in the school or the principal.
Steve Dykstra said it is important to make sure any value-added system is designed to be fair.
Rachel Lander felt it would be better to use value-added data for whole-school performance rather than a proficiency standard, but supported the importance of schoolwide standards.
Rep. Steve Kestell supported the 5% requirement, and questioned what the qualitative half of the evaluation would be based on. He felt perhaps there could be some schoolwide standards to be met in that part of the evaluation, also.
Tony Evers responded that the Danielson Framework was research-based observations, and that the evaluators would need to be highly trained and consistent in their evaluations.
Tony Pedriana had questions about the type of research on which the Danielson Framework is based.
Evers said he would provide further information to the task force.
Mara Brown said she cannot control what the teacher down the hall does, and that the 5% should apply only to principals.
Linda Pils agreed with the 5%, but felt principals need to be watching and guiding new teachers. She agreed with Dykstra's comments on measuring growth.
Sen. Luther Olsen was concerned that the 5% portion of a teacher's evaluation may be the part that tips the balance on job retention for an individual, yet that individual has no control over whole-school performance. He understood the principle of getting everyone involved and committed to a goal, but was concerned with possible consequences.
Mandatory Retention:
The task force was asked to consider whether Wisconsin should implement a mandatory retention policy. If so, what would it look like, and if not, what can be done to make sure students are reading at grade level?
After a guest presentation and discussion, the consensus of the task force was that Wisconsin should not have mandatory retention. Reasons cited were negative effects on later achievement, graduation, self esteem, and psychological well-being. Third grade was felt to be far too late to start intervention, and there needs to be more emphasis on developing teacher expertise and focusing on the responsibility of teachers, principals, and higher education as opposed to threatening the students with retention. Retention without changing the curriculum for the student the following year is pointless.
Dr. Elaine Allensworth, a director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, joined the task force by telephone to summarize the outcomes of a mandatory retention project in Chicago. Students more than 1 year below the cut-off level on certain tested skills were retained unless they passed the test after a summer bridge program. Students identified as at-risk were given after-school tutoring during the year. Retention was thought to have three primary mechanisms that would affect student performance: motivation for students, families, and teachers to work harder, supplemental instruction after school and during the summer, and an additional year in the grade for failing students. All students in the school could be affected by the motivation and the supplemental instruction, but only the retained students by the extra year of instruction. The study found that the threat of retention worked as a positive motivator for teachers, parents, and some older students. However, there were also negatives in terms of higher-achieving students receiving less attention, more time on test preparation, and an instructional shift to focus on tested skills. The supplemental instruction, especially the summer bridge program, was the biggest positive of the retention project. There was high participation, increased personal attention, and higher-quality instruction. Retention itself had more negative effects than positive. Academic gains were either non-existent or rapidly-disappearing. Multiple year retentions resulted in a problematic mix of ages in classrooms, students unable to finish high school by age 18, and a negative overall attitude toward school.
Dykstra said it appeared that the impetus to do things differently because of the threat of retention had some benefit, but the actual retention had either no effect or a negative effect. He wondered if there was some way to provide the motivation without retention.
Allensworth agreed that the challenge was to provide a motivation without having a threat.
Pils asked if third graders could even understand the threat of retention.
Allensworth replied that they understood if teachers helped them. She also said that some schools with low-quality instruction had no way to improve student learning even with the threat of retention.
Allensworth replied that teaching the skills on the test was productive, but not the excessive time that was spent on test-taking strategies. She also said the tendency to teach more narrowly could cause problems later in high school where students needed to be able to participate in broader learning.
Marcia Henry inquired about students who returned to their old rate of learning when they returned to the regular classroom after successfully completing the summer bridge.
Allensworth replied that the summer program used higher quality curriculum and teachers, there was more time provided with students, and the students were more highly motivated.
Dykstra asked if it was possible to determine how much of the summer gain was due to student motivation, and how much due to teachers or parents.
Allensworth said those factors could not be pulled apart.
Champeau questioned whether the summer bridge program taught to the test.
Allensworth replied that it taught in a good way to the skills that the test assessed.
Brown asked if intervention was provided for the first time in third grade.
Allensworth replied that some schools began providing intervention and retaining in first or second grade.
Dykstra asked if the project created a situation where a majority of the school's resources were concentrated in third grade, leaving other grades short.
Allensworth said they didn't look at that, though some schools appeared to put their better teachers at certain grades.
Dykstra thought it was the wrong approach to tie services and supports to a specific grade rather than a specific student.
Are some types of consequences necessary to achieve the urgency and intensity necessary for performance improvement? Should there be mandatory summer school or other motivators? The task force did not seem to arrive at a consensus on this.
Lander said schools need the resources to do early intervention, plus information on what should be done in early intervention, and this is not currently the case in Wisconsin.
Pils questioned where teachers would find the time to provide intervention. She liked the idea of after-school and summer programs as well as reading the classics to kids. Providing a model of best instruction is important for teachers who don't have that background.
Mary Read commented on Bill Gates' experience with spending a lot of money for minimal results, and the conclusion that money needs to go into teacher training and proven programs such as the Kipp schools or into a national core curriculum.
Dykstra noted that everyone agrees that teacher training is essential, but there is disagreement as to curriculum and training content. His experience is that teachers are generally unable to pinpoint what is going wrong with a student's reading. We must understand how poor and widespread current teacher training is, apologize to teachers, and then fix the problem, but not at teachers' expense.
The facilitators asked what the policy should be. Is there an alternative to using retention? Should teacher re-training be mandatory for those who need the support?
Evers said that a school-by-school response does not work. The reforms in Milwaukee may have some relevance.
Olsen suggested that there are some reading programs that have been proven successful. If a school is not successful, perhaps they should be required to choose from a list of approved instructional methods and assessment tools, show their results, and monitor program fidelity. He feels we have a great resource in successful teachers in Wisconsin and other states, and the biggest issue is agreeing on programs that work for intervention and doing it right the first time.
Kestell said some major problems are teachers with high numbers of failing students, poor teacher preparation, the quality of early childhood education, and over-funding of 4K programs without a mandate on how that money is used. There has been some poor decision-making, and the kids are not responsible for that. We must somehow hold schools, school board, and individual educators accountable.
Champeau said teachers have no control over how money is spent. This accountability must be at the school and district level. More resources need to be available to some schools depending on the needs of their student population.
Lander: We must provide the necessary resources to identified schools.
Dykstra: We must develop an excellent system of value-added data so we can determine which schools are actually doing well. Right now we have no way of knowing. High-performing schools may actually be under-performing given their student demographics; projected student growth will not be the same in high and low performing schools.
Pedriana: We have long known how to teach even the most at-risk readers with evidence-based instruction. The truth is that much of our teacher training and classroom instruction is not evidence-based. We need the collective will to identify the evidence base on which we will base our choices, and then apply it consistently across the state. The task force has not yet taken on this critical question.
Pils: In her experience, she feels Wisconsin teachers are among the best in the country. There are some gaps we need to close.
Pedriana: Saying how good we are does not help the kids who are struggling.
Pils: We need to have our best teachers in the inner city, and teachers should not need to purchase their own supplies. We have to be careful with a limited list of approved programs. This may lead to ethics violations.
Pedriana: Referring to Pils' mention of Wisconsin's high graduation rates in a previous meeting, what does our poor performance on the NAEP reading test say about our graduation standards?
Michael Brickman (Governor's aide): There is evidence of problems when you do retention, and evidence of problems when you do nothing. We can't reduce the failing readers to zero using task force recommendations, so what should we do with students who leave 3rd grade not reading anywhere near grade level? Should we have mandatory summer school?
Henry: Response to Intervention (RTI) is a perfect model for intervening early in an appropriate way. A summer bridge program is excellent if it has the right focus. We must think more realistically about the budget we will require to do this intervention.
Olsen: If we do early intervention, we should have a very small number of kids who are still behind in 3rd grade. Are we teaching the right, most efficient way? We spend a lot of money on K-12 education in Wisconsin, but we may need to set priorities in reading. There is enough money to do it. Reading should be our mission at each grade level.
Facilitator: What will be the "stick" to make people provide the best instruction?
Dykstra: Accountability needs to start at the top in the state's education system. When the same people continue to make the same mistakes, yet there are no consequences, we need to let some people go. That is what they did in Massachusetts and Florida: start with two or three people in whom you have great confidence, and build from there.
Facilitator: Is there consensus on mandatory summer school for failing students?
Michele Erickson: Summer school is OK if the right resources are available for curriculum and teachers.
Kestell: All grades 4K - 3 are gateway grades. They are all important.
Champeau: Summer school is a good idea, but we would need to solve transportation issues.
Dykstra: We should open up the concept of summer school beyond public schools to any agency that offers quality instruction using highly qualified instructors from outside the educational establishment.
Lander: Supports Dykstra's idea. You can't lay summer instruction on schools that can hardly educate during the school year.
Brown: Could support summer school in addition to, but not in place of, early intervention during the school year.
Erickson: Look at the school year first when allocating resources. Summer school is a hard sell to families.
Pedriana: Agrees with Olsen that we probably have sufficient funds for the school year, but we need to spend it more wisely. We cannot expect districts to make the commitment to extra instruction if there is no accountability at the top (including institutions of higher education). We need to resolve the issue of what knowledge and content standards will be taught before we address summer school or other issues.
Milwaukee Public Schools' tiered RTI system was presented by DPI's Troy Couillard as an example of an accountability system. MPS chose a new core reading program for 2010-11 after submitting its research base to DPI. Teachers were provided with some in-service training, and there are some site checks for fidelity of implementation. Tier 2 interventions will begin in 2011-12, and Tier 3 interventions in 2012-13. He felt that the pace of these changes, plus development of a data accountability system, student screening with MAP and other testing, progress monitoring, and professional development, has MPS moving much faster than most districts around the county on implementing RTI. DPI embedded RTI in the district's Comprehensive Literacy Plan. DPI is pushing interventions that are listed on the National RTI site, but teachers are allowed to submit research for things they are using to see if those tools might be used.
Pils: Kids in MPS are already struggling. Reading First would suggest that they have 120 minuets of reading a day instead of the 90 minutes provided in the MPS plan.
Couillard: Tier 2 intervention for struggling students will add onto the 90 minutes of core instruction.
Olsen: Can this system work statewide without DPI monitoring all the districts?
Couillard: Districts are trained to monitor their own programs.
Pils: Veteran schools with proven strategies could be paired with struggling schools as mentors and models.
Pedriana: We have no way of knowing what proven strategies are unless we discuss what scientific evidence says works in reading. The task force must grapple with this question.
Brickman: Read to Lead task force needs to start with larger questions and then move to finer grain; this task force may not be able to do everything.
Pedriana: Is there anything more important for this task force to do than to decide what evidence-based reading instruction is?
Brickman: Task force members may submit suggestions for issues to discuss at the final meeting in September. Tony could submit some sample language on "evidence-based instruction" as a starting point for discussion.
Henry: The worst schools should be required to at least have specific guidelines, whether it is a legislative or DPI issue. Teacher retraining (not a 1-day workshop) is a necessity. Teachers are unprepared to teach.
Olsen: Wisconsin has always been a local control state, but one of the outcomes of the task force may be that we have a method for identifying schools that are not doing well, and then intervene with a plan. The state is ultimately responsible for K-12 education. Districts should take the state blueprint or come up with their own for approval by the state.
Erickson: Can we define what will work so districts can just do it?
Evers: MPS experience shows there is a process that works, and districts can do their own monitoring.
Dykstra: Sees value in making a list of things that districts are not allowed to do in reading instruction; also value in making a list of recommended programs based on alignment with the convergence of the science of reading research. That list would not be closed, but it should not include programs based on individual, publisher-funded studies that do not align with the convergence of the science. This could be of benefit to all districts. Even those doing relatively well could be doing better. Right now there is no list, and no learning targets. The MPS plan contains the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contain errors. DPI needs to correct that information and distribute it right now. That would be a good example of accountability at the state level.
Couillard: The new statewide data collection system will help districts monitor their own data.
Champeau: School needs change depending on demographics. The goal should be to build decision-making capacity at the local level, not dictation from outside. We should be talking more about people than programs. Have MPS teachers been doing a better job? What will they do if their program goes away? We need to work on the underlying expertise and knowledge base.
Facilitator: There appears to be agreement that the state can intervene in failing districts.
Lander: We might have some consensus as to what teachers need to know, and then go into schools to see if they know it. If not, we need to teach them.
Pedriana: What is so bad about providing a program, with training, of course? It would help people.
Facilitator: There is consensus around training of teachers.
Dykstra: Some of the distinction between training and programs is artificial. You need both.
Other things the state could require: weighting of reading in evaluation systems, grading of schools etc.
Dykstra: If giving schools grades, they should get separate grades for how they do in teaching separate content areas. In addition, everything should be reported in the best value-added system we can create, because it's the only way to know if you're doing a good job.
Pils: Doesn't like grading of schools. She has a whole folder on cheating in districts that have grading of schools and high stakes tests.
Evers: Do we just want to measure what schools are doing, or do we want to use it to leverage change?
Erickson: Wisconsin has gone from 3rd to 30th on the NAEP, so of course we should be seeking change.
Walker: The idea is not to pick on failing schools, but to help them. We must be able to deploy the resources to the things that work in accordance with science and research to teach reading right.
Dykstra: We should seek small kernels of detailed information about which teachers consistently produce better results in a given type of school for a given type of student. There is a problem with reliability when using MAP data at an individual student level.
Supt. Evers talked about the new state accountability system as being a better alternative to no Child Left Behind. Governor Walker said the state is not just doing this as an alternative to NCLB, but in response to comments from business that our graduates are not well-prepared. Parents want to know what all schools are doing.
Olsen: We need a system to monitor reading in Wisconsin before we get into big trouble. Our changing population is leading us to discover challenges that other states have dealt with for years.
Kestell: The accountability design team is an excellent opportunity to discuss priorities in education; a time to set aside personal agendas and look for solutions that work.
Next Meeting/Status of Report
Michael Brickman will try to send out a draft of a report the week of August 29 with his best interpretation of task force consensus items. The final meeting will be Sept. 27, perhaps in Madison, Eau Claire, or Wausau. Some task force issues will need to be passed on to other task forces in the future.
After weeks of public feuding over teacher salaries and longer school days, Chicago Public Schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard and the teachers union came together Tuesday to embrace a more rigorous curriculum for CPS students beginning the 2012-13 school year.
At a luncheon with civic leaders from the City Club of Chicago, Brizard announced plans to implement the Common Core State Standards curriculum, a national initiative to improve student performance in key subjects such as math and reading by favoring comprehension and analysis over rote memorization.
What started as a student demonstration has turned into the largest protest against the Chilean government since the return of democracy two decades ago, and has harmed the popularity of the current conservative government.
For more than three months, Chilean high school and university students have staged kiss-a-thons, hunger strikes, fake suicides and massive marches to demand the government provide access to free, quality education.
The Chilean Confederation of Students, a group that leads the student movement, agreed to meet with President Sebastian Pinera on Saturday, following his call for dialogue last week.
The private nonprofit university is little known nationally, not selective, and depends on tuition. It sits in a state whose population of public high-school graduates is projected to decline for years.
But rather than limping along, this obscure institution is becoming a regional powerhouse--online.
With 7,000 online students, the university has grown into the second-largest online education provider in college-saturated New England, aiming to blow the University of Massachusetts out of the top spot. It recently began testing TV advertisements in national markets like Milwaukee and Oklahoma City, too, sensing that scandals tarring for-profit colleges have opened an opportunity for nonprofit competitors.
The grass isn't greener and the teachers aren't really keener at some other school.
If you are the parent of an elementary-age school kid, I'm going to offer you some unsolicited advice: the best school for your child is most likely your neighbourhood school.
Not the school across the city with the cool-sounding special program.
Not the school many blocks away where the provincial tests scores for Grade 3 and Grade 6 are higher than those in your own school.
No, the best choice is usually the community school, the one within walking distance, the school of your neighbours and their children, who will soon be your acquaintances and maybe even your very good friends, but only if your children attend that neighbourhood school.
An analysis of core education requirements at 1,007 colleges found that three-fifths of those schools require three or fewer of seven basic subjects, such as science, math and foreign language.
This is the third annual report on general education by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, titled What Will They Learn? The group has set out to illustrate the failings of America's colleges in requiring students to learn essential subjects over the course of their education.
Most colleges allow students to study pretty much what they please. Schools make some effort to guide course choices through a system of "distribution requirements," which typically state that students must take a certain number of classes in each of several broad areas of study.
But the general education system is deeply flawed, as higher education leaders openly admit. Very few schools come close to requiring that students learn any particular topic or work, for political reasons. Colleges are made up of competing academic departments and no department wants to be left off any list of "required" study.
III. The Sleeper Issue: A Collective Bargaining Agreement that Cannot Be Amended Even a Teeny, Tiny Bit
If this weren't enough, there seems to be another legal issue. This is one that has not attracted much attention, but it seems to me to be a serious problem, at least over the short term.
The school district and Madison Teachers Inc (MTI) have a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs terms and conditions of employment for teachers and other represented staff. The plans for Madison Prep calls for working conditions and terms of employment for the school's teachers that differ in significant ways from what the CBA calls for. For example, Madison Prep plans to offer an extended school day and school year and plans to structure its pay for teachers in a different way.
In more normal times, it would be theoretically possible for the school district and MTI to enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) by which the parties agree to modify the terms of the CBA in some regards in order to accommodate Madison Prep's plans.
Such gloom must be placed in context. Doubts about the humanities have been around at least since Aristophanes wrote The Clouds. The playwright claimed that if a man engaged in the "new" Socratic form of teaching and questioning, he could wind up with big genitals (apparently seen as a negative side effect) due to a loss of self-control. But the Socratic humanities survived, in spite of the execution of their founder, through the schools of his intellectual son and grandson -- the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle.
I don't think that the humanities are really in a crisis, though perhaps they have a chronic illness. Bachelor's degrees in the humanities have held relatively steady since 1994 at roughly 12-13 percent of all majors. Such figures demonstrate that the health of the humanities is not robust, as measured in terms of student preferences. In contrast, the number of undergraduate business majors is steadily and constantly increasing.
The Indiana Department of Education released a new report card this week on all Hoosier public schools that boils school improvement on test scores and other federal academic standards into letter grades of A to F.
The new grading system received mixed review from educators, who wonder whether the new accountability system provides an accurate snapshot of their performance.
"The grading system as far as I'm concerned is about politics," said Mary Mathes, a retired teacher who is a board member in the South Harrison school district.
Delivering courses in cyberclassrooms has gained broad acceptance among top college leaders, but the general public is far less convinced of online education's quality, according to new survey data released this week by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle.
Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom's. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching. The presidents' survey included leaders of two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and was conducted online. The public survey was conducted by telephone.
The gauge of differing perceptions comes at a critical moment for online education. Just 10 years ago, few colleges took teaching onto the Internet, and skepticism about the practice was the norm among professors and university leaders.
Drawn by the desire to stay on the road and lower auto insurance costs, a growing number of older Americans are signing up for driving school. But some of the fastest-growing classes aren't behind the wheel. They're behind a keyboard.
That's right: Adults can now take driver's ed without ever sitting in a car labeled "student driver" or making a single three-point turn. Instead, online classes -- typically four to eight hours in total screen time -- have become the fastest way for adults to brush up before a driving test or secure a discount on auto insurance. The AARP's online driver safety course had more than 60,000 students nationwide in 2010, up 30% from a year earlier. By July of this year, another 40,000 had already enrolled. Participation in the American Automobile Association's national online senior driving course has also increased an average of 20% per year over the last three years. "There's been an increasing level of interest from seniors," says Wade Mezey, president of Professional Driving Associates, which runs an online defensive driving course.
But when it comes to actually being a better driver, experts and driving instructors say online courses might not help. "Research shows that classroom programs don't really impact positively on driving performance," says Normand Teasdale, a professor at the University Laval in Quebec, who studies driving patterns among seniors. "You need to practice and get feedback over and over again to improve performance."
If you saw Waiting for "Superman," Steven Brill's tale in Class Warfare will be familiar. The founder of Court TV offers another polemic against teacher unions and a paean to self-styled "education reformers." But even for those who follow education policy, he offers an eye-opening read that should not be missed. Where the movie evoked valiant underdogs waging an uphill battle against an ossified behemoth, Brill's briskly written book exposes what critics of the reformers have long suspected but could never before prove: just how insular, coordinated, well-connected, and well-financed the reformers are. Class Warfare reveals their single-minded efforts to suppress any evidence that might challenge their mission to undermine the esteem in which most Americans held their public schools and teachers. These crusaders now are the establishment, as arrogant as any that preceded them.
Brill's heroes make a high-profile gallery. They are public-school critics like former New York and Washington, D.C. schools chancellors Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. They also include charter school operators David Levin (KIPP) and Eva Moskowitz (Harlem Success Academies), as well as alternative teacher and principal recruiters Wendy Kopp (Teach for America) and Jon Schnur (New Leaders for New Schools). Their ranks boast billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama himself. And they don't lack for savvy, richly endowed representation. Democrats for Education Reform, a lobbying, political action, and communications campaign rolled into one, has brought them all together. Lavishly supported by the newfound wealth of young Wall Street hedge fund managers answerable to no one, DFER's troops have been working overtime to radically transform American public education.
It's rare to hear the word "education" from Tennessee's leaders without "reform" coming after it.
Three years ago, the state began rewriting its curriculum and rethinking the way it dealt with educators. The resulting changes won Tennessee a half-billion-dollar federal grant to attempt to move students from among the lowest-achieving in the nation to the top of the pack.
The state is birthing charter schools at a brisk pace, from none seven years ago to 40 today and, some estimate, up to 20 per year moving forward.
Teachers will be judged routinely on their classroom performance and their students' test scores. Individual districts are rolling out their own reforms, such as Williamson County's invitation for students to bring their own technology and Metro Nashville's dividing of high school students into specific areas of study called academies.
Earlier this year, I shared my disappointment with Fast Company's compilation of "13 Radical Ideas for Spending $100 Million to Overhaul Schools" The problem was that these ideas really just weren't all that radical. Even Will Richardson, who was featured in the article, commented on my blog that he agreed (see comment here). Richardson did feature a radical idea in his own blog a few years back in his post, One Town's Reform...Close the Schools. The article explains how a UK community shut down its 11 schools replacing them with dynamic learning centers that looked very different than traditional compulsory schools. According to their site, they are still going strong.
The learning center idea has certainly taken off as more and more people are realizing that the compulsory, oppressive, disconnected, test-driven schools that exist today are not the best option when it comes to preparing children for success in the world.
The 2010 elections had many obvious effects, but one of the lesser-known is that they revived the school-choice movement in a big way. Although many education writers had assumed the movement was dead, there have been far more efforts to pass school-choice programs this year than ever and, more importantly, the success rate has gone up too.
This reflects the political nature of school choice, which has in modern times been promoted primarily by Republicans. Increasingly, however, Democrats, particularly minority Democrats, have begun bucking the wishes of the national teachers unions, which oppose school choice in any form.
School choice has even broken into the national consciousness with the success of such documentaries as "The Lottery" and "Waiting for 'Superman.'" These focused on parents' efforts to get their children into charter schools, which are public schools operated independently of their local school districts--and, not coincidentally, without teacher union involvement.
From the perspective of status quo supporters, charter schools are the least threatening form of school choice, because they remain public schools, meaning they cannot charge tuition and their admissions practices typically are controlled by lottery. This year has seen dramatic increases in interest in charter schools, as an alternative to regular public schools. Even the Obama administration got into the act, by making the removal of existing caps on the number of charter schools a component of states' applications for federal "Race to the Top" funds.
Fifteen years ago, Wisconsin fourth-graders placed third in the country in state rankings of reading ability known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By 2009, our fourth-graders' scores plunged to 30th, with a third of the students reading below basic levels. The scores of minority youth were even bleaker, with 65% of African-American and 50% of Hispanic students scoring in the below-basic range.
As a member of Gov. Scott Walker's blue ribbon reading task force, I am one of 14 people charged with reversing that drop. And, as a 50-year veteran educator, I have a partial solution. Let me spell it out for you: We need better teacher preparation.
How many of you remember your very best teachers? I remember Miss Hickey at Lincoln School and Miss Brauer at Folwell School in Rochester, Minn. They taught me to read.
I travel throughout the country consulting and providing staff development for school districts and literacy organizations. I've met thousands of dedicated teachers who tell me they are unprepared to teach struggling readers.
This situation is not the teachers' fault. Some teachers in Wisconsin had only one course in reading instruction. Most were never exposed to the latest research regarding early reading acquisition and instruction. In contrast, several states require three or four classes in courses that contain the latest in science-based reading instruction.
Just a day after a New York court found that value-added ratings for public school teachers should be revealed and reported publicly -- something that Joel Klein's DOE succeeded in encouraging the press corps to ask for -- TFA founder Wendy Kopp shot back at the notion that her organization should reveal the value-added ratings for its teachers -- and in particular the charge of being "hilariously hypocritical" in Steve Brill's book. Brill claimed that, because it promotes accountability so fiercely, TFA should reveal its teachers' performance ratings. Kopp claims to have been outraged at the LA Times' decision to name names last year and she writes, "Is it really naive to think that we should not be printing the names of teachers and the results they get on standardized tests in newspapers? Or is the naivete the notion that this might be a good path forward?" I wish Kopp had been so clear back a year ago when this was all first being debated -- it would have been brave and right of her -- and I love to poke TFA in the eye for, well, whatever I can think of (it's not hard to find things). But she's right that publishing the names and ratings is dumb, that the LA Times shouldn't have done it, that there's nothing necessarily hypocritical about TFA's decision to use the scores internally, and that Brill was amusing but incorrect to slam TFA in his book. Full Kopp statement below.
Jeni Callan sits near the front of the school bus, listening and taking tidy notes on a legal pad.
It's new teacher orientation day in the Hamilton School District, and the yellow bus carrying nearly 30 new hires for the 2011-'12 school year is winding through Waukesha County as the district's spokeswoman shouts out the history of each passing school.
Callan, 26, is about to start her dream job as a language arts teacher at Templeton Middle School and knows that her good fortune is partially attributable to an unusually high number of retirements in Hamilton at the end of the school year.
But the job market has not been so kind to other young educators hunting for work, especially those lacking credentials to teach in specialty fields such as special education, math or physics.
"This is maybe the most unusual hiring climate for teachers that I've ever seen," said Bill Henk, dean of Marquette University's College of Education.
Spurred by a "Why are you in college?" discussion I held with my Penn State composition students one day late last semester when rumors swirled of potential state education funding cuts and tuition hikes, an enthusiastic freshman journalism/English major from outside of Pittsburgh came to my office to "talk about her future." She's a good writer, works hard, talks a few times per class. She got right to the point: "Can I get a job with an English degree?"
I wanted to tell her not to worry about the college-to-job equation, that she's in college to broaden her mind, to question, to grow intellectually -- all the learning clichés that hold true. And anyway, what gets a person a job? Solely a degree typed on a resume? The direct skills learned within the major? The subtle, everyday-acquired social and organizational and problem-solving skills? But it is pompous and insular for me to expect my students -- most 18 or 19 years old -- to consider scoffing at this simplified college-to-job equation and just learn for learning's sake -- meaning, maybe, that hard learning now should lead to a solid, dare I say, happy, future. Be it as it may.
For a while now, I've had to get accustomed to the characterization of my 25-year teaching career with the Los Angeles Unified School District as a series of reprehensible acts on my part. As a teacher, I've been the bad guy.
First, over the 16 years I taught elementary, I wanted to teach immigrant children how to speak, read and write in English. Prior to 1997 when the passage of Propostion 227 mandated that immigrant children in California should learn English, my views were considered reactionary and contrary to the best interests of Hispanic children. I was told bluntly that by refusing to teach exclusively in Spanish I was destroying the children's chances of success. One coordinator told me I was perpetuating "English as King." "No," I countered, "English is the common language of most of the world," but this was a non-starter in such circles.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been a presidential candidate for barely two weeks, but already polls indicate he's even with President Barack Obama. So the administration trotted out Education Secretary Arne Duncan to knock him down a peg.
Texas schools have "really struggled" under Gov. Perry, Mr. Duncan told Bloomberg's Al Hunt Aug. 18. "Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college ... I feel really badly for the children there."
It's cheesy for a Cabinet officer to be so political. But that's not why Mr. Obama shouldn't have used the former Chicago superintendent of schools as his attack dog.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth- and eighth-graders in Texas score substantially better in reading and math than do their counterparts in Chicago. The high school graduation rate in Texas (73 percent) is much better than Chicago's (56 percent). Mr. Duncan's charges were recycled. "In low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in March.
I just checked the definition of syllabus in the Oxford English Dictionary. It states what I used to assume it meant: "a statement of the subjects covered by a course of instruction or by an examination, in a school, college, etc.; a programme of study." The oldest quotation using the word is from 1656, when it meant something more along the lines of a table of contents or concordance. The best quote, though, is from 1939 and is taken from W. H. Auden's "Commentary" in Journey to War:
"... the young emerging from the closed parental circle, to whose uncertainty the certain years present their syllabus of limitless anxiety and labour."
But I think we may be a little too fond of limiting and certainty. These days syllabi are looking more and more like those Terms of Service that pop up when we use software. You know, the long documents in fine print with a scrollbar that we click through so we can move on. I thought nobody read them, but it turns out the excellent people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually track changes to them for us. (The EFF points out that these documents have a sinister side. They are contracts that we can't negotiate, and they contain provisions we might not agree to, if we understood what they actually meant.) But the most striking thing about TOS is that they are full of rules - and very few people read them. So maybe they're not the best model for the syllabus.
For many students and their families, scraping together the money to pay for college is a big enough hurdle on its own. But a new survey has found that, once on a campus, many students are unwilling or unable to come up with more money to buy books--one of the very things that helps turn tuition dollars into academic success.
In the survey, released on Tuesday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization, seven in 10 college students said they had not purchased a textbook at least once because they had found the price too high. Many more respondents said they had purchased a book whose price was driven up by common textbook-publishing practices, such as frequent new editions or bundling with other products.
"Students recognize that textbooks are essential to their education but have been pushed to the breaking point by skyrocketing costs," said Rich Williams, a higher-education advocate with the group, known as U.S. PIRG. "The alarming result of this survey underscores the urgent need for affordable solutions."
After the earthquake in Haiti destroyed much of the country's higher-education infrastructure, the University of the People decided to set up three computer centers there, inviting English-speaking students from nearby tent cities to come and work for four hours a day.
"They don't have electricity, they don't have computers, there are university students who have to carry water on their head from another mountain," said Shai Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur who spent $1 million to create the free university two years ago. "They come in two shifts, for four hours a day, to study. Their need was to the point that we began a feeding program."
Mr. Reshef sees his project as a way to use the Internet to bring higher education to poor students around the world. It uses free software and has enlisted hundreds of volunteer professors -- more, he said, than he has been able to use -- to teach 10-week online courses to 1,000 students from more than 100 countries. Starting this fall, students will have to pay $10 to $50 for admission.
The start of the school year isn't normally the time for issuing report cards. But it's been an unusual and momentous year, so as the first day of classes approaches for almost every school in the state, here's a report card on what I'll call the war against the triangle.
Last winter, before Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, a leading Republican told a group of people (according to a reliable person who was present) that there was a triangle that was blocking the path to educational improvement in Wisconsin and his party was going to take out each leg of the triangle.
What were the legs?
Teachers unions, particularly the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC spent hugely on political campaigns and was pro-Democratic. It also was the largest lobbying force in the Capitol. WEAC represented the unwillingness of teachers organizations to change and the need to get rid of most collective bargaining matters.
The state Department of Public Instruction, which represented the status quo, overregulation of schools and how things couldn't change if they were in the hands of government bureaucrats.
Milwaukee Public Schools, which represented - well, which represented Milwaukee Public Schools. Or, to put it another way, a money pit where there was never any positive change.
The work toward attaining "artificial intelligence'' is the center of considerable computer research, design, and application. The
field is in its starting transient, characterized by many varied and independent efforts. Marvin Minsky has been requested to draw this work together into a coherent summary, supplement it with appropriate explanatory or theoretical noncomputer information, and introduce his assessment of the state of the art. This paper emphasizes the class of activities in which a general-purpose computer, complete with a library of basic programs, is further programmed to perform operations leading to ever higher-level information processing functions such as learning and problem solving. This informative article will be of real interest to both the general Proceedings reader and the computer specialist. -- The Guest Editor.
Summary: The problems of heuristic programming--of making computers solve really difficult problems--are divided into five main areas: Search, Pattern-Recognition, Learning, Planning, and Induction. Wherever appropriate, the discussion is supported by extensive citation of the literature and by descriptions of a few of the most successful heuristic (problem-solving) programs constructed to date.
For some students with autism, the idea of operating in the social environment of a college classroom can be so debilitating as to derail the pursuit of higher education at all. For those who do enroll, their condition can make it difficult to succeed in a traditional classroom setting.
But Dana Reinecke, in the department of applied behavior analysis at the Sage Colleges in Albany, N.Y., said she realized that through online learning, students with autism can overcome those barriers. "It allows them to learn from their most comfortable environment, whether it's home, a library, a friend's house, a treatment center, their psychiatrist's office," she said. "It takes away that need to be in a room full of people that they might be uncomfortable with."
Recently Peter Norvig and Stebastian Thrun combined to publicize a course on Artificial Intelligence with the help of Stanford School of Engineering. Within days of its announcement, the course went viral over Reddit, Hacker News and other social networking sites like Quora, FB and Twitter. At the moment, 127663 people have signed and this number is only set to increase phenomenally in the coming days. This trend has been described around as "coming of age for the way education is taught in the internet age; the future of education is here; demise of the universities" etc. Subsequently other Stanford professors pitched in with Machine Learning and Databases courses.
Even prior to these amazing initiatives - discussions, talks and debates on various topics have been going on around and the videos are subsequently being uploaded to the web in increasing regularity. TED talks eventually started featuring videos with captions. TED's methodology and processes for captioning were simple as outlined here. Google houses some in-house guest lectures and makes it a point to upload manual based captions for some of the videos. Google eventually introduced automatic captioning via Youtube in 2009.
Never have there been so many choices in the field of international Higher Education than at present. One is faced with questions of affordability and language, both of which can be tackled with guidance in the right direction. To my mind, USA provides the best all round education I can think of. Buckminster Fuller, one of the best known academic personalities of this time said that in his study of many scientists he found most of them had their first Degrees from a Liberal Arts College. "The Liberal Education offered by the Americans is truly a gift to mankind." A Sri Lankan Professor when speaking in the USA last year at one of the better known Liberal Arts colleges said pretty much the same thing namely that the American Universities offer the finest education in the many disciplines students choose today.
The generosity of the American world of Higher Education cannot be bettered. From Ivy League Universities down to the simple Community Colleges, offers of financial aid ranges from 100% downwards depending on the financial standing of the University. Hundres of Sri Lankans have benefitted by this generosity and continue to do so thanks to good advisors like Principals of International schools, alumni from USA and those who work closely with the Admission offices of American Colleges like Mr. and Mrs. P Dissanayake of Scholarships for USA (PVT) Ltd who have partnered Asian International School in many placements.
To enhance the quality of early childhood education, and provide better economic opportunities to early childhood educators themselves, states should create Charter Colleges of Early Childhood Education. These research-driven, flexible, and accountable institutions would help increase the supply of high-quality early childhood educators, provide those workers and their families with stable, well-paying jobs, and create a new model of higher education and credentialing that can be applied to other fields.
A growing body of research demonstrates that high-quality early childhood education has tremendous potential to improve children's and families' lives. Spurred by this research, as well as growing demand for childcare to enable parents to work, policymakers have seized on early childhood education as a strategy to improve student achievement and break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Yet despite increasing public investment, only one-third of American preschoolers have access to publicly funded pre-K or the federal Head Start program, and preschool quality is often low.
Because of space, some stuff couldn't make it into the Arne Duncan School of Thought interview in TIME, here's one answer I thought was pretty interesting though:
How should Americans think about the consequences of failing to address our educational problems?
Our ability to provide a great education and to have a strong country and a strong country are inextricably linked. The jobs of the future are going to require some sort of college-level experience whether it's two-year, four-year, trade or technical but the world has changed. When I was growing up on the south side of Chicago thirty years ago in high school my friends could drop out and still get a decent job in the stockyards and steel mills and own their own homes, support a family, and do OK. Those jobs are a distant memory of a bygone era. The jobs today are going to go to countries that are producing knowledge workers. And many countries are out-educating us.
Yep - it's the "A" word again. "Assessment." And in higher education, that word is just about everywhere we turn. I suspect that when you saw that word, you likely got a chill up your spine - oh no! Not assessment. Not again! Yep - assessment. Again. But I have developed a take on assessment that might help us see it differently. I believe that doing assessment is not about pleasing accreditors or other external stakeholders (what Peter Ewell, in a 2009 occasional paper for NILOA, identifies as the "Accountability Paradigm"), nor is its strength in supporting continuous quality improvement (what Ewell identifies as the "Improvement Paradigm"). Though these are perfectly legitimate reasons for attending to the work of assessment, to be honest, neither truly fuels my intrinsic desire to engage in the hard work of it all. Instead, I believe that assessment is really an act of care.
I care about my students; therefore, I assess. Let me explain.
If you're looking for a textbook example of technology obstruction by the media industry, look no further than e-textbooks.
"About 90 percent of the time, the cheapest option is still to buy a used book and then resell that book," says Jonathan Robinson, founder of FreeTextbooks.com, an online retailer of discount books. "That is really an obstacle for widespread adoption [of e-textbooks], because smarter consumers realize that and are not going to leap into the digital movement until the pricing evens out."
That's sad news for students headed back to college this fall. IPads, Kindles and even HP's doomed TouchPad tablet are literally flying off the shelves, and many students wouldn't be caught dead on campus without one.
Meanwhile, e-textbook sales at the nation's universities are stuck in single digits, with little hope of escape before 2013. According to Simba Information , in the next two years e-textbook revenue will reach just $585.4 million and account for just over 11 percent of all higher education and career-oriented textbook sales -- a notable but not yet predominant force in the marketplace.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis Thursday rejected an offer of a 2 percent raise for working a 90-minute-longer school day, saying teachers would not be "bullied" by public attempts to push through a slapdash plan.
Lewis refused a proposal involving elementary-school teachers only that was aired in the media Tuesday evening by Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and later amplified in writing to the union Wednesday morning.
"We fully support a better, smarter school day for our children but teachers are now being asked to work 29 percent longer for only a 2 percent pay increase," Lewis said in a written statement. "To that we say thanks but no thanks."
Lewis left the door open to further talks on the issue, however. She told the Chicago Sun-Times the union is crafting ways to add 15 to 60 more minutes to the elementary school day.
In 2010-11, 40 percent of public school students (enrolled in both district and charter schools) in Ohio's eight major urban areas attended a school rated D or F by the state. This is an improvement from the previous year, when 47 percent of students attended such schools.
The percent of students attending schools rated A or B has remained roughly the same. However, the percent of students in these cities attending a school that has met or exceeded "expected growth" (according to Ohio's value-added metric) has risen significantly, from 67 percent in 2009-10 to 78 percent in 2010-11.
This month, 500,000 hopeful substitute teachers are queuing up for work in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and countless small-town schools across the nation. I know from first-hand experience that the extra income and flexibility are big draws, especially if one is unemployed.
But I also know that the job can be demanding, low paying, and conducted without supervision or assistance. Who, I wondered, could do this work coolly and expertly and be willing to accept per diems that start at $45 and average $105?
The answers -- from the United States, the UK, and Japan -- may surprise you.
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) "Studying is crucial for strong academic performance..." and "Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning..."
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: "Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education." More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that "One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students' academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers' influence."
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, "disengaged, lazy whiners," and "noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS," the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...(but) It's a teacher's job...to give students the motivation to learn."
It would seem that no matter who points out that "You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make him drink," our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; "For education, a man's books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his."
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can't see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be--namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than "disengaged lazy whiners" will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics(r) www.tcr.org/blog
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school's principal, decided to try something extreme--by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher's best efforts. The school's team of special educators--including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist--convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it's practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
"I took Besart on that year as my private student," Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles "Yellow Submarine" poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori's desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country's vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
Textbook pirates have struck again. Nearly three years after publishers shut down a large Web site devoted to illegally trading e-textbooks, a copycat site has sprung up--with its leaders arguing that it is operating overseas in a way that will be more difficult to stop.
The new site, LibraryPirate, quietly started operating last year, but it began a public-relations blitz last week, sending letters to the editor to several news sites, including The Chronicle, in which it called on students to make digital scans of their printed textbooks and post them to the site for free online.
Such online trading violates copyright law, but some people have apparently been adding pirated versions of e-textbooks to the site's directory. The site now boasts 1,700 textbooks, organized and searchable. Downloading the textbooks requires a peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent, and the LibraryPirate site hosts a step-by-step guide to using it.
School districts in they future won't just receive report card ratings from the state, they will be ranked from best to worst in a new system.
The mandate in Gov. Kasich's $112 billion executive budget was handed to the Ohio Department of Education to devise the ranking procedure.
The listing may be ready for the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, according to ODE spokesperson Patrick Gallaway.
The ODE is now required to rank schools within comparable groupings on the basis of student results and cost effectiveness, according to the fifth book of the governor's budget containing selected reforms.
A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin's Reading Challenges
UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg and I had an informative conversation with two elected officials at the Capitol recently.
I am thankful for Mark's time and the fact that both Luther Olsen and Steve Kestell along with staff members took the time to meet. I also met recently with Brett Hulsey and hope to meet with more elected officials, from both parties.
The topic du jour was education, specifically the Governor's Read to Lead task force.
Mark kindly shared this handout:
My name is Mark Seidenberg, Hilldale Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, seidenberg@wisc.edu, http://lcnl.wisc.edu. I have studied how reading works, how children learn to read, reading disabilities, and the brain bases of reading for over 30 years. I am a co-author of a forthcoming report from the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) on low literacy among older adolescents and adults. I'm writing a general audience book about reading research and educational practices.
We have a literacy problem: about 30% of the US (and WI) population reads at a "basic" or "below basic" level. Literacy levels are particularly low among poor and minority individuals. The identification of this problem does not rest on any single test (e.g., NAEP, WKCE, OECD). Our literacy problem arises from many causes, some of which are not easy to address by legislative fiat. However, far more could be done in several important areas.
1. How teachers are taught. In Wisconsin as in much of the US, prospective teachers are not exposed to modern research on how children develop, learn, and think. Instead, they are immersed in the views of educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky (d. 1934) and John Dewey (d. 1952). Talented, highly motivated prospective teachers are socialized into beliefs about children that are not informed by the past 50 years of basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.
A vast amount is known about reading in particular, ranging from what your eyes do while reading to how people comprehend documents to what causes reading disabilities. However, there is a gulf between Education and Science, and so this research is largely ignored in teacher training and curriculum development.
2. How children are taught. There continue to be fruitless battles over how beginning readers should be taught, and how to insure that comprehension skills continue to develop through middle and high school. Teachers rely on outdated beliefs about how children learn, and how reading works. As a result, for many children, learning to read is harder than it should be. We lose many children because of how they are taught. This problem does NOT arise from "bad teachers"; there is a general, systematic problem related to teacher education and training in the US.
3. Identification of children at risk for reading failures. Some children are at risk for reading and school failure because of developmental conditions that interfere with learning to read. Such children can be identified at young ages (preschool, kindergarten) using relatively simple behavioral measures. They can also be helped by effective early interventions that target basic components of reading such as vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge. The 30% of the US population that cannot read adequately includes a large number of individuals whose reading/learning impairments were undiagnosed and untreated.
Recommendations: Improve teacher education. Mechanism: change the certification requirements for new teachers, as has been done in several other states. Certification exams must reflect the kinds of knowledge that teachers need, including relevant research findings from cognitive science and neuroscience. Instruction in these areas would then need to be provided by schools of education or via other channels. In-service training courses could be provided for current teachers (e.g., as on-line courses).
Children who are at risk for reading and schooling failures must be identified and supported at young ages. Although it is difficult to definitively confirm a reading/learning disability in children at young ages (e.g., 4-6) using behavioral, neuroimaging, or genetic measures, it is possible to identify children at risk, most of whom will develop reading difficulties unless intervention occurs, via screening that involves simple tests of pre-reading skills and spoken language plus other indicators. Few children just "grow out of" reading impairments; active intervention is required.
I am cautiously optimistic that we may see an improvement in Wisconsin's K-12 curricular standards.
DPI has publicly stated that it is not uncommon for grant awards to be delayed for various reasons. In our case, DPI wants to ensure that all parties - MMSD, DPI and the Urban League of Greater Madison - are on the same page with regard to how Madison Prep will comply with federal and state statutes relative to single sex public schools. We welcome this conversation. MMSD and the Urban League have been working together on this issue since June.
There are also public charter schools such as Bluford Drew Jemison S.T.E.M Academy for boys in Baltimore, Maryland that was approved by the Board of Education of Baltimore City Public Schools without approving a similar school for girls at the same time. Bluford Drew Jameson is part of BCPS' bold and aggressive Charter, Innovative and Transformation Schools Plan to revitalize public education in the city. BCPS' efforts are being heralded nationally as they are seeing clear signs of turning around.
With Confidence, Precedent and Support, We Will Succeed
Given the successful growth of single sex public/charter schools across the country, along with our plans to comply with the new Title IX regulations and our publicly stated commitment to establish the 6-12 grade Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women, we are confident that the issues raised by DPI will be resolved.
With your support and that of DPI and MMSD, Madison Prep will soon provide a long overdue solution to a deeply rooted pattern of academic failure and under-performance, particularly among African American and Latino boys in our community. It will also serve as a learning laboratory that informs the programs, strategies and practices of schools and educators across Greater Madison and the State of Wisconsin.
We look forward to Madison Prep producing hundreds of confident, excited and future-focused young men who are ready for college and committed to promoting the schools values - leadership, excellence, pride and service - in their community, homes, peer groups and daily lives.
There are two different types of charter schools in the City of Milwaukee, and by at least one measure, those not chartered by the Milwaukee Public Schools are performing better.
Milwaukee's ACT scores rose in 2011, but they still weren't able to match the production of the city's non-union charter schools. In the end, the non-district charter schools left their instrumentality counterparts in the dust when it came to college readiness.
The city's non-instrumentality charter schools outperformed the MPS average when it came to the ACT, a selective college readiness test, in the past school year. These schools aren't operated or authorized by local school boards, and have been more successful in preparing students when weighed against the city's average. In the four qualifying high schools, students averaged a score of 18.8.
Protesters have barricaded streets and burned tires in Chile's capital, Santiago, amid a 48-hour strike to press for education reform.
Police and protesters clashed Wednesday, as the government tried to shut down demonstrations in some parts of the city.
Reports from Santiago say business in most parts of the city was un-interrupted, with public transportation continuing to function and traffic flowing through most streets.
The strike was called by Chile's main labor union, CUT, in support of students who have been protesting for weeks for education reform and an overhaul of educational funding. In addition, strike organizers have called for tax reform and constitutional change.
Now that Gov. Scott Walker's major cuts for public schools have been enacted, my question for my fellow educators is: What do we do next? I am sick and tired of constantly reacting to bad news and bad policy and always being in the position of having to play defense. Educators and school districts should organize to go on the offensive.
Walker's budget has significantly damaged one of the best public education systems in the country. He turned half of our community members against us using false information, and now we will be fighting a public relations battle while also working harder to educate students with fewer resources.
Through all of this, we Wisconsin educators will still stand tall and deliver a top-notch education for the children of this state, regardless of what Walker has done, because that is what Wisconsin professional educators do.
My fear is that after we deliver, Walker and his minions will use the media and their bully pulpit to take all the credit for the successes that we will achieve in our classrooms. I can see the headlines now of Walker proclaiming how well his budget cuts worked because schools are performing well under his budget.
So what do we do? What should our strategy be? Here are some suggestions:
There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
I was reminded of this story after reading about the lobbying some parents of Madison elementary school children do to get their kids assigned to teachers who match their "learning styles."
What a contrast between a parent who's more or less OK with a school official delivering not only a beating, but an undeserved beating, and parents who seek to intervene in the basic decisions of professional educators.
Such lobbying and the district's willingness to hear it have "been a common thing as long as I can remember," said district public information officer Marcia Standiford, a former teacher and audio/visual specialist who has been with the district for 15 years. Parents of Madison elementary students have long been asked to fill out questionnaires about their kids to help in assigning them to teachers.
Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline. The higher grades cannot be explained by observable differences in student quality between education majors and other students, nor can they be explained by the fact that education classes are typically smaller than classes in other academic departments. The remaining reasonable explanation is that the higher grades in education classes are the result of low grading standards. These low grading standards likely will negatively affect the accumulation of skills for prospective teachers during university training. More generally, they contribute to a larger culture of low standards for educators.
Key points in this Outlook:
Grades awarded in university education departments are consistently higher than grades in other disciplines.
Similarly, teachers in K-12 schools receive overwhelmingly positive evaluations.
Grade inflation in education departments should be addressed through administrative directives or external accountability in K-12 schools.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Could you give our readers a short crash course to the main ideas of your book?
"The Innovative University" makes the case that a "disruptive" technology, online learning, is bringing fundamental change to higher education. Traditional universities and colleges are vulnerable because their model of education was already becoming too expensive for many students. Most young students will continue to want the campus-based learning experience, but they will expect to pay less and to enjoy a combination of face-to-face and online instruction. Institutions that don't provide a hybrid will see declining enrollments. Most institutions will also have to focus more narrowly on student instruction, rather than emulating the large research universities, such as Harvard. Making these changes will be hard, given the strength of higher education tradition and the autonomy of faculty members. However, we believe that it can be done.
This year's entering college class of 2015 was born just as the Internet took everyone onto the information highway and as Amazon began its relentless flow of books and everything else into their lives. Members of this year's freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word "online" for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives. They have come of age as women assumed command of U.S. Navy ships, altar girls served routinely at Catholic Mass, and when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly, have been accomplished on the Internet.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit's former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. Mindset List websites at Beloit College and at mindsetmoment.com, the media site webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million hits annually.
Nief and McBride recently applied their popular format to 10 generations of Americans over 150 years in their new book, The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal (Wiley and Sons.).
Chicago Public Schools today launched their plans to extend students' time in the classroom by 90 minutes each and by two weeks each year and set up an advisory committee to figure out how it'll be done.
However, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said she would decline an invitation to serve on the committee, saying in a written statement that, "this news has nothing do with helping our children and everything to do with politicizing a real serious problem."
Mayor Rahm Emanuel began pushing for a longer school day while he was on the campaign trail, saying Chicago's school day is the shortest in the nation when compared to public school systems in nine other large cities. School reform legislation passed in June allows the district to implement a longer school day in the fall of 2012 with or without the union's agreement, and CPS officials have said they would do that.
The founder of The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV tells the story of a coalition of unlikely allies in the fight to change a school system that many parents believe is failing the nation's children. He debated education solutions with former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch.
So far, this has been the summer of education task forces in Wisconsin.
There's one addressing school accountability, another tackling how to help school districts implement new academic standards and a third devoted to improving third-grade reading proficiency. That doesn't even count other groups already in existence that are looking at reforming statewide tests or increasing teacher effectiveness.
"There's so many work groups and task forces operating right now, it's hard to keep track of them," said state Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake), chairman of the Assembly Education Committee and a member of some of those task forces.
Keeping all of the task forces on track may also prove difficult.
Earlier this month, a member of the group charged with helping school districts implement new reading standards sent an open letter to members of the governor's Read to Lead Task Force expressing concerns about the approach that the state Department of Public Instruction was taking in developing a model reading curriculum. That letter was followed by another that recommended specific approaches that the task force should take. Dan Gustafson, a Madison-based pediatric neuropsychologist, said he wrote the letters because he was concerned that the DPI was moving ahead with a model reading curriculum without input from differing viewpoints on reading instruction.
Are there hidden messages in your emails? Yes, and in everything you write or say, according to James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has been a leader in the computer analysis of texts for their psychological content. And in his new book, "The Secret Life of Pronouns," he argues that how we use words like "I," "she," and "who" reveal secrets of our psychology. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns?
PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.
Gov. Rick Scott is exploring dramatic higher-education reforms that are similar to those already under way in Florida's public school districts.
Patterned after reforms being championed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently announced he's running for president, Scott is looking at changing the way professors are paid and moving toward a merit-pay system with limits on tenure.
Texas has been debating such changes to save money and bolster professor productivity -- going so far as to consider tying professor pay to how many students they teach and how much research money they bring in.
Instructors would get annual bonuses as high as $10,000 a class if they rated highly on student satisfaction surveys. Even the assignment of faculty offices and parking spaces would be based on their performance.
Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer - the magazine I founded and edited -who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.
In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, "Who says?" When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn't won them.
The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides' views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn't. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon's records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.
Wisconsin DPI announces $6 million for charter school planning and dissemination grants; Proposed IB Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School Not Funded
Groups planning new charter schools and established charter schools that want to replicate their success are sharing $6 million in federal charter school grants.
Planning grants total $4.5 million and will go for planning activities in 23 charter schools that have already been approved by their local school board or authorizing authority. Five of those grants are going to districts that do not currently have charter schools. Five grants, totaling $625,000, will support the expansion of successful charter school models. Another seven grants, totaling $875,000, will help charter schools that are in the second year dissemination activities.
"Planning grant proposals in this round of funding are for a mix of innovative charter schools," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "This is just what the charter school law promotes: local solutions to serve students and their families."
After years of frustration with its own teacher-evaluation system, the second-largest school district in the country is pilot-testing a new idea against the wishes of its union.
With the Obama administration offering incentives for school systems to revamp how they evaluate teachers' effectiveness, the episode with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) carries important lessons nationwide, analysts say.
The fresh approach in Los Angeles meshes with the Obama administration's efforts to use more systematic and data-driven approaches to evaluate teachers. It includes parent and student feedback, students' standardized test scores, and more detailed observations given by peers - who watch teachers and then type their observations and questions into laptop computers, then discuss their impressions the next day.
Like so many debates in America today, the fight over public education is as polarized as it is consequential. There appears to be a general sense of agreement that the results we are getting are woefully inadequate, especially given the demands that a high-tech, global economy will place on our future work force. Nevertheless, there's a sharp disagreement over exactly what to do.
Spending more money is of course a perennial demand. Since 1970 America has more than doubled the real dollars spent on K-12 education. We have increased the number of teachers by more than a third, created legions of nonteaching staff, and raised salaries and benefits across the board. Yet fewer than 40% of the students who graduate from high school are ready for college. At the same time, students in other countries are moving ahead of us, scoring higher--often much higher--on international tests of reading, math and science skills.
One way REL Northwest connects practitioners with research is by posting responses to inquiries made to the Ask A REL Reference Desk. The free Reference Desk service provides educators, policymakers, and community members with prompt, authoritative resources on topical issues, customized to their local needs. Recent responses point to research on topics such as mathematics interventions, data-driven decision making, and the impact of early childhood education programs.
The latest inquiry is on a topic that's receiving increased national attention due to budget challenges: whether consolidating school districts might result in lower overall costs for education. Unfortunately, research on consolidation does not offer definitive guidance for making such decisions. There are several reasons for this: empirical studies of consolidation employ different analytical approaches to data; older data in some studies yield results that may not be representative of current district conditions; studies do not uniformly separate costs related to merging only a narrow range of district services from costs related to merging entire districts or combining schools; different studies focus on different costs or estimate costs in different ways; and much of the literature consists of advocacy.
As Education Week has reported today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan clarified that states will not have to endorse the Common Core State Standards in order to successfully obtain a waiver from portions of No Child Left Behind. While the full details of Duncan’s all-or-nothing waiver proposal have not been released, most (including Education Sector’s Kevin Carey) speculated that states would have to demonstrate they embraced high academic content standards – i.e. Common Core – in order to be let off the hook for meeting the 100% proficiency by 2014 deadline.
While taping C-SPAN’s Newsmakers program, Duncan assured states who have not yet adopted Common Core that the Department is “happy to work with them” as long as they verify their own standards are rigorous. Duncan also noted that this process would likely involve states having their standards approved by their state’s postsecondary institutions – supposedly to certify that they are “college and career ready” standards.
This site is dedicated to informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way. You have to pick one of the non-verbs about which this site knows:
First, a lesson from baseball: It was roughly a year ago that Brewers fans were wringing their hands that the pitching was bad and there was little prospect for fixing that in the off-season, given a weak free agent scene and limited finances. Now, the Brewers have pitching that is basically amazing.
Sometimes, things do improve dramatically. Sometimes, that happens even when there are sound arguments for why they won't.
I could write this entire column - if not a book - on why I'm pessimistic about things getting a lot better on the Milwaukee education scene. I would present a pretty sound case, too.
Maybe I'm wrong. In fact, I hope I'm wrong. I'd like to see things take off like a rocket ship.
There is perhaps no more eloquent statement on the essential link between time and learning than the National Education Commission on Time and Learning, which delivered its report in April 1994. In its highly-quotable declaration, the commission makes very clear that unless the education system is completely reconfigured around the objective of achieving proficiency, rather than meeting arbitrary time requirements, we will never reach the goal of serving all children well. In the commission's words:
"Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only rarely voiced, is simple: learn what you can in the time we make available.... If experience, research, and common sense teach nothing else, they confirm the truism that people learn at different rates, and in different ways with different subjects. But we have put the cart before the horse: our schools and the people involved with them-students, parents, teachers, administrators, and staff-are captives of clock and calendar. The boundaries of student growth are defined by schedules for bells, buses, and vacations instead of standards for students and learning."
A front-page August 16 Washington Times' headline screamed: "Scores show students aren't ready for college -- 75% may need remedial classes."
Seventy-five percent is a number that gets people's attention. It isn't the usual trifling stuff the U.S. Department of Education puts out about math or reading scores being up by two percent one year and down by three percent the next. Add to that another finding reported in the same article: "A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better."
So are we saying that even when students score well, they don't know much? Apparently. Readers who have been following this series (see links to other articles below) may recall U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics' Pascal D. Forgione, Jr., Ph.D., who famously admitted in a speech, "Our idea of 'advanced' is clearly below international standards."
According to the news article, "75 percent [of college freshmen] likely will spend part of their [first] year brushing up on high-school-level course work."
The state's education commissioner says she's exploring ways to make the ACT college entrance exam even higher-stakes for Minnesota students than it already is.
Wednesday's release of ACT scores shows 72 percent of Minnesota high school graduates took the test. No state with that much participation scored higher. But 72 percent isn't enough for Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, especially considering there are waivers available so students can take the test for free.
The problem, she said, is not enough students realize how crucial the ACT is.
"There are so many tests that they're taking; they don't know which is the important test," Cassellius said. "We want to have a test that actually measures their career and college readiness."
With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the best-selling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the "surgeon general of youth culture" by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn't fielding abstract questions -- his own kids are starting university this fall.
College isn't always a bastion of healthy living. Late nights, pizza and stress can't be good for you. What should parents talk to their children about when they leave for college?
Start with the easy stuff -- safety. In the [college] age group, accidents are a major cause of morbidity, and alcohol is often involved in some fashion. Remind students that they're on their own and are not invincible.
I've been to hundreds of colleges all over the country, and almost every one has an outstanding health and mental-health service. Tell them to take advantage of the screenings, services and mental-health services that are there if they need them.
Katy Daugherty enrolled at Tennessee State University because of the school's flexible daytime, evening and online classes and its new urban-studies program.
Once on campus at this historically black college, where more than 70% of the students are African-American, Ms. Daugherty, 29, who is white, became the minority.
"It was definitely different, having grown up and been in the majority, and all of a sudden you are in the minority," she says.
In what has become a mutually beneficial relationship for schools and students, many of the nation's 105 historically black colleges are increasingly wooing non-black students. The goals: to boost lagging enrollment and offset funding shortfalls.
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire--we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
Huxley is talking about the radio and the newspaper, the carriers of noise at the start of the 20th century, but his words could just as well have been written today. Today, silence is a thing to be shunned, with the social ecosystem of apps and devices ready to help you do just that.
When Gaston Caperton was recruited to run the College Board, owner of the SAT entrance exam, he said he didn't want to just run "a testing company."
Founded by Harvard and 11 other universities in 1900 to create a standardized test to admit students based on merit rather than family connections, the College Board by 1999 was facing cash-flow problems.
Caperton turned the nonprofit company into a thriving business, more than doubling revenue to $660 million by boosting fees, expanding the Advanced Placement program and the sale of names of teenage test-takers to colleges. A former West Virginia governor, he persuaded 11 states to cover fees for a preliminary SAT in the 10th grade.
Picture the following scenario. You ask your friend to come up with a creative meal that will amaze your guests at a dinner party you are holding, but you impose some constraints. Your friend can only use the ingredients from a restrictive list and must follow the specific directions from a meal you cooked these same guests just weeks earlier.
What are the odds that your friend makes something innovative? Not good. After all, you've practically defined the solution by specifying nearly all of its inputs before she can even consider what she might cook.
A far better way to generate an innovative solution is to define the outcome you need -- a five-course meal for eight -- and then allow your friend to figure out the best way to get there.
The (Seattle) Times' editorial board is nothing if not amusing. Their current editorial on the School Board races puts forth the results without much analysis (because, of course, if they said, out loud, that the incumbents all appear to be in trouble that would hurt their cause). Here's how they framed the results:
Frustration about Seattle School Board leadership weighed heavily on the minds of primary voters who, in all but one board race, were more generous with their votes for challengers than incumbents.
Yes, generous is one way to put it. Another would be that all the incumbents appear to be in trouble.
They can only say about the challengers that they raise valid concerns about the district and the current Board. Almost like, "thanks for pointing that out, now move along."
Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) may participate in the government's project to supply as much as 15 million tablet computers for school children over four years, state-owned Anatolia news agency said, citing Turkish Trade Minister Zafer Caglayan.
Apple officials told Caglayan during his visit to the U.S. that the Cupertino, California-based maker of smart devices may also decide to use some Turkish manufacturers to make some peripheral equipment such as covers, earphones for its iPad and iPhone models, Caglayan said at a news conference with Turkish reporters in Seattle, according to the Ankara-based agency.
The law school at Villanova University has been censured for submitting falsified admissions data for several years to the American Bar Association. Villanova's average Law School Admissions Test scores were padded by two to three points from 2005 to 2009, law school dean John Gotanda said. The median GPA was raised by up to 0.16 points. Both data sets often factor into law school rankings. The law school could have lost its accreditation because of the scandal. The school must post the reprimand on its website for two years. School officials described the misreporting as an "odd" scheme, considering the inflation "didn't propel us into the top 50."
Displaced whale dies in Calif. river
A 45-foot gray whale that delighted people for more than a month after taking up residence in Northern California's Klamath River died Tuesday after beaching itself on a sandbar. In June, the whale and its calf took refuge in freshwater for an unknown reason while migrating north from Baja California. Scientists said it may have been escaping from killer whales. The calf swam out to sea on July 23, about the right time for it to go off on its own.
Nearly three-quarters of New Jersey school superintendents said the state Education Department did not play an important role in helping districts raise students' achievement or prepare graduates for college and careers, according to a survey the department released Monday.
Many superintendents criticized how the state set goals and evaluated districts' progress and said they did not find school report cards or state and federal data requirements useful in improving students' performance.
They also expressed dissatisfaction with the state's handling of special-education services and its guidance on curriculum and instruction. For instance, 63 percent of superintendents said they had not found the department's efforts helpful in improving math instruction, and 59 percent said the same of improving literacy.
Governor John Kitzhaber announced Tuesday that Representative Ben Cannon will join his staff as Education Policy Advisor. Representative Cannon, currently a state Representative for Portland, teaches middle school Humanities.
"Ben's passion and expertise on education policy will be a great asset to my office and the state," said Kitzhaber. "He'll bring the same dedication he has shown his constituents to implementing an education improvement agenda to ensure better results for Oregon students, more resources for teachers, and a more prosperous future."
"Serving as state Representative has been the highest honor I have ever held, and this was an incredibly difficult decision for me," Cannon said. "But I am convinced that to advise the Governor on education policy represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference on the same issues that drew me to teaching and politics in the first place. The achievements of the Governor and the Legislature this year have created a rare window of opportunity to make important improvements to the Oregon's public education system."
Oregon Rep. Ben Cannon, D-Portland, is resigning from the Legislature to become Gov. John Kitzhaber's top education adviser.
Cannon, a Democrat now in his third term in the House, will replace Nancy Golden, a temporary hire who has returned to her position as superintendent of the Springfield School District this summer.
His resignation is effective Sept. 1. He starts his new position Sept. 6
"It was a tremendously difficult decision to leave the Legislature," Cannon said by phone Tuesday, "but I have the opportunity now to continue to serve the people of Oregon and this governor on an issue that matters so much to me as a teacher, and to me as a father."
Salman Khan sent a video to his young cousin online, to help her with her math homework. A simple explanation, quickly sketched out. Then another and another, up on YouTube.
The next thing you know, a lot of other kids were paying attention. Using those math videos. Millions of kids. Including Bill Gates's kids.
Now, Salman Khan is an education rock star, with videos up on math and chemistry and the Napoleonic Wars. Teachers are keying in. Classrooms. And it's all free.
Thanks to a thriving economy at home, an increasing number of Chinese students are attending U.S. graduate schools, according to a study to be released on Tuesday by a graduate-school industry group.
Graduate schools saw a 21% increase in Chinese applicants from the last school year and a 23% increase in admissions offers, for students slated to start this fall, according to a study by the Council of Graduate Schools. It is the sixth year in a row of double-digit percentage increases for Chinese students.
Applications and offers were up sharply for international students overall, jumping 11% compared with 2010, according to the report. The study looked at data for a total of 591,739 applications to U.S. graduate schools by prospective international students for fall 2011.
State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee's school voucher program and those in the city's public schools.
Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers' expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.
Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state's white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the national average.
At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG).
In the 2010 PEPG report, "U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective," the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics.1 The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.
Proficiency in Mathematics
U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate in mathematics, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Although performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the United States, 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficient level in math.
In six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong, a majority of students performed at the proficient level, while in the United States less than one-third did. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students were proficient. Other countries in which a majority--or near majority--of students performed at or above the proficient level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent).
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh--wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh--my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony--just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: "The centrality of reading and writing was 'one of education's great mistakes.'" In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can't handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word "college" essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
"Teach by Example"
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The average ACT score among the Madison School District's 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison's average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison's average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.
With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin's Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year's graduates and maintained the state's third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
"The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students," Evers said in a news release. "Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago."
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin's recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
The average ACT score among the Madison School District's 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison's average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison's average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.
With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin's Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year's graduates and maintained the state's third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
"The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students," Evers said in a news release. "Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago."
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin's recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
I'm not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn't learned the difference between "it's" and "its," for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master's level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts "Learning to Learn Camp," Madison Area Technical College's nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.
Michigan's school accreditation system "no longer has relevance" state educators say, as every school in the state has met state criteria despite sliding backward on federal testing goals.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's quarterly report on debt and credit, U.S. households had $11.42 trillion in debt outstanding in the second quarter. That was down from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, when the financial crisis took hold, and the lowest since the first quarter of 2007. Mortgage debt, home equity loans, credit card debt and auto loans are all down sharply -- partly because people are being more careful, but also because many have defaulted.
But student loans are up sharply. There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25% from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
This is what one of Los Angeles Unified's most ambitious reform efforts looks like: about 30 people gathered in a Gardena school auditorium, watching a video of a teacher trying to get her young students to understand a John Updike poem.
The viewers furiously type their observations into laptop computers and discuss their impressions of the lesson the next day. They ask open-ended questions -- "What are some possible explanations for the lack of understanding of the vocabulary?" -- all aimed at helping the teacher improve.
These training sessions are the school district's first concrete steps toward replacing its age-old teacher evaluation system, which is widely regarded as a failure. The new version is based on more detailed observations, student and parent feedback, and students' standardized test scores.
Sitting under a parasol to avoid the fierce summer sun, two teenagers at a summer camp in the New Territories debate the criteria for an ideal secondary school. Rosemary and White Cloud - adopting nature-related nicknames is a tradition at the camp - are responding to a Q&A session held earlier, when two secondary school principals were quizzed on topics ranging from the logic of school uniform design to how to prevent teachers from abusing their power.
"The school must have strict rules so every student will behave and be polite," White Cloud says.
Rosemary has very different ideas: "It is not going to work. Strict rules will only make the disobedient even more disobedient. My ideal school is one with no penalties."
The two friends' contrasting views reflect their exposure to Gaia School, an alternative private primary school in Tuen Mun that emphasises personal responsibility and learning from nature.
Journalist Peg Tyre's new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve ($26, Henry Holt) out Aug. 16, condenses decades of education research to help parents make better choices about selecting schools for their children. Tyre, whose 2008 book The Trouble With Boys helped spark a national conversation, says, "Schools can't reasonably be expected to both educate children and educate parents about education. Parents are going to have to get more sophisticated about what excellent education looks like -- and demand it for their child." Tyre recently spoke to USA TODAY:
A school district in the deep woods of Maine that sought out Chinese students to help boost its enrolment and its finances fell far short of its ambitious goal of bringing in 60 students.
Only six Chinese students will attend high school in Millinocket, in a rural part of the northeastern state, next month.
The target of five dozen was probably overly ambitious, officials said.
The efforts were also hindered by a recruiter in China who failed to deliver any students and a writer who told readers of China's Global Times newspaper that the school was "mediocre" and that Millinocket children hang out in parking lots for fun.
Stearns High School officials said they were disappointed more Chinese students won't be attending when classes begin on September 6 but will stick with the programme and try to expand in the years ahead.
I'm not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn't learned the difference between "it's" and "its," for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master's level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts "Learning to Learn Camp," Madison Area Technical College's nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.
One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.
I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness - so that it could have a chance to live.
For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago - a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?
The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the "Parent Trigger" in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton "pulled the trigger," but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.
Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures--including New York -- are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.
The U.S. Department of Education released a new analysis of state standards this week that maps the standards against federal ones to assess rigor. We don't look strong on the mapping, especially in eighth grade reading where we trail the nation.
The analysis using National Center for Educational Statistics data superimposes a state's standard for proficient performance in reading and mathematics onto a common scale defined by scores on NAEP, a federal test administered to student samples in every state to produce a big picture view of American education. (This report offers a lot of data and great graphics.)
The most alarming mapping revealed that Georgia's standard for proficiency in 8th grade reading is so low that it falls into the below basic category on NAEP scoring. (We don't look in 8th grade math, either, but the feds warn that our change from QBE standards to Georgia Performance Standards undermines comparisons.)
The fall semester hasn't officially started yet, but this week a group of incoming Madison Area Technical College students gathered on campus to study in groups, submit homework, and take notes on lectures.
They won't be tested. They're just practicing.
Programs like this one at MATC -- called Learning to Learn Camp -- are increasingly common at colleges and universities as educators try to prepare students for the academic rigor and social stresses of college.
The courses tend to provide basic study skills such as note-taking and time management, as well as information on decidedly squishier topics, such as how to stay motivated or take personal responsibility.
"It all sounds very elementary, but particularly for community college and technical college students who often don't have a college frame of reference, or somebody in their family who went to college, it's really useful information," said Melinda Mechur Karp, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.
The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents -- and everyone else -- a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.
By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year's worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.
The wonderkid who at nine became the city's youngest undergraduate four years ago completed his bachelor's and master's programme this week at the age of 13.
March Boedihardjo will now head off to the United States for a research programme and, possibly, a doctorate. The youngster was admitted to Baptist University's double-degree programme in mathematical science in 2007, finishing it in four years - a year early. March said he really enjoyed his university years, despite earlier concerns about how such a young boy would adapt to the life.
Would you rather have someone graduate high school with good computer skills or good character traits?
I grant it's a false choice. You ought to have both, and they're not in conflict. But I ask this as a way of asking what our priorities are when it comes to educating children.
It's hard to find a school that doesn't have lots of computers these days. The intense push to load schools up with computers seems to have eased, compared with a decade ago. Money is tighter now, and many schools don't need much more because they have a lot already.
But it's not so easy to find schools that have good character education programs.
Schools are held accountable for teaching reading and math and so on. The pressure is always on for academic records for each student and for a school as a whole. But students' character? Other than attendance and discipline for behavior problems, interest in that is pretty inconsistent.
Of course, many would say, it's not the school's job to civilize children. That's the parents' job. Absolutely correct, and I think more should be done to try to get more parents to do that job.
Even with all its flaws, I'm a proponent of public education in much the same way I remain committed to the fundamental principles of democracy despite recent events in D.C. having tested this commitment.
In terms of public education, there are countless books, articles, and research projects from numerous points of view and it's clear one can find proponents and opponents to whatever perspective you may choose. One recent publication is noteworthy due to the clarity in writing and direct premise -- "Schools Cannot Do It Alone" by Jamie Vollmer, former attorney, businessman, and harsh education critic, now an advocate and consultant to education. I'd like to quote and paraphrase from this book in the following column.
He argues schools need the trust, understanding, permission and support from their communities in order to improve the public education system and increase student success. In tracing his journey from critic to consultant, he weaves an interesting tale as he encounters "blueberries, bell curves, and smelly eighth graders," and comes to two conclusions. First, we have a system problem, not a people problem. We need to modify the system in order to get the graduates we want. And second, we cannot touch the system without touching the culture of the surrounding town because everything that goes on inside a school is tied to local attitudes, values, traditions and beliefs. But in order to improve the system it's vital that we first accurately understand the system that presently exists and how it came to be.
For the first time in history the security, prosperity, and health of our nation depend on our ability to unfold the full creative potential of every child -- not just the easy ones, not just the top 20 percent of the class, and not just those who reflect our preferred values. The problem is that America's public education system was never designed to do this. As Thomas Jefferson imagined it, schools should be designed to select and sort students into two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of obedient doers. Back then most everyone was a farmer, the pace of change was slow, options were few, and only a small handful of people were paid to think.
Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.
"Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday."
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
There are lessons that Michigan business and government must learn from the lost decade that stripped our state of pride and nearly 1 million high-paying middle-class jobs.
If we don't embrace and imagine a better future, instead falling back on "business as usual," we will be relegated to the trash heap of dinosaurian, economic history.
The revisionists among us would like us to believe Michigan's fate was pre-determined by the collapse of the domestic auto industry, capped off by a global economic meltdown in 2008.
While the perfect storm of events that hit Michigan were clearly impactful, they need not have defined us. As my dad always told me, "You have little control what happens to you in this life, you have 100 percent control over how you respond."
A state court judge on Friday blocked a suburban school district south of Denver from using public funds to help residents pay for private and religious schools.
Judge Michael A. Martinez ruled that a voucher program designed by the Douglas County School District violated the state constitution because it sent public funds to schools that infused religion throughout their curriculum, required students and faculty to meet certain standards of faith and required students to attend religious services.
The program "provides no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion, and no meaningful protections for the religious liberty of participating students," the judge wrote in a 68-page decision. He also said it amounted to direct public aid to churches and church-sponsored schools, in violation of the Colorado constitution.
Although President Barack Obama is on the ropes, with even some Democratic allies describing him as weak and passive, this week he showed boldness and imagination in one vital area: education.
Obama backed Education Secretary Arne Duncan's announcement that he will grant waivers to states that want to be excused from the punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind , Washington's much-maligned 2002 overhaul of elementary and secondary education policy.
Republican lawmakers complain that the White House waivers run roughshod over the legislative branch -- and they're right. But gridlock demands more robust use of presidential authority and, at least in this case, we're getting it. Unless Duncan's action is challenged and reversed on constitutional grounds, No Child Left Behind will be left behind for good.
Bullying can affect a student's academic performance, but a school's bullying climate may be linked with lower overall test scores, a study finds.
The study, presented recently at the American Psychological Assn.'s recent annual convention in Washington, D.C., surveyed 7,304 ninth-grade students and 2,918 teachers who were randomly chosen from 284 high schools in Virginia. Students and teachers were asked about incidents of bullying and teasing at the school. Ninth-grade students were chosen because researchers felt this first year of high school was a critical adjustment period, and because poor test scores in this grade may be linked with a higher drop-out rate.
In the study, bullying was defined as using strength or popularity to deliberately injure, threaten or embarrass another person, and that harassment can be verbal, physical or social. Two students close in strength who argue are not considered bullies.
Assembling diverse classes is an oft-stated goal among New York City private schools, with brochures featuring beaming multicultural students.
But this September Dalton will approach a rare benchmark: Nearly half of the incoming kindergarten class will be students of color.
Dalton will dramatically exceed the citywide average for kindergarten diversity at New York's private schools, which was 30% students of color last year, according to data from the National Association of Independent Schools.
It's a milestone in an aggressive campaign by the admissions director, Elisabeth "Babby" Krents, to broaden the school's reach since she assumed the position in 1996. The previous year, the kindergarten class was 6% diverse. This year, it will be 47% of the 97-member incoming class.
Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday.
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, 35 states set passing bars that are below the "basic" level on the national NAEP exam. "Basic" means students have a satisfactory understanding of material, as opposed to "proficient," which means they have a solid grasp of it. Massachusetts is the only state to set its bar at "proficient"--and that was only in fourth- and eighth-grade math.
We love robots - tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots - sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes' favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users' window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.
One of the summer scandals keeping us education wonks amused until school starts is a American Federation of Teachers gaffe in Connecticut. Union officials posted online an analysis of their lobbying against a parent trigger law in that state that revealed too much about their distaste for letting moms and dads decide who should run their schools.
Bloggers RiShawn Biddle and Alexander Russo exposed the union celebrating its gutting of a Connecticut version of California's parent trigger law. School reform organizations and editorialists were aghast. AFT president Randi Weingarten disowned the Web post. Activists pushing for parent triggers in Texas and New York welcomed the attention.
This idea has already reached the Washington area and may someday inspire legislation here. That would be bad. Despite its worthy proponents and democratic veneer, the parent trigger is a waste of time. Let's toss it into the trash with other once fashionable reform ideas like worksheets for slow students and brief constructed responses on state tests.
A balance of power in school governance is vital to ongoing improvements AND relevance.
The context for this advice was some technical information about e-learning system downtime that we needed to communicate with our leadership. I was thinking of how to present this information to communicate the meaning I thought most essential, and therefore drive toward the conclusions and actions I thought we should take. Controlling the message and managing the information might be an understandable desire, but when it comes to technology (and perhaps everything else), a controlled message is sometimes the wrong approach.
Deciding not to filter information does not mean that we cease thinking about how to effectively communicate. We need to understand the recipient of the information, and have insight into the most effective manner to package our communication. We should also be aware of how the communication will be perceived, and be prepared to address concerns or questions.
As most Coloradans know, at least those who keep up with statewide education news, the Douglas County school board recently approved -- unanimously -- a groundbreaking plan to help pay the tuition costs for hundreds of students so that they can attend private schools.
This plan, known colloquially as a school voucher program, enjoys ardent support from some quarters, but vigorous opposition elsewhere.
Is such a plan useful, does it seem a wise use of taxpayer provided money, and is it available to all students?
Or, as many think, should public money earmarked for education be used exclusively for public schools to benefit all students? As with so many topics dotting the American sociological landscape, the answers lie in the murky sea of the individual's political leanings.
IT BEGAN on August 4th with the metallic clink of a few pots and pans. By nightfall, thousands of people were on the streets of Santiago banging kitchenware, a form of protest last heard under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. This time the cacerolazos, as they are called, are being staged in the name of educational Utopia--and in response to a cack-handed government ban on marches.
Chile's school system is the least bad in Latin America, according to the OECD's PISA tests, which compare educational attainment across countries. But that does not make it good. And the overall performance hides huge disparities. Analysis done in Chile of the test results in the 65 countries that took part finds that it ranked 64th in terms of the variance of the results according to social class. Rich pupils get good private education; poor ones are condemned to underfunded, dilapidated state-funded schools.
Change is hard. So said many a politician trying to tackle problems confronting the state or nation.
The president of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), Richard Iannuzzi, is a tell-tale example of someone having real difficulty with change by showing a dark side.
Yesterday's Associated Press story on the changing landscape of public education was telling. With strengthened accountability and teacher evaluation combined with tightening resources, changes are afoot. On the one hand, Governor Andrew Cuomo is recognizing the "gravitational forces" of change and is in some ways its instigator by his focus on "improving student performance," including his push that gave more teeth to the state Regents evaluation requirements.
Spurred by a critical state audit, the Madison School District will begin a new program this year intended to better identify and provide services for talented and gifted students.
Using an approach similar to how it identifies and serves special education students, the district plans to categorize talented-and-gifted services into three tiers and identify where all students fit into those tiers based on a combination of test scores, grades, teacher and staff assessments, and parent and self-identification.
Students who qualify for the top tier could receive additional academic services outside of the classroom. The program also seeks to develop the potential talent of all students, especially those who may not have been identified in the past, such as English language learners and low-income students.
In the past, Madison schools have used a more ad hoc, less systematic, approach for identifying and serving students who demonstrate advanced abilities in intellect, academics, leadership, creativity, and the performance and visual arts. The district also has historically blanched at grouping students by ability.
A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We've all seen that movie--more than once, starting with "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me" in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country's most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.
The city's biggest teachers' union has called on the government to scrap its plan to introduce mandatory moral and national education classes at schools after a survey of more than 2,000 of its members found widespread opposition to the proposal.
The pro-democracy Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union, which claims a membership of 80,000, or 90 per cent of all the city's teaching professionals, says the poll found 70 per cent were against the move.
Union officials also criticised the government for carrying out consultation over the move in a "condescending" way and called for a new round of talks.
"If we have to speak in terms of grading requirements, this document [proposing the new curriculum] would be given a `fail'," said James Hon Lin-shan, deputy director of the union's rights and complaints department.
I’m not opposed to a new round of waivers on No Child Left Behind, but the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, the details seem to be getting short shrift lately in favor of the same talking points. To wit, let’s take a look at today’s NYT story on the forthcoming Duncan waiver proposal. Here it is (mostly) annotated with text from the article in itals.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
State-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results are an important resource for policymakers and other stakeholders responsible for making sense of and acting on state assessment results. Since 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has supported research that focuses on comparing NAEP and state proficiency standards. By showing where states' standards lie on the NAEP scale, the mapping analyses offer several important contributions. First, they allow each state to compare the stringency of its criteria for proficiency with that of other states.
Second, mapping analyses inform a state whether the rigor of its standards, as represented by the NAEP scale equivalent of the state's standard, changed over time. (A state's NAEP scale equivalent is the score on the NAEP scale at which the percentage of students in a state's NAEP sample who score at or above that value matches the percentage of students in the state who score proficient or higher on the state assessment.) Significant differences in NAEP scale equivalents might reflect changes in state assessments and standards or changes in policies or practices that occurred between the years. Finally, when key aspects of a state's assessment or standards remain the same, these mapping analyses allow NAEP to substantiate state-reported changes in student achievement.
The following are the research questions and the key findings regarding state proficiency standards, as they are measured on the NAEP scale.
Wisconsin's oft criticized WKCE vis a vis NAEP:
WKCE "proficient" = 2009 NAEP Below Basic for grade 4 reading (along with 34 other states) and grade 8 reading (along with 15 other states)
= 2009 NAEP Basic for grade 4 math (along with 41 other states) and grade 8 (along with 35 other states)
WKCE results showed more positive changes than NAEP results for grade 4
reading from 2007 to 2009, grade 4 math from 2007 to 2009, and grade 4 math from 2005 to 2009
NAEP results showed more positive changes than WKCE results in grade 8
reading from 2005 to 2009.
The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don't worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That's the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.
"They think like assessors, not professors," says Diane Johnson, who is in charge of the university's cadre of graders. "The evaluators have no contact with the students at all. They don't know them. They don't know what color they are, what they look like, or where they live. Because of that, there is no temptation to skew results in any way other than to judge the students' work."
Western Governors is not the only institution reassessing grading. A few others, including the University of Central Florida, now outsource the scoring of some essay tests to computers. Their software can grade essays thanks to improvements in artificial-intelligence techniques. Software has no emotional biases, either, and one Florida instructor says machines have proved more fair and balanced in grading than humans have.
Today's parents are paying substantially higher out-of-pocket costs for higher education than their parents did 30 years ago. And the public has noticed. Three out of four Americans say college is unaffordable for most people, according to the widely publicized survey Pew Research Center survey "Is college worth it?"
A four-year degree is becoming increasingly difficult to attain due to several factors:
--College costs are rising at nearly three times the rate of inflation, according to FinAid.org.
--More than 1 in 10 students graduate with more than $40,000 in undergraduate student debt, according to the Project on Student Debt.
Online education is becoming a legitimate and viable option for education systems around the country. Both colleges and secondary schools are offering classes to students. In fact many states and schools are requiring students to take some method of mode of online learning. New York made major changes around seat time and face-to-face contact between student and teacher. The state's intentions are good. They want to move away the focus from seat time, and they want to offer courses that might be hard to offer in certain areas of the state to all students. With all these innovative systemic changes, one might think we are completely on the right track. I offer a word of caution.
Online education is in danger of replicating a system that isn't working. Yes, I wrote it. With all the potential for innovation that online education has to offer, we have fallen into the pitfall of replication. The keyword is "danger." There is much that online education can do to innovate the education system, and much that has already been done as a result. Yet most of the actual courses and pedagogical structures that are in place are simply replicating the traditional style of education.
DIEGO GARCIA: Two years ago I went to my first BAUDL summer institute, dragged along by my sister Jazmin to the foreign world of debate. I remember being nervous: I had never engaged in an activity like that before, and was worried about having to speak in front of a crowd. But in the end I loved it, and started spending a lot of time on it, enough that my partner and I came out of last year's season as League Champions.
When the 2011 BAUDL institute began my biggest concern was the camp tournament - I had a reputation to defend. The last day of the institute there is a tournament were debaters would test their knowledge based on their own personal experiences and what they learned during the week. Being the competitive debater that I am it's always exciting being at a tournament just to really challenge opponents and make it a learning experience for both teams.
An Associated Press analysis of student testing data shows Tennessee school systems without teachers' collective bargaining rights performed slightly better than those with negotiated contracts, but posted weaker gains.
Thirty-eight of the state's 135 local school districts did not engage in collective bargaining with their teachers before a new law eliminated those rights this year, according to the Tennessee Education Association.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a tuition-free public charter school that will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Our mission is to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service.
To achieve this mission, young men will receive an education that:
We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.
Today's report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools - Eva Moskowitz'sHarlem Success academies - have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City's public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies' black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.
Epoch-making educational reform is predicted to leave its mark on the Taipei City property market. In 2014, Taiwan's nine-year compulsory education will be extended to 12 years, and junior high school students will no longer have rigid entrance exams for senior high schools - it will all depend on their house address.
Instead of test scores in combination with household registration in desirable school districts, only the latter will determine the school that students get into. This, along with the huge faith ambitious parents put in the performance of so-called "star schools", has caused dramatic rises in house prices and rents in the catchment areas of the best schools.
When the producers at Fox & Friends asked me to get up early on Saturday morning to debate the merits of students earning college credits in high school, my third thought (after "Am I being set up as the liberal stooge?" and "Will this get me on The Daily Show?") was, "Who could be against that?" The president of Belmont University, as it turns out. Here's the clip.
While our education system is structured to move people along in age cohorts, some people obviously learn much faster than others. Falling behind is a problem, but so is falling ahead and getting stuck in boring classes that you don't need. As I note, we've been running AP and IB programs in for decades now-I took seven AP tests as a high school student in the mid-80s. Curiously, the object lessons of this experience often seem lost in the broader education debate. People are constantly denouncing multiple-choice "fill in the bubble" standardized tests as horribly inadequate and a tool of corporatist oppression, yet well-off progressive parents scramble to enroll their children in high schools with a full slate of AP courses. "Teaching to test" is also a horrible sin, unless, apparently, the test is AP Physics and you're angling for the Ivy League.
Schoolteachers had better brace for eight hours of work daily. The Right to Education (RTE) Act, which specifies 45 working hours a week for teachers, including preparation hours, is reportedly about to be implemented in the state.
Though school education minister Bratya Basu said he was not aware of any such development, a senior school education department official said the state government has decided on several changes in schools. For instance, the number of class hours to be put in by students in a year has been fixed. The number will be 800 for classes I to V and 1,000 for classes VI to VIII.
"Students of classes I to V will attend school for 200 days a year while those in classes VI to VIII will have 220 school days annually," said a senior school education department official.
Critics of public school "reform" say that it looks too much like a business model with education foundations that have big wallets taking control away from local communities.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, along with his wife, Melinda Gates, founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had an endowment of $33.5 billion as of 2009. The foundation is "driven by the passions and the interests of the Gates family," with an education goal to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.
Another notable figure is Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad (rhymes with road). With his wife Edythe, Broad founded The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.1 billion with a mission to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts.
"Priorities of some of these foundations nationally have taken precedence over parents and community members," said Pam Grundy, co-founder of Mecklenburg Acts, the local affiliate of Parents Across America. "They're trying to do a lot of things that have never been proven to work. We feel like our kids are like an experiment."
Few things about a school seem to matter more to parents than class size. For many of us it is the litmus test for a well-run school. Small class size speaks of a school that is focused on putting resources in the right place -- not administrative retreats, paneling for the principal's office, or expensive but rarely used class-room technology. Small class size is a signal to us that a hundred smaller decisions that accompany the running of a school have been shaped with our children as a priority. As a result, a school is able to invest in an appropriate number of teachers.
Classrooms with fifteen students and one teacher usually look better, too -- more controlled than classrooms with thirty kids. At best, we imagine that small classes are environments where our children will be closely observed and where teachers have the opportunity to get to know each child. We assume that in small classes our children will receive personalized attention and that learning can be sprinkled like stardust through the thoughtful, free-ranging give-and-take between student and teacher. Small class size creates an environment that invites parent involvement, as well. If your daughter is one of thirty second-graders, you know without being told that the teacher is going to be hard-pressed to remember which reading group your daughter is in, much less her progress with phonemes. It's not surprising that so many parents will move heaven and earth to get their children in schools with a low teacher-student ratio.
A banker, a professor, a hospital administrator, and a pastor are among the members of a newly created board to run Bridgeport's school district and overhaul its finances and student achievement.
Acting state Education Commissioner George Coleman announced the six appointments yesterday, saying the new board will start its work immediately in place of the nine-member elected school board being swept out during the state takeover.
State education officials decided this summer that Connecticut needed to assume control of the troubled Bridgeport schools under provisions of a 2007 state law that lets it step in when students' academic performance is in dire need of improvement.
At the start of this year, John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, was predicting that the state soon would have one of the best laws in the nation for improving the number and quality of charter schools.
It's August now. There's no new law and Gee is gone as head of the group. Clearly, things haven't gone as expected this year for these important, independently operated, publicly funded schools.
Charters haven't fared as badly since January as, say, teachers unions. There are going to be more charter schools in Wisconsin this fall than ever - around 225. In Milwaukee, some weak schools are gone, some strong ones are picking up momentum, and there will be more than 10,000 kids in more than 25 charters in September. Charters are here to stay.
But the bumpy ride for charter school advocates in recent months underscores questions about how big and strong the movement is going to be.
In this batch of e-mails you start to sense some wariness on the part of UW (and I think they should be). I think TFA is having these universities create these single-use alt certifications but will, in the end, create their own on-line teaching and cut out the middlemen. If U-ACT still exists in 5 years, I'll be surprised.
David Szatmary (a financial Vice-Provost) to Stritikus; he submitted a number of questions like:
So which is it? Are most Colorado schools doing a good job, as officials regularly assure parents and the public, or are they failing miserably, as some of the same officials will be telling a state court over the next few weeks in a case known as Lobato vs. the State of Colorado?
Both types of assertions can't be true. And if some aren't, they amount to -- let's not sugarcoat it -- deliberate fibs.
Consider Center School District Superintendent George Welsh as a case in point. According to the website Education News Colorado, Welsh was asked Monday in court to reconcile an awkward contradiction. On the one hand, he'd testified at length on the district's failures. Yet he'd also sent a letter to parents in 2007 "citing the good education his own children had received."
"Is that a statement you stand by today?" an assistant attorney general asked Welsh.
"You've got to put a positive spin on things to make your community feel comfortable," Welsh said, but then, reports Education News, answered " 'no' when asked again if he stood by the 2007 praise of the district's quality."
It is often difficult to feel optimistic about the future of liberty. Those of us who value individual liberty and free markets look only at the encroachment of government in our lives. We often overlook the victories that should give us hope for the future of liberty. The school choice movement is one of the most important fights in the future of liberty, and one that we are starting to win.
It is fitting to talk about this now, because July 31 would have been Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman's 99th birthday. Over fifty years ago, Friedman jump-started the school choice movement with an article called "The Role of Government in Education." In it, he laid out a plan for school vouchers that would allow parents to have a choice in where they send their children. In a 2005 interview with Reason Magazine, Friedman said, "I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used."
Douglas County, Colorado school voucher hearings wrap up; What happens when citizens lose faith in government? 2011 Madison School District Open Enrollment Data (4.73% Leave)
Closing arguments in the case challenging the Douglas County School District's voucher program ended three days of hearings that could halt the program in its infancy.
A standing-room-only crowd listened in Denver District Court while a legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union faced off against a team that included the Colorado Attorney General's Office to decide the fate of the district's school choice scholarship program.
Both sides agreed that any decision from Denver District Court Judge Michael Martinez will likely face an appeal, regardless of the ruling.
"There will be an appeal either way," said Michael McCarthy, a plaintiff attorney representing the Taxpayers for Public Education. "What (the school district has) done is press the envelope as far as they can. For those interested in preserving public education in this state, they have got in their face as far as they can."
In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools. The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado. What do you think? Should vouchers only be used with lower-income students? Should they never be used? Do they violate the constitution?
One answer comes from Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist. One of Mr. Krastev's special interests is in the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century. To understand why they endure, Mr. Krastev has turned to the thinking of the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who was born in Berlin in 1915 and eventually became one of America's seminal thinkers.
In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit -- stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice -- speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.
For Mr. Krastev, this idea -- the trade-off between exit and voice -- is the key to understanding what he describes as the "perverse" stability of Vladimir V. Putin's Russia. For all the prime minister's bare-chested public displays of machismo, his version of authoritarianism, in Mr. Krastev's view, is "vegetarian."
"It is fair to say that most Russians today are freer than in any other period of their history," he wrote in an essay published this spring. But Mr. Krastev argues that it is precisely this "user-friendly" character of Mr. Putin's authoritarianism that makes Russia stable. That is because Russia's relatively porous dictatorship effectively encourages those people who dislike the regime most, and have the most capacity to resist it, to leave the country. They choose exit rather than voice, and the result is the death of political opposition: "Leaving the country in which they live is easier than reforming it."
Faced with an increasing stream of data from the Web and other electronic sources, many companies are seeking managers who can make sense of the numbers through the growing practice of data analytics, also known as business intelligence. Finding qualified candidates has proven difficult, but business schools hope to fill the talent gap.
This fall several schools, including Fordham University's Graduate School of Business and Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, are unveiling analytics electives, certificates and degree programs; other courses and programs were launched in the previous school year.
International Business Machines Corp., which has invested more than $14 billion buying analytics industry companies such as Coremetrics and Netezza Corp. since 2005, has teamed up with more than 200 schools, including Fordham, to develop analytics curriculum and training.
Los Angeles Unified fired 56 tenured teachers in the 2010-11 school year - more than four times the number terminated the previous year.
The information was learned by the Daily News, a sister newspaper of the Daily Breeze.
The increase over the 13 teachers fired in 2009-10 represents a policy shift for the district as it tries to improve the quality of teaching, despite state rules that can make the dismissal process lengthy and difficult.
A total of 758 teachers - those with tenure and without - as well as substitutes and administrators were fired last year and 105 more resigned to avoid dismissal, according to a district memo.
Among those fired for poor performance were 136 nonpermanent educators - those with less than two years' experience - and 312 substitute teachers.
The total represents less than 3 percent of the district's workforce of 30,000 teachers, but it's a significant increase from the number of terminations made in previous years.
Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.
The kid in the back wants me to define "logic." The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn't understand a word I'm saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn't done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I'll never know. I'm trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote "clarify your thinking" on his essay, but he's still confused.
It's 8:15 a.m. and already I'm behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.
Momentum for business schools to accept the GRE test, mainly used by graduate-school applicants in the social sciences and humanities, is building as those schools aim to attract less traditional applicants.
Since April, more than 100 business schools have said they will accept applications with GRE--Graduate Record Examination--scores. In the past, business schools have only accepted the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, which looks more at reading comprehension and reasoning. The GRE has a stronger focus on vocabulary and straightforward quantitative skills.
Excellence in Education explains Florida's reading reforms and compares Florida's NAEP progress with Wisconsin's at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting
Remember a long time ago when educators were asking why Johnny couldn't read? Well now in California, it appears that there is a major push to delay learning how well Johnny can read in the first place.
Early assessments are essential to get kids like Johnny on track to succeed in school. These assessments provide critical data that help schools identify which kids need extra help and use best practices to help them get to grade level proficiency.
SB 740, a bill pushed by the California Teachers Association, is quickly moving through the California Legislature, which would eliminate standardized second grade testing. SB 740 eliminates a valuable early assessment mechanism for teachers and parents. Without the data from the second grade assessment, we will be less likely to know exactly which students need extra help. And we will likely have more schools that fail to close achievement gaps and allow students--especially low income and minority students--to fall further behind.
Give a kid a chance and you'll be amazed at what happens next.
That thought kept rolling through my mind as I surveyed the controlled chaos that was lunch for 80 teenagers who'd moved onto Stanford's campus to take five summer weeks of intensive math and science courses.
I know. What's so different about a passel of brilliant kids studying hard stuff at Stanford?
Well, for one thing, a pessimist might look at these particular kids working their way through hamburgers, chicken and mashed potatoes, and conclude that they are not college material. In fact, the vast majority of them would be the first in their families to go to college. Nearly all of them attend high schools where most students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. Some live in tough neighborhoods. Some dodge gangs on the way to and from school -- and maybe even at school.
But that's not what defines them. Not at all. The kids at Stanford, members of the inaugural class of the Silicon Valley version of the Summer Math and Science Honors Academy (SMASH), are energetic, optimistic, determined, resourceful and approaching brilliant.
The head of the USA's second-largest teachers union on Monday said local affiliates will defend the rights of teachers caught up in cheating scandals, including the one now unfolding in Atlanta. But she said cheating "under any circumstances is unacceptable."
Speaking to reporters during the American Federation of Teachers' biannual training conference, Randi Weingarten said the union would "obviously" represent teachers accused of cheating "to make sure that people have some kind of fairness -- and that it's not some kind of witch hunt."
A long-awaited report released last week by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, found teacher- or principal-led cheating in 44 of 56 Atlanta schools investigated. Investigators determined that 178 educators cheated. Of those, 82 confessed.
During the 2011-2012 school year, as MMSD implements Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI2) and the new district School Support Teams, the plan for delivery of Talented and Gifted Services will continue to be integrated and refined so that it accomplishes the following: 1) is both systemic and systematic in nature; 2) is collaborative; 3) is financially sustainable; 4) is fluid and responsive to student needs; S) offers appropriate opportunities for student growth and talent development; 6) addresses the comprehensive needs (academic, social and personal growth) of students; 7) is aligned with State regulations, professional standards, current research, and effective practice; and 8) provides goals and evaluation procedures to evaluate growth and suggest areas in which change is needed. This Plan for TAG Services describes the following:
Tax dollars soon could go to schools where teachers aren't required to be certified and where students aren't required to take the same standardized tests as their public school counterparts.
That concerns Democrats, who expressed concerns about Republican school-choice measures that were the subject of a House Education Committee public hearing today.
Rep. Jim Christiana, sponsor of one bill in the education reform package, said school choice isn't about turning public schools into private ones; it's about letting parents choose where their children will be best educated.
"We're not saying students shouldn't have to take standardized tests. We're just saying the tests should be based on the curriculum you're offering," said Mr. Christiana, R-Beaver.
If the U.S. Department of Education fancies itself a school reform organization, then the School Improvement Grant is one of its most important programs -- if not the most important.
-- Check out the cross-post with our good (and cynical, insightful) friends at Title I-derland. --
The purpose of SIG is to transform "persistently lowest achieving schools" into good ones and, in so doing, demonstrate that the federal government can invest our money wisely. Of course, that is no small task. If this flops, then maybe ED should reconsider its role as a reform organization. The stakes are that high.
Most readers probably know how the program works. Basically, the state identifies the bottom 5 percent of its persistently lowest achieving schools, including Title I and Title I-eligible high schools with a graduation rate of 60 percent or less. Once those schools are identified, districts can apply for SIG funds on behalf of those schools, but only if they implement one of four prescriptive school intervention models.
A Kansas college hopes young doctors will be more willing to practice in small towns if they go to a medical school in a rural area.
The University of Kansas will have what it says is the smallest four-year medical education site in the country when eight students begin taking classes on Monday on a satellite campus in Salina, Kansas. The move is in response to a shortage of rural doctors in the United States.
"By training physicians in a nonmetropolitan area, we are showing young medical students that life can be good, and practice can be stimulating, outside of the big city," said Dr. William Cathcart-Rake, the physician who directs the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Salina.
The charts above show the differences in: a) monthly employment levels and b) monthly unemployment rates between 1992 and 2011 for: a) college graduates and b) workers with less than a high school degree. The differences are quite striking and interesting, and might help explain some of the labor market dynamics in the current "jobless recovery."
Note that the employment level for college graduates flattened during the 2008-2009 recession, but is now at a record high level. In contrast, the employment level for workers without a high school degree is about 2.5 million below the pre-recession peak. Likewise the jobless rate for college graduates has increased by a few percentage points because of the recession (and is now at 4.4%), but the jobless rate for workers with less than a high school degree has increased by more than six percentage points (now at 14.3%), and was recently almost ten percentage points above its pre-recession level.
I like writing about classrooms. I think state and national education politics, by comparison, are irrelevant and trivial. Steven Brill, in his new book "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," wants to prove me wrong. He may have done so.
The book is about the U.S. Education Department and school superintendents and teacher union leaders in New York, Denver, Florida, New Orleans and the District wallowing in regulations and legislation and memoranda of understanding. What a bore, I thought. I put it in the bathroom, my spot for stuff my job forces me to read. Within the first few pages, I was taking the book everywhere -- the supermarket checkout line, the dinner table, the movies.
It is funny, exciting, surprising and deep. Brill is a remarkable person, a reporter who became a mogul, creating American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, Brill's Content magazine and Press+, a new business model for journalism online. But he still likes reporting.
We've also heard what state and district superintendents along with ed
reform organizations around the country think: the public needs to know
which preparation programs are doing a good job and which are not.
But now it's time to _[4]hear_ from those most directly affected by teacher preparation programs: teachers themselves.
We want to know how ready teachers felt on their first day of class. What do teachers value about their teacher preparation programs? What do they think aspiring teachers need to know about the programs they are considering?
The American higher education system is plagued by two chronic problems: dropouts and debt. Barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years, and graduation rates at less-selective colleges often hover at 25 percent or less. At the same time, student loan debt is at an all-time high, recently passing credit card debt in total volume.1 Loan default rates have risen sharply in recent years, consigning a growing number of students to years of financial misery. In combination, drop-outs and debt are a major threat to the nation's ability to help students become productive, well-educated citizens.
The federal government has traditionally tracked these issues by calculating, for each college, the total number of degrees awarded, the percentage of students who graduate on time, and the percentage of students who default on their loans. Each of these statistics provides valuable information, but none shows a complete picture. A college could achieve a stellar graduation rate by passing students
along and handing out degrees that have little value in the job market, making it difficult for graduates to earn enough money to pay off their debt. Alternatively, a college could keep tuition and loan default rates low while also providing a terrible education and helping few students earn degrees. Students choosing colleges and policymakers governing higher education need an overall measure of value, one that combines debt and graduation.
Education Sector has created such a measure, the "borrowing to credential ratio." For each college, we have taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. The results are revealing:
Never put on the Internet anything you wouldn't want to see in the newspaper, right? Tell that to the American Federation of Teachers, which recently posted online an internal document bragging about how it successfully undermines parental power in education.
This document concerns "parent trigger," an ambitious reform idea we've reported on several times. Invented and passed into law in California in early 2010, parent trigger empowers parents to use petition drives to force reform at failing public schools. Under California law, a 51% majority of parents can shake up a failing school's administration or invite a charter operator to take it over.
California's innovation caught on quickly--and that's where the AFT's PowerPoint presentation comes in. Prepared (off the record) for AFT activists at the union's annual convention in Washington, D.C. last month, it explains how AFT lobbying undermined an effort to bring parent trigger to Connecticut last year. Called "How Connecticut Diffused [sic] The Parent Trigger," it's an illuminating look into union cynicism and power.
Kentucky's overall high school graduation rate for the 2009-10 school year was 76.68 percent as computed under a new formula, the state Department of Education said Tuesday.
While 2009-10 is the most recent year for which graduation figures are available, the state also released recalculated rates for 2007-08 and 2008-09 Tuesday using the new "averaged freshman graduation" formula.
Under that formula, Kentucky's overall graduation rate for 2007-08 was 74.99 percent, and it climbed to 75.11 percent in 2008-09, state education officials said.
Kentucky is switching to the averaged freshman formula as it transitions toward a new, federally mandated uniform national formula designed to put all states on the same page in computing graduation rates.
It's not often the words imagination and innovation are used in the context of transcripts, or anything related to most registrar offices. I was lucky this past month to attend the Registrar Forum at the AACRAO Technology Conference, and in the closing session, Tom Black, Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs and University Registrar at Stanford made me remember how powerful thinking outside the box can be, especially for something I take for granted: a student's transcript.
Like many Registrars, I came to this profession through a work-study gig. I worked simultaneously in my college IT Help Desk and Registrar's Office, two offices with different orientations to student computing, but also a lot of overlap. When I was a freshman in the late 1990s, online services under one administrative umbrella were rare, and Wesleyan pioneered electronic portfolios as a wrap-around to most student computing services on campus. While I still think of the e-portfolio as a portal with another name, Tom Black's presentation made me realize the synergy between the two concepts, and how portfolios can enhance the academic transcript.
A business owner and father of three told a packed courtroom today that he joined a lawsuit to stop Douglas County School District's voucher program because it will harm his daughters' schools.
"This is taking money from public schools and funding religious and private schools. This is going to cost our school district precious resources that we do not have," Kevin Leung said. "I taught my children to do what's right. It might cost me business in Douglas County and things like that, but it doesn't matter. You have to do what's right."
Leung testified during the first of what is expected to be three days of hearings on a request to temporarily stop Douglas County from implementing the voucher program until a lawsuit challenging the legality of the program is resolved.
Do voucher programs force public schools into a zero-sum game by redirecting public funds and promising students to private schools? Or do school-choice options spur healthy competition by pressuring public schools to improve? Using data from Florida's Tax Credit Scholarship Program, David Figlio of Northwestern University argues that public schools improve their performance when faced with the prospect of losing students to nearby private schools through voucher programs, and that greater competition results in greater gains in public school students' test scores. In other words, the competitive effects of school choice could create a system where everybody wins.
At least 200 public schools in Michigan would be at risk of losing their state accreditation -- and being closed -- under new standards being pushed by the state Department of Education.
Under the changes, accreditation would be based on standardized test scores, a move state education officials say would help them identify failing schools that need support and intervention.
Currently, accreditation is awarded based on a school's compliance in six areas related mostly to administration and school organization. Schools can self-report data to the state, including staff certification, state curriculum compliance and school improvement plans.
The system misleads the public about how Michigan's 4,000 schools are doing, said Jan Ellis, Department of Education spokeswoman. She added that a revised accreditation system would make schools more accountable to parents and the public.
Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.
But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County's school district will launch this fall.
"He wants more friends and he's interested in playing baseball," his mother said.
The district's full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district's extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
The Georgia Board of Education on Monday unanimously approved Ivy Preparatory Academy's plan to open k-12 boys and girls schools in DeKalb County.
The schools, Ivy Preparatory Academy at Kirkwood, will be housed on the former campus of Peachtree Hope Charter School. Each campus will have 265 students and a staff of 10. A parent information session will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday on the DeKalb campus.
State charter school officials said the plan will help keep more educational options available for DeKalb students.
The state is pursuing its broad mission to improve Hawaii's public school system along several fronts, but sharpening the accountability of all parties surely is one top goal. And teachers are perhaps the most important of the parties being called to account, with plans to develop a more effective way to evaluate their work.
Proposing to overhaul teacher evaluations and make them more "performance-based" was a key element in the state's successful bid for a federal Race to the Top competitive grant -- specifically, to make student academic growth a factor in the teacher's score. To their credit, the Hawaii State Teachers Association leaders have said they favor it in concept.
The ongoing dispute between the union and the state administration, unfortunately, has further complicated what already was to be a complex process. However, the HSTA, which wants to reopen talks, has an opportunity to use evaluation reform as an olive branch to help restart negotiations for contract amendments.
An olive branch is clearly needed. The state imposed its "last, best and final offer," sparking an HSTA complaint that is now before the Hawaii Labor Relations Board.
The Round Rock school district, which earned the state's second-highest academic rating in 2010, this year has two schools that failed to meet state standards, securing "academically unacceptable" labels that will stick for two years.
The news comes as schools and districts across Texas see their ratings slide this year despite making academic gains. Figures released by the Texas Education Agency on Friday show that more than half of all Texas schools that had the highest rating in 2010, exemplary, fell in their ratings, and five times as many schools were deemed academically unacceptable, the lowest rating.
Locally, eight of the Austin school district's 112 rated schools missed state academic targets; last year, only one Austin school was rated academically unacceptable. Pflugerville this year has two schools rated unacceptable. Both traditional high schools in Bastrop failed to meet state standards and received the lowest rating. Hutto has two elementary schools that are rated unacceptable.
I feel you, Wisconsin Education Association Council; I don't trust Gov. Scott Walker, either.
But so far as I know, he's not trying to kill me.
This might be the key distinction in judging WEAC's decision to skip out on a Walker-associated effort to devise an accountability system for Wisconsin schools; one would think the state's largest teachers union would want to be a part of that.
Last week, WEAC president Mary Bell seemed to indicate it all came down to trust.
"How can we trust the governor to be a credible partner on education issues when they just passed laws to make massive cuts to school funding and silence our voices in schools?" she asked.
Detroit Public School union leaders said today they will use the weekend to strategize a response to the district breaking eight union contracts Friday to impose a 10 percent wage cut and increase employees' health insurance contributions.
"We're meeting with attorneys over the weekend and on Monday to outline what we're going to do and how we're going to do it," said Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. The response could include a court challenge, Johnson said.
Emergency Manager Roy Roberts' order affects nearly 10,000 union and nonunion employees. The district, with a $327 million deficit, would save $81.8 million, officials said.
Teachers will have to contribute 20 percent toward their health care. Teachers will see a 10 percent cut in pay starting with their Sept. 20 paycheck, Johnson said.
Math teacher Antoine Joseph already had been thinking of leaving Miami Norland Senior High School, so when its annual grade from the state dropped from a D to an F nine years ago that just solidified his decision.
Joseph said it wasn't just a matter of being stigmatized as a failure - he was just tired of the circumstances behind the failing grade.
"There is a propensity to go to another school where the parents are more involved, the students are more eager to learn and they are more thirsty for knowledge," he said.
Joseph apparently was not alone. A recent study by a trio of economists showed a disproportionate number of Florida teachers left schools that got lower grades in 2002 after the state changed the way it evaluated them.
The researchers call it "accountability shock." That's their term for unexpected results from shake-ups in the way students, teachers, administrators or schools are evaluated, graded, rewarded or punished. The study is timely advice because accountability changes are in the works across the nation due to President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" school initiative. The program is providing $4.35 billion in federal stimulus money to Florida, 10 other states and the District of Columbia for innovative changes aimed at improving student achievement.
The large ballroom in UCLA's Covel Commons resembled a bustling day-care center one recent day, as laughter rang out across the room.
A boisterous game of Twister was being played in one corner, charades were set up near the refreshments and the occasional shout of "Uno!" sounded from the front.
But the participants, speaking in rapid-fire Mandarin, were not children. They were dozens of Chinese teachers in Los Angeles for a nine-day crash course to prepare them for what they consider the opportunity of a lifetime: to teach Mandarin in American schools.
In a few weeks, 176 Chinese teachers will head to kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms across the country, from rural Kentucky towns to the tidy suburbs of Salt Lake City. Only two will remain in California, assigned to schools in Redding and Ojai.
The fourth meeting of the Governor's Read to Lead task force took place in Milwaukee on Friday, July 29. The meeting was filmed by Wisconsin Eye, but we have not seen it offered yet through their website. We will send out a notice when that occurs. As always, we encourage you to watch and draw your own conclusions.
Following is a synopsis of the meeting, which centered on reading improvement success in Florida and previously-discussed task force topics (teacher preparation, licensing, professional development, screening/intervention, early childhood). In addition, Superintendent Evers gave an update on activity within DPI. The discussion of the impact of societal factors on reading achievement was held over to the next meeting, as was further revisiting of early childhood issues.
Opening: Governor Walker welcomed everyone and stressed the importance of this conversation on reading. Using WKCE data, which has been criticized nationally and locally for years as being derived from low standards, the Governor stated that 80% of Wisconsin students are proficient or advanced in reading, and he is seeking to serve the other 20%. The NAEP data, which figured prominently in the presentation of the guest speakers, tell a very different story. Superintendent Evers thanked the task force members and indicated that this is all about "connecting the dots" and putting all of the "puzzle pieces" together. The work of this task force will impact the work going on in other education-focused committees.
The Florida Story: Guest speakers were Patricia Levesque, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Foundation for Florida's Future, and Mary Laura Bragg, the director of Florida's statewide reading initiative, Just Read, Florida! from 2001 to 2006.
In a series of slides, Levesque compared Wisconsin, Florida, and national performance on the NAEP reading test over the past decade. Despite challenges in terms of English language learners, a huge percentage of students on free/reduced lunch, and a minority-majority demographic, Florida has moved from the scraping the bottom on the NAEP to the top group of states. Over the same time period, Wisconsin has plummeted in national ranking, and our students now score below the national average in all subgroups for which NAEP data is disaggregated. 10 points on the NAEP scale is roughly equivalent to one grade level in performance, and Florida has moved from two grade levels below Wisconsin to 1/2 grade level above. For a full discussion of Wisconsin's NAEP performance, see our website, http://www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org.
Levesque and Bragg also described the components of the reading initiative in Florida, which included grading all schools from A to F, an objective test-based promotion policy from third to fourth grade, required state-approved reading plans in each district, trained reading coaches in schools, research assistance from the Florida Center for Reading Research, required individual student intervention plans for struggling students, universal K-2 screening for reading problems, improved licensure testing for teachers and principals, the creation of a reading endorsement for teaching licenses, and on-line professional development available to all teachers. As noted above, achievement has gone up dramatically, the gap between demographic groups has narrowed, early intervention is much more common, and third grade retention percentages continue to fall. The middle school performance is now rising as those children who received early intervention in elementary school reach that level. Those students have not yet reached high school, and there is still work to be done there. To accomplish all this, Florida leveraged federal funds for Title 1 and 2 and IDEA, requiring that they be spent for state-approved reading purposes. The Governor also worked actively with business to create private/public partnerships supporting reading. Just Read, Florida! was able to engineer a statewide conference for principals that was funded from vendor fees. While Florida is a strong local control state, reading is controlled from the state level, eliminating the need for local curriculum directors to research and design reading plans without the resources or manpower to do so. Florida also cut off funding to university professors who refused to go along with science-based reading instruction and assessment.
Florida is now sharing its story with other states, and offering assistance in reading plan development, as well as their screening program (FAIR assessment system) and their online professional development, which cost millions to develop. Levesque invited Wisconsin to join Indiana and other states at a conference in Florida this fall.
Questions for, or challenges to, the presenters came from three task force members.
Rachel Lander asked about the reading coaches, and Bragg responded that they were extensively trained by the state office, beginning with Reading First money. They are in the classroom modeling for teachers and also work with principals on understanding data and becoming building reading leaders. The coaches now have an association that has acquired a presence in the state.
Linda Pils stated her belief that Wisconsin outperforms Florida at the middle school level, and that we have higher graduation rates than Florida. She cited opinions that third grade retention has some immediate effect, but the results are the same or better for non-retained students later, and that most retained students will not graduate from high school. She also pointed out Florida's class size reduction requirement, and suggested that the NAEP gains came from that. Levesque explained that the retention studies to which Pils was referring were from other states, where retention decisions were made subjectively by teachers, and there was no requirement for science-based individual intervention plans. The gains for retained students in Florida are greater than for matched students who are not retained, and the gains persist over time. Further, retention did not adversely affect graduation rates. In fact, graduation rates have increased, and dropout rates have declined. The University of Arkansas is planning to do a study of Florida retention. The class size reduction policy did not take effect in Florida until last year, and a Harvard study concluded that it had no effect on student reading achievement. Task force member Steve Dykstra pointed out that you cannot compare the NAEP scores from two states without considering the difference in student demographics. Wisconsin's middle school scores benefit from the fact that we have a relative abundance of white students who are not on free/reduced lunch. Our overall average student score in middle school may be higher than Florida, but when we compare similar cohorts from both states, Florida is far ahead.
Tony Pedriana asked what kinds of incentives have been put in place for higher education, principals, etc. to move to a science-based system of instruction. The guests noted that when schools are graded, reading performance receives double weight in the formula. They also withheld funding for university programs that were not science-based.
DPI Update: Superintendent Evers indicated that DPI is looking at action in fours areas: teacher licensure, the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, the use of a screener to detect reading problems, and implementation of the Common Core State Standards.
The committee looking at licensing is trying to decide whether they should recommend an existing, off-the-shelf competency exam, or revise the exam they are currently requiring (Praxis 2). He did not indicate who is on the committee or what existing tests they were looking at. In the past, several members of the task force have recommended that Wisconsin use the Foundations of Reading test given in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
DPI is revising the WMELS to correct definitions and descriptions of phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics. The changes will align the WMELS with both the Report of the National Reading Panel and the Common Core State Standards. Per the suggestion of Eboni Howard, a guest speaker at the last meeting, they will get an outside opinion on the WMELS when they are finished. Evers did not indicate who is doing this work.
DPI is looking at the possibility of using PALS screening or some other tool recommended by the National RTI Center to screen students in grades K-2 or K-3. Evers previously mentioned that this committee had been meeting for 6-7 months, but he did not indicate who is on it.
Evers made reference to communication that was circulated this week (by Dr. Dan Gustafson and John Humphries) that expressed concern over the method in which DPI is implementing the Common Core. He stated that districts have been asking DPI for help in implementing the CC, and they want to provide districts with a number of resources. One of those is the model curriculum being developed by CESA 7. DPI is looking at it to see how it could help the state move forward, but no final decision has yet been made.
Task force member Pam Heyde, substituting for Marcia Henry, suggested that it would be better to look at what Florida is doing rather than start from ground zero looking at guidelines. Patricia Levesque confirmed that Florida was willing to assist other states, and invited Wisconsin to join a meeting of state reading commissioners in October.
Teacher Preparation: The discussion centered around what needs to change in teacher preparation programs, and how to fit this into a four-year degree.
Steve Dykstra said that Texas has looked at this issue extensively. Most schools need three courses to cover reading adequately, but it is also important to look at the texts that are used in the courses. He referenced a study by Joshi that showed most of the college texts to be inadequate.
Dawnene Hassett, UW-Madison literacy professor in charge of elementary teacher reading preparation, was invited to participate in this part of the discussion. She indicated we should talk in terms of content knowledge, not number of credits. In a couple of years, teachers will have to pass a Teacher Performance Assessment in order to graduate. This was described as a metacognitive exercise using student data. In 2012-13, UW-Madison will change its coursework, combining courses in some of the arts, and dropping some of the pedagogical, psychological offerings.
Tony Pedriana said he felt schools of education had fallen down on teaching content derived from empirical studies.
Hassett said schools teach all five "pillars" of reading, but they may not be doing it well enough. She said you cannot replicate classroom research, so you need research "plus."
Pils was impressed with the assistance the FCRR gives to classroom teachers regarding interventions that work. She also said spending levels were important.
Dykstra asked Mary Laura Bragg if she had worked with professors who thought they were in alignment with the research, but really weren't.
Bragg responded that "there's research, and then there's research." They had to educate people on the difference between "research" from vendors and empirical research, which involves issues of fidelity and validation with different groups of students.
Levesque stated that Florida increased reading requirements for elementary candidates from 3 to 6 credits, and added a 3 credit requirement for secondary candidates. Colleges were required to fit this in by eliminating non-content area pedagogy courses.
Kathy Champeau repeated a concern from earlier meetings that teacher candidates need the opportunity to practice their new knowledge in a classroom setting, or they will forget it.
Hassett hoped the Teacher Performance Assessment would help this. The TPA would probably require certain things to be included in the teacher candidate's portfolio.
Governor Walker said that the key to the effectiveness of Florida's retention policy was the intervention provided to the students. He asked what they did to make sure intervention was successful.
Levesque replied that one key was reading coaches in the classroom. Also, district reading plans, individual intervention plans, student academies, etc. all need to be approved by the state.
There was consensus that there should be a difference in reading requirements for elementary vs. secondary teachers. There was no discussion of preparation for reading teachers, reading specialists, or special education teachers.
Licensing: The discussion centered around what teacher standards need to be tested.
Dykstra suggested that the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading, written by Louisa Moats, et al, and published by the International Dyslexia Association in 2010, would be good teacher standards, and the basis for a teacher competency exam. There was no need for DPI to spend the next year discussing and inventing new teacher standards.
Champeau said that the International Reading Association also has standards.
Pedriana asked if those standards are based on research.
Dykstra suggested that the task force look at the two sets of standards side-by-side and compare them.
Professional Development: The facilitators looked for input on how professional development for practicing teachers should be targeted. Should the state target struggling teachers, schools, or districts for professional development?
Rep. Jason Fields felt all three needed to be targeted.
Heyde asked Levesque for more details on how Wisconsin could do professional development, when we often hear there is no money.
Levesque provided more detail on the state making reading a priority, building public/private partnerships, and being more creative with federal grant money (e.g., the 20% of each grant that is normally carved out by the state for administration). There should be a clear reading plan (Florida started with just two people running their initiative, and after a decade only has eight people), and all the spending should align with the plan to be effective. You cannot keep sending money down the hole. Additional manpower was provided by the provision that all state employees would get one paid hour per week to volunteer on approved reading projects in schools, and also by community service requirements for high school students.
Bragg suggested using the online Florida training modules, and perhaps combining them with modules from Louisiana.
Dykstra also suggested taking advantage of existing training, including LETRS, which was made widely available in Massachusetts. He also stressed the importance of professional development for principals, coaches, and specialists.
Bragg pointed out that many online training modules are free, or provided for a nominal charge that does not come close to what it would cost Wisconsin to develop its own professional development.
Lander said there were many Wisconsin teachers who don't need the training, and it should not be punitive.
Champeau suggested that Florida spends way more money on education that Wisconsin, based on information provided by the NAEP.
Levesque clarified that Florida actually is below the national average in cost per student. The only reason they spend more than Wisconsin is that they have more students.
Rep. Steve Kestell stated that teachers around the entire state have a need for professional development, and it is dangerous to give it only to the districts that are performing the worst.
Sarah Archibald (sitting in for Sen. Luther Olsen) said it would be good to look at the value added in districts across the state when trying to identify the greatest needs for professional development. The new statewide information system should provide us with some of this value added information, but not at a classroom teacher level.
Evers commented that the state could require new teacher Professional Development Plans to include or be focused on reading.
Pils commented that districts can have low and high performing schools, so it is not enough to look at district data.
Champeau said that administrators also need this professional development. They cannot evaluate teachers if they do not have the knowledge themselves.
Dykstra mentioned a Florida guidebook for principals with a checklist to help them. He is concerned about teachers who develop PDP's with no guidance, and spend a lot of time and money on poor training and learning. There is a need for a clearinghouse for professional development programs.
Screening/Intervention: One of the main questions here was whether the screening should be universal using the same tools across the state.
Champeau repeated a belief that there are districts who are doing well with the screening they are doing, and they should not be required to change or add something new.
Dykstra responded that we need comparable data from every school to use value added analysis, so a universal tool makes sense. He also said there was going to be a lot of opposition to this, given the statements against screening that were issued when Rep. Keith Ripp introduced legislation on this topic in the last biennium. He felt the task force has not seen any screener in enough detail to recommend a particular one at this time.
Heyde said we need a screener that screens for the right things.
Pils agreed with Dykstra and Heyde. She mentioned that DIBELS is free and doesn't take much time.
Michele Erickson asked if a task force recommendation would turn into a mandate. She asked if Florida used a universal screener.
Levesque replied that Florida initially used DIBELS statewide, and then the FCRR developed the FAIR assessments for them. The legislature in Florida mandated the policy of universal kindergarten screening that also traces students back to their pre-K programs to see which ones are doing a better job. Wisconsin could purchase the FAIR assessments from Florida.
Archilbald suggested phasing in screening if we could not afford to do it all at once.
Evers supports local control, but said there are reasons to have a universal screener for data systems, to inform college programs, and to implement professional development.
Lander asked what screening information we could get from the WKCE.
Evers responded that the WKCE doesn't start unitl third grade.
Dykstra said we need a rubric about screening, and who needs what type and how often.
Pedriana said student mobility is another reason for a universal screener.
There was consensus that early screening is important. Certainly by 4K or 5K, but even at age three if a system could be established. Possibilities mentioned were district-run screenings or pediatrician screenings.
Walker reminded the task force that it only makes sense to screen if you have the ability to intervene with something.
Mara Brown wasn't sure that a universal screener would tell her anything more about her students than she already knows.
Levesque said she could provide a screening roadmap rubric for the task force.
No one on the task force had suggestions for specific interventions. The feeling was that it is more important to have a well-trained teacher. Both Florida and Oregon started evaluating and rating interventions, but stopped because they got bogged down. Wisconsin must also be careful about evaluations by What Works Clearinghouse, which has some problems.
Pedriana asked if the task force is prepared to endorse a model of instruction based on science, where failure is not an option.
The facilitator said this discussion would have to wait for later.
Early Childhood: The task force agreed that YoungStar should include more specific literacy targets.
Rep. Kestell felt that some district are opening 4K programs primarily for added revenue, and that there is wide variability in quality. There is a need to spend more time on this and decide what 4K should look like.
Evers said we should use the Common Core and work backward to determine what needs to be done in 4K.
Wrap-Up: Further discussion of early childhood will be put over to the next meeting, as will the societal issues and accountability. A meeting site has not yet been set, but Governor Walker indicted he liked moving around the state. The Governor's aides will follow up as to locations and specific agenda. The next meeting will be Thursday, August 25. All meetings are open to the public.
An effort to develop a statewide school accountability system marks a turning point in Wisconsin, education experts said last week as a public effort to design the system got under way.
When the modern school accountability movement began in the 1990s, several states such as Massachusetts, Kentucky and Florida developed their own systems for measuring how well schools helped students learn. Wisconsin created a statewide test in 1993, but deferred to local districts on what it meant for schools.
"Some states have embraced (school accountability) more than others," said UW-Madison education professor Doug Harris. "Wisconsin hasn't."
Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers, who otherwise have clashed on education issues, have agreed to change that. A task force they formed began collecting information at a symposium last week organized by Walker, Evers and the La Follette School of Public Affairs and will soon meet to begin designing the system.
When it comes to developing a system for accountability for Wisconsin's schools, including ways to measure whether students are meeting the ultimate goal of being ready for a career or college, Betebenner says, "My advice to you is to go slow ... and be deliberate."
John Johnson, director of education information for DPI, was encouraged by the standing-room-only crowd and the attendance by a number of policymakers, including key legislators, at Thursday's meeting.
"Maybe by wading into school reform rather than diving into the deep end of the pool with Race to the Top, we'll actually be able to swim, instead of drowning," he says.
When Jodi Bell enrolled in Miami Dade College's bachelor in education program, she thought she had chosen a recession-proof career and expected to land a job in special education upon graduation.
But while she's been in school, the job market has shrunk.
Broward County laid off 1,400 teachers this spring; Dade was able to balance its budget without slashing teacher jobs, but a few hundred non-instructional positions were cut.
But Bell, who is expected to graduate in May 2012, is still optimistic she'll land a job in her chosen career.
"I'm willing to move for a job, I'm not tied down to this area," Bell said. "I'm optimistic, I'm doing well in my program and my program is good."
Leadership in any organization comes from the top. No, the superintendent is not "the top" of a school district organization. The top spot is held by the School Board, seven elected individuals who work together to implement policies and practices to meet the changing needs of students and families, all within the limited resources, financial and otherwise, that are available.
I have been fortunate during my first two years as superintendent to work with a dedicated and hard-working School Board. Being a board member requires the commitment of endless hours of time and effort, and is frequently somewhat thankless as there are very few decisions made in a large school district that will be welcomed by all. The service and support of our current board is appreciated.
Recently the School Board met in a retreat to review the best practices of high-performing boards and evaluate what changes they can implement to improve not only the functioning of the School Board, but ultimately the effectiveness and efficiency of the school district. I commend our board for this undertaking as it is a great modeling and example of the culture we are seeking to develop in the South Washington County Schools of continuous improvement and performance excellence. While the School Board generally functions very well, there is always room for improvement and this board is committed to such evaluation, assessment and improvement of their performance.
With the economy forcing closer scrutiny of budgeting at all levels of government and politicians zeroing in on government workers' pay, perhaps the most visible target is education.
For the most part, elementary and secondary education in the United States is funded with local tax dollars, with assists from state and federal coffers. And the biggest line-item expense? Teacher salaries. When it comes time to cut the budget, layoffs are announced, and because of union contracts teachers with seniority are favored. Usually those most recently hired are the ones who go.
But is this the smartest way to fix the budget? Dan Goldhaver, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington Bothell, and Roddy Theobald, a researcher at the center and a doctoral student in statistics, write in the fall issue of Education Next this subservience to union seniority rules is wreaking havoc on the education system, often axing the most energetic and creative educators in the system. Worse yet because they are the most recent hires, their salaries are at the low end of the pay scale so it takes more layoffs to meet the dollar figure necessary to reduce the budget, pushing up class size and sometimes forcing districts to eliminate subject areas and programs entirely
Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.
But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County's school district will launch this fall.
"He wants more friends and he's interested in playing baseball," his mother said.
The district's full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district's extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
Add your voice to the discussion. Click here to submit a letter or mini editorial to the Journal staff.
Whatever the endeavor - be it business, athletics ... or education -nobody stays number one by staying the same.
Historically, we Iowans have prided ourselves on the quality of our schools. We have considered ourselves at or near the top in the nation.
The state's education system still gets good, passing grades, don't get us wrong, but we can and should do better in our classrooms to prepare our children for the realities and dynamics of a changing, more-global workforce. "We must," in the words of Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass, "have a world-class education system ..."
Among the many prominent thinkers attending the Urban League's annual conference Thursday, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates made his case for focusing on teachers.
One of the nation's oldest civil rights groups, the Urban League, is holding its annual conference in Boston this week.
Much of the conference focused on education Thursday -- specifically, the persistent achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts.
Gates has been in the education reform game for a while, pouring billions of dollars into scholarships, research and trying to improve public schools. Gates said there have been advances on most other civil rights issues, but not much progress on education.
This is an important moment in the history of education in the state of Iowa.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, Iowa Education Director Jason Glass and an array of educational experts offered a set of challenges to educators at the two-day Education Summit in Des Moines.
The message was simple: Things need to change if Iowa is to regain its status as one of the strongest educational systems in the nation.
Although the statistics about Iowa students' performances on the National Assessment of Educational Progress can be used to support diverse narratives about how students are performing compared with their peers across the nation, international comparisons tell an unambiguous story: American schools will need to do better if the United States is going to produce a globally competitive work force for the 21st century.
When Newark's public school system accepted $5 million from the federal government last year to turn around the poorly performing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School, it agreed to replace at least half of the school's teachers, under the belief that principals could then hire better ones.
Instead, Shabazz swapped teachers with two other failing schools.
Some 68 teachers were shuffled among Shabazz, Central High School and Barringer High School, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Shabazz, which had 90 teachers, sent 21 of them to Barringer. And Barringer sent 21 of its teachers to Shabazz, according to teacher transfer records obtained through an open records request.
"Federal money may have unintentionally funded the infamous 'dance of the lemons' that has been a harmful practice in districts for decades," said Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps school districts recruit teachers.
So Newark officials elected to use the "replace 50% of the staff" form of intervention for Shabazz High School. But, remember, teacher tenure is inviolable. Therefore, what happened to the 45 teachers who were removed to improve student achievement? According to the Journal, 21 of them went to Barringer High School, which is also a chronically failing school. And what happened to the 21 Barringer teachers who were supplanted by the exodus from Shabazz? Simple. They went to Shabazz. Actually, 68 teachers were rearranged among three of Newark's high schools.
With Republicans controlling a majority of state houses and the U.S. House of Representatives, interest in school vouchers has spiked during the past year at the federal, state, and local levels. Vouchers are payments that parents use to finance private school tuition for their children. Although vouchers can be privately funded, the programs that attract the most attention and controversy provide vouchers paid for with public tax dollars.
In the deal that ended the stalemate over the federal fiscal year 2011 budget, Congress restored funding for the District of Columbia voucher program, which had been discontinued in 2009 by the Obama Administration and the previous Democratic- controlled Congress. Vouchers are also likely to be a hot-button issue during the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2012 national elections. Indiana recently enacted a statewide voucher program, and other states are actively considering voucher proposals with strong support from key legislators and governors. The school board in Douglas County, Colorado, adopted a local private school voucher program this spring.
In 2000, the Center on Education Policy (CEP), an independent nonprofit organization, reviewed and summarized the major research on school vouchers in the report School Vouchers: What We Know and Don't Know and How We Could Learn More, available at www.cep-dc.org. Since 2000, much has changed in the voucher landscape. On the legislative front, new voucher programs have been established during the past decade in D.C., Ohio, and New Orleans, in addition to the recently adopted programs in Douglas County and Indiana. Citizens' referenda on vouchers in California, Michigan, and Utah were defeated by sizeable margins. On the judicial front, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the longstanding Cleveland voucher program was constitutional, but state Supreme Courts struck down an established voucher program in Florida and a new statewide program in Colorado. On the research front, numerous studies have added to the knowledge base about vouchers, including comprehensive studies examining the longer-term effects of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and D.C.
This CEP report provides updated information for policymakers and others about the status of publicly funded voucher programs and the findings of major voucher studies published since 2000. Other types of programs also subsidize private school tuition including tuition tax credits, specialized vouchers for students with disabilities, town tuition programs for remote rural students, and privately funded vouchers but in order to produce a succinct report focusing on the most controversial form of subsidy, we limited our review to publicly funded voucher programs for general education students.
THE American ideal of lazy summers filled with fun has an unintended consequence: If students are not engaged in learning over the summer, they lose skills in math and reading. Summers off are one of the most important, yet least acknowledged, causes of underachievement in our schools.
Decades of research confirm that summer learning loss is real. According to a report released last month by the RAND Corporation, the average summer learning loss in math and reading for American students amounts to one month per year. More troubling is that it disproportionately affects low-income students: they lose two months of reading skills, while their higher-income peers -- whose parents can send them to enriching camps, take them on educational vacations and surround them with books during the summer -- make slight gains. A study from Johns Hopkins University of students in Baltimore found that about two-thirds of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income ninth graders could be explained by summer learning loss during the elementary school years.
In Monday's post, I went through the DC teacher evaluation system, IMPACT, which weights value-added improvements in student scores at 50 percent of the teacher's evaluation, with the remaining half of the evaluation covering 22 areas (fit into 9 categories). Five classroom observations are held,
three times by a building administrator and twice by an outside "master evaluator" who is a subject-matter expert and does not report to the building administrator.
Teachers in tested subjects are evaluated by standards different from those used for paraprofessionals, counselors, special education teachers and others in the system, with teachers in non-tested subjects having only 10 percent of their evaluation based on student scores.
The "Race to the Top" program extends the reach of the federal government too far into states' public schools operations, a leading Republican senator said on Wednesday.
The Obama administration also risks neglecting poorer states by moving toward competitive education funding, Sen. Richard Shelby, the most powerful Republican on the Banking Committee, said at a hearing on education spending.
Roy S. Roberts' path to the top job at Detroit Public Schools began long before he made headlines as General Motors Corp.'s highest-ranking African-American executive.
It began before he stepped into the White House Rose Garden to receive the American Success Award from President George H.W. Bush in 1989.
That path began near a cotton farm in rural Texas in the late 1930s, before Roberts was even born.
"The big white guy in town had a cotton farm. He came down and talked to my father and said: 'You have seven kids that are old enough to pick cotton. I want them down there Monday morning,'" Roberts, 72, said in his office in Detroit's Fisher Building, where he serves as emergency manager for DPS.
Akademos, Inc., a leading provider of integrated online bookstores and marketplaces to educational institutions, announced today that it has launched a digital reader that will allow its member institutions to access electronic content from traditional publishers and from open resources, such as the Connexions Consortium, World Public Library, the Guttenberg Project, and many others.
The company also announced its first major Open Educational Resources (OER) partnership with publisher Flat World Knowledge, which is providing the company with its full catalog of over 40 high-quality textbooks covering major subject areas for introductory general education colleges courses.
If you monitor education topics on Twitter you will quickly get the impression that huge numbers of American public schools are being replaced with charter schools. And you will also pick up lot of antipathy toward the schools from some of the most visible promoters of this week's SOS Marches.
But the numbers show that, in most places, charter schools are insignificant.
Charters are not allowed in nine states (Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) and they make up fewer than 3 percent of all schools in 12 other states. More than 10 percent of schools are charters in only three states--Arizona, Florida, Hawaii. Charters in Washington, D.C. get a lot of attention, as they should, because they constitute 45 percent of the schools. New Orleans, where 70 percent of students attend charters, is another hot spot. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a handy map that profiles the charter school situation in each state, going back to 1999.
If there's a student anywhere who would be able to answer a trivia question about President Abraham Lincoln, it would be on the marble steps of his memorial in the nation's capital.
But a summertime visit there backed up recent test results that showed the majority of U.S. students don't know the most basic facts about the country's history -- Lincoln and all.
Test results released in June showed that fewer than one quarter of all students are "proficient" in American history.
With the day of reckoning approaching for California's lavish but disastrously underfunded public-employee pensions, union partisans have tried to persuade the public that reformers are engaged in "pension busting." But to believe that reformers are waging a partisan vendetta against state workers' pensions would require ignoring a mountain of data. The fact is, only by skewing the averages can the unions maintain that they're victims of a campaign against their "modest" pensions.
The union arguments are deceptively straightforward, rehearsed constantly by their talking heads and, unfortunately, repeated by a sympathetic and innumerate media. A master practitioner is Art Pulaski, chief officer of the AFL-CIO's California Labor Federation. In an online debate at the Sacramento Bee in March (which also included City Journal associate editor Ben Boychuk and frequent City Journal contributor Steven Greenhut), Pulaski claimed that the average pension that California's retired state workers collect is not much more than what they would receive under Social Security. "The average state worker gets a pension of $24,000 and often without Social Security," Pulaski said. "Not lavish by any means." More recently, the Bee published a column by Martha Penry headlined PENSION 'REFORMERS' DISTORT FACTS ON BENEFITS. The paper identified Penry as "a special education teacher's assistant in the Twin Rivers school district," but it didn't disclose that she's also a high-ranking union official who serves on the board of directors of the California School Employees Association. Penry accused "pension busters" of overstating the cost of pensions and the amount of the average pension. "Three quarters of CalPERS retirees collect yearly pensions of $36,000 or less," she claimed.
Education leaders told a House committee Wednesday to focus on crafting comprehensive blueprint for teacher evaluations as Congress moves ahead in overhauling No Child Left Behind.
The four witnesses called before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce agreed educators have not come up with an ideal framework to evaluate teachers. They also expressed concern over whether teachers are being prepared for the classroom, and said the right people might not be going into education in the first place.
Witnesses questioned whether the higher education institutions were actively recruiting people who had a true interest or in being educators.
Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said half the people that graduate from an education program don't wind up getting teaching jobs.
Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?
In a flurry of recent exchanges (subject "Writing horse-shoe-of-horse-heading-east Technology") on the Writing Program Administration (WPA) listserv, scholars in writing studies have argued these points in some theoretical and practical depth. Maja Wilson, from the University of Maine, sums up the argument nicely: "Steve [Krause, of Eastern Michigan University], and others were arguing that to teach writing, you need to teach the tools available now and not teach or allow the tools on their way out (pen, pencil), because if you aren't teaching the tools, you aren't teaching writing. Rich [Haswell, professor emeritus from Texas A&M University], and others argued that, while teaching the use of all those tools can be a good thing, it isn't necessary to teach writing: writing itself transcends the particular tools, so while teaching the tools can be involved in teaching writing, it isn't necessarily the same thing."
A fifth of the nation's public school students attend rural schools, but nearly a third of those kids don't graduate. In fact, many schools that researchers have labeled "dropout factories" are in rural communities. No state has more than South Carolina, which has 50. In this state, lots of teenagers just don't think they need a high school diploma.
Oconee County, S.C., sits on the far west fringes of the state, just a few miles from the Georgia border. This is where Nick Dunn was born, and where his father died in a car accident a day before Christmas. Nick was 11.
Both NJ Spotlight and PolitickerNJ are reporting on Gov. Christie's speech at the Iowa Education Summit hosted by Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. According to Spotlight,
[Christie] promoted the idea of charter schools, but added they may not be the answer in all school districts, a clear response to the suburban backlash that has been felt in New Jersey."They are not needed in every district in New Jersey and wouldn't add much to the education offered there," he said.
The "suburban backlash" alluded to is spearheaded by the group Save Our Schools-NJ, which is lobbying for a set of charter school bills that would subject any new charter to a community vote, require every child in surrounding districts to be entered into a lottery, regardless of interest, and severely curtail the growth of new charters. SOS-NJ makes a number of fair points: some charter schools tend to accept fewer kids with disabilities and fewer kids who are English Language Learners. They "cream off" high-achieving students and are a money suck for local districts who pay tuition and must educate anyone who walks in the door.
180 countries on a corruption index that ranges from “Very Clean” (New Zealand) to “Highly Corrupt” (Somalia). The World Bank gauges control of corruption using a detailed list of measures and sources. By the same token, various municipalities in America have different levels of corruption. The Illinois Department of Corrections budgets for prison construction costs based on demographic projections of the number of future governors. The Sopranos was set in New Jersey for a reason.
A Tennessee statewide virtual school received some love from the Knoxville News Sentinel editorial board
Tennessee has been in the online education world for some time, but the new Tennessee Virtual Academy based in Union County promises to kick the process up a couple of notches. Indeed, it might well figure into serious education reform. The academy will open next month and serve students from across the state in kindergarten through the eighth grade. The academy will use the curriculum of K12 Inc., a provider of online school programs claiming to have enrolled about 70,000 students in 21 states.
But Commercial Appeal took the ‘stealing money from districts’ approach. The business news website is apparently outraged that TVA was advertising and even had a facebook page. The pile-on comments are mostly inaccurate or just snarky.
Union County Public Schools, the TVA host, will receive $5,387 from the state for each student and a portion of that will go to K12. That’s a bargain and a lot less than the state pays for kids in traditional schools. The school will need limited facilities and no meals or transportation, so some savings are being realized.
However, the school will have a full complement of teachers with staffing patterns not dissimilar to traditional schools. Many online students note even more personal attention learning online compared to traditional schools.
A survey of media reports on higher education might easily lead those of us working in the field to wonder: When did students and their parents start seeing college as a gantlet rather than as an exciting pathway to opportunity? When did policy makers stop seeing higher education as a valuable public investment? When did tenure become a guarantee only of a declining real wage? When did I start playing for a losing team?
We believe that the answer to these questions is "never," or at least "not yet." Traditional colleges and universities continue to play an invaluable role in our society, all the more so as the world changes. Three of their functions are, for now, irreplaceable.
One is the discovery of knowledge. Though the proportion of basic research performed by businesses continues to grow, university-based research remains powerfully innovative. That was true when the first computers and the Internet were pioneered, and it remains true in the age of Google and Facebook, both spawned in universities.
It's hard to frame the decision by the state's largest teachers union to not participate in a unique task force to improve our schools as anything other than disappointing.
Sure, leaders of the Wisconsin Education Association Council are angry and frustrated to the extreme with Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers for requiring more financial contributions from all public sector employees - including teachers - while strictly limiting collective bargaining.
Go ahead - be angry and frustrated. But don't just withdraw from a great opportunity to improve our schools
The stagnation of Iowa's educational system will impact the region negatively in more than just rankings, according to the United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. The status quo has potential to cripple Iowans entering a globally competitive job market.
"The countries out there that out-educate us, they out-compete us," Duncan said. "The sad truth is that Iowa has started slowly slouching toward mediocrity."
The Keynote speaker of Gov. Terry Branstad's much publicized Education Summit, said that reform will be tough, possibly unpopular, but absolutely necessary to remain relevant in a "knowledge economy."
My name is Robert Kelchen, but many students and faculty who know me at the University of Wisconsin-Madison often introduce me as "the conservative guy" or "my Republican friend." I am used to this sort of introduction after being in Madison for four years; after all, I can count the number of conservative or libertarian doctoral students who I know on two hands. I have been told several times in the past by fellow students that I am the first right-leaning person with whom they have ever interacted on a regular basis. Prior to the passage of Act 10 (the law that restricted collective bargaining), I was one of the few students at the university to request a refund of the portion of the Teaching Assistants' Association dues that went toward political or ideological activities. This also meant that I had to give up my right to vote on issues germane to collective bargaining (the primary purpose of the union), but it was a sacrifice that I was willing to make. During the protests at the Capitol throughout the spring semester, I did my best to stay out of the fray and keep very quiet about my personal opinions.
Sara asked me for my thoughts on the recent New York Times article about why there are so few conservative students in graduate school. I had to consider the offer for a while, as making this post would make my political leanings more publicly known and could potentially affect my chances of getting a job in two years. However, I just could not pass up the opportunity to comment on this article in the newspaper of record for American liberals--and the same paper that ran a front-page article about Sara being one of a new generation of less politically-oriented professors.
The La Follette School of Public Affairs outreach office is helping to organize a conference on educational accountability. The conference, Moving Beyond NCLB to College and Career Readiness: Building a New School Accountability System for Wisconsin, will be Thursday, July 28, from 1 to 5 p.m. in the Pyle Center.
Professor Douglas N. Harris of the La Follette School will speak on building a new accountability system for Wisconsin. "The conference is intended to set the stage for Gov. Walker's attempts to establish clear, plentiful and sophisticated information for judging the quality of almost every school in Wisconsin," says La Follette School outreach director Terry Shelton.
Public schools," ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, "meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone." A better system, the organization argued, would "foster educational freedom and quality" through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this "choice"-- and vouchers "scholarships"--but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.
The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he "loved" ALEC meetings, "because I always found new ideas, and then I'd take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine."
ALEC's most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state.
WRC recommends reading the following open letter from Madison neuropsychologist Dan Gustafson to the Governor's Read to Lead task force. It reflects many of our concerns about the state of reading instruction in Wisconsin and the lack of an effective response from the Department of Public Instruction.
An Open Letter to the Read-To-Lead Task Force
From Dan Gustafson, PhD
State Superintendent Evers, you appointed me to the Common Core Leadership Group. You charged that the Leadership Group would guide Wisconsin's implementation of new reading instruction standards developed by the National Governors' Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
It is my understanding that I was asked to join the group with the express purpose of bringing different voices to the table. If anything, my experience with the group illustrates how very far we need to go in achieving a transparent and reasoned discussion about the reading crisis in Wisconsin.
DPI Secretly Endorses Plan Created by Poor Performing CESA-7
I have grave concerns about DPI's recent announcement that Wisconsin will follow CESA-7's approach to implementing the Common Core reading standards. DPI is proposing this will be the state's new model reading curriculum.
I can attest that there was absolutely no consensus reached in the Common Core group in support of CESA-7's approach. In point of fact, at the 27th of June Common Core meeting, CESA-7 representative Claire Wick refused to respond to even general questions about her program.
I pointed out that our group, the Common Core Leadership Group, had a right to know about how CESA-7 intended to implement the Common Core Standards. She denied this was the case, citing a "non-disclosure agreement."
The moderator of the discussion, DPI's Emilie Amundson, concurred that Claire didn't need to discuss the program further on the grounds that it was only a CESA-7 program. Our Common Core meeting occurred on the 27th of June. Only two weeks later, on July 14th, DPI released the following statement:
State Superintendent Evers formally adopted the Common Core State Standards in June 2010, making Wisconsin the first state in the country to adopt these rigorous, internationally benchmarked set of expectations for what students should know and are expected to do in English Language Arts and Mathematics. These standards guide both curriculum and assessment development at the state level. Significant work is now underway to determine how training will be advanced for these new standards, and DPI is currently working with CESA 7 to develop a model curriculum aligned to the new standards.
In glaring contrast to the deliberative process that went into creating the Common Core goals, Wisconsin is rushing to implement the goals without being willing to even show their program to their own panel of experts.
What Do We Know About Wisconsin/CESA-7's Model Curriculum?
As an outsider to DPI, I was only able to locate one piece of data regarding CESA-7's elementary school reading performance:
4TH GRADE READING SCORES, 2007-08 WKCE-CRT,
CESA-7 IS AMONG THE WORST PERFORMING DISTRICTS.
CESA-7 RANKED 10TH OF THE 12 WISCONSIN CESA'S.
What Claire did say about her philosophy and the CESA-7 program, before she decided to refuse further comment, was that she did not think significant changes were needed in reading instruction in Wisconsin, as "only three-percent" of children were struggling to read in the state. This is a strikingly low number, one that reflects an arbitrary cutoff for special education. Her view does not reflect the painful experience of the 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders who scored below proficient on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
As people in attendance at the meeting can attest, Claire also said that her approach was "not curriculum neutral" and she was taking a "strong stand" on how to teach reading. Again, when I pressed her on what these statements meant, she would only reference oblique whole language jargon, such as a belief in the principal of release from instruction. When I later asked her about finding a balance that included more phonics instruction, she said "too much emphasis" had been given to balanced literacy. After making her brief statements to the Common Core group, she said she had already disclosed too much, and refused to provide more details about the CESA-7 program.
Disregarding Research and Enormous Gains Made by other States, Wisconsin Continues to Stridently Support Whole Language
During the remainder of the day-long meeting on the 27th, I pressed the group to decide about a mechanism to achieve an expert consensus grounded in research. I suggested ways we could move beyond the clear differences that existed among us regarding how to assess and teach reading.
The end product of the meeting, however, was just a list of aspirational goals. We were told this would likely be the last meeting of the group. There was no substantive discussion about implementation of the goals--even though this had been Superintendent Evers' primary mandate for the group.
I can better understand now why Emilie kept steering the discussion back to aspirational goals. The backroom deal had already been made with Claire and other leaders of the Wisconsin State Reading Association (WSRA). It would have been inconvenient to tell me the truth.
WSRA continues to unapologetically champion a remarkably strident version of whole-language reading instruction. Please take a look at the advocacy section of their website. Their model of reading instruction has been abandoned through most the United States due to lack of research support. It is still alive and well in CESA-7, however.
Our State Motto is "Forward"
After years of failing to identify and recommend model curriculum by passing it off as an issue of local control, the DPI now purports to lead. Unfortunately, Superintendent Evers, you are now leading us backward.
Making CESA-7 your model curriculum is going to cause real harm. DPI is not only rashly and secretly endorsing what appears to be a radical version of whole language, but now school districts who have adopted research validated procedures, such as the Monroe School District, will feel themselves under pressure to fall in line with your recommended curriculum.
By all appearances, CESA-7's program is absolutely out of keeping with new Federal laws addressing Response to Intervention and Wisconsin's own Specific Learning Disability Rule. CESA-7's program will not earn us Race to the Top funding. Most significantly, CESA-7's approach is going to harm children.
In medicine we would call this malpractice. There is clear and compelling data supporting one set of interventions (Monroe), and another set of intervention that are counter-indicated (CESA-7). This is not a matter of opinion, or people taking sides. This is an empirical question. If you don't have them already, I hope you will find trusted advisors who will rise above the WSRA obfuscation and just look at the data. It is my impression that you are moving fast and receiving poor advice.
I am mystified as to why, after years of making little headway on topics related to reading, DPI is now making major decisions at a breakneck pace. Is this an effort to circumvent the Read-To-Lead Task Force by instituting new policies before the group has finished its scheduled meetings? Superintendent Evers, why haven't you shared anything about the CESA-7 curriculum with them? Have you already made your decision, or are you prepared to show the Read-To-Lead that there is a deliberative process underway to find a true model curriculum?
There are senior leaders at DPI who recognize that the reading-related input DPI has received has been substantially unbalanced. For example, there were about five senior WSRA members present at the Common Core meetings, meaning that I was substantially outnumbered. While ultimately unsuccessful due to logistics, an 11th hour effort was made to add researchers and leadership members from the Wisconsin Reading Coalition to the Common Core group.
The Leadership Group could achieve what you asked of it, which is to thoughtfully guide implementation of the Common Core. I am still willing to work with you on this goal.
State Superintendent Evers, I assume that you asked me to be a member of the Leadership Group in good faith, and will be disappointed to learn of what actually transpired with the group. You may have the false impression that CESA-7's approach was vetted at your Common Core Leadership Group. Lastly, and most importantly, I trust you have every desire to see beyond destructive politics and find a way to protect the welfare of the children of Wisconsin.
Kevin Johnson, chief executive of Juniper Networks, one of the biggest network equipment makers, talks to the FT's Paul Taylor about cloud computing, innovation, video and his worries about the failure of the US education system to produce home-grown talent
Iowa school reform legislation doesn't need consensus as much as it needs follow-through and buy-in from the top.
Teachers need to be evaluated by their peers and paid according to how well they perform in the classroom and on the test.
Principals need more training, and school districts need to be more selective in whom they hire for a building's top job. Tenure has to be earned, not once, but several times during an educator's career.
Those were just a few of the opinions aired at the Iowa Education Summit during the first day of the two-day Iowa Education Summit that brought teachers, principals, business leaders, college professors, politicians, nonprofit representatives and the nation's top educational authority, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to Des Moines. The summit is expected to be the catalyst for a wide-reaching education reform package Gov. Terry Branstad will introduce next legislative session.
It is singular that Dickens, who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil in the mere educationalism of our time -- the fact that merely educating the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.
They're out to show private colleges can be affordable.
Weighing the costs of education (iStockPhoto)
KAI RYSSDAL: Here's something to interrupt the relaxing summer of a lot of high schoolers out there. It's usually fall of senior year or so that the college search begins in earnest. But really, why wait?
A teacher at South High for about 10 years, Mr. Nystrom is well-known for actions that grab students' attention in an effort to focus them on learning and achievement. He started out as a substitute teacher and ended up making it his career.
He is the recent recipient of the All American Teacher of the Year Award, in the Massachusetts math division. He is one of 23 U.S. teachers honored by the National Math and Science Initiative. The awards recognize outstanding math, science and English teachers in NMSI's Advanced Placement training and incentive program.
I am about to do something rash, which is to disagree with Lucy Kellaway. Last week, the fearless observer of business follies went too far: she called for PowerPoint to be banned.
The prosecution's argument is simple: many PowerPoint presentations are very bad. This is true but it hardly makes the case for a ban. Serviceable tools can produce awful results in the wrong hands, as anyone who has seen me put up shelves can attest. Banning the screwdriver is not the answer.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told an Iowa education summit Monday that Americans need to set aside political differences that divide them and unite behind reforms that will provide the educational excellence that children need to pursue their dreams in a competitive global economy.
However, Christie did not duck controversy either by calling for an overhaul of the current tenure system for teachers, saying children should not be the victims of a failing system that does not reward excellence or enforce consequences for failure.
"You have to draw some lines in the sand, but you also have to leave some room for compromise," he told reporters after delivering a half-hour address to about 1,700 participants in a summit called by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to brainstorm on ways to rekindle the state's once-proud tradition of educational excellence that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said was "at the top of the mountain" in 1992.
Of all the problems this country faces in education, one of the most complicated, heart-wrenching and urgent is the dropout crisis. Nearly 1 million teenagers stop going to school every year.
The impact of that decision is lifelong. And the statistics are stark:
The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general population.
Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.
Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage parents, live in poverty and commit suicide.
Dropouts cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings, welfare and medical costs, and billions more for dropouts who end up in prison.
NPR is looking at the dropout crisis through the stories of five people. Three dropped out of school years ago. They talk about why they left school, the forces in their lives that contributed to that decision and its impact in the years since.
A new analysis of the nation's schools found that Rhode Island falls below the national average for offering high-level curriculum such as Advanced Placement or talented and gifted programs, particularly in the more suburban districts in the state.
The report, which seeks to showcase what is known as the "opportunity gap" between wealthy and high-poverty school districts, actually suggests that Rhode Island offers similar chances to be involved in specialty programs in urban schools as it does in suburban schools. In fact, in some cases, the high-level programs are more available in cities like Providence than they are in Barrington.
But the reality is the state offers very little advance programming overall, meaning that while there may not be a significant gap between the city schools and the ones from more rural areas, Rhode Island schools are still being outpaced by the rest of New England and most cases, the country.
The Numbers
The study, which was conducted by ProPublica, found that Rhode Island falls well-behind the rest of the country when it comes to offering AP tests, advanced mathematics courses and talented and gifted programming.
More students, however, are taking chemistry and physics than in other parts of the country.
This summer, the Relay Graduate School of Education will open as New York's first standalone college of teacher preparation in nearly a century. Relay is being created out of Teacher U, a program within Hunter College and one of the many new models that have gained traction around the country. Relay preaches the practical over the theoretical -- and will have no traditional courses, no campus, no lectures -- all with the end goal of changing the way teachers in this country are taught.
"This," says Matthew Carpenter, "is my favorite exercise." I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It's an inverse trigonometric function: cos-1(1) = ?
Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on "0 degrees." Presto: The computer tells him that he's correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he's nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he's done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. "It took a while for me to get it," he admits sheepishly.
Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn't be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring--in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees--the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don't normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.
As Iowa political and education leaders prepare to make sweeping changes in the state's schools, experts monitoring similar efforts across the country caution that much of what is being tried is still controversial and uncharted territory.
For example:
- A growing body of anecdotal evidence and research supports the push toward longer school days and years to benefit students' academic achievement, especially among low-income or disadvantaged children. But the cost-benefit ratio of such moves remains fiercely debated and some experiments have had mixed results.
John Behrens directs Cisco's Networking Academy. They partner with 10,000 schools in 160 countries and provide free online courses on computer networking. In addition to being an important workforce development strategy, they wanted the Academy to be an important demonstration project for eLearning.
Prior to joining Cisco in 2000, John was a professor of education at ASU. John directs curriculum, assessment, and technology associated with the Academies, so he has the opportunity to create a fully aligned instructional system with an integrated data architecture behind it.
The Academy serves high school and post secondary students interested in careers in networking and IT as well as students that just want broader job skills. They serve 1 million students annually and deliver 40,000 exams most weekdays.
A heat dome has settled over much of American education. Is Gov. Scott Walker just going to add to the stifling atmosphere? Or is Walker right that there are cool breezes in his ideas for how to increase school quality overall?
First, the national perspective: You would think by now, the heat would have been drained from some of the debate about what works in education, especially when it comes to serving urban kids. People have been working on this for decades. Haven't we figured out answers yet?
In most ways, no. Even a lot of things that seem like answers haven't been brought successfully to wide use. Things that look good on paper (or in a political speech) have often accomplished little in reality. The profoundly troubling march to perpetuating educational failure, for the most part, continues.
As disappointment grows, the debates between "education reformers" and those who think the "reformers" are going in the wrong directions often have been contentious. If you follow the tweets and postings and such, you'll find occasional light but a lot of heated rhetoric. Add in this year's wars over the pay, benefits and unions of public employees, combined with the hyperpartisan nature of the times, and you have an atmosphere that should carry health warnings.
For a measure that was supposed to have been stripped of all policy measures, the 148-page K-12 education bill lawmakers approved early Wednesday morning, scarcely an hour after it was released, contains an awful lot of specific, prescriptive language laying out how Minnesota school districts and their staffs are to go about their business.
And the devastation the shift will cause is where most of the educators canvassed on Wednesday would like the public's attention to stay, given that the cumulative deficit it has caused is about an eye-popping $3 billion. That's some $3,000 per pupil, or more than half the annual general fund appropriation.
Recently, the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) announced a redesign of all education programs within its six universities and 13 community colleges called "Ready2Teach." The TBR is initiating change in the process of preparing new teachers for public school classrooms.
Although as a private college, Maryville College is not governed by the TBR, our goal in the teacher education program is to equip our teacher licensure students with research-based knowledge and skills that will facilitate the learning for all children. My concern about the June 13 Associated Press story about Ready2Teach that ran in the News Sentinel, and across the state, was the inaccuracies about how we currently prepare new public school teachers. Here are a few misconceptions:
n Education majors spend most of their time in college listening to lectures about teaching methods or education theory.
While many of their friends are hanging out at the mall or beach, about 20 Connecticut high school students are spending much of their summer vacation in the classroom.
It's an increasingly common scene nationwide as educators, seeking new ways to recruit teachers in critical shortage areas, are embracing a "grow your own" approach by introducing the profession to teens as early as middle school.
And while many of the programs are too new to determine how many of the teens eventually enter the field, the longest-running initiatives -- such as Eastern Connecticut State University's program -- have tracked many of their alumni through college and into jobs as teachers, guidance counselors and school social workers.
Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters--and regrets, Mea Culpa on Small Learning Communities; Does More Money Matter?
One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students. In 2004 it announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Such schools, says Mr. Gates, were designed to--and did--promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.
"But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about--whether you go to college--it didn't move the needle much," he says. "Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn't dramatic. . . . We didn't see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that." Still, he adds, "we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them."
The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.
In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education "equity" lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to "startle" educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.
Asked to critique these endeavors, Mr. Gates demurs: "I applaud people for coming into this space, but unfortunately it hasn't led to significant improvements." He also warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy. "It's worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that's ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it's truly a rounding error."
JEFFREY BROWN: Welcome once again to Art Beat. I'm Jeffrey Brown. This week the Lincoln Center Institute, which is the education arm of Lincoln Center in New York, is holding what it bills as the first national conference focused on making imagination an integral part of American education. Scott Noppe-Brandon is the executive director of the institute, and he joins us now from New York. Welcome to you.
SCOTT NOPPE-BRANDON: Thanks, Jeff. Great to be with you again.
JEFFREY BROWN: What do you mean by imagination and why a conference?
SCOTT NOPPE-BRANDON: First, imagination for us is the capacity or ability to think of things as if they could be otherwise, to ask the 'what if' question. Creativity, by the way, for us is imagination enacted, using the formal language of a discipline to enact that imagination. And we take it to innovation, which for us is a new outcome pushing the forum in some way. The question of why a summit or why a discussion around it -- the answer or the reason is that we believe if we can bring together influencers from commerce, culture and education, including science and business, we can have a discussion of why imagination and creativity in relationship to standards and accountability is an important statement for education in the United States today.
JEFFREY BROWN: The argument, if I get from reading the literature, is that imagination is a skill that can and should be taught in the schools.
Even as schools aim to better prepare students for a global work force, fewer than one in three American students are proficient in geography, with most eighth graders unable to explain what causes earthquakes or accurately describe the American Southwest, according to a report released Tuesday morning.
Over all, high school seniors demonstrated the least proficiency on a 2010 test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation's geography report card, with 20 percent found to be proficient or better, compared with 27 percent of eighth graders and 21 percent of fourth graders.
The average test score for 12th graders declined to 282 (on a scale of 500) from 284 in 2001 when the test was last given. It remained essentially unchanged for eighth graders during that period, though there were gains among the lowest-performing students. Fourth graders had the largest gains, with the average score rising to 213, up five points from 2001.
Gov. Terry Branstad appeared in the gym at Corning Elementary this morning for an town hall meeting on education, a day after his administration released a school report card that found "an alarming slide toward mediocrity."
The purpose of the meeting was to get ideas on how to improve Iowa schools. Branstad asserts that Iowa's school performance has stagnated while other states have jumped ahead.
"We've been complacent too long," Branstad said.
Branstad told the Associated Press that education reform would be central to the next legislative session, which begins in January, and he argued that it was vital to change how teachers are paid. In addition to linking increased pay to classroom performance, Branstad said the state should consider increasing starting salaries.
Iowa's education system may be in need of a major remodel. Students are missing the mark in math and reading competency while their counterparts in other states have made significant gains, according to a new report released today by the Iowa Department of Education.
Achievement trends show stagnant scores across the board, from disadvantaged and minority students to white, relatively affluent students. The results document Iowa's slide from a national leader in education to a national average, or sometimes below average, performer over the past 20 years.
"There are many good schools across the state, but given the global nature of the economy, we need them to be great," said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education. "We must have a world-class education system to have a world-class workforce."
Iowa has slid from a national leader in elementary and secondary education to an average performer over the past 20 years as other states accelerated past it, according to a state report released today.
The Iowa report card -- the first released under Republican Gov. Terry Branstad -- provides an unvarnished assessment of the state's academic performance and sounds a clarion call to improve. The report, "Rising to Greatness: An Imperative for Improving Iowa's Schools," says performance on various national and state tests show "an alarming slide toward mediocrity."
In some ways, Iowa public schools have improved over years past, but other states have surged ahead, said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, which produced the report.
Restoring the greatness of Iowa schools will require more than "tinkering around the edges," he said.
The state's largest teachers union will not participate in discussions led by Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers to develop a new statewide school accountability system.
Instead, starting in September, the Wisconsin Education Association Council will collect input from teachers and communities around the state about their priorities related to school accountability, WEAC president Mary Bell said in a conference call Friday.
Bell said her organization supports Evers, but doesn't trust Walker or Republican legislators on the task force.
"How can we trust the governor to be a credible partner on education issues when they just passed laws to make massive cuts to school funding and silence our voices in schools?" Bell said.
Bryan Kennedy, president of AFT-Wisconsin, said he also declined an invitation to participate.
CNN Feature on US History in Schools 7.26.2011 @ 8:00a.m. EST
I understand that CNN plans to broadcast a feature on U.S. History in the schools at 8am EST on Tuesday, July 26, 2011.
This will include interviews with some of the high school authors whose history research papers were published by The Concord Review in recent issues.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
fitzhugh@tcr.org; www.tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Though few would dispute its value, the job of providing apprenticeships for some 200,000 teacher candidates each year in real classrooms is a massive and complex undertaking. About 1,400 higher education institutions work with many thousands of school districts across the United States to place, mentor and supervise teacher candidates in what is popularly known as "student teaching."1
Even as the profession pushes for more and earlier field work opportunities, student teaching is the final clinical experience.2 During the typical semester-long experience, student teaching candidates must synthesize everything they have learned about planning instruction: collecting or developing instructional materials, teaching lessons, guiding small group activities, and establishing and maintaining order--not to mention meetings with faculty and parents and, in some districts still, taking on lunchroom and playground duties. Passing (or failing) student teaching determines whether an individual will be recommended for certification as a licensed teacher.
Because few dispute the tremendous potential value of student teaching, even alternate pathways to profession, often criticized for taking too many shortcuts, generally try to provide their teaching candidates with some kind of student teaching experience, however abbreviated. Surveys of new teachers suggest that student teaching is the most important part of their teaching training experience.3
We're stuck and $365 million may not help. The United States places an unusual degree of importance on the reliability of yearend standardized tests. These tests have been around for 15 years and, because we have so little performance data, we try to use them for a variety of purposes. For many reasons, the tests haven't improved much. The new barrier is the dual fixation on cost and comparability.
Innovation occurs when markets are efficient--where supply meets demand, where consumers quickly (and often ruthlessly) express preferences, where risk is rewarded with return. Blockages can occur either on the buy or the sell side, but they often slump into complacency together.
In the case of educational testing, we have a set of complicated political problems resulting in weak demand for assessment innovation. The next generation of artificial intelligence will help make better test items faster and cheaper to score. But this is more a political problem than a technical problem.
You've got to be wondering what a teacher like me is doing marching against the "reform" trends. For those of you unfamiliar with my background, I graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University. A year later, after 6-8 months of unemployment and a stint as a data entry person at an educational database firm, I went into the NYC Teaching Fellows program, an offshoot of Michelle Rhee's New Teacher Project. On the surface, I'm a perfect candidate to follow the corporatist thinking about education, and should be easily molded into the dominant thinking from elites who ostensibly believe they're going into education for the common good. All it takes is the right amount of fear, the right amount of frustration, the right amount of ignorance, and the right amount of failure to tip people into the hands of those who wish to rotate our profession backwards.
Fortunately for me, I lucked out. And if you're reading this, I'm thinking the same goes for you.
As promised, this is my follow-up post based on our trip to the Save Texas Schools conference in Austin this past weekend. It was a sobering experience. The long and the short of it is this: Texas has abandoned its children. The Governor and the Legislators in Austin have set the stage for a protracted crisis not only in education but in the State economy. With respect to the former, we can look forward to larger class sizes, the elimination of many important programs, and the placing of even more responsibility of the backs of overworked (and fewer) teachers. Texas already ranked an embarrassing 44th in education and these developments do not bode well for future of the Lone Star State. As far as the economy is concerned, every public education layoff means less income not only for those individuals, but for local businesses where they would have shopped. Indeed, the Legislative Budget Board forecast that almost 45% of job losses would actually be in the private sector (Center for Public Policy Priorities: CPPP Urges Rejection of HB1). Furthermore, the lack of a decent education will greatly reduce the future earning power of Texans. The only firms willing to relocate here will be those hoping to find a source of cheap, low-skilled laborers. Texas will become the alternative to outsourcing to an impoverished, third-world country. The stars at night no longer look so big and bright.
A collaborator pointed out this nice figure (from the paper below), which is pretty self-explanatory, but let me emphasize the fairly wide SES (socioeconomic status) range of families under consideration. If SES were determined solely by household income the four categories in the graph would range from below $20k to above $100k per annum (2003 US income data).
See related posts SES and IQ and Random microworlds.
Note to Tiger Moms and Sociologists: Shared genes make people more alike, but shared family environment does not (very much). Feel free to disregard, though. Who needs data when you have an opinion? :-)
First, a college education costs too much. Middle-class families can no longer afford tuition that increases faster than inflation, per capita personal income, consumer prices and even health insurance. Total student loan debt in America is $1 trillion and exceeds credit card debt. Taxpayer money stretches only so far, with health care, public safety and K-12 education claiming ever larger shares of state budgets.
Second, the higher education industry is undergoing a complete restructuring. Technology is fundamentally altering how courses are created and taught while upending the cost structure of delivery. New entrants - from for-profit white-label degree providers like 2tor to nonprofits like Khan Academy - are bringing disruptive innovation.
Congratulations to the students, teachers and administrators of the Blackstone Valley Mayoral Academy, in Cumberland, who have achieved something extraordinary. All 152 of the kindergarten and first-grade students in the school who took the state Developmental Reading Assessment this year scored proficient, or better.
"To my knowledge, this is the first time in Rhode Island that every student at a school scored proficient or better on this early-grade assessment!" wrote Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist in a congratulatory letter.
Literacy in the early grades is obviously a crucial foundation for learning throughout one's school years, so this unprecedented achievement is one to celebrate.
Higher education in this state has been studied before. Scholars have offered opinions. Commissions have issued reports.
"Report after report," is how Lindsey Alexander put it.
As a project manager for the Citizens League, Alexander is helping produce the next one. Since January, the league, along with the Bush Foundation, has been studying how higher education might be reformed.
Will its findings have more power than reports past?
The timing might be right.
The University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and the Minnesota Private College Council all have new leaders. That's led to predictions of more willingness for reform.
This piece is part of a leadership roundtable on the right way to approach teacher incentives -- with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
In recent years there seems to have been a surge in academic dishonesty across many high schools. No doubt this can be explained in part by increased vigilance and reporting, greater pressure on students to succeed, and the communicable nature of dishonest behavior (when people see others do something, whether it's tweaking a resume or parking illegally, they're more likely to do the same).
But, I also think that a fourth, significant cause in this worrisome trend has to do with the way we measure and reward teachers.
To think about the effects of these measurements, let's first think about corporate America, where measurement of performance has a much longer history. Recently I met with one of the CEOs I most respect, and he told me a story about when he himself messed up the incentives for his employees, by over-measurement. A few years earlier he had tried to create a specific performance evaluation matrix for each of his top employees, and he asked them to focus on optimizing that particular measure; for some it was selection of algorithms, for others it was return on investment for advertising, and so on. He also changed their compensation structure so that 10 percent of their bonus depended on their performance relative to that measure.
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts (including Washington, DC), On Leadership convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system -- with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
Recent news reports of widespread or suspected cheating on standardized tests in several school districts around the country have been taken by some as evidence that we must reduce reliance on testing to measure student growth and achievement. Others have gone even farther, claiming that cheating is an inevitable consequence of "high-stakes testing" and that we should abandon testing altogether.
A National Guard school program for at-risk teenagers is scheduled to open in 2012 in eastern Kentucky. The Appalachian Youth ChalleNGe Academy, to be housed in a renovated former elementary school, will be the second ChalleNGE school in Kentucky. Bluegrass ChalleNGe Academy at Fort Knox opened in 1999.
"Here in Harlan, we found a county with a school system that was willing to help make a program," said Col. John Wayne Smith, director of the Fort Knox program. "We believe that with an academy here, we will be able to get kids to come who wouldn't come to Fort Knox."
The primary recruiting area for the new program is 23 counties in eastern Kentucky, with any remaining openings being offered to teens in the Appalachian region of neighboring states, Smith said last week in the Harlan Daily Enterprise.
"I was looking at the numbers in our target population. I found that Appalachia has a higher rate of these kids, but we also found that because of positive family connections in the area, youth are hesitant to leave and come to Fort Knox. We have had a few come to us, but nothing like the numbers we should be getting," he said at a community meeting.
"What are the right incentives to have in place for teachers?" The very question itself is jarring. It implies that teachers don't want to perform well and that they need incentives, which in today's parlance translates into rewards (money) and reprimands (fear of loss of benefits or position).
Let me present a very different picture: Teachers should be regarded as and behave like professionals. A professional is a certified expert who is afforded prestige and autonomy in return for performing at a high level, which includes making complex and disinterested judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Professionals deserve to live comfortably, but they do not enter the ranks of a profession in order obtain wealth or power; they do it out of a calling to serve. Be it law, medicine, auditing, education or science, the expectation is the same: professionals should work hard to gain the requisite credentials, behave ethically as well as legally, and when they err, should take responsibility for their error and try to learn from it.
Submit your solutions, or nominate a project for this competition, before August 3, 2011, to create new opportunities for students and schools.
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WHEN school textbooks make the headlines in East Asia, they are usually cast as bystanders to some intractable old dispute, and related demands that children be taught "correct" history. Thankfully though, future-minded officials in South Korea have given cause for this correspondent to write about something altogether different: by 2015, all of the country's dead-tree textbooks will be phased out, in favour of learning materials carried on tablet computers and other devices.
The cost of setting up the network will be $2.1 billion. It is hoped that cutting out printing costs will go some way towards compensating for this expenditure. Environmentalists will of course be pleased, regardless. A cloud network will be set up to host digital copies of all existing textbooks, and to give students the (possibly unwelcome) ability to access materials at any time, via iPads, smartphones, netbooks, and even Stone-Age PCs. Kids will need to come up with a new range of excuses for not doing their homework: the family dog cannot be blamed for eating a computer, nor can a file hosted on a cloud network be left behind on a bus.
Update: I originally thought this was from a teacher but it is from a parent. My apologies
Below is a post from a parent, "No Confidence," from another thread but I read it and said bingo! (Emphasis mine.)
I think that the first change that could make some difference would be for teacher & administrators to understand the limits of their abilities to assess. At least the teacher could say, Sally is learning differently than many other kids I see and we don't know why. Johnny is refusing to do writing assignments and we don't know why.
Next I think that PD should include training about learning & developmental differences, with case studies, to the extent that at least teacher are familiar with the possibilities. (I have spoken with so many SPS teachers & administrators who believe that twice exceptional kids don't exist.) There are signs to look for.
Teachers' Unions: Back to the Future. Back in 1998, the Illinois Education Association commissioned the Global Business Network to assess the union's direction for the next 10-15 years and help devise options for dealing with possible scenarios. The result, a report titled The Future of the Illinois Education Association [3.1MB PDF], is a fascinating read not just for its insights into the union's strategic thinking, but for which "predictions" it got right and wrong.
I put the scare quotes around "predictions" because GBN was explicit in stating that the possible scenarios it outlined were not predictions, but merely various possibilities for which the union should plan. As the authors put it, "After imaginatively dwelling in each scenario, participants can develop strategic options that are appropriate to managing in just that scenario."
GBN developed a matrix of four scenarios, based on the variables of strong vs. weak political environments, and strong vs. weak membership connection with the union. Each of the four contains at least some relevance to current events, although other aspects read like one of those "flying car, food pills" science fiction stories written in the 1930s about life in the 1970s.
Last week I saw two women getting into a cab outside an office in central London. Both were in high heels and smart suits and were struggling with a flip chart, its pages flapping in the wind. The quaint sight of the large pad on aluminium legs filled me with longing for the days when people giving presentations wrote things down with felt pens on big sheets of paper.
I might have forgotten this scene, were it not for the fact that the very next day I was sent an invitation to join a brand new political party in Switzerland, the Anti PowerPoint party. "Finally do something!" its slogan says.
Actually I've been quietly doing something for years: I've been declining to learn how to use the ubiquitous piece of software. As a presenter, I'm a PowerPoint virgin, though as an audience member I've been gang raped by PowerPoint slides more times than I can count.
THE United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.
Alas, we've forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled.
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. -- a plain brick building that was my rocket ship -- is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been at odds with state schools chief Tony Evers over budget cuts, vouchers and teachers' collective-bargaining rights. But they have found common ground in their aggravation with No Child Left Behind.
Messrs. Walker and Evers formed a joint committee this month that will write a new state policy to replace the federal law requiring schools to ensure all students are passing state math and reading exams by 2014. No Child Left Behind is "broken," they have said.
"We are not trying to get around accountability," Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a phone interview. "But instead of using the blanket approach that defines a lot of schools as failures, we will use a more strategic approach so we can replicate success and address failure."
Wisconsin and other states say No Child Left Behind unfairly penalizes schools that don't meet rigid requirements. Tired of waiting for Congress to overhaul the law, some states have taken matters into their own hands.
Michael Horn spoke to the National Coalition Public School Options today in Washington DC. NCPSO is an extraordinary network of parents that advocate for educational options for families particularly online learning.
Horn is a coauthor of Disrupting Class and a leading advocate for online learning. He gave the roomful of discerning parents a little history of disruption.
In 1989, Clay Christensen joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School and began studying why successful organization fail. He found that the factors that had promoted success were often cause of the demise. These organizations would add sustaining innovations--think computers and cars--that made models a little better and a little more expensive every year. This cycle of product improvement leaves room for new competitors to fulfill similar needs for substantially less.
These "disruptive innovations" often replace non-consumption for under served consumers. In education non-consumption includes credit recovery, dropout recovery, and home education.
'Honors' Should Mean a Challenge, Not an Upgrade to First Class
For example, most of our honors students place out of the first-year composition course, so it is entirely possible for them to graduate without having taken a course that involves heavy-duty writing. I would argue that the ability to write effectively is the most important skill a student should have. Is there some way to build this into an honors program before a student begins work on a senior thesis?
April really is the cruelest month. I discovered that firsthand this year, as the changes I have made during my two years as director of the University of Florida honors program began to take effect. Our application procedure, once a mere formality, now de-emphasizes standardized-test scores and has caused some students to be turned away. The resulting torrent of angry phone calls and e-mails made me dread going to work all month.
May put an end to that, but it gave rise to a new stream of questions, mostly about housing. One parent made multiple requests for a layout of the honors dorm so she could ensure that her son's room location was optimal.
Has it really come to this? Are honors programs devolving into concierge services? I approach my role as director from the point of view I held as a student more than 20 years ago--that honors is a challenge to engage--but find myself confronted with parental and student expectations that honors is nothing more than a reward for a job well done in high school.
Which raises the question: Why do students want to be in our honors program? I hope they want to surround themselves with serious, like-minded peers to form a real intellectual community. But my darker suspicions about their motivation were confirmed when, during dinner with a few students, one said that the impression he'd received during his visits to the campus was that honors was like flying first class. You know: smaller classes, easier access to advising, better dorm. Further reflection led me to realize that students at universities like Florida have always been "honors students," and that the label is important to them (and their parents). Why would they accept being just a "regular" student here? I suppose that attitude is a natural outcome of today's K-12 achievement culture, but it is shocking nonetheless.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Honors programs were created with good intentions, but it did not take long for them to be perceived as "better" than the regular university experience. Today's parents and students pursue any avenue they think will give them an advantage, beginning in elementary school; hence the proliferation of honor societies, tutoring services, test-preparation courses, and leadership programs. Students are sorted and ranked by their test scores and other metrics from the time they enter school, so they expect that the process will follow them to college.
Critics of honors programs, most notably Murray Sperber in his book Beer and Circus, say this division between "regular" and "honors" students should not exist. Sperber recalls his undergraduate days at Purdue, in the 1960s, when all classes were of reasonable size, taught by regular tenure-track faculty. State flagship institutions, he argues, should stop exploiting large numbers of undergraduates (and taking their tuition dollars) to support ever-expanding research enterprises and instead return to a focus on education. He asserts that while students would like smaller classes and more individual attention, universities cynically ply them with permissive alcohol policies and large athletics programs to keep them quiet. Honors programs, he argues, are a "life raft" for a few lucky students to navigate those treacherous seas.
I agree with some of Sperber's arguments, but I am enough of a realist to know that the ship has sailed. Business-minded legislatures are demanding more education while offering less money to pay for it. They expect flagships to produce cutting-edge research that will drive states' economies. They are also loath to authorize tuition increases, thereby forcing universities to increase class sizes and find other ways to generate revenue. So a return to the glory days is unlikely.
But Sperber misses an important point: Many students view college simply as a means to an end and are not especially engaged in the educational process. This does not make them unintelligent or unworthy of attending a selective public university, but it does not obviate the need for an honors program to challenge students who are seeking more.
So what does the future hold for honors programs at large public research universities? I suspect that those institutions that have the resources to do so (usually via endowments designated to support honors) will very likely continue much as they always have--offering small sections of lower-division courses, recruiting faculty to teach interesting electives on offbeat topics, providing specialized advising, facilitating undergraduate research. In short, offering what they advertise: a liberal-arts-college environment within a large university.
Since honors students at selective public universities meet most of their general-education requirements through advanced placement, perhaps it is time to shift the focus of the honors curriculum to the sorts of skills that these students may still need to improve. For example, most of our honors students place out of the first-year composition course, so it is entirely possible for them to graduate without having taken a course that involves heavy-duty writing. I would argue that the ability to write effectively is the most important skill a student should have. Is there some way to build this into an honors program before a student begins work on a senior thesis?
I also worry that, by skipping general-education courses, students may miss out on acquiring a deeper understanding of material they learned in high school. One step I am taking to combat this at Florida involves a new course built around the concept of justice, to be offered to all first-year students in the honors program as of next spring. The goal is to give our students a common intellectual experience that will help hone their critical-thinking and writing skills. We also encourage our students to pursue double majors, to study abroad for a semester, or to get involved in research.
But those are technical matters. In my view, a philosophical change is needed. We should move away from the notion that honors is an upgrade to first class, one to which students are entitled merely because they scored well on some dubious standardized tests. When I speak to groups of prospective students, I emphasize this point, explaining that honors is a challenge, not a reward, and that moving from high-school honors to university honors is shifting from a culture of achievement to a culture of engagement.
That should be an honors program's true function--engaging students who want to push the boundaries and helping them find ways to do it, rather than providing further empty rewards for students who jump through hoops with style.
This has been a horrible year for teachers unions. The latest stunner came in Michigan, where Republicans enacted sweeping reforms last month that require performance-based evaluations of teachers, make it easier to dismiss those who are ineffective, and dramatically limit the scope of collective bargaining. Similar reforms have been adopted in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, Tennessee, Idaho and Florida.
But the unions' hegemony is not going to end soon. All of their big political losses have come at the hands of oversized Republican majorities. Eventually Democrats will regain control, and many of the recent reforms may be undone. The financial crisis will pass, too, taking pressure off states and giving Republicans less political cover.
The unions, meantime, are launching recall campaigns to remove offending Republicans, initiative campaigns to reverse legislation, court cases to have the bills annulled, and other efforts to reinstall the status quo ante--some of which are likely to succeed. As of today, they remain the pre-eminent power in American education.
Over the long haul, however, the unions are in grave trouble--for reasons that have little to do with the tribulations of this year.
The first is that they are losing their grip on the Democratic base. With many urban schools abysmally bad and staying that way, advocates for the disadvantaged are demanding real reform and aren't afraid to criticize unions for obstructing it. Moderates and liberals in the media and even in Hollywood regularly excoriate unions for putting job interests ahead of children. Then there's Race to the Top--initiated over union protests by a Democratic president who wants real reform. This ferment within the party will only grow in the future.
Teacher-certification requirements are among the most onerous rules enforced by state education agencies and have the potential seriously to limit the scope, quality, and accessibility of virtual schooling for years to come.
By design, certification requirements prohibit unlicensed individuals who reside within a state -- such as higher education faculty, private-sector professionals, private school faculty, and independent scholars -- from teaching virtual courses.
States should allow their virtual schools to have the flexibility to focus on hiring candidates who possess the requisite skills and relevant knowledge and experience, rather than those who possess mandated credentials.
Following up on a recent post on college grade inflation, there's also evidence that grade inflation is taking place at America's high schools. In a study by the college entrance exam company ACT, it found evidence of significant grade inflation between 1991 and 2003 for high school students taking the ACT exam. While ACT scores remained stable between 1991 and 2003, the chart above shows that the average high school GPA increased for ever ACT composite score over that period. From the study:
"Each point on each curve represents the average GPA for all students in 1991 and 2003 who earned that specific ACT Composite score. The curve for 2003 is higher at every Composite score point than the 1991 curve, which is evidence of the existence of grade inflation.
A "satisfactory" evaluation never did much for seventh-grade teacher Susan Cox.
In her 21 years teaching kids, she's earned a national board certification and a master's degree. She's taken on new projects and district initiatives. She's hoping the new evaluation system Wenatchee School District plans to pilot next year will become the next step up in her teaching.
"I can't remember how many years I've been on a short (evaluation) form," Cox said. "I'm observed once and that's it. But this is going to be very different."
Matthew Stewart believes there is a place for charter schools. Just not in his schoolyard.
Mr. Stewart, a stay-at-home father of three boys, moved to this wealthy township, about 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan, three years ago, filling his life with class activities and soccer practices. But in recent months, he has traded play dates for protests, enlisting more than 200 families in a campaign to block two Mandarin-immersion charter schools from opening in the area.
The group, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools, argues that the schools would siphon money from its children's education for unnecessarily specialized programs. The schools, to be based in nearby Maplewood and Livingston, would draw students and resources from Millburn and other area districts.
"I'm in favor of a quality education for everyone," Mr. Stewart said. "In suburban areas like Millburn, there's no evidence whatsoever that the local school district is not doing its job. So what's the rationale for a charter school?"
The Khan Academy iPad app is coming along really well. We're getting near to a 1.0 release. This initial release will have video navigation and viewing as well as an interactive transcripts and offline support. Exercises will be coming in the next release. I've tossed a couple (very alpha) screenshots here. Huge thanks to +Adam Ernst and +Jason Rosoff for making this happen.
A year ago, Adrian Fenty was the mayor of Washington, DC and Michelle Rhee was the chancellor of DC Public Schools. Rhee had made overhauling the DC system of teacher evaluation the centerpiece of her controversial and widely noted reforms. Instead of the standard system of seniority-based raises and nobody ever being fired for bad teaching, Rhee wanted to give the best teachers big raises and show the worst teachers the door.
The American Federation of Teachers was so alarmed by the prospect of the DC teachers union acceding to this plan that AFT President Randi Weingarten shoved aside local leadership and forced Rhee into a protracted series of negotiations. But because teacher evaluation is legally excluded from collective bargaining in DC, Rhee was able to put her system in place unilaterally. After a year of evaluations under the new IMPACT evaluation system, she made good on her promise: big raises for the highest performers in a time when teacher salaries were being cut and frozen in other cities, pink slips for the lowest performers, and a one-year grace period for hundreds more "minimally effective" teachers who would be fired if they didn't improve. Unable to stop the plan through negotiations, the AFT turned to raw politics, pouring $1 million into Vincent Gray's campaign to unseat Fenty. Gray won, and Rhee's divisive tenure soon came to an end.
English, the global language of business, should be well catered for in Hong Kong. Our city is an international financial centre and, to retain its competitive edge, has to attract skilled people from overseas. They will not come here unless their families' needs are catered for, and education in their everyday language is obviously a significant consideration. Surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that due to a lack of suitable school places, we are losing out to regional rivals.
The government does not seem worried. It says there are vacancies at international schools and measures already taken will soon create another 5,000 places, 600 of them when school resumes in September. But the positive tone is at odds with signals from the business community, which has for some time been warning of a shortfall and its consequences. Surveys by the British and Canadian chambers of commerce back the claims, painting the bleakest of pictures.
Scott Walker, the governor who set the stage for a burst of educational excellence? The guy who helped teachers make their work more successful and more rewarding (at least intangibly)?
Goodness, turning those question marks into periods is going to be a project. It's hard to imagine how Walker's standing among teachers could be lower.
But Walker thinks that will be the verdict several years from now.
By winning (as of now) the epic battle to cut school spending and erase almost all collective bargaining powers for teachers, as well as other educational battles, Walker has changed the realities of life in just about every school in the state, including many private schools.
The focus through our tumultuous spring was on money, power and politics. Now the focus is shifting to ideas for changing education itself.
So what are Walker's ideas on those scores?
In a 40-minute telephone interview a few days ago, Walker talked about a range of education questions. There will be strong criticism of a lot of what he stands for. Let's deal with that in upcoming columns. For the moment, I'm going to give Walker the floor, since, so far this year, the tune he calls has been the tune that the state ends up playing. Here are some excerpts:
Much like our exploding federalism, history will certainly reveal how Walker's big changes played out versus the mostly status quo K-12 world of the past few decades. One thing is certain: the next 10 years will be different, regardless of how the present politics play out.
I found the interview comments on the teacher climate interesting. Watching events locally for some time, it seems that there is a good deal more top down curricular (more) and pedagogy (teaching methods) dogma from administrators, ed school grants/research and others.
The city Department of Education and the teachers union have agreed on a teacher evaluation system at 33 failing schools that will for the first time use individual student progress to measure the performance of educators.
The agreement caps months of wrangling between the United Federation of Teachers and the DOE and comes amid a nationwide trend toward making student test scores a key component of teacher evaluations.
The agreement was reached, in part, under pressure from the state Education Department, which was withholding $65 million in federal funds for turning around failing schools unless the city and the union could agree on a new teacher grading system aligned with state guidelines.
The DOE and the UFT jointly announced the news on Friday. The 33 schools will also get help to turn themselves around. In some cases, principals will be removed.
Students packed the lobby of Chicago Public Schools headquarters Thursday to deliver a critical report on school discipline policies that contends the district spends more than 14 times as much on school security as it does on student counseling.
The report, produced by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, a student-led "education justice" advocacy group, claims that CPS' approach to discipline and disproportionate security and guidance budgets hurts graduation rates and deprives the cash-strapped district of revenue.
"Even with all the security in our schools, students don't feel safer," said O'Sha Dancy, a rising sophomore at Dyett High School. "We are not in a prison."
The report is the result of a year-long effort in which VOYCE members and The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, studied discipline policies at schools around the country and conducted a cost-analysis of the CPS budget to determine how much was being spent on security and police services in schools. Among the findings is that the district paid $51.4 million for school security guards in Fiscal Year 2011 compared to $3.5 million for college and career counselors.
Only two years ago, Atlanta Public Schools were the toast of the educational establishment. Scores on standardized tests had been rising--skyrocketing, in some cases--for a decade. In February 2009, schools chief Beverly Hall was feted as national superintendent of the year.
Two months later, dozens of Ms. Hall's teachers and principals engaged in the annual ritual required to produce such success: They cheated on the state standardized test.
The difference between 2009 and previous years of cheating (dating back at least as far as 2006, and perhaps 2001) was that reporters at my newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, questioned the schools' remarkable scores on Georgia's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. Those articles prompted an investigation by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue, and this month the devastating final report arrived. It uncovered cheating by adults in 44 schools, covering 1,508 classes--almost all of them serving low-income, minority students.
A typical school district's reaction to tight budgets is to cut, cut, cut. While cutting education waste can sharpen focus, cutting into innovation leaves your district extremely vulnerable to competition. School districts are no longer just competing against the local private school; rather they are competing with education over the net and the global market place as well. Now more than ever we need contenders.
With the right trainers, district leaders or contenders can become innovation champions for kids. Here's four ways you can step into the ring and put on the gloves for the upcoming education fight with the rest of the world.
Complete an Open Education Resource Scan - What are you paying for in your district with educational technology? What outcomes have you realized? Is there an open free alternative? Can this resource be shared among multiple users for multiple purposes? Example: Are you paying for a learning management system and creating your own content? Or, are you using a free engine and wrapping it around content not just for instruction but for professional development as well.
Last September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced: "Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time-and so have America's teachers, parents, students, and school leaders."
Duncan was excited about a new way of testing students, one that goes "beyond the bubble test," the standardized assessments students take every year that have long been criticized as not only useless in measuring any kind of real learning, but actually detrimental to the entire education system.
Ask most teachers, and you'll hear a litany of reasons why they detest these assessments. They contend the current tests have no bearing on student learning. They waste time that could be better spent in class (the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles, "dismisses the weeks before spring testing as 'Bubbling-In 101,'" according to a Los Angeles Times article.) They complain about having to teach to the tests, leaving them little time to try new ways of engaging students. And in some states, teachers are evaluated based on those very scores.
On June 30th, the Denver Public School Board voted unanimously on nine separate proposals for new charter and innovation schools. That's right, the DPS Board that is notorious for its contentious 4-3 split on nearly every major policy (turnarounds, innovation schools and charters) voted 7-0 in favor of these promising new schools. Here's hoping that this is a sign of the Board's commitment to putting kids first with our new reform minded mayor-elect, Michael Hancock.
The new charter schools, which will be located in all quadrants of the city, include: an all-boys K-12 charter modeled after a school in New Orleans and backed by former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, two additional West Denver Prep middle school campuses and a new West Denver Prep high school, a new KIPP elementary school, two new Denver School of Science and Technology campuses, a K-5 performance school being started by a current DPS principal and district educators, and a new preschool-8 charter school started by a Get Smart Schools fellow.
After years spent directing the distribution of more than $1 billion from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into hundreds of schools across the nation, Tom Vander Ark set his sights on the New York area, with a plan to create a network of charter schools of his own.
Mr. Vander Ark, the foundation's former executive director of education and a national leader in the online learning movement, was granted charters in 2010 to open a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two others in Newark. The New York school, Brooklyn City Prep, also got space in a public school building -- a precious and controversial commodity -- hired a principal, and welcomed applications from 150 eighth graders this spring.
But after spending more than $1.5 million of investors' money on consultants and lawyers, Mr. Vander Ark, 52, has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.
The list of delays states are encountering in implementing their Race to the Top plans keeps getting longer.
Every state but Georgia has now amended its Race to the Top plan in some way, usually to push back a timeline or scale back an initiative. In all, the dozen winners from the $4 billion competition have changed their plans, so far, 25 times, according to the list of amendments approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Remember, the winners were chosen based, at least in part, on their promises in those plans.
The changes includes a 32-page amendment with dozens of changes to New York's plan, including one of the first amendments I've seen that doesn't just push back a timeline, but eliminates a small piece of the state's plan. That particular amendment eliminates a $10 million program to provide competitive grants for charter school facilities in New York, and redistributes the money across a few other programs, including a general "school innovation fund." This may--or may not--be a big deal, but it's at least worth noting.
A new program beginning this fall will allow some older students attending Arkansas' two-year colleges to receive credit for their life experiences.
Ed Franklin, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Two-Year Colleges announced today that Chicago-based Council for Adult and Experiential Learning will offer a six-week evaluation and assessment class to students who are interested to see if their life experiences can be turned into college credit.
CAEL currently offers similar programs to more than 80 colleges in all 50 states, said Mark Campbell, vice president of LearningCounts.org, the online portal where students take the six-week assessment and evaluation class.
The widespread use of search engines and online databases has affected the way people remember information, researchers are reporting.
The scientists, led by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, wondered whether people were more likely to remember information that could be easily retrieved from a computer, just as students are more likely to recall facts they believe will be on a test.
Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia -- for example, "an ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain" -- into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.
Don Buckley (@donbuckley) and I are collaborating with Dr. Sabrina Goldberg (7th Math Teacher) this week to discuss Data Visualization with her students for the next few days. Here is what we are doing with the students for the 3-day unit:
The interim superintendent of Atlanta's public schools promised to reform the district and remove teachers and supervisors implicated in one of the nation's biggest cheating scandals.
Erroll Davis Jr. removed the city's four area superintendents as well as two principals this week, pending further investigation into cheating on standardized tests. At the same time, a former Atlanta deputy superintendent agreed to go on paid leave from a Texas school district that hired her earlier this year.
All were named in an 800-page state report released last week that outlined widespread, systematic cheating by students, teachers and administrators on standardized tests required annually at Georgia's elementary and middle public schools. The cheating, which was intended to raise scores to meet performance benchmarks, involved practices such as teachers erasing incorrect answers on the standardized tests.
AT ITS heart--as in so many scandals--lay a simple thing: the friction of rubber on paper. Too many wrong answers were erased, too many right ones inserted. Questions about dramatic improvements in standardised-test scores taken by children in Atlanta's public schools (APS) were first raised a decade ago. They were thoroughly answered last week when Governor Nathan Deal released a report that found cheating throughout Atlanta's school system, not by pupils but by teachers, with the superintendent and her administration either encouraging it or turning a blind eye.
Cheating occurred in 44 of the 56 Atlanta elementary and middle schools examined, and with the collusion of at least 178 teachers, including 38 principals. (And the report cautions that "there were far more educators involved in cheating, and other improper conduct, than we were able to establish sufficiently to identify by name in this report"). Answer-sheets in some classrooms found wrong-to-right erasures on test sheets that had standard deviations 20 to 50 times above the state norm. According to Gregory Cizek, who analysed test scores for the special report, the chance of this occurring without deliberate intervention is roughly the same as that of the Georgia Dome, a 70,000-seat football stadium, being filled to capacity with spectators who all happened to be over seven feet tall.
On a sunny morning late last month, Noemi Donoso, Chicago Public Schools' new chief education officer, organized a three-inch-thick binder stuffed with paperwork and district data at a table in her office.
It was one of more than 20 such binders from CPS area offices Donoso has been studying since Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed her to oversee curriculum and instruction for the nation's third-largest school district in April. The post has traditionally been held by former CPS principals and Donoso, an outsider groomed in charter schools, faces responsibilities that her predecessors did not.
A sweeping state education bill passed in May by the General Assembly enables CPS to lengthen the school day and fundamentally changes the process of evaluating teachers. Managing the implementation of those reforms will be Donoso's biggest undertaking, said Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago and a member of Emanuel's education transition team.
As part of Gov. Susana Martínez's education-reform effort, she persuaded the New Mexico Legislature to pass a bill by which our public schools will be given grades.
It's an exercise in teacher/administrator accountability, and pretty clearly the public needs more accountability from those folks; our state for years has been at the bottom of national rankings in education, and toward the top when it comes to dropouts.
Education and jobs tend to be a chicken-and-egg proposition -- so, figure the governor and her choice as education secretary, Hanna Skandera, let's begin where we have the chance, and the challenge, of improving the poultry.
But the new school year and the school-grading process are fast approaching. Some superintendents question the state's readiness to apply A's, B's, C's, D's and F's -- especially considering the damage those last two letters might do.
As a candidate, Dannel Malloy a year ago placed education at the center of his campaign. He pledged that if elected governor, he would build on a slew of long-awaited education changes Connecticut lawmakers had passed in order to snag federal Race to the Top funds, intending to push the state even further.
If statewide test scores out this week are any indication, Mr. Malloy still has a long way to go before being known as an education reformer.
Despite being one of the country's biggest education spenders on a per-student basis, Connecticut's 2011 test scores for reading, math and writing barely inched up from the year before, as poor children and those in urban areas continue to lag well behind their richer, more suburban peers.
Only 58% of Connecticut's third graders and 45% of 10th graders meet state standards for reading, and the results are worse for children whose families are eligible for free or reduced-price meals: Nearly twice the percentages of wealthier students scored at the standards for those grades than their peers who are eligible for the meals.
In the typical Oregon public school classroom, students of the same age work at achievement levels that often vary by two or three grades, sometimes more.
That didn't make sense to Mary Folberg. When she launched Northwest Academy, a private college preparatory school for grades 6-12 in downtown Portland, she grouped students the way she did as a dance instructor at Jefferson High, by proficiency rather than age.
That's the seismic shift Gov. John Kitzhaber wants to make in the state's public school system through a package of education bills passed by the Legislature last month.
At the heart of the package is one bill pushed by Kitzhaber to create paths from pre-school through college on which students advance at their own paces. The bill creates a 15-member Oregon Education Investment Board, chaired by the governor, to control the purse strings on all levels of education from preschool through college -- about $7.4 billion or half of the state general fund.
In today's New York Times, Diane Ravitch responds to David Brooks and other critics by hoisting well-worn foreign flags.
"No high-performing nation tests its students every year or uses student test scores to evaluate teacher quality."
This is a point Ravitch makes again and again. I usually just glide right by it, since it comes wedged between so many other questionable claims and also some valid points. But since I just got back from visiting these high-performing nations, I must note that Ravitch's version of reality does not match what I saw.
Everywhere I went, testing was absolutely embedded in the system. It took different forms, and in some places it was done more intelligently and more subtly than we do it, but it was always there. In South Korea, kids are tested in elementary, middle and high school. How do I know? Teachers, principals, students and the Education Minister told me so. It was not a secret.
At an education roundtable Wednesday at the Statehouse, six teachers from around the state told Gov. Branstad and Lt. Gov. Reynolds what Iowa teachers need to make students globally competitive.
Iowa teachers spend 180 days in the classroom. They want more time away from the students to become better teachers.
"We find the issues, but we don't have either the professional development time or collaboration time to fix it," said Philip Moss, a teacher in the North Tama district.
Spending more time learning from each other was something teachers stressed.
"It's all in how you organize the time we do have. A lot of time the master schedule is more based on the finances, not based on what's actually our goal," said Jessica Gogerty of North High School in Des Moines.
Some Southern California teachers are finding ways to keep creativity in the lesson plan even as they prepare their students for standardized tests.
Even as the annual state testing season bore down on her this spring, fourth-grade teacher Jin Yi barely bothered with test prep materials. The Hobart Boulevard Elementary School teacher used to spend weeks with practice tests but found they bored her students.
Instead, she engages them with hands-on lessons, such as measuring their arms and comparing that data to solve above-grade-level subtraction problems.
"I used to spend time on test prep because I felt pressured to do it," said Yi, who attended Hobart in Koreatown herself and returned a decade ago to teach. "But I think it's kind of a waste of time. The students get bored and don't take it seriously and it defeats the purpose."
My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.
Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, "French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition ... and knowledge that results from understanding." Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle ("pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion"; "estate tax" vs. "death tax") in order to gain the political advantage.
Here is another example of New York charter schools using their greater autonomies to develop innovative practices, in this case achieving operating efficiencies during this time where increasing pension costs are a particular concern for school districts. A recent Fordham Institute study reports that, between 2004 and 2010, district pension costs nationally increased from 12% to over 15% of salaries, amid concern that the public pension plans are underfunded.
The study reports that some New York charter schools are opting out of the traditional teacher-pension system, with only 28% of the state's charters participating in the state or city teachers retirement systems (NYSTRS and TRSNYC, respectively) in 2008-9. Those that opt-out cite the high cost of employer contributions. In 2009, the annual employer contribution rate to NYSTRS was 6.19% of an employee's annual salary, and that to TRSNYC was an astonishing 30.8% (by far the highest in this six-state study).
But that doesn't mean that these charter schools are not interested in helping their employees have a more secure future. Schools that choose not to participate in public pension plans most often provide their teachers with defined-contribution plans (401(k) or 403(b)) with employer matches similar to those for private-sector professionals. Although employer contribution rates vary, they generally range up to 6% of the employee's salary. Vesting periods range from immediate vesting to five-year vesting schedules.
Point/Counterpoint: Message From a Charter School: Thrive or Transfer
In 2008, when Katherine Sprowal's son, Matthew, was selected in a lottery to attend the Harlem Success Academy 3 charter school, she was thrilled. "I felt like we were getting the best private school, and we didn't have to pay for it," she recalled.
And so, when Eva S. Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who operates seven Success charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, asked Ms. Sprowal to be in a promotional video, she was happy to be included.
Matthew is bright but can be disruptive and easily distracted. It was not a natural fit for the Success charters, which are known for discipline and long school days. From Day 1 of kindergarten, Ms. Sprowal said, he was punished for acting out.
"They kept him after school to practice walking in the hallway," she said.
Several times, she was called to pick him up early, she said, and in his third week he was suspended three days for bothering other children.
The facts clearly show that Success Academies' educators are incredibly committed to serving children with special needs, we serve a high percentage, and do not push out children who don't "thrive." The Success Academies' special education population is equal to the citywide average of 12.5%. Our ELL population is 9.6%, and when you factor in children who we have successfully taught English (and are no longer ELL), we clearly educate the same children. As Winerip points out, our student attrition rate is significantly lower than our co-located schools and the citywide average.
As the paper trail examined by Winerip clearly indicates, no one pressured Ms. Sprowal to leave the school. Her son did not have an IEP until 3 years after he left the school. When the family left the school in 2008, Ms. Sprowal wrote effusive emails about how happy she was with how the school handled her situation. Three years later, after coaching from the United Federation of Teachers, his mother is now unhappy. The UFT spent five years hovering over our schools to find hordes of students who were unfairly "pushed" out, and the best they could find was a single story with a happy ending.
Most educators would agree that children are different and don't all excel in the same settings. That's why having choices is so important. Different schools are different in their approaches. Some are strict, some less strict, some have bigger class sizes, some smaller etc.. It is our obligation to advise a parent that there might be a better setting for their child.
Our schools are a work in progress, every day we try to do better for the largest number of children. While I don't believe that the school mishandled the situation, we are always working to improve how we serve children with all types of needs. For next year, we have added a 12:1:1 program at two of our schools and a Director of Special Education at the network-level who comes from the city's District 75.
What is most troubling about several of Winerip's recent columns is the suggestion that low-performing schools can't be expected to do any better. Winerip recently wrote that it wasn't Jamaica High School's fault that only 38% of its kids graduate with regents diplomas, because it gets more of the tough-to-serve kids (2% more homeless children, 6% more children with special needs). What school could possibly do better under those circumstances?
The theme is repeated in this story. 33% of 4th graders passed the state ELA test at PS 75, but public schools like PS 75 get more tough-to-serve children. (PS 75 does not, but schools like it do, he argues) When schools like ours have 86% of 4th graders passing the same test, it must be because we don't have the same kids, because schools can't possibly be expected to do that well.
Winerip also makes the argument that schools like PS 75 care about children and thus have low test scores while schools like Harlem Success Academy don't care about children and thus have high test scores.
Those are both false arguments that we must dispel if we're to improve the quality of public education. Schools with tough-to-serve children can do better and it's possible to care about children AND want them to perform well on tests.
At Success Academies, we want children to achieve at high levels AND we care deeply about their social and emotional development. We aim to create schools that are nurturing, joyful, and compelling AND that prepare children to excel in whatever their chosen field. I tell our principals, our true measure of success is whether children race through the door each morning and are disappointed to leave each day because school is just that compelling. Do we also want our children to score well on tests? Yes. High performance and joy are not mutually exclusive.
America's colleges and universities, for years the envy of the world and still a comfort to citizens concerned with the performance of the country's public elementary and secondary schools, are beginning to lose their relative luster. Surveys of the American public and of more than 1,000 college and university presidents, conducted this past spring by the Pew Research Center in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, revealed significant concerns not only about the costs of such education, but also about its direction and goals.
Despite a long track record of serving increasing numbers of students during the past half-century, graduation rates have stagnated. A higher proportion of America's 55- to 64-year-old citizens hold postsecondary degrees than in any other country--39 percent--but America ranks only tenth in the same category for its citizens aged 25 to 34 (at 40 percent). And none of America's higher-education institutions have ever served a large percentage of its citizens--many from low-income, African-American, and Hispanic families.
Indeed, the quality of America's colleges and universities has been judged historically not by the numbers of people the institutions have been able to educate well, regardless of background, but by their own selectivity, as seen in the quality and preparedness of the students they have admitted. Those institutions that educated the smartest students, as measured by standardized tests, also moved up in the arms race for money, graduate students, and significant research projects, which in turn fueled their prestige still further, as faculty members at such schools are rewarded for the quality of research, not for their teaching.
"When high stakes are attached to tests, people often act in ways that compromise educational values. High-stakes testing incentivizes narrowing of the curriculum, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests and cheating."
That passage, taken from a July 1 letter education historian Diane Ravitch wrote to the New York Times disputing columnist David Brooks' characterization of her public policy views, can easily be superimposed onto the current national education portrait.
Ever since Congress and President George W. Bush reauthorized the Early and Secondary Education Act in 2002 to become No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools have been under the gun to up state-mandated student test scores or face financial and structural consequences. Results from those exams are notoriously inflated or teased with public relations precision, not out of the malfeasance of school administrators but as a function of what happens when students are taught to a series of exams that determine a great portion of the state's education funding.
The Atlanta cheating scandal has put a spotlight on how schools could fudge standardized tests.
In California, schools are supposed to report any irregularities in testing and investigate them themselves. The state no longer collects data on erasures, one of the ways that investigators detected cheating in Atlanta. Nor does it do random audits during testing, according to USA Today.
Irregularities can range from teachers accidentally not following exact instructions on how to administer state tests to outright cheating. The state then decides if it needs to adjust school scores to discount some of the test results. California keeps the records of testing irregularities for just one year.
I last requested those records for all schools in San Diego County in April. Keep in mind, these are the school districts that followed the rules and reported irregularities, just like they are supposed to.
If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English.
Then watch them come.
As of June 15, more than 1,200 families had applied for early admission to Avenues: The World School, a for-profit private school co-founded by Mr. Whittle that will not open its doors until September 2012. Acceptance letters go out this week. Gardner P. Dunnan, the former head of the Dalton School and academic dean and head of the upper school at Avenues, said he expected 5,000 applicants for the 1,320 spots available from nursery through ninth grade. "You have to see the enthusiasm," Mr. Whittle crowed.
A lively debate about charter schools, high-stakes testing and impoverished students arose as David Brooks criticized Diane Ravitch, she answered back and readers joined the fray.
THE LETTER
To the Editor:
Re "Smells Like School Spirit," by David Brooks (column, July 1):
Mr. Brooks has misrepresented my views. While I have criticized charter schools, I am always careful to point out that they vary widely. The overwhelming majority of high-quality research studies on charters shows that some are excellent, some are abysmal and most are no better than regular public schools.
Some charters succeed because they have additional resources, supplied by their philanthropic sponsors; some get better results by adding extra instructional time. We can learn from these lessons to help regular public schools.
Others succeed by limiting the admission of students with disabilities and those who can't read English, or by removing those with learning problems. These students are then overrepresented in regular public schools, making comparisons between the two sectors unfair.
I don't want to get rid of testing. But tests should be used for information and diagnostics to improve teaching and learning, not to hand out bonuses, fire teachers and close schools.
When high stakes are attached to tests, people often act in ways that compromise educational values. High-stakes testing incentivizes narrowing of the curriculum, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests and cheating.
Poverty has a strong influence on academic achievement, and our society must both improve schools and reduce poverty.
Top-performing nations like Finland and Japan have taken the time to build a strong public school system, one with a rich curriculum and well-educated, respected teachers. Our desire for fast solutions gets in the way of the long-term thinking and the carefully designed changes that are needed to truly transform our schools.
Looking to attract employers' attention, some law schools are throwing out decades of tradition by replacing textbook courses with classes that teach more practical skills.
Indiana University Maurer School of Law started teaching project management this year and also offers a course on so-called emotional intelligence. The class has no textbook and instead uses personality assessments and peer reviews to develop students' interpersonal skills.
New York Law School hired 15 new faculty members over the past two years, many directly from the ranks of working lawyers, to teach skills in negotiation, counseling and fact investigation. The school says it normally hires one or two new faculty a year, and usually those focused on legal research.
Thirty-two area students are among 112 Wisconsin students and nearly 4,800 students nationwide who received National Merit Scholarships from U.S. colleges and universities this year.
The scholarships range in value from $500 to $2,000. The recipients were selected from 16,000 semifinalists out of 1.5 million students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in 2009.
In Dane County the recipients were from Edgewood High: Catherine A. DeGuire of Verona and Eric J. Wendorf of Madison; from Madison East: Jesse M. Banks, Jillian M. Plane and Scott O. Wilton, all of Madison; from Madison Memorial: Nancy X. Gu of Madison; from Madison West: Abigail Cahill, Nicholas P. Cupery, Sujeong Jin, Peter G. Lund and John C. Raihala, all of Madison, and Al Christopher V. Valmadrid of Fitchburg; from Madison Shabazz: Isabel A. Jacobson of Madison; from Marshall High: Zechariah D. Meunier of Marshall; from Middleton High: Anna-Lisa R. Doebley, Rachel J. Schuh and Cody J. Wrasman, all of Middleton, and Danielle M. DeSantes of Verona; from Stoughton High: Matthew J. Doll and Alexandra P. Greenier, both of Stoughton; from Verona High: Jasmine E. Amerson and James C. Dowell, both of Verona, and Kathryn M. Von Der Heide of Fitchburg; from Waunakee High: Stephen J. Bormann of Waunakee; and from home schools: Greer B. DuBois, Margaret L. Schenk and Isaac Walker, all of Madison.
Outside Dane County the recipients were Madeleine M. Blain of Evansville, Julie Mulvaney-Kemp of Viroqua, Clara E. McGlynn of Reedsburg, Ryanne D. Olsen of Jefferson and Yvette E. Schutt of Janesville.
Creating a new system of accountability for schools in Wisconsin could be a great help to parents and school districts and, thus, an important educational reform for the state. If the new system is fair and done right, it would provide plenty of clear information on which schools are achieving the right outcomes.
Ideally, it would measure schools not only on whether they have met certain standards but how much students and schools have improved over a certain time period. It also would measure all schools that receive public funding equally - public, charter and voucher - so that families would have the information they need to make good choices. That's all important.
The Rev. Reginald Jackson watched in horror last week as the political romance between Gov. Chris Christie and state Senate President Steve Sweeney exploded in flames.
It started when the governor pruned the budget of nearly everything Democrats wanted, after refusing to talk to Sweeney. And it ended with Sweeney's obscene tirade.
All that's left now is the smoldering wreckage of a relationship that's been at the core of every major reform since Christie took office. A week after the governor called to discuss the meltdown, Sweeney still had not returned his calls.
The last time Iowa was considered No. 1 overall in education, teachers faced fewer challenges in the classroom, students were more homogenous and school districts required less of them to graduate.
That was 1992.
Today, as Gov. Terry Branstad endeavors to restore the state's standing as a national education leader, teachers, policymakers and politicians fiercely disagree over what it will take to get back on top. Some dispute that Iowa's students have slid dramatically in performance at all.
What the different factions do agree on is that Iowa is experiencing rapid change in the classroom: Students are significantly poorer, more urban and more diverse than they were in 1992. Course work is more rigorous than it was in the early 1990s but, in an increasingly competitive global economy, that course work is still not believed to be enough.
Change is hard for most organizations. It is easy to live on the "fumes" of the past, until it is too late to change.
How does Wisconsin compare to the world? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org
Three years ago, Heather Vogell, an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, sat down with a data analyst to crunch some numbers.
She had just received the latest crop of scores for the CRCT, a state standardized test. Curiously, Vogell noted, several schools statewide had changed in status between the spring 2008 administration of the test and the summer retest in 2008, going from not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress rates, a calculation set by federal legislation that determines the fates of individual schools, to meeting the measure.
"We saw there were a lot more schools that met AYP than we had expected. It was a larger shift," Vogell told The Huffington Post.
Like any intrepid reporter, she had some questions. "We were poking around. We saw some schools that had very hard to believe gains, just looking with the naked eye," she said.
The Indiana Department of Education on Friday unveiled a website to provide information about the newly approved state voucher system.
The site includes an initial list of eligible private schools and answers to frequently asked questions.
Lawmakers in April approved vouchers, which will provide state dollars to Hoosier kids who want to attend private or parochial schools.
The amount of money available for a student depends on the household income and the local district's state funding. . A family of four, for example, could make up to $62,000 and still be eligible for a partial voucher.
Higher education keeps getting lower. And not just in my home state, where the core curriculum at the University of Arkansas' campus at Fayetteville is being hollowed out. It's happening all over. In Britain, the study of the humanities is being diluted, too.
Happily, this sad trend has inspired a familiar reaction. Over here, as state universities cut back on required courses that once were considered necessary for a well-rounded education, small liberal arts colleges have taken up the slack. Now comes word from England that A.C. Grayling, the renowned philosopher, has joined with other free-spirited academics to start a new, private College of the Humanities.
These new schools are part of an old tradition. Isn't that how the first universities in Europe began -- as communities of scholars teaching the classical curriculum? They were founded, organized and run by the faculty, not administrators. And out of those universities came a great renaissance, the rebirth of classical education after what we now call the Dark Ages.
A state school board has set a minimum score on a language-competency test for teachers who have not mastered English.
The Providence Journal reports that the state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education voted on Thursday to set a minimum score. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist described the score as the "bare minimum'' of fluency.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett on Tuesday hailed Indiana's first statewide all-online public high school as a "revenue generator" and a model for how cash-strapped school districts can save money.
"This is in many ways a breakthrough for the state," Bennett said at a news conference Tuesday formally announcing Achieve Virtual Education Academy, which will be available to Hoosier students this fall. Wayne Township will run the accredited school, which will award regular high school diplomas.
Achieve Virtual allows for the school corporation and its teachers to be entrepreneurial while also allowing children to learn in a way that suits them, Bennett said, making it a "win-win-win opportunity."
It's much tougher to implement the law than it is to write it -- that's the lesson educators are learning this summer as they work to implement a complicated new educator evaluation system.
Some area school leaders question how fair the system can be and say they don't believe it's possible to get everything done on time with the state's strict timeline.
"The timetable is practically impossible," Watertown City School District Superintendent Terry N. Fralick said. "By and large, we feel the timetable cannot be met. But we will do our best to work on it and show good faith."
District officials will work with the Watertown Education Association and the Watertown Association of Supervisors and Administrators, the unions that cover teachers and principals, respectively. School leaders in other north country districts and across the state will be doing the same thing.
A system for providing clear, plentiful and sophisticated information for judging the quality of almost every school in Wisconsin, replacing a system that leaves a lot desired on all of those fronts - that is the goal of an eye-catching collaboration that includes Gov. Scott Walker, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, and leaders of eight statewide education organizations.
Walker and Evers said Friday that they will seek approval from the U.S. Department of Education to allow the new school accountability system to replace the decade-old, federally imposed one they labeled as broken.
They want at least a first version of the new system to be ready by spring, and to apply it to outcomes for schools in the 2011-'12 school year.
The new accountability program would include every school that accepts publicly funded students, which means that private schools taking part in the state-funded voucher program would, for the first time, be subject to the same rules as public schools for making a wealth of data available to the public. Charter schools and virtual schools would also participate.
Sweden could become the first country in Europe to offer Chinese lessons to all schoolchildren under plans floated by the Swedish education minister.
Jan Björklund said giving future generations access to Chinese language tuition was crucial to national competitiveness.
"Chinese will be much more important, from an economic perspective, than French or Spanish," he told the Dagens Industri newspaper.
Other western countries have also started introducing Chinese to school curriculums in recognition of China's growing global role, but Mr Björklund's plan aims to put Sweden ahead of the pack.
In a corner of the San Fernando Valley, amid auto body shops and Salvadoran pupusa restaurants, a Hawaiian summer is in full swing.
At Camp Akela, located at Noble Avenue Elementary School in North Hills, kindergartners read about rainbow fish and draw them. Other students study volcanoes, create travel journals, dance the hula and even play in a portable pool.
But the students, most of them low-income English learners, are also learning literacy, math facts and science and are honing writing skills with "coaches" dressed in leis, tropical shirts and grass skirts.
The New York Times coverage of the recent National Education Association (N.E.A.) convention focused on the inconsequential, while paying little notice to what harbored fundamental significance. It aimed its spotlight and lingered on what it referred to as a shift in position: "... the nation's largest teachers' union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country." (The New York Times, July 5, 2011).
In fact, there was little in the way of concessions by N.E.A. on this point, as The New York Times article itself conceded: "But blunting the policy's potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers..." And the Times added that the N.E.A. went on to insist that only those tests that have been shown to be "developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher's performance" should be used. This qualification eliminates almost, if not all, conventional tests.
The N.E.A. is right to be cautious about basing teacher evaluations and the fate of teachers on the test scores of their students, as the Obama administration has been single-mindedly promoting. We know that students' standardized test scores are correlated above all with their economic standing. As Joe Nocera recently pointed out in an op-ed New York Times article (April 25, 2011): "Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended -- and unquestionably proved -- that students' socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn."
In a flurry of education bills passed last week, Oregon governor John Kitzhaber oversaw legislation to appoint an unlikely candidate for superintendent of schools: himself. Though many states have moved towards more centrally controlled education systems, Oregon became the first state to abolish the traditional office of superintendent and appoint the governor as superintendent of public instruction.
The governor will appoint a deputy superintendent to oversee the day-to-day activities in K-12 schools. The deputy must perform any duty designated by the governor and can be removed at any point following consultation with the state school board (which will also be newly appointed by the governor; this "superboard" of officials will oversee spending and policy for all grade levels).
How did this state of affairs come about? After Oregon's application for the 2010 Race to the Top Competition placed seventh to last, parents and legislators began to press for innovation and reform. Kitzhaber argues that central authority will help him push needed reforms. Kitzhaber is already on the reform track with legislation allowing universities and community colleges to sponsor charter schools and raising the cap on online charter schools. He is also earning pushback from the state's teacher's unions.
Delivering her first State of Education address on Thursday, Oklahoma's new Republican Superintendent Janet Barresi urged public school administrators and teachers to rise to the challenge of budget cuts totaling $100 million this year to public schools.
Barresi, a dentist and charter school organizer elected in November to replace longtime Democratic Superintendent Sandy Garrett, delivered her address to about 2,500 participants at the annual administrative conference at the Cox Convention Center.
IT IS not exactly unusual for children to cheat at school. But Indonesians have learned recently that their teachers add a new twist to a familiar tale: ordering their own pupils to cheat, even if they do not want to. Not surprisingly, the revelation has led to an anxious debate about whether anyone can trust the grades of millions of young men and women who come onto the labour market each year in South-East Asia's biggest economy.
The scandal came to light at the beginning of June when the mother of a 13-year-old boy in Surabaya, in eastern Java, told the local media that her son had been forced by his teachers to share his answers to a national exam with his classmates. The mother, Siami, first complained to the school but was ignored. So she took her story to a local radio station.
I am disappointed to see Jonathan Kozol, a lion in the struggle for education equity, refer to "so-called" achievement gaps.
Ingraham High School in Seattle, WA, is both racially and economically diverse. Of the 1051 students, half are low income, 30 percent are White, 30 percent Asian, 24 percent African American, and 12 percent Latino. In 2010, 65 percent of Ingraham's White students were proficient in Math, compared to only 5 percent (yes, 5 percent) of African American students and 16 percent of Latinos.
In a sign of the endless march of technology individual schools will no longer be required to instruct pupils in long hand from the age of eight, and they may only learn to print.
The move has led to fears that youngsters could grow up not even knowing how to sign their own name.
According to a memo sent by the Department of Education to schools on April 25 they can continue to teach handwriting of they want, but children will be expected to achieve proficiency with a keyboard.
A year ago, everyone from President Obama's education point man Arne Duncan to then Rochester schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard talked about the need for greater teacher accountability. Even the leaders of teachers unions were talking about the importance of holding teachers and principals accountable through more rigorous evaluations.
So much can change in 365 days.
Last week, the New York State United Teachers union sued the State Education Department over teacher evaluations. The union says that the Board of Regents overreached its authority and violated state law by approving stronger regulations for evaluations than the law required.
The regulations allow school districts to double the weight given to state tests, permitting the use of test results to count for up to 40 percent of a teacher's evaluation. The law allows student test results to count for 20 percent of a teacher's evaluation.
Written by an experienced elementary school teacher, Seattle
Dear Laurie Rogers:
Thanks for writing your book. One of the things that you discuss in your compelling discourse is the low standards that our colleges have had in the subject matter (as opposed to teaching theory, sociology, and psychology) for those who have a desire to become teachers in our public schools.
For the past twenty-two years, I have diligently taught 4th and 5th grade students. For the first eighteen years, I taught math according to the classical mode that you describe in your book. As the reforms took hold, and we were monitored ever more closely, I was forced into using Everyday Math according to a pacing guide set by the district. As you have rightly observed, it is a program that emphasizes coverage and not mastery.
For much of the year, I had 34 students. Of these 34 students, seven had Special Education IEPs and were to be served according to a pull-in model which never quite materialized. I did have a special ed. instructional assistant for 50 minutes a day until she was pulled to serve in a more "needy" classroom. One of my students was mentally retarded and never once scored about the first percentile on the MAP test. Another student started the year almost totally blind and had a personal assistant for two hours out of the day to teach her Braille. Two were removed from their homes by CPS and placed under foster care: one for neglect and the other for domestic violence. Three students were absent for more than 30 days each. I could go on, but I think that you get the picture.
In May 2011, state education agency representatives from New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee attended a series of workshops and briefings organized by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE). The sessions described the changes that have taken place in Louisiana over the past six years, including the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD) that redeveloped unproductive schools in New Orleans and elsewhere, the restructuring of the LDOE, and efforts to create a new performance-based organizational culture in state and local education agencies.
Presenters included LDOE staff, RSD administrators, academic observers, nonprofit service partners, and education stakeholders. There was a candid discussion of the LDOE's overall school improvement goals, steps taken to achieve those objectives, and in some cases missteps made in the effort to dramatically turn around a large number of schools in a relatively short time and to prompt improvements in all schools across the state.
Promoters of higher education often point to differences in lifetime earnings to justify the price of higher education. Pay for an education today, and the "investment" will pay for itself over the student's lifetime. Not only will the student make more money, but his or her career will be far more satisfying.
But with the cost of higher education skyrocketing, many families are beginning to question whether a college degree is worth the price. The arithmetic is persuasive. At the stock market's historical 9% annual return (nominal return over the past 50 years), $100,000 not invested in a four-year college education would be worth over $3 million in 40 years. That return would handsomely eclipse the nominal lifetime earnings difference of $1 million often quoted for college vs. high school graduates. Put aside the fact that the four-year degree is being slowly replaced by the five-year degree, which bumps the cost of higher education even higher.
Summer school doesn't necessarily mean hours spent in a school building anymore.
Several York County school districts have started offering summer school -- mostly for students who need to make up courses -- online. Some school officials said it's easier to manage with students' busy summer schedules and offers more tailored programs.
"Summer school has been a hardship for students and their families forevermore," said Shelly Merkle, assistant superintendent for administration for the York Suburban School District.
Students have always had difficulty committing to a summer schedule, she said. Some split time with parents or have difficulty finding transportation, or previously planned vacations become problematic.:
When course requirements at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shifted 10 years ago, faculty members in the mathematics department found themselves with a new task in their job description. Not only did they have to teach their students to solve equations; they also had to instruct them in writing and communicating effectively on the subject.
This change in duties -- which mirrored similar shifts in the teaching of discipline-specific writing at other institutions -- gave rise to a host of new challenges, from the administrative to the pedagogic, said Haynes Miller, professor of math at MIT. The math faculty there had to learn how to teach the subject from a different perspective -- one in which words, not just numbers and symbols, are given emphasis.
In today's Academic Minute, the University of North Florida's Katie Monnin describes how the use of graphic novels in the classroom can improve reading comprehension and attitudes about reading among young readers. Monnin is an assistant professor of literacy at North Florida and author of the forthcoming Really Reading with Graphic Novels and Teaching Content Area Graphic Novels.
State investigators have uncovered a decade of systemic cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools and conclude that Superintendent Beverly Hall knew or should have known about it, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.
In a report that Gov. Nathan Deal planned to release today, the investigators name nearly 180 educators, including more than three dozen principals, as participants in cheating on state curriculum tests, officials said over the weekend. The investigators obtained scores of confessions.
The findings suggest the national accolades that Hall and the school system have collected -- and the much-vaunted academic progress for which she claimed credit -- were based on falsehoods. Raising test scores apparently became a higher priority than conducting the district's business in an ethical manner.
Details are beginning to tumble out from a 428-page report by state investigators on alleged cheating in Atlanta Public Schools.
On Tuesday, Gov. Nathan Deal released only a two-page summary of the report showing organized, systemic cheating in Atlantic Public Schools by scores of educators, including 38 principals.
Deal says "there will be consequences" for educators who cheated and has forwarded the findings to three district attorneys as well as state and city education officials.
GWEN IFILL: Now, an exhaustive new report reveals nearly 200 educators cheated to boost student test scores in Atlanta, a problem that has surfaced in school districts across the country.
The Georgia investigation commissioned by Gov. Nathan Deal found, results were altered on state curriculum tests by district administrators, principals and teachers for as long as a decade. Educators literally erased and corrected students' mistakes to make sure schools met state-imposed testing standards. And it found evidence of cheating in 44 of the 56 schools examined for the 2009 school year.
A couple of key actions have to happen this week for Teach for America to come to Seattle Schools.
One is at the Board meeting on Wednesday night. There is a state entity called the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) that grants educational entities the right to create conditional certificate programs. They require School Board approval has to happen prior to "applying for a conditional certficiate for a teacher candidate. Therefore, Board action is required to hire any TFA candidate if any are selected for hire by a school-based hiring team."
The second action that needs to happen is on Thursday, at the PESB meeting where the UW's College of Education will present their proposal for their teaching certificate program for TFA recruits (and only TFA recruits; no one else can apply to this program).
If you would like to let the PESB know what you think of the plan, e-mail them at pesb@k12.wa.us before Thursday.
About a dozen members of a bipartisan, mostly volunteer organization called Common Ground file into Superintendent Tony Evers' utilitarian conference room in downtown Milwaukee. The group is exploring how to help Milwaukee's beleaguered schools, and it has scheduled a meeting with the head of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as part of its research.
Tall, thin and gray haired, Evers has a boyish smile and a welcoming manner. He's now in a white shirt and tie, sans the suit coat he wore to an earlier meeting with suburban school officials in Pewaukee.
Common Ground, a nonpartisan coalition that includes churches, nonprofits and labor unions, has come to Evers' office today looking for advice on how best to direct its considerable resources toward helping Milwaukee students, whose performance in both traditional public schools and in taxpayer-funded voucher schools ranks at the bottom of major American cities.
After initial pleasantries and introductions are exchanged, Keisha Krumm, lead organizer for Common Ground, asks Evers a question. "At this stage we're still researching what issue we will be focusing on. But we do want to know what you can do. What's your power and influence?"
How does Wisconsin compare to other states and the world? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org.
School may be out for the summer, but school choice is in, as states across the nation have moved to expand education opportunities for disadvantaged kids. This year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.
No fewer than 13 states have enacted school choice legislation in 2011, and 28 states have legislation pending. Last month alone, Louisiana enhanced its state income tax break for private school tuition; Ohio tripled the number of students eligible for school vouchers; and North Carolina passed a law letting parents of students with special needs claim a tax credit for expenses related to private school tuition and other educational services.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker made headlines this year for taking on government unions. Less well known is that last month he signed a bill that removes the cap of 22,500 on the number of kids who can participate in Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, the nation's oldest voucher program, and creates a new school choice initiative for families in Racine County. "We now have 13 programs new or expanded this year alone" in the state, says Susan Meyers of the Wisconsin-based Foundation for Educational Choice.
A new study of twins suggests that environmental factors, including conditions in the womb, may be at least as important as genes in causing autism.
The researchers did not say which environmental influences might be at work. But other experts said the new study, released online on Monday, marked an important shift in thinking about the causes of autism, which is now thought to affect at least 1 percent of the population in the developed world.
"This is a very significant study because it confirms that genetic factors are involved in the cause of the disorder," said Dr. Peter Szatmari, a leading autism researcher who is the head of child psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario. "But it shifts the focus to the possibility that environmental factors could also be really important."
"India is still paying quite a heavy price for this"
India needs to broaden its base in the spheres of education, healthcare and women's equality to foster economic growth, said Nobel laureate Amartya Sen after receiving a honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from the National University of Educational Planning and Administration here on Monday.
Speaking at the special convocation, Prof. Sen was as vehement in demanding an equitable status for women as he was in seeking reforms in education and basic healthcare.
"India does have many achievements in the success of a relatively small group of privileged people well trained in higher education and specialised expertise. Yet our educational system remains deeply unjust. Among other bad consequences, the low coverage and low quality of school education in India extracts a heavy price in the pattern of our economic development," he said.
After several years of state and local budget cuts, thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year, even though virtually everyone involved in education agrees that American students need more instruction time.
Los Angeles slashed its budget for summer classes to $3 million from $18 million last year, while Philadelphia, Milwaukee and half the school districts in North Carolina have eviscerated their programs or zeroed them out. A scattering of rural districts in New Mexico, Idaho and other states will be closed on Fridays or Mondays come September. And in California, where some 600 of the 1,100 local districts have shortened the calendar by up to five days over the past two years, lawmakers last week authorized them to cut seven days more if budgets get tighter.
"Instead of increasing school time, in a lot of cases we've been pushing back against efforts to shorten not just the school day but the week and year," said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the federal Department of Education. "We're trying to prevent what exists now from shrinking even further."
IN an essay published in 1895 called "How to Tell a Story," Mark Twain chastised writers who use "whooping exclamation-points" that reveal them laughing at their own humor, "all of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life."
One shudders to imagine what Twain would have made of e-mail.
Writing is by definition an imperfect medium for relaying the human voice. And in the age of electronic communication, when that voice is transmitted so often via e-mail and text message, many literate and articulate people find themselves justifying the exclamation point to convey emotion, enthusiasm or excitement. Some do so guiltily, as if on a slippery slope to smiley faces.
U.S. officials defended their schools--blaming poor performance on the relative prevalence of immigrant families in the United States. But Schleicher and his colleagues noted that native-born Americans performed just as unimpressively. In fact, worldwide, the share of children from immigrant backgrounds explains only 3 percent of the variance between countries. A country's wealth does not predict success, either. Gross domestic product per capita predicts only 6 percent of the difference in scores. Schleicher also noticed, however, that in the U.S. in particular, poverty was destiny. Low-income American students did (and still do) much worse than high-income ones on PISA. But poor kids in Finland and Canada do far better relative to their more privileged peers, despite their disadvantages.
In Germany, the test became a household name and inspired a prime-time TV quiz show, The PISA Show. Even Schleicher's father began taking his work more seriously. Meanwhile, Schleicher visited dozens of schools and pored over the data. He concluded that the best school systems became great after undergoing a series of crucial changes. They made their teacher-training schools much more rigorous and selective; they put developing high-quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams; and once they had these well-trained professionals in place, they found ways to hold the teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods. Notably, in every case, these school systems devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids.
These days, Schleicher travels the world with a PowerPoint presentation detailing his findings. It seems to have more data points embedded in its scatter plots than our galaxy has stars. When his audiences get distracted by the tribal disputes that plague education, he returns to the facts with a polite smile, like C-3PO with a slight German accent. He likes to end his presentation with a slide that reads, in a continuously scrolling ticker, "Without data, you are just another person with an opinion ... Without data, you are just another person with an opinion ..."
Why is the performance of students in other countries surpassing that of U.S. students? It's a question that Marc S. Tucker, president and chief executive officer of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington sought to answer at a May symposium focused on education reforms in other countries, including Canada, China, Finland, Japan and Singapore.
After the symposium, Tucker spoke about what we can learn from his group's findings. Below are excerpts of the conversation.
Q: The report indicates that countries outperforming the U.S. have developed strategies we have not. What are the key lessons about high performance we can take away from what is being done elsewhere?
Where does Wisconsin stand globally? Learn more, here: www.wisconsin2.org.
Released on April 28, 2011, The Promise of College Completion: KIPP's Early Successes and Challenges reports the college outcomes for our earliest KIPP students. It also examines our early lessons learned in supporting KIPP students through college, and shares the ways we are addressing the challenges of college completion.
Starting this fall, the Indiana Department of Education will no longer require Indiana's public schools to teach cursive writing.
State officials sent school leaders a memo April 25 telling them that instead of cursive writing, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.
The memo says schools may continue to teach cursive as a local standard, or they may decide to stop teaching cursive altogether.
Greene County resident and parent Ericka Hostetter has mixed feelings about the teaching of cursive. She has three children, and two will be in public schools next fall.
"I'm right in the middle," she said, noting that she learned about it on Facebook. "I don't use cursive much. I use keyboard. I use my phone, so even for my generation, I think we use the keyboard more."
I will begin by acknowledging there are many facets of the latest California Budget that are onerous to many organizations. With that said, I will focus on the educational piece.
The latest State Budget by our leaders in Sacramento has not only put education in a precarious and unknown position but also ties the hands of the very people who are supposed to protect and lead school districts.
If in January revenues fall $2 billion or more short of projections the following will happen:
School district revenues would be reduced 4 percent, or $1.5 billion (an average of $250 per student)
Michigan has joined the ranks of states that have made education reform a priority. Although the state still lags far behind others in terms of student performance, new tenure and teacher evaluation measures should help Michigan students improve.
On Thursday, the Senate passed revised versions of House reform bills. It will now be more difficult for new teachers to achieve the protections of tenure and easier to lose them if they don't do their jobs well. And teacher performance will be judged largely on how much their students learn.
Similarly, seniority can no longer determine teacher layoffs; rather, the most effective teachers will remain in classrooms. These are common-sense changes, which place the needs of children first.
It was a tough week for lawmakers, squeezed from both sides of the reform debate. Education unions, such as the Michigan Education Association, pressured lawmakers to avoid such rigorous reforms, while groups such as the Education Trust-Midwest and StudentsFirst firmly advocated the changes.
The House quickly signed off on the amended bills, which now head to Gov. Rick Snyder. Although some reforms could be stronger, lawmakers accomplished much in a short amount of time.
One of the many things I learned producing my film The Finland Phenomenon, was the importance of setting a very high standard for the education and training of teachers.
Finland's high school teachers are required to have both a Bachelors and Masters degree in the subject they teach (e.g. - math, physics, history, etc) combined with one-year of pedagogical training with very heavy emphasis in real classroom teaching experience under the guidance of an outstanding seasoned teacher.
By contrast, most U.S. States require only a Bachelors degree from a college of education with an emphasis in the subject to be taught - and frequently that subject matter is taught by professors in the Education School, not in the actual subject department. Think of it as content and rigor "light" for teachers.
So, what should America do to apply this obvious lesson from Finland? My thoughts:
1- each U.S. State needs to cut off the supply of teachers not sufficiently prepared to teach this generation at its source. The source is colleges of education. A State legislature and Governor can change the requirements to be a teacher in their State. All it takes is courage to withstand the screams from colleges of education - the sacred cash cow of most universities.
2- To teach at the high school level, a State should require the prospective teacher to have at least an undergraduate degree in the subject they plan to teach and from the department that teaches that subject (e.g. - teaching math? Require a B.S. from the Math department).
The two energetic foes on school reform reportedly did not get along. Ms. Gist says that Ms. Ravitch kept making points irrelevant to Rhode Island. Ms. Ravitch says Ms. Gist interrupted her discourse repeatedly, and that in encounters with the powerful in America since 1958 (such as Sen. John F. Kennedy [D-Mass.]), she had "never encountered such behavior."
She demanded an apology from Ms. Gist. They later made peace. Mr. Chafee said he saw nothing inappropriate in Ms. Gist's behavior.
Both women have egos large enough to encompass their educational ambitions -- in fact, Ms. Ravitch has two pedagogical histories under her belt. She was once on Ms. Gist's "side" on school reform. That changed, says Ms. Ravitch, after she lost confidence in testing and charter schools as the prime strategies for success, and started pushing for more respect (pay) for teachers, less reliance on tests, less hope in charter schools and more trust in -- well, so far as we can tell -- in the status quo.
Well, that oversized Kindle didn't become the textbook killer Amazon hoped it would be, but at least one country is moving forward with plans to lighten the load on its future generation of Samsung execs. South Korea announced this week that it plans to spend over $2 billion developing digital textbooks, replacing paper in all of its schools by 2015. Students would access paper-free learning materials from a cloud-based system, supplementing traditional content with multimedia on school-supplied tablets. The system would also enable homebound students to catch up on work remotely -- they won't be practicing taekwondo on a virtual mat, but could participate in math or reading lessons while away from school, for example. Both programs clearly offer significant advantages for the country's education system, but don't expect to see a similar solution pop up closer to home -- with the US population numbering six times that of our ally in the Far East, many of our future leaders could be carrying paper for a long time to come.
Vice President Joe Biden lambasted what he called an increasingly union-hostile "new" Republican party, during remarks delivered to National Education Association representatives today, raising the specter of high profile labor fights picked by Republican governors with public workers unions across the country.
"There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history," Biden said during a speech laden with political red meat, smoothing over past disagreements between teachers unions and the Obama Administration.
"The new Republican party has undertaken the most direct assault on labor, not just in my lifetime ... but literally since the 1920s," he said. "This is not your father's Republican party. This is a different breed of cat."
Biden's remarks to one of the nation's largest teachers unions, a speech that lasted about 30 minutes, came a day before its members are expected to decide whether to cast their support behind the administration in the 2012 presidential election.
The National Education Association Representative Assembly opened this morning in Chicago with 7,321 delegates attending, which is by far the lowest number since I began covering the convention in 1998.
The atmosphere still resembles a political party convention, with speeches, confetti and deafening music, including the new NEA theme song, "Standing Strong":
"Standing strong, standing tall. Standing up for what is right and true, NEA is standing up for me and you!"
Coming soon to a Chevy truck commercial near you.
It is customary for the mayor of the host city to welcome the delegates, but since the mayor is Rahm Emanuel, NEA prudently got hold of Illinois Gov. Quinn instead. After the delegates adopted the standing rules for the assembly, it was time for NEA president Dennis Van Roekel's keynote speech.
There were two new business items (NBIs) of note debated this afternoon. The first was NBI C, submitted by the NEA Board of Directors, which directs the NEA president to "communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that NEA is appalled with Secretary Duncan's practice of..." and then lists 13 of Duncan's most heinous crimes, like "Focusing so heavily on charter schools that viable and proven innovative school models (such as magnet schools) have been overlooked, and simultaneously failing to highlight with the same enthusiasm the innovation in our non-charter public schools."
Widespread unhappiness among teachers about President Barack Obama's education policies is threatening to derail a National Education Association proposal to give him an early endorsement for re-election.
The political action committee of the NEA, the nation's largest union, adopted a resolution in May to endorse Mr. Obama. The proposal will come before the NEA's 9,000-member representative assembly on Monday at the union's annual convention here.
The union has never endorsed a presidential candidate this early in the campaign cycle, instead waiting to make the decision during the election year. But union leaders, anticipating a tough re-election campaign, wanted to bolster support for the president early on, a move that has run into opposition from union members.
Vice President Joe Biden says the "new Republican Party" fundamentally doesn't believe in public education the way Democrats do.
"There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history," he was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune.
A growing number of urban districts across the country are profoundly changing the role of the school district and its relationship to schools in order to bring about dramatically better outcomes for students. New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Hartford, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., are among more than 20 districts pursuing a "portfolio strategy" of continuous improvement. These districts are creating diverse options for families in disadvantaged neighborhoods by opening new autonomous schools, giving existing schools more control of budgeting and hiring, and holding all schools to common performance standards.
CRPE has been studying the development of the portfolio strategy in several cities for the past three years. This interim assessment finds that:
It all started when my daughter, also a Madison teacher, called me. "You have to get down to the union office. We need to call people to go to the rally at the Capitol." I told her I hadn't heard about the rally. "It's on Facebook," she responded impatiently. "That's how they did it in Egypt."
That Sunday rally in Capitol Square was just the first step in the massive protests against Gov. Scott Walker's infamous "budget repair bill." The Madison teachers' union declared a "work action" and that Wednesday, instead of going to school, we marched into the Capitol building, filling every nook and cranny. The excitement mounted day by day that week, as teachers from throughout the state were joined by students, parents, union and nonunion workers in the occupation and demonstrations.
Madison teachers stayed out for four days. It was four exhilarating days, four confusing days, four stressful and exhausting days.
When we returned to school the following week, I debated how to handle the days off. We had received a three- page email from our principal warning us to "remain politically neutral" as noted in the school board policy relating to controversial issues. We were to watch not only our words, but also our "tone and body language." If students wanted to talk about the rallies, we were to respond: "We are back in school to learn now."
These days tenure for teachers is such a brawl in America's elementary and secondary schools that it's easy to forget that it's more a cornerstone of higher education. When Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, announced earlier this month that he was leaving the White House to return to the University of Chicago it was a reminder just how strong the ties -- and inducements -- of university tenure can be, and why it has recently come under fire.
At colleges and universities, tenure basically bestows a job for life unless an institution runs out of money. Originally intended to shield professors from meddling by college administrators, donors or politicians, tenure has evolved into one of the most coveted perks in higher education. It signals excellence and it confers employment stability.
On the Milwaukee Public Schools: All hands on deck Sacrifices are needed to ensure that Milwaukee kids are educated despite state budget cuts. The district, its union and businesses should be willing to step up.
The state budget has left Milwaukee Public Schools reeling. Meeting this challenge requires a response from the entire community.
Local businesses and foundations will be called on to do more. The Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association should make a contribution to the district's pension plan to save teacher positions. And the district itself has to become more efficient by selling unused buildings and finding a less expensive way to feed its 85,000 students.
Of the 519 district employees being sent layoff notices, 354 would be teachers, according to Superintendent Gregory Thornton. Most of the cuts will come in kindergarten through eighth grade. And, as usual, it's mostly teachers with the least amount of experience who will be shown the door.
Once upon a time, the car was the key to understanding the U.S. economy. Then it was the family home. Nowadays, it is any device created by Steven P. Jobs. Call it the Apple economy, and if you can figure out how it works, you will have a good handle on how technology and globalization are redistributing money and jobs around the world.
That was the epiphany of Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer, a troika of scholars who have made a careful study in a pair of recent papers of how the iPod has created jobs and profits around the world. The latest paper, "Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple's iPod," was published last month in The Journal of International Commerce and Economics.
One of their findings is that in 2006 the iPod employed nearly twice as many people outside the United States as it did in the country where it was invented -- 13,920 in the United States, and 27,250 abroad.
You probably aren't surprised by that result, but if you are American, you should be a little worried. That is because Apple is the quintessential example of the Yankee magic everyone from Barack Obama to Michele Bachmann insists will pull America out of its job crisis -- the remarkable ability to produce innovators and entrepreneurs. But today those thinkers and tinkerers turn out to be more effective drivers of job growth outside the United States than they are at home.
In a ceremony this week, Harlem Day Charter School celebrated its 13 fifth-graders who are moving on to middle school. They represent roughly one-third of the class.
The other two-thirds will have to repeat fifth grade.
That hard truth is one of many that the teachers, students and parents of Harlem Day have been confronting in recent months as the school prepares to become the city's first attempt at a takeover of a failing charter school.
Only five of 32 teachers will be returning in September. About 100 of all 247 students in the elementary school are being held back. And administrators are having tough conversations with parents about the true state of their children's academic progress. Parents are being told that students, who for years were passed from grade to grade, lack basic skills.
At Harlem Day, no students were held back last year, despite recent state tests that showed only 20% of students were on grade level in English and 25% were in math.
>Last year, battles over charter schools dominated much of education coverage. This year, the controversy over "teacher evaluations" is poised to be the biggest fight among people with competing visions for improving public schools. For a primer on how these new teacher assessments work, don't miss Sam Dillon's recent piece in the New York Times. Reporting from Washington, D.C., Dillon found that last year the city fired 165 teachers using a new teacher evaluation system; this year, the number will top 200.
D.C. relies on a relatively new evaluation system called Impact, a legacy of its former school chief Michelle Rhee, who noticed that, despite the district's low test scores, most teachers were getting nearly perfect evaluations. Rhee and the proponents of this new evaluation system feel that the old system relied too much on the subjective evaluations by the principal or a few experienced teachers. Opponents of the old system say these internal measurements are not data-driven or rigurous enough to allow principals and districts to identify struggling teachers who need assistance or to find the successful ones who deserve to be recognized and empowered.
Impact or other new evaluation systems are currently being implemented in around 20 states. The basic idea to use performance-based evaluations that use external measures such as test scores in addition to the internal measures mentioned above. Sparked by President Obama's Race to the Top grants, these "value-added" evaluations rely heavily on kids' test scores in math and reading. Teachers whose subjects are not measured by test scores are observed in the classroom. For example, D.C. teachers get five yearly classroom observations, three by principals and two by "master educators" from other schools.
This study describes how the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was used for internationally benchmarking state performance standards. The process is accomplished in two steps. First, PISA items are embedded in the administration of the state assessment and calibrated on the state scale. The international item calibrations are then used to link the state scale to the PISA scale through common item linking. The second step is to use the statistical linking as part of the state standard setting process to help standard setting panelists determine how high their state standards need to be in order to be internationally competitive. This process was carried out in Delaware, Hawaii, and Oregon, and results are reported here for two of the states: Hawaii and Delaware.
Key words: Equating, linking, item response theory, international benchmarking.
Introduction
In 2010, the American Institutes for Research obtained permission from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to use secure items from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for purposes of linking state assessments within the United States to the PISA scale. The OECD provided a representative sample of 30 secure PISA items in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. The PISA items covered the 2006 and 2009 PISA assessment cycles. In addition to the PISA items, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which is the current vender for the OECD contracted to conduct PISA, provided the international item parameters and their standard errors, as well as the linear transformations needed to link the state assessments to the PISA scale. The administration, security, and scoring of the PISA items were carried out by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) based on a License Agreement between AIR and the OECD and monitored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
New York's largest teachers union is suing the state Board of Regents over the state's new system for evaluating public-school teachers, a move that could derail plans by the city and hundreds of other school districts to start basing reviews on how well students perform on standardized tests.
In court papers filed in state Supreme Court late Monday, New York State United Teachers claimed that education officials violated the law when they gave school districts the option of assigning significantly more weight to state assessments in their annual reviews of teachers.
Under the law, teachers could lose their jobs if their students continually fail to improve their scores on state standardized tests.
The union, a labor federation representing hundreds of thousands of teachers, claims that the regulations handed down by the Board of Regents run afoul of the evaluation law, which lawmakers approved last year and is set to take effect in July.
The union's suit is asking a judge to put the evaluation plan on hold until courts rule on whether it's legal.
A former classroom teacher who grew up in the inner city in Milwaukee, Andreal Davis is the assistant director for equity and family involvement for the Madison Metropolitan School District. She is in charge of making sure resources are allocated fairly among schools, that students come to school prepared and that they have equal access to learning opportunities. And in a district where there are now more students of color than there are white students, and where the number of students from economically disadvantaged families is just a shade under 50 percent, an increasingly important part of Davis' job is to help teachers, students and their families work together effectively.
Research shows that a strong partnership between home and school is one of the most critical elements in helping all students succeed, but when there's little common ground or cultural understanding between teachers and the families they are serving, misunderstandings and communication failures are inevitable, and can lead to rocky relationships.
Florida Leads the Nation in the Percentage of High School Students Enrolled in High Level Classes; Some States Still Leave Low-Income Students Behind; Others Make Surprising Gains
Florida is a state of stark contrasts. Travel a few miles from the opulent mansions of Miami Beach and you reach desperately poor neighborhoods. There's the grinding poverty of sugar cane country and the growing middle class of Jacksonville. All told, half the public-school students in Florida qualify for subsidized lunches. Many are the first in their families to speak English or contemplate attending college.
In many states, those economic differences are reflected in the classroom, with students in wealthy schools taking many more advanced courses.
The Opportunity Gap
But not in Florida. A ProPublica analysis of previously unreleased federal data shows that Florida leads the nation in the percentage of high-school students enrolled in high-level classes--Advanced Placement and advanced math. That holds true across rich and poor districts.
Studies repeatedly have shown that students who take advanced classes have greater chances of attending and succeeding in college.
Our analysis identifies several states that, like Florida, have leveled the field and now offer rich and poor students roughly equal access to high-level courses.
In Kansas, Maryland and Oklahoma, by contrast, such opportunities are far less available in districts with poorer families.
That disparity is part of what experts call the "opportunity gap."
Members of state teachers unions sued Thursday to block part of a law giving Gov. Scott Walker veto powers over rules written by other state agencies and elected officials.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal skirmishes between the GOP governor and public employee unions.
In the case, parents of students and members of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and Madison Teachers Inc. challenge the law for giving Walker the power to veto administrative rules written by any state agency. That law wrongly gives Walker that power over the state Department of Public Instruction headed by state schools superintendent Tony Evers, the action charges.
"The state constitution clearly requires that the elected state superintendent establish educational policies," WEAC President Mary Bell, a plaintiff in the suit, said in a statement. "The governor's extreme power grab must not spill over into education policy in our schools."
The measure, which Walker signed in May, allows the governor to reject proposed administrative rules used to implement state laws.
The state's most powerful political force got rolled in the 2011 Legislature.
Last week, Gov. John Kitzhaber and his allies rammed a dozen education bills through roadblocks erected by the 48,000-member Oregon Education Association.
A coalition of Kitzhaber, House Republicans, a few Democrats willing to buck the teachers' union, and newly emboldened interest groups handed the OEA its biggest policy setbacks in years.
"There is a strong desire for real movement forward on education, and people were willing to break a few eggs to get there," says Rep. Chris Garrett (D-Lake Oswego), one of three Democrats who voted "yes" on HB 2301, a controversial online charter-school bill that catalyzed the breakthrough.
To be sure, OEA successfully pushed for a $175 million increase in the K-12 budget over Kitzhaber's opening proposal, and the union helped forestall any significant changes to the Public Employees Retirement System this session. But in terms of educational politics, this session saw substantive bills that have been stymied for many sessions zip through.
After banning flavored milk, the Los Angeles Unified School District is doing something kids all over will cheer about: They issued a decree that homework can only count for only 10 percent of a student's grade. The policy goes into effect July 1.
The idea behind the new rule is that it will level the playing field for students who don't have educational support at home. Also, Los Angeles isn't alone in this new approach. The Los Angeles Times reports:
In many districts, limits are being placed on the amount of homework so students can spend more time with their families or pursue extracurricular activities like sports or hobbies. The competition to get into top colleges has left students anxious and exhausted, with little free time, parents complain.
Today marks one year since Arizona adopted the common core state standards, but you wouldn't know it based on any information provided by public officials or the press in Arizona. Indeed, you would have an impossible time finding any details about the Arizona State Board's official action to adopt the standards.
Last year, I wrote about the bizarre situation where states that were completely overhauling their K-12 reading and math standards in favor of the more advanced, 21st century common core state standards were not only downplaying this standards transformation, but in some instances, also appeared to be proactively burying the information.
Arizona fell into this last group as I mentioned last July:
Even as administrators and legislators push schools to dump printed books in favor of electronic ones, evidence mounts that paper books have important advantages as tools for learning. Last month, I reported on a study out of the University of Washington which showed that students find printed books more flexible than e-books in supporting a wide range of reading and learning styles. Now comes a major study from the University of California system showing that students continue to prefer printed books to e-books and that many undergraduates complain that they have trouble "learning, retaining, and concentrating" when reading from screens.
The University of California Libraries began a large e-textbook pilot program in 2008. In late 2010, more than 2,500 students and faculty members were surveyed to assess the results of the program. Overall, 58% of the respondents said they used e-books for their academic work, with the percentage varying from 55% for undergraduates to 57% for faculty to 67% for graduate students. The respondents who used e-books were then asked whether they preferred e-books or printed books for their studies. Overall, 44% said they preferred printed books and 35% said they preferred e-books, with the remainder expressing no preference. The preference for print was strongest among undergraduates, 53% of whom preferred printed books, with only 27% preferring e-books. Graduate students preferred printed books by 45% to 35%, and faculty preferred printed books by 43% to 33%.
"A fox served fish soup in a flat plate and invited the crane to share it with him 'equally'. But it turned out the crane couldn't drink any because of his long beak, and the fox hogged it all. What does this fable tell us?"
If you answered, "The bourgeois declare 'everyone is equal before the law', but this form of equality is the essence of capitalism," congratulations, you'd be one step closer to qualifying for graduate school in China. If not, better luck next year.
Over 1.5 million people sat this year's National Entrance Examination for Postgraduates (NEEP), China's equivalent to the Graduate Record Examinations used in the United States. The annual test given each January is the first hurdle most students
must clear before being considered for grad-school admission. The majority of its content differs based on school and major, but 20% of the exam is a politics and philosophy section uniform across the entire nation.
One of the most effective ways students can improve their ability to learn for themselves is through the development of self-evaluative skills.
Self-evaluation is judging the quality of one's performance and planning strategies for self-improvement.
This is important, because students learn best when taking responsibility for their own progress.
Students must understand what constitutes quality work. Without an appreciation of quality, it is difficult for students to use feedback to improve their performance. Children can develop such skills by being asked to consider what they are learning, and identify strengths and weaknesses in their work.
One of the more reliable backers of the reform movement that has radically altered public schools in New Orleans is planning to retire from the state board of education.
Glenny Lee Buquet, from Houma, said Monday that she will not run for another term on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, when elections come up this fall. Buquet has served on BESE since 1992 and is one of the six-member majority on the 11-member board that has helped push through the controversial reforms championed by former State Superintendent Paul Pastorek.
Nowhere in the state have those reforms been more far-reaching than in New Orleans. The state took over most schools in the city following Hurricane Katrina, and under the state's Recovery School District, most of those have been transformed into independent charter schools.
Well, the budget battle royale in Wisconsin has come and gone. The tent city of protestors has packed up and moved on. Our state electeds are no longer front and center on Fox News, MSNBC, Colbert or the Daily Show. The guy blowing the vuvuzela outside Governor Walker's East Wing Capitol office is probably still there, but the tidal wave of fervor and insanity that engulfed us seems to have finally receded.
And for all my bright shiny optimism early in this legislative session, some of which persisted well into the spring, I am disappointed with the outcome. There have been some good public policy changes, but on the whole the political losses and missed opportunities far outweigh the gains.
Good News First...
We found middle ground on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program...more or less. The program will remain means tested, but more working class families will be eligible. The private schools that participate will continue to administer the state assessment to choice students so an accurate picture of student performance is available in all publicly funded schools. Unfortunately, many solid choice schools are still being slowly strangled by the discrepancy in funding between kids in the public schools and kids enrolled in choice and charter schools, and we have still done little to get lousy schools out of the education pipeline in Milwaukee once and for all.
Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city's roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. "It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job," Ms. Strzelecki said.
Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city's 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation's highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.
The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.
Students across the U.S. are enjoying or getting ready for summer vacation, but teachers may be looking forward to the break even more. American teachers are the most productive among major developed countries, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data from 2008 -- the most recent available.
Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD, U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom -- among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks. The OECD average is 786 hours.
And that's just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays).
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Education Testing Service's Achievement Gap Symposium, which addressed research and solutions for our education system in Pre-K-third grade, especially for low-income, minority and African American students. What I found most interesting was a comment Jerry D. Weast, Superintendent of the Montgomery County Public Schools and one of the speakers, said: "structure drives your culture and culture drives your expectations." Weast believes the achievement gap can be solved if a district or school can establish a culture with high expectations.
To do this, teachers should be mentors and role models. All children, especially minority students need someone like Mrs. Menendez, my kindergarten teacher, who told me that I would grow up to be a great lawyer one day. She also told my parents that they needed to make sure they did everything in their power to get me through high school and college. Today, my master's program is nearly done and law school is next on the schedule. Parents of minority and low-income children need this kind of one-on-one advice.
After only about a month as top boss of Detroit Public Schools, Roy Roberts, a 72-year-old former General Motors executive and private equity firm founder, is well aware that some people already want him gone.
The district's new financial manager said he's OK with that reality, adding that differing opinions have value. His only request: Stay out of the way as he tries to turn around one of the nation's worst public school systems.
I don't care what people think about me, really ... because I know what parents are going to think," Roberts told The Associated Press during an interview in his Detroit Midtown office. "They're going to love it because I'm trying to do the right thing for their children, and you won't find a parent that doesn't want that. I'm simply going to look at a system and say 'What is the best system we can put in place to educate these kids?' I don't care about the politics."
What concerns him, he said, is a massive budget deficit and students who either don't receive a legitimate education or flee the district in search of one. Those mountainous challenges form the ridge that for decades has left the 74,000-student district on the shadowy side of progress.
Aaron Pallas, an ed school professor at Teachers College, appears to be unwilling to acknowledge that our public schools are failing to effectively educate huge numbers of our kids, or that there's much we can do about it. He struggles to debunk existing examples of demonstrable success perhaps fearing that we might otherwise ask why do we keep doing so poorly when we have proof that we can do so much better.
To that end, last week Pallas penned a piece in this column challenging my assertion in a Washington Post op ed that our "schools can get much better results with th[e] same kids than they're now generally getting." Employing a locution that I never used, and that cannot fairly be inferred from what I said, he tries to portray my view as placing "the emphasis on what schools can extract from kids." (His italics.)
No, Professor Pallas, I don't think knowledge resides in kids and, like iron ore, all we need to do is carefully extract it. What I do think is that our schools, and especially our teachers, need to do a much better job of educating our kids - that is, teaching them the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful in the 21st century. As I put it in my piece, "teachers matter, big time."
What are the economic returns from a college degree, net of individual ability? Does college add value, or is it mainly a signaling device (e.g., for intelligence and work ethic)?
Results from two new studies are discussed here and here in the Times.
The West Aurora School District is looking at options about what data to collect on student achievement and district performance and quality, and what can be done with that data. District officials say they are looking to create a "dashboard" that will give them a general idea of progress, both on an individual level with students, and on a broader scope of trends.
"It's like you're driving a car down the road and looking at all the various things," West Aurora Superintendent Jim Rydland said. "This tells you how your vehicle is running."
The School Board last week heard a presentation from Barb Vlasvich, the district's director of assessment. The presentation covered the importance of being able to monitor this data, and what questions should possibly be asked for the 2011-12 school year.
Baltimore city schools Andres Alonso said last week that while the school district has gone to great lengths to tighten testing security, he anticipates coming before the city again to announce that more schools attempted to game the system.
There are two more investigations pending, from a batch of four schools referred to the state last year. The 2011 Maryland School Assessments will be released next week.
In a news conference last week, Alonso told reporters that it may take one or two more years before cheating is eradicated from the system. He vowed, however, that at some point, "we will emerge from this conversation--it may take one or two years--but we will emerge with our heads held high."
He also indicated that Maryland's new teacher evaluation system, which is partly based on student progress, will spur a "perverse incentive to do something wrong." Baltimore is one of seven districts that will pilot the new state evaluation system in the fall.
School voucher advocates have had two recent op-eds in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "The story behind school choice study" by John Witte and Patrick Wolf on May 28 and "Special needs students benefit from many choices" by Susan Mitchell on June 19. Both are at best misinformed and at worst deceptive. The facts should matter.
State law says voucher schools must accept special education students. Then why are so few special education students (the number hovers near 1%) attending voucher schools? I put this question to a voucher school principal, who said her school has no special education services or students.
I asked her how that was possible. She stated that she simply tells parents of special education students that she cannot provide the services that their children need. Parents then choose another school, she said - most likely in Milwaukee Public Schools.
MPS does receive more money per student than voucher schools receive. But Mitchell claims MPS receives $15,000 per student while voucher students receive $6,442. She somehow arrived at these numbers without doing her homework. One needs to subtract from the total the amount transferred to voucher schools for a variety of programs.
It's not just rhetoric, people, these are truly unprecedented times. The economy seems to choke and sputter like an engine with a fouled spark plug. Consider all that has transpired of late, and it all begs the question: is it time for new leadership within the Sun Prairie School District? We offer 5 solid indicators.
1. District Administrator Tim Culver's Unofficial Approval Rating is at an all-time low.
Years ago Culver could toss it aside as just a few malcontents. He's referred to them as "Nitters and Pickers" and "Wreckers". SheeeeAH...as if name calling is really going to solve the problem. But these folks didn't go away. Rather, they have brought the dirty laundry out into the bright of day. And they multiplied like rabbits on the farm.
For a school district to function effectively and move forward, its leader must have the support of both the public and the district staff. Frankly we don't hear much other than outright contempt for Culver from any of the schools. Ask any of your friends and neighbors and the story is the same...the staff just no longer support Culver. OK...he may have the support of a few of his inner circle administrators...you know...his "pets". And let's not think for one minute that Culver doesn't have his pets. It's as plain as day for anyone who takes the time to see which administrators are getting the 7% raises, and which ones are getting a pittance. It's also clear which administrators are getting revised job descriptions to give them whatever they want.
After months of work across the state to define multiple measures of student growth, the Delaware Department of Education has asked the United States DOE for, and - word is - will receive, permission to delay implementation of our DPAS II teacher evaluation system, which will impact the roll-out of numerous other Race to the Top reforms.
The revised DPAS II evaluation system would have identified teachers as "highly-effective," "effective," "needs improvement," or "ineffective," ultimately impacting eligibility for various initiatives. Below are programs and policies that will be affected by delaying DPAS II implementation:
Diane Ravitch, the historian and leading education reform critic, can be hard to understand. Not that her writing is difficult. Quite the opposite actually, it's incredibly lucid and lively, and my favorite thing about her in fact. Rather it's difficult to understand who exactly the person is that could contain both the Diane Ravitch who once wrote so passionately and doggedly in favor of school choice and accountability from the halls of the Hoover Institute, and the Diane Ravitch who now writes reform criticisms with the hyperbole and one-sidedness of a teacher's union spokesperson. But in a new City Paper piece, Dana Goldstein tries to reconcile the two and find the intellectual continuities that have stayed with her on such a seemingly bipolar intellectual journey. As much of a Ravitch critic as I may be, like Goldstein, I believe that there are some coherent ties that bind old and young Diane, and perhaps surprisingly, one of them is Friedrich Hayek.
Yet Holbrooke is no longer around and the diplomatic surge, like so many other good ideas that have been exported to Afghanistan, has floundered. The country remains awash in chaos, violence, and corruption, and the surge of civilians has hardly made a dent. One of the few things that the Americans have done is to assist Afghan officials in preparations for their presentations before other officials; in other words, as Semple says, "better PowerPoints."
Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports that Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year-old Army reservist, has been dismissed from his post in headquarters with NATO's International Security Assistance Force less than 48 hours after he published an op-ed, via UPI, complaining that the "war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information." Sellin clearly anticipated that his tirade, which NATO says he didn't clear for publication in advance, would serve as a resignation letter. It opened with, "Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now. Consider the following therapeutic." He went on to excoriate the meaningless, self-serving, metastasizing military bureaucracy that holds sway in Afghanistan and justifies its existence via PowerPoint slide: "Little of substance is really done here, but that is a task we do well."
The Recovery School District, a state body that oversees the majority of New Orleans public schools, is laying off more than 70 employees at its central office, part of a sweeping organizational overhaul initiated by the district's new leader.
RSD officials have been saying for weeks that the district will need to downsize as it turns over more of the schools it manages to independent charter operators and closes others. That's been the RSD's strategy since it took over schools in the city following Hurricane Katrina.
But in an interview Friday, RSD Superintendent John White said the district has now begun to notify employees who will lose their jobs as a result of cutbacks, which will take the central office head count down by 35 percent, from 220 people to 144.
"My e-mail?" The boy looks at me as if I had just suggested staying in touch by carrier pigeon. "What, you don't have an email?" I ask, insecure now. "Sure I do. But I only use it for my parents and my grandparents," he says. "Aren't you on Facebook?" I am. Phew. Of course I mostly check my Facebook profile when I'm prompted by an e-mail notification, but I don't tell him that. Trevor Dougherty is 19 and to him, I am a geriatric 36-year-old who belongs to that amorphous generation of people-who-don't-really-get-social-networking that stretches all the way back to, well, his grandparents.
I met Trevor in January, during a dinner debate on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was by far the youngest and most eloquent speaker on the subject. I have perhaps 100 people in my life I call friends. Trevor has 1,275. At one point he tried to add someone called Trevor in every capital so he would have friends to visit across the world. He chats, posts, tweets and consults "his community" on important decisions: "I'm going to start producing/DJing electronic music. What should my stage name be? #youtellme."
The encounter made me curious: what does it do to teenagers to be "on" all the time? Are they just doing what we did 20 years ago -- gossiping, dating, escaping pubescent solitude -- and simply channeling those age-old human urges through this new technology? Or is this technology changing humanity in a more fundamental way? What kind of citizens, voters, consumers, leaders will kids like Trevor grow up to be?
Sir Terry, who stepped down from the helm of Britain's largest private employer earlier this year after 14 years in charge, was addressing an audience of teachers at the Wellington College Festival of Education.
"Standards in schools vary too widely, more widely than you would find in business," he said.
"The standards in too many schools are simply not good enough.
"The answer is deceptively simple. It is about good leadership in each school, good teachers in each classroom and support in their work by the wider society."
He said this was often hampered by a "myriad" of well-meaning Government initiatives and a tendency to "micromanage" education, with "too much management, and not enough help or trust".
I greatly admire both Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, so I have mixed feelings saying that I'm confused about their op-ed this morning.
The article is entitled "The Case for Common Educational Standards." But the article does not contain any case for common educational standards.
Quite the contrary, the article emphasizes the case against common standards. As in:
And, while education is a national priority, the answer here does not appear to be a new federal program mandating national standards. States have historically had the primary responsibility for public education, and they should continue to take the lead.
So that would be an argument against common standards.
Parents, do you want to encourage your young people to think mathematically this summer and beyond? Here are some ways to accomplish that.
Preschoolers
Nurturing Mathematically Talented Preschoolers-In this blog entry, Natasha Chen shares her experience on parenting a mathematically precocious child. The author acknowledges that it can be difficult to find a program for three- to five-year-olds, so she offers some tips that she has found useful. Her suggestions include
Remember how Culver and a group of his peeps were going to explore the possibility of an elementary charter school/ Mandarin Chinese immersion program and report back to the board?
Well skip the board and just sign up because we're hearing that incorporating Mandarin Chinese into the district is a done deal that will occur by the start of the 2012-1 school year.
POINT - COUNTERPOINT ON THE MANDARIN CHINESE PLAN
POINT
Mandarin Chinese? Really? Don't go screamin' "xenophobia", now, but one has to wonder: Is Culver thinking that the economy is tanking so badly that we all should be brushing up on the new landlords' language? Or is he still trying to catch up with his district administrator buddy in Verona? And why are we worrying about what ANYBODY is up to instead of just focusing on our own kids?
And while we're on the subject. We're hoping that the rumors we're hearing are just that...rumors. 'Cause we'd be wondering how much it would cost John Q. TaxPayer to develop this little Mandarin Chinese program.
Based on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.
In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed "college-ready" by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.
While a panel discussion held by The College Board on Capitol Hill this week was meant to highlight a new report on the lagging rates of educational attainment among non-White men, some of the panelists questioned the need for more research on the subject.
"How much data do we need?" asked panelist Dr. Roy Jones, executive director for the Eugene T. Moore School of Education's Call Me MISTER Program at Clemson University. (MISTER is an acronym for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role-models).
His remarks came after a discussion of the new report titled "The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color: A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress," co-authored by John Michael Lee Jr., a co-panelist and policy director at the College Board's Advocacy and Policy Center.
The June 18 editorial "Students of history" outlined steps that should be taken to correct the distressing ignorance of U.S. students about civics. I am sure most education professionals will endorse those recommendations, such as civic-oriented activities, because they follow modern theories of education. Unfortunately, these actions would introduce gross inefficiencies and time-wasting activities into the curriculum. Modern education theories are the main reason students complain of too much work but show themselves to be poorly educated in most subjects.
I took a one-year high school course in civics 60 years ago that was taught by our football-basketball-baseball coach, whose main interest was athletics, not civics. We never took any field trips or did any community service. Yet we learned civics. How? We went through the textbook. It wasn't sexy or exciting -- real learning seldom is -- but it worked. To really improve students' knowledge, schools need only buy good textbooks and tell the teachers to teach the book. It's that easy.
Both the Oregon House and Senate this week passed 3 groundbreaking education bills that are now on their way to the Governor's desk to be signed into law. The bills bring more choice to Oregon's public education system and allow students to learn in schools where they best grow, learn and succeed.
From the standpoint of the state Republican party, who sponsored and supported these bills, they accomplish 3 goals:
allow students to enroll in the school district of their choice
raise the enrollment cap on virtual charter schools
empower community colleges and public universities to create charter schools.
"The Legislature is on track to have its most successful session on education reform in decades," said House Education Committee Co-Chair Matt Wingard (R-Wilsonville). "Together, these reforms help promote choice, accountability and innovation in our educational system. I'm particularly pleased with the progress we've made in expanding choice for parents and their children."
A mind is a precious thing to waste, so why are millions of America's students wasting theirs by going to college? All of us who have been there know an undergraduate education is primarily a four year vacation interrupted by periodic bouts of cramming or Google plagiarizing, but at least it used to serve a purpose. It weeded out underachievers and proved at a minimum that you could pass an SAT test. For those who made it to the good schools, it proved that your parents had enough money to either bribe administrators or hire SAT tutors to increase your score by 500 points. And a degree represented that the graduate could "party hearty" for long stretches of time and establish social networking skills that would prove invaluable later on at office cocktail parties or interactively via Facebook. College was great as long as the jobs were there.
Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it's worth the time or the cost. Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and head of Clarium Capital, a long-standing hedge fund, has actually established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of school and become not just tech entrepreneurs but world-changing visionaries. College, in his and the minds of many others, is stultifying and outdated - overpriced and mismanaged - with very little value created despite the bump in earnings power that universities use as their raison d'être in our modern world of money.
Fact: College tuition has increased at a rate 6% higher than the general rate of inflation for the past 25 years, making it four times as expensive relative to other goods and services as it was in 1985. Subjective explanation: University administrators have a talent for increasing top line revenues via tuition, but lack the spine necessary to upgrade academic productivity. Professorial tenure and outdated curricula focusing on liberal arts instead of a more practical global agenda focusing on math and science are primary culprits.
Kentucky is seeking to become the first state in the nation to use its statewide accountability system to determine whether schools are meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Gov. Steve Beshear sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Monday, asking for a waiver that would allow Kentucky to replace the current method for determining if schools are making adequate yearly progress under the federal law with a new measuring stick that state officials are still developing.
That would allow Kentucky more control over determining whether schools are making sufficient academic progress each year.
"I believe that federal law should set high expectations for education goals, but grant power and judgment to states and districts with regard to the means of achieving those goals," Beshear said in a statement Monday.
[Note from Laurie Rogers: This is part 3 of a series of articles on Celesta, a grade-11 student in Spokane, WA. I interviewed her for a June 4 episode of "Cut to the Chase," a local radio show hosted by Rob Chase for the ACN Network. Part 1 of the series described Celesta as lacking multiple basic skills in mathematics. Part 2 discussed the district's response to my queries about how to help Celesta and her classmates.]
I've been writing about Celesta, a high school student who was carrying a 3.6 GPA, who passed her math tests, got As in her math classes, was placed into honors pre-calculus, and who - like many of her classmates - suddenly found out she was missing multiple critical skills in elementary math. She was struggling to pass her honors math class. She also has few skills in grammar.
I've been trying to figure out a way to help Celesta and her classmates.
The best way to help the students:
Go back in time and teach the students the grammar and the six years of math skills the district refused to give them. I need a time machine to do that, and no one has invented one - not that they've told me, anyway.
Idaho's new multimillion-dollar student data system is causing giant headaches at school districts around the state and local school officials say it isn't working.
State Superintendent of Schools Tom Luna said he's working to address the concerns, and said some aren't valid. "This is the first year ISEE has been operational," Luna told the Legislature's Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which is holding its interim meeting this week. "We are the last state in the nation to deploy a statewide longitudinal data system, but we have made progress quickly. This is the most accurate data we have ever had."
Tom Taggart, president-elect of the Idaho Association of School Business Officials and director of business and operations for the Lakeland School District, told the lawmakers, "We want to look forward in what we can do to make this work, without being too negative, but I think part of our message is a dose of reality as to what's going on at the school level. ... We're the nuts and bolts people who are in the business offices in the schools. We like it when things work, and when they don't work we like to find a way to fix them."
There's a certain childlike innocence that goes along with the popular modern sport of teacher bashing. I say this because most people get over the idea that teachers are ultra-powerful beings who live unattainable lives of luxury at around the age of 7, when they realize that rumpled, coffee-stained JC Penney office apparel is not haute couture. Many critics of teachers, however, manage to hang on to this silly notion way past the time when their skulls have fully hardened.
Call me a fuzzy-headed liberal, but I just don't see the point in bashing people who help train our future workforce.
Of course, the tired old canard that teachers are remorseless, mustache-twisting budget-drainers has been resurrected in the past few months - first when the governor's budget repair bill touched off mass protests among public employees, and most recently when the Wisconsin Supreme Court removed the final barrier to the bill's enactment.
Some have reacted to teachers' and other public employees' reluctance to lie down and simply accept significant cuts in compensation and the stripping of their collective bargaining rights with everything from derision to rancor.
For example, some local wags took to calling Walkerville - the protest village near the Capitol that was inhabited by disgruntled public employees and their supporters - "Entitledtown."
Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss. The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation. Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular. I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.
Teacher at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design (October 2009)
There is no question that high-quality teachers have an enormous impact on student achievement. Over the years, schools and districts have looked at a variety of ways to attract better teachers to public schools, especially those serving the poorest students.
"But these reforms are likely to disappoint if nothing is done to fundamentally overhaul the way the work of teachers is organized," Elena Silva argues in Teacher at Work. Better teaching, she says, will in the long run come not only from attracting a strong pool of talent and giving them boosts in pay, but from "changing the nature of the job."
In the report, Silva highlights promising models of school design, such as Generation Schools in New York City, which provides a school model that focuses on the strategic use of people and time, and calls for a new approach to addressing the teacher quality challenge in public education.
Education Sector: What drew you to this issue in the first place?
Amid the frantic pace of daily family life, it seems almost comical to try to find time to discuss investing with our kids.
Honestly, who really wants to talk about mutual funds in the precious time you have when you're all together?
Yet, many families find a way to share their values about money and investing from generation to generation, whether they're offering tips on being smart shoppers, making the family budget stretch just enough or opening brokerage or savings accounts for youngsters.
In my Getting Going column, in honor of Father's Day, I reflected on the lessons I learned from my father and my grandfather.
They came from very different generations, one influenced by the Great Depression, the other by the growth and prosperity of the 1950s and '60s. One believed in bonds and the other in stocks. Together, they introduced me to the basics of investing--and more importantly, to how to keep the whole process in perspective. While my style is different from either of theirs-( have less tolerance for risk than my dad, but more than my grandfather had-their advice continues to resonate as I plan for my own future.
eading tutor Pam Heyde of Verona has won an "Unsung Hero" award from the International Dyslexia Association for her work helping children to read.
The local reading instructor works outside of school with children who are struggling to learn to read. She was nominated for the national award by Chris Morton, a parent whose son, Will, is one of Heyde's success stories.
I interviewed the Morton family last year as part of an article about an effort to pass legislation requiring schools to identify struggling readers earlier in their school careers and to require teachers to learn more about the different ways children learn to read.
For Kearsley Higgins, raising a baby in San Francisco was idyllic. She and her husband owned a small two-bedroom house in the Castro, she found plenty of activities for her daughter, Maya, and made friends through an 11-member mothers' group.
Now as the mother of an almost 4-year-old, with a baby boy due in September, Higgins has left. A year ago, she and her husband, a digital artist, bought a four-bedroom home with a large backyard in San Rafael. Maya easily got into a popular preschool and will be enrolled in a good public elementary school when the time comes.
The other moms in Higgins' group have moved on, too - to the East Bay, the Peninsula, Michigan and Texas. Just one of the 11 still lives in San Francisco.
"Everyone was very committed to the city when we were starting, and then they all left," said Higgins, 36, a stay-at-home mom. "You see tons of strollers in the city and people running around with the little ones, but then the vacuum occurs."
In an unusually blunt assessment, the board says its academic-performance goals, particularly for disadvantaged students, "are not on track to be met."
Each year about this time Seattle School Board members evaluate their only employee, the district's superintendent. With an interim superintendent on the job only a few months, this year had to be a little different.
In fact, you could say the board did the evaluation three months ago when they fired the previous superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, following revelations that an employee had spent money on contracts for which the district received little or nothing in return.
With Goodloe-Johnson gone and no need to attach accomplishments or failures to the superintendent or go through the agony of determining whether or not she got a raise, the board in a report at its regular meeting last week focused on what the district itself had or had not accomplished. The result was surprising and refreshingly candid language about where the district stands.
Jon Schwartz is an elementary school teacher and runs the site Kids Like Blogs! He believes that blogs motivate students to write, read, create art, and the use of technology. See the Q & A with Jon and be sure to see the work that his students are producing.
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Q: There are many ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. What made you decide to have the children begin to blog?
A: There were several factors. One, I always had my students write a lot, whether I am teaching first or fifth grade. What happens is they end up with a huge amount of work, and I was never satisfied with how it just went in a folder at school, a binder, their desk, or got sent home. I wanted to be able to keep an efficient record of their work that could easily be referenced and shared with others. For example, they may not have written a lot in the previous year, and when their prior teachers want to see how much they have grown, with a blog, you send them a url, rather than sending over a bunch of papers (which they already have stacks of). By either having the students type on a blog, or have them write on paper and then scanning their handwritten work and art and posting it on the blog as a jpeg, you basically have an online gallery and portfolio. This can be shared with the principal who can then look it over quickly and give a quick high five to the kid as they pass in the halls.
One of the biggest advantages is that by creating an online portfolio, you are in effect creating virtual office hours. With class sizes in some cases doubling (I had a 4/5 combo class this year with 39 kids nearly equally split between 4th and 5th grade), you can imagine there is very little opportunity for one on one conferences, the time when you can give input to children on their work.
Join us next week,
Wednesday, June 22, at the Alliant Energy Center's Exhibition Hall as we welcome fellow Rotarian Kaleem Caire to the podium for a presentation on the features of the Madison Preparatory Academy, its timeline for implementation and a status report on where it is in the school development and approval process.
Attendees will learn why and how the Urban League hopes to lead a renaissance in K-12 education in Greater Madison, tying its charter school effort to local school improvement
initiatives, economic development projects and advancements and innovations in higher education and workforce development in Greater Madison.
To compile the 2011 list of the top high schools in America, NEWSWEEK reached out to administrators, principals, guidance counselors, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate coordinators at more than 10,000 public high schools across the country. In order to be considered for our list, each school had to complete a survey requesting specific data from the 2009-2010 academic year. In total, more than 1,100 schools were assessed to produce the final list of the top 500 high schools.
We ranked all respondents based on the following self-reported statistics, listed with their corresponding weight in our final calculation:
Four-year, on-time graduation rate (25%): Based on the standards set forth by the National Governors Association, this is calculated by dividing the number of graduates in 2010 by the number of 9th graders 2006 plus transfers in minus transfers out. Unlike other formulas, this does not count students who took longer than four years to complete high school.
Percent of 2010 graduates who enrolled immediately in college (25%): This metric excludes students who did not enroll due to lack of acceptance or gap year.
AP/IB/AICE tests per graduate (25%): This metric is designed to measure the degree to which each school is challenging its students with college-level examinations. It consists of the total number of AP, IB, and AICE tests given in 2010, divided by the number of graduating seniors in order to normalize by school size. AP exams taken by students who also took an IB exam in the same subject area were subtracted from the total.
Average SAT and/or ACT score (10%)
Average AP/IB/AICE exam score (10%)
AP/IB/AICE courses offered per graduate (5%): This metric assesses the depth of college-level curriculum offered. The number of courses was divided by the number of graduates in order to normalize by school size.
WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress -- "the Nation's Report Card" -- the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation's history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP -- math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.
How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn't know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries -- the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam -- was North Korea's ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans' ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn't say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn't identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don't know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch's Lives and Charles Horne's four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. "When Truman talked of presidents past -- Jackson, Polk, Lincoln -- it was as if he had known them personally," the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.
Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.
While the most promising high school athletes in this country are publicly acclaimed and profiled in the press and recruited by college coaches and offered lucrative scholarships, there is no comparable lauding of outstanding high school history students. A former public school history teacher, Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few "influential admirers" along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls "Varsity Academics®" amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to "read, write, discuss, and enjoy history" outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
"Our goal," says Robert Nasson, the club's young executive director, "is to create kids who are life-long students of history." He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Every year or two, my husband, an academic advisor at a prestigious Midwestern university, gets a call from a student's parent. Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so's son is a sophomore now and still insistent on majoring in film studies, anthropology, Southeast Asian comparative literature or, god forbid ... English. These dalliances in the humanities were fine and good when little Johnny was a freshman, but isn't it time now that he wake up and start thinking seriously about what, one or two or three years down the line, he's actually going to do?
My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students' intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, "Aren't these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?" Also, he says, "The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don't want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice."
Now, I love my husband. Lately, however, I find myself wincing when he recounts these stories.
I think you'll know what I mean by the "higher guff" - the kind of sonorous and empty talk which often issues from the mouths of heads of state and princes. I heard a classic example recently at a British media awards ceremony from the admirable Prince Felipe of Spain. He was being courteous and diplomatic, praising the links and similarities "between our two great countries", once imperial powers and once sworn enemies. "We have so much in common," he enthused; an ironic commentary came from my neighbour, a photographer with a wicked wit: "Yes," said Michael, "we're both in deep shit." The prince can't have heard this, because he went on: "Indeed, so many of your citizens decide to move to Spain."
"Yep," was the uncharitable response from Michael: "All the criminals."
The rule is that the higher the language soars, unless you're careful, the more it leaves itself open to attack from below. Shakespeare was the dramatist who knew this best, especially in the excruciating scene from Troilus and Cressida where Thersites provides a scabrous commentary on the seduction of Cressida by Diomedes. "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery" is his conclusion: the pretensions of the Trojan war reduced to an itch and a scratch.
The US salary figure for MBAs from "leading schools" seems too low to me. Is this apples to apples? Still, it's incredible what people are earning in China and India. One private equity guy I know told me they are hiring top talent in Beijing/Shanghai for USD $100k+ these days.
The 26 young men and women, seated in alphabetical order, were nearly silent as they waited for their high school graduation to start. No giggles. No buzz. No camaraderie. And no wonder: they had met just once before, at the rehearsal two weeks earlier where they got their caps and gowns.
They had come on this muggy June evening to the Miami Zoo, past the flamingos and the tiger, for an hourlong ceremony that Gloria Rodriguez, the organizer, proudly called "the very first South Florida home-school graduation ever created."
Ms. Rodriguez's "home-school class of 2011" had no prom, no yearbook, no valedictorian. Still, for these students who had sidestepped a traditional education -- and especially for their parents -- there was "Pomp and Circumstance" and shiny turquoise tassels to shift from one side of a cap to the other.
Running for re-election in a tight race last fall, state Rep. Keith Farnham received a sizable chunk of his campaign cash -- $50,000 of $462,000 -- from Stand for Children, an Oregon-based education group seeking sweeping reforms in Illinois.
Shortly after the November election, the group was moving to get changes in place, fast -- among them, tougher tenure requirements, limiting teachers' ability to strike, and lengthening the school day in Chicago.
Stand for Children had, after all, successfully worked to overhaul school policies in other states around the country.
But Illinois was not Colorado or Wisconsin, where the power structure made it easier to push laws that weakened union rights. No, Illinois had a Democratic-controlled, union-backed legislature and governor's office.
We have been discussing the issue of tracking in high school, particularly the standard system of regular (or general), honors (or advanced) and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses. Parents in Fairfax County are resisting the school district's elimination of honors courses, leaving only a choice between regular or AP classes. I suggested the district get rid of the regular and leave only honors and AP, because research shows that the college skills taught in honors classes are also important for students who want to get a good job or go to trade school right out of high school.
This generated much comment from around the country, including the two responses below from high school administrators who share the belief that they are not giving all of their students the enriched education they need. I think they provide a useful perspective from inside schools. What do you think of what they are saying?
Mike Musick is the principal of Conifer High School in Conifer, Colo. About nine percent of its students are low-income, and its AP test participation rate is high enough to rank well on my annual Challenge Index list. Amy Fineburg, an assistant principal, asked that I identify her high school only as a high-achieving one in Alabama. But I can say that its demographic and academic characteristics are similar to Conifer High's.
Her 30-minute turn at Jefferson Middle -- an actual class at the Southwest D.C. school -- will be reviewed by school officials, who will use the 360-degree camera to gauge not only her performance but how students responded.
If they like what they see, they will upload the video with the rest of her application to an online portal principals can access to view job candidates. The District, which employs about 4,000 teachers, expects to hire 600 to 800 for the coming academic year. That number reflects the usual turnover along with vacancies expected to emerge in the summer with the dismissal of instructors who receive poor evaluations.
Sowers received 48-hours' notice for what she was expected to cover in the taped lesson. But she entered the room knowing nothing about her students or their relative abilities. That meant showtime came with some surprises.
"It's one thing to talk about these issues on high," says Howard Fuller, who has done that often as one of the nation's most eloquent and best known education activists.
"But when you get over here on 33rd and Brown . . . " His sentence trails off. That's where CEO Leadership Academy is located, and that's where Fuller has come face to face with how tough it is to achieve high results among exactly the students he most wants to help.
Howard Fuller: Former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent. Leading advocate for Milwaukee's private school voucher program. Local and national leader in charter school issues.
Howard Fuller: Hands-on chair of the board of a small high school where test scores for 10th-graders last fall were awful and where the record of success has been plainly disappointing.
A couple years ago, Fuller told me that, as much as he thought he knew about how hard it is to achieve educational success in a high-poverty, urban setting, he didn't know how hard it really was until he got involved at CEO.
Heightening concerns about the value of many of its high school diplomas, the New York State Education Department released new data on Tuesday showing that only 37 percent of students who entered high school in 2006 left four years later adequately prepared for college, with even smaller percentages of minority graduates and those in the largest cities meeting that standard.
In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.
The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.
The big news today is that the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee in a 9-4 vote released legislation that would increase public employee contributions to health care premiums from 1.5% to between 3.5%-35% of the premium. Higher-paid employees would contribute more and lower-paid employees would contribute less. Pension contributions would also go up by a percentage point or two, and the increases would be phased in over a few years.
The bill now goes to the Assembly Budget Committee on Monday, and then to the full Senate on Thursday.
It's unclear whether Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver's proposal to have the legislation sunset after four years is still a go.
Amidst the Senate deliberations yesterday, public worker unions, including NJEA, held a smaller-than-expected rally; the subsequent news reports and editorials in today's papers largely express astonishment at the loss of power of collective bargaining units. Here's a sampling:
Students in schools of education pay a lot of attention to the problems of learning how to learn, lifelong leaning, and the like. In the absence of much knowledge of history, economics, physics, literature, foreign languages, chemistry, calculus and so on, this can degenerate into what Professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr., calls "How-to-ism," an absorption in "pedagogy" without any secure foundation in academic knowledge.
It is also the case that most graduates of our schools of education are shocked by the day-to-day problems of managing youngsters with Twitter, popular music, sports, popularity, and Grand Theft Auto on their minds. But it should be noted that it is very hard to get students interested in academic work, for instance history, if the teacher doesn't know any history herself. This problem causes some number of coaches who teach Social Studies to shy away from the Renaissance in favor of current events, which may seem more approachable both to them and their students. How 'bout those Bruins!
In the meantime, even American students who are Seniors in high school show a pitiful ignorance of the most basic knowledge of the history of their own country, as revealed in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report released this month.
In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., tried to get across the point that teaching learning skills, for example, which pedagogy graduates are supposed to be good at, does little or nothing for helping students acquire knowledge. He argues that the only way to increase knowledge is to build on a stronger and stronger base of knowledge, not by wasting time on the dubious techniques of "Learning How to Learn."
I am convinced that one of the reasons even some students who do not require remediation in reading and writing when they get to college still fail to gain a degree after six or eight years, in part go under academically because they do not bring enough knowledge to help them understand what the professor is talking about. Their ignorance makes them feel lost. Some become determined to find the knowledge they have not been given in high school, but too many quit instead.
To be more fair to the education schools, even Harvard has had great difficulty in committing its faculty to teach certain basic areas of knowledge. The faculty tried to avoid arguing over what needed to be taught, so they fell back on allowing each department to teach "the skills" of its discipline, which they believed could be taught with any subject matter (such as that which the professor's research happened to focus on at the moment).
The problem, as pointed out in an article by Caleb Nelson in The Atlantic called "Harvard's Hollow Core," is that "One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics." Similarly, it is quite hard to think like a historian if you don't know any history.
So the whole "Learning How to Learn" paradigm collapses of its own emptiness and leads to academic failure for many students who have been offered rubrics, techniques and skills as a substitute for the academic knowledge they would need to survive in college.
The Common Core is offering national goals for knowledge. Others have critiqued their weakness in math, but I would suggest that their goals for reading in history are scarcely challenging for eight graders. Reading The Declaration of Independence and A Letter from the Birmingham Jail is not a waste of time, but for high school students, why not offer Mornings on Horseback, Washington's Crossing, Battle Cry of Freedom and The Path Between the Seas? In other words, actual history books? I cannot find out when it was decided (or by whom) that American high school students can manage European history, calculus, Latin, chemistry and so on, but cannot be expected to read through even one complete history book? How did our expectations for nonfiction reading (and gathering knowledge thereby) get so dramatically dumbed down? Of course STEM is very important, but even engineers and scientists need to read and write.
To demonstrate how far we have slid down the slope of expectations since Thomas Jefferson's day, here is an example from The Knowledge Deficit (p. 9):
"In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift."
The UW System Board of Regents has approved the request by UW Colleges to implement a bachelor of applied arts and sciences (B.A.A.S.) degree that will serve place-bound adults in six Wisconsin communities. The Regents also approved a mission change for UW Colleges related to the B.A.A.S. degree.
The degree still requires accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, curriculum development by UW Colleges faculty, policy development by the UW Colleges Senate and other administrative requirements.
Last week Democratic heavyweight George Norcross got up on a stage with Gov. Chris Christie to announce that not only does he support the Opportunity Scholarship Act (the voucher bill) but also he's opening charter schools Camden.
To add to the cognitive dissonance, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) joined forces with the nepotistic Elizabeth school board to campaign against Sen. Ray Lesniak (D-Union), the former chair of the NJ Democratic party -- and the chief sponsor of the school voucher bill.
To muddy matters further, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex), a steadfast ally of the teachers union, looks likely to overcome her initial opposition to a health and pension benefits reform bill -- despite protestations from NJEA leaders. The legislation would require public employees, including teachers, to contribute substantially more than the current 1.5 percent of base pay toward pension and healthcare premiums. (The Assembly Budget Committee just announced it will hear the bill on Monday.)
After Donna Cushlanis's son, who was in second grade, kept bursting into tears midway through his math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
"How many times do you have to add seven plus two?" Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. "I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough."
Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school -- 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth -- and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.
John Danner, CEO and Founder of Rocketship Education, presented the Rocketship charter elementary school model and argued that hybrid schools are better for both students and teachers. Rocketship Education currently operates two open enrollment schools and serves a primarily low-income student population. The organization, which aims to have clusters in 50 cities over the next 15 years, works to eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring its low-income students are proficient and college-bound when they graduate from elementary school.
Shantanu Sinha, President and COO of the Khan Academy, described how their online academy began when the founder created math instruction videos to tutor his cousins. In just seven months, the Khan Academy has grown to serve over 2 million unique users per month with close to 60 million lessons delivered. With a mission "to deliver a world-class education to anyone anywhere," the Academy is utilized mainly by students at home as a supplement to their regular school instruction. Increasingly, though, Khan lessons are used in public schools to provide self-paced exercises and assessments to students, so as to avoid gaps in learning.
Presentations and ensuing discussion with local leaders pointed to two core components of innovative education that Washington State can learn from: efficient use of teacher time and skill as well as individualized instruction. Each builds on the lessons which Joel Rose, founder of School of One, emphasized at the launch of the Washington Education Innovation Forum.
As he won control of the city's public schools nine years ago this week, Mayor Bloomberg boldly promised: "We will not have to tolerate an incapable bureaucracy which does not respond to the needs of the students."
Sadly, New York City isn't even close to achieving that bold vision: We learned this week that only one in three city high-school graduates is prepared for college-level work.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg's promise is being put to the test like never before.
As the school year winds down, City Hall and the United Federation of Teachers have ratcheted up an intense game of chicken over the future direction of the city's school system. What schools will look like come the fall is anyone's guess.
Some education leaders worry a new law intended to give students more opportunities to take online classes will be difficult to implement, might limit students' educations and could hurt some schools in the long run.
Educators expressed their concerns to lawmakers at an Education Interim Committee meeting Wednesday. The law would allow Utah students, starting in the fall, to take up to two courses online instead of at their regular schools. And whoever provides that online course -- either another school district or a charter school -- would get part of the money that would normally go to the student's home school district or charter.
The state school board will hold a special meeting on June 27 to pass an emergency rule outlining how the program should work. But state education leaders told lawmakers Wednesday that while they support online education, certain aspects of the law might be troublesome.
According to the law, online classes would take the place of regular school day classes. Students, however, wouldn't have to take the online classes during the day, meaning they could potentially have nothing to do at school for up to two periods a day.
President Barack Obama's administration said it would offer states relief from the nation's main public-education law if Congress fails to enact changes by the start of the school year.
States may avoid requirements of the No Child Left Behind law that, for example, more students pass standardized tests each year if they agree to administration-backed "reforms," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said June 10 in a press briefing. The Education Department has pushed states to adopt national academic standards and merit pay for teachers. The law ties U.S. funding to test results.
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Republican Representative John Kline are among the members of Congress who have criticized the law's focus on holding schools accountable only through testing proficiency. Almost four years ago, Congress released a draft bill to revamp the law, and in March 2010, the Obama administration issued a blueprint for change. No legislation has been formally introduced, giving Congress less than three months to meet the administration's deadline.
Maybe, in 2001, it seemed like 2014 was too far away to be worth much worry. In 2011, it's not so far away. Not that it's clear what is going to be done now about what was one of the more idealistic, well-intended, but ridiculous, notions ever put into federal law.
In 2001, and with strong bipartisan support, Congress approved the No Child Left Behind education reform law. Amid its complex notions, there were some clear intentions: Congress and the president (George W. Bush at that point, but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would say much the same) were tired of putting a lot of money into schools across the country and not seeing much to show for it. They wanted to see the American education world buckle down to work especially on improving the achievement of low income and minority students. And they wanted every child to be reading and doing math on grade level by - oh, pick a date far away - 2014.
So they called the law No Child Left Behind. A wonderful idea - are you in favor of leaving some children behind? I'm not.
Here are some details, according to a summary from Minority Leader Mark Miller's office:
-increase funding to K-12 by $356 million.
-repeal expansion of the choice program.
-repeal elimination of funding for gifted and talented programs, AODA grants, and science, technology, engineering and match grants.
-Fund the Wisconsin GI Bill and tie financial aid to increases in tuition.
-Boost funding to tech colleges by $17 million annually.
-repeal a provision JFC put into the budget that would create an individual income tax credit derived from property assessed as manufacturing or agricultural property. The tax credit would kick in Jan. 1, 2013, and when fully phased in for tax year 2016 would be worth $128.7 million annually.
As of early afternoon Wednesday the fate of voucher schools in Green Bay is uncertain. Rumors are flying that the proposal to use tax dollars to pay families to send their children to private and religious schools in that city will be pulled from the state budget.
It's been a hot topic.
The voucher story I posted on Chalkboard last week detailed Green Bay Supt. Greg Maass' unhappy reaction to both the proposal and the abrupt legislative process that put it in the budget. It definitely struck a nerve, and drew many comments.
Some of the most interesting reactions went well beyond the issue of vouchers and whether public money should be used to fund private schools. They expressed the heart of the debate surrounding public schools, or "government" schools as some folks call them.
Are public schools failing? Who's to blame? What responsibilities does a civil society owe to children who are not our own? What kind of reforms do parents, and taxpayers, want to see?
Here are some excerpts that are revealing of the divide in the debate:
VHOU812 wrote: ...As a consumer of the public (or private) educational institutions, I am demanding more value. If it is not provided, I will push to refuse to purchase and home school. This is not what I want. I want security knowing that I am satisfied with the investment in my children's education. I don't get that feeling right now from publc schools, and that is the core of the problem that public schools need to fix. I also see that private institutions, by their nature, can make changes to respond to consumer demands very quickly, and it is clear public schools either can't, or won't.
Wolfram's words are well worth considering: "You have to ask, what's the point of universities today?" he wonders. "Technology has usurped many of their previous roles, such as access to knowledge, and the social aspects."
Here is the presentation from today's Work Session on the Strategic Plan with survey results.
Highlights:
5905 responses - 64% family member, 26% teacher or school staff, 1% principals, 5% community, 4% Central Office
By zip code - looks like a somewhat even distribution with NE - 98115 with 528 responses, SE - 98118 with 221 responses, SW - 98136 with 118 responses, West Seattle - 98116 with 182 responses and NW - 98117 with 433 responses. (There were more zip codes than those.)
page 8 has a breakdown of coaches and costs - overall it costs $6.4M for 65.6 coaches (the salary swings are interesting)
Professional development in math, science and reading helping teachers and students - the big answer was .... no opinion. And, out of the nearly 6,000 responses, only 3443 people answered this question. Effective/somewhat effective (families-27%/teachers-51%). Ineffective/somewhat ineffective (families-22%/teachers-28%)
MAP test results effectiveness. Effective/Somewhat Effective (families-41%/teachers-33%). Somewhat effective/ineffective (families-45%/teachers50%). Out of 6k responses, only 3682 respondents answered.
MAP- how many times a year should it be used? 3x- families-30%, teachers-23%, principals-40%. Hmm, looks like principals like it more than teachers. 2x -families-29%,teachers-30%, principals, 40%. That's a lot closer. And hey, they ARE reducing MAP to two times a year for 2011-2013 (winter and spring)
NSAP. More efficient/somewhat more - families-42%/teachers 23%/principals 55%. Somewhat less/less efficient - families-27%/teachers-29%/principals-31%.
Governor Walker's Read to Lead task force met on May 31st at the State Capitol. Following are observations from WRC.
Note: Peggy Stern, an Oscar-winning filmmaker currently working on a project about dyslexia, had a crew filming the meeting. If we are able to acquire footage, we will make it available. If you would like Wisconsin Eye to record future meetings, please contact them at comments@wiseye.org.
Format: Unlike the first task force meeting, this meeting was guided by two facilitators from AIR, the American Institutes for Research. This was a suggestion of Senator Luther Olsen, and the facilitators were procured by State Superintendent Tony Evers. Evers and Governor Walker expressed appreciation at not having to be concerned with running the meeting, but there were some problems with the round-robin format chosen by the facilitators. Rather than a give-and-take discussion, as happened at the first meeting, this was primarily a series of statements from people at the table. There was very little opportunity to seek clarification or challenge statements. Time was spent encouraging everyone to comment on every question, regardless of whether they had anything of substance to contribute, and the time allotted to individual task force members varied. Some were cut off before finishing, while others were allowed to go on at length. As a direct result of this format, the conversation was considerably less robust than at the first meeting.
Topics: The range of topics proved to be too ambitious for the time allowed. Teacher preparation and professional development took up the bulk of the time, followed by a rather cursory discussion of assessment tools. The discussion of reading interventions was held over for the next meeting.
Guests: Dawnene Hassett, Asst. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction and new elementary literacy chair, UW-Madison Tania Mertzman Habeck, Assoc. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction, UW-Milwaukee
Mary Jo Ziegler, Reading Consultant, Wis. Department of Public Instruction
Troy Couillard, Special Education Team, Wis. Department of Public Instruction
Next Meetings: The Governor's office will work to set up a schedule of meetings for the next several months. Some of the meetings may be in other parts of the state.
Action: WRC suggests contacting the offices of the Governor, Luther Olsen, Steve Kestell, and Jason Fields and your own legislators to ask for several things:
Arrange for filming the next meeting through Wisconsin Eye
Bring in national experts such as Louisa Moats, Joe Torgesen, and Peggy McCardle to provide Wisconsin with the road map for effective reading instruction, teacher preparation, and professional development . . . top university, DPI, and professional organization leaders at the May 31st meeting asked for a road map and admitted they have not been able to develop one
Arrange the format of the next meeting to allow for more authentic and robust discussion of issues
Summary
Teacher Training and Professional Development
The professors felt that the five components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) are generally taught in preparation programs, but that instruction varies widely from one institution to another. Reading course work requirements can vary from 12 credits to just one course. They also felt, as did the teachers on the panel, that there needs to be more practical hand-on experience in the undergraduate program. There was a feeling that teachers "forget" their instruction in reading foundations by the time they graduate and get into the classroom. They have better luck teaching masters level students who already have classroom experience. The linguistic knowledge means very little without a practicum, and we may need to resort to professional development to impart that information. Teachers need to be experts in teaching reading, but many currently don't feel that way. It is important, especially with RTI coming, to be able to meet the needs of individual students.Both professors and teachers, as well as others on the panel, felt a "road map" of critical information for teacher preparation programs and literacy instruction in schools would be a good idea. This was a point of agreement. Hassett felt that pieces of a plan currently exist, but not a complete road map. The professors and some of the teachers felt that teacher prep programs are doing a better job at teaching decoding than comprehension strategies. They were open to more uniformity in syllabi and some top-down mandates.
Marcia Henry mentioned studies by Joshi, et al. that found that 53% of pre-service teachers and 60% of in-service teachers are unable to correctly answer questions about the structure of the English language. Tony Pedriana cited another Joshi study that showed college professors of reading were equally uninformed about the language, and the majority cannot distinguish between phonemic awareness and phonics. He also said it was very difficult to find out what colleges were teaching; one college recently refused his request to see a syllabus for a reading course. Steve Dykstra read from the former Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the current Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contained incorrect definitions and examples of phonemic awareness. He questioned whether teachers were being adequately prepared in decoding skills. Rep. Steve Kestell was concerned with the assessment that most teachers do not feel like experts in teaching reading, and he wondered if updated techniques for training teachers would make a difference.
Sarah Archibald (aide to Luther Olsen) proposed looking at a more rigorous foundations of reading test, as found in other states, as a requirement for teacher licensure. This would be one way to move toward more uniform instruction in teacher prep programs. Steve Dykstra pointed out that a test alone will not necessarily drive changes in teacher preparation, but publishing the passage results linked to individual colleges or professors would help. Evers indicated that DPI has been looking for several months into teacher testing and licensure.
Gov. Walker asked if the ed schools were looking at the latest trends in teacher preparation to become better. The professors indicated that the ed schools confer with local districts in an effort to improve.
Supt. Evers said it was probably not a good idea that teacher prep programs across Wisconsin vary so much.
Hassett indicated that some flexibility needs to be retained so that urban and rural areas can teach differently. There was some disagreement as to whether teachers of upper grades need to be trained in reading, or at least trained the same way.
Linda Pils pointed out that the amount and quality of professional development for Wisconsin teachers is very spotty. Most panel members felt that a coaching model with ongoing training for both teachers and principals was essential to professional development, but the coaches must be adequately trained. There was some discussion of Professional Development Plans, which are required for relicensure, and whether the areas of development should be totally up the individual teacher as they are now. Steve Dykstra felt that much existing professional development is very poor, and that money and time needs to be spent better. Some things should not count for professional development. Michele Erikson felt that it would be good to require that Professional development be linked to the needs of the students as demonstrated by performance data. Mary Read pointed out that coaching should extend to summer programs.
The main consensus here was that we need a road map for good reading instruction and good teacher training and coaching. What is missing is the substance of that road map, and the experts we will listen to in developing it.
Assessment
Mary Jo Ziegler presented a list of formal and informal assessment tools used around Wisconsin. Evers pointed out that assessment is a local district decision. Many former Reading First schools use DIBELS or some formal screener that assesses individual skills. Balanced literacy districts generally use something different. Madison, for example, has its own PLA (Primary Language Assessment), which includes running records, an observational survey, word identification, etc. MAP assessments are widely used, but Evers indicated that have not been shown to be reliable/valid below third grade. Dykstra questioned the reliability of MAP on the individual student level for all ages. PALS was discussed, as was the new wireless handheld DIBELS technology that some states are using statewide. Many members mentioned the importance of having multiple methods of assessment. Kathy Champeau delivered an impassioned plea for running records and Clay's Observational Survey, which she said have been cornerstones of her teaching. Kestell was surprised that so many different tools are being used, and that the goal should be to make use of the data that is gathered. Dykstra, Henry, and Pedriana mentioned that assessment must guide instruction, and Archibald said that the purpose of an assessment must be considered. Couillard said that the Wis. RTI center is producing a questionnaire by which districts can evaluate assessment tools they hear about, and that they will do trainings on multiple and balanced assessments. Dykstra questioned the three-cue reading philosophy that often underlies miscue analysis and running records. no consensus was reached on what types of assessment should be used, or whether they should be more consistent across the state. Hassett questioned the timed component of DIBELS,and Dykstra explained its purpose. Some serious disagreements remain about the appropriateness of certain assessment tools, and their use by untrained teachers who do not know what warning signs to look for.
Intervention
Evers began the topic of intervention by saying that DPI was still collecting data on districts that score well, and then will look at what intervention techniques they use. Henry suggested deferring discussion of this important topic to the next meeting, as there were only 8 minutes left.
Just like large companies eager to get a foothold in one of the world's most important markets, international business schools are moving into China in a big way.
Eager to capitalize on demand in a fast-growing economy that has a huge need for well-trained managers, big name B-schools from Europe and the U.S. are launching and expanding M.B.A.-program collaborations with Chinese universities or going it alone with courses aimed at mid-career executives.
Experience in China is also a selling point at home, since Western students increasingly see the benefits of studying at an institution whose faculty have close-up experience of the country. Such links can also give M.B.A. students the chance to study in China for a module or a semester.
"The lure is to go and learn about what's happening, and be in the middle of the action in one of the most dynamic economies in the world," says Krishna Palepu, senior associate dean for international development at Harvard Business School. The school has had a faculty research base in China for about 20 years but now shares a new Shanghai classroom with other Harvard schools.
Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel, wants to pay college students to drop out. If typical venture capital odds apply, about 22 of the 24 people who took his $100,000 inducement to drop out and spend two years working in a start-up will fail to build a successful company. For their sake, let's hope the schools will let them back in.
And based on research from the country's top-ranked school of entrepreneurship, the world will be better off if those whippersnappers stay in school and get 10 years of experience before launching their start-ups.
Peter Thiel has a mixed investment record but has come out ahead. Thiel made $55 million as a co-founder of online payment service PayPal when he sold his 3.7% stake in the company to eBay (EBAY) shortly after graduating from Stanford Law School. He then became the first major investor, putting $500,000 into Facebook.
"You have to ask, what's the point of universities today?" he wonders. "Technology has usurped many of their previous roles, such as access to knowledge, and the social aspects."
"THERE is no dramatic distinction between the processes of the weather and the workings of the human brain," says Stephen Wolfram, a physicist and the founder of Wolfram Research, a software company. "There isn't anything incredibly special about intelligence, it's just sophisticated computational work that has grown up throughout human history." Dr Wolfram is hardly the first scientist to compare the human brain to a computer. Alan Turing, who helped develop the precursors of today's programmable computers during the second world war, began considering the possibility of thinking machines in the 1940s. The difference is that Dr Wolfram claims to have succeeded in codifying vast areas of human knowledge and even replicating supposedly uniquely human attributes such as creativity.
"One of my realisations, or maybe it's just a piece of arrogance, is that the amount of knowledge and data in the world is big, but it's not that big," he says. "In astronomy, there's a petabyte--a million gigabytes--of data about what's out there in the universe. There are also swathes of data from digital cameras, Twitter feeds and even road-traffic movements. It's a bit daunting, but I soon realised that the bigger challenge is not the underlying data but the computations that get done on them."
In a bare-bones basement office in Buffalo, N.Y., Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her minuscule staff of the advocacy group Buffalo ReformED are against incredible odds. In less than a week, they are trying to get a controversial law known as the "parent trigger" through the New York legislature. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school.
Campos and her group are working with some 4,000 frustrated parents like Samuel Radford III, who refuses to accept that as African Americans, his three sons in Buffalo public schools have only a 25% chance of graduating. Radford voiced his concerns for years but saw no improvement, so rather than continue to wait for the district to act, he became vice president of the District Parent Coordinating Council and threw his support behind passing parent-trigger legislation. "This is our chance to not just confront the problem but be part of the solution," Radford says. On June 15, Buffalo ReformED plans to fill a bus of parents like Radford and ride to the state capitol, in Albany, to host an informal hearing on the bill and speak to members of the senate and house education committees.
More than one-fifth of Texans say education is the most important issue facing the state, though it is unclear whether Republicans will pay a political price for cutting education funding, according to poll results released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Texas Lyceum group.
The group released preliminary findings from the telephone survey, conducted at the end of last month, as the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature inches closer to passing a state budget that cuts billions from public schools.
When asked an open-ended question about the most important problem facing Texas, 23 percent of 707 respondents named education, as did 33 percent of 303 likely voters in the group surveyed. Lyceum pollsters define likely voters as Texans who are somewhat interested in politics, are registered to vote and have voted in most or all elections.
Fewer than a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history-test scores released Tuesday.
The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that U.S. schoolchildren have made little progress since 2006 in their understanding of key historical themes, including the basic principles of democracy and America's role in the world.
Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were "proficient" or "advanced," unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Proficient means students have a solid understanding of the material.
Diane Ravitch’s New York Timesop-ed seems to have stuck in the craw of many a reformer, including Arne Duncan himself. What really burned people up was Ravitch’s “straw man” arguments: that reformers say poverty doesn’t matter, or only care about gains in student achievement. "No serious reformer says accountability should just be based on test scores. We all favor multiple measures,” Jon Schnur* complained to Jonathan Alter last week.
Rather than get defensive at Diane's defeatism, we reformers should clarify the ends that education reform can achieve.
Please. Remember the old adage, watch what we do, not what we say? The No Child Left Behind act is still the law of the land, and it most definitely rests on the principle that poverty is “no excuse” for low achievement. And it absolutely punishes schools for bad test scores alone. Diane is on firm ground when she writes:
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney declared his candidacy for president last week. I went to his Web site to read his ideas about education. There weren't any. The same thing happened when I went to former House speaker Newt Gingrich's campaign site.
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty's Web site had a bit more--a piece beating up on teachers unions, a speech saying the federal government should give states more flexibility in fixing schools and an appreciation of former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Business executive Herman Cain's Web site called for less federal and union interference in education reform, and more rewards for the best teachers. Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) wants to end federal education spending, except for tax credits for parents.
That's about it for the Republican candidates. I couldn't find official education positions for potential GOP candidates Jon Huntsman, Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin. Even when the presidential campaign gets hot next year, we won't hear much about schooling from either party. The government activity that most influences American lives has never inspired much talk by national politicians or much coverage by national media.
With 240 students, the academy is one-seventh the size of Jefferson and takes only Loudoun County residents (Jefferson draws from most of Northern Virginia), but it has won glowing reviews from students and has created a research curriculum rare in U.S. secondary education.
“It was completely unlike the standard classroom procedure that I was used to, and I absolutely loved it,” said Carter Huffman, an academy graduate now at MIT. “I have yet to hear of another school that so encourages all of its students to pursue major independent research.”
Elizabeth Asai, another academy graduate, said she and a couple of Yale classmates received university funding this year to design biomedical devices, usually a process daunting to undergraduates. Her friends “were astounded by the ease of presenting our proposal and actually receiving a grant,” she said, but, having attended the Academy of Science, to her “this seemed normal.”
The big shoe ready to drop this summer on the DCPS labor relations front involves the estimated 550 teachers who are subject to dismissal if they receive a second consecutive "minimally effective" rating on the IMPACT evaluation system. For Mayor Vincent C. Gray and Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson, it will be a closely watched test of their resolve to follow through on a signature initiative of the Michelle Rhee era, designed to improve teacher effectiveness by pushing poor performers out of the system.
It now appears that some teachers -- most likely younger ones -- will get a reprieve from the two-strikes-and-out rule established in 2009. Earlier this week, human capital chief and IMPACT architect Jason Kamras told principals that if they had young teachers with promise who were headed for a second poor evaluation, they could apply for exceptions.
"We recognize that in some cases, a principal might want to retain a second-year teacher who has received minimally effective ratings in each of his or her first two years of teaching but has demonstrated improvement and the potential to become an effective teacher in the following year," Kamras said.
The board is now considering policy changes that would require the superintendent's recommendation before it could bring independent schools into the district fold.
Until the change is approved, however, the leaders of a pair of civic groups are standing by letters sent to the board last week warning that they believed it had assumed authority that could return it to its micromanaging habits of old.
Board president Airick Leonard West said he wants the conversation to refocus on the district's vision of a portfolio of schools that are held accountable for their performance.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is signaling that he's prepared to give public schools relief from federal mandates under No Child Left Behind if Congress does not pass the law's long-awaited overhaul and re-authorization this year.
"This is absolutely plan B," Duncan told reporters during an embargoed conference call on Friday. "The prospect of doing nothing is what I'm fighting against."
That relief could take the form of granting waivers on test scoring to flexibility on how schools spend federal dollars. "We can't afford to do nothing," he said.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the mandate, signed into law in 2002 with bi-partisan support, is dated and flawed. One of the major complaints is that some schools have been labeled failures despite making improvements.
Students who take classes in education departments at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in other academic departments. The higher grades awarded by education departments cannot be explained by differences in student quality or by structural differences across departments (i.e., differences in class sizes). The remaining explanation is that the higher grades are the result of lower grading standards. This paper formally documents the grading-standards problem in education departments using administrative grade data from the 2007-2008 academic year. Because a large fraction of the teachers in K-12 schools receive training in education departments, I briefly discuss several possible consequences of the low grading standards for teacher quality in K-12 schools.
There is a large and growing research literature showing that teacher quality is an important determinant of student success (recent studies include Aaronson et al., 2007; Koedel, 2008; Nye et al., 2004; Rivkin et al., 2005; Rockoff, 2004).
But while there is persistent research into a variety of interventions aimed at improving teacher quality, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the primary training ground for K-12 teachers--education departments at universities.
This paper provides an evaluation of the grading standards in these education departments. I show that education students receive higher grades than do students in every other academic discipline. The grading discrepancies that I document cannot be explained by differences between education and non-education departments in student quality, or by structural differences across departments.
The likely explanation is grade inflation.
The earliest evidence on the grading-standards problem in education departments comes from Weiss and Rasmussen in 1960. They showed that undergraduate students taking classes in education departments were twice as likely to receive an "A" when compared to students taking classes in business or liberal arts departments. The low grading standards in education departments, illustrated by these authors over 50 years ago, are still prevalent today.
To get to the point of graduation, you've endured an almost endless sequence of measurements of your intelligence and knowledge, in the form of tests. You have taken more tests than you hope to remember. The role of faculty here and other teachers earlier was to define the questions. Your role, as students, was to provide the right answers.
Many in education, however, have overlooked a frightening fact: finding the right answer is
impossible unless we have asked the right question. Unfortunately our teaching system focuses little attention on teaching us how to ask the right questions. As a scholar, father, and advisor, I have slowly realized that asking the right question is the rare and valuable skill. That done, getting the right answer is typically quite straightforward.
In my remarks today I'd like to describe three instances where people like us have plunged into implementing an answer, without taking the care to define the salient question to which we need good answers. Two are of national scope; the third is personal. My prayer is for each of you - students, graduates, families and faculty - is to see learning to frame questions as a critical part of your work.
Joel Klein, the head of News Corp's new education division, has drawn up plans for "significant" acquisitions in the school data, assessment and interactive content development areas, but ruled out acquiring a traditional publisher.
Five months after he joined Rupert Murdoch's media group, the former chancellor of New York City's public school system said he had started due diligence on possible deals to follow the $360m acquisition last year of 90 per cent of Wireless Generation, a US education software company.
"I'd expect in the next [few] months we'd be making some acquisitions," he told the Financial Times, a day after appointing two executives to bolster News Corp's push into education. "There's the willingness to put in significant capital if the numbers make sense."
News Corp's move into education puts it into competition with groups such as Pearson, which owns the Financial Times and McGraw-Hill, which are expanding beyond textbook publishing into digital learning systems, assessment tools and services for schools.
Mr Murdoch had not "put a number on" the amount of capital he was willing to commit, but was making a long-term bet on education, Mr Klein said.
The caps and gowns haven't changed much. "Pomp and Circumstance" continues to mark the occasion. And many of those valedictorians are bound to quote "The Road Not Taken."
Commencement ceremonies have remained virtually unchanged over the years. But don't be fooled. The high school experience leading up to graduation has never looked so different for American teenagers.
Everything from technology to academic innovations to the lagging economy has influenced high schools and the students they serve -- locally and nationwide.
No longer a novelty, independent charter schools will issue a record number of diplomas to students who received a new brand of education -- often in some unlikely venues, including shopping malls, museums and an old Navy boot camp.
More students than ever will graduate this year after taking some of their courses online.
And tough economic times have created a rising population of homeless students -- and programs and schools designed to educate and help them.
Can we make ourselves smarter? In recent decades, scientists have accumulated increasing evidence that our intelligence, at least as measured by the IQ test, is sharply constrained by genetics. Although estimates vary, most studies place the heritability of intelligence at somewhere between 50% and 80%. It's an uncomfortable fact, but not all brains are created equal.
Which is why there's so much buzz about a forthcoming study that complicates this assumption. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that it's possible to boost a core feature of human intelligence through a simple mental training exercise.
In fact, when several dozen elementary- and middle-school kids from the Detroit area used this exercise for 15 minutes a day, many showed significant gains on a widely used intelligence test. Most impressive, perhaps, is that these gains persisted for three months, even though the children had stopped training.
Education Secretary Michael Gove faces many obstacles (and many opponents) to his plan to let parents, charities and educational experts open and manage new Free Schools in their local areas.
There are many hurdles for Free School advocates to overcome too - funding, for example. But even before you get to that stage, how do you know which areas, the government considers appropriate for Free Schools to open?
The Free School Kit, launched by the government agency Partnerships for Schools (PfS), is designed to answer this question.
If you want to launch a Free School, it needs a business case, which depends on whether there's a need in the area. The Free School Kit enables anyone to see on a map the existing school provision, where the schools are, and what their academic records are.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie added a new element Thursday to his efforts to give children in the state's lowest-performing school districts a better education while keeping the costs to taxpayers down.
He proposed letting local school boards hand control of some so-called "transformation schools" to education management organizations, possibly including for-profit firms.
The proposal is one of several ideas Christie is pushing to try to expand options for students in troubled school districts.
"None of these things are silver bullets," he said. The governor framed the idea as an experiment that could offer lessons to other schools.
At first, no more than five of the privately run schools across the state would be allowed - and they would go only in places where the local school boards want them.
Not long ago, Bucyrus International Inc. stood out in Milwaukee as a veritable poster child for business opportunity and expansion. Mayor Tom Barrett singled out chief executive Tim Sullivan in his 2005 "state of the city" address: "Thank you for believing and investing in our city."
And so it was awkward last week when Sullivan told a packed auditorium of civic leaders that he needed to make a "confession," something he's kept quiet for years. Finding qualified, factory-grade welders in an old-line industrial city such as Milwaukee had become arduous to near impossible. Calling himself a "killjoy," Sullivan said he quietly phoned a few contacts in Texas to see whether the Lone Star State could provide him enough welders who are qualified to piece together the colossal mining machines that Bucyrus ships to India, China and elsewhere around the world.
A delegation of senior Texas government authorities met Sullivan at the airport, including the mayor of the town of Kilgore. In a one-hour lunch, they matched Bucyrus with a ready-to-occupy factory with every possible amenity.
More important, they asked Sullivan exactly what sort of workers he needed. Sullivan said 80 with specific skill. The state gave Sullivan a guarantee that the workers would be waiting when the doors opened at the expansion site in Kilgore. State officials customized a recruitment, training and certification program. One year later, when the expansion site in Kilgore opened its doors, the 80 welders were waiting.
In the two years since then, the Texas site has more than doubled to 184 total workers and plans to keep hiring. And back in Milwaukee, Sullivan has said next to nothing in public about the Kilgore expansion.
"We have a complete disconnect between jobs and education and training," Sullivan said. In Milwaukee, "we're a long way" from replicating the feat in Texas.
"There is no stomach in this state to change the curriculum," he said. "Who is initiating education reform in the state right now? No one."
Although taxpayer-funded MATC probably is the institution best suited to address the skills mismatch, the tech school cannot bear all the blame for its inability to deliver customized workforce training, Sullivan said.
Many Milwaukee-trained welders simply are not mentally prepared by metro Milwaukee's grade schools and high schools, Sullivan said.
At tomorrow's (June 13) school board meeting, an "informational" agenda item will be presented regarding the switch from conventional grading/report card system to the "Grading For Learning" system throughout grades K-7. This switch will be flipped for the 2011-12 school year.
Grading for Learning has been looming on the horizon for several years now. It's not something new to Sun Prairie. In fact, a number of school districts have implemented it and a number will begin implementation this year. Grading for Learning is a concept introduced by Ken O'Connor.
It's located in a grimy and windowless building that it shares with an adult school on the edge of downtown. But to its students and teachers, the Santee Construction Academy is something of an educational utopia.
There are small classes with attentive teachers. A curriculum designed to prepare students for the real world with training for in-demand jobs. An atmosphere that students say is akin to a family.
The campus fits the bill of what some educators and others describe as a model with its career training and staff commitment. Yet, in about two weeks, this program will be history.
It turns out that the same factors that have made the academy successful -- despite lukewarm test scores -- also made it vulnerable to the sweeping cuts Los Angeles public schools are being forced to make with a tightening budget. The program costs more than $1.5 million to operate.
But after learning of the Madison School District's failure to adequately boost test scores under No Child Left Behind, I had to wonder: Heat or no heat, what cause for picnicking is there in the advent of a nearly three-month long break from formal learning for brains that, in their youth, are veritable sponges for knowledge?
I'm less worried about my children, who have a standard pair of educated, middle-class parents. They probably won't make major academic strides over the summer, but they won't lose much ground or -- worse -- fill their free time picking up bad habits.
But here's the thing about the Madison district: Increasingly, its students aren't like my kids.
They are like the kids who live in the traditionally lower-income, higher-crime Worthington Park neighborhood. These and the kids from the tonier Schenk-Atwood neighborhood where we live share a school, but they don't necessarily share the same social, educational and financial advantages.
A school board member shared the following information which was received from a community member, knowing grade inflation is one of SP-EYE's hot buttons. The contributor wasn't identified, but it doesn't matter. It's a great comparison from 20 years ago to today. If these numbers are valid (and we have absolutely no reason to suspect they are not), they represent cause for alarm.
Class of 2011
Class of 1991
Total Students
485
300
# on Honor Roll
187* (39%)
24 (8%)
* This is reportedly the lowest in the past 7-8 years!
New York City has become the latest battleground in the national fight for education equality.
In some schools, hallways serve as a stark dividing line. Classrooms with peeling paint and insufficient resources sit on one side, while new computers, smartboards and up-to-date textbooks line the other. One group of students is taught in hallways and cramped basements, while others under the same roof make use of fully functional classrooms.
New York City has increasingly resorted to co-locating charter schools inside existing public school buildings as way to cut costs. When handled improperly, co-location can lead to visible disparities, division and tension among students. In many instances, traditional students are forced into shorter playground periods than their charter school counterparts, or served lunch at 10 am so that charter students can eat at noon. The inequity is glaring, and it is certainly not lost on the students themselves.
Richmond Open Source Radio's Will Snyder talks about the recent approval of virtual classrooms in Virginia with Rob Jones, VEA's Director of Government Relations and Research and Bill Tucker, Managing Director of the think tank Education Sector. (29 minute mark)
In some ways, it seems like a natural cause for the N.A.A.C.P.: students -- many of them poor, most of them black -- treated as second-class citizens when the public schools they attended had to share buildings with charter schools. A lawsuit filed last month by the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Federation of Teachers described children having to eat lunch so early it might as well be breakfast, and getting less exercise because gym hours were evenly divided between the schools despite big differences in their enrollment sizes.
But black children have been major constituents of charter schools since their creation two decades ago. So when thousands of charter-school parents, students and advocates staged a rally on May 26 in Harlem, it was not so much to denounce the litigation as it was to criticize the involvement of the N.A.A.C.P.
Since then, a war has broken out within the civil rights community in New York and across the country over the lawsuit against the city and the larger questions of how school choice helps or hurts minority students.
"Today marks the beginning of a very dark week at The School District of Philadelphia," began a press release issued last Monday by the District itself. No doubt many Philadelphia school employees would agree. That day, the District issued layoff notices to 3,024 of its workers, including 1,523 of the District's approximately 11,000 teachers.
Budget problems are nothing new for Philadelphia's School District, which was taken over by the state of Pennsylvania a decade ago in part because of its chronic funding problems. Through all those difficulties, though, it has no modern history of teacher layoffs on this scale.
The moves were designed to close a $629 million shortfall in the School District's $2.7 billion budget--a gap caused by the end of federal stimulus funding and the knowledge that cuts in state funding were on the way.
I recently met with one of the several new employees at Seattle Public Schools and gave a rundown on history and culture of the District.
Here's the short version:
1. There is a complete disconnect between what is said, done, and decided in the JSCEE and what happens in the schools.
The headquarters folks make bad decisions because they have no idea how those decisions will actually play out in the schools - and they don't want to know. Their decisions don't matter because they don't check to confirm they are being followed and they couldn't enforce them anyway. The schools know all of this - that the District headquarters is clueless about the realities of schools, that their decisions are horrible, that they will never come around and confirm compliance with the decision, and that they are powerless to enforce those decisions - so they simply ignore the decisions. The schools see the gap between them and the district headquarters as insulation and they work to keep it. They don't want any district interference because it is always bad. The schools work to go unnoticed by the district headquarters. Ideally, they would like the District headquarters to forget they are there. The tall blade of grass gets cut; the high nail gets hammered down. If you have ever been part of an alternative school or an advanced learning program, you've heard people say "Don't make waves, we don't want to attract the District's attention." There are very, very few examples of district intervention in a school that proved beneficial. I think the District's decision to put elementary APP in Lowell in 1997 was one. The interventions at Hawthorne and West Seattle Elementary are looking like they could buck the trend. STEM might also. If so, they would be the exceptions rather than the rule.
What if, despite everything else going on, we were able to put together a strong, multi-faceted campaign that made progress in fighting the reading crisis in our midst?
The optimist in me says it might happen, and I point to five things that are going on to support that. (Don't worry, the pessimist in me will show up before we're done.)
One: I attended the second meeting of Gov. Scott Walker's Read to Lead Task Force recently. Unlike most anything else going on in the Capitol, this was a civil, constructive discussion involving people of diverse opinions. The focus of the afternoon-long session was how to improve the way teachers are trained to teach reading.
Walker and Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, disagree strongly on some major school issues, but they sat next to each other, facing university professors, teachers, reading advocates of varying philosophies, and others. There even seemed to be some emerging agreement that the state Department of Public Instruction and university leaders could and should take steps to ensure that teachers are better trained before they get into classrooms and, once there, get more effective help in continuing to develop their skills.
The broad goal of Walker's task force is to get almost all kids reading on grade level before they leave third grade - a wonderful goal. But reaching it raises a lot of issues, including how to deal with sharply contending schools of thought on how to best teach reading.
Nonetheless, at least for an afternoon, important people were engaged in a serious discussion on a huge issue, and that seemed encouraging.
In most Chinese high schools, outdated rote learning is the norm. But one school in Beijing is promoting creativity and independent thinking.
TESS VIGELAND: This week, we've been looking at China's higher education system -- what it takes to get into college and what happens once students get there. China's emphasis on taking tests to get ahead in society raises questions about whether those students will be creative enough to thrive in an economy based on innovation. One school in Beijing is trying to get away from the testing culture.
Our China correspondent Rob Schmitz has the final of three reports.
There's been a considerable legislative activity affecting our schools lately, with the Joint Finance Committee completing its work on the Governor's proposed budget and other legislative committees active as well.
Here's an update on two developments of particular interest to those of us in Madison - the retention of school districts' ability to use property tax carryover authority to increase spending above otherwise applicable revenue limits and the most recent iteration of the Republican charter school expansion legislation working its way through committee.
Other legislative developments will have significant impact elsewhere in the state in the short run and could well affect Madison significantly in the longer run - I'm thinking of the expansion of voucher schools into all of Milwaukee County and Racine and perhaps Green Bay - but the two developments that will likely have a more immediate impact are my focus for today.
Education officials are collecting data on Iowa students who earn community college credits while in high school to see how well-prepared those students are for college.
According to a new report by the Iowa Department of Education, more than 38,200 high school students in Iowa took classes last year for credit through community colleges, 50 percent more than five years earlier. Those students accounted for more than 25 percent of the enrollment at the state's community colleges.
The Des Moines Register reported Wednesday that the state hasn't tracked passing and failing rates, and officials don't know whether the courses are as tough as those offered at the college level. But state officials are now collecting that information, said Roger Utman, administrator for the Education Department's Division of Community Colleges and Workforce Preparation.
IT IS one of the oldest debates in education. Should teachers tell pupils the way things are or encourage them to find out for themselves? Telling children "truths" about the world helps them learn those facts more quickly. Yet the efficient learning of specific facts may lead to the assumption that when the adult has finished teaching, there is nothing further to learn--because if there were, the adult would have said so. A study just published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, suggests that is true.
Dr Bonawitz and Dr Shafto arranged for 85 four- and five-year-olds to be presented, during a visit to a museum, with a novel toy that looked like a tangle of coloured pipes and was capable of doing many different things. They wanted to know whether the way the children played with the toy depended on how they were instructed by the adult who gave it to them.
One group of children had a strictly pedagogical introduction. The experimenter said "Look at my toy! This is my toy. I'm going to show you how my toy works." She then pulled a yellow tube out of a purple tube, creating a squeaking sound. Following this, she said, "Wow, see that? This is how my toy works!" and then demonstrated the effect again.
d an on-again, off-again relationship with Gov. John Kitzhaber. The Oregon Education Association endorsed his opponent in the Democratic primary, largely because of Kitzhaber’s “performance-based funding” proposal. When Kitzhaber won the nomination, OEA and other public sector unions bet the ranch on him.
Gov. Kitzhaber’s latest proposal is a merger of the state boards dealing with K-12 and higher education, which has caused OEA some heartburn. “I am surprised and disappointed to hear that OEA has changed course and now opposes Senate Bill 909 and a package of modest education reforms that would deliver better results for students, more resources for teachers and more accountability for taxpayer dollars. For them to cling to the status quo is not in the best interest of Oregonians," said Kitzhaber in a statement.
Meanwhile in California, David Kieffer, the executive director of the state SEIU affiliate announced his opposition to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for a special election in September to extend and raise taxes. The state’s public sector unions are interested parties because they would be expected to fund the campaign with dues dollars.
I love Salt Lake but having grown up in Denver it makes me nervous to have mountains in the east. I’ve also noticed that they may be more conservative here than in my new hometown of Seattle. The newspaper is reporting with some surprise today that a local anthropologist has found evidence that Darwin was on to something with that evolution stuff.
The editorial page explains that the precipitous drop in the Utah high school graduation rate is a result of all those Latino students moving in.
CyberPatriot is the National High School Cyber Defense Competition created by the Air Force Association (AFA) to excite, educate, and motivate the next generation of cyber defenders and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates our nation needs.
An Interview with Joe Nathan: How Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools Eliminated the High School Graduation Gap between White and African American Students
1) Joe, there seems to be a lot of good news coming out of Cincinnati in terms of increased high school graduation rates. What's happening in Cincinnati?
Recently Elizabeth Holtzapple, Cincinnati Public Schools Director of Research, Evaluation and Testing, told me that the district's public schools increased overall high school graduation rates to 81.9% in 2010. That is up from 51% to 2000. She also reported the district also has maintained something major it first achieved in 2007. While continuing to increase overall high school graduation rates, CPS also has eliminated the high school graduation gap between white and African American students.
2) About how long has this concerted effort been going on?
This work has been going on for the last decade. It has involved a series of coordinated, research-based strategies, along with tremendous, creative and courageous work by people in schools, as well as the broader community. There was no single, "silver bullet."
3. What were the key strategies?
Cincinnati used several strategies. The most important included
Focusing on just a few goals (increasing overall graduation rates and reducing the high school graduation gap).
Taking educators, parents, community leaders and students to visit some of the nation's most effective urban district and charter public schools.
Focusing staff development on a few key areas: literacy, numeracy and learning to work more effectively with today's urban youth.
Increasing youth/community service so students learned they are capable of more than they thought.
Positive ongoing leadership from the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers
Holding principals accountable and replacing some in schools where there was not much progress.
Is it the best of times or end times for public charter schools? Four thousand charter-school leaders, teachers, advocates and policymakers will gather in Atlanta this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools' annual conference. The gathering of upstarts is larger than what many long-standing traditional-education groups can muster, but in states and cities across the country, charter schools are facing increased political pressure and scrutiny. In Georgia, the state's supreme court just ruled that the arrangements for charter schools are unconstitutional. Welcome to town! (See what makes a charter school great.)
Charter schools, the first of which was created in 1992, are public schools that are open to all students but run independently of local school districts. There are now more than 5,000 of them educating more than a million students. Charter schools range in quality from among the best public schools in the country to among the worst. That variance is proving to be a political Achilles' heel for charter schools, fueling a serious backlash. (See "KIPP Schools: A Reform Triumph, or Disappointment?")
In New York City, the NAACP joined the teachers' union in a lawsuit that would have the effect of curbing charter-school growth. That sparked a protest by families in Harlem, and the NAACP was roundly criticized for its stance, which apparently owes more to politics than kids.
No sooner do parents proudly watch their children graduate high school than they must begin paying for college. As they write checks for upwards of $40,000 a year, they'll no doubt find themselves complaining loudly about rising college costs--even asking: "Is it worth it?"
It's a legitimate question. As college costs have risen wildly, the benefits of the degree seem less and less clear. Larger numbers of college graduates are taking relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.
The good news? There are ways to greatly ease the burden and make college more affordable, according to new data from the University of Texas at Austin.
In a study for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe and I concluded that tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.
It's not too late. The state Supreme Court has one more chance to get it right.
In the legal equivalent to a 70-yard Hail Mary pass into the end zone, the Georgia Charter Schools Commission's existence is dependent upon one of four judges -- in response to a pending motion for reconsideration -- reversing his or her position and voting to not strike down a law that catapulted Georgia to win a $400 million federal Race to the Top grant and recognition as a leader in public school choice.
As an attorney, a former Atlanta Public Schools elementary teacher and a once bright-eyed judicial intern in our state's highest court, I have struggled to understand the court's unnecessarily harsh decision. Despite their vote, I do not believe that the four judges who decided to dismantle the commission based on historically inaccurate and intellectually dishonest reasoning condone the mediocrity that permeates our public schools.
Nor do I think that any member of the court believes that low-income Georgia families stuck in these mediocre schools have access to political and economic capital of the magnitude expended by local boards of education in their efforts to preserve sole control over charter schools. But I do suspect these judges, on a very basic, instinctual, "gut-feeling" level, under-appreciate the magnificent danger posed to returning to the pre-2008 days of leaving charter school authorization in the exclusive hands of locally elected school boards.
School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren't rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education.
The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Now we grade the students, but how do we determine if a school is "good" or "bad"?
NewsHour Education Correspondent John Merrow explores the question in this report.
JOHN MERROW: Reading is the foundation of all learning. But according to the nation's report card, only 33 percent of fourth-graders are competent readers.
At this elementary school in New York City, 33 percent would be good news. Last year on the state reading test, only 18 percent of fourth-graders were on grade level, strong evidence of a failing school.
A preliminary list of public schools that missed federally mandated academic goals for the 2010-'11 school year includes more than 90 schools in Milwaukee, a spike from last year as proficiency standards have risen.
Last year, 78 schools in MPS missed the academic goals.
The federal standards for reading rose from 74% of students scoring proficient or above last year, to 80.5% proficiency required this year; the mathematics proficiency target rose from 58% to 68.5%.
Three charter schools authorized by the City of Milwaukee and two charter schools under contract with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee also were on the list for missed goals, along with a handful of suburban schools.
Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday will announce a new policy to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in federal job training funds each year - and will link the funds to reforms of local education curriculums.
The disclosure came Wednesday morning from Tim Sullivan, chief executive officer of Bucyrus International and the chairman of the Governor's Council on Workforce Investment, a state advisory panel. Sullivan spoke at a meeting of the Milwaukee 7 economic development group.
Under the current system, federal job training funds, disbursed by multiple federal agencies, are paid directly to five state agencies, which in turn have established formulas to spend their share.
Grades shows students what they need to score on their upcoming assignments, tests, and finals in order to get the grade they want. Now with due dates and a handy GPA calculator.
Bill Gates likes Salman Khan a lot, so much so that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is streaming cash to his Khan Academy, an internet silo of over 2,100 free, downloadable video tutorials on Calculus, Physics, Organic Chemistry, et al. Mr. Khan's Academy only has a "faculty of one," but my own students enjoy Mr. Khan's glib teaching style, and they consult his clips on quadratic equations, conic sections, and those hated word problems involving railroad trains. So is the Khan video approach a "disruptive technology" which undermines the existing deathbed educational model by doing it faster, better, and cheaper? Mr. Gates thinks so. "It's a revolution," he enthuses. "Everyone should check it out." (www.khanacademy.org) Wearing his education reformer hat, Mr. Gates declares himself "superhappy."
Mr. Khan, then, by all reports, is an entertaining, trustworthy, and helpful tutor of math and science. However, when he essays history, it's a different story and one that exposes something disquieting about a hidden potential of Internet learning, especially if, as some predict, The Khan Academy is the future of education.
Curious about Mr. Khan's take on something non-science, I pulled up his video "U.S. History Overview 3--World War II to Vietnam"
The screen looks like a squashed, two-dimensional schoolroom; you see a combined blackboard and bulletin board with colorful squiggly dates on a scroll down timeline, random photos (Hitler, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, mushroom cloud), and tiny maps. Mr. Khan remains offscreen but writes or circles things onscreen with his pointer and provides his signature breathless voiceover.
e are rapidly on course to create a dual-level school system for Wisconsin students. In smaller cities and rural and suburban areas, school systems will continue to spend about $10,000 per pupil. That is a bit less than the national average of $10,499, as a recent Census Bureau report found.
But in big cities such as Milwaukee and Racine, and perhaps in Green Bay and Beloit, more and more students will be educated at choice schools that spend about $6,400 per pupil. These school systems tend to have students who are poorer, more likely to have learning disabilities, and they are typically the most challenging to teach. Yet Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators propose to spend less than two-thirds of the average per-pupil spending in other schools in the state and nation.
This situation, I might add, is not simply the fault of Republicans. Many Democrats, in hopes of killing school choice, have adamantly opposed spending more on vouchers in the past, so the per-pupil rate has always been absurdly low. On the other side are Republicans who can't lose with school choice: It undercuts public schools and lowers the number of teachers union members in cities such as Milwaukee. And it allows them to portray themselves as reformers trying to do something about failing schools.
Rhode Island is one of only a handful of states to not have a single school included in the Washington Post's annual High School Challenge, a ranking of more than 1,900 high schools throughout the country.
The reason: Rhode Island students are significantly behind the national average when it comes to taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams, and near the bottom of the country when it comes to passing them. In the class of 2010, only 17.9 percent of Ocean State students took an AP exam (compared with 28.3 percent nationally) and just 10.9 passed (compared with 16.9 percent nationally), according to a report issued by the College Board.
According to The Post, the formula used to rank the schools was to "divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors." The goal wasn't to measure to overall quality of the schools, but simply to track how well they are preparing "average students" for college.
For the first time, the Madison School District has been flagged for possible sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law because of inadequate student test scores.
An annual review by the Department of Public Instruction found that Madison was one of six districts that didn't meet objectives in either test scores, test participation, graduation or attendance. Madison fell short in reading scores for the second year in a row and math scores for the first time.
Madison was one of three districts identified as being in need of improvement -- a distinction that comes after two or more years of not meeting standards in one of the categories.
Sixteen Madison schools didn't meet one or more of the objectives, up from five last year. Leopold elementary, Cherokee and Toki middle, and East, Memorial and La Follette high schools were identified as needing improvement.
I NOTICED this post by Robin Hanson a couple of weeks ago, teasing the question of how, if one feels that we should redistribute income to compensate for unfairness and limit socially damaging inequality, one could justify not redistributing grade-point averages for the same reasons. Mr Hanson riffs off a video of a waggish student asking a number of baffled campus-goers whether they would be willing to take part in redistributing their GPAs, and notes that students in his classes have been similarly stonkered. Since then XPostFactoid and Megan McArdle have both weighed in.
I find the dilemma here a little hard to seize for reasons that have surely been pointed out by many in comment threads, namely that we do in fact heavily redistribute grade-point averages, for many of the same reasons we redistribute income. This situation strikes me as more or less fine. In the very worst schools in America, some students have 3.0 GPAs, even though the students who earn a 3.0 GPA in those schools would be hard pressed to maintain a 1.0 GPA in America's best schools. Work for which students receive B's in poor schools would earn failing grades in top schools. Classes in many subjects even within highly competitive universities are explicitly graded on a curve, particularly some hard-science classes. All of this represents a profound top-down effort to ration educational-credit goods according to a predetermined ideal distribution.
Better public schools are obviously crucial to the future of Rhode Island's students, particularly poor and minority ones, and to its overall economic future.
One of the brightest signs in a long time that Rhode Island can turn things around is the mayoral academy concept, which is thriving in Cumberland, serving that community, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Lincoln. Through the bold leadership of the region's mayors and with the strong support of the General Assembly (especially House Speaker Gordon Fox), it is doing wonderful work.
Dedicated teachers there spend long hours helping students dramatically advance in math, reading and writing, free of union red tape. A mark of the esteem in which parents hold the school is that 877 children vied in April for only 250 open spots, chosen strictly by lottery.
Now, Cranston Mayor Alan Fung is working hard to bring that concept to his city and Providence through a new mayoral-academy program. His plan calls for an academy to grow into two elementary schools, two middle schools and a high school over the next decade.
The state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education is slated to decide whether to go forward on June 16. Though Governor Chafee has stripped that board of some of its most dedicated reformers, members owe it to the children of Rhode Island to move forward with this promising effort.
It all comes down to the quality of instruction. Good schools hire and develop good teachers that provide instruction of consistent quality. And that comes down to execution. Achievement First is a charter network that is very good at execution and, as a result, is one the best networks in the country.
The good news is that the innovative Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA) organization convinced AF to come to RI. ProJo.com said: "One of the brightest signs in a long time that Rhode Island can turn things around is the mayoral academy concept, which is thriving in Cumberland, serving that community, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Lincoln. Through the bold leadership of the region's mayors and with the strong support of the General Assembly (especially House Speaker Gordon Fox), it is doing wonderful work."
The bad news is that "union members packed a hearing on May 26 and urged state officials to reject this opportunity. Some charged that mayoral academies would "siphon" money from the system." Unfortunately the 'protect the system' argument has Rhode Island politicians wavering.
"They're ready," Matthews said afterward, "to do whatever it takes."
After 43 years as executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., Matthews is in the spotlight again after encouraging a four-day sick-out that closed school in February. The action allowed teachers to attend protests at the Capitol over Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to curb collective bargaining by public employees. The matter remains in the courts, but it prompted a hasty contract negotiation between the district and union.
Teachers aren't happy about some of the changes, and Matthews is preparing for a street fight.
"It's going to get down and dirty," Matthews said, alluding to the possibility of more job actions, such as "working the contract" - meaning teachers wouldn't work outside required hours - if the School Board doesn't back off changes in the contract. "You can't continually put people down and do things to control them and hurt them and not have them react."
Moreover, the latest battle over collective bargaining has taken on more personal significance for Matthews, whose life's work has been negotiating contracts.
Big U.S. employers, worried about replacing retiring baby boomers, are wading deeper into education and growing bolder about telling educators how to run their business.
Several initiatives have focused on manufacturing and engineering, fields where technical know-how and math and science skills are needed and where companies worry about recruiting new talent.
Their concerns are borne out by the math and science test scores of 15-year-old students in the U.S., which continue to lag behind China, Japan, South Korea and Germany, for example.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report in May that said higher education had failed to "tap the potential of digital technology" in ways that would "transform learning, dramatically lower costs or improve overall institutional productivity."
The Chamber report praised Internet educational institutions like Khan Academy, which built its reputation on YouTube.com math lessons.
State Superintendent Tony Evers on Monday blasted the Legislature's budget committee for its late-night vote Friday to expand to Green Bay a program that allows students to attend private and religious schools at taxpayer expense.
The voucher expansion should be removed from the state budget and "a true local public debate needs to occur," Evers said in a statement. He also referred to the budget committee's vote to include Racine in the voucher program Thursday night.
"Raising taxes on the citizens of Green Bay and Racine in the dead of night, without public hearings or the support of their locally elected school officials echoes the type of non-representative, undemocratic actions taken by the English parliament against the American colonists through their stamp and tea taxes," Evers said.
He raised several questions about the action Friday night by the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee to include in the state budget an expansion of the school voucher program for Green Bay.
Green Bay property taxpayers are now on track to pay millions for private and religious schools, Evers said. "At the same time, their public school system is being cut $40 million, which will certainly raise class sizes and reduce educational opportunities for public school students."
In response, Superintendent Nerad directed West to start providing honors courses in the fall of 2010. West staff protested, however, and Nerad retracted the directive.
Community members sent another petition in July, 2010-this time signed by 188 supporters-again calling for multiple measures of identification and advanced levels of core courses for 9th and 10th graders at West. This time there was no response but silence.
In the meantime, Greater Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire told us: "The law is there for a reason. Use it."
So, after years of trying to work with the system, we filed a formal complaint with the DPI in September, 2010. Little did we know what upheaval the next months would bring. In October, the district administration rolled out its College and Career Readiness Plan; teachers at West agitated, and students staged a sit-in. In February, our new governor issued his reform proposal; protesters massed at the Capitol, and school was called off for four days.
In the meantime, the DPI conducted its investigation. Though our complaint had targeted West for its chronic, blatant, willful violations, the DPI extended its audit to the entire Madison School District.
In the raging debate over school choice--perhaps the only educational issue that gets heated enough to interest politicians--the combatants, including me, tend to go with our own conclusions rather than the research. Timothy Hacsi in his 2002 book "Children As Pawns" showed this is the way we usually argue about schools in America.
But research is still being done. It is refreshing to find a new book presenting some of the most recent findings, as disturbing as they might be to my favorite biases. "School Choice and School Improvement," edited by Mark Berends, Marisa Cannata and Ellen B. Goldring, is the latest offering of Vanderbilt University's National Center on School Choice.
Here are what the data say. Feel free to ignore if it conflicts with your arguments. I certainly will:
Recently I participated in a panel discussion following a showing of the film " Waiting for Superman ." The film is deeply moving. Only a heart of granite would remain unmoved by the plight of the children and caretakers as they learn they would not get into their schools of choice.
In the discussion, Jim Johnson, a UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School professor and founder of the Union Independent School in Durham, made a crucial observation. He noted that the debate around public charter schools versus traditional public schools, or private versus public schools, deflected us from the underlying issue: the plight of children who have no adult advocates.
As Johnson pointed out, despite failing to win a place in their school of choice, the students featured in the film all had a least one adult in their lives who knowledgeably advocated for them and cared deeply about their learning opportunities.
Last summer, Maryland won a $250 million federal grant with a promise to build a model to evaluate teachers and principals that would be "transparent and fair" and tie their success for the first time to student test scores and learning.
Now, the state that prides itself on cutting-edge practices and top-in-the-nation schools is struggling -- along with every state or school system that has ever tried -- to come up with a reliable formula for improving the teacher workforce and rooting out the lowest performers.
If Gov. Scott Walker's budget is passed with recommendations approved Thursday by the Joint Committee on Finance, there will be more students in more voucher schools in more Wisconsin communities.
But critics of school voucher programs are hoping legislators will look long and hard at actual student achievement benefits before they vote to use tax dollars to send students to private schools. They also suggest that studies that have touted benefits of voucher programs should be viewed with a careful eye, and that claims that graduation rates for voucher schools exceed 90 percent are not just overly optimistic, but misleading.
"The policy decisions we are making today should not be guided by false statistics being propagated by people with a financial interest in the continuation and expansion of vouchers nationwide," wrote state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, in a news release Friday.
Pope-Roberts is particularly critical of statistics that school choice lobbyists and pro-voucher legislators are using that claim that 94 percent of school voucher students graduated from high school in four years.
It's good news, she says, but it tells a very selective story about a relatively small subset of students who were studied. That graduation rate reflects only the graduation rate for students who actually remained in the voucher program for all four years: Just 318 of the 801 students who began the program stayed with it.
Instead of playing cricket with the kids in the alleyway outside, four-year-old Sumit Jha sweats in his family's one-room apartment. A power cut has stilled the overhead fan. In the stifling heat, he traces and retraces the image of a goat.
In April, he enrolled in the nursery class of Shri Ram School, the most coveted private educational institution in India's capital. Its students include the grandchildren of India's most powerful figures--Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party President Sonia Gandhi.
Sumit, on the other hand, lives in a slum.
His admission to Shri Ram is part of a grand Indian experiment to narrow the gulf between rich and poor that is widening as India's economy expands. The Right to Education Act, passed in 2009, mandates that private schools set aside 25% of admissions for low-income, underprivileged and disabled students. In Delhi, families earning less than 100,000 rupees (about $2,500 a year) qualify.
Shri Ram, a nontraditional school founded in 1988, would seem well-suited to the experiment. Rather than drill on rote learning, as many Indian schools do, Shri Ram encourages creativity by teaching through stories, songs and art. In a typical class, two teachers supervise 29 students; at public schools nearby, one teacher has more than 50. Three times a day, a gong sounds and teachers and students pause for a moment of contemplation. Above the entrance, a banner reads, "Peace."
Mr. Educational Landscape Watcher here, with his jaw hanging open while he thinks about a few questions that boil down to this: What next?
In January, Gov. Scott Walker told a convention of school board members and administrators from around Wisconsin that he was going to give them new tools to deal with their financial issues. Naïve me - I thought he meant bigger hammers and saws.
It turned out Walker was thinking along the lines of those machines that can strip-mine most of China in a week.
Goodness gracious, look at where things stand less than five months later, with more earth moving and drama ahead. Every public school in Wisconsin will be different in important ways because of what has happened in Madison. The private school enrollment in the Milwaukee and Racine areas will get a boost, maybe a large one. The decisions many people make on schooling for their kids are likely to be changed by what has happened in Madison. And then there's the future of Milwaukee Public Schools (he said with a shudder).
As the Legislature's budget committee wraps up its work, let's venture thoughts on a few questions:
In 2008, MMSD received a 5.3 million dollar grant Smaller Learning Communities Grant from the federal government. This grant is known locally as Relationships, Engagement, and Learning (REaL). Work to date has focused on developing teacher capacity, aligning curriculum, improving instructional practice all for the end goal of improving student achievement. During the 2010-11 school year, MMSD unveiled a comprehensive process plan for aligning curriculum PrK-12 with specific focus on the four high schools. The attached report serves as a status update on the MMSD High School Curriculum Alignment Process.
In the mountains of southwestern Virginia, Gequetta Bright Laney taught public high school students this spring about a subject of keen interest to the region's biggest employer: the economics of coal mining.
"Where there's coal, there's opportunity," Bright Laney told her class at Coeburn High School in Wise County.
Her lessons, like others in dozens of public schools across the country, were approved and funded by the coal industry. Such efforts reflect a broader pattern of private-sector attempts to influence what gets taught in public schools.
Eager to burnish its reputation, the energy industry is spending significant sums of money on education in communities with sensitive coal, natural gas and oil exploration projects. The industry aims to teach students about its contributions to local economies and counter criticism from environmental groups.
For the most part, organizations are incapable of innovating. Most organizations are founded with a particular mission and method for pursuing that mission. If circumstances require that the mission or method be changed, organizations generally can't do it. They'll just keep doing what they were initially established to do until they can no longer continue operating.
Progress occurs not by turning around failing institutions, but by replacing those organizations with new ones that have a better mission and/or method. Of the original 500 companies included in the S&P 500 in 1957 only 74 (15%) exist today as independent companies. In the private sector, innovation primarily occurs by replacing or fundamentally re-organizing organizations and not by "reforming" them.
And while U.S. real GDP has nearly quintupled since 1970, education achievement of 17 year-olds and high school graduation rates have remained basically unchanged over the same time period. Perhaps the reason for progress in the economy but not in education stems from our willingness to allow new organizations to replace old ones in the private sector, but not in education.
Over the past few weeks, America's colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year's graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year's graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
High School course sequence and alignment by course title across the four large high schools is nearly complete. All course titles will be fully aligned by 2011-12. This allows us to look at fine arts courses that are being offered at all of our high schools and what courses are more building-specific. Fine Arts Leadership Teams and High School Department chairs have discussed the equity (and inequity) across the attendance areas, and these two groups will offer recommendations during the 2011- 12 school year to improve access for all students to a wide variety of high school fine arts offerings.
Through the new Curricular Materials budget process now managed by Curriculum & Assessment (formerly ELM), the purchase of the Silver Burdett Making Music series for all elementary schools began this spring. All kindergarten books have been purchased, and 1" grade materials will be purchased with the 2011-12 Curriculum Materials budget. The decision was made to purchase one grade at a time so that all elementary schools have equitable resources.
Funds from the Curricular Materials budget and the Fine Arts Task Force allocation were used to purchase REMO World Music Drumming instruments and curriculum forall32elementaryschools. Schools were assessed on their current inventory- some schools received full sets and some schools will divide sets based on need. All schools will receive the full complement o f curriculum materials, and professional development in 2011-12 will include world music drumming and drum circles.
2010-11 was the first year in which a formal curricular review cycle has been initiated. According to the program review cycle approved by the MMSD Board of Education, literacy was the first area to be reviewed. As a part of an intensive first year (Year 1) review cycle, the Literacy Evaluation and Recommendations were presented to the Board in February, 2011. At the March, 2011 Board meeting, a panel presentation was made in addition to sharing updated action plans and budget implications. Additional budget clarifications were made at the April, 2011 Board meeting.
Recommendations Requested on June 6, 2011
It is recommended that the Board approve the Literacy Program Evaluation: Findings and Recommendations.
It is recommended that the Board approve $611,000 to support the Literacy Program Evaluation recommendations. $531,000 of this amount is included in the Superintendent's 2011-12 Balanced Budget Funding for READ 180 in the amount of $80,000 is included in the recommended funding for additions to the 2011-12 cost-to-continue budget (memo dated May 16, 2011) from cost savings measures.
It is recommended that the Board approve the plan to purchase learning materials to support literacy in the amount of $415,000. In October, 2011, the Board requested a plan to outline the purchase. This plan supports the Literacy Evaluation Recommendations, including K-12 literacy instructional materials, Dual Language Immersion, and equity purchases. Funding for the $415,000 purchases is included in 2010-11 contingency accounts (Fund 10) transferred to Curriculum & Assessment (Fund 10) to supplement the Instructional Learning Materials Budget (ELM).
Supporting Documentation
The full report, K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation: Findings and Recommendation for Continual Improvement of Literacy Achievement & K-12 Alignment was submitted by courier to the Board on February 22, 2011. This document is in a 3-ring binder, and is not being re-sent in this packet
A summary document, titled Recommendations, Cost Considerations and Plan Description (dated March 17, 2011) provides more detail regarding how the action steps are being carried and reflects the most current budget requests totaling $611,000.
Recommendations #1 - #5:
Recommendations #1-#5 focus on increasing mathematical knowledge for teaching in MMSD 's middle school teachers of mathematics. These recommendations address our workforce, hiring practices, professional development, partnerships with the UW and work with the Wisconsin DPI to change certification requirements.
The C&A Executive Director, C&A Assistant Director, Deputy Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools and Mathematics Instructional Resource Teacher met with Human Resources to discuss the implementation of the district-wide expectation for the hiring and retention of Math Specialists. This team created wording to be inserted into all middle school positions that state expectations for teachers involved in teaching mathematics.
The Mathematics Instructional Resource Teacher from Curriculum and Assessment has visited middle schools across Madison to share information with teaching staff and answer questions regarding the Middle School Math Specialist professional development program and the associated expectation for middle school teachers of mathematics. The resource teacher has also met with the Middle School Math Leadership Academy, and the Learning Coordinators to share information and answer questions. A website was created to provide easy access to the needed information. (A copy of the website is attached as Appendix E.)
The Middle School Math Specialist Advisory group that includes UW Mathematics, UW Mathematics Education, Education Outreach and Partnerships, and Madison Metropolitan School District has met throughout the year to provide updates, guidance to the development of the Math Specialist program, and continual feedback on the courses and implementation.
The first cohort of classes in the Middle School Math Specialist program being offered at UW-Madison began in August of20!0. During the first year, the three courses were co-taught by representatives from UW-Mathematics (Shirin Malekpour), UW- ( Mathematics Education (Meg Meyer), and MMSD (Grant Goettl). A total of22 MMSD teachers participated, with seven completing one course, two completing two courses, and ten completing all three offered courses. The topics of study included number properties, proportional reasoning, and geometry.
The first cohort will continue into their second year with eleven participants. The topics of study will include algebra and conjecture. The first cohort will complete the five course sequence in the spring of 2012.
The second cohort is currently being recruited. Advertising for this cohort began in March and sign-up began in April. This cohort will begin coursework in August of 2011. In the first year they will participate in three courses including the study of number properties, proportional reasoning, and geometry. This cohort will complete the five course sequence in the spring of 2013.
The tentative plan for facilitation of the 2011-2012 courses is as follows:
As educators, one of our defining beliefs is the principle that we do not use the students entrusted in our care as a vehicle for promoting and accomplishing our political agendas. We hold to this core value even when the political agendas we are pursuing involves causes that will better the lives of those young people, such as full funding for day care centers and schools. When communities and families send their young to us to be educated, they trust that we will exercise the authority given to us as teachers responsibly: we do not manipulate young people into political action they do not fully understand, but educate them into the skills and knowledge of democratic citizenship, in order that one day they will be prepared to make and act on their own informed choices of political action.
So when Eva Moskowitz and her Harlem Success Academies turned out students and parents to support the closing of district schools at the February meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, many of us present were shocked at the way in which 5 year old and 6 year old children were sent to the microphones to speak words they clearly did not understand, put into their mouths by adults who called themselves educators, even as they ignored our most fundamental professional ethics. But if we were paying attention, we would have seen that this crass political exploitation of children is actually a consistent behavior of Moskowitz and Harlem Success.
Suen gets tough in textbook dispute: Publishers are told they must separately sell teaching materials and school books, or other parties such as universities will be allowed to enter market
Secretary for Education Michael Suen Ming-yeung yesterday threw down the gauntlet to school textbook publishers, saying the government would take over publishing them unless "monopolies" get serious about selling the books and teaching materials separately.
Advocacy groups welcomed the idea, saying it would lower prices, but publishers described the one-year ultimatum as "mission impossible".
Publishers last year pledged to separately sell textbooks and teaching materials, which can cost twice as much as the textbooks. But they recently said it would take another three years to do so.
This year, we had some truly remarkable news regarding our state assessments. For the first time, Rhode Island high-school students outscored their peers in New Hampshire and Vermont in reading and writing. That's right: Rhode Island high-school students were the best.
Across our state, we see examples of success and pockets of excellence. Many of our schools are moving from good to great. We have the skills and the knowledge base to create a system of public schools in which all students have access to excellence. But we are not there yet.
Our mathematics and science scores, particularly in high school, are far too low. And nearly one of every four students fails to graduate.
To transform education in Rhode Island, we need to turn around our lowest-achieving schools and get them on the road toward success. We have to close the achievement gaps that separate some student groups from others.
Wide gaps separate the performance of our students with disabilities, our English-language learners, and our students living in poverty from their peers across the state. Our Hispanic students, for example, are the lowest-achieving in the country in mathematics - a fact we cannot tolerate and must change.
Even our highest-performing schools can improve their achievement levels. We need to raise our graduation rates, increase the percentages of students going to college, and provide multiple pathways for students seeking entry into challenging and rewarding careers.
Panel moderator and executive director of the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program Ross Wiener underlined that an adversarial relationship between management and labor is not inevitable if both sides are committed to maximizing student outcomes by providing the best-equipped, most effective teachers.
The partnership between PPS and the PFT is a powerful example of what's possible when districts and unions honestly confront the issues, and when leaders on both sides are willing to change. "Pittsburgh's pursuit of an ambitious reform agenda through cooperative efforts offers a powerful counterpoint to the current focus on union-district discord," said Wiener. "While collaboration can't substitute for a substantive improvement agenda, there's every reason to believe we'll make more progress when people are working together. Genuine collaboration will look different in every context, but there are important lessons in Pittsburgh's journey."
Hosted by the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program, the panel discussion was based upon release of its newest report: "Forging a New Partnership: The Story of Teacher Union and School District Collaboration in Pittsburgh." The report, authored by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff writer Sean Hamill, provides an in-depth look at the breakthrough collaboration that took place in Pittsburgh over the past five years. The report also highlights important principles applicable to other districts across the US.
In the long run, education is the issue that will most determine this country's role in the world.
In the long run, it will be the position of the leaders of the Democratic party, state by state and in congress, that will determine the quality of education in America. Democrats have historically supported increased spending but not always measures that increase quality. DFER makes the case in its statement of principles:
A first-rate system of public education is the cornerstone of a prosperous, free and just society, yet millions of American children today - particularly low-income and children of color - are trapped in persistently failing schools that are part of deeply dysfunctional school systems. These systems, once viewed romantically as avenues of opportunity for all, have become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children. This perverse hierarchy of priorities is political, and thus requires a political response.
The state's top education official told lawmakers Wednesday that it will take more than money and standardized tests to improve Rhode Island's public schools.
In an address to a joint session of the state House and Senate, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said parents, teachers and elected leaders must work together to increase student performance and turn out graduates ready for jobs or college.
"To transform our schools, we must also transform the culture," she told lawmakers. "We need to speak out in support of public education and the things we believe in, but we should not question the good intentions of those with whom we disagree. We must never let our dialogue and discourse become toxic."
Robyn Bagley is the chair for Parents for Choice in Education and recently sat down with the Comcast Newsmakers. She is discussing the Utah Statewide Online Program that was passed in the previous session. Learn more about the digital learning and news that is occurring in Utah now.
ids, step away from the scalpels.
In a win for animal rights activists, foregoing the formaldehyde-laced high school rite of passage, Rancho Verde High School in Moreno Valley, California will swap real frogs for their virtual counterparts. In exchange for a minimum five-year commitment, the school will receive free software courtesy of animal-rights groups who advocate for the virtual curriculum.
While the school's assistant principal, Kevin Stipp, said the virtual lesson will not be the same as performing the dissection on a real animal, he told the Riverside Press Enterprise, "it's not so drastically different that the kids won't get something out of it."
The for-profit college boom looks an awful lot like the subprime mortgage bubble. But it's the differences that can teach us how to change the market for higher education.
In the 2000s, home prices went on an historic tear. Easy credit backstopped by government loan guarantees and securitized by Wall Street created excess demand for residential investment. "Fringey" market players like exurban developers and subprime lenders finally blew the bubble past the breaking point.
When a bubble watcher like Vikram Mansharamani looks at the market for higher education, he can't help but find parallels. Historic price increase? College inflation outpaces health care inflation. Easy credit? Total financial aid for college has doubled since 2002. Fringey market players? For-profit schools stand accused of luring low-income students into government-sponsored debt to obtain degrees of questionable value. Easy money, moral hazard, artificial demand? Check, check, check.
But the parallels between the housing bubble and education have their limits. The Great Recession started with a domino of broken promises and failed expectations. Families stopped paying back mortgages, banks wrote down mortgage-backed assets, contagion spread. In education, the domino line is shorter. If students don't pay back their loans to the federal government, the government just pays itself the difference. The only way for the market to change is for Washington to change the market.
At 10:35 a.m. on a Wednesday, six seniors at the Calhoun School, a progressive private school on the Upper West Side, were discussing the role of social class in "Year of Wonders," a historical novel about an English village hit by the plague in the 17th century.
At noon, the students were still at it. They had moved on from deconstructing the novel, by Geraldine Brooks, to hashing out topics for research papers in the science and social studies class, called Disease and Society: one wanted to tackle 17th-century grave digging in London; another would explore the obligation midwives had to report illegitimate children. Throughout, they had staged only one mutiny, asking to work elsewhere because the classroom was first too cold, then too intellectually stifling (requests denied).
If the subject matter was a bit unusual for high school students, the amount of time they had to grapple with it was more so -- 2 hours 10 minutes, in what is called a class block. Long blocks became standard this year at Calhoun, as part of a radical attempt to alter the structure of the school day and school year.
Parents in Fairfax County have proved themselves one of the largest and most powerful forces for innovation in American education. But they have taken a wrong turn in their effort to save the three-track system--basic, honors and AP/IB-- in the county's high schools.
Many Fairfax parents actively oppose the elimination of honors courses in upper high school grades. They don't want to leave their children with the choice of just the basic course or the college level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate version. "Let's keep choices on the table," West Potomac High School parent Kate Van Dyck told me.
They can win this fight and keep the honors courses, but it will take some courage and imagination. Instead of insisting on the old three tracks, tell the schools to keep the honors option and eliminate the basic course.
The Common Core standards released in 2010 for English language arts and mathematics have already been adopted by dozens of states. Just how much change do these new standards represent, and what is the nature of that change? In this article, the Common Core standards are compared with current state standards and assessments and with standards in top-performing countries, as well as with reports from a sample of teachers from across the country describing their own practices.
The Common Core standards released in 2010 represent an unprecedented shift away from disparate content guidelines across individual states in the areas of English language arts and mathematics. Led jointly by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the Common Core State Standards Initiative developed these standards as a state-led effort to establish consensus on expectations for student knowledge and skills that should be developed in Grades K-12. By late 2010, 36 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the standards (http://www.corestandards.org/). These standards are therefore poised to be widely adopted and to become entrenched in state education policy.
Some of New Hampshire's college graduates are questioning the value of their education while they struggle to find jobs in their fields of study and attempt to become independent adults.
But while the job market is still tough, a recent study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers says it isn't quite as bad as it was last year and that this year's graduating class is more likely to have a job offer in hand.
That, however, is not the case for Nate Rowe, who graduated this month from Keene State College with a degree in environmental studies. Rowe has sent out about 75 job applications.
"Most people say that I don't have the experience needed. The problem is that I can't get any experience without first getting a job," said the New Durham resident who has moved back in with his parents until he is able to get a steady paycheck.
Jeff Kirsch knows what it's like to stand on stage at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and for the last few years he has helped teens from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado make it there.
This year, Kirsch, director of the Spanish and Portuguese Independent Learning program in the UW-Madison division of continuing studies, is coaching two students and is spending this week in Washington, D.C., cheering them on.
In addition to coaching Waunakee's Parker Dietry this spring, Kirsch has spent about six months tutoring David Phan, a third-time contestant in the national bee from Boulder, Colo.
"Most spellers do have a parent who is actively helping them, but most don't have a parent who is a former spelling champion who knows multiple languages," said Kirsch, who knows six languages and can teach spelling patterns and exceptions in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Latin.
Madalyn Richmond seems to have little time for competitive spelling.
First, there is school. Then there are sports: volleyball, basketball, softball and track. And then there is music: piano, saxophone and choir.
But winning a classroom spelling bee when she was in fifth grade "really inspired me, and I studied a whole lot that year," Maddie, 13, said last week.
She went on to win the Williams County, Ohio, bee in 2009 and finished eighth in The Journal Gazette Regional Spelling Bee. Maddie repeated as county winner as a sixth-grader and finished fifth in the regional bee in 2010.
She captured her third straight county bee this year and won the 17-county regional bee, which is presented by Touchstone Energy Cooperatives and IPFW.
Waunakee's Parker Dietry will get his chance to spell on national television Thursday as one of 41 spellers who advanced Wednesday to the semifinal round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Parker correctly spelled "fennec" in Round 2 and "dossier" in Round 3. The points he earned for spelling those words correctly combined with his score on Tuesday's written test propelled him to the next round.
"It's going to be really cool to be on ESPN," Dietry said Wednesday from the competition in Washington, D.C.
Daughter comes home from school in the usual mood, with a smile and offhand assurances that school was fine and everything's fine and so on and so forth, but: for moment I catch her staring into the Void, a shadow on her features, and it's time for the parental probe: what's the matter? Oh nothing. C'mon. Something's the matter. You know I'll ask until I get it. Nothing's the matter. i can tell. Nothing - well, there was this one thing.
And so it transpired that she did not get the score in Technology class she thought she deserved, at least relative to the other Powerpoints the kids had done. They had do a PP on an animal. As far as she could tell she had the same amount of content, and applied transitions to the bullet points, which no one else did. Then she said that the kids who got higher marks used all kinds of transitions between the slides, and she only used a fade, so maybe that was it, but that was STUPID.
On September 20,2010, eight residents of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) filed a complaint (numerous others were listed as supporting the complaint) alleging the school district was not in compliance with the Gifted and Talented (G/T) standard, Wis. Stat. sec. 121.02(1)(t), that requires that each school board shall "provide access to an appropriate program for pupils identified as gifted and talented." Based upon this complaint, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (department) initiated an audit pursuant to Wis. Admin Code sec. PI 8.02. The purpose ofthe audit was to determine whether the school district is in compliance with Wis. Stat. sees. 121.02(1)(t) and 118.35, and Wis. Admin. Code
sec. PI 8.01(2)(t)2. The investigation focused on three core content areas: English/language arts; science; and social studies; in particular at the 9th and 1oth grade levels, per the letter of complaint.
The department informed the school district of the audit on October 13, 2010, and requested information and documentation for key components of the G/T plan. The school district provided a written response and materials on November 29, 2010 and supplemental materials on December 21 , 2010.
On January 25 and 26, 2011, a team of four department representatives conducted an on-site audit which began with a meeting that included the school board president, the district administrator, the deputy superintendent, the secondary assistant superintendent, the executive director of curriculum and assessment, the interim Talented and Gifted (TAG) administrator, an elementary TAG resource teacher, a secondary TAG resource teacher, and legal counsel. After this meeting, the team visited East, West, LaFollette, and Memorial High Schools. At each of these sites, the team conducted interviews with the building principal, school counselors, teachers, and students. At the end ofeach ofthe two days the department team met with parents.
TEN years ago, Congress adopted the No Child Left Behind legislation, mandating that all students must be proficient in reading or mathematics by 2014 or their school would be punished.
Teachers and principals have been fired and schools that were once fixtures in their community have been closed and replaced. In time, many of the new schools will close, too, unless they avoid enrolling low-performing students, like those who don't read English or are homeless or have profound disabilities.
Educators know that 100 percent proficiency is impossible, given the enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance. Nevertheless, some politicians believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers.
To prove that poverty doesn't matter, political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain.
Today, the following members of Chiefs for Change, Janet Barresi, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Information; Tony Bennett, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction; Steve Bowen, Maine Commissioner of Education; Chris Cerf, New Jersey Commissioner of Education; Deborah A. Gist, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education; Kevin Huffman, Tennessee Commissioner of Education; Eric Smith, Florida Commissioner of Education; and Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Public Education Department Secretary-Designate, released a statement supporting the National Council on Teacher Quality's colleges of education review.
"Great teachers make great students. Preparing teachers with the knowledge and skills to be effective educators is paramount to improving student achievement. Ultimately, colleges of education should be reviewed the same way we propose evaluating teachers - based on student learning."
"Until that data becomes available in every state, Chiefs for Change supports the efforts of the National Council on Teacher Quality to gather research-based data and information about the nation's colleges of education. This research can provide a valuable tool for improving the quality of education for educators."
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
I've been watching as UW Madison moves into the post-NBP phase of life (wait, there is life after NBP?). In particularly, I'm finding the (re)framing of recent events by NBP proponents both fascinating, and disturbing.
Spin is, to some degree, expected. We can't blame Chancellor Martin for trying to save face, or Governor Walker for that matter.
What I didn't expect, and what upsets me most, is the self-righteousness evident in those who proclaim "we accomplished something here." Something, they claim, UW System did not. Could not. Would not.
Sad and short-sighted, perhaps, but not surprising. On the other hand, a recent tweet from a Madison student stopped me in my tracks. On Saturday he wrote, "No #UWNBP. Disappointing. Looks like we have to be tied to the poor decisions #UWSystem makes." Surprised at his statement, I responded, "Ever been to System? Ever met anyone there? Why do you follow blindly what u r told? #UWNBP #UWSystem." To which he replied "It's fun to make assumptions."
Stacie Bumgarner is a research scientist in the Biology Department at MIT. She leads school outreach efforts for the Office of Educational Innovation & Technology. She is working with JFY Networks to expand the use of two sophisticated science simulations to high school students in Boston:
MONTCLAIR, New Jersey (Reuters) - School districts from coast to coast are weighing the elimination of homework on weekends and holidays, part of a move by educators to rein in student workloads.
Officials at public schools in Galloway Township, New Jersey, this week proposed no more homework on weekends and holidays for their 3,500 students, and the Pleasanton Unified School District in northern California suggested drastic changes to homework policy for the 14,500-student district.
The moves come in response to complaints from parents that children spend too many after-school hours buried in work, and concerns from teachers that test preparation trumps learning.
If you are a successful actor, businessman or novelist, you are likely to be famous. If you are a successful school, forget about it. That's why most people have never heard of the two schools at the top of this year's Washington Post High School Challenge rankings of American high schools.
Two Dallas public magnet schools -- the School of Science & Engineering and the Gifted & Talented Magnet -- are ranked first and second on the national list, based on participation rates on college-level tests. They share a building with four other small magnets near the middle of the city. They have been at or near the top of the list for several years, but their principals and teachers are rarely if ever seen on national news.
That is probably a good thing. Celebrity gets in the way of serious work. Engineering & Science, Talented & Gifted and the rest of the 1,910 high schools (including more than 140 in the Washington area) recognized on the list have staffs dedicated to raising students to new levels of achievement. At Science & Engineering, 63 percent of students come from families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. At Talented & Gifted, the percentage is 33 percent. Most magnets that admit students based on academic credentials have few kids from low-income families, but these two schools work hard to convince disadvantaged students that they will thrive taking Advanced Placement courses as early as ninth grade. Those educators fulfill that promise.
Steven Wolfram, the man behind computing-application Mathematica and the search engine Wolfram Alpha, has a short attention span that's married to a long-term outlook.
Wolfram Alpha is an online service that computes the answers to queries (e.g., age pyramid for the Philippines or glycogen degradation pathway rather than searching for those terms showing up on webpages.
When asked what his favorite query is, the particle physicist and MacArthur "genius" award recipient says he's enamored that Wolfram Alpha can tell you about the plane you just saw flying over your town -- in his case "flights visible from Concord, Massachusetts."
Many popular students approach graduation day with bittersweet nostalgia: excitement for the future is tempered by fear of lost status. But as cap-and-gown season nears, let's also stop to consider the outcasts, students for whom finishing high school feels like liberation from a state-imposed sentence.
In seven years of reporting from American middle and high schools, I've seen repeatedly that the differences that cause a student to be excluded in high school are often the same traits or skills that will serve him or her well after graduation.
Examples abound: Taylor Swift's classmates left the lunch table as soon as she sat down because they disdained her taste for country music. Last year, the Grammy winner was the nation's top-selling recording artist.
Students mocked Tim Gunn's love of making things; now he is a fashion icon with the recognizable catchphrase "Make it work."
J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling "Harry Potter" series, has described herself as a bullied child "who lived mostly in books and daydreams." It's no wonder she went on to write books populated with kids she describes as "outcasts and comfortable with being so."
For many, says Sacred Heart University psychology professor Kathryn LaFontana, high school is the "first foray into the adult world where [kids] have to think about their own status." And for teenagers, says LaFontana, who studies adolescent peer relationships and social status, "the worst thing in the world is to be different from other people; that's what makes someone unpopular."
Literary agent Andrew Wylie is of the old school. His office suite in New York's Fisk Building feels more like a faculty lounge than a synergistic, new-media conglomerate. But the Wylie Agency, which represents some 750 clients, including a who's who of the literary establishment--Roth, Updike, Rushdie--has been at the vanguard of changes in the book industry world-wide. With the advent of e-books and the demise of Borders, the publishing establishment may seem to be crumbling. Yet Wylie, renowned for his ability to extract huge advances from tightfisted publishers, doesn't seem to be much ruffled.
Nicknamed "The Jackal" for his aggressive deal-making, Wylie struck terror into publishers last year by setting up a company, Odyssey Editions, to distribute electronic versions of books he represents through Amazon.com. But don't mistake him for a pop-culture version of a vulpine 15-percenter. Trim, polite and circumspect, Wylie, 63, is uncaffeinated. A New England WASP, he stands foursquare for literary elitism and good old-fashioned standards. And while he has his share of celebrity and political clients, he insists his work is all about great, lasting literature, not quick-buck synergies, "60 Minutes" tie-ins or Facebook friends.
We did not have room for everything I wanted to include in the big package of lists and stories that make up the new Challenge Index rankings of America's high schools. I moved the list this year from Newsweek--where we often called it "America's Best High Schools"-- to washingtonpost.com, where its new title is "The High School Challenge."
My editors were right not to jam in too much material. It is not always easy to find the features that are there. Please consider this a short guide to finding the inside stuff that many readers of this blog crave and that will give them more ammo to fire at me. I also provide below the Catching Up list of local schools with low Advanced Placement passing rates, something my editors and I agreed would work better on my blog.
Use this link to get to the main ranked lists, one for national and one for the Washington area. This link will take you to the Public Elites list, the schools that did not make the main lists because they were too selective. Here is the link to the full unabridged Frequently Asked Questions, which I made into a blog post. And here is the national Catching-up list.
AS DOES much else in the universe, education moves in cycles. The 1960s and 1970s saw a swell of interest in teaching styles that were less authoritarian and hierarchical than the traditional watching of a teacher scribbling on a blackboard. Today, tastes have swung back, and it is fashionable to denigrate those alternatives as so much hippy nonsense.
But evidence trumps fashion--at least, it ought to. And a paper just published in Science by Louis Deslauriers and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia suggests that at least one of the newfangled styles is indeed superior to the traditional chalk-and-talk approach.
Dr Deslauriers's lab rats were a group of 850 undergraduate engineering students taking a compulsory physics course. The students were split into groups at the start of their course, and for the first 11 weeks all went to traditionally run lectures given by well-regarded and experienced teachers. In the 12th week, one of the groups was switched to a style of teaching known as deliberate practice, which inverts the traditional university model. Class time is spent on problem-solving, discussion and group work, while the absorption of facts and formulae is left for homework. Students were given reading assignments before classes. Once in the classroom they spent their time in small groups, discussing specific problems, with the teacher roaming between groups to offer advice and respond to questions.
With few exceptions, Americans spend more on public education than anyone else in the world, but we get some of the worst results. The reason is that most of our public education systems do not properly teach students what they need to know.
That's it. There is no magic. And the federal takeovers, the jazzy new technology, Bill Gates' money, the data-gathering, reform, transformation, national initiatives, removal of teacher seniority, blaming of parents, hand-wringing in the media, and budget shifting won't change that simple fact.
In all of the local, state and federal plans for reforming and transforming public education, I see the bureaucracy growing, the taxpayer bill exploding, the people's voice being eliminated, good teachers being threatened with firing or public humiliation, and students not being taught what they need to know.
A May 25 Wall Street Journal article says some schools now charge parents fees for basic academics, as well as for extracurricular activities, graded electives and advanced classes. Those are private-school fees for a public-school education, and that's just wrong.
Call for revolution in English teaching: Professor says multilingual teachers who grew up speaking Cantonese provide a better model for Hong Kong children than native English speakers
English should be taught in Hong Kong by multilingual teachers, not native English speakers, according to a Hong Kong education professor who is organising an international conference on English as a lingua franca, being held in the city.
"It's a revolutionary shift that we're arguing for, and it's that the multilingual way becomes the linguistic model for teaching kids English here, not that of a native English speaker," says Andy Kirkpatrick, chair professor of English as a professional language at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
Educators have long grappled with the challenge presented by chronically underperforming schools. Environments that consistently fail to prepare students for higher levels of education threaten opportunities for high school graduation, postsecondary education, and career success. The U.S. Department of Education reinforced the urgency of reversing sustained poor performance in early 2009 when it identified intensive supports and effective interventions in our lowest-achieving schools as one of its four pillars of education reform. However, federal and state policies have often situated the cause--and thus the remedies--for persistent low performance at the school level. This brief uses the experience of eight California school districts--all members of the California Collaborative on District Reform--to suggest a more systemic approach to school turnaround.
We explore the district perspective on school turnaround by describing several broad themes that emerged across the eight districts in the California Collaborative on District Reform. We also profile three of these districts to illustrate specific strategies that can create a coherent district-wide approach to turnaround. Building on these district perspectives, we explore considerations for turnaround efforts in the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
The past few weeks have seen a lively debate surrounding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Gov. Scott Walker's various proposals to expand it. It is time for researchers to weigh in.
For the past five years, as mandated by state law, we have led a national team in a comprehensive evaluation of the choice program. Our study has applied social science research methods to carefully matched sets of students in the choice program and in Milwaukee Public Schools. Whenever possible, we have used measures that are applied consistently in the public- and private-school sectors, generating true apples-to-apples comparisons.
This is what we have learned:
Competitive pressure from the voucher program has produced modest achievement gains in MPS.
The three-year achievement gains of choice students have been comparable to those of our matched sample of MPS students. The choice students are not showing achievement benefits beyond those of the students left behind in MPS.
High school students in the choice program both graduate and enroll in four-year colleges at a higher rate than do similar students in MPS. Being in the choice program in ninth grade increases by four to seven percentage points a student's prospects of both graduating from high school and enrolling in college. Students who remain in the choice program for their entire four years of high school graduate at a rate of 94%, compared with 75% for similar MPS students.
Office of the Governor, Governor's Conference Room 115 East State Capitol Madison, WI 53702
Welcome and opening remarks by Governor Walker and Superintendent Evers.
Introductions from task force members and guest members representing UW colleges of education.
A discussion of teacher training and professional development including current practices and ways to improve.
Short break.
A discussion of reading interventions including current practices and ways to improve.
A discussion of future topics and future meeting dates.
Adjournment.
Governor Scott Walker
Chair
Individuals needing assistance, pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act, should contact the Governor's office at (608) 266-1212, 24 hours before this meeting to make necessary arrangements.
This paper is the answer to a question: What would the education policies and practices of the United States be if they were based on the policies and practices of the countries that now lead the world in student performance? It is adapted from the last two chapters of a book to be published in September 2011 by Harvard Education Press. Other chapters in that book describe the specific strategies pursued by Canada (focusing on Ontario), China (focusing on Shanghai), Finland, Japan and Singapore, all of which are far ahead of the United States. The research on these countries was performed by a team assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy, at the request of the OECD.
A century ago, the United States was among the most eager benchmarkers in the world. We took the best ideas in steelmaking, industrial chemicals and many other fields from England and Germany and others and put them to work here on a scale that Europe could not match. At the same time, we were borrowing the best ideas in education, mainly from the Germans and the Scots. It was the period of the most rapid growth our economy had ever seen and it was the time in which we designed the education system that we still have today. It is fair to say that, in many important ways, we owe the current shape of our education system to industrial benchmarking.
But, after World War II, the United States appeared to reign supreme in both the industrial and education arenas and we evidently came to the conclusion that we had little to learn from anyone. As the years went by, one by one, country after country caught up to and then surpassed us in several industries and more or less across the board in precollege education. And still we slept.
"Everything about this program pushes definitions about what is a semester, what is the university, what is a classroom, and where do the faculty belong?"
In the spring of 2008, John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review, approached the Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at at the University of Southern California with a revolutionary idea. USC could increase its graduates by a factor of ten without building another room.
Every year, California adds 10,000 new teachers. And every year until 2008, USC graduated about 100. The school felt "invisible." How could it build influence without new buildings? Katzman said his new project, 2tor, Inc, an education technology company, promised a solution. Forget the brick and mortar, and go online, he said. USC was skeptical. Surely, no Web program could possibly deliver an in-classroom quality of instruction.
Katzman disagreed. I have something to show you, he said.
I thought about this (the accelerating move away from Frederick Taylor [Blekko | Britannica | Clusty] style 19th Century education that we still seem to spend buckets of money on) while attending this week's Madison School District Strategic Plan 2 year review. More on that meeting next week.
When times are tough, as they are now, and schools need to reduce their teacher rolls, the importance of teachers in our children's education demands that we keep the best.
It seems like common sense, Management 101, for any organization, company or agency that wants to do a better job in tough times. Your employees are your most important assets. So if some have to go, which ones do you keep? You save the best.
That commonsense rule of thumb should apply to schools and teachers. Research shows there is not a single school-based factor that has more of an impact on student learning than the quality of a child's teacher.
If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato's Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.
That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don't fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.
"The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking," Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global class
A one-hour elementary school lesson on gender diversity featuring all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish caused a stir in Oakland on Monday, with conservative legal defense organizations questioning the legitimacy of the topic and providing legal counsel to parents who opposed the instruction.
On Monday and today, Redwood Heights Elementary School students at every grade level were being introduced to the topic of gender diversity, with lesson plans tailored to each age group.
The lesson on gender differences was one small part of a much larger effort to offer what parents last year said they wanted at the school: a warm, welcoming, safe and caring environment for all children, said Principal Sara Stone.
The school also teaches students about the variety of families at the school and takes on the issue of bullying.
Every child in the United States deserves a world-class education.
Every child deserves to be educated to high standards that offer opportunities to be successful in an increasingly competitive global economy.
But in a world that is becoming more competitive through increasing international labor markets and rapid technological advances, the US is facing new challenges to its economic competitiveness.
Jobs in a competitive global economy are demanding higher-level skills, higher productivity, and innovation, and other nations are surpassing the US in improving their educational systems to increase achievement, reduce achievement gaps, and elevate the teaching profession.3 In other words, they are educating themselves as a way to a better economy. So must we.
THE business of gaining understanding of the world about us rarely follows a simple path from A to B. False starts, dead ends and U-turns are part of the journey. Science's ability to accept those setbacks with aplomb - to say "we got it wrong", to modify and abandon cherished notions and find new ideas and explanations that better fit the emerging facts - is what gives it incomparable power to make sense of our surroundings.
It also means we must be constantly on our toes. While revolutionary new ideas such as evolution by natural selection, or quantum physics, are once-in-a-generation occurrences, the sands of science are continually shifting in less dramatic ways. In the following, we focus on nine recent examples - a tweak of a definition here, a breaking or weakening of a once cast-iron concept there - that together form a snapshot of that process in action.
Rupert Murdoch signalled that News Corp, the media group he heads, is to make a significant new push into the education technology market, in a high-profile speech to the e-G8 conference of internet entrepreneurs and European policymakers in Paris.
Describing education as the "last holdout from the digital revolution", Mr Murdoch outlined a vision for personalised learning and more engaging lessons delivered by the world's best teachers to thousands of students via the internet.
"The same technologies that transformed every other aspect of modern life can transform education, provide our businesses with the talent they need to thrive, and give hundreds of millions of young people at the fringes of prosperity the opportunity to make their own mark on this global economy," he said.
With Joel Klein, the former New York schools chancellor hired by News Corp in November, Mr Murdoch has visited pioneering educational schemes and classrooms worldwide, including South Korea, California and Sweden.
High schools are offering a new deal at 39 Los Angeles campuses: Students who raise their scores on the state's standardized tests will be rewarded with higher grades in their classes.
If it works, schools also will benefit because low scores can lead to teachers and administrators being fired and schools being closed. A proposed teacher evaluation system relies specifically on these tests for part of an instructor's rating. Even the new superintendent's salary, and his tenure, are tied to scores on the California Standards Tests, which are administered this month.
Too many young children in Michigan aren't getting the foundation of learning they need before starting school that would allow them to succeed once their K-12 education begins. Gov. Rick Snyder is on the right track with his proposals for early education, which highlight the importance of lifelong learning.
It's a fine line for the state to walk. After all, should the state -- and taxpayer money -- be more wrapped up in making up for the shortcomings of parents? Probably not. But if the Michigan Education Department narrowly targets funding for pre-kindergarten development to the most at-risk youth and families, and offers guidance to other parents in teaching their young children themselves, it could provide a sturdier platform for these kid's futures.
In his speech on education last month, Snyder gave some startling statistics. Michigan kindergarten teachers say that only 65 percent of children enter their classrooms "ready to learn the curriculum."
A judge has tentatively ruled that a petition by a group of Compton parents to force a poorly performing elementary school to convert to a charter school could fail because the signatures on the petition were not dated.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony Mohr called the failure to document the dates when the McKinley Elementary School parents signed the petition "fatal," according to the Associated Press.
The Compton Unified School District, which governs McKinley, argued that dating each signature was crucial in determining whether a signer's child was enrolled at the school and had legal rights over the child at the time, the AP reported.
Mohr said in his tentative ruling Friday that he understood the "pain, frustration and perhaps education disadvantages" his 14-page decision might cause but added that he needed to follow the law.
Since being named to Gov. Scott Walker's Read to Lead Task Force, I have come under some political scrutiny by those who oppose the governor's conservative agenda, most notably his attempt to disenfranchise teachers of their right to bargain collectively. Evidently, there are some who feel that it is acceptable to thwart an initiative that seeks to remedy the deplorable state of reading achievement in our state and use it as a weapon to extract some measure of political redress.
I am willing to take political heat for my participation on the panel, but the fact that I must is symptomatic of why we have been stymied in our efforts to address a public health issue of pandemic proportions and leave countless children as collateral damage in the process.
Having been both a teacher and administrator, and having served several stints as my school's union representative, I am naturally opposed to any action that would reduce teacher benefits and marginalize due process protections. But such issues have no place in any discussion that seeks to address how we set about the task of building competent readers. While we have much to accomplish in that regard, there are those who would claim otherwise even though:
Two-thirds of state fourth-graders cannot demonstrate age-appropriate reading ability.
Wisconsin's rank for that same cohort has dropped precipitously over the past decade - from 3rd to 30th among all states and the District of Columbia.
As the number of students in Hawaii's charter schools grows, so has concern about oversight of these diverse campuses that rely on public money but are exempt from many state regulations.
Designed as laboratories for innovation in public education, charter schools now educate 9,000 children across the state, a nearly 50 percent jump in the past three years. Many of the state's 31 charter schools are in rural areas, tucked largely out of sight and out of mind. Other than their devotees, few people know much about them. But that might soon change.
The spotlight is shifting to these "schools of choice" that now educate about 5 percent of Hawaii's public school children under "charters," or contracts with the state. Sixteen years after Waialae Elementary became Hawaii's first charter school, the state auditor is conducting a performance audit of the charter school system, due out this summer.
In the first sentences of an opinion issued last week by the state Supreme Court, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein declared without qualification that the Georgia Charter School Commission was illegal because of an "unbroken ... constitutional authority" existing since the adoption of the 1877 Constitution giving only "local boards of education" the power to create k-12 public schools. As a result, schools for 15,000 underserved children soon may be forced out of business.
But it's the next sentence in the 1877 Constitution -- left out of the court's opinion -- that reveals the true aim of "local control" in education in that era and punctures the logic of disallowing the charter commission a say in education today.
It reads: "Separate schools shall be provided for the white and colored races."
Arguing law with the Georgia Supreme Court may be above my pay grade. But I do know something about Georgia history. And it is astonishing that the court's four-member majority, without the tiniest acknowledgement of Georgia's history of racially abusive statutes, tainted court rulings and educational malpractice with regard to black children, would unblinkingly rely on one of the bleakest moments in the state's political and legislative past for the foothold of its ruling.
Verbally is an easy-to-use, comprehensive assisted speech solution for the iPad. It is the first free Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) iPad app that enables real conversation. Just tap in your phrase and Verbally speaks for you.
State Superintendent Tony Evers [SIS link] in a memo Monday urged the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee to restore funding for public schools and work collaboratively to improve the quality of all Milwaukee schools before considering any voucher expansion.
"To spend hundreds of millions to expand a 20-year-old program that has not improved overall student achievement, while defunding public education, is morally wrong," Evers said in the memo.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed eliminating the income limits on participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, eliminating the enrollment cap and has proposed opening up private schools throughout Milwaukee County to accept vouchers from Milwaukee students. Walker has spoken of expanding the voucher program to other urban areas in the state, such as Racine, Green Bay and Beloit.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created to improve academic performance among low-income students who had limited access to high-performing schools. Low-income students use taxpayer money to attend private schools, including religious schools. Each voucher is worth $6,442. The program now is limited to 22,500 students; 20,189 are in the program this year.
However, after 20 years and spending over $1 billion, academic performance data and the enrollment history of the school choice program point to several "concerning trends," Evers said in his analysis of voucher student enrollment, achievement, and projected cost for long-term expansion.
Low-income students in Milwaukee Public Schools have higher academic achievement, particularly in math, than their counterparts in choice schools. Evers cited this year's Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts exams and the legislatively mandated University of Arkansas study, which showed significant numbers of choice students performing below average on reading and math.
At a press conference in Racine, DPI Superintendent Tony Evers gave his harshest criticism of school vouchers yet. Well beyond the typical quibbles over test scores and graduation rates, Evers claimed that school vouchers were de facto "morally wrong." It's not every day that a State Superintendent of education accuses an education-reform program of being immoral. In doing so, Tony Evers may have bitten off more than he could chew.
Calling a school voucher program morally wrong inculpates more than just the program, it inculpates parents, teachers, organizations, lawmakers, and a majority of Americans that endorse it. In fact, one could reasonably argue that Evers' statement makes himself morally culpable since Milwaukee's voucher program operates out of the Department of Public Instruction of which he is the head. What does it say about the character of a man that knowingly administers an immoral program out of his own department?
In short, Evers' argument goes something like this: voucher programs drain public schools of their financial resources; drained resources hurt children academically; hurting children academically is morally wrong; ergo, voucher programs are morally wrong.
How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturylit. I interviewed Esther about the site, and how she hopes it will serve as a useful tool for both students and educators.
How do you describe the mission for 21STcenturylit?
Wojcicki: The mission of 21STcenturylit.org is threefold: It is to teach students how to be intelligent consumers of digital media, how to be skillful creators of digital media, and to teach students how to search intelligently. We are living in an age when digital media and new digital tools are revolutionizing the world. Schools need to help students learn these skills, not block and censor the Internet.
'Watson,' the IBM super computer system that defeated the best Jeopardy! players on TV, now wants to go to medical school and beat the algorithms off the other medical computers already in the field. When asked if being late to the market was a concern, the big guy said 'Are you kidding? Once I digest 6 million medical text books and 70 million journal articles, I'll kick every lit cell in their systems out to algorithm heaven!"
Though very confident, Watson still has two years of schooling before he's ready to kick butt, but his fans are delighted with his prospects, especially those who are working with him. Recently, Watson gave the Associated Press (AP) a demonstration at IBM's T.J. Watson's research center. Columbia University medical school professor, Dr. Herbert Chase, and several students were there training Watson.
This week thousands of Arizona high school seniors will don caps and gowns and receive their high school diplomas, while others who successfully completed 12 years of schooling but failed the state's infamous AIMS test will be left feeling dejected and betrayed by our failing public education system. How can students pass all 12 grades and not pass the high-stakes test? What happens to these students now? These are but a few symptoms of Arizona's broken educational system.
Perhaps also reflecting on graduation day and the state's failing school system, the Arizona Republic recently published an editorial on education reform: 5 vital ways to reform K-12 education.
The five suggestions read like a right-wing wish list: 1) competition; 2) high expectations; 3) quality teachers; 4) intelligent use of technology; and 5) private sector involvement. Not surprisingly, the editorial was written by Craig R. Barrett, former CEO of Intel and current president and chairman of BASIS, a system of charter high schools.
When Felipe Matos enrolled in the New York Institute of Technology to study graphic design, he never thought that degree would be the very thing that prevented him from pursuing his dream career.
But more than $50,000 in student debt later, he has found himself working as an assistant building manager in New York City -- with half his salary going toward debt repayment.
"In order to get into my field, I'd have to intern," says Mr. Matos, adding that his dream job would be at Pixar, the cutting-edge animation studio. But in order to avoid defaulting on his loans, he has had to defer his dreams. "I often get depressed because I always wanted to make cartoons and 3D animations for a living but can't," he says. His debt load also is affecting his life plans beyond his career: "I have a very loving and serious girlfriend, but I'm afraid we can't have kids or get married until we are in our late 30s."
I attended Mumford High School in Detroit, from the fall of 1964 through June of 1967, the end of a period known to some as the golden age of education, and to others as an utter failure.
Raymond
I attended Mumford High School in Detroit, from the fall of 1964 through June of 1967, the end of a period known to some as the golden age of education, and to others as an utter failure. For the record I am in the former camp, a product of an era which in my opinion well-prepared me to major in mathematics. I am soon retiring from a career in environmental protection and will be entering the teaching profession where I will teach math in a manner that has served many others well over many years and which I hope will be tolerated by the people who hire me.
I was in 10th grade, taking Algebra 2. In the study hall period that followed my algebra class I worked the 20 or so homework problems at a double desk which I shared with Raymond, a black student. He would watch me do the day's homework problems which I worked with the ease and alacrity of an expert pinball player.
While I worked, he would ask questions about what I was doing, and I would explain as best I could, after which he would always say "Pretty good, pretty good"--which served both as an expression of appreciation and a signal that he didn't really know much about algebra but wanted to find out more. He said he had taken a class in it. In one assignment the page of my book was open to a diagram entitled "Four ways to express a function". The first was a box with a statement: "To find average blood pressure, add 10 to your age and divide by 2." The second was an equation P = (A+10)/2. The third was a table of values, and the last was a graph. Raymond asked me why you needed different ways to say what was in the box. I wasn't entirely sure myself, but explained that the different ways enabled you to see the how things like blood pressure changed with respect to age. Sometimes a graph was better than a table to see this; sometimes it wasn't. Not a very good explanation, I realized, and over the years I would come back to that question--and Raymond's curiosity about it--as I would analyze equations, graphs, and tables of values.
Republicans in the state Legislature want to allow school boards in Wisconsin to use teacher evaluations, which are based partly on the results of students' standardized test scores, as part of the criteria for firing or disciplining educators.
We have some concerns about the details, but it is a good idea to hold teachers accountable for their work and to make state test scores part of that process.
At the moment, student test scores can be used as part of a teacher evaluation but cannot be a basis for dismissal. While poor results on state tests never should be the sole reason for firing or disciplining a teacher, it makes little sense not to consider them as part of a holistic evaluation.
Developing meaningful evaluations is difficult, though, and the Legislature should work with teachers as well as administrators and the state Department of Public Instruction to ensure that this bill considers their perspectives.
We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified -- using voter registration records from the county where the university is located -- as either Republicans or Democrats. The evidence suggests that student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors: relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades and with lower grades awarded to Black students relative to Whites.
A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.
They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform -- one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, "They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers' union lobbyists." They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation's education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.
The Gates Foundation has funded many initiatives, including the controversial "small learning community" program.
The Milwaukee School Board and I recently had an unusual conversation. It came at the end of a meeting on our proposed budget. Struck by the sadness of the parents and teachers who had testified on the devastating impacts, and in dismay over the massive cuts to state funding offered by our governor, we came down to a question that summed up the past weeks: What do you do when the facts are not enough?
We have made considerable progress academically and financially. The 2009 McKinsey & Co. report listed potential cost savings for Milwaukee Public Schools in six areas. Efforts to trim costs for textbook purchases, food service, transportation, employee benefits and facilities were already underway when this report was released. Since 2009, the district has addressed each area and, as a result, at least $50 million has been or is scheduled to be saved.
Academic achievement is a priority. Fifty-seven percent of our schools increased their reading scores. Forty-three percent improved in math. Data released by the state Department of Public Instruction this spring shows MPS outperformed Milwaukee voucher schools on the state's test, even though the district serves a much higher proportion of students with disabilities.
SINCE the subject today is schooling, let's start with a quiz:
1. A third grader in Florida is often late for class. She tends to forget her homework and is unprepared for tests. The teacher would like to talk to her parents about this, but they fail to attend parent-teacher conferences. The teacher should:
a) fail the student.
b) fail the parents.
2. A middle-school student in Alaska is regularly absent, and his grades are suffering as a result. The district should:
a) fail the student.
b) fine the parents $500 a day for every day the student is not in school.
Politicians are usually sticks in the mud, technologywise, but that certainly wasn't the case down in Tallahassee this week. Florida legislators closed their eyes, clicked their heals, and took a giant leap forward into the Information Age, passing a budget measure that bans printed textbooks from schools starting in the 2015-16 school year. That's right: four years from now it will be against the law to give a kid a printed book in a Florida school. One lawmaker said the bill was intended to "meet the students where they are in their learning styles," which means nothing but sounds warm and fuzzy.
The reading experts and government leaders on Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" task force are taking a close look at student reading achievement in Wisconsin schools. The meetings of the task force are open to the public; my "live tweeted" notes from the April 25, 2011 inaugural meeting are here:
The New York Times reports that only half of four-year college grads are landing jobs that require a four-year degree and that starting salaries have fallen from $30,000 in 2006 to 2008 to only $27,000 in 2010-11.
And these are the lucky ones. Only 56% of four-year college grads even held a job.
These results makes a Wisconsin technical college education look quite attractive.
The Wisconsin Technical College System's Graduate Follow-up Report indicates that 88 percent of 2009- 2010 technical college graduates were employed within six months of graduation, 71% in fields related to their field of study.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett asked that at a forum of civic leaders last week.
In the biblical story, two women claiming to be the mother of the same baby take their dispute to King Solomon. He calls for a sword so he can split the baby in two and give each woman half. One woman tells him to go ahead. The second tells him to give the baby to the first so the child can live. Solomon, of course, awards the baby immediately to the second. A true mother would sacrifice just about anything, even maternal rights, to let her child live.
What does this have to do with the next couple of years for students in Milwaukee Public Schools?
This: If people act with wisdom, maturity and a willingness to sacrifice for the good of kids, there could be significant relief from cuts that will negatively affect just about all 75,000-plus students. The list could start with easing the looming big jumps in average class size.
The sacrifice part would fall largely on MPS teachers. But it would put them in line with what is almost surely going to happen to the large majority of teachers across the state.
The wisdom part would have to start with Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislative leaders. Willingness to budge on ideological points hasn't been one of their most visible traits in recent months.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led the world into the future for 150 years with scientific innovations. Its brainwaves keep the US a superpower. But what makes the university such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas?
Yo-Yo Ma's cello may not be the obvious starting point for a journey into one of the world's great universities. But, as you quickly realise when you step inside the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there's precious little about the place that is obvious.
The cello is resting in a corner of MIT's celebrated media lab, a hub of techy creativity. There's a British red telephone kiosk standing in the middle of one of its laboratories, while another room is signposted: "Lego learning lab - Lifelong kindergarten."
The cello is part of the Opera of the Future lab run by the infectiously energetic Tod Machover. A renaissance man for the 21st - or perhaps 22nd - century, Machover is a composer, inventor and teacher rolled into one. He sweeps into the office 10 minutes late, which is odd because his watch is permanently set 20 minutes ahead in a patently vain effort to be punctual. Then, with the urgency of the White Rabbit, he rushes me across the room to show me the cello. It looks like any other electric classical instrument, with a solid wood body and jack socket. But it is much more. Machover calls it a "hyperinstrument", a sort of thinking machine that allows Ma and his cello to interact with one another and make music together.
Public school officials called vouchers "morally wrong" and potentially "crippling" for Racine at a press conference Thursday.
A school choice voucher program in Racine would cost taxpayers money while hurting the academic chances of public school students, officials said during the afternoon press conference at Walden middle and high school, 1012 Center St. The press conference was held in response to a proposal from Gov. Scott Walker to expand Milwaukee's school choice voucher program, which allows low-income Milwaukee students to receive state-funded vouchers to attend participating private schools. Walker has proposed removing the low-income requirement while also expanding the program to other cities.
Public school officials who spoke in Racine Thursday think that's a bad idea.
"School vouchers have been called 'a dagger in the heart of public education' and I think there's some truth to that," Racine Unified Superintendent Jim Shaw said at the conference. He explained vouchers take needed funds away from public schools -- when a child leaves a school with a voucher about $6,000 in per pupil state aid to that school leaves with them to pay for private school tuition.
Fact finding: The creation of a three panel board that will look at the final offers from the Board of Education and CTU, publish those offers and study the validity of the different claims. The fact finding process will take over 75 days to complete.
If fact finding does not produce a resolution, then CTU members can vote to strike. In order to authorize a strike 75% of all our bargaining unit members must vote for it.
Attainment of Tenure
Under last year's PERA law, 4 ratings were established: excellent, proficient, needs improvement and unsatisfactory in a four-year probationary period. To achieve tenure, a teacher must have:
3 consecutive years of excellent ratings grants immediate tenure within 3 years.
The state Department of Education says a handful of public school districts will be picked to test new teacher evaluations beginning in September, with the bulk of New Jersey's 616 districts implementing the achievement-based reviews the following year.
Gov. Chris Christie has been pushing for revisions that would center teacher evaluations on student performance and teaching practices. Under the new system, teachers will be rated on a four-tiered scale from highly effective to highly ineffective. They will be rewarded or remediated based on their ranking and could be fired after two consecutive years of ineffective ratings.
The end of the school year and the layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers are bringing more attention to reformers' calls to remake public schools. Today's school reform movement conflates the motivations and agendas of politicians seeking reelection, religious figures looking to spread the faith and bureaucrats trying to save a dime. Despite an often earnest desire to help our nation's children, reformers have spread some fundamental misunderstandings about public education.
1. Our schools are failing.
It's true that schools with large numbers of low-income and English-as-a-second-language students don't perform as well as those with lots of middle- and upper-middle-class students who speak only English. But the demonization of some schools as "dropout factories" masks an important achievement: The percentage of Americans earning a high school diploma has been rising for 30 years. According to the Department of Education, the percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds who were not enrolled in school and hadn't earned a diploma or its equivalent fell to 8 percent in 2008.
Average SAT and ACT scores are also up, even with many more -- and more diverse -- test-takers. On international exams such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, U.S. elementary and middle school students have improved since 1995 and rank near the top among developed countries. Americans do lag behind students in Asian nations such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan on these tests, but so do Europeans. The gap in math and science scores may be an East-West divide.
The State Board of Education today approved higher reading benchmarks for elementary and middle school students beginning this September.
Four of the board's seven members spent several minutes voicing concerns about becoming too focused on test scores and the dangers of raising standards without supporting increased classroom time, improved instruction and student engagement.
Yet, the new rates passed 6 to 0 with chairwoman Brenda Frank abstaining.
Board members say despite concerns, it's critical to raise standards as states move towards a common curriculum and to give students and their parents a more honest assessment of whether the students are on track to graduate on time.
Right now, state leaders say meeting reading benchmarks in third or fourth grade doesn't mean that a child is likely to be on track in high school as well.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it has launched the HMH Global Education Challenge, which is designed to encourage "game-changing ideas" for improving student outcomes in K-12 education.
A Boston company that has a long history in the textbook business, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said in a press release that entrants who submit proposals will be eligible to win from a pool of $250,000 in cash and prizes.
Ohio lawmakers are prepared to cut gifted education by a whopping 89 percent within the state's new education budget. Truly, today's economy means we all have to cut back, but why are gifted students targeted to take the biggest hit? Why are they singled out as not deserving an equal and appropriate education?
We are fortunate in the Marion City School District. We have not fallen victim to this unfair budget cut. Superintendent Barney and the school board have chosen to continue to serve our gifted students next year. For that, I am thankful. I must, however, be realistic. With monies being cut so dramatically, for how long will our district be able to maintain this service? Now is the time to let our legislators in Columbus know how important gifted service is. After all, public education is education for all children. Cutting funding for one specific group more deeply than any other group is simply unfair and unacceptable.
We're not entirely sure what he's talking about, but former Gov. Howard Dean this morning, speaking on the subject of public charter schools declared "that battle is coming to an end."
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," the one-time presidential hopeful and DNC Chair said "charter schools are the future," especially in inner cities, and praised the United Federation of Teachers in NYC for starting a charter school of their own.
To be sure, charter schools are an important part of the Democratic Party's official education platform (see here), but even in NYC, where the union and its charter school are co-located in a traditional public school building, union leaders and activists continue to spend a lot of time and money trying to whack the bejesus out of their vulnerable charter school competitors.
Education officials here are preparing to welcome 300 additional students in the next school year, on top of the 6,296 already enrolled. But a shrinking school budget in this Dallas exurb means there will be fewer teachers, aides, administrators and custodians.
School budgets are being cut across the country, but in Texas, which gained more residents than any other state during the past decade, school systems such as Little Elm Independent School District face the additional challenge of shedding costs while classrooms are bulging.
"It's really changing how we do business," said Lynne Leuthard, Little Elm's school superintendent.
The district is canceling prekindergarten for 3-year-olds--though keeping it for 4-year-olds--and cutting about 80 positions out of 827 in total; the layoffs include 30 teachers, a speech pathologist, a computer aide and 11 special-education aides.
"You just have to take the resources you have and spend them in the best way possible," Ms. Leuthard said.
Last September, when Joel Klein was still at the helm of the New York City Department of Education, he delivered a luncheon talk for a business roundtable, the Association for a Better New York (ABNY). I attended on behalf of the UFT. In his spoken presentation, Klein attributed to the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker the following phrase:
When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
Long before Joel Klein worked this line into his stump speech, I had come across it on the far right precincts of the web, where it is a staple of feverish discussions of the 'malevolence' of teacher unions.* Given the lack of source citation and the way in which the words rung so hollow as something Shanker would say, I was more than a tad bit suspicious about its authenticity.† Over the course of time, I asked a number of people -- some who had worked with Shanker for many years and others who had studied his life and career as scholars -- if they knew of any instance when he had spoken or written these words. Without exception, every person consulted had no knowledge of such a statement.
Madison School District Literacy Program; 2011-12 Proposed Budget Hearing Remarks
We urge the Board of Education to approve and implement the initiatives and budget proposed for the school-wide literacy program [Public Appearance Remarks]. It is deplorable that heretofore there has been no systematic plan to address the reading and writing shortcomings of the District. These shortcomings are the most fundamental causative factor contributing to the poor achievement performance of our students. The proposed design of systemic changes to the curriculum, instructional strategies, engagement of teachers, support staff, students and parents/other adults and the realignment of financial and other resources will result in measurable student growth. Board adoption of the $650,000.00 2011-12 budget considerations is an absolute necessity of the very highest priority.
Our thanks and compliments to the Board and the administration for undertaking the assessment of literacy in the District. However, the Board must take a greatly increased leadership role in demanding the vigorous evaluation and assessment all programs, services and personnel throughout the District. There must be demonstrable commitment and evidence of the systematic implementation of the strategic objective of the five-year District Strategic Plan to address the woefully inadequate and insufficient data upon which to make decisions about curriculum, instruction and performance of students and staff.
The Board must not give any support for an increase in property taxes in finalizing the 2011-12 budget. Nor, is there any justification for using any amount of "under-levy carry-over" if such authorization should be re-instated by the state. There is no evidence to support an increase in taxes. We must be able to prioritize the expenditure of revenues available within the limits established. The Board has already demonstrated it cannot effectively manage its allocations to areas of highest need to strengthen the impact on curriculum, instruction and performance affecting student learning. Until and unless the Board can demonstrate a higher and more effective level of leadership with its decisions and priorities it cannot be trusted with more money that will only get the same results.
We support an increase in allocations for maintenance and electrical infrastructure up-grades conditional upon 1) re-allocation of existing funds to these areas; 2) clear and enumerated priorities, established in advance, for maintenance projects that are specifically related to safety issues; and 3) electrical infrastructure up-grades specifically related to priorities established for improvements and expansion of technology as identified in the Technology Plan for use in student learning, instruction, business services and communications with the public.
The Board must not give approval to the proposed amendment for providing staff with year-end bonuses. This is absolutely the wrong message, for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. It cannot be justified in 'rewarding' those staff who wrongfully abdicated their responsibilities in the classroom to the students; by insulting those staff who did attempt to fulfill their responsibilities; as well as insulting the parents and students harmed by those detrimental actions. It would be far better to allocate the 'savings funds' to resources actively and directly impacting student learning. The Board must make a commitment to providing leadership toward academic improvements and to creating a working culture of mutual trust and collaboration with employees and taxpayers.
For further information contact: Don Severson, donleader@aol.com 577-0851
There is something horribly fascinating about watching Wisconsin Republicans discuss their plans for our state's school system.
First, they swing the bloody ax:
The biggest budget cuts to our public schools in state history, nearly $900 million. Kerchunk.
A bill to create a statewide system of charter schools whose authorizing board is appointed by Scott Walker and the Fitzgeralds, and which will funnel resources out of local schools and into cheapo online academies. Kerchunk.
Lifting income caps on private-school vouchers so taxpayers foot the bill to send middle- and upper-income families' kids to private school. Kerchunk.
Then comes the really sick part. They candy-coat all this with banal statements about "reforms" that will "empower" parents and students and improve education.
Last week, Walker went to Washington, D.C., to give a speech to school-choice advocates at the American Federation for Children. He started off by reading a Dr. Seuss book, and talking about how "every kid deserves to have a great education."
Arguably, no challenge faced by humanity is more critical than generating an environmentally literate public. Otherwise the present "business as usual" course of human affairs will lead inevitably to a collapse of civilization. I list obvious topics that should be covered in education from kindergarten through college, and constantly updated by public education and the media. For instance, these include earth science (especially climatology), the importance of biodiversity, basic demogra- phy, the problems of overconsumption, the fact that the current economic system compels producers and consumers to do the wrong thing environmentally, and the I=PAT equation. I also summarize less well-recognized aspects of the environmental situation that are critical but are only rarely taught or discussed, such as the nonlinear effects of continued population growth, the impacts of climate disruption on agricultural production, and the basic issues of human behavior, including economic behavior. Finally, I suggest some of the ways that this material can be made a major focus of all education, ranging from using environmental examples in kindergarten stories and middle school math to establish an international discussion of the behavioral barriers to sustainability.
Global human society is challenged in a way never before seen in human history. For the first time, humanity is fundamentally altering global ecosystems in ways that can threaten the continuation of our social order. The struggle to develop appropriate modes of behavior compatible with maintaining vital ecological processes is the great challenge of the twenty-first century. Educational systems are pivotal to meeting this challenge by equipping people with the knowledge and values to understand and address the human predicament. Thus, environmental education needs to be a vital component of all educational processes in developed nations from kindergarten to doctoral studies and continuing through the use of mainstream and social media.
However, in my view, environmental education is given much too little attention in the school systems of the USA and other rich nations, and is often poorly timed and structured when it is delivered. The situation is only marginally better in colleges and universities, despite the good efforts of environmental educators. Perhaps the best evidence for the inadequacy of environmental education is that "out of the classroom, people have failed to make the link between their individual actions and the environmental condition" (Blumstein and Saylan 2007, 2011). A basic problem is educational systems for the young are designed to fill people with various packages of "tailored" knowledge, and then send them "out in the world" to use that knowledge, especially to make a living. There is too little systematic thought given to the ever-changing needs of responsible citizens facing the culture gap--the enormous and growing gulf between the non-genetic information possessed by each individual society and that possessed by society (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2010).
One of the largest educational publishers in the world is offering cash prizes to the winners of a crowdsourced learning product innovation competition.
One of the world's largest educational publishers is turning to crowdsourcing for their next great product idea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's (HMH) initiative--the HMH Global Education Challenge--is an Intel Science Fair-style competition for educators that is giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just one important caveat: HMH retains rights to the ideas.
The competition will be the first major attempt to develop for-market pedagogical materials via crowdsourcing. Participants will upload brief descriptions of their potential projects and then are able to view, comment, and vote on other proposals. A panel of judges, including former Education Secretary Bill Bennett and Bob Wise, the former governor of West Virginia, will decide on the winners from a pool of the 20 top-voted entries in September.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is offering a $100,000 grand prize for the winning entrant and a $25,000 second-place prize. Another $125,000 worth of prizes, including iPads, netbooks, and textbook donations, will be distributed to contestants and the schools of their choice.
California Governor Jerry Brown has taken a big step towards reducing the testing mania in the nation's most populous state. Up until his administration we have been on an accelerated path towards the comprehensive data-driven system that test publishers and corporate reformers have convinced leaders is needed to improve schools. But in the May budget outline from Brown's office, he makes it clear he is putting on the brakes.
Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to suspend funding for CALPADS, the state student longitudinal data system, and to stop further planning for CALTIDES, the teacher data base that was to be joined at the hip with CALPADS.
What is even more encouraging is the explanation Brown offers, which shows a great deal of understanding of these issues. The document states:
Since 1998, The Post's Jay Mathews has ranked Washington-area public high schools using the Challenge Index, his measure of how effectively a school prepares its students for college. In 2011, the Post expanded its research to high schools across the United States.
The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors. While not a measure of the overall quality of the school, the rating can reveal the level of a high school's commitment to preparing average students for college.
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don't have B's in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
ON A call with a bank call center, I was just given a little dialect-identification practice. I had just given the attendant my full name. She then asked me "What's your last name?", or so I thought. I repeated it, slightly unsure why she'd asked me to repeat my last name (it's pretty ordinary). But I misheard her. She'd asked "what's your wife's name?" I asked her where her office was located. Any idea where in America a person has to come from to make "wife" sound remotely similar to "last"? Take a guess before reading on.
The office was in Dallas, Texas, which is very close to the borderline of the dialect region known as "Inland South", as you can see on this map. What makes the inland south different from the lowland south? One of the chief things is glide deletion in the [ai] sound before unvoiced consonants. Glide deletion is what turns "ride" into "rahd", where a diphthong (two vowels, one gliding into the other) becomes a monophthong or single vowel. This goes on all around the south. What makes an inland southern accent inland and not lowland is that the glide deletion happens before voiceless consonants (like f, t and s) as well as their voiced equivalents (v, d and z). Around the south, "ride" comes out "rahd". But if someone's "wife" comes out "wahf", chances are that person is from the inland south.
I plowed through a draft of the Oakland school district's strategic plan today -- all 50 pages of it. It'll be discussed at a special board meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday (tomorrow) at the district headquarters. You'll find links to the report below.
I won't be surprised if long-time observers of the school system remind us all of the Five-Year Plans of OUSD Past -- enthusiastically presented, but long since forgotten. I wonder how this plan compares to former superintendents' visions for Oakland Unified. It certainly contains some provocative ideas, such as "risk screens" for African American male students at certain transitional points, and school quality reviews that go far beyond the API score.
The plan describes various school funding formulas that the district might adopt -- but it doesn't recommend any. The current system, Results-Based Budgeting, allocates funding based on each school's average attendance. And unlike schools in most other districts, Oakland schools must cover the actual salaries and benefits of their teachers out of that budget. Schools with lots of teachers who are high on the pay scale typically have a harder time making ends meet in this system, as do those with low attendance rates and/or declining enrollment.
Those schools might find the below statement interesting:
The critical factors of enrollment and teacher salary and benefits do not universally allow for a balanced budget, requiring subsidies based on school size and salary/benefit costs, rather than student needs. While the definition of an adequate core program may change as district‐wide priorities and financial position change, it is the main responsibility of the school district to provide a basic educational program to all students.
In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like a fatal blow. A year later, it appears that, remarkably, the administration has fashioned the ashes of that defeat into one of the most innovative federal higher-education programs ever conceived. Hardly anyone has noticed.
Obama originally called for $12-billion in new spending on community-college infrastructure and degree completion. The money was to come from eliminating public subsidies to for-profit banks that made student loans. But late in the process, some lawmakers insisted that savings that had already occurred, because of colleges' switching into the federal direct-loan program in anticipation of the new law, didn't count as savings. Billions were pulled off the table, and the community-college plan was shelved.
Two days later, negotiators found $2-billion. But they could spend it only on a U.S. Department of Labor program restricted to workers who had lost their jobs because of shifts in global trade. The fit with the president's expansive agenda seemed awkward, and the amount was pennies on the original dollar. Cynical commentators called it a "consolation prize."
Awhile back, I posted here my "Strange Advice for Bright Kids." Today I offer the same gems again, but tweaked to fit the parents of remarkably bright kids. I am once again calling it "strange" advice because I like to look at things from unusual angles and this advice comes from perspectives others may not consider.
1) Ask for help. As you have likely discovered, being the parent of a gifted child isn't always the cakewalk that a lot of teachers, friends, and parents of average intelligence kids sometimes think it is. These bright lil' buggers can be INTENSE, which means keeping up with them can be exhausting. They can debate you into a corner, even at a very young age, rationalizing their way into controlling the conversation. Some gifted children have extremely high energy levels and may not need naps at an age when other kids still do. Their sensitivity can catch you off guard as seemingly nonchalant moments turn out to be the impetus that causes a meltdown. Their keen sense of justice means they're interested in causes beyond their years - and they enlist you to help them save the world. With remarkable focus, they become so immersed in the interesting task at hand that they are impervious to you struggling to tell them it's time for dinner. And your ten-year-old is having a mid-life crisis, exhibiting his existential depression by asking you questions you haven't even considered yourself yet ("Why am I here? Why is the world so cruel? What if I can't make a difference? What's the point if we're all going to die someday anyway?"). Plus you know that if you tell your friends you're worried about your seven-year-old because she's reading four grade levels above but only being given grade-level material and instruction - that their reaction will be a cynical snort.
A few weeks ago I posted a report on Edwize about biases in last year's Teacher Data Reports. Teachers of high performing math students are 35 times more likely to fall at the bottom of the teacher ranking than at the top. [1]
Shortly after that, the DOE placed a document on its website that asserts that "...teachers of high-performing students are as likely to have high value-added scores as low value-added scores."
To me, call me crazy, this is unlikely to be true. First of all DOE charts found in the very same document seem to contradict that (more on that in a minute). What's more, DOE used a broad definition of "teachers of high-performing students," and also included some reports that were so unreliable they were not issued to teachers. Let's go through this step by step.
(aka "Why Teaching In a Testing Grade May Cause Premature Aging," or "Why I Have Band-Aids On All My Fingers From Nervously Picking Off the Cuticles While Proctoring")
10. "Why do we have to use a #2 pencil?"
9. (Directions read by me: "You may not speak to each other while the test is being administered." Student:) "What does 'administered' mean?"
8. "I don't get how to show my work for this part."
7. (The test directs students to continue working when they see the words GO ON at the bottom of the page and to stop working when they see the word STOP. On the ELA, students get ten minutes per passage and have to STOP before being directed to move on. On the math exam, they get 60 minutes to do all 40 questions, no STOPping. On the math exam, one student asked:) "When is it gonna say STOP?!"
6. "But none of these choices are right."
5. "But both of these choices are right."
4. "Can I look this word up in the dictionary?"
In every school in America, in three-ring binders and file folders, sit lesson plans--the recipes that guide everyday teaching in the classroom. Like the secrets of talented cooks, the instructional plans of the best teachers have much to offer their creators' colleagues. But while the plans are increasingly digital, they are still not easily shared across classrooms, nor, especially, across districts or states. Even when these plans are accessible, they are often not organized in a way that makes them easy to use, understand, or customize.
Now, a host of new web sites, from A to Z Teacher Stuff to Lesson Planet to Lessonopoly, are trying to solve that problem and make it easier for teachers to share, find, and make better use of lesson plans and accompanying materials. One, TeachersPayTeachers, a sort of Craigslist for educators, says it has paid more than $1 million in commissions to teachers, who have sold everything from classroom hand puppets to lesson plans on the Civil War. The site even hosts a "lesson plan on demand" auction, in which teachers advertise for, say, 4th-grade materials on Texas history and other teachers bid to fulfill the request.
COMMENCEMENT is a special time on college campuses: an occasion for students, families, faculty and administrators to come together to celebrate a job well done. And perhaps there is reason to be pleased. In recent surveys of college seniors, more than 90 percent report gaining subject-specific knowledge and developing the ability to think critically and analytically. Almost 9 out of 10 report that overall, they were satisfied with their collegiate experiences.
We would be happy to join in the celebrations if it weren't for our recent research, which raises doubts about the quality of undergraduate learning in the United States. Over four years, we followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen diverse four-year colleges and universities. We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.
China's aggressive drive to close the gap with the West in stem-cell research is paying off after five years of heavy investment in a branch of science free of the tight regulatory constraints and intense debate over moral issues that hamper experimental work elsewhere.
A decade ago, China had 37 stem-cell research papers published by reputable journals. By 2008, it was 1,116, the China Medical Tribune said. It now ranks fifth in the world in both the number of stem-cell patents filed and research papers published. And its numbers are growing faster than in any other nation.
ome people who favor national standards have pointed to the variability among states as making comparisons difficult and have been quick to point to national standards and tests as a consistent, nationwide, uniform system to judge all schools in the same way. No one has been more outspoken on those points than the Fordham Institute, whose 2007 The Proficiency Illusion report was touted far and wide. It was followed in 2009 by another Fordham report, The Accountability Illusion, that took states to task not only for having distinct definitions of proficiency, but also with fuzzing the issue even more by playing with other NCLB accountability rules. Checker Finn came out on its publication declaring:
"This report's crucial finding is that - contrary to what the average American likely believes - there is no common, nationwide accountability system for measuring school performance under NCLB. The AYP system is idiosyncratic, even random and opaque. Without a common standard to help determine whether a given school is successful or not, its fate under NCLB is determined by a set of arcane rules created by each state..."
In February 2011, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) convened a conference to help districts implementing school choice under the U.S. Department of Education's Voluntary Public School Choice program. The conference, sponsored by the Department of Education, provided grantees access to the most current knowledge from district and charter leaders and school choice researchers on how to effectively implement public school choice.
The conference focused on the most pressing issues faced by localities committed to public school choice. Panelists addressed how choice districts can
actively manage the supply of schools in the district,
make careful decisions about the allocation of resources across these now independent schools,
build fair and transparent enrollment systems,
effectively communicate to all parents about their choices, and
invoke creative solutions to ensure that students with special needs are well served in these diverse schools.
This report is based on findings from a pair of Pew Research Center surveys conducted this spring. One is a telephone survey taken among a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older. The other is an online survey, done in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, among the presidents of 1,055 two-year and four-year private, public and for-profit colleges and universities. (See the our survey methodology for more information.)
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend. An even larger majority (75%) says college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of college graduates (86%) say that college has been a good investment for them personally.
The Denver mayoral race has been remarkable in its focus on education reform. Never before has there been so much discussion, debate and even television ads on this critical issue in the city's mayoral race. We are fortunate to have two candidates, Michael Hancock and Chris Romer, who are both education reformers.
Some point to the Denver mayor's lack of direct authority over the city's schools to argue that the candidates' rhetoric is better suited for the upcoming school board race. This misses the point: Denver's next mayor is sure to have a significant impact on public education in our city. And as President Obama and Colorado's U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet are demonstrating on the national level, serious and much-needed education reforms require strong leadership.
Hancock and Romer have their differences when it comes to education policy, but both realize the central importance of high-quality public education to bringing growth and prosperity to Denver. There are some truly great public schools in our city, but when the district schools as a whole are struggling to sufficiently prepare one-fifth of their students for college, work and civic participation, fundamental reform is required.
As state lawmakers combed the budget this year for cuts to close a multibillion-dollar shortfall, some leaders focused on a line item that usually draws little attention: the Windham School District, which received more than $128 million in 2010-11 to provide education to inmates in the state's sprawling prison system.
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Lawmakers will most likely cut that number significantly in the 2012-13 budget, and that could be just the beginning of big changes to come.
"The structure itself screams out for change, screams out for renovation and innovation," said State Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano and chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.
The Windham School District is financed by the Texas Education Agency and overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In the 2009-10 school year, about 77,500 offenders participated in some type of Windham program. The school district operates much like a regular public school system, with a superintendent, principals and teachers at campuses across the state. It provides basic adult education, vocational training, life-skills programs and college-level courses.
Jeb Bush left the Florida governor's office in 2007, but his influence still holds sway in Tallahassee, and now is felt in state capitals from New Jersey to Oregon, where lawmakers are eager to adopt his ideas on how to improve education.
Since leaving Tallahassee, the popular former Florida governor has developed a national reputation as an education powerhouse and champion of vouchers and charter schools. His latest recognition: the Bradley Foundation, a conservative group that says it shies away from lauding politicians. Last week, it gave the Republican its Bradley Prize, a distinction that carries a $250,000 stipend.
"The reforms that he put in place during his two terms as Florida governor in many ways lead the country in elementary and secondary education," said Michael W. Grebe, the president and chief executive officer of the Bradley Foundation, which has spent more than $40 million over the last 20 years in support of charter schools and voucher programs, including as a donor to Bush's education foundation. "He put in place programs that have clearly raised academic standards. It's measurable, demonstrable. We're also really impressed by what he continues to do as a private citizen. When he left office, he didn't leave behind his work."
School boards across Wisconsin could use teacher evaluations - which rely in part on the results of students' standardized state test scores - as part of the reason for dismissing and disciplining educators, according to legislation considered by the Assembly and Senate education committees Monday.
Senate Bill 95 proposes modifying 10 state mandates so that local school districts have more flexibility to decide what's best for their communities, said Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), a co-sponsor of the bill with Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills).
The legislation covers a wide berth of areas - from allowing school boards to offer physical education credit to high school students who participate in one season of an extracurricular sport, to changing the way a state-funded class-size reduction program is implemented in the elementary grades - but was criticized by some legislators who thought it was too hastily brought to a hearing Monday.
Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) noted that details about the bill were released only one business day earlier, on Friday, by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
"I'm pretty sure if there had been more notice on this, this room would have been packed," she said, looking at the meager crowd of about 30 people.
Thank you for this opportunity to testify on Senate Bill 95.
Due to time limitations — both the time allotted here and the very, very short time between the release of the Bill on Friday and the scheduling of this hearing for today — I will be confining myself to only two of the topics covered in this wide ranging measure. Those are the dilution of the Student Achievement Guaranty in Education (SAGE) and the use of student standardized test scores as a determinant of educator employment conditions. I will note that I believe every section of this Bill should be thoroughly sifted and winnowed.
Before directly addressing the proposals on SAGE and the use of student standardized test scores, I’d like to say a few things about the broader trend in educational thinking and policy in Wisconsin.
Rahm Emanuel will be sworn in today as mayor of Chicago, having campaigned on promises to fix a school system that graduates only half its students. The veteran Democrat talks a good game and has appointed a schools CEO with strong reform credentials. But Mr. Emanuel has miles to go before he proves that his famous political toughness is a match for the unions and bureaucrats who will oppose any reform worthy of the name.
In addressing Chicagoans today, Mr. Emanuel will likely celebrate Illinois Senate Bill 7, which last week passed the state legislature and awaits Governor Pat Quinn's signature. The law is certainly welcome, and Mr. Emanuel was right to support it. But its provisions say less about the boldness of lawmakers than about the implacability of the status quo.
On the plus side, the law ties teacher tenure and layoffs to student performance, not just to seniority. The law also makes it easier to fire ineffective teachers--easier, that is, than the traditional process that in Chicago can include more than 25 distinct steps. And while it's good that the law makes it harder for the Chicago Teachers Union to strike, Illinois remains one of only 11 states to allow teachers to strike at all.
ased on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.
In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed "college-ready" by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.
A heart charity is calling on the government to include the teaching of life-saving skills in the national curriculum.
In a survey carried out by the British Heart Foundation, 73% of schoolchildren wanted to learn how to resuscitate someone and give first aid.
More than 75% of teachers and parents also agreed it should be taught in schools.
The survey questioned 2,000 parents, 1,000 children and 500 teachers.
The BHF wants emergency life support skills (ELS) to be taught as part of personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) lessons and alongside physical education, citizenship and science.
Life-saving skills include cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which can help someone who's had a cardiac arrest.
Gov. Cuomo yesterday wrote Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents, urging a drastic change of direction as the state Education Department develops a new teacher-evaluation system. The governor's right: The first draft of that system deserves an F.
It seems Tisch got the message. Soon after the governor's letter went public, she released a statement committing to an overhaul of the evaluation system.
Cuomo's recommendations address many of the problems and offer a good starting point to build upon. Now it's up to Tisch and the Regents to adopt them in earnest when they meet Monday.
here's a train coming, folks. And, unlike the proposed Madison-to-Milwaukee rail, this train really is high-speed.
If we're not paying attention, it could end up crippling public education in Wisconsin.
Gov. Scott Walker had already included in his 2011-13 budget proposal a plan to change the Milwaukee school voucher program, which allows low-income students to attend private schools on the taxpayers' dime.
It would eliminate the enrollment caps; expand it to include schools in all of Milwaukee County, not just the city; and phase out income limits, opening the program to middle- and high-income families.
The Assembly last week passed a separate bill that eliminated the caps and the Milwaukee-only school requirement.
Speaking before the Board of Education during its meeting Thursday night, President Jack Lyness expressed strong feelings in opposition to the nation's burgeoning "charter school movement."
Charter schools are primary or secondary schools that are funded by government but operate independently from local boards of education in exchange for meeting academic standards stipulated by the state Commissioner of Education. Unlike private schools, charter schools are not permitted to charge tuition, and they are considered part of the public school system.
Many parents of New Jersey school children are considering charter schools as an alternative to traditional public schools. As of January, there are 73 charter schools in New Jersey-the state is the fourth largest charter authorizer in the U.S.-and the state Department of Education website predicts there will be more than 100 by the fall. This year, more than 22,000 children in grades pre-K through 12 throughout the state are enrolled in a charter school. According to the New Jersey Charter Schools Association, 66 percent of the state's charter schools achieved adequate yearly progress in 2008-09 compared to 44 percent of their local district schools.
There are people who have been making a splash nationally by spreading word that judgment day will be May 21, and by fall, the earth will no longer exist.
If so, we don't need to be so alarmed about the future of Milwaukee Public Schools. Or a list of other school districts that aren't in quite as bad shape. Yet.
But in case we remain in this vale of tears a bit longer, let's talk about what is expected to happen to class sizes in MPS. This won't be pleasant.
MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton used a number last week in a talk before civic leaders and, later, in comments to the School Board: 34. That's going to be the average class size next year, he said.
For kindergarten through 12th grade? No, he told me, for kindergarten through eighth grade. There's no estimate for high schools yet, he said. (As a general matter, high school classes are larger than younger grades.)
"Class sizes will increase," Thornton said. "That's just a reality. . . . This is a community that needs learning to be personalized and customized." In other words, it needs at least reasonable class sizes.
So 34 compared to what this year? Thornton estimated 28 to 29.
ON command, Eze Schupfer reads aloud the numbers on a worksheet in front of her: "42, 43, 12, 13." Then she begins to trace them.
"Is that how we write a 12?" her instructor, Maria Rivas, asks. "Erase it."
"This is a sloppy 12, Eze," she says. "Go ahead: a one and a two. Smaller. Much better."
Eze moves to 13.
"Neater," Ms. Rivas insists. "Come on, you can do it." Finally, she resorts to the kind of incentive that Eze, her pink glitter sneaker barely grazing the ground, can appreciate: "You'll get an extra sticker if you can do a perfect 13."
Eze is 3. She is neither problem child nor prodigy. And her mother, Gina Goldman, who watches through a glass window from the waiting room, says drilling numbers and letters into the head of a 3-year-old defies all the warmth and coziness of her parenting philosophy -- as well as the ethos of Eze's progressive preschool. But she began bringing Eze and her older brother to these tutoring sessions nearly a year ago on the advice of a friend, and has since become the kind of believer who is fueling a rapid expansion of Junior Kumon preschool enrichment programs like this one, a block from the toddler-swollen playgrounds of Battery Park City.
Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet's living creatures, evolution, the discovery of the gene and the structure of DNA. Now, a sixth is on its way - mathematics.
Maths has played a leading role in the physical sciences for centuries, but in the life sciences it was little more than a bit player, a routine tool for analysing data. However, it is moving towards centre stage, providing new understanding of the complex processes of life.
The ideas involved are varied and novel; they range from pattern formation to chaos theory. They are helping us to understand not just what life is made from, but how it works, on every scale from molecules to the entire planet - and possibly beyond.
The biggest revolution in modern biology was the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, which turned genetics into a branch of chemistry, centred on a creature's genes - sequences of DNA code that specify the proteins from which the gene is made. But when attention shifted to what genes do in an organism, the true depth of the problem of life became ever more apparent. Listing the proteins that make up a cat does not tell us everything we want to know about cats.
The children of Milwaukee deserve a quality education regardless of whether they attend Milwaukee Public Schools, a charter school or a private school through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
A key element to support quality is transparency. Clear, easy to understand and readily available information, including test score results, helps parents and the public evaluate their schools. Traditional public and charter schools throughout the state have been using publicly reported test score results and other data to drive school improvement for years. This transparency was extended to the voucher program through laws enacted in the 2009-'11 budget.
This fall, for the first time, students attending private schools through the state's voucher program had their academic progress assessed with the same statewide tests as their public school peers. Results reported this spring showed that some public, charter and private schools in Milwaukee are doing very well, but too many are not providing the education our children need and deserve.
We believe that students in the voucher program, receiving taxpayer support to attend private Milwaukee schools, must continue to take the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination. Standardized tests, including the WKCE, do not paint an entire picture of a student, and many private schools participating in the voucher program take other quality tests. We need to put all the schools in MPS, charter and choice programs on a common report card.
Wasn't it just the other day that teachers confiscated cellphones and principals warned about oversharing on MySpace?
Now, Erin Olson, an English teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, is among a small but growing cadre of educators trying to exploit Twitter-like technology to enhance classroom discussion. Last Friday, as some of her 11th graders read aloud from a poem called "To the Lady," which ponders why bystanders do not intervene to stop injustice, others kept up a running commentary on their laptops.
The poet "says that people cried out and tried but nothing was done," one student typed, her words posted in cyberspace.
"She is giving raw proof," another student offered, "that we are slaves to our society."
On March 31, Yale University announced final plans to open its first joint campus, in partnership with the National University of Singapore, to be known as Yale-NUS College. The Web site of the new, yet-to-be-built campus was launched immediately. It features Potemkin-village photographs of smiling students, presumably posing as future Yale-NUS students. So as of now, for the first time since 1701, there will be two Yales. (The old one should henceforth be called "Yale-New Haven," to avoid confusion.)
On April 11, in Singapore, President Richard C. Levin of Yale, along with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and the president of the National University of Singapore, signed the agreement establishing the Yale campus in the city-state, and they unveiled architectural plans for the new campus. In New Haven, faculty recruitment has begun, reportedly in an atmosphere of "enthralled" enthusiasm. But the Yale-NUS venture raises troubling questions about the translation of academic values and freedoms into a repressive environment.
The Upper West Side could lose its first charter school before it even opens.
A judge has slapped the Department of Education with a temporary restraining order that halted the start of renovations necessary on the school building on 84th Street where Upper West Success Academy Charter School plans to open in August.
The city downplayed the restraining order.
"While we do not believe the stay was warranted, it is not unusual for judges to preserve the status quo for a short period of time while they consider the legal issues before them," said Chlarens Orsland, assistant corporation counsel for the New York City law department.
The school, founded by former City Council member Eva Moskowitz, has been the subject of heated opposition since the DOE announced it would be allowed to take root in the old Brandeis High School building, where there are now five small high schools.
1. Why do people hate creative writing programs so much?
Well they don't really, not everyone, or there wouldn't be so many of them--hundreds. From modest beginnings in Iowa in the 1930's, MFA programs have spread out across the land, coast to coast, sinking roots in the soil like an improbably invasive species of corn. Now, leaping the oceans, stalks have begun to sprout in countries all around the world, feeding the insatiable desire to be that mythical thing, a writer. Somebody must think they're worth founding, funding, attending, teaching at.
But partly in reaction to their very numerousness, which runs afoul of traditional ideas about the necessary exclusivity of literary achievement, contempt for writing programs is pervasive, at least among the kind of people who think about them at all. In fact, I would say they are objects of their own Derangement Syndrome. Logically, any large-scale human endeavor will be the scene of a certain amount of mediocrity, and creative writing is no different, but here that mediocrity is taken as a sign of some profounder failure, some horrible and scandalous wrong turn in literary history. Under its spell, a set of otherwise fair questions about creative writing are not so much asked as always-already answered. No, writing cannot be taught. Yes, writing programs are a scam--a kind of Ponzi scheme. Yes, writing programs make all writers sound alike. Yes, they turn writers away from the "real world," where the real stories are, fastening their gazes to their navels. No, MFA students do not learn anything truly valuable.
A "dagger," said the well-meaning man, "in the heart of public education." That man, who superintends Green Bay's public school system, was reacting to word that Gov. Scott Walker proposed letting parents statewide have the same option poor Milwaukeeans now have - to take their state school aid to a private school, if they choose it.
Parents with options: That was the violence that Greg Maass, that superintendent, was talking about. I don't mean to single out Maass. He colorfully phrased the apocalyptic view that many others had toward Walker's idea. A writer for The Progressive, the left-wing Madison magazine that figures we peaked in about 1938, tiresomely said it was "war on education."
Right: To increase options is to war on education. Actually, though, that is the heart of the complaint of the public school establishment. Giving families more control over where they can get a publicly funded education necessarily means less control for those in charge of what had been the only place you could get one.
But will Walker's idea kill off public education? Unlikely: Incumbent school systems already live with publicly funded competition.
Former D.C.school chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was often denounced as a hard case who used her maniacal emphasis on rigor to beat up D.C. teachers and students. I think that was a misreading of what she actually did.
Often the principals she hired were more concerned with creating an atmosphere where teachers connected with kids. Making students work hard was not a priority. Instead, the idea was to convince them to love learning and get those who were way behind up to grade level. Rhee and the principals and teachers she brought into the system talked about raising the ceiling on achievement and bringing more Advanced Placement and other college-level programs into D.C. high schools, but they didn't do much. My records of AP test participation in the city show no significant gains after Rhee arrived.
I think this is because there is a reluctance, even among the most energetic and reform-minded educators, to push low-income kids too hard. I think many well-meaning and hard-working people in the D.C. school system are biased against rigor. A glaring example of this was unearthed by my colleague Bill Turque in his article about the D.C. Public Charter School Board's decision to approve the opening of BASIS DC, designed to be the most demanding school ever seen in the District.
A WEEK ago South Korea observed "Children's Day", an occasion when every school and office is closed, and the nation's families march off in unison to chaebol-owned theme parks like Lotte World or Everland. Cynical expat residents are fond of asking "isn't every day Children's Day?" They mean it sarcastically but their sarcasm is itself ironic. In reality the other 364 days of the year are very tough for Korean youngsters.
Results of a survey released last week by the Institute for Social Development Studies at Seoul's Yonsei University show that Korean teenagers are by far the unhappiest in the OECD. This is the result of society's relentless focus on education--or rather, exam results. The average child attends not only regular school, but also a series of hagwons, private after-school "academies" that cram English, maths, and proficiency in the "respectable" musical instruments, ie piano and violin, into tired children's heads. Almost 9% of children are forced to attend such places even later than 11pm, despite tuitions between 10pm and 5am being illegal.
Psychologists blame this culture for all manner of ills, from poor social skills to the nation's unacceptably high rate of youth suicide, which is now the leading cause of death among those aged 15-24. Recently, a spate of suicides at KAIST, a technology-focused university, has drawn national attention. For most students the pinnacle of stress is reached somewhat earlier, in the third year of high school. This is the year in which the suneung (university entrance exam) is taken. Tragic reactions to the stress it creates are all too common.
School districts would be able to use standardized test scores as a factor in disciplining or firing teachers under a Republican bill made public Thursday and scheduled for a public hearing Monday.
Currently, districts can use the scores to evaluate teachers, with certain limitations, but not to discipline or fire them.
The bill comes after the state lost out on federal education funding in part due to limitations in how districts can judge teaching performance, and as a state task force develops a plan to better evaluate teachers.
In addition to the teacher evaluation changes, the bill sponsored by the chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees also would allow students to receive physical education credit for playing after-school sports, allow athletics suspensions based on police records and alter funding rules for certain programs, among other things.
The Washington region is a hot zone of student achievement, with leading high schools offering a plethora of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes to prove that theirs is a rigorous path to college.
But next year, a public charter school will open in the nation's capital that raises the concept of academic rigor to a new level. Seventh-graders will take Algebra I and Latin. AP courses will not be an option for high school students -- they'll be the heart of the curriculum.
To graduate, students will be required to complete at least eight AP courses and pass six exams.
The school, to be known as Basis DC, replicates a model developed in Arizona and represents a potential turning point for a charter sector in the District that has grown explosively in the past decade but yielded uneven results.
Class size is one of the small number of variables in American K-12 education that are both thought to influence student learning and are subject to legislative action. Legislative mandates on maximum class size have been very popular at the state level. In recent decades, at least 24 states have mandated or incentivized class-size reduction (CSR).
The current fiscal environment has forced states and districts to rethink their CSR policies given the high cost of maintaining small classes. For example, increasing the pupil/teacher ratio in the U.S. by one student would save at least $12 billion per year in teacher salary costs alone, which is roughly equivalent to the outlays of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the federal government's largest single K-12 education program.
The substantial expenditures required to sustain smaller classes are justified by the belief that smaller classes increase student learning. We examine "what the research says" about whether class-size reduction has a positive impact on student learning and, if it does, by how much, for whom, and under what circumstances. Despite there being a large literature on class-size effects on academic achievement, only a few studies are of high enough quality and sufficiently relevant to be given credence as a basis for legislative action.
National Education Association officials announced Wednesday that they would put a "policy statement" before the union's governing body for approval that, among other changes, would open the door to the use of "valid, reliable, high-quality standardized tests," in combination with multiple other measures, for evaluating teachers.
The statement, passed by the NEA's board of directors May 7, wouldn't take effect unless the 9,000-delegate Representative Assembly signs on to it at its meeting over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. Those delegates could significantly modify the policy statement before approval, and it is likely to be a topic of lively debate.
Still, the announcement comes as a major entry by the NEA in discussions about teacher evaluation, tenure, and due process. To date, the national union has remained silent on most of those issues, even while the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the other national teachers' union, has put forth various proposals. ("NEA, AFT Choose Divergent Paths on Obama Goals," Aug. 25, 2010.)
Aphorism: Short, sweet little sayings expressing an idea or opinion are familiar to everyone -- they just don't always know the technical term for them. Dorothy Parker was a particularly adroit user of aphorisms.
Apostrophe: Beyond a term for daily punctuation, apostrophe also pulls audiences aside to address a person, place or thing currently not present. O, Shakespeare! Such a sterling example of apostrophe use!
Applicability: The venerable Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien coined this term when badgered one too many times about whether or not his beloved fantasy series was supposed to be a World War II allegory. It wasn't, but he thought readers could easily apply such an interpretation to the text without losing anything.
Gov. Scott Walker didn't offer details about how private school voucher programs could work in Green Bay, Racine and Beloit, but on Tuesday, advocates in those cities said they envisioned systems similar to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Or, perhaps, similar to Walker's future vision for the Milwaukee program, which Walker has pushed to modify by lifting the cap on enrollment, phasing out income limits for participants and expanding the program to Milwaukee County so suburban private schools can accept publicly funded voucher students from the city.
"Why reinvent the wheel all over again when we can learn from the benefits and mistakes of the Milwaukee program?" asked Laura Sumner Coon, the head of a nonprofit in Racine that currently provides scholarships for 13 area low-income students to attend private schools.
Public-school leaders in all three cities Tuesday vehemently opposed the idea of channeling taxpayer money out of their systems and into private schools.
Green Bay Superintendent Greg Maass said he hadn't read any research that showed vouchers benefited kids more than maintaining or improving the education they receive in traditional public schools. And research on academic achievement showed voucher-school students haven't performed at much higher levels than their public-school counterparts, he said.
Lots of colleges and universities offer quality programs in engineering, the sciences and technology. But there are some schools that offer students of all kinds a completely technologically holistic experience, offering proximity to major techie corporations and internships, a huge range of courses and degrees devoted to different niches, and a world-renowned reputation for being all hopped up on techie genius. Here are the 10 techiest colleges in the U.S.
MIT: While some colleges and universities -- even big, research-oriented ones -- have single departments that incorporate many different fields in engineering, the sciences or computer tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has 19 separate departments and programs in those fields, ranging from Biological Engineering to Mathematics to Nuclear Science and Engineering and more. Research institutes support scientists, students and faculty in astronomy, aeronautics, physics, neuroscience, nanoscience, and a lot more. MIT's also known around the world as one of the most prestigious tech universities, and its MIT Regional Optical Network provides fast Internet connectivity and support over a 2,500 radius including Boston and New York City.
At a conference last summer, Bill Gates predicted that "place-based activity in college will be five times less important than it is today." Noting the ever-growing popularity of online learning, he predicted that "five years from now, on the Web--for free--you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university."
"College, except for the parties," Gates concluded, "needs to be less place-based."
Although it's bold and thought-provoking, Gates's prediction is oversimplified. As we can already see, something more complex is happening. Across the United States and the world, colleges and universities, historically defined by their physical campuses, are diversifying their delivery systems. They're expanding them to provide higher education not only online, but also in new physical locations, both domestically and worldwide. Online education may be on the rise, but place-based education is, too.
Between 1900 and 1940, America's normal schools, noncollegiate teacher-training institutions with an emphasis on practical education, gave way to university-based teacher education. Today the nation is moving in the opposite direction.
The first of the public normal schools, educating primary-school teachers, was established in 1839. By 1900 there were more than 330 normals, public and private, enrolling over 115,000 students. Their programs, originally a year long and later longer, included academic subjects but emphasized pedagogy and in-school training.
The rise of the high school and the advent of accreditation and education-professional associations in the late 19th century brought the normal-school era to a close. Higher education determined that the preparation of secondary-school teachers, which required mastery of subject matter, should preferably occur on campus, and so colleges and universities began to create their own teacher-education programs.
A few months back, I gave a lunchtime talk called "Digital Humanities: Singular or Plural?" My title was in part a weak joke driven primarily by brain exhaustion. As I sat at the computer putting together my remarks, which were intended to introduce the field, I'd initially decided to title them "What Is Digital Humanities?" But then I thought "What Is the Digital Humanities?" sounded better, and then I stared at the screen for a minute trying to decide if it should be "What Are the Digital Humanities?" And in my pre-coffee, underslept haze, I honestly couldn't tell which one was correct.
At first this was just a grammatical mixup, but at some point it occurred to me that it was actually a useful metaphor for something that's been going on in the field of late. Digital humanities has gained prominence in the last couple of years, in part because of the visibility given the field by the use of social media, particularly Twitter, at the Modern Language Association convention and other large scholarly meetings. But that prominence and visibility have also produced a fair bit of tension within the field--every "What is Digital Humanities?" panel aimed at explaining the field to other scholars winds up uncovering more differences of opinion among its practitioners. Sometimes those differences develop into tense debates about the borders of the field, and about who's in and who's out.
All high school students should be fluent in a language other than English, and it's a matter of national urgency. So says Russell Berman - and as president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), his opinion carries some clout.
"To worry about globalization without supporting a big increase in language learning is laughable," the Stanford humanities professor wrote in this summer's MLA newsletter, in an article outlining the agenda for his presidency.
In conversation, he is just as emphatic, calling for "a national commitment to ramping up the quality of education."
"Budget attacks on language programs from the Republicans and Democrats are just the contemporary form of a xenophobia that suggests we don't need languages - and it's deeply, deeply misguided."
Dual-language immersion programs are the new face of bilingual education -- without the stigma. They offer the chance to learn a second language not just to immigrant children, but to native-born American students as well.
In a Glendale public school classroom, the immigrant's daughter uses no English as she conjugates verbs and writes sentences about cats.
More than a decade after California voters eliminated most bilingual programs, first-grader Sofia Checchi is taught in Italian nearly all day -- as she and her 20 classmates at Franklin Elementary School have been since kindergarten.
Yet in just a year, Sofia has jumped a grade level in reading English. In the view of her mother -- an Italian immigrant -- Sofia's achievement validates a growing body of research indicating that learning to read in students' primary languages helps them become more fluent in English.
Not a single kid or teacher showed up when the unadorned eight-room school in Salavat opened to much fanfare barely a month ago.
It was a heart-breaking moment for the Canadian military and civilian sponsors for whom education of children in the Panjwaii district of Kandahar province has long been a top, if frustrating, priority
"The insurgents told us, 'Don't go to the school. If you guys go, we will cut off your ears,'" says one boy, who looks about 12.
Still, here they are now, neatly paired -- sometimes in threes -- quietly seated in their wooden desks, attentively reciting a lesson or reading from the chalkboard.
Weeks after that inauspicious start, the raucous chatter of scores of kids sporting baby blue UNICEF backpacks echoes across the dusty soccer pitch at the start of the school day.
No truer statement was made about the education reforms enacted in the 2011 Indiana General Assembly than the one uttered Thursday by Gov. Mitch Daniels.
"If we've learned anything in Indiana, we've learned change can happen, but change is hard," Daniels said at a bill-signing ceremony. "Change always brings uncertainty."
"Uncertain" sums up the future awaiting Indiana's public schools and the teachers who work in those facilities.
Change indeed came during the thorny legislative session. Republicans seized their sudden super majorities in the Indiana Senate and House, ramming through almost every "change" dreamed of by the governor and his superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett.
Lab technicians at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China. Clockwise from upper left: Zhi Wei Luo; Wan Ling Li; Zi Long Zhang; and Yu Zhu Xu.
The world's largest genome-mapping facility is in an unlikely corner of China. Hidden away in a gritty neighborhood in Shenzhen's Yantian district, surrounded by truck-repair shops and scrap yards prowled by chickens, Beijing's most ambitious biomedical project is housed in a former shoe factory.
But the modest gray exterior belies the state-of-the-art research inside. In immaculate, glass-walled and neon-lit rooms resembling intensive care units, rows of identical machines emit a busy hum. The Illumina HiSeq 2000 is a top-of-the-line genome-sequencing machine that carries a price tag of $500,000. There are 128 of them here, flanked by rows of similar high-tech equipment, making it possible for the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) to churn out more high quality DNA-sequence data than all U.S. academic facilities put together.
"Genes build the future," announces a poster on the wall, and there is no doubt that China has set its eye on that future. This year, Forbes magazine estimated that the genomics market will reach $100 billion over the next decade, with scientists analyzing vast quantities of data to offer new ways to fight disease, feed the world, and harness microbes for industrial purposes. "The situation in genomics resembles the early days of the Internet," says Harvard geneticist George Church, who advises BGI and a number of American genomics companies. "No one knows what will turn out to be the killer apps." Companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel have already invested in genomics, seeing the field as an extension of their own businesses--data handling and management. "The big realization is that biology has become an information science," says Dr. Yang Huanming, cofounder and president of BGI. "If we accept that [genomics] builds on the digitalization of life, then all kinds of genetic information potentially holds value."
Joshua Falso made his first visit to Bowling Green State University on Saturday.
He toured the campus, donned a cap and gown, and graduated.
Falso, 25, of Cleveland, earned his bachelor of science degree in technology by taking classes online while he served in the Air Force, including a stint in Iraq.
Online education has ballooned in the past 10 years as millions of students of all ages earn certificates, licenses and degrees -- from associate through doctorate -- from any location where they can use a computer.
Technical universities in South Vietnam are on the look out for students as they are increasingly finding it difficult to motivate students to study for any major in their university.
Departments of education and training in the country will complete receiving university application forms for universities by tomorrow and will transfer these forms to universities for the upcoming entrance examinations.
Of the 29,000 applicants in the South representative office of the Ministry of Education and Training, 20,300 students (70 percent) prefer to study economics and technological subjects in universities, while only 3 per cent wish to follow technical programs.
From the 16,000 applicants for the Ho Chi Minh City University of Industry received so far, 20 preferred to study Mechanical Engineering, 35 preferred Heat Engineering and Refrigeration and 30 preferred Garment and Fashion Design while around 500 preferred Accounting and Business Administration.
Most parents would certainly agree that ensuring their children get a good education is a top priority.
However, recent findings from the Fraser Institute suggest that not all schools are created equally - not even close.
The Fraser Institute, one of Canada's leading public policy think-thanks, released their annual school rankings on May 8, which examine the performance of Ontario high schools over the past five years.
"Our report card is the number one source for objective, reliable information about how Ontario secondary schools stack up in terms of academics," said Michael Thomas, the co-author of the Report Card on Ontario's Secondary Schools 2011.
I don't have a magic bullet to fixing education Michigan.
And the truth is, no politician does, either. The vast majority come up with some sound bites and maybe a bill or two that simply validate their ideology and pay back their favorite interest groups. The goal is to help out the teachers' unions or pump up private schools.
Few of them are really trying to improve how kids learn.
Like many governors before him, Gov. Rick Snyder is trying to leave his mark on the state's educational system and I wish him the best of luck. The only hope for this generation of kids is to get a top-notch education from preschool to postgrad -- and the governor is dead-on to take that kind of holistic approach.
Snyder is a great role model, having earned three degrees from the University of Michigan by the age of 23.
As for the governor's education doctrine, it's a pretty standard reform agenda that includes revamping tenure, holding teachers accountable for student performance, computerized learning, more options for high schoolers to earn college credit and degrees and an emphasis on early childhood education.
THREE YEARS AGO, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for "radical reform" to New York City's school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only "incremental" change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard's education school, has described as "the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country," resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city's school system is still not remotely where it needs to be.
That story holds more than true for the country at large. Nearly three decades after A Nation at Risk, the groundbreaking report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people," the gains we have made in improving our schools are negligible--even though we have doubled our spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on K-12 public education. On America's latest exams (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), one-third or fewer of eighth-grade students were proficient in math, science, or reading. Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren't prepared for college. ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates "were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses."
While America's students are stuck in a ditch, the rest of the world is moving ahead. The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education. On international math tests, the United States is near the bottom of industrialized countries (the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and we're in the middle in science and reading. Similarly, although we used to have one of the top percentages of high-school and college graduates among the OECD countries, we're now in the basement for high-school and the middle for college graduates. And these figures don't take into account the leaps in educational attainment in China, Singapore, and many developing countries.
Madison students are slated to get a double dose of standardized tests in the coming years as the state redesigns its annual series of exams while school districts seek better ways to measure learning.
For years, district students in grades three through eight and grade 10 have taken the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a series of state-mandated tests that measure school accountability.
Last month, in addition to the state tests, eighth- and ninth-graders took one of three different tests the district plans to introduce in grades three through 10. Compared with the WKCE, the tests are supposed to more accurately assess whether students are learning at, above or below grade level. Teachers also will get the results more quickly.
"Right now we have a vacuum of appropriate assessment tools," said Tim Peterson, Madison's assistant director of curriculum and assessment. "The standards have changed, but the measurement tool that we're required by law to use -- the WKCE -- is not connected."
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker continues to court national support for an extreme agenda of attacking public employees and public services while diminishing local democracy and shifting public money to private political allies. Despite the fact that Walker's moves have been widely condemned in his home state, the hyper-ambitious career politician has repeatedly suggested that he will not moderate his positions because he wants to shift the tenor of politics and policymaking far beyond Wisconsin.
Walker's stance has earned him talk as a possible dark-horse contender for a chance at the 2012 Republican nod, and the governor has not discouraged it.
To that end, Walker was in Washington Monday night to deliver a keynote address at the innocuously named American Federation for Children's "School Choice Now: Empowering America's Children" policy summit. It's actually a key annual gathering of advocates for privatizing public education, and of some of the biggest funders of right-wing political projects nationally.
The appearance comes at a time when education cuts are becoming a front-and-center issue, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stirred an outcry in the nation's largest city by proposing to lay off thousands of teachers.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker will be on a national education stage tonight to tout his efforts to expand charter school and voucher programs, but he is running into obstacles back home, and not just from those you might expect.
At an Assembly Education Committee hearing last week, for example, a bill Walker backs that would allow parents of special education students to use state tax dollars to pay for private school tuition hit significant roadblocks. In fact, the Republican chair of the committee, Rep. Steve Kestell of Elkhart Lake, called the funding mechanism for the legislation in its current form a "fatal flaw" in a telephone interview Friday.
"The bill is an intriguing proposal," Kestell says. "Where we have a big challenge is how to pay for it."
Kestell and other representatives grilled the authors of the bill during committee testimony. The language of the proposal appears to be taken fairly literally from generic legislation used in other states that have passed special education voucher programs. Kestell says the legislation would have to be "Wisconsinized" to be acceptable.
The bill was also sharply criticized by disability rights groups, who say it would strip hard-won legal rights from families with special-needs children, and by the state Department of Public Instruction, which faults the bill for demanding no accountability from private schools for actually providing the special education services that would be the basis for the vouchers.
I begin with a brief review of psychometric results concerning intelligence (sometimes referred to as the g factor, or IQ). The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power) and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing (currently below $5k per genome), it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify genes which account for a significant fraction of total IQ variation. Finally, I end with an analysis of possible near term genetic engineering for intelligence.
This talk is aimed at physicists and should be accessible even to those with no specialized background in psychology or biology.
New data include ratings for about 11,500 teachers, nearly double the number covered last August. School and civic leaders had sought to halt release of the data.
The Los Angeles Times on Sunday is releasing a major update to its elementary school teacher ratings, underscoring the large disparities throughout the nation's second-largest school district in instructors' abilities to raise student test scores.
The posting -- the only publication of such teacher performance data in the nation -- contains value-added ratings for about 11,500 third- through fifth-grade teachers, nearly double the number released last August. It also reflects changes in the way the scores were calculated and displayed.
Overall ratings for about 470 schools also are included in the release, which is based on student standardized test scores from the academic years 2003-04 through 2009-10. To obtain the rating of a teacher or school, go to latimes.com/valueadded and enter the teacher's or the school's name.
The initial release of teacher ratings last summer generated intense controversy -- and some praise -- across the country, and this round has already met with some opposition.
Two Republican governors are scheduled to speak at a Washington conference hosted by a nonprofit that pushes for private school vouchers and charter schools.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania will address the American Federation for Children's second annual policy summit Monday.
Both are expected to talk about school choice. Walker has proposed expanding a school voucher program in Milwaukee. Corbett is proposing cutting $1.6 billion from public education while also pushing for vouchers, which would allow students in poor-performing public schools to transfer to private schools.
Union leaders and other activists are planning a rally outside the summit, which will also feature former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Opponents say the federation is trying to "dismantle public education."
They are some of most prestigious and toughest schools to get into - and they only take the best of the best.
They also are schools that have long, successful, athletic traditions.
For some getting into the prestigious institutions might mean being set for life when getting out into the real world.
The Ivy Eight, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown, are some of the top schools in the country - and some of the toughest schools to crack.
So, when a student-athlete gets a shot to attend one of these fine institutions they usually don't turn them down - even if it means going into debt for a very long time.
You have to remember for presidents, top executives of Fortune 500 companies and others have all roamed the hallow halls.
But, what does it take to get notice or get into these schools?
At Arizona State University, a high-tech teaching tool with roots in the pre-Internet 1950s has created a bit of a buzz. "I think it's going to be quite good," says Philip Regier, dean of ASU Online. "Looking forward to it," says Arthur Blakemore, senior vice provost of the university. "I'm excited," says Irene Bloom, a senior lecturer in mathematics at the downtown campus.
All are anticipating this summer's debut of Knewton, a new computerized-learning program that features immediate feedback and adaptation to students' learning curves. The concept can be traced back a half-century or so to a "teaching machine" invented by the psychologist B.F. Skinner, then a professor at Harvard University. Based on principles of learning he developed working with pigeons, Skinner came up with a boxlike mechanical device that fed questions to students, rewarding correct answers with fresh academic material; wrong answers simply got them a repeat of the old question. "The student quickly learns to be right," Skinner said.
Education reform: Shorter week, more learning More than 120 school districts across the U.S. are finding that less can be more -- less being fewer days spent in school.
The general assumption is that when it comes to educating American kids, more is more. Longer school hours. Saturday school. Summer school. Yet more than 120 school districts across the nation are finding that less can also be more -- less being fewer days spent in school.
The four-day school week has been around for decades, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, but it's quietly spreading as a money-saving tactic, especially after several states -- including Montana, Georgia, Missouri and Washington -- passed legislation allowing school districts to make the switch as long as they lengthened each school day so that there was no reduction in instructional hours. Teachers work just as much under the four-day plan, so there are no cost reductions there, but schools have saved from 2% to 9%, according to a 2009 report by the Center for Education Policy at the University of Southern Maine. Utility and transportation costs are lower; there's no need to serve a fifth lunch each week; even the reduced wear and tear on buildings has helped.
KnowledgeWorks, led for a decade by Chad Wick, a former bank CEO passionate about connecting urban kids to the idea economy, developed a 2020 forecast that outlines five learning priorities:
1. Students need the ability to sort, verify, synthesize, and use information to make judgments and take action. These skills have always been important but now that we're all drinking from a fire hose of information they are essential.
2. Students need a working knowledge of market economics and personal finance--most students still leave high school without them. Students will be navigating an increasingly dynamic economy in which technologies will improve and change at exponential rates and market opportunities will be big but competitive. Students need the ability to sell--themselves and an idea. They need to experience and give candid performance feedback and gain appreciation for a quality work product.
Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, an independent research institute, told Tom Friedman, "Fortunately, this is the best time ever for innovation," said Carlson, for three reasons: "First, although competition is increasingly intense, our global economy opens up huge new market opportunities. Second, most technologies--since they are increasingly based on ideas and bits and not on atoms and muscle--are improving at rapid, exponential rates. And third, these two forces--huge, competitive markets and rapid technological change--are opening up one major new opportunity after another."
Among the questions facing parents raising children with autism is this: Could easing the symptoms be as simple as taking away grains and dairy products?
Many parents swear the popular gluten-free, casein-free diets being promoted by celebrities help their children be more social and less prone to problematic behaviors such as loud outbursts.
But Lee Anne Owens, a Brownsburg mother of two boys with autism, isn't sure.
"I have a girlfriend who has tried it for her autistic child, and she has seen remarkable improvement," Owens said. "But I just don't see it."
When I was college student and for a few years afterward, there were certain books -- often books I picked up by accident or for which I had low expectations -- that were so revelatory, so eye-opening, that after finishing them I walked around feeling at if I'd just landed on Earth. Everything looked new and strange, and every incident in the book felt as if it related directly to my own life.
It was a giddy sensation, and one that, sadly, comes much less frequently now. Reading William Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education" brought me back to those heady days, when I believed that nothing could possibly be more important than literature.
Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale University and now a book critic, is an accidental Austen enthusiast. As a New Yorker and a graduate student at Columbia during the 1990s, he resisted Austen, preferring "modernism, the literature that had formed my identity as a reader and, in many ways, as a person. Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov: complex, difficult, sophisticated works."
Schoolchildren in Canada sing the national anthem in class everyday. It's also common for US students to recite a pledge of allegiance to their country.
In Hong Kong, most schoolchildren started to learn singing China's national anthem only after Britain returned its most famous colony to Beijing's sovereignty in 1997. Now, the SAR government wants to carry national education further, but is ironically chided for political brainwashing.
The criticism is simply strange. During the colonial era, students never had the opportunity to study modern Chinese history. Crucial chapters differentiating between the Republic of China - now Taiwan - and the People's Republic of China were nowhere to be found in textbooks. It was deliberate as this served the colonial regime's interest better for locals not to be identified with China.
Last week, the SAR launched a four- month consultation on moral and national education, proposing that primary and secondary schools devote 50 hours per year, or two lessons a week, for students to learn the national anthem, attend national flag-raising ceremonies, understand the Basic Law, support national sports teams, and appreciate Chinese culture and the development of China via current affairs. Teachers would have a large freedom in teaching. This is overdue. After all, it has been nearly 14 years since the handover.
Here's the situation. I am an education writer who focuses on the best teachers and best schools, as measured by how much value they add to students' educations and lives. Jefferson is the most selective high school in the country. By many benchmarks -- faculty quality, course level, equipment -- it has to be considered among the best.
That is irresistible to me. Now I have found a Jefferson graduate, Chelsea Slade, who has given me a way to drag into my Jefferson obsession everyone who didn't go to Jefferson, which includes me and almost all of mankind.
Given the importance of economic and financial education, one might expect to find these subjects emphasized in Wisconsin's K-12 schools. Other states are ahead of Wisconsin. Twenty-one states now require high school students to take an economics course; thirteen states require students to take a personal finance course. In Wisconsin, neither is required, so few Wisconsin high school students take a course in economics or personal finance, and few teachers are qualified to teach one.
This widespread disregard has real consequences. The financial crisis from which our nation is currently recovering illustrates some of these, having arisen in part from ill-considered decisions by financially illiterate consumers of credit. For American workers, moreover, the trend away from defined-benefit pensions toward defined-contribution pensions places increasing investment responsibilities in the hands of individuals.
Evidence suggests that improvement will be a challenge. Surveys and assessments of economic and financial education generally yield dismal results. Americans are neither confident in their skills in these areas nor do they perform well on tests of knowledge. Their lack of economic and financial savvy plays out variously -- for example, in the lives of large numbers of Americans who find themselves "unbanked" and reliant on dubious sources of financial services such as payday-loan stores and check-cashing outlets. College students, meanwhile, rack up record levels of credit-card and student-loan debt.
Comments on the Madison School District's Literacy Initiative and Budget Proposal
First of all, our thanks and compliments to you and the administration for undertaking the assessment of literacy in the District. Thanks also to staff and outside advisors for their contributions to making the Report and Recommendations the most meaningful and significant direction for systemic change toward achieving measurable results in student achievement and staff performance in the District's recent history.
We urge the Board of Education support of the Literacy Report AND adoption of the recommendations for implementation of the initiatives and for the budget proposed in the Superintendent's Preliminary Budget for 2011-12. It is vital for the Board to support the direction of the initiatives for balanced literacy with integrity at all grades levels of the District. It is deplorable that heretofore there has been no systematic plan to address the reading and writing shortcomings of the District that are the most fundamental causative factor contributing to the "achievement gap". Finally, we have pro-active leadership from Dr. Sue Abplanalp, who has a full grasp of the organizational development and change processes critical and significant to the implementation and sustainability of difference- making strategies. The proposed design of systemic changes to the curriculum, instructional strategies, engagement of teachers, support staff, students and parents/other adults and the realignment of financial and other resources will result in measurable student growth. Board adoption of the $650,000.00 2011-12 budget considerations is an absolute necessity of the very highest priority. We urge you to get on with it. Thank you.
For further information contact: Don Severson, donleader@aol.com 577-0851
As I learn more about community colleges, one of the most surprising lessons has been the sloppy and deceptive ways that students are introduced to courses. Placement tests are not well explained to students. Whether you have a passing score or not can depend on which college you attend.
At least as unsettling are studies showing that dual enrollment courses -- community college courses given to high school students -- often bar applicants who have less than a B average or fail a placement test, even though they need that taste of college-level work to prepare for the real thing.
Now a troubling new research paper says that the remedial courses given to community college students who do not score high enough on placement tests often do no good. Colleges still swear by the courses, however. Students are further deceived by upbeat guidance to a community college placement test owned by the College Board that tells students, wrongly, that they can't really fail a placement test.
Questions & Suggestions for the Madison School District's Innovation & Alternative Programs
225K PDF: As a result of the presentations and discussion at the first Committee meeting I have some questions and suggestions I want to share with you.
1. Regarding the "Charge" for the Committee: Is the identification and planning for expansion limited to "programs and educational options"?
Recommended suggestions: Think beyond programs, services and projects for processes to affect 'systemic' changes.
Questions and Concerns Regarding the "Findings and Recommendations" of the MMSD K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation report
The following questions and concerns are submitted to you for your consideration regarding the "findings and recommendations" of the MMSD K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation report:
1. What findings and recommendations are there for 'year-around' literacy experiences to help mitigate 'losses' over the summer months in achievement gains during the traditional academic year?
Although "summer loss" was not a particular focus of discussion during the evaluation process, there are several ways in which the recommendations address reducing the impact of summer reading loss. These include:
Recommendation I - curricular consistency will provide for a more seamless connection with content and instruction in summer school, Saturday school (pending funding) and after school supports.
Recommendation II - more explicit instruction focused in early grades will allow students to read for enjoyment at earlier ages.
Recommendation III - a well-developed intervention plan will follow a student through summer school and into the following academic year
2. What are the findings and recommendations regarding parental (significant adults in student's life) participation, training, evaluation and accountability in the literacy learning process?
Parental participation opportunities to support their children's enjoyment and achievement in literacy include:
Literacy 24-7: Parent training for Spanish speaking families on how to promote literacy learning. Read Your Heart Out Day: This event builds positive family, community and school relationships with a literacy focus and supports both the family involvement and cultural relevance components of the Madison Metropolitan School District Strategic Plan.
Tera Fortune: Professional development for parents about the Dual Language Immersion Program with a focus on bi-literacy throughout the content areas. MALDEF Curriculum Training: Nine-week training covering a variety of topics to assist parents in sharing the responsibility of student success and how to communicate effectively in schools.
Regular column in Umoja Magazine: Forum to inform families and community members about educational issues through African American educators' expertise. Several columns have focused on literacy learning at home.
Training is provided for parents on how to choose literature that:
Has positive images that leave lasting impressions
Has accurate, factual information that is enjoyable to read
Contains meaningful stories that reflect a range of cultural values and lifestyles
Has clear and positive perspective for people of color in the 21st century
Contains material that is self affirming Promotes positive literacy learning at home
Evaluations of the Read Your Heart Out and Family Literacy Night were conducted by requesting that participating parents, staff, students and community members complete a survey about the success of the event and the effects on student achievement.
3. What are the consequential and remediation strategies for non-performance in meeting established achievement/teaching/support standards for students, staff and parents? What are the accompanying evaluation/assessment criteria?
A District Framework is nearing completion. This Framework will provide clear and consistent expectations and rubrics for all instructional staff and administrators. Improvement will be addressed through processes that include the School Improvement Plans and staff and administrator evaluations processes.
MMSD proposes to maintain Reading Recovery teachers and teacher leaders as an intervention at grade 1. There are currently two Reading Recovery teacher leaders participating in a two-year professional development required to become Reading Recovery teacher leaders. One of these positions will be certified to support English Language Learners. The modifications proposed include: 1) targeting these highly skilled Reading Recovery teachers to specific students across schools based on district-wide data for 2011-12 and 2) integrating the skills of Reading Recovery staff into a comprehensive intervention plan along with skilled interventionists resulting in all elementary schools benefiting from grade 1 reading intervention.
5. How will the literacy learning process be integrated with the identification and development of Talented and Gifted (TAG) students?
The Response to Intervention model is based on evidence-based instruction and responds to students who need additional challenge and/or support.
6. What will be the 2010-2011 budgetary priorities and strategies for undertaking the literacy program and resources recommendations outlined in the report?
PreK-12 literacy will be a priority for the 2011-12 budget process. In addition to the prioritization of funding within our budget parameters, MMSD is in the process of writing a major grant (Investing in Innovation - i3) to support the recommendations of the literacy evaluation as a key strategy to close achievement gaps and improve literacy for all students to be ready for college and/or careers.
For generations, Wisconsin has taken pride in the opportunities we offer children through our public schools. When students or schools are struggling, we work together to find solutions.
Wisconsin is at the top when it comes to ACT and Advanced Placement scores and graduation rates, and just last month, significant gains on test scores were reported along with a narrowing of achievement gaps between minority groups. That's a foundation that should be built upon, not dismantled.
Gov. Scott Walker's education plan included in his state budget proposal will move our students and state backward. Whether you have children in a public school or not, whether you are Democrat, Republican or somewhere in between, children are counting on the state to do what's right. Public education must remain a top priority.
For months, Wisconsinites have been telling their legislators that we believe there is a better way - a balanced way - to respond to tough fiscal times without throwing away our tradition of high-quality public education. Linda Copas of Plainfield pointed out to the Joint Finance Committee that in her small school district, the number of students who live in poverty has more than doubled, but the governor's education plan ignores that. Kim Schroeder, a Milwaukee teacher, said his students are losing opportunities such as gym, art and music.
I've read Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go" quite a bit over the past few weeks as I visited schools in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Stevens Point to read to second- and third-graders and meet with teachers and school officials. I've been visiting schools to promote our Read to Lead Task Force, which is finding ways to make sure all Wisconsin students can read before they complete the third grade.
As a parent with two boys in public schools, it has been great to see the passion our teachers have for showing children how education can take them to amazing places. Like the teachers I met, I believe strongly in the power of education to open new worlds of opportunity, break the cycle of poverty and empower those searching for hope with a sense of purpose and self-determination.
All too often, people focus on the negatives in our education system. We are trying to focus on our strengths - particularly in reading - and then replicate that success in every classroom across our state.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Reality Check: Milwaukee Exceed's Madison's Black Not Hispanic 4 Year High School Graduation Rate: 59.5% to 48.3%
Andrew Shilcher, via email:
In response to the press release that the DPI put out today, I did some digging to see where Madison and Milwaukee stacked up. You can check out how each district breaks down for yourself by following the links at the bottom, but here are some of the highlights (if you want to call them that)
According to WINSS...
The 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students in MMSD for the 2009-2010 school year was 48.3%.
The 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students in MPS for the 2009-2010 school year was 59.5%.
The 4 year graduation rates for Hispanic students in MMSD and MPS for the 2009-2010 school year are comparable at 56.7% in MMSD and 59% in MPS.
The statewide average 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students for the 2009-2010 school year was 60.5%.
The statewide average 4 year graduation rate for Hispanic students for the 2009-2010 school year was 69%.
I won't go into the difference between the 4 year rates and Legacy rates, but you can check those out at the links below too. 4 year rates place students in a cohort beginning in their first year of high school and see where things stand within that cohort 4 years later. Legacy rates are a yearly snapshot of the number of graduates for a year compared to the number of students expected to graduate high school for that given year. For a further explanation of this refer to http://dpi.wi.gov/spr/grad_q&a.html.
Something that I think drives at least some of my disagreements with other liberals about education policy is that I think a lot of middle class liberals implicitly underestimate the extent of really bad learning outcomes. Take this report (PDF) from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund which notes "that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations" and also that "within the tricounty region, there are a number of municipalities with illiteracy rates rivaling Detroit: Southfield at 24%, Warren at 17%, Inkster at 34%, Pontiac at 34%."
Alfie Kohn has really pushed the buttons of ed reformers in his Education Week commentary, "How Education Reform Traps Poor Children." He bemoans the educational techniques of charter school teachers whom, he says, perseverate on mechanical drills and rote learning. This results in a pedagogy that is "noticeably different from the questioning, discovering, arguing, and collaborating that is more common (though by no means universal) among students in suburban and private schools." In low-income schools, he charges, "not only is the teaching scripted, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token-economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals."
Phew. Strong stuff. This "pedagogy of poverty" (the phrase comes from a 1991 paper by Wisconsin professor Martin Haberman) is racist, charges Kohn, stemming from an over-emphasis on standardized tests. In the end it "serves to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap."
Mitch Kapor knows something about reaching full potential.
When the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, it was fabulous in concept. A computer that fit on a desk! But available programs were clunky and sales were slow. Kapor went about developing Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet designed for the computer that turned the early PC into a bona fide business machine.
It's no different with students who are potentially brilliant at science and math, but are hamstrung by poor schools that are not equipped to prepare them for the 21st century. "It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material," Kapor says, "and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed."
Kapor is a tech icon, for starting Lotus, for cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for being the first chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, which supports Firefox and other open source projects. He's a San Francisco-based venture capitalist now and he's done well for himself.
But he has always had a wide progressive advocacy streak. Born in Brooklyn, he worked as a rock disc jockey, taught Transcendental Meditation and worked as a mental health counselor before making his name in the tech field.
Just when you thought the Madison School District had enough on its plate -- perennially tight budgets, teachers incensed at Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting, minority achievement gaps -- it's under a gun of a different sort:
Get your program for talented and gifted, or TAG, students in order, the state told the district in March, after a group of parents complained their kids were not being sufficiently challenged in the classroom.
I am dubious of efforts to devote additional time and money to students who already have the advantage of being smart -- and often white and upper-middle class -- and who have similarly situated parents adept at lobbying school officials.
Money, time and effort generally not being unlimited commodities in public school districts, the question over what is to be done about Madison's TAG program strikes me as one of priorities.
Improving TAG offerings would seem to require an equal reduction in something else. And maybe that something else is more important to more students.
Not that it's likely anyone on the School Board would ever acknowledge any trade-offs.
It's a "false dichotomy," said School Board member Ed Hughes, and "not an either/or situation." Can the district be all things to all people? I asked. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"
During the 1960s, the whole society caved in and gave up the ghost. The education system, such as it was, crashed. I was there, as a teacher, part of that time, and I saw it happen. It foundered on just this point. Repetition. It was as if minds had gone soft and couldn't perform.
Broadly speaking, the basics of arithmetic went out the window. So did spelling, grammar, and the ability to write coherent sentences. Poof. The amount of scut work it took to build a basic education became unacceptable.
When I read tracts about the intentional undermining of the American educational system, I sense truth in them, but to me the real crash was all about what I'm discussing here.
You can bring up drugs, horrible junk food, the influence of TV and the Internet, large classes, and so on. You can say they all make education a tougher job. Sure, I don't deny any of that, but the rubber meets the road in REPETITION. The grind. You can either do it or you can't. If you can't, everything you learn is faked. It SEEMS to be real, but it isn't.
THE TEST is almost upon us! Recently I met with my principal to discuss what grade I'd like to teach next year. After many, many hours of soul-searching I had listed second grade as my first choice on my preference sheet, but there may not be an opening, so I then spent many, many hours agonizing over whether I'd rather move to first grade or stay in third. My principal asked me to be "completely honest" about my reservations in third grade.
"Well," I said, "I've never done test prep before, and I've never had a class like this before, so getting this class through test prep has been..."
He finished the sentence for me. "Get me the hell out of third grade?"
Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system--politicized and monopolistic--will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.
Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries--"for free"--from its neighborhood public supermarket.
No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.
Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.
Urban Prep Academy will mark another first this year -- the city's all-male, all-African-American charter high school will be sending its first students to an Ivy League school in the fall.
Urban Prep Academy will mark another first this year -- the city's all-male, all-African-American charter high school will be sending its first students to an Ivy League school in the fall.
Seniors Matthew Williams and Julius Claybron have been accepted into Cornell University. Williams also has been accepted into Dartmouth College and wait-listed at Harvard and Yale, school officials said.
The students and 102 others in the Class of 2011 announced the colleges they will attend at a ceremony Wednesday at U.S. Cellular Field. They put on baseball caps for their college picks, which included Morehouse, Oberlin, Grinnell and the University of Michigan.
"The Widget Effect," a widely read 2009 report from The New Teacher Project, surveyed the teacher evaluation systems in 14 large American school districts and concluded that status quo systems provide little information on how performance differs from teacher to teacher. The memorable statistic from that report: 98 percent of teachers were evaluated as "satisfactory." Based on such findings, many have characterized classroom observation as a hopelessly flawed approach to assessing teacher effectiveness.
The ubiquity of "satisfactory" ratings stands in contrast to a rapidly growing body of research that examines differences in teachers' effectiveness at raising student achievement. In recent years, school districts and states have compiled datasets that make it possible to track the achievement of individual students from one year to the next, and to compare the progress made by similar students assigned to different teachers. Careful statistical analysis of these new datasets confirms the long-held intuition of most teachers, students, and parents: teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student achievement growth.
Some innovations change everything. The rise of personal computers in the 1970s decimated the mini-computer industry. TurboTax forever changed tax accounting, and MP3s made libraries of compact discs obsolete. Even venerable public institutions like the United States Postal Service, which reported an $8.5 billion loss in 2010, are not immune. It experienced a 6 billion piece decline in mail volume that fiscal year, thanks mostly, of course, to email.
These innovations bear the traits of what Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen terms a disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovations fundamentally transform a sector by replacing expensive, complicated, and inaccessible products or services with much less expensive, simpler, and more convenient alternatives. This pattern is as common in heavy industrials as in professional services, consumer packaged goods, and nonprofits. In one of its most recent manifestations, it is little by little changing the way people think about education.
Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery, but to transform it. Online learning started by serving students for whom there was no alternative for learning. It got its start in distance-learning environments, outside of a traditional school building, and it started small. In 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. But by 2010, over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online-learning program. The preK-12 online population is now growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 43 percent--and that rate is accelerating.
Special interests in Washington DC have hired expensive lobbyists who also represent large corporate interests including, General Motors and Proctor & Gamble to try to pull the wool over the eyes ofparents ofchildren with disabilities. They allege that their interest is, "To advocate for parental options in education that empowers low and middle-income families to make choices in where they send their children to school." (1) These high powered special interests have never approached Disability Rights Wisconsin or any other major Wisconsin disability group to learn from those of us who have been advocating for Wisconsin children with disabilities for over 30 years, to find out what really needs improvement Wisconsin's special education system. Instead, they have set up a Facebook site which fails to tell the whole truth about the bill they promote.
This fact sheet tells the whole truth about AB 110 and its effort to dismantle special education as we know it and subsidize middle and upper income families who want to send their kids to private school ai taxpayer expense.
Myth# l-AB 110 allows parents the option to choose any other school they want their child to attend if they are unsatisfied with the special education being provided in their public school.
Fact-AB 110 has no requirement in it that forces any school to accept a child who has a special needs voucher.
Myth# 2-Since only children with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) can receive a special needs scholarship, private schools who accept them must provide them with special education and implement the child's IEP.
Facts-AB 110 makes no requirement that private schools which accept a special needs scholarship provide any special education or implement any IEP. In fact, AB II 0 does not even require that private schools which accept special needs scholarships have a single special education teacher or therapist on their staff!
The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year's most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell '89 and Stanford '89, by the way) leading the charge.
Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
As long as there have been colleges, there's been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture--an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It's no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York-based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column "8 Alternatives to College" something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn't think he should pay for it. "What am I going to do?" he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam--college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. "The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That's why they keep raising tuition."
'Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement," said the White House in a statement on March 29. "The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students." But less than three weeks later, President Obama signed a budget deal with Republicans that includes a renewal and expansion of the popular D.C. program, which finances tuition vouchers for low-income kids to attend private schools.
School reformers cheered the administration's about-face though fully aware that it was motivated by political expediency rather than any acknowledgment that vouchers work.
When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn't decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start.
During the second half of the 19th century, the world's biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. If you wanted to know who owned land or owed a debt, it was a fact recorded locally--and most likely shielded from outsiders. At the same time, the world was expanding. Travel between cities and countries became more common and global trade increased. The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy.
To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible--so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."
What makes the ideal school? After entries from all over the country, Dea Birkett reveals the Children's Manifesto of ideas, from comfy beanbags to soothing music and pets
In January we launched the School I'd Like, asking schoolchildren what would make their perfect school. Hundreds of young people let us know in emails, essays, poems and pictures. From these ideas, we've compiled the Children's Manifesto for the school we'd like, overseen and edited by a panel of 10 children. Some of the ideas are blue-sky thinking: horses and sheep in playgrounds may never be the norm. But many are small and easy to implement. First-aid lessons, a choice of uniform and music instead of bells at break time involve little cost or effort.
Behind these specific, modest requests lie big ideas. The most important aspect of education children want changed is the timetable. They wanted their educational experience to be tailored to them. Sausage-machine schooling, with a one-size-fits-all schedule, is their biggest complaint. They don't want to do less work (although Friday afternoons off was a popular request). They just want work that enthuses and means something to them.
Sen. Kathleen Vinehout suggests that we can't afford expanded school choice in Wisconsin - but history shows that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has saved the state hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in areas like Vinehout's hometown of Alma.
Vinehout's recent op-ed in the La Crosse Tribune suggested several changes to the proposed 2011 Wisconsin State Budget in order to accommodate potential shifts in fiscal projections over the next two years. One of the Senator's ideas is to cut any proposed expansions to charter school and MPCP. Her emphasis is clearly worded: "Get rid of the charter school expansion and new private school "choice" vouchers. We can't afford them."
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a consortium of 25 states working together to develop a common set of K-12 assessments in English and math anchored in what it takes to be ready for college and careers. These new K-12 assessments will build a pathway to college and career readiness by the end of high school, mark students' progress toward this goal from 3rd grade up, and provide teachers with timely information to inform instruction and provide student support. The PARCC assessments will be ready for states to administer during the 2014-15 school year.
PARCC received an $186 million grant through the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top assessment competition to support the development and design of the next-generation assessment system.
Kaleem Caire has spent much of the last year making a passionate, personal and controversial pitch for a publicly funded male-only charter school called Madison Preparatory that would operate independently of the Madison Metropolitan School District. It aims to serve primarily minority boys in grades six through 12 and their families.
Caire, a Madison native and the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, has mustered a great deal of community support by highlighting the struggles of and grim statistics surrounding black and Hispanic young boys and men in Dane County, and through telling his own powerful story of underachievement in Madison's public schools.
"I learned about racism and lower expectations for minority kids when I arrived the first day at Cherokee Middle School, and all the black boys and a few other minorities sat at tables in the back. I was assigned to remedial math, and even when I showed the teacher I already knew how to do those worksheets, that's where I was stuck," Caire says.
With its emphasis on discipline, family involvement, preppy-looking uniforms and a non-negotiable stance on being a union-free school, Caire's proposal for the boys-only middle and high school has won hundreds of enthusiastic supporters, including a number of prominent conservatives who, surprisingly, don't seem particularly troubled by the school's price tag.
Some might argue that certain programs within "traditional" public schools are experimental, such as Connected Math and Small Learning Communities among others.
Physical education classes may be scarce in some schools, but an activity program combined with school lessons could boost academic performance, a study finds.
Research presented recently at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Denver looked at the effects of a 40-minute-a-day, five-day-a-week physical activity program on test scores of first- through sixth-graders at a public school. This program was a little different from most, since it incorporated academic lessons along with exercise.
For example, younger children hopped through ladders while naming colors found on each rung. Older children climbed on a rock wall outfitted with numbers that challenged their math skills. The students normally spent 40 minutes a week in PE class.
Perry and Lester are two guys living in an abandoned mall outside of Miami. They're the sort of guys who, to borrow a phrase from the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, can think up six impossible things before breakfast -- and then build them in their workshop out of stuff they've found in the junkyard.
In short, they're makers.
Cory Doctorow's Makers: A Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come is jam-packed with cool ideas. In the book, a lot of these come from Perry and Lester, like a toast-making robot made of seashells or the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster, which uses a gaggle of discarded toys to drive a Smart car via voice commands. Now these two examples are pretty silly -- something you do just to prove you can, but there's also some stuff that shows up later in the book that made me think, "Hey, I'd buy one of those!" Parts of the book read like a "Best of Kickstarter" highlights reel.
The Madison School District is under added pressure to improve how it identifies and educates talented and gifted students after state officials found its program does not comply with state law.
In revealing shortcomings in the district's offerings for talented and gifted (TAG) students, the Department of Public Instruction challenges the approach some schools, particularly West High School, have used in which all students learn together.
"The district is going to have to face (the question): 'How do they reconcile their policy of inclusion with honors classes?'?" said Carole Trone, director of the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth at UW-Madison. "If parents see the other districts are challenging their students more, they might send their students there."
Developing a comprehensive system to identify TAG students -- including testing and staff training -- can be expensive, Trone said. Moreover, districts that don't identify students from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds open themselves up to discrimination lawsuits, she said.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said it's unclear how much such a revamped program will cost.
Do you know a teacher who brings learning to life? Whether you're a student, parent, teacher or school administrator, you can nominate your K-6 teacher for a chance to win an all-expense paid trip to Science in the Rockies, Steve Spangler's three-day hands-on science teacher training in Denver.
When our school administrators speak to the public, we often hear one or more of the following:
Blaming of others - Typical targets include teachers, parents, students, poverty, and a (fake) lack of money.
Deceitful presentation of student outcomes - They'll speak glowingly of some stray statistic that supposedly shows them in a slightly more positive light, but which also depends on the public not knowing the entire truth of it.
Astonishing ignorance or accidental honesty. Sometimes the truth comes out of them - in shocking or comical ways.
Requests for more money, on the heels of low student achievement. As pass rates go down, the expense per student continues to increase.
New policy that will serve their ulterior purpose, but which will make life more difficult for students, parents and teachers.
And so it went, at two recent gatherings for Spokane Public Schools. Teachers were blamed. Administrators praised themselves. The superintendent's comments caused a stir. And the school board voted to increase class sizes and cut 90 teachers.
.......
Increased expense for unproved programs
Taxpayers pay for scads of district and community programs devoted to reducing dropout rates and increasing on-time graduation rates. As district expenditures skyrocket, parents are still staring at students' low pass rates, high dropout rates, high rates of college remediation, and low levels of basic skills.
Dr. Stowell praised the district for obtaining a multi-million-dollar grant for Rogers High School, which suffers from particularly low graduation rates. (Please note the illogic of awarding grants to failing programs because they are failing. Failure thus results in more money.) Dr. Stowell said the grant will pay for longer school days, extra teacher pay, a homework center, and - you knew it was coming - a pilot evaluation for teachers.
Part I of a new blog series exploring data from Ohio e-schools. While online learning is still new to the vast majority of K-12 students and schools, Ohio has operated "e-schools," public charter schools that operate entirely online and which students "attend" on a full-time basis, for a decade. As policy debates around online learning grow, what do we know about these schools-who do they enroll and how well do they perform-and what can we learn from Ohio's e-school experience?
In 2001, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio's first charter 'e-school', opened its doors. Soon there were 27 e-schools across the state. And, despite a moratorium that has prevented any new schools from opening since 2005, total e-school enrollment has skyrocketed to over 29,000 students.
OF all the goals of the education reform movement, none is more elusive than developing an objective method to assess teachers. Studies show that over time, test scores do not provide a consistent means of separating good from bad instructors.
Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers' control can influence student performance from year to year -- or even from classroom to classroom during the same year. Often, more than half of those teachers identified as the poorest performers one year will be judged average or above average the next, and the results are almost as bad for teachers with multiple classes during the same year.
Fortunately, there's a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction -- in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.
GreatSchools is headquartered in San Francisco, home of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). And it just so happens that San Francisco Unified is on the vanguard of school choice, allowing and encouraging all parents to make a proactive choice about which of the districts' approximately 160 schools they would like their children to attend.
SFUSD recently completed the "first round" of its school selection process for the 2011-12 school year, and released some interesting information about the process.
Like most districts, SFUSD has the concept of an "attendance area" for elementary schools. Perhaps the most interesting piece of data is that only 23 percent of kindergarten applicants listed their attendance-area school as a first choice. The remainder: 24 percent listed a city-wide school, and 53 percent listed another attendance area school as their first choice.
The U.S. Secretary of Education said Friday he was impressed with Nebraska's P-16 initiative -- a coalition of state education, business and government leaders -- and a sense of cohesion and commitment to education.
"To see all these leaders from across the state come together to really challenge the status quo and drive the state to new heights actually is extraordinarily encouraging to me," said Arne Duncan, who met Friday with state and local education leaders at the governor's mansion.
In a short news conference after a closed-door meeting with education leaders, Duncan touched on the No Child Left Behind law and the cost of college education. He said the Obama administration will invest in community colleges and in early education.
"At the end of the day, my goal and (the) president's goal is to again lead the world in college graduates," he said.
One of the core features of computer games besides the graphics, sounds and story is something you don't notice immediately. Some games do not do it very well but some became famous for it: Game Artificial Intelligence.
From the humble beginnings in games like Pacman to the great successes we know today like the Halo series, Game AI showed generations of kids that a computer can be pretty smart and sometimes even mean. Some of the better computer games adapt to the way the player reacts and then find new ways to compete. The aim is of course to keep the player interested in the game and engaged in the sense to make it just as difficult to challenge the player's skills but on the other hand not to make it too frustrating or impossible to win.
Another part of good game design is that the controls are self explanatory and most gamers won't be bothered with reading a manual before starting the game. If something is boring and thus means the player understood a strategy or principle of the game there needs to be a way to skip it and move on.
• School districts where students show an average of one year academic growth per year of instruction would get bonus money, on top of per-pupil state aid. Some individual schools might qualify. In the 2012-13 School Aid Fund, $300 million would be set aside for rewards.
• Some funding for all districts would be tied to achievement, not enrollment.
• Tougher standards for individual schools to ensure academic progress.
• Require all districts to develop online dashboard that shows funding and academic progress. Prohibit districts from paying more than 80% of employee health care; those that fail would lose some state per-pupil funding.
Governor Mitch Daniels signed Senate Enrolled Act 1 Saturday, a key measure in his comprehensive education reform package that changes the way teachers are evaluated and paid.
According to the governor's office, for the first time in Indiana, teacher effectiveness will be part of decisions for hiring, salary and promotions.
"Among all the things we can do to make more successful the children of this state, nothing comes close to a better teacher. We are so glad that Indiana has leaped to the forefront by saying to people of all backgrounds and all walks of life, 'come and teach,'" Daniels said, surrounded by Hoosier teachers from such organizations as Stand for Children, Students First and Teach for America.
Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, was the author of the bill; Rep. Robert Behning, R-Indianapolis was the sponsor.
The doorbell wasn't working when Bob Kattman visited a school recently. Kattman sent the principal an email afterward saying that he expected that wouldn't be the case the next time he arrived.
Kattman isn't particularly meddlesome or picky - in fact, his reputation is the opposite. But he has expectations for what he wants to see in a school. An orderly, functioning atmosphere where things like doorbells work is part of the recipe.
Other critical ingredients: strong school leadership, a united and energized staff, a clear academic program (although what the program is can vary widely), a focus on achievement, skillful use of data, an effective character education program for students and a climate in which everyone from the principal to the students is continuously asks how to do things better.
The success overall of the dozen schools in Milwaukee that Kattman oversees as head of the charter school office at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is one of the most important and promising developments on the education scene in Milwaukee and perhaps well beyond.
In one corner of the courtyard, green-painted railings enclose the tomb of a saint. In another, a pair of 12-year-old boys in spotless white shirts and neatly pressed trousers politely answer visitors' questions. In Diyarbakir, a city in Turkey's Kurdish south-east where many children work on the streets or land in jail for throwing stones at security forces, these two have come to prepare for high school entrance exams. Asked what they want to do later, one says "doctor" and the other, grinning, declares "police".
They are attending a study house run by supporters of Fethullah Gulen - a preacher who has inspired the creation of a vast network of schools and student dormitories that blend academic rigour, especially in the sciences, with a moral education based on Islamic principles.
"It's not just explaining English or maths - it's explaining what it means to be a good or bad person," says the director of Diyarbakir's 20 study houses. "In this system teachers come to school earlier, become friends with students and care about the relationship....In none of our schools do we teach religion. We tell them what's right and wrong. We show them good and bad practice, and they decide."
But in Turkey, opinion is sharply divided between those who see Mr Gulen as a force for social mobility and tolerance, and those who suspect he is insidiously undermining the country's secular foundations. His followers have been described as "Islamic Jesuits" - and as Turkey's equivalent of Opus Dei. Yet there is little doubt that the movement he inspires is now an important force shaping Turkish society, part of a broader evolution in which leaders emerging from a religious, business-minded middle class are gradually eclipsing older, fiercely secular, elites.
Many people, including commenters on this blog, say the people running the KIPP charter school network---the best known and most successful in the country---don't explain themselves enough. That may be, but KIPP provides more information about its efforts to raise student achievement than any other charter network, or most school districts for that matter.
The report is a bit of a stretch in terms of KIPP taking credit or blame, since the students surveyed left KIPP more than a decade ago at the end of eighth grade. But KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg made preparing kids for college their chief goal when they started the first KIPP middle schools in Houston and the South Bronx in 1995. That is still their main target. They say they are determined to report how that effort is going no matter what statistical qualms they may hear from people like me.
One of the most negative reactions to the piece has come from former Chancellor Joel Klein, who (in an email exchange with the reporter) responded defensively to the article's implied criticism of his own administration's support for charters:
A thought-provoking article about a successful district middle school in the Bronx in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine has led to some interesting public responses from charter advocates in New York. As the article notes, this school's principal and teachers combine innovative teaching and learning (such as a dual-language immersion program for its high proportion of English Language Learners) with a firm commitment to serving all students who want to come -- even if, unlike at charters, those students arrive in the middle of the year or as transfers in upper grades.
One of the most negative reactions to the piece has come from former Chancellor Joel Klein, who (in an email exchange with the reporter) responded defensively to the article's implied criticism of his own administration's support for charters:
This week Governor McDonnell announced, as part of his "Opportunity to Learn" education reform agenda, an initiative to institute performance-pay at Virginia schools that are designated as "hard to staff."
While performance-pay is supported by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, many Democrats side with teachers unions in opposing performance-pay. I have been critical of many aspects of Governor McDonnell's education policy including his lack of adequate funding and partisan decision not to participate in Race to the Top. This latest initiative however, is worthy of support.
Indiana will create the nation's broadest private school voucher system and enact other sweeping education changes, making the state a showcase of conservative ideas just as Gov. Mitch Daniels nears an announcement on whether he will make a 2012 presidential run.
The Republican-controlled state legislature handed Daniels a huge victory Wednesday when the House voted 55-43 to give final approval to a bill creating the voucher program that would allow even middle-class families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools.
The move to a digital culture is raising a new set of challenges for educators. This study examines the Internet sources that students commonly use and provides educators with ideas to help students develop better citation and writing skills.
For weeks leading up to the national Academic Decathlon, two teams -- from California and Texas -- have been sizing each other up from afar, rekindling a rivalry nearly as old as the competition itself.
Each team has something to prove: Granada Hills Charter High School wants to maintain California's winning streak for the ninth consecutive year; Dobie High School, on the outskirts of Houston, wants to show that Texas, dormant as a frontrunner since 2000, is ready to be a contender again.
On Friday, Dobie upped the ante when it narrowly beat Granada Hills in the Super Quiz, the only public portion of the intense, two-day competition. (They'll find out who won overall here Saturday.)
The pressure has been on since the recent state-level competitions, when Dobie won in Texas with a score only 300 points lower than Granada Hills' winning score in California. In a competition where good teams score more than 50,000 points, that kind of margin is akin to, according to one description, a football game with a score of 20 to 20.4.
We just received a tip that Seattle Public School students are using high-tech to steal teacher passwords, hack systems, and alter grades. I am waiting for SPS to confirm this.
According to an email sent by the district's Chief Informational Officer Jim Ratchford at 11:15 a.m. today to SPS employees, including Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield, Department of Technology Services has determined that network log-in credentials "are being stolen and used to inappropriately access district systems."
The email, whose subject line reads "Unauthorized Access Warning," says that the incident "appears to have been going on for the last few weeks, possibly longer." "At this point, we are aware of this happening at these schools: Ballard, Ingraham, and Sealth. However, all schools and teachers are at risk," Ratchford says in his email.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday it would be investing $20 million to bring new national education standards into the classroom using game-based learning, social-networking and other approaches to capture the imagination of bored or unmotivated students.
The Seattle-based foundation is partnering with the nonprofit arm of one of the largest textbook publishers in the United States to create the new learning tools and offer some of the materials for teachers and school districts to use for free. It is also working with education game developers and an online public school in Florida for this project.
Judy Codding, the Pearson Foundation executive leading the course development team, said during a news conference that her organization already planned to be involved in developing new ways to help teachers adopt the new national education standards that will replace local learning goals in more than 40 states.
The partnership with the Gates Foundation offers the philanthropic side of the textbook company the money it needs to really innovate and try out new ideas that catch kids' attention, said Codding, former president and CEO of America's Choice, an education reform company acquired last year by Pearson.
On Easter weekend, I went to a wedding in Michigan. The occasion featured a radiant young couple who are expecting their first child in June, amidst a loving community of family and friends. As it happened, many of the people assembled were teachers. And so, on this April weekend, with the countryside greening around us and signs of new life everywhere, I found myself engaged in many conversations about teachers and schooling.
I was struck by the optimism and ambition of many of these young people embarking on careers in education. With their talent and accomplishments, they could select careers that are much more financially rewarding than teaching. But instead, they have chosen the classroom as a site to try to make the world better. They see education as a place to help train young minds and create engaged communities.
One young man, a second-generation teacher, told me that he thinks he affects many more lives as a teacher than he did in his prior work as a student leader and activist. Teaching seventh- and eighth-graders on the south side of Chicago, he explained, forces him to keep learning with his students, to keep their interest and to motivate them.
It was lunch hour and hundreds of Dos Pueblos High School students surged onto the bleachers at the school's outdoor Greek Theater. The crowd was cheering, the music was thumping and a student-built robot named Penguinbot IV was wheeling and pivoting, sucking up dozens of lightweight balls and shooting them at the young athletes who had ventured onstage.
From a console to one side, teenagers in black, NASA-style jumpsuits guided the 150-pound machine as it weaved and dodged. When the robot and star basketball player Jay Larinan began pelting each other, a girl in the stands screamed, "I believe in you, Jay!" The crowd went wild.
It was the kind of free-spirited scene that gladdens the heart of Amir Abo-Shaeer, the 39-year-old physics teacher who each year leads the school's robotics team into a rigorous national competition that requires months of preparation and a season's worth of intense face-offs.
Ever since there have been IQ tests, people have debated what they actually measure. Is it "intelligence", is it an abstract combination of mental abilities, or is it, as Edwin Boring said, "the capacity to do well in an intelligence test"? Regardless of the answer, studies have repeatedly shown that people who achieve higher scores in IQ tests are more likely to do well in school, perform well in their jobs, earn more money, avoid criminal convictions, and even live longer. Say what you like about the tests, but they have predictive power.
However, Angela Lee Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania has found that this power is overrated. The link between our IQs and our fates becomes muddier when we consider motivation - an aspect of test-taking that is often ignored. Simply put, some people try harder in IQ tests than others. If you take this into account, the association between your IQ and your success in life becomes considerably weaker. The tests are not measuring intelligence alone, but also the desire to prove it.
At a board meeting of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board on Wednesday, Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said that $10,000 bachelor's degrees -- books included -- as proposed by Gov. Rick Perry are "entirely feasible."
He hopes to have concrete proposals and coursework in place to meet the challenge before the start of the next legislative session in 2013.
A repeated theme in the board's discussion about the governor's cost-cutting proposal was that they were not seeking to replace existing degrees or artificially push the costs of those down, but were rather seeking to provide alternative options for low-income students. "We're not talking about every field," Paredes said. "We're not talking about every baccalaureate degree. We're not talking about every student."
Gov. Rick Snyder said today he wants to retool Michigan's school system so it demands and rewards performance in terms of student achievement.
He detailed changes to merit pay and the teacher tenure system; approval for more charter schools; a new state office devoted to early childhood education; tough anti-bullying measures; a greater emphasis on online education; and a more flexible system in which state funding would follow students wherever they go, rather than being assigned to a particular school district.
Further, the governor announced as many as 23 financially distressed school districts could be placed under emergency managers who have beefed-up powers to scrap collective bargaining agreements under controversial legislation he recently signed into law.
Snyder also expanded "Schools of Choice" plans and said residents of a local district will have the first opportunity to enroll there, but schools will no longer be able to refuse out-of-district students. And he called for consolidation and competitive bidding of school district business and administrative functions.
Higher education institutions, whether they are private or public, have an obligation to be transparent about the design and operations of their teacher preparation programs. After all, these institutions have all been publicly approved to prepare public school teachers.
Here at Transparency Central, you can keep track of whether colleges and universities are living up to their obligation to be open. Just click on a state to learn more about the transparency of individual institutions there.
NCTQ is asking institutions to provide documents that describe the fundamental aspects of their teacher preparation programs: the subject matter teachers are supposed to know, the real-world classroom practice they are supposed to get, the outcomes that they achieve once they enter the classroom. Taken together, the evidence we gathering will answer a key question: Are individual programs setting high expectations for what new teachers should know and be able to do for their students?
A number of institutions have let us know that they do not intend to cooperate with our review, some even before we formally asked them for documents. As a result, we have begun to make open records requests using state "sunshine" (or "freedom of information act") laws.
We'll be regularly updating our progress, so come back soon to learn more about our efforts to bring transparency to teacher prep.
Voters overwhelmingly believe that taxpayers are not getting a good return on what they spend on public education, and just one-in-three voters think spending more will make a difference.
Nationally, the United States spends an average of about $9,000 per student per year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 11% of voters think the taxpayers are getting a good return on that investment. Seventy-two percent (72%) disagree and say taxpayers are not getting their money's worth. Sixteen percent (16%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Thirty-four percent (34%) voters believe student performance will improve if more money is spent on funding for schools and educations programs. A plurality (41%) disagrees and thinks that increased spending will not lead to improve student performance. Twenty-five percent (25%) aren't sure.
The survey also found that voters tend to underestimate how much is spent on education. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say the average per student expenditure is less than $9,000 per year while only 12% think it's higher than that. Nine percent (9%) estimate the right amount but a plurality of 40% is not sure. There is a wide range of expenditure on education depending upon the state and region.
The system of awarding science Ph.D.s needs to be reformed or shut down, given the tough competition for limited jobs in academia, a provocative series of pieces in one of the world's pre-eminent scientific journals said this week.
According to the multipart series in the journal Nature, the world is awash in Ph.D.s, most of them being awarded to scholars who will never find work in academia, the traditional goal of those holding a doctorate.
"In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack," the cover article said.
Of people who received Ph.D.s in the biological sciences five to six years ago, 13 percent have tenure-track positions leading to a professorship, said Paula Stephan, who studies the economics of science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. For the rest, 10 percent work part time or not at all; 33 percent are in academic positions that don't lead to a professorship; 22 percent are in industry; and 20 percent are at community colleges or in government or non-profit jobs, she said.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy, and the foundation associated with Pearson, the giant textbook and school technology company, announced a partnership on Wednesday to create online reading and math courses aligned with the new academic standards that some 40 states have adopted in recent months.
The 24 new courses will use video, interactive software, games, social media and other digital materials to present math lessons for kindergarten through 10th grade and English lessons for kindergarten through 12th grade, Pearson and Gates officials said.
Widespread adoption of the new standards, known as the common core, has provoked a race among textbook publishers to revise their current classroom offerings so they align with the standards, and to produce new materials. The Gates-Pearson initiative appears to be the most ambitious such effort so far.
Weeks after Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany's defense minister, was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal, three German universities say they are investigating similar complaints about the academic work of three figures from the country's political sphere.
The theses of all three have been posted for public scrutiny on VroniPlag , a site run by the same people who posted the Guttenberg work online.
Two of the three -- Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of the European Parliament; and Veronica Sass, a daughter of former state leader -- have declined to comment on the accusations that their theses are suspect. The third, Matthias Pröfrock, a new state lawmaker, conceded that he might have committed unintentional errors and has called on his university to recheck his thesis.
The best schools -- whether they're charter schools, public schools or private schools -- are intentional about everything they do, says educational analyst Andrew Rotherham.
"They are intentional about who is in the building, who is teaching, how they use data, what's happening for students, the support for students, the curriculum, how progress is assessed," he says. "Everything is intentional and nothing is left to chance."
On Thursday's Fresh Air, Rotherham explains why he supports strategies that will redesign American public education with the help of charter schools, public sector choices and teacher accountability.
Rotherham is a partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Bellwether advises grant-making organizations like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, educational nonprofits and charter school networks on their operational and public policy issues.
Rotherham, who served in the Clinton administration as a special assistant of domestic policy, now spends his days thinking about how to make public and charter schools work for more kids. The public school system worked for him, he says, but only because he grew up in a nice suburb outside Washington, D.C.
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools.
In 2005, she wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation."
But four years later, Ravitch changed her mind.
"I came to the conclusion ... that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools -- or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not -- because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today."
The achievement gap between white and minority students has nothing to do with aptitude but correlates to socioeconomic factors such as poverty, racism and family structure. Still, it stands to reason that states with higher percentages of lower-performing students will perform lower in the aggregate than states with higher percentages of better performing students.
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress test are broken down for ethnicity. The scores show white students in Texas consistently score higher than white students in Wisconsin, and black and Hispanic students in Texas also outscore their Wisconsin counterparts.
As for the writer's statement that Texas licenses mere four-year college graduates rather than school of education graduates, I say "good for Texas!" It's ironic that the most engaging teachers at our colleges and universities, such as UW-Madison's famous chemistry professor Bassam Shakhashiri, would not be allowed to teach in a Wisconsin public school because most have no degrees in education.
I. Introduction A.Title/topic-Talented and Gifted Compliance
B. Presenter/contact person -Sue Abplanalp, Jennifer Allen, Pam Nash and Dylan Pauly
Background information- On March 24,2011, MMSD received DPI's initial findings in the matter ofthe TAG complaint. DPI found MMSD to be noncompliant on all four counts. The Board has forty-five days from the date of receipt ofthe initial findings to petition the state superintendent for a public hearing. If the Board does not request such a hearing, the findings will become final. Once the findings are final, regardless of whether a hearing is held, if there is a finding of noncompliance, the state superintendent may develop with the Board a plan for compliance. The plan must contain a time line for achievement of compliance that cannot exceed ninety days. An extension of the time period may be requested if extenuating or mitigating circumstances exist.
II. Summary of Current Information:
Current Status: Currently, DPI has made an initial finding of noncompliance against MMSD. While the Board is entitled to request a public hearing on the issue of compliance, the administration does not recommend this course of action. Consequently, at this time, the administration is working toward the development ofa response to DPI's findings, which will focus on remedial steps to insure compliance.
Proposal: Staff are working on a response to the preliminary findings which we will present to the Board when completed. It is the administration's hope that this response will serve as the foundation to the compliance plan that will be developed once the DPI findings are final. The response will include input from the TAG Advisory Committee, the District's TAG professionals -- our Coordinator and staff. A meeting to begin work one the proposed response is currently scheduled for April28, 2011 from 4:00 p.m.-5:00pm. Subsequent meetings will follow.
I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It's been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can't get him out of my mind.
The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement's leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.
Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, "all of the educational experimentation" that took place on Klein's watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that's required to improve student performance, so that's all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely -- and needs to.
Amazon will let users of its Kindle e-reader borrow electronic books from two-thirds of US libraries as it seeks to broaden the device's appeal in the face of competition from Apple's iPad and rival tablets.
The world's largest online retailer said that from later this year, customers would be able to borrow e-books from libraries and read - and annotate - them on a Kindle or any other device to which users have downloaded a Kindle app.
Amazon's move intensifies questions about the commercial threat the growing popularity of e-readers poses to traditional book publishers, which have acknowledged a concern that e-book lending might cannibalise sales of books. US public libraries have spent several years building up their e-book collections, which have been accessible to users of Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony's Reader device. But until now they have not worked with the Kindle.
Most schools are looking for ways to boost achievement and save money. Blended learning is part of the solution. Blended learning is an intentional shift to an online environment for at least a portion of the student day to boost learning and operating productivity. Math is a great place for a school or district to introduce blended learning because it:
facilitates individualized progress
leverages great math teachers
takes advantage of quality math content (open & proprietary)
can be augmented by games and tutorials
School of One, a pilot middle grade math program in New York City, is a good example of multiple modes of instruction aligned with an assessment framework. An early example of a smart recommendation engine creates a unique schedule for each student every day. This important pilot project introduced the idea of a customized learning playlist, but it has not attempted to improve operating productivity.
Among the drastic changes planned for Nevada's K-12 education system -- ranked at the bottom of the nation for high school graduation -- few strike a nerve like a plan to stop paying higher salaries to teachers with advanced degrees and switch to a pay-for-performance model.
The bill reflects a growing nationwide movement toward performance pay; it's based on research that shows an advanced degree seldom leads to increased student achievement at the elementary school level, and only sometimes increases it in high school classrooms.
"We're 50th in the nation," said Assemblyman Ira Hansen, R-Sparks. "We need radical surgery."
The Guardian highlights a serious problem both in the United Kingdom and the United States: students aren't comfortable with and sometimes aren't prepared for academic writing.
Whether the cause is an unsatisfactory education prior to enrollment or a long layoff since a student last studied formally, writing improvement is a priority.
Daphne Elliston cried the first time she had to write an assignment. She put it bluntly:
Hurdles include understanding content and vocabulary unique to academic writing, which can be a stumbling block to understanding the assignment itself. Research, too, is difficult when a student is having trouble with language.
And then they must analyze it, process it and put it into their own words to write the paper. It can be a daunting combination, but colleges and universities are trying to rectify it.
Daphne Ellison said she thought a gap in her education was the reason for her trouble with writing--she continued higher education after many years out of school--but Margi Rawlinson, an academic coordinator at Edge Hill University, says it's an epidemic not confined to non-traditional students:
"We have people with A-levels who are arriving poorly equipped for academic writing," she says.
"I think one of the issues at A-level is that they're not being taught to research independently, and [with essays] it's not just the writing--that's only part of it."
Rawlinson isn't alone in her assessment. Helena Attlee, a writer in residence at Worcester University and a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund echoes Rawlinson's diagnoses:
"It seems to me there's a lack of interface between A-levels and degrees, so the thing that people are required to do to get very good A-levels isn't equipping them to do what is required to get a degree."
A variety of support systems are in place for struggling writers, from one-on-one instruction to more detailed irection on particular assignments from professors themselves. School officials are hopeful that increased attention and support can improve an adult student's poor writing skills. Professor Wayne Martin, when askked whether students can really improve, sums it up:
"Yes, incredibly. And the biggest improvement is generally in the first five weeks," he says.
---------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Obama had his "Sputnik Moment," when standardized test scores around the world pointed to the mediocrity of American students in reading, math and sciences. There is now a major mantra coming from Washington to all state capitals: the "race to the top" is on, and it doesn't include a continuation of the downward spiral of test scores. The new modus operandi: Leave aside achievement throughout the years in high school, the stream of G.P.As., the difficulty of courses taken during the years in 9 to 12, and any creative projects done by students. Base everything on standardized tests.
When career prospects, prestige, and job security are connected to one and only one criteria -- score on a standardized test -- human nature is bound to creep in. Baseball players start taking steroids; Olympic athletes try every means to beat the system. Will it happen to dedicated teachers who are working hard to educate our next generation? Will temptation overtake honesty, integrity and ethical behavior?
There have been fresh calls for schools to dump the dull ICT lessons that are turning kids off IT and failing to create the type of IT-savvy employees that UK businesses need.
Earlier this year, a discussion forum on digital skills heard from a BCS member and IT teacher that pupils and teachers are "bored rigid" by ICT lessons in their present form.
Intellect, the trade body for the UK's tech sector, has now called on the government to drop ICT lessons in their current form from the national curriculum and replace them with ones that focus on higher-value computer science skills. The organisation was submitting its response to a Department of Education review of the National Curriculum in England, launched in January this year.
ICT should also be taught by embedding interactive and multimedia technology across every subject, according to Intellect - which believes technology businesses could play a role here to help teachers make the best use of relevant equipment by supporting training.
Intellect reckons the ICT curriculum is too focused on teaching pupils how to use a limited number of software packages and is therefore failing to inspire students to develop more advanced computer skills.
It seems to me that the goals of Education Reform are primarily to bring the increases in productivity (and cost reductions) seen in other industries to the education industry. The greatest obstacle to the effort to cut the cost of education is teacher salaries. The cost of education cannot be cut until the cost of teaching is cut. The Education Reform movement seeks paths to cutting the cost of teaching.
While technology has allowed for amazing radical increases in productivity in nearly every other industry, teaching is still, for the most part, done exactly as it was done in pre-industrial times: face-to-face with a personal relationship between a professional teacher and a limited number of students. For there to be any improvement in productivity (and reduction in cost), this model must be broken.
Education Reform is pursuing four paths to increase productivity (and thereby reduce costs).
1. The de-professionalization of teaching. Teachers are professionals. They are expected to work with minimal supervision and direction. They are expected to use their expertise, judgement, and talent to respond improvisationally to student needs. In the Education Reform model, however, teachers are expected to deliver standardized lessons prepared centrally. They can make some small prescribed variations within a prescribed range. The best model for this is how professional bankers have been replaced by non-professionals, sitting in cube farms, wearing headsets, and completing loan application forms by working through a script on a computer screen. The script includes what to say if the customer says this or if the customer says that. Based on this model it isn't hard to imagine non-professionals in front of a classroom delivering a scripted lesson with scripted responses to expected student questions.
Nathan Carlberg, 27, is exactly the type of teacher Barack Obama, US president, wants to keep in the system. Fresh-faced and passionate, he troops around room 207 at Commodore John Rogers Elementary School in Baltimore dispensing superlatives to students who get the answers right to his spelling quiz.
"Bingo," yelps one of the second-graders and jumps up with his paper. Mr Carlberg ambles over. "Let me check," he says and the class is silent. "He got it right," shouts Mr Carlberg. The kids erupt, eager to win the next round.
Even a year ago this scene would have been unthinkable at CJR. It ranked as one of the worst five elementary schools in Maryland in 2010 but has since managed to pull itself around. Last year it became a "turnaround school", which meant every teacher had to reapply for his or her job. Only three were retained.
The turnaround process is one of the signature strategies of Mr Obama's new school agenda and its flagship Race to the Top programme. It revolves around a simple but controversial notion: giving incentives for innovation. Race to the Top awards money to school districts that can prove they have new strategies for improving teaching and results.
Michigan's public schools need to more rigorously measure students' academic growth, but with fewer state rules to make that happen, Gov. Rick Snyder said today.
That means more autonomy for individual schools and teachers, and a system to financially reward outstanding teachers who can mentor others.
Also, state schools superintendent Michael Flanagan called for a virtual deregulation of schools, such as eliminating minimum number of hours or days students must attend each year.
That's a change Snyder hinted he'll include in his special message on education Wednesday. He said the state should give teachers and schools and the state more flexibility to teach and to lift all students to higher academic standards.
Two to three years ago, I found very little traction when trying to initiate discussions around the potential use of mobile phones in education with many counterparts in education ministries around the world. (And when this *was* discussed, talk usually centered on how to ban them from schools.)
This is now changing very quickly! Many factors appear to be behind this change -- including, it is probably worth noting, the strong apparent interest by many companies to get in on the ground floor of what they feel will be very large markets related to 'm-learning' in developing countries in the coming years. (I now get so many cold calls from vendors every week wanting to share information about their 'm-learning solutions' that I let all phone calls ring into voicemail by default.)
With momentum building around 1-to-1 computing initiatives (where every student receives her own laptop) in many countries, many governments are embarking on large-scale roll outs of educational technologies as never before. However one feels about the potential relevance of mobile phones in education (and reasonable people can certainly disagree about this), it appears to me to be a topic that at a minimum merits some discussion in many education systems, given that small, connected computing devices known today as mobile phones are increasingly to be found in the pockets and pocketbook of teachers, and even students, at rates perhaps unimagined only a decade ago. It is worth noting that this large scale roll-out of computing devices in the hands of teachers and students has largely happened without any government subsidy at all. Given this fact, is it worthwhile for governments to consider taking some of the monies dedicated for the purchase of ICT hardware and use it instead for other purposes (more/better education content? more training? better connectivity? something not at all ICT-related?)? Even if you feel that mobile phones are not relevant to discussions of technology use in education, perhaps it is worth considering these sorts of questions before dismissing such use out of hand.
Until this year, Ena Baxter, an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, would often have her 10th graders compose papers by summarizing a single piece of reading material.
Last month, for a paper on the influence of media on teenagers, she had them read a survey on the effects of cellphones and computers on young people's lives, a newspaper column on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4,200-word magazine article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.
Here's a status report on the region's public education from the New England Board of Higher Education.
Connecticut
Gov. Dannel Malloy's two-year plan to deal with a $3.2 billion deficit (in the first year alone) relies on significant concessions from labor to the tune of $1.5 billion. Unions gave Malloy strong support in his race for governor. The remaining portion of the deficit would be addressed through $750 million in program cuts and $1.5 billion in tax increases.
The General Assembly's Finance and Appropriations Committees met with Malloy and reached agreement on the budget for FY12-FY13. Following the meeting, the Joint Appropriations Committee released its budget, which will be debated in the House in the coming week. The governor and legislative leaders still must finalize an agreement with labor. Malloy has said he expects to see a budget on May 6.
Higher Education
Malloy has proposed a two-year $144-million cut to public higher education. Also included in his budget is a plan to restructure the system, which features the following:
OVER at Language Log is a discussion of a new directive that is intended to get executive agencies to cut the jargon and acronyms in writing intended for the public. Johnson certainly applauds that effort. But Mark Liberman and other commentators note a few ironies. One is that the guidance itself is pretty confusingly worded, as is the underlying statute (like many other statutes). Mr Liberman's peeve is the confusing scope of conjunctions in acts of Congress: how to interpret simple ands, ors and buts ends up taking up a lot of appellate courts' time.
The second irony, noted by Matt Negrin at Politico, is the name of the set of rules designed to cut masses of capital letters. It is the Plain Language Action and Information Network. (Update: see correction below.) Get it? PLAIN? Ugh. This from the sausage factory that brought you the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. As David Rees wrote in his comic "Get Your War On", "I still can't believe they named that thing the fuckin' USA-PATRIOT Act. Grown-ups did that. Never forget that." If I were in Congress I'd sponsor a Prohibiting Naming Laws With Cute Titles Act, or the PNLWCT Act, avoiding initial vowels just to make sure that it's unpronounceable.
Richard Whitmire's latest blog (via Whitney Tilson) suggests that edreform is in trouble "My sense is that the school reform movement -- roughly defined as those who believe that schools alone can make a dent in the seemingly intractable problems arising from the confluence of race and poverty -- is headed toward a major beat-down."
Here's what he's missing:
1.The Race: A half a dozen examples of the new employment bargain, data systems, and choice landscapes are sufficient to tip a lot of states.
2. The Khan-a-bes: the explosion of informal learning like Khan Academy is enveloping the formal system. It's now possible for anyone to learn anything anywhere.
3. Online learning. We finally have a massively scalable quality capability. The top half a dozen providers (both nonprofit and for-profit) could provision summer school for any interested student in America.
More students are taking ambitious courses. According to a recent Department of Education study, the percentage of high school graduates who signed up for rigorous-sounding classes nearly tripled over the past two decades.
But other studies point to a disconnect: Even though students are getting more credits in more advanced courses, they are not scoring any higher on standardized tests.
The reason, according to a growing body of research, is that the content of these courses is not as high-achieving as their names -- the course-title equivalent of grade inflation. Algebra II is sometimes just Algebra I. And College Preparatory Biology can be just Biology.
Lynn T. Mellor, a researcher in Austin, Tex., who has studied the phenomenon in the state, compares it to a food marketer labeling an orange soda as healthier orange juice.
"Like the misleading drink labels, course titles may bear little relationship to what students have actually learned," said Dr. Mellor, who has analyzed course completion, test records and other student data in Texas. "We see students taking more and more advanced courses, but still not performing well on end-of-course exams."
White schoolchildren in Britain's poorest communities lag behind peers who are black or of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, a Financial Times analysis of more than 3m sets of exam results reveals.
Poor white children even achieve worse average results than deprived pupils for whom English is a second language.
The average black pupil from among the poorest fifth of children, identified by postcode analysis, gains the equivalent of one more GCSE pass at A*, the highest grade, than the average white child from a similar background.
The figures highlight the challenge facing the coalition, which has identified social mobility as one of its top concerns. Earlier this month, the government published a "social mobility strategy", which stated that "tackling the opportunity deficit...is our guiding purpose".
Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust and Britain's leading educational philanthropist, said the FT results showed that "if the coalition is really serious about raising social mobility, it will need to find a way to crack the problems of the English white working class".
Primerica Inc., which has the country's largest life-insurance sales force, had another strong recruiting year in 2010: About 230,000 people signed up to become agents.
Another number also stayed strong: the drop-out rate
About 80% of Primerica recruits don't actually become insurance agents, often because they flunk state licensing exams, according to filings and interviews. That's a problem for the company, which, more than any other insurer of its size, depends on agents to sell policies. As the number of Primerica agents has declined over the past four years, so, too, have sales of life insurance.
So Primerica recently came up with a novel solution: Make the tests easier. It asserted to state regulators that the exams aren't only too hard in some places, but might also be racially biased, putting African-Americans and other minorities at a disadvantage.
A revised Excel Data Table for the NRC Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States is now available. A summary of changes for each program can be found here. Those who wish to compare the September 28, 2010 version of the Data Table to the revised rankings, may find the old rankings here.
The revisions are in response to communications and queries received by the NRC since the first Data Table was released on September 28, 2010. At that time, the NRC agreed to follow up on queries about the data and these were received from approximately 450 doctoral programs from 34 institutions. Ten of these institutions had queries for 10 or more of their programs.
The most common questions centered around faculty lists and related characteristics: publications per allocated faculty member, citations per publication, the allocation of faculty, and the measure of interdisciplinarity that used this measure. The NRC was not able to permit changes in faculty lists from what universities had originally submitted. That would have required enormous expense to completely redo the study with the 2005/6 data.
"I wanted an entire new board, an entire new corporate suite because what's happening today both on the finances and the educational scores -- needs to be shaken up. And what I know in my heart [is that] the people of the city do not think we're doing what we need to do for our children." -- Rahm Emanuel
Rahm Emanuel isn't even officially mayor yet and he's already got the city and its schools in a fine mess. His appointment of the embattled J.C. Brizard as schools CEO (that's what we call school superintendents here in Chicago) rivals only Bloomberg's pick of Cathie Black in New York as most embarrassing of the year. Black lasted a mere three months before high-tailing it back to the sanctity of the corporate world, where failure is more often than not rewarded with super bonuses and not just a kick in the ass and a golden parachute a la urban school bosses.
Bloomberg's choice of the eminently unqualified Black reset the I-don't-give-a-damn-what-anybody-else-thinks standard previously set by former D.C. mayor, Adrian Fenty, whose pick of the also unqualified Michelle Rhee earned him the total disdain of D.C. voters who ultimately booted both Fenty and Rhee out of town.
Dykstra, in particular, had a lot to say, but the discussion of how well Wisconsin kids are learning to read -- a subject that gets heated among education experts as well as parents and teachers -- struck me as quite engaging and generally cordial.
There seemed to be consensus surrounding the notion that it's vitally important for students to become successful readers in the early grades, and that goal should be an urgent priority in Wisconsin.
But how the state is currently measuring up to its own past performance, and to other states, is subject to some debate. Furthermore, there isn't a single answer or widespread agreement on precisely how to make kids into better readers.
John Covington hesitated before becoming this city's 26th school superintendent in 40 years. A blunt-talking African American from Alabama, he attended the Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles, which prepares leaders for urban school districts, and when he asked people there if he should come here, their response, he says, was: "Not 'no,' but 'Hell, no!' " He says they suggested that when flying across the country he should take a flight that does not pass through this city's airspace.
How did this pleasant place become so problematic? Remember the destination of the road paved with good intentions.
This city is just 65 miles down the road from Topeka, Kan., from whence came Brown v. Board of Education , the fuse that lit many ongoing struggles over schools and race. Kansas City has had its share of those struggles, one of which occurred last year when Covington took office with a big bang: He closed 26 of the district's 61 schools. Kansas City had fewer students but twice as many schools as Pueblo, Colo., where Covington had been superintendent.
Thirty-five years ago, Kansas City's district had 54,000 students. Today it has fewer than 17,000. Between then and now there was a spectacular confirmation of the axiom that education cannot be improved by simply throwing money at it.
In the 1980s, after a court held that the city was operating a segregated school system, judicial Caesarism appeared. A judge vowed to improve the district's racial balance by luring white students to lavish "magnet schools" offering "suburban comparability" and "desegregative attractiveness." And he ordered tax increases to pay the almost $2 billion bill for, among other things, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a planetarium, vivariums, greenhouses, a model United Nations wired for language translation, radio and television studios, an animation and editing lab, movie editing and screening rooms, a temperature-controlled art gallery, a 25-acre farm, a 25-acre wildlife area, instruction in cosmetology and robotics, field trips to Mexico and Senegal, and more.
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
State taxpayers are getting a fantastic bargain this year on the education of about one in six Milwaukee children. But how long will they go on getting it?
The bargain is what we spend when a family takes its school aid in the form of a voucher to a private school in Milwaukee's choice program. Taxpayers shell out $6,442 per child, about 45% as much as the $14,183 per-child cost in the Milwaukee Public Schools, by the latest state figures.
The question is how much longer that can go on. Choice schools cannot charge poor families any more than the voucher, but researchers with the five-year study of school choice report that 82% of such schools have higher per-pupil costs. In the most recent figures, the average choice school spent $7,692 per child.
The voucher just isn't enough to run a school, said the University of Arkansas' Brian Kisida, one of the researchers: "How can you hire the best people on half the money?" He said that if he had Gov. Scott Walker's ear, he'd tell him to keep the rule requiring state tests, flawed as they are, and to raise the grant.
That isn't happening. Walker's two-year budget through 2013 freezes the voucher at $6,442, since the state is $3.5 billion in the hole. Walker also cuts how much public schools have, reducing their per-child revenue limit, their most fundamental number, by 5.5% in the first year and freezing it in the second.
On a muggy afternoon in mid-April, Mary Ruiz, an animated 18-year-old, bounced through the air-conditioned corridors of her South Dallas high school.
"Excuse the mess," she said, brushing away a small scrap of paper in an otherwise spotless stairwell, giggling as she added, "I'm acting like this is my house."
Ms. Ruiz is a senior at the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center's School of Health Professions, a magnet in the Dallas Independent School District. The Townview Center, named for the panorama of the downtown Dallas skyline visible from its north windows, houses six magnets, including programs for law, business and science.
Austin Polytechnical Academy, a school established in 2007 to help broaden the West Side community's academic opportunities and retool perceptions of vocational education, is facing harsh realities as it prepares to graduate its first senior class: lagging test scores, diminishing attendance and dismal reading levels.
Last October, Polytech joined the ranks of the 67 percent of Chicago's public neighborhood high schools when it was placed on academic probation. That same week, state-issued report cards showed that the school was not making sufficient yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Having both local and federal education officials label the school as failing is a bitter pill for parents, teachers and students. Yet people with a stake in Austin Polytech have always known they would need to struggle against long odds.
Administrators and teachers at Austin Polytech, which occupies two floors of a massive concrete building that once housed the failed Austin Community High School, have been working for four years to undo decades of neglect and failure.
Early in February, leaders of the state's largest teachers union took what was for them a major step - endorsing a series of reforms they had previously resisted, including performance pay, dividing up Milwaukee Public Schools and tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.
Within a week, however, Gov. Scott Walker released a plan to sharply curb the collective bargaining rights of most public-sector workers, and little more was heard from the Wisconsin Education Association Council about its reform initiatives.
Amid the debate over public workers' rights in Wisconsin, school reform has gotten lost in recent months, especially changes related to one of the most promising ways to improve academic achievement: focusing on teacher effectiveness.
Walker and his supporters have said that by prohibiting teachers unions from bargaining for anything other than inflation-tied wage increases, school boards are free to implement reforms that WEAC has been unwilling to embrace in the past.
A controversial review of America's teacher colleges has met resistance in Wisconsin, where education school leaders in the public and private sector say they will not voluntarily participate.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit advocacy group, and U.S. News & World Report, known for its annual rankings of colleges, announced in January they would launch a first-ever review of the nation's roughly 1,400 colleges of education. The recruitment and training of teachers have become a hot-button issue tied to education reform, but university system presidents in Wisconsin as well as New York, Georgia, Oregon and Kentucky have expressed misgivings about the process of assessing and ranking their education schools.
"While we welcome fair assessment and encourage public sharing of our strengths and weaknesses, we believe your survey will not accomplish these goals. We therefore wish to notify you that our entire membership has decided to stand united and not participate further in the survey process," says an April 7 letter by Katy Heyning, president of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and addressed to the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News. Heyning also is the dean of the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The council, meanwhile, is filing open-records requests to get information about the public education schools in states that won't provide it voluntarily. Arthur McKee, manager of teacher preparation programs at the NCTQ, said the council had not received the letter from Heyning. But it had received a letter from UW System President Kevin Reilly.
That letter from March 28 says that UW's 13 teacher colleges declined to participate because of "serious concerns" about the survey's methods of data collection, analysis and reporting.
A few months ago, we moved out of Washington, D.C., to be closer to where we'll be sending our children to school. That decision wasn't just made because it's our parish school or because many DC public schools have serious problems. Prior to getting married, my husband and I separately served on the school board that oversaw the change in our parish school's curriculum to a Classical approach. It was a large undertaking but we couldn't be more pleased with the results.
From my experience, I know that the Classical movement is sizable and under-covered by major media. So I was completely delighted to read about a new Classical school in the area in a recent Washington Post. Written by Julia Duin, it begins with an anecdote that shows how Classical education works:
It's 1 p.m. and time for Amy Clayton's fifth grade to show off their memorization skills.
Decked out in blue long-sleeved shirts and dark pants for boys and bright yellow blouses and plaid jumpers for girls, the students begin with the words of Patrick Henry's immortal "Give me liberty or give me death" speech first delivered on March 23, 1775, in Richmond. That recitation merges into verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride." That morphs into a few phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and finally to fragments of speeches by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
"Beautifully done," Clayton says at the conclusion. "We just encapsulated 80 years of American history in our recitation." She is engaged, dramatic, and students are nearly jumping out of their seats trying to answer her questions about the beginnings of the Civil War. To her right is a banner containing a quote from Aesop: "No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted." Near that hangs a crucifix.
Our nation's finest universities and colleges say they want our teenagers to be ready for college. They say they will do whatever they can to make that happen.
I would like to believe them, but in one small but revealing way, many of them -- including the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University and Washington College -- have been doing the opposite. They have failed to correct a discriminatory credit policy that is hurting the high school students trying hardest to prepare for their rich and rigorous programs.
Check the Web sites or rule books of most American universities, including the ones above, and you will discover that they offer college credit to students who get good grades on Advanced Placement exams in high school but that they refuse to give the same credit to students who do well on similar International Baccalaureate Standard Level exams. They offer credit to students who get good grades on exams taken after two-year Higher Level IB courses, but those are different. Tests for one-year IB courses don't get credit; tests for similar one-year AP courses do.
Former premier Zhu Rongji made a rare public appearance yesterday, delivering a scathing criticism of the mainland's education system and other policies during a visit to his alma mater, Tsinghua University.
Zhu (pictured) lashed out at the much-criticised reform of tertiary education and urged mainland officials and scholars to speak the truth.
He said a newly published directive on trial reforms of the education system was "full of empty talk and nonsense", according to excerpts of his remarks posted on the popular microblog platform Sina Weibo.
Gov. Bob McDonnell on Tuesday rolled out Virginia's teacher merit-pay plan, inviting 57 districts that have struggling schools to apply for $3 million in total state funding for the 2011-12 school year.
At least 40 percent of a teacher's performance evaluation will be tied to student academic performance -- including improvements in standardized test scores. Schools that receive grants must adopt teacher-appraisal systems aligned with state-approved evaluation methods and performance metrics.
The General Assembly approved the pilot performance-pay initiative as part of McDonnell's amendments to the state budget. A key component of the Republican governor's education agenda, the initiative is aimed at attracting good teachers to so-called hard-to-staff schools. Such schools include those at risk of losing state accreditation and those that have a high percentage of English learners or special-needs students.
Great post by John Danner, Rocketship CEO today on their efforts to customize learning. Rocketship is a network of high performing elementary schools in San Jose California. Students spend about a fifth of their day in a learning lab. Here's the guts of John's post:
We've put a ton of work into figuring out how to go from student assessments to individualized learning plans. When a learning plan accurately captures the next 6-8 objectives a student needs at a fine grain (i.e. this student needs to work on short a sounds), then you set yourself up to deliver the right lesson at the right time. This process of figuring out exactly what a student needs to learn is the key. From that, the potential upside for the right lesson to each child at the right developmental level probably has the potential to be 10x more effective for the student than a classroom lesson targeted at what a child that age should be learning, or some scope and sequence that has been defined. For students who are the farthest behind, classroom lessons are almost never relevant, they just aren't there developmentally. So this 10x potential increase in learning is what our model plays on.
Scientists who attain a PhD are rightly proud -- they have gained entry to an academic elite. But it is not as elite as it once was. The number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The growth shows no sign of slowing: most countries are building up their higher-education systems because they see educated workers as a key to economic growth (see 'The rise of doctorates'). But in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.
In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more -- but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia. Here, Nature examines graduate-education systems in various states of health.
Madison's Warner Park may be best known as home of the Madison Mallards baseball team, but it's also home to real mallards and at least 99 other species of wild birds.
Thanks to a group of outdoor-loving Sherman Middle School students working with University of Wisconsin-Madison student mentors, the list of wild birds that make the almost 200 acre urban park their home, or their temporary home as they migrate north and south, now stands at 100.
The first week in April the Sherman birding club, which includes sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students partnered with UW students, discovered the landmark 100th species in the park. It's a yellow-bellied sapsucker, a type of woodpecker, sighted with the help of nationally renowned ornithologist and author John C. Robinson.
Robinson was visiting Madison to give a talk at the UW on conservation and outdoor recreation.
Physicist, neuroscience entrepreneur and businessman, Jon Joseph traded the money and prestige of a flourishing career in corporate America for the opportunity to teach high level calculus, computer science and physics to high school kids. He's doing his thing in the northern Green County community of New Glarus, teaching at a high school where there were exactly zero Advanced Placement courses less than 15 years ago.
A shortened version of his professional resume includes a Ph.D. in physics with a focus on neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While an assistant professor at UW, he founded the Biomagnetic Research Laboratory for brain research. He left academia for the corporate world in 1989, doing brain research for Nicolet Biomedical and later moving to the NeuroCare Division of VIASYS Healthcare, where he was chief technology officer and VP of engineering and new technology. Most recently, he was part of a startup company called Cyberkinetics, where he was vice president of research and development. He got his teaching certificate in 2006, and previously taught in Madison and Middleton. In New Glarus, he heads up the math and computer science department.
Capital Times: Describe the work you did before you became a teacher.
Jon Joseph: I spent a lot of time b
Somewhat related, from a financial and curricular perspective: The Khan Academy.
With Secretary Arne Duncan at the helm, the U.S. Department of Education is gradually--and sometimes quietly--chipping away at key parts of the No Child Left Behind Act as states and districts demand more relief from the elusive goal that all students be what the law terms "proficient" in reading and math by 2014.
The pressure on Mr. Duncan to waive substantial parts of the 9-year-old federal school-accountability law is only growing as Congress continues to drag its feet on reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which NCLB is the latest version.
Although President Barack Obama and Mr. Duncan have called for revision of the law by the start of the next school year, draft legislation has yet to be introduced, and school leaders anxious about rapidly approaching deadlines are clamoring for leeway in the meantime.
After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group's agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting's 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against "marginalized" groups and restrict self-expression.
Even noted composition scholar Peter Elbow, in his address, claimed that the grammar that we internalize at the age of four is "good enough." The Internet, thankfully, has freed us from our previous duties as "grammar police," and Elbow heralded the day when the white spoken English that has now become the acceptable standard, will be joined by other forms, like those of non-native and ghetto speakers.
Freed from standards of truth claims and grammatical construction, rhetoric is now redefined as "performance," as in street protests, often by students demonstrating their "agency." Expressions are made through "the body," images, and song--sometimes a burst of spontaneous reflection on the Internet. Clothes are rhetorically important as "instruments of grander performance."
EVERYTHING ABOUT CALIFORNIA'S school system is complicated, starting with the question of how bad its public schools are. Comparisons show that students in California fare worse than the national average in mathematics, reading, science and writing. But the numbers are unfair, says John Mockler, an expert in Californian education who has been following its fortunes since the 1960s. For instance, half of California's pupils are Hispanic, and 40% of those hardly speak English. Most other states don't face this problem.
Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus that California's public schools are not what they could be, nor what they used to be. California ranks 47th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in spending per pupil ($7,886, against an average of $11,397). It ranks last in the number of students per teacher: California's legislative analyst estimates that most classes have 28-31 pupils. And it ranks 42nd in the proportion of pupils who graduate (63%, against a national average of 69%).
Great art begins with an idea. Sometimes a vague or even bad one. How does that spark of creativity find its way to the canvas, the page, the dinner plate, or the movie screen? How is inspiration refined into the forms that delight or provoke us? We enlisted some of America's foremost artists to discuss the sometimes messy, frequently maddening, and almost always mysterious process of creating something new.
The assumption behind Gov. Brian Sandoval's education reform package is that red tape has prevented schools from getting rid of bad teachers, who are increasingly viewed as the greatest impediment to improving public education.
Simply put, the governor wants to make it easier to fire teachers by ending tenure and removing those who fail annual evaluations.
Testifying Saturday on behalf of the reform measure, Assembly Bill 555, Sandoval's senior adviser, Dale Erquiaga, noted that 0.3 percent of Nevada public school teachers annually lose their jobs because of poor performance. The national average, he said, is 1.5 percent.
The implication: The current process fails to weed out poor teachers.
Erquiaga argued the process is "too hard" and "too cumbersome," citing research showing 5 to 10 percent of teachers could be replaced for poor performance.
The almost complete overhaul of the Chicago Public Schools' leadership team announced by Rahm Emanuel Monday sets a tone for the district and aligns with his education agenda to increase the number of charter schools, turn around failing schools, implement merit pay and lengthen the city's school day.
"It's a really comprehensive set of appointments," said Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University. While his top choices, Jean-Claude Brizard and Noemi Donoso, have no previous ties to the city's schools, the rest of Emanuel's pics are strategic and, as he put it, share his "thirst for reform."
Move over, finger paint. A school district in Maine recently approved a $200,000 initiative that would give each of its 285 kindergarten students a new hands-on tool: Their very own iPad 2.
In what they are calling "a revolution in education," the Auburn, Maine, school district will be bringing the $499 Apple tablet devices into kindergarten classrooms starting in the fall with the aim of increasing literacy rates from 62 percent to 90 percent.
This isn't the first time Maine has become an early tech adopter in its educational systems. In 2002, it became the first state to give out laptop computers to its middle school students and later expanded the program to high schoolers as a part of a move to boost literacy.
Wisconsin's performance on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is simply unacceptable and unnecessary. Click here to view a summary of the results. Click here for more statistics.
4/25/2011 meeting agenda:
A general and detailed agenda for the April 25th meeting of the Governor's Read to Lead task force have been released. We feel the important topics in reading reform can be addressed through this agenda.
General:
Introductions
Welcome and opening remarks by Governor Walker on the mission of the Task Force.
A discussion of the current state of reading achievement in Wisconsin
A discussion of current practices as well as ways to improve reading instruction at the classroom level in Wisconsin
A discussion of future topics and future meeting dates.
Adjournment
Detailed:
I. Identifying the problem and its root causes.
A. An overview of the problem in Wisconsin
B. What are the some of the root causes of illiteracy?
1. Teaching methods and curriculum
2. Teacher training and professional development
3. Problematic interventions
4. Societal problems
5. Lack of accountability
6. Others?
C. Why are we doing so much worse than many other states and so much worse, relative to other states, than we did in the past?
II. Reading instruction
A. How are children typically taught to read in Wisconsin schools?
B. How do early childhood programs fit into the equation?
C. How might reading instruction be improved?
D. How do these methods and curricula differ with ELL & special needs students?
E. How quickly could improved reading instruction be implemented?
Governor Walker's blue ribbon task force, Read to Lead, will have its first meeting on Monday, April 25, 2011, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM. The meeting will be held in the Governor's conference room, 115 East, in the State Capitol. All meetings are open to the public. In addition, WRC will prepare reports on the progress of the task force to send as E-Alerts and post on our website, www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org. Questions on the task force can be addressed to Kimber Liedl or Michael Brickman in the Governor's office at 608-267-9096.
In preparation for the meeting, the Governor's office made this comment:
"As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's education columnist observed on Sunday, "[t]his is not your ordinary task force." The creation of this task force is an opportunity to improve reading instruction and achievement in our state in an effort to open new opportunities for thousands of children. The MJS also noted that our task force "has diversity of opinion." This is by design. Governor Walker is not looking for a rubber stamp, but for a robust, yet focused, conversation that will ultimately lead to concrete policy solutions."
It seems that the academic expository writing of our public high school students will rise, or fall, to the level of our expectations. Here are excerpts from narrative essays, written by U.S. public high school students, to illustrate that claim--three have been written to the student's own high expectations and the other three to our generally low expectations for National Competitions, civics and otherwise:
Excerpt from a 40-page essay written as an independent study by a Junior in a Massachusetts public high school [endnote notation omitted]:
"At first, the church hierarchy was pleased at this outburst of religious enthusiasm and female piety; it was almost a revival. Hutchinson, after all, was a prominent and devout member of the Boston church, and only the most suspicious churchmen found immediate fault in the meetings. But soon, Hutchinson's soirées became less innocuous. In response to her audience's interest--in fact, their near-adulation--and in keeping with her own brilliance and constant theological introspection, she moved from repeating sermons to commenting on them, and from commenting to formulating her own distinct doctrine. As Winthrop sardonically remarked, 'the pretense was to repeat sermons, but when that was done, she would comment...and she would be sure to make it serve her turn.' What was actually happening, however, was far more radical and far more significant than Hutchinson making the words of others 'serve her turn.' She was not using anyone else's words; she was preaching a new brand of Puritanism, and this is what is now known as Antinomianism."
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Excerpt from a Grand Prize-winning 700-word essay written for a National Competition by a Junior from a public high school in Mableton, Georgia:
"Without history, there is no way to learn from mistakes or remember the good times through the bad. History is more than a teacher to me; it's an understanding of why I am who I am. It's a part of my life on which I can never turn back. History is the one thing you can count on never to change; the only thing that changes is people's perception of it.
It cannot be denied that every aspect of the past has shaped the present, nor that every aspect of the present is shaping and will continue to shape the future. In a sense, history is me, and I am the history of the future. History does not mean series of events; history means stories and pictures; history means people, and yet, history means much more. History means the people of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. History means me."
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Excerpt from a 30-page independent study by a Junior at a public high school in Worthington, Ohio [endnote notation omitted]:
"Opposition to this strictly-planned agricultural system found leadership under Deng Zihui, the director of rural affairs in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC). This faction believed that peasants engaged in farming should have freedom in management, and advocated a form of private ownership. To them, peasants should have the power to buy, sell, or lease land, and to manage and employ labor. Zihui saw collectivization as a dangerous and detrimental practice to the Chinese economy. The production-team system that was practiced under collective farming did not maximize agricultural output. Production teams were comprised of around 20 to 30 households in the neighborhood, and net income was based on the performance of the production team as a whole. Individual peasants did not see direct returns for their efforts, and therefore the incentive to work hard did not exist under the production-team system. Consequently, agricultural outputs and farmers' per capita net income were significantly low; in 1957, each farmer received an average net income of 73.37 yuan."
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Excerpt from a 750-word Grand Prize-Winning essay for a National Competition by a Sophomore from a public high school in Rochester, Michigan:
"Similar to how courage has changed our country, having courage has helped shaped who I am today. When I was in 7th grade, I befriended two boys with autism in my gym class. I fully knew that being friends with them was not going to help me climb any higher on the social ladder, but I did not care. I had the courage to go against what was socially acceptable in order to do what was right. I soon not only played with them in gym but invited them to sit with my friends at lunch too. Someone had to have the courage to say that they deserved to be treated equally.
Equality is a civic value that Americans take pride in, and it needs to be defended.
Courageous people stand up for what is right in order to preserve these civic values.
Courageous acts in American history are what have molded us into the great nation we are today. They are, in large part, the reason why we became an independent nation and also an important reason why we have our first African-American president. Social and political movements in the U.S. began with one courageous person willing to stand up and go against the crowd. Every downpour has to start with one drop of rain."
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Excerpt from a 25-page essay by a Junior at a public high school in Manchester, Massachusetts [endnote notation omitted]:
"Paris was the center of medicine in the 19th century, an age which witnessed a revolt against dogmatism and a new emphasis on scientific thought. As universities were freed of political and ecclesiastic control, more social classes were able to attend, and true scientific thought was encouraged. A new type of clinical observation emerged that focused on active examination and explainable symptoms. Furthermore, laboratory medicine, meaning research-based medicine, gained a foothold. As medicine became more systematic, scientists moved away from the four humors view of the body and began conducting experiments in chemistry, notably biochemistry. In 1838, Theodor Schwann and Malthais Schleidan formulated the cell theory, and in 1854, Hugo von Mohl, John Goodsir, Robert Remak, and Rudolf Virchow demonstrated that cells arise from other cells. These two discoveries make up the modern cell theory and the foundation of all biological advances. With the discovery of cells came new opinions about the origins of disease, reviving interest in microbiology. The most widely accepted theory about how disease was spread was the "filth theory." According to the filth theory, epidemics were caused by miasmatic hazes rising from decaying organic matter. However, some disagreed with this hypothesis. The idea that epidemic diseases were caused by micro-organisms and transmitted by contagion was not new in the mid-19th century. It had been proclaimed by Fracastorius in the 16th century, Kircher in the 17th, and Lancisi and Linne in the 18th. Opposing the filth theory, Jacob Henle proposed the role of micro-organisms again in 1840. Unfortunately, many of his contemporaries viewed him as old-fashioned until some notable discoveries occurred. Bassi, Donné, Schoelein, and Grubi each proved fungi to be the cause of certain diseases. In 1850, bacteria, discovered earlier by Leeuwenhoek, were also confirmed as sources of disease. Even though micro-organisms as the source of disease was well documented, many did not accept this theory until about 20 years later. Nevertheless, people knew something was causing diseases, igniting a public hygiene movement in Europe and the dawn of the preventive medicine age."
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Excerpt from a First Prize essay by a public high school Sophomore for a National Creative Minds Competition [creative nonfiction writing] organized by the oldest and best-known gifted program in the United States:
"It is summer, one of those elusive, warm days when the world seems at peace. I splash around in the ocean, listening to the voices of the beachgoers mingling with the quiet roar of the waves. When I scoop water into my palm, it is clear, yet all the water together becomes an ocean of blue. Nothing plus nothing equals something; I cannot explain the equation of the ocean. I dip my head under to get my hair wet and to taste the salt once held by ancient rocks. I hold myself up on my hands, imaging I am an astronaut, and explore my newfound weightlessness.
But water is the opposite of space. Space is cold and lifeless, and water is warm and life giving. Both are alien to my body, though not to my soul.
Underwater, I open my eyes, and there is sunlight filtering through the ceiling of water. As I toss a handful of sand, the rays illuminate every drifting grain in turn. I feel as if I can spend forever here, the endless blue washing over me. Though the water is pure, I can't see very far. There is a feeling of unknown, of infinite depths.
As a little girl, I used to press my face against the glass of my fish tank and pretend I swam with my guppies, our iridescent tails flashing. The world moved so unhurriedly, with such grace. Everything looked so beautiful underwater--so poetic. It was pure magic how the fish stayed together, moving as one in an instant. What was their signal? Could they read minds? how did these tiny, insignificant fish know things I did not?"
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The questions suggest themselves: What sort of writing better prepares our students for college and career assignments, and must we leave high standards for high school academic expository writing up to the students who set them for themselves? [The more academic excerpts were taken from papers published in The Concord Review--www.tcr.org]
When budget cuts wiped out honors French classes at her Uxbridge, Mass., high school, 18-year-old Katie Larrivee turned to the Internet.
These days, Ms. Larrivee, who plans to study abroad in college, practices her pronunciation alone in front of a computer.
"J'ai renforcé ma comprehension de la langue" by taking an advanced-placement French course online, Ms. Larrivee says.
Advanced-placement classes have been booming amid efforts by high-school students and parents to trim college tuition costs and gain an edge in the college-admissions race. A record 1.99 million high-school students are expected to take AP exams next month, up 159% from 2000, says Trevor Packer, vice president, advanced placement, for the College Board, New York, the nonprofit that oversees AP courses and testing. About 90% of U.S. colleges and universities award college credit to high-school students who pass the program's rigorous subject-matter tests.
Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel's pick to guide the Chicago Public Schools is a New York superintendent who raised test scores and the union's ire in Rochester, closed under-performing schools and opened new ones-and has quite a task ahead if he is to fulfill the education agenda outlined by his new boss.
"I've decided to have a fresh start and hit the reset button on education," Emanuel said Monday in announcing Jean-Claude Brizard as his choice for chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, along with an entirely new school board and new CPS leadership team.
The appointment raised concerns among the Chicago Teachers Union about Brizard's contentious relations with Rochester's teachers. In Brizard, Emanuel has chosen a proponent of charter schools and merit pay who also now must deal with an $820 million budget deficit.
The Chicago Teachers Union, with whom Brizard must start negotiating a new contract, criticized the selection. "We're disappointed both by the choice of Brizard and by the entire tone that the mayor-elect has adopted," said Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
When districtwide layoff notices hit every one of Detroit Public Schools' 5,466 unionized employees late last week, an American Federation of Teachers spokeswoman called the move the largest "one fell swoop" firing of teachers in union memory.
More broadly troubling to teachers and education-reform observers, however, was DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb's concurrent announcement that he plans to unilaterally modify the Detroit Federation of Teachers' collective bargaining agreement, the first test of a sweeping new state law.
Public Act 4, signed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in March, grants the emergency managers of troubled school districts the power to "reject, modify, or terminate one or more terms and conditions of an existing collective bargaining agreement." Under the law, Bobb could choose to abrogate the Detroit teachers' contract entirely.
As the call for teacher evaluation and tenure reform intensifies across the country, the hypothetical arguments against holding teachers accountable become frustratingly similar. "How can we hold teachers accountable for students with difficult home lives? What about teachers who have homeless students in their classrooms? What about students whose parents are almost criminally uninvolved in their education? Certainly, it wouldn't be fair to make teachers responsible for those students." So, let's settle this once and for all: making sure that those students get an education is the whole purpose of public education. And the existence of teachers who feel they should only have to worry about the children of involved, employed, and educated parents is part of what drives the fervor for education reform.
Public education should be a refuge for those children. It should be the one place where a child can be certain that his parents' actions cannot hurt him, and where he can be sure all of the adults have only his best interests at heart. Public education should ensure that EVERY child graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college and in the 21st century job market. It should be the springboard out of generational poverty. Instead of family struggles or background being an excuse to give up on students, it should be the inspiration to work twice as hard to be sure students get the education that could change the course of their lives.
The U.S. Constitution says nothing about public education, but all the state constitutions have clauses addressing it, and reading through them is a mildly inspiring way to spend half an hour. Arkansas: "Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools." Florida: "The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida." Idaho: "The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature . . ." Massachusetts: "It shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences." Michigan: "Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
The Texas state constitution hits a similar note in Article 7, which states: "A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools." Compared with the other states' fine print, this is pretty good. It isn't quite as ardent as Michigan's declaration, but it has considerably more enthusiasm than Wyoming's ("The right of the citizens to opportunities for education should have practical recognition"). And the idea it articulates, in one long legal sentence, is beautifully straightforward and persuasive: We need a well-educated populace in order to have a functional democracy, so the state should ensure that everyone gets an education. Simple.
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
The situation is murkier in New York, Maryland, Colorado, and California, where public university officials have sent letters to NCTQ and U.S. News requesting changes to the review process, but haven't yet declined to take part willingly.
In Kentucky, the presidents, provosts, and ed. school deans of public universities wrote in a letter to the research and advocacy group and the newsmagazine that they won't "endorse" the review. It's not yet clear what that means for their participation.
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town are "above average." Well, in the School of Education they're all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW's schools. Scrolling through the Registrar's online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C's and only the really high performers score A's.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody's a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that's the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A's and a handful of A/B's. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
Political leaders hope to act this year to renew and fix the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind). In this important new paper, Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Executive Vice President Michael J. Petrilli identify 10 big issues that must be resolved in order to get a bill across the finish line, and explore the major options under consideration for each one. Should states be required to adopt academic standards tied to college and career readiness? Should the new law provide greater flexibility to states and districts? These are just a few of the areas discussed. Finn and Petrilli also present their own bold yet "reform realist" solutions for ESEA. Read on to learn more.
r. Steve Perry is the founder of the phenomenal Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut. Recognized by U.S. News and World Report, 100 percent of the graduating seniors are admitted to four-year colleges. An outspoken and highly successful national leader in education, Dr. Perry is also an Education Correspondent for CNN.
I was excited Dr. Perry could share his thoughts on school readiness, the role of community involvement in education, and keys to Capital Preparatory's success.
1. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress study noted that two out of three children in the United States are not reading at grade level. School readiness is a major crisis in our country.
Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring? Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills? Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own? Buck up, my friend. The traits you consider signs of failure may actually be marks of intellectual vigor, according to a new study appearing in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior.
The study, by Bu Zhong and Marie Hardin at Penn State and Tao Sun at the University of Vermont, is one of the first to examine the personalities of social networkers. The researchers looked in particular at connections between social-network use and the personality trait that psychologists refer to as "need for cognition," or NFC. NFC, as Professor Zhong explained in an email to me, "is a recognized indicator for deep or shallow thinking." People who like to challenge their minds have high NFC, while those who avoid deep thinking have low NFC. Whereas, according to the authors, "high NFC individuals possess an intrinsic motivation to think, having a natural motivation to seek knowledge," those with low NFC don't like to grapple with complexity and tend to content themselves with superficial assessments, particularly when faced with difficult intellectual challenges.
The researchers surveyed 436 college students during 2010. Each participant completed a standard psychological assessment measuring NFC as well as a questionnaire measuring social network use. (Given what we know about college students' social networking in 2010, it can be assumed that the bulk of the activity consisted of Facebook use.) The study revealed a significant negative correlation between social network site (SNS) activity and NFC scores. "The key finding," the authors write, "is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people." Moreover, "high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals."
To put it in layman's terms, the study suggests that if you want to be a big success on Facebook, it helps to be a dullard.
Antonoff said the proposed budget is inflated by purchases of technology "gimmicks" such digital whiteboards and audio equipment.
"We didn't have those," he said. "Computer is a distraction. . . . You learn the basics first."
Disagreeing, Acevedo said schools need modern technology to stay globally competitive.
Technology is a tool to save money, said Hughes, who opposes the proposed budget. Systems that enable Internet-based communication between parents, teachers and students save money the district would spend on ink, paper and postage, she said.
There are growing protests from teachers and parents across the country over high-stakes standardized testing and other school reform measures -- many of which the Obama administration has encouraged states to undertake -- as well as over huge cuts in public education.
The pushback has largely been local, though a national march on Washington is being organized for this summer as states move to enact reforms that call for more charter schools and vouchers and that make standardized testing more important than ever in evaluating schools, students and teachers.
In North Carolina, for example, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools this spring field tested 52 (yes 52) new standardized tests, including four exams each for kindergartners and first-graders, and kids lost as much as a week of instruction. That won't stop the district from adding even more tests next year, for art, music and physical education, and many teachers and parents fear that this is becoming the face of public education.
In 2008, Molly Rozga went back to school just shy of her 27th birthday.
Rozga wanted to work in a field where she could give back to the community and have the added comfort of job security. So, she chose education, thinking teaching was one of the most stable careers out there.
But in the current political environment, Rozga, now a 29-year-old junior education major at Alverno College, sees teaching as something "a little scary to be going into."
"It's giving me a little bit of anxiety," Rozga said.
With Gov. Scott Walker proposing to cut state aid to public schools and restrict collective bargaining for public school teachers as part of a plan to close a $3.5 billion state budget deficit, students like Rozga are stepping into a new world in their chosen field.
The new state law, held up pending a legal challenge, forbids most public worker unions from negotiating salary schedules, benefits and workplace rules with employers. It still allows bargaining over inflationary increases in "total base wages," but generally makes it harder for unions to operate.
It also means school administrators would be able to make major changes to pay scales, school calendars and work rules without consulting teachers.
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union, said that while teachers won't necessarily obstruct changes, they are less likely to offer new ideas themselves if they are not covered by a union contract.
"Innovation takes risk," Bell said. "Risk in an environment where your protection is gone is a much different proposition."
Just days before Walker announced his changes to collective bargaining, WEAC had announced support for a statewide teacher evaluation system and performance-based pay. That overture, however, has been largely overshadowed by the union controversy.
Three weeks ago I shared an interview with Superintendent John Kuhn of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in the great state of Texas. Today he offers us a reflection on a recent experience at the state Capitol.
Yesterday I testified before the Public Ed. Committee of the Texas House of Representatives on behalf of a bill that would initiate a two-year moratorium on standardized testing, known as STAAR in Texas. Here are the remarks I shared before the representatives began asking questions:
I have a dilemma: I personally believe state testing is morally compromised because TEA has overwrought test security to the point that it is a parody of big government interference and micromanagement, because testing has turned the adventure of education into something that feels more like an assembly line, because Austin has nudged our teachers from behind their podiums and has said Pearson can assess better than they can, because student creativity is being sacrificed in favor of standardization, because scores are used to unfairly punish schools and teachers that embrace the neediest students, and because test scores have been used during the past five years to drive a labeling process that has systematically concealed the fact that some schools are comparatively underfunded. Is a high target revenue "recognized" school really any better than a low target revenue "acceptable" school? Texas has published these labels with no mention of funding disadvantages, leaving the public to assume underperforming schools do so for no other reason than they are less competent institutions. I'm worried STAAR will continue this kind of railroading of our local schools.
I am probably the nation's most devoted reader of real-life high school reform drama, an overlooked literary genre. If there were a Pulitzer Prize in this category, Alexander Russo's new book on the remaking of Locke High in Los Angeles would win. It is a must-read, nerve-jangling thrill ride, at least for those of us who love tales of teachers and students.
Readers obsessed with fixing our failing urban schools will learn much from the personal clashes and political twists involved in the effort to save what some people called America's worst school. I remember the many news stories about Locke, and enjoyed discovering the real story was different, and more interesting.
Locke was not really our toughest high school. Russo finds some nice students and kind teachers. But its inner-city blend of occasional mayhem and very low test scores made it famous when its teachers revolted and helped turn it over to a charter school organization that tried to fix it by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Indiana is on the verge of taking its most important strides forward on education in decades.
The final, and most important, piece fell into place Friday when Gov. Mitch Daniels announced that he would ask the General Assembly to expand full-day kindergarten to every school district in the state. That unexpected announcement, which dropped late in the legislative process, was made possible by a much better than expected revenue forecast.
Schools also will fare better than planned in the overall state budget. Districts absorbed 3 percent budget cuts last year, and the proposal before Friday was to write those reductions into the new two-year budget. Now, the governor and Republican legislators, who control the budget process, want to funnel an additional $150 million into public schools over the next two years.
A visit to Newark by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Wednesday highlights the city's emerging status as a focal point in struggle over how to improve public schools.
Duncan has high hopes for Newark, which is looking for a new superintendent at a time when both Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have made education their top issue. The Christie administration has approved a record number of public charter schools this year, many of them in Newark.
A $100 million education grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has meant, as Duncan put it, that "eyes of the country will be on Newark."
"The goal in Newark is that in five years, not 10 years, it should be the best urban school system in the country," Duncan said in an interview with the Star-Ledger.
Competitive disadvantage: High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like no
Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she's lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong's younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn't sound Asian.
"It's a difficult time to be Chinese," says Wong, a scientist who develops medical therapies. "There's a lot of jealousy out there, because the Chinese do very well. And some people see that as a threat."
Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet.
The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed - provoked over the winter by Amy Chua's controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces.
There is, of course, no one perfect way to grade schools. The Children at Risk methodology is designed to evaluate schools on multiple academic measures and goes beyond the state's accountability system, which is based largely on whether students pass (or are projected to pass) the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Children at Risk looks at the higher standard of "commended" on the TAKS. At the high school level, the most weight is given to a six-year graduation rate, calculated by Children at Risk. No matter what a school is doing, if students don't graduate, then did it get the job done?
The formula also gives a boost to schools with larger concentrations of low-income children in an attempt to adjust for the impact of poverty. Children at Risk attempted to include as many schools as possible in the rankings, but those with insufficient data or atypical grade-level configurations were excluded. The rankings are based on public data from the Texas Education Agency from 2010 or 2009 (using the most recent year available).
Proposed overhaul of state accreditation rules but remain alarmed by its far-reaching implications.
They continue to raise serious questions about the proposal, which, among other things, would
- increase the number of already controversial state-mandated exams,
- require districts to be reviewed annually, instead of every five years, and
- force districts to track the progress of graduates and to report a variety of new details, including how many students complete federal financial aid forms.
Students in Chicago's public schools will spend an extra hour or hour and a half in school each day once new legislation makes it out of Springfield, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel said Friday.
Emanuel said the issue of how much more teachers will get paid is open to negotiation -- but not the question of whether the school day will be longer. It will be, Emanuel said.
"We're not going to negotiate or discuss whether children get more instruction -- we will work together so that gets done. I'm not deviating from that. I was clear about it," Emanuel said after speaking at a South Side charter school.
More than any other mayoral candidate, Emanuel said he strongly backed curtailing teachers' right to strike and a longer school day.
Chicago students are "cheated" by not getting as much school time as Houston's students, Emanuel said.
PAUL M. MASON does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says.
Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves."
That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason's domain: undergraduate business education.
Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
If there's one consistent trait of Ohio's governors, it's their desire to leave a personal mark on the state's education system.
Former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland wanted a longer school year, tougher standards and greater college access in his multi-faceted plan that never got off the ground thanks to politics and the state's budget crunch.
Now, his successor Republican John Kasich wants to change the game with his own ambitious ideas, including:
» Publicly ranking Ohio schools and rewarding those in the top 10 percent, while punishing those in the bottom 5.
» Creating "innovation" schools that, with staff and school board agreement, could get rid of most rules and create their own, possibly including longer class time.
Terry Moe has spent years carefully researching this new book on the education unions. I look forward to seeing Terry's research, which informed his taking of the teacher unions to the woodshed in a debate a couple of years ago. Terry's opening statement was very powerful:
What we are saying is that the unions are and have long been major obstacles to real reform in the system. And we're hardly alone in saying this. If you read "Newsweek," "Time Magazine," the "Washington Post," lots of other well respected publications, they're all saying the same thing: that the teachers unions are standing in the way of progress. So look. Let me start with an obvious example. The teachers unions have fought for all sorts of protections in labor contracts and in state laws that make it virtually impossible to get bad teachers out of the classroom. On average, it takes two years, $200,000, and 15% of the principal's total time to get one bad teacher out of the classroom. As a result, principals don't even try. They give 99% of teachers -- no joke -- satisfactory evaluations. The bad teachers just stay in the classroom. Well, if we figure that maybe 5% of the teachers, that's a conservative estimate, are bad teachers nationwide, that means that 2.5 million kids are stuck in classrooms with teachers who aren't teaching them anything. This is devastating. And the unions are largely responsible for that.
They're also responsible for seniority provisions in these labor contracts that among other things often allow senior teachers to stake a claim to desirable jobs, even if they're not good teachers and even if they're a bad fit for that school. The seniority rules often require districts to lay off junior people before senior people. It's happening all around the country now. And some of these junior people are some of the best teachers in the district. And some of the senior people that are being saved are the worst. Okay. So just ask yourself, would anyone in his right mind organize schools in this way, if all they cared about was what's best for kids? And the answer is no. But this is the way our schools are actually organized. And it's due largely to the power of the unions.
Moves to weaken traditional job protections for teachers are gaining momentum around the country. Tenure reform bills were recently signed into law in Florida and Tennessee, and are being considered in Illinois, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and several other states. Delaware and Colorado passed such laws last year.
In Oklahoma, a bill cleared a House committee on April 12 that would broaden the list of reasons teachers can be fired to include dishonesty, insubordination, negligence, and failing to comply with school district policies.
Illinois teacher unions have numbers and money that translate into influence at the state Capitol, but they're still making major concessions on job security and the ability to strike.
While union leaders said they were driven by what's best for kids, they also acknowledge watching high-profile fights over public employee rights in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana.
"It made all the parties more cognizant that everyone was going to have to come away with less than their ideal on some issues," IEA President Ken Swanson said Thursday. "But at the end of the day, this thing was too important to not come to agreement."
Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department's chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education.
Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Times's online coverage of the killings and their aftermath. Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters' rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts -- however incoherent their stated reasons -- were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.
Call for Participation: Congress in the Classroom 2011-Our 20th Year
* Deadline to Apply: April 15, 2011 *
Congress in the Classroom is a national, award-winning education program now in
its 20th year. Developed and sponsored by The Dirksen Congressional Center, the
workshop is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and information on teaching
about Congress.
Congress in the Classroom is designed for high school or middle school teachers
who teach U.S. history, government, civics, political science, or social
studies. Forty teachers will be selected to take part in the program. All
online applications must be received by no later than April 15, 2011.
Although the workshop will feature a variety of sessions, the 2011 program will
feature a broad overview of Congress and blends two kinds of sessions. Some
emphasize ideas and resources that teachers can use almost immediately in their
classrooms -- sessions about primary sources and Best Practices are good
examples. Other sessions deal with more abstract topics. Think of them as
resembling graduate-level courses, stronger on content than on classroom
applications. If you are looking for a program that features one or the other
exclusively, Congress in the Classroom is probably not right for you.
Throughout the program, you will work with subject matter experts as well as
colleagues from across the nation. This combination of firsthand knowledge and
peer-to-peer interaction will give you new ideas, materials, and a
professionally enriching experience.
"Until now so much of what I did in my class on Congress was straight
theory-this is what the Constitution says, "noted one of our teachers. "Now I
can use these activities and illustrations to help get my students involved in
the class and at the very least their community but hopefully in the federal
government. This workshop has given me a way to help them see how relevant my
class is and what they can do to help make changes in society."
The 2011 workshop will be held Monday, July 25-28, 2011, at Embassy Suites,
East Peoria, Illinois. The program is certified by the Illinois State Board of
Education for up to 22 Continuing Education Units. The program also is endorsed
by the National Council for the Social Studies.
Participants are responsible for (1) a non-refundable $125 registration fee
(required to confirm acceptance after notice of selection) and (2)
transportation to and from Peoria, Illinois. Many school districts will pay all
or a portion of these costs.
The Center pays for three nights lodging at the headquarters hotel (providing a
single room for each participant), workshop materials, local transportation,
all but three meals, and presenter honoraria and expenses. The Center spends
between $40,000 and $45,000 to host the program each year.
What follows are the sessions planned for the 2011 edition of Congress in the
Classroom. Please re-visit the site for changes as the program develops.
Session Titles, 2011:
* Jumping Right In Frank Mackaman, The Dirksen Congressional Center CONFIRMED
* Congressional Insight: A Simulation Colleen Vivori, National Association of
Manufacturers CONFIRMED
* Using Fantasy Congress to Engage My Students Scott Corner, Government and
Politics Teacher, Palma High School, Salinas CA CONFIRMED
* Congress at Work Christine Blackerby, Center for Legislative Archives,
National Archives and Records Administration CONFIRMED
* Help for Teachers from the Office of The Historian Kathleen Johnson, Oral
Historian, Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives CONFIRMED
* A View of Congress from the White House: What the Presidential Tapes Reveal
KC Johnson, Department of History, Brooklyn College CONFIRMED
* The Congressional Time Line Project Frank Mackaman, The Dirksen Congressional
Center CONFIRMED
* Congress for Kids Cindy Koeppel, The Dirksen Congressional Center CONFIRMED
* A Journalist's Take on Congress David Lightman, Congressional Correspondent,
McClatchy News Service CONFIRMED
* Teaching with Primary Sources Cindy Rich, Project Director, Teaching with
Primary Sources, Eastern Illinois University CONFIRMED
* Leadership in the House During the 112th Congress Bryan Marshall, Department
of Political Science, Miami University of Ohio CONFIRMED
* New Approaches to Teaching about Congress Paul C. Milazzo, Department of
History, Ohio University CONFIRMED
* Listen Up Legislators: How to Get Your Point Across Stephanie Vance, the
Advocacy Guru, Washington DC CONFIRMED
* Best Practices CONFIRMED
* The Impact of Congressional Redistricting on the 2012 Elections TENTATIVE
Take a look at The Dirksen Center Web site --
-- to see
what participants say about the program.
* REGISTRATION *
If you are interested in learning more about the sessions and registering for
the Congress in the Classroom 2011 workshop, you can complete an online
registration form found at: http://www.dirksencenter.org/programs_CiCapplication.htm
If you do not want to receive information from The Dirksen Center in the
future, please send an email to Cindy Koeppel at
mailto: ckoeppel@dirksencenter.org.
When students across the state sit down Monday to begin intensive testing in the main round of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, they'll be faced with an exam that is a bit different - and, in some cases, harder - than in previous years.
The Florida Department of Education is unveiling the FCAT 2.0 this year for grades 3-10 in reading and grades 3-8 in math.
The new FCATs were designed using the state's new Next Generation Sunshine State standards, which are considered more rigorous than the previous FCAT standards.
For instance, reading assessments will have more questions that require prior knowledge and reasonable inferences than previous FCAT exams. They will also include more historical documents and literature. Some of the reading passages are longer than in previous years.
A sprawling education-reform package that could lengthen the school year in Chicago, give school districts new powers to oust poorly performing teachers and impose new obstacles on teachers strikes passed the Senate Thursday without dissent.
The Senate's 59-0 vote on a plan that united teachers unions, reform groups and school boards capped a busy legislative day in which lawmakers rejected a business-backed workers compensation reform package and launched a new crackdown on the state's cash-strapped prepaid college tuition program.
"This is the reason why I serve in this chamber: It's for education youth development, giving that child who lives in a poor zip code the same opportunities as a child who lives in a wealthy zip code," Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) said of her school-reform bill as she choked up with emotion.
The legislation drew backing from Gov. Quinn, who said it "helps us make sure that we have the best teachers in our classrooms and assures effective teacher performance."
The bill under consideration is the result of negotiations between education groups Advance Illinois and Stand for Children, teachers' unions, and school administrators and it reforms tenure, establishes performance as a hiring standard and limits seniority and the right to strike. The Chicago Teachers Union, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Education Association have all backed the measure.
On the campaign trail, Emanuel backed an early version of the bill that the unions originally opposed, using harsh rhetoric against the teachers unions.
"Chicago kids are being cheated out of four years' worth of education," Emanuel said in February signaling he backed reforms to tenure and curtailing the right to strike. Teachers, he said "are working very hard in adverse conditions in many places but they are not underpaid."
Eleven schools in Milwaukee have been identified as some of the lowest performing in the state and are in line for over $6.3 million in federal grants to spur a turnaround. If MPS' targeted plans go through, more than half will be looking for new principals for the 2011-2012 school year - and one will be closed altogether.
Major reforms are in line for four of the schools, according to city superintendent Gregory Thornton. The city will adhere to the federal turnaround model designed specifically to combat the culture of failure in these schools. As a result, Pulaski High School, Northwest Secondary School, Washington High School of Information Technology, and Advanced Language and Academic Students (ALAS) will have their entire instructional staff released.
These schools will be tasked with finding a new principal and several new teachers, as only half of the existing teaching corps is eligible to be rehired. Many of these changes will come with assistance from outside sources, which will be accommodated by $6.3m of federal funding.
The new Seattle Public School Superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield has promised to usher in a new era of transparency to SPS. In this spirit, she has agreed to answer your questions directly. Ask here about the direction Seattle Public Schools will be taking, how they are dealing with the budget crises, plans for opening/closing schools etc. On April 13, she will answer at least ten questions.
DAVID, a 34-year-old living on the east coast of the United States, is a big fan of World of Warcraft but is anxious that his heavy workload is not leaving him enough time to play, and therefore make progress, in the online game. Rather than see his friends race ahead of him, he contacts a Chinese "gaming-services retail company" which sells him some WoW gold, the game's electronic currency, which he uses to buy magic potions and other stuff that boosts his power as a player. The gold was bought, in turn, from a cybercafé in a Chinese town which employs young professional gamers to play WoW for up to 60 hours a week to earn the online currency.
Sitting in a café playing computer games sounds a lot more fun, and certainly less risky, than working down a Chinese coal mine. This is but one of the estimated 100,000 online jobs that now provide a living for people in places like China and India, according to a new study by infoDev, an initiative of the World Bank and its private-sector financing offshoot, the IFC. Other examples of paid work becoming available for anyone with a computer, an internet connection and plenty of spare time include: classifying the products in an online store's catalogue; transcribing handwritten documents; and signing up as a bogus fan of a consumer brand on Facebook or some other social-networking site, to boost the brand's visibility in search results.
Why do most colleges require students to take a semester (sometimes two) of Western civilization? We want students to know about the history of our civilization because, amazingly enough, humans keep making the same stupid mistakes. The historian's hope -- well, at least this historian's hope -- is that students will recognize the stupidity of first century BC Rome, and fourth century BC Greece, and Weimar Republic Germany, and about nine zillion other moments in time -- and not do it again! It's probably a hopeless task, but I try.
But there is another reason as well. The West has a rich heritage of faith and reason that we want our students to understand. There are so many historical and cultural references contained in our books and literature that will be utterly mystifying if you do not know from whence they came. My students (well, most of them) now know why "Spartan" as an adjective refers to very primitive or basic services or provisions. They know what "crossing the Rubicon" means -- and whose crossing of that river meant that "the die is cast." They understand the importance of channelization in warfare, because of how the Greeks used it to defeat the Persians at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis. They know why "Praetorian Guard" often means someone who is as much in charge as the person or institution that they are supposed to be protecting.
What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they "grow" their students' test scores? Colorado is about to find out.
On exam day in Sabina Trombetta's Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant -- almost neon -- greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, "Women are suffering machines."
The test asked the first-graders to look at "Weeping Woman" and "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, "In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.
Trombetta, 38, a 10-year teaching veteran and winner of distinguished teaching awards from both her school district, Harrison District 2, and Pikes Peak County, would have rather been handing out glue sticks and finger paints. The kids would have preferred that, too. But the test wasn't really about them. It was about their teacher.
Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers -- even those in art, music, and physical education -- according to how much they "grow" student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape -- bullet points on Colorado's new fine-art curriculum standards.
American high-schoolers are earning more credits and taking more challenging courses than they did 20 years ago, according to a new study of high school transcripts. But education experts still worry that not enough of them are graduating ready to enter college or get on track for science- and math-based careers.
Almost twice as many students completed at least a standard curriculum in 2009 as in 1990, the report shows. Curricular rigor improved for students across racial and ethnic groups, but significant gaps still remain.
The economic future of the country depends on improving education, and "the message [of this study] is that rigor works," says Bob Wise, president of Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, which advocates for improving high schools. "But it puts an obligation on all of us to be sure we're not only providing rigorous courses, but also the support students need to succeed in them."
Gary Stresman stands on a chair in the cafeteria in Nicolet High School addressing a bustling crowd of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Though it's rather early on a Saturday morning and they are in a school, the students are excited.
They are at a science fair.
It's going to be a great day, Stresman tells them. They should be proud of the work they put into their projects and be ready to have some fun, he says.
"Because science is cool, right?" he asks.
"Right!" they answer him.
That enthusiasm for science fairs - once a staple of school life - doesn't burn as brightly throughout Wisconsin.
In recent years, Wisconsin's statewide science fair, which takes the winners from the eight regional fairs around the state, has drawn about 75 high school students. Milwaukee is down to one districtwide science fair for MPS, after the Milwaukee Regional Science and Engineering Fair folded in 2009.
The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program's performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program's achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee's long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
Long-troubled Audenried High School, once known locally as the Prison on the Hill, today boasts a new, $55 million building, a crop of dedicated young teachers and sharply higher test scores.
So when the school district announced in January that Audenried would be shut down, parents were surprised. Audenreid, they were told, would become one of 18 "turnaround" schools in the city.
Progress had been made in the school, but not enough, officials said. While scores have risen sharply, they fall short of the city's average, along with other performance measures. Major discipline problems at the school last year included the beating of a female student in a classroom.
Boasting nine million members in nearly 200 countries, LiveMocha is capitalizing on an ever-expanding market. CEO Michael Schutzler talks to Inc.com about his business.
As businesses go global, the market for second-language acquisition continues to grow due to both increasing globalization and an increasingly diverse U.S. population. According to the 2010 Census, the foreign-born population of the United States is approaching 37 million people. Meanwhile, approximately 280 million Americans age five and older speak only English in their homes. How can companies capitalize on the proliferation of technology to help adults learn a second language? Enter LiveMocha. Founded in 2007 and located in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington, it is the largest online-based language learning service with 9 million members in nearly 200 countries. It's giving Rosetta Stone some serious competition by utilizing new technologies and offering a product at $150 to compete with the $500 to $1,000 that Rosetta charges for an equivalent service. Inc.com's Lou Dubois spoke with LiveMocha CEO Michael Schutzler, the former CEO of Classmates.com, one of the first social networks, about the continued need for secondary language acquisition in the United States, the industry's significant growth potential, and why Schutzler considers the company a mix of social networking and gaming mechanics.
The California State College System reported recently that 47% of their freshmen must take remedial reading courses before they can be admitted to regular college academic courses. The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools Project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at our colleges each year.
Keep in mind that these are not high school dropouts. These are students who did what we asked them to do, were awarded their high school diplomas at graduation, applied to college, were accepted at college, and then told when they got there that they were not well prepared enough by their high schools to take college courses.
The Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of college professors, who reported that 90% of their freshmen were not very well prepared in reading, doing research or writing.
From my perspective, these students, regardless of their gender, race, creed, or national origin, have been disadvantaged during their twelve years in our public schools. My research indicates that the vast majority have never been asked to do a single serious research paper in high school, and, while I have been unable to find money to do a study of this, I have anecdotal evidence that the vast majority of our public high school students are never asked to read one complete nonfiction book by their teachers during their four years.
Race can be a disadvantage of course, even for the children of Vietnamese boat people, and poverty can be a disadvantage in education as well, even for the children of unemployed white families in Appalachia. But the disadvantages of disgracefully low expectations for academic reading and writing are disinterestedly applied to all of our public high school students, it appears.
Huge numbers of unprepared public high school students provide an achievement gap all by themselves, albeit one that is largely ignored by those who think that funding is the main reason so many of our students fail to complete any college degree.
In that study by The Chronicle of Higher Education, they also asked English teachers if they thought their students were prepared for college reading and writing tasks, and most of them thought their students were well prepared. The problem may be that English departments typically assign fiction as reading for students and the writing they ask for is almost universally personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, supplemented now by work on the little 500-word personal "college essay."
It is hard to conceive of a literacy program better designed to render our public high school students poorly prepared for the nonfiction books and term papers at the college level. Of course, many colleges, eager to fill their dorms and please their "customers" with easy courses and grade inflation, are gradually reducing the number of books students are assigned and the length of papers they are asked to write, but this simply adds to the disadvantages to which we are subjecting our students, all the while charging them large amounts of money for tuition.
Many parents are satisfied when their children tell them that they love their high school, perhaps not fully realizing that the students are talking mostly about their social life and their after-school sports and other activities. They may remain unaware that our students are being prevented from learning to read history books and from writing serious term papers. No one mentions that disadvantage, so no doubt these parents are just as surprised, humiliated, and embarrassed as their children when they are not allowed into regular college courses when they get there.
Americans have big hearts, and are concerned when they are told of the plight of our disadvantaged students who are black, Hispanic, or poor. But they are naturally not really able to summon up much concern over an academic literacy achievement gap which disadvantages practically all of our public high school students, especially if the schools and the Edupundits keep them quite uninformed about it.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Few would argue that she was a good choice. But as you watched the almost giddy reception that greeted the departure of the New York City schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, last week -- "She wasn't in the class for the full semester so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to give her a grade," said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers -- it was hard not to wonder whether the debate over school reform has reached a point where debate is no longer possible.
As is often the case with morally charged policy issues -- remember welfare reform? -- false dichotomies seem to have replaced fruitful conversation. If you support the teachers' union, you don't care about the students. If you are critical of the teachers' union, you don't care about the teachers. If you are in favor of charter schools, you are opposed to public schools. If you believe in increased testing, you are on board with the corruption of our liberal society's most cherished educational values. If you are against increased testing, you are against accountability. It goes on. Neither side seems capable of listening to the other.
The data can appear as divided as the rhetoric. New York City's Department of Education will provide you with irrefutable statistics that school reform is working; opponents of reform will provide you with equally irrefutable statistics that it's not. It can seem equally impossible to disentangle the overlapping factors: Are struggling schools struggling because they've been inundated with students from the failing schools that have closed around them? Are high school graduation rates up because the pressure to raise them has encouraged teachers and principals to pass students who aren't really ready for college?
Odds are, your kid is in a failing school district.
Odds are even better, if your kid's school or school district isn't failing now, by federal standards, it will be in a year or two.
Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that within three years no less than four out of five American schools will not meet the standard for "Adequate Yearly Progress." That's government speak for saying the schools aren't meeting the federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act.
This week Minnesota students will begin taking this year's version of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments - the standardized tests that will determine the supposed success or failure of each Minnesota public school and school district. Results of the tests will be made public in late summer, and most educators, like Duncan, are not optimistic concerning the outcome.
Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed the state's third major school-overhaul bill of the session into law Friday, and a parents' group immediately filed paperwork for a referendum drive to overturn it.
The third bill, SB 1184, shifts funds from teacher salaries to technology upgrades and a merit-pay program, and brings a new focus on online learning. The two earlier bills, already signed into law and targeted in referendum drives, remove most collective-bargaining rights from teachers and set up a teacher merit-pay bonus plan. Both houses of Idaho's Legislature are controlled by Republicans.
Otter, also a Republican, said, "The system we had wasn't working, wasn't producing the kind of students that we needed."
State schools Superintendent Tom Luna, who joined Otter at the signing along with a group of legislative sponsors and supporters, said the bills will do "things that we know we should have done long ago."
A case of poor timing landed state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek in hot water with the House Appropriations Committee as he was testifying Wednesday about his agency's budget.
Pastorek, whose cocksure manner and $377,000 annual pay package has rankled legislators in years past, told Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, early in the meeting that he planned to select a new superintendent for the Recovery School District "soon, very soon." But Pastorek didn't divulge to the committee members that he had tapped John White, deputy chancellor for New York City public schools, to take over the job held by Paul Vallas.
As Pastorek continued his testimony, lawmakers on the committee learned the truth, as the news of White's selection was reported on NOLA.com. And that brought a rebuke from the courtly committee chairman Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, who reminded the superintendent that he was under oath when he was being questioned. "So you weren't willing to share that? That you had made the selection?" Fannin asked.
"Guess who won this battle?" teacher Cindy Agner asks.
"No one," the kids chorus.
"This is what they call a draw."
And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation's deadliest armed conflict began. Agner's reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads -- a tactile lesson the vet eran teacher dreamed up this year -- drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate.
Richard Miller has had one of the toughest jobs in higher education. The Olin Foundation tapped him a dozen years ago to create an engineering college on a hilltop in the Boston suburb of Needham. When Miller started, there were no buildings, no faculty, no curriculum, no students.
The foundation's mandate: design a boldly original model for a 21st century school whose graduates would be not just accomplished engineers but world-beater entrepreneurs and leaders.
Now the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a wind-swept cluster of six earth-toned buildings, 347 brainy students who pay a maximum of $38,000 tuition, an untenured faculty totaling 25 men and 13 women and a curriculum oriented toward what Miller calls "design based" learning. Miller, who has a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, has honed his leadership skills as Olin's chief creator and builder. The following is an edited version of an interview with Miller conducted by Inc. contributor Joseph Rosenbloom.
As a logical stage of development, the African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC) has established a number of community projects for 2011. The AACCC will focus the wisdom and energy of its corresponding constituent groups toward areas in need of positive outcomes. The projects are designed to serve as a demonstration of what can be accomplished when the "talent" of the community is focused on solutions rather than symptoms.
Education
The AACCC's first educational pilot project is the "adoption" of Orchard Ridge Elementary (ORE) School for the first six months of 2011 (second semester of 2010/2011 school year).
After assessing the primary issues and unmet needs concerning student achievement, the AACCC, the ORE School Principal and Central Office MMSD administration (including the Superintendent) have determined a number of vital activities in which the AACCC could play a vital role.
Too much is at stake for the AACCC adoption of Orchard Ridge Elementary to be viewed as a "feel good" project. The student population of ORE involves 56% students of color, and fifty five percent (55%) of its student enrollment is from low-income homes. As dramatically depicted below, approximately two thirds of that population cannot read.
There are still a few things that have to happen before many of Idaho's newly minted education reforms can be fully executed in the state's kindergarten- through 12th-grade public schools.
Some of the responsibility for the success or failure of Idaho public schools chief Tom Luna's "Students Come First" education reform plan now rests with members of the Idaho State Board of Education. Other reform package measures require that school boards throughout the state create their own local policies and procedures to put the reforms, now Idaho law, into action.
"Implementation will determine how effective the reforms are and if the promised efficiencies will be realized," state education board spokesman Mark Browning said.
The sweeping changes to K-12 education were announced by Luna, with support from Gov. Butch Otter, in Janurary at the start of the legislative session.
Broken down into three bills, the reforms were passed by lawmakers during weeks of contentious House and Senate committee hearings, and protests by students and teachers throughout the state. The final bill was signed into law Friday by the governor, a day after the session adjourned.
e know the District's mission - to educate Seattle's students. That work is done primarily in the schools. The mission of the schools - to educate students - no different from the District mission. The Central Office has two sides: Operations and Academics. The mission of the Operations side is also clear - to take on all of the non-academic work to free the schools to focus on academics. But what is the mission of the academic side of the Central Office?
What academic tasks are the proper work of the Central Office?
The lack of a clearly defined mission for the Academic side of the Central Office has led to two unacceptable consequences: tasks that the central office should do have been left undone and the central office has squandered resources and irritated colleagues by taking on work they should not be doing.
I suggest that the Central Office has three academic duties:
1. Quality Assurance. Someone needs to follow up on the schools and make sure that they are doing a good job. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate interventions for students working below grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate challenge for students working beyond grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are delivering - at a minimum - the core content in each subject at each grade level. Someone needs to make sure that the teachers understand that the Standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Someone needs to make sure that they are following the IEPs, that they are providing appropriate services to ELL students, that their Advanced Learning program meets the expectations for such programs, and so on. Someone needs to make sure that the schools offer all of the classes and opportunities that they are supposed to offer (music, AP classes, etc.). This work, Academic Assurances, is the District's work. Much of it has not been done. Much of it still is not done.
Along these lines, Dr. Enfield wanted to clarify her "Spectrum is Spectrum is Spectrum" remark, but she didn't really manage it. I will follow up with her.
Again and again, I clicked on Wisconsin on an interactive map of reading scores from across the nation. Wisconsin fourth-graders compared with other states. Eighth-graders compared with other states. White kids. Black kids. Hispanic kids. Low-income kids.
The color-coded results told a striking story: In each case, there were few states colored to show they had significantly lower scores than Wisconsin. For fourth-grade black kids, there were none. For fourth-grade low-income kids, there were four.
Here's one that will probably surprise you: For fourth-grade white kids, there were only four (Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia) that were significantly below Wisconsin. Wisconsin white kids score slightly below the national average, putting us in a pack of states with kind-of-OK results, significantly below more than a dozen that are doing better.
Wisconsin is not the reading star it was a couple of decades ago. You'll get little argument that this isn't good.
..
But how reading is taught may be exactly what it heads for. In interviews, Dykstra and Pedriana said they hope there will be a comprehensive review of how reading is taught in Wisconsin - and how teachers are trained by universities to teach reading.
"We need to pay more attention to what works best," Dykstra said. "We have known for 40 years a basic model for how to teach kids to read that is more effective than the predominant model in the state of Wisconsin."
Pedriana said Wisconsin was a particularly "grievous example" of a state that had not done what it could to improve reading achievement. "Teacher training has to be addressed," he said.
Something unprecedented is happening with charter schools in San Diego and across California. This year, San Diego County saw a 14 percent increase in the number of charter schools operating, jumping from 81 to 92. Throughout California, 115 new charters opened - the largest number to ever open in a single year in any state in the nation. This brings California to 912 charter schools serving 365,000 students. Even though the state's funding crisis is disproportionately affecting charter schools, the pipeline for expansion is more robust than it has ever been.
What is causing this growth?
Plain and simple, it is coming in response to demand from parents. Parents are seeing the successes that charter schools are generating. In addition to offering highly innovative programs that cater to individual student needs, charter schools are becoming known for generating high levels of learning.
For several months, I had been listening to my friend agonize over the challenges she had been facing with her 16 year old daughter, "Tammy" , who was attending a suburban public high school in Washington state.
It started with a few phone calls from the school about some relationship issues between Tammy and some other girls at school. Within a month, Mom was getting two or three calls a week informing her Tammy had skipped several classes that day. Over the next several months the skipping continued, Tammy's grades took a nose dive, and she became recluse and defiant at home. Meetings were held with the school administration, school counselor and the family. The parents did what they could administering consequences on their end. Yet nothing seemed to help.
My friend felt like she was loosing her daughter. Tammy could care less about graduating anymore - even though she used to love school as a child. That's when I mentioned to her the idea of enrolling Tammy into one of Washington State's online learning programs. At first, Mom was resistant. Like myself, my friend grew up in your "typical brick and mortar" school.....grouped by age, all taught the same thing at the same time no matter what level your were at, promoted regardless of mastery, huge masses of students moving through a system based on the industrial revolution. Tammy's high school had close to 2000 students in it. Her teachers had about 180 students a day. Would anyone even notice Tammy's plight?
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lauded the city and state for its post-Hurricane Katrina education reform during a wide-sweeping conversation about education on Friday.
Duncan spoke to a room of education journalists during the Education Writers Association National Seminar and touched on national issues relevant to Acadiana school systems.
He touted drastic reform in education, an issue that he said touches so many other problems. For example, only 25 percent of America's youth qualify for the
The data from which this conclusion was drawn were collected between 2003 and 2007 on one of the most scientifically productive holidays in history. This was a round-the-world cruise taken by Craig Venter on his yacht, Sorcerer II, which studied the diversity of micro-organisms in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.
Dr Venter was working out his frustrations after having been fired in 2002 from Celera Genomics, a company he helped set up in 1998 with the specific aim of sequencing the human genome faster and better than the public Human Genome Project was managing at the time. In that, it succeeded. In the wider aim of turning such knowledge into hard cash, however, it was nowhere near as successful as its financial backers had hoped. Dr Venter therefore found himself with more time on his hands than he had been planning.
His killer app in Celera's assembly of the human genome was a technique called shotgun sequencing. This first shreds a genome into pieces small enough for sequencing machines to handle, then stitches the sequenced pieces back together by matching the overlaps using a computer. In principle, he realised, that trick could be used on mixed DNA from more than one organism. A good enough program would stitch together only fragments from the same type of creature. This would allow you to see what was living in a sample without having to culture anything. And since a huge majority of micro-organisms (by some estimates, 97%) cannot be cultured, that sounded like a great idea.
Metagenomics [Wolfram Alpha], as the new technique is known, has vastly extended knowledge of what bugs live in the sea--and in many other places, from hot springs to animals' guts. It is not perfect. In practice a lot of what emerges are fragments of genomes, rather than complete assemblies. But it has been enormously successful at identifying previously unknown individual genes.
Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking - which is key to "the artistic side" of technology.
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.
When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.
Choice students do not attend public schools, but Milwaukee property taxpayers still support their costs. In fact, until recently, Milwaukee property taxpayers actually paid more for students attending choice schools than they paid for students attending traditional Milwaukee Public Schools.
Over the past few years, I've worked with the state to correct this inequity. We have made a significant improvement from where we stood in the 2006-'07 school year, and Milwaukee taxpayers have benefited greatly.
But we have a lot more work to do to ensure this program is fair to all taxpayers.
For decades, our state has recognized that some communities have more wealth than others. That means that the amount spent on a child's education could change dramatically depending on which "side of the tracks" a student lives on.
The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program's performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program's achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee's long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
That discussion is a relevant one given that higher educational attainment certainly is the overall goal for all Milwaukee students. Nevertheless, there are several reasons recent comparative test score results should not be dismissed.
Remember the statewide tests for public school students signed into law in 2008?
A Lincoln senator would like the state to consider deviating from that just a smidgen.
Lincoln Sen. Bill Avery would like to persuade the Legislature to go along with a pilot program that could change the statewide NeSA test for 11th-graders to the ACT college entrance exam.
The idea is to conduct the pilot in Lincoln and seven other districts in the state for three years. The program would evaluate whether the ACT would be an appropriate measure of content knowledge in reading, math and science, and of college and career readiness.
Avery believes having students take the ACT statewide could improve Nebraska's college-going rate. The current rate is 67 percent for graduating high school students, he said.
Maybe what the liberal arts needed was a full-blown depression.
"A couple of years ago I had great hope, because of the externality of the economic situation," Martin Ringle, the chief technology officer at Reed College, told a room full of fellow audience members at a summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) on Thursday.
"I was really hoping, contrary to all of my better judgment, that things would really go into the toilet," Ringle continued. "Because if we didn't stop at recession -- if we went all the way down to depression -- maybe that would be enough for the economic forces to require us to change."
The vicious scam behind Milwaukee's school voucher program now is becoming public for all to see. The program is about to take another ugly turn transferring money from our neediest students to the most privileged.
It was always suspicious that right-wing Republicans were enthusiastically supporting a tax-funded government program they claimed would help poor children of color receive a quality education.
Historically, the right has consistently fought tax funds going to people in need, especially those of other races. The only government programs they support are huge tax cuts and corporate welfare benefiting the wealthy.
What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem.
In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college--at an ever greater cost--when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" after four years of education?
This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking?
EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.
EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists's threshold for the minimum number of participants.)
This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord. They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large. But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.
Two Chinese novelists, Su Tong and Wang Anyi, have just been named finalists for the biennial Man Booker International Prize, the first Chinese writers to receive this honour. This is, therefore, something of a milestone. Yet, even while savouring the reflected glow of this accolade, those familiar with contemporary Chinese literature might wonder why it has taken so long. One explanation might be that this prize, like many international prizes, is based on works in English, and the English-language publishing world has been slow to produce Chinese novels or, indeed, much of anything in translation (a situation that, fortunately, seems to be improving somewhat).
This particular prize, furthermore, is awarded not for a single book, but for a writer's entire corpus. China's recent history has been such that it has not been possible for a long time to publish novels; these two authors are, by the standards of such lifetime prizes, relatively young, Su Tong particularly so.
Proposed Organization Goal Goal Area: Development of 2011 - 12 District Budget.
STATUS: New
Evidence of Need / Baseline Data: There is a need to implement a budget process and develop a proposed budget consistent with the Governor's proposed budget and the reduction of aid.
Target Date for Completion: June, 2011.
Objective: To provide leadership, supervision, and direction to MMSD staff in a budget planning exercise that anticipates and prepares for reduction in state aid for 2011-12.
Results: (For each objective, state the progress.) This goal will be assessed through the implementation of a budget process (budget timeline) and by the development of a proposed 2011-2012 District budget plan.
Action Plan: (Steps to be taken) 1. Implement the five-year budget model forecast to identify the impact of budget scenarios under consideration.
2. At the earliest date after the Governor releases his budget, work with department leaders to identify potential efficiencies and/or savings, taking into account Board priorities and District needs.
3. Use staff recommendations to develop a list of possible cuts for Board review no later than April 1, 2011. Said list must be reviewed and vetted to address mathematical and other errors before it is provided to the press, the Board, or MMSD staff. Said list must be vetted to remove any items that administration would not or could not implement before it is given to the Board for consideration.
4. Work to ensure that all spending for new programs with cumulative costs over $50,000 in property tax revenue be incorporated into the proposed budget and presented to the Board before it votes to approve the preliminary budget.
5. Identify the users of unexpended or unencumbered revenue, by source, as part of the budget materials presented to the Board.
Summary and Next Steps:
360 Degree Feedback:
Leadership Development Goal Goal Area: 360 Degree Feedback Reflection: What are my strengths?
STATUS: Completed
My strengths are in providing strategic, collaborative and participative leadership within the organization. Additional strengths include facilitation skills, communication skills, leading change, working with complex and difficult issues, multi-tasking, addressing diversity and resolving conflicts. Leadership practices inventory indicate strengths in the areas of inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way. My strengths remain stable over time.
Leadership Self-Development Goal: In what area(s) do I need to "grow"? To focus on encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process. Areas
needing developing remain stable over time. Kouzes and Posner profile used for this assessment
Objectives: What are the desired end results? (How will my leadership look different in the future? What building level changes, interventions would occur?)
To further develop skills and practice in encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
End of the Year Results: For each objective, state the progress.
This goal will be assessed by the completion of the 360 degree feedback tool and a review of the perceptions of others related to my personal skills in encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
Personal Development Plan: What will I do? (Steps to be taken, including focused reading, study group membership, conference attendance, peer partnerships, reflective journaling, other.)
1. Continue to read and learn about leadership in contemporary organizations.
2. Attend workshops/conferences consistent with needed leadership development areas.
3. Practice skills developed through various learning experiences.
Summary and Next Steps:
Recent readings about leadership in contemporary organizations include How Leaders Learn (Gordon A. Donaldson, Jr., The School Leaders Our Children Deserve; George Theoharis, Instructional Rounds in Education (Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiarman and Lee Teitel). I have not recently attended workshops/conferences consistent with the need to develop additional skills in encouraging the heart and challenging the process. Given this assessment, I see a need to continue to specifically work on skills related to challenging the process. Specific skills needing to be worked on include searching for opportunities to seek innovative ways to change and experimenting and taking risks. I believe I have made improvements in my skills related to encouraging the heart by recognizing the contributions of others. We are also in the process of identifying a 360 degree feedback tool for all administrators that will be completed prior to my summative performance evaluation in January.
There is a need to finalize the 360 degree tool for all administrators including me. This work is being developed by the Human Resources Department.
School districts across the nation are grappling with the question of how to improve student performance in a time of fiscal austerity. Some reformers are challenging the idea of automatic tenure, arguing that teachers should be paid based on performance rather than seniority. Moreover, recent legislative battles involving teacher compensation in Wisconsin and Ohio have put the issue squarely in the public spotlight.
One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master's degree. Simply by giving up the extra payment for the master's degree, school districts in Florida could save better than 3 percent of their teaching personnel costs without losing any of their classroom effectiveness. In a paper just published in the Economics of Education Review, Matthew Chingos and I look at the characteristics of effective 4th through 8th grade teachers in Florida over the period 2002 to 2010.
We found that teachers with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. Further, we found out that it did not make any difference from which public university in Florida a teacher had earned the degree. None of them had an educational program that correlated with a teacher's classroom effectiveness.
Yet a teacher who has taught for 10 years will earn 6.5 percent more (or about $2500), if he or she has collected that extra diploma. Since about half the teachers have pursued that advanced degree--given the extra dollars, why not?--the state could save better than 3 percent of its teaching personnel costs by eliminating this useless feature of the teacher compensation scheme.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday called for public school teachers to be evaluated based equally on their classroom performance and student achievement and accused the state's largest teachers union of being a group of "bullies and thugs."
Christie laid out his proposal in a speech in New York sponsored by the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank. A teachers union spokesman called the governor's plan an "educational disaster."
Since taking office last year, the Republican Christie has emerged as a popular figure among conservatives nationally for his willingness to confront public employee unions, including teachers, over their salaries and pensions. Several other governors have since followed suit, saying such benefits for public employees are unsustainable over time.
The state, if you recall, released a snapshot of student performance in Milwaukee’s school choice program last week. Tony Evers, head of the Department of Public Instruction, used the numbers to make a political statement against school choice, which he opposes.
But the figureshad issues, and now still more are emerging. One of the surprises in the figures were how poorly one particular choice school, Tamarack Waldorf, did.
It’s surprising because Tamarack is by reputation a good school, unusually deliberate in its curriculum and rigorous in the peculiar way of schools in the Waldorf movement – where, for instance, children do not just have a chapter on photosynthesis but, instead, spend a couple of weeks learning the chemistry behind it and studying the geometry of branches and doing a project on forest ecology and reading literature about trees and taking a field trip to the park, the better to appreciate art involving trees and to make some of their own. Rather than taking tests, the children produce books to demonstrate their learning.
The kind of people who send their kids to such a school are generally engaged and intellectual parents – and, generally, not favorably disposed to standardized testing.
So an unusual number of Tamarack parents opted their children out of the state’s tests, as is the right of any parent in the state. You can see the figures here: In math and reading, about 55% of choice students at Tamarack didn’t take the state tests.
The state’s figures say that 42% of Tamarack students did well – scored “proficient” or “advanced” in reading, and 24% did in math. Those aren’t good scores. But they aren’t real, either.
As Tamarack administrator Jean Kacanek wrote to parents, “The data published is not complete because the Department of Public Instruction averaged scores of ‘0’ for each MPCP student in grades 4-8 at Tamarack who did not take the test. As one might expect for a Waldorf school, with a philosophy averse to standardized testing, many parents chose to opt out of the test.”
When the rankings of the best school systems in the world were released earlier this year, Americans were shocked: our former number one standing slipped again, this time to number 26.
The rankings showed a new trend: the highest-performing school systems in the world are mostly in Asia.
What are the Asian school systems doing right? And what can the United States learn? Asia Society invited top education ministers from China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan and Singapore, to sound off on these questions.
There was no lively debate. The answer was clear: invest in teachers.
Before coming to Literacy Services of Wisconsin, the 28-year-old knew only random letters and their sounds, which made reading difficult, if not impossible.
"If you get mail at home and do not know how to read, you're in trouble," said Snead, who often enlisted the help of others to read her own mail. "Going through life not knowing how to read can be hard on a person."
So, over the past two years, Snead has set out to change her path and is getting good results. "My reading levels are moving up."
Snead, who dropped out of high school, is among an increasing number of adult learners seeking literacy services, in large part to earn their GED, said India McCanse, the executive director of the agency, which served more than 800 people last year.
Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing.
In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn't, or didn't, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write.
I got my start as a journalist freelancing stories for the old Milwaukee Sentinel about problems with achievement test results at Milwaukee Public Schools. Throughout the 1980s, the media's increasing focus on problems at MPS helped to lay the groundwork for a radically different alternative - a voucher system where low-income families could choose to send their children to private schools. The case for school choice could not have been made without years of achievement test data showing the below-average performance of MPS schools.
So it is highly ironic - and quite alarming - that Gov. Scott Walker is proposing to end the requirement that choice schools participate in the state system of standardized testing. I can't think of a better way to guarantee these schools are failures.
Last week the media reported the results of state tests for MPS and choice schools. The average scores were astoundingly bad for some choice schools. The proportion of students who were proficient in reading and math was just 12 percent and 14 percent at Texas Bufkin Christian Academy; 17 percent and 6 percent at Travis Technology High School; 20 percent and 7 percent at Washington DuBois Christian Leadership Academy; 23 percent and 9 percent at Right Step, Inc.; 18 percent and 0 percent (Did no one take the math test?) at Dr Brenda Noach Choice School; 16 percent and 9 percent at Destiny High School. You get the feeling some of these schools worked harder on creating their name than educating the students.
A Massachusetts school committee has petitioned their legislature to opt out of Federal education standards which most states have adopted in attempt to get federal funding during lean budget times.
The Tantasqua Regional School Committee, the equivalent of our local Board of Education, is working with their state legislature to allow them to opt out of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
School Committee Chairman Kathleen Neal told the Gazette committee members are concerned with the cost of implementing the program as well as the way the standards were adopted with little public input last year.
The Massachusetts Core initiative was adopted during the summer and Neal said the committee had no idea it was being discussed until after the vote was passed with almost no notice to the general public. "If you are going to change the way you do assessments you should bring the people who are invested in it to the table." She expressed frustration at state officials lack of asking the local districts for solutions.
As I think back over a dozen years in the classroom, I cannot recall the exact moment that I changed from an idealistic beginning teacher at the peak of my game to the space-wasting NEA member who is keeping some good young teacher on the unemployment line.
When did experience turn from an asset to the biggest roadblock to saving American public schools?
In Missouri, a bill has been proposed by Republican Rep. Scott Dieckhaus which would eliminate tenure and the due process it guarantees and allow administrators and school boards to fire teachers with or without reason.
Dieckhaus' bill also calls for a four-tier merit pay system, based almost entirely on the scores on standardized tests. The bill specifically forbids basing teacher pay on years of experience or advanced schooling.
Gov. John Kitzhaber leads a full-court press today for what he considers to be the centerpiece of his education reform plan -- a single board that would help set the budgets for pre-kindergarten programs to universities and everything in between.
At a news conference, he surrounded himself with every top education official in the state to tout his bill that would establish the Oregon Education Investment Board. The board would replace the state boards of education and higher education, and would oversee spending on all facets of learning.
"The state needs to move from a funder to an investor," Kitzhaber said. And the money each program gets "needs to be based on outcomes rather than seat time."
Later today, Kitzhaber is scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee on Senate Bill 909, which takes the first steps toward establishing the new uber-board.
Kitzhaber acknowledged that even under that system interest groups would still compete. But not as fiercely as they do under the current system.
John Kitzhaber: "If you're developing a single joint budget based on some clear criteria going in, it creates a rationale for that debate. Right now it's simply how do I get as much money as I can in my pot."
The unified education budget would still have to be approved by lawmakers. Kitzhaber made his pitch to members of the Oregon Senate Education Committee.
The U.S. Department of Education developed this broadband availability map and search engine as part of a collaborative effort with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This education-focused broadband map and database builds upon the NTIA State Broadband Data and Development (SBDD) Program that surveys bi-annually broadband availability and connectivity for the 50 United States, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia.
With its intricate mysteries of quadratics, logarithms and imaginary numbers, Algebra II often provokes a lament from high-schoolers.
What exactly does this have to do with real life?
The answer: maybe more than anyone could have guessed.
Of all of the classes offered in high school, Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates.
In recent years, 20 states and the District have moved to raise graduation requirements to include Algebra II, and its complexities are being demanded of more and more students.
The effort has been led by Achieve, a group organized by governors and business leaders and funded by corporations and their foundations, to improve the skills of the workforce. Although U.S. economic strength has been attributed in part to high levels of education, the workforce is lagging in the percentage of younger workers with college degrees, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
As we have seen in the past, teacher licensing requirements have little relation to student achievement. One reason for this may be that rather than driving up teacher quality, licensure requirements can be so full of bureaucratic red tape that they drive away smart and knowledgeable teaching candidates who have other options.
In support of that theory, I offer an anecdote, namely an email from a good friend of mine who has more knowledge and training than most prospective teachers -- she went to Princeton for undergrad, Yale for a master's degree, and Harvard for law school. But before she can even get in the door and start studying pedagogical techniques and the like, she is being told that she has to take nine (9) more undergraduate courses of background knowledge.
Gov. Chris Christie created a committee today that will be tasked with reviewing all of the state's education regulations.
The task force will return recommendations to eliminate regulations which take decision-making power away from the local districts, Christie said.
"What I want to have happen here is to return more of the power back to school districts and less from the central office in Trenton, so that we can encourage people to innovate," Christie said. "We've gotten into a pattern over the course of time with increasing money coming from Trenton over the last 20 to 25 years years with increasing regulation coming from Trenton. I don't think that's the best way for us to go at transforming education.
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners... but having the same manner for all human souls. In short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
Professor Henry Higgins says this to Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's 1912 play, Pygmalion. He has wagered that he can pass Eliza, a "lowly" flower girl, for a society lady by teaching her how to speak and behave properly. Higgins is successful, Eliza does pass, but her acceptance into the social elite came as much from her newly found self-esteem, as her style and manner.
The idea that "social assets" can help kids get ahead and do more in the world isn't a new one. Social assets aren't about money, but the stuff that comes with money. Things like knowing about fine art, current events, fashion, design, even food and wine. These are the social markers that give away what part of town you live in, where you go to school, and what your parents do for a living. In the last forty years the concept of social assets has been widely recognized in educational research as a major factor in where, or if, kids go to college, and how much they'll earn over their lifetimes.
As a former high school English teacher, I used to have a pretty constricted view when attending continuing education workshops. Like most teachers, I thought: How can this help my school and students? Now, as a HuffPost Education editor reporting at the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference in Los Angeles, I got to think big in terms of the newest education ideas and who they affect. And there was lots to take note of.
The conference was a mix of educators, reformers and software developers who spent three days bouncing around theories, policies and practices on the best ways to use technology in the classroom. Diligent teachers tuned in by taking notes on their iPads and updated grades on their smartphones -- all while discussing how best to use these platforms in their curriculum.
Being born female set sometime actress Christine Liao on the road to a career in ballet, but it could all have been so different.
Growing up in a traditional, male-dominated environment, the founder of the Christine Liao School of Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet Company may never have had such an impact on the art form had she not seen other career paths blocked.
And that's precisely why she is backing a new campaign called "Because I am a Girl", which will promote the rights of girls.
Liao began dancing when she was eight and, at the age of 19, she became a film actress using the stage name Mao Mei, and starred in eight films from 1955 to 1962. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in languages and literature, she turned her back on the silver screen and considered becoming a lawyer or working in an office.
No longer the preserve of tree-huggers, the trend for sustainable design is gaining momentum as more people opt for homes and buildings created using renewable resources that don't cost the earth, literally. No wonder - these buildings use less energy, cost less to operate, use fewer natural resources and have less of an impact on the environment than their conventional counterparts.
Hong Kong Academy's green school, which opens in Sai Kung in 2013, is part of a new era in sustainable architecture in our city, says Josh Arnold, who teaches middle school science, maths and design technology at HKA.
The striking bit of news out of that ongoing study comparing private and public schools in Milwaukee is this: Researchers aren't yet sure how, but the private schools are better at getting kids across the finish line.
This is one bright spot in a report otherwise showing that children using Milwaukee's school choice program were doing only about as well as Milwaukee Public Schools kids on state tests. The study, by independent university researchers, is following two sets of children, matched for background and poverty, to see which system does a better job of improving their scores on math and reading tests. So far, say researchers, there's no statistically significant difference.
But the study's oldest students have reached graduation age. There, say researchers, there is a difference. Children in choice schools were notably more likely to graduate from high school. Just among those who spent ninth grade taking their state aid to a private school in the form of a voucher, 77% graduated in four years; 69% of MPS kids did.
Among students who spent all four years in a choice school, 94% graduated on time; 75% of kids who stayed in MPS all four years did.
MISSED ADJUSTMENTS and OPPORTUNITIES RATIFICATION OF Madison School District/Madison Teachers Collective Bargaining Agreement 2011-2013
The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education and the Madison Teachers, Inc. ratified an expedited Collective Bargaining Agreement for 2011-2013. Several significant considerations were ignored for the negative impact and consequences on students, staff and taxpayers.
First and foremost, there was NO 'urgent' need (nor ANY need at all) to 'negotiate' a new contract. The current contract doesn't expire until June 30, 2011. Given the proposals regarding school finance and collective bargaining processes in the Budget Repair Bill before the legislature there were significant opportunities and expectations for educational, management and labor reforms. With such changes imminent, there was little value in 'locking in' the restrictive old provisions for conducting operations and relationships and shutting the door on different opportunities for increasing educational improvements and performances in the teaching and learning culture and costs of educating the students of the district.
A partial listing of the missed adjustments and opportunities with the ratification of the teacher collective bargaining agreement should be instructive.
Keeping the 'step and advancement' salary schedule locks in automatic salary increases; thereby establishing a new basis annually for salary adjustments. The schedule awards increases solely on tenure and educational attainment. This also significantly inhibits movement for development and implementation of 'pay for performance' and merit.
Continues the MOU agreement requiring 50% of teachers in 4-K programs (public and private sites combined) to be state certified and union members
Continues required union membership. There are 2700 total or 2400 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers, numbers rounded. Full-time teachers pay $1100.00 (pro-rated for part-time) per year in automatic union dues deducted from paychecks and processed by the District. With 2400 FTE multiplied by $1100 equals $2,640,000 per year multiplied by two years of the collective bargaining unit equals $5,280,000 to be paid by teachers to their union (Madison Teachers Inc., for its union activities). These figures do not include staff members in the clerical and teacher assistant bargaining units who also pay union dues, but at a lower rate.
Continues to limit and delay processes for eliminating non-performing teachers Inhibits abilities of the District to determine the length and configuration of the school day, length and configuration of the school year calendar including professional development, breaks and summer school
Inhibits movement and placement of teachers where needed and best suited
Restricts adjustments to class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios
Continues very costly grievance options and procedures and litigation
Inhibits the District from developing attendance area level teacher/administrator councils for collaboration in problem-solving, built on trust and relationships in a non-confrontational environment
Continues costly extra-duties and extra-curricular agreements and processes
Restricts flexibility for teacher input and participation in professional development, curriculum selection and development and performance evaluation at the building level
Continues Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP), costing upwards to $3M per year
Does not require teacher sharing in costs of health insurance premiums
Did not immediately eliminate extremely expensive Preferred Provider (WPS) health insurance plan
Did not significantly address health insurance reforms
Does not allow for reviews and possible reforms of Sick Leave and Disability Leave policies
Continues to be the basis for establishing "me too" contract agreements with administrators for salaries and benefits. This has impacts on CBAs with other employee units, i.e., support staff, custodians, food service employees, etc.
Continues inflexibilities for moving staff and resources based on changes and interpretations of state and federal program supported mandates
Inhibits educational reforms related to reading and math and other core courses, as well as reforms in the high schools and alternative programs
Each and every one of the above items has a financial cost associated with it. These are the so-called 'hidden costs' of the collective bargaining process that contribute to the over-all costs of the District and to restrictions for undertaking reforms in the educational system and the District. These costs could have been eliminated, reduced, minimized and/ or re-allocated in order to support reforms and higher priorities with more direct impact on academic achievement and staff performance.
For further information and discussion contact:
Don Severson President
Active Citizens for Education
donleader@aol.com
608 577-0851
I'm tired of talking about systems and governance and structures for education. If we've proved anything in Milwaukee, we've proved that these things make less difference than a lot of people once thought.
Since 1990, Milwaukee has been one of the nation's foremost laboratories of experimentation in school structures. This has been driven by hope (some national experts used the word panacea) that new ways of creating, running and funding schools would bring big progress.
A ton of data was unloaded during the last week, including test results from last fall for every school in Wisconsin, a new round of studies comparing performance of students in Milwaukee's publicly funded private school voucher program with Milwaukee Public Schools students and - for the first time - school-by-school test results for those voucher schools.
And what did I learn from all this?
1.) We've got big problems. The scores, overall, were low.
2.) We're not making much progress overall in solving them.
3.) Schools in all three of the major structures for education in Milwaukee - MPS, voucher schools and charter schools - had about the same overall results.
4.) Some specific schools really did much better than others, even when dealing with students with much the same backgrounds as those in schools that got weaker results.
In my dreams, all of us - especially the most influential politicians, policy-makers and civic leaders - focus a lot more on the fourth point than we have been doing.
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
A joyful kaleidoscope in clay, Lo Yip-nang's display of intricate patterns in jewel tones entranced thousands of people who visited his exhibition at the Jockey Club Creative Art Centre in Shek Kip Mei. Although many were eager to talk to the artist, he kept working with his slivers of coloured clay, giving monosyllabic replies to queries.
"You've been working all day; are you tired?" asks one woman. "No," he says after a long pause. "People like your work, does that make you happy?" asks another. "Yes."
Lo wasn't playing the temperamental artist, though. The 30-year-old is autistic and his two-week exhibition last month is a personal triumph - and a sign of hope that people with the disability can live independently.
Autism stems from glitches in neurological development that cause sufferers to be socially impaired. Unable to interpret what people are expressing or to communicate how they feel, they typically become engrossed with specific objects instead or find comfort in repetitive behaviour and routine. But Lo, or Nang as he is affectionately known, is a rare autistic person who found a way to express himself.
Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius said Friday that the Dayton administration and the Republican-controlled Legislature have some work ahead of them to reach some compromise on the education funding bills that passed at the Capitol this week.
The proposals would boost the basic per-pupil funding. But it freezes spending for special education and other funding that goes primarily to the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth districts.
One example is aid that's distribute based on how concentrated poverty is in a school building. Cassellius says cutting that funding would hurt the most vulnerable students.
"It's really a realization of not understanding the difficult nature of concentrations of poverty, and the difficulty to meet the needs of all children and all the challenges that are there," she said.
The president who turned No Child Left Behind from slogan into statute is gone from Washington, and the influence of his signature education law is fading. But another brand of Bush school reform is on the rise.
The salesman is not the 43rd president, George W. Bush, but the 43rd governor of Florida, his brother Jeb.
At the core of the Jeb Bush agenda are ideas drawn from his Florida playbook: Give every public school a grade from A to F. Offer students vouchers to help pay for private school. Don't let them move into fourth grade unless they know how to read.
Through two foundations he leads in Florida and his vast political connections, Jeb Bush is advancing such policies in states where Republicans have sought his advice on improving schools. His stature in the party and widening role in state-level legislation make him one of the foremost GOP voices on education.
The Madison School Board's recent consideration of the Urban League's application for a planning grant from DPI for the Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men prompted me to dig deeper into the issues the charter school proposal raises. I have several concerns - some old and some new - that are described below.
I apologize for the length of this post. It kind of turned into a data dump of all things Madison Prep.
Here are the seven areas of concern I have today about the Madison school district agreeing to sponsor Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school.
1. The Expense.
As I have written, it looks like the roughly $14,500 per student that Madison Prep is seeking from the school district for its first year of operations is per nearly twice the per-student funding that other independent and non-instrumentality charter schools in the state now receive.
Independent charter schools, for example, receive $7,750 per-student annually in state funding and nothing from the local school district. As far as I can tell, non-instrumentality charter schools tend to receive less than $7,750 from their sponsoring school districts.
It seems that the Madison Prep proposal seeks to pioneer a whole new approach to charter schools in this state. The Urban League is requesting a much higher than typical per-student payment from the school district in the service of an ambitious undertaking that could develop into what amounts to a shadow Madison school district that operates at least a couple of schools, one for boys and one for girls. (If the Urban League eventually operates a girl's school of the same size as projected for Madison Prep, it would be responsible for a total of 840 students, which is a larger total enrollment than about 180 school districts in Wisconsin can claim.)
What about the argument that Madison Prep does not propose to spend any more on a per-student basis than the Madison school district already spends? There are a couple of responses. First, MMSD does not spend $14,500 per student on in-school operations - i.e., teachers, classroom support, instructional materials. The figure is more like $11,000. But this is not the appropriate comparison.
The release of the results of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the standardized test that every state public school is required to give, is a rite of spring for Wisconsin schools.
Distributed every year, the WKCEs provide educators, parents and community members with information about how well schools and districts are performing, broken down by subject and grade level.
The WKCEs are used alongside other measures to determine where schools are falling short and what is working well. For parents with many different types of educational options from which to choose, the WKCEs allow them to make informed choices about their child's school. For taxpayers, the tests provide a level of transparency and demonstrate a return on investment.
But while state law requires all public schools to give the WKCEs, not all publicly funded schools are required do to so. Since its inception 20 years ago, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has been virtually without any kind of meaningful accountability measures in place. Choice schools have not been required to have students take the WKCEs. That is, until this school year.
We have all done it at one time or another -- opened our mouth before engaging our brain.
State Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, just had one of those moments. In reacting to the news that, on average, students attending schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice program performed about the same or slightly below students in Milwaukee Public Schools, she said taxpayers are being "bamboozled" and the program is "a disservice to Milwaukee students."
Whoa! Had she taken a moment to think before she spoke, here are a few things that should have occurred to her:
• Those private schools are performing about as well at educating Milwaukee children as the public schools -- at half the cost. Public funding for each child in the choice program costs taxpayers $6,442 while each child in Milwaukee Public Schools receives taxpayer support of over $15,000. If all of the 21,000 choice students moved back into Milwaukee Public Schools, that would require a $74 million increase in local property taxes across the state, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Thirteen-year-old Robert Rosner is in eighth grade in Phelps, Wis. -- pop. 1,400. There are seven students in his class in the small, Northwoods village near the Michigan state line.
But on the walls of his bedroom, Robert has taped National Geographic maps that carry him to landscapes far beyond the woodsy confines of Phelps. Every night, before he sleeps, he stares at the maps and travels to places he's never seen, according to his mother, Donna.
Friday, Robert mustered all he has learned from those imaginary journeys to win the state National Geographic Bee and a very real trip to Washington, D.C., where in May he will compete against 49 other students who have advanced from their own state contests to the national geography competition.
Robert plowed through tough questions on everything from tectonic plates beneath South America to tunnels in Norway and crocodiles in Mauritania to best more than 100 other elementary and middle school students from around Wisconsin in the annual contest. He seemed cool and confident throughout, unlike his mother.
When we bought our home in Jackson (only the second purchase in my thirty plus years of rather hectic service in the "Military-Industrial Complex", helping fight and win the Cold War in all its versions across nearly half the lower 48 states), my wife and I found ourselves stakeholders in the Jackson Enterprise , both divisions - educational (60 percent) and municipal (40 percent). After observing the rapid deterioration in the management of both from the relatively peaceful days of the late 1990′s (zero increase in the school tax rate and an equally steady municipal tax rate) I took an active interest in the operation of the increasingly dysfunctional Board of Education (BoE). Of special interest is the BoE's stubborn and inflexible operating principle that "education" improvement is inevitable if you just shovel sufficient millions of dollars into the bottomless maw of the educator cadres (NJEA Jackson cell in cahoots with the School Administration), eventually some of that will stick. Ending this mind set is my overriding objective.
How do you feel your presence on the school board can benefit education in Jackson?
What passes for a proper education, to be fair, not just in Jackson, is the fostering in the Trophy Kids generation students of a conviction of entitlement and victimization if they are not pampered at every turn(expect to get a medal or commendation of some sort for just showing up on time ). Other countries, our main competitors, teach that students have an obligation to learn in return for the privilege, not the right, granted them . That is their duty to their parents and the nation, and ultimately themselves. That is why our pampered students get their clock cleaned in international math and science competitions, year after bloody year. My contribution to education in Jackson will flow from my thirty years of experience of overseeing and executing the staffing of programs in often way-off-the-road places demanding the hiring on tight schedules of large numbers (hundreds) of often ill-prepared junior engineers with king-sized salary expectations. Thank God for the availability of retiring US Army trained senior noncoms and warrant officers - they always save the contract and know how to run an mission to meet assigned objectives.
Today the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released new results for the statewide exam.
Not surprising to those who have been paying attention, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) did better than schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), otherwise known as the voucher program.
Overall, MPS had 47.8% of its students scoring as proficient in math, with 59% proficient in reading.
Among economically disadvantaged kids, MPS scored 43.9% in math and 55.3% in reading.
Those scores are lower for students in the voucher program--all of whom are economically disadvantaged, although that could change if Gov. Scott Walker has his way and opens up the program to middle-class and wealthy kids. Only 34.4% of voucher students scored proficient in math, while 55.2% were proficient in reading, about the same as MPS.
The East Valley School District is asking voters to approve a $33.75 million school construction bond on April 26. The bond will be used to expand and renovate its primary schools.
But the issue many are debating is the district's decision to eliminate its middle schools and turn its elementary schools into kindergarten through eighth grade schools, regardless of bond approval.
It's a model that's being considered across the country. Districts in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland and New York - including the large urban areas of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Baltimore - are moving toward K-8 schools.
"I've heard of charter schools," the woman told me. "But I really don't know understand them." People are not familiar with schools often run by a private group but using taxpayer dollars.
Imagine a school created with a business-like contact or "charter". This charter sets it own rules for the school and exempts it from the usual rules about classes, staff, budgeting and administration.
Many charter schools are created and run by local school districts but some are independent charters. Cost to local school districts for these independent schools this year was almost $60 million statewide. In our Senate District, school districts will pay an estimated $1.3 million in the next two years for these independent charter schools.
Relating to the Creation of the Governor's
Read to Lead Task Force
WHEREAS, the number one priority for children in grades kindergarten through third grade is to learn to read; and
WHEREAS, one third of all Wisconsin students cannot read at a basic level and two thirds of all African American students in our state cannot read at a basic level, which is the lowest rate in the nation; and
WHEREAS, in approximately ten years, Florida, through state reading law reforms, has improved from one of the lowest ranked states in the nation to one of the highest and in doing so achieved a much smaller racial achievement gap than Wisconsin; and
WHEREAS, it is critical to have initiatives that will empower teachers, districts, and parents--not lawmakers--with the ability to decide how best to teach reading and explore ways to provide teachers and parents with better tools to identify young struggling students and address why they are struggling and how to overcome those challenges; and
When Wayétu Moore fled her home of Monrovia, Liberia with her father and two sisters in the summer of 1989, banished by the outburst of civil war, one of the few things she had was a small notebook. In Lai, the village where they hid for six months, five-year-old Wayétu and her sisters scribbled about the death and mayhem they witnessed around them.
Over two decades after they left Liberia, the Moore sisters now lead successful lives in America. Their parents have reunited (their mother was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University when they had to flee), and two brothers were born in America. But they have never forgotten their war-devastated homeland, and the fact that very few children there--especially girls--are educated, or even literate. Earlier this year Wayétu Moore (pictured) and her siblings launched One Moore Book, a publishing company that creates children's books for countries with low literacy rates. The idea is to publish stories about kids who rarely feature in children's books, and to donate books to these countries through schools and libraries.
Many families choose to enroll their children in Catholic schools for religious reasons, but educators say kids also get academic benefits.
The Green Bay Area Catholic Education system for the first time compared test scores from 10 local Catholic schools with scores from area public schools. Catholic educators say the comparison showed students at the parochial schools are generally more proficient or advanced in math, reading and language arts than their peers at public schools.
Catholic school advocates say the scores highlight the strong quality of education at those schools at a time when they're working hard to attract students. That effort ramps up this week, which is National Catholic Schools Week.
GRACE president Carol Conway-Gerhardt said bringing together 10 local Catholic schools into one system allowed administrators to compare test scores from those students with those at public schools.
While many high school magazines have discontinued, the annual Wayfarer magazine at Edgewood High School is thriving.
The school recently learned that the 2010 issue of Wayfarer, the 25th edition of the student literary and art magazine, received a Superior Award from the National Council of Teachers of English and was nominated for a Highest Award. The council annually reviews student literary magazines for quality, variety, editing and proofreading and design/artistic aspects. The Wayfarer is one of only two Wisconsin high school literary magazines to receive both of these honors.
Diane Mertens has been the faculty adviser for about 25 years and said an introduction to the magazine's 20th anniversary issue holds true today: "I continually rediscover how refreshing it is to look at the world through adolescent eyes. I also find it exciting to observe the editorial board's discussions as members debate the artistic merit and quality of student writing and artwork."
There are a few dissenters who have remained leery of the great success story of the KIPP schools, questioning the turnover of students in the acclaimed program. KIPP operates three schools in the metro area and a high school, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate, opens this summer.
Now skeptics are about to get some data on attrition and funding that may confirm their suspicions.
In a study bound to raise the hackles of KIPP supporters, researchers at the College of Education and Human Development at Western Michigan University and Teachers College at Columbia University found that KIPP has a high attrition rate among African-American boys.
While the study does not challenge the academic success of KIPP graduates, it raises questions about the funding and whether the high level of private dollars is sustainable. The study found that KIPP schools benefit tremendously by donations and private funding, earning an extra $6,500 on average per pupil.
Madison Metropolitan School District officials are beginning to digest new statewide test score results.
The results for Madison are mixed, but district leaders said that they believe they have a lot of work to do to improve.
The tests reveal that Madison is home to some very bright students, but Superintendent Dan Nerad said that schools aren't doing enough for students who are struggling. He said the test results are proof.
The results showed that, in general, reading levels among students increased across the board while math performance improved only slightly.
District officials said that they also continue to be a "bi-modal" district -- meaning there are students who are scoring at the highest level while it also has ones who are scoring at the lowest levels in nearly every grade in math and reading.
AMERICA'S schools are dotted with stories of progress. In December your correspondent watched a class of seven-year-olds on Chicago's poor West Side. As Mauricia Dantes, a consultant for IBM before she retrained as a teacher, led the pupils in a discussion about the deaf-and-blind author Helen Keller, one small girl declared: "I feel like I'm in college." One day, thanks to Ms Dantes and other teachers, she may be.
Barack Obama wants such scenes to be the rule rather than the exception. The question is what the federal government can do to help. Ten years ago Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a bold effort to improve America's schools. On March 14th Mr Obama announced that he wants to pass a new version by August. It could be one of his most important feats. But it will not be easy.
Study: Voucher students more likely to attend college
Milwaukee voucher students are more likely to graduate and enroll in college than their public school counterparts, according to a new study from researchers the state asked to evaluate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Other findings, such as the neutral effect on student test scores, were discovered in past years of the study and reaffirmed in the latest findings.
"We haven't found any evidence of harm, and it wasn't for lack of looking," said lead researcher Patrick Wolf, who will be presenting the new research at UW-Madison today.
A day after the release of state test scores showed voucher-school students in Milwaukee achieving lower levels of reading and math proficiency than students in Milwaukee Public Schools, new data from researchers studying the voucher program's results over multiple years shows those students are doing about the same as MPS students, not worse.
The contradictory report is part of the latest installment of data from a group of researchers at the University of Arkansas who have been tracking a sample of Milwaukee voucher students matched to a set of MPS peers since 2005-'06.
After looking at achievement results on state tests over three years for those matched samples of students, the researchers' data continues to show little difference in academic achievement between both sectors in 2009.
For a matched sample of ninth-grade students in 2005-'06, the researchers found slightly higher graduation rates and college enrollment for voucher students three years later.
....
John F. Witte, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who's involved with research on the five-year study, said the program is justifiable because it gives low-income families more opportunities.
"Some higher-income people are free to switch schools or move their kids out of the city because they have resources, and some people don't have those resources, so the program balances that out," Witte said. "This was never intended to be a silver bullet."
The Indiana House on Wednesday passed what would be the nation's broadest use of school vouchers, allowing even middle-class families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools. The bill passed the house 56-42.
In an effort to lure House Democrats back from a five-week, self-imposed exile in Illinois, Republicans agreed to reduce the number of vouchers, with a limit of 7,500 the first year and 15,000 the second, 6News' Norman Cox reported.
Still, unlike other systems that are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools, this one would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those whose parents earn up to $60,000 a year.
A week from today, about 10 percent to 15 percent of the voters will go to the polls and choose three members of the Rockford School Board to help govern the third largest school district in Illinois.
A fourth member, Bob Evans, will be re-elected because the Rockford College professor is unopposed.
We've written reams of copy here at the News Silo about the upcoming election. Our colleagues at WNTA radio and at the television stations have interviewed the candidates on the air. Forums have been held.
A lot of issues have been discussed. Should the board continue to be elected from seven subdistricts or should we pursue legislation at the state level to allow the mayor of Rockford and the Winnebago County Board chairman to appoint some or all of the members? What are the "real" numbers in the ongoing debate about the size of the budget shortfall for the remainder of this school year and the next? Do people trust the superintendent or should we hire a new one?
Even among the nation's woeful traditional big-city school districts, Detroit Public Schools is a particular abomination. Between falling into state receivership for the second time in the past 12 years, facing $327 million in budget deficits for the next four years, wrangling with scandals such as the travails of literacy-bereft now-former school board president Otis Mathis (who resigned last year after the district's superintendent complained that he had engaged in lewd acts during meetings), and constant news about its failure to educate its students, the Motor City district has secured its place as the Superfund site of education.
So it wasn't a surprise when Detroit's state-appointed czar, Robert Bobb, announced on March 12 that the district would slash its deficit -- and eliminate as much as $99 million in costs from operating its bureaucracy -- by getting rid of 29 percent of the 142 dropout factories and failure mills. But instead of just shutting down the 41 schools (as the district originally planned to do) it would convert them into charter schools, handing off instruction, curriculum, and operations to nonprofits, parents groups, and others interested in running schools.
Small class size is thought to be a ticket to classroom success. Some states require schools, by law, to limit the number of students assigned to one teacher. But Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive of the Success Charter Network, argues that formula doesn't guarantee a good education.
The Obama administration "strongly opposes" a bill championed by House Speaker John Boehner that would revive and expand vouchers for low-income students in the District of Columbia.
The administration's statement stops short of saying President Obama will veto the measure, known as the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act or SOAR.
"Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement," said the Office of Management and Budget statement. "The administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students."
Several decades ago, the Canadian Army was having a problem with its male recruits. Far too many of them were going Absent WithOut Leave, for various reasons, to various places, for varying amounts of time.
The Army tried giving them punishment laps, kitchen duty, latrine duty, even time in the stockade, but nothing worked--they were still going AWOL.
Finally, someone thought of trying something completely new. They sent the recruit home to his mother, with a note saying he was too immature for Army duty, and would she keep him at home for another year, and then perhaps he could try again. The AWOL problem disappeared.
Something like 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years, and they don't, for the most part, go home to mother, but they do leave a hole and a problem in filling their shoes back in the schools.
My guess is that no one conducts serious exit interviews with these teachers, who are perfectly free to leave the profession, for personal reasons, to start a different career, or whatever. But I would argue that a significant portion of them, it would be found if there were serious exit interviews conducted, have been virtually pushed out.
People go back and forth arguing whether teaching is a profession or a civil service job like firefighters and police, paid out of municipal taxes.
In general, professionals don't have clients delivered to them, as students are delivered to teachers, and if a client leaves a lawyer for another lawyer the first lawyer does not call his union representative.
For me, one test of whether a teacher is a professional or not is whether she/he can refuse service to someone. Lawyers who are about to try a case in court before a jury can interview potential jurors and they have, I think, two peremptory challenges, which allow them to say: "This potential juror and that potential juror are excused." They can exercise this privilege if there are a couple of people they think would prejudice their case or make it harder to win. They don't have to give any reasons.
A "professional" teacher, on the other hand, is not allowed to look over a class, and say, "This one and that one, I can't teach." Even if what it means is if those students stay in their class they may have to give 60% of their time to controlling them, and have only 40% of their time for the other 27 students. And it is worse than that, because the effort to control disruptive students does not come at one time in the class, but is needed to interrupt the rest of the class any number of times.
Teachers are trained and expected not to think about stuff like that. They are taught and expected to believe that it is their job to accept all comers and exercise their "classroom management skills" without being relieved of the burden of any disruptive student, no matter how much damage that student may do to the education of the other students in the class.
So teachers, for the most part, take all students, and their teaching suffers as a result. They are frustrated in their efforts to offer the best that they have to the majority of their students. And, by the way, it is no secret to the students that the school administration doesn't have enough respect for the teacher's professional work to remove such a student. And we wonder why people don't want to be teachers and don't want their children to be teachers.
Theodore Roosevelt had a guest in the oval office one day, when his daughter Alice came charging through the room screaming. The guest asked the President if he couldn't control her. TR responded that he could control Alice, or he could be President of the United States, but not both. He was a professional and was treated as such.
I blame teachers for not having the courage to say that if I have to keep this student or that student in my class, the education I am able to offer to the other students will be damaged by 60%. If they did say that, of course they would be judged incompetent in classroom management and probably encouraged to leave the profession.
Many too many do leave the profession, and I believe that many of them were literally pushed out through being prevented from doing their best by the unchecked and disregarded misbehavior of some students. I know that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student, but so was every rapist and murderer, and students who cannot conduct themselves as they should must not be allowed to ruin the careers of our teachers. Perhaps such students should be sent home to their mothers, but they don't belong in classrooms where important professional academic work is going on.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The 2010 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam results reveal strong academic achievement for students in the Sun Prairie Area School District, according to district officials.
This past November, Sun Prairie administered the WKCE to more than 3,400 students in grades 3 through 8 and grade 10. Students in grades 3 through 8 were assessed in reading and math. Students in grades 4, 8 and 10 were also assessed in language arts, science, social studies and writing.
It is important to note that testing in the fall shows the impact of instruction from the previous school years and just two months at the designated grade level. For example, 6th grade scores reflect proportionately more about the 5th grade program than about the 6th grade program.
Combining all grade levels, 88 percent of Sun Prairie students are proficient or advanced in reading and 86 percent are proficient or advanced in math, according to district officials. The numbers are both an increase from last year.
In his (anonymous) new book, Professor X describes a scene he witnessed in a departmental office. A frazzled student comes in and wants the secretary to get a message to her professor. The secretary asks the professor's name, and the student turns out to be unaware -- at the midpoint of the semester.
The secretary shows no judgment but proceeds to figure out a way to identify the professor:
"Male or female?"
Female.
"Tall or short?"
Regular,
"Blond or brunette? Light hair, dark hair?"
She has dreads.
By process of elimination, the secretary identifies the instructor and promises to deliver the message. The secretary never smirks -- even after the student leaves. The student is treated with respect. Professor X marvels at the commitment of staffers to helping students at the colleges at which he teaches. "Nowhere are employees friendlier," he writes. "The staffers could not be more accommodating to students who have lost their way in the forests of financial aid or class schedules."
The latest data from the U.S. Census's American Community Survey paints a fascinating picture of the United States at the county level. We've looked the educational achievement and the median income of the entire nation, to see where people are going to school, where they're earning money, and if there is any correlation.
The D.C. State Board of Education will hold a hearing next week on irregularities in standardized test scores, board President Ted Trabue said Monday.
The hearing comes in response to a USA TODAY investigation that found 103 public schools in the nation's capital where tests showed unusually high numbers of answers that had been changed from wrong to right.
"It's disturbing," Trabue said. "You never want to see the system being gamed."
The board is a group of elected officials who advise the state superintendent, the District of Columbia's equivalent to a state education department.
I just returned from the Association for Education Finance and Policy annual conference in Seattle, which was a really fantastic meeting. At the conference I saw Dartmouth economic historian, William Fischel, present a paper on Amish education, extending the work from his great book, Making the Grade, which I have reviewed in Education Next.
Fischel's basic argument is that our educational institutions have largely evolved in response to consumer demands. That is, the consolidation of one-room schoolhouses into larger districts, the development of schools with separate grades, the September to June calendar, and the relatively common curriculum across the country all came into being because families wanted those measures. And in a highly mobile society, even more than a century ago, people often preferred to move to areas with schools that had these desired features. In the competitive market between communities, school districts had to cater to this consumer demand. All of this resulted in a remarkable amount of standardization and uniformity across the country on basic features of K-12 education.
Hearing Fischel's argument made me think about how ill-conceived the nationalization effort led by Gates, Fordham, the AFT, and the US Department of Education really is. Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized. No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.
'Multiculturalism' entails society offering a full range of prospects, membership, and respect to all its members - regardless of cultural and religious differences -while also creatively accommodating them in a fashion that is both morally persuasive and practically effective for the majority of society. Has Europe ever tried it?
You always know something is up when the leaders of Germany, France and Britain are in happy agreement. Their most recent cheery confabulation is that multiculturalism in Europe has been a failure. In quick succession first Merkel, then Cameron, then Sarkozy seized the limelight and declared diversity's demise. They stated this as a truism rather than as an argument. Equally striking is that these political leaders seem more relieved than troubled: as if, for a while, western Europe had lost its bearings but now is regaining them. Diversity is out, they seem to say, and common sense back in.
But of course, given the diversity of our societies, it is diversity that is common sense.
That's not to suggest Madison schools are flush with money. Gov. Walker, after all, is trying to balance a giant state budget deficit without raising taxes or pushing the problem further down the road. Walker has proposed cuts to most state programs, including aid to public schools.
Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: "Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn't perform better in state tests", "Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools", "Choice schools not outperforming MPS"; Spend 50% Less Per Student
Latest tests show voucher scores about same or worse in math and reading.
Students in Milwaukee's school choice program performed worse than or about the same as students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on the latest statewide test, according to results released Tuesday that provided the first apples-to-apples achievement comparison between public and individual voucher schools.
The scores released by the state Department of Public Instruction cast a shadow on the overall quality of the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which was intended to improve results for poor city children in failing public schools by allowing them to attend higher-performing private schools with publicly funded vouchers. The scores also raise concerns about Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to roll back the mandate that voucher schools participate in the current state test.
Voucher-school advocates counter that legislation that required administration of the state test should have been applied only once the new version of the test that's in the works was rolled out. They also say that the latest test scores are an incomplete measure of voucher-school performance because they don't show the progress those schools are making with a difficult population of students over time.
Statewide, results from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam show that scores didn't vary much from last year. The percentage of students who scored proficient or better was higher in reading, science and social studies but lower in mathematics and language arts from the year before.
Great. Now Milwaukee has TWO failing taxpayer-financed school systems when it comes to educating low income kids (and that's 89 per cent of the total population of Milwaukee Public Schools).
Statewide test results released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction include for the first time performance data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which involves about 110 schools serving around 10,000 students. There's a total population of around 80,000 students in Milwaukee's school district.
The numbers for the voucher schools don't look good. But the numbers for the conventional public schools in Milwaukee are very poor, as well.
In a bit of good news, around the rest of the state student test scores in every demographic group have improved over the last six years, and the achievment gap is narrowing.
The test results show the percentage of students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program who scored proficient or advanced was 34.4 percent for math and 55.2 percent for reading.
Among Milwaukee Public Schools students, it was 47.8 percent in math and 59 percent in reading. Among Milwaukee Public Schools students coming from families making 185 percent of the federal poverty level -- a slightly better comparison because voucher students come from families making no more than 175 percent -- it was 43.9 percent in math and 55.3 percent in reading.
Statewide, the figures were 77.2 percent in math and 83 percent in reading. Among all low-income students in the state, it was 63.2 percent in math and 71.7 percent in reading.
Democrats said the results are evidence that the voucher program is not working. Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, the top Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said voucher students, parents and taxpayers are being "bamboozled."
"The fact that we've spent well over $1 billion on a failed experiment leads me to believe we have no business spending $22 million to expand it with these kinds of results," Pope-Roberts said. "It's irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars and a disservice to Milwaukee students."
Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who is developing a proposal to expand the voucher program to other cities, took a more optimistic view of the results.
"Obviously opponents see the glass half-empty," Vos said. "I see the glass half-full. Children in the school choice program do the same as the children in public school but at half the cost."
Statewide the gap between the percentage of white and black students scoring proficient or advanced closed 6.8 percentage points in math and 3.9 points in reading between 2005-06 and this year. Comparing white students to Hispanics, the gap closed 5.7 points in math and 3.7 points in reading.
In Madison the gap between white and black students closed 0.4 percentage points in math and 0.6 points in reading. Among Hispanics, the gap increased half a point in math and decreased 1 point in reading.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad was unavailable to comment Monday on the results.
A thread was requested about ALOs (Advanced Learning Opportunities, the third tier of the Advanced Learning program) and differentiated teaching. Differentiated teaching is a teacher knowing his/her students' strengths, challenges and readiness and being able to adjust teaching to the different levels in the classroom. (This doesn't necessarily mean teaching to every single student's level but rather knowing that there are different abilities in the classroom and trying to meet those needs.)
In Houston, school district officials introduced a test score-based evaluation system to determine teacher bonuses, then -- in the face of massive protests -- jettisoned the formula after one year to devise a better one.
In New York, teachers union officials are fighting the public release of ratings for more than 12,000 teachers, arguing that the estimates can be drastically wrong.
Despite such controversies, Los Angeles school district leaders are poised to plunge ahead with their own confidential "value-added" ratings this spring, saying the approach is far more objective and accurate than any other evaluation tool available.
"We are not questing for perfect," said L.A. Unified's incoming Supt. John Deasy. "We are questing for much better."
School choice opponent Barbara Miner says that Wisconsin legislators should "just say no" to Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to expand educational options for Milwaukee parents (Crossroads, March 13).
My advice to legislators?
Just say yes.
Those who do will have Milwaukee residents, especially Milwaukee parents, on their side.
In a recent poll, Milwaukeeans rate the 20-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program successful by a two-to-one margin (60%-28%). The results cut across racial and economic lines and extend even to households without school-age children.
Parents are especially enthusiastic. Two-thirds say the program is successful, and 64% endorse expansion.
There is good reason for their support. Students in Milwaukee's school choice program graduate from high school at rates 18% higher than Milwaukee Public Schools students, according to estimates by University of Minnesota professor John Robert Warren.
Memo to all Wisconsin legislators. There is an easy way to prove you care about public education in Wisconsin. And it won't cost a penny.
Just say no to Gov. Scott Walker's proposed expansion of the Milwaukee voucher program providing tax dollars to private schools.
This may seem merely like a Milwaukee issue. It's not. Voucher advocates have made clear for more than 20 years that their goal is to replace public education with a system of universal vouchers that includes private and religious schools.
The heartbreaking drama currently playing in Milwaukee - millions of dollars cut from the public schools while vouchers are expanded so wealthy families can attend private schools in the suburbs - may be coming soon to a school district near you.
For those who worry about taxation without representation, vouchers should send shivers down your spine. Voucher schools are defined as private even though subsidized by taxpayers.
IMPORTANT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Madison Board of Education to Vote on Madison Prep Planning Grant!
Kaleem Caire, via email:
March 28, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
In 30 minutes, our team and the public supporting us will stand before the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education to learn if they will support our efforts to secure a charter planning grant from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men.
For those who still do not believe that Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men is a cause worthy of investment, let's look at some reasons why it is. The following data was provided by the Madison Metropolitan School District to the Urban League of Greater Madison in September 2010.
Lowest Graduation Rates:
In 2009, just 52% of Black males and 52% of Latino males graduated on-time from the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) compared to 81% of Asian males and 88% of White males.
Lowest Reading Proficiency:
In 2010, just 45% of Black, 49% of Hispanic, and 59% of Asian males in 10th grade in the MMSD were proficient in reading compared to 87% of White males.
Largest ACT Performance Gap:
Just 7% of Black and 18% of Latino seniors in the MMSD who completed the ACT college entrance exam were "college ready" according to the test maker. Put another way, a staggering 93% of Black and 82% of Latino seniors were identified as "not ready" for college. Wisconsin persistently has the largest gap in ACT performance between Black and White students in the nation every year.
Children Grossly Underprepared for College:
Of the 76 Black seniors enrolled in MMSD in 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam required by Wisconsin public universities for admission consideration, just 5 students (7%) were truly ready for college. Of the 71 Latino students who completed the ACT, just 13 students (18%) were ready for college compared to 403 White seniors who were ready.
Looking at it another way, in 2010, there were 378 Black 12th graders enrolled in MMSD high schools. Just 20% of Black seniors and completed the ACT and only 5 were determined to be college ready as state above. So overall, assuming completion of the ACT is a sign of students' intention and readiness to attend college, only 1.3% of Black 12th graders were ready for college compared to 36% of White 12th graders.
Not Enrolled or Succeeding in College Preparatory Courses:
High percentages of Black high school students are completing algebra in the 9th grade but only half are succeeding with a grade of C or better. In 2009-10, 82% of Black 9th graders attending MMSD's four comprehensive high schools took algebra; 42% of those taking the class received a C or better compared to 55% of Latino and 74% of White students.
Just 7% of Black and 17% of Latino 10th graders attending MMSD's four comprehensive high schools who completed geometry in 10th grade earned a grade of C or better compared to 35% of Asian and 56% of White students.
Just 13% of Black and 20% of Latino 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed at least two or more Advanced Literature courses with a grade of C or better compared to 40% of White and 43% of Asian students.
Just 18% of Black and 26% of Latino 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed at least two or more Advanced Writing courses with a grade of C or better compared to 45% of White and 59% of Asian students.
Just 20% of Black 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed 2 or more credits of a Single Foreign Language with a grade of C or better compared to 34% of Latino, 69% of White and 59% of Asian students.
Just 33% of Black students took Honors, Advanced and/or AP courses in 2009-10 compared to and 46% of Latino, 72% of White and 70% of Asian students.
Just 25% of Black students who took Honors, Advanced and/or AP courses earned a C or better grade in 2009-10 compared to 38% of Latino, 68% of White and 64% of Asian students.
Extraordinarily High Special Education Placements:
Black students are grossly over-represented in special education in the MMSD. In 2009-10, Black students made up just 24% of the school system student enrollment but were referred to special education at twice that rate.
Among young men attending MMSD's 11 middle schools in 2009-10, 39% of Black males were assigned to special education compared to 18% of Hispanic, 12% of Asian and 17% of White males. MMSD has been cited by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for disparities in assigning African American males to special education. The full chart is attached.
Of all students being treated for Autism in MMSD, 14% are Black and 70% are White. Of all Black students labeled autistic, 77% are males.
Of all students labeled cognitively disabled, 46% are Black and 35% are White. Of all Black students labeled CD, 53% are males.
Of all students labeled emotionally disabled, 55% are Black and 35% are White. Of the Black students labeled ED, 70% are males.
Of all students labeled learning disabled, 49% are Black and 35% are White. Of the Black students labeled LD, 57% are males.
Black students are Disproportionately Subjected to School Discipline:
Black students make up a disproportionate percentage of students who are suspended from school. Only Black students are over represented among suspension cases.
In 2009-10, MMSD levied 2,754 suspensions against Black students: 920 to Black girls and 1,834 to Black boys. While Black students made up 24% of the total student enrollment (n=5,370), they accounted for 72% of suspensions district-wide.
Suspension rates among Black children in MMSD have barely changed in nearly 20 years. In 1992-93, MMSD levied 1,959 suspensions against a total of 3,325 Black students. This equaled 58.9% of the total black enrollment in the district compared to 1,877 suspensions against a total of 18,346 (or 10.2%) white students [Dual Education in the Madison Metropolitan School District, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, February 1994, Vol. 7, No. 2].
Black males were missed a total of 2,709 days of school during the 2009-10 school year due to suspension.
Additionally, 20 Black students were expelled from the MMSD in 2009-10 compared to 8 White students in the same year.The Urban League of Greater Madison his offering MMSD a viable solution to better prepare young men of color for college and beyond. We look forward to making this solution a reality in the next 18 months.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Website: www.ulgm.org
The Washington State Court of Appeals has reversed an earlier decision in King County Superior Court that found Seattle's choice of a new high-school math series was arbitrary and capricious.
The appellate court found no basis for the Superior Court's conclusion in February 2010 that the Seattle School board "was willful and unreasoning in coming to its decision" when it chose the Discovering Math series of textbooks for algebra and geometry in high school math.
The school district has been using the series since the start of the 2009 school year.
Some parents have criticized the Discovering Math series, saying it is inferior to other series and that its emphasis on verbal descriptions makes it difficult for some students to understand, especially those for whom English is a second language.
When it comes to changing public education in Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett's proposed billion-dollar funding cut to school districts this year could be just the beginning.
The governor also is pushing a legislative agenda that could significantly affect the way children are taught, the teachers who instruct them, and how schools craft their budgets.
One proposal that many suburban school boards fear and many taxpayers relish calls for voter approval of proposed district budgets when tax increases exceed inflation. If this were in effect now, more than 80 percent of the districts in Philadelphia's suburbs probably would have to vote.
Other Corbett initiatives would:
Give school boards, for the first time, a free hand to lay off teachers to cut costs, with the decider in the furloughs being classroom performance, not seniority.
Create vouchers providing state funding so low-income children in struggling schools could transfer to private ones. The role of charter schools would also be expanded.
I remember once, in the early 1980s, when I was teaching at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I visited a class in European History taught by my most senior colleague, a man with a rich background in history and many years of teaching.
He presented a lot of historical material in that class period, interlaced with interesting historical stories and anecdotes which the students seemed to enjoy. While I envied him for his knowledge and experience, I began to notice that the students were, for the most part at least, laid back and simply being entertained.
They were not being asked to answer challenging questions on the material, or demonstrate the knowledge they had gathered from their homework or outside reading in history, or, in fact, do anything except sit there and be entertained.
This was before the IPod, IPhone, IPad or laptops appeared in classrooms, so no one was texting anyone, but I did see that a few students were not even being bothered enough to be entertained. Here was this fine, educated instructor offering them European history and they were just not paying attention.
I understand that high school classes are only partly voluntary, that if students want a high school diploma they have to take some courses, and history is generally less demanding than calculus, chemistry or physics.
Nevertheless it stayed with me that there was so little "audience participation" from these Juniors and Seniors. I couldn't see that any of them felt much obligation, or opportunity really, to do the work or take part in the class.
Perhaps the teacher was trying to entertain them because a junior colleague was visiting the class, but I don't think that was it. I think that good teacher, like so many of us, and so many of his colleagues to this day, had bought the idea that it was his job to entertain them, rather than to demand that they work hard to learn history for themselves.
He told good stories, but the students said nothing. They, too, had adopted the notion that a "good" teacher would keep them entertained with the absolute minimum of effort on their part, as though it was the teacher's responsibility to "make learning happen," as it were, to them.
The memory of this classroom visit comes back to me as I see so many people in and out of education these days, talk about selecting, monitoring, controlling, and, if necessary removing, teachers who are not sufficiently entertaining, who do not "make students learn" whether they want to or are wiling to work on it themselves or not.
As a high school student in Pennsylvania recently commented, "It's a teacher's job to motivate students." Of course, football and basketball coaches are expected to motivate their athletes as well, but not while those athletes do nothing but sit in the stands and watch the coach do "his thing." They are expected to take part, to work hard, to get themselves into condition and to carry their load in the enterprise of sports.
A sports clothing store near me sells sweatshirts which say; "Work all Summer, Win all Fall." I confirmed with the store owner, a part-time high school football coach, that "Work" in this case does not mean get a summer job and save some money. Rather, it means run, lift weights and generally put time in on their physical fitness so that they will be in shape to play sports in the Fall.
I do not know of any equivalent sweatshirt for high school academics: "Study all Summer, Get Good Grades all Fall." I don't think there is one, and I think the reason is, in part, that so many of us, including too many teachers, have decided that teachers are the ones who need to work on, and take responsibility for, student academic learning. Their job goes way beyond the coaches' task of motivating young athletes who "Work all Summer" and come expecting to give it their all in the Fall.
Those who keep saying that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality simply conspire with all those others, including too many students, who support the idea that academic work and student learning are the teachers' problem, and not one in which the students have a major share. Of course teachers who are forced out of teaching because their students don't do any academic work suffer, but we should also be concerned with the consequences for so many of our students who have been led down the primrose path of believing that school is not their primary job at which they also must work hard.
-------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The district has focused reading instruction and has launched an intensive effort aimed at boosting dismal outcomes. The MPS chief academic officer asks: Will we be given enough time?
Walk in many Milwaukee Public Schools classrooms today, and here's what you're likely to see:
There will be a teacher sitting at a table in a corner, guiding a handful of young readers or writers in targeted instruction. The other students, whether they be 4-year-olds or teenagers, will be actively engaged in small group work.
What you're not likely to see: a teacher holding court at the center of the room of mostly silent children, heads down on tables or blank stares on their faces.
As the district's new literacy effort takes hold, our students increasingly work in small groups at hands-on literacy stations set up around the room. Students, who otherwise would have had to wait for their teacher to pause and for their turn to speak, are instead guiding their own practice and that of their peers.
Milwaukee's private school voucher program has broken new and controversial ground often in its 21-year history. Now, it is headed toward what might well be another amazing national first.
If Gov. Scott Walker and leading voucher advocates prevail, Milwaukee will become the first city in American history where any child, regardless of income, can go to a private school, including a religious school, using public money to pay the bill.
Universal vouchers have been a concept favored by many free-market economists and libertarians since they were suggested by famed economist Milton Friedman more than half a century ago. Friedman's theory was that if all parents could apply their fair share of public money for educating their children at whatever school they thought best, their choices would drive educational quality higher.
Coming soon (fairly likely): Milwaukee as the biggest testing ground of Friedman's idea.
But not only is it hard to figure out what to say about the future of vouchers, it's not easy to know what to say about the past of Milwaukee's 21-year-old program of vouchers limited to low-income students except that it has been popular (more than 20,000 students using vouchers this year to attend more than 100 private schools) and there is not much of a case (except in some specific schools) that it has driven quality higher, both when it comes to many of the private schools specifically and when it comes to the educational waterfront of Milwaukee.
School administrators should end their obsession with average test scores and focus instead on an absolute standard: Can each child actually read?
For more than two decades now, the Seattle school district has been telling us that its most important goal is "closing the achievement gap." Nevertheless, it is not unfair to say that only incremental progress has been made.
Seattle, as everyone knows, is not alone. "Closing the achievement gap" has come to stand for the perennial problems of American K-12 education -- though the inability of high schools to graduate more than two-thirds of their students has been running a close second.
Among the results of this frustratingly persistent problem is a vast, energetic industry of school reform, headlined in recent years by the involvement of powerful private foundations and the policy directives of the federal government: "No Child Left Behind" in the "Race to the Top."
PLEASE JOIN US MONDAY! Madison Board of Education to Vote on Madison Prep; costs clarified
March 25, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
On Monday evening, March 28, 2011 at 6pm, the Madison Metropolitan School District's (MMSD) Board of Education will meet to vote on whether or not to support the Urban League's submission of a $225,000 charter school planning grant to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. This grant is essential to the development of Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men, an all-male 6th - 12th grade public charter school.
Given the promise of our proposal, the magnitude of longstanding achievement gaps in MMSD, and the need for adequate time to prepare our final proposal for Madison Prep, we have requested full support from the school board.
Monday's Board meeting will take place at the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton Street) next to the Kohl Center. We hope you will come out to support Madison Prep as this will be a critical vote to keep the Madison Prep proposal moving forward. Please let us know if you'll be attending by clicking here. If you wish to speak, please arrive at 5:45pm to register.
Prior to you attending, we want to clarify misconceptions about the costs of Madison Prep.
The REAL Costs versus the Perceived Costs of Madison Prep
Recent headlines in the Wisconsin State Journal (WSJ) reported that Madison Prep is "less likely" to be approved because of the size of the school's projected budget. The article implied that Madison Prep will somehow cost the district more than it currently spends to educate children. This, in fact, is not accurate. We are requesting $14,476 per student for Madison Prep's first year of operation, 2012-2013, which is less than the $14,802 per pupil that MMSD informed us it spends now. During its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep's requested payment from MMSD drops to $13,395, which is $1,500 less per student than what the district says it spends now. Madison Prep will likely be even more of a savings to the school district by the fifth year of operation given that the district's spending increases every year.
A March 14, 2011 memo prepared by MMSD Superintendent Daniel Nerad and submitted to the Board reflects the Urban League's funding requests noted above. This memo also shows that the administration would transfer just $5,541 per student - $664,925 in total for all 120 students - to Madison Prep in 2012-2013, despite the fact that the district is currently spending $14,802 per pupil. Even though it will not be educating the 120 young men Madison Prep will serve, MMSD is proposing that it needs to keep $8,935 per Madison Prep student.
Therefore, the Urban League stands by its request for equitable and fair funding of $14,476 per student, which is less than the $14,802 MMSD's administration have told us they spend on each student now. As Madison Prep achieves economies of scale, reaches its full enrollment of 420 sixth through twelfth graders, and graduates its first class of seniors in 2017-18, it will cost MMSD much less than what it spends now. A cost comparison between Madison Prep, which will enroll both middle and high school students at full enrollment, and MMSD's Toki Middle School illustrates this point.
We have also attached four one-page documents that we prepared for the Board of Education. These documents summarize key points on several issues about which they have expressed questions.
We look forward to seeing you!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Website: www.ulgm.org
In order to maintain Madison Prep, the school district would have to find these amounts somewhere in our budget or else raise property taxes to cover the expenditures. I am not willing to take money away from our other schools in order to fund Madison Prep. I have been willing to consider raising property taxes to come up with the requested amounts, if that seemed to be the will of the community. However, the draconian spending limits the governor seeks to impose on school districts through the budget bill may render that approach impossible. Even if we wanted to, we likely would be barred from increasing property taxes in order to raise an amount equal to the net cost to the school district of the Madison Prep proposal.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time that budgetary considerations prevent us from investing in promising approaches to increasing student achievement. For example, one component of the Madison Prep proposal is a longer school year. I'm in favor. One way the school district has pursued this concept has been by looking at our summer school model and considering improvements. A good, promising plan has been developed. Sadly, we likely will not be in a position to implement its recommendations because they cost money we don't have and can't raise under the Governor's budget proposal.
Similarly, Madison Prep proposes matching students with mentors from the community who will help the students dream bigger dreams. Effective use of mentors is also a key component of the AVID program, which is now in all our high schools. We would very much like to expand the program to our middle schools, but again we do not have the funds to do so.
Mr. Hughes largely references redistributed state tax dollars for charter/virtual schools - a portion of total District per student spending - the total (including property taxes) that Madison Prep's request mentions. I find Madison Prep's fully loaded school based cost comparisons useful. Ideally, all public schools would publish their individual budgets along with total District spending.
here are some problems that are too hard to solve in traditional ways. Teacher effectiveness and school choice fit the bill--they are complicated and contentious. The good news is that digital learning allows us to solve these problems in new ways.
It's pretty easy to solve the teacher problem if we focus on providing a 'great teacher for every course' rather than a great teacher in every classroom.'
If educational funding follows the student to the best course available (online or onsite) it provides a much more powerful and accountable model than partial funding for a private school down the street.
Digital Learning Now recommends that all students should be able to "customize their education using digital content through an approved provider." More specifically, DLN recommends that states:
Ambitious reforms across the country are reshaping teacher evaluation and performance management. Designing new systems for measuring teacher effectiveness and using that information to increase student achievement are at the heart of these efforts and at the center of important policy debates. Yet little information exists about how these systems work in practice and how to use evaluations in concert with other levers to improve teaching and learning.
As policymakers and education leaders seek to accelerate reform in this area, it is essential to learn from efforts already underway. The Education & Society Program published three new reports: profiles of the performance management work in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and the Achievement First (AF) charter school network; and a synthesis of issues that emerge from the two profiles. Both DCPS and AF are at the forefront of efforts to re-design teacher evaluation, performance management, and compensation policies. The commonalities, distinctions, and early lessons learned in these initiatives represent an important learning laboratory for the field.
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System was wildly hailed as author and education critic Diane Ravitch's dramatic about-face on No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and school choice. What's missing from this sensational take is that Ravitch has changed her mind only about school reform tactics, and not about what constitutes good schools, or about her top priorities in fostering them.
She still stresses curriculum--apparently still her topmost priority. She still supports a challenging, content-rich core curriculum of the sort promoted by E.D. Hirsch and his Core Knowledge Foundation. She still believes that the best teachers are those with who know their fields well and are enthusiastic about teaching. She still believes that attracting such teachers is nearly as essential, if not as essential, as curriculum reform.
It's in the question of why we've strayed so far from these ideals that Ravitch has shifted. While her earlier research (c.f. Left Back, published in 2000) critiqued, inter alia, a variety of prominent fad-peddling members of the education establishment, Ravitch now appears to blame just three factors: the high-stakes testing and accountability of No Child Left Behind (NCLB); the meddling in education by powerful outsiders like politicians and businessmen; and school choice ventures that skim off the best students and leave the rest to the most struggling of public schools.
On NCLB testing and accountability, Ravitch is convincing. Tests can be effective, comprehensive measures of achievement, in which case teaching "to" them is equivalent to teaching students what they should learn anyway. But, as Ravitch explains, NCLB's top-down, high-stakes, punitive approach deters states from devising tests that come anywhere near this ideal.
A Republican Assembly leader plans to add to the state budget bill an expansion of Milwaukee's voucher program to other school districts, potentially giving more families in cities such as Madison access to private and religious schools.
Voucher advocates say the time is ripe to expand the program to other cities, especially with Republicans in control of state government and a recent study suggesting students in the 20-year-old Milwaukee program are testing as well or better than their public school counterparts, with a lower cost per pupil.
They also argue that vouchers would level the playing field for private schools, which have seen enrollment decline as public charter schools have gained popularity.
But voucher opponents say expansion would further cripple public schools, which already face an $834 million cut in state funding over the next two years.
And state test scores to be released Tuesday, which for the first time include 10,600 Milwaukee voucher students, could suggest they are testing no better than poor students in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
"Given the proposed unprecedented cuts to public education as well as results from our statewide assessments, I question plans in the 2011-13 state budget for expanding the choice program in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin," State Superintendent Tony Evers said.
The District is preparing a "Strategic Plan Refresh". They will review the Strategic Plan and decide which projects to continue, alter, defer, or remove. The refresh will have to include goals, timelines, status, and budgets for each of the projects.
I spoke with Mark Teoh last night and asked if he could include two items in the Refresh program:
1) A record of the various projects in the Strategic Plan, including those that were originally in it, those that were added, those that were completed, and those that were simply dropped without notice. Remember how there was supposed to be an APP Review in the plan? Remember how there was going to be an alternative education review? These projects just silently faded away. At the same time, Capacity Management and World Language curricular alignment, which were not part of the original plan, have been added.
2) A review of the community engagement protocols and some table that shows which of the projects are meeting the requirements of the protocol (it's easy - none of them).
Isabel Fernandes, a cheery 22-year-old with a constellation of stars tattooed around her right eye, isn't sure how many times she repeated fifth grade. Two, she says with a laugh. Or maybe three. She redid seventh grade as well. She quit school with an eighth-grade education at age 20.
Ms. Fernandes lives in a poor suburb near the airport. She doesn't work. Employers, she says, "are asking for higher education." Even cleaning jobs are hard to find.
Portugal is the poorest country in Western Europe. It is also the least educated, and that has emerged as a painful liability in its gathering economic crisis.
Wednesday night, the economic crisis became a political crisis. Portugal's parliament rejected Prime Minister José Sócrates's plan for spending cuts and tax increases. Mr. Sócrates handed in his resignation. He will hang on as a caretaker until a new government is formed.
Fifty teachers from Redondo Union High School stormed the Board of Education Tuesday night to protest the implementation of the International Baccalaureate program.
The group included a majority of the school's department heads and some of the longest-tenured and most respected teachers at RUHS. Their concerns ranged from the cost of the program to what they argued was a lack of teacher input and a greater need to address the needs of less high-achieving students.
Linda Dillard, the chair of the school's science department, told the school board that teachers have not been allowed to engage in a "data-driven, fact-finding process" to help determine if the program is a good fit for RUHS.
Re "Separate and Unequal," by Bob Herbert (column, March 22):
In spite of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, sadly the struggle goes on. The Department of Education reported in 2008 that 70 percent of white schoolchildren attend schools where at least 75 percent of the students are white, whereas more than half of all black children in industrial states attend schools where over 90 percent are members of minority groups. Go into any urban school and it is clear that 57 years after Brown, the schools have largely remained segregated.
Years of social science research have cited the benefits of integrated schools. In our work with the West Metro Education desegregation initiative in Minneapolis public schools, the students in grades 3 to 7 who got on the bus to attend suburban schools made three times the progress in both reading and math when compared with similar students who did not participate.
Teacher quality remains a consistent important factor. Ultimately, though, students in diverse classrooms benefit from collaboration and teamwork with those whose family circumstances are different from theirs. Eric J. Cooper
President, National Urban Alliance for Effective Education
Stamford, Conn., March 22, 2011
I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.
Let me start with something that ZDNet's digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet's upcoming 20th anniversary:
I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.
Let me start with something that ZDNet's digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet's upcoming 20th anniversary:
Lately you can't turn around in education without bumping into someone talking about innovation. The President is asking Congress for more federal support for educational innovation in this year's budget, more and more school districts are naming "innovation officers," and just last week a group of Silicon Valley start-up veterans launched a new incubator for innovative education companies. But while innovation is a catchy buzzword, on the ground conditions are often anything but innovative. This week, the resignation of a school administrator in New York City who most readers have probably never heard of vividly illustrates that disconnect.
Joel Rose, 40, got his start teaching in Houston with Teach For America. After law school and a stint at Edison Schools, he landed at the New York City Department of Education leading a personnel strategy for that massive 1.1. million student system. Rose was struck, as many observers are, by how little technology had changed education relative to most other fields during the past few decades. So he started a program within the New York City Public Schools called "School of One" that uses technology to offer a completely customized schooling experience for each student.
By now, the political lore is familiar: A major political party, cast aside by Wisconsin voters due to a lengthy recession, comes roaring back, winning a number of major state offices.
The 43-year-old new governor, carrying out a mandate he believes the voters have granted him, boldly begins restructuring the state's tax system. His reform package contains a major change in the way state and local governments bargain with their employees, leading to charges that the governor is paying back his campaign contributors.
Only the year wasn't 2011 -- it was 1959, and Gov. Gaylord Nelson had just resurrected the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Certain of his path, Nelson embarked on an ambitious agenda that included introduction of a withholding tax, which brought hundreds of protesters to the Capitol. Nelson also signed the nation's first public-sector collective bargaining law -- the same law that 52 years later Gov. Scott Walker targeted for fundamental revision.
Two different governors, two different parties, and two different positions.
Ironically, their assertive gubernatorial actions may produce the same disruptive outcome. By empowering the unions, Nelson's legislation led to public-sector strikes and work stoppages. By disempowering the unions, Walker's actions might lead to public-sector strikes and work stoppages.
In Walker's case, union members reluctantly agreed to his pension and health-care demands, but have fought desperately to preserve their leverage in negotiating contracts. That raises the basic question of the Madison showdown: Why is Scott Walker so afraid of collective bargaining?
The answer can be found in the rise of the state's teachers unions.
Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands."
Supporters of school vouchers like to say that their goal is to provide a higher-quality education for the children who need it most. The latest events in Colorado say otherwise. A voucher program there seems more likely to benefit middle-class children and religious schools than low-income public school students, and to worsen inequities in education.
Last week, the board of the Douglas County School District voted for a pilot program that will give the parents of 500 of its 60,000-students about $4,500 each -- 75% of what the district receives in per-pupil funding -- to use toward tuition at participating private schools of their choice. Many of the private schools in the area are religiously based.
Even in Colorado, where a dollar stretches a lot further than in Southern California, $4,500 falls significantly short of private school tuition. Most schools there range from about $7,000 up to $14,000. Clearly, the parents poised to benefit most from this taxpayer-sponsored perk are those with a few thousand to spare to fill in the price gap. There might be scholarships for some of the needier students -- about 10% of the Douglas County students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches -- but no one is promising anything.
Despite an abiding preference for the traditional book, I started using an e-reader about seven months ago -- and have found it insinuating itself into daily life, just as a key chain or wallet might. For there is a resemblance. A key chain or wallet (or purse) is, in a sense, simply a tool that is necessary, or at least useful, for certain purposes. But after a while, each becomes more than that to its owner. To be without them is more than an inconvenience. They are extensions of the owner's identity, or rather part of its infrastructure.
Something like that has happened with the e-reader. I have adapted to it, and vice versa. Going out into the world, I bring it along, in case there are delays on the subway system (there usually are) or my medical appointment runs behind schedule (likewise). While at home, it stays within reach in case our elderly cat falls asleep in my lap. (She does so as often as possible and has grown adept at manipulating my guilt at waking her.) Right now there are about 450 items on the device. They range from articles of a few thousand words to multivolume works that, in print, run to a few hundred pages each. For a while, my acquisition of them tended to be impulsive, or at least unplanned. Whether or not the collection reflected its owner's personality, it certain documented his whims.
Testimony at the Capitol over a controversial bill that would strip control over charter schools from locally elected officials and place it in the hands of a politically appointed state-wide authorizing board drew hundreds on Wednesday to a standing-room-only Senate education committee hearing.
Senate Bill 22, authored by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) would also fund independent charter schools ahead of traditional public schools. I wrote about the bill on Tuesday and it's generated a robust conversation.
Madison Superintendent Daniel Nerad testified in opposition to the bill, and so did local school board member Marjorie Passman. Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and a strong proponent of the proposed boys-only Madison Preparatory Academy for minority students, testified in support of the bill. Madison Prep, if approved, will be a publicly funded charter school in Madison.
Charter schools may be multiplying fast across the country, but they're stalled in affluent, high-performing suburban school systems. Of the 5,300 charter schools in the U.S., only one-fifth are in suburbs.
Suburban parents are frustrated by what they see as arbitrary policies to keep charter schools from spreading and are fighting back.
That's the case with some parents in Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington, D.C., where Ashley Del Sole lives. Her oldest daughter is about to start school, but she can't go to her neighborhood school because it's overcrowded.
"My daughter is actually slated to go to a middle school next year for kindergarten because of the overcapacity problem," Del Sole says.
With millions being cut from Kansas schools by legislative action or local boards reacting to reduced funding, it is easy to fall into a trap of believing that with less money our schools can't possibly do as good of a job educating our kids. Probably, but not necessarily.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire who is devoting much of his fortune to improving education and who co-chairs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote a provocative column this month in the Washington Post. Highlights from Gates' conclusions are spotlighted in this week's column to remind us that spending more money does not ensure better-educated kids and that some radical changes in how the dollars we now pour into education might significantly improve outcomes.
"Not only has the $10,000 annual bonus failed to move effective teachers to high-poverty schools, it has also failed to make those teachers any more likely to stay in high-poverty schools than other teachers," said the report's author, Jim Simpkins.
Washington State provides $5,000 bonuses to those teachers who undergo and pass the rigorous national board certification process, a credentialing program that marks its graduates as among the best teachers. The evidence, however, on whether national board certified teachers (NBCTs) are actually more effective teachers is mixed.
In 2007, state legislators added a second $5,000 bonus for NBCTs who teach in a high-poverty school, defined as one where a large portion of students are on free or reduced-price lunches. According to the Center's report, " . . . less than 1% of Washington's NBCTs move from low-poverty to high-poverty schools each year."
Albert Shanker was one of a kind (sui generis). No one has replaced him or the intelligent analysis of American education in his weekly columns in The New York Times. Known as a powerful advocate of union solidarity and the protection of teachers, he was also the source of the idea for charter schools, and, perhaps most astonishingly, he often spoke of the "nomenclatura of American education."
He used that term, borrowed from the name for the Soviet bureaucrats and their special privileges and interlocking tentacles, to label the complex interconnections of the many layers of special interest agencies in our education system: organizations of superintendents, school boards, curriculum specialists, counselors, professional development experts, literacy experts of all kinds, and so forth.
I believe he was pointing out that this system of special interest groups had achieved a paralysis of our educational efforts similar to the paralysis that the Soviet nomenclatura brought to the economy and society of the USSR, leading to its spectacular collapse in 1989.
He suggested that any good idea for reform to help our students learn more was likely to be immediately studied, re-interpreted, deconstructed, re-formulated and expounded until all of its value and any hope of its bringing higher standards to American education had been reduced to nothingness. The concern of the special educational nomenclatura for their own jobs, pensions, perks, prerogatives, and policies would manage to overwhelm, confuse and disintegrate any worthwhile initiative for greater academic achievement by students.
Mr. Shanker is gone, and the loss is ours, but the nomenclatura he spoke of is alive and well. With all the best intentions, for example, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association, cheered on by the Department of Education, major foundations, and others, have taken on the idea of Common Standards for American students.
Unfortunately, they have largely left out curriculum--any clear requirements for our high school students to, for instance, read a history book or write a serious research paper. For a long time, those in the nomenclatura involved in assessment have been reluctant to ask students to demonstrate any knowledge on tests, for fear that they would not have any knowledge to demonstrate. So essay tests, for example, do not ask students to write about literature, history or science, but rather to give opinions off the top of their heads about school uniforms or whether it is more important to be a good student or to be popular, and the like.
For all the talk in the nomenclatura about college and career readiness, no one knows whether our high school students are now expected to read a single complete nonfiction book or write one 20-page research paper before they graduate, because no one asks about that.
One could have hoped that our Edupundits would try to fill the void left by the loss of Mr. Shanker, but sad to say, they have largely become lost in the tangles and tentacles of the nomenclatura themselves. They endlessly debate the intricate problems of class size, teacher selection, budgets, principal education, collective bargaining, school governance, and so on, until they are too exhausted, or perhaps just unable, to take an interest in what our students are being asked to read and write.
Although great efforts have gone into the new Common Core Standards, they contain no actual curriculum, partly because the nomenclatura doesn't want to engage in difficult political battles over what actual knowledge our students must have. So, even though almost all of the state bureaucracies have signed on the new Standards, the chance is good that they will collapse of their own weight because they contain no clear requirements for the actual academic work of students.
Our Edupundits are constantly hard at work. Some could be described, to paraphrase Alexander Pope, as "dull, heavy, busy, bold and blind," and they do meet, discuss, speak, and write a great deal about the details of educational administration and management--details which are very popular with those who seek to apply a business school mindset to the organization of our K-12 education.
However, so long as they continue to ignore the actual academic work of our students, our students will be quite free to do the same. Fortunately, some teachers will continue to require their own high school students to read serious books and write research papers, and to do the most difficult academic work of which they are capable, in literature, languages, math and science. But in their efforts they will have received at best no help (or at least no interference) from the nomenclatura, and the Edupundits who are lost in their wake.
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"Teach by Example"
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The Concord Review [1987]
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National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
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Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Anxious families awaiting April college admission news are living their own March Madness.
Their insanity is captured in Andrew Ferguson's new book, "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College" (Simon & Schuster). He describes the vanity of a desperate mother at a cocktail party who is dying to announce her daughter's perfect SAT scores:
"'We were really surprised at how well she did,' the mother would say, running a finger around the rim of her glass of pink Zinfandel.
Her eyes plead: Ask me what they were, just please please ask."
One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered. It has become a political no-no.
Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.
When I began teaching in New York City in 1975 I didn't initially see the need for a union or get involved in union activities. I knew, from history and the stories my parents and grandparents told, about the struggle for unions, but like so many today, I took the existence of a union and a contract for granted. My chapter leader gave me some advice and made sure I had all the necessary forms when I got appointed, but that was the sum of my union involvement until I moved to a position as an Education Evaluator on School Based Support Teams.
In that position, as a Special Education Teacher/Education Evaluator, I was much more exposed to the whims of management than I had been as a classroom teacher. Administrators didn't often walk into my SIE VIII classroom as most of them were afraid of the volatile students I taught. I worked with my co-teacher and we succeeded in making a difference for most of our students.
A pharmacist friend in Jasper, Alberta said that she was appalled at the seemingly light sentences given to abusers who kill children while someone murdering a police officer gets a life sentence.
Her take on this disparity was, "How do you know that if this child grew up he wouldn't become a policeman?"
An interesting and provocative take which I recalled when thinking of the value of education and our teachers who seem to be under attack these days as overpaid (whoever though a teacher could be accused of that?) and greedy.
Georgia charter school ruling to reverberate across nation
A state Supreme Court opinion that will decide who has the power to fund and open public charter schools is expected by March 31, ending a constitutional challenge that threatens to derail the education of thousands of students.
The two-year legal battle launched by seven local districts over power, money and the exclusive right to open neighborhood schools has threatened Georgia's reputation as a national leader in education reform.
The feud began in 2009 when the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, a state board, got into the business of approving and funding neighborhood schools such as Cherokee Charter Academy.
The school, which plans to open in the fall as Cherokee County's first charter campus, received more than 1,300 applications for about 700 spots. It was denied twice by the Cherokee Board of Education.
Don't let anyone tell you that things aren't changing. AFT Connecticut is supporting a reform package that would accelerate creation of better teacher evaluation standards. The Connecticut Education Association is opposing it.
The idea is to speed-up efforts already underway so that school districts have clear measures over what makes a good teacher. Instead of, say, how many years a teacher has been on the job -- which is the seniority standard that dominates in school districts.
The rival Connecticut Education Association will have none of this. John Yrkchik, in testimony prepared for delivery at tomorrow's public hearing by the education committee, says:
Bill Gates shook up the battle against AIDS in Africa by applying results-oriented business metrics to the effort. Now, he is trying to do the same in the tricky world of evaluating and compensating teachers.
The Microsoft Corp. co-founder has moved on from a $2 billion bet on high school reform--much of it spent on breaking up big, failing high schools and replacing them with smaller ones.
Now, he is venturing that improving teacher effectiveness is the key to fixing broken schools. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $290 million to school districts in Memphis, Tenn.; Hillsborough, Fla.; and Pittsburgh, and a charter consortium in California to build new personnel systems Mr. Gates hopes will be models for the country.
Compared with more than 70 economies worldwide, America's high school students continue to rank only average in reading and science, and below average in math. But this sorry record for a wealthy nation can be broken if the US focuses on recruiting and keeping first-rate teachers.
That's the conclusion of a new paper that looks at the latest achievement tests of 15-year-olds in the 34 developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as many other nations.
America has been trying to raise its academic standards for more than two decades, an effort that cannot be abandoned in tough times. But it can learn more from other countries about the difficult task of teacher training, selection, and compensation - even as cash-strapped states take on teacher unions.
The government-union wrangling would be less if both sides focused on quality investments in better teachers. The goal is not debatable. Studies show that matching quality teachers with disadvantaged students is an effective way to close the black-white achievement gap. Good teachers are more effective than small class sizes, for instance.
For starters, the United States needs to increase its pool of quality teachers. Almost half of its K-12 teachers come from the bottom third of college classes. Classroom leaders such as Singapore, South Korea, and Finland select from the top ranks. In Finland, only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted into teacher training.
Part of the hurdle in the US is compensation. Teaching offers job security but not great pay compared with other professions that top college graduates might choose. As states tussle over budgets, one solution might be to lower teacher benefits and end tenure while bulking up salaries.
And yet pay isn't the only consideration. Last year, 11 percent of graduates from US elite colleges applied to the federally funded Teach for America program. Participants teach in low-achieving rural and urban districts for two years.
In Finland, teachers earn only about what their American counterparts do (US teacher pay starts, on average, at $39,000). The difference is that in Finland, teaching is a high-status, well-respected job, right up there with doctoring and lawyering.
Another US hurdle is teacher training. Many states require a master's degree in education in order to be certified to teach. This automatically locks out a talented population such as second-career experts in a field who don't want to invest the time or money in a graduate degree that's often short on classroom skills and long on pedagogy.
President Obama's "Race to the Top" fund encourages states through competitive grants to open up alternative, effective routes to teacher certification. Hopefully, that fund will survive budget cutting (same for Teach for America).
Public schools won't be able to attract and keep high quality teachers if they don't reward and develop them once they get into the classroom.
That's next to impossible given the standard operating procedure of teacher unions. As the nation is witnessing, a rigid rule such as last-hired, first-fired lops off enthusiastic newcomers in favor of those with seniority. Experience is important in education, but it does not always add up to quality. Performance must be the determiner.
Unions need to accept that the main goal is high teacher performance and student outcomes, not job preservation. That's what the teacher union did in Ontario, Canada, according to the paper based on the OECD findings.
Teachers in Ontario are heavily organized. Yet, in 2003, the union and the premier of Ontario reached a grand bargain based on the need to elevate student achievement.
"The educators, through their union, agreed to accept responsibility for their own learning and the learning of their students; the government agreed to supply all of the necessary support," according to the report.
The paper, called "What the U.S. Can Learn from the World's Most Successful Education Reform Efforts," says that Ontario students subsequently shot up from the bottom to the top of test scores.
Investing in high quality teaching is necessary to boost US economic competitiveness. The study argues that the US also needs to elevate the teaching profession to one of high status and respect. But respect doesn't come overnight. Government and educators will have to earn it by working together to improve teacher quality.
Under a Republican-sponsored bill, nine political appointees would get to authorize public charter schools while local school districts foot the bill. The creation of this state-wide charter school authorizing board -- with members appointed by the governor and the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly -- is a key provision of legislation authored by Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills that will get a hearing on Wednesday at 10 a.m. at the Capitol before the Senate Education Committee.
Senate Bill 22 not only de-emphasizes local control, but also creates changes in how teachers are certified and removes caps from the numbers of students who may enroll in virtual schools. A companion bill is also pending in the state Assembly.
Opponents say the proposed changes would not only eliminate local control in favor of a new, politically motivated bureaucracy but would also siphon general aid away from all of Wisconsin's 424 public school districts in favor of charters. But backers say it will remove current barriers that prevent charter schools from realizing their full potential.
"This bill would get rid of the charter school lite culture we currently have in Wisconsin and allow these schools' full potential for autonomy, flexibility and innovation to be fully realized," says John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Association for Charter Schools.
Research continues to confirm what intuition has told many of us for years: Teacher quality has a bigger impact on student learning than any other factor in a school. Nationwide, this finding has increasingly motivated policymakers and the public to focus reforms on dramatically improving teacher quality. National, state, and local leaders have initiated reforms designed to better prepare teachers for the classroom, more accurately identify and reward top teachers, support teachers' development, and equip education leaders to identify and remove the very least-effective teachers.
Discussions of teacher quality often lead to questions about which teachers are retained and dismissed in K-12 public schools, and thus to questions about tenure. Teacher tenure was designed in the early 1900s as a set of procedural protections against unfair and arbitrary dismissals.1 But today, concerns about the effect on student outcomes -- along with budgetary constraints -- dominate education reform discussions.
As a result, leaders in a handful of states and districts have begun making changes to align their tenure systems with their goal of increasing student learning. Common changes include streamlining tenure protections and increasing the rigor of the tenure-granting process.2 Parallel efforts to improve the quality, accuracy, and rigor of educator evaluations have strengthened the basis for personnel decisions based on performance, and have fueled increased interest in tenure reform
"...In other places, educators are experimenting with different ways to test what kids learn. Bill Tucker, a managing director at Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says states like Oregon have led the way with so-called adaptive tests, computerized assessments that actually change as students answer questions right or wrong. Such tests satisfy the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law. Students sit for these tests any time they're ready, from October on, and the tests allow schools to find out more about how much kids have learned. And since each test is essentially different from the last, they're "harder to game," Tucker says.
In a bid to look beyond bedrock skills such as reading and math, a few states are also looking at other measures, such as how many of their high school graduates had to take remedial classes in college, Tucker says. Federal Race to the Top funding, part of the Obama administration's education stimulus plan, is pushing states to develop databases that would allow states to track graduates.
The federal government has also invested in two separate efforts by the states to overhaul tests; 45 states are participating. One project is aimed at developing so-called "through testing," which would sample every few months how much students learn, then combine those scores with the score on an end-of-year test. The other project focuses on computer-adaptive tests, like those used in Oregon, to be given at year's end.
On Wednesday morning at the state Capitol, the Senate Committee on Education will hold a public hearing on several bills: SB 20, SB 22 and SB 34. Senate Bill 22, which deals with public charter schools, is the bill with the most statewide effects. (The others focus solely on Milwaukee Public Schools.)
Two dimensions of SB 22 should give pause to citizens across the political spectrum because as written, the bill would make it less likely for charter schools to serve the common good. The effect will be to reduce the professionalism of the faculty and the level of local accountability for charter schools.
Clearly, the quality of education that occurs across sectors - public to private, preschool to postsecondary - is in the public interest. We all benefit when our schools educate children not only academically but in numerous other manners as well. Society is strengthened to the degree that children learn reflection, compassion, creativity and generosity. Schools can foster cross-cultural relationships and nurture respect amongst a populace that is growing increasingly pluralistic. While all schools serve the common good when they promote such learning, these characteristics define our expectations of public schools.
According to the Obama Administration, the majority of the nation's schools could be failing.
In a statement to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce just over a week ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that under the current No Child Left Behind law, 82 percent of the nation's schools may not be sufficiently educating students. But this is debatable.
It is true that far too many schools in the United States are not providing students with a good, or even remedial, education. Children in the U.S. continue to fall behind their peers internationally, and too few students are able to reach proficient levels in crucial areas like reading and math. This spells tragedy for the future of our nation.
The alarm clock is sounding on American education. While China's emergence as an educational powerhouse is relatively new, the continued poor performance by US students - though improved, still 31st place in math on the most recent international test - is not. Today, Shanghai tops the charts, but yesterday, it was other nations. Even a casual observer of education news knows the US long ago ceded its place as world leader in student performance. It's an unsettling state of affairs.
West loses edge to Asia in education: Top five OECD findings
But what's more unsettling is how prominent education leaders like Education Secretary Arne Duncan have called America's sorry standing a "wakeup call." President Obama has called for a new "Sputnik moment" to reignite the nation's commitment to science education. But the wakeup alarm didn't just start going off. It sounded decades ago; the US has just repeatedly hit the snooze button.
The crisis in American education includes both our overall poor national performance and the miniscule numbers of US students achieving at the highest levels. Even our best students are less competitive. The problem with previous education reform efforts is that they have poured time, money, and resources into bringing all students up to proficiency - at the expense of our most gifted students. If we want the best educational performance, we have to target our brightest students, not ignore them in the fight to help everyone reach "average."
Moving from paper to practice
We've been inundated with reams of reports, studies, and expert panels advising us how to fix this problem. During one week last fall, two government-convened panels released reports full of prescriptions for what the nation must due to reclaim its position as a leading innovator.
The reports by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the National Science Board offer a plethora of recommendations including better teacher training, creating 1,000 new STEM-focused (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) schools, and holding schools accountable for the performance of high-achieving students.
Though they highlight crucial goals, unfortunately, these proposals carried no implementation plan. To prevent them from collecting dust on a shelf, we offer the following core recommendations:
Reignite innovation
Reignite innovation. The original "Sputnik moment" was more than empty rhetoric. It featured real resources and genuine commitment to drive innovation and identify and support students who excelled in math and science. We need a similar vow today to identify and serve all high-potential and high-ability students to fill the talent pipeline.
To achieve this, the administration must assign clear authority and accountability to the Department of Education for supporting high-potential and high-ability students and to stop neglecting these students in federal education policy. One omission is that there is no national data collected on gifted students that can help districts make key decisions about their curricular and instruction needs.
And this administration has again recommended eliminating the sole program federal program for high-ability students - the modest Javits grant program that focuses on strategies to reach disadvantaged gifted learners.
Do better than 'proficient'
Hold schools accountable for more than proficiency. Accountability drives action. If states and school districts know they will be evaluated not just on achieving proficiency but on improving student performance at the high end of the achievement spectrum, they will implement and fund strategies to do so. Districts can use multiple factors to identify students - not just intelligence test scores - recognizing that giftedness takes many forms. We must use a variety of services - such as grade acceleration, enrichment programs, advanced courses and more - to develop this talent. All of which requires teachers with specialized knowledge and skills.
Our national obsession for proficiency alone doesn't cut it in today's competitive global environment. The push for proficiency must extend to a quest for excellence so that more students reach the highest levels on national and international benchmarks.
Talent is color- and income-blind
Seek talent in all settings. High potential and giftedness are color and economic status blind. Yet due in part to funding issues, quality gifted education programs are available almost exclusively in well-off suburban districts, while most urban and rural districts offer few to no such opportunities. Our failure to cast a wide net to identify and serve gifted students from minority and underserved communities is a national tragedy that has squandered untold amounts of talent.
Correcting this problem means we must reject the notion that low-income equals low performance. Although Title I, the federal program that supports schools in low-income settings, permits funds to be used to support all eligible students, the direction from the Department of Education and from many in Congress focuses on using federal education funds exclusively for low-performing students. No guidance from the Department of Education urges districts to spend Title I funds on their high-ability students. Other grants aimed at children in poverty focus on remediation when they should also focus on student excellence.
A federal pilot program to help Title I districts better identify and serve their high-potential students would be welcomed steps. Such a program should highlight schools where underserved students are reaching high achievement levels and establish new, rigorous STEM schools and other programs that develop talent in disadvantaged.
Invest in our innovation leaders
As we begin a new decade, the nation has two choices: We can continue doing more of the same, commission more studies and reports, and act surprised when the next round of scores show that American students continue to lag behind their global peers.
Or we can marshal the collective resolve of a half-century ago that catapulted the US to become the world's innovator and rededicate ourselves to address the challenges before us. America's greatest asset then is still our greatest asset now - human capital. If we don't identify and invest in our brightest students, we can't expect those leaders in innovation to emerge.
We know what it takes. Let's stop hitting the snooze button.
Ann Robinson is president of the National Association for Gifted Children and the director of the Jodie Mahony Center for Gifted Education, University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
I'VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.
I don't expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students' daily chatter, as well as the world's conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital.
So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers. Once, I asked them, "Come up with two lines of copy to sell something you're wearing now on eBay." The mix of commerce and fashion stirred interest, and despite having 30 students in each class, I could give everyone serious individual attention. For another project, I asked them to describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences. One student wrote, "A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it's erased, there are traces of everything that's been written on it."
Over the past year, I have traveled the nation speaking to nearly 100,000 educators, parents, and school-board members. No matter the city, state, or region, those who know schools best are frightened for the future of public education. They see no one in a position of leadership who understands the damage being done to their schools by federal policies.
They feel keenly betrayed by President Obama. Most voted for him, hoping he would reverse the ruinous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of George W. Bush. But Obama has not sought to turn back NCLB. His own approach, called Race to the Top, is even more punitive than NCLB. And though over the past week the president has repeatedly called on Congress to amend the law, his proposed reforms are largely cosmetic and would leave the worst aspects of NCLB intact.
Suzanne Fields writes in her March 5 column that teachers should put pupils first. I am appalled that teachers are being blamed for the state of education and the economy.
I have been a teacher in the Capital Region for 25 years and have had the privilege of working with highly qualified, dedicated, hardworking professionals. Yes, we consider ourselves professionals. The union has fought to improve salaries and working conditions, and protect workers from favoritism.
U.S. schools lag behind those in other countries because of America's culture. There has been a decline in discipline, self-discipline and structure in the home, as well as a host of other social problems. Teachers should be respected by their students and the families they serve; instead, they are unfairly under attack. Students in other countries work harder; their culture is one of respect for education and teachers.
Republicans in the Minnesota House offered a K-12 Finance bill that would dramatically alter the how the state's schools are funded, change teacher seniority rules and would allow public money to be spent for low-income students to attend private schools.
The bill, released Saturday afternoon, makes a slight reduction in expected growth for K12 schools, but increases the amount of money in the state's per pupil formula.
"The debate in education this year isn't going to be about how much we spend," said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington as he compared his bill to Gov. Mark Dayton's budget plan. "The debate instead will be what we fund and what reforms we make to the system."
Garofalo finds the extra funding in the per pupil formula by cutting the state aid schools rely on for integration. It also caps state special education funding at current levels, leading many Democrats to allege that it would force local school districts to raise property taxes to meet federal requirements. Garofalo says he plans to offer a bill later this session that would free up state requirements on schools with special ed students. He says that would save schools money.
I wrote several weeks ago (not in the newspaper) that education in Wisconsin was entering "unchartered" waters.
Oops. For one thing, I meant "uncharted" waters. A mental slip.
More important, the waters are, in reality, about to become increasingly chartered. Charter schools are in for major boosts, both in Milwaukee and statewide, if Republican proposals in the Legislature become law. In fact, a big step in that direction may come Wednesday when the state Senate Education Committee takes up three education bills.
But as more charter boats get launched, expectations rise for successful sailing. Will the resulting schools be piloted well? Will they set sail with enough skill and power to carry more kids to success?
"If we're going to maintain our credibility and maintain legislative support, we've got to show that we're not simply producing large numbers, we're producing quality schools," said Dennis Conta, who heads a coalition known as the Milwaukee Charter School Advocates.
Nationwide, the verdict is out on whether charter schools are a worthy innovation. The good ones offer important contributions to school improvement efforts. But, overall, those star schools are far outnumbered by charter schools where things aren't more successful than nearby conventional schools. Sometimes they're worse. There is no convincing case that charter schools overall have made things better.
I can't get that electrician out of my mind. He was so incensed at last week's School Board meeting.
Shameful, he said, that South Milwaukee teachers, on average, make more than the average income of South Milwaukeeans. Shameful that the School Board had signed a new contract with teachers.
I don't remember all the stats he reeled off, backed up with proof, he said, as he waved a sheaf of papers of god knows what along with his assertions. But the upshot was that the School District was paying its teachers way too much in relation to other school districts in the the state. Nevermind that South Milwaukee students' high achievement rates reflect the high quality of teachers the district hires. Or maybe the electrician puts no value on high-achieving students. Warehousing kids to keep them out of parents' hair during the day is OK?
Now, I really, really respect the work electricians do. They and plumbers and roofers do stuff I could and would never, never do or be able to do.
Neither would I be able to do what a teacher does. Even a kindergarten teacher. Or make that, most especially a kindergarten teacher. I've spend time in a kindergarten classroom--as a visitor. Believe me, I would last about 10 minutes if I had to be in charge of just wrangling a classroom of those children--adorable as they are--let alone actually have to teach them something.
The College Board Honors 4 Districts with Advanced Placement District of the Year Awards: Districts in Chicago; Tampa, Fla.; Hudson County, N.J.; and San Bernadino, Calif. to Be Recognized at the AP® Annual Conference in July
"These districts are defying expectations by expanding access while improving scores," said College Board President Gaston Caperton. "They are experimenting with initiatives and strategies that have driven increases in average exam scores when making AP available to a much broader and more diverse student population. Over the next two months we will work closely with each of the AP District of the Year winners to document what they are doing so we can share their best practices with all members of the AP community."
Wisconsin Districts that achieved recognition:
Appleton Area School District
Columbus School District
D C Everest Area School District
Diocese of Madison Education Office
Germantown School District
Green Bay Area Public Schools
Kimberly Area School District
Marshfield School District
Menomonie Area School District
Middleton-Cross Plains Schools
Monroe School District
Mt Horeb Area School District
Mukwonago Area School District
School District of Hudson
School District of Rhinelander
Stevens Point Area Public School District
Trevor-Wilmot Consolidated School District
Watertown Unified School District
Wauwatosa School District
West Bend School District
As Northern Virginia became home to more immigrant families in recent decades, Fairfax County officials say they started programs to teach English as a second language at every school - about 200 of them. Except one.
The holdout was the region's hallowed magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where many assumed that steep admissions standards rendered such a program for English language learners unnecessary.
But next year, at the behest of the school's teachers, Thomas Jefferson - often called TJ - plans to hire its first instructor to cater to a growing number of students who thrive in math and science classes but sometimes struggle with English.
The decision to hire the half-time teacher has reinvigorated a debate about TJ's mission - namely, how heavily the school's admissions policy should favor math and science standouts over well-rounded applicants with superior reading and writing abilities.
Meanwhile, American kids, when compared with those in other countries, are in the middle of the pack or worse when it comes to reading, math and science proficiency, according to a study released last week. And locally, Madison schools struggle with rising numbers of low-income students and poor minority graduation rates.
These are not problems that can be solved by killing teachers unions, nor with teachers unions unwilling to participate in real reform.
But I suppose that as long as Walker and the unions remain in fight mode, solutions will have to wait.
By all accounts, George Washington Elementary School is the very model of a modern urban public school.
Tucked into an up-and-coming neighborhood west of downtown, the school has produced impressive results on annual Maryland School Assessment (MSA) math and reading tests over the past several years. By 2007, scores had improved so steadily that the U.S. Department of Education made it a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. First lady Laura Bush came to town to hand out the award.
But in October 2008, a parent came forward with a troubling complaint: Someone was tampering with answer bubble sheets at Washington Elementary.
Soon, Baltimore Schools CEO Andres A. Alonso showed up at a PTA meeting at Washington and found "very poor" parent turnout and "an absence of student or staff enthusiasm," according to city records.
The Obama Administration is doubling down on its push to overhaul the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Last Wednesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan testified before Congress and aggressively urged action to revise the landmark and contentious education law that was passed in 2001. The President began this week with a speech at a northern Virginia middle school urging Congress to act and then spent part of Tuesday cutting several radio interviews prodding Capitol Hill even more.
This isn't the first time the Administration has implored Congress to change this law: it's been a constant drumbeat since 2009 (the law was due to be "reauthorized," Washingtonspeak for tuned up, in 2007 but Congress couldn't agree on how to do it) and even during the 2008 campaign. Now, frustrated with the lack of action, Obama and Duncan are trying a new approach: scaring Congress into acting. Both Obama and Duncan are highlighting Department of Education estimates that more than 80% of schools will not meet performance targets this year if the law isn't changed. One wag dubbed the new strategy a "fail wail."
They met on an icy afternoon, Clay Harris, an elementary math teacher at the end of a hectic day, and Eric Bethel, one of the city's new master educators, there to render a verdict on Harris's teaching that could determine whether he kept his job.
In polite, awkward silence, they walked to Harris's empty classroom at Beers Elementary School in Southeast Washington and settled in kid-size chairs at a low, yellow table.
Bethel set up his laptop. Harris took out a piece of paper for notes and began tapping his pencil on it.
"I didn't do everything perfectly," he said almost apologetically.
I have spent the last 25 years studying and working with governments and private groups to improve the education available to marginalized youth, in the United States and around the world. Most of that work was based in the belief that change at scale could result from the decisions made by governments, and that research could enlighten those choices. When I joined the Harvard faculty 13 years ago I set out to educate a next generation of leaders who would go on to advise policy makers or to become policy makers themselves, and designed a masters program largely responsive to that vision. During those years I continued to write for those audiences.
Over time, however, I have become aware that traditional approaches can't improve education at a scale and depth sufficient to ready the next generation of students for the challenges they will face. I have also become more skeptical of the assumed linear relationship between conventional research and educational change. I now believe the needed educational revitalization requires design and invention, as much as linear extrapolation from the study of the status quo -- that is, of the past. It also requires systemic interventions -- changes in multiple conditions and at multiple levels, inside the school and out. And it requires a departure from the conventional study into how much we can expect a given intervention or additional resource to change one educational outcome measure -- typically a skill as measured on a test or access to an education level, or transition to the next.
The Glendale Elementary School principal who was accused by some teachers of being a bully while praised by others as a visionary is leaving at the end of the year to take a principal job in Puerto Rico.
In a statement, Mickey Buhl said he knew sometime last school year that this would be his last year at Glendale. "The stage we are at makes it a wise time for a change for the school and for me," he wrote to parents last week.
Superintendent Dan Nerad praised Buhl as an "innovative instructional leader who has played a key role in improving the educational results for Glendale students."
During Buhl's six years, test scores among Glendale's low-income and minority students have improved as changes were made to foster more collaboration between teachers. But Buhl's aggressive management style rubbed some teachers the wrong way, prompting a district investigation last fall.
Countries that outpace the U.S. in education employ many different strategies to help their students excel. They do, however, share one: They set high requirements to become a teacher, hold those who become one in high esteem and offer the instructors plenty of support.
On Wednesday and today, education leaders, including U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the nation's largest teacher unions, and officials from the highest scoring countries, are meeting in New York to identify the best teaching practices.
The meeting comes after the recently released results of the Programme for International Student Assessment exam of 15-year-olds alarmed U.S. educators. Out of 34 countries, it ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.
"On the one hand, the United States has a very expensive education system in international standards," said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the exam. "On the other hand, it's one of the systems where teachers get the lowest salaries.
"Then you ask yourself, how do you square those things?"
Some 16 countries' teachers union leaders and education ministers say the U.S. must "raise the status of the teaching profession"-- meaning spend more money. We've wasted enough. Let's reduce unions' power.
Defenders of government control of education will believe any and every explanation for failure -- except government control.
Andreas Schleicher, the head of the division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that conducts evaluations of the scholastic performance of different countries' 15-year-old pupils every three years, complains in a new report about the image of educators in America.
"The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did," he says, "nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world's best-performing economies."
The Hechinger Report: It's well-known that Finland's teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It's also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment - what does it look like, specifically? How does teacher training in Finland differ from teacher training in other countries?
Virkkunen: It's a difficult question. Our teachers are really good. One of the main reasons they are so good is because the teaching profession is one of the most famous careers in Finland, so young people want to become teachers. In Finland, we think that teachers are key for the future and it's a very important profession--and that's why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers. All of the teacher-training is run by universities in Finland, and all students do a five-year master's degree. Because they are studying at the university, teacher education is research-based. Students have a lot of supervised teacher-training during their studies. We have something called "training schools"--normally next to universities--where the student teaches and gets feedback from a trained supervisor.
Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.
To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.
Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.
"Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation," Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. "Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership."
There's been a lot of negative media lately, particularly surrounding education and teachers' unions in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida.
My children attend a Florida public high school that is ranked as one of the top five best schools in the state for academics, and consistently ranked number one in football and volleyball. They have an extensive Advanced Placement course program that is so popular that my kids cannot get into all of the AP courses that they want. The courses are large and overenrolled, but at least they are challenging.
From my perspective as a parent and a college educator, most of my kids' high school teachers have been excellent. A few, however, have been inferior -- a situation that does not really surprise me. As a former department chair and evaluator of faculty performance at the college level, I understand how flawed and difficult the evaluation process can be. I also understand how faculty have different strengths and weaknesses. The weaker scholar with the higher student GPA average may be the person who provides after-hours counsel to students in trouble. The faculty with the lower student evaluations and course G.P.A.'s may be the most intellectually challenging faculty in the classroom -- the one who students learn to appreciate after they graduate. And then there are a few faculty who should probably leave education entirely, but will not go and cannot be fired without difficulty, if they have tenure. All of these issues--teacher evaluation, compensation, tenure--are on the political table right now for public schools. Florida is one of the states that is pushing a bill to link secondary student performance to better teacher retention and merit pay. New Florida Governor (and Tea Party favorite) Rick Scott supports a bill in which teacher evaluations are no longer subject to the collective bargaining process, only pay and benefits are negotiated. Teachers' unions are unhappy about the methods (and the rhetoric) that many politicians are using for evaluating them and their classrooms. It's unfortunate how this clash between workers and management is playing out in the classroom.
"Life is difficult." I read the first line in The Road Less Traveled on my first day off after my first year as a superintendent and thought to myself, "M. Scott Peck should try being a school superintendent." Peck describes love as, "extending yourself to benefit another." At that point, I turned the book sideways and wrote "teaching" in big letters in the margin. Helping another person learn is the greatest gift a person can give. Becoming a school teacher is still the best way to give the gift of learning, but there is an expanding array of learning professions where skill and passion can unite to make a difference.
Jay Kimmelman is a serial edupreneur. After graduating from Harvard in 1999, Jay founded Edusoft to bring simple scanning technology to education assessment. The simple step automated data collection at a time when nearly every state was planning to implement standards and assessments. By 2003, EduSoft had achieved revenues of $20 million and Jay sold the company to Houghton Mifflin. That launched a worldwide journey to study the obstacles faced by people living in poverty. Jay spent 18 months studying subsistence farming in a remote Chinese village. In 2007, Jay moved to Kenya and launched Bridge International Academies, an affordable network of schools serving families in the slums of Nairobi for less than $40 per year. Jay built a scalable "school in a box' model by relentlessly driving down the cost of each component and pushing up the quality. Jay was not trained as an educator, but may do more to improve access to quality education in Africa than anyone in history.
Years from now, lets hope ed reformers looking back on 2011 and gauging the Republican "position" don't liken it to the opening of Charles Dickens' classic A Tale of Two Cities, with it having been among "the best of times and the worst of times" for education reform. Of course, at first blush this scenario would appear to be highly unlikely - an exaggeration at best -but sadly such a pronouncement seems less farfetched with each passing day of the new 112th Congress and with the emerging priorities of at least some self-proclaimed education reform governors.
Huh? Wasn't 2011-12 supposed to be a 'banner year' for all things education reform?
After a marathon bargaining session that lasted from Friday morning into early Saturday morning, the school district and MTI, our teachers union, settled on the terms of a two-year collective bargaining agreement for our teachers and four other bargaining units that will take effect on July 1. As is true for most negotiations, the terms of the final agreement varied considerably from the parties' initial offers (discussed in my previous post). The school board ratified the agreement on Saturday and MTI membership voted to approve the pacts today, Sunday.
Here are some frequently asked questions about the agreement along with my responses.
What is your reaction to the settlement?
I wonder if any provisions were included that address the District's "infinite campus" implementation challenges?
Two Cornellians on opposite sides of the education debate--controversial former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee '92 and teachers' union leader Randi Weingarten '80--sat down with CAM to talk about school reform. (But not together.)
They are the two strong-willed women at the heart of the nation's debate on school reform. Both were featured in last year's education documentary Waiting for Superman--one as a hero, the other as a heavy. They have offices seven blocks from each other in Washington, D.C., but are miles apart philosophically. And, yes, reform advocate Michelle Rhee '92 and union leader Randi Weingarten '80 are both Cornellians, a connection they've never discussed.
Rhee, forty-one, catapulted to national prominence--including appearances on Oprah and the covers of Time and Newsweek--as a result of her tumultuous three years as schools chancellor in the District of Columbia. Appointed in 2007 by Mayor Adrian Fenty to overhaul the troubled D.C. system, she fired hundreds of teachers and principals, closed schools, and reorganized the bureaucracy. Test scores rose and enrollment stabilized, but her steamroller style made enemies, not the least of them the Weingarten-led American Federation of Teachers. AFT poured money into the mayoral campaign of Vincent Gray, who defeated Fenty in last September's Democratic primary. Rhee, calling the outcome "devastating," resigned soon after. She has since started a new organization, Students First, to promote school reform. A native of Toledo and the divorced mother of two daughters, Rhee is engaged to former NBA star Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento.
nlightened Citizenship: How Civic Knowledge Trumps a College Degree in Promoting Active Civic Engagement is the fifth report to the nation issued by ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. While each past study has had a different point of emphasis, all share a common thread of examining the relationships that exist between higher education, civic knowledge, and citizenship.
Unfortunately, the results of ISI's past civic literacy research does not inspire confidence that our institutions of higher learning are living up to their educative and civic responsibilities, responsibilities that almost all American colleges recognize as critical to their overall public missions.
In 2006 and 2007, ISI administered a sixty-question multiple-choice exam on knowledge of American history and institutions to over 28,000 college freshmen and seniors from over eighty schools. In both years, the average freshman and senior failed the exam.
In 2008, ISI tested 2,508 adults of all ages and educational backgrounds, and once again the results were discouraging. Seventy-one percent of Americans failed the exam, with high school graduates scoring 44% and college graduates also failing at 57%.
Creative writing is an academic discipline. I draw a distinction between writing, which is what writers do, and creative writing. I think most people in the UK who teach creative writing have come to it via writing - they are bona fide writers who publish poems and novels and play scripts and the like, and they have found some way of supporting that vocation through having a career in academia. So in teaching aspirant writers how to write they are drawing upon their own experience of working in that medium. They are drawing upon their knowledge of what the problems are and how those problems might be tackled. It's a practice-based form of learning and teaching.
But because it is in academia there is all this paraphernalia that has to go with it. So you get credits for attending classes. You have to do supporting modules; you have to be assessed. If you are doing an undergraduate degree you have to follow a particular curriculum and only about a quarter of that will be creative writing and the rest will be in the canon of English literature. If you are doing a PhD you have to support whatever the creative element is with a critical element. So there are these ways in which academia disciplines writing and I think of that as Creative Writing with a capital C and a capital W. All of us who teach creative writing are doing it, in a sense, to support our writing, but it is also often at the expense of our writing. We give up quite a lot of time and mental energy and also, I think, imaginative and creative energy to teach.
IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that "as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school." But our current educational approach doesn't just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.
We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That's why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.
Students in California public schools are not achieving at the levels they should. Too many students are unprepared for jobs or have to take remedial courses when they start college. In California, we judge student achievement through student scores on statewide tests. These tests assess how much students know about subject-matter content that is specified in an official set of state academic-content standards. Research has long shown that effective teachers are among the best ways to bring up student achievement. But in order to improve teaching effectiveness, it is helpful to know where the challenges are.
We've heard a lot in California recently about the move to factor student test scores from statewide standards-based tests into teacher evaluations. Yet did you know that for more than a decade, it has been the law in California to do just that?
St. James School, a small Catholic school tucked away off South Mills Street, -- made a big splash when a group of eighth-graders won $10,000 in a national renewable energy contest.
Two teams in teacher Gina Pignotti's eighth-grade science class entered projects in the Lexus Eco Challenge competition. One of the teams, which is raising $7,000 to install a solar panel on the school, received the award and the chance to compete with other winners for a $30,000 grand prize in the Final Challenge. The students will submit their entry Thursday and will learn next month if they won.
For the Final Challenge, the students are required to educate others. So they worked with Tim Tynan, a teaching assistant at UW-Madison who has helped students produce videos, to create a short documentary about renewable energy, their experiences with the project and a challenge to others to learn about the issue and do something about it.
Iowa Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds said Monday that she may support requiring students to pass a competency test before graduating from high school.
Reynolds was asked about her views on required competency tests for high school students during a news conference to announce details of an education summit that Gov. Terry Branstad plans for July.
"I think it's something we need to take a look at," Reynolds said. "That's been very effective in Massachusetts, as has been indicated by the test scoring."
She said requiring such competency tests could help determine how effective schools are in bolstering student achievement.
A group of students at a prestigious New York high school was being eyed in a college test cheating ring, the New York Post reported Monday.
The teens, seniors at John L. Miller Great Neck North High School on Long Island, allegedly tried to improve their college prospects by hiring a third party to take their SAT exams, sources said.
A school board source confirmed that the district was investigating the alleged cheaters.
The sixteenth century universalist poet Kabir captures the high Indian regard for education:
गुरु गोबिंद दोऊ खडे, काके लागूं पाये
बलिहारी गुरु आप की, गोबिंद दियो मिलाये
To whom should I bow, my Guru or the Lord?
I bow to thee, O Guru, for you have shown me God
A host to universities since before the time of Christ, India has long revered learning, which, along with spirituality have been the pillars of the Indian notion of civilization (Sankriti). Despite the history, at the time of independence in 1947, only one in five citizens was literate. In independent India, equitable access to education was considered of first importance, hence the sector came under the purview of the government.
Until economic liberalization in 1991, India's best tertiary institutions were exclusively public funded. These included the well-known Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The first private university was recognized in 1995 - today, India has 77. Most private universities are run on unabashedly profit-oriented lines. While the better ones compete with the top public institutions, most do not. Philanthropic support of college and universities is weak, even as the ranks of the wealthy grows in strength.
Based in a Meridian business park and powered by the K12 education company, the Idaho Virtual Academy is the state's oldest and largest online charter school, with 3,000 students from 43 counties.
State Superintendent Tom Luna's education reform would give students computers and require some online classes. His proposals, stuck in the Senate Education Committee for the past two weeks, would not affect the Virtual Academy, but the current debate has fostered numerous misconceptions about virtual education, according to academy staff and students.
"The biggest misconception is that the computer replaces the teacher," academy Head of School Desiree Laughlin said. More than 80 certified teachers who live and work in Idaho teach the classes, and learning coaches, generally parents, oversee the home study.
There will be blood. It's undeniable, especially when the governor goes out of his way to say that he doesn't have any on his hands.
Rick Perry, watching over a legislative session that threatens (at this point) to cut $9.3 billion or more from state spending on public education, said this week that it would not be the state's fault if any public school teachers lost their jobs. "The lieutenant governor, the speaker and their colleagues aren't going to hire or fire one teacher, as best I can tell," he said. "That is a local decision that will be made at the local districts."
House Speaker Joe Straus, Republican of San Antonio, said a day later that the governor was "technically correct," in that the teachers don't work directly for the state and the state won't be doing the firing. They may be cutting off the food supply to the kitchen, but it's the cooks who decide which diners will be fed.
The Legislature should attend to policies impacting distance education, teacher training and student counseling, a task force has said.
The tentative report serves as early recommendations from the group, which formed almost a year ago under a legislative directive.
Policy makers will ultimately look to its final recommendations for guidance when setting education policy. The group spent two days last week combing, as a co-chairman put it, through a "kitchen sink" of 63 ideas. Roughly half remained when it wrapped up work Friday afternoon.
The list -- still tentative -- places emphasis on turning to technology-supported distance education in a vast state with relatively few residents. The group suggested state education and workforce development departments should team with university leaders to assess broadband infrastructure. The list would also nudge lawmakers further by asking them to consider encouraging school districts to start requiring some online coursework before a student can graduate.
The U.S. is enjoying a new spring of education reform, with challenges to teacher tenure and "parent-trigger" for charter schools. So it's natural that the mother of all school choice reforms--vouchers--is also making a comeback.
Last week a House committee voted to restore Washington, D.C.'s opportunity scholarship program, which lets kids in persistently failing schools attend a private school of the family's choosing. Joe Lieberman is pushing similar legislation in the Senate, where it enjoys bipartisan support. The White House and teachers unions killed the program in 2009, despite clear evidence of academic gains.
Meanwhile, more states are realizing that true educational choice extends beyond charter schools. The most promising development is occurring in Pennsylvania, where a state-wide voucher bill supported by new Governor Tom Corbett is moving through the Republican-controlled legislature.
When I was a child there was a truism that anyone could make something (a rabbit hutch, say) or mend something (a bicycle) if they had a classical education. It was felt that using intellectual tools--parsing a bit of Latin history, constructing an argument--was training enough for taking on the material world. Learning gave you a steady approach to the tricksiness of the world of things. Lurking behind this belief was an attitude of de haut en bas; condescension towards those working with their hands.
This annoyed me. Partly because I could only stumble through my Latin lessons but mostly because my afternoons were spent in a pottery workshop learning to throw pots. It was clear to me--a white apron over my school uniform as I kneaded the clay to take out the air bubbles and give it the right consistency, pulled the long twisted wire made from rabbit snares, divided it into 4-ounce balls and sat at my kick wheel in the corner readying myself for my hours of practice--that this was different from classroom learning.
A generation ago, California had what was considered the best education system on the planet.
Today, our daughters and sons attend one of the worst-performing education systems in the industrialized world.
We are failing on the rock-bottom basics. California students' ability to read is ranked 49th in the country by the U.S. Department of Education. Our kids' ability to do math is ranked 47th and we are second to worst in science. Compared globally, the situation darkens further. Of the top 35 nations, the United States is ranked 29th in science and 35th in math. Your neighborhood school might be good by California standards, but that is a very low bar indeed. Our education crisis is a human tragedy and a looming economic disaster.
The Bay Area Council resolutely refuses to accept this crisis as our state's fate. Let's get past the political gridlock and get down to the real business of dramatically improving California schools. We know, as every honest study has shown, that it will take a combination of real dollars and major changes in the way we deliver education.
Yesterday afternoon I got a call from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She was responding to my request for her union's view of the charge that union rules might force KIPP to close its high-performing schools in Baltimore.
Weingarten was not happy. She unloaded the harshest assessment of KIPP, the nation's best-known charter school network, and its dealings with her and her union I have ever heard from her.
She said KIPP is playing by its own set of rules. She said the network, with 99 schools in 20 states and the District, has undermined her repeated attempts to establish a relationship that would allow them to work together for the greater good of children and public schools.
One of the great failures of high schools, my favorite subject, is the lack of effective training in productive behaviors and attitudes, such as cooperating, being on time, making eye contact, speaking persuasively, offering suggestions and focusing on tasks.
Many educators are trying to develop programs that teach these traits. Some call this character education, which has been around for decades. A few schools and school systems have made progress. Most have not.
Now a study offers renewed hope. An approach called social and emotional learning (SEL), which trains students to think and act in positive ways, can make a significance difference in school achievement, according to this research. The next step will be to see if it has the same effect on life and work after graduation.
There are those who think the best way to determine teacher effectiveness is by looking only at students' test scores. The simplicity of this approach can be seductive, but it is inherently flawed. This approach only makes sense if you assume all children come to school with the same abilities, have the same educational resources and opportunities and return home to the same support systems. As a kindergarten teacher for more than 30 years, I can confirm what you already know to be true: Every child is different.
The fact of the matter is student achievement and teacher effectiveness aren't simple to measure, and the results of one test are not going to offer a complete assessment of either. Many different measures must be used in order to determine true effectiveness.
So how do you define teacher effectiveness? How to evaluate it? How to reward it? These are all good questions. Most research will tell you an effective teacher is one of the most important factors in a student's education, and I would agree. Research will also tell you that many other factors can and do influence student success: poverty, hunger, homelessness, language skills, parental involvement and education, the learning environment, hormones and personal motivation.
The chances the Madison School Board will approve an Urban League proposal for an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities are dwindling.
Madison Preparatory Academy would cost the district $1.1 million in 2012-13, its first year of operation. That would increase to $2.8 million by its fifth year, Superintendent Dan Nerad told the board last week.
"For each of these years, (the district) would be obligated to reduce programs and services to our existing schools to transfer this amount of money to Madison Prep," Nerad wrote in a memo.
Some school board members said last week that Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal makes it less likely they will be able to support cutting other programs to find money for Madison Prep.
So much tumult lately. It's hard to focus on just one thing. So here are four short columns instead of one long one.
Column 1
Forget the Viagra. The teachers I've been in touch with lately need Prozac.
Somewhere in the chaos of last week, the Milwaukee teachers union confirmed that it had given up the fight for its members' rights to have drugs for sexual dysfunction covered by their insurance (a stand that, whatever its merits, belongs in the Hall of Fame of public relations blunders).
But depression among teachers - now that's a serious subject. Maybe not genuine, clinical depression. Rather, bad-morale, pessimistic, stressed-out, I-think-it's-only-going-to-get-worse depression.
Maybe the unhappiness will blow over. Daily routines tend to win out in our minds. Or maybe you think ill will is just a necessary by-product of the mother of all comeuppances that teachers deserved and got at the hands of Gov. Scott Walker and the legislative Republicans.
But marking the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War by staging a new one in Wisconsin will have long-term consequences on teachers and teaching. Some maybe on the upside. Some will have lasting effects as downers. Who goes into teaching, who stays, what the work is like - there will be big issues to sort out.
If Terry Mazany, the interim chief of Chicago Public Schools, is no longer chief upon the arrival of a new mayor, he can at least claim to have performed the impossible: shortening the school day.
In a Chicago Tribune homage to Mr. Mazany upon the "milestone" of his 100th day in office, various achievements were claimed as he threw his predecessor, Ron Huberman, under a school bus. ("The system was in free fall," Mr. Mazany said.)
Nowhere in a multimedia outreach by Mr. Mazany was there mention of a policy change that makes about as much sense as Gov. Scott Walker's joining the Wisconsin state employees union. You didn't think it could happen, but Chicago's pitifully short school day is getting even shorter.
Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren't open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America's children.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers -- and 47 percent of America's kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, "Closing the Talent Gap."
Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.
We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.
One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.
The emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools presented a plan Saturday to turn nearly one in every three schools into charter schools as part of a bid to save the district millions of dollars and prevent massive school closings.
The 41 schools selected for independent control currently enroll about 16,000 of the district's 73,000 students and would operate as public school academies starting as soon as this fall. The district expects to release a list of the schools this week and solicit proposals for their transfer.
Recently the district led by a state-appointed manager overseeing a total of 142 schools has explored modeling Detroit on post-Katrina New Orleans, where a shrunken district was remade with mostly charter schools.
Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager, said in a news release Saturday that the charter-school plan would reduce operating costs by $75 million to $99 million, but did not say over what period of time any cost savings would be realized.
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
Khan discusses moving away from the "one size fits all" approach to education. However, he does advocate "peer to peer tutoring".......
As the debate rages over public unions and, in particular, over their role in school reform, an unfortunate dichotomy about America's teachers has emerged. On one side, unions and many teachers say that teachers are unfairly vilified, that they work incredibly hard under difficult circumstances and that they are underpaid. Critics, meanwhile, say that our education system is broken and that to fix it we need better teachers. They say that teachers today have protections and benefits not seen in the private sector - such as life tenure, lifetime pension and health benefits, and short workdays and workyears.
Both sides are right.
Teaching is incredibly hard, especially when dealing with children in high-poverty communities who come to school with enormous challenges. Many teachers work long hours, staying at school past 6 p.m., and then working at home grading papers and preparing lessons. Some teachers get outstanding results, even with our most challenged students. These are America's heroes, and they should be recognized as such. Sadly, they aren't.
Memo to all Wisconsin legislators. There is an easy way to prove you care about public education in Wisconsin. And it won't cost a penny.
Just say no to Gov. Scott Walker's proposed expansion of the Milwaukee voucher program providing tax dollars to private schools.
This may seem merely like a Milwaukee issue. It's not. Voucher advocates have made clear for more than 20 years that their goal is to replace public education with a system of universal vouchers that includes private and religious schools.
The heartbreaking drama currently playing in Milwaukee - millions of dollars cut from the public schools while vouchers are expanded so wealthy families can attend private schools in the suburbs - may be coming soon to a school district near you.
The Madison School District has reached a tentative agreement with all of its unions for an extension of their collective bargaining agreement through mid-2013.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the agreement includes a 50 percent employee contribution to the pension plan. It also includes a five percentage point increase in employees' health insurance premiums, and the elimination of a more expensive health insurance option in the second year.
Salaries would be frozen at current levels, though employees could still receive raises for longevity and educational credits.
The district said the deal results in savings of about $23 million for the district over the two-year contract.
The agreement includes no amnesty or pay for teachers who missed four days last month protesting Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to strip public employee collective bargaining rights. Walker's signing of the bill Friday prompted the district and MTI to reach an agreement quickly
A two-year tentative contract agreement has been reached between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the Madison Teachers Union for five bargaining units: teachers, substitute teachers, educational and special educational assistants, supportive educational employees and school security assistants.
District administrators, with the guidance of the Board of Education, and Madison Teacher Inc. reps negotiated from 9 a.m. Friday until 3 a.m. Saturday when the tentative agreements were completed.
Under details of the contract, workers would contribute 50 percent of the total money that's being contribution to pension plans. That figure according to district officials, is believed to be very close to the 12 percent overall contribution that the budget repair bill was calling for. The overall savings to the district would be $11 million.
I present Blaska's Red Badge of Courage award to the Madison Area Technical College Board. Its part-time teachers union would rather sue than settle until Gov. Scott Walker acted. Then it withdrew the lawsuit and asked the board for terms. No dice. "Times have changed," said MATC's attorney.
The Madison school board showed a rudimentary backbone when it settled a contract, rather hastily, with a newly nervous Madison teachers union.
The school board got $23 million of concessions over the next two years. Wages are frozen at current levels. Of course, the automatic pay track system remains, which rewards longevity.
The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers, Inc. have reached tentative contract agreements for five bargaining units: teachers, substitute teachers, educational and special educational assistants, supportive educational employees, and school security assistants.
District administrators, with the guidance of the Board of Education, and MTI reps negotiated from 9:00 a.m. Friday until 3:00 a.m. Saturday when the tentative agreements were completed.
The Board of Education held a Special Meeting today at 2:00 p.m. and ratified the five collective bargaining agreements. The five MTI units must also ratify before the contracts take effect.
Technology continues to become of more and more importance in the classroom. But is it being used properly and to the best of its' ability? Many would argue the answer is no. And one man is on a mission to change that - Salman Khan. Khan, along with his fellow brainiacs at the Khan Academy (and with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as Google), want to revolutionize the way technology is utilized, making the use of computers and videos to have a more positive and powerful impact. How?
Shantanu Sinha, the president of Khan Academy, stated in a piece for the Huffington Post that, "for the most part, we didn't teach kids with the computer, we taught them how to use the computer. Most kids need no help and could probably teach their parents." He added that, "in the end, computer labs were a side show, expensive investments largely squandered due to a lack of good content or purpose."
Chicago needs more public high schools in general -- and more single-gender high schools in particular -- to bolster student performance and stem an exodus of middle class families, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel said Friday.
During a town-hall meeting with Chicago high-school students, Emanuel blamed a "severe shortage" of high schools, in part, for an alarming, 200,000-person decline in the city's population in the 2010 U.S. Census.
The mayor-elect said that nine out of ten students who apply for admission to Lane Tech High School are turned away. On the West Side, there are 14,000 students "ready to go to high school and only 7,000 slots," he said.
"Academically Adrift," a new book on the failures of higher education, finds that undergrads don't study, and professors don't make them.
Here's the situation. You're an assistant to the president at DynaTech, a firm that makes navigational equipment. Your boss is about to purchase a small SwiftAir 235 plane for company use when he hears there's been an accident involving one of them. You have the pertinent newspaper clippings, magazine articles, federal accident reports, performance graphs, company e-mails and specs and photos of the plane.
Now, write a memo for your boss with your recommendation on the SwiftAir 235 purchase. Include your reasons for finding that the wing design on the plane is safe or not and your conclusions about what else might have contributed to the accident.
Gov. Walker's proposed 2011-2013 biennial budget calls for an expansion of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program by repealing the enrollment cap, allowing private schools anywhere within Milwaukee County to participate, and expanding eligibility to all City of Milwaukee families by eliminating income limits.
During tough budget deliberations, it would be good to know whether the expanded choice program is likely to save or cost state taxpayers over the long run. Either is possible - taxpayers save if the students who join the expanded program otherwise would have been students at more costly public or charter schools and taxpayers lose if the new voucher users would have otherwise been free to the state as tuition-paying private school students.
There is a debate over the likelihood that the program will be able expand considerably, as capacity for new students in the county's existing private schools appears constrained at this time. However, the debate so far has overlooked the fact that the proposed budget would allow new voucher users to be existing private school students starting in the 2012-13 school year. There is a real concern that the expanded program may, in fact, increase costs for the state over the long run by increasing the total number of Wisconsin K-12 students who receive state support for their education.
"Stand up if you have ever been told that you weren't college material," the school president booms during the commencement ceremony.
In answer to his question, dozens of students stand and pump their fists; cheers go up; an air horn blasts. He goes on:
"Now, stand if you are the first member of your family to go to college."
Dozens more rise.
"Stand if you started your degree more than 10 years ago," and then the president tells them to stay standing as he ticks off intervals of time, "Fifteen years? Twenty years? Twenty-five years?"
Gov. Bill Haslam went outside the state and outside the schoolhouse to find Tennessee's next education commissioner.
Kevin Huffman is a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who has two years of classroom experience and a decade as an administrator at Teach for America, a nonprofit dedicated to taking bright young college students with no teaching experience and training them to teach in some of the poorest schools in the nation.
"I put a special effort into finding the right fit for education commissioner," Haslam said in Thursday's announcement of one of his final Cabinet appointments. "... Kevin combines the experience of having been a bilingual first- and second-grade teacher to helping oversee a national organization with 1,400 full-time employees and a budget of $212 million."
This wealthy New York suburb prides itself on its public schools. Class sizes are small. Students can choose from an array of subjects not offered everywhere. Teacher pay ranks among the nation's highest. And voters long approved high real estate taxes to pay for it all.
But even here -- as in other affluent enclaves -- corners are being cut, bringing home the wrenching debate that has caused turmoil in so many other communities. What some really fear is that the cuts will continue. "You hear people say they want Mandarin taught in the sixth grade or they want smaller class size or some other enhancement," said Julie Meade, president of the Parent Teacher Association and mother of two school-age children. "But they don't talk about raising taxes to pay for what they advocate. I haven't heard anyone say raise taxes to pay for quality."
Ms. Meade and others in her P.T.A. are beginning to suggest that austerity may be going too far, particularly in the matter of class size, which has crept up in kindergarten through fifth grade to an average of 22 from 19.9 in 2006-7, the last full school year before the recession. While 22 is hardly overcrowding by the standards of most American school districts, it does push the envelope in the wealthiest suburbs.
The Los Angeles Board of Education shocked the city, and much of the education world, last week by ordering six charter schools shut down after a charter official was found to have orchestrated cheating on state tests. It is rare for a school board to close that many charters at once. Even the local teachers union, often hostile to charters, advised against it.
But more surprising, and perhaps a sign of a significant shift in the national debate over testing, is the fact that the jump in scores at the Crescendo charter system was investigated at all. USA Today, in a series of stories launched this week, has compiled nationwide evidence of inexplicable test score gains, followed by equally puzzling collapses, that experts say suggest cheating but are ignored by the officials responsible for those schools.
A big crowd packed into the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Union Theater on Tuesday night to hear education historian Diane Ravitch, considered one of the most influential scholars in the nation on schools.
In her talk, she ripped into Gov. Scott Walker's budget, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to the Top, the obsession with measuring student progress through high stakes testing, privatization of education through charters and vouchers and No Child Left Behind legislation that is closing schools and punishing teachers.
Her gloomy assessment of the current passion for "fixing" education and vilifying teachers is particularly striking because Ravitch herself is a former proponent of school testing and accountability and an early supporter of the No Child Left Behind legislation.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about research on new computer-based tools to assess student essays. I concluded that, for now, these tools might be best for establishing basic levels of writing proficiency. But, I also noted that the most important value of these tools may not be for high-stakes testing, but to increase writing practice and revision.
Randy Bennett, one of the world's leading experts on technology-enhanced assessments, points me to his extremely helpful -- and readable -- new article, which offers advice to the assessment consortia as they look to implement automated scoring (not just in writing, but also for literacy and math).
Bennett's paper distinguishes among the various types of automated scoring tasks, illustrating where automated scoring is most ready for high-stakes use. He makes a much needed call for transparency in scoring algorithms and even provides ideas on how automated and human-based scoring can improve one another (noting flaws in human-based scoring, too). Finally, he ends with this sensible approach:
Visit the Wisconsin Department of Administration website and look up "Budget in Brief" to find this and other information regarding the budget. The Drum received this document from a Waukesha County School District resident. These memos were sent out to all the parents of children in their district and we were told the teachers are not happy.
There are some interesting changes Gov. Walker is looking to pull of. The one that stands out to me is found in the last bulleted point on page 1. It is the repeal of the requirement that charter school teachers hold a DPI teacher license and the only requirement is to have a bachelor's degree.
This won't be popular, but I know several professionals that want to get involved in education and do not because of the licensing requirement. If this gets repealed I know that some will get involved in charter schools and they will have a positive impact on students. There will be more Black Male teachers as a result of this sea change.
Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city's 80,000 teachers--names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.
The Los Angeles Times already had jolted newsrooms across the country back in August, when it published 6,000 public school teachers' names next to its own performance calculations. New York education reporters, though, were considerably more reluctant to leap on this bandwagon. They found themselves with twenty-four hours to explain a complex and controversial statistical analysis, first to their editors and then to the public, while attempting to fend off the inevitable political and competitive pressure to print the names next to the numbers, something nearly every one of them opposed. "I stayed up all night kind of panicked," said Lindsey Christ, the education reporter for the local NY1 television station, "writing a memo to everyone in the newsroom explaining what was coming and what was at stake."
A 15-year-old Australian boy is suing the government after allegedly being left illiterate and innumerate despite being taught at a state-run school, officials confirmed yesterday.
The Victoria state education department said it was defending the claim made by the boy from Melbourne.
Lawyers for the student reportedly told the Federal Court that the state government promises a "world-class" education for students, but the boy had been severely bullied at school and left illiterate and innumerate.
In the third edition of the Advise the Advisor program, Melody Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council and one of President Obama's senior advisors on education policy, is asking for feedback from parents, teachers and students on what's working in communities and what needs to change.
Providing our nation's students with a world-class education is a shared responsibility. It's going to take all of us - educators, parents, students, philanthropists, state and local leaders, and the federal government - working together to prepare today's students for the jobs of the 21st century.
You can add your voice to the conversation by answering one or all of the following questions at WhiteHouse.gov/Advise:
A bipartisan group of educators and business and labor leaders announced on Monday their support for a common curriculum that states could adopt for public schools across the nation.
The proposal, if it gains traction, would go beyond the common academic standards in English and mathematics that about 40 states adopted last year, by providing specific guidelines for schools and teachers about what should be taught in each grade.
For decades, similar calls for common academic standards, curricular materials and tests for use nationwide -- the educational model used by many countries in Europe and Asia -- have been beaten back by believers in America's tradition of local control of schools.
Scott Mueller seemed to have an uncanny sense about what his students should study to prepare for upcoming state skills tests.
By 2010, the teacher had spent his 16-year career entirely at Charles Seipelt Elementary School. Like other Seipelt teachers, Mueller regularly wrote study guides for his classes ahead of state tests.
On test day last April, several fifth-graders immediately recognized some of the questions on their math tests. The questions were the same as those on the study guide Mueller had given out the day before. Some numbers on the actual tests were identical to those in the study guide and the questions were in the same order, the kids told other Seipelt teachers.
What was billed as a funeral procession of sorts made its way from the Las Vegas Strip to the Palms hotel-casino on Sunday as about 500 people protested Gov. Brian Sandoval's proposed cuts to education -- or what attendees referred to as the "death of education" in Nevada.
Although it was a student-led protest, the rally attracted parents and educators as well, many of whom carried posters bearing messages such as "Nevadans care about education! So should you, Mr. Sandoval," "What happens in Vegas matters," and "Budget cuts? Nevada bleeds."
Protesters lamented the effects cuts would have on education in Nevada, arguing for more creativity and tax increases rather than slashing the budgets of K-12 and higher education.
"No matter how many budget cuts they take from us, we will continue to rise," said Greg Ross, a Nevada State College student. "... Education, no matter what happens at the end of the day, determines the future."
The battle over education reform in Idaho will continue this week. The House of Representatives is set to possibly send two of the three bills attached to Superintendent Tom Luna's plan to the governor's desk. The teachers' union is promising more demonstrations and there could also be more student walkouts.
Last week saw student walkouts most of the week from around the state, all in protest of Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna's Education Reform Plan.
But while it looks like a huge number of students, teachers, and parents are against his plan, Luna doesn't necessarily believe they're in the majority.
"Sometimes, there's an organized effort to get people to testify and protest, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they represent a majority," Luna said.
Some students we talked to did admit they were only protesting as a means of getting out of class. Luna believes more students would be in support if his plan if they really knew the facts about it.
The United States is "in an age national stupidity," with a corporate education reform agenda bent on "demonizing teachers so it can fire them," national education advocate Diane Ravitch said at a union-backed education reform symposium.
Ravich, a former assistant U.S. secretary of education who had a role in developing No Child Left Behind and the charter school movement, renounced both reforms, saying they've given way to a culture of incentives and punishments through testing that does little to help students.
We recently wrote a column for CNN.com that garnered national attention for saying there was a "simmering rage" among teachers who feel they've been under attack and made a scapegoat for school and budget problems.
Historians are known for studying news, not making it. But Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor of education, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and blogger for Education Week, is not only heralded as the nation's "most history-minded education expert" (The Wall Street Journal) but is also a newsmaker in her own right.
When Ravitch, assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and an early proponent of the No Child Left Behind legislation, recanted her former support for school choice and standardized testing in 2010, her turnaround made headlines in all the major media.
Ravitch says applying a business model to schools and classrooms is misguided. She also maintains that many of the most popular notions for restructuring public education, including privatization, high-stakes testing, and charter and voucher schools, have put public education in peril.
As Texas schools scrounge for cash to buy supplies and threaten to lay off teachers, $830 million in education funding earmarked for the state is sitting at the federal Department of Education.
The money, part of the stimulus package passed last year by Congress to help U.S. schools, is trapped by an increasingly hostile battle between the state's Republican and Democratic politicians over how to use it--to the dismay of school districts facing an almost $10 billion shortfall in state aid.
Democrats in the state's congressional delegation included a provision in the federal legislation requiring Texas to use the money to supplement existing spending. In the past, they contend, Republicans have replaced state education dollars with federal money, then used the savings for other purposes.
"Federal aid to education should actually aid education in our local Texas schools, not provide a bailout to the governor for his mismanagement of the state budget," said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who represents part of Austin.
As the White House seized that job news yesterday, President Obama went to Miami. He was there to talk about an issue that has bipartisan support: Education reform. The president visited a Miami high school with an inspiring comeback story. NPR's Greg Allen reports he was joined by a well-known Florida Republican: The former governor, Jeb Bush.
GREG ALLEN: There are many lessons to be learned from Miami's Central High School: The first is that when there's a president visiting, 600 students can make a lot of noise.
President BARACK OBAMA: It is good to be here today.
(Soundbite of cheering)
Mr. OBAMA: I'm excited.
ALLEN: Miami-Dade is the nation's fourth-largest school district, and for many years Central was one of its worst high schools. A perennial underachiever, for years it consistently ranked as a failing F school. President Obama noted that in one survey only a third of students said they felt safe at school.
Stop the presses! The British, French and German heads of state agree on something: Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel have all recently declared multiculturalism a failure.
Like the related dogma of diversity, multiculturalism is so deeply embedded in the lexicon of liberalism that it has become axiomatic. Proponents hold it so dear that the faintest doubt poses an existential threat.
With the stakes so high, agnostics face sanctimonious wrath: if you don't believe in multiculturalism there is simply something wrong with you; maybe you're even nuts. While I have reservations I think I'm basically sane, and I sure as heck hope the aforementioned world leaders are operating with a full deck.
It's important to distinguish between diversity and multiculturalism, which are often lumped together in liberal orthodoxy. Diversity is inherently good; but multiculturalism too often leads to separation and resentment that foments extremism.
Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal calls for deep cuts in most areas of public education with one notable exception - public school choice programs.
In addition to steep reductions in school district funding, Walker's budget calls for a 10 percent cut to grants for programs such as bilingual-bicultural education and 4-year-old kindergarten. It also retains current grant funding for special education and low-income students, despite projected growth in those populations.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee's 20-year-old voucher program would receive $22.5 million more to accommodate 1,300 additional students. The growth would result from Walker's proposal to remove the program's income requirements and enrollment caps.
And independent charter schools would receive $18.4 million more over the biennium. Walker is projecting 600 additional students as his proposal would lift the state enrollment cap on virtual charter schools, allow the UW System's 13 four-year universities to establish charter schools, and allow independent charter schools in any district in the state.
Elementary School Level DLI: Proposal to plan and implement DLI programs at Stephens, Thoreau, and Hawthorne Elementary Schools for the 2011-2012 School year. Given the ongoing increase in the number of Spanish-speaking English language learners, MMSD needs to implement bilingual education programming in order to meet legal requirements imposed by the state statutes. It is recommended we start planning at these three sites during the 2011-2012 school year for program implementation during the 2012-2013 school year starting with a Kindergarten cohort.
La Follette High School Dual Language Immersion Program Proposal Update: A committee has been formed to start developing a proposal to bring to the BOE for a high school DLI continuation program. The committee is made up of representatives from the district ESLIBE/DLI Division as well as administrators and staff from La Follette High School. The committee meets biweekly. This high school DLI program would
serve the needs of students in the Sennett DLI program. The students are scheduled to start their high school programming during the 2013-2014 school year. A proposal is scheduled to be presented to the BOE in May of 2011 .
So what will things look like the day after the Milwaukee Public Schools system collapses?
Or, if you prefer, what needs to be done to avoid finding out the answer to that question?
Are these serious questions or is all this the-MPS-world-is-ending talk exaggerated?
I only have a firm sense of the answer to one of those questions, and it's No. 3: It probably won't be this fall (although it might be). But, best as I can see, the system as we know it stands at the brink of a momentous functional breakdown.
There have been people in recent years who thought the best solution to the problems of MPS was to blow up the system and build something better.
Monday evening, the Portland School Board will vote on a teacher contract that, once again, ignores the elephant in the room -- Portland Public Schools' failure to adequately educate low-income children and children of color. We encourage all Portland residents to read the contract and see what some would have us celebrate. School board members should explain what they've gained and what they've given up with this negotiation. The public deserves answers.
The district's budget woes are real. But the bigger problem is that PPS time and again puts adult jobs and politics ahead of students' learning and graduating. Our community and state pay a hefty price. With an overall graduation rate of 53 percent (31 percent for Hispanic, 44 percent for African American and 45 percent for poor children), our quality of life is being redefined right before our eyes.
On Dec. 20, the Black Parent Initiative, the Coalition of Black Men, Community & Parents for Public Schools, and Stand for Children asked the school district, school board and teacher association to eliminate barriers to recruiting and retaining excellent teachers and principals, and to better serve our students, in particular our students of color. Barriers exist in both the teacher contract and district policy. The Native American Youth and Family Center, Latino Network, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, the Hispanic Chamber and a number of civic leaders soon joined with us.
The problem with the current crisis in Madison over public-sector unions is that it distracts from the real issue where Wisconsin's public education is concerned.
The governor recently announced the need to send contract termination notices to public school teachers if a vote on his budget-repair bill doesn't happen soon.
Hmm. Do unionized teachers earn too much because of their unions? Can the state afford it?
The question should be: Would Wisconsin pay for excellent public schools even without teachers unions?
Teachers are not like General Motors workers in the '70s or janitors today. Those workers have nothing to offer but their strong backs and hands. If they do not bargain collectively, they lose. Nor can teachers be lumped in with police and firefighters. These workers are necessary in a society that wishes to be safe.
Effective teachers are the kind of professionals who are valuable because of their education, creativity, innovation and initiative. Excellent teachers should be allowed to rise to the top and be in demand, while ineffective ones should be trimmed. The large teacher unions I have belonged to (Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association and Chicago Teachers Union) seem to do the opposite. However, excellent teachers will still need to be attracted with competitive pay and benefits.
Take the school John Norquist sent his son to when he was mayor of Milwaukee. It's private because it bought into the decidedly non-mainstream Waldorf movement. The Norquist family obviously felt it was worth the tuition, which the mayor could afford.
The school also accepted children via Milwaukee's school choice program, so poor children could attend. Who was left out? Children from families neither poor nor well-off, including children whose parents worked for Norquist as firefighters and cops.
This is one reason Norquist says Gov. Scott Walker is right to expand school choice. By letting in the middle class, said Norquist, Walker makes better options available to middle-income parents in Milwaukee.
Norquist swiftly adds that he agrees with nothing else Walker has proposed lately. The ex-mayor goes on at length that he believes Walker wrong to limit public-union bargaining power.
That said, he vigorously favors more school choice. Milwaukee has school choice for the middle class, only it amounts to moving out to somewhere that the public schools are good. "One of the reasons people leave the city is because they feel they don't have good choices for their kids," Norquist said. "This bill changes that."
Britain's awesome Cambridge University calls its July/August session an "International" summer school because it is open to people from all over the world and of any age, without entrance requirements and without later tests or examinations. I recently wrote about this impressive program, which can be pursued in much of July and August for either one, two, three, or six weeks at a time. Probably because she enjoys a Google alert bringing to her attention any mention of her school, the Director of that program learned about my blog and has now sent me a charming comment that adds helpful details about the opportunity to spend a learning vacation at Cambridge this summer. Her e-mail to me reads as follows:
Iowa has been widely known as an "education state" throughout its existence. Because of population shifts and changing educational needs for our K-12 students, this part of our education system receives a great deal of attention.
There is another component of Iowa's education system which internally has probably not attracted as much attention but which has brought both distinction and tens of thousands of high school graduates to our state for more than a century and a half.
That component is higher education - public universities under the governance of the Board of Regents, private colleges and universities, and area community colleges. All have made great contributions to Iowa, the United States and the world. Their economic impact within Iowa might be described as "hidden in plain sight."
Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day's math homework. The assignment: Create a "stem-and-leaf" plot of the birthdays of each student in the class and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest, and if so, which month? Do you:
a) Stare blankly
b) Google "stem-and-leaf plot"
c) Say, "Why do you need to know that?"
d) Shrug and say, "I must have been sick the day they taught that in math class."
If you're a parent of a certain age, your kids' homework can be confounding. Blame it on changes in the way children are taught math nowadays -- which can make you feel like you're not very good with numbers.
Well, our math guy, Keith Devlin, is very good at math, and he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that there's a reason elementary schools are teaching arithmetic in a new way.
"That's largely to reflect the different needs of society," he says. "No one ever in their real life anymore needs to -- and in most cases never does -- do the calculations themselves."
"the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands."
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) "Studying is crucial for strong academic performance..." and "Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning..."
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: "Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education." More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that "One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students' academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers' influence."
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, "disengaged, lazy whiners," and "noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS," the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...(but) It's a teacher's job...to give students the motivation to learn."
It would seem that no matter who points out that "You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make him drink," our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; "For education, a man's books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his."
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can't see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be--namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than "disengaged lazy whiners" will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
Budget cuts! Layoffs! Bigger classes! Oh my! Given the mini-Wisconsins erupting around the country, it's not surprising that parents are worried about their children's schools. At least 45 states will face some budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins this July, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Last week the school board of Providence, Rhode Island gave pink slips to the city's entire teaching force. Rumors of class sizes as large as 60 students circulated in Detroit.
Reality check: There will be teachers teaching in Providence next year. Similar sky-is-falling scenarios will be averted in Detroit and elsewhere, too. But that doesn't mean that there will not be fewer teachers--and larger classes--in many places when school opens this fall. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may well be right that scarce resources will be the "new normal" for schools.
The looming budget cuts are putting the question of class size front and center in local communities and the national education debate. A proposal to raise class sizes in Idaho by laying off more than 700 teachers led to protests around the state. Many other states and cities are considering changes to rules about class size.
Every day educators across the country are challenging the status quo and showing that low-performing schools can be turned around. Today, the President and I will visit Miami Central Senior High School to talk to some of those educators. Central has received nearly $800,000 in federal funding to support and accelerate turnaround efforts already underway.
Working with the school district and teachers union, Central promoted a strong school leader to be principal and replaced more than half the staff. It extended learning time after-school and during the summer, and engaged the community by offering Parent Academy classes for parents on graduation requirements and financial literacy. More than 80 percent of students are on free or reduced price lunch. Yet academic performance is steadily improving -- and students and teachers are showing that a committed school can beat the demographic odds.
The burdens of poverty are real, and overcoming those burdens takes hard work and resources. But poverty is not destiny. Hundreds of schools in high-poverty communities are closing achievement gaps. America can no longer afford a collective shrug when disadvantaged students are trapped in inferior schools and cheated of a quality education for years on end.
Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed author, historian, and professor Dianne Ravitch on her new book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System."
Ravitch argued that testing and choice are undermining America's education system. She said that ever since the No Child Left Behind Act, "schools have been turned into testing factories."
She also discussed how being a teacher has turned into a thankless job, and that teachers have become entirely demoralized. She stated that "the whole public monologue for the last couple of years has been 'Blame the teachers for everything.'" Stewart agreed, noting that his mother worked in education for years.
Tying test scores to teacher evaluations could narrow curriculums in schools and reinforce teaching for the sake of passing a test, the New Jersey Education Association argued today, saying that plans by the Christie Administration to impose performance reviews based on how well students do on standardized tests were unworkable.
Last month, acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf unveiled a five-point reform proposal that would abandon New Jersey's teacher job guarantee program and replace it with an evaluation system rewarding educators for good student performance and working in at-risk schools
Under the plan, the state's public school teachers would be assessed and paid using a new rating system based in part on how their students do in the classroom.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he would introduce legislation to speed the implementation of a statewide system to evaluate teachers' performance.
His announcement came minutes after the State Senate passed legislation sought by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that would reverse a rule protecting long-serving New York City teachers from layoffs regardless of their effectiveness.
Mr. Cuomo's proposal would have far broader implications, affecting school districts across the state. But it would not affect the thousands of layoffs that Mr. Bloomberg maintains he will be forced to carry out because of cuts in state aid.
Rather, Mr. Cuomo is seeking to accelerate the introduction of new standards for teacher and principal evaluation that the state's Education Department, with the support of teachers' unions, has been developing since last year.
The Minnesota Senate has passed a bill that creates a new method of obtaining teacher licenses.
The alternative licensing plan is aimed at meeting projected teacher shortages in the future. It's designed to give Minnesota schools an infusion of new, mostly young teachers who don't attend traditional teaching colleges, and help close an achievement gap between white and minority students that's one of the worst in the country.
Critics say it will harm schoolchildren by making it too easy to become a teacher. But the bill the Senate passed Thursday reflects a compromise between Gov. Mark Dayton and bill sponsors, and it's expected to get his signature.
The Republican faceoff with labor unions in the Midwest and elsewhere marks not just a fight over money and collective bargaining but also a test of wills over how to improve the nation's schools.
Various GOP proposals to narrow labor rights, dismantle teacher tenure and channel public money toward private schools raise a question: Should states work with teacher unions to overhaul education or try to roll over them?
Like many Democrats, President Obama wants collaboration. He has preached teamwork with unions even as he pushes harder than any of his predecessors to get bad teachers out of schools and pay more to those who excel.
Here in Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) shares many of Obama's education goals. But Daniels, a possible 2012 presidential contender, and several of his Republican peers are pursuing reform through confrontation.
The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.
"You feel punched in the stomach," said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees' two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor's plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.
Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class.
"I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt," she said. "I'm 30 years old, and I can't save up enough for a down payment" for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.
This front page story in today's NYT annoys the heck out of me because it's missing one word in its title - it should read: "Teachers UNIONS Wonder, Why the Scorn?" The author presents NO evidence that Americans don't cherish teachers other than a random placard and online comment. What Americans DO object to are unions using their enormous political influence to benefit their members while throwing kids under the bus - two great examples are the impossibility of firing even the most horrific teachers and doing layoffs purely by seniority. Checker Finn has it exactly right:
Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, said the decline in teachers' status traced to the success of unions in paying teachers and granting job security based on their years of service, not ability.
"They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn't individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear," Mr. Finn said.
And why did the author quote the only young teacher in America who thinks it's fair that he's being laid off because he lacks seniority rather than doing it based on which teachers are best for kids? He could have easily quoted one of the Educators 4 Excellence teachers, for example:
Last month Mr. Tougher was notified that because of his lack of seniority, he will be laid off, or "excessed," this year under the state's proposed cuts to school aid. A union activist, he believes seniority-based layoffs are fair.
"The seniority part, I get that," said Mr. Tougher, who is single. "While it would be a bummer if I were excessed for next year, that's just how things go sometimes."
But the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is questioning the legality of Walker's proposal to fund the program through the Department of Administration.
Walker has proposed spending $600,000 in each of the next two years to implement recommendations of a new task force appointed by Walker that would develop a third-grade reading test. Walker noted Wisconsin's performance on a national fourth-grade reading exam has fallen from third out of 39 states in 1994 to 30th out of 50 states in 2009.
"From kindergarten to third grade, our kids learn to read, and then from third grade on, they use reading to learn," Walker said in his budget address. "We need to make sure every child can read as they move on from third grade."
Alex Stavros, a second-year student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, had been pitching an eco-tourism luxury resort idea to potential investors for months, but wasn't getting any bites.
He noticed that investors lost interest after the first few minutes of his presentation, and were slow to reply to emails. So Mr. Stavros enlisted the help of one of Stanford's writing coaches for six weeks to help streamline his pitch. After the instruction, his pitch was whittled down to 64 words from 113, and he dropped three unnecessary bullet points.
"During my consulting career, each slide was a quantitative data dump with numbers and graphs, which I thought proved I had done the work," he says. "Now, my presentations are simpler, but more effective."
In his 35 years as a high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia, Thom Williams often encouraged his students to splash their most creative thoughts on the walls of his classroom.
Hundreds of students embraced his invitation, covering those painted cinderblocks with original art, quotes from favorite books, and deep thoughts born from teenaged angst.
"I looked to those walls for inspiration," says 18-year-old Lauren Silvestri, a student of Mr. Williams's at Marple Newtown High School in Newtown Square, Pa. Before graduating last year, she signed her name and a quote she loves. "It felt good to know I'd come back someday and my words on the wall would be there."
Her words won't remain for long, however. Mr. Williams died of cancer in December at age 63, and now the school is being renovated. That classroom's walls are set to be demolished or painted over. "Thom was a free spirit who encouraged his students to be free spirits," says Raymond McFall, the school's principal. Still, "I can't have everybody painting on the walls of the school."
The Coalition Government brought a big shift in ICT policy for education. From a position of active strategies, streams of guidance, heavy investment in connectivity, research and equipment, to a touch so light as to be barely perceptible.
The recent white paper, "The Importance of Teaching", emphasises standards for frontline teaching, with ideas about what the curriculum might contain, but scant reference to how they might teach, or with what resources. ICT has one mention - in relation to procurement. This is no oversight. Why the big change? And a recurrent fear among those consulted is worrying - they simply don't fully understand the importance of ICT.
A set of three simple questions were put to a number of leading figures involved in ICT for learning (the full set of questions and answers can be downloaded here) and three to schools minister Nick Gibb MP. While the Department for Education emphasised schools' new freedoms (see below), the other responses raised a range of worries.
William F. Buckley Jr., my political opposite, once denounced the growing popularity of CD-ROM's in student research. Shouldn't young people learn from real books?
I disagreed. Why not instead digitize a huge number of books and encourage the spread of book-friendly tablet computers with color screens and multimedia capabilities? (Decades later, we have a version of that in the iPad.) Buckley loved my proposal ("inspiring") and came out in the 1990s with two syndicated columns backing the vision. As a harpsichord-playing Yalie famous for political and cultural conservatism and cherishing archaic words, Buckley was hardly a populist in most respects. But he fervently agreed with me that a national digital library should be universal and offer popular content--both books and multimedia. The library should serve not just the needs of academics, researchers, and lovers of high culture.
While hundreds of protesters were forced to stay outside, 15 third-graders were admitted into the Capitol on Wednesday to complete their mission: Find out what democracy looks like.
"We're not here to protest. We're here to observe what other people are doing," explained Suzanne Downey, a third-grader at Madison's Lincoln Elementary who was part of the class field trip.
Accompanied by their teachers and chaperones, the students explored the Capitol's ground floor, mingled with the remaining die-hard protesters, talked to police and "collected data" on what they saw and heard.
"We thought it would be best for them to see for themselves what was going on," said Korinna McGowan, a student teacher at Lincoln. "We want to provide them with a real-life example and a real-life experience."
With that question out of the way, we'll take a look at the thornier question of how those five states' test scores stack up nationally, and against Wisconsin in particular.
On Feb. 20, 2011, Angus Johnston, an adjunct assistant professor at the City University of New York, published a comprehensive analysis of this question on his blog. He published links to a chart that appears to have been the inspiration for the tweets and Facebook postings. It offers a state-by-state analysis of scores on the SAT and the ACT, the two leading college-admissions tests, assembled by University of Missouri law professor Douglas O. Linder.
Johnston is critical of Linder's methodology for a variety of reasons, which he explains in more detail here. But without even taking those concerns into account, we find the statistics unreliable. They were published in 1999, meaning that the statistics themselves are likely more than a dozen years old -- far too old to be presumed valid in 2011.
Fortunately, it's possible to obtain state-by-state rankings for the SAT and ACT of a more recent vintage. Here's a table of the relevant states:
The National Governors Association concluded its 3-day winter meeting today with an address by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Governors from across the country gathered to discuss issues facing states, including job creation and providing education that prepares workers to compete in a global market.
Today's closing session focused on "Preparing to Succeed in a Global Economy." Gates talked about the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve education and how education is imperative to remaining competitive in a global economy.
This morning, the Governors were at the White House to meet with President Obama. He discussed with them the ongoing state and federal budget situation as well as the implementation of the health care law. In remarks, the President said that he is open to new ideas on how to lower the cost of health care and the burden on the states, but the quality of care cannot suffer.
Gates notes that US per pupil spending has doubled in the past 20 years and yet the outcomes have not changed that much. Gates advocates "flipping these curves", essentially spending the same and doing much more.
Gates also noted the decline in the amount of time teachers spend teaching (adult to children) accompanied by an increase in adult staffing levels over the past 20 years.
But America shouldn't compete on the basis of cheap labor: we are not nor should we try to be the Walmart of Work. So the first question becomes how do we compete in ways that don't involve endlessly ratcheting down wages and benefits? And the second, related question is how can we generate enough demand for American workers so that market forces drive incomes up from year to year and decade to decade?
The key to success is obvious: we need to continue to raise productivity throughout the economy. If productivity goes up quickly enough, wages can rise here even if they are falling elsewhere. This is getting harder; productivity is both easier to measure and to raise in manufacturing than in services. But substituting capital and technology for human sweat has to be a large part of what we do.
To raise productivity significantly, and especially to do it in ways that give us some long term advantages, we are going to have to do more about productivity in services. In particular we are going to have to look at health, government, education and the legal industry. Health care accounts for 18% of our GDP; education for 7%, and government spending (federal, state and local) accounts for 40%. (Because a lot of government spending goes to health and education, the total from these sectors is closer to 45% of GDP than 65%.)
My mom once asked me about the first steps I would hypothetically take to make a "better school." I don't claim to be an education expert, but I do have personal opinions about the ideal school -- one I'd like to go to. Among many other things, I said that I would change school starting times, improve cafeteria lunches, and bring back recess. These would be good first steps because they help a lot of students a little bit. And they can have wide-reaching impacts.
Starting Times
Studies have repeatedly shown that everyone, especially children with developing brains, need a good amount of high-quality sleep. It's difficult to get when you have to worry about waking up at 7 in the morning to go to school. Not everyone is a morning lark, and by starting school so early, not only students but also educators have to stave off yawns throughout the day.
I was at a conference where a well-respected sleep researcher, Dr. James Maas, revealed that adolescent sleep cycles tend to begin at 3 a.m. and end at 11 a.m. Yet we're starting school at 7 or 7:30 a.m. While I wouldn't quite change school start times to 11 a.m. (since we have to consider parents who have to go to work), I think it would be reasonable to move them to 8:45 AM or after. Then hypothetically a teenager could go to bed at 12 a.m. (as many often do), wake up at 8, shower and eat breakfast, and go to school with eight rather than five or six hours of sleep.
Lunch
Another step: improve cafeteria lunches. Put a cap on the amount of sodium, fat, and calorie content allowed in each lunch. Mandate nonfat or 1 to 2 percent milk (and in smaller containers -- who really drinks that much milk?) instead of whole milk. Get rid of chocolate milk, soft drinks, and vending machines with unhealthy items. Require a certain percentage of food served be organic and/or local, and have smaller portions to help minimize cost (we all know how much food gets dumped out). Have the school's cooking classes (or maybe the entire student body) help make lunch on certain days.
A bigger step: I think it would be a good idea to have randomly assigned seating during lunch. This might be controversial among students, but the social division that occurs when students simply pick out where they want to sit can be hurtful and exclusive to students new to the school or children with difficulty making friends. Also, it seems that teachers rarely eat lunch and converse with the students. I've learned a lot from being able to have conversations with adults. So, teachers would be required to eat lunch with the students -- at least on certain days -- (and really, if they really can't stand students to the extent that they can't eat with them, should they be teaching?)
Recess
While making nutritious school lunches would be an excellent way to start combating childhood obesity, bringing back recess, at all grade levels, could do even more (as well as markedly increasing cognitive ability). In middle and high school you might have a somewhat more organized approach (depending on students, because it isn't hard to envision students simply standing around and talking to each other instead of exercising.
Perhaps instead of a dreaded required class one semester of junior high, physical education could become a fun, daily 15 to 20 minute class -- where healthy behaviors, like calisthenics, frequent exercise, jogging, and hiking, would be modeled every day. Students could get involved actively in the "curriculum," by submitting their favorite exercise activities and voting on which new things to try.
"Big" Changes
I want to talk about "big" changes I would make in education (if I were in a position of incredible power!) -- multiple, age-independent, subject-based grade levels; online learning; and authority hierarchy in school.
Age-Independent Grades
I took two electives recently at Redmond Junior High. Everyone asked what grade I was in. It would go something like this:
"Adora, what grade are you in?"
"Ninth grade."
They look incredulously at my apparently seventh-grade style of dress (i.e., sweaters and shirts vs. tank tops and jackets) and say, "You're in ninth grade?"
"Yeah," I nod quickly, and explain, "I skipped a grade."
[Actually, it's feasible that I skipped two grades, since 12-year-olds are often put in seventh grade (depending on when your birthday is) but usually I say I just skipped one, since I'm now thirteen.]
One's grade in school decides what you'll learn and the level at which you'll learn it. It decides when you'll graduate from high school and even the friends you'll make (most of your friends are probably in your grade or close to it). My question is why your age, not your aptitude, should determine your grade -- and why grade covers all subjects, when people have varying degrees of ability and interest across subjects. (Yes, there's a reason kids are always asked, "What's your favorite subject?")
I am at a loss as to the benefits of putting a group of people of approximately the same age -- but of varying aptitudes -- into one room where they will all learn the same thing. The quicker students will sit bored while the teacher re-explains a concept they already know from their voracious reading, while the slower students will be confused and left out by the rapid pace at which everyone else seems to be progressing.
My parents homeschooled my sister and me for many years. Why? Because the local school insisted that I, being three, should go to preschool, and my sister, being five, should go to kindergarten. The problem? You learn your alphabet in preschool, and I was already reading chapter books. At the same time, however, I was not so far along with math and science. In other words, I was not "advanced" in everything. Yet many gifted and talented programs try to put students into all-around advanced classes.
Wouldn't it make more sense to be able to take some kind of test (oral, written, multiple choice, or informal discussion with a counselor) to determine what level you would be? Maybe then I could have taken a test which would have allowed me to learn at second grade reading and history level, and kindergarten or first-grade math and science.
To me, this approach makes far more sense than sorting students into grades based on when your birthday is. Would you ever tell a son or daughter, little brother or sister, "You weren't born before September 1st, so I'm not going to help you learn your alphabet"? Yet that is what our school system does every year.
Placement tests to sort students into levels would put students with a larger knowledge base into higher grades, but a large knowledge base doesn't necessarily mean a love of learning. I'd propose that honors/gifted status would then be determined by a student's desire to learn and exhibition of independent learning traits (i.e., reading a lot outside of school, tracking current events, etc.). For instance, if you're a 10-year-old who's been advanced to seventh-grade level mathematics, you'd be placed in the honors math class. The material covered would be the same as the seventh-grade level math (because honors classes would no longer have to serve only as a means of providing harder material -- you'd be placed in a higher grade if you had that large knowledge base), but there would be more discussion, extracurricular activity, etc.
I personally think that there is no compelling benefit to having an age-based grade system. It could be argued that some poor little advanced 3-year-old, taking language arts classes with 8-year-olds, will feel different and lonely--but 10 years ago, you would have found 3-year-old Adora Svitak taking classes at Renton's H.O.M.E. Program (a public program offering classes for homeschooled children)... with 6, 7, and 8-year-olds, among others -- and feeling fine. Diversity should be more than a buzz phrase. If students are prepared to make friends with and learn from those younger (or older) than them, we have made true progress in embracing diversity.
Authority Hierarchy in School
I definitely think that students need to get involved in decision-making on a deeper level, beyond simply being on an associated student government or student council. At the TEDx conference I organized last year, TEDxRedmond, several speakers (all of whom were under 18), spoke movingly on their opinions about education and certain ways their schools had supported and/or failed them.
In many countries, schools are preparing students to participate in a democratic environment; yet schools themselves tend to be extremely autocratic, with all high-level decisions being made by adults. Let students have a voice -- use online technology to have students give constructive feedback to their teachers and school administrators. Implement student suggestions. Put students on school district boards. Allow students to help form curriculum and get their ideas on which assignments work best for them. Hold regular meetings where students are invited to speak to their school officials.
Online Learning
Every school district should have an online learning framework, so that "blended learning" (partially online, partially in-person) can be an option for students. Students could read more of the fact-based lesson material online, so that when they came to class in-person, time could be used on higher-order thinking skills like experiments, projects, and the like. A lot of excellent learning takes place when students are face-to-face with each other and a teacher, yet there are situations where students may not always be able to make it to class. Should students not be able to continue doing any of their work simply because of a school flu epidemic, school staff on strike, snow days, or absences?
Other obvious benefits of incorporating online learning:
Teachers could post assignments, students could submit responses, and teachers could grade them, all online, without worrying about endless stacks of paper.
Students could keep up with what was going on in class and see instant grade updates.
Teachers could post multiple-choice tests, which can be easily computer-graded, online, and save themselves from the tedious work of checking multiple choice answers.
Students could review materials from past lessons before a test.
Teachers could easily post links and resources online for students to view.
Parents could keep updated on what was happening in class.
By using tools like Elluminate, Skype, GoToMeeting, chat, Google Voice, etc., teachers could easily stay in touch with students (particularly when students had questions).
As a student at an online public high school, I see my teachers using many of these tools. Many of my teachers have Google Voice as well as embeddable chat tools, so we can quickly get in contact.
Of course, all these changes, big and small, will cost money. Where will that come from? By shifting more content online, we could cut some of the spending that would go toward giant reams of paper and industrial-size printers and copiers. Maybe we could levy a tax on soft drink and junk food purchases, to pay for healthier school lunches. (We could call it "Buy a Twinkie for Yourself, Give a Whole Wheat Sandwich to a Student!")
Finally, students should take international studies classes, since it's often shocking how little Americans know about other countries. Let's do a pop quiz. I bet most Canadians can name our president. Can you name the prime minister of Canada? It's rare to find someone who hasn't heard of "California" or "New York" before. Can you name a single state of India? It's easy enough for most people to find the U.S. on a map. Can you find New Zealand, recently affected by a devastating earthquake? Or Afghanistan, where we're currently at war?
I know this post is quite long, and because of the extreme municipal-level management of schools, many of these changes are seemingly impossible. In the coming days and years, I'm hoping we can work together to create a better school -- not just for today's kids, but for tomorrow's.
Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it.
The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions.
At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him.
"You know this stuff better than I do!" he said. "Stop asking me questions!"
DiMaggio was struck dumb.
"I definitely didn't feel like I knew what was going on at all," he remembers. "Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what's going on or everything falls apart."
DiMaggio's question concerned an essay titled, "What's your goal in life?" The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds.
IN 1975, when New York City teetered toward bankruptcy, Hugh Carey, then the governor of the state of New York, convinced the teachers' union to invest a significant amount of its pension funds in bail-out bonds. He also persuaded District Council 37 to shelve pay increases for its municipal workers. The unions played a crucial role in saving the city and probably the state with it. Thirty-five years later, during his gubernatorial campaign, Andrew Cuomo gave copies of "The Man Who Saved New York", an account of Mr Carey's role in the crisis, to labour leaders. Seymour Lachman, the book's co-author, reckons that, like Mr Carey, Mr Cuomo wants and needs the unions' help in surviving the current crisis.
Facing a $10 billion deficit, Mr Cuomo campaigned on pension reform, making it clear he was going to target public-sector unions and sounding more like his Republican neighbour across the Hudson, Chris Christie, than a Democrat. Mr Christie stirred up a lot of headlines when he took on the unions, most recently calling them greedy, selfish and self-interested. Mr Cuomo is less vitriolic, but no less adamant that he wants the unions to do their part. During his budget address on February 1st, in which he declared the state to be "functionally bankrupt", he called on the state's public-sector unions to make $450m in concessions. He threatened, as a "last resort", to lay off up to 9,800 state workers to get the savings needed.
Yet this year, when Vern Williams looked at the Jefferson application, he felt not the usual urge to get his kids in, but a dull depression. On the first page of Jefferson's letter to teachers writing recommendations, in boldface type, was the school board's new focus: It wanted to prepare "future leaders in mathematics, science, and technology to address future complex societal and ethical issues." It sought diversity, "broadly defined to include a wide variety of factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), geography, poverty, prior school and cultural experiences, and other unique skills and experiences." The same language was on the last page of the application.
"This is just one example of why I have lost all faith in the TJ admissions process," Williams said. "In fact, I'm pretty embarrassed that the process seems no more effective than flipping coins."
When Judy Smith was looking for someone to play the central role of stage manager in "Our Town," the classic Thornton Wilder play about life in small-town America, she wasn't expecting to cast a boy with Asperger's syndrome.
Yet when 14-year-old Clayton Mortl auditioned more than six weeks ago, Smith said she experienced a director's "quintessential moment." He was perfect for the role.
Legendary actors like Paul Newman have brought powerful performances to the play - a staple of Broadway, community theater and classrooms since its 1938 debut, said Smith, the performing arts center manager and theater arts adviser at New Berlin West Middle / High School.
But when the 18-member middle school cast takes the stage Thursday, at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., Clay's performance may be legendary in its own right.
Though everyone is different, people with Asperger's - an autism spectrum disorder - have impaired ability to socially interact and communicate nonverbally. Their speech may sound different because of inflection or abnormal repetition. Body movements may not seem age appropriate. Interests may be narrowly focused to the extent that common interests aren't shared.
Labor bills and union protesters drew most of the attention at the Indiana Statehouse last week, as Democrats in the House of Representatives walked out and headed to Illinois to block Republicans from conducting business.
But the other half of the stalemate is over wide-ranging education reform that could change where Indiana children go to school, how their teachers are evaluated, and the formula for funding the system that uses about half of Hoosiers' state tax dollars.
Democrats say Republicans are trying to dismantle public education. Republicans say Democrats are just protecting teachers unions.
The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyere - lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound together by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.
Downstairs, a flyer by the doorman's desk had greeted them with a provocative question: "Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?" Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.
"Middle-class families need options too," she said.
But Moskowitz is trying to expand her chain into a whole new precinct of the city, the relatively well-off Upper West Side. And outside the parties she has organized to drum up interest, the reaction has been anything but warm from the neighborhood's stridently anti-charter political establishment.
IF our state Legislature takes no action this session, Washington state will drop its new, improved math standards for an untested experiment: Common Core "national" standards that have never been used in the classroom and for which assessments have yet to be developed.
And there is a high price tag for such a switch, an expense our state can ill afford. Surprisingly, one of the most profound changes in U.S. education in decades has been virtually uncovered by the national media.
Until two years ago, our state had some of the worst math standards in the country, rated "F" by the Fordham Foundation, and lacking many of the essentials found in standards used by the highest-performing nations. That all changed in 2008, when under the impetus of the state Legislature, a new set of standards, based on world-class math requirements, was adopted.
Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils "will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history". Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and "evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties".
Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards--for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina's example. "Twenty-first century skills" may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.
This is a boom time for parental choice in education. Frankly, that's pretty scary to me.
I'm not talking about the school voucher program or charter schools, or other things like that.
I'm talking about the choices parents make in how they raise their children - how they can do (or not do) things that maximize the chances of their children becoming well-educated, well-balanced, constructive adults.
Since, say, the 1960s, expectations have grown for schools to take care of an increasing range of children's needs. That goes for academics, of course, but also for social development, recreation, mentoring and, in many cases, providing nutrition, clothing and some basics of health care. That's especially true for schools serving low-income kids, but you'd be surprised how often it is true in all schools.
I believe that one of the things we are seeing in the continuing chaos in Madison is that the tide is cresting for schools to play such roles. Teachers and staff members are simply going to be unable to do some of the things they've done to make up for what parents aren't doing.
It's not only Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who are challenging unions. When it comes to teachers unions, increasingly it's Democrats like Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the public school system in Washington, D.C.
Rhee led the school district for almost three years. While she was there, she tied pay increases to merit rather than tenure and fired hundreds of teachers who she said were underperforming.
Those moves angered teachers unions across the country and made Rhee one of the most controversial figures in education reform. Now, she's heading up an education advocacy group based out of Sacramento, Calif., called StudentsFirst. With it, she tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz, she hopes to create a powerful lobby to push for education reform.
After a morning of handling knotty words, Kira Zimmerman seemed almost stunned when asked to spell "peril" to win the All-City Spelling Bee on Saturday.
The defending champion, Vishal Narayanaswamy, had just narrowly missed on "receptacle," which Zimmerman then spelled correctly, leaving her the final, five-letter challenge.
She asked the Bee's pronouncer, Barry Adams, to repeat the word, paused almost like she suspected a trick, and then said, "Ohh, peril ... p-e-r-i-l" and won the hefty traveling trophy for her school and the honor of representing Madison in the Badger State Spelling Bee on March 26 at Edgewood College.
As the Hamilton Middle School eighth-grader posed for pictures, her first thought was of getting a doughnut her father, David Zimmerman, had promised during a break if she won. Then she talked about winning and moving to the state championship.
Let's face it: Teachers union president John Matthews decides when to open and when to close Madison schools; the superintendent can't even get a court order to stop him. East High teachers marched half the student body up East Washington Avenue Tuesday last week. Indoctrination, anyone?
This Tuesday, those students began their first day back in class with the rhyming cadences of professional protester Jesse Jackson, fresh from exhorting unionists at the Capitol, blaring over the school's loudspeakers. Indoctrination, anyone?
Madison Teachers Inc. has been behind every local referendum to blow apart spending restraints. Resist, as did elected school board member Ruth Robarts, and Matthews will brand you "Public Enemy Number One."
When then-school board member Juan Jose Lopez would not feed out of the union's hand, Matthews sent picketers to his place of business, which happened to be Briarpatch, a haven for troubled kids. Cross that line, kid!
The teachers union is the playground bully of state government. Wisconsin Education Association Council spent $1.5 million lobbying the Legislature in 2009, more than any other entity and three times the amount spent by WMC, the business lobby.
Under Gov. Doyle, teachers were allowed to blow apart measures to restrain spending and legislate the union message into the curriculum. Student test scores could be used to determine teacher pay -- but only if the unions agreed.
The most liberal president since FDR came to a school in Madison to announce "Race to the Top" grants for education reform. How many millions of dollars did we lose when the statewide teachers union sandbagged the state's application?
You've heard this a million (10 to the power of 6) times, but it is frightening. In the 2009 (41 X 49) Program for International Student Assessment US 15-year-olds ranked 25th (4! + 1) among 34 (square root of 1156) countries in math falling behind Canada, New Zealand, Finland, and Asian countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
To counter this sad trend, stop by The Math Salon at Mosaic Coffeehouse on February 28th from 4-6 PM:
I have not seen the Madison business community step up to the plate like this since getting Monona Terrace built 20 years ago.
CUNA Mutual Foundation is backing Kaleem Caire's proposal for a Madison Prep charter school. Steve Goldberg, president of the CUNA Foundation, made that announcement this Saturday morning. The occasion was a forum held at CUNA to rally support for the project. CUNA's support will take the form of in-kind contributions, Goldberg said.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men would open in August 2012 -- if the Madison school board agrees. School board president Maya Cole told me that she knows there is one vote opposed. That would be Marj Passman, a Madison teachers union-first absolutist.
The school board is scheduled to decide at its meeting on March 28. Mark that date on your calendars.
CUNA is a much-respected corporate citizen. We'll see if that is enough to overcome the teachers union, which opposes Madison Prep because the charter school would be non-union.
Responding to criticism that tenure gives even poor teachers a job for life, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced a plan Thursday to overhaul how teachers are evaluated and dismissed.
It would give tenured teachers who are rated unsatisfactory by their principals a maximum of one school year to improve. If they did not, they could be fired within 100 days.
Teacher evaluations, long an obscure detail in an educator's career, have moved front and center as school systems try to identify which teachers are best at improving student achievement, and to remove ineffective ones.
The issue has erupted recently, with many districts anticipating layoffs because of slashed budgets. Mayors including Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Cory A. Booker of Newark have attacked seniority laws, which require that teacher dismissals be based on length of experience rather than on competency.
Ms. Weingarten has sought to play a major role in changing evaluations and tenure, lest the issue be used against unions to strip their influence over work life in schools -- just as Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Ohio are trying to do this week.
The results of the PISA survey (http://www.jyu.fi/ktl/pisa/) have brought about satisfaction and pride in Finland. Newspapers and media have advertised that Finnish compulsory school leavers are top experts in mathematics.
However, mathematics teachers in universities and polytechnics are worried, as in fact the mathematical knowledge of new students has declined dramatically. As an example of this one could take the extensive TIMSS 1999 survey, in which Finnish students were below the average in geometry and algebra. As another example, in order not to fail an unreasonably large amount of students in the matriculation exams, recently the board has been forced to lower the cut-off point alarmingly. Some years, 6 points out of 60 have been enough for passing.
This conflict can be explained by pointing out that the PISA survey measured only everyday mathematical knowledge, something which could be - and in the English version of the survey report explicitly is - called "mathematical literacy"; the kind of mathematics which is needed in high-school or vocational studies was not part of the survey. No doubt, everyday mathematical skills are valuable, but by no means enough.
Only 18 percent of the city's public school fourth graders and 13 percent of its eighth graders demonstrated proficiency on the most recent national science exams, far below state and national achievement levels, according to results released Thursday.
Alan J. Friedman, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, the bipartisan group that oversees the tests, called the city's results "a big disappointment," particularly because New York has a number of cultural organizations devoted to science, like the Museum of Natural History and the New York Hall of Science in Queens, which he directed for 22 years.
The exam was given in 2009 to a sampling of 4,300 fourth and eighth graders in the city, or about 3 percent of students in those grades. Nationwide, 33 percent of fourth graders and 29 percent of eighth graders showed proficiency, and in New York State, those numbers were 30 and 31, respectively.
Here are the fiscal facts. Unlike most employees, few Wisconsin teachers have to contribute more than marginally to their retirement and health care costs. My colleague Bob Costrell, who has done substantial work in Milwaukee, calculates that the city's public school teachers get a remarkable package of benefits equal to 74% of salary, roughly double the normal benefits for workers calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics but in line with other Wisconsin teachers.
And that's not all. By collective bargaining agreement, the Wisconsin Education Association Council has a lock on health insurance coverage for members, not necessarily a great service for teachers but a wonderful profit center for the union.
What explains this? As one who has served in government and taught public personnel management, the answers are three-fold, and in combination explain why allowing a broad scope for collective bargaining undermines transparency and, ultimately, democracy.
First, teachers unions play a big role in politics, meaning that, as Terry Moe writes in "Teacher Unions and School Board Elections" (published in a Brookings Institution book on school boards), "the fact that school boards are elected means that the teacher unions can actually participate in choosing - or even literally choose - the management they will be bargaining with."
In the California school districts Moe studies, unions fund candidates and mobilize voters in (low-turnout) school board elections and often recruit the candidates. Unions thus control both sides of the collective bargaining table. Surveys of school board members suggest that business interests, in contrast, have little power.
I have not seen comparable research on Wisconsin, but I suspect similar dynamics.
School administrators and teachers raised questions Wednesday about the potential costs of a proposal backed by Republican Gov. Susana Martinez to stop promoting public school students who lack basic skills in reading.
Legislation under consideration by the House Education Committee will stop third-graders from moving to the fourth grade if they aren't proficient in reading starting in the 2012-13 school year. A student could be held back one year and schools will be required to provide students with programs to improve their performance.
In testimony to the committee, educational groups suggested that school districts will need additional money for remedial and intensive instruction to help struggling students.
"We know that if we are going to do effective remediation, there are going to be costs associated with that," said Tom Sullivan of the New Mexico Coalition of School Administrators.
Protests sparked by a push from Wisconsin Republicans to gut collective bargaining for unions - in order to balance the state budget - continue to spread, with several state capitals witnessing vitriolic faceoffs between union protesters and tea party activists this week.
About 300 union protesters and about 100 tea party activists taunted one another in front of the gold-domed Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Wednesday, in a scene echoing similar standoffs earlier in the week in Columbus, Ohio; Des Moines, Iowa; and Denver, Colo.
Meanwhile, deadlock continues in Madison, Wis., ground zero of the debate over public-sector union benefits and their impact on deficit-burdened state coffers. Democratic senators there have decamped for Illinois in protest - and to thwart a quorum for a vote on the union-targeting legislation. A similar episode is playing out in Indiana, where the state legislature is also controlled by Republicans.
A resolution that could give the governor control over Utah education moved one step closer to becoming law Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the sponsor of another resolution that sought to amend the state constitution to make it clear that the state school board's control and supervision over education is "as provided by statute," said he will likely no longer push that measure.
The Senate voted 23-6 to give preliminary approval to SJR9, which seeks to amend the state constitution to place public and higher education under the governor's control. The Senate must now vote on the resolution one more time for it to advance to the House.
In order to take effect, SJR9 would ultimately have to pass the House and Senate by a two-thirds majority. The question would then be put to voters in the 2012 general election.
Advances in technology continue to change how adults view and interact with the world. Of course, those same advances are available to teachers and the youngsters who populate their classrooms.
These developments are leading to enormous challenges for teachers regarding the role digital devices can and should play in the learning process. For some educators, the view is that technology should only be utilized as a tool to help facilitate student understanding and mastery of the current curriculum. For other educators, technology is as fundamental to learning as reading and writing and therefore must become a separate segment of the school curriculum.
As law professors, we spend a substantial amount of time engaged in the activity of reviewing exams, papers, and other "evaluative devices" with the purpose of assigning our students grades. Personally, I estimate that I have spent over four thousand hours (almost six months of days and nights, or a year of long summer days) hunched over student work during my teaching career. It can be difficult not to consider student exams as a mere obstacle, a chore of the most unpleasant type to endure, and the worst part of our otherwise usually rewarding work as professors. Grading law school exams has been declared a "deadening intimacy with ignorance and mental fog" which saps a professor's pedagogical and scholarly energies.I It is a "terrible occupation," a "cloud," a task which we accomplish with less efficiency and more distaste as our teaching career advances.2 Professorial engagement with Blue Books, in which most law student exams continue to be written, is deemed tedious and boring, leading to a "corrosive negativity" regarding the intellectual abilities of our students as well as a destructive influence upon our own character.3
These days, it sure seems like a radical idea: asking teachers, rather than telling them, what's needed to improve their schools.
It's happening in Oakland, though. You can read more about the purpose and the early work of a largely teacher-led project, the Effective Teaching Task Force, here. The story ran over the weekend.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED: The task force makes a stop tomorrow (Wednesday) on its "Teachers Talking to Teachers" listening tour. This one is for high school and adult education teachers, and it takes place at 2 p.m. Wednesday in the gym of United for Success Academy (Calvin Simmons campus), 2101 35th Avenue. Another event, for pre-k through eighth-grade teachers, is scheduled on March 23, at the same time and place.
Want to represent your school at an Oakland teacher convention in Emeryville April 7-9? Delegate elections -- two for each school -- are scheduled to take place at faculty meetings the week of March 7-11.
Robots could one day help teach kids in classrooms, suggests research involving droids and toddlers in California.
A robot named RUBI has already shown that it can significantly improve how well infants learn words, and the latest version of the bot under development should also be able to wheel around classrooms, too.
The idea to develop RUBI came to Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, when he was in Japan for research involving robots and his kids were in a child care center.
"I thought, 'Let's bring robots to the child care center,' and the children got really scared. It was a really horrible experience," Movellan recalled. "But it showed that the robots really got their attention, and that if we got the experience right, it could be potentially very powerful at evoking the emotional responses we'd want."
Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44thIf you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.
As Mr Lemieux says, this doesn't show that collective bargaining makes school systems better. But it makes it pretty hard to argue the converse.
This presentation discusses the results of the DQC's sixth annual state analysis Data for Action 2010, a powerful policymaking tool to drive education leaders to use data in decision making.
In support of Pennsylvania's Senate Bill 1, which would provide taxpayer-funded vouchers to private schools, voucher evangelists have been citing a report by the Foundation for Educational Choice, "A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on How Vouchers Affect Public Schools." However, a review of the report by the National Education Policy Center finds no credible evidence that vouchers have improved student achievement.
Located at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Education Policy Center aims to provide high-quality information on education policy. Its review found that the "Win-Win" report, "based on a review of 17 studies, selectively reads the evidence in some of those studies, the majority of which were produced by voucher advocacy organizations.
"Moreover, the report can't decide whether or not to acknowledge the impact of factors other than vouchers on public schools. It attempts to show that public school gains were caused by the presence of vouchers alone, but then argues that the lack of overall gains for districts with vouchers should be ignored because too many other factors are at play." The review goes on to note that "existing research provides little reliable information about the competitive effects of vouchers, and this report does little to help answer the question."
The state of Michigan approved a plan for Detroit to close about half of its public schools and increase the average size of high-school classrooms to 60 students over the next four years to eliminate a $327 million deficit.
The plan was submitted in January by Robert Bobb, Detroit Public Schools' emergency financial manager, as a last-ditch scenario if the district couldn't find new revenue sources, which it hasn't so far. Final approval came after Mike Flanagan, the state superintendent of public instruction, cleared Mr. Bobb's initial plan with some new requirements, including that the district not file for bankruptcy protection during Mr. Bobb's remaining months in office.
The state approved the plan in a Feb. 8 letter, which the Detroit public-schools district released Monday.
Mr. Bobb said the deep cuts were necessary if the district hoped to be solvent again without additional state aid. But he said the strategy was ultimately ill-advised because it will likely drive even more students away, depriving the district of needed state funds, which Michigan apportions on the basis of enrollment.
Get out your library cards: Now you can wirelessly download electronic books from your local library using the Apple iPad or an Android tablet.
Last week, OverDrive Inc. released OverDrive Media Console for the iPad, a free app from Apple's App Store. With the app, you can now borrow eBooks for reading on the go with a tablet.
You can already borrow an eBook from a library using an eReader, including the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, but you'll need a PC and a USB cable for downloading and synching. Amazon's Kindle doesn't allow borrowing eBooks from libraries.
For the past week, I borrowed and wirelessly downloaded digital books onto tablets primarily using OverDrive, the largest distributor of eBooks for libraries. I tested the OverDrive Media Console for the iPad. I also used the Dell Streak 7 tablet to test the app on the Android operating system; this app also works on Android smartphones. An iPhone app is available.
The third edition of the work of the brilliant and cantankerous Englishman H. W. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, published in 1996, signaled the triumph of the descriptivist view of language--the view, that is, that the lexicographer's duty is merely to describe the language as it's used, not to make pronouncements about how it ought to be used. It also signaled the triumph of tedium over enjoyment, and of abstract truth over utility. Edited by the late R. W. Burchfield, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, as the third edition was titled, addressed all the significant questions about English grammar and usage and explained with sufficient clarity the ways in which those questions have been addressed in the past.
But it only gave unambiguous counsel if there were some practical reason for it, and then only in the mildest terms: "this use should probably be eschewed." If you wanted to know whether "their" may refer to singular antecedents, for example (If someone isn't doing their job, they should be fired), Burchfield told you that "the issue is unresolved, but it begins to look as if the use . . . is now passing unnoticed." Maybe the issue is "unresolved," one thought, but could you please resolve it and tell me whether I should write "they" or "he" or "he or she" and so avoid sounding like an ignoramus to an educated audience? For his part, Fowler--the original Fowler--had called this use of the plural pronoun a "mistake." He acknowledged rare instances of the use in Fielding and Thackeray, but suggested that "few good writers" could get away with it.
The keys to success lie beyond K-12 education. It is critical to ensure that the earliest learners - those birth to age 5 - come to school prepared for learning in a school setting and that college students not only enter college but also succeed.
The recommendations made in this report align with and support these values. In addition to initiatives already underway, the task force recommends the following priorities, as well as the complete recommendations found in the full report:
Reorganize the Early Childhood Development Authority; create a system of support, including parent education, for students at all levels of kindergarten readiness; and create common school readiness standards and instruments.
Include sufficient funding in the state budget to improve access to effective, high-quality preschool programs.
Require, beginning in 2012-2013, collaboration among state-funded preschool, Head Start, and qualified child care programs in order to access state funding.
Create family literacy programs dedicating new state resources to provide comprehensive family engagement in all schools, especially the Commonwealth's lowest achieving schools.
Raise the compulsory school age, effective in 2016, from 16 to 18 with state-funded supports for students at risk of dropping out.
Create an advisory council, the Advanced Credit Advisory Council, to recommend policies, legislation, and a comprehensive funding model for advanced secondary coursework, college credit during high school, and early graduation options for the 2012 General Assembly.
Establish a steering committee to develop a comprehensive statewide plan for implementing a new model of secondary career and technical education with an emphasis on innovation, integration of core academics, 21st-century skills, project-based learning, and the establishment of full-time CTE programs, for implementation in the 2012 General Assembly.
Implement policies to enhance and expand virtual and blended learning, including funding options to ensure equitable access to students across the Commonwealth.
Include funding in the state budget to expand programs in Kentucky to recruit high-quality teacher candidates, including those who may enter through alternative certification routes.
Ensure school districts incorporate a balance of technology-enhanced formative and summative assessments that measure student mastery of 21st-century skills.
Madison schools will open Tuesday for the first time in a week, but it won't be just any other school day.
Civil rights icon the Rev. Jesse Jackson will greet East High School students over the loudspeaker in the morning. Students have made posters in support of their teachers. And classrooms likely will be buzzing with discussion over the four-day teacher walkout prompted by Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to limit collective bargaining.
With that backdrop, district officials have been preparing principals and staff for what could be a dramatic day.
"We know that there's a lot of emotion here and we need to recognize that there's a lot of upset and upset in the parent community as well," Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said.
The daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.
But any similarity between 1946 and now ends there. The U.S. debt levels tumbled in the years after World War II, but today they are still climbing and even deep cuts in spending won't completely change that for several years.
As President Obama and Republicans squabble over whose programs to cut and which taxes to raise, slow growth and a rising tide of interest payments - largely beyond their control - are making the job of fixing the budget much harder than in the past. Statehouses and governors face similar challenges.
Financial crooks brought down the world's economy -- but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements -- whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth -- people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.
Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.
It is no coincidence that the night President Obama sat down for a lovely dinner with a dozen of America's richest executives in Silicon Valley this week, that protests in Wisconsin over budget cuts and union worker rights reached a fever pitch. Though the President paid lip service to the protesters, a well-heeled, well-funded voting bloc he will no doubt rely on heavily for the 2012 presidential race, he understood what mattered most -- to him and America.
Technology
Innovation
Globalization
Education -- as offered by highly competitive colleges and universities that have little to no monopoly power
Entrepreneurialism - unshackled from government regulations, free from unionized labor and unfettered by legacy depictions of work and economy and business
Politics may force President Obama to become more actively, more visibly involved in the events of Wisconsin, where public worker unions, essentially America's last remaining unions, fight for de facto guarantees of job security, lifetime healthcare, lifetime benefits, sanctioned limits on hours worked and on responsibilities blurred. But the President is acutely aware that, as protests in Egypt offered a glimpse into the future, protests in Madison, Wisconsinwere a reminder of America's past.
This is Tea Party Redux. The Union Strikes Back. Yet just as with the angry tea party protests from two years ago, the song remains the same. Large swaths of Americans, having been party to an unspoken agreement that they would have a guaranteed middle class life, filled with highly targeted government benefits -- which they repeatedy insisted they "earned" and which they knew could not survive should they be spread throughout the wider population -- so too is it with the government worker unions. Unlike the entirety of the US population, they have a unique sanctuary within the American economy. Just like those in the Tea Party voiced their angry over policies that diminished their unique standing, in America and the world, so too do the protests in Wisconsin reflect anger and fear over exactly the same concerns. Both groups, of course, argued, believed perhaps, that what was good for them was good for workers, good for the middle class, good for America.
Dawn of the dumbest data ... data-driven dementia... data: It keeps teachers busy. Take your pick. But these cats at my school really have to be stopped.
As you may suspect, we here at my school are "data-driven." That's right. There is no substitute for data. And the best thing about it, from an administrator's point of view, is that you don't have to worry about how long it takes teachers to collect the data or if it is really of any value in the first place. Just collect that data and tell everybody that you are collecting it and using it to make data-driven decisions ... for the kids. The rest, my friend, will fall into place. No worries.
More traditional neighborhood schools are looking to operate as charters because they can get huge increases in funding as well as flexibility in how they use it.
The latest example is El Camino Real High School, one of Los Angeles Unified School District's star schools.
Although conversions are holding steady at about 10 percent of new charters nationally, in California they're on the rise. Long a forerunner in the charter school movement, the Golden State saw a jump in the number of conversions from six in 2009 to 16 in 2010, according to the California Charter School Association.
It's a troubling pattern for school districts -- every student enrolled in a charter means a funding loss, and defections of their own schools and principals are a blow to district esteem.
When she was just 3, Teela Huff understood how to add numbers. By third grade, she was tutoring her peers.
"She can explain the problems to you without making you feel stupid," one of Teela's classmates wrote of her, according to her father, Tom.
But Teela's quick mind -- she is now a 10-year-old fifth grader but reads at a 12th-grade level -- meant her classes at Silver Oak Elementary in San Jose were often boring and frustrating. She finally enrolled in a program for gifted children, where students wrestled with things like mind-bending math riddles and thought-provoking questions like how to survive on a desert island. And she loved it.
Her new adventures in learning ended in September, however, when the Evergreen School District eliminated all programs for its 790 or so gifted children. The move was part of a statewide wave of cuts in a program known as Gifted and Talented Education.
Americans must be either very excited about the artificial intelligence that IBM has built into a new computer called "Watson" or very scared. This week, when Watson competed on ABC's Jeopardy against two of the best players in the quiz show's history, the network got its highest ratings in six years. Crammed full of data from reference books and trained to understand questions in regular human speech, Watson wiped its human rivals out, correctly answering questions on everything from who wrote the Études-Tableaux for piano (Sergei Rachmaninoff) to who designed the Emmanuel College chapel at Cambridge (Christopher Wren).
The feat has been compared to the 1997 victory of IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, over Garry Kasparov, the world's champion at the time. But for a computer to master language is a far more unsettling encroachment on the sanctum of uniquely human behaviours than superiority in a game played on an 8-by-8 grid. Outside the walls of IBM headquarters, Watson has provoked mostly anxiety - over the practical question of what jobs it will destroy, and the metaphysical question of whether talking machines will erode our sense of what it means to be human.
To some extent, this is a misunderstanding. Watson is not a smart machine that has shown its intelligence by winning at Jeopardy. It is a Jeopardy-playing machine which, after years of tinkering by dozens of IBM's top scientists, now works reasonably well. As big as a room, it combines a supercharged version of the grammar check on your word-processing software with a supercharged version of Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button.
What do we want in the schools our children attend? People have a lot more in common in answering that than you might think.
A warm, caring environment, one where teachers, staff, parents and especially children feel like they count.
Good teachers. Beyond all the debate about how to improve teacher quality, anyone who ever went to school knows there are people who are really good teachers and people who aren't, because we had them both. And we want our kids to have good ones.
Small classes, or at least ones of reasonable size. The research on class size paints a somewhat mixed picture of how important it really is. A top flight teacher with a few more kids in the class is better than someone who is not very good with fewer kids. That said, show me parents who want larger classes for their kids and I'll show you really rare parents.
Enriching programs. They come in a lot of different, very good forms, but in every case, these are programs in which children become good at reading and reasonably good at math. Students gain a grasp of science, social studies, history. They get exposure to music and art and physical education. They learn how to learn. Positive character traits and habits are built and reinforced. Students work hard but have fun, too.
Panoramas from Pro-union, Tea Party rallies at the Wisconsin Capitol
Click on the images above to view the full screen panoramas on mac/pc/iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Look for one or two more panoramas tomorrow.
I've posted a number of still images, here. Many Madison residents went about their weekend as always, including the ice fisherman captured in this scene (look closely for the eagle):
1. Intensify reading instruction in Kindergarten in order to ensure all No additional costs. Professional development provided by central students are proficient in oral reading and comprehension as office and building-based literacy staff must focus on Kindergarten. measured by valid and reliable assessments by 2011-2012. Instruction and assessment will be bench marked to ensure Kindergarten proficiency is at readinQ levels 3-7 {PLAA, 2009).
2. Fully implement Balanced Literacy in 2011-12 using clearly defined, Comprehensive Literacy Model (Linda Dorn), the MMSD Primary Literacy Notebook and the MMSD 3-5 Literacy Notebook.
a. Explore research-based reading curricula using the Board of Education Evaluation of Learning Materials Policy 3611 with particular focus on targeted and explicit instruction, to develop readers in Kindergarten.
b. Pilot the new reading curricula in volunteer schools during 2011-12.
c. Analyze Kindergarten reading proficiency scores from Kindergarten students in fully implemented Balanced Literacy schools and Kindergarten students in the volunteer schools piloting the new reading curricula incorporated into a
Balanced Literacy framework to inform next steps.
d. Continue pilot in volunteer schools in Grade 1 during 2012-13 and Grade 2 durino 2013-14. 2011-12 Budget Addition Request $250,000
3. Incorporate explicit reading instruction and literacy curricula into 6th grade instruction.
.....
3. Review previous Reading Recovery recommendations, with Additional Reading considerations to:
Place Reading Recovery Teachers in buildings as needed to (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).reflect the needs of 20% of our District's lowest performing first graders, regardless of what elementary school they may attend;
Analyze the other instructional assignments given to Reading Recovery teachers in order to maximize their expertise as highly skilled reading interventionists
Ensure standard case load for each Reading Recovery teacher at National Reading Recovery standards and guidelines (e.g. 8 students/year).
Place interventionists in buildings without Reading Recovery. Interventionists would receive professional development to lift the quality of interventions for students who need additional support in literacy.
Additional Reading Recovery and/or Interventionist FTE costs. 1 FTE-$79,915 (average rate when teacher is re-assigned). 1 new FTE-$61,180 (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).
On Tuesday, Feb. 15, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan convened hundreds of teachers'-union leaders and school-district leaders in Denver to discuss ways management and labor could work together better. Kumbaya!
Two days later, all hell broke loose in Madison, Wis. The flash point was Republican Governor Scott Walker's plan to address the state's budget gap by making public employees contribute more to health care coverage, coupled with a proposal to eliminate collective bargaining for most public employees -- including teachers. Democratic state legislators went into hiding to thwart a vote on the measure, and schools closed as thousands of teachers left their classrooms to descend on the state capital.
The two episodes vividly illustrate the hope -- and the reality -- of labor-management issues in education today. As Madison becomes ground zero for the debate over government spending and public-sector reform, some hard questions are getting lost in political theatrics and overwrought rhetoric. Here are questions Wisconsin's governor, labor leaders and President Obama should have good answers for but so far don't:
# Design and implement strategies to meet high expectations while providing the support necessary to maintain student engaegment. (RIGOR)
# Embrace the teaching and learning of the core academic skills that build on foundations, connect to real-world applications, and ensure success beyond the classroom. (RELEVANCE)
# Encourage individuals to be self-advocating and responsible by promoting a positive, safe and accepting environment. (RELATIONSHIPS)
# Act with integrity and honesty, with a strong sense of fairness and high expectations for the diginty of the individual, group and community. (RESPECT).
President Obama released his 2012 budget proposal earlier this week to a fanfare of predictable criticism from the right and a few cries from the left. In a budget that saw cuts to many cherished programs, one of the big winners was education - with an 11 percent boost in total funding. Within education spending, however, the popular charter school movement wound up as a slight loser - with proposed funding reduced to $372 million after a pledge of $490 million in last year's budget.
While some charter school advocates may wring their hands over the slight reduction in proposed funding, the rest of us should be asking whether charter schools have been adequately scrutinized as part of a "tough choices" budget.
"Yes, he has made us aware of threats to him and family members and we are looking into those, and we are aware of those, and we are doing what we can to provide protection," Nampa Police Deputy Chief Craig Kingsbury said.
On Saturday night, a man who identified himself as a teacher reportedly showed up at Luna's mother's home in Nampa in order to speak with her about the superintendent's contentious education reform plan. Luna happened to be at his mother's house at the time, Department of Education spokeswoman Melissa McGrath said.
"The man was very angry... the superintendent did feel threatened," she said. The man eventually left after Luna spoke to him for several minutes. Luna told the man it was an inappropriate place and time, and later filed a police report, McGrath said.
Presidents' Day 2011 is right around the corner, but George Washington would be dismayed by the findings of this new study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Reviewers evaluated state standards for U.S. history in grades K-12. What they found is discouraging: Twenty-eight states--a majority--deserve D or F grades for their academic standards in this key subject. The average grade across all states is a dismal D. Among the few bright spots, South Carolina earns a straight A for its standards and six other jurisdictions--Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and the District of Columbia--garner A-minuses. (The National Assessment's "framework" for U.S. history also fares well.) Read on to learn how your state scored.
Overview
Wisconsin's U.S. history standards, for all practical purposes, do not exist. Their sole content is a list of ten eras in American and Wisconsin history, followed by a few brief and vague directives to understand vast swaths of history and broad historical concepts. Determining an actual course's scope, sequence, and content rests entirely on the shoulders of local teachers and districts.
Goals and Organization
Wisconsin's social studies standards are divided among five strands: geography, history, political science and citizenship, economics, and behavioral sciences. Each strand consists of a "content standard"--a one-sentence statement of the strand's purpose--and a one- paragraph "rationale" justifying its importance. The history strand also includes short lists of ten chronological/thematic eras for Wisconsin, U.S. history, and world history. The ten listed eras of U.S. history are said to apply to grades 5-12, and those for Wisconsin history to grades 4-12.
New Jersey's acting education commissioner on Wednesday unveiled a plan to overhaul the way teachers are evaluated -- and the consequences of poor evaluations.
Under the concept unveiled by Christopher Cerf, many key decisions about teachers -- including whether they receive lifetime tenure protections, how big their raises are and which ones are laid off when budgets are slashed -- would be based largely on how much their students progress.
Cerf said making the changes are essential to improving schools in New Jersey, where the public education system by many measures is among the best in the nation -- but with a serious caveat. Schools in the state's impoverished cities generally perform poorly -- and at great expense.
Seattle Public high schools have a wide variety of really good science classes. They range from the BioTech program at Ballard (celebrating its 10th year in 2011) to Marine Science to Forensics and many others. Here is a link to the SPS page on this issue.
The district is now moving onto science curriculum alignment as part of their overall alignment process. I do understand the idea of alignment so that students who move from school to school (and it happens more than you might think) will find the same level of instruction. This is fine.
The issue is that the district wants to make 4 science classes mandatory for graduation. Those classes are physical science, biology, chemistry and physics.
What that means is that most of the other science classes, unless they get certified as a substitute for one of the four, will be electives (AP and IB science courses will also count as substitutes). With so many other subject requirements for graduation, it is unlikely that most of the elective science classes would survive. It would be a big loss.
One of the most contentious budget debates this year may be over something the president did not include in his 2012 spending plan -- school vouchers. Now more often called "scholarships," vouchers have been debated for decades, but support for these initiatives is on the rise.'
Let's start with D.C. After years of discussion, Congress established a plan in 2004 to give 1,700 students in Washington a voucher of up to $7,500 to attend private and religious schools in the city as alternatives to the frequently lousy neighborhood schools. The program was controversial from the start -- it was the first federal funding for vouchers in three decades. But in 2009, under intense pressure from the teachers unions, Congress and the Administration began to dismantle the program and no new students are participating today. New Speaker of the House John Boehner says restoring the program is a top priority.
A lot of people have a lot to say about the union protests in Wisconsin and the governor's plan to curtail collective bargaining for teachers. Those on the ground are best qualified to hash out the big issues, so I'll just add three morsels to the conversation.
1) Sickouts. The Madison school district and others were closed yesterday due to teacher sickouts. There has been some debate about whether this constitutes an illegal strike, but for a protest that centers on public employee collective bargaining, it's ironic that whatever you want to call it, yesterday's protest was a violation of the Madison teachers' collective bargaining agreement.
Madison teachers are allowed five personal leave days per year, but are required by contract to notify the principal at least three working days in advance. Since the teachers themselves didn't have that much notice of the protest, they had to use sick leave. The contract spells out in exacting detail the purposes for which sick leave can be used. Union rallies are not among them.
Some may consider the protest a matter of principle or civil disobedience, That's all well and good. But remember, the only reason to call in sick is so you still get paid for the day. So go ahead and yell. Just remember who's paying for the microphone.
The Madison contract also contains this provision:
Therefore, MTI agrees that there will not be any strikes, work stoppages or slow downs during the life of this Agreement, i.e., for the period commencing July 1, 2009 and ending June 30, 2011. Upon the notification of the President and Executive Director of MTI by the President of the Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District of any unauthorized concerted activity, as noted above, MTI shall notify those in the collective bargaining unit that it does not endorse such activity. Having given such notification, MTI shall be freed of all liability in relation thereto.
Whatever you call it, it was certainly an "unauthorized concerted activity."
Sometimes a technology comes along that is so great it seems almost unjust to former generations. Aviation. The personal computer. The polio vaccine.
One gets the same feeling today when considering a new app out for iPhone and Android. Quick Cite, a 99-cent app, automates the task of putting together a bibliography--that arduous list of books, articles, and other sources consulted that goes at the end of a master's thesis of PhD dissertation. The first thought you have is, "How much time scholars will henceforth save!" The next thought you have is, "Anyone who got a PhD before the year 2011 was a poor sucker."
The app works by using the smartphone's camera to scan the barcode on the back of a book. Then it emails you a citation formatted to fit one of four common bibliographic styles: APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE. The app was one of seven developed over seven sleepless days by seven undergraduates at the University of Waterloo. Thus they called the week-long experiment in coding creativity and class-cutting "7Cubed," and even made a little video about it.
Douglas County, a swath of subdivisions just south of here that is one of the nation's wealthiest, is something of a public school paradise.
The K-12 district, with 60,000 students, boasts high test scores and a strong graduation rate. Surveys show that 90% of its parents are satisfied with their children's schools.
But a new, conservative school board is exploring a voucher system to give parents -- regardless of income -- taxpayer money to pay for their children to attend private schools that agree to abide by district regulations. If it's implemented, parents could receive more than $4,000 per child.
The proposal's supporters argue that competition can only improve already-high-performing schools.
Colorado's Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the "wealthy Denver suburbs".
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad unveiled on Tuesday his new preschool program designed to award scholarships to low-income families, setting aside $43.6 million in state appropriations.
"By providing all Iowa children the opportunity to attend preschool, we will reduce the need for special-education services and for children to repeat grades," Branstad said in a press release.
The Iowa Preschool Scholarship eliminates universal preschool for 4-year-olds, but it aims to provide $3,000 scholarships to eligible 4-year-olds who attend at least 10 hours of preschool a week beginning in the 2011-12 school year.
Under the annual scholarship, families pay costs on a sliding scale depending on federal poverty guidelines up to 300 percent poverty. The plan means higher income families to pay full tuition.
A speech which was seen by many in the US as a strong step in the right direction or even as not strong enough was in fact a gift to the Chinese government.
Before Hillary Clinton's speech, for many Chinese students the conflict was between Google and the Chinese government. After the speech, it was Google / US government vs the Chinese government - US interests vs Chinese interests. Concerns this might be the case were earlier expressed on this site here and here.
An analysis of Clinton's words misses the point. Most of the students didn't know them. All that mattered to the students was that the US government had aligned itself with Google and now "Google" & "US government" were synonymous. The existence of such a close partnership was not at all a stretch for Chinese students to believe since they were already very accustomed to a blurry line, if any, between government and business in their own country - often associated with corruption.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, convening a two-day labor-management conference here on Tuesday, argued that teachers' unions can help solve many of the challenges facing public schools.
But as the conference opened, that view was under challenge in a number of state capitals.
Republicans in several states have proposed legislation in recent weeks that would bar teachers' unions from all policy discussions, except when the time comes to negotiate compensation. In Tennessee and Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed stripping teachers' unions of collective bargaining rights altogether.
Education historians said the unions were facing the harshest political climate since states began extending legal bargaining rights to schoolteachers decades ago.
The conference, convened by the Department of Education, drew school authorities and teachers' union leaders from 150 districts across the nation to Denver to discuss ways of working together. To participate, each district's superintendent, school board president and teachers' union leader had to sign a pledge to collaborate in good faith to raise student achievement.
Richard Whitmire's deft and revealing book about former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee chronicles a difficult time in the history of the city's schools, when good people fought hard against one another because of sharply contrasting views on how to help our children.
The book is "The Bee Eater," the title a reference to a moment when Rhee as a young teacher gained respect from her unruly Baltimore students by killing and swallowing a wayward insect flying around her classroom. The point was that this young woman had a taste for aggressive, if sometimes unappetizing, action.
The question of Rhee - her history, her iron confidence, her successes and failures - is still a hot topic. I got twice the usual page views on my blog last week just by raising the issue of her early teaching results. In this book, Rhee fans like me will enjoy remembering her unexpected success in bringing energy and sanity to the District's central office, closing 23 underused schools and getting an innovative new teachers contract. Her critics will nod as they read of her needlessly alienating city officials and good teachers and carelessly reawakening the race issue. Whitmire makes his admiration for Rhee clear but seems as baffled by some of her decisions as many of her friends were.
Chicago's school reform movement faces one of the most important moments in its too-short history. Don't underestimate what's happening right now. The future of a school system with 415,000 children is at stake.
Here's why:
The most powerful and persistent champion of Chicago school reform, Mayor Richard Daley, will leave office in May.
No one knows who will be leading the Chicago Public Schools in a few months. The quite capable interim CEO, Terry Mazany, and chief education officer, Charles Payne, are on a short-term lease. The next mayor will choose the next CEO. No major candidate for mayor has identified who would get the job in his or her administration.
Imagine "one-on-one tutoring for every student in every subject" and you get a picture of Open High School, a virtual charter school serving 250 Utah students in ninth and tenth grades, expanding to up to 1500 students 9-12 by 2014.
Aptly named, the Open High School of Utah Trailblazers are forging new paths in multiple arenas,s but what sets them apart is their commitment to use open education resources (OER) where possible and to share what they develop under Creative Commons licenses.
The curriculum is hosted on MoodleRooms learning management system (but they miss their BrainHoney gradebook).
The Madison School Board approved a one-year extension of Superintendent Dan Nerad's contract on a 5-2 vote Monday.
Board members Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira voted against the extension. Maya Cole, Beth Moss, Ed Hughes, Marj Passman and James Howard voted to extend the contract through June 30, 2013.
Only Mathiak and Hughes spoke during the meeting. The board has been discussing Nerad's contract in multiple closed-door meetings.
Mathiak didn't address why she voted against the extension but said that she had reviewed board minutes, e-mails, notes of conversations and newspaper articles as she completed an evaluation that she received in December.
THE industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy--and society--in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.
It works like this. First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are thus built up by progressively adding material, one layer at a time: hence the technology's other name, additive manufacturing. Eventually the object in question--a spare part for your car, a lampshade, a violin--pops out. The beauty of the technology is that it does not need to happen in a factory. Small items can be made by a machine like a desktop printer, in the corner of an office, a shop or even a house; big items--bicycle frames, panels for cars, aircraft parts--need a larger machine, and a bit more space.
DN: Unless we get more of our kids to standards, children will not remain strong and the community will not remain strong. Our vision has to be about advancing learning for all kids while we work to address these very notable achievement gaps for certain groups of kids. It's not an either-or. It's not a zero sum. That's why I believe we can be about a conversation about achievement gaps and we can be about a conversation about how we can better serve talented-and-gifted students.
WSJ: Is that the central tension?
DN: That's the manifestation. If it's about human capital development, it has to be about all kids moving forward, but there's real constraints around that because we do in fact make budget decisions year by year and people feel disaffected by those budget decisions. There's real concern, and I'm right in line with that concern, that we aren't doing enough to face these achievement gaps in an aggressive enough way. (Other) people feel very strongly that we're not doing enough to advance the needs of our advanced learners.
WSJ: Summarize your first 2½ years in Madison.
DN: We immediately jumped into a referendum discussion. The need for that was identified prior to my coming. We spent a considerable amount of time in that first year focused on those issues. From there I worked with the board on some board reorganization. And then it moved into comprehensive strategic planning with our community. From there we did the reorganization of the administration. Creating a teacher and a parent council was part of our thinking about how we do our work differently. And then we had a major focus needed on this current year's budget. That was a very difficult conversation. We were looking at this huge gap and this huge amount of money. There has been one major thing after another. Take one, it's significant. Take them all, it's been very significant. And while I've been here 30 months, I'm still learning the culture of this organization and of this community. I've tried to be sensitive to the culture and there's been some tension about how we've done our work and has it been sensitive enough to the culture. None of that is lost on me.
Imagine an organization with one mission - to provide a world-class education, for free, to anyone, anywhere. Now imagine having instant access to all that knowledge directly in your BitTorrent or uTorrent client.
Today we launched a brand-new app in collaboration with Khan Academy, a renowned not-for-profit organization fulfilling the mission of global education through video classes. We are extremely honored to support their vision.
The Khan Academy exemplifies the type of content creators for whom we built the App Studio - independent artists looking to build relationships with our global community of over 100 million users. With the Khan Academy, we have the added bonus of helping to promote a worthy cause through technology innovation.
There is no more pressing topic in education today than closing the achievement gap, and there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.
Although he is a Harvard professor based in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Ferguson, 60, spends lots of time flying around the country visiting racially mixed public high schools. Part of what he does is academic, measuring the causes of the gap by annually surveying the performance, behaviors and attitudes of up to 100,000 students. And part is serving as a de facto educational social worker, meeting with students, faculty members and parents to explain what steps their schools can take to narrow the gap.
The gap is about race, of course, and it inevitably inflames passions. But there is something about Dr. Ferguson's bearing -- he is both big (6-foot-3) and soft-spoken -- that gets people to listen.
Morton Sherman, the Alexandria school superintendent, watched him defuse the anger at a meeting of 300 people. "He talks about these things in a professorial way, a kind way," Dr. Sherman said. "It's not about him. He doesn't try to be a rock star, although he is a rock star in this field."
• No. 1. Once there was an enormous omelet, as big as a city, full of all sorts of stuff. Some of it was great. A lot of it was lousy. Almost nobody liked the omelet. "We can make it better by unscrambling it," some people said. But you can't unscramble an omelet. So everyone who tried to do that moved on to other things.
• No. 2. Once there were a bunch of big kids playing baseball. A little kid - well, he used to be a big kid, but things changed somehow - ran up and said he wanted to get in the game. He began throwing rocks at a tree to show how good he could pitch. The big kids said that was nice. Actually, they hoped the little kid would go away.
• No. 3. Once there were children who stood each day at the busiest corner in the city. Everyone could see they were hungry. Drivers who went by said the kids ought to be fed. Politicians said the kids ought to be fed. Everyone said the kids ought to be fed. The end.
OK, so they're not very entertaining parables. Sorry. I'm not even sure how well they fit what's going on. In fact, I really hope there's a much better ending to the third one. The history of the last couple decades around here supports the pessimistic storyline that leads to nothing. But this is a new day. Maybe something good will occur.
Which brings me to the proposal to break up Milwaukee Public Schools into a set of smaller districts.
Under its "performance pay" proposal, teachers would get more for staffing hard-to-staff schools and filling hard-to-fill positions. Pay would also be related to regular employee evaluations -- if in some as-yet-undefined, possibly very weak way. WEAC president Mary Bell declined to specify how closely student test scores should track with evaluations and thus pay hikes, for instance.
Protecting pay is, of course, the most important of the union's objectives in its reform plan. But pay is a function of how much money is available, and while WEAC is advocating paying better teachers better salaries, it's not in favor of cutting pay for teachers who aren't so good. This is about a bigger education pie, in other words, not about the same pie cut into different-sized pieces.
Pay is also a function of who's handing out the raises, and WEAC is doing what it can to ensure those partly or mostly responsible for handing out the raises are as sympathetic as possible.
To wit, it would like to see the majority of the members on a teacher's evaluation panel be teachers themselves -- thus paving the way, it seems to me, for a lot of good reviews.
"It's an extremely difficult task," Bell said of evaluating one of your peers, but one that can work because "people care so deeply about the quality of the profession."
When Gov. Rick Perry challenged the state's public institutions of higher learning this week to develop bachelor's degree programs costing no more than $10,000, including textbooks, Mike McKinney was stumped.
"My answer is I have no idea how," McKinney, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, told the Senate Finance Committee. "I'm not going to say that it can't be done."
Tuition, fees and books for four years average $31,696 at public universities in Texas, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Sul Ross State University Rio Grande College is the cheapest, at $17,532.
The governor's call for low-cost degrees comes as legislative budget writers and the governor himself have proposed deep cuts in higher education funding -- cuts that would put pressure on governing boards to raise tuition, not lower it.
But officials of some university systems -- whose governing boards are fully populated by Perry appointees -- nevertheless struck an upbeat tone, or at least a neutral one. As McKinney, a former Perry chief of staff, put it: "If it can be figured out, we've got the faculty that can figure it out."
A spokesman for the University of Texas System said, "We look forward to reviewing details of the governor's proposal."
This is exactly the kind of thinking we need: fresh approaches toward all aspects of education.
Students in a new Hip Hop Studies class at West finished a unit on hip-hop history by writing verses. A few excerpts:
"'Why do you study hip-hop?
Isn't it just rappers that never ever stop?'
That right there's the problem,
People think it's just angry pop.
And even though they don't know
They go and talk about the videos
And go and slam it on their shows
One reader notes: "Is this the fabulous programming that we may lose if West (gasp) has real honors classes? ".
THE success of the government's bid to create new "free schools"--funded by the state, but able to set conditions for staff, pick and choose from the national curriculum, and so on--rests on its ability to wrest power from local authorities and give it to community groups. The policy is a key element of David Cameron's "Big Society", but suffers from the same difficulty as the overall project: pushing through devolution in a time of austerity is tricky.
The aim of free schools, which are based on American and Swedish models, is to give parents more choice and promote competition. New schools can be established by parents, teachers, charities, religious outfits, universities, private schools and not-for-profit groups. They will be given public funds based on how many pupils enroll, with those from poor families attracting a premium.
"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards." - Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson
I was somewhat dismayed by the article in last Saturday's Daily News about the sudden thud in the bargaining process between the Red Bluff Union Elementary School Board and the teachers' union. It was a year ago last August when I congratulated the District and the teachers' union on the agreements they made to stave off fiscal problems for the 2009-2010 school year. Based on the article in the Daily News things are not so harmonious at this point. I have faith that in a community like ours things will work their way out, but it is difficult to tell given the limited statements made by the School Board representative and statements about filing a grievance or an unfair labor practice charge.
Saturday's article was followed up by coverage of the School Board meeting on February 8; it was equally dismaying.
The plan called for students with high scores to receive an "Honors'' diploma, those with average scores to earn a "Regents'' diploma, and ones who score "partially proficient'' to be granted a basic Rhode Island diploma. Children who fail the test would have the opportunity to take it again. If they fail a second time, but other requirements are achieved, they could still graduate with a certificate.
Opponents claimed the proposal created a state-sanctioned caste system that would stigmatize struggling students and haunt them when seeking future employment or college admission. Based on recent test scores, they countered that almost all students who were poor, minorities, had disabilities, or were learning English would get the lowest tier diploma, if they even got one at all.
Gov. John Kitzhaber aims to fix Oregon's broken school funding system by consolidating power and money into a single board for all levels of education -- a board that he would chair.
What youths need, he says, is a system that allows them to improve at their own pace, with funding that is targeted at schools and programs that are getting results.
On Friday, the governor ordered the creation of an investment team to design the framework for an Oregon Education Investment Board that would oversee education for children from birth through college. He will name the 12 members of the team next week.
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) is submitting this budget narrative to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education as a companion to its line‐item budget for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep). The budget was prepared in partnership with MMSD's Business Services office. The narrative provides context for the line items presented in the budget.
Madison Prep's budget was prepared by a team that included Kaleem Caire, President & CEO of ULGM; Tami Holmquist, Business Manager at Edgewood High School; Laura DeRoche‐Perez, ULGM Charter School Development Consultant; and Jim Horn, ULGM Director of Finance. Representative of ULGM and MMSD met weekly during the development of the Madison Prep budget. These meetings included including Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services and Donna Williams, Director of Budget & Planning. The budget was also informed by ULGM's charter school design teams and was structured in the same manner as start‐up, non‐instrumentality public charter school budgets submitted to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board in Washington, DC. DCPCSB is widely regarded as one of the most effective authorizers of charter schools in the nation.
In addition, Madison Prep's Facilities Design Team is led by Dennis Haefer, Vice President of Commercial Banking with Johnson Bank and Darren Noak, President of Commercial Building with Tri‐North Builders. Mr. Noak is also the Treasurer of ULGM's Board of Directors. This team is responsible for identifying Madison Prep's school site and planning for related construction, renovation and financing needs.
......
Budget Highlights
A. Cost of Education
In 2008‐09, the Madison Metropolitan School District received $14,432 in revenue per student from a combination of local, federal and state government and local property taxes. The largest portion of revenue came from property taxes, $9,049 (62.7%), followed by $3,364 in state aid (23.3%), $1,260 in federal aid (8.7%) and $759 in other local revenue (5.3%). That same year, MMSD spent $13,881 per student on educational, transportation, facility and food service costs for 25,011 students for a total of $347,177,691 in spending.
In 2010‐11, MMSD's Board of Education is operating with an amended budget of $360,131,948, a decrease of $10,155,522 (‐2.74%) from 2009‐10. MMSD projects spending $323,536,051 in its general education fund, $10,069,701 on food service and $8,598,118 on debt service for a total of $342,203,870. Considering the total of only these three spending categories, and dividing the total by the official 2010‐11 enrollment count of 24,471 students, MMSD projects to spend $13,984 per student.3 This is the amount per pupil that ULGM used as a baseline for considering what Madison Prep's baseline per pupil revenue should be in its budget for SY2011‐12. ULGM then determined the possibility of additional cutbacks in MMSD revenue for SY2011‐12 and reduced its base per pupil revenue projection to $13,600 per student. It then added a 1% increase to it's per pupil base spending amount for each academic year through SY2016‐17.
ULGM recognizes that per pupil funding is an average of total costs to educate 24,471 children enrolled in MMSD schools, and that distinctions are not made between the costs of running elementary, middle and high schools. ULGM also understands that the operating costs between all three levels of schooling are different. Middle schools costs more to operate than elementary schools and high schools costs more than middle schools.
Reviewing expense projections for middle and high schools in MMSD's SY2010‐11 Amended Preliminary Budget, ULGM decided to weight per pupil spending in middle school at 1.03% and 1.16% in high school. Thus, in SY2012‐13 when Madison Prep opens, ULGM projects a need to spend $14,148 per student, not including additional costs for serving English language learners and students with special needs, or the costs of Madison Prep's third semester (summer).
B. Cost Comparisons between Madison Prep and MMSD
Staffing Costs
In 2010‐11, MMSD projected it would spend $67,133,692 on salaries (and benefits) on 825.63 staff in its secondary (middle and high) schools for an average salary of $81,312. This includes teachers, principals and in‐school support staff. In its first year of operation (SY2012‐13), ULGM projects Madison Prep it will spend $1,559,454 in salaries and benefits on 23 staff for an average of $67,802 in salary, including salaries for teachers, the Head of School (principal) and support staff. In its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep is projected to spend $3,560,746 in salaries and benefits on 52 staff for an average of $68,476 per staff person. In both years, Madison Prep will spend significantly less on salaries and benefits per staff member than MMSD.
Additionally, MMSD spends an average of $78,277 on salaries and benefits for staff in its middle schools and $79,827 on its staff in its high schools.
The high cost results from the likelihood that Madison Prep will serve more low-income, non-English speaking and special education students, said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which is developing the charter school. The school also plans to have a longer school year, school day and require students to participate in volunteer and extracurricular activities.
"What we're asking for is based on the fact that we're going to serve a high-needs population of kids," Caire said. "We don't know yet if what we're projecting is out of line."
Caire said the proposal will likely change as potential state and federal revenues are assessed.
A Republican charter school bill circulated in the Legislature this week could also alter the landscape. The bill would allow charter schools to receive approval from a state board, rather than a local school board, and those that don't use district employees, like Madison Prep, would be able to access the state retirement and health care systems.
After Detroit, Milwaukee is the country's most segregated city. The Milwaukee Public School District (MPS) has an endemic racial achievement gap, in which, in terms of aggregate statistics, African American students perform three to four years below their European American counterparts in both math and reading. Combine this with a general dearth of resources -- as is common to virtually all of public education -- and you have a recipe for inadequate schooling that is failing its almost 90,000 students.
The crisis in Milwaukee is indicative of the educational crisis roiling the nation. Across the United States, school districts are facing enormous budget deficits, decreasing enrollment and intense pedagogical and ideological debates questioning the very foundations of modern education. The debate is particularly vociferous here in Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin Education Association Council feels threatened by Governor Scott Walker's educational platform. This past Tuesday, however, WEAC introduced a series of reforms it would endorse, many of which took observers by surprise, and received mixed reactions.
The reform drawing the most ire is the proposal to carve up MPS into multiple smaller districts to make them more manageable, and thus more successful. However, as pointed out by one observer, this separation of districts would probably mirror racial divisions within the city, compounding instead of alleviating racial achievement gaps.
Michelle Rhee, a national voice on education reform, told state lawmakers Thursday that charter schools and vouchers for low-income students have a place in public education, but in a blend with strong traditional schools.
"Vouchers in and of themselves are not the answer. Charters in and of themselves are not the answer," said Rhee, who last fall stepped down as chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools after three years in which she was both lauded and derided for her overhaul of the school system.
"The answer in my mind is a really strong traditional public school system. That has very specific strategies to turn around failing schools [and incorporates both vouchers and charters]."
Rhee is on a national tour talking about education reform, particularly teacher evaluations and performance.
A new report finds that charter schools use the freedoms they have from traditional school district mandates to define and operate schools in innovative new ways. However, expectations about what a school "should look like," the stress of tight and unstable budgets, and overwhelming administrative demands are powerful forces pulling charter schools back to traditional practice.
This report offers great reason for optimism that charter schools are well positioned to answer President Obama's call for public schools to innovate. But it also cautions that traditional regulatory structures and weaknesses in capacity must be addressed if they are to fully meet the challenge of innovation.
Based on a four-year study of the teachers, leaders, and academic programs in charter schools in six states, Inside Charter Schools: Unlocking Doors to Student Success observes that "autonomy only creates the opportunity for high-quality schools, it by no means guarantees it."
Author Betheny Gross, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington, argues that autonomy makes it possible for charter schools to:
One of the biggest stories of the past week has been the Wisconsin Education Association Council's recommendation to fragment Milwaukee Public Schools into smaller districts. According to WEAC, this would create "more manageable components" as well as "drive greater accountability within the system." However, a look at how Milwaukee's public schools operate as separate entities suggests that these schools will run into problems regardless of the size of their district.
In 2009, Milwaukee's schools carried over operating debts of over $8 million into the new school year. Of the 148 schools surveyed in October of 2010, 93 (62.8%) finished the preceding school year in the red. 42 of these schools racked up debts of more than $100,000. 20 more overspent their budgets by $40,000 or more.
As the MacIver Institute has previously noted, schools like Bradley Tech (running a deficit of over $750,000), Vel Phillips (-$475k), Audubon Middle (-$436k), and Wedgewood (-$382k) are some of the city's biggest offenders. While some schools have been able to create careful surpluses with their funds, the system as a whole has shown to be flawed. In all, the city's school-by-school deficits added up to over $10.7 million dollars in 2009-2010 alone.
On the face of it, encouraging children to learn Latin doesn't seem like the solution to our current skills crisis. Why waste valuable curriculum time on a dead language when children could be learning one that's actually spoken? The prominence of Latin in public schools is a manifestation of the gentleman amateur tradition whereby esoteric subjects are preferred to anything that's of any practical use. Surely, that's one of the causes of the crisis in the first place?
But dig a little deeper and you'll find plenty of evidence that this particular dead language is precisely what today's young people need if they're going to excel in the contemporary world.
Let's start with Latin's reputation as an elitist subject. While it's true that 70 percent of independent schools offer Latin compared with only 16 per cent of state schools, that's hardly a reason not to teach it more widely. According to the OECD, our private schools are the best in the world, whereas our state schools are ranked on average 23rd.
No doubt part of this attainment gap is attributable to the fact that the average private school child has advantages that the average state school child does not. But it may also be due to the differences in the curriculums th
While the majority of New Jerseyans love public school teachers, more than half believe that the NJ Education Association (NJEA) is "playing a negative role in improving public education," according to a Quinnipiac poll released yesterday.
In addition, reports New Jersey Newsroom, 68% of residents favor implementation of a merit pay system and 62% support tenure reform. We're more split on school choice; the poll found that by a small margin we oppose school vouchers and charter school expansion. From Maurice Carroll of Quinnipiac:
"The Fraser Institute released its controversial B.C. elementary school rankings today," a TV news anchor intoned earlier this week, "and this year a school in the polygamous community of Bountiful topped the list. That's giving opponents of the rankings more ammunition."
The report continued with Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, saying that "everyone who has anything to do, credibly, with the public education system, will tell you that the rankings are worthless." (The thousands of parents who consult the rankings don't count, as they should have realized by now.) "It's just another example of how ... meaningless the rankings are, and that we should pay no attention to them."
And then the Fraser Institute's Peter Cowley rebutted: "How is it possible that ... a president of a teachers' union can say, on the basis of the evidence that shows that [the school is] doing well, for one year, in reading, writing and math skills at Grades 4 and 7, we have to invalidate those results because of [the community's religious] beliefs?"
And that was pretty much it. It was the line most media outlets took, and it was almost completely beside the point.
More high school seniors are taking Advanced Placement courses in Minnesota and scoring higher on the tests, but the state's rankings are still below national averages.
According to new data from the College Board, more than 15,000 Minnesota high school seniors took an AP course last year, and nearly 10,000 of them scored at least a three on an AP test. A score of three to five usually allows students to gain college credit for that class.
Students have other options to take advanced coursework in Minnesota schools, including throughout the International Baccalaureate program. Tuesday's report was confined to the AP program.
New York state high-school students' college and career readiness lags far behind the graduation rates that most school districts post, according to data from the state Department of Education.
Across the state, the graduation rate in 2009, the last year for which figures are public, was 77%. But only 41% of high-school students were prepared for a career or college, the state said. The state defines students as college- and career-ready if they score at least an 80 on the state's math Regents exam and at least a 75 on the English Regents exam. New York students receive a high-school diploma if they achieve a score of at least 65 on Regents tests.
"WEAC unveiled their strategy Tuesday in the form of a pre-emptive strike as Governor Scott Walker prepares his upcoming budget proposal, which most insiders agree will have a significant impact on school funding and the way our schools operate.
"The organization's main focus is to break Wisconsin's largest district into multiple pieces by 2015. According to WEAC leaders, this move would create a more manageable system in the schools that have become a collective albatross hanging from the neck of Wisconsin's public education.
"[I]n its current configuration, we do not believe MPS can be fixed. It is simply too big," said WEAC President Mary Bell. Bell later went on to say that despite the state union's buy-in, the local Milwaukee Teachers' Educational Association (MTEA) isn't on board.
"While MPS is fraught with problems, a reduction of size won't be a panacea, nor will it make things much clearer in Wisconsin's largest city. While WEAC's change of heart is refreshing given their recent track record on education reform, they are resorting to a drastic step without fully exploring their other options for reform that are politically more feasible. MPS is only the 33rd largest school district in the country by enrollment, and while some of the cities that are larger than Milwaukee nationally have their own problems, many operate successfully despite a glut of students.
After 2½ years as Madison schools superintendent, Dan Nerad is still finding his footing.
For Nerad and his supporters, that's more of a statement about Madison's slippery and sometimes treacherous political terrain.
But among critics there is frustration that Nerad hasn't risen to the task, particularly given the high expectations for the former social worker and Green Bay superintendent.
The two views among Madison School Board members and others in the community are circulating as the board weighs whether to extend Nerad's contract beyond June 2012.
Supporters point to a long list of accomplishments so far despite severe obstacles -- implementation of 4-year-old kindergarten after decades of discussion, development of a strategic plan that brought in dozens of community voices and expansion of dual-language immersion programs.
When it comes to the quality of Madison's public schools, the issue is pretty much black and white.
The Madison Metropolitan School District's reputation for providing stellar public education is as strong as it ever was for white, middle-class students. Especially for these students, the district continues to post high test scores and turn out a long list of National Merit Scholars -- usually at a rate of at least six times the average for a district this size.
But the story is often different for Hispanic and black kids, and students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Madison is far from alone in having a significant performance gap. In fact, the well-documented achievement gap is in large measure responsible for the ferocious national outcry for more effective teachers and an overhaul of the public school system. Locally, frustration over the achievement gap has helped fuel a proposal from the Urban League of Greater Madison and its president and CEO, Kaleem Caire, to create a non-union public charter school targeted at minority boys in grades six through 12.
"In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys," says Caire, who is black, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. "We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I'm not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education."
What often gets lost in the discussion over the failures of public education, however, is that there are some high-poverty, highly diverse schools that are beating the odds by employing innovative ways to reach students who have fallen through the cracks elsewhere.
Dave Baskerville has argued that Wisconsin needs two big goals, one of which is to "Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030". Ongoing use of and progress measurement via the WKCE would seem to be insufficient in our global economy.
Children are often happier with their online lives than they are with reality, a survey has revealed.
They say they can be exactly who they want to be - and as soon as something is no longer fun they can simply hit the quit button.
The study also shows that, despite concerns about online safety, one in eight young people is in contact with strangers when on the web and often lies about their appearance, age and background.
Researchers for children's charity Kidscape assessed the online activities of 2,300 11- to 18-year-olds from across the UK and found that 45 per cent said they were sometimes happier online than in their real lives.
Andy Rotherham just published a report with obvious conclusions: sustainability is impacted by location. More specifically, if you open a charter in California, you will spend a lifetime begging for money.
Find the New paper on charter school finance from Bellwether out today (pdf). Press release can be found here and The Wall Street Journal editorial page weighs-in on it here.
The New York State Education Department has released data that it said indicates that not all students graduating high school are prepared to enter college or careers.
The data compares graduation rates versus college- and career-ready graduation rate calculations for general education students who entered ninth grade in the 2005-06 school year, through June 2009.
General education graduation requirements for a local diploma include a score of 65 or better on two Regents exams and 55 or better on three Regents exams. The designation of college- and career-ready is defined by graduates who received at least an 80-percent grade on the math Regents exam and 75 on the English Regents exam.
In Rochester, there was a 46.6 percent graduation rate, with only 5.1 percent of graduates being college- and career-ready, said state education officials. This compares to 49.5 and 14.7 percent, respectively, in Syracuse, and 64.5 and 22.8 percent in New York City.
In the Preface to his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson informed his readers that there was one aspect of his compatriots' discourse that he was unwilling to engage with. "Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people", he wrote,
"the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience, and though current at certain times and places, and in others utterly unknown. This fugitive cant, which is always in state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation."
Yet, as Johnson must have been aware, published works recording this "casual and mutable" English had existed since Thomas Harman added a glossary of canting terms to his Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors of 1567 and, indeed, a generation after Johnson dismissed what we would call slang as "unworthy of preservation", a very different view was being propounded. For Francis Grose, the antiquary and former military man, author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785, it was a matter of regret that "terms of well-known import, at New-market, Exchange-alley, the City, the Parade, Wapping, and Newgate", and which also "find their way into our political and theatrical compositions", were not recorded in conventional dictionaries. Indeed Grose (as had Johnson) managed to establish a patriotic slant to his dictionary-making. Referring to a recent dictionary of "satyrical and burlesque French", he claimed that with "our language being at least as copious as the French, and as capable of the witty equivoque", his dictionary was fully justified. He pursued this theme further, adding that
Don't be surprised if a surprising number of Michigan school districts fall short of proficient scoring after next year's round of standardized state testing.
The Michigan Board of Education approved higher cut scores, or scores that mark proficiency, for both the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) and Michigan Merit Exam (MME) tests at a board meeting Tuesday. According to experts, the new standards will be more honest about how well students are doing on the tests.
"It's going to make a real difference in the share of kids who are being labeled proficient and in the share of schools passing AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress)," said Susan Dynarski, associate professor of economics, education and public policy at the University of Michigan. "Michigan has been Lake Woebegone -- right now 95 percent of our third graders are labeled as proficient in math and under the new standards, it would become 34 percent."
The George W. Bush Institute's second big education initiative will seek to improve graduation rates by focusing on middle school as a foundation for future success.
Former first lady Laura Bush is set to announce the initiative, called "Middle School Matters," Wednesday in Houston at Stovall Middle School in the Aldine school district.
She says research has shown that 6th through 8th grade is a crucial time and that many high school dropouts essentially dropped out in middle school. One goal will be to ensure students are prepared for high school.
As part of the five-year $1.3 million grant, Arabic classes would have been taught at Cross Timbers Intermediate School and other schools feeding into Summit High School.
Parents at Cross Timbers say they were caught off-guard by the program, and were surprised the district only told them about it in a meeting Monday night between parents and Mansfield ISD Superintendent Bob Morrison.
State officers of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) today unveiled three dramatic proposals as part of their quality-improvement platform called "Moving Education Forward: Bold Reforms." The proposals include the creation of a statewide system to evaluate educators; instituting performance pay to recognize teaching excellence; and breaking up the Milwaukee Public School District into a series of manageable-sized districts within the city.
"In our work with WEAC leaders and members we have debated and discussed many ideas related to modernizing pay systems, better evaluation models, and ways to help turn around struggling schools in Milwaukee," said WEAC President Mary Bell. "We believe bold actions are needed in these three areas to move education forward. The time for change is now. This is a pivotal time in public education and we're in an era of tight resources. We must have systems in place to ensure high standards for accountability - that means those working in the system must be held accountable to high standards of excellence."
TEACHER EVALUATION: In WEAC's proposed teacher evaluation system, new teachers would be reviewed annually for their first three years by a Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) panel made up of both teachers and administrators. The PAR panels judge performance in four areas:
Planning and preparing for student learning
Creating a quality learning environment
Effective teaching
Professional responsibility
The proposed system would utilize the expertise of the UW Value-Added Research Center (Value Added Assessment) and would include the review of various student data to inform evaluation decisions and to develop corrective strategies for struggling teachers. Teachers who do not demonstrate effectiveness to the PAR panels are exited out of the profession and offered career transition programs and services through locally negotiated agreements.
Veteran teachers would be evaluated every three years, using a combination of video and written analysis and administrator observation. Underperforming veteran teachers would be required to go through this process a second year. If they were still deemed unsatisfactory, they would be re-entered into the PAR program and could ultimately face removal.
"The union is accepting our responsibility for improving the quality of the profession, not just for protecting the due process rights of our members," said Bell. "Our goal is to have the highest-quality teachers at the front of every classroom across the state. And we see a role for classroom teachers to contribute as peer reviewers, much like a process often used in many private sector performance evaluation models."
"If you want to drive change in Milwaukee's public schools, connect the educators and the community together into smaller districts within the city, and without a doubt it can happen," said Bell. "We must put the needs of Milwaukee's students and families ahead of what's best for the adults in the system," said Bell. "That includes our union - we must act differently - we must lead."
Madison's "value added assessment" program is based on the oft-criticized WKCE examinations.
In the Preface to his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson informed his readers that there was one aspect of his compatriots' discourse that he was unwilling to engage with. "Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people", he wrote,
"the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience, and though current at certain times and places, and in others utterly unknown. This fugitive cant, which is always in state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation."
Yet, as Johnson must have been aware, published works recording this "casual and mutable" English had existed since Thomas Harman added a glossary of canting terms to his Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors of 1567 and, indeed, a generation after Johnson dismissed what we would call slang as "unworthy of preservation", a very different view was being propounded. For Francis Grose, the antiquary and former military man, author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785, it was a matter of regret that "terms of well-known import, at New-market, Exchange-alley, the City, the Parade, Wapping, and Newgate", and which also "find their way into our political and theatrical compositions", were not recorded in conventional dictionaries. Indeed Grose (as had Johnson) managed to establish a patriotic slant to his dictionary-making. Referring to a recent dictionary of "satyrical and burlesque French", he claimed that with "our language being at least as copious as the French, and as capable of the witty equivoque", his dictionary was fully justified. He pursued this theme further, adding that
Look quickly and you might think that charter schools have it easy, given the celebrated documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,'" the efforts of reformers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, and the support of the Obama Administration. That's why a report out Tuesday is a needed corrective: It demonstrates how government policies regularly discriminate against charters.
Published by Bellwether Education Partners, a reform-minded advocacy group, the report examines the finances of Aspire Public Schools, a network of 30 California charter schools with 9,800 students from kindergarten through high school. With extended school days and years, innovative curricula and other hallmarks of charter autonomy, Aspire ranks as California's single best school system serving a majority of very poor students. Yet it operates with margins of only 0.6%, or $60 per student, which make it harder to scrape together funds to open new schools.
Montgomery County is rightly proud of its public school system, which is widely regarded as one of the best in the state. Perhaps that's why, nearly eight years after state lawmakers passed a law allowing for the establishment of charter schools -- alternative institutions that receive public funds but operate independently -- the Montgomery County school board has yet to approve a single application to open one.
Is that because no one has come up with a credible plan for a school that would give parents more choices for educating their children? Or is it because local school officials simply don't want the competition?
The state school board looked into the matter last year, after Montgomery County school officials turned down the applications of two groups that wanted to set up new charter schools in the district. What they found goes a long way toward explaining why school reform advocates like the Washington-based Center for Education Reform have rated Maryland's charter school law as one of the weakest in the nation. Despite passing important reforms last year regarding lengthening of the time it takes teachers to earn tenure and linking student test scores with teacher evaluations, lawmakers need to take another look at strengthening the state's charter school law if Maryland is to build on those gains.
In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush's No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama's Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine--already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations--are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don't want for books--or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non-Title I schools can't afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.
Here's my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children--all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.
Supporters call them a matter of choice, a lifeline for children stuck in broken schools. Opponents deride them as unconstitutional and unworkable and warn that they will erode conditions in some of Pennsylvania's most troubled schools.
The debate over taxpayer-paid tuition vouchers to help poor children find alternatives to attending the state's weakest-performing public schools has emerged as a major item on the legislative agenda for the next six months -- perhaps the major item after the state budget.
The voucher issue will come to the fore in the General Assembly on Feb. 16, when the chairman of the Senate Education Committee will lead a hearing on his bill to establish the Opportunity Scholarship and Educational Improvement Tax Credit Act.
I worried constantly about my daughter Jerlisa when she attended our neighborhood elementary school. I knew that I wanted a better education for her, but I didn't know how to make that happen. In 2005, I took a chance and applied to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Little did I know how much more than $7,500 I would be gaining.
I grew up in the District and attended D.C. public schools. Jerlisa started off the same way. We enrolled her at Gibbs Elementary School for kindergarten, and as the years went by she started to fall behind. There was so much going on around the school and in the classroom. Every morning, I walked with her to school, and every afternoon I waited outside the school gates to walk her home again. She got teased for that, but I was worried about the drug dealers, addicts and bullies in the neighborhood. I didn't have any other choice. I had to make sure she was safe.
When Jerlisa was in fifth grade, she became anxious and didn't want to return to school. It was clear to me she wasn't getting the help that she needed. That's when I received fliers about the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Although I didn't know everything about the OSP, I knew I had to do something different, even if it meant getting out of my comfort zone. When you're a single mother on a fixed income, sometimes simple things like filling out your name, address or income on a form can be a scary thing to do.
Background information: In 2010, the Board approved a number of administrative recommendations geared toward increasing usage of the Infinite Campus System. The current timeline requires all high school teachers to use grade-level appropriate Infinite Campus teacher tools by the end of the fourth quarter of the 2010-2011 school year.
The administration has been notified by the vendor that significant changes will be made to the Infinite Campus interface in July 2011. Accordingly, if training sessions were to continue as required to meet the current deadline, those same teachers would have to be trained on a new interface only months later.
It would be more prudent to wait until the new interface is available and require full implementation of the Infinite Campus teacher tools at the high schools by the end of the second quarter of the 2011-2012 school year.
D. BOE action requested: Postpone mandatory use of Infinite Campus teacher tools at the high schools until the end of the second quarter of the 2011-2012 school year.
The system originally lifted off during the fall of 2007. I wonder how much has been spent on it without full use? This type of system can be a useful way for parents, teachers and students to communicate - if it is used.....
Rarely have school science fairs, a source of pride and panic for generations of American students, achieved such prominence on the national stage. President Obama held one at the White House last fall. And last week he said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like Sunday's Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation's competitive edge.
Yet as science fair season kicks into high gear, participation among high school students appears to be declining. And many science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration's own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.
In a report issued on February 2nd, Harvard researchers question the value of 'college for all.'
According to the co-authors of the report, Academic Dean Robert Schwartz and Ronald Ferguson, a Senior Lecturer at Harvard, the US's four-year colleges are failing students by focusing too much on classroom-based academics and not adequately preparing students for careers. The proposal has sparked immediately concern from educators as it raises the 'specter of tracking,' in which students (often from lower-income or disadvantaged backgrounds) are 'channeled unquestioningly into watered-down programs that curtail their prospects,' according to EdWeek.
Currently, 42 percent of 27-year-olds in the US have no more than a high school degree. Only 30 percent of Americans earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are 27. President Obama has stated that he wants to improve the nation's college graduation rate to 60 percent in 10 years (ABC News). The US now ranks in 12th place in the world for college graduates, In comparison Canada's college graduation rate is 55.8 percent; in South Korea and Russia, the rate for college graduates is 55.5 percent, according to statistics from the College Board.
Pocatello-Chubbuck School District 25 has officially come out against an education reform plan backed by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, arguing it adds new costs at a time when the state can't cover existing expenses.
School board members, who hosted a special meeting Tuesday to discuss the plan, even took exception with the name of Luna's plan, called "Students Come First."
"The legislation itself is insulting in its title, thinking that any one of the school boards in this state would not put children first," board members wrote in the document they authored outlining their position on the plan.
They noted past policy changes, including core standards and heightened graduation requirements, involved considerable input and time for research. Luna's proposed legislation, they argue, wasn't based on sufficient input or extensive research. They suggest implementing pilot programs to test various aspects of the plan, which could be used to measure success or as a basis for modifications.
Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist is putting the brakes on regulations that require high school students to reach at least "partial proficiency" on state tests in order to graduate. She's pushing the 2012 deadline back two years.
But she says Rhode Island's high schools can't continue to dole out diplomas to students who cannot read, write or compute at a high-school level.
Schools must do more to help students reach the higher goals, and state education officials must find better ways to support schools, she says.
"We need people to understand we are not putting a two-year pause in place," Gist said in an interview Friday.
The anger of demonstrators in Tunisia and Egypt runs, too, through 25-year-old Saleh Barek al-Jabri.
Mr. Jabri, the son of a Yemini bus driver, says he answered his government's call for young people to study petroleum engineering, enrolling in a course at Yemen's Hadhramaut University for Science and Technology. Officials visited his school to offer encouragement. An oil minister came through to promise jobs. Mr. Jabri excelled, finishing fifth in his class.
But after graduating last year, he has yet to find work. Classmates with family connections got what few jobs existed. Mr. Jabri moved to Yemen's capital, San'a, where he shares a single room with two other unemployed recent graduates.
"I had dreams," Mr. Jabri says. "They've all evaporated."
As families begin to enroll their students Monday in virtual schools or neighboring districts through the state's open enrollment process, the Legislature is debating changes to the program.
The Senate approved a bill this week that would extend the enrollment period from three weeks in February to three months, starting this year. The bill still needs approval in the Assembly and the governor's signature.
The changes would make it easier for parents who want to enroll their students in public schools outside their own district, but may not be thinking about that decision in February, said Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, who introduced the bill.
Democrats opposed the changes, however, saying the wider window will cause administrative hassles and uncertainty for school districts about proper staffing levels as they try to budget for the next school year.
Gov. Mark Dayton pledged Friday to increase funding for K-12 education and laid out a plan that focuses on early learners and reducing achievement disparities between student groups.
But there was no detail on how much the plan would cost or how it would be accomplished with the state facing a $6.2 billion deficit.
Dayton deferred questions about funding to his Feb. 15 budget presentation, saying Friday's announcement was about fulfilling a campaign pledge to provide more money to schools.
He'll propose increasing aid each of the next two years, he said, "no excuses, no exceptions."
Dayton promised last year as a candidate to spend more on schools every year, but softened that stance because of the state's financial problems.
Dayton's seven-point education plan, titled "Better Schools for a Better Minnesota," calls for investment in early-childhood initiatives -- led by Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius -- and all-day kindergarten, as well as a push to increase the number of children ready for kindergarten and to ensure all children are reading by third grade.
Hundreds of protesters descended on Brooklyn Thursday, laying bare the deep philosophical divide that has become central to the Bloomberg administration's education policy: whether the city should fix failing schools or shut them down.
The dichotomy came to a head this week as the Panel for Educational Policy met twice to vote on whether to shutter 22 schools deemed failures because its students can't read or do math on grade level.
The panel, which is populated mostly by Bloomberg appointees, voted to close 10 schools at its meeting Tuesday and was expected to vote to close the other 12 Thursday night.
The administration and charter-school advocates argue that some schools are such failures they must be shut down completely and replaced with new schools. Students are allowed to register at the new schools, but for the most part, the new schools start up with different teachers and administrators. The city maintains that the new schools are more effective.
NJ’s voucher bill, the Opportunity Scholarship Act, is the big education news story today. Assembly Bill 2810 will be the subject of a hearing today before the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee and proponents and opponents are going to the mattresses. Excellent Education for Everyone (E3) is running print ads that begin, “My school is failing me! I go to one of the worst schools in New Jersey. There are 80,000 kids just like me. The New Jersey Education Association wants to me to stay here. Will you help me get out?" New Jersey Teachers Association is running its own ad campaign, and has put out this set of talking points for parent leaders to use to lobby against the bill, which passed through the Senate Education Committee last month. (Here’s coverage from The Wall Street Journal and NJ Spotlight.)
Recently retired New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein made headlines this week when he told the Times of London that "it's easier to prosecute a capital-punishment case in the U.S. than terminate an incompetent teacher." The New York Post blared, "Joel: Easier to ax a killer than a teacher." The prize for most sensational probably goes to Liz Dwyer's headline, "Joel Klein Compares Teachers to Murderers."
There's plenty of scorched earth between Klein's words and these headlines, reflecting how unnecessarily polarized the education reform wars remain, even over the smallest changes in policy.
Advocates for virtual education say that it has the power to transform an archaic K-12 system of schooling. Instead of blackboards, schoolhouses, and a six-hour school day, interactive technology will personalize learning to meet each student's needs, ensure all students have access to quality teaching, extend learning opportunities to all hours of the day and all days of the week, and innovate and improve over time. Indeed, virtual education has the potential not only to help solve many of the most pressing issues in K-12 education, but to do so in a cost-effective manner. More than 1 million public-education students now take online courses, and as more districts and states initiate and expand online offerings, the numbers continue to grow. But to date, there's little research or publicly available data on the outcomes from K-12 online learning. And even when data are publicly available, as is the case with virtual charter schools, analysts and education officials have paid scant attention to--and have few tools for analyzing--performance. Until policymakers, educators, and advocates pay as much attention to quality as they do to expansion, virtual education will not be ready for a lead role in education reform.
I learned Mayor is having an informational briefing tomorrow morning about charter schools. It will be done by two staff from the Center for Reinventing Public Education from UW. Now this is fine but I will say that the CRPE is not exactly neutral on charters (the majority of their research is around it with them being in the pro column). Of course, it is a little odd use of time in a state that has no charter law and has turned it down three times.
When I saw the e-mail yesterday, I called and asked if I could come and listen. The staffer was very nice, said no and then said he would check. I was told today, sorry but no.
The issue isn't so much that I can't go. I'm sure there won't be any other media there but I operate on the "it doesn't hurt to ask" policy.
Speaking of Mayors, I've invited the four candidates for Madison Mayor to chat about education topics. Should they respond affirmatively, I will post the video conversations here.
1. What criteria will you use in selecting the next CEO of the Chicago Public Schools?
I support hiring a superintendent for the Chicago Public Schools with a strong and proven track-record in education. Strong managerial skills and the ability to work with community leaders, parents, and teachers will also be extremely important qualities I will consider as mayor.
2. What will you do to keep the students who are in Chicago Public Schools safe?
I believe schools must be places where the community comes together. Parents, local businesses, community organizations, and local law enforcement must all play a role in providing a safe and secure space of learning for Chicago's youth. As Senator, I was sponsor of the Midnight Basketball program, which brought local youth together with local police officers. I will provide an educational curriculum with more art, drama, and music classes to keep more students in school and engaged in activities to keep the gangs at bay. In addition, vocational training will provide students with the skills to be more competitive in the workforce and less likely to join gangs.
While this particular website might be new, the idea is hardly innovative. That there are entrepreneurs willing to traffic in essays is no secret to anyone who evaluates admission applications for a living. And if the evidence and anecdotes of déjà vu experienced by admission officers are any indication, such sites probably do a brisk business. In that sense, the public premiere of a new outfit would border on prosaic if it weren't for the fervent and opposing arguments that inevitably follow:
"Access to essays levels the playing field and helps students from schools with lackluster college counseling programs compete in today's take-no-prisoners admission wars!"
"The sale of essays promotes plagiarism and diminishes the capacity of students to think for themselves!"
If the first claim is misguided (and conventional wisdom among admission professionals suggests that it is), the second one is incomplete. Yes, plagiarism is a nasty potential byproduct of these businesses. And reliance on samples of other people's work to create one's own can certainly constrain rather than inspire. But there's also an important practical point that usually gets overlooked:
Acknowledging that the achievement gap between African-American students and those of other races has persisted far too long, the Los Angeles Unified School District has established an African-American Education Working Committee designed to help create a plan to replicate "best practices" district-wide.
The 25-member committee has met twice since it was formed in mid-January, and has yet to determine specifics on what practices will be implemented and how.
But, committee member and Community Coalition lead organizer for youth programs Tonna Onyendu said "The beginning has been about introducing everyone to what the task force is about, and what the purpose is and why we are convening. Then we also made sure we were all on the same page in terms of what the goals of the task force are, which is to improve the educational outcome of African-American students within LAUSD."
In the middle of this winter of our discontent, the rearrangement of a state education Board may be going unnoticed by busy, weary families. But changes announced this week for the state Board of Regents has a whole lot to do with the future opportunities these families can expect for their children, whether they realize it or not. Chairman Robert Flanders, who provided strong leadership as an unwavering supporter of the bold reform vision of state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, is stepping down and former House Majority Leader and friend to unions and union lawyers, George Caruolo, is Governor Chafee's pick for new Board Chairman.
Though it may be unfair to prejudge incoming appointments, it's a foregone conclusion to state that for the Board to lose Judge Flanders and the equally strong Gist supporters Angus Davis and Anna Cano-Morales all at once spells setbacks for the Gist engine for sure. But to characterize this as a victory for the Chafee-Union alliance, and a defeat for the lightning rod Commissioner is to miss the shameful truth. After all, if the leadership of the teachers' unions wants to reclaim their turf as the unnamed but fully operating Commissioners of Education, what record of victory are they actually trying to reclaim?
Deputy State Schools Superintendent Jorea Marple believes pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade education in West Virginia has reached a pivotal point, and the state's current direction for schools is just beginning to show benefits.
Mark Manchin, executive director of the state School Building Authority, wants to develop policies that help provide a "high-quality, 21st Century education" for children. He also promises to help support teachers and school administrators, provide safe and up-to-date school buildings and work with state lawmakers and the governor to ensure the state Board of Education's agenda is advanced.
Carolyn Long, chairwoman of the West Virginia University Board of Governors, believes her experience in both higher education and other public schools could help bring "these two cultures together" to serve the needs of West Virginia.
Throughout its 900-year history, Oxford University has survived the Bubonic Plague, the English Civil War, and a host of other maladies. Oxford Vice Chancellor Andrew Hamilton takes solace in the University's resilient history as he grapples with the decision by the UK coalition to slash funding for higher education by 80%:
[The budget cuts] are pretty bad. The challenge for us obviously is the speed with which we have to confront the issues that result from them... One of the proposals that has been recently passed by government in the UK is to allow the cost of undergraduate education charged to students to rise. And again, that is happening in a very short period of time. Changes of this significant kind-I think we would all much prefer to be able to manage the cuts and manage any rise in tuition fees that will occur over a longer period, but we're not being given that luxury. We're going to have to manage them over a very short period of time, as little as two or three years. And that is going to be quite the challenge.
Even in middle school, there are a few easy things (and some more challenging steps) students can do to up their chances at a college admission. Join Jay Mathews to discuss these tactics.
All high school juniors in the Houston Independent School District will have the chance to take the SAT college entrance exam in class for free this April.
Typically, students only can take the SAT on Saturdays or Sundays. HISD officials say the district will be only the third in the country to offer the in-class testing -- which should significantly increase the number of students taking the exam.
Nearly 5,000 of HISD's graduates in 2010 -- less than half -- took the SAT, according to the district. It's likely other students took the ACT exam, which most colleges accept as well, but that number wasn't immediately available for the Class of 2010.
It has been 10 years since Wisconsin overhauled an old set of rules for state teacher licensure (PI 3 and PI 4) and replaced it with a new set called PI 34. At the time of its approval in 2000, PI 34 was warmly welcomed by state leaders and legislators from both sides of the aisle. It was praised as a way to create a new generation of Wisconsin teachers.
The purpose of this report is to assess PI 34 in an effort to learn whether it has made good on these high expectations.
The underlying issue in this assessment has to do with occupational licensure. Why is it widespread in many states including Wisconsin? There are two viewpoints. The first is that consumers don't have enough information to make judgments regarding the purchase of services from members of certain occupations. Licensure, according to this view, serves as a means to protect consumers from fraud and malpractice.
The second argument is made by economists. It opposes the first. Prominent economists claim that licensure benefits members of various occupations more than it benefits consumers. It does so by limiting access to the occupations in question, thus reducing competition. Those seeking protection from barriers of this sort believe that the various regulations will eventually enhance their incomes. The costs to consumers include reduced competition and restricted consumer choice.
...
PI 34's weaknesses far outweigh its strengths. The weaknesses include the following:
PI 34 undervalues the importance of subject-matter knowledge in initial training programs for teachers and in teachers' professional development activity.
PI 34 imposes an overwhelming regulatory system--dwarfing, for example, the regulatory system governing licensure for medical doctors.
PI 34 rules for licensure renewal fail to ensure that renewal will depend on demonstrated competence and professional growth. These rules create incentives for pro forma compliance, cronyism, and fraud.
PI 34 sets up high barriers (a single, proprietary avenue) for entrance into teaching. It makes licensure conditional on completion of approved training programs requiring, normally, at least two years of full-time enrollment in education coursework. Many highly trained professionals contemplating career changes are deterred by these requirements from becoming teachers, despite demand for their services.
PI 34 has no built-in measures for linking teacher licensure to teacher competence. Wisconsin has no evidence that any incompetent teacher has ever been denied licensure renewal.
PI 34 enables education producers (WEAC and the DPI) to dominate the licensure system. In this system, parents and students are marginalized.
PI 34 is particularly onerous for educators in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where producing academic gains is a challenging problem, and school principals, struggling to hire competent teachers, would benefit greatly from a flexible licensure system.
It's the stuff of legends: A group of men comea across what would be today worth $65 million in gold and silver while on expedition in early-19th-century New Mexico territory. Then, they transport said treasure thousands of miles and bury it in Virginia. One of them, named Thomas Jefferson Beale, leaves three ciphertexts, simply strings of comma-separated numbers, with an innkeeper in Virginia, who forgets about it for more than 20 years.
One day, the innkeeper, realizing that Beale isn't coming back, opens the box and tries to solve the riddle. Frustrated, he then tells the story and passes along the texts to a friend, J.B. Ward, who cracks one of the three ciphertexts, but not the one that actually gives the precise location of the treasure. More than a hundred years go by, and no one can solve the remaining two ciphers, not even with the benefit of modern computers, and the treasure, if it exists, may still be out there, waiting in the mountains of Virginia.
Picking up on this unsolved mystery, modern storyteller Andrew S. Allen created a short film The Thomas Beale Cipher, a refreshingly modern take on this century-old mystery. In Allen's story, Professor White, a cryptographer who has recently run into some poor luck, has figured out a way to solve the Beale ciphers. But this knowledge is dangerous, and federal agents are hunting him down.
Business schools have long sold the promise that, like an F1 driver zipping into the pits for fresh tyres, it just takes a short hiatus on an MBA programme and you will come roaring back into the career race primed to win. After all, it signals to companies that you were good enough to be accepted by a decent business school (so must be good enough for them); it plugs you into a network of fellow MBAs; and, to a much lesser extent, there's the actual classroom education. Why not just pay the bill, sign here and reap the rewards?
The problem is that these days it doesn't work like that. Rather, more and more students are finding the promise of business schools to be hollow. The return on investment on an MBA has gone the way of Greek public debt. If you have a decent job in your mid- to late- 20s, unless you have the backing of a corporate sponsor, leaving it to get an MBA is a higher risk than ever. If you are getting good business experience already, the best strategy is to keep on getting it, thereby making yourself ever more useful rather than groping for the evanescent brass rings of business school.
Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.
The momentum began over a year ago with President Obama's call to measure and reward effective teaching, a challenge he repeated in last week's State of the Union address.
Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.
Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that have put teachers' unions on the defensive.
A central Florida lawmaker wants school teachers to grade parents on their children's report cards.
State Rep. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, recently proposed a bill that would require public school teachers to grade the parents of their students in kindergarten through third grade.
A grade of "satisfactory," "unsatisfactory" or "needs improvement" would be added to their children's report cards.
The grading system would be based on the following criteria:
While the College Board plans to unveil a sweeping revision to Advanced Placement biology courses on Tuesday, it is delaying similar changes in United States history by a year to address concerns from high school teachers.
The changes in both subjects are part of a broad revamping of A.P. courses and exams to reduce memorization and to foster analytic thinking. But while the new biology curriculum is specific about what material needs to be covered, some teachers complained that parts of the history course seemed vague, and the board said it needed more time to clarify what should be studied.
Board officials said they expected to publish the new United States history curriculum next fall. That curriculum will now take effect in the 2013-14 school year, they said, rather than in 2012-13, when the new biology program is to begin.
namored with President Obama's plans for the country.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the rumored "Sputnik moment" fell flat. After all, the "clean green" mantra lit up with squiggly bulbs just doesn't ignite the creativity of the populace like the notion of going to the moon. Of course there was more to the president's technological ideals than that, but he invested too many words in education to make them sound believable.
In a way Obama was playing it safe by pulling out the motherhood-and-apple-pie concept of winning the future through education for the children. Nobody (except the Grinch) would argue against something done for the children, would they?
"When a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance. But too many schools don't meet this test. That's why instead of just pouring money into a system that's not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top."
Ah, but Mr. President, a crucial distinction must be made here. There is a difference between education and federal spending on education. Since when has federal involvement in education helped the economy or improved learning?
Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar's offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.
Meanwhile, conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents' options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this "a Rosa Parks moment for education."
Gov. Brian Sandoval's State of the State address has certainly given us all a great deal to consider. His proposals for Nevada's public higher education system, in particular, will prompt needed dialogue. However, it is critical that such discussions begin with correct assumptions, and contrary to what we have been told, the Nevada System of Higher Education is not broken.
As evidence of that assertion, some point to our universities' six-year graduation rates (for the period beginning in 2004) of only 50 percent. However, that statement is misleading. When student transfers and eight-year graduation rates are reflected in the calculation, the graduation rate is much higher, ranging from 55 to 70 percent -- certainly in need of improvement, but a respectable figure in any national comparison.
Many have been critical of Nevada's community college graduation rates, which range from 5 to 26 percent. However, many, if not most, community college students don't attend community colleges to graduate from a community college -- they attend to take specific courses or they transfer within a relatively short period of time. These are designed to be access institutions, and graduation rates, taken alone, really don't adequately reflect their mission.
Henry Kranendonk describes himself as "a person who'd never served on anything other than a church board" until the day about three years ago when he got a call from an aide to Margaret Spellings, then the U.S. secretary of education.
Would he join an elite group of somewhat frustrated people working near the top of the national education pyramid?
Well, that's not quite how it was put. But that's a practical reading of what being a member of the National Assessment Governing Board has meant for Kranendonk, who was the top math specialist in Milwaukee Public Schools at that point.
Those unhappy numbers, released last week, about how only one in five high school seniors across the country is proficient in science? The data a year ago that put MPS fourth- and eighth-graders near the bottom of the proficiency list among 18 urban districts? Those reports over the last decade that showed Wisconsin had the largest or close to the largest gaps in the U.S. between white and black students in reading and math?
Principals and teachers may have violated state procedures by entering locked DeKalb County school closets on weekends and late at night to access students' answers to standardized tests.
Principals and teachers may have violated state procedures by entering locked DeKalb County school closets on weekends and late at night to access students' answers to standardized tests.
If so, they weren't caught on camera, but their security key cards gave them away.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution learned DeKalb County school district's internal investigation into possible cheating on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test hinged on illegal access to the tests and led to 24 educators being removed from the classroom this week. The list includes principals, assistant principals and teachers who are now doing administrative jobs.
"There's a chain of evidence that requires only certain people to have access to those tests," schools' spokesman Walter Woods said Friday. "There were several instances where employees accessed school over the weekend, and those employees were flagged."
Student attendance rates are up, suspensions are down and math performance is improving in the nine struggling Houston ISD schools taking part in the district's experimental reform program called Apollo 20.
But the instruction in many classrooms remains too basic and boring, according to the first major progress report on the $29 million effort being watched by urban districts nationwide. Questions also remain about future funding of the program.
HISD Superintendent Terry Grier, who released the Harvard University report to the school board on Saturday, described the first-semester results as "very good news" but acknowledged some weaknesses.
"This is a three-year pilot," he said. "You're not going to turn around the lowest-performing schools in the district, all of them, in a year."
The Apollo program launched in August at five middle schools and four high schools that ranked among the lowest-achieving in the Houston Independent School District. The effort started with a staff shake-up. Grier's administration replaced all the principals, and about 40 percent of the teachers are new to the campuses.
They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called "intellectual vitality." The perception is that today's over-achieving, college-driven kids have it -- whatever it is. They're not just groomed; they're ready. There's just one problem.
Once on campus, the students aren't studying.
It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don't just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours.
The attached proposed changes to Policy 4025 reflect the amendments to Wis. Stat. §118.51, which now permits a nonresident district to consider whether a student has been habitually truant for purposes of allowing open enrollment into the non-resident district. This change applies to students who lived in the district, moved outside of the district boundaries, and are seeking to stay in the district as a nonresident student. A second change allows a district to prohibit a nonresident student from attending district schools after an initial acceptance if the student is habitually truant during either semester of the current school year. The open enrollment period begins February 7, 2011 and ends February 25, 2011.
Over the next five years, more than a million new teachers will enter public school classrooms. But the system in place to produce these teachers--supported by an ever-expanding set of federal financial aid programs and multimillion-dollar federal grants--offers no guarantees of quality for anyone involved, from the college students who often borrow thousands of dollars to attend teacher preparation programs to the districts, schools, and children that depend on good teachers.
"Simply put, the nation's thousands of teacher preparation programs are good at churning out teachers but far less successful at ensuring that those teachers meet the needs of public schools and students," say the authors of a new Education Sector policy brief. In A Measured Approach to Improving Teacher Preparation, analysts Chad Aldeman, Kevin Carey, Erin Dillon, Ben Miller, and Elena Silva examine the way the United States currently prepares teachers and offers some specific suggestions on how to improve it.
Mary was four years old when she entered the pre-kindergarten program in Marshall. Her parents were struggling with her behavior. She had a significant speech delay. She didn't like snuggling with them. She didn't want to read books. And she refused to let her parents touch her hair.
"What are we doing wrong?" her parents wondered.
Mary's early childhood teachers worked with her parents and her pediatrician to help diagnose the problem: Mary had autism. Her teachers created a special education plan for her, which included "social stories" -- books of pictures from Mary's daily life that helped explain mysterious rituals like brushing her hair.
The teachers taught Mary how to read facial expressions and verbalize her feelings, instead of having tantrums. They took her on field trips to public places, so she could get used to the noise and bustle of other people.
As Mary's parents began to understand autism, the teachers supported them by offering advice. The intense, early intervention helped Mary and her family learn to manage her autism. By sixth grade, Mary was doing so well she was able to exit special education services for good.
Full-time college students in the 1960s studies 24 hours per week, on average, and their counterparts today study 14 hours per week. The 10-hour decline is visible for students from all demographic groups and of all cognitive abilities, in every major and at every type of college.
The claim that this is true for "every type of college" is important because he wants to conclude that schools have lowered their standards. The alternative is that there are more, low-quality schools now, or that some schools have massively lowered their standards. These are both potentially problems -- and are probably real -- but are not quite the same problem as all schools everywhere lowering their standards.
So it's important to show that individual schools have lowered their standards, and that this is true for the selective schools as well as the not-selective schools. The article links to this study by Babcock. This study analyzes a series of surveys of student study habits from the 1960s to the 2000s, and thus seems to be the basis of his argument, and in fact the introduction contains almost the identical statement that I have quoted above. Nonetheless, despite these strong conclusions, the data that would support them appear to be missing.
The controversy at West High School continues about the Madison School District's new talented and gifted program. Students, parents and teachers decry the plan, pointing to the likelihood of a "tracking" system and increasingly segregated classes.
While I am in agreement with them here, I must differ when they mistakenly point to the current "embedded honors" system as a preferable method for dealing with TAG students.
The idea itself should immediately raise red flags. Teaching two classes at the same time is impossible to do well, if at all. Forcing teachers to create twice the amount of curriculum and attempt to teach both within a single context is unrealistic and stressful for the educators.
The system creates problems for students as well. There is very little regulation in the execution of these "embedded honors" classes, creating widely varying experiences among students. By trying to teach to two different levels within one classroom, "embedded honors" divides teachers' attention and ultimately impairs the educational experiences of both groups of students.
While the concerns raised about Superintendent Dan Nerad's plan are legitimate, "embedded honors" as a solution is not.
In February 2009, leaders from the Los Angeles Education Community publicly signed the L.A. Compact - a collaborative commitment to transform education in Los Angeles. The Compact signers have pledged to put the interests of students first. They have committed to work together to meet the following goals:
Goal 1: All students graduate from high school
Goal 2: All students have access to and are prepared for success in college
Goal 3: All students have access to pathways to sustainable jobs and careers
As part of their commitment, the signers pledged to release an initial data report in order to facilitate the measurement of their progress against these baselines in future years. The data in this report details Los Angeles Unified School District's rates of graduation, enrollment, preparation, and more. It then follows LAUSD graduates and tracks their progress in post-secondary education. At this point in its development, the report highlights several important markers as we discuss collaborative opportunities for improvement. The measurements and their sources will continue to be refined and expanded over the coming years.
A couple of highly valued sources have taken issue with a story I wrote in today's paper about the No Child Left Behind law.
The gist of their complaint, I believe, is that I did not walk readers through more of the fine print of the 2002 law to explain the context of the well-known goal of all students passing state tests by 2014. So let's do that now.
First of all, here's what the law says:
Section 1111 (b)(2)(F) Accountability--Timeline: Each State shall establish a timeline for adequate yearly progress. The timeline shall ensure that not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001-2002 school year, all students in each group described in subparagraph (C)(v) will meet or exceed the State's proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments under paragraph (3).
This excerpt from a rather long statute marks the core of the promise of No Child Left Behind. "All students" means what it says. "Shall ensure" is self-evident. "Proficient" means, essentially, passing the test. The requirement here is for states to chart a path toward 100 percent proficiency by 2014. Not 90 percent, or 80 percent, but 100 percent.
Twenty-four DeKalb County educators have been reassigned to nonschool duties over irregularities in 2009 state testing that affected nine schools and possibly 1,400 students. The unidentified educators, both teachers and principals, could face losing their teaching licenses. The DeKalb District attorney will review the investigation conducted by the school system and determine if criminal charges are warranted.
DeKalb County schools Interim Superintendent Ramona Tyson said 29 current and former employees were referred to the state Professional Standards Commission.
Phil Skinner, AJC DeKalb County schools Interim Superintendent Ramona Tyson said 29 current and former employees were referred to the state Professional Standards Commission.
School officials told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday they referred 24 educators and five former employees to the Georgia Professional Standards Commission after an internal investigation uncovered numerous irregularities on the April 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.
"No cheating has been proved and no one has come forward and admitted to cheating," schools spokesman Jeff Dickerson said. "But we couldn't have these individuals in the classroom right now. We made these decisions based on what is best for our students."
A quarter or two ago my son Andy took a rather unique course at the University of Washington. In his Math 480b: Programming for the Working Mathematician course, Andy learned about a number of important topics including the Unix command line, Python programming (including classes, exceptions and decorators). In the second half of the quarter they learned about the Sage open source math system.
The course ended by teaching the students how to make a genuine contribution to Sage. They were asked to find an open bug, figure out how to fix it, fix it, and to create and submit a patch. In essence, they learned a very practical skill that is taught all too rarely in school -- how to be a contributor to an open source project. This is pretty significant. Despite the presence of the word "open", I have come to learn that many people don't understand the actual workings of the process. Walking the students through it, and having them make an actual contribution, will ensure that they leave school with this knowledge under their belt. With any luck it will be easier for them to find jobs and they'll be more useful and more productive once they start.
Over at the mothership, Sunny Schubert has a wonderful column about a teacher she knows that has attempted to infuse his school with a little class. Zach, the fresh faced 22 year old newbie, decided he needed to set himself apart from his 7th grade students, so he started wearing a tie to school. For this transgression, he was mocked by the veteran teachers, none of whom saw any reason to dress up for school. In a show of solidarity with their teacher, Zach's students actually started wearing ties to school - while the other teachers took time out of their day to trash his classroom with gaudy neckties.
This story is good enough - but Schubert also mentions a wildly entertaining "scandal" brewing at Glendale Elementary School in Madison, which serves a large number of African-American children. (In fact, Glendale has the highest percentage of poor and minority students at any Madison elementary school.)
In 2005, Mickey Buhl took over as Glendale's principal, with the purpose of instilling the school with a new attitude and more innovative techniques. Since he took over, the school's test scores have risen dramatically.
When Paul Radspinner's 15-year-old son Mitchell wanted to participate in a student sit-in last October outside West High School, he called his dad to ask permission.
"He said he was going to protest, and wanted to make sure I had no problem with it. I thought, 'It's not the '60s anymore,'" recalls Radspinner. The students, he learned, were upset about planned curriculum changes, which they fear will eliminate elective class choices, a big part of the West culture.
"It was a real issue at the school," notes Radspinner. "The kids found out about it, but the parents didn't."
This lack of communication is a main reason Radspinner and 60 other parents recently formed a group called West Cares. Calling itself the "silent majority," the group this month opposed the new English and social studies honors classes the district is adding next fall at West, as well as Memorial. (East and La Follette High Schools already offer these classes for freshmen and sophomores.)
The parents fear separating smarter kids from others at the ninth-grade level will deepen the achievement gap by pushing some college-bound students into advanced-level coursework sooner. They also believe it will eviscerate West's culture, where all freshmen and sophomores learn main subjects in core classes together regardless of achievement level.
"It's a big cultural paradigm shift," says parent Jan O'Neil. "That's what we're struggling with in the West community."
Most states' evaluation, tenure and dismissal policies remain disconnected from classroom effectiveness.
Teacher evaluation is a critical attention area in 42 states because the vast majority of states do not ensure that evaluations, whether state or locally developed, preclude teachers from receiving satisfactory ratings if those teachers are found to be ineffective in the classroom. In addition, the majority of states still does not require annual evaluations of all veteran teachers, and most still fail to include any objective measures of student learning in the teacher evaluations they do require.
In 46 states, teachers are granted tenure with little or no attention paid to how effective they are with students in their classrooms. While there are a few states that have vague requirements for some consideration of evidence, and a few others that promise that teacher evaluations will "inform" tenure decisions, only Colorado, Delaware, Oklahoma and Rhode Island demand that evidence of student learning be the preponderant or decisive criterion in such decisions.
Dismissal is a critical attention area in 46 states. There are at least two state leaders taking this issue head on. In Oklahoma, recent legislation requires that tenured teachers be terminated if they are rated "ineffective" for two consecutive years, or rated as "needs improvement" for three years running, or if they do not average at least an "effective" rating over a five-year teaching period. In Rhode Island, teachers who receive two years of ineffective evaluations will be dismissed. Any teacher with five years of ineffective ratings would not be eligible to have his or her certification renewed by the state.
Education eyes were on Washington this week to see what President Obama would say about schools in his State of the Union address. But just as in 2010, if you really want to follow the action on education reform, it's better to look toward the states. All the new governors (29), education chiefs (18 new ones elected or appointed since November) and legislators (nearly 1,600) mean things are more fluid in the states, where teacher tenure is becoming a major flash point. Florida and New Jersey are considering pretty much ending tenure altogether. And while those states may be ground zero for tenure battles, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania are also considering significant changes.
Quick primer: When people refer to tenure for public-school teachers, what they're really talking about is a set of rules and regulations outlining due process for teachers accused of misconduct or poor performance. The elaborate rules often make it nearly impossible to fire a teacher. Joel Klein, who recently stepped down as New York City schools chancellor, has pointed out that death-penalty cases can be resolved faster than teacher-misconduct cases. In some places, the due-process rules are part of collective-bargaining agreements, and in others they're state law. In either case, there is a consensus among education reformers and some teachers'-union leaders that the rules need to be changed and the process streamlined. The contentious debate tends to be about how to modify what constitutes due process -- as negotiators did in a landmark teachers' contract in the District of Columbia in 2009 -- rather than get rid of it altogether.
"Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years . . . assuming they don't improve."
- Norman R. Augustine,
retired CEO of Lockheed Martin
What America needs, says one American parent, is more parents who resemble South Korean parents. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, 46, a father of a third-grader and a first-grader, recalls the answer Barack Obama got when he asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, "What is the biggest education challenge you have?" Lee answered: "Parents are too demanding." They want their children to start learning English in first rather than second grade. Only 25 percent of U.S. elementary schools offer any foreign-language instruction.
Too many American parents, Duncan says, have "cognitive dissonance" concerning primary and secondary schools: They think their children's schools are fine, and that schools that are not fine are irredeemable. This, Duncan says, is a recipe for "stasis" and "insidious paralysis." He attempts to impart motion by puncturing complacency and picturing the payoff from excellence.
Exams are out, the Great Books are in.
In a far-reaching overhaul of undergraduate education, Chinese University will scrap exams for most mandatory subjects and boost the teaching of both Western and Chinese classics.
The changes are part of the university's preparation to lengthen degree courses from three years to four years next year.
Details of the overhaul revealed yesterday include a drastic reduction in the number of final exams for mandatory courses in general education, languages, physical education and information technology.
"We will focus on the classics by [authors such as] Adam Smith, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. We want students to cite classics when thinking about modern problems," said Leung Mei-yee, director of the university's general education foundation programme.
SMALL rays of light can illuminate surprisingly large areas of darkness. The fuss continues to rumble on about the decision by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to publish revised school league tables showing how many pupils achieved a reasonable pass in five core subjects: English, maths, a foreign language, a science subject and either history or geography (a cluster of subjects that he is calling the English baccalaureate). This marked a sudden switch away from a system in which schools reported how many pupils gained a reasonable pass (an A, B or C grade) in any five subjects including English and maths.
As my colleagues in the Britain section reported earlier this month, this transparency ambush has already achieved one desired and desirable effect: to expose how many schools were boosting their scores by pushing pupils into soft, often vocational subjects which counted for as much as a pass in chemistry, French or history.
cience scores for Wisconsin students exceeded the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment, administered between January and March of 2009.
The state's scale scores on the assessments were 157 at both fourth and eighth grades, eight points higher than the national scale scores of 149 for both grades. In state-by-state comparisons, Wisconsin's results at fourth grade were higher than those in 27 states, not significantly different from those in 12 states, and lower than seven states. At eighth grade, Wisconsin's results were higher than 27 states, not significantly different than 14 states, and lower than five states.
Today I am releasing the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress science results.
Students were assessed at the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. Over 156,000 students at grade 4, 151,000 at grade 8, and 11,000 at grade 12 took the assessment. We have national results for public and private school students at all three grades. At grades 4 and 8, we also have results for public school students in 46 states and the Department of Defense schools. The state samples were combined and augmented with sampled students from the four non-participating states plus the District of Columbia, along with a national sample of private school students, to create the full national samples for grades 4 and 8. The twelfth-grade sample is smaller because there are no state-representative samples at that grade.
As California starts a new year and a new decade--with new state leadership--what major forces will affect public education? And how will they either help or hamper our schools' ability to cope with the dual pressures of financial adversity and the need to improve student achievement?
Please join us for this year's EdSource Forum and get a view of what this new decade holds from state and national leaders who see these issues, and the future for California public education, from a variety of different vantage points.
WHAT good would a gathering of literary types be if it didn't coincide with a little acrimony and rancour? South Asia's largest book festival is under way in Jaipur, Rajasthan, a five-hour drive (if you're lucky) from Delhi. From January 21st to the 25th a couple of hundred authors, tens of thousands of book-lovers and a few Nobel laureates cram the lawns of the Diggi palace in the Pink City.
The annual Jaipur Literature Festival is now big enough--32,000 attended last year; this year the tally will be much higher--that there should be no need for anyone to stir up controversy to get attention. Nonetheless, shortly before the event Hartosh Singh Bal, an (Indian) editor of a local magazine, accused William Dalrymple, a (British) writer who co-directs the festival, of being "pompous" and setting himself up as an arbiter of writers' taste in the country.
Stung, Mr Dalrymple accused Mr Bal, in turn, of racism. A flurry of angry commentary has followed in the Indian press and beyond, along with a discussion of whether or why Indian writers crave foreign approval, especially from Brits.
Tony Brown didn't set out to overhaul his college's policies on intellectual property. He just wanted an easier way of tracking local apartment rentals on his iPhone.
The University of Missouri student came up with an idea in class one day that spawned an iPhone application that has had more than 250,000 downloads since its release in March 2009. The app created by Brown and three other undergraduates won them a trip to Apple headquarters along with job offers from Google and other technology companies.
But the invention also raised a perplexing question when university lawyers abruptly demanded a 25 percent ownership stake and two-thirds of any profits. Who owns the patents and copyrights when a student creates something of value on campus, without a professor's help?
Like fellow Republican governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, New Mexico's new governor, Susana Martinez, is her state's first female chief executive. She is also the nation's first Latina governor, as Haley is the first woman governor in the United States of Indian descent.
But Martinez is not new to public service, having been a prosecutor for nearly a quarter-century. Her full biography is here. Her husband, Chuck Franco, has also had a long career in law enforcement. See the couple's photo below greeting a little girl.
Last week with Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell's State of the State address, we heard of the strong economy in the country's largest state geographically. (For links to all of the state of the state addresses published on Top of the Ticket so far, please scroll to the bottom.)
With New Mexico, however, we return to the familiar 2011 governmental theme of deficits and the need to cut spending. Martinez hits that theme strongly, imposing several major changes from policies of her predecessor, Democrat Bill Richardson.
She has ordered the state jet sold, cut expenses at the governor's residence by 55%, including letting go the two personal chefs who had been working there, cut her cabinet members' salaries by 10% and frozen all new vehicle purchases, except for law enforcement, among other stringencies.
The Chronicle of Higher Education released a nifty interactive map which shows the percent of those 25-and-older with at least a bachelor's degree in each county across the United States.
This remarkable tool, which relies heavily on Census Bureau data, not only allows one to break college attainment figures down by gender and race (Asian, black, Hispanic, white) in each county, but also lets one compare these statistics decade to decade.
The good news is 44.4 percent of all residents 25-and-older in Dane County now have at least a bachelor's degree. That's the highest percentage of any county in the state and ranks among the national leaders.
Conversely, while 45.0 percent of whites here have a four-year degree, only 18.5 percent of blacks do. That 26.5 percentage point gap locally is larger than in Milwaukee County -- which the Chronicle singles out as an area where the college attainment gulf between whites and blacks is especially wide.
Not that this gap in Dane County should stun anyone, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational policy studies and sociology at UW-Madison.
A young friend of mine - I'll call him Zach because that is, indeed, his name - graduated from college last May and started his first teaching job in August: 7th-grade Spanish in a school with a fairly high population of low-income children.
Zach is a very good-looking young man, but I must emphasize the word "young" because he has, for lack of a better term, a baby face.
Well aware of the fact that he looks younger than some of his students, Zach decided last summer that every day, he would wear a dress shirt and tie to school.
This was a source of amusement for some of his students, who had apparently never seen a teacher wearing a tie before.
It was NOT amusing to his fellow teachers, however, some of whom apparently felt Zach was making them look bad.
One day, all the male teachers wore ties - loud ties, ugly ties, sloppy ties, with T-shirts and sweatshirts.
Hispanics for School Choice (HFSC), a non-profit organization founded in Milwaukee County, is hosting a coming out event at the United Community Center (UCC) on January 24th. It marks the first time in Wisconsin history that leaders in the Hispanic community have organized to expand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
A Buzz at the State Capitol
Last week, Executive Board members of Hispanics for School Choice created somewhat of a buzz as they descended upon the State Capitol to circulate their legislative agenda. Associates from the American Federation of Children and School Choice Wisconsin accompanied HFSC in separate meetings with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, Education Committee Chair Steve Kestell, and Secretary of the Department of Administration Mike Huebsch to discuss a timetable of moving the School Choice program forward.
HFSC Board Members were also given exclusive entry to a closed caucus in the Grand Army of the Republic Hearing Room before Assembly Republicans - an access rarely granted to non-profit organizations of any sort for any reason. Before the 60-member caucus, Board Members of HFSC were introduced communicating the idea that HFSC aimed to be more of a resource to legislators than a needy lobbyist.
District, county, and state education offices are fond of sharing "best practices" through professional development. The idea is to spread the word about strategies that work in some schools so other teachers can use these strategies and get the same great results. There are times when it works this way. Unfortunately, things can get complicated when the same people who pick and distribute best practices are also responsible for checking whether they are being done correctly, and when none of those people are current teachers. Here's an example of how the sharing of best practices sometimes works once supervising offices get involved.
Phase one: A school seems to be successful in educating students in a given subject or demographic sub-group. Let's call this School A.
Phase two: A team of people who want to know what made School A successful descends upon the school. They sit in the classrooms. They ask questions. Then the team comes back with a report that says something like, "Teachers at School A are successful because they ask students to make their own test using fill-in-the-blank test questions. This is a research-based report."
Phase three: The information from the report is filtered through a series of people sitting in a quiet, student-less office. Materials are created. Packets are made.
In Jay Greene's recent blog post, "The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism," he points out that Vicki Phillips, head of education at the Gates Foundation misread her Foundation's own report. Jay's point was that Vicki continued to see what she and others wanted to see: "'Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.' Science had produced its answer -- teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms)."
I was intrigued by the education establishment's long-held view as Jay paraphrased it. This view has become one of the "enduring truths" of education and I have heard it expressed in the various classes I have been taking in education school the last few years. (I plan to teach high school math when I retire later this year). In terms of math education, ed school professors distinguish between "exercises" and "problems". "Exercises" are what students do when applying algorithms or routines they know and can apply even to word problems. Problem solving, which is preferred, occurs when students are not able to apply a mechanical, memorized response, but rather have to apply prior knowledge to solve a non-routine problem. Moreover, we future teachers are told that students' difficulty in solving problems in new contexts is evidence that the use of "mere exercises" or "procedures" is ineffective and they are overused in classrooms. One teacher summed up this philosophy with the following questions: "What happens when students are placed in a totally unfamiliar situation that requires a more complex solution? Do they know how to generate a procedure? How do we teach students to apply mathematical thinking in creative ways to solve complex, novel problems? What happens when we get off the 'script'?"
Faculty members from the unions of public colleges from 21 states met this weekend in Los Angeles and committed to launching a campaign with a lofty goal: assuring the future of higher education.
Participants reviewed and many expressed support for a set of organizing principles contained in a draft document called "Quality Higher Education for the 21st Century" that was prepared by the California Faculty Association. It advocates for more scrupulous analysis of calls to reform higher education. "Wholesale embrace of change without careful thought and deliberation can take us in the wrong direction," the document states, "not toward reforming higher education but, in fact, toward deforming precisely those aspects of American higher education that have made it the envy of the world."
I do wish I had attended the Washington Policy Center breakfast last week. One reason is the speaker was Dr. Andres Alonso, the head of Baltimore Schools. He sounds like an interesting guy and I would have liked to hear him in person.
However, a couple of readers (Greg is one), pointed out that there was coverage of his speech in this week's Crosscut. What is interesting is he seems the non-firebreathing, anti-union, anti-parent Michelle Rhee. He came into an incredibly poor situation:
Only 35 percent of Baltimore's students received high-school diplomas the year before Alonso arrived. Proficiency levels as measured by standardized tests were in the cellar. Over nine years the district lost 25,000 students, dwindling from 106,540 in 1999 to 81,284 in 2008.
In the same period the district gained 1,000 staff, Alonso said. With costs rising despite continuing enrollment declines, "baseline aid from the state to the city had doubled.... It was clearly an organization not sustainable over time."
How could they lose over 25,000 students and gain 1,000 staff? Who was the superintendent before this guy?
In 1919, the young EB White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte's Web, took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk assigned his self-published manual on composition entitled "The Elements of Style", a 43-page list of rules of usage, principles of style and commonly misused words. It was a brief for brevity. "Vigorous writing is concise," Strunk wrote. "When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter." Half a century later, when preparing his old professor's manuscript for publication, White added an essay of his own underlining the argument for concision in moral terms. "Do not overwrite," he instructed. "Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating." Strunk & White, as the combined work came to be known, was issued in 1959 and went on to become a defining American statement of what constituted good writing, with 10m copies sold, and counting. Its final rule summoned the whole: "Prefer the standard to the offbeat."
Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for "vigour" and "toughness" in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists. As Lorin Stein, the new editor of the celebrated literary magazine The Paris Review, recently put it to me: "It's like a national superego." And when it comes to an activity as variable, difficult and ultimately ungovernable as writing sentences, the allure of rules that dictate brevity and concreteness is enduring.
The Gleason Family Foundation has long had an intense interest in the quality of education. With great disappointment over the decades, we've watched our public education system continually fail to meet the needs of all children.
The education special interests tell us that the crisis in education is a fabricated one. But the growing body of achievement data overwhelmingly shows that K-12 student performance, particularly in urban school systems, has been middling at best, comparing unfavorably even to some Third World countries.
Rochester, like all too many urban school systems, graduates fewer than 50 percent of its students, many of whom are totally unprepared to meet the challenges of an increasingly high tech world.
Well, members of the Wisconsin legislature have several important choices ahead of them as they look at the educational landscape in this state.
The temptation is to sweep our state's educational problems under the rug with one heck of a broom for an excuse, "there is no money."
To give in to that temptation would be wrong and there are steps the legislature can take to restore educational innovation and improve educational access without breaking the bank.
One of the steps would be to eliminate the cap on online public charter school enrollment. The cap is one of the most shameful educational policy holdovers from the Governor Jim Doyle era, and it needs to be repealed.
From primary school onwards, Chinese children will now receive lessons in the art of queuing, good table manners, how to respect their elders and betters and the correct way to write letters, emails and even send SMS messages.
Older children will be tutored in the arts of introducing oneself to strangers, dealing politely with members of the opposite sex, making public speeches and the rudiments of dealing with foreigners and (to Chinese eyes, at least) their strange ways.
"The goal is to let students know that China is a country with a long history of civilisation, rituals and cultures," said the guidelines which were published on the ministry's website.
It's New Jersey School Choice Week. Gov. Chris Christie signed a proclamation encouraging all citizens to "join the movement for educational reform."
Or, at least, his brand of reform, one that includes cutting $1 billion from traditional public schools while spending taxpayer money on independent schools that have somehow failed to enroll New Jersey's neediest children, those with handicaps, language problems, and very low income.
In the last few days, the governor issued a study that purported to show charters "outperforming" traditional schools, approved 23 more charters, proposed laws making it easier to create the independent but publicly funded schools, and hired an organization run by Geoffrey Canada, the champion of New York charter schools, to try his magic in Paterson.
Some critics argue state studies comparing scores of charter schools with their home districts were not scientific and unbiased and, if they showed anything, proved test score averages can be improved by not enrolling children who don't do well on standardized tests.
The 2011 legislative session presents a historic opportunity for Oklahoma to lead in improving our children's future through comprehensive education reform. The combination of a reform-minded Legislature, governor and state school superintendent, along with an engaged public, provides a unique window for passing the greatest educational improvements in our lifetime.
The first reform is choice in education through an educational tax credit scholarship act that follows the example of the states that have seen the most rapid improvement in educational achievement. This bill empowers parents to find the schools that will best meet their children's needs, stimulates the creation of innovative scholarship schools, and provides the competition that has been proven to greatly improve the public schools.
Choice also is promoted by expanding the charter school laws, allowing the state schools superintendent to charter new schools, and freeing these highly successful charter schools to finance their own infrastructure needs.
I have a good feeling about this class. I'm going to like them. Liking a class is more practically useful than it sounds. In a likable class, discussions are freer, more open. When the students like one another, they take everyone's work more seriously. In another class I taught, after a woman read a section of her novel aloud, another woman asked, "May I be your friend?" The first woman answered, "You already are." The students will also feel safe with one another and will trust the group with personal information they use in their writing.
In my novel-writing workshop, a student wrote about a woman who was taking care of her husband, whose mind was deteriorating. She too was deteriorating from the effort. She told her story as a novel, but the students understood it was her own. They respect such disclosures. They unite with one another like a noisy brood of brothers and sisters. And they can always unite against me.
From a practical standpoint, we would like to think that every action taken by the Kansas Legislature would be "suitable" for the state.
However, that word has spawned considerable controversy in Kansas as it pertains to education funding -- controversy that has landed the state in court before and may do it again.
Gov. Sam Brownback wants to avoid that and many Kansans would agree with his contention that defending state laws in court is a poor use of precious resources. To that end, in his State of the State address, Brownback invited legislators to better define "a suitable education."
Like many Kansans, Brownback quoted a term that actually doesn't appear in Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution, which covers education. The actual wording is that the legislature "shall make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state." The sentence even appears under Section 6: Finance.
Hispanics for School Choice, an organization designed to expand school choice programs, launched Monday at a gathering at the United Community Center.
The group's legislative agenda includes:
Removing the enrollment cap in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Expanding choice schools to allow students from Milwaukee to attend schools throughout Milwaukee County.
Allowing all parents to participate in choice by lifting income limits.
Expanding school choice to other cities.
"Despite differences in political philosophies, our community agrees that school choice is educationally effective in educating our children, and we're serious about getting the best for our children," said Zeus Rodriguez, president of the organization.
The school choice movement has backed an array of options outside the traditional public school system. Proponents argue that such programs expand options for parents and pressure public schools to operate more efficiently. Critics argue that the choice program drains resources from public schools, and that public funds shouldn't flow to private, often religious schools.
The news that 45 percent of college students learn little or nothing during their first two years of college comes as no surprise to those who have been studying higher education. But it should serve as a wake up call for parents who go deeply into debt to purchase a very expensive diploma for their children.
The researchers who studied more than 2,300 undergraduates found that nearly half showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. After four years, 36 percent of students still did not demonstrate significant improvement.
Undergraduate students just aren't asked to do much, according to findings in the new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester. One-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading a week.
Austin schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen met with facilities task force members Saturday to encourage them to broaden their scope and not to focus as much on the district's looming budget crisis.
In recent weeks, the task force seemed to stray a bit from its mission of creating a 10-year plan on future schools, renovations and attendance zones. After it earlier this month named nine schools that could be closed for efficiency's sake, outraged community members rallied to save their schools.
Although the long-term plan probably will have recommendations on closures, task force members said they felt pressured to produce short-term fixes to help the district get past one of the worst anticipated budget shortfalls in its history.
On Saturday, Carstarphen, in effect, told task force volunteers that was her burden, not theirs.
"There's only so much in efficiencies you can do," she said. "You can't do it all. You don't need to do it all."
The Austin School District's 2010-2011 budget is $973,997,900 for 86,000 students ($11,325.55 per student). Madison's 2010-2011 budget is $379,058,945 (according to the January, 2011 "State of the District" presentation for 24,471 students. That is $15,490 per student.
Expect to hear the phrase "school choice" more than usual in the coming days. The fourth week of January is National School Choice Week, and advocates for educational freedom across the country will be highlighting its effectiveness for children.
Why school choice? Economist Milton Friedman best stated the philosophy behind it: "You can subsidize the producer or you can subsidize the consumer. In education, we subsidize the producer; we subsidize the school. If you subsidize the student instead, you would have competition. The student could choose which school he would go to, and that would force the schools to improve and to meet the tastes of their students."
But you don't have to get philosophical. Just ask the kids.
EVER since 1982, when the American penny (one-cent piece) ceased being minted from brass and started being made instead from zinc with a thin coating of copper, eighth-graders at some of the country's more inspired schools have been given a nifty little experiment in electrochemistry to do for homework. Your correspondent's 13-year-old came home recently with goggles and instructions to find the amounts of copper and zinc in a modern penny. While in class, each kid had first carefully weighed three such coins on a scientific balance. After that, the rest was up to them (and their dads).
The experiment is designed to test the pupils' knowledge of the galvanic series, and the science that explains how corrosion occurs. The series lists metals according to their resistance to electrochemical reaction--with the "noblest" (eg, palladium, platinum and gold) at the top of the rankings, and the most reactive or "basest" (eg, beryllium, zinc and magnesium) at the bottom. Copper comes 11 places above zinc in the table. Thus, when the two metals share an electrolyte, the zinc (being much the more reactive) will dissolve into the solution long before the copper. In a similar way, zinc anodes attached to the hulls of ships protect the vessels' steel plates from rusting away by being sacrificed instead.
The threat to revoke the accreditation of Atlanta Public Schools last week was as ominous as a shark fin: Could one unruly school board somehow pull the whole city under?
Shortly after the school system was placed on probation, however, powerful interests in the city and state coalesced into a formidable defensive line. Loss of accreditation, they said, simply can't happen.
"Come September, we will have an accredited, functioning school system," state Rep. Edward Lindsey, R-Atlanta, said of a Sept. 30 deadline facing the school board to improve its governance. "We are all committed we will work our way through this ... issue. That's the most important message any of us could give."
George Washington University has opened a private college-preparatory high school that will operate entirely online, one of the nation's first "virtual" secondary schools to be affiliated with a major research university.
The opening of a laboratory-style school under the banner of a prestigious university generally counts as a major event among parents of the college-bound. The George Washington University Online High School, a partnership with the online learning company K12 Inc., is competing with brick-and-mortar prep schools and with a small but growing community of experimental online schools attached to major universities.
Online learning may be the next logical step in the evolution of university "lab" schools, an ongoing experiment in pedagogy. Online instruction holds the potential to transcend the factory model of traditional public education, allowing students to learn at their own pace. In the ideal online classroom, no lesson is ever too fast or too slow, and no one ever falls behind.
The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy--where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision--investing in education yields great bang for the buck.
Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K-12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation - working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don't rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher. Other foundations--Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few--often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement's success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.
For some classes at the University of Notre Dame, iPads are replacing textbooks -- at least temporarily.
The school is studying the use of the Apple Inc. tablet among students to see how it affects learning, and after a test this fall found that students students thought the device made their class more interesting.
"Moments before the start of class, I could place a video into students' dropboxes, and the majority of them would arrive having already watched it and able to discuss it. Those sorts of things made the class more interesting and dynamic and could never have happened in the past," said Assistant Professor Corey Angst, the professor behind the project. Half of the students ultimately said they strongly agreed that the iPad made their project management course more interesting.
The study, called the eReader Project, looked at undergraduates in a project-management course at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business this past fall. The sampling of students was small: 40 students in the course used Wi-Fi iPads for seven weeks of the semester; a second wave of 38 students received in the second half of the semester.
A state Senate committee voted Thursday to advance a program that would offer vouchers for students in failing public schools to attend private and parochial schools.
The Opportunity Scholarship Act is a signature piece of Gov. Chris Christie's education reform agenda and another proposal over which he and the state's largest teachers union are coming to blows. The New Jersey Education Association vehemently opposes the voucher program, calling it "a government bailout for struggling private schools."
If implemented, the bill would cost about $825 million and serve 40,000 students in 166 chronically failing public schools by its fifth year. It could be a boon for parochial schools, which have been closing in droves because of declining enrollment, but could also force reductions in state aid to public school districts.
If the Milwaukee Public Schools system keeps operating the way it is now, things just aren't going to get much better. If we want things genuinely to improve, big changes need to be made. And the time for making changes is now.
I'm not presenting my views. I'm describing the views of Gregory Thornton.
With a half-year as superintendent of MPS behind him, he is beginning to make moves that are sure to define the success or failure of his time in Milwaukee - and may have a major impact on the shape of education in the city for years to come.
Lengthening school days and teacher workdays.
Giving administrators freer hands in hiring and assigning teachers.
Revising rules that make seniority the deciding factor in who gets laid off or reassigned when cuts are made.
Revamping teacher evaluations and maybe pay, including student performance as a factor.
Giving management more freedom to schedule training for teachers.
Revising the relationship between the School Board and the administration so the superintendent has a freer hand.
We heard encouraging words about school reform last week from Republican leaders in the state Legislature.
For starters, those leaders -- Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon and Rep. Steve Kestell of Elkhart Lake -- both seem focused on change and flexibility, essential parts of any movement forward with our public schools. And both seem committed to reducing the mandates and state demands on local school systems.
That type of increased local control will be necessary not only to truly bring about change to public schools but also to maneuver them through an era of exceedingly tight budgets. Funding for schools no doubt will be squeezed as Gov. Scott Walker deals with the state's $3 billion-plus deficit in his two-year budget proposal next month.
It was a packed house today as teachers, parents, superintendents, and members of the community showed up to voice their concerns or approval for Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna's comprehensive plan for education reform.
It was also a historic day at the Statehouse as the Joint Finance-Appropriation Committee took public comment for the first time ever, and boy did they ever take public comment.
It was standing room only as people crowded in to give their 3-minute testimonies on Luna's plan to overhaul K-12 education in Idaho.
"Hansen has been hit hard by the cuts to education," said teacher Lauren Peters. "Unlike many districts, we were unable to pass our override levy. So our children lost out. Our drama and music classes are entirely gone."
"We don't have the money," said Danielle Aarons, a mother. "We have to make cuts. It's not fun, it's hard. But at home, in our budgets, this is what we have to do. It's simple math."
The first major point of Luna's plan includes merit pay for teachers and doing away with their tenure.
"Currently, there is no accountability system where districts, schools, or teachers are recognized or rewarded for top performance, or corrected when performance is poor," said Colby Gull, Superintendent of Challis schools.
Concentration broken only by the soft whispers of student questions, the fifth-graders in Hartland South Elementary School teacher Holly Albrecht's class lounge on bean bags, perch on fabric cubes or lightly bounce on stability balls.
With the entire class studiously completing math tests, a couple of students choose to work at a table pushed to a corner during a redesign of Albrecht's classroom. But the room's sole desk goes abandoned.
Just changing the furniture by removing almost all of the desks and most of the chairs in her classroom has brought about changes in her students, Albrecht said, aiding concentration and providing more flexibility for how they learn. Other teachers in her school have taken notice and are planning changes of their own, budget allowing.
"The kids love it," Albrecht said.
Although this is only a few teachers and only one school building, such moves to get rid of the traditional desk-and-chair design of an upper-elementary-grade classroom are part of a larger rethinking of the school experience.
The Report
The 2011 State of the District Report brings into focus the great strengths and challenges of the Madison Metropolitan School District, and sheds light on our strategies, plans and priorities for keeping all of the community's children on a secure path toward learning and healthy development.
Mission Critical
The mission statement of the Madison Metropolitan School District focuses on our commitment to ensuring that our students develop a love of learning, and the necessary citizenship skills that will allow them to function effectively in an evermore complex world and be of assistance to the communities in which they reside.
MMSD In Context
Students:
The MMSD is the second largest school district in Wisconsin with 24,796 students. This is the 3rd Friday of September 2010 count and includes pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
Student Population by Race/Ethnicity:
White 47%
African-American 24%
Hispanic 17%
Asian 10%
Multiracial 6%
Native American 1%
49% Free and Reduced Price Lunch Students (37% State Avg.)
17% English Language Learners (6% State Avg.)
70 different languages spoken as the primary language in the homes of MMSD students
15% Students with Disabilities (14.1% State Avg.)
Employees FTEs*
Total 6,286 3,853.4
Some employee groups:
Teachers 2,626 2,500.61
Substitutes 729 N/A
Educational Assistants 625 480.55
Custodians 211 211.0
* Full-time equivalent; 1.0 FTE = a full-time position
Financial Status:
With the 2009-10 fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, the Madison Metropolitan School District's General Fund (10) expenditures were less than budgeted, allowing the district to increase fund balance over last year by $5.15 million, to $40.49 million.
The adopted 2010-11 budget continues to put resources where they are most needed - in the classrooms. The budgeted spending for all funds is a total of $379,058,945 which is an increase of $8,771,475 or 2.37% over 2009- 10.
The total property tax levy increased by $10,823,758 or 4.62%, with a mill rate increase of $0.88 or 8.65%. The following graph shows the breakdown of 2009-10 Actual Revenue by four major categories.
=And here's a good one: don't reuse exam questions just because you are teaching at a different law school. It's called "the internet," professors. Your students have access to it and can find your old questions. If you put in just a little bit of work, you can come up with entirely new exam questions.
It's your job! You get paid for it!
And if you do your job with minimal diligence, you won't end up like Penn Law professor William Wilson Bratton, and we won't have to write about you...
Last year, a visiting professor at NYU got into trouble for re-using exam questions. It's a mistake that's so easy to avoid that I'm surprised to see it happen again. But maybe we just need to post one of these stories every year to encourage professors to demonstrate basic competence stay on their toes.
Governor Chris Christie has some changes in mind when it comes to education in the Garden State.
Christie invited players in the education reform movement to Trenton on Wednesday for a showing of "Waiting for Superman", the acclaimed documentary that looks at the failures of public education.
Christie said beforehand it's his goal to turn those failures around.
"The failed teacher must be shown the door, bad schools must be closed and start over," Gov. Christie said.
Hoping to give students in troubled districts more choices, the state has just approved the opening of 23 new charter schools across New Jersey. Charters are publicly funded schools that operate independently.
There exists a familiar crescendo during the holiday season that achieves its apex as the New Year begins. If your family is like mine, it began with great anticipation about gifts, both receiving them and choosing just the right one.
But after the presents were opened and the last bit of leftover turkey devoured, we turned our attention to contemplating the purpose of the holidays and our ambitions for the upcoming New Year. As the president of one of America's oldest institutions of higher learning, Hampden-Sydney College, I thought it appropriate to offer my comments on the purpose of a college, for higher education is, or should be, central to the ambitions of all our young men and women.
A bit of history is illustrative.
Universities, when they were established more than a thousand years ago, focused on educating clergy and instilling religious piety. Over the years, religious education was supplement and then supplanted by the notion of civic virtue and, eventually, by secular humanism which became the core purpose of institutions of higher learning. The 1800s gave rise to the German university with its graduate students and deliberate focus on research. The American concept of a liberal arts education, which included emphasis on teaching and, usually, the shaping of moral character, was shaken to its core as research universities attracted talented professors, eager students, and government and foundation dollars. But undergraduate students still needed some degree of moral formation or at least some growing up. Colleges and universities still have to address this need -- particularly for the Millennials -- our wonderfully over-programmed, over-achieving and, at times, over-confident young people born after 1979.
The methods behind the Harlem Children's Zone education and social project have been praised by President Barack Obama and lionized in the film "Waiting for Superman.'" But the integrated approach to raising successful children has been tough to repeat -- and now New Jersey is going to give it a try.
Officials in Paterson, N.J., will begin working with experts from the Harlem Children's Zone to mimic the model, the Christie administration said Wednesday.
Few details were given about what exactly that might look like. Geoffrey Canada, the outspoken president of Harlem Children's Zone, will work with city officials "over the coming weeks and months" to create a program. It's unclear whether there will be additional federal, state or private funding for the Paterson experiment.
Shekira Roby is only 11 years old, but she is already becoming fluent in the language of money.
She has studied the time value of money, the concept of risk and reward, as well as the importance of budgeting and most of all how to save.
"I'm almost up to $100," said Roby, who has also become adept at counting money as one of four tellers at the in-school bank at the Business and Economics Academy of Milwaukee or BEAM, where she is a sixth-grader.
The type of learning she and others are engaged in at the school already is paying dividends toward her financial future, said Tim O'Driscoll, director for the Center for Economic Education at the Lakeland College Milwaukee Center.
"People have to save more at a younger age," O'Driscoll implored. "In society, there is a tremendous lack of knowledge about personal finances and just basic economics."
During spring semester 2010, Katherine Parker (a pseudonym) resigned from her position as a tenure-track history professor at a regional comprehensive university, on the border between the South and the Midwest, to work at an elite private high school. She left, she says, for a number of reasons including low pay, frozen salaries, and cost-of-living adjustments that never came; insufficient resources for travel, research, and instruction; blatant administrative condescension toward faculty; and a poor personal fit with the region and its culture. There was also, Parker explains, "the sense that I was becoming more and more disconnected from my work -- phoning it in because it no longer offered anything exciting."
For three successive years, Parker attempted to find a better position within the ivory tower, and every year she was a finalist for "a great job." But, in the end, each of the search committees offered her dream academic job to another candidate. In the midst of the 2009-10 job season, Parker decided that the plummeting state of the academic market meant that it was time to explore other options. She'd had enough. "Private school teaching attracted me because it combined the work I already knew I enjoyed with an institution that could support that work better (more resources, fewer students, more support for those students). It also promised a higher caliber of student."
Atlanta's public school system was told Tuesday it has until September 30 to make progress on a series of recommendations or risk its high schools losing their certification, a fate that would affect the college hopes of many of the system's graduates.
The probationary status stems from complaints that conflicts between members had severely hampered the school board's ability to govern effectively, according to a statement from AdvancEd, the world's largest school accrediting agency and the parent company of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
"This is designed to improve the school system," Mark Elgart, president and CEO of AdvancED, said at a news conference Tuesday. "The (school) board and the system have a choice here: They can choose to proactively take actions designed to improve it, building on these actions we have outlined, or they can fight it."
"Achievement, alignment and sustainability. We will focus all of our efforts in these three areas to build the strong schools that will become the heart, and the hope, of our communities." Superintendent Valeria S. Silva
Strong Schools, Strong Communities is our strategy for improving education for all students - without exception or excuse. The plan focuses clearly on the needs of students.
Changes, which will be phased in over the next three years, will require us to think differently about some of our long-held beliefs. The changes reflect the best and most successful practices in urban education. They honor and support the elements that have been successful in Saint Paul.
The plan will allow our schools to focus on delivering an education that will reach not only the children who are thriving today in Saint Paul but all of the students in our district. And, we believe, the changes we are making will reconnect many students to the communities where they live - truly making the schools the heart of our community.
We invite you to learn more by clicking on any of the links below, or by attending an upcoming information session near you (see end of page for dates, times and locations).
I don't know if you've been following the discussion that's been out there the past week or so, about a book written by a Chinese-American woman named Amy Chua. It's about the differences -- the very big differences -- between western and Asian styles of parenting. Suffice it to say that Amy Chua is a strict mom: A's are the only grade that's acceptable, three hours of piano practice every day is barely enough -- that kind of thing.
Anyway, I've been wracking my brain trying to find a Marketplace angle to the thing. Commentator and educator Michelle Rhee says it's all Marketplace.
MICHELLE RHEE: We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.
The Wisconsin school systems of Oshkosh and Eau Claire are about the same size and serve similar student populations. They also get largely similar results on state exams-but Eau Claire spends an extra $8 million to run its school system
This report is the culmination of a yearlong effort to study the efficiency of the nation's public education system and includes the first-ever attempt to evaluate the productivity of almost every major school district in the country. In the business world, the notion of productivity describes the benefit received in exchange for effort or money expended. Our project measures the academic achievement a school district produces relative to its educational spending, while controlling for factors outside a district's control, such as cost of living and students in poverty.
Our nation's school system has for too long failed to ensure that education funding consistently promotes strong student achievement. After adjusting for inflation, education spending per student has nearly tripled over the past four decades. But while some states and districts have spent their additional dollars wisely--and thus shown significant increases in student outcomes--overall student achievement has largely remained flat. And besides Luxembourg, the United States spends more per student than any of the 65 countries that participated in a recent international reading assessment, and while Estonia and Poland scored at the same level as the United States on the exam, the United States spent roughly $60,000 more to educate each student to age 15 than either nation.
Our aims for this project, then, are threefold. First, we hope to kick-start a national conversation about educational productivity. Second, we want to identify districts that generate higher-than-average achievement per dollar spent, demonstrate how productivity varies widely within states, and encourage efforts to study highly productive districts. Third--and most important--we want to encourage states and districts to embrace approaches that make it easier to create and sustain educational efficiencies.
This report comes at a pivotal time for schools and districts. Sagging revenues have forced more than 30 states to cut education spending since the recession began. The fiscal situation is likely to get worse before it gets better because the full impact of the housing market collapse has yet to hit many state and local budgets. At a time when states are projecting more than $100 billion in budget shortfalls, educators need to be able to show that education dollars produce significant outcomes or taxpayers might begin to see schools as a weak investment. If schools don't deliver maximum results for the dollar, public trust in education could erode and taxpayers may fund schools less generously.
While some forward-thinking education leaders have taken steps to promote better educational efficiency, most states and districts have not done nearly enough to measure or produce the productivity gains our education system so desperately needs. Some fear that a focus on efficiency might inspire policymakers to reduce already limited education budgets and further increase the inequitable distribution of school dollars. To be sure, our nation's system of financing schools is unfair. Low-income and minority students are far more likely to attend schools that don't receive their fair share of federal, state, and local dollars. But while the issue of fairness must be central to any conversation about education finance, efficiency should not be sacrificed on the altar of equity. Our nation must aspire to have a school system that's both fair and productive.
Our emphasis on productivity does not mean we endorse unfettered market-based reforms, such as vouchers allowing parents to direct public funds to private schools. Nor do we argue that policymakers should spend less on education. Indeed, we believe neither of these approaches can solve the nation's pressing education challenges. Transforming our schools will demand both real resources and real reform. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently said: "It's time to stop treating the problem of educational productivity as a grinding, eat-your-broccoli exercise. It's time to start treating it as an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress."
The size of classes in schools around the country is growing. Half the districts responding to a recent poll say they are increasing class size because of budget pressures. Many school officials fear this will hurt students.
But some education reformers say there are ways to boost class size and save money at the same time.
Marguerite Roza analyzes school spending for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She's been watching districts deal with tight budgets through across-the-board cuts and other desperation moves.
Roza says she's worried that schools view tight spending limits as a lose-lose proposition.
Challenging economic times present an opportunity to rethink many processes...
Under the proposed plan, all new educators will have two-year contracts with raises and bonuses based on student achievement. Teachers with seniority will not be protected from workforce reduction layoffs, and collective bargaining will be limited to salary and wage-related benefits.
"We think that gives the local elected school board more control over the staff and the people that work in their schools," Luna said.
The plan further requires that once agreements between local teachers unions and school boards are reached, they must be published online immediately by school districts. In addition, collective bargaining negotiations for those contracts must take place during open meetings, with parents, teachers and the public able to observe.
The state will publish a fiscal report card for every district showing per-pupil spending, how much of a district's budget is going into the classroom, how much is spent on administration and how each district compares to other districts in the state.
Funding for the reform package aligns with the governor's proposed K-12 public schools budget of $1.2 billion, and includes a multi-year spending strategy using revenue from some cost-saving measures to pay for other programs.
The education secretary nominee fired off one of her first public salvos last week, and it was a dilly. Responding to Education Week's Quality Counts grade of an F in K-12 Achievement and a D+ in Chance for Success in the report (though we got an overall grade of C), Hanna Skandera said, "It is unacceptable that New Mexico has an F in K-12 achievement and that our rankings have decreased each year. ... For every decision that needs to be made, we will ask, 'Are New Mexico students the winners in this decision?' Our focus must be on the classroom."
That's the same argument all the challengers for Santa Fe's board of education are making as they continue to hit the campaign trail this month (more on that in a moment).
Three San Francisco schools have begun the unsavory task of replacing half their teachers to fulfill a bargain that got them $5 million each in federal grants aimed at boosting test scores.
Bryant Elementary, Carver Elementary and Everett Middle are among 10 San Francisco schools that landed on the state's list of the 188 lowest-performing schools and are now required to take drastic steps to turn themselves around.
All told, the three schools must replace 26 teachers. Those teachers will get first choice to occupy vacancies left by retiring teachers at other schools. Those who transfer will remain at their current jobs through this school year.
Every year across the country, around a quarter of a million people enter the teaching profession. Almost all of them are prepared in the nation's schools of education. If the country is serious about bending upward the curve of its students' stagnant academic performance, improving the preparation of new teachers would seem to be a crucial step. And yet, very little is known about the quality of teacher preparation programs--their selectivity, the content and pedagogical knowledge that they demand that their teacher candidates master, or how well they prepare candidates for the rigors of the classroom. Without such knowledge, people thinking about becoming teachers can't make informed choices about where to get trained, district superintendents and principals don't know where to look for well-prepared teachers, and policymakers lack the means to sanction poorly performing education schools.
South Dakota public schools spent only 1.4 percent more per student in 2009-10 than they did the year before, and some of the leanest districts again are near Sioux Falls.
The average district spent $7,958 per student last school year on its general, special education and pension funds, up from $7,850 the year before, according to the South Dakota Department of Education.
Sioux Falls came in at $7,288 per student, which ranks 124th among 154 districts. At $6,018, Chester Area spent the least. Superintendent Mark Greguson said that with 345 students - not counting its online high school for those in Hutterites colonies - Chester is able to maximize its teaching staff.
Marshall Middle School in Janesville is in its second year of offering single-gender classrooms, and students and teachers said the program has made a positive difference in their education.
Currently, more than 200 school districts around the country are testing out the teaching method, and about 10 schools in Wisconsin offer a single-gender classroom program.
Marshall Middle School teacher Charles Smith said getting eighth-grade boys and girls to agree on music isn't easy. But his social studies class is girls only, and Smith said the class prefers to study to the music of Beyonce.
"If the kids are comfortable, they feel better about it. Then this is a good place for them," said Smith.
Smith said the single-gender classroom is about making students feel comfortable.
While his students learn, he said he's also learning how to better tailor his lessons.
FOR decades, families in southeast Seattle have sent their children off every morning to low-performing neighborhood schools. And for equally as long, we have asked for better.
We have been told to be patient, that things will improve. We have been told that it's not the school's fault -- it's the children we send there. We have been told to be better parents. We have been told, because we are poor or immigrants or African American, that we shouldn't expect academic success.
But we don't believe this, and we are impatient. We know that across the country, children just like ours are excelling in school and succeeding in college.We are the Filipino Community of Seattle, East African Community Services, the Vietnamese Friendship Association, African American Community/Parent Coalition and more than a dozen other community organizations that represent the families and children of southeast Seattle. Together, we are the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition and we are tired of waiting.
Everyone knows that for many years, at least in this part of the Land Between the Coasts, high schools have been judged based on what percentage of their students graduate within four years of entering as freshmen. I start with this fact deliberately. More on this later.
More than 40 percent of area public high school graduates in 2009 entered Missouri colleges and universities so far behind in reading and math that they took at least one remedial course once they arrived on campus, data show.
Of the 7,067 area graduates who enrolled that year as freshmen in state-funded schools, 3,029 of them landed in academic purgatory, taking catch-up classes that didn't count toward a college degree, according to the Missouri Department of Higher Education.
The proportion of Missouri public school students who end up in remedial college classes has risen only slightly in recent years but is up sharply since 1996. Thirty-eight percent needed remediation before moving on to college-level courses in 2009, compared with 26 percent 14 years ago.
Who should govern universities? Should the best scholars sacrifice their career as researchers and govern academic institutions or should professional managers provide the experience of running healthy and competitive business? This question is currently discussed in different countries and across different academic cultures.
In his recent blog, "Training university administrators: Should management schools do it?" Prof. Philip Altbach raises this important question and stresses the risk of professional business management training for academic managers. Prof. Altbach explains that the uniqueness of universities as complex organizations needs further clarification. Certainly, recognizing the differences in specific environment matters but awareness of university processes is not enough. Those who have governing authority at universities must be respected by the academic community or forego their support for critical management decisions. Typically respect is based on academic status and research achievements, accomplishments less common among business professionals.
Larry Nichols sensed disdain for the level of instruction in public schools after taking the job of Galveston school district superintendent in September.
"One of the things attributed to public schools is that the curriculum is watered down, it's not as rigorous as it was," Nichols said.
To combat that idea, Nichols decided to begin challenging adults to answer the same questions that confront students. He began handing out 10 multiple-choice questions from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, the test every Texas high school senior must pass in order to receive a diploma.
Nichols handed the questions out every time he met with a local organization, among them the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Realtors Association, the Pachyderm Club.
The Washington region has many school districts. Each has a school board, more or less. (The District's board is going through a neutered phase.) Each board has many members. Each member is being reminded this month, as meetings resume after the holidays, that his job is to endure boredom and verbal blows from the public.
School boards are also chided by the superintendents they hire, although usually not to their faces. Superintendents save their criticisms for off-the-record conversations with journalists like me, toward the end of a nice lunch. There, they feel better questioning the values and habits of the elected amateurs who could fire them immediately, if they wished.
The 21st century has not been good to school boards. Their political squabbles are often blamed for disorganized schools and low student achievement. In several cities, including the District, boards have been pushed aside in favor of mayoral control. The mayors in turn have stumbled, but few voters seem to want the school boards back in charge.
Like dinosaurs, school boards are dying fast. There were more than 80,000 in 1950. Now there are fewer than 14,000. One leading critic, former IBM chief executive Louis V. Gerstner Jr., said we don't need more than 70 - one for each state and one for each of the 20 largest districts.
But after combing through the data for and against this battered and bleeding symbol of local democracy, Gene I. Maeroff, a senior fellow at Teachers College at Columbia University, has concluded that "there is scant evidence that school systems would be better served if school boards did not exist."
To write his insightful new book, "School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy," Maeroff, a former New York Times reporter, made the sacrifice of getting himself elected to the school board in Edison, N.J. He is still there, enduring soporific meetings and nasty e-mails, convinced that despite its faults, the school board as an American institution will survive.
Proposals to study a merit-based pay system for teachers and to extend the school year by five days gained the approval of a House committee Friday.
Members of the House Education Committee agreed that the ideas deserved further discussion and should move to the floor of the House for debate.
One bill would study what a merit-pay system could look like for Wyoming's teachers, while the other piece of legislation would increase the number of school days from 175 to 180.
The Legislature's new Republican leaders will emphasize giving school districts, parents and students more choices as they seek reforms in K-12 education, and opposition is surfacing to a proposal that would kill Madison's 4-year-old kindergarten program.
Later this month, Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, a former teacher and co-chairwoman of the Legislature's budget committee, plans to introduce a charter school reform package that will, among other things, call for an independent statewide board to approve charter schools.
Currently local school boards approve charter schools, even if they won't be directly operated by the district. A statewide board could help proposals, such as an all-male charter school in Madison, move forward "without having to wait forever and ever and without having lots of obstacles," Darling said.
Other education reforms are expected in Gov. Scott Walker's 2011-13 budget proposal in February, said Rep. Robin Vos, Assembly chairman of the budget committee.
Olsen has hired education policy consultant Sarah Archibald, a UW-Madison professor and researcher at the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Archibald has written about attracting high-quality teachers by offering bonuses to top math and science students who decide to teach, making it easier for teachers trained outside Wisconsin to obtain certification here and increasing the grade-point requirement for aspiring teachers above the current 2.5.
Sometimes, the biggest things are the ones that didn't happen. I feel that way about Wisconsin's high school graduation exam; the one we don't have.
At the urging of then-Gov. Tommy Thompson, the Legislature in the late 1990s approved creating a test that Wisconsin students would have to pass to get a high school diploma. Its general aim was to require students to show they could do 10th-grade work to graduate 12th grade.
But in short order, the graduation test picked up a lot of opposition. There were (and are) substantial problems with the idea. How do you make a test that is fair and reliable? Isn't taking classes and passing enough? And what about kids who just don't do well on tests, or who have special education needs? The list could go on.
For a couple of years, the test staggered around the political landscape in Madison before finally dying because it was decided the state didn't have enough money to pay for it.
But there were (and are) states that created graduation exams or, in some cases, exams connected to specific courses that had to be passed. In places such as Massachusetts, overall results have improved and many point to the graduation test as a big reason why.
It was awhile before Pewaukee High School English teacher Christina LeDonne knew that one of her students had misplaced his paperback copy of "Lord of the Flies" for a school assignment.
Armed with one of the laptops that the Pewaukee School District has given to every student in seventh through 10th grade this school year, the student tracked down an online version of the classic novel and read along with the rest of the class without skipping a beat.
Such incidents have only encouraged the view among school leaders and teachers - amazed by the continued growth of available, and even free, resources on the Web - that traditional print materials have a limited life expectancy in schools.
"I don't think it's just inevitable, I think it's here," Phil Ertl, superintendent of the Wauwatosa School District, said of the prospect of digital textbooks.
The proliferation of mobile technology, which is leading some schools to experiment with one-to-one computing initiatives, combined with the expansion of traditional textbook publishers onto the Internet means that many students are reading in a whole new way.
To better implement some of the pilot projects, the State Council directive sets out a 10-point guideline for across-the-board reform of the school system, from higher education down to kindergarten, which has been a focal point of discontent.
Pilot projects in Shanghai's Minhang district and parts of six provinces will push for kindergartens to become part of regular public services, and projects in Jiangsu and Zhejiang are aimed at tackling the shortage of kindergarten teachers, the weakest link in mainland preschool development.
China National Institute for Educational Research professor Gao Xia said the shortage of kindergarten teachers was exacerbated by a Ministry of Education decision to abolish many kindergarten teacher-training programmes at secondary schools and make a tertiary certificate a prerequisite for a preschool teacher.
Gao said rising public discontent over the status of preschool education on the mainland was a result of poor funding from the government, with the lion's share of funding going to a few elite public kindergartens.
Beginning on Monday, February 14, 2011, 826 National will draw a prize a day for five other lucky winners including: the Anti catalog of records, a 60-disc Matador Records sampler, Poketo Road Trip prize pack, a drum head signed by The New Pornographers, Neko's limited-edition 1966 Gretsch Silver Duke guitar, a Gibson guitar signed by members of the Speaking Clock Revue including Elton John, Elvis Costello, Dr. Ralph Stanley, Leon Russell, and T Bone Burnett, an Adidas prize pack, a Carr Amplifier and much more. The winner of the car will be drawn on Friday, February 18, 2011.
Limited edition, custom Poketo T-shirts are being sold in conjunction with the online event in 826 chapter storefronts across the country and online at the 826 National store.
This drawing seeks to raise both money and awareness for the 826 National writing centers, co-founded by award-winning educator Nínive Calegari and award-winning author Dave Eggers. 826 National centers are located in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Ann Arbor, Boston, and Washington, DC. Last year, 826 chapters served over 24,000 students and produced 800 student-authored publications, with all programs free of charge for students, classes, and schools.
Gov. Chris Christie's tough-on-schools approach in a state that has zealously protected its public schools -- and its teachers -- has already put him at loggerheads with legislative leaders, unions and some parents in New Jersey.
And on Tuesday, the governor, a Republican, used his State of the State address to push his education agenda further by calling for an end to teacher tenure, on top of his support for merit pay for teachers based partly on student achievement and adoption of a voucherlike system that would give students in low-performing schools other options.
The proposals are not new; many have been suggested and tried in other school districts and other states. But with Mr. Christie's growing national stature and his ability to attract news media and political attention through his blunt -- and very public -- persona, his latest salvo has placed New Jersey center stage in the increasingly rancorous national debate over education.
Ethics complaints have been filed against two West Bend School Board members over their actions during the recent debate over a charter school proposed by a local Baptist pastor.
The full board is scheduled to hear and possibly act on the complaints at a meeting Monday after the district's attorney, Mary Hubacher, determined that the board members might have violated board policies if the allegations prove true. Hubacher recommended against board hearings on three other complaints, which involved the same board members.
In one of the complaints to be heard, School Board member David Weigand is accused of violating the School District's ethics policy by writing a letter to the editor published in a local newspaper that supported the charter school while the board was still deliberating whether to approve it.
The other complaint to be discussed at the hearing was filed against School Board member Tim Stepanski alleging he broke district policy regarding ethics, employee harassment and e-mail communications based on his e-mail correspondence with a constituent and district officials regarding the proposed charter school.
An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!
At the very top of the charts, in all three fields and by a wide margin, was Shanghai. Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.
The United States? We came in 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math.
CONGRATULATIONS to the latest crop of school matriculants have been pouring in. Despite the enforced closure of schools throughout the football World Cup, hosted by South Africa, followed by a three-week teachers' strike, the pass rate for the 2010 school-leaving "matric" examination, taken in November, has jumped by seven percentage points to 68%, bringing an apparent end to a six-year decline. But with half of all pupils dropping out of school before taking the exam and a required pass mark of just 30-40%, it is too soon for rejoicing. Educational standards in Africa's biggest and most advanced economy remain generally dire.
Barely one in ten South African pupils qualifies for university, and only 5% end up with a degree. South Africa does particularly badly in maths and science, coming last (out of 48 countries) in a report published in 2003 by a Dutch institute called "Trends in International Maths and Science", a study of Grade 9 pupils (aged 15). Humiliated, it withdrew from the 2007 series, though it plans to take part in this year's tests. If the 2010 matric results are anything to go by, it may not do much better. Barely one in four matric candidates achieved a pass in maths and less than one in five passed physical science.
Al Kouba, who lives in Bend, Ore., was told by his son in California that his family's Christmas letter would only be posted on Facebook--not mailed. That's when the retired systems engineer knew it was time to play catch up: "If you're going to communicate with your family, you have to be on Facebook," he says.
So he turned to a technology expert: his 15-year-old granddaughter, Marlee Norr. But as Marlee explained the steps to log on to the social-networking site, Mr. Kouba protested: "Look, kid, I'm 77 years old! I'm not quite as swift as I used to be." Both laughed, says Marlee, also of Bend, and she agreed to "back up and slow down."
The head of Minnesota's teachers union unveiled a plan Tuesday to help close the achievement gap between minority students and their white peers, annually evaluate teachers and offer broader pathways into teaching.
Education Minnesota has been criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for blocking similar education initiatives in the last legislative session. Now, those same critics hope the union's announcement is a sign its leaders are willing to work with them on improving the state's education system.
"I appreciate they understand the importance of those issues," said Rep. Sondra Erickson, R-Princeton, chairwoman of the House Education Reform Committee and a former English teacher. "It seems like they want a seat at the table and want to be part of the discussion."
Gov. Christie's State of the State speech was widely praised as diplomatic if short on specifics regarding education reform. Here comes the specifics, gleaned from reports from a Town Hall meeting in Paramus last night:
1) Replace lifetime tenure for teachers with renewable five-year contracts. (Here's NJEA's response, courtesy of spokesman Steve Wollmer, who warned teachers, "This is not reform, it's patronage. We do not need 125,000 more patronage jobs in New Jersey, we already have enough corruption. Your job security under the Christie proposal would be at the whim of a principal who may or may not be acting in the best interest.")
2) Raise contributions to health benefits premiums. Specifically, replace the newly-legislated benefits contributions for teachers of 1.5% of base pay with a plan through with all public employees would pay 1/3 of benefits plans. (According to the Courier-Post, a teacher earning $60,000 a year now contributes about $900 in benefits contributions. Under the new proposal, that teacher would contribute $7,333 for the same plan.)
States are the toast of Washington again. Tea Partiers and the incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives idealize them. When Congress read the U.S. Constitution last week, the 10th Amendment -- the one reserving power to the states -- was an applause line. Of course, celebrating states and localism is nothing new. More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville declared that it is "the political effects of decentralization that I most admire in America." More recently, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis hailed states as "laboratories of democracy." But when it comes to education, we shouldn't lionize states when they're too often failing to fix our schools.
WHEN Michael Gove, the education secretary, took up his post last May, he placed on the bare home page of his department's website the information that he considers most important: school performance tables. A few months later, Mr Gove added to the data deluge when he announced that schools would be judged not only on the proportion of pupils that passed examinations, but also on the share passing academically rigorous ones. The revamped league tables, published on January 12th, reveal the extent to which schools have artificially inflated their performance by steering pupils towards easier exams.
Just over half of English children leave school having passed five GCSEs, including English and maths, with acceptable grades, a figure that has been rising relentlessly since that measure was introduced as the basis of school-performance tables. Yet only 16% pass their five exams in the subjects once considered essential: a science, a language and a humanity, in addition to English and maths. The rest pass vocational subjects--not surprising, perhaps, when according to the official exchange rate a GCSE in applied physical education is equivalent to one in Latin, and a vocational qualification in beauty therapy worth as much as a good pass at GCSE physics.
The Institut d'Etudes Politiques, better known as Sciences Po, one of France's most prestigious universities, on Wednesday became the first French public institution to join the College Board, the nonprofit American organization that oversees the SAT exam and Advanced Placement program.
"This is an important step forward for us," Francis Vérillaud, deputy director of Sciences Po and head of the International Affairs Division, said in a press release, adding that "40 percent of our students already come from 130 countries."
As a new member of the College Board, Sciences Po, which specializes in humanities and social sciences, will be better able to recruit students in North America and beyond.
A crowd of about 100 people, mostly teachers, packed the Burlingame School District's Tuesday night board meeting imploring its members to keep the "early bird, late bird" language program intact. They got their wish, as the board voted 5-0 to maintain the program.
The program, which exists in just four districts statewide, shortens the class day while giving students more individualized reading and writing instruction.
District kindergarten-through-second grade students currently start their 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day an hour late or leave an hour early, with the first and last hours reserved for more individualized reading and writing instruction.
Scott and Kim Yarnish live just across the street from Brookland Education Campus @ Bunker Hill, making it the most obvious choice when the time comes for their 2-year-old son, Theo, to begin preschool. But the Ward 5 couple, like most of the young families at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday afternoon, were searching for alternatives to their traditional neighborhood public schools.
Attendance figures were not available, but the third-floor exhibition hall was packed for the second annual D.C. Public Charter School Recruitment Expo, where the city's 52 publicly financed and independently operated schools set up tables to answer questions and offer enrollment forms. The crowd included Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who has promised that his new administration will be more charter-friendly. His appearance alone was a change, according to Nona Richardson, communications director for the D.C. Public Charter School Board, who said that then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty did not visit the inaugural expo last year.
Scott Yarnish said he came "to get the lay of the land" and because he'd received mixed reports about Brookland, a PS-8 school where less than half of the students read at proficiency level or higher on the 2010 DC CAS.
Twenty-three years ago I walked the halls of Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Ill., with a diverse mix of white-, black- and brown-skinned fellow students.
Then I would walk into an honors class and be confronted with a near-blanket of white.
Not much has changed at my alma mater, and as a result the school district has been embroiled in a contentious curriculum debate that touches on race, academics and the meaning of public education itself.
Sound familiar?
Evanston and Madison are both affluent, well-educated and liberal. And both have high schools where racial achievement gaps are the norm. Their school districts differ, though, in their approach to that gap today: Evanston is cutting honors classes; Madison is adding them.
Unlike Madison, Evanston has long had a sizable minority population and began desegregating its elementary and middle schools in the 1960s -- with some positive academic results.
Seniors at ETHS, the city's only public high school, last year had an average ACT score of 23.5, or 2.5 points higher than the national average. This in one of only five states that requires its students to take the test and in a high school whose student population, about 2,900, is 43 percent white, 32 percent black and 17 percent Latino.
When the new Board majority was elected in 2007 they started their terms of office talking a lot about Governance. It was all just talk; there wasn't any action associated with it. Then, after the first few months that talk faded away. Back then it was code for staying out of management and restricting themselves to "policy issues". After the audit was released six months ago, they started talking about Governance again. I'm not sure what it means this time around, but not only are they talking about it a lot, they are also claiming to take some action. I'm not sure those claims can be proven.
There was a discussion of Governance Priorities at the December 15, 2010 Strategic Plan Update work session.
One of the Governance Priorities is Budget development. They say that they will implement a comprehensive budget development process that reflects the strategic plan priorities and includes both internal and external engagement. Why isn't this what they were doing all along? I'm not asking that as an accusation, but to focus the attention on the obstacles to this sort of work. If they say that they are going to start doing this then they will have to identify and overcome those obstacles, won't they? I think that they have already found and addressed one of the historic obstacles, the budget timeline that put the central administration budget ahead of the schools' budgets. I suspect there are others.
The Madison Metropolitan School District is preparing to start up 4-year-old kindergarten this fall, but a state lawmaker said the program isn't worth the cost and wants it cut from the state budget.
More than 300 school districts in Wisconsin already offer 4-year-old kindergarten, but Gov. Scott Walker is considering a proposal to do away with the program.
This comes as Madison prepares to enroll any child who turns 4 years old on or before Sept. 1, 2011, and to launch 4K in the fall.
The turnout Wednesday at the last scheduled meeting for Madison's upcoming 4K program wasn't just standing-room-only; some parents, such as Emily Lockwood, weren't even able to step foot inside at the Lussier Community Center because the crowd was so large, WISC-TV reported.
"I'm excited. She loves to learn. She's really into numbers and letters and writing," said Lockwood, whose daughter Adele plans to attend the 4K program.
D.C. and Maryland school officials have agreed to national academic standards and have begun to lay the groundwork for new tests and teacher training. But it will take at least a few years before such measures generate notable change in the classroom.
The movement to adopt common standards swept 40 states and the District in 2010, a watershed for public education expected to ripple through many aspects of teaching and learning. The standards, spelling out what should be learned in English and math every year from kindergarten through high school, are meant to replace what has been a jumble of benchmarks that vary from state to state in content and depth.
The Center on Education Policy reported last week that many states plan to revise teacher training within the next two years. But in most cases, key measures will not be rolled out until 2013 or later.
Wisconsin's education system was rated slightly above the national average based on factors ranging from student achievement to school financing in industry publication Education Week's annual state rankings released Tuesday.
Overall, Wisconsin received a C-plus grade while the nation earned a C.
The state got high marks in the annual "Quality Counts" report for its school finance system and the "chance for success" its students have based on relatively high levels of parents who are educated and fluent in English, strong kindergarten enrollment and a high graduation rate. Wisconsin's finance system does particularly well on the report compared with other states in providing more equitable resources among school districts.
Wisconsin's lowest grade among six areas assessed in the report was for K-12 achievement, where it earned a D-plus. That grade was based on student reading and math proficiency levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, including any differences in performance for students living in poverty, and the percentage of students doing advanced-level work. The national average for K-12 achievement also was a D-plus.
Austin, Tex., drew the largest numbers of young Americans from 2007 through 2009, according to an analysis by a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, replacing Riverside, Calif., which was the most popular destination for young people in the middle of the decade.
Migration slowed greatly during the recession, and rates have continued to remain low. But in an analysis of migration still occurring among some of the country's most mobile citizens -- people ages 25 to 34 -- the cities at the top of the list were those that had remained economically vibrant, like Dallas, and those that were considered hip destinations, like Austin and Seattle, the demographer, William H. Frey, found.
In the middle of the decade, before the recession, the top five destinations were Riverside, Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte, N.C., according to the analysis, which was based on Census Bureau data. Austin ranked ninth in that period, and Las Vegas was No. 10.
Compare Wisconsin & Texas NAEP scores here (White students in Texas outscore Wisconsin students in Math) and have a smaller difference between black students.
On a freezing Saturday in February, my wife and I sat through a full-day introduction to college admissions for the parents of 11th graders. This was our first little step on the high-anxiety journey thousands of families trod each year. As parents of twins, we were double-booked. There wasn't a vacation day in the next eight months that one of us didn't spend on a college campus, somewhere.
That day, at a workshop called "Behind Closed Doors: the Life of the Application," an admissions dean from a prestigious small college in Connecticut described carrying home a teetering armload of folders every night during her decision season. She told of examining a student's high school transcript, the SAT or ACT scores, the letters of recommendation.
"And then," she said, her manner growing brighter, almost big-sisterly and confidential, "I turn to the personal essay, my favorite part."
Gov. Mitch Daniels has never been patient when it comes to pushing progress for Indiana. And Tuesday night he implored legislators not to wait any longer on key education and local government proposals.
"Wishing won't make it so. Waiting won't make it so. But those of you in this assembly have a priceless and unprecedented opportunity to make it so. It's more than a proposal, it's an assignment. It's more than an opportunity, it's a duty," he said.
Although some were searching for a hint about his presidential aspirations, Daniels used his seventh State of the State address to focus on Indiana - sticking to a familiar formula of highlighting successes and seeking improvement.
He reminded legislators of the progress they have made in road construction, cutting property taxes and keeping Indiana fiscally solvent. And he asked them to do more - much more.
The elite has become obsessed with fixing public schools. Whether it's Ivy League graduates flocking to Teach for America or new-money foundations such as Gates, Broad, and Walton bestowing billions on the cause, "for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980," Newark, New Jersey, education reformer Derrell Bradford told the Associated Press last fall.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the latest entrepreneur to join this rush. He announced in late September that he planned to donate $100 million to the city of Newark to overhaul its school system. Zuckerberg, a billionaire by age 23, has little experience in philanthropy and no connection to Newark; he met the city's mayor, Cory Booker, at a conference and was impressed with Booker's ideas for school reform. Plans are still sketchy, but Zuckerberg has endorsed merit pay for teachers, closing failing schools, and opening more charters.
So will this princely sum produce a happy ending? Unlikely. The Zuckerberg gift, like all social action, is based on a particular "theory of change" -- a set of beliefs about the best strategy to produce a desired outcome. The United Way has one theory of change about the best way to feed the hungry (direct aid funded by international private donations). Che Guevara had a very different one (self-help through armed revolution). Unfortunately, the theory of change behind the recent infusion of private money into public schools is based on some questionable assumptions: First, public schools will improve if they harness more resources. Second, charter schools and strong, MBA-style leaders are the preferred means of improvement. And third, a school's success can be measured through standardized testing.
Recent reviews of the National Curriculum have failed to harness the insights emerging from high quality transnational comparisons, according to a top academic.
In a Cambridge Assessment paper out today (Thursday 18 November 2010), Tim Oates, Group Director of Assessment Research and Development, said: "We should appraise carefully both international and national research in order to drive an evidence-based review of the National Curriculum and make changes only where justified, in order to avoid unnecessary disruption to the education system.
"However, simply importing another country's classroom practices would be a gross error. A country's national curriculum - both its form and content - cannot be considered in isolation from the state of development of these vital 'Control Factors'*. They interact. Adjust one without considering development of the others, and the system may be in line for trouble."
In a foreword to Tim's paper, the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education, supported the call for international evidence to be at the heart of curriculum reform and said:
n April 2010, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation convened a group of researchers and financial analysts to discuss how to better understand the financing and sustainability of CMOs. The goals of the meeting were twofold: (1) to suggest a set of common ways of assessing CMO financial viability, and (2) to outline a research agenda for settling the most urgent CMO finance questions relevant to policy and practice.
The following themes emerged from the meeting:
For most CMOs financial self-sustainability is an aspiration, not yet a reality.
Public funding levels clearly limit, but may not fully explain, CMO scale-up difficulties.
CMOs are experimenting with different cost and service delivery models, but there is little evidence yet about which ones are most cost effective.
Politically and financially, CMOs need to figure out how to do more school turnarounds.
Technology and innovation are critical paths to sustainability.
Spending comparisons between CMOs and school districts are hard to do and not likely to yield much payoff.
There is at least as much speculation about CMO finance as there is fact: a rigorous research and development agenda is needed.
My colleague Valerie Strauss, creator and proprietor of the fabulous The Answer Sheet blog on this Web site, recently encouraged a spirited debate over attrition rates at KIPP schools. I wrote my last book, "Word Hard. Be Nice" about the birth and growth of KIPP, the charter school network most successful in raising student achievement. (The official name is now just KIPP, not the Knowledge Is Power Program.)
I still follow KIPP closely. I want this blog to be the go-to place for anyone who wants to keep up with important developments in the network of 99 schools in 20 states and the District. Valerie has graciously agreed to allow me to put those recent KIPP posts from the debate here, so you can easily follow the lines of reasoning and can read my views.
It began with a great post (despite its polite digs at me) by Richard D. Kahlenberg, the Century Foundation senior fellow who has provided much original thinking on how to improve the education of disadvantaged children:
THE nation's most selective universities have long required three SAT subject tests. But with the introduction of writing sections on the SAT and ACT in 2005, colleges have been gradually reducing the subject-test requirement.
This admissions cycle, Harvard has jumped on the two-test bandwagon, and Georgetown is "strongly" recommending three instead of requiring them. The most subject tests that any American college now requires is two, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. For 18 institutions, the ACT is good enough -- no subject tests required at all.
The writing test has been found to be a good indicator of future academic success, says Jeff A. Neal, a Harvard spokesman.
With the Republican takeover of state government this year, educational reformers have high hopes for change. The administration of Governor Jim Doyle did little to promote educational reform. Nowhere was that more evident in the state's double failure to win Race to the Top federal funds when Wisconsin's application failed to demonstrate movement in educational reform.
Doyle proposed a mayoral takeover of the struggling Milwaukee Public Schools after the federal Race to the Top funding competition was launched. The proposed mayoral takeover did not offer sufficient justification to win over opponents and the effort failed in the Democrat-controlled legislature.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin's two applications for federal Race to the Top funding did not even make the list of finalists. The main reason for the failures was the lack of teacher accountability for student performance.
Doyle's other record on education is an obstacle to other reforms, especially when it comes to school choice.
Wisconsin is certainly ripe for curricular and choice innovation.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has several good ideas about reforming public education. Her most dramatic recommendation -- consolidating several agencies into one Department of Education -- warrants consideration because consolidation often is an effective strategy during tough economic times. We made that point in a Dec. 17 editorial applauding Gregoire's proposal to merge 21 state agencies (not including education departments) into nine agencies.
But several concerns must be resolved before this giant merger is pursued. First, consider the size of that monolithic mega-bureaucracy. It would include four operations that currently are distinct and sovereign: the Department of Early Learning, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Education (which runs K-12 education, described in the state constitution as the state's "paramount duty"), the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges and the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Trying to align all of those diverse and complex missions into a Cabinet-level department could create a bureaucratic briar patch so thick that it would defeat the purpose of consolidation.
Supporters of expanded charter schools and school vouchers say most Hoosiers want more education options for their children, and Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels will outline plans Tuesday to bring those choices to more Indiana families, especially low-income ones.
Advocates met at the Statehouse Monday to push education proposals that have renewed life during this legislative session because of support from Daniels and leaders in the GOP-controlled House and Senate. They say a poll they've paid for shows two-thirds of the state supports vouchers and expanded charter schools.
"This session brings the best opportunity for education reform in a generation," said Luke Messer, executive director of School Choice Indiana.
High school graduation rates increased for both Milwaukee Public Schools students and low-income city children using vouchers to attend private schools in 2008-'09, but voucher students are still more likely to graduate than their public school peers, according to data released Monday.
The latest findings add a seventh year of data - for 2008-'09 - to a study that has followed the graduation rates of both groups of students since 2002-'03.
Because the latest graduation rate went up 5 percentage points from the previous year for both Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and MPS students, the report contends that choice (also called voucher) students were 17% more likely to graduate from high school than children in MPS over the past two years of the study.
For voucher school students, the graduation rate increased to 82% in 2008-'09; for MPS students, it increased to 70%, the study says.
Wisconsin is ripe for many more student/parental choices.
In high school, I was a nerd with political ambitions, desperate for popularity. My U.S. history teacher encouraged criticism, giving me a chance for glory when, during the usual Friday game of 20 questions, he said the thing we were trying to guess occurred in the 19th century.
We failed to get the right answer: the Alien and Sedition Acts. That meant extra weekend homework. But, I thought to myself excitedly, wasn't he wrong? Weren't the acts in the Adams administration, late 1790s? "Mr. Ladendorff, will you cancel the homework if I can show that happened in the 18th century?" He nodded. I found the citation. Cheers! Pleasant looks from girls! For a few minutes, I was the hero.
The controversy over errors in Virginia history books, well covered by my colleague Kevin Sieff, reminds me of the best day I ever had in high school. It makes me wonder whether the delights of detecting errors by authoritative educators and their textbooks might turn the scandal into ways to make history classes, at least in high school, more exciting.
EDUCATION, students are frequently told, is the key to a better job. First, finish high school. Then, go to college and get a degree. For those with higher aspirations, try for a master's.
But increasingly, there is another way. Short vocational programs leading to a certificate are becoming the kudzu of the educational world. There's a program for virtually any skill, from interior design to paralegal to managing records at a doctor's office. Instead of investing in a master's, professionals itching to move up the career ladder can earn certificates in marketing strategies, credit analysis or even journalism.
In an economy that increasingly rewards specialization, more and more institutions -- from the ones that advertise on late-night cable to the most elite of universities -- are offering these programs, typically a package of five or six courses, for credit or not, taken over three to 18 months. Some cost a few thousand dollars, others tens of thousands.
As to the first point, I wish people were a bit less concerned about what will inconvenience or irritate our teachers and a bit more concerned about what's best for our students. I think it is absolutely correct that the alignment plan will reduce the autonomy of teachers. Classes will have to be designed and taught against an overriding structure of curricular standards that will need to be addressed. I think that is a good thing.
We'd all like the freedom and autonomy to be able to define our own job responsibilities so that we could spend our time exclusively on the parts of our jobs that we particularly like and are good at, but that is certainly not the way that effective organizations work. I believe that teachers need to be held accountable for covering a specific, consistent, coherent and rigorous curriculum, because that is what's best for their students. I don't see how holding teachers to curriculum standards should inhibit their skills, creativity or engagement in the classroom.
The second point concerns 9th and 10th grade accelerated class options and the accusation that this will result in "segregation." This line of argument has consistently bothered me.
We don't hear much from African-American parents who are upset about the possibility of accelerated classes because, as the open letter puts it, they will result in "more segregation." On the contrary, we on the Board have heard a number of times from middle class African-American parents who are dissatisfied, sometimes to the point of pulling their kids from our schools, because their kids regularly experience situations where well-meaning teachers and staff assume that because the kids are African-American, they'll need special help or won't be able to keep up with advanced class work. I think that frustration with this essentially patronizing attitude has contributed to community support for the Madison Prep proposal. It seems to me that the open letter suggests the same attitude.
"Overall, had MPS graduation rates equaled those for MPCP students in the classes of 2003 through 2009, the number of MPS graduates would have been about 18 percent higher."
In coming months the future of education in Milwaukee and Wisconsin will receive much attention as elected officials seek to raise academic outcomes while facing a multi-billion dollar state budget deficit. In this challenging environment, Governor Walker and members of the Legislature would be wise to consider the results reported here on high school graduation rates in Milwaukee.
Using seven years of data, University of Minnesota Professor John Robert Warren, a recognized expert in the field, tracks graduation rates for students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) and the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Professor Warren estimates that low-income school choice students were about 18% more likely to graduate from high school than students from across the economic spectrum in MPS. Significantly, he reports that these results occurred during a period when the historically low MPS graduation rate was increasing.
Thus, in one of the most important measures of educational achievement -- high school graduation -- recent developments in Milwaukee are positive, both for choice students and for students attending MPS. Professor Warren explains that separate research being conducted at the University of Arkansas will address whether expanded choice for Milwaukee parents has caused the higher rates reported here.
The MPCP, now twenty-one years old, serves more than 20,000 students. It saved state taxpayers $37 million in FY 2009. As this report shows, it achieved higher graduation rates than MPS in six of seven years studied. Had MPS attained the same graduation rate achieved in the MPCP, an additional 3,939 Milwaukee students would have received diplomas between 2003 and 2009. According to authoritative research cited in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the annual impact from an additional 3,939 MPS graduates would include an additional $24.9 million in personal income and approximately $4.2 million in extra tax revenue.
Unfortunately, benefits for high school students in the MPCP are at risk. This is because increased regulation and funding cuts threaten the viability of private high schools participating in the MPCP. For example, tax support for these schools is less than 45 per cent of the public support for MPS schools. This is not financially sustainable, a fact that has caused private high schools in the MPCP to reduce freshmen enrollment despite high parent demand. For the first time in several years, the number of 9th graders entering the MPCP actually decreased in 2010-11.
Without regulatory relief and increased financial support, the kind of positive results reported here are in jeopardy.
In Budget Crises, an Opening for School Reform School systems can put students first by making sure any layoffs account for teacher quality, not seniority.
In the past year, 46 states grappled with budget deficits of more than $130 billion. This year could be worse as federal recovery dollars dry up. And yet, for education reform, 2011 could be the best of times.
California, to name one example, bridged its $25.4 billion budget gap by cutting billions from public education. It is now forced to cut another $18 billion to fill its current deficit. State executives and legislatures face severe choices and disappointments that could undo political careers and derail progress.
On the bright side, public support is building for a frontal attack on the educational status quo. And policy makers are rising to the challenge, not only because their budgets are tighter than ever, but also because they see an opportunity to reverse the current trend of discouraging academic results for our children.
Three weeks ago, I founded StudentsFirst, a national organization to defend and promote the interests of children in public education and to pursue an aggressive reform agenda to make American schools the best in the world. In the first 48 hours, 100,000 Americans signed up as members, contributing $1 million in small online donations.
A smattering of cynicism can be necessary, even beneficial, when dealing with things that are new.
It's when a lack of understanding causes something with potential benefit to be viewed through jaundiced eyes that the cynicism can become a roadblock.
Take as an example ongoing discussion about a proposal to create a charter school for Jacksonville.
The sticking point in the months since the proposal for 8 Points Charter School was unveiled has not been the need or the curriculum, but rather the dollars and cents.
This should not become a bottom-line decision. While money has to be a concern given the sealed-wallet finances across the state, the greater question should be "is it something Jacksonville needs right now?"
Gov. Gregoire's' bold new proposals for an integrated education department? Great in concept (in fact, much needed). Hard to do. Even harder to insure better results than we're getting now.
That's how I'd summarize Gov. Gregoire's proposal to replace the various boards of education with a cabinet-level Department of Education.
First, the need: Sure, the state Board of Community and Technical Colleges, the Higher Education Coordinating Board, and the Board of Education for K-12 schools -- not to mention the entire Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction whose incumbent has already acquitted himself poorly in this debate -- all these bodies represent separate silos and have a tough time making their goals and systems fit together. Worse though, they're also creaky and inefficient, a poor system for making (or changing) policy. (The proposed new department would also absorb the recently created Department of Early Learning which already reports to the governor.)
In last week's Jackson Sun online poll, about two-thirds of 622 responders said they are against establishing a public charter school in East Jackson. Often the contrarian when it comes to public opinion, I am here to argue in favor of the school.
harter schools present an opportunity for innovation in public education. They are tools that can help move public education away from its 19th and 20th century education model. Charter schools are allowed to operate outside of the traditional public education rulebook, and for good reason. Innovation demands new approaches to old problems. Charter schools do have to meet federal guidelines regarding non-discrimination and other fairness laws, but beyond that, they are free to try new ideas to meet student needs.
This is especially important in today's technology-driven world where people get to individualize nearly every aspect of their lives. But public K-12 education has, for the most part, failed to keep up with this trend. Public education still is a homogenized, generic system. Classrooms and curricula in Los Angeles differ little from classrooms and curricula in Boston. There is little innovation in higher education teacher training as teachers are cranked out cookie-cutter fashion ready to step into a K-12 classroom to pick up where the last teacher left off.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will lay out his ideas for overhauling teacher tenure, giving parents a choice in where their children attend school and shoring up a teetering public worker pension system in his first State of the State address.
Christie told The Associated Press in an interview that he plans to stick to three themes Tuesday in a speech that will top out at under 30 minutes: education reform; changes to the pension and health benefits funds for government workers, teachers, police and firefighters; and responsible budgeting.
"It's going to be brisk and direct," Christie said of the speech, "talking about those things and why they're so important to the future of the state. We'll do a little bit of a review of where we've been and what we accomplished our first year in office, but the majority of the speech will be talking about those three big issues to me."
Michelle Rhee, who gained national attention as the chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., called Monday for giving students government-funded vouchers to attend private schools, rating principals based on student achievement and getting rid of teacher tenure.
The release of the blueprint was the first formal action of Ms. Rhee's new advocacy group, StudentsFirst, which she launched in December, after leaving her job heading D.C. schools in October. Ms. Rhee said she was in discussions with the governors of Florida, New Mexico, New Jersey, Tennessee, Nevada and Indiana to adopt part, if not all, of the agenda.
In an interview Monday, Ms. Rhee said she recognized her platform would be controversial and tough to implement but that her group could help push through the changes.
StudentsFirst has attracted 140,000 members, including nearly 20,000 teachers, and collected $1.4 million in contributions, Ms. Rhee said. She has said her group would donate to political campaigns and help school districts fund chosen strategies.
YOU might say it all started with spell-check. In the 1980s, with the introduction of word processing programs like WordPerfect, it became apparent that computerized proofreaders could come to the rescue of struggling spellers and bad typists. Thirty years later, an ever-growing array of assistive technology is available to help students read, write term papers and take tests. From pens that can remember to text that can talk, such technologies are now being held up as important tools for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia, dysgraphia (trouble writing) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
"These technologies help level a playing field for individuals who would not be able to demonstrate their capabilities as learners," says Brant Parker, director of learning and innovation technology for the Calgary Board of Education in Canada. In his district, at least 90 public schools are using Dragon Dictate, a voice-recognition program that does the typing for you.
Take the case of Michael Riccioli, who noticed that his teenage son was not comprehending a novel assigned in class. Mr. Riccioli transformed the book into an MP3 file using software called GhostReader, which scans texts and reads them aloud. His son listened to the file on his iPod while reading along. "All went well with his test on the book," Mr. Riccioli says.
Leilei Song, who teaches in Mandarin at the state's first Chinese immersion school, reached back to her own childhood for a recent lesson with a combined kindergarten and first grade class.
She showed a Monkey King video -- a favorite of hers when she was growing up in China -- to the class at the Verona Area International School. A couple of her students, whose day is split between learning in Mandarin and in English, were very aware of how the video fits into lesson plans.
"We get to watch fun videos like Monkey King but they're in Chinese," kindergartener Zane Oshiro, 5, said.
"So we're learning," added first grader Mikala Feller, 6.
The United Kingdom is looking to Alberta's education system to see why students here consistently earn top marks in international testing.
A British multimedia company has produced a video series called Lessons from Alberta to examine why Alberta's public education system is so successful. The two 20-minute videos were released last month by Teachers TV, a free online service that offers educational videos and resources to people working in the British school system.
"Alberta, in Canada, has the highest performing schools in the English-speaking world," says a summary of one of the videos on the Teachers TV website. "This video explores the roots of the region's success, accountability, curriculum and teacher professionalism."
Sixteen years ago, Janet Barresi wanted to find a better middle school for her two sons. Eventually, she landed at the front of Oklahoma's charter school movement and took up education reform as a full-time job.
Barresi starts Monday as the new state superintendent of schools, succeeding Sandy Garrett.
In the 1990s, Barresi and other parents persuaded the Oklahoma City school board to create a parent-run "enterprise" middle school, which became one of the state's charter schools after the Legislature authorized them. She eventually started two charter schools and became president of the Oklahoma Association of Charter Schools.
Barresi spent more time on educational issues and sold her dental practice.
Universities house an enormous amount of information and their libraries are often the center of it all. You don't have to be affiliated with any university to take advantage of some of what they have to offer. From digital archives, to religious studies, to national libraries, these university libraries from around the world have plenty of information for you. There are many resources for designers as well. Although this is mainly a blog that caters to designers and artists I have decided to include many other libraries for all to enjoy.
As Florida's governor, Jeb Bush shepherded a series of bold yet divisive school proposals into law.
A-plus Accountability Plan • Requires that students be tested annually, sets A-F letter grades for the state's schools and allows students in persistently low-performing schools to transfer to higher-performing public schools.
The law -- approved about three years before the enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind Act -- also originally allowed families of students in persistently struggling schools to obtain vouchers to attend private schools.
Private School Option: Offered students average payments of about $4,200. The option ended when it was deemed unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court in 2006. But other voucher-type programs adopted during Bush's tenure remain, including one that provides vouchers to students with disabilities to attend private schools. Another program, which offers corporations tax credits to cover private school tuition for low-income students, was expanded last year by Florida lawmakers.
Ms. Nelson is paying most of her own way at Landmark, a two-year college exclusively for students with learning disabilities and A.D.H.D. She wants to graduate on time this spring, and with tuition and fees alone at $48,000 a year -- more than any other college in the nation -- she cannot give in to distraction.
"I have a lot riding on this," says Ms. Nelson, who is also dyslexic. She wants to transfer to a four-year institution and get a bachelor's degree -- a goal that would have been out of reach, she says, had she not found Landmark three years after graduating from high school. If Ms. Nelson gets her associate degree in May after four semesters, she will buck the trend at Landmark.
Only about 30 percent graduate within three years; many others drop out after a semester or two. The numbers suggest that even with all the special help and the ratio of one teacher for every five students, the transition is not easy.
The issues are the failure of the MMSD Administration to follow basic practices of open inclusive governance and the implementation of segregative policies.
Below (and here) [70K PDF] is an open letter drafted and signed by 18 West High parents on Friday 1/7/2010. Understanding the letter requires some background and context. The background -- along with the latest news and some final thoughts -follows.
IN the seven years since he quit his job as a college counselor at a private high school in Portland, Ore., Lloyd Thacker has become something of a folk hero in admissions circles. In standing-room-only gatherings in high school auditoriums, he has implored families to take back the college admissions process from those entities that, he says, do not always act in their best interests -- whether a magazine seeking to drum up sales for its rankings issue or a college trying to boost applications.
Among his prime targets has been the College Board, the sprawling, nonprofit organization that oversees the SAT and Advanced Placement program.
In the introduction to "College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy," a collection of essays he edited that was published in 2005, Mr. Thacker lamented the "corporatization" of the board and suggested that its efforts to "compete with other purveyors of college prep services and materials" -- referring, in part, to a failed attempt at a for-profit Web site -- raised questions about its credibility.
But that was then.
Last spring, Mr. Thacker announced that he and the organization he founded to promote his ideals, the Education Conservancy, were going into partnership with the College Board. Their joint venture: a Web site, free to users, that would provide all manner of advice and perspective on the admissions process.
WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson's A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web-based aids that supplement the text.
And what fuels the panic is that nearly every tongue-twisting term and microscopic fact is fair game for the year-end test that decides who will receive college credit for the course.
"Some of the students look at the book and say, 'My gosh, it's just like an encyclopedia,' " Mrs. Carlson says. And when new A.P. teachers encounter it, "they almost want to start sobbing."
A FEW weeks after I started a tenure-track job last semester at the State University of New York at New Paltz, an e-mail message landed in faculty in-boxes relaying the news that an online textbook-rental company had requested records for all grades awarded on campus since 2007.
The company, Chegg.com, wanted grade distributions -- how many A's, B's, C's, etc., were given -- organized by semester, course section and instructor, without individual student information. The request was made under New York's Freedom of Information Law, which allows the public to access state government records. That definition covers grades at state universities, according to SUNY New Paltz lawyers. So the administration had to give up the goods.
Chegg, a rapidly growing company backed by more than $221 million in venture and debt capital, sent similar requests to 533 colleges and universities, according to Tina Couch, its vice president of public relations. The company is in the process of uploading the grades on CourseRank.com, a class planning Web site that Chegg acquired in August. Students who register for CourseRank will be able to take into account a professor's grade distribution, along with peer reviews and ratings, when deciding whether to take a class.
AT a time when recent graduates, age 24 and under, are experiencing a jobless rate of nearly 10 percent, a new study renews the debate over the value-added component of going to college.
The sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia tracked 2,300 students through four years of college and into the labor market. The first two years are chronicled in their forthcoming book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (University of Chicago Press).
This interview with Dr. Arum was conducted and condensed by Amanda M. Fairbanks.
Q. What piqued your interest in this topic?
A. For the last several decades, we've evaluated learning in K-12 education. But there's never been a serious attempt to follow kids through college. We conclude that large numbers don't appear to be learning very much.
Gov. Jerry Brown replaces seven state Board of Education members Several proponents of charter schools are removed. Many see the influence of the teachers union.
n one of Gov. Jerry Brown's first official acts this week, he sacked the majority of the state Board of Education, replacing several vocal proponents of charter schools, parent empowerment and teacher accountability.
A broad range of educators, policy makers and others say the move was widely believed to be the handiwork of the California Teachers Assn., which heavily supported Brown in his gubernatorial campaign. The union's support will be vital if he, as expected, places measures on the June ballot to temporarily raise taxes to ease the state's budget deficit. It also appears to delay a key vote about parents' power to reshape failing schools -- an effort opposed by the union -- leading to strong criticism of the governor from fellow Democrats.
"No doubt about it, this is in part looking at the November election first and foremost, and then of course upcoming elections," said former state Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat.
The class began with a Mayan-inspired chant and a vigorous round of coordinated hand clapping. The classroom walls featured protest signs, including one that said "United Together in La Lucha!" -- the struggle. Although open to any student at Tucson High Magnet School, nearly all of those attending Curtis Acosta's Latino literature class on a recent morning were Mexican-American.
For all of that and more, Mr. Acosta's class and others in the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican-American program have been declared illegal by the State of Arizona -- even while similar programs for black, Asian and American Indian students have been left untouched.
"It's propagandizing and brainwashing that's going on there," Tom Horne, Arizona's newly elected attorney general, said this week as he officially declared the program in violation of a state law that went into effect on Jan. 1.
Although Shakespeare's "Tempest" was supposed to be the topic at hand, Mr. Acosta spent most of a recent class discussing the political storm in which he, his students and the entire district have become enmeshed. Mr. Horne's name came up more than once, and not in a flattering light.
In a December speech heard around the halls of LAUSD, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa charged that United Teachers Los Angeles was the biggest obstacle to education reform. Ouch. With L.A. schools' dismal ranking and graduation rates, he implored the teachers union to join the education reform team. Rather than going the "united we stand, divided we fall" route, however, he embarrassed the union. From the full transcript:
William H. Fitzhugh, the cantankerous publisher of a journal that showcases high school research papers, sits at his computer in a cluttered office above a secondhand shop here, deploring the nation's declining academic standards.
"Most kids don't know how to write, don't know any history, and that's a disgrace," Mr. Fitzhugh said. "Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools."
His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review. Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations.
The review's exacting standards have won influential admirers. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions, said he keeps a few issues in his Cambridge office to inspire applicants. Harvard considers it "something that's impressive," like winning a national math competition, if an applicant's essay has appeared in the review, he said.
I thought it fitting that my colleague Nick Anderson had his eye-opening piece on the Success For All reading program published in The Post on New Year's Day. The night before, we were all singing "Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind." That could be the theme song for Success For All.
As Anderson reveals, the cleverly organized and well-tested program, brainchild of legendary Johns Hopkins University research couple Robert E. Slavin and Nancy A. Madden, spent the Bush Administration in a wilderness inhabited by other wrongly discarded educational ideas. It did not disappear, but it did not get much attention or growth. Now it is back in the forefront of school improvement, beneficiary of a $50 million grant from the Obama administration. Its risen-from-the-dead story would be hard to believe if Anderson hadn't explained it so well in his story.
I know Madden and Slavin. A decade ago, I wrote a magazine piece about their unusual marriage and work, and what they had done to alter reading instruction throughout much of the country. [I would love to link to the piece, but I can't find it.] They had come from well-to-do families -- Madden from Edina, Minn., and Slavin from Montgomery County, Md. They met as undergraduates at Reed College, a Portland, Ore., institution that encourages social activists. They fell in love and decided to dedicate their lives to finding the best ways to teach children, particularly kids whose own upbringings weren't as comfortable as theirs had been. (They later adopted three children from South America.)
In the wake of a state review that found dozens of errors in Virginia social studies textbooks, Del. David Englin will introduce a bill Monday that would overhaul the state's textbook adoption process.
The legislation would shift the responsibility of vetting textbooks from panels consisting mostly of school teachers to the publishers. Companies would have to be certified with the Virginia Board of Education before their books are approved for use in public schools.
Last year, textbook review committees approved two books by Five Ponds Press - "Our Virginia, Past and Present" and "Our America to 1865" - that several state-appointed scholars found last month to have dozens of historical inaccuracies.
"As a legislator and a parent, I was shocked and appalled to learn that Virginia social studies textbooks had such egregious factual inaccuracies," Englin (D-Alexandria) said. "As parents, the bare minimum we expect from textbooks is that the facts are correct."
The new Wisconsin governor is considering sweeping reforms in Madison, one of which could directly impact Beloit schools.
Gov. Scott Walker and the incoming Republican legislature assumed power in the state Monday and wasted no time in introducing the possibility of expanding the state's school voucher program. The program, presently instituted in the Milwaukee area, allows students to receive taxpayer-financed vouchers to attend private schools, including religious schools. Just under 21,000 of the maximum 22,500 students enrolled in the program this year.
The governor has identified Beloit as one place where the vouchers could be phased in as part of a trial effort to spread the program statewide.
"I think school choice is successful," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "I think it's worth looking at expanding it. How do you do that? There's really a multitude of options, not only those being discussed in other parts of the country. And we want to continue to be at the forefront of that."
"My concern is that the district has to become conscious of today's market. If you have a system that is attractive, people will send their kids here. If you don't, the days of an educational monopoly are over," he said.
Additional choices for our communities is a good thing. Thompson's perspective is correct and useful.
The Record reports today that the NJ DOE has drawn up changes to credential requirements for superintendents of "struggling school districts." Taking a page, perhaps, from Mike Bloomberg, some districts would have the ability to hire superintendents who lack specific educational certification or degrees from teaching colleges.
Richard Bozza, head of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, says that the proposed change in employment requirements give some applicants a "free pass" and "our view is clear: you need to have an educational background to lead a district."
(Of course,, such changes offer a solution to the problem of traditionally-credentialed superintendents fleeing the state for greener pastures because of the newly-imposed salary caps, but that's another matter.)
As students returned to class this week, some were carrying brand-new Apple iPads in their backpacks, given not by their parents but by their schools.
A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through "Jeopardy"-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.
As part of a pilot program, Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.
Students at Broadway High School in Minneapolis are being told that some of the credits they've received for classwork might not be valid for graduation.
Minnesota Public Radio News has learned the Minneapolis school district is investigating whether some teachers at the school didn't have the proper licenses for classes they were teaching.
Associate superintendent Mark Bonine says issues surfaced this fall as Broadway's new site administrator, Sally Reynolds, took over the school.
"As Sally was assessing, she had some concerns around some credits," Bonine said.
The issue is whether those credits were earned properly, but Bonine added that students "are not at fault here."
Next month, Juan Botella will spend more than 60 days aboard a ship in the Southern Ocean to learn firsthand how scientific research is conducted - knowledge he will bring back to his classroom along with new information on how the southern polar region has changed.
The trip to the body of water surrounding Antarctica fulfills a lifelong dream for Botella, a science teacher at Monona Grove High School who's always wanted to travel there, although he's nervous about spending months on a boat.
"I would have liked to be on land," Botella admits, but added he's still excited for the trip. "I'm a very bad sailor. I am very easily seasick."
Botella, 43, was chosen from among more than 150 applicants to accompany and help 32 researchers collect and study water samples from the Antarctic region.
Schools around the country have begun to show measurable progress in closing achievement gaps, according to evidence from a growing range of sources. That's the good news.
The bad news is that in New Jersey this progress is much more limited, and it is young African-Americans who seem to be losing out the most.
Despite an influx of new funding to New Jersey's poorest urban school districts following the state Supreme Court's Abbott rulings, student achievement levels remain mostly flat at the lower end of the spectrum.
The percentage of black eighth-graders who scored above "basic" in reading actually declined, from 62 percent in 2005 to 60 percent in 2009 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence--except maybe a random number generator--had a hand in determining what went where.
But the warehouses aren't meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might--by placing like products next to one another, for instance--Diapers.com's robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.
low-up to a story we aired last month on the tough job market for recent college graduates.
NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman looks at job-hunters who've already been out of school for a few years.
RICHARD WHITE, Career Services, Rutgers University: The last couple of years have been a very, very tough time to be coming out of college.
PAUL SOLMAN: Rutgers University, where Richard White runs career services.
RICHARD WHITE: At the time of graduation, probably 50 percent of college grads have some kind of job. That's during the good times. That probably was cut in half during these last two tough years.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the results from the international education test scores (PISA) were "a massive wake-up call" for American educators. Midmorning discusses what kind of reform American schools need, and if there is room for the rote test-driven education that put Shanghai on top and the U.S. far behind.
During her visit to High School for Violin and Dance in the Bronx on Monday, one of the stops in five-borough tour that worked as her formal introduction to her new job, New York City's schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, gathered around a table with students and alumni, discussing career paths, opportunities and plans.
One man told her he was studying architecture at State University of New York at Delhi. One woman said she was majoring in criminal justice at Hostos Community College. Another, who is graduating at the end of the month, described to Ms. Black how learning to play a musical instrument helped her learn new words.
Before she left the building, Ms. Black peppered the principal, Tanya John, with questions about college preparedness and the school's curriculum. Then, she revealed what is starting to look like an obsession.
Like other union leaders, WEAC President Mary Bell can see some "labor unrest" among her members if they're targeted by the incoming Walker administration.
But she can't see them taking an extreme step like going on strike, something they're prevented from doing under Wisconsin law.
"My members care so desperately about the work they do that it would be extremely difficult to envision them leaving their classrooms, leaving their kids," Bell said in a new WisPolitics interview. "We have that history in Wisconsin, but it's been 30 years since those things took place."
With Scott Walker set to occupy the governor's office next week and Republicans poised to take over both houses of the Legislature, Bell and WEAC executive director Dan Burkhalter said their members are feeling apprehensive and somewhat targeted. Still, Bell pointed out they've felt targeted since the early 1990s, when the state imposed the qualified economic offer.
In the last budget, Dems and Gov. Jim Doyle lifted the QEO, which allowed districts to avoid arbitration so long as they offered teachers a bump in pay and benefits of at least 3.8 percent.
"I was under the impression that the role of the CAC was to meet with a representative of each school, other interested parents and citizens, and to bring their educational concerns to the school board and the superintendent,'' he explained. ''I have been told that I essentially have this backwards and the CAC is supposed to only bring items to the parents that the school board determines are important."
In a certified letter, board of education President Patricia Nalley had written to Frank that the CAC must restrict its agenda to board-approved issues and would not be allowed to convene any type of candidates' forum. Frank also was told he'd have to cancel the CAC candidates forum, which was to include the four board members on the ballot for November's election.
It became apparent the CAC regulations had become a fantasy document. The democratic vision contained in these regulations had been greatly diluted over the decades and many surviving democratic provisions had long since stopped being consistently enforced.
Teachers and like-minded parents have struck first in an expected statewide battle over education changes being proposed by Gov.-elect Rick Scott's transition team.
They have held meetings and conference calls, traded information via Facebook, planned an education summit and formed bill-writing committees to create alternative legislation.
And on Tuesday, they plan to wear red to send the new governor -- and the Republican-dominated legislature -- a message that they support public schools.
Nine months after Waukesha voters gave Larry Nelson a swift kick out of the mayor's office, denying him a second term, he's back to teaching - if in a distinctively different place and position than the one he left four years earlier.
Nelson is the English teacher at the Waukesha County Juvenile Center, where he teaches 11- to 17-year-olds who either are in shelter care or have been court-ordered to secure detention.
"I've always loved teaching, and even when I was mayor I felt I was teaching on a bigger scale," he said.
Since Nelson, 55, was granted a leave of absence from his Butler Middle School teaching job in Waukesha when he was elected mayor in 2006, the School Board allowed him to return this fall, his 31st year of teaching.
Nelson comes to work at 8 a.m. every day to find out how many students he has, and who they are, he said. He could have one, or 10. They may be around for a day, a week or a month. The longest has been two months. With much of his teaching one-on-one or in small groups, he can customize what he teaches, he said.
1) Who is being "Betrayed" by the public school system in America?
The education establishment is betraying the following groups:
The children, who aren't getting the education they need;
Parents, who struggle to manage bored and frustrated children, who must pay for several college remedial classes, and who sometimes wind up with students who have given up and dropped out;
Teachers, who are micromanaged and disrespected in myriad ways by the bureaucracy and then blamed for the results;
Taxpayers, who pay hundreds of billions of dollars each year for a largely failing K-12 education system;
Businesses, which must recruit from other countries;
Government agencies and military organizations that struggle to fill critical jobs with qualified Americans;
The country, which teeters on the brink of economic and social disaster, crippled by a populace that is not acquiring sufficient skills or knowledge to properly run it or even to fully understand the challenges that face it.
The only people not being betrayed are those who feed off of our failing education system.
It's this: The money a school district gets depends on enrollment. In Milwaukee, the one place private-school choice is now offered, the Milwaukee Public Schools' per-pupil funding is not hurt at all when kids go somewhere else (per-pupil, it increases annually). But when about 20,000 pupils go elsewhere, MPS has less money overall, since it's teaching fewer children.
Every school district statewide is liable to this already: Wisconsin parents can enroll children in any other public school district. More than 28,000 kids do this switch annually. For every child who moves, one district loses about $6,800 and another gains it. Since some places are big losers and others big gainers, this affects districts' budgets.
For instance, Milwaukee lost about $27 million in the latest year; other big losers were Racine, Green Bay and Madison. It made no difference to taxpayers overall, but the system moved money away from districts that parents shunned and toward ones they preferred.
The snag is transportation. Parents must take kids to their preferred district. This is tough for the poor, especially in places like Racine, where the local district includes all of suburbia as far as the edge of Oak Creek. It's perverse when there are private alternatives in poor neighborhoods.
When Grigsby and others make their complaint, it isn't to say that letting parents choose other schools will hurt weak districts' budgets, else they'd be wailing about public school choice, which does just that. The complaint is that the government-run school system overall will have less money as children and their aid leave.
The first middle-school dual-language immersion program in the Madison area was started at Sennett Middle School this year and the benefits are far reaching, according to Principal Colleen Lodholz.
At Sennett, 50 percent of the students' academic classes are taught in English and 50 percent are taught in Spanish.
"It really honors both languages," Lodholz said. "The students are good little ambassadors in terms of modeling the importance of learning a second language and the importance of learning about another culture."
Most of the 50 sixth grade students in the program come from Nuestro Mundo Community School -- the area's first elementary dual-language immersion program that started when they were kindergarteners -- and a strong sense of community was established, Lodholz said. Lodholz sees the students looking out for each other and fewer discipline issues, she said.
IN 2000 the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries, decided to find out how much children were learning at school. At the time, only half of Brazilian children finished primary education. Three out of four adults were functionally illiterate and more than one in ten totally so. And yet few Brazilians seemed to care. Rich parents used private schools; poor ones knew too little to understand how badly their children were being taught at the public ones. The president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, saw a chance to break their complacency. Though Brazil is not a member of the OECD he entered it in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Brazil came last.
A decade on, it is clear that the shock was salutary. On December 7th the fourth PISA study was published, and Brazil showed solid gains in all three subjects tested: reading, mathematics and science (see chart 1). The test now involves 65 countries or parts of them. Brazil came 53rd in reading and science. The OECD is sufficiently impressed that it has selected Brazil as a case study of "Encouraging lessons from a large federal system".
Attached please find a proposed intergovernmental agreement with the Middleton/Cross Plains Area School District. The proposed agreement with Middleton/Cross Plains Area School District (MCPASD) allows the District to establish a 4k site in a nursery school (Orchard Ridge Nursery School) that lies within the MCPASD's border. The rationale for the District's desire to do so is the fact that Orchard Ridge is within 1/4 mile of MMSD's boundary and it serves primarily (70-80%) Madison residents. The agreement would also allow the District to serve MCPASD 4k students who chose to enroll at Orchard Ridge in exchange for direct non-resident tuition reimbursement by MCPASD to Orchard Ridge. Conversely, MCPASD will be allowed to establish 4k sites at two centers (LaPetite and Middleton Preschool) that are within MMSD's border. MCPASD's rational for wanting to contract with those sites is identical to MMSD's desire to contract with Orchard Ridge (i.e. proximity and demographics of children already at the center). MCPASD would also serve MMSD residents who chose to attend those sites in exchange for MMSD directly reimbursing LaPetite and Middleton Preschool. The agreement with MCPASD is attached for your review and action.
Value added is the use of statistical technique to identify the effects of schooling on measured student performance. The value added model uses what data are available about students--past test scores and student demographics in particular--to control for prior student knowledge, home and community environment, and other relevant factors to better measure the effects of schools on student achievement. In practice, value added focuses on student improvement on an assessment from one year to the next.
This report presents value-added results for Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) for the two-year period between November 2007 to November 2009, measuring student improvement on the November test administrations of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) in grades three through eight. Also presented are results for the two-year period between November 2005 to November 2007, as well as the two-year period between November 2006 to November 2008. This allows for some context from the past, presenting value added over time as a two-year moving average.
Changes to the Value Added Model
Some of the details of the value-added system have changed in 2010. The two most substantial changes are the the inclusion of differential-effects value-added results and the addition to the set of control variables of full-academic-year (FAY) attendance.
Differential Effects
In additional to overall school- and grade-level value-added measures, this year's value-added results also include value-added measures for student subgroups within schools. The subgroups included in this year's value-added results are students with disabilities, English language learners, black students, Hispanic students, and students who receive free or reduced-price lunches. The results measure the growth of students in these subgroups at a school. For example, if a school has a value added of +5 for students with disabilities, then students with disabilities at this school gained 5 more points on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across MMSD.
The subgroup results are designed to measure differences across schools in the performance of students in that subgroup relative to the overall performance of students in that subgroup across MMSD. Any overall, district-wide effect of (for example) disability is controlled for in the value-added model and is not included in the subgroup results. The subgroup results reflect relative differences across schools in the growth of students in that subgroup.Much more on "Value Added Assessment", here.
Teachers of the past had to be concerned about students passing notes in class. Today's educators have a much greater challenge with the advent of cell phone technology, and its prevalence in the classroom. A study by two Wilkes University professors shows that texting is a greater problem than educators might believe. They also suggest that classroom management strategies can potentially minimize texting in class.
Wilkes University psychology professors, Drs. Deborah Tindell and Robert Bohlander, designed a 32-question survey to assess the text messaging habits of college students in the classroom. In total, 269 college students, representing 21 majors, and all class levels, responded anonymously to their survey.
The study showed that 95 percent of students bring their phones to class every day and 91 percent have used their phones to text message during class time. Almost half of all respondents indicated that it is easy to text in class without their instructor being aware. In fact, students frequently commented on the survey that their professors would be "shocked" if they knew how much texting went on in class.
Just before the holiday break, the Madison School District approved the Badger Rock Middle School. This is big and exciting news for Madison, and I hope it sounds a new tone for education in the city.
It is not new news that Madison's school district has been struggling to maintain its national reputation for innovation and excellence. During the past two budget cycles, the district has suffered deep funding cuts and the loss of millions of dollars. And over the past five years, families have been migrating to surrounding school districts -- and to private schools.
But visionary leadership and innovative charter schools such as Badger Rock may just be the answer.
The philosophy for Badger Rock is cutting edge and simultaneously a throwback to classical education. Students learn from their environment. It is a setting and style that would make Aldo Leopold proud, and that ties local curriculum to Wisconsin's deep-seated environmental roots.
As far as I can tell, local school budgets have grown annually for decades. Ms. Joiner is referring to reductions in the increase. Spending growth slowed this year and will likely do so in the future. The Madison School District's "Budget Amendments and Tax Levy Adoption for 2010-11" mentions 2010-2011 revenues (property taxes, redistributed state and federal taxes and grants) of $423,005,653, up from $412,219,577 in 2008-2009. The document's 2009-2010 revenues are $489,487,261, which seems unusual. Enrollment has remained flat during the past few years (details here).
For those wanting a less colloquial explanation, the Big Society is an attempt to transform the relationship between the state and its citizens. Using the weapons of devolution and transparency, it seeks to empower individuals, improve public services that fail the most disadvantaged and reconnect the civic institutions that lie between the people and the state.
So why is the Big Society such a radical idea? As one of its leading proponents in government admits, it is a massive social experiment - stripping power from the state in the expectation that individuals, communities and enterprises will pick up the reins. "As in most such experiments, it is based upon instincts and understanding rather than empirical data," he says. "It will be two to three years before we begin to see if it is playing itself out properly. But the direction of change will be remorseless and I'm confident it will transform Britain."
This tussle between the responsibilities of state and citizens is at the centre of political struggles across the west, from France's battles over pensions to the backlash against Washington in the US. Unsurprisingly, the Big Society ideas - far removed from the rampant individualism of the Tea Party - are being watched with growing interest by moderate Republicans.
In Britain, they fit comfortably with a nation fed up with over-bearing statism and corporate irresponsibility. The latest British Social Attitudes survey revealed growing distrust of both state and big business, combined with a desire for smaller, more local institutions.
I had wanted to put this quote in from the governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, because it made me laugh. He made this remark after the NFL postponed the Sunday football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Minnesota Vikings (which was played last night and the Vikings won). The NFL called the game off because of the danger of fans getting safely to and from the stadium because of a huge snowstorm.
"We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything," Rendell added. "If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."
The "doing calculus on the way down" made me laugh. But then there was this interesting piece on NPR today about Chinese education. Basically, the point is that they are great at learning and memorizing facts but not very good at analytic, problem-solving thinking. Even their principals admit this but like many bureaucratic issues, it's recognized but no one knows what to do.
Public universities across the U.S. are arguing for freedom to reap more revenue and create more efficiencies to offset dwindling state dollars.
One way, they say, is to raise tuition. At California University of Pennsylvania, a 158-year-old state school serving 9,400 students, enrollment is rising for all but the poorest students, which, in part, has led to a novel idea: replace the "low tuition for all" policy with a market-rate policy.
University officials say students from wealthier families could afford to pay more than the average $5,804 annual tuition at the state's 14 universities. Fresh revenue from the higher tuition, they say, could be used to offer more scholarships to help the neediest students.
NBER Report: Great Teachers Are Worth $400,000 A Year
Huffington Post
How much is a good teacher worth? Some would say they're priceless, but recent findings in the National Bureau of Economic Research's The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality, is a bit more exact. The report, written by Eric A. Hanushek, suggests that quality teachers with 20 students are worth $400,000 more in the future earnings of their students than an average teacher, annually.
Hanushek examines how the quality and effectiveness of a good teacher can impact a student's future success and how this achievement can effect future economic outcomes for the country as a whole.
According to his calculations, it isn't just that good teachers are worth a lot when considering our economic future as a country; alternatively, bad teachers are costing us trillions. Hanushek says that by exchanging the bottom 5-8 percent of crummy teachers with average teachers, the United States, as a country, could jump up the ranks to top in math and science, generating an astounding $100 trillion in present-day value.
Supporters of the proposal to develop charter schools in the Madison Metropolitan School District -- including "academies" segregated along lines of gender -- have made a lot of noise in recent weeks about how the School Board should radically rewrite rules, contracts and objectives.
Fair enough. Let's have a debate.
Two School Board seats will be filled in the coming spring election -- those of incumbents Marj Passman and Ed Hughes.
Hughes and Passman have both commented thoughtfully on the Urban League's Madison Prep boys-only charter school proposal.
Hughes, in particular, has written extensively and relatively sympathetically about the plan on his blog.
Passman has also been sympathetic, while raising smart questions about the high costs of staffing the school as outlined.
But neither has offered the full embrace that advocates such as the Madison Urban League's Kaleem Caire and former Dane County Board member Dave Blaska -- now an enthusiastic conservative blogger -- are looking for.
Our community is certainly better off with competitive school board races.
In the version of history being taught in some Virginia classrooms, New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917).
These are among the dozens of errors historians have found since Virginia officials ordered a review of textbooks by Five Ponds Press, the publisher responsible for a controversial claim that African American soldiers fought for the South in large numbers during the Civil War.
"Our Virginia: Past and Present," the textbook including that claim, has many other inaccuracies, according to historians who reviewed it. Similar problems, historians said, were found in another book by Five Ponds Press, "Our America: To 1865." A reviewer has found errors in social studies textbooks by other publishers as well, underscoring the limits of a textbook-approval process once regarded as among the nation's most stringent.
It's been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military's physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb.
The nonprofit Education Trust released a first-ever report this week showing that more than one in five young people don't meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment. Among minority candidates the ineligibility rates are higher: 29 percent. In Minnesota, the disparity for black applicants was even more startling: 40 percent were found to be ineligible. Among Hispanics in Minnesota the rate was 20 percent, but among whites, it was 14.1 percent.
This is more a distressing indictment of the U.S. education system than it is a testament to today's Cheeto-eating, Xbox-playing youth, say the authors of the report. It strips away that illusion that the military can be an easy landing ground for those not bound for college, and it suggests that national security is at stake.
While pointing to some school governance problems that certainly need addressing, the recent Audit Commission report on Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) schools has triggered public condemnation of these schools in the absence of proper examination of the quality of education they provide. This risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
DSS schools stand somewhere between the traditional public sector and the private sector, and were part of education reform to create a more diverse schools landscape. They are subject to less government regulation and free to set their curriculum, fees and entrance requirements. Many middle-class parents unhappy with local schools find DSS an affordable substitute. They regard it as part of their taxpayer's right under the free education policy to attract some government subsidy for their children attending schools outside the government and aided sector.
Children in an outdoor classroom at an East L.A. preschool use natural materials and the environment as a learning laboratory. It's part of a national campaign to connect youngsters to the outdoors.
On a visit to a Home Depot one day, Cynthia Munoz was surprised when her 4-year-old son began clamoring to plant flowers, trees and a strawberry patch at their La Puente home. She was taken aback again when he knew exactly what tools to use in their backyard garden.
But he'd already had plenty of practice at his preschool, the Brooklyn Early Education Center in East Los Angeles. The school has an outdoor classroom, part of a growing trend in California and other states of using natural materials and the environment as a learning laboratory.
The American Academy for Liberal Education has withdrawn its petition for renewal of recognition by the U.S. Education Department's advisory panel on accreditation, which, after having been dismantled and reconfigured, held its first meeting in over two years Wednesday.
The accreditor's decision came as a surprise to many in attendance at the first day of meetings held by the new-look National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. Earlier this week, AALE officials had vowed to fight the Education Department staff's recommendation that NACIQI urge Education Secretary Arne Duncan to deny recognition for their accreditation body because of its "continued noncompliance."
Ralph A. Rossum, chairman of the AALE board and Salvatori Professor of American Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College, told Inside Higher Ed that the agency decided to withdraw from the process of seeking renewed recognition because of the lack of time his agency was given by the Education Department to defend itself. He noted that AALE received the final report of Education Department staff members -- which contained 45 citations of noncompliance -- the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
When state schools Superintendent-elect Janet Barresi takes office, her first priority is going to be stepping up the difficulty and rigor in schools so that more kids are ready for college when they graduate.
Only 2.4 percent of students in Oklahoma's graduating class of 2009 scored in the upper tiers of national math exams, a ratio that places the state among recently industrialized nations such as Bulgaria, Uruguay and Serbia, according to a study released this month.
State schools Superintendent-elect Janet Barresi said the study, which also ranks Oklahoma among the worst 10 states in producing top-achieving math students, should be a wake-up call against the status quo.
"Let's quit making excuses," she said. "Let's accept it, and use it as a challenge, Oklahoma."
Call it the chicken/egg effect, but Apple's iPad, which has now sold over 1 million and is listed as this years most desired gift by kids (aka the chicken) has resulted in a dramatic demand for children's apps (aka the eggs). While this new iTunes-based $.99 per app publishing model has been a shock to publishers, it's great news for a curious child stuck in the back seat on a long trip. This year saw the release of zinc roe's Tickle Tap Apps (like Sound Shaker), and several new titles from Duck Duck Moose, like Park Math, with adjustable age levels. If you're interested in ebooks, have a look at two of our favorites: Bartleby's Book of Buttons and Nash Smasher! And any doubts about the validity of the iPad in the classroom have evaporated thanks to apps like Symmetry Shuffle, Cut the Rope and Motion Math. For dessert, save some room for Smule's Magic Piano.
The sign on the classroom wall prohibits the use of handheld communication devices, yet on this December morning all 28 students in Lori Hunt's algebra II class are texting on their cell phones. But these Middleton High School students are not a defiant bunch of teens.
With Hunt's blessing, they're using their cell phones to text answers to math problems. Every answer appears, anonymously, on a wall-mounted, interactive, electronic whiteboard all students can see.
For Hunt, it provides an instant way of knowing how many students understand the problem and can calculate the answer. For the students, it allows them to use a familiar technology to explore challenging new concepts.
Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking the state's end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.
With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone -- not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.
So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomical. Copying is the almost certain explanation.
Since the company, Caveon Test Security, began working for Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, said James Mason, director of the State Department of Education's Office of Student Assessment. "People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you're going to get caught," Mr. Mason said.
This Issue Brief examines institutional graduation rates reported at 200 percent of normal time, a time frame that corresponds to completing a bachelor's degree in 8 years and an associate's degree in 4 years. The report compares these rates with those reported at 150 percent and 100 percent of normal time for all nine institutional sectors. The purpose is to determine whether the longer time frame results in higher institutional graduation rates.
Remember Norman Rockwell's stark painting of the little African-American girl being escorted into a New Orleans schoolhouse by two deputy U.S. marshals? Today that little girl, Ruby Bridges, is working to open a public charter school in that same school building, which will house a civil rights museum as well.
Wouldn't it be strange for a civil rights figure like Bridges to join a movement that was "accelerating re-segregation by race," as charter schools were characterized in a recent Miller-McCune.com article? Yet that's what some critics would have us believe, though more than a million black and Latino parents have chosen charters as a way of opening doors for their own children.
From Examiner.com, courtesy of Hans Bader, counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
Much of college "education" is a waste of time. I learned more practical law in six weeks of studying for the bar exam and a couple summers of working for law firms than I did in three years of law school. I spent much of my time at Harvard Law School watching "Married With Children" or arguing with classmates about politics, rather than studying (much of what I did study was useless). Even students who were high on drugs had no difficulty graduating.
(Higher education is no guarantee of even basic literacy. When I worked at the Department of Education handling administrative appeals, I was dismayed by the poor writing skills of the graduate students who lodged complaints against their universities).
The world's first technology for writing was invented not by poets or prophets or the chroniclers of kings; it came from bean counters. The Sumerian cuneiform script--made up of symbols incised on soft clay--grew out of a scheme for keeping accounts and inventories. Curiously, this story of borrowing arithmetical apparatus for literary purposes has been repeated in recent times. The prevailing modern instrument for writing--the computer--also began as (and remains) a device for number crunching.
Dennis Baron's extended essay A Better Pencil looks back over the entire history of writing technologies (clay tablets, pens, pencils, typewriters), but the focus is on the recent transition to digital devices. His title implies a question. Is the computer really a better pencil? Will it lead to better writing? There is a faction that thinks otherwise:
We all want more young people to attend college. Who would argue with that? Politicians and educators at all levels extol the obvious virtues, from enhanced earning potential to a greater satisfaction in life. One increasingly popular way to encourage college attendance is through dual enrollment, in which students take courses in high school for both high school and college credit.
In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
In Indiana, dual enrollment is encouraged at the highest levels, with state Education Secretary Tony Bennett maintaining that at least 25 percent of high school graduates should pass at least one Advanced Placement exam or International Baccalaureate exam, or earn at least three semester hours of college credit during high school.
In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
Caire believes the Madison community must first address its at-risk population in a radically different way to level the playing field before fundamental change can come.
"Madison schools don't know how to educate African Americans," says Caire. "It's not that they can't. Most of the teachers could, and some do, valiantly. But the system is not designed for that to happen."
The system is also not designed for the 215 annual school days and 5 p.m. end times that Madison Prep proposes. That, and the fact that he wants the school to choose teachers based on their specific skill sets and cultural backgrounds, is why Caire is seeking to proceed without teachers union involvement.
"Ultimately," he says, "the collective bargaining agreement dictates the operations of schools and teaching and learning in [the Madison school district]. Madison Prep will require much more autonomy."
Many aspects of Caire's proposed school seem rooted in his own life experience. Small class sizes, just like at St. James. Uniforms, just like the Navy. Majority African American and Latino kids, eliminating the isolation he grew up with. Meals at school and co-curricular activities rather than extracurricular, so that poor students are not singled out or left out.
Teachers the students can identify with. Boys only, in the hopes of fostering the sensitive, supportive male peer groups so critical to Caire's evolving sense of self over the years.
Join Mattie and Josh, the sister-brother team who discover the mysterious Chaos Cave. Ghostly breezes chill their spines as they try to interpret strange petro glyphs and a note of warning. The kids stumble upon a skeleton whose bones rest around an ancient Chinese Puzzle Box. Inside the box they find a ring--a ring that will change their lives forever.
Chaos Cave transports Mattie and Josh on A Revolutionary Adventure as the kids travel through time to Boston, 1775. They encounter the evil Archie, who murdered his own brother and now seeks the ring for all the power it holds. While they desperately try to evade Archie, they must also find a way to return safely to their own time without altering the course of important historic events.
My daughter is with us for the holidays, having survived her first barrage of law school exams in California. The exams were longer and more difficult than anything I ever had as a graduate student in Chinese studies. But her professors allowed students to have notes with them. This got my attention because her boyfriend at a neighboring law school was forbidden to have notes in two of his exams.
At these two institutions dedicated to equality under the law, what my daughter did during exams at one could have been considered cheating if she attended the other. What are we to make of the uneven nature of such rules, just as unpredictable as those found in our public K-12 schools? Open-book exams are okay some places, not in others. Cooperating with friends on homework is encouraged by some teachers, denounced elsewhere as a sign of declining American moral fiber.
North Carolina high school students soon must take and pass two American history courses to graduate.
The State Board of Education approved Thursday a revised social studies curriculum for public schools that will expand study of U.S. history from one year to two to ensure more material is covered.
They called it the "Canada effect" - the phenomenon in which students from a string of states along the country's northern border regularly beat the rest of the nation on academic tests.
As recently as 1992, only three states - all from northern climates - had significantly higher average scores than Wisconsin in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. No states scored significantly better than Wisconsin in fourth-grade math national assessments.
By 2009, this effect was wiped out for Wisconsin's students. The state's fourth grade reading scores placed statistically ahead of only 12 states and the District of Columbia. On the fourth- and eighth-grade math tests, the state's students beat 26 states and the District of Columbia, results that could be considered slightly above average.
"We have lulled ourselves into thinking we're really, really good," said state Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who will become chairman of the Senate Education Committee. "We're OK, but we need to get better because other states are doing more at improving."
With research showing the most important school factor in student performance is the effectiveness of classroom teachers, Wisconsin's political and education leaders have called louder than ever for improving the quality of the state's educators.
The last Sunday of the year and time for our first, perhaps annual, awards for noteworthy things that hapened in education around here in 2010.
Unsung Hero of the Year Award: Robert Kattman, director of the Office of Charter Schools at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The soft spoken former North Shore superintendent has been both supportive and demanding in building a roster of a dozen charter schools authorized by the UW Board of Regents. The list includes some of the best schools in Milwaukee, such as Milwaukee College Prep, Bruce Guadalupe, Seeds of Health Elementary, Woodlands School, Veritas High School. If the charter movement was like this nationwide, there would be far less controversy about these independent, publicly funded schools. Kattman is retiring at the end of the school year. Thanks for all your efforts.
The High Standards Start Here Award: State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. Evers quickly signed up Wisconsin to be part of the "core standards" effort to bring coherence to the mish mash of what different states want students to learn. If the follow-through is good, it will raise Wisconsin's expectations and, one hopes, student performance in years to come.
Most Important Data of the Year Award: The urban school district results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This was the first time MPS took part and its students could be compared directly to those in 17 other central city school systems. The results were generally pretty distressing. Do we want our local education motto to be: "Thank God for Detroit - at least someone is worse than us"? The data should remain chastening and motivating to everyone involved in local education.
Is your library out of your favorite book? Would you like to take your book home for break? Want to read your favorite book on a plane ride or road trip? University of South Florida is making this very easy now. iTunes and USF have started Lit2Go:
a collaboration between the Florida Department of Education and the University of South Florida College of Education -- supports literacy by providing access to recordings of historically and culturally significant literature. The extensive collection of hundreds of audiobooks, stories, and poems, including classics such as Alice in Wonderland, Aesop's Fables, and A Tale of Two Cities -- all for free on iTunes.
Now there is no reason for not finishing your book report! Schools are making it increasingly easy to access information from several sources. It is a more efficient, a green way of teaching and learning, not to mention for free. The iTunes U world instantly expands your reach to knowledge and information. There are options to research by subject, school, and company, all at the tip of your fingers!
Gov.-elect Rick Scott's education team laid out reform ideas that would give parents state money to pick schools for their children and authority to remove them from a subpar teacher's class.
That theme echoes throughout the 20 sprawling pages of reform ideas that Gov.-elect Rick Scott's education team unveiled this week.
Parents should get state money to pick their own schools, public or private. Parents should decide what reform model is best to jump-start their children's school. Parents should be able to remove their child from an underperforming teacher's class.
``The parent is the ultimate accountability,'' said Patricia Levesque, a close advisor to former Gov. Jeb Bush and a leader of Scott's education transition team. ``They know what's best for their child. To substitute someone else's judgment . . . is wrong.''
It has been exactly a month since Jeanie Meikle, a frequent reader of this blog, asked me this good question:
"In all the articles I have read about TJ [the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the most selective secondary school in the country] and its failures of inclusiveness, I have never seen the statistics as to how many (and %) of applicants were African American or Hispanic or what the acceptance rate of those applicants was. ... So do you by any chance know what the numbers are?"
I didn't, but I asked Fairfax County schools spokesman Paul Regnier and he got them for me. The delay in posting them is entirely my fault. All of the sports teams in Washington have been collapsing into shapeless mediocrity, and worse. I needed time to reflect on that.
The admissions statistics for the Jefferson class of 2014, this year's ninth-graders, show there were 3,119 applicants, of which 480, or 15.4 percent, were admitted. This included 272 boys (16.4 percent of those that applied) and 208 girls (14.2 percent of applicants.)
There is a major budget crunch for schools around southern Nevada. That is why some people are questioning whether teachers should be getting a bigger salary simply because they have a master's degree.
The U.S. Secretary of Education says there's little evidence students are getting any better education from teachers who have advanced degrees. Secretary Arne Duncan delivered a speech recently on how financially challenged districts could do more with less.
Teachers who have masters degrees typically earn $5,000 more in annual salary.
"We analyzed 20 systems from around the world all with improving but differing levels of performance and examined how each has achieved significant, sustained, and widespread gains in student outcomes, as measured by international and national assessments. The report was based on more than 200 interviews with stakeholders in school systems and an analysis of some 600 interventions they carried out two strands of research comprising what we believe is the most comprehensive database of global school system reform ever assembled. It identifies the reform elements replicable for school systems elsewhere, as well as those elements that are context specific, as they move from poor to fair to good to great to excellent performance.
Among other findings, the report shows that a school system can improve from any starting point and can become significantly more effective within six years. The research suggests that all improving systems implement similar sets of interventions to move from one particular performance level to the next, irrespective of culture, geography, politics, or history. A consistent cluster of interventions moves systems from poor to fair performance, a second cluster from fair to good performance, a third from good to great performance, and yet another from great to excellent performance. Although reaching each performance stage involves a common set of interventions, systems may sequence, time, and roll them out quite differently.
It's a holiday ritual as predictable as Santa showing up at your local mall: overheated rhetoric about the "War on Christmas." A lowlight this year was a feature on The O'Reilly Factor about a letter from the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urging school districts to make holiday celebrations inclusive. Through O'Reilly's prism, the letter -- quoted selectively -- was an attempt to squelch Christmas. In reality, the letter just asked school districts to avoid celebrations focusing exclusively on a single religion. It was more common sense than state-coerced atheism.
Unfortunately, once you cut through the blather on cable news, there is a real, if much less discussed, problem in that public schools are skittish about teaching much about religion. Although there is little hard data, the consensus among those who study the issue is that to the extent world religions are taught, they are treated superficially, usually with the help of just a few textbook pages that have been heavily sanitized to avoid even the hint of controversy. And that's not good news if you believe a working knowledge of the world's religions and their history is an important aspect of a well-rounded education.
MATTHEW CARTER, a type designer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was recently approached in the street near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman greeted him by name. "Have we met?" Mr Carter asked. No, she said, her daughter had pointed him out when they were driving down the street a few days before. "Is your daughter a graphic designer?" he inquired. "She's in sixth grade," came the reply.
Mr Carter sits near the pinnacle of an elite profession. No more than several thousand type designers ply the trade worldwide, only a few hundred earn their keep by it, and only several dozens--most of them dead--have their names on the lips of discerning aficionados. Then, there is Mr Carter. He has never sought recognition, but it found him, and his underappreciated craft, in part thanks to a "New Yorker" profile in 2005. Now, even schoolchildren (albeit discerning ones) seem to know who he is and what he does. However, the reason is probably not so much the beauty and utility of his faces, both of which are almost universally acknowledged. Rather, it is Georgia and Verdana. Mr Carter conjured up both fonts in the 1990s for Microsoft, which released them with its Internet Explorer in the late 1990s and bundled them into Windows, before disseminating them as a free download.
Efforts to help US schools become more effective generally focus on improving the skills of current teachers or keeping the best and ejecting the least effective ones. The issue of who should actually become teachers has received comparatively little attention. Yet the world's top-performing systems--in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea--recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes.
A McKinsey survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students confirms that a major effort would be needed to attract them to teaching. Among top-third students not planning to enter the profession, for example, only 33 percent believe that they would be able to support a family if they did. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that an ongoing achievement gap between US students and those in academically top-performing countries imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. To learn more, read "Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching" (September 2010).
In contrast, several Asian countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed most other countries. China's Shanghai took the PISA test for the first time and ranked first in all three areas: reading, mathematics and science (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 9, 2010). The Chinese government has been lauded for its investment in human capital.
It is ironic that just as PISA is highly regarded as a prestigious measure and the world is impressed by Shanghai's achievement, insiders' perspectives reveal skeptical and critical thoughts of the results.
One critical response came from Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal of Peking University High School and director of the International Division. Mr. Jiang is concerned that the "high scores of Shanghai's students are actually a sign of weakness".
Language analysts, sifting through two centuries of words in the millions of books in Google Inc.'s growing digital library, found a new way to track the arc of fame, the effect of censorship, the spread of inventions and the explosive growth of new terms in the English-speaking world.
In research reported Thursday in the journal Science, the scientists at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google and the Encyclopedia Britannica unveiled a database of two billion words and phrases drawn from 5.2 million books in Google's digital library published during the past 200 years. With this tool, researchers can measure trends through the language authors used and the names of people they mentioned.
It's the first time scholars have used Google's controversial trove of digital books for academic research, and the result was opened to the public online Thursday.
Two more groups have won state approval to sponsor charter schools in Minnesota.
Authorizers don't actually run charters but a new law requires them to be more involved in the fiscal and academic oversight of the schools they sponsor. It also requires every current authorizer to re-apply to maintain their status.
The two newly-approved groups are the Northfield School District and Audubon Center of the North Woods. Northfield currently sponsors two charter schools, while Audubon is the state's largest authorizer with 23.
Fa la la la! Tis' the season. The kids are out of school, the days are cold, the museums are packed, the Legos are scattered under the couch, and Toy Story 3 has been memorized. It's time to refresh that most valuable tool in the modern parent's arsenal: the iPhone. Last year, I wrote about how the iPhone is a Swiss Army knife of digital parenting and asked for your best iPhone apps for kids. Let's do the same thing this year.
A lot has changed; a lot has not. On the scene there's now what my 5-year-old son calls a "big iPhone"--a.k.a. the iPad, which promises a larger, richer, smudged-screen experience. In general, I've found iPad apps for kids either disappointing or merely blown-up versions of already excellent iPhone apps. The iPhone itself has taken on a more social aspect, asking my 2-year-old-son to post his Fruit Ninja scores to Facebook. Another generalization: All of the GameCenter stuff just creates needless complication for a youngster looking to samurai chop some pineapple.
When I think of the holidays, I envision seeing the latest films with my wife, gorging on sweets and contemplating the wonder of the schlocky ceramic village I have set up on top of the piano, the result of many visits to Christmas shops.
You'll notice there aren't any children in this scenario. Nobody steals my chocolates or smashes the Sweet Shop from the Snow Village series. That is because only adults live in my house. Grandson No. 2 arrives next month, but he and his brother are stuck in L.A. because their very pregnant mother can't fly.
Local Living editor Liz Seymour, with two children at home, realized I was out of touch with her kind of winter vacation, so she more or less ordered me to gather expert advice on what parents can do during those daunting two weeks without school. Educators have fabulous ideas that I can put to use with my grandsons before long.
One recent night, Mackenzie Stassel was cramming for a quiz in her advanced math course in Montgomery County. Her review of the complicated topics followed hours of other homework. Eventually she started to nod off at the table.
It was 11:15 p.m. Mackenzie is a sixth-grader.
There will be fewer such nights in the future for many Montgomery students.
Last month, Maryland's largest school system announced that it would significantly curtail its practice of pushing large numbers of elementary and middle school students to skip grade levels in math. Parents had questioned the payoff of acceleration; teachers had said students in even the most advanced classes were missing some basics.
ENGLISH is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science, global business and popular culture. Many think it will spread without end. But Nicholas Ostler, a scholar of the rise and fall of languages, makes a surprising prediction in his latest book: the days of English as the world's lingua-franca may be numbered.
Conquest, trade and religion were the biggest forces behind the spread of earlier lingua-francas (the author uses a hyphen to distinguish the phrase from Lingua Franca, an Italian-based trade language used during the Renaissance). A linguist of astonishing voracity, Mr Ostler plunges happily into his tales from ancient history.
A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in "isms" -- formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism -- grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread.
The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.
Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical "ism" and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.
These researchers are digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to understand what role topography played in victory, using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz, searching through large numbers of scientific texts and books to track where concepts first appeared and how they spread, and combining animation, charts and primary documents about Thomas Jefferson's travels to create new ways to teach history.
"We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."
This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK's prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that's because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.
Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It's the culmination of a project called 'i, scientist', designed to get students to actually carry out scientific researchthemselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton's head teacher. But the work is all their own.
My son Channing, the grinning eight year-old to the left, has too much homework. He attends one of the best schools in the state and they send him home every night with what the teachers say is one hour of homework but it looks like two hours to me. And since Channing would really rather be fishing or terrorizing his little brothers those two hours regularly turn into three hours or more. This is not only too much homework, it hurts rather than helps. It seems indicative of an educational system that's out of control.
Several years ago I gave a speech about technology to the Texas Library Association's big annual meeting. After the speech I was talking with a pair of elementary school librarians. Channing was back then just going off to pre-school so homework was the last thing on my mind but they brought it up. "The best thing you can do for your kids," they said, "is to not allow them to do homework until the third grade."
America won the moon race. Can it win the higher education race?
A smart and innovative strategy will make this goal attainable, but too many in Washington fail to recognize that private-sector colleges and universities - sometimes referred to as career colleges - are an essential part of the answer. Now educating 12 percent of higher education students, these schools are the game-changer when a game-changer is badly needed.
In California, private-sector colleges and universities play crucial roles in educating students. More than 340,000 students in the state, 9 percent overall, attend career colleges. Two-thirds of these students are minorities, and almost 80 percent receive financial aid. These students are being armed with the skills needed to meet the demands of the 21st century economy.
Georgia took steps to become a national leader in cyber education Thursday with the approval of new charter schools and funding that could bring the possibility of online school to the home of every student.
The Georgia Charter Schools Commission authorized a new class of charter schools to open this fall, including a K-12 "virtual campus," two K-8 schools and a middle school. Its decision to free up funding will enable two other cyber schools to start up as well.
After months of research, the commission agreed to increase funding for cyber schools from $3,400 to $5,800 per pupil - a figure below the national average of $6,500, but one that operators say they can live with.
In response to a recent letter received by the parents of the Rome School District, the New York State Education Department notified the district that Rome Free Academy has recently received the status of "in need of improvement" for the academic year 2010-2011. The improvement derives from the assessment results of the 2009-1010 academic year. While the district met the requirements for all students, those students with disabilities did not meet graduation requirements. This forced the group to lose Safe Harbor status, which has ultimately caused the improvement status for Rome Free Academy.
Within this letter, the district stated that due to the No Child Left Behind guidelines within the current status, parents may request their child to be transferred to another high school within the district -- yet for these parents, there is no other option.
While currently administrators and teachers are receiving collaborative instructional practice from trained literacy coaches, the graduation rate has not been positively affected by the curriculum. So the question is what is the district really trying to work on?
Struggling to drum up dissipating ad revenue and to stay afloat in the sea of cable news slime, most media organizations have resorted to sloshing around in the infotainment gutter for shock and schlock. No surprise then that the issue of school reform has played out with all the depth and journalistic standards of an Ali G. interview. And while it's had innumerable opportunities to unravel the eternal conundrum of public education through exhaustive research and nuanced reporting, the press has all but ignored its obligation to offer the public a sober, informed, balanced discourse on a topic with such critical short- and long-term import.
Instead, the school reform debate screeches to its ignoble crescendo. The media has gone all STORM WATCH on us, opting for a sensational script over substance, and emphasizing the fear factor by manufacturing predictable boogie men. For the most part, the American public has jumped onboard for yet another ride on the self-righteous victimhood express.
1/6/2011 Madison School Board Meeting on the Administration's proposed Hogh School Plans
Madison School Board Member Arlene Silviera, via email:
The Board meeting to discuss the high school plan been set. Information is below.
Thursday, January 6 5:00-8:00pm McDaniels Auditorium Doyle Administration Building
All are welcome to attend but there will not be public speaking.
The intent of the meeting is to provide the Board with a better understanding of the plan, process, timelines, budget, goals, etc. We will receive a presentation followed by Q&A.
There sure are a lot of words used at Seattle Public Schools that have a special or specific meaning within the context of public K-12 education. The jargon of education. The professionals often use this jargon among themselves to speak precisely. At Seattle Public Schools the professionals often use this jargon to confuse or intimidate the public. The staff of Seattle Public Schools particularly like to MIS-use this jargon to confuse the public, or to tempt the public into mis-using the jargon to make them appear ignorant.
Of late, this trick has been practiced more by Dr. Cathy Thompson and Kathleen Vasquez than any other member of the staff.
A decade ago, almost any discussion about reforming the nation's public schools included vouchers. The idea of letting students use taxpayer dollars to attend private schools appealed to conservatives, who liked the notion of subjecting public schools to competition. Some Democratic mayors, frustrated with the slow pace of school improvement, also rallied behind vouchers.
Then, vouchers got overtaken by other ideas about how to shake up public schools. Unions vehemently opposed vouchers, arguing they would starve public schools of funding. Vouchers were left out of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law, making it difficult for programs to gain a foothold in school districts. More recently, the Obama administration left vouchers out of its Race to the Top grant program, even as it endorsed other reforms such as charter schools and pay-for-performance plans for teachers.
One day Kathy Ceceri noticed a tick on her arm and started to worry that it was the kind that carried Lyme disease. So she went to her home lab, put the tiny arachnid under her microscope, which is connected to her computer through a U.S.B. cable, and studied the image.
"It was," she said. "Then of course I Googled what to do when you've been bitten by a deer tick."
Ms. Ceceri's microscope, a Digital Blue QX5, is one of several pieces of scientific equipment that make up her home lab, which she has set up on her dining room table in Schuylerville, N.Y. Home labs like hers are becoming more feasible as the scientific devices that stock them become more computerized, cheaper and easier to use.
Before, during and even between classes at Hillbrook School this fall, seventh-graders have been spotted on the Los Gatos campus, sometimes burbling Spanish or Mandarin phrases into the glowing screen in their hands, other times staring into it like a looking glass.
iPads -- the Apple of almost every adolescent's eye -- are being provided to students at several Bay Area public and private schools this year, including Hillbrook, which claims to be the only K-8 school in America using tablet computers in class and sending them home. This has led to a lot of 12-year-olds swanning around the wooded hillside campus, talking to their iPads.
Summoning up a virtual keyboard recently, Sophie Greene quickly typed a note to herself in iCal, a calendar program, then played back an audio file in which she was speaking Spanish. "We record a conversation, e-mail it to our teacher, Señorita Kelly," she explained, "then she critiques the lesson in Spanish and sends that back to us."
The goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project is to help educators and policymakers identify and support good teaching by improving the quality of information available about teacher practice. With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, independent education researchers, in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions, will work to develop fair and reliable measures of effective teaching.
When art teacher Kandy Dea recently assigned fourth-graders in her Walnut, Iowa, classroom to create a board game to play with a friend, she was shocked by one little boy's response: He froze.
While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, "I can't think of anything," Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged "wrong," he tried to copy another student's game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.
Americans' scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group, says Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The finding is based on a study of 300,000 Americans' scores from 1966 to 2008 on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a standardized test that's considered a benchmark for creative thinking. (Dr. Kim's results are currently undergoing peer review to determine whether they will be published in a scholarly journal.)
Being named to Oprah Winfrey's book club is a boon to working authors, but this week the talk show host dug into literary history and named as her latest pick two novels by Charles Dickens: "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations."
Setting down our paged-through copy of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" for a bit, Speakeasy has been thinking about Dickens' legacy. Will modern readers relate to the impoverished 19th century social conditions that are so associated with Dickens' work -- is yesterday's chimney sweep today's downsized auto worker? We put the issue to two Dickens scholars: Michael Slater, author of a well-reviewed biography, "Charles Dickens" (Yale University Press) and Lillian Nayder, author of "The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth" (Cornell University Press) about the novelist's wife.
Back in 1997, I was an unhealthily driven Yale undergraduate in pleated khakis. An English major--I wanted above all to become a writer--I was rapidly losing my faith. Not only did the theory-laden literary scholarship that I encountered seem little more than jargonish, impenetrable sound and fury, but the sciences appeared to have much more to offer. I followed in real time as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins engaged in ferociously exciting debates in places like The New York Review of Books. Here was a clarity, an urgency, and a series of battle cries that I, the grandson of a creationist-despising evolutionary biologist, could relate to.
Those were the days of the "Science Wars" in the academy, a clash between literary post-modernists ("po-mos") and scientists over whether the scientific process could lay claim to any truly objective means of describing reality. And thanks to people like Gould and Dawkins, I had slowly been turned. I was a mole within the humanities. That's not to say I'd stopped loving literature, but I felt I had to flee a ship that seemed without a rudder--and in the decade since then, it appears I'm hardly the only one.
While English is the most widely-spoken lingua franca in history, so-called common or working languages can be much less pervasive. Elamite, for example, was the submerged administrative language of the Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C.E. All official documents were written down in Elamite, but they were both composed and read out in Persian, the language of the illiterate ruling class. Then there is Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism. No longer used in everyday conversation, Pali is written in different scripts in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Burma, and sounds different when read aloud by Thai and Burmese speakers. The identity of the language is almost obscured by its profusion of forms.
Pali is a tantalizing case for Nicholas Ostler, because it suggests to him the possibility of a "virtual" language. A "virtual language" would not be read or spoken itself. It would allow the user to understand what is being written or said without learning the original language--in much the same way that "virtual reality" allows the user to have an experience of something without actually doing it. Pali is not "one language" in the concrete sense that it has one set of words, but those who know any of its forms can access exactly the same information. Yet on closer inspection this is not because it is a "virtual language." It is because the differences between its forms are largely superficial. However the words are pronounced or written down, they mean the same thing. It is one language after all.
This fall, work demands have put a serious crimp in my school meeting schedule -- and (to be honest) in my willingness to bang my head against the wall known as "public engagement" at Seattle Public Schools. But last Monday I decided it was time to get back into the ring -- or at least into the loop -- so after dinner (and a prophylactic rum cocktail) I headed down to South Lake High School to hear what Southeast Director Michael Tolley had to say about the District's recently released School Reports.
These reports represent the District's effort to track each school's progress on a variety of measures, from test scores to student absences to the teachers' feelings about their school's leadership. The schools have had annual reports before -- they're available online going back to 1998 -- but these new ones go into considerably more detail. They also include a one-page Improvement Plan for each school -- goals to raise achievement, or attendance, or whatever -- and a description of what the school is doing in order to reach those goals: instructional coaches, individual tutoring, more collaborative staff time, and so on. And every school has now been ranked on a five-point scale based on overall student performance and improvement on standardized tests, and the achievement gap between poor kids (those who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches) and everyone else.
U.S. Army Capt. David Brown knows education of Afghans is critical to the future of the country.
"We see it as stronger than guns and bombs. Schools and education are the foundation for the future of Afghanistan," the Connecticut native told a class of 50 Afghan youth at a graduation ceremony after they completed an eight-week course on computer skills and English. "Education is a powerful weapon."
It's so powerful that the Taliban have been actively working against it, even spraying acid on school girls that's blinded at least two girls. The Taliban have forced the closure of 75 out of 228 schools in one province alone after assassinating teachers and students and destroying school buildings. Just last month, they burned a girls' school in eastern Afghanistan with 850 Qurans inside. CARE International, a non-profit organization working in Afghanistan, documented 670-education related attacks in 2008.
Chicago children shouldn't have to compete for the chance to attend the city's best performing schools, mayoral candidate Carol Moseley Braun said Thursday.
And if she's elected, Braun said she plans to focus on improving neighborhood schools so parents won't have to send their kids to magnet and selective enrollment schools in other parts of town.
"It seems to me the opportunity for a quality education is not something we should have to compete for," Braun said.
"It ought to be available to every child in every neighborhood."
By late Friday, Patrice Robinson's favorite technology was Caller ID, a thin bit of insulation between her and dozens of arm-twisters wanting her ear.
"I've been inundated with e-mail and phone calls from high-ranking people on both sides," said the Memphis City Schools board member. "I am still deliberating.
"People keep calling with new information, then I'm over here. Then I get another call and I'm over there."
Robinson is one of three board members who said late last week that she was still undecided on whether to join four others committed to voting tonight for a resolution that would ask city voters if they want to surrender the MCS charter.
Kwanzaa comes once a year, but at Falk Elementary School it's a part of the lesson plan almost every day.
On Friday, the last day of school before the holidays, students in first, second and third grade came together for a weekly morning routine called Harambee, which in Swahili means "all pull together."
They form a circle as they dance, clap and chant in unison to a song about freedom. When the music ends, the children chatter with fresh energy for a moment, until teacher Kira Fobbs walks slowly to the center, demanding silence with her stare.
We've been hearing a lot about high school dropouts because of a flurry of studies and reports that offer dire warnings about the drag dropouts can be on the economy and the nation's future. But if you want to understand why a million kids drop out of school every year, all you have to do is ask them -- which is what NPR's Claudio Sanchez did as part of a recent reporting assignment to Central Falls Rhode Island.
When it comes to the public schools, Bay Area parents rarely illustrate the strident, progressive beliefs they apply to most political and social issues.
The phrase limousine liberal is not complimentary, but on this issue, it's a glove that fits a little too well.
Because whether it's fueled by economic privilege or simply a matter of choice, the rate at which Bay Area parents, regardless of ethnicity, send their children to private schools has historically been higher than most other places in the country, say researchers who have studied the issue.
And at inner-city schools, that migration has translated into an exodus of white students from the public school systems in both Oakland and San Francisco.
THE Nobel Prize in Literature was presented to Mario Vargas Llosa at an awards ceremony on Friday in Oslo. This reawakened the disappointment felt by many fans of African literature, who had hoped that this would be the year for the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o. But there's actually reason to celebrate Mr. Ngugi's loss. African literature is better off without another Nobel ... at least for now.
A Nigerian publisher once told me that of the manuscripts she reads from aspiring writers, half echo Chinua Achebe and half try to adopt Wole Soyinka's style. Mr. Achebe and Mr. Soyinka, who won the continent's first Nobel in literature in 1986, are arguably the most celebrated black African writers, especially in terms of Western accolades. But their dominance causes problems in a region where the common attitude is, "If it already works, why bother to improve on it?"
Valerie Ooka Pang has written a book about the unmet needs of Asian Pacific American children. She teach courses in multicultural education, social studies methods, curriculum & instruction, and social foundations. She is interested in culturally meaningful teaching.
The use of acronyms by the Department of Defense is extensive. Many acronyms have multiple meanings and are not always well known outside a particular organization. Although using acronyms in written material is intended to make writing clearer, their misuse or abuse does the exact opposite.
Effective immediately, all written correspondence prepared for the Secretary or Deputy Secretary of Defense will minimize the use of acronyms or include a comprehensive glossary as the last tab of the package. Particular attention should be given to Read-Aheads and slide presentations, which can contain a large number of acronyms.
America's primary and secondary schools have many problems, but an excess of excellence is not one of them. Not only do our weak students fare poorly in international comparisons, so do our strong ones. Mediocrity is the national norm. The very best students are the ones most likely to do things of great benefit to the rest of us -- cure malaria, devise revolutionary inventions, start the next Apple or plumb the secrets of the universe. But we don't always put much importance on helping them realize their full potential.
A case in point is Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Ill., a racially and economically mixed suburb of Chicago that is home to Northwestern University. It recently decided to eliminate a high honors freshman English course aimed at challenging the top students. Henceforth, these youngsters will be grouped with everyone else in a regular "honors" class in humanities. Next year, the same may be done with biology. Your kid is an honor student at ETHS? Heck, everyone is an honors student at ETHS. It's hardly the only school in America where grouping students according to their ability is in disrepute. There is a widespread impulse to treat all kids as equally able and willing to learn. But the results often fall dismally short of the hopes.
When the Chicago public schools scrapped remedial classes for ninth graders and put everyone in college-prep courses, "failure rates increased, grades declined slightly, test scores did not improve and students were no more likely to enter college," according to a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago. Among average and above-average students, absenteeism rose. The danger in putting the brightest kids in general classes is that they will be bored by instruction geared to the middle. But their troubles don't elicit much sympathy. Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless told The Atlantic magazine, "The United States does not do a good job of educating kids at the top. There's a long-standing attitude that, 'Well, smart kids can make it on their own.'"
But can they? Only 6 percent of American kids achieve advanced proficiency in math -- lower than in 30 other countries. In Taiwan, the figure is 28 percent.
School administrators in Evanston insist the change is aimed at making the curriculum more demanding, even as they make it less demanding for some students. Thanks to the abolition of this elite course, we are told, "high-achieving students" will profit from "experiencing multiple perspectives and diversity in their classes to gain cultural capital."
In other words, racial balance will take priority over academic rigor. Blacks and Hispanics make up nearly half of all students but only 19 percent of those in advanced placement courses and 29 percent of those in honors courses. This is because minority students at Evanston, which has an enrollment of nearly 3,000, generally score lower on achievement tests. Putting all students together is supposed to give everyone an equal opportunity.
But if you have a fever, you don't bring it down by breaking the thermometer. The low numbers of black and Hispanic students are a symptom of a deeper problem, namely the failure of elementary and middle schools to prepare them for the most challenging course work. Evanston has had a big racial gap in academic performance for decades, and there is nothing to gain from pretending it doesn't exist. Schools that group (or "track") kids by ability generally get better overall results. Chester Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, notes in a recent report, "Middle schools with more tracks have significantly more math pupils performing at the advanced and proficient levels and fewer students at the needs improvement and failing levels."
Why would that be? Teaching is not easy, and teaching kids with a wide range of aptitude and interest is even harder. Grouping students by ability allows the tailoring of lessons to match the needs of each group. Putting them all together is bound to fail one group or another. Shortchanging gifted teens creates the risk of another unwanted effect: inducing their parents to leave. Families in Evanston can always move to neighboring suburbs with good schools, or they can opt for several fine private and parochial alternatives. Average students don't gain from being in the same classes as exceptional ones if the exceptional ones are not there.
We as a society have not been very successful at turning average students into high achievers. Maybe we'll have better luck doing the opposite.
Ed Kupka is taking a strong stand. As principal of Milwaukee's Bradley Tech High School, he wants to encourage the good ones, do something about the bad ones and make the school more successful.
I'm not talking about students, although that's been a hot subject. A recent gang fight at the school drew a massive police response, negative attention from Ald. Robert Donovan and new steps aimed at removing troublemakers from the school.
I'm talking about teachers. Kupka has taken a strong stand on removing teachers who he says are not succeeding in the classroom, so they can be replaced with teachers who can do better.
"I'm addicted to getting the best person in front of the students," he said. "It's the only way to get achievement up."
In an interview shortly before the fight, Kupka said that addressing ineffective performers on the staff was taking up much of his time. He thinks the school is making progress on that score, but setbacks last spring and summer were so serious that he considered quitting.
This report provides a detailed look at student performance on state tests and examines whether state-level results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) confirm the trends found on state tests. The report tracks data for all states and the District of Columbia in math and reading for grades 4, 8, and high school by student race, ethnicity, income, and gender from as early as 2002 through 2009, where three or more years of comparable data are available. Also available are 50 state profiles with detailed student achievement data and tables showing the performance of various student groups on 2009 state tests. Finally, also posted here are short video clips of CEP's President and CEO Jack Jennings explaining the main findings of this study.
A few months ago I wrote up a list of secondary benefits that come with learning a foreign language, based on my own experience learning Arabic. It's a bit long, but I hope it will be of interest.
How to listen to other people's stories and perspectives. Being able to shut up and really listen to different opinions is a rare skill. If we want to make informed policy in cross-cultural contexts, we need to humanize and understand the "other" -- which includes both our allies and our enemies. We do not have to agree with each other, but we need to listen long enough to genuinely understand each other's narratives. Being in a foreign language environment forces you to concentrate and listen, especially because you probably lack the language skill to respond as you wish.
How to operate in an environment of constant uncertainty. When you arrive in a foreign culture, everything is uncertain. You feel a constant tightness in your chest because you don't know the rules for even the most trivial day-to-day tasks. Even something as simple as buying hummus and falafel or riding in a taxicab involves new processes, rituals, and vocabulary -- especially if you want to do it like the natives. You can't be a perfectionist, because you'll never get anything done otherwise. You learn to control negative emotional responses like fear, anger, or frustration. Fortunately, you do acclimate to this uncertainty. You learn to be patient, cool, and observant.
We should offer every American family the good school promise-access to at least one effective school where most students are on grade level and make at least a year of progress. We should offer every American student best efforts at giving them a teacher that gives them a shot at making at least a one year gain.
In an EdWeek OpEd, The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Teacher Quality makes the case:
JEB BUSH and BOB WISE, a Democrat who was West Virginia governor from 2001-2005, unveil the "10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning," a "roadmap for local, state and federal officials to integrate digital learning in education. ... Technology has the power and scalability to customize education so each and every student learns in their own style at their own pace."
Now you can go to a new website, and see just how good or bad citizens in your state are at managing household finances.
Here's a small spoiler: if you aren't a citizen of New York, New Jersey or New Hampshire, you are less likely to be among the most financially adept individuals. Those three states were among the top five in at least three of five measures of financial capability, according to a survey of more than 28,000 people.
The interactive, clickable map of the U.S. is based on the State-by-State Financial Capability Survey released Wednesday that was developed in consultation with the Treasury Department and the President's Advisory Council on Financial Literacy. Find the full data here.
During a 40-year career in higher education, Stan Albrecht has seen his share of strategic plans emerge after interminable meetings and lots of sweat only to gather dust on the shelf.
The Utah State University president cautioned the Utah Board of Regents that its new 10-year road map -- hoped to pave Utah's way to a much more educated workforce -- might be destined for such a fate if the scope of its 52 recommendations is not narrowed.
On Thursday, the Regents approved the 100-page Higher Ed Utah 2020 Plan, crafted at the request of Gov. Gary Herbert, after months of meetings and consultations. The plan seeks to get more students into college and earning degrees -- currently less than 50 percent graduate -- while promoting the role of higher education in economic innovation and workforce development.
How? By expanding need-based aid, embracing instructional technology and conducting classes online, shoring up the community college mission at the state's regional universities, and subsidizing associate degree-seeking students, among dozens of other recommendations.
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per are, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
Some of Chris Christie's reform agenda has become law, but more work is left to be done -- including education reform, which the governor says is at the top of his agenda for 2011.
Christie discussed that and other topics Tuesday during his 17th town hall meeting at the Clinton Community Center on Halstead Street.
The governor said New Jerseyans are beginning to feel pride again in their state, and that there are some positive discussion topics for the public.
New Jersey has the highest tax burden in the nation, many anti-business regulations and an atmosphere where private-sector jobs are treated like the enemy, Christie said. But, he said, the Legislature is getting serious about passing his many reform initiatives, including property tax reform, education reform and the municipal tool kit.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has selected former New York City schools official Christopher Cerf to be his next commissioner of education, two sources close to the administration said.
Cerf will be nominated to lead a department that has been adrift since the sacking of its former commissioner, Bret Schundler, in the wake of the state's loss in a federal education grant. A spokeswoman for the governor would not confirm the selection.
Christie has spent the past year cutting school funding, tangling with teachers and superintendents, and trying to make New Jersey's schools do more with less. He has pointed to Newark and other cities as examples of school systems where more money has not led to education gains, leaving children "trapped" in failing schools.
Joel Klein, the outgoing chancellor of New York City schools, where Cerf served as a deputy chancellor until 2009, called Cerf "a man of enormous intellect, talent and deep understanding of K-12 education and would be a terrific leader."
The association's PharmFree Scorecard is a national report on 152 medical schools, looking at a variety of measures, including gifts and meals from industry to doctors, paid promotional speaking for drug and device companies, acceptance of free drug samples, interaction with sales reps and drug company-funded education.
UTLA leaders dispute criticisms from the mayor and others, but reiterate their firm opposition to furloughs, larger classes and use of students' test scores to evaluate teachers' performance.
The state's largest teachers union Wednesday fired an early salvo in contract negotiations, serving notice that it wouldn't accept pay cuts easily and that it won't consider linking teacher evaluations to student test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The afternoon news conference, at union headquarters in Koreatown, was a familiar exercise in rallying the rank and file. But it also marked a renewed effort to lead the public debate over school reform, coming shortly after L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa labeled United Teachers Los Angeles the primary obstacle to improving schools.
India faces a severe shortage of teaching staff as it rapidly expands it higher education system. At such top institutions as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, the generation of academics who matured with these schools is now retiring and there isn't another cohort in the pipeline to take their places. Similarly, there are shortages of well-qualified staff in departments as most Indian universities responsible for graduate (post-graduate) degrees. The undergraduate colleges face fewer problems although they too have problems finding highly qualified teachers.
The pace of expansion at the top of the higher education sector has been remarkable--eight new IITs, 7 new IIMs, and 12 new central universities established in the past two years. It is not clear how these new institutions are being staffed--or for that matter paid for. Although the national government has increased its investment in higher education by 40 percent, to US$3.1 billion, this is nonetheless a modest amount given the degree of expansion taking place. While most of Indian higher education is the responsibility of state governments or the private sector, the institutions above are supported by the central government and although US$3 billion is a significant amount, it is not sufficient against the need resulting from the combined challenges of expansion and retirements.
From scholarships and training programmes for officers to promises of Green Cards and jobs for family members, America is doing whatever it takes to build a lobby for itself in India.
The loquacious charm employed by United States President Barack Obama during his India trip is merely one of the many force multipliers exercised by an economically beleaguered Washington seeking to sell New Delhi varied military equipment for billions of dollars, and affirming bilateral strategic ties as a hedge against a resurgent China.
The other more protracted and consequently effective inducements are the raft of scholarships to American universities handed out to the offspring of top Indian politicians, civil servants and defence and intelligence officers, and the patronage extended to Service officers under the long established Military Education and Training (IMET) programme.
So blatant, widespread and generous is Washington's largesse to the students -- facilitating and financing, as it does, their pursuit of eclectic disciplines like the liberal arts, English literature and, even, art and history in leading U.S. institutions -- that it is worth asking to what extent Indian policy on a range of issues of interest to America remains 'hostage' to the children of a growing number of Delhi's powerful decision-makers. The scholarship recipients' list is embarrassingly revelatory.
Marin County continues to have one of the lowest high school dropout rates in California and that rate fell in the past year, even as the state's overall dropout rate is on the rise.
The county's rate of 1.4 percent for 2008-09 -- the most recent year for which data are available -- fell from the previous year's rate of 1.8 percent, and is well below the state average of 4.5 percent, released Tuesday by the California Department of Education.
Marin school officials say they plan to continue working to eliminate the county's dropout rate altogether.
"One student who drops out of school is one too many," said Marin County Superintendent of Schools Mary Jane Burke. "The loss of any young person before their education is completed means a more difficult life for that student, and too often a loss of productivity and civic participation in our community."
Our family is very proud of the fact that five of the seven of us has graduated from the University of Wisconsin System and the other two attended for some time. We all attended public schools in our youth. We are very pro-education. Jean was a teacher for many years.
But, times have changed in the last 20 years or so. Spending on education has skyrocketed. Quality has gone down. Kids are forced to mortgage half of their lives to graduate from college and it takes five years. MPS is a total disaster with only a small number of kids being able to read in the 10th grade. Many businessmen consider high school degrees worthless.
School budgets are bloated with administrators as salaries and benefits far exceed what the average taxpayer makes. The unions have little interest beyond themselves. If left to their own, kids would continue to come out dumber per national average than when they went into the system. All of the advertising during Green Bay Packer games will not change that.
A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts.
It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But that's what he became, not by choice (at least in the beginning) but by opportunity.
When art teacher Kandy Dea recently assigned fourth-graders in her Walnut, Iowa, classroom to create a board game to play with a friend, she was shocked by one little boy's response: He froze.
While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, "I can't think of anything," Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged "wrong," he tried to copy another student's game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.
Americans' scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group, says Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The finding is based on a study of 300,000 Americans' scores from 1966 to 2008 on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a standardized test that's considered a benchmark for creative thinking. (Dr. Kim's results are currently undergoing peer review to determine whether they will be published in a scholarly journal.)
The test scores of students at independent charter schools in Milwaukee and those of MPS students are relatively equal in the areas of reading and math, a study released Thursday says.
The report, released by the School Choice Demonstration Project conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arkansas, compared the 2006-2007 reading and math scores of 2,295 students attending 10 of the 14 independent charter schools in grades 3-8 to a carefully matched sample of 2,295 students from MPS.
When controlling for factors such as switching schools, the scores from students at independent charter schools score the same in reading and math as their counterparts in MPS.
The news last week that Shanghai students achieved the top scores in math on the international PISA exam was for some of us not exactly a wake-up call (as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan characterized it) or a Sputnik moment (as President Obama called it).
We've seen this result before. We've seen the reactions and the theories and the excuses that purport to explain why the US does so poorly in math. In fact, there are three main variations used to explain why Chinese/Asian students do so well in international exams:
Version 1: They are taught using rote learning and then regurgitate the results on exams that test how well they memorize the procedures of how to solve specific problems.
Version 2: They are taught using the reform methods of a "problem based approach" that doesn't rely on drills, and instills critical thinking and higher order thinking skills
Version 3: The teacher or the culture produces the proper conditions for learning.
On Rick Scott's recent pre-take-office tour, Floridians got a peek at what issues his administration's agenda will be likely to favor. The results ranged from confusing to frightening, especially since the opposition party will be virtually powerless to stop him. Provided Scott's initiatives are supported by the Republican majority in the legislature, he will have the opportunity to make broad and sweeping changes and seems intent to do just that.
As with any political movement, I tend to look at who is pushing it, how it fits into their core ideology and what stands to be gained. In this spirit, the most troubling part about vouchers is that they seem to be most strongly favored by those who do not really believe in government funding of education in the first place. That's not to say that all supporters of such programs wish to abolish public education. Nonetheless, I still think that it is instructive to examine why those who do wish public education to suffer such a fate view vouchers as a vehicle toward that end.
Superintendent Daniel Nerad School Board President Maya Cole School Board Members Ed Hughes, James Howard, Lucy Matthiak,
Beth Moss, Marjorie Passman & Arlene Silveira, and
Student Representative Wyeth Jackson
Madison Metropolitan School District
545 W Dayton St
Madison WI 53703-1967
RE: Opposition to Single Sex Charter School
Dear Superintendent Nerad, President Cole, and School Board Members:
We are writing on behalf of the ACLU of Wisconsin to oppose the proposal for an all-male charter school in Madison. Single sex education is inadvisable as a policy matter, and it also raises significant legal concerns.
The performance problems for children of color in Madison public schools cross gender lines: it is not only African-American and Latino boys who are being failed by the system. Many students of color and low income students - girls as well as boys - are losing out. Further, there is no proof that separating girls from boys results in better-educated children. What's more, perpetuating gender stereotypes can do nothing more than short-change our children, limiting options for boys and girls alike. For these reasons, the ACLU of Wisconsin opposes the effort to open a single-sex, publicly-funded charter school in Madison.
To be clear: the ACLU does not oppose the idea of providing a public charter school with a rigorous academic program and supplemental resources as an alternative to existing school programs in the Madison district. And we strongly encourage efforts to ensure that programming is available to children in underserved communities. Were this an effort to provide an International Baccalaureate program to both boys and girls in Madison - such as the highly- rated, coeducational Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, whose students are predominantly low-income children of color - we would likely be applauding it.
A new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says students' gains in test scores is one of the strongest predictors of teacher effectiveness, apparently validating D.C.'s controversial teacher evaluation tool and drawing fire from union critics.
The preliminary findings of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project say that teachers' past ability to raise student performance on state exams is one of the biggest predictors that the teacher would continue to oversee big test gains, and is "among the strongest predictors of his or her students' achievement growth in other classes and academic years."
Teachers with these high "value-added scores" -- named for increasing a student's achievement level
-- were also more likely to increase students' grasp of math concepts and reading comprehension through writing practices.
A lot of attention is being given to the idea of school "turnarounds" lately - the concept of taking a poorly performing school and drastically changing the staff, curricula, or other elements in an effort to make it much better.
But a study out Tuesday underlines just how hard it is to actually turn around a failing school.
The study, "Are Bad Schools Immortal?," examined more than 2,000 of the worst-performing district and charter schools in 10 states over five years. It found that very few of them closed, and even fewer - about 1 percent - truly "turned around."
One teacher learned in the Peace Corps how to sidestep bureaucrats to get things done, and he says educators with the most unconventional career tracks often make the best innovators.
Thirty years ago I was a Peace Corps volunteer drilling water wells in Liberia, West Africa. It was rough, dirty, sweaty work fraught with all the hazards and obstacles associated with operating dangerous machines in jungle environments. My overseers were generally low-level operatives working for USAID (and the CIA) or corrupt local politicians looking to maximize their status (or fill their pockets) through the successes of others.
As a young idealist, the Peace Corps taught me much about the strategies necessary to navigate past government bureaucrats to get a job done. My job was saving children's lives from the multitude of waterborne diseases prevalent in Africa.
He stood out at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., an experimental school light on structure that was mockingly called "Commie High," and at Brown, the Ivy League university known for giving students free rein, and where one of his inspirations was an education dean who espoused flexibility in teaching.
Today, Shael Polakow-Suransky is the chief accountability officer of the New York City Department of Education, a job that is as institutional as they come. He traffics in hard numbers, overseeing a system that assigns grades to schools based on complex and fixed formulas, in which success depends largely on how students score on a single test.
Black Friday set off the sale of trinkets, capes, and magic wands, and Michelle Rhee bought a few of the latter. Before Thanksgiving, I would have pegged her for a neoliberal overbearing contessa. After the edu-world lauded Washington, DC's unseating of Mayor Adrian Fenty, and in turn Ms. Rhee, even those who didn't follow education news the way DC residents and interested thought leaders did got a glance at the former chancellor for what she really was. After essentially negotiating away DC teachers' due process or equity in their latest ratified contract, we knew she'd still find a job to do. Little did I know it'd be as the 21st century Mr. Mistoffelees.
How she's been promoted as a students first education reform is definitely a work of prestidigitation and legerdemain. She'll defy examination and deceive you again.
Three area school districts were among only 14 statewide that received the highest marks under the Colorado Department of Education's new accreditation system, which places emphasis on academic growth and preparing students for college and careers.
Nine other districts in the Pikes Peak region, including and Falcon School District 49 and Woodland Park RE-2, received the second highest ranking of "accredited." Five area districts received the mid-level "accredited with improvement plan" designation: Colorado Springs School District 11, Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8, Widefield School District 3, Harrison School District 2 and Cripple Creek-Victor School District RE-1.
Given middle of the pack reading levels on PISA results, the National Journal asked the rediculous question, “what’s so awful about being average?” They seem to ignore that US math and science results are much worse and lag most of the developed world. As dumb as the prompt was, it got a few of us to write a response. Here’s mine.
Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in American. There are pockets of excellence, but results from American schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement, high school graduation and college completion rates.
The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann's work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)
Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.
As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn't as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.
Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the "low scores" achieved in the most recent PISA :-)
To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.
NYTimes: ... PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.
In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.
In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.
The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
As the governor-elect prepares to take office, California's schools are confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.
As Gov.-elect Jerry Brown prepares to take office, major headwinds are buffeting the biggest component of his upcoming budget: California's schools. They are being confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.
Most immediate and pressing is the state's fiscal crisis -- a $28-billion gap is forecast for the next 18 months. How that will affect school districts already reeling from years of multibillion-dollar cuts will be the subject of Brown's second budget forum, which is scheduled for Tuesday in Los Angeles.
"Jerry Brown is entering office at a moment when the capacity of the system is weaker than any time in recent memory," said John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA. "I worry we may be reaching a breaking point."
Current American education policy is built on these assumptions: The quality of American education has plummeted because our schools are filled with teachers who can't teach. Teachers' unions and contracts tie the hands of school administrators. And teachers' unions protect bad teachers. Here are a few reasons why these conclusions are leading our educational system in a bad direction.
First, these policies ignore the effects of poverty on educational outcomes. Given the increasing number of children growing up in poverty, we ignore its effects at our peril.
I know something about poverty and its effects because I grew up in an impoverished, single-parent home and attended a low-quality school through eighth grade. Despite those beginnings, I graduated from one of the top US law schools and am now a law professor. If I could make it, then poverty must not matter, right?
I only know of two K-12 schools that have come close to doing full 1-1 rollouts of iPads to their students. One is the Cedars School of Excellence outside of Glasgow, Scotland, whose 105-student deployment has captured most of the publicity due to the eloquence of its head of IT, Fraser Speirs. The one that gets less publicity is actually much more ambitious in many ways.
Saint Andrews School is a private school in Savannah, Georgia. It has deployed a total of 480 iPads to students, including one to all 440 students in the grades 1-12, and classroom sets for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (so technically not 1:1, but pretty close).
At the union's convention last July in New Orleans, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel announced the creation of a Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, which would study teacher effectiveness and report its findings to the delegates of the 2011 convention.
"Let's demand to be the ones in charge," Van Roekel said, adding, "Imagine going beyond 'being at the table' to running the meeting."
He asked, rhetorically, "What would the profession look like if we - the union of practitioners - actually controlled teacher training, induction and licensure, evaluation and professional development?"
Today, NEA announced the 21 members of that commission, and while the press release described them as "diverse" and "independent," they seem committed to Van Roekel's goals - union control of teacher training, induction, licensure, evaluation and professional development.
In the race to replace Mayor Daley, Rahm Emanuel would like voters to be thinking about something other than those challenges to his residency, and he's talking about schools.
Sunday, he unveiled his plans for improving education in Chicago, includind giving principals more power over their individual schools, doubling the number of teacher training academies and getting parents more involved.
Emanuel wants parents to sign a contract with their child's teacher pledging to encourage learning at home.
"Our teachers simply cannot succeed without parents as partners. While government must do its part, it's no substitute for a committed parent," Emanuel said.
Monday, it's back to the residency challenge, when Emanuel and other witnesses will be called to testify at a Board of Elections hearing.
There's been plenty of buzz -- much of it positive -- surrounding a proposed single sex charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of Madison minority students. Yet a closer look at the financing projections for the Madison Preparatory Academy, starting with the $300,000 the proposal notes is coming from the Madison Community Foundation, raises some questions,
"I have no idea where they got that figure," says Kathleen Woit, president of the foundation, when asked about the funding. "No, we have not committed to that. We'll have to get this straightened out."
The preliminary proposal, presented to the Madison School Board's Planning and Development Committee Dec. 6, also notes that $1.35 million would be available in six grants of $225,000 through the state Department of Public Instruction's charter school federal start-up fund. That's more than twice what is allowable for a school of Madison Prep's size, and suggests the school would be receiving both implementation and planning grants in two of the four years the school is eligible for start-up money.
"It looks like they are double counting," says Robert Soldner, director of School Management Services for the Department of Public Instruction. Soldner says that DPI typically helps charters get up and running with several years of funding, starting with a planning grant the first year, an implementation grant the second year and extensions of the implementation grants possible in the next couple of years of operation. Charter schools are not eligible for planning and implementation grants at the same time.
Educators at a small private Christian school in Olde Town Augusta are seeing results with a math curriculum imported from halfway around the world.
For the past three years, Heritage Academy has used Singapore Math as its basal math curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade.
In the first year the school adopted Singapore Math, all of its kindergarten and first-grade pupils met or exceeded proficiency standards on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, as did 80 percent of second-graders.
The Chronicle had an interesting story in yesterday's paper (print-only until Tuesday) about the brain drain in the Oakland school district after the fifth grade.
At Lincoln Elementary School in Chinatown, the city's first public, non-charter school to win a National Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education, a staggering 77 percent of last year's fifth-graders left the district, up from 57 percent a few years ago.
Superintendent Tony Smith told Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker, whose son goes to Peralta Elementary in Rockridge (a school with the fifth-highest "leaving rate" in OUSD - 44 percent), that the loss of top students was one explanation for the drop-off in district test scores at the middle and high school level.
In a more concerted effort to enhance the manner in which our students are taught to become contributing members of a global society, we would like our schools to emphasize:
The interconnectedness of the world's cultures, politics, and economics.
Recognizing, analyzing, and evaluating trends in global relationships.
Creative problem solving, critical thinking, and innovative thought processes.
Understanding issues from cultural perspectives other than our own.
Encouraging study and travel abroad.
Technical competence and the critical impact that technology has had in our world.
Technological innovation that can expand curriculum, opportunity, and our students' world view.
Outreach to the community for resources and expertise to further global awareness.
The role of world languages in preparing students for an international environment. Consideration of Chinese as a new curricular offering.
It is our hope that all students are touched by this initiative, in all courses and at all levels of our curriculum. We appreciate any innovation that can be brought to our students to achieve this goal.
In a speech to state leaders, the mayor brands United Teachers Los Angeles as an obstacle to reform as the city stands at 'a critical crossroads.'
With a hard-hitting speech that branded the city's teachers union as an unyielding obstruction to education reforms, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set the stage this week for a new battle over control of the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest.
In a Sacramento address to state leaders, Villaraigosa -- himself a longtime teachers union employee before launching a career in public office -- declared that education in Los Angeles stands at "a critical crossroads," and he assailed United Teachers Los Angeles for resisting change.
During the last five years, the mayor said, union leaders have stood as "one unwavering roadblock to reform." He called for change in contentious areas such as tenure, teacher evaluations and seniority -- all volatile arenas in which teachers unions have balked at proposals for reform as eroding their rights.
Public employee unions look increasingly out of touch and may be forced to swallow wage and benefit cuts.
Too bad a ball-peen hammer wasn't handy. If so, leaders of the embattled Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association might have walloped themselves over the head. Instead, they did something even more self-destructive, suing Milwaukee Public Schools for Viagra coverage of its members.
Union president Mike Langyel gamely defends the suit, saying Viagra is used to treat a bona fide medical problem. But even liberal supporters winced at the timing.
Here was a financially strapped school system struggling with an anticipated layoff of almost 500 teachers, and the clueless union was demanding insurance coverage of a sexual aid that could cost taxpayers more than $700,000 a year.
new one-of-a-kind charter school in the city of Madison could soon become a reality, but an error in crunching numbers may mean more of a burden for city taxpayers.
The error was found just a few weeks ago, and it could put taxpayers on the hook for an additional $380,000 over the next five years.
But proponents of the proposed Badger Rock charter school have been scrambling to find ways to trim costs. And despite the bigger budget numbers, they said they hope the Madison School Board sees the bigger picture and not just dollar signs.
The year-round, agriculture- and green-based school on Madison's southwest side would start with 50 students in sixth grade. The school would add grades seven and eight in the following two years, for a total of 150 students.
Support for the school has been great until what's being called a "hiccup" two weeks ago.
As part of the conditions that passed, the board must execute a contract with the school no later than April 1 to operate it for a five-year period. Board member Lucy Mathiak added a sentence saying the contract shall define the district's financial obligations for each of the five years and shall contain language limiting the district's financial liability. Mathiak's amendment passed 6-1.
It would be interesting to see how the funding/review/political model compares with the ill-fated Studio School proposal and, how current public schools might fare as a "startup" today.
One suggestion Severson offered that hasn't gained much traction in the past is to have board members represent geographic areas rather than the entire city, more like the Milwaukee School Board.
Ruth Robarts, who served on the board for 10 years, said a consequence of at-large seats like those in Madison is that races are more expensive -- hers cost $20,000 -- and it becomes impossible to campaign door-to-door.
That means candidates rely on the endorsements of Madison Teachers Inc., which Robarts said has "almost overwhelming influence" on local board elections, and other groups, which then tout candidates' qualifications and get members out to vote.
"However, the big unknown in my mind is whether School Board campaigns would become much more parochial," she added, referring to district-based elections. "If so, would that lead to good trade-offs needing to happen to get things done or would it lead to political gridlock at this very local level?"
The Obama administration could not have set the stage for a better demonstration of the power and priorities of Wisconsin's teachers unions.
With its Race to the Top competition, the federal government dangled the prospect of a share of $4.35 billion for those states ready to enact reforms, especially related to improving teacher and principal performance.
Eyes on that prize, states launched plans tying teacher pay and promotions to student achievement, giving state officials more control over local schools and overhauling data tracking and assessment systems.
Then the game got tricky: Teachers unions had to be on board.
In the end, only 11 states and the District of Columbia ended up with money from the program this year. Wisconsin got nothing.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council had helped kill or watered down critical parts of the state's proposal, with the president of the teachers union attaching a letter to the application that one participant described as "grudging." In the end, only 12% of the union's local leaders endorsed a plan that might have brought in more than $250 million in school funding to Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent nearly twice as much as any other organization to lobby lawmakers in 2009, according to the Government Accountability Board.
The state's largest teachers union reported spending more than $1.5 million and 7,239 hours lobbying, almost twice as much as the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance, which spent the second-highest amount on lobbying in the state.
One aspect of the union's lobbying effort was largely successful, with the state Legislature repealing the 16-year-old qualified economic offer law that restricted teachers' pay and benefits.
Not all parents want to see the Parent Trigger Law pulled at McKinley Elementary School, according to Principal Fleming Robinson.
In a statement released Thursday, Robinson said despite recent outcry there are still a lot of parents who support the school and its administration, and a host of others have been misguided.
"Some have said they signed the petition but were harassed or signed under false pretenses, which included beautifying the school," Robinson said. "A lot of parents weren't given clear information on what the petition was for."
However, on Tuesday during a press conference where more than 50 parents, students, guardians and residents spoke before heading to Compton Unified School District headquarters to hand over a stack of parent-signed petitions, Elizabeth Hidalgo, the mother of a child attending McKinley, acknowledged that several parents were up in arms over their attempts and "have been spreading lies" about not receiving all the details.
Study backs 'value-added' analysis of teacher effectiveness
Classroom effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging students' progress on standardized tests, Gates foundation study shows. Results come amid a national effort to reform teacher evaluations.
Teachers' effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students' progress on standardized tests, according to the preliminary findings of a large-scale study released Friday by leading education researchers.
The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of "value-added" analysis, whose accuracy has been hotly contested by teachers unions and some education experts who question the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
The approach estimates a teacher's effectiveness by comparing his or her students' performance on standardized tests to their performance in previous years. It has been adopted around the country in cities including New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and soon, if local officials have their way, Los Angeles.
The $45-million Measures of Effective Teaching study is a groundbreaking effort to identify reliable gauges of teacher performance through an intensive look at 3,000 teachers in cities throughout the country. Ultimately, it will examine multiple approaches, including using sophisticated observation tools and teachers' assessments of their own performance
For two years, backed by a friendly Congress and flush with federal stimulus money, President Obama's administration enjoyed a relatively obstacle-free path for its education agenda, the focus of which is the $4 billion Race to the Top grant program.
But with Republican deficit hawks taking control of the House next month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will no longer have billions of dollars to use at his discretion.
The administration is also having to recalibrate its goals for working with Congress to overhaul the main federal law on public schools. Fortunately for the administration, its ambitions for the law, the Bush-era No Child Left Behind effort, are shared by Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who will be the chairman of the House education committee.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared in Tampa, Fla. alongside the presidents of the two major teachers unions: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association.
Praising teacher evaluation, tenure, and pay reforms pursued through a partnership among the local school district, union and the Gates Foundation, Duncan lobbed a message of conciliation into an often-overheated debate over the role of unions in school improvement efforts.
"I don't think any of us like it when something is imposed on us," Duncan said. "I think there is so much the country can learn from what's happening here. You have elevated the profession."
The news conference - held in Hillsborough County, where it now takes up to four years to earn tenure and teachers are paid, in part, according to how well their students perform on standardized tests - was intended to extend an olive branch to the teachers unions in recognition of an important, though increasingly embattled, Democratic Party constituency.
Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special "All-Scholastics" 14-page (12x22-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.
Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead HS, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students...No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn't mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.
In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, receive any notice from the Globe.
International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don't care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don't think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.
---------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Newsweek reports this week on Michelle Rhee's new project StudentsFirst, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while our High School students have spent some 12,960 hours observing teachers [6 hours x 180 days x 12 years] and giving at least some of their attention to other aspects of school reform that affect them, no one seems to show any interest in actually talking with them to discover what they have learned.
Tony Wagner of Harvard did conduct a focus group for recent grads of a suburban high school he was working with, and he was surprised and intrigued by what he learned from them during the course of the conversation. But he tells me he only knows of three high schools in the whole country (of 20,000 +) which conduct such efforts to learn from students what they have noticed about their schools.
When I left my job at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation to accept a new job with Pan Am in the early 1960s, they gave me an exit interview to find out why I was leaving, but also to discover what I might offer by way of observations about my tasks and the job environment.
Our high schools, I feel it is safe to claim, do not offer their students exit interviews, either as they finish graduation or a few years later. We pass up the chance to harvest knowledge from those thousands of hours of classroom observation, and from their "hands-on" experience of the educational system in which we placed them for 12 years.
What could be the reasons for this vacuum in our curiosity about education? I believe it comes in part from our attitude that, after all, students are merely students, and that they will not become thinking human beings until long after they leave our buildings.
This is a really stupid attitude, in my view. After all, some of these students have managed calculus, chemistry, Chinese and European history. I know some who have written very very good 11,000- to 15,000-word history research papers. So it should be obvious to us, if we take a moment to think, that not only are they fully capable of noticing something about the the instruction and the other schooling processes they have experienced, but also that they are fully capable of reporting to us some of what they have learned, if we can convince them that we really want to know.
Now, someone may point out that half our college freshman drop out before their sophomore year, that a million of our HS graduates are in remedial courses every year when they get to college, and so on. I know that, so let's, at least initially, not talk to poorly-performing students. Instead, to get our feet wet, let's give serious interviews to the ones who will graduate summa cum laude from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Harvard. You know, the ones who will get the Nobel Prizes one day. Surely it is not so hard to identify the ten most academically promising and thoughtful of our HS seniors each year, and, after graduation, at least ask them if they would be willing to share some of their observations and thoughts in a conversation with us.
This would give us a small first step, and a fresh one, on the way to putting Students First, and start to put an end to our really dumb neglect of this rich resource for helping us understand how to do our education jobs better for their younger peers.
I can only hope that Mr. Gates, with his hopes to improve teacher training, and Michelle Rhee, with her new push to pay attention to students for a change, are listening to this.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Houston School board OKs creation of a school just for boys
No sagging pants and grungy T-shirts will be allowed at this new Houston school.
Neither will bad attitudes.
And neither will girls.
This school, approved by the Houston board of trustees Thursday, will open next fall with only male students. The campus will start with sixth- and ninth-graders, who will have to apply to attend, and will grow annually to become a full middle and high school.
The boys at this new school in Houston's Fifth Ward will have to wear blazers and ties. They will take advanced courses, learn a foreign language and- the biggest expectation -- go on to earn a college degree.
This will be the first all-boys school started directly by the Houston Independent School District, which last month announced plans to open an all-girls campus next year. The district has two other all-boys schools, but they are run by contractors and one is leaving HISD's umbrella to become a state charter school.
What education practices can high-performing nations learn from one another?
Learning With the World is an Asia Society initiative that focuses on common educational concerns worldwide, as well as international best-practice solutions. We work with education leaders from nations with the best and quickly improving education systems to discuss the key drivers of educational improvement and the lessons learned.
As the Madison School Board prepares to take a second shot Monday at approving an agriculture-themed charter school on Madison's South Side, board members remain divided on what was once thought to be a slam-dunk proposal.
"I'm sold on the concept; I'm not sold on the budget," board member Lucy Mathiak said Friday. "I don't see anyone being jolly about spending $700,000 a year for 50 kids."
Badger Rock Middle School, expected to open next fall with 50 sixth-graders mostly from the Sennett Middle School attendance area, has a projected budget shortfall of $43,000 for 2011-12, with a projected budget of $668,600. The gap is projected to grow to $134,000 in the charter school's third year, when it has 150 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders and is expected to cost $1.37 million to run.
On February 16,2010, MMSD received BRMS's Planning
Grant and Executive Summary of its proposed charter school. On August 16, 2010, the DPI approved the Planning Grant and provided BRMS with an award of $200,000.
(Please see communication from DPI attached as Appendix A).
The proposed charter school will be located on 4 acres of property on the grounds of the
Badger Resilience Center in South Madison. The designated site is adjacent to a 7 acre
Madison park that will also be used to foster BRMS' philosophy of cultural and
environmental sustainability. The site also currently has a working farm, a community
center, a cafe and a gardening and sustainability operation run by Growing Power.
In addition to the previously referenced planning grant, funding for BRMS, including a
school endowment, is being spearheaded by the Center for Resilient Cities. BRMS
reports that "close to a million dollars" has been committed to the project and these, and
future, funds are being provided by private contributors.
BRMS notes that the research-based instructional strategies upon which their pedagogy
will be established are Environmental-Based Education (EBE) and Place -Based
Education (PBE). As noted in BRMS Executive Summary, both EBE and PBE have
been subject to numerous research efforts and have demonstrated positive results for
involved students, and in particular, students at the middle school level. EBE in
particular is also consistent with PI 8.01 which mandates that "environmental education
objectives and activities shall be integrated into the kindergarten through grade 12
sequential curriculum plans." BRMS also proposes a "year-round" school which would
not increase the number of instructional days, but would lessen the traditional threemonth
summer break.
BRMS has established numerous partnerships with community agencies. These
agencies are detailed in the Executive Summary and Detailed Proposal (See
Appendices B and D)
President Barack Obama said Monday in a speech about education that this is "our generation's Sputnik moment."
My first question is: How many high school students around here know what Sputnik is?
My second question is: Do you think there are things to be learned from the educational success in countries that are doing better overall than the United States?
The release last week of results from testing of 15-year-olds around the world, including in most of the world's industrial nations, was one of the main factors underlying Obama's statement. American students showed a bit of improvement, but overall were in the middle of the pack. That means, among the 34 countries at the center of the study, the U.S. was 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. The U.S. standings were in line with other results in recent years.
While the rankings from the Program for International Student Assessment got a lot of attention, a set of accompanying reports got little. Among those was one focused on lessons for the United States.
More than half of Wisconsin residents are living paycheck-to-paycheck and have no "rainy day" fund that would cover thee months of unanticipated financial emergencies, a survey released this week says.
The Financial Capability Survey conducted by FINRA, the self-regulating agency of the investing industry, said 55% of Wisconsinites report spending all or a little more than their household income, which is similar to the rate nationwide. About 57% of Wisconsin resident don't have emergency money stashed away, slightly better than the national average of 60%.
A Colorado state senator told New Jersey lawmakers considering ways to fix tenure Thursday about a new law he pushed to make such job protection a "badge of honor."
Mike Johnston gave the Senate education committee details of a law passed in spring that requires teachers to get three consecutive years of effective evaluations before they earn tenure, called non-probationary status there. If they have two consecutive years of poor evaluations, they go back on probation. Those teachers can get help to improve and might eventually earn back tenure. If they don't, a district can dismiss them.
The recent figures released by the state Department of Education, which show a statewide public high school dropout rate of 37 percent among African American students, is a symptom of a broader social malaise and not an accurate measure of one group's performance.
Because when you hear some of the stories of children living in big city, high-crime neighborhoods, you come to understand that steering clear of troubled streets is in itself a full-time job.
I spoke with four young African American men on Thursday, all of them dropouts who returned to school. They attend Dewey Academy, the continuation high school in Oakland, where the high school dropout rate hovers around 40 percent.
In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch "jaundiced," and "the Whittaker Chambers of school reform," praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including "student feedback," which Alter observes parenthetically, is "(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)..."
Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?
I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.
Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.
Hasn't a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that "below" the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: "Can we not--using W.C. Field's paraphrase--see the handwriting on the floor?"
But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.
We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don't you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?
But we don't think to ask them. We don't benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!
Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.
While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don't we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?
We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn't we? And brought the astronauts safely home...surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn't we?
Seven school districts and 23 charter schools are joining Minnesota's alternative system for evaluating and paying teachers -- the signature education initiative under Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who leaves office next month.
Pawlenty on Wednesday announced the largest one-year expansion of the Q Comp program since it began in 2006. With the addition of the new schools next year, nearly a third of Minnesota students will be taught by a teacher in the program.
Also, the Minnesota Department of Education has begun uploading state-approved lessons for teachers and preschool through high school students to the iTunes web site in collaboration with Apple Inc., Pawlenty said.
f you want to get a sense of what's in store for the American workforce, just take a look at how our students match up against the rest of the world in math and science. After all, most of the professions within the U.S. economy that are growing -- healthcare, information technology, and biomedicine -- require extensive training in both subjects.
So how are we doing? Not well, at all.
American 15-year old students scored below average in math and were outperformed by 23 other countries and education systems, according to test results released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment.
And they didn't do much better in science, ranking 19 among the lot of 65 participating countries and education systems (N.B. "educational systems" are individual cities within a country, like Shanghai).
Green Bay-area school districts are beginning to change long-standing bans on handheld technology, such as cell phones and iPods, after realizing they are increasingly part of students' everyday lives.
The Pulaski School District, for example, now encourages middle and high school students to bring their cell phones to class. They're also welcome to carry other electronic gadgets such as netbooks, which are a bit smaller than laptop computers; iPads, handheld tablet computers; or electronic-book readers.
Pulaski school leaders said they decided to drop a ban on cell phone use because it wasn't practical. Students own the gadgets, administrators say, so why not use them as classroom tools?
Governor-elect Scott Walker's campaign promise to lift the enrollment cap on Wisconsin's voucher and virtual schools could come to fruition soon, despite opposition from unions.
In an interview this week on the public affairs program "WisconsinEye," State Superintendent Tony Evers said that he is open to lifting the enrollment limits, something Republicans have pushed for in the face of resistance from unions and public school advocates who see the voucher program as draining resources from Milwaukee schools by diverting public funding to private voucher schools.
"I'm steeped in reality. I'm not sure if what I think makes a lot of difference," Evers said, alluding to the impending Republican control of the governor's office and both houses of the Legislature. "People have made clear what their positions are."
Removing the caps on virtual schools or the choice program would not "fundamentally change the way those programs operate, nor will it dramatically increase the enrollments," Evers said.
Texas Comptroller Susan Combs released a study Wednesday to help school districts and campuses identify cost-saving strategies schools can make without compromising academics.
The newly released study was required by House Bill 3 from the 2009 legislative session. It was conducted by researchers from the state's top institutions, including the University of Texas at Dallas, among industry experts.
The costs of Texas public education have increased significantly to nearly $55 billion, with per-pupil spending rising by 63 percent, Combs said, in a written letter. With cuts to state-funded budgets expected in the upcoming legislative session, school districts will need to operate more efficiently.
The Houston Independent School District is making above-average gains in student performance but isn't spending its money as efficiently as other districts, according to a new study released today by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.
Houston ISD, the state's largest district, earned three stars. Dallas ISD, the second-largest district and the most comparable to Houston's, received two stars.
Statewide, 43 districts and charter school operators earned five stars. The list included Angleton, Clear Creek, Conroe, Cypress-Fairbanks, Friendswood, Katy and Pearland.
The Comptroller's office is leading the Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) to examine how our school districts and campuses spend their money - and how this spending translates into student achievement. Our study is intended to identify cost-effective practices that promote academic progress.
In addition to presenting the FAST study findings, this website also allows you to run your own custom reports on school district finances and results. We hope that policymakers and the public alike will use this resource to see how our education dollars are working to prepare the next generation.
In its response to the Department of Public Instruction's request for information on its talented and gifted services, the Madison School District points out that the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has recently updated its standards for TAG programming. Now, the District argues, the NAGC standards "actually serve as validation of the District's current practices," including West High School's claim that it meets the needs of talented and gifted students through differentiation within regular classrooms. We disagree.
The NAGC issued its revised standards in September, around the same time West High School area parents filed a complaint against the Madison School District for allowing West High to deny appropriate programming to academically gifted students. West has refused for years to provide alternatives to its regular core curriculum for 9th and 10th graders who demonstrate high performance capabilities in language arts and social studies.
If there's one theme that emerges from the ongoing audit of Houston ISD's magnet schools, it's inconsistency. An interim report [pdf] from Magnet Schools of America, released today, finds that the funding, quality, entrance criteria and student diversity vary from school to school. This is not ground-breaking news for those who have followed the magnet school discussions and media coverage over the last several years. An HISD committee that evaluated the magnet schools in 2006 drew similar conclusions.
The interim report doesn't name schools or cite specific data, but here are a few of the general points — which shouldn't necessarily be taken as gospel because three of the auditors noted that "it appeared as though they were observing a specially designed day rather than feeling this is the way we do things at the school every day." [Editor's translation: The schools were putting on a dog and pony show for the auditors.]
For months, there was nothing but enthusiastic buzz surrounding the proposal to start a green charter school in Madison. The organizers of Badger Rock Middle School have broad support throughout the community and have meticulously done their homework. The school district administration was enthusiastic about the school's focus on urban agriculture, and School Board members, who have the ultimate vote, were too.
Then, just days before the board was expected to give its final approval, the school district released new figures showing it would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to staff and operate the new school. This was a reversal from earlier projections that showed Badger Rock would bring no extra costs to the district.
In the current era of pinched budgets and dreary financial prospects, this revelation threw a monkey wrench into the process and caused the board to delay final consideration of the project until later this month.
"I had planned to come in here tonight to vote for this most innovative project," board member Marj Passman said during the Nov. 29 meeting. "But at the last minute the Badger Rock people and the board were both hit broadside with new information that raises a lot of last-minute questions."
The election of a tough-talking new teachers' union head here could complicate efforts to turn around the capital's struggling school system, just as the fragile national effort to overhaul public schools faces a change in educational leaders in this and two other big cities.
Officials who took over in the wake of Michelle Rhee's departure as chancellor of Washington's school system said Friday they might refine her signature policies, but promised not to backtrack on closing low-performing schools and evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
But they face a new player in Nathan Saunders, who ousted Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker in an election last week. Mr. Saunders said he wanted to overhaul the teacher evaluation system Ms. Rhee put into place, and would fight to retain many of the 737 teachers termed low-performing by the school district who could lose their jobs at the end of the school year.
With China's debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.
American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai -- an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country -- are by no means representative of all of China.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.
Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China's rapid modernization.
The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.
There is a new trend in education and frankly, I don't like it.
Unfortunately, you don't have to be an educator to be at the helm of an educational system.
Years ago, it was impossible for an educator to rise to the top of the system without having established degrees and qualifications such as a PhD, classroom experience, administrative experience and academic hours in educational management.
The new sense in big city governments is to treat education less as a profession and more as bean counting. The thinking is to manage the process while the children, teachers and parents become peons.
Local attorney and former Wisconsin State Bar Association president Michelle Behnke spoke in favor of Madison Prep, saying both she and her now grown children attended Edgewood High School in preference over Madison public schools. "I am not a gambler," Behnke, who is black, said during her three minute appearance before the board. She noted that the statistics regarding academic success for minority students in Madison were so bleak that neither she nor her parents felt they could risk a public school education.
Steve Goldberg, representing CUNA Mutual, also testified in favor of the school, saying his organization was looking forward to being involved and supportive of Madison Prep.
According to Caire, extreme measures are needed to deal with the extreme problems facing area black and latino youth in public school settings, claiming that conventional efforts have not yielded significant results. Both the achievement gap and the incarceration rate for black males in Dane County are at the bottom of national statistics.
Caire believes Madison Prep could be an experimental laboratory for change, and that if successful it could be replicated across the Madison district and elsewhere.
"We've been trying various approaches for 30 or 40 years and it's still not working," he says.
American teenagers made modest progress on an international exam, but still performed below average in mathematics compared with their peers in other industrialized countries, according to results released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The results for American students drew a lukewarm response from U.S. education officials as they seek to boost test scores among high-school and college students. "We're in the middle of the pack; that's not where we want to be," said Stuart Kerachsky, deputy commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Department of Education that administers the PISA test in the U.S.
Korea and Finland top the OECD's latest PISA survey of reading literacy among 15-year olds, which for the first time tested students' ability to manage digital information.
The survey, based on two-hour tests of a half million students in more than 70 economies, also tested mathematics and science. The results for 65 economies are being released today.
The next strongest performances were from Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Japan. Full results here.
The province of Shanghai, China, took part for the first time and scored higher in reading than any country. It also topped the table in maths and science. More than one-quarter of Shanghai's 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%.
The Urban League of Greater Madison's dramatic proposal for an all-male public charter school deserves open minds and fair consideration from the Madison School Board.
Don't dismiss this intriguing initiative just because the teachers union is automatically opposed. A new approach to helping more young black men get to college is justified, given the district's stark numbers:
Only 7 percent of black students who took the latest ACT college preparation test were ready for college.
Barely half of black students in Madison schools graduated in 2009.
Almost three-quarters of the 3,828 suspensions last school year were black students, who make up less than a quarter of the student body
Madison School District Leaders Learn More About Boys-Only Charter School
Madison Metropolitan School District leaders on Monday night learned more about a proposed boys-only charter school and heard from the public.
The school, which would have uniforms and be targeted toward minority students, would be the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
The idea is called Madison Prep, and it would be part of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The school's goal is for 100 percent higher education acceptance for its students, and to meet that goal it will have a longer school day and school year.
And while it's never been done here before, the person behind it said that's the idea. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, said it's time to think out of the box to help children be more successful in school -- specifically black middle-school children.
The only remotely classical thing about Pegasus Primary School on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford is the name and the school logo of a blue winged horse. The logo looks cuddlier than the Pegasus of Greek mythology, sprung from the blood of the gorgon Medusa when the hero Perseus cut off her head.
This is not the Oxford of the dreaming spires; the school is in one of the largest council estates in Europe, close to the former Morris car works at Cowley, where Minis are now made. My taxi driver points out the Blackbird pub, noted for fights, and a supermarket which he claims has been raided five times in the past year.
This well-run primary school in a tough area is doing something culturally counter-cyclical: it is teaching Latin and Greek under the auspices of the Iris Project, a volunteer-run scheme which brings classics to inner-city state schools. As someone who loved classics at public school in the 1970s, when the subject seemed out of date and doomed to oblivion, I find this both incredible and thoroughly heartening.
Ben Kemper, 19, plans to wear a frock coat with cuffs to the annual Jane Austen birthday tea in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.
The outfit will be "the whole shebang," says Mr. Kemper, who hopes to scare up some yard work so he can pay for the new threads. He says his costume may include riding boots, a cane, gloves and a buttoned vest.
Mr. Kemper is among an unlikely set of fans of the long-dead Ms. Austen--young people. The English novelist best known for "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility" has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as "Janeites" who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.
Teachers can make their case about reform to policymakers
In the Nov. 28 Star, Matthew Tully contributed an insightful piece highlighting a significant disconnect between education reformers and those who will perhaps be most affected by reforms -- teachers ("Teachers hear something else in reform debate"). The article begs us to contemplate the forces underlying educators' distrust of state-directed education reforms. Teachers will be instrumental in implementation of these reforms. As such, the fracture between policymakers and practitioners demands our attention.
Tully captured the gestalt of the problem when noting that many good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools' failures. We're not. We're actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools' successes.
An announcement from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Angel Gurría, Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on the standing of U.S. students in reading, math and science literacy compared to other countries around the world;
A two-way conversation with Secretary Duncan and students, teachers and administrators from Olin College of Engineering (Needham, Mass.) and the School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Dallas, TX);
Robert D. Atkinson, President of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discuss the results from a new report on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education released that morning; and
An interview with Thomas L. Friedman on U.S. competitiveness, innovation and economic growth.
Live Webcast on Tuesday, December 7, 8:45 a.m. EST
The countywide graduation rate for African-American students also showed a dramatic improvement, going from 64 to 90 percent in the past five years, although individual district graduation rates still lag, including Madison's.
What's happened to cause this? United Way began focusing on school dropout and graduation rates in recent years, after an intensive study on what factors cause kids to drop out and fail to graduate. The charitable agency has directed more funding to groups that attack school problems with the goal to get more kids to stay in and finish school.
The superintendents at the meeting also cited other factors, including better tracking of students and creating opportunities for problem students to get another chance to earn their diplomas.
It's good to know that efforts to solve some of those nagging problems facing our schools are being addressed -- and getting results, besides.
The last Talented and Gifted (TAG) Education Plan was adopted by the MMSD Board of Education in 1991. With state statute and policy reform, alignment with current District strategic planning, and a desire to utilize research in exemplary practice, approval of a comprehensive Talented and Gifted Plan has become a District priority.
This document is meant to be a guide as the Division aims to achieve its mission in alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, the State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules for gifted and talented education, and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
There will be a review of the Plan, with status reports issued to the Board of Education, in January and June 2010. Adjustments to the Plan will be documented at that time.
Wisconsin State Statute 121.02(1) (t), and Administrative Rule PI 8.01(2)(t).2 require school districts to identify those students who give evidence of high performance capability as talented and gifted and provide those students with access to appropriate systematic and continuous instruction. The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) standards complements the Wisconsin framework and provides a guide for quality educational programming.
The Plan below identifies the following categories as areas in need of improvement in MMSD Talented and Gifted Programming. The primary focus in developing this Plan has been in the areas of identification, programming, and professional development.
Charter schools are public schools that have more freedom to innovate because they are exempt from many (but not all) policies that govern traditional public schools. There are more than 200 public charter schools in Wisconsin and two in Madison.
Charter schools employ fully qualified teachers and participate in statewide testing programs just like traditional public schools do.
Wisconsin has two kinds of charter schools: instrumentality (staff employed by a school district) and non-instrumentality (staff not employed by a school district, but by a nonprofit organization).
Ivelisse Cruz can barely watch the video footage from her first time teaching a math lesson.
The video shows Cruz, a first-semester sophomore at Alverno College at the time, hesitantly starting her lesson seated with a group of seventh-grade students around a small table at Fairview Charter School in Milwaukee. She doesn't quite explain what the focus of their math lesson will be, looks slightly uncertain and speaks in what she would later criticize as a monotone voice.
"It was terrible, I don't even know how these kids were even paying attention," Cruz, now in her senior year at Alverno, said as she watched the video.
Fast forward through three more semesters, learning the art of teaching and spending time working with students.
Now the video shows a more confident woman standing at the front of her class, reviewing her work with the students from the week before, forecasting what the next lesson will be, calling a student to stand beside her at an overhead projector to walk through a practice problem.
Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century -- 1,681,161, to be exact -- are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven't necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
Consider this a thought that could change the way schools operate throughout the Milwaukee area:
Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us ...
Or, to put the 1970s Burger King jingle into education jargon:
Individualize and customize within a standardized system. (OK, that's not quite as catchy. )
The promise of Burger King was that they would come up with the best thing for you as an individual. You weren't just another customer. This would make your experience at Burger King more engaging and more successful. Yet you could count on consistent standards of quality in the outcomes.
Now replace all the food references with educational references and you get at a key to a campaign by area school leaders that aims to bring major change to the basic structures of schooling. They don't have small goals - the title of the report at the heart of their effort is Transforming Public Education: A Regional Call to Action.
In most American schools, teachers are evaluated by principals or other administrators who drop in for occasional classroom visits and fill out forms to rate their performance.
The result? More than 9 out of 10 teachers get top marks, according to a prominent study last year by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group focusing on improving teacher quality.
Now Bill Gates, who in recent years has turned his attention and considerable fortune to improving American education, is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.
The effort will have enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and educators more accountable for student achievement.
Twenty states are overhauling their teacher-evaluation systems, partly to fulfill plans set in motion by a $4 billion federal grant competition, and they are eagerly awaiting the research results.
Over the past eight years, I've been privileged to serve as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the nation's largest school district. Working with a mayor who courageously took responsibility for our schools, our department has made significant changes and progress. Along the way, I've learned some important lessons about what works in public education, what doesn't, and what (and who) are the biggest obstacles to the transformative changes we still need.
First, it is wrong to assert that students' poverty and family circumstances severely limit their educational potential. It's now proven that a child who does poorly with one teacher could have done very well with another. Take Harlem Success Academy, a charter school with all minority, mostly high-poverty students admitted by lottery. It performs as well as our gifted and talented schools that admit kids based solely on demanding tests. We also have many new small high schools that replaced large failing ones, and are now getting outsized results for poor children.
Educational professionals have enacted initiatives to help high school students improve writing skills critical to success in higher education. In recent years university scholars and high school teachers have invested significant time and resources to better prepare students for college writing.
This project will develop, field test, and scale an interactive, on-line writing lab to help high school juniors and seniors complete school assignments and help prepare them for college level writing.
Using new media technologies, the I-OWL writing lab will help students improve specific writing strategies, transfer writing skills to assignments across three academic disciplines - science, social studies and language arts, and assess their skills in relation to college-level writing.
As tertiary education becomes more popular and marketable, and investment in human capital a topic of attention, education is today often equated to vocational preparation. As a result, a number of leading academics have raised the alarm. Professor Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia, lamented that universities nowadays focus too much on imparting knowledge and not wisdom. Living in the age of money, modern universities are trying their best to fit in, he said, so that university education is being reduced to vocational training. He urged universities to "wise up".
In a recent book, Not For Profit, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, observed that modern tertiary education has lost its way. She said that if society wants to produce graduates who can empathise as a "citizen of the world", then it should reverse the current skew towards economic productivity and restore liberal and critical values at universities.
Parents can take their children's public schools to court to force educators to provide the minimum amount of physical education required by state law, the California Court of Appeal ruled in Sacramento on Tuesday, which could spell trouble for a lot of state schools.
California's education code requires elementary schools to offer 200 minutes of physical education every 10 days, an amount that rises to 400 minutes in middle or high schools, not including lunch or recess. A small-scale survey of state schools a few years ago found more than half failed to provide the required minutes of physical activity.
The 2002 American Community Survey, taken by the US Census Bureau, indicated that 52.7 percent of the American population has some sort of college education; however, only 27.2 percent of Americans actually continue their education long enough to obtain a college degree. These numbers seems pretty dismal when compared with countries like Finland and the Netherlands where the percentage of people with college degrees range from 34 to 40 percent. Fortunately, the number of people taking online classes continues to rise, increasing the percentage of people working towards obtaining a degree. When you take into consideration the benefits online classes offer it's easy to see why the popularity of online education has grown immensely over the past few years.
Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has joined the education transition team of Florida Gov.-elect Rick Scott (R), according to a statement from the Scott's office.
The full text of the statement, after the jump.
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL - Calling the members of his latest transition team "Champions for Achievement," Governor-elect Rick Scott announced an experienced and distinguished team of education experts, including nationally recognized education reformer, Michelle Rhee, to help him find innovative ways to create a new education system for a new economy.
Sally Blount is getting down to business. As the newly appointed dean of the Kellogg school at Northwestern University near Chicago, the chic 48-year-old professor is taking the school back to its roots as one of the few top US business schools that focuses on teaching management rather than finance and economics.
Fast-talking and forthright, and a specialist in negotiation and behavioural decision-making, Prof Blount says she is perplexed about how MBAs have been hijacked by the finance industry.
On November 29, 2010, the Madison School District responded to a request for information from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) about Madison's services for talented and gifted students.
The DPI initiated an audit of Madison's talented and gifted programming after West High School area parents filed a complaint on September 20, 2010, arguing that West refuses to provide appropriate programs for ninth and tenth grade students gifted in language arts and social studies. West requires all freshmen and sophomores to take regular core English and history courses, regardless of learning level.
(All three of Madison's other comprehensive high schools-East, LaFollette, and Memorial-provide advanced sections of core subjects before 11th grade. East and LaFollette offer advanced and/or honors sections starting in ninth grade, while Memorial offers English 10 honors and AP World History for tenth graders.)
As part of a Small Learning Community Initiative phased in over the past decade, West implemented a one-size-for-all English and social studies program to stop different groups of students from following different courses of study. Some groups had typically self-selected into rigorous, advanced levels while others seemed stuck in more basic or remedial levels. Administrators wanted to improve the quality of classroom experience and instruction for "all students" by mixing wide ranges of ability together in heterogeneous classrooms.
Bill Gates is raising his arm, bent at the elbow, in the direction of the ceiling. The point he's making is so important that he wants me and the pair of Gates Foundation staffers sitting in the hotel conference room in Louisville, Ky., to recognize the space between this thought and every lower-ranking argument. "If there's one thing that can be done for the country, one thing," Gates says, his normally modulated voice rising, "improving education rises so far above everything else!" He doesn't say what the "else" is--deficit reduction? containing Iran? free trade?--but they're way down toward the floor compared with the arm above that multibillion-dollar head. With the U.S. tumbling since 1995 from second in the world to 16th in college-graduation rates and to 24th place in math (for 15-year-olds), it was hard to argue the point. Our economic destiny is at stake.
Gates had just finished giving a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers in which he tried to explain how administrators could hope to raise student achievement in the face of tight budgets. The Microsoft founder went through what he sees as false solutions--furloughs, sharing textbooks--before focusing on the true "cost drivers": seniority-based pay and benefits for teachers rising faster than state revenues.
Seniority is the two-headed monster of education--it's expensive and harmful. Like master's degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has "little correlation to student achievement." After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It's a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they're young?
In most states, pay and promotion of teachers are connected 100 percent to seniority. This is contrary to everything the world's second-richest man believes about business: "Is there any other part of the economy where someone says, 'Hey, how long have you been mowing lawns? ... I want to pay you more for that reason alone.' " Gates favors a system where pay and promotion are determined not just by improvement in student test scores (an idea savaged by teachers' unions) but by peer surveys, student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom), video reviews, and evaluation by superiors. In this approach, seniority could be a factor, but not the only factor.
President Obama knows that guaranteed tenure and rigid seniority systems are a problem, but he's not yet willing to speak out against them. Even so, Gates gives Obama an A on education. The Race to the Top program, Gates says, is "more catalytic than anyone expected it to be" in spurring accountability and higher standards.
Gates hardly has all the answers: he spent $2 billion a decade ago breaking up big high schools into smaller ones and didn't get the results he'd hoped for. Today, he's too enamored of handheld devices for tracking student performance. They could end up as just another expensive, high-tech gimmick. But you've got to give Gates credit for devoting so much of his brain and fortune to this challenge. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] His biggest adversary now is Diane Ravitch, a jaundiced former Education Department official under George H.W. Bush, who changed sides in the debate and now attacks Gates-funded programs in books and articles. Ravitch, the Whittaker Chambers of school reform, gives intellectual heft to the National Education Association's campaign to discredit even superb charter schools and trash intriguing reform ideas that may threaten its power. When I asked Gates about Ravitch, you could see the Micro-hard hombre who once steamrolled software competitors: "Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts? Does she think all those 'dropout factories' are lonely? If there's some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we're all ears." Gates understands that charters aren't a silver bullet, and that many don't perform. But he doesn't have patience for critics who spend their days tearing down KIPP schools and other models that produce results.
There's a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] Like the rest of us, they know that if we don't fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye.
Jonathan Alter is also the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Stephanie Findley was not just some carpetbagger looking for a job when she decided to run for the Assembly earlier this year.
She had a job -- a few of them, actually. She worked as an office manager for Milwaukee District Council 48, a large and politically active labor group. She owned a small business, Fast & Accurate Business Solutions. She taught classes at the Spanish Center in Milwaukee and at Bryant & Stratton College.
A single mother who says she was already pregnant when she walked across the stage to get her Milwaukee Public High School degree some 20 years ago, Findley had overcome poverty and earned a master's degree from Cardinal Stritch. She was also active in the Democratic Party, was head of the City of Milwaukee's Election Commission and volunteered for too many organizations to count.
She was a 20-year resident of the 10th Assembly District, which has long been the province of retiring lawmaker Annette Polly Williams -- a woman many still call "the mother of school choice" -- when she decided to run for the seat herself. Findley, after all, had many of the same struggles and worries her neighbors did -- including the high cost of health care, taxes, and the quality of MPS schools.
My books have moved with me from Maine to Connecticut to San Francisco to New York, to Iowa to New York to Los Angeles to Rochester to Amherst and now to New York once again. I'm a writer, also the child of two people who were each the ones in their family to leave and move far away, and the result is a life where I've moved regularly, and paid to ship most of my books so often I'm sure I've essentially repurchased them several times over. Each time I move, my books have grown in number. Collectively, they're the autobiography of my reading life. Each time I pack and unpack them, I see The Phoenicians, a picture history book my father gave me as a child, and will never sell; the collection of Gordon Merrick paperbacks I shoplifted when I was a closeted teenager, stealing books no one would ever let me buy. The pages still retain the heat of that need, as does my copy of Joy Williams's Breaking and Entering, bought when I was a star-struck college student at the Bennington Summer Writers' Workshop 20 years ago. Each time they were all necessary, all differently necessary.
In the life of a New Yorker, a new book is a crisis the exact size of one new book. I spent three hours scrutinizing the shelves for weak links that could go to the used bookstore, projecting either into the past--When had I read this book and why?--or the future--Would I ever read this again, or even read it?--and filled three bags. I held my two mass-market paperback editions of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, bought at Church Street Books in San Francisco in 1990--one to own and one to lend--and after all this time, put the second into the bag. The one remaining now a reminder that I once had two.
On the way to their new elective class, the seventh- and eighth-graders walked under the fluorescent cafeteria lights and past bagged lunches on tables, awaiting the first lunch shift.
What they saw on the other side of the wall at Concordia University School made many whisper and cast surprised looks at their friends: candles amid a 15-piece table setting, white tablecloth, silver platters and fine china, soup bowls and a centerpiece.
Presentation is everything in Camille Monk's etiquette class. The 29-year-old has started a business bringing classic social training to urban schools, in the hopes that teaching tolerance and respect will help the students successfully navigate future social situations. The payoff for students who complete the class: a formal five-course lunch or dinner at Bacchus restaurant downtown.
But at a time when budget cuts have eliminated long-established specials such as gym, art and music in many school buildings, financial support for manners training is a struggle, even though experts say soft skills - from properly eating at a dinner table to managing a Facebook page - are critical for today's students.
By Chicago Public Schools' own reckoning, about a quarter of its elementary schools and more than 40 percent of its high schools are failing, according to internal documents obtained by the Tribune.
Each year, district officials score each school based on academic performance. Last year, they assigned grades A through F based on the numeric scores, and schools chief Ron Huberman talked of publicly releasing them so school and community members would know where they stood. But he never did.
An analysis of the grades shows that a disproportionate number of schools scored in the D range or worse, including 48 percent of elementaries and 68 percent of high schools.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color and those who desire a nurturing educational experience for young men.
Madison Prep's founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding - and in some cases fear - of Black and Latino boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison - the "founders" of Madison Prep - also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
Madison Prep will be a non-instrumentality charter school - authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education - that serves an all-male student body in grades 6-12. It will be open to all males residing in Dane County who apply, regardless of previous academic performance. The school will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them for leadership, service, and success at a four-year college or university.
Madison Prep will employ seven Educational Strategies to achieve this mission: an all-male student body, the International Baccalaureate curriculum, a College Preparatory educational program, Harkness Teaching, an extended school day and year, mentoring and community support, and the "Prep Year."
Madison Prep will also use four key Operational Strategies in order to support the educational strategies: adequate staffing, target student population, appropriate facilities/location, and sufficient funding.
Eight Core Values and Four Leadership Dimensions will additionally serve as underpinnings for the success of Madison Prep and Madison Prep students. These Core Values - Excellence & Achievement, Accountability, Teamwork, Innovation, Global Perspective, Perseverance, Leading with Purpose, and Serving Others - will also root Madison Prep in the Educational Framework of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Four Leadership Dimensions - Personal, Team, Thought, and Results Leadership - will serve as criteria for student and staff evaluations.
Madison Prep's educational program will be bolstered by partnerships with businesses, government agencies, professional and membership associations, colleges and universities, and scholarship-providing organizations that have the capacity to bring talent, expertise and resources into the school community to benefit Madison Prep students, faculty, staff, and parents. Madison Prep will also host special activities to engage parents, family members, and the community in the education of their young men. Invitations will be extended to parents, community leaders, and experts to join young men at the Harkness Table to add to their learning and to learn with them.
Seed funding for the establishment of Madison Prep will come from public and private sources, including planning and implementation grants from charter school investment funds, charitable foundations, government agencies, and individuals. Ideally, Madison Prep will be located in a business or higher education environment with access to quality classroom, athletic and laboratory facilities or the ability to create such facilities.
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM or Urban League) will submit a Detailed Proposal for Madison Prep in 2011 to the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board of Education to receive approval to open the school in 2012. If approved, the school will open in August 2012 serving 90 boys in grades 6 and 7. The school will grow by one grade level each year until it offers a full complement of secondary grades (6 -12). At maturity, Madison Prep will serve 315 students and graduate its first class of seniors in 2017-18.
In many ways, the outcome of this initiative will be a defining moment for our local public schools, particularly in terms of diffused governance, choice, a different curricular approach (potentially a movement away from the one size fits all model), economics and community engagement. If it does not happen in Madison, I suspect it will with a neighboring district.
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The Madison Prep Difference
Although it is clear that Madison Prep can and will support MMSD objectives, there is no doubt that Madison Prep will be unique. Madison Prep will be the only all-male public school option in Dane County serving young men when it opens in 2012. Furthermore, the school will be the only IB school in the city offering the full continuum of the IB Programme at the secondary level. Young men enrolled in Madison Prep in 6th grade will begin their education in the IB Middle Years Programme and continue in the curriculum until they move into the rigorous two- year Diploma Programme beginning in 11th grade, thereby increasing their likeliness of success. Finally, while MMSD offers after school activities and care, no school in the district offers a significant amount of additional instructional time through an extended school day and extended school year, as Madison Prep will.
In mathematics classrooms, generalization is an important part of the curriculum.
When students know how to generalize they can identify commonality across cases, extend their reasoning beyond the range in which it originated, and derive broader results from particular cases. But generalization remains difficult for students to do, and for teachers to support.
UW-Madison education professor Amy Ellis studies the processes that support students' productive generalizing in their math classrooms. She considers generalization a dynamic social process as well as an individual cognitive activity.
In a recent study she studied an 8th-grade math class during a 3-week unit on quadratic growth. The class sessions focused on relationships between the height and area of growing rectangles (see illustration). As they grew, the rectangles retained the same height-to-length ratio.
In the decade since educators launched a nationwide campaign to improve schools and stop students from dropping out, progress has been made, according to a new report, but more than 1 million public high school students failed to graduate with their class this year and 2 million attend so-called "dropout factory" schools where their chance of graduating is only 50-50.
Being able to read in third grade is an early indicator of whether a student will stay in school.
In the first half of the decade, at least one out of every four public high school students and almost 40 percent of minority students (defined as African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians) did not successfully graduate with their class. In 2008, the high school graduation rate was about 75 percent, a three-point increase from 2001.
Students can lose interest in school early, according to education experts. Studies show that you can tell who is most at risk for dropping out from third grade reading scores. Half of all low-income fourth-graders who could not read on grade level were put on a "drop out" track, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
As soon as a doctor, lawyer, or plumber walks into any social setting, it seems as if they are the sole representatives of their respective professions. Can you help me treat this sore shoulder, sue the person that injured it, and unplug the drain under my sink? With all the press lately on education reform, most of which related to the hoopla enveloping the "Superman" film, I certainly become the local representative of both teachers and higher education most everywhere I go. Questions arise. What did you think of that latest Friedman column in The New York Times? How can my child transfer to a different public school? The kicker: What is wrong with our education system anyway?
The more questions I'm asked, the fewer answers reached than expected by both myself and others. It's fitting that I'm bringing this up around the holiday season because this is the time families are visited and new acquaintances are made. So, what do you do for a living? I teach teachers. Ah, so how do we get rid of all these crap teachers?
Becky Ploense's job was eliminated in 2002, so she figured it was a good time to raise her chances of re-employment and get the high school diploma she never finished.
As the mother of a teenager, she liked the convenience of an online program that allowed her to work from her Hartland home. She enrolled with her credit card, was assessed monthly payments totaling about $500, was sent study materials by mail and completed her work online. It took her about four months to finish the courses in math, reading, social studies, science and English.
But she did not get what she thought she had paid for - her GED, or General Educational Development credential.
She went back to work for another seven years but, last December, lost her job as a team leader when Maysteel LLC in Menomonee Falls closed. Ploense, now 44, approached Anthem College, formerly High-Tech Institute, in Brookfield with hopes of studying massage therapy.
"Caught in the hurricane of hormones," the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital's middle schools. Suspended "between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach."
"The Bermuda triangle of education," former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. "Hormones are flying all over the place."
Indeed, you can't touch middle school without hearing about "raging hormones."
Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, "If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type."
Even in professional journals you catch the drift of "middle-school madness." Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places "where academic achievement goes to die," wrote Yecke.
FOR YEARS, POOR PERFORMANCE BY STUDENTS IN AMERICA RELATIVE TO THOSE IN OTHER COUNTRIES HAS BEEN EXPLAINED AWAY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR NATIONWIDE DIVERSITY. BUT WHAT IF YOU LOOKED MORE CLOSELY, BREAKING DOWN OUR RESULTS BY STATE AND SEARCHING NOT FOR AN AVERAGE, BUT FOR EXCELLENCE?
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place--the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future--using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.
We've known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students--by this measure at least--might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.
ANUSHEK, WHO GREW UP outside Cleveland and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, has the gentle voice and manner of Mr. Rogers, but he has spent the past 40 years calmly butchering conventional wisdom on education. In study after study, he has demonstrated that our assumptions about what works are almost always wrong. More money does not tend to lead to better results; smaller class sizes do not tend to improve learning. "Historically," he says, "reporters call me [when] the editor asks, 'What is the other side of this story?'"
Charter school management organizations (CMOs) have emerged as a popular means for bringing charter schooling to scale. Advocates credit CMOs with delivering a coherent model of charter schooling to a growing number of children across numerous sites. Skeptics have wondered whether CMOs constitute an effective management approach, whether they won't merely re-create the pathologies of school districts as they grow in size and scale, and whether they are well-suited to make use of new technological tools. In this forum, Robin Lake of the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) CEO Kevin Hall discuss what we know about the strengths and frailties of CMOs, what the future holds, and what promising alternatives might be.
After publishing essay on addiction to war, Charles Whittington must obtain psychological evaluation before returning to classes
By writing the paper, Charles Whittington thought he would confront the anxieties that had tormented him since he returned from war.
He knew it wasn't normal to dwell on the pleasure of sticking his knife between an enemy soldier's ribs. But by recording his words, maybe he'd begin to purge the fixation.
So Whittington, an Iraq veteran, submitted an essay on the allure of combat for his English class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville. He called war a drug and wrote that killing "is something that I do not just want but something I really need so I can feel like myself."
SEVEN YEARS AGO, Maria Goodloe-Johnson declined to apply for the job as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools and instead took the same job with the Charleston County School District in South Carolina. "The [Seattle] school board was very confused," she says. "And I wasn't interested in confusion." She won't get more specific than that when describing the district circa 2003, but it couldn't have been drastically different than the situation she inherited when she accepted the Seattle school district's top spot in 2007.
Attendance at South Seattle schools was sinking. The school board had adopted a new student assignment plan without any idea of how to implement it. Schools were teaching to vastly different standards. Heck, the district's computer system was so outdated, prospective teachers had no means for applying online for jobs at multiple schools at once. SPS lacked accountability and administrative oversight, and Goodloe-Johnson whipped out her ruler and started rapping knuckles almost immediately.
My high school alma mater, Waubonsie Valley High School, was diverse in every sense of the term, but the most striking difference I noticed was the vast disparity in achievement that existed within each classroom.
While some students graduated and went to top universities like MIT, Brown and UW-Madison, others continued to struggle with writing complete sentences or finishing an algebra test in their senior year. A handful of students did not receive the learning experience they needed to prepare them for the future.
This glaring achievement gap is present in the city of Madison--most notably in the African-American population--where only 52 percent of students graduated from high school in 2009.
Fortunately, Kaleem Caire of the Urban League is stepping up and proposing a way to increase graduation rates and overall academic achievement among Madison students.
Caire plans to build an all-male, mostly African-American charter school called Madison Prep for sixth through 12th graders. Madison Prep will take several departures from the normal school model that many students find sufficient, but will focus additional attention on students who need extra help--a necessary resource that is often lacking in Madison schools.
The makers of the popular Firefox Web browser are exploring ways to create a do-not-track mechanism that could offer Internet users a way to avoid being monitored online.
The effort comes just months after Firefox's creator, Mozilla Corp., killed a powerful and new tool to limit tracking under pressure from an ad-industry executive, The Wall Street Journal has learned. Mozilla says it didn't scrap the tool because of pressure, but rather out of concern it would force advertisers to use even sneakier techniques and could slow down the performance of some websites.
ALLOWING teachers, parents, charities and religious groups to open new schools funded by the state, but independent of local authorities, is a central plank of the government's plans for improving education in England. Despite the enthusiasm of the education secretary, Michael Gove, for such radical reform, take-up has been lacklustre: he has approved just 25 "free-school" proposals so far. Likewise his bid to encourage existing state schools to become academies--again, funded by the state but independent of local authorities--has failed to take off.
On November 24th Mr Gove unveiled his latest plan for curing ailing schools, this time by changing what is taught in them, and who does the teaching. He is thus revisiting the policy terrain on which the previous Labour government focused (arguing that "standards, not structures" were what mattered) until its final term in office.
Britain's best independent schools attract pupils from around the world. But most British families cannot afford the steep fees such schools charge. Just 7% of British children are educated privately; the rest attend state schools, where standards are generally much lower. The Labour government doubled school spending in real terms during its 13 years in power; despite the splurge, the attainment gap between the two systems has widened.
Eleven years ago, Florida chose sweeping reforms to improve the dire state of education affecting their children. Today, these changes are still paying dividends, and don't show signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Florida's graduation rate, once amongst the worst in America, has risen steadily over the past five years, capping off at 79 percent for the 2009-2010 school year. This is over ten percentage points more than in 2005-2006, when the rate held at 68.9, and a 20-point increase from Manhattan Institute estimates of the rate in 2000-2001. Over this span, the state has gone from straggling behind the national average to becoming an above-average performer when it comes to graduating their high school students.
Most encouraging, however, are the state's results when it comes to the matriculation of minority students. African-American and Hispanic students have made the strongest gains of any group since 2005-2006. These two groups have improved their rates by 13.1 and 13.3 percent, respectively, to become the driving force behind Florida's overall improvement. Comparatively, white students have only bettered their graduation rate by eight percent over the same time frame. Through the past decade, Florida has proven that the achievement gap can be conquered through dynamic solutions in the classroom.
There has been surprisingly little discussion about why Wisconsin did not win a Race to the Top grant. A look at the points awarded for each section of Wisconsin's application and the accompanying reviewer comments makes it clear that the failure to use student achievement data to inform decisions was the most important contributor to Wisconsin's loss. More aggressive use of these data would have put Wisconsin within striking distance of winning.
The irony of Wisconsin's loss is that its largest district, Milwaukee Public Schools, was one of the pioneers of the value-added movement. Ten years ago, it started work on a value-added model that has since spread to other cities and states, including some Race to the Top winners.
This reluctance to use data seems deeply ingrained in Wisconsin's education culture.
For example, the state defines "highly qualified teachers" in very traditional terms, such as degrees, certifications, courses taken, and years of experience. Unfortunately, most research has found little correlation between these traditional measures and student achievement gains, which Wisconsin ignores.
The greatest challenge facing America's schools today isn't the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or "teacher quality." It's the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What's needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.
U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge--at least three grade levels. So if you're a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?
The Madison School Board on Monday delayed approval of an agriculture-themed charter school by two weeks after learning the school could cost the district about $318,000 more than previously thought.
The board had been told Badger Rock Middle School, estimated to cost $596,000 in the 2011-12 school year, would be cost-neutral, but that prediction was based on erroneous information provided by district officials earlier this year. Superintendent Dan Nerad apologized for the error during Monday night's board meeting.
Erik Kass, assistant superintendent for business services, said his staff told the planning team for Badger Rock in February that it could budget $596,000 for the school.
But the district failed to account for an additional $310,000 needed to create 3.9 new positions in the district to accommodate the new school. The district also determined the school's proposed utilities budget was $8,000 too low.
When I was a student, then faculty member, then administrator at private universities -- a mere 40+ years -- land-grant institutions were not front and center in my consciousness. Having now moved to a land-grant institution, I have concluded they are one of the most precious if not always most highly visible resources this nation has.
Our nation needs to broaden what "greatness" in a university means. At the very least, we need to expand our conception of greatness to a multidimensional notion, not just a notion of unidimensional rankings as appear in certain magazines. Land-grant institutions, contrary to some popular beliefs, are not merely about agricultural development, but rather, about changing the world in a positive, meaningful, and enduring way. Land-grant institutions perhaps best represent the very core of what greatness means in American society -- namely, equal opportunity for all and, through it, the chance to make our society and the world a better place in which to live.
K-12 curricula needs to be less expensive and of higher quality. Nearly all curricula used in schools and adopted by school districts is print based. The cost of printing keeps open source and small, innovative, for-profit projects from being widely available in print and thus, widely adopted by school districts. The fixed, static nature of print means writers can't get real time, detailed feedback on their work and can't change it to meet teacher's needs.
We make curricula free to create, drastically lowering the costs of production. We help developers make their curricula better by providing opportunities for teachers to give feedback on resources they use. By making curricula free to create and connecting developers to teachers, we lower costs and improve quality.
t's not often that Slow Lane can claim a scoop but I think I am the first to divulge the contents of a report that has just, rather mysteriously, arrived on my desk. It is called "The Future of BP" and it was commissioned by the UK government from Dr Stradivario Verdi, the noted entomologist and education tsar - until he was forced to step down from his position earlier this year because of damaging rumours about his relationship with a stag beetle.
Verdi calls not simply for a reorganisation of the company affected by a series of environmental and safety disasters culminating in the Deepwater Horizon spill but for a fundamental change in its philosophy. Amazingly, he suggests that BP in the future should be concerned not with making money for shareholders but with something he quaintly terms the public good. This would seem to imply a radical move away from environmentally damaging oil and gas exploration and refining into the development of renewable energy.
Only joking. This absurd caprice is, however, not really any more absurd, when you think about it, than the independent review of higher education and student finance commissioned by the UK government and chaired by the former chief executive of BP, Lord Browne - a businessman, not an educationalist.
How could he have spent much time in serious thought, research or discussion about the purposes of higher education when he was at the helm of one of the world's biggest corporations?
What present can you give a kid that will outlast the latest must-have toy or gadget? How about some stock in the company that makes it.
You can jump-start a young person's finances by giving him or her the gift of investing with stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Throw in some lessons on how the markets work -- and the common pitfalls investors face -- and you could end up giving them some financial savviness as well.
Getting kids investing early "allows them to accumulate knowledge over time on what can be a complex topic," says June Walbert, a certified financial planner based in San Antonio with financial-services firm USAA.
Individual Stocks. Does your 10-year-old nephew spend most of his free time playing videogames? Harness that interest by giving him stock in the videogame maker. A kid might be more interested in following a company's stock if it's linked to a brand he or she is familiar with, such as the company behind a favorite activity, toy, restaurant or snack food.
James Sonnenberg has a request for Gregory Thornton, the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools: "Give me the best you have, to work with the children who need the most."
It's a logical request. Most business leaders put the most capable employees in the most demanding situations.
But it's also a very tough request, because, in general, that isn't the way it works in education, where quality flows uphill, away from the lowest-performing schools and students. As teachers build up experience, seniority and, experts generally say, competence, they head for higher-performing kids, higher-performing schools and, frequently, the suburbs.
Sonnenberg is the highly regarded principal of West Side Academy, an MPS kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in a tough neighborhood, around N. 35th St. and W. Lisbon Ave. His pursuit of a strong teaching staff is one vignette in a story that runs deep in schools serving high-needs children all across the nation.
Sonnenberg has plenty of weight to put behind his quest for more star power on his teaching staff. Federal law calls for doing more to put good teachers in front of the kids most likely to falter. Research shows those children are likely to benefit the most from having star teachers. There is wide agreement that it is a worthy goal.
It's hard not to reflect carefully upon the Seattle Public School District's dramatic acknowledgement that a major data point used by parents, educators, school board members and others to highlight the district's quality is absolutely wrong. I have been thinking long and hard about this issue since it hit the newspaper last week. Without question, I have been one of the elected officials most guilty of perpetuating the (incorrect) data, and it doesn't feel good.
While there are some who will see a more cynical conspiracy, I see a profoundly troubling mistake that needs to be discussed openly and courageously in all corners of our community.
The real issue is obviously not that a mistake was made. The district's admission this week that a key piece of data is wildly inaccurate is more than an embarrassing glitch, it's a symbolic reflection of a more systematic challenge facing many elected boards statewide that have fiduciary obligations to oversee billions in tax dollars and policy but lack access to the professional, independent staff to do the job.
School districts across the state and nation are well versed in the inconsistent arrangement by which part-time, unpaid community leaders (who campaign for the job) are then expected to volunteer thousands of hours without the ability to get the answers to their tough questions that may run counter to professional staff interests. The real issue is that the district's administration didn't strive to aggressively correct the inaccuracy from day one. They need to ask themselves why and, hopefully, share the truth with the community.
f you only watch one video on my site, make it this one.
Are schools designed to help people learn? Are colleges and universities really institutions of higher education? Do students actually learn any science in science classes? Can skateboarding give us a better model for teaching and learning? Watch this video to find out.
At some point in the next couple months, members of the Madison School Board are almost certain to be in the unlucky position of having to decide whether to admit what is most fairly characterized as a colossal failure.
Approving a charter for Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire's all-boy, mostly black, non-union Madison Preparatory Academy will make it clear that, when it comes to many black schoolchildren, teachers have failed to teach, parents have failed to parent, and the rest of us have failed to do anything about either.
Reject the charter and risk the false hope that comes from thinking that all these children need is another program and more "outreach." A tweak here and a tweak there and we can all just keep on keeping on. Never mind that the approach hasn't seemed to work so far, and that if past is prologue, we already know this story's end.
Caire's model would be a radical departure for Madison. The district's two existing charter schools -- Wright Middle School and Nuestro Mundo -- don't exactly trample on hallowed educational ground. They employ union teachers and have the same number of school days and teaching hours as any other non-charter and "broadly follow our district policies in the vast majority of ways," said district spokesman Ken Syke.
I want to thank Kaleem Caire for coming home to Madison and making positive changes. If anyone can make an all-male charter school happen here, he can. The statistics in the article may be alarming to some, but not as alarming to the students and parents who are living these statistics.
I support integration, but how can it be true integration when the education gaps are so large? Who is benefiting? In my eyes, true integration in the school system would support the same quality of education, the same achievement expectations, the same disciplinary measures and so on.
Numbers don't lie, and what they tell us is that we need to go another route to ensure educational success for black males. If that means opening a charter school to intervene, then let's do it!
Instead of the headline "All-male charter school a tough sell," imagine this one, "Loss to society: Madison schools graduated only 52 percent of black male students in 2009." Then the reaction to the Urban League's plan to start a charter school intended to boost minority achievement might have been different.
Reaction in the article discussed all the reasons why people will or should oppose the idea of an all-male charter school, despite its benefits. Let's not talk about why we should be aghast at the cultural performance disparities in Madison's schools. And let's not talk about what we lose as a society when almost half of all black males attending Madison schools fail to graduate.
The comments of John Matthews, head of the Madison teachers union, on charter schools are hyperbole. Saying that the Madison School Board will have no control is a cover for the union not having control.
We can't argue the importance of good teachers. But the idea that a degree in education, and a union membership, make you the only one capable of performing this role is specious. All of us are teachers, or have been taught meaningfully by individuals with teaching skills. Are we going to let successful teachers teach, or are we going to let their union dictate?
According to Carlo D'Este's book "Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War," Churchill, during a lull in his career, learned bricklaying. Hearing this, the British Trade Union Council, in a public relations gesture, offered him a Master's card.
Douglas Alexander:
Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire applied for a charter school for males because only 52 percent of black males graduate in Madison schools, while black males are suspended significantly more than the majority white students.
Before anyone responds, they should answer two questions:
Rahm Emanuel made a campaign promise last week that if elected mayor, he would install a new math and English language curriculum in Chicago's public schools by the end of his first term.
Mr. Emanuel said the new curriculum would be geared toward equipping students with the skills to meet the "common core standards" that education officials in Illinois and more than 40 other states have adopted. In imposing the new standards, the state has left up to the districts the question of how to try to meet those standards.
"I want us, the city of Chicago, to be the first city to adopt the curriculum that teaches toward the common standards," he said in an interview with the Chicago News Cooperative. "Nobody has taken on the initiative."
The effort would better prepare high school graduates for college or the workplace, he said.
Samuel Casey Carter is, in a way, the Tom Paine of the movement to raise school achievement in low-income neighborhoods. He coined the term "no excuses schools" for those run by people who think that no matter how bad their students' family lives, with great teaching they should be able to learn just as much as kids from affluent suburban homes.
His new book, "On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character," puts this in an even wider context. He profiles a dozen schools that, he says, have set high expectations for personal attitudes and behavior and created both good people and good students.
This time, only four of the 12 schools Carter profiles are in low-income communities. Nearly all schools in all communities need some fixing, he says. They need to nourish student character if they want young intellects to grow.
A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.
But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A's and B's in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C's, D's and even F's -- students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school -- did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
The Innovative and Alternative Program Committee is charged with identifying alternative education and program needs and developing a plan to expand alternative programs and educational options. This will allow the district to articulate a direction and a plan for these types of programs which will be presentedto the Board of Education.
An open approach to alternative education models - an area Madison lags - is a good thing. A simple first step would be to address Janet Mertz's longstanding quest Credit for Non Madison School District Courses.
It will be a year-round middle school. And an urban farm. And a cafe with indoor and outdoor seating. And a neighborhood center. And an office space. And a home for small business.
Planners of the Resilience Research Center development have firmed up their vision and timeline for the nearly 4-acre parcel planned to start taking shape in January on the South Side, near the intersection of East Badger and Rimrock roads.
Now they're working with the city on a somewhat complicated task: Zone this!
"I don't know of many other projects that have this type of mix with commercial uses and a school on one site," said Heather Stouder of the city's planning division.
Attached is the final draft of the Superintendent evaluation document to be used for the summative or end -of-year evaluation to be voted on at the November 29 meeting. The document has two parts. The first part is the Superintendent of Schools Performance Expectations Standards Assessment, a rubric based on the following:
The Superintendent Position Description, adopted Sept. 21, 2009; and
Feedback from the formative (mid-year) evaluation for the Superintendent, July 2010
The second part of the evaluation involves feedback on the following elements:
The Superintendent goals, approved December 15, 2009;
Two elements from the additional evaluation framework identified by Mr. Howard: Diversity and Inclusion and Safety.
From the original draft sent to the Operational Support Committee on November 8, these are element numbers 3 and 4. In addition to approving a final version of the evaluation plan, the Board needs to discuss the date for evaluations to be submitted for compilation to the Board president and dates for a closed session meeting(s) to discuss the results. To complete the process by February, January 3, 2011 is the recommended date for submittal. January 10, 24, and 31 are possible meeting dates. During this period Board members also need to provide input on the Superintendent's goals for 2011.
If you have any questions, please email James or Beth.
MMSD has had a longstanding relationship with the University of Wisconsin- Madison in providing schools as sites for practicum and student teachers to learn throughout their two years in the School of Education. Each of these schools had an Instructional Resource Teacher who provided support to UW students as well as professional development for all school staff. The UW, school, and central office all shared costs of these positions.
Project Description: This agreement provides for the interchange of three teachers in an effort to further the goals of the Madison Professional Development School Partnership (PDS). The teachers will assume the duties and responsibilities of PDS Supervisors/ Coordinators for Memorial High School, West High School, and Midvale/Lincoln Elementary Schools. The teachers will provide assistance in curriculum development and evaluation to teachers at the identified schools; coordinate placement of practicum and student teachers assigned by UW-Madison; give workshops; hold regular seminars for practicum students, student teachers, and building teachers; and assist UW staff in research and curriculum development efforts involving the PDS program
I heard Jeb Bush give a talk a few months ago in Milwaukee about education policies that he promoted while he was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. I should have taken notes, because I think I was listening to at least a few of the pages from the playbook that will be used by Scott Walker when he becomes governor of Wisconsin in about five weeks.
I'm betting that is particularly true for the system of giving every school in the state a grade - A to F - each year. It's a centerpiece of the "A+ Schools" program that Bush championed in Florida. He credits the grading system with being a key driver of rising test scores over the last decade.
In his campaign platform, Walker called for launching a grading system for Wisconsin schools. He hasn't spelled out details, but Florida is the primary example of such a system, and Walker is an admirer of Bush. Walker also will have strong Republican majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and I can't think of any reason he won't succeed in turning what he said he would do into reality in the not-at-all-distant future.
So let's look at Florida's grading system on the assumption it is a lot like what will be used here.
There's a new program at Des Moines East High School that requires students who skip classes to go to school on Saturday mornings.
The Des Moines Register reports that the new Saturday program started earlier this months. The program requires students to attend school from 8 to 11 a.m. on Saturday if they have five or more unexcused absences. The goal is for the students to make up for time lost from the classroom. Principal Dan Conner says students who don't come on Saturdays face discipline, including in-school suspension.
As banks have tightened lending standards, growing numbers of families are stepping into the breach. But while intrafamily loans can yield significant financial rewards for lenders and borrowers, families must carefully assess the risks.
While many families handle the process in informal oral agreements, advisers urge clients to document such loans in written contracts, just as a bank would. This can also make it easier for families to comply with tax rules that require lenders to pay income tax on the interest they receive and allow borrowers with mortgages to deduct the interest payments they pay.
Some families choose to go through websites like Prosper and Lending Club, which match lenders and borrowers online--though they also set minimum interest rates.
It's become obvious in recent years that charter schools, with their unique and innovative approach to student instruction, are a source of great promise for our nation's troubled public education system.
For years, our nation's powerful school-employee unions, like the AFT and the National Education Association, opposed the very concept of charter schools and pressured state governments to cap their numbers or shut them down altogether.
The 'highly qualified' gap No Child Left Behind mandates such teachers in all U.S. schools. A new study shows that little progress has been made in meeting that requirement.
While states and school districts hotly debate the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, the nation has been virtually ignoring a more basic question: whether those teachers are even qualified in the first place. Too many of them aren't.
The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all students be taught by "highly qualified" teachers. And although we disagree with many elements of that 2001 federal school reform act -- its rigidity, its use of the wrong measurements to assess student progress -- this provision always made more sense.
Among other things, a highly qualified teacher in the secondary schools is supposed to have expertise in the subject he or she teaches, whether that means having majored in the subject in college or having a credential to teach it. Ample research has found that students learn better when their teachers have such formal expertise. Yet a new report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the educational lot of poor and minority students, shows that the problem is widespread and that little progress has been made.
Is it any wonder that the government is besieged on all sides by the educational establishment, for it is falling into the trap of all previous governments for the past 30 years: blaming the teachers and the students for the ills of the nation (Bad teachers out, social mobility in: Gove outlines goals, 25 November).
Having been in the field of education as a teacher, deputy head of a large and successful comprehensive school and now an administration manager in another, I weep for teaching staff and children in this country. Teachers and state schools have been forced to obey the whims of successive administrations because they thought they knew better. Despite continual central interference, and constant change in examination systems, teachers delivered time and time again. Standards have improved, and teachers are somehow vilified for it instead of congratulated.
Now we have another set of Harrow, Eton, Westminster and Oxbridge boys who know better than the sensible, pragmatic and logical majority of headteachers, teachers and teaching assistants working out there in state schools up and down the country. This group of privileged career politicians now have the nerve to take us back to the 1950s. All secondary schools will be measured against each other in five subjects: English, maths, science, a foreign language and history or geography. All modular exams will be abolished in favour of one set of exams at the end. Well, isn't this progress! This is not suitable for all children; what about business, enterprise, design and technology skills? What about even giving a thought for the bottom 20%? What will happen to them? Do they care?
Texas lawmakers, more than ever, are looking for a way to get the most bang for the buck in education.
And they may have found it.
Complex ratings have been developed by the state comptroller's office and at least one private company that provide a look at how much money is really needed to provide Texas students with a good education.
Faced with a record budget shortfall, the state will most likely have to consider cuts to education spending. School superintendents say any reduction in funding will lead to teacher layoffs and cuts to instructional programs. They argue they need more money, not less.
That's why looking at the data may become important in the debate. The systems show not only where students have the best academic performance but which districts spend the least to achieve those results.
Brad Bernatek began his Broad Residency in Urban Education Cohort 2006 with Seattle Public Schools and became the chief honcho for accountability in 2008. From the Broad website:
Brad Bernatek serves [for now] as Director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment for Seattle Public Schools. In this role, Bernatek runs the department responsible for student statistics including enrollment, demographics, evaluation and standardized testing. During his Residency, Bernatek served the district as interim manager for research, evaluation and assessment and as special assistant to the chief operations officer.
When a new strategic plan was being put together in 2008 with the new superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson (Broad Supt. Academy, Class of '03), the Broadies needed some really embarrassing piece of information about SPS that could be used to leverage the changes they wanted to initiate: ending the remains of the school integration plan killed by the Roberts Court in 2007, more testing, closing more schools, opening more corporate charters, longer school days, teacher pay and evaluations based on test scores, working to end tenure, and the bringing in Teach for America to replace professional faculty. In short, the disaster capitalists needed a disaster to bring about change before anyone could regain their composure.
More Hoosier schools are making progress toward state and federal student achievement standards, but high schools locally and across the state have failed to keep up with the gains made by elementary and middle schools, according to data released Tuesday by the Indiana Department of Education.
The problem with high schools boils down to "a combination of generally low performance and no significant improvement," Jeff Zaring, the department's chief of results and reform, told the State Board of Education.
As a result, the board voted to put three-quarters of Indiana's high schools into "academic watch" and "academic probation" categories based in part on standardized test scores and how they've changed over the past three years. Locally, that includes Henryville, Silver Creek, Borden, Clarksville, Charlestown, Jeffersonville, New Albany, North Harrison, Corydon Central and South Central high schools.
Over the next few weeks, the Cedarburg School District will contact 111 families that did not return opt-in forms to have their children participate in sensitive issues of the human growth and development curriculum.
Last year, only a handful of parents opted their children out of the sex education curriculum.
In a move that caused controversy among community members, the Cedarburg School Board voted to reverse the process - mandating that parents had to specifically opt their children into the programming by signing a permission slip by Nov. 1. If no form was returned, it was assumed they opted out.
That change in policy drew the attention of the state Department of Public Instruction, which notified the district in a letter that it could face a legal challenge if the board didn't return to an opt-out policy. Since then the board has discussed the policy at its last two regular meetings.
Despite ongoing research and theorizing, the educational achievement of black boys and young black men continues to lag behind their white peers, nationwide. James Earl Davis of Temple University's College of Education and Pedro Noguera, author of The Trouble With Black Boys discuss.
Everyone's talking about superintendent salary caps. The Record reports that the New Jersey Association of School Administrators filed a motion in State Superior Court claiming that just because Gov. Christie has proposed caps doesn't mean he can enforce them right now. The association also argues that Acting Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks "broke the law" by advising our 21 Executive County Superintendents to veto any contracts above the caps.
In other litigation, the Parsippany-Troy Hills School Board filed suit in the appellate division of Superior Court regarding the Morris County Executive County Superintendent's refusal to approve the new contract for Superintendent Le Roy Seitz, which will pay him $234,065 by the fifth year of the 5-year contract.
A new disciplinary program that stressed leniency has failed to rein in dozens of students who caused serious disruptions; kids who come to school or class late, or who have even threatened teachers, received minimal or no punishment, said a number of teachers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Some teachers have reported being assaulted by students.
Teachers have made hundreds of referrals of students for disciplinary measures, but, some teachers said, the administration does little if anything in the way of punishment.
After first denying any problem, school officials have said part of the program would be reviewed. This admission occurred after a meeting with the Central Falls police chief, Capt. Col. Joseph Moran III, who is also head of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs' Association.
Some teachers also said they are some of their colleagues have been threatened and/or disciplined by administrators for merely disagreeing with policy, and that they believe the administrators are using some of the cameras installed in the school to monitor them.
When he scans the faces in his honors science courses at Evanston Township High School, chemistry teacher William Farmer can easily see who's missing: minority kids.
"Out of 26, you might have three nonwhite students," he said.
One of the most racially mixed high schools in Illinois, Evanston has a mission of embracing diversity and promoting equity and excellence for all students. But its own data show that few minority students make it into the school's most rigorous courses that will best prepare them for college and the future.
Honors classrooms dominated by white students have been common in Illinois and across the nation, a byproduct of a century-old and controversial tradition of tracking, or sorting, students into different levels of classes.
Madison Preparatory Academy School Board Presentation 12/6/2010
Kaleem Caire, via email:
The initial proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be presented to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education's Planning and Development Committee on MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010 at 6:00pm in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton St., Madison 53703). The committee is chaired by Ms. Arlene Silveira (asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us). The Madison Prep proposal is the first agenda item for that evening's committee meeting so please be there at 6pm sharp. If you plan to provide public comment, please show up 15 minutes early (5:45pm) to sign-up!
Please show your support for Madison Prep by attending this meeting. Your presence in the audience is vital to demonstrating to the Board of Education the broad community support for Madison Prep. We look forward to you joining us for the very important milestone in Madison history!
The Mission
Madison Prep will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them to think critically, communicate effectively, identify their purpose, and succeed in college, 21st century careers, leadership and life. For more information, see the attachments or contact Ms. Laura DeRoche at lderoche@ulgm.org.
Get Involved with Madison Prep
Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. They will also develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL).
Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school's operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School.
Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep's budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school's operation."
Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.
When I was the executive director of instruction and professional development for the New York City Public Schools, I grew keenly aware of the challenges schools face in educating African-American males. For many reasons, far too many boys don't get the support at home or in the community they need to thrive as adults. Instead, that job falls almost completely on their schools. And that means it comes down to their teachers.
Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits - particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys' gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.
The Government's determination to repair Britain's educational system is becoming clearer by the day. This week, a White Paper will propose scrapping "bite-sized" GCSE examinations, which chop the qualification into modules that pupils can re-take in order to boost their grades. This move will cut the number of exams pupils have to sit - and, in doing so, increase academic rigour. That fact alone tells us something about Labour's wretched education policies: in the rest of the world, exams actually raise standards. In place of the dumbed-down courses will come GCSEs in which, to quote Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, pupils will be "examined on everything they have learnt at one time".
The White Paper will also address the gross devaluation of A-levels by cutting the number of modules; Ofsted inspections will focus more sharply on teaching standards; and trainee teachers will spend more time in the classroom and less in teacher training colleges in which tired, Left-wing theories of education hold sway.
This last proposal is extremely significant. Mr Gove's plans to improve education extend far beyond his championing of Free Schools. He aims to increase parental choice, restore discipline and ensure that lessons are devoted to academic subjects rather than politically correct children's entertainment. But introducing these reforms will be a huge challenge. They will not take root without the co-operation of this generation of teachers and the next.
Rupert Murdoch is making his first significant foray into school rooms with the $360m acquisition of Wireless Generation, a US education technology company, just days after the chief of New York's schools announced he would join News Corp to scout for education deals.
News Corp, whose interests range from its 20th Century Fox film studio to a planned iPad-only newspaper, will buy 90 per cent of the privately-held New York-based company in cash from its founders, who will retain the remaining 10 per cent.
"It would be completely crazy to roll out this 4K plan that is supposed to really, fundamentally be about preparing children, especially underprivileged, and not have the centers in the neighborhoods that most need the service," School Board member Lucy Mathiak said.
Deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp, who is coordinating implementation of the program, acknowledged some students will have to travel outside their school attendance areas to attend the nearest 4K program, "but it's not a long drive, especially if they're in contiguous areas."
"We will make it work," Abplanalp said. "We're very creative."
The school district is conducting its own analysis of how the distribution of day care providers and existing elementary school space will mesh under the new program. Some alternative programs may have to move to other schools to make room, but no final decisions have been made, Abplanalp said.
Detailed information has not been shared with the Madison School Board and is not expected to be ready before the board votes Monday on granting final funding approval for the program. The approval must happen then because the district plans to share information with the public in December before enrollment starts in February, Abplanalp said.
Every year, American schools pay more than $8.6 billion in bonuses to teachers with master's degrees, even though the idea that a higher degree makes a teacher more effective has been mostly debunked.
Despite more than a decade of research showing the money has little impact on student achievement, state lawmakers and other officials have been reluctant to tackle this popular way for teachers to earn more money.
That could soon change, as local school districts around the country grapple with shrinking budgets.
Just last week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the economy has given the nation an opportunity to make dramatic improvements in the productivity of its education system and to do more of what works and less of what doesn't.
Duncan told the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday that master's degree bonuses are an example of spending money on something that doesn't work.
On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master's degree bonus.
Atlanta schools Superintendent Beverly Hall's announcement that she will step aside when her contract ends June 30 comes at a time when the district is facing uncertainty on multiple fronts.
Feuding among city school board members, in which one faction of the board has sued the other over leadership changes, has caused the system's accrediting agency to say the board's capacity to govern is "in serious jeopardy."
The two sides have a court date Tuesday.
The system also faces two inquiries -- one by federal prosecutors, the other by special investigators appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue -- into test cheating allegations that could bring criminal charges against school officials.
As the result of a related investigation, local officials reported more than 100 city educators to the state teacher certification body, although their cases are on hold until state investigators wrap up their work. That is expected to happen early next year.
A publicly funded school proposed by a Baptist pastor has gained support among School Board members despite objections by the district's administrators over the school's use of "a standard parochial curriculum with evangelical leanings."
The School Board is scheduled to vote Monday on whether to enter into contract negotiations with First Baptist Church Pastor Bruce Dunford over his plans to open Crossroads Academy as a charter school next school year.
The school would teach a traditional curriculum that includes more classical readings and would have a more structured discipline system than other public schools, Dunford said. The school also would support the values of a majority of the West Bend community, he said, in response to concerns that he's heard about bullying and a lack of modesty and morality in the public schools.
He said the school would be operated separately and not on the grounds of his church, where West Bend School Board member Tim Stepanski is a deacon. Unlike most charter schools in which staff is employed by the chartering district, Crossroads would be a so-called non-instrumentality charter school - one that employs its own staff and has more independence from the School Board on its curriculum and how it runs its day-to-day operations.
"I just simply believe the taxpayers, the parents of the community, should have options available to them," Dunford said. "There should be a quality education that conforms to the value standards, convictions, whatever you want to call it, of a large part of our community."
Milwaukee educator Taki Raton sees the problem with failing black students in very stark terms.
For him, the issues are black and white with very little gray.
"Black people are the only ones who can teach black children, it's as simple as that," he told me, in no uncertain tones.
Raton, currently a writer and lecturer who runs an educational consulting firm, also founded Blyden Delany Academy, a well-respected private school, which operated under Milwaukee's choice program for 10 years. Raton closed the school a few years ago because of financial concerns, but while Blyden Delany was open, it was consistently praised by black parents in Milwaukee with children enrolled in the institution.
Raton doesn't think that was anything out of the ordinary. Blyden Delany was African-centered - some call it Afrocentric - in its approach to teaching black students. Raton and a legion of similarly minded black educators in Milwaukee and across the nation believe that distinction makes all the difference.
"We know what we're doing," he said, referring to African-centered schools in general. "We don't have the kind of problems other schools have because we're following a classical model for African-centered education."
t has been said that universal education for every citizen is a cornerstone of American democracy. The importance we attach to schooling and the attention we pay to educational issues are in evidence daily--from what we tell our children when they bring home their report cards to how we vote on school funding matters. Not a day goes by without accounts of perceived successes at "model schools," of remarkable teachers who made a difference, and of new public policy initiatives designed to deliver better results. But not a day goes by without reports about failures in education--poor test scores, questions surrounding teacher performance, and inadequate funding.
In "Education Is Fundamental," a special three-part Academy Evenings series brought to you in conjunction with the UW-Madison School of Education, leading historians, researchers, and administrators in the field of education come together to discuss the most important educational challenges facing Wisconsin--a picture of dysfunction but also innovation--and offer their ideas for repair.
It looks like any other classroom inside Carrick High School, a sprawling structure that towers like a stone fortress over this working-class neighborhood on the city's south side. It's still dark out as 16 teachers and counselors - some clutching coffee or energy bars - sit in a circle, dissecting with brutal candor their students' performance.
In addition to their classroom duties, these teachers serve as advisers to every ninth- and 10th-grader in the school, and they show up 45 minutes before school starts each day to talk about where their students need to be. No punches are pulled; no feelings are spared.
As part of the Promise Readiness Corps, these teachers are eligible for financial bonuses.
In Pittsburgh, the Corps is one element of a new plan that overhauls the way the district hires, trains, evaluates, pays and dismisses teachers. Under a new performance-pay system, incoming district teachers whose students learn, on average, at 1.3 times their grade level can earn $100,000 a year within seven years of being hired.
Raising the quality of teaching in America has been a priority of President Barack Obama's administration, and reforms receiving the most attention right now include stronger teacher evaluation systems and financial incentives to attract, reward and retain quality educators.
State education officials appear ready to move forward with their plan to establish a three-tier high school diploma system tied to student performance on state tests, and will start drafting changes to the regulations.
At a well-attended work session Thursday, the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education discussed the details of the plan, which differs significantly from the regulations the Regents approved in 2008.
Regent Colleen Callahan expressed concerns with the proposal, saying it places too much weight on the standardized tests, which were not designed to be high-stakes or to determine what kind of diploma a student receives.
"I'm worried about tests being the determining factor, as opposed to other parts of the system," Callahan said, a reference to grades and student portfolios or projects.
The phrase "ready to learn," frequently applied to young children, is rather odd when you stop to think about it, because the implication is that some kids aren't. Have you ever met a child who wasn't ready to learn -- or, for that matter, already learning like crazy? The term must mean something much more specific -- namely, that some children aren't yet able (or willing) to learn certain things or learn them in a certain way.
Specifically, it seems to be code for "prepared for traditional instruction." And yes, we'd have to concede that some kids are not ready to memorize their letters, numbers, and colors, or to practice academic skills on command. In fact, some children continue to resist for years since they'd rather be doing other kinds of learning. Can you blame them?
Then there's the question of when we expect children to be ready. Even if we narrow the notion of readiness to the acquisition of "phonemic awareness" as a prerequisite to reading in kindergarten or first grade, the concept is still iffy, but for different reasons.
The AJC asked Attorney General Thurbert Baker to determine whether the district's denial in July of a request for the report was a criminal violation of the Georgia Open Records Act.
The newspaper's complaint calls the district's refusal to produce the report a "willful and premeditated violation."
"The purpose of the Open Records Act is to prevent government officials from burying information in this way," said Tom Clyde, an AJC attorney.
District spokesman Keith Bromery said Friday that officials were reviewing the complaint and would not comment.
The complaint comes amid federal and state probes into the falsification of hundreds of Atlanta students' scores, with dozens of GBI agents questioning teachers and administrators at schools across the district.
On the eve of a Board of Education meeting in February where the death knell was to sound for five schools, Ron Huberman, the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, granted an 11th-hour reprieve.
The low enrollment and poor academic record at Paderewski Elementary had made the South Side school a target for closing, and its students were being sent to Mason Elementary, the only nearby school that had higher test scores. Mr. Huberman said he changed his mind after walking from Paderewski to Mason and discovering that students would have to cross a wide intersection of four streets, a situation he concluded was too dangerous.
Although the pardon for Paderewski might have been a relief for some teachers, parents and students, it did not address the problems at a low-performing, underutilized school. Other poorly performing schools are also being spared as resistance to closing them has grown, confronting the next mayor with a longstanding question: What can be done with neighborhood schools where enrollment is shrinking and academic improvement is slow?
The school board in a wealthy suburban county south of Denver is considering letting parents use public funds to send their children to private schools--or take classes with private teachers--in a bid to rethink public education.
The proposals on the table in Douglas County constitute a bold step toward outsourcing a segment of public education, and also raise questions about whether the district can afford to lose any public funds to private educators.
Already hit hard by state cutbacks, the local board has cut $90 million from the budget over three years, leaving some principals pleading for family donations to buy math workbooks and copy paper.
"This is novel and interesting--and bound to be controversial," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative, educational think tank in Washington, D.C.
...
Douglas County School District board members are also considering letting students enrolled in public schools opt out of some classes in favor of district-approved alternatives offered at for-profit schools or by private-sector instructors. Students might skip high-school Spanish, for example, to take an advanced seminar in Chinese, or bypass physics to study with a rocket scientist, in person or online.
Another proposal under review calls for expanding publicly-funded services for families that home-school their children.
Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said she is not sure which proposals she might support. But in a recent letter to parents of the district's 56,000 students, she said her leadership team "did not find the ideas alarming" and pledged the district would "set the stage for new thinking in education."
"These days, you can build a custom computer. You can get a custom latte at Starbucks," said board member Meghann Silverthorn. "Parents expect the same out of their educational system."
Colorado's Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the "wealthy Denver suburbs".
High school seniors in Massachusetts are ranked highest in the nation in reading and math ability, according to new test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The first state-specific results for Grade 12 in 2009 showed that Massachusetts students had the highest scaled score in both the reading and math exams. The Bay State was one of 11 states to participate in the pilot program for states to receive state-specific Grade 12 results.
In a ceremony at Medford High School, Governor Deval Patrick, surrounded by state education officials and hundreds of students, heralded the results as proof of the state's position as a leader in public education.
Entrepreneurs are working very hard to build education systems outside of the formal higher ed and public ed systems. One day, they will merge with the increasingly archaic structures of public ed, but for now, they will remain outside.
Is it possible that companies like this will form partnerships with Knewton.com or Facebook? University of Phoenix made $3.7 billion in 2009 [the source I used this morning was off by just a bit, this page says that the University of Phoenix made $3.9 billion in revenue, and a net income of US$598 million. The entire Apollo Group's revenue was $5 billion. Hat tip to Tom Vander Ark for the specifics and the links.], and that was during a recession. Facebook's revenue was only, ONLY, $800 million. Can you imagine what happens when Facebook puts a learning curriculum into its platform? Could they make more money than University of Phoenix? Could they offer a more adaptive and successful learning system than Duke University? If you think that knowledge and skills needed usually need to be utilized in the shorter term, then maybe. Maybe. If we truly live in a knowledge economy, then it will be our social value online that measures our ability to rise first to a challenge, be the first to be relied upon to fix the problem, and it will have less to do with our degree, than with how we treated someone in our day to day life.
That's why relationships are so important. That's why online and working out in the open is so important. You can exchange knowledge with strangers, send them contact lists, and if you don't use other people's knowledge for selfish benefit, and include people in your circle, then you will increase your social value among others.
This is of course the weakest of anecdotal evidence and no one should take it as gospel (particularly the seminary students who apparently also contract out papers to the same ghost writer). But let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's true--that ed school students are the most common consumers of fraudulent papers. How could we explain that?
There's no reason to believe that future teachers are any more ethically deficient than their peers in other fields, so that's an unlikely explanation. Could it be that ed school students are less well prepared for college? Certainly it's an uncomfortable truth that the SAT scores of those applying to ed school (both undergraduate and graduate) consistently rank below those of applicants to most other college programs. But it is also widely acknowledged that the academic standards of ed schools are commensurately below those of other college disciplines, so future teachers shouldn't have any more difficulty completing their assignments than students in other fields.
College foreign language and literature programs have been in decline for some time, first shrinking, then being consolidated with other departments, and now in a growing number of cases actually closed down. But the recent decision to eliminate French, Italian, Russian and Classics at SUNY Albany appears to have struck a nerve, and caused an outcry: "Defend the Humanities!"
It's a cry that has been heard many times in the past. As the segment of the university that has no direct link to a career-providing profession, the humanities have regularly been called upon to justify their usefulness, but the justification is easy to make, and it is an honorable one that instantly commands respect.
The case generally goes like this: exposure to the best of our civilization's achievements and thought gives us the trained minds of broadly educated people. We learn about ourselves by studying our history, and understanding how it has shaped us and the institutions we live by. As European civilization developed it produced a range of extraordinary thinkers who grappled memorably with questions that will always be with us, leaving a rich and varied legacy of outstanding thought on philosophical, ethical, religious, social and political matters. Its creative writers left a record of inspired reflection on human life and its challenges. Studying the humanities make us better prepared for civic life and for living itself, and better citizens.
For the first time, the "Nation's Report Card" includes rich state-level data on the math and reading skills of America's 12th-graders.
Eleven states volunteered to have their results itemized in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), allowing for comparisons across state lines and over time. Beyond the overall test scores, the state results also look at everything from achievement gaps between racial groups to the amount of reading the students do on a daily basis.
The data come at a time when the majority of states are trying to move toward a common set of reading and math standards, aimed at better ensuring that students graduate from high school with the skills they need for higher education or job training.
A request by a Seattle parent to have the 1931 novel "Brave New World" removed from Seattle Public Schools' literature curricula will be considered -- and possibly decided -- at a Seattle School Board meeting Wednesday evening.
Parent Sarah Sense-Wilson has persuaded Nathan Hale High School administrators to drop the distopian Aldous Huxley novel from its Language Arts class, which her daughter took last year. But she has not been as successful in her attempts to have the book removed from literature curricula districtwide.
Having been denied by Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Sense-Wilson will make her case this evening to the board, the final appeal under district rules.
Sense-Wilson, a Native American, said she and her daughter found the book offensive for its numerous uses of the word "savages."
Everyday masses of students march up and down Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin and on their way, pass a piece of history.
Many students headed to class or exams Monday however, passed festivities taking place inside the more than 100-year-old Education Building.
To kick-off American Education Week, UW's School of Education planned a two-day event to showcase the renovation of the building, Dean Julie Underwood said.
In particular, the re-dedication of the building Monday morning brought together students, faculty, staff and alumni not only to celebrate the building, but those who made it possible.
UW alumni John and Tashia Morgridge donated $34 million to renovate the building, and those in attendance treated them to many standing ovations as well as thanks.
When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to "fight on all fronts, at home and abroad."
By that he meant that while it was critically important to fight against racial injustice and oppression, it was just as important to support, nurture and fight on behalf of one's family and community.
Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim -- don't ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America's black population, especially black males.
We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.
ALBANY, N.Y. -- Eight states are beginning a national pilot program to transform teacher education and preparation to emphasize far more infield, intensive training as is common practice in medical schools.
"Teaching, like medicine, is a profession of practice," said State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, who is co-chairwomam of the expert panel that released a report on the recommended changes Tuesday in Washington. "Making clinical preparation the centerpiece of teacher education will transform the way we prepare teachers."
The pilot program developed by school and higher education officials with teachers unions to improve instruction is being done in California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee as well as New York. The states agreed to implement the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning created by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked business executives to pressure policymakers at every level of government to improve an education system that is falling behind the rest of the world.
The U.S., in a single generation, fell from first in the world in college graduates to ninth, Duncan told The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council. Too many students are dropping out of high school, he said. And in math and science education, at least 20 countries beat the U.S.
"We're simply not producing the citizens, the workers, that you guys need," Duncan said. "We have not had enough passion, enough push from the business community, and your collective voice is extraordinarily powerful."
A panel of education experts has called for an overhaul of U.S. teacher-preparation programs, including a greater emphasis on classroom training as well as tougher admission and graduation standards for those hoping to teach in elementary and secondary classrooms.
The panel's sweeping recommendations, released Tuesday, urge teacher-training programs to operate more like medical schools, which rely heavily on clinical experience.
Teacher candidates should spend more time in classrooms learning to teach--and proving that they can boost student achievement--before they earn a license to teach kindergarten through twelfth grade, the panel said.
"We need large, bold, systemic changes," said James Cibulka, president of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the group that convened the expert panel. "As a nation, we are expecting all of our students to perform at high levels, so it follows that we need to expect more of our teachers as they enter the classroom."
There are many suggestions that the best teachers have an obligation to teach in the worst schools. Perhaps they would be more likely to do so if they were granted a few privileges, such as the peremptory challenge available to lawyers in court trials....
PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
15 November 2010
The conductor pauses, waiting for the coughing to die down before he raises his baton. The surgeon looks over her team, making sure all are in place and ready to work, before she makes the first incision. The prosecuting attorney pauses to study the jury for a little while before making his opening statement.
All these highly trained people need certain conditions to be met before they can begin their vital work with the necessary confidence that it can be carried out well. If the audience is too noisy, the conductor must wait. If the team is not in their places, the surgeon will not begin. If the members of the jury have not been examined, the attorney will not have to present his case before them.
Only schoolteachers must start their classes in the absence of the calm and attention which are essential to the careful exchange of information and ideas. Only the schoolteacher must attempt the delicate surgery of attaching knowledge and removing ignorance, with no team to help. Only schoolteachers must accept all who are assigned to the class, without the benefit of the peremptory challenges the attorney may use to shape his audience, and give his case the benefit of the doubt.
The Sanskrit word for a teaching, sutra, is the source of the English word, suture, and indeed the stitching of learning to the understanding in young minds is a particularly delicate form of surgery. The teacher does not deal with meat, but with ideas and knowledge, attempting to remove misconceptions and provide truth. The teacher has to do this, not with one anaesthetized patient, and a team of five, but with twenty-five or thirty students and no help.
Those who attend concerts want to be quiet, so that they and their fellows can hear and appreciate the music. Those who come in for surgery want the doctor to have all the help she needs and to have her work under the very best possible conditions, because the outcome of the operation is vital to their interests. The legal system tries to weed out jurors with evident biases, and works in many ways to protect the process which allows both the prosecution and the defense to do their best within the law. The jury members have been made aware of the importance of their mission, and of their duty to attend and to decide with care.
Students, on the other hand, are constantly exposed to a fabulously rich popular culture which assures them that teachers are losers and so is anyone who takes the work of learning in school seriously. Too many single parents feel they have lost the power to influence their offspring, especially as they become adolescents, and many are in any case more concerned that their youngsters be happy and make friends, than that they respect and listen to their teachers, bring home a lot of homework, and do it in preparation for the serious academic work that awaits them the next day.
Students are led to believe that to reject authority and to neglect academic work are evidence of their independence, their rebellion against the dead hand of the older generation. We must of course make an exception here for those fortunate children, many but not all Asian, who reject this foolish idea, and instead apply themselves diligently to their studies, grateful for the effort of their teachers and for the magical opportunity of 12 years of free education.
But what they see as a privilege worthy of their very best efforts, many other students see as a burden, an wanted intrusion on their social and digital time of entertainment. A study of the Kaiser Foundation last year found that the average U.S. student spends more than six hours each day with some form, or combination of forms, of electronic entertainment, and the Indiana Study of High School Student Engagement studied 80,000 teenagers and found that 55% spent three hours or less each week on their homework and still managed to get As and Bs.
We hear stories about the seriousness of students in China and India, but we are inclined to ignore them, perhaps as the Romans discounted rumors about the Goths and the Visigoths until it was too late. We hear about our students doing more poorly in international academic competitions the longer they stay in school, but we prefer to think that our American character and our creativity will carry us through somehow, even as we can see with our own eyes how many of the things we use every day are "Made in China."
Part of the responsibility lies with our teachers in the schools, overburdened and unappreciated as they are. Their unions fight for better pay and working conditions, but say nothing about their academic work. Teachers, too, like lawyers, should demand peremptory challenges, so that they can say they will not be able to teach this one and that one, without damaging the work of the whole class. They, as much as the surgeons who are cutting meat, must be able to enforce close attention to the serious work of suturing learning in their classes. And like the conductor, they must be given the attention that is essential if the music of their teaching is to be heard and appreciated. Teachers who do not demand these conditions are simply saying that their academic work is not important enough to deserve such protections and conditions, and as a result, parents and students are encouraged to see it in the same light.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Bruce Baker. Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers and blogger at SchoolFinance101, looks at performance in 4th and 8th grade math of charter schools versus traditional public schools in NJ. In "Searching for Superguy in Jersey" he's created a statistical model for schools within urban centers and weighted achievement for free and reduced lunch rates, homelessness, rates, and student racial composition. His conclusion is fair and reasonable:
As you can see, there are plenty of charters and traditional public schools above the line, and below the line. The point here is by no means to bash charters. Rather, this is about being realistic about charters and more importantly realistic about the difficulty of truly overcoming the odds. It's not easy and any respectable charter school leader or teacher and any respectable traditional public school leader or teacher will likely confirm that. It's not about superguy. It's about hard work and sustained support; be it for charters or for traditional public schools.
Dr. Baker's scattergrams place both charters and non-charters at the high end of performance ("Beating the Odds") and low end ("Underperforming"). He also features Newark-specific scattergrams.
What do to 8th grade students in Wisconsin have in common with 8th grade students in Russia and Lithuania? They're just as likely to post advanced scores in math testing as their Eurasian counterparts.
A new study released by Harvard University measured how America's students stack up across the world in advanced knowledge of math and other school subjects. Not surprisingly, the results didn't weren't exactly encouraging for us Yankees. The United States ranked 31st out of 57 participating countries when it came to the percentage of students testing at an advanced level or better in 8th grade math. In all, 16 of those countries had at least twice as many advanced students than America, according to recent test data.
The report, authored by education policy stalwarts Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessman, dug even deeper to America's lag. The trio produced specific results for readers to compare individual states against the rest of the world. Wisconsin, despite ranking 11th in the country, fails to match up favorably against other developed countries.
More parents in Southwest Washington are taking advantage of a federal law that allows them to transfer their kids out of failing schools.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act allows parents to bus their children from a "failing" school to another school at district expense.
More than 160 elementary students in the Longview and Kelso school districts are using the school choice provision of the law this year, The Daily News reported.
That's still a small percentage of the 5,510 students eligible to transfer in both school districts. But it's up sharply from the 24 Longview students who switched out of failing schools last year.
he above shakedown is similar to but not the same as
Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Hardcover)
by Steven Malanga.
In his book Mr. Malanga speaks of how the Government has financed an entire "Cottage Industry of Activists" for causes that advocate for what he sees as the Shakedown of the American taxpayer. I see that he makes a strong case and do not disagree with him.
I think a similar case can be built around
Shakedown: The Current Conspiracy against the American Public School Parent, Student, and Teacher.
This shakedown is financed by foundations and other forces (often business related) that finance the faux grassroots organizations that pose as pushing for Better Public Schools, while neglecting the significant data that shows what they advocate for is very ill advised.
The Obama/Duncan "Race to the Top" is a perfect example of this Shakedown. It is founded on attempting to define problems and then mandate particular actions as the solutions to these problems. The real problem with "RttT" is that while the problems defined may in fact be real, unfortunately the changes advocated are NOT solutions.
Wisconsin Gov.-elect Scott Walker hasn't seen the film "Waiting for Superman" yet, about America's struggling public school system. The demands of campaigning and now preparing to take office don't allow much time for movies.
But Walker did have "a good chat" with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week. "In many ways," Walker told the State Journal, "our ideas on reform follow a similar path."
That's encouraging because Walker has a huge opportunity to reshape our state's schools. The incoming GOP governor needs to think big and act boldly, just as the Democratic president's impressive education secretary has.
Duncan last month called the release of "Waiting for Superman," by director Davis Guggenheim, "a Rosa Parks moment." Duncan hopes the vital film -- now playing at Sundance Cinemas in Madison -- will spark discussion and action aimed at the incredibly serious challenges facing public education.
According to her study, for children to develop the math skills they'll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples -- instead of just repeating them out loud.
"Just about all 2-year-olds can rattle off the sequence from one to 10," Levine tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "But then, if you ask them to give you three objects ... they'll just grab a handful."
Norma Mortimer moves about her high school classroom with confidence born of 41 years' experience.
Directions to students are clear; she knows when to push for an answer and when to let a question hang.
The English teacher formerly taught music, composed and arranged marching band music, and performed at the Bristol Renaissance Faire.
"It all adds into what I bring to the classroom," she said.
Once every three years as a tenured teacher, performance evaluations provide her with feedback, something she looks forward to even though she knows she's not slipping.
Still, evaluations never flag what she considers her weakest area - teaching effectively when the class is in small groups. Last year, she never received her post-evaluation conference with the principal.
In the growing national debate on how to raise the quality of public school teaching in America, performance evaluations have become both a lightning rod and a sticking point.
Most evaluation systems in public schools provide little information to properly assess teachers' strengths and weaknesses. And because teachers are rarely dismissed over their performance, formal evaluations seldom carry much weight.
Debates about education these days tend to center on familiar terms like charter schools and merit pay. Now a new fault line is emerging: "parent trigger."
Like many radical ideas, parent trigger originated in California, as an innovation of a liberal activist group called Parent Revolution. The average student in Los Angeles has only a 50% chance of graduating high school and a 10% chance of attending college. It's a crisis, says Parent Revolution leader Ben Austin, that calls for "an unabashed and unapologetic transfer of raw power from the defenders of the status quo"--education officials and teachers unions--"to the parents."
Parent trigger, which became California law in January, is meant to facilitate that transfer of power through community organizing. Under the law, if 51% of parents in a failing school sign a petition, they can trigger a forcible transformation of the school--either by inviting a charter operator to take it over, by forcing certain administrative changes, or by shutting it down outright.
Schools are eligible for triggering if they have failed to make "adequate yearly progress," according to state standards, for four consecutive years. Today 1,300 of California's 10,000 schools qualify.
New spending approved by the Oshkosh school board would cover a gap in math tutoring services that has left four schools with inadequate help for struggling students since last year.
About 13 percent of Oshkosh elementary school students perform below grade level in math, said Director of Curriculum Shelly Muza.
That's better than the average Wisconsin district, which has about 25 percent of elementary students performing below grade level. But budget cuts in the 2009-10 academic year stripped Oakwood, Carl Traeger, Lakeside and Green Meadow schools of math support services after the board decided to fund the $295,000 program with federal Title I dollars - money given only to schools with higher rates of poverty - instead of general fund dollars.
The remaining math intervention teachers who work one-on-one with struggling students can barely keep up. The equivalent of 4.25 full-time teachers are split between about 570 students in 12 elementary schools, said Muza.
Madison schools have the chance to be bold in helping Spanish-speaking students
For most people, including me and probably much of the education establishment, this child's future would not appear particularly bright.
But for those willing to peek through the other end of the looking glass, he's ripe for a talented and gifted program that values advanced, often in-born academic gifts, but might do a better job respecting the advanced, real-world skills of its poorer, less-stereotypically successful students.
Elias is bilingual, after all, which by itself would go a long way toward qualifying him for jobs the rest of us English-only Americans could never hope to get in our rapidly diversifying society: urban newspaper reporter, Spanish-language television executive, United Nations translator.
The Department of Education this week laid out a technology strategy to improve the U.S. educational system.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan released the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), which sets goals to achieve by 2015 for how technology can transform the way students learn.
Text and images may be king on the Internet, but people in a position to buy seem to prefer the real thing
In this age of fierce competition between Internet marketing and traditional retail, merchants want to know: Which approach stirs potential customers most?
Experiments by neuroeconomist Antonio Rangel and his colleagues suggest that the old pop song chorus--"Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby"--might have it right.
The findings could be relevant to more than shopping, however. They may give insight into the ways our brains assign value in the computational activity that is human choice.
"Whether the stimuli are physically present or not really affects the values you assign and the choices you make," says Rangel, a California Institute of Technology researcher who published the research results with his colleagues in the American Economic Review in September.
The Los Angeles Times decided in August to publish "teacher effectiveness" ratings using "value-added" test scores, an action that not only did a disservice to teachers but also to the children of California. The Times reduced the definition of quality teaching to a simplistic equation: Good teachers produce good test scores.
There is a simple, intuitive appeal to that formulation, but study after study demonstrates that scores on state tests, even using value-added measurement, are affected by too many factors to support simplistic conclusions about individual teachers.
That is not simply our opinion. Every major professional association of education researchers has said so. The National Academies and the Economics Policy Institute have said so as well.
It’s with some amusement that I read the overheated debate about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. For one thing, there is a vast difference between those who want to eliminate the federal role in education, and those who want to return ED to its former home in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But since neither of those things is going to happen, I guess it doesn’t matter if they are lumped together.
On the other hand, there are those who think getting rid of ED would “destroy public education as we know it,” and that those abolitionists are “strange bedfellows in Crazy Town.” This attitude only demonstrates the hopelessness of the task. If talk of eliminating or downgrading a Cabinet department is beyond the pale, maybe the Postmaster General should should be returned to his spot.
Less federalism in education would certainly be welcome, from my perspective.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveiled the final version of the National Education Technology Plan on Tuesday -- proposals to use social networking, data collection and multi-media to get U.S. kids to learn more. According to Duncan, the plan -- almost two years in the making -- will help American education "transition to digital classrooms and transform learning" for the Facebook and IPhone generation and beyond.
As a middle school math teacher and a long-time union member, I had heard it all before. Dozens of "solutions du jour" have come and gone -- with little if any measurable improvement. I figured that this was one more attempt that was destined to fail.
As I read Duncan's speech about the plan, my skepticism evaporated. Not only could this plan prompt Democrats and Republicans in the incoming Congress to cross the aisle to focus on a crucial learning roadmap, but the plan -- and each of its five very specific goals -- makes sense!
When it's time to read at Whitman Elementary School, kids don't get to pick their favorite SpongeBob or Scooby Doo book from the rack.
Reading time here at this quiet little school in outer Southeast Portland is serious business, and for good reason: there are benchmarks to meet, levels to advance.
With one out of three students learning English as a second language at Whitman, Principal Lori Clark makes it a priority to boost literacy not just for those students, but also for every child, through intensive two-hour blocks of reading time each day. The blocks are staggered, to make the most of the school's two-and-a-half ESL teaching positions and one bilingual assistant.
In an earlier post, I provided my understanding of the background of the protest at West High about the proposal for changes in the District's high school curriculum. I explained how the proposal was an outgrowth of the work that has gone on at the high schools for the last few years under the auspices of a federal grant, known as the REaL grant (for Relationships, Engagement and Learning).
That proposal, which will affect all four of the District's comprehensive high schools and is now known as the High School Career and College Readiness Plan, has since evolved somewhat, partially in response to the feedback that has been received and partially as a consequence of thinking the proposals through a bit more.
Here is where things currently stand.
The high school proposal should start a conversation that could last for a few years regarding a long-term, systematic review of our curriculum and the way it is delivered to serve the interests of all learners. What's currently on the table is more limited in scope, though it is intended to serve as the foundation for later work.
The principal problem the proposal is meant to address is that we currently don't have any district-defined academic standards at the high school level. There is no established set of expectations for what skills students should be learning in each subject area each year. Since we don't have any basic expectations, we also don't have any specific and consistent goals for accelerated learning. A corollary of this is that we really don't have many ways to hold a teacher accountable for the level of learning that goes on in his or her classroom. Also, we lack a system of assessments that would let us know how our students are progressing through high school.
CT: How will you bring boys who are already behind a couple of years or more up to grade level so they are fully prepared for college?
KC: One, we will have a longer school day, a longer school year. They will start about 7:30 and end about 5 o'clock. Tutoring will be built into our school program. It will be built into each schedule based on your academic performance. We're going to use ability grouping to tackle kids who are severely behind, who need more education. We'll do that if we can afford it by requiring Saturday school for young people who really need even additional enrichment and so we're going to do whatever it takes so we make sure they get what they need.
CT: What kind of commitment will Madison Prep require of parents or guardians?
KC: They have to sign a participation contract. These are non-binding contracts but it will clearly spell out what their expectations are of us and our expectations are of them. Parents will be given a grade for participation on the child's report card. There are ways for ALL parents to be involved. You know, some people have asked, 'What will you do if parents won't show up to a child's performance review?' Literally, we'll go set up our tables outside their houses and it will be kind of embarrassing but we'll do it because we won't allow our kids to be left behind.
CT: You've said you'd like to see more flexibility and innovation. Does that mean you'd like to run this school without a union contract?
Many community college students do not engage in enough classroom activities that enhance their "broadly applicable thinking, reasoning and judgment skills," according to the latest Community College Survey of Student Engagement released today.
This year's release of the survey, now in its 10th year, draws from the responses of more than 400,000 community college students in 47 states, the Marshall Islands and the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Ontario. In addition to the annual set of questions about their classroom and campus experiences, this year's respondents were asked specific questions about "deep learning" techniques -- defined as those "abilities that allow individuals to apply information, develop a coherent world view and interact in more meaningful ways."
The authors of this year's survey argue that the percentages of students who reported that they engaged "often or very often" in "deep learning" activities indicate that community colleges must do a better job of promoting them in the classroom if they hope to boost student performance.
Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, is not a popular man among those who have spent their careers working in the school system--but, to judge by the reaction in the edu-blogosphere, any joy engendered by the announcement of his resignation was quickly extinguished when the identity of his successor became known. She is Cathie Black, a career magazine-industry executive with no work experience in education; in appointing her, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is showing that he doesn't trust educators, even those with reformist reputations, to run the school system. So the toxicity surrounding school reform isn't likely to disappear.
How Mayor Bloomberg feels about the school system isn't news anymore. What's most interesting about yesterday's announcement was not that Klein is leaving or that Black is replacing him, but that Klein is going to work for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to explore possibilities in education. Recently, two famous Wall Street short sellers, James Chanos and Steve Eisman, announced that they see a crash coming in the for-profit education sector, which is heavily dependent on online degrees paid for through federally guaranteed student loans. (For details, see the very viral PowerPoint and speech that Eisman delivered at an investment conference last May, called "Subprime Goes to College.") The shorts, and the Obama Administration, which is tightening student-loan eligibility, have driven down the prices of education stocks--including that of the Washington Post Company, which depends economically on Kaplan Inc., one of the leading for-profit education companies (and until recently the employer of Joel Klein's predecessor as New York schools chancellor, Harold Levy).
The College Board announced on Wednesday the revival of the Advanced Placement test in Italian, setting the stage for a renaissance in the study of the language of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci in U.S. high schools.
Italian teachers had feared nothing less than the demise of their discipline when the college-preparatory nonprofit organization eliminated AP Italian last year, saying the program was underfunded.
Wednesday's announcement signaled the success of a two-year lobbying campaign by advocates of Italian language and culture in U.S. schools. The turning point came when the Cuomo family, cast in the role of cultural ambassadors, secured a financial commitment from the Italian government.
"These things don't happen without that level of support. And we are very grateful to Prime Minister [Silvio] Berlusconi for that," said Margaret Cuomo, daughter of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and sister of Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo.
Los Angeles Unified officials took a big step forward Tuesday toward launching a new controversial method to evaluate teachers based on the performance of their students.
The school board approved two consultant contracts to study and develop the new teacher evaluation method, with a combined cost of up to $4.5 million.
One consultant will develop ways to evaluate teachers based on the test performance of their students over time, called the "value-added" method. The other will help develop new guidelines and "best practices" for teachers.
The value-added method compares student performance from one year to the next to evaluate a teacher's abilities. It has been sharply criticized by some union leaders and experts as flawed and unfair, but applauded by others, including President Barack Obama.
Given today's economic difficulties, I thought I'd come to Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden, lug him back home in my duffel bag and declare him at American customs to pick up the $27 million reward.
More on that mission in a moment. First, another conundrum here in Pakistan:
The United States has provided $18 billion to Pakistan in aid since 9/11, yet Pakistan's government shelters the Afghan Taliban as it kills American soldiers and drains the American Treasury. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of Pakistanis have confidence in President Obama, according to the Pew Research Center. That's not even half as many as express confidence in bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks postflood aid from Western taxpayers, yet barely taxes its own affluent citizens at home. And its feudal landholders have historically opposed good schools, for fear that poor Pakistanis -- if educated -- would object to oppression.
In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals--gold, silver, and bronze--at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.
Maintaining our productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at producing high-achieving math students, we compared the percentage of U.S. students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 with advanced skills in mathematics to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries.
Caire was one of four main presenters, the others being Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad, the dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, and -- sure enough -- Madison Teachers Inc. union president Mike Lipp.
Nerad was o.k. He got off a good line: "Children are the future but we are our children's future." He even quoted Sitting Bull but on first reference made certain to use his actual Native American name. This IS Madison, after all.
UW Education Dean Julie Underwood was atrocious -- a firm defender of the status quo denouncing the "slashing" of school budgets, "negative ads," and demanding that the community become "public school advocates." I.E., the whole liberal litany.
Say, Dean Julie, how about the community become advocates for teaching children -- in other words, the goal -- instead of a one-size-fits-all, government-ordained delivery mechanism? Isn't competition the American way?
Union apologist Mike Lipp reminded me of Welcome Back Kotter -- looks and mien. He could be humorous (I am certain he is a good teacher) but he spent his allotted time on the glories of that holy grail of education: the union's collective bargaining agreement. I expected an ethereal light beam to shine down on this holy writ, which Lipp lamented that he did not bring with him. His other purpose was to defuse the powerhouse documentary, "Waiting for Superman."
Indeed, it was that indictment of public education's "failure factories" and the hidebound me-first teachers unions that prompted Tuesday evening's "conversation." I wrote about it, and Kaleem Caire, here.
When Lipp was finished he returned to his table next to union hired gun John Matthews. No sense in sitting with parents and taxpayers.
When it came time for the participants to respond, one parent said of the four presenters that only Kaleem Caire took to heart the evening's admonition to "keep students as the focus." I think that was a little unfair to Nerad, who deserves credit for opening this can of worms, but otherwise right on target.
Caire reported that only 7% of African-American students tested as college-ready on the ACT test. For Latinos, the percentage is 14. Those are 2010 statistics -- for Madison schools. In these schools, 2,800 suspensions were handed down to black students -- of a total black enrollment of 5,300 students!
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
How NOT to vote for school board & Who Does the Superintendent Report to
Last week, I voted for several people on the Montgomery County school board, one of the few times I ever thought about that body.
As an education writer, I try to stay away from school boards. I know that sounds odd, but over the years, I have found school board meetings to be as interesting, newsworthy and uplifting as visits to the dentist. I avoid them. I talk to teachers, principals, students and parents instead.
I feel guilty about that. School boards have a vital role in a democratic society. They are the link between us and our schools. If you have a complaint that the school system is not addressing, the school board is pretty much the only place to go. So why don't I make more of an effort to get to know its members?
The recent election reminded me of one reason. The public sources of information about school board members, such as news articles, voters guides and school district Web sites, rarely tell me the most important things to know about those being elected.
The most important decision school board members make is whom to hire as superintendent. Whether they vote for or against the superintendent's plans for improving schools is also crucial. Cities, including the District, have transferred that power over superintendents to mayors or city councils because their school boards were too distracted by political or personal feuds and failed to support even effective superintendents.
Young people should be assessed and moved through K-12 education at their own pace, after evaluations have determined competencies, rather than the current policy of advancing learners based primarily on seat time, according to a new report published yesterday.
The paper explores competency-based pathways, a necessary condition to realizing the potential of next generation learning. The report promotes a deeper understanding of K-12 education policies and practices for implementing student-centered learning through competency-based pathways through a scan of exemplars across the United States. Also touched on in the paper are the many explorations into next generation learning that are sweeping across the country, as well as the technological advancements that are opening up new student-centered, performance-based, "anytime, anywhere" educational opportunities.
I've never been accused of having any talent worth nurturing in an Advanced Placement class, although I'm sure there are some who would say I have a gift for irritating people. (Unfortunately, they don't give out Rhodes Scholarships for that.)
So feel free to take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, or a healthy dose of sour grapes on my part, but I question the utility of the way we challenge the young brainiacs among us.
Diving deeply into physics or fine arts might make for good rocket scientists and concert pianists, but it would also seem inevitably to exclude a certain less intense, yet broader range of experiences and the people they include.
My new Facebook friends and perhaps the most courteous political insurgents ever, Madison West seniors Joaquin Selva and Jacob Fiksel, admitted to something along those lines when I ran into them Wednesday at the school district's Community Conversation on Education.
On Sunday, November 7, the Wisconsin State Journal featured a front-page article about the Madison School District's Talented and Gifted education services: "TAG, they're it." The story describes parents' frustration with the pace of reform since the Board of Education approved the new TAG Plan in August, 2009. It paints the TAG Plan as very ambitious and the parents as impatient-perhaps unreasonable-to expect such quick implementation.
The article includes a "Complaint Timeline" that starts with the approval of the TAG Plan, skips to the filing of the complaint on September 20, and proceeds from there to list the steps of the DPI audit.
Unfortunately, neither this timeline nor the WSJ article conveys the long history leading up to the parents' complaint. This story did not start with the 2009 TAG Plan. Rather, the 2009 TAG Plan came after almost two decades of the District violating State law for gifted education.
To provide better background, we would like to add more information and several key dates to the "Complaint Timeline."
November 2005: West High School administrators roll out their plan for English 10 at a PTSO meeting. Most of the 70 parents in attendance object to the school eliminating English electives and imposing a one-size-for-all curriculum on all students. Parents ask administrators to provide honors sections of English 10. They refuse. Parents ask administrators to evaluate and fix the problems with English 9 before implementing the same approach in 10th grade. They refuse. Parents appeal to the BOE to intervene; they remain silent. Meanwhile, parents have already been advocating for years to save the lone section of Accelerated Biology at West.
Hundreds of teachers, parents and students came together Tuesday night to discuss strategies -- which the Madison School District hopes to eventually act on -- to ensure quality education for all students.
Key ideas included hiring top teachers, encouraging parent involvement and meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse classroom.
"We are our children's future," said Superintendent Dan Nerad, adding strong children are essential for a strong community.
School officials who organized the event hoped the release of "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that examines the state of U.S. public education, would help spark conversation about improving the way students learn in Madison. Attendees were seated in small groups to brainstorm the successes and challenges of public education as well as improvements that need to be made.
My son is playing on a local soccer team which has lost every one of its games, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy, but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking: he tells the kids not to care about whether they win, puts players at any positions they want, and doesn't listen to their suggestions.
He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: "How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you're doing wrong?" The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they'd played a great game.
And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place.....
[A]m I right in thinking that sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills? A central element in that world is rewarding those who do better, which also offers an incentive for them and others to strive....
The most critical factor in a child's education outside the home is the quality of the teacher at the front of his or her classroom. A great teacher can lift a struggling student. A mediocre teacher can set a child back months if not years.
So which Illinois education schools are producing great teachers? And which aren't?
The most disturbing finding: The state's largest producers of teachers -- Illinois State University and Northern Illinois University, -- earned poor marks. Illinois State, the report said, merited "exceptionally low grades in its undergraduate elementary and special education programs." Northern Illinois "did only slightly better, with weak grades in its undergraduate elementary and both its undergraduate and graduate special education program."
The California Academy of Mathematics and Science in south Los Angeles is one of the top high schools in the country, and senior Danial Ceasar is one of its top students, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker. He's got an A average, and he's ambitious - he wants to be a psychiatrist.
"I'm looking at Berkeley and Stanford as my top schools," Danial said.
But here's a troubling sign of the times: achieving, black, male students like Danial are increasingly rare in America's schools.
"The overall academic achievement of African American males was appallingly low, not only in cities, but nationwide," said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.
According to a new study released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, by fourth grade only 12 percent of black male students read at or above grade level, while 38 percent of white males do. By eighth grade it falls to just 9 percent for black males, 33 percent for whites. Black male students are almost twice as likely as white males to drop out of school. And in some big American cities the dropout rate is around 50 percent.
High school students in Palo Alto will take their winter break next month knowing they'll have final exams waiting for them when they return, but a school board vote tonight may change that practice for future classes.
Palo Alto Unified School District trustees will decide whether to start the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years three days earlier than years past, allowing teachers to schedule exams before winter break instead of in mid-January. Students would start classes on Aug. 18 next year and Aug. 16 the following year.
"I think that high school students have for years expressed an interest in having finals before winter break," Superintendent Kevin Skelly said. "Many, if not most of the schools in our area, are having finals before winter break."
The proposal has split parents into different camps. The district had received nearly 430 e-mails on the controversial idea as of Oct. 26, the last time it discussed changing the school calendar.
t Seattle Public Schools, we truly believe in excellence for all. It's more than a saying; it's our commitment to this community and the name of our five-year strategic plan to ensure every child graduates ready for college, career and life.
Seattle Public Schools is providing detailed information on how each school, and the district overall, is performing. These reports also explain what we are doing to increase academic achievement and close the achievement gap in each school and across the district.
The second annual District Scorecard shows how our students are
performing across the district - from test scores to graduation rates. The Scorecard also shows how the district is performing operationally, in areas such as facilities, transportation and family satisfaction. District Scorecard
For the first time, we are issuing individual School Reports. We want to give parents, students and the community important information so we can all learn from and act on the data.
You can read about your school's academic growth, student climate, accountability, family and staff engagement, and overall school performance. We hope you also take time to read the narrative page,
On Tuesday morning, Seattle Public Schools will unveil detailed new reports on 82 of its schools, and a new ranking system that rates each school on a scale of 1-5 based largely on test scores and whether those scores are moving up or down.
The reports, which will be posted on the school district's website about 10 a.m., will give parents and the public more information than ever before on the city's public schools.
In addition to test scores, each school's report includes data about attendance rates, average class size, percent of high-school students taking college classes and much more. The schools also outline their goals for the year and how they plan to achieve them.
Begining 2011, India and the US will hold annual summits to enhance collaboration in higher education. The first such summit, it will be headed by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The summit will see members of the academia, industry, government and other stakeholders from the two nations discuss a range issues related to education, sources said, adding the details are yet to be worked out.
"We have decided to hold a Higher Education Summit next year. Cooperation in the education sector holds a great promise because no two other countries are better equipped to be partners in building the knowledge economy of the future," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told his joint press conference with US President Barack Obama.
Early thoughts on Joel Klein, Cathie Black and education reform in New York Yor
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein stepped down today after eight years on the job and will be replaced by Hearst chairwoman Cathie Black. In the coming days, we'll see many assessments of Klein's legacy; what's clear is that he succeeded in projecting an image of order, organization and improvement in the nation's largest public school system, which educates 1 million children and employs 80,000 teachers. Klein oversaw the establishment of about 100 new charter schools; broke up large comprehensive high schools into smaller, themed schools; and raised the on-time high school graduation rate to 60 percent from about 44 percent in the class of 2004.
What's less clear is how well-prepared the typical New York City public school grad is for higher education or the workplace; much of the district's proudly touted gains on state tests disappeared earlier this year when New York declared the tests too easy and recalibrated proficiency rates. On NAEP, the only national test of students' skills, New York City fourth-graders have improved modestly, but eighth-graders are stagnant.a
From Washington to Trenton to Newark, political leaders from both parties - including President Barack Obama and Gov. Chris Christie -- are promoting charter schools as an answer to perceived public school failure. And the privately run but publicly funded schools receive support from some of the wealthiest and most famous people on the planet.
But a few activists based in Princeton -- some charter school parents -- and a Rutgers researcher want their voices heard above the cheerleading. They warn charters are not panaceas.
Vladimir Putin: Mr Fursenko, the programme for advancing education will expire this year, and the ministry has drafted a new document on this issue. Today, I would like to discuss some aspects of the newly drafted programme. First of all, this concerns the general school education system, as well as vocational education and specific criteria for evaluating the performance of educational establishments.
Andrei Fursenko: Mr Putin, first of all, the principles behind the new programme hinge on the part of the national education project that deals with the comprehensive development of education in the regions. I have told you why this project has turned out well. Therefore the new federal targeted programme stipulates the very same idea, namely, helping to establish regional centres of excellence, centres providing the best early childhood education and the best school education and training centres in the field of primary and secondary vocational education, including the retraining of adults.
The idea of the new programme is to encourage the regions to develop independently. This approach has already been tested, and we believe that assistance through a federal targeted programme will be most effective. In about a year we should switch over to national programmes that will encompass the entire educational system. But these specific guidelines may yield substantial results in the next 12 months.
Three times a week, Van Hise Elementary fifth-grader Eve Sidikman and two fellow students from her school board a bus bound for GEMS, the Madison school district's "Growing Elementary Math Students" program for students whose math abilities are so high they aren't challenged in a standard classroom.
Eve's bus also makes the rounds to Randall and Thoreau before pulling up to the curb at Shorewood Elementary, where Eve and her GEMS classmates have a two-hour math session taught by a member of the district's Talented and Gifted staff.
"She teaches it in a creative and fun way," Eve, who was placed in GEMS after her mother sought out and paid for a national test that proved Eve was capable of acing eighth-grade math, said of her teacher. "I think she's preparing us for our middle school years well."
The Madison School district is grappling with how best to serve students deemed "Talented and Gifted," or TAG in district shorthand -- partly to stem a talent drain through open enrollment, partly to satisfy a vocal group of dissatisfied parents, and partly to find more Eves who don't necessarily have a family with the financial means, determination and know-how to capitalize on their student's untapped talents.
District critics say change is happening too slowly -- something Superintendent Dan Nerad admits -- and programs like GEMS are few and far between. Advocates also acknowledge, however, there is skepticism of gifted services among both the public and educators at a time when so many students fail to meet even minimal standards.
Having worked some 40 years in the business world, mostly abroad, with many leaders in business, politics and religion, I believe the most important ingredient for success is setting one or two ambitious, long-term goals that are routinely and publicly measured against the best in the world.
For Wisconsin, we only need two:
Raise our state's per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota's by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.
Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.
Our educational standards are based relative to the United States. So even if we "successfully" accomplish all of our state educational goals, our kids would still be in the global minor leagues. How about targeting Finland and Singapore in math, South Korea and Japan in science, Canada in reading?
As the saying goes: "When one does not know where one is going, any road will do" (or not do).
Without clear scorecards, we citizens will have little ability to coerce and evaluate politicians and their excuses, rhetoric and laws from the right and left. If JFK had not set a "man on the moon" stretch target, would we have landed there? Do the Green Bay Packers have a chance at winning another Super Bowl if they never tack that goal to the locker room walls?
The Boston school system is churning out illiterate students whose only skills are to pass predictable standard tests
I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education - a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people's children.
I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.
However, they were all college bound - the ultimate goal of our school's vision statement-- clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.
They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul --the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words--oral and written--independently, with relative ease and confidence.
For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.
We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to "pass.'' Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test--but remained illiterate.
I also bear witness to my students' ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A's and B's were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.
In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the "walk across the stage'' frenzy is at its peak.
When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs--a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to "testing accommodations''; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.
Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students--the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list--and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.
At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people's children.
Junia Yearwood, a guest columnist, is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher who taught at English High for 25 years.
The New Mexico PreK evaluation, from the 2008-2009 school year, finds positive impacts from the state-funded prekindergarten program for young children, consistent with previous findings. With statistically significant increases observed in vocabulary, math, and literacy scores for children participating in New Mexico PreK, the authors find New Mexico PreK is helping prepare young children for later school success. The New Mexico PreK initiative began in 2005 and has expanded rapidly. From the beginning, the National Institute for Early Education Research has been evaluating the program using the regression-discontinuity approach.
New site provides financial literacy curricula for parents, students, and educators.
Our sister site GoCollege has given a great deal of attention to the current student loan crisis. The problem is actually a very simple one, easy access to loans has led naïve students to borrow significant sums of money as they pursue their college degree.
The problem is that too many students are borrowing far too much and thus are literally mortgaging their entire future. I recently highlighted my concerns with what is happening in my own state where students are leaving the state university with some of the highest average debt levels in the country.
Unfortunately, financial literacy is not a typical topic generally taught in public schools. Thus, educating children about money and the concept of using credit in a healthy manner still falls upon parents. In essence, this is a subject where every family must employ the home-schooling concept.
A lot of harsh words are thrown around during a campaign, and Gov.-elect Paul LePage was on the receiving end of many of them, particularly regarding his positions on education.
But now that the votes have been cast the rhetoric can die away. Although there is still considerable flesh that has to be added to the policy bones that LePage campaigned on, we like much of what he proposed in regards to education reform, which includes ideas that we have been championing for some time.
LePage supports public charter schools, funded from the same sources as traditional schools. Charter schools have a mixed track record, but the best ones serve as innovative laboratories for new approaches to teaching and learning.
They also offer school districts a way to pilot alternative programs, like schools that meet at night, during the weekend or combine with a vocational focus, which could bring dropouts back into education.
The most successful schools ignore government advice and set their own standards for effective teaching, according to a thinktank report published today.
The best schools have an "open culture", in which heads regularly pop into classrooms informally, the thinktank Reform says.
"The teachers view this as supportive rather than threatening ... the best schools foster an expectation and culture of perpetual improvement."
This change in culture leads to failing teachers either improving or leaving, the report says.
Being taught by a good teacher rather than a poor one improves a student's results by half a GCSE grade a subject, according to academic research quoted in the report.
It is worth looking at the data to see how Wisconsin compares with some other states. Here is the mathematics comparison with Minnesota.
The "state" results are the percent of students ranked as proficient on the state test with the current cut scores being used. The international percent was obtained by using the state results on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and this was mapped by comparing levels of problems to the level on TIMSS, (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study).
Grade 4 Mathematics Percent proficient
State International
Wisconsin 74 45
Minnesota 68 55
Massachusetts 49 63
No, the Massachusetts scores were not reversed here. Their cut score levels are set higher than the TIMSS levels.
It is time for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to redo the cut score levels to make them realistic. Parents in Wisconsin are mature enough to be told the truth about how well their children are doing.
Standing at the edge of a pond surrounded by her class of fourth-graders, Jasmine Zeppa filled a bucket with brown water and lectured her pupils on the science of observing and recording data. Many of the children seemed more interested in nearby geese, a passing jogger and the crunchy leaves underfoot.
Zeppa's own professor from St. Catherine University stood nearby and recorded video of it all.
"I think it went as well as it possibly could have, given her experience," the professor, Susan Gibbs Goetz, said. Her snap review: The 25-year-old Zeppa could have done a better job holding the students' attention, but did well building on past lessons.
Zeppa is among the first class of aspiring teachers who are getting ready for new, more demanding requirements to receive their teacher license. A new licensing system is being tested in 19 states that includes filming student teachers in their classroom and evaluating the video, also candidates must show they can prepare a lesson, tailor it to different levels of students and present it effectively.
The groups have been slow to come to terms with the push for reform. Some see them as obstacles to change, and even union sympathizers agree that their voice in the education debate has been muted.
Teachers unions have a well-deserved reputation for exercising political clout. With a nearly unparalleled ability to raise cash and organize their ranks, they have elected school boards, influenced legislation and helped set the public school agenda in major American cities for decades.
Now, that clout is in question.
A nationwide school reform movement with bipartisan support has collided head-on with unions over three ideas that labor has long resisted: expansion of charter schools, the introduction of merit pay for teachers and the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
Even the long-held protections and prerogatives conferred by seniority and tenure no longer seem sacrosanct.
A wave of change and reform has finally begun moving across American public education. Across the political spectrum from President Obama rightward, people now agree that our children must learn much more than they are learning now, and that major change is necessary to enable them to do so. Only the most selfish special interests still insist on defending the status quo.
Indiana has led the nation in many areas lately. Fiscal responsibility, a pro-growth business climate, property tax reduction and infrastructure are good examples, but we can make no such claim about K-12 education. Only one in three Hoosier eighth-graders is able to pass the national reading and math tests; if we compare their scores to those of children in foreign countries, they look even worse.
It's not that we have made no headway. We have doubled the number of our 5-year-olds with access to full-day kindergarten, although a quarter still do not have it. We have strengthened the ability of teachers and principals to maintain classroom discipline by immunizing them from lawsuits. We have ended the "social promotion" of third-graders who cannot read to the fourth grade and almost certain failure in high school and life.
US President Barack Obama's visit to India is set to start to an unprecedented wave of back-to-back, big-ticket international education deals over the coming week aimed at making India a global education destination. India will sign key education pacts with Canada on Tuesday and the UK on Thursday after finalising projects with Obama's delegation on Monday, top government sources confirmed.
"Don't forget that the US, UK and Canada are countries that Indians have traditionally thronged for education. It is indicative of India's role in the global education scenario today that they are coming to India virtually in back-to-back trips we have never witnessed before," a senior government official said. "These countries need us as much as we need them."
An educational earthquake aimed at improving the effectiveness of teachers is rumbling across the nation.
So far, the quake is only beginning to affect Wisconsin. But the tremors of change are already being felt here, and more are coming.
In the process, a new world of teaching is being built.
Nationwide, the federal government and giant philanthropies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into underwriting work in dozens of states and cities on better ways to select teachers, monitor their work and pay them.
President Barack Obama has taken on teachers unions - traditionally partisan allies - over teacher improvement issues, while many Republicans, including Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker, say they support reform in teachers' pay.
National leaders of teachers unions, long opposed to change, are willing to talk about once-taboo subjects such as making it easier to get weak teachers out of classrooms.
Multiple factors have ushered in this new era. First, it is now widely understood that not only are teachers the most important school-related factor in student learning, but that teacher effectiveness varies drastically. Second, the recession - and the resulting stimulus package - gave Obama a chance to launch large programs focused on increasing teacher effectiveness. Third, data about students and teachers has improved greatly, providing better tools for figuring out the success of many teachers on an individual basis.
Other columnists spend the dark winter months reconnecting with their loved ones before a cozy fire or a richly laden holiday feast. I use that time to fill a spreadsheet with the names of high schools and their ratios of college-level tests to graduating seniors.
It doesn't sound like much fun, but it is to me. Since 1997, when I devised a way to compare all U.S. high schools based how much they encouraged students to take challenging courses and tests, that has been my winter work. I have published the ranked list called America's Best High Schools, based on my Challenge Index, in the spring.
I am working on a new list now, with a few twists. First, it will no longer be sponsored by Newsweek magazine, but by the Washington Post, and this Web site, washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post Company, my employer for 39 years, just sold Newsweek, so I brought the list over here.
Second, I am going to include in the ranking calculations not only Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests, which are standardized exams that come at the end of college-level courses given in high school, but also the final exams of what are called dual enrollment or concurrent enrollment courses. These are courses given by local colleges to high school students. The students either come to the college campuses for a part of the day or have college professors or specially trained instructors conduct the courses at their high school.
No one writing in the English language is likely to establish a reigning authority over poetry and criticism and literature in general as T.S. Eliot did between the early 1930s and his death in 1965 at the age of 77. Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot's career strikes one today, at a time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.
The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on "The Function of Criticism" in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. "I do not believe," he remarked afterward, "there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism." Eight years earlier, in 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. In later years, when he went into the hospital, which he did with some frequency, suffering from bronchitis and heart troubles, news of his illnesses appeared in the press or over the radio both in England and America; and so too did news of his second marriage, in 1957, at the age of 69, to his secretary, a Miss Valerie Fletcher, 38 years younger than he. He lectured often and everywhere, so much so that Lyndall Gordon, his most penetrating biographer, wrote that his "face acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lectern into rows upon rows of eyes." Eliot was the equivalent in literature of Albert Einstein in science in that everyone seemed to know that these men were immensely significant without quite knowing for what.
An immitigable highbrow, Eliot was concerned about the slackening of high culture and the diminishing quality of education--concerns that have proved prophetic. The poetry on which his reputation as a leading figure of the modernist avant-garde was based was not easily comprehended. "Poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult," he wrote, but he also wrote that "genuinepoetry can communicate before it is understood," which seems to have been the case with his. His criticism, much of which began as lectures, always came from on high. This was not a man who wrote or spoke down to his audience, ever. Which makes all the more curious his widespread fame.
So let's think out loud about what might lie ahead:
State aid to schools. It's hard to see how Republicans are going to keep their campaign promises and fund the same percentage of statewide costs for kindergarten through 12th grade. The state committed itself to paying two-thirds of those costs in the 1990s (under Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson). The current rate is a bit below that. But look for Walker to want to do something about this multibillion dollar annual spending. Reductions in state aid would translate into large increases in property taxes (that hardly seems likely, given the state of public opinion) or large cuts in school spending. That leads us to:
Teacher benefits. Look for a lot of action around this. Teachers are deeply defensive of their benefits, especially health insurance plans that are substantially above what almost anybody else has these days. But WEAC, the state teachers union, was among the biggest losers on Tuesday and has few friends in the Capitol now. There's been talk about trying to bring teachers into the state employees' health plan, which costs less than most teacher plans. Now is likely to be the time for doing that. Or maybe other ideas will surface.
Teachers contracts are negotiated locally, so the most powerful thing Republicans can do might be just to give local districts less money and let school officials and local unions figure out what to do about it. My guess is that the Milwaukee teachers union agreed recently to a new contract that goes until 2013, two years longer than the normal agreement, in hope of staving off more concessions at least for that long.
No one expects to find beets and carrots in a sliver of the South Bronx wedged between Metro-North Railroad tracks and a busy elevated highway.
But there they are, along with late-season eggplant, tomatoes, basil and habanero peppers, all growing in a pocket-sized farm called La Finca del Sur, Spanish for Farm of the South.
The formerly weed-choked vacant lot will be a classroom for a new venture called Farm School NYC: The New York City School of Urban Agriculture.
Starting in January, the school will offer a two-year course aimed at developing "the next generation of leaders who will work to use urban agriculture to transform their communities into healthy food communities," said executive director Jacquie Berger.
E-book gadgets have finally cracked the mass market here in the United States or at least have come a long way.
Consider a memorable Kindle commercial from Amazon, in which a brunette in a bikini one-ups an oafish man reading off a rival machine. Mr. Beer Belly asks about her e-reader. "It's a Kindle," she says by the pool. "$139. I actually paid more for these sunglasses." Mad Men would be proud. A year or two from now, count on twice as much ballyhoo and on better machines for less than $99.
I myself own both a Kindle 3 and the Brand X iPad and can attest to the improved readability of the latest E Ink from Amazon's supplier, even indoors, despite lack of built-in illumination. Outside on walks, as with earlier Kindles, I can listen to books from publishing houses savvy enough to allow text to speech. No matter where I am, I can instantly see all occurrences of a character's name in an engrossing Louis Bayard novel. I can also track down the meanings of archaic words that Bayard's detective narrator uses in this murder mystery set at West Point and featuring a fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe.
The "Edupunks" will inherit the Earth ... or at least some attention.
Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute's 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference.
"We're still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.... I just don't think that's going to work," said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore.
It was a forum held Wednesday by the Dane County League of Women Voters on "how changing demographics are affecting Dane County schools and human services," and the speakers -- Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad, Sun Prairie district administrator Tim Culver and Dane County director of Human Services Lynn Green -- aren't exactly right wingers.
But it's odd how the best of intentions can muddle a message, especially when it comes to race, and especially in Madison.
The panel was nothing if not well intentioned, not to mention extremely careful in its language.
Happy- and/or neutral-sounding words like "diversity" and "changing demographics" took the place of the more direct "black" or "Latino" or "poor." And while it was clear that these changing demographics meant higher rates of poverty and single-parent families, which in turn correlate with more problems in the schools or need for services, the panel chose not to identify them as problems. They were instead "challenges."
They were also careful to frame their remarks in a spirit of inclusiveness, and Nerad and Culver described efforts to inject "culturally relevant" instruction into their curriculums and to hire more minority teachers.
(I wondered how conservatives would respond to such efforts, widely applauded and rarely questioned in places as liberal as Madison. What does cultural relevancy have to do with learning the three Rs? Do you have to be black to teach a black child?)
The audience was provided with graphics showing student achievement rising during this period of increasing student poverty and diversity, but Nerad and Culver did not make a big deal of that in their remarks. Nerad said after the meeting that too much emphasis on the district's successes can invite criticism about areas where it isn't doing so well.
Enclosed is an update report regarding the High School Career and College Readiness Plan. This plan is written as a complement to the first document entitled "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success". The original document was intended to outline both a possible structure for organizing accelerated and preparatory courses for high school students. The original document was also intended to serve as an internal document outlining a planning process. Since, the dissemination of the "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" many questions and concerns have been expressed by a variety of stakeholders. Through feedback and questions brought forth by teachers, students, community members and the Board of Education it is understood that our original plan did not effectively communicate the rationale, scope, scale, and end outcomes as intended. The conversations that occurred as a result of the dissemination of the "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" have been at times difficult but they have also been the right conversations for us to have in order to move forward as a district. These conversations have highlighted the interconnectedness ofall grade levels, calling on us to proceed with a k-12 district wide curricular alignmentprocessinwhichhighschoolisembedded. hlordertomoreaccuratelycapturetheintentofouroriginal work we have renamed the plan High School Career and College Readiness to accurately reflect the intended goal; for all MMSD graduates will become self-determined learners able to access a wide array ofpost-secondary options. For these reasons, we have not included the original "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" plan in this report. Rather we have created this document to serve as bridge that more clearly articulates the history, rationale, data, work to date and next steps that are outlined in the original plan. Our Theory of Action, process
and end goals have not changed, but how we articulate this work has become more explicit, transparent and responsive. Weare in process ofcreating a more comprehensive plan to be shared with a broad range ofaudiences. We will share that plan with the Board of Education when finalized. We will also share periodic updates with the Board of Education. ill the meantime, the enclosed report serves to answer questions, concerns received to date and provide more detailed and accurate iuformation. Attached is the original document, unchanged.
Justices Revisit Use of Tax Credits for Religious Schools
The Supreme Court on Wednesday returned to a subject that produced a major and closely divided decision eight years ago: how far may the government go in aiding religious schools?
In 2002, in a 5-to-4 ruling, the court upheld a school voucher system in Cleveland that parents used almost exclusively to pay for religious schools.
Four new justices have joined the court since then, but there was nothing in Wednesday's arguments to suggest that the issue has become any less polarizing.
The program at issue on Wednesday gives Arizona taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar state tax credit of up to $500 for donations to private "student tuition organizations." The contributors may not designate their dependents as beneficiaries. The organizations are permitted to limit the scholarships they offer to schools of a given religion, and many do.
Since the January 2010 Board of Education update, the majority of focus of the Fine Arts Division in Curriculum and Assessment has been on recommendations regarding curriculum revisions, distribution ofequitable essential arts resources, and plans for a proposed fine arts programming financial planning team.
The Fine Arts Task Force Report contains three main areas. This updated report is organized around the recommendations from the Fine Arts Task Force, progress to date, and next steps in these three areas: Curriculum; Equity; and Long-Term Financial Planning.
Creation ofa multi-year funding pIan for arts education will be structured to provide adequate, sustained funding for MMSD students taking k-12 arts education courses, which will offer:
A sequence o f diverse, skill-based classes Expanded, equitable access to co-curricular opportunities Knowledge of and appreciation for world art forms
Developing Asia's rapidly expanding middle class is likely to assume the traditional role of the US and Europe as primary global consumers and help rebalance the global economy, says a new report on Asia's middle class from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The report, published in a special chapter of Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2010, the flagship annual statistical publication of the ADB, found that Asia's consumers spent an estimated $4.3 trillion (in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars), or about one-third of OECD consumption expenditure, in 2008 and by 2030 will likely spend $32 trillion, comprising about 43% of the worldwide consumption.
The special chapter, titled "The Rise of Asia's Middle Class", examines the rapid growth of Asia's middle class, how the poor advance to the middle class, factors that characterize the middle class, and pathways through which they become effective contributors to growth and poverty reduction in the region.
Two quick education-related comments on Tuesday's election outcomes in Wisconsin:
First, this was a banner outcome in the eyes of voucher and charter school leaders. Governor-elect Scott Walker is a long-time ally of those promoting the 20,000-plus-student private school voucher program in the city of Milwaukee, and he is a booster of charter schools both in Milwaukee and statewide. But just as important as Walker's win was the thumpingly strong victories for Republicans in both the Assembly and State Senate, which will now come under sizable Republican majorities.
What will result?
Let's assume it's good-bye to the 22,500-student cap on the voucher enrollment in Milwaukee. Will Walker and the Legislature expand the voucher program beyond the city, perhaps, for openers, to Racine? Will they open the doors wider for charter schools, for national charter-school operators to come into Wisconsin, and for more public bodies to be given the power to authorize charter schools? (Currently, UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee City Hall, and UW-Parkside are the only ones authorized to do that, other than school boards.) Perhaps most important, what will the Republicans do about the per-student payments to voucher and charter schools? School leaders now are chafing under the impact of receiving less than $6,500 per student for each voucher student and less than $8,000 for each charter student. Will this be one of the very few spots where the Republicans increase the state's financial involvement? Pretty good chance the answer is yes to all of the above.
The question posed to the San Francisco eighth-graders was: "Have you ever been ripped off?"
Hands shot up. Cedrick Mitchell said, "I gave my friend $20 for four new wheels for my skateboard, but I only got two new ones. So I had to roll with two nice wheels and two bad ones."
Will deHoo, standing before the whiteboard in a classroom at Stuart Hall for Boys, nodded excitedly. "That's right. You can get ripped off for $20 or $100 or $1,000. Whatever it is, it doesn't feel good. We are here to help you not get ripped off, and to make smart money decisions."
Education officials expressed little surprise, and some frustration, that 11 of 13 area school districts and high schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress, according to the newly released Illinois State Report Cards.
"It's just a matter of time before every school is going to be on it," said Joel Estes, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Galesburg School District 205, in response to his district's academic warning standing.
Estes said the district has been on the list for "quite some time" due to being a more diverse and larger district.
Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, is determined by two standardized tests and is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Until recently, if you wanted to take Professor Rebecca Henderson's course in advanced strategy to understand the long-term roots of why some companies are unusually successful, you needed to be a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ms. Henderson teaches at the Sloan School of Management. Admission to the Sloan School is extremely selective, and tuition fees are over $50,000 a year.
For the past two years, though, anyone with an Internet connection can follow Ms. Henderson's lectures online, where the lecture notes and course assignments are available free through M.I.T. OpenCourseWare. Why give away something with such a high market value?
"I put the course up because the president of M.I.T. asked us to," said Ms. Henderson. "My deep belief is that as academics we have a duty to disperse our ideas as far and as freely as possible."
Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a worldwide organization of about 250 academic institutions around the world, adds that universities get "global engagement" from posting courses online.
Fellow graduate students sometimes express shock at how little many undergraduates know about the structure and purpose of universities. It's not astonishing to me: I didn't understand the basic facts of academic life or the hierarchies and incentives universities present to faculty and students when I walked into Clark University at age 18. I learned most of what's expressed here through osmosis, implication, inference, discussion with professors, and random reading over seven years. Although most of it seems obvious now, as a freshman I was like a medieval peasant who conceived of the earth as the center of the universe; Copernicus' heliocentric[1] revolution hadn't reached me, and the much more accurate view of the universe discovered by later thinkers wasn't even a glimmer to me. Consequently, I'm writing this document to explain, as clearly and concisely as I can, how universities work and how you, a freshman or sophomore, can thrive in them.
The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity.
Once a week, year six pupils at Ashmount Primary School in North London settle in front of their computers, put on their headsets and get ready for their math class. A few minutes later, their teachers come online thousands of kilometers away in the Indian state of Punjab.
Ashmount is one of three state schools in Britain that decided to outsource part of their teaching to India via the Internet. The service -- the first of its kind in Europe -- is offered by BrightSpark Education, a London-based company set up last year. BrightSpark employs and trains 100 teachers in India and puts them in touch with pupils in Britain through an interactive online tutoring program.
The feedback from pupils, the schools and parents is good so far, and BrightSpark said a dozen more schools, a charity and many more parents were interested in signing up for the lessons. The one-on-one sessions not only cost about half of what personal tutors in Britain charge but are also popular with pupils, who enjoy solving equations online, said Rebecca Stacey, an assistant head teacher at Ashmount.
Jamal Cooks, a San Francisco State University professor of education and former teacher, wrote the following piece for The Education Report, Katy Murphy's Oakland schools blog. Read more at www.ibabuzz.com/education. Follow her at Twitter.com/katymurphy.
LAST Monday, I went to a matinee to watch "Waiting for Superman." As a former teacher, director of after-school programs, coordinator of mentoring programs, and a professor of teacher education, I watched the movie intently and hung on every word. I am a public school educator, a public school product, and a public school advocate. I have spent 20 years working for and with students who have challenging home lives, come from rough neighborhoods, and lack some resources, but who want the same education as the next person.
In fact, my daughter will be starting kindergarten soon, and with the local public school's API scores under 800, I want public schools to work. However, there are some real facts that must be acknowledged before moving forward for equitable education for all students.
The movie made some interesting points about public schools and their teachers. It is true that some schools have been underpreparing young people for decades. The cursory tenure process for teachers needs to be revamped; it takes a typical university
From 1997 to 2010, Edgewood's average ACT scores rose by 2.3 points to 25.4 with an average of 95% of EHS students taking the test over that period. During the same time period, state and national averages remained essentially unchanged. The total number of students taking AP courses nearly quadrupled and the average number of tests taken per EHS AP student per year rose from 1.34 to 1.77. In addition, the percentage of passing scores (3,4 or 5) rose from 54% in 1997 to 75% in 2010.
2009-2010 ACT and AP notes:
ACT average went up by .1 from 2008 to 2009 with 100% of EHS students taking the test.
43% of juniors and seniors - more than 1/2 of seniors and 1/3 of juniors took at least one AP course and exam in 2009-10. The national figure was 26.5%
37.5% of the EHS graduating class passed (scored 3,4 or 5) at least one AP exam, 2.4 times the national average (15.9%) and 2.2 times the Wisconsin average (17.3%)
EHS offers one AP course for every 13-14 seniors
30 Students Earn Advanced Placement Scholar Awards
We received word in September that 30 students at Edgewood High School have earned AP Scholar Awards in recognition of their exceptional achievement on AP Exams. About 18% of the nearly 1.8 million students worldwide who took AP exams performed at a sufficiently high level.
This Saturday, high-school students around the country will sit for hours of silent testing that will determine some portion of their future: That's right, it's SAT time. For both parents and kids, the preparation for taking the standardized test is stressful and expensive, often involving hours of studying and several hundreds of dollars spent on classes, workbooks and tutors. And many kids will take these tests more than once.
So this week I tried a Web-based form of test prep called Grockit that aims to make studying for the SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE or LSAT less expensive and more enjoyable. Grockit.com offers lessons, group study and solo practice, and does a nice job of feeling fun and educational, which isn't an easy combination to pull off.
A free portion of the site includes group study with a variety of questions and a limited number of solo test questions, which are customized to each student's study needs. The $100 Premium subscription includes full access to the online platform with unlimited solo practice questions and personalized performance analytics that track a student's progress. A new offering called Grockit TV (grockit.com/tv) offers free eight-week courses if students watch them streaming live twice a week. Otherwise, a course can be downloaded for $100 during the course or $150 afterward. Instructors hailing from the Princeton Review and Kaplan, among other places, teach test preparation for the GMAT business-school admissions test and SAT.
On October 19, 2010, over 250 influential educators, policymakers, community, and business leaders from around California gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley to learn more about the innovative work of California's school districts, charter management organizations and education non-profits in using the power of data and technology to close the achievement gap.
General Sessions
The Power of Data and Technology to Close the Achievement Gap
• Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director, The Education Trust - West The Power of Data video
Learning from Other States: The Texas Student Data System
• Lori Fey, Policy Initiatives, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation PPT Presentation
Five years ago, alarms sounded over America's rapidly falling stature in STEM education.
That's science, technology, engineering and math -- the keys to our nation's prosperity. But U.S. schools weren't keeping up in the fast-changing fields.
Governors dispatched task forces. New programs were launched. Foundations poured in funding. And schools started to make gains.
Now, however, signs are emerging that the momentum of the mid-2000s is slipping away, even as students' needs continue to grow.
First, get the data right. Then, hand it over to parents.
As soon as standardized evaluations become available for teachers in New Jersey, they should be made public -- with teacher names attached. That will force districts to make a priority of teacher quality.
Elsewhere, newspapers have filed Freedom of Information requests to get this data released. They're following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Times, which recently published the names and "value-added" scores of about 6,000 L.A. teachers.
Members of the Atlanta school board were told Monday that their capacity to govern is "in serious jeopardy" and that staff from one of the nation's top accrediting agencies will be in the city school system next month for a formal review.
The decision by Mark Elgart, president and CEO of AdvancED, to send in a team for on-site interviews and investigation essentially formalizes a warning he gave last week that the board's infighting has put its accreditation at risk.
Three metro school districts -- with a combined nearly 200,000 public school students -- now are being reviewed by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and its parent, AdvancED. SACS notified DeKalb County last week that it would conduct an on-site review before Feb. 1 over concerns about its operation. In 2008, SACS revoked Clayton County Schools accreditation, which has since been restored on a probationary basis.
As we all know by now, US President Barack Obama has not had a great first two years. His Republican critics have hammered him at every opportunity as an out-of-touch, anti-business, high-spending liberal. His greatest social mission - healthcare reform - has backfired. Elected on a promise of uniting the country, the divisions between Left and Right - or progressive and conservative, to use the American terminology - have instead solidified.
Education, however, has been an exception to the relentless criticism. Even prominent Right-wingers such as Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, have praised the President's approach to reforming schools. The Obama administration's centrepiece initiative has been Race to the Top, which allocated $4.35 billion
When their high-school child starts talking about the ACT, parents often equate it as the time for "Almost College Tuition."
The letters originally were an abbreviation for American College Testing. Colleges use the standardized test, which assesses high school achievement, to evaluate readiness of applicants applying for admission.
High schools vary their approach to prepare students wading into this important ritual. They try to make it a natural progression for parents, too.
"Pressuring the student is never a good idea. My suggestion is to get involved freshman year, from a grades standpoint. Grades can drive this process and overshadow a lower test score," said Jeff Buckman, college and career specialist in the counseling office at Eureka High School.
Tomorrow's whirlwind visit to London by Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's education secretary, could not have come at a better time for Michael Gove. Last week the secretary of state was besieged by discomfiting revelations about £500,000 of public money granted to the New Schools Network, the charity and company set up by one of his former advisers, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, during which it emerged that no other organisation was asked to tender for the job of advising groups who want to set up new and "free" schools.
This week, then, in place of answering questions about transparency and accountability, Gove will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with one of Obama's lieutenants - at Hackney's Mossbourne Academy in London, no less; the jewel in the crown of New Labour's education policy - and talk about the need to tackle educational inequalities, root out bad teachers, ill discipline and so on.
In fact the funding of the New Schools Network and the expected razzmatazz around Duncan's visit are all part of the same strategy: central planks in the frequently disingenuous war now being fought over the future of our school system, in which a seductive language of cultural radicalism and a powerful invective against educational inequality will increasingly be used to promote a further fragmented and multi-tiered system of education. Existing state provision is in effect being undermined by a mix of instant celebrity critics, a growing number of private providers and behind-the-scenes lobbyists, with the full if not always fully publicised support of the government.
At the end of this school year, Northwest Indiana schools on their fifth year of academic probation may face state takeover if the schools don't make gains on standardized test scores.
The Indiana State Board of Education is beginning to detail what a state takeover will look like. The options range from the state appointing a manager for the school to the school merging with a higher performing school. The schools could close, or the Indiana Department of Education could make more recommendations for improving the school.
Northwest Indiana has five schools that stand to be impacted if improvements aren't made: Gary's Roosevelt Career and Technical Academy, Hammond and Morton high schools, Calumet High School and East Chicago Central. Lake Station's Central Elementary also is on its fifth year of probation, but the Lake Station Community School Corp. is closing the school at the end of the year.
Kindergarten teacher Marisa Martinez was tired of political promises, unfulfilled vows to restore California classrooms to their former glory. She despaired as she saw her beloved art and music disappear from the schools as money dried up, leaving teachers scrambling for pencils and paper. To Martinez, 41, paintbrushes and pianos weren't luxuries; they were necessities.
A professional musician as well as an educator at San Francisco's El Dorado Elementary School, she decided to take things into her own hands. With her own money, she created a CD of songs she sings to her predominantly low-income students, tunes with a bluegrass, folksy feel that address the basics of life and literacy with humor and joy. It's called "Chicken & ABC's." The project was both a labor of love and an artistic uprising against broken political promises from a frustrated and funny teacher who signs her e-mails, "With Love, chickens, Chihuahuas, children and Peace."
They amount to less than 1 percent of the Class of 2014 at the selective public school in Fairfax County, regarded as among the nation's best. "It's disappointing," said Andrea Smith, the club's faculty sponsor. "But you work with what you got."
The count of Hispanic freshmen is not much higher: 13.
Years of efforts to raise black and Hispanic enrollment at the regional school have failed, officials acknowledge. The number of such students admitted has fallen since 2005.
GOVERNOR Christie has formed the Education Effectiveness Task force, a panel to consider using student performance and other factors in assessing teacher performance ("Christie forms panel on teaching," Page A-3, Oct. 29).
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Christie is currently popular because he offers simple-minded quick fixes. The operative word here is simple. His belief in magical charter schools is simple. Just like "Waiting for Superman," the recently released documentary movie that has become a promo for charter schools, he thinks schools are factories that can be measured for profit and loss. And he's fixated on the dollars in teachers' paychecks.
And like all good neo-cons from the Church of the Divine George W. Bush -- lest we forget Christie's pedigree -- he offers government by theory, which always selects only those facts that fit the theory.
For years now, a war has been brewing between two sides of the education world.
One side argues that standardized tests are necessary to evaluate teacher performance, and the other argues that these tests are an inadequate measure of the hard work that teachers pour into their classrooms.
With the recent release of the movie "Waiting for 'Superman,' " that war has spilled out of the classrooms and into the mainstream. And at the heart of this war is the commonly heard argument that standardized tests cause teachers to "teach to the test."
Teacher evaluation is emerging as the central flash point in education policy debates. The recent controversy in Los Angeles over publication of teachers' student test score gains illustrates this. So does D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection loss following his school chancellor's firing of 173 teachers who were rated "ineffective."
Both incidents drew national attention because they exemplify an approach to teacher effectiveness aggressively promoted by President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan -- both rhetorically and in the Race to the Top and I-3 grant programs. Teacher evaluation was the main focus of NBC's "Education Nation" coverage; one segment featured New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ranting over teacher unions' defensive stance on evaluation.
Teacher evaluation is controversial because it combines two elements new to education professionals and the public - quantifiable measurement of performance, and stakes like firing or public exposure. Teachers matter. But the core problem in public education is not identifying effective teachers. It's that our existing system does not produce effective teaching in sufficient scope, scale, regularity, or intensity.
Since 2004, the annual ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We gather information about how skilled students believe they are with technologies; how they perceive technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for IT in courses. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010 is a longitudinal extension of the annual 2004 through 2009 studies. It is based on quantitative data from a spring 2010 survey of 36,950 freshmen and seniors at 100 four-year institutions and students at 27 two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 84 students at 4 institutions; and review of qualitative data from written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to exploring student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, including ownership and use of Internet-capable handheld devices, the 2010 study also includes a special focus on student use of social networking websites and web-based applications.
When I tell people that I'm the founder of Uncommon Schools, a network of high-performing charter schools for low-income children, started in 1997, I often hear a skeptical response: "Admirable what you're trying, but you're cherry-picking your students. The average poor kid is doomed, right?"
I know a second grader--let's call him Hosea--who would seem to have drawn a doomed hand, born into the wrong ZIP Code in Newark, N.J., to a teen mom and an absent father. When his grandmother attended public school here in the 1970s, the district was dysfunctional and corrupt; by the 1990s, when his mom was in school, the state had "taken over," but the result was the same: abysmal test scores and sad outcomes. According to skeptics, Hosea has about a 1% chance of graduating from college.
But please don't tell any of this to Hosea! At 7:45 on a recent morning, he started the day singing the Oberlin College cheer. At North Star Academy's elementary school (which opened four years ago as part of our network), he sat with 225 other first, second and third graders in a giant circle, hands folded, backs straight, focused laser-like on their teacher, Julie Jackson.
"...Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own--who have more stringent criteria for success and failure--will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate."
"...Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students' beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort."
Beyond the Classroom, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 183-187
For nearly fifteen years now, educators and policy-makers have been engaged in a nationwide effort to solve the problem of low student achievement in America. In one blue-ribbon bipartisan commission report after another, the American public has been told that if we change how we organize our schools, how and what we teach in the classrooms, and how we select, train, and compensate our teachers, we will see improvements in our children's educational performance. In response to these reports, government agencies and private foundations have spent massive amounts of money on research designed to transform America's schools. Although we hear occasional success stories about a school here or a program there that has turned students' performance around, the competence of American students has not improved.
It is time we faced the music: fifteen years of school reform has not really accomplished anything. Today's students know less, and can do less, than their counterparts could twenty-five years ago. Our high school graduates are among the least intellectually competent in the industrialized world. Contrary to widespread claims that the low achievement of American students is not real--that it is merely a "statistical artifact"--systematic scientific evidence indicates quite compellingly that the problem of poor student achievement is genuine, substantial, and pervasive across ethnic, socioeconomic, and age groups.
The achievement problem we face in this country is due not to a drop in the intelligence or basic intellectual capability of our children, but to a widespread decline in children's interest in education and in their motivation to achieve in the classroom; it is a problem of attitude and effort, not ability. Two decades ago, a teacher in an average high school in this country could expect to have three or four "difficult" students in a class of thirty. Today, teachers in these same schools are expected to teach to classrooms in which nearly half of the students are uninterested. And only a very small proportion of the remaining half strives for excellence.
Given the findings of our study, it is not difficult to understand why so many students coast through school without devoting very much energy to schoolwork. As things stand, there is little reason for the majority of students to exert themselves any more than is necessary to avoid failing, being held back, or not graduating. Within an educational system in which all that counts is promotion to the next level--in which earning good grades is seen as equivalent to earning mediocre ones, and worse yet, in which actually learning something from school is seen as equivalent to not learning anything at all--students choose the path of least resistance. Getting by, rather than striving to succeed, has become the organizing principle behind student behavior in our schools. It is easy to point the finger at schools for creating this situation, but parents, employers, and the mass media have been significant participants in this process as well.
Our findings suggest that the sorry state of American student achievement is due more to the conditions of students' lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls. In my view, the failure of the school reform movement to reverse the decline in achievement is due to its emphasis on reforming schools and classrooms, and its general disregard of the contributing factors that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are probably more influential. In this final chapter, I want to go beyond the findings of our study and discuss a series of steps America needs to take if we are to successfully address [solve] the problem of declining student achievement.
Although we did not intend our study to be a study of ethnicity and achievement, the striking and consistent ethnic differences in performance and behavior that we observed demand careful consideration, if only because they demonstrate that some students are able to achieve at high levels within American schools, whatever our schools' shortcomings may be. This does not mean, of course that our schools are free of problems, or that all students would be performing at high levels "if only" they behaved like their successful counterparts from other ethnic groups. Nevertheless, our findings do suggest that there may be something important to be learned by examining the behaviors and attitudes of students who are able to succeed within American schools as they currently exist, and that something other than deficiencies in our schools is contributing to America's achievement problem.
By identifying some of the factors that appear to contribute to the remarkable success of Asian students (and Asian immigrants in particular), or that impede success among African-American and Latino students (and especially among Latinos whose families have been living in the United States for some time), we were able to ask whether these same factors contribute to student achievement in all groups. That is, we asked whether the factors that seem to give an advantage to Asian students as a group are the same factors that facilitate student achievement in general, regardless of a youngster's ethnic background. The answer, for the most part, is yes.
Across all ethnic groups, working hard in school is a strong predictor of academic accomplishment. One clear reason for the relative levels of performance of the various ethnic groups is that Asian students devote relatively more effort to their studies, and Black and Latino youngsters relatively less. Compared with their peers, Asian youngsters spend twice as much time each week on homework and are significantly more engaged in the classroom. Students from other ethnic groups are more likely to cut class, less likely to pay attention, and less likely to value doing well in school. Black and Latino students are less likely to do the homework they are assigned than are White or Asian students.
Second, successful students are more likely than their peers to worry about the potential negative consequences of not getting a good education. Students need to believe that their performance in school genuinely matters in order to do well in the classroom, but students appear to be more strongly motivated by the desire to avoid failure than by actually striving for success. Because schools expect so little from students, however, it is easy for most of them to avoid failing without exerting much effort or expending much energy. Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own--who have more stringent criteria for success and failure--will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate.
Asian students are far more likely to be worried about the possibility of not doing well in school and the implications of this for their future; this, then, is the second reason for their superior performance relative to other youngsters. Contrary to popular stereotype, African-American and Latino students are not especially pessimistic or cynical about the value of schooling, but, rather are unwisely optimistic about the repercussions of doing poorly in school. Either these students believe they can succeed without getting a good education or they have adopted this view as a way of compensating psychologically for their relatively weaker performance. In either case, though, their cavalier appraisal of the consequences of doing poorly in school is a serious liability.
Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students' beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort. Unsuccessful students, in contrast, attribute success and failure to factors outside their own control, such as luck, innate ability, or the biases of teachers. The greater prevalence of the healthful attributional style we see among Asian students in this country is consistent with what other researchers have found in cross-cultural comparisons of individuals' beliefs about the origins of success. Americans, in general, place too much emphasis on the importance of native ability, and too little emphasis on the necessity of hard work. This set of views is hurting our children's achievement in school.
Regardless of ethnic background, success in school is highly correlated with being strongly engaged in school emotionally. The factors that contribute to the relative success of Asian students--hard work, high personal standards, anxiety about doing poorly, and the belief that success and failure are closely linked to the amount of effort one exerts--are keys to academic success in all groups of students. The superior performance of Asian students in American schools, then, is not mysterious, but explainable on the basis of their attitudes, values, and behavior.
Why Students Don't Write Research Papers in High School
Catherine Gewertz via Will Fitzhugh:
Those of you who lament the state of high school students' research and writing skills will be interested in a discussion that's been unfolding at the National Association of Scholars. It began a couple weeks ago with the publication of a previously undisclosed report on why students are not learning--let alone mastering-- the skills of crafting substantial research papers.
The report found that most social studies/history teachers never assign moderately long research papers. Most of the teachers--whose student loads often surpass 150--said they can't afford the time necessary to grade such papers.
This is hardly a new conversation. Consider the work done by Achieve and ACT on this issue, and the look Cincinnati took at it last year. And Will Fitzhugh, who was the driving force behind the recently disclosed paper, has been tirelessly advocating for rigorous high school research papers for years. A retired history teacher, he runs the Concord Review, the only journal that publishes high school students' history research papers, and blogs as well. (He sums up his views on the importance of research papers in this EdWeek commentary, from a few years ago, and more recently on The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.)
On a related note, another recent paper pinpointed a fragmented high school English curriculum and a neglect of close-reading skills as key explanations for teenagers' poor reading skills. That paper was written by one of the architects of Massachusetts' academic standards, former state board member Sandra Stotsky, and published by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).
While the reflections on students' mastery of reading, writing and research skills are hardly new, they take on an interesting dimension (and more urgency, perhaps?) with the widespread adoption of common standards that envision a significant shift in how literacy skills are taught.
Among those teachers who do not assign research papers, the predominant factor is time. Namely, the time it takes to correct and grade the assigned papers and the time research papers can take away from other curriculum priorities.
The majority (82%) of teachers say it is difficult to find adequate time to devote to reading and grading the research papers they assign. Almost half (49%) of teachers say that is very difficult to find the time, one third (33%) say that it is somewhat difficult.
Underscoring that difficulty is that grading papers cuts into teacher's personal time--more than six in ten specify non-school time, or personal time, as the place where they grade papers. Specifically, one in five (20%) grades papers at home or outside of school, 10% do so on weekends and 15% on their own time, 8% say they use evenings or late nights, 3% use time in the early morning and 1% assign papers over a holiday or break.
Since time is such an important consideration, it is not surprising that teachers value the timeliness of paper submission. On a scale of one to ten, 70% ranked submitting the paper on time as a "9" or a "10." In terms of grading importance, timeliness is followed by the quality of written expression and a well-defined, important thesis or hypothesis.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Our time in office and in charge of the school system of Washington, D.C., is quickly drawing to an end. Monday is Michelle's last day as schools chancellor, and Mayor Fenty failed to win the Democratic primary last month. A new mayor will be elected next week.
During our nearly four years in office we pressed forward an aggressive educational reform agenda. We were determined to turn around D.C.'s public schools and to put children above the political fray, no matter what the ramifications might be for ourselves or other public officials. As both of us embark on the next stages of our careers, we believe it is important to explain what we did in Washington, to share the lessons of our experience, and to offer some thoughts on what the rest of the country might learn from our successes and our mistakes.
Public education in America, particularly in our most troubled urban neighborhoods, has been broken for a long time, and nowhere more so than in our nation's capital. When we took control of the public schools in 2007, the D.C. system was widely considered the lowest-performing and most dysfunctional in the country. Schools regularly failed to open on time for the new school year, due to leaking roofs and broken plumbing. Textbooks and supplies arrived months after classes began--if at all. In the 10 years before we came into office, the district had gone through six schools chiefs.
All community members are invited to participate in a Community Conversation on Education during which attendees can share - in small group discussions - their hopes and concerns for public education in Madison.
Join the Community Conversation on Education
Share your concerns and hopes for public education in Madison. Sponsors United Way of Dane County, Urban League of Greater Madison, Madison Teachers, Inc., Madison Metropolitan School District and UW-Madison School of Education have organized an evening of focus questions and small group discussion intended to elicit ideas for action.
When: Tuesday, November 9 • 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Where: CUNA Mutual Group Building • 5910 Mineral Point Road
Who: Parents/Guardians, Educators, High School Students, Community Members
To register, go to www.Madison4Education.org or call 663-1879.
Seating capacity is 200 so please register soon. It is not necessary to have seen the movie Waiting for Superman.
Transportation from a few specific sites will be available to registrants, as will be childcare and language interpretation. However, it's important to register to obtain these supports.
College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.
When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions ("1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?") I think you have an obligation to say, "Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way..."
When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, "perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class..."
Major laws-more than 200 examples-passed by Congress from 1933 to the present
The partisan composition of each Congress, along with the presidential administration and the congressional leaders
The session dates of each Congress
Measures of legislative productivity, such as the number of bills introduced and passed
Information about women and African-Americans serving in Congress
Examples of documents and audiovisual materials related to legislation
The ability to add information to the timeline by using the "wiki" feature
Select the 88th Congress from the drop-down menu on the right.
Click the "expand" button under 1963 to see general information about the 88th.
To experience the multimedia potential for the site, click the "collapse" button for 1963 and the "expand" button for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at July 2, 1964.
Check out the rotating cube! You will see additional content-documents, photos, even a video of the presidential signing ceremony.
If you would like to contribute to the timeline, use the wiki component-just click on "wiki" on the rotating cube.
We know this first version of the Congressional Timeline will have some bugs to work out.
If you have suggestions, please contact me at fmackaman@dirksencenter.org. We'll do our best to respond and improve the timeline.
But for West High School teachers and students the "dual pathways" label sounded like the tracking model the school abandoned 15 years ago that created a lot of "low-level, non-rigorous classes with a lot of segregation by socio-economic status, which is pretty much racially," science department chairman Steve Pike said.
"If they had this document beforehand" Pike said of the document unveiled Friday, "it would have at least shown that there's a lot of questions and a lot of work that needed to be done."
West teachers aren't the only ones with concerns.
Peggy Ellerkamp, a librarian at LaFollette High School, said teachers there wonder how students in regular classes will be able to move into advanced classes, especially if regular courses become "more like a one-room schoolhouse" with embedded honors, regular, special education and English language learner students.
"I have a lot of questions about a lot of the details," Ellerkamp said. "I'm very pleased that there's more time for this to be worked through."
Jessica Hotz, a social studies teacher at East High School, is concerned that gearing classes to the Advanced Placement test could result in a "dumbing down of the curriculum." One proposed change in social studies would cram U.S. history into one year instead of the two years that East offers now, Hotz said.
She is D.C. schools chancellor for just one more day, but that didn't stop Michelle A. Rhee from issuing one last warning Thursday, this one to ineffective teachers and the undergraduate education programs that granted them degrees.
"Now we have a new teacher evaluation system where we know who's ineffective, minimally effective and highly effective," she told a hotel ballroom filled with educators attending a College Board forum. "We're going to back-map where they came from, which schools produced these people. And if you are producing ineffective or minimally effective teachers, we're going to send them back to you."
Parents fear the Atlanta school board fight is jeopardizing their children's future by putting the accreditation at risk, which could cost students access to the HOPE Scholarship and admission to college.
"There is a lot at stake here. These kids are working around the clock to better themselves and make the school shine," said Nancy Habif, who has five children in Atlanta public schools. "In the worse case scenario the kids who are busting their butts are not even going to have the HOPE Scholarship."
The school board fight over who should be in charge makes the schools look bad to college admission offices and blocks good news such as Grady High School's mock trial team winning the Empire International contest last weekend, Habif said "I don't think a lot of people out there understand that its not all bad," she said Thursday.
It's been out for a little over a week, but the Chronicle of Higher Education's package on academic credit is an absolute must read. Chad blogged about one piece of it already, but the longer articles about a general discussion of credit issues (here) and how the effect of course values on financial aid at for-profits (here) are well worth the time.
The articles give much-needed insight to something that is the fundamental building block in a host of higher education problems related to quality, transfer, and other areas. But the plight of college credits-particularly current federal regulations aimed at changing its definition-is also an important cautionary tale about accountability.
Parents of preschoolers who are applying to New York's top private schools are now coming face to face with the test universally known as the E.R.B., a nerve-racking intelligence exam made more so because there is no do-over if the child has a bad day.
But for a select few students who do not score well, there is something of a second chance. Admissions consultants, preschools and some private schools acknowledge that a small number of children every year are permitted to undergo another round of intelligence testing to supplement their results on the E.R.B., which stands for the Educational Records Bureau, the organization that administers the test.
The practice is not publicized on schools' Web sites, and the psychologists who offer the service do not openly advertise it. Nor is it entirely clear what qualifies a child for another test, although those who are children of alumni or have a sibling already at a school are most frequently granted the option, according to consultants and schools.
I started working in city-subsidized, Washington, DC child care centers in 1995 and I couldn't believe how depressing they were. Located in decrepit strip malls, strewn with broken glass outside, parents walked their toddlers into these small, overheated spaces. Television blaring, children sitting on the floor, staring blankly at Elmo, they looked abandoned. Teachers sat in the back on break, the smell of microwave popcorn choking the room. Children were crying from their cribs, others wandered aimlessly around the room, with little to do. There were few books, and the toys were old, many broken leftovers. I was appalled. I wasn't sure I could keep going back. But this was my job.
For nine years I ran an early learning arts and literacy program called Inner City-Inner Child, which took new books, artist teachers and professional development programs to the city's poorest child care centers. Washington's elite has never seen these parts of DC.
Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has fixed on an unlikely source of salvation: Chinese teenagers.
Never mind that Millinocket is an hour's drive from the nearest mall or movie theater, or that it gets an average 93 inches of snow a year. Kenneth Smith, the schools superintendent, is so certain that Chinese students will eventually arrive by the dozen -- paying $27,000 a year in tuition, room and board -- that he is scouting vacant properties to convert to dormitories.
"We are going full-bore," Dr. Smith said last week in his office at the school, Stearns High, where the Chinese words for "hello" and "welcome" were displayed on the dry-erase board and a Lonely Planet China travel guide sat on the conference table. "You've got to move if you've got something you believe is the right thing to do."
Great questions from Chad and quick airport answers:
1. How do you reconcile individualized and adaptive curriculum with a blanket dismissal of "let everyone do what they want?" Where should individualization and adaptation end? At standards?
Yes, do what you please ends at standards. As we pivot to personal digital learning, all students will have a unique/customized pathway but toward common ends. The Core is higher, but I wish it were even 'fewer and clearer.'
Could "the land of learn as you please" be a compromise between "the land of do as you please" and "the land of do what we tell you?"
I hope we can increasingly separate ends & means-tight on ends, loose on means. Digital learning is opening up a world of opportunity but it is currently bounded by the Bismarckian conception of factory schooling. Read more on 10 shifts that change everything.
Religion usually makes news in France when the state invokes its stern policy of "laïcité."
This is the country, as we read again and again, with laws that ban crucifixes and Islamic headscarves in state schools and outlaw the full-face Muslim veil in public streets.
Yet here I am sitting in the front row at a Catholic lycée surrounded by Muslims, Christians and non-believers, as the bishop of Versailles blesses the pupils and the building and reads to the new pupils from the gospel of Matthew: "You are the light of the world. ..."
The nation's unemployment rate is 9.6%, but it is 16.1% for blacks and an unconscionable 41% for black teens. Politicians continue to promote minimum-wage hikes that harm the job prospects of younger and less-skilled individuals, a disproportionate number of whom are black. Wal-Mart's attempts to open a store that would bring jobs and low-price goods to a depressed neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been thwarted repeatedly by labor unions. And the NAACP is issuing studies on the tea party movement?
Black children are funneled into the nation's worst public schools, where they underperform and often don't graduate. Black boys in eighth grade read at about the same level as white girls in fourth grade. The achievement gap persists through high school, where the average black student is graduating with an eighth-grade education--if the student graduates at all.
The situation has remained essentially unchanged for three decades. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have noted that just 2,000 of the nation's 20,000 high schools produce half of all dropouts, and nearly 50% of black kids attend one of these "dropout factories." But that hasn't stopped the Obama administration from phasing out a Washington, D.C., voucher program for low-income students that improved graduation rates. Still, the NAACP is worried about the tea party?
A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.
Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
The simple truth is that many families in this country don't put a high priority on education. After all, it takes 13 years to finish high school and another four years to earn a college degree. That's 17 years that parents must regularly cajole their children, and 17 years that they must feed, clothe and provide shelter without any return on their investment.
The problem with education in this country lies not with the children, but with the parents. If parents don't continually emphasize the importance of education, only the most self-motivated students will ultimately become independent of their families and the state.
Currently, the vast majority of funds allocated to education are for tuition, scholarships, lunches and books. Only a miniscule amount of money is being used to help parents become better parents.
I am proposing the Dolly Solution as an alternative to Charter Schools Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" (AKA, Grovel for Lucre) reform initiative, which, if other federal education programs are any guide, is destined to end in a muddle of red tape, unfunded mandates, and unintended consequences.
The Dolly Solution refers to Dolly the Sheep, country-music superstar Dolly Parton's namesake, not to Ms. Parton's 2002 cover of Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven." Dolly the Sheep, you may recall, emerged in 1996 from a surrogate ewe to become the first-ever cloned mammal.
What does cloning have to do with saving public education? Well, in three easy steps, it's the surest route for upgrading the quality of public education from a "C" average to "A+":
Once again I hear people asking "Why would a student want to get high school credit for classes taken in middle school?"
This may not surprise you, but you're not going to get a good answer to this question from someone who isn't interested in it or who thinks it ranges from pointless to being a bad idea. Yet that's who have been answering that question of late.
So, rather than their explanation, to graduate high school early, let me instead offer some better reasons.
1) Lighter course load when taking challenging classes. A high performing student might take as many as three or four AP classes as a senior. These classes are challenging and demanding classes. Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to not take two other classes at the same time so the student can devote more time to the AP classes?
SHOULD WE increase the number of hours and days students attend school each year?
The proposal has recently gained traction as educators, celebrities and a movie have embraced the concept.
Before his departure last month, former state Education Commissioner Bret Schundler expressed support for extended time, saying it has the potential to increase student achievement, especially in low-income districts. He made his comments at the Robert Treat Academy, one of the most successful charter schools in the state, with both an extended school day and year. And noted Washington, D.C., Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee recently called extended school days and years vital to improving urban student achievement.
It seemed like a terrific idea in 2002, when the Classroom Size Reduction Amendment (CSR) was adopted by the voters mandating a specific number of students -- caps -- in every "core" classroom at every grade level: in grades pre-kindergarten through third, the cap was 18 students; in grades 4-8 22 students; and grades 9-12 25 students. Core classes included math, science, social studies, language arts and foreign languages. However, the unintended consequence of this inflexible constitutional amendment has wreaked havoc with many students' schedules, frustrated families and drained much needed resources from our schools. At the end of the day, it is not in the best interest of our students' education and more flexibility is needed -- here's why.
University High, a school of approximately 1,900 students, made more than 700 schedule changes in one week alone in order to maintain compliance. Spruce Creek High, three weeks before the CSR's arbitrary compliance date, had 100 sections with only one or two students more than the cap. Not too bad for a high school with more than 2,800 students -- until you hear that those 100 sections encompassed 32 different subject areas. Southwestern Middle School admitted a new student last week, and in order to maintain CSR compliance the school had to modify many other students' schedules. This was done during the last week of the first nine-week grading period. Does the word "nuts" come to mind?
utdoor education programs in San Mateo County have earned a boost from the Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting ancient redwood forests
The league has awarded a $2,500 grant to Vida Verde Nature Education, which provides overnight camping experiences for underprivileged youth.
The league also awarded $3,000 to YMCA Camp Jones Gulch, which serves 17,000 people annually through various programs.
In addition, the league gave $3,000 to Exploring New Horizons Outdoor Schools, which provides financial support to low-income students so they can travel to and learn about the forests.
The funding was part of more than $100,000 in grants awarded by the league to 37 schools, park interpretive associations and nonprofit groups statewide.
These grants allow children and adults to study and experience redwood forests in ways otherwise not possible, the league said.
Linda White and Amy Nowell both voted in 2002 to amend the Florida Constitution to limit the size of classes in the state's public schools.
The two now are on opposite sides when it comes to redefining those limits -- an issue that will be decided by Florida voters in the Nov. 2 general election. Their views mirror a statewide debate about whether to keep the class-size rules as they are or give school officials more flexibility to comply with them.
School officials say they desperately need the flexibility Amendment 8 would provide as students move in and out of classes during the year. Other Amendment 8 supporters say the original limits -- which they estimate will cost $350 million to $1 billion annually going forward -- are simply too expensive for the state to afford.
Critics, like the state teachers union and Florida PTA, say the smaller classes approved in 2002 are best for students and are workable if the Florida Legislature would only fund them properly as required by the original constitutional amendment.
He says she's a "greedy thug" who uses children as "drug mules." She says he's a "bully" and a "liar" who's "obsessed with a vendetta."
Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, and Barbara Keshishian, president of the state's teachers union, say they want to improve public schools. That's where agreement ends. In speeches, mailings and multi-million dollar TV ads, they've battled over teacher salaries, property taxes and federal education grants. They have met once, an encounter that ended when Mr. Christie threw Ms. Keshishian out of his office.
For Mr. Christie, 48 years old, the fight is part policy, part personality. He quickly has positioned himself as a politician in tune with an angry and impatient electorate, and he's already mentioned as a 2012 presidential candidate. He's well aware that the fate of his fight with the teachers union could determine his own. "If I wanted to be sure I'd be re-elected, I'd cozy up with the teachers union," he says in his ornate state office, decorated with Mets memorabilia and a signed guitar from Bruce Springsteen. "But I want far-reaching, not incremental, change."
The governor already has persuaded many voters on a fundamental point: New Jersey pays way too much for education. Mr. Christie's poll numbers dipped earlier after the teachers union began running TV commercials critical of him. But his numbers have rebounded in recent polls. Frederick Hess, education-policy director at the American Enterprise Institute, a think thank that pushes for market-oriented solutions, says a likely new crop of Republican governors who have promised to slash budgets and reform schools will be watching to see how Mr. Christie fares. "New Jersey is the canary in the coal mine," he says.
Education may not be the first thing that comes to voters' minds this year when they think of the Wisconsin governor's race, but maybe it should be.
After all, soon after the next governor raises his hand to take the oath of office, he is likely to immediately be confronted with the state's 2011-'13 biennial budget and a shortfall of about $3 billion.
Education now consumes more than half of the spending by the State of Wisconsin - school aid for kindergarten through 12th grades alone cost about $5 billion this year - even though the state's portion of education funding has fallen in the last two years and has needed help from federal stimulus dollars.
So, whoever voters select for the state's top spot could have a big effect on their neighborhood schools as well as on state taxing and spending.
"It's huge," Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said about the school funding issue. "By mathematical definition, if the state has big financial problems, it has real implications for education."
It has been requested of Administration to put together possible scenarios for funding four year old kindergarten (4-k) through the use of Education Jobs Bill funding, Equity Reserves, Property Taxes, and any other sources of funding.
What you will find below are three distinct scenarios looking at how we may fund 4-k over the first 4 years. The focus is on the first 4 years, because the original projections put together by administration and subsequently by PMA through the forecasting model looked at the program beginning in the 2010-11 school year as year one, so we consequently only have projections going through the 2014-15 school year.
These projections will be updated as part of our work with the 5 year budget model ad hoc committee of the Board in the coming months.
All of the following scenarios we believe to be very conservative in terms of the number of students to be enrolled, and especially on projections for funding from the State of Wisconsin. These original projections from earlier this year, assumed MMSD would be losing 15% funding from the State of Wisconsin for the 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 budget years. As we have seen recently, we have lost less than the maximum state law allows (2010-11 reduction of approximately 8.4%). The funding scenarios are as follows:
Who Gets To Write Public-School History Textbooks?
A new fourth-grade Virginia history textbook was found to contain the dubious assertion that battalions of African-American soldiers fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The textbook's author, who has written other textbooks and children's books like Oh Yuck!: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty, says she found the information in question on the Internet. Can just anyone write a school history textbook?
Sort of. Anyone can write and publish a textbook, but before it gets handed out to public-school students, the book's content would have to be approved by several review committees. As long as the textbook is deemed to meet state-specified guidelines and cover the subject matter with accuracy and coherence, the author's pedigree can be of secondary importance. Textbook publishing is typically a collective endeavor, anyway. Publishers often contract with a handful of freelancers who have knowledge about specific subject areas. There's no particular qualification required for these freelancers: Anyone with a Ph.D. in a relevant field might be acceptable, for example, but so would a high-school teacher with a decent writing sample. In general, the publisher hires a more distinguished scholar as the main editor, who oversees the project and has final say over the content.
This Fordham Institute publication--co-authored by President Chester E. Finn Jr. and VP Michael J. Petrilli--pushes folks to think about what comes next in the journey to common education standards and tests. Most states have adopted the "Common Core" English language arts and math standards, and most are also working on common assessments. But...now what? The standards won't implement themselves, but unless they are adopted in the classroom, nothing much will change. What implementation tasks are most urgent? What should be done across state lines? What should be left to individual states, districts, and private markets? Perhaps most perplexing, who will govern and "own" these standards and tests ten or twenty years from now?
Finn and Petrilli probe these issues in "Now What?" After collecting feedback on some tough questions from two-dozen education leaders (e.g. Jeb Bush, David Driscoll, Rod Paige, Andy Rotherham, Eric Smith), they frame three possible models for governing this implementation process. In the end, as you'll see, they recommend a step-by-step approach to coordinate implementation of the Common Core. Read on to find out more.
Finally, the document includes a statement on "fund equity", or the District's reserves (39,163,174.09 on June 30, 2010):
Statement on Fund Equity
In 1993 when the revenue cap law was enacted, the District budgeted funding to continue to increase the District's equity (fund balance) at the same proportion as the budget increase. The actual budget was constructed based on worst case assumptions for many of the non-controllable expenses. Using worst case budget assumptions allowed some room for unexpected increased expenditures above those projected without causing the expenditures to exceed revenues. Before the enactment of revenue caps this approach did not affect the District's ability to cpntinue to provide programming at the same levels as before. This was very sound budget practice and placed the District in an outstanding fiscal position.
After the revenue cap was enacted and until 1998 the District continued the same budgeting strategy. During these early years, continuing the increase in equity and using worse case budget assumptions was possible. It did not jeopardize the District's instructional programs because sufficient budget reductions were possible through increased operating efficiencies.
In 1998 it became clear that to continue to budget using the same assumptions would necessitate even larger budget cuts to programs than would be necessary if a more narrow approach to budgeting was used. The effect of using a realistic but best case set of budget assumptions for non-controllable expenses was to delay making reductions of critical District educational support programs for several years. However, it also placed the District in a position to have expenditures exceed revenues if the assumptions proved to be inaccurate and the projections were exceeded.
The District's SUbstantial equity made this approach possible without endangering the District's excellent fiscal position. The viability of the strategy has been borne out by our Aa1 bond rating from Moody's Rating Service and the continued excellence of our educational program.
As indicated in the annual audited financial report provided each year to the Board of Education, the District's expenditures exceeded revenue during the fiscal years 2002 through 2006. Our desire is always to balance the revenues and expenditures on a yearly basis. However, the excess expenses over revenues in those five years resulted solely from specific budgeted expenditures and revenues not meeting assumptions and projections used at the time of budget preparation. We did not add expenditures or staff. The district maintained its fiscal health. The equity was used as it was intended - to maintain the District's quality through difficult financial times.
We reached the point where the district's equity position could no longer support the aggressive approach. We rnanaged the 2008-09 and 2009-10 budget more aggressively, which resulted in an increase in equity. We also prepared the 2010-11 budget more conservatively, which will result in a positive affect to the District's equity at the end of this year.
Donna Williams Director of Budget, Planning & Accounting Services
Geoffrey Canada is adamant in his answer: People would succeed. They wouldn't give up, they would work harder, and, when it comes to schools, they wouldn't keep doing the same unsuccessful things over and over.
"When it's clear that failure won't be tolerated or accepted, you know what happens? People stop failing," Canada told more than 500 people Friday at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee. He was the keynote speaker at a national conference of the Alliance for Children and Families, a Milwaukee-based organization for human services organizations.
Canada is the founder and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, a birth-through-college set of programs focused on getting children in a 97-block area of New York's Harlem to earn college diplomas. He has become a national celebrity as a crusader for such efforts. He is featured in the new, controversial movie, "Waiting for 'Superman.' "
Canada said things Friday that would leave people from most anywhere on the political spectrum saying, no way, can't be done, he's crazy. Teachers, major politicians, rich people, low-income people - he said things all would dislike.
We have received a significant volume of questions and feedback regarding the plan for High School College and Career Readiness. We are in the process of reviewing and reflecting upon questions and feedback submitted to date. We are using this information to revise our original timeline. We will provide additional information as we move forward.
We will have an electronic format for gathering additional feedback in the near future.
Summary
High School Career And College Readiness Plan is a comprehensive plan outlining curricular reform for MMSD comprehensive high schools and a district-wide process that will end in significant curriculum reform. The rationale for developing this plan is based on five points:
Need for greater consistency across our comprehensive high schools.
Need to align our work to the ACT career and college readiness standards and common core standards.
Need to address our achievement gaps and to do so with a focus on rigor and acceleration of instruction.
Need to address loss of students through open enrollment.
Need to respond to issues regarding unequal access to accelerated courses in grades 9 and 10.
The plan is based on the following theory of action:
Putting a Price on Professors A battle in Texas over whether academic value can be measured in dollars and cents.
Carol Johnson took the podium of a lecture hall one recent morning to walk 79 students enrolled in an introductory biology course through diffusion, osmosis and the phospholipid bilayer of cell membranes.
A senior lecturer, Ms. Johnson has taught this class for years. Only recently, though, have administrators sought to quantify whether she is giving the taxpayers of Texas their money's worth.
A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.
Ms. Johnson came out very much in the black; in the period analyzed--fiscal year 2009--she netted the public university $279,617. Some of her colleagues weren't nearly so profitable. Newly hired assistant professor Charles Criscione, for instance, spent much of the year setting up a lab to research parasite genetics and ended up $45,305 in the red.
The head teacher of a school in New York is facing calls to resign after he sent out an error-strewn letter claiming that children did not need books, while he also recommended Wikipedia.
Andrew Buck, the principal of The Middle School for Art and Philosophy, Brooklyn, wrote to his teachers to defend the school's policy of not providing textbooks, which had been criticised by some parents.
His memo contained so many spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and non-sequiturs that a concerned member of staff passed it on to parents, who began handing out copies at the school gates.
Mr Buck, who is paid $130,000 (£83,000) a year, wrote: "Text books are the soup de jour, the *sine qua non*, the nut and bolts of teaching and learning in high school and college so to speak." However, he added, "just because student have a text book, doesn't mean she or she will be able to read it Additionally students can't use a text book to learn how to learn from a textbook.
"Are text books necessary? No. Are text books important? Yes. Can a teacher sufficiently teach a course without them? Yes, but conditionally."
As someone who enthusiastically supported Vince Gray during his successful primary bid to unseat incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty this year, I can say that I joined many of my fellow Washingtonians in breathing a sigh of relief.
We would no longer have a Mayor who, when asked when the snow would be cleared from the streets earlier this year, gave the most tone-deaf answer imaginable by saying it would be gone when, " the temperature gets warm enough." A Mayor that when challenged by Gray to account for his failure in spending the $4.6 million authorized by the City Council to tackle D.C.'s 9.8 unemployment rate, lazily responded with, "the reality is, D.C. has always had higher unemployment rates than nationally." A Mayor that could not be bothered to attend a meeting on the city's lack of enforcement of its Living Wage Law. A Mayor that callously closed down homeless shelters and seemed intent on gentrifying the city to a point where D.C. would no longer look like D.C. We now have a Mayor that shows a genuine concern for the needs of the people especially its most vulnerable, as opposed to one that treats the common folk like plebeians for not recognizing what a brilliant Mayor they were so blessed to have. But the one decision that Fenty made during his four years in office of which I have come to now appreciate was his selection of Michelle Rhee as the Chancellor of D.C. schools.
Rhode Island's education commissioner said she's promising new checks on educators to determine if they can speak, write and read fluent English, however union leaders say the problem is being blown out of proportion.
The issue came to light this week after a Board of Regents meeting. Commissioner Deborah Gist said she learned about it when parents came to her with concerns.
"I think any Rhode Islander would have the same reaction I would have, which is to be truly stunned about this," Gist said.
When June Burch Heffernan's kindergarten-age son began his first physical education unit on dance last year at Franklin Elementary School, his mother was appalled.
The school, like more than two dozen elementary schools across the Madison district, got students to move in part by plugging in "DanceDanceRevolution," an electronic dance game set to a techno-pop beat, where students stomp on interactive pads and get feedback from a TV screen.
"Dance is a creative, human form. 'DanceDanceRevolution' is a video game," said Burch Heffernan.
"It scores you. You're facing a screen, not another human. And you're not getting the inspiration to move from your own brain -- it's telling you via a screen in front of you where to stick your foot."
So Heffernan, who has a background in theater and serves as the arts and culture chair for the Franklin Parent-Teacher Organization, decided to take action: She called in the ballerinas.
magine if we designed the 21st-century American classroom to be a place where our kids could learn to think, calculate, and invent as well as the students in the top-performing countries around the world.
What would those spaces look like? Would students plug into mini-MRI machines to record the real-time development of their brains' executive functions? Would teachers be Nobel Prize winners, broadcasting through screens installed in the foreheads of robots that don't have tenure?
To find out, we don't have to travel through time. We could just travel through space. At the moment, there are thousands of schools around the world that work better than our own. They don't have many things in common. But they do seem to share a surprising aesthetic.
Classrooms in countries with the highest-performing students contain very little tech wizardry, generally speaking. They look, in fact, a lot like American ones--circa 1989 or 1959. Children sit at rows of desks, staring up at a teacher who stands in front of a well-worn chalkboard.
"In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms," says Andreas Schleicher, a veteran education analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who spends much of his time visiting schools around the world to find out what they are doing right (or wrong). "I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets."
The man likely to be Washington's next mayor doesn't want a school chief who won't cater to the teachers union. So Michelle Rhee resigned. But her loss to D.C. kids is a gain for students somewhere else.
That "somewhere else" might be New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie has reportedly offered Washington school chancellor Rhee the job of state education commissioner.
Christie could do much worse. Rhee was hired in 2007 by current Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, who lost to Vincent Gray in last month's Democratic mayoral primary. Her job was to reform the district's schools, where the per-pupil expenditure is near the top -- more than $20,000 a year -- while test scores are consistently among the lowest in the country, and she took it seriously.
tatistical measures such as "mean", "median" and "mode" are measures that give us a sense of where data are located on a number line. They are therefore, sometimes, called "measures of location". I had to think of them this past week as Ursuline College prepares to host the meeting of the Ohio Division of the Mathematical Association of America, which, for the first time in its history, will be located at our small college campus. A group of math professors from throughout Ohio will be descending on our campus this weekend, and my colleague in the math department is responsible for not only arranging to have the conference come to our campus, but also is responsible for taking care of many of the details that go with planning a conference. Always more of a "big picture" person than one who can deal with minutia, I am in awe of the job she is doing. Her involvement ranges from finding work study students to handle registration to arranging to make coffee and hot chocolate herself rather than pay a high price to have it made for the conference. I certainly could never have done such a good job, and I look forward to watching the conference unfold on our campus that is temporarily missing students, who are on a "fall break."
When my colleague joined us at Ursuline almost ten years ago, she immediately signed up to have her membership in the Mathematical Association of America transferred to her new Ursuline College address. However, when she filled out the form to do so, she was unable to find Ursulline College on the list of Ohio campuses from which to choose. She found herself checking "other", and then writing in the name of "Ursuline College." That would have to change, she recalls thinking!
Chinese "crammer" school operators are cashing in on investors' enthusiasm for the country's $85bn-plus private education market with a series of public offerings in the US.
Xueda Education Group, which runs a nationwide network of coaching centres for students facing entrance exams, this week filed for a $124m listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
This came as shares of rival TAL Education jumped 50 per cent in their trading debut on Wednesday after raising $120m in New York. Two others, Global Education & Technology Group and Ambow Education, listed on Nasdaq recently.
Many of these companies are backed by private equity and venture capital - both from China and abroad. They have generally found the US markets receptive, ever since veteran outfit New Oriental listed there as early as 2006.
But the latest rush is driven by ever-higher expectations of the amounts of money Chinese parents will pay to educate their children.
Eighth-grader James Roll enjoys learning math, science, English and social studies through an online school that lets him learn at his own pace using a computer at home. But he says he likes the art and music classes at what he calls "real school" -- Kromrey Middle School in Middleton -- even more.
This year, Middleton launched its 21st Century eSchool. It's one of just a dozen virtual schools in Wisconsin, and the second in Dane County; last year the McFarland School District became the sponsoring district for the Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA), which opened for the 2009-2010 school year with about 400 students and this year counts twice that many.
The two schools share several key elements: They offer a broad range of online courses, beginning at the kindergarten level and continuing all the way through high school, employ licensed Wisconsin teachers to oversee online learning, and require that students participate in mandatory testing each year.
......
Hughes' obvious irritation was fueled by recent open enrollment figures showing that Madison has lost more than 150 students to McFarland, both to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy and to McFarland bricks-and-mortar schools.
Hughes expanded on his frustration in a recent piece he wrote for his Ed Hughes School Blog: "Since we have to send about $6,800 per student to districts that receive our open enrollers, this means that we'll be cutting a (perhaps figurative) check in excess of $1,000,000 to the McFarland School District."
But McFarland Superintendent Scott Brown says his district is only getting $300 to $350 per student per year from the online school and says the Wisconsin Virtual Academy is not necessarily poaching students from the traditional classroom. "Schools like WIVA have brought a lot of students who may not have been under the tent of public education into school districts like ours.
More options for our children is great for them, parents, business, our communities and taxpayers.
With respect to Ed's post, providing alternative models at what appears to be substantially lower cost than Madison's annual $15K per student expenditures is good for all of us, particularly the students.
The Khan Academy is worth a visit.. Standing in front of new education models and more choices for our children is a losing proposition. Just yesterday, Apple, Inc. announced the end of hard drives for volume computers with the introduction of a flash memory based notebook. Certainly, hard drive manufacturers will be fighting over a smaller market, but, new opportunities are emerging. Some will take advantage of them, others won't. Education is no different.
What makes a great teacher? These days, one has to wonder.
As the pressure builds for public schools to perform better, teachers can seem the scapegoat, perceived as over the hill, out of touch with current subject matter, disinterested and weary.
So it was heartening to catch an invigorated teacher, Linda Mondel, 47, telling Lansing Sunrise Rotarians about her Fulbright scholarship to India. The Lansing School District teacher was vibrant, dynamic and imbued with enthusiasm. She had spent five weeks touring schools throughout the Asian country and would now, with the 14 others from across the U.S., prepare a teaching unit for American schools.
This woman was no slug. But there is more.
Last year she was the first teacher in the Lansing School District to earn national certification for rigorous testing and screening similar to programs for doctors and accountants. Now she is the media specialist at Pattengill Middle School.
OK, I'm pretty sure that it's safe to say that Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb has been a failure. He's screwed up the DPS transportation system, with results ranging from comical to pathetic. He's exacerbated problems among special-needs students. He's slashed school resources while spending on pricey consultants. He convinced voters to approve a $500-million construction bond even as his own demographers argued that enrollment would continue to plummet. And, of course, he's ballooned the very budget deficit that he was hired to eliminate. And yes, there was his yadayadayada about going to lame-duck politicians to get the state to absolve the DPS debt or else...but even that seems like so much of the same brand of smoke he's been blowing.
Sure, he's done all of this with an undeniable air of professionalism and charm -- but by every available measure, the man's tenure has been a flop. Meanwhile, come March, when his contract expires, it'll all be water under the Belle Isle Bridge. He's likely out of here, joining the lame duck governor who appointed him, and the district won't have a single gain to show for it.
At least a thousand Tibetan high-school students have protested against the increasing use of Mandarin in their lessons, at the expense of their Tibetan.
Between 1,000 and 7,000 students in the town of Tongren, in Qinghai province, took to the streets on Tuesday, chanting slogans against the replacement of Tibetan with Mandarin Chinese.
According to Radio Free Asia, which obtained fuzzy video images of the protest, marchers from six schools in the area took part. Many of them were wearing their blue-and-white school tracksuits.
Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch, and retired administrator Larry Aceves want to be California's superintendent of public instruction. Voters should ask the candidates why Florida, though demographically similar to California, continues to trounce the Golden State in student achievement.
Two years ago, significant numbers of Florida's low-income and minority fourth-graders outscored all California fourth-graders in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card. The latest results confirm that Florida's success is no fluke.
Low-income and minority students continue to propel Florida's gains while California student performance lags near the bottom. The latest fourth-grade NAEP reading results reveal how California's failure to reform its public schools is putting students at an alarming disadvantage.
Here's an all-too-familiar storyline about reform, from education to agricultural development: The reform has run its course, has not achieved its goals, and the reformers and other analysts speculate in policy briefs or opinion pages about what went wrong. The interesting thing is that the reform's flaws were usually evident from the beginning.
As someone who has lived through several periods of educational reform and has studied schools and taught for a long time, I see characteristics of the current reform movement, as powerful as it is, that could lead to unintended and undesirable consequences. But when reform is going strong it can become a closed ideological system, deaf to the cautionary tale.
The New York City school system announced Wednesday that it will release ratings for nearly 12,000 teachers based on student test scores, potentially giving the public an unprecedented window into the effectiveness of instructors at the nation's largest school district.
The move, which the city's teachers union said it would fight, is certain to escalate a national debate over how teachers should be evaluated and what role test scores should play in the process.
The release, planned for Friday, was prompted by requests from several news organizations and follows a series of Los Angeles Times stories in August that analyzed 6,000 elementary school teachers' effectiveness in raising students' math and English scores. It was the first time such data had been made public.
Union Plans to Try to Block Release of Teacher Ratings
The city's teachers' union said on Wednesday that it would request a restraining order to prevent education officials from releasing reports that rate thousands of city teachers based on how much progress students made on state standardized tests.
The release of the reports, if a judge does not block it, would propel New York City to the center of a national debate about how student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers and whether news media organizations should release the ratings of teachers to the public as a measure of their performance. The reports include the names of teachers and their schools.
The city's public school principals have received the reports for the past two years, and last year, they were instructed to use them in teacher evaluations and tenure decisions. But education officials have repeatedly refused to make the reports public because of an agreement with the teachers' union and because of concerns that their release could compromise student privacy. Several news media organizations, including The New York Times, requested their release.
As an undergraduate at Sacramento State, Ryan Stevens founded NoteUtopia in order to provide a mechanism for students to buy, sell, and share their university course notes. Stevens graduated last spring and NoteUtopia officially launched in August. But less than six weeks into the startup's history, NoteUtopia has received a cease-and-desist letter from the California State University system, charging that the company violates a provision of the state education code.
The provision in question dates back a decade and reads "no business, agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell, transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes."
Following the cease-and-desist letter, officials also emailed the students at all 23 universities in the Cal State system, warning them that selling their class notes online "including on the NoteUtopia website, is subject to discipline, up through and including expulsion from the university."
For years, principals answered that question by visiting a classroom, taking down observations and handing the teacher an annual review.
Now with millions in federal money aimed at rewarding the nation's best teachers, school districts are looking for ways to identify them. Recent studies also point to teacher quality as a key to solving lagging student performance.
But who deserves rewards? Who should get fired? And most perplexing: What makes good teachers and how do we know it?
"That is the $64 million question," said Linda Bridges, president of the American Federation of Teachers' Texas chapter. "It's not just a snapshot in time via a standardized test or a classroom observation in 45 minutes."
Like many people who follow education issues closely, I was curious to see Waiting for Superman, the limited-release documentary film that follows five students and their families in their quest to get the best education.
I finally had the chance this past weekend.
What I came away with was probably what Davis Googenheim, who directed this movie as well as An Inconvenient Truth back in 2004, intended: A sense of injustice at what these children are stuck with through no fault of their own, or their parents, other than the neighborhood in which they live.
We meet Anthony, a fifth-grader in Washington, D.C., who is being raised by his grandmother; Bianca, a kindergartner in Harlem, N.Y., being raised by her mother; Francisco, a first-grader in the Bronx, N.Y., being raised by his mother; Daisy, a fourth-grader in Los Angeles being raised by both parents; and Emily, an eighth-grader in the affluent Silicon Valley, Calif., also being raised by both parents.
There has been a lot of talk recently about education reform and the need to improve public education in America. The buzz words have been; Race To The Top, First to the Top, The Tennessee Diploma Project, the five day News Story on Channel 4 "Education Nation," and the movie "Waiting for Superman."
When I started to school 55 years ago in one-room Porter School, things were a lot different than today. We did not have running water, indoor plumbing and certainly not a computer. Also, all 20 of us (grades 1-8) were taught by one teacher.
During the time I grew up, the United States was the dominant nation in the world. We were viewed as world leaders in technology, medicine, industry and education. In 2010, the United States ranked ninth in college graduates. When I received a toy during my childhood and it was labeled "Made in Japan," I immediately thought it was an item of inferior quality. Today almost everything we purchase is made in Asia or Mexico.
With its accreditation under review, its former superintendent under indictment and many of its schools underperforming, DeKalb County is at a crossroads. The school board will face many challenges next year, including hiring a new superintendent to lead the system back to stability. School board candidates in the Nov. 2 general election tell us how they would deal with these challenges.
1. What qualities should the next superintendent of schools have?
2. How would you involve the communities in the school redistricting and closings process?
3. With the indictments of two top school officials and the current questions from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools about leadership of the district, what will you do to help restore credibility and confidence?
Here's a provision of the proposed Baltimore Teachers Union contract that escaped my notice but caught the eye of the editors of the Washington Post. The tentative agreement - voted down by the BTU rank-and-file - proposes a system by which teachers would be paid not strictly according to years and college credits, but by "achievement units" accumulated.
A teacher would receive 12 AUs for the highest grade on an evaluation and 1 AU for each college credit. But work your way to page 9 of the tentative agreement and you find a teacher is to be awarded 3 AUs annually for being a union building representative.
Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to urban school districts that have pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don't have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.
Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.
Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems. (The latest example is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to the Newark public schools, given with the provision that Zuckerberg, apparently an education reform expert, play a big role in determining success.)
What this means is that these philanthropists -- and not local communities -- are determining the course of the country's school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: "They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so."
Baltimore students are learning the ups and downs of the investment market with the help of Stocks in the Future, a program where students get paid for perfect attendance and good grades. But instead of pocketing the money, students invest in the stock market, learning a valuable lesson about investing their time in school.
One in particular -- the addition of more AP classes will certainly not be a detriment in the college application process. However, the most selective colleges generally expect applicants to have taken the AP classes at their high school if they are available.
The idea that this new plan will promote segregation is particularly pernicious and about 180 degrees off the mark as far as the intent of the program goes.
Finally, the point of choosing a curriculum for our schools is to determine the best courses for our students to take, not the courses that teachers most want to teach. Students and their needs come first.
Posted on 10/18 to the East High Community list serv, in response to a description of the MMSD high school reform proposal. Posted here with the author's permission.
Dear East Community:
I contribute to this discussion group only once in a blue moon, but this issue is near and dear to my heart and I am compelled to comment. I cannot think of a more important issue than that of race and racism in our educational institutions.
I speak as a lifelong political progressive who has been active in community issues relating to racism and economic and social disparities for thirty years, from Cleveland to Chicago's south side to Madison. More important, I speak as an adult basic instructor in mathematics at MATC who teaches many of the students that have been failed by their experience in the Madison schools, most of them students of color or students mired in the low margins of the socioeconomic system.
With that said, it frustrates and saddens me see how many well-meaning people have this issue exactly backward. It is not racist school policy to offer multiple tracks, specifically honors or AP TAG classes. Rather, racist school policy - of the most insidious nature imaginable - is failing to offer those classes because students of color aren't in them. That argument implicitly says that students of color cannot achieve, and that message speaks volumes about the difference between looking fair in some lowest-common-denominator way versus fighting for the hard and true and noble path in student achievement.
Simply put, we should have TAG classes and they should be filled with students of every class, race and color. That they have historically not been filled with students of every class, race and color is the real issue. It tells us that our methods for evaluating students are abysmal, even abusive (how many of you have enjoyed watching your 4th grader take class time to learn to use a squeeze ball to reduce stress on standardized tests?). It tells us that we are not successfully seeking out students of tremendous potential because we don't understand them or don't know how to relate to them or reach them. It also says that we fail to properly appreciate what a culture of demanding expectations of achievement can do for every student in a classroom, especially when we demand of ourselves to understand and embrace each of our students as strikingly unique individuals and not achievers based upon highly overrated and dubious "educational standards," standardized test scores or other unhelpful common denominators.
The progress of my classes at MATC this semester is typical and no surprise to me. I have two algebra classes. One, downtown, is mostly white and/or middle class. The other, in South Madison, is almost entirely students of color, most with difficult personal circumstances, most of whom have always failed at math. One class is achieving well enough. The other class is over-achieving, pushed hard, pushing me back, engaged, holding an average grade of AB. Any guesses which is which?
As educators and supporters of our schools we can do so much better than we do. But we cannot do better by pretending that differentiation in a classroom can accomplish the same thing as a motivated rainbow of a class with a class-wide ethic to achieve deep understanding and a drive to overcome commonplace expectations.
I say that we need both TAG classes and the recruiting methods and policies to make sure that they reflect every kind of brilliance in our community.
We have the most wonderfullest idea that has been created by our district administration this year, and it has had amusingly unforeseen consequences for Ms. Cornelius.
Here's the deal: the Powers That Be have revived the farcical "Leadership Cadre." What might this be, you ask? Well, remember that our district has an absolutely stellar record of hiring district employees for administration jobs-- and by stellar I imply events so rare as to be separated by light-years.
But wait! Let's get some teachers who have administrative certification-- and frankly, no hope in hell of actually being hired-- fill in when one of our peripatetic assistant principals gets to go jaunting off to a conference in Orlando or Bimini or Noo Yawk. Boom! Voila! "Leadership Cadre!" These chumps members of the Leadership Cadre will then garner administrative experience. Forget that whilst these ersatz nabobs are substitute nabobing, they will not be fulfilling the function for which they were hired and for which a school district exists: namely, teaching students. No; let the students eat substitutes!
Now, there is one particular dewy-eyed dreamer who leapt at this chance-- whom I will call "Bob," since "Sawed-Off Runt" seems far too brutal, if apropos. I can see the attraction of administration for Bob. He only puts eight grades in the gradebook per semester as it is, but if he becomes an AP he has figured out that that number will drop to zero. And that's less, right? (Did I mention Bob teaches math?)
Del. Kirk Cox and Gov. Bob McDonnell were a study in contrasts last week as they spoke to a commission tasked with recommending higher education reforms.
Cox, the second-ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, repeatedly warned his audience that money is scarce, and increased spending on public universities is a worthy goal when prosperity returns to the commonwealth.
McDonnell promised greater investment in the near term and rewards for universities that increase graduation rates and beef up science, engineering, math and technology majors. He later estimated new state aid could total between $30 million and $100 million next year. He was vague about the source.
On the 11-seat Rockinghom County Board of Education five seats are at-large spots, meaning residents of any part of the county can seek to fill them. This year, 10 people, including three incumbents, have filed for those five seats.
The incumbents:
Lorie McKinney
What sets you apart/qualifies you?
I feel that having children in our school system makes a big difference on how you look at things. I have a child in middle school and a child in elementary school. Plus I have family members in our system that range from kindergarten through 12th grade. I work with the public and receive a lot of information across the county on what is happening in our schools. I will always put the best interest of our children first.
How would you deal with an ever-tightening budget?
The current school board, along with our superintendent, has been looking at this for two years now. We have only hired when we could, due to state funding and the increase in classroom size from fourth to 12th grade due to new state standards. We are looking at every possible thing we can to keep from letting people go.
What's the No. 1 problem/priority in your mind for the schools right now?
Our budget; we can only hope and pray that our state does not take any more money from our schools.
It came as no surprise to District of Columbia residents when Michelle Rhee announced her resignation this week as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools. That her resignation (and tenure) made national news illustrates the depth of the education debates that she sparked. She leaves as her legacy the mass firings of teachers rated as minimally effective, increased emphasis on charter schools, and expanded use of standardized tests. Unafraid to publicly speak her mind, she has been alternately applauded or scorned by educators, depending on their views and positions in the broader educational system.
For education policymakers, how significant is Rhee's very public struggle with a major city's public school system? Does it help or hurt the debate to have a face and a name attached to it? Can educators take policy cues from her experience, or are the lessons to be learned largely about politics?
The percentage of Prince George's County high school seniors taking at least one Advanced Placement exam is rising, as is the percentage of those achieving passing grades.
For the Class of 2010, the percentage taking an AP test rose to 35 percent, up from 27 percent for the Class of 2009, according to data released by the school system. Of the tests they took, 26.3 percent received passing grades of 3, 4 or 5 in 2010, up from 24.6 percent in 2009.
California can't improve college completions without rethinking developmental education at its community colleges
California educates about one-quarter of all community college students in the nation, but large portions of community college students enter unprepared for college-level work. As a result, policy discussions in California and nationally are focusing increasingly on ways to improve student success in developmental or basic skills programs at community colleges.
State policymakers, community college system leaders, and local campus leaders and faculty all have a part to play in making this happen. Much of the work toward these objectives necessarily involves K-12 education as well.
This report sets out the issues involved, drawing heavily from a recent EdSource study that was commissioned by the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office to provide a deeper understanding of the system's challenges and opportunities related to developmental education. It also highlights recent state policy actions and the broader context within which those actions were taken.
Teaching teachers: As educators struggle with the issue of teacher improvement, a program in Tennessee shows that struggling teachers can gain a lot from watching great teachers in action.
Teachers are at the center of the great debate over how to fix American education. We're told the bad ones need to be fired; the good ones, rewarded. But what about the rest? Most teachers are in the middle -- not terrible, but they could be better. If every student is going to have a good teacher, then the question of how to help teachers in the middle must be part of the debate.
One reason "teacher improvement" doesn't get more attention is because researchers don't know that much about how teachers get better. Typical professional development programs, in which teachers go to a workshop for a day or two, aren't effective. Even programs that provide longer-term training don't seem to work very well. Two experimental studies by the U.S. Department of Education showed that yearlong institutes to improve teacher knowledge and practice did not result in significantly better student test scores.
When Memorial High School opened its doors last year for the immigration/migration project -- which helped students learn about their backgrounds -- officials were astonished when more than 400 people showed up.
So the school decided to do it again, and the recent open house for the event drew 677 people.
Besides the numbers and the interaction of the families at the night of the event, social studies teacher Kristin Voss likes the idea that students are sitting down to talk to family members and are learning something about their classmates as well.
The project has revealed "a handful of immigrants in classrooms" or the children of immigrants, Voss said.
The students discover information they never knew about family members, and a couple of students learned they had a common relative from the 1860s.
A packed audience watched failure after failure by generations of politicians, federal and state officials and public school teachers Saturday during a screening of "Waiting for Superman," a documentary film that won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
The screening, hosted by the Santa Cruz Education Foundation at the Nickelodeon Theatre, was followed by a short discussion by local educators.
"It's a powerful movie," former Assemblyman John Laird said after film concluded. "The issues are more complex than in some ways they were represented in the movie, but I'm hoping that it focuses everybody on this issue and brings people together toward improvements."
Gigot: So you said when you resigned this week that for reform to continue, the reformer had to leave. With respect, that seems a bit contradictory. Why did you feel you had to go?
Rhee: Well, the new presumptive mayor-elect in Washington, D.C., Vincent Gray, and I decided that the best thing to do for the city would be for me to step aside, because we really want to make sure that the entire city now can embrace the reform efforts. And certainly for some members of the community, to have me continue to be associated with the reforms was not going to allow them to do that. I asked my deputy chancellor to step in in my place. I asked my entire management team to stay in place through the end of the school year. And to be honest, I mean, those folks are the brains and the talent behind the reforms, and so I feel like, by doing this, it would allow the reforms to continue on, and they could do it in a way where the entire city could get behind it.
Gigot: OK, when you came to see us a few months ago, you had said that one of the secrets of your success was the support you had had from Mayor Adrian Fenty--that when you got into trouble, he always backed you up. Do you think the new mayor is going to back up your successor?
Rhee: Well, I think he has to. His commitment is not to roll back the clock and to continue the reforms as aggressive as we've been doing them over the last 3½ years. And in order to do that, you have to give your unequivocal support. My deputy has been working with me since day one. She knows what the political support looks like to get this work accomplished, and I don't think she's going to settle for anything less.
On Friday night, October 15th at Discovery World in Milwaukee, The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (WCSA) announced the winners of annual awards in four categories, as well as two career achievement honorees:
Each year when I ask high schools around the country to fill out the form for my annual America's Best High Schools list, I try to add a question to illumine an issue on which there is little research. This was my extra question for 2010:
"May any student at your school enroll in AP American History or AP English Literature if they want to? (If not, we would like to know what qualifications they must have -- a certain GPA? a teacher's recommendation?)"
I just calculated the results. They suggest the widespread habit of restricting access to AP may be losing strength, although not fast enough to suit me or the AP teachers who have influenced me on this issue.
I am beginning to contact schools for the 2011 list. Any that haven't heard from me by Thanksgiving and think they qualify -- a school needs to have given as many AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests as it had graduating seniors -- should e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com.
Before leaving the topic of, "Education, Need to get government out of," in my naive Sunday series on "What is to be done," let me touch specifically on the topic of our universities.
I wrote, recently, a rather facetious piece on this topic for a Catholic website in the United States, in which I asked whether universities were ever a good idea, in the face of the modern assumption that such questions need never be asked. I alluded to evidence that, back in the 13th century, when Europe's oldest universities were new, the same sort of nonsense prevailed on campus as today: kids suddenly "empowered" by freedom without adequate discipline; professors with a little too much tenure for anyone's well-being.
This was written by Philadelphia Schools Supt. Arlene Ackerman. She was one of 16 big-city school district chiefs who signed onto a reform "manifesto" published in the Washington Post this week that was long on rhetoric and short on substance. It was initiated by New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and signed by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has since resigned, and 14 others.
Yesterday Ackerman told me that she had not seen the final version of the manifesto -- which views charter schools as a big answer to urban school failure, bashes teachers unions and supports market-driven "fixes" to schools -- and though an aide gave permission for her name to be added to it, she does not agree with it. Here is her statement.
By Arlene Ackerman
Some may feverishly await the arrival of Superman to resolve the problems that overwhelm our public education system, while others prefer to enlist with the personality of the day or prescribe to the scripted agenda of the hour. However, my preference, which remains unchanged for the past 42 years, has been to tackle school reform through collaborative efforts, with the start and end goal of providing quality educational opportunities for all children who attend public schools. Period.
Augustana College has never been a pure liberal arts institution.
The Illinois college has long had programs like education and business amid the traditional liberal arts disciplines. But those programs have been relatively few in number and, faculty members say, have never defined the institution's ethos, which is solidly in the liberal arts tradition. The college is proud of its general education program, of its study abroad offerings, and of its emphasis on critical thinking and building of community, not just on job preparation.
Now, in the face of the economic downturn, the college is making some adjustments -- which Steven C. Bahls, its president, calls the "post-recession strategic plan" for a liberal arts college. That means several new majors focused on pre-professional interests. With new majors, Bahls says the college may need, over time, to move away from a tradition (rare among American colleges) of paying faculty members equivalent salaries across disciplines; the plan also means symbolic and real steps to be sure that the college can attract diverse students, beyond its historic (and shrinking) base of Swedish Lutheran families.
Reading pervades every aspect of our daily lives, so much so that one would be hardpressed to find a room in a modern house without words written somewhere inside. Many of us now read more sentences in a day than we listen to. Not only are we highly competent readers, but our brains even appear to have regions devoted to recognizing words. A Martian just beginning to study us humans might be excused for concluding that we had evolved to read.
But, of course, we haven't. Reading and writing is a recent human invention, going back only several thousand years, and much more recently for many parts of the world. We are reading using the eyes and brains of our illiterate ancestors. Why are we so good at such an unnatural act?
A funny thing happened on the way to Teach for America trying to give Milwaukee Public Schools an infusion of idealism and energy from some of the best and brightest of America's college graduates:
MPS ran out of jobs for them and for a lot of other young, promising teachers.
So instead, Teach for America's Milwaukee work this year involves infusing itself mostly into charter schools and private schools in the publicly funded voucher program.
In the big picture, you can argue this doesn't make much difference: The corps members, as TFA teachers are called, are still working with thousands of the city's students who need good teachers.
In terms of the individual teachers involved, it doesn't make too much difference either, at least in many ways. What they are doing is ultimately much the same: Giving at least their first two years out of college to teaching low-income kids. Whatever you call the schools they're in, the work has similar demands, joys, frustrations and challenges.
Right now I am struggling to get my head around what the proposed high school reforms are or are not, what problems they are intended to address (TAG? achievement gap? readiness for life after high school? other?), the many interpretations of what is proposed, and whether the proposed reforms would be effective in achieving any of the stated purposes.
In an interesting twist, this process has brought me back to my own personal wish list of what I would like to see in comprehensive high school reform. I believe that any one of the items on the list would make a real difference and in ways that are compatible with DPI requirements and national standards.
My thinking is informed by sources that are predictable and others that may not be obvious but are equally important: personal observation, years of listening at parent meetings and testimony to the school board, numerous national studies and commentaries, and what I have learned from my highly skilled colleagues who work with undergraduate programs at UW-Madison.
In some ways, the debates over the proposed two-strand system, the fate of electives (which I want to keep), consistency across the four high schools, college preparation, national standards, etc., are less important to me than the basic expectations and requirements for the students who enter and graduate from our schools. Without changing those things, I believe that we will be confined to tinkering around the edges without touching some of the fundamental expectations that students will confront after graduation.
I believe that we could make a serious dent in the achievement gap, address long standing dissatisfaction with academic opportunities and challenges, and move toward rebuilding Madison's reputation for schools that draw people to invest in homes in our metro area and neighborhoods by truly making the changes - vs. planning to study and eventually implement changes - to address the items that are on this list:
1. Increase opportunities for advanced study at all grade levels, whether it is part of an AP curriculum or other courses developed and taught at a higher level with or without special labels. Then remove the unmovable obstacles that keep students from participating.
2. Restore West's 9th and 10th grade honors courses.
3. Conform MMSD policy and practice to meet or exceed DPI standards at all grade levels, and particularly in regard to graduation requirements.
4. Guaranty that ALL middle school math teachers are proficient in algebraic reasoning and other skills necessary to prepare students to master the high school math and science curriculum.
5. Teach students to write using complete sentences, correct spelling and standard grammatical conventions.
6. Make a compelling case for consistency and then truly implement consistency across the board if that is going to be a rationale for homogenizing the curriculum in our high schools.
For the entire post, go to: http://lucymathiak.blogspot.com/
IV. The Rollout of the Plan: The Plotlines Converge
I first heard indirectly about this new high school plan in the works sometime around the start of the school year in September. While the work on the development of the plan continued, the District's responses to the various sides interested in the issue of accelerated classes for 9th and 10th grade students at West was pretty much put on hold.
This was frustrating for everyone. The West parents decided they had waited long enough for a definitive response from the District and filed a complaint with DPI, charging that the lack of 9th and 10th grade accelerated classes at West violated state educational standards. I imagine the teachers at West most interested in this issue were frustrated as well. An additional complication was that West's Small Learning Communities grant coordinator, Heather Lott, moved from West to an administrative position in the Doyle building, which couldn't have helped communication with the West teachers.
The administration finally decided they had developed the Dual Pathways plan sufficiently that they could share it publicly. (Individual School Board members were provided an opportunity to meet individually with Dan Nerad and Pam Nash for a preview of the plan before it was publicly announced, and most of us took advantage of the opportunity.) Last Wednesday, October 13, the administration presented the plan at a meeting of high school department chairs, and described it later in the day at a meeting of the TAG Advisory Committee. On the administration side, the sense was that those meetings went pretty well.
Then came Thursday, and the issue blew up at West. I don't know how it happened, but some number of teachers were very upset about what they heard about the plan, and somehow or another they started telling students about how awful it was. I would like to learn of a reason why I shouldn't think that this was appallingly unprofessional behavior on the part of whatever West teachers took it upon themselves to stir up their students on the basis of erroneous and inflammatory information, but I haven't found such a reason yet.
School Board member Marj Passmon on the Proposed Madison High School Changes
via email:
It was the intention of the Administration to first introduce the plan to HS staff and administrators and get some input from them. If you read the Plan then you know that it never discusses anything relating to current electives or student options and, I, personally, would never vote for any plan that does.
Although I admire the students for their leadership and support of their school, both they and their teachers seem to have leaped to certain conclusions. I am not saying that this is a perfect plan and yes, there are elements that may need to be worked on but to immediately jump on it without asking any questions or presenting suggestions for improvement does not speak well of those who helped to spread rumors.
It is now up to MMSD Administrators to explain to the staff and students what this Plan is actually about and, perhaps then, the West Staff can have a more objective discussion with their classes.
Marj
-----------------------------------
Marjorie Passman
Madison Board of Education
mpassman@madison.k12.wi.us
The consensus among Edupundits is that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement.
I argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Edupundits have chosen very complex subject matter for their investigations and reports. They study and write about dropouts, vouchers, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, budgets, curricula in all subjects, union contracts, school management issues, and many many more.
Meanwhile, practically all of them fail to give any attention to the basic purpose of schools, which is to have students do academic work. Almost none of them seems inclined to look past the teacher to see if the students are, for instance, reading any nonfiction books or writing any term papers.
Of course all of the things they do pay attention to are vitally important, but without student academic work they mean very little. Now, I realize there are state standards in math and reading, and some states test for writing after a fashion, but no state standards ask if students have read a history book while they were in school or written a substantial research paper, and neither do the SAT, ACT, or NAEP tests.
The fact is, today's young professionals need to be told how to dress and act
A few summers ago, Google (GOOG) intern Gregory Duncan was receiving instruction at his workstation in the company's New York office when a visitor swung by for a chat. Duncan remembers that his engineer-supervisor wasn't very gracious about the social call. "Just a minute," he hissed at the visitor, holding up an index finger in the universal signal for 'I have way more important things to deal with.' The visitor? Sergey Brin.
Civility in the workplace has been on the decline since Emily Post published her primer on the topic, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, in 1922. Even books about etiquette--like the current best-seller The No Asshole Rule--lack a certain polish. Yet as hoodie-wearing, emoticon-tweeting millennials graduate college and prepare for the workforce, the low point may just be arriving. In other words, it's a great time to be a professional etiquette coach.
As part of the curriculum review cycle to provide a systematic, ongoing method for the MMSD to update its curricular materials in each of the content areas, base line data is currently being acquired from each school, K-12in literacy. An additional goal ofthis review cycle is to provide all students with equitable access to research-and standards-based curricular materials and programs district wide.
Attached are matrixes that went to all schools seeking information about the Core Practices, Interventions, Assessments, and Resources in each ofthe buildings. Please note: these documents are a tool to gather information. It is NOT to evaluate buildings or individual teachers. Curriculum and Assessment will use the information provided to determine ways to better support the schools and more equitable ways.
This questionnaire is being distributed to the Instructional Resource Teachers at the elementary level, the Learning Coordinators at the middle level, and the Literacy Coaches at the high school leveL The intention is to gather information from a literacy expert who serves the entire school as the focus oftheirjob. We have also asked these staffmembers to confer with other literacy experts who work in their building: Read 180 teachers or six grade Literacy Coaches, for example. Once the information is shared with principals it will be returned day on Wednesday, October 27, 2010.
This gathering of information serves several initiatives within the strategic plan including better support the schools and more equitable ways.
The Board of Education information requests from the August 9, 2010 Board meeting are listed in the attached document (Attachment A). The following are the information requests that have been addressed in the attached documents:
Staff age and experience - rationale and implications for these data. We do not have staff age by school yet, but we have staff experience by school.
Staff Experience by School - Elementary School (Attachment B-1)
Staff Experience by School - Middle School (Attachment B-2)
Staff Experience by School - High School (Attachment B-3)
Staff Experience by School - Other (Attachment B-4)
Average experience of teachers by school (Attachment C)
Teacher turnover by school and include all staff categories not just instructional and administrative; Le., custodial, clerical, technical. food service
September 30, 2010 Memo to Board of Education regarding Turnover Data (Attachment D-1) School Turnover Summary - Annual Report by Employee Group (Attachment D-2) School Turnover Summary - Annual Report by Location (Attachment D-3)
A final report will be completed by November 11 as part of a discussion at the regular Board of Education meeting on November 29.
I am both delighted and honored to receive Dr. Hacker's correspondence--as well as the generous message of thanks left publicly by co-author Claudia Dreifus in the comments of the post itself--and given the opportunity, I composed a reply to them which clarifies and expands my earlier comments. What follows is a slightly altered version of these additional thoughts.
Firstly, I did not mean to argue that because many less prestigious colleges provide a great undergraduate education that therefore prestigious places which employ graduate teaching assistants do not. The PhD students in the United States I've met are brilliant, enthusiastic, generous people, and I feel fortunate to know them. Their undergraduates are likewise fortunate. So while I believe it is accurate to suggest that undergraduate education in the Ivy League schools is no better than it is in many other (occasionally unlikely) places, on the other hand I would be hesitant to argue that it is necessarily worse. Obviously, you do not need a research superstar to teach Sociology 101 -- nor do you need an instructor with thirty years of experience. Some of the most dedicated and effective teachers I've ever met are current PhD students.
Nevertheless, that fact does not justify the wholesale casualization of the academic workforce. My experience at Raritan Valley Community College was perhaps atypical. Like most community colleges, RVCC relies heavily upon poorly-paid adjuncts (some of whom are also graduate students in the region), but because I was taking upper-level courses as a student there I was fortunate to have taken classes taught primarily by full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. I believe that this was an invaluable part of my experience. These professors provided not just expertise but also continuity to the educational experience. For students such as me, knowing that the professors would be there semester after semester, year after year, fosters attachment to the college and confidence in its mission. Thus the faculty was key to RVCC's strength. A strong community requires social stability.
Purpose: The purpose of this Data Retreat is to provide all BOE members with an update on the progress of 4K planning and the work of subcommittees with a recommendation to start 4K September, 2011.
Research Providing four year old kindergarten (4K) may be the district's next best tool to continue the trend of improving academic achievement for all students and continuing to close the achievement gap.
The quality of care and education that children receive in the early years of their lives is one of the most critical factors in their development. Empirical and anecdotal evidence clearly shows that nurturing environments with appropriate challenging activities have large and lasting effects on our children's school success, ability to get along with others, and emotional health. Such evidence also indicates that inadequate early childhoOd care and education increases the danger that at-risk children will grow up with problem behaviors that can lead to later crime and violence.
Empowering Americans to make good financial decisions for themselves and their families is necessary to building a financially stronger America. To meet this goal, we must improve Americans' understanding of financial products and terms, expand financial access, and provide appropriate and robust consumer protection. President Obama is committed to building a country in which more families have the knowledge, skills, and financial access to make good financial choices and to establishing the consumer protections that enable and encourage them to do so.
As part of this commitment, President Obama issued an Executive Order establishing the President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability ("Council") and appointed a highly qualified group of men and women from the private and non-profit sectors to advise him on these critical issues. The Council, which will work at the direction of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, will advise the President on how to maximize the effectiveness of existing private and public sector financial education efforts and identify new approaches to increase financial capability for all Americans.
Making sure Americans have the information they need to make smart financial choices is a cornerstone of a number of Administration efforts. One of the central aspects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed in to law on July 21, 2010, is the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose sole mission is to look out for American consumers and empower them with the clear and concise information they need to make the financial decisions that are best for them and their families. The Bureau will create a level playing field for all providers of consumer financial products and services, regardless of their charter or corporate form and will ensure high and uniform standards across the market. It will rein in misleading sales pitches and hidden traps, and foster competition on the basis of price and quality. In addition, it will help lead efforts to increase financial capability by establishing an Office of Financial Education.
As some of you surely know, there is currently a national trend (supported by significant grant dollars) to increase access to AP courses. The DPI's "Blended Learning Innovations: Building a Pipeline for Equity and Access" is part of that trend.
The purpose of the grant is to close the race and SES based achievement gaps by increasing the number of AP courses in schools with high levels of poverty and by increasing the participation and success of poor and minority students in AP courses and testing. The MMSD is a partner in the grant.
Please note that both nationally (NAGC) and locally, AP has never been a focus of the "TAG" community. (On the contrary, those of us who worked on the MMSD TAG Plan advocated for consideration of an IB curriculum ... which is what's been proposed for the Madison Preparatory Academy.)
I imagine I am not the only one who would appreciate it if the District (and the press) would be clearer with the community about these points:
1) This high school proposal has been in the works for a long time. (Importantly, it has been in the works since well before the West DPI petition and complaint. The complaint may have sped up the rolling out of the plan, for better and worse, but it did not impact the content of the plan. As evidence, consider the second paragraph of the October 14 letter sent out to the West community: there is no mention whatsoever of 9th and 10th grade honors classes, which is the sole focus and request of the DPI complaint.)
2) The extent to which the DPI's "equity and access" AP grant is driving the content of the MMSD's high school proposal.
FOR more than half a century, Americans have fled the cities in their millions, heading away from crime and poverty towards better schools and safer neighbourhoods in the suburbs. Now poverty is catching up with them. According to two new reports from the Brookings Institution, over the past decade the number of poor people in the suburbs has jumped by a whopping 37.4% to 13.7m, compared with some 12.1m people below the poverty line in cities. Although poverty rates remain higher in the inner cities, the gap is narrowing.
Suburban areas largely escaped during earlier downturns, but not this time. Support groups say people are using safety-net programmes, such as food stamps or unemployment insurance, who have never applied for them before. They are often making tough choices. "It's mortgage or food," observes Paule Pachter of Long Island Cares, a non-profit group on Long Island, one of the first destinations to be populated by escapees from the city.
It was inevitable that Michelle Rhee, the District of Columbia's hard-driving schools chancellor, would resign after her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost last month's Democratic primary. It was no secret that Ms. Rhee had a strained relationship with Vincent Gray, the presumptive mayor and chairman of the City Council.
Still, Ms. Rhee's departure is a loss for the nation's capital. It has unsettled middle-class parents who valued the strong, reform-minded leadership that was setting Washington's schools on the path back from failure. And it sent a tremor through the private foundations that provisionally committed nearly $80 million to support the school reforms that were started during Ms. Rhee's tenure.
After Mr. Gray's clashes with Ms. Rhee, it was good news that he said the right things after her resignation. He pledged to move ahead with the reform agenda, which has strengthened the city's teacher corps, remade a patronage-ridden central bureaucracy and raised math and reading scores. He said he would keep Ms. Rhee's senior staff on for the remainder of the school year and named her deputy and longtime associate, Kaya Henderson, the interim chancellor.
They agree on the need for more charter schools and see a property tax cap as an important tool to rein in school spending.
They part ways on consolidating school districts and differ greatly on how to reform public education.
Yes, Andrew M. Cuomo and Carl P. Paladino disagree as much as they agree, but, in the eyes of educators, what's more important is the candidates' lack of attention to education as a campaign issue.
"It doesn't seem a priority for either candidate," said Grand Island Superintendent Robert W. Christmann, who also heads the State Council of School Superintendents. "It seems to be getting short shrift."
In 2005 Dan Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, approached the Chicago Public Schools for help reviving manufacturing in Chicago. The result was Austin Polytechnical Academy, whose mission is to redefine vocational education in Chicago and beyond, and revive the city's manufacturing industry by educating the next generation of advanced manufacturers--part engineer and part machinist. Through a diverse curriculum, Polytech aims to prepare students for college but also encourages them to pursue careers in advanced manufacturing that do not require a four-year degree.
This year the school will be graduating its first senior class and Chicago News Cooperative reporter Meribah Knight is following three students, Deandre Joyce, Stran'ja Burge and Marquiese Travae Booker, as they navigate the academic year and carve out their future. Facing a school record of poor academic performance and a community rife with violence, poverty and unemployment, these honor students are determined to stay on track and come out on top. Her first story will be posted on our Web site tonight.
A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.
Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
There are no superheroes coming to save the day for students in America's failing schools, cautions the heart-wrenching new documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman.' "
No superheroes, but students who want choices do face enemies. In fact, they -- well, their lawyers -- appeared before the state Supreme Court Tuesday.
I'm not talking about teachers unions, whom "Waiting" largely fingers as the obstacles to education reform. They are a huge impediment in some places but the situation's different in Georgia, and in any case the problem is much broader than that. It covers all those in the education establishment who put preserving their fiefdoms above giving students their best chance at a good education.
And if that doesn't sum up the school systems suing to overturn the law creating Georgia's Charter School Commission, I don't know what does.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground or perched high on stone sculptures outside the school, about a quarter of West High's 2,086 students staged a silent 37-minute sit-in Friday morning outside their building to protest a district proposal to revamp curriculum at the city's high schools.
The plan, unveiled to Madison School District teachers and parents this week, would offer students in each high school the chance to pick from advanced or regular classes in the core subjects of math, science, English and social studies. Students in the regular classes could also do additional work for honors credit.
Designed to help the district comply with new national academic standards, the proposal comes in the wake of a complaint filed against the district by parents in the West attendance area arguing the district fails to offer adequate programs for "talented and gifted" ninth and 10th grade students at West. The complaint has prompted an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Okay, everyone, remember to breathe, and don't forget to read.
A draft copy of possible high school curriculum changes got what could be gently characterized as a turbulent response from staff and students at West High School. Within hours of the release of a proposal that would offer more advanced placement options in core level courses at local high schools, there was a furious reaction from staff and students at West, with rumors flying, petitions signed and social media organizing for a protest. All in all, the coordination and passion was pretty amazing and would have done a well-financed political campaign proud.
Wednesday and Thursday there was talk of a protest walk-out at West that generated interest from over 600 students. By Friday morning, the march had morphed into a silent sitdown on the school steps with what looked like 200 to 300 students at about 10:50 a.m. when I attended. There were also adult supporters on the street, a media presence and quite a few police cars, although the demonstration was quiet and respectful. (Somehow, I don't think the students I saw walking towards the Regent Market or sitting, smoking, on a stone wall several blocks from school, were part of the protest).
NAS Unearths Censored Study on High School Research Papers
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published a long-buried study on the state of the history research paper in American high schools. The 2002 study sponsored by The Concord Review (TCR) went unpublished when its benefactor, the Albert Shanker Institute, found the results unflattering to high school teachers.
In commissioning the study, TCR founder Will Fitzhugh sought to find out why American high schools aren't doing a better job of teaching students to write--specifically, why so few teachers assign major research papers. 95 percent of teachers surveyed believed that research papers are important, but 62 percent never assigned extended-length essays.
According to the report, the biggest barriers to teachers are time and class size. Most teachers said that grading papers took too much personal time, and that not enough time was provided for this in the school day. Teachers surveyed taught an average of 80 students each. Assigning a 20-page paper then means having 1,600 pages to grade. The Concord Review urged high schools to support teachers by providing more time for them to grade papers.
Fitzhugh considered what may be lost if most high school history teachers never assign a long research paper:
It may very well mean that a majority of our high school students never read a complete nonfiction book on any subject before they graduate. They may also miss the experience of knowing a fair amount about some important topic--more, for instance, than anyone else in their class. They may also miss a fundamental step in their preparation for demanding college work.
"This is an important study, even eight years later," said Peter Wood, NAS president. "It sheds light on a problem that keeps getting worse and reverberates through college and employment. American high schools should take heed from this study to change their ways and make research paper-writing a priority." In an introduction to the study, Wood wrote, "[NAS's] interest in this is part of our broader goal of rebuilding the basis for genuine liberal arts education in the United States."
The National Association of Scholars advocates for higher education reform. To learn more about NAS, visit www.nas.org.
The Malibu Times sent a questionnaire to eight candidates running for four seats on the Board of Education for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. They were given the same time frame to respond and were limited to 150 words per answer.
There is a feeling by many in Malibu that this city is an afterthought for school district officials. Why does this sentiment exist? What can be done to change this feeling?
This feeling is understandable. Although Santa Monica and Malibu are part of a unified school district, the vast majority of district students and voters come from Santa Monica. All current school board members are from Santa Monica, the central office is in Santa Monica and our two cities are 15 miles apart. If I am elected, I will work hard to change the feeling that Malibu is an "afterthought" and to ensure that Malibu families are heard and feel an integral part of the district.
As a school board member, I will meet regularly with Malibu parents and staff to listen and learn, and address the specific concerns of Malibu schools. I will also develop opportunities for district-wide shared educational and social experiences. Whether we live in Santa Monica or Malibu, we all share the same aspirations for our children and our schools.
Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old's stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane's mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.
She's right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.
It's not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.
Charter schools are all the rage these days. The public is increasingly smitten with them -- in this year's Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup education poll, 68% of respondents said they support charter schools, up from 42% in 2000 -- but few people know what charters are. When the education journal Education Next asked Americans some basic questions this summer about charter schools, such as whether they can charge tuition or hold religious services, fewer than 1 in 5 respondents knew the correct answer (which was no in both cases). The confusion is so pervasive that more than half of the teachers surveyed couldn't answer the questions correctly either.
Quick primer: Charters are public schools that generally operate independently of traditional school districts. Since 1992, they have grown in number from one in Minnesota to about 5,000 in 40 states and the District of Columbia. (Ten states don't have laws allowing charter schools.) Collectively, they serve about 1.6 million students, and an estimated 420,000 kids are on various waiting lists to get into them. By law, when more students apply to a charter than there are seats available, the school has to hold a lottery to determine who gets in.
Maddy Winters knows what she wants. Yes to ballet, no to soccer, yes to astronomy, and definitely yes to hanging out with the older crowd of third and fourth graders on her block.
Just 3 years old, she begged to go to school, but the local public school just won't do for her parents, Mark Filippone and Marie Winters. In September, Maddy will be enrolled at the Philadelphia Free School, where she will continue to decide what she wants to do all day long.
The Free School, which plans to launch a pilot program in January in South Philadelphia for students ages 4 to 18, follows a democratic model of education, meaning no tests, no curriculum, no bells every 45 minutes, no separation into grades, and no teachers. The adults at the school will be called "staff" and be elected by the students each year. The students will also vote on the school's budget and serve on a judicial committee that deliberates on misbehaving peers.
The high-profile head of DC's schools exits, leaving an uncertain legacy. Will her successor follow through on her reforms--or forfeit millions in federal funds?
As expected, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee will announce Wednesday that she will step down after three years on the job.
Rhee's tenure was defined by school closings, teacher dismissals, and incremental student test score gains in one of the poorest-performing and most racially segregated school districts in the nation. A Teach for America veteran who had never before run a school district, Rhee became a national spokesperson for aggressive school reform, unafraid to voice her disdain--often in the media--for teachers unions and for concepts such as cooperation and community buy-in.
Few documentaries have had as profound an impact as 2006's An Inconvenient Truth. Davis Guggenheim's film about Al Gore's crusade to educate the public about global warming won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, helped Gore snag a Nobel Prize, and incited a culture-wide debate about the film's subject.
Guggenheim has worked extensively in television and narrative films. He worked as a producer and director on Deadwood and helmed the pilot for the recent Melrose Place remake, in addition to directing films like Gossip and Gracie, a docudrama based on the teenage years of Guggenheim's wife, actor Elisabeth Shue. But Guggenheim is best known as a muckraking documentarian whose ambitious, zeitgeist-capturing epics forthrightly address major social issues. Guggenheim has made headlines for his latest documentary, Waiting For Superman, an impassioned exploration of the failure of the American public-school system that has incited heated debate and attracted vitriolic attacks from teachers' unions for its less-than-flattering depiction of them and its evangelizing on behalf of charter schools. The A.V. Club recently spoke with the idealistic filmmaker about making movies about quagmires, being hated on by teachers, and whether President Obama is a cactus.
The A.V. Club: What's the relationship between your documentary about first-year teachers, The First Year, and Waiting For Superman?
Let's start with something we can all agree with: some of NJ's public schools are great and some stink. The worst schools are usually in the most impoverished urban areas. This disparity has remained unchanged through many different education commissioners and both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Another truism: we've recognized this fact for decades and have tried mightily to alleviate disparities through additional funding to impoverished districts. This has worked well in a few places and less well in many others.
And another: NJ is broke. We're spending as much as (or more than) residents can bear for public education. Increased state funding in our neediest districts is not an option.
Let's continue the truisms: New Jerseyans love their home rule. A Garden State school board and administration in a well-performing district is insular, circumscribed, a world unto itself. Our bulimic state government - scarfing down money and vomiting out regulations and mandates - merely increases a functional district's isolation and lack of shared responsibility to poor kids outside its wrought iron gates.
We sure hope the Madison School District is serious about pursuing more charter and specialty schools.
Superintendent Dan Nerad told the State Journal editorial board on Tuesday he plans to appoint a committee next month to study alternatives to traditional schools.
Giving parents and students more options and innovations will help keep more middle class families in the Madison district. At the same time, charter schools and their spin-offs in Madison have catered to a higher percentage of low-income and minority students. So they're not elitist.
Teaching students in new ways can boost student interest and effort while getting more parents involved in their children's educations -- a key ingredient for success. And if new approaches don't work, they can be shut down.
We are writing today to clarify the proposal for high school course offerings in the Madison Metropolitan School District. While discussion and questioning should be part of any change process, the discussion needs to center on factual information.
We have proposed that Advanced Placement offerings be increased in all of our high schools. We have also focused on making an embedded honors option available in 9th and 10th grade English and Social Studies next year and Math and Science the following year at all four high schools. We have also proposed increasing support to students who may not traditionally have participated in an honors or AP course so that rigorous opportunities can become part of every high school student's transcript.
What we have NOT proposed is the elimination of any electives at any of the high schools. Our current high school offerings vary quite widely across the district and we are striving to make good things available across all attendance areas. Nothing in the proposal prohibits a dynamite elective course from being shared and adopted across the city, in fact, some consistency of elective offerings would be welcomed.
The two pathways are groupings of courses. They are NOT a way to group students. Student and family choice is wide open. We are also proposing a set of assessments that will start in middle school to help inform families, students, and teachers about skills that students have that are strong and skills that need to be supported and improved. Those assessments will be given every year and are meant to be used to inform students and families about student progress and growth and to allow students and families to make informed decisions about future courses.
Please understand that students will still have choices. If they chose not to take an Advanced Placement course and wish to take an elective instead, that option remains.
We regret that incomplete information was used to make students and families upset. The proposal had, and still has the word "draft" on it. We look forward to productive conversations with all of you about ways in which we can now move forward.
Before I delve into the mess and the proposal, I think it is important to say that despite huge and inexcusable problems with the process, many unanswered questions and some real things of concern; there are some good things in the proposal. One part near the heart of the plan in particular is something I’ve been pushing for years: open access to advanced classes and programs with supports. In the language of the proposal:
Pathways open to all students. Students are originally identified by Advanced Placement requirements and other suggested guidelines such as EXPLORE /PLAN scores, GPA, past MS/HS performance and MS/HS Recommendation. however, all students would be able to enroll. Students not meeting suggested guidelines but wanting to enroll would receive additional supports (tutoring, skill development classes, AVID, etc.) to ensure success. (emphasis added and I would like to see it added in the implementation).
Right now there are great and at times irrational barriers in place. These need to go. I hope this does not get lost as the mess is cleaned up.
This is in four sections: The Mess; What Next?; The Plan: Unanswered Questions and Causes for Concern; and Final Thought.
arent of an early-entrance child: We live in a town where many parents, school board members, and teachers hold their kids back a grade in school so they can excel in sports. When such a choice appears to be an accepted norm, accelerating a young boy into school goes against the local culture. Some parents and teachers have tried to politely ask me if I've considered the implications of my son "always being the youngest." At first, I felt like I had to defend my son and our decision to them. Now, I simply state that "parents try to do what they feel is best for their child. We looked at the research and our child's readiness and made the decision. He's thriving in school and sports, too." If the well-meaning continue to inquire, I share my unique sports perspective: I went to college on a sports scholarship. Were sports important to me? Yes. However, being challenged in school to be a whole person was - and is - more important.
Early entrance to Kindergarten is one excellent option for some highly advanced children. It is the process by which a child enters Kindergarten earlier than he or she otherwise would have according to school or state decreed "cut-off dates." In Montana, our magical date is September 10th. If the child is five years old on or before September 10th of that year, he gets to go to Kindergarten. If he turns five on September 11th or later, he goes the next year.
Online education companies Eleutian Technology and Idapted Ltd said on Wednesday that they will merge, bringing together the U.S. and Chinese companies in the fast-growing $100 billion market for online English instruction.
Backers of the new company, which will retain Eleutian's name, include Cheyenne Capital and Gobi Partners, as well as former Kleiner, Perkins partner Russell Siegelman and Xu Xiaoping, co-founder of New York-listed Chinese education company New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc (EDU.N), Eleutian said in a statement.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Under the merger, Kent Holiday will remain as president and CEO, while Idapted Cjief Executive Adrian Li will become general manager for China.
The introduction of this volume details government spending on three early childhood programs - Early Head Start, Head Start, and home-visiting programs. Co-editors Ron Haskins and Steve Barnett also review enrollment in each type of program, review the contrasting papers presented on each program, and recommend policies designed to increase the returns on investment produced by these early childhood programs.
We once cherished our universities--but now feel that there are too many of them and they hand out worthless degrees. Why have our highest seats of learning become so unloved?
The streets of London will soon be bustling with architecture students starting their first year at UCL's Bartlett faculty. Armed with illuminating quotations from great authorities they will inspect, for example, the Nelson staircase at Somerset House, marvel at its elegant, soaring wit, discover for themselves its moral purpose, and never take staircases for granted again. At the same time, University of Westminster architecture undergraduates will seethe under and over the city, mapping where global warming will flood it and creating apocalyptic, realistic flood defences. Last year a similar project won every prize going. The head of the English department at Roehampton, Jenny Hartley, (the author of a highly praised book on Dickens's house for fallen women) will organise reading groups in prisons. War studies students at King's College, London will spend their second year gaming every battle in the second world war from both sides to see if they can get them to come out differently, while history undergraduates at Queen Mary prepare questions to put to the cabinet secretary when they meet him. The dentistry department at King's has invented an online course that is managed in the developing world by students and teachers--and is changing the subject. Meanwhile, politics undergraduates at Hull prepare for placements with local politicians.
A few weeks ago, I spent a day at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The first thing you see on the drive into the campus is a six-foot-tall sign, stuck in the grassy median of the entrance road, that says, "WE'RE NUMBER 1" and "Top Up-and-Coming National University AGAIN!" It sets a tone: UMBC is on the move. How far it will be allowed to go is less certain.
The No. 1 designation was courtesy of U.S. News & World Report, which conducts an "up and coming" survey along with its regular annual ranking of which colleges are sitting atop the biggest piles of money and fame. The campus itself is fairly standard, with clusters of dorms encircling a compact group of grassy lawns and academic buildings. Throngs of students were out that day, lounging in the kind of late-summer sunlight that keeps brochure photographers in business. Everyone was fiddling with cellphones, and there was nowhere to park.
Candidates for superintendent discussed charter schools and bad teachers at a candidate forum.
LARAMIE -- Candidates for state superintendent discussed how they'd address standardized testing and bad teachers during a debate Tuesday at the University of Wyoming.
Former Cheyenne junior high assistant principal and Republican candidate Cindy Hill said Wyoming teachers need measures they can trust and academic leaders. State Senator and Democratic candidate Mike Massie said he believes that struggling teachers should get a year's worth of additional training and mentoring to get back on track. And if the plan isn't working, teachers should be fired no matter how long they've previously held their position.
West: TAG Complaint and Proposed High School Redesign Create Perfect Storm
The parent complaint to DPI over MMSD's failure to comply with WI laws on Talented and Gifted education have combined with administration's recent proposal to create more consistency across the four major high schools, to create a perfect storm of controversy at Madison West. Within the past 24 hours, allegations that the proposal eliminates all electives have spawned a number of calls and e-mails to the Board of Education, a FB page (Walk-out Against MMSD School Reform) promoting a student walk out on Friday, and a YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zgjee-GmGI created to protest the elimination of electives.
As a board member, I have a somewhat different take largely because I know that allegations that the proposal to standardize core high school curriculum is not a product of the DPI complaint. Anyone who has watched MMSD operate, would probably agree that nothing is put together that quickly (the complaint is less than a month old), especially when it involves a proposal.
I also just received the proposal a day or so ago. In full disclosure, I did not take advantage of the briefings conducted for board members who met with the superintendent and assistant superintendent individually or in pairs. I'm a certifiable pain in the neck and thought that any presentations should be made to the board as a whole in an open board or committee meeting, but that is just my issue.) I am just beginning to read and think through what is being proposed, so have no firm opinion yet.
There's been a great deal of misinformation and angry speculation flying around West High regarding the District's High School Curricular Reform proposal.
On Tuesday, District administrators unveiled their plan for high school curricular reform at meeting with nearly 200 educators from all four high schools. Several parents attended the subsequent TAG Advisory Committee meeting, during which they also revealed an overview of the plan to this group.
I attended the TAG Advisory meeting. As I understand it, this plan involves increasing the number of accelerated and AP courses and expanding access to these options.
When teachers at West got news of this plan, many were enraged at not being included in its development. Further, many concluded that the District plans to replace West's electives with AP courses. They've expressed their concerns to students in their classes, and kids are riled up. Students plan to stage a walk-out on Friday, during which they will walk down to the Doyle Building and deliver a petition to Superintendent Nerad protesting the proposed reforms.
We received the Open Enrollment numbers for this year and they provide much grist for thought. My first reaction is prompted by the fact that 158 MMSD students have open enrolled in the McFarland School District. Since we have to send about $6,800 per student to districts that receive our open enrollers, this means that we'll be cutting a (perhaps figurative) check in excess of $1,000,000 to the McFarland School District.
Since last year, McFarland has operated a virtual school. This year, according to Gayle Worland's article in last Sunday's State Journal, the virtual school has enrolled 813 students, and a grand total of 5 of them live in McFarland.
Actually, it is overly generous to say that McFarland "operates" the virtual school, known as Wisconsin Virtual Academy. More accurately, McFarland has contracted with a publicly-traded corporation, K12, Inc., to operate the charter school, through another organization called Four Lakes Education.
President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children's Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start several years ago typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada's two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in "Waiting for 'Superman,' " the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children's Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And its cost -- around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending -- has raised questions about its utility as a nationwide model.
$16,000 per student is close to Madison's roughly $15K / student annual spending.
Why don't more of our smartest, most accomplished college graduates want to become teachers?
People trying to improve education in this country have been talking a lot lately about boosting "teacher effectiveness." But nearly all such efforts focus on the teachers who are already in the classroom, instead of seeking to change the caliber of the people who enter teaching in the first place.
Three of the top-performing school systems in the world -- those in Finland, Singapore and South Korea -- take a different approach, recruiting 100 percent of their teachers from the top third of their high school and college students. Simply put, they don't take middling students and make them teachers. They tap their best people for the job.
Of course, academic achievement isn't the whole story in these countries. They screen would-be teachers for other important qualities, and they invest heavily in training teachers and in retaining them for their entire careers. But scholastic prowess comes first: You don't get through the classroom door in Finland, Singapore or South Korea without having distinguished yourself academically. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers scored among the top third of SAT and ACT test-takers back in high school. In high-poverty schools, that figure is just 14 percent.
In your first year as the commissioner of education in Rhode Island, you earned headlines for backing a plan to fire all the high-school teachers in the poorly performing district of Central Falls. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and even President Obama chimed in with support. Did the attention surprise you?
I think that just the visual for people was noticeable, and I think what exactly was happening was misunderstood. I think people seemed to feel that teachers were being blamed for the performance of the school, which was not the way we understood what was happening.
Perhaps overshadowed by the Central Falls controversy, you've put forth a dramatic reform agenda aimed at improving teacher quality. To help, you created a new evaluation system that requires an annual review of all teachers.
I think most professionals would be surprised to know [that annual reviews] weren't already in place. Professionalism is about being respected for the work that you do, being acknowledged for the work that you do, and being accountable for the work that you do. I meet teachers in our state all the time who are more than ready to be held accountable for their work and are very proud of the results that they're able to see with their students.
What's gotten the most attention is that evaluations will be primarily based on measures of student growth and achievement.
How to fix our schools" is the title of a manifesto published on Sunday, October 10, in The Washington Post by Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, and fourteen other school superintendents across the country.
The Future Of Our Children
The piece starts off well enough:
"It's time for all of the adults - superintendents, educators, elected officials, labor unions and parents alike - to start acting like we are responsible for the future of our children. Because right now, across the country, kids are stuck in failing schools, just waiting for us to do something."
Who can disagree with that? The writers continue: "As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their zip code or even their parents' income - it is the quality of their teacher."
When a 12-year-old's mother asks him "How many times do I have to tell you to stop?" he will understand that the answer, if any is required, had better not include a number.
But that insight requires a sophisticated understanding of ironic language that develops long after fluent speech. At what age do children begin to sense the meaning of such a question, and to what degree can they respond appropriately to other kinds of irony?
In laboratory research on the subject, children demonstrate almost no comprehension of ironic speech before they are 6 years old, and little before they are 10 or 11. When asked, younger children generally interpret rhetorical questions as literal, deliberate exaggeration as a mistake and sarcasm as a lie.
The rise of mainstream tablet computers is proving to have unforeseen benefits for children with speech and communication problems--and such use has the potential to disrupt a business where specialized devices can cost thousands of dollars.
Before she got an iPad at age two, Caleigh Gray couldn't respond to yes-or-no questions. Now Caleigh, who has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, uses a $190 software application that speaks the words associated with pictures she touches on Apple Inc.'s device.
"We're not having to fight to prove to people that she is a smart little girl anymore, because it's there once they see her using the iPad," said Caleigh's mother, Holly Gray, who said her daughter can use the tablet to identify colors or ask to go outside.
iOS speech and translation tools are quite remarkable.
Legislation co-sponsored by Deputy Assembly Speaker John Burzichelli would declare the last week of September as "Jersey Fresh Farm to School Week" to promote the importance of supporting New Jersey's agricultural business and the value of healthy eating for children.
"Our state is bursting with locally grown produce, from blueberries, cranberries, peaches, to tomatoes, New Jersey grows it," said Burzichelli, D-3rd Dist.
"Teaching children about the importance of Jersey Fresh produce can help them understand what farming is about and that fresh vegetables are good for them and their health."
The legislation calls on the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to design a bidding guide that allows for school purchases of locally-grown food and would establish a website to provide information for farmers, distributors, and schools to create purchasing networks.
As more students choose web-based learning for reasons that can include bullying or health issues, enrollment at the state's publicly funded online charter schools has risen by nearly half within five years, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education.
Department figures show that the state's 27 free e-schools had more than 29,000 students taking classes by computer during the last school year, up from about 20,000 in 2005. The enrollment numbers were first reported Monday by The Columbus Dispatch, which also noted that the increase came during a period when no new online charters opened in Ohio. The state imposed a moratorium before the 2005-06 school year.
The e-charters are drawing more students because they fill a need and provide families with options, school officials and parents said.
Online schools can be attractive to students who feel they're being bullied at a traditional school and need a refuge, said Nick Wilson, a spokesman for the Columbus-based Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. ECOT is the state's oldest and largest Internet charter school.
The housing bubble blew up so catastrophically because science and technology let us down. It blew up because our technocratic elite told us to expect an ever-wealthier future, and science hasn't delivered. Except for computers and the Internet, the idea that we're experiencing rapid technological progress is a myth.
Such is the claim of Peter Thiel, who has either blundered into enough money that his crackpot ideas are taken seriously, or who is actually on to something. A cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook (his stake was recently reported to be around 3%), Mr. Thiel is the unofficial leader of a group known as the "PayPal mafia," perhaps the most fecund informal network of entrepreneurs in the world, behind companies as diverse as Tesla (electric cars) and YouTube.
Mr. Thiel, whose family moved from Germany when he was a toddler, studied at Stanford and became a securities lawyer. After PayPal, he imparted a second twist to his career by launching a global macro hedge fund, Clarium Capital. He now matches wits with some of the great macro investors, such as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, by betting on the direction of world markets.
Those two realms of investing--narrow technology and broad macro--are behind his singular diagnosis of our economic crisis. "All sorts of things are possible in a world where you have massive progress in technology and related gains in productivity," he says. "In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem."
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee will announce Wednesday that she is resigning at the end of this month, bringing an abrupt end to a tenure that drew national acclaim but that also became a central issue in an election that sent her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, to defeat.
Rhee survived three contentious years that made her a superstar of the education reform movement and one of the longest-serving school leaders in the city in two decades. Student test scores rose, and the teachers union accepted a contract that gave the chancellor sweeping powers to fire the lowest-performing among them.
But Rhee will leave with considerable unfinished business in her quest to improve teaching, close the worst schools and infuse a culture of excellence in a system that has been one of the nation's least effective at educating students.
The academic calendar is symbolic of how an institution values time. It pegs the community to set dates like enrollment and graduations; exam periods and study periods; and holidays and vacations. In my university's case, what is not contained in the calendar is more instructive than what it actually says. Like many non-modern societies, we take a more malleable approach to time and along with it, a less strict teaching regimen.
My University's academic calendar is a historical artifact from a former agrarian society that was dependent upon the young's labor for planting and harvesting. It begins in June and ends in March. Book-ending the semesters are Christian holidays (All Saints/Souls Day in November 1; and Lent in late March/early April). Apart from the requisite two-week holiday for Christmas and New Year (December), we also give way to numerous "public" holidays celebrating heroes and heroic events (about 7 national and 3 local), which under former President Arroyo's holiday economics scheme invariably were moved to Mondays (and inconveniently announced the week before the holiday!).
Caleb Carr was excited to return to classes this fall so he could use a school-issued cell phone -- not just to talk, but to learn.
Carr and his classmates at Lutheran High School South in Newport are taking advantage of a $42,000 program from GoKnow, a Dallas-based mobile education company founded in Ann Arbor that equips students with cell phones.
The phones rely on mobile applications that let students -- many of whom text faster than they write -- take notes, complete assignments and watch presentations from the palms of their hands.
"Homework's more fun with the phone," said Carr, a junior at the private school who was part of a student group that tested the phones this summer. "For a teenager to have a phone, it's a great privilege."
GoKnow is one of several mobile applications companies with Michigan connections trying to cash in on the mobile technology revolution, encouraging students and teachers to trade notebooks for smartphones they say help pupils learn better.
Kwami Coleman, the new kid on the block at the Jazzschool, is a graduate student in musicology at Stanford who grew up in New York, where his dad was a pianist.
He got his job through inadvertent networking when, at a musicological conference in Quebec, he asked author Scott DeVeaux ("The Birth of Bebop") about the importance of Igor Stravinsky hearing Charlie Parker play live at Birdland.
Flash forward a couple of years and Susan Muscarella is looking for someone to teach the history of jazz from 1920 to the present at the Jazzschool. She contacts DeVeaux, who says he doesn't know of anyone, except for this young guy at Stanford who impressed him at the musicology conference.
This afternoon, I received an outraged phone call from my sister. "A bunch of obnoxious and pushy parents are demanding West High offer more AP classes. They say West needs to improve talented and gifted classes. Can you believe it? I knew this would happen someday." Although my sister's characterization of these parents' complaints was less than completely accurate, her impressions and outrage will be shared with many members of my high school's community. This makes me both frustrated and concerned for my former school.
Madison West High School prides itself on its diversity, fine arts programs, and impressive academic achievements, and West prepared most of my classmates well for our college careers. The preparation, however, did not involve many AP classes. Some of my classmates took AP exams for subjects in which they had not had official AP classes, and they often scored well. But many of us took only an AP language exam or maybe an AP calculus test. Historically, West's teachers have resisted forgoing their own curricula in favor of those dictated by the College Board. And with instructional minutes treated like a precious commodity, I can see why many teachers don't want to sacrifice the six weeks of school after the AP exams to the severe senioritis that overcame my classmates and myself in the few AP classes I did take. I have great respect for my teachers' anti-AP position, and I think West is a better school for it. So whether or not these "obnoxious and pushy parents" are demanding AP classes for their gifted children, I share my sister's skepticism of changing West's curriculum to fit with that of the College Board.
"I'm grateful to the school board and transportation department who came together to reinstate the bus routes for my corridor. There's always room for improvement and it's early in the (school) year. I just moved to the county and I'm still trying to evaluate some things with the board."
Kenny Ruffin, Riverdale councilman
Grade: A-
"They've pretty much met most of the goals set for them by SACS. They're the board I would credit with helping restore Clayton County's school accreditation. The only thing that keeps me from giving them an A is that there's still a couple of members who still need to work toward working together cohesively for the benefit of the community."
Madison residents will have an opportunity to evaluate two school board seats in the April, 2011 election. Marj Passman and Ed Hughes currently occupy those positions. The City of Madison Clerk has posted candidate information here.
IT is alma mater to a gaggle of politicians, authors, an Antarctic explorer, an Anglican bishop and a rock star.
And this week it celebrates 100 years as the oldest state secondary school in Geelong.
Geelong High School, labelled the School of Choice, is marking the anniversary with a week of activities which started yesterday with a launch at the school hall and tours of the campus.
School principal David Whelan said the big day would be next Saturday, with reunions at the school and a Centenary Cabaret at South Barwon Civic Centre.
He said there were 300 people who had confirmed they would attend the cabaret.
Mr Whelan, who is in his fifth year as principal, said there were many well-known locals who had attended the school.
My column on Charles Hebert Flowers High School requiring a 3.0 grade point average to take an Advanced Placement course, then dropping the rule after I asked about it, inspired many people who have been barred from AP and college prep courses to offer their stories. Here are two accounts from people who suffered because of the still widespread and wrongheaded view that only top students should be challenged. Carolyn Elefant is a lawyer in Washington. Evelyn Nolan is a retired teacher from Prince George's County, where Flowers High is located.
Katharine Birbalsingh, 37, was ordered not to come into school on Thursday or Friday after making critical remarks before a speech by Education Secretary Michael Gove at the party conference in Birmingham on Tuesday.
Addressing the audience as a guest speaker, she gave a damning account of standards in schools, saying education had been "so dumbed down that even the children know it."
The board of governors at St Michael and All Angels Church of England Academy in Camberwell, south London, told Miss Birbalsingh to stay away from the school while they considered her position.
But the French teacher and deputy head has been told that she would be allowed to return to the classroom on Monday after parents voiced their support.
In her speech on Tuesday, Miss Birbalsingh told delegates of a "broken" system which "keeps poor children poor".
Gov. Chris Christie has said he strongly supports charter schools and recently spoke of his plans to ease the way for their expansion. That's great, but what's still missing is the money.
And it's all about the money. Without their fair share of state funding, charter schools will continue to struggle. They're public schools, but only get a portion of what a local district spends per student -- and, even worse, no public funding for facilities at all.
Charter schools allow for innovation and give parents a choice. Some are failing and should be shut down. But many are succeeding wildly and drawing huge waiting lists.
Money is their biggest handicap. Charter schools end up with less because they get none of the so-called "adjustment aid" the state gives out to districts. The disparity is greatest in places like Camden, Paterson or Jersey City, where district schools get the most adjustment aid.
A group of West High parents have filed a complaint concerning the perceived lack of sufficient gifted and talented programming as mandated by state statute.
A group of 50 parents in the West High School attendance area has asked state education officials to investigate whether the Madison School District is violating state law by denying high-achieving students access to the "talented and gifted" programming parents say they deserve.
In a Sept. 20 complaint to the state Department of Public Instruction made public Tuesday, the parent group argued that freshmen and sophomores at West have limited opportunities for advanced English, biology and social studies classes
I have heard similar complaints expressed by MG parents. (Some of which are addressed by recent changes to the high school science curriculum for freshman and sophomores. )
A small group of people you've probably never heard of spend $8 billion of your tax money each year, employ more than 90,000 people and set policies that affect 800,000 area schoolchildren.
Dr. Ricky A. Welkis is one of the few audience members at the sparsely attended Cobb county school board meeting in Marietta recently. Welkis is a school board candidate for post-6 in the upcoming election.
They are elected, but in some cases with fewer than 20 percent of voters casting ballots.
They are your school board members.
Metro Atlanta has some of the best and some of the worst.
There are patterns discernible in their bios: Most have college degrees; most get annual training; but a surprising 40 percent have had financial problems -- bankruptcies or liens -- even as they control multimillion-dollar and even billion-dollar budgets.
Recently, several metro Atlanta boards have presided over school systems in crisis. Often, those that do are accused of meddling at the schoolhouse.
School Board governance vs. administrative intransigence is a topic worth exploring, per Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak's recent blog post. It appears, to this observer, that some board members prefer to go along with the status quo while a few others are trying to drive change.
I didn't expect that going to hear the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela rehearse and play at the Beethovenfest in Bonn would give me a new perspective, not just on Beethoven but also on wealth and poverty and the divide between the haves and have-nots. Many of the teenagers in this orchestra (a younger version of the better-known Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela) come from the poor barrios of Caracas: what we would call slums, lacking basic amenities and privacy.
No wonder the kids I spoke to were so impressed by what they called the "beautiful" city of Bonn, where the Porsches and Mercedes glide through wide and well-ordered avenues, but where, from the deathly silence that reigns on the streets, you might think an invisible plague had killed the inhabitants.
But these kids obviously have something. In fact, what they have impressed the respectable burghers of Bonn so much that 1,600 of them rose to their feet after a concert consisting of the Fifth Symphonies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and then gave themselves up to delirious and quite un-middle-aged clapping and swaying as the orchestra launched into six encores.
It's neat to see my son, a first grader, get off his Chicago Public Schools bus when it drops him back home. It also reminds me of what's wrong with our education system.
Mayoral candidates should join me as the bus arrives about 2:45 p.m. That means he has been in school for, at most, five and a half hours. Chicago has the shortest school day of the 50 largest districts in the United States.
Ron Huberman, head of Chicago Public Schools, confirmed to me once that our school year is about seven weeks shorter than New York's.
The length of the school day is one of many topics being faced as education experiences another paroxysm of interest. It's partly due to "Waiting for Superman," a documentary about our flagging schools. Oprah Winfrey did two shows inspired by the movie, while NBC and MSNBC gave the subject a week of serious attention
The New York Times ran a story on September 30 about Singapore Math being used in some schools in the New York City area. Like many newspaper stories about Singapore Math, this one was no different. It described a program that strangely sounded like the math programs being promoted by reformers of math education, relying on the cherished staples of reform: manipulatives, open-ended problems, and classroom discussion of problems. The only thing the article didn't mention was that the students worked in small groups.
Those of us familiar with Singapore Math from having used it with our children are wondering just what program the article was describing. Spending a week on the numbers 1 and 2 in Kindergarten? Spending an entire 4th grade classroom period discussing the place value ramifications of the number 82,566? Well, maybe that did happen, but not because the Singapore Math books are structured that way. In fact, the books are noticeably short on explicit narrative instruction. The books provide pictures and worked out examples and excellent problems; the topics are ordered in a logical sequence so that material mastered in the various lessons builds upon itself and is used to advance to more complex applications. But what is assumed in Singapore is that teachers know how to teach the material--the teacher's manuals contain very little guidance. Thus, the decision to spend a week on the numbers 1 and 2 in kindergarten, or a whole class period discussing a single number is coming from the teachers, not the books.
The mistaken idea that gets repeated in many such articles is that Singapore Math differs from other programs by requiring or imparting a "deep understanding" and that such understanding comes about through a) manipulatives, b) pictures, and c) open-ended discussions. In fact, what the articles represent is what the schools are telling the reporters. What newspapers frequently do not realize when reporting on Singapore Math, is that when a school takes on such a program, it means going against what many teachers believe math education to be about; it is definitely not how they are trained in ed schools. The success of Singapore's programs relies in many ways on more traditional approaches to math education, such as explicit instruction and giving students many problems to solve, in some ways its very success represented a slap in the face to American math reformers, many of whom have worked hard to eliminate such techniques being used.
No education scholar in America throws an analytical knuckleball as well as David F. Labaree of Stanford University. You are reading along, enjoying the clarity of his prose and the depth of his research, thinking his argument is going one way when--whoops!--it breaks in another direction altogether.
It is dizzying, but in a fun way, like an intricate rollercoaster. In a recent book, for instance, Labaree showed that education schools like the one that employs him teach theories that have little to do with how schools work but--here comes the twist--that's okay because education school graduates ignore those courses once they start teaching.
He is at it again in his new book, "Someone Has To Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling." The book is only 280 pages long, but so rich in contrarian assaults on cherished American assumptions I cannot adequately summarize it. I will describe pieces of it instead, like the thrilling part where Labaree disembowels the argument for higher U.S. school standards made by Bob Compton, the high-tech entrepreneur who produced the film "Two Million Minutes" and completely skewered me once on cable TV.
We propose Chavez Elementary as the DLI site for the Memorial attendance area. Of all the elementary schools in this attendance area, Chavez student enrollment of Spanish-speaking English-language learners remained most consistent. This proposal reconunends that Chavez Elementary begin the 2011-2012 school year with two DLI classrooms, similar to Sandburg's DLI program which opened this school year with two DLI classrooms.
In addition, opening a DLI program at Cesar Chavez Elementary acknowledges the school's name sake, a Latino civil rights activist. The goals of DLI progrannning to develop cross-cultural understanding and bilingualism support Cesar Chavez' vision, and the MMSD strategic plan.
I thought the hula hoop was a fad when I was a kid, which is to say, I thought it would be gone in about a month. A half century later, hula hoops are still around.
I thought decentralization of decision making and budgeting for Milwaukee Public Schools a decade ago was a trend, which is to say, it was an important, lasting change in the educational landscape. Now, it's effectively gone. Just a fad.
Education history is filled with hot subjects of the moment - new ways to teach reading, new ways to handle misbehaving students, new ways to organize the school day. Teachers should stand in the front of the room. Teachers should stand in the back of the room. Teachers should wander around the room.
Most of these ideas leave the stage after a little while. You can make a lot of teachers roll their eyes just by mentioning some of them. Come back next year and we'll be doing things differently, they say.
I was once at a seminar for reporters and editors on fads, trends, and how to tell the difference. Everyone agreed fads go away quickly, trends stay, and you usually can't tell which is which until you wait them out. (I'm beginning to think this Internet thing is a trend, for example.)
So what about Michelle Rhee? The new Milwaukee Public Schools' reading program? The increasing and potent role of the federal government in shaping local education? "Waiting for Superman"? Response to Intervention?
I know how high school course choices affect college chances, but I know much less about how they affect lives. For that kind of advice, I rely on some experienced career specialists, such as Ann Emerson of Stafford County public schools.
She sent me a refreshingly cool appraisal of the red hot national campaign to expand math and science education. She explains why we are having such trouble persuading students to pursue careers in chemistry, psychometrics, physics, biotechnology and related pursuits.
The full term for this most fashionable of all 21st-century education trends is STEM, short for science, technology, engineering and math. STEM advocates want to put more emphasis on these subjects in school. They want to train more teachers in these disciplines and produce more professionals in these fields.
Early each school day morning, 10-year-old twins Galyn and Grace Hartung and their 8-year-old brother Henry bound out of the house and run to the school bus stop to play with friends from their Cross Plains neighborhood. But when the school bus pulls up to the curb some 20 minutes later, only the friends get on board.
The Hartung kids, virtual school students, head back home to a brightly painted basement room where many assignments are digital, the teachers are heard through a laptop and the study hall monitor is mom.
"It just feels like a normal way to do school," said Grace.
Galyn, Grace and Henry are among some 3,955 students enrolled this fall in 12 virtual charter schools statewide. That's up from 3,829 students in 2009-10 and 2,983 in 2008-09.
If Schools Were Like 'American Idol' . . . Unless we measure success by how children perform, we'll have higher standards for pop stars than public schools.
Over the past few years, I have often complained about a hidebound culture that prevents many newspapers from responding to the challenges of new technology. There is, however, another hidebound American institution that is also finding it difficult to respond to new challenges: our big-city schools.
Today, for example, the United States is home to more than 2,000 dysfunctional high schools. They represent less than 15% of American high schools yet account for about half of our dropouts. When you break this down, you find that these institutions produce 81% of all Native American dropouts, 73% of all African-American dropouts, and 66% of all Hispanic dropouts.
At our grade schools, two-thirds of all eighth-graders score below proficient in math and reading. The average African-American or Latino 9-year-old is three grades behind in these subjects. Behind the grim statistics is the real story: lost opportunities, crushed dreams, and shattered lives. In plain English, we trap the children who need an education most in failure factories.
A policy approved more than a decade ago designed to ensure kids were prepared for the next grade by passing a standardized test was eliminated Thursday by the State Board of Education because it contained exceptions and didn't appear to be effective.
The board agreed to end the requirement that students in third-, fifth- and eighth- grades pass end-of-grade tests to be promoted or end-of-course tests in five high school subjects to graduate. It was removed as the board agreed to approve five broad standards by which schools and teachers will be judged in coming years for student performance.
The testing requirement, which initially took effect in late 1999, was supposed to reduce "social promotion" -- students moving on to the next grade even if they hadn't mastered their grade-level subjects. Critics of the change at the time argued it would hurt minority students the most and the state lacked funding to give the students remedial help.
From a windowless basement office on Chicago's West Side, Greg White is trying to answer public education's $2 million-dollar question: What is the top priority for a school in Chicago's cash-strapped district?
The answer for Mr. White, chief executive of the LEARN Charter School Network -- which received two $1 million grants from Oprah Winfrey's Angel Network and the United States Department of Education last month -- is to open a fifth charter school in the network next fall. It is one of 10 charter schools in Chicago that Mr. White said he wanted to open in as many years, which would allow him to hire dozens of out-of-work teachers.
A month ago, those ambitious plans were in jeopardy. Chicago Public Schools approved a budget that cut district financing to charter schools by 6 percent, which could remove more than $400,000 from the network's budget this year. The two grants will cover the cost of opening the fifth school, Mr. White said.
A proposed agreement that would change how teachers are laid off in the nation's second-largest school district is being hailed as a landmark that could pave the way for changes in urban districts across the nation, but the city's teachers union said Wednesday that it had "serious concerns."
The settlement, which must be approved by a judge, would shield up to 45 underperforming schools from teacher layoffs for budget reasons. It also stipulates that vacancies be filled as quickly as possible, and contains a commitment to explore incentives, such as bonuses, to recruit and retain teachers and principals at poorly performing schools, with additional incentives if the school's academic performance improves.
The agreement stems from a lawsuit by American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California over teacher layoffs at three inner-city schools. The group had filed a class-action suit against the Los Angeles Unified School District in February, saying that mandated seniority-driven layoffs led to the three schools shedding some two-thirds of their teachers, which left students largely in the hands of substitutes.
The ACLU said students were being denied their state constitutional right to a fair and adequate education. It won a temporary injunction in May that prevented more layoffs of first- and second-year teachers who form the bulk of faculties at these schools in improverished areas, which more experienced teachers tend to avoid.
Baffling. That's one way to describe the back-to-back speeches last week by Education Secretary Duncan and President Obama at the centennial celebration of the National Urban League.
Both Obama and Duncan decried the status quo in education, offered some expensive and untried proposals for improvement, but failed to embrace an obvious and economical reform: school choice.
Too many low-income children are sentenced to chronically underperforming schools and nearly 50 percent of African-American and Latino students drop out of high school, putting themselves and the nation at risk, said the secretary. But while acknowledging some pockets of educational excellence that exist across the country, he and his boss overlooked the amazing work being done by religious and independent schools to combat the drop-out rate and close the achievement gap.
The most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that black eighth-grade students in private schools score roughly two full grade levels higher in reading than their counterparts in public schools. According to other government reports, private high school students take tougher courses, score much better on the SATs and ACTs, and go to college at significantly higher rates than their public school peers. If getting more students ready for college is the administration's primary educational goal, then helping more parents choose private schools for their children should be at the front of reform efforts.
A nationwide system of Child Development Accounts (CDAs) established as early as birth can lead to lifelong savings, raise college expectations and affordability, and serve as a basis for more stable and productive financial lives for American families, according to a new report.
The report, "Lessons from SEED, a National Demonstration of Child Development Accounts," is based on the experience of more than 1,171 children of all ages and their families who participated in pioneering CDA pilot programs in 12 states and communities. This pilot demonstration showed that, given the opportunity, families in some of the poorest communities in our country, would save for their child's college education and future. The programs tested CDAs, savings or investing accounts that begin as early as birth and allow parents and children to accumulate savings for college, homeownership or business initiatives.
The Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment Initiative, or SEED, is a 10-year, multi-million dollar national policy, practice and research endeavor to develop, test and promote matched savings accounts and financial education for children and youth. SEED was designed to set the stage for universal, progressive American policy for asset building among children, youth and families. It was funded by 12 national foundations, including the Ford and Citi Foundations.
An Update on Madison Preparatory Academy: A Proposed International Baccalaureate Charter School
Kaleem Caire, via email:
October 8, 2010
Greetings Madison Prep.
It was so wonderful to have those of you who were able to join us for the information session Tuesday night (Oct 5) here at the Urban League. We appreciate you dedicating part of your evening to learning about Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and we look forward to working with you on this very important project. You are receiving this email because you volunteered to join the team that is going to put Madison Prep on the map!
There are a few things we want to accomplish with this email:
1. Share information about the project management website that we've established to organize our communications and planning with regard to developing the school
2. Secure dates and times that you're are available to attend the first of your selected Design Team meeting(s)
3. Provide, as promised, background information on Madison Prep along with hyperlinks that will help you educate yourself on charter schools and components of the Madison Prep school design
Please SAVE this email as it contains a number of information resources that you will want to refer back to as we engage in planning Madison Prep. There is a lot of information here and we DO NOT expect you to read everything or learn it all at once. Take your time and enjoy the reading and learning. We will guide you through the process. J
PROJECT MANAGEMENT WEBSITE
Today, you will receive an email with a subject line that reads, "You're invited to join our project management and collaboration system." Please open this email. It will contain the information you need to sign up to access the Madison Prep Project Management Site. You will need to select a username and password. FYI, Basecamp is used by millions of people and companies to manage projects. You can learn more about basecamp by clicking here. Once in the site, you can click on the "help" button at the top, if necessary, to get a tutorial on how to use the site. It is fairly easy to figure out without the tutorial. If you have spam controls on your computer, please be sure to check your spam or junk mail box to look for emails and posting that we might make through Basecamp. Occasionally, postings will end up there. Please approve us as an email "sender" to you.
We have already posted the business plan for the original school (NextGen Prep) that is the same model as Madison Prep. We've also posted other important documents and have set a deadline of Friday, October 15, 2010 for you to review certain documents that have been posted. The calendar shown in Basecamp will include these assignments. Please email me or Ed Lee (elee@ulgm.org) if you have questions about using this site.
DATES FOR DESIGN TEAM MEETINGS
At the Interest Meeting we held on Tuesday (or in other conversation with us), you indicated a preference for getting involved in one of the following design teams. Please click on the name of the team below. You will be taken to www.doodle.com to identify your availability for these meetings. Please share your availability by Monday, October 11 at 12pm so that we can send out meeting notices that afternoon. We will address the dates and times of future meetings at the first meeting of each team. Please note, you do not need to be a "charter school" expert to be involved with this. You will have a lot of fun working towards developing a "high quality public charter school" and will learn in the process.
· Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. At least for the first meeting of this design team, Instructional strategies will be addressed as well. The Instruction team will develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL). Additional details will be shared at the first meeting.
· Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school's operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School. The Head of School will be the instructional leader and therefore, there will be some overlapping conversations that need to occur with the team that addresses instruction and quality teaching.
· Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
· Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep's budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school's operation."
· Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
BACKGROUND ON MADISON PREPARATORY ACADEMY AND CHARTER SCHOOLS
There is a lot of good support and buzz growing around Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (charter school). To ensure you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with charter schools and single gendered school models, we have listed internet resources below that you can visit and review. Just click on the hyperlinks.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be an all-male charter school that we intend to open in the Madison area in the fall of 2012. It will serve as a high quality school option for parents as well as a demonstration school for secondary education reform and improvement in Dane County. We want local teachers and schools to learn from Madison Prep, and will take steps
We have attached the two page executive summary again for your review along with a business plan for the school (that will be modified to fit Madison). Madison Prep was originally to be launched as a charter school in Washington, DC and Prince Georges County, Maryland in 2011 and 2013 under Next Generation, an organization I founded in Maryland with my wife and other partners in 2006.
ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS
In 2009, there were 5,043 charter schools in the United States compared to 33,740 private schools and 98,916 traditional public schools. Nationally, charter schools enrolled 1,536,079 students in 2009. According to the Wisconsin Charter School Association, there are more than 223 charter schools in Wisconsin serving more than 37,432 students. There are presently just two charter schools in Madison: James C. Wright Middle School on Madison's South side, founded in 1997 (originally as Madison Middle School 2000).
Until recently, other school districts in Wisconsin have been more open to charter schools. Appleton (14), Janesville (5), Kenosha (6), LaCrosse (4) and Milwaukee (66), Oshkosh (6), Sheboygan (7), Sparta (4), Stevens Point (7), and Waukesha (6) have authorized a significant number of public charter schools when considering the size of their total school district enrollments. However, recent enthusiasm around the formation of Badger Rock School is a sign that Madison area school districts could be more receptive to innovative charter school models that serve a specific community need and purpose. With your support and that of many others, we intend to make a very strong case for Madison Prep and why it's so desperately needed in our community.
Prior to being hired as President & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM), I shared with our ULGM board that I would look to establish charter schools as a strategy to address the persistent underperformance and failure of our children attending Madison area schools. As we have engaged our community, listened to leaders, researched the issues, and evaluated the data, it is clear that Madison Prep is not only needed, but absolutely necessary.
SINGLE GENDERED PUBLIC SCHOOLS
As of June 2010, there were 540 public schools in the U.S. offering a single-gendered option, with 92 schools having an all-male or all-female enrollment and the rest operating single gendered classes or programs. There were 12 public schools in Wisconsin offering single gendered classes or classrooms (6 middle schools, 5 high schools, and one elementary school).
In 1936 the University of Iowa became the first school in the United States to offer a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing. Forty years later there were only a dozen such programs in the world. Today, according to an article in the current issue of Poets & Writers magazine entitled "The MFA Revolution," there are nearly 200 creative writing MFA programs worldwide, and at least 4,000 aspiring writers apply to these programs each year in the U.S. alone. "What is clear," the article concludes, "is that the burgeoning network of fully funded MFA programs is rapidly becoming the nation's largest-ever patronage system for young artists."
Whenever the words "patronage" and "artists" appear in the same sentence, questions must be asked. Is this mass patronage system a boon for American fiction, or is it a poison pill? Do creative writing programs nurture genuine talent, or are they spawning a torrent of technically accomplished books that are devoid of felt life? And more broadly: Just what good does schooling of any kind do for a writer?
In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl points out the "seemingly banal" fact that virtually all contemporary American fiction writers have attended college. "In previous generations this would not likely have been the case," McGurl writes, "both because fewer individuals of any kind went to college before the postwar advent of mass higher education and because a college education was not yet perceived as an obvious...starting point for a career as a novelist. Rather, as the un-credentialled, or rather press-credentialled, example of the high school graduate Hemingway makes clear, the key supplementary institution for the novel until mid-century was journalism."
Speaking of Newark Public Schools, this past December the well-regarded organization called The New Teacher Project (of Widget Effect fame) partnered with Newark to evaluate the "impact of the school district's policies and practices...to build and maintain strong instructional teams." Here's the results:
1. Newark Public Schools sabotages its ability to hire high-quality teachers by not responding promptly to early applicants, especially in high-need subject areas. According to the report, teachers hired before June 1 for the coming school year are more likely to receive a "distinguished" evaluation rating, yet Newark waits until August and September to make most of its job offers. 73% of principals "have lost a desirable candidate because they could not make a timely offer."
2. While both teachers and administrators vastly prefer to have interviews before being moved from one school to another, "more than half of all administrators have been forced to accept a less desirable teacher candidate 'force-placed' by the Human Resources Department. "85% of principals have had a teacher placed into their school without an interview."
With school closings, declining enrollment and financial struggles putting Mesa Unified School District at a crossroads, parents packed a meeting this week to hear from the four candidates running for two seats on the governing board.
Close to 90 people attended the first Mesa Parent Advocates for Quality Schools (MPAQS) meeting of the school year on Tuesday. The two incumbents and two newcomers seeking seats on the board in the Nov. 2 election presented brief statements and answered audience questions.
Based on September enrollment figures, the district saw a 2,400-student decline from last school year. Five years ago, the start of the 2005 school year, there were 74,000 students in the district. Today, there are 64,817.
In January the current board voted to close a junior high school and moved smaller programs to that campus to free up other buildings for lease or sale.
Pennsylvania's auditor general said the state's charter school funding formula is seriously flawed.
Jack Wagner is now calling for a moratorium on new charter schools until the Rendell administration makes some changes.
It may cost $15,000 a year to educate each student in one public school and $10,000 in another, depending on taxes.
But any child from any district can go to a charter school. And that's where the charter school funding formula gets a little tricky.
"It becomes an equal playing field in terms of what the child can get," said Diane LaBelle, executive director, Lehigh Valley Charter High School for Performing Arts.
It may be an equal playing field for the kids, but...
President Obama's Education secretary, Arne Duncan, deserves credit for breaking the ice on a touchy topic in Washington: making sure schools of higher education that rely on tax dollars or their tax-free status are held accountable for their results.
Certainly, the nation's desire to reduce unemployment requires that graduates be fit for jobs and not overly burdened by student loans. One federal study found joblessness would drop by one-third if workers' skills matched the jobs that employers are currently offering.
Unfortunately, Mr. Duncan is being too timid.
His department is oddly focused on making sure that only career colleges, or the for-profit sector of higher ed, are graduating students into "gainful employment" and with lower debt. Duncan must also aim his sights on state-run universities and the private, nonprofit schools that likewise gulp up education subsidies.
Those schools, too, often overpromise, underperform, and leave graduates short on career prospects and deep in red ink. Just ask many recent law graduates or anyone with a new bachelor's degree in, say, sociology.
Gail Collins: David, the White House has named this an education week. It's actually been a kind of education year, what with all the controversy over the new documentary "Waiting for Superman," and Obama's big Race to the Top initiative.
The bad thing about the current education hysteria is that too much attention is focusing on more charter schools and getting rid of teachers unions, or at least teacher tenure.
The great thing about the current education hysteria is that it has everybody geared up to do something. The bad thing, as I see it, is that almost all the attention is focusing on A.) more charter schools and B.) getting rid of teachers unions, or at least teacher tenure.
David Brooks: I confess I don't think either charters or teacher unions are the primary issue here. If I had to summarize the progress we've made in education over the last decade, it's that we've move beyond the illusion that we could restructure our way to a good education system and we've finally begun to focus on the core issue: the nature of the relationship between the teacher and the student.
People learn from people they love. Anything that enriches the space between a student and a teacher is good. Anything that makes it more frigid is bad. This doesn't mean we have to get all huggy and mushy. It means rigorous instruction has to flow on threads of trust and affection.
I finally got around to sorting state-level test score data, something I've been meaning to do since the Academic Performance Index release last month. (Boy, is it harder than it should be. Those mismatched column headers...)
Five of Oakland's schools are up in the top 100 -- roughly 1 percent of all public schools in California -- when sorted by API: the three American Indian Model charter schools, Montclair and Hillcrest.
The American Indian Public Charter School in East Oakland's Laurel District was the highest-performing middle school in the state, with an API of 988. (Not including schools with K-8 or 6-12 grade configurations, whose middle school scores aren't broken out here.)
Watching Waiting for Superman last week left me exhausted. For too many years, education reformers have fought hard against the very injustices in the education system portrayed in the film. The good news, however, is that this newest declaration against the intolerable conditions of a broken public education system could finally call enough attention to the persistent problems to change things for the children whom we care so deeply about.
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, is interviewed throughout the film. Canada talks about his childhood and how disappointed he was to learn that there was no real Superman who would save him from the hardships of his own difficult childhood. His anecdote inspired the title of the movie.
The movie shows over and over again why ineffective teachers should be replaced with successful ones and how important that is to children's academic progress. Fighting against such commonsense ideas are the teachers unions, which oppose the teacher evaluation, merit pay, and firing of poor teachers.
I inadvertently kicked up a firestorm earlier this year in a profile I wrote about Judd Schemmel, Edgewood High School's energetic new president. The story's focus was the venerable Catholic institution's increased enrollment, its growing reputation for academic excellence and its improving finances.
Sounds like a positive take on this 130-year-old Madison institution, right?
Many Edgewood partisans didn't see it that way. In an offhand way, I mentioned that Edgewood had not, traditionally, had a reputation as an "academic powerhouse." I was not only thinking of the perceptions surrounding Edgewood when I attended high school in Madison in the late 1960s, but also the formidable reputations of public high schools West and Memorial when it comes to producing National Merit Scholar semifinalists, as well as perfect scores on the ACT and SAT college entrance examinations. And, I confess, I was also influenced by the aura surrounding Edgewood cast by its most famous graduate, the late "Saturday Night Live" comedian/wild man Chris Farley. Brilliant, yes. Academic? Not so much.
It turns out I had uttered fighting words, subject to heated interpretation in the story's comment section regarding just what was necessary to be known as an "academic powerhouse."
Some readers loyal to West High were angry, too. They were skeptical (to put it politely) about claims that Edgewood seniors were being accepted at elite universities, including Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford.
Clearly, the facts were beside the point. When I walked into the "academic powerhouse" buzz saw, it was all about the reputations -- the brands -- of Madison's high schools.
Yes, high schools have brands, just like cars or beer or blue jeans. High school brands are based not on advertising, but on their histories, demographics (specifically, class, race and money), curricula and cultures. Their brands contain stereotypes, of course, but they also include nuggets of truth. Analyzing perceptions of school culture this way can reveal an institution's real strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the emotional truth underneath the brand can help encourage and guide growth in a positive way, while mitigating some of the problems.
It's also fun -- but first you need to understand what the brand actually is.
66th NACAC Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, October 1, 2010
Panelists: Christopher Burkmar, Associate Dean of Admissions at Princeton;
Will Fitzhugh, Founder, The Concord Review; Jonathan Reider, Director of College Counseling, San Francisco University High School
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
I propose a thought experiment for what it may be worth.
What if we change the name of our organization from the National Association of College Admissions Counselors to:
The National Association of College Completion Counselors?
Note that the new name is more comprehensive, as Completion presupposes Admission, but, as is all too obvious these days, Admission cannot assume Completion.
You are all at least as aware as I am of the numbers about the need for academic remediation in Higher Education and the numbers of dropouts from college, but I will review a couple of them. Tony Wagner of Harvard reports that in general, including community colleges, half of college freshman do not return for a second year, and a huge percentage of our HS graduates take six years or more to complete a Bachelor's degree, and four years or more to complete an Associate's degree.
Students who need remediation in basic academic skills are more likely to drop out, and the more remedial courses they have to take, the more likely they are to drop out.
The California State College System reported at a conference last Fall that 47% of their Freshman students are in remedial reading courses.
We may assume that these students have had 12 years of reading in school already, but they still can't read well enough to do college work, at least by California standards.
Reading is not calculus or chemistry, it is just a basic academic skill in which we expect that the schools have offered practice for 12 years.
Now, a youngster can start to play Pop Warner football at age 6. By graduation from HS, he could have had 12 years of practice at the basic skills of football. Imagine athletes reporting for a college football team, only to be told that they need a year of remedial blocking and tackling practice before they can be allowed to play. It seems unlikely that they would not have learned basic blocking and tackling skills in their previous 12 years of playing football.
I am not just talking about improvement here. Of course, students in college can learn to read more difficult material in new academic subjects. And of course college athletes can get better at all the skills needed for success in their sports.
But we are talking about basic, entry-level academic skills. 47% of freshmen in the California State College System don't have them in reading, after 12 years of practice in school.
When I went into the Army in 1960, I had never fired a rifle before, but in a week or two on the range in Basic Training, I was able to meet the standard for "Sharpshooter." I missed "Expert" by one target.
I am convinced that if I had had 12 years of practice with my M-1 Garand, I really could have scored "Expert"--perhaps even by the higher standards of the U.S. Marine Corps.
I have to confess I am stunned that so many of our high school students, having been awarded one of our high school diplomas, and having been accepted at one of our colleges, are found to be unable to read well enough to do college work.
The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are now in remedial courses when they get to college.
It also notes that these students, having satisfied our requirements for the high school diploma, and graduated--having applied to college and been accepted--are told when they get there, that they can't make the grade without perhaps an additional year of work on their academic fundamentals. Naturally this experience is surprising to them, given that they satisfied our requirements for graduation and admission to college, and embarrassing, humiliating and depressing, as well.
As you may know, my particular interest since 1987 has been in student history research papers at the high school level. I have published 912 essays by secondary students from 44 states and 38 other countries over the last 23 years.
Some of the students who wrote the required Extended Essays for the IB Diploma and were published in The Concord Review, and some of our other authors as well, have told me that in their freshman dorms they are often mobbed by their peers who are facing a serious term paper for the first time and have no idea how to do one.
It is absurd to contemplate, but imagine a well-prepared college basketball player being mobbed for help by his peers who had never been taught to dribble, pass, or shoot in high school.
If even colleges like Harvard and Stanford require all their Freshmen to take a year of expository writing, that may not exactly be remedial writing, but I would argue that a student who has completed an Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate Diploma, and a student who has published a 12,000-word paper on Irish Nationalism or a 15,000-word paper on the Soviet-Afghan War for The Concord Review, should perhaps be allowed to skip that year of remedial writing. The author of the Soviet-Afghan War paper, from Georgia, is now at Christ Church College, Oxford, where I believe he did not have to spend a year in an expository writing course, and the author of the Irish Nationalism paper is at Princeton, where she may very well have been asked to spend a year in such a course.
If so many of our students need to learn how to do academic writing (not to mention how to read), what are they spending time on in high school?
I believe that writing is the most dumbed-down activity we now have in our schools. The AP program includes no research paper, only responses to document-based questions, and most high school Social Studies departments leave academic writing tasks to the English Department.
Now, in general, English Departments favor personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, but college admission requirements have given them an additional task on which they are working with students. Teaching writing takes time, not only in preparing and monitoring students, but more especially in reading what students have written and offering corrections and advice. Time for one kind of writing necessarily means less time for another kind.
Personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay have already taken a lot of the time of English teachers and their students, but as college admissions officers ask for the 500-word personal essay, time has to be given to teaching for that.
While high school English departments work with their students on the 500-word personal essay, they do not have the time to give to serious term papers, so they don't do them, and I believe that is why so many students arrive in our colleges in need of a one-year course on the expository writing they didn't get a chance to do in school.
Lots of the public high school students whose work I publish simply do their papers as independent studies, as there is no place for serious academic writing like that in the curriculum.
I would suggest that if college admissions officers would ask instead for an academic research paper from applicants in place of the short little personal essay, while it would be more work for them, it would make it more likely that students they accept would arrive ready for college work, perhaps even ready enough to allow them to skip that year of expository writing they now have to sit through, and they could take an actual academic course in its place.
Making sure that our high school students arrive in college able to manage college-level nonfiction reading and academic expository writing might really help us earn our new credential as professionals who work not just to help students get accepted at college, but to help them complete college as well.
==============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The Manhattan Free School in East Harlem is not free, but the principal there practically is. Now in her third year, Pat Werner, a 57-year-old former literacy coach who logged 18 years in New York City public schools, accepted all of $3,000 in salary last year.
Few go into education for the money, but Ms. Werner's dedication to opening young people's minds might better be described as utopian than idealistic -- which is only appropriate at a private school where students do not receive grades, take tests or have to do anything, really, that they do not feel like doing.
For parents exhausted by New York's numbers-oriented, lottery-driven public school system or its hierarchical, hypercompetitive private schools, the Manhattan Free School represents another way to go: equally wacky, but at the opposite extreme.
A school like this, where a comic-book-making class is now offered but calculus is not, is not likely to drain applicants from Dalton. Operating on a $100,000 budget, the school, at Good Neighbor Presbyterian Church on East 106th Street, now has 23 students ages 5 to 18.
State statutes mandate that "each school board shall provide access to an appropriate program for pupils identified as gifted and talented." The DPI stipulates that this programming must be systematic and continuous, from kindergarten through grade 12. Madison schools have been out of compliance with these standards since 1990, the last time the DPI formally audited the District’s gifted educational services.
Recognizing this concern, Superintendent Dan Nerad has stated that "while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district."
"At the secondary level, the inconsistencies are glaring," said Raihala. "There are broad disparities among Madison's public high schools with regard to the number of honors, advanced/accelerated, and AP courses each one offers. Also, each school imposes different requirements and restrictions on students seeking advanced courses. Surprisingly, Madison's much touted West High School offers the fewest advanced course options for ninth and tenth graders. While the other schools offer various levels of English, science, and social science, Madison West requires all students to follow a standardized program of academic courses, regardless of their ability. This means that students with SAT/ACT scores already exceeding those of most West seniors (obtained via participation in the Northwestern University Midwest Area Talent Search program) must sit through the same courses as students working at basic and emerging proficiency levels."
Madison School Board member Marj Passman, briefly discusses curriculum, perception and school climate on WTDY radio yesterday (mp3 audio): "We must keep our talented and gifted in the District". The interviewer mentions "the tripling in transfers out of the district, even as the District posts higher college placement scores than other districts in the area". Marj responds: "and that's why I don't understand the perception people have that their children are not being challenged in the Madison schools". I will post the rest of the interview if someone finds it.
Gayle Worland:Parents file complaint over 'talented and gifted' school programming.
High Expectations For All Students is the Way to Beat the Achievement Gaps
Simpson Street Free Press editorial
Chantal Van Ginkel, age 18
Historically, Madison West High School has not had a spotless regard regarding race relations. Before and during the 1990's, the school was accused by some of segregation. Most white students had their lockers on the second floor, while most minority students used lockers on the ground floor.
To the school's credit, changes in policies have greatly improved a once hostile environment. Some of these changes include getting rid of remedial classes, and implementing SLC's or Small Learning Communities.
A more recent change, however, has sparked controversy and heated debate. Madison West High School plans to largely eliminate honors classes. This is part of an attempt to provide equal opportunity for all students by homogenizing their classroom experience.
At one time, this might have been a good step toward desegregation of West's student body. It is not a good idea now.
To some extent, enrollment in honors courses of all Madison high schools is racially segregated. Affluent students and white students take advanced courses much more frequently than other students.
But in my opinion, the lack of more rigorous courses is a problem. It is a problem for all students at West. Many parents, students and some faculty share this sentiment.
Recently, a petition signed by over a hundred West attendance area parents requested that 9th and 10th grade honors classes be reinstated. When Superintendent Nerad took steps to make this, some members of the West High teaching staff spoke up. They asserted that honors classes are racist. The project to reinstate advanced course offerings for West's freshmen and sophomores was then abandoned.
Honors classes, in and of themselves, are not inherently racist. Rather, the expectation that only certain students will take these classes is the problem. The fact that too many minority students end up in remedial courses is racist, but eliminating rigorous courses is not the answer.
As writers for this newspaper have said many times, the real racism is the cancer of low expectations. High expectations for all of our students is how we will beat the achievement gaps in local schools. Low expectations will only make our problem worse.
Note: Madison West High School has not had honors classes in 9th and 10th grade for several years. (The only exception to that is the historically lone section of Accelerated Biology, which some West teachers have repeatedly tried to get rid of.) Not only that, but Madison West High School is the only Madison high school that does not have any honors/advanced/accelerated classes in English and Social Studies in 9th and 10th grade. All West 9th and 10th grade students are expected to take regular English 9 and 10 and regular Social Studies 9 and 10, in completely heterogeneous (by ability) classes.
Note: The petition mentioned by the author -- the one requesting honors classes in English and Social Studies in 9th and 10th grade -- has now been signed by almost 200 current, past and future West community members.
American schools are using two-dimensional communication in a 3-D world. All one needs to do is view the YouTube video of a toddler quickly mastering an iPad to understand the problem, and the solution.
American education is linear, but the rest of a student's world isn't. Watch young people hunting knowledge at a computer, and you won't see them moving along a straight line (as textbooks or slide presentations do). You'll see them zooming in and out, leaping from hyperlink to hyperlink, remixing knowledge on the fly. This type of learning is brain candy to young people, and they don't get enough in school. As one T-shirt recently seen in a New York City school says, "It's Not ADD - I'm Just Not Listening."
The Daily Prophet is the newspaper of choice for the discerning witch or wizard, this much we all know. With moving pictures and articles on every topic of interest, the Prophet is a fine advance on the offerings afforded to us muggles.
Or is it? You see I'm increasingly of the opinion that JK Rowling aimed too low with her imagination on this part. She couldn't foresee the way in which things like newspapers and textbooks would really be consumed if the magic (read: technology) was widely available.
To take you further in to the future of textbooks, I first have to take you back, way back...
(I can't resist digressing to recount how I was in a math class for high-performing seniors at a major Milwaukee high school several years ago. Let's do some warm-up questions, the teacher said. One of them was: One-third rounds off to what percentage and what decimal value? Yes, 33% and .33. A good question for, maybe, sixth-graders, in my opinion. And these were kids taking Advanced Placement courses in other subjects! Perhaps I should point out that 31% is less than a third.)
Here's another fact: Wisconsin law requires only 13 credits to get a high school diploma, the lowest total in the country, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. Permit me to repeat that: The lowest total in the country. True, probably every school district in the state requires more than, oh, about three courses a year in high school, and no teen with hopes for university admission or for success in pursuing a wide array of other options would take such a light load. Nonetheless, this does say something about where the bar is set by the state.
All of which is to say, college readiness is a serious concern nationwide, and don't think Wisconsin is not part of that picture. It's not enough to graduate from high school or even to get into college. How are students going to do when they get there?
Blue Ribbon Schools must meet either of two criteria:
High performing schools: Regardless of the school's demographics or percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the school is high performing. These are schools that are ranked among a state's highest performing schools as measured by state assessments in both reading (English language arts) and mathematics or that score at the highest performance level on tests referenced by national norms in at least the most recent year tested.
HARVARD COLLEGE
Office of Admissions and Financial Aid
September 15, 2010
Mr. Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
Dear Will,
We agree with your argument that high school students who have read a complete nonfiction book or two, and written a serious research paper or two, will be better prepared for college academic work than those who have not.
The Concord Review, founded in 1987, remains the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we in the Admissions Office here are always glad to see reprints of papers which students have had published in the Review and which they send to us as part of their application materials. Over the years, more than 10% (103) of these authors have come to college at Harvard.
Since 1998, when it started, we have been supporters of your National Writing Board, which is still unique in supplying independent three-page assessments of the research papers of secondary students. The NWB reports also provide a useful addition to the college application materials of high school students who are seeking admission to selective colleges.
For all our undergraduates, even those in the sciences, such competence, both in reading nonfiction books and in the writing of serious research papers, is essential for academic success. Some of our high schools now place too little emphasis on this, but The Concord Review and the National Writing Board are doing a national service in encouraging our secondary students, and their teachers, to spend more time and effort on developing these abilities.
Sincerely,
Bill
William R. Fitzsimmons
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
Administrative Office: 86 Brattle Street • Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
-------------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
IT is widely acknowledged that expanding Australian higher education means increasing diversity. But how, why and by how much?
A focused look at the most diverse higher education system in the world may suggest some answers.
Diversity was and is the key to the early and extraordinary growth of mass, then universal, higher education in the US, a nation that continues to provide higher education for an extraordinary proportion of its population.
Insistent demand for higher education has been felt for a half century. Australian higher education, based on British precedents and practices, responded as Britain did: by expanding the size and number of capital-intensive, high teaching and research cost universities. Attempts to create another tier of institutions, polytechnics or colleges of advanced education, in which less noble subjects and students would be served at lower cost, were defeated by academic drift. All are universities now. Unit costs are high, funding sources limited, unconventional subjects, students and institutions still suspect.
The British International School of New York offers spacious waterfront classrooms, small computers encased in rubber for small people who tend to drop them, and a pool for the once-a-week swimming classes required for all students.
But there is nothing within its halls or on its Web site that indicates what differentiates British International from the teeming masses of expensive private schools in New York: It is run for profit.
It is one of a small number of large for-profit schools that have opened recently or plan to open in New York City next year. While they are a speck on the city's private-school landscape, for-profit schools are practically the only significant primary and secondary institutions to have started up in the last decade, and may represent the future of private-school growth.
June Jordan School for Equity has been touted as a shining star of San Francisco public high schools and a national example of how limiting enrollment and tailoring instruction to the needs of individuals can push struggling students into college.
The school, which opened seven years ago, boasts small class sizes and an adviser for every 16 students, plus a college counselor. June Jordan's funding of more than $11,000 for each of the 241 students, which comes from public and private sources, exceeds what most other district students get.
The school board loves it. So do many parents and students.
The world of academe is generally considered a marketplace of ideas. But its customers may do more one-stop shopping than browsing the aisles.
Campus constituencies across the country are skeptical of their institutions' emphasis on -- and consideration of -- diverse viewpoints both in the classroom and on campus generally, according to a report released Thursday by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The surveyed groups -- students, faculty, academic administrators and student affairs professionals -- reported a need for more institutional focus on taking other people's perspectives seriously. There was also a general consensus that for the most part, individuals do not strive to encourage, and sometimes do not even consider, listening to diverse perspectives. (The groups were generally more forgiving to themselves than to each other, however.)
Before kids arrived for their first day at Verona's newest charter school two weeks ago, their parents got a couple warnings.
First, your kids will be tired after school. And second, they can't learn Chinese in a day.
The Verona Area International School, located within a single classroom at Stoner Prairie Elementary School, is the first public school in Wisconsin to teach kids in both English and Chinese. Twenty-two students in grades K-1 spend the first half of each day together hearing nothing but Mandarin before switching back to English for afternoon lessons.
The prospect of getting 5- and 6-year-olds to listen to a foreign language for hours at a time might sound daunting, but the school's part-time director, Sally Parks, said Monday that so far, kids don't seem discouraged.
"They are so adaptable," Parks said. "They seem to pick it up so quickly.
Yet another study, this one from Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives (boy that's specific) in the Times.
The study released Tuesday by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives researchers found that students in classrooms where teachers received bonuses saw the same gains as the classes where educators got no incentive.
"I think most people agree today that the current way in which we compensate teachers is broken," said Matthew Springer, executive director of the Vanderbilt center and lead researcher on the study. "But we don't know what the better way is yet.
They state that 5-8th grade teachers in Nashville public schools over 3 years from 2007-2009 could make between $5k-$15K annually, depending on how their students tested.
A bit issue here as in a study in Florida is that you are talking about individual bonuses which tend to pit teachers against each other. Maybe merit pay would be better for team-based teaching or school-wide merit pay. Does merit pay make a mediocre teacher try harder? Can money alone do that or would a school/district need to add more professional development to kick it up?
Anyone who thinks America has academic talent to spare isn't paying attention.
We used to lead the world in the percentage of our population with college degrees. Now we're No. 14. Global competition is getting tougher, and having an educated work force is vital to our long-term prospects. To keep up, we're importing highly skilled immigrants from around the world. At the same time, however, we make it difficult for thousands of young people who grow up here to attend college and illegal for them to get jobs.
This status quo appears designed to create a permanent underclass and set back our nation's competitiveness.
Congress can fix this problem -- and enrich America's human capital -- by passing the DREAM Act. This legislation, which the Senate is due to consider Tuesday, would provide temporary residence for many undocumented kids brought to the United States as small children who have completed high school. It then offers a path to legal permanent status if they attend college or serve in the military.
ACT is committed to college and career readiness and success for all students and our latest research report, Mind the Gaps: How College Readiness Narrows Achievement Gaps in College Success, looks at the steps that can be taken to improve college and career readiness and success among underserved populations. As a nation we must close the achievement gap across racial/ethnic and family income groups. The data in this report shows the types of policies that work to improve college and career readiness and success.
Change in education is coming, says State Superintendent Tony Evers - but we can't tell you exactly what that change will be until after November's elections.
Evers, speaking at his second annual State of Education address last week, discussed the work he's done in the past year as well as his intentions for the 2010-2011 school year. The address laid out the state's goals in areas like funding, graduation requirements, teacher certification, and standardized testing.
The speech expressed the superintendent's pride in Wisconsin's public schools, but also discussed his plans to improve education in the next year. These plans included:
A Teacher Quality Manifesto: What happens to bright teachers stuck in schools that don't have the right to hire by performance and build a culture of excellence? They quit.
The documentary "Waiting for 'Superman'" (hitting theaters this Friday) and President Obama's Race to the Top competition have focused the national education debate on one question: How can we ensure a quality teacher in every classroom?
So far the answer has centered on accountability: standards, testing, data and evaluations. Accountability is critical. Without it, children's lives are ruined, and as educators we should not be allowed to keep our jobs if students aren't learning.
But accountability alone misses a more fundamental issue. If we want to elevate teacher quality in our country, we need to stop treating teachers like industrial-era workers and start treating them like professionals.
For the last seven years at Harlem Village Academies, we've been obsessed with teacher quality. Our strategy from the start was to attract talented people, create an environment where they could develop into great teachers, and hold them accountable. We were confident the results would follow.
In 111 piercing minutes of film, Davis Guggenheim offers something that reams of foundation reports, endless pieces of bipartisan legislation and oceans of newspaper ink never have: a stunning liberal exposé of a system that consigns American children who most need a decent education to our most destructive public schools.
Nor does he exempt himself from this corrupt bargain. The man who produced both the Barack Obama short for the 2008 Democratic Convention and Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary about global warming offers an inconvenient truth of his own. Each morning, Mr. Guggenheim shows, he drives by three public schools until he gets to the nice private school where he deposits his own children. In so doing, he accuses himself of "betraying the ideals I thought I lived by."
His new film, "Waiting for 'Superman,'" is his own attempt to right that balance with a focus on those he calls "other people's children." At the Washington, D.C., premiere last Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called it "a Rosa Parks moment." New York Magazine suggests it might be "the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact."
And they are standing attentively in the lobby of the Mitchell Park Domes.
"What makes these buildings so unique?" asked Paula Zamiatowski, education coordinator at the Domes.
"The nature inside," one girl said.
"Their shape," said another boy.
The students Zamiatowski led through the three beehive-shaped glass buildings that sit just south of I-94 were from an equally unique place - a virtual school.
Students from Wisconsin Connections Academy, a kindergarten through eighth-grade public school that operates almost entirely over the Internet and is chartered through the Appleton School District, took a field trip to learn about the world's ecosystems and interact with the classmates they may have never met. About 400 students are enrolled at WCA, and roughly 100 of those are from southeastern Wisconsin, said school spokeswoman Lauren Olstad.
It's hard to believe this is happening in America. Now, how far will Bill Gates go to fix it? Plus, the one-woman tornado at the center of a Washington, D.C., storm.
Though it has become something of a sport to bash public education, a new poll shows that most Americans actually think highly of their neighborhood public schools and have trust in teachers.
The Obama administration's education agenda gets mixed reviews in the 2010 poll by the Gallup organization and Phi Delta Kappa, a global association of education professionals. The PDK/Gallup poll has been conducted with Gallup annually since 1969.
Here are highlights of the poll, published by Kappan Magazine and available here:
Americans believe the most important national education program should be improving the quality of teaching. Developing demanding standards, creating better tests, and improving the nation's lowest-performing schools were rated significantly lower.
Seventy-one percent of Americans say they have trust and confidence in teachers, with a greater percentage (78 percent) of public school parents registering confidence. Two out of three Americans would support their child's decision to teach in the public schools for a career.
Today, our President & CEO, Kaleem Caire, was invited to participate in a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show as a member of the studio audience for a town hall discussion Ms. Winfrey is having on education reform as a follow-up to her show yesterday on the critically acclaimed documentary, "Waiting for Superman." The film is directed by award winning filmmaker, David Guggenheim, the creative genius behind AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Ms. Winfrey has invited leaders in education, along with parents, community, business leaders, and students to discuss what needs to be done to fix America's public schools. The full format has not yet been shared but guests have also been invited to view a showing of Waiting for Superman Thursday evening at her studio. The show will air this Friday afternoon. If anything should change, we will let you know.
Considering just 7 percent of Madison's African American graduating seniors in the class of 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam were considered "college ready" by the test-maker (93 percent were deemed "not ready"), it is more important now than ever that the Urban League, our local school districts, local leaders, and other organizations move swiftly and deliberately to implement solutions that can move our children from low performance to high performance. It is even more important that we provide our children with schools that will prepare them to succeed in the economy of the future . With the right approaches, we believe our education community can get the job done!
We look forward to working with our partners at the United Way of Dane County, Madison Metropolitan School District, Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, YMCA of Dane County, Madison Community Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education, and many others to get our youth on the right track.
Whether it's this post or Oprah, today may be the first time you hear of the movie "Waiting for Superman" but it won't be the last. A flood of pissed-off parents, Charter Schools and reformers and deep-pocketed billionaires and millionaires will make sure of that.
But the other reason you'll keep hearing about this documentary on the state of America's public education system is that it's just a really great documentary.
I've never quite understood how the public school system of the wealthiest country in the world-one where every President pledges to "fix" education and one where education spending continually goes up-could be so intractably horrible. The problem seems too big, bloated, complex and confusing to even have a smart debate around, much less try to fix. Fortunately, since I'm not a parent, it's an issue where I can just throw up my hands, assume any politician saying they'll fix it is lying, and start saving for the private school I'll one day need when I do have kids.
Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching: Only 23 percent of entering teachers come from the top third of their graduating class. What would it take to do better?
Helping teachers to lift student achievement more effectively has become a major theme in US education. Most efforts that are now in their early stages or being planned focus either on building the skills of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the best and dismissing the least effective performers. The question of who should actually teach and how the nation's schools might attract more young people from the top tier of college graduates, as part of a systematic effort to improve teaching in the United States, has received comparatively little attention.
McKinsey's experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the US debate. In a new report, Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching, we review the experiences of the world's top-performing systems, in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. These countries recruit 100 percent of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort. Along with strong training and good working conditions, this extraordinary selectivity is part of an integrated system that promotes the prestige of teaching--and has achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that systematically recruit top students to teaching if the United States decided that it was worthwhile to do so.
ere is one of the great disconnects of our time: 60 percent of Wisconsin citizens rated the public schools in the state, with the exception of Milwaukee, as excellent or good. Two years ago, that number was even higher--just under 70 percent. People don't seem to believe anything is holding education back in Wisconsin. But there are times when fact interferes with perception and--bad news here--this is one of those times. When compared to 17 other large urban districts including Chicago and New York City, Milwaukee's students are in the back of the pack--only Detroit's students score lower in math and reading in fourth and eighth grades. Largely driven by the abysmal performance of many of Milwaukee's public schools, our state has the most persistent gap in achievement between black and white students in the country.
This isn't just a Milwaukee problem; it's a state problem. And the problems don't end there.
Wisconsin employs more than 50,000 teachers, at an annual cost of approximately $3.65 billion,1 and yet it has no common means of measuring teacher effectiveness. The majority of these teachers have a continuing contract, which is another word for tenure -- meaning, with few exceptions, they have that job for life if they want it. This might not be such a bad thing if teachers had to demonstrate their effectiveness in the classroom to get this lifelong contract--but they don't. To put this in context, is your job guaranteed for life? And if it is, did you have to prove your ability in your job to get it?
Somehow, it has come to pass that most teachers are immune from the realities of the workplace that every other citizen faces. Can you imagine another profession in which it is against the law to fire someone from their job because they are not achieving the desired outcome?
My family lives on the west side of Los Angeles. I face the same choice as many urban families: Will the kids attend public or private schools? Should one minimize opportunities for one's own child in service to the greater good?
In our desire to protect our children physically and academically, we send them to very expensive schools that are inherently segregated ethnically and economically. We, being white, educated, and comparatively affluent, are the agenda-setters in society. The agenda does not include fierce protection of the public school system we value in general terms but abandon in our own specific cases.
A Community College Transfer Initiative launched four years ago by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation greatly increased the volume of students transferring from community colleges to eight selective four-year colleges.
By supporting the transfer process at receiving schools, the initiative dramatically boosted community college transfers to some of the nation's most prestigious schools: Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California. A report on the initiative, "Partnerships that Promote Success," was released this month.
Among the eight schools, the initiative yielded 550 transfers in the 2007-08 academic year. By 2009-10, transfer enrollment had risen to 1,723.
The University of Michigan enrolled 1,104 community college transfers as of 2009-10; Mount Holyoke, 275; Berkeley, 245; Cornell, 113.
We need an improved, ongoing process to develop a five-year budget plan that focuses on key issues and considers worst-case possibilities. Encourage more participation of teachers & staff in decision-making.
We need to study post-secondary outcomes of all our students. Determine successful practices for meeting the needs of struggling students, high- achieving students, and students with special needs. Determine better student assessments and retaining more families. Study the approach at Shabazz (reaching students) especially when looking at transitions.
Improve the MMSD diversity situation. MMSD should recruit locally or within midwestern region. Success is measured by relationship to eLF data. White men should always help develop this goal.
Board and administration need to build a culture of accuracy and accountability. The board relies on administration for accurate information to make decisions. Board needs to make clear, respectful and timely requestsandexpectresults. Administrationneedstoacknowledge,clarify intent, check for accuracy, and respond with accurate, appropriate, complete datal information.
Program and Services Evaluations
Need to develop sound methods for evaluating programs and business services and implement plans to improve professional performance, evaluations could be external. Those evaluations should yield information and data that can be used to make decisions.
The Board discussed the issue. Individual members expressed concern about the 3% cap, suggesting that this wasn't the way for us to deal with the open enrollment issue. I was one of those who spoke against the proposal. The Board voted unanimously to support the other two proposed changes to WASB policy, but not the 3% cap. This amounted to a unanimous rejection of the 3% limit. (A video of the Board meeting can be found here. The WASB discussion begins about 48 minutes in.)
From the Board's perspective, the endorsement of the proposal regarding financial stability wasn't seen as one that had much bearing on our district. But we'd like support from other districts on our push for a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars, and so we were willing to support proposals important to other districts, like this one, as a way of building a coalition for fresh consideration of open enrollment issues by the WASB.
The "financial stability" proposal certainly wasn't intended by us as a dagger to the heart of the open enrollment policy; I don't suppose that it was ever the intent of the legislators who supported the open enrollment statute that the policy could render school districts financially unstable.
The State Journal never reported that the Board rejected the 3% cap proposal. It ran letters to the editor on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that all seemed premised on the assumption that we had in fact supported such a cap. The Wednesday letter said in part, "[T]he Madison School District's answer to its shortcomings is to build a Berlin wall, preventing students from leaving." From the Thursday letter, "Unfortunately, instead of looking inward to address the problems and issues causing flight from Madison schools, the School Board would rather maintain the status quo and use the coercive force of government to prevent its customers from fleeing for what they think is a better value." From Friday's letter: "So the way you stem the tide of students wanting to leave the Madison School District is to change the rules so that not so many can leave? That makes perfect Madison School Board logic." (The State Journal also ran a letter to the editor on Friday that was more supportive of the district.)
I'm glad Ed continues to write online. I continue to have reservations about the "financial stability" angle since it can be interpreted (assuming it becomes law.... what are the odds?) any way the Board deems necessary. Further, I agree with Ed that there are certainly more pressing matters at hand.
Abstract: An education gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers is something to which most Americans have become accustomed. But this racial division of education--and hence of prospects for the future-- is nothing less than tragic. The good news is that the racial divide in learning is a problem that can be fixed. Of course, it can only be fixed if education reform is approached in a common sense and innovative way. Continuing to repeat the largely failed national policies and ever-increasing spending of the past decades is surely not commonsense. One state, Florida, has demonstrated that meaningful academic improvement--for students of all races and economic backgrounds--is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted far-reaching K-12 education reform that includes public and private school choice, charter schools, virtual education, performance-based pay for teachers, grading of schools and districts, annual tests, curbing social promotion, and alternative teacher certification. As a result of parental choice, higher standards, accountability, and flexibility, Florida's Hispanic students are now outperforming or tied with the overall average for all students in 31 states. It is vital that national and state policymakers take the lessons of Florida's success to heart. The future of millions of American children depends on it.
For years, policymakers around the country have looked for ways to address the racial achievement gap in K-12 education. Despite significant increases in education spending at all levels and the federal government's ever-increasing role in education, national academic achievement has remained relatively flat, graduation rates have stagnated around 70 percent, and racial disparities persist. Many states have enacted policies to address racial disparities in academic achievement and attainment, but the changes have been largely piecemeal.
One state, however, has demonstrated that meaningful improvement is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted a series of far-reaching K-12 education reforms that have increased academic achievement for all students and substantially narrowed the racial achievement gap. Today, Florida's Hispanic and black students outscore many statewide reading averages for all students.
One morning last winter I watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and steam-driven radiators that hissed and clanked endlessly.
Doyle was, at 54, a veteran teacher and had logged 32 years in schools all over Manhattan, where he primarily taught art and computer graphics. In the school, which was called Quest to Learn, he was teaching a class, Sports for the Mind, which every student attended three times a week. It was described in a jargony flourish on the school's Web site as "a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes." What it was, really, was a class in technology and game design.
The lesson that day was on enemy movement, and the enemy was a dastardly collection of spiky-headed robots roving inside a computer game. The students -- a pack of about 20 boisterous sixth graders -- were meant to observe how the robots moved, then chart any patterns they saw on pieces of graph paper. Later in the class period, working on laptops, they would design their own games. For the moment, though, they were spectators.
Open enrollment allows students to go to schools outside their district. If "school choice" and "vouchers" are the buzz words popping into your head right now, you're probably not alone. When the legislation passed in 1997, it was in the same ballpark as those two old Republican saws. Open enrollment supposedly introduces choice to the public education "marketplace," forcing districts to compete and get better.
Democrats typically see such policies as the first step toward balkanizing the public schools into the haves and have-nots, when they should be a hallmark of a society in which any kid can become president.
Open enrollment has not shown a particularly good light on Madison in recent years. More kids have been transferring out than in, with the net loss last year 435 students. The resolution the school board passed Monday calls on the state to allow districts to limit the students that could leave under open enrollment "if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened."
Clearly, district leaders feel open enrollment is a fiscal threat; their analysis shows it created about a $2.7 million hole in the district budget last school year.
A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children's websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.
The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 "cookies," "beacons" and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.
The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a "hobby" and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.
Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.
The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.
The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don't include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.
The California Department of Education issued a news release Monday touting 10 years of uninterrupted progress on the Academic Performance Index. By contrast, on the test that researchers use to evaluate real performance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California students' scores have been flat during that same time.
Why the big difference? The main test on which the API is based, the STAR, has never been secure, and teachers can teach to the exact questions on it, or even hand out the correct answers in test sessions that are not proctored by outside authorities. By contrast, the NAEP is a secure test, and because it carries no financial incentives, there is no motivation to game the system.
The Notebook gathered data including enrollment, student demographics, attendance, and test scores. You can sort through the information in an Excel sheet or view a PDF of the center spread of data from the print edition.
Key to data for District schools
SAT, PSSA scores: for 2009 from Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Graduation rates: Rates are as determined in 2009 for entering 9th graders from fall 2005, from School District of Philadelphia. Students are attributed to their 9th grade school.
All other data are reported by the School District of Philadelphia for the 2009-10 school year.
Mayor Adrian Fenty staked his career on overhauling the District of Columbia's education system with Obama-style reforms -- closing dozens of failing schools and firing hundreds of teachers.
Then the teachers struck back.
Fenty's defeat this week -- due in no small part to community and teachers union resistance to his education push -- is emerging as a cautionary tale for education reformers, who fear that it could cause others to back away from aggressive reform programs swept into the mainstream by President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top."
His downfall, observers fret, serves notice to officeholders coast to coast that they could suffer Fenty's fate if they embark on that ambitious brand of school reform championed by Fenty and his controversial schools chief Michelle Rhee.
"This is a real wake-up call for the Obama administration," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who studies teachers unions. "The emphasis on firing teachers which was central to Rhee's approach -- she stood in a picture on the cover of Time magazine with a broom. That doesn't seem to resonate with voters."
Students enrolled this semester in "Education in Black America" at Howard University got their reward Thursday morning for slogging to campus instead of sleeping in: About 10 minutes into class, singer-songwriter John Legend strode in. No introduction needed.
"Surprise, surprise," Legend said, as cellphones came out and cameras flashed. "I'm glad you didn't skip class today."
Legend, 31, was guest professor as part of an mtvU program called Stand In, in which big names such as Bill Gates and Madonna show up unannounced and teach a class on a subject they care about.
For Legend, a Grammy Award winner who grew up in poverty, that subject is education reform -- a key theme of the just-released Waiting for Superman documentary, for which he wrote a song. So it made sense to arrange with professor Greg Carr to appear in Carr's class, which was discussing the education of ex-slaves when the knock at the door came.
Happy back to school! In honor of my officially becoming a tenured teacher (take that, new value-added teacher data reports to determine tenure), I present to you 10 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Started Teaching.
1. Don't sweat the small stuff.
You put your students' names on everything in your room only to find out that some of them are spelled wrong on your class list. Or some of them moved away and you're getting three more instead. And now you don't have enough little birthday cakes to complete your class chart! Something like this will inevitably happen in the first week of school. But the truth is, the only person who will notice is you -- and if you resent the fact that you're going to stay at school until 6 pm redoing it, you're just going to make yourself miserable.
2. If you can put off until tomorrow what you planned on doing today...you might want to think about it.
I realize this sounds an awful lot like procrastination, which to most teachers is a dirty, dirty word. But as a new teacher, you're going to be staying in your classroom until nightfall anyway. Your classroom is going to become a time-sucking vacuum of dry erase markers and despair. (That was poetic, no?) So if you really, really wanted to plan out your entire week's worth of math lessons, but it's after 5 pm and you've got at least an inkling of what you're going to do tomorrow -- go home. You'll take care of tomorrow tomorrow; tonight, you have to take care of you.
Looking for a puzzles to exercise the minds of your students? Are you in search of interactive puzzles for your kids at home? Post a puzzle a day or a puzzle a week in your classroom. Present a puzzle to your kids while driving in the car. Create a puzzle corner at home or at school.
The Internet is full of games and puzzles that work the brain and help kids think outside the box. Just search on such terms as "brainteasers" or "puzzles." Here are just a few sites that will keep you and your gifted kids occupied for a good long time.
There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself.
This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement.
That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation's top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that
could be repeated.
Next, there are the decades since the late 1980s, in which there has been no clear trend in the gap, or sustained period of change in the gap, one way or another. While there has been considerable investigation of the gap that remained, little advance in knowledge has occurred as attention was directed to alternating small declines and small gains, interspersed with periods of no change.
Paul Barton and Richard Coley drop back in time to the beginning of the 20th century when the gap in educational attainment started to narrow, and bring us to the startling and ironic conclusion that progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination. Had those things that were helping to close the gap stopped, or had they been overshadowed by new adversities that were not remedied by gaining equality before the law? Unfortunately, no comprehensive modeling by researchers is available that might identify and quantify the culprits, nor is it likely that there will ever be. The authors draw on the knowledge base that is available, from whatever schools of scholarship that have made relevant investigations, whether they be historians, or sociologists, or economists, or practitioners. Barton and Coley explore topics that remain sensitive in public discussion in their search for answers.
A lot of suspects are rounded up, and their pictures are posted for public view. Ultimately, readers will have to turn to their own good judgment. The report informs the judgments that have to be made, for there is no escaping the fact that failure to re-start progress is an unacceptable and dangerous prospect for the nation.
Michael T. Nettles.
Senior Vice President .
Policy Evaluation and Research Center
The nation's attention has been -- and remains -- riveted on the persistent Black-White gap in the achievement of our elementary and secondary school students. Each year when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) releases "the nation's report card," the front-page news focuses on whether scores are rising or falling and whether the achievement gap is changing. Speculation is rife as to whether any change is some indication of either the success or failure of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and other efforts in our local-state-federal education system.
The nation's efforts to address the achievement gap have a long history. Expectations increased with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954 and with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, which focused on the inequality of school resources. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spiked optimism for progress in education and in society at large. And most recently, NCLB was purposeful in its requirement to "disaggregate" the average achievement scores of state accountability programs to expose the inequality that had to be addressed.
This report is about understanding the periods of progress and the periods of stagnation in changes in the achievement gap that have occurred over the past several decades. We try to understand what might have contributed to the progress as well as probe the reasons that may account for the progress halting, in the hope of finding some clues and possible directions for moving forward in narrowing the achievement gap.
For instance, he's the only state elected official to actually and seriously float a proposal to repair the broken state funding system for schools. He promises the proposal for his "Funding for Our Future" will be ready to introduce to lawmakers this fall and will include details on its impact on the state's 424 school districts.
Evers also is interested in the potential of charter schools. Let's be open and supportive about education alternatives, he says, but mindful of what's already working well in public schools.
And he says qualified 11th and 12th graders should be allowed to move directly on to post-secondary education or training if they wish. Dual enrollment opportunites for high school age students attending college and technical schools will require a shift in thinking that shares turf and breaks down barriers, making seamless education -- pre-K through post-secondary -- a reality instead of some distant dream, according to Evers.
As to Evers' comments on teacher testing, he joins a national conversation that has been sparked, in part, by the Obama administration as well as research that shows the single universal element in improved student performance is teacher quality. We recently featured a story about concerns over teacher evaluation based on student performance and test scores, and the issue has been a potent topic elsewhere, as well.
The proof, as always, is in the pudding, or substance.
I think many ed reformers rightly say, "Kids can't wait." I agree.
There is nothing more depressing than realizing that any change that might be good will likely come AFTER your child ages out of elementary, middle or high school. Not to say that we don't do things for the greater good or the future greater good but as a parent, you want for your child now. Of course, we are told that change needs to happen now but the reality is what it might or might not produce in results is years off. (Which matters not to Bill Gates or President Obama because their children are in private schools.)
All this leads to wonder about our teachers and what this change will mean. A reader, Lendlees, passed on a link to a story that appeared in the LA Times about their teacher ratings. (You may recall that the LA Times got the classroom test scores for every single teacher in Los Angeles and published them in ranked order.)
Susan Troller notes that Wisconsin's oft criticized WKCE (on which Madison's value added assessment program is based) will be replaced - by 2014:
Evers also promised that the much maligned Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, used to test student proficiency in 3rd through 6th, 8th and 10th grades, is on its way out. By 2014, there will be a much better assessment of student proficiency to take its place, Evers says, and he should know. He's become a leading figure in the push for national core education standards, and for effective means for measuring student progress.
It's at the end of the Lynx light rail line off South Boulevard, a 7-year-old building near Pineville sprawled among a smattering of small houses. All but five students are African-American or Latino; 91 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches.
Yet it is the transformation inside that brought U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Gov. Bev Perdue to Sterling Elementary on Wednesday.
Three years ago, only 34.6 percent of Sterling's students passed end-of-grade reading tests. A year later, after a plan to improve poorly performing schools took effect, 58.9 percent passed. Math scores were more dramatic: 52.4 percent passed three years ago; 83.7 percent a year later.
Some quick one-liners from Hartland North Elementary School Principal Pat Thome can sum up the difference between his school now and one year ago.
"There's nobody over 3½ feet tall," he said. "I'm the only guy who comes to work, and there's 450 people wanting to give you a hug every day."
Over the summer, both elementary schools in the Hartland-Lakeside School District transitioned from serving students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade to serving half those grades. North got the students in pre-kindergarten through second grade while Hartland South Elementary School, less than two miles away, now has students in only third through fifth grades.
It's a structure that other southeastern Wisconsin school districts have studied - most recently the Whitnall School District - but few have adopted. Among the obstacles to such changes are concerns voiced by parents about losing their neighborhood schools and the addition of a transition between school buildings in the middle of a child's elementary years.
Madison public schools produced more National Merit Scholarship semifinalists than any other school district in the state again this year.
Thirty-nine students from Madison East, West, La Follette and Memorial high schools, along with 10 other Madison seniors who receive home schooling or attend Edgewood High or Abundant Life Christian School, are among 16,000 students nationwide to receive the honor. The semifinalists, who represent fewer than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, will continue to compete for some 8,400 National Merit scholarships worth more than $36 million to be announced next spring.
Tuesday's primary was a disaster for charter school proponents and their hedge fund backers. They funded three insurgent state Senate candidates, only to see them lose by huge margins to incumbents viewed as hostile to charter schools: Sen. Bill Perkins in Manhattan, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery in Brooklyn and Sen. Shirley Huntley in Queens.
"If you're going to make a statement, you have to either win or be competitive, because if you get crushed it sends the opposite message," one legislator says. "People are going to believe that this is a paper tiger."
Wall Street and the financial services industry made a similar gamble by investing in insurgent Reshma Saujani against Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who supported the sweeping financial regulation bill and won passage of credit card reforms that will curb banks' profits. Saujani raised more than $1.3 million but won only 19% of the vote in an Upper East Side district where support for Wall Street is thought to be greater than elsewhere.
Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank... Fredrick and Nelson... Nordstroms... their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry's store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point. Each of the hundreds of different objects was priced with a faded circle of red cardboard. And walking past, my friend, Laurie, took a long look and said, "Their window-dressing philosophy must be: 'If the window doesn't look quite right - put more in'."
She said the perfect comment at the perfect moment, and I remember it two decades later because it made me laugh. Those other, pretty display windows... I'm sure they were stylist and tasteful, but I have no real memory of how they looked.
For this essay, my goal is to put more in. To put together a kind-of Christmas stocking of ideas, with the hope that something will be useful. Or like packing the gift boxes for readers, putting in candy and a squirrel and a book and some toys and a necklace, I'm hoping that enough variety will guarantee that something here will occur as completely asinine, but something else might be perfect.
Teachers are seriously underpaid, but the public won't support paying the good teachers more without tools to evaluate them. Teachers ought to be leading the way in designing fair evaluation systems.
Linking teacher evaluation to pay is an increasingly hot button issue in Washington state and around the nation. Too much talk is about evaluation and too little about compensation. Sure, teacher evaluation is important. But it's the wagging tail, not the dog. Evaluation schemes won't attract and keep great people in front of the class unless positive evaluations bring meaningful financial rewards.
Teachers make an enormous difference in what children learn. Every parent knows teachers matter. Extensive scientific evidence backs up the importance of teachers to education outcomes. One oft-cited statistic is that a good teacher moves students up one-and-a-half grade levels in a single year. Students of a poor teacher learn only half a year's material.
To reward good teachers we need to identify them. Evaluation should focus on measuring what students learn and then associating student learning measurements with the teachers who taught them.
When UW-Madison chemistry lecturer Jeanine Batterton accused 42 students last fall of plagiarism on a written lab assignment in Chem 104, she was floored by the range of "bizarre excuses" offered by the undergraduates.
Some contended that cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia -- the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia -- was OK because no single author writes the entries.
Others argued that since the assignment was a group project, and since they didn't write the part of the report in question, how could she punish them for any wrongdoing?
One student even told Batterton that when he was caught copying homework answers in another class, the professor let him re-do the assignment -- so why couldn't she do the same?
The state Board of Education took up the controversial issue of teacher evaluations Wednesday, unanimously voting to create an online database to share information about local, state and national efforts to measure educators' effectiveness.
The board also asked the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Fresno school districts to propose specific ways the state can support local efforts to create more meaningful evaluation tools, including the value-added method of using students' test scores to rate teacher performance.
"This is a huge step forward," said board member Ben Austin, who proposed the resolution at the Sacramento meeting. "Including value-added as a component is just common sense, if we take seriously the notion that education is about kids and not grownups."
In the two years Madison has collected and shared value-added numbers, it has seen some patterns emerging in elementary school math learning. But when compared with other districts, such as Milwaukee, Kiefer says there's much less variation in the value- added scores of schools within the Madison district.
"You don't see the variation because we do a fairly good job at making sure all staff has the same professional development," he says.
Proponents of the value-added approach agree the data would be more useful if the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction were to establish a statewide value-added system. DPI is instead developing an assessment system to look at school-wide trends and improve instruction for individual students.
.....
But some question whether value-added data truly benefits all students, or is geared toward closing the gap between high- and low-performing students.
"Will the MMSD use new assessments...of students' progress to match instruction levels with demonstrated learning levels?" asks Lorie Raihala, a Madison parent who is part of a group seeking better programming for high-achieving ninth- and 10th-graders at West High School. "So far the district has not done this."
Others are leery of adding another measurement tool. David Wasserman, a teacher at Sennett Middle School and part of a planning group pushing to open Badger Rock Middle School, a green charter (see sidebar), made national news a few years ago when he refused to administer a mandatory statewide test. He still feels that a broad, student-centered evaluation model that takes multiple assessments into account gives the best picture.
"Assessment," he says, "shouldn't drive learning."
For the first time, more women than men in the United States received doctoral degrees last year, the culmination of decades of change in the status of women at colleges nationwide.
The number of women at every level of academia has been rising for decades. Women now hold a nearly 3-to-2 majority in undergraduate and graduate education. Doctoral study was the last holdout - the only remaining area of higher education that still had an enduring male majority.
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters.
The Administration's initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools. The Department of Education said money from the Education Jobs Fund could go only to teachers and others employed by a local education agency or school district.
"A charter school," says the department, "may not use Ed Jobs funds to pay for the compensation and benefits of employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization who provide school-level educational and related services in the charter school." Many charter school teachers are employees of management firms rather than the school district, so the guidelines would have excluded more than 1,000 charters nationwide (serving around 400,000 students) from the cash.
The drudgery of solving for X flew out the door of a Presidio Middle School classroom Friday as the giddy students traded in their back-breaking algebra textbooks for an iPad touch screen filled with integers and equations that came to life with the flick of a finger.
The San Francisco eighth-graders are among 400 California middle school students participating in a pilot study funded by textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on the use of digital textbooks. The results will help determine whether the high-tech version educates schoolchildren as well or better than its wood-pulp predecessors.
While it's not hard to imagine classrooms full of such devices in the not-so-distant future, the novelty was not lost on many of the adults in the classroom Friday.
Remember this day, district officials told the students.
A school district near Sacramento, Calif., is looking outside the box for new revenue sources in these harsh budget times. Elk Grove Unified has opened up its own Virtual Academy offering complete online curricula for grades kindergarten through 12.
Officials hope to attract home-school students and children from other districts, plus the state tax dollars that come with them. But this kind of online education is also raising some red flags.
Wisconsin has showed little muscle when it comes to motivating students, teachers or schools to achieve ambitious academic goals.
Massachusetts provides a particularly striking comparison to Wisconsin. Just 15 to 20 years ago, Massachusetts and Wisconsin were fairly even. Since then, Massachusetts has moved forward substantially. The state has led the nation in reading and math scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress in recent years. A recent New York Times article said, "Many regard (Massachusetts) as having the nation's best education system." And Boston is widely regarded as a leader in tackling urban school issues.
So what explains the successes in Massachusetts and Boston?
There is nearly universal agreement that the key is "the grand bargain" struck in the Bay State's legislature in 1993. At heart, it was a simple deal: Give schools more money and demand better results.
A multibillion-dollar infusion of state aid to schools righted inequities between have- and have-not school districts. But along with the money came one of the nation's most rigorous sets of standards for what children were expected to learn, and a demanding state testing system, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).
Cesar Chavez is not on the fall election ballot. Neither is Thomas Jefferson. And Texans will not actually get a say in the teaching of evolution in public schools or how to handle sex education.
Voters, however, will help shape the State Board of Education. And nearly everyone agrees that Texans are paying closer attention to the once low-profile board after the 15 members attracted state and national attention for their controversial pursuit of new science and social studies curriculum standards.
Two key contested races in the Nov. 2 general election will determine whether Texans prefer traditional values as seen by supporters of Republican incumbent Ken Mercer, of San Antonio, and candidate Marsha Farney, of Georgetown. Democrats in those races are looking for voters to reject what they call the politicization of education for nearly 5 million public school children.
The board in recent years has been divided largely among seven Republican social conservatives voting as a bloc, five Democrats and three Republicans often considered swing votes.
The scruffy rooftop basketball court of the Larchmont School, a small charter school packed into one floor of an 83-year-old building, offers a breathtaking view of the city's priciest new gem: the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" said Larchmont's executive director Brian Johnson, gazing at the gleaming green rectangular structure surrounded by pristine athletic fields and rows of stately palm trees.
The new public-school complex has drawn criticism for its cost at a time when Los Angeles city schools have laid off thousands of teachers to help plug its $640 million budget gap.
Guggenheim at moments became emotional, choking up as he spoke about one of the girls, Daisy, he profiles in his latest film, "Waiting for Superman," which exposes the breakdown in American education.
"I've watched this movie 40 times and I watch Daisy in East Los Angeles and she's motivated, smart and her father works as a truck driver, while her mother cleans hospital rooms. She wants to be a doctor and her parents have hope. They believe that if they do their part that America will do its part."
At the core of "Superman" is whether America has the will and courage to face up to its spiraling public education system. While it has been generally accepted that education in America has faced a frightening decline, with statistics to back up that fear, Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") hopes that the film will motivate people to believe that a crisis that may appear intractable can be reformed and improved despite the perception that it is a system stymied by entrenched paralysis.
In Caire's mind, kids can't wait. Consider the data he cites from the ACT District Profile Report for the Madison Metropolitan School District's 2010 graduating class:
Of students taking the ACT, average test scores differed significantly between African Americans and white students:
English
Math
Reading
Science
Composite
African Americans
16.3
18.0
17.1
18.4
17.6
Caucasian/White
25.1
25.6
25.8
24.8
25.4
The percent of students meeting ACT College Readiness Benchmark Scores, broken out by ethnicity, for the 2010 graduating class seems more alarming:
Total Tested
English (18)
Math (22)
Reading (21)
Science (24)
All Students
1,122
81%
68%
71%
51%
African Americans
76
38%
24%
25%
9%
Caucasian/White
733
90%
77%
79%
60%
Hispanic
71
59%
39%
45%
18%
Asian/Pacific Isl.
119
67%
65%
61%
45%
Numbers like these fuel Caire's fire, and his vision for The Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. "I'm amazed that [the primarily white leadership in the city] hasn't looked at this data and said, 'wow!' They have the power, but I don't think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I'm the angry black man."
Caire understands the challenges that lie ahead. By November, he needs to formally propose the idea to the School Board, after which he will seek a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction. He anticipates other hurdles along the way. Among them, a misconstrued conception. "Madison believes it's creative, but the reality is, it's not innovative." Will the community accept this idea, or sit back and wait, he wonders.
Second: The resources to do it. "We can survive largely on what the school system can give us [once we're up and running], but there's seed money you need to get to that point."
Third: The teacher's union response. "No one knows what that will be," Caire said. "The school board and district are so influenced by the teacher's union, which represents teachers. We represent kids. To me, it's not, 'teachers at all costs,' it's 'kids first.' We'll see where our philosophies line up." He added that the Urban League and those behind the Charter School idea are not at all opposed to the teacher's union, but the Prep School's design includes, for example, a school day longer than the teacher's contract allows. "This isn't about compensation," he said of the contract, "it's about commitment. We don't want red tape caught up in this, and we want to guarantee long-term success."
Recent research and media reports have raised serious concerns about teacher turnover rates in charter schools. But it isn't exactly clear why teacher turnover rates might be high in charter schools: is it a consequence of their less regulated labor market, or is it the types of students and neighborhoods where they tend to operate?
This study tracked the careers of 956 newly hired charter school teachers and 19,695 newly hired traditional public school teachers in Wisconsin between 1998 and 2006. Although not representative of the charter school sector overall, the study's analysis of Wisconsin's charter school sector provides some important clues about the nature of teacher turnover in charter schools: (1) high teacher turnover rates in Wisconsin's charter schools are mostly a function of teacher characteristics (young and inexperienced) and school contexts (poor and urban), rather than a "charter effect," and (2) teachers in Wisconsin's urban charter schools are less likely to leave their schools than similar teachers in urban traditional public schools.
To better understand teachers' motivations for leaving and staying, researchers turned to national data from the U.S. Department of Education's 1999-00 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS). The SASS-TFS asked traditional public school teachers and charter school teachers who left their schools why they left. In response, teachers in both sectors pointed to a lack of administrative support, poor working conditions, and low salaries. However, compared to traditional public school teachers, charter school teachers were more likely to say that they left because of a lack of job security and the expansive nature of their work.
It is 8:30 on a crisp September morning, the start of a busy day for preschoolers at the Waisman Center's Early Childhood Program, a nationally renowned laboratory school.
At a piano in the gym, a teacher holds a 4-year-old named Michael in her lap and helps him tap out "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." She speaks to him using both sign language and a singsong voice. Several other boys driving toy cars swerve around another teacher doing duty as traffic cop. A student teacher is coloring at a table with students. In a corner of the gym, two girls are playing house. "This is your bed, Baby Kitty. Go to sleep right NOW!" one of them says. A tiny child with big brown eyes, named Caroline, curls up on a mat and pretends to sleep.
Michael, distracted by the noisy traffic behind him, wriggles out of Kerri Lynch's lap and runs up to the boys in cars, making guttural sounds. The boys ignore him and continue to whiz past. Lynch waves down an especially energetic driver in a red T-shirt who has snagged the school's popular police car. "Michael is talking to you," she says, holding Michael, who is clearly becoming frustrated. She puts Michael's face between her hands gently so that he makes eye contact with the other child and encourages him to try to speak again. The other boy listens carefully as the teacher translates: "Michael is wondering when he can have a turn?"
When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the "mad minute" math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter's minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.
We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun -- and wanted less.
I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son -- who was clearly not "ready" to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn't read the questions?
State universities have become the favorite of companies recruiting new hires because their big student populations and focus on teaching practical skills gives the companies more bang for their recruiting buck.
Under pressure to cut costs and streamline their hiring efforts, recruiting managers find it's more efficient to focus on fewer large schools and forge deeper relationships with them, according to a Wall Street Journal survey of top corporate recruiters whose companies last year hired 43,000 new graduates. Big state schools Pennsylvania State University, Texas A&M University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were the top three picks among recruiters surveyed.
Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms.
Employers also like schools where they can form partnerships that allow them to work with professors and their students, giving them an inside track when it comes time to make offers for internships and jobs.
No one should be shocked that the "peer-review" process for Race to the Top is distorted by political considerations, especially since we at JPGB (among others) have been warning about it for months. But it is nice to see someone actually document the existence and magnitude of the distortion.
One of my students at the University of Arkansas, Dan Bowen, conducted an analysis that was featured in AEI's Education Stimulus Watch. It predicted each state's RTTT "peer-review" score based on independent ratings of state reform efforts by Education Week's Quality Counts and others. It then also considered whether political considerations were systematically related to a state doing significantly better or worse in the "peer-review" process than would be predicted by those independent ratings. Dan found that states with hotly contested Senate or gubernatorial contests received significantly higher scores:
The handwriting workshop at Meriter Hospital is much more than penmanship drills.
The 8-week program for elementary students focuses on areas such as upper body strength and stability and eye-hand coordination. Some students took the hour-long class, which was held once a week, in the summer to be more prepared for school this fall. Two more evening workshops for students grades second through fifth will start Sept. 28.
"Handwriting is really important," said Noah Walker, 7, a second grader at Cottage Grove Elementary School. "It won't be all scribbly."
At a recent session, Noah practiced throwing animal-shaped bean bags against the wall. Later he practiced writing with a vibrating pen to work on grip strength and to make the task more enjoyable.
D.C. schools officials detailed for the first time Friday how teachers can qualify for the performance-based pay increases that could vault them into the ranks of the country's best-paid public school educators.
The increases, which come in two forms, are targeted toward teachers who receive the best evaluations. The programs are voluntary, and teachers who participate give up certain job protections.
Those ranked highly effective may be eligible for as much as $25,000 in one-time bonuses, with the amount determined by student performance and other factors. Those ranked highly effective for two years in a row could see their base pay rise by as much as $26,000 a year.
In the past few weeks, more than 400,000 young black men entered American high schools as freshmen. Four years from now, fewer than half of them will get diplomas.
That's according to a new study from the Schott Foundation for Public Education. It found that only 47 percent of black male students entering high school in 2003 graduated in 2008. For white males, the graduation rate was 78 percent.
Dr. John Jackson, the foundation's president and CEO, tells NPR's Guy Raz that those numbers are dismal largely because of the lack of resources in schools with high black populations. He says that when young black men are given opportunities to learn in schools with more resources, they perform well.
High-school students' performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam remained generally unchanged from the previous year, except for Asian-American students who continue to post notable gains and outperform all other students.
Overall, the average scores for the class of 2010 in critical reading remained at 501, in math it climbed from 515 to 516, in writing it dropped from 493 to 492. The combined scores match last year's tally, which was the lowest total since the writing exam was added to the SAT in 2006.
The only bright spot was the performance of the nation's Asian-American students. They posted a three-point gain in reading, four-point jump in math and six-point gain in writing over their 2009 scores.
The SAT news comes a few weeks after the results of the other college entrance exam, the ACT, revealed that only one-quarter of the nation's high-school students possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level college courses. Taken together, the test scores suggest a continued stagnation of high-school performance and highlight the challenge the Obama administration faces in its efforts to boost the nation's college-graduation total.
Two primary school pupils from Hong Kong won the top awards in one of Asia's most prestigious maths competitions.
It's the first time that any Hong Kong pupil has won a grand champion award at the International Mathematics Contest which was held in Singapore last month. About 1,000 pupils competed in the event which sees teams from the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand battling it out in algebra, geometry, statistics and measurements.
Nine-year-old boy Li Ka-wing scored the highest marks in the Primary Three category and 11-year-old girl Lam Ho-yan was the best pupil for the Primary Five exams.
"Each year, there are good results. However this year, it was very special," the school's principal, Pinky Lam Sui-ping, said. Every year, thousands of Hong Kong pupils applied to compete in the event by sitting online tests, she said.
Mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and beaming broadly, the Microsoft chairman Bill Gates looked every bit the benevolent businessman as he took the stage at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday evening, to help plug the education-reform documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'" Mr. Gates appears in the film, and, with his wife Melinda, heads a foundation that has invested heavily in improvements to education. But his aw-shucks manner couldn't hide the fact that some of the proposals he tossed off on stage at the Winter Garden theater here were volatile stuff. "We're investing in building these evaluation systems," Mr. Gates said. He was referring to systems that would evaluate the performance of public school teachers, with an eye toward ending the current tenure system under which many teachers now work, and providing a way to weed out the worst teachers, while, perhaps, rewarding the best. He also mentioned, at least twice, changes to teacher pension systems.
I was never into the 1970s British TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs," where the big shots lived upstairs, the servants lived downstairs, and there was all this dramatic interaction. (I preferred the "Sesame Street" version, where one of the Muppets ran up and down the stairs, loudly proclaiming what he was doing.)
But it sure does seem like we're having vivid episodes of "Upstairs, Downstairs" when it comes to education now. An increasing and huge amount of the action is occurring upstairs, on the federal and state levels, while local control of schools by folks downstairs, like school board members, counts for less and less. The vitality of local control, a Wisconsin tradition for decades, is seeping away. And the staff downstairs - teachers, in other words - are feeling more than a bit put upon.
A few years ago, you would not have expected what is going on now. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan came close to succeeding in eliminating the U.S. Department of Education on the grounds that the federal government shouldn't have much role in that area. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton suggested national tests in reading and math so children across the country were measured by the same standards. The idea went nowhere.
He's got their attention, but only for a few minutes. A few precious minutes to teach in a position that is otherwise layers removed from teaching. Right now, these are his students.
The adults in the room are also intrigued. The new superintendent is an outsider leading a district where staff morale and student achievement are at an all-time low. He arrived on the heels of a fierce debate about mayoral control that polarized the city. His predecessors - including the last superintendent of eight years - have found little success. He's inherited reports that show the district's financial operations and human resource practices need serious improvement.
In addition, there's a $55 million hole in the budget, hundreds of teachers on layoff, 40,000 empty seats in mothballed buildings and a union committed to health care benefits the district can't afford. Teachers are working under a contract that expired in 2009.
And then there are the children. At Starms, all of them on the floor are black, like Thornton, and they are facing tremendous odds. The achievement gap in Wisconsin between white and black students is one of the highest in the nation. African-American fourth-graders in MPS have lower reading scores than their peers anywhere else in the country, even lower than kids in rural Mississippi or Alabama.
In days gone by, before Milwaukee Public Schools undertook the busing of its students to promote racial integration, just about everybody in Bay View went to Bay View High School.
Today, the school has students from all over town, and so for area old-timers, it's lost its identity with their neighborhood.
"People who fondly remember Bay View High School have been in mourning that their school no longer exists," says Kathy Mulvey, president of the Bay View Historical Society.
That's why she is so enthusiastic about a special course at the high school, created by staff from Discovery World science museum - a program that has four students this weekend collecting stories and artifacts from old Bay View at the Beulah Brinton House, the historical society's headquarters.
From the Ed.Gov Toolbox Executive Summary (C. Adelman)
"The academic intensity of the student's high school curriculum still counts more than anything else in precollegiate history in providing momentum toward completing a bachelor's degree. At the highest level of a 31-level scale describing this academic intensity (see Appendix F), one finds students who, through grade 12 in1992, had accumulated:
3.75 or more Carnegie units of English
3.75 or more Carnegie units of mathematics
highest mathematics of either calculus, precalculus, or trigonometry
2.5 or more Carnegie units of science or more than 2.0 Carnegie units of core
laboratory science (biology, chemistry, and physics)
more than 2.0 Carnegie Units of foreign languages
more than 2.0 Carnegie Units of history and social studies
1.0 or more Carnegie Units of computer science
more than one Advanced Placement course
no remedial English; no remedial mathematics
These are minimums. In fact, students who reached this level of academic curriculum intensity accumulated much more than these threshold criteria (see table F1), and 95 percent of these students earned bachelor's degrees (41 also percent earned master's, first professional, or doctoral degrees) by December 2000.
Provided that high schools offer these courses, students are encouraged or required to take them, and, in the case of electives, students choose to take them, just about everybody could accumulate this portfolio....."
--------------------
[How is it that the reading of complete nonfiction books (which will be asked for in college) and
the writing of serious research papers (which will be asked for in college), never seem to penetrate
these maxims about Recommended Curriculum for College and Career Readiness? (At least the International
Baccalaureate Curriculum requires an Extended Essay for the Diploma...)
The world wonders.
Will Fitzhugh
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Why is it that the last people listened to regarding problems in public education are the ones who deal with it on the front line day after day?
Chicago's Renaissance 2010 education plan came onto the charts back in 2004. Immediately, classroom teachers pointed out its many flaws. Were they listened to? Of course not. Instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley and now U.S. Secretary of Education -- then Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer -- Arne Duncan pushed ahead with a program that had come not from the educational community, but rather from the business community.
Lest anyone forget, that's the same business community that has demonstrated questionable wisdom in the world of finance, ultimately leading the United States into its current economic crisis.
Across the region and around the country, parents are kissing their college-bound kids -- and potentially up to $200,000 in tuition, room and board -- goodbye.
Especially in the supremely well-educated Washington area, this is expected. It's a rite of passage, part of an orderly progression toward success.
Or is it . . . herd mentality?
Hear this, high achievers: If you crunch the numbers, some experts say, college is a bad investment.
"You've been fooled into thinking there's no other way for my kid to get a job . . . or learn critical thinking or make social connections," hedge fund manager James Altucher says.
Altucher, president of Formula Capital, says he sees people making bad investment decisions all the time -- and one of them is paying for college.
ACADEMIC qualifications' value in the workplace is a big issue for students, policymakers and taxpayers, especially as the rising numbers of students in higher education make them less distinctive. In the latest annual report on education by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, the answer is clear: the pay-off from tertiary education is still good, both for the individual and the economy. Most graduates take jobs fitting their qualifications, earn more than non-graduates, and thus tend to pay more in taxes.
The workforce is smartening up. In the OECD 35% of the 25- to 34-year-old workforce has completed tertiary education, compared with 20% of the cohort approaching retirement. Countries such as Japan and South Korea have invested so heavily in educating their young that more than half now hold post-school qualifications. Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are close behind. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's chief of education research, reckons that these countries may well become more competitive as a result.
Minister of Education, Science and Technology Lee Ju-ho said Friday he will give top priority to creating a fairer education environment for the second half of the Lee Myung-bak government.
"I believe every student should have an equal opportunity to learn. I am not talking about uniform equal society. I mean children from poor families also should have the chance to receive quality education," Lee said.
Mentioning the college admission system, the lawmaker-turned-minister said he plans to order an investigation into universities to confirm whether children of professors or school staff have been given special treatment in the process.
"In order to fix a holistic admission system at colleges, we need three important values: trust, fairness and the specialty of admissions officers. On top of this, we will seek student diversity," he said.
What is the primary reason you are running for this office?
Education is the most important thing a community provides for its youth to ensure that they grow up to be productive members of society. I am running for re-election because I want to continue to help shape and influence the quality of the educational experience of students in our schools. I want all children in our schools to graduate prepared to be productive, engaged and fulfilled citizens with viable options for their futures.
What will be your single most important priority if you get elected?
My most important priority is to ensure that we provide a quality educational experience for each of our students by continuing to improve student learning and engagement, within the constraint of maintaining our fiscal solvency. There may be different opinions about how to improve student learning and engagement, especially with limited resources. It's important that the values and concerns of all stakeholders-students, parents, staff (at all levels and in all functions), and community members-be considered as the district sets direction and aligns initiatives. We also need to acknowledge and work positively with the natural tension between district direction and site-based initiative.
The biggest opportunity we have is to "get more bang for our buck". The mp3 file includes an interesting discussion on Florida's approach to public information on school performance. Ladner also mentioned teacher certification reform, particularly in math & science.
Today the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released a new book that provides a simple, direct way of comparing the effectiveness of public education in every state. I co-authored the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform with Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips and school choice expert Andrew LeFevre. ALEC is distributing the book to state lawmakers across the country.
For the Report Card, we rank all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on student test scores and learning gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We focused in particular on the scores of low-income students who were not in special education programs from 2003 to 2009, the years in which all jurisdictions took the tests used by NAEP.
Our rankings give the same weight to overall performance (which states had the highest test scores) and overall gains (which states made the most progress over time). The table below shows the rankings:
Jonathan Narcisse, the Iowa Party candidate for governor, said Wednesday that parents and teachers, not the federal government, are the key to making Iowa schools great again.
Federal involvement in schools "has diminished the excellence of education in our state in general and placed in peril urban education in Iowa," Narcisse said.
His speech at Culture Inc., a Des Moines nonprofit youth program that emphasizes the arts, came less than a week after a state report showed a quarter of Iowa schools were labeled "in need of assistance," or failing, based on math and reading test scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Narcisse, 46, a former Des Moines school board member, blamed the federal law for a culture in which fearful teachers "teach to the test" and students are deprived of a "real education."
WASB Policy Modifications Related to Open Enrollment Recommended changes to the current WASB resolution on open enrollment (Policy 3.77):
Current f.: The options for the districts to limit the number of students leaving the school district under the open enrollment program, if the school board believes that number is large enough to threaten the viability of the district.
Proposed f.: The option for the districts to limit the number of students leaving the school district under the open enrollment program, if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened.
Rationale - As school districts are confronted by a combination of revenue limits and declining state aid, fiscal issues are overriding attention paid to the educational programs offered to our children. The law originally limited open enrollment transfers to 3% of a district's total enrollment and was designed to provide parents with enrollment options for their students.
Now, districts lack the flexibility or capacity to adjust to large scale student population shifts. Districts already fiscally weakened by nearly two decades of revenue limits, and more recently, cuts to general state aids - particularly in small, rural districts - are left with the options of dissolving the district, or Draconian cuts to the educational program.
**********
Current i.: The WASB supports a clarification in state statutes to limit the number of students enrolling in nonreSident school districts to 10 percent of the resident district membership.
Proposed i.: The WASB supports limiting the number of students enrolling in nonresident school districts to 3 percent of the resident district membership.
Rationale - The law originally capped open enrollment to 3% of a district's total enrollment. This change returns control of open enrollment transfers to locally elected school board members. If districts choose to limit open enrollment transfers to less than 3%, correspondingly, a district would have to use the same method/policy for accepting students through open enrollment. **********
Proposed i: The WASB supports a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars in open enrollment transfers.
Rationale - Current law requires that a sending district pay the receiving school district approximately $6,500. The $6,500 payment is the estimated statewide cost of educating a student; however, in practice this amount doesn't really reflect the costs of educating a student in the receiving district, or takes into account the loss of revenue to the sending district.
The law could be changed by lowering the dollar amount to $5,000, or the amount of state aid per pupil received by the sending district in the prior year, whichever is less.
While the WASB supports public school open enrollment, participation in the program should not be a fiscal hardship. The current state/nation fiscal climate and local economic circumstances confronted by school districts, has dramatically changed the fiscal equation and requires modifications to the state's open enrollment law.
Approved by the School Board of: Madison Metropolitan School District Date: 9/13/10
kt:4tf,s;:.C~ Signed: (Board President)
or public schools looking to improve their curricula, it's hard to argue with a free product.
That has proved to be a good thing for Web-based education company Everfi, which has raised $11 million in Series A financing from New Enterprise Associates and Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures, as well as angels including Michael Chasen, chief executive of Blackboard, which sells a learning management system.
Everfi provides Web-based learning programs for students, particularly in public schools, focusing on subjects that are not covered in traditional courses, such as nutrition and wellness, personal finance and student loan management.
The company's curriculum is different from the traditional textbook model because it includes 3-D animated gaming-oriented applications. For example, for a lesson about stocks, students virtually visit the New York Stock Exchange and learn how to make a trade, while for a section about student loans, students virtually go to a college campus and learn how to fill out forms and the like.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken another step toward increased transparency, acknowledging in its annual report that the world's largest charitable foundation is too secretive and hard to work with.
The report, posted online Tuesday, includes the usual financial information and a look at the foundation's plans. But it also offers a glimpse of the organization's attempts to be more open.
CEO Jeff Raikes draws attention in the report to a grantee survey that gave the foundation poor marks for communicating its goals and strategies, and for confusing people with its complicated grant-making process.
Mr. Raikes originally released the survey results in June--a day before Bill Gates made headlines for launching a campaign with investor Warren Buffett to get other American billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity.
For most college students, there's a differentiation between life inside the classroom and out; there's a time to be cerebral and then there's the other 22 hours of the day. But these aren't most college students. We looked for schools that cater to students who happily spend all their waking hours in pursuit of intellectual stimulation, questioning life, challenging the status quo, and letting their curiosity run wild. 30,000 student votes later, we've identified the Top 10 Schools where being a "nerd" (as they often, and lovingly, refer to themselves) is truly the norm.
It is shocking to hear that almost no one in Seattle Public Schools had a job description, had regular performance reviews, or even had any set criteria for a performance review. That represents a grosteque failure of management at just about every level of District management, but primarily at the top. I don't know why people think that Raj Manhas was in any way capable, because the CACIEE final report was basically a catalog of his utter failure to fulfill any part of his responsibilities. Joseph Olchefske was no better, and John Stanford started the whole thing by failing/refusing to take on a quality assurance role when he de-centralized decision-making. I certainly appluad the Superintendent for introducing management to Seattle Public Schools. But the REAL focus of her Performance Management effort is schools. Not teachers and principals so much as schools taken a whole.
When Mio Honzawa starts fifth grade next April, her textbooks will be thicker.
Alarmed that its children are falling behind those in rivals such as South Korea and Hong Kong, Japan is adding about 1,200 pages to elementary school textbooks. The textbooks across all subjects for six years of elementary school now total about 4,900 pages, and will go up to nearly 6,100.
In a move that has divided educators and experts, Japan is going back to basics after a 10-year experiment in "pressure-free education," which encouraged more application of knowledge and less rote memorization.
"I think it's a good move. Compared to the education I got, I'm kind of shocked at the level my children are receiving," said Keiko Honzawa, a Tokyo resident and mother of Mio and her seventh-grade brother.
"This has become known as the iPad class," Corey Angst, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, told his students on their first day of class Aug. 24. "It's actually not...it's 'Project Management.'"
A member of Notre Dame's ePublishing Working Group, Angst is debuting the University's first and only class taught using Apple's new wireless tablet computer to replace traditional textbooks. The course is part of a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of eReaders, and Angst is conducting the first phase using iPads, which just went on sale to the public in April.
"One unique thing we are doing is conducting research on the iPad," Angst says. "We want to know whether students feel the iPads are useful and how they plan to use them. I want them to tell me, 'I found this great app that does such and such. I want this to be organic...We have an online Wiki discussion group where students can share their ideas."
The working group participants are from a broad array of colleges and departments, including the Mendoza College of Business, Notre Dame Law School, College of Arts and Letters, First Year of Studies, Hesburgh Libraries, Office of Information Technologies, Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore, Office of Sustainability, Notre Dame Press and Office of Institutional Equity.
THIS WEEK marks the start of the school year. Unfortunately, Massachusetts students are returning to classrooms that haven't changed much since their parents and grandparents attended. Meanwhile, students in other states are taking advantage of a learning opportunity that students here are denied -- online education.
Massachusetts should be in the forefront of using computers and the Internet to change where, when, and how students learn. We have the expertise to lead in virtual education, but the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has restricted school district efforts to introduce virtual schools.
The education reform act approved by the Legislature in January makes it easy for districts to create virtual schools. Of course, we don't envision a future in which online learning replaces brick-and-mortar public schools. Face-to-face peer contact and personal teacher mentoring will always be an important part of learning, especially at the lower grades. However, an increasing portion of learning can occur online with the support of peers and with less direct supervision by teachers. In the long run, this may be the only way to significantly expand learning time within the state's economic constraints.
Robert J. Samuelson, the Newsweek and Washington Post economics columnist, edited my first news story. We were both college sophomores. I was trying out for the student newspaper. He was already a seasoned reporter and editor on the staff. He tossed the typewritten sheets back to me and said to try again.
I did as I was told. I learned much from him during that first encounter, as I have continued to do during our long friendship. He enlightens me even on topics in my specialty, such as his latest column in the Post, "The failure of school reform."
FROM "Wikinomics" to "Cognitive Surplus" to "Crowdsourcing", there is no shortage of books lauding the "Web 2.0" era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn't that great?
No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, "You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto", published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet's sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the "fake friendship" of social networks "is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers". For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. "Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless," he writes, "but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction."
If this criticism of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia had come from an outsider--a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe--then nobody would have paid much attention. But Mr Lanier's denunciation of internet groupthink as "digital Maoism" carries more weight because of his career at technology's cutting edge.
For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
"We have known these principles for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error," said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken."
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are "visual learners" and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. "The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing," the researchers concluded.
Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. "We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere," said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book "Why Don't Students Like School?"
Yet in Newark's public schools, as in many other urban districts, our children's endless talent meets headfirst with a stultifying bureaucracy that too often extinguishes rather than ignites their genius. It is beset with rules that ignore the individual talents of school leaders and teachers.
Its primary features -- tenure, lockstep pay, and seniority -- deny the complexity and creativity of effective teaching and learning, implying that teachers and principals are little more than interchangeable assemblyline workers. These practices instill performance-blindness into the fabric of our schools, dishonoring the talent, commitment and effort of our many good teachers and principals, whose excellence is systematically unrecognized and thus underappreciated. This both disrespects the notion of education as a sophisticated profession and produces a system in which student achievement is peripheral to the day-to-day operations of schools.
Simply put, our children have no limits; our schools have too many.
The future for our children depends on revolutionary school reform, executed relentlessly. Our children can no longer afford tinkering around the edges. This reform must include at least four elements:
•Reform of tenure and collective bargaining, including eliminating tenure for principals and significantly restricting it for teachers.
Efforts to improve education in the U.S. has included financial incentives for high-performing teachers and programs have targeted middle- and high-school students, but a recent study found success in giving money to kids as young as third grade who scored well on standardized tests.
The pay-for-performance plan targeted third through sixth graders who took standardized tests in math, reading, writing, science, and social studies. The students could earn up to $100 -- $20 per score of Advanced in each test. Students who scored proficient were awarded $15 per test. In order to make sure the proceeds went directly to the students, payment was made in "Coshocton Children's Bucks," which could only be redeemed by kids for children's items. Participation in the program was randomized based on a lottery as specified by Robert Simpson, a local factory owner, who financed the effort.
The program showed generally positive results, with the biggest gains coming in math. Students who were eligible for the payments improved about 0.15 standard deviations, a statistically significant result. Though there were small improvements shown for other subject areas, the difference wasn't statistically significant.
I've been giving thought to the School Board elections next year. I might run. I say that not for anyone to comment on but because I'm musing out loud on it. There are many reasons NOT to run but I have one main reason TO run.
Accountability.
To this day, I am mystified over the number of people who run for office that don't believe they have to explain anything to voters AFTER they are elected. And I'm talking here about people whose work is not done with a vote (like the Mayor) but people who have to work in a group (City Council, School Board).
I truly doubt that these people get challenged on every single vote but I'm sure people ask on some. Why would they not respond? If asked, what data or information did you use to make this decision, why can't they answer in specific? Why wouldn't you be accountable to explain how you came to your decision?
Locally, the April, 2011 school board election features two seats, currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman.
Fears that the Government's "free" schools programme will be dominated by faith groups and create more segregation between religions were re-ignited yesterday. Five of the first 16 schools announced by Education Secretary Michael Gove will be faith-orientated - two Jewish, one Hindu, one Sikh and one Christian.
In two other cases, organisers say there will be a strong Christian influence but the school will not officially be a faith school. Two of the projects are proposed by the education charity ARK, which was set up by the hedge fund millionaire Arpad Busson. The author Toby Young was also given the green light for his proposal for a secondary school in Acton, west London, which will concentrate on the classics - every child will be expected to learn Latin at least up to GCSE level.
Under the Government's plans, parents, teachers, charities and faith groups are being encouraged to put in bids to run their own schools with state financial support. They will be able to determine their own curriculum and be free of local authority controls, but the British Humanist Association warned yesterday that they would also be free to promote religious intolerance.
When the Michigan Department of Education classified 41 schools in the Detroit Public Schools system as "failing" last month, I braced myself for a thunderous public outcry.
After all, it was only a few weeks ago that a very energized group descended on the Detroit City Council to loudly and angrily express themselves about education in Detroit. Surely these concerned citizens, having just voiced such a strong concern about education, would leap to action to demand that something be done to fix these "failing" schools now.
But that hasn't happened. The silence, as the old cliché goes, has been deafening.
Why would people who were so passionate and loud so recently remain silent about a report that shows our children are being severely shortchanged? Why would members of the school board who fought to preserve the status quo remain equally silent about such a devastating report?
After all, nothing is as important to our children's future as education. And nothing is more important to our future as a city than our young people.
This is an encouraging season for education reform, and the latest development is a bipartisan political breakout on vouchers in the unlikely state of Pennsylvania.
Last month, and to widespread surprise, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato came out in support of school vouchers for underprivileged kids. Mr. Onorato said that education "grants"--he avoided the term vouchers--"would give low-income families in academically distressed communities direct choices about which schools their children should attend."
Mr. Onorato's Republican opponent, state Attorney General Tom Corbett, is also a strong backer of education choice, which means that come November Pennsylvania voters will get to choose between two candidates who are on record in support of a statewide school voucher program.
Mr. Onorato, the Allegheny County Executive, adopted his new position at the urging of state lawmaker Tony Williams, a voucher proponent whom he defeated in a May primary. The speculation is that Mr. Onorato, who trails Mr. Corbett in the polls, is looking to attract financial support from pro-voucher businessmen who backed Mr. Williams in the primary.
The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper's tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I'm at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school - Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle's affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
"As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her," says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. "In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That's how valuable a Lakeside education is."
Recall now the biblical phrase, "from whence comes my help?" It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.
They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother's prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.
Public education can benefit from more transparency. The disclosure of data on student achievement and teacher effectiveness can be a good thing -- for teachers, parents and American education.
"Too often our systems keep all of our teachers in the dark about the quality of their own work," Duncan told an audience in Little Rock, Ark. "In other fields, we talk about success constantly, with statistics and other measures to prove it. Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?"
It seems a great many teachers have no such fear. Duncan noted that more than 2,000 Los Angeles teachers had called the Times last week to ask for their scores.
The concern has always been that achievement tests are not a reliable or complete measure of teacher eectiveness. It's a valid concern. Certainly, test scores are not a complete measure, and should never be used as such in decisions on hiring, firing or career advancement. Whether or not test scores can be a reliable, or fair, measure depends on how thorough and careful the analysis.
When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as Brazil's president in early 2003, he emotionally declared that he had finally earned his "first diploma" by becoming president of the country.
One of Brazil's least educated presidents -- Mr. da Silva completed only the fourth grade -- soon became one of its most beloved, lifting millions out of extreme poverty, stabilizing Brazil's economy and earning near-legendary status both at home and abroad.
But while Mr. da Silva has overcome his humble beginnings, his country is still grappling with its own. Perhaps more than any other challenge facing Brazil today, education is a stumbling block in its bid to accelerate its economy and establish itself as one of the world's most powerful nations, exposing a major weakness in its newfound armor.
"Unfortunately, in an era of global competition, the current state of education in Brazil means it is likely to fall behind other developing economies in the search for new investment and economic growth opportunities," the World Bank concluded in a 2008 report.
Tennessee schools are measured on two things: achievement, seen in standardized assessment and ACT results; and growth, reported through the state's value-added assessment system. For the first time, parents and other Tennessee citizens can plot the performance of their child's school and others across the district or state through the ECF's interactive Growth vs. Achievement Charts.
To view charts for each major grade level grouping, visit the following links:
A group of high school thespians sharpened their skills this summer at a camp where they worked with professional actors by day and then watched them perform at American Players Theatre at night.
The 27 students ages 13 to 17 attended Acting for Classical Theatre, an American Players Theatre residential camp. The annual six-day camp was based at Bethel Horizons Camp and Retreat Center in Dodgeville where the campers received their training and lodging.
On four nights, they traveled to the nearby American Players Theatre in Spring Green to watch Shakespearean plays. On another night, they received a backstage tour. When they got back to camp, they played theater games -- despite the late hour.
On the last day, parents and American Players Theatre employees were invited to watch the youth perform a shortened, 60-minute version of Hamlet on the American Players Theatre stage.
When Marshall High School opens for the new school year Tuesday, it will have an almost entirely new teaching staff, a revamped curriculum and a $2 million infusion of federal money.
The students and teachers at Marshall--a hulking three-story building on the city's violent West Side known as much for its powerhouse basketball teams as its abysmal test scores--are among millions nationwide who will see changes this fall as part of President Barack Obama's push to overhaul K-12 public schools.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has used much of his $100 billion budget--almost twice what his recent predecessors had--to lure states into reshaping schools through programs such as Race to the Top and school transformations like the one Marshall is undergoing.
"Mainly, this is a year to lay a foundation for the long-term reforms that will get all students college-ready," said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a nonpartisan group of state school chiefs.
American students' lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling.
According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map.
Less than one half of today's high school students study a foreign language, and while a million study French, a language spoken by some 80 million worldwide, less than 75,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by some 1.3 billion. Minority students especially have little access to global topics taught in "higher performing" schools, ranging from languages and economics to exchanges, arts and cultural activities.
The typical teacher or supervisor is not prepared to address this gap: most educators have not taken any international courses and comparatively few participate in study abroad programs.
Schools: The Disaster Movie A debate has been raging over why our education system is failing. A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth throws fuel on the fire.
The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children's Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America's schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted "Call my office," which translated to "Buzz off."
Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he'd made--An Inconvenient Truth--and Canada snapped to attention. "I had absolutely seen it," Canada recalls, "and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn't burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn't become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something." Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. "I honestly didn't think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk."
Two years later, Guggenheim's new film, Waiting for "Superman," is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison's new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
The start of the school year brings another one of those nagging, often unquenchable worries of parenthood: How good will my child's teachers be? Teachers tend to have word-of-mouth reputations, of course. But it is hard to know how well those reputations match up with a teacher's actual abilities. Schools generally do not allow parents to see any part of a teacher's past evaluations, for instance. And there is nothing resembling a rigorous, Consumer Reports-like analysis of schools, let alone of individual teachers. For the most part, parents just have to hope for the best.
That, however, may be starting to change. A few months ago, a team of reporters at The Los Angeles Times and an education economist set out to create precisely such a consumer guide to education in Los Angeles. The reporters requested and received seven years of students' English and math elementary-school test scores from the school district. The economist then used a statistical technique called value-added analysis to see how much progress students had made, from one year to the next, under different third- through fifth-grade teachers. The variation was striking. Under some of the roughly 6,000 teachers, students made great strides year after year. Under others, often at the same school, students did not. The newspaper named a few teachers -- both stars and laggards -- and announced that it would release the approximate rankings for all teachers, along with their names.
The articles have caused an electric reaction. The president of the Los Angeles teachers union called for a boycott of the newspaper. But the union has also suggested it is willing to discuss whether such scores can become part of teachers' official evaluations. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 teachers have privately reviewed their scores online, and hundreds have left comments that will accompany them.
Doug, a longtime science teacher in Alaska, makes this observation:
"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school "reform," with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom's after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture.
When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Chairman Henry Waxman said the Committee reviewed 30,000 documents related to the oil disaster and found "no evidence that you (Hayward) paid any attention to the tremendous risks BP was taking." Likewise no one at the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, or the House and Senate education committees etc. is paying any attention to the tremendous risks the U. S. Department of Education is taking with its money bribes to the states.
Dr. Diane Ravitch is a polarizing figure in the education world. From 1991-1993, Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education in President George H.W. Bush's administration. Originally a strong proponent of school choice, vouchers and high-stakes testing, her views have changed considerably. She argues for her change of heart and in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
It was recently announced that Dr. Ravitch will receive NEA's 2010 Friend of Education Award. CEA recently interviewed Dr. Ravitch about the role of teaching and learning in the age of accountability.
Let's say you were to walk into an elementary classroom in any school district ten years from now. If we stay on the present course set by NCLB, how will teaching and learning be different?
I think that there will be a great deal of drilling and teaching to the test. Most of the day will be spent on reading and mathematics. Kids will be encouraged to take lots and lots of test prep. This is happening now and I don't see any change in the foreseeable future. The secretary has said that 100 percent of all kids should be proficient. There doesn't seem to be an end date where this regime will conclude in victory. Now that so many states are tying teacher evaluation to test scores, it is predictable that we will have a system in which testing of basic skills is the basic purpose of education.
Detroit is the next city to throw away the administrative reins and open the doors for an all-teacher-led school. Serving pre-K through eighth grade and roughly 450 students, the Palmer Park Preparatory Academy (P3A) will open in Detroit Public Schools this fall-- sans principal--replacing the Barbara Jordan Elementary School, which closed in spring 2010 to become a turnaround school after being identified as low performing. The school, which DPS students and families will apply to, is modeled after similar schools in Boston, Milwaukee, Denver and Los Angeles. P3A will partner with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to form a robust, individualized curriculum.
The Detroit Public Schools teacher-led school development team with their reform partners, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Many teachers felt so passionately that they offered to sacrifice their tenure to prove they didn't fear the added responsibility of accountability, says Ann Crowley, DPS teacher and co-founder of the group Detroit Children First, an organization who had been vying for an all-teacher school for several years.
"Many excellent teachers felt they could get more for their children if they had a greater voice in the decisions that are made in their schools," says Crowley.
PARENTS seeking the best education for their offspring often look to ancient institutions. Small wonder that schools run by either the Catholic church or the Church of England are often high on their list. Almost a quarter of all children in the state system attend a religious school, most of them Anglican- or Catholic-run primary schools.
In his drive to give parents more choice in educating their children, Tony Blair raised the profile of church schools by encouraging existing ones to expand and new ones to set up shop. The former prime minister was also keen on incorporating other religions into the state system. The first state-funded Muslim and Sikh schools opened soon after he took power, and the first Hindu school in 2008.
Mr Blair's successors have lacked his zeal, but religious schools continue to flourish. One reason is that their pupils tend to do better than others in exams. In 2009, 57% of them at around age 16 passed national exams (GCSEs) with acceptable grades, including those in maths and English, compared with 51% at non-religious state schools.
Whiteflame128, a participant in my Admissions 101 discussion group, described what happened when he graduated from a Fairfax County high school and showed up for college enrollment with an entire freshman year's worth of credit from Advanced Placement courses and tests. "My advisor had absolutely no idea what to do with my schedule at orientation," he said.
Many students have encountered this problem, some of them in just the last few weeks in this enrollment season. All those extra credits, from AP or International Baccalaureate, don't fit easily into the standard college schedule. They force newcomers to compete with second-year students for limited space in second-year courses. They aggravate the need to take less favored courses just to maintain full-time status. They waste time and money. What do to about this is hard to figure out. Most of the colleges seem to throw up their hands.
Admissions 101 participant grcxx3 said "my son and I were just caught off-guard about how difficult it would be to schedule classes for that first year." Grcxxe said the AP, IB or local college dual enrollment her son took in high school meant he was "coming in with 18-plus hours of credit, much of which [could exempt him from] common freshman classes (like freshman English) and basic general ed classes that are often taken during the first year"
In his most recent post he also hands me some ammo to fire back at him. He quotes an online letter to President Obama from a reader, Ira Socol. Socol is critical of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), as an example of the kind of charter school the president admires, and compares KIPP unfavorably---too rigid, too uncreative, too imperialist---to the Sidwell Friends School which Obama's daughters attend. This is reminiscent of a point made by the late, great Gerald W. Bracey at the beginning of the Obama administration.
Sadly, Socol makes the same mistake Jim has made many times. He cites as evidence for his views of teaching at KIPP and Sidwell some descriptions he found on their Web sites. Any good teacher would tell you that is no way to judge a school. Socol gives no indication he has ever spent time inside a KIPP school, or Sidwell. Neither has Jim, unless I have missed something. They are among the many KIPP critics who consider it sufficient to judge schools by what they read on the Internet.
I think they should visit the schools they write about and tell us what they see. All of the KIPP schools I know have an open door policy. There are 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and D.C., including one in each of the 20 largest cities except Phoenix. I have visited many KIPP schools and Sidwell. I think Socol, and Jim, will be surprised, once they get inside, at how little difference there is between the great teaching going on at both places.
The group, including the presidents of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., urges the use of student test score data and more access to information about instructors for families.
A group of business and civic leaders is urging the Los Angeles school district and teachers union to quickly develop a new evaluation system that incorporates student test score data and gives families more access to information about instructors.
"This system should be transparent and the results of the teacher evaluations should be made available to parents," said a letter signed by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, as well as the presidents of both the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., and 18 other people.
The civic group also endorsed including value-added analysis -- a statistical method that links student test scores to their teachers -- in teacher performance reviews and cited a Times series on the subject as one reason they decided to weigh in.
Interesting discussion on the teachers contract at the Daily Kos. From the thread (italics mine, bold theirs):
Wednesday afternoon the Seattle teachers' union (SEA) achieved a huge victory over the proponents of what is popularly (and erroneously) known as "education reform."
After many, many hours of hard negotiations, the SEA negotiators achieved a tentative contract with the district. What is remarkable about this contract is that:
Teachers' final evaluations will not depend on student test scores. * Teachers' jobs will not depend on student test scores.
Teachers' pay will not depend on student test scores.
This tentative agreement was reached despite intensive efforts by the Broad-Foundation-connected superintendent to insert test scores into all three of the above areas.
And actually, it is a real victory for the teachers (in terms of ridding themselves of what they did not want in the contract) and anyone who does not support the ed-reform push by wealthy foundations and the DOE.
These include better infrastructure to support learning, new progression choices for Normal (Academic) students, new specialised schools for Normal (Technical) students, and an extension of the Integrated Programme to more schools .
A new medical school will start in 2013 and MOE will also fund a number of new places in new degree courses in NAFA and LASALLE.
Opening Remarks by Dr Ng Eng Hen at the National Day Rally Media Conference held at the MOE Function Room 31 August 2010.
Investing in All Learners, Creating New Opportunities and Pathways
Singapore's rapid progress has been made possible only through the sheer ability, tenacity and wits of its people.
We must nurture this critical human resource through education as it is our most precious asset. Singapore is fortunate to have a strong and respected education system and good teachers, which have resulted from persistent efforts in the last three decades.
The role of test scores in evaluating teachers is a prickly and complicated issue, which is why California has been avoiding the conversation for so long. Fortunately, that procrastination is no longer possible after The Times took the bold step of analyzing standardized test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District to see whether individual teachers appeared to be successful at raising their students' scores.
Given the current nationwide push to include test data in teacher evaluations, it was time to strip away the mystery about test scores and take a close look at what they are, what they show and don't show, and what teachers, administrators and the rest of us might learn from them. The Times' articles and online database rating nearly 6,000 elementary school teachers allow the examination to begin.
Another national magazine says Madison is one of the nation's best cities in which to raise a family.
That's something to celebrate.
But Kiplinger's, a monthly business and personal finance periodical, also raps ours city schools as "weak" in its latest edition.
That's troubling.
"Madison city schools are weak relative to the suburban schools," the magazine wrote in its analysis of the pros and cons of living here with children.
Really?
The magazine apparently used average test scores to reach its conclusion. By that single measure, yes, Dane County's suburban schools tend to do better.
But the city schools have more challenges - higher concentrations of students in poverty, more students who speak little or no English when they enroll, more students with special needs.
None of those factors should be excuses. Yet they are reality.
And Madison, in some ways, is ahead of the 'burbs. It consistently graduates some of the highest-achieving students in the state. It offers far more kinds of classes and clubs. Its diverse student population can help prepare children for an increasingly diverse world.
College Station's 2009-2010 budget was $93,718.470, supporting 9,712 students = $9,649.76 per student. . They also publish an annual check register, allowing interested citizens to review expenditures.
Madison's 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471 for 24,295 students = $15,241 per student, 57.9% higher than College Station.
College Station's A and M Consolidated High School offers 22 AP classes while Madison East offers 12, Memorial 25 (8 of which are provided by Florida Virtual...), LaFollette 13 and West 8.
College Station's "student profile" notes that the District is 59.3% white, 31.4% are economically disadvantaged while 10.3% are in talented and gifted.
I went to McDonald's this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald's to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald's, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play.
On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald's, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, "Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!" "McDonald's has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!"
The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, "We want to do it!" So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It's a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.
I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I've seen leads me to believe that isn't the case.
For one thing I find it very hard to believe that we would waste so many resources on a nearly unproductive enterprise. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there trying to make money by selling cheaper, in time and money, versions of education and they aren't very successful. Mainstream schools have experimented with programmed learning, lectures on video, self-paced learning, etc. and none of the methods have caught on. Why wouldn't they if they worked?
Of course its hard to believe that reading novels and poems contributes much to ones productivity on the job. So how do I square curriculum content with my view that education is productive? Here goes:
1. Education isn't mainly about learning specific subject matter. Rather education is mainly about practicing the sort of self-discipline that is necessary to be productive in a modern work environment. High school allows you to practice showing up on time and doing what you are told. College allows you to practice and work out techniques that work for you that allow you to take on and complete on time complicated multi-part tasks in an environment where you have considerable freedom about how you spend your time. Some people may be more talented than others at this sort of thing (you come to mind as someone who is particularly talented at self-discipline), but this is also an acquired skill that one can develop with practice, and everyone needs to develop certain work habits that make one more productive at both types of tasks.
Kindle owners buy twice as many books as non-Kindle owners. Just one of the many signs that while the paper book is dead, the narrative will live on.
If you are saying to yourself, "That sounds horrible. I hope books do not go away," I ask you to consider the world's poorest and most remote kids.
The manufactured book stunts learning, especially for those children. The last thing these children should have are physical books. They are too costly, too heavy, fall out-of-date and are sharable only in some common and limited physical space.
Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get.
Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp a fifth of Pakistan. President Mohamed Nasheed, of the Maldives, worries enough about future sea levels to hold a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear. (Don't miss this on YouTube!)
Parallel thinking should apply to a phenomenon of greater concern to readers here: "extreme academe." Think of it as the hysterical upgrading of ugly visions of the future already found in polite critiques of higher ed.
Back in 2003, for instance, former Harvard President Derek Bok, in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press), drilled home the problem capsulized in his subtitle by noting that throughout the 1980s, deans and professors brought him "one proposition after another to exchange some piece or product of Harvard for money--often, quite substantial sums of money."
A whole week of catharsis, yet the Garden State still agonizes over the loss of $400 million in Race To The Top money. Ex-Commissioner Bret Schundler is out on his keister -- amid calls for legislative hearings because of a botched question that pushed us into the losers' column by three points. (NJ came in 11th with 437.8 points; Ohio, the 10th of 10 winners, got 440.8.)
NJ Facebook Group: New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze
More pertinent is the NJ Department of Education's perceived ineptitude. During the presentation of our application to federal reviewers, five high-level DOE staffers were unable to conjure up basic fiscal information for 2008 and 2009, instead of the mistakenly/cravenly entered information on 2011. And that's after spending $500K on a consultant.
Was the incorrect answer a clerical error? Was it a ham-handed effort to elude accountability on state school aid cuts?
Final answer: it's irrelevant.
We didn't lose the Race To The Top by a grimace-inducing three points because of a whiffed answer valued at less than one-half percent of the total 500 points. We lost because our ambitious reform plans elicited lukewarm support from local school boards and superintendents (about half signed on) and ice-cold censure from NJEA affiliates.
For comparison's sake, New York State won and had buy-in from every local union president.
With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week advocating for transparency for teacher evaluations that include, in part, standardized test scores, the National Education Association weighed in today, asking members how they'd like to be measured.
NEA staffer Kevin Hart asked teachers to reply on the union's Facebook page, and reported some interesting answers.
"They believe a well-designed process can help them improve at their jobs and will ultimately benefit students," Hart wrote on the union's NEA Today website. "But teachers believe any evaluation process should be fair, consistently applied, and take into account the realities of their profession."
Teachers told the secretary that faculty members love what they do and treat each other like family. Parents said their children feel comfortable in the welcoming school, and Superintendent Thomas Brennan thanked city officials for providing much needed resources for books and staff.
Duncan was at Bakersville, labeled a "persistently low-achieving school" by the state Department of Education, as part of his Courage in the Classroom tour throughout the state this week. On Monday, Duncan visited Keene State College, and on Tuesday afternoon, he headed to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to talk to military families.
Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.
.......
States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.
My Reasons for Optimism on Education: Across the country, new institutions like charter schools are disproving the old assumption that economic circumstances determine outcomes.
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the latest winners of Race to the Top, the initiative he devised to leverage federal dollars to drive education reform at the state level. While no grant process is perfect, the competition drove a remarkable volume of new plans and even new laws designed to advance educational opportunity. Many states showed boldness--and I'm particularly excited that all 12 winning states mentioned Teach For America in their applications.
This fall marks Teach For America's 20th anniversary, and I have spent much of the summer reflecting on the sea change that has taken place in public education over the last two decades.
When we set out to recruit our first corps of teachers in 1990, it would be fair to say that there was no organized movement to ensure educational opportunity for all children in our nation. The prevailing assumption in most policy circles was that socioeconomic circumstances determined educational outcomes. Thus, it was unrealistic to expect teachers or schools to overcome the effects of poverty.
When Jaime Escalante led a class of East Los Angeles students to pass the AP calculus exam in 1982, the Educational Testing Service questioned the results, and Hollywood went on to make the hit movie "Stand and Deliver" about his success. Escalante was lionized as an outlier--not as someone whose example could be widely replicated.
All through the community, I have been hearing families express varying emotions about the beginning of a new school year this week. Some are glad for the relief from costly summer programs. Others are anxious about changes for their children who are moving from elementary to middle or middle to high school. One parent even shared how her daughter wakes up in the middle of the night asking questions about kindergarten.
At a recent United Way Days of Caring event in Middleton for more than 100 students from Madison-area Urban Ministry, Packers and Northport, lots of children expressed excitement over starting school again and appreciated the fun as well as the backpacks filled with school supplies that Middleton partners provided.
The schools where we send our children to learn and the people we ask to respect and teach them stir up a lot of emotions, just like an article about Wisconsin ACT scores stirred up a lot of emotions in me. ACT stands for American College Testing and the scores test are used to gain entrance into college, which translates for most Americans into an ability to live well economically or to become the institutionalized poor. Certainly the good news is that Wisconsin scored third in the nation and that Madison schools' scores went up slightly.
The bad news is when your look at the scores based on racial groups, once again in Madison, in Wisconsin and in the U.S., the scores of African-American students are the lowest.
It felt more like a day of summer camp than the first day of school, with team-building fun and games and youthful leaders in T-shirts and shorts.
But the goal of ninth-grade orientation Wednesday at Madison's East High School -- the school year's first day that's been labeled "Freshman Academy" -- was serious: to lower truancy rates, curb behavior problems and raise academic success of the incoming class of 2014.
As it's been in Madison for years, the first day of school in the city's public high schools was dedicated to welcoming only ninth-graders, an effort to help them find their way before the buildings become flooded with additional sophomores, juniors and seniors Thursday.
East's new take on that is based on Link Crew, a national program designed to bond newcomers with juniors and seniors, who throughout the year will serve as mentors and personal cheerleaders to a freshman group of about six students each.
The fight for teacher accountability is gaining traction around the country, and the latest evidence is that the unions are objecting to a newspaper bold enough to report . . . the news. That's the story out of Los Angeles, where on Sunday the Los Angeles Times published evaluations of some 6,000 city school teachers based on how well their students performed on standardized tests.
The paper is defending its publication of the database as a public service amid union boycott threats, and rightly so. Since 1990, K-12 education spending has grown by 191% and now consumes more than 40% of the state budget. The Cato Institute reports that L.A. spends almost $30,000 per pupil, including capital costs for school buildings, yet the high school graduation rate is 40.6%, the second worst among large school districts in the U.S.
After decades of measuring education results only by money spent, with little to show for it, parents are finally looking for an objective measure to judge teacher effectiveness. Taxpayers also deserve to know whether the money they're paying teachers is having any impact on learning or merely financing fat pay and pensions in return for mediocrity. The database generated 230,000 page views within hours of being published on the paper's website, so the public would appear to want this information.
Union leader A.J. Duffy of the United Teachers Los Angeles stupidly called for a boycott of the Times. Boycotts can be sensible things, but threatening to boycott a newspaper is like threatening to throw it into a briar patch. Hell, Duffy might as well have volunteered to sell Times subscriptions, door-to-door, as to threaten a boycott. Doesn't he understand that the UTLA has no constituency outside its own members and lip service from members of other Los Angeles unions? Even they know the UTLA stands between them and a good education for their children.
Duffy further grouched that the Times was "leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by ... a test." [Ellipsis in the original.] Gee, Mr. Duffy, aren't students judged by test results?
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also knocked the Times for publishing the database that measures the performance of 6,000 elementary-school teachers. Weingarten went on to denounce the database as "incomplete data masked as comprehensive evaluations." Of course, had the Times analysis flattered teachers, Weingarten would be praising the results of the analysis.
Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren't strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.
Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms--in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay--than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.
Los Angeles school board members made their first public statements Tuesday about evaluating teachers partially by analyzing student test scores, with most saying that the current system needs to be reworked and some adding that parents deserve more information about their children's teachers.
"As a parent, I think I have a right to know," said board member Nury Martinez, who added that she did not believe that the general public should be able to see a teacher's entire review.
Martinez also acknowledged that the district has lagged in updating its evaluation system.
"I also believe this conversation has taken way too long. I think we're talking years and years and years," she said. "We need to get the ball moving here."
In "Steal This Movie, Too" (column, Aug. 25), Thomas L. Friedman is right to rejoice in those educators working from the bottom up.
I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed a career as a teaching artist in the Catskills and in New York City for many years. I see the really great teachers and administrators every day, and they have two important characteristics in common: they love and respect the children, and they love and are open to thought.
Everything else follows -- the expectations that the children really want to learn and will do well, the enthusiasm with which the educators seek out and bring new ideas to the classroom and are willing to listen to the students' theories, and the eagerness to bring others into the classroom to contribute other concepts. These educators should indeed be championed.
ALEC's 16th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.
With its foreword written by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, this completely revised Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform examines the reforms enacted under his tenure and how Florida has risen from consistently earning near-bottom scores to ranking third in the country.
As students in the state's first online-only public school, they will log onto a computer and find out what books they need to read and what new skills they should master.
The Massachusetts Virtual Academy opens in Greenfield on Thursday, not only as the first in the state, but also as the first virtual school in New England to serve students from kindergarten through high school.
At virtual school, the students will take all of their classes online and have a learning coach make sure they complete their assignments. A parent could be certified, for instance, to be the learning coach.
The student can work anytime of day and some may never see their teachers in person.
In fact, the changing face of Madison's school population comes up consistently in other interviews with public officials.
Police Chief Noble Wray commented recently that gang influences touch even some elementary schools, and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz expressed serious concern last week that the young families essential to the health and vitality of Madison are too often choosing to live outside the city based on perceptions of the city's schools.
Nerad says he saw the mayor's remarks, and agrees the challenge is real. While numbers for this fall will not be available for weeks, the number of students who live in Madison but leave the district for some alternative through "open enrollment" will likely continue to grow.
"For every one child that comes in there are two or three going out," Nerad says, a pattern he says he sees in other urban districts. "That is the challenge of quality urban districts touched geographically by quality suburban districts."
The number of "leavers" grew from 90 students as recently as 2000-01 to 613 last year, though the increase might be at least partly attributed to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greatly curtailed the ability of school districts to use race when deciding where students will go to school. In February 2008, the Madison School Board ended its long-standing practice of denying open enrollment requests if they would create a racial imbalance.
Two key reasons parents cited in a survey last year for moving children were the desire for better opportunities for gifted students and concerns about bullying and school safety. School Board member Lucy Mathiak told me last week that board members continue to hear those two concerns most often.
Nerad hears them too, and he says that while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district. On safety, he points to a recent district policy on bullying as evidence of focus on the problem, including emphasis on what he calls the "bystander" issue, in which witnesses need to report bullying in a way that has not happened often enough.
For all the vexing issues, though, Nerad says much is good about city schools and that perceptions are important. "Let's be careful not to stereotype the urban school district," he says. "There is a lot at stake here."
The significant property tax hike and ongoing budget issues may be fodder for the upcoming April, 2011 school board election, where seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot.
Superintendent Nerad's statement on "ensuring that we have a stable middle class" is an important factor when considering K-12 tax and spending initiatives, particularly in the current "Great Recession" where housing values are flat or declining and the property tax appetite is increasing (The Tax Foundation, via TaxProf:
The Case-Shiller index, a popular measure of residential home values, shows a drop of almost 16% in home values across the country between 2007 and 2008. As property values fell, one might expect property tax collections to have fallen commensurately, but in most cases they did not.
Data on state and local taxes from the U.S. Census Bureau show that most states' property owners paid more in FY 2008 (July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008) than they had the year before (see Table 1). Nationwide, property tax collections increased by more than 4%. In only four states were FY 2008's collections lower than in FY 2007: Michigan, South Carolina, Texas and Vermont. And in three states--Florida, Indiana and New Mexico--property tax collections rose more than 10%.
A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles -- with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers' work.
The system calculates the value teachers add to their students' achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.
Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.
The Royal Society, Britain's science academy, is curious as to why British youngsters seem to be going off studying computing at school. The number of people studying the subject has fallen by a third over the past four years, which is odd, considering how much boilerplate we get from the great and the good about the importance of computer literacy in today's wired world.
The RS is getting together with teaching outfits and the Royal Academy of Engineering. They intend to investigate the problem and produce a report. As is compulsory for anything to do with science in modern, cash-strapped Britain, the RS worries dutifully that having fewer kids studying computing will damage Britain's economy. Maybe. But I want to defend computing not because a good computing curriculum might raise GDP by a few percentages points, but because the subject deserves on its own merits to be part of any modern, liberal education.
Full disclosure: your correspondent is a huge computer nerd, and has been ever since he was in short trousers. I'm familiar with the problem the RS describes: when I was at secondary school over a decade ago, our computing classes were terribly dull. In fact, they weren't really about computing at all. They were about the quirks of Word, how to make pretty charts in Excel and the importance of backing up your files, the sorts of things taught on computers-for-the-clueless courses like the European Computer Driving Licence. In fact, the analogy with a driving licence illustrates the point nicely: for me, the classes were rather like going on an automotive engineering course, only to find it was all about how to perform hill starts and three-point turns. From talking to today's teenagers, it seems little has changed.
I fully agree. We should not be so focused on teaching powerpoint, or word. Each student should know essential html and an understanding of how to solve problems with computers, and create new opportunities.
New York City's standalone middle schools do a worse job educating students than schools that offer kindergarten through eighth grade under one roof, according to a new study to be released Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University.
On average, children who move up to middle school from a traditional city elementary school, which typically goes up to fifth grade, score about seven percentiles lower on standardized math tests in eighth grade than those who attend a K-8 school, says Jonah Rockoff, an associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Business who co-authored the study.
The disparity stems from the toll that changing to a new school takes on adolescents and differences in the sizes of grades, the study says. Typically, K-8 schools can fit fewer children in each grade than standalone middle schools.
"What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform." says Mr. Rockoff, noting that there aren't significant differences in financial resources or single class sizes between the two types of schools. Standalone "middle schools, where kids are educated in larger groups, are not the best way to educate students in New York City."
The research culls data for city school children who started in grades three through eight during the 1998-99 school year and tracks them through the 2007-2008 school year, comparing test scores, attendance rates and parent evaluations. Of the student sample, 15,000 students attended a K-8 school versus 177,000 who attended a standalone middle school.
We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement. We instrument for middle school attendance using the grade range of the school students attended in grade 3, and employ specifications that control for student fixed effects. This leaves only one potential source of bias--correlation between grade range of a student's grade 3 school and unobservable characteristics that cause decreases in achievement precisely when students are due to switch schools--which we view as highly unlikely. We find little evidence that placing public school students into middle schools during adolescence is cost-effective.
One of the most basic issues in the organization of public education is how to group students efficiently. Public schools in the U.S. have placed students of similar ages into grade levels since the mid-1800s, but grade configurations have varied considerably over time. At the start of the 20th century, most primary schools in the U.S. included students from kindergarten through grade 8, while the early 1900s saw the rise of the "junior high school," typically spanning grades 7-8 or 7-9 (Juvonen et al., 2004). More recently, school districts have shifted toward the use of "middle schools," which typically span grades 6-8 or 5-8.1 Interestingly, middle schools and junior high schools have never been popular among private schools.2
The impact of grade configuration has received little attention by economists relative to issues such as class size or teacher quality. There are a few studies which provide evidence that the transition to middle school is associated with a loss of academic achievement, elevated suspension rates, and reduced self esteem (Alspaugh (1998a, 1998b), Weiss and Kipnes, (2006), Byrnes and Ruby (2007), Cook et al. (2008)). There is also a large body of work by educational researchers and developmental psychologists documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence (Eccles et al. (1984)), and some have hypothesized that instructional differences in middle schools contribute to these changes. However, these studies examine differences between middle school and elementary school students using cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to reject the hypothesis that differences across students, rather than differences in grade configuration, are responsible for divergent educational outcomes.3
In this study, we use panel data in New York City to measure the effects of alternative grade configurations. Specifically, we focus on variation in achievement within students over time, and examine how student achievement is affected by movement into middle schools. Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion extend through grade 8; thus most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. We find that achievement falls substantially (about 0.15 standard deviations in math and English) when students move to middle school, relative to their peers who do not move. Importantly, these negative effects persist through grade 8, the highest grade level on which test data are available.
Seeing as I am not paid to blog as part of my daily job, it's basically impossible for me to be even close to first out of the box on the issues of the day. Add to that being a parent of two small children (my most important job - right up there with being a husband) and that only adds to my sometimes frustration of not being able to weigh in on some of these issues quickly.
That said, here is my attempt to distill some key points and share my opinions -- add value, if you will -- to the debate that is raging as a result of the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish the value-added scores of individual teachers in the L.A. Unified School District.
First of all, let me address the issue at hand. I believe that the LA Times's decision to publish the value-added scores of individual teachers was irresponsible. Given what we know about the unreliability and variability in such scores and the likelihood that consumers of said scores will use them at face value without fully understanding all of the caveats, this was a dish that should have been sent back to the kitchen.
Although the LA Times is not a government or public entity, it does operate in the public sphere. And it has a responsibility as such an actor. Its decision to label LA teachers as 'effective' and 'ineffective' based on suspect value-added data alone is akin to an auditor secretly investigating a firm or agency without an engagement letter and publishing findings that may or may not hold water.
Frankly, I don't care what positive benefits this decision by the LA Times might have engendered. Yes, the district and the teachers union have agreed to begin negotiations on a new evaluation system. Top district officials have said they want at least 30% of a teacher's review to be based on value-added and have wisely said that the majority of the evaluations should depend on classroom observations. Such a development exonerates the LA Times, as some have argued. In my mind, any such benefits are purloined and come at the expense of sticking it -- rightly in some cases, certainly wrongly in others -- to individual teachers who mostly are trying their best.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
Black boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations.
Research indicates that although black boys have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein black males find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young Black men will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (aka Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men of color. Its founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding - and in some cases fear - of black boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison - the "founders" of Madison Prep - also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
Five years ago yesterday, the levees broke. Hurricane Katrina flooded roughly 80% of this city, causing nearly $100 billion in damage. The storm forced us to rebuild our homes, workplaces and many of our institutions--including our failing public education system.
But from the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.
Citywide, the number of fourth-grade students who pass the state's standardized tests has jumped by almost a third--to 65% in 2010 from 49% in 2007. The passage rate among eighth-graders during the same period has improved at a similar clip, to 58% from 44%.
In high school, the transformation has been even more impressive. Since 2007, the percentage of students meeting the state's proficiency goals is up 44% for English and 45% for math. Schools have achieved this dramatic improvement despite serving a higher percentage of low-income students--84%--than they did before the storm. Many of these students missed months or even a whole year of school.
The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the world's most definitive work on the language, will never be printed because of the impact of the internet on book sales.
Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.
A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED - known as OED3 - for the past 21 years.
The dictionary's owner, Oxford University Press (OUP), said the impact of the internet means OED3 will probably appear only in electronic form.
The most recent OED has existed online for more than a decade, where it receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay an annual fee of £240.
More than a fifth of the incoming kindergarteners registered in the Madison School District will be more ready for school this fall after attending a six-week summer program.
The full-day K-Ready program helps children prepare for kindergarten by working on academic readiness skills such as letter recognition, name writing and counting. They also have the opportunity to learn what school is like, how to get along with others, and how to listen to a teacher.
This summer, the program grew to a new high of 460 students - about 22 percent of projected kindergarteners.
Fakeith Hopson enrolled his daughter, Aniyah, who will attend Leopold Elementary School, in the K-Ready program at Huegel Elementary School and was impressed by the strides she made in counting and saying her ABCs. She also learned how to tie her shoes.
"At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"
Students are returning to school this week. But they're not heading back to class -- they're walking straight into a war zone. Our kids have become cannon fodder for two rival ideologies battling to control America's future.
In one camp are conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education; in the other are politically radical multiculturalists and their de facto champion, President Barack Obama. The two competing visions couldn't be more different. And the stakes couldn't be higher. Unfortunately, whichever side wins -- your kid ends up losing.
That's because this war is for the power to dictate what our children are taught -- and, by extension, how future generations of Americans will view the world. Long gone are the days when classrooms were for learning: now each side sees the public school system as a vast indoctrination camp in which future culture-warriors are trained. The problem is, two diametrically opposed philosophies are struggling for supremacy, and neither is willing to give an inch, so the end result is extremism, no matter which side temporarily comes out on top.
Both visions are grotesque and unacceptable -- and yet they are currently the only two choices on the national menu. Which shall it be, sir: Brainwashing Fricassee, or a Fried Ignorance Sandwich?
"In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys," says Caire, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. He is blunt about the problems of many black students in Madison.
"We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I'm not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education. Well, here's a plan that's innovative, and that has elements that have been very successful elsewhere. I'd like to see it have a chance to change kids' lives here," says Caire, who is African-American and has extensive experience working on alternative educational models, particularly in Washington, D.C.
One of the most vexing problems in American education is the difference in how well minority students, especially African-American children, perform academically in comparison to their white peers. With standardized test scores for black children in Wisconsin trailing those from almost every other state in the nation, addressing the achievement gap is a top priority for educators in the Badger State. Although black students in Madison do slightly better academically than their counterparts in, say, Milwaukee, the comparison to their white peers locally creates a Madison achievement gap that is, as Caire points out, at the bottom of national rankings.
He's become a fan of same-sex education because it "eliminates a lot of distractions" and he says a supportive environment of high expectations has proven to be especially helpful for improving the academic performance of African-American boys.
Caire intends to bring the proposal for the boys-only charter prep school before the Madison School Board in October or November, then will seek a planning grant for the school from the state Department of Public Instruction in April, and if all goes according to the ambitious business plan, Madison Prep would open its doors in 2012 with 80 boys in grades 6 and 7.
Forty more sixth-graders would be accepted at the school in each subsequent year until all grades through senior high school are filled, with a total proposed enrollment of 280 students. A similar, same-sex school for girls would promptly follow, Caire says, opening in 2013.
Five things would make Madison Prep unique, Caire says, and he believes these options will intrigue parents and motivate students.
Fabulous.
It will be interesting to see how independent (from a governance and staffing perspective) this proposal is from the current Madison charter models. The more the better.
Last up, is "Next Steps for Future Board Development Meetings and Topics.' Board development is good and important, but with only 2/3 of the term left I hate to see too much time and energy devoted to Board Development.
I keep coming back to this. Every year about 1/3 of the time and energy is devoted to budget matters, that leaves 2/3 to try to make things better. Put it another way; it is September, budget season starts in January. Past time to get to work.
This just leaves the closed meeting on the Superintendent evaluation. Not much to add to what I wrote here. My big point is that almost all of this process should be public. I will repost the links to things that are public:
Charlie Mas continues to chronicle, in a similar manner to TJ, the Seattle School Board's activities.
In my view, the Madison School Board might spend time on:
Public Superintendent Review, including oversight of the principal and teacher review process. Done properly, this should improve teaching effectiveness over time. This process should include full implementation of Infinite Campus. Infinite Campus is a potentially powerful tool to evaluate many activities within the District.
Implement a 5 year budget.
Evaluate ongoing MMSD Programs for their effectiveness, particularly from a spending and staffing perspective.
Voters will have another chance to weigh in on the Madison School Board during the spring, 2011 election, when seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot. Those interested in running should contact the City of Madison Clerk's office.
Update: I received the draft Madison School Board ethics documents via a Barbara Lehman email (thanks):
Presently we do not have a policy that describes expectations regarding the performance of School Board members. The Committee developed this list on the basis of similar policies adopted by other Boards as well as our own discussion of what our expectations are for each other. The Committee members were able to reach consensus on these expectations fairly quickly.
Expectation No.4 refers to information requests. We realize that current MMSD Policy 1515 also refers to information requests, but our thinking was that the existing policy addresses the obligation of the superintendent to respond to information requests. We do not currently have a policy that addresses a Board member's obligation to exercise judgment in submitting information requests.
Expectation No. 10 is meant to convey that School Board members hold their positions 24-hours a day and have a responsibility to the Board always to avoid behavior that would cast the Board or the District in a poor light.
How might Number 10 affect an elected Board member's ability to disagree with District policies or activities?
These paragraphs are a modification from existing language. Although the overall intent appears to remain similar to existing policy, I recommend the existing language because I think it does a better job of expressly recognizing the competing interests between the "beliefstatements" and a Board Member's likely right, as an individual citizen (and perhaps as a candidate for office while simultaneously serving on the Board) to accept PAC contributions and or to make a statement regarding a candidate. Perhaps the langnage could make clear that no Board Member may purport to, or attempt to imply, that they are speaking for the School Board when making a statement in regard to a candidate for office. That is, they should be express that they are speaking in the individual capacity.
The Board functions most effectively when individual Board Members adhere to acceptable professional behavior. To promote acceptable conduct of the Board, Board Members should:
When my father graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1927, I am pretty sure it was not called "The Harvard Graduate School of Medical Education." People I know who got their degrees from Harvard Law School tell me that it was never, to their knowledge, called the "Harvard Graduate School of Legal Education." I think that the Harvard Business School does not routinely refer to itself as the "Harvard Graduate School of Business Education." Harvard College (this is my 50th reunion year) has never seen the need to call itself "The Harvard Undergraduate School of Academic Subjects," as far as I know. But the Harvard Education School, where I was informed, in the late 1960s, that I had been made a "Master of Education," (!?) calls itself the "Harvard Graduate School of Education." Perhaps that makes it a status step up from being called the Harvard Normal School, but the name is, in my view, a small symptom of a deeper problem there.
I had lunch in Cambridge yesterday with a man from Madagascar, who was bringing his daughter (one of The Concord Review's authors), for her first year at Harvard College. He asked me why there seemed to be so much emphasis in United States schools on nonacademic efforts by students (I assumed he was referring to things like art, band, drama, chorus, jazz ensemble, video workshop, sports of various kinds, community service, etc., etc.). Now you have to make allowances for a geophysicist from Madagascar. After all, on that large island, and indeed in the whole Southern Hemisphere, they think that June, July, and August are Winter months, for goodness' sake!
As I tried to explain to him the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in American life, and the widespread anti-academic attitudes and efforts of so many of our school Pundits, I thought again about the way the Harvard Education School defines its mission.
As you may know, I am very biased in favor of reading and writing, especially by high school students, and since 1987, I have published 912 exemplary history essays by secondary students from 39 countries in the only journal in the world for such work, so when I have failed to stir some interest in faculty at the Harvard Education School, it has disposed me to look closer at what they are interested in other than the exemplary academic work of students at the high school (or any other) level.
To be fair, there have been a few Harvard people who have taken an interest in my work. Harold Howe II wrote to fifteen foundations on my behalf (without success) and Theodore Sizer wrote the introduction to the first issue in the Fall of 1988, and served on my Board of Directors for several years. Recently, Tony Wagner has taken an interest, and, a very good friend, William Fitzsimmons, Harvard Dean of Admissions, got his doctorate there.
But what are the research interests of faculty at the Harvard Education School, if they don't include the academic work of students? I recommend that anyone who is curious about this odd phenomenon may review the interests of this graduate faculty by looking at their website, but here a few revealing examples:
"Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. For much of the past decade, Dr. Ferguson's research has focused on racial achievement gaps..."
"During the past two decades, [Howard] Gardner and colleagues have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project, a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with longtime Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James, he is investigating trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Underway are studies of effective collaboration among nonprofit institutions in education and of conceptions of quality in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic 'The True, The Beautiful, and the Good: Reconsiderations in a post-modern, digital era.'"
"Nancy Hill's area of research focuses on variations in parenting and family socialization practices across ethnic, socioeconomic status, and neighborhood contexts. In addition, her research focuses on demographic variations in the relations between family dynamics and children's school performance and other developmental outcomes. Recent and ongoing projects include Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students), a longitudinal study between kindergarten and 4th grade examining family related predictors of children's early school performance; Project Alliance/Projecto Alianzo, a multiethnic, longitudinal study of parental involvement in education at the transition between elementary and middle school. She is the co-founder of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, an interdisciplinary group of scientists who develop theory and methodology for defining and understanding the cultural context within diverse families. In addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals, she recently edited a book, African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity (Guilford, 2005) and another edited volume is forthcoming (Family-School Relations during Adolescence: Linking Interdisciplinary Research, Policy and Practice; Teachers College Press)."
This is really a random sample and there are scores of faculty members in the School, studying all sort of things. If I were to summarize their work, I would suggest it tends toward research on poverty, race, culture, diversity, ethnicity, emotional and social disability, developmental psychology, school organization, "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good...in a post-modern, digital era," and the like, but as far as I can tell, no one there is interested in the academic study (by students) of Asian history, biology, calculus, chemistry, foreign languages, European history, physics, United States History, or any of the academic subjects many taxpayers think should be the main business of education in our schools.
Of course all the things they do study are important, and can be funded with grants, but how can the academic work of students in our schools be of no importance to these scholars? How can they have no interest in the academic subjects which occupy the time and efforts of the teachers and students in our schools?
Perhaps if they were interested in the main academic business of our schools, the place would have to change its name to something less pretentious, like the Harvard Education School?
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
It's a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in "Monster Math."
That's Tan's name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits, Tan makes her class practice with 10 digits by two -- just to show them it's not so different.
On this spring day, her students pick apart the problem on the board -- 7,850,437,826 x 56 -- with the enthusiasm of game show contestants, shouting out answers before Tan can ask a question. When she accidentally blocks their view, several stand up with their notebooks and walk across the room to get a better look.
The answer comes minutes later in a singsong unison: "Four hundred and thirty-nine billion, six hundred and twenty-four million...."
Congratulations, Tan tells them, for solving it con ganas. That's Spanish for "with gusto," a phrase she picked up from watching "Stand and Deliver," a favorite film of hers about the late Jaime Escalante, the remarkably successful math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
After serving on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District's Governing Board of Trustees since 2006, I've decided not to seek re-election. My years on the board have been an amazing experience, but it's time for me to step aside and allow a new community member the opportunity to offer his or her leadership to the school district.
As we head into the election season and what will certainly be a climate of overheated rhetoric about what's right and what's wrong with our school district and what ought to be done about it, I think it's appropriate to lay out the duties of a school board member for the sake of voters and those who seek to serve on the board.
The California School Board Association spells out the role of a school board member very clearly: School board members are locally elected public officials entrusted with governing a community's public schools.
Along with the superintendent, board members set the long-term vision for the district so students will reach their highest potential. Board members are responsible for maintaining an efficient structure of school district operations by employing the superintendent, setting policy for hiring other personnel, setting a direction for and adopting the curriculum, and establishing budget priorities. Board members ensure accountability by evaluating the superintendent and district policies as well as monitoring all aspect of the district's operations. School board members must
Santa Cruz County schools face major challenges in coming years. Just like most schools in California, local districts are faced with funding cuts, fewer staff members and more demands -- especially in educating students with limited English skills, many from disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances.
In addition, schools are trying to cope with ever increasing demands to raise standards and be more accountable to state and local government for results.
In the series, State of Our Schools, which concludes today, the Sentinel reports that local schools will be operating with fewer teachers, more students in classrooms, less support help and, in some districts, a shorter school year.
Clearly, most people in the county and state don't like to see school funding cut. The easiest answer is to simply restore the funding.
Change forces and market drivers (described in 3×5 revolution) are finally bringing the digital revolution to education. Online learning is creating new options for students. Blending online and onsite learning has the potential to improve learning and operating productivity. The digital learning revolution is creating 10 shifts int he way we learn (first explored in a 7/3 post)
1.Responsibility. Families are taking back responsibility for learning and choices in learning are exploding. In America, most states grant charters to nonprofit groups to operate independent schools. New York City closed 90 failing schools and invited community organization to assist in developing 400 new schools. Independently run government funded education is common in Europe, Scandinavia, and Chile. Low cost private schools provide educational options in India and Africa.
Higher learning choices are expanding; and while traditional college costs spiral higher, some new options like Open University are free, and some are very low cost. Competency-based programs like Western Governor's University give credit for demonstrated expertise. Straighter Line allows students to earn college credits on an accelerated basis for $99 per month.
2.Expectations. The standards movement, culminating in the Common Core,[iii] reflects American political consensus that all students should be eligible and prepared for higher learning--a monumental step for equity but with the unintended consequence of standardizing a 19th century version of schooling based on age cohorts, credit hours and bubble sheet tests.
"Revolutionary." "Disruptive." These terms are used with such frequency that they may have lost much of their meaning. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of products and services that are innovative, and plenty of systems, plenty of organizations that are ripe for disruption or "revolution." Take education, for example. Our modern education system is, after all, not so modern, with many of its practices strongly rooted in a "factory" model circa the Industrial Revolution. But what does revolutionizing education really look like? And which startups working in education technology are really "disruptive"?
A recent thread on Quora bypasses the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" adjectives, asking instead "What are some interesting startups in the education space?" But a recent blog post at The Teaching Master does invoke these adjective, listing the "Top 25 Web Startups Revolutionizing Teaching." Neither the Quora nor the Teaching Master post offer metrics. There's no indication of what makes a "top" startup or what constitutes "interesting," let alone "revolutionary" work in the ed-tech space.
The announcement on Tuesday that Massachusetts has qualified for $250 million in federal grant money under the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" program would seem to validate the state Board of Education's unanimous decision in July to adopt the national standards program. The standards will dictate what students across the country will learn in English and math.
Nevertheless, the board's decision still may prove a liability for Gov. Deval Patrick in his bid for re-election in November.
Nine other states will share more than $3 billion in grants in this second round of awards. Cape Cod schools look to gain almost $2 million -- all of which will be targeted toward improving pupil performance, particularly in schools where the student achievement gap is significant. It will provide funding to improve teacher training, overhaul failing schools, and will increase accountability by tying test results to teachers.
Of the record $100 billion in federal education funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009, Congress and President Obama set aside $5 billion to be awarded at the discretion of the Secretary of Education to states, districts, and consortia that develop robust education reform plans. The $5 billon is broken down as follows:
$4 billion - Race to the Top State Incentive Fund (individual states)
$650 million - Investing in Innovation or i3 Grants (local, regional collaborators)
$350 million - Race to the Top Assessment Grants (multi-state consortia)
In total, these funds represent less than 1% of the $600 billion (federal, state, and local funds) spent on U.S. public elementary and secondary schools.
This unprecedented infusion of federal education reform funds, coupled with unprecedented latitude afforded to a U.S. Secretary of Education, catapulted the Obama Administration to the role of top U.S. venture philanthropist in the education policy world.
Tony Bennett, the state's superintendent of public instruction for nearly two years, deserves accolades for shoving education reform toward the top of Indiana's agenda.
Unlike his predecessor, Suellen Reed, who seemed little more than a cheerleader for schools, Bennett is pushing hard-nosed reforms.
And while at times he's unfairly cast the state's powerful teachers' union--the Indiana State Teachers Association--as a villain, Bennett wisely struck a more productive, collaborative tone during his State of Education address Aug. 23. The New Albany Republican avoided the rhetoric that scores political points but does little to actually improve schools.
Heidi Ramirez does not drink alcohol, except for one shot a year of bourbon in honor of President Harry Truman.
Truman, she says, was a great president, and he had a shot of bourbon every day. But obviously that's not the whole story.
Ramirez grew up in a large, low-income family in Amsterdam, a small city northwest of Albany, N.Y. She made it to Syracuse University, and won a prestigious Truman Scholarship, a program that is aimed at college juniors "with exceptional leadership potential" and an interest in public service.
So, a toast once a year to Truman. The scholarship paved the way for her to go on to Harvard, Stanford and jobs in which she worked with some of the most influential people in American education.
And then she came to Milwaukee, where, at 36 and with no experience teaching or administering a school, she immediately became one of the most influential people on the local education scene. She is chief academic officer of Milwaukee Public Schools, one of several outsiders brought into MPS this summer by new Superintendent Gregory Thornton.
If MPS' education problems could be solved by personal energy, we already would have everything licked. Thornton is an energetic person and Ramirez, if anything, surpasses him. She is so hard-driving, yet cheerful about what she is doing, that some people tell her she sounds giddy about her job. "I really am," she admits. "I feel so incredibly blessed to be part of the work. . . . I get to do work that I love and that I think really matters."
Cortines wants the method based on student test scores to count for at least 30% of instructor evaluations. But the teachers union must consent.
Revamping teacher evaluations with the goal of helping instructors improve has become an urgent priority in the nation's second-largest school district, Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an address to administrators Wednesday.
Cortines said the district will develop and adopt a "value added" method that determines teachers' and schools' effectiveness based on student test scores. And he told a packed Hollywood High School auditorium that he's committed to using these ratings for at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation. The plan would require the consent of the teachers union.
In a later interview, Cortines also said he was disappointed that California lost its bid Tuesday for $700 million in federal Race to the Top school improvement grants. L.A. Unified's share would have been $153 million.
There is an old myth that vampires cannot be seen in a mirror. A vampire has no real substance, the story goes, so light simply travels through him, rather than bouncing back and creating a reflection. That myth came to mind when Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project recently asked "who's a member of the 'blame the teacher' crowd?" and could not find a single person. Apparently Daly cannot see himself in a mirror.
If there was ever a question about the existence of the 'blame the teacher' crowd, it was surely put to rest by the response of many in the self-identified 'education reform' community to the prospect of a wave of teacher layoffs as schools re-opened for the 2010-11 school year. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, Wal-Mart Professor of Education Reform Jay Greene: the blogging boys of the educational right have told all who would listen that the education funding crisis and the prospect of massive layoffs was a good thing, and that the passage of the edu-jobs legislation mitigating those layoffs was the real disaster. With Lenin, they embrace the formula "better fewer, but better": public schools would be better off with fewer teachers. After all, what do teachers have to do with the education of students?
Consider it a new version of death by PowerPoint. The NATO command in Afghanistan has fired a staff officer who publicly criticized its interminable briefings, its overreliance on Microsoft's slideshow program, and what he considered its crushing bureaucracy.
Army Colonel Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack yesterday from his job as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Kabul. It was barely 48 hours after United Press International ran a passionate op-ed he wrote to lament that "little of substance is really done here." He tells Danger Room, "I feel quite rather alone here at the moment."
The colonel's rant called into question whether ISAF's revamped command structure, charged with coordinating the day-by-day war effort, was much more than a briefing factory. Or, as Sellin put it, "endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information." According to Sellin, when his commanding general (whom he doesn't want to name) saw that Sellin described IJC as a blinkered bureaucracy, he informed the colonel that it was time to pack his things. "He was very polite and shook my hand and wished me luck," Sellin says.
Economists have discovered that the earning gap for college is even bigger because students are studying far less than previous generations. Midmorning asks if students are coming to college better prepared, or if the schools are complicit in lowering standards?
Change & Accountability: New Jersey Governor Fires Education Chief
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has fired his education commissioner, Bret D. Schundler, in the midst of a controversy over the state's failure to win a $400 million education grant, the governor's office announced Friday.
A clerical mistake in the state's grant application had led the state to come up short by just three points in the high-stakes competition, known as Race to the Top. Mr. Christie had defended his administration's actions on Wednesday, in part by insisting that Mr. Schundler had provided the correct information to federal reviewers in an interview two weeks ago.
But federal officials released a video on Thursday showing that Mr. Schundler and his administration had not provided the information when asked. Mr. Christie, asked later Thursday about the videotape in a radio interview, said he would be seriously disappointed if it turned out he had been misled.
These candidates have committed to support all children in all Milwaukee schools. Please help us show them that education reform supporters in Milwaukee recognize their efforts. With your help we can elect and re-elect committed leaders who will fight for real reform and support more quality options for children and their parents.
Please join us whether you can give $5, $50 or $500 to each candidate!
When: Monday August 30th, 2010
Where: The Capital Grille 310 West Wisconsin Avenue
Time: 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Refreshments will be served.
Free Valet Parking Provided.
RSVP: Ptosha Davis, DFER WI, 414-630-6637 or dferwisconsin@gmail.com
Canada's point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it's with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.
"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist," Canada says in the film. "I read comic books and I just loved 'em ...'cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, 'He's coming, I just don't know when, because he always shows up and he saves all the good people.' "
Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, "Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?" She told him the truth: " 'Superman is not real.' I was like: 'He's not? What do you mean he's not?' 'No, he's not real.' And she thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. And I was crying because there was no one ... coming with enough power to save us."
"Waiting for Superman" follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.
Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to their local public schools until "it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn't matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. And so every morning, betraying the ideals I thought I lived by, I drive past three public schools as I take my kids to a private school. But I'm lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there's a great public school there aren't enough spaces, and so we do what's fair. We place our children and their future in the hands of luck."
It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid's educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film's core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.
California's community colleges have dropped a controversial plan that would have allowed their students to take some courses at the online Kaplan University and make it easier to transfer to that school for a bachelor's degree.
State community college officials Wednesday said they had canceled a 2009 agreement with Kaplan, a for-profit institution, because the University of California and Cal State University systems had not agreed to accept Kaplan courses for transfer credits. Without the transfer agreements, the plan could have harmed students and the community colleges, the officials said.
Kaplan University officials, in a statement Wednesday, said they were disappointed by the decision but "will continue to foster relationships with California community colleges and to look for innovative ways to help students meet their academic and career goals."
I am a mother of four children, two of whom are enrolled in Wisconsin Connections Academy, the state's public K-8 virtual school. My decision to do this was based on a number of factors. My oldest son, 6, is very bright and thoughtful, but has always had difficulty in social situations. He is easily overwhelmed by crowds and tends to withdraw, and I knew he would need help and extra attention to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. My daughter, 11, had been in the public school system from the beginning and was struggling as well. I knew that she was not getting the help she needed to keep up in math, for example. Also, the social stresses at school were affecting her self-esteem, and she was losing her desire to challenge herself. I began looking into virtual schools.
I have been a long-time supporter of public schools and a fierce advocate for involving parents as partners in education. Yet I also came to realize that bricks-and-mortar schools could only go so far toward individualized education. Virtual schools, like WCA, provide the perfect opportunity for children to receive personalized education. WCA provides a public school education using state-certified teachers who work directly with learning coaches to bring personalized instruction.
It is schooling at home, not home-schooling. While they sound similar, there is a huge difference. With WCA, I am the learning coach for my children, but they learn a state-certified curriculum, just like kids in bricks-and-mortar schools. They have desks, books and computers. We even have a Smart Board in our basement that we use on a regular basis. We go on field trips and have opportunities to meet other families who have similar stories about how they came to WCA.
It is, of course, essential that Oregon ensure the rigor and quality of online charter schools and demand financial and academic transparency from the private vendors operating these "virtual schools." But once the state is convinced that online students are receiving a quality education, why should it prevent other families from making the same choice?
The Oregon Board of Education recently spent several hours kicking this question around before concluding that parents should be allowed to choose online schools -- but only up to a point. A majority of board members supported parent choice only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district. In other words, parent choice for some, but not necessarily all.
We understand the issue: State money follows students, and in theory enough students might bail out of an individual school district that it would leave that district too financially weakened to serve its remaining students.
It's the start of another school year, and parents everywhere are asking themselves: Is my child's teacher any good? The Los Angeles Times recently attempted to answer that question for parents. Using a statistical technique known as "value added"--which estimates the contribution that a teacher made to a student's test-score gains from the beginning to the end of the school year--the paper analyzed the influence of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers on the math and reading scores of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The results suggest a wide variation in the quality of L.A.'s teachers. The paper promises a series of stories on this issue over the next several months.
The Times has admirably highlighted the importance of using data to evaluate teacher performance, confirming the findings of a wide and growing body of research. Studies show that the difference between a student's being assigned to a good or bad teacher can mean as much as a grade level's worth of learning over the course of a school year. While parents probably don't need studies to tell them who the best teachers are--such information is an open secret in most public schools--academic research helps underscore the inadequacy of the methods currently used to evaluate teacher performance. Even the nation's lowest-performing school districts routinely rate more than 95 percent of their teachers as satisfactory or higher.
When I'm not blogging away about technology for the Bits Blog, I'm also an adjunct professor at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
The program is a technology-focused graduate course, so it came as no surprise when four of my students walked into class in early April with fancy new Apple iPads in hand. After the students got past the novelty factor, a debate ensued about how the iPad would fit into their school life. One factor the students discussed was the ability to carry less "stuff" in their backpacks: the iPad can replace magazines, notepads, even a laptop.
Now there's an iPad application that could further lighten the load. A new company called Inkling hopes to break the standard textbook model and help textbooks enter the interactive age by letting students share and comment on the texts and interact with fellow students.
New report highlights the best and worst of Detroit's schools
WXYZ:
A new report by Excellent Schools Detroit is highlighting the best and worst Detroit's schools.
The report is a report card of sorts about almost every school in the city. It ranks the schools from best to worst based on MEAP test results for elementary and middle schools and ACT results for high schools.
The report is meant to be used as a guide for parents who want to find the best school for their children. The authors recommend parents examine the data on their child's current schools and then look at the data from other schools that they could attend.
Among the best elementary schools in Detroit are the private Cornerstone School - Nevada Primary and Martin Luther King Jr. Education Center Academy, a charter school. Also included are the Bates Academy and Chrysler, both of which have special admissions requirements.
When I get into cocktail-party conversation about language and politics, someone inevitably says "and of course there's the rise of China." It seems like any conversation these days has to work in the rise-of-China angle. Technology is changing society? Well, it's the flood of cheap tech from China. Worried about your job? It's the rise of China. Terrified of nuclear Iran? If only that rising China would stop resisting sanctions. What's for lunch? Well, we'd all better develop a taste for Chinese food.
I was reminded of this walking down New York's Park Avenue last night, when I saw a pre-school offering immersion courses in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. For years now, we've been seeing stories like this: Manhattan parents, always eager to steal some advantage for their children, are hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies, so their children can learn what some see as the language of the future.
But while China's rise is real, Chinese is in no way rising at the same rate. Yes, Mandarin Chinese is the world's most commonly spoken language, if you simply count the number of speakers. But the rub is that they're almost all in China. Yes, we've also read that Mandarin is advancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities (which have traditionally spoken one of China's other languages, such as Cantonese). And China is trying to expand the use of the language through the expansion of its overseas Confucius Institutes. But English remains the world's most important language. America's superpower status has made it everyone's favourite second language. This is where its power lies. A Japanese businessman does deals in Sweden in English. A German airline pilot landing in Milan speaks English to the tower. English is also the language of writing intended for an international audience, whether scientific, commercial or literary.
I had the craziest dream last night, Louisiana, a state that is a leader on all the things that the administration says are priorities didn’t get Race to the Top funding…oh wait…
Big takeaways beyond the RTT issues below, are that the odds of seeing consistent and deep change across all Race to the Top winners got a lot longer with this round of selections. But the two fundamental questions basically remain the same and can’t be answered yet: How durable will the many RTT-inspired policy changes prove to be and will those changes actually improve student learning?
Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around -- the teachers -- and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special-ed teacher 22 years."
Here at GeekDad we are fortunate to spend time reviewing and exploring the increasing number of applications design to entertain, educate and amuse our children. The sudden rise in accessible touch technology through smartphones and tablets combined with the business model provided through App Stores to developers has turned application development into a modern day equivalent of a gold rush. Everyone is out there, developing apps as quickly as possible - hoping to strike it rich with a well designed flatulence application - and consequently flooding the market with sub-standard applications that see them back up their tent and leave the electronic frontier as quickly as they came.
Consequently, there are a lot of apps for kids that are not well thought through, not developmentally appropriate, or simply way too generic! And, in my professional life and personal life having reviewed and played a lot of these games I think it is time to ask developers to start focusing on quality, rather than quantity.
Four months ago, Jamila Best was still in college. Two months ago, she started training to become a teacher. Monday morning, the 21-year-old will walk into a D.C. classroom, take a deep breath and dive into one of the most difficult assignments in public education.
Best is one of 4,500 Teach for America recruits placed in public schools this year after five weeks of summer preparation. The quickly expanding organization says that the fast track enables talented young instructors to be matched with schools that badly need them -- and the Obama administration agrees. This month, Teach for America won a $50 million federal grant that will help the program nearly double in the next four years.
But many educators and experts question the premise that teaching is best learned on the job and doesn't require extensive study beforehand. They wonder how Best and her peers will handle tough situations they will soon face. Best, with a Howard University degree in sociology and psychology, will teach students with disabilities at Cesar Chavez Parkside Middle School in Northeast Washington. She has none of the standard credentials for special education.
"I'm ready to go," Best said last week at the public charter school as she put finishing touches on her lesson plans. "The challenges will come."
The Chicago Teachers Union on Tuesday accused Mayor Daley's handpicked school team of hiring "baby sitters" to provide "education on the cheap" -- online, after-school classes in reading and math that will extend one of the nation's shortest school days for 5,500 students.
"When the kids are tired and they want to go home and they don't want to do this any more, what happens? I'm a little concerned about how this plays out over an entire year," said union president Karen Lewis.
At a news conference at Walsh Elementary School, 2015 S. Peoria, Daley acknowledged that "some parents and teachers will not support" his efforts to use computerized learning to extend the school day.
But he argued that an extra 90 minutes a day would add up to 255 more hours a year. That's a 25 percent increase in a school day that pales by comparison to other major cities, he said.
"This is all about children and not about adults. . . . Education doesn't end at 2:45" p.m., the mayor said.
Schools CEO Ron Huberman added, "All of our efforts to expand the school day with the traditional work force were, unfortunately, rejected. This has been the mayor's push to say, 'Despite constraints, we must find a way to do this.' "
Virtual learning is an important and desirable part of the K-12 world.
Arne Duncan, US education secretary, tells Anna Fifield, the FT's US political correspondent, that the "Race to the Top" programme has led to a "quiet revolution" with 36 hard-up states implementing reforms simply in the hope of receiving federal funding. Despite opposition from teachers' unions, Mr Duncan says the administration will continue to push for change, although it will not raise the proportion of education funding that comes from the federal government.
A report released Tuesday ranks cities not in terms of best-performing schools but on their openness to outside ideas and education reform.
Education entrepreneurs - the sort of people who want to open a new charter school, or have an innovative way to get talented new teachers into schools - would do well to head to New Orleans. Or Washington or New York.
At least that's the judgment of "America's Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents," a study released Tuesday that's attempting to rank cities in a new way. It doesn't look at how well their students perform, or even on the programs their districts have put in place, but on how welcoming they are to reforms and new ideas. The education version of the World Bank's annual ranking of the best countries for business, if you will.
Enter the education entrepreneur, a problem-solver who has developed a different and--it is to be hoped--better approach to teaching and learning, either inside or outside the traditional school system. He or she may provide, among other things, a novel form of brick and mortar teaching, an alternative version of teacher recruitment or training, or time-saving software and tools that make for more efficient instruction and surer learning. Which cities would welcome and support such problem-solvers by helping to bring their ideas to scale, improve their odds of success, and nurture their growth? Put another way, which cities have the most reform-friendly ecosystems?
To answer this question, analysts examined six domains that shape a jurisdiction's receptivity to education reform:
Human Capital: Entrepreneurs need access to a ready flow of talented individuals, whether to staff their own operations or fill the district's classrooms.
Financial Capital: A pipeline of flexible funding from private and/or public sources is vital for nonprofit organizations trying to break into a new market or scale up their operations.
Charter Environment: Charter schools are one of the primary entrees through which entrepreneurs can penetrate new markets, both as direct education providers and as consumers of other nontraditional goods and services.
Quality Control: Lest we unduly credit innovation per se, the study takes into account the quality- control metrics that appraise and guide entrepreneurial ventures.
District Environment: Because many nontraditional providers must contract with the district in order to work in the city, finding a district that is both open to nontraditional reforms and has the organiza- tional capacity to deal with them in a speedy and professional manner can make or break an entrepreneur's foray into a new market.
Municipal Environment: Beyond the school district, is the broader community open to, even eager for, nontraditional providers? Consider, for example, the stance of business leaders, the mayor, and the media.
Drawing on publicly available data, national and local survey data, and interviews with on-the-ground insiders, analysts devised a grading metric that rated each city on its individual and collective accom- plishments in each of these areas.
I have just returned from giving a three-day workshop on student history research papers for English and Social Studies teachers, both high school and middle school, in Collier Country, Florida.
They assessed and discussed four high school student research papers using the procedures of the National Writing Board. We went over some of the consequences for a million of our students each year who graduate from high school and are required to take (and pay for) non-credit remedial courses when they get to college.
I talked to them about the advantages students have if they have written a serious paper, like the International Baccalaureate Extended Essay, in high school, and the difficulties with both reading nonfiction books and writing term papers which students (and college graduates) have if they have not been asked to do those tasks in high school.
It was a diligent, pleasant and interesting group of teachers, and I was glad to have had the chance to meet with them for a few days. They seemed genuinely interested in having their students do serious papers and be better prepared for college (and career).
At lunch on the last day, however, I discovered that Florida is a "right to work" state, and that their local union is rather weak, so they each have six classes of 30 or more students (180 students). One teacher is being asked to teach seven classes this year, with 30 or more students in each (210).
After absorbing the fact of this shameful and irresponsible number of assigned students, I realized that if these teachers were to ask for the 20-page history research paper which is typical of the ones I publish in The Concord Review, they would have 3,600 pages to read, correct, and comment on when they were turned in, not to mention the extra hours guiding students through their research and writing efforts. The one teacher with 210 students would have 4,200 pages of papers presented to him at the end of term.
It made me both sad and angry that these willing teachers, who want their students to be prepared for higher education, have been given impossible working conditions which will most certainly prevent them from helping their students get ready for the academic reading and writing tasks which await them in college (and career).
Few education stories have excited me as much as the series on teacher assessment being done by reporters Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times. They have dug up a goldmine of data on the student test score gains of 6,000 individual elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, information that the district has refused to show to parents despite pleas from its staff to do so.
The latest story in the series, "L.A.'s leaders in learning," does many things that I think are crucial to improving American education, and fit what I have been trying to do calculating the level of challenge in high schools, nationally and in the Washington area, the last 12 years.
The latest Times story focuses on how schools as a whole, not individual teachers, are doing in raising achievement. That emphasis encourages schools to create team-like cultures in which everyone works to make everyone else better. The story buttresses the central point of the series--that schools that seem similar to parents trying to choose where to send their children look very different when unreported data like relative test score gains are revealed. It also shows in a dramatic way the uselessness of our usual means of rating schools. Those that have the highest test scores are considered the best, even though achievement measured that way reflects the average incomes of the parents far more than it does the quality of the teaching.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set an ambitious goal last year of overhauling 1,000 schools a year, using billions of dollars in federal stimulus money.
But that effort is off to an uneven start. Schools from Maine to California are starting the fall term with their overhaul plans postponed or in doubt because negotiations among federal regulators, state officials and local educators have led to delays and confusion.
In this sprawling district east of Los Angeles, for example, the authorities announced plans earlier this year to use the program to convert Pacific High, one of California's worst-performing schools, to a charter school, involving a comprehensive makeover.
American writer Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion
Every 50 years or so, American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".
Why would you study design if you weren't planning to become a designer? Especially if you were a high school student in a depressed rural area of the United States, like Bertie County, one of the poorest counties in North Carolina, where 80 percent of students live in poverty, and your best chance of employment will be a low-skilled job in agriculture or biotechnology.
Why indeed? Yet all 16 teenagers in the 11th grade at the School of Agriscience and Biotechnology at the Bertie Early College High School have committed to attending an experimental design course, Studio H, for three hours every day in the new school year. An abandoned car body shop behind the school has been converted into a classroom, studio and workshop for the course. By the end of it, the students will have designed a community project, a farmers' market to sell locally gown produce, and will then be paid to build it over the summer.
Because of Bertie County's poverty, "very few of these kids will become designers," said Emily Pilloton, founder of the humanitarian design group, Project H, who recently moved to Bertie County from San Francisco to run Studio H with Project H's project architect, Matthew Miller.
So most of you may have heard that the LA Times is doing a huge multi-part story about teacher evaluation. One of the biggest parts is a listing of every single public school teacher and their classroom test scores (and the teachers are called out by name).
Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers -- something the district could do but has not.
The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
Interestingly, the LA Times apparently had access to more than 50 elementary school classrooms. (Yes, I know it's public school but man, you can get pushback as a parent to sit in on a class so I'm amazed they got into so many.) And guess what, these journalists, who may or may not have ever attended a public school or have kids, made these observations:
Here on Jeju Island, famous for its tangerine groves, pearly beaches and honeymoon resorts, South Korea is conducting a bold educational experiment, one intended to bolster opportunity at home and attract investment from abroad.
By 2015, if all goes according to plan, 12 prestigious Western schools will have opened branch campuses in a government-financed, 940-acre Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community within Seogwipo, where everyone -- students, teachers, administrators, doctors, store clerks -- will speak only English. The first school, North London Collegiate, broke ground for its campus this month.
While this is the country's first enclave constructed expressly around foreign-style education, individual campuses are opening elsewhere. Dulwich College, a private British school, is scheduled to open a branch in Seoul, the capital, in a few weeks. And the Chadwick School of California is set to open a branch in Songdo, a new town rising west of Seoul, around the same time.
Since Andie was in 6th grade - she'll be entering 8th grade Sept. 1 - the Smith family has used Infinite Campus, an electronic data system that gives parents access to information about how students are doing in school. It often provides more information than the typical middle school student brings home and it helps parents know from week-to-week what's going on in the classroom. Madison, like most other Dane County school districts, has been using some form of electronic communication system for the last several years.
"I don't have to ask to look at her planner anymore," says Smith. "And, her group of teachers at Toki wrote a weekly newsletter last year that I could read online. When your kids get into middle school, they've got more classes, and parents generally have fewer connections with the teachers so I really appreciate the way it works."
For the first time this year, Smith, like the rest of the parents and guardians of the approximately 24,000 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, is using the online system to enroll her children in class. She also has a son, Sam, who will be a 5th grader at Chavez Elementary this fall. District officials hope that giving parents a password and user ID at the enrollment stage will expand the number of parents using Infinite Campus. A primary goal is to help increase communication ties between home and school, which is a proven way to engage kids and boost academic achievement.
But whether all parents will take to the system remains to be seen. Despite the boom in electronic communication, there are plenty of homes without computers, especially in urban school districts like Madison where poverty levels are rising. The extent to which teachers will buy in is also unclear. Teachers are required to post report cards and attendance online, but things like test scores, assignments and quizzes will be discretionary.
Abstract
Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these "teacher value added" measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added are rejected by empirical evidence. However, the assumption violations may not be severe, and value-added measures still seem to contain useful information. I also compare teacher value-added accountability with three main policy alternatives: teacher credentials, school value-added accountability, and formative uses of test data. I argue that using teacher value-added measures is likely to increase student achievement more efficiently than a teacher credentials-only strategy but may not be the most cost-effective policy overall. Resolving this issue will require a new research and policy agenda that goes beyond analysis of assumptions and statistical properties and focuses on the effects of actual policy alternatives.
6. CONCLUSION
A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the statistical assumptions of VAMs, and many of the most important papers are contained in the present volume. The assumptions about the role of past achievement in affecting current achievement (Assumption No. 2) and the lack of variation in teacher effects across student types (Assumption No. 4) seem least problematic. However, unobserved differences are likely to be important, and it is unclear whether the student fixed effects models, or any other models, really account for them (Assumption No. 3). The test scale is also a problem and will likely remain so because the assumptions underlying the scales are untestable. There is relatively little evidence on how administration and teamwork affect teachers (Assumption No. 1).
If you have a child in college, or are planning to send one there soon, Craig Brandon has a message for you: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"The Five-Year Party" provides the most vivid portrait of college life since Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." The difference is that it isn't fiction. The alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses that Mr. Brandon writes about are real. His book is a roadmap for parents on how to steer clear of the worst of them.
Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students' eternal obligations--do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments--no longer apply. The book's title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.
Especially telling for me were the comments by a remedial writing teacher at a community college who noted: "They don't know how to develop an argument. They have very little ability to get past rhetoric and critically analyze what is motivating the writer."
This teacher's observation highlights what may well be the school system's worst deficiency in terms of skills development: a failure to promote critical thinking. That skill is fundamental if our youth are to become thoughtful workers and thoughtful citizens of a democratic society rather than robots. Developing it can't be left to writing classes alone but must happen throughout the curriculum.
he descendant of a slave is about to enter Mars Hill College, bringing to an end 105 years of segregation at the Baptist school in western North Carolina.* Her admittance means something more: the payoff of a novel moral debt.
The founders of little Mars Hill were in trouble as soon as they laid the last handmade brick on the first building in 1856. They owed the contractors $1,100; the treasury was empty. While they frantically passed the hat, the builders slapped a judgment on the Rev. J. W. Anderson, future secretary of the college. The Rev. Mr. Anderson owned a Negro named Joe --a strapping young man easily worth $1,100 on the slave market in nearby Asheville. Some say that Joe himself volunteered to be a human surety. The builders took him to jail for safekeeping. Four days later, when the founders raised the cash. Mars Hill was saved.
So you want to know if the teacher your child has for the new school year is the star you're hoping for. How do you find out?
Well, you can ask around. Often even grade school kids will give you the word. But what you hear informally might be on the mark and might be baloney. Isn't there some way to get a good answer?
Um, not really. You want a handle on how your kid is doing, there's plenty of data. You want information on students in the school or the school district, no problem.
But teachers? If they had meaningful evaluation reports, the reports would be confidential. And you can be quite confident they don't have evaluations like that - across the U.S., and certainly in Wisconsin, the large majority of teachers get superficial and almost always favorable evaluations based on brief visits by an administrator to their classrooms, research shows. The evaluations are of almost no use in actually guiding teachers to improve.
Many school parents question the value of today's homework assignments. They rightly wonder whether their children are getting the education they need in order to succeed in college. For the most part, they are well-meaning parents who were educated from the 1950's through the 1970's in a different style--a style derided by the current power elite in graduate schools of education and school administration. They describe the schoolroom remembered by today's parents as: sitting in rows, facing front, listening passively to a teacher who talked to the blackboard, "memorizing by rote", and thinking uncritically. In today's classrooms, students are given a minimal amount of instruction, and instead are presented with a question--say a math problem--told to form groups and work out an approach to solving the problem. Or if not a math problem, they are told to discuss an aspect of a book they are reading. Homework assignments are often art projects, in which students must construct dioramas of the climactic event of a story they read, or decorate a tissue box with German phrases to help them learn the language, or put together a family tree with photographs and label each with the Spanish term for their place in the family.
In Raising a Left-brain Child in a Right-brain World, Katharine Beals explores today's classrooms and describes in detail why this approach is particularly destructive and ineffective for students who are shy, awkward, introspective, linear and analytic thinkers. She is careful to explain that her use of the term "left brained" is her way of categorizing students who are linear thinkers--who process information by learning one thing at a time thoroughly before moving on to the next. (I use the term in the same fashion in this review.)
A particularly powerful passage at the beginning of the book describes the difficulties that left-brained children face and provides a stark and disturbing contrast with the traditional classrooms that the parents of these children remember:
Making matters worse is how today's informal discussions favor multiple solutions, personal opinions, and personal connections over single correct answers. In previous generations the best answer, exerting an absolute veto power, favored the studious over the merely charismatic; how that there is no best answer, extroversion is king. ... To fully appreciate the degree to which today's classrooms challenge our children, we should consider how they might have fared in more traditional schools. Imagine how much more at ease they might be in general, and how their attitudes toward school might improve, if they enjoyed the privacy of quietly listening to teachers lecture instead of having to talk to classmates. ...Imagine if they could read to themselves instead of to a group, do math problems on their own, and find, in the classroom, a safe haven from school yard dynamics. (p. 23)
Douglas Harris, associate professor of educational policy and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, is a cautious advocate of these measures, but points out that concerns about teaching to the test could be heightened if teachers, as well as principals and school districts, are evaluated based on test results. "Teacher can generate high value-added measures by drilling the test over and over," Harris said.
If these measures catch on, they could also encourage more teachers to cheat. "If we start to place a lot of weight on these things, [you] have to expect some degree of malfeasance," said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "You want the benefits to outweigh the costs, and you want to police it in a smart way."
Will the benefits outweigh the costs? "That's the big unknown," Michael Hansen, a researcher in the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email. "What is known is that the way most districts currently hire, evaluate, and pay teachers is misaligned with the public goal of increasing overall student learning."
Fewer than one percent of Oregon students are enrolled in online public schools. But for nearly five years, the funding, quality and financial management of these virtual schools have been dominating conversation in State Capitol hearing rooms and school district board rooms.
In Oregon, education dollars follow the students. And this issue pits parent choice against school district stability.
Initially, each of six members of the state board suggested slightly different solutions. After nearly three hours of discussion, however, most board members said they would support parent choice but only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district.
"Parents should have the option to transfer," said board chairwoman Brenda Frank. "I don't believe the district has all the answers. But I think there just needs to be a gate."
It has been said that victory is sweetest when you've known defeat. Yesterday's Commission ruling sure felt sweet! Thanks to the energized efforts of Georgia parents, school choice reigns supreme for our 9th grade students. The state school board ruled 8-2 in favor of adding ninth grade to the Georgia Cyber Academy. This decision allowed 660 GCA ninth graders to begin classes on September 7.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Aileen Dodd was there to cover the story live. She writes, "After the outcries of parents and the embarrassment of having two approved cyber schools call off August openings, leaders of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission admitted that they may have low-balled the cost of virtual public education. The board has agreed to rethink its figures."
The premise of this book is enticingly simple . It presents two solutions to two prevalent problems in education . The first is the vast amount of content required to be taught because of various state standards, and how one can thread that maze and "teach for understanding ." That is, how can educators get students to apply what they've learned to new and unfamiliar problems? The second is the diverse nature of today's classrooms, the result of heterogeneous grouping of students of different abilities . How does an educator differentiate instruction to accommodate such diversity in a single classroom?
I read this book in a math teaching methods class a few years ago . One event in that class stands out regarding this textbook . In a chapter on assessing understanding, a chart presents examples of "Inauthentic versus Authentic Work" (p . 68) . For example, "Solve contrived problems" is listed as inauthentic; "Solve 'real world' prob- lems" is listed as authentic . The black-and-white nature of the dis- tinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices "inauthentic" is not only pejorative but misleading . Since the chart listed "Practice decontextualized skills" as inauthentic and "Interpret literature" as authentic, I asked the teacher, "Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?"
She replied that she didn't really know about issues related to reading . Keeping it on the math level, I then asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn't involve "authentic" mathematical concepts . She answered with a blank stare and the words "Let's move on ."
That incident remains in my mind because it is emblematic of the educational doctrine that pervades schools of education as well as this book . The doctrine holds that mastery of facts and attaining procedural fluency in subjects like mathematics amounts to mind- numbing "drill and kill" exercises that ultimately stifle creativity and critical thinking . It also embodies the belief that critical thinking skills can be taught .
In a discussion of what constitutes "understanding," the authors state that a student's ability to apply what he or she has learned does not necessarily represent understanding . "When we call for an appli- cation we do not mean a mechanical response or mindless 'plug-in' of a memorized formula . Rather, we ask students to transfer--to use what they know in a new situation" (p . 67) . In terms of math and other subjects that involve attaining procedural fluency, employing worked examples as scaffolding for tackling more-complex prob- lems is not something that these authors see as leading to any kind of understanding . That a mastery of fundamentals provides the foun- dation for the creativity they seek is lost in their quest to get stu- dents performing authentic work from the start
The Los Angeles Unified School District will ask labor unions to adopt a new approach to teacher evaluations that would judge instructors partly by their ability to raise students' test scores -- a sudden and fundamental change in how the nation's second-largest district assesses its educators.
The teachers union has for years staunchly resisted using student test data in instructors' reviews.
The district's actions come in response to a Times article on teacher effectiveness. The article was based on an analysis, called "value-added," which measures teachers by analyzing their students' performance on standardized tests. The approach has been embraced by education reformers as a way to bring objectivity to teacher evaluations.
Local school districts have started to grade teachers based on student test scores, but the early results suggest the effort deserves an incomplete.
The new type of teacher evaluations make use of the standardized tests that have become an annual rite for American public-school students. The tests mainly have been used to measure the progress of students and schools, but with some statistical finesse they can be transformed into a lens for identifying which teachers are producing the best test results.
At least, that's the hope among some education experts. But the performance numbers that have emerged from these studies rely on a flawed statistical approach.
One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn't stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
A tragic crisis of enormous magnitude is facing black boys and men in America.
Parental neglect, racial discrimination and an orgy of self-destructive behavior have left an extraordinary portion of the black male population in an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas -- for example, 28 percent in New York City.
The astronomical jobless rates for black men in inner-city neighborhoods are both mind-boggling and heartbreaking. There are many areas where virtually no one has a legitimate job.
Madison Metropolitan School District students received an average composite score on the ACT of 24.2, up slightly from the previous year's composite of 24.0. The scores were in line with a 16-year history of the district where results have ranged from 23.5 to 24.6 and average 24.2 in that period (see Table 1 below).
As in previous years, MMSD students outperformed their peers in the state and the nation on the 2010 ACT. District students outscored their state peers by 2.1 points and their national peers by 3.2 points, scoring 10% higher and 15% higher respectively. The average ACT score for Wisconsin and the nation were 22.1, and 21.0, respectively.
Madison Edgewood High Schools' Composite ACT score was 25.4 (100% of Edgewood seniors took the ACT).
WRITING about the same analysis of Los Angeles public school teachers my colleague referenced yesterday, Matthew Yglesias points to the NAEP mathematics 8th-grade test rankings of different major-city public-school systems, which shows Los Angeles performing below average for black, hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander students, as well as for low-income students. Los Angeles did okay with middle-class white students. This reminded me of something I learned a couple of months ago: there are other, perhaps better ways of categorising students than race and income, for the purpose of deciding whether they are being well served by their schools. Specifically, parents' educational attainment. Taking parents' educational attainment as a baseline is a very effective way to measure whether a "good" school is really doing a standout job of educating its kids, or whether it's simply benefiting from a student population that has a head start.
This is largely how the Netherlands' educational inspectorate (Onderwijsinspectie) has been measuring student baselines for the purposes of evaluating schools since 2006. How they got to this measurement is an interesting story, as Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske of Duke University explain in this paper. First, starting 25 years ago the Dutch instituted a system of funding schools based on "weighting" students: students who came from backgrounds presumed to be educationally disadvantaged got more funding, and schools with large populations of "weighted" students ended up with more resources to try and make up the disparities. Initially, the high weights were given to children from immigrant backgrounds, or to children of poor native Dutch parents with very low educational attainment. But as Dutch politics became more right-wing in the 2000s, the idea of giving more funding to children of immigrants than to children of native Dutch parents became unpopular. Hence the idea of weighting children chiefly according to parents' educational attainment, which was amenable to both right- and left-wing parties: it still tends to weight children from immigrant backgrounds more heavily, unless their parents are wealthy, highly-educated immigrants, in which case they probably didn't need the extra help anyway. It also directs more resources to children of native Dutch parents from underprivileged backgrounds, and it defuses some of the racial tensions over school funding.
The four digital titles-- McGraw-Hill Cos. best sellers in biology, economics, marketing, psychology--are expected to become available via the iTunes App Store beginning Friday. Prices will start at $2.99 per chapter and $69.99 for entire books, for a limited time. Thereafter, chapters will be $3.99 and books will start at $84.99.
The Inkling-based e-books make full use of the iPad's color, video and touch screen. A biology text, for example, offers 3-D views of molecules such as DNA, video lectures, and interactive quizzes. Users can highlight text, take notes and share them in real time with other users, such as fellow students. Along the way, students can jump outside the text to Google or Wikipedia.
Inkling has struck deals with other large publishers, including John Wiley & Sons Inc. and Cengage Learning, to launch future titles.
It is always news to me when I hear or read something good about the Newark school system, so I took notice when the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a new study saying that both that city, and the state of New Jersey, lead the nation in the percent of black male students graduating from high school.
Schott's report focused on the abysmal national graduation rate for black males, only 47 percent in the 2007-08 school year, but it heralded the New Jersey results, and gave credit to that state's heavy spending and innovative measures to raise graduation rates for everyone.
It said New Jersey had a graduation rate for black males of 69 percent in 2007-08, with the next closest states being Maryland (55 percent), California (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (53 percent). In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.
But Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, urges the L.A. Times not to publish a database showing how teachers may have influenced students' standardized test scores.
The head of the American Federation of Teachers said Wednesday that she believed parents have a right to know how well their children's teachers are rated on employee evaluations, but strongly disagreed with The Times' decision to publish data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students.
Such data should be considered only as part of a well-rounded evaluation of a teacher's performance, Randi Weingarten said, and then should be available only to the teacher, his or her principal, and individual parents. It is wrong, she said, to make such information widely available to the public.
A quarter-century ago, the nation was transfixed by this question: " Where's the beef?"
Now, the question we should be asking ourselves about our nation's schools is this: " Where's the rigor?" Or, "Where's the academic beef?"
Concerns about the lack of rigor in U.S. schools were renewed recently, when new data were published on how prepared - or not - U.S. high school students are for college. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero said, "New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level [college] courses."
The story, as reported by many outlets, was that the average ACT score has fallen slightly since 2007. But the real story - and the one that Banchero focused on - is that the vast majority of our high school graduates aren't ready for college or a career. And this holds true even when they follow a supposedly "rigorous" course of study, taking four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies.
It turns out that much of what U.S. schools offer is "rigorous" in name only. Said differently, a distinct lack of academic rigor is de rigueur.
UW researchers have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, teachers in math and science earn less than other high-school instructors.
Researchers at the University of Washington have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, math and science teachers earn less than other high-school instructors.
The way Washington and many other states pay teachers -- with more money going to those with more years of experience and graduate degrees -- has led to the uneven salaries.
Jobs that pay better at nearby high-tech companies may also be a contributing factor, because math and science teachers may be recruited away before they have a chance to reach the higher rungs on the pay ladder, said Jim Simpkins, a researcher on the report, with Marguerite Roza and Cristina Sepe.
Washington State recently passed a law (House Bill 2621) intending to accelerate the teaching and learning of math and science. However, in the two subject areas the state seeks to prioritize, this analysis finds that nineteen of the thirty largest districts in the state spend less per math or science teacher than for teachers in other subjects.
Existing salary schedules are part of the problem. By not allowing any differential compensation for math and science teachers, and instead basing compensation only on longevity and graduate credits, the wage system works to create the uneven salaries.
The analysis finds that in twenty-five of the thirty largest districts, math and science teachers had fewer years of teaching experience due to higher turnover--an indication that labor market forces do indeed vary with subject matter expertise. The subject-neutral salary schedule works to ignore these differences.
Life expectancy at birth ranges from 80 years in Hawaii to 72 in Washington, DC; and from 83 in Japan to 40 in Swaziland. In vitro fertilisation is available in some regions of the UK within months; in others it takes years. Fill in your own example here, because it is now a commonplace that the price, availability and quality of anything from a nursing home to a good education will vary depending on where you live.
I am not sure whether the British complain more about this than anyone else, but we have developed our own term to describe it: the "postcode lottery". For community-minded gamblers there is actually a real postcode lottery, in which prizes are shared between winning ticket-holders and those fortunate enough to have homes on the same street. But for most Britons, the term is a lazy shorthand for the fact that where you live affects what you get.
There is a glaring problem with this phrase: while the ticket that gets pulled out of the tombola is chosen at random, the postcodes where you and I live are not. We aren't serfs. If we want to move and we can afford to move, we can move.
I live in Hackney, a London borough where crime is high and the schools are poor. If I had a few spare million, perhaps I would move to Hampstead or Chelsea. I do not. People who shop at Harrods expect better food than those who shop at Tesco. Ferraris are faster and sexier than Fords. There are many words to describe this state of affairs, but "lottery" is not the one I would choose.
Harford makes an excellent point. It is clearly futile to impose one size fits all approaches, particularly in education. We, as a society are far better off with a diverse governance (many smaller schools/districts/charters/vouchers) and curricular environment.
Seattle opens next front in education reform effort
Seattle Public Schools administrators are fighting a battle for schoolchildren across the state.
The district has decided to go to the mat over teacher performance evaluations. District officials want teachers to be judged based in part on their students' academic growth.
The union says the proposal is a no-go. With the school year fast approaching, a strike could be in the offing.
The Seattle Education Association would rather stick to a previous compromise: an evaluation system that would put teachers who rate "basic" or "unsatisfactory" at risk of dismissal.
What a radical notion - that teacher performance should dictate a teacher's career prospects. Such is what qualifies as "historic change" - union officials' words - in public education.
The district's proposal is also rather modest contrary to the union's characterizations.
Good eye contact, a firm handshake and self confidence can pave the way to a good interview. Turns out, that's the case even if the applicant is 4 or 5 years old.
In the frenzy to get kindergarteners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview.
For years, such preparations have been the norm for the standardized tests children must take to get into private schools, the so-called ERBs, which measure IQ and are administered by the Educational Records Bureau. But after a cottage industry devoted to test-prep materials and classes developed, parents say scoring in the top percentile or two became the norm rather than the exception; schools such as Horace Mann, Dalton and Collegiate began placing more emphasis on the interview and getting more granular in their assessments.
Since New York parents have a tendency to exaggerate their sons' and daughters' piano or French skills, admissions directors say they like to see any special talents with their own eyes.
Two New York entrepreneurs are offering college students the chance to put their money where their grades are.
Their website lets college students place wagers on their own academic performance, betting they will earn, say, an A in biology or a B in calculus. Students with low grade point averages are considered long shots, so they have the opportunity to win more money for high grades than classmates with a better GPA.
The pair of recent college graduates who founded Ultrinsic.com say they hope to turn a profit and inspire students to work harder. "It would be great if everyone was intrinsically motivated to get good grades, but that's, like, not reality," said Jeremy Gelbart, a 23-year-old co-founder of the site.
CourseRank helps students choose classes, and 95% of Stanford students use it, says the company.UC Berkeley, Duke, Cornell and other universities and colleges in the U.S. and Canada now use it as well. The company now has five employees.
New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years.
The results raise questions about how well the nation's high schools are preparing students for college, and show the challenge facing the Obama administration in its effort to raise educational standards. The administration won bipartisan support for its education policies early on, but faces a tough fight in the fall over the rewrite and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind program.
While elementary schools have shown progress on national achievement exams, high-school results have stayed perniciously low. Some experts say the lack of rigor in high-school courses is partly to blame.
"High schools are the downfall of American school reform," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington. "We haven't figured out how to improve them on a broad scope and if our kids aren't dropping out physically, they are dropping out mentally."
40 to 49% of Wisconsin High School Graduates who took the ACT met at least three of the four college readiness benchmarks. 50 to 54% of Minnesota's students met three out of four while 30-39% of Illinois students achieved that standard. Iowa's percentage was the same as Wisconsin's.
Teachers, by the numbers A team of Times reporters is giving the public its first glimpse of some surprising findings on teachers and their performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers -- which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they're doing.
For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students' test scores count for half or more of a teacher's performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores.
"What's there to hide?" Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest school system. "In education, we've been scared to talk about success."
Duncan's comments mark the first time the Obama administration has expressed support for a public airing of information about teacher performance -- a move that is sure to fan the already fierce debate over how to better evaluate teachers.
Spurred by the administration, school districts around the country have moved to adopt "value added" measures, a statistical approach that relies on standardized test scores to measure student learning. Critics, including many teachers unions and some policy experts, say the method is based on flawed tests that don't measure the more intangible benefits of good teaching and lead to a narrow curriculum. In Los Angeles, the teachers union has called public disclosure of the results "dangerous" and "irresponsible."
With less than a week before school starts, the California Department of Education released the results of the 2010 Standardized Testing and Reporting Program tests.
As I looked at the numbers, I was encouraged as well as concerned.
There was growth in students scoring proficient or above in some grades and declines in others. Looking at the Sierra Sands Unified School District results, I was really tickled to see across-the-board growth at the high-school level. While gains were not overly dramatic, the results show movement in the right direction.
I was also pleased to see growth in the Trona Joint Unified School District elementary grades. This is a good sign, because the elementary school is in program improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind. I hope this growth is a sign of things to come.
Come to Milwaukee and help grow the good food revolution. Hosted by Growing Power--a national organization headed by the sustainable urban farmer and MacArthur Fellow Will Allen--this international conference will teach the participant how to plan, develop and grow small farms in urban and rural areas. Learn how you can grow food year-round, no matter what the climate, and how you can build markets for small farms. See how you can play a part in creating a new food system that fosters better health and more closely-knit communities.
There's already plenty of chatter about Sunday's LA Times article on the value-added scores of LAUSD teachers, and certainly more to come (comments blowing up here). With access to seven years of math and English scores for hundreds of thousands of 3rd through 5th grade students (under California Public Records Act), the Times hired RAND researcher Richard Buddin to conduct a value-added analysis on LAUSD teachers. Over the next few weeks, and likely beyond that, the Times promises to publish the findings of this analysis in articles and via a full database. For thousands of LAUSD teachers, this means they should expect to see their names and scores in their morning paper. For parents and the rest of the public, it means they will have more information about public school teachers' performance than ever before.
The Board, first and foremost, are the elected representatives of the public, but this Board doesn't represent the public at all. This Board doesn't raise the public's concerns, doesn't relay the public's wishes, and doesn't voice the public perspective. I almost never hear the Board members talk about the public or their constituents saying "People are concerned about.." or "People want..." or "People see it this way...".
The Board doesn't voice the public perspective and certainly doesn't advocate for it. Worse, the Board doesn't advocate for the public to have a voice for themselves. The Board is no champion of community engagement. The Board regularly approves motions with inadequate community engagement and regularly approves motions with NO community engagement. The Board hasn't demanded improved engagement from anyone and hasn't even demanded that the staff provide the community engagement that they promised to do. The Board's own community engagement is just about the worst of any workgroup in the District. Their primary community engagement practice is testimony at Board meetings and they never respond to the people who come and speak to them there.
Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.
For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. "I forgot," he says.
It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?
Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education - Mark Twain.
Our new, wired world has brought forth many positives. One of the simplest, yet powerful, of the new tools available is the ability to bookmark worthy Internet materials for future use.
Even more powerful is the ability to share those materials indirectly through the use of sites like Delicious. We subscribe so as to have the most popular education bookmarks forwarded to us on a daily basis.
I'm not so sure we have all that much to brag about in terms of our statewide educational standards or achievement. The Milwaukee public schools are extremely challenged, to put it mildly. The state has one of the worst achievement gaps in the nation. The WKCE is widely acknowledged as a poor system for statewide assessment of student progress. Just last week our state academic standards were labeled among the worst in the country in a national study.
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
There is generally no small amount of bragging on Madison National Merit Semi-finalists. It would be interesting to compare cut scores around the country.
But Daly returned home from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and headed straight to the local community college for more classes.
Community colleges in the Washington region are doing brisk business this summer with students from four-year universities. The students are taking advantage of increasingly flexible transfer policies to load up on cheap, convenient credits that will help them graduate more quickly and at a lower expense.
Prince George's Community College enrolled 136 students from four-year colleges this summer, nearly double last year's number. Tidewater Community College in Virginia has 2,150 four-year college students, up 14 percent. Montgomery College has 3,100 four-year college students, about one-quarter of its summer enrollment. No comparison with last year's enrollment was available.
Globalization is changing the food we eat, the way we communicate and, increasingly, the way we go to college. Nearly 3 million students were enrolled in universities outside their borders in 2009, a 57 percent increase over the previous decade, according to the Institute of International Education, which facilitates exchange programs.
"The Great Brain Race," by Ben Wildavsky, takes a comprehensive look at today's worldwide marketplace for college students -- with stops in such places as Singapore, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, where western schools, including the University of Chicago and potentially George Mason University, are opening satellite campuses or where local governments are making heavy investments in American-style research universities. The author, a former education editor at U.S. News & World Report, also explores the latest attempts to rate the world's top colleges now that more students are degree-shopping across borders.
Jordan Holt needed a business plan. So he went back to school.
A technician for a military contractor in Yuma, Ariz., Mr. Holt launched a side business last year, servicing and repairing generators--and quickly realized he would need to write up a formal plan if he ever wanted to borrow money for equipment. But after doing some online research, putting together a plan "looked complicated and overwhelming," he says.
He decided to get the help he needed from a business-plan development course at Arizona Western College in Yuma. "I was able to take everything in my head and put it down on paper," says Mr. Holt, a 29-year-old ex-Marine. "I truly think it could work."
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
I asked a few people who know about such things and received this response:
The critical cut score for identifying National Merit Semifinalist varies from state to state depending on the number of students who took the test and how well those students did on the test. In 2009, a score of 207 would put a student amongst the top 1% of test takers in Wisconsin and qualify them as a National Merit Semifinalist. However this score would not be high enough to qualify the student as a semifinalist in 36 other states or the District of Columbia.
Taking Schools Into Their Own Hands: More Mayors Seek Control as Washington Presses for Action on Failing Institutions; Setting an Example in Rochester
During the last weeks of the term, third graders at School 58-World of Inquiry School created an oil spill in a bowl. Under the guidance of teacher Alyson Ricci, they tried to clean it up. Cotton swabs worked.
The school last year won the national Excellence in Urban Education Award, with all students meeting state proficiency rates in science and social studies. It's an exception, though, in a Rochester system where fewer than half of the 32,000 public-school students graduate on time.
Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy wants to set up more schools that produce results like World of Inquiry's. But he says the superintendent's efforts to close failing schools and open new ones have been hobbled by a school board mired in minutia. He is pushing to dissolve the elected board in favor of one appointed by the mayor and city council for a five-year test period. New York's state legislature is considering the bid.
As cities come under increasing pressure to fix failing schools, more are, like Rochester, trying to take matters into their own hands--or at least those of their mayors.
The September opening of New Jersey's first Hebrew-language charter school is being challenged over claims it hasn't met enrollment requirements.
The East Brunswick school board this week asked an appeals court to temporarily block Hatikvah International Academy Charter School's final charter, saying the school's enrollment doesn't meet charter-school regulations and that Hatikvah's failure to provide enrollment information makes it difficult for the district to plan for the school year. The motion follows an earlier complaint by the school board to the state's education commissioner, Bret Schundler.
State officials declined to comment on the pending case. "The charter school met requirements when its application was approved," said a Department of Education spokesman, Alan Guenther. Hatikvah received its final charter from the education commissioner on July 6. New Jersey code requires charter schools to verify 90% of enrollment by June 30; in the case of Hatikvah, that would have been 97 of its 108-student capacity.
One of the most useful traits an editor can possess is an openness to surprises, and no book I've ever worked on has surprised me more than The Chicago Manual of Style. Little did I suspect back in 1992, when I first read the Manual paragraph by paragraph for a basic manuscript editing class, that I would eventually join the team responsible for keeping this classic, century-old publication current. Nor would I have guessed in 1998, when I helped create the first manuscript for the 15th edition by slicing apart a bound copy of the 14th, that nine years later we would initiate the 16th edition by extracting the XML files used for the full-text HTML version of the 15th. And yes, a late adopter of technology like me may never have learned to fling around such terminology of the digital age if not for my work on the 16th edition, which will be published this summer. Go figure.
Still, the biggest surprises I've encountered in connection with the Manual have come in the responses of those who use the book, or at least understand its place in the canon. More often than not, people who hear that I work on the Manual--even those from outside the worlds of academia and publishing--instantly recognize the title, a rare treat for an editor in scholarly publishing. Sometimes they tell me stories of college days spent wrestling with proper footnote format or of interoffice battles over comma use, both of which likely involved recourse to the Manual. Inevitably, they ask me questions. Their curiosity increasingly centers on the broad issues that preoccupy those of us on the revision team, such as how changes wrought by technology affect everything from editing processes to citation style. But the question I still field most frequently concerns a matter of much smaller scale:
In 1983, a presidential commission issued the landmark report "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." The report warned that despite an increase in spending, the U.S. public education system was at risk of failure "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today," the report declared, "we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein often quotes the commission before discussing how U.S. schools have fared since it issued its report. Despite nearly doubling per capita spending on education over the past few decades, American 15-year olds fared dismally in standardized math tests given in 2000, placing 18th out of 27 member countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Six years later, the U.S. had slipped to 25th out of 30. If Americans have been fighting against mediocrity in education since 1983, they are losing the battle.
What could turn things around? At a recent event that I organized at the Columbia Business School, Klein opened with his harsh assessment of the situation, and researchers offered some stark options for getting American education back on track. We could find drastically better ways of training teachers or improve our hiring practices so we're bringing aboard better teachers in the first place. Barring these improvements, the only option left is firing low-performing teachers--who have traditionally had lifetime tenure--en masse.
Fion Chan Chui-tung could barely utter a complete sentence in Putonghua or English a year ago.
Now, after 12 months at Utahloy International School, a sprawling and pristine international school in Guangzhou, the Hong Kong teen converses effortlessly with her ethnically diverse schoolmates.
Fion, 18, is one of a growing number of pupils who have upped sticks and headed north to study. Enrollment of Hongkongers in international schools in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is rising by 5 to 10 per cent a year.
Parents who spurn prestigious international schools in Hong Kong in favour of mainland ones cite a list of factors: lower tuition fees, low living costs, a strict teaching regimen and bucolic campuses where not a word of Cantonese is spoken.
Fion's mother, Luk Yim-fong, a businesswoman, transferred her daughter from Heung To Secondary School in Tseung Kwan O to Utahloy so that she would not be surrounded by Cantonese speakers. "Although Heung To offers Putonghua classes, all the students speak Cantonese after class," she says. "From my business dealings with multinational corporations like Samsung, even Korean businessmen speak fluent Putonghua. Mandarin is a language my daughter must master in order to thrive in future."
The state Senate Education Committee will meet on Monday to discuss a measure that would revamp New Jersey's charter school regulation system.
State Education Commissioner Bret D. Schundler, who supports the expansion of charter schools, is scheduled to attend the hearing to outline the Christie administration's priorities regarding education in New Jersey.
The meeting will also focus on bill S-2198, a measure sponsored by Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex) and Senator Sandra Bolden Cunningham (D-Hudson), which would enable Rutgers University to authorize charter schools. The bill is designed to expedite the approval of charter school applications, and permit the authorization of special purpose charter schools.
Who's teaching L.A.'s kids? A Times "Value Added" analysis, using data largely ignored by LAUSD, looks at which educators help students learn, and which hold them back.
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world -- the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.
Many are the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants who never finished high school, hard-working parents who keep a respectful distance and trust educators to do what's best.
The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book.
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students or their parents.
It's their teachers.
With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith's pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far behind.
Education in South Korea is a paradox, where two big truths clash. Koreans are incredibly keen, and on many measures do very well. Yet nobody - students, parents, teachers or the authorities - is happy. And now battles are raging, on everything from testing and elitism to teachers' politics, free school meals and corporal punishment.
Let's start with the positive. I'm a bit skeptical when Koreans tell you how their Confucian heritage values learning. In theory yes, yet for centuries hardly anyone got to study except a tiny male scholar elite. Modern education - girls not excluded - only arrived with Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. Mass schooling for all is newer still. As recently as 1945, when Japan's harsh 40-year rule ended, less than a quarter of Korean adults (22%) were literate.
They've certainly made up for lost time since. South Korea's first rulers were no democrats, but they knew that so resource-poor a country needed human capital to develop. Hence even after a terrible war in 1950-53 and despite being poorer than much of Africa - yes, really - at that stage, under Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) primary education was vastly expanded. General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) extended this to secondary and vocational schooling. By 1987, when South Koreans wrested back democracy from another general (Chun Doo-hwan), one third of high school-leavers went on to higher education: more than in the UK at that time.
CHILDREN can be tender souls. Pitch them a sob story and they often swallow it whole. Reflect the harsh reality outside the school gates, however, and they develop sophisticated strategies for making hard choices. That, at least, is the early experience of an initiative to teach philanthropy to young teenagers.
Two years ago the Big Give, an organisation which collates information about 6,000 charities worldwide in an attempt to foster philanthropy, asked the fee-paying Dragon School in Oxford to run a pilot programme. It gave the school £1,250 to donate to charity and asked 13-year-old pupils to decide where the money should go.
The study of Shakespeare never grows old. His plays are counted among the greatest works in English literature. He was an outstanding observer and communicator of human character. He expressed enduring wisdom and wit. Presented appropriately, students--especially gifted students--are fascinated by Shakespeare and appreciate the opportunity to study and perform his plays. There are a number of excellent resources available to help teachers and parents expose their children to this icon of literature.
The Folger Shakespeare Library is located on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. It is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare materials. On its Web site, there is a Teach and Learn section that contains a wealth of information. Teaching resources for K-12 provide Shakespeare lesson plans and other materials for teachers, including audio and video podcasts, a blog, a Teachers' Lounge forum, and an expanding list of web features. The Shakespeare for Kids section of the site offers games, activities, and creative fun. Folger is a strong advocate of performance-based teaching, which is reflected in the resources at their Web site.
The University of Texas at Austin created Shakespeare Kids. It is designed for young people and also for teachers, parents, and administrators who work with students in grades K-8. The resource page contains an excellent list of Internet sites, books, and films.
Children crowd into a large, open room an hour drive from Peshawar, Pakistan, their young bodies packed together despite the lingering heat. A small boy with a serious face sits in the back, a copy of the Quran on the cement floor beside him.
Madrasas like this have come to dominate much of rural education in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the state has forgotten its children and the mullahs have room to step in.
But with the Taliban insurgency going strong and a rising Islamic militancy in Pakistan, experts worry that such schools -- which often push a more fundamentalist brand of Islam than is traditional in these countries -- have become fertile recruiting grounds for the Taliban.
With their own public education systems in shambles, however, Afghanistan and Pakistan are beginning to look to Turkey's brand of Islamic education as a potential antidote to madrasas where there is often little offered beyond rote memorization of the Quran.
Noting that far more students attend charter schools in Philadelphia than are enrolled in the state's second-largest school district, a group has formed to represent city charters.
Founders of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence say they want to publicize the successes of charter schools and reassure the public that most of the 74 charters are not being investigated for possible corruption.
The organization requires member schools to meet strict ethical standards and plans to create a website to help parents compare the performance of charter schools.
The nonprofit organization was scheduled to be announced Friday.
"There are 74 of us, and in a typical school district with 74 schools, there would be a public-relations representative," said Jurate Krokys, chief executive officer of Independence Charter School in Center City and the group's vice president. "The idea is to be a resource about charter schools in Philadelphia."
The group's mission statement calls it "an alliance of high-performing public charter schools committed to creating a path toward academic and personal excellence for all students."
Minutes before the Badger Rock Middle School planning team presented its final proposal to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education Thursday, supporters received news that they had been awarded a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction in the amount of $200,000.
The proposed Badger Rock Middle School, which would open in the fall of 2011 on Madison's south side, would be a year-round charter school and be part of a larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison-based Center for Resilient Cities.
The Resilience Research Center project is designed to be a four-acre campus with a working farm, a neighborhood center, café, adjacent city park and the proposed school.
iHelp for Autism For autistic children, the new iPad is an effective, portable device for teaching communication and social skills. It's also way cool.
Three weeks had passed since Shannon Rosa had glanced over the numbers on her tiny blue raffle ticket. Like many other parents, she had agreed to cough up $5 not because she thought she had any real chance of winning, but to support the school.
Now, as she sat in her Honda Odyssey in a Redwood City parking lot, about to pick up some tacos for the family, her cellphone rang. It was the school secretary. Rosa had won the raffle.
Alone in her van, she screamed. Then she drove straight to Clifford School to claim her prize: a glistening new iPad.
Although Rosa already owned an iPod Touch, she had purposely held off on the iPad. She isn't an early adopter; she likes to wait until the kinks are worked out. But for $5, she didn't mind taking the iPad home one bit. Maybe Leo would like it.
What Can Parents Expect To See in English Language Arts Classrooms After Common Core's Standards Begin To Be Implemented? A Worst Case Scenario--But Probably Not Far from Reality
In June 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) offered the nation two sets of English language arts standards: one set called "college and career readiness anchor standards," and the other, grade-level standards that build towards these anchor standards. With few exceptions, both sets of standards consist of content-empty and culture-free generic skills. Why are they so bereft of substantive content? In large part because they reflect a faulty diagnosis of why many American students are unprepared for authentic college-level work. The misdiagnosis comes from CCSSI's reliance on the results of ACT surveys to guide the development of its standards.
Several years ago, ACT surveyed thousands of post-secondary instructors to find out what they saw as the chief problems in their freshman students. Not surprisingly, the chief complaint was that high school graduates cannot understand the college texts they are assigned to read. Without an explanation for its reasoning, ACT leaped to two conclusions: (1) college students are not expected to read enough complex texts when they are in high school; and (2) they are not given enough instruction in strategies or skills for reading complex texts in high school.
The Seattle Public Schools administration is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores -- a bone of contention in current negotiations with the Seattle Education Association. Guest columnists Pat Bailey and Robert Femiano, past union board members, argue that the district's approach is wrong.
The Seattle school district is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores.
The current teacher evaluation includes student growth as a factor but the district wants an easier path and quicker time frames for teacher dismissals. The district officials' plan is to use test scores to fire those teachers they claim are responsible for the poverty and racial academic gaps and reward those with high improvements in scores. History shows this carrot-and-stick approach not only fails to reduce the achievement gap but is ultimately unhealthy for good teaching.
One result of high-stakes testing is clear: The inordinate focus on test scores narrows what is taught. Diane Ravitch's "The death and life of the great American school system" documents this and other unintended consequences. In order to keep their jobs, teachers will teach and re-teach to the test. Lost are the arts, music, PE, civics, science and even recess. Early-childhood experts point to rich school environments as crucial to healthy development, so who wants to cause the opposite?
We have this thing called Algebra I that exists in very different forms, even within the same school.
That's her admirably candid response to the results of pilot tests of Algebra I and Biology, which demonstrates the gap in proficiency between poor and wealthy students. "On the biology test, just a quarter of the students in the poorest districts were proficient, compared with more than 80 percent in the wealthiest." For Algebra I, "75 percent of students in the poorest districts were deemed "below basic," while that number was 11 percent in the richest districts."
In other words, 75% of NJ's poor students failed both the biology test and the algebra test while only 20% of NJ's wealthy students failed biology and 11% failed algebra. Odds are high, based on Alberti's comment, that the vast majority of the poor students passed their coursework in spite of lack of proficiency.
Hunching over her notebook at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sharasha Croslen struggled to figure out what to do with the algebra problem in front of her: x2 + 2x - 8 = 0.
It was a question every ninth grader is expected to be able to answer. (For those who have erased the ninth grade from memory, the answer is at the end of the article.) But even though Ms. Croslen managed to complete three years of math and graduate from high school, she did not know how to solve for x.
"It's incredibly frustrating," she said during a break from her remedial math course, where she has spent the last several weeks reviewing arithmetic and algebra. "I know this is stuff I should know, but either I didn't learn it or I forgot it all already."
So do school districts that spend more money per pupil perform better? I checked out the financial figures for the 2007-08* school year in Texas and found that more money per pupil doesn't necessarily make a school better. Of the top 10 school districts and charter schools that spent more money in operating expenses per student, one held the state's highest rating, "exemplary;" three were "recognized;" and the remaining six were "academically acceptable." (Go to the jump for a list of these schools).
Carroll ISD, an exemplary school district, spent $8,301 per student, compared to $9,446 per student in the academically-acceptable Dallas ISD.
In 2010, with the blessing and encouragement of the nation's president and secretary of education, we are establishing "common-core standards" to address the historical claim that our public schools are failures. In the 1890s, a similar lament was voiced by the group known as the Committee of Ten:
"When college professors endeavor to teach chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, meteorology, or geology to persons of 18 or 20 years of age, they discover that in most instances new habits of observing, reflecting, and recording have to be painfully acquired by the students--habits which they should have acquired in early childhood."
The College Board is about to announce a change in the Advanced Placement program that will end the penalty for wrong answers.
So after decades in which test takers were warned against random guessing, they may now do so without fear of hurting their scores. The shift is notable because the SAT continues to penalize wrong answers, such that those who cannot eliminate any of the answers are discouraged from guessing. The ACT, which has gained market share against the SAT in recent years, does not have such a penalty. At this point, the College Board is changing its policy only for the AP exams.
Under College Board policy to date, AP scores have been based on the total number of correct answers minus a fraction for every incorrect answer -- one-fourth of a point for questions with five possible answers and one-third of a point for questions with four possible answers. The idea is that no one should engage in "random guessing." The odds shift, of course, if a test taker can eliminate one or more possible answers, and the College Board's advice to test takers acknowledges this, saying that "if you have SOME knowledge of the question, and can eliminate one or more answer choices, informed guessing from among the remaining choices is usually to your advantage."
A new report by the Michigan League for Human Services bemoans the lack of tax money going to higher education. But the authors give a skewed view of appropriations, get some facts wrong, and completely miss the 800-pound gorilla of higher education: that increasing costs drive tuition increases.
The bottom line in Michigan is that state appropriations for higher education have been essentially unchanged since fiscal 2004, though there was a decrease prior to that. When MLHS authors complain of falling appropriations, they're crying over milk spilled six years ago.
The authors also fault the state for the loss of financial aid programs, but the level of assistance offered by state universities has never been higher. While some state government programs were put on the chopping block, it's a pretty standard practice among universities to subsidize desirable candidates, and these amounts grew substantially. The level of financial aid offered by universities increased from $288 million in 2005 to $456 million in 2009, according to a report from the House Fiscal Agency. Perhaps that is one reason why gifted and motivated students tend to get scholarships.
One in 12 babies born in the U.S. in 2008 were offspring of illegal immigrants, according to a new study, an estimate that could inflame the debate over birthright citizenship.
Undocumented immigrants make up slightly more than 4% of the U.S. adult population. However, their babies represented twice that share, or 8%, of all births on U.S. soil in 2008, according to the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center's report.
"Unauthorized immigrants are younger than the rest of the population, are more likely to be married and have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew in Washington, D.C.
The report, based on Pew's analysis of the Census Bureau's March 2009 Current Population Survey, also found that the lion's share, or 79%, of the 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. in 2009 were born in the country and are therefore citizens.
"The Fight Over Education in Washington" (editorial, July 31) says "teachers unions and other forces of the status quo" are trying to discredit the Obama education initiative, Race to the Top.
There is nothing "retrograde" about objecting to the pernicious effect standardized assessment has had on our children, schools and a generation of teachers. And there is nothing "reform"-minded about a policy -- begun under President George W. Bush and adapted by the current administration -- that reinforces those negative consequences.
In their annual review of the district leader, board members gave Elia high marks for her leadership, policy-making, organization, management, values and ethics.
Her total score was 282, just two points shy of outstanding and the same score as the previous school year.
Board members applauded Elia's efforts in landing a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Board members also said Elia was "much more open minded to suggestions ... '' while adding, "she needs to listen more.''
The future of education technology is one where schools continually outsource the activities they're not as good at to focus on their specialty, educating the leaders of tomorrow. At its core, this is simply the law of comparative advantage: the ability of a party (individual or firm) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party (per Wikipedia). Basically, if someone does something better than you can, you should allow them to do it for you so you can focus on your specialty. This results in "gains from trade".
The future of education technology will benefit from such gains. The internet enables schools to gain efficiencies by outsourcing what they can't do as well to dedicated technologists, allowing more innovative education technology to flow into schools at a lower cost.
We're already seeing this take place. While developing the LearnBoost Gradebook, we spoke to numerous schools (public and charter) about their technology needs. These were the most common situations we found:
Schools are loyal to their current technology provider despite expensive and inadequate software solutions. Legacy systems and entrenched interests generate steep switching costs and make it difficult to reach a consensus among stakeholders.
Schools are spending too much money outsourcing their data management to a Student Information System (SIS) provider.
As legislators and lobbyists congratulate themselves on the 2300 pages of legalese drafted to reform Wall Street banks and the financial services industry, not one paragraph addresses a major reason why the meltdown occurred: how American consumers learn to manage money. According to several mortgage banking studies, nearly 70 percent of the victims of foreclosure admit they did not understand the terms of the deal they signed or the long-term impact on their lives.
Congress had plenty of chances to address this problem. More than 30 bills focused on financial literacy have been introduced since 2006. All of them died in Senate or House committees. None were included in this recent reform bill.
Money, like sex, is supposed to be taught at home but in a 2008 Charles Schwab study, 69% of parents interviewed reported they were more prepared to discuss sex than money with their children.
Last week I noted that Fordham had offered up the Gadfly as a platform for an argument, made by guest columnist Eugenia Kemble, that the next logical step after establishing national standards is a single national curriculum.
Well, my post has drawn a sharp response from Kemble. Of course, she disagrees with me on the substance (the merits of a national curriculum and the badness of teachers' unions) but that goes without saying. More interestingly, she accuses me of not addressing her argument on the merits, but only being concerned with the significance of her piece having appeared in the Gadfly. The indictment has two counts. First, she accuses me of not offering an argument for my position that "common" standards adopted by the states are really "federal" standards (i.e. controlled by the federal government.) Second, she accuses me of practicing "guilt by association" by insinuating that if Checker publishes a union piece, he must embrace the entire union agenda.
To the second count I plead not guilty. I didn't insinuate that Checker agrees with the unions about everything. I insinuated that his position in favor of national standards was having the effect - whether intended or not - of advancing the unions' agenda in one respect. And that the appearance of Kemble's piece in the Gadfly clearly demonstrates that those of us who have been saying this all along were right. And I stand by that insinuation.
In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.
Key points in this Outlook:
Study time for full-time students at four-year colleges in the United States fell from twenty-four hours per week in 1961 to fourteen hours per week in 2003, and the decline is not explained by changes over time in student work status, parental education, major choice, or the type of institution students attended.
Evidence that declines in study time result from improvements in education technology is slim. A more plausible explanation is that achievement standards have fallen.
Longitudinal data indicate that students who study more in college earn more in the long run.
Twenty of our public schools in the Fairbanks area made "Adequate Yearly Progress" in the past year, while 15 did not.
But as in previous years, it is impossible to say exactly what this means about the quality of education in any of those schools. The state education department released the details last week.
Statewide, 203 schools failed to make adequate progress, while 302 made the mark.
As a means of judging educational achievement, the process used to determined AYP in Alaska has always been inadequate. For some of our schools, there is real significance in either a positive or a negative rating. For others, there is not.
Merit pay is an issue that highlights the culture clash between the new breed of educational reformers and the traditional education establishment that finds its foundation in teachers and their unions.
Educational reformers nowadays frequently come to education as an avocation after successful business careers. These reformers, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, believe that our approach to education can be improved if we import the sort of approaches to quality and innovation that have proved effective in the business world.
So, for example, let's figure out what's the single most important school-based variable in determining student achievement. Research indicates that it's the quality of the teacher. Well then, let's evaluate teachers in a way that lets us assess that quality, let's put in place professional development that will allow our teachers to enhance that quality, and let's have compensation systems that allow us to reward that quality.
Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison's summer session, Peter Owen hasn't spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.
Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he's knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.
"I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed," Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.
Welcome to the modern world of "distance education," a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren't sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it's generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered -- at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.
The Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program is a one-year Urban Education Fellowship Program located in Houston, Texas.
The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is looking for dynamic college graduates to commit one year to improving the academic achievement of inner-city students. You will tutor five pairs of middle- or high-school students in math, every day, for the whole school year. You will have the opportunity to build close relationships with each of your students, and the chance to make a significant impact on their lives. This program is unique in that it is the first large-scale tutoring program integrated into the students' school day that has ever been launched in an urban public school district. With your help, Houston can become a leading innovator in the urban education field.
No, it's not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte -- instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they're self-motivated learners.
"Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world," Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. "It will be better than any single university," he continued.
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it's an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less "place-based," according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.
As the Iowa governor's race takes shape, some of the sharpest differences have been about the state's education system, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of Iowa's $5.3 billion budget.
Both Democratic Gov. Chet Culver and Republican Terry Branstad said education will be a priority, but they have made it clear that they favor different approaches for the state's elementary and secondary schools. In fact, a key difference relates to children who haven't even started kindergarten.
Culver speaks repeatedly about his success in making state-paid preschool available to nearly every 4-year-old in the state.
Based on the numbers, Carstens Elementary School on Detroit's East Side should have closed by now. The building is 95 years old, and its enrollment last year fell to 234 from 719 a decade earlier, making it one of the fastest-shrinking schools in district history.
In the spring, Carstens was on a preliminary list of 45 schools targeted for closure by Robert C. Bobb, the state-appointed executive in charge of stabilizing the finances of Detroit Public Schools, and his team of accountants, planners and demographers.
But a deeper dive into the neighborhood changed their minds. Carstens, they discovered, was one of the few public institutions within miles. It also served as a health clinic, a seven-day-a-week recreation center and a food pantry. Closing Carstens, they concluded, would effectively turn off the lights on the whole neighborhood.
The Irving school district missed achieving a "recognized" rating in the recently released state accountability ratings because the completion rates for black students fell 1 percentage point short of the standard.
The ratings showed an 84 percent completion rate for black students, short of the required 85 percent. Completion rates represent students who graduated or continued high school rather than dropping out. The district kept the "academically acceptable" rating it has maintained since 2004.
Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around -- the teachers -- and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special-ed teacher 22 years."
In a 1963 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed that "the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual." The advances have only accelerated since then, along with the dangers. Today, as companies strive to personalize the services and advertisements they provide over the Internet, the surreptitious collection of personal information is rampant. The very idea of privacy is under threat.
Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other. To have goods, services and promotions tailored to our personal circumstances and desires, we need to divulge information about ourselves to corporations, governments or other outsiders.
This tradeoff has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. But now, thanks to the Net, we're losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs--to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don't. Incredibly detailed data about our lives are being harvested from online databases without our awareness, much less our approval.
Superintendent Nerad, President Cole and Members of the Board,
Please accept this detailed proposal for Badger Rock Middle School, a project based charter school proposed for South Madison, which focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. As you know, our charter school concept is part of the larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison based Center for Resilient Cities (CRC), bringing urban agriculture, community wellness,sustainability and alternative energy education to South Madison and the MMSD community.
We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish to date and the extraordinary encouragement and support we have gotten from the neighborhood, business and non-profit community, local and national funders, and MMSD staff and Board. We are confident that Badger Rock Middle School, with its small class size, collaborative approach, stewardship and civic engagement model, will increase student achievement, strengthen relationships and learning outcomes for all students who attend, while also offering unparalleled opportunities for all MMSD students and faculty to make use of the resources, curriculum and facility.
Our stellar team of educators, community supporters, funders and business leaders continues to expand. Our curriculum team has created models for best practices with new templates for core curriculum areas. Our building and design team has been working collaboratively with architects Hoffman LLC, the Center for Resilient Cities and MMSD staff on building and site plans. In addition, outreach teams have been working with neighborhood leaders and community members, and our governance team has been actively recruiting a terrific team for the governing board and our fundraising team has been working hard to bring local and national donors to the project. In short, we've got great momentum and have only begun to scratch the surface of what this school and project could become.
We are submitting the proposal with a budget neutral scenario for MMSD and also want to assure you that we are raising funds to cover any contingencies that might arise so that additional monies from MMSD will not be needed. Our planning grant from DP! has recently been approved, seeding the school $175,000 in planning grant monies immediately, with another $175, 000 to arrive before the school opens in August 2011.
We ask for your full support of this proposal and the creation of Badger Rock Middle School. BRMS will surely be a centerpiece and shining star of MMSD for years to come.
The Board of Education adopted Equity Policy 9001 on June 2, 2008 (http://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/policies/9001). The policy incorporates recommendations from the Equity Task Force and charges MMSD administration with developing an annual report of the extent to which progress is being made towards eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement for all students. The Equity Task Force recommendations also requested annual data on the distribution of resources (budget, staff, programs, and facilities) by school.
On September 29, 2009, the Board of Education adopted a new strategic plan which established strategic priorities and objectives for the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Equity Task Force report and resulting Equity Policy 9001 were considered in the development of the strategic plan. This Annual Equity Report aligns the equity policy with priorities established in the strategic plan and reports equity progress using the same benchmarks as those used in the strategic plan.
Eboni Turner, a high school student from Chicago, will never forget the six weeks she spent in Madison for the Summer Science Institute.
She was doing field research in Lake Wingra when she got stuck in the decomposing material at the bottom.
"It smells really, really bad," said Turner, who will be a senior this fall. "While I was scared, this was so cool. I was stuck in stuff and I had to get out."
Turner was one of 16 students who participated in the recent Summer Science Institute, a six-week residential program through the Center for Biology Education at UW-Madison.
The program gives high school students an understanding of biological and physical research while learning about college life. The students work in groups with mentors on a specific research project. Then they write a research report and present their project and findings at a symposium at the end of the program.
School districts across Texas are paying tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for private tutoring that has a mixed track record of improving student test scores.
Even districts that want to stop footing the bill to ineffective providers are not allowed. The No Child Left Behind law guarantees free tutoring to low-income students who attend schools that repeatedly miss federal academic targets. Parents get to pick the tutoring provider from a state-approved list that has grown to more than 200 for-profit and nonprofit entities.
Since the law went into effect in 2002, Texas has never removed a provider from its list despite complaints from school districts and the state's own evaluation that found seven of the eight tutoring companies studied had no significant impact on student achievement.
With the latest federal school ratings released last week, districts are preparing to send letters to parents from about 140 under-performing schools about the tutoring options. At the same time, officials with some of the state's largest urban districts, including Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, are calling for tougher standards for the tutoring providers.
Teacher Donald Hawkins shouts enthusiastically to his 3- and 4-year-old students: "Can you name any animals that hop?"
The answers trickle in from the sleepy but smiling youngsters: a kangaroo, a frog, a rabbit. They decide to mimic the frog. It's 9:30ish in the morning inside Browne Education Campus's comfortably warm gymnasium in Northeast Washington. Fast-tempoed music gets the kids in the mood to hop, and off they go, rhythmically squatting and bouncing across the room. When the music stops, the children rise, a little more awake.
"Are you ready?" Hawkins yells. "I can't hear you!"
On a Tuesday morning in February, Soheila Ahmad's first-grade class at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School has just finished language arts. The 12 children -- all boys, all African American -- are tidying up their desks.
There are no windows in this basement room, but one wall, the backdrop for posters, is painted sky blue.
"I need the cleanup crew here," shouts Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.
"Let's practice counting by 10s to 100," Ahmad says.
In the last year, advocacy groups have churned out reports on how all kinds of students--those who work, are minorities, attend less-selective colleges, or come from low-income families--struggle in higher education. They have talked about the needs of the modern work force, and how the United States is falling behind.
All together, the groups' findings have been picked up by USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and so
The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.
We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens' lives. All are experiencing significant decline.
The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America's young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.
Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have come in for repeated criticism in Germany, where the government has concerns about what they do with users' data. Now one state, worried about the amount of information young people reveal online, plans to teach school pupils how to keep a low profile on the web.
Many of Facebook's 2 million users in Germany are young people who might not give a second thought to posting pictures of themselves and their friends skinny-dipping or passed out at parties. Unfortunately, being casual with one's data also has its risks. After all, potential employers also know how to use social networking tools.
Now the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recognizing that young people are not always aware of the dangers of revealing personal information on the Internet, is planning to teach school students how to deal with the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Our goal is to convey that the Internet doesn't only offer chances and opportunities, but also has risks that students should understand in order to exercise autonomy with regards to digital media," said North Rhine-Westphalia's media minister, Angelica Schwall-Düren, in an interview with the Thursday edition of the regional newspaper WAZ.
Early on in Beverly L. Hall's 11-year tenure as superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, she figured that the academic gains she intended to make with the city's mostly poor, black students would face skepticism.
"I knew the day would come when people would question, was the progress real?" she said in an interview last week.
So Dr. Hall took a risk, signing up for a trial program to track and compare urban school districts. Since then, Atlanta has made the highest gains in the program in reading and among the highest in math, making it a national model and Dr. Hall a star in the education field.
But that has not insulated her from a cheating scandal that initially threatened to engulf two-thirds of the district's 84 schools. Even after an independent investigation recently found that the problem was much less widespread, critics have called for her resignation and attacked the investigation's credibility.
DeKalb County school board members insist they are not heading down the same path as Clayton County and will salvage the district's accreditation.
"I'm not concerned about us losing accreditation," board chairman Tom Bowen said Friday. "There will have to be a lot of back and forth with [the accrediting agency] and non-compliance on our part. I don't see that happening."
But many of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' concerns about DeKalb mirror the questions the agency had about Clayton two years ago, which led to its losing accreditation.
On Friday, the DeKalb board announced that it received an extension to answer SACS questions about hiring practices, training, conflict of interest, nepotism, procurement policies, the superintendent search and other areas.
I have been an educator and education advocate in Oakland, California for almost two decades, and I have spent those decades working towards the achievement of those four words. In California, an Academic Performance Index of 800 is the minimum score for a school to be considered good. In 1999, Oakland operated 42 "red" schools, schools with API scores of less than 500. 38 of those "red" schools sat firmly in what we call the "flatlands" of Oakland, the area occupied by predominantly low-income communities of color. At that time, there was only one charter public school, struggling as well. In 1999, Oakland Unified was widely considered one of the worst school districts in the country.
In response to this crisis, families across the flatlands mobilized to demand reforms that supported small, autonomous, new schools and more rigorous curriculum in all schools. New and bold leadership responded to this call and brought school and principal accountability, greater autonomy over school budgets and programs, student-based budgeting, an options policy for ALL families, and a policy to close failing schools and replace them with new schools.
In 2010, the Oakland public school landscape has been dramatically altered. From 2003 to 2007, Oakland Unified closed 18 failing schools and replaced them with 26 new schools, most with carefully-selected staffs, new program designs, and greater autonomies. The district created a culture of accountability and performance, used data strategically, and focused on rigorous standards-aligned instruction. Oakland Unified has been the most improved urban school district in California for five consecutive years, and today, there are only 5 "red" schools.
M.C. Escher was a Dutch graphic artist known for his mathematically inspired constructions that seem impossible. His artwork represents explorations of infinity, architecture, fractals, and tessellations. Gifted students find his work fascinating and love studying his prints, which are readily available in books and on the Internet. Young people also appreciate learning about the theories behind Escher's artwork and trying to replicate his techniques.
The advice, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, is the latest blow for Mr Gove as he battles against the fallout from his botched announcement last month in which he axed more than 700 projects.
At least two local authorities - Sandwell and Nottingham City Council - are known to be preparing possible legal challenges, and several other councils may follow in moves which could see the taxpayer facing payouts totalling hundreds of millions of pounds.
With an additional $30,000,000 to come to Marc Tucker's NCEE from the USED's "competition" for assessment consortia grants, his hare-brained scheme for enticing high school sophomores or juniors deemed "college-ready" by the results of the Cambridge University-adapted "Board" exams that he plans to pilot in 10 states (including Massachusetts now) comes closer to reality. The problems are not only with this scheme (and the exams NCEE will use to determine "college-readiness") but also with the coursework NCEE's America's Choice is busy preparing to sell to our high schools to prepare students for these "Board" exams. (Try to find some good examples of the reading and math items and figure out their academic level.)
First, some background. NCEE's scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000–all taxpayers' money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE's start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America's Choice to put its key people on Common Core's ELA and mathematics standards development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use. NCEE has a completely free hand to "align" its "Board" exams exactly how it pleases with Common Core's "college-readiness" level and to set passing scores exactly where it wants, since the passing score must be consistent across piloting states.
The children crouched like bushes rooted in the church's sanctuary and waited for the music.
Then they rose alongside their instructors, lifted their arms and sang Labi Siffre's 1980s anti-apartheid anthem as it boomed through the stereo system:
"The higher you build your barriers, the taller I become
The farther you take my rights away, the faster I will run..."
It's the last week of Wisconsin's only Freedom School, but the morning group exercise of singing, clapping, stomping, hugging and chanting is the same as it's been every day for the past several weeks at All Peoples Church, 2600 N. 2nd St. It's also the same way Freedom School has begun this summer at 145 other sites around the country.
Administered nationally by the Children's Defense Fund nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C., Freedom Schools aim to teach kids from first grade through high school to fall in love with reading. The six-week summer program is rooted in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, so reading is seen more broadly as a way to empower low-income and minority youth, to instill them with the education, confidence and tolerance necessary to succeed and help others.
Since it was published last year, The Spirit Level - Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's book on why equal societies do better than unequal ones - has become a sparkplug for heated, testy debate. Not one, not two, but three pamphlet-length critiques of it have been published, while others have rushed to man the book's intellectual barricades ('This book's inconvenient truths must be faced', said a Guardian editorial).
Yet now Pickett and Wilkinson have imposed an extraordinary condition on future debate about their book. Because much of the criticism of The Spirit Level has consisted of 'unsubstantiated claims made for political purposes' (in their view), 'all future debate should take place in peer-reviewed journals', they decree.
Wow. In one fell swoop they have painted any criticism of their book that appears in non-peer-reviewed journals as somehow illegitimate. They snootily say that 'none of [the] critiques are peer-reviewed' and announce that from now on they'll only engage in discussions that 'take place in peer-reviewed journals'. So any peep of a critique that appears in a newspaper, a book published by a publishing house that doesn't do peer review, a non-academic magazine, an online magazine, a blog or a radio show - never mind those criticisms aired in sweaty seminar rooms, bars or on park benches - is unworthy because it hasn't been stamped with that modern-day mark of decency, that indicator of seriousness, that licence which proves you're a Person Worth Listening To: the two magic words 'Peer Reviewed.'
Over the years, I feel like I've come to know you -- your political leanings and life experiences, your writing style, sense of humor and average snark level. But what about your math skills?
For example: Can you (or any high school student you know) do this?
Show that there are only finitely many triples (x, y, z) of positive integers satisfying the equation abc = 2009(a + b + c).
Or this?
Let n be an integer greater than 3. Points V1, V2, ..., Vn, with no three collinear, lie on a plane. Some of the segments ViVj , with 1 *< i < j < n, are constructed. Points Vi and Vj are neighbors if ViVj is constructed. Initially, chess pieces C1,C2, ...,Cn are placed at points V1, V2, ..., Vn (not necessarily in that order) with exactly one piece at each point. In a move, one can choose some of the n chess pieces, and simultaneously relocate each of the chosen piece from its current position to one of its neighboring positions such that after the move, exactly one chess piece is at each point and no two chess pieces have exchanged their positions. A set of constructed segments is called harmonic if for any initial positions of the chess pieces, each chess piece Ci(1< i < n) is at the point Vi after a finite number of moves. Determine the minimum number of segments in a harmonic set.
(*Note: This sign (<) should read "less than or equal to," but I have some keyboard limitations.)
Having spent September 2009-June 2010 serving as a Fulbright Scholar in General Education in Hong Kong , I have now returned to my responsibilities at the University of Washington, Bothell, as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Director of the academic side of our First Year Experience. All the universities in Hong Kong are moving from three to four year degrees and UW Bothell started first and second year programs in 2006 and is now rapidly expanding its degree options. On both sides of the Pacific, curricular and administrative structural reform are moving forward at a sometimes dizzying, but always invigorating, pace. What are the connections and asymmetries involved in such an effort?
As in other parts of the world, a very similar language is emerging in both Seattle and Hong Kong around curricular reform, including the familiar rhetoric of student-centeredness; outcomes-based assessment; interdisciplinarity; writing, quantitative, and IT literacies; cross-cultural competencies; interactive pedagogies; and the development of new administrative structures that can serve the university as a whole instead of reproducing only department or College level concerns.
A recent and startling increase in tick-borne Lyme disease among Islesboro residents gave nine students in Islesboro Central School's ninth grade, and two of their teachers, science teacher Heather Sinclair and business and computer education teacher Vicki Conover, a unique and perfect opportunity to combine classroom and experiential learning. To examine the connection between the island's deer population and the increase of Lyme disease, students in Ms. Sinclair's biology class conducted primary scientific research to determine the island's deer herd size, then with Ms. Conover's guidance used GIS and computer applications to analyze and present the data to propose one possible cause of the disease's increase.
As a Health Center Advisory Board (HCAB) member, Ms. Sinclair heard concerns about the deer herd's possible relationship to the spread of Lyme disease on island. The HCAB decided to conduct a deer count and hired a consulting firm, Stantec, to design a survey. The students and twenty community volunteers did the on-the-ground research, following the procedure recommended by Stantec. To establish a sample, Stantec identified thirty-three random transects, lines across the island, that included representative terrain and habitat. The students and Stantec both analyzed the data that volunteers gathered.
Traditional elite schools continued their dominance of the fifth-form public exam to the last, with their pupils filling most of the top-scoring slots.
The only one among the 16 from a New Territories school has a special distinction - she racked up her perfect result despite suffering from a rare blood disease that requires frequent medial check-ups and occasional spells in hospital.
"I feel pain in the stomach and vomit when I am under pressure," said Yiu Sze-wan, 17 - only the second straight-A pupil in the history of the SKH Lam Woo Memorial Secondary School in Kwai Hing.
Seattle Public Schools wants teacher evaluations and student performance joined at the hip, but the teachers' union is taking issue with how the district plans to fuse those two factors.
A proposal that would tie teacher evaluations to student growth prompted a 2,000-word refutation e-mail from the Seattle Education Association earlier this week, a sign of friction in ongoing contract negotiations.
"Their mechanized system is one of minimal rewards and automated punishments," union leaders wrote to members Wednesday.
That statement was sent in response to an e-mail teachers received this week from public schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. She detailed how the school plans to roll out parts of its bargaining proposal -- specifically factors related to how teachers' performances are evaluated.
The district is proposing an four-tier evaluation system that would roll out over two years. Teachers who chose to be evaluated base on to "student growth outcomes and peer and student feedback" would be eligible for perks, including an immediate 1 percent pay increase, eligibility for stipends and other forms of "targeted support."
The district's recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn't any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
"Anecdotally we're hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it's still pretty early to see many specific changes," she says. "It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It's not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort."
I believe it is inevitable that we will see more "teacher evaluation" programs. What they actually do and whether they are used is of course, another question.
Ideally, every school's website should include a teacher's profile page, with their CV, blog and social network links, course syllabus and curriculum notes. Active use of a student information system such as PowerSchool, or Infinite Campus, among others, including all assignments, feedback, periodic communication, syllabus, tests and notes would further provide useful information to parents and students.
Madison schools plan to give middle and high school teachers an hour of "professional collaboration time" on Wednesday afternoons starting this fall. The goal is to let teachers meet in groups to share ideas and improve their instruction.
We're all for boosting performance and results.
But the logistics of this new policy, announced just weeks before the start of school, are troubling.
For starters, Madison elementary schools already release their students early on Mondays to give teachers time to collaborate. That means a lot of parents will now have to juggle two early release days rather than one.
The district's recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn't any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
"Anecdotally we're hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it's still pretty early to see many specific changes," she says. "It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It's not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort."
Progress seen over several decades in narrowing the educational achievement gap between black and white students has remained stalled for 20 years, according to data analyzed in a new report.
Called "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped," the report by the Educational Testing Service examines periods of progress and stagnation since 1910 in closing the achievement gap.
Anybody who thinks that the achievement gap will be closed by throwing more standardized test scores at kids and without addressing health and social issues should read the report and think again.
The report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS's Policy Information Center, uses data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to show that there was a steady narrowing of the achievement gap from the 1970s until the late 1980s. Scores essentially remained the same since then.
It's another sign of private money shaking up public education in the District: A $5.5 million gift will dramatically help expand a network of high-performing charter schools in the city, with a goal of more than doubling the number of students enrolled by 2015.
The grant by Venture Philanthropy Partners, a nonprofit organization using the principles of venture-capital investment to help children from low-income families in the Washington region, will fund Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. The grant is to be announced Monday.
"VPP recognized our ability to impact not just the students we have, but the students throughout D.C.," said Allison Fansler, president and chief operating officer of KIPP DC. "We want to set a high bar for what's possible."
For many years, critics of the SAT have cited a verbal question involving the word "regatta" as an example of how the test may favor wealthier test-takers, who also are more likely to be white. It's been a long time since the regatta question was used -- and the College Board now has in place a detailed process for testing all questions and potential questions, designed to weed out questions that may favor one group of students over another.
But a major new research project -- led by a scholar who favors standardized testing -- has just concluded that the methods used by the College Board (and just about every other testing entity for either admissions or employment testing) are seriously flawed. While the new research doesn't conclude that the tests are biased, it says that they could be -- and that the existing methods of detection wouldn't reveal that.
There appears to be a lot of support, right now, among politicians, the media, and rest of the "opinion-making" class, for Education Reform.
I understand that. The Education Reform movement has a lot of very attractive bumper-sticker type slogans that appear to make a lot of very good sense. Who wouldn't be in favor of firing bad teachers? We've all had a bad teacher who should be fired - haven't we? Even if you haven't had a bad teacher, you've heard the horror stories about them. Who doesn't think accountability is a good thing? Who wouldn't support innovation and choice? It all sounds really good and worthy of our support. Morover, anyone who opposes it, such as teachers' unions, must be doing so for their own selfish purposes.
It's only when people go past the bumper-stick slogans, get past the anectdotes and myths, and begin to consider the realities that the elements of this vaunted Education Reform start to break down.
Professor Andrew Hacker says that higher education in the U.S. is broken.
He argues that too many undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants or professors who have no interest in teaching.
Hacker proposes numerous changes, including an end to the tenure system, in his book, Higher Education?
"Tenure is lifetime employment security, in fact, into the grave" Hacker tells NPR's Tony Cox. The problem, as he sees it, is that the system "works havoc on young people," who must be incredibly cautious throughout their years in school as graduate students and young professors, "if they hope to get that gold ring."
That's too high a cost, Hacker and his co-author, Claudia Dreifus, conclude. "Regretfully," Hacker says, "tenure is more of a liability than an asset."
Reading the blog of the mildly mysterious G.F. Brandenburg, I gathered a clue to why the reports there are so easy to read for geezers like me who squint a lot at computer screens. Brandenburg reveals in passing that he retired as a D.C. teacher recently, so he is likely not too far from my age cohort, and understands us deeply.
Bless him, and not just for the amazing clarity of his written words. He is savage toward D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, whom I highly regard. But there is no substitute for his analysis of what is happening with D.C. achievement scores, and the ways they are being used for various political purposes.
Here is his deft analysis of what has happened to elementary scores, which have gone up, and then down, in the Rhee era:
Contrary to the spin put on things by [D.C. Mayor Adrian] Fenty and Rhee, at the elementary level, virtually all of the increases on DC-CAS scores over the past 4 years happened during the period '07 to '08. And it so happens that 2006 was the first year that DCPS switched to using the DC-CAS as its major standardized test, instead of using the Stanford-9 (also known as the SAT-9). That was under superintendent Janey.
A year or two ago, I received this e-mail. The writer was upset with me for arguing that school principals should have the power to fire teachers who do not perform. As numerous educators have told me, union protections being what they are, dumping a teacher -- even a bad one -- is an almost impossible task.
My correspondent, a teacher, took issue with my desire to see that changed, noting that without those protections, she'd be at the mercy of some boss who decided one day to fire her.
In other words, she'd be just like the rest of us. The lady's detachment from the reality most workers live with struck me as a telling clue as to why our education system frequently fails to educate. When you can't get fired for doing bad work, what's your impetus for doing good?
Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.
Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU's presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as "contingent"--that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site's frequently asked questions page about homelessness -- and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student's copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive -- he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries -- unsigned and collectively written -- did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
The beginning of the school year is a time of optimism, and nobody in the wide world of education is more optimistic than the 168 people holding freshly certified teaching credentials from San Francisco State University.
There are no jobs, and as soon as the credential was in hand, in May, the clock started ticking in two ways. The big hand shows that they have five years to convert their preliminary credential into a permanent one. To do so, they must take part in a two-year development program that requires work experience. You have to be a public school teacher to become a public school teacher.
The little hand on the clock, meanwhile, shows that they have six months before the first payment on their student loans comes due.
This past week the NAACP, the National Urban League and other civil-rights groups collectively condemned charter schools. Claiming to speak for minority Americans, the organizations expressed "reservations" about the Obama administration's "extensive reliance on charter schools." They specifically voiced concern about "the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities."
Someone should remind these leaders who they represent. The truth is that support for charters among ordinary African-Americans and Hispanics is strong and has only increased dramatically in the past two years. Opposition along the lines expressed by the NAACP and the Urban League is articulated by a small minority.
We know this because we've asked. For the past four years, Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, together with the journal Education Next, has surveyed a nationally representative cross-section of some 3,000 Americans about a variety of education policy issues. In 2010, we included extra samples of public-school teachers and all those living in zip codes where a charter school is located.
President Barack Obama on Thursday delivered a fresh call to hold teachers accountable for student achievement, defending his administration against complaints from unions, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers.
These groups, usually backers of the president, have objected to the administration's Race to the Top program, which seeks to drive change at the local level through a competition for $4.3 billion in federal grants.
To qualify for funding, states are encouraged to promote charter schools and tie teacher pay to performance. Unions have questioned both goals.
Mr. Obama, defending his administration's approach in a speech before the National Urban League, said teachers should be well paid, supported and treated like professionals but those who fail should be replaced.
Talandra Jennings and Infinity Gamble couldn't contain their excitement as the 11-year-olds showed off the zucchini picked from the East High Youth Farm on a recent morning.
It was the first vegetable harvested from their section of the farm, which consists of a number of gardens in an area next to Kennedy Elementary School. The two girls, who will be sixth graders at O'Keeffe Middle School, are working at the East High Youth Farm, which is a hands-on science and vocational program focused on sustainable agriculture and service learning.
"We help plant. We help wood chip and sometimes we trellis tomatoes and we harvest," Talandra said. "I'm out here doing something instead of being a couch potato."
Kai Ryssdal: State education officials around the country are having a busy day. Today's a key deadline in the Obama Administration's Race to the Top. That's the $4 billion pot of federal money that states can get -- get, if they agree to certain policy changes. One of those changes -- and this is today's deadline -- is to sign on to a national set of common curriculum standards. That could bring the education marketplace from widely fractured and segmented with dozens of different standardsinto something resembling coherent.
Christopher Swanson is the vice president for research and development at Education Week. Welcome to the program.
Christopher Swanson: Glad to be here.
Ryssdal: It's a mistake to talk about a national education market, I suppose, but this drive to get some uniform core curriculum standards does kind of change the market dynamic for things like testing and textbooks, doesn't it?
As encouraging as it is to see California in the running to win a Race to the Top grant for its schools, we can't help wondering how great a price the state will pay for the possibility of receiving as much as $700 million.
The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that California is one of 19 finalists in the second round of grant applications. Should it succeed -- and the odds are decent, because officials say that more than half the finalists will receive grants -- many of California's neediest schools will receive infusions of new money. Even so, we see this potential win as mixed news.
People with autism are often socially isolated, but the Madison public schools are nationally known for including children with disabilities in regular classes. Now, as a high school junior, Garner, 17, has added his little twist to many lives.
He likes to memorize plane, train and bus routes, and in middle school during a citywide scavenger hunt, he was so good that classmates nicknamed him "GPS-man." He is not one of the fastest on the high school cross-country team, but he runs like no other. "Garner enjoys running with other kids, as opposed to past them," said Casey Hopp, his coach.
Garner's on the swim team, too, and gets rides to practice with a teammate, Michael Salerno. On cold mornings, no one wants to be first in the water, so Garner thinks it's a riot to splash everyone with a colossal cannonball. "They get angry," the coach, Paul Eckerle, said. "Then they see it's Garner, and he gets away with it. And that's how practice begins."
is a Democratic state senator from Philadelphia who ran for governor this year on a platform that included universal school choice
I was raised to revere the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a child, I learned of its legendary achievements in fighting against the oppression of the human spirit and removing the barriers of segregation and racial discrimination. The organization's recent involvement in controversies surrounding Shirley Sherrod and the tea party, however, indicates a shift away from its core values. Today, the long-revered civil rights group seems more concerned about public relations, political positioning, and currying interest-group favor than providing a voice to the voiceless. Nowhere is this transformation more evident, or troubling, than in the area of education.
A handwriting program called "Handwriting Without Tears"
(at http://www.hwtears.com -- see model-samples at
http://www.hwtears.com/files/HWT_Alphabet.pdf ) has begun aggressively lobbying to make every detail of its own particular instructional method and writing styles legallly *required* as the sole method in all USA schools, by piggybacking on current White House efforts to create and impose a detailed national curriculum for all USA schools.
The founder of HWTears, Jan Olsen, began announced this publicly 7 years ago (that her firm would eventually be doing this) during her organization's training and recruitment workshops.. People unaffiliated with her program tried to warn others in the handwriting field, but almost nobody thought Jan Olsen meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called "Handwriting Standards" at http://www.handwritingstandards.com (note the teeny-tiny copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to see which handwriting program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists' web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface, but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards, these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears teaching sequence and even stylistic features and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site's own descriptions of the same endeavor -- to the point that, if the "Handwriting Standards" lobbyists succeed, no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting tie in very closely with HWTears program sequence, to the point that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary of specifically that program's sequence/curriculum/practices.
Of special note: the proposed standards' stylistic requirements (which are HWTears requirements) mean that the program would make it illegal to teach certain programs that have been popular homeschooling choices for many years.
For example, all the cursive-first programs that so many homeschoolers are using (such as Abeka) would be forbidden (because the proposed standards require print first and cursive later) and so would be all the Italic programs (such as Getty-Dubay) that are also widely popular homeschooling choices (because the proposed standards for cursive require 100% joined and looped cursive, as well as specifically cursive-stle capitals, which Getty-Dubay and the other Italic programs do not use. Therefore, these and many other successful programs would not be allowed).
Therefore, if the lobby-group wins it will affect many of the people who are receiving this letter (and who are -- I hope -- sharing it with their children and passing it on to others of like mind). It would affect anyone who uses a program that would be banned by this not-so-neutral "standards" organization.
(There are 200+ handwriting programs in the USA -- with a few strokes of the pen, 199+ of them would be criminalized. Ethical concerns therefore come into play.)
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words "lobby" and "handwriting") and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 (Albany, NY) to decide what we must do, and how. We must act now.
I have my own favorite handwriting program -- it's the one I designed -- and I don't hide that fact (see my signature below!) ... but I'd never try to get the other programs outlawed. A handwriting program must stand or fall on its own merits, not because Big Brother tells you what your handwriting (or our students' handwritings) should look like.
Please send this letter to everyone whom you would like informed on this issue. If the lobby leads to a bill, we must prevent the bill from becoming a law.
Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
6-B Weis Road, Albany, NY 12208-1942
518/482-6763 - handwritingrepair@gmail.com
The founder of HWTears, Jan Olsen, began announced this publicly 7
years ago (that her firm would eventually be doing this) during her
organization's training and recruitment workshops.. People
unaffiliated with her program tried to warn others in the handwriting
field, but almost nobody thought Jan Olsen meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an
innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called "Handwriting
Standards" at http://www.handwritingstandards.com (note the teeny-tiny
copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to see which handwriting
program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists' web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface,
but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards,
these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears
teaching sequence and even stylistic features
and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site's own
descriptions of the same endeavor --
to the point that, if the "Handwriting Standards" lobbyists succeed,
no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching
method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting tie in very closely with HWTears program sequence, to the point that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary of specifically that program's sequence/curriculum/practices.
Of special note: the proposed standards' stylistic requirements (which are HWTears requirements) mean that the program would make it illegal to teach certain programs that have been popular homeschooling choices for many years.
For example, all the cursive-first programs that so many homeschoolers are using (such as Abeka) would be forbidden (because the proposed standards require print first and cursive later) and so would be all the Italic programs (such as Getty-Dubay) that are also widely popular homeschooling choices (because the proposed standards for cursive require 100% joined and looped cursive, as well as specifically cursive-stle capitals, which Getty-Dubay and the other Italic programs do not use. Therefore, these and many other successful programs would not be allowed).
Therefore, if the lobby-group wins it will affect many of the people who are receiving this letter (and who are -- I hope -- sharing it with their children and passing it on to others of like mind). It would affect anyone who uses a program that would be banned by this not-so-neutral "standards" organization.
(There are 200+ handwriting programs in the USA -- with a few strokes of the pen, 199+ of them would be criminalized. Ethical concerns therefore come into play.)
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words "lobby" and "handwriting") and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 (Albany, NY) to decide what we must do, and how. We must act now.
I have my own favorite handwriting program -- it's the one I designed -- and I don't hide that fact (see my signature below!) ... but I'd never try to get the other programs outlawed. A handwriting program must stand or fall on its own merits, not because Big Brother tells you what your handwriting (or our students' handwritings) should look like.
Please send this letter to everyone whom you would like informed on this issue. If the lobby leads to a bill, we must prevent the bill from becoming a law.
Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
6-B Weis Road, Albany, NY 12208-1942
518/482-6763 - handwritingrepair@gmail.com
When New York state education officials recalibrated test scores this week, hundreds of New York City schools suddenly had vastly fewer children who could be termed "proficient" in math and English.
For many schools, the higher bar had barely an effect. For others, it was a devastating blow, revealing a much larger chasm between the city's academic haves and have-nots.
Overall, the country's largest school system lost a lot of ground. Last year, nearly 70% of students were considered proficient in English. Now, only 42% are. In math, 54% of city children scored proficient this year, down from 82%.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, stressed this week that the only thing that changed was the definition of "proficient," and that the gains that New York City students have made since they took over control of schools--as evidenced by performance on national tests--are real.
I am a veteran of the math wars. I was there in 1995 when the shiny new California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test told graders to award a higher score to a student who incorrectly answered a math problem about planting trees - but wrote an enthusiastic essay - than to a student who got the answer right, but with no essay.
The genius responsible for that math question explained that her goal was to present eighth-graders with "an intentionally ambiguous problem in which no one pattern can be considered the absolute answer." Gov. Pete Wilson's education czar, Maureen DiMarco, promptly dubbed new-new math "fuzzy crap."
I was there in 1997, when a trendy second-grade math textbook featured a lesson called "fantasy lunch," which instructed students to draw their fantasy lunch on paper, cut out the food and place their drawings into a bag.
Google it. That's what many college students do when asked to read an excerpt of a play for class, write a resume or find the e-mail address of a politician.
They trust Google so much that a Northwestern University study has found many students only click on websites that turn up at the top of Google searches to complete assigned tasks. If they don't use Google, researchers found that students trust other brand-name search engines and brand-name websites to lead them to information.
The study was published by the International Journal of Communication.
"Many students think, 'Google placed it number one, so, of course it's credible,'" said Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern. "This is potentially tricky because Google doesn't rank a site by its credibility."
In the published, study 102 students at the University of Illinois at Chicago sat at computers with researchers. Each student was asked to bring up the page that's usually on their screen when they start using the Web.
The State Board of Education is voting Monday on adopting national K-12 curriculum standards in a package that includes an obese, unteachable eighth-grade math course.
Back in May 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell pledged to adopt the then-not-yet-created national curriculum standards only if they "meet or exceed our own."
The pledge these public officials took was wise and honorable. California has K-12 academic-content standards that are widely praised as the best in the nation. For example, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found on July 21 that California's standards in both English and mathematics are the absolute best in the nation and better than the national standards. Clearly, Fordham's expert reviewers did not agree with the calls we sometimes hear that we must ditch our standards because they are inadequate.
Charter schools were the main topic at Palm Springs Unified School District's board of education meeting on Tuesday.
A school dedicated to abused, neglected and foster children asked to set up in the district, while union members protested the language in Cielo Vista's charter, which was amended on Tuesday.
The Father's Heart Charter School made its first presentation to the board on Tuesday, asking to open a school for 25 students at Father's Heart Ranch in Desert Hot Springs.
The ranch serves 6- to 15-year-old boys who have been abused, whose parents are in jail or who are in foster care.
Most of the boys attend district schools, but they often are in trouble regularly and fail academically.
"In traditional schools, it's just really hard for teachers to be able to accommodate what these kids need," said Susanne Coie, a consultant with Charter Schools Development Center.
It's a simple question, isn't it? The Board Directors, if asked, all claim (rather indignantly) that they DO enforce policy. The state auditor says they don't. I can't find any evidence that indicates that the Board enforces policy. More than that, I can't even think of HOW the Board enforces policy.
No Board member alone can speak for the Board. So no Board member, on their own, can direct the superintendent to do anything. So if an individual Board member, such as Director Martin-Morris, were to discover that a policy, such as Policy B61.00 which requires the superintendent to provide annual reports on District programs, wasn't being followed because there is no report on the Spectrum program, what could he do about it? I suppose he could ask the superintendent, pretty please, to provide the report, but what if she didn't? He could not, on his own, compel her compliance with the policy.
If the Board, as a group, wanted to enforce a policy, such as Policy C54.00 which requires the superintendent to get input from the community before assigning a principal to an alternative school, they would have to meet to do it. Any meeting of a quorum of Board members would be subject to the Open Meetings Act, and would require the posting of an agenda in advance and minutes afterward. There are no minutes from any meeting that describe the Board as taking action to enforce policies.
When DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee announced Friday that she was firing more than 200 ineffective teachers, their union chief blasted the move as punitive and unfair. Others have insisted that Rhee's corporate model doesn't belong in schools.
But, as the president said today, education is an economic issue. Failing schools threaten our global standing. And adults who don't attend college are twice as likely to be unemployed.
The key, by all accounts, is teachers. One new study found that an excellent kindergarten teacher is worth $320-thousand dollars per year. That's how much more his or her students will earn as adults than their peers.
INFURIATING Scott G. McNealy has never been easier. Just bring up math textbooks.
Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same.
"Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time," Mr. McNealy says.
Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years
For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT.
So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation's top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.
Until then, despite being the daughter of a physician, she said, "I was kind of thinking medical school was not the right track for me."
New York City principals are getting tougher: They denied tenure or continued the probation of a record 11% of teachers in the school year just ended, according to Department of Education data released Thursday.
Five years ago, less than 1% of teachers found themselves in the same predicament. Principals this year also gave hundreds more teachers "unsatisfactory" ratings.
The results come amid a push by schools chancellor Joel Klein for greater teacher accountability and a harder stance on tenure. In a letter to teachers in February, he said tenure had become "an expectation more than an honor." He had also called on principals for the first time to consider student test scores when making tenure decisions, and the latest results show that they did.
"Our principals are retaining top teachers and they are dismissing low-performing teachers," said John White, a deputy chancellor. "They are doing it as part of a culture shift of using evidence of student learning."
In a recent poll a majority of Americans said they thought Barack Obama, president, was a socialist. It is safe to say that America's teachers were not among them. At the annual convention earlier this month of the National Education Association, America's largest teachers' union, the body's president accused Mr Obama and Arne Duncan, his high-profile education secretary, of spearheading the most "anti-educator, anti-union and anti-student" administration he could recall.
To a degree that almost nobody anticipated 19 months ago, Mr Obama, who will on Thursday give a set piece address in Washington on education reform, has alienated the largest single historical provider of cash and volunteers to the Democratic party - namely the teachers' unions.
Yet Mr Obama's reforms, which have been taking place at the state level and often in the teeth of union opposition, have brought about what even critics concede is the most rapid school reforms America has seen in a generation.
"You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice," writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of "wistful optimism" or the quasi-religious appeal to "hold hands" and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.
"This transformation is both essential and urgent if we are to accelerate achievement for all children and accomplish the goals of Imagine 2014," she said in a statement, referring to the district's five-year improvement plan.
Regional office facilities, which generally served as buffers between schools and the central office, will reopen this fall as parent- and family-resource centers designed to provide support services for parents.
Along with the changes to the regional offices, Ackerman has appointed three associate superintendents.
Tomas Hanna, Ackerman's former chief of staff who was recently given the job of associate superintendent of academics, will serve as the associate superintendent of academic support.
David Weiner, former chief of accountability, will become the associate superintendent of academics and curriculum.
According to the school board, Notter needs to improve his communication with staff members and the general public; improve relations with the teachers union in Broward and cut administrative costs. "With all the complications we went through, I believe it is a fair and valid assessment of how the superintendent worked with the board, worked with his leadership team to do the right thing for our children," said Notter.
Mike Ritzius works with students at the Integrated Studies Program, a project-based pilot program inside the Camden County Technical School, in New Jersey. Students work to master state content with the help of teacher-advisors and project-management applications, primarily Project Foundry.
Chad: Would you please describe your school for us?
Mike: The Integrated Studies Program (ISP) is a pilot at Camden County Technical School (CCTS). The school as a whole is a county-wide technical school, serving 32 sending districts with the largest being the city of Camden, NJ. The majority of the students come from challenging socio-economic situations, making the entire school eligible for Title 1 funds. Students choose to come to CCTS to pursue a trade but recently, the district has been adding more professionally minded career areas. As a whole, the district delivers content through very traditional means.
The ISP approach is 180 degrees different from the rest of the school. The program was piloted in the 2009-2010 school year with five advisors and 100 students, now down to 87. The attrition rate for the rest of the district is 27% due mostly to the high mobility of the student body and the rigorous demands of CCTS as a whole when compared to the larger sending districts.
And now Bronson has turned his fertile imagination to the act of creativity itself. In a Newsweek cover story early this month, Bronson and his co-author Merryman write about the crisis of creativity now affecting American schools and children. According to Bronson, the results of creativity tests for American kids has been falling since 1990 - a particularly worrying statistic given that these test scores have been rising over the past twenty years in most other industrialized countries around the world.
So it was a real honor to have Po come into the Techcrunch.TV studio last week to talk about Silicon Valley creativity, its role in the broader economy, his own creativity and why, exactly, there's a creativity crisis today in American schools. This may be the single most important issue facing not only the American economy, but also our culture and society. And there are few, if any, writers around today who can discuss creativity with the same erudition, imagination and wit as Po Bronson.
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown unveiled an education reform plan Wednesday that calls for a wholesale restructuring of California's public school system, from changing the way schools are funded to revamping the state's higher education system.
The eight-page plan touches upon the major issues facing the state's education system, from the increasing cost of college to the state's dismal dropout rate. Some of the proposals, such as changing the way schools are funded, would take years. Brown urged patience.
"There is no silver bullet that will fix everything," he wrote. "Education improvement takes time, persistence and a systematic approach."
McGill University's medical school may have an Ivy League reputation, but it no longer has something that most of the top medical schools on the continent do -a requirement for all students to write the Medical College Admission Test.
Beginning this month, Canadian students who studied at a Canadian university before applying to McGill medical school will no longer be required to write the MCAT -the widely used admissions test that measures students in physical sciences, verbal reasoning, biological sciences and a written sample. Students typically spend about three months studying for the exam.
In making the decision, McGill is aligning itself with francophone or bilingual universities here and elsewhere in Canada that also don't require the MCAT because the test has no French equivalent. Students from outside the country will still have to write the MCAT.
It's true, in a sense, that all that happened Wednesday was the state reported test scores using a higher cut-score. It was just like they'd moved the goalpost further down the field, one Buffalo educator (and apparent football fan) explained. More kids failed because they graded the tests harder.
But a lot more happened than that.
As State Education Commissioner David Steiner explained at the state's press conference, the state tests have not simply become too easy. They have become bad tests.
They have been assessing only a very narrow band of state standards and virtually ignoring the rest of the state curriculum. They have repeated questions from year to year, making it easy to game the tests. And they do not reflect what students need to succeed in college and careers.
That is going to change. Over the next three years, the tests will become longer. They will test more material, have more open-ended questions and require more writing. They will aim to assess not whether students learned "test-taking tricks," in Steiner's words, but whether they can apply knowledge and explain their answers. By 2014-15 the goal is that our state tests will be able to tell students honestly if they are on track to succeed in college and beyond.
I received some interesting news recently from two Washington area high schools, Washington-Lee in Arlington County and the Friendship Collegiate Academy in the District. W-L, as it is often called, is a regular public school. Friendship is a public charter school. About 34 percent of the W-L students are low-income. That figure is twice as high, 70 percent, at Friendship.
W-L graduates about 400 seniors a year, Friendship about 250. They both have dedicated teachers and ambitious programs to give as many students as possible exposure to college-level courses. W-L has both Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. Friendship also has AP, plus access to a significant number of University of Maryland and University of District of Columbia courses.
Friendship has fewer affluent, college-educated families than W-L does. (Arlington, where W-L is, has just been declared by the Brookings Institution as having the largest portion of adults with bachelor's degrees, 68 percent, of any U.S. county.) Friendship students mostly come from D.C. schools with standards not as high as those in Arlington. So they start high school, on average, at a lower level.
Barack Obama on Thursday said education was "the economic issue of our time", linking America's declining public schools with its struggles to remain competitive. Pointing out that America has been dropping steadily down the international league tables, particularly in mathematics and the sciences, Mr Obama made a coded plea for America's teachers' unions to comply with the controversial "Race to the Top" reforms he is pushing.
He pointed out that America now ranks 12th in the proportion of its people who graduate from college compared to first place a generation ago. "If we want success for our country, we can't accept failure in our schools," Mr Obama told the National Urban League in a speech. "I know some argue that during a recession, we should focus solely on economic issues. But education is an economic issue - if not the economic issue of our time."
The president's address comes amid a growing restlessness among ordinary Americans, who tell pollsters they fear the recovery from the recession will fail to create the high-paying jobs to which people were accustomed in earlier decades. Mr Obama's economic advisers concede it will take years to build "new foundations" for the American middle class who were suffering their own "personal recessions" - in terms of stagnant or declining incomes - way before the 2008 financial meltdown.
A state appeals court strengthened the authority of local school boards over charter schools Monday by making it harder for California education officials to approve statewide charters with campuses in multiple counties.
Charter schools are publicly funded and tuition-free but operate independently of local school districts and their union contracts, though districts are supposed to monitor their performance. They have been proliferating both in California and nationwide.
State law allows the state Board of Education, appointed by the governor, to let a company establish charter schools in far-flung counties without local approval or monitoring. Groups of school boards, administrators and teachers claimed the board was overstepping its authority, and on Monday, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed.
In August 1818, Thomas Jefferson authored a report for the Virginia Legislature that laid out the topics to be included in the curriculum of his newly founded University of Virginia. Like so many foundational documents, Jefferson's report resonated with such clear and specific language that it serves to this day as an accurate summation of his educational vision -- and a blueprint upon which his intellectual heirs may continue to build.
Massachusetts, like Virginia, is among the great pioneers in American education, from Colonial times to the present. But last week's decision by the state Board of Education to adopt national Common Core standards is an object lesson in how not to pursue education reform. It's stuff that would have driven Jefferson to laughter or scorn, and should provoke nothing less among Massachusetts taxpayers.
What was approved, and how, make clear that this state's educational leaders need refresher courses in the pursuit of educational excellence.
“You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice,” writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of “wistful optimism” or the quasi-religious appeal to “hold hands” and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.
They see life as a game. They enjoy nothing more than outsmarting the system. They don’t trust politicians, medias, nor brands. They see corporations as inefficient and plagued by an outmoded hierarchy. Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy. They belong to a group — several, actually — they trust and rely upon.
“They”, are the Digital Natives.
The French polling institute BVA published an enlightening survey of this generation: between 18-24 years of age, born with a mouse and a keyboard, and now permanently tied to their smartphone. All of it shaping their vision of an unstable world. The study is titled GENE-TIC for Generation and Technology of Information and Communication. Between November 2009 and February 2010, BVA studied hundred young people in order to understand their digital habits. Various techniques where used: spyware in PCs , subjective glasses to “see what they see”, and hours of video recording. (The 500 pages survey is for sale but abstracts, in French, are here ; BVA is considering a similar study for the US market). Here are the key findings:
Erasing years of academic progress, state education officials on Wednesday acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of children had been misled into believing they were proficient in English and math, when in fact they were not.
The bar for what it means to be "proficient" has now been set substantially higher. For instance, last year more than 77% of New York state students in grades three through eight reached proficiency in state English exams. Under the new standards, only 53% were considered proficient this year. The difference amounts to nearly 300,000 students across the state.
"We are facing the hard truth that the gains in the past were simply not as advertised," said Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the state Board of Regents, during a news conference announcing the new standards.
In New York City, the number of students scoring proficient in English fell to 42% this year from 69% in 2009. In math, 54% of city children scored proficient this year, down from 82%.
The huge drops across the state raised questions about how much of the academic gains touted in the past several years were an illusion.
If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school -- and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past.
Duncan joked with attendees at a luncheon at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington that he would like schools to stay open 13 months out of the year. Then he told the audience of over 100 that he seriously supports longer school hours.
"In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year," Duncan said. "This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ESL classes."
He continued by explaining that the American school calendar is antiquated and must be modified so that American students can compete at the highest levels internationally.
A few weeks ago I was asked to a friend's son's christening. "We haven't found God, just a really good church school" she scrawled across the bottom of the invitation. In days gone by I might have huffed and puffed about the hypocrisy of it all. But now I'm a parent myself and school admission is hovering on the horizon.
We share the dilemma faced by thousands of families across London. Our home is just about equidistant between a fairly average Church of England school and a local primary that has been in special measures for the past two years. The idealist in me says stand by your principles -- I believe in community and the impact supportive parents can have on a school. The parent in me says: do whatever is best for your child's education.
But the choice, such as it is, also makes me cross. Why are so many inner London schools still so poor that parents feel they have to lie about religion, compromise their principles, or even -- and most can't afford this option -- move house to secure a half-decent place? We're not even on to secondary yet.
Education Secretary Michael Gove claims he gets it. His academies bill -- passed in the Commons last night-- allows schools to opt out of local authority control and be directly funded by government. They will have greater freedom over the curriculum and teachers' pay and access to extra funds currently administered by councils.
At the same time, the school district awaits a state Supreme Court ruling on city funding of schools, and may face a possible referendum on who will pay for schools.
If the funding issue goes to the voters this fall, expect a campaign for funding led by the school board, Williams said.
"I think most people understand in order to reduce crime, we are going to have to invest in education," she said. "You can pay now or pay later. It's a lot less expensive to educate a child than to pay a year for a person in the criminal justice system."
How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?
Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not -- which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child's health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes."
Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
Wednesday early release set for Madison middle, high schools
Susan Troller:
Hey Madison parents, teachers and students, get ready for some changes.
I wrote about a letter sent to teachers several weeks ago, but snags in transporation had the plan still tentative until today.
Now it's official: A plan for teacher collaboration at the Madison middle and high school levels beginning this fall will alter daily and weekly schedules for all eleven local middle schools and four high schools.
The most immediate change will be early release most Wednesdays for both high school and middle school students; middle school classes (except at Wright Middle School) will end on Wednesdays at 1:37 p.m. School will end at Wright at 2:15 p.m.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan was being too modest when he said in a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club that the Obama administration is playing a "modest role" in sparking a "quiet" revolution in education.
There is nothing modest about the administration's role in driving reform, and there is nothing "quiet" about the change process, not in Washington or in state legislatures that rushed to change laws for a chance to win federal dollars.
The administration is Bigfoot, driving change with billions of dollars in the Race to the Top competition. In fact, Race to the Top, which started with $4.35 billion, is doling out the largest pot of discretionary federal education money ever. How's that for modest?
Duncan announced the finalists for Round 2 -- 18 states and the District of Columbia -- each of which will send teams to Washinton, D.C., in August to explain why they deserve to be on top.
As the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the superintendent brought in to revive New Orleans' troubled public schools is bidding farewell after turning many of the schools into charters. Before his departure, Paul Vallas speaks with John Merrow about where things stand with the city's school reform efforts.
JOHN MERROW: For Paul Vallas, the veteran superintendent Louisiana hired in 2007 to do the job, the pressure was on.
PAUL VALLAS, superintendent, Recovery School District of Louisiana: We need to move now. We need to start building buildings now. We need to modernize those classrooms now.
JOHN MERROW: Almost from the time he arrived in New Orleans, Paul Vallas began making promises, talking publicly about all the big changes he intended to make in the schools. Well, it's been three years. Time for Paul Vallas' report card.
PAUL PASTOREK, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education: I give Paul very high marks.
JOHN MERROW: State Superintendent Paul Pastorek hired Paul Vallas.
PAUL PASTOREK: If you would tell people five years ago what is happening today, no one would have believed it was possible.
Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?
Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.
In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.
In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.
At one school district in New Jersey, "D" now stands for for "dropped."
Starting this September, middle and high school students in Mount Olive won't be getting D's anymore -- because the board has dropped that letter from its grade system. Now, any score below 70 percent is an F.
The move passed the the Mount Olive School board in an 8-1 vote Monday.
Superintendent Larrie Reynolds, who proposed the new policy last month, says it will raise the bar for Mount Olive students.
"I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," Reynolds told the Daily Record. "We intend to be the beacon of excellence in Morris County, and to do that, we have to fix it."
It took an offer to appear on a national TV show for Wade Warren to reluctantly give up what he calls his "technology" for a week.
That was the only way, his mother says, that he would ever pack his 2006 MacBook (with some recent upgrades, he'll tell you), his iPad tablet computer, and, most regretfully, his Nexus One smart phone into a cardboard box and watch them be hustled out the door of his room to a secret hiding place.
Wade, who's 14 and heading into ninth grade, survived his seven days of technological withdrawal without updating his 136 Twitter followers about "wonky math tests" and "interesting fort escapades," or posting on his photography product review blog, or texting his friends about... well, that's private. But he has returned to his screens with a vengeance, making up for lost time.
Children who take part in musical training have an advantage in learning that spills over to skills that include language, speech, memory, attention, and even vocal emotion.
Research on the effects of music training on the nervous system has strong implications for education, says Nina Kraus, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology at Northwestern University and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
Scientists use the term neuroplasticity to describe the brain's ability to adapt and change as a result of training and experience over the course of a person's life, Kraus
I'm a broke writer who can't find a gig in the recession, so I decided to save myself -- by helping students cheat
My clients never fail to amuse.
"Can I have a military discount?" one asked.
"Do you give student discounts?" asked another.
No and no, I thought, hitting Delete on those e-mails. In the business of doing other people's homework, there are no discounts of any kind. (Who needs my services besides students, anyway?) All sales are final, and all payment is upfront. No one gets free credit -- well, they get credit from their instructors, plus high grades and lots of compliments.
I entered this business purely by accident. A victim of the craptastic economy, I've done all sorts of things for money. I've cleaned maggots out of other people's kitchens. I've scraped cat poop off carpets. I've watched small screaming children for hours at a time. But doing college homework for cash? That one took me by surprise. It began innocently. Having tutored writing at a small private school, I decided to offer my services to the larger market via Craigslist. Soon, a prospect contacted me.
There are numerous schools in Milwaukee where you can receive an art-centric education. Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Marquette University, UWM, Mt. Mary College, and Milwaukee Area Technical College are some schools that offer creative degrees in the area.
So do we need another school offering degrees in fields like Advertising, Film making, Graphic Design, Culinary Arts, Fashion Marketing, Interior Design, Media Arts and Animation and Interactive Media?
"Yes, because this is a great market," Art Institute of Milwaukee President Bill Johnson said. "We feel there is a need for more educational opportunities here. We will fill a different niche than MIAD; we'll be complementary and provide a valuable education."
AI-Milwaukee (one of 48 Art Institutes across the nation) will enroll its first students in October at a 35,000 sq. ft. campus on Buffalo Street in the Third Ward. It will offer baccalaureate degrees in the aforementioned disciplines, along with an associate degree in Graphic Design. Johnson said degrees are designed to attract students with an "art bent" and prepare them for entry-level jobs in their selected fields.
It was a course for the true economic elite. Hundreds of children from the mainland's wealthiest families gathered to hear words of wisdom from the people who advise the country's top leaders.
The topics ranged from ancient emperors' secrets about managing the succession of power to the strategies used by the People's Liberation Army to keep its soldiers loyal.
The course, sponsored by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce in Beijing, caught the nation's attention and quickly turned into a hot internet discussion topic because it was tailored for what Xinhuanet called "the second generation of the rich", whose family companies have blossomed since the nation embraced capitalism in 1979.
Respondents focus their brief on arguing that no reasonable school board would adopt "inquiry-based" high school mathematics textbooks instead of "direct instruction" textbooks. There are "dueling experts" and other conflicting evidence regarding the best available material for teaching high school math, and the Seattle School Board ("the Board") gave due consideration to both sides of the debate before reaching its quasi legislative decision to adopt the Discovering series and other textbooks on a 4-3 vote.
The trial court erred by substituting its judgment for the Board's in determining how much weight to place on the conflicting evidence. Several of the "facts" alleged in the Brief of Respondents ("BR") are inaccurate, misleading, or lack any citation to the record in violation of RAP l0.3(a)(4). The Court should have an accurate view of the facts in the record to decide the important legal issues in this case. The Board is, therefore, compelled to correct any misimpressions that could arise from an unwary reading of respondents' characterization of the facts.
A tussle over the Jersey City schools superintendent's $280,000-a-year contract is headed for a showdown involving New Jersey's education commissioner, putting a spotlight on one of the state's most troubled school districts.
Charles Epps has been superintendent for the past 10 years. Twenty-six of his 37 schools failed last year to make "adequate yearly progress," according to federal standards, and one middle school---where only 32% of children are proficient in English and 25% proficient in math--has fallen short of the federal goal nine years straight.
Late last month, the local school board voted to forgo an outside search for a new superintendent and to begin negotiating a new three-year contract with Mr. Epps. That enraged some local activists, who have filed a petition with the state to overturn the board's vote.
"There's a window of opportunity to stop rewarding failure," said Steven Fulop, a Jersey City council member who is helping to spearhead the opposition. "Nobody in their right mind would rehire someone who has failing performance without even a cursory look at who else is out there." The petition accuses the school board of failing to give 30 days' notice and opportunity for the public to voice their opinions before the vote.
New Jersey's largest school district will create a special enterprise zone for education in September, bringing together seven low-performing schools for an ambitious program of education and social services provided through a coalition of colleges and community groups led by New York University.
The Newark schools -- Central High School and six elementary and middle schools -- will be part of a Global Village School Zone stretching across a poor, crime-ridden swath of the city known as the Central Ward. The zone is modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, a successful network of charter schools and social service programs, and represents the latest in a growing number of partnerships between urban school districts and colleges.
While the Newark zone will remain part of the city's long-troubled school system, which has been under state control since 1995, its schools will be largely freed from district regulations and will be allowed to operate like independent charter schools. Decisions about daily operations and policies will be turned over to committees of principals, teachers, parents, college educators and community leaders, and the schools will be allowed to modify their curriculum to address the needs of students.
California's public school system has finally found itself at the top of a list. According to a new report, its academic standards are the highest in the country. But in less than two weeks, California's State Board of Education will vote on whether or not to swap them out for new national standards-and there may be good reason to do so.
California's academic rigor may be high, but its student proficiency rates still trail behind many states with less stringent standards. Consider the state of Maryland. According to a study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, Maryland's standards are less rigorous than California's. But a separate report by Education Week ranked Maryland first in the country for overall quality, with high marks for the indicators that measure academic achievement and a student's success from school to the workforce.
Supporters of the switch to the Obama administration's so-called "Common Core Standards," including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, say that the new framework makes more sense because it focuses on building critical grade skills and abilities rather than touching on a long list of academic materials.
Centenary College is closing its satellite business schools in China and Taiwan after discovering rampant cheating among local students, campus officials said.
The cheating was so extensive that the Hackettstown college is withholding degrees from all 400 Chinese-speaking students in its master's of business administration programs in Beijing, Shanghai and Taiwan, said Debra Albanese, Centenary's vice president for strategic advancement.
The students were told they have until the end of the month to decide whether to take a comprehensive exam to earn their degree or accept a full tuition refund So far, school officials said, most students have opted for the refund of their $1,200-to-$1,400 tuition.
A more rigorous high school curriculum is paying off in better college entrance scores for state students.
Michigan's tough, new high school curriculum is passing the test. Scores for state high school students on the Michigan Merit Examination, which includes the ACT, climbed by half a percentage point, meaning students will enter college better prepared.
The results, released Thursday by the Michigan Department of Education, show high school students have improved their ACT scores for the third year in a row.
The steady improvement, from an average score of 18.8 in 2008 to 19.3 this year, demonstrates the rigorous high school graduation requirements adopted in 2006 are gradually paying off.
Few U.S. citizens would agree to cutting special education funds. After all, students with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) obviously learn differently and need increased time and attention from educators in order to ensure they are attending to and learning the academic standards. However, another group of students who learn differently and need time and attention to guide their learning of the academic standards are being denied this year. These are the gifted students.
According to the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Policy Insider, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee met to draft the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget for the Department of Education. Although the budget has increased 3.2% since FY 2010, the budget completely eliminates the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Student program. "The 20 year-old Javits program is the only federal program that supports the unique learning needs of America's three million students with gifts and talents."
Portland schools may not feel an immediate impact from the loss of the Javits Program. However, this program provides scholarships to the disadvantaged gifted student and research support in the area of effective instructional practices for these students who learn differently than their peers.
Over the last several months I have been in many meetings with HR and L&D professionals talking about the enormous power of formalized informal learning. As we walk through out enterprise learning framework and talk with people about the need to expand their concept of training, I am reminded of the work we did back in 2003 and 2004 when I wrote The Blended Learning Book® (which is just as important to understand today as ever before).
Here are a few of the jewels I want to remind everyone to consider.
Thanks to a dual credit program at her high school, Casey Hahney, of Hammond, was able to transfer her credits and enroll at Ivy Tech Community College Northwest.
Dual credit is designed for high school juniors and seniors, enabling them to earn college credits while fulfilling high school requirements.
Educators say dual credit may not mean that students will finish college in less than four years but it may reduce the number of students finishing in six years.
Local colleges and universities recently reported six-year graduation rates in 2008 well below 50 percent, also less than the national average of 55.9 percent.
Not every high school graduate will go on to college. But for those who do, a basic high school diploma may not give them the preparation they need. Dual credit classes range from English to anatomy or engineering. It saves times and money, and gives students a leg up, helping to prepare them for a successful college career.
"Each year is more fun than the last," said 10-year-old Chloe Janisch, who is entering fifth grade at DeForest Area Middle School and returned to the theater program for her fourth year. "It is a very fun atmosphere."
Pam Smith, who teaches music at Yahara and Morrisonville elementary schools, proposed the idea to the parks and recreation department more than five years ago. Each year she has participants put on a musical with a different theme.
"The Inside Pitch," a musical composed by Michael and Jill Gallina, was performed this year.
Pearson, which also owns Penguin Books, has agreed to buy the "learning systems" division of Sistema Educational Brasilerio (SEB), as part of the FTSE 100 company's plan to expand its presence in south America.
The deal will more than double the size of Pearson's education business in Brazil and includes an agreement that will ensure that SEB's remaining schools and higher education institutions remain "major customers" of Pearson.
The acquisition comes after Dame Marjorie Scardino, Pearson's chief executive, pledged to reinvest the company's £900m windfall from the sale of its majority-stake in market data provider IDC into expanding its education business in fast-growing economies.
Pearson said Brazil is one of the world's largest education markets with 56m students and an educational materials market valued at about $2bn. Pearson said it expects the new division to generate sales of about 160m reais this year.
Time is on my side, the Rolling Stones sang in the 1960s.
Seems like it was. They're still rich and famous four decades later.
But what about millions of school kids, especially those on the short end of educational good fortune? What if time - namely, too little of it in constructive educational situations - is working against them?
The way time is and is not used to give kids valuable educational experience is a good subject here at the height of the summer, when a large number of kids, especially those with the biggest challenges in school, are likely going backward educationally.
"Summer learning loss" is the term for the well-documented problem of kids coming back to school around Labor Day with erosion in their skills.
Should something be done about the classic school schedule - 180 days a year, usually not more than seven hours from the time a student walks in the door until dismissal, with 10 weeks or more off in the summer?
The current calendar became the norm more than a century ago, and many trace its origins to an economy that leaned heavily toward agriculture. Kids were needed to help out during the growing season.
Since the start of American public schools, both well-meaning and not so well-meaning people have tried to reform them. Movements have ranged from the introduction of "teaching machines" to the current political cry for increased testing, market-model accountability and school choice.
Until recently, most reform efforts have been relatively benign, with no serious threat to the concept of public education. That was changed during the George W. Bush administration and it continues under President Obama. His plans are punitive, counter-productive to real reform and insidious in intent. They do pose serious threats to the very existence of the American public school system.
Fresh from his hard-earned, well-deserved victories in health-care reform and financial regulation, Obama is now redirecting his energy toward education reform. This time, though, he is acting on bad advice, misinformation about education and denial of valid research that rebuts the plan he supports. Race to the Top (RTTT) is the name of President Obama's plan, spearheaded by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Under it, states submit an application to the federal government with their "best blueprint" for reform. Duncan has devised a model for the states to follow that's composed of several elements, each given a point value. The total number of points possible, if all criteria are met, is 500.
The model includes provisions for taking over "failing schools" and encouraging the establishment of charter schools, many of which are funded by such organizations as the self-serving Gates Foundation. Recent national studies have found no significant difference between the education students receive in charter schools and public schools -- but the studies are ignored.
College students study a lot less now than in the 1960s, yet they get better grades.
For students, these trends must seem like marvelous developments. But they raise questions about both declining rigor and potential grade inflation in higher education.
In a forthcoming study in the journal Economic Inquiry, economist Philip Babcock finds the trends linked. As Babcock related in an e-mail, when the instructor "chooses to grade more strictly, students put in a lot more effort." And when the professor gives easy A's, students expend less effort.
The finding relates to an earlier study, cited in a previous post here, showing that professors who get high ratings from their students tend to teach those students less. (The minimal effort required in those classes apparently fuels the professor's popularity.)
Babcock, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reviewed two sets of research literature that document crisscrossing trends.
On Thursday at 10:30 AM an appeal of the Superintendent's one-year contract extension to June 30, 2013 will be filed at the King County Courthouse.
At 1:30 PM filings initiating the recall and discharge of each of five Seattle School Directors will be filed at the King County Elections Office. Directors Sundquist, Maier, Martin-Morris, Carr, and DeBell are the subjects of these five recalls. Directors Smith-Blum and Patu are not subjects of recall.
If you wish to volunteer to collect signatures...
please contact: .. dempsey_dan@yahoo.com
using the subject line "RECALL".
We expect to receive authorization to begin collecting signatures within 30 days of initial filing. Signatures will be gathered from voters registered in the City of Seattle. We hope that most voters will choose to sign all 5 petitions. Approximately 32,000 valid signatures will be needed for each director to bring about a recall election. A 180 day maximum for signature gathering is allowed and the election is scheduled 45 to 60 days after the required number of signatures has been submitted and verified.
A new study has claimed that good school leadership is critical to good education.
Researchers Kyla Wahlstrom and Karen Seashore Louis from the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development and Kenneth Leithwood and Stephen Anderson from the University of Toronto, have broad implications for the understanding of how leadership affects learning across the United States.
"Leadership is important because it sets the conditions and the expectations in the school that there will be excellent instruction and there will be a culture of ongoing learning for the educators and for the students in the school," said Wahlstrom.
"SCHOOL reform chaos?" asked a frowning satchel depicted on posters plastered around Hamburg. "No thank you." The sorrowful satchel was the mascot of a citizens' rebellion against a proposed school restructuring in the city-state. Voters rejected the plan in a referendum on July 18th. The stinging defeat for Hamburg's government, a novel coalition between the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Green Party, has national consequences, as it may make the CDU-Green alliance a less appealing model for a future federal government. Ole von Beust, Hamburg's mayor, announced his resignation before the result, saying he had done the job for long enough. He is the sixth CDU premier to leave office this year. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the CDU, must now promote a new generation of leaders.
More important are the implications for schools. Hamburg's plan was a bold attempt to correct a German practice that many think is both unjust and an obstacle to learning. In most states, after just four years of primary school children are streamed into one of several types of secondary school: clever kids attend Gymnasien, middling ones Realschulen and the slowest learners Hauptschulen, which are supposed to prepare them for trades. (A few go to Gesamtschulen, which serve all sorts.) Early selection may be one reason why the educational achievement of German children is linked more closely to that of their parents than in almost any other rich country. Children at the bottom often face low-wage drudgery or the dole.
When Desiree Lunsford didn't know the answer to a question in school, she felt embarrassed.
"But now I don't," the 10-year-old said.
That's because Lunsford is getting a jump start on the fifth grade. As one of more than 650 elementary school students participating in Red Clay Consolidated School District's summer enrichment program, she is learning the math and English concepts she would learn in the fall during a 23-day summer course ending Friday. Students are rising third to sixth graders.
This is the second year for the program, which has doubled in size and length.
The program runs at Marbrook, Baltz and and Warner elementary schools from 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and is open to all Red Clay students. The program is federally funded, with breakfasts and lunches provided through the federal Summer Food Service Program.
Brian Rodriguez, a history teacher at Alameda's Encinal High School, once taught at the old Elmhurst Middle School in East Oakland. Though he left the Oakland school district, he's still teaching lots of Oakland kids. He worries that a "witch hunt" for out-of-district transfers is about to happen. -Katy
I have taught at Encinal High School in Alameda since the 1996-97 school year, when I left Oakland following the teacher strike. I left reluctantly, because I loved teaching at Elmhurst Middle School, but like many union reps, I was the subject of illegal disciplinary action following the month-long teacher's strike and left in disgust.
To my delight, I still was able to teach many Oakland students who also left OUSD following the strike, and to work with fine educators who left then, too. It's estimated that 400 out-of-district students attend Alameda schools.
Adding to a drumbeat of concern about the nation's dismal college-completion rates, the College Board warned Thursday that the growing gap between the United States and other countries threatens to undermine American economic competitiveness.
The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.
"The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation's long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis," Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. "To improve our college completion rates, we must think 'P-16' and improve education from preschool through higher education."
In the school district where I teach, we do a moderate amount of within-grade-level ability-grouping with our students, particularly in reading and math. Occasionally I hear a teacher bemoan this practice as "tracking," despite the fact that the groups are rather flexible and, particularly in reading, the students are re-grouped often (every few weeks) according to their learning needs. It is not "tracking" in the way groupings were created decades ago in our district in which students were irreversibly placed into, or rather locked into, a track. These are flexible groupings far more than they are tracks.
Ironically, the grade-level, whole-class groupings apparently preferred by these teachers who bemoan ability-grouping are the most restrictive form of tracking, that by age. For a century (-ish), schools have "tracked" students based on when they were born, not based on what they are ready and able to learn. "Born between September 1, 2003, and August 31, 2004? You belong to the Class of 2022." That is how it works in nearly every school in our country. It's tracking by age, but no one calls it that.
Of course, many teachers, especially those of us in the realm of gifted education, recognize that age-tracking (particularly in the absence of any differentiation) does little to help schools meet the learning needs of gifted and advanced learners who are academically years ahead of their age-peers.
The story about Provost Academy and the rise of online learning initiatives in South Carolina should be a pretty good indicator of the benefit that alternative learning methods have for today's youth. Here is a stretch of text from the story. You can read the whole story online by visiting the site. Everyone has his or her own learning style.
Washington's mother, Alice Peterson, said she knew her daughter was headed down the wrong path.
"I might have been in jail and she might have been in the funeral home somewhere," Peterson said.
Instead, the cousins heard about Provost Academy, a free public online high school for South Carolina residents. They meet at Refuge Outreach Ministry in Lake City to take their lessons.
Years later, Grace Dunham still remembers a typical sixth-grade day at St. Ann's School: She played guitar, made papier-mâché aliens for Jupiter's moon Europa, went to puppetry, had some lunch and then dropped an egg off a balcony for a project that involved creating protective covers to prevent eggs from breaking.
She recalls feeling like a very lucky 12-year-old. "It was an amazing feeling," she said.
Ms. Dunham, now 18, has just graduated from St. Ann's, the private school in Brooklyn Heights that has no grades, few rules and exceptionally good admissions to some of the country's most elite colleges. (Ms. Dunham is headed to Brown University.)
But around the time she was figuring out how to build a better eggshell, the school's board was coming to the conclusion that what St. Ann's possessed in creativity, it lacked in professional management. It ushered out its founding headmaster and defining figure, Stanley Bosworth, and brought in new help.
An overhaul in the admissions process for Chicago's selective public schools had little impact on overall diversity, but individual buildings show much more variance -- in some cases growing more segregated for the 2010-11 school year, CPS officials said Tuesday.
Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman cautioned that the data are very preliminary and could change when the school year starts. Among other things, a budget crisis may force cuts in transportation to and from these schools, which could prompt enrollment changes.
He conceded that some schools are losing diversity.
California typically lands at or near the bottom in virtually every measure of public school performance nationally, but the academic content taught to the state's schoolchildren is second to none, according to a study released Tuesday. That status has left the Golden State with a conundrum. To be more competitive for federal Race to the Top funds, the state must adopt common standards in English, math and other subjects to be in sync with most other states.
But that would mean replacing the academic standards that were recognized in the study conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank based in Ohio.
Critics are concerned the national standards could dumb down California classrooms, discarding the state's superior academic framework adopted 13 years ago for students from kindergarten through high school.
Poets writing in English have six centuries' worth of forms at their disposal. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare and Milton made blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) the standard mode for narrative and dramatic verse, while in the eighteenth century Dryden and Pope preferred the urbane rhythms of the heroic couplet. Then there are the adopted forms, not quite domesticated from their French or Italian originals: rhyme royal, sestinas, triolets. Recently, American poets have become fond of the pantoum, an originally Malay form that involves a cyclical repetition of lines. But none of these is as vigorous, even in the generally lawless and anti-formal world of contemporary American poetry, as that most conventional and classical of forms, the sonnet.
Reading and math learning goals for Hawaii public schools are "mediocre" and "often vague," says a new national report that gives the state a "C" for its educational standards.
But the report points out that when Hawaii adopts common national standards in the 2011 school year, its standards will improve. The report gives the national standards a B-plus for English and an A-minus for math.
"Hawaii has raised the bar by adopting the common core," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which was scheduled to release its standards report today. "There are going to be much higher expectations."
More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.
Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.
Spending on teacher salaries and benefits dropped from 50 percent of statewide spending to 48 percent over the same period. Spending on administrators and supervisors, staff travel and conferences all increased faster than teachers' pay.
The report mentions that California's average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison's 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).
he K-12 academic standards in English language arts (ELA) and math produced last month by the Common Core State Standards Initiative are clearer and more rigorous than today's ELA standards in 37 states and today's math standards in 39 states, according to the Fordham Institute's newest study. In 33 of those states, the Common Core bests both ELA and math standards. Yet California, Indiana and the District of Columbia have ELA standards that are clearly superior to those of the Common Core. And nearly a dozen states have ELA or math standards in the same league as Common Core. Read on to find out more and see how your state fared.
As Massachusetts nears decision time on adopting national education standards, the Boston Herald takes state leaders to task for their support of the Common Core standards, which some analysts say are inferior to current state standards. But fear not, says Education Secretary Paul Reville. If the national standards are inferior, the Bay State can change them. "We will continue to be in the driver's seat."
If only national standardizers -- many of whom truly want high standards and tough accountability -- would look a little further than the ends of their beaks.
The charter-school movement appears to be catching up to the teachers union in political giving to Albany.
With the help of hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street financiers, charter-school advocates gave more than $600,000 to Albany political candidates and party committees since January, according to the latest campaign filings. That's more than twice as much as in prior reporting periods, according to allies of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
Pro-charter donations appear to have surpassed the $500,000 or so that candidates raised from teachers unions during the six-month period.
We know that Massachusetts students scored below the national average on SATs in the early 1990s and barely broke the top 10 on national assessments. We know that Massachusetts students have become the best students in the nation on these same assessments, and are among the best "nations" in math and science.
We know that implementing standards in Massachusetts took years of public debate and hard work, and, spending over $90 billion since 1993 on K-12 education, that it came at no small cost to the Commonwealth and its communities.
We know that there are ways to improve our current standards and our performance across all demographics and geographies of the Commonwealth.
We know that our education reforms distinguish us from the rest of the country and are critical to business and job creation.
We know that having state flexibility allows us to improve faster than the rest of the nation and to make adjustments that are good for the people and children of Massachusetts.
Americans have never had national education standards. Goals for what public schools should teach are set by state and local school boards. Their members are often elected.
But some Americans say the lack of national standards is wrong in a competitive global economy. Former president Bill Clinton said it was as if somehow school boards "could legislate differences in algebra or math or reading."
President George W. Bush and Congress expanded federal intervention. His education law, still in effect, required states to show yearly progress in student learning as measured by the states' own tests.
Gifted and Talented Education is a broad term for special practices used in the education of children who have been identified as intellectually gifted. There is no common definition for exactly what that means. GATE supporters argue that the regular curriculum fails to meet their special needs. Therefore, these students must have modifications that will enable them to develop their full potential.
In Virginia, each school division establishes procedures for the identification of gifted students and for the delivery of services to those students. GATE funding comes from the state with a local match. Consequently, there is some variation between school divisions in the strength of their GATE programs.
Each Virginia school division must develop a GATE plan. The larger school systems often have separate GATE teachers and classrooms. Others use the regular classroom teacher (often specially trained) to practice what is called differentiation within the classroom.
Differentiation is not providing the GATE student with an extra worksheet. It might be more like, for example, having the GATE students write a novella while the other students are writing a short report. The GATE students may also work together in small groups to solve teacher-generated problems related to the curriculum the whole class is working on.....
But GATE has long struggled with an educational system that has been much more focused on the children struggling to reach a certain level of proficiency. This became more pronounced with the advent of SOL tests and No Child Left Behind. GATE also suffers from charges that it is elitist and focuses on economically advantaged and non-minority children. Any time children and academic labels come together, it can make for a highly-charged environment.
There is no doubt that some children's academic skills put them in a very different category from the majority of students. And who could argue with the concept that public education should try to provide specialized programs to meet each student's specific needs. I think advocates of gifted education would get more public support if they used different terminology. Special education is defined by the type of curriculum not the intellectual capabilities of the students. The identification process can be arbitrary in defining who is "gifted" and who is not. And everyone has the capability to be talented at something....
Seattle Public Schools has a number of slogans. Among them is "Every School a Quality School". The District claims to be working towards this goal, but the District has no definition of a Quality School, so those claims lack credibility. Rather than clucking at the District for not having a definition of a Quality School, our time would be more productively used helping them to find one.
What is a Quality School? We need to be clear that we separate the idea of a Quality School from the students in the school. If we were to rely on student achievement, for example, as our definition of a Quality School, then we might conclude that Bryant is good school and that Hawthorne is a struggling school. But does anyone believe that if the Hawthorne students were all transferred to Bryant and if the Bryant students were all transferred to Hawthorne that the outcomes for the students would be much different? Would the Hawthorne students suddenly start to achieve because they are now at a good school and the Bryant students suddenly start to under-perform because they are now at a struggling school? I doubt it.
With the latest batch of charter-school approvals likely to be announced soon by the state Department of Education, some state lawmakers are beginning a push for a bill that could expand the alternative public schools' movement in New Jersey.
The proposal would permit Rutgers University to approve charter schools, in addition to the Department of Education. It also would end deadlines for organizers to apply for charters, allowing applications to be filed at any time and requiring decisions on them within five months.
The proposal would also expand the types of charter schools allowed in New Jersey, allowing virtual or e-charter schools, charter schools with students of only one gender and charter schools catering to students with behavioral needs or disorders, such as autism.
The legislation is sponsored by five Democrats but seems likely to receive a warm welcome from pro-charter Republican Gov. Chris Christie and his education commissioner, Bret Schundler, who helped found a Jersey City charter school in the 1990s.
Stand on the promenade of any British seaside resort on a summer's afternoon, and you will hear the full, remarkable range of accents of this small island pass by soon enough.
Stand on the seafront in Brighton, and the experience is rather different. The accents come from all over the planet. Most people seem to be speaking English, which is what they are meant to be doing. But it may not be English as we know it.
For if English is now the language of the planet, Brighton might be the new centre of the universe. There are about 40 language schools operating within the city. And at the height of the season - which is right now - about 10,000 students crowd into town, thronging the bars and cafés, practising their fragile English skills.
It's great business for the locals. This trade seems to be recession-proof; it is certainly weather-proof - these visitors arrive in even the wettest south-coast summers; and the weak pound is a bonus. The students' presence spreads cash round all corners of the area, since most of them stay with host families - and anyone with a decent spare room can earn some pocket money.
This is the second in a series of essays by Gelernter commissioned by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The German translation was published on June 22nd ("Ein Geist aus Software").
DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
Victory Schools Inc., a for-profit charter-school operator, has hired away New York City's charter-schools chief and is considering converting into a nonprofit.
Michael Duffy, the director of the Department of Education's Charter School Office, will join Victory, according to representatives for both the DOE and the company. Victory helps manage 16 charter schools with 7,000 students in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Mr. Duffy, whose title hasn't yet been decided, is widely credited for accelerating charter-school growth in the city. He couldn't be reached for comment.
The future of Victory has been the subject of interest since the spring, when the New York legislature passed a law that essentially prevents for-profit charter schools from growing. The law, which also doubled the number of charter schools allowed in the state, said no more than 10% of the state's charter schools can be for-profit. Victory operates nine such schools in the state.
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, apprehensive about a new state law that allows public schools to operate almost entirely in cyberspace, will consider imposing limits on the growth of these "virtual schools,'' much to the dismay of supporters.
The goal of the proposed regulations, which the board is scheduled to vote on tomorrow, is to allow some experimentation in Massachusetts with these kinds of schools, while not allowing them to grow unfettered without knowing what works and what doesn't, said Jeff Wulfson, an associate education commissioner.
Among the proposed limits: capping enrollment at each virtual school at 500 students and requiring at least 25 percent of those students to reside in the school district that is operating the virtual school, according to the proposed regulations.
"We're trying to find the right balance,'' Wulfson said.
New York State education officials acknowledged on Monday that their standardized exams had become easier to pass over the last four years and said they would recalibrate the scoring for tests taken this spring, which is almost certain to mean thousands more students will fail.
While scores spiked significantly across the state at every grade level, there were no similar gains on other measurements, including national exams, they said.
"The only possible conclusion is that something strange has happened to our test," David M. Steiner, the education commissioner, said during a Board of Regents meeting in Albany. "The word 'proficient' should tell you something, and right now that is not the case on our state tests."
When Kim Lecus heard that the Fritsche Middle School program would move into Bay View High School in the fall of 2010, she immediately was concerned about the impact on her daughter, who just finished seventh grade at Fritsche.
The emerging middle/high model at Bay View may offer student Lindsey Lecus a greater variety of accelerated courses, but in her mother's eyes, it comes with a serious price: the mixing of vulnerable adolescents with older teenagers.
The Milwaukee School Board has approved an increasing number of sixth through 12th grade schools in the city. Board members think it will improve the transition for students from middle to high school and will consolidate space in the district.
The "best" way to serve children in the delicate and hormonally charged years between ages 11 and 13 - something national researchers have wrestled with for years - is still unclear. Underscoring that point is Milwaukee, where the emergence of more 6-12 schools is coming just a few years after former superintendent William Andrekopoulos championed moving middle schoolers in with elementary students in K-8 schools.
I know that I'm inviting trouble with this, but something that Reader wrote in a comment on another thread piqued my interest. I would like to discuss only a narrow question. Please don't expand the discussion.
Writing about Everyday Math and Singapore, Reader wrote: "The fact is, the newer curricula stress more problem solving and discovery. That is, it's doing more than a lot of older curricula."
Here's my question: can problem-solving be taught?
I mean this in the nicest possible way and I don't have an answer myself. I'm not sure, I'm asking. Can people be taught or trained in problem-solving techniques or is it a talent that some people just natively have more than others? Problem solving requires a certain amount of creativity, doesn't it? It can require a flexibility of perspective, curiosity, persistence, and pattern recognition. Can these things be taught or trained?
Has endlessly skimming short texts on the internet made us stupider? An increasing number of experts think so - and say it's time to slow down . . .
If you're reading this article in print, chances are you'll only get through half of what I've written. And if you're reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects - respectively, the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen - which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.
at its meeting on May 11, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) adopted a bland-sounding motion that henceforth, "unless an instructor officially informs the Registrar by the end of the first week of the term" of the intention to end a course with a formal, seated exam, "the assumption shall be that the instructor will not be giving a three-hour final examination" and no slot will be reserved for it in the schedule. Previously, the faculty members' handbook specified that courses were assumed to end with examinations unless instructors petitioned for an exemption. That procedure has been uniformly ignored: dean of undergraduate education Jay M. Harris told colleagues he had never received such a form.
But signing Wisconsin on to the nationwide standards campaign may trump all of those. Wisconsin's current standards for what children should learn have been criticized in several national analyses as weak, compared with what other states have. The common core is regarded as more specific and more focused on what students really should master.
Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the generally conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, is a big backer of the new standards. "There is no doubt whatsoever in Wisconsin's case that the state would be better off with the common core standards than what it has today," he said in a phone interview.
But standards are one thing. Making them mean something is another. Evers said that will be a major focus for him ahead.
"How are we going to make this happen in the classrooms of Wisconsin?" he asked.
The answer hinges on making the coming state testing system a meaningful way of measuring whether students have learned what they are supposed to learn. And that means teaching them the skills and abilities in the standards.
Does that mean Wisconsin will, despite its history, end up with statewide curricula in reading and math? Probably not, if you mean something the state orders local schools to do. But probably yes in terms of making recommendations that many schools are likely to accept.
"We will have a model curriculum, no question," Evers said. He said more school districts are looking to DPI already for answers because, with the financial crunches they are in, they don't have the capacity to research good curriculum choices.
Educational statistics expert Joseph Hawkins, one of my guides to the mysteries of test assessment, is impatient with the way the Montgomery County Public School system, as he puts it, "is always telling the world how better it is than everyone else." He finds flaws in its latest celebration of college success by county graduates, particularly minorities.
As a senior study director with the Rockville-based research firm Westat, Hawkins' critique has regional and national importance because it deals with the National Student Clearinghouse. This little-known information source may become the way school raters like me decide which school families and taxpayers are getting their money's worth and which aren't.
The clearinghouse has a database of more than 93 million students in more than 3,300 colleges and universities. It originally specialized in verifying student enrollment for loan companies. Now it tells high schools how their alums are doing.
Yeah, sure, says Hawkins, but "data from the Clearinghouse is not completely accurate, especially if social security numbers for students are not obtained." Also, he says, some of the numbers Montgomery County brags about don't look so good when compared to others.
A handful of administrators at the University of California are spearheading an effort to create an ambitious online educational program for undergraduates. The idea is that UC could become the first top-tier American university to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet. It's a thought-provoking, fascinating and innovative concept. It's also a highly risky experiment.
Online education has a place - even in the university system. For students, it's impossible to beat the convenience and the accessibility of online learning. For workers, it can be a great way to expand their knowledge base without having to leave their jobs. Corporations, small businesses, even traffic schools - all of these institutions have shown that there's a positive place for online education in our society.
But that doesn't mean that the UC should jump into the fray.
Almost every state has been slashing budgets trying to balance expenses with shrinking revenues. A few governors have asked for creative ways to stretch education funding while improving learning and operating productivity. Here's a few ideas:
Promote blended learning
Require all students to take at least one online course each year of high school and negotiate a 10-20% discount with multiple online providers and give students/schools options.
Provide statewide access to multiple online learning providers and reimburse at 80% of traditional schools (with performance incentives for serving challenging populations).
Encourage K-8 schools to adopt a Rocketship-style schedule with 25% of student time in a computer learning lab and a tiered staffing model that makes long day/year affordable. A loan program to upgrade to a 1:3 computer ratio would support adoption of a blended model could be repaid out of savings.
This is a life's work," says Jay Kenton, the Oregon University System's vice chancellor for finance and administration. "I've been working to change this for 30 years."Flexibility for higher ed.
"This" is not Oregonians' understanding of the importance of a national-class higher education system, why some states regard their universities as economic engines, why it's a problem to be among the lowest higher-ed-funding states in the country. Changing that could be more than a life's work; it could take at least until Oregon State wins a Rose Bowl.
Kenton's goal, expressed in a proposal from the State Board of Higher Education earlier this month, is to loosen the Legislature's control over the state universities' budgets, control that has not lightened an ounce while the state's fiscal contribution has become almost weightless.
So I like to check in regularly with other blogs. I look at LEV's blog, the Alliance's blog and Harium's blog. One interesting thing I've noticed is that, when challenged or asked about information on their threads, you can rarely get an answer. Charlie asks a lot of pertinent questions in a respectful, albeit blunt, manner and rarely gets an answer. Harium does occasionally but most of his replies are that he supports the staff. I noticed that when Charlie started asking questions at LEV, there stopped being replies.
So what are these people afraid of? I can get Harium being busy and not able to reply to everything (but then, why have a blog?). But LEV and the Alliance say they want to engage and talk and yet there's silence. I think there are two issues.
Robert Lane Greene is an international correspondent for The Economist, currently covering American politics and foreign policy online. His book on the politics of language around the world, "You Are What You Speak", will be published by Bantam (Random House) in the spring of 2011.
Monitors of language-usage are often seen as either scolds or geeks. Which book do you recommend to convey what is fascinating about language?
After years of reading about language for pleasure and then researching for my own book, I'd still refer anyone who asks back to the book that lit a fire for me a decade or so ago: Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" (written about by The Economist here). You can take or leave Mr Pinker's case that all human languages share a few common features, and that those features are wired into our grey matter (rather than, say, an extension of our general intelligence). But whatever your views on this subject, it's hard to read the book and then happily go back to seeing language as a set of iron-bound rules that are constantly being broken by the morons around you. Instead, you start seeing this human behaviour as something to be enjoyed in its fascinating variability.
This week, State House News broke a story on the "cozy relationship" between Health Care for All and the Patrick Administration. HCFA is an effective organization, but when an HCFA official writes to the state's Insurance Commissioner: "If you expect to do anything 'newsworthy' [on insurance premium caps], can we be helpful with our blog or media at all?" well, then you have to take their positions with a brimming cup of salt.
Surrogate relationships are very much a fact of life in a state where one party is dominant, like Massachusetts. Next up to bat in this age-old game, Education Commissioner Mitch Chester and Secretary Paul Reville. In anticipation of the important debate over whether to adopt weaker K-12 national standards, they have to all appearances lined up their surrogates.
Via two trade organizations, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the Obama Administration and the Gates Foundation have decided to get all states to "voluntarily" adopt national standards. They are working closely with longtime national standards advocates, such as Achieve, Inc., and are funded with tens of millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. As Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution notes in an article by Nick Anderson of the Washington Post:
More than one in three American physicians say that they do not always feel a responsibility to report colleagues who are impaired or incompetent, according to a new report from researchers at the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital. The findings, published in the July 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, are based on the survey responses of 1,900 physicians throughout the U.S. specializing in internal medicine, pediatrics, cardiology, general surgery, family medicine, psychiatry and anesthesia. Of those who responded, only 64% said that it was their professional obligation to report any colleagues who were significantly impaired -- due to substance abuse or mental illness -- or incompetent.
The findings suggest that self-regulation in the medical profession may not be enough to ensure that ill-equipped physicians aren't potentially harming patients, the researchers say. For example, of the doctors who responded to the poll, 17% said they knew of physicians who were practicing despite impairment or incompetence in the previous three years, yet of those who witnessed sub-par performance, only two thirds said they had taken steps to report it.
Alexander S. Szalay is a well-regarded astronomer, but he hasn't peered through a telescope in nearly a decade. Instead, the professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University learned how to write software code, build computer servers, and stitch millions of digital telescope images into a sweeping panorama of the universe.
Along the way, thanks to a friendship with a prominent computer scientist, he helped reinvent the way astronomy is studied, guiding it from a largely solo pursuit to a discipline in which sharing is the norm.
One of the most difficult tasks has been changing attitudes to encourage large-scale collaborations. Not every astronomer has been happy to give up those solo telescope sessions. "To be alone with the universe is a very dramatic thing to do," admits Mr. Szalay, who spent years selling the idea of pooling telescope images online to his colleagues.
It's been two years since Bill Gates left his day-to-day role at Microsoft (MSFT) to concentrate on supervising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation--and his new enterprise is booming. Headquartered in a converted check-processing center in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood, the 10-year-old foundation plans to move into a 900,000-square-foot campus and visitors' center near the city's Space Needle next spring. The Gates Foundation opened a London office this year; it also has offices in Washington, Delhi, and Beijing, and 830 employees around the world, up from about 500 in 2008. With assets of $33.9 billion as of Dec. 31, 2009, and America's two richest people--Gates and Warren Buffett--as trustees, the foundation plans to spend $3 billion in the next five to seven years on education. If there's such a thing as a charity behemoth, the Gates Foundation is it.
While its efforts in global health are widely applauded, its record in America's schools has been more controversial. Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement.
School may be out for the summer, but the topic of education reform has certainly not gone on vacation. Both nationwide and right here at home there are several different ideas on the table that, if implemented, could go a long way tdsoward improving educational outcomes for our students.
Under the guidance of Governor Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin was once a nationwide leader in educational innovation. Unfortunately, bold, reform-minded leadership has been absent from the Governor's office for the last eight years. The most recent failures of Governor Jim Doyle and legislative Democrats were their unsuccessful efforts to grab federal Race to the Top dollars and their blundering attempt at a mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Usually we look to our nation's capital for examples of how not to do business, but the new collective bargaining agreement Washington D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee struck with her teachers' union is just the sort of thing we need here in Milwaukee. The contract includes teacher pay for performance, lessens the weight of seniority if layoffs become necessary and ends "job for life" tenure for ineffective teachers.
Another reform MPS sorely needs is the elimination of the teacher residency requirement, a completely arbitrary barrier that discourages quality educators from teaching at MPS. Only two of the nation's fifty largest school systems, Milwaukee and Chicago, still require its teachers to live within the city limits. No other school district in Wisconsin has a residency requirement.
As always, there will be some who maintain the cure for all that ails K-12 public education is just to keep throwing more money at it. There are some holes in that logic. First, one need look no further than MPS for an example of high spending and low results. Second, aid to public schools is already the biggest chunk of the state budget by far and spending per pupil is over $11,000. Even if simply putting a lot more money into the system were the answer, the state doesn't have it and taxpayers are already stretched to the limit.
Calling education "the civil rights issue of our generation," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday issued a national challenge for whole communities to get involved in improving public education.
"The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve it in the classroom," Duncan told NAACP delegates meeting in Kansas City for the group's annual convention.
"This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative," he said. "Everyone has a responsibility. Every one can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope."
He said community leaders "must be at the table when decisions are made about how to improve struggling schools."
The Obama administration is making $4 billion available to improve the 5 percent worst-performing schools in the country, Duncan said.
LEONARDO DA VINCI had many talents, including the ability to read (and write) mirror-writing fluently. Most adults find this extremely difficult, but new evidence suggests that recognising mirror images comes naturally to children. The 7th Forum of European Neuroscience, held in Amsterdam this week, heard that learning to read requires the brain's visual system to undergo profound changes, including unlearning the ancient ability to recognise an object and its mirror image as identical.
Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the French medical-research agency, INSERM, believes that skills acquired relatively recently in people's evolutionary past must have piggybacked on regions in the brain that originally evolved for other purposes, since there has not been time for dedicated neural systems to develop from scratch..
In the days following his inauguration, President Obama included a package of educational reforms in his stimulus bill that offered states financial incentives to make dramatic improvements in their education systems. About 10% of the $100 billion allocated for education was used to create competitive grants. States could only win them by drafting comprehensive and aggressive plans to, for example, adopt higher academic standards, turn around chronically low-performing schools, and redesign teacher evaluation and compensation systems.
Although it has received much less attention than health care and financial regulatory reform, this measure may ultimately be one of Mr. Obama's most profound and lasting achievements. In just one year, we've already seen more reforms proposed and enacted around the country than in the preceding decade.
Yet on July 1, with little warning, the House of Representatives watered down these reform efforts by approving an amendment to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, proposed by Rep. David Obey (D., Wis.). It takes away $800 million that has already been committed to three critical parts of the president's education reform package--Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the Charter Schools Program. This breaks a promise to the states, districts and schools that are doing the most important work in America. The funds are to be redirected to a $10 billion "Edujobs" bill to prevent teacher layoffs.
In many third-grade classrooms in California, students are taught -- briefly -- about obtuse and acute angles. They have no way to comprehend this lesson fully. Their math training so far hasn't taught them the concepts involved. They haven't learned what a degree is or that a circle has 360 of them. They haven't learned division, so they can't divide 360 by 4 to determine that a right angle is 90 degrees, and thus understand that an acute angle is less than 90 degrees and an obtuse angle more.
It makes no pedagogical sense, but California's academic standards call for third-graders to at least be exposed to the subject, and because angles might be on the standardized state test at the end of the year, exposed they are.
Now, that might change. In June, a yearlong joint initiative by 48 states produced a set of uniform but voluntary educational standards in English and math. Urged on by the Obama administration, the initiative's main purpose was to encourage states with low academic standards to bring their expectations into line with those of other states. Twenty states have already adopted the standards; 28 more, including California, are considering them. Texas and Alaska are the only states that declined to participate in the project.
Kate Simpson is a full-time English professor at the Middletown, Va., campus of Lord Fairfax Community College. She saw my column about Prince George's County history teacher Doris Burton lamenting the decline of research skills in high school, as changing state and local course requirements and grading difficulties made required long essays a thing of the past.
So Simpson gave her freshman English students a writing assignment.
Simpson noted my complaint that few American high-schoolers, except those in International Baccalaureate programs, were ever asked to do a research project as long as 4,000 words. Was I right or wrong? Did her students feel prepared for college writing? The timing was good because her classes had just finished a three-week research writing project in which they had to cite sources, do outlines, write and revise drafts.
She said she discovered that 40 percent of her 115 students thought that their high schools had not prepared them for college-level writing. Only 23 percent thought they had those writing skills. Other responses were mixed.
Will Fitzhugh has been discussing this issue for decades....
Taking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald's: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you're just as full.
Now the University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation's first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program.
"We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale - and that has not been done," said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the effort.
The Obama Administration is successfully orchestrating one of the largest federal overreaches into education policy since the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s. If this news is coming as a surprise, it's because the Administration is maneuvering outside of normal legislative procedure, by way of Trojan-horse programs such as Race to the Top and the suggestive power of their "blueprint" to reauthorize No Child Left Behind.
The Administration's push for national standards and tests, which is moving quickly, is an historic federal overreach. By August 2, 2010, states must submit "evidence of having adopted common standards" in order to increase their chances of winning a Race to the Top grant. For states not enticed by the $4.35 billion grant competition, the Administration has already laid the groundwork in their blueprint for tying the $14.5 billion in Title I funding for low-income districts to the adoption of national standards--a deal that states will likely be unable to turn down.
The League of Education Voters is trying to co-opt dissent by creating a campaign called Education Revolution and using a lot of incendiary language and images, but not taking any action.
It got me thinking about what the Revolution really is or should be. Help me clarify my thinking on this.
I think that the Revolution is about re-defining and re-purposing the District's central functions and responsibilities. The change will come when the role of the central administration is defined. What do we want the District's central administration to do? And what DON'T we want them to do?
Ideally, the District's headquarters will take responsibility for everything that isn't better decided at the school building level. They should relieve the school staff of those duties. They should:
1) Provide centralized services when those services are commodities and can achieve economies of scale. For example, HR functions, facilities maintenance, data warehousing, contracting, food service, procurement, accounting, and transportation.
A proposed sex education program that teaches fifth graders the different ways people have intercourse and first graders about gay love has infuriated parents and forced the school board to take a closer look at the issue.
Helena school trustees were swamped Tuesday night at a hearing that left many of the hundreds of parents in attendance standing outside a packed board room. They urged the school board in this city nestled in the Rocky Mountains to take the sex education program back to the drawing board.
The proposed 62-page document covers a broad health and nutrition education program and took two years to draft. But it is the small portion dealing with sexual education that has drawn the ire of many in the community who feel it is being pushed forward despite its obvious controversial nature.
Most people I've spoken with about California's school finance system, regardless of their political views, seem to think it's a mess. The researchers on the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence described it as "the most complex in the country, lacking an underlying rationale and transparency."
Mike Kirst, the Stanford University education Professor Emeritus I interviewed today, said he wouldn't even call it a system. He called it "an accretion of incremental actions that don't fit together and that make no sense."
Will the courts finally force the deadlocked state Legislature to overhaul the formulas and regulations that dictate how California allocates money to its schools (and how much)? The nonprofit Public Advocates law firm hopes so. It filed suit today in Alameda Superior Court on behalf of a coalition of advocacy groups, students and parents, saying the status quo denies students the right to a meaningful education.
For as long as exams and term papers have existed, cheating has been a temptation. But with Web technology, it's never been easier. College professors and high school teachers are engaged in an escalating war with students over cutting and pasting articles from the Internet, sharing answers on homework assignments and even texting answers during exams. The arms race is now joined between Web sites offering free papers to download and sophisticated software that can detect plagiarism instantly
Interesting article in last week's Times about the Superintendent over in Bellevue. First, she's never been a superintendent before; Bellevue got to her come from her consulting business in California. Two, she says she's doing this one gig and then going back to consulting. (She was allowed to still keep that job as president something that seems to bother some. The State Auditor found no issue with her hiring of a colleague to work as an education consultant.)
What makes her most interesting is this:
The first-time superintendent is engaged in a bold move to change the teaching culture in a district that has already gained a reputation for excellence, with all five of its high schools regularly winning national acclaim.
But it's that very reputation, the school board believes, that has masked an important failure: reaching students at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in a district that's far more diverse than many may realize.
Cudeiro believes a philosophy she honed over eight years of consulting work could close the divide.
On a rainy May morning in 2008, my research team assembled at the Italian Community Center in downtown Milwaukee for focus-group sessions with the parents of students enrolled in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
After a long morning of listening to parents vent about the aspects of their children's schools that disappointed them, the tone of the meeting suddenly changed when we concluded with an "open mike" session.
"We may complain a lot about our children's schools," one of the parents told us, "but please, please, please don't take our school choice away."
Parents like this concerned mother have played a starring role in the long-running policy debate over the school-choice program, which enables parents to select a school for their child other than the assigned neighborhood public school. Charter schools, for example, offer choices within the public school system. School-choice programs like Milwaukee's notably include private schools and are often called voucher programs.
It is just minutes before the bell rings to end Tom Schalmo's eighth-grade reading class at Milwaukee's Burbank Elementary School, and the first-year teacher is trying hard to keep the 29 kids in his room focused.
He is reviewing the answers to a test on the book Holes by Louis Sachar. But a warm breeze floats through the window, carrying the sounds of kids on the playground three stories below. Schalmo's students are restless, and he has to tell them to "Sit down" repeatedly. He does it firmly, without saying "Please," and without raising his voice.
A tall, gangly kid in the second row keeps getting to his feet and edging toward the door. In the third row, another boy and a girl poke and slap at each other. Schalmo holds his hand up and says in a flat, warning tone, "Five, four, three..." The kids settle.
"These grades are important to you," he says, holding a handful of test papers aloft.
"I have recorded them. Now pay attention."
The students take turns answering the questions aloud, until Schalmo asks what offense Kissin' Kate Barlow had committed that caused her to be cursed. The answer: "She kissed a Negro." This causes about half the class -- the black kids -- to burst into giggles.
Public schools in most areas of the U.S. are caught in the vise of declining revenues and rising costs.
Policymakers talk about innovating to do more with less, but to date no one knows what that looks like in education. The truth is that dramatically more productive schooling models simply have not emerged in the last two decades, even amidst cost pressures that drove spending up faster than inflation or GDP.
While education differs in important ways from other service sectors, improvement in productivity in other economic sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system can become more efficient and effective.
This paper first explores the past and future outlook for education absent productivity gains. The authors then discuss several areas in which labor-intensive businesses have improved productivity: information technology, deregulation, redefinition of the product, increased efficiency in the supply chain, investments by key beneficiaries, production process innovations, carefully defined workforce policies, and organizational change. They conclude with a five-step agenda for finding the cure for Baumol's* disease in public education.
*In the 1960s, economist William Baumol observed that productivity (defined as the quantity of product per dollar expended) in the labor-intensive services sector lagged behind manufacturing. Because labor-intensive services must compete with other parts of the economy for workers, yet cannot cut staffing without reducing output, costs rise constantly. This phenomenon, of rising costs without commensurate increases in output, has been labeled Baumol's cost disease.
In his first address to Congress in February 2009, when the nation teetered on the brink of economic collapse, President Obama declared that "dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country--and this country needs and values the talents of every American." Since then, the administration has made a major commitment to increasing America's high school graduation rate, which was once the highest in the developed world and is now among the lowest. Leading researchers now agree that 25 to 30 percent of students who enroll in American high schools fail to graduate. In many of the country's largest urban school districts, such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis, the dropout rate is as high as 60 percent, and rates are similarly high in many rural areas. A generation ago, high school dropouts could still join the military, or get work on assembly lines, and had a fair chance of finding their way in the world. President Obama does not exaggerate when he implies that today's America has little use for dropouts and cannot expect to flourish so long as their numbers remain so high.
The administration has proposed nearly $1 billion in its latest budget specifically for the dropout problem. And it has already put $7.4 billion on the table, including its famous Race to the Top grants, which states and districts can get only if they agree to overhaul their worst-performing high schools. These are the 2,000 or so high schools that Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan refer to as "dropout factories"--schools that graduate fewer than 60 percent of their students and account for more than half the nation's dropouts.
This level of financial commitment to fixing America's underperforming high schools is unprecedented. The 1983 Nation at Risk report, which marked the start of the modern era of education reform, did not so much as mention the dropout problem even as it called for higher graduation requirements. Between 1988 and 1995, only eighty-nine school districts won federal grants for dropout prevention programs. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 applied mostly to grades three through eight. While it nominally required states to hold high schools accountable for dropout rates, it ended up allowing them to lowball the problem. Generally, the thought among educational reformers has been to concentrate on preschool and grade school education, and hope that success there would result in better student performance in high school.
Canadians, particularly those of conservative persuasion, love to compare Canada with the United States, which has a lot to learn in the key area of K-12 education. As the United States struggles with mounting deficits and debt, Americans would be well served to look north if they want to raise student performance while saving money. Canadians would be equally well served to understand their own success and expand it.
Little known to most Canadians is how well the country's students perform on international tests, particularly when compared to the United States. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardized test administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Every three years PISA tests 15-year-olds in reading; mathematical and scientific literacy; and general competencies -- that is, how well students apply the knowledge and skills they have learned at school to real-life problems.
At-risk children who depend on Head Start should not have their futures jeopardized by a study that leaves many questions unanswered or by decision-makers who seem to be ignoring the study's very first conclusion: Head Start children outperformed the control group "on every measure of children's preschool experiences."
Head Start's value has been affirmed by people who experience the outcomes. Just ask police chiefs who know that people who began in Head Start commit fewer crimes and go to jail less often. Just ask school administrators. For example, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland recently found that kindergarteners with special needs who had been in Head Start needed 3.7 hours of special education per week on average, versus 9.8 hours for non-Head Start children -- a huge financial saving.
A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own, less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim from the Web.
"I have to assume that in every class, someone will do it," he said. "It doesn't stop them if you say, 'This is plagiarism. I won't accept it.' I have to tell them that it is a failing offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave."
Not everyone who gets caught knows enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep his shirt on, that what he'd done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F.
When Stanford University School of Medicine became the first medical school in the nation this summer to offer a course to teach students how to interpret genetic tests, the 50 people who signed up to take it were asked to make a controversial choice: whether to study their own genotypes.
The course has proved popular. It has a waiting list for admission - unheard of for a summer class - but it took a yearlong debate before it was introduced.
Its originator, a grad student, said the course was conceived to fill a growing discipline in the field of medicine.
The corruption and mismanagement storm that hit Detroit Public Schools has been likened, on occasion, to Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans' schools.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Michigan Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan has been meeting with New Orleans education officials as he plans to open a new statewide school district in 2011 for Michigan's poorest performing schools.
But what Flanagan discovered while analyzing schools was that an academic hurricane had hit more than Detroit.
Over at least the next year, the state will distribute about $119 million in federal funds to schools across the state, not just in Detroit, to improve academic performance.
From the start, the governor served notice that he saw the public employees' unions as a central part of the state's problems, and that he meant to take them on. His first day in office, he signed an executive order, later struck down in court, to limit their ability to finance campaigns. The first bills he signed limited spending on pensions and benefits. He relished months of verbal sparring with the teachers' union, and analysts say he got the upper hand.
Mr. Christie said there was no plan to put the unions front and center, though some of his aides say privately that it was quite intentional.
But on controlling local government spending and taxes, he acknowledged that "yes, absolutely," there was a political strategy to doing things in a particular order. The governor's budget reduced school aid, leading to predictions that districts would raise property taxes. He blamed the teachers' union for any increases and proposed capping property tax increases. Now he is using that cap as leverage for a package of bills, which has met union opposition, to help towns and school districts control spending.
Across the country, public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution. States are embracing voluntary national standards for English and math, while schools are paying teachers based on student performance.
It's an agenda propelled in part by a flood of money from a billionaire prep-school graduate best known for his software empire: Bill Gates.
In the past 2 1/2 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $650 million to schools, public agencies and other groups that buy into its main education priorities.
The largest awards are powering experiments in teacher evaluation and performance pay. The Pittsburgh school district landed $40 million, Los Angeles charter schools $60 million and the Memphis schools $90 million. The Hillsborough County district, which includes Tampa, won the biggest grant: $100 million. That has set the nation's eighth-largest school system on a quest to reshape its 15,000-member teaching corps by rewarding student achievement instead of seniority.
Rowdy delegates to a national teachers convention Saturday gave several standing ovations to Bill Gates, whose billions in foundation grants for experimental-education-overhaul efforts over more than a decade have sparked widespread controversy and debate.
There were scattered boos and hisses among the 3,400 attendees at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Seattle, and a small group of dissident teachers walked out on Gates' speech, but many at the Washington State Convention Center seemed to welcome the Microsoft co-founder's message that teachers must be partners in any efforts to improve student achievement.
"If reforms aren't shaped by teachers' knowledge and experience, they're not going to succeed," Gates told the delegates.
Randi Weingarten, AFT president, said she welcomed the dialogue with Gates, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led efforts to improve education, including charter schools, which while public are largely nonunion and run by autonomous management organizations.
Bill Gates sure is a popular guy. He is appearing this afternoon at the national conference of the American Federation of Teachers in Seattle, after having recently been the keynote speaker at the annual National Charter School convention.
Just this week, Warren Buffett announced he was giving an additional $1.6 billion to the Gates Foundation, which already had a $35 billion endowment; by far the largest in the nation.
In the past eight years, the foundation has spent nearly $4 billion promoting his personal education agenda; at first providing subsidies to districts that would agree to close down large neighborhood high schools and start small schools in their place; and now encouraging the rapid and widespread proliferation of charter schools. Gates also is aggressively promoting efforts to create programs that link teacher evaluation and compensation to standardized test scores.
David Cameron has admitted that he is "terrified" by the prospect of trying to find a good state secondary school for his children in London.
Mr Cameron said that, living in central London, he sympathised with parents in areas across Britain where there was no choice of decent schools.
"I've got a six-year-old and a four-year-old and I'm terrified living in central London," he said in an interview with a Sunday newspaper. "Am I going to find a good secondary school for my children? I feel it as a parent, let alone as a politician."
Mr Cameron, who was educated at Eton, said he remained determined to send his children to state schools despite rejecting 15 primary schools for his six-year-old daughter Nancy, before sending her to St Mary Abbots, Church of England primary in Kensington.
The head of Atlanta Public Schools promised an impartial inquiry into reports of cheating on state achievement tests. Recusing herself, Superintendent Beverly Hall declared the investigation would be conducted by "a respected outside organization."
Five months later, the investigation remains incomplete, and questions have emerged that challenge its independence.
The "blue-ribbon" commission appointed to oversee the investigation is populated with business executives and others who have done business with the school district or who have other civic or social ties to the district or to Hall.
One of the firms chosen to run the inquiry also is a school district vendor, having collected $1.7 million for other work performed as recently as 2008.
A Chinese IT outsourcing company that has started hiring new U.S. computer science graduates to work in Shanghai requires prospective job candidates to demonstrate an IQ of 125 or above on a test it administers to sort out job applicants.
In doing so, Bleum Inc. is following a hiring practice it applies to college recruits in China. But a new Chinese college graduate must score an IQ of 140 on the company's test.
An IQ test is the first screen for any U.S. or Chinese applicant.
The lower IQ threshold for new U.S. graduates reflects the fact that the pool of U.S. talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said.
In China, Bleum receives thousands of applications weekly, said CEO Eric Rongley. Rongley is a U.S. citizen who founded Bleum in 2001; his career prior to that included stints working in offshore development in India and later in China.
College students today are spending less time studying than they did in the past, according to a recent report. The University of California study finds that the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours. That downward trend has been consistent across all kinds of schools, majors, and students. But why is this happening? Here are a few thoughts and theories, many of them courtesy of the very thoughtful commenters at Mother Jones, where blogger Kevin Drum asked "professors and current students" to suggest explanations.
Study Leaders Cite Professor Apathy The Boston Globe's Keith O'Brien writes, "when it comes to 'why,' the answers are less clear. ... What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors' unwillingness to challenge them."
Modern Technology Not to Blame The Boston Globe's Keith O'Brien says the study leaders don't think so. "The easy culprits -- the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what's a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses -- don't appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found." Why so sure? "According to their research, the greatest decline in student studying took place before computers swept through colleges: Between 1961 and 1981, study times fell from 24.4 to 16.8 hours per week (and then, ultimately, to 14)."
Evaluation of the Madison School District Superintendent
Madison School Board. The Board of Education will evaluate Superintendent Dan Nerad Monday evening, during a closed session according to the online agenda.
Dan was hired in 2008, after a long tenure as Superintendent of the Green Bay public schools.
In 2003, the Harvard Educational Review published a controversial article by Roy Freedle that claimed bias against African American students in the SAT college admissions test. Freedle's work stimulated national media attention and faced an onslaught of criticism from experts at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the agency responsible for the development of the SAT. In this article, Maria Veronica Santelices and Mark Wilson take the debate one step further with new research exploring differential item functioning in the SAT. By replicating Freedle's methodology with a more recent SAT dataset and by addressing some of the technical criticisms from ETS, Santelices and Wilson confirm that SAT items do function differently for the African American and White subgroups in the verbal test and argue that the testing industry has an obligation to study this phenomenon.
The Harvard Educational Review has published a research article by Maria Veronica Santelices (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and Mark Wilson (University of California, Berkeley) that is critical of the Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analyses used in the construction of the SAT®. Unfortunately, this work is deeply flawed. It utilizes only partial data sets, focuses on a student sample that lacks representation and diversity, and draws conclusions that do not match the data. Simply stated, this research does not withstand scrutiny.
The SAT is a fair assessment, and many years of independent research support this. It is the most rigorously researched and designed test in the world and is a proven, reliable measure of a student's likelihood for college success regardless of student race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. There is no credible research to suggest otherwise. While a few critics have promoted the notion that the test results indicate bias in the tests themselves, this theory has been by and large debunked and rejected by the psychometric community.
In reviewing this article, our researchers identified a number of fundamental flaws in the data analysis, and they also expressed serious concerns about the conclusions reached by the authors. Key concerns with this study include the following:
The annual report - which includes revisions to the formula used to categorize spending - shows that statewide schools spent 57.8 percent of their funding on student instructional expenditures in the 2008-09 school year.
This is also known as the percentage of dollars going to the classroom.
"I encourage school board members, administrators, teachers and citizens across the state to closely examine the way dollars are currently allocated and evaluate whether their budgets truly put students first," Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said. "I will only be satisfied once we have driven every possible dollar toward increasing student achievement and success."
While performance differences between boys and girls have narrowed considerably, boys still outnumber girls by more than about 3-to-1 at extremely high levels of math ability and scientific reasoning.
At the same time, girls slightly outnumber boys at extremely high levels of verbal reasoning and writing ability.
Those are the findings of a recent study that examined 30 years of standardized test data from the very highest-scoring seventh graders. Except for the differences at these highest levels of performance, boys and girls are essentially the same at all other levels of performance.
The findings come from a study performed by Duke University's Talent Identification Program, which relies on SAT and ACT tests administered to the top 5 percent of 7th graders to identify gifted students and nurture their intellectual talents. There were more than 1.6 million such students in this study.
a. developing a theory of action to guide how central office leaders and principals work together to improve instructional leadership and to provide support to schools.
b. designing and implementing school cluster support teams with a focus on developing a common understanding of quality instruction and in developing stronger relationships between central office leaders and principals that are focused on growing principal instructional leadership.
The Star-Ledger reports that 2,900 NJ high school seniors failed the Alternative High School Assessment, the replacement for the long-discredited Special Review Assessment, which almost no one failed. The AHSA, which replaced the SRA just this year, is administered to students who failed the traditional assessment (the HSPA) three times.
The reason for the change in passage rate - 96% for the SRA and now about 36% for the AHSA (8,000 kids took it) is due to the change in scoring. The SRA was scored by the teachers within the child's district who administered the test. The AHSA is scored by Measurement, Inc., an outside vendor.
It is clear to anyone who looks at the state of textbooks today that the system is broken. It does not work well for anyone, but it is especially hard on students, who typically pay $1,000 a year or more for textbooks.
Everyone with a financial stake in the textbook business is looking for a new model. That is especially true for publishers, but also for bookstores and authors. Macmillan's recent announcement of its DynamicBooks program, which provides a high degree of customization with electronic and print-on-demand capabilities, is typical. Most major textbook publishers have or are planning something similar.
Several textbook-rental companies, including Chegg.com, CollegeBookRenter.com, and BookRenter.com, have made inroads into college campuses, and major college-bookstore operators are exploring rental programs as well. Start-ups like Flat World Knowledge offer their textbooks free on the Web and sell a variety of versions of the text (print-on-demand books, printable PDF's of chapters, and MP3 files) and support materials. Connexions and numerous other groups provide platforms for a growing number of open textbooks.
Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation. Katrina forced nearly a million people to leave their homes and caused almost $100 billion in damages. To an already failing public school system, the storm seemed to provide the final deathblow. But then something amazing happened. In the wake of Katrina, education reformers decided to seize the opportunity and start fresh with a system based on choice.
Content from Sternberg, R. (1994). In search of the human mind. New York: Harcourt Brace.
1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
2. Lack of impulse control. Habitual impulsiveness gets in the way of optimal performance. Some people do not bring their full intellectual resources to bear on a problem but go with the first solution that pops into their heads.
3. Lack of perserverance and perseveration. Some people give up too easily, while others are unable to stop even when the quest will clearly be fruitless.
4. Using the wrong abilities. People may not be using the right abilities for the tasks in which they are engaged.
Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs The former Intel chief says "job-centric" leadership and incentives are needed to expand U.S. domestic employment again
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
There has been quite a bit of commentary on Grove's Bloomberg article online: Bing, Clusty, Google and Yahoo.
The common-sense arguments for and against providing students with slide handouts before a lecture are well rehearsed. Having the handouts means students need take fewer notes, therefore allowing them to sit back and actually listen to what's said. Withholding the handouts, by contrast, entices students to make more notes, perhaps ensuring that they're more engaged with the lecture material rather than mind-wandering.
Elizabeth Marsh and Holli Sink began their investigation of this issue by surveying university students and lecturers. The student verdict was clear: 74 per cent said they preferred to be given slide handouts prior to the lecture, the most commonly cited reason being that having the handouts helps with note-taking. The lecturers were more equivocal. Fifty per cent said they preferred to provide handouts prior to the lecture, but 21 per cent said they never gave out handouts and 29 per cent preferred to distribute afterwards. The most common lecturer reason for retaining handouts was students wouldn't pay attention if they had the handouts.
A couple of weeks ago, in the course a long post about how we came to live in a post-NCLB world, I wrote:
Why did this happen? First, because NCLB didn't work very well. The federal government is good at distributing money. It can fund research, provide information, and set standards. It has a significant if limited capacity to prohibit people from doing bad things. But it is very difficult for the federal government to make state and local governments do good things they don't want to do. And that's where NCLB fell down. You cannot create a regulatory apparatus that mandates, via adherence to enforceable rules, the transformation of bad schools into good ones.
I've been thinking about this some more and thought it would be worth elaborating.
Brown v. Board was a case of the federal government prohibiting people from doing bad things. It hasn't been easy-the civil rights division of the Justice Department is still overseeing and litigating numerous related cases today-but it worked, in large part because both the problem and the solution were easy to identify. If a small, angry man is standing in the entrance of the local high school swearing eternal fealty to segregation, it's not hard to figure out what needs to change. The remedy is also straightforward: send in the national guard to remove the segregationist and unchain the high school doors.
After Brown, the next big judicial push for educational justice came in school funding. Because the Rodriguez case closed off the federal courts, this battle was fought state by state. Again, it wasn't easy. There were numerous losses, some cases dragged out for decades, and recalcitrant legislatures reneged on their constitutional obligations to poor children. But there were also many victories, in large part because, again, the problems and solutions were straightforward. Money is easy to count. If poor districts get much less of it than rich districts, there's only so much states can do to defend themselves. If subsequent counting shows persistent financial disparities, you get hauled back into court.
Since the small schools movement in the '90s, the Bay Area has been something of a petri dish for alternative academics in K-12 education. Oakland, for example, boasts 34 charter schools of various themes and sizes (as well as graduation rates), the first of which was founded in 1993. But until now, Berkeley hasn't joined the experiment.
Now, to the outcry of some community members and the cheers of others, Berkeley will open its first charter schools, after a proposal for the schools was approved by the Board of Education last month. With a starting budget of just over $3 million, the Revolutionary Education and Learning Movement middle and high schools will open in the fall of 2011. REALM seeks to integrate alternative ways of learning into its curricula, including computer programming, game design and other technology-based projects.
It was final exam day in Anthony Skokna's classroom, and his students scanned textbooks and old exams for inspiration as they scribbled answers.
Such assistance was standard practice in Skokna's economics class, but on this June day it was not enough. Halfway through the period, one student asked the teacher outright for the answer to a true/false question. Skokna complied, and a flood of questions and answers ensued like some twisted game show.
"Skok, you might get your job back," yelled one excited student. "It look like we're learning."
Mickey Mouse might not be the most obvious choice as a language teacher but he and Donald Duck are being put to work in China by Walt Disney as part of a rapid expansion of a schools programme that aims to teach English to 150,000 children a year by 2015.
Disney, which has identified Shanghai as the location of its next theme park, is the first western media company to operate schools in China. It owns a handful in Shanghai and recently opened its first in Beijing.
Here is the opening paragraph, which includes a pretty big number, but I don't know what this writer means by "the educational community", or what he means by "support and services for open source software by 2012″:
The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications as part of their educational curriculum for a wide variety of subjects.
There is no link to the number or to the analysts, so I don't know from where the information comes. I'd like to say right away that I don't like that the writer of this blog post is saying that these open source tools "replace" existing tools or software. I don't think there is any way for one person to measure that. I think it is helpful, though, to say that these open source tools may work well in cooperation with existing software, or as accents for software that already exists.
The last time documentary film director Davis Guggenheim was in the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton, he was asking Al Gore to be in his new movie about global warming.
"An Inconvenient Truth" won Guggenheim an Academy Award and put Gore on the fast track for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Guggenheim, 46, now had the Hollywood clout to pursue any project he wanted. He chose to take on the country's public school system.
Back at the Ritz-Carlton, the director was just starting the promotional tour of his new film, "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that follows five families who reject the assigned path into an inferior public school and embark on a quest to gain admission into quality public schools - all public charter schools, including Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City.
Guggenheim, who sends his own children to private school, takes on the teachers unions, bureaucracy and a status quo that denies children the opportunity a public education is supposed to give them.
"We don't have charter schools. So let's put that over there, and let's talk about something else. How about kids being successful, how about kids being challenged? How about providing interventions to close the achievement gap?"
Okay. Let's talk about those things.
How about kids being successful and challenged? Under Dr. Goodloe-Johnson's administration, what changes have we seen? On the good side we have seen more AP classes in the high schools that didn't have many before. We have certainly seen more students taking AP classes. That's in the high schools. What have we seen in K-8? More schools have been designated as ALOs, but there is no quality assurance so we don't know if there is anything there beyond the official designation. That's particularly true with Spectrum programs.
It's not unusual for government agencies with budget problems to start outsourcing services to private industry.
Computer maintenance, prison management, landscaping -- all are among the services that state or local bureaucrats have handed off to private firms over the years.
What about college education? It turns out that California is trying to outsource our public higher education system to the for-profit college industry. What is surprising is that this is happening without any evidence that the affected students would be well served.
The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.
No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student's speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.
The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen -- using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later -- is easy to spot.
Scratch paper is allowed -- but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.
When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student's real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.
I have had the pleasure of handing diplomas to some unusual people at commencement. Still, it was startling to see the child walk toward me. He was 9. He looked younger.
He wasn't accepting the diploma for himself, of course. It was for his dad, on active duty in Iraq. He'd sent his son, living on a base in Germany, to get it for him.
"Congratulations," I said. He and his dad deserved it.
At University of Maryland University College (UMUC), our graduates are America's adult learners. Almost all work full time. Half are parents. Their diplomas often reflect the work, sacrifice -- and triumph -- of an entire family.
However, a new study of what parents from the nation's sixth largest metropolitan area want for their children's education tilts favorably to a growing national preference for private and charter schools.
"This trend has developed in the face of evidence that many charters perform no better than district schools and of a constant drumbeat of news reports and investigations regarding alleged and proven improprieties in the way charters operate," the report's authors say.
So why are an estimated 420 million students on waiting lists for charter schools?
Frustration with the struggling direction and results of traditional public schools is a leading cause.
A comprehensive new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative finds that K-12 education in Philadelphia is undergoing a sweeping transformation that has given parents a new array of choices about where to send their children to school but has left families thinking they still do not have enough quality options.
The study, "Philadelphia's Changing Schools and What Parents Want from Them," finds that the three largest educational systems in the city--traditional public schools, charter schools and Catholic schools--have changed dramatically in size and composition during the past decade. Only one of them, the charter schools, has been growing. Indeed, charters, which have been in existence for only 13 years, now have more students than the Catholic school system.
Germany's left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.
In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn't that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats. Sometimes Besser called the police to examine a suspicious package; she was careful to always apologize to the neighbors for the commotion.
The students had proclaimed a revolution, and Besser, the widow of an officer, belonged to those forces in the city that were sharply opposed to the radical changes of the day. Three years earlier, when she was a newly elected member of the Berlin state parliament, the CDU had appointed Besser, a Ph.D. in philology, to the education committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being both direct and combative.
The briefcase contained a stack of paper -- the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.
Earlier this week I hopped on the Red Line in the middle of the afternoon to attend a screening of the education reform documentary Waiting for Superman at the Gallery Place movie theater downtown. It's a resonant, skillfully made film, a pitch-perfect representation of education reform in 2010. And arguably the most striking aspect was the near-total absence of No Child Left Behind, which is mentioned only in passing as one more failed federal plan.
This reinforced an idea that's been nagging me for a while now: Some time in the last two or three years, we moved into the post-NCLB era of education reform.
It didn't used to be that way. When I began working on education policy full-time in the early 2000's, the center of gravity in education reform sat with the coalition of civil rights advocates, business leaders, and reform-minded governors of both parties who pushed NCLB through Congress in 2001. To find that same hum of ideas and influence today, you'd head straight for the annual New Schools Venture Fund Summit and its confluence of charter school operators, TFA alumni, urban reformers, philanthropies, and various related "edupreneurs." It's a different world with a different mindset, and this has real implications for public schools.
Forget about students spending one year in each grade, with the entire class learning the same skills at the same time. Districts from Alaska to Maine are taking a different route.
Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.
Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.
Here's a good quick read: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America (Teachers College, 2009), Allan Collins & Richard Halverson. Doug's post on three evolutions reminded me of chapter 6 of Rethinking: The Three Eras of Education. With some additions here's a summary of the current industrial-era education, what was before, and what's next.
t is time to end the childhood obesity epidemic once and for all.
Obesity decreases a child's quality of life and longevity. It contributes to a host of medical conditions and costs our country millions each year. Childhood obesity is preventable and our country should take responsibility for helping all children achieve a healthy weight.
My proposal will guarantee that no child will be obese by the time they graduate from high school. This will be accomplished by simply holding schools as well as health and physical education teachers accountable for insuring that all students reach or maintain a healthy weight before graduating high school.
Before I begin, let's address all the naysayers whose excuses will be endless.
Dane County African American Community Forum on Thursday, July 8
via a Kaleem Caire email:
Greetings.
We want to remind you that the Urban League of Greater Madison is hosting a forum with members of Dane County's African American community on Thursday, July 8, 2010 from 5:30pm - 7:30pm CST at our new headquarters (2222 South Park Street, Madison 53713) to discuss ways the Urban League can support the education and employment needs and aspirations of African American children, youth, and adults in greater Madison. We would like to hear the African American community's opinions and ideas about strategies the Urban League can pursue to dramatically:
· Increase the academic achievement, high school graduation, and college goings rates of African American children and youth;
· decrease poverty rates and increase the number of African American adults who are employed and moving into the middle class; and
· increase the number of African Americans who are serving and employed in leadership roles in Dane County's public and private sector.
If you have not already RSVP'd, please contact Ms. Isheena Murphy of the Urban League at 608-729-1200 or via email at imurphy@ulgm.org. We will serve light refreshments and begin promptly at 5:30pm CST.
We look forward to listening, learning, and helping to manifest opportunity for all in Dane County.
________________________________________ Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 South Park Street, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Email: kcaire@ulgm.org
Internet: www.ulgm.org
Facebook:
Thirty-seven states have some sort of mandate to address the needs of gifted and talented students in public schools. While many parents and teachers have mixed views about the tests used to identify talent and "giftedness," the programs are strongly supported by many parents who cannot afford to send their children to private schools. They are hard to overhaul, for various reasons.
In New York City, officials are seeking a new exam for admissions of gifted students that may involve testing children as young as 3. The city says it is responding to complaints that minorities are underrepresented in the current selection process and that many parents have learned to game the system. Is New York's approach a step forward or backward? What does the latest research show in identifying gifted and talented students?
This is despite ex-chief inspector of UK schools, Chris Woodhead, estimating some 15,000 are not up to the job.
Some bad teachers are moved between schools, rather than having their competency challenged, it has emerged.
Teaching unions dispute the claims. The General Teaching Council for England, which investigates complaints, says the number of poor teachers is "not clear".
However, the GTC admits the suggestion that the 18 struck off represented the total number of incompetent teachers in the system is not credible.
Two years ago, its chief executive Keith Bartley said there could be as many as 17,000 "substandard" teachers among the 500,000 registered teachers in the UK.
Bill Cosby used his trademark humor and storytelling style to chide hundreds gathered Saturday at the Essence Music Festival's empowerment seminars into talking to their children about real life and, in the process, keeping it simple.
"We've got to lay it out for them," Cosby said when asked about how to help cut the rate of teen pregnancies in America. "Let's tell them about life. You're 14 and having sex. OK. So, what kind of job do you have?"
Cosby, who received a standing ovation when he walked on stage, said the African-American community must get involved if change is going to occur in any area.
Halfway through his Presidency, George W. Bush called on the country to build "an ownership society." He trumpeted the soaring rate of U.S. homeownership, and extolled the virtues of giving individuals more control over their own financial lives. It was a comforting vision, but, as we now know, behind it was a bleak reality--bad subprime loans, mountains of credit-card debt, and shrinking pensions--reflecting a simple fact: when it comes to financial matters, many Americans have been left without a clue.
The depth of our financial ignorance is startling. In recent years, Annamaria Lusardi, an economist at Dartmouth and the head of the Financial Literacy Center, has conducted extensive studies of what Americans know about finance. It's depressing work. Almost half of those surveyed couldn't answer two questions about inflation and interest rates correctly, and slightly more sophisticated topics baffle a majority of people. Many people don't know the terms of their mortgage or the interest rate they're paying. And, at a time when we're borrowing more than ever, most Americans can't explain what compound interest is.
Financial illiteracy isn't new, but the consequences have become more severe, because people now have to take so much responsibility for their financial lives. Pensions have been replaced with 401(k)s; many workers have to buy their own health insurance; and so on. The financial marketplace, meanwhile, has become a dizzying emporium of choice and easy credit. The decisions are more numerous and complex than ever before. As Lusardi puts it, "It's like we've opened a faucet, and told people they can draw as much water as they want, and it's up to them to decide when they've had enough. But we haven't given people the tools to decide how much is too much."
NBI 6 - "NEA shall seek a cease and desist agreement from AFT instructing its local Affiliates in Alabama to stop their attempted raids each year."
NBI 20 - "NEA requests Arne Duncan and the Department of Education to immediately implement the decade old recommendation that the 'achievement levels' of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) not be published this year.
We education watchers are gradually waking up to the fact that a very small but growing number of educators are using Advanced Placement, originally designed for only the best high schools, as a shock treatment to improve instruction at some of our worst high schools.
This is not, to say the least, a well-understood trend. Some of the smartest AP people in the country do not like it. Others do. I think it has great potential benefits, but it is too soon to draw solid conclusions. So I have appointed myself the unofficial scorekeeper for such schools, and have created a special category for them -- what I call the Catching Up schools -- in my annual Challenge Index ratings. This includes my ranked list of all public high schools in the Washington area, published in The Washington Post, and a separate list of schools nationally that have the highest AP test participation rates, best known as America's Best High Schools in Newsweek.com.
I am giving this such attention because when I have looked at schools using this wild approach, it seems to be working for them. Students and parents like the challenge and don't care if they are unlikely to pass many of the tests. The teachers are energized. The fears of critics that using AP with low-performing students will create false expectations and low self esteem seem unfounded.
There's good news for American education. About three-quarters of residents -- 74% -- know the U.S. declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776. The bad news for the academic system -- 26% do not. This 26% includes one-fifth who are unsure and 6% who thought the U.S. separated from another nation. That begs the question, "From where do the latter think the U.S. achieved its independence?" Among the countries mentioned are France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.
The National Indian Education Study (NIES) is a two-part study designed to describe the condition of education for American Indian and Alaska Native students in the United States. The study is sponsored by the Office of Indian Education (OIE) and conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics for the U.S. Department of Education. A Technical Review Panel, whose members included American Indian and Alaska Native educators and researchers from across the country, helped design the study.
NIES was authorized under the 2004 Executive Order 13336. The purpose of this order was to assist American Indian/Alaska Native students in meeting the challenging student achievement standards set forth in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorized in 2001.
Part I of the NIES provides in-depth information on the academic performance of fourth- and eighth-grade American Indian and Alaska Native students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics and reading.
Kudzu? Who dares compare Wisconsin's education policies to kudzu?
Christopher Brown, a professor in curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, that's who.
Kudzu is a plant that originated in Asia. Agriculture officials in the U.S. encouraged its use, starting in the 1930s, as a low cost way to stem soil erosion. But, especially in the South, it spread rapidly and far beyond intended areas. It became regarded as a weed.
Hmm. Launched with good intentions, appealing as an easy option, it grew rapidly and accomplished little. That sums up Brown's analysis of Wisconsin education policy from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. In his observations there lie major lessons for those who want to raise the expectations of students in Wisconsin and see more students meet those expectations.
Someone recently pointed me to Brown's analysis, which started as a doctoral dissertation while he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a few years ago. Just the title of the version published in 2008 in the academic journal Educational Policy made me laugh - and wince:
"Inspirational" is the best word to describe the American Library Association's annual summer conference, at least for lovers of children's and teen literature.
For the ALA's summer meeting is the time when the authors and illustrators who have won the organization's top awards -- the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, as well as a host of others -- come and give their acceptance speeches.
The speeches are consistently thought-provoking and thoughtful, as authors and illustrators assess how the creative process, coupled with their life experiences, have brought them to the point of winning a top children's-literature award.
Two of the best speeches are invariably given by the winners of the Caldecott and Newbery Medals, and this year was no exception.
Inspired by the realist style of Edward Hopper, recent Century High School graduate Ali Sifuentes snapped a few nighttime photographs of Silver Lake Foods on north Broadway hoping to recreate the scene in an oil painting.
"I've been by there many times and after studying the building I thought I'd try to recreate the cinematic contrast between light and dark colors," Sifuentes said. "The building has a fantasy sort of feel and it seemed ideal for this style of painting."
Sifuentes believes Hopper, a well-known American artist that often focused on urban and rural scenes depicting modern American life, was sending a message about himself and people of his time.
"I'm basically trying to do the same thing, only I'm showing what the present looks like," Sifuentes said.
Imagine that after paying $17,000 for a brand new car you found out that it cannot take any fuel that is available at gas stations and that modifying the car so it can use regular gasoline will cost almost about half what the card did. You'd be pretty upset right?
Well that's the exact situation students find themselves in when they enroll in at an accredited university only to find out later that their course of study doesn't have program accreditation or state approval.
There are two types of accreditation. The most common kind is regional or national accreditation, in which an entire institution is reviewed to check its finances, academic programs, and other things. Winning approval under this process allows a school to participate in the federal student aid programs. It also lends a strong degree of credibility to an institution since it indicates an outside acknowledgment of legitimacy.
While general institutional accreditation works for most subject areas, some technical or vocational offerings also require their own programmatic or specialized, accreditation. Graduating from an accredited program is frequently a requirement for taking the recognized licensing test in that field. For example, with most law schools need to be accredited by the American Bar Association so that students can sit for the bar exam and be practicing lawyers. It's a similar story with medical and dental school.
A state appellate court ruled unanimously on Thursday that New York City must keep open 19 schools it wanted to close for poor performance, blocking one of the Bloomberg administration's signature efforts to improve the educational system.
The ruling, by the Appellate Division, First Department, in Manhattan, upheld a lower court finding that the city's Education Department did not comply with the 2009 state law on mayoral control of the city schools because it failed to adequately notify the public about the ramifications of the closings.
Because many eighth graders assumed the schools would be closed and the Education Department discouraged them from attending the schools, few applied. Some of the schools could begin September with just a few dozen freshmen. School officials said they expected enrollment to grow with students who move into the city, but the number will still likely be far smaller than in past years.
Benjamin Franklin was a printer, politician, diplomat and journalist. But, despite only two years of schooling, he was also an ingenious scientist. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dudley Herschbach and Franklin biographer Philip Dray discuss the achievements of America's first great scientist.
The recession is forcing states to raise taxes and cut budgets, including education budgets, which is a wildly stupid national policy both on short-term economic grounds and in terms of investing in future human capital. The responses to this crisis have been maddeningly short-sighted. On the right, and even the center, you have self-styled deficit hawks cheering state-level Hooverism. (The Washington Post editorial page opposes any federal aid to cushion education firings unless states first overhaul their hiring practices, which is of course impossible in that time frame.)
Now on the left you're seeing an equally maddening response. House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey proposes to fund money for saving teachers by cutting back funding for the Obama administration's wildly effective "Race to the Top" program, which provides incentives to states that reform their education policy. Obey's spokesman explains:
"Mr. Obey has said, 'When a ship is sinking, you don't worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat,' " Brachman said. "He is not opposed to education reform. But he believes that keeping teachers on the job is an important step."
The district is inviting bidders to run poorly performing and new campuses with 35,000 students. More than 80 groups submitted letters of intent for new or low-achieving schools for fall 2011.
The nation's second-largest school system is once again inviting bidders to take over poorly performing and new campuses, in a school-control process that is, once again, pitting teachers and their union against independently operated charter schools, most of which are nonunion.
Teachers working for the Los Angeles Unified School District put in bids for every school. And charters are vying for all but one.
At stake is the education of more than 35,000 students who will attend those schools.
Trying to put the finishing touches on a series of education policy victories in the recently concluded legislative session, Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law a hotly debated plan to let local schools seek waivers from a range of state rules and regulations.
But as soon as the ink was dry on House Bill 1368, one of the state's major teachers unions delivered on its promise to challenge the act as unconstitutional.
The teachers group wants a Baton Rouge district court to rule that the Legislature cannot abdicate its law-making authority by effectively allowing the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to pick and choose which laws local schools have to follow.
The new program topped Jindal's K-12 education agenda for the session that ended June 21. The governor pitched waivers as a way to give schools more flexibility, much like public charter schools that have proliferated in New Orleans and elsewhere since Hurricane Katrina.
The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.
The College Board's A.P. program, which offers a long menu of single-subject courses, is still by far the most common option for giving students a head start on college work, and a potential edge in admissions.
The lesser-known I.B., a two-year curriculum developed in the 1960s at an international school in Switzerland, first took hold in the United States in private schools. But it is now offered in more than 700 American high schools -- more than 90 percent of them public schools -- and almost 200 more have begun the long certification process.
Calling the Fenty administration's approach to education reform "shortsighted, narrow and sometimes secretive," D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray unveiled a blueprint Thursday to guide education policy if he is elected mayor.
The plan promises more transparency, funding equity for public charter schools, tax credits for early-childhood programs and greater support for the city's neighborhood high schools.
Educators, students and supporters filled the library at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter high school in Southeast, where Gray outlined an ambitious plan and tried to further distinguish himself from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who has made public schools one of his priorities.
Gray, who is challenging Fenty for the Democratic nomination for mayor, said he gives "tremendous credit" to Fenty for calling attention to the need for education reform. But "what we've learned over the past three years is that it's not enough to have mayoral control. What we need, ladies and gentlemen, is mayoral leadership," he said to hearty applause.
President Barack Obama's education-overhaul agenda was dealt its first major setback after the U.S. House of Representatives diverted money from charter schools, teacher merit pay and the Race to the Top competition to help fund a jobs bill that would stave off teacher layoffs.
Even a last-minute veto threat by Mr. Obama late Thursday couldn't prevent the diversion of $800 million, including a $500 million cut from Race to the Top, the president's showcase initiative that rewards states for adopting innovative education redesigns.
Officials with the U.S. Department of Education vowed Friday to keep the president's education agenda intact and find other places to make budget trims.
"We're grateful they passed a jobs bills but not at the expense of the reform efforts we need for our long-term economic interests," said Peter Cunningham, spokesman for the Education Department.
It is difficult to see the governance and spending approaches of the past addressing the curricular, teacher and student challenges of today, much less tomorrow.
Does online learning help you with your strengths and weaknesses? Rick says, "I needed help with writing, and it works very well."
What makes people choose one school over another? Or, choose to go to virtual school? Sydney, "As a general statement, when anyone esee the world laptop, they say 'I want to go to that school.' Besides that, I like it because it's a new school. We were going into a new setting, nobody knew each other."
How do laptops help you learn? Sydney: "It's obvious that laptops and textbooks are two different things. Time is evoloving and so is technology. You can look up so much more. You can see more than what you are already given."
Aaron, "We are able to check our grades 24/7. I can see what I scored immediately."
Things have changed since Caire was raised by an aunt across the street from Penn Park at a time when adults didn't hesitate to scold neighborhood kids who got out of line, and parents took on second jobs to make ends meet. Today, there is more "hard core" poverty, more crime, and much less sense of place, says Caire, who still can recite which families lived up Fisher Street and down Taft.
The supportive community of his boyhood began disappearing in the 1980s, as young parents moved in from Chicago to escape poverty and could not find the training and jobs they needed, Caire says. People started to lose their way. In a speech this month to the Madison Downtown Rotary, Caire said he has counted 56 black males he knew growing up that ended up incarcerated. "Most of 'em, you would never have seen it coming."
Caire, once a consultant on minority education for the state and advocate for voucher schools, left Madison a decade ago and worked with such national nonprofit organizations as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Fight for Children. Later he worked for discount retailer Target Corp., where he was a fast-rising executive, he says, until he realized his heart wasn't in capitalism, despite the excellent managerial mentoring he received.
The sense of community that nurtured his youth has disappeared in cities across the country, Caire remarks. So he's not trying to recreate the South Madison of the past, but rather to build connections that will ground people from throughout Madison in the community and inform the Urban League's programs.
Caire recently attended the Madison Premiere of "The Lottery", a film which highlights the battle between bureaucratic school districts, teacher unions and students (and parents).
I had lunch recently with two rising 12th-graders at the Potomac School in McLean. They are very bright students. They told me they had signed up for a course in column-
writing in the fall.
Naturally, I was concerned. There is enough competition for us newspaper columnists already: bloggers, TV commentators, former presidential advisers, college professors. Many of them write well and make us look unnecessary. The idea that 17-year-olds are getting graduation credit to learn how to do my job fills me with dread.
But I think I know what the Potomac School is up to. They aren't teaching these kids to write columns. Their real purpose is to show students how to write their college application essays.
This animation is for a startling documentary called, "Waiting For 'Superman'" that highlights some very serious issues in America today and it made us feel good to make it.
Wisconsin Democrat Representative Tammy Baldwin votes with David Obey to Reduce Race to the Top Funding and Support Teacher Union Request to Avoid Layoffs
The education measure provoked fierce debate, especially because it would reduce by $500 million the award money available to three dozen states that have submitted proposals in Round 2 of the Obama initiative, the Race to the Top competition.
To become law, the legislation needs Senate approval. The White House said in a statement that if the final bill included cuts to education reforms, Mr. Obama would most likely veto it.
"It would be short-sighted to weaken funding for these reforms," the White House said.
Using stimulus money voted on last year, the Department of Education awarded $500 million to Tennessee and $100 million to Delaware in March, and has promised to distribute the $3.4 billion that remains among additional winning states this year. The House bill would reduce the money available to $2.9 billion.
Teachers' unions lobbied for weeks for federal money to avert what the administration estimates could be hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs.
Several dozen charter school and other advocacy groups lobbied fiercely against cutting Race to the Top, which rewards states promising to overhaul teacher evaluation systems and shake up school systems in other ways.
In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth shined a light on global warming, bringing images of collapsing ice sheets and drowning polar bears to multiplexes nationwide.
Could 2010 be the year moviegoers get the angry urban parent with a hand-drawn placard, demanding more high-quality charter schools and an end to teacher tenure?
This summer, no fewer than four new documentaries, most of them independently produced, tackle essentially the same question: Why do so many urban public schools do such a bad job -- and what can be done to help kids trapped in them?
School committee members across the state will now also have to attend six hours of training each year on how to perform their community responsibilities.
Bill sponsor Sen. Hanna M. Gallo, D-Cranston, said the legislation's genesis came from "a lot of people expressing concern that not all school committee members are aware of all the [educational] issues they should."
Issues, such as how schools are financed, labor relations, teacher-performance evaluations, strategic planning and opening meetings laws that require members do their business in public, will be addressed.
"They need to be educated," said Gallo. "It's a big responsibility being on the school committee. It's our children, our students and our future, and we have to make sure we do the job to the best of our ability."
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
For a time in the mid-2000s, small schools were booming. They were supposed to transform the large, failing American high school, to engage students and boost their achievement to ready them for college.
But the results have been mixed, national and local research shows. Students at small high schools were more likely to graduate, have positive relationships with their teachers, and feel safer. Still, they did no better on standardized tests than did their peers at big schools.
In Philadelphia, where 26 of the 32 small high schools have been opened or made smaller in the last seven years, some schools have thrived. Their presence has transformed the high school mix.
Among the district's current 63 high schools, the 32 small schools enroll roughly a quarter of the 48,000 total enrollment. The rest attend large neighborhood high schools.
A CAREFULLY MANICURED soul patch graces Jordan Kavoosi's lower lip. His polo shirt exposes tattoos on both forearms--on his right, a Chinese character; on his left, a cover-up of previous work. Curling his mouth up into a sideways grin, the 24-year-old sinks back into his brown leather chair.
"I mean, anybody can do anything," he says, gazing out a window that overlooks the strip-mall parking lot. "You just have to do whatever it takes to get there."
Kavoosi is in the business of plagiarism. For $23 per page, one of his employees will write an essay. Just name the topic and he'll get it done in 48 hours. He'll even guarantee at least a "B" grade or your money back. According to his website, he's the best essay writer in the world.
Kavoosi's business, Essay Writing Company, employs writers from across the country. Most of the customers are high school or college students, but not all. In one case, an author asked Kavoosi's crew to write a book to be published in his own name.
To be sure, there are ethical implications to running a business that traffics in academic fraud. The services Kavoosi offers are the same as those exposed in the University of Minnesota's 1999 basketball scandal, during which an office manager admitted to doing homework for players.
"Sure it's unethical, but it's just a business," Kavoosi explains. "I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved."
One day this year, one of my elementary gifted students went home and proclaimed (in obvious distress) to his mom that he didn't want to be a "smarty" anymore. Turns out the kids in his class had been teasing him about his very-apparent intelligence. In his meltdown, he expressed that he just wanted to be normal, that he wanted to know what it was like to not worry about everything so much, that he just wanted to be a regular kid and not "stick out" so much all the time.
I wondered how many of my other students wished at times that they weren't so intelligent. What were their thoughts on the "love/hate" relationship gifted individuals sometimes have with their giftedness? As a means of offering you some insight into the mind of a gifted child, here are their responses to the prompt, "Sometimes I wish I wasn't so smart because..." [To their credit, about half of the kids said they were glad they were intelligent. I'll post those responses separately.] [All names are student-chosen pseudonyms.]
"I get taken advantage of. People ask to be my partner or work with me on a paper and I am stuck doing all the work. The only thing they do is make sure their name is on the paper or project." Charlotte, 8th grade
On Monday, June 21st, we filed our "Brief of Respondent" in the School District appeal of Judge Spector's decision. (Sorry to be late in posting it to this blog; our attorney left town after sending me hard copy, but neglected to email an electronic version of the document we filed.) A link to the brief can be found in the left-hand column, below, under "Legal Documents in Textbook Appeal."
There's no new information, either in the District's brief or our response. You might notice that, rather than acknowledge the catalog of unrelated miscellany in the Seattle Public School District's brief, our attorney, Keith Scully, chose to essentially restate our original case, upon which Judge Spector ruled favorably. He did emphasize certain statements which pertained to claims in the District's brief.
I think Keith has, once again, done a masterful job.
School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson will tap a charter school management organization to run one of the district's low-achieving middle schools, a first for the state, under a plan she will present tonight to the Boston School Committee.
Johnson has not decided which middle school would be overseen by Unlocking Potential Inc., a new Boston nonprofit management organization founded by a former charter school principal.
A key part of the proposal calls for converting the middle school into an in-district charter school, which would enable the management organization to operate under greater freedom from the teacher union's contract as it overhauls programs, dismisses teachers, and makes other changes.
In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with "acting white." I knew that a book which did not focus on racism's role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a "sell-out" and "not really black" because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the "acting white" slam did not even exist.
I was hardly the first to bring up the "acting white" problem. An early description of the phenomenon comes from a paper by John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham in 1986, and their work was less a revelation of the counterintuitive than an airing of dirty laundry. You cannot grow up black in America and avoid the "acting white" notion, unless you by chance grow up around only white kids. Yet in the wake of Losing the Race, a leading scholar/activist on minority education insisted that he had never encountered the "acting white" slander--while shortly thereafter describing his own son doing poorly in school because of precisely what Ogbu, Fordham, myself, and others had written about. Jack White, formerly of Time, roasted me in a review for making up the notion out of whole cloth. Ogbu (with Astrid Davis) published an ethnological survey of Shaker Heights, Ohio describing the "acting white" problem's effects there in detail, while a documentary on race and education in that town explicitly showed black students attesting to it. Both book and documentary have largely been ignored by the usual suspects.
Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the "acting white" charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people's unusual social history in America--and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.
Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said Tuesday that charter schools can revolutionize education, but that the charter school movement also must hold itself accountable for low-performing schools.
"We need breakthroughs," Gates said at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago. "And your charters are showing that breakthroughs are possible."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a big player in the school reform movement, spending about $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education. Gates said charter schools and their ability to innovate are a key part of the foundation's education strategy.
"I really think that charters have the potential to revolutionize the way students are educated," Gates said.
Charter schools receive taxpayer money but have more freedom than traditional public schools to map out how they'll meet federal education benchmarks.
Charter schools receive a lot of well-deserved attention this time of year when they appear to be performing miracles. But what about the ones that don't?
The Obama administration believes, as did the Bush administration, in taking harsh action against "failing" schools, such as firing staff, closing the school or turning over control to the state or private charters.
Much of the news has been encouraging, especially in schools where graduates outnumber dropouts for a change.
It was exciting to hear that Urban Prep Academies, a charter school on Chicago's South Side, is sending 100 percent of this year's 107 graduates to college. That's particularly impressive for a school where only 4 percent of its original 150 students were reading at or above grade level when it opened four years ago.
One should not under-estimate the impact of the DC school voucher program on student achievement. According to the official announcement and the executive summary of the report, school vouchers lifted high school graduation rates but it could not be conclusively determined that it had a positive impact on student achievement.
Something about those findings sounds like a bell striking thirteen. Not only is the clock wrong, but the mechanism seems out of whack. How can more students graduate from private schools if they weren't learning more? Are expectations so low in the private sector that any one can graduate?
Peering beneath the press release and the executive summary into the bowels of the study itself one can get some, if not all the answers, to these questions.
Let's begin with the most important--and perfectly uncontested--result: If one uses a voucher to go to school, the impact on the percentage of students with a high school diploma increases by 21 percentage points (Table 3-5), an effect size of no less than 0.46 standard deviations. Seventy percent of those who were not offered a school voucher made it through high school. That is close to the national average in high school graduation rates among those entering 9th grade four years earlier. As compared to that 70 percent rate among those who wanted a voucher but didn't get one, 91 percent of those who used vouchers to go to private school eventually received a high school diploma.
Lanyon, Grams, and fellow Hawthorne teachers Julie Olsen and Abby Miller received a grant from the national nonprofit Fund for Teachers that allowed them to travel to Harlem to learn about the art, music, poetry, literary history and drama of this hub of African-American life. They all agree that they now have a new appreciation for the richness of black culture and its profound impact on American life and culture as a whole.
For these four, plus a dozen more local educators whose travel was covered by a couple of additional grants, the experience was part of a wider effort to help them better teach in what's known as a culturally relevant way.
"Culturally relevant practice" is a relatively new movement in education that recognizes that learning, for all of us, is related to our cultural background and what we know from our daily living. Research shows that effectively bridging the gaps between a teacher's background and student's experience can improve academic performance.
Andreal Davis is one of two district administrators in charge of helping to create culturally relevant practices in local classrooms. A former elementary school teacher at Lincoln, Davis, who is black, now helps colleagues recognize that different groups of children bring their different backgrounds, expectations and even communication styles to the classroom.
She says teachers sometimes need help learning to translate different ways their students learn, or what kind of interactions make sense to different groups of children.
"Communication styles for all of us can vary a great deal. It can be like the difference between listening to conventional music, or listening to jazz, where the narrative doesn't just go in a straight line," she explains. "If that flow is what you're used to, it's what you know how to follow in a conversation, or in a class."
Given Hawthorne's demographics -- 70 percent of the students are poor, with a diverse population that includes 18 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, 32 percent black and 28 percent white -- the school has respectable, rising test scores.
People who saw the recent Madison screening of The Lottery saw another part of the Harlem world: the battle between the traditional public school system and charters, specifically the Harlem Success Academy.
Charter management organizations (CMOs), nonprofit entities that directly manage public charter schools, are a significant force in today's public K-12 charter school landscape.
CMOs were developed to solve serious problems limiting the numbers and quality of charter schools. The CMO model is meant to meld the benefits of school districts--including economies of scale, collaboration among similar schools, and support structures--with the autonomies and entrepreneurial drive of the charter sector.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the major philanthropies funding charter schools invested heavily in CMOs and similar organizations, spending an estimated total of $500 million between 1999 and 2009. Ultimately, those who invest in CMOs want to achieve a significantly higher number of high-quality schools in the charter school sector. Their investments in CMO growth have been targeted to specific urban school districts that have been considered difficult, if not impossible, to reform.
This book has been taken out of print by W. H. Freeman. You are welcome to use it if you like. We believed in 1992 it was the way to introduce theory in Computer Science, and we believe that today.
If you are interested in building a responsible career that successfully blends financial return with social impact and environmental responsibility, you might be interested in looking into opportunities in education.
You might think that building a career in education means being a teacher. Well, there are a number of other positions available in the education field that does not involve teaching, or even interacting with children. Furthermore, if you live in the US, you have certainly noted that in many states, recent changes in teachers' tenure terms are increasingly tying teachers' performance reviews to the performance of their students. Many of these changes are driven to compete for the Race To The Top Education Fund of $4.35 billion that was introduced by the Obama Administration to increase the effectiveness of public education in the US. The Obama Administration has sent a clear signal regarding the requirements states have to follow to qualify for funding. For the first phase of the fund deployment, forty states and the District of Columbia submitted applications. However, only Delaware and Tennessee were awarded grants. It is anticipated that, given how selectively these funds were distributed the first time around, states will want to revamp their approaches to increase their chance to compete for the $3.4billion still available. Beyond public education reform, a number of opportunities are available to support supplemental programs focused on after school programs, youth empowerment programs and college preparation programs.
When the State Education Department announced five years ago that all students would soon be required to pass five tests to earn high school diplomas in New York, officials applauded themselves for raising standards.
The new requirements do not take full effect until the class of 2012 graduates. What is clear is that if they were in place today, New York City's graduation rate would almost certainly drop after years of climbing steadily.
What is not so evident, educators and testing experts say, is whether the higher bar will inspire students and schools to greatness, or merely make them lean more heavily on test-taking strategies. Nor is there agreement on whether it will actually make a difference in how students perform in high school and beyond.
Students in Texas must get the grades they earn and not an inflated score on report cards under a new state law that bans minimum grade policies, a judge decided Monday in a ruling that backed arguments from state education officials.
Eleven school districts sued Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott over his interpretation of the law, which he said should apply to class assignments and report cards. The districts, most of them in the Houston area, said it should only apply to classroom assignments.
Some districts have long had policies that establish minimum grades of 50, 60 or even 70. That means if a student failed and earned a zero, his or her grade would be automatically brought up to the minimum score.
Last month, I was contacted by a faculty member I had met several years ago at a conference (I'll call her Claire). Our conversation began like many I've had recently, with tears in response to a negative and critical annual review. Claire is a brilliant social scientist, incredibly hard-working, and passionately committed to her scholarship, her institution and her students. While Claire is an award-winning teacher, and far exceeded her college's service expectations, her publication record was significantly below her department's standards. Her chair was clear that her lack of publications was problematic and she left the meeting feeling an almost desperate sense of urgency to move several manuscripts forward this summer.
Of course, I suggested she make a summer plan and join a writing group that would motivate and support her throughout the summer. Last week, when I was writing about resistance to writing I couldn't help but think of Claire, so I decided to give her a call. Unfortunately, she had done very little writing: only three short sessions in the 30 days since we last spoke. When I asked Claire what was holding her back, she had difficulty identifying anything specific. She readily acknowledged having more free time and fewer responsibilities than she did during the academic year. But despite knowing that this was an important summer for her to be productive and having a general sense that she should try to write every day, somehow her days kept flying by without any progress on her manuscripts.
I'm going to turn 60 soon and my job title at Marquette Law School these days is "senior fellow," so I have a disposition to respect seniority. Especially when other things are equal, you should earn some standing by dint of long service.
But do you think Trevor Hoffman should be sent out to pitch the ninth inning for the Brewers just because he has seniority over everyone else on the team? Of course not. Put in the best pitcher.
I may be in a minority, but I regard baseball as a game, as entertainment.
Education is not a game. It's as crucial a matter as any facing Milwaukee.
So why don't schools follow this simple lesson from sports: You stand your best chance of winning when you field your best players?
Milwaukee is well on its way this summer to a vivid lesson in seniority in action. Milwaukee Public Schools administrators have given layoff notices to 482 teachers, as well as 816 other employees.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
This Wednesday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Brent Elementary School at 301 North Carolina Ave. SE, the D.C. public schools will hold a chancellor's forum on how to add useful learning to your child's summer. Several groups, such as the D.C. Public Library, the University of the District of Columbia Science and Engineering Center, and even Madame Tussaud's, will have booths about their summer programs.
But the District, like other urban districts, will have a summer school that includes only about a fifth of its students. Many people laugh that off: Who in their right mind wants to go to summer school? Give the poor kids a break.
State and local tax burdens vary greatly from state to state. New Hampshire, for instance, has no income or sales tax -- but its neighbor Vermont has both. Fiscal conservatives say New Hampshire's long history of low taxes has forced the state to keep spending in line. But New Hampshire residents say that tradition of fiscal austerity has exacted a price on the state's schools.
NAEP 4th grade average math scale score: New Hampshire: 251; Wisconsin 244; Vermont 248, Massachusetts 252, Minnesota 249, Iowa 243. Low income: New Hampshire: 237; Wisconsin 229; Vermont 235, Massachusetts 237, Minnesota 234, Iowa 232.
NAEP 4th grade average reading scale score (national average is 220): New Hampshire: 229; Wisconsin 220; Vermont 229, Massachusetts 234, Minnesota 223, Iowa 221. Low income (national average is 206): New Hampshire: 213; Wisconsin 202; Vermont 215, Massachusetts 215, Minnesota 203, Iowa 208.
NAEP 8th grade average reading scale score (national average is 262): New Hampshire: 271; Wisconsin 266; Vermont 272, Massachusetts 274, Minnesota 271, Iowa 265. Low income (national average is 249): New Hampshire: 257; Wisconsin 249; Vermont 260, Massachusetts 254, Minnesota 252, Iowa 253.
The windows to Beckman Middle School are boarded and the grass has turned into weeds, but Taiwane Payne sees potential for the school that the Gary Community School Corp. closed and is now selling.
Payne came to an open house at the shuttered school on Thursday eager to see if it would be an ideal building for his not-for-profit venture. Payne wants to revitalize a Gary school into a technical center that would teach the unemployed green technology.
But that's as long as the price is right.
"It's up to the city of Gary and the school corporation not to try to get as much money out of them as possible," Payne said. "It would be great to see the building being used and not abandoned."
From the outside, Payne surmised Beckman, which closed in 2004, would need some work.
"I need to get in and find out exactly what needs to be done," Payne said pulling on his work gloves and carrying an industrial flashlight.
Gary Community Schools is in the process of selling 11 of its vacant school buildings, but Gov. Mitch Daniels thinks some of the structures should be given to charter schools.
Every so often, Aalim Moody, 5, and his twin sister, Aalima, break into a kind of secret code, chatting in a language their father does not understand.
Walking along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, they make out the lettering on kosher food shops and yeshiva buses, showing off all they learn at the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Midwood, where they both attend kindergarten.
Ask Aalim his favorite song and he will happily belt out:
"Eretz Yisrael sheli yaffa v'gam porachat!" -- My land of Israel is beautiful and blossoming! -- and then he continues in Hebrew:
There will be no valedictory speech at Jericho High School's graduation on Sunday. With seven seniors laying claim to the title by compiling A-plus averages, no one wanted to sit through a solid half-hour of inspirational quotations and sappy memories.
Instead, the seven will perform a 10-minute skit titled "2010: A Jericho Odyssey," about their collective experience at this high-achieving Long Island high school, finishing up with 30 seconds each to say a few words to their classmates and families.
"When did we start saying that we should limit the honors so only one person gets the glory?" asked Joe Prisinzano, the Jericho principal.
For students and their parents, the wait for FCAT scores has been endless.
Results of this year's writing tests were due in April, but the state Department of Education has yet to release them.
The same goes for the reading, math and science scores that the state had expected to release by late May for fourth graders through high school juniors. So far, only third graders have received their math and reading results.
Even with the DOE finally planning to issue the scores early next week, people want to know: What went wrong?
The answer centers on Pearson Plc., a giant London-based media and education company that last year won a $254 million, multiyear contract with the state to handle Florida's high-stakes standardized test.
As recently as 2008, Locke High School here was one of the nation's worst failing schools, and drew national attention for its hallway beatings, bathroom rapes and rooftop parties held by gangs. For every student who graduated, four others dropped out.
Now, two years after a charter school group took over, gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward. Newly planted olive trees in Locke's central plaza have helped transform the school's concrete quadrangle into a place where students congregate and do homework.
"It's changed a lot," said Leslie Maya, a senior. "Before, kids were ditching school, you'd see constant fights, the lunches were nasty, the garden looked disgusting. Now there's security, the garden looks prettier, the teachers help us more."
This isn't actually about vouchers. It's about a new government report (pdf) on a school vouchers program in Washington, D.C., that reveals just how perversely narrow our view of "student achievement" has become.
Issued this week by the Education Department, the report is the final evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program ordered by Congress.
The program was the first federally funded private school voucher program in the country. Since 2004, more than 3,700 students -- most of them black or Hispanic -- have been awarded scholarships, each worth up to $7,500 tuition. Since Congress refused to reauthorize the program, no new students are being accepted.
The new evaluation of the program is remarkable for how it describes student achievement. It says: "There is no conclusive evidence that the OSP affected student achievement."
What is student achievement? In this report it is all about standardized test scores. The evaluation says:
"On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships."
I wonder how much was spent per student in the voucher schools vs the traditional public districts?
Somewhat related: Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the DC Voucher program, along with the Democrat majority.
America needs to make "fundamental, dramatic change" to the kind of education called for in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Friday in a meeting with local educators in Mill Valley.
The nation's education chief said the federal government should reward rather than punish struggling schools, that it should support art, music and physical education classes in addition to math and science and that it should encourage reforms that come from the local level, rather than imposing them from on high.
"The law needs to be less punitive. Right now, there are 50 ways for schools to fail for every way there is for them to succeed," Duncan said. "And we have to make sure students have a more well-rounded education, not just in high school, but in the first and second grade."
But Duncan had few specific examples of those changes, which he outlined before a crowd of Marin and Sonoma teachers, administrators and school board members at an event hosted by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, at Tamalpais High School.
Look at this video and tell me where the hell are the teachers? WHOEVER the principal is at this school (video is from '07) needs to be fired. The teacher should be fired as well. Look closely at the 2:26 mark of this video clip and see the teacher (or some adult) sitting up against some counter watching this ish. Is this man getting thrills watching these adolescent, Black Kids grind on each other? No excuse MPS, this is why WE cannot read, write or do math with any competency at many of the public schools.
Actor Richard Dreyfuss wants students to take on a project bigger than "Jaws."
Dreyfuss, speaking Thursday in Lexington to the annual Student Congress of the Henry Clay Center for Statesmanship, told about 60 students and teachers from around the country that improving civics education in schools is the way to save American democracy.
The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Dreyfuss, 62, said, "We have to learn how to use the tools given to us in 1787" in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The draft standards were released in March and CCSSI allowed the public to submit comments on the draft via their website. Over 10,000 comments were received. The U.S. Coalition for World Class Math was one of the commenter's and I had a hand in drafting comments. We were concerned with the draft standards' use of the word "understand" and pointed out that the use of this verb results in an interpretation by different people for different purposes. I am pleased to see that the final version of the standards has greatly reduced the use of the word "understand", but I remain concerned that 1) it still is used for some standards, resulting in the same problems we raised in our comments, and 2) the word "understand" in some instances has been replaced with "explain".
I am not against teaching students the conceptual underpinnings of procedures. I do not believe, however, that it is necessary to require students to then be able to recite the reasons why a particular procedure or algorithm works; i.e., to provide justification. At lower grade levels, some students will understand such explanations, but many will not. And even those who do may have trouble articulating the reasons. The key is whether they understand how such procedure is to be applied, and what the particular procedure represents. For example, does a student know how to figure out how many 2/3 ounce servings of yogurt are in a ¾ ounce container? If the student knows that the solution is to divide ¾ by 2/3, that should provide evidence that the student understands what fractional division means, without having to ask them to explain what the relationship is between multiplication and division and to show why the "invert and multiply" rule works each and every time.
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
A few years ago a "contemporary artist" named Judi Werthein made headlines when she distributed specially designed and equipped sneakers to Mexicans waiting to cross the U. S. border. She called her piece "Brinco," from the Spanish word for "jump." Sneakers are also apt here. Ms. Werthein's shoes--equipped with a compass, map, flashlight, and medication--were intended to assist people engaging in illegal immigration.
Dipti Desai, who directs the art education program at New York University's Steinhardt School, thinks that "Brinco" should be studied in America's art classrooms. At the National Art Education Association (NAEA) convention in April, she praised contemporary artists who use "a wide range of practices" to criticize U. S. immigration policy. If like-minded NAEA members can persuade Congress, your children may soon be studying works like "Brinco" in school.
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If you'd asked me a year ago whether or not I would be sad to graduate, I probably would've broken out in an uproar of laughter.
But as I stood in my bedroom hours before the ceremony, clad in my cap and gown, I was completely overwhelmed. Senior year has come to an end, and with it, a new chapter of life has begun.
Needless to say, I am extremely excited to begin my life at NYU, but parting ways with Stuyvesant High School is harder than I thought it would be. As I cleared out my locker a few days ago, I found little pieces of memorabilia (my choral music folder, old math notes, gym clothes, the Stuyvesant Spectator newspaper) and instantly it hit me: this is it.
And I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I almost cried (well, it was more of an "awww" moment than a full out cry of agony).
To understand our impact and communicate it to the public, KIPP has commissioned Mathematica Policy Research to conduct a rigorous, third-party evaluation that will examine how KIPP students fare over the long term. The Atlantic Philanthropies, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided the lead support for the Mathematica evaluation of KIPP middle schools.
The Mathematica study will help us understand the degree to which KIPP schools make a difference for our students in both academic and non-academic outcomes, including achievement and motivation. The first report from the Mathematica study of KIPP middle schools was published on June 22, 2010. The next report is due to be released in late 2012.
Key Findings:
1. KIPP does not attract more able students (as compared to neighboring public schools).
2. KIPP schools typically have a statistically significant impact on student achievement.
3. Academic gains at many KIPP schools are large enough to substantially reduce race and income-based achievement gaps.
4. Most KIPP schools do not have higher levels of attrition than nearby district schools.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg just spent 20 minutes speaking with New York Times' chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. at the New York Forum.
Following are some of the highlights from that conversation:
- The government's first job is to promote economic activity. Give people the ability to enjoy life, keep food on plate, roof on head.
- The big problem NY State faces is that its number one industry is finance. Washington has forgotten that the economic engine for the United States is finance. Nothing works without it. Credit derivative swaps don't sound good, so the government decided to go after the banks. That is potentially very damaging to the country. If you want to create jobs you have to have banks willing to provide loans. You can't have it both ways.
Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame has shown that, when teacher's pay is linked to the the performance of their students on standardized tests, they are prone to cheat -- I mean the teacher's cheat. Levitt's data from Chicago suggest that about 5% of teachers cheated to get bonuses and other goodies. A recent New York Times article shows that this problem persists, and tells a rather discouraging story of a principal from Georgia who "erased bubbles on the multiple-choice answer sheets and filled in the right answers." And if you look check out the Freakonomics blog, there is evidence that Australian teachers cheat too.
The kind of pressures that educators face aren't just financial incentives (although that alone is plenty of pressure as many systems reward only the top performers no matter how well everyone else does), they also risk being fired, demoted, or their schools may lose accreditation, be put on probation, and in some cases, closed for poor performance
The Times article offers an interesting quote that has implications beyond education:
Improving public education remains the top goal of Mayor Karl Dean as his administration and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce begin work on a new five-year economic development plan.
Education is the key to bringing higher-paying technology jobs to Nashville, a key focus of the so-called Partnership 2020 initiative outlined at a chamber gathering Monday afternoon.
It's a new take on the program the city and the chamber first launched in 1990, which most recently has been known as Partnership 2010 and has been credited with bringing more than 600 new companies to the area over those two decades.
"Our focus has changed," the mayor said before addressing chamber members. "There will be more of an emphasis on facets of our economy such as music, where a lot of the technology jobs will be created. But education is the single biggest thing we need to get right."
One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.
But it's not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.
Think of it as summer school for the Facebook generation.
That's the idea behind Grockit Inc., a San Francisco startup that offers tutoring and test prep online. The company aims to take on companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review Inc. by undercutting their prices, offering more custom features and using social networking to appeal to students.
The site lets users collaborate and socialize while studying, giving them more reasons to keep coming back. The challenge is winning the trust of parents, who may be more comfortable relying on established names to get their kids into top colleges. A handful of players dominate test preparation and course supplements, a market worth more than $1 billion, according to research firm Outsell Inc.
Increasing educational attainment is likely to reduce conflict risk, especially in countries like Pakistan that have very low levels of primary and secondary school enrollment. Education quality, relevance and content also have a role to play in mitigating violence. Education reform must therefore be a higher priority for all stakeholders interested in a more peaceful and stable Pakistan. Debate within the country about education reform should not be left only to education policymakers and experts, but ought to figure front and center in national dialogues about how to foster security. The price of ignoring Pakistan's education challenges is simply too great in a country where half the population is under the age of 17.
There has been much debate concerning the roots of militancy in Pakistan, and multiple factors clearly come into play. One risk factor that has attracted much attention both inside Pakistan and abroad is the dismal state of the national education sector. Despite recent progress, current school attainment and literacy levels remain strikingly low, as does education spending. The Pakistani education sector, like much of the country's public infrastructure, has been in decline over recent decades. The question of how limited access to quality education may contribute to militancy in Pakistan is more salient now than ever, given the rising national and international security implications of continued violence.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education issued its final evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program -- aka school vouchers.
To review, the federally funded voucher program is on life support. The Democratic Congress has thus far resisted attempts to reauthorize the program. The Obama administration last year budgeted enough money to allow current voucher holders to complete their high school educations, but not enough to allow new applicants; Congress has maintained that approach since.
So will the study move the ball? Here's what it found: (a) "There is no conclusive evidence that the [voucher program] affected student achievement." (b) The program "significantly improved students' chances of graduating from high school" -- by 12 percent. And (c), the program "raised parents', but not students', ratings of school safety and satisfaction."
An initial glance at those results -- no rise in test scores, but a significant rise in graduation rates -- would fall into the category of mixed results. And mixed results, given the heated political climate under which the voucher program operates, means plenty of room for spin.
In 2009 a group of 42 researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs met together at the invitation of Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm, to discuss how the Web could transform education. A major theme of the daylong discussion, which took place under the theme "Hacking Education," was "unbundling," the process through which online distribution of digital media and information breaks apart and erodes existing industries. At the center of "unbundling" are new technologically-enabled relationships that democratize access to the means of production and collectively create plenty where scarcity once existed.
An often-cited example of "unbundling" is newspapers: with blogs and other online tools, one no longer needs a printing press or fleet of delivery vehicles to be heard. The newspaper editorial room competes with an army of bloggers and other online media outlets. Craigslist emerges as the marketplace for used household items, local job listings, and community announcements, replacing the advertising function of the traditional print newspaper. The combination is a perfect storm leading to a steady, nationwide stream of newspaper closures.
Does differential access to computer technology at home compound the educational disparities between rich and poor? Would a program of government provision of computers to early secondary school students reduce these disparities? The authors use administrative data on North Carolina public school students to corroborate earlier surveys that document broad racial and socioeconomic gaps in home computer access and use. Using within‐student variation in home computer access, and across‐ ZIP code variation in the timing of the introduction of high‐speed internet service, the authors demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high‐speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.
Is this a wise investment of public funds? Very little evidence exists to support a positive relationship between student computer access at home and academic outcomes.
The Department of Education released the final report of the evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program today. The major finding of this report, and it is MAJOR, is that students who were randomly selected to receive vouchers had an 82% graduation rate. That's 12 percentage points higher than the students who didn't receive vouchers. Students who actually used their vouchers had graduation rates that were 21% higher. Even better, the subgroup of students who received vouchers and came from designated Schools in Need of Improvement (SINI schools) had graduation rates that were 13 percentage points higher than the same subgroup of students who weren't offered vouchers-and the effect was 20 percentage points higher for the SINI students who used their vouchers!
This is a huge finding. The sorry state of graduation rates, especially for disadvantaged students, has been the single largest indicator that America's schools are failing to give every student an equal chance at success in life. Graduating high school is associated with a number of critical life outcomes, ranging from lifetime earnings to incarceration rates. And, despite countless efforts and attempts at reform, changing the dismal state of graduation rates has been an uphill battle.
Of course, the uphill battle will continue. As most are aware, Congress voted to kill the DC voucher program last year, despite evidence that the program had significantly improved reading achievement for students who received scholarships. That evidence didn't count for much when faced with opposition from teachers' unions.
In the Advanced Learning work session there was a slide that showed the growth of AP and IB in the District. It is true that many more students are taking AP classes than ever before. But it doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.
Take, for example, Roosevelt High School. At Roosevelt about half of the 10th grade students used to take AP European History. This is typically the first AP available to students, one of the few open to 10th grade students on the typical pathway. The class is challenging for 10th grade students and the fact that about half of the students took it is a testament to Roosevelt's academic strength. The other half of the students took a history class similar to the one that students all across district and the state take in the 10th grade.
Early last Monday , while I was still in bed and wondering why the "Today" show had gotten so tabloidish, I was slammed on my washingtonpost.com blog by a reader who did not like my column about Doris Jackson, the principal at Wakefield High School in Arlington County.
It wasn't Jackson who bothered the commenter, but my praise of the school's strong performance on Advanced Placement tests. He had a complaint that has often puzzled me: Hispanic students who take AP Spanish, and the schools that let them, are getting away with something, he suggested.
"It is because of the Internet that we know that about half the students in Wakefield are Hispanic," he said. "We also know that the AP test that they are taking, which has falsely massaged these stats, is the Spanish Advanced Placement test. Take away that fabrication of academic performance, and the true percentage of AP tests passed plummets."
A number of responses to my column about the education I received at Classical High (a public school in Providence, RI) rehearsed a story of late-flowering gratitude after an earlier period of frustration and resentment. "I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours," the poster typically said, "and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life."
Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money's worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers' contracts? I suspect the answers would have been "no," "no" and "no," and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.
In this graduation season, Rhode Island's two top education officials made it a point Monday morning to attend a recognition ceremony held in an unlikely place -- the state prison.
Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist and Higher Education Commissioner Ray Di Pasquale went to the John J. Moran Medium Security Facility to congratulate more than 100 inmates who were enrolled in General Equivalency Degree or college-level classes, and to shake hands with the two dozen men who received degrees of completion.
"The fact that you are here means you have made mistakes along the way and you have had difficulties," Gist said. "But the fact that you are here means you are lifting yourself above those circumstances. We've all made mistakes. You've decided to better your education. You've made a very important decision."
It was the first time in memory that prison officials could recall both education officials attending the ceremony. Di Pasquale, who also serves as president of the Community College of Rhode Island, has attended in recent years to confer associates degrees from CCRI.
Monday, he handed out two associates' degrees and praised the recipients for their persistence. He encouraged the inmates to continue their education to "change your lives for the future."
What's one sure-fire way to stress out parents? Shorten the school day.
And that's exactly what the Madison school district is proposing, starting next year, for grades six to 12. According to a letter recently sent to middle school staff by Pam Nash, the district's assistant superintendent of secondary schools, ending school early on Wednesdays would allow time for teachers to meet to discuss professional practices and share ideas for helping students succeed in school.
"I am pleased to announce that as a result of your hard work, investment and commitment, as well as the support of central administration and Metro busing, together we will implement Professional Collaboration Time for the 10-11 school year!" Nash wrote enthusiastically.
Despite Nash's letter, district administrators appeared to backpedal on Monday on whether the plan is actually a done deal. Thus far there has not been public discussion of the proposal, and some teachers are expressing reservations.
Some middle school teachers, however, who also happen to be parents in the district, say they have some serious concerns about shortening the day for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Not only will there be less time spent on academics each week, they say, but the additional unsupervised hours will pose a problem for parents already struggling to keep tabs on their adolescent kids.
This expenditure appears to continue the trend of increased adult to adult expenditures, which, in this case, is at the expense of classroom (adult to student) time.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
During a debate last February in Tallahassee on a proposal to expand a scholarship program that allows poor children to go to private schools, state Sen. Frederica Wilson decried the legislation.
"We're taking children out of the public schools and making them weaker," the Miami Democrat said. "This is not America."
A recent study by a highly regarded Northwestern University researcher shows how wrong Wilson was. Florida voters are fortunate that the Legislature passed the bill and Gov. Charlie Crist signed it into law.
The study found public schools' performance improved when they were faced with the possibility of losing students to private schools.
One thing that remains murky to me is how accountable the state Charter Schools Commission - which a Fulton County judge recently ruled is constitutional - is for the schools that it approves over the objections of local boards of education. The commission is here in Atlanta, but it is approving schools across the state.
As the authorizer of the schools, how is the commission held accountable if one goes bad or if parents are unhappy and can't go to the local school board to complain since the local folks had nothing to do with the school's approval?
At a media briefing earlier this year, Charter Schools Commission member Jennifer Rippner surprised me when I asked whether parents of students in a commission charter school could ultimately turn to the charter commission with complaints that they felt were not being dealt with by the school itself or its board of directors.
Having accepted just 2.1 percent of applicants for its first freshman class, the liberal-arts college that New York University plans to open in Abu Dhabi this fall has positioned itself as one of the world's most selective undergraduate colleges.
NYU Abu Dhabi, which its administrators like to call the "world's honors college," announced on Monday that its first class would be made up of 150 students who speak 43 different languages in all and hail from 39 countries.
The 63 women and 87 men, forming a female-to-male ratio of 42 percent to 58 percent, have met high standards.
Their SAT critical-reading scores are projected to be 770 at the class's 75th percentile. Their 75th-percentile scores for SAT mathematics are projected to be 780, according to statistics released by NYU Abu Dhabi.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Neumann is proposing to get rid of state certification for teachers as part of an education reform plan.
Neumann also is proposing a series of incentives that will encourage private schools and public charter schools to compete with and replace failing public schools.
Neumann is outlining his plans during news conferences in Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.
In a phone interview, he said the state should provide suggested qualifications for educators, but actual hiring decisions should be left up to local school boards, superintendents and principals.
Neumann acknowledges that many of his proposals would need approval from the Legislature.
In the Legislature, Porter chaired key education committees and proved to be a quick study who mastered the intricacies of complex legislation. As then-Gov. Zell Miller's floor leader, he sponsored the HOPE scholarship bill that has paid college tuition for Georgia students and funded voluntary pre-kindergarten programs.
Last year, Porter popped into a third-grade classroom at Saxon Heights Elementary School when he saw a teacher giving a lesson on Thurgood Marshall. Porter, a longtime lawmaker, newspaper publisher and lawyer, sat down and observed before finally asking, "May I?"
With the teacher's permission, he then recounted the life and times of the groundbreaking NAACP lawyer and first African-American to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice
A meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), the highest advisory body in the sector, here Saturday formed consensus on a bill for an apex regulator, considered a panel to remove hurdles to implemeting the right to education act and decided on a common curriculum for science and mathematics students across the country.
In a step ahead towards creating an apex regulator for higher education, a broad consensus on the issue appeared for the first time among the states.
"There is a broad consensus, not just on the structure but also on the purpose of the bill," Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal said.
The daughter of businesswoman Winnie Tsoi is studying in the economics and finance programme at the University of Hong Kong. The price she paid to get a quality degree education for her eldest daughter was HK$900,000.
The world-renowned HKU has not become a mercenary diploma mill selling degrees to the rich - it was more a case of Tsoi sending her daughter overseas on a pricey education detour to skip the gruelling local A-levels exams, but still secure the required grades.
The HK$900,000 became the "entrance ticket" to the hotly contested programme at HKU. A student seeking admission had to score a minimum of two Bs and credits for two languages in the local A-levels last year. With a less-than-brilliant score of 21 (out of 30) in the Form Five public exam in 2007, Tsoi figured that the odds of her daughter passing the Hong Kong A-levels with flying colours and gaining entry to the HKU degree course would be very low.
Shanghai student to live Harvard dream of many A Harvard-bound Shanghai pupil is the envy of her peers, for whom entry to the Ivy League ranks is a class act
It was just a week after Chang Shui received her acceptance notice from Harvard that the first book offer came.
A publisher approached her father with a detailed outline for an inside guide to how a Shanghai couple prepared their daughter to compete successfully with the best students from America. Local newspapers weighed in with articles about how Shui's membership in a dance troupe surely helped. "Magical girl 'danced' her way into Harvard," the Shanghai Evening Post headlined its story.
Qibao High School, where Shui is a senior, trumpeted the news on a large electronic billboard at the front gate. The day that she received her acceptance notice - by e-mail at 5am on April 2 - teachers at the high school crowded around to have their picture taken with her.
"She was a celebrity," her homeroom teacher, Xiong Gongping, boasts.
I plan to write in more detail about why I dislike the tradition of explaining property tax levy changes in terms of the impact on the owner of a house assessed at a value of $250,000. The editorial in this morning's State Journal is evidence of how reliance on the $250,000 house trope can lead to mischief.
Here are the third and fourth paragraphs of the editorial:
"The Madison School Board just agreed to a preliminary budget that will increase the district's tax on a $250,000 home by about 9 percent to $2,770. The board was dealt a difficult hand by the state. But it didn't do nearly enough to trim spending.
"Madison Area Technical College is similarly poised to jack up its tax bite by about 8 percent to $348. MATC is at least dealing with higher enrollment. But the 8 percent jump follows a similar increase last year. And MATC is now laying the groundwork for a big building referendum."
I'm glad Ed is writing online. Two Madison School Board seats are open during the spring, 2011 election: the two currently occupied by Ed and Marj Passman.
What happens when a group of teenagers sets their minds on making something to help people with disabilities? In Boise, Idaho, a group of aspiring engineers teamed up with Bill Clark, a businessman in their community who suffers from hand tremors that keep him from being able to write legibly. They set about designing an easy-to-use, portable device that would steady Mr. Clark's hand and, after many hours working with prototypes in their garage, came up with a design they call the PAWD - a Portable Assistive Writing Device.
When the team took their PAWD to the National Engineering Design Challenge in Washington, D.C. and won "Best Design," they say it was just icing on the cake. Three of the student engineers behind the project spoke with NewsHour Extra about the design process, what it's like to make something for a client and why they like engineering.
Legendary investor Peter Lynch is donating $20 million to train school principals in Boston, making him the latest in a growing list of high net worth individuals to publicly champion philanthropy.
Last week, Microsoft (MSFT.O) founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N) (BRKb.N) the two wealthiest Americans, said they were asking hundreds of U.S. billionaires to give away at least 50 percent of their wealth.
Lynch's fortune is considerably more modest -- at an estimated $350 million -- but he shares the belief that the wealthy should give back.
"The people who have been luckier than others should give away a lot of money," Lynch said in an interview.
Lynch, 66, made his fortune running Fidelity Investments' Magellan Fund. Between 1977 and 1990, when he resigned as a fund manager, the fund grew to Fidelity's flagship, with more than $14 billion in assets, from a mere $20 million, and averaged a 29.2-percent annual return.
Lynch, now vice chairman of Fidelity Management and Research Co.,and his wife, Carolyn, have long funded educational initiatives through the Lynch Foundation, their philanthropic organization.
The new initiative, at Boston College's Lynch School of Education, will be the first to give specific training to principals as a way to raise overall educational attainment.
Professor Jones is well known for her generosity. She encourages nonconfrontational exchanges of ideas and is always upbeat and positive about her colleagues and their work. She is patient with her graduate students, encouraging them to be patient with one another as well. When a student makes a comment in class that is weak or off base, unlike some other faculty members in her department, Jones will not make a fuss. When the appropriate opportunity presents itself, she will try to work with the student to improve his or her thinking. Jones's critical credo is, "If you don't have something positive to say, then it is best not to say anything at all--at least not in public."
Her colleague Professor Smith is quite the opposite. He has built a successful career by telling people that they are wrong. The goal of criticism, he believes, is to persuade other people to see the world his way, and if they don't, then he will do everything he can to prove to them--and anyone else who will listen--that they are wrong. Criticism is a competition of ideas, a nasty business in which it is acceptable and sometimes necessary to be a brute. Strong ideas survive, weak ones perish; there is no room for wishy-washy opinions and people. Smith's assessments are harsh but well argued and persuasive. His critical credo is, "Public criticism is as valid as public praise."
As a classroom teacher with 30+ years experience, I just completed the absolute worst year in the classroom I have ever endured (and it was NOT the fault of my students--they were great).
"This year I was told what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, how long to teach, who to teach, who not to teach, and how often to test. My students were assessed with easily more than 120 tests of one shape or another within the first 6 months of the school year.
"My ability to make decisions about what is best for my students was taken away by an overzealous attempt to impose 'consistency' within my grade group. My school hired an outside consultant who threatened us with our jobs, demanded that everyone comply, and required us to submit data on test results on a weekly basis. If your class didn't do well, you were certainly going to be in trouble.
"In addition, my class was visited at least twice a month by the consultant, two superintendents, principal, assistant principal, reading coach, math coach, and sometimes even more people. If I was not teaching exactly what they wanted to see, I was in trouble.
I asked Madison's 3 Superintendent candidates in 2008 if they believed in either "hiring the best teachers" and essentially setting them free, or a "top down" approach to teaching. Madison continues to expand adult to adult spending ("coaches", "professional development").
How about this for strong medicine to improve a school: Ask every teacher and administrator to turn in resignations. Tell them they can reapply for their jobs, but there's going to be higher expectations from now on. Hire back less than half of the staff. Revamp the academic program extensively.
I've rarely heard of it actually happening around the country, and never around here. Until now:
"It's a new day," the message board outside St. Joan Antida High School, the 300-student, all-girls Catholic school at 1341 N. Cass St., says. It certainly is.
It's been a difficult few years for the 56-year-old school. Enrollment declined from close to the building's capacity of 400 to about 300. Competition increased from other private schools, charter schools and even suburban public schools.
The level of academic success at St. Joan Antida wasn't much different than in Milwaukee Public Schools, which means it wasn't very good.
Some students who enrolled were far behind grade level and the school wasn't doing well in accelerating their achievement. The student body had become much less diverse - higher-income and white students had just about all departed, 90% of the students qualified for publicly funded school vouchers, and the student body was about evenly split between African-American and Hispanic.
People involved in the school say discussions about making major changes go back several years. Some teachers at the non-unionized school were not renewed, and there were some other efforts to improve. But the results didn't amount to much.
What's an alumnus to do when the university that was the gateway to his entrepreneurial millions was a place of "suffering" where professors "didn't give a damn about the students"? Moshe Yanai's answer: Give it millions of dollars to encourage faculty members to be more pleasant.
IBM minces few words when describing the work of Mr. Yanai, who holds one of the computer maker's prestigious fellowships: "One of the most influential contributors in the history of the data-storage industry. His 30 years of technical expertise and design innovation are legendary."
Mr. Yanai attributes his success in no small part to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, from which he graduated in 1975. Now a multimillionaire, he has given quietly to charities for many years, including to the Technion, the academic incubator of Israel's high-tech revolution. But memories of his bitter experience there discouraged him from doing anything high profile.
Planning laws are being torn up so that hundreds of parents can set up their own schools in shops and houses, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced today. Gove said at least 750 groups of teachers, parents and charities had expressed an interest in establishing the schools that will be run as academies.
Applications to set up the schools opened today. The plan, a flagship Tory education policy, is modelled on Sweden's free schools and charter schools in the US.
Teachers argue it would strip existing schools of much-needed cash and increase social segregation. They say only middle class parents would start their own schools. The man in charge of Sweden's schools, Per Thulberg, has said free schools do not improve standards.
Gove said the amount spent per pupil would stay the same and the policy would reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils. Planning laws and regulations were being rewritten to make it far easier for the schools to be established, he said.
FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: "Happy Bloom's Day."
It was a message to mark the annual celebration of James Joyce's "Ulysses," the epic novel built around events unfolding on a single day -- June 16, 1904 -- in the life of the fictional Dubliner Leopold Bloom. But the postcard also served as a kind of diploma for the men who received it.
Two years earlier a number of Bell's top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company's hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.
The Brookfield Board of Education plans to adopt an updated strategic plan this summer that, according to its chairman, Mike Fenton, will be, among other things, "paying closer attention to technology" and "changes in the world."
Assistant Superintendent of Schools Genie Slone told the school board at its regular meeting Wednesday night that longtime school district consultant Jack Devine, an instructor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, has been coordinating discussions with a committee that is updating the strategic plan for the next five years.
The committee includes staff members, local residents, students, as well as two school board members, Jane Miller and Mr. Fenton.
Mr. Fenton said in an interview after the meeting that the plan is updated every five years and is a valuable document that provides direction in how the school board makes decisions.
"It is part of how we formulate the budget every year," he said.
The class of eighth graders at a Los Angeles middle school tap their rulers and nod their heads to the rhythm of the rap video projected on a screen. It's not Snoop Dogg or Jay-Z.
It's their math teacher, LaMar Queen, using rhyme to help them memorize seemingly complicated algebra and in the process improve their grades.
"It gets stuck in your head," says Cindy Martinez, a 14-year-old whose math grade went from a C-average to a B.
Queen, 26, is now known at Los Angeles Academy as the rap teacher, but his fame has spread far beyond the 2,200-student school in this gritty neighborhood. He's won a national award and shows teachers and parents how to use rap to reach children.
"Math is a bad word in a lot of households," he says. "But if we put it in a form that kids enjoy, they'll learn."
Queen is doing what many veteran educators have done -- using students' music to connect with them. Where teachers once played the rock n' roll tunes of "Schoolhouse Rocks" to explain everything from government to grammar, they now turn to rap to renew Shakespeare or geometry.
"Rap is what the kids respond to," Queen says. "They don't have a problem memorizing the songs at all."
School officials in Mounds View will decide next week whether to get rid of class rank for graduating seniors. If they do, they'll join a handful of other public school districts who have made the switch in recent years, and who say it might help some students get into college.
More than 400 seniors from Mounds View High School got their diplomas last week during commencement ceremonies. The school doesn't list a valedictorian -- but rather reconizes the top 10 ranking graduates during the ceremony.
That part of commencement might be gone next year, if the Mounds View School Board votes next Tuesday to ditch class rank. Class rank compares one student's grade point average with that of his or her classmates.
Principal Julie Wikelius says the top of each class at Mounds View is compacted. Plenty of students earn good grades in honors and advanced classes, which creates a tight battle for the top-ranking GPA.
oday's roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses.
Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage. Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.
Some Georgia students will be able to log on to a home computer and attend high school in their pajamas this fall.
The Georgia Charter Schools Commission on Friday approved the state's first virtual charter high schools, opening the door for kids across the state to have a full k-12 experience online.
The two statewide virtual campuses, Kaplan Academy of Georgia, for students in grades 4-12, and the Provost Academy Georgia high school, will expand choice for families of gifted, struggling and special needs students who want the flexibility of learning at their own pace. Virtual schools provide the curriculum, the teachers and, for those who qualify, the computers , too, for free.
Kaplan and Provost follow the state's first and largest virtual charter, Georgia Cyber Academy, a K-8 cyberschool of 5,000 , in serving public school students online.
"I think it is going to be a wonderful opportunity, especially for kids who have some very unique special needs," said Ben Scafidi, state charter commission chairman. "These virtual schools are a lifeline to them."
HISD is working to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions and provide a road map for our future. The purpose of this strategic direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Supporting the Principal as the CEO, Developing Central Standards, Ensuring Accountability, and Cultivating Stakeholder Commitment. We believe these key, overarching strategies will help HISD achieve its goals and become the best school district in America.
To develop our long-term Strategic Direction, we are working with a in a six-month effort that started in February, 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of the final plan. The first step involved a diagnostic research effort to understand the current state of the district across a number of critical dimensions such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness. It also included analyzing other transformation efforts within HISD and across the country to ensure that the best ideas are being considered in our planning process. We have also started to gather input from members of Team HISD and we will continue to do so over the next several months. Click here to view the preliminary findings (.pdf)
True transformation does not happen overnight and cannot happen without the participation of every member of Team HISD. For this process to be authentic and meaningful, HISD needs all of you -parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and broader community members- to be fully engaged.
Pamela Farinas, the principal of Houston ISD's Foerster Elementary, was honored Wednesday night as Principal of the Year for the district's west region. It turns out that was her final hurrah in the state's largest school district. Farinas is headed to the popular KIPP charter school chain. She will be a deputy head of schools and school leader (KIPP lingo for principal) at LIPP Liberation College Prep).
KIPP-co-founder Mike Feinberg, who began his career as a Teach for America teacher in HISD, also confirmed today that he has snagged a few other leaders from the school district:
-Daphane Carter, the principal of Bonham Elementary, is leaving to be a deputy head of schools and school leader at KIPP Spirit College Prep.
-Bill Sorrells, the principal of Thomas Middle School, is the new school leader at KIPP Polaris Academy for Boys.
As promised, I will respond directly to people who objected to my earlier posts critiquing the charter school movement.
On June 14, The New York Times ran a front-page article about kindergarten children at the Clara E. Coleman Elementary School from Glen Rock, New Jersey who are learning about the principles of engineering through hands-on activities before they even know how to read. Their task was to design housing that would protect the three little pigs from the big, bad, wolf.
This was a wonderful project, in a wonderful classroom, with an excellent teacher, in an affluent suburban school district. Pictures that accompanied the article showed that the children in this class and school are almost all white. According to real estate estimates and the 2000 census report, in the borough of Glen Rock, about twenty miles from New York City, the medium household income was over $100,000 a year, about 60% of adults are college graduates, houses sell for about $500,000, and the population was 90% White, 6% Asian, 3% Latino, and 2% African American. For the High School graduating classes of 2004 through 2006, over 95% of students indicated that they would move on to a two-year or four-year college.
SARAH ZANDER and Ashley Jacobsen are like many teenage girls. Sarah likes soccer. Ashley was captain of her school's team of cheerleaders this year. They are also earning good money as nursing assistants at a retirement home. Sarah plans to become a registered nurse. Ashley may become a pharmacologist. Their futures look sunny. Yet both are products of what is arguably America's most sneered-at high-school programme: vocational training.
Vocational education has been so disparaged that its few advocates have resorted to giving it a new name: "career and technical education" (CTE). Academic courses that prepare students for getting into universities, by contrast, are seen as the key to higher wages and global prowess. Last month the National Governors Association proposed standards to make students "college and career ready". But a few states, districts and think-tanks favour a radical notion. In America's quest to raise wages and compete internationally, CTE may be not a hindrance but a help.
Four of the 27 new charter schools opening in New York City this fall have ties with religious organizations, although leaders assert curriculum and instruction will be secular.
Supporters say the new schools are a welcome addition amid overcrowded classrooms and heightened demand for charters, especially in neighborhoods with low-performing schools. But the development blurs the line between church and state, and also calls into question the distinction between public education and private groups, an issue with which charter schools already contend.
Four pastors are involved in starting charter schools, which receive public funding but can be privately run.
The Rev. A.R. Bernard's Brooklyn-based nondenominational Christian Cultural Center boasts a membership of 33,000, with 5,000 coming to services on any given Sunday. Now, 120 kindergarteners and first-graders will be attending Monday through Friday as it opens a charter school called the Culture Arts Academy Charter School at Spring Creek. The charter school will share the same building--but on a different floor--as the private school Mr. Bernard previously founded, Brooklyn Preparatory School.
Recess will be one of the topics on today's The Conversation starting at noon. Call in if you have thoughts, 543-KUOW. Here's their report on it. Interesting finding:
Another big difference between the schools is that at Thornton Creek, most of the students are white and middle-class. At Dunlap, nearly all of the students are black, Latino or Asian and from low-income families.
That corresponds to what KUOW found when we surveyed recess times across the Seattle school district. For instance, we looked at the 15 highest-poverty and lowest--poverty schools. Kids at the low-poverty schools average 16 minutes more recess than kids at the high-poverty schools. That amounts to about one whole recess more.
And amount of recess?
Dornfeld: "A lot of schools in the district give kids 45 minutes to an hour of recess every single day. Is that something that you see as realistic for this school?"
I attended my first Chicago Board of Education meeting in decades Tuesday and my first Chicago Public Schools kindergarten graduation the next morning. The inadequacies of the former were underscored by the inspiration of the latter.
The board reaffirmed the existing teachers contract, guaranteeing a generous 4 percent raise negotiated by the weak-kneed duo of Mayor Richard M. Daley and Arne Duncan, then the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools and now the United States secretary of education. The board thus eliminated the chance of a strike in the fall as it also gave Mr. Duncan's successor, Ron Huberman the power to perhaps lay off teachers and raise the number of students in classrooms.
"Door Open to 35 in a Class," declared a Chicago Sun-Times headline, reflecting the prime concern of what essentially is a superficial debate.
In fact, the meeting itself might as well have been choreographed by the Goodman Theatre, given all the role-playing.
A growing chorus of state and federal policymakers, large foundations, and business leaders across the country are calling for states to adopt a common, rigorous body of college- and career-ready skills and knowledge in English and mathematics that all K-12 students will be expected to master by the time they graduate.
This report looks at the history of efforts to create common education standards, in particular the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It also describes factors California may consider when deciding whether to adopt them.
Highlights:
The Common Core is the latest effort to create rigorous, common academic standards among states
California is supporting the concept of common standards, but state law calls for further review and leaves the adoption decision to the State Board of Education
Issues surrounding the adoption include the quality of the Common Core standards and their relationship to the state's current standards as well as costs and other implementation concerns
Common Core or not, California might decide to review its current standards and expectations for students
On January 7, 2010, the Governor signed into law Senate Bill X5 1 (Steinberg). The bill calls for California's academic content standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics to be examined against the Common Core Standards that were released in final form on June 2, 2010. The bill also calls for the establishment of the California Academic Content Standards Commission. The Governor and Legislature have made the required appointments to the commission.
The five candidates for Oklahoma's superintendent of schools were asked Wednesday how they would reform education in a state that ranks near the bottom of the nation for funding and also lags behind in the number of college graduates.
All agreed the state's education system is in need of change, but differed in their vision of a successful system.
Democrat Jerry Combrink said after 30 years as the superintendent of two school districts in rural southeastern Oklahoma, he knows students need options, and not every student is going to college.
"I believe that we need to prepare students for the future they want. Develop a two-track system ... so students who are not going to college are not diluting the teaching efforts of the students who are."
His opponent in the July 26 primary, state Sen. Susan Paddack, D-Ada, said the state needs a strategic plan that will use test results to track improvements and failures.
This high school graduation season, millions of young adults from around the country will celebrate their achievements and prepare to begin the next chapter in their lives. For many, setting out into the "real world" also means taking on new financial responsibilities. Capital One Financial Corporation (COF 42.16, -0.21, -0.49%) recently surveyed high school seniors to see how prepared they are to manage finances on their own. The survey shows that while many students are uncertain about their ability to manage their banking and personal finances, those who have had financial education -- both in the classroom and through conversations at home -- are significantly more confident about their personal finance skills and knowledge.
One troubling statistic shows that nearly half (45 percent) of all high school seniors polled say they are unsure or unprepared to manage their own banking and personal finances. However, of the students surveyed who have taken a personal finance class (30 percent of the sample), 75 percent said they feel prepared to manage their finances. In addition, two thirds (66 percent) of students who have taken a personal finance class rate themselves as "highly" or "very" knowledgeable about personal finance, compared to only 30 percent of students with no financial education course who show the same level of confidence in their skills.
Hu Yu Fan, a 12-year-old boy with doleful eyes, is the face of the other China -- the one untouched by the nation's economic miracle.
He is among tens of millions of young Chinese who have moved from rural provinces to major cities but are being denied the education needed to thrive in modern society. Instead, they end up in shabby migrant schools in places like Beijing and Shanghai, with few resources and few opportunities.
"I have never dreamed of anything for the future," the boy said.
Hu and those like him are the focus of a program run jointly by Stanford University and Chinese research centers, called Rural Education Action Project, or REAP, which is researching ways to improve education for China's rural and urban poor.
Financially supported by American companies such as San Jose's Adobe Systems and Dell Inc., the researchers produce reports that are reviewed by the country's top officials, including Premier Wen Jiabao. China's leaders have grown increasingly concerned that the widening wealth and income gap between the country's urban and rural citizens is a threat to social stability.
The idea that only a few people in a room are smart and the rest have a lot to prove is on trial this week in camp designed to change hearts and minds and eventually the culture of Memphis City Schools.
It all comes down to some simple brain theory, which 15 middle schoolers are soaking up at Douglass Elementary and five other city schools.
"Smart is not just something you are but something you get," says Barbara Logan, director of School Services and Training at the Efficacy Institute in Waltham, Mass.
With $1.1 million this year from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to Memphis City Schools, Efficacy plans to train several hundred "student envoys" responsible for preaching the gospel of discipline and self-esteem, and delivering the message that smart isn't by chance.
Could the adoption of common core standards lead to substantial academic gains, even if somehow developed and kept at a high level in some imaginary Federal Reserve type fortress of political solitude and kept safe from the great national dummy down?
I ran NAEP numbers for all 50 states and the District of Columbia and calculated the total gains on the main NAEP exams (4th and 8th grade Reading and Math) for the period that all states have been taking NAEP (2003-2009). In order to minimize educational and socio-economic differences, I compared the scores of non-special program (ELL, IEP) children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch.
I then ranked those 50 states, and the table below presents the Top 10, along with the total grades by year for the strength of state proficiency standards as measured by Paul Peterson. Peterson judges state assessments by comparing scores on the state exam to those on NAEP.
Two dozen children donned homemade mortarboards Wednesday for a commencement ceremony marking their graduation from a program designed to help them be ready for kindergarten this fall.
As many of their parents snapped photos, the children received certificates and were cheered by a crowd that included the graduates' siblings and officials from government and nonprofit agencies.
The ceremony and a picnic at Madison's Vilas Park celebrated the end of the first year of the KinderReady program, which served 320 children ages 3 to 5, far exceeding its goal of 200.
The surge was largely credited to a weekly call-in program, "Families Together," on La Movida, 1480-AM, a Spanish-language station, that includes learning activities for children, said Andy Benedetto, who is directing KinderReady for the nonprofit Children's Service Society of Wisconsin.
Although data measuring KinderReady's effects won't be available until next year, interviews with parents and officials suggest the program is helping prepare children for kindergarten.
Facing an estimated $427 million FY 2011 deficit, the Chicago Board of Education gave CPS CEO Ron Huberman emergency power to raise class sizes and lay-off almost 3,000 public school teachers. The schools' chief has not agreed to follow through with that plan quite yet. Instead, he's offering a "menu of possible concessions" to the Chicago Teachers Union and its new president-elect, Karen Lewis. Neither side will disclose what's on the list, although Lewis told the Reader's Hunter Clauss that she's hoping to survey her members this summer to find out exactly where they are willing to budge. "These official actions were partly procedural, and partly a way for Huberman and the board to publicly and skillfully back the teachers union into a corner," adds Catalyst's Sarah Karp.
In several print and television interviews yesterday morning, Lewis offered Huberman some alternative ways to trim costs. The new president set her sights on the city's contracts with consultants, which she said cost $300 million per year. She also discussed trimming the central office payroll and eliminating a $60 million program that provides curriculum packages and coaching to high schools. But to get a clear sense of the Daley administration's priorities, and find out where waste might exist, Lewis stressed that the budgeting process needs to be considerably more transparent to teachers and parents alike.
It took repeated Freedom of Information Act requests, for example, for the city to post basic payroll information online. And they've ignored consistent appeals to provide serious internal data on the effect of the city's tax increment financing system (TIF) on schools. From her acceptance speech this weekend (watch it here):
EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable, readily accessible data on graduation rates and other indicators for every school district and high school in the country.
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is proud to present this powerful online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders combat the nation's graduation crisis. EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable data on graduation rates for every school district and high school in the country.
This Web-based application allows users to easily map out graduation rates by zooming in on any of the nation's individual school districts. Users can then access detailed information for that district or any of its high schools.
In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality are often based on contemporaneous student performance on standardized achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching quality. We possess unique data that allow us to measure relative student performance in mandatory follow-on classes. We compare metrics that capture these three different notions of instructional quality and present evidence that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow-on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.
I do suggest one idea that I think has some promise: eliminate individual grades, and let students compete against other schools in academic competitions.
This idea is far from original. Rather, it comes from the eminent sociologist James Coleman. Coleman observed the striking fact that while students regularly cheer for their school's football or basketball team, they will poke fun or jeer at other students who study too hard or who are too eager in class: "the boy who goes all-out scholastically is scorned and rebuked for working too hard; the athlete who fails to go all-out is scorned and rebuked for not giving his all."
But this is odd, is it not? Why are attitudes toward academics and athletics so different? Sports are more fun than classwork, of course, but that does not explain why success would actually be discouraged in class.
Coleman's explanation was disarmingly simple: The students on the athletic teams are not competing against other students from their own school. Instead, they are competing against another school. And when they win a game, they bring glory to their fellow students, who get to feel like they too are victors, if only vicariously.
But the students in the same class are competing against each other for grades and for the teacher's attention. Naturally, that competition gives rise to resentment against other children who are too successful (just as students will hate the football team from a cross-town rival).....
On Monday, amidst the car horns and chatter, the sound of broken dreams echoed through Egypt's streets.
Young girls fainted in the arms of their sobbing mothers. Fathers screamed with rage, their faces contorted into grotesque expressions of indignation. In some areas, ambulances were called in to treat victims of shock.
The source of all this madness: the English test in the thanawaya aama, Egypt's annual nation-wide high school examination.
"They were suffering. The girls were crying, they were screaming. It was so difficult. All of them were suffering," said Ahmed Ghoneim, a high school English teacher at Imbaba Secondary School outside Cairo, whose telling of the sorrowful scene inside the examination room might have recalled a motorway accident or a vicious murder.
The American university, like the nation's other major social institutions -- government, banks, the media, health care -- was created for an industrial society. Buffeted by dramatic changes in demography, the economy, technology, and globalization, all these institutions function less well than they once did. In today's international information economy, they appear to be broken and must be refitted for a world transformed.
At the university, the clash between old and new is manifest in profound differences between institutions of higher education and the students they enroll. Today's traditional undergraduates, aged 18 to 25, are digital natives. They grew up in a world of computers, Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, and social networking.
States significantly increased buy-in from local teachers' unions in round two of the Race to the Top competition, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the states' education reform plans.
Those patterns emerged from an Education Week analysis of applications from 29 states and the District of Columbia, all of which entered both rounds of the $4 billion federal grant contest.
Although the changes made in applications from the first to the second round varied widely from state to state, union buy-in increased on average by 22 percentage points, with states such as Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin making big leaps.
At the same time, the overall level of district support and students affected in the 30 applications barely budged, mostly owing to California's loss of support from about 500 districts representing nearly 2 million students. That negated progress other states made in improving buy-in.
The rise, and rise, of Seattle schools: The Seattle Public Schools are undergoing dramatic changes. However, the story is not one of doom and gloom but of steady progress.
THERE is much to be optimistic about as Seattle Public Schools transform into an urban model of education quality and accessibility.
Dramatic change doesn't happen by tinkering around the edges. Nor is Seattle's thrust occurring in isolation. It is part of a welcome push by urban school districts across the country to improve access to good teaching, strong curriculum and better school resources.
The work under way is most visible in Seattle's shift from a costly open-choice system to a neighborhood assignment plan. Families got that they were exchanging choice -- which worked for a lucky few -- for a cheaper, simpler and fairer way to access schools and programs.
Making improvements in the middle of a deep recession required Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her team to aggressively leverage millions of dollars from credible organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and federal school-improvement grants.
Wholly appropriate, and much appreciated, is Seattle's civic and business organizations' willingness to fill a recession-driven vacuum in education funding. This kind of support has allowed the district to continue key improvements, including professional development for all principals and teachers and increasing popular programs such as foreign-language immersion and advanced classes.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted two external analyses of the performance of Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) 2008-9 3rd graders on the New York State Test in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The first analysis was based on a comparison of the performance of 2006-7 first graders (who became the 2008-9 3rd graders) who were chosen through a random selection lottery process to attend HSA, and remained in HSA through the 3rd grade, relative to those who were not admitted by lottery to attend HSA and remained in New York City public schools. The second analysis compared the same HSA 3rd graders to 3rd graders in geographically proximate and demographically comparable New York City public schools. Student results were compared separately for ELA and mathematics using ordinary least squares regression and controlling for student gender, age, and special education status. The results indicated that HSA 3rd graders performed statistically significantly better than did either the randomized comparison group or the students in the demographically similar schools. More specifically, attendance at HSA was associated with 34-59 additional scale score points (depending on test subject) for non-special education students, after adjusting for differences in student demographic characteristics. Described another way, these results represent between 13-19 percent higher test performance associated with attending Harlem Success Academy.
The Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) opened its doors in August 2006. The school, located in Harlem Community School District 3 of New York City at 118th street and Lenox Avenue, is currently a K-4 school that intends to add a grade each year as students matriculate until it is a full K-8 school. HSA is one of four existing Harlem Success Academies founded by the Success Charter Network. Over the next ten years, the Success Charter Network plans to expand the network to 40 schools.
Students are admitted into HSA through an annual lottery which randomly selects students to attend the school from the pool of applicants. Any student who lives in New York City can apply to HSA and the school uses the lottery process to determine who will attend the school. Since the school has documented both the students who applied to HSA and were accepted through the lottery, as well as those who applied and were not selected, these conditions make for an experimental study of the impact of HSA on student learning outcomes.
Have you thought about having your students create voice-over presentations to share with your class? Instead of (or in addition to) having your students give live class presentations, a voice-over PowerPoint can be easily recorded and shared through the LMS.
The 5 best things about using Jing, PowerPoint and the Discussion Board:
The charter school's popular director resigned abruptly at mid-year. One third of the faculty vowed not to return next year. E-mail allegations of poor management and failed communication clogged the in-boxes of parents, teachers and board members.
And that's just in Excelsior Academy's first year.
The K-8 charter school in Erda -- Tooele County's first charter -- has had a rocky start.
So do many charter schools, which have to find or build a school house, navigate state laws and recruit a board and staff, typically with limited funds and expertise. The public schools receive money from the state for each pupil they enroll at the same rate as other public schools, but must raise funds for other expenses.
New schools often face opposition from parents and teachers when they don't function as expected.
Earlier this week, the New York Times published the first part of a two-part series by John Tierney looking at the current state of women in the sciences--in particular, whether the playing field can ever really be level, or whether innate neural differences mean there will always be more men getting ahead in science and math careers than women.
When Dr. Larry Summers raised the issue to fellow economists and other researchers at a conference in 2005, his hypothesis was caricatured in the press as a revival of the old notion that "girls can't do math." But Dr. Summers said no such thing. He acknowledged that there were many talented female scientists and discussed ways to eliminate the social barriers they faced. Yet even if all these social factors were eliminated, he hypothesized, the science faculty composition at an elite school like Harvard might still be skewed by a biological factor: the greater variability observed among men in intelligence test scores and various traits.
Almost a decade ago, third graders at seven high-poverty schools in the Twin Cities got an offer: Stay in school, and we'll give you $10,000 for college. All the students had to do was stay in the Minneapolis or St. Paul public schools, graduate, and go to college. Midday looks at how the experiment turned out.
In a class full of aspiring engineers, the big bad wolf had to do more than just huff and puff to blow down the three little pigs' house.
To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs -- and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.
"Excellent engineering," their teacher, Mary Morrow, told them one day early this month.
All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C's of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.
Ravitch was assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush and a board member of various right-wing think tanks, who has now become a leading critic of the market-based school "reform" that has been embraced by both Democrats and Republicans. Ravitch is "still looking" for an elected official to take a stand against these changes, but opposition is more likely to come from below. One encouraging piece of news is the landslide victory this week of the Caucus Of Rank-and-file Educators in the election for the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. --PG
As a part of the economic stimulus package of January 2009 -- you may have heard of it -- the federal government created a $100 billion education fund for states that were willing to take bold action to reform and improve their schools.
The fund, known as Race to the Top, is having the desired effect in many places. With state budgets in dire shape across the nation, it has provided a real incentive for states to look for ways to innovate in order to address real problems in the educational system -- failing schools, bureaucratic deadlock, the achievement gap between rich and poor students.
In Wisconsin, though, what it has inspired is something more like a few pro-forma changes and half-hearted applications.
Wisconsin ranked in the bottom half of all the states that applied for Race to the Top funding in the first round in March. (The federal government placed our state's application 26th out of 41 states and the District of Columbia that applied.)
Ten years after Wisconsin overhauled its licensure system for public school educators, the first big wave of teachers is set to advance under the rules - and reports are mixed on whether the change has made a difference.
Expectations for the new licensure regulations were high when they were first approved in 2000. In addition to requiring that teachers pass basic knowledge and skills tests and receive mentors for their first year in the profession, the rules also provided that teachers would have to demonstrate they had grown enough in their careers to attain a "professional" license.
For some beginning teachers, the new rules have been stressful additions to the start of an unfamiliar career with many bugs still left to be worked out. Others say they appreciate that they could set their own teaching goals and pursue related professional development activities while also reflecting on their experiences.
"I think teachers who really take the process seriously and do it with fidelity - they choose a goal that they really believe in and they want to achieve - that's fine, that's good, it serves its purpose," said Judy Gundry, a citywide mentor for educators with initial teaching licenses in Milwaukee Public Schools.
More than 160 teachers in Houston ISD's under-performing middle and high schools weren't offered jobs at those campuses next year, the district announced Friday evening. The decision affects staffing at nine schools targeted in Superintendent Terry Grier's "Apollo 20" reform plan.
Of the 600 teachers at those schools last year, 358 -- or 60 percent -- learned on Friday that the district wants them to return to help with the improvement efforts. But the district is forcing 162 teachers, or 27 percent of the staff, out of those schools. The administration made the decisions based on "an exhaustive data-driven evaluation" of the teachers, according to the news release, which didn't specify what data were used.
An additional 80 teachers at the targeted schools previously had decided to retire, resign or transfer to other campuses, according to HISD. "In some cases, teachers opted not to stay due to a personal conflict with the longer school year and longer school day schedules of the Apollo schools," the news release said.
Each year, Newsweek picks the best high schools in the country based on how hard school staffs work to challenge students with advanced placement college-level courses and tests. Just over 1600 schools--only six percent of all the public schools in the U.S.--made the list.
This year rankings have some fantastic new interactive features. We've teamed up with a data company called Factual to create individual profile pages for each school where students and faculty can comment and contribute. (For more information about how the rankings were calculated, see our FAQ.)
Mostly Milwaukee area high schools such as Rufus King (318) made the list. The only non-southeast Wisconsin high schools to make the list was Marshfield (370) and Eau Claire Memorial (1116). Marshfield High School offers 29 AP classes while Milwaukee Rufus King offers 0 and Eau Claire Memorial offers 14, via AP Course Ledger.
Colorado is changing the rules for how teachers earn and keep the sweeping job protections known as tenure, long considered a political sacred cow around the country.
Many education reform advocates consider tenure to be one of the biggest obstacles to improving America's schools because it makes removing mediocre or even incompetent teachers difficult. Teacher unions, meanwhile, have steadfastly defended tenure for decades.
Colorado's legislature changed tenure rules despite opposition from the state's largest teacher's union, a longtime ally of majority Democrats. Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, signed the bill into law last month.
After the bill survived a filibuster attempt and passed a key House vote, Democratic Rep. Nancy Todd, a 25-year teacher who opposed the measure, broke into tears.
"I don't question your motives," an emotional Todd said to the bill's proponents. "But I do want you to hear my heart because my heart is speaking for over 40,000 teachers in the state of Colorado who have been given the message that it is all up to them."
While other states have tried to modify tenure, Colorado's law was the boldest education reform in recent memory, according to Kate Walsh, the president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which promotes changing the way teachers are recruited and retained, including holding tenured teachers accountable with annual reviews.
I. Introduction
A. Title or topic - District Evaluation Protocol - The presentation is in response to the need to provide timely and prioritized information to the Board of Education around programs and interventions used within the District. The report describes a recommended approach to formalizing the program evaluation process within the District.
B. Presenters Kurt Kiefer - Chief Information Office/Director of Research and Evaluation Lisa Wachtel- Executive Director of Teaching & Learning Steve Hartley - Chief of Staff
C. Background information - As part of the strategic plan it was determined that priority must be given to systematically collect data around programs and services provided within the district. The purposes for such information vary from determining program and intervention effectiveness for specific student outcomes, to customer satisfaction, to cost effectiveness analyses. In addition, at the December 2009 Board meeting the issue of conducting program evaluation in specific curricular areas was discussed. This report provides specific recommendations on how to coordinate such investigations and studies.
D. Action requested - The administration is requesting that the Board approve this protocol such that it becomes the model by which priority is established for conducting curricular, program, and intervention evaluations into the future.
II. Summary of Current Information
A. Synthesis of the topic· School districts are expected to continuously improve student achievement and ensure the effective use of resources. Evaluation is the means by which school systems determine the degree to which schools, programs, departments, and staff meet their goals as defined by their roles and responsibilities. It involves the collection of data that is then transformed into useful results to inform decisions. In particular, program evaluation is commonly defined as the systematic assessment of the operation and/or outcomes of a program, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program.
Program evaluation is a process. The first step to evaluating a program is to have a clear understanding of why the evaluation is being conducted in the first place. Focusing the evaluation helps an evaluator identify the most crucial questions and how those questions can be realistically answered given the context of the program and resources available. With a firm understanding of programs and/or activities that might be evaluated, evaluators consider who is affected by the program (stakeholders) and who might receive and or use information resulting from the evaluation (audiences). It is critical that the administration work with the
Evaluating the effectiveness of Madison School District expenditures on curriculum (such as math and reading recovery) along with professional development (adult to adult programs) has long been discussed by some Board and community members.
In perhaps President Obama's most stealth campaign to date, the federal government has been slowly tightening its grip on the education sector to little fanfare. Rather than working through the democratic legislative process, this Administration has circumvented Congress to enact an ill-conceived education agenda that will weaken accountability, reduce transparency and minimize choice while only adding to the national deficit.
For close to four decades, the federal government has operated under the seemingly simple premise that increased spending on education will translate into academic achievement. This line of thinking has resulted in inflation-adjusted
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2008/09/Does-Spending-More-on-Education-Improve-Academic-Achievement">federal expenditures on education increasing 138 percent since 1985. Per-pupil expenditures have ballooned to
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/05/Creating-a-Crisis-Schools-Gain-Staff-Not-Educational-Achievement">over $11,000 per student, and are even higher in most urban areas including the District of Columbia where the government spends
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2009/02/DC-Opportunity-Scholarship-Program-Study-Supports-Expansion">$14,500 on each child. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into our public school system because the federal government, backed by powerful teachers unions, is convinced that it is best suited to administer our country's education system. Unfortunately,
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2008/09/Does-Spending-More-on-Education-Improve-Academic-Achievement">this approach has been a miserable failure.>
Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation's public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.
Driving the boom is a surge in federal funding for such products, the industry's aggressive marketing and an idea axiomatic in the world of education reform: that to prepare students kids for the 21st century, schools must embrace the technologies that are the media of modern life.
Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn't necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the whiteboard -- essentially a giant interactive computer screen that is usurping blackboards in classrooms across America -- locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction counter to the more collaborative small-group models that many reformers favor.
Opportunity at the Top, a great report from Public Impact, points out that it's great teachers that close achievement gaps but that all current efforts will fall well short of ensuring that all US students see the benefits.
The problem is that we're trying to solve the wrong problem-there's just no way to make the batch-print model work well for all kids. Batch processing age-cohorts in groups of 25 (or more) kids through print curriculum with one teacher has lots of limitations. The Public Agenda report shows it's mathematically impossible to put a great teacher in every room and even if we did some kids would be behind while other kids were ahead.
Even the accompanying 3x For All report falls short of the answer because it is rooted in teacher-centric delivery. The solution is a blended learning environment with tiered staffing that leverages great teachers across hundreds of kids. If personalized digital learning made up 1/3 of the elementary day and 2/3 of the secondary day, school staffing patterns can be adjusted to include a variety of learning professionals-some on site and some remote.
Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier has eliminated the position of manager of magnet programs. That means Dottie Bonner, who held the job since March 2002, is out. She submitted her letter of resignation effective Aug. 31, according to the district.
Grier instead has created a higher-level position, an assistant superintendent over school choice. Lupita Hinojosa, the former executive principal over the Wheatley High School feeder pattern, has been named to the post.
We know that changing anything related to magnets puts parents on edge, especially after former HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra's failed attempt to reduce busing to the specialty schools. A quick Internet search shows that magnet transportation also was a hot topic in Grier's former district, San Diego Unified. The school board there voted in spring 2009 to eliminate busing to magnets to save money but reversed the decision after parent outcry, according to Voice of San Diego.
I talked to Grier this morning about what happened in San Diego, and he said the decision to end busing to magnet schools was the school board's, not his. "(Deputy Superintendent) Chuck Morris and I counseled and advised and recommended that they not do this -- that it would destroy the magnet program -- but they did anyway."
How does a university rate the quality of a professor? In K-12 education, you have standardized tests, and those scores have never been more widely used in evaluating the value added by a teacher.
But there's no equivalent at the college level. College administrators tend to rely on student evaluations. If students say a professor is doing a good job, perhaps that's enough.
Or maybe not. A new study reaches the opposite conclusion: professors who rate highly among students tend to teach students less. Professors who teach students more tend to get bad ratings from their students -- who, presumably, would just as soon get high grades for minimal effort.
The study finds that professor rank, experience and stature are far more predictive of how much their students will learn. But those professors generally get bad ratings from students, who are effectively punishing their professors for attempting to push them toward deeper learning.
The study is called "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors." It was written by Scott E. Carrell of the University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research; and James E. West of the U.S. Air Force Academy
Just when it looked like things were quieting down at troubled Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, the place that became famous when all of the teachers were fired and then rehired, there's a new controversy.
One of the two newly named co-principals was approved by the Central Falls Board of Trustees this week even though his resumé said that math scores at his former school were much higher than they really were, according to the Providence Journal.
Let's review: In March, all of the teachers and other educators at the only high school in Central Falls, Rhode Island's smallest and poorest city, were fired so that the school could be restructured with a new staff.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo for firing all of the educators in the building, and President Obama said it showed "a sense of accountability."
Madison School District Board of Education Progress Report--March through June 2010
Maya Cole, Board President & Beth Moss Board Vice-President, Via email:
The 2009-10 school year is over, and the Board is wrapping up a very busy spring 2010. After several months of hard work, the Board finalized the preliminary 2010-11 budget on June 1. For the second year in a row, the state legislature decreased the amount of per pupil state aid by 15%. This decrease in revenue, coupled with a decrease in property values in the Madison Metropolitan School District, created a much larger than usual budget shortfall. This year is different because unlike previous years when the Board of Education was not allowed to raise property taxes to cover the shortfall, this year the state gave the Board the authority to raise taxes by an extreme amount. The Board and administration have worked hard to mitigate the tax impact while preserving programs in our schools.
2010-11 Budget Details:
The Board approved a preliminary budget of $360,131,948 after creating savings of over $13 million across all departments in the district. This budget represents a decrease of over $10 million from 2009-10. The final tax impact on a home of average value ($250k) is $225. The Board made reductions that did not directly affect instruction in the classroom, avoiding mass teacher lay-offs as experienced by many districts around the country and state.
Other State action:
The School Age Guarantee for Education (SAGE) Act was changed from funding K-3 class sizes of 15:1 to 18:1. The Board is considering how to handle this change in state funding.
Race to the Top is a competitive grant program run through the federal government. The state of Wisconsin applied for Race to the Top funding in round 1 and was denied. The Board approved the application for the second round of funding. Federal money will be awarded to states that qualify and the MMSD could receive $8,239,396.
Board of Education Election:
Thank you for 6 years of service and good luck to Johnny Winston, Jr. Taking his seat is James Howard, an economist with the Forest Service and MMSD parent. New Board officers are Maya Cole, president, Beth Moss, vice president, Ed Hughes, clerk, and James Howard, treasurer.
Sarah Maslin, our student representative from West High School, will be off to Yale University in the fall. Thank you for your service and good luck, Sarah! Congratulations to Wyeth Jackson, also from West, who won the election for student representative to the Board of Education. Jessica Brooke from La Follette will return as Student Senate president and alternate to the BOE Student Representative.
Other news:
In April the board received the following reports:
The Facility Assessment Report, a compilation of district maintenance needs over the next 5 years.
The Board of Education/Superintendent Communication Plan, providing a template for reports to the Board.
The District Reorganization Plan, a plan to restructure the administration and professional development department of the district.
The Board held a public hearing on the proposed budget at UW Space Place. In addition, the School Food Initiative Committee and the 4-K Advisory Committee met.
In May the Strategic Planning Steering Committee met. Stakeholders reviewed accomplishments achieved thus far and discussed and reprioritized action steps for the next year. A second public hearing on the budget was also held in May.
In June the Board finalized the Preliminary Budget after a statutory public hearing. During committee meetings on June 7, the ReAL grant team presented action plans for each of the large high schools and gave the Board an update on the ReAL grant and the Wallace grant. The four high schools have collaborated for the past two years to improve engagement and achievement at our high schools. The Student Services and Code of Conduct/Expulsions Committee presented a proposal for a new code of conduct and abeyance, with an emphasis on restorative justice.
Congratulations and good luck to all graduates! Have a safe and restful summer break.
I started covering education reform in 1983, with the release of the "Nation at Risk" report. In those days everybody had some idea for how we should reorganize the schools or change the curriculum--cut school size, cut class size, create vouchers, create charters, get back to basics, do less basics, increase local control, increase the federal role.
Some of the reforms seemed promising, but the results were disappointing, and tangential to the core issue: the relationship between teacher and student. It is mushy to say so, but people learn from people they love.
Today, aided by the realization that teacher quality is what matters most, a new cadre of reformers have come on the scene, many of them bred within the ranks of Teach for America. These are stubborn, data-driven types with a low tolerance for bullshit. The reform environment they find themselves in is both softhearted and hardheaded. They put big emphasis on the teaching relationship, but are absolutely Patton-esque when it comes to dismantling anything that interferes with that relationship. This includes union rules that protect bad and mediocre teachers, teacher contracts that prevent us from determining which educators are good and which need help, and state and federal laws that either impede reform or dump money into the ancien régime.
I have long considered high school drop-outs not only the least soluble of our education problems but the least clear. School districts have traditionally fudged the numbers, reporting their drop-out rates as only 5 or 6 percent, a grossly deceptive one-year rate.
The National Governors Association and other policymakers, ashamed of this charade, have put an end to it. Everyone is switching to a four-year drop-out rate, the percentage of ninth-graders (about 31 percent nationally) who do not receive diplomas four years later. The improved data has not only raised the level of the debate but also made possible a new report with some unnerving revelations about graduation rates.
My wife made the mistake of letting me go with her to her office last Sunday to catch up on work. While there I read the new Education Week report, "Graduation by the Numbers: Putting Data to Work for Student Success," and kept squealing at one statistical surprise after another. I insisted on reading each one to her, delaying her efforts to get back outside on a nice weekend day.
Announcing the SUMMER 2010 Online Issue of Gifted Education Press Quarterly
via a Maurice Fisher email:
Dear Subscriber --
Could you share the following message with your STAFF, TEACHERS OR PARENTS? We are offering a complimentary copy of Gifted Education Press Quarterly. They would need to email me directly to receive our SUMMER 2010 issue. My email address is:
gifted@giftededpress.com
Please encourage your colleagues and friends to email me for a complimentary online subscription to GEPQ.
I need your help in locating new subscribers, and would greatly appreciate your asking colleagues and friends to contact me. We are now in a major political battle with federal and state governments to maintain gifted education programs in the public schools. I need your support in making Gifted Education Press Quarterly a resource available to all educators and parents who want to maintain and expand programs for gifted students! Your colleagues and friends should email me at: gifted@giftededpress.com. Thank you.
We're all on a mission to advance the well-being of gifted education, and we all share a vision of excellence in this field. At this time in our nation's history, it is important to maintain our leadership in education, science and the humanities. Therefore, I am asking the readers of Gifted Education Press Quarterly for your support to insure that we can continue publishing this Quarterly. Please consider sending a few dollars to help defray the costs of producing this important periodical in the gifted education field or ordering some of our books. We have been publishing GEPQ for 23 years with the goal of including all viewpoints on educating the gifted. Our address is: Gifted Education Press; 10201 Yuma Court; P.O. Box 1586; Manassas, VA 20109. Thank you.
I would also like to give you a special treat. Joan Smutny, the editor of the Illinois Association for Gifted Children Journal has given me permission to place the entire Spring 2010 Journal on the Gifted Education Press web site in PDF format. This is a very important journal issue in the gifted education field because it contains 27 excellent articles on Advocating for Gifted Education Programs. I invite you to read and/or print any or all of these articles from our web site. There is no charge for accessing this journal! Just go to my web site at www.GiftedEdPress.com and click the link for Gifted Advocacy - Illinois Association for Gifted Children Journal. Happy reading!
Members of the National Advisory Panel for Gifted Education Press Quarterly are:
Dr. Hanna David -- Ben Gurion University at Eilat, Israel; Dr. James Delisle -- Kent State University; Dr. Jerry Flack -- University of Colorado; Dr. Howard Gardner -- Harvard University; Ms. Margaret Gosfield - Editor, Gifted Education Communicator, Published by the California Association for the Gifted; Ms. Dorothy Knopper -- Publisher, Open Space Communications; Mr. James LoGiudice -- Bucks County, Pennsylvania IU No. 22; Dr. Bruce Shore -- McGill University, Montreal, Quebec; Ms. Joan Smutny -- National-Louis University, Illinois; Dr. Colleen Willard-Holt -- Dean, Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario; Ms. Susan Winebrenner -- Consultant, San Marcos, California; Dr. Ellen Winner -- Boston College.
Sincerely Yours in the Best Interests of the Gifted Children of America,
Maurice
Maurice Fisher, Ph.D.
Publisher
Gifted Education Press
Attention Parents who are Homeschooling their Gifted Children, or Parents or Teachers who are Interested in Using Additional Enrichment Materials in the Home or Classroom. Please see our Latest Book by Robert E. Myers at:
1. By Maurice & Eugenia Fisher, Editors: Heroes of Giftedness: An Inspirational Guide for Gifted Students and Their Teachers --Presenting the Personal Heroes of Twelve Experts on Gifted Education. Discusses Highly Gifted Individuals who can be used as models for motivating gifted students to study different fields of knowledge.
"Heroes of Giftedness: An Inspirational Guide is an exciting new edition to gifted education literature. It well fulfills its purpose in the inspiring, exhilarating accounts of famous individuals and their contribution to the world. Gifted students, teachers, and parents will benefit hugely from these biographies of great men and women who overcame personal and professional challenges to move forward in their fields." Joan Smutny, Director The Center for Gifted National-Louis University
"My view of the world is that people are best served when they find their passion early on, because we tend to be good at things we're passionate about. I think we also need to find people whom we admire and try to emulate them." Chesley Sullenberger, the Captain who successfully guided US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River on January 15, 2009 (From Air & Space Magazine, May 2009, p. 11) http://www.giftededpress.com/HEROESOFGIFTEDNESS.htm
2. By Harry T. Roman: Energizing Your Gifted Students' Creative Thinking & Imagination: Using Design Principles, Team Activities, and Invention Strategies --A Complete Lesson Guide for Upper Elementary and Middle School Levels. Concentrates on nurturing Gifted Children's Applied Creative Thinking and Imagination to solve practical and real world problems. This book will help them become masters at using engineering and design principles in their everyday life in the school and home.
3. By Robert E. Myers: Golden Quills: Creative Thinking and Writing Lessons for Middle-School Gifted Students. Contains Twenty-Seven Challenging Lessons for Stimulating Creative Learning in Language Arts. Further information can be found at:
4. By Judy Micheletti: MORE SNIBBLES: Serendipitous Seasons. This book focuses on how to motivate gifted students to be more creative at their school and home, and it contains several delightful line drawings that will entice the imagination of all curious children and adults. Further information can be found at:
5. By Harry T. Roman: Solar Power, Fuel Cells, Wind Power and Other Important Environmental Studies for Upper Elementary and Middle School Gifted Students and Their Teachers: A Technology, Problem-Solving and Invention Guide. It is perfect for use in Tech Ed, pre-engineering and environmental courses and study units. Further information can be found at:
All of these books are useful resources for gifted students and their parents and teachers. They can be ordered directly from Gifted Education Press or through Amazon.com. All orders under $50.00 (sent to GEP) must be prepaid. Orders of $50.00 or more (sent to GEP) can be made with a purchase order. If you have any questions, please email me. Please add 10% for Postage and Handling. Thank you.
South Korea has some of the world's most over-educated bakers. In one class in Seoul teaching muffin and scone-making, there are graduates in Russian, fine art and animation. For South Korean parents, the world's highest spenders on their children's education, something is going horribly wrong.
"I wanted to ease the burden on my parents by earning just a little something and finding a job that could give me something more dependable than temporary work," said one 29-year-old trainee baker. Since graduating in art she could only find part-time work as a waitress. Like so many young people asked about finding work in a socially competitive society where unemployment is a stigma, she was too embarrassed to give her name.
South Koreans often attribute their economic success to a passion for education. But the country of 48m has overdone it, with 407 colleges and universities churning out an over-abundance of graduates.
The new national standards are too timid to recommend that high school students read complete history (or other nonfiction) books, or that high school students should write serious research papers, like the Extended Essays required for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.
Even the College Board, when it put together "101 books for the college-bound student" included only four or five nonfiction books, and none was a history book like Battle Cry of Freedom, or Washington's Crossing.
For several reasons it has become taboo to discuss asking our students to read complete nonfiction books and write substantial term papers. Not sure why...
In fact, since the early days of Achieve's efforts on standards, no one has taken a stand in recommending serious history research papers for high school students, and nonfiction books have never made the cut either.
Since 1987 or so it has seemed just sensible to me that, as long as colleges do assign history and other nonfiction books on their reading lists, and they also assign research papers, perhaps high school students should read a nonfiction book and write a term paper each year, to get in academic shape, as it were.
After all, in helping students prepare for college math, many high schools offer calculus. For college science, high school students can get ready with biology, chemistry and physics courses. To get ready for college literature courses, students read good novels and Shakespeare plays. Students can study languages and government and even engineering and statistics in their high schools, but they aren't reading nonfiction books and they aren't writing research papers.
The English departments, who are in charge of reading and writing in the high schools, tend to assign novels, poetry, and plays rather than nonfiction books, and they have little interest in asking for serious research papers either.
For 23 years, I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students from near and far [39 countries so far], and it gradually became clearer to me that perhaps most high school students were not being asked to write them.
In 2002, with a grant from the Shanker Institute, I was able to commission (the only) study of the assignment of history term papers in U.S. public high schools, and we found that most students were not being asked to do them. This helped to explain why, even though The Concord Review is the only journal in the world to publish such academic papers, more than 19,000 of the 20,000 U.S. public high schools never submitted one.
The nonfiction readings suggested in the new national standards, such as The Declaration of Independence, Letter From Birmingham Jail, and one chapter from The Federalist Papers, would not tax high school students for more than an hour, much less time than they now spend on Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and the like. What would the equivalent be for college preparation in math: long division? decimals?
High school graduates who arrive at college without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious term paper, even if they are not in remedial courses (and more than one million are each year, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report), start way behind their IB and private school peers academically, when it comes to reading and writing at the college level.
Having national standards which would send our high school graduates off to higher education with no experience of real term papers and no complete nonfiction books doesn't seem the right way to make it likely that they will ever get through to graduation.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 http://www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850.
But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.
The district said the educators had distributed a detailed study guide after stealing a look at the state science test by "tubing" it -- squeezing a test booklet, without breaking its paper seal, to form an open tube so that questions inside could be seen and used in the guide. The district invalidated students' scores.
Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as educators tampering with children's standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher -- including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers' performance reviews.
In the center of Boston is the Boston Common, where there are several small statues of the ducklings made famous by the book "Make Way for Ducklings". Long before I became a parent, I bought a painting from a local Boston artist that depicted the statues of the ducklings from that children's book. In a decision of radical faith in the future, and one that involved finding a few extra dollars that I, as a graduate student, didn't really have at the time, I bought it and decided that if I was ever to have a child, I would hang it in their room. I know that someday my daughter will outgrow it, but for now, it hangs above her desk in her room. I hope to visit the Boston Commons with her some day and show her the original statues that depict the characters from the book which she, of course, has a copy of. If such a visit takes place some year, it will be after my summer school class has ended for the summer.
I know of many people who claim that that just don't teach summer school. The pay is often not great, and it takes away from time that might be spent on research and course development. However, someone must teach summer classes, which reminds me of the question of the "tragedy of the commons." Like the farmers who all brought their cows to graze in the commons in the center of town, each individual professor is asking whether they, as individuals, wish to teach summer school. Something similar happens as is found when the common grazing land is depleted as too many cows are brought to the commons to graze. In both cases, since a "public good" is involved, the individual decisions may not lead to an optimum result. Too few professors may end up choosing to teach at that time.
The Board has two work sessions scheduled for this month.
The first, today, Thursday June 10 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, will be on Math. No agenda details are available but there is sure to be a powerpoint and it is sure to appear on the District web site soon. I have to believe that the Board is looking for a report on the implementation of the curricular alignment, the implementation of the Theory of Action from the High School textbook adoption, and some update on student academic progress in math.
Next week, on Wednesday, June 16, from 4:00pm to 5:30pm, will be a Board Work Session on Advanced Learning. I honestly cannot imagine what the District staff will have to report
With a little tweaking "The Lottery" would fit nicely into the marketing materials for the Harlem Success Academy, a public charter school founded by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman. On one level, this heart-tugging documentary recounts the experiences of four children competing in the academy's annual intake lottery. On another, it's a passionate positioning of charter schools as the saviors of public education.
Though infinitely classier -- and easier on the eyes -- than "Cartel," the recent documentary exploring public education, this latest charter-school commercial is no less one-sided. Virtually relinquishing the floor to Ms. Moskowitz (who delights in vilifying the "thuggish" tactics of the United Federation of Teachers) and her supporters, the director, Madeleine Sackler, captures a smidgen of naysayers in mostly unflattering lights. Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.
This fall, Jeanet Ugalde will attend UW-Madison on a full scholarship to study nursing. But first, she'll be among the initial group of students receiving a diploma as part of a Madison School District program designed to give first-generation college-bound students the training to succeed in high school and post-secondary education.
"When I got the (UW acceptance) letter ... I cried and I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. When I get the (tuition) bill around July and it says 'zero,' I will be so amazed," Ugalde, the first person in her family to graduate from high school, said of being accepted to college.
Started three years ago at East High and now running in all four Madison high schools, AVID, which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination, is designed to give "students in the middle" who may be the first in their families to graduate high school and attend college the training to succeed. The correlating TOPS -- Teens of Promise -- program is focused on extracurricular activities, including summer work internships.
Over at Flypaper Mike Petrilli has finally tried to address the problems we've raised regarding national standards. Despite Mike's best efforts, I'm afraid that national standards and assessments still sound like a really bad idea.
I raised doubts about the rigor and soundness of the proposed national standards, citing the fact that many credible experts have denounced them as lousy. His response is simply to repeat that Fordham has given the standards good grades and thinks the latest revisions have been positive. This is not a substantive response; it is simply a reiteration of their initial position.
Why should we find Fordham's grading of the proposed national standards any more credible than that of the experts who have denounced the standards? The fact that Fordham issued a report with letter grades is just a marketing exercise for Fordham's opinion. There is nothing scientific or rigorous about Fordham hand-picking their friends experts to repeat the opinion Fordham already holds -- especially when we know from past experience that Fordham might exclude experts or change the grades if it does not come out the way they want.
Some neophyte politicians spent megabucks gained from their famous companies to persuade California voters Tuesday to grant them a spot on the November ballot.
Then there was Larry Aceves. The retired superintendent of San Jose's Franklin-McKinley, a school district obscure even in its own county, stumbled onto the ballot for California's superintendent of public instruction after a low-budget campaign tour of the Rotary and PTA circuit. Topping 11 other candidates, Aceves won 18.8 percent of the statewide vote, the secretary of state's office reported Wednesday, shocking two better financed and more experienced candidates.
"I pinched myself several times to make sure this wasn't a dream," the until now, little-known educator said Wednesday morning.
Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Martinez, won 18 percent and the chance to face Aceves in a November runoff. Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, earned 17.2 percent of the vote, while nine others each got less than 10 percent in their quest to replace outgoing schools chief Jack O'Connell.
This is the second in a series of interviews with thought leaders in education reform. Today we interview former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise about personalized learning, equity and policy changes that will enable a better system for our students.
What is the vision for personalized learning?
For personalized learning, it's delivering high-quality content to children and students wherever they live. I mean, whatever their conditions, their life situations, their educaiton surroundings. It's being able to customize education so that we engage each student where they want to be, and make it as relevant as possible to them.
Personalization to me is the sense of making sure there is a personal graduation plan for every student, making sure a direct relationship bteween at least one adult in the building and one student.
Even if you are using data...there is data that immediately is picking up whether they are increasing absences, etc...and someone is charged with intervening. How do we take what is a largely impersonal experience, to using technology that is actually helping education become a more personal experience.
Can a $50 stack of paperbacks do as much for a child's academic fortunes as a $3,000 stint in summer school?
Researchers think so. Now, an experimental program in seven states -- including the Chicago Public Schools -- will give thousands of low-income students an armful of free books this summer.
Research has shown that giving books to kids might be as effective at keeping them learning over the summer as summer school -- and a lot cheaper. The big questions are whether the effect can be replicated on a large scale -- and whether it can help reduce the achievement gap between low-income and middle-class students.
Schools have always tried to get students to read over the summer. For middle-class students, that's not as big a deal. They usually have access to books, says Richard Allington, a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
The 14-hour study sessions were over but the nerves remained for Tong Dan as she squeezed in some last-minute cramming during a lunch break Monday from the most important test she and millions of other Chinese teens will ever take.
Each year, about 10 million high school seniors across China take the "gaokao" -- the exam that is the sole determinant for whether they get into a university. About 68 percent of test takers this year are expected to pass -- but for the vast majority who don't it means they head straight into the search for a low-paying, blue-collar job.
But even a college degree no longer guarantees graduates a good job in China's increasingly competitive workplace. With about 700,000 of last year's university graduates still unemployed, there is added pressure on students like 17-year-old Tong to do well on the two-day college entrance exam and gain one of the few coveted slots at the country's elite schools.
China has poured billions of dollars into a massive university expansion plan over the past few decades, meaning the number of graduates will skyrocket to a record 6.3 million this year, compared to 1 million in 1998. The expansion has also led to a widening gap between the quality of education found in many universities, especially those in poorer provinces, and the top schools.
As the number of black children in Dallas ISD declined over the last decade, the number of black activists closely observing school board meetings has dwindled to a few in the audience.
And some leaders of a civil rights group that once battled for equal education in Dallas schools are now urging black parents to send their kids elsewhere. Some say the rising attention to the needs of children learning English is overshadowing the needs of black students.
As their focus wanes from Dallas ISD, some fear a powerful lobby for the interests of the district's minority students could be lost.
"It's not a surprise to anybody that blacks are leaving DISD," said Juanita Wallace, president of the Dallas NAACP. "We know that Hispanics are really taking over the school district. The whites are completely gone, and now blacks are going."
I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. It became black and misshapen and I finally took it off. But now I have a new one, courtesy of the organizing committee of my 55th high school reunion, which I attended over the Memorial Day weekend.
I wore the ring (and will wear it again) because although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with. The name tells the story. When I attended, offerings and requirements included four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history, civics, in addition to extra-curricular activities, and clubs -- French Club, Latin Club, German Club, Science Club, among many others. A student body made up of the children of immigrants or first generation Americans; many, like me, the first in their families to finish high school. Nearly a 100 percent college attendance rate. A yearbook that featured student translations from Virgil and original poems in Latin.
We our now entering the second round of "Race to the Top." State legislatures are busy worshiping at the alter of "charter schools" in order to establish their eligibility.
The radio, television, and print ads show a very unlikely and powerful coalition supporting the demand for new charter schools - Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, JP Morgan, assorted hedge funds, Michael "Moneybags" Bloomberg, Joel "Clueless" Klein, and Reverend Al Sharpton. The impression they are trying to give is that everybody whose opinion we trust thinks it is a good idea and that the teachers and their evil union want to block reform that will benefit our children.
On May 27, 2010, JP Morgan Chase ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times with the headline The Way Forward, Investing in Our Children's Future. It cost the bank approximately $180,000. This is the same JP Morgan Chase that received a $25 billion bailout from Congress as part of the federal Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Just because the bank can't manage its own affairs, does not mean it shouldn't manage ours.
Six of the seven Madison schools that made the federal list of schools in need of improvement last year are on it again, including two Madison elementary schools that faced sanctions for failing to meet No Child Left Behind standards.
In addition, three out of four Madison high schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, according to state Department of Public Instruction data released Tuesday. DeForest, Middleton and Sun Prairie high schools also made the list.
Statewide, 145 schools and four districts missed one or more adequate yearly progress targets. Last year 148 schools and four districts made the list, according to DPI. This year 89 Wisconsin schools were identified for improvement, up from 79 last year.
"These reports, based off a snapshot-in-time assessment, present one view of a school's progress and areas that need improvement," said State Superintendent Tony Evers in a statement.
The Lottery is a feature-length documentary that explores the struggles and dreams of four families from Harlem and the Bronx in the months leading up to the lottery for Harlem Success Academy, one of the most successful charter schools in New York. The four families cast their lots in a high-stakes draw, where only a small majority of children emerge with a chance at a better future. The vast majority of hopefuls will be turned away.
By interlacing the families' stories with the emotional and highly politicized battle over the future of American education, The Lottery is a call to action to avert a catastrophe in the education of American children. With heart, humor and hope, The Lottery makes the case that any child, given the right educational circumstances, can succeed.
Packed neatly on the bookshelves in Mark Changizi's Carnegie Building office sit stacks of notebooks containing hundreds of questions. Why do we have fingernails? Why are organs packaged in such a specific way inside our bodies? Why does skin wrinkle when it gets wet? Why are our hands shaped the way they are?
These are among the questions in the notebooks--26 and counting--that Changizi fills with potential research ideas he poses as queries about the design and behavior of biological systems.
So far questions in the notebook have yielded highly acclaimed research findings, including why primates see in color and have forward-facing eyes, why optical illusions succeed at tricking our eyes, and why written characters across languages share common shapes.
Changizi's groundbreaking explanations have landed on the pages of The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and New Scientist. In May 2009, his findings will appear in Changizi's first-ever trade book The Vision Revolution, published by Benbella Books.
Boston school officials this week will unveil a more stringent residency policy for students applying to the city's three exam schools, responding to growing concerns that out-of-towners are improperly gaining admission.
Currently, nonresidents can take the entrance exam for those schools; they must establish residency shortly before admission decisions are made.
"It's a fairly significant change,'' said Rachel Skerritt, chief of staff for Superintendent Carol R. Johnson. "We want to make sure students who have access to the stellar education at the exam schools live in the city.''
President Barack Obama is telling high school graduates in Michigan not to make excuses, and to take responsibility for failures as well as successes.
In excerpts of remarks to be delivered later Monday at Kalamazoo Central High School, Obama says that it's easy to blame others when problems arise. "We see it every day out in Washington, with folks calling each other names and making all sorts of accusations on TV," the president says.
He says the high school kids can and have done better than that.
It's 7:15 on a chilly spring morning kids from all over New Orleans are coming in by the bus load to KIPP Central City Academy and Primary. A group of sixth graders is hanging outside, waiting for the bell to ring. So I ask them what they think about their school. Three of the boys say they like it just fine. The fourth one, Troy Picard, is not a fan.
"No, their rules are just too strict for me," says Picard, prompting a quick rebuttal from his friend Carl Lacoste.
"Troy, I disagree what you said about strict rules," Lacoste says. "The only rules we have are work hard and be nice."
"But a lot of other rules fall under that category," Picard says.
Students aren't the only ones with rules. Jonathan Bertch, who runs the business side of things at KIPP Central City, says adults at the school have rules, too. The main one is "no excuses." As in: All those excuses you hear about why inner city kids can't succeed? Out the window.
Attention, children in Milwaukee Public Schools: Your Reading Adventure Awaits!
It has lots of stories! It wants you to write out answers to lots of questions about what goes on in the stories!
It has lists of spelling words! It will teach you the difference between common nouns and proper nouns! How to use proofreading marks! What to learn from the sequence of vowels and consonants in words!
It has a fair amount of phonics-related skill building, but it's not as strong on that as some phonics-oriented people would like!
It will require you to do a lot of work, if you're going to succeed! It's not easy! I stumbled during an exercise in a fifth-grade reading book on matching English words to their foreign language roots, and I thought I was smarter than a fifth-grader!
In Harlem--as elsewhere in this city, state, and nation--there is a sharply rising struggle between teachers' unions and black parents.
That dispute is over parental choice of schools, especially in regards to publicly financed charter schools which can, and usually do, refuse to recognize teachers' unions. Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children's Zone is nationally known for making charter schools a working part of the community, recently sent out a rallying cry to black parents everywhere when he said, "Nobody's coming. Nobody is going to save our children. You have to save your own children."
In Harlem, where thousands of parents apply for charter schools on civil rights grounds, State Senator Bill Perkins--whose civil liberties record I've previously praised in this column--is in danger of losing his seat because of his fierce opposition to charter schools. The UFT contributes to his campaigns. His opponent, Basil Smikle--who has worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Bill Clinton Foundation, and, unfortunately, Michael Bloomberg--says: "Education has galvanized the community."
1833: Founding of Kalamazoo College, Michigan's oldest college campus.
1874: Kalamazoo paves the way for tax-funded education in Michigan when the state Supreme Court affirms Kalamazoo's right to levy taxes to operate a public high school.
1896: Kalamazoo Public Library is among the first 10 in the country, and the second in Michigan after Detroit, to create a children's section with its own librarian.
1903: Founding of Western Michigan University, now one of the 50 largest universities in the country.
1906: Kalamazoo Central High School creates state's first high school marching band.
1920: Kalamazoo Central becomes the country's second high school with a drama class and opens Chenery Auditorium, one of the largest high school auditoriums of that era.
1958: Kalamazoo College creates its study-abroad program, one of the first in the country.
A good friend of mine, James, has an interview this morning. It is quite important. If he is successful, it will mean quite a lot in the future. If he fails, he will certainly be at a disadvantage.
Given the importance of doing well, he has spent some time preparing and rehearsing answers to practice questions. What he wears to the interview has been carefully thought out as first impressions are very important. There is a lot riding on the 15 minutes he will spend being questioned.
James, however, is not taking this very seriously. I am confident that he does not have the faintest idea how important this is. In fact, it is fairly likely that he will not even realise that he has to do an interview at all until he is right there in the room.
James is two years old. His interview is for the purpose of whether he will get into primary school, in a couple of years. There is nothing particularly special about the school he is applying to; its admission policies are the same as a lot of schools in Hong Kong.
I have been known to produce pieces of pure fiction in this column from time to time, but I am not making this up. This actually happens. Schools really employ people to interview two-year-olds and make a decision about each toddler's academic future.
It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar.
The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.
Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily.
College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. ... Normal supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."
Consumers would balk, except for two things.
First -- as with the housing bubble -- cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They're willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often, their parents) don't fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.
Mr Green, speaking at the Hay Festival on the Welsh borders on Saturday, said it would be of particular relevance to those who would grow up to become part of the sub-prime market.
"Part of the answer lies in financial literacy education in schools," said Mr Green, promoting his 2009 book Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World.
"I really don't think it's wise in the circumstances of modern life to have people come out of the school system into working life or, sadly, often not working life, without the very basics of financial literacy."
Mr Green, who has been chairman of HSBC since 2005, and is also an ordained priest, was keen to stress that there was a social imperative for banking services to be open to those on lower incomes.
However, he said some forms of lending were unacceptable, citing 110pc mortgages, and said those at the bottom end of the market may not have had proper understanding or access to information when taking out such loans.
Almost 78 percent of the district's 13,816 students are of Hispanic or Latino origin. About 54 percent of them are English-language learners. The district, which sprawls over the foothills in east San Jose, is more working class than middle class.
It's tempting to view a district like Alum Rock as indicative of the challenges California will face in educating the next generation of children, but it might be better to view it as an opportunity. California's educational system desperately needs to adapt to both a 21st century economy and the state's shifting demographics. We can't afford to fail the next generation of students. So how will California's educational system adapt to meet their needs?
Math and language arts standards likely will become more rigorous in Utah schools.
As part of a widespread movement toward common academic goals, the Utah Board of Education gave preliminary approval Friday to a new set of language arts and mathematics standards for children in grades K-12, developed for a group of 48 states, two territories and the District of Columbia. If the plan gains final approval in August, state officials plan to overhaul Utah's language arts and math curricula over the next five years to reflect the new goals, which are more ambitious in some ways than Utah's current ones, said Brenda Hales, state associate superintendent.
"They are high standards," said state Superintendent Larry Shumway. "They are high and they are rigorous. I don't have any doubt they will be a step forward for us as a state."
'What's funny," says Madeleine Sackler, "is that I'm not really a political person." Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind "The Lottery"--an explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday.
In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York's biggest lottery. It wasn't the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city's best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren't subject to union rules).
"I was blown away by the number of parents that were there," Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. "I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them." And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera.
Her initial aim was simple. "Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story," she says. "A vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise" in the months leading up to the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy.
It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim (among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", Fox News 5/22/2010, wrote:
After passing the nation's toughest state immigration enforcement law, Arizona's school officials are now cracking down on teachers with heavy accents.
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Like so many parents at this time of year, we stood watching and cheering as our daughter walked across the stage at graduation.
For Julia, it was graduation from college in mid-May. For others, it will be graduation from high school. But whatever the setting, Julia and her fellow graduates take an awful lot of people across the stage with them -- many of them teachers.
Not that we have any particular bias as her parents, you understand. We think Julia is incredibly smart, poised, inquisitive, a leader in her group. But we also know that step by step through her days in school, it was teachers who helped shape her into the graduate we applauded on that Saturday in May.
As a society we say we value education. We are sure a whole lot more ambivalent about teachers as a group. You heard that ambivalence in the Madison area as the School Board wrestled with a very tough budget for the coming year. You hear that at the national level as President Obama's education policies are demanding more accountability from teachers.
My point is not that teachers ought not be asked to share in the financial burden of tough times nor that there ought not be ways to hold them accountable. My point is that in looking at ways to strengthen our education system, we ought to remember that the teachers are the ones giving of themselves day after day to prepare our sons and daughters for the future. It does no one any good to be bashing them.
Is every teacher terrific? Of course not. But at least in the Madison schools, with four kids who have been educated by something like 150 teachers over the years (to say nothing of another vast array of teachers at the college level), I have developed a deep admiration for the work they do.
It's "payday" in Jill Strand's classroom at Glacier Edge Elementary School in Verona.
Strand's third-graders rush toward plastic bins crammed with parent-donated school supplies and trinkets, eager to cash the weekly mock paychecks issued by Strand for classroom jobs like collecting library books and checking desks for tidiness.
"They don't understand how much they're really learning," says Strand. "They see it as fun, free-choice time."
But in a sign that a deeper financial message is resonating, not all students are quick to part with the hard-earned classroom currency the paychecks are exchanged for. Kate Veak tucks her "Strand Bucks" away, saying she is saving for something bigger, like a hardcover book.
Strand recently chronicled her lessons in savings and investing in "Financial Literacy: TEACH IT!," a series of online teacher vignettes compiled by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, which won a 2010 award from the Governor's Council on Financial Literacy for the project. Strand says she may soon introduce her third-graders to the concept of sales tax and is considering letting them borrow from their classroom bank, potentially leading to discussions about credit card interest and maybe even payday loans.
A consortium of school districts including: Belleville, Middelton Cross Plains, Mt. Horeb, Oregon, McFarland, Verona Area, Madison and Wisconsin Heights are actively and energetically seeking partnerships with business, academic and manufacturing sectors in the Dane County region in an effort to create and staff what is referred to as The Global Academy. The Global Academy will be a hybrid secondary / post-secondary learning environment designed primarily for high school juniors and seniors from the consortium districts. The Global Academy will provide specialized and advanced training in the following areas that culminate in two year or four year degrees: Architecture and Construction, HealthScience, InformationTechnology, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Rationale:
Regional, national and global need for specialized and advanced skills, along with growing competition for jobs that require those skills from advanced and developing countries is changing the curriculum landscape for high schools in the United States. In Wisconsin, public high schools are making valiant efforts to respond to this need, but struggle to do so given revenue caps and shrinking budgets. Neighboring school districts produce similar programs that are barely sustainable and represent an inefficient duplication of programs and services. A consortium of school districts providing specialized and advanced programs, pooling resources, talent and students is a much more viable and sustainable method ofproviding educational programs that prepare students for 21st Century career opportunities. Additionally, partnering with business, manufacturing and academic sectors will add expertise, latest trend information and greatly increased opportunities for obtaining certifications, advanced standing and credits in institutions of higher learning.
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff; have examined the research that shows thatfundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has heen to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase student achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross - district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligmnent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.
Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
Since March of 2010, MMSD district and school staff has completed the following work to move the goals of the REaL Grant forward. Specific accomplishments aligning to REaL grant goals are listed below.
REaL Grant Goal 1: Improve Student Achievement for all students
Accomplishment I: Completed year 2 of professional development for Department Chairpersons to become instructional leaders. The work will continue this summer with the first ever Department Chairperson and Assistant Principal Summer Institute to focus on leading and fostering teacher collaboration in order to improve student achievement.
Accomplishment 2: Continued with planning for implementing the ACT Career and College Readiness Standards and the EP AS system. Visited with area districts to see the
impact of effective implementation the EP AS system in order to ensure successful implementation within MMSD.
Accomplishment 3: Piloted the implementation of the EXPLORE test at Memorial, Sherman and with 9th grade AVID students at all four comprehensive high schools.
Accomplishment 4: This summer, in partnership with Monona Grove High School and Association of Wisconsin School Administrators (AWSA), MMSD will host the Aligned by Design: Aligning High School and Middle School English, Science, Math and Social Studies Courses to College/Career Readiness Skills. To be attended by teams of MMSD high school and middle school staff in July of 2010.
Accomplishment 5: Continued focused planning and development of a master communication system for the possible implementation of early release Professional Collaboration Time at MMSD High Schools. Schools have developed plans for effective teaming structures and accountability measures.
Accomplishment 6: District English leadership team developed recommendations for essential understandings in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening for 9th and 10th grades. Following this successful model, similar work will occur in Math, Science and Social studies.
Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media.
Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.
But of course, that's what always happens. Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.
As Gutenberg's press spread through Europe, the Bible was translated into local languages, enabling direct encounters with the text; this was accompanied by a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre. Vulgar versions of the Bible and distracting secular writings fueled religious unrest and civic confusion, leading to claims that the printing press, if not controlled, would lead to chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life.
First, Obama and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, set up a contest. They put down $4.5 billion in Race to the Top money. They issued some general guidelines about what kind of reforms states would have to adopt to get the money. And then they fired the starting gun.
Reformers in at least 23 states have passed reform laws in hopes of getting some of the dough. Some of the state laws represent incremental progress and some represent substantial change. The administration has hung tough, demanding real reform in exchange for dollars. Over all, there's been a tremendous amount of movement in a brief time.
This is not heavy-handed Washington command-and-control. This is Washington energizing diverse communities of reformers, locality by locality, and giving them more leverage in their struggles against the defenders of the status quo.
Second, the Obama administration used the power of the presidency to break through partisan gridlock. Over the past decade, teacher unions and their allies have become proficient in beating back Republican demands for more charters, accountability and choice. But Obama has swung behind a series of bipartisan reformers who are also confronting union rigidity.
In Rhode Island, the Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, fired all the teachers at one failing school. The unions fought back. Obama sided with Gallo, sending shock waves nationwide. If the president had the guts to confront a sacred Democratic interest group in order to jolt a failing school, then change was truly in the air. Gallo got the concessions she needed to try to improve that school.
In this era of rising college expectations -- more applications, more students and more university places than ever -- we Americans remain very insular. We think nothing can be better than Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or some other moldy brick institution high on the U.S. News list. A few adventurous U.S. students are enrolling in Canadian and British schools, but nobody talks about that in the high school cafeteria or the PTA.
Our self-regard is, in some ways, justified. On most international ratings, one of the topics of Ben Wildavsky's intriguing new book "The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World," U.S. colleges still dominate the top 10. But Wildavsky reveals that that will probably change. Students in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are beginning to speak as knowledgeably about France's Ecole Polytechnique, the Indian Institutes of Technology and Britain's University of Leicester as they do about Columbia and Caltech. Many foreign universities are catching up with ours.
In our comfortable spot at the top of the world's higher ed pyramid, we are ignoring one of the most powerful trends of the 21st century -- a growing free trade in great minds. Wildavsky, a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, argues that this will make this era more innovative, and more prosperous, than any that human civilization has seen.
The number of colleges that offer bachelor's degrees in three years can be counted on two (or three) hands. They include Lake Forest College in Illinois, Southern New Hampshire University, Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and, in a recent conversion, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The three-year degree has spawned a round of news coverage and, last month, an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by the former president of George Washington University.
"The college experience may be idyllic," Stephen Joel Trachtenberg wrote, "but it's also wasteful and expensive, both for students and institutions."
Trachtenberg, who co-wrote the piece with GWU professor Gerald Kauvar, floated the idea of a three-year degree during his tenure at the Foggy Bottom university.
That piece drew enough notice to prompt a rebuttal, released today by the president of the Association of American College and Universities, a D.C. nonprofit advocating for the cause of liberal education.
The lack of nation-wide education standards has long been a key difference between US schools and those of most other developed countries, many of which score higher on international comparisons.
To help make sure schoolchildren around the country are learning the same grade-by-grade information necessary for success in college and life after high school, Wisconsin's schools chief Wednesday formally committed the state to adopting a set of national education standards.
The long-awaited Common Core State Standards for English and math, released Wednesday, define the knowledge and skills children should be learning from kindergarten through graduation, a move intended to put the United States on par with other developed countries and to make it easier to compare test scores from state to state.
"These standards are aligned with college and career expectations, will ensure academic consistency throughout the state and across other states that adopt them, and have been benchmarked against international standards for high-performing countries," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said in a news release Wednesday.
Wisconsin already had pledged to support the common standards. A draft report released in March solicited public comment on the standards, which were subsequently tweaked before the final document was released Wednesday.
Here's a new way to look at Wal-Mart: institution of higher learning.
Under a program announced Thursday, employees will be able to receive college credit for performing their jobs, including such tasks as loading trucks and ringing up purchases. Workers could earn as much as 45 percent of the credits needed for an associate or bachelor's degree while on the job.
The credits are earned through the Internet-based American Public University, with headquarters in Charles Town, W.Va., and administrative offices in Manassas.
"We want to provide you with more ways and faster ways to succeed with us," Eduardo Castro-Wright, head of Wal-Mart's U.S. division, told 4,000 employees during the company's annual meeting. The program is designed to encourage more workers to climb the corporate ladder. Though Wal-Mart says about 70 percent of its managers begin as hourly employees, it estimates that about half of its staff do not hold college degrees.
Jaymes Murphy, 24, a salesman from Victoria, Tex., who was at the annual meeting, said he tried for several years to juggle work and school with little success. He would attend class from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then sprint to his job as a cashier at Wal-Mart from 3 p.m. to midnight. He eventually quit school but he dreams of getting a bachelor's degree in political science or communications.
"It gets stressful," he said. The program would allow him to "not have to worry about sacrificing one or the other."
Smart. A great example of thinking different in an effort to address costs and benefits.
School choice option including both voucher and neo-voucher options like tuition tax credit funded scholarship programs have become increasingly prevalent in recent years (Howell, Peterson, Wolf and Campbell, 2006). One popular argument for school choice policies is that public schools will improve the education they offer when faced with competition for students. Because state funds are tied to student enrollment, losing students to private schools
constitutes a financial loss to public schools. If schools face the threat of losing students and the state funds attached to those students--to private schools, they should be incentivized to cultivate customer (i.e., parental) satisfaction by operating more efficiently and improving on the outcomes valued by students and parents (Friedman, 1962).
Alternatively, vouchers may have unintended negative effects on public schools if they draw away the most involved families from public schools and the monitoring of those schools diminishes, allowing schools to reduce effort put into educating students (McMillan, 2004).1
It is notoriously difficult to gauge the competitive effects of private schools on public
school performance because private school supply and public school performance affect each other dynamically (Dee, 1998; McEwan, 2000). In cross-section, the relationship between private school supply and public school performance could plausibly be either upward-biased or downward-biased. On the one hand, private schools may disproportionately locate in communities with low-quality public schools. In such a case, the estimated relationship between private school penetration and public school performance would be downward-biased. On the other hand, if private schools locate in areas with high valuation of educational quality, then the
Pressure for quick fixes can outweigh research evidence when ministers set schools policy, according to a study of three decades of education initiatives.
Media pressure and political expediency are more likely to influence decision making, says a report from the CfBT education charity.
The report draws upon interviews with former ministers and civil servants.
It calls for the setting up of an independent chief education officer to give objective advice.
The report, Instinct or Reason, due to be published next week, examines the pressures that have shaped education policy since the late-1970s, across Conservative and Labour administrations.
Yes ter day, I wrote about just a few of the rea sons I am opposed to summer home work. Of course that doesn't mean I am opposed to read ing for plea sure, learn ing for plea sure, or pur su ing one's pas sions. I'm just opposed to the school send ing home the same kind of work it sends home dur ing the school year - work that is mostly an after thought, is busywork, and doesn't engage a student.
Before you resign your self to sum mer home work, though, make sure that your school is com ply ing with all poli cies and guidelines.
Take a few min utes and check your school's pol icy. You might be surprised to find that it for bids sum mer home work. If it does, just give your school prin ci pal a friendly call and remind her/him of the pol icy. But if your school pol icy doesn't pro hibit sum mer home work, don't stop there. Be sure to check the dis trict and state guide lines as well.
A group representing governors and state school chiefs laid out a detailed blueprint Wednesday of the skills students should learn at each grade level, reinvigorating the battle over what some see as an attempt to usurp local control of schools.
Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the concept of common standards but haven't promised to adopt them. If they do, it could trigger wide-scale changes to state tests, textbooks and teacher-education programs nationwide.
The Common Core State Standards detail the math and language-arts knowledge children should master to prepare them for college and the work force.
The blueprint doesn't tell teachers exactly what to teach or how to teach but lays out broad goals for student achievement. Kindergartners, for example, should know how to count to 100 by tens, and eighth-graders should be able to determine an author's point of view. Currently, each state sets its own academic benchmarks, and the rigor varies widely.
School districts around the country are planning massive layoffs as they struggle to bridge big budget deficits.
And as they select which teachers go and which ones stay, many can only use one factor as their guide: seniority. Many districts will have to cast out effective teachers, because local contracts and even state laws require it.
Like many of his counterparts around the country, Cleveland schools CEO Eugene Sanders is facing a monster $54 million spending gap.
According to Sanders, there's no room left to trim, and he may have to shed more than 500 teachers. He says that when he sent out pink slips earlier this year, he had no flexibility.
As part of The Economist and InnoCentive's Challenge Program for the upcoming Ideas Economy Conference Series,The Economist is seeking insights on the topic of the 21st Cyber Schools.
Solvers from any discipline or background are invited to participate. The winner of this Challenge will receive a cash prize of $10,000 and be elevated to the position of 'Speaker' at The Economist's Ideas Economy: Human Potential event on September 15-16th in New York.
Many more details are provided in the Challenge's Detailed Description section once you create and login to your free InnoCentive Solver account.
One of the favorites to win this year's National Spelling Bee lay face down on his living room floor wearing a black shirt, blue jeans and white socks, his torso supported by a couple of big pillows. His hands seemed to be on nonstop autopilot as they folded colorful paper into origami shapes.
Across the room in a big chair sat his younger brother. Between them were stacks and stacks of oversized, homemade note cards, bound by rubber bands and arranged like a city skyline on a large footstool. They are only a fraction of some 20,000 cards in the house, each printed with a word, its origin, pronunciation and definition.
These particular stacks contained the really hard words, the ones 13-year-old Tim Ruiter hadn't mastered yet.
A member of the Class of 2010--who this season dons synthetic cap and gown, listens to the inspirational words of David Souter (Harvard), Anderson Cooper (Tulane), or Lisa Kudrow (Vassar), and collects a diploma--need not be a statistics major to know that the odds of stepping into a satisfying job, or, indeed, any job, are lower now than might have been imagined four long years ago, when the first posters were hung on a dorm-room wall, and having a .edu e-mail address was still a novelty. Statistically speaking, however, having an expertise in statistics may help in getting a job: according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, graduates with math skills are more likely than their peers in other majors to find themselves promptly and gainfully employed.
The safest of all degrees to be acquiring this year is in accounting: forty-six per cent of graduates in that discipline have already been offered jobs. Business majors are similarly placed: forty-four per cent will have barely a moment to breathe before undergoing the transformation from student to suit. Engineers of all stripes--chemical, computer, electrical, mechanical, industrial, environmental--have also fared relatively well since the onset of the recession: they dominate a ranking, issued by Payscale.com, of the disciplines that produce the best-earning graduates. Particular congratulations are due to aerospace engineers, who top the list, with a starting salary of just under sixty thousand dollars--a figure that, if it is not exactly stratospheric, is twenty-five thousand dollars higher than the average starting salary of a graduate in that other science of the heavens, theology.
How does Google's unchallenged domination of Search shape the way we retrieve information? Does Google flatten global knowledge?
I look around, I see my kids relying on Wikipedia, I watch my journalist students work. I can't help but wonder: Does Google impose a framework on our cognitive processes, on the way we search for and use information?
Two weeks ago, at an INMA conference in Oxford, I met Monica Bulger, an Education PhD, she was giving a speech covering the notion of cognitive containers associated with devices such as the iPad (see her blog). Then, at a dinner at Exeter College, in a room right out of a Harry Potter movie set, she discussed her work at the University of California Santa Barbara where she investigated her students' use of Web searches.
Dr. Bulger took 150 graduate and undergraduate students and asked them to write a 1 to 2 pages recommendation for the use of computers in the classroom (she verified that the question was not already treated in Wikipedia). They had 50 minutes to complete the assignment.
The goal of the experiment was 'to disprove the fact that information is simply a matter of access, and after that, everything else is easy. I wanted to show the highly sophisticated cognitive process taking place. No matter how sophisticated machines are, research still requires a bit of work'.
During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers--three experienced Web surfers and three novices--for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics--the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car--the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.
The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.
The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. "Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains," Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.
The crisis in U.S. public education is beginning to read like something out of the theater of the absurd.
Now they are getting rid of summer school.
The Associated Press reported Sunday: "Across the country, districts are cutting summer school because it's just too expensive to keep. The cuts started when the recession began and have worsened, affecting more children and more essential programs that help struggling students." A survey found that over one third of the school districts in the country are looking at cutting out summer school starting this fall. And who are the students who will be hit hardest by this move? "Experts say studies show summer break tends to widen the achievement gap between poor students and their more affluent peers whose parents can more easily afford things like educational vacations, camps and sports teams," said AP.
"Most people generally think summer is a great time for kids to be kids, a time for something different, a time for all kinds of exploration and enrichment," Ron Fairchild, chief executive officer of the National Summer Learning Association, told the news agency. "Our mythology about summer learning really runs counter to the reality of what this really is like for kids in low-income communities and for their families when this faucet of public support shuts off."
A documentary from a pair of Dutch filmmakers about urban farming at a Detroit school for pregnant teens and young mothers is getting wider recognition as the school's program faces the prospect of being uprooted.
"This is really a film Americans should see," Mascha Poppenk said. "They need to see there are good things going on in Detroit."
The building that houses Catherine Ferguson could be closed in June and its program moved to another one about a mile away. It's part of a plan announced in March by district emergency financial manager Robert Bobb to close 44 schools.
Detroit Public Schools, which is fighting years of declining enrolment and a $219 million budget deficit, closed 29 schools before the start of classes last fall and shuttered 35 buildings about three years ago.
A few weeks ago my friend's 8-year-old came home all excited, waving a letter from school about a test called the Scholastic Reading Inventory.
Not only did the little boy have test results showing he'd scored well above the third-grade level (no surprise to anyone who knows this avid reader), he also had a list of recommended books. Number one on the list: Arctic Dreams. Number two: A Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange?
His mom gently took the list away and scanned the titles before explaining that she would not be getting a dystopian novel about ultraviolence for her third-grader (or, for that matter, most of the other recommended books, including Guns of August, Left for Dead, and Kafka's Metamorphosis). Then she called her son's school, Shorewood Elementary, to ask what was going on.
President Barack Obama's signature education initiative has encouraged the overhaul of state laws governing charter schools, teacher evaluations and student-testing systems.
But ahead of the Tuesday deadline for states to apply for the second phase of Race to the Top, some education reformers were complaining the changes have not been as bold or widespread as expected.
"It's the dog that didn't bark," said Andy Smarick, a former education department official under George W. Bush who supports the initiative. "I don't want to underplay what has happened, but we have not seen revolutionary changes from coast to coast."
The "unschooling" movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today's back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the "whole language" philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about -- unlocking the world of stories and information.
A little more than a decade ago, educators bore no responsibility for their students' failure; it was considered the fault of the students, their parents and unequal social circumstances. Now schools are held liable for whether students learn, regardless of the students' lack of effort or previous preparation, and are held solely accountable for reaching unrealistic goals of achievement.
No wonder schools have a chronic case of educational whiplash. If there's a single aspect of schooling that ought to end, it's the decades of abrupt and destructive swings from one extreme to another. There is no magic in the magic-bullet approach to learning. Charters are neither evil nor saviors; they can be a useful complement to public schools, but they have not blazed a sure-fire path to student achievement. Decreeing that all students will be proficient in math and reading by 2014 hasn't moved us dramatically closer to the mark.
Diffused governance, is, in my view, the best way forward. This means that communities should offer a combination of public, private, virtual, charter and voucher options. A diversity of K-12 approaches insures that a one size fits all race to the bottom does not prevail. I was very disappointed to recently learn that Wisconsin's Democrat Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the Washington, DC voucher program. No K-12 approach is perfect, but eliminating that option for the poorest members of our society is simply unpalatable.
Somewhat related Lee Bergquist and Erin Richards: Wisconsin Governor Candidate Mark Neumann taps public funds for private schools
Republican businessman Mark Neumann started his first taxpayer-funded school with 49 students, and in eight years enrollment has mushroomed to nearly 1,000 students in four schools.
Neumann, a candidate for governor who preaches smaller government and fiscal conservatism, has used his entrepreneurial skills to tap private and public funds - including federal stimulus dollars - to start schools in poor neighborhoods.
The former member of the U.S. House operates three religious-based schools in Milwaukee, a fourth nonreligious school in Phoenix and has plans to build clusters of schools across the country.
The Nashotah businessman is part of a growing national movement from the private sector that is providing poor neighborhoods an alternative to traditional public schools.
There are signs the schools are achieving one of their primary goals of getting students into post-secondary schools.
When the kindergartners at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, one of New York City's schools for gifted students, form neat boy-girl rows for the start of recess, the lines of girls reach well beyond the lines of boys.
A similar imbalance exists at gifted schools in East Harlem, where almost three-fifths of the students at TAG Young Scholars are girls, and the Lower East Side, where Alec Kulakowski, a seventh grader at New Explorations in Science and Technology and Math, considered his status as part of the school's second sex and remarked, "It's kind of weird and stuff."
Weird or not, the disparity at the three schools is not all that different from the gender makeup at similar programs across the city: though the school system over all is 51 percent male, its gifted classrooms generally have more girls.
Traumatised by the destruction of their homes and lives, Haiti's children are finding some refuge in schools resurrected from the rubble
If there is a drier, dustier, more desolate place in the Caribbean I'd be amazed to see it. A few weeks ago, this vast space in Haiti now know as Corail Cesselesse was a vast scraggly grassland about 20km outside the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Now, after the 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on 12 January, it is home to several thousand of the 1.5 million who have been displaced. Many are children - in a country where half the population is under 18 - and for those who have moved to giant camps, they have also been uprooted from their homes, their families and their schools.
Corail is an official camp - the product of inter-agency co-operation and government consent - and there is plenty of evidence of the foreign money pouring into the country in the aftermath of the earthquake. It is guarded by armed UN guards, and there are well-organised latrines and water tanks.
Nearly four dozen public and private schools in Indiana are offering Chinese language instruction for credit as part of an effort to make Mandarin Chinese the next world language.
Many of the programs are taught by Chinese educators through a collaboration between the College Board and Hanban, a government-funded organization affiliated with the Chinese Education Ministry.
Since 2006, China has sent more than 325 "guest teachers" to work in U.S. schools to help launch Chinese language programs. The teachers can stay for three years, then reapply to stay for another three years.
Bret Schundler is like no education commissioner the state has ever had. He's not an educator, but a businessman and a politician. He is more of an advocate for private schools than for public schools. He is a true believer in parental choice, something he deems "a human right."
And, in the midst of an ugly fight between his governor and the state's largest teachers union, his spokesman refers to New Jersey schools as "wretched" -- just when they led the nation in a countrywide test of educational achievement.
Okay, so he repudiated the word "wretched" when legislators and educators protested -- but what does he really think of the public schools he is constitutionally sworn to support?
That's not an easy question to answer, even after sitting with Schundler for three hours and talking about the schools.
Qualcom technologist Marie Bjerede wonders if the top-down reform model doesn't work, why there's not more iterative development:
In the software world, we address this dilemma through an iterative development model. That is, we assume that when we are thinking about what users might need or how they will use our product, we will get some things wrong. So we code up some simple end-to-end functionality, throw it out for people to use, and then improve it iteratively based on feedback from our users. This feedback may be explicit, in the form of questions and requests, or implicit, based on our observations of how the software is used. It may well be automated, in the way Google instruments the applications we use and modifies them based on how we engage.
This approach is often best for application development and is related to the lean capitalization approach to building a business that usually works best these days. But it's tough to do in schools. Here's a few of the reasons
My wife often starts a book by reading the last few pages. I think this is cheating. It spoils any surprises the author might have planted there. She suggests, when I say this out loud, that she is better able to appreciate the writer's craft if she knows where the story is going.
But I yielded to the temptation to do the same when I read the table of contents of Harvard political scientist Paul E. Peterson's intriguing new book, "Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning." It is an analytical history of key American school reformers, from Mann to John Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr. to Al Shanker to Bill Bennett to James S. Coleman. I knew about those guys, but the last chapter discussed someone I never heard of, Julie Young, chief executive officer of the Florida Virtual School.
Peterson is always a delight to read. Even his research papers shine. I enjoyed the entire book. But I read first his take on Young and the rise of new technology because it was a topic I yearned to understand. I have read the paeons to the wonders of computers in classrooms, but I don't see them doing much in the urban schools I care about. The 21st century schools movement in particular seems to me too much about selling software and too little about teaching kids.
A reporter asked me "what went wrong with the small schools idea?" It's odd question because all the networks developing highly effective new schools--KIPP, Achievement First, Success Network, Green Dot, Alliance and dozens more--still use the tried and true rule of thumb of 100 students per grade.
The better question is "what went wrong with the big schools idea?" The 50-year experiment with mega-high schools of 1,500-4,500 students had disastrous results especially for low income students. The combination of anonymity and a proliferation of low expectation courses set up the results we see today: one third of American students drop out and one third graduate unprepared for college or careers.
Fixing this problem has proven vexing. The one difference between good schools and bad schools is everything--structure, schedule, curriculum, instruction, culture, and connections with families and community. That makes turnarounds, especially at the high school level, really difficult. Layer on top of that outdated employment contracts and revolving door leadership and you have a national Gordian knot.
POLITICIANS around the world love to promise better education systems. Proposals for reform come in many flavours. Some tout the benefits of more competition among schools; others aim to train more teachers and reduce class sizes. Still others plump for elaborate after-school programmes or for linking teachers' pay to how well pupils do.
A relatively recent addition to this menu is the idea of paying students directly for performance. Boosters argue that pupils may fail to invest enough time and effort into education because the gains--better jobs and higher incomes--are nebulous and distant. Cash payments, on the other hand, reward good performance immediately. Link payments to test results or graduation rates, the argument goes, and test scores should increase and drop-out rates decline. Two new papers* describe the effect of such schemes in Israel and America. Their results will disappoint those who hope for a silver bullet. But they also suggest that cash payments may have their uses in some situations.
Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem studied high-school students in 40 Israeli schools where few pupils went on to get their school-leaving certificate (the Bagrut). In half the schools students were offered a chance to earn nearly $1,450 if they passed all the tests and got the certificate. The economists found that completion rates in "payment schools" increased by about a third--but only for girls and mainly for those who needed to do only a tiny bit more to graduate.
When Nitya Rajendran started kindergarten, she didn't talk until November. "She'd point and wave," said her teacher, Rick Parbst. This year she was the lead in Trinity School's spring musical and decided to translate parts of "The Iliad" from ancient Greek. She's headed to Georgetown University in September.
In fourth grade, Cody Cowan's class was studying ancient Egypt, and he was asked to develop an irrigation system. He was fine with the engineering, but didn't know how to draw people and animals. "By the time I turned around, he had four girls doing his drawings," recalled his teacher from that year, Mary Lemons. This summer, Mr. Cowan will intern on Representative Carolyn B. Maloney's re-election campaign, and he plans to study international relations in the fall.
At Trinity, one of Manhattan's oldest independent schools, a roomful of graduating seniors and their childhood teachers unearthed these pieces of the past at the annual survivors breakfast, a rite of passage for seniors who received all 13 years of their formal education at Trinity. Over coffee and bagels and chocolate Jell-O pudding doused with crushed Oreos and gummy worms (a class of 2010 culinary tradition), the students reconnected with teachers and dished about who, at age 5 , ate Play-Doh, sang well and cried whenever his mom left the room.
Like all human beings, educators accept rules and procedures that make sense to them, even when academic types wave data in their faces proving they are wrong. That appears to be the case with one of the most powerful and widespread practices in Washington area high schools -- the extra grade point for college-level courses.
Thousands of students are taking panicked breaths wondering whether what I am about to reveal will incinerate their grade-point averages, keep them out of any college anyone has heard of and consign them to a life of begging for dollar bills like that scruffy guy on Lynn Street south of Key Bridge.
A new study shows that grade weighting for Advanced Placement courses is unnecessary. Schools have been promising students 3 grade points (usually given for a B) if they get a C in an AP course so they will not be frightened away by its college-level demands. It turns out, however, they will take AP with or without extra credit.
Like all human beings, educators accept rules and procedures that make sense to them, even when academic types wave data in their faces proving they are wrong. That appears to be the case with one of the most powerful and widespread practices in Washington area high schools---the extra grade point for college-level courses.
Thousands of students are taking panicked breaths wondering if what I am about to reveal will incinerate their grade point averages, keep them out of any college anyone has heard of and consign them to a life of begging for dollar bills like that scruffy guy on Lynn Street south of Key Bridge.
A new study shows that grade weighting for Advanced Placement courses is unnecessary. Schools have been promising students 3 grade points (usually given for a B) if they get a C in an AP course so they will not be frightened away by its college-level demands. It turns out, however, they will take AP with or without extra credit.
The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) recently released its report on "Teachers' Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009." While 97% of those teachers surveyed said they had access to computers in the classroom, the ratio of computer to student was more than 5 to 1. And while 94% of teachers responding indicated they used the Internet often, most of them - 66% - said they used it for "research."
But Internet technology has done more than make research easier and more timely for teachers and students. Educators are using the real-time Web for a variety of innovative purposes, both in and out of the schoolroom.
The Real-Time Web in the Classroom
It may be cliche to emphasis the world wide aspect of the Web, but Internet technologies have lowered the proverbial walls of the classroom, giving students access to information that far surpasses the print-bound copies of encyclopedias and periodicals that were once the standard for K-12 research projects. As technology-educator Steven Anderson argues, these technologies "really make the world smaller for our students and show them that they can find the answers they need if we equip them with the tools and resources do to so." But in addition to simply making information more accessible, real-time technologies including Twitter, Skype, and Google Wave have shaped the types of lessons teachers can create and the types of projects they can task their students.
The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun ("water," for instance, or "bias") that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.
"An exercise in showmanship to avoid answering the question," is the way the historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on "innocence" in 1964, a tour de force effort that began with the opening chords of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and then brought in, among other things, the flawed heroes of Stendhal and the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp in the William Golding novel "Free Fall."
No longer will other allusion-deploying Oxford youths have the chance to demonstrate the acrobatic flexibility of their intellect in quite the same way. All Souls, part of Oxford University, recently decided, with some regret, to scrap the one-word exam.
Basil Smikle Jr. has a lot of ideas about how to address Harlem's most vexing problems, from crime to housing to underemployement, but his biggest asset as he runs for state Senate against Bill Perkins may be that he supports charter schools.
Mr. Perkins, a two-term legislator from Harlem, has outraged the charter-school community with his vocal opposition of the schools.
During a hearing on charter schools that he organized in April, Mr. Perkins said that because so many of the schools serve predominantly African-American and Hispanic children, "there is concern that charters are creating a de facto re-segregationist educational policy in New York City," Mr. Perkins said.
More high schools dropping class ranking Elmbrook schools are latest to cite college admission concerns
Amy Hetzner:
A 3.5 grade-point average is enough to qualify a student for honor roll and be considered above a B-plus average at Brookfield East High School, but it might not be enough to put a student among the top third of the class.
That's one of the reasons why sophomores at the school say they won't be sad when class rank is eliminated from high school transcripts and report cards in two years.
"We get good grades, but we don't get credit for it," said Alison Kent, a sophomore at Brookfield East. "You can have a 3.5 or higher and it looks terrible."
Nearly a decade after some of the state's top-performing high schools began dropping class rank from their students' transcripts, more are following their lead.
The Elmbrook School Board voted this month to end reporting class rank on high school transcripts and student report cards in the 2011-'12 school year. The school boards for Nicolet and Mequon-Thiensville will consider whether to enact similar measures this summer.
Under plans unveiled by Michael Gove last week, the school system in England and Wales will be radically overhauled. Some will break away from local government control. Elsewhere, other new schools will be created by parents. Here, experts discuss whether this shake-up will benefit those who matter most - our children
His fake diamond earring, only just small enough to meet school rules, is gleaming in the May sunshine. Under a tough exterior, over-long, frayed trousers and a shambling walk, is a sensitive teenager coping with a lot. Shane tells me that his girlfriend has run off with his best friend, he is not getting on with his dad's new "bird", he is looking after his seven-year-old brother who is depressed and To Kill a Mocking Bird is just "bare" hard.
This student and 80 like him have been subjected to a carefully choreographed series of interventions - one-to-one mentoring, Saturday school, motivational assemblies, extra revision classes - at the London comprehensive where I work, to try to get them to the magic number of five good GCSEs.
Girls once again outclassed boys, this time in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class X examination, the results of which were announced on Friday. In Ajmer region, 93.51% candidates cleared the examination. The success rates for boys and girls were 92.26% and 95.42% respectively. Ajmer region stood second as Chennai region secured the top slot with 96.18% success rate. Board examination will be abolished from next year.
A total of 9,02,747 candidates (9.50% more than last year) had registered for the board examination and 89.28% students cleared the examination . Last year, 88.84% students cleared the test, with 90.68% girls clearing the test and 88.30% boys being successful. For the first time, the results were not in the form of marks but grades and candidates had mixed reactions about it. Under the new grading system, the CBSE has introduced a nine-point scale --A 1 (91-100 marks), A2 (81-90 ), B1 (71-80 ), B2 (61-70 ), C1 (51-60 ), C2 (41-50 ), D (33-40 ), E1 (21-32 ) and E2 (20 and below).
Simon Jenkins is right to be critical of the way in which the education proposals in the Queen's speech will further undermine local government (Comment, 26 May). However, that is the least of the problems inherent in the expansion of academies and the proposed introduction of Swedish-style "free" schools. What we will see, if the Treasury does not sabotage these expensive proposals, is more and more outsourcing of public education to private, profit-driven companies.
If this could be shown to be an effective means of raising overall standards, it might be a price worth paying, but all the evidence is to the contrary.
A Tale of Two Students In middle school, Ivan and Laura shared a brief romance and a knack for trouble. Then they parted ways. Now he is college-bound and she isn't. How different schools shaped their paths.
In middle school, Ivan Cantera ran with a Latino gang; Laura Corro was a spunky teen. At age 13, they shared their first kiss. Both made it a habit to skip class. In high school, they went their separate ways.
This fall, Ivan will enter the University of Oklahoma, armed with a prestigious scholarship. "I want to be the first Hispanic governor of Oklahoma," declares the clean-cut 18-year-old, standing on the steps of Santa Fe South High School, the charter school in the heart of this city's Hispanic enclave that he says put him on a new path.
Laura, who is 17, rose to senior class president at Capitol Hill High School, a large public school in the same neighborhood. But after scraping together enough credits to graduate, Laura isn't sure where she's headed. She never took college entrance exams.
The divergent paths taken by Laura and Ivan were shaped by many forces, but their schools played a striking role. Capitol Hill and Santa Fe South both serve the same poor, Hispanic population. Both comply with federal guidelines and meet state requirements for standardized exams and curriculum. Santa Fe South enrolls about 490 high school students, while Capitol Hill has nearly 900.
At Santa Fe South, the school day is 45 minutes longer; graduation requirements are more rigorous (four years of math, science and social studies compared with three at public schools); and there is a tough attendance
Sarae White is an all-too-typical student in Philadelphia -- she stopped going to school last year, and was on her way to becoming one more dropout.
"The teachers didn't care, the students didn't care," White said. "Nobody cared, so why should I?"
In Philadelphia, the country's sixth largest school district, about one of every three students fails to graduate -- about the national average. CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that of the 4 million students who enter high school every year, one million of them will drop out before graduation. That's 7,000 every school day -- one dropout every 26 seconds.
Michael Piscal, Headmaster of View Park Prep Charter School in Los Angeles said, "It's not working for teachers, it's not working for students -- it's not working for society.
The Funding Disparity: Now and Then
In 2005, a group of researchers associated with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute examined the comparative funding of charter schools in the broader context of educational finance. The goal of that study, which used data from the 2002- 2002-03 school year, was to determine whether and to what extent there were differences in the financial resources provided to charter schools when compared to public school districts in the same states. These researchers used data from 18 states across the United States, and released their results in the report "Charter School Funding: Inequity's Next Frontier." The results of this first study demonstrated a clear pattern of inequity in charter school funding. Across the states included in the study, the per pupil funding gap was $1,801 per pupil, or 21.7 percent of district funding. The funding disparity was most severe in the study's 27 focus districts, many of them urban, where charter schools received $2,256, or 23.5 percent less funding per pupil compared to the school districts in which they were located. The researchers identified lower local funding as the primary source of this fiscal gap, particularly with respect to capital investment.
Every state school in England will be allowed to apply to become an academy - a school funded by the state but independent from local authorities. That leaves them free to set their curriculum and run themselves as they see fit. In practice, however, anything too unconventional will attract a bad rating from Ofsted, the schools watchdog. Fears that this academic freedom could, for example, lead to the teaching of Creationism as a factual discipline can therefore be largely allayed.
Hasn't this all been done already by Labour?
Yes, but the policy was limited. Only 203 academies were established under Labour out of a possible 3,100 secondary schools. The last government mainly invited bids from schools in deprived areas, arguing that this was where radical changes such as the creation of academies were most needed. But Michael Gove, the Conservative education secretary, said on Wednesday he expected the bulk of secondaries to become academies eventually. He has also invited applications from primaries, which were disbarred by Labour from bidding for academy status.
Wendy Kopp is founder and chief executive of Teach For America. She proposed the creation of Teach For America in her 1989 undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University and has spent the past 20 years working to sustain and grow the organization. Today, 7,300 corps members teach in 35 urban and rural regions across the country. The organization expanded to Milwaukee in 2009, and Marquette is one of two area universities that provides course work for corps members.
Kopp gave the Commencement address to Marquette's Class of 2010 on May 23, 2010 at the Bradley Center. More than 2,000 graduating students, their family and friends, and members of the Marquette community attended.
Last week I visited the Carpe Diem charter school in Yuma Arizona. Yuma is off the beaten path, in far western Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico.
Carpe Diem is a 6-12 school with 240 students. A value added analysis of test scores found that they have the biggest gains in the state of Arizona. Their math results are really off the chart, with some grades averaging at the 98th percentile on Terra Nova.
Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction. Their building is laid out with one large computer lab, with classroom space in the back. They had 240 students working on computers when I walked in, and you could have heard a pin drop.
Carpe Diem has successfully substituted technology for labor. With 6 grade levels and 240 students they have only 1 math teacher and one aide who focuses on math. Covering 6-12 and 240 students and getting the best results with a demographically challenging student body = no problem for Carpe Diem. Their founder, Rick Ogston, told me they use less staff than a typical model, and have cash reserves in the bank despite relatively low per pupil funding in AZ. They have never received support from philanthropic foundations, making due with state funding, but their model seems like it could be brought to scale with the right investment.
Is Seattle Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson in for a drubbing tomorrow?
The school board will hear a report from a local consulting company that summarizes what individual board members have said about the superintendent in one-on-one interviews, as well as what Goodloe-Johnson has said about herself.
The report will be used for a formal evaluation of the superintendent and will help determine whether she gets a raise and an additional bonus. It will also influence whether her contract, which runs through 2012, is extended.
If the report is anything like a recent community group's survey, Goodloe-Johnson is in trouble.
Academy status will become the norm for state secondary schools, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, forecast yesterday.
Mr Gove revealed he had written to every state school head in England - primary, secondary and special - urging them to consider putting in a bid for academy status.
If they take up his offer, it would bring to an end 108 years of local authorities running the vast majority of state schools. Mr Gove predicted that secondary schools would initially be more interested in taking up the offer than primaries. "I anticipate that's likely to be the case [for academy status to be the norm for secondary schools]," he added. "However, I'm not putting a time limit on it. It's up to the schools to decide."
Lesley Surman, a 42-year-old housewife and mother of three - "working class and proud of it" - wants to set up a new secondary school in the west Yorkshire village of Birkenshaw.
Mrs Surman is no fantasist. She is part of a group of about 60 activists trying to establish the school in 2013 because she harbours doubts about the alternatives available to local parents. "We want to get back to core values, pastoral care and a school where you celebrate winning." Instead of offering "beauty therapy and mechanics" - vocational subjects increasingly offered in the state sector - she would prefer a focus on nine or so academic subjects, including science and history.
The answer to her problems could lie several hundred miles across the North Sea. Tomorrow's Queen's Speech, outlining the ruling coalition's legislative priorities, is expected to use Sweden's "free schools" as a model for an overhaul of the English education system, making it easier for parents and teachers to create privately run but state-funded primary and secondary schools.
"Free" in the sense of independent, these private establishments were introduced in 1995 to provide greater choice for parents unable to afford the fees for Sweden's tiny (now even tinier) privately funded sector. Underpinning the policy of the country's centre-right government was the free-market principle that competition would raise standards in all schools as state institutions were forced to work harder to keep up.
The government has similar hopes for England (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own education policies) - where, in spite of large numbers of private, fee-charging, schools, 93 per cent of children are state educated.
"Legislation will be introduced to...give teachers greater freedom over the curriculum and allow new providers to run state schools."
The purpose of the Bill is to:
Give full effect to the range of programmes envisaged in the Coalition agreement.
The main benefits of the Bill will be:
To give all schools greater freedom over the curriculum
To improve school accountability
To take action to tackle bureaucracy
To improve behaviour in schools
The main elements of the Bill are:
To provide schools with the freedoms to deliver an excellent education in the way they see fit.
To reform Ofsted and other accountability frameworks to ensure that head teachers are held properly accountable for the core educational goals of attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor.
To introduce a slimmer curriculum giving more space for teachers to decide how to teach.
To introduce a reading test for 6 year olds to make sure that young children are learning and to identify problems early.
To give teachers and head teachers the powers to improve behaviour and tackle bullying.
We expect standards across the education sector to rise through the creation of more Academies and giving more freedom to head teachers and teachers. We will also ensure that money follows pupils, and introduce a 'pupil premium' so that more money follows the poorest pupils.
In this postrecession, digital era, colleges must reevaluate how accessible they are--or, often, how inaccessible they really are--to their potential customers, or, as you call them, "college students." Schools must change their business models to attract more students if they have any hope of surviving in the current competitive economic environment.
Over the past 10 years, we have seen a definitive shift from brick-and-mortar to online offerings across most industries. If 20 years ago you were told that shopping malls would be cannibalized by online shopping sites like eBay (EBAY) and Amazon.com (AMZN), and that movies would be accessed online through Netflix (NFLX) instead of at the movie theater, many of us would have found that difficult to believe. Yet the companies that failed to adapt to the digital consumer's demand for instant, online access struggled or failed. And for the companies actively marketing online to consumers with infinite options at their fingertips, competition has never been tougher. Online consumers today are looking for the best, most reliable bargain.
State Superintendent Tony Evers issued a statement today on the $13.8 million, four-year longitudinal data system (LDS) grant Wisconsin won to support accountability. Wisconsin was among 20 states sharing $250 million in competitive funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
"Receiving this U.S. Department of Education grant is very good news for Wisconsin and will allow us to expand our data system beyond its current PK-16 capacity. Through this grant, the Department of Public Instruction will work with the University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin Technical College System, and the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to develop an interoperable data system that supports the exchange of data and ad hoc research requests.
"Teacher quality, training, and professional development are key factors in improving student achievement. However, Wisconsin's aging teacher licensing and certification system is insufficient for today's accountability demands. This grant will allow us to improve our teacher licensing system and incorporate licensing data into the LDS, which will drive improvement in classroom instruction and teacher education.
Public schools in Wisconsin can now obtain, at no cost, post-graduation student data for local analysis.
The Department of Public Instruction recently signed a contract with the National Student Clearinghouse, a non-profit organization which works with more than 3,300 postsecondary institutions nationwide to maintain a repository of information on enrollment, degrees, diplomas, certificates, and other educational achievements.
The NSC data can answer questions such as
Where in the country, and when, do our high school graduates enroll in college?
How long do their education efforts persist?
Do they graduate from college?
What degrees do they earn?
The DPI will integrate information about graduates from Wisconsin high schools into the Wisconsin Longitudinal Data System (LDS). In addition, any public high school or district in Wisconsin can use the NSC StudentTracker service to request similar data for local analysis.
Madison School District: Strategic Plan Update Meeting
The Madison School District is holding an update to their Strategic Planning Process this week. A number of documents have been distributed, including:
K-12 school districts that lay off teachers by seniority, a policy known as "last in, first out," disproportionately affect the programs and students in their poorer and more minority schools than in their wealthier, less minority counterparts.
Looking at the 15 largest districts in California, researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that teachers at risk of layoffs are indeed concentrated in schools with more poor and minority students.
In these districts, if seniority-based layoffs are applied for teachers with up to two years' experience, highest-poverty schools would lose some 30 percent more teachers than wealthier schools, and highest-minority schools would lose 60 percent more teachers than would schools with the fewest minority students.
The District's Appeal Brief is in -- A link to the appeal is shown on the lower left.
The Seattle School District's first brief in its appeal of Judge Spector's decision was filed on Friday. To me, it is not surprising that its arguments are weak. I don't think we could ever have scored this unprecedented victory had our case not been extremely well founded. Nonetheless, one can't predict what the appeals panel will rule.
Basically, the brief restates the district's original contention that, because the specified process was followed, any decision made by the board, (I might add -- regardless of how it flouted overwhelming evidence) must stand. Also, the brief misstates and misinterprets many aspects of our case. One of the most egregious examples is the contention that the court overstepped its authority by making a decision on curriculum. Not so - the court simply remanded the board's decision back to the board on the basis of the lack of evidence to support the decision.
We have 30 days to file our response brief (by June 21), and SPS has 15 days after (by July 6) to file its rebuttal. Our attorney tells me that a hearing will be scheduled after all briefs have been filed.
Today, when you were supposed to be reading your book, and while I was meeting with another student, I saw you writing something furiously. You are one of the few students in the class who regularly and dutifully records your thoughts on post-its, and, when I excused myself from my conference to come see what you were doing, I expected to see just that. However, when I asked you what you were doing, you told me about your book. I listened, but continued to glance at what you were trying to hide under your arm. When I saw it, I was less than happy. You were doing last night's homework, and I was livid.
I did not react as I should have. Taking your paper and crumpling it was inappropriate. Had I thought for a moment, instead of reacting instantly, I would have remembered that you are one of the most diligent, hard-working students in the class. I would have realized something was amiss.
I should have asked you why you didn't do your homework, rather than make rash assumptions. But I didn't. Instead, I tossed your paper in the trash and returned to the other student, without a word to you or even a glance back, thinking that you'd receive the message of disappointment and disdain I sought to deliver. (Maybe I didn't want to see the horror that had surely set upon your face).
When I finished with the other student, I called you over to my desk and told you to sit. Again, I seethed, and let my emotions get the best of me. I continued to lecture you and said I was upset with two things: you didn't do your homework, and you lied to me.
When he moved to Milwaukee from a tiny town in Mexico, Carlos Torres couldn't speak a word of English. Not even hello or goodbye.
He was a frightened kid, plunked into fifth grade at a south side Milwaukee school. His family - he's the youngest of 10 children - rented a place near 14th and Lincoln.
Now, a mere dozen years later, Carlos is a standout graduate of Marquette High School and, as of last weekend, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Faced with an enviable choice among four medical schools that accepted him, he has chosen Harvard on a full-tuition scholarship. He's the first member of his family to graduate from college.
As American dreams go, this one's pretty vivid.
Carlos became an American citizen, by the way. You may already be wondering about that. We're living in sensitive times when it comes to immigration issues. Carlos admits he was tempted to wear a shirt to UW graduation saying, "Do I look legal? Want to see my papers?" but he thought better of it.
To track how well Johnny could read last week -- and the week before that -- Gina Tortorice can now drag her finger across the front of an iPod Touch and watch her student's progress.
The first-grade teacher is one of 11 educators at the adjacent Black Hawk Middle and Gompers Elementary schools using KidGrid, an experimental iPod application designed by UW-Madison researchers to make documenting student progress frequent, instantaneous and high-tech.
"It's been very powerful for teachers, because they can keep track of data over time to see trends, and they can see specific growth in student learning," said Anne Schoenemann, an instructional resource teacher at Gompers. "What we really need to be doing is moving into the technology age and supporting teachers with the tools they need to collect data in an efficient manner - and paper and pencil doesn't always do it."
From the outside, it looks like any other school in Kabul. A red two-story building is sealed off from the street by a high wall. A few trees stand in the front yard. Children constantly go in and out.
But listen carefully. When the noise of the traffic dies down, you can hear the gentle sounds of violins being played and the patter of drums. In this city where music was illegal less than a decade ago, a new generation of children is being raised to understand its joys.
"This school is unique in Afghanistan," said Muhammad Aziz, a 19-year-old student who dreams of becoming one of the world's greatest players of the tabla, a South Asian drum. "It's the only professional music school and there are so many good teachers here."
The new National Institute of Music has been offering some courses for the past several months, but the formal opening will be later in May.
There's an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It's a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:
It's that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children's prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it's been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)
News of Martin Gardner's death began circulating on Saturday night. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his work, here's a taste of the kinds of puzzles he was famous for bringing to the world. Of course, he did much more: 15 years ago, I had the great honor of meeting him and his wife for a profile of him, which you can read here.
I still have the trick pen he gave me as a souvenir, one that I'll show anyone who comes by my desk. (I'll try to post a video of the pen.) It brings back fond memories of being shown his stash of magic tricks and gag gifts, his thoughtful comments on irrational beliefs, his experiences with mathematicians like Paul Erdős and the Gardners' feeding of feral kittens that came to the back deck of the house every afternoon.
The future of charter schools in New York hangs on negotiations between City Hall and teachers union President Michael Mulgrew. This is perverse.
The United Federation of Teachers is fighting to limit the growth of charters even as the state's application for as much as $700 million in federal Race to the Top money demands letting the number of schools expand.
Mulgrew's strategy has been to give the nod to upping the charter cap while trying to make it all but impossible for a sponsor to open one of these privately run, publicly funded academies. For example, by creating barriers to moving a charter into unused space in a public school building.
Although the city's charter schools have almost universally racked up amazing achievement gains, the UFT resists them because most are not unionized. And the more successful charters have become, the greater the resistance has grown
The Houston Independent School District is in the midst of developing a long-term strategic plan that will provide a road map for the future as the district strives to become the best public school system in the nation. To ensure that all key stakeholders are engaged and involved in this process, HISD is inviting any member of the Houston community to give their input at an open discussion on Monday, May 24, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center's board auditorium (4440 West 18th Street).
To develop a long-term Strategic Direction, HISD is working with the Apollo Consulting Group in a six-month effort that started in February 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of a final plan. The goal is to create a set of core initiatives and key strategies that will allow HISD to build upon the beliefs and visions established by the HISD Board of Education and to provide the children of Houston with the highest quality of primary and secondary education.
Over the past two months, HISD has been gathering input from members of Team HISD, as well as from parents and members of the Houston community, including faith-based groups, non-profit agencies, businesses, and local and state leaders. After analyzing feedback and conducting diagnostic research, a number of core initiatives have emerged. They include placing an effective teacher in every classroom, supporting the principal as the CEO, developing rigorous instructional standards and support, ensuring data driven accountability, and cultivating a culture of trust through action.
"True transformation cannot happen overnight and it cannot happen without the input from everyone at Team HISD and those in our community who hold a stake in the education of Houston's children," says Superintendent of Schools Terry B. Grier. "In order for it to be meaningful, we need everyone to lend their voice to the process and help us shape the future direction of HISD."
The Detroit school board and its emergency financial manager battled over money and power in two Wayne County Circuit Court cases on Friday.
Irene Nordé, a math administrator for the Detroit Public Schools, testified Friday that state appointee Robert Bobb made changes to the curriculum that put students in jeopardy of not being able to pass standardized tests.
That's because, she said, teachers have been instructed to focus on remediation, rather than moving students forward.
Nordé was subpoenaed by attorneys for the school board, which alleges that Bobb is violating state law by making academic decisions and not consulting with the board on financial plans as required by law.
Bobb refuted Nordé's claim. "We'll let the data speak for itself," he said, referring to test scores.
The case, which will continue for another six to eight weeks, could determine who has authority over much-needed reform in a school district where students received the lowest scores on 2009 national math and reading tests.
Colorado won a $17.4 million federal grant to build a statewide data system that will link information about public school students from the time they enter preschool to when they graduate from college.
The grant was announced at noon by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Colorado was one of 20 states to share $250 million in stimulus funds intended to support the development of systems that link data across time and databases, from early childhood into careers, including matching teachers to students, according to the Institute of Education Sciences.
The student data will be kept private.
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands applied for the grants. Colorado's was the fourth largest grant.
Mike Lipp is athletic director at Madison's West High School. Previously, he was a science teacher at the school for 20 years, and coached swimming, soccer and baseball. He also was a science teacher in DeForest for 15 years.
Lipp, 59, this month began a one-year term as president of the teacher unit of Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents teachers, related professionals and school support personnel. His grandmother and father-in-law were union members and he was in the United Auto Workers during a summer when he was a graduate student.
In your personal finances, what would you do if your expenses exceeded your revenue?
That happens in several levels, when you get a mortgage or when you get a car loan. I have never bought a car with cash. ... Personally, you can operate in the red but governments have to operate in the black. It's a funny system.
Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets. They come to us thinking they've entered a military Camelot, and find a maze of petty rules with no visible future application. These rules are applied inconsistently by the administration, and tend to change when a new superintendent is appointed every few years. The students quickly see through assurances that "people die if you do X" (like, "leave mold on your shower curtain," a favorite claim of one recent administrator). We're a military Disneyland, beloved by tourists but disillusioning to the young people who came hoping to make a difference.
In my experience, the students who find this most demoralizing are those who have already served as Marines and sailors (usually more than 5 percent of each incoming class), who know how the fleet works and realize that what we do on the military-training side of things is largely make-work. Academics, too, are compromised by the huge time commitment these exercises require. Yes, we still produce some Rhodes, Marshall and Truman Scholars. But mediocrity is the norm.
Meanwhile, the academy's former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success (and, yes, athletic skills that are more pertinent to military service) in favor of players who, according to many midshipmen who speak candidly to me, often have little commitment to the military itself.
During the past year, academic experts, educators, and policy makers have waged a confusing and largely invisible war over the content and quality of Common Core's proposed high school exit and grade-level standards. Some critics see little or no value to national standards, explaining why local or state control is necessary for real innovations in education and why "one size doesn't fit all" applies as strongly to the school curriculum as it does to the clothing industry. On the other hand, some supporters believe so strongly in the idea of national standards that they appear willing to accept Common Core's standards no matter how inferior they may be to the best sets of state or international standards so long as they are better than most states' standards. In contrast, others who believe that national standards may have value have found earlier drafts incapable of making American students competitive with those in the highest-achieving countries. No one knows whether Common Core's standards will raise student achievement in all performance categories, simply preserve an unacceptable academic status quo, or actually reduce the percentage of high-achieving high school students in states that adopt them.
All these alternatives are possible because of the lack of clarity about what readiness for college and workplace means - the key concept driving the current movement for national standards - and what the implications of this concept are for high school graduation requirements in each state and for current admission and/or placement requirements in its post-secondary institutions. There has been a striking lack of public discussion about the definition of college readiness (e.g., for what kind of college, for what majors, for what kind of credit-bearing freshman courses) and whether workplace readiness is similar to college readiness. According to Common Core's own draft writers, these college readiness standards are aimed at community colleges, trade schools, and other non-selective colleges, although Common Core hasn't said so explicitly.
A new study comparing reading skills of fourth- and eighth-grade children in 18 urban school systems once again places Milwaukee Public Schools near the bottom of the ladder, a pattern of underachievement that gave voice to worries Thursday about the future of Milwaukee's children and calls - yet again - for a greater sense of urgency to improve.
In a set of national reading tests, Milwaukee's fourth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, while its eighth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Fresno, Calif., and Washington, D.C., according to the results of the Trial Urban District Assessment, a special project of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a periodic national assessment, often referred to as the Nation's Report Card, that allows for state-to-state comparisons in core academic subjects. The urban district study isolates scores among a number of the country's high-minority, high-poverty school systems to better compare how those students are doing.
All of the voluntary participants in the program are from cities with populations of at least 250,000, ranging from districts serving Fresno, Calif., and Louisville, Ky., to those in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
This is the first time that Milwaukee Public Schools participated in the reading tests for the urban districts. Last year, results from the math tests also carried bad news for MPS, which did better than only Detroit at the eighth-grade level.
Keeping just 20 books in the home can boost children's chances of doing well at school, according to a major study.
Regular access to books has a direct impact on pupils' results, irrespective of parents' own education, occupation and social class, it was claimed.
Researchers said that children coming from a "bookish home" remained in education for around three years longer than young people born into families with empty bookshelves.
The study, led by Nevada University, in the United States, comes despite continuing concerns over a decline in reading at school.
It is feared that some teachers are being forced to dump books - and teach children using basic worksheets - to boost their performance in literacy tests.
Michael Rosen, the former Children's Laureate, has said that many pupils now go all the way through their formative years at school without reading a single novel.
Under the state's new math curriculum, lower scores plus a quicker pace of instruction equal greater anxiety for both students and their teachers.
"In my classes, I have 60 kids and only 17 are passing. You know how stressful that is on me?" said Donna Aker, a veteran math teacher at South Gwinnett High School.
It's a problem common to many metro Atlanta schools. Nearly one in five ninth-graders in metro Atlanta last year got an F in Math I -- the first year of the state's new math curriculum in high school.
The math failure rate was more than double that experienced by the same group of kids in the eighth grade the year before.
We're in graduation days for the Class of 2010. 1.6 million bright-faced young men and women getting undergraduate degrees, college diplomas, across the country.
And the job market? Brutal. It was brutal last year, of course. Now it's brutal stacked on brutal. 19.6 percent unemployment for Americans under 25. The highest since 1948.
Just one in four new college grads who applied for a job has one. Twenty five percent. And many have applied for scores of jobs.
This Hour, On Point: we talk to the Class of 2010 about the job hunt - and survival strategies in the economy of 2010.
Ashbrook included a segment from media "star" Anderson Cooper's commencement address at Tulane in his show. While not a fan of the generally thin coverage provided by the "Mainstream Media", Cooper's story of determination, risk and luck is worth a look:
When I graduated there were hiring freezes at most TV news networks. I tried for months to get an entry-level job at ABC news, answering phones, xeroxing, whatever, but I couldn't get hired. At the time it was crushing. But in retrospect, not getting that entry-level job, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
After months of waiting, I decided if no one would give me a chance as a reporter, I should take a chance. If no one would give me an opportunity, I would have to make my own opportunity.
I wanted to be a war correspondent, so I decided to just start going to wars. As you can imagine, my mom was thrilled about the plan. I had a friend make a fake press pass for me on a mac, and I borrowed a home video camera... and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government... then I moved onto Somalia in the early days of the famine and fighting there.
I figured if I went places that were dangerous, I wouldn't have as much competition, and because I was willing to sleep on the roofs of buildings, and live on just a few dollars a day, I was able to charge very little for my stories. As ridiculous as it sounds, my plan worked, and after two years on my own shooting stories in war zones, I was hired by ABC news as a correspondent. I was the youngest correspondent they had hired in many years. Had I gotten the entry-level job I'd wanted, I would have never become a network correspondent so quickly, I probably would never have even become one at all. The things which seem like heartbreaking setbacks, sometimes turn out to be lucky breaks.
The progressive decline of students' ability in English worries me as a secondary school teacher. Do people know students are no longer formally tested in grammar?
Instead, it would appear that our curriculum is leaning toward encouraging students to be more creative and expressive. I would argue that this can be beneficial as long as students have a basic understanding of the foundation in the language.
A glaringly clear example of this going wrong is when Chinese medium of instruction students, who cannot demonstrate a clear understanding of the tenses, are asked to have a group discussion about a book or film.
Today is a pretty big day for anyone who cares about school funding in California. This morning a broad coalition of people and organizations--individual students and parents, nine school districts (including SFUSD!), the state PTA, the California School Boards Association (CSBA) and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA)--announced that a school funding adequacy lawsuit has been filed against the state.
The lawsuit, Robles-Wong v. California, requests that the current education finance system be declared unconstitutional and that the state be required to establish a school finance system that provides all students an equal opportunity to meet the academic goals set by the State.
In Act 1 of "My Fair Lady", Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl learning to speak like a lady, fantasizes about meeting the king. Of course, because it's a musical, she sings:
One evening the king will say, 'Oh, Liza, old thing -- I want all of England your praises to sing. Next week on the twentieth of May, I proclaim Liza Doolittle Day.
Since I'm not Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn -- or Marni Nixon, who sang for Audrey Hepburn in the movie, I'll spare you the rest. But suffice it to say, Eliza envisions all of England celebrating her glory. The only ones who recognize Eliza Doolittle Day, however, are music theater geeks like me. And while an evening of cocktails and show tunes sounds like fun, it's insufficient to mark the occasion because Eliza's message is all too relevant today.
You see, "My Fair Lady" is based on George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion", and both pieces explore the ramifications of learning how to speak properly at a time when elocution was valued as a symbol of education and upward mobility.
Emphasis on the was.
Listen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt say, "The only thing we have to feah is feah itself," and it's almost inconceivable that ordinary Americans trusted someone who sounded like Thurston Howell III. We are now in an age when Sarah Palin speaks to a quarter of the electorate, even though she talks like she's translating into Korean and back again. Even the rhetorically gifted President Obama has felt compelled to drop his g's while tryin' to sell health care reform.
Nowadays, soundin' folksy has become more important than sounding educated. As Eliza's teacher Henry Higgins says, "Use proper English, you're regarded as a freak." But our country's biggest competitors are learning proper English and, judging from all the Indian call centers, learning it quite well. Our country was built by people striving to move up, not dumbing down. So on this Eliza Doolittle Day, perhaps we should all take a moment to think before we speak.
Marc Acito is the author of How I Paid for College and Attack of the Theater People.
Government as Innovation Catalyst The $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" education program is showing how government can successfully drive systemwide innovation
The best use of government is as a catalyst for social system innovation. Yes, that's right: "Innovation bureaucrat" need not be an oxymoron. Leaders should get the innovation reaction started--and then get out of the way.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is showing how it can be done. The "Race to the Top" program offers $4 billion in grants to states committed to reforming their education systems. Duncan outlined a clear goal of restoring the U.S. as a world leader in preparing students to succeed in college and the workplace and announced the first grants on Mar. 29, 2010--$100 million for Delaware and $500 million for Tennessee.
If educators want to shrink the number of students who drop out of high school each year, they must greatly increase the number who can read proficiently by the time they're in fourth grade, a key non-profit children's advocacy group says in a new report.
"The bottom line is that if we don't get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty," the authors say.
Ralph Smith, the foundation's executive vice president, says recent research shows that dropouts "don't just happen in high school" but that students give clear indications as early as elementary school that they're on a "glide path" to dropping out. Among the clearest signs: difficulty reading and understanding basic work that becomes more detail-oriented around fourth grade.
The University of California at Berkeley is an experimental place, and sometimes those experiments start as early as the summer before new students set foot on campus.
This summer, the university's College of Letters and Science -- home to three quarters of Berkeley's 25,000 undergraduates -- will ask freshmen and transfers to return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.
Like so many other institutions, the college usually asks students to read a specific book or watch an assigned movie in the weeks before classes start, to inform discussion during orientation and throughout the fall. But a reading assignment didn't make sense for something as cutting-edge and personalized as genetic analysis.
Finding depressing education news is easy. The recession, combined with the waning of federal stimulus money, is about to trigger hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs--an "education catastrophe," warns Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The layoffs will play out against a background of flat national reading scores and mediocre showings on international education rankings. Looming behind everything: the country's much-debated school reform law, No Child Left Behind, has fallen into disrepute.
None of this can be sugarcoated; yet dwelling on the negatives masks some significant education breakthroughs that promise to pay dividends for years to come. Together they represent the country's best shot at achieving President Obama's ambitious goal of pushing the country back to the top of international education rankings--measured by college graduations by 2020.
These developments include breakthroughs on answering these questions:
We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?
That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually devoted to just high school.
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city's Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr. Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely disappointing.
Education reform is "moving into prime time," writes Steven Brill in the Times Magazine article "The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand." He looks at how Race to the Top, the charter-school movement and other factors are coming together to overhaul public education in the United States -- and why teachers' unions are resisting many of these reforms.
...[Race to the Top] has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics. The activity set off by the contest has enabled [the school-reform network New Leaders for New Schools] to press as never before its frontal challenge to the teachers' unions: they argue that a country that spends more per pupil than any other but whose student performance ranks in the bottom third among developed nations isn't failing its children for lack of resources but for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front of the class.
If a state mandates that every school reduce class sizes, will students learn more? Since reducing class size is very expensive, that is a question state legislatures are asking themselves at a time when fiscal deficits are looming nearly everywhere. To that question, a just released study of the Florida Class Size Amendment says "No." Telling schools they must reduce class size yields no benefit, it reports.
Florida is an interesting place to explore this issue, because students there have been improving at a faster rate than any other state in the union, according to Matt Ladner at the Goldwater Institute. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Ladner shows that student performance in 4th and 8th grade reading and math has leaped forward in Florida while it has remained stagnant in many other states.
Some have attributed the spectacular Florida gains to the state's accountability system, its Just Read initiative, or the state's school choice programs. But others have attributed the Florida gains to an amendment to the Florida Constitution, adopted by the voters in 2002, which requires every school district to reduce its average class size. To fulfill the purposes of the amendment, the Florida state legislature has in recent years allocated state funds that must be used for class size reduction in those districts not yet at the limit. The remaining districts have received comparable amounts to be used for any educational purpose they see fit.
Sharon Begley, science editor at Newsweek, doesn't have anything nice to say about education research. In a recent article, she refers to it as "second-class science" and "so flimsy as to be a national scandal."
I agree that there is a problem, but I don't think she's diagnosed it correctly.
There is a lot of excellent research in education. I spend most of my time reading basic scientific work and trying to understand what it means for classrooms and for policy, and much of what I draw on is education research.
There is, however, also a good deal of dreck.
There is a certain amount of poor science in other fields as well. Go to the psychology section of a large book store and you'll see plenty of nonsense. Books with crazy suggestions on dieting, love, self-actualization, and so on.
The difference between psychology and education is that psychology, as a field, is more vigilant in its self-regulation, particularly through its professional societies.
Less than a month after signing the nation's toughest law on illegal immigration, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has again upset the state's large Hispanic population, signing a bill aimed at ending ethnic studies in Tucson schools.
Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.
"Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people," Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday.
Judy Burns, president of the governing board of the Tucson schools, said the district's ethnic studies courses did not violate any of the provisions of the new law and would be continued because they were valuable to the students.
A school district that gained the support of President Barack Obama for promoting accountability after it fired all its teachers from a struggling school announced on Sunday it had reached an agreement with the union to return the current staffers to their jobs.
The two sides said a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the coming school year would allow the roughly 87 teachers, guidance counselors, librarians and other staffers who were to lose their jobs at the end of this year to return without having to reapply. More than 700 people had already applied for the positions.
The agreement calls for a longer school day, more after-school tutoring and other changes.
"What this means is that they have come to an agreement about a reform effort and that will change the quality" of the education program at Central Falls, said Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, who applauded both sides for working together.
the intensive use of data to guide decisions on daily policing - is a hot strategy when it comes to law enforcement, including in Milwaukee.
If used well, data can make police work more precise and effective and leaders can be more effective in determining what works and even in determining who is getting the job done.
This is education's version of CrimeStat: Rooms filled with round tables, each table surrounded by a team of people from one school poring over data to try to figure out what they can do to get better results at their school.
In fact, Milwaukee Public Schools calls its program EdStat. Two-day "data retreats" are becoming centerpieces of how to run an MPS school, and the wealth of data available at the click of a mouse at any time to principals and others is growing quickly. A variety of test scores, attendance records, discipline records, and information on what teaching techniques are being used in each classroom, some of it updated every day - it's impressive.
The concept is simple: Find out all you can about what is going on in a school and put it to the smartest, best use you can in moving forward. The mountain of information can be just an impenetrable mass or a gold mine of insight.
The burst of interest in data use may be one of the less exciting, but most important trends in American education. Good data use is high on the list of priorities of education advocates who might otherwise differ on just about everything.
In a dramatic show of White House support, President Obama's education czar will visit a Brooklyn charter school Tuesday to help persuade the foot-dragging state Assembly to lift the cap on the number of charters, The Post has learned.
The timing of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's trip is significant since New York has just two weeks to revamp its charter-school law ahead of the June 1 deadline for the state to submit its application for $700 million in federal education funds.
"I hope the Legislature will do the right thing by children," Duncan told The Post yesterday.
As an education policy analyst, I am very concerned about the quality of education our children are receiving. My research has led me to conclude that the key impediment to improving public education is not lack of money, but the organizational structure of public schools. Private schools in Washington and public charter schools in other states are given the advantage of operating free of public education's centralized and highly regulated superstructure. As a result, private and public charter schools can better direct resources to the classroom, more reliably place effective teachers in every classroom, and offer better life prospects to children through higher-quality education. Cutting central bureaucracies and putting qualified principals in charge of their schools would help make sure that education dollars actually reach the classroom.
Teachers in Seattle receive an average of $70,850 in total salary (base pay and other pay), plus average insurance benefits of $9,855. These figures apply to a ten-month work year.
Teachers in Seattle public schools can earn up to $88,463 in total base and other pay for a ten-month work year, or $98,318 including benefits.
Seattle Schools employ 371 people as "educational staff associates," who receive an average of $76,339 for a ten-month year, or $86,194 including benefits.
Seattle Schools employs 193 non-teachers, mostly senior administrators, who each receive more than $100,000 in total pay.
The true aim of the humanities is to prepare citizens for exercising their freedom responsibly.
In 1867, when he discharged his main responsibility as honorary rector of St. Andrews University by delivering an address on liberal education to the students, the philosopher and civil servant John Stuart Mill felt compelled to defend the place of the sciences alongside the humanities. Today it is the connection of the humanities to a free mind and citizenship in a free society that requires defense.
For years, an array of influential voices has been calling for our nation's schools and universities to improve science and math education. Given the globalized and high-tech world, the prize, pundits everywhere argue, goes to the nations that summon the foresight and discipline to educate scientists and engineers capable of developing tomorrow's ideas.
No doubt science and math are vital. But all of the attention being paid to these disciplines obscures a more serious problem: the urgent need to reform liberal education.
Welcome to the new age of school autonomy and teacher freedom.
At least that is what has been promised: fewer directives and targets, less guidance and prescription.
However, there are conflicting messages on English education policy from the new coalition government.
They can be summed up by two consecutive sentences in the "coalition agreement", which has become the working handbook for the new government.
First, it promises that all schools will have "greater freedom over the curriculum". Then, it adds that all schools will be held "properly accountable".
The moment of truth for Ivan and Olga Rojas came in 2008, when their son Esteban finished his sophomore year at the Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket and told his parents he wanted to transfer to Central Falls High School. The thought alarmed them. The high school had been under-performing for years, and Esteban's mother feared there were gangs and drugs at the school.
For Blanca Giraldo the reckoning came in February 2009, when Central Falls High School Principal Elizabeth Legault sent a letter asking her to come to the school. Legault told Giraldo that her daughter Valerie Florez was failing: she was frequently late, skipping class and not doing her work.
For Jackie Wilson, a random act of violence forced her to uproot her daughter Sakira during her junior year at Central Falls High.
Kudzu, (Pueraria lobata), I learn from Wikipedia, was "... introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant.
From 1935 to the early 1950s, the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion.... The Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years.
It was subsequently discovered that the southeastern United States has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control--hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, and temperate winters with few hard freezes...As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953."
We now have, I suggest, an analogous risk from the widespread application of "the evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction, K-12."
At least one major foundation and one very old and influential college for teachers are now promoting what I have described as "guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, processes and the like, as props to substitute for students' absent motivation to describe or express in writing something that they have learned."
A seven-year school revamp spearheaded by this gas-rich emirate's first lady is emerging as test case for radical education overhauls in the Mideast.
The United Nations and World Bank have long blamed low educational standards for contributing to economic stagnation and instability across the region, which faces the highest rates of youth unemployment in the world and the threat of growing religious extremism.
Schoolteachers across the region have been bound by entrenched programs that emphasize religion and rote learning, often from outdated textbooks. Qatar, with a tiny population and outsize natural-gas export revenue, launched a new system in 2004 that stresses problem-solving, math, science, computer skills and foreign-language study. The final slate of new schools in the program was approved last month, giving Qataris over 160 new schools to choose from when the next school year begins in September.
"The old system churned out obedient but passive citizens. What good is that for a global economy?" says first lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned.
Madison School District Online Survey: "Embedded Honors" High School Courses
via a kind reader's email. The survey is apparently available via the District's "Infinite Campus" system:
1. The Embedded Honors option provided work that was challenging for my child.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
2. Please provide an explanation to Question 1.
(empty box)
3. The Embedded Honors work allowed my child to go more in-depth into the content of the course.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
4. Please provide an explanation to Question 3.
(empty box)
5. For Embedded Honors, my child had to do more work than other students.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
6. For Embedded Honors, my child had to do more challenging work than other students.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
7. Mark the following learning options that were part of your child's experience in the Embedded Honors for this corse.
o extension opportunities of class activities
o class discussions and labs to enhance my learning
o flexible pace of instruction
o access to right level of challenge in coursework
o opportunities to focus on my personal interests
o independent work (projects)
o opportunities to demonstrate my knowledge
o opportunities to explore a field of study
o additional reading assignments
o more challenging reading assignments
o additional writing assignments
o helpful teacher feedback on my work
o activities with other Embedded Honors students
o more higher-level thinking, less memorization
8. My child benefited from the Embedded Honors option for the course(s) for which he/she took, compared to courses without Embedded Honors.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
When Christopher Xu turned 2, his mother's worst fears were confirmed. The other babies at her son's birthday party babbled, gestured and used simple words as they played and interacted with their parents and each other. But Christopher was different.
"He was locked in his own world," Sophia Sun recalls. "No eye contact. No pointing. No laughing at cartoons or looking at me when I talk to him."
In fact, Sun says, she and her husband, Yingchun Xu, both Chinese-born computer engineers who earned their graduate degrees in Vancouver, British Columbia, had never known anyone with this kind of remote, inaccessible child.
The couple were living with their older daughters, Iris and Laura, in a Chicago suburb when Christopher was born. Both girls were interactive, affectionate babies, but Christopher paid little attention to his mother, his family or his surroundings. As a toddler he spent most of his time lining up his favorite toys in order or spinning himself in circles -- over and over again. When the Xu family went to an air show, his mother pointed to the planes roaring overhead, saying, "Christopher, look at that! Look up!" but the little boy just spun around and around, oblivious to the noise or the world surrounding him.
Now Christopher is 11, and he will soon graduate from the fifth grade at Madison's John Muir Elementary to head off to middle school. Thanks to the love and persistence of his family, powerful early training, insightful teachers and accepting classmates, his story has changed dramatically, and his remarkable abilities are increasingly apparent.
Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think. (Recorded at TEDxNYED, March 2010 in New York, NY. Duration: 11:39)
"LIFELONG learning" is a phrase beloved by business schools. But not, it seems, by their clients. According to a recent survey by Mannaz, a management-development firm, the number of professionals taking part in formal corporate training drops rapidly after the age of 55. Are these wise, old heads being overlooked?
It is tempting to conclude that older executives are falling victim to age discrimination, as firms focus resources on younger talent. But according to Jorgen Thorsell, Mannaz's vice-president, this is not the case. Reticence, he says, comes not from the organisations but from the employees themselves.
Mr Thorsell believes that conventional training simply no longer serves their needs. Formal programmes are often seen as a repetition of lessons already learned and become increasingly irrelevant in the light of experience and expertise. The resulting "training fatigue" is resistant to most incentives.
Thanks largely to the efforts of President Obama, more Americans are paying attention to education reform. In Wisconsin, many people were forced out of their comfort zone (we are pleased about ranking either #1 or #2 in ACT scores) when the Obama administration snubbed our request for federal "Race to the Top" money.
Just as the public is coming to understand the vulnerability of the Wisconsin economy, they are beginning to see the vulnerability of our K-12 school system. Dropouts are up, test scores are down, and we have never spent more on education. Increasingly, people are beginning to demand more performance from their education dollar.
In education, like so many aspects of our lives, we look for success stories. Today's rock star of education reform is the diminutive head of the Washington D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee. She is shaking up the world of education based on her passion around one simple concept; performance. Enabled by changes in federal and city laws, Rhee has put in place a teacher evaluation system, 50% of which is based on teachers' impact on student learning. Using this tool, Rhee laid off dozens of teachers. If they were not performing, they were gone.
The need to succeed at teaching children is at the basic core of everything we do in Madison schools.
So why did the very society that depends on us to educate their most precious beings, their children, come to be so apprehensive about us? How did this happen? When did our state Legislature and many of our fellow citizens decide that an increase and/or a change in public financing of education was not in their interest?
Perhaps we all need to calm down and ask ourselves the very basic question of why we have public schools. The following tenets are a good start:
1. To provide universal access to free education.
2. To guarantee equal opportunities for all children.
3. To unify a diverse population.
4. To prepare people for citizenship in a democratic society.
5. To prepare people to become economically self-sufficient.
6. To improve social conditions.
7. To pass knowledge from one generation to the next.
8. To share the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
9. To instill in our young people a love for a lifetime of learning.
10. To bring a richness and depth to life.
Many Americans have either forgotten, disregard, or no longer view public schools as needed to achieve the above. Some, not all, view the public schools in a much more narrow and self-indulgent way -- "What are the public schools going to do for me and my child?" -- and do not look at what the schools so richly provide for everyone in a democratic society.
There are many reasons that public education institutions face credibility challenges, including:
Having said that, there are certainly some remarkable people teaching our children, in many cases resisting curriculum reduction schemes and going the extra mile. In my view, our vital public school climate would be far richer and, overall, more effective with less bureaucracy, more charters (diffused governance) and a more open collaborative approach with nearby education institutions.
Madison taxpayers have long supported spending policies far above those of many other communities. The current economic situation requires a hard look at all expenditures, particularly those that cannot be seen as effective for the core school mission: educating our children. Reading scores would be a great place to start.
New Madison School Board Governance: Maya Cole is President & Beth Moss Vice President
Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting included a shifting of the chairs as Maya Cole succeeds Arlene Silveira as President and Beth Moss steps in for Lucy Mathiak as Vice President. Best wishes.
"I hope we will criticize the many reform ideas that rest upon false assumptions about the differences between "us" (especially middle- and upper-class whites) and "them" ... spouted by folks ... whose solutions support the continuation of schools with a test-prep curriculum and military/prison-style behavioral norms ... I want all kids to have a chance to go to schools of the sort where Arne Duncan and President Obama send their own kids." - Deborah Meier
If you're interested in public education, take a look at this exchange between reknowned inner-city principal and writer Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch, author most recently of The Death and Life of the Great American School System. It's a terrific back-and-forth. Meier, by the way, had this to say about the selection of Arne Duncan in a discussion that occurred right after he was picked:
NJEA's website has a new feature: an analysis NJ's RTTT application. While its censorious tone is no surprise, there's a few factual misrepresentations. As a public service, we offer these annotations.
1) The proposal will call "for more and more testing, in all subject areas, in all grades." Actually, the DOE is most likely going to eliminate statewide assessments in all grades except for 4th, 8th, 11th. New district assessments will be web-based and easily integrated into classroom instruction. (By the way, anyone want to figure out how much time and money was spent on developing our new grade 3, 5,6,7, and 9 assessments?)
2) "while NJEA was vilified for weeks by Christie when the poorly conceived and hastily written Phase RTTT application was rejected by the Obama Administration, Schundler told reporters he didn't think NJEA's support was central to approval in Phase II." Actually, Schundler is echoing U.S. Ed Sec. Arne Duncan, who has explained that he prefers strong reforms without buy-in over weak reforms with union support.
On May 11, the UFT, NYSUT and the State Education Department reached a new agreement -- subject to legislative approval -- to create a teacher evaluation and improvement plan. Under the new agreement, which would take effect in September 2011, the evaluation process will be more objective, be based mostly on qualitative measures and limit the role of test scores.
How will the teacher evaluation system change?
The current evaluation system doesn't work for us as a profession. It is totally subjective and too dependent on the whims of administrators. The new system, which would move us forward as a profession, will establish specific criteria that incorporate multiple measures of evaluating teacher performance. The new system embeds professional development in the evaluation system. Teacher evaluation was never meant to be a gotcha system. It was supposed to allow teachers to grow and develop professionally throughout their careers.
Under President Obama's new $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, states can compete for funds by creating programs that improve the quality of their schools. The idea of rewarding school reform initiatives is good, but one-time grants from the federal government will not improve our public education system by itself.
Why? Because the $400 million grant Pennsylvania now seeks represents less than half of 1% of the $23 billion spent annually in my state's public school system. Given the thousands of dollars already being spent per student, an additional $56 per child will be insignificant--unless it is accompanied by comprehensive school-choice reform.
Pennsylvania should adopt reform based on the same premise as the Race to the Top initiative: that competition for taxpayer dollars improves the quality of education.
Let's suppose you have spent your career as a professor at an American education school, training future teachers. Then suppose that your state decided that teachers could get certified without attending an education school at all.
That's called "alternative certification," and most of my school of education colleagues are outraged by it.
I take a different view. These new routes into teaching could transform the profession, by attracting the type of student that has eluded education schools for far too long. We should extend an olive branch to our competitors, instead of circling the wagons against them.
The biggest challenger at the moment is Teach for America (TFA), which recruits graduating seniors, mostly from elite colleges, and places them as teachers in public schools following a five-week training course. Last year, a whopping 11% of all Ivy League seniors applied to TFA. It was the No. 1 employer at several other top colleges, including Georgetown and the University of Chicago.
Four of the Mt. Diablo school district's lowest-achieving schools will present their plans Tuesday for boosting student performance by applying for federal grants of up to $2 million a year to reform their campuses.
"It really could be an opportunity to make big changes," said Tom Carman, principal of Bel Air Elementary in Bay Point, among the schools that will apply for the money.
"A lot of what the teachers are going to be talking about is looking at data and finding out the best way to teach 'x, y or z,'" said Carman, who will retire this year. "So, we're going to be better educators."
Six district schools landed on that state's list of low-achieving campuses, identified as testing among the bottom 5 percent statewide.
'Throw away your dictionaries!' is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In this extract from his new book, Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of a linguistic phenomenon - and its links to big money.
Globalisation is a word that first slipped into its current usage during the 1960s; and the globalisation of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation. Combined with the biggest IT innovations since Gutenberg, it continues to inspire the most comprehensive transformation of our society in 500, even 1,000, years. This is a story I have followed, and contributed to, in a modest way, ever since I wrote the BBC and PBS television series The Story of English, with William Cran and Robert MacNeil, in the early 1980s. When Bill Gates was still an obscure Seattle software nerd, and the latest cool invention to transform international telephone lines was the fax, we believed we were providing a snapshot of the English language at the peak of its power and influence, a reflection of the Anglo-American hegemony. Naturally, we saw our efforts as ephemeral. Language and culture, we knew, are in flux. Any attempts to pin them down would be antiquarianism at best, doomed at worst. Besides, some of the experts we talked to believed that English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants. The Story of English might turn out to be a last hurrah.
In the 19th century, Illinois was the land of Lincoln. In the 20th, it was the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. In the 21st, Illinois has given us a new breed of Republican: Roger Eddy.
Mr. Eddy is what they call a downstater, an assemblyman who serves an east-central Illinois district hugging the Indiana border. His day job turns out to be in government as well, as a public schools superintendent.
Last week Mr. Eddy became the face of the Republican failure to get a voucher bill through the Illinois assembly. The bill had passed the Senate. Yet despite being pushed by a remarkable coalition involving fellow Republicans, a free-market state think tank, and a prominent African-American leader, only 25 Republicans in the House voted yes. That was 12 votes short. Mr. Eddy was one of 23 Republicans who killed it by voting no.
"Last week was a missed opportunity for children in Chicago's worst and most overcrowded schools, and it was a missed opportunity for Republicans," says Collin Hitt, who handles education issues for the Illinois Policy Institute. "It's not often that a minority Republican party has the chance to advance cornerstone policy with key African-American support. The good news is that the legislation remains alive, and this bill has another chance."
The reform efforts at Sam Houston High School, once the worst-ranked campus in Texas, have drawn high-profile praise, from Gov. Rick Perry to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
"Sam Houston is proof that positive change is possible," Perry said at a celebratory news conference in October. "After six years of underperformance, this school has not only met state standards, it is now a recognized campus."
Perry is correct: Sam Houston last year did break its streak of "academically unacceptable" ratings from the state, but that is only part of the statistical picture. Duncan's visit last month to Sam Houston -- where he applauded the turnaround efforts -- has reignited debate about the high school's transformation: Is it the success story that Houston ISD and elected officials claim?
The answer is complicated. But in the final analysis, one thing is clear: Despite an improvement in student test scores, Sam Houston benefited from the state's easier rating system last year.
In the summer of 2008, the Houston Independent School District was under orders from Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott to make major changes at Sam Houston, which was the longest-running unacceptable school in the state. State guidelines required HISD to replace the principal and rename the school. In addition, at least 75 percent of the teaching staff had to be replaced, and half the students were supposed to be new.
Without giving too much away, I'll just say that my college uses one format for final exams, and is considering switching to another in a couple of years.
I've been thinking about the relative advantages of different formats, and would love to hear from my wise and worldly readers about their experiences with the different schedules. I'll admit being pretty agnostic on this one.
The various formats I've seen:
1. Run the regular class schedule right up to the bitter end; let each class schedule its own final, if any.
Advantages: No schedule conflicts, no issue with some classes preferring papers or projects instead of exams.*
Disadvantages: Doing 'common' finals across multiple sections of the same class becomes impossible, and exams are limited to the length of a class period.
Leaders and backers of the handful of high-energy "no excuses" schools in Milwaukee are launching efforts aimed at tripling the number of children attending such schools in the city.
The goal proclaimed by leaders of four efforts that have sprung up almost simultaneously is to raise the number of students in such demanding schools from about 6,000 now to 20,000 by 2020.
If the efforts succeed, they will dramatically change the education landscape in Milwaukee and, backers hope, make widespread the high achievement levels of the schools that are at the center of the new effort.
But for the effort to succeed, major political, institutional and financial hurdles will need to be jumped. People on both sides of the longstanding, giant chasm between partisans for Milwaukee Public Schools and partisans for charter schools and private voucher schools will need to cooperate and focus on matters of improving the quality of education where they might actually find common ground.
In any profession, you need a flow of ideas so the conversation around any particular subject doesn't become stale. But we also need a common understanding of the profession's fundamentals. For example, who wouldn't want our doctors and pilots to understand the basics of medicine and flying? If they don't, we're all in a heap of trouble.
A new National Council of Teacher Quality study suggests that Texas education schools are approaching the heap-of-trouble designation in teaching fundamentals. The report takes a look at 67 schools across the state in such areas as preparing teachers to instruct students in math and reading.
The study finds that the only consistency among them is their inconsistency.
The number of children born outside marriage in the United States has increased dramatically to four out of ten of all births.
Figures show that 41 per cent of children born in 2008 did not have married parents - up from 28 per cent in 1990.
Researchers have concluded that although Christian values still play an important role in American society, public attitudes have changed.
Having a child out of wedlock does not carry the stigma and shame it once did, they say.
The study also found that in America there is a declining number of teenage mothers and rising numbers of older parents.
The University of Wisconsin-Parkside is considering suspending admission to the school's teacher certification program and dissolving the teacher education department.
The Journal Times in Racine reports that Chancellor Deborah Ford is recommending the action.
If the proposal passes the Faculty Senate next week, officials say students enrolled in the certification program would be able to finish their degrees and student teaching, but no new students would be admitted.
Ford said she hopes a new education program will be in place in three years. Her announcement comes about a year after a Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction investigation found that the university's education program had "serious deficiencies and noncompliance issues."
Celebrity English tutor Karson Oten Fan Karno, also known as K. Oten, was arrested for suspected infringement of copyright of public examination papers along with seven people in a raid by customs officers on tutorial centres.
K. Oten and the tutorial company through which he delivered video lessons both denied they had breached copyright rules in offering lessons to around 60 Form Six students at two centres in Admiralty and Yau Ma Tei.
The tutorial firm, Advanced Contemporary Education Centre, said yesterday it had never copied exam papers. "The handouts used in tutorial classes offered by us were written, printed and distributed to students by the tutors themselves," it said.
It had suspended classes taught by Oten and refunded cash to students. It said it would reserve the right to pursue damages.
We now have, I suggest, an analogous risk from the widespread application of "the evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction, k-12." At least one major foundation and one very old and influential college for teachers are now promoting what I have described as "guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, rubrics, processes and the like, as props to substitute for students' absent motivation to describe or express in writing something that they have learned."
Most of these literacy experts are psychologists and educators, rather than historians or authors of literature. Samuel Johnson, an 18th century author some may remember, once wrote that "an author will turn over half a library to produce one book." A recent major foundation report suggests that Dr. Johnson didn't know what he was talking about when it comes to adolescents:
"Some educators feel that the 'adolescent literacy crisis' can be resolved simply by having adolescents read more books. This idea is based on the misconception that the source of the problem is 'illiteracy.' The truth is that adolescents--even those who have already 'learned how to read'--need systematic support to learn how to 'read to learn' across a wide variety of contexts and content." So, no need for adolescents to read books, just give them lots of literacy kudzu classes in "rubrics, guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, and processes..."
Other literacy kudzu specialists also suggest that reading books is not so important, instead that: (to quote a recent Washington Post article by Psychologist Dolores Perin of Teachers College, Columbia) "many students cannot learn well from a content curriculum because they have difficulty reading assigned text and fulfilling subject-area writing assignments. Secondary content teachers need to understand literacy processes and become aware of evidence-based reading and writing techniques to promote learners' understanding of the content material being taught. Extended school-based professional development should be provided through collaborations between literacy and content-area specialists."
E.D. Hirsch has called this "technique" philosophy of literacy instruction, "How-To-Ism" and says that it quite uselessly tries to substitute methods and skills for the knowledge that students must have in order to read well and often, and to write on academic subjects in school.
Literacy Kudzu has been with us for a long time, but it has received new fertilizer from large private foundation and now federal standards grants which will only help it choke, where it can, attention to the reading of complete books and the writing of serious academic papers by the students in our schools.
Writing in Insidehighereducation.com, Lisa Roney recently said: "But let me also point out that the rise of Composition Studies over the past 30 or 40 years does not seem to have led to a populace that writes better."
Educrat Professors and Educrat Psychologists who have, perhaps, missed learning much about history and literature during their own educations, and have not made any obvious attempt to study their value in their education research, of course fall back on what they feel they can do: teach processes, skills, methods, rubrics, parameters, and techniques of literacy instruction. Their efforts, wherever they are successful, will be a disaster, in my view, for teachers and students who care about academic writing and about history and literature in the schools.
In a recent issue of Harvard Magazine an alum wrote: "Dad ( a professional writer) used to tell us what he felt was the best advice he ever had on good writing. One of his professors was the legendary Charles Townsend Copeland, A.B. 1882, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Copeland didn't collect themes and grade them. Rather, he made an appointment with each student to come to his quarters in Hollis Hall to read his theme and receive comments from the Master..."Dad started reading his offering and heard occasional groans and sighs of anguish from various locations in the (room). Finally, Copeland said in pained tones, 'Stop, Mr. Duncan, stop.' Dad stopped. After several seconds of deep silence, Copeland asked, 'Mr. Duncan, what are you trying to say?' Dad explained what he was trying to say. Said Copeland, 'Why didn't you write it down?'"
This is the sort of advice, completely foreign to the literacy kudzu community, which understands that in writing one first must have something to say (knowledge) and then one must work to express that knowledge so it may be understood. That may not play to the literacy kudzu community's perception of their strengths, but it has a lot more to do with academic reading and writing than anything they are working to inflict on our teachers and students.
I hope they, including the foundations and the university consultant world, may before too long pause to re-consider their approach to literacy instruction, before we experience the damage from this pest-weed which they are presently, perhaps unwittingly, in the method-technique-process of spreading in our schools.
The idea of a tangent line is central to many aspects of mathematics. In geometry, we study when a line rests on another figure at just one point, the point of tangency. In calculus, the slope of the line tangent to a curve at a point becomes the "derivative" of that curve at that point. One can even think of tangencies in more than one dimension. Imagine an (x,y) plane drawn on a table with a three dimensional object resting on it. One can therefore find a point of tangency in the x direction, and also one in the y direction. I found myself thinking of this recently when two dates almost coincided this past week. This past week, I celebrated my birthday and in a few days I will celebrate Mother's Day. In many ways, these two dates are tangential in two dimensions.
They are tangential in the sense that this year they both appear in the same week, with my birthday on Tuesday and Mother's Day on Sunday. In the years in which we wanted to be parents but could not, Mother's Day was a painful day that I often wished would just go away. I was most disturbed when the church I went to focused on mothers and Mother's Day, leaving those of us without children feeling like second class citizens. I would often leave crying, with my heart even more broken.
It was during those years that I discovered the true history of Mother's Day, which made the pain of the day seem less stinging. For, despite what the people at the greeting card companies want us to believe, Mother's Day began as a day of Peace, with a call to all mothers to pause for a minute to work to create a world in which peace could thrive. I have a copy of the original declaration of Mother's Day, written in 1870 by Juliet Ward Howe, hanging on my office door. It invites mothers to take a day away from their chores to help build a better world for all of our children. The celebration on Sunday is therefore much more than an excuse to buy flowers or chocolate (but I will still happily take the chocolate, thank you!)
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is more than doubling the number of senior managers who oversee the city's 123 public schools, a move intended to put more muscle behind her efforts to raise teacher quality and student achievement.
Openings for 13 new "instructional superintendents" were posted on the D.C. schools Web site last week, at annual salaries of $120,000 to $150,000. Instructional superintendents directly supervise school principals, overseeing academic performance while troubleshooting personnel and student discipline issues.
The move comes as the school system deals with serious budget pressures. Rhee and District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi continue to search for an additional $10.7 million to fully fund the proposed $135.6 million teachers' contract. Rhee also faces, according to Gandhi, about $30 million in projected overspending, some of it produced by salaries of school-based special education aides, overtime and severance payments.
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
These lines from Romeo and Juliet are often quoted to indicate the triviality of naming. But anyone who has read or seen the play through to its end knows that the names Montague and Capulet indicate a complex web of family relationships and enmities that end up bringing about the tragic deaths of our protagonists.
Lore also has it that Shakespeare's lines were perhaps a coy slam against the Rose Theatre, a rival of his own Globe Theatre, and that with these lines he was poking fun at the stench caused by less-than-sanitary arrangements at the Rose.
The release of every new national literacy report is a cause for the heart to sink.
Although there are small gains here and there, the reading and writing levels among our nation's schoolchildren are very low for an advanced industrial society (now an information society) that not only provides twelve years of publicly-funded education but requires postsecondary course work.
The educational system is rich in its teaching workforce. Most teachers are dedicated to the needs of children, and willing to work in the trenches where it really matters.
However, these strengths are often undermined by a lack of understanding of the reading and writing process, and strategies to teach students how to perform the intricate procedures needed to comprehend written text and produce meaningful writing.
The Obama administration's proposal for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, A Blueprint for Reform, is on the right track in its literacy goals.
a href="http://www.nje3.org/blitz/crisisandhope.pdf">Yesterday’s conference at Princeton University,“Crisis and Hope: Transforming America’s Urban Schools,” featured a star-studded roster of speakers: Ed. Comm. Bret Schundler, Martin Perez (President of the Latino Leadership Alliance of NJ), Rev. Reginald Jackson (Black Ministers Council of NJ), Dr. Marcus Winters of The Manhattan Institute, Dana Rone, Joe Williams (Democrats for Education Reform), Dr. Marc Porter Magee (ConnCan), Lisa Graham Keegan (Former Superintendent of the State of Arizona), Ryan Hill (Founder of TEAM Charter Schools), Patricia Bombelyn (Co-Counsel for the plaintiffs in Crawford v. Davy). The conference was sponsored by Excellent Education for Everyone, Citizens for Successful Schools, and
A rift has developed between teachers' unions over a controversial bill that aims to improve teacher effectiveness.
The American Federation of Teachers Colorado signed onto Sen. Michael Johnston's, D-Denver, Senate Bill 191 yesterday, arguing that amendments expected to be introduced today in the House Education Committee send the bill in a "new direction."
The amendments include providing for a due process system in which teachers would be able to appeal evaluations that result in an educator being returned to probationary status; providing laid off teachers with preference in rehiring; and providing for a system in which two teachers would provide input on so-called "mutual consent" hiring decisions when a teacher applies to transfer between schools.
But the state's largest teachers' union, the Colorado Education Association, which represents about 40,000 teachers, does not put much stock in the approval given by the AFT of Colorado. They argue that the AFT Colorado is a much smaller union that represents mostly Douglas County teachers, and therefore does not have the interest of teachers across the state in mind.
The recession has not been kind to many private schools.
Nationally, public school enrollment is rising as the recession has forced many parents to pull their kids from private schools. In Wisconsin, the number of students enrolled in private schools fell more than 2 percent from 2007 to 2009, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.
But Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart, under the leadership of President Judd Schemmel, seems to be bucking the trend. Enrollment at the nearly 130-year-old school during Schemmel's five-year tenure has risen a little over 5 percent, from 626 to 660 this year; Schemmel has his eye on an optimal enrollment of between 700 and 725 students.
The school, not traditionally known as an academic powerhouse, has also seen improved academic performance under Schemmel; elite universities from Harvard to Stanford and Princeton to Yale accepted Edgewood students from the class of 2009. It is also on more stable financial footing than it was five years ago, with its debt shrinking from just under $1 million to about $335,000 today, despite a number of building improvements and classroom renovations.
One of the two states chosen by Education Secretary Arne Duncan as a winner in the first round of the $4 billion Race to the Top competition has academic standards that earned the grade of 'F' in a new study by Harvard University researchers, while the other state got a 'C minus.'
The Education Next report by researchers Paul E. Peterson and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón also shows that standards in most states remain far below the proficiency standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is known as the nation's report card because it tests students across the country by the same measure and is considered the testing gold standard. States have their own individual student assessments designed to test students' knowledge of state academic standards, which are all different.
The Washington Post Co. announced Wednesday that it's putting Newsweek up for sale. The magazine is losing money, and its paid weekly subscriptions have dropped below 2 million.
But although the Washington Post Co.'s flagship newspaper is also losing money, the company is surprisingly profitable because of a shrewd acquisition it made more than 20 years ago in a growing sector of the economy: for-profit higher education.
In 1984, Stanley Kaplan - who pioneered standardized test prep courses -- sold his business to The Washington Post Co. In 2000, Kaplan Higher Education bought a company called Quest. One of Quest's properties was Hagerstown Business College in Hagerstown, Md., which then became Kaplan College and later part of Kaplan University.
Ubiquitous Microsoft presentation software now a fixture of high-level military planning efforts. Junior officers spend hours distilling complex issues into PowerPoint. Top commanders skeptical, NYT reports.
Pentagon = tip of iceberg. Military's use of PowerPoint pales next to corporate America's.
The case for PowerPoint:
Radically simplifies decision-making.
Offers ready alternative when elegant prose, hard numbers, clear thinking are in short supply.
Ideal format for identifying "paradigm shifts,'' "synergies,'' "value-adds.'
For legions of 4- and 5-year-olds and their parents, the test known as the E.R.B. is the entree into the world of private schooling, its pressure and price a taste of the expensive years to come.
Gabriella Rowe, head of the Mandell School, which has dropped the test. "None of us can truly trust the E.R.B. results because the prepping materials are so accessible," she said.
But parents who grumble about a test that they fear could determine their children's educational future now have company: some of the private schools themselves.
At least two schools in Manhattan have dropped the exam as a requirement for admission starting this fall, bucking a trend of more widespread use of such tests. More broadly, a powerful coalition of New York schools is contending that pretest preparation, which they believe skews the results, has become so widespread as to cast doubt on the value of the test.
The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind--creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people--artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers--will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys." --Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind
I remember when my twins entered kindergarten at our community public school. All of the parents were invited to the school for an introductory presentation on the teachers' goals for learning in the upcoming year. Everything sounded wonderful. The 25 children in the classroom would be organized into small groups. Creating art would introduce them to science and math concepts. They would be exposed to different cultures by learning songs in different languages. Time would be allotted for daily storytelling followed by discussion. The teachers described an interdisciplinary, imaginative and stimulating year ahead, complete with field trips and physical, active play.
While listening to the teachers' presentation at my twins' school, I had a moment of clarity: The kindergarten classroom is the design studio. All of the learning activities that take place inside the kindergarten classroom are freakishly similar to the everyday environment of my design studio in the "real world." In an architectural design studio, we work as an interdisciplinary global team to solve the complex problems of the built environment in a variety of different cultural contexts. We do this most effectively through storytelling--sharing personal experiences--with the support of digital media and tools. A variety of activities--reflective and collaborative, right-brain and left-brain--happen simultaneously in an open environment. Like the design studio, the kindergarten environment places human interaction above all else.
Loyola law students are having trouble getting jobs. The economy, it would seem, is bad. So administrators and faculty are on the case. They care about their students. They are going to make everything right. They are going to retroactively raise every grade on every transcript by one third (a "B-" become a "B"; a "B" becomes a "B+"; etc.). Because cooking the transcripts is just the sort of thing that's called for in these tough economic times.
Just over a week. That's all the time the Colorado state house has to get a controversial education bill to the Governor's office-- or to stop it.
The legislative session is set to end next Wednesday.
Teachers aren't very happy with the bill many are saying will only help students.
"What we're out to ensure is that every child across Colorado has access to the most effective teachers and principals possible," said Lindsay Neil with Stand for Children Colorado.
But is eliminating teacher tenure the answer?
A spokesman for District 51 teachers says 'No.'
"It's not fair," Jim Smyth with the Mesa Valley Education Association.
There are five education directors who have all been laid off. The elimination of their positions are part of the reduction of central administration staff and expenses. Please, dry your eyes. Their jobs will be slightly re-defined and brought back. It is disingenuous of the Superintendent to claim that the jobs were cut in the first place.
Right now the five Education Director positions include one for high schools, one for middle schools and K-8s, and three for elementaries. My understanding is that when the jobs come back they will be re-organized geographically instead. So there will be an Education Director for West Seattle, for the south-end, for the Central Region, and two for the north-end. The divisions are likely to be along the lines of the old middle school regions.
Personally, I think this is a stupid idea. How can we believe that there is parity across the District if the people responsible for it are regionalized? Will you believe that the north-end schools and the south-end schools offer similar academic opportunities if they don't share administrators? In addition, the issues of high schools are sufficiently different from those of middle schools and elementary schools that specialization is called for. Right now there is one person to turn to for high school credit or high school graduation issues. To whom will they turn in future?
THE latest evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest and most extensive system of vouchers and charter schools in America, came out last month, and most advocates of school choice were disheartened by the results.
The evaluation by the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research group that matched more than 3,000 students from the choice program and from regular public schools, found that pupils in the choice program generally had "achievement growth rates that are comparable" to similar Milwaukee public-school students. This is just one of several evaluations of school choice programs that have failed to show major improvements in test scores, but the size and age of the Milwaukee program, combined with the rigor of the study, make these results hard to explain away.
So let's not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers -- measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.
Murray wants to be clear that he still favors choice, but not to improve test scores. Instead, he favors choice because it satisfies the diversity of preferences about how schools teach and what they teach. Standardized test scores impose a uniform concept of higher achievement on students, and so cannot capture the improved satisfaction of the diversity of tastes that choice can more efficiently satisfy.
There is a kernel of truth in Murray's argument. We should support school choice simply because it allows us the liberty of providing our children with the kind of education that we prefer.
How much would it cost to solve some of the world's biggest problems? King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia says about $10 billion -- that's the endowment he's given to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, a huge research facility devoted to solving some of the major problems facing the planet.
The brand new school -- it opened just this past fall -- rises from the desert north of Jeddah like the secret research lab in a James Bond movie. The desert blooms here, thanks to a private desalination plant and an army of gardeners. With a private Red Sea beach, knock-your-socks-off architecture and world-class labs, KAUST hopes to lure the world's brainiest scientists to this Xanadu for nerds.
This isn't a university in the traditional sense, says KAUST President Choon Fong Shih.
"Serious reform like Escalante's cannot be accomplished single-handedly in one isolated classroom; it requires change throughout a department and even in neighboring schools."
In real life, though, Escalante didn't teach the calculus course until his fifth year. In his first attempt, five students completed the course and two passed the AP test. A critic might write "just five students" or "only two," though anyone familiar with both the difficulty of the exam and the extent of math deficiencies in an underperforming school recognizes this as a laudable feat.
Still, it took Escalante eight years to build the math program that achieved what "Stand and Deliver" shows: a class of 18 who pass with flying colors. During this time, he convinced the principal, Henry Gradillas, to raise the school's math requirements; he designed a pipeline of courses to prepare Garfield's students for AP calculus; he became department head and hand-selected top teachers for his feeder courses; he and Gradillas even influenced the area junior high schools to offer algebra. In other words, to achieve his AP students' success, he transformed the school's math department. Escalante himself emphasized in interviews that no student went the way of the film's Angel: from basic math in one year to AP calculus in the next.
An innovative study of 17 schools along the East Coast suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students' reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years.
The study, which was presented here on May 1 during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, is as notable for its methods as for its results. It's among the first of what many scholars hope will be a new generation of studies that offer solid clues not only to what works but also when, under what conditions, and to some extent, why.
The study finds that reading gains are greatest in schools where teachers receive a larger amount of coaching. It also finds that the amount of coaching that teachers receive varies widely and is influenced by an array of factors, including relationships among staff members and how teachers envision their roles.
We recently wrote about a new study on grade inflation, and how it has been especially rampant at private colleges. The post prompted a lot of interesting questions and comments about the reasons behind changing G.P.A.'s.
Stuart Rojstaczer, an author of the study, responded to some of the reader reaction on his blog. He has agreed to take your questions, which you can submit below.
Ed Note: Aaron Moore was the winner of the National Financial Capability Challenge, an awards program announced in December by Treasury Secretary Geithner and Education Secretary Duncan, designed to promote financial education among high school students across the country. He has made several speaking engagements and national media appearances discussing the topic of financial literacy and serves as the president of Future Business Leaders of America for the state of Maryland. He will enter Villanova University in the fall to study Business Administration.
Students are given opportunities and choices; I was given an opportunity like no other, to speak at the Treasury Department along side of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. From beginning to end I was engaged, enlightened, and excited. The halls of the Treasury truly represented what it means to be American, full of marble, wood, and gold, the building materials of our founding fathers.
As California's public schools have increasingly poured attention and resources into the state's struggling students, high academic learners - the so-called gifted students - have been getting the short shrift, a policy decision that some worry could leave the United States at a competitive disadvantage.
Critics see courses tailored for exceptional students as elitist and not much of an issue when compared with the vast number of students who are lagging grades behind their peers or dropping out of school. But a growing chorus of parents and advocates is asking the contentious question: What about the smart kids?
"We have countries like India, Singapore, China, and they realize the future productivity of their country is an investment in their intellectual and creative resources," said gifted education expert Joseph Renzulli.
The Instructional Technology Council recently released a report on the trends in distance education and online learning at community colleges. Among its findings: Enrollment in distance education courses increased by over 20%, while overall community college enrollment increased by less than 2%. Clearly online learning offers many opportunities to students, teachers and academic institutions. But what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?
The Case for OpenCourseWare
Of course, entrepreneurs can benefit themselves from taking online classes. As Bill Gates said in a recent speech at M.I.T., he's a "super happy user" of the university's OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online courses, noting that he "retook physics" along with over a dozen of the other online offerings. Gates praised OpenCourseWare for offering a blend of the best of video technology, professional instruction and testing, and argued that accreditation too should be separated from place-based learning. Gates stated that "What's been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this."
As a former administrator, I have had the good fortune to visit a significant number of classrooms over the years. Because I have been witness to bad or indifferent teaching, there has always been a special feeling of excitement during those times I was able to witness the talents of a true professional at work in the classroom. It also has encouraged me to be reflective on my years in the classroom.
Having begun teaching in the 1970's at the high school level, my approach in the early years was very traditional. My classroom would have been best described as teacher-centered and my organizational skills combined with my ability to relate to students created a room that earned me high marks from my administrators.
In the early nineties though, it became increasingly clear that my methods were growing less popular with students. In addition, I found myself less and less successful on the most important element, student achievement. My classroom was well-managed and discipline issues seldom arose, but my students seemed to be losing interest in the subjects that I taught.
Journalist-turned-documentarian Bob Bowdon saw something very wrong with the New Jersey public education system. More than $400,000 of public money was earmarked for each classroom, yet an alarming rate of students were not proficient in reading or math.
Once he dug deeper, Bowdon found a flawed system that embraced cronyism, squandered money and frowned upon alternative education options such as charter schools. Bowdon spent three years pointing his camera at New Jersey administrators, teachers, unions, students and parents and the result is the documentary "The Cartel," opening at Kendall Square in Cambridge today. The film focuses on his home state of New Jersey, but Bowdon assures it is a case study likely evident across the country. As the film points out, in 12 percent of U.S. schools, less than 60 percent of freshmen make it to senior year.
Q: Did you ever think you'd be a documentary filmmaker?
A: Well, it wasn't some sort of lifelong dream. I got a film certificate from New York University, but it really wasn't to become a filmmaker. This issue wasn't well covered by traditional media. Education is an emerging national disaster and that story needed long-form treatment.
New York City teachers get 10 sick days during their 184-day school year, and most stick to that number. But 20% of teachers take more than that amount -- and a small percentage take 30 or more days off, according to Department of Education figures.
The data show that for some of the poorest districts, like the South Bronx and Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, more than 20% of the teachers are out two weeks or more during the school year. The teachers union cautions that the absence data includes all types of absences, including things like professional development and jury duty over which teachers have no control. And not all poor districts have high-absentee teachers.
Still, in districts like the one that contains the Upper East Side, the percentage of teachers absent two weeks or more is below the average.
The Wall Street Journal, attack dog for the righteous marketplace, apostle of "bang for the buck" for civil servants, and conscience of the all-day businessman's lunch for dividends gluttons, decried in an April 28 piece the alleged statistic that public school teachers tend to exhaust their annual ten-day "sick bank," especially in poorer areas of the city.
They suspect that teachers' claim of sickness is often a ploy and mask for their contemptuous attitude towards professional duty. They see teachers who get sick as slackers who if they cared about kids would have immune systems better able to repel microbes. They plainly feel that unions are the enablers of teachers' audacity.
Perhaps it's true about teachers burning through their ten days over ten months. But a fragment of truth without context is no truth at all, but as an instrument to exploit the public's gullibility, it's more serviceable than an out and out lie.
Art From the Start The current rage in education is STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But creative types are working valiantly to turn STEM into STEAM - with the A standing for the arts. At the Boston Arts Academy, for instance, the arts are infused in every subject. While creative pursuits are often the first to go when budgets are cut, this high school continues to innovate as it engages students through the arts. The ninth grade just wrapped up a unit on African civilization with a multimedia celebration called "Africa Lives." The students got their hands dirty. And they mastered the material.
"High school shouldn't be a preparation for life," says co-headmaster Linda Nathan. "It should be life."
Nathan is not alone in her belief that the arts foster deep learning. Young Audiences of Massachusetts, a nonprofit that brings artists into schools, is inaugurating an arts integration program at the Salemwood Elementary School in Malden this fall. Visiting artists will help teachers incorporate the arts into the literacy and social studies curriculums. If the pilot program takes off, Young Audiences hopes to make it a model for other Extended Learning Time schools like Salemwood. Explains executive director Diane Michalowski Freedland: "We need to think big."
If someone asked you for a memory from elementary school, what would come to mind?
Fourth-grader Maggie Lombardi remembers way back to first grade at Randall Elementary School in Waukesha. PJ Day. Popcorn and reading. She got to bring a blanket and a stuffed animal and watch "Finding Nemo." Even her teacher wore pajamas.
"It was super cool," she wrote.
Maggie's dad, Jim Lombardi, an electrical engineer who attended the same school between 1969 and 1976, has memories, too, if a bit more vague. Happiness. A great learning experience from great teachers. Fun times with friends.
He still stays in touch with some of those friends who've settled in the same diverse neighborhood around Carroll University. Now his kids go to school with some of their kids, he wrote.
Maggie's grandmother, former Waukesha mayor Carol Lombardi, walked the same hallways as a student in the early 1940s.
"I was a very good student, and usually the teacher's pet," she said. "I got to ring the bell in the morning. I got to answer the school phone. A lot of the kids hated me because I was doing all those things, but I learned so much responsibility."
When Duke University's Cathy Davidson announced her grading plan for a seminar she would be offering this semester, she attracted attention nationwide. Some professors cheered, others tut-tutted, and others asked "Can she do that?"
Her plan? Turn over grading to the students in the course, and get out of the grading business herself.
Now that the course is finished, Davidson is giving an A+ to the concept. "It was spectacular, far exceeding my expectations," she said. "It would take a lot to get me back to a conventional form of grading ever again."
Davidson is becoming a scholar of grading. She's been observing grading systems at other colleges and in elementary and secondary schools, and she's immersed herself in the history of grading. (If you want to know who invented the multiple choice test, she'll brief you on how Frederick J. Kelly did so at Emporia State University and how he later renounced his technique.)
But it was her own course this semester -- called "Your Brain on the Internet" -- that Davidson used to test her ideas. And she found that it inspired students to do more work, and more creative work than she sees in courses with traditional grading.
If education reform was easy, we would have done it long ago and, like the mythical Lake Wobegon, all of our children would be performing above average. In the real world, reform happens when adults put aside differences, embrace the challenge of educating all children, and work together toward a common vision of success.
The theory behind the Race to the Top competition is that with the right financial incentives and sensible goals, states, districts and other stakeholders will forge new partnerships, revise outmoded laws and practices, and fashion far-reaching reforms. Despite the fact that the $4 billion Race to the Top program represents less than 1 percent of overall K-12 funding in America, it has been working.
Since the competition was announced last summer, more than a dozen states changed laws around issues like teacher evaluation, use of student data and charter schools. Meanwhile, 48 governors and chief state school officers raised learning standards, and a number of school districts announced progressive, new collective bargaining agreements that are shaking up the labor-management status quo.
When you see a cluster of elementary schoolchildren at a bus stop or street-crossing, struggling with bristling backpacks full of textbooks and school papers, it's hard to imagine that kids in distant lands are carrying even weightier tomes, slogging through more homework and spending longer hours in class. But many of them are. That's among the reasons that American children consistently post lower test scores than children in several other countries.
Education activists -- from mega-wealthy wise men such as Bill Gates to policy experts such as Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- believe the nation's economic competitiveness depends on lifting our academic standards. Some even worry that the current generation of schoolchildren may be the first whose level of educational attainment falls below that of their parents.
Given widespread fears about the nation's ability to maintain its leadership in a world growing smaller and flatter, should we allow school systems to go broke as a result of the recession? Is this any time for widespread teacher layoffs, overcrowded classrooms and shorter school days?
As school systems grapple with almost certain budget cuts, they should passionately resist taking significant bites out of programs that challenge bright students to reach higher.
New Hanover County school officials are considering cuts to the county's program for academically gifted students as one way to cope with a dire budget outlook. One proposal, if adopted, would force small schools to share gifted-education teachers. A few years ago, the board took the bold step of insisting that each school have its own specialized teacher for students identified as Academically and Intellectually Gifted (AIG, not to be confused with the bailed-out insurance giant).
Parents and some teachers naturally fear that changes could affect the quality and the reach of gifted education.
No Child Left Behind and other accountability mandates focus mainly on bringing all students to an acceptable minimum level. When a teacher's time is consumed with bringing students up to grade level, often the quick learners go unchallenged.
This is the story the teachers unions wish never happened. This is the story that proves all their hysterical demands for more money are nothing but a sham. This is the story that makes the unions and education bureaucrats sick to their stomachs. This is the personal story of my daughter Dakota Root.
In each of the books I've written, I've taken great care to acknowledge my beautiful and brilliant little girl, Dakota. I often noted that Dakota and her parents were aiming for her acceptance at either Harvard or Stanford and would accept nothing less. The easy part is aiming for gold. The hard part is achieving it. "Homeschool to Harvard" is a story about turning dreams into reality.
Dakota has been home-schooled since birth. While other kids spent their school days being indoctrinated to believe competition and winning are unimportant, and that others are to blame for their shortcomings and failures, Dakota was learning the value of work ethic, discipline, sacrifice and personal responsibility. While other kids were becoming experts at partying, Dakota and her dad debated current events at the dinner table. While other kids shopped and gossiped, Dakota was devouring books on science, math, history, literature, politics and business. I often traveled to business events and political speeches with my home-schooled daughter in tow. While other kids came home to empty homes, Dakota's mom, dad, or both were there every day to share meals and a bedtime kiss and prayer. Despite a crazy schedule of business and politics, I'm proud to report that I've missed very few bedtime kisses with my four home-schooled kids.
It's 6:30 p.m., that after-dinner time slot when my daughter and I play our least-favorite game show, "Are You Smarter Than A Third-Grader?"
Claire's homework often consists of a page of math problems. And when a math-averse third-grader teams with her writer father to tackle the evening's homework, what typically results is math problems.
My daughter is a bookworm and, like her father, a bit of a right-brainer. We are the type of people who can conjugate verbs in multiple languages, sketch the image of a long-lost friend from memory, or summarize the day's events in haiku. But we couldn't balance a checkbook if the Earth's fate depended on it.
A sheet of math problems gives us a cold chill, like when someone walks over your grave, or you accidentally walk in on your grandmother in the bathtub. Claire already is being asked to multiply and divide double-digit figures, and last week she brought home a worksheet requiring her to compute the area and volume of prisms. I don't remember being asked to handle such concepts in third grade. But maybe I blocked it out, just like the mental image of Grandma in the tub.
Dr. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the prestigious University of Michigan, Dr. Teresa Sullivan, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education, faculty, students, family, and friends of the graduating class of 2010. I am most grateful and honored to address the 2010 graduating class on the 88th commencement celebration of the school of education. I applaud you for your tenacity, endurance, stamina, and perseverance in commanding the intellectual rigor, knowledge, and skills to fulfill the requirements for the degree that you are about to receive. This commencement celebration culminates the final milestone of a long and arduous journey in preparation for your career as educators, practitioners, researchers, analysts, and advocates in the field of education. When the jubilation of this moment ends, and the last farewell is bided, brace yourself for the dawning challenges that tomorrow holds for you in the practice of your profession. The struggle and fortitude to mold, shape, cultivate, motivate, and invigorate young inquiring minds are surmountable challenges that you must endure to guarantee our children the right of passage to a well-rounded education. I know you are eager with anticipation and enthusiasm to meet the challenges of helping our children reach their greatest potential in mastering the art, science, knowledge, and skills of learning. Your zeal, passion, and ardent interest to make a difference in meeting the educational needs of children are admirable; and, I laud you for choosing a career path in education. Allow me to be among the first to congratulate you for your dedication, preparation, and commitment to tackle the myriad of problems that plague our educational system. This commencement exercise serves to remind you of your accomplishments and the challenges in the field of education that await you.
A Republican lawmaker put out a news release at the end of this year's legislative session boasting that lawmakers approved more local control and funding flexibility for schools.
Just try to convince members of your local school board that's the case.
In the wake of a $297 million reduction in education spending statewide, school districts struggle to cut costs without laying off teachers, eliminating programs or shuttering schools. But the minimal leeway they once enjoyed is gone - stripped along with the small percentage of local property tax levy they controlled and handed over to the state in exchange for an increase in the sales-tax rate.
"What local control?" quips Diana Showalter, superintendent of Manchester Community Schools. "When the state assumed control of the general fund, they took control of the major financial source for the schools. ... When we can't control our own destiny through the collection of property taxes, we are setting ourselves up for a difficult time."
Top 20 of the Most Hilarious Spelling Mistakes on Resumes and Cover Letters March 19th, 2010 by Andrew Kucheriavy Posted in Humor, Most Popular, Resumark News, Resume Writing
Most employers and recruiters agree that the top reason that makes them reject a resume is spelling mistakes. Some mistakes are so funny that we couldn't let recruiters have all the fun and put together this list for your enjoyment.
If you don't want to end up on this list, there is a simple rule to follow: proofread, proofread again, and then have someone else proofread your resume and your cover letter. For more tips, make sure to read Resume Tips Everyone Needs to Know and Cover Letter for Your Resume - How to Write One that Doesn't Get Thrown Away?
In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids' table in the cafeteria.
Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers' unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine "your ideas with our dollars" from the federal government. "What you have created," he said, "is a real movement."
Reading the information released Thursday about the Milwaukee Public Schools budget for next year, with its grim warnings about hundreds of job cuts and swelling benefit costs, my mind wandered.
I had a vision of the new governor of Wisconsin unveiling his budget proposals in February and deciding (this is the most fanciful part) that he was going to break with established positions of whichever political party he represents. He decided to give a speech to the Legislature like this:
•
Folks, we need to stop posturing, and we all know that's one of our most striking talents here in the Capitol. Man, the legislators the last two years should have made commercials for Posturepedic. Lots of talk, little dealing with the real issues. No more, people. Things are too serious.
From Superior to Kenosha - and especially in Milwaukee - we've got a really deep education problem. That goes in some serious ways for just plain education. But it goes especially for paying for education. If the school system in your hometown isn't financially broken, it's under huge stress and it's going to be broken soon. Show me figures that say I'm wrong.
The National Council on Teacher Quality has come out with an assessment of how Texas' schools of education prepare instructors for the classroom. The bottom line is some of our schools need a lot of work.
In this Viewpoints piece, David Chard, dean of SMU's Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, is honest about the shortcomings of his program, which actually does okay on this survey. As we talk here about quality teachers, I hope we have more voices like Chard's saying this is what we need to do to improve. Better that, than defensive reactions.
Not very many -- if you believe the principals' evaluations, which even teachers concede aren't very good. The Houston school board heard a presentation Thursday from the New Teacher Project, and it included some fascinating data -- from HISD's own records and from surveys of teachers and principals. One slide (No. 14 below) particularly stood out: It showed that only 3.4 percent of teachers in the Houston Independent School District were rated "below expectations" or "unsatisfactory" on any domain on their appraisals between the 2005-06 school year and last school year. Looking at the domain ratings on all the evaluations from that time period, only 1 percent were below proficient.
The Boston Globe may be forgiven for printing such a heretical claim, because it is trying to give a "voice" to young people, and the high school student may not be aware that his suggestion goes against the settled wisdom of the vast majority of U.S. Edupundits.
Our Edupundits are in substantial agreement, often repeated, that "the principal variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality." I have nowhere found much interest in my own argument that the principal variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Yet here is a high school Senior, writing that: "students seem to socialize more than they should. In hallways, stairwells, and bathrooms, students sit and talk to their friends after the late bell rang for classes." He adds that: "My friends agree that new teachers alone are not going to solve the problems at Burke [Jeremiah Burke High School in Boston is one of 35 schools in the state that is asking its staff to re-apply for their jobs]. Jussara Sequeira, a Junior, said: "Some of us students are not trying hard enough and I don't think the school's teachers should pay the consequences."
Paul Zoch, a high school Latin teacher, in Doomed to Fail [2004] points out that: "the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education. That being the accepted wisdom, students are free to do nothing more than wait for the teachers to create success for them. Education reform literature rarely contains the thought that our students are primarily failing because they do not study enough." Another heretic!
Many thanks to Paul Zoch, Diane Ravitch, Chrismaldy Morgado, and Jussara Sequeira for pointing out the egregious folly of leaving student effort out of the analysis of those things which make for academic success in the schools.
It is hard to understand how so many Edupundits miss this essential sine qua non of good learning outcomes for our schools. One possibility is that their view is so lofty and unfocused that they never take the academic work of mere students into account.
Tony Wagner at Harvard has found that only three high schools in the country, for instance, ever sit down in a focus group with their graduates and ask them for their thoughts about their education while they were at the school.
This still does not completely explain why students' academic responsibility gets so routinely overlooked in all the multi-billion-dollar efforts at school reform.
Paul Zoch writes: "In reading about Japanese education, one is repeatedly struck by the expectation that the students must work hard for success, in contrast to the United States, where the teacher is expected to work hard to find a way for the students to succeed...Effort and self-discipline are considered by the Japanese to be essential bases for accomplishment. Lack of achievement, then, is attributed to the failure to work hard."
What chance is there that the voices of Chirsmaldy Morgado and Jussara Sequeira will be heard in their call for more student academic effort in Boston high schools? It is hard to say. So much attention and concern, on the part of parents and the rest of us, seems to be on whether our students have friends and are having a good time in school, rather than whether they are working as hard as they can academically. It is far easier to blame teachers if student academic achievement is too low.
If we listened to those two public high school students, we should surely inform our students at the start of every school year, that they have the responsibility to pay attention, do their homework, read books and write papers, and in general give their very best efforts to making the most out of the free public education which has been provided them. Let's tell them that their academic success is their job. It is up to them how much they learn and how much they grow in competence through their own work in school.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
ithin the 242 pages of Diane Ravitch's lightning rod of a book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," there appear exactly three references to Catholic education. Which makes sense, given that Ms. Ravitch is addressing and deploring recent efforts to reform public schools with extensive testing and increasing privatization.
Yet what subtly informs both her critique and her recommendations for improving public schools is, in significant measure, her long study of and admiration for Roman Catholic education, especially in serving low-income black and Hispanic students.
In that respect, Ms. Ravitch and her book offer evidence of how some public-education scholars and reformers have been learning from what Catholic education is doing right. What one might call the Catholic-school model is perhaps the most unappreciated influence on the nation's public-education debate.
Bob Braun at the Star-Ledger writes of renowned education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond’s lecture in New Brunswick this week in which she lauds New Jersey’s success in closing the achievement gap among White, Black, and Hispanic students. “She listed measures of success in New Jersey — higher graduation rates, higher test scores, higher national rankings. Darling-Hammond drew gasps of appreciation by noting that, on one national exam, the average scores of black and Latino students in New Jersey were as high as the average scores of all students in her home state, California.”
Let’s put aside graduation rates for the moment (though just for the moment) and look more closely at the data that Darling-Hammond cites. There’s only one national test that NJ and California students take: the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fondly known as the NAEP. And while it’s true that average scores in California for all 4th and 8th graders (the two age groups tested by NAEP) are comparable to average scores for Black and Latino students in NJ, there’s one piece of data missing from Dr. Darling-Hammond's analysis: 53% of California’s students are eligible for free and reduced lunch, the metric for establishing economic disadvantage.
Jacqueline Byrne developed the creative teaching techniques that form the basis of the academic and verbal test prep curricula at Ivy Educational Services. Her SAT prep book, "SAT Vocabulary Express" (McGraw Hill, 2004), introduces students to a new strategy for improving their functional vocabulary and raising their SAT and ACT verbal scores. In addition, Ms. Byrne designed Ivy Educational Services' college essay writing program.
ACT scores came out this week, and sophomores are starting to think about college tests for next year, so this is a good time to talk about options.
Every college in the United States accepts the ACT (with the optional essay) and the SAT equally, so students now have a choice about which test to take. While the choice is wonderful, it can create more stress for families because there are more options:
Option One
Take both tests in alternating months: February ACT, March SAT, April ACT, May SAT, June SAT and ACT.
Bill Gates is amazed at what he sees happening at KIPP charter schools. Bill has no idea those same things happen at Francis Lewis High School, and countless other public schools, each and every day. Because Bill believes in the very same “reforms” that have caused Francis Lewis, my school, to balloon to 250 percent capacity, he surreptitiously funded the Learn NY campaign to preserve mayoral control (in practice, mayoral dictatorship). So I don’t trust him, and I don’t think he knows much about education, despite the millions he throws around imposing his pet projects on us. Still, I withheld judgment when he sent his new program to my school. I did not participate, but I said nothing to those who chose otherwise.
The Measures of Effective Teaching program, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, is now at my school and many others across the city. Teachers were told this study would show what worked and did not work in the classroom. They hoped it would give them ideas on how to reach their students more effectively. How long should you pause after posing a question? Did certain seat arrangements promote more interaction? Is group work always more effective than lecturing?
When Deborah Gist became commissioner of Rhode Island schools in 2009, she pledged to make every decision in the best interests of children -- something we've heard before and rarely seen happen. Then she started doing it.
At first, no one outside Rhode Island noticed. Gist, 43, announced that staffing decisions would be based on teacher qualifications, not seniority. She also launched a new evaluation system in which teachers get annual reviews -- an idea practiced in only 15 other states. When she learned that Rhode Island's teacher-training programs had one of the lowest test-score requirements for entrance, she found out which state set the bar the highest -- then raised Rhode Island's one point above it.
For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.
I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.
1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.
Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.
This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...
New research shows that rather than being totally devoted to one goal at a time, the human brain can distribute two goals to different hemispheres to keep them both in mind--if it perceives a worthy reward for doing so
The human brain is considered to be pretty quick, but it lacks many of qualities of a super-efficient computer. For instance, we have trouble switching between tasks and cannot seem to actually do more than one thing at a time. So despite the increasing options--and demands--to multitask, our brains seem to have trouble keeping tabs on many activities at once.
A new study, however, illustrates how the brain can simultaneously keep track of two separate goals, even while it is busy performing a task related to one of the aims, hinting that the mind might be better at multitasking than previously thought.
"This is the first time we observe in the brain concurrent representations of distinct rewards," Etienne Koechlin, director of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in Paris and coauthor of the new study, wrote in an email to ScientificAmerican.com.
For years there has been broad disparity among the four MMSD high schools in the number of honors, advanced/accelerated, and AP courses each one offers. In contrast to East and LaFollette, for instance, West requires all students, regardless of learning level or demonstrated competence, to take standard academic core courses in 9th and 10th grade. There has also been wide discrepancy in the requirements and restrictions each school imposes on students who seek to participate in existing advanced course options.
Parents of children at West have long called on administrators to address this inequity by increasing opportunities for advanced, accelerated instruction. Last year Superintendent Dan Nerad affirmed the goal of bringing consistency to the opportunities offered to students across the District. Accordingly, the Talented and Gifted Education Plan includes five Action Steps specifically geared toward bringing consistency and increasing student participation in advanced courses across MMSD high schools. This effort was supposed to inform the MMSD master course list for the 2010/11 school year. Though District administrators say they have begun internal conversations about this disparity, next year's course offerings again remain the same.
Please consider what levels of English, science, and social studies each MMSD high school offers its respective 9th and 10th graders for the 2010-11 school year, and what measures each school uses to determine students' eligibility for advanced or honors level courses.
Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out--often awkwardly--nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.
Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback."
That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task--and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can.
Teachers union officials strongly opposed recommendations made to the Los Angeles school board Tuesday that call for using student test score data to evaluate instructors.
The suggestions came from a task force comprising Los Angeles Unified School District administrators, principals, teachers and union leaders that was created shortly before The Times published a series of articles last May examining the difficulties in firing and evaluating teachers.
The task force made several proposals, including giving more money to high-performing teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools, waiting up to four years before granting tenure to teachers and requiring principals and local superintendents to vouch for an instructor before they receive tenure, and revamping the evaluation process to include student test scores and parent and teacher feedback.
A minor bill aimed at improving Milwaukee's failing schools barely passed the Legislature last week during the final day of session.
It was a weak and fallback response to the terrible problem of countless Milwaukee children falling behind their peers in reading and math and failing to earn diplomas.
What the Legislature should have done is give Milwaukee's mayor the power to appoint the urban district's school chief. That could have prompted swift, bold change with clear accountability for results.
Gov. Jim Doyle had championed mayoral appointment as the best way to shake up Milwaukee's failing schools and save more children from academic ruin.
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, attended math class at Foothill College April 20.
The software pioneer visited the Los Altos Hills campus to do some homework on Foothill's Math My Way program, designed to help students grasp basic math concepts, outperform their peers and advance faster to college-level math classes.
Nineteen Math My Way students were told in advance that a special guest wanted to observe instructors Nicole Gray of Sunnyvale, Rachel Mudge of Mountain View and Kathy Perino of Campbell, to gain a better understanding of how they teach developmental math. Students were surprised when Gates and members of his foundation walked into the classroom, but quickly got to work on the math problems at hand. Later, the students had an opportunity to talk with Gates about how the methods used in the class are making a difference for them.
Gates and his team are reviewing models and best practices in developmental mathematics education. They heard about Math My Way during a meeting at the Gates Foundation offices in Seattle with Foothill-De Anza Chancellor Linda Thor, who was invited to discuss her experiences with online learning programs.
Student performance would be the biggest factor in teacher evaluations under draft regulations proposed Tuesday by the Maryland Board of Education.
The new regulations could set the stage for a conflict between education officials and the state's teachers unions.
All of the state's public schools would be required to make student progress, as measured by standardized tests and other means, account for at least 50 percent of teacher and principal evaluations by 2012. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have pressed educators to give student performance more weight in teacher evaluations.
Maryland education officials have said the 50 percent figure is important in showing the state's commitment to Obama's education priorities, which could help it qualify for as much as $250 million in federal aid through the Race to the Top competition.
Co-education is bad enough, with its ability to make it very hard indeed to pay attention to what the teacher/professor is saying, but a recent piece by two medical school professors brings me to write about the follies of those who defend the attractions of digital learning and multi-tasking.
These professors say that their students have indicated to them that they (the professors) are digital immigrants, while the students themselves are digital natives, used to attending to multiple sources of information at once. Students did not indicate whether in these multiple digital processes they felt they were engaging several or all of their multiple intelligences at the same time or not, but their main argument was that the professors, if they hoped to teach the digital natives what they needed to know about medicine, needed to "get with it, Daddy-O" in the vernacular of another generation of teens who believed they belonged to a different (better, smarter, cooler) future than their (old) teachers.
The professors (this was an article in a medical journal, and I don't have the citation) came to believe that indeed they were employing old-fashioned methods like reading, speaking, and writing, to bring medical knowledge to their students, and they expressed an awakening to their need to learn about this new digital culture of multi-tasking and so on.
In my own view, it is instead the students who are, in fact, the immigrants to the study of medicine and they would be wise to attempt some humility in the face of their own plentiful ignorance of the field, instead of trying to influence their teachers to provide them with more stimulation and better entertainment.
The first example of harmful multi-tasking that comes to my mind is the elevated accident rate of those drivers who think they can manage traffic and chat (or text!) on their cell phones at the same time. They can't, and the accident numbers for those who try to manage those two tasks at the same time demonstrate that the net result is a minus not a plus.
The Kaiser Foundation, in a ten-year study of the use of electronic entertainment media by young people, found that on average they spend more than six hours a day with instant messaging, facebooking, twittering, music, chat, video games, and other forms of digital distraction, adding up to more than 48 hours a week. Young people believe they can do several of these activities at once, but the chances are that their competence in each task suffers with the addition of one more new task attempted at the same time.
According to the American College Testing program, more than half of high school students report spending three to four hours a week on homework, and it is not unlikely that the quality of even this small amount of homework is diminished by students multi-tasking with entertainment media while they do it.
These distractions do not all occur at home, or while driving, of course. Laura Mortkowitz reports in The Washington Post [April 25, 2010} that "The trend of laptop-banning seems strongest at law schools," although a number of college professors have banned them from their classes as well.
Laptops were originally thought to provide an opportunity for students to take better notes and to absorb the learning their professors were offering even more profoundly, but as it has turned out, for far too many students, the laptop has opened a window on pure distraction, allowing the student to wander off into the Web, and multitask their social life, completely missing the content of their college courses in the process.
It seems likely to me that if, as they report, 47% of the freshmen in California's state college system have to take remedial English classes, there is a chance that the students may have multi-tasked and digitally-enhanced their way to a very expensive and time-wasting state of aliteracy.
Let us make an effort to resist the persuasive billions spent by Disney and Microsoft et al to lure us and our students away from the basic tasks of reading books (especially history books), writing serious research papers, and paying attention to their teachers. Change can be charming, and technology is lots of fun, but learning is now, and always has been, hard work, and we pretend we and they can slide by without that at our students' peril.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war," General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
About 600 people attended Monday's rescheduled Grand Rapids Board of Education meeting, with nearly 50 registering days in advance to question the board about proposed changes, including a controversial shift to online instruction at the city's high schools.
But Wes Viersen said he came to answer the board's questions about online classes. The Creston High School senior considers himself an expert in online courses, having completed 14 this year -- a feat he said he could verify with the transcript in his pocket.
"Overall, the quality of E2020 is horrible," Viersen told the board. "I completed courses, but I did not get an adequate education."
Hundreds of Camden City high school seniors are unsure if they'll graduate this year after learning they failed at least part of the state's Alternate High School Assessment, formerly known as the SRA.
But Camden's seniors aren't alone, as the first round of statewide testing in January resulted in massive failure -- 90 percent of the 4,500 students who took the language arts section and two of every three of the 9,500 students who took the math section, didn't pass -- according to the Education Law Center, an urban school advocacy organization, which obtained the results of the test.
Across New Jersey, 120 school districts had no student pass the language arts section and 40 school districts saw no student pass math, said Education Law Center Director of the Secondary Reform Project Stan Karp.
Ace choreographer Saroj Khan, who has made almost all top Bollywood celebrities dance to her moves, is judging a reality show Chak Dhoom Dhoom on Colors which starts April 30.
She talks about her experience of judging the kids and her Broadway musical. Excerpts:
How was your judging experience in the audition rounds?
Superb! The kids are very talented, gifted and considering their age, really scary! All of them wanted to be different from each other and to be the best. Their spirit is admirable. It is very difficult to reject kids and see the sadness they go through, but we had to say 'No' to some. We will ensure that we do not break the hearts of these children.
You are known to be a very strict teacher. Are you going to be strict with the kids?
I am strict with the adults who claim to be good dancers and perform wrong steps and mudras. So I correct them. That is my duty and I will always do that. During Nach Baliye [ Images ] you must have seen how celebrity couples improvised and transformed into good dancers. Correction is very important and I don't care if someone doesn't like that. But with children, we have to very cautious and sensitive.
A new institute dedicated to spreading Chinese language and culture across Washington state was officially launched Monday, a partnership of Seattle Public Schools, the University of Washington and Hanban, a Chinese nonprofit group affiliated with China's Ministry of Education.
Called the Confucius Institute, it will join about 250 similar organizations across the globe, one of a number of Hanban's efforts to capitalize on the growing international interest in China.
Its efforts have been met with suspicion in some communities, most recently in suburban Los Angeles, where some parents expressed concern that a Hanban program might promote the Chinese government's political views.
Washington officials don't share those worries.
"We see nothing but upsides to teaching the languages and cultures of the world," said Stephen Hanson, the UW's vice provost of global affairs.
Madison West High School's Accelerated Biology "Screening Test" 5/4 and 5/5
via a kind reader's email:
Those interested in Freshman Accelerated Biology at Madison West High School may take the screening test Tuesday, May 4th at James C. Wright Middle School from 4-6 pm (room TBA) or Wednesday, May 5th at West High School from 4-6 (room 225).
With Monday's actions, the board still has about $5.6 million to deal with - either through cuts, property tax increases, or a combination of the two - when it meets again next week to finalize the district's preliminary budget for 2010-11. So far, the board has made about $10.6 million in cuts and approved a levy increase of $12.7 million, a tax hike of $141.76 for the owner of a $250,000 Madison home.
In an evening of cost shifting, the board voted to apply $1,437,820 in overestimated health care insurance costs to save 17.8 positions for Reading Recovery teachers, who focus on the district's lowest-performing readers. That measure passed 5-2, with board members Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak voting no. The district is undergoing a review of its reading programs and Cole questioned whether it makes sense to retain Reading Recovery, which she said has a 42 percent success rate.
Vermont will not seek millions of dollars in a federal grant program aimed at improving failing schools, joining a handful of states in dropping out of the "Race to the Top" program despite strapped budgets.
The competitive grant requires states to link teacher pay to student performance and invest in charter schools, which would require policy and legislative changes in Vermont, commissioner Armando Vilaseca said Monday.
After spending hundreds of hours reviewing the application and program, the state will not apply, Vilaseca said.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has vowed to press states to remake the 5,000 or so chronically failing schools that account for about half of the nation's dropouts and usually serve -- or more to the point fail to serve -- the poorest children. A $4 billion school improvement fund is intended to give states the help and the incentive to turn these schools around.
Piecemeal plans that evaporate once the grant money is spent won't do the job. Only comprehensive, districtwide approaches deserve to be financed.
From Thatcher to Major, and from Blair to Brown, the most heated arguments about education have turned on the question of choice. The election of 2010 is no different, but this time it is hard to concentrate on the debate, because of the distracting background din of the steel being sharpened for the savage years ahead. The row over fees for state nurseries which has now beset the Conservatives is a more instructive guide to what the next few years have in stall than any of the choice agendas we are being asked to choose from.
The Conservatives' Michael Gove has long argued the best way to raise standards in general - and most particularly in deprived places - is to enable disgruntled parents to walk away from failing local authorities and establish schools of their own. Regarded by Mr Gove as a natural extension of Tony Blair's academy programme, the plan is inspired by an 18-year old experiment in Sweden. And, until recently, the most pertinent questions related to the Swedish evidence. Initially positive signs have recently been overshadowed by the nation slipping down the educational league, and growing fears that gains in its free schools may have come at the expense of other institutions. As the scale of the post-election retrenchment becomes clearer, however, the really big question is the one acutely posed yesterday by a top Conservative councillor. Although Kent's leader, Paul Carter, later "clarified" that he supported the party line, his query about where the cash will come from still demands an answer.
A storm is brewing in teacher training in America. It involves a generational change that we education writers don't deal with much, but is more important than No Child Left Behind or the Race to the Top grants or other stuff we devote space to. Our urban public schools have many teachers in their twenties and thirties who are more impatient with low standards and more determined to raise student achievement than previous generations of inner city educators, having seen some good examples. But they don't know what exactly to do.
This new cohort is frustrated with traditional teacher training. They think most education schools are too fond of theory (favorite ed school philosopher John Dewey died in 1952 before many of their parents were born) and too casual about preparing them for the practical challenges of teaching impoverished children.
The Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is to be implemented in secondary schools across Scotland in August.
But there have been union threats of disruption over the controversial, planned changes.
The changes, already in place in primary schools, are designed to give teachers more freedom and make lessons less prescriptive.
Mr Russell said: "Head teachers are at the heart of any successful school.
To ace the state standardized tests, which begin on Monday, Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, finds money for coaches in writing, reading and math. Teachers keep detailed notes on each child, writing down weaknesses and encouraging them to repeat tasks. There is after-school help and Saturday school.
But at the start of this school year, seven or eight students were still falling behind. So the school hired a speech therapist who could analyze why they and other students stumbled in language. A psychologist produced detailed assessments and recommendations. A dental clinic staffed by Lutheran Medical Center opened an office just off the fourth-grade classrooms, diagnosing toothaches, a possible source of distraction, and providing free cleanings.
Perfection may seem a quixotic goal in New York City, where children enter school from every imaginable background and ability level. But on the tests, P.S. 172, also called the Beacon School of Excellence, is coming close -- even though 80 percent of its students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch, nearly a quarter receive special education services, and many among its predominately Hispanic population do not speak English at home.
I've been thinking about Peter Conn's article in the Chronicle about the depressing current and predicted future of academic employment in the humanities. The entire article is worth reading, but I was struck especially by his discussion of the need to communicate the value of the humanities to both the academy and the population at large, and to integrate these disciplines better into the world's business:
Collectively, those of us who profess the humanities must make a sustained effort to explain to our various constituencies--students, parents, legislators, journalists, even our own university trustees (I speak from personal experience of that latter group)--that these disciplines, and the traditions they represent, are not merely ornamental and dispensable. They lie near the heart of mankind's restless efforts to make sense of the world. Debates over war and peace, justice and equity: From the uses of scientific knowledge to the formulation of social policy, the humanities provide a necessary dimension of insight and meaning.
Generally, law school is considered the initial step on the path to a life of public service. Of course it's important to understand the laws of the country you're serving, but I've been having fun imagining what the government would look like with more humanities scholars running things. Here's what I've come up with, and I hope you'll add your thoughts:
In the fall of 1970, I dropped out of the University of Michigan during my senior year with the intention of never re turning. I was a math major and I convinced myself that I would have a better chance being a writer than a mathematician
In the fall of 1970, I dropped out of the University of Michigan during my senior year with the intention of never re turning. I was a math major and I convinced myself that I would have a better chance being a writer than a mathematician. I figured I would work at any job I could get to support myself. The only job I could get was unloading telephone books from a truck into the cars of people who were to deliver them. The job was to last three days--I quit after the first. During that first day, around the time when my arms became like rubber and I could hardly even lift one phone book, I had a flash of insight and decided to return to school and get my degree. Then I would become a writer. In the summer of 1971, I got my degree, and vowed to never again set foot in another math classroom in my life, and told myself that if I ever did I would puke.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has vowed to press states to remake the 5,000 or so chronically failing schools that account for about half of the nation's dropouts and usually serve -- or more to the point fail to serve -- the poorest children. A $4 billion school improvement fund is intended to give states the help and the incentive to turn these schools around.
Piecemeal plans that evaporate once the grant money is spent won't do the job. Only comprehensive, districtwide approaches deserve to be financed.
Local administrators -- and the Department of Education in Washington -- should be paying close attention to what is happening in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.
Two years ago, district administrators adopted an innovative staffing system intended to put the best principals in the most troubled schools -- and give them the autonomy they need to succeed. While Charlotte was already one of the highest-performing urban systems in the country, it has made progress since then.
The Obama administration's signature education initiative has incited tense showdowns in states across the country as unions and state officials feud over strategies to compete for $3.4 billion in federal funding.
The skirmishes come as states jockey for cash under the administration's Race to the Top program, which seeks to reward states that are pushing to overhaul their education systems.
Applications for the second round are due by June 1, with winners to be chosen in September. Of the 40 states that submitted applications in the first round, only 16 were picked as finalists.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan ramped up pressure on the unions last month when he cited the advantage of union cooperation in picking just two states--Delaware and Tennessee--as winners in the competition's first round. Those states will share $600 million.
This week, Mike and Andy discuss Charlie Crist's veto, Linda Darling-Hammond's charter school, and Race to the Test's quickly narrowing field. Then Amber tells us about a new PEPG study on teacher compensation, and Stafford eats a cold cheese sandwich--and loves it! Click here to listen through our website and peruse past editions. To download the show as an mp3 to your computer, click here.
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 2010 Wisconsin Solo & Ensemble Festival. It is a true delight to enjoy the results of student and teacher practice, dedication and perseverance.
I very much appreciate the extra effort provided by some teachers on behalf of our children.
I thought about those teachers today when I received an email from a reader asking why I continue to publish this site. This reader referred to ongoing school bureaucratic intransigence on reading, particularly in light of the poor results (Alan Borsuk raises the specter of a looming Wisconsin "reading war").
I'll respond briefly here.
Many years ago, I had a Vietnam Vet as my high school government teacher. This guy, took what was probably an easy A for many and turned it into a superb, challenging class. He drilled the constitution, Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers and the revolutionary climate into our brains.
Some more than others.
I don't have the ability to stop earmark, spending or lobbying excesses in Washington, nor at the State, or perhaps even local levels. I do have the opportunity to help, in a very small way, provide a communication system (blog, rss and enewsletter) for those interested in K-12 matters, including our $400M+ Madison School District. There is much to do and I am grateful for those parents, citizens, teachers and administrators who are trying very hard to provide a better education for our children.
It is always a treat to see professionals who go the extra mile. I am thankful for such wonderful, generous people. Saturday's WSMA event was a timely reminder of the many special people around our children.
What about Wisconsin? Wisconsin kids overall came in at the U.S. average on the NAEP scores. But Wisconsin's position has been slipping. Many other states have higher overall scores and improving scores, while Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.
Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, an organization that advocates for phonics programs, points out something that should give us pause: If you break down the new fourth-grade reading data by race and ethnic grouping, as well as by economic standing (kids who get free or reduced price meals and kids who don't), Wisconsin kids trail the nation in every category. The differences are not significant in some, but even white students from Wisconsin score below the national average for white children.
(So how does Wisconsin overall still tie the national average? To be candid, the answer is because Wisconsin has a higher percentage of white students, the group that scores the highest, than many other states.)
Peter Borock, 23, is in his second year teaching history at Health Opportunities High School in the South Bronx. It could be his last.
With New York City schools planning for up to 8,500 layoffs, new teachers like Mr. Borock, and half a dozen others at his school, could be some of the ones most likely to be let go. That has led the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, into a high-stakes battle with the teachers' union to overturn seniority rules that have been in place for decades.
Facing the likelihood of the largest number of layoffs in more than a generation, Mr. Klein and his counterparts around the country say that the rules, which require that the most recently hired teachers be the first to lose their jobs, are anachronistic. In an era of accountability, they say, the rules will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best.
When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education.
Mrs. Bakke, a former teacher, said she had been interested in education since the summer she was a 12-year-old and, together with a friend, opened the Humpty Dumpty Day School, charging $2 a week in "tuition" to parents of the children attending. Mr. Bakke was eager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools.
The Bakkes became part of the nation's new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools. Beginning with one failed charter school company they acquired in 2004, they have built an organization that has contracts with 71 schools in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Imagine is now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.
"The Review embodies Will Fitzhugh's idea about how to get students thinking and writing. In supporting him, you would be helping a person who is building what should and can become a national education treasure." Albert Shanker, 1993
"What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put The Concord Review on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon." Denis P. Doyle, 2010
Denis Doyle:
With recent NAEP results (holding steady) and the RTTT announcements (DE and TN are the two finalists in this round) everyone's eye continues to focus on the persistent problem of low academic achievement in math and English Language Arts. And that's too bad; it's time for a change.
Instead of looking exclusively at the "problem," it's time to see the promise a solution holds. It's time to "backward map" from the desired objective--universal literacy--to step-by-step solutions. Achieving true literacy--reading, writing, listening and speaking with skill and insight--is, as Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles; we must begin with a single step. Let's begin at the end and work our way backwards.
How might we do that? Little noted and not long remembered is the high end of the literacy scale, high flyers, youngsters who distinguish themselves by the quality of their work. By way of illustration, young math and science high flyers have the Intel Talent Search to reward them with great fanfare, newspaper headlines and hard cash (the first place winner gets a $100,000 scholarship) and runners-up get scholarships worth more than $500,000 in total.
That's as it should be; the modern era is defined by science, technology and engineering, and it is appropriate to highlight achievement in these fields, both as a reward for success and an incentive to others.
But so too should ELA receive public fanfare, attention and rewards. In particular, exemplary writing skills should be encouraged, rewarded and showcased.
It was the Council for Basic Education's great insight that ELA and math are the generative subjects from which all other knowledge flows. Without a command of these two "languages" we are mute. Neither math nor English is more important than the other; they are equally important.
Indeed, there is a duality in literacy and math which is noteworthy--each subject is pursued for its own sake and at the same time each one is instrumental. Literacy serves its own purpose as the fount of the examined life while it serves larger social and economic purposes as a medium of communication. No wonder it's greatest expression is honored with the Nobel Prize.
What is called for is a Junior Nobel, for younger writers, something like the Intel Talent Search for literary excellence. In the mean time we are lucky enough to have The Concord Review. Lucky because its editor and founder, Will Fitzhugh, labors mightily as a one-man show without surcease (and without financial support). We are all in his debt.
Before considering ways to discharge our obligation, what, you might wonder, is The Concord Review?
I quote from their web site: "The Concord Review, Inc., was founded in March 1987 to recognize and to publish exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world. With the 81st issue (Spring 2010), 890 research papers (average 5,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography) have been published from authors in forty-four states and thirty-seven other countries. The Concord Review remains the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students." (see www.tcr.org)
Lest anyone doubt the importance of this undertaking, permit me to offer a few unsolicited testimonials. The first is from former Boston University President John Silber, "I believe The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously."
The other is from former AFT President Al Shanker: "The Review also has a vital message for teachers. American education suffers from an impoverishment of standards at all levels. We see that when we look at what is expected of students in other industrialized nations and at what they achieve. Could American students achieve at that level? Of course, but our teachers often have a hard time knowing exactly what they can expect of their students or even what a first-rate essay looks like. The Concord Review sets a high but realistic standard; and it could be invaluable for teachers trying to recalibrate their own standards of excellence."
Can an enterprise which numbers among its friends and admirers people as diverse as John Silber and Al Shanker deserve anything less than the best?
What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put TCR on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon. Will Fitzhugh has been doing this on his own for 22 years (he's now 73) and TCR deserves a more secure home (and future) of its own.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
What if we prepared teachers the same way we prepare doctors?
As school reformers lurch toward more innovative ways for training classroom teachers, this idea is getting a lot of attention. A handful of teacher "residency programs" based on the medical residency model already exist. Boston was one of the first to create one in 2003.
Tom Payzant had been Boston Public Schools superintendent when he founded the Boston Teacher Residency program. Payzant, who now teaches at Harvard University, says the city desperately needed to attract more talented teachers, especially for hard-to-fill positions like math, science and special education. But it wasn't just about the numbers, Payzant says. It was about the quality of teachers coming out of colleges of education.
THE general election due in Britain on May 6th is not the one David Cameron was chosen to fight. The opposition Conservatives made him their leader in 2005 after a barnstorming speech delivered without notes to their annual conference. His pitch: that he could persuade the electorate to trust him with public services and offer tax cuts too, by "sharing the proceeds of growth". It was a formula worthy of an earlier young, centrist, opposition politician: Tony Blair, who in 1997 led Labour to victory after 18 years of Conservative rule.
Now there is nothing to share: taxes will have to rise and public spending fall. But still Mr Cameron is reprising Mr Blair. In 1997 Mr Blair memorably said that his priorities were "education, education, education". In the run-up to this election, education reform is the main, perhaps the only, broad and deeply thought-out proposal from his self-styled heir.
The Bellevue School Board adopted a traditionalist-favored math curriculum last week, and the superintendent revealed her final budget-cutting recommendations on Tuesday, making April a pivotal month for the school district.
Regarding math, the school board voted 3-0 on April 13 to adopt the Holt series, snubbing an inquiry-based Discovering curriculum that had math purists and many district parents up in arms.
Board members Paul Mills, Peter Bentley, and Michael Murphy voted in favor of the Holt textbooks. Chris Marks, Karen Clark, Judy Bushnell and Cudiero were not present.
The math decision fell in line with a recommendation from the district's textbook-adoption committee, which favored Holt over Discovering.
Three conclusions from this year's Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination results for Madison School District students:
The performance of Madison School District students was relatively unchanged from last year in reading and math across the seven tested grade levels.
MMSD's non-low income students continue to outperform their Wisconsin peers in reading and math.
Small gains were made in 10 of 14 scores on the achievement gap but the differences remain too significant.
1. In reading, across the seven grades tested, four grade levels had an increase in the percentage of students scoring at the Proficient or higher performance categories compared with the previous year while three grades showed a decline in the percentage. In math, four grades increased Proficient or higher performance, one grade declined and two grades remained the same. (See Table 1 below.)
A top education official in the Obama administration sat in San Francisco's Marshall Elementary School cafeteria taking notes Monday as parents, teachers and administrators recited a recipe for what it takes to turn around a struggling school.
The main ingredients included quality teachers, involved parents and a supportive principal mixed perhaps with a new dual-immersion language program. Time must be allowed to let it all take hold.
It is the kind of formula federal officials would love to see in place at schools across the country. Too many schools are failing year after year with no end in sight, said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller.
The Houston school district has scheduled meetings to discuss with parents its plans for reforming Lee, Jones, Kashmere and possibly Sharpstown high schools. HISD Superintendent Terry Grier and his staff presented the plans, which include extending the school day and year and offering students small-group tutoring, at a school board workshop last week. District officials plan to implement the changes this coming school year, so the turnaround is fast -- and the parent meetings are just around the corner. After columnist Lisa Falkenberg got a tip about the upcoming meeting at Lee from a peeved state lawmaker, I asked the district for a list of all the meetings. It took a day to get it, but here it is:
Women are now just as likely as men to have completed college and to hold an advanced degree, part of an accelerating trend of educational gains that have shielded women from recent job losses. Yet they continue to lag behind men in pay.
Among adults 25 and older, 29 percent of women in the United States have at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 30 percent of men, according to 2009 census figures released Tuesday.
Women also have drawn even with men in holding advanced degrees. Women represented roughly half of those in the United States with a master's degree or higher, due largely to years of steady increases in women pursuing a medical or law degree.
Children enrolled in Los Angeles Universal Preschool programs made significant improvements in the social and emotional skills needed to do well in kindergarten, according to a study released Monday. The gains were especially pronounced for English language learners, the study showed.
The findings confirmed observations of preschool teachers that children attending high-quality programs are better prepared for kindergarten. For the first time, the study provided data to back up those observations, officials with the nonprofit preschool organization said.
"This is unique because there's very little research in terms of cognitive progression in the preschool years," said Celia C. Ayala, chief operating officer for Los Angeles Universal Preschool. "We know there are differences, we see the differences, but this gives us a way to assess improvements."
The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) confirmed today that industrial action to ''frustrate the administration of the tests'' will go ahead, following meetings of their executives.
It comes after headteachers overwhelmingly supported a boycott in ballots carried out by the two unions.
Diane Ravitch was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, but in her new book she now admits that it isn't working, and is in fact helping kill the kind of education she advocates. She continues to believe that the American public schools do a poor job, and that we can build a much more successful system of public education.
I agree with her on the first point. She's dead wrong on the second. We can't build a better system.
That's not a cry of despair, it's a statement of fact. There is never going to be a national school system much better than what we have now. It may get worse, but it won't get much better.
We could build a better school system by the simple expedient of abolishing the Department of Education. Some of us thought we could manage that when Reagan was swept into office, but the liberal establishment with the support of the teachers unions wouldn't permit that: and Reagan needed Congressional support for his defense measures. Some of us remember that when Reagan took office, only ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States looked to be in bad shape, with too many overseas commitments -- what Walter Lippman called drafts on our power -- and too little actual power, either military or diplomatic. The military needed a big shakeup and buildup, we needed to look into our overseas commitments, financial reforms were desperately needed, and the liberals, knowing all this, were willing to help -- provided that they got their share of liberal programs. The Department of Education was one of their bastions, and they would fight to the death -- or at least to the death of the Republic -- to prevent it from being abolished.
Less centralization, including the breakup of big districts would be a great step forward.
On April 20, the San Francisco Board of Education will convene a policy discussion to discuss the Superintendent's plans for our 10 schools labeled "persistently underperforming" by the state of California.
This list was created as part of the state's efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. It designates five percent of the state's schools as failing, and prescribes one of four turnaround models for districts to take. There's no choice in the matter, though it's unclear under state law when these actions would have to be taken. If, however, a district wants to apply for Federal funds to help implement one of the turnaround models, it must submit a plan in the next few weeks--and begin the work within six months.
I am not crazy about any of the turnaround models. They assume that school leaders are so stupid that--D'oh! We never thought of replacing principals! We never thought of reconstitution (which we tried in this district and which failed, miserably)! Charter schools! Wow! (Even though charter schools have as mixed a record as traditional public schools--no miracles here.) School closure! (How does closing a school affect the achievement of its former students, exactly?)
Now they tell you, just when you've sold the old Harvard Classics on eBay, hauled the Britannicas down to the dump and signed up Junior for online SAT prep. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller-McCune:
After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home -- and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect -- gives children an enormous advantage in school.
"Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents' education, father's occupational status and other family background characteristics," reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. "Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.
In short, the Race to the Top 500-point rating system presents a patina of scientific objectivity, but in truth masks a subjective and somewhat random process.
This competition was a trial run for Secretary Duncan of a policy approach he hopes to make permanent. The Obama administration has proposed that formula-driven Title I funding16 be frozen at its present level, without future adjustment for inflation, and that increases in federal education spending be devoted entirely to a new collection of competitive grants, some of which have similar requirements to RTT, and some of which, as indicated above, attempt to create incentives for initiatives not included in RTT. Because such a reduction in real Title I funding would further exacerbate state fiscal crises, and because this trial run of a competitive system has proven to have little credibility, the administration should rethink its approach to federal education aid and its relationship to school improvement.
Yet for now, the Department of Education proposes to go through an identical process for judging a second round of applications by July. States that lost in the March competition have been invited to re-apply, and several are doing so, again investing time and expense to re-do their applications. Experts in these states are likely to spend many hours studying the review process employed in March, so they can recommend small changes in their states' applica- tions to exploit the quirks of the Department's rating system. Such gaming is unlikely to reflect an actual improvement in the education policies of applicant states.
So I was just thinking about the progress on the Strategic Plan. I know I shouldn't. It only serves to upset and frustrate me. Nevertheless...
Focusing just on the primary themes and elements of the Plan, it still doesn't look good.
1. Ensuring Excellence in Every Classroom
1A. Adopt an aligned curriculum in math and science
They haven't done this. They're nowhere with regard to science; I don't think they've even gotten started. They're not much further along with math. They have standardized the textbooks (for the most part), and they have posted pacing guides, but there's no evidence that they have aligned the curriculum. In fact, it doesn't appear that they have any ability to align the curriculum, that they even know how to align curriculum, or that they know what aligned curriculum would look like. After making bold statements on PowerPoints and paying millions to vendors, they appear to be completely adrift.
1B. Develop districtwide assessments in math and reading
This is a reference to the MAP, but it isn't districtwide yet and teachers either don't know how to use the results or simply aren't choosing to use them. There were supposed to be a lot of other common assessments, but there's no evidence to suggest that they are either in use or useful. Mostly this was an excuse to funnel millions to a vendor for a data warehouse which isn't ready yet and will be of questionable utility when it is ready.
Legislators trying to help save a generation of Milwaukee children from lives of poverty and unemployment want to add a new law to the books in Madison this week.
They should, if they want to make a real difference, also delete one.
Part of the new education bill passed by the Senate the other day, and now being considered by the Assembly, calls for rigorous, annual teacher performance evaluations - something that many districts all across America already supposedly administer.
But not really.
Last year, the New Teacher Project researched teacher evaluations in 12 districts, both big and small, across the country. Methods and frequency of evaluation differed from district to district, but one thing was found to be strikingly similar. Virtually all teachers in the districts studied are told over and over and over again that they are either good or great. In districts that use binary rating systems, for instance, (generally "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory" categories are used) more than 99% of teachers are given the "satisfactory" designation, according to the researchers.
Around the world, from the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which may be 25,000 years old, to the images left behind by the lost Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, to the ancient aboriginal art of Australia, the most common pictograph found in rock paintings is the human hand. Coupled with pictures of animals, with human forms, with a starry night sky or other images that today, we can only identify as abstract, we look at these men's and women's hands, along with smaller prints that perhaps belong to children, and cannot help but be deeply moved by the urge of our ancestors to leave some permanent imprint of themselves behind.
Clearly, the instinct for human beings to express their feelings, their thoughts, and their experiences in some lasting form has been with us for a very long time.This urge eventually manifested itself in the creation of the first alphabet, which many attribute to the Phoenicians.When people also began to recognize the concept of time, their desire to express themselves became intertwined with the sense of wanting to leave behind a legacy, a message about who they were, what they had done and seen, and even what they believed in.Whether inscribed on rock, carved in cuneiform, painted in hieroglyphics, or written with the aid of the alphabet, the instinct to write down everything from mundane commercial transactions to routine daily occurrences to the most transcendent ideas--and then to have others read them, as well as to read what others have written--is not simply a way of transferring information from one person to another, one generation to the next. It is a process of learning and hence, of education.
Ariel and Will Durant were right when they said,"Education is the transmission of civilization." Putting our current challenges into historical context, it is obvious that if today's youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what they've read, and then write clearly and effectively about what they've learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential. (In that regard, the etymology of the word education, which is "to draw out and draw forth"--from oneself, for example--is certainly evocative.) Indeed, young people who do not have the ability to transform thoughts, experiences, and ideas into written words are in danger of losing touch with the joy of inquiry, the sense of intellectual curiosity, and the inestimable satisfaction of acquiring wisdom that are the touchstones of humanity.What that means for all of us is that the essential educative transmissions that have been passed along century after century, generation after generation, are in danger of fading away, or even falling silent.
One of my education reporting maxims is that principals of schools in troubled districts never seek me out. Journalists are poison to them. We only want to write about bad stuff. Anything they say can be held against them.
So I was surprised when Charlie Thomas, principal of Crossland High School in Prince George's County, began sending me emails. His school has been one of the worst in a low-performing district for a long time. But Thomas, who arrived in 2004, was trying to improve his school and was willing even to deal with a fault-finding columnist if it would help. Nearly 66 percent of his students were low-income, but he was not going to let that slow him down.
I confess he has gotten my attention with some unusual moves. For instance, he quickly discovered that close to 800 of his 1,800 students were still in the ninth grade. "I asked for a list of every ninth grade student that was 16 years old or older with a grade point average of less than 1.0 [a D average]," he told me. The list had 330 names. Some had been there four or five years.
Roland Fryer is an economist at Harvard University who had an idea for a straightforward method of getting kids at urban schools more engaged: Pay 'em.
Four reward schemes were tried in four different cities, each in a randomized control trial lasting one year. The results are reported in Time magazine this week.
New York City: Students were promised pay for higher standardized test scores. There was no effect.
Chicago: Students were paid for higher grades. The rewards prompted higher attendance rates and higher grades, but standardized test scores were not improved.
Washington, D.C.: Students were rewarded for improved behaviors such as good attendance, refraining from fighting, and so on. There was a modest improvement on standardized test scores.
Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master's degrees.
But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on theory and not enough on the craft of effective teaching.
In an ever-tightening job market, their graduates are competing with the products of alternative programs like Teach for America, which puts recent college graduates into teaching jobs without previous teaching experience or education coursework.
And this week, the New York State Board of Regents could deliver the biggest blow. It will vote on whether to greatly expand the role of the alternative organizations by allowing them to create their own master's degree programs. At the extreme, the proposal could make education schools extraneous.
There are a number of people who believe that the District intentionally cultivates confusion around the definitions of the terms "curriculum", "materials", "content", and "Standards". The misuse of these terms on official District documents and by District staff is exactly the sort of thing that supports this suspicion. The misuse of these terms detracts from transparency and community engagement. This example is particularly egregious because it speaks to an adoption. These actions do NOT adopt a curriculum, only materials.
Many people get too excited about the latest hot education innovation. They lose their sense of perspective. It has happened even to me once or twice. When we wander off like that, we need someone with a sharp intellect and strong character to pull us back to reality.
One such person is Paul T. Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. He has written a short, wise book, "Learning As We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait," which provides the clearest explanations I have seen for why independent public charter schools need more time to develop. Hill believes it is worth waiting for charters to make what he thinks will be widespread positive impact on the quality of education. He thinks they are more promising than a renewed fondness for strengthening bureaucracy and standardizing instruction that seems to be bubbling in some foundations and national advocacy groups.
Hill makes five simple points and more or less devotes a chapter to each. Here is what he says, with some fussing and worrying by me. If you want to add your ideas to these, or explain why these are nonsense, the comments box below awaits.
I spoke with the Superintendent Friday regarding the proposed reorganization. The conversation occurred subsequent to an email I sent to the School Board regarding Administrative cost growth and the proposed reduction in Superintendent direct reports.
I inquired about the reduction in direct reports, the addition of a Chief Learning Officer, or Deputy Superintendent and the apparent increased costs of this change. Mr. Nerad said that he would email updated budget numbers Monday (he said Friday that there would be cost savings). With respect to the change in direct reports, he said that the District surveyed other large Wisconsin Schools and found that those Superintendents typically had 6 to 8, maybe 9 direct reports. He also reminded me that the District formerly had a Deputy Superintendent. Art Rainwater served in that position prior to his boss, Cheryl Wilhoyte's demise. He discussed a number of reasons for the proposed changes, largely to eliminate management silos and support the District's strategic plan. He also referenced a proposed reduction in Teaching & Learning staff.
I mentioned Administrative costs vis a vis the current financial climate.
I will post the budget numbers and any related information upon receipt.
Finally, I ran into a wonderful MMSD teacher this weekend. I mentioned my recent conversation with the Superintendent. This teacher asked if I "set him straight" on the "dumbing down of the Madison School District"?
That's a good question. This teacher believes that we should be learning from Geoffrey Canada's efforts with respect to the achievement gap, particularly his high expectations. Much more on the Harlem Children's Zone here.
But the New York Times story demands a bit more discussion. (Plus it buries the lede…check out the Shalvey quote)
In the story Linda Darling Hammond points out that the Stanford school takes all kids. Sure, but so do many other public schools (including some in the community including Aspire Public Schools, a network of public charters established by a former CA school superintendent) that have better results. More on that below. That uncomfortable reality also makes Diane Ravitch’s quote in the story really curious. This situation doesn’t illustrate much about the debate about schools and poverty overall, but it does again show that there are big differences among schools serving similar kids and that powerful and intentional instruction matters.
Recently I visited a history class at a local, low-performing high school where students read in turn from the autobiography of a famous American. The teacher was bright and quick. He interrupted often with comments and questions. The 18 sophomores and juniors seemed to be into it, but it was such an old-fashioned--and I suspect to some educators elementary--approach for that I decided to see what other educators thought of it.
I love spending time in classrooms, listening and watching. Often I see something new and surprising, or sometimes old and surprising like one young English teacher diagramming sentences. Was round robin reading (what educators usually call the read aloud technique I witnessed) bad or good? Was it a time-wasting throwback or a useful way to involve every student?
Yes and yes, teachers told me. That is the problem judging the way teachers teach. It all depends on the circumstances, the students, the object of the lesson, the style of the instructor and the judge. Read these and tell me who is right:
Before each tournament, Sam Crichton, a senior on the Wake Forest debate team, meticulously stocks a half-dozen Rubbermaid tubs with computer printouts. Each sheet of paper -- perhaps 5,000 total -- summarizes the argument in, say, a presidential speech or op-ed piece. These "cards" have been sorted into manila files, grouped into brown accordion folders, stacked into the tubs and labeled by argument type: affirmatives, disadvantages, counterplans, critiques, case arguments/negatives, backfiles.
There are 50 tubs for the entire Wake Forest team -- a traveling library of debate research. With the aid of all those pages of argumentation, debaters can summon up well-reasoned, highly specific points about nuclear disarmament, this year's topic for college policy debaters. What if an affirmative team contends that nuclear armament has hurt Africa? What if a negative team cites Heidegger to bolster its response?
"There's a strange comfort in reading off a sheet of paper," Mr. Crichton says. "Having all of this paper may seem like a form of chaos, but to me it actually seems more organized."
The textbooks and the workbooks and the teachers manuals and all the other materials were displayed attractively. There were mini-candy bars and cloth shopping bags for visitors to take.
America's biggest text book companies - Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt - each had large, handsome displays.
For three days last week, the third-floor library of the Juneau High School building was the center of looming big change in the way children in Milwaukee Public Schools are taught reading. MPS officials are selecting a new reading program.
A special committee will make a recommendation and the School Board will make the choice in the winner-takes-all curriculum selection process. The sunlit scene in the Juneau library was the part of the process where anyone could take a look and give input.
It was an amiable scene. The representatives of the publishers were friendly, talkative, knowledgeable, and quite willing to schmooze. "Great tie," one told me as I walked down the aisle. She appeared to know something about this tie that no one else had noticed in the 20 years I've owned it.
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children's books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
"A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline," says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. "But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they're the most basic questions we have about the world."
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist's classroom read Shel Silverstein's "Giving Tree," about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed -- on environmental ethics, or "how we should treat natural objects," as Professor Wartenberg puts it -- with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it's difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus's largest lecture hall, with room for 736.
She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box's contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, "because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?" The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.
Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world's foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.
Why homeschool? Maybe to brush up for an exam, get a sense of what a college is like, or just to learn. In the articles listed below, writers who know the fields weigh in on some of the highlights of free education.
Every school should provide opportunities for their students to take advantage of online courses. They are a great complement to traditional teaching, and a way to reduce or eliminate local curriculum creation expenditures.
The study of ethics, once an academic orphan, is grabbing a more central role at many business schools since the financial crisis shone a spotlight on the damage that can be done by irresponsible business practices and an exclusive focus on the bottom line.
Critics have suggested that B-schools bear some responsibility for the culture of excessive risk-taking that helped trigger the credit crunch, saying they failed to teach students that there is more to business than just making money. Many schools have responded by re-examining their priorities, and giving ethics more classroom time, either in modules of its own or incorporated into key classes like strategy, finance and accounting.
Faculty are defining the subject broadly, arguing that ethical business practice is not just about refraining from cheating and corruption, but recognizing that a company has responsibilities beyond its shareholders' wallets--to employees, community, customers and the environment.
The biology professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge gives brief quizzes at the beginning of every class, to assure attendance and to make sure students are doing the reading. On her tests, she doesn't use a curve, as she believes that students must achieve mastery of the subject matter, not just achieve more mastery than the worst students in the course. For multiple choice questions, she gives 10 possible answers, not the expected 4, as she doesn't want students to get very far with guessing.
Students in introductory biology don't need to worry about meeting her standards anymore. LSU removed her from teaching, mid-semester, and raised the grades of students in the class. In so doing, the university's administration has set off a debate about grade inflation, due process and a professor's right to set standards in her own course.
To Homberger and her supporters, the university's action has violated principles of academic freedom and weakened the faculty.
America's future math teachers, on average, earned a C on a new test comparing their skills with their counterparts in 15 other countries, significantly outscoring college students in the Philippines and Chile but placing far below those in educationally advanced nations like Singapore and Taiwan.
The researchers who led the math study in this country, to be released in Washington on Thursday, judged the results acceptable if not encouraging for America's future elementary teachers. But they called them disturbing for American students heading to careers in middle schools, who were outscored by students in Germany, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan.
On average, 80 percent to 100 percent of the future middle school teachers from the highest-achieving countries took advanced courses like linear algebra and calculus, while only 50 percent to 60 percent of their counterparts in the United States took those courses, the study said.
WARNING: This blog post is utterly simple and obvious. There are some life phenomena, events, and trends that are widely recognized and accepted by most people as just plain Truth. (Majority perception isn't always right, but it often is.) The argument that follows needs no regressions, 5-page data sets, or integration symbols.
This is a fact: Smart, ambitious people are rarely choosing K-12 teaching as a career these days.
Consider that, in 2007, among high school seniors who took the SAT and intended to major in education, the average scores were a dismal 480 in Critical Reading, 483 in Mathematics, and 476 in Writing. Compare those scores with the average scores of students intending to become engineers--524, 579, and 510. Or to students intending to enter the fields of communications and journalism: 523, 501, 519. Also consider that the most competitive, elite colleges and universities, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, aren't offering undergraduate majors in teaching or education.
For almost a decade, No Child Left Behind has tested and labeled our kids and our schools. We know you care about your students, and we are eager to let Washington know just what you think about NCLB. Please take a few minutes to complete the following survey so we can let your representatives know exactly how this legislation has affected you and your students, and how it needs to be changed.
This is the introductory text to a new survey the National Education Association is using to ostensibly guage where its members stand on ESEA reauthorization.
But this "survey" is hardly a survey. C'mon.
Although the NEA claims to be eager to "let Washington know just what [its member-teachers] think about NCLB," tools like this only serve to tell teachers what the NEA thinks they should think. This all-too-short, multiple-choice-only survey begins by using the rotten brand "NCLB" in the introduction to inflame the survey-taker. Next, it asks only two questions about the survey-taker's identity: role and zip code.
A mind-numbing barrage of random television clips and trash-talking heads, "The Cartel" purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it's a bludgeoning rant against a single state -- New Jersey -- which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers' unions and corrupt school boards.
Blithely extrapolating nationally, the writer and director, Bob Bowdon, concludes that increased financing for public schools is unlikely to raise reading scores but is almost certain to raise the luxury-car quotient in administrator parking lots. To illustrate, Mr. Bowdon rattles off a laundry list of outrages -- like a missing $1 billion from a school construction budget -- and provides a clumsy montage of newspaper headlines detailing administrative graft.
The evidence may be verifiable (and even depressingly familiar), but its complex underpinnings are given short shrift. Instead Mr. Bowdon, a New Jersey-based television reporter, employs an exposé-style narration lousy with ad hominems and emotional coercion. In one particularly egregious scene he parks his camera in front of a weeping child who has just failed to win a coveted spot in a charter-school lottery -- another tiny victim of public school hell. Later, confronted with the president of the New Jersey Education Association, Mr. Bowdon performs the rhetorical equivalent of poking a lion with a stick and running away.
It's a good thing Madison is a full of certified smarty-pants. It takes a high level of smarts just to comprehend the complex and shifting budget situation faced by the Madison school district. Even some school board members have a hard time making sense of it.
"I've never seen anything quite like this," says Lucy Mathiak, the board's vice president, of the process by which the district has presented information about its proposed $372.8 million budget this year. "When you have the health and welfare of schools on the line, I feel like I have to ask for answers. It's not a comfortable position."
Frustrated, Mathiak first raised questions about how the district came to its projected $30 million budget hole in her School Daze blog. She notes, first of all, that the gap was closer to $18 million, presuming the board exercises its existing ability to raise taxes, as approved by voters in a 2008 referendum: "This means that the draconian school closings and massive staff layoffs reported earlier are unlikely to happen."
But even if that gap is plugged, new ones are opening up. Recently the district was told by a consultant that it needs to do $85.7 million in repairs to existing buildings over the next five years, well beyond the $4 million a year it budgets to this end.
Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee's senior Republican member, today warned sensitive student information could be at risk through vast data warehouses that collect private, personally identifiable information on school children. The committee heard testimony on the risks to students' personal information during a hearing on data collection in the K-12 education system.
"Today's hearing reinforces the need for federal, state, and local policymakers to ensure sensitive personal information about our children is safeguarded, and student and family privacy rights are protected. Efforts to collect vast troves of information on our students, tracking them from cradle to career, raise serious concerns," said Kline. "Information on student performance, while important to a child's success in the classroom and ensuring we have the best teachers serving in our schools, should not supersede our responsibility to protect a student's personal information."
The committee heard testimony from Professor Joel Reidenberg, academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at the Fordham University School of Law, who shared his research into security weaknesses in current state-based data systems and the potential that state data warehouses could be commandeered to create an unprecedented federal tracking system for maintaining private student information.
Middlebury College, a small Vermont college known for its rigorous foreign-language programs, is forming a venture with a commercial entity to develop online language programs for pre-college students. The college plans to invest $4 million for a 40 percent stake in what will become Middlebury Interactive Languages.
The partnership, with the technology-based education company K12 Inc., will allow Middlebury to achieve two goals, said Ronald D. Liebowitz, the president of the college: It will help more American students learn foreign languages, an area in which they lag far behind Europeans; and it will give Middlebury another source of revenue.
"We wanted to do something about the fact that not enough American students are learning other languages, and it's harder for students if they don't learn language until college," Mr. Liebowitz said. "It is also my belief, and I think our board's belief, that finding potential new sources of revenue is not a bad thing. By doing what we're doing with this venture, we hope to take some stress off our three traditional sources of revenue -- fees, endowment and donations."
There are many online opportunities today. These initiatives are an opportunity for school districts to think differently about traditional methods and their curriculum creation expenditures.
Milwaukee's incoming schools leader will focus on improving student achievement, creating more efficient and effective district operations, and partnering with parents, businesses and community members when he takes the reins of the state's largest public school system in July.
That's according to Gregory Thornton, Milwaukee Public Schools' superintendent-in-waiting, who for the first time in public Tuesday began laying out his plan for improvement and hinting at the changes those inside and outside the system can expect to see over the next few years.
"I'm excited because I think Milwaukee is at a very key place," Thornton said. "I think we're at a tipping point . . . I believe we need to tip this thing in a way that young people can be successful."
Thornton's discussion was part of a Newsmaker Luncheon hosted by the Milwaukee Press Club at the downtown Newsroom Pub. He answered questions from a panel of local journalists as well as audience members.
From the start, Thornton said, he will have to do "some housekeeping" in the district. Change will happen, he said, and those standing in the way will not be encouraged to stick around.
The latest report on Michigan's charter schools, to be presented to the state Board of Education today, does not compare the performance of charter students to those in traditional public schools -- a controversial practice done in past years.
In previous years, the annual report compared test scores in all charter schools with the average score of 20 traditional (and mostly low-performing) districts in which about 75% of Michigan charter schools are located. By that measure, charter schools do better.
The new 33-page annual report, created by the Michigan Department of Education and Michigan State University, explores topics including student performance and profiles. The report also recommends giving the department more authority over charter schools and a small increase in funding to pay for that.
100 Years of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
James Crow, professor emeritus of genetics at the UW-Madison recently gave a talk to the Madison Literary Club on "100 Years of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Click to download a 4.5mb .zip file that contains a few images from Monday's Madison Literary Club talk.
When I was a student at Cambridge University, I was told that term time was for attending lectures and socializing, at Oxford and Cambridge, and vacation time was for reading lots of books (a reading period). When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, (this is my 50th reunion year), we were given a formal Reading Period before exams, to help us catch up on semester reading assignments and prepare for finals.
If we would like to expect high school teachers of English and History to work with their students on the sort of serious research paper from which they will learn a lot on their own, and which will prepare them for college term papers, we have to give teachers a Reading Period, too, but we don't, so many don't assign such papers, and the majority of our public high school students now go on to college unprepared for college writing and panicked when their first assignments come down.
Laura Arandes, when she was a Freshman at Harvard, was shocked at the newacademic writing expectations, because at her public high school in Southern California she had never been asked to write more than a five-paragraph essay. She wrote me that:
I thought a required freshman writing course was meant to introduce us to college paper-writing. To ease us into the more rigorous scholastic environment we had so recently entered. In reality, the course was a refresher for most of the other students in the class. At a high-level academic institution, too many of the students come from private schools that have realized that it would be an academic failure on their parts to send their students to college without experience with longer papers, research environments, exposure to non-fiction literature, and knowledge of bibliographic techniques. And they're right. It is a failure, one being perpetrated by too many public high schools across the nation.
It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them. So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn't easily quantified and demonstrable.
A survey of college professors done a couple of years ago by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them thought the students they were seeing were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, and writing.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from 2008 found that more than one million of our high school graduates, with diploma and college acceptances in hand, are put into remedial courses when they arrive at college. The California State College people reported at a conference in Philadelphia last fall that 47% of their Freshman were in remedial writing courses. I asked the Director of Composition at Stanford if they had any remedial writing courses, and she told me that, no, all Freshman had to take a composition course.
So, what is the matter with all those public high school English and History teachers, that they are not preparing our graduates for college writing tasks? Many public high school teachers have five classes of thirty students each. With 150 students, if the teacher assigns a 20-page paper, she/he will have 3,000 pages of student research and writing to read, consider and correct when they come in. If she/he takes an hour on each paper, that would require 150 hours, or 30 days at five hours a day.
Even teachers who do a lot of their preparation and correcting after regular school hours, at night and on the weekends, do not have 150 hours to go over research papers. As a result, they do not assign them, students do not learn how to do the reading and writing required, and colleges (and students) complain when students arrive unprepared.
A sensible solution, it seems to me, would be to provide a Reading Period of perhaps eight school days for History and English teachers to do the necessary work to prepare their students for serious academic papers. This will seem excessive and unmanageable to administrators, but not, perhaps, if they consider the extra time already allotted in our public high schools for other things, like band practice, layup drills for basketball, yearbook, concerts, football and baseball practice, and on and on and on, when it comes to non-academic purposes.
If we do give the necessary time for teachers of English and History to work with their students on research papers, and to evaluate their work, I believe our students will learn how to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious term papers, but if we continue to expect the impossible of our teachers, they will continue to ask less academically of their students than they can do, and students will continue to suffer the consequences.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
I have a great deal of respect for Larry Cuban and his important work, but this blog post on Michelle Rhee reads like boilerplate applied to a situation that it doesn't fit.
For starters, when you actually read the new contract you'll see that Rhee didn't compromise a lot away, she basically got everything she wanted - including tenure reform. If there is a lesson in the contact timeline and resolution it's far less about compromise than about fortitude. Cuban says that the teachers got the raises they wanted. OK, sure. But Rhee wanted those, too!
The AFT's Randi Weingarten deserves a great deal of credit (which so far she hasn't gotten in the media in my view**) for signing a contract that effectively ends tenure and addresses layoffs in a respectful but cost-sustainable form, but the spin that this was a give and take deal evaporates when you actually read the document. It's precedent setting in some key ways.*
Second, I don't know where Cuban gets his 5 percent figure on the number of ineffective teachers in D.C.'s schools but while the percent can certainly be overstated in the public debate you're hard pressed to find anyone with firsthand experience in the D.C. schools or around them who does not peg that number higher. I was a charter trustee in D.C. for seven years and have spent a lot of time in both sector's of the city's public schools and would place that figure higher than 5 percent in a lot of the city's charter schools, too, by the way. This just isn't something the field does well yet.
Yesterday I attended the premier showing of A Right Denied produced by Bob Compton who also produced 2 Million Minutes and few other related documentaries about education systems in the US and the world.
In between watching the Masters or the Yankees lose a few ballgames this weekend, please review this information and in particular, the attached 240 slide PPT presentation prepared by Whitney Tilson who is featured in A Right Denied. Whitney's research and factual data took a few years to compile and is the basis for the documentary. I have been following Whitney's work closely for a few years and if you asked me if I could have dinner with any one person in America today who would it be; my answer (after my wife of course) Whitney Tilson. Please review his material and feel free to share this with those you know.
While the achievement gap among racial groups and the sad inequities based solely one's zip code are illustrated, so is the decline in the U.S. education system on a whole - the data is alarming.
Some select pieces from the PPT slides (5.5MB PDF):
Why hasn't additional money resulted in improved results?
Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades
Our school systems have become more bureaucratic and unaccountable
As a nation, have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching TV, listening to iPods, playing video games (up 25% in the last four years), going to sporting events, etc. rather than studying hard. These two pictures capture what's happening in China vs. the U.S. (see slide number 15).
Americans watch more than twice as much TV as any other country. (Watching the Masters or Baseball is exempt however.)
Achievement Gap #1 - We are falling behind all economic competitors.
15-year-olds trail almost all other OECD countries in Math and Science.
Our High School graduation rate lags nearly all OECD countries.
US is among the leaders in college participation but ranks in the bottom half or college completion.
The college completion rate in the US has stagnated and our competitors have surpassed us.
American students score highly in self-confidence. 72% agree or strongly agree; "I get good marks in Mathematics", yet we are near the bottom internationally in mathematics.
Achievement Gap #2 - Academic achievement of low-Income, minority students is dramatically lower than their more affluent peers. You already know this but, did you know;
The black-white achievement gap is already one year in kindergarten?
The majority of Black and Latino 4th graders struggle to read a simple children's book.
The achievement gap widens the longer students are in school.
Black and Latino 12th graders read and do math at the same level as white 8th graders.
Massachusetts and NYC have made great strides in math the past six years.
Very few children from low-income households are graduating from any four-year college, and this has stayed consistent for the past 40 years.
74% of students at elite colleges are from the top quartile of households and only 9% are from the bottom half of households.
Even the better high school graduates today are alarmingly unprepared for college. Close to half need remedial courses.
Two general approaches to fixing our schools
Improve the current system and create alternatives to the current system. Adopt both strategies.
Too many school systems today are dominated by the "Three Pillars of Mediocrity."
Lifetime Tenure
Lockstep Pay
System Drive by seniority (not merit)
Teacher Quality and Effectiveness. Teacher quality has been declining for decades. College seniors who plan to go into education have very low test scores.
Teacher certification has little impact on student achievement.
Please review the trailer http://www.2mminutes.com/films/ and the slide presentation attached which I know you will appreciate. I would encourage you to purchase the CD too or you can borrow mine if you like, I also have 2 Million Minutes and 2 Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution.
Today, State Representative Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) joined other education supporters to announce a new education reform proposal designed to increase supports for Milwaukee Public Schools and its democratically-elected school board. Grigsby issued the following statement regarding today's activities:
"If this compromise were about mayoral takeover, I would not be here in support of it today. Over the past year, much of the debate surrounding MPS has been about who runs the schools, rather than the quality of education being given to our children. Now that the debate surrounding takeover has come to an end, I'm glad that so many different stakeholders have been able to join together to find common ground with the best interests of Milwaukee's children in mind.
"This compromise is not about a change in governance, nor is it about school control. This compromise is about support for our schools and providing a consistent, quality education for our children. For education to improve, MPS needs more community support, more district support, and more state support. You will not find a takeover of any sort in this legislation. Instead, this proposal puts in place important policies designed to support and strengthen Milwaukee Public Schools and maintain its democratically-elected, empowered school board.
Sandra Stotsky and I have pieces in today's Arkansas Democrat Gazette on the current national standards push. We take slightly different approaches -- Sandy thinks national standards are a good idea in general but the current draft has bad standards, while I think national standards are a bad idea altogether. But we end up with the same policy recommendation -- the current national standards push should be stopped. I've reproduced both pieces below:
One Size Fits None
by Jay P. Greene
The Obama administration and Gates Foundation are orchestrating an effort to get every state to adopt a set of national standards for public elementary and secondary schools.
These standards describe what students should learn in each subject in each grade. Eventually these standards can be used to develop national high-stakes tests, which will shape the curriculum in every school.
On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson charted the course for a new nation: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Abraham Lincoln declared that we were "a new nation, conceived in Liberty" and "the last best hope of earth." Ronald Reagan observed: "Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than any other place on earth."
I recently watched Al Sharpton on the Stephen Colbert show talk about how education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. He discussed his collaboration with Newt Gingrich to promote education reforms. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich? That's an interesting coupling.
And I thought of all the interesting volunteers who come together at School on Wheels to tutor a homeless child. Why do they do this? For some it's because they recognize the vulnerability and difficulty of being a homeless student. For others, it's the opportunity to give back to those they consider less fortunate. For most, however, it's the understanding that education is the one sure path out of poverty and the cycle of homelessness. In Los Angeles County, we have a 60% graduation rate, well below the national average of 70%. And not only is the poverty rate in L.A. County higher than the nation as a whole, but we are the homeless capital of the nation.
Homelessness is extreme poverty. A serious illness or the loss of a job can leave anyone in extreme poverty. And when kids become homeless, their education suffers immensely.
In the midst of an interesting memo defending President Obama’s decision to propose level funding Title I for next year, Raegan Miller of the Center for American Progress raises the point that many states and school districts don’t need increased Title I money because they are still receiving additional stimulus dollars. That’s a good point and makes a lot of sense–no need to spend more when there are already federal funds available.
But while the stimulus funds may be enough to justify flat-funding Title I for next year, it also hints at some important looming questions in all levels of federal education spending—what to do when the stimulus money expires.
As Miller notes, school districts and states still have some remaining funds from the $10 billion provided for Title I in the stimulus that would supplement the flat funded level of $14.49 billion for Title I. According to Jennifer Cohen, my former colleague at the New America Foundation, only about 24 percent of Title I stimulus funds had been disbursed by March 5. Coupled with the fact that up to 15 percent of the $10 billion can be reserved for the 2011 fiscal year, this increases the likelihood that states will still have a decent amount of money to use.
Win or lose with healthcare "reform", there is another socialist crisis looming, thanks to the Obama administration, but one that most conservatives and many libertarians will not only go along with but actually applaud, until it is forever too late. The battle over our schools has been being lost for nearly a decade and with the help of conservatives who do not understand how The late Senator Edward Kennedy and the current Pelosi ally, U.S. Representative George Miller pulled one over on Bush and the GOP with No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The defining impact of NCLB was not what it imposed on the nation's public schools but that it opened the door to direct Federal control of one of the most intimately local institutions in American history and culture (Will, 2007). That Federal control of the schools is precisely why Democrats who railed against the law for its first four years did not overturn it after taking control of Congress in 2007, when the law first came up for renewal. Democrats may not like details within NCLB but they apparently like the idea of federal control of the schools more than they dislike the current law, considering that they have left NCLB unchanged until Obama has proposed his "Blueprint for Education" (Turner, D). Many of the same people who bitterly opposed Obama on healthcare will now jump through all his various hoops to help him further take over the nation's schools on a federal level by accepting his shiny false lure of blaming education's ills on so-called "bad" teachers (Navarrette). The proof of the falsehood in the lure to punish "bad" teachers is in which states won first approval under Obama's first canary in the coal mine for federal takeover of the schools, also known as Race To The Top; states whose teachers unions agreed to the so-called reforms (Anderson & Turque).
Disappointment was widespread last month when Minnesota failed to make the list of finalists for federal Race to the Top education funds. For a state accustomed to being a national leader in education, it was a rude awakening to be bested by winners Delaware and Tennessee and eight other finalists.
Still, the poor showing can be the kick in the teeth Minnesota needs to jump-start educational reforms, and it should serve as a wake-up call for a teachers union that has wielded too much power in preserving the status quo. Minnesota lost points in the competition for poor plans to produce better educators and close the achievement gap, and for not having more support from its teachers unions.
Ze'ev Wurman and Sandra Stotsky, in their opinion piece ("Grade 10 Diploma Not a Wise Idea," Insight, April 4) misrepresented our proposals.
They suggest that the State Consortium on Board Examination Systems is proposing to send all of the high school students in our states to community colleges at the age of 16. Not so.
We offer the option of going to community college after the sophomore year in high school to students who pass exams showing they can do college-level work. But students who pass these exams could stay in high school to take a career and technical program or a program designed to prepare them for admission to selective colleges. High schools would be obligated to give students who don't pass their exams additional instruction in the areas in which they are weak, so they could succeed the next time they take the exam.
In the approved Plan to Align the Work of the Administration to the District's Mission and Strategic Plan, the Reorganization Plan, it states "For all revised or newly created positions, job descriptions will be developed and submitted to the Board of Education for approval."
On the April 12, 2010 Regular Meeting agenda - Superintendent's Announcements and Reports - I am seeking action on four position descriptions representing three new positions as a result of the approved reorganization plan and one revised description. These include:
Deputy Superintendent / Chief Learning Officer
Director Professional Development Director
Early and Extended Learning
Executive Director - Curriculum and Assessment
Action on these position descriptions is being sought at this time in order to allow the newly created positions to be posted in as timely a manner as possible.
When additional existing position descriptions are revised, as a result of the reorganization plan, they will be submitted to the Board for review and approval. Please let me know if you have any questions on these position descriptions.
The Deputy Superintendent / Chief Learning Officer adds a layer between the current Superintendent, Dan Nerad and a number of positions that formerly reported to him:
The Deputy Superintendent/Chief Learning Officer provides leadership in the ongoing development, implementation and (curriculum, instructional and responsible for the improvement of all learner-related programs within the all assigned administrators
Supervises:
Assistant Superintendents-Elementary and Executive Director of Educational Services Executive Director of Curriculum and Ksse:,snm Executive Director of Student Services Director of Professional Development Coordinator-Grants and Fund Development Executive Assistant
Key legislators and major players in Wisconsin's education scene are close to agreement on a package of ideas aimed at invigorating efforts to improve low performing schools, particularly in Milwaukee.
The focus of the proposal is on giving Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, an array of new tools for taking on the problems of the schools in the state that get the weakest results.
According to a draft of the proposal, when it comes to low-performing schools, Evers would have powers to order school boards to change how principals are hired and fired; how teachers are assigned; how teachers and principals are evaluated, including the use of student performance data; and how curriculum and training of teachers is handled.
"There's a large consensus of people who are around this," State Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said. "That's exciting."
Evers said, "We feel confident we have a good, meaningful piece of legislation." He said it had been "an amazing few weeks" as prospects for a major education reform package this year went from bleak to energized. He said conversations, including a session Wednesday at the Capitol with many of the major players, had involved hard conversations in which people had given ground on stands they had taken previously.
"I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could have tolerated anything so primitive."
- John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, "No Easy Victories" (1968)
Education reform is in the air and taking root in thousands of classrooms across the country. From overhauling No Child Left Behind to closing poorly performing schools and raising student expectations, the push for change is powerful. Yet, the space where most learning takes place--the school and classroom--has changed little over the last 200 years.
Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. School designers call these hallways "double-loaded corridors." The factory model of control and direct instruction still pervades most new schools. If we are to have thorough-going school reform, we must change the design model, too, starting with the place students first enter the school.
History matters. Most intelligent adults, no matter how limited their education, understand that. Even if they have never formally studied the subject, they are likely to take an interest in historical topics. Historians on television - notably Simon Schama and David Starkey - draw big audiences (the book of Schama's History of Britain sold more than a million copies). Military historians who have become household names in recent years include Richard Holmes and Anthony Beevor. And journalists such as Andrew Marr, Jeremy Paxman and David Dimbleby have also been highly successful in reaching a mass audience with historical material.
History, it might be said, has never been more popular. Yet there is a painful paradox at the very same time: that it has never been less popular in British schools.
History is not a compulsory part of the British secondary school curriculum after the age of 14, in marked contrast to nearly all other European countries. The most recent statistics for England and Wales indicate the scale of the problem. In 2009 a total of 219,809 candidates sat the GCSE in history - just 4 per cent of all GCSEs taken. More students sat the design and technology GCSE (305,809).
Two years ago, Indian Prairie School District 204 was building state-of-the art schools and athletic facilities. For years, new homes regularly had been added to the tax rolls, which kept dollars rolling in. Administrators in the district covering south and west Naperville decided to expand kindergarten to a full school day.
In the older neighborhoods to the north and east, Naperville School District 203 was enlarging its older schools rather than building new ones. Although the district spent more per pupil than its southern neighbors, kindergarten remained a half-day program, which didn't sit well with some parents.
But in recent weeks, District 204 approved plans to cut 145 teachers and $21.4 million out of next year's budget, while its neighbors in District 203 made small budget adjustments that left the educational program largely intact.
No wonder a Race to the Top that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hyped as education's "moon shot" is beginning to look like a wet firecracker. The Obama administration said the competition would be transparent, yet anonymous judges evaluated 40 states' applications behind closed doors. The administration said it would reward innovation, yet gaining assent from change-averse teacher unions gave the two winning states the edge, not bold new options for students and parents.
In the final analysis, the race may have a good effect if it finally convinces education patrons and stewards that "Waiting for Superman" (to borrow from Davis Guggenheim's brilliant documentary about deeply flawed public education) is an exercise in futility. The only way to reform education is from the bottom up.
Sweden has the right idea in letting public money follow children to the independent or public schools of their choice, thus sparking a competition that actually enhances quality for all.
New York-based online video management company whistleBox has developed a new browser-based augmented reality (AR) experience geared directly at children by integrating it with the one thing every kid loves: cartoons. The project, dubbed Do Crew, is a series of animated stories for kids that include interactive AR games and challenges that the kids can play with using a webcam attached to a desktop or laptop computer.
In examples shown in videos on the Do Crew site, kids can control cartoon vehicles by jumping or leaning side-to-side, and can play other games by waving their hands in front of the camera. Think Project Natal but in a web browser, and integrated within kids' cartoons. This is an excellent use of augmented reality technology because it is a practical application with genuine value, an attribute we discussed last week as being the strongest way AR can break into the mainstream.
Merit pay for teachers based on genuine, verifiable student learning would be a good thing. But the bill the Legislature finalized early Friday morning has too many holes in it, takes away local control and doesn't pay for the changes it orders.
Gov. Crist has said he might veto the bill, and that's exactly what he should do.
The bill requires local school districts to hire, fire and pay teachers according to how well students do on end-of-course exams in all subjects. But those tests don't exist yet. So how can teachers and students know they'll be valid when they go into effect in 2014? The Legislature says the state Department of Education will take care of the details.
That would be more reassuring if the state had a better track record on the FCAT. For a decade Florida has corrupted an otherwise useful test by putting way too much weight on it. Entire schools and districts are graded on a high-stakes test that doesn't even cover most subjects.
While most doctoral programs have some sort of orientation, the focus on such matters as required courses, time to degree and dissertation goals may diminish opportunities to consider really important matters -- such as how to wander into a colloquium at which food is served, timing your entrance so you don't need to listen to the talk.
Adam Ruben wants to help. His Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School is just out from Random House and offers advice -- tongue in cheek but with plenty of truth -- for those who want a doctorate. Ruben earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University in 2008, so the material comes from his personal experience -- although the attitude comes from his moonlighting as a stand-up comic. He covers everything from selecting professors to work with to figuring out when you need to finish up already (the latter in a chapter appropriate for the Passover season, "Let My Pupil Go.")
Critics of the Obama administration's signature education initiative have been breathing fire since it was announced that only Delaware and Tennessee had won first-round grants under the program, known as Race to the Top. Politicians from some losing states have denounced the well-designed scoring system under which the 16 finalists were evaluated. Others have thrown up their hands, suggesting that retooling applications for the next round is more trouble than it's worth.
Plenty of states will line up for the remaining $3.4 billion. But even if the program ended today, it already has had a huge, beneficial effect on the education reform effort, especially at the state and local levels.
THROUGHOUT the torturous contract talks between D.C. schools and teachers, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee vowed she would not agree to anything that didn't further her efforts at reform. The innovative agreement announced Wednesday is evidence of that resolve -- and also of a gutsy willingness by local and national union leaders to make the changes that are needed if D.C. children are to do better in school.
Ms. Rhee and officials of the Washington Teachers' Union reached an accord -- subject to ratification by the full membership and approval by the D.C. Council -- that would provide base salary increases of 21 percent over five years. In return, school officials would get important tools to reward teachers who do well with children and hold accountable those who don't. This includes a performance-based bonus system to be instituted in the fall, greater autonomy in assigning teachers and better means of getting rid of teachers unable to produce results.
As fourth-grade teacher Abel Varney introduced a lesson on negative and positive integers, all eyes in his Sabin Elementary classroom were upon him -- including the unblinking lens of a high-tech camera.
The camera recorded Varney's every move and utterance and captured the reactions of every child in the room -- images that will be examined by researchers in a national study trying to figure out what makes effective teaching.
Varney is one of 176 teachers from 17 Denver schools who signed up to have their lessons analyzed during a two-year project funded by a $878,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is not on Facebook or Twitter, but she wants to use the power of the Internet to get young people interested in civics.
"Two-thirds of Internet users under the age of 30 have a - whatever this is - social-networking profile," the feisty 80-year-old said in a speech at New York Law School Tuesday.
"We need to bring civics education into the 21st century."
O'Connor, who retired in 2006, said she knows young people are using sites such as Twitter and Facebook to swap political views - and the medium could be harnessed for other messages.
Failing schools are a drain on the state's already sluggish economy and require wholesale transformation, not just minor tinkering, state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist told lawmakers Wednesday in a speech on education reform.
Gist, whose reform efforts led to the firings of all teachers and staff at one of the state's worst-performing schools, said test scores in the state need vast improvement, the graduation rate must grow and too few high school graduates -- just more than half -- are heading directly to college.
Improving schools is critical to the economy in Rhode Island, a state with nearly 13 percent unemployment, since students who drop out will struggle and be a cost to society, Gist said in an address to the General Assembly.
"We cannot thrive in a knowledge-based marketplace if 45 percent of our high-school students cannot do math and 39 percent cannot do science at the very basic level," said Gist, who is in her first year as commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
The commissioner annually addresses the Legislature.
AS THE Obama administration spreads enthusiasm about a proposal to replace a patchwork of state education standards with national ones, it might also heed a cautionary tale. In the 1990s California too established rigorous standards. "We thought they were the highest," up there with those of Massachusetts and Indiana, says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank in Washington, DC. But California never translated those standards into results. Its public schools are, with some exceptions, awful. Moreover, the state's fiscal crisis is about to make them even worse.
California's 8th-graders (14-year-olds), for example, ranked 46th in maths last year. Only Alabama, Mississippi and the District of Columbia did worse. California also sends a smaller share of its high-school graduates to college than all but three other states. One of its roughly 1,000 school districts, Los Angeles Unified, which happens to be the second-largest in the country, has just become the first to be investigated by the federal Office for Civil Rights about whether it adequately teaches pupils who have little or no English.
Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist who is trying to reform education, blames a combination of California's dysfunctional governance, with "elected school boards made up of wannabes and unions", and the fact that the state's teachers' union is both more powerful and "more regressive" than elsewhere. The California Teachers Association (CTA) is the biggest lobby in the state, having spent some $210m in the past decade--more than any other group-- to intervene in California's politics.
Predictions are always perilous. Many of us recall the hearty enthusiasm of the Bowen report of 1989, which assured prospective graduate students that they would find "a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences" when they earned their degrees in the mid-1990s. Of course, they did not.
Moral: Avoid confident assertions about the future of the academic job market in the humanities (or in any other field). It may be that our current dilemma is another episode in a longish cyclical history. It may also be, as I rather pessimistically suspect, that something more serious is going on.
My reason is that just about all of the key drivers are simultaneously pointed in the wrong direction. Full-time tenured and tenure-track jobs in the humanities are endangered by half a dozen trends, most of them long-term.
In his ongoing look at efforts to turn around ailing schools in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. John Merrow reports on the use of alternative school programs in Louisiana and progress on negotiations between a teachers union and public schools in the nation's capital.
JIM LEHRER: The "NewsHour"'s special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has been tracking changes in the public schools of New Orleans and Washington, D.C., two cities that are being watched nationally.
We begin in New Orleans tonight. John looks at alternative schools for students with behavior and academic problems.
JOHN MERROW: When school superintendent Paul Vallas arrived in New Orleans three years ago, he faced a tough challenge: how to educate students who are way behind academically or who have gotten in trouble with the law.
This school, Booker T. Washington, was designed for teenagers who are performing at an elementary school level. Although three-fourths of students in Vallas' district are at least one grade level behind, here, the problem is extreme.
Had an encouraging conversation at College Board this morning about the potential for a new AP assessment system that would allow several testing times each year (eventually many times or anytime) and reduced reliance on the end of course assessment but considering a 'book of work' during the course taking period.
The reason this would be a breakthrough is that this country could double the number of AP courses taken by expanding online offerings. Districts could double the number of courses offered, ensure instructional quality, and reduce costs by moving all AP online (or a blend of online and onsite). This would best be facilitated by 1) eliminating seat time requirements, 2) adding flexibility to certification requirements, and 3) making it easier to take the test when a student is ready.
For parents and politicians hungry for better schools, the idea of paying teachers more if their students perform better can seem as basic as adding two and two or spelling "cat."
Yet just a handful of schools and districts around the country use such strategies. In some states, the idea is effectively illegal.
That could all be changing as the federal government wields billions of dollars in grants to lure states and school districts to try the idea. The money is persuading lawmakers around the country, while highlighting the complex problems surrounding pay-for-performance systems.
Some teachers, like Trenise Duvernay, who teaches math at Alice M. Harte Charter School outside of New Orleans, want to be rewarded for helping students succeed. Duvernay is eligible for $2,000 a year or more in merit bonuses based on how well her students perform in classroom observations and on achievement tests.
Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road.
In the place of books and lectures are videogames, a contraption that simulates walking on ice and an obstacle course around an artificial village.
Based on results so far, the world's largest package-delivery company is convinced that 20-somethings--the bulk of UPS driver recruits--respond best to high-tech instruction and a chance to hone skills.
Driver training is crucial for Atlanta-based UPS, which employs 99,000 U.S. drivers and says it will need to hire 25,000 over the next five years to replace retiring Baby Boomers.
Candidates vying for a driver's job, which pays an average of $74,000 annually, now spend one week at Integrad, an 11,500-square-foot, low-slung brick UPS training center 10 miles outside of Washington, D.C. There they move from one station to another practicing the company's "340 Methods," prescribed by UPS industrial engineers to save seconds and improve safety in every task from lifting and loading boxes to selecting a package from a shelf in the truck.
After the endowment of Centenary College in Shreveport, La., fell by 20 percent from 2007 to 2009, the private school decided to eliminate half of its 44 majors. Over the next three to four years, classic humanities specialities like Latin, German studies, and performing arts will be phased out. It's quite a change from 2007, when NEWSWEEK labeled Centenary the "hottest liberal-arts school you never heard of," extolling its wide range of academics. In their place, the school is considering adding several graduate programs, such as master's degrees in teaching and international business. Such professional programs have proven increasingly popular and profitable at other universities and colleges, especially during economic downturns, a point that the college president tries to downplay. "We're not intentionally trying to chase markets," says David Rowe. "We think the students need to have a grounding in the arts and sciences, but they also probably need some training in a specific area."
I generally have a great deal of sympathy for regular schmoes who look inordinately like famous people. Through no fault of their own, they walk through life being judged on what they are not (the famous person), rather than what they are (a working stiff that is sick of being told he looks like Jim from "The Office.")
Imagine if you were the guy who works at Kinko's who looks sort of like Matt Damon. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.) People don't notice that you may be better looking than your average guy - they only judge you on how far you fall short of looking like Jason Bourne. (After all, if you looked exactly like Matt Damon, you probably wouldn't be working at Kinko's. Staples, maybe - but certainly not Kinko's.)
On Wednesday of this week, the results of a longitudinal study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) were released. The study, mandated by a state law enacted in 2006 and conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas, is an attempt to compare student achievement in the Choice program in Milwaukee to similar students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an interesting article ($) earlier this week about the use of online graders located in other countries both to ease the burden of scoring papers for professors and because teaching assistants were not offering quality feedback. The piece mainly focuses on graders from EduMetry, a Virginia-based company, which are providing this service for business students at the University of Houston, though one can easily imagine that there are schools across the country trying similar programs:
Last week marked a historic time for the public school system as President Obama and Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, announced that they were drafting a blueprint to "overhaul" the No Child Left Behind policy and improve the quality of the nation's schools - exactly what the current policy left behind. Though they are only in the planning process, this is the one of the greatest and most desirable moves the White House has made to date - even more so than healthcare reform.
In Fla., we are all too familiar with the No Child Left Behind policy, specifically with the creation of the FCAT and other standardized tests that are supposed to be used to gauge students' knowledge and education. "Supposed to" is the key phrase here. According to teachers' complaints, the FCAT has forced teachers to teach only for the test. As a result, students are learning to perform well on the test when they should be learning the material.
Wisconsin students continued to make steady gains in math proficiency in 2009-'10, boasting their best performance in five years, even as reading scores remained flat over that same time period, according to statewide test results released Wednesday.
Yet even though the overall proportion of students deemed proficient or advanced in math increased to 77.3% on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations from 72.8% in 2005-'06, the share of students considered at least proficient in 10th grade - the highest grade tested - decreased in that time.
The share of Wisconsin 10th-graders who scored proficient or advanced in math was 69.8% this school year, compared with 71.6% five years ago.
Meanwhile, reading proficiency remained almost constant, with 81.6% of students considered proficient or advanced on this year's test vs. 81.7% in 2005-'06, when the current version of the WKCE first was implemented.
A dozen governors, led by Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, sat with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hotel ballroom in Washington a few weeks back, praising his vision and gushing with enthusiasm over a $4 billion grant competition they hoped could land their states a jackpot of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But for many of those governors, the contest lost some sizzle last week, when Mr. Duncan awarded money to only two states -- Delaware and Tennessee.
Colorado, which had hoped to win $377 million, ended in 14th place. Now Mr. Ritter says the scoring by anonymous judges seemed inscrutable, some Coloradans view the contest as federal intrusion and the governor has not decided whether to reapply for the second round.
Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program, according to a study released Wednesday.
Researchers from the University of Arkansas and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, presented their findings at UW-Madison. The study also found that Milwaukee Public Schools are doing better than expected when compared with other urban school districts.
The reports released Wednesday represent the midway point of a five-year study of the oldest and largest public voucher program in the United States, which provides funding for more than 20,000 students to attend private schools in Milwaukee.
The comparison between students in private voucher schools and those in public schools was made two years after large panels of students in the program and students in the Milwaukee public school system had been carefully matched to each other.
Minnesota was hoping for $330 million in grants, which go to states deemed innovative in their school policies. In the next round, Minnesota can't get more than $175 million.
Pawlenty wants more latitude to let experts become teachers without going through traditional routes, to reassign teachers based on effectiveness and to more closely link teacher pay to student performance.
Democratic state Rep. Mindy Greiling said the alternative licensure proposal has a better shot than the others.
Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don't believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn't simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren't we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren't answered in the teachers' manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?
The MMSD has been waiting a long time already to have math-qualified teachers teaching mathematics in our middle schools. Many countries around the world whose students outperform US students in mathematics only hire teachers who majored in the subject to teach it. Other school districts in the US are taking advantage of the current recession with high unemployment to hire and train people who know and love mathematics, but don't yet know how to teach it to others.
Wisconsin students can count on one hand the number of times they'll still have to take the math section -- or any section -- of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the annual weeklong test whose results for 2009-10 were scheduled to be released Wednesday.
That's because the WKCE is expected to give way in a few years to tests based on new national academic standards proposed last month that could become final this spring.
The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and all 50 U.S. states except Alaska and Texas in the fall signed on to the development of the Common Core State Standards for math and English, which spell out what the nation's public schoolchildren should be taught from kindergarten through high school.
When the final standards are unveiled, probably in late May, Wisconsin likely will adopt them, said Sue Grady, executive assistant to the state school superintendent.
For nearly an hour, no one speaks a word of English in this first-grade math class.
Not the teacher, Ying Ying Wu, who talks energetically in Mandarin's songlike tones.
Not the students -- 6- and 7-year-olds who seem to follow along fine, even though only one speaks Mandarin at home.
Even the math test has been translated, by Wu, into Chinese characters.
At Beacon Hill International School, many students learn a second language along with their ABCs by spending half of each school day immersed in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.
In Round 1 of Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education delivered on its promise to hold states to a high bar for reform. Only 2 states out of 16 finalists and 41 total applicants were selected for awards: Delaware and Tennessee.
These states won because they outlined bold, comprehensive visions of reform and demonstrated the ability to make them a reality. Statewide teacher effectiveness policies were the foundation for their success. They focused on putting effective teachers in every classroom and giving teachers the critical feedback and support they need to do their best work. They shifted to evaluation systems that improve their ability to recognize great teachers and respond to poor performance. Together they set a new benchmark for reform that Round 2 applicants must meet in order to win.
This analysis offers a close look at the scoring of the Round 1 finalists. It refutes some of the most common myths about Race to the Top and offers important lessons for states applying for the $3.4 billion in funding that remains available in Round 2.
At the same time, it examines scoring deficiencies that the Department of Education must address. While these issues did not result in a lowering of the bar for Round 1 winners, they could mean the difference between winning and losing for states applying in Round 2.
A few data points: according to the last School Report Card, there were over 800 freshman at Trenton Central. However, so many kids drop out (24.7% of White students) that there were only 440 seniors left last year. 51.6% of these students failed the language arts HSPA and a stunning 79.5% failed the math HSPA. 43% of the student body was suspended during the 2008-2009 school year. Total cost per pupil is $16,843. 4.4% enrolled in an Advanced Placement class; the state average is 19%. Average SAT scores are 364 Math and 369 Verbal.
The ongoing health care debate has focused on accessible and affordable health care. Although reforming health care policies is important, we need to change the health behaviors that make our health system one of the most expensive in the developed world. Costly chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease are linked to obesity, smoking and diet - things we can do something about.
The Michigan Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that nearly one-fifth of high school students smoke cigarettes and binge drink. Over 50% do not attend any physical education classes, and the number of overweight youth has been increasing. These behaviors set the stage for lifelong obesity, smoking habits and poor diet.
According to Trust for America's Health, in five years, Michigan could save $545 million in annual health care costs by spending just $10 per person on programs to increase physical activity, encourage better nutrition and prevent the use of tobacco.
Recently, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a group of 48 states organized by the nation's governors and chief state school officers, released draft K-12 education standards in English and mathematics.
As a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I know that common education standards are essential for producing the educated work force America needs to remain globally competitive. Good standards alone are not enough, but without them decisions about such things as curricula, instructional materials and tests are haphazard. It is no wonder that educational quality varies so widely among states.
English and math standards have so far mostly been set without empirical evidence or attention as to whether students were learning what they needed for college and the workplace. College educators and employers were hardly ever part of the discussion, even though they knew best what the real world would demand of high school graduates. Luckily, about five years ago, states began to raise the bar so that their standards would reflect college- and career-ready expectations.
India's United Progressive Alliance government has come out with a landmark legislation making education a fundamental right for all children between the ages six and 14. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, was first introduced in the Indian Parliament way back in 2002.
It took more than seven years for this act -- which makes access to education a fundamental right -- to be notified after much debate in and outside the Parliament. The importance of the legislation can be gauged from the fact that there are nearly 300 million Indians below the age of 15, many of whom belong to poor families that can ill-afford the high cost of primary education.
There are about 10 million children in the targetted age group who are today not in school, but working in factories, farms and other places, often in abysmal condition, and helping their parents make both ends meet. It remains to be seen how many of these children can be brought back to classes.
The effectiveness of the landmark measure will depend on how state governments will ensure its implementation. Education falls under the concurrent list in the Indian Constitution and states have a major responsibility in ensuring access, especially to primary education. While many of the southern and western states have a better track record, those in the north and east have been laggards. Guaranteeing free education to millions of children -- and making it legally enforceable -- will also cost a lot of money. The federal government led by the Congress Party has asserted that funding would not be a problem. Estimates are that a whopping $40 billion will be needed over the next five years and the government has promised a mere $5.5 billion to states during this period.
As Chad Aldeman pointed out at the Quick and the Ed, many major newspapers missed the story on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress scores. The New York Times bemoaned that fourth-grade reading scores have barely increased since the early 1990s.
Aldeman pointed out that reading scores look somewhat better if you separate the data by race, as shown here.
Antonio Villaraigosa, the handsome high-voltage mayor of Los Angeles, really comes alive when recalling his start in local politics--as a labor organizer agitating for reform inside decrepit and overcrowded schools. "I cut my teeth working for the union. I cultivated these young teachers who had come to these schools to change the world," he said, brimming with pride.
Back in 1989, one of those teachers, Joshua Pechthalt, joined Villaraigosa for a rally downtown in Exposition Park. Pechthalt remembers his charismatic young friend pumping up the crowd. "Antonio was the master of ceremonies who had parents and teachers on their feet," recalled Pechthalt, now vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). "When we see each other, to this day, we give each other a hug."
Delaware's surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama's education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board's vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state's teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.
The reports on growth, school switching, testing, integration and other measures of the 20-year-old program will be released by the evaluation team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Room 313 of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., from 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
The evaluation team includes professor John Witte of UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs; Patrick Wolf, Jeffery Dean, Jonathan Mills and Brian Kisida, all of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas; Joshua Cowen of the University of Kentucky; David Fleming of Furman University; Meghan Condon of UW-Madison; and Thomas Stewart of Qwaku & Associates.
The Wisconsin Legislature authorized the evaluation in 2005 to learn how well the program, the oldest and largest urban educational voucher program in the United States, is working. The maximum voucher amount in 2007-08 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used vouchers to attend secular or religious private schools.
The general purposes of the evaluation are to analyze the effectiveness of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in terms of longitudinal student achievement growth and grade attainment, drop-out rates and high school graduation rates. The former will be primarily accomplished by measuring and estimating student growth in achievement as measured by the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations in math and reading in grades three through eight during a five-year period.
It explores two different approaches to math; one is representative of the fuzzy math side of things, and the other is in the traditionalist camp. I make it clear what side I'm on. I talk about how the fuzzy side uses what I call a "separate path" in which students are given open ended and ill posed problems as a means to teach them how to apply prior knowledge in new situations. I present two different problems, one representing each camp.
The math may prove challenging for some readers, though high school math teachers should have no problems with it.
Much has been written about the debate on how best to teach math to students in K-12--a debate often referred to as the "math wars". I have written much about it myself, and since the debate shows no signs of easing, I continue to have reasons to keep writing about it. While the debate is complex, the following two math problems provide a glimpse of two opposing sides:
Problem 1: How many boxes would be needed to pack and ship one million books collected in a school-based book drive? In this problem the size of the books is unknown and varied, and the size of the boxes is not stated.
Problem 2: Two boys canoeing on a lake hit a rock where the lake joins a river. One boy is injured and it is critical to get a doctor to him as quickly as possible. Two doctors live nearby: one up-river and the other across the lake, both equidistant from the boys. The unhurt boy has to fetch a doctor and return to the spot. Is it quicker for him to row up the river and back, or go across the lake and back, assuming he rows at the same constant rate of speed in both cases?
The first problem is representative of a thought-world inhabited by education schools and much of the education establishment. The second problem is held in disdain by the same, but favored by a group of educators and math oriented people who for lack of a better term are called "traditionalists".
Whitney Tilson and True South Studios present A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform. Education reformer Whitney Tilson gives the most in-depth exploration ever committed to film of the twin achievement gaps that threaten our nation's future: between the U.S. and our economic competitors, and between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. After spending more than two decades on the front lines, witnessing first-hand public education's shocking failures and remarkable successes, Mr. Tilson was inspired to assemble a powerful and at times unsettling presentation about the twin achievement gaps and what must be done to address them. He utilizes the latest data and research to paint the most detailed portrait of American public education ever committed to film. More importantly, he presents us with a way forward so our nation can deliver on its promise to all of its children and ensure its long-term future.
University of Wisconsin System leaders are crafting a plan to boost the number of degrees the schools award each year by 30% over the next 15 years, a move that would make the universities even more of an engine that makes the state's economy attractive for businesses.
The goal is to boost the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have college degrees or some professional certificate from a university or college. To meet it, the schools would have to confer 33,700 degrees in 2025, up from today's rate of about 26,000 a year. If the universities meet the goal, they will award 80,000 more degrees over the next 15 years than they would otherwise.
UWM would be a major player in the plan, UW System President Kevin Reilly said. Officials could announce as early as Monday how many additional degrees the urban campus would produce under the plan.
Meeting the goal would come at an up-front cost for the state, Reilly said. The universities would have to make the case to state lawmakers to reverse a long-term trend in which a shrinking share of the budget for the campuses comes from the state. Reilly also said the state would have to help increase faculty salaries, which lag behind salaries at peer universities in other states.
The recent disclosure that African-American fourth-graders in Wisconsin have the worst reading skills in the entire country came as a shock to many Milwaukeeans.
Keisha Arnold wasn't among them.
Her 10-year-old son has experienced reading problems and poor grades at his Milwaukee school for some time. Arnold has been frustrated with her inability to find a way to address the problem.
"I just don't understand why he can't seem to get the help he needs," said Arnold, 28, a single parent who returned to Milwaukee a few years ago after living in Phoenix.
When she returned to her hometown, she enrolled her son in a local charter school. "I didn't want him to go to MPS because I didn't think he'd get a good education there," she explained.
But it didn't take long for Arnold to recognize that deficiencies in her son's reading and math skills were not being addressed.
She met with his teachers and sought additional tutoring, but her son's grades failed to improve.
The New York Times education writer, Winnie Hu, had no trouble in Saturday's paper distinguishing some of NJ’s wealthy and high-performing school districts from our poor, low-performing ones: Cresskill, Montclair, Ridgewood, Millburn, Westfield, West Windsor-Plainsboro and Glen Ridge, she writes, “have long attracted families because they offer some of the best public education in the state. But now many of these top school systems are preparing to reduce the academic and extracurricular opportunities that have long set them apart.”
“Have long set them apart.” It’s an irony-free description of NJ’s educational inequity despite decades of Abbott compensation and the hard line of accountability etched from No Child Left Behind legislation. Among are 591 school districts (and 566 municipalities) are intractably poor, failing schools. Leveling the playing field in NJ is a quixotic task. Sword-yielding education reformers tilt at the windmills of an inculcated culture of disparity with little appreciable difference in student achievement. We can’t cure poverty; we can’t break down district barriers unless we find the cohones to desegregate and move to county-wide districts, an unlikely scenario. School choice is an embryonic concept with a long, slow learning curve (although the DOE just received 36 charter applications, a new record).
In February, the national press reported on a pilot program that will give high school sophomores in eight states a chance to earn a diploma and head straight to credit-bearing math and English courses at a state college. To do so, they will have to take special course work and can try to pass academic tests known as board exams as early as grade 10.
The idea of a grade 10 diploma is the latest brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, the originator of the unsuccessful school-to-work initiative in the 1990s. The project is funded by the Gates Foundation, which has abandoned its initiative to create small high schools as a way to get more low-achieving students through high school.
The center's so-called fast-track approach ups the ante and aims to get at-risk students out of high school and into college - and supposedly on a quick credit-bearing path to a degree. It also aims to get bright high school students into college sooner for supposedly better course work. However, the center's proposed 10th-grade "diploma" is the wrong answer to the wrong problem for three groups of students: those with a strong academic orientation, those without it but who are willing to stay in school and those who drop out.
It was a Race to the Top, but Colorado, amazingly, finished close to the bottom.
Of the 16 finalists for President Obama's cash giveaway for education reform, only New York and Washington, D.C. -- areas with some of the country's worst schools -- finished below Colorado. It was an embarrassing plummet for a state whose bid just a year ago looked so promising.
Colorado had been at the forefront of education reform since Gov. Roy Romer ushered in CSAPs and then-state lawmaker Bill Owens pushed for charter schools. Even Denver Public Schools for the past five years have been incubators for what are now emerging as national reforms.
This was Colorado's race to lose. And we did.
Obama dangled $4.35 billion in front of states to spur them into developing innovative education-reform plans. But Colorado's plan lacked ambition, bold ideas and statewide impact. It also failed to build great teachers and leaders, according to the Obama administration's scoring system.
TODAY, Apple's iPad goes on sale, and many see this as a Gutenberg moment, with digital multimedia moving one step closer toward replacing old-fashioned books.
Speaking as an author and editor of illustrated nonfiction, I agree that important change is afoot, but not in the way most people see it. In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights -- or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.
The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.
The chances of a high school student eventually becoming first violin for the Boston Philharmonic: one in a million.
The chances of a high school student eventually playing basketball in the NBA? About the same.
In fact, the chances of someone growing up and getting a job precisely like yours, whatever it is, are similarly slim. (Head of development at an ad agency, director of admissions for a great college... you get the idea). Every good gig is a long shot, but in the end, a lot of talented people get good gigs. The odds of being happy and productive and well compensated aren't one in a million at all, because there are many good gigs down the road. The odds are only slim if you pick precisely one job.
After reading aloud from an essay about the fast-food industry, I threw a typical softball question to the students of a UC Berkeley composition class:
"What's the argument of the paragraph?"
Silence.
Written by a former student, the paragraph implied that a rise in American obesity is linked to increased dollars spent on fast food.
I called on a student. "Advertising?" she said, a word that appeared in the paragraph only once. Why did this student, a hard-working athlete, so badly misread the paragraph? Because instead of really interpreting the passage, she used a little clue. "Advertising" had been mentioned in the thesis just a paragraph earlier.
Unfortunately, strategies such as hers aren't uncommon in the college classroom. Within the same lesson, another student made quick assumptions about a sentence's meaning because of its first words. My colleagues and I often swap stories like these, in which our students use faulty shorthand in place of critical thinking.
But I want to focus on the most interesting contributor to the volume, a Texas economist named Kristin Klopfenstein who is author or co-author of two chapters and one of the four editors of the book. She has become the most articulate and knowledgeable critic of using AP to raise achievement in low-income schools, a movement I have been supporting for a quarter of a century, I decided to call her up, discuss our differences and report what she had to say.
Klopfenstein is an associate professor of economics at Texas Christian University, currently on leave to work as a senior researcher at the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas-Dallas. In the new book, she is the sole author of a chapter that argues that people who say AP saves taxpayer money and reduces time to college graduation are wrong. Since I am not one of those people, I didn't ask her about that chapter, but about a chapter of which she is the lead author, with Mississippi State University economist M. Kathleen Thomas as co-author, entitled "Advanced Placement Participation: Evaluating the Policies of States and Colleges."
Klopfenstein has spent many years looking at AP in public schools, aided by a terrific state data base in Texas that follows students from grade school into college. Other researchers in Texas and California have produced studies that suggest that taking AP courses and exams in high school leads to more success in college than avoiding or being barred from AP, as happens with most college-bound students. Klopfenstein told me those studies should not be given great weight because they show correlation, not causation.
Massachusetts did not receive Race to the Top school funding but state education officials say they plan to reapply for the grant.
Pres. Barack Obama established the Race to the Top program last summer for states to compete for $4.35 billion in grant funding to pursue education overhauls and innovative reform.
Of the initial 40 states to qualify, Massachusetts was named one of 16 finalists. Early this week, the U.S. Department of Education announced Delaware and Tennessee were the only winners.
The program states winners would be chosen simply on the state's readiness to rework their education system.
Superintendent Lincoln Lynch said Massachusetts might have been passed up since the achievement gap here may not be as great as in other states. As a finalist, however, Massachusetts will have the opportunity to reapply in for a second round of funding in June.
From 1982 to 1987 I stalked Jaime Escalante, his students and his colleagues at Garfield High School, a block from the hamburger-burrito stands, body shops and bars of Atlantic Boulevard in East Los Angeles. I was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post, allegedly covering the big political, social and business stories of the Western states, but I found it hard to stay away from that troubled high school.
I would show up unannounced, watch Jaime teach calculus, chat with Principal Henry Gradillas, check in with other Advanced Placement classes and in the early afternoon call my editor in Washington to say I was chasing down the latest medfly outbreak story, or whatever seemed believable at the time.
Escalante, who died Tuesday from cancer at age 79, did not become nationally famous until 1988, when the feature film about him, "Stand and Deliver," was released, and my much-less-noticed book, "Escalante: The Best Teacher in America," also came out. I had been drawn to him, as filmmakers Ramón Menéndez and Tom Musca were, by the story of a 1982 cheating scandal. Eighteen Escalante students had passed the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam. Fourteen were accused of cheating by the Educational Testing Service, based on similarities in their answers. Twelve took the test again, this time heavily proctored, and passed again.
Twenty years after technology began transforming every other sector, there is finally enough movement on a sufficient number of fronts--15 to be precise--that, despite resilience, everything will change. New and better learning options are inevitable, but progress will be uneven by state/country and leadership dependent.
The 5 Drivers. These Web 2.0 forces are benefiting the learning sector, emerging economies, as well as every other sector:
More broadband: increasingly ubiquitous high speed Internet access is enabling a world of engaging content including video, multiplayer games, simulations, and video conferencing.
Cheap access devices: netbooks, tablets, and smart phones have dropped below the $100 per year ownership level enabling one-to-one computing solutions.
Powerful application development platforms: rapid application development and viral adoption have radically reduced cost and increased speed of bringing solutions to market.
Adaptive content: personalized news (iGoogle), networks (Facebook), purchasing (Amazon), and virtual environments (World of Warcraft) have created a 'my way' mindset that will eventually eliminate the common slog through print.
Platforms: Apple's iPhone illustrates the elegant bundling of an application, purchasing, and delivery platform.
Delaware's surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama's education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board's vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state's teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.
A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles teachers union to block the city's school district from giving new campuses to charter schools was denied Friday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.
The suit was filed in December on behalf of United Teachers Los Angeles as a result of the Los Angeles Unified School District's controversial school reform plan, which sought to turn over 30 campuses to bidders from inside and outside the district, including charter school organizations.
The lawsuit claimed that L.A. Unified could not allow charter operators to take over new campuses unless 50% of the district's permanent teachers petitioned for it. Charters are independently managed public schools and are generally nonunion.
The legal process went forward, and the school board voted to give teacher-led groups control of 22 of the campuses; four were awarded to charters.
The Maine International Center for Digital Learning has produced four videos designed to help schools prepare for and transition into one-to-one schools. The videos feature former Maine Governor Angus King and two Maine teachers, Lisa Hogan and Google Certified Teacher Sarah Sutter. The video series covers the practical and logistical aspects of one-to-one for teachers as well as the educational theory aspects of one-to-one.
The `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009′ (RTE Act) came into effect today, with much fanfare and an address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In understanding the debates about this Act, a little background knowledge is required. Hence, in this self-contained 1500-word blog post, I start with a historical narrative, outline key features of the Act, describe its serious flaws, and suggest ways to address them.
Historical narrative
After independence, Article 45 under the newly framed Constitution stated that The state shall endeavor to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years.
As is evident, even after 60 years, universal elementary education remains a distant dream. Despite high enrolment rates of approximately 95% as per the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2009), 52.8% of children studying in 5th grade lack the reading skills expected at 2nd grade. Free and compulsory elementary education was made a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution in December 2002, by the 86th Amendment. In translating this into action, the `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill' was drafted in 2005. This was revised and became an Act in August 2009, but was not notified for roughly 7 months.
Your schools are not what they once were. Last week you were named one of only four states to have its fourth-grade reading scores decline on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the nation's report card.
This is sad news, but it shouldn't come as any great surprise: Iowa's scores have been flat for nearly two decades. In 1992, you trailed only four states in fourth-grade reading. You now trail 25, including Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.
It might be tempting to blame your declining scores on changing demographics, and that's fair to some extent, but you haven't had the same influx of minority students that your neighbor Minnesota has, for example, even though their scores have risen much faster than yours.
Milwaukee Public Schools today provided some response to the not-so-much-progress progress report recently issued by an independent expert who's overseeing the implementation of an educational improvement plan in the district.
In a letter, MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board President Michael Bonds tell Alan Coulter, the independent expert, that it's unfortunate his report doesn't "accurately reflect the incredible efforts underway by the District" and that it seems he has been "factually deprived of pertinent information" regarding MPS' progress.
In an e-mail today, Roseann St. Aubin, district spokeswoman, also said there appears to be a communication problem between the Department of Public Instruction in Madison and Coulter in New Orleans.
But, she also said that Coulter is required to do these progress reports under the settlement agreement between Disability Rights Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and that MPS is not a party to this settlement.
Professional development is the manner with which we all learn and grow in our profession. The needs of our students continue to grow and change. The expectations of teachers continue to develop. Larry Wilson once said, "Our options are to learn the new game, the rules, the roles of the participants, and how the rewards are distributed, or to continue practicing our present skills and become the best players in a game that is no longer being played." Just as we expect doctors, lawyers, and other professions to be current on the latest research and methods, our teachers need to continue developing their skills through professional development.
"Professional development is the key to the success of a school." (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
"One of the most cost-effective methods for making significant gains in student performance on standardized tests is providing teachers with better content knowledge and instructional methods to enhance the curriculum." (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
"In the history of education, no improvement effort has ever succeeded in the absence of thoughtfully planned and well-implemented professional development." (Guskey & Yoon, 2009)
'A school culture that invites deep and sustained professional learning will have a powerful impact on student achievement." (Brandt, 2003)
According to research, high-quality teaching has about five times more statistical effect than most feasible reductions in class size (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine as cited in Frank & Miles, 2007).
"We have a rich, untapped pool oftalent in the millions ofmediocre teachers that are currently in the classroom. Rather than dismiss them, we need to help them grow. If we could move two million teachers from 'mediocre talent' to even 'mediocre- strong', it would have an incredible effect on student outcomes... Rather than focusing on punishing bad schools and teachers, we need to develop a culture of development and growth." (Scott, 2010.)
In the 1980s, when I was teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, one day there was a faculty meeting during which some of my colleagues put on a skit about one of our most intractable problems: students wandering in the hallways during classes. One person played the principal, another the hall monitor, and others the guidance counselor, the vice-principal, and I can't remember who else from the staff. One teacher played the student who had been in the halls.
They did a good job on the acting and the lines were good, but as it went on, I noticed something a bit odd. Everyone had a part and things to say, but the only passive member of the show was the student, who had nothing much to say or do.
I notice a parallel to this in the majority of discussions about education reform these days. With some exceptions, including Carol Jago, Diane Ravitch, Paul Zoch, and me, edupundits seem occupied with just about everything except what students do academically.
There is a lot of discussion of what teachers do, and what superintendents, curriculum coordinators, principals, financial officers, mayors, legislators, and so on, do, but the actual academic work of students gets very little attention.
This observation was reinforced for me when the TCR Institute did a study in 2002 of the assignment of serious term papers in U.S. public high schools. It was the first (and last) study of its kind, and it found that the majority of HS students are not being asked to do the sort of academic writing they need to work on to prepare themselves for college (and career).
In the last eight years, I have sought funds for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, but no one seems interested. Of course, many billions have been spent since 2002 on school reinvention and reorganization, assessment plans, teacher selection, training and retention, and so on, but again, the academic work of the students (the principal mission of schools) is "more honored in the breach than the observance."
My perspective on this is necessarily a bottom-up, Lower Education one. I publish the serious research papers of high school students of history. Most of the 20,000+ U.S. public high schools never send me one, which is not a great surprise, because most history departments, other than in IB schools, do not assign research papers.
But it gives me a curiosity over the neglect of student work which does not seem to be present in those whose focus is at a Higher Level in education. Those who live on the Public Policy level of Education Punditry can not see far enough Down or focus closely enough on the activity of schools to find out whether our HS students are reading history books and writing term papers.
I believe this is because foundation people, consultants, education professors, public policy experts, and their tribes mostly talk to each other, not to students or even to teachers, who are so far far beneath them. They hold conferences, and symposia, and they write papers and books about what needs to be done in education, but from almost none of them come suggestions that involve the academic reading and writing our students should be doing.
Of course what teachers do is vastly important, as well as very difficult to influence, but surely it cannot be that much more important than what students do.
Naturally, we should design curricula rich in knowledge, but if they don't include serious independent academic work by students, the burden will still be on the teacher, and many too many students can slide through under it and arrive in college ready for their remedial classes in reading, math and writing, as more than a million do now each year.
Tony Wagner, the only person I know at the Harvard Education School who is interested in student work, did a focus group with some graduates of a high school he was working with, and they all said they wished they had been given more serious work in academic writing while they were in the high school. I asked him how many schools he knows of which take the time to hold focus groups with their recent graduates to get feedback from them on their level of academic preparation in school, and he said he only knew of three high schools in the country which did it.
We do need improvements in all the things the edupundits are working on, and the foundations and our governments are spending billions on. But if we continue to lack curiosity about and to ignore what students are doing academically, I feel sure all that money will continue to be wasted, as it has been so many many times in the past.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Rhode Island's new education boss told a large crowd of Bristol and Warren residents last Thursday night that their towns have gotten a great deal for nearly two decades, but it's time to settle up. The message was frustrating and disappointing to many in attendance.
Department of Education Commissioner Deborah Gist confirmed that a proposed funding formula would slash into the Bristol Warren Regional School District's revenue stream each year for the next 10 years, escalating to a $9.1 million reduction by 2020. Her message was delivered to a large crowd packed into the Mt. Hope High School auditorium to hear her speak.
Half the reduction is elimination of a regionalization "bonus" that has been given to the school district each year since the two towns merged their school systems in the early 1990s. Ms. Gist said the state simply does not have the resources to continue to fund the district at the level it has been. However, Ms. Gist offered one small carrot -- she said the state would help pay for students requiring a high level of specialized services.
According to Ms. Gist, the proposed funding formula would distribute enough funds to each district so all can adhere to the Basic Education Plan, an outline of standards Rhode Island students must achieve.
Why draw from the model? A number of years ago, my husband and I and some friends--all, except for me, artists who also teach at art schools here in New York--spent hours discussing this question, though without arriving at anything particularly convincing. A few of them recalled drawing from the model as undergraduates, but none had done so in graduate programs--these were the heady, experimental days of the early '70s, when all the action took place in the seminar room; in my husband's program, studios had been dispensed with altogether. When we turned our attention to the art world today, drawing and models seemed just as antiquated. Installation, photography, and video, more popular than ever, are mechanically derived. And though we could easily think of paintings with figures in them, all of them had been lifted from mass-media images; they had as little relation to drawing from the pose of a living person in the artist's studio as photography.
Yet, at art schools today, freshmen are required to draw from the model, sometimes six hours at a stretch, their labors then judged by teachers who have no use for, indeed, who disdain, the practice in their own work. We spent quite a while trying to account for this odd disjuncture. The best anyone could come up with is that studio drawing focuses the eye and hand; it is an intense discipline in seeing and then translating what one sees into material form. This, it seemed to me, was another way of saying that it was good for its own sake, even if it had no relation to making art these days. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but the next morning what had eluded us the night before now appeared so ridiculously obvious that I could not believe we had missed it: The reason the Academy required students to master the painstaking practice of drawing from the model was because, until very recently, the action of figures--gods, heroes, and mere mortals--was the prime subject, the central drama, the moving force, of all the greatest paintings.
Educating the poor is more than just a numbers game, says Shukla Bose. She tells the story of her groundbreaking Parikrma Humanity Foundation, which brings hope to India's slums by looking past the daunting statistics and focusing on treating each child as an individual.
The founders of the Blue School aspired to create something different: a private school not fixated on the Ivy League prospects of preschoolers and devoid of admissions hysteria. An education that, as they put it, "you don't have to recover from."
The school was in the East Village, not uptown, and its leaders were not bluebloods but the founders and spouses of the Blue Man Group, the alternative theater troupe.
The school, which is entering its fourth year, has remained true to its progressive roots, with "imagination stations" and "glow time." Children help direct the curriculum, and social and emotional skills are given equal weight to reading and math.
Washington has historically talked tough about requiring the states to reform their school systems in exchange for federal aid, and then caved in to the status quo when it came time to enforce the deal. The Obama administration broke with that tradition this week.
It announced that only two states -- Delaware and Tennessee -- would receive first-round grants under the $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative, which is intended to support ambitious school reforms at the state and local levels. The remaining states will need to retool their applications and raise their sights or risk being shut out of the next round.
That includes New York State, which ranked a sad 15th out of 16 finalists.
Even if you don't live in Florida, you should pay attention to what is going on there.
Teachers, parents and even students in the Sunshine State call it the "Education Debacle." And they are no longer sitting quietly, hoping that common sense will magically prevail with state legislators seemingly intent on passing legislation affectionately called a "hammer" on the teaching profession by its sponsor.
They are taking to the streets, literally and digitally, to transmit their horror over legislation that would end teacher job security, increase student testing and tie teacher pay to student test scores. It also prohibits school districts from taking into account experience, professional credentials or advanced degrees in teacher evaluation and pay.
Ever since MIT's famous OpenCourseWare initiative was launched in 2001, people have been fascinated with the power that technology would have on open sourcing of information and the democratization of education. OpenCourseWare started as MIT's decision to open up its vast academic curricula to "any joker with a browser". I will never forget the visualization from this Wired article of an MIT 'student' racing home through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City to 'attend' a lab in software engineering...
It's true that initiatives like OpenCourseWare have helped to deliver new ways to learn. But despite access to these new tools, true innovation in education has been hampered by all the restrictive dependencies which have been part of education's lineage. For example, kids may learn a foreign language better earlier in schooling, but the structure around how English grammar is taught prevents foreign language classes from being rolled out until much too late. Clay Christensen's new book Disrupting Class brilliantly delves into this topic.
Sitting before a computer in the library at Wauwatosa West High School, senior Ricky Porter clicks his mouse and moves a squiggly web of multicolored lines across a computerized map speckled with red and blue dots.
Move one line wrong and an elected representative whose district he has redrawn will stand up in protest, a warning that Porter's new map might not be able to pass an imaginary state legislature, governor and court review. But if he gets his lines just right and manages to please all the incumbents, while staying on the right side of the law, his mission is complete.
The Redistricting Game played by Porter and classmates in his American Public Policy class at West is one of a number of new online and video games that offer educational experiences for schools and teachers willing to experiment. Porter's teacher, Chris Lazarski, who also plans to use a game named Peacemaker to teach students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said such games give students chances to interact and solve problems in a way with which they're comfortable.
This is precisely the art of leadership practiced by Seattle Public Schools. Think of all of the imaginary future things they have promised in exchange for real things in the present. Then remember how few (if any) of the imaginary future things ever materialized.
When dealing with the public, the real thing they want in the present is usually your willingness to accept a change that is unacceptable and the imaginary thing in the future is some action that will mitigate the damage done by the change.
For example, if the APP community won't kick up too much of a fuss over the split of the program, then the District will deliver an aligned, written, taught and tested curriculum concurrent with the split. The APP community didn't oppose the split, but the District never delivered - and now clearly never will deliver - the promised curriculum.
A casual joke on Twitter recently let slip a dirty little secret of large science and engineering courses: Students routinely cheat on their homework, and professors often look the other way.
"Grading homework is so fast when they all cheat and use the illegal solutions manual," quipped Douglas Breault Jr., a teaching assistant in mechanical engineering at Tufts University. After all, if every answer is correct, the grader is left with little to do beyond writing an A at the top of the page and circling it. Mr. Breault, a first-year graduate student, ended his tweet by saying, "The profs tell me to ignore it."
While most students and professors seem to view cheating on examinations as a serious moral lapse, both groups appear more cavalier about dishonesty on homework. And technology has given students more tools than ever to find answers in unauthorized ways--whether downloading online solution manuals or instant-messaging friends for answers. The latest surveys by the Center for Academic Integrity found that 22 percent of students say they have cheated on a test or exam, but about twice as many--43 percent--have engaged in "unauthorized collaboration" on homework.
Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, died Tuesday. He was 79.
The subject of the 1988 film "Stand and Deliver," Escalante died at his son's home in Roseville, Calif., said actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed the teacher in the film. Escalante had bladder cancer.
"Jaime didn't just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives," Olmos said earlier this month when he organized an appeal for funds to help pay Escalante's mounting medical bills.
Escalante gained national prominence in the aftermath of a 1982 scandal surrounding 14 of his Garfield High School students who passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam only to be accused later of cheating.
HEY THERE, talented recent university graduate! I'd like to offer you a job in an extremely challenging and rewarding field. The pay is based almost entirely on performance metrics--you know, what they used to call "commission" in the old days. The better you do, the more you earn! Of course the worse you do, the less you earn, but don't focus on that--you're a winner, you'll do great. We can offer you a five-year contract to start. By "contract" I mean we'll let you work for us, if things work out, but we can of course fire you at any time. And after that you'll have solid contracts! Each contract lasts one year, and we can decide to let you go at the end if you're not performing up to our standards. And by that time, you'll be earning...well, actually, you'll be paid at exactly the same rate as when you started out. We're prohibited by law from paying you more just because you've worked for us longer. If, however, you want to go get qualified in some new technical field or obtain an advanced degree, then...we can't raise your pay either. We basically just pay you a flat standardized commission depending on how well you perform on the mission.
President Barack Obama has made education reform a signature issue of his administration, and the sweeping changes in how school systems are evaluated by the federal government announced over the weekend appear to go a long way toward achieving that goal.
Mr. Obama wants to revise the criteria for judging student achievement away from a strict reliance on standardized testing and toward a system that measures not only how much progress students make during the school year but also how well prepared they are for college and the workplace when they graduate from high school.
The Obama administration sent up a bright yellow warning flag Monday to states vying for billions of dollars in federal education funds intended to encourage school reform efforts. Of the 40 states that entered the first round of the Race to the Top competition in January, only 16 were named as finalists last month, and of those only two states -- Delaware and Tennessee -- actually ended up winning part of the federal largesse this week. Delaware was awarded $102 million, while Tennessee got just more than $500 million.
In rejecting the bids of big states such as Florida, New York and Illinois, all of which had been considered strong contenders for the prize, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a powerful signal that the feds won't be satisfied by half-measures grudgingly adopted by state lawmakers without strong support from local teachers unions. The message was that everybody needs to get behind meaningful reform.
The results of this first round of judging should be sobering to anyone who believed that all Maryland had to do was wave around its No. 1 ranking in Education Week to walk away with a big pile of federal money. More than a dozen states with stronger education reform credentials than Maryland were shut out, and this state surely would have been as well had it not belately recognized how unprepared it was to compete seriously.
A reader signing in as "suegjoyce" recently posted a comment on this blog describing her visit to a KIPP middle school "in the Delta." KIPP is the Knowledge Is Power Program, the most successful charter school network in the country and the subject of my most recent book. I was pleased to see suegjoyce's comment, since I have been urging readers curious about KIPP to ignore the myths they read on the Internet and instead visit a KIPP school. The vast majority of people I have encountered online with negative opinions of KIPP give no indication that they have ever been inside one of those schools, so she was setting a good example.
She had some critical things to say. She was not specific about which KIPP middle school she visited, but only one has the word "Delta" in its title, the KIPP Delta College Preparatory School in Helena-West Helena, Ark. So I asked Scott Shirey, executive director of the KIPP schools in that area, to respond. Neither Scott nor I know how to reach suegjoyce, but if she sees this and has more to say, I would be delighted to post her thoughts prominently on the blog.
Many educators greatly admire the wide range of human achievements over the millennia and want their students to know about them. However, there are those, like the Dean of the Education School at a major east coast university, who told me that: "The myth of individual greatness is a myth." Translated, I suppose that might be rendered: "Individual greatness is a myth (squared)."
Why is it that so many of our teachers and others in education are, as it were, in the "clay feet" business, anxious to have our students know that human beings who accomplished wonderful things also had flaws, like the rest of us? As they emphasize the flaws, trying to encourage students to believe that they are just fine the way they are now, with their self-esteem and perhaps a couple of the multiple intelligences, they seem to teach that there is no need for them to seek out challenges or to emulate the great men and women who have gone before.
One of the first major problems with this, apart from its essential mendacity, is that it deprives students of the knowledge and understanding of what these people have accomplished in spite of their human failings. So that helps students remain ignorant as well as with less ambition.
It is undeniable, of course, that Washington had false teeth, sometimes lost his temper, and wanted to be a leader (sin of ambition). Jefferson, in addition to his accomplishments, including the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia, the Louisiana Purchase and some other things, may or may not have been too close to his wife's half-sister after his wife died. Hamilton, while he may have helped get the nation on its feet, loved a woman or women to whom he was not married, and it is rumored that nice old world-class scientist Benjamin Franklin was also fond of women (shocking!).
The volume of information about the large and small failings is great, almost enough to allow educators so inclined to spend enough time on them almost to exclude an equal quantity of magnificent individual achievements. Perhaps for an educator who was in the bottom of his graduating class, it may be some comfort to focus on the faults of great individuals, so that his own modest accomplishments may grow in comparison?
In any case, even the new national standards for reading include only short "informational texts" which pretty much guarantees for the students of educators who follow them that they will have very little understanding of the difficulties overcome and the greatness achieved by so many of their fellow human beings over time.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that: "Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness." What Education School did he go to, I wonder?
Peter Gibbon, author of a book on heroes, regularly visits our high schools in an effort to counter this mania for the denigration of wonderful human beings, past and present.
Surely it would be worth our while to look again at the advantages of teaching our students of history about the many many people worthy of their admiration, however small their instructor may appear by comparison.
Malvolio was seriously misled in his take on the meaning of the message he was given, that: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them," but his author, the greatest playwright in the English language, surely deserves, as do thousands of others, the attention of our students, even if he did leave the second-best bed to his wife in his will.
Let us give some thought to the motivation and competence of those among our educators who, whether they are leftovers of the American Red Guards of the 1960s or not, wish to advise our students of history especially, not to "trust anyone over thirty."
After all, in order to serve our students well, even educators should consider growing up after a while, shouldn't they?
==============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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SALLY BLOUNT, unveiled today as the new dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, describes her appointment as a return to her intellectual home. The school was where, as a PhD student, she did much of her work in the fields of psychology and economics.
But other than a sense of going back to her roots, the main reason she was drawn to Kellogg, she says, is its reputation as a collaborative institution. "I am a middle child," she explains. "So it's in my DNA, this collaborative approach."
Collaborative leadership is a model whose time appears to have come in business as well as business education. The days of the imperial CEO bestriding an organisation, browbeating the company with the force of his personality, became suddenly unfashionable at around the same time that sub-prime mortgages did. But, perhaps unusually for academia, which can be famous for its backbiting, teamwork has long been a characteristic of Kellogg.
Michigan can harness innovation as a way to do more with less in K-12 education, even though that challenge may seem overwhelming. At a time when new investments in our K-12 system are not likely, Michigan must face the daunting task of improving student achievement and increasing graduation rates with fewer financial resources.
To date, K-12 education has yet to realize the full potential of using online learning to improve how educators teach and how students learn. Nearly every sector of our economy is now turning to information and communications technologies to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Education is not alone in its need to manage scarce resources, maintain relevance and succeed in today's new global economy.
Research has shown online learning is academically effective and can provide meaningful alternatives for students who have a need for greater flexibility with their education due to individual learning styles, health conditions, employment responsibilities, lack of success with traditional school environments, or desire to be working early at the college level. Online learning needs to be part of the broader policy discussion related to restructuring public education during this prolonged budget crisis. Economic arguments in addition to the latest research on student learning support this position.
Deep within America's collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.
The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States -- and they're right to, as test results confirm again and again.
But just as most Americans disapprove of congressional shenanigans while harboring some affection for their own representative, parents tend to say that their child's teacher is pretty good. Most people have mixed feelings about their own school days, but our national romance with teachers is deep and long-standing. Which is why the idea of kids staring at computers instead of teachers makes parents and politicians extremely nervous.
Wisconsin's application for a share of $4.35 billion in federal education grants scored in the bottom half of 41 applicants, earning the equivalent of a C-minus grade by government reviewers.
The state's score sheet and the accompanying reviewer comments were released Monday after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan revealed that Tennessee and Delaware won funding from the first phase of the Race to the Top competition, qualifying them for $500 million and $100 million, respectively, over the next four years.
All of the reviewers noted that few local teachers union leaders in Wisconsin had supported the state's application, and one noted that the statewide teachers union's support seemed "tepid." That was far short of expectations for competitive applications.
"Because teachers will play such a key role in the implementation of these efforts, their support is essential," one of Wisconsin's reviewers wrote in an evaluation of the state's application.
It was an off-the-record conversation early last summer with a major figure in education politics in Wisconsin. I suggested that if a serious move was made to put the Milwaukee Public Schools under mayoral control, the outcome would be decided by a few specific people.
"Gwen Moore?" the source suggested.
No, but what an interesting thought. And it pointed to several key reasons that the proposal, when it came a couple months later from Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, faltered from the start, never picked up momentum, and soon became a dead idea walking.
When Moore, the popular congresswoman who is influential among Milwaukee's African Americans, promptly came out against mayoral control, her decision pointed to three major flaws in the Doyle-Barrett plan:
*** There is almost no evidence that Doyle and Barrett prepared a strategy for building support for the idea before they went public. Was the fight even worth instigating if it had garnered so little support over the preceding years, and there was so little evidence anything had changed?
When I travelled to Sweden to report on their school system, I took some company - the Conservative party's policy document Raising the Bar, Closing the Gap - its action plan for raising standards in schools, creating more good school places and making opportunity more equal.
It describes an educational utopia, a land where new schools can open up anywhere to meet parental demand. Even better, the increased competition for pupils forces standards up. The blueprint is based on similar reforms introduced in Sweden in 1992 as part of a sweeping New Labour-style reform programme to give more choice in public services.
I thought it was really good that I could choose the new school. I had a choice
Mimmi Kindstrom
There are now more than 1,100 such schools in Sweden, funded by the state, but operated independently.
I visited one of them. Kallskollen was one of the very first to be set up when the Swedish education system went from being one of the most centrally controlled, to being one of the most liberal.
"Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning" (Belknap Press, 336 pages, $25.95) by Paul E. Peterson: Education reformers have left the essential teacher-pupil relationship untouched for more than a century, fighting instead for changes outside the classroom: desegregation, teacher pay hikes, funding equality, increased testing, vouchers and changes in curriculum.
Harvard University government professor Paul Peterson argues that although many of those efforts have been well-intentioned, even noble, American schools haven't kept pace with changes in society. And they're just not very good.
In a compelling and enlightening narrative, "Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning," Peterson traces a variety of reform movements by profiling their leaders or other key players. Horace Mann fostered public schools nationwide, creating a global model in the 19th century; in the early 1900s, John Dewey pushed for education that respected children as individuals and erased social strata; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in leading the civil rights movement, forced schools to start doing as courts and legislators told them; Albert Shanker pushed for better pay and conditions for teachers; a series of "rights" reformers tried to improve quality across the board, while a series of scholars measuring their work found precious little benefit, and that led to the "adequacy" and choice movements, including the push for publicly funded vouchers and charter schools, which together involve less than 10 percent of U.S. schoolchildren.
Angela Merkel on Monday sought to calm tensions over first-language schooling for Germany's Turkish immigrant community during a visit to Turkey aimed at strengthening trade ties and steadying a difficult bilateral relationship.
Some 3m Turks live in Germany and trade between the two countries is worth $23bn annually. But political sensitivities over the integration of migrants, and Ms Merkel's reluctance to back Turkey's European Union membership bid, frequently place strains on the partnership.
The latest irritant in the relationship was Ankara's request, revived shortly before the German chancellor's visit, to open Turkish-language secondary schools in Germany.
An Oklahoma senator complained that federal rules on teacher credentials had driven thousands of experienced educators out of rural schools. A North Carolina lawmaker complained that formulas for distributing federal education money favored big-city districts at the expense of poor students in small towns.
And a senator from Alaska wanted to know how school-turnaround strategies based on firing ineffective instructors would work in a remote village on the Bering Sea that she said already had tremendous teacher turnover.
Lawmakers who represent rural areas told Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hearing Wednesday that the No Child Left Behind law, as well as the Obama administration's blueprint for overhauling it, failed to take sufficiently into account the problems of rural schools, and their nine million students.
This will be an especially personal post, but as it brings into sharp relief many of the ideas I've spent years writing about here, I figured it's worth sharing.
As many of you know, a few evenings ago I received the following email from one of my old creative writing professors:
Jeff,
Would you mind taking my name off your "about" page on Proteinwisdom? I've always liked you and your fiction, and your and [name redacted] impetus to make that conference happen, at that moment in time, did a great deal to speed this program along. I was also simply grateful to have you in the program when you came along, because you were-and are-a very smart and intellectual fiction writer, a rare commodity still, to this day. But I am more and more alarmed by the writings in this website of yours, and I do not want to be associated with it.
Brian Kiteley
Here's the context of that mention on my "about" page: "Some of the writers Jeff studied under are Rikki Ducornet, Beth Nugent, Brian Kiteley, and Brian Evenson.
n a bid to enhance innovative and technical education in India, Union HRD Ministry will develop a syllabus for geospatial information studies.
"Presently, we are working with Rolta in preparing a syllabus for geospatial study. It is being developed to create more workforce in the geospatial space as India is lacking speciality technical education. We are trying to expand more opportunities in the education space," HRD Minister Kapil Sibal told reporters on the sidelines of a CII meet here today.
Geospatial information studies focuses on the interface between human information constructs and spatial decision making.
The Obama administration has decided to award just two states--Delaware and Tennessee--with hundreds of millions in education grants, the culmination of a hard-fought competition that originally drew applications from 40 states, according to people familiar with the decision.
That the administration has picked only two states, and passed up states like Florida and Louisiana that were widely seen as favorites, will surprise many in the education world.
The grants, the first of two rounds under the administration's $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, are designed to reward states that are pushing ahead on tough teaching standards to overhaul lagging schools.
The fact that just two states won will placate critics, who warned that the administration appeared to be watering down its own standards for the awards. Skeptics have also raised concerns that the Race to the Top program, a cornerstone of the administration's education policy, would reward states making big promises instead of only those best prepared to impose real change.
A Chicago Public Schools policy that dramatically increased science requirements did not help students learn more science and actually may have hurt their college prospects, according to a new report from the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.
The science policy was part of a larger CPS initiative to expose all students to a college-preparatory curriculum by increasing course requirements across a range of subjects.
Though CPS high school students took and passed more college-prep science courses under the new policy, overall performance in science classes did not improve, with five of every six students earning Cs or lower. College-going rates declined significantly among graduates with a B average or better in science, and they dipped for all students when researchers controlled for changes in student characteristics over time.
Those of us who wallow in educational jargon have all heard the term "authentic." It seems to mean lessons that connect to the real world, like a physics class visiting a nuclear power plant or an English class performing a play by Edward Albee.
But like all fashionable terms, its meaning can evolve, or be distorted, depending on your point of view. I often use it to describe the powerful effect of telling Advanced Placement students in inner city schools that they are preparing for the same exam that kids in the richest school in the suburbs are taking. That makes their studies seem more authentic. Am I misusing the word?
How do you use it? Is it important in schools? Or is it just another buzz word gone bad?
I raise this intriguing issue, which had not occurred to me before, because of an email from Carl Rosin, an English and interdisciplinary/gifted class teacher at Radnor High School, 12 miles west of Philadelphia:
[Note: this unpublished paper was originally drafted in 2004 with Jim Shelton and draws heavily from the work of Paul Hill, Michael Barber, Michael Fullan, Kim Smith. Posting today, with a few updates, was inspired by a panel discussion yesterday including Paul Hill, Steve Adamowski, Garth Harries, Dacia Toll, and Andy Moffit]
The most important challenge in America today is creating systems of schools that work for all students, particularly low income and historically underserved groups. The goal of helping all students achieve at high levels is now decades old. We've made slow but steady progress in elementary literacy but secondary achievement levels and graduation rates remain stagnant. Hundreds of schools are helping most students achieve at high levels, but they remain largely random acts of innovation and heroic leadership. Few if any public school districts have achieved uniformly high performance and attainment levels. Building systems of schools that break the cycle of poverty and close the achievement/attainment gap remains critical to our economy, society and democracy.
GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight: Does the U.S. need more college graduates in its work force to remain competitive in the global economy? That was the central question at the kickoff of a new season of national debates hosted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, argued that we need more college graduates. George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richard Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University, argued that many jobs being created today don't require college degrees.
PAUL SOLMAN: Is it not the case that the United States needs to have a more and more sophisticated work force? Isn't it the case that, if other countries with whom we're competing are becoming more sophisticated, that that's a challenge to us, George?
GEORGE LEEF, director of research, John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy: Oh, it's a challenge, but putting more people through college is not the way to meet it.
At the margin -- remember, we're not talking here about are we going to educate most of the Americans who -- who have high skills and high aptitude, the high-SAT kids, the motivated students. They can -- they're going to go to college. The question is, are we going to get a few more at the margin into college?
When I was superintendent in Federal Way, two of our best reading teachers happened to be sisters, Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. I had the good fortune to run into them on a flight this week. They’ve published two great books, The Daily 5 most recently, and run an online professional development site, The Daily Cafe–a great business model and resource. It’s great to see a couple edupreneurs doing well by doing good.
Like its predecessor, the Obama Administration is focusing its education policy on fixing failed schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls for a "dramatic overhaul" of "dropout factories, where 50, 60, 70 percent of students" don't graduate. The intentions are good, but a new study shows that school turnarounds have a dismal record that doesn't warrant more reform effort.
"Much of the rhetoric on turnarounds is pie in the sky--more wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of what school reform can actually accomplish," writes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. "It can be done but the odds are daunting" and "examples of large-scale, system-wide turnarounds are nonexistent."
Mr. Loveless looked at 1,100 schools in California and compared test scores from 1989 and 2009. "Of schools in the bottom quartile in 1989--the state's lowest performers--nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) scored in the bottom quartile again in 2009," he writes. "The odds of a bottom quartile school's rising to the top quartile were about one in seventy (1.4 percent)." Of schools in the bottom 10% in 1989, only 3.5% reached the state average after 20 years.
Conversely, the best schools tended to remain that way. Sixty-three percent of the top performers in 1989 were still at the top in 2009, while only 2.4% had fallen to the bottom. School achievement, or lack thereof, is remarkably persistent, and California's worst schools were all the subject of numerous reform attempts in "finance, governance, curriculum, instruction, and assessment," writes Mr. Loveless, a former California public school teacher.
Every job is a technology job. Technology is baked into each aspect of work. Social media means that everyone in an organization is a communicator, everyone is a salesperson.
As the technical infrastructure continues an inexorable movement towards a service, sourced from without, skills to utilize technology higher up the value chain will be the only ones that pay a professional wage. Just as the word processor replaced the secretary, lightweight authoring tools and social media publishing platforms will replace Web and media specialists for all but the highest fidelity (and revenue generating) tasks.
I'm not saying the media and Web jobs will disappear, rather we will all be expected to create multimedia work in digital format and share / interact with digital tools. Today's NYTimes reporter who writes, but also podcasts and creates short videos, (think David Pogue), provides a glimpse into all of our futures.
What would you choose as the 10 competencies that every college graduate must bring to the job market?
Teachers aren't the only ones talking about a proposed bill that will change the way they are evaluated and paid.
Parents talk about it when they pick up their children from school, at extracurricular activities and at church. Some of them are unfamiliar with the particulars of the bill, while others have written legislators to ask them to vote against the bill.
Few of them support it.
"I just do not feel like that is something that is going to help our kids or our education system in Florida," said Amy Moye, who has two children at Bluewater Elementary School. "I think it's going to hurt us in the long run. I am all for removing ineffective teachers from the classroom, but I think there are other ways to do it, and this is going to remove good teachers from the classroom."
Black fourth-graders in Wisconsin are bringing up the rear in national reading tests for the nation's schoolchildren, according to a recent government report.
This news has led to another round of the usual handwringing, head-shaking and general consternation about the state of public education in cities like Milwaukee, where the largest population of black students lives.
For many, the main concern about failing black students is the assumption many won't be able to contribute productively to society because of their lack of reading skills. In that event, some fear, failing black students will eventually end up behind bars.
If that happens, some will have their education continue with people like James Patterson.
Patterson is an education specialist with the Racine Youthful Offender Correctional Facility, where inmates 15 to 24 are held for various juvenile and adult offenses. During their time at the facility, many inmates attend classes and work toward earning a high school equivalency diploma.
Milwaukee, in the strongly revised opinion of Diane Ravitch, is almost a textbook example for showing that the prediction that the tide of school choice will lift all educational boats is wrong.
"One might wonder about how much (Milwaukee Public Schools) is coming apart at the seams because of the competition," Ravitch said in a telephone conversation. "The competition was supposed to make things better."
A few years ago, Ravitch was a prominent voice for that latter sentiment. But in a way that has caused a stir in education circles nationwide, she now has come down emphatically in the opposite camp when it comes to private school vouchers, charter schools and the testing-based accountability regimen that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind education law.
Those ideas just haven't worked, she argues in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education." It is time to return to emphasizing better curriculum and instruction as the key to better success, she says, and it is time for emphasizing the needs of the mainstream of public school students.
A gathering of academicians drawn from a range of disciplines will meet on April 7, 2010, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, to examine the declining state of the male, stemming from cataclysmic changes in today's culture, environment and global economy.
At first I wondered if it was a joke. Evidently it is not.
The colloquium will be led by Lionel Tiger, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University.
It's never easy closing a school, but sometimes it needs to happen if policymakers take accountability issues seriously. District school closures, particularly outside New York City, are rare. By contrast, the unique accountability and oversight of charter schools is integral to the bargain they make, which includes the ultimate accountability of closing their doors for underperformance.
This has always been the case for charter schools, of which eight have been closed since 2004, when the initial schools first came up for their five-year charter renewal (another conversion charter was revoked in 2001).
In some instances, it's a close call whether or not to close a charter school. Like any school, charters can make mistakes and need more time to implement corrections to show better academic results. Charter school authorizers have typically granted additional time in the form of a short-term renewal of their charters. In most cases, short-term renewals were just the right approach, as these charters took the extra time to show better results to earn them a subsequent full five-year renewal.
Google Earth has opened up potential for students in classrooms around the globe with its bird's-eye view of the world. Whether you are a veteran teacher looking for new ways to teach old topics or you are a still an education student getting ready to make your debut in the classroom, these exciting ways to use Google Earth are sure to infuse your lessons with plenty of punch. Find ideas for any age student and a handful of virtual tours that will not only help you instruct your students, but might even teach you something along the way.
Elementary
Younger students can have fun with these Google Earth lessons and ideas.
"Teaching to the test" means teaching real skills.
In a week dominated by health care, President Barack Obama released a set of education proposals that break with ideals once articulated by Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy's view was that accountability is essential to educating every child. He expressed this view in 1965, while supporting an education reform initiative, saying "I do not think money in and of itself is necessarily the answer" to educational excellence. Instead, he hailed "good faith . . . effort to hold educators responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the touchstone of success."
But rather than raising standards, the Obama administration is now proposing to gut No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability framework. Enacted in 2002, NCLB requires that every school be held responsible for student achievement. Under the new proposal, up to 90% of schools can escape responsibility. Only 5% of the lowest-performing schools will be required to take action to raise poor test scores. And another 5% will be given a vague "warning" to shape up, but it is not yet clear what will happen if they don't.
Five principals at the helm of struggling San Francisco schools will be forced within the next few weeks to make a gut-wrenching choice: Fight for their jobs - a battle that could cost their schools millions of dollars - or leave.
Last week, the principals found out their sites had been placed on the state's list of schools that are persistently the lowest-performing. Statewide, 188 schools are on the list, and each one can qualify for up to $2 million annually in federal grants for the next three years. But in exchange, they must undergo a major overhaul, starting with naming a new principal.
The schools have less than five months to come up with a reform plan, apply for the funding, and put everything in place by the first day of school in the fall.
Parents with students in the lowest-performing elementary schools in Chicago could obtain vouchers to move their children into better-performing private schools under a plan that passed the Illinois Senate on Thursday.
The voucher legislation pushed by Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) passed 33-20, with three voting present, could affect thousands of children in the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools. It now moves to the House.
"By passing this bill, we'll give 22,000 kids an opportunity to have a choice on whether or not they'll continue in their failing school or go to another non-public school within the city of Chicago," Meeks said.
"Just as we came up with and passed charter schools to help children, now is an opportunity to pass this bill so we can help more children escape the dismal realities of Chicago's public schools," Meeks said.
As the buzz continues to grow about three-year bachelor's degrees, Texas Tech University is starting a three-year M.D. program.
Two Canadian institutions -- McMaster University and the University of Calgary -- offer three-year M.D. options. In the United States, the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine offers a three-year option for a D.O. degree. But the unusual Texas Tech M.D. program could represent a significant move in efforts to encourage more medical students to go into primary care and to find ways to minimize the costs of medical education. And it may raise questions about the fourth year of most medical degrees.
When President Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago's Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city's best public schools. The list--long kept confidential--was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune. We speak with the Chicago Tribune reporter who broke the story and with two Chicago organizers about Duncan and his aggressive plan to expand charter schools. [includes rush transcript]
JUAN GONZALEZ: When President Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago's Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city's best public schools. The list--long held confidential--was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune.
The paper reports that the nearly forty pages of logs show admissions requests from twenty-five aldermen, Mayor Daley's office, the state House Speaker, the state attorney general, the former White House social secretary, and a former United States senator. The log noted "AD"--initials for Arne Duncan--as the person requesting help for ten students and a co-requestor about forty times.
A spokesman for Duncan denied any wrongdoing and said Duncan used the list, not to dole out rewards to insiders, but to shield principals from political interference.
AMY GOODMAN: Duncan was chief executive of the Chicago schools, the nation's third-largest school system, from 2001 to 2009. During that time, he oversaw implementation of a program known as Renaissance 2010. The program's aim was to close sixty schools and replace them with more than 100 charter schools. Now as President Obama's Education Secretary, Duncan is overseeing a push by the administration to aggressively expand charter schools across the country.
Superintendent Frances Gallo combed the classrooms of embattled Central Falls High School. Teachers and students were gone for the day. Gallo was hunting for a particular item: an effigy of President Obama.
She hoped the rumor of its existence wasn't true.
Gallo had fired all the high school teachers just a month earlier, igniting an educational maelstrom in Rhode Island's smallest and poorest community while winning praise from the president.
The teachers union lampooned her; hate mail flooded her inbox. For weeks, she'd prayed every morning for the soul of the man who wrote: "I wish cancer on your children and their children and that you live long enough to see them die."
It was one thing to take barbs from opponents -- another thing altogether if the division was infecting classrooms. Teachers assured the superintendent that the school battle wasn't seeping into lesson plans. So, when CNN asked her about the rumor of the effigy, Gallo took it upon herself to get to the bottom of it.
Last month's wholesale firing of 74 teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island exemplified America's rising anti-teacher sentiment. Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo's decision, and Newsweek writers Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert called the firings a "notable breakthrough."
This is an excerpt from my commentary in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, "War on teachers escalates". Please click here to read the entire article. You can respond or provide feedback by clicking on the comment button below.
America's classroom culture wars broke out again this week after a vote by the Texas Board of Education to rewrite the standards for high school social studies courses in the largest single US market for textbooks.
A conservative group on the board voted through revisions that opponents said would challenge the Founding Fathers' belief in the separation of church and state, play up Republican leadership and play down negative connotations about the word "capitalist" by replacing it with talk of the "free-enterprise society".
The dispute has sparked headlines around the country about a "Texas textbook massacre". It was featured by Jon Stewart, Comedy Central late-night television satirist, under the caption "Don't mess with textbooks", a reference to the state's old "Don't mess with Texas" bumper stickers.
For the publishing industry, however, the news is both wearily familiar and a sign of how much the textbook business has changed. Battles over subjects from evolution to Civil War history have become almost annual events, not least in Texas.
I can't pinpoint the moment the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated it can't be taken seriously.
I can't pinpoint the moment when the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated that it can't be taken seriously.
It happened on Monday, March 15, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was expounding to reporters about revising the No Child Left Behind law. The new policy, he asserted, "is going to revolutionize education in our country."
No, it's not. We have been at the task of education for a long time, and one thing we know is that you cannot revolutionize it. The American system of schooling is vast, complicated, self-protective, slow to change and even slower to improve.
On these points, No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, leaves no doubt. It was inaugurated with grand promises eight years ago. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results," exulted President George W. Bush upon signing it.
HEALTH reform was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Barack Obama's first year as president. Instead it has riled Republicans, alienated leftists and exhausted everyone else. However, on March 15th Mr Obama presented Congress with a plan that ought to have a greater chance of support: reforming No Child Left Behind (NCLB), America's main federal education programme. Everyone agrees that America's public schools are floundering, and NCLB is widely considered to have failed.
NCLB, enacted in 2002, transformed education policy. It gave the federal government a crucial role in education, forcing states to set standards and hold their schools accountable for meeting them. Schools that failed to make progress would face financial sanctions. All students were to be proficient in reading and maths by 2014. George Bush championed the law; Congress supported it wholeheartedly.
ana T. Bedden, 43, will begin his new job as Irving school superintendent in July.
Bedden currently leads the Richmond County School System in Augusta, Ga. He's also worked in school districts in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The Florida native makes history as Irving's first black superintendent. He replaces Jack Singley, who led the district for 21 years.
Bedden has signed a three-year contract with the district at a base salary of $244,400.
Bedden answered questions in a telephone interview Wednesday. Here are excerpts from the discussion.
One challenge in Irving is a lack of parental involvement. How will you address this?
I try to be inclusive. Who's at the table so a community can feel they have a voice? We have to look at how we go about engagement. Are we always asking them to come to us, or do we take opportunities to go to them where they feel comfortable? It's creating access, but it's also educating.
To start off, I'm a sopho more in a rel a tively pres ti gious pri vate insti tu tion; I have an IQ over 180. I don't need to cheat. But why wouldn't I. Hell, I don't bother on tests, I get all the answers right before most kids in my class, but the sheer volume of home work I receive every night is absolutely ridiculous! Tell me, if I'm already investing 8 hours in school, 2 in sports, 2 in other ECs, how in the hell do my teachers expect me to add 6 more hours to homework?
I'm not stupid, it's not a matter of me being slow with my work, there just aren't enough hours in a day for school, rugby practice, play rehearsal, and that much home work! I'll give a run-down of what I'm supposed to do tonight:
AP U.S. History: Take (meticulous) notes on chapters 40 - 43 (the end of the text, thank [insert deity here].) Prepare for in-class essay on anything that occurred during Roosevelt's presidency. Okay, so that's not so bad, but we still have another 6 classes to cover.
Madison voters will soon be put to a test, perhaps one of the more important ones they've faced in recent years. On April 6, they'll get to decide who will fill an open seat on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education during its biggest financial crisis.
It's apt, then, that the opposing candidates -- James Howard and Tom Farley -- also be put to the test. We gave them a series of essay questions on a range of pertinent topics, from how they'd cut the school budget to challenges they've faced with their own children in Madison schools.
Their answers, lightly edited for length and style, follow.
Isthmus: What are two specific programs you would suggest cutting or policies you would suggest changing due to ongoing budget challenges, and why?
Howard: In Wisconsin, for 17 years, since 1993, we have had a school funding plan that caps a school district's annual revenue increase at 2.1%, although the actual cost to run a school district has averaged 4% during those years. Secondly, the state of Wisconsin is supposed to pay two-thirds of the cost of schools. This has never happened. So I'd suggest lifting the revenue caps and legislating complete state funding of public education.
Farley: Certainly, the state's funding formulas and current economic cycles have had a major effect on this current budget crisis. However, budget challenges will be "ongoing" until the district addresses our own systemic issues. Policies regarding talented and gifted students should be based on national best practices. We should also address length of school year and school day, which are far too limiting and lag other countries.
More importantly, what a loss of young talent for our state.
Wisconsin must do better when it comes to teaching students - especially black students - to read.
Black fourth-graders in Wisconsin just posted the lowest reading scores among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Only 9 percent of black fourth-graders in Wisconsin performed at or above the proficient level. That compares to 38 percent of white fourth-graders, itself a discouraging number.
Those percentages increase to 38 percent for blacks and 75 percent for whites when fourth-graders who can read at a "basic" level are included.
Have you noticed the ways that your work patterns have changed over the past five years? Instant messaging, tweeting, SMS, email, and chat, combined with smartphones has enabled us to be "always on." It's now easy to strike up a collaborative working relationship across organizational and geographic boundaries--by messaging, emailing, conferencing, and sending pictures and files back and forth.
Everyone is now reachable much of the time by mobile phone. The modalities of collaboration are becoming richer, and, at the same time, more ad hoc. You can get a quick answer via Twitter, SMS or instant messaging.
Having recently returned from rural Africa, I was amazed by my ability to stay in touch through my Blackberry email in the remotest locations.
Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott ordered the closure Thursday of a small school district near Houston that has been plagued by years of poor performance on state academic tests.
Kendleton ISD, a 78-student district southwest of Houston that serves elementary students through the sixth grade, is scheduled to be annexed July 1 to the neighboring Lamar Consolidated school district. Scott's order is pending approval by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kendleton received state ratings of "academically unacceptable" for the last four years, most recently due to poor performance on the writing portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Previously, the ratings were caused by poor performance in reading, math and science.
With all of this talk about Performance Management I thought it would be a good time to review the Performance of the Board Directors and the Board as a whole. I know that the Board does their own self-assessment, but I can't find it. Besides, it is impossible for anyone to hold themselves accountable. I simply have no faith in self-policing.
For accountability purposes we need some objectively measurable outcomes for the Board job.
The Board job, as I have often written, has three components.
First is to serve as the elected representatives of the public. This includes:
Students in the nation's urban school districts have improved markedly in mathematics and reading proficiency as measured both on state exams and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to a new report by the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools.
Released today, the council's ninth annual "Beating the Odds" report looks at how students in urban districts stack up on state tests compared with students in their respective states as a whole. The report from the council, a Washington-based advocacy organization that represents more than five dozen of the nation's urban school districts, also uses NAEP data to compare scores of students in big-city districts with national averages.
Urban students showed progress on both sets of data, in some cases outstripping the performance of other students in their own states and nationwide, the report says.
Tyler started this nice meme. I'm a bit skeptical about the reliability of introspection and memory, and I think this kind of thing generally reflects one's favorite current self-construction rather than real influence, so I'll try to avoid that, but I won't entirely. I guess I'll do this roughly chronologically, and leave out the Bible and the Book of Mormon...
1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer. This book made me realize that it is possible to play with words and ideas. I can't even remember much of the story now. (Is it Milo?) What I remember is the revelation that it is possible to get a thrill from manipulating ideas and the words that express them.
2. Dune by Frank Herbert. The Dune books connected with me deeply as a teenager. They appealed, I think, to the sense that people have profound untapped powers that discipline can draw out; e.g., Mentats, Bene Gesserit. Also, it appealed to the fantasy that I might have special awesome hidden powers, like Paul Atreides, and that they might just sort of come to me, as a gift of fate, without the hassle of all that discipline. I think this book is why I was slightly crushed when I turned 18 and realized that not only was I not a prodigy, but I wasn't amazingly good at anything. I sometimes still chant the Litany against Fear when I'm especially nervous or panicking about something.
Stanford is training a new type of engineer for a fast-changing world and James Plummer wants to get the word out that students needn't be a total techie to apply.
"We're looking for kids who think of the world in terms of finding solutions to big problems, like global warming, international development, the environment," Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, said in an interview. "We want to attract students ... who might have a wider world view" than those in the traditional math- and science-laden programs featured at the nation's top technical schools.
"We are not - and should not be - a technical institute," Plummer told the university's Faculty Senate last month. "If (students) come here, they can take advantage of all the other pieces of this campus, which are equally as good as the School of Engineering."
The approach has advantages when recruiting the kind of students Stanford wants, Plummer said. But it has also brought the engineering school some grief, both from the professional group that accredits it and from the employers who hire the graduates.
The Fordham Institute's expert reviewers have analyzed the draft Common Core K-12 education standards (made public on March 10) according to rigorous criteria. Their analyses lead to a grade of A- for the draft mathematics standards and B for those in Eng
Two weeks ago, American education approached a possible turning point, when the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released drafts of proposed new academic standards in English language arts and math for kindergarten through high school. Already the object of much interest--and some controversy--these are standards that, once revised and finalized, will be candidates for adoption by individual states in place of those they're now using.
For months before they were made public, the "Common Core" standards were much discussed. Between now and April 2--the end of the public comment period on this draft--there will be plenty more. That is a healthy thing, both because the more thoughtful scrutiny these drafts receive, the better the final product is apt to be, and because the only way for these standards ever to gain traction in our far- flung, highly-decentralized, and loosely-coupled public education system is if peo- ple from all walks of life--parents, educators, employers, public officials, scholars, etc.--take part in reading, commenting, and shaping the final product.
But ought they gain traction? We think so. Assuming this draft only improves in the process of revision, the Common Core represents a rare opportunity for American K-12 education to re-boot. A chance to set forth, across state lines, a clear, ambi- tious, and actionable depiction of the essential skills, competencies, and knowledge that our young people should acquire in school and possess by the time they gradu- ate. Most big modern nations--including our allies and competitors--already have something like this for their education systems. If the U.S. does it well and if--this is a big if--the huge amount of work needed to operationalize these standards is earnestly undertaken in the months and years to follow, this country could find itself with far-better educated citizens than it has today. Many more of them will be "college- and career-ready" and that means the country as a whole will be stronger, safer, and more competitive.
The nation's students are mired at a basic level of reading in fourth and eighth grades, their achievement in recent years largely stagnant, according to a federal report Wednesday that suggests a dwindling academic payoff from the landmark No Child Left Behind law.
But reading performance has climbed in D.C. elementary schools, a significant counterpoint to the national trend, even though the city's scores remain far below average.
The report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that fourth-grade reading scores stalled after the law took effect in 2002, rose modestly in 2007, then stalled again in 2009. Eighth-grade scores showed a slight uptick since 2007 -- 1 point on a scale of 500 -- but no gain over the seven-year span when President George W. Bush's program for school reform was in high gear.
The proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is prompting concern from the Wyoming teachers' union.
President Barack Obama last week announced his administration would revamp the federal education law, officially known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), during an upcoming re-authorization process. The Wyoming Education Association sees the rewrite as both promising and troubling.
"The blueprint earns a grade of incomplete," WEA President Kathryn Valido said. "There are a lot of areas that need to be re-thought. There are some pieces in it that are a step in the right direction, but the overemphasis on one or two test scores to determine the effectiveness of a teacher or a school doesn't make sense."
The latest scorecard gauging how well Wisconsin's students read compared with their classmates in other states showed little change from previous years, but the rest of the nation's fourth-graders have been catching up and Wisconsin's black students now rank behind those in every other state.
"Holding steady is not good enough," state schools Superintendent Tony Evers said about the results. "Despite increasing poverty that has a negative impact on student learning, we must do more to improve the reading achievement of all students in Wisconsin."
Amid a sea of moms and dads wearing T-shirts declaring themselves "Proud charter parents" and kids waving handmade signs that read, "I am College Bound," Daniel Clark grabbed a microphone at P.S. 92 in Harlem earlier this month and told the more than 150 people gathered for a Department of Education hearing that his son Daniel Jr. and four friends now proudly call themselves the "Geek Five."
Mr. Clark says his son was a "super slacker" before he arrived at the Democracy Prep charter school two and half years ago. But the eighth grader "now goes around telling everyone he's going to be mayor--and he believes it."
A few months back, I wrote here at "Teacher Magazine" about RTI ("Response to Intervention") and its possible implications for and adaptations for gifted students. The response to that post has been really interesting and I've enjoyed hearing from so many of you about how RTI is being adapted to included the gifted population in your schools. I wanted to take a moment today to post a couple updates for you regarding happenings since I last wrote about the topic.
First, ASCD contacted me a couple months ago wanting to interview me about RTI and Gifted Education. The transcript of the interview is now available online and includes some great new links at the bottom with relevant RTI/GT information.
Robert Bobb's vision for radically restructuring Detroit's failing education system is validated by the decision of Kansas City to shutter half of its schools.
Bobb intends to tear apart the Detroit Public Schools and rebuild the district on a foundation of small, nimble schools that are responsive to the needs of all children and fully accountable for how students perform. Everything will change, from how schools are managed to how teachers teach, and schools that don't perform will be quickly shut down.
His proposals are raising howls from the special interests that benefit from keeping things as they are, as well as from some parents who aren't willing to endure the sacrifice -- closed schools and more rigorous standards -- to make the changes possible.
Knowing pi to 30 digits is not something I regularly brag about. In fact, a teacher told me the length to which one can recite pi is inversely related to one's chances of obtaining a date. That may be true, but I thought it would at least increase my chances of receiving admission to M.I.T.
Befittingly, the university posted admission decisions on 3/14 at 1:59, the time of pi day universally enjoyed among fellow nerds.
Unfortunately, my logic proved incorrect, as I was not offered admittance into M.I.T.
Queen Elizabeth may seem ancient to school children, but did she really invent the telephone? Ten percent of British students think so, according to a survey of science knowledge. They also believe Sir Isaac Newton discovered fire, and Luke Skywalker was the first person on the moon.
It's not just the British. While on travel recently, a seatmate (probably 30) asked me where Denver and Chicago were on the map (we were flying to Denver). Another seatmate some time later mentioned that their retail business deals with many citizens who don't know the difference between horizontal and vertical...
The Obama Administration wants to revise the No Child Left Behind education law, which is understandable because the law has flaws. But it's too bad many of the proposed fixes would weaken the statute and undermine the Administration's twin goal of raising state education standards.
Some of the White House proposals make sense, such as the push for more charter schools that can focus on the specific needs of their student populations by operating outside of collective bargaining agreements. We also like using student test scores to measure an instructor's effectiveness and influence teacher pay. Both reforms are strongly opposed by the teachers unions, and Team Obama deserves credit for putting children ahead of the National Education Association.
Other parts of its proposal leave us scratching our heads. The Administration wants to junk NCLB's requirement that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014 and replace it with an equally unrealistic goal of making all kids "college ready" by 2020. By this thinking, it's impossible to teach every kid to read at grade level within the next three years, but getting all of them ready for higher education six years later is doable.
This morning the Obama Administration officially released its proposal for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka, No Child Left Behind). The proposal is a mixed bag, and still one with a gaping hole in the bottom.
Among some generally positive things, the proposal would eliminate NCLB's ridiculous annual-yearly-progress and "proficiency" requirements, which have driven states to constantly change standards and tests to avoid having to help students achieve real proficiency. It would also end many of the myriad, wasteful categorical programs that infest the ESEA, though it's a pipedream to think members of Congress will actually give up all of their pet, vote-buying programs.
On the negative side of the register, the proposed reauthorization would force all states to either sign onto national mathematics and language-arts standards, or get a state college to certify their standards as "college and career ready." It would also set a goal of all students being college and career ready by 2020. But setting a single, national standard makes no logical sense because all kids have different needs and abilities; no one curriculum will ever optimally serve but a tiny minority of students.
Issaquah and Sammamish are home to a well educated population, many of which are employed in professional and high tech occupations. Thus, it is surprising that the Issaquah School District administration is doing everything possible to place very poor math books in its schools.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, March 24) night the Issaquah School Board will vote on the administration's recommendation for the Discovering Math series in their high schools. These are very poor math texts:
(1) Found to be "unsound" by mathematicians hired the State Board of Education.
(2) Found to be inferior to a more traditional series (Holt) by pilot tests by the Bellevue School District
(3) That have been rejected by Bellevue, Lake Washington, North Shore, and Shoreline (to name only a few)
(4) Whose selection by the Seattle School District was found to be arbitrary and capricious by King County Judge Spector.
(5) That are classic, weak, inquiry or "reform" math textbooks that stress group work, student investigations, and calculator use over the acquisition of key math skills.
The pattern of an increasing number of open enrollment transfer applications continued this spring. As of March, 18, 2010 there were 765 unique resident MMSD students applying to attend non-MMSD districts and schools. The ratio of number of leaver applications to enterer applications is now 5:1.
It is important to note that not all applications result in students actually changing their district or school of enrollment. For example, for the 2009-10 school year although 402 new open enrollment students were approved by both MMSD and the non-resident districts to attend the non-resident district, only 199 actually were enrolled in the non-resident district on the third Friday September 2009 membership count date. Still, the trend has been upward in the number of students leaving the district.
America's nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation's teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores--things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. "Let's be honest," darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University's Teachers College last February. "What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?" It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation's teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)--self-actualization, following one's joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity--but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one's own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to "professionalize" teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats' pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in "Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education" that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson's course doesn't give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn't either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by "building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing." On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they're doing." I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
"Developing the subtext" turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and--most admirably--quickly checking the students' weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light "texts," both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; "What excites me about teaching?" "What concerns me about teaching?" and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: "What was it like to do this writing?"
This last question triggers a quickening volley of self-reflexive turns. After the students read aloud their predictable reflections on teaching, Professor Nelson asks: "What are you hearing?" A young man states the obvious: "Everyone seems to be reflecting on what their anxieties are." This is too straightforward an answer. Professor Nelson translates into ed-speak: "So writing gave you permission to think on paper about what's there." Ed-speak dresses up the most mundane processes in dramatic terminology--one doesn't just write, one is "given permission to think on paper"; one doesn't converse, one "negotiates meaning." Then, like a champion tennis player finishing off a set, Nelson reaches for the ultimate level of self-reflexivity and drives it home: "What was it like to listen to each other's responses?"
The self-reflection isn't over yet, however. The class next moves into small groups--along with in-class writing, the most pervasive gimmick in progressive classrooms today--to discuss a set of student-teaching guidelines. After ten minutes, Nelson interrupts the by-now lively and largely off-topic conversations, and asks: "Let's talk about how you felt in these small groups." The students are picking up ed-speak. "It shifted the comfort zone," reveals one. "It was just acceptance; I felt the vibe going through the group." Another adds: "I felt really comfortable; I had trust there." Nelson senses a "teachable moment." "Let's talk about that," she interjects. "We are building trust in this class; we are learning how to work with each other."
Now, let us note what this class was not: it was not about how to keep the attention of eight-year-olds or plan a lesson or make the Pilgrims real to first-graders. It did not, in other words, contain any material (with the exception of the student-teacher guidelines) from the outside world. Instead, it continuously spun its own subject matter out of itself. Like a relationship that consists of obsessively analyzing the relationship, the only content of the course was the course itself.
How did such navel-gazing come to be central to teacher education? It is the almost inevitable consequence of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine, born in a burst of quintessentially American anti-intellectual fervor in the wake of World War I. Educators within the federal government and at Columbia's Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students then flooding the schools take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. "Life adjustment," not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education.
The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about. Knowledge is changing too fast to be transmitted usefully to students, argued William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, the most influential American educator of the century; instead of teaching children dead facts and figures, schools should teach them "critical thinking," he wrote in 1925. What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a "lifelong learner."
Two final doctrines rounded out the indelible legacy of progressivism. First, Harold Rugg's The Child-Centered School (1928) shifted the locus of power in the classroom from the teacher to the student. In a child-centered class, the child determines what he wants to learn. Forcing children into an existing curriculum inhibits their self-actualization, Rugg argued, just as forcing them into neat rows of chairs and desks inhibits their creativity. The teacher becomes an enabler, an advisor; not, heaven forbid, the transmitter of a pre-existing body of ideas, texts, or worst of all, facts. In today's jargon, the child should "construct" his own knowledge rather than passively receive it. Bu the late 1920s, students were moving their chairs around to form groups of "active learners" pursuing their own individual interests, and, instead of a curriculum, the student-centered classroom followed just one principle: "activity leading to further activity without badness," in Kilpatrick's words. Today's educators still present these seven-decades-old practices as cutting-edge.
As E.D. Hirsch observes, the child-centered doctrines grew out of the romantic idealization of children. If the child was, in Wordsworth's words, a "Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!" then who needs teachers? But the Mighty Prophet emerged from student-centered schools ever more ignorant and incurious as the schools became more vacuous. By the 1940s and 1950s, schools were offering classes in how to put on nail polish and how to act on a date. The notion that learning should push students out of their narrow world had been lost.
The final cornerstone of progressive theory was the disdain for report cards and objective tests of knowledge. These inhibit authentic learning, Kilpatrick argued; and he carried the day, to the eternal joy of students everywhere.
The foregoing doctrines are complete bunk, but bunk that has survived virtually unchanged to the present. The notion that one can teach "metacognitive" thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge. Moreover, if you don't know in what century the atomic bomb was dropped without rushing to an encyclopedia, you cannot fully participate in society. Lastly, Kilpatrick's influential assertion that knowledge was changing too fast to be taught presupposes a blinkered definition of knowledge that excludes the great works and enterprises of the past.
The rejection of testing rests on premises as flawed as the push for "critical thinking skills." Progressives argue that if tests exist, then teachers will "teach to the test"--a bad thing, in their view. But why would "teaching to a test" that asked for, say, the causes of the [U.S.] Civil War be bad for students? Additionally, progressives complain that testing provokes rote memorization--again, a bad thing. One of the most tragically influential education professors today, Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, an advocacy group for increased teacher "professionalization," gives a telling example of what she considers a criminally bad test in her hackneyed 1997 brief for progressive education, The Right to Learn. She points disdainfully to the following question from the 1995 New York State Regents Exam in biology (required for high school graduation) as "a rote recall of isolated facts and vocabulary terms": "The tissue which conducts organic food through a vascular plant is composed of: (1) Cambium cells; (2) Xylem cells; (3) Phloem cells; (4) Epidermal cells."
Only a know-nothing could be offended by so innocent a question. It never occurs to Darling-Hammond that there may be a joy in mastering the parts of a plant or the organelles of a cell, and that such memorization constitutes learning. Moreover, when, in the progressives' view, will a student ever be held accountable for such knowledge? Does Darling-Hammond believe that a student can pursue a career in, say, molecular biology or in medicine without it? And how else will that learning be demonstrated, if not in a test? But of course such testing will produce unequal results, and that is the real target of Darling-Hammond's animus.
Once you dismiss real knowledge as the goal of education, you have to find something else to do. That's why the Anything But Knowledge doctrine leads directly to Professor Nelson's odd course. In thousands of education schools across the country, teachers are generating little moments of meaning, which they then subject to instant replay. Educators call this "constructing knowledge," a fatuous label for something that is neither construction nor knowledge but mere game-playing. Teacher educators, though, posses a primitive relationship to words. They believe that if they just label something "critical thinking" or "community-building," these activities will magically occur...
The Anything But Knowledge credo leaves education professors and their acolytes free to concentrate on more pressing matters than how to teach the facts of history or the rules of sentence construction. "Community-building" is one of their most urgent concerns. Teacher educators conceive of their classes as sites of profound political engagement, out of which the new egalitarian order will emerge. A case in point is Columbia's required class, "Teaching English in Diverse Social and Cultural Contexts," taught by Professor Barbara Tenney (a pseudonym). "I want to work at a very conscious level with you to build community in this class," Tenney tells her attentive students on the first day of the semester this spring. "You can do it consciously, and you ought to do it in your own classes." Community-building starts by making nameplates for our desks. Then we all find a partner to interview about each other's "identity." Over the course of the semester, each student will conduct two more "identity" interviews with different partners. After the interview, the inevitable self-reflexive moment arrives, when Tenney asks: "How did it work?" This is a sign that we are on our way to "constructing knowledge."...
All this artificial "community-building," however gratifying to the professors, has nothing to do with learning. Learning is ultimately a solitary activity: we have only one brain, and at some point we must exercise it in private. One could learn an immense amount about Schubert's lieder or calculus without ever knowing the name of one's seatmate. Such a view is heresy to the education establishment, determined, as Rita Kramer has noted, to eradicate any opportunity for individual accomplishment, with its sinister risk of superior achievement. For the educrats, the group is the irreducible unit of learning. Fueling this principle is the gap in achievement between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and other minorities on the other. Unwilling to adopt the discipline and teaching practices that would help reduce the gap, the education establishment tries to conceal it under group projects....
The consequences of the Anything But Knowledge credo for intellectual standards have been dire. Education professors are remarkably casual when it comes to determining whether their students actually know anything, rarely asking them, for example, what can you tell us about the American Revolution? The ed schools incorrectly presume that students have learned everything they need to know in their other or previous college courses, and that the teacher certification exam will screen out people who didn't.
Even if college education were reliably rigorous and comprehensive, education majors aren't the students most likely to profit from it. Nationally, undergraduate education majors have lower SAT and ACT scores than students in any other program of study. Only 16 percent of education majors scored in the top quartile of 1992-1993 graduates, compared with 33 percent of humanities majors. Education majors were overrepresented in the bottom quartile, at 30 percent. In New York City, many education majors have an uncertain command of English--I saw one education student at City College repeatedly write "choce" for "choice"-- and appear altogether ill at ease in a classroom. To presume anything about this population without a rigorous content exit exam is unwarranted.
The laissez-faire attitude toward student knowledge rests on "principled" grounds, as well as on see-no-evil inertia. Many education professors embrace the facile post-structuralist view that knowledge is always political. "An education program can't have content [knowledge] specifics," explains Migdalia Romero, chair of Hunter College's Department of Curriculum and Teaching, "because then you have a point of view. Once you define exactly what finite knowledge is, it becomes a perspective." The notion that culture could possess a pre-political common store of texts and idea is anathema to the modern academic.
The most powerful dodge regurgitates William Heard Kilpatrick's classic "critical thinking" scam. Asked whether a future teacher should know the date of the 1812 war, Professor Romero replied: "Teaching and learning is not about dates, facts, and figures, but about developing critical thinking." When pressed if there were not some core facts that a teacher or student should know, she valiantly held her ground. "There are two ways of looking at teaching and learning," she replied. "Either you are imparting knowledge, giving an absolute knowledge base, or teaching and learning is about dialogue, a dialogue that helps to internalize and to raise questions." Though she offered the disclaimer "of course you need both," Romero added that teachers don't have to know everything, because they can always look things up....
Disregard for language runs deep in the teacher education profession, so much so that ed school professors tolerate glaring language deficiencies in schoolchildren. Last January, Manhattan's Park West High School shut down for a day, so that its faculty could bone up on progressive pedagogy. One of the more popular staff development seminars ws "Using Journals and Learning Logs." The presenters--two Park West teachers and a representative from the New York City Writing Project, an anti-grammar initiative run by the Lehman College's Education School--proudly passed around their students' journal writing, including the following representative entry on "Matriarchys v. pratiarchys [sic]": "The different between Matriarchys and patriarchys is that when the mother is in charge of the house. sometime the children do whatever they want. But sometimes the mother can do both roll as mother and as a father too and they can do it very good." A more personal entry described how the author met her boyfriend: "He said you are so kind I said you noticed and then he hit me on my head. I made-believe I was crying and when he came naire me I slaped him right in his head and than I ran...to my grandparients home and he was right behind me. Thats when he asked did I have a boyfriend."
The ubiquitous journal-writing cult holds that such writing should go uncorrected. Fortunately, some Park West teachers bridled at the notion. "At some point, the students go into the job market, and they're not being judged 'holistically,'" protested a black teacher, responding to the invocation of the state's "holistic" model for grading writing. Another teacher bemoaned the Board of Ed's failure to provide guidance on teaching grammar. "My kids are graduating without skills," he lamented.
Such views, however, were decidedly in the minority. "Grammar is related to purpose," soothed the Lehman College representative, educrat code for the proposition that asking students to write grammatically on topics they are not personally "invested in" is unrealistic. A Park West presenter burst out with a more direct explanation for his chilling indifference to student incompetence. "I'm not going to spend my life doing error diagnosis! I'm not going to spend my weekend on that!" Correcting papers used to be part of the necessary drudgery of a teacher's job. No more, with the advent of enlightened views about "self-expression" and "writing with intentionality."
However easygoing the educational establishment is regarding future teachers' knowledge of history, literature, and science, there is one topic that it assiduously monitors: their awareness of racism. To many teacher educators, such an awareness is the most important tool a young teacher can bring to the classroom. It cannot be developed too early. Rosa, a bouncy and enthusiastic junior at Hunter College, has completed only her first semester of education courses, but already she has mastered the most important lesson: American is a racist, imperialist country, most like, say, Nazi Germany. "We are lied to by the very institutions we have come to trust," she recalls from her first-semester reading. "It's all government that's inventing these lies, such as Western heritage."
The source of Rosa's newfound wisdom, Donald Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know, is an execrable book by any measure. But given its target audience--impressionable education students--it comes close to being a crime. Widely assigned at Hunter, and in use in approximately 150 education schools nationally, it is an illiterate, barbarically ignorant Marxist-inspired screed against America. Macedo opens his first chapter, "Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies," with a quote from Hitler and quickly segues to Ronald Reagan: "While busily calling out slogans from their patriotic vocabulary memory warehouse, these same Americans dutifully vote...for Ronald Reagan...giving him a landslide victory...These same voters ascended [sic] to Bush's morally high-minded call to apply international laws against Saddam Hussein's tyranny and his invasion of Kuwait." Standing against this wave of ignorance and imperialism is a lone 12-year-old from Boston, whom Macedo celebrates for his courageous refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
What does any of this have to do with teaching? Everything, it turns out. In the 1960s, educational progressivism took on an explicitly political cast: schools were to fight institutional racism and redistribute power. Today, Columbia's Teachers College holds workshops on cultural and political "oppression," in which students role-play ways to "usurp the existing power structure," and the New York State Regents happily call teachers "the ultimate change agents." To be a change agent, one must first learn to "critique" the existing social structure. Hence, the assignment of such propaganda as Macedo's book.
But Macedo is just one of the political tracts that Hunter force-fed the innocent Rosa in her first semester. She also learned about the evils of traditional children's stories from the education radical Herbert Kohl. In Should We Burn Babar? Kohl weighs the case for and against the dearly beloved children's classic, Babar the Elephant, noting in passing that it prevented him from "questioning the patriarchy earlier." He decides--but let Rosa expound the meaning of Kohl's book: "[Babar]'s like a children's book, right? [But] there's an underlying meaning about colonialism, about like colonialism, and is it OK, it's really like it's OK, but it's like really offensive to the people." Better burn Babar now!...
Though the current diversity battle cry is "All students can learn," the educationists continually lower expectations of what they should learn. No longer are students expected to learn all their multiplication tables in the third grade, as has been traditional. But while American educators come up with various theories about fixed cognitive phases to explain why our children should go slow, other nationalities trounce us. Sometimes, we're trounced in our own backyards, causing cognitive dissonance in local teachers.
A young student at Teachers College named Susan describes incredulously a Korean-run preschool in Queens. To her horror, the school, the Holy Mountain School, violates every progressive tenet: rather than being "student-centered" and allowing each child to do whatever he chooses, the school imposes a curriculum on the children, based on the alphabet. "Each week, the children get a different letter," Susan recalls grimly. Such an approach violates "whole language" doctrine, which holds that students can't "grasp the [alphabetic] symbols without the whole word or the meaning or any context in their lives." In Susan's words, Holy Mountain's further infractions include teaching its wildly international students only in English and failing to provide an "anti-bias multicultural curriculum." The result? By the end of preschool the children learn English and are writing words. Here is the true belief in the ability of all children to learn, for it is backed up by action....
Given progressive education's dismal record, all New Yorkers should tremble at what the Regents have in store for the state. The state's teacher education establishment, led by Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, has persuaded the Regents to make its monopoly on teacher credentialing total. Starting in 2003, according to the Regents plan steaming inexorably toward adoption, all teacher candidates must pass through an education school to be admitted to a classroom. We know, alas, what will happen to them there.
This power grab will be a disaster for children. By making ed school inescapable, the Regents will drive away every last educated adult who may not be willing to sit still for its foolishness but who could bring to the classroom unusual knowledge or experience. The nation's elite private schools are full of such people, and parents eagerly proffer tens of thousands of dollars to give their children the benefit of such skill and wisdom.
Amazingly, even the Regents, among the nation's most addled education bodies, sporadically acknowledge what works in the classroom. A Task Force on Teaching paper cites some of the factors that allow other countries to wallop us routinely in international tests: a high amount of lesson content (in other words, teacher-centered, not student-centered, learning), individual tracking of students, and a coherent curriculum. The state should cling steadfastly to its momentary insight, at odds with its usual policies, and discard its foolish plan to enshrine Anything But Knowledge as its sole education dogma. Instead of permanently establishing the teacher education status quo, it should search tirelessly for alternatives and for potential teachers with a firm grasp of subject matter and basic skills. Otherwise ed school claptrap will continue to stunt the intellectual growth of the Empire State's children.
[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal]
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
A lot of the knowledge you'll glean comes in the form of facts (or "laws") on how and why certain things work. A few lessons involve behaviors, such as team work. On very rare occasions, one learns a life lesson.
But there are some things you'll never learn in the classroom. Hopefully, this will fill some of the gaps:
Ethical Challenges Occur More Frequently Than You Expect - Some engineering programs and a large number of business programs offer courses on ethics, but while these courses might expose the student to certain predicaments, they seldom help the student develop the muscle memory necessary to respond to ethical dilemmas.
As part of a Compton Adult School tutoring program, adults trying to pass the California High School Exit Examination get an assist from Palos Verdes High students.
Brandy Rice eyed the test question.
She thought of what her tutor directed her to do: Read the entire sentence. Read all the answers.
Instead of playing multiple-choice roulette with the answers as she had so many times before, she followed the directions.
Rice, 26, was one of 20 Compton Adult School students in a tutoring program for the California High School Exit Examination. The tutors weren't teachers, but teenagers from Palos Verdes High School.
The tutors carpooled from the green, laid-back beach community on a hill to Compton every Saturday for five weeks. Most had never before been to Compton and weren't used to getting up at 7 a.m. on a weekend.
Supercool School, which allows anyone to create an online learning environment for which they can charge students, says it has a $450 million dollar total addressable market opportunity in the U.S. alone, with over two million potential customers.
Supercool founder Steli Efti told me what he's trying to create is the Ning of Education, allowing anyone to build their own educational site.
"We provide a white label platform that allows everyone to create and customize an online school," he said in an email. "The platform allows for social learning and real-time virtual classrooms and can be turned into a business by monetizing content and courses online."
Thanks to all the people who have written, expressing your support and dedication to this effort, and also to those who have so generously made financial donations. We are many, many people nationwide standing in solidarity in our commitment to make effective math education accessible to all students.
I apologize to those who have looked for news recently on this blog: I've been following other math ed news, but little has been happening directly regarding our lawsuit, so I haven't sat down to give updates.
In the last 6 weeks, there has been an outpouring of support for our lawsuit and its outcome, as well a surge of determination to deflect the tide of inquiry-based math instruction that has flooded so many of our schools. I've been very moved by letters from parents who have struggled (heroically, and often poignantly, it seems to me) to support their children in developing strong math skills despite curricula that they found confusing, unintelligible, and deeply discouraging. I strongly believe that, whether the Seattle School District's appeal of Judge Spector's decision succeeds or fails, the continuing legal action will only heighten public awareness of the tragic and devastating results of the nationwide inquiry-based math experiment. The public NEEDS TO KNOW about this debacle. I think/hope that our lawsuit and its aftermath are helping this to happen.
Among piles of paperwork and shelves crowded with books on edu-topics, David Elliott's office at Coe Elementary is crammed with pictures of baseball teams he has coached, crayoned drawings, and letters with childish handwriting careening all over the page. There's a lot of stuff that he is going to need to haul out of here at the end of June when he moves to become principal at Queen Anne Elementary.
Elliott concedes that a recent shift in focus at this soon-to-open school, coupled with a lack of publicity, has a lot of parents scratching their heads about whether or not to enroll their child in this so called "Option School." And time is running out -- the Open Enrollment period will come to a close on March 31st. To that end, Elliott sat down with me earlier this week (full disclosure: my kids go to Coe Elementary) to discuss this new venture he is heading up. Elliot's answers to my questions are in italics.
At first Seattle Public Schools said that Queen Anne Elementary was going to be a Montessori school. Now it is going to have a "technology" focus. How did that change come about?
This manuscript - one of the British Library's best - loved treasures - is the original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, the pen-name of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician.
Dodgson was fond of children and became friends with Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell, the young daughters of the Dean of his college, Christ Church. One summer's day in 1862 he entertained them on a boat trip with a story of Alice's adventures in a magical world entered through a rabbit-hole. The ten-year-old Alice was so entranced that she begged him to write it down for her. It took him some time to write out the tale - in a tiny, neat hand - and complete the 37 illustrations. Alice finally received the 90-page book, dedicated to 'a dear child, in memory of a summer day', in November 1864.
The Kansas City, Mo., district is closing nearly half its campuses after 10 years of dwindling student population. It's what happens when a district loses support of the public it is meant to serve.
During the warm months, when students at Westport High School got too hot, they cooled down by moving to one of the many vacant classrooms on campus. It was one of the advantages of having 400 students assigned to a school that could hold 1,200.
The downside became apparent last week, though, when the Kansas City school board voted to close Westport and 25 other schools -- nearly half of the district's campuses.
Big-city districts shutter schools all the time. Cities such as Denver and Portland, Ore., have seen childless young families repopulate their urban cores and have adjusted accordingly.
But what is happening in Kansas City is different in scale than anywhere else in the country. It's an extreme example of what happens when a school system loses the support of the public it's meant to serve.
Last week's column, full of practical suggestions on how to limit cheating, did not seem controversial to me. Many teachers sent their own ideas. Many recommended small adjustments, such as having the questions in different order for different students, to hinder copying.
So I was surprised to hear from Erich Martel, an Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher at Wilson High School in the District, that his principal, Peter Cahall, was critical of him doing that.
Martel's classroom, 18 by 25 feet, feels like shoebox to him. Some days he squeezes in 30 students, plus himself. That is 15 square feet per student, which Martel has been told is well below the district standard of 25 square feet. The cramped conditions led to a disagreement when Cahall assessed Martel's work under the school district's IMPACT teacher evaluation system.
The data, as Ravitch says, disappoints on other fronts, too--not least in failing to confirm high hopes for charter schools, whose freedom from union rules was supposed to make them success stories. To the shock of many (including Ravitch), they haven't been. And this isn't just according to researchers sympathetic to labor. A 2003 national study by the Department of Education (under George W. Bush) found that charter schools performed, on average, no better than traditional public schools. (The study was initially suppressed because it hadn't reached the desired conclusions.) Another study by two Stanford economists, financed by the Walton Family and Eli and Edythe Broad foundations (staunch charter supporters), involved an enormous sample, 70 percent of all charter students. It found that an astonishing 83 percent of charter schools were either no better or actually worse than traditional public schools serving similar populations. Indeed, the authors concluded that bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1.
Obviously, some high-visibility success stories exist, such as the chain run by the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, which I've previously discussed here. But these are the decided exceptions, not the rule. And there's no evidence that a majority of eligible families are taking advantage of charters, good or bad. "While advocates of choice"--again, Ravitch included--"were certain that most families wanted only the chance to escape their neighborhood school, the first five years of NCLB demonstrated the opposite," she writes. In California, for example, less than 1 percent of students in failing schools actually sought a transfer. In Colorado, less than 2 percent did. If all this seems a little counterintuitive, Ravitch would be the first to agree. That's why she supported charters in the first place. But the evidence in their favor, she insists, simply hasn't materialized.
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released today, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success.
The report, "Why So Few?" supported by the National Science Foundation, examined decades of research to gather recommendations for drawing more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields.
"We scanned the literature for research with immediate applicability," said Catherine Hill, the university women's research director and lead author of the report. "We found a lot of small things can make a difference, like a course in spatial skills for women going into engineering, or teaching children that math ability is not fixed, but grows with effort."
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town are "above average." Well, in the School of Education they're all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW's schools. Scrolling through the Registrar's online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C's and only the really high performers score A's.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody's a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that's the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A's and a handful of A/B's. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
A host of questions are prompted by the appearance of such brilliance. Can all these apprentice teachers really be that smart? Is there no difference in their abilities? Why do the grades of education majors far outstrip the grades of students in the physical sciences and mathematics? (Take a look at the chart below.)
Here's how my formal education began: On a September morning in 1957, my mother and I walked the block and a half to 53rd Street School on Milwaukee's northwest side. We went to the school office, she filled out some forms, said goodbye and "see you at lunch." Here was another Kozak for the Milwaukee Public Schools to educate.
There was, of course, no choice, which made the entire process much simpler. Since we weren't Catholic, the parochial alternative wasn't an option, and if there were any private schools in Milwaukee at the time (there was one), I'm sure my parents never considered it.
There was good reason for my parents' carefree attitude. The public school system in Milwaukee circa 1957 was first-rate. The teachers were committed professionals. The curriculum had not changed appreciably since my parents' day. They were satisfied with their experience and found the public schools perfectly adequate for their children.
In Outliers [2008], Malcolm Gladwell writes [p. 149-159] that: "...three things--autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward--are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying...Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful." (emphasis in the original)
One of the perennial complaints of students in our schools is that they will never make use of what they are learning, and as for the work they are asked to do, they often say: "Why do we have to learn/do/put up with this?" In short, they often see the homework/schoolwork they are given to do as not very fulfilling or meaningful.
In this article I will argue that reading good history books and writing serious history research papers provide the sort of work which students do find meaningful, worth doing, and not as hard to imagine as having some future use.
In a June 3, 1990 column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote:
"...It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we've known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process--or better yet become involved in it--productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits--history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned--it's no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review's authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it's time for us to take it seriously."
His point has value twenty years later. Even the current CCSSO National Standards recommend merely snippets of readings, called "informational texts," and "literacy skills" for our students, which, if that is all they get, will likely bore them and disengage them for the reasons that Mr. Shanker pointed out.
Students who read "little bits" of history books have nothing like the engagement and interest that comes from reading the whole book, just as students who "find the main idea" and write little "personal essays," or five-paragraph essays, or short "college" essays, will have nothing comparable to the satisfaction that comes from working on and completing a serious history research paper.
Barbara McClay, a homescholar from Tennessee, while she was in high school, wrote a paper on the "Winter War" between Finland and the Soviet Union. In an interview she was asked why she chose that topic:
"I've been interested in Finland for four years or so, and I had read a book (William Trotter's A Frozen Hell) that interested me greatly on the Winter War; after reading the book, I often asked people if they had ever heard of the Winter War. To my surprise, not only had few of them heard about it, but their whole impression of Finnish-Soviet relations was almost completely different from the one I had received from the book. So there was a sense of indignation alongside my interest in Finland in general and the Winter War in particular: here was this truly magnificent story, and no one cared about it. Or knew about it, at least.
"And it is a magnificent story, whether anyone cares about it or not; it's the stuff legends are made of, really, even down to the fact that Finland lost. And a sad one, too, both for Finland and for the Soviet soldiers destroyed by Soviet incompetence. And there's so much my paper couldn't even begin to go into; the whole political angle, for instance, which is very interesting, but not really what I wanted to write about. But the story as a whole, with all of its heroes and villains and absurdities--it's amazing. Even if it were as famous as Thermopylae, and not as relatively obscure an event as it is, it would still be worth writing about.
"So what interested me, really, was the drama, the pathos, the heroism, all from this little ignored country in Northern Europe. What keeps a country fighting against an enemy it has no hope of defeating? What makes us instantly feel a connection with it?"
Perhaps this will give a feeling for the degree of engagement a young student can find in reading a good nonfiction history book and writing a serious [8,500-word, plus endnotes and bibliography] history research paper. [The Concord Review, 17/3 Spring 2007]
Now, before I get a lot of messages informing me that our American public high school students, even Seniors, are incapable of reading nonfiction books and writing 8,500 words on any topic, allow me to suggest that, if true, it may be because we need to put in place our "Page Per Year Plan," which would give students practice, every year in school, in writing about something other than themselves. Thus, a first grader could assemble a one-page paper with one source, a fifth grader a five-page paper with five sources, a ninth grade student a nine-page with nine sources, and so on, and in that way, each and every Senior in our high schools could write a twelve-page paper [or better] with twelve sources [or better] about some historical topic.
By the time that Senior finished that paper, she/he would probably know more about that topic than anyone else in the building, and that would indeed be a source of engagement and satisfaction, in addition to providing great "readiness" for college and career writing tasks.
As one of our authors wrote:
...Yet of all my assignments in high school, none has been so academically and intellectually rewarding as my research papers for history. As young mathematicians and scientists, we cannot hope to comprehend any material that approaches the cutting edge. As young literary scholars, we know that our interpretations will almost never be original. But as young historians, we see a scope of inquiry so vast that somewhere, we must be able to find an idea all our own.
In writing this paper, I read almanacs until my head hurt. I read journal articles and books. I thought and debated and analyzed my notes. And finally, I had a synthesis that I could call my own. That experience--extracting a polished, original work from a heap of history--is one without which no student should leave high school."
This paper [5,500 words with endnotes and bibliography; Daniel Winik, The Concord Review, 12/4 Summer 2002] seems to have allowed this student to take a break from the boredom and disengagement which comes to so many whose school work is broken up into little bits and pieces and "informational texts" rather than actual books and term papers.
If I were made the U.S. Reading and Writing Czar at the Department of Education, I would ask students to read one complete history book [i.e. "cover-to-cover" as it was called back in the day] each year, too. When Jay Mathews of The Washington Post recently called for nonfiction book ideas for high school students, I suggested David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback, for Freshmen, David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing for Sophomores, James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom for Juniors, and David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas for all Seniors. Naturally there could be big fights over titles even if we decided to have our high schools students read nonfiction books, but it would be tragic if the result was that they continue to read none of them. Remember the high school English teacher in New York state who insisted that her students read a nonfiction book chosen from the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and a big group of her female students chose The Autobiography of Paris Hilton...
When I was teaching United States History to Sophomores at the public high school in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1980s, I used to assign a 5-7-page paper (at the time I did not know what high schools students could actually accomplish, if they were allowed to work hard) on the Presidents. My reasoning was that every President has just about every problem of the day arrive on his desk, and a paper on a President would be a way of learning about the history of that day. Students drew names, and one boy was lucky enough to draw John F. Kennedy, a real coup. He was quite bright, so, on a whim, I gave him my copy of Arthur Schleshinger, Jr.'s A Thousand Days. He looked at it, and said, "I can't read this." But, he took it with him and wrote a very good paper and gave the book back to me. Several years later, when he was a Junior at Yale, he wrote to thank me. He said he was very glad I had made him read that first complete history book, because it helped his confidence, etc. Now, I didn't make him read it, he made himself read it. I would never have known if he read it or not. I didn't ask him.
But it made me think about the possibility of assigning complete history books to our high school students.
After I began The Concord Review in 1987, I had occasion to write an article now and then, for Education Week and others, in which I argued for the value of having high school students read complete nonfiction books and write real history research papers, both for the intrinsic value of such efforts and for their contribution to the student's preparation for "college and career."
Then, in 2004, The National Endowment for the Arts spent $300,000 on a survey of the reading of fiction by Americans, including young Americans. They concluded that it was declining, but it made me wonder if anyone would fund a much smaller study of the reading of nonfiction by students in our high schools, and I wrote a Commentary in Education Week ["Bibliophobia" October 4, 2006] asking about that.
No funding was forthcoming and still no one seems to know (or care much) whether our students typically leave with their high school diploma in hand but never having read a single complete history book. We don't know how many of our students have never had the chance to make themselves read such a book, so that when they get to college they can be glad they had that preparation, like my old student.
As E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham have pointed out so often, it takes knowledge to enrich understanding and the less knowledge a student has the more difficult it is for her/him to understand what she/he is reading in school. Complete history books are a great source of knowledge, of course, and they naturally provide more background to help our students understand more and more difficult reading material as they are asked to become "college and career ready."
Reading a complete history book is a challenge for a student who has never read one before, just as writing a history research paper is a challenge to a student who has never been asked to do one, but we might consider why we put off such challenges until students find themselves (more than one million a year now, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report) pushed into remedial courses when they arrive at college.
It may be argued that not every student will respond to such an academic challenge, and of course no student will if never given the challenge, but I have found several thousand high school students, from 44 states and 36 other countries, who did:
"Before, I had never been much of a history student, and I did not have much more than a passing interest for the subject. However, as I began writing the paper, the myriad of facts, the entanglement of human relations, and the general excitement of the subject fired my imagination and my mind. Knowing that to submit to The Concord Review, I would have to work towards an extremely high standard, I tried to channel my newly found interest into the paper. I deliberately chose a more fiery, contentious, and generally more engaging style of writing than I was normally used to, so that my paper would better suit my thesis. The draft, however, lacked proper flow and consistency, and so when I wrote the final copy, I restructured the entire paper, reordering the points, writing an entirely new introduction, refining the conclusion, and doing more research to cover areas of the paper that seemed lacking. I replaced almost half of the content with new writing, and managed to focus the thesis into a more sustained, more forceful argument. You received that final result, which was far better than the draft had been.
In the end, working on that history paper, ["Political Machines," Erich Suh, The Concord Review, 12/4, Summer 2002, 5,800 words] inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly; instead I would have altered my paper only slightly, enough to make the final paper a low 'A', but nothing very great. Your Concord Review set forth a goal towards which I toiled, and it was a very fulfilling, life-changing experience."
If this is such a great idea, and does so much good for students' engagement and academic preparation, why don't we do it? When I was teaching--again, back in the day 26 years ago--I noticed in one classroom a set of Profiles in Courage, and I asked my colleagues about them. They said they had bought the set and handed them out, but the students never read them, so they stopped handing them out.
This is a reminder of the death of the book report. If we do not require our students to read real books and write about them (with consequences for a failure to do so), they will not do that reading and writing, and, as a result, their learning will be diminished, their historical knowledge will be a topic for jokes, and they will not be able to write well enough either to handle college work or hold down a demanding new job.
As teachers and edupundits surrender on those requirements, students suffer. There is a saying outside the training facility for United States Marine Corps drill instructors, which says, in effect, "I will train my recruits with such diligence that if they are killed in combat, it will not be because I failed to prepare them."
I do realize that college and good jobs are not combat (of course there are now many combat jobs too) but they do provide challenges for which too many of our high school graduates are clearly not ready.
Some teachers complain, with good reason, that they don't have the time to monitor students as they read books, write book reports and work on serious history research papers, and that is why they can't ask students to do those essential (and meaningful) tasks. Even after they realize that the great bulk of the time spent on complete nonfiction books and good long term papers is the student's time, they still have a point about the demands on their time.
Many (with five classes) now do not have the time to guide such work and to assess it carefully for all their students, but I would ask them (and their administrators) to look at the time put aside each week at their high school for tackling and blocking practice in football or layup drills in basketball or for band rehearsal, etc., etc., and I suggest that perhaps reading books and writing serious term papers are worth some extra time as well, and that the administrators of the system, if they have an interest in the competence of our students in reading and writing, should consider making teacher time available during the school day, week, and year, for work on these tasks, which have to be almost as essential as blocking and tackling for our students' futures.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.
Deep down, we know the rules of writing. Or the rule, rather, which is that there are no rules. That's it. That's the takeaway point from any collection of advice, any Paris Review interview and any book on writing, whether it be Stephen King's "On Writing" or Joyce Carol Oates's "The Faith of a Writer" (both excellent, by the way, but only as useful as a reader chooses to make them).
Despite this fact, writers continue to write about writing and readers continue to read them. In honour of Elmore Leonard's contribution to the genre, "Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing", the Guardian recently compiled a massive list of writing rules from Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, Colm Tóibín and many other authors generous enough to add their voices to the chorus.
Among the most common bits of advice: write every day, rewrite often, read your work out loud, read a lot of books and don't write for posterity. Standards aside, the advice generally breaks down into three categories: the practical, the idiosyncratic and the contradictory. From Margaret Atwood we learn to use pencils on airplanes because pens leak. From Elmore Leonard we learn that adverbs stink, prologues are annoying and the weather is boring. Jonathan Franzen advises us to write in the third person, usually.
It is easy to get drawn into the union-management aspects of public education and forget that the schools are there for the kids. What the kids need are stars in the classroom: great teachers.
With that in mind, the public should support the effort by Hartford school leaders to change from a system of district-wide teacher seniority to one of school-based seniority.
The city's Board of Education voted Tuesday to ask the State Board of Education to step in and change this contractual guarantee. The state board has the authority to intervene in low-achieving schools to alter a union contract, but to date has never done so.
Under the current rules, the least experienced teachers are the first to be laid off and can be "bumped" by more experienced teachers from any school in the district. This can result in a disruptive shuffle of teachers among various schools.
Supporters of the proposed change say this endangers the quality of specialty schools, where particular themes or methods require teachers to have special qualifications or training.
The D.C. Public charter school board (Pcsb) has produced a detailed annual performance report for each school under its oversight since 1999. Each school report provides a school profile, including enrollment, attendance and discipline, demographic, graduation and college acceptance data; a review of the Pcsb's evaluations of each school's academic, financial, compliance and governance performance, as well as board actions; test data, and each school's self- described unique accomplishments. the reports are intended to be a resource for consumer decision-making and public accountability. the notes on page 5 and 6 explain each section of the school performance report and the source of the data, as appropriate.
the 2009 school Performance reports include data collected during the 2008-2009 school year. as the sole chartering authority in Washington, D.C., the D.C. Public charter school board remains committed to its role as a partner in the city-wide effort to raise student academic achievement and improve public education in D.c., by providing families with quality public charter school options.
Before the debate:
24% FOR 43% AGAINST 33% UNDECIDED
After the debate:
25% FOR 68% AGAINST 7% UNDECIDED
Robert Rozenkranz: Thank you all very much for coming. It's my pleasure to welcome you. My job in these evenings is to frame the debate. And we thought this one would be interesting because it seems like unions would be acting in their own self interest and in the interest of their members. In the context of public education, this might mean fighting to have the highest number of dues paying members at the highest possible levels of pay and benefits. With the greatest possible jobs security. It implies resistance to technological innovation, to charter schools, to measuring and rewarding merit and to dismissals for almost any reason at all. Qualifications, defined as degrees from teacher's colleges, trump subject matter expertise. Seniority trumps classroom performance. Individual teachers, perhaps the overwhelming majority of them do care about their students but the union's job is to advocate for teachers, not for education. But is that a reason to blame teachers unions for failing schools? The right way to think about this is to hold all other variables constant. Failing schools are often in failing neighborhoods where crime and drugs are common and two parent families are rare. Children may not be taught at home to restrain their impulses or to work now for rewards in the future, or the value and importance of education. Even the most able students might find it hard to progress in classrooms dominated by students of lesser ability who may be disinterested at best and disruptive at worse. In these difficult conditions, maybe teachers know better than remote administrators what their students need and the unions give them an effective voice. Maybe unions do have their own agenda. But is that really the problem? Is there strong statistical evidence that incentive pay improves classroom performance? Or is that charter schools produce better results? Or that strong unions spell weak educational outcomes, holding everything else constant? That it seems to us is the correct way to frame tonight's debate, why we expect it will give you ample reason to think twice.
I guess we can agree: the world is changing at an increasingly faster pace, and the volume of information is growing at an explosive rate.
Change is the name of the game these days and who lives and works off the Internet knows how true this indeed is. But... how are we preparing and equipping our younger generations to live and to cope with such fast-paced scenario-changing realities and with the vast amount of information we drink-in and get exposed to without any crap-filtering skills?
Excerpted from my guest night at Teemu Arina's Dicole OZ in Helsinski, here are some of my strong, uncensored thoughts about school and academic education in general.
In this four-point recipe I state what I think are the some of the key new attitudes we need to consider taking if we want to truly help some of your younger generations move to a higher level of intellectual and pragmatical acumen, beyond the one that most get from our present academic system.
President Obama is proposing a massive rewrite of the No Child Left Behind policy. But many teachers are skeptical. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says the president's plan gives teachers full responsibility but no authority.
In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka) ruled that separate was not equal. The ruling allowed for the integration of students from all races and socio-economic status to receive an equal education under the same roof. But now, America's public school system is in shambles, and the poorest kids are the only ones underneath the rubble. (For example, Chicago's public schools have dwindled from 75,000 students to 25,000 students, thanks to charter schools and private schools.)
No Child Left Behind was a complete failure.
Now, it is the duty of the administration to fix America's destroyed public education system.
Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
Kids in China already attend school 41 days a year more than students in the U.S. Now, schools across the country are cutting back to four-day weeks. Chester E. Finn Jr. on how to build a smarter education system.
"He who labors diligently need never despair, for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor." --Menander
How many days a year did the future Alexander the Great study with Aristotle? Did Socrates teach Plato on Saturdays as well as weekdays? During summer's heat and winter's chill?
Though such details remain shrouded in mystery, historians have unearthed some information about education in ancient times. Spartans famously put their children through a rigorous public education system, although the focus was on military training rather than reading and writing. Students in Mesopotamia attended their schools from sunrise to sunset.
In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans--and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries--and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.
How has the United States responded to this global challenge in education? We continue to lower our standards. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a major step in education reform, it has inadvertently created a system where states continue to lower the expectations bar. In 2007, only 18% of Mississippi students scored proficient in the standardized national reading test. However, 88% scored proficient in the standardized state reading test. While Mississippi can be considered an extreme, a Department of Education report acknowledged, "state-defined proficiency standards are often far lower than proficiency standards on the NAEP." While under this system test scores have improved slightly, our student's education level has remained constant. As states are under enormous pressure to show improvements in test scores, standards are lowered. While politicians avoid future trouble, our children inherit it.
Even our once seemingly monopoly on higher education has eroded in recent years. While ranking 2nd in the world in older adults with a college diploma, the U.S. has slipped to 8th in the world in young adults with a college diploma. As other countries continue to provide numerous incentives for their students to attend universities, the United States seems content in allowing higher education to climb ever higher out of the reach of ordinary Americans. Furthermore, China and other Asian countries have created a higher education system that is far more useful in equipping its students with the needs to survive in a 21st century economy. More than 50 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in China are in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, compared to just 16 percent in the United States. While we are focused on creating litigators and lawyers, China and our competitors are creating the entrepreneurs and engineers of the future.
Even before the current recession hit, the competitive challenges of a global economy were putting ever more pressure on the economic development efforts mounted by state governments across the country.
States that once could dangle their low costs of doing business to lure industry from other states have suddenly faced competition from even lower-cost places such as China and Southeast Asia. Many have been scrambling to catch up with ever-growing packages of tax incentives and grants - so much so that critics have fretted about "an economic war between the states," as the organization Good Jobs Now calls it.
But while states scramble, the ground has shifted beneath them. The economic development contest is changing.
Traditional economic development efforts have focused on leveraging money, in one guise or another. Some states had lower costs and lower taxes to brag about - money. Some emphasized helping new industry by improving roads and water and sewers - money. Some tried to make up for high costs by offering various grants and tax breaks - in other words, money.
ccountability is a mantra of the charter school movement. Students sign pledges at some schools to do their homework, and teachers owe their jobs to students' gains on tests.
Attrition rates have been criticized, but Mr. Jean-Baptiste said, "We attract more than the amount of students we lose."
But as New York State moves to shut down an 11-year-old charter school in Albany, whose test scores it acknowledges beat the city's public schools last year, it is apparent that holding schools themselves accountable is not always so easy, or bloodless, as numbers on a page.
The principal, teachers and families of the New Covenant school have mounted a furious defense, citing rising achievement as well as their fears for the loss of a safe harbor from chaotic homes and streets, where teachers deliver homework to parents who are in jail to keep them involved, and the dean of students chases gang members from a nearby park.
AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation's schools.
Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down the separation of church and state and even eliminating Thomas Jefferson -- the author of that malignant phrase, "wall of separation" -- from a list of revolutionary writers.
Each of these seemingly unrelated developments is part of a crazy quilt created by one of America's most cherished and unexamined traditions: local and state control of public education. Schooling had been naturally decentralized in the Colonial era -- with Puritan New England having a huge head start on the other colonies by the late 1600s -- and, in deference to the de facto system of community control already in place, the Constitution made no mention of education. No one in either party today has the courage to say it, but what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy.
I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice of killing D.C. vouchers stand.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked me to become one of the founding members of the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, African-Americans drank at separate water fountains and our schools were segregated. A decade later, when people came together to march against these injustices, the idea that a black man could ever be elected president of the United States was still something for dreamers. My experience with that great movement gives me a particular appreciation for the historic importance of the presidency of Barack Obama--and the new dreams that his example will inspire in our young.
If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country's race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the "civil rights issue of our generation." Millions of our children--disproportionately poor and minority--remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.
Pretty good free online K-12 learning options exist in most states, so why aren't more students learning online? There are more than 2 million students learning online and that's growing by more than 30% annually, but there are five significant barriers to more rapid adoption:
Babysitting: Don't underestimate the custodial aspect of school--it's nice to have a place to send the kids every day. Homeschooling continues to grow aided by online learning but will never exceed 10% because most folks don't want their kids around all day every day or just can't afford to stay home.
Money & Jobs: At the request of employee groups, the Louisiana state board recently rejected three high quality virtual charter applications. Districts don't want to lose enrollment revenue and unions don't want to lose jobs.
Tradition: Layers of policies stand in the way of learning online starting with seat time requirements--butts in seats for 180 hours with a locally certificated teacher plowing through an adopted textbook.
There are likely many opportunities to offer online learning options for our students, particularly in tight budget times.
On my blog, washingtonpost.com/class-struggle, I gush over my many genius ideas, worthy of the Nobel Prize for education writing if there was one. Here is a sample from last month:
"Why not take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a new essay exam that measures analysis and critical thinking, and apply it to high schools? Some colleges give it to all of their freshmen, and then again to that class when they are seniors, and see how much value their professors at that college have added. We could do the same for high schools, with maybe a somewhat less strenuous version."
Readers usually ignore these eruptions of ego. But after I posted that idea, a young man named Chris Jackson e-mailed me that his organization had thought of it four years ago and had it up and running. Very cheeky, I thought, but also intriguing. I never thought anyone would try such a daring concept. If your high school's seniors didn't score much better than your freshmen, what would you do? What schools would have the courage to put themselves to that test or, even worse, quantify the level of their failure, as the program does?
Rhode Island's Central Falls High School faces a world of problems. Not quite half of the freshmen class of 2005 went on to graduate last year. A little more than half of the juniors passed a state reading test. In math, just 7 percent passed.
Superintendent Frances Gallo asked her teachers to step up, to help her turn around their failing school. She asked them to teach 25 minutes more each day. She asked them to tutor the kids, to eat lunch once a week with the kids, to spend more time learning how to teach effectively.
She also offered to increase their pay. Teachers at Central Falls do well: $72,000 to $78,000 a year. Gallo offered them a $3,400 bump.
When the bare-knuckled brawl over health-care reform finally wraps up, and the Obama Administration pivots to less divisive topics, education reform may be one of the few issues capable of drawing bipartisan support. The Obama Administration's proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) could resonate with Republicans, many of whom have been disappointed with the results of George W. Bush's signature education initiative. Obama's blueprint, which was sent to Congress March 15, sets forth an ambitious national standard --that by 2020, all students graduate high school ready for college or a career -- but leaves the specifics on how to achieve this goal up to state and local authorities. "Yes, we set a high bar," President Obama said in his weekly radio address. "But we also provide educators the flexibility to reach it."
With more than 1 million high school students dropping out every year and the U.S. lagging behind many of its competitors on achievement benchmarks, no one can argue with the need to better prepare students for college and beyond. NCLB, which earned broad bipartisan majorities when the legislation passed in 2002, has drawn praise for shining a light on achievement gaps by forcing the nation's 99,000 public schools to disaggregate student data. But the legislation's emphasis on accountability and standardized testing has had some unintended results. By requiring schools to demonstrate adequate yearly progress -- toward a goal of 100% proficiency in reading and math by 2014 -- Bush's landmark bill has led many districts to narrow their curricula and some states to lower their standards in order to meet annual targets.
Class divisions fuel furor over a plan to close college-prep academy in the eastern Sierra Nevada. 'The situation has unleashed pandemonium,' says the district's superintendent.
When Eastern Sierra Unified School District Supt. Don Clark stared down a projected budget deficit, he did what school administrators across the nation have had to do: consider laying off teachers and closing campuses.
But that decision, in a rural district sprawled along U.S. 395 between the snowy Sierra and the deserts of Nevada, has exposed deep resentments between parents of students in traditional high schools and those with teenagers in a college-prep academy designed for high achievers.
The trouble started a week ago when Clark announced that the district, facing a budget shortfall of $1.8 million, was considering laying off more than a dozen teachers and closing the 15-year-old Eastern Sierra Academy, among other measures.
It has been, for some time now, the District's contention that they are working to "make every school a quality school". This is a significant goal of the Strategic Plan, "Excellence for All", and a pre-requisite for the New Student Assignment Plan.
So one might wonder how the District defines a "quality school". In fact, many more than one might wonder about it. The entire freakin' city might wonder about it. Well, they can just go on wondering because the District doesn't have an answer.
That's right. They have been ostensibly working for two years now towards a goal that they have not defined. Although the District defines accountability as having objectively measurable goals and insists that everyone is accountable, there are no objectively measurable goals tied to the definition of a "quality school". This would appear to be an intentional effort to evade accountability. Not only are there no objectively measurable goals, there are no metrics, no benchmarks, and no assessments. Nice, eh?
Congratulations to the panel of teachers, administrators and parents who put together groundbreaking proposals on smarter ways to hire, pay, evaluate and fire teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Improbable as it is that many of the proposals will be adopted by the school board, which is heavily influenced by the teachers union, they have opened a conversation sought by parents and school reformers, and that conversation is unlikely to be silenced until major changes are made.
We have long supported some of these recommendations: Not allowing seniority to rule which teachers are laid off. Expanding the probationary period before teachers get tenure. Including test scores and parent and student opinions in teacher evaluations. Paying more for excellent teachers who are willing to work in low-performing schools.
Those who wonder why California was excluded from the first round of federal Race to the Top grants would do well to examine their own commentary for clues. It is typical of editorials and other articles on this topic to speak in general terms -- to throw out noble-sounding phrases that, in the end, don't offer specifics. The Times' March 4 editorial, "Another setback for California schools," reflects this kind of commentary.
Take, for example, The Times' assertion that "district administrators, not union contracts," should determine teacher assignments in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Really? If you were a teacher, would you completely trust administrators to always make good assignment decisions? The same people who inspired the term "dance of the lemons" as incompetent (and sometimes criminal) administrators were transferred from one school to another by their downtown buddies? Would you want to be forced to an overcrowded school terrorized by crime and violence, hobbled by a lack of supplies and a crumbling infrastructure, in a neighborhood beset by a multitude of social ills, with only a district administrator to count on for support and security? Most administrators are talented, committed and fair, but too many are none of those things.
What surprised me most about a new study on cheating at MIT--which concludes that copying homework can lead to lower grades--was that students cheat at the prestigious school, which only admits brainy kids who don't need to.
But of course, students cheat everywhere, even at the best schools; witness the recent grade-changing scandal at high-achieving Churchill High School, and, for that matter, the computer hacking scandal at high-achieving Whitman High School last year. Both are in Montgomery County and both are among the best secondary schools in the country.
In fact, according to the book, "Cheating in School: What we Know and What We Can Do," by Stephen F. David, Patrick F. Drinan and Tricia Bertram Gallant, there are students cheating everywhere--from elementary to graduate school, rich and poor schools, public and private.
The authors define cheating as "acts committed by students that deceive, mislead or fool the teacher into thinking that the academic work submitted by the student was a student's own work."
In a week dominated by health care, President Barack Obama released a set of education proposals that break with ideals once articulated by Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy's view was that accountability is essential to educating every child. He expressed this view in 1965, while supporting an education reform initiative, saying "I do not think money in and of itself is necessarily the answer" to educational excellence. Instead, he hailed "good faith . . . effort to hold educators responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the touchstone of success."
But rather than raising standards, the Obama administration is now proposing to gut No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability framework. Enacted in 2002, NCLB requires that every school be held responsible for student achievement. Under the new proposal, up to 90% of schools can escape responsibility. Only 5% of the lowest-performing schools will be required to take action to raise poor test scores. And another 5% will be given a vague "warning" to shape up, but it is not yet clear what will happen if they don't.
Students: Take a look at some of the changes to the Texas curriculum, and then at a passage from your own American history or government textbook. Considering word choice and the inclusion and treatment of leaders and movements, what values and ideas do you think it conveys? What connotations do the terms used have for you? Tell us what ideas you think are expressed in how your textbook is written.
Adults, please note: Though, of course, anyone can be a "student" at any age, we ask that adults respect the intent of the Student Opinion question and refrain from posting here. There are many other places on the NYTimes.com site for adults to post, while this is the only place that explicitly invites the voices of young people.
Math textbooks are an area ripe for this type of inquiry.
THE good news is that more Texans are paying attention to social-studies lessons than ever before. The bad news is that they suddenly have cause. On March 12th, the state board of education voted for a series of changes to the state's history and social-sciences curricula. The changes look small enough--a word here and there, a new name included, maybe a different way of phrasing an issue. But the overall effect, if the changes are approved in May, will to be to yank public education to the right.
The board alluded to the controversial amendments in a polite press release: "All those who died at the Alamo will be discussed in seventh grade Texas history classes. Hip hop will not be part of the official curriculum standards." The most dramatic change is that Thomas Jefferson has gotten the boot. The conservatives on the board deemed him to be a suspiciously secular figure. The new guidelines would pay more fond attention to their favoured presidents, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association are in. So are the Black Panthers.
Some of the oddest changes concern economics. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek will join Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx. And the board decided that references to "capitalism" and the "free market" should be changed to say "free enterprise", because capitalism has a bad reputation at the moment. That decision is almost inexplicable. Capitalism has been through a rough patch, but surely the term itself is no more inflammatory than free enterprise.
an Madison afford a new School Board member who requires time to understand the issues, study the research, or develop a good relationship with board members and union leaders? These are all certainly desirable objectives, and over time it is important that they occur. Yet these are exceptional times for Madison and its public school system.
The federal government has demanded that educational leaders in every community must start demonstrating a willingness to challenge the status quo, seek innovative solutions, and begin executing change management efforts. Only those school districts that show a willingness to radically alter their approaches to education, in order to achieve real results, will be supported and funded. The time has come to bring that level of leadership to the Madison School Board.
Management of the Madison School District cannot continue operating in its present form, or under its current philosophies. We have called for additional funding and referendums to increase taxes, and this has not produced the promised results. Clearly, it is not lack of money that hinders our education system; it is the system itself. That needs to change.
James Howard: We must make cuts, but not in classroom
As parents, teachers, taxpayers and voters evaluate the financial woes our Madison public schools face, there are several key points to keep in mind.
First, the taxpayers in our district have been very generous by passing several referendums that have helped close the gap between what schools can spend and what it really costs to educate our kids. However, due to the depressed economy voters are focused on direct family financial impacts and less on the indirect costs that result from any decline in quality of our public schools. Since the district is currently operating under a three-year recurring referendum, it would be a lot to ask of taxpayers to vote yes on a new referendum.
That means we must look elsewhere for answers on how to close what might be a gap of as much as $30 million. Let me be very clear as to where I wouldn't look: the classroom. We need to protect learning by keeping class sizes small; by funding initiatives that help at-risk children perform up to grade level in basic subjects; and by funding those things that make Madison schools so special, like programs in the arts and athletics.
A group of parents is gathering information from Madison-area community members about whether or not parents would like to see another high school option in the area and, if so, what it might look like. Would it be an independent school or a charter school? Would it be a math and science academy, a performing arts school, an Expeditionary Learning school, or something else?
If you would like to share your ideas, wish list, or perspective, please join us for what is likely to be a stimulating conversation about possibilities. A discussion will take place Thursday evening, March 25th, at 7 p.m. at Wingra School (3200 Monroe St.). Please feel welcome to bring neighbors, family members, etc. who would like to participate.
Note: Wingra has very generously offered space for this conversation to take place. This is not a Wingra-sponsored event, nor is it a discussion about Wingra starting a high school.
Monday's story from Susan Troller about standardized tests explains how large school districts like Madison and Milwaukee are interested in what small Monona Grove is doing because its program offers much more detailed results than the standard Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) and delivers them far more quickly. But it's also interesting to consider how Monona Grove might be in the vanguard of national changes in how students are taught and tested.
On Monday, President Barack Obama sent a blueprint to Congress for an overhaul of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 law pushed by President George W. Bush that ties federal funding to students' standardized test results. Annual testing would still be required under Obama's plan, but one major focus would change from meeting narrow grade-by-grade benchmarks and move toward achieving a common set of skills needed for life after high school, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
In preparation for the New Schools Summit, following are a few thoughts for a great group.
Acknowledging the difficulty of penetrating the complex decentralized maze of US public education, a New Schools regular asked a dinner gathering of notable reformers last week if education innovation was an oxymoron.
After a few laughs and couple hopeful responses, a former urban deputy superintendent dampened enthusiasm by reminding us not to underestimate the power of resistance from elaborate political bulwarks. Barriers to edupreneurs clearly deflect talent and investment from the sector.
Charter schools emerged in the 90's as an entry point that allowed edupreneurs to open mission-designed new schools, then to create mission-designed school networks. Kim Smith created New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) to create an edupreneurial ecoysystem around schools, tools, and talent. NSVF supported the most important work in education over the last decade.
Instead of cutting what could be almost 400 teaching positions in Milwaukee Public Schools next year to balance the budget, the Milwaukee Board of School Directors could instead eliminate all athletics, the entire 3- and 4-year-old kindergarten program or all the school nurses, according to a new list of non-mandatory programs released by the district's central office.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said he has not recommended that the board cut any of the attention-grabbing, discretionary programs on the list - such as the $10 million the district spends to bus high school students around the city, or the $12 million it spends to fund art, music, foreign language and class-size reduction programs at the high schools. But, he said, it's important to make the board aware of non-mandatory areas it can trim or cut altogether.
The School Board will discuss the list of items included on the superintendent's informational report at a budget work session Thursday. Some of the items on the list include
In recent years, high schools that are configured to provide students the opportunity to earn both a high-school diploma and a college associate's degree or up two years of credit toward a bachelor's degree have grown in popularity. The Early College High School Initiative, a private partnership made up of 13 member organizations, has started or redesigned more than 200 such schools since 2002. In addition, the National Center on Education and the Economy is spearheading a similar initiative. Dozens of public schools in eight states next fall will adopt a program that lets 10th-grade students test out of high school and go to community college. The first generation of these schools targeted low-income, minority students who were likely to be the first in their family to attend college.
We looked at Pleasantville High School last week in the context of Diane Ravitch's new book, chosen at random among the cohort of segregated, impoverished, and failing Jersey schools. Coincidentally this challenged Abbott district made non-bloggy headlines s a day later because at that week's Board meeting Pleasantville Superintendent Gloria Grantham blasted away at teachers to the consternation of her Board, The Press of Atlantic City reports,
Grantham spoke at length Tuesday night about the benefits teachers get - vacation days, free health coverage, free professional development - and the effort they owe their students.
"This is not to hurt anyone, this is just to present the facts. We have got to do a better balancing act between what our students receive and what our adults receive," Grantham said. "They're benefiting pretty well from the opportunity to teach in our high school."
For years, many people, including politicians and unions, have complained that Rhode Island is the only state without a school-funding formula. The public's distrust of the legislature, however, has made it difficult to proceed. Not without reason, people feared that vast amounts of money would be simply siphoned away, without accountability, to benefit teachers unions and other powerful interests, not students.
But now there seems hope that Rhode Island can move beyond such cynicism. State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the state Board of Regents have approved a plan more focused on students. The formula is now before the General Assembly.
Under their plan, state school-aid dollars would "follow the students" -- even to charter schools, public institutions that operate outside the red tape of standard schools and are sometimes anathema to teachers unions.
For the fifth consecutive year, Inside Higher Ed presents its Academic Performance Tournament - a unique look at what the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I Men's Basketball Tournament would look like if teams advanced based solely on their outcomes in the classroom.
The winners were determined using the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate, a nationally comparable score that gives points to teams whose players stay in good academic standing and remain enrolled from semester to semester. When teams had the same Academic Progress Rates, the tie was broken using the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate - which, unlike the federal rate, considers transfers and does not punish teams whose athletes leave college before graduation if they leave in good academic standing.
OK, mom and dad. Remember your last semester of high school? Chances are you weren't freaking out about your AP chem class. Your prom plans may have mattered more than your 12th-grade GPA. And if you were headed to college, you were probably waiting to hear from just a couple of schools.
It's not like that today for college-bound high school seniors. They're cramming in AP classes for college credit. They're waiting to hear from 10 or 12 schools. And they can't shrug off homework, because many colleges make admission contingent on decent final grades.
"We have a policy to do 100 percent verification to ensure that final high school transcripts are received and reviewed," said Matt Whelan, assistant provost for admissions and financial aid at Stony Brook University in New York. "While it has been the exception, unfortunately, I have had the experience of sending letters to students informing them that because they did not successfully complete high school, they could were no longer admitted, and we rescinded both admission and financial aid."
College administrators around the country echoed Whelan's sentiments, from the University of Southern California, to Abilene Christian University in Texas, to Dartmouth, an Ivy League college in New Hampshire.
Not only do 12th graders feel pressure to keep up academically, but many also dedicate themselves to beloved teams, clubs and the performing arts.
Simon Fraser University has applied for accreditation from the U.S. quality assurance board Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. Being the first large research university in Canada to look south of the border for accreditation, the university's move highlights the fact that Canada lacks any national mechanism for assuring quality of post-secondary institutions.
Simon Fraser University (SFU) academic planning and budgeting director Glynn Nicholls, who is also accreditation project manager, explained that SFU's need for accreditation is related to its joining the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The university became the first non-U.S. school to be a member of the 100-year-old sports organization when it was accepted as a member in July 2009. SFU's varsity teams will compete in the Great Northern Athletic Conference, which includes Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Idaho.
The $2 Trillion Hole: Promised pensions benefits for public-sector employees represent a massive overhang that threatens the financial future of many cities and states.
LIKE A CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE, populist rage burns over bloated executive compensation and unrepentant avarice on Wall Street.
Deserving as these targets may or may not be, most Americans have ignored at their own peril a far bigger pocket of privilege -- the lush pensions that the 23 million active and retired state and local public employees, from cops and garbage collectors to city managers and teachers, have wangled from taxpayers.
Some 80% of these public employees are beneficiaries of defined-benefit plans under which monthly pension payments are guaranteed, no matter how stocks and other volatile assets backing the retirement plans perform. In contrast, most of the taxpayers footing the bill for these public-employee benefits (participants' contributions to these plans are typically modest) have been pushed by their employers into far less munificent defined-contribution plans and suffered the additional indignity of seeing their 401(k) accounts shrivel in the recent bear market in stocks.
And defined-contribution plans, unlike public pensions, have no protection against inflation. It's just too bad: Maybe some seniors will have to switch from filet mignon to dog food.
What should we do about the computer hackers at Winston Churchill High School in Montgomery County who changed dozens of grades? What is the solution to student cheating in general?
Research suggests that rising pressure to get into good colleges has led students to cut corners. One study cited by the Educational Testing Service said only about 20 percent of college students in the 1940s said they had cheated in high school, and the proportion is four times as large today.
Deemphasize the college race, some experts say, and much of this nonsense will go away. I have written for many years about research showing that adult success really doesn't depend on the prestige of one's alma mater. But that approach to easing cheating isn't going to get us far. Competition is too much a part of American culture. Also, college pressure tends to affect only the top 20 percent of students who seek selective schools (it's a higher percentage in the affluent Washington area) and not students who cheat for other reasons, such as laziness or boredom.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that the Obama Administration will ramp up investigations of civil rights infractions in school districts, which might sound well and good. What it means in practice, however, is that his Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will revert to the Clinton Administration policy of equating statistical disparity with discrimination, which is troubling.
OCR oversees Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by race, color or national origin in public schools and colleges that receive federal funding. In a speech last week, Mr. Duncan said that "in the last decade"--that's short for the Bush years--"the Office for Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating racial and gender discrimination." He cited statistics showing that white students are more likely than their black peers to take Advanced Placement classes and less likely to be expelled from school.
Therefore, Mr. Duncan said, OCR "will collect and monitor data on equity." He added that the department will also conduct compliance reviews "to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities" and to determine "whether districts and schools are disciplining students without regard to skin color."
What Stuck? What faded? As an EdReformer, it's interesting to think about the investment of time and money with a little hindsight.
Seven years ago, Caprice Young chaired the LAUSD board. She went on to run the California charter association and is now CEO of KCDL, a leading virtual education provider. About her work as a board member in LA, Caprice observed that :
Buildings and charters stuck,
Reading and arts programs didn't.
When Caprice was elected, LA was about 200,000 seats short. The board she chaired initiated one of the largest building projects in the world--a $19 billion ten year effort. Those buildings, for good or bad, will mark the LA landscape for a generation to come.
Also, I see a problem in the president using the achievement gap as a measure of schools in his suggested revisions. This could mean that a wonderfully diverse school like T.C. Williams High in Alexandria, a recent subject on this blog, would be motivated to ignore its best students, who want to get even better, and focus all its money and time on those at the bottom of the achievement scale so they can narrow the gap. That is not a good idea, and I hope the president will get it out of his proposal.
One of the world's foremost experts on comparing national school systems told lawmakers on Tuesday that many other countries were surpassing the United States in educational attainment, including Canada, where he said 15-year-old students were, on average, more than one school year ahead of American 15-year-olds.
America's education advantage, unrivaled in the years after World War II, is eroding quickly as a greater proportion of students in more and more countries graduate from high school and college and score higher on achievement tests than students in the United States, said Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which helps coordinate policies for 30 of the world's richest countries.
"Among O.E.C.D. countries, only New Zealand, Spain, Turkey and Mexico now have lower high school completion rates than the U.S.," Mr. Schleicher said. About 7 in 10 American students get a high school diploma.
Test early, test often, and make sure the results you get are meaningful to students, teachers and parents.
Although that may sound simple, in the last three years it's become a mantra in the Monona Grove School District that's helping all middle and high school students increase their skills, whether they're heading to college or a career. The program, based on using ACT-related tests, is helping to establish the suburban Dane County district as a leader in educational innovation in Wisconsin.
In fact, Monona Grove recently hosted a half-day session for administrators and board members from Milwaukee and Madison who were interested in learning more about Monona Grove's experiences and how the school community is responding to the program. In a pilot program this spring in Madison, students in eighth grade at Sherman Middle School will take ACT's Explore test for younger students. At Memorial, freshmen will take the Explore test.
Known primarily as a college entrance examination, ACT Inc. also provides a battery of other tests for younger students. Monona Grove is using these tests -- the Explore tests for grades 8 and 9, and the Plan tests for grades 10 and 11 -- to paint an annual picture of each student's academic skills and what he or she needs to focus on to be ready to take on the challenges of post-secondary education or the work force. The tests are given midway through the first semester, and results are ready a month later.
"We're very, very interested in what Monona Grove is doing," says Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for secondary education for the Madison district. "We've heard our state is looking at ACT as a possible replacement for the WKCE (Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam), and the intrinsic reliability of the ACT is well known. The WKCE is so unrelated to the students. The scores come in so late, it's not useful.
The Madison School District's "Value Added Assessment" program uses data from the oft-criticized WKCE.
One key to the successful small high schools, almost without exception, is that they grew from the ground up. They weren't created by some order from above. The people involved in launching the school knew what they wanted, were willing to do the hugely demanding work of making the school a reality and committed to continually working on improving what they did.
Montessori High fits that description. A charter school staffed by MPS employees, it is led by three teachers with no conventional principal. It is one of just a handful of Montessori high school programs in the U.S., and an even smaller number that combine the Montessori style of learning, with emphasis on individual development, with rigorous International Baccalaureate courses.
The environment in the school is somewhat casual, but serious. For example, 10 couches set the atmosphere for Chip Johnston's history class, where the lively discussion on a recent morning dealt with reacting to the statement, "Liberty means responsibility." Overall at the school, there is a strong emphasis on arts, on projects involving real-world issues, and on working with partners or in small groups.
Count the Dodgeland School District in central Dodge County as among those that have closed schools in outlying communities. Voters in 2001 approved a $17 million referendum to construct one school facility on Juneau's south side to house all of the district's students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
That meant closing a middle school in Reeseville and an elementary school in Lowell. An elementary school in Clyman had closed in the late 1990s, according to Superintendent Annette Thompson.
She said trying to adequately fund the previous school arrangement in today's fiscal environment would be difficult. The change has been for the better.
"It was a hard transition, but we recognized that to be the most cost-effective, we needed a facility that meets the needs of all students," Thompson said. "I think we're moving in a really positive direction."
Two recent New York Times articles have described opposition to the thriving charter school movement in Harlem. An influential state senator, Bill Perkins, whose district has nearly 20 charter schools, is trying to block their expansion. Some public schools in the neighborhood are also fighting back, marketing themselves to compete with the charters.
This is a New York battle, but charter schools -- a cornerstone of the Obama administration's education strategy -- are facing resistance across the country, as they become more popular and as traditional public schools compete for money. The education scholar Diane Ravitch, once a booster of the movement, is now an outspoken critic.
What is causing the push-back on charter schools, beyond the local issues involved ? Critics say they are skimming off the best students, leaving the regular schools to deal with the rest? Is that a fair point?
In the United States, the education debate has been framed as a zero-sum game. But a look at Finland, whose schools rank No. 1 in global surveys, shows that a national commitment to education can neutralize political debates over school reform.
Last spring, Timo Jaatinen, a Finnish high school teacher living in Virginia, was surfing Internet job boards looking for a position in his home country. After a few phone interviews, Jaatinen was offered a spot as an English and Swedish teacher at Alppila Upper Secondary School in Helsinki, a popular general education high school with a reputation for attracting students interested in the arts.
"The principal said, 'This job is yours,'" remembered Jaatinen, one of those young, dynamic teachers who you'd guess teenagers instinctively respect. "And then she said, 'Do you want to go to Rome?'"
Jaatinen was lucky. Alppila had scored well on the city of Helsinki's educational benchmarks for the 2007-2008 school year, and all the school's teachers were rewarded with modest salary bonuses and a free Italian vacation, to which new teachers were also invited. Jaatinen headed back to Finland to begin his new job and claim his trip.
The goal of the Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation is to identify, inspire, nurture, and scale breakthrough ideas in children's digital media and learning. The program will annually award cash prizes and provide ongoing business planning support and mentorship to a new generation of children's media entrepreneurs and visionaries.
Ask anyone about President Obama's track record and you'll hear the same: Not much movement on global warming, the domestic economy or health care. But there is one area in which Obama has already begun to move long-dormant mountains: education reform.
He has steered billions of dollars into education, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan has doled out in a carrot-and-stick approach that has forced states to promise reforms that were long thought impossible. For example, several state legislatures were "persuaded" -- okay, legally bribed -- into peeling back excessive teacher-protection laws.
Ultimately, however, Obama will be measured by his bottom line goal: for the United States to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by the year 2020. Translated, that means jumping from the middle of the rankings of developed nations to the top in just 10 years.
Featured speakers at the conference include Greg Richmond, President and founding board member of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and establisher of the Chicago Public School District's Charter Schools Office; Ursula Wright, the Chief Operating Officer for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; Sarah Archibald of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at UW-Madison and the Value-Added Research Center; and Richard Halverson, an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Also speaking at the Conference will be:
State Senator John Lehman (D-Racine), Chair Senate Education Committee
State Senator Luther Olsen (R-Berlin), Ranking Minority Member, Senate Education
State Representative Sondy Pope-Roberts (D-Middleton), Chair, Assembly Education Committee
State Representative Brett Davis (R-Oregon), Ranking Minority Member, Assembly Education
The Conference will feature interactive sessions; hands-on examples of innovative learning in classrooms; networking; a coaching room open throughout the conference; and keynote speakers that highlight the importance of quality in and around each classroom, and the impact that quality has on the learning of students everywhere. More details are attached.
Thank you for your consideration and your help in getting word out! If you would like to attend on a press pass, please let me know and I will have one in your name at the registration area.
President Obama outlined his own education vision Saturday, one that he hopes will replace the punitive elements of the sweeping No Child Left Behind Act and give schools more flexibility in bringing students up to speed. To convey the new focus, the law will get a new name, although it has not been announced. (I am sure a few of you will have some pithy suggestions.)
The president and Ed Secretary Arne Duncan have clearly heard the cries from the classrooms where teachers complained that they were teaching to the tests in a futile attempt to meet impossible and overly rigid standards. Details are few right now, but the president did outline a new direction that is supposed to be kinder, fairer and more realistic.
I am not sure that teachers will agree that the plan is more realistic and fairer as it still seems to have high expectations that schools will make strides with all students.
President Barack Obama unveiled his plan for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's school system Saturday, proposing changes he says would shift emphasis from teaching to the test to a more nuanced assessment of judging school and student progress.
On Monday, Obama will submit his blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind law to Congress, and he's given lawmakers a powerful incentive to take up the bill this year--his budget proposal includes a $1 billion bonus should new legislation land on his desk this year.
Obama's proposal would toss out the core of the Bush-era law, which calls for across-the-board proficiency from all students in reading and math by 2014, and instead emphasize revamped assessment tools that link teacher evaluations to student progress, and a goal of having students career and college ready upon graduation.
I'm excited for the opportunity to "debate." The term violates my traditional sensibilities, but I'll try to get over it. What resolution should we discuss? Resolved: "The problem with education is teachers," as one online headline for your story read. Resolved: "The best way to deal with underperforming teachers is to fire them." Resolved: "Much of the ability to teach is innate," as the lead story in your package declares.
My reporting for The New York Times Magazine turned up counter-arguments to each of these declarations. But it also turned up many facts that appear in your story. Here are some premises we can probably agree on: The quality of teaching plays a major role in determining whether children learn. An upsetting number of teachers are not helping children learn as much as we want them to. A smaller group of teachers are actively impeding learning. It is insanely difficult to fire these bad teachers, and the teaching profession at large is an insanely isolated one in which it is not unusual for the only people who ever observe the professional at work to be 9 years old.
That said, the overwhelming conclusion of my reporting is that efforts to change this picture must go beyond simply firing the lowest performers. One reason is just plain money. Firing employees--in many professions, not just teaching--brings a lot of legal hurdles and therefore costs a lot of money. The bill is especially high for firing teachers; to fire underperforming teachers in New York City, Chancellor Joel Klein invested $1 million a year in a fleet of fancy attorneys tasked solely with this responsibility. In the two years the project has gone on so far, the city only fired three teachers charged with incompetence.
To encourage high school students to tackle tougher academic classes, many schools assign bonus points to grades in Advanced Placement or honors courses. But schools' policies on whether students should receive a grade-point boost and by how much are all over the map.
My local public school district, for instance, used to add an extra third of a grade-point to students' AP course grades while the private high school on the other side of town would bump up students' grades by a full letter grade.
Since students from both schools would be applying to many of the same colleges, and essentially competing with one another, it didn't seem fair to me that the private school kids should get such a generous grade boost.
That's why I was heartened to come across a new study by a Harvard University researcher that takes a more systematic look at the practice of high school grade-weighting.
He found that for every increasing level of rigor in high school science, students' college course grades rose by an average of 2.4 points on a 100- point scale, where an A is 95 points and a B is worth 85 points and so on. In other words, the college grade for the former AP chemistry student would be expected to be 2.4 points higher than that of the typical student who took honors chemistry in high school. And the honors students' college grade, in turn, would be 2.4 points higher than that of the student who took regular chemistry.
Translating those numbers, and some other calculations, to a typical high school 1-to-4-point grade scale, Sadler estimates that students taking an honors science class in high school ought to get an extra half a point for their trouble, and that a B in an AP science course ought to be counted as an A for the purpose of high school grade-point averages.
The Obama administration will ask Congress to toss out the two-tiered pass/fail school rating system of the No Child Left Behind education law and replace it with one that labels schools one of three ways: high-performing, needs improvement or chronically low-performing, according to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
President Obama announced the change Saturday during his weekly radio address, saying the administration plan sets "an ambitious goal: all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career - no matter who you are or where you come from. Achieving this goal will be difficult. It will take time. And it will require the skills, talents, and dedication of many: principals, teachers, parents, students. But this effort is essential for our children and for our country."
In a briefing Friday, Duncan told reporters he will give the high performers both freedom and financial incentives to stay that way.
"We want to get out of their way," Duncan said. "But we also want to learn from them."
The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards -- often the same curriculum -- from one end of the nation to the other. The United States relies on a generally mediocre patchwork of standards that vary, not just from state to state, but often from district to district. A child's education depends primarily on ZIP code.
That could eventually change if the states adopt the new rigorous standards proposed last week by the National Governors Association and a group representing state school superintendents. The proposal lays out clear, ambitious goals for what children should learn year to year and could change curriculums, tests and teacher training.
Among the 10 organizations to which President Obama donated his Nobel Prize Award are the United Negro College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Appalachian Leadership and Education Foundation, the American Indian College Fund, and the Posse Foundation.
What do those groups -- each of which is receiving $125,000 of the total $1.4 million that he received -- have in common?
They all work to help underserved populations of young people get ready to attend and be successful in college.
Obama has said repeatedly that his education goal is to make sure that every child has a quality education and the opportunity to graduate from college -- and he displayed his commitment to that with his own award money.
Yet his education policies to this point cannot ever reach this goal. Nor can they do what he promised during the presidential campaign: Stop high-stakes standardized testing from driving our public education system.
Waukesha West High School won its ninth straight title Friday at the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon in Wisconsin Dells, earning a trip to next month's national competition.
The team scored 46,428.3 points out of a possible 60,000, placed first in the Super Quiz relay and earned the top team award for all 10 featured subjects, said decathlon director Molly Ritchie.
In academic decathlon, nine student teams go head to head in a series of tests on academic subjects, interviews and essays. Each team includes three students with A-grade averages, three with B averages and three C students.
Twenty teams competed in the state competition, based on their performance at local and regional events.
In Saturday's address, Obama called for Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which in 2002 became known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
With a goal of having every child read at grade level by 2014, No Child Left Behind has been criticized by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan as "utopian" and as failing to properly reward schools for progress. One change under his proposed legislative blueprint, Obama said, would be that schools that perform well would be rewarded, while underperforming schools would face tough consequences.
A focus on education reform may be a politically astute move for the president and fellow Democrats in Congress, some of whom face difficult elections in the fall. Education reform, unlike financial regulatory reform or new environmental laws, is a kitchen-table issue that many Americans support.
"The announcement's timing suggests Obama is looking beyond the health care proposal that still lingers in Congress, has delayed the president's international trip next week, and threatens his party's electoral prospects in November," writes the Associated Press.
1. Standards are the lifeblood of student achievement in public schools; and that includes even those site-based managed schools that are based on parental choice. You all know the stories of charters and voucher programs that don't deliver the kind of transformational improvement we all want. In MA, our charters for the most part are of a higher quality than elsewhere and far outperform their district counterparts. In part that is because of the great upfront business planning/vetting and accountability/closure processes (yes, regulation), but it is even more because MA has set really high academic standards, assessments, and teacher testing. Charters are effective at attaining goals but you have to set high academic goals for them to be good schools with high-achieving students. Arizona, with its numerous but too often lower quality charter schools, take note.
"Not a war . . . a family dispute." So said Carson Holloway, a board member at Shimer College, responding to a student's half-joking remark. At this unique college, which calls itself "the 'Great Books' school of Chicago," a struggle over academic authority has been raging recently, rife with 1960s-style undertones. The school's embattled president, Tom Lindsay, is facing ideological opposition from faculty and students. Yet he thinks that the resolution of tensions at Shimer could serve as a "bellwether" for colleges nationwide, where for the past 50 years political agendas have too often contaminated the quality of a liberal-arts education.
Everyone at Shimer believes in a great-books education, through which students study the profound questions of Western thought and civilization. The "family dispute" is over how to govern this great-books school. Should a community of scholars call the shots, as it has done over the past 30 years? Or should the school be run by a chief executive, as the college's president thinks? Is Shimer a Greek-style polis, as many Shimerians believe? Or does it need to function more like a corporation, as the president contends?
In his 2010 State of the Schools address, Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier commented on the district's relationship with the public charter schools we founded more than a decade ago, YES Prep and KIPP. Grier referred to the relationship as a partnership as well as a competition, stating that HISD is ready to "get busy" in order to ensure parents are not leaving failing HISD schools to attend YES Prep, KIPP or other high-performing charters in Houston. We could not be more pleased to hear these comments from Grier. In fact, we've been hoping for many years that our existence would indeed result in this type of relationship with HISD and a superintendent ready to "get busy" and compete. The recent changes that Grier and the board have implemented regarding a longer calendar and focus on human capital show that they are committed to this idea.
YES Prep and KIPP were both born inside HISD in the mid-1990s when we were both classroom teachers in underserved communities in search of a better way to educate our students. We had a number of theories we wanted to test about what it would take to educate our students in a way that would allow them to compete with students from our city's very best schools. What we learned in those early years was that for us to have the freedom to be experimental, nimble and fleet-footed, for us to be able to make sometimes unorthodox decisions in the best interest of our students, we would need to leave HISD's political bureaucracy to operate as independent public charter schools.
If the nation's education system finally makes a meaningful turn for the better, March 10 may very well mark the turning point.
On Wednesday, two influential organizations of state leaders -- the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers -- released drafts of new "common core" academic standards for American schools, covering English and math from kindergarten through 12th grade. The standards are intended -- if states embrace them, teachers teach them and children study hard -- to prepare tomorrow's young people to be "college- and career-ready" by the end of high school and to help the U.S. become more internationally competitive.
A closely related development will soon occur, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveils a program that will let states compete for up to $350 million in federal funds to develop new tests "aligned" with the new standards.
I don't know what job the members of the school board came to do. I don't know what job they think they are doing. But I do know what job they aren't doing: they aren't doing the Board job.
The Board job begins with serving as the elected representatives of the public. But the Board members aren't representing the public's voice in Seattle Public Schools. They certainly aren't advocating for the public's perspective. We know that they aren't because if they were, we would hear them begin their sentences with the words: "My constituents want... " and they don't. We don't hear them say "My constituents want equitable access to language immersion programs." or "My constituents want equitable access to Montessori programs." or "My constituents want access to a real Spectrum program for their Spectrum-eligible children." or "My constituents want reduced class sizes." We aren't hearing that. And we sure aren't hearing them follow these statements with "So let's make it happen for them."
In a provocative Detroit News column, columnist Laura Berman describes the troubling case of Detroit school board president Otis Mathis. Mathis appears to be a decent man admired by his colleagues. He is fair and open. He can also barely construct a sentence, as Berman shows by sharing his e-mails.
One Mathis example that she provides:
If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.
Mathis does not deny his writing problems or his weak education record and speaks openly with Berman about them. He says his own struggles and deficiencies don't disqualify him from leading a school system that shares many of those same struggles and shortcomings on an epic scale.
Facing low enrollment and a $50 million budget deficit, the Kansas City Board of Education announced on Wednesday that it would close almost half of the city's public schools. The "Right-Size" plan will mean closing 28 of the city's 61 schools and eliminating 700 out of 3,000 jobs.
National education experts have said that the Kansas City schools were not responding to demographic changes and academic failure. District officials say the closings will improve achievement by allowing the system to focus its resources.
How much does school size matter? And what are the lessons learned from Kansas City?
Faced with a deficit and troubled school system, Kansas City's Board of Education voted to close 28 out of 61 schools. Barbara Shelley, columnist for the Kansas City Star, talks with Kai Ryssdal about what led to the decision and its impact.
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL: The board of education in Kansas City, Mo., took a vote last night on how to save their city's long-troubled school system. It was close. But by the end of the evening a plan to shut down 28 of the district's 61 schools and lay off 700 people did pass. The vote was 5-4. The district says the plan should cut $50 million from the budget.
Barbara Shelley is a columnist for the Kansas City Star. She's been writing about schools there and the city itself for quite a while. Barb, it's good to have you with us.
BARBARA SHELLEY: Good to be here.
RYSSDAL: What's the reaction in town today after this announcement?
SHELLEY: Well, I think you have two different reactions. You have the reaction from people that are going to be directly affected. And that's the families and the teachers and the students. And there's a lot of anguish in that group. You have another reaction from I would say business types and people that see this as a hope that a smaller, more streamlined school district will mean better performance and a better academic potential for the district.
Big front page story in the WaPo todayabout a debate over getting rid of congressional "earmarks" for for-profit entities. But is the problem that for-profits can get earmarks or that the earmark process is just not very meritorious in its selection regardless of the tax status of the recipient? Plenty of for-profits will continue to get federal money through a variety of avenues. Meanwhile, not every non-profit is a model of efficiency, virtue, or effectiveness.
In K-12, and education more generally, we have a similar problem when it comes to thinking about quality.
If you are a parent in cities such as Bellevue, Issaquah or Seattle, your kids are being short-changed--being provided an inferior math education that could cripple their future aspirations--and you need to act. This blog will tell the story of an unresponsive and wrong-headed educational bureaucracies that are dead set on continuing in the current direction. And it will tell the story of how this disaster can be turned around. Parent or not, your future depends on dealing with the problem.
Let me provide you with a view from the battlefield of the math "wars", including some information that is generally not known publicly, or has been actively suppressed by the educational establishment. Of lawsuits and locking parents out of decision making.
I know that some of you would rather that I only talk about weather, but the future of my discipline and of our highly technological society depends on mathematically literate students. Increasingly, I am finding bright students unable to complete a major in atmospheric sciences. All their lives they wanted to be a meteorologist and problems with math had ended their dreams. Most of them had excellent math grades in high school. I have talked in the past about problems with reform or discovery math; an unproven ideology-based instructional approach in vogue among the educational establishment. An approach based on student's "discovering" math principles, group learning, heavy use of calculators, lack of practice and skills building, and heavy use of superficial "spiraling" of subject matter. As I have noted before in this blog, there is no competent research that shows that this approach works and plenty to show that it doesn't. But I have covered much of this already in earlier blogs.
The Kansas City Board of Education voted Wednesday night to close almost half of the city's public schools, accepting a sweeping and contentious plan to shrink the system in the face of dwindling enrollment, budget cuts and a $50 million deficit.
In a 5-to-4 vote, the members endorsed the Right-Size plan, proposed by the schools superintendent, John Covington, to close 28 of the city's 61 schools and cut 700 of 3,000 jobs, including those of 285 teachers. The closings are expected to save $50 million, erasing the deficit from the $300 million budget.
"We must make sacrifices," said board member Joel Pelofsky, speaking in favor of the plan before the vote. "Unite in favor of our children."
Developing a set of core content standards to prepare high school students with the academic foundation and skills necessary to succeed on any college campus is the goal of a new initiative at the University of Oregon.
Specifically targeted are the subject areas of mathematics and English, as well as a set of career-oriented two-year certificate programs.
David T. Conley, a professor of education and founder and chief executive officer of the non-profit Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), will lead the ambitious project, which is partially funded by a $794,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Seattle-based foundation announced in February a $19.5 million package of 15 grants to develop and launch new instructional tools and assessments to assure college readiness across the nation. Other support for the UO project comes from the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Starting as early as this fall, every Hillsborough County schoolteacher will be subject to ratings by his or her peers.
The School Board on Tuesday unanimously approved the move as part of a reform effort under way to improve schools through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The board's vote dedicates $360,000 to an online training course for the peer evaluation system that, by 2013, will help determine whether teachers qualify for tenure or merit pay.
Within a month or so, teachers will be able to see how the system works in real life. The optional six-hour course by national teacher evaluation expert Charlotte Danielson includes an overview and video clips from actual classrooms where similar evaluations have been used.
The U.S. Education Department is planning to examine the Los Angeles Unified School District's low achieving English-language learning program to determine whether those students are being denied a fair education.
The department's Office for Civil Rights will investigate whether the nation's second-largest school district is complying with federal civil rights laws with regard to English-language learners, who comprise about a third of the district's 688,000 pupils, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The inquiry was sparked by the low academic achievement of the district's English learners. Only 3 percent are proficient in high-school math and English.
Problems in LAUSD's English-language learning program were highlighted last fall in a study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.
The relative decline of American education at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation's future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists--and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag.
For much of this time--roughly the last half century--professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language--but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements.
Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate--an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not
As part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the draft K-12 standards are now available for public comment. These draft standards, developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce.
Governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia committed to developing a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. This is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
The NGA Center and CCSSO have received feedback from national organizations representing, but not limited to teachers, postsecondary education (including community colleges), civil rights groups, English language learners, and students with disabilities. These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2.
The nation's governors and state school chiefs will propose standards Wednesday for what students should learn in English and math, from kindergarten through high school, a crucial step in President Obama's campaign to raise academic standards across the country.
The blueprint aims to replace a hodgepodge of state benchmarks with common standards. The president has aggressively encouraged the states' action as a key to improving troubled schools and keeping the nation competitive. Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.
Fourth-graders, for example, would be expected to explain major differences between poetry and prose and to refer to such elements as stanza, verse, rhythm and meter when writing or speaking about a poem. Eighth-graders would be expected to use linear equations to solve for an unknown and explain a proof of the Pythagorean theorem on properties of a right triangle -- cornerstones of algebra and geometry.
"It's hugely significant," said Michael Cohen, a former Clinton education official, who is president of the standards advocacy organization Achieve. "The states recognize they ought to have very consistent expectations for what their students should learn."
Buried on the Department of Education's website is a page that lists per pupil spending on a school-wide, district-wide, and system-wide basis. Using this information, as well as expense data from the 2007-2008 audits and the recent Independent Budget Office report, we compared spending by charter schools and traditional public schools that are located in the same building.
We found that charter schools spent $365 less per pupil than their co-located traditional public schools in 2007-2008. You can see our calculations in a workbook here.
Five schools in Oakland, five in Hayward and one in San Lorenzo are among 188 statewide that have been deemed "persistently lowest-achieving" on a preliminary list released Monday by state education officials.
The unwelcome distinction was given to schools that posted low scores on reading and math tests in the past three years and that have shown little improvement, based on the state education department's analysis.
In Hayward, that includes all three of the city's high schools.
The schools will eventually be required to make one of four interventions set forth by the federal government, including the replacement of the principal and staff, closure and charter conversion, state officials said Monday. Those who wish to receive federal school improvement grant funds must do so by this fall; otherwise, the timeline is unspecified.
At first glance, the right-sizing of the Kansas City School District just feels wrong.
It feels wrong to close more schools in struggling neighborhoods, to punish scholars with longer bus rides home, to let teachers go with little more than "we wish we didn't have to," to take beautiful buildings that stood for community and put boards in their windows, to ask families to bear the burden of a solution after years of school boards -- which now include myself -- failing to fix the problems. In the storm of controversy, it is easy to overlook what is right in the journey we are on.
Beyond all that may feel wrong, there is so much that is right in our district and with the right-sizing plan. We should celebrate that our superintendent has led a thoughtful, data-driven, six-month, three-stage process to arrive at the plan.
Notes on the Alliance for Education Teacher Quality Survey
Melissa Westbrook:
just finally got around to looking over the Alliance for Education survey called "Teaching Quality Community Survey". What were they thinking? (Sorry to be a little late to this party but I was out of town last week.) I'm not going to even provide a link. I answered every question "don't know" so I could read through the whole thing.
Just from a survey standpoint, it's a mess. There are multiple values in questions starting with the very first one. It's about (1) redesigning the salary schedule AND (2) eliminating coursework incentives AND (3) "reallocating pay to target the district's challenges and priorities." What?!? You can't write a survey question like that.
Question two has a classic "leading the reader" form using phrases like "redouble efforts" and "as attempted by the current superintendent". How does the reader know this actually DID happen? Also, the "latest" negotiations haven't even formally started; is the district showing its hand here?
And it goes on and on. "Gather teacher data so that teachers are equitably distributed among schools." So elsewhere they want to eliminate pay for more education for teachers but at the same time in this question they want to spread the number of teachers who do have more education more equitably among the schools?
LOCAL SCHOOL officials say everything is on the table when it comes to cutting the budget, but there are some measures that would be a bit less painful.
For instance, the Savannah-Chatham Board of Education should consider a temporary increase in class sizes.
While the state last year increased class size regulations marginally, the local system remains, on average, about two or three students below those limits. There is more leeway in elementary schools, with class sizes closer to state limits in the middle and upper grades.
More students per class will likely mean more stress on educators. However, this move can be easily undone when the economy (and school tax revenue) improves.
Superintendent Thomas Lockamy said that out of the system's roughly 3,200 teaching positions, some 300 to 400 come vacant at the end of each year through resignations or retirement.
Rafaela Espinal held her first poolside chat last summer, offering cheese, crackers and apple cider to draw people to hear her pitch.
She keeps a handful of brochures in her purse, and also gives a few to her daughter before she leaves for school each morning. She painted signs on the windows of her Chrysler minivan, turning it into a mobile advertisement.
It is all an effort to build awareness for her product, which is not new, but is in need of an image makeover: a public school in Harlem.
As charter schools have grown around the country, both in number and in popularity, public school principals like Ms. Espinal are being forced to compete for bodies or risk having their schools closed. So among their many challenges, some of these principals, who had never given much thought to attracting students, have been spending considerable time toiling over ways to market their schools. They are revamping school logos, encouraging students and teachers to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the new designs. They emphasize their after-school programs as an alternative to the extended days at many charter schools. A few have worked with professional marketing firms to create sophisticated Web sites and blogs.
Attendees will glean new ideas and insights from those who are part of charter schools. Charter schools work as "learning laboratories" and are anxious to share insights and best practices that can be applied to traditional public schools. Whether you're looking to network at our larger sessions, or if you prefer to sit down one-on-one in a more private setting with someone who can answer your questions, we can make it happen for you at this year's conference.
A small but growing number of school districts across the country are moving to a four-day week, in a shift they hope will help close gaping budget holes and stave off teacher layoffs, but that critics fear could hurt students' education.
State legislators and local school boards are giving administrators greater flexibility to set their academic calendars, making the four-day slate possible. But education experts say little research exists to show the impact of shortened weeks on learning. The missed hours are typically made up by lengthening remaining school days.
Of the nearly 15,000-plus districts nationwide, more than 100 in at least 17 states currently use the four-day system, according to data culled from the Education Commission of the States. Dozens of other districts are contemplating making the change in the next year--a shift that is apt to create new challenges for working parents as well as thousands of school employees.
The heightened interest in an abbreviated school week comes as the Obama administration prepares to plow $4.35 billion in extra federal funds into underperforming schools. The administration has been advocating for a stronger school system in a bid to make the U.S. more academically competitive on a global basis.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday the federal government will become more vigilant to make sure students have equal access and opportunity to everything ranging from college prep classes to science and engineering programs.
"We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement," Duncan said on a historic Selma bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of a bloody confrontation between voting rights demonstrators and state troopers.
Duncan said the department also will issue a series of guidelines to public schools and colleges addressing fairness and equity issues.
"The truth is that, in the last decade, the office for civil rights has not been as vigilant as it should be. That is about to change," Duncan said.
Duncan spoke to a crowd about 400 people on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observance of "Bloody Sunday," the day in 1965 when several hundred civil rights protesters were beaten by state troopers as they crossed the span over the Alabama River, bound for Montgomery.
Carl Dorvil started Group Excellence in his SMU dorm room. The son of Haitian immigrants, Carl never took his education for granted. He was the first African American president of his high school and balanced four jobs while completing a triple major and starting a business as an undergraduate.
Some good advice from the founder of Macaroni Grill led Carl to pursue an MBA. But when his professor saw the revenue projection for Group Excellence, he suggested a semester off to work on the business.
Carl finished his MBA in 2008, but the break allowed him to build a great business. Today Group Excellence (GE) employs 500 people in four cities and serves over 10,000 Texas students. GE provides tutoring services to struggling low-income students. Dorvil says, "The knowledge that I gained from business school propelled GE into becoming one of the most respected tutoring companies under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act."
In one Dallas middle school, math scores shot up from 12% to more than 60% passing the state test only 8 months after activating the GE program.
The state's largest teachers union ripped into a proposed overhaul of teacher contracts Monday, saying the bill represented an effort to score political points instead of serious education reform.
"It attacks the very people who work in our school system each and every day as opposed to giving them the resources that are needed to succeed," said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, at a news conference called to slam the proposal from Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine.
Thrasher's bill, filed last week, would base half of a teacher's salary on student performance while extending to five years the period during which a new teacher can be fired at the end of each school year without cause.
It would also dismantle teacher tenure in the three counties, including Duval County, where it exists as well as other employment protections in other parts of the state. In most parts of the state, teachers can obtain a "professional service contract" after three or four years and can only be fired for cause.
SINCE "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice's sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo ("Do-Do-Dodgson").
But Alice's adventures with the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and so on have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination. Just fantastical tales for children -- and, as such, ideal material for the fanciful movie director Tim Burton, whose "Alice in Wonderland" opened on Friday.
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice's search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson's field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In "Alice," he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense -- using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.
At 11, the violinist Patricia Travers made her first solo appearance with the New York Philharmonic, playing Lalo's "Symphonie Espagnole" with "a purity of tone, breadth of line and immersion in her task," as a critic for The New York Times wrote in 1939.
At 13, she appeared in "There's Magic in Music," a Hollywood comedy set in a music camp. Released in 1941 and starring Allan Jones, the film features Patricia, chosen by audition from hundreds of child performers, playing with passionate intensity.
In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives's Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence.
Not long afterward, she disappeared.
Between the ages of 10 and 23, Ms. Travers appeared with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the New York, London and Berlin Philharmonics and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. She performed on national radio broadcasts, gave premieres of music written expressly for her and made several well-received records.
Zachary Dupland was a kindergartner at Menasha's Gegan Elementary School when his parents split up. His dad, Eric Dupland, moved to Appleton. His mom, Tauna Carson, moved to Neenah.
As part of their custody agreement, however, they opted to keep Zachary, now a third-grader, at a school in Menasha by applying for open enrollment.
His parents felt no reason existed to uproot him from his friends and teachers, at least until middle school.
"We wanted to avoid any more dramatic changes in his life," Eric Dupland said.
"This option has been wonderful for us," Carson said. "It has allowed us to do just what we need to do for Zachary."
The state of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the United States has seen some unflattering appraisals in recent years, and deservedly so. In early February, the House of Representatives heard testimony on undergraduate and graduate education. The message from the panel, which included experts from academia, STEM-based industries, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), was clear: the problems in STEM education are well-known, and it's time to take action.
Both the hearing's charter and its chair, Daniel Lipinski (D-IL), pointed out the obvious problem in higher education: students start out interested, but the STEM programs are driving them away. As the National Academies described in its 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, successful STEM education is not just an academic pursuit--it's a necessity for competing in the knowledge-based economy that the United States had a key role in creating.
The potential for action comes thanks to the fact that the America COMPETES Act of 2007 is up for reauthorization. Its initial focus was on STEM education at the K-12 levels, but efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels are needed to retain students to fill the jobs left vacant as baby boomers retire.
There was a time in East Los Angeles when el maestro's el maestro's gruff voice bounced off his classroom walls. He roamed the aisles, he juggled oranges, he dressed in costumes, he punched the air; he called you names, he called your mom, he kicked you out, he lured you in; he danced, he boxed, he screamed, he whispered. He would do anything to get your attention.
"Ganas," he would say. "That's all you need. The desire to learn."
Nearly three decades later, Jaime Escalante finds himself far from Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, the place that made him internationally famous for turning a generation of low-income students into calculus whizzes. Twenty-two years have passed since his classroom exploits were captured in the film "Stand and Deliver."
He is 79 and hunched in a wheelchair at a cancer treatment center in Reno. It is cold outside, and the snow-capped mountains that crown the city where his son brought him three weeks ago on a bed in the back of an old van remind him of his native Bolivia.
ittle Johnny can't read or write because, in government schools, the interests of teachers' unions prevail over the interests of children. Unions may be beneficial to educators, but they are indifferent -- if not hostile -- to the intellectual development of children.
But education reformers nationwide are celebrating a rare victory for the kids. Last month in Rhode Island, Superintendant Frances Gallo fired the entire staff of Central Falls High School -- a total of 93 people. The grateful citizens of Central Falls have erected a billboard in Gallo's honor. Rightly so. Gallo, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the Central Falls school board (which approved the firings on a 5-2 vote) are an inspiration to the public school reform movement.
Central Falls High is one of the worst schools in Rhode Island. Only 45 percent of the students are proficient in reading, 29 percent in writing and, incredibly, only 4 percent in math. Compare those abysmal numbers to Rhode Island's (somewhat less embarrassing) statewide averages in the same subjects: 69, 42 and 27 percent, respectively. Furthermore, half of the students at Central Falls are failing every subject, and the school's graduation rate is 48 percent.
Only teachers' unions could defend such a spectacular failure. Several hundred bused-in, placard-waving educators and their union representatives showed up in Central Falls hours before the firings. "We are behind Central Falls teachers," proclaimed Mark Bostic of the American Federation of Teachers, "and we will be here as long as it takes to get justice." But on Tuesday, the Central Falls union publicly pledged to support Gallo's reforms, and she said she's willing to negotiate.
When hundreds of parents went to Albany last month to rally for charter schools, they were greeted by a parade of politicians offering encouragement and promises.
But when Bill Perkins, the state senator from Harlem who represents many of the parents, took the stage, they drowned him out with boos.
Some parents confronted him later in the vestibule outside the Senate chamber, demanding that he meet with them that afternoon and chanting "Move Bill, get out the way, get out the way," before he could even speak.
As advocates of charter schools, including the Bloomberg administration, try to persuade legislators to lift the limit on the number of such schools in the state, no one is as likely to stand in their way as Mr. Perkins, whose district encompasses nearly 20 charter schools. Several more are planned next year.
The article was written by UW-Madison graduate Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University. Rojstaczer is a retired professor of geophysics at Duke University and the creator of GradeInflation.com, a website that tracks grading trends.
The report analyzes decades of grading patters at American four-year institutions and notes that "grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade."
Amidst the Race to the Top excitement this week, an important story may have gotten lost in the buzz. On Wednesday, my colleague Jamie Davies O'Leary, a 27 year-old Princeton grad, liberal Democrat, and Teach For America alumna described her surprise bookshop encounter with former Weatherman and lefty school reformer Bill Ayers.
If Bill Ayers and Fred and Mike Klonsky were 22 again, they would be signing up for Teach For America. The whole thing is worth reading (it's a great story) but note this passage in particular, about Ayers' talk:
[Ayers] answered a young woman's question about New York Teaching Fellows and Teach For America with a diatribe about how such programs can't fix public education and consist of a bunch of ivy leaguers and white missionaries more interested in a resume boost than in helping students. Whoa.
And:
As someone who read Savage Inequalities years ago and attribute my decision to become a teacher partially to the social justice message, I almost felt embarrassed. But that was before I learned a bit of context, nuance, data, and evidence surrounding education policy debates. It's as if Bill Ayers hasn't been on the planet for the last two decades.
Almost as soon as Jamie's essay was posted, the Klonsky brothers (Fred and Mike--both longtime friends and associates of Ayers, both involved in progressive education causes) went after her. Fred posted a missive titled, "File under misguided sense of one's own importance." Mike tweeted that her depiction of the encounter was a "fantasy."
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager -- desperate, in some cases -- for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students' strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn't reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he'd seen before: "a dispiriting exercise in good people failing," as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers' instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn't have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.
To no great surprise, Wisconsin will not be one of the handful of states leading a national push to transform public education.
President Barack Obama announced Thursday that Wisconsin failed to survive even a preliminary round of competition for billions of dollars in federal innovation grants.
It's a huge disappointment - especially since Obama came to Madison last fall to officially launch the nationwide effort, which he calls a "Race to the Top."
It's not yet clear why Wisconsin didn't make the cut. That's because the U.S. Department of Education hasn't released our state's scores and comments from the judges.
Yet Gov. Jim Doyle's criticism Thursday of the entrenched Milwaukee School Board and reform-averse state lawmakers was dead-on. The Legislature's failure to shake up the failing Milwaukee public school district had to hurt our state's bid for as much as $254 million in Race to the Top funds.
At the same time, Rep. Brett Davis' criticism of Doyle and the Democratic-run Legislature for kowtowing to the big teachers union was equally apt. The Wisconsin Education Association Council has long resisted big changes in public education, including pay for performance. And the teachers union spent more - by far - on lobbying last year than any other special interest group at the state Capitol.
I am deeply disappointed that SPS will funnel more resources into this appeal, which, I suspect, will be more costly than following the judge's instruction to reconsider.
Our attorney tells me: ".... I'll put in a notice of appearance, and then we wait for the District to complete the record by having the documents and transcripts transmitted to the Court of Appeals. They write the first brief, due 45 days after the record is complete.
One of the first high-profile examples of President Obama's public education reforms comes from Rhode Island, a participant in Race to the Top (RttT).
Superintendent Frances Gallo, overseeing the persistently failing Central Falls High School, decided to fire all the school's teachers after the teacher union proved to be the road block to reform. The superintendent was set to initiate an intervention program at the high school which involved many changes including a longer school day, lunch with the students, and more after school tutoring. The union rejected the proposal because there was not enough monetary compensation attached. Because the intervention plan was refused, the superintendent had to resort to a different model of school reform - the turnaround model -- which involves firing the majority of the faculty and staff. Deborah Gist, Rhode Island's new education commissioner approved the turnaround model for the school.
Zina McGowan-Thomas, the energetic public information officer for St. Mary's County public schools, sends me many announcements and news releases that I am tempted to delete, as I do most e-mails from local school districts. I know this is a bad idea, because sometimes you will find, in the smallest bulletin, something astonishing, like such as the e-mail she sent me a few weeks ago about the Chesapeake Public Charter School.
She told me and her long list of contacts that the school was about to have an open house. Ho-hum. All schools have open houses. Wait a minute: McGowan-Thomas works for a public school district with 27 schools and 17,000 students. Her job is to spread information about them, not a charter school. To most public school employees in the United States, charter schools are the enemy. Finding McGowan-Thomas promoting a charter school event is like seeing your local post office displaying a FedEx poster.
Charter schools are independent public schools that use tax dollars but do not have to follow a lot of school district rules. They can have different hours, different textbooks, different teaching methods and whatever else appeals to the teachers and parents who have gotten permission to set them up.
Teachers call for engaging curriculum, supportive leadership, clear standards common across states in survey by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today released Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools, a landmark report presenting the results of a national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12. The survey reveals that, while teachers have high expectations for their students, they overwhelmingly agree that too many students are leaving unprepared for success beyond high school. Primary Sources reveals teachers' thoughtful, nuanced views on issues at the heart of education reform - from performance pay and standardized tests to academic standards and teacher evaluation. Teacher responses reveal five powerful solutions to raise student achievement.
"Teachers are a critical part of preparing our children for the future, and their voices are an essential addition to the national debate on education," said Margery Mayer, Executive Vice President and President, Scholastic Education. "At Scholastic, we work daily with teachers and we know that they have powerful ideas on how best to tackle the challenges facing our schools. Since teachers are the frontline of delivering education in the classroom, the reform movement will not succeed without their active support. Primary Sources is a step in ensuring that teachers' voices are a part of this important conversation."
A Rhode Island school board's decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama's endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.
The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school turnaround program kicks into gear.
While there is fierce disagreement over whether the firings were good or bad, there is widespread agreement that the decision would have lasting ripples on the nation's education debate -- especially because Mr. Obama seized on the move to show his eagerness to take bold action to improve failing schools filled with poor students.
"This is the first example of tough love under the Obama regime, and that's what makes it significant," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, an educational research and advocacy organization.
Among the many controversies surrounding the Knowledge Is Power Program, the nation's most successful charter school network, is the suggestion that KIPP scores look good because their weakest students drop out. A new and unusually careful survey has found that in the case of at least one KIPP school, that's not true.
Last year I wrote a book, "Work Hard. Be Nice," about KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. I promised readers who think this makes me biased that I would mention this in future columns on KIPP. I don't think I'm biased, but I am obsessed. I think KIPP--and schools like it--are the most interesting phenomenon to emerge in public education in my lifetime. I make sure that all important developments in KIPPland--both good and bad--are reported here.
The new study, "Who Benefits From KIPP," [[[this link is to a page that makes you pay for the report. The link to the report directly for free is http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/5311, but I could not copy and paste it. Yet the WSJ managed to use it as a link in a blog post. Maybe our experts can figure this out.]]]was done by Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak and Christopher R. Walters of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan and Thomas J. Kane of Harvard University, for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is the first to use a randomized control group method to determine the effects of KIPP's long school days, energetic teaching and strong work ethic on fifth- through eighth-graders.
How appropriate that, as one of the biggest education protests in history unfurled across the state, California's application for a Race to the Top school reform grant was rejected by federal officials. Could there possibly be a louder wake-up call?
Given the chaos and infighting that muddied the state's halting attempt to qualify for Race to the Top, the rejection is no surprise. But if education funding continues to decline, and if turf battles continue to prevent real reform, it's not just students who will suffer. California's greatness is at risk.
For much of the late 20th century, our public schools, colleges and universities were the envy of the nation, driving an economic boom that made the Golden State a global power. It's no coincidence that this happened when taxpayers' commitment to education was at its zenith.
That support has been declining for years, and the results are alarming.
Community colleges are required to accept everyone, but next fall, they'll turn away some 200,000 students because they can't afford to offer enough classes. With unemployment around 12 percent, what will those students -- with only a high school diploma -- do while waiting for a spot on campus?
Los Angeles schools did not undergo the transformation we had expected from the Public School Choice initiative, which in its first year opened more than 30 new or underperforming public schools to outside management. Top-notch charter operators applied for relatively few schools and then were removed from the running at the last minute. The school board once again mired itself in political maneuvers instead of putting students first.
What transformation there was came, more surprisingly, from the teachers. They agreed to allow and create more pilot schools, which are similar to charter schools but employ district personnel. They formed partnerships and, with the help of their union, United Teachers Los Angeles, drew up their own, often strong applications for revamping schools. It would be wrong to underestimate the effort and skills needed to pull this off. The time frame was short and the list of requirements long. Unlike charter operators, which submit such applications as a matter of course, the teachers had no particular background for this work. They met with parents who have long fumed that the schools discourage their participation. They listened. They responded.
This is a tremendous step in a school district where, too often, teachers and their union have not been the agents of change but impediments to it. In fact, had the process worked as it was supposed to, the reform initiative would have served as a much stronger application for federal Race to the Top funds than anything the Legislature came up with.
President Barack Obama's budget will lead to deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, the CBO estimated Friday.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said President Barack Obama's budget would lead to annual deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.
The estimates are for larger deficits than the budget shortfalls expected by the White House.
Annual deficits under Obama's budget plan would be about $976 billion from 2011 through 2020, according to a CBO analysis of Obama's plan released Friday.
Try "tax gap" or "revenue problem." These are terms that Superintendent Dan Nerad -- who is slated to offer his budget recommendations to the School Board on March 8 -- and other school district players are starting to use to describe the financial troubles the district is facing.
What's commonly been defined as the district's budget gap in the past -- the difference between the cost to continue existing programs and salaries and what the district is allowed to tax under state revenue caps -- is actually $1.2 million. That's the amount the district would still have to cut if the board were willing to tax to the maximum amount allowed under the state revenue limits. (And in past years, Madison and almost every other district in the state have taxed to the limit.) But if you add in the drop in revenue from the state -- about $17 million for the 2010-2011 budget -- the gap grows to $18.2 million.
It's fair to ask then, what makes up the other $11.6 million that the administration calls the $29.8 million 2010-2011 budget gap? In a rather unorthodox manner, Nerad and company are including two other figures: $4 million in levying authority the district was granted through the 2008 referendum and $7.6 million in levying authority within the revenue limit formula.
Confused? You're not alone. It's got many folks scratching their heads. But the bottom line is this: Although the district has the authority to raise property taxes up to $312 on an average $250,000 home, it's unlikely the board would want to reap that amount of revenue ($11.6 million) from increased taxes. Large property tax hikes -- never popular -- are particularly painful in the current economy.
Madison school administrators laid out a grim list of possible cuts big and small Friday that School Board members can use as a starting point to solve a nearly $30 million hole in next year's budget.
The options range from the politically painless -- restructuring debt, cutting postage costs -- to the always explosive teacher layoffs and school closings.
But the school-closing option, which would close Lake View, Lindbergh and Mendota elementary schools on the city's North Side as part of a consolidation plan, already appears to be a nonstarter. A majority of board members said they won't go there.
"It's dead in the water for me," said Lucy Mathiak, board vice president.
President Arlene Silveira said the option is not on the table for her, either. Ditto for board members Marj Passman and Maya Cole, who said she immediately crossed out the option with a red pen.
Board members could decide to raise taxes enough to cover almost all of the $30 million, or they could opt to not raise taxes at all and cut $30 million. Neither option is considered palatable to board members or most residents, so some combination of the two is expected.
Seniors will have to "show evidence of their writing" in order to graduate, beginning with the class of 2013, Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron will announce Thursday.
"All students are expected to work on their writing both in general courses and in their concentration," Bergeron wrote in an e-mail to be sent to students Thursday. Sophomores will have to reflect on their writing in their concentration forms, according to the letter.
The changes come out of recommendations from the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, Bergeron told The Herald. Based on the findings of an external review and discussions with faculty and academic committees, the College Writing Advisory Board and the College Curriculum Council collaborated on a new, clearer delineation of the expectations of writing at Brown, she said.
Bergeron's letter ends with a statement on writing, explaining why it is an important skill for all graduates. "Writing is not only a medium through which we communicate and persuade; it is also a means for expanding our capacities to think clearly," she wrote.
When all the teachers were fired from Central Falls High School last week in a sweeping effort at school reform, their superintendent gave them a taste of the accountability President Barack Obama says is necessary.
It is a strategy that has been used elsewhere, such as in Chicago and Los Angeles. But while there have been some improvements in test scores, schools where most teachers have been replaced still grapple with problems of poverty and discipline. Even advocates of the approach say firing a teaching staff is just one of several crucial steps that must be taken to turn around a school.
Central Falls teachers have appealed the firings and both they and the administration are now indicating a willingness to go back to the table to avoid mass firings. Teachers say wholesale firings unfairly target instructors who work with impoverished children who have been neglected for years.
"We believe the teachers have been scapegoated here," American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said of the Central Falls firings this week.
That's a real quote. The speaker is Asbury Park School District's new superintendent Denise Lowe, who says that "major changes have to be made to the schools or the school district will cease to exist, " according to the Asbury Park Press. Enrollment is dropping because students are leaving for parochial schools and charter schools, so she's put together a five-year plan to improve achievement.
She's got her work cut out for her. Asbury Park High School, for example, with 478 kids, has a 45.7% mobility rate. (The state average is 9.6%.) 72% of students failed the 11th grade HSPA test in language arts and 86.1% failed the math portion. Average SAT scores are 325 in math and 330 in verbal. Attendance rates in 9th grade are 83%. A whopping 64.6% of kids never pass the HSPA and end up taking the Special Review Assessment, a back-door-to-diploma-route that is impossible to fail. The total comparative cost per pupil? $24,428. (DOE data here.)
When state Sen. James Meeks asks fellow Democrats to give education vouchers to kids who attend some of the worst schools in Chicago, the legislators often tell him they don't want to divert dollars from public education.
Meeks' response: "If the public schools are not doing their job, why do you want to continue to reward them with money?"
Good question.
We have yet to hear a good answer.
Meeks is trying valiantly to shake up the status quo in public education, and we stand with him in that effort. He is pushing a solid plan to create a voucher program for Chicago. The Senate's executive subcommittee on education is set to discuss the bill on Wednesday.
More than a dozen states have formed an alliance to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.
Stan Jones, Indiana's former commissioner for higher education, is leading the effort with about $12 million in startup money from several national nonprofits including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
About one in every two Americans who start college never finish, said Jones, who founded Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, last year.
The U.S. has focused on access to higher education for the past several decades, and states need to turn their focus toward how many students actually graduate after they get in, even if it means using a funding structure that is based on degree completion instead of attendance, Jones said Tuesday.
I think it is very difficult for a person who lives in a community to know whether, in fact, his educational system is what it should be, whether if you compare his community to a neighboring community they are doing everything they should be, whether the people that are operating the educational system in a state or local community are as good as they should be.
... I wonder if we couldn't have some kind of system of reporting ... through some testing system that would be established [by] which the people at the local community would know periodically ... what progress had been made."
Ravitch, once an ardent supporter of charter schools, accountability and other market-based reforms, has done a dramatic, highly public 180-degree turn. She now says these approaches will destroy public education if allowed to continue unfettered.
A former federal education official (under Bush I and Clinton) and an influential writer and thinker on education, Ravitch's change of heart is attracting national notice, and with good reason.
Her book, while exhibiting some of the new convert's zeal and bombast, contains thought-provoking stuff. While I don't agree with some of her conclusions, and though she paints some people as villains who don't deserve the abuse, she also makes some compelling arguments that those of us pushing some of the reforms she now abhors would be wise to ponder.
I wish to take issue with some of the assumptions made by the four teachers who were interviewed concerning the Gates Foundation grant ("Teachers in transition," Views, Feb. 28).
It was said several times that good parenting is essential for children's success in school. Not true! My two brothers and I grew up in a totally dysfunctional home, filled with constant criticism, hatred, anger, punishment, a mostly absent father, and one in which our mother constantly set us one against the other. There were no books, no magazines, no art on the walls and certainly no love or encouragement. Never once did we hear, "I'm proud of you!" or "Good job!"
We should have been poster children for not succeeding in school, but we weren't. Today, my older brother is a medical doctor. My younger brother has two master's degrees and is a life-long learner with a huge book collection. I started and completed my BA in English at age 25, with two toddlers to care for and no help from anyone, graduated in three years and had a successful career. We all still read voraciously.
Two dozen seventh-graders from Jefferson Middle School toil up a stony ridge on snowshoes, in the heart of the Madison School Forest. At the top they peel off into small groups and stand gazing upward at a twiggy village of giant nests, silhouetted against a pure-blue sky.
"How many do you see in your tree?" calls Nancy Sheehan, a school forest naturalist. The kids in her group count seven great blue heron nests in the bare branches of one towering white oak. They also record data about the tree, including its GPS location, which they'll turn over to the Department of Natural Resources as part of ongoing monitoring of this heron rookery near the Sugar River in southwest Verona.
"This is your chance to do some real science," Sheehan tells them. "Herons are extremely sensitive creatures. If this landscape continues to suit them, they'll come back again in spring. That's why your work today is important."
Seventh-grader Amos Kalder's cheeks are red with cold (and exercise) as he gazes upward at the rookery: "Dude, it'd be so cool to see these nests with all the herons in them. There'd be like 50 birds sitting in the sky."
The school forest is a real blessing, one in which I had an opportunity to participate in some years ago. I hope every classroom visits.
Last week I attended Education Industry Days in a hotel between the AFT and the NEA-a bit ironic, don't you think?. On the opening day, the front page of the USA Today reported that public sector union members now outnumber private sector members-we are well protected from ourselves.
The once respected scholar Diane Ravitch has joined the unions in monopoly protection-no choice, no market, no testing. She nearly made me crash my car in Phoenix this morning during her ridiculous back-to-the future NPR interview suggesting a return to free-for-all teach what-ever-however past. A former conservative, she now shuns markets, choice, testing-basically everything necessary to drive performance at scale. Hard to follow the logic of how her proposals would make things better for low income kids.
If you care about equality and excellence, see Education Equality Project and their case for accountability. Folks like Ravitch complain about accountability but don't offer an alternative that has a reliable chance for making this significantly better for low income kids.
Many states have made measurable progress in recent years toward the elusive goal of college readiness, according to a new report by the nonprofit Achieve.
Maryland, Virginia and the District have made more progress than some, but less than most. Each state has achieved only one of five college-readiness goals identified in the report.
"What started off as isolated efforts among a few states five years ago has produced a national consensus: All students should receive a quality education that prepares them to succeed in college, career and life," said Mike Cohen, Achieve's president, in a release.
Achieve's fifth annual "Closing the Expectations Gap" report finds that the majority of states, 31, now have high school standards in English and mathematics that align with the expectations of colleges and business. (Meaning that collegiate and business officials were involved in drafting the standards and approved the final product.) In 2005, by contrast, only three states had such standards.
Four additional states: new Hampshire, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Wyoming reported plans to administer college and career ready assessments, although their plans are not yet developed enough to include in the table on page 16.
Government-run, union-controlled education is as antiquated in 21st Century America as a mimeograph machine and as outdated as the New Deal.
The entire history of this great country is choice -- except in the all-important field of education, wherein one size shall fit all.
Imagine an America restricted to one mobile cell phone provider, one television station, never mind cable or satellite, one car insurance company -- that is the government-monopoly education system.
Confreres, here is change you can believe in. In the previous blog, I engaged in a colloquy with the delusional Matt Logan, who encourages us law and order types to volunteer for school breakfast. I'm game, but think we'd be welcome?
Imagine the Blaska Man grabbing the empty belt loop of a gangsta wannabe and saying, "Time-out, young fella."
The kid would laugh at my time out as they laugh at the teachers' time outs and the squire of Stately Blaska Manor would be brought up on charges of belt-loop grabbing with intent to instill values.
History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit, says a Chicago scholar
The history of publishing is swimming with pirates--far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing--and the future of the book.
Johns, a historian at the University of Chicago, has done much of his hunting from his office here, which is packed so high with books that the professor bought a rolling ladder to keep them in easy reach. He can rattle off a long list of noted pirates through the years:
Alexander Pope accused "pyrates" of publishing unauthorized copies of his work in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a man known as the "king of the pirates" used the then-new technology of photolithography to spread cheap reprints of popular sheet music. In the 1950s, a pirate music label named Jolly Roger issued recordings by Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats from LP's that the major labels were no longer publishing. A similar label put out opera recordings smuggled from the Soviet bloc.
As a teacher who has taught at various comprehensives for 20 years, I know that means a lot of tears and pain. I have seen parents who hit the bottle and come raging on to the school premises, demanding that the school takes their child; parents who do nothing but pester the school secretaries on the phone or by email; and parents who have just given up in despair, despite the fact that they have good grounds to appeal.
The main things parents should remember is not to descend into a great panic, and to review their situation dispassionately. What many don't grasp is that if they fail to meet the admissions criteria of a school, children won't get in, no matter how wonderful. The government has a strict admissions code that means schools have little room for manoeuvre: they can no longer just pick pupils they like the look of.
The Obama administration will inform most states on Thursday that they didn't make the grade to receive billions of dollars in education funding.
Forty states, plus the District of Columbia, submitted applications in January to compete in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which President Barack Obama describes as central to his push to improve local education standards.
The idea is to reward states that show the greatest willingness to push innovation through tough testing standards, data collection, teacher training and plans to overhaul failing schools.
The Department of Education turned to a panel of outside judges to help pick finalists and winners according to an elaborate scoring system, and on Thursday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce finalists for the first of two rounds of funding. Administration officials declined to comment, but people familiar with the deliberations said as few as five states could actually qualify when the first round of winners is announced in April.
Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos says they're also disappointed because there should have been more teacher involvement in the curriculum's development.
Mr Gavrielatos says a curriculum document alone won't improve educational outcomes and what teachers need are more resources.
Knewton, an online test prep company that uses adaptive learning to boost scores on standardized tests, announced today the launch of its new SAT prep course. The company already provides prep courses for the GMAT and LSAT, and now hopes to tap the market of high-pressure parents and overachieving high school students.
The SAT prep course will include live instructors, educational videos and real-time feedback on students' performance in specific SAT concepts. Overbearing parents can also track their children's progress with a set of tools designed for them. The course costs $490, (there's a $290 intro offer).
The courses use adaptive learning technology--a method that serves up questions and resources according to students' needs based on their past performance. The concept is taken from adaptive learning tests, which serve questions that get harder or easier, depending on a student's answers. In fact, Knewton's two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, helped design those tests: Swanson wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests, and McKinley wrote the algorithms for the ACT.
When Lindsey Lecus heads to the library for her literature studies class at Fritsche Middle School, she checks the assignments posted by her teacher in Maine and may enter a discussion forum with a classmate in Switzerland.
It's the second online English class Lecus has taken thanks to Fritsche's partnership with an international provider of online courses, and the seventh-grader said she likes the fact that she can work ahead of the traditional curriculum and earn credits toward high school.
In Milwaukee and elsewhere, more middle and high schools are starting to offer online classes to students during the day in place of one or more face-to-face classes.
Fully virtual schools in Wisconsin continue to attract students who pursue their entire educations through the Internet, but adding online classes to the options students have during a traditional school day is a trend that may combine the best of both worlds.
Advocates say students learn to work independently and can take harder courses in preparation for college while also getting in-school support from teachers and peers.
The demise of the venerable codex, or bound book, has been predicted at least since 1899, when HG Wells in The Sleeper Awakes envisaged the entire corpus of human literature reduced to a mini-library of "peculiar double cylinders" that would be viewable on a screen. More informed commentators have been arguing since the computer became domesticised in the 1980s that it would herald the end of print but, each time, the predicted end of days has rolled around with no sign of an apocalypse. As the joke goes, books are still cheap, robust and portable, and the battery life is great.
Most of us are in no hurry to see them go. This week the UK's early version of World Book Day rolls around with its freight of £1 children's books (the rest of the world gets around to it on April 23). Meanwhile, Oxford has just launched upon the public its lavish Companion to the Book, a vast work of reference seven years in the making in which some 400 scholars chart the forms that books have taken since mankind began scratching out characters.
But it seems reasonable to think that change is afoot. At the time of writing, an American court is in the process of reconsidering the settlement that Google reached with the Authors Guild in 2008, allowing the company to digitise thousands of books, including many still in copyright. The case has caused heated debate - court documents this week revealed that more than 6,500 authors, many well-known, have decided to opt out of the Google settlement. The case continues: its outcome promises to transform the way in which we view and access information. If Google has its way, one of the world's largest companies will end up with unchallenged distribution rights over one of the world's largest book collections.
When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the local public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.
Don't believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.
"Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city," said Ms. Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.
So she vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake's nationally recognized income-based busing policy.
"Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." So said Samuel Johnson, according to James Boswell--and if any man can get away with making a pithy, slightly nonsensical, yet somehow illuminating statement about the merits of dictionaries, repositories of our language, it is Johnson.
Watches and other kinds of clocks may not "go quite true" yet, but they have managed to attain such a degree of exactness that the point is largely moot. The most accurate form of timekeeper available today, a cesium fountain atomic clock, is expected to become inaccurate by no more than a single second over the next fifty-plus million years (although it is by no means clear what other clock might be used to judge the world's most accurate timekeeper).
What of dictionaries? Have they been improved to the same extent as clocks? Is there somewhere a dictionary that is expected to be wrong by only one word in the next fifty million years?
In November of 2008 the district was given voter approval for a three year operating referendum: $5 million in 2009-2010, $4 million in 2010-2011, and $4 million in 2011-2012, The approved operating referendum has a shared cost plan between property tax payers and the district.
During the fall adoption of the 2009-2010 budget the Board of Education worked to reduce the impact for property tax payers by eliminating costs, implementing new revenues, and utilizing fund balance (see Appendix A). The Wisconsin State 2009-2011 budget impacted the district funding significantly in the fall of2009-2010 and will again have an impact on the 2010-2011 projections.
The district and PMA Financial Network, Inc, have worked to prepare a five year financial forecast beginning with the 2010-2011 budget year, which is attached in pgs 1-2.
2010-2011 Projection Assumptions:
The following items are included in the Budget Projection:
1. The budget holds resources in place and maintains programs and services.
2. October enrollment projections
3. Salary and Benefits - Teacher salary projections are based on their current settlement, and all other units are at a projected increase consistent with recent contract settlements.
4. Supplies & Materials - A 1% (~$275,000) projection was applied to supply and material budgets each year
5. Revenues - The district utilized revenue limit and equalization aid calculations based on the 2009-2011 State Budget. All other revenues remained constant.
6. Grants - Only Entitlement Grants are included in the forecasted budget. Example ARRA funds are not included as they are· not sustainable funds.
7. Debt - The forecast includes a projection for the WRS refinancing as of January 26th Attached on pgs 3-4 is a current Debt Schedule for the District which includes thecurrently restructured debt and the estimated WRS refinanced debt.
8. The 4-k program revenues, expenditures and enrollment have been added to the
projections beginning in 2011-2012.
Introduction and Overview
1. Background and Overview Daniel A. Nerad, Superintendent of Schools
Prior to the fall of 2008, MMSD high schools functioned as four separate autonomous high schools, with minimal focus on working collaboratively across the district to address student educational needs.
In 2008 MMSD received a Federal Smaller Learning Communities for $5.3 million dollars over a five year period. The purpose of that grant is to support the large changes necessary to:
Increase student achievement for all students.
Increase and improve student to student relationships and student to adult relationships.
Improve post-secondary outcomes for all students.
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff, have examined the research that shows that fundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has been to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase stndent achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross - district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligll1nent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.
Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
While we are at the formative stages of our work, evidence shows that success is occurring at the school level. Feedback from principals indicates that district meetings, school buildings and classrooms are feeling more collaborative and positive, there is increased participation by teachers in school based decisions, and school climate has improved as evidenced by a significant reduction in behavior referrals.
This report provides a summary of the REaL Grant since fall of2008 and includes:
1. Work completed across all four high schools.
2. School specific work completed.
3. District work completed.
4. REaL evaluation
5. Future implications
In addition the following attachments are included:
1. Individual REaL School Action Plans for 09-10
2. REaL District Action for 09-10
3. ACT EP AS Overview and Implementation Plan
4. AVID Overview
5. Templates used for curriculum and course alignment
6. Individual Learning Plan summary and implementation plan
7. National Student Clearninghouse StudentTracker System
8. Student Action Research example questions
2. Presenters
Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools
Darwin Hernandez, East High School AVID Student
Jaquise Gardner, La Follette High School AVID Student
Mary Kelley, East High School
Joe Gothard, La Follette High School
Bruce Dahmen, Memorial High School
Ed Holmes, West High School
Melody Marpohl, West High School ESL Teacher
3. Action requested of the BOE
The report is an update, providing information on progress of MMSD High Schools and district initiatives in meeting grant goals and outlines future directions for MMSD High schools and district initiatives based on work completed to date.
MMSD has contracted with an outside evaluator, Bruce King, UW-Madison. Below are the initial observations submitted by Mr. King:
The REaL evaluation will ultimately report on the extent of progress toward the three main grant goals. Yearly work focuses on major REaL activities at or across the high schools through both qualitative and quantitative methods and provides schools and the district with formative evaluation and feedback. During the first two years ofthe project, the evaluation is also collecting baseline data to inform summative reports in later years of the grant. We can make several observations about implementation ofthe grant goals across the district.
These include:
Observation 1: Professional development experiences have been goal oriented and focused. On a recent survey of the staff at the four high schools, 80% of responding teachers reported that their professional development experiences in 2009-10 were closely connected to the schools' improvement plans. In addition, the focus of these efforts is similar to the kinds of experiences that have led to changes in student achievement at other highly successful schools (e.g., Universal Design, instructional leadership, and literacy across the curriculum).
Observation 2: Teacher collaboration is a focal point for REaL grant professional development. However, teachers don't have enough time to meet together, and Professional Collaboration Time (PCT) will be an important structure to help sustain professional development over time.
Observation 3: School and district facilitators have increased their capacity to lead collaborative, site-based professional development. In order for teachers to collaborate better, skills in facilitation and group processes should continue to be enhanced.
Observation 4: Implementing EP AS is a positive step for increasing post-secondary access and creating a common assessment program for all students.
Observation 5: There has been improved attention to and focus on key initiatives. Over two- thirds ofteachers completing the survey believed that the focus of their current initiatives addresses the needs of students in their classroom. At the same time, a persisting dilemma is prioritizing and doing a few things well rather than implementing too many initiatives at once.
Observation 6: One of the important focus areas is building capacity for instructional leadership, work carried out in conjunction with the Wallace project's UW Educational Leadership faculty. Progress on this front has varied across the four schools.
Observation 7: District offices are working together more collaboratively than in the past, both with each other and the high schools, in support of the grant goals.
Is it likely that the four high schools will be significantly different in four more years?
Given the focus on cultivating teacher leadership that has guided the grant from the outset, the likelihood is strong that staff will embrace the work energetically as their capacity increases. At the same time, the ultimate success ofthe grant will depend on whether teachers, administrators, anddistrict personnel continue to focus on improving instruction and assessment practices to deliver a rigorous core curriculum for all and on nurturing truly smaller environments where students are known well.
Playing along with the Mozart effect If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.
Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.
In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.
As if all that weren't enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.
But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you'll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.
It's absurd to believe anyone wants ineffective teachers in any classroom.
So when President Barack Obama, in a speech last fall at Madison's Wright Middle School, called for "moving bad teachers out of the classroom, once they've been given an opportunity to do it right," the remark drew enormous applause. Such a pledge is integral to the president's commitment to strengthen public education.
But this part of Obama's Race to the Top agenda for schools has occasioned much nervousness. Educators and policymakers, school boards and school communities have questions and genuine concern about what it means. What, exactly, is a bad teacher, and how, specifically, do you go about removing him or her from a classroom?
Many other questions follow. Do we have a "bad teacher" problem in Madison? Does the current evaluation system allow Madison to employ teachers who don't make the grade? Is our system broken and does it need Obama's fix?
A look into the issue reveals a system that is far from perfect or transparent. But Madison school board President Arlene Silveira agrees it's an issue that must be addressed.
The Florida State DOE posted (leaked) the January 13th confidential draft of the Common Core Standards in their Race to the Top Application. Thank you Florida!
The other day, I found myself rummaging through a closet, searching for my old viola. This wasn't how I'd planned to spend the afternoon. I hadn't given a thought to the instrument in years. I barely remembered where it was, much less how to play it. But I had just gotten word that my childhood music teacher, Jerry Kupchynsky -- "Mr. K." to his students -- had died.
In East Brunswick, N.J., where I grew up, nobody was feared more than Mr. K. He ran the town's music department with a ferocity never before seen in our quiet corner of suburbia. In his impenetrably thick Ukrainian accent, he would berate us for being out of tune, our elbows in the wrong position, our counting out of sync.
"Cellos sound like hippopotamus rising from bottom of river," he would yell during orchestra rehearsals. Wayward violinists played "like mahnyiak," while hapless gum chewers "look like cow chewing cud." He would rehearse us until our fingers were callused, then interrupt us with "Stop that cheekin plocking!"
The Board of Education has shown concern with current levels of participation among staff, parents, and students in the use of the Infinite Campus student information system. This concern comes despite many efforts to engage the stakeholders with various professional development opportunities and promotional campaigns over the past three years. In December 2009, the Board was provided a summary from a staff survey conducted on the topic explaining why staff had been reluctant to use the teacher tools. That report is found as an attachment to this report (see Attachment 1).
A survey of Wisconsin school districts was completed to determine the standards for teacher use of student information system technologies in the state. The survey gathered information about the use of grade book, lesson planners, and parent and student portals. Responses were collected and analyzed from over 20 Wisconsin districts. Nearly all responding districts report either a requirement for online grade book use, or have close to 100 percent participation. (See Attachment 2).
Describe the action requested of the BOE
The administration is requesting that the Board of Education take action in support of the proposed action steps to enhance the overall use of the teacher and portal tools among our stakeholders.
The proposed time line for full teacher use of grade level appropriate Infinite Campus teacher tools is: High school teachers - 2011-2012 End of 4th Quarter, Middle school teachers - 2010-2011 End of 4th Quarter, Elementary school teachers - End of 4th Quarter, 2011-2012 (calendar feature only)
Fascinating tone. I support the Board's efforts to substantially increase usage of this system. If it cannot be used across all teachers, the system should be abandoned as the District, parents and stakeholders end up paying at least twice in terms of cost and time due to duplicate processes and systems.
The system of excluding badly behaved pupils from school should be abolished because it punishes the most vulnerable children, a major new report on education has concluded, writes Anushka Asthana.
The study, by the thinktank Demos, says that difficult children are being pushed out of schools too often and finds that exclusions do not solve behavioural problems. Instead, they are linked to very poor results and in three out of four cases relate to children with special educational needs who should receive additional support. The report finds that 27% of children with autism have been excluded from school.
Sonia Sodha, co-author of the report, said: "Most other countries do not permanently exclude children from school in the same way we do. Instead of helping these children, we are punishing and then banishing them."
The report comes as figures from the Conservatives show that 1,000 pupils are excluded or suspended for physical and verbal assaults every day. Speaking at the Tory party spring conference, Michael Gove, shadow children's secretary, promised that in power he would make it easier for teachers to remove violent and disruptive pupils.
Mark H. Ingraham Dean Emeritus, College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin [Click to view this 23MB PDF "book"]:
Contents
Preface
Part I Liberal Education
The Omnivorous Mind 3
Given May 16, 1962, to the University of Wisconsin Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Republished from The Speech Teacher of September 1962.
Truth-An Insufficient Goal 17
The Keniston Lecture for 1964 at the University of Michi- gan; March 17, 1964. Republished from the Michigan Quarterly Review of July 1964.
On the Adjective "Common" 31
An editorial for the February 1967 Review of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, February 23, 1967.
Part II Educational Policy
Super Sleep-A Form of Academic Somnambulism 37
First given as retiring address as President of A.A. U.P . This much revised version was given to the Madison Literary Club, March 12, 1940.
No, We Can't; He Has a Committee Meeting 57
Madison Literary Club; May 11, 1953.
Is There a Heaven and a Hell for Colleges? 70
Commencement address, Hiram College; June 8, 1958.
The College of Letters and Science 79
Talk given to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, May 3, 1958.
Some Half Truths About the American Undergraduate 84
Orientation conference for Whitney-Fulbright Visiting Scholars. Sarah Lawrence College, September 6, 1962.
Maps Versus Blueprints 94
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin, May 18, 1973.
Part III To Students
A Talk to Freshmen 103
University of Wisconsin; September 18, 1951
Choice: The Limitation and the Expression of Freedom 112
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin; June 17, 1955. Republished from the Wisconsin Alumnus.
"The Good is Oft Interred with Their Bones" 121
Commencement, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; Janu- ary 19, 1968.
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College 129
April 9, 1969
The Framework of Opportunity 136
Thanksgiving Address, University of Wisconsin; November, 1947
Part IV A Little Fun
Food from a Masculine Point of View 149
Madison Literary Club; November 11, 1946
On Telling and Reading Stories to Children 165
Attic Angel Tower, Madison, Wisconsin; March 6, 1978
Three Limericks 179
Fragments 181
a. From an address given to the University oF Wyoming Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, April 26, 1965
b. A comment
Part V Somewhat Personal
Letter of Resignation from Deanship 185
April 5, 1961
Retirement Dinner Talk 188
May 24, 1966
Thanks to Richard Askey for extensive assistance with this digitized book. Clusty Search Mark Ingraham.
Parent Feedback on the Madison School District's "Branding" Expenditures
via a kind reader's email: Parent Diane Harrington:
Dear Board Members, Dr. Nerad, and Madison Alders,
My 11-year-old and I visited John Muir Elementary for basketball practice one recent evening. Their gym has banners noting that for several years they've been named a "School of Excellence."
Ben's school, Orchard Ridge Elementary, had just been dubbed a "School of Promise."
Which school would YOU rather go to?
But Ben didn't need a marketing effort to tell him which school was which; he knows some John Muir kids. Ben, too, would like to go to a school where kids are expected to learn and to behave instead of just encouraged to.
Just like those banners, the very idea of your upcoming, $86,000 "branding" effort isn't fooling anyone.
You don't need to improve your image. You need to improve your schools.
Stop condescending to children, to parents and to the public. Skip the silly labels and the PR plans.
Instead, just do your #^%* job. (If you need help filling in that blank, head to ORE or Toki. Plenty of kids - some as young as kindergarten - use several colorful words in the hallways, classrooms, lunchroom and playground without even a second look, much less disciplinary action, from a teacher or principal.)
Create an environment that strives for excellence, not mediocrity. Guide children to go above and beyond, rather than considering your job done once they've met the minimum requirements.
Until then, it's all too obvious that any effort to "cultivate relationships with community partners" is just what you're branding it: marketing. It's just about as meaningless as that "promise" label on ORE or the "honor roll" that my 13-year-old and half the Toki seventh graders are on.
P.S. At my neighborhood association's annual Winter Social earlier tonight, one parent of a soon-to-be-elementary-age child begged me to tell him there was some way to get a voucher so he could avoid sending his daughter to ORE. His family can't afford private school. Another parent told me her soon-to-be-elementary-age kids definitely (whew!) were going to St. Maria Goretti instead of ORE. A friend - even though her son was finishing up at ORE this year - pulled her daughter out after kindergarten (yes, to send her to Goretti), because the atmosphere at ORE is just too destructive and her child wasn't learning anything. These people aren't going to be fooled by a branding effort. And you're only fooling yourselves (and wasting taxpayer money) if you think otherwise.
Top issues mentioned include a lack of challenging academics and out-of-control behavior problems. Families are leaving because of real experience in the schools, not "bad press" or "street corner stories."
High academic standards: High academic standards are based on the principle that all students can learn. Raising expectations for what students are required to learn in the classroom will better prepare students for success. Standards in core subjects must be raised to meet international benchmarks to ensure American students can compete with their peers around the globe.
Standardized measurement: To provide an accurate depiction of where our students are, annual standardized testing must be continued and expanded in all 50 states. Measuring whether students are learning a year's worth of knowledge in a year's time is essential for building on progress, rewarding success and correcting failures. To accurately measure progress, modern data and information systems should be utilized, and there must be maximum transparency across the board.
Data-driven accountability: Holding schools accountable for student achievement - measured objectively with data such as annual standardized tests and graduation rates - improves the quality of an education system. Success and learning gains no longer go unnoticed and problems are no longer ignored, resulting in efforts to effectively narrow achievement gaps.
If they hadn't been mostly shut out of bids to run a slew of new L.A. Unified campuses, the groups might have demonstrated how they handle students with challenging needs.
Los Angeles school officials lost a chance this week to test whether the booming charter movement can take on all the problems of the district's traditional, and often troubled, schools.
On Tuesday, the Board of Education denied proposals from three major charter organizations that had sought to run newly built neighborhood schools, which would have included substantial numbers of limited-English speakers, special education students, foster children and low-income families.
That is exactly the population that charter schools have been criticized for not sufficiently reaching.
Charters are independently managed and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. They're also schools of choice -- campuses that parents seek and select. And researchers have found that charters enroll fewer students with more challenging, and often more expensive, needs.
Virginia officials are moving to sharply limit an alternative testing program that many schools in the Washington suburbs use to measure the abilities of special education students who traditionally have fared poorly on the state's Standards of Learning exams.
The effort by state lawmakers and education officials targets "portfolio" tests, which have helped increase passing rates at many schools by allowing students to avoid the multiple choice tests in favor of more flexible, individually tailored assessments. Critics have said that the alternative tests undermine Virginia's widely praised accountability system and overstate the progress districts are making in closing achievement gaps between racial groups.
For those who believe that performance pay and charter schools pose a threat to public education and that a cult of testing and accountability has hijacked school reform, an unlikely national spokeswoman has emerged.
Diane Ravitch, an education historian, now renounces many of the market-oriented policies she promoted as a former federal education official with close ties to Democrats and Republicans. In large part because of her change of heart, Ravitch's critique of the reform ideas that prevail in government, philanthropies and think tanks is reverberating in the world of education.
"In choosing his education agenda, President Obama sided with the economists and the corporate-style reformers," Ravitch writes in her book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," circulating in advance of its general release Tuesday.
She stoutly defends teachers unions, questions the value of standardized test data and calls the president's affinity for independently operated charter schools "puzzling."
Inessa Volkonidina had taken precalculus once and dropped it. She needed to take it again, and quickly, to fulfill a graduation requirement at Long Island University. She went online and found a company with an odd name, StraighterLine, that offered the course on even odder terms: $99 a month.
She thought it might be a scam. But StraighterLine, based in Alexandria, is a serious education company and a force that could disrupt half a millennium of higher-education tradition. The site offers students as many general-education courses as they care to take for a flat monthly fee, plus $39 per course. As college tuitions go, it is more on the scale of a cable bill.
The courses, standard freshman fare such as algebra, are cash cows for traditional schools, taught to students by the hundreds in vast lecture halls. They generate handsome profits to support more costly operations on campus.
Josephine Norwood, a Bronzeville mother of three Chicago public school students, has rebounded from two rounds of school closings that displaced her children from their schools. As she watched the Board of Education approve another set of schools for closing or turnaround last week, Mrs. Norwood had a simple question: Can Chicago Public Schools officials promise that the new schools will be better?
"If this process could guarantee the child the best and they would benefit from the school closing, then maybe it is a positive thing," Mrs. Norwood said. But she spoke out last week, along with many others, about the need for more transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.
As the public schools system entered its annual process of selecting schools for closing or turnarounds, parents, teachers and community groups leveled criticism at school officials for the lack of communication with the communities involved and questioned data from the central office that does not match the reality in the schools. Some also pleaded for the district to delay any action until the corrective measures taken at the lowest-performing schools -- the wholesale turnover of administrators and teachers -- could be better evaluated and a comprehensive plan for school facilities could be developed by a new task force.
"Star Wars," Legos and an interest in word origins combined to prepare Vishal Narayanaswamy to become the 2010 Madison All-City Spelling Bee champion Saturday.
The 12-year-old from Jefferson Middle School rose to the top of a field of about 50 third- through eighth-graders during the competition on the Edgewood College campus.
Vishal clinched the win, and a trip to the Badger State Spelling Bee, by spelling "apparatchik," a word of Russian origin meaning communist secret agent.
He wasn't sure about the word's meaning, but while studying for the competition he memorized the first four letters by remembering they were the same as the Tamil Indian word for "father."
"And it sounded Slavic so I knew it had a 'k' at the end," Vishal said. "I usually don't hear the meanings. I just remember word patterns."
The following administrative processes are currently being utilized to provide administrative leadership within the district:
Superintendent's Management Team Comprised of the Superintendent and department administrators, this team meets weekly and serves as the major decision making body of the administration.
Strategic Plan Monitoring and Support The Superintendent meets monthly with administrators with lead responsibility for the five priority strategies within the Strategic Plan.
Superintendents-Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director, Human Resources The Superintendent meets weekly with the Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Human Resources to discuss key operational issues.
Board Liaison Team The Board Liaison Team, consisting of designated administrators, meets three times a month to coordinate Board agenda planning and preparation. District Learning Council The District Learning Council consists of curriculum, instruction and assessment related administrators and teacher leaders. This council meets bi-weekly to discuss major instructional issues in the district and provides coordination across related departments.
Department Meetings Administrators assigned to each department meet as needed.
Principal Meetings Assistant Superintendents meet minimally one time per month with all principals
Committee Meetings There are numerous administrative/staff committees that meet as specific tasks require.
General Strengths of the Current Administrative Structure
The strengths of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
The basic structure of our district has been in place for many years. As a result, the current department structure is known by many and has predictable ways of operating.There exist needed checks and balances within the current system, given the relative equal status of the departments, with each department leader along with the Assistant Superintendents and Chief of Staff directly reporting to the Superintendent of Schools.
General Weaknesses of the Current Administrative Structure
The weaknesses of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
The degree to which the mission-work of the district, teaching and learning, is central to the function of administration is of concern especially in the way professional development is addressed without a departmental focus.
Traditional organizational structures, while having a degree of predictability, can become bureaucratically laden and can lack inventiveness and the means to encourage participation in decision making.
Organizational Principles
In addition to the mission, belief statements and parameters, the following organizational principles serve as a guide for reviewing and defining the administrative structure and administrative processes within the district.
The district will be organized in a manner to best serve the mission of the district .and to support key district strategies to accomplish the mission.
Leadership decisions will be filtered through the lens of our mission.
Central service functions will be organized to support teaching and learning at the schools and should foster supportive relationships between schools and central service functions.
The district's organizational structure must have coherence on a preK-12 basis and must address the successful transition of students within the district.
The district will be structured to maximize inter-division and intra-division collaboration and cooperation.
The district's organizational structure must have an orientation toward being of service to stakeholders, internally and externally.
The district must be organized in a manner that allows for ongoing public engagement
and stakeholder input.
To meet the district's mission, the district will embrace the principles of learning organizations, effective schools, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork.
The district will make better use of data for decision making, analyzing issues, improving district operations, developing improvement plans and evaluating district efforts.
The need for continuous improvement will be emphasized in our leadership work.
Ongoing development and annual evaluation of district leaders is essential.
Leadership Needs
Given these organizational principles, as well as a review of the current administrative structure and administrative processes within the district, the following needs exist. In addition, in the development of this plan, input was sought from all administrators during the annual leadership retreat, individual Management Team members and individual members of the Board of Education. These needs were specifically referenced in identifying the recommended changes in our administrative structure and related administrative processes that are found in this report.
There is a need to better align the administrative structure to the district's mission and Strategic Plan and to place greater priority on the mission-work of our organization (improved achievement for all students and the elimination of achievement gaps).
From an administrative perspective, the mission-work of our district is mainly delivered through teaching and learning and leadership work being done in our schools. Central service functions must act in support of this work. In addition, central service functions are needed to ensure constancy of focus and direction for the district.
New processes are needed to allow for stakeholder engagement and input and to create greater inter-department and division collaboration and cooperation
The mission of the district must be central to decisions made in the district.
The organizational structure must support PreK -12 articulation and coordination needs within the district.
Leadership work must embody principles of contemporary learning organizations, effective school practices, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork. Included in this will be a focus on the purposeful use ofteacher leadership, support for our schools and a focus on positive culture within the district.
There must be an enhanced focus on the use of data in our improvement and related accountability efforts.
There is a need to unifonnly implement school and department improvement plans and to change administrative supervision and evaluation plans based on research in the field and on the need for continuous improvement of all schools, departments and all individual administrators.
In addition, as this plan was constructed there was a focus on ensuring, over the next couple of years, that the plan was sustainable from a financial point of view.
David Carr writes about media and culture for The New York Times, which is not why I wanted to interview him for this series. Rather, it was what Atlantic Monthly called his "joyous peculiarity" in this article.
Carr tells his own story in "The Night of the Gun," a beautifully written, funny yet wrenching memoir that spares nothing about the drug addiction and madness into which he descended, but, from which, almost unbelievably, he escaped.
Before going to The Times, he was a contributing writer for Atlantic and New York Magazine and was the media writer for Inside.com. He also worked at the alternativeCity Paper in Washington D.C., as editor.
A father with three daughters, Carr and his wife now live in Montclair, N.J. Here are excerpts from our conversation about his formal and informal education.
As a rookie mom, I used to be shocked when another parent expressed horror about a teacher I thought was a superstar. No more. The fact is that your kids' results will vary with teachers, just as they do with pills, diets and exercise regimens.
Nonetheless, we all want our kids to have at least a few excellent teachers along the way, so it's tempting to buy into hype about value-added measures (VAM) as a way to separate the excellent from the horrifying, or least the better from the worse.
It's so tempting that VAM is likely to be part of a reauthorized No Child Left Behind. The problem is, researchers urge caution because of the same kinds of varied results featured in playground conversations.
Value-added measures use test scores to track the growth of individual students as they progress through the grades and see how much "value" a teacher has added.
A former bank compliance officer now enrolled in graduate school has won the inaugural essay contest on banking regulation sponsored by the International Centre for Financial Regulation and the Financial Times.
Her essay won praise from the judges for its discussion of the best way to give creditors a stake in preventing excessive risk-taking, including a comparison of contingent capital, a form of debt that converts to equity when a bank gets into trouble, with subordinated debt, in which some creditors would see their claims made junior to those of depositors and senior bond holders.
"Fuelling debate around regulatory reform remains a key objective for the ICFR and the Financial Times. The research prize was designed to engage financial industry participants in a discussion on the repercussions of banking regulation on the global economy and the submissions we received surpassed our expectations," said Lord Currie, ICFR chairman.
The Kaiser Foundation, in its January 2010 report on the use of electronic entertainment media by U.S. students, aged 8-18, found that, on average, these young people are spending more than seven hours a day (53 hours a week) with such (digital) amusements.
For some, this would call into question whether students have time to read the nonfiction books and to write the research papers they will need to work on to get themselves ready for college and careers, not to mention the homework for their other courses.
For the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, however, the problem appears to be that we are not paying enough attention to the possible present and future connections between digital media and learning, so they have decided to invest $50,000,000 in grants to explore that relationship.
One recent two-year grant, "for $650,000 to study the effect of digital media on young people's ethical development and to develop curricula for parents and teachers," went to the Harvard Education School, which has distinguished itself for, among other things, seeming to have no one on its faculty with any research or teaching interest in the actual academic work of high school students, for example in chemistry, history, economics, physics, foreign languages, calculus, and the like.
The Harvard Ed School faculty do show real interest in poverty, disability, psychological problems, race, gender, ethnicity, and the development of moral character, so they may take to this idea of studying the relation between electronic media and student ethics. A visit to the Harvard Ed School website, and a review of the research interests of the faculty would prove enlightening to anyone who thought, for some odd reason, that they might be paying attention to the academic work of students in the schools.
Whether Harvard will conclude that seven hours a day doesn't help much with the ethical development of students or not, one could certainly wish that they would discover that spending a lot of their time on digital media does very little for student preparation for college academic work that is at all demanding, not to mention the actual work of their careers, unless they are in the digital entertainment fields, of course.
The National Writing Project, which regularly has received $26,000,000 each year in federal grants for many years to help thousands of teachers feel more comfortable writing about themselves, has now received $1.1 million in grants from the MacArthur Foundation, presumably so that they may now direct some of their efforts to helping students use digital media to write about themselves as well.
Perhaps someone should point out, to MacArthur, the National Writing Project, the Harvard Ed School, and anyone else involved in this egregious folly and waste of money, that our students already spend a great deal of their time each and every day writing and talking about themselves with their friends, using a variety of electronic media.
In fact, it is generally the case that the students (without any grants) are already instructing any of their teachers who are interested in the use of a variety of electronic media.
But like folks in any other self-sustaining educational enterprise, those conversing on the uses of digital media in learning about digital media need a chance to talk about what they are doing, whether it is harmful to serious academic progress for our students or not, so MacArthur has also granted to "the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (in Monterey, California) $2,140,000 to build the field of Digital Media and Learning through a new journal, conferences, and convenings (over five years)."
The MacArthur Foundation website has a list of scores more large grants for these projects in digital media studies and digital learning (it is not clear, of course, what "digital learning" actually means, if anything).
This very expensive and time-consuming distraction from any effort to advance respectable common standards for the actual academic work of students in our nation's schools must be enjoyable, both for those giving out the $50 million, and, I suppose, for those receiving it, but the chances are good that their efforts will only help to make the college and career readiness of our high school students an even more distant goal.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The doors at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry on Fish Hatchery Road don't open for another 30 minutes, but a line has already formed.
They wait quietly, for the most part, this rainbow coalition of all ages: African-American grandmothers, Latino families, young women with pierced tongues, disabled seniors and working fathers.
What they have in common is poverty. Once a month, with a valid photo ID, clients get enough groceries to last a week.
"As my kids get older, I just keep having to cook more, so every bit helps," says Belinda Washington, 44, who has four children at home ages 4 to 17.
A Chicago native, Washington moved to Madison 17 years ago and lives in the Lake Point neighborhood off West Broadway on the city's south side. Her resume includes food service, catering and factory work but she's been unemployed since her youngest was born. "I keep applying but the jobs are hard to come by," she says.
ne of the most firmly entrenched academic practices centers upon the use of textbooks as the fundamental drivers of curricula. Ultra-expensive, these items represent one of the largest costs for public school systems as well as those attending college.
As the digital age continues to work its way into the stuffy world of academics, there are clear indications that textbooks are gradually being phased out in many areas of the country. The sheer volume of resources available on the net is leading many school districts to create and share their own materials.
Macmillan, considered one of the largest players in that old, conservative world, apparently has now also seen the "handwriting on the wall." The company recently announced it will offer academics an entirely new format: DynamicBooks.
The mass firing of teachers at a Rhode Island high school this week is hardly new: For nearly two decades, states and school districts have been "reconstituting" staffs at struggling public schools.
But Tuesday's move by Central Falls, R.I., Superintendent Frances Gallo to remove all 74 teachers, administrators and counselors at the district's only high school may be the first tangible result of an aggressive push by the Obama administration to get tough on school accountability -- and may signal a more fraught relationship between teachers unions and Democratic leaders.
"This may be one school in one town, but it represents a much bigger phenomenon," says Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., education think tank. "Thanks to years of work battling the achievement gap and the elevation of reform-minded education leaders, we may finally be getting serious about the nation's lowest-performing schools."
In some quarters I'm viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I've spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I've spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.
These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.
In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must "let meaning choose the word, not the other way around." By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms---campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors---enormous and grotesquely unfair power.
You would think that raising standards and pushing for an extending day and year would be a great time to embrace a couple thousand entrepreneurial organizations that specialize in targeted tutoring and compelling after-school learning. You would think that a disruptive effort to fix or replace the lowest performing schools would be accompanied by an insurance policy of direct support for low income students that have been trapped in low performing schools. You would think that 500,000 low income minority students receiving targeted tutoring sounded like a good idea. However, Supplemental Educational Service (SES) providers are getting the message that they are not needed; more specifically, they are getting the message that school districts want the $3b Title 1 set aside back.
Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot; SES was inserted as what seemed like punishment in a progression of interventions in NCLB and, a result, most districts didn't do much to market these extended learning opportunities. Where districts embraced SES providers as partners in student success, tailored solutions worked well for schools, kids, and parents.
The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.
Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring, and nine agreed to pay fines of a few thousand dollars or take classes, or both, so they could keep their jobs. One teacher lost his job before his case was decided, after the department called immigration officials and his visa was revoked. The cases of more than 50 others are awaiting arbitration.
Lawyers for the department said an additional 418 teachers had left the system after finding out that they could face charges of incompetence. Because no formal charges were brought in these cases, the number is hard to corroborate; officials from the teachers' union said they doubted it was that high.
In education, there's a lot up in the air right now: standards, testing, employment practices, budgets, student technology, online learning, and federal policy. It's conceivable that if we took advantage of the uncertainty, a few places could emerge with a better and cheaper education system. Here's three pivot points that could anchor next generation systems:
1. Merit Badges: the goal of college and career readiness and development Common Core standards will require most states, district to make lots of course and curriculum. States could use the opportunity to replace the 100 year old seat time and credit system with a new merit badge system--a bundle of assessments would be used to demonstrate learning of a bundle of competencies. Take ratios and fractions as an example; a merit badge would describe what students need to know and a combination of ways they can show it including content-embedded assessment (e.g., game score), performance assessment (e.g., project), adaptive assessment (e.g., online quiz), and an end of unit test. Mastery-based learning and merit badge evidence would replace grades and courses as the primary mechanism to mark student progress.
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has fired 10 D.C. teachers for administering corporal punishment and two for sexual misconduct since July 2007, according to a report she submitted to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray.
Another 28 teachers served suspensions of as long as 10 days for administering corporal punishment, defined by District law as the use or attempted use of force against a student as punishment or discipline.
The report, sent to Gray (D) on Feb. 12, does not include names and offers only fragmentary descriptions of the incidents. Most involve grabbing, shoving, slapping, scratching or arm-twisting. One teacher drew a five-day suspension for putting a student in a closet and turning the lights off in February 2008. A case of spanking in November 2007 resulted in a teacher's dismissal and reinstatement after a hearing officer's decision. An instructor who threatened students with a knife if they misbehaved received a one-day suspension.
For entertainment value read the Discovering Math Q&A in this article in the Seattle Times. The Discovering Math guy (1) doesn't always answer the question asked, (2) answers but doesn't address the topic properly - see the question on if Discovering Math is "mathematically unsound" and (3) sounds like he works for the district.
Here's one example:
The Discovering books have been criticized by parents, but they've been the top pick of a couple of districts in our area, including Seattle and Issaquah. Any thoughts on why the textbooks seem to be more popular with educators than with parents?
Ryan: I think because (parents) lack familiarity -- this doesn't look like what I was taught. I don't know how you get students to a place where more is required of them by repeating things that have been done in the past. That's not how we move forward in life.
A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High School
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. -- A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.
When the teachers failed to adopt a 'transformation' plan that included a modest lengthening of the day, the superintendent shifted to Plan B, what federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) call Turnaround, which requires that at least 50% of the staff be replaced. Under Rhode Island law, teachers must be notified of the potential for nonrenewal by March 20, hence the board vote and notices. All the teachers will have the opportunity to reapply, up to half will be rehired.
The hysteria is now reverberating on CNN and papers around the country. Central Falls may be an early example but there are thousands to come. As I began reporting in October, SIG will cause widespread urban disruption. But we'll all need to be cautious to use language carefully and differentiate between 'firing all the teachers' and notifying them of the requirement to reapply for their positions.
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on "What Wisconsin's Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late." 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy:
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again - if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
It helps explain why the teachers got precisely what they wanted from the Democratic-run Legislature and governor's office in the last state budget: repeal of state limits on teacher compensation.
It also shows why reforming public education - to require more accountability and innovation - won't be easy. The teachers union has resisted pay for performance, something commonplace in most professions, and frowned on innovative charter schools. State leaders will need to stand up to the union if public education is to be transformed.
I would like to discuss a book which helps to inform educators and parents about gifted education in other countries from developmental, family and international perspectives. It is an excellent example of the increasing worldwide interest in studying and educating the most advanced students. By using the case study research method, Hanna David, Ph.D. and Echo Wu, Ph.D. have written fascinating accounts of Israeli and Chinese students who have demonstrated giftedness in public school classrooms and at the university level. David is a professor of education at Ben Gurion University in Eliat, Israel and Echo Wu is now teaching at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Their book, Understanding Giftedness: A Chinese-Israeli Casebook (Pearson, 2010, ISBN 981-06-8300-6), contains such research topics as a study of five gifted boys in one classroom, parental influences of three Chinese-American families on talent development, case study of a visually disabled young boy (seven years), conversation with a Chinese Nobel Laureate (chemistry), and case study of a gifted family emigrating from Russia to Israel. All of these studies are a clear demonstration of the forcefulness of gifted characteristics and behavior under sometimes severe pressures from cultural influences and learning disabilities. The book also serves as an inspiration to researchers who use the case study method for studying giftedness. In this sense, David and Wu follow the traditions of Piaget and other masters of child development who grounded their work in making systematic observations and carefully recording the individual child's intellectual development. I highly recommend that Understanding Giftedness be used as a model for further studies of the gifted mind.
He tells the National Governors Assn. that states will be required to help students be 'college- and career-ready.'
Reporting from Washington - Decrying shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Obama on Monday pledged to make American students more competitive in the global economy by encouraging higher state standards for primary and secondary education.
Students in the United States lag by several crucial measures, Obama told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House, with eighth-graders ranking ninth in the world in math and 11th in science.
"In response to assessments like these, some states have upped their game," Obama said, pointing to Massachusetts, where eighth-graders are tied for first in science around the world. "Some states have actually done the opposite, and between 2005 and 2007, under No Child Left Behind, 11 states actually lowered their standards in math."
When Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars unveiled a cost-cutting measure this month that would have made the high school senior year optional, perhaps no one in the state Capitol Building was more surprised than 18-year-old Jake Trimble, who already opted out of the second half of senior year just weeks earlier.
He has spent the past month working at the Capitol as an unpaid intern for the state Democratic Party's communications team, designing posters and writing scripts for legislators' robocalls. Trimble graduated in January, one semester early, from the nearby Academy of Math Engineering and Science (AMES).
"I'm very happy to not be in high school anymore," says Trimble, who proudly reports that he's "not rotting in my parents' basement." Actually, when the legislative session ends next month, he'll move on to another internship (this one paid) as a lab assistant at the University of Utah's Orthopedic Center.
Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students -- most of them academically advanced and, as a result, a tad restless -- who are tinkering with their senior year. A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.
An Interview with Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky
It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky recently.
We discussed a wide variety of topics, including Eagle's History (founded in 1982), curricular rigor, the importance of good textbooks and critical student thinking. I also found it interesting to hear Mary's perspective on public / private schools and her hope, in 1982, that that the Madison School District would take over (and apply its lessons) Eagle School. Of course, it did not turn out that way.
Finally, Mary mentioned the term "high school" a number of times, along with $20,000,000. I suspect we'll see a high school at some point. It will take a significant effort.
Thanks to Laurie Frost for arranging this interview.
Will Fitzhugh...has been fighting for more non-fiction for years: Help pick non-fiction for schools
Jay Matthews:
It wasn't until I was in my fifties that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been, and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for either generation were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I would also have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Maybe that's changing. Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other non-fiction stars.
Sadly, no.
The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-2009 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program that encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
When I ask local school districts why this is, some get defensive and insist they do require non-fiction. But the only title that comes up with any frequency is Night, Elie Wiesel's story of his boyhood in the Holocaust. It is one of only two nonfiction works to appear in the top 20 of Accelerated Reader's list of books read by high schoolers. The other is 'A Child Called 'It,' Dave Pelzer's account of his alleged abuse as a child by his alcoholic mother.
Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review quarterly publishes research papers by high school students, has been fighting for more non-fiction for years. I agree with him that high school English departments' allegiance to novels leads impressionable students to think, incorrectly, that non-fiction is a bore. That in turn makes them prefer fiction writing assignments to anything that could be described by that dreaded word "research."
A relatively new trend in student writing is called "creative nonfiction." It makes Fitzhugh shudder. "It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in 'essay contests' by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as 'How do I look?' and 'What should I wear to school?'" he said in a 2008 essay for EducationNews.org.
Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction's simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don't know enough about the real world because they don't read non-fiction and they can't read non-fiction because they don't know enough about the real world.
Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. "Language mastery is not some abstract skill," he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. "It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community."
I think we can help. Post comments here, or send an email to mathewsj@washpost.com, with non-fiction titles that would appeal to teens. I will discuss your choices in a future column. I can see why students hate writing research papers when their history and science reading has been confined to the flaccid prose of their textbooks. But what if they first read Longitude by Dava Sobel or A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar? What magical exploration of reality would you add to your favorite teenager's reading list?
It's that time of year again. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training and high school students are puzzling over which classes to take next fall. The choices students make do matter. Outside of grades, nothing is more important in college admissions than the classes kids take in high school. "Strength of Program" is a big deal.
Let's start with the basics. Colleges expect students to take at least five core academic subjects every year of high school -- English, social studies, science, math and foreign language.
In a perfect world, students would take each core subject every year. But the world isn't perfect and colleges don't expect kids to be. As long as students take each core subject through eleventh grade, they should feel free to pursue their particular academic interests in greater depth during twelfth grade. There's nothing wrong with dropping social studies senior year in order to double up on science.
n a conversation last week with a big muckety-muck, I realized that there are two fundamentally different, and largely opposed, understandings of outcomes assessment in play. Which definition you accept will color your expectations.
The first is what I used to consider the basic definition: internal measures of outcomes, used to generate improvement over time. If you understand assessment in this way, then several things follow. You might not want all of it to be public, since the candid warts-and-all conversations that underlie real improvement simply wouldn't happen on the public record. You'd pay special attention to shortcomings, since that's where improvement is most needed. You'd want some depth of understanding, often favoring thicker explanations over thinner ones, since an overly reductive measure would defeat the purpose.
The second understanding is of assessment as a form of marketing. See how great we are! You should come here! The "you" in that last sentence could be prospective students being lured to a particular college, or it could be companies being lured to a particular state. If you understand assessment in this way, then several things follow. You'd want it to be as public as possible, since advertising works best when people see it. You'd pay special attention to strengths, rather than shortcomings. You'd downplay 'improvement,' since it implies an existing lack. And you'd want simplicity. When in doubt, go with the thinner explanation rather than the thicker one; you can't do a thick description in a thirty-second elevator pitch.
A math class for students with intellectual disabilities at Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax practiced naming dates on a calendar one recent morning and deciphering what time it is when the big hand is on the 10 and the little hand is on the 11. But first, the teacher led them in a prayer.
Father in heaven, we offer you this class and all that we may accomplish today," they said together.
Federal law requires that public schools offer a free, appropriate education for students with disabilities, and federal and state governments subsidize the higher costs of smaller classes and extra resources. Catholic schools have no such legal mandate, and financial constraints have historically made it difficult for them to offer similar specialized services.
Readers can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?
In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.
Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.
While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years -- allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing -- DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.
Why haven't schools of choice yet achieved a broader appeal? Publicly funded school choice programs--charter schools in forty-three states and vouchers in a few localities--have for the most part been qualified successes. Yet the rhetoric of choice supporters promised much more effective schools and an era of innovation that has not come to pass. In Learning as We Go: Why School Choice Is Worth the Wait, Paul T. Hill examines the real-world factors that can complicate, delay, and in some instances interfere with the positive cause-and-effect relationships identified by the theories behind school choice.
Hill explains why schools of choice haven't yet achieved a broader appeal and details the key factors--including politics, policy, and regulation--that explain the delay. The author then suggests changes in public policy along with philanthropic investment that could overcome barriers and increase the rate of progress toward full operation of what he calls the "virtuous cycle" stimulated by school choice.
Arundhati Jayarao, Middle and High School Chemistry and Physics, Virginia; Sarah Yue, High School Chemistry, California; Kirk Janowiak, High School Biology and Environmental Science, Indiana; Ben Van Dusen, High School Physics, Oregon; Mark Greenman, High School Physics, Massachusetts; and John Moore, High School Environmental Science, New Jersey.
Moderated By: Kent Hughes, Director, Program on America and the Global Economy.
The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellows offer a unique perspective on U.S. schools and educational policymaking; they have been chosen by the Department of Energy to spend a fellowship year in congressional or executive offices based on their excellence in teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics(STEM) subjects in K-12 schools. The Fellows will discuss how to achieve national standards that are benchmarked to the world's best and how higher standards will affect changes in curricula.
Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion -- the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.
Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She's gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.
There is an overemphasis on "the program elements," she said, "things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day." She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.
"If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well," she said, "that was just 100 times more important than anything else."
33-year-old math and science whiz kid -- working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley -- may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he's become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.
Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type's Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell.
Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned - and rightly so - that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days. If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers. "Can we even be said to be alive," one agitated young mother wrote me, "if our status updates go unread?" The answer, of course, is no. In the realtime environment, the absence of interactive stimuli, even for brief periods of "time," may result in a state of reflective passivity indistinguishable from nonexistence. On a more practical level, a lack of realtime skills is sure to constrain a young person's long-term job prospects. At best, he or she will be fated to spend his or her days involved in some form of manual labor, possibly even working out of doors with severely limited access to screens. At worst, he or she will have to find a non-tenure-track position in academia.
In Wisconsin, we have always been proud of our strong education system. New demands and technology are changing the way we prepare our children to enter the 21st century workforce. We must ensure that our state's education system remains a national leader by providing our children with the skills that are needed to compete in a global economy.
It has been proven that not every child learns the same way. In fact, some students learn best outside of the traditional bricks-and-mortar school setting. For these children, virtual schools have come to fill an educational need. Virtual schools involve long-distance learning that use computers and Internet connections. These schools employ vigorous and challenging curricula along with regular interaction with state-certified teachers.
However, virtual schools were nearly wiped out in 2007 due to a court challenge by WEAC, the state's teachers union.
In response, in the last legislative session I led the charge to ensure that virtual schools remain an option for Wisconsin's parents and children. A bipartisan compromise was reached to keep the schools open but included a cap of 5,250 students requested by critics until a legislative audit could be conducted.
Senior House Republicans and Democrats recently announced a new bi-partisan effort to re-authorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's a good sign for some real progress, both for education specifically and Washington in general, but there's been no word on whether the Senate is so inclined. The "proposals" put forward so far by the Department of Education and at yesterday's announcement are light on details, so this post is my attempt at rectifying some of the major issues around No Child Left Behind.
No More Pass/ Fail
One of the more frequent criticisms of the law concerns its binary pass/ fail system. If a school fails to meet a single academic benchmarks in a single grade in a single subject by a single sub-group of students, it is said to not meet "adequate yearly progress," or AYP. If it does not meet AYP for multiple years in a row, the school is subject to a series of consequences that become more punitive the more years it misses targets.
The strengths of this arrangement came from protecting under-served populations. Because a school would be held accountable for all groups of students, it focused much more attention on achievement gaps and did not let a school hide its problems educating important sub-groups behind school-wide averages.
For Milwaukee Public Schools, the financial crisis that many of us have been warning about is here. As principals get their initial budgets, they are faced with cutting teachers; larger class sizes; the loss of specialty teachers such as those in art, music, physical education; and the lost of librarians. Perversely, schools that have the best student achievement are often the hardest hit, since the middle-class students attracted to these schools bring less aid with them.
While many other school systems (and other government units) are also facing cuts brought on by exploding health care costs and the weak economy, MPS has been particularly hard hit. And much of the MPS pain is self-inflicted. Next year, MPS is facing a 77% fringe benefit rate, meaning that the cost to the district of an employee is 77% more than that employee's pay. If the unfunded liability for retiree benefits were correctly included, the fringe benefit rate would rise to almost 104%, meaning that the cost to the school district of an employee is more than twice that employee's pay.
The biggest factor in the exploding benefits cost is the cost of health care. MPS offers two plans, one of which costs MPS twice as much per employee as the other. Yet because MPS pays the full cost of the plans, there is no incentive for employees to pick the less-expensive plan. Employees can retire at age 55 and continue to have MPS pay for their health insurance at the rate it did when they retired. Pensions have an employer and an employee contribution, but MPS pays both parts.
Today's idea: Since written language is merely a technology for storing and transferring information, it's likely to be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more effectively, a futurist says.
E Reader on empty bookshelf. This image has been manipulated using Photoshop.
The Britannica Blog has a series of posts called Learning and Literacy in the Digital Age, including this one by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist. He speculates that text could be rendered obsolete not by the "culture of the image" -- that threat is so last century -- but by the so-called "information age" itself:
... Research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.
I attended Harium's Community meeting and the 43rd Dems meeting (partial) yesterday. Here are some updates (add on if you attended either or Michael DeBell's meeting).
We covered a fair amount of ground with Harium but a lot on the math ruling/outcomes. Here's what he said:
the Board will decide what will happen from the math ruling. I asked Harium about who would be doing what because of how the phrasing the district used in their press release - "In addition to any action the School Board may take, the district expects to appeal this decision." It made it sound like the district (1) might do something different from the Board and (2) the district had already decided what they would do. Harium said they misspoke and it was probably the heat of the moment.
He seems to feel the judge erred. He said they did follow the WAC rules which is what she should have been ruling on but didn't. I probably should go back and look at the complete ruling but it seems like not going by the WAC would open her decision up to be reversed so why would she have done it? He said the issue was that there are statewide consequences to this ruling and that Issaquah and Bellevue (or Lake Washington?) are doing math adoptions and this ruling is troubling. I gently let Harium know that the Board needs to follow the law, needs to be transparent in their decision-making and the district needs to have balanced adoption committees or else this could happen again. No matter how the district or the Board feel, the judge did not throw out the case, did not rule against the plaintiffs but found for them. The ball is in the Board's court and they need to consider this going forward with other decisions.
On my show last night -- which re-runs at 10pm tonight on FBN -- I said that Washington DC gives voucher schools $7,500 per student, but DC's public schools cost twice that much: $15,000.
The $15,000 number has been cited by congressmen and newspapers like the WSJ and the Denver Post. It comes from the the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census.
Unfortunately, it's also wrong. Or at least very misleading, since it ignores major sources of spending. As CATO Education scholar Andrew Coulson explains:
DC also has a "state" level bureaucracy that spends nearly $200 million annually on k-12 programs, and the city spends another $275 million or so on school construction, school facilities modernization, and other so-called "capital" projects.
But those aren't included in the regular spending figures.
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student. The DC budget morass illustrates the necessity of K-12 budget clarity in all cases, including Madison.
Sixteen Wisconsin high schools had at least one senior in the Class of 2009 who received the top score on the ACT, ACT Inc. announced this week.
The schools with students who received 36s were:
Arrowhead High School in the Town of Merton
Bay City Baptist School in Green Bay
Central Wisconsin Christian High School in Waupun
Edgewood High School in Madison
Fort Atkinson High School
Heritage Christian School in West Allis
Homestead High School in Mequon
Marquette University High School in Milwaukee
Middleton High School
Monona Grove High School in Monona
Neenah High School
Onalaska High School
Oshkosh North High School
Oshkosh West High School
Wauwatosa East High School
West High School in Madison
The New Jersey Education Association makes it easy to conclude that most public school teachers in New Jersey are lousy or mediocre. They must be, because they're willing to settle for the same pay the lazy, unprepared and uninspiring slug in the chaotic classroom across the hall is getting.
The NJEA -- the union for most of New Jersey's public school teachers -- refused to back the state's application for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid because the Rise to the Top program demands that teachers tie their pay to measurable student performance.
President Obama has endorsed merit pay, but the NJEA, as expected, has come up with many reasons why this is a bad idea. Of course it won't propose its own merit-pay formula, because the NJEA is against any form of merit pay.
The union doesn't want teacher pay tied to testing because a teacher could be penalized if "a kid was up all night playing video games" or "didn't have breakfast," NJEA president Barbara Keshishian recently told The Star-Ledger editorial board. That's a silly argument, because no one would suggest tying a salary to a single test, but those are the kinds of silly arguments the NJEA makes.
With a little over a month before the Right to Education Act is notified, union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said that his ministry would hold consultations with the states to resolve issues such as fee structure and teachers' salaries, that are likely to arise while implementing the Act. Stressing that the government will take steps to prevent commercialisation of education, Mr Sibal said that the consultation would be undertaken to evolve a policy so that "poor, marginalised, and disadvantaged" students are not adversely affected.
"Our aim is to ensure that all children in India get quality education, but we are against commercialisation of education. Incessant hike of fee and overcharging from parents is something we do not support. I will talk to every state government on issues regarding implementation of the RTE Act from April 1. I will be meeting Delhi chief minister Sheila Diskhit on Monday regarding the same," the minister said. Mr Sibal drew special attention to the need to provide some relaxation to "marginal" schools, which are currently not recognised. The RTE makes it mandatory for all schools to be recognised. While state laws, such as that of Delhi, require that all recognised schools pay teachers according to government scales, and tuition fees of schools be regulated.
Most American schoolchildren learn about Islam in a social studies classroom. But at the Friends School in Baltimore, eighth-graders make their own mini-pilgrimage every year, to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C.
As their bus rattles along the highway south to Washington, most of the kids are busy making up songs about each other. But 12-year-old Julia Potter is counting off the Five Pillars of Islam on her fingers: charity, prayer, fasting, profession of faith, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
These kids are well-versed in the basics of Islam and more: In class, they learn about Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity; about prophets, taboos and holy laws. And every year, eighth-graders visit the Islamic Center -- though every year, according to teacher Deloris Jones, they get there late. "There's absolutely nothing over the years I have been able to do to keep this thing on time," Jones says.
Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to "get the job properly done" -- to use Herbert's words.
Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called "Bridging Differences." This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch's critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.
If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.
Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC's schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools.....
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration's ongoing "same service" governance approach.
It wasn't until I was in my 50s that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for both generations were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I also would have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Could that be changing? Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other nonfiction stars.
Sadly, no. The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-09 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program, which encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
Thinking about the Cost of Educating Students via the Madison School District, Virtual Schools and a Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes email to State Senator Fred Risser
Madison School Board member Ed Hughes sent me an e-mail pointing out another vexing problem with Wisconsin's school funding system and how it penalizes the Madison district, which I've written about in the past. Hughes notes in his e-mail "This particular wrinkle of the state school financing system is truly nuts."
Hughes is incensed that the IQ Academy, a virtual school operated by the Waukesha district, gets over $6000 in state aid for poaching students from the Madison district while total state aid for educating a student in a real school here at home is $3400. Waukesha makes a profit of about $500 per student at the expense of taxpayers here, Hughes says. And that's including profits going to the national corporate IQ Academy that supplies the school's programming.
The complete text of Ed Hughes letter to Senator Risser:
Sen. Risser:
As if we needed one, here is another reason to be outraged by our state school financing system:
This week's issue of Isthmus carries a full page ad on page 2. It is sponsored by "IQ Academy Wisconsin," which is described as a "tuition-free, online middle and high school program of the School District of Waukesha, WI." The ad invites our Madison students to open-enroll in their "thriving learning community."
What's in it for Waukesha? A report on virtual charter schools by the State Fiscal Bureau, released this week, sheds some light on this. The Madison school district gets a little more than $2,000 in general state aid for each of our students. If you include categorical aids and everything else from the state, the amount goes up to about $3,400/student.
However, if Waukesha (or any other school district) is successful in poaching one of our students, it will qualify for an additional $6,007 in state aid. (That was actually the amount for the 2007-08 school year, that last year for which data was available for the Fiscal Bureau report.) As it was explained to me by the author of the Fiscal Bureau report, this $6,007 figure is made up of some combination of additional state aid and a transfer of property taxes paid by our district residents to Waukesha.
So the state financing system will provide nearly double the amount of aid to a virtual charter school associated with another school district to educate a Madison student than it will provide to the Madison school district to educate the same student in an actual school, with you know, bricks and mortar and a gym and cafeteria and the rest.
The report also states that the Waukesha virtual school spends about $5,500 per student. So for each additional student it enrolls, the Waukesha district makes at least a $500 profit. (It's actually more than that, since the incremental cost of educating one additional student is less than the average cost for the district.) This does not count the profit earned by the private corporation that sells the on-line programming to Waukesha.
The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts' students. Grantsburg, for example, has a virtual charter school that serves not a single resident of the Grantsburg school district. What a great policy.
By the way, Waukesha claims in its Isthmus ad that "Since 2004, IQ Academy Wisconsin students have consistently out-performed state-wide and district averages on the WKCE and ACT tests." I didn't check the WKCE scores, but last year 29.3% of the IQ Academy 12th graders took the ACT test and had an average composite score of 22.9. In the Madison school district, 56.6% of 12th graders took the test and the district average composite score was 24.0.
I understand that you are probably tired of hearing from local school board members complaining about the state's school funding system. But the enormous disparity between what the state will provide to a virtual charter school for enrolling a student living in Madison, as compared to what it will provide the Madison school district to educate the same student, is so utterly wrong-headed as to be almost beyond belief.
Ed Hughes
An interesting side note: the Madison Metropolitan School District's current business manager, Erik Kass, was instrumental to helping to keep Waukesha's virtual high school open and collecting a surplus when he was the business manager for that district.
I found the following comments interesting:
An interesting note is that the complainers never talked about which system more effectively taught students.
Then again, it has never really been about the students.
The "Great Recession" has pushed many organizations to seek more effective methods of accomplishing their goals. It would seem that virtual learning and cooperation with nearby higher education institutions would be ideal methods to provide more adult to student services at reduced cost, rather than emphasizing growing adult to adult spending.
Nearly six months after the state announced it was scrapping its annual test for public school students, efforts to replace it with a new assessment are on hold and state officials now estimate it will take at least three years to make the switch.
The reason for the delay is tied to what is happening in the national education scene.
Wisconsin is among the 48 states that have signed onto the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which expects to complete work on grade-by-grade expectations for students in English and math by early spring. Once that is done, the anticipation is that the state will adopt the new standards, using them to help craft the new statewide test.
Wisconsin officials also are planning to compete for part of $350 million that the U.S. Education Department plans to award in the fall to state consortiums for test development.
"What's a court doing making a decision on math textbooks and curriculum?" This question and its associated harrumphs on various education blogs and online newspapers came in reaction to the February 4, 2010 ruling from the Superior court of King County that the Seattle school board's adoption of a discovery type math curriculum for high school was "arbitrary and capricious".
In fact, the court did not rule on the textbook or curriculum. Rather, it ruled on the school board's process of decision making--more accurately, the lack thereof. The court ordered the school board to revisit the decision. Judge Julie Spector found that the school board ignored key evidence--like the declaration from the state's Board of Education that the discovery math series under consideration was "mathematically unsound", the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction not recommending the curriculum and last but not least, information given to the board by citizens in public testimony.
The decision is an important one because it highlights what parents have known for a long time: School boards generally do what they want to do, evidence be damned. Discovery type math programs are adopted despite parent protests, despite evidence of experts and--judging by the case in Seattle--despite findings from the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
First-year elementary school teachers must take a "generalist" exam to be in compliance with federal standards. The Texas Education Agency has successfully fought for a waiver that would exempt fine-arts teachers from the test.
While I certainly realize the time and expense involved in testing as many as 30,000 new teachers statewide and understand TEA's desire to cut that number, I feel that such an exemption is a big mistake.
Elementary school is a time when children learn about the world around them and make connections between subjects. More detailed instruction in various disciplines comes at the secondary level. With the current emphasis on testing in math, reading, science and social studies, classroom teachers find themselves working to see that basic concepts in each of these subjects are learned by their students. Time constraints make lessons with numerous "connections" difficult to achieve.
What better place to weave many subjects together than in the music or art class? I have always chosen to teach this way but have discovered than many music teachers do not, perhaps because they do not see the necessity or because they may not see the connections themselves. A test of general knowledge may help.
A fresh, educational reform is sweeping the U.S. and leaving Vermont in the Jurassic period of traditional public schools. What is this reform and why haven't many MMU students heard of this?
The terms public school and private school are terms that are familiar to all of us. There is nothing foreign to us about the concept (or the practice) of public schools. Something that is not so familiar is the idea of a charter school. Many MMU teens have no idea what a charter school even is. An interviewed sophomore asked if charter schools were "private schools that public people went to," that student was by far closer than most MMU students. There has been a fast-paced change in education over the past several years and while many states have jumped on the bandwagon, Vermont hasn't even come close. That change is the development of charter schools.
The U.S .Charter Schools website defines charter schools as "innovative public schools providing choices for families and greater accountability for results." In other words, they are schools that have been granted a charter exempting themselves from selective state or local rules, while still adhering to the basic educational laws. Their purpose is to build strong communities, to focus on the kids and their needs as well as the make sure each child has the access to a quality education.
After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.
As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.
The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?
After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.
The current system -- designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case -- involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student "profiles," using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools.
It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.
This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student's home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten.
Sitting on the desk of the secretary of education are dozens of ideas bold enough to finally start solving our country's education crisis. They are contained in applications by 40 states and the District of Columbia for grants from the Race to the Top fund, a $4.35 billion piece of the stimulus package designed to dramatically improve student achievement.
Congress established strong guidelines to guarantee that states spend Race to the Top money on audacious reforms. Many states responded with equal fortitude, submitting proposals to radically improve how they use data or to adopt college- and career-ready standards -- concepts that used to be considered third rails in the world of education. Never before has this country had such an opportunity to remake the way we teach young people.
One reason I am so optimistic about these developments is because, after decades of diffuse reform efforts, they all zero in on the most important ingredient of a great education: effective teachers. The key to helping students learn is making sure that every child has an effective teacher every single year.
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student -- more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I'll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student.
School Supt. Frances Gallo and the city's teachers union gave conflicting accounts Thursday of how talks to reform the struggling Central Falls High School broke down last week, leading to the dramatic decision to fire the entire staff.
Gallo said she offered the high school's 74 teachers "100-percent job security" for the 2010-11 school year, if they'd agree to her six conditions to transform the low-performing school.
But teachers union President Jane Sessums said that while the issue of job security certainly came up in negotiations, Gallo never promised to protect every job.
In the wake of their failure to reach agreement, Gallo mailed letters Thursday afternoon to every teacher at Central Falls High School informing them that she is recommending their termination at the end of the current school year. The school district's Board of Trustees will vote on Gallo's recommendation Feb. 23.
The lure of $4 billion in federal funding at a time of fiscal peril has driven state after state toward school reforms long considered politically unlikely, undoable or unthinkable. This week, Maryland provided the latest surprise: Gov. Martin O'Malley, who is seeking union support for reelection, proposed tighter rules for teachers to qualify for tenure and opened the door to broader use of test scores to evaluate them.
Many teachers view such policies with deep skepticism despite a national movement to overhaul public education's seniority system. Until recently, there was no reason to think Maryland would join the movement because the state has high-performing public schools and strong unions. O'Malley (D) initially hesitated to propose any changes. But the governor shifted course, hoping to boost Maryland's chances at snaring as much as $250 million in President Obama's Race to the Top competition.
"Who fights money?" asked Clara Floyd, president of the Maryland State Education Association, a teachers union.
The contest has catalyzed action from coast to coast to expand charter schools, lay the groundwork for teacher performance pay, revise employee evaluation methods and even consider the first common academic standards. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), also seeking reelection, said it added up to too much federal intrusion in local affairs and pulled his state out of the competition. But O'Malley aims for Maryland to apply in June.
Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the report is one of four that will eventually be released in order to study how the schools have multiplied, who is attending them, who is teaching in them, and whether they're succeeding. The Gates Foundation popularized and funded the small schools movement in New York, fueling the growth of nearly 200 small schools with a $150 million investment.
A New-York based research group, MDRC, conducted the report, which does not look at the schools' academic record -- that analysis will come out in spring -- but focuses on the schools' enrollment and demographics.
One of the report's key findings is that the small schools are seeing modest demand from students.
Have your kids ever gotten an A for work that you, or they, didn't think was worthwhile? Something like that happened recently with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Education historian and New York University Professor Diane Ravitch gave him an A for effectiveness at getting buy-in for linking teacher evaluations to student test scores and a D- for pushing bad ideas. I would forgo the A and lower the grade to an F for pushing ideas that are destructive.
Why destructive? At first blush, rewarding teachers for higher student test scores seems reasonable to many people. The second and third blushes are the problem.
New regulations impacting Milwaukee school choice program: School closures up, number of new schools down
The Public Policy Forum, via a kind reader's email:
Between the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, fewer new schools joined the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) than ever before. In addition, 14 MPCP schools closed and another three schools merged--the most year-over- year closures the program has seen (Chart 1).
In this 12th edition of the Public Policy Forum's annual census of MPCP schools, we find 112 schools are participating in the choice program, enrolling 21,062 students using taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. The number of full-time equivalent students using vouchers is greater than in any other year of the program's 19-year history; however, there are fewer schools participating today than earlier this decade (Chart 2, page 2).
The decline in the number of new schools and the increase in the number of closed schools are likely due to new state regulations governing the program. These regulations require schools new to the program to obtain pre-accreditation before opening and require existing schools to become accredited within three years of joining the program.
Throughout this decade, the average number of schools new to the program had been 11 per year. Under the new pre- accreditation requirement, 19 schools applied for pre-accreditation, but just three were approved. Another 38 schools had previously indicated to state regulators an intent to participate in the program in 2009-2010, but did not apply for pre -accreditation. The pre-accreditation process is conducted by the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL) at Marquette University.
Will Morton was a happy, creative and enthusiastic child until he went to kindergarten.
As his classmates sounded out letters, and began reading words and simple sentences, he fell behind. His teacher was perplexed by Will's lack of progress because he was clearly bright and had plenty of exposure to books and language at home. And his parents were worried, because Will's older brother and sister had learned to read easily.
"We knew nothing about reading problems because we hadn't ever had any experience with them, but I remember wondering in kindergarten if he was dyslexic because he seemed to have trouble recognizing letters and associating them with sounds," says Chris Morton, Will's mother. "His teacher told us not to worry, that it was a little developmental delay and we needed to give him time and he'd be fine."
But she was wrong, experts on dyslexia say.
Students like Will - who have persistent trouble reading because the neural pathways in their brains do not decode letters and sounds in the ways that make reading and writing natural - need specific help, they say, and the sooner the better. Without that kind of help, they will never catch up, and even if they manage to disguise their different learning style, they are likely to continue to struggle with reading, spelling, language and sometimes with math; in short, they won't ever achieve their full intellectual potential.
Deborah Gist: Chasm: Seniority is no longer a way in which teachers will be selected and assigned in our state. I sent a letter to all superintendents last fall to remind them that the Basic Education Program Regulation in going in effect this summer, and seniority policies would be inconsistent with that regulation. Unfortunately, state statute requires that layoffs be done on a "first in, first out" policy. Legislation would be required to change that, and I would wholeheartedly support it if it were introduced. I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the very highest quality teacher is in every classroom in our state.
Deborah Gist: I can't imagine how any district or school leader could interpret my words or actions to be anything other than ensuring the top quality, so "change for change's sake" would be contradictory to that.
Bob: Please run for governor. I love your go getter attitude!
Deborah Gist: I appreciate your support very much. Make sure to keep watching and hold me accountable for results!
Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You can replace the teachers....and you can give new teachers incentives to change things around. But this is a band aid. Teachers are blamed for too many problems. They can't be expected to solve the problems of society. Teachers have many many challenges these days- more so than 25 years ago. Kis and parents need to take responsibility for on education. Just look at math grades around the state. Kids don't know how to deal with fractions because they don't know how to tell time on an analgoue clock. But the teachers are blamed. Let's take a look at the real problems. Educate the kids - the parents- look around the country at other programs. Please don't make this mistake.
Deborah Gist: Parent involvement is important, and supportive, engaged parents are important partners in a child's education. Fortunately, we know that great teaching can overcome those instances when children have parents who are unable to provide that level of support. I don't blame teachers, but I do hold them accountable for results. I also hold myself and everyone on my team accountable.
Matt: Will you apologize for repeatedly saying that "we recruit the majority of our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college"? The studies that you cite do not back this up.
Deborah Gist: Matt: As a traditionally trained teacher, I know this is difficult to hear. I don't like it either. Unfortunately, it is true. While there are many extraordinarily intelligent educators throughout Rhode Island and our country, the US--unlike other high performing countries--recruits our teachers from the lowest performers in our secondary schools based on SAT scores and other performance data.
Deborah Gist: If you have a source that shows otherwise, I'd love to see that. I'm always open to learning new resources. So, I'd be happy for you to share that.
The September 1994 issue of NEA Today, the monthly newspaper published by the National Education Association, reports the "resolutions" adopted by delegates to their 1994 Representative Assembly. Below is a small sampling from the 302 resolutions that were passed this year. (One of the resolutions listed is not among those adopted by the NEA. See if you can figure out which one it is.)
Arbor Day Education
Repatriation of Native American Remains
Left-Handed Students
Professionalism and Accountability
Genocide
Competency Testing and Evaluation
World Hunger
Statehood for the District of Columbia
Violence Against and Exploitation of Asian/Pacific Islanders
The resolution that didn't make it is "Professionalism and Accountability".
A major part of Gov. Bob Riley's final year agenda, the legalization of charter schools, has been killed by the Alabama Legislature.
The Senate Finance and Taxation-Education Committee voted 13-4 Wednesday to kill the Senate version of Riley's charter school bill. The House Education Appropriations Committee voted 13-2 last week to kill the House version of the bill.
"I would pretty much conclude it has no chance for the rest of the session," a proponent, state Superintendent Joe Morton, said after the vote Wednesday.
An opponent, teacher lobbyist Paul Hubbert, agreed the issue is gone "for this year," but he said it may be back after the 2010 state elections.
Gov. Bob McDonnell wants to fill a $2 billion budget shortfall by eliminating more than 500 jobs over three years, instituting 10 furlough days for state workers and slashing services for children and the sick.
But he proposes no new taxes, and he is electing to keep the $950 million-a-year car-tax break for localities.
The governor also wants to spare higher education from further cuts and seeks to restore some of former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's proposed cuts to public safety.
Schools and health care -- the largest parts of the state's general fund budget -- take heavy hits under McDonnell's plan, with reductions of $731 million to public education over the two-year budget period, and more than $300 million to health-care programs.
"All the cuts give me heartburn," McDonnell said at a news conference. "All of them were difficult because I know that behind every cut there is a Virginian . . . that might be affected."
Less than half of California school districts and only about a quarter of teacher unions have promised to make key education reforms required for the state to win $700 million in competitive federal grants, officials said Wednesday.
Only 41 percent of school districts and 60 percent of eligible charter schools signed on for changes needed to participate in the Obama administration's Race to the Top contest in which states can win extra federal funding to ease the impact of steep budget cuts.
Still, state education officials were hopeful California would be among the states chosen in April to share about $4.35 billion. Officials note that districts agreeing to the reforms represent 58 percent of the state's public school students and almost 61 percent of students from low-income families.
"We're very pleased with the turnout," said Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education. "We think we have a very strong application. We're competitive."
State and federal leaders are touting charter schools as key to education reform, but advocates say the movement needs more public funding to grow in New Jersey.
"It's politically expedient to talk about charter schools," said Rex Shaw, lead person at the Teaneck Community Charter School. "But show me the money."
Governor Christie has been a vocal supporter of the schools, which act independently of local districts even though they are publicly financed. But his office was mum on whether more money would be available to spur the movement.
At their best, charters serve as laboratories for innovation -- trying new approaches without the restraints of union rules and administrative orthodoxy.
But the schools have been slow to catch on in most of New Jersey -- hampered by a lack of money and interest in a state where the public schools generally are considered good. Nearly 80 percent of the 68 charters now operating are in urban areas where the local districts are struggling, if not failing.
In his blockbuster best-selling book, writer Malcolm Gladwell identified a phenomenon called ―the tipping point.‖ This point marks the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable and something happens that, in either large or small measure, turns the world on its axis. For those who have been working to improve education, it appears that the tipping point may have finally arrived.
Currently, K-12 education in the United States is dealing with three major crises, each of which on its own is capable of wreaking havoc on schools and communities around the nation, but together are an all-out perfect storm. Simultaneously, the U.S. education system is facing
global skill demands vs. educational attainment;
the funding cliff;
and a looming teacher shortage.
These three factors have brought our education system to a point where the need for change and innovation is no longer something to be researched and discussed. We must do what people have done for centuries and turn crisis into opportunity, somehow making progress in the face of enormous challenges.
Sally made 500 gingerbread men. She sold 3/4 of them and gave away 2/5 of the remainder. How many did she give away?
This was one of the homework questions in Craig Parsley's fifth-grade class. The kids are showing their answers on the overhead projector. They are in a fun mood, using class nicknames. First up is "Crackle," a boy. The class hears from "Caveman," "Annapurna," "Shortcut" and "Fred," a girl.
Each has drawn a ruler with segments labeled by number -- on the problem above, "3/4," "2/5" and "500." Below the ruler is some arithmetic and an answer.
"Who has this as a single mathematical expression? Who has the guts?" Parsley asks. No one, yet -- but they will.
This is not the way math is taught in other Seattle public schools. It is Singapore Math, adopted from the Asian city-state whose kids test at the top of the world. Since the 2007-08 year, Singapore Math has been taught at Schmitz Park Elementary in West Seattle -- and only there in the district.
In the war over school math -- in which a judge recently ordered Seattle Public Schools to redo its choice of high-school math -- Schmitz Park is a redoubt or, it hopes, a beachhead. North Beach is a redoubt for Saxon Math, a traditional program. Both schools have permission to be different. The rest of the district's elementary schools use Everyday Math, a curriculum influenced by the constructivist or reform methods.
Ninety percent of parents believe it is likely that their children will attend college, and most of them believe that any student can get the loans or financial aid required. But a new survey, reported on by my colleague, Tamar Lewin, finds that parents don't have a lot of confidence in the way colleges are managed.
Increasingly, parents think colleges are too focused on their own finances, rather than the educational experience of students, the survey found.
"One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education," said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, "is the vote of no confidence we're getting from the public. They think college is important, but they're really losing trust in the management and leadership."
KC District parents, students make pitch to keep their schools open Read more: KC District parents, students make pitch to keep their schools open & Interesting Comments
For many of the 400 people who came out to defend their schools from Kansas City's chopping block Tuesday night, this was their first time for one of these hearings.
Not for those from McCoy Elementary.
They'd been through this before, most recently a year ago. And the school's supporters were back again in their orange shirts with their neighbors, teachers and a popular principal.
"It's the best school on the planet -- McCoy," 7-year-old Edwin Lopez declared to a round of cheers.
With the district pushing its longest list of possible closings ever, McCoy supporters know it will be hard for the school to escape one more time.
But as Superintendent John Covington and his staff started the community tour Tuesday night, he left everyone in the crowd with some hope that his plan to close half of the district's 60 schools could change. He also left them with the reality that many of their schools will be closed.
The President and Secretary deserve credit for advancing the teacher quality agenda-a tough thing for democrats to do. Some of the credit for that goes to Jon Schnur and DFER. Because we don't have very good predictive techniques, it's important to watch teachers in their first few years, keep the best, and ask 10-20% or so that don't appear cut out for teaching to find a new job. Historically, 99% of teachers have been granted lifetime employment. The idiocy of this policy is finally coming to light. Two examples follow.
NY Chancellor Joel Klein wrote a candid piece for the NY Daily Post which ran with the headline: Get Incompetent Teachers Off the Payroll:
Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort--in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.
Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.
Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.
The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.
The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.
"That's a central problem we're trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges," said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. "We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon."
State Sen. James T. Meeks, D-Chicago, one of the most influential voices in the city's black community, recently stood before a group of mostly white, free-market conservatives to passionately plead for their support.
It was an unlikely meeting of the minds at an Illinois Policy Institute lunch session, but when Meeks was finished, he had his audience cheering. Might this be the launch of a political alliance that would unshackle Chicago kids from the tyranny, dangers and incompetence of Chicago Public Schools?
Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, was pitching Senate Bill 2494, his proposed Illinois School Choice Program Act that would give vouchers to students in the worst public schools to attend non-public schools of their choice.
Meeks, a recent voucher convert, came to talk political reality: Legislation that would free children from their bondage would be hard for African-American lawmakers to oppose. Combined with the support of Republican voucher supporters, they might be able to create a coalition that could make vouchers available for the first time in Illinois.
My guest is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of "Why Don't Students Like School?"
By Daniel Willingham
I have recently written about the problems in trying to use student achievement data to measure teachers' effectiveness.
But that doesn't mean that I think teachers' effectiveness should not be measured.
Indeed, I think it's essential that it is.
People focus on just one of the uses to which measurement of teachers could be put: rewarding the successful and firing the unsuccessful. But if you're interested in improving the practice of teaching, you must have a method of measuring teachers' effectiveness.
The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, held a conference call last week with about a thousand of his closest friends to talk about the Obama administration's initiatives on child nutrition and physical activity. He started by describing the twin problems that make this a high priority for the administration: obesity and hunger. A third of the nation's children are overweight, and 16.5 million children live in food-insecure households -- those with hunger or fear of starvation.
For decades, the federal government has sought to address child hunger through programs such as the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Snack Program, Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, and Child and Adult Care Food Program. These programs are coming up for review as part of the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which will occur this year, and attention will also be given to how they reduce obesity. Vilsack says the Obama administration is committing an additional $1 billion to this effort.
However, I was disappointed not to hear from Secretary Vilsack or see in the Obama budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2011 a clear commitment to fund Farm to School programs, which aim to get locally grown food served to children in school cafeterias. Among the groups working to do so are the National Farm to School Network and the Community Food Security Coalition.
After five years of getting nowhere with Los Angeles Unified officials, fed-up parents in Sunland-Tujunga are using a new state law to force change at a long-troubled middle school.
Parents and community members say problems at Mount Gleason Middle School, which has been on a federal list of under-performing campuses for a dozen years, go beyond failing test scores.
"There is an unsafe atmosphere at this school that is spilling over into the community...," said Lydia Grant, a resident and parent of a former Mount Gleason student. "People are tired of it and we want to see change."
Thanks to new legislation, known as the "parent trigger" law, they're able to do something about it.
Rhode Island education officials are pushing an expansion of charter schools as a way to boost innovation and quality.
Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said her goal is to have excellent schools for all children, whether it's a charter school or regular school.
Gist and other charter school supporters want to change a law that limits the number of state charter schools to 20 and says a maximum of 4 percent of the state's students can attend them. That's about 6,000 students.
Right now, Rhode Island has 13 charter schools with 3,200 students and 3,600 student on waiting lists.
Gist plans to testify in favor of removing the cap when lawmakers reconvene later this month.
Here is an open letter which I sent last night to Edie Harding, Executive Director of the State Board of Education. Under the letter I have paraphrased her reply; below that is my response to her.
I am responding to your comment today in the Seattle Times:
' "It's long been established that in our state, the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum." ....the Seattle decision was "a surprise, and if I were the Seattle School Board, I would -- well, I might take issue with the judge," she added.'
Having been one of the plaintiffs in the recent textbook appeal in Seattle, I'm well aware that School Boards make curriculum decisions. However, Ms. Harding, what recourse do you suggest to parents when School Boards abdicate their decision making power - refusing to consider voluminous, compelling, evidence from parents and community members, and instead give school administrators carte blanch to turn math education in directions that are unacceptable to informed parents and community members?
A Clayton State University education professor says the recipe has been in place for a while for CRCT cheating with the main ingredient being the pressure on schools to reach artificial and questionable goals.
Here is an opinion piece by Mari Ann Roberts, assistant professor in Clayton State University's department of teacher education:
I like to cook so I'm going to share a recipe with you.
Take one flawed underfunded federal education improvement act, like NCLB,
add increasing pressure on individual schools to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress,"
include some inane expectations that teachers can work miracles,
sprinkle liberally with furlough days, suspended raises, and budget cuts dating back to 2003 that will total more than $2.8 billion through the fiscal year ending next June.
And what do you get? Whatever it is, it can't be good.
Covington and other officials announced on Saturday that up to 31 of the district's schools could close, including Westport High School and possibly Northeast High School. The central office at 12th and McGee streets also will be for sale.
The proposed reductions are fiscally sound and clearly necessary. The schools on average are operating at only half capacity. The months-long decision-making process evaluated each school's age, costs, efficiency and durability, as well as the best transfer possibilities for students to get a good education.
Covington and his administrative team deserve high marks so far for involving the public in the decision process, beginning last year. Parents, students, district workers, and business, faith, civic and community leaders were invited to "Right Sizing the District" forums.
Anthony J. Tata was an Army brigadier general in northeast Afghanistan's Kunar Province in April 2006 when a Taliban rocket slammed into a primary school in Asadabad, killing seven children and wounding 34.
The vicious attack and others like it by the Taliban left him with a thought: "It struck me at the time that if the enemy of my enemy is education, then perhaps that's a second act for me."
Three years later, Tata began his second act by accepting Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's offer to become chief operating officer for D.C. public schools, a newly created post that places him in charge of purchasing, food service, technology and other support areas.
After a 28-year career that took him to Kosovo, Macedonia, Panama, the Philippines and the international agency charged with thwarting improvised explosive devices, Tata's mission is to help bring the District's notorious school bureaucracy to heel.
Brent Elementary principal Cheryl Wilhoyte was mentioned in this article. Wilhoyte is a former Superintendent of the Madison School District.
TheDailyPage.com partnered with UW-Madison Prof. Sue Robinson's graduate journalism class during the fall semester to report on some of the challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District. The following are the resulting stories, focusing on the entire district as well as on each level; elementary, middle schools and high schools.
The proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars would chip away at Utah's $700-million shortfall. He's since offered a toned-down version: Just make senior year optional.
Reporting from Denver - At Utah's West Jordan High School, the halls have swirled lately with debate over the merits of 12th grade:
Is it a waste of time? Are students ready for the real world at 17?
For student body president J.D. Williams, 18, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. "I need this year," he said, adding that most of his classmates feel the same way.
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
The years after 1976 have seen school teaching change beyond recognition. The curriculum has become more uniform, inspection is much tighter and more prescriptive, and targets and league tables are the principal drivers of school improvement. Lazy teachers and ineffective schools have been tackled under this centralising imperative.
However, concerns are now heard that the new focus on league tables is narrowing the quality and breadth of education. Universities and employers often feel that schools are very effective in instructing their pupils in how to get top marks, but are less impressive at teaching them how to think.
A report that Maryland students ranked first in the nation in the percentages of high school seniors taking and passing Advanced Placement exams comes just as Gov. Martin O'Malley is set to announce his legislative proposals for making the state more competitive for millions of dollars in new federal education funds. But it's too early for congratulations just yet. Maryland's high ranking on the AP exams masks glaring disparities between the state's best- and worst-performing school districts, and the legislative package the governor is proposing will need to be scrutinized closely on key elements, notably those involving charter schools, where the state still needs to demonstrate its commitment to education reform.
It's a sign of definite progress that Governor O'Malley, who recently bristled at the notion that Maryland was ill-prepared to compete for federal school dollars under the nationwide Race to the Top program, has been working with teachers unions in recent weeks to get their agreement on legislation to reform the state's educational system.
The governor's package would extend the minimum time teachers are required to serve before being awarded tenure from two years to three, a change that would bring Maryland more in line with the rest of the nation; 38 states already require teachers to work at least three years before getting tenure, and eight states require more than that.
Superintendent Beverly Hall told a national audience of educators about Atlanta schools' steady strides forward at a conference in Phoenix Wednesday.
But back home that same day, Georgia officials were unveiling findings that call into question how much of that progress was real.
Hall is at the high point of her career, basking in national accolades for a dramatic turnaround of the city's schools -- with rising state test scores cited as key evidence. Those scores are suddenly in doubt.
More than two-thirds of Atlanta's public elementary and middle schools face investigations into cheating after the state unveiled a statewide analysis of suspicious erasures on standardized tests. Atlanta had more schools flagged than any other district. In one school, nearly 90 percent of classrooms are under scrutiny.
In China, learning spoken English is giving rise to a huge and growing market. For instance, in addition to English classes in public schools, parents send their children to about 50,000 for-profit training schools around the country, where English is the most popular subject. Instead of American Idol, on CCTV, the national government-owned TV network, they have the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition. This is possibly the largest nationwide competition in China. Last year, 400,000 students between the ages of 6 and 14 took part in it.
This year, the competition is adding a virtual twist, and a startup based in Massachusetts called 8D World is at the center of it. 8D World runs a virtual world called Wiz World Online for Chinese-speaking kids who want to learn English. In what is a huge coup for the startup, this year's CCTV English competition will use Wiz World Online as its official training and competition platform. Wiz World will be used to screen contestants and will be promoted to millions of Chinese viewers.
Seventeen days ago, Jessica Deibel stood in front of the Milwaukee School Board, accepting praise for her accomplishments. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos gave her a plaque. Each board member shook her hand.
Deibel and only seven other teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools were recognized for receiving in the past year national board certification, a prestigious credential for teachers.
Congratulations, Ms. Deibel. And now you're going to be bounced out of your job.
The school you love - where you send your own children - is taking it on the chin as the financial picture of MPS takes major steps into deeper financial distress. The staff will shrink at this little school where student achievement exceeds city averages by wide margins. Class size will go up sharply. Time with music, art and gym teachers will be reduced or eliminated.
Even with your new certification, the product of months of work, you have the least seniority in this small school and you will be the first one required to leave, Ms. Deibel.
"It was kind of like a slap in the face," Deibel said of the recognition at the School Board meeting. "Here's your reward, but you can't stay here."
What is the biggest issue facing the Milwaukee-area business community?
It might surprise many to hear that several small business owners believe it is the area's education system, specifically the Milwaukee Public Schools.
"The state of education in the region is a huge issue for all of us," said Nancy Hernandez, owner of Abrazo Multicultural Marketing, Milwaukee. "We've faced issues for a number of years. We have to set aside the politics and deal with the issues. It is important to the future of our community."
The plan was offered under a state mandate to fix the school, which has among Rhode Island's worst test scores and graduation rates.
The plan included six conditions such as adding 25 minutes to the day and providing tutoring outside school hours.
The added work didn't come with much extra pay and the teachers union refused to accept it.
Superintendent Frances Gallo blasted the union's "callous disregard" for the situation. She said the school's 74 teachers will be fired, effective next school year.
During the recent National School Boards Association conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talked about revising the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001."
Such reforms could change the school accountability measures that we have had in public education for nearly a decade. Under "No Child Left Behind," individual school progress is determined by student achievement on reading and math tests.
These tests are different in each state, based on state standards and linked to statewide curriculum. Tests are used to identify achievement gaps among groups and evaluate schools based on annual testing of all students who must show proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
"No Child Left Behind" legislation expired in 2007-08. Congress kept the measure going by approving annual appropriations for K-12 education. However, in 2010, the Obama administration is asking Congress for reauthorization, not of the "No Child Left Behind Act," but of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965."
Detroit Public Schools challenged by high-quality charter schools From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20100211/OPINION01/2110342/Editorial--Detroit-Public-Schools-challenged-by-high-quality-charter-schools#ixzz0fNPgbPTI
The evolution of charter schools and education in Detroit is no more sharply illustrated than by these facts: It was Gov. Jennifer Granholm who went to Houston to convince the phenomenally successful YES academies to open a school in Detroit, and it was the Detroit Public Schools that sold YES the school building where it will begin holding classes this fall.
Six years ago, Granholm stood in the schoolhouse door with the Detroit Federation of Teachers and said no to an expansion of charters in the city. Since then, the high performance of the city's best charter schools, the continued deterioration of the Detroit Public Schools and the demand from parents for alternative education choices has changed attitudes about charters. DPS, under the leadership of Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, now welcomes the competition from charters as an impetus to improve its schools.
In fact, Bobb sold YES the old Winship Elementary School on the city's northwest side to use as a home for the new academy, serving grades 6-12.
Writing Instruction in Massachusetts: Commonwealth's Students Making Gains, Still Need Improvement
BOSTON - Writing Instruction in Massachusetts [1.3MB PDF], published today by Pioneer Institute, underscores the fact that despite 17 years of education reform and first-in-the-nation performance on standardized tests, many Massachusetts middle school students are still not on the trajectory to be prepared for writing in a work or post-secondary education environment.
The study is authored by Alison L. Fraser, president of Practical Policy, with a foreword by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review, who, since 1987, has published over 800 history research papers by high school students from around the world.
Writing Instruction finds that Massachusetts' students have improved, with 45 percent of eighth graders writing at or above the 'Proficient' level on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test. In comparison, only 31 percent of eighth graders scored at or above 'Proficient' in 1998. The paper ascribes Massachusetts' success in improving writing skills to adherence to MCAS standards and the state's nation-leading state curriculum frameworks. It also suggests that strengthening the standards will help the state address the 55 percent of eighth graders who still score in the "needs improvement" or below categories.
According to a report on a 2004 survey of 120 major American businesses affiliated with the Business Roundtable, remedying writing deficiencies on the job costs corporations nearly $3.1 billion annually. Writing, according to the National Writing Commission's report Writing: A Ticket to Work...Or a Ticket Out, is a "threshold skill" in the modern world. Being able to write effectively and coherently is a pathway to both hiring and promotion in today's job market.
"While we should be pleased that trends show Massachusetts students have improved their writing skills, the data shows that we need renewed focus to complete the task of readying them for this important skill," says Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute. "Before we even think about altering academic standards, whether through state or federal efforts, we need to recommit to such basics."
The study notes that if the failure to learn to write well is pervasive in Massachusetts, one should look first to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) designed to measure mastery of those frameworks. Analysis completed in December 2009 by a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education found that nearly all of the skills that the 21st Century Skills Task Force identified as important, such as effective written communication, are already embedded in the state's academic standards guiding principles.
Writing Instruction in Massachusetts has these additional findings:
The Poor Alignment Between State Writing Standards and Teaching Methods: In large measure, prospective teachers are instructed in how to promote the use of various "writing processes," typically for experience-based writing. Therefore, without the knowledge to teach different approaches to writing, teachers often fall back on the vagaries of the process approach or formulaic methods of instruction learned in high school.
The Importance of Reading to the Writing Curriculum: As Professor E.D. Hirsch describes, core knowledge and cultural literacy means a familiarity with a common core of knowledge, gleaned from well-rounded reading in the liberal arts, gives students, and other writers, a common language through which to communicate with their audience.
A Better Way Must Be Found: School districts and teachers can more effectively help students develop their own voices and ideas across multiple subjects by focusing on knowledge- and skill-building, rather than the self-centeredness of approaches such as the Writer's Workshop. Direct instruction, as opposed to the group-centered and collaborative methods emphasized in many classrooms today, focuses teachers and students on building those skills that research has shown have the greatest impact on student writing.
"Broadening one's knowledge base strengthens comprehension, improves vocabulary and creates the civic and global awareness that is so important in this century," writes Fraser. "In other words, in order to be a good writer, students should have ideas and information to write about."
A 2006 Pioneer report, Aligning District Curricula with State Frameworks, has demonstrated that the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks are not fully aligned with district-level curriculum and are not being taught effectively in many classrooms. The key is clear, sequenced instruction, combined with the reading of quality non-fiction, which will give students access to information about which to write. Students need experience reading, analyzing, and writing about informational and content-rich texts, ultimately preparing them for college and career success.
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Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to change the intellectual climate in the Commonwealth by supporting scholarship that tests marked solutions against the conventional wisdom of more governmental involvement in Massachusetts public policy issues.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
School districts can take steps to level out salary inequities caused by maldistributions of teachers, according to researchers at the University of Washington.
It is a well-known fact that within districts, higher-paid teachers with more experience congregate in the more affluent schools, while poorer schools have less-experienced, lower-paid teachers.
If, as has been proposed, the federal Title I program closes a loophole in its "comparability" provision, districts would have no choice but to address the problem.
According to Marguerite Roza and Sarah Yatsko at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, districts have four "salary reallocation" options that can erase the imbalance and work to close the spending gap, without reassigning the more experienced teachers.
Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state's standardized achievement test.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
"This is the biggest erasure problem I've ever seen," said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina who has studied cheating. "This doesn't suggest that it was just kids randomly changing their answers, it suggests a pattern of unethical behavior on the part of either kids or educators."
Marshall High School wins L.A. Unified's Academic Decathlon
Nicole Santa Cruz:
Marshall High School beat out 63 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the annual Academic Decathlon, district officials announced Thursday night.
Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic was the highest-scoring individual student, with 8,933 points.
The decathlon tests students' knowledge in a variety of areas, including history. This year's focus was the French Revolution.
Marshall first won a national championship in 1987. Since then, the district has won 15 state and 10 national competitions.
West High School in Torrance won the Los Angeles County Academic Decathlon for the second year in a row, county officials announced Thursday.
Texas Board of Education and our Christian founders
Nicole Stockdale:
Sunday, yet another long-form essay on the Texas State Board of Education will hit the newsstands, this one in The New York Times Magazine.
"How Christian Were the Founders?" discusses the philosophy of "members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative," focusing the debate on whether the authors of the Constitution intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation.
The one thing that underlies the entire program of the nation's Christian conservative activists is, naturally, religion. But it isn't merely the case that their Christian orientation shapes their opinions on gay marriage, abortion and government spending. More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a "Christian nation," they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country's roots and the intent of the founders.
Marshall High School beat out 63 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the annual Academic Decathlon, district officials announced Thursday night.
Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic was the highest-scoring individual student, with 8,933 points.
The decathlon tests students' knowledge in a variety of areas, including history. This year's focus was the French Revolution.
Marshall first won a national championship in 1987. Since then, the district has won 15 state and 10 national competitions.
West High School in Torrance won the Los Angeles County Academic Decathlon for the second year in a row, county officials announced Thursday.
Milwaukee Public Schools has failed to fulfill multiple elements of its state-ordered educational improvement plan, according to newly released documents from the state Department of Public Instruction that detail why the district is at risk of losing millions of dollars of federal funding.
Though the main standoff between the state and its largest district continues to be a disagreement over how MPS imposes remedies of an ongoing special education lawsuit, the new documents specify where MPS hasn't met other state orders, including literacy instruction, identifying students who need extra help or special services, and tracking newly hired, first-year teachers and teachers hired on emergency licenses.
The district's lack of compliance with what are known formally as "corrective action requirements" - imposed by the state because MPS repeatedly has missed yearly academic progress targets - is what led Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers last week to initiate the process of withholding up to $175 million in federal dollars.
Legally, the greatest leverage Evers can exert against a poorly performing district under the federal No Child Left Behind law is to withhold federal dollars. To take that action, he said, he first had to issue notice to MPS and allow the district to request a hearing.
When I interviewed Mayor Tom Barrett about his proposal to take over MPS last August, he insisted it was no power grab.
It was all about the kids, Mayor Barrett said. He believed the change was the right thing. He acknowledged that the plan was controversial but the legislative session in Madison would be over by the end of the year and, one way or another, we'd all move on by 2010.
Well here it is February, and we're still talking about it. The Democratic leaders in the state legislature show no interest in bringing the plan to a vote, and there's little evidence the bill would pass.
In an apparent change of heart, Mayor Barrett continues to push the idea. With his experience in Madison and Washington, you'd expect Barrett to know how to count and to know when to stop pushing for a piece of legislation that doesn't have enough votes.
But Barrett is also running for statewide office, and he appears to believe this issue will play well with voters across Wisconsin. It gives him the opportunity to run against type and show that he's willing to take on the teachers union, usually a reliable supporter of Democrats, in support of a popular initiative.
At tonight's listening session several people talked about the structural deficit problem: the fact that due to the state funding formula, we are looking at a deficit that grows by a million dollars each year for as far as the projections go. As Craig mentioned, our revenues increase by about 2% a year (less than inflation) while our expenses go up by more than 4% per year. This is the real problem that makes the issues brought up today look like child's play. Several people asked us to consider the long term, a sentiment I couldn't agree with more. Others asked us to consider an operating referendum to avoid cuts. I agree that given the current situation we will need to consider this as we move forward. But an operating referendum alone can't solve this problem - the deficit is not a one time or short term issue.
A while ago someone asked for my long term plan for solving the structural deficit. I've given this a lot of thought, and I have to say there is no magic bullet for this, I haven't heard anyone on the board or administration articulate any specific ideas that get us out of this situation. What we need more than anything is else is good ideas.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, trying to salvage something from a lost week, has asked teachers to report to school Friday for a scheduled day of professional development. Rhee increased funding and time devoted to helping educators lift their game. So, ice and drifting snow not withstanding, PD is on. Here is her just-released letter to teachers:
Dear DCPS Teachers,
We have decided to proceed with Friday's professional development day as planned. One of the key messages I hear from teachers at the listening sessions I do at schools across the city is that we need to do more to support you in our work. The district-wide professional development days are a key opportunity to do exactly that. Because we have such a limited number of these days, and because the worst of the weather has passed, I have decided to move forward with the scheduled activities tomorrow.
n January, on the first day of the Computer Science 106A: Program Methodology course at Stanford University, Eric Roberts, the professor, began with his customary admonition: Cheat, and you will be caught. And, he added: Cheat, and your classmates will suffer. More weight will be given to the final exam when calculating the final grade.
These are not idle threats in a department where it may be easy to cheat (cut, paste some code, voila!) but it is just as easy to detect cheating. (It is the computer science department, after all). Jay de la Torre, a senior, was caught and has been suspended this quarter as part of his punishment. Mr. de la Torre was taking the computer science class for a second time in his junior year when he cheated. After he was disciplined, he resigned from his position as student body vice president in November, The Stanford Daily reported.
"I wasn't even thinking of how it easy it would for me to be caught," he said.
I have been teaching literature for 30 years, and the longer I teach, the more I enjoy teaching Shakespeare. As I grow older and wearier, his plays seem to deliver greater matter and art in a more condensed and lively way than any other text I could choose. To be clichéd about it: Shakespeare offers more bang for the buck.
While Shakespeare now draws me more than ever before, one work in particular draws me most. This is The Merchant of Venice. For me, this extraordinary play grows increasingly subtle and supple with time. It continues to excite me with its language, its depth of character, and its philosophical, political, spiritual, and pedagogical implications. Looking back over my years of teaching the play, I see that the way it has been received by my students is an index to how our society has changed. I also see how much the play continues to push against established readings and to challenge even the most seemingly enlightened perspectives. The Merchant of Venice is both a mirror of our times and a means of transcending the bias of our times. It teaches how to teach.
My response to the play may be connected to the nature of my career in literature. I was exposed to highbrow literary criticism in the 1970s at elite undergraduate and graduate institutions. This was a time when multiculturalism was making inroads in academia but when progressive thinking coexisted with an ingrained snobbism regarding how literature should be taught and who should teach it.
On an April morning last year, more than 200 juniors took their seats at Marshall High School for the Prairie State Achievement Examination, a measure of whether their school had prepared them to meet basic state learning standards.
When the results came in for Marshall, only three students had met the standards for the math part of the test. Eighteen had passed the reading part. No students had exceeded state standards in reading or math.
The test results were but one indication of a high school in trouble. For years, many Marshall students have been ill prepared to enter college or the job market, and the school's long history is also marked by frustration and failures that often have little to do with math or reading.
The dismal statistics have made Marshall a target for turnaround in the next school year, along with Phillips High School and three elementary schools. Turnaround is an intervention promoted by the Obama administration that involves firing a school's current staff, committing resources in the form of building upgrades and new curriculums, and training new teachers.
Unlike other undergrads on the UW-Madison campus, many of these students weren't interested in taking AP chemistry or honors English in high school.
They may not have taken the ACT college entrance exam or cared much about grades. Their kingdom is the farm, not the classroom.
"I've never liked school that much," said Brittney Muenster, 18, of Seymour, about 20 miles west of Green Bay. "I just never saw fit to go to school for four years."
One of the university's oldest programs, UW-Madison's Farm and Industry Short Course has been offering Wisconsin's future farmers like Muenster cutting-edge techniques during the non-growing season, November to March.
The Madison School District is facing a $30 million budget hole for 2010-11, a dilemma that could force school board members this spring to order massive cuts in programs, dramatically raise property taxes, or impose a combination of both.
District officials will unveil a list of possible cuts -- which could include layoffs -- next month, with public hearings to follow.
"This is a big number," School Board President Arlene Silveira said. "So we have to look at how we do business, we have to look at efficiencies, we have to look at our overall budget, and we are going to have to make hard decisions. We are in a horrible situation right now, and we do have to look at all options."
Even with the maximum hike in school property taxes -- $28.6 million, or a jump of $312.50 for the owner of a $250,000 Madison home -- the district would have to close a $1.2 million budget gap, thanks in part to a 15 percent drop in state aid it had to swallow in 2009-10 and expects again for 2010-11.
The district, with a current budget of about $360 million, expects to receive $43.7 million from the state for 2010-11, which would be the lowest sum in 13 years, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, and down from a high of $60.7 million in 2008-09. The district is receiving $51.5 million from the state for the current school year.
I'm not sure where the $360 million number came from. Board member Ed Hughes mentioned a $432,764,707 2010-2011 budget number. The 2009-2010 budget, according to a an October, 2009 District document was $418,415,780. The last "Citizen's budget" number was $339,685,844 in 2007-2008 and $333,101,865 in 2006-2007.
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and more ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the type of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 6th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful and data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has imposed specific accountability and reporting requirements on states. The NCLB reports present school-, district-, and state-level information in those areas mandated by NCLB, which are as follows: status regarding Adequate Yearly Progress; information on highly qualified teachers; attendance and dropout data; and assessment data that has incorporated all of the conditions mandated under NCLB for meeting federally approved proficiency levels.
The results displayed on NCLB Reports are based on the state assessment data with the NCLB conditions applied. Additionally, the NCLB data incorporates the data appeals submitted by districts/schools that have been granted by the NJDOE. Therefore, the data in the NCLB Reports may be different from the data displayed on the NJ School Report Cards.
Before being ordered by Gov. Rick Perry not to compete for a chunk of the $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" federal grants for public schools, staffers at the Texas Education Agency had put in more than 800 hours preparing an application.
Inquiring minds, including my colleague Ericka Mellon, wanted to look at what our employees had proposed and filed requests for copies of the draft under the Texas Public Information Act.
But TEA Commissioner Robert Scott, a Perry loyalist, ordered agency attorneys to appeal to the attorney general, asking that the work be declared a state secret.
The Public Information Act states that all documents produced with the taxpayers' money are public with certain specific exceptions
So what exception is the TEA citing?
The exception that information can be kept from the public if its release "would give advantage to a competitor or bidder."
Why shouldn't local school boards have the option of allowing charter schools in their districts if they feel it can help serve students better?
A group of legislators in the House Education Appropriations Committee not only rejected that option, but didn't allow other members of the House to even vote on it.
They rejected the charter schools possibility outright. With it they also rejected the possibility of millions of dollars in federal assistance for education.
For a state that can use every cent and more to improve education, this wasn't a wise choice.
The $ 4 billion dollars in federal money will be spent, but the likelihood of part of it being spent for our students is now diminished, since part of the criteria for getting the money is charter schools being an option in your state.
Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced "algebra for all" policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier.
A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek.
Among the newer findings:
• An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th graders, even making it one course past Algebra 2 might not be enough to help them become "college and career ready" by the end of high school.
• An evaluation of the Chicago public schools' efforts to boost algebra coursetaking found that, although more students completed the course by 9th grade as a result of the policy, failure rates increased, grades dropped slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to attend college when they left the system.
The program is a competition in which kids become eligible if they do well on the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which is generally taken in 11th grade though some students take it earlier. Any regular reader to this blog will know that I do not look kindly on anything in education that relies on the a single standardized test score.
Here is a critique of the program that I recently read and wanted to share. It was written by Jonathan Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, in response to a list-serv query about how schools should display National Merit winners. His advice: Don't.
When teachers Bryan Grau and Debora Gil R. Casado pitched an idea in 2002 to start a charter school in Madison that would teach classes in both English and Spanish, they ran into resistance from school administrators and their own union. Grau and his cohorts were asked to come up with a detailed budget for their proposal, but he says they got little help with that complex task. He recalls one meeting in particular with Roger Price, the district's director of financial services.
"We asked for general help. He said he would provide answers to our specific questions. We asked where to begin and again he said he would answer our specific questions. That's the way it went."
Ruth Robarts, who was on the Madison School Board at the time, confirms that there was strong resistance from officials under the former administration to the creation of Nuestro Mundo, which finally got the green light and is now a successful program that is being replicated in schools around the district.
"First they would explain how the existing programs offered through the district were already doing a better job than this proposal, and then they would show how the proposal could never work," says Robarts. "There seemed to be a defensiveness towards these innovative ideas, as if they meant the district programs were somehow lacking."
The Madison School District "has historically been one of the most hostile environments in the state for charter schools, especially under Superintendent Rainwater," adds John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of Charter Schools.
Virtual charter schools are publicly funded nonsectarian schools that are exempt from many regulations that apply to traditional public schools and that offer the majority of their classes online. They began operating in Wisconsin during the 2002-03 school year. Pupils typically attend from their homes and communicate with teachers using e-mail, by telephone, or in online discussions. During the 2007-08 school year, 15 virtual charter schools enrolled 2,951 pupils. Most were high schools.
A Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruling in December 2007 prevented the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) from providing state aid payments to a virtual charter school through the open enrollment program, which allows pupils to attend public schools outside of their school districts of residence. 2007 Wisconsin Act 222, which was enacted to address concerns raised in the lawsuit, also required us to address a number of topics related to virtual charter schools. Therefore, we evaluated:
enrollment trends, including the potential effects of a limit on open enrollment in virtual charter schools that was enacted in 2007 Wisconsin Act 222;
virtual charter school operations, including attendance requirements, opportunities for social development and interaction, and the provision of special education and related services;
funding and expenditures, including the fiscal effects of open enrollment on "sending" and "receiving" districts;
teaching in virtual charter schools, including teacher licensing and pupil-teacher interaction; and
academic achievement, including test scores and other measures, as well as pupils', parents', and teachers' satisfaction with virtual charter schools.
Ask about the signature achievements of George W. Bush's eight years as president, and the No Child Left Behind Act is certain to be high on the list. The 2002 law made accountability a watchword in public school education. It aimed to evaluate the nation's elementary and secondary schools based on student test scores and to hold schools, teachers and administrators to account for their success or failure in moving students to achieve proficiency targets for the classroom.
The law, which has been the subject of much debate and criticism from the start, is up for reauthorization this year. President Obama has made clear his intent to reshape the legislation and the federal role in public education. Not clear yet is what precisely he intends to do.
No Child Left Behind has been criticized fiercely for its heavy emphasis on yearly testing and the rating of schools as successes or failures on the basis of test scores. For teachers and school officials, one of the most contentious of the law's requirements is that schools be able to show, from the test scores, that every student group is making adequate yearly progress, AYP. Repeated failure to make AYP results in penalties that include shutting down schools.
The law also set a deadline: that students be proficient in math and English by 2014, a goal Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, recently described as utopian.
President Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) state competition has brought charter schools to the forefront of public education reform. Additionally, charter schools are prominent in Obama's 2011 proposed budget - increasing funding for charter schools and an extra $1.8 billion toward Supporting Student Success (which focuses on Promise Neighborhoods, of which charter schools are the central focus).
RttT relies heavily on charter schools as a tool for reform, awarding more points to states which enable charter school creation than to those which do not:
It's easy to miss the school tucked into the corner of a strip mall at N. 25th St. and W. North Ave. and its sister building a few miles away, an airy gray metal and brick structure that doesn't have a sign yet.
The most noticeable school of the three may be at the south end of a nonprofit building on N. King Drive, and that's because a large banner outside proclaims the high school's name.
But within these unassuming spaces, HOPE Christian Schools are quietly expanding and changing, figuring out the best way to make sure every child - from kindergarten through 12th grade - is on the path to college.
The schools are without frills because energy and resources at this point are better spent on the elements more closely tied to student success: strong teachers who want to stay year to year, innovative and empowered administrators, testing tools that provide day-to-day and week-to-week feedback about how fast kids are progressing and which ones need more attention.
"We're still focusing on what our model looks like," said Andrew Neumann, president of HOPE Christian Schools.
Neumann also is president of the umbrella nonprofit Educational Enterprises, which plans to establish schools nationwide that help populations of disadvantaged, minority children get to college. The schools in Milwaukee are a testing ground; this year, Educational Enterprises opened a HOPE-inspired college prep charter elementary school in Phoenix.
Choices without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards
Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel‐Hawley, and Jia Wang [1.4MB PDF] :
Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school segregation.
Our analysis of the 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students reveals that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. While examples of truly diverse charter schools exist, our data show that these schools are not reflective of broader charter trends.
Four major themes emerge from this analysis of federal data. First, while charter schools are increasing in number and size, charter school enrollment presently accounts for only 2.5% of all public school students. Despite federal pressure to increase charter schools--based on the notion that charter schools are superior to traditional public schools, in spite of no conclusive evidence in support of that claim--charter school enrollment remains concentrated in just five states.
Second, we show that charter schools, in many ways, have more extensive segregation than other public schools. Charter schools attract a higher percentage of black students than traditional public schools, in part because they tend to be located in urban areas. As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.
A decade ago, most Seattle-area high schools offered just a handful of rigorous classes that provided a way to earn college credit while supercharging a transcript. And only students with top grades were allowed to sign up.
But in 10 years, the intensive, fast-paced Advanced Placement (AP) classes have skyrocketed in this state.
In 2008, fully one-quarter of Washington public-school seniors took at least one AP test during their high-school years, compared with 10 percent in 1997. In some schools, almost every student takes an AP class in junior or senior year.
And other schools around the state are moving fast to add AP classes and expand participation, in part because college admissions officials say the demanding classes do a good job of preparing students for higher education.
Many schools are encouraging all students -- not just the high achievers, but also average students and even those who struggle -- to take AP classes or enroll in other rigorous programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB).
Yong Zhao is back in receptive Seattle this week preaching his gospel of edu-innovation. The anti-standards, pro-creativity Zhao is a Chinese-born prof at Michigan State. Here's his thesis in a nutshell:
In my new book Catching Up or Leading the Way, I mostly focus on issues facing education in the United States noting that the current education reform efforts, with their emphasis on standards, testing, and outcome-based (read test score-based) accountability, are unlikely to make Americans "globally competitive."
Zhao and I like the same schools and probably share a similar vision for what a good education looks like and the benefits it provides students. We both agree that bad standards and tests badly applied is bad for kids.
But his anti-standards mantra strikes me as a bit irresponsible in the sense that he doesn't grapple with accountability. We have NCLB because states were not fulfilling the good school promise--they ignored generations of chronic failure. The Department of Education is now grappling with a new accountability framework, one that is tight on goals and loose on means.
Seated with a classmate at a table near the Whitnall High School library, freshman Josh Kelly stumbles into trouble with some of his make-up work for history class.
"There's this artist in the Middle Ages, and I don't know how to spell his name," Josh says as teacher Andrew Baumann comes over quickly to help.
"Oh, Giotto . . . frescoes," Baumann replies, bending over the teenager's textbook. "He basically invented all these new techniques that people after him started using in the Renaissance."
While Baumann is a social studies teacher, he's not technically Josh's social studies teacher. Instead, he's one of two full-time faculty members who staff the school's academic support center, an all-day service where students can come for tutoring, to complete projects or to make up assignments and tests.
It's one of several solutions that high schools have come up with to provide students with more academic help during the school day, as opposed to trying to compete with work, sports and other activities that commonly lure teenagers outside of the school hours.
The year after Whitnall's center started in 2006, Germantown High School initiated one of its own.
Today, it serves between 90 and 120 students a day - enough that Germantown's Academic Support Center teacher, Cindy Collins, had to come up with a new 15-minute pass system to ensure she wasn't turning students away. She also depends on volunteers from the school's junior and senior classes to provide tutoring in easier subjects that freshmen might grapple with during the center's busy times.
Widespread corruption among some of the mainland's most ambitious academics has undermined the country's scientific community but one man has made it his mission to expose the culprits and clean up the system
On January 16, Fang Shimin kicked off the new year with a recap of his top 10 news items of 2009. On his popular New Threads blog (www.xys.org), Fang, both respected and hated as the mainland's self-appointed "science cop", revisited a string of startling allegations: 12 university presidents and vice-presidents accused of plagiarism; a university president who claimed a leading scientific prize that was not rightfully his; two professors caught faking research results in an international journal; and a medical doctor who distorted the success rate for a new surgical procedure, which could have had serious health implications....
House lights up!" proclaimed the silver-haired former lawyer who, with blue jeans, black T-shirt, black safari jacket and Nikes, looked oh-so Hollywood in an oh-so Chicago bastion, the Merchandise Mart.
As four understudies from the Second City comedy troupe entered the sound stage, they were trailed by film students climaxing three weeks of labor by taping a half-hour faux "Saturday Night Live." It featured comedy sketches, droll pre-taped mock commercials and a live performance by Rhymefest, a hip hop artist.
The students get academic credit by handling sound, cameras, lights and the funny people, all with the help of professionals, and their polished handiwork, "Live at the Mart," may soon be shown on NBC locally or nationally. It underscored the glitz, teamwork and market-driven pragmatism at the core of Chicago's Flashpoint Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, one of the country's most curious and disorienting educational institutions.
Imagine Pixar, Disney, Nintendo and Dreamworks all melded into a vocational setting. Started in 2007, this is a pricey ($25,000 a year) two-year school intended for those not motivated by high school, or brief college stays, but who are captivated by technology.
This unprecedented finding shows school boards and district administration that they need to consider evidence when making decisions. The voice of the community has been upheld by law, but the Seattle School district indicated they plan to appeal, demonstrating the typical arrogant, wasteful practices which necessitated the lawsuit in the first place.
Concerned individuals in Seattle and across the country need to speak up now, and let Seattle administration know that it's time to move forward and refocus on the students, rather than defend a past mistake.
The ruling states:
"The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series."
I attended a presentation on Friday by Dr. Rob Stein, principal (and alum) of Manual High School in Denver. Manual HS has been designated an "Innovation School" with approval from its staff and the local & state school boards, which means they, by Colorado state law, can deviate from district and state regulations (but not federal). They are not a charter school - all of their staff are district employees.
Denver's central bureaucracy and expenditures sounded similar to Seattle's. He showed a picture of Denver's policy manuals: thousands of pages occupying an entire shelf. Some were downright comical but illustrative of the dysfunction in public schools. For example, their 98 page union agreement includes "Article 15-1-1: Each school will have a desk and a chair for each teacher, except in unusual circumstances." He was quick to point out that the union is not to blame, but it's symptomatic of a breakdown in trust in a system no longer optimized for student education. He showed the Denver schools org chart with dozens of arrows pointing to all of the folks that a typical principal needs to answer to. He estimated 80+ hours a week just to respond to the emails. More importantly, he calculated $4,157 per student to pay for central staff despite a fuzzy connection to specific student learning in his school.
Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.
When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years -- completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students -- a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
"We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."
North Carolina has dropped the teaching of United States History before 1877 for its public high school students. Quite a number of U.S. History teachers have argued for years that they should have two years for the subject, but North Carolina has just dropped year one.
One argument they advance for doing this is that it will make our history "more relevant" to their students because it will be "closer" to their own lives.
The logical end of this approach will be, I suppose, to constrict the teaching of U.S. History to the latest results for American Idol.
This is just one more egregious consequence of the flight from academic knowledge in our schools.
One of the authors published in The Concord Review wrote more than 13,000 words on Anne Hutchinson, who not only lived before the student did, but even lived and died more than two centuries before 1877. How was this possible? The public high school student (who later graduated summa cum laude from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship) read enough about Anne Hutchinson so that her life became relevant enough to the student to let her write a long serious term paper about her.
For students who don't read history, and don't know any history from any other source, of course anything that happened "back then" seems not too relevant to their own lives, whether it is or not.
It is the job of the history teacher to encourage and require students to learn enough history so that what happened in the past is understood to be relevant, whether it is Roman Law, or Greek Philosophy, or the Han Dynasty, or the Glorious Revolution or our own.
If the student (and the teacher) has never read The Federalist Papers, then the whole process by which we formed a strong constitutional government will remain something of a mystery to them, and may indeed seem to be irrelevant to their own lives.
Kieran Egan quotes Bertrand Russell as saying: "the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child's imagination."
Now, the folks in North Carolina have not completely abandoned their high school history students to American Idol or to only those things that are local and immediate in North Carolina. After all, President Rutherford B. Hayes rarely appears on either local tv or MTV, so it will be a job for teachers to make Rutherfraud seem relevant to their lives. Students will indeed have to learn something about the 1870s and even the 1860s, perhaps, before that time will come to seem at all connected to their own.
But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student's comfortable confinement to his or her own town, friends, school, and historical time.
Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine them to what is relevant to them before they do academic work is to attempt to shrink their awareness of the world to an unforgivable degree.
North Carolina has not done that, of course. If they had made an effort to teach United States history in two years, or perhaps, if they decided to allow only one year, many will feel that they should have chosen Year One, instead of starting with Rutherford B. Hayes. These are curricular arguments worth having.
But in no case should educators be justified in supporting academic work that requires less effort on the part of students to understand what is different from them, whether it is Cepheid variable stars, or Chinese characters, or the basics of molecular biology, or calculus, or the proceedings of an American meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.
Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance with which they arrive into our care.
Imagine that your stockbroker - or the friend who's always giving you stock tips - called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.
This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called "cognitive fluency." Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it's a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people's judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.
Imagine that driving across town, you've fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You're so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn't there.
By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. You're drinking coffee and talking to your boss on a cellphone, practicing your pitch. You cause an identical accident. You've heard all the warnings about cellphones and driving--but on a gut level, this wreck might bewilder you in a way that the first scenario didn't. Wasn't I operating at peak alertness just then? Your brain had been aroused to perform several tasks, and you had an illusory sense that you must be performing them well.
That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently--so the worry goes--students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.
OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy -- a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student -- that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.
In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.
Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school's social worker, literally carried him to the principal's office, where he again crawled under a chair.
New Chef Will Help Pastry Level to Rise
Restaurants like Charlie Trotter's, Tru and Per Se all have alumni of the French Pastry School in their kitchens. Chicago has long attracted ambitious immigrants from all corners of the world. World champion bakers from tiny Alsatian villages are not usually among them.
Pierre Zimmermann may well be the first when he arrives in August to join the faculty of Chicago's French Pastry School. Mr. Zimmermann stands out in the tightly-knit and highly competitive international baking scene as the latest in four generations of his family who have run a boulangerie-patisserie in Schnersheim.
The pedigree, and Mr. Zimmermann's deft touch with a baguette, made him such an attraction that the Loop school pursued him for four years.
That he chose to give up his job as "the little baker of my village," as he put it in a recent e-mail translated from French, is a testament to Chicago's importance among food cognoscenti and the French Pastry School's growing reputation.
Last year, Seattle Public Schools adopted the Discovering math series despite valiant opposition from parents and math professionals, despite poor assessments of the Discovering series' rigor and adherence to the new state math standards, and despite the fact that OSPI did NOT ultimately recommend the Discovering math series.
In response, three people filed a lawsuit, saying that Seattle didn't have sufficient supporting evidence for its adoption, and also that the Discovering series was associated with an INCREASE in achievement gaps.
Recently, a judge agreed with the plaintiffs and - while stopping short of telling Seattle to cease and desist in their adoption - told Seattle to revisit its adoption. The district can continue to use the Discovering series, and Seattle administrators have stated their clear intention to do so.
Nevertheless, the court decision is momentous. It sets a precedent for districts across the country. When board members can't justify their adoption decisions, the people now have legal recourse.
Influencing practice and policy in science education is what drives ASU's Julie Luft and has led to her distinguished service to K-12 science teacher education and renowned research contributions to the field. She considers her recent call from Congress to testify about the status and future of science education to be among her most notable achievements.
Luft delivered her first-time testimony before the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee at the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Education Hearings that took place Feb. 3-4. She was joined by Craig Strang, associate director of the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California-Berkeley.
The purpose of the hearing was to inform Congressional subcommittee members about the status and future direction of STEM education in the K-12 sector. STEM education is considered vital to maintaining the United States' leadership in the rapidly advancing world of science and technology. In her testimony, Luft emphasized the importance of inquiry in teacher education and professional development, and the need for more federal funding to support science organizations involved in research and development. She also stressed the unintended consequences of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which has limited the amount of inquiry-based instruction in K-12 science classrooms.
Opponents of a controversial sex ed bill passed by Wisconsin legislators last week warn that if Gov. Jim Doyle signs the bill into law as he has promised, some local school districts will stage a revolt against the measure by ignoring it or dropping their human growth and development curriculum entirely.
"Did the state in its zeal to impose its own way even think about the consequences? Because a lot of districts are just going to just walk," predicts Matt Sande, director of legislation at Pro-Life Wisconsin.
The proposed new law would require any Wisconsin public school district that offers a course in human growth and development -- or sexual education -- to teach students about sexually transmitted diseases and methods of safe sex, including contraception. Under current law districts can choose to provide only instruction focusing on abstinence or chastity.
The proposed new law doesn't require school districts to offer such courses at all, however. School districts can drop their sex ed classes completely rather than comply, which is what Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, says her organization will encourage them to do in upcoming mailings. "This is a Planned Parenthood dream come true," Appling says about the bill. "They have taken options away from local school districts. Now the choice is something Madison says is best or to have no human growth and development classes at all, which, quite honestly, is the better choice."
In my recent post, Race to the Top?: Part I, I described the academic achievement rat race in which students near the top of the educational food chain strive maniacally to win (or at least finish). I argued that the emphasis on testing by former President Bush's No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and continued with President Obama's Race to the Top initiative (RTTT) has only exacerbated the problem better characterized by the title of the powerful new documentary by Vicki Abeles, Race to Nowhere. This post, in contrast, explores how RTTT impacts those students and schools at the other end of the educational food chain, those who are just trying to survive in the turbulent sea of American public education.
The first mistake that this administration made was to call education reform a race. Races connote winners and losers. Yet, we need to ensure that all our students and schools are winners. I think a more appropriate name for this initiative is "Climb to the Top" because the focus should be on how to get to the top.
The administration's second mistake was to continue Bush's initial mistake of focusing on testing; instead of being a tool for education reform, testing has morphed into the end-all, be-all of said reform. Yes, assessment is essential for determining the effectiveness of programs such as RTTT, aimed at achieving something as ethereal and elusive as education reform or the more tangible goal of closing the education and economic gaps between the haves and have-nots. At the same time, improved test scores should not be the ultimate objective of education reform.
THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:
FINDINGS OF FACT
1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District's high school basic math materials.
a. A recommendation from the District's Selection Committee;
b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;
c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was "mathematically unsound";
d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;
e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;
f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;
g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that W ASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;
h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;
1. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;
J. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;
k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;
I. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.
3. The court finds that the Discovering Series IS an inquiry-based math program.
4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there IS insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.
CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
I. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board's decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;
2. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;
3. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;
4. This court has the authority to remand the Board's decision for further review;
5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a
Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately
characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.
ORDER
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Judge Julie Spector today announced her finding of "arbitrary and capricious" in the Seattle School Board's May 6 vote to adopt the Discovering Math series of high school texts despite insufficient evidence of the series' effectiveness.
Judge Spector's decision states, "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering series."
Plaintiffs DaZanne Porter, an African American and mother of a 9th-grade student in Seattle Public Schools, Martha McLaren, retired Seattle math teacher and grandparent of a Seattle Public Schools fifth grader, and Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, had filed their appeal of the Board's controversial decision on June 5th, 2009. The hearing was held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams -- particularly in the South -- is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college's criteria.
The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation -- and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.
Skylar Shafran, a turquoise headband on her brunette head and a pink princess shirt on her string-bean frame, is standing on a chair in her living room, shifting from left foot to right. She has already gulped down a glass of orange juice and nibbled on some crackers; she has also demonstrated, with extemporaneous grace, the ability to pick up Hello Kitty markers with her toes. For more than an hour, she has been answering questions to a mock version of an intelligence test commonly known to New York parents as the ERB. Almost every prestigious private elementary school in the city requires that prospective kindergartners take it. Skylar's parents, Liz and Jay, are pretty sure they know where they're sending their daughter to school next year, but they figure it can't hurt to get a sense of where she sits in the long spectrum of precocious New York children. And so, although it wasn't cheap--$350--they've hired someone to find out. Skylar has thus far borne this process with cheerful patience and determination. But every 4-year-old has her limits.
"What is an umbrella?" asks the evaluator, a psychology graduate student in her mid-twenties.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to travel to Alabama next month to help Gov. Bob Riley persuade lawmakers to pass legislation allowing charter schools, Riley said Wednesday.
"As a Republican I've always pushed for charter schools . . . but when I say it, it doesn't have the legitimacy and credibility that the secretary of education and president of the United States has," Riley said after meeting with Duncan Wednesday afternoon in Washington.
President Obama's administration is preparing to hand out more than $4 billion to help states improve their public schools, and those without charter schools -- like Alabama --- are at a competitive disadvantage for the money.
Two months back, tiny Lincoln University attracted worldwide media attention when it threatened to withhold diplomas from overweight students unless they took a special fitness class.
Under its 2005 policy, which the Philadelphia area school rescinded in December after weeks of criticism from activists and the media, students with body mass indexes (BMI) over 30 were required to take a one-credit class called "Fitness for Life" in order to graduate from the historically black college. A person with a BMI of 30 is considered obese under health guidelines.
We'll get back to Lincoln. But the controversy made me curious about the role our schools are playing in our children's fitness and whether they are having any impact in the so far losing effort against the obesity epidemic.
When I went to high school in the early 1970s, phys ed was a requirement: three periods a week, if memory serves, through junior year. Team sports reigned. The athletic kids would park me on the offensive line during flag football and tell me to stay out of the way on the basketball floor. Let's not even bring up Greco-Roman wrestling.
Twelve central Ohio schools are among the worst 5 percent statewide.
Their academic struggles mean they are eligible to receive federal money to help them transform or start over. A list of these schools was released yesterday by the Ohio Department of Education.
Six Columbus City Schools buildings are on the list of the worst-off, as are four in Cleveland and 16 in Cincinnati. Several charter schools -- six of them in central Ohio -- also made the "top" rung on the list.
"No one is going to like the fact that they're on this list," said Mark Real, who heads the Columbus-based nonprofit KidsOhio, which studies education issues. He's been monitoring stimulus-related spending and improvement programs. "But this is not just a 'label and leave it' approach. These schools are in for some pretty intensive care."
These schools all have a large number of poor students and have been mired in academic difficulties for several years.
The Asbury Park Press slams the Marlboro Board of Education for taking a hard line with the local teachers union during contract negotiations and then, apparently, folding after two years of an escalating impasse. If only it were that simple.
Here's how it works in N.J.: as the end of a typically-three-year contract approaches, a school board, represented by an attorney, and the local NJEA chapter, represented by NJEA reps, exchange proposals and proceed with negotiating everything from minor changes in contract language to salary increases and contributions (or not) to health benefits. If the two sides reach an impasse (usually once they hit salary and benefits, but sometimes over a seemingly insurmountable semantic technicality), they call in a state-appointed mediator who proposes a compromise. If one or both sides reject the compromise, they go to a state-appointed fact-finder who recommends a settlement. (Here's Marlboro's fact-finder's report.) If that doesn't work, they go to someone called a super conciliator, who writes up a lengthy resolution to the impasse. None of these interventions are binding.
On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation's current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.
I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the "goals loose but the steps tight." On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the "goals tight but the steps loose."
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC's of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories -- Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity -- and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
1. ACHIEVEMENT
If there is a bottom line in schools today, it's that educators must do whatever it takes to help close the achievement gap and improve student learning. To do so effectively and fully, schools must expand their measures for determining student achievement. After all, "achievement" isn't only about student test scores; it's also about other factors. The following are all critical to achievement:
I got a call the other day from the head football coach at one of the larger state universities.
He said, after the usual greetings, "I've got some real problems."
"Like what?" I asked.
"The players I am getting now are out of shape, they don't know how to block or tackle, then can't read the playbook and they can't follow their assignments."
"That does sound bad. What is your record this season?"
"The teams we play seem to have similar problems, so all our games are pretty sad affairs, ending in scoreless ties."
"Also," he told me, "During breaks in practice, most of them are text-messaging their friends, and almost half of them just drop out of college after a year or two !"
"Have you talked to any of the high school coaches who send you players?"
"No, I don't know them."
"Have you visited any of the high school games or practices?"
"No, I really don't have time for that sort of thing."
"Well, have you heard there is a big new push for Common National Athletic Standards?"
"No, but do you think that will help solve my problems? Are they really specific this time, for a change?"
"Absolutely," I said. "They want to require high school students, before they graduate, to be able to do five sit-ups, five pushups, and to run 100 yards without stopping. They also recommend that students spend at least an hour a week playing catch with a ball!"
"That is a start, I guess, but I don't think it will help me much with my problem. My U.S. players have just not been prepared at all for college football. I have a couple of immigrant kids, from Asia and Eastern Europe, who are in good shape, have been well coached at the secondary level, and they have a degree of motivation to learn and determination to do their best that puts too many of our local kids to shame."
"Well," I said, "what do you think of the idea of getting to know some of the coaches at the high schools which are sending you players, and letting them know the problems that you are having?"
"I could do that, I guess, but I don't know any of them, and we never meet, and I am really too busy at my level, when it comes down to it, to make that effort."
[If we were talking about college history professors, this would not be fiction. They do complain about the basic knowledge of their students, and their inability to read books and write term papers. But like their fictional coaching counterpart, they never talk to high school history teachers (they don't know any), they never visit their classrooms, and they satisfy themselves with criticizing the students they get from the admissions office. Their interest in National Common Academic Standards does not extend to their suggesting that high school students should read complete nonfiction books and write a serious research paper every year. In short, they, like the fictional head coach, don't really care if students are so poorly prepared for college that half of them drop out, and that most of them do not arrive on campus prepared to do college work. They are really too busy, you see...]
===========
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget: Comments in a Vacuum?
TJ Mertz comments on Monday evening's Madison School Board 2010-2011 budget discussion (video - the budget discussion begins about 170 minutes into the meeting). The discussion largely covered potential property tax increases. However and unfortunately, I've not seen a document that includes total revenue projections for 2010-2011.
Property tax revenue is one part of the MMSD's budget picture. State and Federal redistributed tax dollars are another big part. The now dead "citizens budget" was a useful effort to provide more transparency to the public. I hope that the Board pushes for a complete picture before any further substantive budget discussions. Finally, the Administration promised program reviews as part of the "Strategic Planning Process" and the recent referendum ("breathing room"). The documents released to date do not include any substantive program review budget items.
Ed Hughes (about 190 minutes): "it is worth noting that evening if we taxed to the max and I don't think we'll do that, the total expenditures for the school District will be less than we were projecting during the referendum". The documents published, as far as I can tell, on the school board's website do not reflect 2010-2011 total spending.
Links to Madison School District spending since 2007 (the referendum Ed mentioned was in 2008)
It would be great to see a year over year spending comparison from the District, including future projections.
Further, the recent "State of the District" document [566K PDF] includes only the "instructional" portion of the District's budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 "Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization's mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple "citizen's budget" financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
Ed, Lucy and Arlene thankfully mentioned that the Board needs to have the full picture before proceeding.
January 15, 2010 Dear Secretary Duncan:
On behalf of Wisconsin's school children, we are pleased to present to you our application for the US Department of Education's Race to the Top program. We were honored when President Obama traveled to Wisconsin to announce his vision for this vital program and we are ready to accept the President's challenge to make education America's mission.
We are proud of the steps we are taking to align our assessments with high standards, foster effective teachers and leaders, raise student achievement and transform our lowest performing schools. Over the last several months Wisconsin has pushed an educational reform agenda that has brought together over 430 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools together around these central themes.
Race to the Top funding will be instrumental in supporting and accelerating Wisconsin's education agenda. While Wisconsin has great students, parents, teachers and leaders we recognize that more must be done to ensure that our students are prepared to compete in a global economy. The strong application presented to you today does just that.
Wisconsin's application contains aggressive goals supported by a comprehensive plan. These goals are targeted at not only high performing schools and students but also address our lowest performers. For example, over the next four years Wisconsin, with your support, is on track to:
Ensure all of our children are proficient in math and reading.
Drastically reduce the number of high school dropouts.
Increase the high school graduation growth rate for Native American, African American and Hispanic students.
Significantly increase the annual growth in college entrance in 2010 and maintain that level of growth over the next four years.
Drastically cut our achievement gap.
These goals are supported by a comprehensive plan with a high degree of accountability. Our plan is focused on research proven advancements that tackle many of the challenges facing Wisconsin schools. Advancements such as the following:
Raising standards -- joined consortium with 48 other states to develop and adopt internationally benchmarked standards.
More useful assessments -- changes to our testing process to provide more meaningful information to teachers and parents.
Expanded data systems -- including the ability to tie students to teachers so that we can ultimately learn what works and what doesn't in education.
More support for teachers -- both for new teachers through mentoring and for other teachers through coaching.
Increased capacity at the state and regional level to assist with instructional improvement efforts including providing training for coaches and mentors.
An emphasis on providing additional supports, particularly in early childhood and middle school to high school transition, to ensure that Wisconsin narrows its achievement gap and raises overall achievement.
Turning around our lowest performing schools -- enhancing the capacity for Milwaukee Public Schools and the state to support that effort; contracting out to external organizations with research-proven track records where appropriate.
Providing wraparound services, complimenting school efforts in specific neighborhoods in Milwaukee to get low income children the supports necessary to succeed within and outside the school yard.
Investing in STEM -- Building off our currently successful Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology efforts to ensure that more students have access to high-quality STEM courses and training.
The agenda that you have before you is one that builds on our great successes yet recognizes that we can and must do more to ensure our children are prepared for success. We appreciate your consideration of Wisconsin's strong commitment to this mission. We look forward to joining President Obama and you in America's Race to the Top.
Sincerely, Jim Doyle
Governor
Tony Evers
State Superintendent
Stanford's successful effort to exempt itself from Santa Clara County's new rules on underage drinking has put a focus on the university's growing effort to curb alcohol abuse on campus.
The county's new ordinance, which took effect last year, makes it easier for police to cite anyone hosting a party where underage drinking occurs. It can mean a fine of up to $1,000 plus costs anytime the police are called in.
About 95 percent of Stanford's 6,600 undergraduates, many of them younger than 21, live on campus in university-owned housing. As the landlord, the school could have found itself facing plenty of potential liability under the new county rules.
But the financial question didn't play a role in the university's attempt to persuade county officials to free Stanford from the regulations, said Jean McCown, the school's director of community relations.
IT IS HARD to square the words of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten with the actions of many of her union's officials. Even as Ms. Weingarten issues stirring calls for new ways of thinking, labor leaders in places such as New York use their political muscle to block important reforms. Perhaps they don't think that she means business, or maybe they don't care; either way, it is the interests of students that are being harmed.
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT affiliate that represents teachers in New York City, led the opposition to legislation favored by Gov. David A. Paterson (D) that would have lifted the state's cap on charter schools. Mr. Paterson, backed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had hoped to better position the state for up to $700 million in federal education dollars. The Obama administration has made clear that states that deny parents choice in where their children go to school by limiting the growth of these increasingly popular independent public schools will be penalized in the national competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds.
y husband decided to send me a couple of links to various STEM articles which then led me to even more interesting links. If you are interested in this subject from a state and national level, here are some links. Happy reading!
Apparently, Ohio is waaay ahead on this stuff so many of this articles are about different projects in that state.
From Government Technology magazine, an article about a new STEM school in Ohio.
From the University of Cincinnati (a key sponsor of a lot of these schools), an article about FUSION (Furthering Urban STEM Innovation, Outreach and New Research).
So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.
Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.
In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them -- stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.
In the brave new world of data-driven education reform, most states have learned how to talk the talk. Start with "global competitiveness," add in some "longitudinal data" and "transparency," garnish with "accountability" and serve.
But far fewer states are committed to more than the language of reform -- a reality made clear by the applications submitted last week to President Obama's Race to the Top grant program.
Race to the Top is the crown jewel of the Obama administration's education reform agenda and the largest-ever discretionary federal grant program for public schools. (In his State of the Union address this week, the president proposed adding an additional $1.4 billion to the pot of $4.35 billion.) The hope is that fiscally strapped states will make changes to ineffective policies and present comprehensive reform plans to be competitive for grants of up to $700 million. Indeed, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that around a dozen states have changed laws or policies in response to the program thus far.
Last Friday, NEA heralded the release of its annual Rankings & Estimates report by sending out a press release (embargoed until today) that claimed "inflation over the past decade has outpaced teachers' salaries in every single state across the country." This didn't sound right to researcher Jay P. Greene, so he scrutinized the report and couldn't find a single statistic to back up this claim. On the contrary, NEA's numbers revealed that teachers' salaries had increased 3.4 percent over the past decade, after adjusting for inflation.
Ronnay Howard is 9 years old and legally blind with cornrows in her hair and a smile on her face.
She sits in front of a keyboard in the resource room for the visually impaired at Engleburg Elementary School, her small hands moving methodically over six large keys.
She is writing in Braille, spelling out a single word - furious.
"I know I'm really good at it," she says.
This is how Braille is learned and how it is preserved, one student at a time, one word at a time.
Technology has been a great leveler, a blessing in this modern age for those with visual impairments. It has enabled tens of thousands of people to access written material quickly, to hear what they cannot see.
But there is an underside to the use of technology, to all the cassette tapes and digital recordings of everything from romance novels to textbooks to government forms.
It is called Braille illiteracy.
The National Federation of the Blind has been waging a campaign to ensure that those who are visually impaired learn how to read Braille.
DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya's arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein's blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand.
The lack of basic kit is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of "Reaching the Marginalised", a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO.
In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank's researchers made spot checks. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.
All the candidates for governor are being invited to share their education views with Get Schooled readers. As each piece comes in and is published here, it will be added to a category called Governor 2010. I urge you to read all the pieces.
Here is what GOP candidate Jeff Chapman submitted:
By Jeff Chapman
It is a fact of life that today's children must have access to a first-rate education if they are to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to compete successfully in a modern, technological society.
It is also true that the quality of education in America, Georgia included, has, in too many cases, not kept pace with the demands of an increasingly complex world. High drop-out rates, low scores on achievement tests and poor classroom discipline are just some of the signs indicating that we must do better in preparing today's youth for success in college and the workforce.
What are some of the steps we could take to promote quality education and help ensure that every Georgia student has the opportunity to succeed?
Voters Tuesday will choose reform plans for 30 Los Angeles-area schools in an election like no other.
For one thing, the voting age could dip to 14. Undocumented residents are welcome. Some people will get multiple votes. Ballot stuffing is expected.
And did we mention that each contestant will actually be competing in seven simultaneous elections? And that the results could be meaningless?
Whoever said democracy is messy could have been thinking of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The subject of the election is singular: Groups inside and outside the school system are competing to run 12 persistently low-performing schools and 18 new campuses. The purpose of the balloting is for different voting blocs to select their favored bidder. Each bloc will be tallied separately, including parents, high school students and school employees.
Jim: What's the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there's the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.
Ellie: [32:52] I think there's no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I've served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: "This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it's an excellent curriculum. But that's not enough."
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, "We're going to turn the pages at the same time, and we're going to write the answers in the same way." It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that's why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it's going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.
The university had hoped that other institutions would follow its lead in making it harder for students to earn an A. “But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton's walls,” Ms. Foderaro writes, adding: “with the job market not what it once was, even for Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against bulked-up G.P.A.'s may be coming at their expense.”
How much tougher is it to earn an A at Princeton? The percentage of grades in the A range fell below40 percent last year, compared to nearly 50 percent in 2004, when the policy was adopted.
Virtual schooling can be an educational choice with particular benefits for some students with disabilities. The recent study "Serving Students with Disabilities in State-level Virtual K-12 Public School Programs" by Eve Müller, Ph.D., published in September 2009 by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE)'s Project Forum, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, surveyed state education agencies nationwide regarding their virtual K-12 public school programs:
Eleven states described one or more benefits associated with serving students with disabilities in virtual K-12 public school programs. These include:
The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law's 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.
Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers' unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.
Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law's commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.
Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation's 14,000 school districts.
A number of years ago, curious about the ownership of student work produced in a class, I asked a lawyer friend who specializes in art and design copyright law if schools had the right to reproduce student work in their recruitment publicity without the students' permission. He informed me that the student, despite advice from faculty who may have shaped the work, owns the work and that written permission must be secured before it could be reproduced. He also said such works could be considered student records and recruitment results in some benefit to the institution that exceeds any reading of the "fair use" practices of educational institutions (i.e. those that might be applied to the use of lecture slides for a class).
This reading of the law is at odds with the prevailing opinion of many schools that the student would not have produced work of a particular quality under his or her own resources, and therefore, that faculty have some "ownership rights" in the output of any class. Since that time I have been very careful to ask students first about any public use of their work, even in lectures I give at other schools, and I always credit the work with their names and give students the details on the presentation venues for their resumes. My lawyer friend told me that statements in college catalogs claiming that the institution retains ownership of work produced in a class wouldn't hold up in court; unless the maker is an employee of the institution/company or has signed away rights through some explicit agreement, ownership is retained by the maker. Other attorneys may have different interpretations, and I don't profess to be a legal expert, but the ownership of work produced by students is certainly something to think about.
Abstinence-only education has been a frequent point of contention between conservatives and liberals.
Conservatives, particularly religious ones, have argued that young people need to be taught the moral dimension of sexual activity as part of abstinence education and urged to avoid sex until marriage.
For those reasons, liberals and many health and education professionals have argued against abstinence-only education. Many of them have preferred comprehensive sex education.
On the second page of the Post's Metro section, and on this Web site, you see the results of the 12th annual Washington Post survey of high school student participation in college-level tests, what I call the Challenge Index.
The ranked list of public schools -- both the Washington area version in the Post and the national version in Newsweek each June -- gets lots of attention, but the outrage and acclaim usually swirls around the issue of whether ranking schools is good for you. With much support from Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate teachers around the country, I think it is. But how can you use it?
I invented the list to show that some schools in good neighborhoods don't deserve their great reputations, and some schools in poor neighborhoods don't deserve their terrible ones. Opening up AP and IB courses to everyone who wants to work hard -- the philosophy of the teachers who inspired me to do this -- is a relatively new idea. Ten years ago, most schools in the United States did not let students take these courses unless they had strong grade point averages or teachers' recommendations.
My column last week about how to reveal the secrets of which teacher is getting the best Advanced Placement results received many more comments than I expected. This was, I thought, a topic only for insiders, AP obsessives like me. I forgot, once again, that college-level exams have become a rite of passage for at least a third of American high schoolers, with that proportion increasing every year.
The column provided links to the several local school districts that have posted the subject-by-subject AP results for each school. I was shocked that any were doing it, since five years ago when I asked about this, few school officials had given it much thought. Since the AP tests are written and graded by outside experts, a teacher who does not challenge his students in class is likely to have lots of low scores on that school report, which until now hardly anyone had a chance to see.
Many thought I glossed over the effects of opening up AP courses to anyone who wants to get a useful taste of college trauma, sort of like camping in the back yard before your dad takes you to the Sierras. Enough mediocre students have enrolled in AP, and a similar program International Baccalaureate, to lower average scores even in the classes of the best teachers.
BROADWAY WEST! Ensuring that West High drama continues to thrive; Honoring all of West's talents across the arts
You're invited to spend a fun and lively evening at Broadway West --
the Friends of West High Drama's largest fundraiser and social event of the year!
Saturday, February 6, 2010 • 7-10 pm
Alumni Lounge in the UW's Pyle Center (next to the Red Gym at 702 Langdon Street)*
$30 for one adult • $50 for two adults • $10 per West High student
Tickets will be available at the door, but advance reservations are greatly appreciated
• Enjoy a variety of fabulous theatrical and musical performances,
along with art exhibitions, by some of West's highly talented students
• Eat, drink, and be merry with other West parents, theater friends, and students
• Hors d'oeuvres, desserts, and a cash bar will be available,
with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages
• Bid on great live-auction items, auctioned by the always-hilarious Tom Farley
• Relax in our casual, but festive lakefront venue, with its 270-degree view of Lake Mendota
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
• If you'd like to make a last-minute donation of a fabulous live-auction item, please contact us at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com. All donors will be recognized at the event and acknowledged in writing. We can assist with a pick-up if needed.
• Reserve your tickets to attend Broadway West: $30 for one adult; $50 for two adults; and $10 per West High student. If time permits, fill out the form below and mail it back to us. Or just show up! You can purchase tickets for the same price at the door.
• Make an online donation: If you cannot attend, but would like to support West drama in your absence, consider making a contribution using the form below or online through the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools at https://fmps.org/donate.asp?pt=drama
Thank you for your support -- this will undoubtedly be an evening to remember!
Questions? Contact us at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com.
*Parking is available on Lake and Langdon Streets, in the Memorial Union surface lot, and in the Helen C. White, Lake Street, and Lucky Building ramps.
Make checks payable to FMPS-Friends of West High Drama. Complete and return this section with your payment to: Marcia Gevelinger Bastian, 4210 Mandan Crescent, Madison, WI 53711. Pre-paid tickets will be ready for you at the door of the event. If time does not permit an advance ticket purchase, just show up! You can buy tickets for the same price at the door.
_____ Yes! I'd like to reserve adult tickets: _____ one at $30, or _____ two at $50 = (total) $ _____
($20 of each $30 ticket is tax deductible.)
_____ Yes! I'd like to reserve West student tickets: (number) _____ at $10 each = (total) $ _____
(Student performers get in free.)
_____ I enclose a tax-deductible contribution in the amount of $ _____
(You can also donate online through the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools at https://fmps.org/donate.asp?pt=drama)
_____ Yes! I'd like to donate a live-auction item. I'm contacting FWHD at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com to discuss it and to arrange a pick-up if needed.
Name(s): _______________________________________________________________________________
Address, City, State, Zip: _________________________________________________________________
E-mail: ________________________________________________________________________________
Phone (in case we have questions): _________________________________________________________
Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.
Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.
Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service's mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.
According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson's International Education business, China is the world's largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.
There are many ways to learn, not all of them require traditional methods or expensive "professional development".
This document provides grade level standards for mathematics in grades K-8, and high school standards organized under the headings of the College and Career Readiness Standards in Mathematics. Students reaching the readiness level described in that document (adjusted in response to feedback) will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics courses and for training programs for career-level jobs. Recognizing that most students and parents have higher aspirations, and that ready for college is not the same as ready for mathematics-intensive majors and careers, we have included in this document standards going beyond the readiness level. Most students will cover these additional standards. Students who want the option of entering STEM fields will reach the readiness level by grade 10 or 11 and take precalculus or calculus before graduating from high school. Other students will go beyond readiness through statistics to college. Other pathways can be designed and available as long as they include the readiness level. The final draft of the K-12 standards will indicate which concepts and skills are needed to reach the readiness level and which go beyond. We welcome feedback from states on where that line should be drawn.
English Language Learners in Mathematics Classrooms
English language learners (ELLs) must be held to the same high standards expected of students who are already proficient in English. However, because these students are acquiring English language proficiency and content area knowledge concurrently, some students will require additional time and all will require appropriate instructional support and aligned assessments.
ELLs are a heterogeneous group with differences in ethnic background, first language, socio-economic status, quality of prior schooling, and levels of English language proficiency. Effectively educating these students requires adjusting instruction and assessment in ways that consider these factors. For example ELLs who are literate in a first language that shares cognates with English can apply first-language vocabulary knowledge when reading in English; likewise ELLs with high levels of schooling can bring to bear conceptual knowledge developed in their first language when reading in a second language. On the other hand, ELLs with limited or interrupted schooling will need to acquire background knowledge prerequisite to educational tasks at hand. As they become acculturated to US schools, ELLs who are newcomers will need sufficiently scaffolded instruction and assessments to make sense of content delivered in a second language and display this content knowledge.
A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly.
Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.
A "Value Added" Report for the Madison School District
Kurt Kiefer:
Attached are the most recent results from our MMSD value added analysis project, and effort in which we are collaborating with the Wisconsin center for Educational Research Value Added Research Center (WCERVARC). These data include the two-year models for both the 2006-2008 and 2005-2007 school year spans.
This allows us in a single report to view value added performance for consecutive intervals of time and thereby begin to identify trends. Obviously, it is a trend pattern that will provide the greatest insights into best practices in our schools.
As it relates to results, there do seem to be some patterns emerging among elementary schools especially in regard to mathematics. As for middle schools, the variation across schools is once again - as it was last year with the first set of value added results - remarkably narrow, i.e., schools perform very similar to each other, statistically speaking.
Also included in this report are attachments that show the type of information used with our school principals and staff in their professional development sessions focused on how to interpret and use the data meaningfully. The feedback from the sessions has been very positive.
Table E1 presents value added at the school level for 28 elementary schools in Madison Metropolitan School District. Values added are presented for two overlapping time periods; the period between the November 2005 to November 2007 WKCE administrations, and the more recent period between the November 2006 and November 2008 WKCE. This presents value added as a two-year moving average to increase precision and avoid overinterpretation of trends. Value added is measured in reading and math.
VA is equal to the school's value added. It is equal to the number ofextra points students at a school scored on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across the district A school with a zero value added is an average school in terms of value added. Students at a school with a value added of 3 scored 3 points higher on the WKCE on average than observationally similar students at other schools.
Std. Err. is the standard error ofthe school's value added. Because schools have only a finite number of students, value added (and any other school-level statistic) is measured with some error. Although it is impossible to ascertain the sign of measurement error, we can measure its likely magnitude by using its standard error. This makes it possible to create a plausible range for a school's true value added. In particular, a school's measured value added plus or minus 1.96 standard errors provides a 95 percent confidence interval for a school's true value added.
N is the number of students used to measure value added. It covers students whose WKCE scores can be matched from one year to the next.
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.
About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience.
Seventy percent of teachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack o!familiarity with them.
Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie leaming management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
About one third of parents with high school stUdents use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal. Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year. About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some of the issues related to enhancing the use olthese tools among staff, parents, and stUdents. This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
You ask whether things have changed -- since math wasn't being taught well 40+ years ago either. You're absolutely right on that, but I believe it's only gotten worse over the years, as more and more math phobic people have gone into the field of education. These people never understood math well, so their teaching had to be based on rote following of procedures, etc. Then came "new math", which was an effort to reinvent math and make it more accessible. That bombed, and the efforts to reinvent continued.
What happened is that eventually those bright, math-phobic folks took over the education establishment. They reinvented math to be gentler, kinder, and more fun. Some of the hallmarks are: Small group problem solving, with students figuring our their own solutions to challenging problems. Visiting many topics for only a few weeks each year and moving on, regardless of whether any real mastery was attained. The thinking was/is that students will revisit the topics again in successive years, and will painlessly absorb the concepts. This turns out to be an extremely inefficient way to teach math, so, in order to have enough time to do all these hands-on projects in groups, the explanation of the underlying structure of math and and practice with standard algorithms have all been chucked.
Last year Seattle Public Schools selected new, "inquiry-based" math textbooks. Now there's a lawsuit against the district over the Discovering Mathematics series of textbooks.
Do you have a child in school who is using the new textbooks? What is your experience with inquiry-based math education? KUOW's Ross Reynolds is planning a show on Wednesday, February 3 in the 12 o'clock hour. We'd like to hear from you by Wednesday morning. Share your experience with KUOW by filling out the form below, or call 206.221.3663.
IN this time of job insecurity, the question may have occurred to you: Should you consider part-time teaching as a way to improve your finances and expand your career opportunities?
Becoming a teacher can be rigorous and time-consuming, but at the college level, part-time teaching is a realistic option for some professionals. Postsecondary schools are often willing to be flexible about academic credentials in return for real-world expertise.
The need for part-time professors, known as adjuncts, is high right now. Education is one of the few areas of the economy that has been expanding, partly because so many of the unemployed are returning to school.
You may not want to pursue teaching part time, however, if your motivation is mainly financial. The pay for adjunct professors is usually low, and the work can be challenging. Still, the nonmonetary rewards that come with teaching can be substantial.
Often, people need a minimum of a master's degree to work as adjunct professors, whether at two- or four-year colleges. But with the equivalent skills and expertise, even someone with only a bachelor's degree might be hired, said Claire Van Ummersen, vice president for the Center for Effective Leadership at the American Council on Education.
Few people realize the impact that high school dropouts have on a community's economic, social, and civic health.
Business owners and residents--in particular, those without school-aged children--may not be aware that they have much at stake in the success of their local high schools.
Indeed, everyone--from car dealers and realtors to bank managers and local business owners--benefits when more students graduate from high school.
Nationally, more than seven thousand students become dropouts every school day. That adds up to almost 1.3 million students annually who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled. In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also an economic argument for helping more students graduate from high school.
To better understand the various economic benefits that a particular community could expect if it were to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), with the generous support of State Farm®, analyzed the local economies of the nation's fifty largest cities and their surrounding areas. Using a
sophisticated economic model developed by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based economics firm specializing in socioeconomic impact tools, the Alliance calculated economic projections tailored to each of these metro regions.
I think I have about as good a handle as anyone on the reasons to feel depressed about the Milwaukee school situation. I've been giving talks to groups around the city fairly often lately. I jokingly refer to it as my Spreading Gloom tour.
But at heart, I still am optimistic. Why?
Because I've had the privilege of visiting some schools lately that offer hope. There are too few of them, but they exist. You find them in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, among the private schools supported by public vouchers, and among the charter schools that operate outside MPS. I expect to feature some of them in upcoming columns.
Because there is ample reason to believe that other urban school systems are doing better than Milwaukee. Every school district that is dominated by children coming from impoverished settings has big struggles. But other cities are showing more success and exhibiting more energy than we are, and I don't know any convincing reason why Milwaukee needs to be behind the pack so often. Certainly, this could be changed if we did the right things.
Because things have to get better in terms of the educational success of kids for the city, the metropolitan area and even the state to thrive, and I somehow think awareness of that will eventually create enough pressure to bring improvement.
And - my specific subject for today - because of a new book.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it forced the community to take steps to improve low-performing public schools, according to excerpts from the transcript of a television interview made public Friday afternoon.
The excerpts, e-mailed to reporters, quoted Duncan as giving an evaluation of the effect of the 2005 hurricane on the city's schools.
Martin was quoted as saying to Duncan: "What's amazing is New Orleans was devastated because of Hurricane Katrina, but because everything was wiped out, in essence, you are building from ground zero to change the dynamics of education in that city."
The Green Bay Area Public School District is losing students to open enrollment by a three-to-one ratio. Now, during a pivotal few weeks, it's launching a major multi-media campaign.
Statewide, applications for open enrollment begin Monday and run through the first part of February.
For school districts everywhere, it's a critical time to keep -- and gain -- students.
The Green Bay district is wasting no time in getting its message out. From the classroom to your TV screen, it's an all-out multi-media blitz to highlight the district during a very vulnerable few weeks.
Beginning Monday, a TV ad hits the airwaves advertising what the Green Bay school district says it can offer current and potential students.
I was reading the comments in an earlier post about the new assignment plan and there were many comments about the rigor or lack there of at Rainier Beach High School. I would like to dispel the myth that Rainier Beach does not offer rigor to the high achieving student. If you have a high achieving 8th grader and are in the RBHS attendance area, here is just a sample of what you can expect:
In math as a Freshman, you will start in at least Honors Geometry with Ms. Lessig who is our best math teacher. Once you get through that, you will take Honors Advanced Algebra with me, then Pre Calculus with Mr. Bird (a math major in college) and then as a Senior, you take AP Calculus with Ms. Day, a highly experienced and skilled teacher. As a bonus, in either your Junior or Senior year, you get to take AP Statistics with me. All of these classes are demanding and well taught by teachers who know what they are doing and are passionate about teaching math.
This Dallas suburb, a wealthy enclave known for its top-notch schools, is struggling to integrate a flood of poor, minority students.
In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city's more diverse downtown.
Last month, the district's school board angered many parents when it created a Pac-Man-shaped zone that placed their children in the downtown school for grades nine and 10 instead of in the newer, closer campus.
The downtown school has the highest proportion of poor students of all high schools in the district; many are Hispanic and African-American.
"We want to go to our neighborhood school," said Kelly McBrayer, a white, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives near the site of the new high school.
Being deeply entrenched in all things money, I see first-hand the link between quality education and real, lasting economic success. The better schools you attend, the greater the chance you'll find and prepare for work that will provide satisfaction and financial stability. This is not to say that other factors (such as parent involvement) don't count or that some people don't overcome the odds and attain wealth and happiness without attending or graduating from college, but I'm talking the basics here: kindergarten though high school.
The sad fact is that California public schools are in jeopardy. Many are wonderful now, but as the Chron's Jill Tucker reports, 113 million in funding cuts over two years will change all that. Teachers are facing lay-offs, class size will swell to unmanageable numbers, and programs that make schools appealing to students will be slashed. Want to make kids dislike and devalue formal learning? This will do it. And as a society, we can't afford to have children reject education. Those who do are more likely to make poor financial and lifestyle choices when they reach adulthood, draining the resources of the population at large.
I am one of the three plaintiffs in the math textbook appeal. I am also the white grandmother of an SPS fifth grader, and a retired SPS math teacher.
Mr. Westneat grants that the textbooks we are opposing may be "lousy," but he faults us for citing their disproportionate effect on ethnic, racial, and other minorities. He states that we can't prove this claim. I disagree, and West Seattle Dan has posted voluminous statistics in response to the column. They support our claim that inquiry-based texts, which have now accrued a sizable track record, are generally associated with declining achievement among most students and with a widening achievement gap between middle class whites and minorities.
We've brought race and ethnicity (as well as economic status) into this appeal because there is ample evidence that it is a factor. True, this is not the 80's, and true, in my 10 years of experience teaching in Seattle Schools, I found no evidence that people of color are less capable than whites of being outstanding learners. However, in my 30+ years as a parent and grandparent of SPS students and my years as a teacher, I've developed deep, broad, awareness of the ways that centuries of societally mandated racism play out in our classrooms, even in this era of Barack Obama's presidency.
WHEN the Federal Government's My School website goes live this morning, I will give a little internal cheer.
It will be a little victory for transparency, a little win for democracy and a little tick in the box that shows the Federal Government is deadly serious about improving education standards.
It will also be a little kick in the shins for those who would rather the mountain of compiled information the Government already has - and has had for some years - remains buried under layers of bureaucracy far from public view.
I will be happy because I want to know about the statistics around the performance of the schools in my area. I want to see the spots that need addressing and the areas where they are leading the way. Like most thinking parents out there, the information made available this morning will not be the sole premise on which I will judge those schools, those teachers or those students. Those who have been bleating about the way in which the students, teachers and schools will be judged must view parents as shallow and mushroom-like.
How sweeping education reforms signed into law Monday will be implemented in Michigan remains unclear to area school officials.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed reforms that make it easier to close failing schools, link teacher pay to performance and hold school administrators accountable. The bills also raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, starting with the Class of 2016; allow up to 32 more charter schools to open each year; give professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers, and allow for cyber-schools to educate students who have dropped out online.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said up to 200 low-performing schools could end up under state control as a result of the new laws.
The legislation is part of Michigan's effort to win money from the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition tied to education reform. Michigan could get up to $400 million if it's among the winners.
Local school boards and unions now face a Thursday deadline to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" that indicates their support for the reforms. The memorandums are to be included with the state's Race to the Top application. School districts where the board and union do not sign an agreement risk losing their share of the money.
That's what was argued Tuesday in a Seattle courtroom. Not overtly racist in that a book of equations and problem sets contains hatred or intolerance of others. But that its existence -- its adoption for use in Seattle classrooms -- is keeping some folks down.
"We're on untested ground here," admitted Keith Scully.
He's the attorney who advanced this theory in a lawsuit challenging Seattle Public Schools' choice of the Discovering series of math textbooks last year.
The appeal was brought by a handful of Seattle residents, including UW atmospheric-sciences professor Cliff Mass. It says Seattle's new math books -- and a "fuzzy" curriculum they represent -- are harmful enough to racial and other minorities that they violate the state constitution's guarantee of an equal education.
It also says the School Board's choice of the books was arbitrary.
Mostly, Mass just says the new textbooks stink. For everyone. But he believes they will widen the achievement gap between whites and some minority groups, specifically blacks and students with limited English skills.
Online college education is expanding--rapidly. More than 4.6 million college students were taking at least one online course at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. That's more than 1 in 4 college students, and it's a 17 percent increase from 2007.
Turns out it's the economy, stupid.
Two major factors for the soaring numbers in the 2008-2009 school year are the sour economy and the possibility of an H1N1 flu virus outbreak, according to the seventh annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning report, titled "Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States in 2009." But, the survey's authors say, there is a lot more work to be done, and there's huge potential for online education to expand, especially at larger schools.
"For the past several years, all of the growth--90-plus percent--is coming from existing traditional schools that are growing their current offerings," says Jeff Seaman, one of the study's authors and codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College. Seaman's coauthor, Elaine Allen, who is also a codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group, added that community colleges, for-profit schools, and master's programs have seen significant growth in online offerings.
Thousands of protesters showed up at New York City's Brooklyn Technical High School on January 26 to protest against the closing and reorganization of 19 public schools. Three hundred parents, teachers, students, and local politicians testified that the closings were arbitrary and ignored the struggles and successes taking place in these buildings. The hearing went on until after 2:30 in the morning, when the Panel for Educational Policy, whose majority is appointed by Mayor Michael "Money Bags" Bloomberg, did exactly what it planned to do at the start; it voted to rubber stamp the closings.
The panel's decision will mean phasing out six comprehensive high schools, including Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens, Paul Robeson and William Maxwell in Brooklyn, and Alfred Smith and Christopher Columbus in the Bronx. This is part of Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein's campaign to replace the comprehensive high schools with small mini-schools and charters. Since 2002, Bloomberg/Klein has closed, or is in the process of closing, over ninety schools. What the Mayor and Chancellor were unable to explain was why if smaller schools are the panacea for educational problems six of the schools being closed in this round were small high schools created in previous rounds of school reorganization.
Here's a Spark's Notes version of Gov. Christie's Education Subcommittee Report, which constitutes a list of recommendations to improve public education in N.J. Some are considered "early action," i.e., to be completed within 90 days. The rest have a whopping 6 months for completion. Okay: maybe it's more of a wish list, but it gives any reader a clear sense of Christie and Schundler's agenda.
We've divided these 17 pages of pre-K through 12th grade recommendations (there's another 8 on higher education) into 3 basic categories: School Finance, School Reform, and NJ DOE Oversight.
The federal government's controversial website giving information on the performance of all schools will go live from this Thursday.
The site, called My School, will provide profiles for almost 10,000 schools and will allow parents to compare schools in their area as well as statistically-similar schools in other regions.
In navigating the web page, parents will be able to look at the profiles of their child's school which includes the numbers of students, teachers, attendance rates and the percentage of indigenous students.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard made no apology for the introduction of the website.
"I'm passionate about this and I believe this is the right direction for this country," she told Sky News on Monday.
Independent policy think-tank the Grattan Institute has added to growing criticism of the Federal Government's My School website, saying it will not give an adequate assessment of a school's performance.
My School, scheduled to be launched tomorrow, has already come under heavy criticism.
The Education Union says it will unfairly stigmatise disadvantaged schools, and the Secondary Principals Council says it fails to include crucial data about school funding.
However, several parent groups have supported the proposal to provide information on school performance.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard says it will provide parents and the community with accurate information, allowing them to be their own judge.
Today Cliff Mass and I, (DaZanne Porter had to be at a training in Yakima) accompanied by Dan Dempsey and Jim W, had our hearing in Judge Julie Spector's King County Superior Courtroom; the event was everything we hoped for, and more. Judge Spector asked excellent questions and said that she hopes to announce a decision by Friday, February 12th.
The hearing started on time at 8:30 AM with several members of the Press Corps present, including KIRO TV, KPLU radio, Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, and at least 3 others. I know the number because, at the end, Cliff, our attorney, Keith Scully, and I were interviewed; there were five microphones and three cameras pointed towards us at one point.
The hearing was brief; we were done by 9:15. Keith began by presenting our case very clearly and eloquently. Our two main lines of reasoning are, 1) that the vote to adopt Discovering was arbitrary and capricious because of the board's failure to take notice of a plethora of testimony, data, and other information which raised red flags about the efficacy of the Discovering series, and 2) the vote violated the equal education rights of the minority groups who have been shown, through WASL scores, to be disadvantaged by inquiry based instruction.
Realistically, both of these arguments are difficult to prove: "arbitrary and capricious" is historically a very, very difficult proof, and while Keith's civil rights argument was quite compelling, there is no legal precedent for applying the law to this situation.
The School District's attorney, Shannon McMinimee, did her best, saying that the board followed correct procedure, the content of the books is not relevant to the appeal, the books do not represent inquiry-based learning but a "balanced" approach, textbooks are merely tools, etc., etc. She even denigrated the WASL - a new angle in this case. In rebuttal, Keith was terrific, we all agreed. He quoted the introduction of the three texts, which made it crystal clear that these books are about "exploration." I'm blanking on other details of his rebuttal, but it was crisp and effective. Keith was extremely effective, IMHO. Hopefully, Dan, James, and Cliff can recall more details of the rebuttal.
A lawsuit challenging the Seattle School District's math curriculum went to trial Monday in King County Superior Court.
A group of parents and teachers say the "Discovering Math" series adopted last year does a poor job, especially with minority students who are seeing an achievement gap widen.
A spokeswoman for the Seattle School District, Teresa Wippel, says it has no comment on pending litigation.
KOMO-TV reports the district has already spent $1.2 million on Discovering Math books and teacher training.
On Tuesday, January 26th, at 8:30 AM, King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector will consider an appeal by a group of Seattle residents (including yours truly) regarding the selection by Seattle Public Schools of the Discovering Math series in their high schools. Although this issue is coming to a head in Seattle it influences all of you in profound ways.
In this appeal we provide clear evidence that the Discovery Math approach worsens the achievement gap between minority/disadvantaged students and their peers. We show that the Board and District failed to consider key evidence and voluminous testimony, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously by choosing a teaching method that was demonstrated to produce a stagnant or increasing achievement gap. We request that the Seattle Schools rescind their decision and re-open the textbook consideration for high school.
As his title hints, Louis Menand has written a business book. This is good, since the crisis in American higher education that the Harvard professor of English addresses is a business crisis. The crisis resembles the more celebrated one in the US medical system. At its best, US education, like US healthcare, is of a quality that no system in the world can match. However, the two industries have developed similar problems in limiting costs and keeping access open. Both industries have thus become a source of worry for public-spirited citizens and a punchbag for political opportunists.
Menand lowers the temperature of this discussion. He neither celebrates nor bemoans the excesses of political correctness - the replacement of Keats by Toni Morrison, or of Thucydides by queer theory. Instead, in four interlocking essays, he examines how university hiring and credentialing systems and an organisational structure based on scholarly disciplines have failed to respond to economic and social change. Menand draws his idea of what an American university education can be from the history of what it has been. This approach illuminates, as polemics cannot, two grave present-day problems: the loss of consensus on what to teach undergraduates and the lack of intellectual diversity among the US professoriate.
Much of today's system, Menand shows, can be traced to Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades after 1869. Faced with competition from pre-professional schools, Eliot had the "revolutionary idea" of strictly separating liberal arts education from professional education (law, medicine, etc), and making the former a prerequisite for the latter. Requiring a lawyer to spend four years reading, say, Molière before he can study for the bar has no logic. Such a system would have made it impossible for Abraham Lincoln to enter public life. Funny, too, that the idea of limiting the commanding heights of the professions to young men of relative leisure arose just as the US was filling up with penurious immigrants. Menand grants that the system was a "devil's bargain".
Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation's education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.
The boost that the Administration's Race to the Top initiative - which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education - has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration's biggest domestic policy success of 2009 - all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
What's more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.
These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept - in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth - to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.
Some effects are immediate - for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children. Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.
Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don't hurt the feelings of kids who don't earn awards.
This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.
By Robert H.Wainberg:
I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.
In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be "too hard," not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.
Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.
What we fail to realize is that the concept of "survival of the fittest" still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more "adapted" to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.
A gritty industrial patch of a blue-collar Chicago suburb seems an unlikely setting for the pioneering curriculum at Morton Alternative High School. The program, which combines intensive psychotherapy with conventional studies to help gang members and emotionally troubled teenagers finish school, has reported promising results and has attracted the notice of educators nationwide.
Morton Alternative High School is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East High School and Morton West.
Dr. Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst, started the program at Morton Alternative three-and-a-half years ago as a contrast to schools that take a strict disciplinary approach to youths with behavioral problems. Dr. Smaller and his team of social workers conduct weekly group and individual therapy sessions to help students deal with emotional problems and social pressures common to life in neighborhoods where families struggle with job losses, crime, violence and immigration issues.
Morton Alternative in Cicero is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East and Morton West High Schools. An average of about 100 students are at the school at any one time -- those judged to have some chance for improvement -- though they come and go throughout the academic year.
After his Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" spotlighted climate change, Davis Guggenheim is hoping to do for the US public education system what he did for the environment.
Guggenheim's new film, "Waiting for Superman," is vying for honors in the Sundance Film Festival's US documentary competition, and offers a searing look at the problems facing schools and colleges in the United States.
Like the Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth," Guggenheim's film utilizes graphs and animated charts intercut with interviews with students and educators to illustrate the sector's woes.
There are interesting parallels between charter schools in the US and affordable private school in India. Both focus on the urban poor, promote choice, and often develop within an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Whether it's New Orleans or Hyderabad, there are a dozen accelerants that promote access and quality:
1. Incubation support for new/existing operators with multi-campus potential. including planning support and seed funding (e.g., New School Venture Fund, Charter School Growth Fund, NY Charter School Center). Mumbai-based Dasra incubates social entrepreneurs but with limited access to seed capital.
In New Jersey, we are proud to be ranked among the top 5 NAEP performers in reading, writing, and mathematics. We are proud to have invested so successfully in admired and effective early childhood programs, high-quality charter schools, and high school redesign. We are proud to see the success of our efforts.
However, while we are making inroads to close the achievement gap, we also recognize that more work is needed to prepare all of our students for the demands of the global economy. The existing minority achievement gaps and the gaps for economically-disadvantaged and non- disadvantaged students are unacceptable. There is an urgent need for these further reforms.
The landmark Abbot decisions over the last three decades in conjunction with the creation of the new school funding formula in 2008 solidified New Jersey's commitment to equitable school resources and ensuring that all student sin the State have access to needed resources. Although this has been a significant step, we have not yet achieved outcomes commensurate with the State's investments in education in all districts. Furthermore, we have not yet solved the problems of how to place great teachers and leaders in struggling schools and districts.
Eleven Wisconsin school districts want nothing to do with a highly touted federal grant program that could direct thousands of dollars to their classrooms.
The districts were the only ones out of 425 that refused to take part in the state's application to receive money under the nearly $4.5 billion Race to the Top grant program.
That means if Wisconsin is awarded the $254 million it seeks, the 11 districts won't get a cut, and the money they would have gotten will go to the remaining schools.
That's just fine with Mary Dean, administrator of the Maple Dale-Indian Hills School District just north of Milwaukee. She said the requirements under the state's Race to the Top application were too onerous for her 500-student district to comply with, so instead of giving itself the option of declining to take part later, it decided not to participate at all.
"We really had too many questions, too many unknowns," she said. "We thought the costs would outweigh the benefits."
In classrooms across Wisconsin, students learn mathematics, reading, social studies, art, science, and other subjects through integrated projects that show great promise for increased academic achievement. The catch: the collaboration between students and teachers often involves multiple academic subjects, which can present licensing issues for school districts.
"There is no question that parents and students want innovative programs," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "The reality of some of today's educational approaches requires that we look at our licensing regulations to increase flexibility and expand routes to certification to ensure that these programs are taught by highly qualified teachers."
The filmmaker Vicki Abeles features the stories of students and teachers of Advanced Placement classes and the pressures they face in our achievement-obsessed culture.
Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child's health and behavior?
Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess -- sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.
Schools that have tried it report that when children play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables. And some teachers say there are fewer behavior problems.
"Kids are calmer after they've had recess first," said Janet Sinkewicz, principal of Sharon Elementary School in Robbinsville, N.J., which made the change last fall. "They feel like they have more time to eat and they don't have to rush."
Trying to address a major ethnic and racial achievement gap, the school could divert funds from before- and after-school science labs filled mostly with white students. The plan has sparked debate.
Aaron Glimme's Advanced Placement chemistry students straggle in, sleepy. It is 7:30 a.m. at Berkeley High School. The day doesn't officially begin for another hour. They pull on safety goggles, measure out t-butyl alcohol and try to determine the molar mass of an unknown substance by measuring how much its freezing point decreases.
In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful.
Most districts would not argue with such a record, but Berkeley High's science labs are embroiled in a debate over scarce resources with overtones of race, class and politics.
Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs -- decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% -- and using that money to fund "equity" programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state.
From Discovery Channel's series 'Time Warp' where MIT scientist and teacher Jeff Lieberman and digital-imaging expert Matt Kearney use the latest in high-speed photography to turn never-before-seen wonders into an experience of beauty and learning.
Definition: coalesce - To come together so as to form one whole; unite (from Latin coalescere com- 'together' + alescere 'to grow up')
The timing and content are interesting, from my perspective because:
The nearby Verona School District just approved a Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote. (Watch the discussion here). Madison lags in such expanded "adult to student" learning opportunities. Madison seems to be expanding "adult to adult" spending on "coaches" and "professional development". I'd rather see an emphasis on hiring great teachers and eliminating the administrative overhead associated with growing "adult to adult" expenditures.
I read with interest Alec Russell's recent lunch with FW de Klerk. de Klerk opened the door to South Africa's governance revolution by freeing Nelson Mandela in 1990:
History is moving rather fast in South Africa. In June the country hosts football's World Cup, as if in ultimate endorsement of its post-apartheid progress. Yet on February 2 1990, when the recently inaugurated state President de Klerk stood up to deliver the annual opening address to the white-dominated parliament, such a prospect was unthinkable. The townships were in ferment; many apartheid laws were still on the books; and expectations of the balding, supposedly cautious Afrikaner were low.
How wrong conventional wisdom was. De Klerk's address drew a line under 350 years of white rule in Africa, a narrative that began in the 17th century with the arrival of the first settlers in the Cape. Yet only a handful of senior party members knew of his intentions.
I sense that the Madison School Board and the Community are ready for new, substantive adult to student initiatives, while eliminating those that simply consume cash in the District's $418,415,780 2009-2010 budget ($17,222 per student).
The "State of the District" document [566K PDF] includes only the "instructional" portion of the District's budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 "Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization's mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple "citizen's budget" financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
A new financial reality. I don't see significant new funds for K-12 given the exploding federal deficit, state spending and debt issues and Madison's property tax climate. Ideally, the District will operate like many organizations, families and individuals and try to most effectively use the resources it has. The recent Reading Recovery report is informative.
I think Dan Nerad sits on a wonderful opportunity. The community is incredibly supportive of our schools, spending far more per student than most school Districts (quite a bit more than his former Green Bay home) and providing a large base of volunteers. Madison enjoys access to an academic powerhouse: the University of Wisconsin and proximity to MATC and Edgewood College. Yet, District has long been quite insular (see Janet Mertz's never ending efforts to address this issue), taking a "we know best approach" to many topics via close ties to the UW-Madison School of Education and its own curriculum creation business, the Department of Teaching and Learning.
In summary, I'm hoping for a "de Klerk" moment Monday evening. What are the odds?
Picture a Milwaukee Public Schools high school that college-bound students are clamoring to attend. The school has grown from 100 to 1,000 in six years. Its program is rigorous, its test scores are strong. Hundreds are on a waiting list for admission for next year.
You might think MPS leaders would look at the meteoric rise of Ronald Wilson Reagan College Preparatory School on the far south side and say, "Terrific! This is an opportunity. What can we do to satisfy the obviously huge appetite for what this program has to offer?"
Or, if you were perhaps a bit more cynical, you might think MPS leaders would look at the Reagan situation and say: "OK, who screwed up? Who allowed this school to grow so fast? Can we get a lot of these parents to switch their kids to other high schools where - for some reason - there is no waiting list?"
Reagan arguably has provided the biggest shot in the arm that MPS has gotten in the last decade or so. It provides a rigorous International Baccalaureate program for all its students - "We have one vision, one mission, one focus - IB," says Julia D'Amato, the principal and chief driver behind Reagan's success. Reagan is working with other MPS schools to develop a kindergarten through high school IB continuum in MPS.
But in recent months, Reagan has had to fend off an attempt to cap its enrollment and it has been ordered to reduce sharply the number of students next fall who do not fall into the special education category. Reagan leaders clearly feel frustrated by how much work is going into protecting their success from MPS leaders.
"All the buzzwords that are supposed to make a successful school, that's what we have here," says Mary Ellen McCormick-Mervis, one of the school's administrators. "If we're doing everything right, why not help us?"
In discussions of "effective" teaching, we often hear about the "objectives" that teachers should spell out and repeat, the "learning styles" they should target, the "engagement" they should guarantee at every moment, and the constant encouragement and praise they should provide--all in the interest of raising test scores. The D.C. public schools IMPACT (the teacher assessment system for D.C. public schools) awards points to teachers who implement such practices; Teach For America addresses some of them in its forthcoming book.
Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: "No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!"
Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson's content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students "on task," reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives.
When Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, came to the Sundance Film Festival here this week, it wasn't movies on his mind, it was education -- your kids' education.
A new documentary, "Waiting For Superman," by director Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") looks at what Gates and Guggenheim say is a U.S. public school system in shambles.
"The quality of our educational system is what made America great. Now it's not as good as it was, and it needs to be a lot better," Gates told Reuters after the film's premiere on Friday.
"Many of these high schools are terrible, and this film, 'Waiting for Superman' by Davis Guggenheim, which I have a very minor part in, tells this story in a brilliant way," he said.
One staff member at a Springfield charter school told state education investigators he felt so pressured by his principal last spring to improve MCAS scores that, in order to keep his job, he helped one student write an essay for the test.
Another staff member said he was fired after he accused the principal of encouraging cheating, while another staff member observed a colleague pull some students away from watching a movie so they could fix answers on their tests.
The findings, released yesterday by state education officials, offer the first public glimpse into the specific cheating allegations that have been leveled against Robert M. Hughes Academy, which was ordered last winter to improve its scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests to avoid being closed.
Previously, Mitchell Chester, commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, had said only that the cheating, described as pervasive and systemic, was orchestrated by the principal and carried out by several adults at the school, which teaches 180 students in kindergarten through grade 8.
The most interesting session I attended concered Kewaskum schools program they call "People over programs". I have long noted that compared to the private sector, school district management structures are very weak - the Kewaskum program deals with this problem by focusing on high professional standards for their staff. I was encouraged to see an alternative model that acknowledges this issue and attempts to address the problem directly.
Along similar lines I hear a presentation from the Janesville schools - they are working with a management consulting firm (that is donating their services) to develop standards of professionalism and accountability in management. The Superintendents evaluation is published on the district website with progress toward specific measurable goals.
I also attended a session with ideas about using incentives with HRA's to reduce health insurance costs, and a session about district consolidation - I think that looking at collaborative or consolidated support services with neighboring district might be a way to save money.
Parents wishing to send their children to a different school district next year will be able to participate in the open enrollment program the first three weeks of February.
From Feb. 1 through Feb. 19 parents can apply for their children to attend a public school other than the one in which they live. Last school year, more than 28,000 students participated.
Participation in the program has grown each year since it began in 1998 when just 2,500 were enrolled.
Cassie Frankel seems an unlikely martial arts warrior.
The sophomore at West High heard about the Mixed Martial Arts Club from her chemistry teacher and decided to give it a try. The group meets Thursdays at noon, learning and practicing a variety of fighting styles, including boxing, wrestling, judo and jujutsu.
"I like that it's an individual sport because I'm not that athletic," Frankel says during a break in practice. "It's more about how your body works." She likes boxing best: "I feel really tough with the boxing gloves, even though they're pink."
Frankel acknowledges the controversy over teaching kids to fight. But, she says, "I think it's a good idea because if you know how to fight you're less likely to get hurt."
The January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic features a noteworthy article titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? Although the article does not focus on gifted education per se, it is still worth a close read. The article discusses specific attributes that excellent teachers with exceptional track records tend to display in the classroom. (It is important to note that these attributes are based on research that was conducted by the nonprofit organization, Teach for America, which advocates for teacher reform. It is also important to note that the group's research focuses solely on teachers who work in underperforming school districts where the primary goal in the general education classroom is to get students to perform at or above grade level.) The article outlines several specific recommendations that the organization makes for recruiting and hiring successful teachers, particularly in underserved communities.
For those of us in the gifted education community, the traits identified in the article may be ones that we should perhaps consider first before we consider any additional teacher characteristics that might be specific to gifted education. (See my previous blog entry titled, Training and Competencies of Teachers of the Gifted.)
Two weeks ago I explored the possibility that high schools could challenge all students, gifted or otherwise, without having gifted programs. Quaker Valley High School outside of Pittsburgh, for instance, seemed able to create new opportunities for a variety of kids by ignoring standard procedures that had outlived their usefulness, such as homework requirements or rules against taking more than one course in the same period.
One wise reader said, in effect: Yeah, but that will never work in elementary schools.
As if by fate, I received an email shortly after from Susan Ohanian, a delightful teacher, speaker, author and blogger whose work I love, even when she is portraying me as a test-addled idiot. We may disagree on policy issues, but we have shared tastes about what good teaching looks and sounds like. In her email, she described how she brought a free-form gifted non-program to an elementary school in Troy, N.Y.
Here is what she said. Don't forget to take a look at her blog at susanohanian.org.
Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature, it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.
SOUTH AFRICA spends a bigger share of its GDP on education than any other country on the continent. Yet its results are among the worst. Fifteen years after apartheid was buried, black children continue to receive an education that is vastly inferior to most of their white peers. Instead of ending inequality, as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) promised, the country's schools are perpetuating it.
For Graeme Bloch, an education expert at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, his country's education system is a "national disaster". He says around 80% of schools are "dysfunctional". Half of all pupils drop out before taking their final "matric" exams. Only 15% get good enough marks to get into university. Of those who do get in, barely half end up with a degree. South Africa regularly comes bottom or near the bottom in international literacy, numeracy and science tests.
University heads increasingly complain about students totally unprepared for higher education. Employers bemoan a dearth of skilled manpower, yet--by some measures--one in three South Africans has no job. A study of first-year students by Higher Education South Africa, the universities' representative body, found only half the 2009 intake to be proficient in "academic literacy" and barely a quarter in "quantitative literacy", while no more than 7% were deemed to have the necessary mathematics skills.
Each day after school, 17-year-old Phyllis Quach goes to a warehouse filled with silk flowers, stuffed animals and other gift items her parents sell through their South Florida wholesale business.
The recession hit the family hard and they can no longer afford the building. Quach helps pack the goods for a move to a cheaper location. On weekends, her mother often goes door to door, hoping to find new retail customers.
"I never want to go through what they go through," Quach said, tears gathering in her eyes.
So Quach is taking a a personal finance course at her Miami high school -- getting early lessons on managing credit, balancing a budget and buying a first home. Experts say the recession's length and severity means it could affect the students' lifelong financial behavior, as the Great Depression affected their grandparents' frugal generation.
Dear Members of Our Community, The mission of the Madison Metropolitan School District is as follows:
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
A year ago, a group of community and school staff members committed time to develop a revised Strategic Plan for the school district. As part of this, our mission statement was revised. This plan was approved by the Board of Education in September 2009 and will be reviewed and updated annually. For the foreseeable future, the plan will serve as our road map to know if we are making a difference relative to important student learning outcomes and to the future of our community. To make the most difference, we must continue to partner with you, our community. We are indeed very fortunate to be able to educate our children in a very supportive, caring community.
As a school district, our highest priority must be on our work related to teaching and learning. For our students and the community's children to become proficient learners and caring and contributing members of society, we must remain steadfast in this commitment.
Related to our mission, we have also identified the following belief statements as a district:
We believe that excellent public education is necessary for ensuring a democratic society.
Webelieveintheabilitiesofeveryindividualinourcommunityandthevalueof their life experiences.
We believe in an inclusive community in which all have the right to contribute.
Webelievewehaveacollectiveresponsibilitytocreateandsustainasafe environment that is respectful, engaging, vibrant and culturally responsive.
We believe in continuous improvement in formed by critical evaluation and reflection.
We believe that resources are critical to education and we are responsible for their equitable and effective use.
Webelieveinculturallyrelevanteducationthatprovidestheknowledgeandskills to meet the global challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Purpose of this report
The purpose of this State of the District Report is to provide important information about our District to our community and to share future priorities.
Ever seen the Advanced Placement Grade Report for your high school? I thought not. Most people don't know it exists. That is why I have so much pleasure going over the reports. It is like reading the principal's e-mails, full of intriguing innuendo and secrets that parents and students aren't supposed to know.
Although these subject-by-subject reports rarely appear on public Web sites, some schools will show them to me if I ask, for the following reasons: 1. I am very polite; 2. no reporter has ever asked for them before, so there are no rules against it; and 3. they don't think anyone will care.
They are wrong on that last count. The AP Grade Report allows the public to see which AP courses at a school produce the most high grades, and the most low grades, on AP exams. You can gauge the skill of the teachers and the nature of the students who take various AP subjects.
This region's schools have made AP (and the similar International Baccalaureate, which provides comparable reports) the most challenging and influential courses they have. On Feb. 1, The Post will publish my annual rankings of Washington area schools based on participation in these tests, written and scored by outside experts. Students who do well on them can earn college credit. Many people would be interested in the actual results (different from the participation figures I use in the rankings) if they were readily available. To my surprise, that is beginning to happen.
Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey -- dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.
But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.
Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting some help. The Chinese government is sending teachers from China to schools all over the world -- and paying part of their salaries.
At a time of tight budgets, many American schools are finding that offer too good to refuse.
In Massillon, Ohio, south of Cleveland, Jackson High School started its Chinese program in the fall of 2007 with 20 students and now has 80, said Parthena Draggett, who directs Jackson's world languages department.
That is close to a third of all schools in the District. Such schools will be required to adopt one of four drastic reform strategies approved by the US Department of Education.
** UW-Madison is receiving nearly $18,000 from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute -- which One Wisconsin Now calls a "conservative think tank" -- for the polling project to cover a part of Goldstein's salary.
** Poll results showed a 46.6 percent to 42.4 percent statewide opposition to private school vouchers. However, due to political concerns, it appears WPRI President George Lightbourn was able to keep these numbers from being played up. In the end, references to statewide opposition to private school vouchers were not used in a press release touting the poll. Instead, a press release talking about the poll results put out on the UW-Madison website included only figures from Milwaukee County, where the majority supported vouchers.
"This is a lesson about the credibility and the trustworthiness of materials produced by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute," Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, says in the press release. "If polling results don't fit its pro-voucher agenda, then those polling results are erased from the final analysis. Most unfortunately, the UW is now tied directly to this manipulation to serve the political agenda of WPRI."
One Wisconsin Now does extensive voter data collection and mining for certain candidates.
"Civil War Medicine" paper published in the Winter 2009 Issue of The Concord Review
Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length. I remember the dread that filled me as my A.P. United States History teacher, Mrs. Melissa Humphrey, handed out the assignment for the twenty-page research paper. She also passed around copies of The Concord Review as examples of research papers done well. For us, the first deadline was only a few weeks away. We had to have a thesis. It was then that I truly realized the depth of this academic adventure. My job was not to simply report on some topic in U.S. history; I had to prove something. I had to create an arguable thesis and defend it. I was overwhelmed.
I put the assignment in the back of my mind for about a week. Then, I began to think seriously about what I could possibly want to write about. I brainstormed a list of all times in U.S. history that fascinate me, ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I settled on Civil War medicine because of my plans to pursue a career in medicine. I figured this would be a great opportunity to gather more knowledge on my potential future profession.
Simply choosing a topic was not enough, though. I needed a thesis. So I began to search through books and online databases for any information about Civil War medicine. I gathered so much information that my head was spinning. I realized I had to narrow down my topic, and that this would be done by creating a specific, arguable thesis. Sifting through all the data and historical articles, I noticed that Civil War medicine was not as atrocious as I had always believed it to be. I had my thesis. I wanted to defend Civil War medicine by placing it in its own historical context, something many fail to do when evaluating it with a modern eye.
A few weeks later, approved thesis in hand, I stepped into the Tufts University library, the alma mater of my mother. The battle plan: gather enough materials, particularly primary sources, to prove my thesis. The enemy: the massive amounts of possibly valuable literature. I had never previously encountered the problem of finding books so specialized that they didn't end up being helpful for my thesis nor had I ever been presented with so many options that I had to narrow down from thirty to a mere fifteen books. Actually, I had never left a library before with so many books.
For the next few months, the books populated the floor of my room. Every weekend, I methodically tackled the volumes, plastering them with Post-it notes. The deadline for the detailed outline and annotated bibliography loomed. I continued reading and researching, fascinated by all I was learning. In fact, I was so fascinated that I felt justified using it as my excuse to delay synthesizing all of my information into an outline. With thousands of pages of reading under my belt, I finally tackled the seven-page map for my twenty-page journey. That was easily the hardest part of the entire process. Once the course was charted, all I had to do was follow it. Of course, it was under construction the entire way, and detours were taken, but the course of the trip turned out much like the map.
I thought printing out the twenty-page academic undertaking, binding it, and handing it in was the greatest feeling I had ever experienced from a scholastic endeavor. I remember being overjoyed that day. I remember sleeping so soundly. I remember the day as sunny. I'm not sure if it actually was...
Clearly, I was thinking small. I had no idea what my grade would be. At that point, I did not even care. I had finished the paper. I considered that a tremendous accomplishment. Eventually, the graded research papers were handed back. What had previously been my greatest academic feeling was surpassed. The grade on my paper was a 99%. I was overjoyed and thrilled that I had not only completed such a tremendous task but had completed it pretty darn well. I thought that was the greatest feeling.
I still needed to think bigger. I submitted my paper to The Concord Review on a whim this summer. I remember Mrs. Humphrey showing us the journals and praising their quality. She is a tough teacher, and I thought since she had liked my paper so much I should give The Concord Review a go. I was not counting on being published. I knew my chances were slim, and I knew I was competing with students from around the world.
This November, I received a letter in the mail from Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review. My paper was selected to be published in the Winter 2009 issue. That was the greatest feeling. I am a seventeen-year-old public high school student. I am also a seventeen-year-old published author. People work their whole lives to make it to this point. I feel so honored to have this recognition at my age. My hard work paid off far beyond where I thought it would. Thank you, Mr. Fitzhugh, for recognizing the true value of academic achievement and for reminding me why I love to learn.
Milwaukee's Michael Bond's Letter to Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle on Race to the Top & Governance
Michael Bonds, President, Milwaukee Board of School Directors [1.3MB PDF]:
January 18, 2010
Governor Jim Doyle
Office of the Governor
115 East State Capitol
Madison, WI 53702
Dear Governor Doyle:
As President of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, I am writing to express my disappointment with your cynical statement regarding Wisconsin's Race to the Top (RTT) application. In your release, you predict that the application will fail because it does not include mayoral control of the Milwaukee Public Schools District (MPS). You also argue that the Legislature's refusal to adopt your mayoral control proposal in Milwaukee will cost other school districts millions of dollars.
Since mayoral control is not a requirement for Race To the Top dollars, your statement can only be interpreted as a political attempt to tum the rest of the state against MPS and to intimidate legislators who oppose mayoral control into supporting your proposal.
The Obama administration's main school improvement initiative has spurred education policy changes in states across the nation, but it is meeting with some last-minute resistance as the first deadline for applications arrives Tuesday.
Thousands of school districts in California, Ohio and other states have declined to participate, and teachers' unions in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida have recommended that their local units not sign on to their states' applications. Several rural states, including Montana, have said they will not apply, at least for now, partly because of the emphasis on charter schools, which would draw resources from small country schools.
And Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said last week that his state would not compete for the $700 million that the biggest states are eligible to win in the $4 billion program, known as Race to the Top, calling it an intrusion on states' rights.
Still, about 40 states were rushing to complete applications for the Tuesday deadline, the first in the two-stage competition. The last-minute opposition is unlikely to derail efforts by most of those states to win some of the federal money.
*** Keep School on Dedicated Path in Meeting Goals
*** Get Teachers and Students to Know Each Other
*** Move All Students Toward Success
*** Have Strong School Leaders and Governing Boards
*** Support and Train Good Teachers
*** Create Small School for Connectedness and Community
*** Continually Measure Student Progress
*** Work to Create Parental Involvement
*** Get Around the Obstacles
A lot of the success in a school depends on intangibles, says Marcia Spector who heads Seeds of Health in Milwaukee. Energy, drive, a genuine commitment to high goals, working hard, and a street-smart sense of how to work with kids, how to work the bureaucracy, and how to run the school are all important. Yes, it is hard work, but it's worth it. In fact, it's actually fun, says Spector.
A new Mandarin Chinese immersion charter school will open this fall in Verona.
The Verona school board voted 4-3 on Monday night to approve the school, making it the first of its kind in the state.
The school will be called the Verona Area International School. It will have two halftime teachers, one who teaches only in English and the other who teaches only in Mandarin. Math, science and some social-science classes would be taught in the Chinese language. Students will spend half the day learning in English and half in Mandarin Chinese.
Grover is not real sanguine with current education policy ideas, such as Mayor Tom Barrett's bid for a takeover of Milwaukee public schools. Fundamentally, smaller school districts (500 kids) should be the goal, and structural changes will never trump upbringing and parental involvement in their children's education, he said.
"The difference between the kid headed to a Milwaukee school and one in Whitefish Bay is what they bring to the school house door," he said. "The aspiration level of the parents is key. They want the best for their kids."
As for the contest to succeed Jim Doyle as governor in 2010, Grover isn't sure Barrett can be tough enough but suggests he'd be an improvement.
"Jim Doyle started out life at third base and thought he hit a triple," Grover said, using an aphorism to denote "an elitist west side (Madison) upbringing."
"Barrett is absolutely a decent human being. I have the feeling he won't be as aggressive as he will need to be. He's almost like Barack (Obama) ...'Let us reason together.'"
Smaller districts certainly make sense, including places like Madison.
Kudos to the country's two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.
Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia's next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state's next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.
This is good news for all school children in both states, but it's especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.
But China’s drive to succeed in the sciences is also subjecting its research establishment to intense pressure and sharper scrutiny. And as the standoff last week between Google and China demonstrated, the government controls the give and take of information.
How likely is it that China will become the world’s leader in science and technology, and what are the impediments to creating a research climate that would allow scientists to thrive?
There is increasing talk these days about making every school in the district a "quality" school. The New Student Assignment Plan has increased the frequency, volume, and urgency for this bumper sticker talk. But despite those increases, there has not been much increase in action or even understanding of the goal.
Everytime I hear someone spout this talk about "every school a quality school" I stop them immediately and ask them what they mean by that. What is a "quality school"? How will we know one? I pretty much tell them that if they cannot accurately define a quality school then they should just shut the hell up about it. I hate it when people use words without knowing what they mean.
So, for the record, I have my own idea about what is a quality school. It is a school where the students are taught - at a minimum - the core set of knowledge and skills that they should be taught at their grade level and they learn it. It's a school in which students working beyond grade level are appropriately challenged with more rigor, meaning accelerated lessons, more ambiguous ideas, more complex ideas, a wider range of contexts, or a deeper understanding of the ideas. It's a school were the students who are working below grade level are given the early and effective interventions they need to get to grade level. In short, students are taught at the frontier of the knowledge and skills and are brought at least to grade level. There are plenty of examples of such schools here in Seattle.
Colorado education officials will unveil a reform proposal today that asks for $380 million in federal Race to the Top funding, but they are missing a key plank regarding teacher evaluations that will likely give other states a leg up in the contest.
Months of work have led to a nearly 150-page plan that touches on nearly everything, including incentives for top teachers, resources focused on failing schools and sharing data across the state.
But while Colorado's application vows to address such issues as teacher performance, tenure and dismissal through a commission born today of an executive order from Gov. Bill Ritter, other states with more advanced teacher-tracking systems have put their evaluation plans into law.
Colorado began the competition as a front-runner, but analysts say the lack of guidelines for tenure and dismissal will likely hurt the state's chances at being among the first chosen for a share of the $4.35 billion program. As many as 45 states nationwide are revamping their K-12 systems to compete for hundreds of millions in stimulus dollars that will be granted in two rounds of competition.
Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien has spearheaded Colorado's Race to the Top effort and said she would rather have the support of teachers and their union than forge ahead with a plan that schools are unhappy with.
The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that's always in crisis. The academy is too distant from the concerns of everyday life, or else it's too politically engaged. The academy has become completely irrelevant, except for the fact that it's too relevant. We ought to be grateful to our universities for this. Academic wrongheadedness is one of the few things people across the political and cultural spectrum can agree upon.
One popular way of describing the failure of the contemporary academy is to complain that it no longer produces special things called "public intellectuals," so it is either a great relief or a rule-proving exception to read a blazingly sane take on the academy's troubles by one of the few professors who pretty safely deserves the term. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas manages to do many things in four short essays--describe the changing self-conception of the university, identify the difficulties behind curricular reform, and analyze the anxieties of humanities professors. But the book's chief accomplishment is its insistence that what we take for academic crises are probably just academic problems, and they are ours to solve.
New York, home of the nation's largest school district, is on the verge of rejecting key components of the White House's education effort amid a state fight over charter schools.
The Democratic-led legislature, with heavy backing from teachers' unions, is behind a law that critics, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, say will curb the growth of charter schools.
Tuesday is the deadline for states to submit initial bids for a slice of the $4.35 billion that is up for grabs under the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" competition, which is intended to coax policy concessions such as opening charter schools and getting approval of merit-pay systems through stubborn legislatures.
Late Monday, New York Governor David A. Paterson and lawmakers were negotiating a compromise to salvage the state's application for the first phase of the contest. Although it is seen as unlikely that Albany leaders will strike a compromise by the deadline, it is expected that New York will submit a bid either way.
The maximum amount that New York could win is $700 million and it is unclear if program's financial lure will be enough to forge a breakthrough.
We argue about testing in the US, but the focus on and stakes related to testing is much higher in China and India where the tip of the human funnel is the 12th grade exam; to a large life options hang in the balance. In the US, there are lots of options and second chances; not so in India and China. As a result, the singular secondary focus is marks leading to success on the exit exam.
Yesterday, I visited an expensive private school in Hyderabad. The International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program looked familiar and rich. I dropped in on a primary teacher staff meeting that was informed by student work.
However, it was a different picture in the middle grades where the school abandoned IB for the Cambridge curriculum. Students sat in rows quietly plowing through workbooks while teachers sat at their desk. It was among the most stifling middle grade programs I've ever seen.
As New York finalizes its application for the federal Race to the Top program, a proposal to end the cap on the number of charter schools has been promoted as key to our success in getting these new federal funds. But promoters of this proposal are ignoring two other critical issues: The small role that charter schools play in the Race to the Top application, and the fact that city charters are not serving a representative sample of our neediest students.
Despite the heated rhetoric from charter proponents, the fact is that the charter cap accounts for only eight of the 500 points New York can earn on its Race to the Top application.
What's more, Race to the Top guidelines state that charter schools should "serve student populations that are similar to local district student populations, especially relative to high-need students." But the evidence is clear that New York's charter schools are actually becoming a separate and unequal branch of public education.
Mulgrew is the president of the United Federation of Teachers.
"Good audience skills are imperative," Danielle Johnson reminds her restless 10th-graders as one, Raquel, nervously fiddles with her laptop before holding forth on her project portfolio at City Arts and Technology High School (known as CAT), a charter school of 365 students on a green knoll above the blue-collar southern reaches of Mission Street in San Francisco.
"I decided to use the story of my mom getting to this country as an immigrant," Raquel says, moving into her personal-memoir segment, sniffing back tears as a blurry photo of her mother at age 18 appears on the screen. "I had never asked my mother about how she got here."
CAT exemplifies President Obama's push to seed innovative schools that demand much from all students, echoed by Sacramento's $700 million reform plan that goes to Washington this week. How to bottle the magic of CAT teachers like Johnson - listening carefully to each teen, strengthening each voice with basic skills and motivating ideals - is the challenge facing would-be reformers.
Perhaps with business organizations behind it, a significant increase in the state's investment in education from kindergarten through college could gain some traction in the Florida Legislature.
Certainly without it, there is virtually no likelihood that lawmakers in an election year will find the courage to search for ways -- not all of them monetary -- to improve public education, and therefore our state's chances for the future.
An educated population and an accomplished work force are the underpinnings of a state where, as the Florida Council of 100 and Florida Chamber of Commerce expressed in a report last week, the American dream can be successfully carried out. Where better, asked Council of 100 Chair Susan Story "than in the state of Florida?"
Both Gov. Charlie Crist and former Gov. Jeb Bush put their stamp of approval on what was described at its unveiling Thursday as the "education wish list" of these two significant Florida business groups. Last year, the two joined with education leaders to get more money for higher education, even though the Legislature went in the opposite direction, cutting $150 million from our universities. Again this year budget committees are asking universities to be prepared for across-the-board cuts as high as 10 percent, in keeping with a budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion.
The recommendations from these groups, which are coincidentally against most tax or fee increases and lifting sales-tax exemptions, include tougher graduation standards at the pre-K-12 level, virtual elimination of teacher tenure and a constitutional amendment legalizing vouchers.
The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union, has been working hard to distance itself from its competitor, the National Education Association, which tends to resist sensible reforms.
The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.
oth Gov. David Paterson and the state Legislature need to be shown the woodshed. The so-called Race to the Top federal education initiative that we're being rushed into accepting by the governor would lift the cap on the number of charter schools in this state and in the process throw teachers under the bus for the failures of inner-city public education. It's another chuckleheaded set of directives from Washington. The big Bush push, No Child Left Behind, left a lot of kids behind, and school districts and even states that became disenchanted with education policy that never matched funding for the mandates involved. Race to the Top is headed for the same dust heap, but not before we pay through the nose for it.
And once again New York is panting to go along with the feds because of extra stimulus money available, up $700 million possibly, maybe, if we're one of the winners of the race. On the other hand and by way of perspective, we spend more than $20 billion a year in this state on public education. So essentially we're giving up our right to set our own policy, as flawed as it is, for a short-term handout. How New York of us.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends to the White House this week a colorful pastiche of education fixes, hoping to score $700 million in federal dollars. Sacramento's plan echoes Washington's own reform strategy - built on President Obama's surprising faith in market remedies for the ills facing schools.
Oddly mimicking Reagan's game plan of a generation ago, Sacramento's agenda relies on market competition by seeding more charter schools, allowing parents to shutter lousy schools and rewarding teachers who boost student performance.
"This is about parental choice in public education," said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a chief architect of the bipartisan plan.
Even more notable, efforts by educators at nearby Johns Hopkins University to replicate the school's gains in dozens of other locations have also met with some success. Slowly, the network of Talent Development High Schools is helping student groups that often seem most at risk.
But good news at the high school level is unusual. Despite vigorous calls for change and a host of major reform efforts, encouraging results have been scarce. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores - considered the "Nation's Report Card" - tend to be stagnant for high-schoolers, even when they rise for elementary school students.
Only about half of low-income and minority students in US high schools graduate, and many of those who do are unprepared for college. The isolated examples of success often fail when administrators or education reformers try to reproduce them on a large scale.
Teachers hate this idea because they know that teachers are not solely responsible for their students' scores. The students bear some responsibility, as do their families, for whether students do well or poorly on tests. District leaders bear some responsibility, depending on the resources they provide to schools. Teachers also are aware that the tests are not the only measure of what happens in their classrooms and that even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that we need better tests. There is a fairly sizable body of research demonstrating that test scores are affected by many factors beyond the teachers' control.
I was surprised too when I read the headlines and the press accounts.
Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done a lot of traveling in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world where many of you come from.
I knew I would enjoy that, and I have--I've been doing it ever since. I'm the doctor that students get sent to see if they have a writing problem that their professor thinks I can fix. As a bonus, I've made many friends--from Uganda, Uzbekhistan, India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Iraq, Nigeria, Poland, China, Colombia and many other countries. Several young Asian women, when they went back home, sent me invitations to their weddings. I never made it to Bhutan or Korea, but I did see the wedding pictures. Such beautiful brides!
According to the Florida Department of Education, Manatee High School was not a place parents should have wanted to send their children in 2006. The Bradenton-based school received a "D" rating on the state's A-F scale of academic performance that year while failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind proficiency standards for the fourth year in a row. At the same time, Boca Raton Community High School was flying high, having just earned its second straight "A" rating and being named among the best high schools in the country by Newsweek magazine.
But while Manatee got dismal marks from state and federal accountability schemes, it was actually quite successful in a number of important ways. It graduated a higher percentage of its students than Boca Raton and sent almost the same percentage of its graduates off to college. Once they arrived on college campuses, Manatee graduates earned higher grades and fewer of them failed remedial, not-for-credit math and English courses than their Boca Raton peers.
In other words, D-rated Manatee was arguably doing a better job at achieving the ultimate goal of high school: preparing students to succeed in college and careers. But because Florida's accountability systems didn't measure college and career success in 2006, nobody knew.
On August 27, 2009, State Superintendent Tony Evers stated that the State of Wisconsin would eliminate the current WKCE to move to a Balanced System of Assessment. In his statement, the State Superintendent said the following:
New assessments at the elementary and middle school level will likely be computer- based with multiple opportunities to benchmark student progress during the school year. This type of assessment tool allows for immediate and detailed information about student understanding and facilitates the teachers' ability to re-teach or accelerate classroom instruction. At the high school level, the WKCE will be replaced by assessments that provide more information on college and workforce readiness.
By March 2010, the US Department of Education intends to announce a $350 million grant competition that would support one or more applications from a consortia of states working to develop high quality state assessments. The WI DPI is currently in conversation with other states regarding forming consortia to apply for this federal funding.
In September, 2009, the School Administrators Alliance formed a Project Team to make recommendations regarding the future of state assessment in Wisconsin. The Project Team has met and outlined recommendations what school and district administrators believe can transform Wisconsin's state assessment system into a powerful tool to support student learning.
Criteria Underlying the Recommendations:
Wisconsin's new assessment system must be one that has the following characteristics:
Benchmarked to skills and knowledge for college and career readiness • Measures student achievement and growth of all students
Relevant to students, parents, teachers and external stakeholders
Provides timely feedback that adds value to the learning process • Efficient to administer
Aligned with and supportive of each school district's teaching and learning
Advances the State's vision of a balanced assessment system
In the early 1960s, I was fortunate enough to work for a while at the Space and Information Systems Division of North American Aviation in Downey, California, which was building the command modules for the Apollo Program. I was quite impressed by the fact that, although I was basically a glorified clerk, when I left the company to work for Pan American World Airways, they invited me in for an exit interview.
The interviewer asked me about the details of my job--what I liked and didn't like about it. He asked me if the pay and benefits were satisfactory, and whether my immediate boss had done a good job in supervising me or not (he was an Annapolis graduate and had done a first-rate job). The general goal of the interview seemed to be to find out why I was leaving and if there was anything they could do to keep an employee like me in the future. This took place in the middle of a very high-pressure and a multi-billion dollar effort to get to the moon before the end of the decade. North American Aviation also had the contract for the Saturn 5 rocket at their Rocketdyne division. But they made the time to talk to me when I left.
Tony Wagner of Harvard, in his book, The Global Achievement Gap (2008), reports on a focus group he held for recent graduates "of one of the most highly-regarded public high schools," to ask them about their recollections of their experience of the school. This was a kind of exit interview two or three years later. When he asked them what they wished they had received, but didn't, in school, they said:
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."
This was of particular interest to me, because of my conviction that the majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious research paper. When I asked Mr. Wagner if he knew of other high schools which conducted focus groups or interviews with recent graduates, he said he only knew of three.
I would suggest that this is a practice which could be of great benefit to all our public high schools. Without too much extra time and effort, they could both interview each Senior, after she/he had finished all their exams, and ask what they thought of their academic experience, their teachers, and so forth. In addition, schools could hold at least one focus group each year with perhaps a dozen recent graduates who could compare their college demands with the preparation they had received in their high schools.
Lack of curiosity inevitably leads to lack of knowledge, and it is to be lamented that our high schools seem, in practice, not to wonder what their graduates actually think of the education they have provided, and to what extent and in what ways their high school academic work prepared or did not prepare them for their work in college. Mr. Wagner points out that:
Forty percent of all students who enter college must take remedial courses...and perhaps one of every two students who start college never complete any kind of postsecondary degree.
The Great Schools Project, in its report Diploma to Nowhere in the Summer of 2008, said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial classes each year when they get to college, and the California State Colleges reported in November of 2009 that 47% of their freshmen are now in remedial English classes.
As national concern slowly grows beyond high school dropouts to include college "flameouts" as well, it might be time to consider the benefits of the ample knowledge available from students if they are allowed to participate in exit interviews and focus groups at the high school which was responsible for getting them ready to succeed academically in college and at work.
==============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Wisconsin received an above-average grade for overall educational quality, although it ranked toward the bottom of the nation in efforts to improve schools by establishing grade-level academic standards and holding schools accountable, according to a report released Thursday.
The annual "Quality Counts" report, by national trade publication Education Week, gave the Badger state a C-plus for the overall status of its schools and improvement efforts. That was slightly higher than the grade given to the nation - a C - and ranked the state 16th among all the states and the District of Columbia.
Wisconsin fared best in the annual report for its school finance system and in a category the publication calls "chance for success," which measures factors from employment rates to kindergarten enrollment in states. The state was ranked ninth and 11th, respectively, in those areas, drawing B grades in each.
The state's lowest ranking came in the area of standards, assessments and accountability, with a C grade placing it 42nd in a category where 20 other states received grades of A or A-minus.
Students, parents and lawmakers lobbied Wednesday for more diversity in Texas' social studies curriculum, before the state board of education adopts new classroom standards that will determine how history is taught for the next decade.
In more than six hours of public testimony, dozens of people took their chance to help shape the way millions of Texas school children learn topics from the Roman Empire to the entrepreneurial success of billionaire Bill Gates.
The public hearing sets up a tentative vote Thursday on the new standards. But, as usual in votes before the conservative-led board, the wide-reaching guidelines are full of potential ideological flashpoints.
Bold plans for a new kind of middle school in Madison deserve encouragement and strong consideration.
The proposed Badger Rock Middle School on the South Side would run year-round with green-themed lessons in hands-on gardens and orchards.
The unusual school would still teach core subjects such as English and math. But about 120 students would learn amid a working farm, local business and neighborhood sustainability center.
Money is tight in this difficult economy. And the Madison School Board just committed to launching an expensive 4-year-old kindergarten program in 2011.
But organizers say Badger Rock wouldn't cost the district additional dollars because private donors will pay for the school facility.
To be clear, I don't think that such instruction is worthless. It has a significant impact, but it seems to be a one-time effect and the strategies are quickly learned. More practice of these strategies pays little or no return. You can read more about that here.
Knowledge of the topic you're reading about, in contrast, has an enormous impact and more important, there is no ceiling--the more knowledge you gain, the more your reading improves.
In a recent email conversation an experienced educator asked me why, if that's true, there has been such emphasis on reading strategies and skills in teacher's professional development.
THE streets surrounding St James's Palace in London are dotted with gentlemen's clubs, many of which now also admit women. This year, one such establishment is marking its 350th anniversary. The club in question is not merely a meeting place for like-minded members, however: it is the society that founded modern science.
The first fellows of the Royal Society, as it is now known, were followers of Sir Francis Bacon, a 17th-century statesman and philosopher who argued that knowledge could be gained by testing ideas through experiments. On a damp and murky night in November 1660, a dozen of them met to hear a lecture by a 28-year-old astronomer called Christopher Wren, who would later become the architect who designed St Paul's Cathedral. Inspired, they determined to meet every week to discuss scientific matters and to witness experiments conducted by different members of the group. In so doing, they invented the processes on which modern science rests, including scientific publishing and peer review, and made English the primary language of scientific discourse.
Every American leader, from Barack Obama to Arnold Schwarzenegger, would agree that if there's one lifelong lesson to be learned from the implosion of the housing market, it is that before you sign on the dotted line, you'd better know what you're getting yourself into. You'd better ask clarifying questions. You'd better read the fine print. And you'd better make absolutely sure that there are no hidden clauses or trap doors that take you and those dependent on you to the dog house.
While our local districts are comprised of well intentioned, highly educated and reflective leaders who are doing their best to find resources to fill the budget shortfall, we are perplexed that some districts agreed to submit a "Memorandum Of Understanding" with the Governor's Office to participate in California's application for the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program. Many of our local teachers' associations hope that since more than half (60%) of school systems in California did not sign on to the State's MOU, that there is change in the RTTT program language so that district leaders, teachers, parents and stakeholders can work together with their local districts to come up with solutions that are based in research-supported strategies for all.
Earlier this month the governor signed California's RTTT legislation that includes: promoting national education standards, using test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers and principals, lifting a cap on charter schools, and allowing parents to transfer their children out of the state's lowest performing schools -- while providing no provision for transportation costs -- leaving this last piece a true hollow victory for parents.
Morning folks, I am running this op-ed on the Monday education page that I assemble each week for the AJC. Written by UGA professor William G. Wraga, it raises some interesting questions about whether the charter school movement has been co-opted by privatization proponents.
By William G. Wraga
The original intent of charter schools, to increase the professional autonomy of teachers so they could explore innovative ways to educate children and youth, has given way to other agendas that have grafted onto the movement.
Increasingly, charter school policies have been influenced by market ideology that treats the movement as a vehicle for privatizing public schools.
State of the Madison School District Presentation by Superintendent Dan Nerad 1/25/2010
via a kind reader's email:
A State of the District presentation will be made by Superintendent
Daniel Nerad to the community at a Board of Education meeting on Monday, January 25 at 5:30 p.m. in the library of Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd. The presentation will be the meeting's sole agenda item.
All community members are welcome to attend.
The presentation will provide an overview of important information and data regarding the Madison School District - including student achievement - and future areas of focus.
The visually-supported talk will be followed by a short period for questions from those in attendance.
The speech and Q&A period will be televised live on MMSD-TV Cable Channels 96/993 and streaming live on the web at www.mmsd.tv. It will
also be available for replay the following day at the same web site.
For more information, contact:
Ken Syke, 663-1903 or ksyke@madison.k12.wi.us , or
Joe Quick, 663-1902 or jquick@madison.k12.wi.us
Ken Syke
Public Information
Madison School District
voice 608 663 1903; cell 608 575 6682; fax 608 204 0342
First the good: This is an important acknowledgement from Weingarten and one with some big implications. She deserves credit for that. For a long time the union line on all this has been that it’s not hard to rid the field of low-performers, the problem is lousy administrators and a blame the teachers mindset. This isn’t all wrong by the way, administrators are not just chompin’ at the bit to rid schools of under-performing teachers. The problems are systemic ones. But by laying this on the table Weingarten is opening the door on that conversation more than a crack and pulling the rug out from under a lot of folks. That’s important. By calling the process “glacial” the genie is out of the bottle, perhaps more than Weingarten herself may realize.
In addition, bringing in Kenneth Feinberg is important. He demonstrated an ability for reasonableness in thorny situations. And because he has no aspirations within education he has no reason to pull any punches. Perhaps most importantly, with Feinberg you get the sense that if this is all a big ruse, that will become clear. He doesn’t seem like someone with a lot of patience for misdirection plays and so forth. In other words, involving him increases the accountability.
Read Educflack's Patrick Riccards, who has a new post up on why New Jersey should either 1) hold off on applying to Race To the Top til June, or 2)simply not apply at all. Riccards, a native New Jerseyan, explains the benefits of either proposition:
1) While Davy's proposal is "a good plan," Christie's transition team was uninvolved in the details and, in fact, Christie won't even be able to sign it since the application is due the day he gets sworn in as Governor. The state would be better off waiting until Christie's new team can reshape it to conform with his vision of education reform.
2) Fuggedaboudit. N.J.'s too screwed up to take on another big initiative. Deciding not to compete in RTTT would be a bolder move: "he [Christie] could decree that his education improvement agenda is focused exclusively on the expansion and support of charter schools, and since charters are but a minor part of Race's intentions, he's going to go all-in on charters in his own way, and he'll find the state and private-sector support to make it happen without the federal oversight."
The Los Angeles Board of Education Tuesday will consider new policies aimed at both assisting charters and holding them more accountable for their performance. The regulations, about a year in the making, include key provisions on conflicts of interest and services for disabled students that are opposed by the association that represents charter schools.
The number of charter schools is expected to increase sharply, partly as a result of a school board strategy that lets charter operators bid to take control of struggling traditional campuses as well as 50 new ones scheduled to open. Charter operators as well as groups of teachers are to submit final bids today for the first group of 30 campuses.
The teacher sits in a large wooden rocking chair. One by one, she invites her third-graders to get up from their desks and take a place in front of her on the rug. "Thank you, Kiara," she says, complimenting a scrawny child with long black hair for sitting criss-cross-style. As the other students take their places on the rug, the teacher sits on the edge of her chair. Her eyes move from left to right, watchful for misbehavior.
"Look at that teacher scan," says Jim Lengel with an excited laugh. "It's like radar."
The students freeze as Lengel, a visiting professor at Hunter College School of Education, pauses the video he's been watching them on. Ten of the third-graders are looking directly at the teacher, while two look off toward the camera.
Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal Monday announced that there would be a vast change in education policy making of the government in 2010.
'You will see a paradigm shift in education policies. It will be an epochal year,' he said.
Describing the year 2010 as very important for his ministry, Sibal said that researchers and faculty would be given a stake in the system to boost higher education and research which are vital for a nation's development.
A law adopting statewide high school exams for graduation took effect in Pennsylvania on Saturday, with the goal of ensuring that students leaving high school are prepared for college and the workplace. But critics say the requirement has been so watered down that it is unlikely to have major impact.
The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation's public school students, say they often fall short of officials' ambitious goals.
"The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them," said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Then there are the students, preppy in white shirts and ties, their black sweater vests emblazoned with the school seal.
Appearances aren't necessarily deceiving: L.A. International does have an exceptional campus, perched on a bluff in the tiny community of Hermon, overlooking Highland Park. It formerly was the campus of the now-defunct Pacific Christian High School. And the students, most of them, aspire to succeed in school and go to college.
The one approach that Follow Through found had worked, Direct Instruction, was created by Siegfried Engelmann, who has written more than 100 curricula for reading, spelling, math, science, and other subjects. Engelmann dates DI's inception to an experiment he performed at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the summer of 1964. He took two groups of three- to five-year-olds--one white and affluent, one black and poor--and tried to teach them "sophisticated patterns of reasoning. . . . things that Piaget said couldn't be taught before the age of formal operations--around 11 or 12." These things included concepts like relative direction (A is north of B but south of C) and the behavior of light entering and leaving a mirror. Both groups learned what Piaget said they couldn't at their age. But to Engelmann's consternation, the affluent kids learned faster. He traced the difference to a severe language deficit in the African-American group (the deficit that Hart and Risley later quantified) and resolved to figure out how to overcome it.
Engelmann and two colleagues, Carl Bereiter and Jean Osborn, went on to open a half-day preschool for poor children in Champaign-Urbana that dramatically accelerated learning even in the most verbally deprived four-year-olds. Children who entered the preschool not knowing the meaning of "under," "over," or "Stand up!" went into kindergarten reading and doing math at a second-grade level. Engelmann found (and others later confirmed) that the mean IQ for the group jumped from 96 to 121. In effect, the Bereiter-Engelmann preschool proved that efforts to close the achievement gap could begin years earlier than most educators had thought possible. The effects lasted, at a minimum, until second grade--and likely longer, though studies on the longer-term effects weren't performed.
Massachusetts enjoys a history as an educational leader dating to the early days of our country. The 1993 Education Reform Act positioned Massachusetts at the forefront of school reform and produced gains in student learning that are the envy of every other state. Now, the Obama administration's Race to the Top program gives Massachusetts another chance to lead, this time by fully integrating public charter schools into the fabric of the commonwealth's education system.
Charter schools are public schools open to all students. They're accountable for their performance and overseen by the state, which has closed down lower performing charters even when these schools outperformed nearby traditional public schools. But unlike traditional public schools, charters have autonomy and flexibility. For example, they can reward their best teachers and fire low performers. This autonomy--not the red herring of funding--is why charter schools are so contentious.
Across the country the experience with charter schools is mixed. Charter schooling is producing amazing schools, many among the best in America. At the same time, the openness of the charter sector is also creating some quality problems. Charter quality varies state by state and owes a great deal to different state polices.
In the course of their work my brilliant children - a human rights lawyer and a freelance journalist - travel to places such as Phnom Penh and Dubai. In the course of mine Macomb, Illinois, is a more typical destination, involving five hours of flying, including a layover in Detroit and then two hours of driving through snow-covered fields barely interrupted by a couple of semi-boarded-up "towns", including the intriguingly named Preemption (population 71).
After all this industrial-agricultural wasteland, Macomb is a veritable hive of human, cultural and commercial activity. There is a branch of the state university system, where I have been invited to speak, and until a few months ago, my hosts inform me, there were a total of two Italian restaurants in town, one famed for its Spam-and-Doritos-topped pizza. I'm staying at the Hampton Inn, a minimalist motel chain located opposite a Farm King, an agricultural supply store. I can't help asking whether this is where the university puts up a genuine celebrity speaker, such as Bill Cosby. "Oh no," I am told, "he flew in in his private plane and out the same night."
Ann, a congenial administrator at Western Illinois University, fills me in on the student body. They are mostly white, first-generation college students and, while about a third of them are studying law enforcement with a view to a career in police work, this does not stop them from illegal under-age drinking or, for that matter, smoking pot. We muse on the problem of binge drinking, endemic to American campuses: why go straight from sobriety to vomiting? Haven't they ever sampled the pleasures of tipsiness? Then Ann tells me one of the saddest things I've heard on the perennial subject of Young People Today: they don't know how to be "silly", she says, in the sense of whimsy and absurdity. They are strait-laced and even a little timid, unless, of course, they are utterly wasted.
Much has been written about how two education reform bills signed into law last week might affect California's chances of qualifying for federal Race to the Top funds.
As important as that funding is, the new laws' significance goes much deeper. It signals that the balance of power in education is shifting away from teachers unions and toward parents, where it belongs.
The "parent trigger," a controversial element of the legislation, is the best evidence of this turning point.
The concept was developed by the grass-roots group Parent Revolution in the Los Angeles Unified School District. If a majority of parents in a failing school petitions for an overhaul, the district must do something -- replace administrators, convert to a charter school or make other major reforms.
By law, tenured California teachers can convert their school to a charter if a majority of them vote for it, and that has happened dozens of times. But teachers unions and other groups opposed giving parents the same right. One group called it the "lynch mob" provision -- an odd choice of words, given that it would empower parents primarily in minority communities where failing schools abound.
The greatest revolution in education in the United States today is taking place in Los Angeles. It is the mandate of the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board to convert almost a third of its schools either to charter schools, the public schools of choice that are the one shining light in an otherwise dysfunctional system, or other alternatives such as magnet schools. The change is not only a mighty one for the state's largest school district, but in time it could double the number of public schools of choice in California.
What is remarkable is not just the magnitude of this earth-shaking change, but the complete shift of the paradigm about how we think about public education. The driving force behind this revolution is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is not only a Democrat but also a former organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles, Los Angeles teachers' union. Villaraigosa took his nontraditional stand because, as he noted, LAUSD was racked with violence and plagued with a dropout rate of 50 percent, and showed no signs of improving.
A couple of things – first, the Neenah Schools contract settlement – I read the Post-Crescent account Friday and interpreted the recent deal as a total 4.4% over two years. No.
I talked with Neenah School District HR folks and the increase is an average 4.4% per year. Wow. Where are they going to get that kind of money? (December 29: Teacher cuts, not pay freezes recommended) And as much to the point, how will other districts in the area afford that?
As many of you know, if a school district (or municipality) can’t come to terms with their union(s), they can choose to go to arbitration – where neutral arbitrators decide which party’s last offer is best. That “best” includes which offer may be closest to other settlements in the area. And thanks to your legislators and mine, the state budget passed last June (yup, policy in the budget – imagine) says arbitrators are no longer required (point 3) to take local economic conditions or a district’s ability to pay into consideration.
Do you see a referendum and higher property taxes coming?
Race to the Top Dollars Several Wisconsin school districts are considering not applying for Race to the Top (RTTT) dollars.
Charter tackles middle school challenges with young faculties and a no-nonsense attitude
Howard Blume:
At Lakeview Charter Academy, inexperienced teachers have strong support and high expectations.
Eleazar and Nora Gonzalez decided to send their son Daniel to Lakeview Charter Academy because, they said, large public middle schools have a reputation for gangs and drugs. They also worried about academics.
So they warmed to the no-nonsense welcomings issued at the first monthly parents night.
"It will be a miracle the day I don't give homework because home is to review," Alexandra Aceves, 25, announced, in English and Spanish, to the Gonzalez family and others crowded into a second-floor classroom.
The scene exemplified the characteristics of the 10 schools operated by Partnerships to Uplift Communities, a locally based charter management organization that, like others in Los Angeles, has focused on serving low-income minority communities. It has taken on, in particular, the thorny challenge of middle schools, especially in the Latino neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and downtown.
DATE: January 11, 2010
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Active Citizens for Education
RE: 4-year old Kindergarten
Race to the Top
I am Don Severson representing Active Citizens for Education.
The Board of Education is urged to vote NO on the proposal to implement 4-year old Kindergarten in the foreseeable future. In behalf of the public, we cite the following support for taking this action of reject the proposal:
The Board and Administration Has failed to conduct complete due diligence with respect to recognizing the community delivery of programs and services. There are existing bona fide entities, and potential future entities, with capacities to conduct these programs
Is not recognizing that the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Wisconsin authorizes the provision of public education for grades K-12, not including pre-K or 4-year old kindergarten
Has not demonstrated the district capacity, or the responsibility, to manage effectively the funding support that it has been getting for existing K-12 programs and services. The district does not meet existing K-12 needs and it cannot get different results by continuing to do business as usual, with the 'same service' budget year-after-year-after-year
Will abrogate your fiduciary responsibility by violating the public trust and promises made to refrain from starting new programs in exchange for support of the "community partnership" urged for passing the recent referendum to raise the revenue caps
To reiterate, vote NO for District implementation of 4-K.
The Board of Education is urged to vote NO to signing the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the State of Wisconsin as part of an application for funding through the U.S. Department of Education ACT "Race to the Top" (RttT).
In behalf of the public we cite the following support for taking this action to reject the signing the RttT MOU: The Board and Administration
Does not have complete information as to the requirements, criteria, expectations and definitions of terms of the MOU or its material Exhibits; therefore, there has been serious inhibitors in time, effort and due diligence to examine, understand and discuss the significant implications and consequences of pursuing such funding
Does not have an understanding through the conduct of interactive discussions regarding the roles and relationships of the Board of Education, the Administration and the union regarding the requirements of the MOU as well as any subsequent implications for planning, implementation, evaluation and results for receiving the funding
Must understand that the Board of Education, and the Board alone by a majority vote, is the only authority which can bind the District in any action regarding the MOU and subsequent work plan. District participation cannot be authorized by the Board if such participation is contingent on actual or implied approval, now or in the future, of any other parties (i.e., District Administration and/or union)
Does not have an understanding of its personnel capacity or collective will to establish needs, priorities and accountabilities for undertaking such an enormous and complicated "sea change" in the ways in which the district conducts its business in the delivery of programs and services as appears to be expected for the use any RttT funding authorized for the District
Must also understand and be prepared for the penalties and reimbursements due to the state and federal governments for failure to comply with the provisions attached to any authorized funding, including expected results
To reiterate, vote NO for District approval for the MOU and application for funding through the RttT.
Daniel Willingham "Is It True That Some People Just Can't Do Math"
Patsy Wang-Iverson, Perla Myers, and Edmund Lim W.K. "Beyond Singapore's Mathematics Textbooks - Focused and Flexible Supports for Teaching and
Learning"
The first has a number of useful references as well as comments. Here is one. There have been many papers written in Madison on student's lack of understanding of the equal sign. I once asked Liping Ma if this was a problem in China. She said that as far as she knew it was not. There is confirmation of this in one of the references.
Four questions asked of sixth grade students in the U.S. and China.
The paper which includes this is "Sources of Differences in Children's Understanding of Mathematical Equality: Comparative Analysis of Teacher Guides and Student Texts in China and the United States", by Xiaobao Li, Meixia Ding, Mary Margaret Capraro, Robert M. Capraro. It appeared in Cognition and Instruction, vol. 26, no. 2, pages 195-217, in 2008.
Standardized tests show that the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to higher levels of achievement.
At their best, charter schools in Los Angeles shatter the conventional wisdom that skin color and family income are the greatest predictors of academic success.
Setting standards high and wringing long hours out of students and teachers, the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to levels of achievement, as measured by standardized tests, more typical of affluent, suburban students.
If such schools were the norm, any debate over the value of charters would be moot. But there is no typical charter. They adhere to no single vision and vary widely in quality.
That said, a Times analysis showed that, overall, L.A. charter schools deliver higher test scores than traditional public schools. But charters lag well behind L.A. Unified's network of magnet schools.
ON AUGUST 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.
One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked.
The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a ZIP code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so.
Although charter schools come under withering criticism from some quarters, Ohio parents apparently aren't listening.
A new state Department of Education report shows that charter-school enrollment is up 8 percent this year, while the number attending traditional Ohio schools has fallen.
Currently, 89,000 students attend 332 charter schools statewide. At the same time, enrollment in traditional public schools has dropped slightly to 1.75 million students.
In Greater Cincinnati, 32 charter schools enroll more than 9,000 students. Enrollment increases mirror the state trend.
T.C.P. World Academy's enrollment increased from 389 last year to 410 students this year.
"We always have a waiting list," said Superintendent/Principal Karen French, who attributed the enrollment increase to performance results and word of mouth.
The Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy enrollment numbers are at about 700 students now, compared with nearly 650 last year.
Semaj Arrington hadn't missed a day of school in almost four years at Tenor High School, a small charter school downtown. It was a pretty remarkable record, given his background, which was, um, not out of a textbook for school success.
Then one morning last spring, he didn't show up at school. The principal, Jodi Weber, called his house. Arrington said he'd hurt his ankle and couldn't walk. He couldn't catch the bus to school.
Excused absence, right? Wrong. Mark Schneider, the dean of students, drove across town to Arrington's house, helped him to the car, and brought him to school.
"They have ways of making you be more professional, just have your head on right," says Arrington, 19, now working on becoming an electrician at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
In 2005, I wrote a story about what I called the Marcia Spector school district, a set of small elementary schools and high schools under the umbrella of Seeds of Health, a nonprofit organization headed by the smart, entrepreneurial and forceful Spector.
There were about 900 students in the schools, all of them funded with public dollars but operating outside the traditional public school system. Each of the schools had high energy, a distinctive and well-executed program, and a record that made them valuable parts of the local school scene.
I recently saw the Great Depression film "The Grapes of Wrath," and while I had seen it before, this time I was reminded of what's going on in employment today. The movie starts off with Henry Fonda returning to his family farm after having been away for a few years, only to find his home abandoned. He soon learns that his family, as well as all of his Oklahoma neighbors, have been evicted and are leaving for the promise of jobs in California.
We then learn that the families in Oklahoma have been hit with a perfect storm. Drought, low farm prices, and the displacement caused by farm automation had resulted in bankruptcy and foreclosure for millions of farmers. It was reported that one man with a tractor could replace 10-15 family farms, and over 100 farm workers.
Similarities to the Great Recession
Consider the tractor for a moment. The gasoline powered tractor first appeared way back in 1892. However, it didn't really catch on until the tractor was mass produced in the 1910's. Then, as tractor prices came down, its use on the farm started to take off. The result was an increase in farm productivity, falling prices for farm products, and a loss of jobs for millions of farmers. This displacement peaked 20 years later, during the Great Depression.
he city's charter schools are providing a bigger boost to students' reading and math performance than are traditional public schools, according to a new study.
The study -- by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University -- is the second in four months showing positive results for the city's charter schools. It comes as proponents of the publicly funded, privately run schools are urgently pushing officials to lift the state's charter school cap above 200.
New York's application for as much as $700 million in federal aid under a competition known as Race to the Top -- which looks favorably on states that support charter school growth -- is due by Jan. 19.
But the money comes with a catch: The district must come up with $100 million from other sources to finish the job.
Where to get the money in a sparse economy remains a question, leaving some district leaders defensive while others shrug.
"We don't have $100 million," acknowledges school board member Dorthea Edgecomb.
One thing is for certain: There is give in a district budget that runs about $3 billion a year, so administrators are confident they can shift money from other programs to initiatives prescribed in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant.
Among the possible sources:
•$16 million over three years to create a computer lab to prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to move online.
Enrollment is up, and overall, standardized test scores outshine those at traditional campuses. Even the L.A. Unified board has eased its resistance.
Over the last decade, a quiet revolution took root in the nation's second-largest school district.
Fueled by money and emboldened by clout from some of the city's most powerful figures, charter schools began a period of explosive growth that has challenged the status quo in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Today, Los Angeles is home to more than 160 charter schools, far more than any other U.S. city. Charter enrollment is up nearly 19% this year from last, while enrollment in traditional L.A. public schools is down. And a once-hostile school board has become increasingly charter-friendly, despite resistance from the teachers union. In September, the board agreed to let charters bid on potentially hundreds of existing campuses and on all 50 of its planned new schools.
Charter schools now are challenging L.A. Unified from without and within. Not only are charter school operators such as Green Dot Public Schools and ICEF Public Schools opening new schools that compete head-to-head with L.A. Unified, but the district's own schools are showing increasing interest in jumping ship by converting to charter status.
"I'll do better,'' my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. "I know I've gotten behind this semester, but I'm going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?''
I sat silent for a moment. "Yes. But it's important that you catch up completely this weekend, so that you're not just perpetually behind.''
A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. And, again, there would be no tangible result: No make-up papers. No change in effort. No improvement in time management.
By the time students are in college, habits can be tough to change. If you're used to playing video games like "Modern Warfare'' or "Halo'' all night, how do you fit in four hours of homework? Or rest up for class?
Teaching in college, especially one with a large international student population, has given me a stark - and unwelcome - illustration of how Americans' work ethic often pales in comparison with their peers from overseas.
My "C,'' "D,'' and "F'' students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.
Lauren Garey: Lazy American students? Uninformed professor!
In it, I wrote about how teaching in college has shown me that international students often work harder than their American counterparts. Though this is emphatically not true across the board, the work ethic and success of Asian, European, and South American students - who have to compete with a classroom of native English speakers - can be astounding.
I also noted in the column that there's too much texting in class, too much dozing off, too much e-mail-checking, too much flirting (I didn't mention flirting in the first piece, but I'll mention it here). Obviously, international students do all these things, but I have noticed them more amongst American students.
I worked hard on the column and lay in bed Sunday night hoping that - amidst the flurry of Christmas shopping - someone would read it.
It takes a special statement to become the EIA Communiqué Quote of the Week, and a singular one to be included as one of the Quotes of the Year. So you can imagine how difficult it was to choose the Quotes of the Decade. I found it impossible to chop it down to 10, so here are the 17 most memorable quotes of the 2000s, in countdown order. I have cited the source but have not embedded the original links, since many of them no longer exist.
17) "The nice thing about reducing class size is that it makes teachers happy in their own right and it's the one thing that we know how to do." - Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, education policy professor at the University of Chicago. (February 22, 2009 New York Times)
16) "With increasing cost of college loans and health care and the fact that the buying power of the teacher dollar is no more than what it was 20 years ago, we're pretty much back to where we were when I started teaching in the 1960s. I had to work in the summer to eat." - Cheryl Umberger of the Tennessee Education Association. (May 23, 2008 Tennessean)
15) "What would we really do differently if we really did listen to our members? First, we would very rarely, if ever again, give a cent to a politician or a political party." - former Ohio Education Association Executive Director Robert Barkley, giving his farewell speech at OEA's Representative Assembly in December 2000.
14) "You deserve a President who understands what I'm about to say." - U.S. Senator John Kerry, during a July 16, 2004 speech at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Washington, DC.
13) "While building efficiencies of scale might fit a sound business model, it is the antithesis of sound educational practice." - Hawaii State Teachers Association Vice President Joan Lewis. (November 1, 2005 Honolulu Advertiser)
Charter public schools have existed in Massachusetts since 1995, after enabling legislation was included in the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) of 1993. Originally conceived as laboratories for educational innovation1 that could offer choice for families and competition for traditional district schools, charters are public schools that may not discriminate as to whom they accept. In fact, aside from their often superior levels of academic achievement2, charter public schools differ from their district counterparts in only one major way: they enjoy some freedoms and autonomies that district schools do not in exchange for being subject to additional accountability requirements.
In Massachusetts, any group or individual can apply to establish and run a charter public school.3 Charters are authorized by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), and if the BESE approves an application for a charter school, the school is established based upon a contract, or charter, which outlines its performance goals and the standards to which it will be held.4 Once established, all charter public schools in Massachusetts are subject to a review by the authorizer, which takes place at least once every five years. If, during that review, it is found that a charter public school is not meeting the terms of its charter or failing to live up to requirements for academic progress set by the state and federal governments, the authorizer may close the school.5 These are the additional accountability requirements to which charter public schools are held.
Teach for America, a corps of recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation's most troubled schools, has become a campus phenomenon, drawing huge numbers of applicants willing to commit two years of their lives.
Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?
But a new study has found that their dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.
In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.
The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America's approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.
The study, "Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America," is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America's founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer -- the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters -- had become more politically active.
Quality Counts 2010 explores the widening national debate over common academic standards. Join the report's authors for an in-depth discussion of what they discovered through their research and reporting, as well as the EPE Research Center's annual updates in four key areas of education policy and performance.
On the third floor of Harlem's Frederick Douglass Academy, 21 senior students are discussing the moral implications of organ transplant markets. A student raises her hand and wonders if doctors would be motivated to harvest a criminal's organs before he was actually dead. The unfolding ethical debate isn't typical for a microeconomics course, but in Jane Viau's classroom engaged, inquisitive students are the norm.
Viau, 45, is a former investment banker turned math teacher, who has a knack for explaining bone-dry concepts like price ceilings by turning them into something worthy of the Facebook generation's attention.
For the last eight years Viau has been making math easy for her students to understand, and the proof is in the percentages. Last year her advanced placement statistics class had a 91 percent passing rate, compared with the national rate of 59 percent. But the disparity in numbers is consistent with the school's reputation.
Jane Viau explains advanced microeconomics to senior students at Frederick Douglass Academy. Photo: Stephanie Marcus
The school, located at 148th Street and Seventh Avenue, is a bright spot for the New York City public school system; a predominantly African-American student population, that boasts a 90 percent 4-year graduation rate. Compared with the 60.8 percent citywide graduation rate, Frederick Douglass seems to be doing something different with its emphasis on structure and discipline, mandated uniforms, and intense focus on college preparation.
Some of the most contentious areas of the new legislation include the option to close failing schools, convert them to charter schools or replace the principal and half the staff. Parents could exercise greater power within the public school system, with the possibility of moving children in the lowest-performing schools elsewhere or petition to turn around a chronically failing school.
The transfer option would be available to parents of children at the worst 1,000 schools. Parental petitions would be limited to 75 schools.
However, the implementation of any reforms is hazy, as the federal guidelines for the program cite broad goals, such as "making improvements in teacher effectiveness."
Mekeel assured the board members that supporting the state's application would not bind the district to accept the funds, if California is selected as a recipient.
"You'll have another decision to make before we're actually involved in this," he said.
The legislation package also provides a method for linking teacher evaluations to student performance -- an aspect arousing the fury of educators statewide.
Eight years after President George W. Bush signed the bill that branded an era of school reform, the education world is wondering when President Obama will seek to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law.
Obama officials, who for months have been on a "listening and learning" tour, are expected at some point to propose a framework for the successor to a law that is two years overdue for reauthorization. Time is growing short if the president aims for action before midterm elections that could weaken Democratic majorities in Congress.
As the eighth anniversary of the law's enactment passed quietly Friday -- an occasion that Bush marked throughout his presidency as a domestic policy milestone -- the regimen of standardized testing and school accountability remains intact.
Every year from grades three through eight, and at least once in high school, students must take reading and math exams. Every year, public schools are rated on the progress they make toward the law's goal of universal proficiency by 2014. And every year, states label more schools as falling short and impose sanctions on them, including shakeups and shutdowns.
Since Friday is the day for lists on The Sheet, here is one showing the 10 most important education policy issues for 2010, as determined by the non-profit American Association of State Colleges and Universities. I have shortened the analysis; for a fuller one, click here.
1) Fiscal Crises Facing States
The biggest force behind much of the policy action that will occur in 2010 is the quarter-trillion-dollar collective deficit that has devastated states' budgets in the past 24 months. Public colleges and universities throughout most of the country are slicing and dicing budgets because state governments have lowered--dramatically in some cases--public funding. This has been most obvious in California, where tuition increases are the highest ever and where enrollment caps have kept ten of thousands of students out of classrooms.
Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ...
Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People -- spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?
Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?
Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".
A report out from the Southern Education Foundation out today says the South is the first part of the country where more than half the children in public schools are minorities. That is happening in part because more Latinos and their larger families are moving in. Latinos are the fastest-growing part of the U.S. population.
And as the United States tries to keep up with other countries in getting students into, and graduated from college, Latinos are getting special attention. Because they're the least likely to get college degrees. From American RadioWorks, Emily Hanford reports.
President Obama announced on Wednesday a partnership between federal agencies and public universities to train thousands more mathematics and science teachers each year, part of the administration's effort to make American students more competitive globally in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Leaders of 121 public universities have pledged to increase the total number of science and math teachers they prepare every year to 10,000 by 2015, up from the 7,500 teachers who graduate annually now.
Forty-one institutions, including California's two university systems and the University of Maryland system, said they would double the number of science and math teachers they trained each year by 2015.
The partnership is part of the Obama administration's "Educate to Innovate" campaign, a program announced in November that seeks to join government agencies, businesses, and universities in efforts to improve math and science education.
Based on local news reports, it appears that a growing number of states are putting together bold plans in order to better position themselves for Race to the Top grants. But in a number of places, unions are erecting serious obstacles. For instance, in Florida, Minnesota, and Michigan, state union officials are discouraging their local affiliates from supporting the plans because of elements the union finds objectionable, such as merit pay programs and efforts to use student performance gains in teacher evaluations. In New Jersey, the union is slamming the state's application.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his department place a premium on collaboration, so states gain points in the Race to the Top scoring when they show that stakeholders from across the state support the proposal. That's certainly a reasonable inclination--wider buy-in suggests a greater chance at successful implementation.
My Dec. 10 column about that troublesome Washington area gifted child, future billionaire Warren Buffett, said our schools are never going to help such kids much. I said the gifted designation was often arbitrary and should be disposed of. Instead, we ought to find ways to let all kids explore their talents.
This produced a flood of comments on my blog. Many readers thought I was callous and daft. "Unfortunately, eliminating the label generally means that the schools give up doing anything for advanced learners," wrote a reader signing in as EduCrazy. Another commenter, CrimsonWife, said "if educators are fine with giving special attention and services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the low end of the spectrum, why is it so controversial to provide specialized services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the high end?"
What's up With Implementation of the Arts Task Force Recommendations - Who Knows
I have similar concerns about "meaningful" implementation of the fine arts task force recommendations. The task force presented its recommendations to the School Board in October 2008, which were based in large part on input from more than 1,000 respondents to a survey. It was another 7 months before administration recommendations were ready for the School Board, and its been another 6 months since then without any communication to the community or staff about: a) brief summary of what the School Board approved (which could have been as simple as posting the cover letter), b) what's underway, etc. Anything at a Board meeting can be tracked down on the website, but that's not what I'm talking about. There are plenty of electronic media that allow for efficient, appropriate communication to many people in the district and in the community, allowing for on-going communication and engagement. Some of the current issues might be mitigated, so further delays do not occur. Also, there already is a blog in the arts area that is rarely used.
Afterall, one of our School Board members, Lucy Mathiak, has a full-time job (in addition to being a school board member) as well as having a lot of other life stuff on her plate and she's developed a blog. It wouldn't be appropriate for administrators to comment as she does if they are wearing their administrator hats, but concise, factual information would be helpful. I mentioned this to the Superintendent when I met with him in November. He said he thought this was a good idea and ought to take place - haven't seen it yet; hope to soon, though.
In the meantime, I'm concerned about the implementation of one of the most important aspects of the task force's recommendations - multi-year educational and financial strategic plan for the arts, which members felt needed to be undertaken after the School Board's approval and in parallel with implementation of other efforts. Why was this so important to the task force? Members felt to sustain arts education in this economic environment, such an effort was critical.
From the task force's perspective, a successful effort in this area would involve the community and would not be a solo district effort. As a former member and co-chair of the task force, I've heard nothing about this. I am well aware of the tight staffing and resources, but there are multiple ways to approach this. Also, in my meetings with administrative staff over the summer that included my co-chair, Anne Katz, we all agreed this was not appropriate for Teaching and Learning whose work and professional experience is in the area of curriculum. Certainly, curriculum is an important piece, but is not the entire, long-term big picture for arts education. Also, there is no need to wait on specific curriculum plans before moving forward with the longer-term effort. They are very, very different and all the curriculum work won't mean much if the bigger picture effort is not undertaken in a timely manner. When the task force began it's work, this was a critical issue. It's even more critical now.
Does anyone have information about what's underway, meaningful opportunities for community and teacher engagement (vs. the typical opportunities for drive by input - if you don't comment as we drive by, you must not care or tacitly approve of what's being done is how I've heard the Teaching and Learning approach described to me and I partially experienced personally). I so hope not, because there are many knowledgable teaching professionals.
I know the topic of this thread was talented and gifted, but there are many similar "non-content" issues between the two topics. I'm hoping to address my experiences and my perspectives on arts education issues in the district in separate posts in the near future.
Nearly two years ago, Spanish teacher Emily Mueller was dismayed to learn that her charter high school, Northtown Academy in Chicago, was asking teachers to teach six classes instead of five.
There was no real discussion between teachers and administrators about alternative solutions, according to Mueller. There was no pay increase attached to the increased workload, either. The unilateral, unpaid workload increase "just didn't seem sustainable," she says.
But Mueller didn't want to leave the school, one of three chartered by an organization called Chicago International Charter School and operated by an organization called Civitas Schools. So she and a handful of colleagues did something that only a few charter school teachers have done: they began the long, difficult, but ultimately successful push to join the Illinois Federation of Teachers and negotiate a contract that now represents roughly 140 teachers at the three schools.
TEACHERS UNIONS and state education officials may disagree over how to turn around failing schools, especially if it involves overhauling labor contracts. But both sides should be able to agree on one thing: Massachusetts students would benefit greatly from the infusion of $250 million in federal grant money.
A fierce competition is underway among more than 30 states for dollars from the Race to the Top program, an education initiative included in last year's stimulus bill. Applications are due Jan. 19, and those with the best chance of success will include statements of support signed by superintendents, school committee members, and heads of teachers unions. The unions will be the hardest to enlist. Scores of local union leaders across the state are waiting for signals from the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. And these union heads are waiting to hear more today from state education officials about how the grant application might affect their members.
Dozens of speakers passionately disagreed about how to fix Milwaukee Public Schools during a daylong state Senate hearing Tuesday, with the only consensus being that a solution is unlikely to come soon in Madison.
Several hundred people packed the auditorium at MPS' central office to testify before the Senate Education Committee on a bill that would give the city's mayor more power over Milwaukee Public Schools and a separate measure that would allow the state's school superintendent to more easily intervene in failing schools in Wisconsin.
Like the Milwaukee legislators who have split over the mayoral-control legislation, members of the public at the hearing were fairly evenly divided about whether allowing the mayor, rather than the School Board, to appoint MPS' superintendent was necessary to improve academic performance in the school system or a step backward for democratic representation.
"How in the world does excluding parents from selecting their school leadership encourage them to participate in the education of their children?" Milwaukee resident Mike Rosen said.
Former Milwaukee School Board member Jeanette Mitchell said, however, that she supported mayoral control because it would give education a bigger platform in the city. She exhorted legislators to work together to reach a compromise to help students succeed in city schools.
As many of you know, I have a strong interest in K-12 math education, motivated by the declining math skills of entering UW freshmen and the poor math educations given to my own children. Last quarter I taught Atmospheric Sciences 101, a large lecture class with a mix of students, and gave them a math diagnostic test as I have done in the past.
The results were stunning, in a very depressing way. This was an easy test, including elementary and middle school math problems. And these are students attending a science class at the State's flagship university--these should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs. And yet most of them can't do essential basic math--operations needed for even the most essential problem solving.
Leadership will be on the curriculum when Hong Kong's first international boarding school opens its doors in three years' time under a franchise arrangement with a leading English public school.
With an illustrious history dating back to 1243, Harrow School has produced eight prime ministers and countless statesmen, and its Hong Kong offshoot is aiming to carve out an equally prominent future role.
Executive headmaster Dr Mark Hensman said: "Our hope is that students from Harrow Hong Kong go on to become famous leaders in their fields in Hong Kong, Asia - and the world - be they musicians, scientists, humanitarians or politicians."
Harrow International Management Services, which runs international schools in Beijing and Bangkok, won a government tender in August for a boarding school on the site of a former military barracks in Tuen Mun. Unlike its parent school in Britain, which is only for boys, the Hong Kong school will be co-educational.
When it comes to education, Americans may disagree on most of the details, but they do agree on one point: Today's system is in need of an overhaul. Despite huge hikes in federal, state and local spending on schools in recent decades, policymakers, education advocates and experts, parents, employers and educators concur: The nation's children need better preparation for 21st century life and careers.
Whatever the system's good points and whatever its faults, there is strong agreement on the need to revamp for a new decade and radically changing job markets. With unemployment at 10%, many jobs go unfilled because of a shortage of skilled workers. Higher education costs more than too many people can afford and keeps rising much faster than inflation. And too many youngsters are left behind by a system that can't keep up with changing needs.
Ten years ago, deep in the Rio Grande Valley, two 23-year-old Teach for America teachers opened an after-school tutoring program. Through sheer force of will, the program became a public charter school, housed on the second floor of a local church. Eventually, that school became a cluster of 12 schools, serving kids from Colonias -- communities so impoverished that some lack potable water.
IDEA College Prep graduated its first high school class in 2007 with 100 percent of the seniors headed to college. Last month, U.S. News and World Report ranked it No. 13 among America's public high schools.
"It's not magical resources," IDEA Principal Jeremy Beard told me. "It's the thinking around the problem. I have no control over what goes in on in the kids' Colonia. But we can create a culture. Kids here feel part of a family, part of a team, part of something special."
I have worked in education for most of the past 17 years, as a first-grade teacher, as an education lawyer and, currently, for Teach for America. I used to be married to the D.C. schools chancellor. And the views expressed here are mine alone. I tell the IDEA story because too often when we look at the sorry state of public education (on the most recent international benchmark exam conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. high schoolers ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in math and 24th in science) we believe the results are driven by factors beyond our control, such as funding and families. This leads to lethargy, which leads to inaction, which perpetuates a broken system that contributes to our economic decline.
Happy and healthy new year to all.... and now let's start off the new decade with, appropriately for an education blog, a quiz.
I thought about doing one of those top 10 education story of the year or decade lists, but realized it would be repetitive: Budget cuts hurt K-12; budget cuts squeeze community colleges big-time; budget cuts and endowment losses bring pain to colleges and universities ... etc.
A quiz sounded more fun. Here are some unusual education stories you may not have read in 2009. Take a look and guess from where they came.
The quiz follows, and the answer sheet will be in a separate posting, complete with links, below this one. You can find it here.
Let me know how you do, and send in other stories that you think would be interesting to share.
For much of his life, astrophysicist George Smoot III has been what he calls a "scientific outlaw."
It was his passion for searching and investigating outside the mainstream that won the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist the Nobel Prize for physics in 2006 for evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory. Even among his nerdy peers, the effusive Smoot was on the fringes, playing football in high school, trekking in Nepal, attending the Academy Awards, listening to music like Jay Z and Avril Lavigne on his iPod and volunteering as a sound tech for Jerry Garcia back in the day..
How sweeping education reforms signed into law Monday will be implemented in Michigan remains unclear to area school officials.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed reforms that make it easier to close failing schools, link teacher pay to performance and hold school administrators accountable. The bills also raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, starting with the Class of 2016; allow up to 32 more charter schools to open each year; give professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers, and allow for cyber-schools to educate students who have dropped out online.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said up to 200 low-performing schools could end up under state control as a result of the new laws.
The legislation is part of Michigan's effort to win money from the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition tied to education reform. Michigan could get up to $400 million if it's among the winners.
Local school boards and unions now face a Thursday deadline to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" that indicates their support for the reforms. The memorandums are to be included with the state's Race to the Top application. School districts where the board and union do not sign an agreement risk losing their share of the money.
With growing appeals for changes in New York's charter school law, prominent elected officials joined the United Federation of Teachers today in a call for major reforms which would ensure that charter schools become public schools in the fullest meaning of the term -- not private schools supported with public funds.
State Senator John Sampson, leader of the Senate's majority Democratic Conference, and New York City Comptroller John Liu joined UFT President Michael Mulgrew in this call. State Senators Eric Schneiderman and Toby Stavisky and State Assembly members Michael Benedetto, Alan Maisel, Jose Peralta, Adam Clayton Powell, IV and Linda Rosenthal were present and participating in the call.
Among the proposed changes are:
a mandate for charter schools to serve the same proportion of the neediest students as the local community district in which they are located;
America's teachers' colleges are facing some pressure to reinvent themselves.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been leading the assault, with a series of speeches calling for better teacher training. Duncan says it's crucial that education schools revamp their curricula so they can help replace a wave of baby boomers who will soon retire from teaching.
One university is trying to rebuild its teacher-training program from the ground up.
At the University of Michigan School of Education, Dean Deborah Ball and her faculty have taken apart their training program and reassembled it, trying to figure out what skills teachers really need.
Katie Westin, a senior at the University of Michigan and a student teacher, says that when she compares notes with teachers-in-training at other schools, it's clear that her program is more hands-on.
"We expect people to be reliably able to carry out that work. We don't seem to have that same level of expectation or requirement around teaching," Ball says.
By the time the first bell rings at Brookfield Central High School, most of the students in Room 22 are immersed in college-level vector equations, reviewing for their final exam on the Friday before Christmas.
Senior Lea Gulotta, however, looks on the bright side of waking early every morning for the past semester so she can take a Calculus 3 class taught at the school by a college professor.
"We get to sleep in for a month," she said, noting that the regular high school semester won't end until mid-January.
There's another positive to Brookfield Central's agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha continuing education department, which brought the advanced mathematics class to the high school this year as part of the state's youth options program. Under youth options, school districts pick up the costs of courses at Wisconsin colleges if they don't have similar offerings available to students.
Instead of seeing students spend extra time commuting and attending class on a college campus, the arrangement placed the professor in the high school to teach 11 students who had completed advanced-placement calculus as juniors. Two of the students in the class come from the Elmbrook School District's other high school, Brookfield East.
Elmbrook pays UW-Waukesha the same tuition that it would pay if its students chose to attend the college campus on their own, she said.
TWO years ago, during lunch with a second-grade teacher in the Chicago area, I mentioned that I was going to substitute teach. The teacher -- I'll call him Dan -- started into a story about his own experience with a substitute, which is easily summarized: Dan left a lesson plan; the sub didn't follow it. So, he ended by asking, how hard can substitute teaching be?
I smiled, said nothing and bit into my Reuben.
Over the next two years, I would learn -- as I subbed once a week for a variety of classes, including kindergarten, sixth grade, middle-school social studies, high-school chemistry, phys ed, art, Spanish, and English as a second language -- that Dan's story is standard teacher fare. Last time I heard it, though, I didn't bite my sandwich or my tongue.
As much as I became frustrated by the lack of training and support, I was most angered by how many days teachers were out of their classrooms. Nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of professionals outside teaching and more than one and a half times as high as that of teachers in Britain. Teachers in America are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays.
This means that children have substitute teachers for nearly a year of their kindergarten-through-12th-grade education. Taxpayers shell out $4 billion a year for subs.
I subbed for many legitimately ill teachers and for many attending educational conferences. But my first assignment was to fill in for a sixth-grade teacher who went to a home-and-garden show. My last was for a first-grade teacher who said she needed a mental health day because her class was so difficult.
THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself as Home of the Guaranteed Job! Students who can't find work in their fields within six months of graduation can come back to take classes free, or have the college pay their student loans for a year.
The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.
And in a class called "The English Major in the Workplace," at the University of Texas, Austin, students read "Death of a Salesman" but also learn to network, write a résumé and come off well in an interview.
Even before they arrive on campus, students -- and their parents -- are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What's the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?
An overwhelming majority of teachers are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge and that everyone can be creative. They also subscribe to the idea that creativity is a fundamental skill to be developed in schools, even if they are more ambiguous about how it can be taught, and less sure still about how it can be assessed.
Survey respondents were asked to express their opinion about how they view creativity, as a general concept as well as in the school context, on a scale of 5 ranging from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree'. The results are displayed in Figure 1.
Literature reports that very often people, including teachers, refer to creativity as being related exclusively to artistic or musical performances, as springing from natural talent, and as being the characteristic of a genius. These myths about creativity stifle the creative potential of students and create barriers to fostering creativity in schools.
To a large extent, the teachers that took part in our survey have an understanding of creativity which goes against such myths. Almost all teachers who took part in the survey are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge (95,5%) , and to every school subject. More than 60% are even strongly convinced of this. They confirm this view very clearly by disagreeing to a large extent with a statement restricting creativity to the realm of artistic and cultural expression (85%).
Two elite English-medium schools offering the local curriculum have drawn up bold expansion plans that will enable them to admit children from non-Chinese-speaking families.
The moves will permit the Direct Subsidy Scheme schools, which require all pupils to study Chinese language, to widen their nets to include children from English-speaking families, as well as foreign pupils and ethnic minority children.
Currently, almost all pupils at the schools, which are obliged to offer the local curriculum and will run the IB Diploma alongside it, have Chinese as their mother tongue and most are permanent residents.
More minority students need to be lured into the sciences. One program has been a resounding success.
At most universities, freshman chemistry, a class I've taught for nearly 40 years, is the first course students take on the road to a career in the health professions or the biological or physical sciences. It's a tough course, and for many students it's the obstacle that keeps them from majoring in science. This is particularly true for minority students.
In 2005, more than two-thirds of the American scientific workforce was composed of white males. But by 2050, white males will make up less than one-fourth of the population. If the pipeline fails to produce qualified nonwhite scientists, we will, in effect, be competing against the rest of the world with one hand tied behind our backs.
We've been able to survive for the last several decades in large measure because of the "brain drain" -- the fact that the most able students from other countries, particularly China and India, have come here to study science at our best universities and, in many cases, have stayed to become key players in our scientific endeavors.
It was Deadline Day at YES Prep North Central, the day college applications were supposed to be finished, the day essays, personal statements and a seemingly endless series of forms needed to be slipped into white envelopes, ready for submission.
The day the school's first graduating class would take one leap closer to college.
The seniors inside Room A121 were sprinting, scurrying and stumbling to the finish line. They hunched over plastic banquet tables, brows furrowed and eyed fixed on the screens of Dell laptop computers. Keyboards clattered, papers rustled and sighs swept across the room like waves of nervous energy.
There is a lot of talk about education reform, but let's face it: True education reform takes place once the classroom door closes. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality ("Human Capital in Seattle Public Schools") reinforces this point. The most effective education reform begins and ends in the classroom. Nothing we do at the state level can replace the value of a superior teacher.
So what is the measurement of a premier educator? It's more than just a student's test scores.
The best teachers value their students as individuals. Danyell Laughlin, an English teacher in Silverdale, works tirelessly to show students that each one "of them is valuable and has valuable things to share." Every child is a priority, and because that child is valued, that child values learning.
Our best teachers foster a respect for self and others, a love for learning, and a child's capacity to dream and achieve those dreams.
The best teachers also believe that each and every child can learn. Their belief in their students is contagious.
Statistically, no. A good teacher is easy to find if you check their SAT scores, their resumes and then see if their students' standardized test scores beat the average and close the gap. But a really good teacher--one that isn't just perfect on paper, but is also effective in the classroom--is harder to seek out. No one can pinpoint what exactly makes a good teacher, if not their results from the students.
So the search begins. The Gates Foundation, a large proponent for education reform, has dedicated $2.6 million towards finding what exactly makes a good, effective teacher. The study, called the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET), will last two years, beginning with the 2009 school year, with the goal to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of a teacher without having to rely on the performance results from the students' standardized test scores.
This study is going beyond just measuring test scores. They realize that it is going to be hard to take into consideration what all a teacher does in the classroom. They've upped the ante by asking for volunteer teachers to sign up their classrooms to be observed by way of videotape, their students' test scores and also by taking test themselves.
I am still receiving e-mails about my Nov. 23 column on Dan Goldfarb, the first teacher to share with me the results of an evaluation under the new D.C. teacher assessment plan, IMPACT.
Goldfarb was not happy with his score, 2.3 out of a possible 4 points. He said the rules forced his evaluator to focus on trivia, such as whether he had been -- to quote the IMPACT guidelines -- "affirming (verbally or in writing) student effort or the connection between hard work and achievement." He said the evaluator told his principal of his complaints about the program and about D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, violating confidentiality.
Goldfarb had legitimate gripes. But his evaluation was a tiny sample of this innovative attempt to rate teachers. When I sought evaluations from teachers not as opposed to IMPACT, several said they would send theirs, but so far only one has.
That evaluation differed from Goldfarb's in intriguing ways. The score was almost perfect, 3.92 out of 4. The analysis, however, seemed somewhat out of sync with the thinking behind the program.
The state Senate's Education Committee will hold a public hearing at the Milwaukee Public Schools central office, 5225 W. Vliet St., at 10 a.m. Tuesday to hear people's thoughts about proposals to change the way MPS is governed.
Some people - Gov. Jim Doyle and some legislators - seem to think this hearing is a significant step toward legislative action. I'm dubious, for two reasons:
1. Count me as one who thinks the prospects are not good for action in the Legislature on any major changes, especially the idea of giving control of MPS to Milwaukee's mayor. The Democratic legislative leaders made that clear by not even taking up proposals in December. Republicans aren't in the mood to help Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democratic candidate for governor. (Today's political trivia question: How many members of the Senate Education Committee are from Milwaukee? Zero.)
2. I'm tired of the political posturing, on all sides, about change in MPS. With a few exceptions, so little of it is attached to real commitment to doing better. And so much of it pays little attention to the facts, with ideology, belief or just plain incorrect statements trumping careful, focused use of real, live facts.
If you're gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.
Technology, health care and education will continue to be hot job sectors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' outlook for job growth between 2008 and 2018. But those and other fields will yield new opportunities, and even some tried-and-true fields will bring some new jobs that will combine a variety of skill sets.
The degrees employers say they'll most look for include finance, engineering and computer science, says Andrea Koncz, employment-information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. But to land the jobs that will see some of the most growth, job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say, which many students already are doing. "Students are positioned well for future employment, particularly in specialized fields," Ms. Koncz says.
Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends. For example, communications pros will have to master social media and the analytics that come with it; nursing students will have to learn about risk management and electronic records; and techies will need to keep up with the latest in Web marketing, user-experience design and other Web-related skills.
Madison School District's Infinite Campus Teacher Tool and Parent/Student Portal Report: Approximately 2/3 of Middle and High School Parents don't use it
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.
About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience. Seventy percent ofteachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack of familiarity with them.
Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie learning management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
About one third of parents with high school students use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal.
Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year.
About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some ofthe issues related to enhancing the use of these tools among staff, parents, and students.
This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
I spent the morning in a U.S. Department of Education technical-assistance planning seminar on Race to the Top, and have picked up a lot of interesting tidbits. Many states are in attendance--including Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Tennessee (including education commissioner Tim Webb), just to name a few. Interestingly, Texas is also in attendance, I'm told.
The seminar will continue well into the afternoon, but so far, here are the insights I've picked up about this $4 billion competition:
Race to the Top Director Joanne Weiss emphasized that there will be a lot of losers in Phase 1 of the application, so states shouldn't worry if they want to wait until the second round of competition. "We promise there will be plenty of money left in Phase 2," she said.
Attached are the revised performance measures we will use to help monitor progress in meeting the Strategic Objectives Action Steps. Goals for the WKCE scores remained at 100% success rate as that is the requirement in No Child Left Behind legislation. Other goal areas were reduced to 95% as the target.
Identification Criteria - Several action steps within Goal 1 are based on the need for a clearly defined criteria and process to identify students as talented and gifted. The Talented and Gifted (TAG) Division staff has established and confirmed identification criteria including: 1) consideration of students' levels of academic performance; 2) grade level performance data employing the historical two-year above grade level as a marker; and 3) consideration of several student data sources, including input and information from teachers and family. Work will continue into the spring semester to incorporate these data sources to create a student profile and, pending individual student performance level indicators, a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for students.
Monitoring Model - TAG staff continues work with the Research and Evaluation Department to create a model for student data analysis to aid in identification. These models will be research- based and provide the information needed to make identification, programming, and additional diagnostic decisions pertaining to individual students. It has been determined that the Student Intervention Monitoring System (SIMS) can be used as the tracking and reporting system. It currently containing much of the student information needed, including assessment and other data from Infinite Campus, that will make up the student profile component of a TAG student report. T AG staff will use SIMS in the current form to develop student profiles and Differentiated Education Plans (DEPs). Next steps include customizing reports in SIMS to meet future documentation/Plan development needs=
On Monday, the Board of Education will have a presentation by the planning group that is proposing an environmentally-focused project-based charter middle school. The Badger Rock Middle School is the first charter proposal to come before the board since the Studio School debacle a few years back. From what we are hearing in the community, it is not likely to be the last (more on that later).
Proposed Charter: Badger Rock Middle School
What we will be deciding now: The board will be asked to approve the group's initial proposal, which will form the basis of a planning grant application to the Department of Public Instruction. If the planning grant is awarded, the group will carry out additional work necessary to develop and design the charter school in greater detail, and develop a proposal that would come before the board requesting approval of the creation of the school and its charter.
This at least was the view of Martin Heidegger when he gave the title Holzwege - literally Woodpaths - to his first postwar collection of essays. As he wrote in the foreword: "In the wood are paths that wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket." To be on a woodpath is a conversational German expression that means to be on the wrong track, a way that goes nowhere. But Heidegger's point is that nowhere might turn out to be somewhere. "Woodcutters and foresters," after all, "are familiar with these paths" and none is quite identical to another. Woodpaths don't lead you definitively out of the woods but, then, by learning woodways and woodcraft, you might come to see the wood as somewhere full of possibility.
In my years as a university teacher I found that students increasingly wanted Roman roads or motorways rather than woodpaths. They wanted what were called "clear goals and objectives", narrower than my old-fashioned idea of nurturing a more humane person; or rather, they wished to be presented with the shortest, quickest way of acquiring the grades they needed ... to get other grades. They seemed to want to be given the answers, rather than the means to explore and generate questions.
John Wood's epiphany, almost to his own embarrassment, took place in a Nepalese monastery. As he describes it in his book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, the then high-flying computer executive plucked up the courage to leave corporate life and start an educational charity over a brass bowl of piping hot yak-butter tea surrounded by 30 chanting monks. "Oh, no, this is going to sound like a terrible cliché," he wrote. "Western guy walks into monastery and changes the course of his life."
In truth, Wood's life had begun to change several months before. Aged 35, on a trekking holiday to Nepal, he had been appalled at the near-absence of books in the mountain schools. That, plus a growing disenchantment with his life as a corporate warrior-cum-slave, persuaded him to return to Nepal the following year with thousands of books. Books for Nepal, as Room to Read was called before its rapid international expansion forced a change of name, started out small. But as soon as Wood had broken from Microsoft, he began to apply the lessons he had learnt in business to his fledgling charity.
Fifteen years ago, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning explained that the American school calendar of 180 six-hour days stands as the "design flaw" of our education system, for schools could not be expected to enable children to achieve high standards within the confines of the antiquated schedule. Today, a small but growing number of schools have begun to overcome this "flaw" by operating with school days substantially longer than the six-hour norm and, in many cases, a calendar that exceeds the standard 180 days.
The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has produced this groundbreaking report on the state of what can be called "expanded- time schools." Through this effort, NCTL has helped to define and bring together this previously unidentified category of schools, while still recog- nizing the considerable diversity among this group. Extracting and analyzing information from NCTL's newly created database of over 650 schools that feature an expanded day and/or year, this report describes the various trends emerging among these schools, including issues related to costs, time use and student outcomes. The searchable database is available on our website, www.timeandlearning.org.
"Academic standards were raised" They were? Where? How? By whom? I didn't see anyone raising any standards this year.
"The Legislature amended the Basic Education Act, a giant leap forward in an 18-year education-reform effort." Yes, they voted for it, but they didn't fund it and they are now in Court saying that they are already fulfilling their obligation to funding education, so they are denying it. The amended act is lip service - hardly a step forward, let alone a giant leap.
They said that the delay in making high stakes math and science tests a graduation requirement was a gaffe. No, the gaffe has been miseducating students in math and science for the past ten years. These tests were supposed to be used to hold adults accountable, not students. Where are the adults who have suffered negative consequences for these failures? Why punish the students, the people with the least power to influence the system?
Career academies are a time-tested model for improving academic achievement readying students for both college and careers, and engaging the world outside of school in the work of reforming them. As lawmakers work to craft policies that will dramatically improve American public education, career academies should be recognized for their effectiveness and included in reform efforts.
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.
Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. "The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing," said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School's science department, at last week's school board meeting.
Victor Pauca will have plenty of presents to unwrap on Christmas, but the 5-year-old Winston-Salem boy has already received the best gift he'll get this year: the ability to communicate.
Victor has a rare genetic disorder that delays development of a number of skills, including speech. To help him and others with disabilities, his father, Paul, and some of his students at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem have created an application for the iPhone and iPad that turns their touch screens into communications tools.
The VerbalVictor app allows parents and caregivers to take pictures and record phrases to go with them. These become "buttons" on the screen that Victor touches when he wants to communicate. A picture of the backyard, for example, can be accompanied by a recording of a sentence like "I want to go outside and play." When Victor touches it, his parents or teachers know what he wants to do.
This state does well in schooling better-off suburban children. But it fails low-income children, who are mostly concentrated in city schools. Poor students in the fourth and eighth grades in Connecticut score three grade levels below their more comfortable peers -- the worst achievement gap in the nation -- even though this state is among the highest per-pupil spenders in the nation.
Connecticut's goals for the next decade, starting in 2011, should be to end that terrible distinction and reach the No. 1 spot on "the nation's report card," the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Gov.-elect Dan Malloy's choice of education commissioner will be critical.
The legislature and Board of Education made commendable strides in 2010 by increasing pre-K funding and adding more rigorous high school graduation requirements in math, science and languages, among other things.
The end of the year is a time to count blessings. Let's start with the underappreciated fact that the Washington area is the best place in the country for children to both learn the mysteries of science, math, English and history, and to become comfortable with stark differences in race and culture.
I've looked all over the country for schools--particularly high schools--that have a critical mass of committed parents and educators of various backgrounds who are determined to create a lively learning environment for every child. It was hard to find that when I lived in Pasadena, Calif., which was still reeling from massive white flight after a desegregation fight. It wasn't much better when we moved to Westchester County, N.Y., where schools were very short of minorities and low-income people.
Coming to Washington, it took time to see the difference. As usual, everyone complained about public education. That's an American pastime. But the more high schools I visited here, the more I realized this was---at least relatively speaking-- the Shangri-la of American education. There were more schools in one place than I had ever seen that fit my profile---well-mixed, well-run, with families committed to strong instruction. They shrugged off neighbors who, betraying unexamined biases, wondered how they could send their kids to THOSE schools.
CAL has completed a comprehensive survey of K-12 foreign language programs nationwide, describing how our schools are meeting the need for language instruction to prepare global citizens. For comparative purposes, the survey has collected statistical data in 1987, 1997, and 2008. Elementary and secondary schools from a nationally representative sample of more the 5,000 public and private schools completed a questionnaire during the 2007-2008 school year. The 2008 survey results complement and enhance the field's existing knowledge base regarding foreign language instruction and enrollment in the United States.
The report of the survey, Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools: Results of a National Survey, provides detailed information on current patterns and shifts over the past 20 years in languages and programs offered, enrollment in language programs, curricula, assessment, and teaching materials, qualifications, and trainings, as well as reactions to national reform issues such as the national foreign language standards and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. The survey results revealed that foreign language instruction remained relatively stable at the high school level over the past decade but decreased substantially in elementary and middle schools. Moreover, only a small percentage of the elementary and middle schools not teaching languages planned to implement a language program within the next two years. The findings indicate a serious disconnect between the national call to educate world citizens with high-level language skills and the current state of foreign language instruction in schools across the country. This report contains complete survey results, along with recommendations on developing rigorous long sequence (K-12 programs whose goals are for students to achieve high levels of language proficiency, and are of interest to anyone interested in increasing language capacity in the United States. 2009.
My colleague Nick Anderson, the Post's national education reporter, has done a wonderfully balanced and nuanced job of answering a question I am often asked: If Arne Duncan is such a hotshot education secretary, then why are the Chicago schools he once led so bad?
Anderson's front page story Tuesday provides all the relevant facts---disappointing test score gains, watered-down Illinois state standards, Duncan turnaround projects that didn't work. But he also puts it in context, showing where Duncan forced some improvements and how daunting Chicago's problems are.
He also makes it clear that you can't expect anyone to transform our urban school systems in a big way quickly. The improvements that occur are always on the margins. Those districts will never rise to the level of their suburban neighbors. But you can see Duncan has been working at this very hard for many years, and (if you look at what he has actually said rather than what sloppy writers like me have suggested) he has been honest about how far his home town still needs to go.
David Steiner, New York's new education commissioner, gave a stirring address last week about where he hopes to lead public education in this state. He's setting his sights very high, and both his message and his method are laudable. The State Education Department has needed an effective communicator at the top.
"Teaching well is a deeply complex professional activity," Steiner told the Board..
Thirteen-year-old Kayla Savage was failing math. Like many of her classmates in middle school, she hated the subject. Stuck in a large seventh-grade class with a teacher who had little time to offer individual help, Kayla was lost among rational numbers and polynomials.
Her frustration led to a phobia of math, an all-too-common affliction that often starts in middle school and threatens to derail students' future math studies in high school and chances for college.
Kayla is like thousands of students across America who struggle with math. The struggle in California is borne out by this grim U.S. Education Department statistic: Students in California rank 40th in eighth-grade math, a critical year in math learning that sets the path for math success in high school and beyond.
In Santa Clara County, only about 39 percent of eighth-graders meet the California standard for Algebra I proficiency. One study showed that less than one-third of eighth-graders have the skills or interest to pursue a math or science career. Yet these careers are the drivers of our future.
I spent most of today tracking down some information about the history of information overload, so I though I'd blog it in case someone else is looking into this. Also, I may well be getting it wrong, in which case please correct me. (The following is sketchy because it's just notes 'n' pointers.)
I started with Alvin Toffler's explanation of info overload in the 1970 edition of Future Shock. He introduces the concept carefully, expressing it as the next syndrome up from sensory overload.
So, I tried to find the origins of the phrase "sensory overload." The earliest reference I could find (after getting some help from the Twitterverse, which pointed me to a citation in the OED) was in coverage of a June, 1958 talk at a conference held at Harvard Medical School. The article in Science (vol 129, p. 222) lists some of the papers, including:
The decade began with ambitious plans for raising the bar on public education and student achievement.
After winning office as the nation's 43rd president, George W. Bush introduced a federal program, dubbed No Child Left Behind, aimed at improving education through higher standards and greater accountability.
For the better part of the decade, educators and school administrators worked diligently to implement the program and meet its expectations.
More recently, however, a recession of historic proportions has taken a heavy toll on the public school system, prompting deep budget cuts, and in some cases, a rethinking of what schools will offer.
"Our future depends on our ability to prepare the next generation for success in the hyper-competitive global economy," said Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction. "In order to deliver the quality education our students need, we must get off this budget roller coaster and find a stable, long-term solution to education funding. Our future depends on it."
If you recently found a shiny gold dollar coin in downtown Bellevue, thank the kindness class. Ditto if you stumbled upon a piece of glass art in Pioneer Square, or a lottery ticket taped to a bus shelter with a note saying, "This may be your lucky day."
Since mid-September, the 250 people in Puget Sound Community School's online course learned about kindness by practicing it.
Along the way, they took emotional risks, repaired relationships, improved their outlook on the world, and realized that kindness is contagious.
The column itself was the usual pointless pablum that we typically see in these guest columns. Lots of goals with no action plan. The interesting bit, as usual, comes in the reader comments in which members of the community writes that we DON'T need more engineers because there are lots of them standing in unemployment lines and that engineering jobs are being outsourced to India and China or to people from India and China who come to the U.S. on guest worker visas.
This article is also written completely without reference to the ineffective math education methods adopted over the past ten years.
Plainfield East High School doesn't have a senior class. But it clearly possesses a new staple of American education: "sexting." I urge a surely chagrined Principal Anthony Manville to buy several large boxes of fig leaves.
A 16-year-old honors student took a nude photo of herself, used her cellphone to send it to a friend and, bingo, for the last two weeks the photo has made the rounds of the three-year-old school with 1,300 students. Plainfield police seized some students' phones and passed them on to computer forensic experts at the Will County Sheriff's Department.
The school is contemplating punishment, the police are interviewing students and James Glasgow, the Will County state's attorney, is mulling whether to prosecute anybody under Illinois child pornography statutes. In the meantime, everybody can spend time off over the holiday cheerfully consuming "Teens and Sexting," a study just completed by the Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center.
Based partly on a survey of 800 teenagers, parents and guardians, it underscores the role of cellphones "in the sexual lives of teens and young adults." Four percent of the teenagers indicated that had dispatched "sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves" via text messaging, while 15 percent claimed they had received such images of a person they know.
"The research around early reading intervention illuminates the complex decision making required to meet individual student literacy needs. There seems to be no one right answer, no quick fix for success. While recent research brings up questions as to the cost/benefit of Reading Recovery, what other supports and options are available? One thing is certain, alternative interventions must be in place prior to removing current systems." Summary, "Reading Recovery: A Synthesis of Research, Data Analysis and Recommendations," Madison Metropolitan School District Report to the Board of Education, December, 2009.
How well are we teaching our children to read?
The "Annual Measurable Objectives" under No Child Left Behind for Wisconsin call for all students to achieve reading levels of proficient or better under the WKCE by the 2013-14 school year. Benchmarks toward that goal are phased in over time. The current intermediate goal (ending this school year) is 74%. (Put another way, the percentage of students who are below proficient should not exceed 26%.) The goals move up to 80.5% in 2010-11, 87% in 2011-12, and 93.5% in 2012-13.
71.7% of MMSD 3rd graders scored at or above the proficient level on last year's (November 2008) WKCE reading assessment (this and the rest of the WKCE data cited here are from the DPI web site). This did not quite meet the 74% Annual Measurable Objective. We should be concerned that achievement levels are going down even as achievement targets are going up:
The Annual Measurable Objectives also apply to demographic subgroups, including economically disadvantaged students. Economically disadvantaged students—whose futures are almost wholly dependent on the ability of their schools to teach them to read—and their achievement levels deserve particular attention.
How well are we teaching our children from low-income families to read?
Can we continue to explain/excuse/blame poverty rates for this failure?
What should we do to acknowledge and address this crisis?
If there's one thing that 2009 proved, it's that there's nothing like an addictive game to keep people coming back to your service for more. Over the last year, we've seen Foursquare and Gowalla tap into this with their colorful badges, and Zynga is making a killing off games like Farmville. But what if you could turn that habit into something that might actually be helpful to school or your career? That's the premise behind Lingt, a new startup that's looking to leverage gameplay elements to help with the mother of all repetitive tasks: learning a new language.
The Y Combinator funded company is launching today in public beta, offering a suite of matching games to help English speakers learn Chinese. Using the app is quite straightforward. First, you choose a set of words that you need to learn. You can use a one of Lingt's suggested lists, a list of vocabulary words drawn from one of thirty US/Chinese textbooks, or you can manually enter your own words. From there, the site will quiz you on the meaning of the words. You can either input your answers via text, by saying them aloud, or as a matching game (click on one of five choices).
Dion Haith was observing a new teacher and decided to make a chart of what she was doing. When the class was over, he showed it to her. She spotted something right away:
All the questions she asked were directed to girls. It wasn't something she did intentionally. But she did it.
Haith's observations drove home a lesson: You need to draw all your students into what you're doing. That's the kind of lesson Haith is supposed to be teaching as a full-time mentor for young teachers.
But the lessons go well beyond classroom tips. Stephanie Gwin-Matzat said her job requires her to be a bit of a marriage or relationship counselor, a bit of a financial counselor and a bit of a lot of other things. She'll tell the people she works with how to open a credit union account or how to get photocopies done efficiently.
The robot revolution is indeed on its way: Soon we'll have robovacuums, robot chefs, and now, robots teaching our kids about robots. But it's not a one-way evolution, as humans are becoming little more futuristic too, with the help of a robo-knee.
Japan's Bot for School Kids
The robot pictured above is yet another humanoid robot (that'll be an android, then) joining the ranks currently led by Honda's amazing Asimo. This unnamed machine is based on a design by ZMP and is pretty capable--even has a video-projection system built in. There's a lithium battery to give it some autonomy, and all the gyros and accelerometers to give it a sense of balance as its 21 joints let it amble across the floor. It can speak and hear, and it's WiFi enabled for remote control.
As you can see from the video below, this new robot just isn't quite in the same class as Asimo. Its locomotion is stilted, and it basically hops from foot to foot while walking--Asimo's gait, in comparison, is so very human that it can stroll, jog and even run pretty much exactly as we do. Asimo's sensor array is also smarter, and it has manipulator hands for doing physical tasks.
With the radio playing softly in the background and munching on spoonfuls of noodles and cheese, Maria Vespa sat at her family's kitchen counter to take her geography mid-term on a recent afternoon.
The 15-year-old stared intently at her computer screen as test questions popped up. She'd study each for a minute, take another bite of lunch and click on an answer. When she got stumped, she pulled out her notebook.
"That's one of the great things about online school," Maria said. "You get to use your notes when you're taking tests."
Another great thing about online school: instant grades. A few moments after Maria answered the last test question, her score popped up.
"I got a B," she said. "I would have loved an A, but a B is still pretty good."
The children walking along the dusty road, each with a thick stack of textbooks under their arm, are probably an hour away from school. For miles around, there is no sign of anything much: a scattering of stilted houses in the yellowing paddy fields, some buffalo trudging through a road-side ditch, a bridge over the trickle of a river.
In western Nepal, as in much of the country, indeed as in many rural areas in the developing world, schools are a luxury, not a right. In these parts, a 90-minute walk to school is an unremarkable fact of life. Among the children making this daily pilgrimage are girls sponsored by Room to Read, an educational charity that the Financial Times is supporting in this year's seasonal appeal.
Bay State Gov. Deval Patrick stopped by the South Shore Charter Public School on Friday (Dec. 18), where he held an on-location cabinet meeting and used the opportunity to talk up his education reform bill.
Patrick and his cabinet met with the students and staff at the charter school and talked with Pru Goodale, the school's executive director, about the school's initiatives to diversify education through various programs.
"The South Shore Charter School is helping students thrive and opening up worlds of opportunity for them," Patrick said. "All children deserve the same chance at a world-class education and that's what our reform package will give them."
At last nights board meeting former Winnequah Principal Patty McGuinness presented the results of the 4k-8 study commissioned by the board last summer. The report detailed the costs of implementing 4k-8 grade configurations in each community. The proposed configuration would require significant changes to Winnequah school to accomodate programming for Monona 3-8th grade students and some changes to Glacial Drumlin to shift CG 4th graders into the building.
The report (I'll link it here when it is up on the district website) was very thorough, and I found it a useful exercise to see all the costs and factors that go into making a school laid out in one place. It is worth a read on that basis. One issue identified from the study was that the scheduling wouldn't work with the current encore staff and additional staffing would be required. These additional requirements hadn't been worked out, but they would add to the costs included the study.
Growing up in the '70s, John Halamka was a bookish child with a penchant for science and electronics. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and buttoned his shirts up to the collar.
"I was constantly being called a geek or a nerd," he recalled, chuckling.
Dr. Halamka grew up to be something of a cool nerd, with a career that combines his deep interests in medicine and computing, and downtime that involves rock climbing and kayaking.
Now 47, Dr. Halamka is the chief information officer at the Harvard Medical School, a practicing emergency-ward physician and an adviser to the Obama administration on electronic health records.
Hybrid careers like Dr. Halamka's that combine computing with other fields will increasingly be the new American jobs of the future, labor experts say. In other words, the nation's economy is going to need more cool nerds. But not enough young people are embracing computing -- often because they are leery of being branded nerds.
The following questions were set in last year's GCSE examination in England.
These are genuine answers from 16 year olds, not very bright, but entertaining, 16 year olds.
Q. Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink
A. Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists
Q. How is dew formed
A. The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire
Q. What causes the tides in the oceans
A. The tides are a fight between the earth and the moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins the fight
Southeastern Wisconsin could benefit economically by increasing the quality of early childhood education centers, but doing so presents a daunting tradeoff: more than doubling the expense of caring for infants and young children up to age 5.
A three-year study by Public Policy Forum researchers released Tuesday found that a system of high-quality early childhood education programs would cost about $11,500 per child, per year.
In the current system, child care providers are estimated to spend about $5,625 per child annually.
The new report relies on research showing a correlation between high-quality early learning experiences and higher rates of achievement in school, especially for disadvantaged children.
The analysis for policy-makers includes the economic pros and cons of maintaining the status quo, funding a variety of mid-level improvements and implementing a high-quality system of early childhood education across southeastern Wisconsin, said Anneliese Dickman, research director at the Public Policy Forum.
Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. As pressure increases on teachers unions to mend their ways and become better partners in school reform, the bar for what constitutes meaningful change seems to be getting lower.
In October, the New Haven (Conn.) Federation of Teachers agreed to a new labor agreement that was hailed by both American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as a breakthrough and national model. Yet the contract was actually a set of promises and processes to potentially undertake reforms after more discussion and mutual agreement.
Maybe the union was playing for time to make more reform-oriented deals away from the crucible of a labor negotiation. Critics were not buying it and argued the entire thing was a ploy. We'll know who was right by next summer.
Daniel Kahn has never lived in this city, but he has attended its legendary public schools since the fourth grade. Now in eighth grade, he is vice president of the student council, plays in two school bands and is an A student who has been preparing to tread in his sister's footsteps at Beverly Hills High School.
But Daniel will almost certainly be looking for a new place to hang his backpack next fall. The school board here intends to do away with hundreds of slots reserved for nonresident children, most of whom live in nearby neighborhoods of Los Angeles where the homes are nice but the city's public school system is deeply distressed.
The students used to be a financial boon for Beverly Hills, bringing millions of dollars in state aid with them. But California's budget crisis is changing the way schools are financed in many wealthy cities, suddenly turning the out-of-towners into money losers.
Bob Sutton has an interesting post linking to this New York Times story: After Bankruptcy, G.M. Struggles to Shed a Legendary Bureaucracy. A manager relates how the company's legendary bureaucracy is being cut down to size: his massively extensive performance review has been cut down to a single page. I liked his explanation for this:
We measured ourselves ten ways from Sunday. But as soon as everything is important, nothing is important.
My feeling is that what appears to be happening at GM needs to happen in a lot more places. It often seems to me that everytime we experience a crisis, the solution is to write more rules. A child dies due to failings in care, and more forms have to be filled in. In absurd extremes, a council bans parents from entering a play area as they've not had a criminal records bureau check.
Alongside this is a creeping extension of the need for academic qualifications, the ability to write clever essays. Social workers will have their initial training extended to four years; nurses will have to get a degree level qualification in future. Soon, psychotherapists will have to get a masters degree in order to practice.
But the real revolution, tucked away in the Race to the Top guidelines released by the Department of Education last month, is that high school has a new mission. No longer is it enough just to graduate students, or even prepare them for college. Schools must now show how they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year of college. In other words, high schools must now focus on grade 13.
To be sure, this shift is long overdue. It has been a generation since a high school diploma was a ticket to success. Today, the difference in earning power between a high school graduate and someone who's finished eighth grade has shrunk to nil. And students themselves know, better even than their parents or teachers, according to a recent poll conducted by Deloitte, that the main mission of high school is preparation for college.
Still, this shift will be seismic for our nation's high schools, because it will require gathering a great deal of information, and using it. And at the moment, high school principals know virtually nothing about what becomes of their graduates. Most don't even know whether their students make it to college at all.
What better gift to give that special child than the message that learning is cool. Most children really think that naturally as they begin to explore their world by walking, talking, and gaining new skills at a rapid rate as toddlers and preschoolers. A cartoon in the Dec. 14 "The New Yorker" shows two little kids in a sandbox. The older one says to the younger one: "It's all learning-is-fun and invented spelling, and then-bam!- second grade."
What's wrong with second grade? As a teacher, consultant, longtime educational specialist, it is sad to often see fewer smiles and sparkling eyes with each advancing grade of school. Rather than continuing to believe that learning is fun, cool, an ultimate aim, too many children dumb down, hide their talents, and proceed in a lock-step method of learning that doesn't fit them and holds little appeal. It doesn't have to be that way.
No studies of Reading Recovery® that fall within the scope of the English Language Learners (ELL) review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Reading Recovery® on ELL.
Reading Recovery® is a short-term tutoring intervention designed to serve the lowest-achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. The goals of Reading Recovery® include: promoting literacy skills; reducing the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read; and preventing long-term reading difficulties. Reading Recovery® supplements classroom teaching with one-to-one tutoring sessions, generally conducted as pull-out sessions during the school day. The tutoring, which is conducted by trained Reading Recovery® teachers, takes place for 30 minutes a day over a period of 12 to 20 weeks.
Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city's poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.
But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.
"You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here," he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. "That's it. See?"
For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.
Before showing a video to the 11th and 12th graders in his physics class, Glenn Coutoure, a teacher at Norwalk High School, warned them that his mouth would be hanging open, in childlike wonderment, almost the whole time.
Mr. Coutoure then started the DVD, showing him and other science teachers floating in an airplane during a flight in September. By flying up and down like a giant roller coaster along parabolic paths, the plane simulated the reduced gravity of the Moon and Mars and then weightlessness in 30-second chunks.
The teachers performed a series of experiments and playful stunts, like doing push-ups with others sitting on their backs and catching in their mouths M & M's that flew in straight lines, that they hoped would help them better explain to their students the laws of motion that Sir Isaac Newton deduced centuries ago.
"You see the ball just hangs there," Mr. Coutoure said.
My former Post colleague Tracy Thompson has two daughters in a Washington area school district. I promised not to say which one. It doesn't matter, because the issue she raises involves all high-tech schools, of which we have many.
People aren't using the new Web features designed to help families. Is it because parents like me are technophobes? Not entirely. The reluctant participants who concern Thompson are teachers.
Both of Thompson's kids have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. They have trouble getting their work done. Her school district, like several in the area, has Web sites on which parents can see their children's assignments. That way, they cannot be fooled by sly evasions when they ask their children, sitting in front of the TV, whether they have any homework.
Thompson was delighted to discover the Web homework schedules when her older daughter was a sixth-grader. Disappointment followed, she said, when "I found out only about half of her teachers used it. Some teachers were weeks behind in updating the info. My older daughter is off to high school next year and has matured amazingly over the past three years, so I don't have to worry that much about her stuff anymore. But now my younger daughter is in third grade, and I am in my second year of trying to get her teachers to use the Web."
Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachers released this year, more than half said that "too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads." Some 60 percent said that "parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don't belong there."
Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?
Kristin Klopfenstein, economist
Trevor Packer, College Board
Patrick Welsh, high school teacher
Philip M. Sadler, Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics
David Wakelyn, National Governors Association
Saul Geiser, Center for Studies in Higher Education
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. "According to Webster's," begins a piece, blithely, and the lexicographer shudders, because she knows that a dictionary is about to be invoked as an incontrovertible authority. Although we may profess to believe, as the linguist Dwight Bolinger once put it, that dictionaries "do not exist to define but to help people grasp meanings," we don't often act on that belief. Typically we treat a definition as the final arbiter of meaning, a scientific pronouncement of a word's essence.
But the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word "means." A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.
The district received an initial solicitation from the state DPI regarding "Race to the top" funds. The race to the top funds will be divided into two parts, with half of the funds going to districts that agree to implement programs in 5 areas outlined in the memorandum:
Mathews: I loved your book, as you saw in my review last week. It is the best book ever written about the 21st century skills movement. But why were you so hard on Advanced Placement? There are many AP teachers who think the program is terrific for the typical schools where they work (you focused on some of the tiny upper crust schools that are a different issue) and who are trying to do everything you and I want them to do. Why not see AP (and IB, which is pretty near exactly what you want) as a great platform for change rather than the enemy?
As college students finish up their first semester, it's not just time to take a break, it's also time to look at grades and study how well their college career is going. But it's not just an individual assessment -- it's also an assessment of how well their K-12 schooling prepared them to compete in the world beyond high school.
According to Madison School Board member Ed Hughes, information from students is one of the most important ways to test how effective schools or school districts are serving their communities.
"Probably the best single source of information about how well we're doing comes from students themselves, and how well-prepared they feel when they go out into the world," says Hughes, a board member since 2008 as well as an attorney and a parent.
Earlier this year, Hughes -- who has a daughter who is a senior at East High School and a son in college -- did an informal survey of students who had graduated from the Madison Metropolitan School District and were now either in college, graduate school or the work force. The 143 respondents ranged from the graduating classes of 1999 through 2008; most had graduated from Madison schools within the last five years.
"A Throwback" Review keeps light shining on high school scholars
Adam Sell:
The Concord Review is a one-man outfit run from a cluttered office on Route 20 in Sudbury.
Back issues of the academic journal featuring research by high school history students sit in stacks, and editor Will Fitzhugh keeps his computer in the corner so he can leave even more room for books.
Fitzhugh, 73, has been running the quarterly publication for 22 years in an effort to keep old-fashioned term papers alive and well. He thinks scholarly research at the high school level has declined, and students are arriving at college unprepared.
"I think we're doing the majority of public high school students a disservice,'' said Fitzhugh. "They get to college and are assigned these nonfiction books and term papers, and they flame out. The equivalent is sending kids to college math classes with only fractions and decimals.''
Yet Fitzhugh, who started the journal while on sabbatical from his teaching job in Concord (hence the name), can't find anybody to take over when he retires. He took no salary from the journal for 14 years, and even now averages only $10,000 a year.
"It's going to be really hard, there's no job security. But most people don't want to work for nothing, and they don't want to leave the classroom,'' Fitzhugh said. "I don't know how long I can keep going.''
Despite a perpetual lack of funding for his project--Fitzhugh said he's been turned down by 154 foundations--The Concord Review has persevered.
The number of subscribers has grown to more than 1,400, and its printing runs every three months range from 2,500 to 4,000 copies. Filling each issue are 11 articles that Fitzhugh picks from more than 200 submissions.
Papers come in from all over the world; the most recent issue features one from the American School of Antananarivo in Madagascar. Of the other 10 articles, seven were from students in private schools, which Fitzhugh said is roughly the average proportion.
And these are no simple book reports the students are writing. This issue includes papers titled "Rise and Fall of Cahokia,'' "Andersonville Prison,'' "Arquebus in Japan,'' and "Civil War Medicine.''
"Obviously it's been difficult in some ways, but I've been inspired by the work of the kids,'' Fitzhugh said.
One of those is Jonathan Weinstein. When he started writing a research paper for his Asian studies class at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Weinstein said, he expected it to come out around 10 pages, roughly the assigned length. But as he kept digging into information on HIV/AIDS in China, his paper grew.
"As I got into the topic, there wasn't any way to do a proper analysis without making it around 34 pages,'' Weinstein said. He started looking toward other avenues of publication, and settled on The Concord Review.
Sandra Crawford, Weinstein's teacher at Lincoln-Sudbury, hopes the recognition he got for his report might drive other students to attempt the same.
"I know it's made me think about when I have students do excellent papers, how can I bring those to a wider audience?'' Crawford said.
Though public schools contribute fewer of the papers Fitzhugh publishes, The Concord Review has a fan in Robert Furey, head of the history department at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School.
"It's an extraordinary opportunity for kids to have their work viewed by a wider audience,'' said Furey. "I think there needs to be a Concord Review to give the most serious history students the chance to have their work read.''
But not all teachers are sold. Todd Whitten, who teaches Advanced Placement courses at Burlington High School and was formerly a department head at Beaver Country Day School in Brookline, says the standards that The Concord Review sets are a throwback to a different era of teaching history.
"I think it's feeling more and more anachronistic,'' Whitten said. Term papers "are the way college works, it's a format that needs to be taught, but anecdotally, it's been taken over by English departments.''
Whitten said from his perspective, history and social studies departments aren't having students write Fitzhugh's style of paper anymore. "The focus is on being generalists, not specialists. You're trying to cover the surface of a lot of stuff,'' Whitten said.
For Fitzhugh, it boils down to showing that high school students are capable of outstanding academic work. The Concord Review is just one facet of his Varsity Academics initiative. If he can help inspire students to strive beyond their own expectations, even if The Concord Review folds, he will have done his job, Fitzhugh said.
"Athletics are performed publicly. Good academics are a secret.''
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
I am keeping my weekly Extra Credit column alive on this blog with occasional answers to reader questions, the format of that column I did for many years in the Extras before they died. This teacher, Michael Feinberg (no relation to the co-founder of the KIPP schools with the same name), sent me a copy of an intriguing letter about physics he sent to the Montgomery County school superintendent, and agreed to let me get an answer and use it here.
Dear Dr. Weast:
I am a retired MCPS teacher; I taught Physics at both Kennedy H.S. and Whitman H.S. until the time that I retired in 2005. After retirement I have, on occasion, tutored Physics students.
When the 9th grade Physics curriculum was introduced I opposed it on the grounds that Physics should be taught at a higher mathematical level. While tutoring students in both grades 9 and 11/12 I see that this is true; students in 11th grade learn rigorous Physics with mathematical applications while students in 9th grade usually do descriptive worksheets. I believe that it unfair that students in 9 th grade receive the same honors credit for what is promoted as the same curriculum but is not the same.
It is a chance L.A. Unified all but squanders, according to interviews with more than 75 teachers and administrators, analyses of district data over the last several years, and internal and independent studies. Among the findings:
Nearly all probationary teachers receive a passing grade on evaluations. Fewer than 2% are denied tenure.
The reviews are so lacking in rigor as to be meaningless, many instructors say. Before a teacher gets tenure, school administrators are required to conduct only a single, pre-announced classroom visit per year. About half the observations last 30 minutes or less. Principals are rarely held responsible for how they perform the reviews.
The district's evaluation of teachers does not take into account whether students are learning. Principals are not required to consider testing data, student work or grades. L.A. Unified, like other districts in California, essentially ignores a state law that since the 1970s has required districts to weigh pupil progress in assessing teachers and administrators.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls himself a big fan of National Board Certification for Teachers. "What if every child had a chance to be taught by a National Board Certified teacher? I think the difference it would make in our students' lives woul
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls himself a big fan of National Board Certification for Teachers.
"What if every child had a chance to be taught by a National Board Certified teacher? I think the difference it would make in our students' lives would be extraordinary," he said recently.
Unfortunately, every child doesn't have that chance. In fact, most don't. But a growing number of teachers nationally and in Alabama are becoming board certified.
Nationally, more than 82,000 teachers are board certified, with nearly 8,900 joining the ranks this year. Alabama has 233 newly certified teachers, bringing the state's total to 1,781, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards announced Wednesday. Alabama ranks 11th nationally in the number of teachers board certified this year, and 13th in the total number of certified teachers.
I applaud the work of the Board of Education in their efforts to downsize the district's infrastructure. During my service on the board, I learned how difficult that process can be when various factions of the community come before the board pleading to save their favorite schools. In fact, many current board members have campaigned for their buildings in the past. They cited educational studies praising the positive influences of small neighborhood schools and how important it was to maintain the configuration at that time. It appears they have now come to realize instead that what they once called warehousing of students does not lead to an adverse learning environment and that larger schools can indeed contribute to student success. That observation is supported by their decision to replace the plan that placed 400 students in each of six buildings to one that has three buildings with approximately 500 students and three with many fewer students.
Now the public is being asked to spend millions on four buildings Ridge Mills, John Joy, Denti and Gansevoort. I suggest that the board reconsider the proposition and look to renovate three buildings. Instead of closing Ridge Mills, they could close both Ridge Mills and John Joy that currently serve a total of 481 students. The combination would still be smaller in size than either Denti or Bellamy (about 500 and 485 students, respectively). The board can renovate either one of the closed buildings and reopen it to provide adequate space for their students and result in one less building for the district to maintain.
Parents would be able to yank their children out of failing schools and ask any other school in the state to admit them under a compromise bill approved Thursday by the state Senate.
That change and other proposals are part of the state's plan to compete for President Obama's Race to the Top grants - up to $4.3 billion for all states and as much as $700 million for California alone.
States have until next month to apply for the federal grants, but political fighting over how to make California as competitive as possible has killed two competing proposals and left little time before the Jan. 19 application deadline.
To qualify, states have been asked to demonstrate a commitment to education reform. Under the bill, California would establish specific plans for failing schools, including closing a school, dismissing the principal and up to half of the teachers, or allowing the school to become a charter school.
What does mastery of the finer points of English grammar have to do with succeeding in business?
Nothing.
But if you want to get into a top business school, you need to do well on the GMAT. And that means tangling with some very ugly verbal questions.
Specifically, it means psychoanalyzing the folks who put the test together, who sometimes don't include a correct English answer as one of the options.
When there's no right answer to a question (which there often isn't in business), you have to figure out the least-wrong answer--without being driven insane by rage at the stupidity of your questioner. Thus, the GMAT tests your aptitude for all sorts of things you WILL need in business.
The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its 2009 word of the year. It is "unfriend", as in "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight".
Unfriend has "currency and potential longevity", says Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary programme. It is true, she says, that most words with the prefix "un-" are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant) but there are some "un-" verbs, such as unpack and uncap. "Unfriend has real lex-appeal," she says.
"Unfriend" will irritate those who oppose the nasty habit of turning nouns into verbs. But nouns have been turning into verbs for ages. In his book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker estimates that a fifth of English verbs started as nouns, including "to progress", "to contact" and "to host".
Also, many supposedly new words are not new at all. "Unfriend" has an ancient past, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1659, Thomas Fuller wrote in The Appeal of Injured Innocence: "I hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Unfriended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us."
I am interested in the words that did not make word of the year. They included "paywall" (admitting only paying subscribers to part of a website) and "birther" (someone who believes Barack Obama was not born in the US).
With 809, California leads the nation in the number of charter schools. In less than 20 years, the education activists have started nearly 5,000 of these institutions, which are publicly financed and free for students to attend but independently operated.
I share this secret only with recluses like myself who lack the imagination to conceive of any gift better than a book. If you are buying for a child -- particularly if you are in a last-minute Christmas shopping panic -- scan this list compiled by a company called Renaissance Learning.
It is an amazing document. Parents who keep track of what their children are doing in school, particularly in this area, might be vaguely aware of Renaissance Learning and its famous product, Accelerated Reader, the most influential reading program in the country. It was started 23 years ago by Judi Paul and her husband, Terry, after she invented on her kitchen table a quizzing system to motivate their children to read.
Students read books, some assigned but many chosen on their own, and then take computer quizzes, either online or with Accelerated Reader software, to see whether they understood what they read. Students compile points based in part on the difficulty and length of each book and sometimes earn prizes from their schools.
They are two of the clearest reasons to be both discouraged and hopeful about public education in Tampa Bay. The wide disparities in passing rates for Advanced Placement exams, often within the same high school, indicate a failure by district superintendents and school principals to hold teachers accountable for performance. Looking forward, a $100 million grant to Hillsborough schools by the Gates Foundation offers a wonderful opportunity to improve teacher training and match salaries to more sophisticated measures of performance. The bold experimentation in Hillsborough could show the way to address the sorts of shortcomings exposed by the analysis of AP exams.
There are more immediate steps that can be taken to address a system that rewards schools for increasing the number of students taking AP exams but ignores teachers with ridiculously low exam passing rates. The state should proceed with plans to put more weight on passing rates in evaluating high schools. The schools should re-examine their policies that encourage even unprepared students to take college-level AP classes. Students should be challenged with rigorous courses, but it is a disservice to admit those who have virtually no chance to grasp the material well enough to pass the exam. That is a waste of time and taxpayers' money.
Dallas has more public schools rated as failures by the Texas Education Agency than any other district, with 48 campuses among the 499 on this year's list of the state's worst.
The list released Tuesday consists of schools where student test scores were too low or recent school ratings were "unacceptable," giving students the right to transfer next year under the state's Public Education Grant program.
The number of Dallas Independent School District campuses on the list is down slightly from last year, when 52 schools were singled out. But Dallas is by far the state leader; Fort Worth and Houston tied for second with 30 campuses each.
Schools on the list had 50 percent or more students fail the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in two of the last three years, or an "academically unacceptable" rating in one of the last three years.
Only a small number of the estimated 350,000 students eligible to transfer from the 499 schools - about 6.5 percent of the state's campuses - are expected to do so, because the state provides no funding for transportation. Officials have said lack of transportation is one of the biggest obstacles for students and parents interested in switching schools under the program.
Typically, fewer than 1,000 students statewide exercise the transfer option each year.
Wisconsin Race to the Top: Governor/DPI Letter and "Memorandum of Understanding"
via a kind reader's email; Letter from Governor Doyle and Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers [107K PDF]:
We are excited to invite you to participate in Wisconsin's Race to the Top application to the federal government. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama and Congress provided $4 billion in competitive grant funding to states that move forward with innovations and reform in education.
Earlier this fall, at our request, the Wisconsin Legislature passed bills to make Wisconsin both eligible and more competitive for the Race to the Top grants. Now our local school district leaders - school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, and other staff - need to prepare their district for participation in Wisconsin's grant application. Enclosed is the Race to the Top district memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the federal government requires participating districts to sign as part of the state's Race to the Top grant application. The MOU provides a framework of collaboration between districts and the state articulating the specific roles and responsibilities necessary to implement an approved Race to the Top district grant.
The MOU is divided into two parts - Exhibit I and Exhibit II. To receive any Race to the Top funding, a district must agree to the activities in Exhibit I. Districts that agree to Exhibit I are eligible, if they so choose, to participate in Exhibit II. In Exhibit II districts will receive additional funding for participating in the additional activities. Exhibit I is included in this information and Exhibit II will be forthcoming in the very near future.
My guest today is Donalyn Miller, a sixth-grade language arts teacher in Texas and literacy expert. She is the author of "The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child," and writes about literacy for teachermagazine.org.
By Donalyn Miller
A recent Carnegie Mellon University research study indicates that children engaged in a 100-hour intensive reading remediation program improved both their reading ability and the white matter connections in their brains.
While the study shows promise for educators and clinicians who work with developing readers, one casual mention in the study stood out for me-- the 25 children designated as "excellent readers" in the control group still outperformed the 35 third and fifth graders who participated in the remediation program.
The widespread belief that some readers possess an innate gift, like artists or athletes, sells many children short. I often hear parents claim, "Well, my child is just not a reader," as if the reading fairy passed over their child while handing out the good stuff.
Keeping Score When It Counts: Assessing the 2009‐10 Bowl‐bound College Football Teams - Academic Performance Improves but Race Still Matters
Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports [182K PDF]:
Overall academic progress continued while the gap between white and African‐American football student‐athletes increased slightly for the 67* Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools (formerly known as Division I‐A schools) playing in this year's college football bowl games according to a study released today by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida.
Richard Lapchick, the Director of TIDES and the primary author of the study Keeping Score When It Counts: Assessing the 2009‐10 Bowl‐bound College Football Teams - Academic Performance Improves but Race Still Matters, noted that, "The academic success of big time college student‐athletes that grew continuously under the leadership of the late Dr. Myles Brand continued this year and will be part of his legacy. The new study shows additional progress and reinforces the success of Dr. Brand's academic reform package. This year, 91 percent (61 of the 67 schools), the same as in the 2008‐09 report and up from 88 percent in the 2007‐08 report, had at least a 50 percent graduation rate for their football teams; approximately 90 percent of the teams received a score of more than 925 on the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate (APR) versus 88 percent in the 2008‐09 report."
The NCAA created the APR in 2004 as part of an academic reform package designed to more accurately measure student‐athlete's academic success as well as improve graduation rates at member institutions.
Lapchick added that, "In spite of the good news, the study showed that the disturbing gap between white and African‐American football student‐athletes remains a major issue; 21 teams or 31 percent of the bowl‐bound schools graduated less than half of their African‐American football student‐athletes, while only two schools graduated less than half of their white football student‐athletes."
Previous research has found that male high school athletes experience better outcomes than non-athletes, including higher educational attainment, employment rates, and wages. However, students self-select into athletics so these may be selection effects rather than causal effects. To address this issue, I examine Title IX which provides a unique quasi- experiment in female athletic participation. Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates--to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates--in order to comply with Title IX. This paper uses variation in the level of boys' athletic participation across states before Title IX as an instrument for the change in girls' athletic participation over the 1970s. Analyzing differences in outcomes for both the pre- and post-Title IX cohorts across states, I find that a 10-percentage point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation. Furthermore, greater opportunities to play sports leads to greater female participation in previously male-dominated occupations, particularly for high-skill occupations.
I don't mean this as a criticism of my talented colleague Bill Turque. He was reporting the news, as usual. But I did not like the focus of his otherwise irreproachable Sunday story on the achievement gap not narrowing in the D.C. schools.
Turque was letting us know that despite the growth in D.C. math scores, the gap between black and white students had gotten larger for fourth-graders. This was an important topic in education circles, so he had to report it.
But I think the achievement gap is useless as a measure of school improvement, and we would be much better writing about how much each ethnic group, each school, each child is improving, or not improving. Our gap fixation puts us in a very awkward position.
You see it. It's simple. It forces us to hope that white kids, or middle class kids, or high achieving kids, don't improve.
We have extended our Early Bird registration rate for the Green Schools National Conference to January 15th. We are encouraging everyone to register early as space is limited for this ground breaking green schools event.
Purchase Orders are now being accepted so you can lock in the lower rate now and pay later. Low rates are also being offered for groups of 4 or more from one school / organization.
Registration Questions?
Email: greenschoolsconf@continue.uoregon.edu or call 1.800.280.6218 between 9am-5pm Pacific Coast Time.
We have received exciting commitments from two of our featured speakers.
TOM FEEGEL, Author of "Green My Parents" and the mastermind behind "Earth Hour & Live Earth". Tom is continuously making positive contributions for educators, students and parents in the green schools movement.
MICHAEL STONE, Author of "Smart By Nature: Schooling for Sustainability." He is Senior Editor at the Center for Ecoliteracy. Michael coedited "Ecological Literacy" and was managing editor of "Whole Earth" magazine.
Plan to attend the GREEN SCHOOLS NATIONAL CONFERENCE on October 24-26, 2010 in Minneapolis, MN.
As Seattle Public Schools released new details about its latest transformation plan for perpetually-troubled Cleveland High School over the past week, there's been a collective eye roll among some teachers there.
"I've been here for 15 years and every other year we do this," says math teacher David Fisher, referring to a long string of ballyhooed overhauls that the Beacon Hill school has embarked on at the behest of the district.
One thing is different: The district is promising to pour money into this reinvention of Cleveland as the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It proposes to spend more than $4 million over the first three years, according to a report at last Wednesday's school board meeting by Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson. That's a lot of money for a school that is already up and running. (See the breakdown of spending on page 8 of this pdf.)
[Milwaukee...] Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) proclaims that if her bill giving the mayor of Milwaukee control of Milwaukee's Public Schools comes up in Special Session this week, it will pass the State Senate.
"I believe if the bill comes to the floor in the Senate, it's going to pass," Taylor said in an exclusive interview with the MacIver News Service. "I don't hesitate on that."
Taylor's bill, co-authored by Rep. Pedro Colon, (D-Milwaukee) is the result of a compromise between legislative supporters, the mayor and the governor. It grants the mayor authority over MPS and allows him him to pick the superintendent. City residents would still be allowed to elect the school board, but many of its powers would be transferred to the superintendent. Current Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett originally wanted the ability to appoint the school board himself.
Some of Taylor's Democratic colleagues from Milwaukee are opposed to her proposal. Two of them, Milwaukee Senator Spencer Coggs and Representative Tamara Grigsby, recently announced their own proposal, which would allow the mayor more say in MPS, but their plan stops short of handing over full control of the district. The Coggs-Grigsby plan has the support of the teachers' union and several prominent community activists.
My wife was enjoying a quiet flight back to Washington after a week off in California when I, sitting next to her, started thrashing around. I was reading a book, but in a way that any person would find disturbing. I was marking and remarking pages. I was filling margins with unreadable scrawls. I was flipping back and forth. I was talking to myself: "Whoa! No! Yes!"
My habit is to write on the last page, next to the inside of the back cover, any column ideas that come to me from a book. The last page of my copy of Wagner's book is a maze of my jottings. I have been making fun of the 21st century skills movement as a high-cost, high-level, often incomprehensible conversation among people who have forgotten to explain what it means to teachers.
Improving teacher effectiveness is hgh on the list of most education reformers in colorado, as it is nationally. Effective teaching in the elementary years is of vital importance to ensure not only that children master fundamental skills, but that performance gaps narrow rather than widen beyond repair. We now know that disadvantaged students can catch up academically with their more advantaged peers if they have great elementary teachers several years in a row.
It is for these reasons that the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a nonpartisan research and advocacy group dedicated to the systemic reform of the teaching profession, evaluates the adequacy of preparation provided by undergraduate education schools. These programs produce 70 percent of our nation's teachers. We think it is crucial to focus specifically on the quality of preparation of future elementary teachers in the core subjects of reading and mathematics.
Teacher preparation programs, or "ed schools" as they are more commonly known, do not now, nor have they ever, enjoyed a particularly positive reputation. Further, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that teacher preparation does not matter all that much and that a teacher with very little training can be as effective as a teacher who has had a lot of preparation. As a result, many education reformers are proposing that the solution to achieving better teacher quality is simply to attract more talented people into teaching, given that their preparation does not really matter.
In several significant ways, we respectfully disagree. NCTQ is deeply committed to high-quality formal teacher preparation, but, importantly, we are not defenders of the status quo. We also do not believe that it is a realistic strategy to fuel a profession with three million members nationally by only attracting more elite students. Yes, we need to be much more selective about who gets into teaching, and we strenuously advocate for that goal. But even smart people can become better teachers, particularly of young children, if they are provided with purposeful and systematic preparation.
NCTQ has issued two national reports on the reading and mathematics preparation of elementary teachers in undergraduate education schools. The first, What Education Schools Aren't Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning was released in May 2006.1 The second, No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools, followed just over two years later.2 These reports provide the methodological foundations for this analysis of teacher preparation in every undergraduate program in Colorado.
What wouldn't California do for $700 million right now? That's not a rhetorical question. With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan parceling out more than $4 billion to states that conform to his vision of school reform, California's Legislature is just one of dozens that are frantically revamping their states' education systems for some of that cash. Should California succeed, its share would be somewhere between $350 million and $700 million.
To obtain the money, Sacramento must pass legislation that would serve as the basis for an application. This has given Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a perfect opportunity to push for more parent choice and fewer restrictions on charter schools, while the teachers unions have pushed an agenda that would handcuff the charter movement. There is some merit to both sides' proposals -- charter schools should be more accountable, and parents should have more say in the education process -- but they have been poorly executed in ways that could have negative repercussions. Applications for Duncan's "Race to the Top" grants are due in January, so who has time for a thoughtful debate?
Today, all available data indicates that students of color are "much more likely than white students to fall behind in math and science courses, drop-out, and much less likely to graduate from high school, acquire a college or advanced degree, or earn a middle-class living." Even though data cites numerous factors contributing to the achievement gap, it failed to include the most important factors such as lack of culture-inclusive curriculum, and lack of teachers' knowledge, skills, and desire to teach non-European contributions and accomplishments in all areas of human endeavor to all learners, especially to students of color.
In my opinion, the achievement gap cannot be closed until we close the knowledge gap about various ethnic groups we teach. The gap will persist as long as we continue teaching the way we have been teaching for nearly 400 years.
During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school.
It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo's interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.
Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.
They did - and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident's 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he's helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can't afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.
The neediest students in California high schools are being taught by the least prepared teachers, a new study shows.
Fewer than half the principals in high-poverty schools said their teachers had the skills to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving among their students, while more than two-thirds of their counterparts in wealthier communities said their teachers possessed those abilities, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning said in a study being released today.
The nonprofit center also found that teachers in the lowest-performing schools are more than twice as likely as those in the highest-achieving schools to be working without at least a preliminary credential.
The center's study, "The Status of the Teaching Profession 2009," is the latest to show that the most disadvantaged students don't have access to the same quality of teaching as those in more affluent, high-achieving schools.
The number of outside applicants being offered a seat would drop at nearly every Chicago magnet school next year under new admissions criteria to be voted on Wednesday, according to a Tribune analysis.
By giving greater priority to siblings of current students and applicants who live within 1 1/2 miles of each magnet school, the policy could reduce the offers extended to other applicants by about 14 percent overall.
In some schools, the reduction is far greater. At Drummond Elementary, where the acceptance rate hovers around 3 percent, offers to students outside the neighborhood would drop almost 55 percent. At Black Magnet on the South Side, where just 1 in 10 students is accepted, 32 percent of the offers would dry up.
Some observers say the policy will undermine the essence of magnets, which were created nearly 30 years ago to integrate schools in the nation's most segregated large city. By raising the number of students from the neighborhood who can attend, magnets once meant for all public school kids would increasingly become de facto neighborhood schools.
I am a proud graduate of Montgomery's public schools, and my progression from the railroad tracks in west Montgomery to the halls of Congress proves that education can transform lives. As governor I will do everything in my power to build a public school system that gives our children the chance to cross the bridge that I have walked.
The next governor of Alabama will need to launch a decade-long effort to revitalize public education. In a century where Alabama's workers must compete globally, we can no longer afford to sit near the bottom of national categories that rank college affordability and high school graduation rates. We cannot be afraid of reform and we cannot dismiss the possibility that new ideas can work.
I will make it a priority to strengthen Alabama's nationally recognized early learning programs. Our pre-kindergarten program is an Alabama success story, and many more children in our state should have access to it. Similarly, the Alabama Reading Initiative, which helped produce the biggest jump in fourth-grade reading performance in the country, must be broadened to reach middle school and above.
But did we "celebrate" them? Two were named last week in the Wisconsin State Journal, and they were named because of their disabilities. I could not find reference to the other 55 on the school district's website. (By searching madison.com archives, I did find a list of 62 from September, including private school students.) How many high school athletes did we celebrate this week, by posting their names, their accomplishments, and their pictures in the paper?
The State Journal names a male and female athlete of the week, and runs a feature story. When did we name a scholar of the week? A thespian? A musician? Do we cover the State Solo and Ensemble Competition as though it were newsworthy? How about math meets? Debate and forensics? Do we review high school plays with the same attention as weekly football games?
When academic and artistic pursuits are covered with even a quarter of the vigor with which we cover sports, when students of color are served by the district as gifted in fields other than athletics, when we let students know in a public way that we value them for those gifts and that hard work, then we can begin to talk about celebrating the high fliers, and then we can begin to scratch our heads about an achievement gap.
When we send the clear message to students, especially students of color, that they are of value to society for their entertainment value on an athletic field, we do not serve them or us.
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."
Tony Wagner
The Global Achievement Gap
New York: Basic Books 2008, p. 101-102
College Ready?
A few years ago, I was asked by the leaders of one of the most highly regarded public high schools in New England to help them with a project. They wanted to start a program to combine the teaching of English and history because they thought that such a program would give their graduates an edge in college--and more than 90 percent of their students went on to college. They thought that teaching the two subjects together would help students gain a deeper understanding of both the history and literature of an era. Yet when I asked them how they knew that this would be the most important improvement they might make in their academic program, they were stumped. They'd just assumed that this innovation would be helpful to students.
Personally, I think interdisciplinary studies make a great deal of sense, but I also know that schools have very limited time and resources for change and so must choose their school and curriculum improvement priorities with great care. I proposed that we conduct a focus group with students who'd graduated from the high school three to five years prior, in which I would ask alums what might have helped them be better prepared for college--a question rarely asked by either private or public high schools. The group readily agreed, though, and worked to identify and invite a representative sample population of former students who would be willing to meet for a couple of hours when they were back at home during their winter break.
The group included students who attended state colleges and elite universities. My first question to them was this: "Looking back, what about your high school experience did you find most engaging or helpful to you?" (I would ask the question differently today: "In what ways were you most well prepared by high school?") At any rate, they found
the topic quite engaging and talked enthusiastically and at length about their high school experiences.
Extracurricular activities such as clubs, school yearbooks, and so on topped the list of what they had found most engaging in high school. Next came friends--there were no cliques in this small school, they claimed, and so everyone got along well. Sports were high on the list as well: Because the school was small, nearly everyone got a good deal of playing time.
"What about academics?" I asked.
"Most of our teachers were usually available after school to help us when we needed it," one young man replied. Several nodded in agreement, and the the room fell silent.
"But what about classes?" I pressed.
"You have to understand, " a student who was in his last year at an elite university explained to me somewhat impatiently. "Except for math, you start over in all your courses in college--we didn't need any of the stuff we'd studied in high school."
There was a buzz of agreement around the table. Then another students said, with a smile: "Which is a good thing because you'd forgotten all the stuff you'd memorized for the test a week later anyway!" The room erupted in laughter.
I was dumbfounded, not sure what to say next. Finally, I asked: "So, how might your class time have been better spent--what would have better prepared you for college?"
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."
============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
The Washington, D.C., public school system, with its high dropout rates and low test scores, has long been a national embarrassment. But things seem to be improving under maverick Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. So it's curious that the White House hasn't done more to support her reform efforts, especially since they track so closely with the Obama Administration's own stated education goals.
New student test scores released by the U.S. Department of Education last week showed that Washington's fourth-graders made the largest gains in math among big city school systems in the past two years. D.C.'s eighth-graders increased their math proficiency at a faster rate than all other big cities save San Diego. Washington still has a long way to go, but it's no longer the city with the lowest marks, a distinction that now belongs to Detroit.
Before Ms. Rhee's arrival, the nation's capital went through six superintendents in 10 years. Since taking over as Chancellor in 2007, Ms. Rhee has replaced ineffective principals, laid off instructors based on "quality, not by seniority" and shuttered failing schools. These actions have angered teacher unions to the point of bringing (unsuccessful) lawsuits, yet academic outcomes are clearly improving.
Author Beth Fertig says that as many as 20 percent of American adults may be functionally illiterate. They may recognize letters and words, but can't read directions on a bus sign or a medicine bottle, read or write a letter, or hold most any job. Her new book, Why cant U teach me 2 read, follows three young New Yorkers who legally challenged the New York City public schools for failing to teach them how to read -- and won. Host Scott Simon talks to Fertig about her book.
....
SIMON: The No Child Left Behind Act is often criticized. But you suggest in this book that it perhaps did force teachers to not just let a certain percentage of students slip through the cracks.
Ms. FERTIG: That is the one thing that I do hear from a lot of different people is, by not just looking at how a whole school did and saying, you know, 60 or 70 percent of our kids passed the test, they now have to look at how did our Hispanic kids do, how did our black students do, how did our special ed students do, how did English language learners do - students who aren't born to parent who speak English.
And this way, by just aggregating the data, they're able to see which kids are falling behind and hopefully target them and give them more interventions, more help with their reading. And the ideal is that a child like Umilka isn't going to be caught, you know, in high school and they're going to figure out then that they weren't reading.
SIMON: You make a point in the book you can't get a job cracking rocks these days without having to probably fill out a computer form as to how many rocks you cracked.
Ms. FERTIG: Exactly. Antonio is now working at UPS as a loader. He had to take a basic orientation test. And because he had improved his reading skills to a fourth or fifth grade level, he was able to pass that. But he feels stuck now.
MBJ: As superintendent, you are the CEO of a $311 million budget, 32,000 students and 4,500 employees. What are your priorities?
Thompson: Basically, moving the school district forward so we are considered one of the No. 1 school districts in the state. Making sure that our students are successful and that they have skills that will allow them to compete in what I consider a global society. My priority is to make sure first and foremost that we have kids in the classroom - so we have to tackle that dropout rate.
MBJ: Any other initiatives?
Thompson: The Career Academies is another way we're looking at deterring our dropout rate. We hope that this gives our kids some idea of the light at the end of the tunnel; some skill set they can see and some jobs they can do. Potentially, we see (Career Academies) being a linkage for those kids for reasons why to stay in school because this can give you jobs - these are classes you can take while you're in high school so when you graduate, you actually have a job. And the last component of that - that three-tier component that I consider -- is prevention. We increased seven pre-K programs because the other part of dropout prevention is that part. We added seven pre-K programs this year for a total of 21. The reason that is so critical is because one of the reasons kids drop out is because they don't have the skills that they need. We're trying to increase giving the kids skills as 4-year-olds so when they come into kindergarten, they are caught up. That's part of that three-pronged approach.
MBJ: What are some of the things that you learned about MPS since you took over in August, and what has surprised you?
Thompson: I learned a lot about the commitment that this community has towards education, particularly the business (community), work force development and the chamber. They are very committed to making sure that the public schools in Montgomery are successful. I guess I was surprised at the Career Academies. They are cutting-edge in terms of what you want to be doing in the school district and the involvement that we have in the chamber in the (Career Academies) is exciting and unusual.
Reading Recovery Discussed at the 12/7/2009 Madison School Board Meeting and Administration Followup
Click for a Reading Recovery Data Summary from Madison's Elementary Schools. December 2009
Madison School Board 24MB mp3 audio file. Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's December 10, 2009 memorandum [311K PDF] to the board in response to the 12/7/2009 meeting:
Attached to this memo are several items related to further explanation of the reason why full implementation is more effective for Reading Recovery and what will happen to the schools who would no longer receive Reading Recovery as part of the administrative recommendation. There are three options for your review:
Option I: Continue serving the 23 schools with modifications.
Option II: Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools and Non-Title I Schools.
Option III: Serving some students in all or a majority of schools, not just the 23 schools who are currently served.
The first attachment is a one-page overview summary ofthe MMSD Comprehensive Literacy Model. It explains the Balanced Literacy Model used in all MMSD elementary schools. It also provides an explanation of the wrap around services to support each school through the use of an Instructional Resource Teacher as well as Tier II and Tier III interventions common in all schools.
The second attachment shows the detailed K-5 Title I Reading Curriculum Description in which MMSD uses four programs in Title I schools: Rock and Read, Reading Recovery, Apprenticeship, and Soar to Success. As part of our recommendation, professional development will be provided in all elementary schools to enable all teachers to use these programs. Beginning in Kindergarten, the four instructional interventions support and develop students' reading and writing skills in order to meet grade level proficiency with a focus on the most intensive and individualized wrap around support in Kindergarten and I" Grade with follow up support through fifth grade.
Currently these interventions are almost solely used in Title I schools.
The third attachment contains three sheets - the frrst for Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools, the second for No Reading Recovery - at Title I Schools, and the third for No Reading Recovery and No Title I eligibility. In this model we would intensify Reading Recovery in a limited number of schools (14 schools) and provide professional development to support teachers in providing small group interventions to struggling students.
The fourth attachment is a chart of all schools, students at risk and students with the highest probability of success in Reading Recovery for the 2009-10 school year. This chart may be used if Reading Recovery would be distributed based on student eligibility (districtwide lowest 20% of students in f rst grade) and school eligibility (based on the highest number of students in need per school).
Option I: Leave Reading Recovery as it currently is, in the 23 schools, but target students more strategically and make sure readiness is in place before the Reading Recovery intervention.
At the most recent meeting on Dec. 7, the school board heard a final presentation from New Century School's site council. Developments with New Century's charter renewal are reaching a critical point, since we need approval from the school board by early January to participate in kindergarten recruitment. New Century is one of Wisconsin's oldest charter schools (established in May 1995), and our school community is fighting for the charter's continued existence. It's been a challenging journey.
Click "video" for the December 7, 2009 meeting and look for "D", the New Century Presentation. Interestingly, "E" is a presentation on a proposed Chinese immersion charter school.
Unfortunately, Madison lacks significant charter activity, something which, in my view, would be very beneficial to the community, students and parents.
As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.
Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.
Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.
In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.
Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.
I give William Andrekopoulos credit - the school superintendent has invited outside scrutiny of what's going on in Milwaukee Public Schools, and he hasn't flinched when that has brought bad news time after time.
He says it takes courage to do this, and, especially compared with the mealy-mouthed way lots of executives in public and private businesses act, he's right.
"If you don't put the truth on the table . . . there will never be a sense of urgency to improve," he said in a phone conversation. He said he wants his successor - whom the School Board is on pace to pick soon - to have a clear understanding of what the score is.
So here's some of the score:
In 2006, Andrekopoulos invites the Council of the Great City Schools, a professional organization for big city school administrators, to assess the education program in MPS. The result: A report that is strongly critical, saying efforts in city schools are a hodgepodge of practices, many of them weak. The report also says there is a pervasive lack of urgency about getting better results in MPS.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have more power over the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and budget than nearly any other U.S. mayor holds over a big-city school system, under a bill the Legislature is to consider Wednesday.
"If they go ahead with the present plan, it will make for one of the most powerful education mayors in the country," said Joe Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College who led a commission to study mayoral control in New York City and has edited a book, "When Mayors Take Charge."
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee), would allow the mayor to appoint the superintendent without confirmation by the School Board or Common Council, and would let the superintendent set the school budget and tax levy without a vote by the board or council.
Elected School Board members - who now select the superintendent and approve the budget - would be limited to an advisory role on the budget and would control only such functions as student discipline, community outreach and adult recreation.
A flood of emails Monday resisting my suggestion of longer school days to raise achievement leads me to wonder if parts of the regular school day could be put to better use. Is the typical raucous high school lunch period, in an overcrowded and sometimes dangerous cafeteria, really necessary? My colleague Jenna Johnson wrote last week of imaginative principals letting students avoid the cafeteria in favor of staying in classrooms to catch up with work or having club meetings. Can lunch become a time for stress-free learning, rather than Lord of the Flies with tile floors?
Okay, I confess I have long considered lunch a waste of time. I avoided the cafeteria during high school. My favorite lunch was eating a sandwich in a classroom while convening the student court, of which I was chief justice, so we could sanction some miscreant for stealing corn nuts from the vending machine. (I heard a radio ad for that classmate's business when I was home recently---he has become a successful attorney.) At the office these days I stay in my cubicle and have crackers and fruit juice, maybe a cookie if somebody has brought them from home.
We looked at more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states and the District of Columbia. The following are the 100 schools that performed the best in our three-step America's Best High Schools ranking analysis.
Kenneth Terrell:
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., the top school in U.S. News & World Report's America's Best High Schools rankings, is designed to challenge students. A course load of offerings that include DNA science, neurology, and quantum physics would seem to be more than enough to meet that goal. But students and the faculty felt those classes weren't enough, so they decided to tackle another big question: What are the social responsibilities of educated people? Over the course of the school year, students are exploring social responsibility through projects of their own design, ranging from getting school supplies for students with cerebral palsy in Shanghai to persuading their classmates to use handkerchiefs to reduce paper waste. The One Question project demonstrates the way "TJ," as it's referred to by students and teachers, encourages the wide-ranging interests of its students.
"None of our students has the same passion," says TJ Principal Evan Glazer. "But having a passion is widely accepted and embraced."
This enthusiasm has placed TJ at the top of the America's Best High Schools ranking for each of the three years that U.S. News has ranked high schools. U.S. News uses a three-step process that analyzes first how schools are educating all of their students, then their minority and disadvantaged students, and finally their collegebound students based on student scores on statewide tests, Advanced Placement tests, and International Baccalaureate tests.
Thank you for your continued participation in the Read On Wisconsin! book club. We had a fantastic semester traveling to classrooms across Wisconsin and inviting numerous classes and authors to the Executive Residence for Reading Days.
Throughout the fall, we spoke to elementary, middle, and high school students about the importance of reading and suggesting the excellent books chosen by the Literacy Advisory Committee. Three Cups of Tea: The Young Reader's Edition by Greg Mortenson has been one of our most popular choices and has connected so many students and staff with community service. (You can learn more at: www.penniesforpeace.org.)
We have held very successful Reading Days at the Residence. In November, we welcomed three authors: Rachna Gilmore (Group of One), Sylviane Diouf (Bintou's Braids), and James Rumford (Silent Music). Each of these authors shared their enthusiasm for writing and answered many student questions about their international experiences.
Our next Reading Day will be: Thursday, January 21, 2010 from 9:00 - 2:30. At our January Reading Day, we will welcome John Coy, the author of our high school selection, Box Out. This book shares a courageous story of a high school basketball player who speaks up against an unconstitutional act occurring at his school. Box Out reaches all students. We are seeking five middle or high school classes for this Reading Day.
Please e-mail Ashley Huibregtse at ashley.huibregtse@wisconsin.gov or call 608-575-5608 to reserve your middle or high school group a spot in the schedule. Each class will be scheduled for one hour. Please share your time preference when you call or e-mail. Remember we offer bus reimbursement up to $100 to help with transportation costs if needed.
E-mail or call today! This will be an exciting Reading Day to start 2010! All the best for a happy holiday season, and Read On!
lexandria School Superintendent Mort Sherman has discovered that the city's gifted education program needs revision. Sherman likes to poke at beehives. Few issues inspire as much angry mail as changing gifted programs. He wants to find ways to get more black and Hispanic kids into the program, but if I were he, I would go much further than that.
Start with the story of one particularly troublesome Washington area gifted child, Warren Buffett, as described in the biography "The Snowball," by Alice Schroeder. By age 13, Buffett, later to be the richest man in the world and a Washington Post Co. board member, had had it with school. I wonder whether it might have been better if his parents had let him quit right then.
At newspaper gatherings, Buffett sometimes mentions the Washington Post paper route he had as a boy. It sounds quaint and charming, until you read the book and discover that the kid had so many routes that his annual income (including proceeds from his tenant farm and other investments) was greater than that of his teachers at Deal Junior High and Wilson High in the District. His father was a congressman. His family was comfortable. But he had made all that money himself as a boy genius entrepreneur. By age 14, he had filed his first tax return.
In a majority of schools around the country mobile phones/devices are locked away or 'banned' from use as they are perceived as a distraction or danger. The premise of this study is to see how mobile technologies can be used as a tool for learning within schools, by both staff and students.
30 students have been given the loan of an iPhone 3GS until then end of the academic year. They will be able to use these devices as part of their every day lessons in school and use them in whichever way they feel will aid their learning, working closely with their teachers. The increasing availability of 'apps' (applications) on these phones means that a wealth of possibilities may be accessed, and the group involved in the study will meet at regular intervals to share ideas on how they are being used as well as look at their regular attainment to see if, in reality, and change in learning can be monitored.
Eighty percent of Wisconsin school districts offer 4-year-old kindergarten (4K), educational programming that has been growing throughout the state.
Sixteen school districts opened 4K programs this year. The 333 districts that provide 4K programs are serving 38,075 children, an enrollment increase of more than 4,000 from last year. Of the districts providing 4K, 101 do so through the community approach, which blends public and private resources to allow more options for the care and education of all 4-year-olds.
Licensed teachers provide instruction for all public school district 4K programs. In the community approach, some districts provide a licensed 4K teacher in a private child care setting, some contract with Head Start or the child care setting for the licensed teachers, and others bring child care into the licensed 4K public school program or mesh licensed 4K services with a Head Start program. Wisconsin is one of the nation's leading models for combining educational and community care services for 4-year-olds.
Board of Education Progress Report, December, 2009
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, via email:
4-Year-Old Kindergarten (4K): The Board received updates from the community-based 4K planning committee in the areas of: 1) logistics; 2) curriculum; 3) public/community relations; 4) family outreach/involvement; 5) funding. The Board voted to have the District continue to work with the community in planning for 4K with an anticipated start date of September 2010, pending the determination of the availability of the resources necessary to support the new program. A presentation on financial resources will be made to the Board in December.
Financial Audit: As required by state statute, the MMSD hires an independent audit firm to perform an audit of our annual financial statements and review our compliance with federal program requirements. The audit looks at the financial operations of the District. This audit was completed by Clifton Gunderson LLP. The Board received the audit report and a summary from Clifton Gunderson.
When asked what the summary message was that we could share with the community, the response was that the District is in a very sound financial position. Results of operations for 2009 were very positive with $10M added to fund balance. The fund balance is critical to the operation of the District and the cash-flow of the District. We were pleased with the audit outcome.
Math Task Force: The Board approved the administrative response to the 13 recommendations listed in the MMSD Math Task Force Report. The recommendations focused on middle school math specialists; district-wide curricular consistency; achievement gap; assessment; teacher collaboration; parent/community communication; balanced math approach; addressing failing grades in algebra; and algebra in 8th grade. The Board also asked for regular updates on the progress of plan implementation. The Task Force Report is located on the District's web site.
Enrollment Data: The Board reviewed the enrollment data and projections for the District. One area that stood out was the overcrowding in some of the elementary schools in the La Follette attendance area. The Long Range Planning Committee is starting a series of meetings to study the overcrowding in this area and to develop recommendations for the Board on how to address this issue. It is anticipated that recommendations will be brought back to the Board in February. The Board will have the final say on how to deal with the overcrowding issues.
If you have any questions/comments, please let us know. board@madison.k12.wi.us
What are the implications of "tracking," or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report's key findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.
A new report out today makes the case that students do better in school when they are separated into groups based on their achievement.
Loveless found that de-tracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than do tracked schools--and that de-tracking is more popular in schools that serve disadvantaged students.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are all but certain to follow. Assuming these courses hold water, some youngsters will dive in majestically and then ascend gracefully to the surface, breathing easily. Others, however, will smack their bellies, sink to the bottom and/or come up gasping. Clearly, the architects of this policy have the best of intentions. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a "gatekeeper" to future educational and career success. One can scarcely fault policy makers for insisting that every youngster pass through that gate, lest too many find their futures constrained. It's also well known that placing students in remedial classes rarely ends up doing them a favor, especially in light of evi- dence that low-performing students may learn more in heterogeneous classrooms.
Yet common sense must ask whether all eighth graders are truly prepared to succeed in algebra class. That precise question was posed in a recent study by Brookings scholar Tom Loveless (The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education), who is also the author of the present study. He found that over a quarter of low-performing math students--those scoring in the bottom 10 percent on NAEP--were enrolled in advanced math courses in 2005. Since these "misplaced" students are ill-pre- pared for the curricular challenges that lie ahead, Loveless warned, pushing an "algebra for all" policy on them could further endanger their already-precarious chances of success.
When American education produced this situation by abolishing low-level tracks and courses, did people really believe that such seemingly simple--and well-meanin --changes in policy and school organization would magically transform struggling learners into middling or high-achieving ones? And were they oblivious to the effects that such alterations might have on youngsters who were al- ready high-performing?
Andreal Davis - Madison School District Instructional Resource Teacher for Cultural Relevance, via a kind reader's email:
Communalism is the concept that the duty to one's family and social group is more important that individual rights and privileges. On November 4, 2009 I personally experienced this concept through President Barack Obama's visit to James Coleman Wright Middle School.
The experience began with my 12 year old son, Ari Davis, being selected to lead the Pledge of Allegiance during the ceremony. Minutes after being informed of this special occasion, I was invited to attend the event as a member of the Madison Metropolitan School District staff. Thus, I attended the ceremony wearing two hats, one as a parent and the other as an educator.
On the day of this event, several of us anxiously awaited - for more than four hours - the arrival of President Obama. During this period I experienced first hand the spirit of communalism. A recap of my educational career began to unfold in the parking lot as I held conversations with past and current MMSD colleagues. As I entered Wright Middle School I had the opportunity to interact with students I had taught at Lincoln Elementary. This allowed me to see some products of my work by listening to their thought provoking reactions to the President's impending visit.
America has tried many strategies over the decades to reverse the slow, steady decline in its public schools. Few of these have delivered real results. The "classrooms without walls" of the 1970s, for example, were supposed to open students' minds to creativity and curiosity. It worked for some kids, but too many others ended up merely distracted. In the '90s, school vouchers--publicly financed scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools--were praised as a way to give families choices and pressure schools to improve. Vouchers helped a fraction of families across the country but didn't instigate any real change. The 2002 No Child Left Behind requirements were supposed to guarantee that every kid learned at least the "three R" basics. English and math scores for elementary students did inch up, but the scores of average American high schoolers on international science and math tests continued to sink. The United States currently ranks 17th in science and 24th in math, near the bottom of the developed world.
Now President Obama has launched the Race to the Top campaign to improve schools by holding students to higher standards, paying bonuses to teachers whose students excel, and replacing the worst schools with supposedly nimbler and more intimate charter schools. This time will be different, he insists, because he's only going to promote strategies proven to help students, and he's going to reward the winners of his reform race with prize money from a stimulus fund of at least $4 billion, a slice of the more than $100 billion he set aside for education in the stimulus bill.
Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rollingout a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We're glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy "improvements" have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.
The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook's notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today's privacy announcement to all Facebook users, "give you more control of your information." But do all of the changes really give Facebook users more control over their information? EFF took a close look at the changes to figure out which ones are for the better — and which ones are for the worse.
Our conclusion? These new "privacy" changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.
You can't say it more plainly than that so I reprinted the headline from this NY Times article.
Apparently NYC already uses test scores as a factor in teacher/principal bonus pay (yes, they have that too), for the grade a school gets (A-F) and for which schools are closed because of poor performance. A lot of this effort is to get Race to the Top money.
The article suggests that the Mayor (he just won his third term despite having said he would follow the law that he couldn't run again - he got that changed) may put forth his political capital to take on the teachers union.
And from the article of interest to us:
"The mayor also said the state should allow teacher layoffs based on performance rather than seniority, as they are now."
Nanny State Update: I don't get this. Why would instructions be issued to teach kids - to be required to teach kids - about taking out a mortgage and the risks of a home loan?.
Why would teachers need to be told to teach kids about money management? How much more of this stuff are these poor teachers going to be mandated to teach?
The state's Model Academic Standards for Personal Financial Literacy are extensive and detailed. A quick glance at the Table of Contents tells you DPI has it covered. Peek inside (Credit and Debt management, pp. 8 - 10) and you'll see tons of objectives and sub-objectives for 4th graders, 8th graders and 12th graders. Check it out. Yes, I think we're covered!
Basic knowledge of Math should be sufficient to help all of us understand loans that make sense, vs those that don't. I continue to be amazed at the financial pitches that apparently work: $89/month for a new Honda Civic (fine print: big down payment and a balloon payment after x years).
ducation reform advocates have been cheered by the election of Chris Christie as New Jersey's next governor. A key plank of his education plan is creating more high-quality public charter schools -- a goal shared with the administration of President Obama.
Since the first charter school law was passed in 1991, the movement has enjoyed bipartisan support at the federal and state levels. Now, in part because of the emphasis on charters in the administration's "Race to the Top" competition, we're seeing a firestorm of renewed interest in many states.
As Carlos Lejnieks, chairman of the a, rightly says, we need to move charters "from mediocre to good; from good to great; and from great to growth." The good news is that New Jersey has assets to build from and is already doing some things right.
From Ryan Hill and Steve Adubato in Newark to Gloria Bonilla-Santiago in Camden, some of the nation's leading charter leaders are in New Jersey. In terms of policy, there is no statewide "cap" on the number of charter schools that can be created; the New Jersey Department of Education has created a reasonably rigorous process for approving new charters while adding greater numbers of new schools in recent years; and the statewide public school-finance reforms enacted in 2008 helped establish a more level playing field for charters that had suffered huge disadvantages under the previous funding program.
Charter schools reached a new milestone this year. According to the Center for Education Reform, more than 5,000 charters are now operating in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Considering that the first charter didn't open until 1992, and that these innovative schools have faced outright hostility from teachers unions and the education bureaucracy, their growth is a rare gleam of hope for American public schools.
More than 1.5 million students now attend charters, an 11% increase from a year ago. That's only about 3% of all public school students, but the number has more than quadrupled in the past decade. And it would be much higher if the supply of charter schools was meeting the demand. As of June, an estimated 365,000 kids were on waiting lists.
Robust Advanced Placement programs are often seen as a seal of quality for high schools. And in its quest for excellence, Texas has seen an explosion of the classes that offer the promise and prestige of college credit.
But the latest data show Texas high school students fail more than half of the college-level exams, and their performance trails national averages.
Some say Texas failure rates are higher because more students from an increasingly diverse pool take AP classes here. But high failure rates from some of the Dallas area's elite campuses raise questions about whether our most advantaged high school students are prepared for college work.
I have argued that universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities. The full online model is not here yet but I see an increasing amount of evidence for the superstar model of teaching. At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research.
I do not think GMU is unique in this regard--my anecdotal evidence is that the market for professors is rewarding great teachers with higher wages and higher placements than in earlier years.
The online aspect, which enhances the market for superstars, is also growing. Here from a piece on online education in Fast Company are a few nuggets on for-profit colleges which have moved online more quickly than the non-profits.
The benefits of online schooling have always seemed obvious to me: A student can work at his or her own pace and desired time and will likely have a larger selection of courses from which to choose.
The chief drawback of online schooling was equally obvious to me: The teacher-student relationship, funneled through an Internet connection, would necessarily suffer. How could a teacher really get to know students when all of the interactions were via email and webcams?
That disadvantage was obvious to me until I mentioned it, in passing, to a friend who is an online teacher. Her experience was the just the opposite. She felt that she knew her students better in an online environment than she had in a bricks-and-mortar school.
I was intrigued enough that I tracked down five other online teachers at different grade levels, all of whom had taught in traditional schools. They all reported the same feelings.
Once they explained the reasons, it seemed not only plausible, but obvious.
It is far past the time for California to step up and reform its education system. As a state, our schools were once the fourth-highest in the nation in reading and math. Now, we now rank below 40. In science, our students were once proudly some of the highest in the nation and now they are now some of the lowest.
This is simply unacceptable.
We have to reform the way we educate our children and, thanks to the Obama administration, we have a chance to do just that.
Thanks to the Race to the Top funds - $4.35 billion worth of competitive grants - states have the opportunity to compete for these funds that are intended to "encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform." Essentially, the White House and Department of Education have issued a challenge to states - come up with a workable plan to fix your failing schools and they will reward you with funding.
Citing low Milwaukee Public Schools' scores on a new national assessment, Gov. Jim Doyle called for a special legislative session for Dec. 16 to give the Milwaukee mayor the power to appoint the school superintendent.
That's the same day lawmakers hope to pass a bill to toughen drunken driving laws.
Doyle for weeks has pushed for the change to help secure a share of $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top funds. But he faces strong opposition from some of his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature.
"I am calling a special session of the Legislature because we must act now to drive real change that improves students' performance, month after month and year after year," Doyle said in a statement. "The children at Milwaukee Public Schools are counting on the adults around them to prepare them for success."
But opponents of the plan said they will continue to fight the measure.
"It is disappointing that Gov. Doyle has decided to ignore the will of Milwaukee's citizens and continue his push for a mayoral takeover of Milwaukee Public Schools," Rep. Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement. "MPS needs serious reform, but the top-down approach for which he advocates lacks the level of community engagement and consideration that any proposal of this magnitude requires."
It would seem to hold all the appeal of listening to someone read the dictionary aloud.
But hundreds of people will pack into a room on the UW-Madison campus Saturday to attend a presentation on the properties of carbon dioxide, liquid nitrogen and zirconium.
In short, the choice activity in Madison on Saturday is a chemistry lecture.
If it sounds like a snooze, then you don't know Bassam Shakhashiri.
This is the 40th time the UW-Madison professor has held his annual Christmas show extravaganza, otherwise known as "Once upon a Christmas cheery, in the lab of Shakhashiri."
With a flair for showmanship, Shakhashiri is like a magician who wows audiences by using science, rather than sleight of hand or illusions. Beakers erupt with material, solutions turn psychedelic colors, chemicals explode thunderously - all to an audience oohing and ahhing as if they were watching Harry Houdini.
Most urban school districts failed to make significant progress in math achievement in the past two years, and had scores below the national average, according to a federal study.
The results, released Tuesday by the Department of Education, offer more ammunition to critics who question claims of academic progress in districts such as New York City. But federal and schools officials said that many of these districts had shown large gains since 2003, and didn't lose ground despite budget constraints.
Four of the 11 school districts the study has tracked since 2003 -- including Washington, D.C., which is in the throes of a turnaround effort -- bucked the trend and showed solid gains between 2007 and 2009.
Urban districts are central to federal efforts to improve U.S. education, especially among poor and minority students, who are disproportionately taught in underperforming schools. Congress is likely to look at the fresh data when it considers, as soon as next year, reauthorizing George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The law relies on state tests, but critics -- liberals and conservatives -- worry that states may be making the tests too easy.
Scores for most districts higher than in 2003, but few make gains since 2007
Representative samples of fourth- and eighth-grade public school students from 18 urban districts participated in the 2009 assessment. Eleven of the districts also participated in the 2007 assessment, and 10 participated in 2003. Between 1,800 and 4,300 fourth- and eighth-graders were assessed in each district.
In comparison to 2007, average mathematics scores for students in large cities increased in 2009 at both grades 4 and 8; however, only two participating districts at each grade showed gains.
Scores were higher in 2009 for Boston and the District of Columbia at grade 4, and for Austin and San Diego at grade 8.
No districts showed a decline in scores at either grade.
In comparison to 2003, scores for students in large cities were higher in 2009 at both grades 4 and 8.
Increases in scores were also seen across most urban districts that participated in both years, except in Charlotte at grade 4 and in Cleveland at grades 4 and 8, where there were no significant changes.
Childs Walker's article "Poor, minority students lose ground in college, study says" (Dec. 4) was quite chilling for anyone who has watched the demise of our public school system. The thinking seems to be that if minorities can't pass tests than the tests must be too difficult and should be made easier. That has become American education's mindset and has produced high school graduates who can't read, write, do basic math or think for themselves. It is much easier to dumb down education than to address the real problems of lack of parenting skills and inadequate teaching methods.
Of course America will be at a competitive disadvantage; while the rest of the world is raising educational standards, we are focused on making sure minority testing and graduate percentage rates are as high as non-minorities no matter how closing the gap is achieved.
New Jersey's laws governing charter schools received a "C" from a Washington, D.C. non-profit group that ranked the statutes governing charter schools across the nation.
The Center for Education Reform, which advocates for charter schools and school choice, found New Jersey's laws fell right in the middle -- 17th strongest -- among the 40 states and districts that allow charter schools.
Only three places received an "A": California, Minnesota and the District of Columbia. And only 13 of 40 states have strong laws that do not require revision, according to the report released today.
Last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study, which I requested, reaffirming these concerns, particularly in schools that serve our most disadvantaged students. As Congress undertakes reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) next year, NCLB should be overhauled significantly. That is why I am pushing for key reforms of the federal testing mandate, including supporting the development of higher quality tests and ensuring students and schools are measured by more than test scores.
In the coming weeks, I will reintroduce the Improving Student Testing Act, which would provide competitive grants to states and school districts to develop alternatives to multiple choice tests. These assessments measure more complex academic skills, can give a more detailed analysis of student achievement, and can also provide more immediate feedback to teachers and students than the current tests used in most states.
Models of academic longevity, Peter Walshe, Michael True and Tom Lee have a combined 114 years of teaching at Catholic colleges and universities. Having transitioned from full-time classroom toil, they are among the emeriti: seasoned and serene veterans buoyed by the satisfactions of the professorial life that they treasured through the decades.
Convivial and opinionated, part of the liberal wing of Catholic academia, they are the kind of old hands you would hunt down for reflections on the state of Catholic higher education. Going back awhile, I've had many conversations with each of the professors on their campuses: Walshe at the University of Notre Dame, True at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., and Lee at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.
For this essay, I asked each of the three to focus on the positives and negatives they came upon at their schools.
The Obama administration's Department of Education recently launched what I believe will become its most expensive, most lamentable, and most avoidable folly. Declaring that, "as a country, we all need to get into the turnaround business," Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the availability of $3.5 billion in School Improvement Grants.
Years of research have clearly demonstrated that efforts to fix our most persistently failing schools seldom work. Moreover, turnarounds in other fields and industries have the same distressing track record. (This Education Next article fully discusses this matter.)
If the secretary's declaration were merely rhetorical, it would only demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the sad history of turnarounds. But it's entirely more worrisome than that. During a speech at the 2009 National Charter Schools Conference, Duncan encouraged the nation's best charter school operators to move away from their magnificent core competency--starting new schools for disadvantaged students--and get into the turnaround business. If they unwisely take him up on the offer, the opportunity costs could be staggering.
And of course, there is the matter of money. At $3.5 billion, this grant program is mammoth, meaning we are about to spend an enormous sum of money on a line of work with a remarkable track record of failure. Exacerbating the problem, the final guidelines allow for tepid interventions (the "transformation" model) to qualify as a turnaround attempt. While districts could choose to pursue more radical activities, history teaches us that few will.
Parents at two largely Latino, bilingual schools - one on Milwaukee's south side and one in Waukesha - are waging battles to save their schools.
Although Kagel and White Rock elementary schools stand 18 miles apart in separate counties, the debates at both fit into the larger, national philosophical issues about bilingualism, small schools vs. large schools, economic pressures on school districts and changing demographics.
At Kagel, a neighborhood school in the heart of Milwaukee's Latino community, more than 200 parents filled the school's small gymnasium last month when word leaked out that Kagel was on the list of schools that Superintendent William Andrekopoulos identified for possible closure because of dropping enrollment or performance issues.
Parents reacted with signs that read: "Small school - Ideal scenario" and "Our children's education is important to us."
At the meeting, Andrekopoulos assured parents that Kagel, which is 76% Latino, won't be shut down. But because of low enrollment - 334 students - and increasing district costs, some changes might be in store, such as converting it into an early child education center, he said.
Zuleika Reza, a parent and member of the school's governance council, said parents don't want that.
"We want to make it clear that we want to keep it as a small school that's within walking distance for many families," she said.
After-school programs at De Anza Elementary in Baldwin Park keep students, faculty and even families focused on education.
The bell signaling the end of the school day at De Anza Elementary in Baldwin Park rang more than an hour ago. But hundreds of students are still at school, studying vocabulary, practicing math and completing homework under the supervision of teachers.
With the help of state grants, federal funds and teacher volunteers, nearly half of De Anza's students spend extra hours every week learning at school -- hours well beyond the traditional school day.
"Until six o'clock at night, you would think we're still in session," said Principal Christine Simmons. "Seeing the campus so alive like that, and seeing the parents and students so excited, just makes me and all the teachers want to work harder."
The result, according to the state Department of Education, is a dramatic improvement in student achievement.
I attended the Cleveland STEM Community Meeting on December 4 with my wife and 8th grade daughter.
First, the important parts.
My daughter is excited about the program. To her it looks like a good mix of the academic challenge of Garfield with the more personalized instruction (and project-based learning) of NOVA. She got most excited when she saw a list of the possible classes in the Global Health Academy.
My wife and I are much more confident about the probability that the program will actually be there and that it will be something like what has been advertised.
There was a pretty good crowd of people there - I'd say about forty to fifty (not counting staff).
The folks from Cleveland who were there are excited about the program and have a very clear picture of the idea - the project-based learning, the integration of technology, the alignment between classes, the extended school day and accelerated schedule, etc.
The STEM program looks real and, to us, it looks good. They still have some things to work out. The schedule is inspired, but needs some tinkering. They haven't figured out how to get the student:computer ratio to the promised 1:1. They are still missing a lot of the curricular elements - they haven't found the puzzle pieces but they know what they have to look like.
I wanted to write about why that couple that crashed the President's first state dinner should be strung up and publicly flogged for days on end. But editorial rejected it because they wanted to me write something about the LSAT.
So then I offered to write an analysis of why our failure to punish a couple who crash a President's state dinner in hopes of landing a Bravo reality show indicates that the post WWII American empire is dead, dead, dead. That was rejected by editorial on grounds that it was the same as the first story (which it kind of was, but still), and because they wanted something about the LSAT.
Instead, I've been "asked" to write a piece far more complicated, which will inevitably be rife with speculation and controversy. Thus, I wade into the sordid issue of averaging LSAT scores.
Once upon a time, law schools used the average of your LSAT scores in the admissions process, and none of us even bothered to ask why.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it would investigate whether some colleges are discriminating against women in an effort to generate a more gender-diverse student population. Reaction was mixed, with some saying it's about time that the "crisis with boys" in higher education is acknowledged and addressed, and others expressing some disbelief and ridicule that the gender wars have come to this.
But part of the overall response really stuck in my craw--the oft-repeated claim that we "just don't know" what's going on with boys. According to many, sources for the gender differential in higher education are a complete "mystery," a puzzle, a whodunit that we may be intentionally ignoring.
Yes, there are numerous potential explanations for the under-representation of men in higher education--and in particular the growing female advantage in terms of bachelor's degree completion. For example, it could be that boys and girls have differing amounts of the resources important for college success (e.g. levels of financial resources or parental education) or that the usual incentives for college-going (e.g. labor market returns) have differential effects by gender (why, laments the Wall Street Journal, don't boys "get" the importance of attending college?). It's also possible that changes in the labor force or marriage markets, gender discrimination, or societal expectations play a role--or that the reasons have to do with the growth of community colleges, changes in college affordability, or shifts in the available alternatives to college (e.g. the military).
After two false starts, the Graduate Record Exam, the graduate school entrance test, will be revamped and slightly lengthened in 2011 and graded on a new scale of 130 to 170.
The Educational Testing Service, which administers the G.R.E., described its plans Friday at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in San Francisco, calling the changes "the largest revisions" in the history of the test.
Although the exam will still include sections on verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing, each section is being revised. The new verbal section, for example, will eliminate questions on antonyms and analogies. On the quantitative section, the biggest change will be the addition of an online calculator. The writing section will still have two parts, one asking for a logical analysis and the other seeking an expression of the student's own views.
"The biggest difference is that the prompts the students will receive will be more focused, meaning that our human raters will know unambiguously that the answer was written in response to the question, not memorized," said David G. Payne, who heads the G.R.E. program for the testing service.
For security reasons, he said, new content would be introduced and the sequence of questions scrambled every two hours. The new test will be three and a half hours.
Terry Dade, the 33-year-old principal of Tyler Elementary in Southeast Washington, freely describes himself as a "data geek" who shares Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's educational creed: Digging relentlessly into student test scores, diagnosing weaknesses and tailoring teaching to address them can ultimately lift a school's academic performance.
Hired by Rhee as a first-time principal last year, Dade dug out a success story at Tyler, with double-digit boosts in reading and math proficiency. It's also left Dade with a challenge that has thwarted many other principals: what to do for a second act.
Studies across the country show that many low-performing schools falter after big one-year gains in test scores. Of the seven D.C. public schools that increased proficiency rates by 20 percentage points or more in both reading and math in 2008 -- Aiton, Hearst, Raymond and Thomas elementary, Winston Educational Campus, Mamie D. Lee and Sharpe Health Center -- only Thomas showed growth in 2009. Most of the schools that surged 20 points or more in a single category last year also had difficulty building on the increase this year.
Attached to this memorandum is detailed costing information relative to the implementation of four-year-old kindergarten. We have attempted to be as inclusive as possible in identifying the various costs involved in implementing this program.
Each of the identified options includes cost estimates involving all three program models that have previously been discussed. The first option includes the specific cost requests provided to us by representatives from the community providers. The remaining options include the same costing information for Model I programs (programs in district schools) but vary for Model II and III programs (programs in community-based early learning centers). These options vary in the following ways:
For District Option 1, we have used a 1:10 staffing ratio instead of a 1:8.5 staffing ratio that was submitted by representatives from the community providers.
For District Option 2, we have used a three-year phase-in for the reimbursement to local providers.
For District Option 3, we have used both a 1:10 ratio and a three-year phase-in for reimbursement to local providers.
For District Option 4, we have used both a 1:10 ratio and a two-year phase-in for the reimbursement to local providers.
The District options with a 1:10 ratio were created because this was the staffing ratio that was recommended by the 4K planning committee and is the ratio needed for local accreditation. All Modell costing(in District schools) is based on a 1:15 ratio with the understanding that additional special education and bilingual support to the classroom is provided. The District options employing a two- or three-year phase-in of the
We've all had that boring class that we just need to get over with, to get the grade and go. Then, we've had those classes that surprise us, the ones that interest us despite our prior indifference. For me, the biggest factor of the class, other than if it's at 8 a.m., is the professor.
A professor's own knowledge and interest is pretty evident in the way they handle the class. They're the ones who can make learning about a new subject fascinating or dull.
Recently, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan decried the quality of today's educators in a speech to Columbia University's Teachers College, and he questions their preparedness in teaching future generations. "By almost any standard," he said, "many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom."
If our future teachers aren't getting the knowledge they need to prepare for their careers, then what does that mean for their future classrooms? Would this "mediocre job" be passed down to those unwitting students of the 21st century? Obviously, times have changed. We're living in a world of fast and easy communication, which is exemplified in the classroom. Classrooms don't run the same way as they did a decade ago.
Teachers are using PowerPoints, podcasts, and the internet to transfer information. Classrooms are more internationally aware (or should be).
Finally tonight: overhauling the nation's schools.
A report today says, most states will apply for their share of federal stimulus money tied to education reform.
The NewsHour's special correspondent for education, John Merrow, offers some historical context on the latest reform efforts.
U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There we go. It's done.
JOHN MERROW: The stimulus bill the president signed in February included a new $4.3 billion fund for public schools.
BARACK OBAMA: This is one of the largest investments in education reform in American history. And rather than divvying it up and handing it out, we are letting states and school districts compete for it.
JOHN MERROW: This is where the money will be handed out, at the U.S. Department of Education. It sets the rules for what it's calling the Race to the Top.
Arne Duncan is the new secretary of education.
ARNE DUNCAN: Really, what I'm trying to do, can we make the Department of Education not the driver of compliance, not the driver of bureaucracy, but the engine of innovation?
It's lunchtime at the Ashongman School in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, and dozens of children in orange-and-brown uniforms file out to a serving table to pick up plates of jollof rice, a hearty dish with stewed chicken and tomatoes.
As the kids sit down, Jeffrey S. Raikes approaches them with the air of a waiter checking to see if his customers are enjoying their meal. "Do you like the rice?" he asks, as the kids stick their fingers into bowls to scoop up their meals in the dimly lit room. The kids nod, not entirely sure what to make of the stranger.
Raikes isn't there to gauge if the menu is a hit, nor can the chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation claim credit for the three-year-old Ghana School Feeding Program. Of the $2.8 billion the foundation doled out last year, not a penny was spent on putting food in the mouths of these children. Instead, Raikes wants to learn why much of the rice eaten by the program's participants comes from Thailand instead of from farms a few miles away. If Ghana's farmers can find buyers for their crops, Raikes argues, they will have an incentive to make their land more productive and give this West African nation a more secure food supply. "The real opportunity here is to create a stabilized market," says Raikes. "You can use the school feeding program to bootstrap those efforts."
Michigan lawmakers are in such a frenzy to qualify for up to $400 million in one-time money for schools from President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program that they're rushing through complex changes to the state's education structure in a matter of weeks.
Yet they can't agree on how to keep school districts from getting hit by cuts of roughly $300 to $600 per student that have administrators contemplating laying off teachers, closing schools and eliminating busing, among other cost-saving moves.
They could be debating the positives and negatives of a proposal suggested recently by state Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith, a Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, to trim some business tax exemptions and use the money to roll back a business tax surcharge and plug the $500 million hole in the state's education fund.
They could be looking for ways to restore after-school and preschool programs, both of which have been proven to help students learn and improve test scores, or the college scholarships that encouraged high school students to do better in school.
Michelle Lukacs grew up in Mequon and worked as a teacher in Milwaukee. Then she was a teacher and guidance counselor in Jefferson. She got a school principal's license through a program at Edgewood College in Madison.
She moved back to Milwaukee and decided to open a school as part of the publicly funded private school voucher program. She called it Atlas Preparatory Academy because she liked the image of Atlas holding the whole world up and because it was the name of a refrigeration company her husband owns.
On the first day of classes in September 2001, Atlas had 23 students in leased space in an old school building at 2911 S. 32nd St.
This September, Atlas had 814 students, a growth of 3,439% over eight years. It now uses three buildings on the south side and has grown, grade by grade, to be a full kindergarten through 12th-grade program.
Atlas' growth is explosive, even within the continually growing, nationally significant voucher program. Voucher enrollment over the same period has roughly doubled from 10,882 in September 2001 to 21,062 this fall.
The Atlas story underscores an interesting trend: The number of voucher schools in recent years has leveled off, and this year, fell significantly. But the total number of students using vouchers to attend private schools in the city has gone up, and a few schools have become particular powerhouses, at least when it comes to enrollment.
For me, the greatest national security crisis in the United States is the crisis in education. We are turning out new generations of Americans who are whizzes at video games and may be capable of tweeting 24 hours a day but are nowhere near ready to cope with the great challenges of the 21st century.
An American kid drops out of high school at an average rate of one every 26 seconds. In some large urban districts, only half of the students ever graduate. Of the kids who manage to get through high school, only about a third are ready to move on to a four-year college.
It's no secret that American youngsters are doing poorly in school at a time when intellectual achievement in an increasingly globalized world is more important than ever. International tests have shown American kids to be falling well behind their peers in many other industrialized countries, and that will only get worse if radical education reforms on a large scale are not put in place soon.
Consider the demographics. The ethnic groups with the worst outcomes in school are African-Americans and Hispanics. The achievement gaps between these groups and their white and Asian-American peers are already large in kindergarten and only grow as the school years pass. These are the youngsters least ready right now to travel the 21st-century road to a successful life.
A new report, billed as one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how low-income and minority students fare in college, shows a wide gap in graduation rates at public four-year colleges nationwide and "alarming" disparities in success at community colleges.
The analysis, released Thursday, found that about 45 percent of low-income and underrepresented minority students entering as freshmen in 1999 had received bachelor's degrees six years later at the colleges studied, compared with 57 percent of other students.
Fewer than one-third of all freshmen entering two-year institutions nationwide attained completion -- either through a certificate, an associate's degree or transfer to a four-year college -- within four years, according to the research. The success rate was lower, 24 percent, for underrepresented minorities, identified as blacks, Latinos and Native Americans; it was higher, 38 percent, for other students.
Only 7 percent of minority students who entered community colleges received bachelor's degrees within 10 years.
EVER since the cap on the number of children who could be awarded top grades in their GCSE exams was abolished in 1988, the proportion of pupils attaining these heights has relentlessly increased. This week that inexorable progress was revealed to be illusory. Three separate studies showed how Britain is failing its schoolchildren--and shortchanging the country in the process.
All rich countries rightly expect their young people to be literate and numerate by the time they leave school. Some aspire to loftier goals such as scientific prowess, fluency in a foreign language and a rough grasp of history. In a report released on December 1st, Reform, a think-tank, pointed out the poverty of Britain's ambitions for its children.
Students at 16 are required to take just three academic subjects--English, maths and science--and many study no others. Even if they leave school with vocational qualifications too, they are ill placed to better themselves. Employers consistently value the ability to think above skills that can be learned on the job, and universities that accept students with vocational qualifications do so only after admissions tutors have reassured themselves that the young person in front of them is no dullard. Allowing pupils to choose vocational courses over academic ones--indeed, encouraging it, as vocational qualifications are treated in published school-league tables as if they were worth twice as much as academic ones--does no favours to children from deprived backgrounds. Instead it segregates the workforce and impairs social mobility. Bad at any time, this is appalling now that globalisation has increased competition in the workplace.
60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use
via a kind reader's email: Sue Abplanalp, Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education, Lisa Wachtel, Executive Director, Teaching & Learning, Mary Jo Ziegler, Language Arts/Reading Coordinator, Teaching & Learning, Jennie Allen, Title I, Ellie Schneider, Reading Recovery Teacher Leader [2.6MB PDF]:
Background The Board of Education requested a thorough and neutral review of the Madison Metropolitan School District's (MMSD) Reading Recovery program, In response to the Board request, this packet contains a review of Reading Recovery and related research, Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Reading Recovery student data analysis, and a matrix summarizing three options for improving early literacy intervention. Below please find a summary of the comprehensive research contained in the Board of Education packet. It is our intent to provide the Board of Education with the research and data analysis in order to facilitate discussion and action toward improved effectiveness of early literacy instruction in MMSD.
Reading Recovery Program Description The Reading Recovery Program is an intensive literacy intervention program based on the work of Dr. Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970's, Reading Recovery is a short-term, intensive literacy intervention for the lowest performing first grade students. Reading Recovery serves two purposes, First, it accelerates the literacy learning of our most at-risk first graders, thus narrowing the achievement gap. Second, it identifies children who may need a long-term intervention, offering systematic observation and analysis to support recommendations for further action.
The Reading Recovery program consists of an approximately 20-week intervention period of one-to-one support from a highly trained Reading Recovery teacher. This Reading Recovery instruction is in addition to classroom literacy instruction delivered by the classroom teacher during the 90-minute literacy block. The program goal is to provide the lowest performing first grade students with effective reading and writing strategies allowing the child to perform within the average range of a typical first grade classroom after a successful intervention period. A successful intervention period allows the child to be "discontinued" from the Reading Recovery program and to function proficiently in regular classroom literacy instruction.
Reading Recovery Program Improvement Efforts The national Reading Recovery data reports the discontinued rate for first grade students at 60%. In 2008-09, the discontinued rate for MMSD students was 42% of the students who received Reading Recovery. The Madison Metropolitan School District has conducted extensive reviews of Reading Recovery every three to four years. In an effort to increase the discontinued rate of Reading Recovery students, MMSD worked to improve the program's success through three phases.
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.
Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It's true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 - bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.
Belmore's attitude is that the current program is working at these schools and that the percentage of advanced/proficient readers will eventually reach the districtwide success level. But what happens to the children who have reading problems now? The school district seems to be writing them off.
So why did the school district give the money back? Belmore provided a clue when she said that continuing to take part in the program would mean incrementally ceding control over how reading is taught in Madison's schools (Capital Times, Oct 16). In other words, Reading First is a push down the slippery slope toward federal control over public education.
Thanks to Jason Shepard for highlighting comments of UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg at the Dec. 13 Madison School Board meeting in his article, Not all good news on reading. Dr. Seidenberg asked important questions following the administrations presentation on the reading program. One question was whether the district should measure the effectiveness of its reading program by the percentages of third-graders scoring at proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT). He suggested that the scores may be improving because the tests arent that rigorous.
I have reflected on his comment and decided that he is correct.
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT---like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades--- measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the proficient and advanced levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence.
I'm glad Jason Shepard questions MMSD's public display of self-congratulation over third grade reading test scores. It isn't that MMSD ought not be proud of progress made as measured by fewer African American students testing at the basic and minimal levels. But there is still a sigificant gap between white students and students of color--a fact easily lost in the headlines. Balanced Literacy, the district's preferred approach to reading instruction, works well for most kids. Yet there are kids who would do a lot better in a program that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, like the one offered at Lapham and in some special education classrooms. Kids (arguably too many) are referred to special education because they have not learned to read with balanced literacy and are not lucky enough to land in the extraordinarily expensive Reading Recovery program that serves a very small number of students in one-on-on instruction. (I have witnessed Reading Recovery teachers reject children from their program because they would not receive the necessary support from home.)
Though the scripted lessons typical of most direct instruction programs are offensive to many teachers (and is one reason given that the district rejected the Reading First grant) the irony is that an elementary science program (Foss) that the district is now pushing is also scripted as is Reading Recovery and Everyday Math, all elementary curricula blessed by the district.
I wonder if we might close the achievement gap further if teachers in the district were encouraged to use an approach to reading that emphasizes explicit and systematic phonics instruction for those kids who need it. Maybe we'd have fewer kids in special education and more children of color scoring in the proficient and advanced levels of the third grade reading test.
Standards and common assessments were introduced 15 years ago. KIPP took the expectations expressed by state tests seriously and made numerous process improvements to the old model of school. At the middle school I visited Monday, 100% of the Kipsters had passed the state math test.
This KIPP school gives uniform weekly quizzes in every state tested subject and relentlessly evaluates the data from every classroom and student. The school only hires new teachers, trains them on data-driven instruction, and expects hard work (e.g., to go along with their bonus plan, a sign in the principal's office read, "New Incentive Plan: Work or Get Fired")
This is the best of the batch-print model. Kids sit obediently in rows in classrooms of 25 students. One teacher per subject per grade yields direct accountability for results. Their homegrown curriculum is mostly worksheets. Quizzes are paper based. Scores are tabulated on a spreadsheet. No fancy learning management system at work here--they just figure out what the state wants, teach it and test it. They are fantastic executors--a critical innovation in a sector that is commonly sloppy and uneven in delivery.
Piano notes drift up the stairs in a Beijing branch of the Liu Shih Kun Piano School. Perched near the East Glorious Gate of the Forbidden City, the school does a brisk business educating the children of the affluent. In a practice room downstairs, a little girl is flanked by two adults--her teacher and her mother, who watches the proceedings intently. Lessons cost about 150 yuan ($22) per hour, and upright pianos sell for more than 13,000 yuan, substantial sums even for upper or middle-class families.
Still, they come en masse with their children. "Almost every student is accompanied here by the parents," explains Ba Shan, the young woman manning the reception desk at the school founded by one of China's first famous pianists. "Almost all of them have pianos at home, too."
Between several established chains like Liu Shih Kun, thousands of individual schools and uncountable private teachers, there are still no firm figures on the actual number of music students in China. In an interview with the New York Times this year, Jindong Cai, a conductor and professor at Stanford University, estimated that there are 38 million students studying piano alone. A 2007 estimate put violin students at 10 million. And the trend is clearly upward.
Gov. Jack Markell's administration today announced planned changes in education policy designed to help Delaware compete for a $75 million federal education grant.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to award a portion of the $4 billion federal Race to the Top Fund early next year - and again in 2011 - to states willing to undertake changes in the way schools are run.
Markell wants to help Delaware's chances of receiving the grant by improving student readiness, ensuring teacher quality, effectively using student data and turning around the state's lowest-performing schools.
"This is as important as anything we could possibly do to advance our state," Markell said.
Duncan hasn't said how many states he expects to win a chunk of the money, but has indicated that only states that lead the way in education reform will have a chance. Based on its student population size, Delaware could receive up to $75 million.
To improve the quality of Delaware schools and better prepare Delaware students for college, work and life, the Governor and the Department of Education have created an education reform action plan that represents the input of more than 100 participants, including teachers, administrators, the business community, parents, the disabilities community, higher education leaders, and legislators over the course of several months.
"This action plan [78K PDF] focuses on four specific goals to help ensure that Delaware schools are world-class - improving student readiness, ensuring teacher quality, effectively using student data, and turning around persistently low-performing schools," said Delaware's Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery. "It is a plan that takes bold steps and was built from months of discussion from everyone who has a stake in the strength and success of our public schools."
The Secretary and the Governor will be attending community forums in local districts to discuss the plan in depth and how the plan aligns with efforts to compete with the federal Race to the Top competition for additional federal dollars to invest in public schools.
The http://www.bushfoundation.org/">Bush Foundation has committed up to $4.5 million to support the University of Minnesota as it restructures teacher preparation programs in the College of Education and Human Development.
Through ongoing collaboration with K-12 schools, the university's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative (TERI) will have a long-lasting, positive impact on the children of Minnesota, new teachers and programs within the college. Improved partnerships with K-12 districts are designed to benefit the university, district and prospective teachers.
Teachers prepared through TERI will strongly focus on student learning and have the ability to adapt to the needs of all learners. The university will diversify its teaching candidate pool and provide pathways into its teacher preparation programs for both exceptionally qualified undergraduate students and for career changers.
The first group of prospective teachers will enter the redesigned program during summer 2011.
The voucher subsidy scheme for non-profit kindergartens triggered an uproar when it was announced three years ago, amid fears that an exodus of students would force profit-making schools to close and claims of discrimination against middle-class families. But critics failed to reckon with parents who believe it is never too soon to imbue the work ethic. As we reported yesterday, the voucher scheme is subsidising a new class of preschoolers, aged from three to six, who spend the entire day in two separate kindergartens - one for profit and one not.
Their parents claim the vouchers for half the cost of a half day at a local non-profit kindergarten, and can also afford to enrol them in international classes at profit-making private kindergartens for the other half day. One father concerned argues that twice the time spent interacting with other children and teachers is better than half a day watching television. Moreover, these children are exposed at an early age to two languages - English and either Cantonese or Putonghua - in a school environment. Thus the obsession with grades now extends almost from the nursery door to young adulthood.
Have you ever given up working on a math problem because you couldn't figure out the next step? Wolfram|Alpha can guide you step by step through the process of solving many mathematical problems, from solving a simple quadratic equation to taking the integral of a complex function.
When trying to find the roots of 3x2+x-7=4x, Wolfram|Alpha can break down the steps for you if you click the "Show steps" button in the Result pod.
late start today, but well worth the wait: we have tantalizing tidbits of student writing from the high schools, for your reading pleasure.
Thanks, Judy Levy, communications coordinator for the South Orange Maplewood school district, for sending out three choice pieces from Columbia High School's student newspaper, The Columbian (click on the "more" button at the end of each excerpt for the full piece). And congratulations again to Millburn High School's literary magazine, Word, for its Gold Medal in the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. We're including an excerpt from the magazine as well.
Enjoy.
Push for Perfection: Has the pressure to be the ideal applicant gone too far?
by Olivia Karten, Columbia High School Senior, The Columbian Co-Editor in Chief
She called on lawmakers to approve by the end of December legislation to give the state more power to intervene in academically failing school districts, increase the number of "high quality" charter schools, merit pay for teachers and alternative certification for teachers without education degrees.
Those changes are among the criteria the federal government will use to award $4.3 billion in grants to states to improve schools academically.
Earlier today, the Senate Education Committee approved legislation that would create more charter schools, enable state takeover of failing schools and allow alternative certification of teachers.
The House is expected to consider similar legislation.
During a recent City Council committee hearing, charter-school operators from across the city described their efforts to provide high-quality, safe, accessible educational options for Philadelphia families. Many had been waiting for years to get approval to expand, even as they accommodated students without reimbursement by the school district and kept waiting lists in the hundreds. Others talked about being held to higher standards than district-run schools.
During the same hearing, Philadelphia schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman spoke of the district's support for charter schools. It's time for the School Reform Commission to back up this assertion with clear action.
As the SRC considers amending its charter- school policy to significantly limit charter schools' ability to expand their enrollment or change their grade configurations, it should demonstrate genuine support for charter schools in several ways. First, it should do away with the district's proposal to restrict charter school expansion to once or twice every five years, and even then only if they "demonstrate [a] unique or innovative idea that the district is not currently providing."
The Nov. 22 Sunday Register editorial advocates tying teacher evaluation to test scores. Such action would intensify the role of high-stakes tests in education reform. The editorial seems very much in tune with the Race to the Top policy of the Obama administration, and cites U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in support.
In contrast, the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Academy of Science sent a very strongly worded 13-page letter last month to Duncan citing concerns about current Race to the Top policies, with particular reference to the use of test scores. The letter specifically cites student-growth models used to evaluate teachers and principals as a practice not ready for implementation.
Anyone who has ever had to go to Saturday School knows the grind: Arrive at 9 in the morning, spend three hours sitting at a table looking as if you're doing something productive, take the usual 15-minute break and, of course, scoff at the random troublemaker who tries to set the clock ahead an hour so everyone can leave early.
I'm all too familiar with this routine. During my 17th hour of my sixth session in Room 201 at Las Lomas High School on a Saturday morning, a thought struck me: How is this type of punishment possibly going to help me not disrupt class and not get more tardies in the future? Obviously, this method is not completely working for me because I've had a total of six Saturday Schools in my two years at Las Lomas.
Maybe Saturday School is a wake-up call to some impolite students, but it's not enough. Fear doesn't seem to solve the problem. Acknowledges Associate Principal Mark Uhrenholt, "As the year goes on, there will be more repeat offenders."
This update will address some of the concerns that have been raised since the beginning of the year as well as review many of the major initiatives, events and programs at West during the 2009-10 school year.
District Concerns
High school pupil/teacher ratios for allocation purposes have remained static or been reduced. All four high schools struggle with allocation issues and every school but Lafollette has classes above 30.
In a system where we are working with a finite allocation and have to respond to a set number of required courses first, electives may have to be capped so that required courses can be staffed. As a result we guarantee that all students will have access to the required courses needed to graduate within their four-year high school career.
West High School Concerns
The first issue I would like to address is the misinformation reported to the West High School Community regarding our enrollment numbers here at West. I would like to clarify what our enrollment numbers are, and then explain how that mistake was made. The second issue involves our scheduling practices. Concerns related to scheduling were raised by numerous students and parents this Fall, and there were questions and concerns at grade level meetings as well.
I take full responsibility for the manner and content of the information that was shared with the West community regarding enrollment numbers this Fall. This was a human error, not a computer error. Infinite Campus has the ability to generate enrollment numbers in two ways. One screen calculates and displays all students linked to West, including those in alternative programs. For example, a student attending Shabazz is still listed on that screen as a West Student. A second screen does not include all students linked to West; instead, only students physically attending West, and serviced through our site based allocation. Simply put, I relied on information from the incorrect screen generated on Infinite Campus. I apologize for the frustration this mistake regarding enrollment numbers caused.
Each year we closely plan our scheduling procedures and attempt to implement a process that is equally efficient and effective. This Fall particularly, we have heard concerns from a number of students and parents; primarily dissatisfaction with the availability of certain course offerings. Here are some of the challenges and issues related to scheduling,
This is a music video parody of Eminem's award-winning song "Lose Yourself." Instead of a depressed rapper, we have a troubled math student who tries to find his way into the math scene by engaging in tough algebra tests, breakdance battles, and nail-biting underground math competitions.
This project was started by East High's math department; it was written by Daniel Torres. After a long recording session, four shoots, and countless hours editing, this is the end result.
I understand that the genesis of it is that last year Alan Harris told the different departments at East that they should have a theme song or something. This started out as the math department's theme song (written by a teacher, based on an Eminem song) and then Jackson Eagan, an East senior, decided to produce a video for it, starring another East math teacher.
Madison's achievement gap -- driven in large part by how well white students perform on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam -- is significant compared to other urban districts in the state with high minority populations. White students here perform significantly better on the annual tests than students in Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Beloit and scores for Madison's black students are somewhat better than in Milwaukee or Racine. But black students' scores in Madison are lower than Kenosha's and, among younger students, lower than Beloit's, too.
The point spread between the scores of Madison's white and black sophomore students on the WKCE's 2008 math test was a whopping 50 points: 80 percent of the white students taking the test scored in the advanced and proficient categories while just 30 percent of the black students scored in those categories. It's a better performance than in Milwaukee, where just 19 percent of black students scored in the advanced and proficient categories, or Racine, where 23 percent did, but it lags behind Kenosha's 38 percent. None of the scores are worth celebrating.
Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Education Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a nationally known expert whose work has often explored issues related to the achievement gap. He says racism, overt or inadvertent, may make school feel like a hostile environment for black students, and that it needs to be recognized as a potential factor in the achievement gap.
"It would be naive to say it doesn't exist, and that it's not a problem for a certain number of students," Gamoran says. He cites disproportionate disciplinary actions and high numbers of black students referred to special education, as indicators of potential unequal treatment by race.
Green, who attended Madison's public schools, says when black students are treated unfairly it's a powerful disincentive to become engaged, and that contributes to the achievement gap.
"There's plenty of unequal treatment that happens at school," says Green who, while in high school at La Follette, wrote a weekly, award-winning column about the achievement gap for the Simpson Street Free Press that helped her land a trip to the White House and a meeting with Laura Bush.
"From the earliest grades, I saw African-American males especially get sent out of the classroom for the very same thing that gets a white student a little slap on the wrist from some teachers," she says. "It's definitely a problem."
It manifests itself in students who check out, she says. "It's easy to live only in the present, think that you've got better things to do than worry about school. I mean, it's awfully easy to decide there's nothing more important than hanging out with your friends."
But Green advocates a doctrine of personal responsibility. She encourages fellow minority students to focus on academic ambitions, starting with good attendance in class and following through with homework. She also counsels students to take challenging courses and find a strong peer group.
"The bottom line, though, is that no one's going to get you where you're going except you," she says
"Is this level of recklessness something a citizen should even have to contemplate?" asked Lubar, the founder and chairman of Milwaukee investment firm Lubar & Co. In an April 2008 speech, Lubar said Milwaukee County government was such a mess it wouldn't work even "if Jesus was the county executive and Moses chaired the board of supervisors."
The current system favors elected officials, public employees and unions, he said Tuesday.
"There are a lot of reasons why the unions and others who want power and want control are going to fight this," Lubar said. He said change would be difficult, but insisted that a radical overhaul of county government was possible. He called for the election of a governor and legislators who support the overhaul as the best way to bring about the change.
Lubar also endorsed mayoral control of Milwaukee Public Schools, saying he supported the plan advocated by Barrett and Gov. Jim Doyle to give the Milwaukee mayor the power to appoint the MPS superintendent.
Marshall is among a team of educators, scholars and school administrators collaborating to develop a national K-12 standard for English-language arts and mathematics.
"The reason for the initiative is that we have 50 states and 50 sets of standards, which means that a student in Mississippi isn't necessarily learning the same kind of things as students in Georgia," Marshall said.
Marshall said students in each state are learning on different levels largely because of notions of equality, access and mobility.
The set of standards provides a better understanding of what is expected of both teachers and students. Though curriculums will not be regulated, there will be a criteria for what needs to be taught.
"The standards are more statements of what students should know and be able to do, not how they are going to learn," Marshall said.
To succeed in this new global age, our students need a high level of proficiency in the English Language Arts. The ability of schools to develop such proficiency in students requires the kind of fewer, clearer and higher common core ELA standards that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is constructing. Moreover, benchmarking these standards to exemplary ELA standards from other countries appropriately sets expectations for student performance at a world-class level.
As the comment period ends, we would like to urge that the final common core ELA standards ensure that our students learn not just from the world but about the world. Internationally benchmarked standards will ensure that U.S. students are globally comparable, but not globally competent or globally competitive. For the latter, common core ELA standards must explicitly call out the knowledge and skills that enable students to effectively read, write, listen and speak within the global context for which they will be prepared, or be passed by, in the 21st century. English language arts offers students the chance to deepen their insight into other cultures, effectively gather and weigh information from across the world, and learn how to create and communicate knowledge for multiple purposes and audiences. To support students' development of the English language skills required in a global economic and civic environment, we urge the English Language Arts Work Group to consider integrating within the common core ELA standards the following essential skills.
My sense is, at the end of the day, these initiatives will simply increase power at the school administrative level while substantially reducing local school board governance. I understand why these things are happening, but have great doubts that our exploding federalism will address curricular issues in a substantive manner. I continue to believe that local, diffused governance via charters and other models presents a far better model than a monolith.
The number of Montgomery County students who took and passed Advanced Placement exams last spring grew by the largest margin since 2002, an increase fueled by the number of black and Hispanic students who took the test, school system officials said Tuesday morning.
In 2009, Montgomery students took 28,575 of the college-level exams, which are often used as a measure of a curriculum's difficulty and students' readiness for college. Students took 2,654 more tests than they did in 2008, the largest increase in seven years. Montgomery, the largest school system in Maryland, emphasizes the tests as a pathway to college, and Superintendent Jerry D. Weast hailed Tuesday's news.
"Montgomery County is already a state and national leader when it comes to AP, so a 10 percent increase in one year is a very significant jump," Weast said in a statement. "We have worked hard over the past several years to make AP available to more students and those efforts are paying strong dividends."
All over the world, in poor and rich countries alike, families take their children out of school in order to contribute to the livelihood of the family. They're not opposed to education, but the family needs the extra hands that the child can provide in order to make ends meet. There are many educational innovations that are aimed at improving the ability of the child, once educated, to earn a decent income. But nobody has focused on the issue of replacing or improving the family's income while they send their kids to school.
By contrast, the innovations that have been developed by the Uganda Rural Development and Training program and employed at the URDT Girls' School are special in that they increase the family income, not years later, but while the child is still in school. On average, the incomes of families whose children are enrolled at the URDT Girls School increase by 20% while their daughters are still in school.
Think about that for a minute. What that does is eliminate the need to have the girls drop out of school in order to contribute to the family's income. Imagine the implications for the rest of the world if all families benefited by keeping their children in school rather than by having them drop out to go to work.
IN THE long list of problems that plague American education, one is primary: what should students learn? For decades, however, this question has baffled people. In an education system run by the 50 states, success is in the eye of the beholder. Mississippi has different expectations for pupils than Massachusetts does. America as a whole has fallen behind. In a ranking of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialised countries in 2006, American teenagers came a dismal 21st in science and 25th in maths.
Now there is a new drive to set national standards. Arne Duncan, the education secretary, is offering more than $4 billion in total to states that pursue certain reforms--in particular, adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to compete in a global economy. This gives urgency to an effort already under way: the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) are in the midst of drafting common standards.
Monday afternoon, I had the opportunity to respond to Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents, and David Steiner, the New York State Commissioner of Education, as they talked about the future of P-16 education in New York State at the Phyllis L. Kossoff Policy Lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University. I wasn't sure what they'd say, so prepared some remarks responding to the proposals regarding teacher education in New York State that the Commissioner presented to the Board of Regents a few weeks ago. For the handful of readers who might be interested, here's what I wrote. (Due to time constraints, I didn't say all of this at the event.) Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner were quite willing to hear and engage with the critiques that my colleague Lin Goodwin and I offered, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with them.
It's no surprise that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents have taken up the cause of ensuring an equitable distribution of highly-qualified teachers across New York State. The key justification for such a goal is the fact that the K-12 education system is shortchanging our children. Although some students are highly successful, many more are not, and the problems are concentrated in urban school systems serving large numbers of poor children of color.
If that's the problem, is improving the education of teachers the solution? It's certainly part of the solution, given what we know about the centrality of teaching to student learning. But it's by no means the entire solution, as a great many other forces shape student outcomes. For example, a great teacher can't compensate for a child coming to school hungry, and great teaching of an out-of-date curriculum only results in great mastery of out-of-date knowledge. I trust that Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner are not seduced by claims that the single most important determinant of a child's achievement is the quality of his or her teachers, because that's simply not true. Family background continues to be the dominant factor. But the quality of teachers is, at least in theory, something that is manipulable via education policy initiatives, and it's a lot more tractable than addressing the fact that one in five children under the age of 18 in New York State live below the poverty line.
Despite lagging state budgets, 2010 will be a year of great progress in American education. Here's the 10 biggest developments of the year ahead:
Race to the Top awards will be made in two phases to about 18 states and will set the standard for excellence in state policy. About 30 states will make significant policy changes in preparation for application or after being rejected.
Common Core will be adopted by almost everyone except the Republic of Texas and will lay the groundwork for a new generation of content and assessment
While not likely to pass in 2010, a framework for ESEA (that looks a lot like RttT) will emerge with an improved accountability and student support system
Many fine people, including President Obama, are trying to make public schools better, but I don't see much progress. Cities like New York, reporting impressive achievement gains, seem to have trouble with their data. The results from great charter schools are neutralized by the results from bad ones. New ideas are everywhere, but most are bloodless, hard to understand, difficult to visualize.
Here is one idea that is starkly different: Mr. President, you have to be the Grim Reaper, the Terminator. Get out there and start closing schools that don't work. I know a way you can do it that will win applause from everybody.
The trick here is that I do NOT want you to close regular public schools. There are plenty of them that are doing a terrible job -- too many, actually, for even a president to tackle. As a constitutional scholar, you know you don't have the power to shut them down anyway. That's the job of the states and cities.
But there is now this peculiar kind of public school called a charter school. It uses tax dollars, but is independent of school district rules. There are only 5,000 of them in the country, compared to more than 90,000 regular public schools.
The beautiful part of my plan is that you have been a huge charter school supporter. In your signature speech on school reform, delivered March 10 in Washington, you celebrated charters that gave creative educators "broad leeway to innovate." But you also said "any expansion of charter schools must not result in the spread of mediocrity, but in the advancement of excellence." To do that, you said, we should "close charter schools that aren't working."
Let's rejoice: French teachers embrace the internet. Well, calm down. I'm not saying they embrace it the way I would like them to. This week saw two technological breakthroughs at my son's Parisian high-school. The first one is a decision-support tool on the school's website: it helps parents decide whether or not to send their kids to school when a protest blocks the gates, something that happens several times a year. Usually, my son whips up his cell phone at 7:30 in the morning : "Hey, dad, this just in: a text-message... gates are jammed by a barricade of trash bins (the kids' touching expression of solidarity to last week's teacher union action), I can go back to sleep". Now, I'll be able to fact-check the SMS alert on the web. (No webcam, though, I'll have to rely on teachers' good faith).
The second breakthrough happens as I immerse myself in the Life Science course for the same text-message freak, Abercrombie-clad kid who happens to be my offspring. Then, an epiphany. His science professor is an internet fan. Don't get me wrong, here. As 90% of the 1.3m members of L'éducation Nationale (the world's biggest employer after the erstwhile Red Army or, worse, today's Wal-Mart), I'm sure the lady loathes the internet. You see: the net flaunts apalling attributes of foreign technology, it is the vector of free market ideology. Sorry, Larry and Sergei. Your Google is definitely evil, down here.
While channel surfing on Thanksgiving morning, I found a school board association meeting where a famous prof was railing on standards and testing with lots of applause from the audience (in a state contemplating delaying college-ready math and science standards until 2015). I agreed with many of his assertions like "America is still best at encouraging differences and entrepreneurship" and "we want to teach everything." He went to deride standards, testing and a system where everything was "reduced to a single number." Since lots of my friends are in his camp and want to pitch No Child Left Behind and add more services, it reminded me of why we have NCLB and what the new version should look like.
The primary reason we have a federal law like NCLB is that school boards (and state boards) allowed generations of chronic failure. They cut bad employment deals and asked for more money when things didn't go well. Teachers that could went to the suburbs. Most low income and minority kids were getting left behind. Anyone committed to equity could see things had to change.
NCLB reflected a consensus that 1) measurement and transparency would help us understand the problem, 2) that a basic template for school accountability would ensure that things would get better for underserved students, and 3) the federal government should play a bigger role in ensuring equity and excellence.
Five mornings a week, Bruce Kravets, 66, puts on a coat and tie, straps on his helmet and bikes to work at Palms Middle School on L.A.'s Westside, where he teaches math. For free.
Last June, after 42 years of teaching, Kravets retired. He'd put so much money into his retirement fund over the decades, his monthly compensation if he stepped down would be greater than his regular pay. But that didn't mean he was ready to abandon teaching. His plan was to stay on and teach for no salary, because he couldn't think of anything more fun or rewarding than teaching algebra, geometry, logic and stage craft.
A no-brainer, right? Kravets is, by all accounts, a truly gifted teacher, and in a district with a budget crisis, here was a guy who said, "Keep your money, I'll do it gratis."
Ahhh, but this is LAUSD, and for months after he announced his plan, it was looking as if Kravets would be told thanks, but no thanks. At one point over the summer, I was told by a Los Angeles Unified administrator that Palms would lose funding if Kravets taught class, because the daily attendance of his students wouldn't be counted if he was an unpaid teacher.
First, it was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Later it became No Child Left Behind in 2002.
But with the Obama administration now in the White House, talk of a new rewrite of the law has already begun. Education Secretary Arne Duncan addressed the issue publicly in September, calling for changes to the landmark law during a speech to education leaders.
Just don't expect to call the next version No Child Left Behind.
"We're going to change the name of the bill," said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman of the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. "That was the previous administration's name for it. That was their bill, not ours."
Though nothing definitive has been announced, the department is already in discussions about re-authorizing the law in a different form, Hamilton said. Duncan has spent much of his tenure so far traveling the country to gather input, he added.
Minnesota's charter school movement, which sparked a national rethinking of public schooling nearly two decades ago, has been infected by an out-of-control financing system fueled by junk bonds, insider fees and lax oversight.
State law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but consultants have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to use millions of dollars in public money to build schools even though the properties remain in the hands of private nonprofit corporations.
The key to making it all work is the state's lease aid program, which was created 11 years ago to help spur competition in public education by offering rental assistance to groups promoting alternatives to district schools. In the beginning, many charters were located in dumpy strip malls and received no real-estate grants.
igh-stakes testing is a bullet train barreling through education reform; you're either on the train, on the sidelines, or waving your hands in frantic protest, only to be run over.
Last week's education speech by emboldened New York City Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg (who just dropped nine-figures of his own cash on his re-election bid) is depressing news to people on the ground in schools. Conducting the Testing Express, Bloomberg announced:
"As [Secretary of Education] Arne [Duncan] had said a number of times, 'A state can't enter Race to the Top if it prohibits schools from using student achievement data to evaluate teachers and that's why California just repealed its prohibition on doing so.'
Anthony Bolton, veteran star stock-picker at Fidelity International, is moving to Hong Kong to set up a China fund. He is following Michael Geoghegan, HSBC's chief executive, who has already announced he is moving from London to Hong Kong. "The centre of gravity is clearly shifting," Mr Bolton says.
It certainly looks that way, although it is worth recalling that it was not that long ago that Japan was tipped to be the new number one. Economies have their ups and downs - look at Dubai.
What we can forecast with some confidence is that English will remain the world's leading language for as long as anyone reading these words is alive. Economies can tip into crisis, fund managers can switch their investments at the click of a button and executives can relocate to the other side of the world, but it takes a lot more to topple the global language.
If Mandarin - or Spanish, or Arabic - is to replace English as the world's lingua franca, children in São Paulo, St Petersburg and Auckland had better start learning it now. Forget all those advertisements promising you can learn a language in three months. You can't. You may be able to summon up a few phrases. Perhaps you could engage a taxi driver in a minute of conversation before you seize up.
A story on National Public Radio's Web site about MySpace and Facebook recently quoted students from the Urban School of San Francisco.
I teach at Urban, and what stung me was its description as "an elite private school." As a journalist and teacher, this kind of thing gets under my skin.
With tuition at $30,800 a year, it's inevitable that Urban will be stereotyped as a prep school for smarties who exist in a parallel universe of privilege. But as someone who has spent several years teaching in public schools, I also know that California's per-pupil spending rate of $7,571 a year - watch out, Mississippi, we're racing you to the bottom - doesn't provide even the basics, let alone enough for a truly decent education. My hometown of Milwaukee spends twice as much, and still only 46 percent of high school students graduate. The fact is that we could and probably should be spending four times as much on public education as we do now.
At Urban, I'm rarely impressed by excess, just by thoughtful teaching, the resources to support it and kids who work so hard that I sometimes have to tell them to slow down. But stereotypes persist. When I got my job at Urban, a friend who works at a community college promptly checked my delight. "Isn't that the fancy private school in the Haight?" she asked. "How nice for you."
Reading and math are two of the three "basics" of education, writing being the third. Those not proficient in these areas will be left behind in a society where there is a rapidly dwindling demand for "unskilled labor."
That's why a recent study by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance is so encouraging. The group tracked test results of Wisconsin students who took a statewide exam as third-graders in the 2005-06 school year, and then charted that class as they were tested again as sixth-graders last school year.
The good news is that students at 52 percent of Wisconsin schools improved their proficiency ratings in both reading and math. Eau Claire, Altoona, Chippewa Falls and Menomonie were among the schools whose students improved in both areas as they progressed from third to sixth grade. Other area schools' improvements were almost off the charts: Augusta students' scores improved by 24.4 points in reading and 17.5 in math. Colfax, Cornell, Bruce and Somerset in our area also improved by double digits in both subjects.
Critics of standardized tests sometimes warn against taking too much from the results because they say education is about more than memorizing information. But reading and math are pretty straightforward. Either you can read and comprehend information, or you can't. And either you have mastered the building blocks of math and can solve problems successfully, or you can't. Any "teaching to the test" in reading and math can only be a good thing.
They're not the students strolling across the bucolic liberal arts campuses where their grandfathers played football. They are first-generation college students--children of immigrants and blue-collar workers--who know that their hopes for success hinge on a degree.
But college is expensive, unfamiliar, and intimidating. Inexperienced students expect tough classes and demanding, remote faculty. They may not know what an assignment means, what a score indicates, or that a single grade is not a definitive measure of ability. And they certainly don't feel entitled to be there. They do not presume success, and if they have a problem, they don't expect to receive help or even a second chance.
Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of interviews and observations at community colleges. She shows how students and their instructors misunderstand and ultimately fail one another, despite good intentions. Most memorably, she describes how easily students can feel defeated--by their real-world responsibilities and by the demands of college--and come to conclude that they just don't belong there after all.
Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, The College Fear Factor reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students' success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.
As President Obama pushes for more charter schools, the education world craves a report card on an experiment nearly two decades old. How are these independent public schools doing? The safest and perhaps most accurate reply -- it depends -- leaves many unsatisfied.
Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, reported in June that most charter schools deliver academic results that are worse or no better than student accomplishments in regular public schools. She relied on test data from 15 states (not including Maryland or Virginia) and the District.
When Liz Fitzgerald realized her son and daughter were forced to read books in math class while the other children caught up, she had them moved into gifted classes at their suburban elementary school.
Just 100 miles down the road in Taliaferro County, that wouldn't have been an option. All the gifted classes were canceled because of budget cuts.
Such disparities exist in every state, according to a new report by the National Association for Gifted Children that blames low federal funding and a focus on low-performing students.
The report, "State of the States in Gifted Education," hits at a basic element of the federal government's focus on education: Most of its money and effort goes into helping low-performing, poor and minority students achieve basic proficiency. It largely ignores the idea of helping gifted kids reach their highest potential, leaving those tasks to states and local school districts.
The masters of education With the Gates Foundation grant in hand, Memphis City Schools will funnel incentives to develop the best and brightest teachers and seed the system with role models
Kimberly Hamilton arrives and leaves work in the dark so often, custodians at Winchester Elementary School are on alert not to lock her in or out.
"If I leave at 5 o'clock, someone's putting a hand to my forehead to see if I have a fever," she says, laughing at the absurdity, but serious about the hours it takes to move children from barely proficient to mastery.
She teaches her third-graders to get along with others, be good citizens, live in a violent society and dream for the future.
The $90 million grant the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded this month to Memphis City Schools to improve the effectiveness of its teachers offers Hamilton the biggest one-time raise she could ever hope for in public education, going from the $49,000 she earned last year to the $75,000 base pay proposed for the district's most talented teachers.
Suzanne Tecza had spent a year redesigning the library at Middle School 126 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, including colorful new furniture and elaborate murals of leafy trees. So when her principal decided this year to give the space to the charter high schools that share the building, Ms. Tecza was furious.
"It's not fair to our students," she said of the decision, which gives the charter students access to the room for most of the day. "It's depriving them of a fully functioning library, something they deserve."
In Red Hook, Brooklyn, teachers at Public School 15 said they avoid walking their students past rooms being used by the PAVE Academy Charter School, fearing that they will envy those students for their sparkling-clean classrooms and computers. On the Lower East Side, the Girls Preparatory Charter School was forced to turn away 50 students it had hoped to accept because it was unable to find more room in the Public School 188 building.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made charter schools one of his third-term priorities, and that means that in New York, battles and resentment over space -- already a way of life -- will become even more common. He and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have allowed nearly two-thirds of the city's 99 charter schools to move into public school buildings, officials expect two dozen charter schools to open next fall, and the mayor has said he will push the Legislature to allow him to add 100 more in the next four years.
Bill Clinton may have invented triangulation - the art of finding a "third way" out of a policy dilemma - but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is practicing it to make desperately needed improvements in K-12 education. Unfortunately, his promotion of value-added education through "Race to the Top" grants to states could be thrown under the bus by powerful teachers' unions that view reforms more for how they affect pay and job security than whether they improve student learning.
The traditional view of education holds that it is more process than product. Educators design a process, hire teachers and administrators to run it, put students through it and consider it a success. The focus is on the inputs - how much can we spend, what curriculum shall we use, what class size is best - with very little on measuring outputs, whether students actually learn. The popular surveys of America's best schools and colleges reinforce this, measuring resources and reputation, not results. As they say, Harvard University has good graduates because it admits strong applicants, not necessarily because of what happens in the educational process.
In the last decade, the federal No Child Left Behind program has ushered in a new era of testing and accountability, seeking to shift the focus to outcomes. But this more businesslike approach does not always fit a people-centered field such as education. Some students test well, and others do not. Some schools serve a disproportionately high number of students who are not well prepared. Even in good schools, a system driven by testing and accountability incentivizes teaching to the test, neglecting other important and interesting ways to engage and educate students. As a result, policymakers and educators have been ambivalent, at best, about the No Child Left Behind regime.
Tristesse Jones will probably never drive a tractor or guide a combine through rows of soybeans at harvest time.
There isn't a farm within miles of where she grew up on Chicago's west side, but she's set to graduate with a bachelor's degree in crop sciences from the University of Illinois' agriculture school next spring.
"People ask me what is my major, and they say 'What is that? So you want to grow plants?' " Jones said.
She is one of a growing number of students being drawn to ag schools around the country not by ties to a farm but by science, the job prospects for those who are good at it and, for some, an interest in the environment.
Enrollment in bachelor's degree programs in agriculture across the country grew by 21.8 percent from 2005 to 2008, from about 58,300 students to nearly 71,000, according to surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the numbers are likely higher - not all schools respond to the surveys.
With New Jersey high schools already facing a new mandate to teach students financial literacy, at least six school districts will be able to participate in a pilot program that establishes a class on the topic for seniors.
The state Department of Education in June added economics and financial literacy instruction to the state's high school graduation requirements.
At the same time, a bill working its way through the Legislature aimed to create a financial literacy pilot program, establishing a course on the subject in six districts. Those schools would receive advice and support from the state in establishing those classes.
Gov. Corzine signed the pilot-program bill on Nov. 20. The program, which will set up courses for high school seniors, will cover topics such as budgeting, savings and investment, and credit-card debt.
"So many young New Jerseyans find out all too late that living in a credit-card culture carries a price," said Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester), one of the law's sponsors.
I would hope that essential financial calculations would be covered in Math class.
When Max Love attended the annual International Education Week at Lodi High School as a student there, it fueled his interest in global learning and led to his desire to serve in the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe.
A 2009 Lodi High School graduate, he returned to the event this year as a guest speaker on multicultural and international education. Now a UW-Madison student in Middle Eastern studies, he received a scholarship to study Arabic and wanted to let students know about the opportunities that exist.
"It's immeasurable," said Love about the effect of International Education Week.
It's the fourth year of the event, which just concluded after featuring more than 35 speakers from around the world, an international film festival, international cuisine, an Indian dance troupe and other activities.
Time for a status report on all the different ways Milwaukee children can use public money to pay for their kindergarten through 12th grade education:
Private school voucher program enrollment: Up almost 5% from a year ago, just as it has been up every year for more than a decade.
City kids going to suburban public schools using the state's "open enrollment" law: Up almost 11%, just as it has been up every year for about a decade.
Enrollment in charter schools given permission to operate by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or Milwaukee's City Hall: Up more than 19% and up substantially from a few years ago.
Enrollment of minority students from the city into suburban schools using the state's voluntary racial desegregation law, known as Chapter 220: Up almost 5%, although the long-term trend has been downward.
Enrollment in what you can think of as the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system: Down, but by less than 1%, which is better than other recent years. Mainstream MPS enrollment has been slipping every year and went under 80,000 a year ago for the first time in many years.
With all the controversy in recent months around whether to overhaul the way MPS is run, the half dozen other routes that Milwaukee children have for getting publicly funded education have been almost entirely out of the spotlight. But Milwaukee remains a place where the term "school choice" shapes the educational landscape in hugely important ways.
It was during the 1999 Maghi festival, whose revelries grip western Nepal in mid-January each year, that Asha Tharu's parents sold her. Asha, who was then five years old, fetched $40. In return for the money, Asha was sent to work for a year as a bonded labourer at the house of her new owner in Gularia, a town near her village of Khairapur.
"I had to get up very early and I had to clean the pots, clean the rooms and wash the clothes," recalls Asha, now a bright 15-year-old. "I worked all day and I didn't get enough sleep."
I have come along jolting, unmade roads from Nepalgunj in western Nepal to meet Asha at her sister-in-law's hut, a rather beautiful dwelling of unbaked mustard-yellow bricks, more African in appearance than Asian. In the main living area are two large, exquisitely fashioned mud urns built into the walls for storing rice. In the unfurnished room where the family sleeps, Asha sits on the dirt floor and tells me about her new life. She says she is happy in school and that, on the weekends, she works in a brick factory, earning $1.30 for an eight-hour shift. That is enough to buy rice and to help her elder sister pay for school.
More than anything, Asha remembers the petty slights she endured during her eight years of servitude, which ended last year when her "master" agreed to release her. "They would give me scraps. I used to feel very hurt by that, receiving the left-overs of guests or the elder family," she says, glancing occasionally at the dusty ground outside the mud hut where she now lives. "Sometimes I'd get rotten food, or half-stomach food, not enough to stop my hunger," she says. "They would hit me or shout at me if I dared complain."
In the opening keynote, "Networked Learners," Lee Rainie will discuss the latest findings of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project about how teenagers and young adults have embraced technology of all kinds -- including broadband, cell phones, gaming devices and MP3 players. He will describe how technology has affected the way "digital natives" search for, gather and act on information.
The 2009 MVU Online Learning Symposium will explore how young people are using new media and communication tools to build social networks, create content and learn from their peers. This new environment has significant implications for learning and teaching, and it creates new challenges for students, parents, educators and policy makers.
New this year: The 2009 symposium is being offered in an alternative live Web-accessible format for those who cannot attend in person. Online attendees will see, via Mediasite simulcast, both keynotes, the closing panel discussion and three breakout sessions.
It's lunchtime at Patuxent High School in Southern Maryland, but it looks and sounds more like recess.
Students lounge in hallways and classrooms with sack lunches and trays of food. They play Frisbee, get dating advice from teachers, hold club meetings, cram for afternoon quizzes, play video games or catch up on sleep.
Two years ago, Patuxent Principal Nancy Highsmith released students from the confines of the cafeteria and replaced the multiple 30-minute lunch periods with one hour-long, schoolwide lunch. With some creative scheduling class time has remained the same, she said, and the middle-of-the-day burst of freedom has increased club participation, taught time management skills and given stressed-out students time to chill.
But there's an ulterior motive: raising test scores, grades and graduation rates.
In dropping their opposition to student test scores being used in teachers' performance evaluations, Nevada's teachers unions appear to be essentially adopting a compromise by the Obama administration.
While it earlier emphasized that student achievement data need to be linked with teacher performance evaluations, the Obama administration has since softened its tone after months of taking policy input from the public.
Student performance data, such as test scores, now should be considered along with as other performance measures, such as observation-based assessments and a teacher's demonstration of leadership, according to a new policy announcement.
The U.S. Department of Education published its standards for teacher evaluations on Nov. 12 as part of the application criteria for the Race To the Top Funds, a $4 billion pool of competitive grants intended to spur educational reform at the local level.
Facing possible closure because of flagging enrollment , Verona's New Century charter school is proposing to become Dane County's first "green," or environmentally-focused, charter school.
The move, which must be approved by the district's board, illustrates the challenges facing charter schools across the state: to find an academic niche that will continually attract students.
"Having a (charter school) choice means a lot to parents," said Kristina Navarro-Haffner, who has a first-grader at New Century. "We really want to be that option for parents and help the Verona School District bring in more people."
In the last two years, a few charter schools -- public schools given autonomy from their district in exchange for strict accountability -- have changed their focus to attract students, said John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. A lack of performance or non-compliance with state requirements to be a charter school led to the dissolution of 15 charter schools prior to this year, he said, leaving a total of 206 in the state and 10 in Dane County.
Pamela Krys, who moved to Woodland Hills a year ago, made a confession during a school fair this month at Sutter Middle School in Canoga Park.
"I don't understand the points," she said, referring to one aspect of the application process for magnet programs. "They don't do points in Florida."
Understanding the points system is just one of the complications surrounding school choice in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although its "choices" website is improving, the school system provides no central location -- online or off -- to help parents manage all their options if they don't want their children to attend their neighborhood school.
Separate programs have different application forms, processes and deadlines. Nor does the district supply some key information, such as student test scores for most magnets. Budget cuts led to the cancellation of districtwide magnet fairs, although some regional administrators have staged smaller events.
The Rochester, N.Y., public schools do a fine job. Their leaders often have great ideas. But according to Rochester school board member Mike Reno, they are talking about doing something to their Advanced Placement courses that could be troublesome, even though I once thought it was a good idea. (Some people who know me say that is the very definition of a bad idea.)
Here is what Reno revealed in an email to me:
"Our district, in an effort to increase AP participation, is proposing to lower the grading scale for AP classes. The idea is based on the notion that kids in Rochester don't want to take AP classes because they are afraid that the tougher work will lead to a lower grade, and they don't want to damage their GPA for fear it will harm their college entrance chances. The district's logic suggests by that lowering the grading scale, students will have a better chance of getting a better grade, and therefore be more willing to take the class.
"This is not their brainchild. They claim other districts are doing it. They are calling it internal weighting. They believe this is a better approach than grade weighting, where an A in an AP class would be worth, say, 5.0 instead of 4.0. The district argues that colleges strip off weighted grades, whereas an internal weight benefits the student during college entrance. (I believe grade weighting has value when calculating class ranking, vals, sals, top scholars, etc, but think colleges are free to recalculate anything they'd like). Am a crazy to think this is a bunch of nonsense?"
Spend enough time riding the New York City subway--or any big-city metro--and you'll find yourself on the tenure-track to an honorary degree in transit psychology. The subway--which keeps random people together in a contained, observable setting--is a perfect rolling laboratory for the study of human behavior. As the sociologists M.L. Fried and V.J. De Fazio once noted, "The subway is one of the few places in a large urban center where all races and religions and most social classes are confronted with one another and the same situation."
Or situations. The subway presents any number of discrete, and repeatable, moments of interaction, opportunities to test how "situational factors" affect outcomes. A pregnant woman appears: Who will give up his seat first? A blind man slips and falls. Who helps? Someone appears out of the blue and asks you to mail a letter. Will you? In all these scenarios much depends on the parties involved, their location on the train and the location of the train itself, and the number of other people present, among other variables. And rush-hour changes everything.
"Civics education has been all but removed from our schools," she often remarks. "Too many people do not understand how our political system works. We are currently failing in that endeavor."
O'Connor cites examples in which Americans could name a judge on "American Idol," but couldn't name a single justice on the Supreme Court or the three branches of government.
She's calling attention to an extremely important problem in the U.S. All too many American citizens don't understand the country's democratic system and why it's crucial to the future of that democracy to stay informed and participate. The Founding Fathers, after all, counted on the citizenry to be the republic's caretaker and that's a major reason why they felt so strongly about education.
Unfortunately, schools over the years have been saddled with teaching just about everything but civics, history and the arts. The heralded No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, has forced schools to drop meaningful civics classes so that teachers can "teach to the test," consisting primarily of math and reading. And now that the Obama administration wants to tie teachers' pay and promotions to those tests, classes on citizenship will continue to get the short end of the stick.
I'm glad Dave Zweifel raised this issue. I hope he remains active on curricular issues, which, in my view are not simply driven by No Child Left Behind.
If you went to my high school and weren't in attendance on the first day back from summer break -- say, you had been on vacation with your parents an extra day, or you had come down with the flu -- a rumor that you were pregnant and out getting an abortion went hastily through the locker-lined halls. In 10th grade, it happened to me (I had been sick), and, from then on, I wanted to write about a popular girl who is mistaken for pregnant by her schoolmates. The girl must hand in her homecoming crown, withdraw from student government, where she is president, and give up her football-captain/quarterback boyfriend.
Years went by, and I did become a writer -- a screenwriter, not a novelist. I wrote this story to mixed reviews. "Interesting premise," said one agent. "But not much story there." I chalked it up to the particular necessities of those who buy and produce screenplays: They need shocking, cinematic events. They need things to blow up.
I decided to write the story as a young adult novel. I have always loved and admired YA novels, as much for their alternate themes of devastation and lightheartedness as for how influential they can be in their readers' lives. I sat down to write the story and finished it in a couple of months. But before I sent it to an agent who was interested, I did something I never thought I could do: I deleted it.
When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city's schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he's watching is gifted.
"Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is" by looking at the colors of the students, he said. "It shouldn't be that way."
Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled "gifted." Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.
Sherman, at the helm for a little more than a year, is bringing fresh attention to equity issues that have long confounded the small urban school system, where half of the 11,000 students live in poverty.
From a distance it sounds like the chanting of monks. Only as one approaches the building, set in the lush fields of a school playground, does it become apparent who is making the sound: dozens of girls quietly reading books.
Sat on rows of wooden chairs laid out in the library, they mouth the words as they trace a finger slowly along the text, breaking off only to admire the colourful pictures. Though each child is reading a different story, their words mingle to form a gentle hum, lending an almost sacred air to the bright little room.
In Laos, a school library is indeed sacred. Books are rare in the isolated villages where four-fifths of the landlocked nation's 7m people eke out the slenderest of livings. The communist government has been slow in implementing its theoretical commitment to free education. Literacy rates have risen, though many people who have learnt to read soon forget because they lack reading materials. According to Room to Read, the charity that helped build and stock this library and hundreds of others like it, still only 60 per cent of women and 77 per cent of men can read and write.
Many schools, often ramshackle thatched structures with leaking roofs, cannot offer a full range of tuition. Sometimes teachers instruct two or three years of classes simultaneously - if they have not ditched their class to earn supplementary income elsewhere. Student dropout rates are high, especially for girls, who typically quit at around 13. Many parents would prefer a helping hand at home or in the paddy fields.
The Obama Administration's education rhetoric, with its emphasis on charter schools and evaluating teachers based on student performance, has won plaudits from school reformers--and from us. But this month the Department of Education laid out in detail the eligibility requirements for states seeking federal grant money, and it looks like the praise may have been premature.
In the spring, when the White House announced its $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative to improve K-12 schooling, President Obama said, "Any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways to compete for a grant." Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters, "states that don't have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application."
The Administration appears to be retreating on both requirements. The final Race to the Top regulations allow states to use "multiple measures," including peer reviews, to evaluate instructors. This means states that prohibit student test data from being used to measure a teacher's performance may be eligible for the federal funds, even though the President clearly said that they wouldn't be.
Near the end of her struggle to find the right high school for a son who did not always share her tastes, Tracey Henley was overjoyed to discover that some of her son's best friends had endorsed her choice, and his resistance had vanished. "So now we don't have to forge his signature on the form, always a plus," she said.
Where had this painful sifting of options occurred? Was it some struggling urban district? No, Henley lives in Montgomery County, like much of suburban Washington a mecca for those seeking the best in public education. Her story illustrates that in even the best possible circumstances, parents often have to work very hard to find the place that fits their child. I, like Henley, wonder if there is a better way to do this.
Henley's son is an eighth grader at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring. He has attention deficit disorder, but the meds have been effective and through elementary school he performed well above grade level in all subjects. Then he entered middle school and "we were really unprepared for just how much his already-poor executive management functions would collapse in the face of increased expectations," Henley said.
A lesson in incompetence: How 1 in 3 schools fails to provide adequate teaching Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230668/How-1-3-schools-fails-provide-adequate-teaching.html#ixzz0Xsqow7u6
It was in the Musée Rodin that I first realised what Art was capable of. Trailing along behind Monsieur S., our strenuously Francophile teacher in his sadly unironic beret, we had already "done" Notre Dame. Then came a route march through the Louvre. Before its airy makeover with the glass pyramid, the Louvre felt like the worst kind of museum-punishingly vast, the walls of its interminable corridors lined with dukes with beards like spades and spoilt, mean-mouthed women in poodle wigs. After some hours, footsore and deafened by culture, we got to the "Mona Lisa". I remember thinking how small she was. And how podgy. The famous smile hinted at embarrassment that all these people would bother coming so far to see her, when really she was nothing special. We adored Monsieur S. and we listened to him hold forth, complete with faux-Gallic gesticulations, about a turning point in the history of portraiture, the subtle handling of flesh tones, blah blah. But it was no good. The "Mona Lisa" was such a masterpiece, we could hardly see her. Or discover her secret for ourselves, as teenagers badly need to do, whether in love or art.
The last thing we wanted at the end of that day was another damned museum. But with the light fading to the freckled silver that makes the Parisian skyline look like an early photographic print, we found ourselves in rue de Varenne. You have to cross a cobbled yard to get to the front door of the Hotel Biron. The Biron is actually a perfect small chateau, like a doll's house lowered from heaven into seven acres of exquisite formal gardens in Faubourg Saint-Germain. Built circa 1730, it was first a private house, then a school. By 1905 it was in disrepair and the rooms were let out to several tenants. At one point, they included Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Isadora Duncan, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Rodin himself. The queue for the bathroom must have been quite something.
The federal appeals court in Philadelphia has upheld a New Jersey school district's ban on religious songs during the Christmas holiday season.
In their ruling, three judges of the Third Circuit of Appeals noted that such songs were once common in public schools, but that times have changed.
Michael Stratechuk sued the Maplewood-South Orange School District in 2004, saying the ban violated his two children's First Amendment's freedom of worship rights.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city has found a loophole to a state law enabling it to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The mayor says the city will start using student test scores to evaluate teachers coming up for tenure this year. Speaking at an education event in Washington, DC today, Bloomberg said his lawyers have determined that a state law barring such evaluations only applies to teachers hired after July 2008. That means teachers hired in 2007, now coming up for tenure, can be evaluated with test scores.
Bloomberg took part in a panel discussion on education reform with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, sponsored by the liberal think tank The Center for American Progress. He urged the state legislature to lift the cap on charter schools and to end rules requiring principals to lay off the least senior teachers in times of budget cuts. He said these steps would make the state more competitive for federal grants rewarding school reforms.
After Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from "wasting any federal research funding on political science projects," political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this year's Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack.
Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate the field's direction, what sort of questions it pursues, even how useful the research is.
Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. "But we're kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it," he said. "We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work."
How can we be sure that the students are learning the curriculum? If students who are working below grade level do not get any intervention, then they will not be ready and able to succeed with the grade level curriculum. There will be no vertical alignment for them. They will continue to just get passed along and they won't do any better. Where are the interventions needed to make curricular alignment successful? You will be told that the District is working on them, but they are NOT in place. Without them, Curricular Alignment is doomed. Note that we have always needed these interventions. Needing these interventions is nothing new, yet we have not been able to reliably provide them. What has changed that assures us that we will be able to reliably do what we have never been able to do before? There will be references to the MAP testing to identify the under-performing students. Okay, good. But how can we be assured that the identified students will get the necessary services?
There are some interesting accountability comments to this post.
Preparation: John Robert Wooden, revered and very successful basketball coach at UCLA, used to tell his players: "If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail."
and,
Premise: The majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single (1) complete nonfiction book, or written one (1) serious (e.g. 4,000+ words, with endnotes and bibliography) research paper.
and,
Elitism" is making the best form of education available to only a few. The democratic ideal of education is to make the best form of education available to all. The democratic ideal is not achieved, and elitism is not defeated, by making the best form of education available to almost nobody.
Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia
Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George's County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.
A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as "a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia." She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. "As time went by," Burton said, "even the better seniors' writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read." Before her retirement in 1998, she said, "I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all."
Rigorous research and writing instruction have never reached most high-schoolers. I thought I had terrific English and history teachers in the 1960s, but I just realized, counting up their writing assignments, that they, too, avoided anything very challenging. Only a few students, in public and private schools, ever get a chance to go deep and write long on a subject that intrigues them.
We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this. It isn't just college students who are hurt. Studies show research skills are vital for high school graduates looking for good jobs or trade school slots.
Students who have been forced to do well-researched essays tell me those were the most satisfying academic experiences of their high school years. Christin Roach, a 2001 graduate of Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, glowed when she described the work she put into her 4,000-word report, "The Unconstitutional Presidential Impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton." It taught her the skills that led to her earning a joint degree in journalism and political science at Boston University.
Her project was part of the International Baccalaureate program at Mount Vernon. More than 20 Washington area public high schools, and a few private ones, have IB programs. But only a few dozen students at most at each school write the 4,000-word papers to get the full IB diploma. Take away IB and a few selective private schools, and well-organized research projects largely disappear from the high school landscape.
The leading U.S. proponent of more research work for the nation's teens is Will Fitzhugh, who has been publishing high school student papers in his Concord Review journal since 1987. In 2002, he persuaded the Albert Shanker Institute to fund a study of research paper writing by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut. The results were as bleak as he expected. Sixty-two percent of the 400 high school history teachers surveyed never assigned a paper as long as 3,000 words, and 27.percent never assigned anything as long as 2,000 words.
They had no time to assign, monitor, correct and grade such papers, they said. If they assigned long projects, they could not insist on the many revisions needed to teach students the meaning of college-level work. So most new undergraduates check into their freshman courses unclear on the form and language required for academic research.
The colleges aren't great at filling the gap. A new book by Seton Hall University scholar Rebecca D. Cox, "The College Fear Factor," painfully exposes students wallowing in ignorance, and professors not understanding why. Only about half survive this torture and graduate.
Why not junk some of the high school history requirements in favor of one solid month devoted to one long paper, with students bringing in their work, step by step, every day? Doris Burton and her colleagues couldn't get their students to focus, but they had little support above. If we want our students to be proud of what they did in high school, we have to insist that they do it, and no longer assume they will somehow learn it in college. By Jay Mathews | November 18, 2009; 10:00 PM ET
News that a Rhode Island teachers union has won a $200,000 union-funded grant to develop teacher evaluations can't help but stir fears that the fox wants to guard the henhouse. Public-employee unions, after all, are in the business of promoting their own economic interests, which do not always coincide with the interests of students.
Yet it appears to be welcome news that the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, under Marcia Reback, will be working to help develop some standards for weeding out sub-par teachers early on in their careers.
"The union is tired of being portrayed as a protector of bad teachers," Ms. Reback said.
In a sense, the unions do have an economic interest in promoting higher standards in their profession, since that tends to build public support for giving teachers greater financial rewards. And early in their career is an excellent time to evaluate fairly whether teachers can truly cut the mustard. Under Ms. Reback's proposal, unions would work closely with administrators to develop a proposed system of evaluations.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of California's Public Schools Accountability Act, an early legislative triumph of then-Gov. Gray Davis. While some good things have come out of the law, the act has failed in its two key missions: to inform parents and the public about the true performance of schools and students, and to impose widespread tough consequences on failing or underperforming schools.
In contrast to funding-focused measures, such as Proposition 98, the act commendably sought to spotlight school and student outcomes, especially results on the state's standardized tests. While many educators complain about this emphasis on student testing, the real problem turned out to be how the act uses test scores to measure school performance.
The act uses the Academic Performance Index, or API, to measure the performance of schools. Based on student results on the state's California Standards Tests, the API calculates a score on a scale of 200 to 1,000 for every school, with the state designating 800 as the target to which all schools should strive to achieve.
For decades, policy makers have talked about significantly improving public education. The problem has been clear: one-third of public school children fail to graduate, there are embarrassing achievement gaps between middle-class children and poor and minority children, and the gap between our students and those in other countries threatens to undermine our economic competitiveness. Yet for the better part of a quarter century, urgent calls for change have seldom translated into improved public schools.
Now, however, President Barack Obama has launched "Race to the Top," a competition that is parceling out $4.35 billion in new education funding to states that are committed to real reform. This program offers us an opportunity to finally move the ball forward.
To that end Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pushing states toward meaningful change. Mr. Duncan has even stumped for reform alongside former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Yet the administration must continue to hang tough on two critical issues: performance standards and competition.
Already the administration is being pressured to dilute the program's requirement that states adopt performance pay for teachers and to weaken its support for charter schools. If the president does not remain firm on standards, the whole endeavor will be just another example of great rhetoric and poor reform.
The Mississippi Department of Education has been warning school districts and the public for months that the new, tougher accountability ratings were going to stun some people.
The previous accountability system had lulled schools and parents into thinking their students' academic performance was better than it actually was. For the most part, the old system compared how Mississippi students performed academically in relation to students in other parts of the state. The new system compares how they perform in relation to students around the country.
As a result, there are a lot fewer superior schools and districts in Mississippi and a lot more that are failing or close to it. It's not that the public schools in the state have gotten worse. It's just that they and the public are getting a truer picture of really how they stack up nationally.
In Greenwood and Leflore County, the first year's ratings, which were released Monday, are disappointing. Both districts have been listed as "At Risk of Failing," the third lowest of the seven accountability levels. Although Greenwood officials say they feel their rating is undeservedly low and are pursuing an appeal, even if the district moves up a notch to "Academic Watch," that's still not good enough.
Between the two school districts, only three schools out of 13 are rated "Successful" (the third highest ranking) or better. One of those, T.Y. Fleming in Minter City, was shut down this year because of low enrollment.
Speaking at Collin College in Plano, Hutchison said that her plan includes better use of technology in the classroom, recruiting and retaining quality teachers, curbing the state's dropout rate and helping local school districts become more efficient.
"We need more innovation, more efficiency and more accountability," Hutchison said.
Hutchison, who is battling Rick Perry the Republican nomination for governor in the March primary, tied improvements in Texas schools to the state's economic fate.
"Our labor force in Texas stands to suffer the most by this stagnation," she said. "If we decline to treat education investment as economic investment, then our foundation for job creation will erode within."
Here, where suburb meets desert, students are clambering amid the cacti to dig soil samples and take notes on flora and fauna. In an old movie complex in nearby Chandler, others are dissecting a Renaissance tract on human nature. On a South Phoenix campus with a National Football League connection, still others are learning how to pass a basket of bread and help a lady into her chair.
These are just three charter schools among a multitude in the most wide-open public education market in America.
Arizona's flourishing charter school movement underscores the popular appeal of unfettered school choice and the creativity of some educational entrepreneurs. But the state also offers a cautionary lesson as President Obama pushes to dismantle barriers to charter schools elsewhere: It is difficult to promote quantity and quality at the same time.
Under a 1994 law that strongly favors charter schools, 500 of them operate in this state, teaching more than 100,000 students. Those totals account for a quarter of Arizona's public schools and a tenth of its public school enrollment, giving charters here a larger market share than in any other state.
Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District's new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn't like the new system or how Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is implementing it.
He was willing to reveal what the evaluator said to him, give me a copy of his evaluation and expose himself to what I expect will be an unhappy reaction from his principal and other D.C. school officials. So here goes. Goldfarb hit some bumps that deserve attention.
The assessment by his evaluator (the official title is "master educator") occurred Sept. 25. The fact that Goldfarb has an AP class at the city's only academic magnet school suggests that his supervisors determined long ago that he is a good teacher. He is also, by his own description, not afraid to speak up. But he said he respects his principal, Anita Berger, who has had a long and successful career at the school, and will go along with the changes demanded by IMPACT because she has asked him to do so.
To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.
President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, officials say.
The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.
Science and engineering societies are promising to provide volunteers to work with students in the classroom, culminating in a National Lab Day in May.
Omar Masis doesn't want to get a teaching license just for himself. He also wants to do it for the preschoolers he sees every day at Blair Elementary School in Waukesha.
For two years now, he has been leading a class full of youngsters through lessons that focus on building their vocabularies and improving motor skills. But, with a background in agricultural engineering instead of education, he has been doing so on an emergency teaching permit sustained by six credits of education classes a year.
Now he's ready to make the leap to become a credentialed teacher.
"There's something in me that tells me I need a formal education so I can help these kids and improve my teaching style," said Masis, a native of Nicaragua who also has worked as a teacher's aide in Waukesha. "I can do better."
Before, Masis might have had to go elsewhere to fulfill his new dream.
But a recent decision by the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center, one of the largest certification programs in the state for college graduates who want to become teachers, means he can stay in Waukesha.
After more than a dozen years of working to place teachers in hard-to-fill classrooms in Milwaukee Public Schools, MTEC has opened its program to work with other public school districts.
Imagine you are a parent with a child in fifth grade in an inner-city public school. One day your child comes home and reports that the teacher taught a lesson in class about the evils of U.S. military intervention in Latin America.
You also learn that after school the teacher took the children to a rally protesting U.S. military aid to the Contras, who were then opposing the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The children made placards with slogans such as:
"Let them run their land!" "Help Central America, dont kill them." "Give the Nicaraguans their freedom."
Your child reports that the teacher encouraged the students to write about their day of protest in the class magazine and had high praise for the child who wrote the following description of the rally:
"On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras. The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads."
A fantasy? An invention of some conspiracy-minded right-wing organization? Not at all. It happened exactly as described at a bilingual Milwaukee public school called La Escuela Fratney. The teacher who took the fifth-graders to the protest rally and indoctrinated them in international leftist politics is Robert Peterson.
Virtual schools, viewed skeptically by the educational establishment, have a champion in this veteran teacher.
Kathy Hennings starts her day like any other Wisconsin public school teacher: She's up, coiffed, appropriately dressed and ready to go.
And then she starts her commute: down the hall in her Cedarburg home from the kitchen to her office. She sits down in front of a bank of two linked computers, and starts going through the 20-plus emails she receives each day from the parents of her students.
Then she and her students settle down for another day of learning--21st-century style--in the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, one of 14 Internet-based online charter schools in Wisconsin.
Hennings has 75 students: 30 first-graders and 45 second-graders. They live in rural areas, villages, towns and big cities all across Wisconsin, from Superior to Stevens Point, from Hudson to Milwaukee.
I recently was invited to attend a presentation in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of its 2009 education "Leaders and Laggards" report to the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
This report was a cooperative effort of the U.S. Chamber, the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The report is a state-by-state "report card" on education innovation. Education innovation is described by the report as "Discarding policies that no longer serve students while creating opportunities for smart, entrepreneurial problem-solvers to help children learn."
The report graded state schools on seven criteria: school management, finance, hiring and evaluation of staff, removing ineffective teachers, data collection, pipeline to post-secondary education, and technology. West Virginia received an overall grade of D+, however, ranked first in the nation on technology, measured by student per Internet-connected computer.
No state received an overall grade higher than a C+, and although West Virginia was ranked in the bottom quarter of states, there were 11 states ranked below us. Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas ranked overall the highest, and Kansas, Montana and Nebraska were at the bottom of the rankings.
As principal of Custer High School, Kathy Bonds often faces criticism for having one of the most notoriously rough schools in the city.
Many of her students live in poverty, return at night to homeless shelters, commit severe crimes or deal with a staggering number of mental, emotional and physical disabilities.
Look at the numbers, Bonds says: 30.8% of her students are classified as special education, a main reason that performance at her school continues to suffer.
The Milwaukee School Board appeared to agree with the spirit of that assessment last week when it voted to even out the distribution of special education students within the city's high schools.
As part of the approved recommendation, the board directed the administration to immediately begin making sure all schools are equipped to serve a wide range of student needs. Members also directed the administration to establish a target range of special education students, and to help schools with very high or low special education populations come closer to that target range.
Keith Ripp and other Madison-area parents have spent thousands of dollars to test and tutor their children for dyslexia. They think this is something Wisconsin school districts should more aggressively pursue.
But Ripp has a better-than-average ability to do something about it. A Republican state assemblyman from Lodi, he has authored a bill to require that schools perform dyslexia screening on pupils in kindergarten through second grade, as well as those from grades three to five who score low on reading tests.
Another Ripp bill would require the Department of Public Instruction to ensure that reading specialists, special education teachers and elementary school reading instructors are trained and tested in dyslexic instruction techniques.
"My youngest son, who is 13, has severe dyslexia," says Ripp. "My wife and I knew something was going on before second grade. We hired tutors. We tried to work with the school system to come up with something. We had his hearing and eyesight checked. He was very intelligent but was struggling a lot with reading."
The couple paid for the testing on their own, as well as some tutoring, at an estimated cost of about $8,000.
Do you believe in the American dream -- the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools -- at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus.
In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace -- and be prepared to teach our state's kids -- the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.
The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U's flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers' lack of "cultural competence" contributes to the poor academic performance of the state's minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.
Better Letters was created to improve handwriting. It was inspired by the instructional handwriting font work of UK handwriting specialist Christopher Jarman. The app provides instructional lectures, both audio and written, along with practice fonts providing choices of writing style, guidelines, and directional arrows.
With Better Letters, your iPhone or iPod Touch becomes a personal handwriting trainer.
Research shows that the fastest, clearest handwriters join some letters, not all of them: making the easiest joins and skipping the rest. Also, the fastest and clearest writers tend to use the simplest letter shapes, avoiding the complex and accident-prone letter formations of conventional cursive.
In fact, the earliest published handwriting books (half a millennium ago) taught a semi-joined style of this type - called "Italic" in reference to the style's origins in Renaissance Italy - well before today's more complicated cursive came along.
; via a Kate Gladstone email, who notes:
Better Letters is a multi-featured suite of handwriting instruction/improvement resources, developed by -- of all places -- a medical software company, Deep Pocket Series, which describes this app as a "personal handwriting trainer." (In addition to MDs, the company is also marketing this app to teachers, administrators, teens, and parents of elementary/middle school children.)
In addition to MDs, the company is also marketing this app to teachers, administrators, teens, and parents of elementary/middle school children
The tail of teaching talent in your institution is longer then generally recognized, and it extends to your librarians and technologists. Perhaps this long tail of teaching talent encompasses others as well, such as the professionals in institutional research, human resources, building operations, and many more.
The idea that the only qualification for developing and teaching a college course is a Ph.D. is stunningly counterproductive. The knowledge necessary to design a course is not the exclusive property of the terminally credentialed. The passion necessary to teach, which really means to co-learn, does not co-vary with years spent in school. How can we recognize that staff have the ability and background to teach, and that the work they do often lends itself to translation into courses? How can we set up systems, processes, incentives and rewards to enlarge the pool of instructors to include staff?
At many colleges and universities staff have been brought into the teaching process with great success. I've seen this occur most notably in freshman seminar classes. These small courses, led by faculty and staff partners, often focus on the ethical and behavior issues (or sometimes study and interpersonal skills) essential for new students to engage with but often not covered in the regular curriculum. Community building freshman seminars can reduce the risk of attrition by connecting new students with a supportive group of adults working at the college and peers early in their college career. Since these courses are often new offerings, and they are instructor intensive to design and run, there seems to be a great flexibility in enlarging the pool of acceptable instructors to the large staff population.
From a distance it sounds like the chanting of monks. Only as one approaches the building, set in the lush fields of a school playground, does it become apparent who is making the sound: dozens of girls quietly reading books.
Sat on rows of wooden chairs laid out in the library, they mouth the words as they trace a finger slowly along the text, breaking off only to admire the colourful pictures. Though each child is reading a different story, their words mingle to form a gentle hum, lending an almost sacred air to the bright little room.
In Laos, a school library is indeed sacred. Books are rare in the isolated villages where four-fifths of the landlocked nation's 7m people eke out the slenderest of livings. The communist government has been slow in implementing its theoretical commitment to free education. Literacy rates have risen, though many people who have learnt to read soon forget because they lack reading materials. According to Room to Read, the charity that helped build and stock this library and hundreds of others like it, still only 60 per cent of women and 77 per cent of men can read and write.
Many schools, often ramshackle thatched structures with leaking roofs, cannot offer a full range of tuition. Sometimes teachers instruct two or three years of classes simultaneously - if they have not ditched their class to earn supplementary income elsewhere. Student dropout rates are high, especially for girls, who typically quit at around 13. Many parents would prefer a helping hand at home or in the paddy fields.
The chart above shows the male-female test score ratio for the 2009 SAT math test (data here). For example, for perfect scores of 800, males (6,928) outnumbered females (3,124) by a ratio of 2.22 to 1. In other words, 69% of test-takers who got perfect math scores were males vs. 31% of perfect scores by females. Or we could also say that there 222 high school boys who got perfect SAT math scores for every 100 high school girls.
The graph further shows that boys outperformed girls at all 23 math test scores between 580-800 (10 point intervals, with male-female ratios of 1.0 or above), and then for math test scores between 200 points and 570, girls outnumbered boys (male-female ratio below 1.0).
Just about everybody can find a YouTube video they appreciate these days, whether they love animals, practical jokes, dance, politics, or academia-even science. From evolution to the future of medicine, the following videos encompass nearly every aspect of science a student would need to know. Some are 90 minutes long, while others are 20 seconds, but all of them are full of valuable information for the modern scientist.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced its biggest education donation in a decade, $290 million, in support of three school districts and five charter groups working to transform how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure.
A separate $45 million research initiative will study 3,700 classroom teachers in six cities, including New York, seeking to answer the question that has puzzled investigators for decades: What, exactly, makes a good teacher effective?
The twin projects represent a rethinking of the foundation's education strategy, previously focused largely on smaller grants intended to remake troubled American high schools. With these new, larger grants, the foundation is seeking to transform teacher management policies in four cities in hopes that the innovations can spread.
The foundation committed $100 million to the Hillsborough County, Fla., schools; $90 million to the Memphis schools; $40 million to the Pittsburgh public schools. Some $60 million will go to five charter management organizations based in Los Angeles: Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.
Now that the Gates foundation is "rethinking" its previous "small learning community" grants, will local thinking change on the same?
In my view, we as a community should do everything we can to hire (and pay) the best teachers. That does, as the Gates Foundation recognizes via this grant, require changes to the current UAW teacher union model.....
Today's ed page has a startling story by my colleague Michael Alison Chandler on the rapid spread---and resulting score inflation---of portfolio exams in Virginia. These are collections of classwork of students with learning disabilities or insufficient English. They substitute for the usual state multiple choice tests in assessing those students' progress, and the progress of their school. At one Fairfax County elementary school, Chandler reports, the reading passing rate for English learners has gone from 52 to 94 percent and for special education students 34 to 100 percent in the two years this system has been in place. Sound fishy to you? It does to me, but I think it is going to force some interesting and likely beneficial changes.
I am NOT saying the teachers who compile their students' portfolios and the educators (who don't usually know the students) who grade them are trying to deceive us. I am sure they are doing their best to be fair and accurate. But it is difficult for empathetic human beings like educators to resist the temptation to err on the side of generosity when assessing students, particularly when we are talking about those struggling with disadvantages.
It is clear to me, and I suspect to most readers, that this system inflates achievement scores. Of course, so has the assessment system we have been using in schools since the beginning of public education---teachers grading their own students' work. We seem to have prospered as a nation despite giving many struggling students a break on their report cards. I don't think portfolios used in this limited way are going to ruin the effort to set strong national standards, but I think it is going to give a big push to the idea of introducing independent inspectors to assess the effectiveness of schools and teachers.
Calling charter schools a "fad" that takes money away from public schools, teachers union boss Paul Hubbert said he will fight Gov. Bob Riley's proposal to bring them to Alabama.
Riley told the Press-Register on Tuesday that he would like the Alabama Legislature to pass a law enabling the creation of charter schools. It's the only way, he said, that Alabama will be able to compete against other states for $4.35 billion in education funds that President Barack Obama is giving out as part of his Race to the Top campaign.
But Hubbert, who holds influence as executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association, said Thursday that he'll fight any charter proposal.
"I intend to oppose it strongly," Hubbert said. "I think it's wrong and I think it will hurt far more than help.
"It would absolutely take money from the public schools and put it in a charter school, which basically operates like a private school," Hubbert said.
Yesterday, at the Washington State School Directors' Association (WSSDA) conference at the Westin in downtown Seattle, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn announced his new plans for math and science graduation requirements to an audience of over 1,000 statewide school board members.
Dorn, elected as a reformer last year, said it was necessary to postpone stricter graduation requirements for math until the class of 2015, and all graduation requirements for science until the class of 2017, to give students and teachers appropriate time to adjust to pending reforms.
For math graduation requirements until 2015, Dorn is okay with giving students a fall back option of earning two credits of math after tenth grade in order to graduate (a choice that is set to disappear in 2013) in place of passing a set of exams. Reformers want the scheduled changes--getting rid of the additional course work graduation option--to kick in for the class of 2013. They want students to have to pass either a state exam or two end-of-course exams to graduate starting in 2013--without Dorn's fallback.
For 2015 and onward, Dorn offered a two-tier proposal: Students either meet the proficiency level in two end-of-course exams or students meet the basic level in the exams and earn four math credits. Students who don't meet the basic level in the exams have the option of retesting with a comprehensive exam or using state-approved alternatives such as the SAT.
As far as the science graduation requirement, Dorn proposed postponing any requirements until the class of 2017, and replacing the current comprehensive assessment with end-of-course assessments in physical and life sciences. The 2010 legislature (starting this January) is supposed to define the science requirements.
nter professor Kenneth K. Wong of Brown University in Providence, R.I., lead author of the 2007 book "The Education Mayor: Improving America's Schools." It was the fullest examination to date of the range of ways mayors have become involved in school governance in dozens of cities across the United States.
The book was generally favorable to well-executed mayoral involvement, broadly saying mayoral control creates a political environment for stronger decision making about improving schools. But the conclusions on academic impact were more tepid - Wong and his associates said there were improvements in reading and in math in many cases, but that, overall, getting the mayor involved didn't help and sometimes harmed efforts to close the achievement gaps between have and have-not students.
Both supporters and critics of mayoral control have cited things in the book as supporting their side.
Wong was more assertive about the merits of mayoral control than he was in the book. "Mayoral control has a statistically significant positive effect on student achievement in reading and math at both elementary and high school grades," he said.
Mayoral control, he said, eliminates the "nobody's in charge culture" that leads to many school systems just keeping on doing things the way they've been done, even though they aren't succeeding overall. With a clear point of power, there is clear accountability and motivation to make needed changes, he said.
Andrea Ballarin, 23, is a self-confident student hoping to graduate soon from Humboldt University in Berlin. But when she starts talking about getting a job once she graduates, her mood changes. The prospects, she said, are slim.
It is not because of the economic crisis facing Germany. Ms. Ballarin, who will graduate in Slavic studies, said the reason for such poor job prospects had more to do with the new higher-education policies the government recently introduced.
"It is not that I think the reforms are bad," Ms. Ballarin said. "They are needed, but they are so ill-thought out in the way they are being introduced."
In the past week, those changes have led to student demonstrations and sit-ins in many universities in Germany, which last year turned out over 309,000 graduates. Adding to the students' anger, several universities have introduced tuition fees, €200 to €500 a semester, or about $300 to $750, to a previously free system.
As the University of California struggles to absorb its sharpest drop in state financing since the Great Depression, every professor, administrator and clerical worker has been put on furlough amounting to an average pay cut of 8 percent.
In chemistry laboratories that have produced Nobel Prize-winning research, wastebaskets are stuffed to the brim on the new reduced cleaning schedule. Many students are frozen out of required classes as course sections are trimmed.
And on Thursday, to top it all off, the Board of Regents voted to increase undergraduate fees -- the equivalent of tuition -- by 32 percent next fall, to more than $10,000. The university will cost about three times as much as it did a decade ago, and what was once an educational bargain will be one of the nation's higher-priced public universities.
Among students and faculty alike, there is a pervasive sense that the increases and the deep budget cuts are pushing the university into decline.
The budget cuts in California, topping $30 billion over the last two years, have touched all aspects of state government, including health care, welfare, corrections and recreation. They have led to a retrenchment in state services not seen in modern times, and for many institutions, including the state university system, have created a watershed moment.
China's Ministry of Education voiced on Monday its support for the formation of C9, an academic conference comprising nine domestic prestigious universities and referred to as China's Ivy League by some experts.
Xu Mei, the ministry's spokeswoman, said the establishment of the conference is a "helpful attempt that is conducive to the country's construction of high-quality colleges, cultivation of top-notch innovative talents and enhanced cooperation and exchanges between Chinese universities and their foreign counterparts."
On October 12, nine institutions of higher learning including the elite Peking University and Tsinghua Univerisity signed cooperative agreements that featured flexible student exchange programs, deepened cooperation on the training of postgraduates, and establishment of a credit system that allows students to win credits through attending classes in member universities of C9.
More Idaho high school students should go to college.
They need more rigorous math and science instruction.
And the state needs to find more highly qualified teachers -- those who have degrees in the subjects they are teaching.
Those are among several recommendations expected to be unveiled Wednesday by a group of Idaho business leaders, parents and educators as a way for Idaho to provide a high-quality, cost-effective education.
The group, called the Education Alliance of Idaho, was formed after Gov. Butch Otter challenged business leaders in 2007 to look for ways to improve education in Idaho. Otter will introduce the alliance and the report at a news conference Wednesday morning.
The four broad goals and 17 recommendations are aimed at improving Idaho's educational quality as compared to the rest of the country, said Guy Hurlbutt, Alliance chairman.
A proposal that high school students graduate with up to 30 college credits goes back to plans offered by state schools Superintendent Tom Luna since he took office in 2007 to increase availability of college credits in high schools as a way to help kids get a leg up on higher education and save some money.
Demanding more rigor in high school math and science dates back to high school reform pushed by the State Board of Education earlier this decade. Then, the board succeeded in adding an additional year of math and science to high school graduation credits, beginning with the class of 2013.
Nor is the alliance's work the first shot at reform in Idaho public schools.
African Americans represent 26 percent of the state's 1.2 million students but 12 percent of those in gifted education programs. Hispanics are 9 percent of the state's schoolchildren, but 5 percent of gifted students.
"Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities. . . . It's critical we assess any disproportionate barriers . . . so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate," Kaine said in a release.
NAACP officials have urged Kaine in recent months to address racial and ethnic disparities in new regulations for gifted education that he is expected to sign in the next few weeks. Some said a study does not go far enough to address their concerns.
Sir Maurice Wilkes, 96, one of the pioneers of British computing, strolls through the history the he helped create
Walk round the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and sooner or later you'll hear a cry of recognition and someone will say: "I remember using one of those." It probably doesn't happen often to The Millionaire, a mechanical calculator that went into production in 1893, but Sir Maurice Wilkes spotted it, adding: "We used to have one in the lab. I hope it's still there."
In this case, "the lab" was what became the Cambridge University Computer Lab, which Wilkes headed from 1945 until 1980. It was where he built Edsac, one of the world's first electronic computers, using sound beams traversing baths of mercury for the memory units. Edsac (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) first ran in May 1949, so this year a dinner was held to celebrate its 60th birthday. And, of course, to celebrate Wilkes himself, who is a bright, sharp 96 years of age, and has seen most of the history of computing at first hand.
How sharp? On seeing the museum's air traffic control display, which fascinates many visitors, he immediately asks: "Where's the radar?" Ah, well, there isn't one. The displays are running real radar sequences but they're recorded. Wilkes, the consummate hardware guy, doesn't just see the screen, he looks to see how the whole system fits together.
Lynbrook Elementary School, which serves one of the poorest communities in Fairfax County, seems to be a model for reform. Three years ago, the Springfield school failed to meet state testing goals in English. Since then, it has charted double-digit gains in passing rates for every one of its closely monitored racial and ethnic groups of students.
But the success at Lynbrook and other schools throughout the state is not only due to better teaching. More and more, students who have struggled to pass Virginia's Standards of Learning exams are taking different tests.
The trend dates to 2007, when federal officials approved an alternative assessment after the Fairfax School Board threatened to defy a mandate to give multiple-choice reading tests to students who were destined to fail -- students who, like many at Lynbrook, were just beginning to learn English.
DFER Reforming Education Speaker Series: Lessons for Milwaukee - Jon Schnur
via a Katy Venskus email:
Through out the fall of 2009 Democrats for Education Reform will bring to Milwaukee national education leaders with a proven record of reform in urban districts. Our speakers will offer new perspectives and experience with what works and what does not in a challenging urban district.
We are pleased to invite you to the second installment in this series featuring one of the most powerful national voices on education reform:
As CEO and Co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, Jon works with the NLNS team and community to accomplish their mission- driving high levels of learning and achievement for every child by attracting, preparing, and supporting the next generation of outstanding principals for our nation's urban schools. From September 2008 to June 2009, Jon served as an advisor to Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, a member of the Presidential Transition Team, and a Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Jon also served as Special Assistant to Secretary of Education Richard Riley, President Clinton's White House Associate Director for Educational Policy, and Senior Advisor on Education to Vice President Gore. He developed national educational policies on teacher and principal quality, after-school programs, district reform, charter schools, and preschools.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [40K PDF]:
Two graduates from Marshfield High School have been named Advanced Placement Scholars for Wisconsin. This is the third year that both scholars have been from the Marshfield School District. The College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Program recognized Kara Faciszewski and Stephen Nordin as 2009 State AP Scholars from Wisconsin for their performance on Advanced Placement exams. This is the 19th year that the organization has granted State AP Scholar Awards. The distinction goes to one male and one female student from each state and the District of Columbia with grades of three or higher on the greatest number of AP exams, and then the highest average score (at least 3.5) on all AP exams taken. For 2009, 109 students nationwide received AP Scholar Awards.
All eyes turned to the dark-haired woman sitting on a folding chair along the back wall of the room. Some eyes rolled, as most of the group knew Eva Joseph, the embattled superintendent of Albany Public Schools (APS). They had seen her at countless education forums, on the local nightly news, and in the daily paper at every turn of the school budget clock, determinedly defending her district and, increasingly, railing against charter schools. "I'll make it quick," said Dr. Joseph. "I do want to thank you for acknowledging the situation in Albany, but going to the heart of what's real, we have 10 charter schools in Albany with a total public school population of 10,500 students. Compare that to 23 charter schools in the Big 5, with the exception of New York City. Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Yonkers. Twenty-three total charter schools and you total up their enrollment. The proliferation here. The oversaturation, per pupil and per capita, is glaring. And it has serious implications for the district. It destabilizes it on many fronts...."
Standing a few feet away, as Joseph plunged on, a man leaned against the wall, smiling. It was not a smug or obvious smile, nor the smirk of a man who was mocking or scornful. Tom Carroll was smiling because he had heard the speech before and because he knew, as founder of the charter school foundation that had siphoned off nearly a quarter of Dr. Joseph's 10,500 students, that he was at least an immediate cause of the vitriol. It was the smile of victory.
Bumper stickers are like tattoos for cars. They're gaudy, mighty tough to get off and, no matter how hard they try, rarely inspiring. We don't need goofy "coexist" decals to inform us that the person doing a mean 45 MPH in the passing lane is against religion-fueled hatred and wars. Of course that guy's against war. He's driving a Saturn Ion.
And we've just about had it up to here -- lower jaw area -- with those wretched honor roll notifications. "Oh really, Mrs. Johnson? Tommy's getting straight A's in middle school?" Somebody call NASA. Or, if nothing else, call B.S. Just wait 'til he starts listening to rap music.
But parents, as a species, aren't rational beings. After all, if they were, they would've put you up for adoption. Instead, they foolishly assume their child is The Great White Hope, with equal parts of Jim Brown, Barack Obama and Jesus Christ mixed in -- although, interestingly, none of them are white. In Madison, this wide-eyed parental belief that their genes will save the world is best represented by discussions surrounding programming for gifted youngsters.
As reported Monday in the Wisconsin State Journal, some area parents are becoming increasingly frustrated with the Madison school district's weak implementation of TAG programming. TAG, which stands for "talented and gifted," is class instruction designed to challenge more advanced students, and forever lost its credibility when it became loosely associated with a canned body spray. According to the article, the school district currently has eight and a half positions devoted to pushing TAG programming forward, and that's simply not enough to spawn effective change.
Fortunately, it's not necessary, especially when dealing with elementary and middle school students. Try and tell 9-year-olds they're gifted; they'll listen, but only after a good nose-picking and two minutes of straight laughter stemming from a joke that incorporated the word "butt."
Fascinating. The TAG initiative, from my perspective, ideally should lead to increased rigor for all students. That is obviously a contentious topic.....
Education should be the top national priority ahead of health care, the economy and climate change, according to Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) Chief Executive John Chambers.
Education should be an issue that brings together Democrats and Republicans at a time when they can agree on little else, Chambers said. He helped present the findings of an education-focused task force at the WSJ CEO Council conference Tuesday.
The task force determined that the government should form a national council for an educated work force, linking together the secretaries of education, labor and commerce, said Accenture Ltd. (ACN) Chief Executive William Green.
"We don't have a national agenda to be tops in the world in education," Green said. "On every measure, we're slipping."
Indeed, countries are doing a better job of preparing their children for the global work force, Chambers said.
AT&T Inc. (T) Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said that the talent pool coming out high schools is getting diluted.
"Parents need to recognize that their children are falling behind," he said.
Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance. In that first Leaders and Laggards report, we found much to applaud but even more that requires urgent improvement. In this follow-up report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at how states are performing today, but at what they are doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless earn high marks for policies that are creating an entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus because, regardless of current academic accomplishment in each state, we believe innovative educational practices are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and transformational change.
And change is essential. Put bluntly, we believe our education system needs to be reinvented. After decades of political inaction and ineffective reforms, our schools consistently produce students unready for the rigors of the modern workplace. The lack of preparedness is staggering. Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds of their students on time. And even the students who do receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More than 33% of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
Former Gates Foundation education director Tom Vander Ark is behind one charter school's application to open in New York City next year.
For years, Vander Ark shaped the educational giving for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, overseeing grants the organization gave to cities that agreed to build small high schools. Now a partner at an education public affairs firm in California, Vander Ark has supported such causes as lifting New York State's charter cap and bringing more and better technology into classrooms.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education confirmed that Vander Ark is behind the application for Bedford Preparatory Charter School, a small high school school that, if approved, would open in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn next school year.
An overview of Bedford Prep describes the school as being modeled on NYC iSchool, a small, selective high school that opened in Tribeca last fall as the first school in the city's NYC21C initiative. Since then, the Department of Education has opened eight more schools based on the iSchool model.
Senator Charles E. Grassley wrote to 10 top medical schools Tuesday to ask what they are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals -- and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students.
Mr. Grassley, of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent the letters as part of his continuing investigation of so-called medical ghostwriting. The term refers to publication of medical journal articles in which an outside writer -- sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied -- has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.
Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.
Recently I was talking with a group of master's and doctoral students about writing. A colleague asked me to talk with his students and I gladly agreed. We were sitting in a round circle in a nice tan-colored classroom with lots of windows on the west side. There were about 30 of us in the room. After I spoke about writing and read excerpts from my book, I fielded a bunch of questions that came in quick succession. Then after a pause in the question and answer session, one student across from and to the right of me asked a question. From his voice, I could tell that he had been hesitating. He said he really appreciated my presentation on prewriting and on developing a regular writing routine. Then he admitted that he struggles with writing and that my experience with procrastination resonated with him. But this was his dilemma. He had a deadline for his master's thesis in a few months and how does he go about trying to employ these new writing techniques while also getting a thesis written? Isn't that too much to take on?
Oh boy, it brought me back to when I was a doctoral student, who was struggling with writing to the extent that I was at risk for being ABD. I too had to learn habits of fluent writing while working on my dissertation. For this reason, I readily talk with any group about developing a regular writing routine, I wrote my book, and I am writing this column. If I can prevent one person from experiencing the struggles I had with writing, I would consider it worth it.
To his question, I replied: "You will eventually have to complete your master's thesis, and you will. You could probably gut it out without trying anything new, and it would be miserable, but you could do it." He nodded in agreement. Then I added, "But, why not try these techniques? Yes, it will take additional effort as you will be changing habits and writing a thesis at the same time. But your deadline is going to arrive whether you try new techniques or not. So why not work on some of these techniques and see how it goes." After talking a little more I concluded by saying: "I did it, and so can you."
There were a lot of things I was anxious about when I came out of the School of Ed. One was the switch from being the graded to the being the grader. It was really an odd sensation to grade someone else's work in black and white. All that time spent at a liberal undergraduate school attending vegan potluck dinners, talking about how terrible judging people can be, and now I was being paid to judge people every day.
It gets easier with time. At first you might pour over your grades for a very long time, thinking about how many points a student really deserves based on their effort and the demonstration of their comprehension of an idea. You might come up with rubrics for the littlest assignments to ensure fairness and award points to papers only after covering up their authors. A lot of that will disappear under the shear workload that is grading. Really, looking at students' work takes forever! A very good friend of mine back in Kansas has over 150 students on her rosters. Think about it: you assign a two page paper in all of your classes and all of a sudden you have a 300 page novel to tear apart, comment on, revise and turn back to its many authors. Who has time for that?
In addition to time, it's really difficult to do any kind of grading if things are going poorly in the first year of teaching. It's unfair to fail all of the students for not learning if you've not grabbed hold of the reigns and taken control of the class. While the vast majority of the students who failed my class last year were making very poor decisions that led to that failure, fewer would have done so poorly if I'd been able to give them the structure and support they needed. How many? Who knows.
In releasing the third annual round of A through F grades for New York City high schools on Monday, the Education Department produced a rather murky picture: The number of schools receiving A's on the city's report cards increased this year, but more schools received C's and D's. And just one school received an F.
The Bloomberg administration has made the school report cards a central part of its accountability system, and the grades are likely to provoke renewed anxiety among large, struggling high schools in the city, which could be shut down for poor performance. The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, has moved to close 28 schools, including nine high schools, since the city began issuing the grades in 2007.
State education officials have also said that they plan to close the bottom 5 percent of schools statewide to comply with guidelines for a competitive federal grant that will award billions of dollars to states making strong efforts to improve schools.
Before choosing where to go for college, high school students and their parents usually spend time shopping around, evaluating various colleges and universities. Many also consult the college rankings published by a number of magazines and organizations. Those lists rate schools on such criteria as tuition, student SAT scores, and teacher to student radio. This year, a new ranking considered a different criterion.
"What Will They Learn?" compares educational requirements, not academic reputation
What are students at this school expected to learn? That was the question posed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to 100 colleges and universities across the country. ACTA is an independent nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, quality and accountability. Its president, Anne Neal, says ACTA wanted to compare educational requirements... not academic reputation.
The report looked at seven key subjects: math, science, composition, U.S. history or government, economics, foreign languages and literature. Courses in these key areas of knowledge are necessary for students to be successful in their careers and life, Neal says.
As you may recall I was wondering how come the district had no results (by grade or school or district) for the PSAT given last fall to 9th, 10th and 11th graders. Bob Vaughn in Advanced Learning told me they had too much on their plate to get it done.
Joy Stevens, the Public Records officer said this:
I am writing in response to your email below requesting PSAT test results. In doing so, I learned that the test results that we receive are in a format that cannot be easily incorporated into our information, which would allow us to release statistical information without violating individual student confidentiality. I am looking into whether it would be possible to redact or remove student identification from the results we get from the College Boards and/or extract statistical totals.
I also placed a call to Boeing and got a very nice guy who was puzzled but said that they were expecting a report by Dec. 31. He got back to me on Friday and said he got a report and that the district said they would be releasing the results shortly.
About a dozen New York City schools have introduced a child-friendly Rubik's Cube-based math curriculum devised for students as young as 8. In addition, New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation is planning to introduce Rubik's Cube solving at its 32 after-school program sites citywide within the next few weeks.
These actions are happening under a program conceived around two years ago by the company that owns the license to the Rubik's Cube, Seven Towns, which is based in London. In an attempt to make the cube part of an educational curriculum, the company took the relatively cryptic problem-solving guides and made them more student-friendly by adding colorful illustrations and simplifying the instructions.
An unlikely opponent has joined the mounting opposition against a bill in the state Senate this afternoon that would expand the number of charter schools.
The Massachusetts Association of Charter Public Schools said today the bill could actually stifle the growth of charter schools because of changes made to the legislation last Friday in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Those changes would pull first-year funding for all new charter schools from the state's general education fund known as Chapter 70 and would create a new budget line for those costs, which the association fears could make it more vulnerable to line-item budget cutting.
Another change made by the committee would require that the first three new charter schools approved each year to be located in a district that ranks in the bottom 10 percent in MCAS scores. Given that the state only approves two or three applications a year, the association said the requirement would make it virtually impossible to open new charter schools in other parts of the state.
The parents of exceptionally bright students in Madison schools waited 18 years for a plan to raise the academic bar for their children. But now, they're really getting impatient.
Approved by the Madison school board in August, the district's new three-year plan for talented and gifted ("TAG") students already is raising questions from parents about focus and speed. The district's TAG staff, they note, consists of only 8.5 positions in a district of 24,622 students - and three of those positions are vacant.
"Change of a large system takes time," said Chris Gomez Schmidt, the mother of three young children who serves on the district's advisory committee for talented and gifted students. "But I think there's a lot of families within the system who are frustrated when they see that their students' needs are not being met. I think that families don't feel like they have a lot of time to wait."
The district's talented and gifted plan, which replaces a 1991 document, will be spelled out for the public Tuesday night in a community forum from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Hamilton Middle School, 4801 Waukesha St. The forum is meant to make the reforms understandable and "transparent" to the public, said Lisa Wachtel, executive director for teaching and learning for the district.
CARL DJERASSI can remember the moment when he became a writer. It was 1993, he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California and he had already written books about science and about his life as one of the inventors of the Pill. Now he wanted to write a literary novel about writers' insecurities, with a central character loosely modelled on Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal.
His wife, Diane Middlebrook, thought it was a ridiculous idea. She was also a professor--of literature. "She admired the fact that I was a scientist who also wrote," Djerassi says. He remembers her telling him, "'You've been writing about a world that writers know little about. You're writing the real truth inside of almost a closed tribe. But there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who know more about writing than you do. I advise you not to do this.' "
Even at 85, slight and snowy-haired, Djerassi is a determined man. You sense his need to prove that he can, he will prevail. Sitting in his London flat, he leans forward to fix me with his hazel eyes. "I said, 'ok. I'm not going to show it to you till I finish. And if I find a publisher then I'll give it to you.' "
Eventually Djerassi got the bound galleys of his book. "We were leaving San Francisco for London for our usual summer and I said 'Look, would you read this now?' She said, 'Sure, on the plane.' So my wife sits next to me and of course I sit and look over. And I still remember, I had a Trollope, 700 pages long, and I couldn't read anything because I wanted to see her expression."
Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007 and, as Djerassi speaks, her presence grows stronger. By the end it is as if there are three of us in the room. "She was always a fantastic reader," he says. "She read fast and continuously. And suddenly you hear the snap of the book closing, like a thunder clap. And I looked at her, and she then looked at me. She always used to call me, not 'Carl' or 'Darling', she used to call me 'Chemist' in a dear, affectionate sort of way. It was always 'Chemist'. And she said, 'Chemist, this is good'."
Carl Djerassi is a polymath. Strictly speaking that means he is someone who knows a lot about a lot. But Djerassi also passes a sterner test: he can do a lot, too. As a chemist (synthesising cortisone and helping invent the Pill); an art collector (he assembled one of the world's largest collections of works by Paul Klee); and an author (19 books and plays), he has accomplished more than enough for one lifetime.
The campaign for universal preschool education in the United States has gained great momentum. Precisely as strategists intended, many Americans have come to believe that pre-kindergarten is a good and necessary thing for government to provide, even that not providing it will cruelly deprive our youngest residents of their birthrights, blight their educational futures, and dim their life prospects. Yet a troubling contradiction bordering on dishonesty casts a shadow over today's mighty push for universal pre-K education in America (see "Preschool Puzzle," forum, Fall 2008).
The principal intellectual and moral argument that advocates make--and for which I have considerable sympathy--is similar to that of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) backers: giving needy kids a boost up the ladder of educational and later-life success by narrowing the achievement gaps that now trap too many of them on the lower rungs. Serious pursuit of that objective would entail intensive, educationally sophisticated programs, starting early in a child's life, perhaps even before birth, and enlisting and assisting the child's parents from day one.
Yet the programmatic and political strategy embraced by today's pre-K advocates is altogether different. They seek to furnish relatively skimpy preschool services to all 4 million of our nation's four-year-olds (and then, of course, all 4 million three-year-olds), preferably under the aegis of the public schools.
Open enrollment has become part of the educational path that many families in the Boulder Valley School District follow, and this year officials have made some changes to the application process to make it both easier and greener.
For the first time, parents can file a request for their child to attend a Boulder Valley school outside their neighborhood on the district's Web site, eliminating the need for applicants to pick up a paper form and drive it to the Boulder Valley Education Center. The online application will mirror the hard-copy version, allowing parents to choose their top choices and explain their reasoning.
"It will be more convenient, faster and it will mean that a person will not need to drop it by the education center," said district assessment director Jonathan Dings. "We think this will save paper and gas, in an effort to be as green as we can in this process."
Parents still will have the option of filling out a paper application and dropping it off, if that works best for them, Dings said. But, he said, the district is "hopeful that we will have a great deal of participation" in the inaugural online program.
"We know that if the product works well, a whole lot more people will try it," he said.
Open enrollment is a statewide option that allows families to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods. The option plays a substantial role in how Boulder Valley students are placed, Dings said.
I sympathize with those who might not be comfortable with the latest plan to rid our schools of at-risk kids. Several educators across the country, including Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman, have decided not to call them that anymore. Henceforth they will be known as "at-promise" children.
"We use the term 'at-promise' in Alexandria City Public Schools to describe children who have the potential to achieve at a higher rate than they are currently achieving," Sherman said in a July 23 op-ed in the Alexandria Gazette Packet. "Really, all children are at-promise, because we, as educators, have made a promise to each and every child that we will work toward higher achievement for all."
Cathy David, Alexandria schools deputy superintendent, explained at a School Board meeting last December: "The previous 'at-risk' model was a deficit model that identified and categorized children by criteria such as low income, special education, ethnicity or English language proficiency, with the assumption that if the criteria fit the child, then the child must have some sort of deficit. The 'at-promise' model comes from strengths."
Give me some adjectives to describe your school, the visitor asked a couple of dozen eighth-graders at the Hmong American Peace Academy one morning last week.
Peaceful, one volunteered.
Dependable, another said.
Successful.
Educational.
Fair.
Respectful.
Hard.
Supportive.
Show me a school where kids volunteer a list like that, and I'll show you a bright spot on Milwaukee's educational landscape. Which is exactly the case with this school, popularly known as HAPA.
Entering its sixth year, HAPA has a kindergarten through eighth-grade enrollment of 435, nearly twice the number when the doors first opened in 2004. That's not counting another 60 in a partner high school, International Peace Academy, that is in its second year and just beginning to grow.
On a wall near that eighth-grade classroom, charts list the attendance each day, classroom by classroom. Most of the entries read: "100%." Overall attendance is not only higher than the Milwaukee Public Schools average, it is higher than the state average.
The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (WCSA) has announced the winners of annual awards in four categories, as well as three career achievement honorees:
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person's trash is transformed into another's treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
"To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it's fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds," said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.
The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.
Trying to fix academic problems in high school by adding more credit requirements would likely result in one thing for certain: more cost to educate, due to a need to hire more staff to teach 20 percent more classes ["Boost credits to ensure high-school grads are ready to succeed," Opinion, guest commentary, Nov. 12].
There are many school districts in this state that already have 24-credit programs, and they aren't preparing kids for graduation. In fact, Washington state is now 43rd in the nation in high-school completion.
Writer Trish Millines Dziko is so right when she stated we are not preparing kids for adulthood. Why? Our secondary schools, unlike those in most of the rest of the world, are more social halls than places of learning.
In a 20-credit school, you can obtain all of the credits and courses you need to gain admission to the most competitive colleges in this country.
What is needed is a much more serious, focused, deliberate approach to secondary schools by educators, parents and students.
To seek a share of $4.5 billion in federal "Race to the Top" funding for public education, the Legislature passed a recent bill that among other things allows teachers to be evaluated, though not disciplined or fired, based on their students' test scores.
However, to improve the state's chances of receiving the most grant money possible, the Legislature is contemplating other changes to existing law. A bill in the Assembly to grant the state Superintendent of Public Instruction the power to take corrective action in failing schools and school districts is one such proposal.
The bill would give the state superintendent the power to implement new curriculum, expand school hours, add individual learning plans for pupils, make personnel changes and adopt accountability measures to monitor the school district's finances.
I am running for School Board because I care about the success of our children. I want our schools to be even better. I strongly believe that in order for our community to be successful we need to support "ALL THE KIDS ALL THE TIME."
At the same, I understand the importance of maintaining fiscal responsibility to taxpayers. As an economist with over 35 years of experience I know it is critical to analyze and evaluate the economic impact of decisions.
My Priorities
High expectations for all students
Raise educational standards
Narrow the achievement gap
Base school curriculum, wellness and safety decisions on research
Ensure fiscal responsibility to taxpayers
Improve communication between teachers, parents, district administrators and the community
Press Release:
--PRESS RELEASE--
Today James Howard officially announced his candidacy for the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education. Mr. Howard is a candidate for Seat 4 which is currently held by retiring Board member Johnny Winston, Jr.
"I'm announcing my candidacy with great excitement," said Mr. Howard. "I care deeply about the success of our children. I strongly believe that in order for our community to have continued success we absolutely must support 'ALL THE KIDS, ALL THE TIME.' I want to work to ensure that happens."
Mr. Howard, an economist and scientist at the Forest Products Laboratory, has been active in education and community matters for many years. He served on the MMSD Strategic Planning Committee, the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force, and was co-chair of Community and Schools Together (CAST), the school referendum support group. He has also served on the South Madison Economic Development Committee and the Town of Madison Economic Development Committee.
In making this announcement, Mr. Howard thanked Mr. Winston for his many years of dedicated public service to Madison's children and community. "Mr. Johnny Winston, Jr. has been a leader on the board and in our Madison community. It will be a challenge for any newly elected board member to maintain the high standards that he exemplified," said Mr. Howard.
Mr. Howard has identified as his Board priorities: ensuring high expectations for all students, raising educational standards; narrowing the achievement gap; basing school curriculum, wellness and safety decisions on research; ensuring fiscal responsibility to taxpayers; improving communication between teachers, parents, district administrators and the community; and improving state funding of public schools.
He and his wife, Kathryn, have three children. His adult daughter is a UW Madison senior studying abroad in Kenya, his son attends Sherman Middle School, and his youngest daughter attends Emerson elementary.
I got to the last page of the last icon-shattering piece Gerald W. Bracey will ever write, and felt sad and empty. As usual, he had skewered--with great erudition and insight--some of my fondest beliefs about how to improve schools. As a consequence, my thinking and writing about these issues will (I hope) be better next time. But who is going to do that for me in the future?
Jerry Bracey, the nation's leading critic of unexamined assumptions in education, died Oct. 20 at age 69, apparently in his sleep, in his new home in beautiful Port Townsend, Wash. This was a shock to everyone who knew him because, although he had prostate cancer, it did not seem to have slowed him down.
The last person to receive one of his infamous emails questioning the ancestry and sanity of the recipient should frame the thing and put it on a wall. I don't know anyone else in our community of education wonks who matched him in passion, honesty and wit. The 2009 edition of the Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education proves it.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been widely held in high regard since he was appointed in January, but no honeymoon lasts forever. Mr. Duncan's came to an abrupt end earlier this week when he issued long-awaited rules that the states must follow to apply for his $4.3 billion discretionary fund, known as the Race to the Top Fund, and the second round of federal financing under the $49 billion federal stimulus package known as the state fiscal stabilization fund.
....
The language in the application reflects timidity at the White House and in Congress, where some voices wanted to delay the fight over this issue until next year when Congress will likely reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The language also reflects the sometimes excessive influence of boutique alternative certification programs, which want to keep doors open for teachers who might be shut out under traditional criteria.
I had a good chat with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this morning at his office. He had other important duties, but I would not let him go until he addressed each and every one of the questions sent in by readers last night and this morning. (Sorry, I missed questions that came in after 8:30 a.m. I had to get going. You know what D.C. traffic is like in the rain.) Here is what he said. I think most of his answers can be summed up as "we're handing out $4.35 billion in stimulus funds for innovation, and if we do it properly we will help solve a lot of problems."
From mhallet1: Ask him how he is coming on national Algebra I standards.
Duncan said that was the job of the group of 48 states and the Districts working to produce common standards. He said he is following their progress with great interest, but at the moment it is a state, not a federal, project.
From nicheVC: Disclosure: I spent the first 15 years of my career as an education practitioner, the last 10 investing in and discerning how the private sector might bring innovation and efficacy to the same.
Over the years I've often taught Edward Bellamy's classic 19th century utopian novel Looking Backward. It's a blistering critique of Gilded Age America and a creative imagining of a future in which work, social class, gender relations, and the political economy have been radically reconfigured. The novel is provocative and rich in ideas, and its premises spark great debate. What it's not is a page-turner. Most of the book is an extended lecture interspersed with occasional questions and a contrived (and mawkish) romance. Students sometimes complain that the book is "boring." I'll take that -- they have to have read it to render such a judgment.
Any book we assign is useful only insofar as students actually crack the cover and consume its contents. One of the biggest complaints one hears in the hallways and faculty lounges of American colleges concerns literary dieting. The professorial mantra of the 21st century is: "They just don't read." All manner of villains emerge to explain students' repulsion toward reading: Internet surfing, video games, cell phone obsession, campus partying, over-caffeination, lack of intellectual curiosity.... When all else fails, professors whet their knives to slaughter tried-and-true scapegoats: television and inadequate high school preparation. Here's a tip about why they don't read: they never did! In previous articles I've noted that instructors often mistakenly assume that all students share their zest for learning. Alas, often we are but credit-accumulation obstacles that students must dodge.
There's been no Golden Age of student reading in my lifetime -- not when I was a student, a high school teacher, a community college instructor, a lecturer at an elite institution, or a prof at a state university. Move on. Think like Edward Bellamy; he was a utopian, but he was no fool. His ideal world did not rely upon people's good natures; it was structured to remove choice from the equation. Everyone had to work -- not a bad way to approach reading in your classrooms. If you want students to read, make it hard (or impossible) to avoid.
Parents: How extensively do your children do research for school papers? Does anyone still own encyclopedias?
Teachers: What sources and how many of them do you require when you assign a research paper? Is Wikipedia acceptable as a source?
Posted by: jane100000
Adam, some would say (and I would agree) that neither conducting an on-line search nor consulting an encyclopedia counts as doing a research paper. Google and wikipedia can give a student a great start in gaining some grasp of the issues s/he is planning to address in a paper, but only reading entire chapters (or entire books) and being able to consult journal articles can get you even close to confidence that you're not missing the boat.
With student debt rising and more of those enrolled failing to graduate in four years, there is a growing sentiment that college may not be the best option for all students. At the same time, President Obama has called on every American to receive at least one year of higher education or vocational training. Behind the rhetoric lies disagreement over a series of issues: which students are most likely to succeed in college; what kind of college they should attend; whether the individual or society benefits more from postsecondary education; and whether college is worth the high cost and likely long-term debt. The Chronicle Review asked higher-education experts to weigh in.
Who should and shouldn't go to college?
Alison Wolf: Anyone who meets the entry criteria and is willing to pay the fees should be able to go. In one sense, that just passes the buck--politicians then have to decide how much subsidy they are willing to provide. But it shouldn't be up to them to decide how many people go, what they study, and why.
Charles Murray: It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation's youth possess. That doesn't mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.
The number of students who used open enrollment to attend the state's virtual charter schools this fall fell well short of the cap set last year by the state Legislature, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
In the end, only 3,635 students enrolled in virtual charter schools for the 2009-'10 by using the state's public school choice system, the DPI says. That's 3,000 fewer than initially applied and 1,615 under the cap enacted as part of a legislation in response to a court ruling that threatened the schools' existence.
To even be eligible for the funds, however, Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had said that Wisconsin would have to repeal its "firewall" law that banned the use of student scores in teacher evaluations.
In his remarks, Obama acknowledged that eliminating the law was controversial in some places but said it was a necessary first step toward bringing a new accountability to classrooms, especially with struggling students.
Normally, that would be a message the Wisconsin Association of School Boards would be eager to hear. But instead, the so-called firewall reform bill passed by the Legislature is a failure in the group's eyes because it doesn't allow school districts to use student test scores to discipline or dismiss a teacher whose performance doesn't measure up.
"While the wording of the legislation might meet the letter of the law, we don't think it really addresses its spirit," says Dan Rossmiller, a spokesman for the school boards association.
And because the new law requires collective bargaining over any teacher evaluation plan that includes student test scores, Rossmiller says the school boards association believes the requirement would make the process too unwieldy. "We think it will make it harder to use test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, not easier," he adds. "For that reason, I don't think we'll be recommending that school districts try to develop evaluation plans for teachers that include using test scores."
But Mary Bell, president of WEAC, says the new firewall reform law's most important purpose is to improve teacher effectiveness and that a focus on using data in a punitive way misses the point.
A COMIC novel, "Lucky Jim", published by Kingsley Amis in 1954, portrayed life as a university lecturer as a grubby, tiresome slog, for all that it was shot through with humour. A somewhat drier study of university life has now found that academics no longer devote as much time to teaching as they did because of the bureaucratic burdens they are now forced to carry.
The study, by Malcolm Tight of Lancaster University, examined surveys of academic workloads since 1945. He found that university staff have worked long hours, typically 50 hours a week, since the late 1960s. Academics fiercely protect the time they spend on research. They also do more administrative work than in the past. As a result, he concludes, "the balance of the average academic's workload has changed in an undesirable way... [making] it more difficult to pay as much attention to teaching as most academics would like to do."
The finding suggests that new ideas for promoting better university teaching may be addressing only half the problem. On November 3rd Peter Mandelson, the business secretary, whose department's wide remit includes universities, came up with a series of proposals for modernising them. He wants English universities to compete for students by publishing information on a whole host of issues, including how much direct contact they can expect to have with academic staff.
We've blogged several times about Roland Fryer's research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem Children's Zone (which was chronicled in Paul Tough's excellent bookWhatever It Takes), with hopeful results: "Harlem Children's Zone is enormously effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value, the effects in middle school are enough to reverse the black-white achievement gap in mathematics and reduce it in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects." Fryer and Dobbie attribute the program's success to the high-quality schools or the combination of high-quality schools and community programs but find that community investments alone cannot close the gap. "The HCZ model demonstrates", the authors conclude, "that the right cocktail of investments can be successful."
Every week or two I get an email from a teacher, parent, or school board member seeking my opinion about a curriculum or product. I'm not a product reviewer, so until now I've declined. But some of the products seem so ill-conceived that I thought it was worth writing about them. So I'm starting an occasional series on this blog called "Hall of Shame" in which I'll feature educational products that are unsupported or contradicted by scientific evidence, and yet are actually in use in schools.
eyeQ is a computer program currently being tested in Salt Lake City Schools which the makers describe as "an effective tool for Brain Enhancement, Reading Improvement, and Vision Therapy or Eye Training." Near-sighted users are promised that they likely will see an improvement in their vision. Improvements in reading speed of 100% in less than one month are described as typical.
You can try the first lesson free at the website. You are encouraged to read at different paces (some that are clearly meant to be faster than you could possibly read), to follow a moving object as it appears and disappears at different spots on the screen, and to visualize an object expanding, guided by an oval that increases in size.
Humans are fallible and have a tendency to repeat past failures. Education is no exception. The pendulum of reform has had its swing back and forth over the decades with minimal progress. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is taking the bull by the horns, purporting that the very teachers, who have entrusted him as their chief, are not to be trusted to do the proper job without close supervision, re-training, and additional monetary rewards. He calls for scrutiny, an uphauling of current educational institutions by employing a trace back system that will mark the culprit, the raison d'etre for the failure of our children.
Duncan's tough, paternal scolding sends a clear message: teachers beware.
Revolutionary or some of the same? The 4.35 billion Race to the Top reform resonates a familiar cadence, the mantra of the Bush administration and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the gotcha mentality that fails to consider a teacher's moral intentions, or the common good. Certainly, within education, there exists a few bad apples, as in any profession. Yet, the majority of teachers choose the field of teaching for the intrinsic rewards rather than the monetary rewards.
Our failing schools reflect , more likely, a society gone amuck, an evolution of insidious issues that have seeped into the classroom, rather than inept teachers.Yet, Duncan argues that it is the teachers that are ill prepared and failing our students.
Critics who agree, suspected soft bigotry, low expectations, or inept teachers, are coming out in droves and applauding Duncan's reform as brilliant. Ruben Navarrette, in his article entitled "An Apple for the Secretary" (San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/28/09), argues that the "trace back" method is "groundbreaking stuff" and will finally flesh out the culprits. He points to Louisiana, currently using the trace back theory: students in grades 4-9 with low scores are traced back to teachers and the teachers are then traced back to the institutions that trained them. The state then provides the institution with information and "urges schools to improve."
BY promising basic information on the performance of our schools, Education Minister, Julia Gillard has landed a blow for common sense and for parents.
For too long, the argument about whether national testing on literacy and numeracy should even be done, let alone published, has been deadlocked.
Education experts, state education departments, teachers and their professional bodies, have long resisted the move arguing that such comparisons were worse than meaningless, they would be misleading.
The argument went that there were many more elements to the education of a young person than simply teaching he or she to read, write, and add up - the so called three "Rs". But while this argument may be true, it has never been a convincing argument against gathering good information on those things that can be measured well, and then providing it freely.
Acknowledging the "whole person" objective of school education, Ms Gillard says a fundamental prerequisite to becoming a productive community member is basic literacy and numeracy.
Politicians seem to have temporary set aside the debate about improving our schools, but you can bet that when the issue rises again, one solution will be raised, over and over: Improving student/teacher ratios--that is, hiring more teachers. But is it really a silver bullet for increasing results? What sort of results can we expect?
The graph above offers a few clues--but unraveling them takes a bit of explanation. The crucial point being: Adding teachers might improve student performance relative to past results, but it's a weak lever for effecting aggregate improvements.
So, let's dig into the graph. Each of the lines--colored in blue or green--represents data from a single state. To the left is that state's student/teacher ratio; to the right is that state's average SAT score.
The graph looks sort of confusing at first, but it actually does a pretty good job at showing that student/teacher ratios and SAT scores aren't closely related. If they were highly correlated, you'd expect to see lines with slopes all at a 45-degree angle (whether sloping up or down). But as you can see, they're actually a tangle. The states with the highest SAT achievement have relatively low student/teacher ratios--but those ratios alone don't account for their performance, since plenty of other states have similar ratios but don't score nearly as well.
A longer school day can help improve student test scores, closing the achievement gap. But critics question the cost of those additional hours.
Going to school from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. may sound like a student's nightmare, but Sydney Shaw, a seventh-grader at the Alain Locke Charter Academy on Chicago's West Side, has come to like it - as well as the extra 20 or so days that she's in class a year.
"I'm sure every kid at this school says bad things about the schedule sometimes," says Sydney, who was at school on Columbus Day, when most Chicago schools had a holiday. "But deep down, we all know it's for our benefit."
Finding ways to give kids more classroom time, through longer hours, a longer school year, or both, is getting more attention. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan support a lengthier timetable. Many education reformers agree that more time at school is a key step.
Charter schools like Alain Locke and KIPP schools (a network of some 80 schools that are often lauded for their success with at-risk students) have made big gains in closing gaps in student achievement, partly through expanded schedules. Other schools have been making strides, too - notably in Massachusetts and in the New Orleans system.
Rob Meyer can't help but get excited when he hears President Barack Obama talking about the need for states to start measuring whether their teachers, schools and districts are doing enough to help students succeed.
"What he's talking about is what we are doing," says Meyer, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Value-Added Research Center.
If states hope to secure a piece of Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" stimulus money, they'll have to commit to using research data to evaluate student progress and the effectiveness of teachers, schools and districts.
Crunching numbers and producing statistical models that measure these things is what Meyer and his staff of 50 educators, researchers and various stakeholders do at the Value-Added Research Center, which was founded in 2004. These so-called "value-added" models of evaluation are designed to measure the contributions teachers and schools make to student academic growth. This method not only looks at standardized test results, but also uses statistical models to take into account a range of factors that might affect scores - including a student's race, English language ability, family income and parental education level.
"What the value-added model is designed to do is measure the effect and contribution of the educational unit on a student, whether it's a classroom, a team of teachers, a school or a program," says Meyer. Most other evaluation systems currently in use simply hold schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
Much more on "value added assessment" here, along with the oft-criticized WKCE test, the soft foundation of much of this local work.
An Alabama High School Makes Literacy a Schoolwide Job An Alabama school that is seen as a national model shows how to teach reading and writing in every subject.
[and the wordless picture books have been a big hit, too!!...Will Fitzhugh]
"The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that 'looks more like an elementary school,' Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well."
Catherine Gewertz:
The sheep's-brain dissections are going rather well. Scalpels in hand, high school students are slicing away at the preserved organs and buzzing about what they find. It's obvious that this lesson has riveted their interest. What's not so obvious is that it has been as much about literacy as about science.
In preparing for her class in human anatomy and physiology to perform the dissections, Karen Stewart had the students read articles on the brain's structure and use computer-presentation software to share what they learned. She used "guided notetaking" strategies, explicitly teaching the teenagers how to read the materials and take notes on key scientific concepts. She reinforced those ideas with more articles chosen to grab their interest, such as one on how chocolate affects the brain.
The class also watched and discussed a recent episode of the hit television show "Grey's Anatomy," about a patient with an injury to one side of the brain. The students' work is graded not just on their grasp of the science, but also on the quality of their research and writing about it.
Ms. Stewart isn't the only teacher who weaves literacy instruction into classes here at Buckhorn High School. It pops up on every corridor. A teacher of Spanish shows his students a self-portrait of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and asks what cues it conveys about her culture. A physical education teacher brings his class to the school library to study body mass. And a mathematics teacher burrows into the Latin roots of that discipline's vocabulary to help students see their related meanings, and uses "concept maps"--visual depictions of ideas--to help them grasp an idea's steps or parts.
Literacy is shot through everything at this 1,350-student Alabama school in a former cotton field 10 miles south of the Tennessee state line. It's been an obsession for a decade, ever since school leaders tested their students and found that one-third of the entering freshmen were reading at or below the 7th grade level, many at the 4th or 5th grade level.
"Those numbers completely changed my professional life," said Sarah Fanning, who oversees curriculum and instruction at Buckhorn High. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Each of those numbers had a face, and that face went to bed with me at night."
'Relentless From the Beginning'
The Buckhorn staff immersed itself in figuring out how to improve student learning by boosting literacy skills in all subjects, something few high schools do now, and even fewer were doing then. That work has made the school a national model. Hosting visitors and making presentations--including at a White House conference in 2006--have become routine parts of its staff members' schedules.
Adolescent-literacy work such as that at Buckhorn High is taking on a rising profile nationally, as educators search for ways to improve student achievement. Increasingly, scholars urge teachers to abandon the "inoculation" model of literacy, which holds that K-3 students "learn to read," and older students "read to learn." Older students are in dire need of sophisticated reading and writing instruction tailored to each discipline, those scholars say, and without it, they risk being unable to access more-complex material. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently released a report urging that adolescent literacy become a national priority. ("Literacy Woes Put in Focus," Sept. 23, 2009.)
Selected literacy resources at Buckhorn High School:
Professional Reading
Reading Reminders, Jim Burke
Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher
Content Area Reading, Richard R. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca
I Read It, But I Don't Get It, Cris Tovani
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Cris Tovani
Wordless Picture Books
Anno's Journey, Mitsumasa Anno
Free Fall, David Wiesner
Tuesday, David Wiesner
Freight Train, Donald Crews
Zoom, Istvan Banyai
Content-Area Picture Books and Graphic Novels
Chester Comix series, Bentley Boyd
Just Plain Fancy, Patricia Polacco
Harlem, Walter Dean Myers
The Greedy Triangle, Marilyn Burns
High-Interest, Easy-to-Understand Books for Adolescents
A Child Called "It," Dave Pelzer
Hole in My Life, Jack Gantos
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Burned, Ellen Hopkins
The "Twilight Saga" collection, Stephenie Meyer
The "Soundings" and "Currents" series, Orca Publishing
The Bluford High series, Townsend Press
Source: Buckhorn High School
"We've seen a lot of focus on early literacy, but more recently people are saying, 'Wait a minute, what about kids in the upper grades?'" said Karen Wood, who focuses on adolescent literacy as a professor of literacy education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"The days are passing by rather rapidly of middle and high school teachers' being able to say, 'Either you get the content or you don't.' I think we are starting to see a greater acceptance of the need for this," Ms. Wood said. "And it has to be a whole-school responsibility, not just something that's put off on teachers."
Sherrill W. Parris is the assistant state superintendent of education who oversees the 11-year-old Alabama Reading Initiative. Buckhorn High, she says, was on the leading edge of the state's adolescent-literacy work by enlisting in the project in its second year, 1999. It was one of the few high schools to do so.
"They have been relentless from the beginning," she said.
In Search of Expertise
When Buckhorn joined the reading initiative, its teachers and top administrators attended the state's two-week summer workshop, and were inspired by its vision of literacy instruction across the content areas. But they quickly saw they would have little guidance in putting the vision into action.
"We called the state department of education and said, 'Can you recommend some good books or programs?' and they said, 'No, but if you find some, call us,'" recalled Tommy Ledbetter, who has been Buckhorn's principal for 28 years.
Ms. Fanning said the state paid for a reading coach that first year, but Buckhorn "didn't know enough then to know how to use her."
The state program's fluctuating funding and focus, and a shortage of expertise in guiding middle and high schools, have meant that adolescent literacy has not received the consistent support in Alabama that originators of the initiative would have liked, Ms. Parris said.
On its own, Buckhorn's staff scoured the field for expertise. Gradually, they assembled a list of authors such as Kelly Gallagher and Cris Tovani, whose theories and strategies seemed to click, and who became their shining stars. ("Kelly Gallagher is our Brad Pitt," quipped Buckhorn English teacher Tracy Wilson.)
Higher Scores
Buckhorn High School has exceeded county and state averages on Alabama's 10th grade writing test. SOURCE: Alabama Department of Education
The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that "looks more like an elementary school," Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well.
Colorful student work lines the school's walls and dangles from its ceilings. In one poster, a math student drew a picture of himself next to a streetlamp, and described his reasoning in deciding how to calculate its height. He included the calculation and the answer.
On a "word wall" in an English classroom, a student didn't simply write the definition of the word "ostracize." To show its meaning, he insisted that his teacher hang it several inches away from the wall, as if it had been rejected by the other words.
That teacher, Donna Taylor, said she was a skeptic when school leaders began emphasizing visual and artistic depictions of ideas a decade ago.
"It seemed kind of elementary," said Ms. Taylor, who's been teaching for 17 years. "I thought, hey, I'm a high school teacher--we need to be preparing [students] for college, doing serious, deep work, one step away from a bachelor's degree. But once I saw how this visual stuff helps the kids learn, I was on board."
Avoiding 'Assumicide'
Will Culpepper is just such a student. "It's hard for me to understand something when I write it down or read it, but if I do a picture or hands-on stuff with it, I can get it better," said the 16-year-old junior.
Teachers use a variety of strategies to build comprehension. Recognizing that many students are intimidated by vast gray stretches on textbook pages, English teacher Tracy Wilson uses shorter articles or excerpts to teach the same content. That builds students' knowledge and confidence to tackle the full versions, she says.
Taking a cue from math teachers, she uses "talk-alouds," stopping frequently as the class reads a fiction passage to discuss what is happening. Instead of only writing definitions of vocabulary words, her students often make "foldables," colorful projects with sections that open to show a word's meaning, context, origin, and use.
Math teacher Carrie Bates asks students to explain their problem-solving reasoning, in class and in homework. When a student struggles, she finds that simple picture books, like The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns, can work wonders to get a concept across. Then she can build more-complex understanding onto that.
Buckhorn teachers try to avoid committing what Kelly Gallagher calls "assumicide": assuming students have the skills to access the content. They explicitly teach those skills.
Ms. Wilson walks her students through ways to get clues about meaning from context, helping them deduce from the sentence "the phlox is blooming in the garden," for instance, that phlox is a flower.
Career and technical education teacher Connie Mask helps her students get the most from their textbooks, acquainting them with the table of contents and the index, and explaining the significance of photographs and captions. "This was stuff I just thought students knew how to do," she said.
Each week, the teachers work on specific literacy strategies. One week, it's using graphic organizers or Venn diagrams to help students understand content. Another week, it's building students' retelling and summarizing skills or practicing guided-reading techniques.
A good chunk of teachers' weekly professional development focuses on such strategies as well. And in an ongoing "book group," they tackle tomes by literacy experts. Teachers also spend a lot of time scrutinizing data from state and school tests to see how their instruction needs adjusting.
Social studies teacher Jenny Barrett says she didn't used to think her job description included teaching literacy skills. But now she sees that she has to help her students learn how to spot places in the textbook to mark with Post-its, understand the common roots of words like "oligarchy" and "monarchy," and draw pictures of ideas when that helps them understand. She also has learned strategies like breaking text into "chunks" to help students parse the meanings.
Librarian's Key Role
School librarian Wendy Stephens has played a key role in Buckhorn's literacy work, revamping the library's holdings in support of both students and teachers. She helped Ms. Barrett expand the list of materials she uses, such as picture books and comic books, for instance, and works closely with her on a project in which students research aspects of Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat, such as globalization or outsourcing, and make videos about them.
Ms. Stephens has built up collections that typically are popular with boys, such as manga, or Japanese cartoon, magazines, books by Edgar Allan Poe, and a series of books by Dave Pelzer recounting his abuse as a child. For girls, she makes sure to stock the "Twilight Saga" by Stephenie Meyer, and works by Maya Angelou and Ellen Hopkins.
She added wordless picture books, which many teachers use to help students construct storylines in various subjects, and content-area comic books.
Expanding the library's pop fiction collection required a shift in attitude, Ms. Stephens said.
"I had to put aside my own bias," she said recently in the school's large, airy library. "Sure, I thought everyone should be reading Hemingway. But I just want to increase their fluency."
It seems to be working. The number of books checked out of the library has soared from fewer than 200 a month when Ms. Stephens took over in 2003 to more than 1,600. About a dozen students come in early for a book group, and she has set up computer-based videoconferences for students with favorite authors.
Measuring the impact of the literacy work at Buckhorn High isn't easy, since the school no longer uses the standardized test it used in 1998. It does outpace the 19,000-student Madison County district and the state in the proportion of students who score proficient on the reading portion of the state graduation exam, but only by a small margin. (Ninety-eight to 100 percent of Buckhorn's students have been passing in recent years; statewide, the percentage is in the mid- to high 90s.)
The school's proficiency scores on the state's 10th grade writing test are significantly better than district or state averages.
Ms. Fanning points in particular to the fact that one-quarter or more of Buckhorn's freshmen enter as "struggling readers"--two or more grade levels behind--but nearly every student passes the graduation exam by 12th grade.
"We think we are really making a difference here," she said.
Coverage of pathways to college and careers is underwritten in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Vol. 29, Issue 10, Pages 20-23
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Those unfortunate people in the District may worry about the quality of their teachers, and wait anxiously for the results of the school system's controversial new evaluation of classroom techniques and test score improvement. But those of us in the Washington area suburbs don't have to worry because we already know that close to 100 percent of our teachers are entirely satisfactory. How? Our school districts say so.
I asked suburban school officials to share the latest results from their teacher evaluations, which are usually done by principals and subject specialists. Here are the percentages of teachers rated satisfactory, in some cases called meeting or exceeding the standard: Alexandria 99 percent, Calvert 99.8 percent, Charles 98.4 percent, Culpeper 97 percent, Fairfax 99.1 percent, Falls Church 99.55 percent, Loudoun 99 percent, Montgomery 95 percent, Prince George's 95.56 percent, and Prince William 98.3 percent.
Anne Arundel, Arlington, Fauquier and Howard, and Manassas City say they don't collect such data. Carroll says it is doing it for the first time and hasn't finished yet.
Those numbers in the high 90s sound good, but they don't impress some advocates of better teaching. Near perfect teacher evaluation passing rates are common throughout the country.
One reason why D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has launched her complex IMPACT evaluation of the District's teachers is that the research and training organization she founded, the New Teacher Project, is a sworn enemy of those standard evaluation systems. Since teacher ratings in most districts are as discerning as peewee soccer award night, with everyone getting a trophy, why bother?
proposal before Massachusetts lawmakers aimed at protecting students who voice religious views at public schools is being assailed by advocates of separation of church and state, who say it forces religion on people.
Critics also argue it would open a backdoor for teaching creationism.
But the bill's sponsors say opponents are misreading the measure. They say it would simply ensure the existing free speech rights of religious students that are sometimes neglected at schools around the country. "What we're trying to do with this bill is create an even playing field,'' said Evelyn Reilly of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which wrote the bill.
The bill has bipartisan backing and is pending before the Legislature's Joint Committee on Education.
Governor Jim Doyle today signed into law Senate Bills 370, 371, 372 and 373, which take the first steps toward reforming education in Wisconsin and ensuring every student has a chance to succeed. Governor Doyle signed the laws at Wright Middle School just days after President Obama visited the school to call for states to make significant education reform. The bills take important steps to align Wisconsin with federal education reform goals laid out by the President and position Wisconsin to compete for Race to the Top funds.
"I want to thank state legislative leaders for acting swiftly to take these critical first steps toward major education reform," Governor Doyle said. "We are really proud of our state's great schools but we know we have to step it up and strive to reach the highest levels. We must continue moving forward reforms that put our students first and answer President Obama's challenge to race to the top."
The Governor will continue to work closely with the Legislature to move forward reform efforts to create clear lines of accountability at Milwaukee Public Schools, strengthen the State Superintendent's ability to turn around struggling schools and raise math and science standards so every student can compete in the global economy.
When President Barack Obama spoke to education groups on the campaign trail, he said he didn't believe in the false choices currently offered by the education debate. He didn't believe that it was a choice between supporting unions or supporting charters. He didn't believe it was about striving for either equity or excellence.
Instead, Obama reiterated that this moment in education is about moving beyond ideology and moving toward results. What matters is not whether a kid goes to a charter school or a district school or a magnet school; what matters is they go to a good school. What matters is not whether a child has a union teacher or a non-union teacher; what matters is that every child has an effective teacher.
The recent DPS school board elections have been miscast as a referendum on the false choice Obama sought to dispel. In the aftermath, it is important to focus on what has actually driven both Denver and Colorado's educational improvements in recent years and how that illuminates the road ahead.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been the perfect national symbol of this clear-eyed pragmatism, with a relentless focus on results. Long before he was a Cabinet member, Duncan found himself caught in a classic version of this false choice Obama dismissed. There were two competing groups of educators that released their own set of principles to guide the Obama presidency. One group was backed by "reformers" who insisted that the system needed radical changes to make sure we recruited, retained and released educators based on merit. The other was backed by a set of "union leaders" who argued that we must attend to the out-of-school variables that impact learning, including more counseling, support services and professional development.
I must have landed on an Internet marketing list, because I receive so many e-mails pitching my chances to win a scholarship to an online college. Like: "Hey, mom, apply for a full-tuition scholarship, earn your degree and have a career!" Are these scholarships for real? -- B.R.
A few people will win these scholarships, but the advertised financial-aid awards are really hooks cast by companies in the lead-aggregation industry. They're marketing ploys.
Notice that virtually all the schools offering these scholarships are for-profit colleges. Higher-education experts tell me that on average, online for-profit colleges cost three times more than online nonprofit colleges.
Here' the inside story. Lead-generating marketers require scholarship seekers to provide their personal information on a scholarship application -- in reality, a "lead form." The marketers aggregate the forms and sell them to participating schools at a price of up to $100 per qualified lead. It's little wonder that you're receiving so many scholarship pitches.
This is in response to a "Teen Rant" of Oct. 18 by Lizzie Logan, who complained about SAT tests. Lizzie believes that the tests are unfair because they give an advantage to students from rich families. Here is what I'd like to tell Lizzie:
Yes, Virginia, the colleges do prefer knowledgeable students who are already fluent in trigonometry and calculus, who have a reasonably rich lexicon and who can convey their thoughts in the form of an essay. Otherwise, the students will have to spend two out of four college years taking remedial classes. Our society does not need engineers who study engineering subjects proper for only the two remaining years.
The State Journal's call for more charter schools in the editorial welcoming the president to Madison was a bit off the mark.
A charter school is not an end in itself - it's a means to achieve an end. If there are impediments to learning that we're unable to address, or opportunities for improvement that we're unable to provide through our neighborhood schools, then a charter could be an effective way to address the issue
For example, I'd be interested in a charter proposal designed to attack our achievement gap by providing a more intense academic focus in a longer school day and longer school year for students who are behind. But if a charter idea lacks that sort of vital justification, then for me there's insufficient reason to deviate from our traditional neighborhood school approach.
The same is true for the school district's recently-adopted strategic plan. More charter schools is not a goal, it's a strategy. If charters can be an effective means of achieving our goals of improving academic outcomes for all students and ensuring student engagement and effective student support, for example, we should and likely will consider them.
As I understood the president's remarks at Wright, this approach is consistent with the laudable goals he described.
Things were a bit discombobulated last week on the Eastside, where a generations-old allegiance to Roosevelt Senior High School has been upset by a new relative: the recently opened Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center.
At Roosevelt, hallways shimmered with gold and crimson banners hung in anticipation of the biggest football game of the season, against Garfield High School.
At the new Mendez high school -- populated by many students transferred from Roosevelt's overcrowded campus -- the walls were bare; the gymnasium empty.
At Roosevelt, students celebrated spirit week and crowned a homecoming queen.
At Mendez, students felt unsure about their newly selected mascot, the jaguar. There were murmurs of school spirit. But there is no football team, no cheerleading squad, no queen to crown.
"We're starting with nothing," said Michael Mena, 15.
Founded in 1993 as Madison Middle School 2000, the school alleviated crowding in the West High School attendance area and served as a hopeful sign to the ethnically diverse South Side, which lacked a middle school. The school moved to its building at 1717 Fish Hatchery Road (Panoramic view) in 1997 and was renamed for the late Rev. James C. Wright, a prominent local black pastor and civil rights leader.
The school's early years were marred by lax discipline, high staff turnover, the resignation of the original principal and clashes among parents and teachers over governance. Stability arrived in 1998 with Ed Holmes, whose six-year tenure as principal earned praise from many parents and students.
"I would characterize (Wright) as one of the district's grand experiments," said Holmes, now West High principal.
As a charter school, students choose it; no one is assigned there. Enrollment is capped at 255, and classes rarely exceed 20 students. The school's mission stresses civic engagement, social action and multicultural pride.
The total identified in the Priority 1 Recommended Budget is $284,925.
We are continuing to plan in the areas of:
implementing Individual Learning Plans,
using ACT Standards as part of assessments,
supporting technology,
program evaluation, and
a possible expulsion abeyance options pilot for second semester.
Budget recommendations for these areas will come to the Board at a later date.
More:
The electronic based ILP (Individual Learning Plan) developed in collaboration with University of Wisconsin staff to meet the unique needs ofthe MMSD. The ILP will be based off of the WisCareers platform which will interface with Infinite Campus, the District's information management system.
Identify a subgroup of the ILP Action Team to create an ILP implementation plan that includes a mechanism for feedback and evaluation (e.g., Survey instruments, external evaluation conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research).
The only way President Barack Obama could have been any more indirect about his message on Wednesday in a speech at a middle school in Madison was by giving it in another state.
He never mentioned Milwaukee, he barely mentioned Wisconsin. It might seem hard to be boring when you're talking about giving away billions of dollars to places that shake up their education systems, but Obama succeeded, so much so that a Washington Post story described his speech as "turgid."
And yet, there was a very pointed message in there, aimed right at Wisconsin and Milwaukee. How do I know? Arne Duncan told me so.
Being president may mean rarely being able to say what's really on your mind, but, in a telephone interview after the speech, the outspoken secretary of education was more than willing to tread almost all the places his boss didn't want to go.
In short, the message of the visit was: Get with the program, Wisconsin.
In the spirit of generosity I've been thanking the gods that private school teachers' salaries are not connected to students' standardized test scores. Else Malia Obama's science teacher at the Sidwell Friends School might have lost her job faster than you can say "grade inflation."
On November 3, 2009, the one-year anniversary of his election, President Obama, speaking at a middle school in Madison, Wisconsin, told his audience that First Daughter Malia had recently come home from school with a 73 on a science test, but after renewed educational vigor she aced her next test. This was the same day President Obama reiterated his call for public school teachers' merit pay to be based in part on student performance on standardized tests.
After numbing my students with No Child Left Behind tests for the past seven years, I can now depend on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to turn it all around.
But Secretary Duncan's not going to hand over any federal grant money willy-nilly. No sir. No money changes hands until the states beat down those all-powerful teacher unions (and if you want to see how powerful teacher unions are, just drive by your local public school and check out the cars in the faculty parking lot. The Cash for Clunkers program rejected my 1997 Toyota Corolla and most of my colleagues' cars as well)
Elected leaders, educators, parents and students need to get these tasks done. The future of Wisconsin and our nation is at stake.
Obama didn't sugar coat what needs to occur. He talked tough about closing failing schools and firing bad teachers. He told parents and students they were more responsible than anyone for student success, which hinges on high expectations and follow-through.
Yet the "educator in chief" also offered reassurance and rewards, including a chance to win hundreds of millions of dollars in competitive grants.
It's time to act.
A day after Obama's visit to Wright Middle School on Madison's South Side, the Wisconsin Legislature barely approved a bill allowing student test scores to be used in teacher evaluations - something Obama specifically called for. Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan had called Wisconsin's ban on tying teachers to test data "ridiculous."
Representatives of five would-be virtual charter schools will file into the administrative towers of the Georgia Department of Education today to pitch their brand of public education, which lets students study at home computers in their pajamas.
Some contenders will come with national representatives from education management companies touting their records of student achievement in other states. Some will rely on the moms and dads who sit on the boards of petitioning schools to make their case.
If they're successful, they stand to be funded just as any other Georgia public school. Some state officials, however, aren't ready to prop open the door of school choice and let more cyber campuses in without first doing more homework on the subject.
The Common Core blog, which shares my distrust of the 21st century skills movement, is warning about the appointment of Apple executive Karen Cator as head of the U.S. Education Department's Office of Education Technology. I don't know Cator. Common Core says she once chaired the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the movement's leading organization, and might push their agenda in Washington. I think the partnership is led by well-intentioned people, but so far they have done a lousy job showing how their approach will improve schools.
My recent column about a book by two partnership leaders made this case in more detail. Lynne Munson and James Elias, who wrote the Common Core post about Cator, seem to think she would use her new job to divert more education dollars to technology companies and forget about giving students a deep and balanced education.
How Do Students at Wright Compare to Their Peers at Other MMSD Middle Schools?
Via Jeff Henriques:
Examining the performance of only economically disadvantaged students in 8th grade, after two years and a quarter at Wright Middle School, compared with other MMSD middle schools.
The last sitting President to visit Madison didn't have a plane. This one had a very big plane, which pulled to a stop in Madison right on time (The commander of the 115th Fighter Wing, Col. Joseph Brandemuehl told me that Air Force One is never more than two minutes off schedule). It was fitting that he came here to give a serious policy speech about education and that he visited a Madison public school with both high diversity and high achievement. And it was an honor to host the President one year after his election. All in all, it was experience those kids - and most of the rest of us - will never forget.
At the school the President did trip a little on the pronunciation of my name. But this is his third attempt and he's getting closer each time. And here's the thing. When the President of the United States mispronounces your name you don't think 'gee, I wish that guy would get it right.' No. You think, 'gee, the President tried to pronounce my name.'
This job has its long days and its share of difficult stretches but once in awhile you get a moment that is just undeniably cool. As we waited for President Obama to walk down the stairs from Air Force One, I was thinking about the last time I was at that spot. It was exactly five years ago when I got a ride with the Colonel in an F-16. Taking a flight in a fighter jet or greeting the leader of the free world qualifies as one of those times when I take a moment to thank the voters of Madison for giving me the chance to be there on their behalf. This is not a job that lacks interesting days, but yesterday is one I'll remember long after someone else gets the honor of saying, "Welcome to Madison, Mr. President."
The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal. It costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year but the Obama administration is giving its reauthorization less serious attention than most people pay to their phone bill. Families facing tight budgets actually consider cancelling a service that doesn't benefit them. ("Do I really need a landline if I already have a cell phone?") But ending federal involvement in k-12 schooling is not something that education secretary Arne Duncan is even willing to talk about.
Here are three good reasons why we need to have that conversation:
First, we have little to show for the nearly $2 trillion dollars spent on federal education programs since 1965. As the chart demonstrates, federal education spending per pupil has nearly tripled since 1970 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars -- but achievement has barely budged. In fact, the only subject in which achievement at the end of high school has changed by more than 1 percent is science, and it has gotten worse.
This overall average masks some tiny gains for minority children, such as a 3 to 5 percent rise in the scores of African American 17-year-olds. But even these modest improvements can't be attributed to federal spending. Almost all of the gain occurred between 1980 and 1988, a period during which federal spending per pupil actually fell. And the scores of African American 17-year-olds have declined in the twenty years since, even as federal spending has shot through the roof.
The Wisconsin Legislature passed a series of education reform bills designed to make the state compete for nearly $4.5 billion in federal stimulus money.
The Assembly voted 47 to 46 in favor of the reform bills around 3 a.m. on Friday morning after a long closed door meeting among Democrats. The Senate approved the measures earlier on Thursday.
The action came after President Barack Obama came to Madison on Wednesday to tout the Race to the Top grant program.
One of the bills would create a system to track student data from preschool through college. A second bill would tie teacher evaluation to student performance on standardized tests. Another bill would require all charter schools to be created under federal guidelines. The last bill would move grants awarded to Milwaukee Public Schools for student achievement to move from Department of Administration to Department of Public Instruction control.
The bills remove a prohibition in state law from using student test data to evaluate teachers.
Even with it removed, teachers could not be disciplined or removed based on student test scores. And the teacher evaluation process would have to be part of collective bargaining.
Republicans argued that means most schools won't even attempt to use the test data when evaluating teachers. Attempts by them to alter the bill were defeated by Democrats.
Senate Republicans expressed concern about the teacher evaluation portion, saying collective bargaining could become a hurdle to the Race to the Top guidelines and that teachers should also be disciplined or fired based on standardized testing results, not only rewarded.
"(Obama) said we have to be bold in holding people accountable for the achievement of our schools. Well, trust me, if we pass this legislation requiring mandatory negotiations we're not bold, we're a joke," said Sen. Luther Olson, R-Ripon.
Four education bills aimed at bolstering the state's application for federal Race to the Top funds were also moved through the Legislature. In the Assembly, passage of a bill allowing the use of student performance on standardized tests to be used in evaluating teachers. Republicans objected to the bill because they say it requires school districts to negotiate how the data is used in the teacher evaluations and would tie the hands of administrators who seek to discipline or dismiss poor performing teachers.
The bill barely passed the Assembly on a 47-46 vote.
The Assembly session wrapped up at about 4 a.m.
It will be interesting to see how these bills look, in terms of special interest influence, once Governor Doyle signs them. I do - possibly - like the student data tracking from preschool through college. Of course, the evaluations may be weak and the content may change rendering the results useless. We'll see.
In related news, Madison School Board Vice President Lucy Mathiak again raised the issue of evaluating math curriculum effectiveness via University of Wisconsin System entrance exam results and college placement at the 11/2/2009 Madison School Board meeting. This request has fallen on deaf ears within the MMSD Administration for some time. [Madison School Board Math Discussion 40MB mp3 audio (Documents and links).]
The armed services are willing to grant waivers for some of those conditions - asthma, or a little bit of weed. But the military's biggest concern is how big and how weak its potential recruits have become.
"The major component of this is obesity," Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions, tells Army Times' William McMichael. "Kids are just not able to do push-ups... And they can't do pull-ups. And they can't run."
23 percent of 18- to 34-year-old are now obese, up from just six percent in 1987.
The group of potential enlistees is further slimmed by the "propensity to serve" among American youths, which social scientists say also is declining. According to Gilroy, research shows that about 12 percent of all U.S. military-eligible youth show an interest in military service.
The Ford Foundation pledged $100 million Wednesday to "transform" urban high schools in the United States, focusing on seven cities, including Los Angeles.
The seven-year initiative is among the largest philanthropic efforts aimed at improving education in the United States and, as described, could both complement and challenge aspects of the Obama administration's education reform efforts. It will fund research and reform in four areas: teacher quality, student assessment, a longer school day and year, and school funding.
The initiative is being led by Jeannie Oakes, who until recently was head of the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at UCLA, where she was a strong advocate for reform aimed at helping disadvantaged students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Besides Los Angeles, the Ford Foundation effort will focus on schools in New York, Newark, N.J., Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Denver.
Oakes said the foundation has already begun working with L.A. Unified Supt. Ramon C. Cortines to find ways to better distribute finances in the district. She said Ford also hopes to help Los Angeles land one of the Obama administration's "Promise Neighborhood" grants, which place public schools at the center of a comprehensive strategy of combating poverty and improving educational achievement.
When, if ever, has a president of the United States inserted himself as directly into a legislative issue in Wisconsin as President Barack Obama is doing by visiting Madison on Wednesday? Obama's visit to a middle school a couple miles from the State Capitol will focus on education - and it comes as Gov. Jim Doyle and others are ramping up their push for a series of educational reforms, including giving much of the power over Milwaukee Public Schools to Milwaukee's mayor.
Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who will be with him, are firm supporters of many of the ideas being incorporated into the legislative package. Wisconsin clearly has to make changes such as these if it wants a decent chance at a share of the $5 billion in the Race to the Top money and other incentive funds Obama and Duncan will distribute over the next couple years.
It appears highly likely a special session of the Legislature will be called in November to consider the education proposals. The outcome is not clear.
Long revered for their dedication to equal opportunity and affordability, public universities play a crucial role in building our country's human capital. And yet--a sobering fact--less than 60 percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating. Why is this happening and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line, the most important book on higher education to appear since The Shape of the River, provides the most detailed exploration ever of the crisis of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status.
Probing graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four statewide systems of public higher education, the authors focus on the progress of students in the entering class of 1999--from entry to graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. They examine the effects of parental education, family income, race and gender, high school grades, test scores, financial aid, and characteristics of universities attended (especially their selectivity). The conclusions are compelling: minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates--and take longer to earn degrees--even when other variables are taken into account. Noting the strong performance of transfer students and the effects of financial constraints on student retention, the authors call for improved transfer and financial aid policies, and suggest ways of improving the sorting processes that match students to institutions.
Crossing the Finish Line has things to say about virtually every important factor in college life, but by far the most important thing is this:
The SAT and ACT do not matter in predicting college success.
I have been an unequivocal supporter of using the SAT/ACT* in making college admissions decisions (see here and here), but this sample of students and the rigor of this study are impossible to ignore. Here's what the authors found:
Taken separately, high school GPA is a better predictor of college graduation rates than SAT/ACT score. This findings holds true across institution type, and gets stronger the less selective an institution is. High school GPA is three to five times more important in predicting college graduation than SAT/ ACT score.
SAT and ACT scores are proxies for high school quality. When the authors factored in which high schools students attended (i.e. high school quality), the predictive power of high school GPA went up, and the predictive power of SAT/ ACT scores fell below zero.
High school quality mattered, but not nearly as much as the student's GPA. Other research, most notably on Texas' ten percent admission rule, has proven this before. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but it shows that a student's initiative to succeed, complete their work, and jump any hurdles that come up matters more than the quality of their high school.
Join the Green Charter Schools Network as an organization member and we'll send you a FREE copy of SMART By NATURE. Click organization membership form.
"Smart by Nature is must reading for teachers, school administrators, parents, and the concerned public," writes leading environmental educator David W. Orr. "It is an encyclopedia of good ideas, principles, and case studies of some of the most exciting developments in education."
The Green Charter Schools Network and River Crossing Environmental Charter School are featured in Smart By Nature. "We're all concerned about the environment and sustainability," says Jim McGrath, GCSNet President. "That's why we're doing it -- because, really, what could be more important than preparing young people for a sustainable future."
Helen Lovejoy is more than a minister's wife. She is an icon, the yellow-faced bulldog behind one of society's most enduringly annoying mantras:
Won't somebody please think of the children?
In Milwaukee, this cry often falls on deaf ears. The Milwaukee Public School system is less an educational structure than it is a punch line on fail blog. Students are performing far below expected levels, resources are few, and ultimately too few people are thinking about the children.
Fortunately, Gov. Doyle decided to step in. Knowing there needed to be a change in MPS, and potentially motivated by a larger desire to make Wisconsin attractive for the Obama administration's Race To The Top grants, Doyle announced a bill that would take significant authority away from the school board and put it in the hands of Milwaukee's mayor. These powers, which include the ability to select the superintendent and set the annual tax levy, should not be taken lightly, and one would hope a busy mayor would find adequate time to thoroughly look at the city's public school system. After all, if you have time to lose a fight at a state fair, you can budget a few days to deal with education.
New Jersey's next governor, making his first post-Election Day appearance at a thriving charter school in the state's largest city, renewed a campaign pledge to reform urban education.
Chris Christie, speaking to grade-schoolers in green uniforms who addressed him as "Governor Chris," used the event at the Robert Treat Academy in Newark's North Ward to demonstrate his commitment to improving education and reducing crime in New Jersey's cities.
"When I had to decide what I was going to do with my day, the day I was elected governor, there was no place else I wanted to be than here with all of you," Christie said. "And I knew, because I was just elected yesterday, that all these people would come," he said referring to the reporters and photographers who ringed the podium in the school's auditorium.
The visit was also politically symbolic for the Republican governor-elect: the school was founded by Essex County Democratic Party boss Steve Adubato Sr.
A hoarse and worn-looking Christie was joined by Adubato, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo Jr., also Democrats. Christie said he was sending a message that his new administration would encourage bipartisan cooperation but is not afraid to fight for his principles.
Booker seemed eager to accept Christie's offer.
"Politics is over," said the mayor, who campaigned hard for Gov. Jon Corzine. "I've got to find partners for progress."
Declaring there should be "no excuse for mediocrity" in public schools, President Obama on Wednesday pledged to push for recruitment of better teachers, better pay for those who succeed and dismissal of those who let their students down.
When principals are trying to determine which teachers are doing well, he said, they should be able to consider student performance as part of the evaluation.
And when schools are failing, "they should be shut down," Obama said. "But when innovative public schools are succeeding, they shouldn't be stifled, they should be supported."
The president's tough words came as Obama spoke to students and teachers at a charter middle school in Wisconsin's capital, Madison. But as he announced the criteria by which states can win grants from his Department of Education's $4.35-billion "Race to the Top" fund, Obama spelled out standards that depart from conventional Democratic dogma.
For one thing, Obama called for the abolition of "firewall" rules, which prevent many schools from judging teacher performance based on student performance.
The Department of Education will be accepting proposals for projects aimed at four reform areas:
To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally bench marked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
To close the data gap -- which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction -- states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals -- and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren't up to the job.
Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture
There is one issue standing in the way for Wisconsin: a state law that prevents standardized test results from being used to evaluate teachers, which makes WI ineligible for "Race to the Top" funds. A bill in the legislature aims to repeal that law.
Q Secretary Duncan, can you articulate why it's important to link student achievement data with teacher performance, and also why it's important to lift these caps on the charter schools?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: I'll take one at a time. On the first one -- it's amazing, I always use the California example because California is a big state -- California has 300,000 teachers -- 300,000 teachers. The top 10 percent, the top 30,000 teachers in California, would be world-class, would be among the best teachers in the world. The bottom 10 percent in California, the bottom 30,000, probably need to find another line of work, another profession. And nobody can tell you of those 300,000 teachers who's in what category. There's no recognition.
And so what I fundamentally believe is that great teaching matters and we need to be able to identify those teachers who routinely are making an extraordinary difference in students' lives. And to say that teaching has no impact on student performance, on student achievement, just absolutely makes no sense to me. It absolutely degrades the profession.
So the counterargument -- so right now as a country basically zero percent of student achievement relates to teacher evaluation. I think that's a problem. I also think 100 percent -- if all you do is look at a test score to evaluate a teacher, I think that's a problem. So zero is a problem; 100 is a problem. As a country, we're here, we're trying to move to a middle point where you would evaluate teachers on multiple measures -- that's really important -- not just on a single test score, but, yes, student achievement would be a part of what you look at in evaluating a teacher.
And so whether it's an individual teacher, whether it's a school, whether it's a school district, whether it's a state, the whole thing as a country we need to do is we need to accelerate the rate of change. We have to get better faster. And there are teachers every single year -- just to give you an illustration -- there are teachers every single year where the average child in their class is gaining two years of growth -- two years of growth per year of instruction. That is herculean work. Those teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. And nobody can tell you who those teachers are.
There are some schools that do that, not just one miraculous teacher or one miraculous student. There are schools that year after year produce students that are showing extraordinary gains. Shouldn't we know that? Isn't that something valuable? Shouldn't we be learning from them?
And the flip side of it, if you have teachers or schools where students are falling further and further behind each year, I think we need to know that as well. And so we just want to have an open, honest conversation, but at the end of the day, teachers should never be evaluated on a single test score. I want to be absolutely clear there should always be multiple measures. But student achievement has to be a piece of what teachers are evaluated on.
And there's a recent study that came out, The New Teacher Project, that talked about this Widget Effect where 99 percent of teachers were rated as superior. It's not reality.
On your second point, on charter caps, I've been really clear I'm not a fan of charter schools, I'm a fan of good charter schools. And what we need in this country is just more good schools. We need more good elementary, more good middle, more good high schools. No second grader knows whether they're going to a charter school, or a gifted school, or traditional school, or magnet school. They know, does my teacher care about me? Am I safe? Is there high expectations? Does the principal know who I am?
We need more good schools. And where you have -- where you have good charters, we need to replicate them and to learn from them and to grow. Where you have bad charters, we need to close them down and hold them accountable. And so this is not let a thousand flowers bloom, this is trying to take what is being successful and grow.
And what I would say is if something is working, if you reduce -- we talked about the graduation rate, if you're doing something to reduce the dropout rate and increase the graduation rate, would you put a cap on that strategy? Would you ever say that we're going to cap the number of students who can take AP classes this year? We're going to limit the number of kids who take -- we're going to limit the number of kids that graduate? We would never do that.
So if something is working, if that innovation is helping us get better, why would you put an artificial cap on it? So let's let that innovation flourish, but at the same time actually have a high bar and hold folks accountable.
So I was a big fan of successful charter schools in Chicago when I was a superintendent there, but I also closed three charter schools for academic failure. And you need both. Good charters are a big piece of the answer. Bad charters perpetuate the status quo and we need to challenge that.
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, we're thrilled to be here and this is a school that's getting better and better, and you guys are working really, really hard. And we've been lucky. We have a President here who has got a tough, tough job. Being President is tough without the -- he's fighting two wars, a really, really tough economy -- I like your shirt.
STUDENT: Thanks. (Laughter.)
SECRETARY DUNCAN: And what amazes me is that week after week, month after month, he just keeps coming back to education, and he's absolutely passionate about it. He and his wife, the First Lady Michelle Obama, received great educations. Neither one was born with a lot of money, but they worked really hard and had great teachers and great principals and made the most of it. And now he's our President. So it's a pretty remarkable journey. The only reason he's the President is because he got a great education.
So we're thrilled to be here. He might want to say a few things, and looks like you guys have questions for him. And so we'll be quick and we'll open up to your questions.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it is good to see all of you. Thanks so much for having us.
First of all, I've got a great Secretary of Education in Arne Duncan. So he helps school districts all across the country in trying to figure out how to improve what's going on in the schools. And let me just pick up on something that Arne said earlier.
I was really lucky to have a great education. I didn't have a lot of money. My parents weren't famous. In fact, my father left when I was two years old, so I really didn't grow up with a father in the house; mostly it was my mom and my grandparents. But they always emphasized education and they were able to send me to good schools, and by working hard I was obviously in a position to do some good stuff.
My wife, Michelle, same thing. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Her dad was actually disabled, he had multiple sclerosis, but he still worked every day in a blue collar job. And her mom didn't work, and when she did she was a secretary. But because she worked really hard in school she ended up getting a scholarship to Princeton and to Harvard Law School and ended up really being able to achieve a lot.
So that's the reason why we are spending a lot of time talking to folks like you, because we want all of you to understand that there's nothing more important than what you're doing right here at this school. And Wright has a great reputation, this school is improving all the time, but ultimately how good a school is depends on how well you guys are doing.
And the main message that I just wanted to deliver to you is, every single one of you could be doing the same kinds of things that Arne is doing or I'm doing or you could be running a company or you can be inventing a product or you could -- look, anything you can imagine, you can accomplish, but the only way you do it is if you're succeeding here in school. And we are spending a lot of money to try to improve school buildings and put computers in and make sure that your teachers are well trained and that they are getting the support they need.
So we're working really hard to try to reform the schools, but ultimately what matters most is how badly you want a good education. If you think that somehow somebody is just going to -- you can tilt your head and somebody is going to pour education in your ear, that's just not how it works. The only way that you end up being in a position to achieve is if you want it, if inside you want it.
And part of the reason why we wanted to talk to you guys is, you're right at the point now in your lives where what you do is really going to start mattering. My daughters are a little younger than you -- Malia is 11, Sasha is eight -- but when you're in grade school, you're playing -- hopefully somebody is making sure you're doing your homework when you get it, but to some degree you're still just kind of learning how to learn.
By the time you get to middle school, you're now going to be confronted with a lot of choices. You're going to start entering those teenage years where there are a lot of distractions and in some places people will say you don't need to worry about school or it's uncool to be smart or -- you know, all kinds of things. And, look, I'll be honest, I went through some of that when I was in high school and I made some mistakes and had some setbacks.
So I just want everybody to understand right now that nothing is going to be more important to you than just being hungry for knowledge. And if all of you decide to do that, then there are going to be teachers and principals and secretaries of education who are going to be there to help you. So hopefully you guys will take that all to heart.
All right. Okay. Now we're going to kick out everybody so I can let you -- you guys can ask me all the really tough questions without having the press here.
The President and Secretary Arne Duncan will meet with approximately 40 students at James C. Wright Middle School, one of two public charter schools in Madison, Wisconsin. The group of 6th, 7th and 8th graders was chosen based on teacher recommendation.
RACE TO THE TOP ANNOUNCEMENT
JAMES C. WRIGHT MIDDLE SCHOOL
1:30 PM CDT
The President will deliver remarks to students, parents, teachers, school officials and state/local leaders at James C. Wright Middle School on strengthening America's education system and putting the interests of the nation's students first. In coming weeks, states will be able to compete for a grant from one of the largest investments ever made in education - over $4 billion - the Race to the Top Fund. These grants will be made available to states committed to transforming the way we educate our kids so that they can develop a real plan to improve the quality of education across the nation.
The audience will be composed of approximately 500 Wright Middle School students, parents, teachers, and school officials as well as state and local leaders. Secretary Duncan will also be in attendance.
PARTICIPANTS
- Principal Nancy Evans will welcome students, parents and invited guests.
- Ari Davis (6th grade) will lead the Pledge of Allegiance.
- Miko Jobst (8th grade), Laura Sumi (7th grade), and Erika Meyer (orchestra teacher) will perform the National Anthem.
- Governor Jim Doyle will introduce the President.
BACKGROUND ON JAMES C. WRIGHT MIDDLE SCHOOL
The mission of the Wright Middle school is "to educate all students to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence required to participate fully in an evolving global society." A public charter school established in 1997, the Wright school is the smallest and most ethnically and economically diverse middle school in Madison (38% African-American, 37% Latino, 13% White, and 86% low-income). The school also has a significant population of students with disabilities (22%) and English language learners (39%), and outpaces both the school district and statewide average achievement for both student subgroups.
Wright offers a core curriculum of language arts, social studies, math and science at each grade level, and provides enrichment courses in physical education, music, art, and technology. All grades at the school participate in a social action project focused on the environment at the sixth grade level; the economy at the seventh grade level; and government at the eighth grade level. Among the school's signature reforms are a small and tailored instructional program; bilingual resource specialists (Spanish and Hmong languages); an academic acceleration program in literacy to support struggling 6th and 7th graders; and a mentorship and afterschool homework program.
Wright is also one of three middle schools in Madison that partners with the University of Madison in a teacher preparation program through an innovative model that pairs new teachers with veterans and delivers professional development and ongoing support.
State officials changed the way the TDEC "value added" and "achievement" report card scores were calculated this year.
"Because we have been on an aggressive path to improvement with the Tennessee Diploma Project," Education Commissioner Timothy Webb said, "it was necessary to utilize this transition year to change our calculation methods and more accurately demonstrate student progress in an effort to pursue higher standards."
Officials changed the baseline year used to compare student scores and achievement, and they've implemented a new grading scale that could see previously high A marks lowered to the B or C level, according to a TDEC release.
Referring to the scoring changes, Knox County Schools spokesperson Melissa Copelan, in a news release, said, "This makes comparison of the 2009 Report Card data with previous years' scores not possible or valid."
Arne Duncan is the latest in a splendid crop of U.S. education secretaries over the last few decades. The ones I have known best include, in alphabetical order: Bill Bennett, Rod Paige, Dick Riley and Margaret Spellings--all fine people who care about kids and understand the issues. But I wish all of them had not spent valuable time trying to deal with the painfully slow pace and often politically-addled reasoning of national education policy. Their best work for kids, in my view, happened when they were NOT education secretary. So let's abolish the office and get that talent back where it belongs, where school change really happens, in our states and cities.
Secretary Duncan is going to reject this idea immediately, and I know why. He took the job because his friend the president needed him. Both are from Chicago, and know how much that city has struggled to improve its schools. The president, I suspect, thought that Duncan, the former chief of the Chicago public schools, could use all he had learned there to raise achievement for students across the country.
It sounds great, but it was the same thought that led previous presidents to appoint those previous fine education secretaries to their posts. How much good did that do? Test scores for elementary and middle school students have come up a bit in the last couple of decades, but not enough to get excited about. High school scores are still flat. If national education policy had made a big jump forward, I would say we should continue to fill this job, but that hasn't happened either. I think the No Child Left Behind law, supported by both parties, was an improvement over previous federal policies, but it was only copying what several states had already done to make schools accountable and identify schools that needed extra help.
Duncan will never admit this, but I am betting that soon he will realize, if he hasn't already, that he had the potential to do much more for students when he was running the Chicago schools. He was able to make vital decisions like appointing principals, rather than push papers and give speeches in his new Washington gig.
Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.
Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.
Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. "For every one percent of a public school's students who leave for a charter," concludes Mr. Winters, "reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative." It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.
Bennett says instead of assuming people will pick teaching careers and stay for life, schools could consider front-loading pay for beginning teachers to lure more people in, while also instituting closer evaluations for those rookie teachers to make sure they're qualified.
The Professional Standards Board is scheduled to discuss Bennett's call to license teachers based on non-school experience at its November 18 meeting. Bennett says he expects the board to make some changes to the details of the plan, but says he hopes for final approval before year's end.
You could lure new talent with competitive pay and support. Give teachers the power to evaluate each other's work. Reward those who perform, and fire those who don't.
It could spark a seismic change in the nation's schools, or prompt a backlash that alters nothing.
With a little luck, the Hillsborough County Public Schools will soon embark on a seven year, $202 million journey to find out. The district would join a national effort to improve teacher effectiveness, the one factor experts say makes the biggest difference in a student's success or failure.
Officials worry about cost overruns, dissension from teachers and their union, and other glitches which have doomed similar efforts across the nation. But success would create a generation of great teachers, and bolster the district's reputation as a laboratory for educational reform./em>
Teachers, historically, have had to fight for respect in a society that placed a lower premium on teaching. From its origins, teaching has been held as a lowly position held by unskilled clergy and masters (mostly men) who, as long as they could recite the Bible, were equipped. Those that couldn't do, taught. As a matter of fact, not too long ago, before unions fought for higher pay, teaching was the one of the lowest paid professions.
Currently, in Connecticut, along with other states across the country, we have raised the bar, and set the highest standards for our teachers. Susan Engel suggests otherwise. In an article in the New York Times entitled "Teach Your Teachers Well" (11/01/09), she agrees with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's reform that in order to have good schools "we need great teachers." Engel goes onto say that "once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently than we did in the past." Engels calls for a more rigorous teacher preparation program with a 3.5 GPA minimum requirement and an "intensive application process."
The implication is that our failing schools are due to dumb teachers teaching the students. As she states: "weaker students are in the less intellectually rigorous programs and the ones training to become teachers."
Before the 19th century, teachers didn't require a license to teach. Today, we have increased standards, dramatically, yet, oddly enough, our students are failing to make the grade. It's hard to believe that we were better off just teaching the Bible.
Wisconsin schools could use student test scores to evaluate teachers, but they still couldn't use the information to discipline or fire them under a bill moving quickly through the Legislature.
Lawmakers must remove a ban on using test scores in evaluations for Wisconsin to compete for about $4.5 billion in Race to the Top stimulus money for education. Race to the Top is intended to improve student achievement, boost the performance of minority students and raise graduation rates.
Republicans and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say Doyle and Democrats who control the Legislature are still giving teachers too much deference even as they work to qualify the state for the program.
Wisconsin and Nevada are the only states that don't allow test results to be used to evaluate teachers. A similar prohibition in New York expires next year, and California removed its ban earlier this year to compete for the federal stimulus money.
Doyle and Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to get Wisconsin's ban removed with a vote this week. There is urgency because applications for the Race to the Top money will likely be due in a couple of months and the Legislature ends its session for the year on Thursday.
Doyle supports a proposal that would lift Wisconsin's restriction on tying test scores with teacher evaluations. However, it would keep in place a ban on using the scores to fire, suspend or discipline a teacher.
ARNE DUNCAN, the secretary of education, recently called for sweeping changes to the way we select and train teachers. He's right. If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.
Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren't working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.
So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors.
These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process. But they should also be free of charge, and admission should include a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.
Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher.
Barb Williams is a teacher at Madison's Hamilton Middle School.
Former Portland Superintendent Vicki Phillips, now director of education for the Gates Foundation, didn't break any news in her speech to big city school board members and superintendents in Portland last week.
Instead, she reinterated what she and others already have said about Gates' version 2.0 of fixing American high schools: Essentially, it's all about the teacher.
The Gates Foundation first tried to improve students' readiness for college and decrease the dropout rate by getting high schools to morph into smaller, more personalized academies. It poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort, but ultimately, it didn't work.
Gates and Phillips now openly admit: School structure is not the key. (Parents and educators in Portland Public School make use that same line about Phillips' main, and unfinished, initiative while in PPS: creating K-8 schools in place of middle schools.)
So, the foundation now plans to pour at least half a billion dollars into a teacher quality initiative.
It will sponsor rigorous research to help determine which qualities or skills that a teacher exhibits translate into the greatest gains in student learning, so that school districts can identify, recruit and retain the best performers. And it will award millions to several pioneering urban districts that agree to hire, place, train and pay teachers differently, with much more weight given to helping ensure that students get highly effective teachers, particularly students in greatest academic need.
When Kathy Patterson learned about Thursday's D.C. Council hearing, during which Chairman Vincent C. Gray and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee pelted each other with accusations of law-breaking and secret meetings, she had one immediate reaction.
"Here we go again," said Patterson, a former council member and chairwoman of its education committee. It looked as if another attempt at public school reform was disintegrating in a hail of recriminations and rhetoric, with Rhee destined to join Franklin L. Smith, Lt. Gen. Julius Becton, Arlene Ackerman, Paul L. Vance and Clifford B. Janey, the school leaders who preceded her in the past two decades.
It was supposed to be different this time. The 2007 legislation that disbanded the old D.C. Board of Education and gave control of the school system to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) was designed to minimize the push-and-pull of ward politics, making a single executive accountable. But Thursday's hearing vividly illustrated that no legislation can completely account for the mix of personalities who come together to execute it.
In a new report contrasting proficiency scores on state exams to federal tests, Georgia comes across as a very easy grader.
"States are setting the bar too low," said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the release Thursday of the study "Mapping State Proficiency Standards onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007."
The federal study compares proficiency standards of states using the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress -- often called the Nation's Report Card -- as the common yardstick.
A national test given to select students in every state, NAEP is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas.
Because students across the nation take the same NAEP assessment, state-to-state comparisons can be made.
Wisconsin schools could use student test scores to evaluate teachers, but they still couldn't use the information to discipline or fire them under a bill moving quickly through the Legislature.
Lawmakers must remove a ban on using test scores in evaluations for Wisconsin to compete for about $4.5 billion in Race to the Top stimulus money for education. Race to the Top is intended to improve student achievement, boost the performance of minority students and raise graduation rates.
Republicans and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say Doyle and Democrats who control the Legislature are still giving teachers too much deference even as they work to qualify the state for the program.
Wisconsin and Nevada are the only states that don't allow test results to be used to evaluate teachers. A similar prohibition in New York expires next year, and California removed its ban earlier this year to compete for the federal stimulus money.
Doyle and Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to get Wisconsin's ban removed with a vote this week. There is urgency because applications for the Race to the Top money will likely be due in a couple of months and the Legislature ends its session for the year on Thursday.
Doyle supports a proposal that would lift Wisconsin's restriction on tying test scores with teacher evaluations. However, it would keep in place a ban on using the scores to fire, suspend or discipline a teacher.
The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) is a nationally representative, longitudinal study of more than 23,000 9th graders in 944 schools who will be followed through their secondary and postsecondary years. The study focuses on understanding students' trajectories from the beginning of high school into postsecondary education or the workforce and beyond. What students decide to pursue when, why, and how are crucial questions for HSLS:09, especially, but not solely, in regards to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, majors, and careers. This study features a new student assessment in algebraic skills, reasoning, and problem solving and includes, like past studies, surveys of students, their parents, math and science teachers, school administrators, as well as a new survey of school counselors. The first wave of data collection for HSLS:09 begins in the fall of 2009 and will produce not only a nationally representative dataset but also state representative datasets for each of ten states.
According to a new national report, South Carolina student achievement standards are among the highest in the nation.
The report said many states declare students to have achieved grade-level mastery of reading and math when the children have not, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education. [Complete Report 3MB PDF.]
The agency compared state achievement standards to the standards behind the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The report, which was released Thursday, said many states deemed children to be proficient or on grade level based on state standards when those students would rate "below basic," meaning lacking even partial mastery, in reading and math under the NAEP standards.
State standards vary significantly from state to state, according to the report. But South Carolina standards measured among the highest.
In 15 states the standards a student had to meet to score proficient on state reading tests for eighth-graders were not as high as the standards to score basic on NAEP, according to the report. But South Carolina standards for eighth-grade reading were the highest in the nation.
Murray Fisher had a dream: Take the 600 miles of New York City's coastline and all the water surrounding it, and start a maritime high school that would teach inner-city kids about their watery world -- everything from boat building and ocean ecology to oyster growing.
Next year, the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School will open its doors on Governors Island, a tree-covered jewel sold to the Dutch for two axes and a necklace, 800 yards off the coast of Manhattan. But for now, the Harbor School is in Bushwick, in the heart of Brooklyn.
Urban Environment Meets Natural World
At the Harbor School, each student wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the school's name. Tanks burble with classroom-grown fish.
Brendan Malone teaches maritime technology -- his classroom is big enough to build wooden boats in.
A good teacher equals a good school year. Not always, but far more often than not. Ask any parents of an elementary-grade child how the school year is going, and it won't be long before you'll hear them rave about - or bemoan - the teacher their child has been assigned to. There are teachers who are duds, who can find a way to drain the fun out of a unit on dinosaurs for second-graders. And there those with a gift for reaching the eighth-grader slouched in the back of the classroom with a penchant for eye rolling. These teachers can bring to life to Poe's fascination with the dead, or deliver just the right contemporary analogy to make sense of the War of 1812.
Nearly everyone can probably recall a teacher who lit their passion for poetry or who was able to help them connect all the dots in a seemingly incomprehensible algebra formula. We know that individual teachers can make a huge difference.
But public schools in America have been bent on ignoring the obvious: Almost nothing about the way we hire, evaluate, pay, or assign teachers to classrooms is designed to operate with that goal in mind. Most teachers receive only cursory performance evaluations, with virtually every teacher graded highly. We use a one-size-for-all salary structure, in which the only factors used in raises are teachers' higher-education credentials and number of years in the system, neither of which is strongly linked to their effectiveness. And we often let seniority, rather than merit, drive decisions about where a teacher is placed. It is in many ways an industrial model that treats teachers as identical, interchangeable parts, when we know that they are not.
Robert Cook gave people at a multicultural education convention in Denver a patriotic history lesson that was different from any that most people had heard before.
Cook, president of the Oglala Lakota Indian Education Association, said Saturday that Article I Section 8 and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution ensure rights through treaties for American Indians. That includes the right for American Indian children to receive a good education that will prepare them for college and good careers.
Sadly, however, American Indian schools, with an average age of 60 years, are in horrible condition, and the dropout rate of Native people is disproportionately high.
"Our schools are literally falling apart," Cook told the 19th Annual International Conference of the National Association for Multicultural Education, which ends today. "They don't serve the needs of our students."
Notes and Links: President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Visit Madison's Wright Middle School (one of two Charter Schools in Madison).
Background
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will visit Madison's Wright Middle School Wednesday, November 4, 2009, purportedly to give an education speech. The visit may also be related to the 2010 Wisconsin Governor's race. The Democrat party currently (as of 11/1/2009) has no major announced candidate. Wednesday's event may include a formal candidacy announcement by Milwaukee Mayor, and former gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett. UPDATE: Alexander Russo writes that the visit is indeed about Barrett and possible legislation to give the Milwaukee Mayor control of the schools.
I'm certain that a number of local politicians will not miss the opportunity to be seen with the President. Retiring Democrat Governor Jim Doyle, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk (Falk has run for Governor and Attorney General in the past) and Madison School Superintendent Dan Nerad are likely to be part of the event. Senator Russ Feingold's seat is on the fall, 2010 ballot so I would not be surprised to see him at Wright Middle School as well.
"Nuestro Mundo, Inc. is a non-profit organization that was established in response to the commitment of its founders to provide educational, cultural and social opportunities for Madison's ever-expanding Latino community." The dual immersion school lives because the community and several School Board members overcame District Administration opposition. Former Madison School Board member Ruth Robarts commented in 2005:
The Madison Board of Education rarely rejects the recommendations of Superintendent Rainwater. I recall only two times that we have explicitly rejected his views. One was the vote to authorize Nuestro Mundo Community School as a charter school. The other was when we gave the go-ahead for a new Wexford Ridge Community Center on the campus of Memorial High School.
Here's how things happen when the superintendent opposes the Board's proposed action.
Those interested in a quick look at the state of Madison's public schools should review Superintendent Dan Nerad's proposed District performance measures. This document presents a wide variety of metrics on the District's current performance, from advanced course "participation" to the percentage of students earning a "C" in all courses and suspension rates, among others.
Education Hot Topics
Finally, I hope President Obama mentions a number of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's recent hot topics, including:
American schools have struggled for decades to close what's called the 'minority achievement gap' -- the lower average test scores, grades and college attendance rates among black and Latino students.
Typically, schools place children who are falling behind in remedial classes, to help them catch up. But some schools are finding that grouping students by ability, also known as tracking or leveling, causes more problems than it solves.
Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., is a well-funded school that is roughly 60 percent black and 40 percent white. The kids mix easily and are friendly with one another. But when the bell rings, students go their separate ways.
Teacher Noel Cooperberg's repeat algebra class last year consisted of all minority kids who had flunked the previous year. There were only about a dozen students because the school keeps lower-level classes small to try to boost success. But a group of girls sitting in the middle never so much as picked up a pencil, and they often disrupted the class. It was a different scene from Cooperberg's honors-level pre-calculus class, which had three times as many students -- most of them white.
These two classes are pretty typical for the school. Lower-level classes -- called levels two and three -- are overwhelmingly black, while higher-level four and five are mostly white. Students are assigned to these levels by a combination of grades, test scores and teacher recommendations.
The purpose of this report is to describe the recomrnendations in response to the Madison Metropolitan School District Mathematics Task Force Report: Review of Mathematics Curriculum and Related Issues, submitted to the Board of Education June, 2008.
Administrative Recommendations Summary The materials included in this packet update and replace those distributed to the Board of Education in April 2009. Included in the materials is a proposed budget.
Middle School Mathematics Specialists (see Recommendations 1-5)
The Superintendent and UW-Madison Deans of Letters and Sciences and the School of Education commissioned a representative and collaborative group to design a professional development plan for this initiative. The group was convened in June and has since met four times during the summer to research and design a professional development plan to support middle school mathematics teachers.
The Middle School Math Partnership committee has tentatively planned five courses for the professional development proposal. Those courses are Number and Generalization, Rational Number and Proportional Reasoning, Geometry, Measurement and Trigonometry, and Algebra and Functions. The courses would be spread out over two years and be co-facilitated by UW and MMSD staff.
Research, data gathering and design will continue through 2009-2010 with the initial cohort of middle school teachers beginning in summer 2010. Upon completion of an initial draft, the plan will be presented to district teachers for further input and refinement.
In collaboration with the above group, a National Science Foundation Targeted Partnership proposal, Professional Learning Partnership K-20 (PLP K-20), was submitted on August 20, 2009. A UW-Madison and MMSD team of nearly 30 members worked during the summer to craft a proposal focused on systemic and sustainable mathematics professional development. The vision described in the proposal creates "a lasting interface to coordinate material, human, social, and cyber resources" among the UW-Madison and District. The principal investigator of the NSF proposal is Eric Wilcots. Co-Pl's include Provost Deluca, Superintendent Nerad, Dean Sandefur and Dean Underwood.
Kennedy worked closely with President Bush on the flawed and deeply unpopular No Child Left Behind Act. Like a packaged-goods company with a tainted product, the Obama administration has left that name behind and now calls its program the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, LBJ's original title in 1965. But the accountability-and-standards movement Kennedy and Bush launched is essential, and Obama has moved much faster than expected to advance it. He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are showing some Chicago muscle and giving states a "choice" right out of The Untouchables: lift your caps on the number of innovative charter schools allowed and your prohibitions on holding teachers accountable for whether kids learn--or lose a chance for some of Obama's $5 billion "Race to the Top" money. Massachusetts recently lifted its charter cap and nearly a dozen other states are scampering to comply. Now that's hardball we can believe in.
This issue cleaves the Democratic Party. On one side are Obama and the reformers, who point out that we now have a good idea of what works: KIPP and other "no excuses" charter models boast 80 percent graduation rates in America's roughest neighborhoods, nearly twice the norm. On the other side are the teachers' unions and their incrementalist enablers in the political class. They talk a good game about education but make up phony excuses for opposing real reform and accountability.
In a surprise move, Gov. Paterson said yesterday he doesn't plan to push for changes to state laws that experts have warned could jeopardize New York's chances of raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal education aid.
Federal officials have highlighted two state laws in particular -- one limiting the number of charter schools to 200 and another prohibiting the use of student test scores in determining whether a teacher deserves tenure -- as potential barriers to the state's bid for a share of the $4.3 billion competitive pot, known as Race to the Top.
While legislation was introduced last week to enhance New York's standing by scrapping those laws, a spokeswoman for Paterson -- who has supported charter schools in the past -- said the governor would not be among its boosters.
"At this time, we believe New York state is eligible for Race to the Top funds and that legislative changes are currently not needed," said the spokeswoman, Marissa Shorenstein.
Everybody knows that college is harder to get into today than ever before, right? That's why students flock to test-prep courses, and spend countless hours trying to transform themselves into what they imagine admissions deans want.
Admissions deans have tried to play down the hype, and just last week the National Association for College Admission Counseling released data showing that the acceptance rate at four-year colleges has declined from 71.3 percent in 2001 to 66.8 percent in 2007 -- hardly an impossible bar to get over. So why are so many people convinced that the story in higher education admissions is about increased competitiveness?
A small number of colleges have become much more competitive over recent decades, according to Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford University. But her study -- published by the National Bureau of Economic Research -- finds that as many as half of colleges have become substantially less competitive over time.
The key shift in college admissions isn't increased competitiveness, Hoxby writes. Rather, both trends are explained by an increased willingness by students generally, and especially the best students, to attend colleges that aren't near where they grew up. This shift increased the applicant pool for some colleges but cut it for others.
"Typical college-going students in the U.S. should be unconcerned about rising selectivity. If anything, they should be concerned about falling selectivity, the phenomenon they will actually experience," Hoxby writes.
This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges. I show that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.
The initial program in biomedicine would include courses in the principles of biomedical sciences; human body systems; medical interventions; and science research. The classes likely would be taught by high school teachers, but would incorporate business and academic experts to help teach, offer apprenticeships and career placement.
The academy's location won't be decided until leaders know how many students are interested in the program. However, one possibility is holding classes at MATC's West campus in the former Famous Footwear building, Reis said.
Students - organizers hope about 150 - would travel from their respective high schools to Madison's Far West Side every day for the courses, which would be part of the academy's two-year programs. Depending on the interest in the biomedical class, three sections would be taught during the day and possibly one in the evening, Reis said.
Offering a night class would maximize the use of the facility and offer some flexibility to students who live farther outside of Madison, he said.
Verona, Middleton Cross-Plains, Belleville, McFarland, Mount Horeb, Oregon, Wisconsin Heights and Madison school districts have agreed to participate in the academy.
Discussing these data is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, use of the WKCE does not instill much confidence, from my perspective. via "Some States Drop Testing Bar" by John Hechinger.
A new federal study shows that nearly a third of the states lowered their academic proficiency standards in recent years, a step that helps schools stay ahead of sanctions under the No Child Left Behind law. But lowering standards also confuses parents about how children's achievement compares with those in other states and countries.
The study, released Thursday, was the first by the federal Department of Education's research arm to use a statistical comparison between federal and state tests to analyze whether states had changed their testing standards.
It found that 15 states lowered their proficiency standards in fourth- or eighth-grade reading or math from 2005 to 2007. Three states, Maine, Oklahoma and Wyoming, lowered standards in both subjects at both grade levels, the study said.
Eight states increased the rigor of their standards in one or both subjects and grades. Some states raised standards in one subject but lowered them in another, including New York, which raised the rigor of its fourth-grade-math standard but lowered the standard in eighth-grade reading, the study said.
The single best piece of writing in recent memory on the large scale structural forces shaping higher education and the role of technology in impacting these forces is the first chapter of The Tower and the Cloud, "The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle?"
You can read Katz's chapter here, or better yet go and get the whole volume. I'm focussing on Katz's introductory chapter, but the whole book contains a series of wonderful essays that flush out the ideas raised by Katz in his chapter and are worth the investment to read.
Rarely does a piece of writing stick with me like Katz's chapter has, one-year on from when I first picked up the Tower and the Cloud at last year's EDUCAUSE conference. We live in such a fast world of micro information, tweets, disposable blog posts, quick YouTube videos, online presentations, and RSS feeds. We ed. tech. people like the new new, we like innovation, we are suspicious of the status quo and firmly believe that if technology has changed everything else it should (and can) change the academy as well.
Katz's writing is an important antidote to the "right now" nature of much of our information consumption, communication and work in learning technology. He takes the time to tell the long story of the development and growth of higher education, and then situates the disruptive innovations slamming into our institutions as part of this larger story.
President Obama's November 4, 2009 Madison Destination: Wright Middle School?
President Obama's "education" speech, due to be delivered in Madison on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 may, perhaps be given at Wright Middle School. It is a (rare) charter school located in Madison. Obama and Education Secretary (and former Chicago Superintendent) have been promoting structural change within our public schools. Wright, a Charter School, was birthed via a "Madison Middle School 2000" initiative along with the desire to place a new middle school on Madison's south side. Local biotech behemoth Promega offered land for the school in Fitchburg, which the District turned down (that land and initiative became Eagle School).
AND what was the Minotaur? The ten-year-olds scribble their answer onto tiny whiteboards and hold them up for the teacher to see. Once each has got a nod, they repeat together: "half-man, half-bull."
By the time these fifth-graders at the BASIS school in Scottsdale, Arizona, reach 8th grade they will have the option of taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams, standardised nationally to test high-school students at college level. By the 9th grade, they must do so. As a result, says Michael Block, the school's co-founder, our students are "two years ahead of Arizona and California schools and one year ahead of the east coast."
But that, he emphasises, is not the yardstick he and his wife Olga use. Instead, their two BASIS schools, one in Tucson and this one in suburban Phoenix, explicitly compete with the best schools in the world--South Korea's in maths, say, or Finland's in classics.
They had the idea after Olga Block came to Arizona from her native Czech Republic, looked for a school for her daughter and was horrified by the mediocrity and low expectations at American public schools. So they decided to "establish a world-standard school in the desert," says Mr Block. They started the Tucson campus in 1998 and added the Scottsdale one recently.
The promise of distance learning through the Internet has yet to be realized and I'm puzzled why this is the case since it should be possible to collaborate on creating a great online curriculum. Once it is created it can be easily accessed by anyone.
Why don't we use the social networking and collaborative tools we already have to put together an open-sourced curriculum consisting of text, images, videos, lectures, online volunteers acting as tutors, etc. We have all the technology we need to do all of this today.
I've always been amazed that San Francisco/Silicon Valley region public schools are so bad. We are inventing the future here, yet we can't use our ingenuity, our technologies to improve our local schools? Our public schools should be showcases, not basket cases, we should be ashamed to allow this to happen.
So it's good to see Google becoming more interested in schools because there is a lot it could do to help, especially in terms of projects like its Google Books. Maybe it could help to provide text books. It's incredible how expensive textbooks are.
For the past two days Google has hosted a conference on its campus: Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age. The goal was to "create and act upon a breakthrough strategy for scaling up effective models of teaching and learning for children." It's not clear what breakthrough strategy has emerged but at least it's a start,
It's an eternally vexing problem in New Jersey: How do you give the children in the state's largely poor cities as good an education as the kids in middle-class and affluent suburbs?
The three main candidates for governor in Tuesday's election have different ideas highlighting their plans.
Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine says a major piece of the answer is expanding a program that seems to be working , state-funded preschools for low-income children.
Both his challengers, Republican Chris Christie and Independent Chris Daggett, want to give parents and students more ways out of bad schools, hoping that will pressure them to improve.
By most measures, New Jersey's school system as a whole is good. On standardized tests that can be used to compare states, students regularly rank consistently at or near the top.
The system is also pricey: Public schools cost more than $16,000 per student in the 2006-07 school year , the last year for which federal data is available. That was the highest price tag in the country, though it also comes in a state where incomes and the cost of living are among the highest.
For all the money, there's long been a gap between how well students do in the cities and in the suburbs.
Education reformers are intensifying their push to bring charter schools to West Virginia as parents, teachers and lawmakers ready themselves for another round of legislative battles aimed at improving the state's school system.
Charter schools advocates are stepping up their lobbying efforts by running advertisements and polling West Virginians on their thoughts about charters, which are private-style public schools. The state's powerful teachers unions helped kill a charter school proposal earlier this year.
"We hope to change that conversation a bit," said Tim McClung, a member of the group that calls itself West Virginians for Education Reform
To help do that, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools started polling state residents Wednesday night to gauge their reaction to charter schools, McClung said.
Fluency in English is part of the foundation necessary for a good quality of life in the United States. The school system must be set up so that students who are in an English language learning [ELL] programs are able to master the language and transition out of the program, as soon as possible, to join the rest of the student body to continue their studies.
An analysis by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, appropriately entitled "¿Qué Pasa? Are ELL Students Remaining in English Learning Classes Too Long?" points to delays in reclassifying as "fluent English proficient" students who began school as English language learners so that they can transition into regular academic programs. The detailed study shows that 30% of students who started First Grade as English language learners were still in the same classification eight years later. This situation puts students at greater risk of academic failure, as Ninth Grade is seen as critical for success in High School.
The problem is that students who are not reclassified by school authorities as fluent English proficient are at a disadvantage even when they get to the California High School exit exam.
Public charter schools'
presence in K-12 schooling continues to grow, according to the latest Top 10 Charter Communities by Market Share report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In fact, charters now enroll more than one in five public school students in 14 communities - including major cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City.
Demand remains strongest in urban areas - and as a result, charter "market share" is growing rapidly in cities and adjacent suburbs, even while the overall number of students remains a modest portion of nationwide enrollment.
"Charter schools are working at scale in a growing number of American cities," according to Nelson Smith, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "Chartering is becoming well-established as a key component of the public education delivery system," he added.
Nearly 30% of Los Angeles Unified School District students placed in English language learning classes in early primary grades were still in the program when they started high school, increasing their chances of dropping out, according to a new study released Wednesday.
More than half of those students were born in the United States and three-quarters had been in the school district since first grade, according to the report by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC.
The findings raise questions about the teaching in the district's English language classes, whether students are staying in the program too long and what more educators should do for students who start school unable to speak English fluently.
"If you start LAUSD at kindergarten and are still in ELL classes at ninth grade, that's too long," said Wendy Chavira, assistant director of the policy institute. "There is something wrong with the curriculum if there are still a very large number of students being stuck in the system."
Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who has made teacher quality the cornerstone of her three-month-old administration, is raising the score that aspiring teachers must achieve on a basic skills test required for admission to all of the state's teacher training programs.
Currently, Rhode Island's "cut score" ranks among the lowest in the nation, alongside Mississippi and Guam. Gist wants to raise it to the highest.
"Teacher quality is the single most important factor for student success in school," Gist said. "This is a first step in raising our expectations across the board for our educators and our system."
Gist says she intends to transform "the entire career span of a teacher," including who is allowed to train to become a teacher, the rigor of the programs, mentoring of new teachers, support and training for veteran teachers, and the reward of higher pay for high performance.
"We need to look at how we improve at every point along the span," Gist said. "Looking at teacher cut scores before they ever get accepted to a preparation program is a way to safeguard the early gate."
Gist and her staff reviewed other states' cut scores and found Virginia's to be the highest in reading, math and writing. Gist set Rhode Island's score one point higher than Virginia's in each subject, saying she wants to make Rhode Island's education system the envy of the nation.
"I have the utmost confidence that Rhode Island's future teachers are capable of this kind of performance," she said.
Perhaps one day we'll have such actions in Wisconsin...
At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration's approach to education reform: "We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn't work." Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top" initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
The "Massachusetts miracle," in which Bay State students' soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature's passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch's legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch's ideas and urge other states to do the same.
Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov's lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader's subjective response, and the text's historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation--on Wordsworth--he was already breaking with the New Critics. "I came to see that the text alone is not enough," Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. "The unspoken--that is, relevant background knowledge--is absolutely crucial in reading a text." Hirsch's big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia.
Mayor James Doyle has declared he's in the city's school superintendent search process, a move that is not sitting well with some School Committee members.
Doyle told members of the School Committee in an Oct. 15 letter, "I have decided to organize a search committee that will represent the entire community.
"The purpose of this search committee is to assist and advise the School Committee in the task of securing the best possible candidate to serve as Pawtucket's next superintendent."
Acting School Committee Chairman James Chellel told The Valley Breeze he planned to sit down with Doyle during the early part of this week as he tries to avoid a showdown over whether Doyle's administration or the School Committee has the authority to set up a search committee.
"I want to show that we're working together on this, but I do have reservations about the mayor taking this over," said Chellel.
There's no question that selecting a new superintendent falls under the purview of the School Committee, said Chellel, but the questions of who should set up the parameters of the search to find outgoing Superintendent Hans Dellith's replacement are a little more fuzzy.
"I've asked our legal counsel for an opinion on it," he said.
In the world of for-profit higher education, and higher education in general, the University of Phoenix has historically been viewed as the 800-pound gorilla.
As of Tuesday, it may be more like a 1,000-pound gorilla. As Phoenix's parent company, the Apollo Group, reported its fourth quarter and annual earnings Tuesday, it announced that the university's enrollment of degree-seeking students grew to 443,000 as of August 2009, up 22 percent from 362,000 in August 2008. The biggest growth in Phoenix's enrollments, by far, came among students seeking associate degrees, which rose by 37 percent, to 201,200 from 146,500 in 2008.
About two-thirds of the university's new students as of August are female, 27.7 percent are African-American, and about half are 30 or over.
The university attributed the sizable increases to a range of factors, including increased efforts in retaining students, expanded marketing, and the "current economic downturn, as working learners seek to advance their education to improve their job security or reemployment prospects." Many community colleges and several of Phoenix's major peers in for-profit career education, including Kaplan Higher Education (21.9 percent) and Corinthian Colleges, Inc. (24.4 percent), have reported sharp upturns in student enrollments this fall.
Everyone can agree that 1+1=2. But the idea that 7 is greater than 13 -- that some numbers are luckier than others -- makes no sense to some people. Such numerical biases can cause deep divisions.
And that is what happened earlier this month in Hong Kong. Property developer Henderson Land Development Co. made news for selling a condominium for $56.6 million, a price the developer called a residential record in Asia. But after that sale was announced, the property began making news for other unusual numbers. Henderson is labeling the floors of its property at 39 Conduit Road with numbers that increase, but not in the conventional 1-then-2 way. The floor above 39, for example, is 60. And the top three floors are consecutively labeled 66, 68 and 88.
This offended some people's sense of order. At a protest Sunday against high housing prices, Hong Kong Democratic Party legislators expressed dissatisfaction with the numbering scheme's tenuous relationship to reality. "You could call the ground floor the 88th floor, but it's meaningless," says Emily Lau. "When you say you live on the 88th floor, people expect you to be on the 88th floor, not the 10th floor or something."
For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University's journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project's director says, and an Illinois governor once cited those wrongful convictions as he announced he was commuting the sentences of everyone on death row.
But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another case, that of a man convicted in a murder 31 years ago, a hearing has been scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request: Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves.
The prosecutors, it seems, wish to scrutinize the methods of the students this time. The university is fighting the subpoenas.
What should you do if you're a high school junior who feels that spending one more year in high school would be a waste of time?
A thread on College Confidential raises that question, and has generated a lot of interesting responses. Here's an excerpt from the original post:
I am a junior in high school and because I seem like I am more mature and academically way ahead of my peers (especially in the math and sciences) at the moment, am considering an early leave from high school. But the thing is, I cannot get a graduation degree unless I complete four years of high school. Nevertheless, my desire for early admission into college has never ceased because (a) I know what I want to study and roughly what I want to do in life and (b) I feel like my senior year in high school will be somewhat a waste of my time since I would have practically exhausted all the resources available to me.
In a later post, the student adds: "Every day at school I cannot help but realize that I need so much more than just the classes and activities I have available to me at the moment. I don't know if I could stand senior year."
Economics correspondent Paul Solman takes his Business Desk blog inside classrooms across the United States to respond to high school students' most pressing questions about Wall Street, the recession and unemployment.
Question: How does it happen that the whole world is in a recession? --Kavion, senior, Central High School, Phoenix, Ariz.
Paul Solman: The whole world isn't in a recession. China is growing; so is India; so is Brazil. Among them, those three countries alone have something like two-thirds our GDP and maybe nine times as many people as we do.
As to the parts of the world that are in recession -- largely in Europe -- it looks like the reason is because their citizens borrowed and spent "beyond their means."
According to the Virginia Department of Education, the drop-out rate for Charlottesville high school students is 13 percent.
How would you address this question? What measures would you recommend, specifically, to lower the rate?
As of last year, the state is calculating the dropout rate in a new, more accurate manner than in prior years, tracking individual students starting in ninth grade. Obviously the factors leading to a student's high school success or failure start much earlier than ninth grade; therefore it is impossible to defeat the dropout problem even over several years of making all the right moves educationally. Moreover, because the educational needs of all children start at birth, every positive educational change will ultimately increase his or her chances of remaining in school.
Ned Michie
As a public school division, we take all comers regardless of aptitude, educational background, grade level, or other circumstance. While every school division has a set of challenges, Charlottesville's student population presents a particularly unusual array of educational challenges for a small division.
On the one hand, we have a large number of children who will go on to the finest universities and become doctors, lawyers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and captains of industry. We ensure that these students stay challenged by providing an excellent gifted education program, honors classes, and about 20 AP and dual enrollment courses. On the other end of the spectrum, we have many children with great educational needs. For example, about 10 percent of our students use English as a second language (with about 50 different native languages). Half were refugees arriving with little or no knowledge of English; many had no education even in their own countries. Charlottesville also has a large number of group homes and, sadly, still has a significant population of economically disadvantaged families whose children are statistically at risk educationally.
Memphis City Schools administrators haven't spent the money, but they're counting on nearly $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the effectiveness of the district's teachers.
In fact, the district is investing $720,000 for a consultant to help make MCS Gates grant-ready.
U.S. Sen. Bill Frist may also tap the wealth of the Microsoft founder to help put together a statewide reform plan for Tennessee that would address teaching and school governance issues.
Not just at the district and state level, however, is the influence of America's richest education reformer being felt.
The reform-minded Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who's preparing to hand out $4.3 billion in stimulus money for public education improvement projects across the country, has two former Gates employees among his inner circle.
ow much of your personal information is Google willing to turn over to a third party without a fight? We've asked a California federal court to unseal a report that would give customers of the world's largest Internet company an answer to that question.
Google handed the report in question over to a judge in September to comply with a restraining order requested by Rocky Mountain Bank. The bank requested the order after it mistakenly sent the bank records for more than 1,000 customers to the wrong Gmail account. In the order granted by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, Google was told to deactivate the Gmail account and to provide contact information about the user of the Gmail account and whether he or she had read the e-mail. Google and the Gmail account holder also were told they couldn't read the email, download the records or forward them to anyone.
A Gmail user who did nothing wrong had his or her account shut down because of the bank's monumental screw up. And Google, a company that basically prints its own cash, didn't lift a finger to protect the rights of one of its users. I love my Gmail account but this is a good reminder that there is NO privacy with any e-mail provider when push comes to shove. Public Citizen is representing Media Post Communications in this case. One of their reporters, Wendy Davis, has written extensively about the bank's bungled email and Google's lack of intestinal fortitude:
Volume One, Number One
The Concord Review, Fall 1988
Theodore Sizer: Professor of Education, Brown University Author, Horace's Compromise, Horace's School Chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools
Americans shamefully underestimate their adolescents. With often misdirected generosity, we offer them all sorts of opportunities and, at least for middle-class and affluent youths, the time and resources to take advantage of them.
We ask little in return. We expect little, and the young people sense this, and relax. The genially superficial is tolerated, save in areas where the high school students themselves have some control, in inter-scholastic athletics, sometimes in their part-time work, almost always in their socializing.
At least if and when they reflect about it, adolescents have cause to resent us old folks. We do not signal clear standards for many important areas of their lives, and we deny them the respect of high expectations. In a word, we are careless about them, and, not surprisingly, many are thus careless about themselves. "Me take on such a difficult and responsible task?" they query, "I'm just a kid!"
All sorts of young Americans are capable of solid, imaginative scholarship, and they exhibit it for us when we give them both the opportunity and a clear measure of the standard expected. Presented with this opportunity, young folk respond. The Concord Review is such an opportunity, a place for fine scholarship to be exhibited, to be exposed to that most exquisite of scholarly tests, wide publication.
The prospect of "exhibition" is provocative. I must show publicly that I know, that I have ideas, and that I can defend them resourcefully. My competence is not merely an affair between me and a soulless grading machine in Princeton, New Jersey. It is a very public act.
The Concord Review is, for the History-inclined high school student, what the best of secondary school theatre and music performances, athletics, and (in some respects) science fairs are, for their aficionados. It is a testing ground, and one of elegant style, taste and standards. The Review does not undersell students. It respects them. And in such respect is the fuel for excellence.
================
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
About a month ago, Deidra Hewitt, who lives in Denver, North Carolina, where she has two children in a public elementary school, wrote about how the school required her to sign off on her children's homework more than 400 times a year. Today, she writes about what happened after she wrote to the school Superintendent to tell him about the policy. Read the background here.
Advocacy Can Make a Difference
by Deidra Hewitt
I emailed a letter to the school Superintendent and the Board of Education, regarding the "sign or your child will be punished" policies, that I find so offensive. The Superintendent contacted me for a meeting. I was really pleased with the outcome of this encounter. The Superintendent of Schools completely agreed with me, about parent signatures being voluntary. He was against children being held accountable for parent behavior. He indicated that changes were in the works. Starting at the county level, he advised me that the "accountability agreements" were being phased out, and that they will be gone next year. He stated that he is actively searching for ways to engage parents of disadvantaged students. He agrees that countless signatures do not accomplish this goal. He is prepared to investigate the objectives of requests for parent signatures, and certify that signatures are voluntary.
Teachers routinely use test scores to help them evaluate their students.
Wisconsin schools should similarly use student test results to help them evaluate teachers.
Every other state except Nevada allows this.
Wisconsin should, too.
And if we don't, our state won't be eligible for any of the $4.5 billion in "Race to the Top" grants President Barack Obama plans to award starting next year.
That's how important this reform is to the Democratic president.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced last week he'll push to repeal a Wisconsin law preventing schools from using tests to help evaluate teacher performance.
The Legislature needs to move fast to nix this law because Wisconsin has only a few months to submit an application for some of the $4.5 billion in federal innovation grants.
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, Sesame Workshop with Google and Common Sense Media are sponsoring Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age, a conference of 200 thought leaders who will come together to discuss solutions to the literacy and dropout problems facing the nation. This blog focuses on the dropout crisis; the one yesterday focused on the literacy problems.
The dropout crisis is bigger than you might have guessed. While in some areas it has improved somewhat in the last year, in the country as a whole the problem is growing. Almost fifty percent of students in the fifty largest American cities drop out of high school. In some cities, there is over a seventy percent drop out rate.
A major consequence of the dropout rate is an increase in crime and and the prison rate. We spend more to keep prisoners in jail than we do to educate our students. Typical per-prisoner expenses run from $20,000-$50,000 per year while typical per pupil expenditures run from $7,000 to $20,000, averaging $9,000. This discrepancy needs to be addressed now and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is trying to promote change through incentives in the $100 billion education stimulus package.
At a recent India-China book launch, where human resource development minister Kapil Sibal was present, I made it a point to highlight the comparative picture between India and China in the education sector. This is a crucial sector for emerging economies attempting to achieve inclusive and rapid growth. Moreover, as several recent studies have brought out, returns on skill formation and higher education, which are already substantial, continue to rise as the world increasingly takes on the attributes of a knowledge economy. By the way, the book by Mohan Guruswamy and Zorawar Daulet Singh titled Chasing the Dragon is well worth a read for all those interested in finding out the distance we have to cover to catch up with China.
India's adult literacy is 61 per cent compared with China's 91 per cent. Expenditure on education as a percentage of total public expenditure is 10.7 per cent and 12.8 per cent, respectively. China has 708 researchers per million population compared with 19 in India. In 1990, publications by Indians in journals were 50 per cent higher but in 2008, Chinese publications outnumbered Indian ones by two to one. In 1985, the number of PhDs in science and engineering in India were 4,007 and 125 in China, but by 2004, China had 14,858 PhDs, while we had increased the number to only 6,318. In 2007, Indians filed 35,000 patents compared with 245,161 in China.
After days of frantic blogging on the latest D.C. schools crisis and trading speculation with interested readers, I find it refreshing to visit three educators who are making major changes in two of the city's lowest-performing high schools. Unlike me and many of the people I exchange comments with, they know what they are talking about.
George Leonard, 57, chief executive officer of the Friends of Bedford group from New York; Chief Financial Officer Bevon Thompson, 35; and Chief Operating Officer Niaka Gaston, 34, sit around a table in the basement of the District's Dunbar High School. The school was so dark and filthy when they first saw it that they cringe at the memory.
Dunbar and Coolidge high schools, both educational disaster areas, are under the command of their consulting company. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee handed them the keys to the two schools because of the rigor and high graduation rates they brought to a small public high school, the Bedford Academy, in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The problem is well-known: The U.S. lags far behind other developed countries at the K-12 level in terms of measured performance in math and science courses.
What can be done to change that? The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray posed that question to three experts: Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; and Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, who was also a member of the Obama administration transition team working on education issues.
Here are edited excerpts of their discussion: It's the Teachers
ALAN MURRAY: What will it take to get the American system up to the level of some of the other developed countries in terms of math and science education?
JOEL KLEIN: The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and science. Those countries that are doing best are recruiting their K-12 teachers from the top third of their college graduates. America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third, and when you go into our high-needs communities, we're clearly underserving them.
MR. MURRAY: How do you explain that? It doesn't seem to be a function of money. We spend more than any of these other countries.
MR. KLEIN: We spend it irrationally. My favorite example is, I pay teachers, basically, based on length of service and a few courses that they take. And I can't by contract pay math and science teachers more than I would pay other teachers in the system, even though at different price points I could attract very different people. We've got to use the money we have much more wisely, attract talent, reward excellence.
The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been the biggest player by far in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education.
Now the foundation is taking unprecedented steps to influence education policy, spending millions to influence how the federal government distributes $5 billion in grants to overhaul public schools.
The federal dollars are unprecedented, too.
President Barack Obama persuaded Congress to give him the money as part of the economic stimulus so he could try new ideas to fix an education system that most agree is failing. The foundation is offering $250,000 apiece to help states apply, so long as they agree with the foundation's approach.
Obama and the Gates Foundation share some goals that not everyone embraces: paying teachers based on student test scores, among other measures of achievement; charter schools that operate independently of local school boards; and a set of common academic standards adopted by every state.
Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis -- and Themselves, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
WHAT: A virtually minute-by-minute account of the scariest hours of the crisis, beginning in the aftermath of the seizures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and concluding with TARP and the hastily assembled near-afterthought that was the $180 billion AIG bailout.
BEST BIT: On page 120 appears the first print mention of the rumored affair between Joe Gregory, the widely reviled chief operating officer of Lehman Brothers, and Erin Callan, the statuesque, blonde, wholly inexperienced tax attorney promoted to chief financial officer of the firm at the beginning of the year. According to the book, Callan separated from her husband "around the time" of the promotion, after which she and Gregory "became inseparable."
Pervasive PowerPoint Culture: Former Detroit Bailout Czar Looks Back
Steven Rattner:
Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.
For example, under the previous administration's loan agreements, Treasury was to approve every GM transaction of more than $100 million that was outside of the normal course. From my first day at Treasury, PowerPoint decks would arrive from GM (we quickly concluded that no decision seemed to be made at GM without one) requesting approvals. We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify these expenditures.
The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).
Dropping a bombshell on the teachers' unions, state Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist ordered school superintendents to abolish the practice of assigning teachers based on how many years they have in the school system.
On Friday, the unions said they were blindsided by Gist's announcement, adding that the commissioner made no attempt to confer with labor before going public with the decision.
"We're going to court," said Marcia Reback, president of the Federation of Teachers. "I'm startled that there was no conversation with the unions about this. I'm startled there were no public hearings, and I'm startled at the content. This narrows the scope of collective bargaining."
To promote greater knowledge and understanding of dyslexia and related learning disabilities, The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) designated the month of October as National Dyslexia Awareness Month. "Awareness is key with learning disabilities because if identified early enough, their impacts can be minimized through intervention and effective teaching."
In order to increase awareness of dyslexia, Wisconsin Literacy posted two videos on its website created by Sun Prairie Cable Access. You will need Quicktime installed on your computer to view the video files. Download it for free here: www.apple.com/quicktime/download.
Living and Learning with Dyslexia: Hope and Possibilities
(Time 36:59)
Dr. Julie Gocey leads a panel discussion on dyslexia with Cheryl Ward (Wisconsin Branch of the International Dyslexia Association), Layla Coleman (Wisconsin Literacy, Inc.), Pam Heyde (Dyslexia Reading Therapist) and Margery Katz (Dyslexia Reading Therapist). The program covers a variety of topics including science-based, multisensory instruction for kids and adults; obstacles for identifying individuals with dyslexia; and lack of training of teachers. A college student with dyslexia shares strategies for academic success.
Educators, parents and health professionals must work together to improve literacy for ALL students in Wisconsin. It is well known that early literacy is one of the most powerful predictors of school success, gainful employment and many measures of health.
For that reason, the sincerest expression of child advocacy is to ensure that ALL students in Wisconsin have the opportunity to become proficient readers. In my experience as a pediatrician, co-founder of the Learning Difference Network, and as a parent, current policies and practices do not routinely provide the 10 percent to 17 percent of our students who have some degree of dyslexia with adequate opportunities for literacy.
Dyslexia is a language-based learning problem, or disability if severe. The impact that this neurobiological, highly heritable condition has on learning to read, write and spell cannot be underestimated.
Dyslexia is the best understood and most studied of all learning difficulties. There is clear evidence that the brains of dyslexic readers function differently than the brains of typical readers. But the good news is this: Reading instruction from highly skilled teachers or tutors who use evidence-based techniques can change how the brain processes print and nearly ALL students can become proficient readers.
Early intervention is critical to successful outcomes, but there is a disconnect between research and practice on many levels.
Current obstacles include myths about dyslexia, lack of early identification and a need for educators to be given training in the science of reading and multi-sensory, systematic, language-based instruction. This is critical for students with dyslexia, but can be beneficial to all learners. For those of us who are able to pay for private testing and instruction for our children, the outcomes can be phenomenal. Unfortunately, where poverty and its associated ills make daily life a struggle, this expert instruction is not routinely available.
Families who ask school personnel about dyslexia are often referred to a physician, who in turn sends them back to school for this educational problem. Educational testing is often denied coverage from insurance companies, though the implications for health and wellness are clear. Unfortunately, parents may be left without useful information from anyone, and appropriate treatment - excellent reading instruction - is further delayed.
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. On Thursday, Oct. 22, there will be a noon rally in the Capitol rotunda to raise awareness about the need to improve reading instruction for students with dyslexia and for all struggling readers in Wisconsin.
State Rep. Keith Ripp, R-Lodi, is introducing bills this week to help identify and help children with dyslexia. One bill calls for screening for specific skills to find kids with a high chance of struggling to learn to read. The other bill aims to improve teacher training to deal with reading problems.
There is too much evidence describing the science of reading, dyslexia and the costs of illiteracy to continue without change. Parents who suspect dyslexia must not be dissuaded from advocating for their children; keep searching until you find help that works.
Health professionals must seek the latest information on this common condition in order to support families and evaluate for related conditions. Educators must seek out training to understand this brain-based condition that requires educational care. The information is solid. We must work together to give ALL our kids the opportunity to read and succeed.
Dr. Julie Gocey is a pediatrician and a clinical assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and also a co-founder of the Learning Difference Network
There has been a mantra of sorts going around education circles over the past few years: "Nothing matters more to a child's education than good teachers." Anyone who's ever had a Ms. Green or a Mr. Miller whom they remember fondly instinctively knows this to be true. And while "Who's teaching my kid?" is an important question for parents to ask, there may be an equally essential (and rarely remarked upon) question -- "Who's teaching my kid's teachers?"
On Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to Columbia University's Teachers College, the oldest teacher-training school in the nation, and delivered a speech blasting the education schools that have trained the majority of the 3.2 million teachers working in U.S. public schools today. "By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," he said to an audience of teaching students who listened with more curiosity than ire -- this was Columbia University after all, and they knew Duncan wasn't talking to them. It was a damning, but not unprecedented, assessment of teacher colleges, which have long been the stepchildren of the American university system and a frequent target of education reformers' scorn over the past quarter-century.
Theodore R. Sizer, one of the country's most prominent education-reform advocates, whose pluralistic vision of the American high school helped shape the national discourse on education and revise decades-old ideas of what a school should be, died on Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass. He was 77.
Professor Sizer was best known as the father of the Essential Schools movement, which he founded in 1984. The movement's umbrella organization, the Coalition of Essential Schools, spans a diverse array of public and private schools united by their adherence to a set of common principles.
His progressive ideas about how schools should be organized and what students should learn helped drive the debates that rattled parents, government officials and educators in the 1980s and '90s.
Ted Sizer, a former prep school headmaster and Harvard University dean who built an education reform movement that has endured for two decades despite its unfashionable opposition to government- imposed standards and emphasis on deep learning over memorization and regurgitation, has died. He was 77.
Sizer died Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass., after a long battle with cancer, according to a statement by the Coalition of Essential Schools, the organization of 600 private and public schools he founded at Brown University in 1984 with the goal of restructuring the American high school.
An effort has been launched in the state Capitol to give the state schools superintendent broader authority to turn around struggling schools and position Wisconsin to better compete for millions of dollars in federal education grants.
Little fanfare has accompanied potential legislative changes that would allow the superintendent of public instruction to order curriculum and personnel changes in chronically failing schools. It didn't even make the news release for Gov. Jim Doyle's three-city announcement on Monday of educational changes he is seeking to help Wisconsin qualify for some of the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education.
State Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said the idea of giving the state superintendent "super-duper powers" has attracted support from legislators and educational interest groups since it first surfaced earlier this month.
"There's getting to be general agreement around these interventions," he said.
Prior to any expansion of the Wisconsin DPI's powers, I'd like to see them implement a usable and rigorous assessment system to replace the oft-criticized WKCE.
Perhaps, this is simply politics chasing new federal tax dollars....
Distance learning has broken into the mainstream of higher education. But at the campus level, many colleges still know precious little about how best to organize online programs, whether those programs are profitable, and how they compare to face-to-face instruction in terms of quality.
That is what Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, concludes in a study released today in conjunction with the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications.
The study, based on a survey of senior officials at 182 U.S. public and private nonprofit colleges, found that 45 percent of respondents said their institution did not know whether their online programs were making money. Forty-five percent said they had reorganized the management of their online programs in the last two years, with 52 percent anticipating a reshuffling within the next two years. And while a strong majority of the administrators surveyed said they believed the quality of online education was comparable to classroom learning, about half said that at their colleges the professors are in charge of assessing whether that is true.
Supreme Court strikes down law that has blocked children from attending English-language schools.
For thousands of francophone and immigrant parents in Quebec who want to send their children to English public schools but are barred from the system, a Supreme Court ruling Thursday seemed to offer hope.
"This is really wonderful news, it's a great decision," said Virender Singh Jamwal, one of the 25 parents who fought in court for seven years for the right to send their kids to school in English.
But in its attempt to reach a rare compromise in Quebec's volatile language politics, the court may have managed to prick nationalist sentiment without doing much to protect Mr. Jamwal's educational preference.
In a 7-0 decision, the court struck down a law known as Bill 104 that, since 2002, has blocked some 8,000 children in Montreal alone from attending English-language schools.
The benefits of electronic school textbooks are compelling. They cost half as much as ordinary books, are easy to locate and manage, can be quickly kept up to date, are environmentally responsible and do not risk a child's physical well-being when carried in number in a backpack. Unsurprisingly, school boards and districts the world over are speedily adopting them. But such attributes are not so impressive to a Hong Kong government working group, which after a year of study, has recommended a cautious, go-slow, approach.
Among the group's key suggestions are launching a three-year "promoting e-learning" pilot scheme in up to 30 of our city's 1,060 schools and giving a one-off grant to buy resources. The conclusions are at vast odds with those drawn by the governor of the US state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in June launched a digital textbook initiative in the name of cutting costs and keeping learning material fresh and relevant. Students are being given free electronic readers, and publishers pushed to quickly make books available. California is by no means at the cutting edge; there are some Hong Kong schools already using the technology.
The Graduate Management Admission Test has for years been the dominant standardized test when it comes to getting into M.B.A. programs.
This week, Business Week reported on an interesting trend: Some employers are starting to ask M.B.A. grads for their GMAT scores, using them as one measure of a job candidate's potential. In this tight market, business schools are worried about their graduates' job prospects, so a number of them are now advising -- informally or formally -- some of their students to retake the GMAT in hopes of a higher score. The article, as one would expect for a business publication, focuses on why some businesses are using the GMAT in this way and other employers are not.
What the article doesn't address is an educational issue: The employers who are using the GMAT in this way are doing so in direct violation of the guidelines issued by the test's sponsors. And those sponsors include business schools that are apparently going along with the use of the test scores in this way.
The Graduate Management Admission Council, the association of business schools that runs the GMAT, has never claimed that it is a valid tool for employers. The council says that its research shows the test to have predictive value of first-year grades in an M.B.A. program. The council maintains a list of "inappropriate uses" of the GMAT, including as a requirement for employment.
Based on the Business Week article (and additional reporting by Inside Higher Ed), it appears that there is plenty of inappropriate use going around -- and that the council (which benefits financially when people take the GMAT) isn't objecting.
All colleges and graduate schools of education must do a better job of preparing future teachers for the classroom, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, said in a speech Thursday. Many leaders of teacher education programs said they agreed with his comments, but it was hard to find any who said they thought his criticisms applied to their institutions.
"By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," he told an audience of faculty members, students and teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University. "America's university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change -- not evolutionary tinkering."
Duncan's speech bore down on the colleges and graduate schools that prepare more than half the teachers in U.S. primary and secondary schools -- 60 percent of whom, by one count, entered the classroom feeling unprepared for the challenges that lay ahead -- and called on those programs to introduce more in-the-classroom training and better tracking of teacher performance and student outcomes.
Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former dean of Teachers College, said the speech "threw a lifeline to university-based teacher education programs" as more states and school districts are turning to other kinds of teacher certification programs to get bodies to the blackboard.
"I would say more, but I don't want somebody knocking on my door and asking for $50,000 back. It's almost like bribery; I felt that I was supposed to sign the agreement, take the money and keep all their secrets."
-former Freddie Mac employee who worked on internal financial controls.
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I find this fascinating: Some people simply do not understand basic contractual freedoms between consenting adults. Others do not understand the concept of ethics. And, they want the free lunch, no personal responsibility, having it both ways. They want the money but not the obligations it comes with.
Sorry, that ain't how it works.
Here's the story: Former Freddie Mac employees, who upon departing FMC, were required to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) as part of the severance package. These employees are now being requested to violate those agreements in civil -- not criminal -- litigation. Under the law, you cannot privately contract not to answer questions from government prosecutors and investigators in any criminal case or in a regulatory proceeding. Really smart class action lawyers try to get a criminal case going simultaneously.
A statewide education reform commission headed by former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist issued its final recommendations today, with a goal of moving Tennessee to the top of the Southern states in K-12 education.
Search report cards
"The very simple goal is to make Tennessee - us, our kids - the best in the South in five years," Frist said at a State Capitol event unveiling the report. "It's a challenging, ambitious goal but it can be done."
The recommendations of the bipartisan "State Collaborative on Reforming Education," or SCORE, which Frist established early this year, includes 60 specific recommendations that revolve around four key "strategies:"
** Embracing the higher graduation standards that are about to go into effect as part of the Tennessee Diploma Project that aims at both raising standards and graduating more students. There has been some fear that when the impact of the more rigorous standards are felt, there will be political pressure on legislators to scale them back.
** Cultivating stronger school leaders, including superintendents and teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this morning for states to link student test data not only back to teachers, but also to the programs that trained them. New York State education officials said they are already working on it.
Speaking to a packed auditorium at Columbia University, Duncan criticized education schools for failing to graduate classroom-ready teachers. He said there needs to be a way to determine which programs are working.
"It's a simple but obvious idea," Duncan said. "Colleges of education and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. The power of competition and disclosure can be a powerful tonic for programs stuck in the past."
Duncan said he will use the competitive stimulus package funds known as the "Race to the Top" program to pressure states to use student data to evaluate teacher preparation programs.
What the coverage leaves out is that Duncan won't be anywhere near the first to tout the importance of teaching or lament the sad state of teacher prep programs. Or the first to mention Alverno, Emporia State, residency programs, the Levine report.
In addition, there are precious few real details in Duncan's speech about what if any means the Secretary is going to try and use to make ed schools change their evil ways. He mentions changes will come as part of NCLB reauthorization, but that's a long way off. He mentions teacher quality partnership grants, but that's less than $200M. No bold specifics like rating ed schools based on graduates' performance or longevity, or limiting Pell grant eligibility to ed schools that meet certain performance characteristics.
To Duncan's credit, he notes that this is a quality problem, not a teacher shortage, and that alt cert programs train fewer than 10K candidates a year (out of 200K overall).But it's just a speech. A very nice, somewhat long, quote-laden speech that someone finally sent me this morning. In other words, in thiss balloon-boy era, it's news! The text of the speech is below. See for yourself.
"By almost any standard, many, if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," Duncan said today in a speech at Columbia University in New York.
Duncan said hundreds of teachers have told him their colleges didn't provide enough hands-on classroom training or instruct them in the use of data to improve student learning. He also cited a 2006 report by Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia's Teachers College, in which 61 percent of educators surveyed said their colleges didn't offer enough instruction to prepare them for the classroom.
The nation's 95,000 public schools will have to hire as many as 1 million educators in the next five years as teachers and principals from the so-called baby-boom generation retire, according to Education Department projections. More than half of the new teachers will have been trained at education colleges, Duncan said.
While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today called for the reform of college programs that educate
teachers, Center for Education Reform president Jeanne Allen said that Duncan must back up his rhetoric with strong provisions regarding teacher quality at the federal level. Allen recently released guidance to the federal government urging tough regulations on federal funds used for state teacher quality efforts.
In response to Duncan's speech today at Columbia University's Teachers College, Allen praised the Education Secretary's demand for revolutionary changes to the way that colleges of education prepare educators, saying that his remarks should serve as a wake up call to teacher unions, education bureaucrats, and entrenched special interests who would block data-driven performance reviews of teachers in an effort to monitor teacher quality throughout their careers.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Just back from the frenzy of lunchtime recess, third-grader Amena Saleh donned a head scarf Wednesday and dropped to her knees at Madinah Academy of Madison, a full-time Islamic school on the city's South Side.
Her prayer was one of five that are obligatory every day for Muslims but the only one that fell during school hours.
"We have a God who's up in the sky and his name is Allah," said Amena, 8, explaining the focus of her ritual.
At Madinah Academy, the educational program is grounded in Islam and guided by the Quran, the religion's holy book. Now in its fifth year, the school serves 28 students in grades pre-kindergarten through three and is eager to add grade levels. It is housed in a strip mall at 1325 Greenway Cross, just off Fish Hatchery Road and near Madison's border with Fitchburg.
New statistics show that U.S. students are struggling to learn basic math. The 2009 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math, a test given every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide, were released this week. Although average overall scores have doubled since the NAEP was introduced in 1990, results have completely flat-lined among fourth-graders, and the achievement gap between white and black students isn't narrowing.
The New York Times notes that such trends could be linked to the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in prepared remarks circulating in advance of a speech Thursday, accuses many of the nation's schools of education of doing "a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom."
My colleague Nick Anderson, on the national education beat, and I found the advance text a meaty read.
Duncan's speech, to be delivered at Columbia University, goes further than any other I can remember from an education secretary in ripping into the failure of education schools to ready teachers for the challenges of the day, particularly the demand for academic growth in all students.
Duncan's speech points out two major deficiencies in education school teaching with which most critics would agree: They do a bad job teaching students how to manage disruptive classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, and they don't offer much in the way of training new teachers how to use data to improve their classroom results.
The excerpts of the speech we were given, however, did not appear to address one part of the classroom management problem that is often raised when successful teachers explain how they learned to keep students in order. These teachers often say they learned by doing, by facing a class alone without help, trying one thing after another until something worked for them. Education school deans have been critical of the Teach for America program, which pushes recent college graduates into classrooms with only a few weeks training, but teachers who have survived that toss-them-into-the-water approach say it works better than class management classes at their teacher's colleges.
For today's mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children's magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.
Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared "activity features" and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner's was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.
At that point, Mr. Gardner was 42 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on "recreational mathematics," a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.
But it soon became clear that this was a field "study"-- as the teachers called it -- not a field "trip," and the 75 Harlem kindergartners were going not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.
"I want to get smarter," 5-year-old Brandon Neal said.
"I want to do better on homework and tests," added Julliana Jimenez, one of his classmates.
New York State's English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.
Not that the questions were all easy, but a new Pew Research Center poll finds the state of public knownedge about current U.S affairs to be pretty dismal. The news quiz, conducted Oct. 1-4 among 1,002 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, was announced this week.
It asked 12 multiple choice questions about people, events and issues in the news. Respondents answered an average of 5.3 questions correctly. That's well below a D grade, at 44 percent. But hey, if only Balloon Boy coulda been among the questions.
Here's one that really challenged people: Only 18 percent could correctly identify Max Baucus as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which has developed legislation to reform U.S. health care. Fewer than a third knew how many troops we have in Afghanistan.
Two out of five of America's 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.
The nationwide study, "Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today," whose results are being reported here for the first time, offers a comprehensive and nuanced look at how teachers differ in their perspectives on their profession, why they entered teaching, the atmosphere and leadership in their schools, the problems they face, their students and student outcomes, and ideas for reform. Taking a closer look at the nation's teacher corps based on educators' attitudes and motivations for teaching provides some notable implications for how to identify, retain, and support the most effective teachers, according to the researchers.
This portrait of American teachers, completed in time for the beginning of the 2009-10 school year, presents a new means for appraising the state of the profession at a time when school reform, approaches to teaching, and student achievement remain high on the nation's agenda. It also comes as billions of economic-stimulus dollars pour into America's schools focused on ensuring that effective teachers are distributed among all schools, and Congress will have to consider reauthorization or modification of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act., the nearly 8-year-old latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about -- our struggling public schools -- was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.
There's something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street -- precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.
In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream -- a house and yard -- with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.
A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won't be just a passing phase, but our future.
"Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker's global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges," argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. "This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker's production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally."
Aside from having capital Ps in their names, Pittsburgh, Prague and São Paolo might seem to have little in common.
The first has an industrial heritage as a US steel hub. The second, in central Europe and once part of the Soviet bloc, has an historic district that is a World Heritage Site, and the third, founded by Jesuit priests, is the capital of Brazil's most populous state and one of the most dynamic cities in Latin America.
What links all three is the global executive MBA delivered by the Joseph M Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
Katz has been running an EMBA programme since 1972, a time when Pittsburgh had one of the US's highest number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the city. In 1990, the school started offering an EMBA programme in the Czech Republic, in Prague and, since 2000, in São Paolo, Brazil.
Until 2003, the three programmes operated as independent entities. Students from the Prague and Brazil campuses would come to Pittsburgh for two-week periods, but because they were at different stages in the curriculum, they did not interact with each other or with the other students from Pittsburgh.
We know that children need to eat more healthily but the message will be useless if they don't learn to cook - and enjoy doing so. Sadly, a generation has already grown up without learning to cook at school: when the National Curriculum was introduced into UK state schools in 1990, practical cookery was sidelined in favour of "food technology". Children learned to design logos for pizza boxes, rather than to make a pizza.
This gaping hole in our children's education is something Katie Caldesi, director of Italian cookery school Cucina Caldesi in Marylebone, London, is keen to correct. She has two sons aged seven and nine, and says: "It's criminal that we dropped cookery from the curriculum. Italian food lends itself to cookery for children as long as they don't just have white carbohydrates; in Italy you have pasta first, then meat, vegetables, then fruit."
To help get children cooking their favourite Italian dishes, Cucina Caldesi runs classes for those aged six and over alongside its adult programme. It also has a holiday workshop for teenagers, "La Cucina dei Ragazzi", led by Caldesi head chef Stefano Borella. I went to observe, while my 13-year-old son Ben, a keen eater and occasional cook, took part in the class alongside five others.
Borella, whose teaching style is informal but authoritative, won over the young cooks from the start. The aim of the session, he said, was to prepare, cook and eat a three-course meal: gnocchi with walnut pesto, fish skewers with lemon couscous and basil pannacotta served with berries.
Though he died in 1947 aged 56, even a cursory review of modern management practices reveals the enduring influence of Kurt Lewin, the German-American psychologist.
The source of his influence can be found in the confluence of three aspects of his personal career.
The first was his early training in mathematically-oriented psychology, focused on the study of human perception. From this he developed a view that it was possible to apply the disciplines of the physical sciences to psychological phenomena.
The second was his rejection of reductionist ideas, which hold that complex phenomena can be explained in terms of simpler building blocks. This formed the tradition of German psychology.
Prof Lewin was much more interested in Gestalt psychology, which implied that psychological phenomena are related to the interaction of the person with their environment and the result of the interplay of many forces within the person.
The District of Columbia's embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.
Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients' private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive.
At a congressional hearing last month, Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and vocal critic of the program who heads the subcommittee that controls its funding, said he was open to supporting its continuation if certain changes were made. They include requiring voucher recipients to take the same achievement tests as public-school students.
The senator's comments were a "really positive sign," said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that supports vouchers and charter schools -- public schools that can bypass many regulations that govern their traditional counterparts. "It's clear the momentum is coming our way," added Kevin Chavous, a former Washington city councilman who has appeared in television ads supporting the voucher plan, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program.
In a move he says is meant to re-energize support for public education, Gov. Steve Beshear announced Monday the creation of a task force charged with developing a unified vision of what Kentucky schools need to offer to better prepare students for the 21st century.
"Our world has changed dramatically since the reforms of 1990," Beshear said, during a press conference at Louisville Male High School, where he discussed the Transforming Education in Kentucky initiative. "We must now turn our focus to the future and again to our schools to ensure that our strategies and programs are designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century."
Not all embraced Beshear's task force, which is suppose to spend the next year developing recommendations on how to improve education in the state.
In a letter to the governor, Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, said he believed the task force "is duplicative" of education efforts already underway.
"I respectfully submit that it is past time for your administration to move beyond discussion and to immediate action," Williams said, noting that topics on the task force's agenda are already being discussed by legislative committees or have been the subject of legislative bills. "...These issues cannot be put off another year."
There's more depressing news on the education front today. In The Times, Joanna Sugden reports that children are struggling with language skills in schools and that it's vital for parents to speak to, and read to, their children. Meanwhile in the Daily Mail, it's reported that boys are falling ever behind, even at a really young age. Many can't write their name by the end of Reception year; they're falling behind girls in vital aspects of the curriculum - and life.
As regular readers of the blog will know, I am convinced that it's incredibly important to do something about boys and their under-achievement in schools. I am often asked to recommend books for boys (and there are loads), for my views on their disinterest in writing or how they won't settle at school. I've written about this a number of times (please see below) and am saddened not only that it's still an issue, but that not much seems to be taking place to address it.
There seems little point in my writing about the issues again, so I'm going to mention an initiative which hopes to get children reading again. Innocent and Francesca Simon (author of the Horrid Henry books, which are incredibly popular amongst girls and boys) have teamed up to inspire parents to tell stories.
Tania Goldhaber, an enthusiastic and personable undergraduate studying mechanical engineering at MIT, lives the Web 2.0 life.
Her laptop is her key to the virtual world, always on, always ready to access Facebook and other social networking sites. For EMBA students at Cambridge University's Judge Business School she has become the human face of Web 2.0.
Simon Learmount, programme director, says: "We used video to beam her into the classroom for a morning during the orientation week [the first of three separate weeks where the students are physically together]. Her presentation showed how her life is completely structured by Web 2.0. Afterwards, some of the students went off and started blogging immediately."
These Judge EMBA students are the top brass of the business world in the UK, chief financial officers and the like with a sprinkling of chief executives among them, who, until Ms Goldhaber's presentation, may not have understood blogging, let alone written an online diary themselves.
It is one of the first results of a risky but potentially hugely productive experiment that the school launched a few weeks ago.
The teenagers in Stephanie Nichols's algebra class have nothing on her blank stare. And they can't even come close to her best confused expression: eyebrows furrowed, mouth frowning, a flash of ditziness framed by a blond bob.
"Sorry if I'm the slow kid," she said, slowly, during a lesson on slope. "I don't get it." As students calculated problems on the board, she interrupted, "I'm really lost. . . . How did you do that?" Occasionally, she was more blunt: "Huh?"
Nichols's vacant looks and incessant questions put the students at Arlington County's Washington-Lee High School in the uncomfortable position of being the math teacher, explaining how the numbers on the white board relate to each other, how algebra actually works.
Community meeting to introduce the new Madison School District Talented and Gifted Plan
via a kind reader's email:
Tuesday, November 17
6:00 - 7:30 p.m. (this is the correct time)
Hamilton Middle School LMC
4801 Waukesha Street
Madison, Wi
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Talented and Gifted Division will host a community forum on November 17, 2009, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Superintendent Dan Nerad and Director of Teaching and Learning Lisa Wachtel will be in attendance.
The focus of the forum will be to provide the Madison community with an overview of the recently Board of Education approved Talented and Gifted Education Plan, followed by an opportunity for discussion.
f I had care of a four-year-old right now, I think I'd go and live in France. Even though I'm not that fond of France and I hate speaking the language, I'd be able to pop my four-year-old into the nearest ecole maternelle and relax. He'd stay there until he was six, by which time they'd teach him to read. And then he'd go to primary school and learn to write - with accents on and everything.
Here in England, everything I hear, read or watch on telly about education is too baffling to understand. I say this as a governor of a small village primary school. I'm not being funny, nor boasting about my idleness or lack of care. I'm saying the education of England's children is too baffling to understand for anyone who is not an educationist.
Nobody could blame me, I hope, for being baffled by news of the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest and most detailed study of primary education for 40 years. I listened carefully to Jim Naughtie talking to the review's lead author, Professor Robin Alexander, on the Today programme yesterday. Naughtie said the review found primary education was "in good heart", but it challenged the Government over the uselessness of its cherished Sats. Also, they want "formal schooling" to begin at six, not five. The Prof did his best to condense 500 or so pages into 12-second sound bites, and I listened in that vague early-morning way, thinking: Goodness, this is dense.
A skirmish between powerful teachers' unions and President Barack Obama over nearly $5 billion in education spending is shaping up as a preview of the battle to come over No Child Left Behind in Congress early next year.
But the tables are turned: now the unions are worried that Obama, a Democratic ally, is going to be just as tough on them as President George W. Bush, a longtime foe.
The dispute adds teachers' unions to a growing list of key Democratic constituencies that have been frustrated by Obama's lunges toward the political middle, along with gay-rights activists upset Obama won't lift the ban on gays in the military, and Latino officials who say Obama is slow-walking immigration reform.
So far, both the unions and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have tried to avoid a full-on collision, and the unions are showing new flexibility in accepting previously unheard-of moves like stricter teacher evaluations.
But they're also making it clear they'll only go so far with Obama, who was booed at two teachers' union conventions when he was a candidate.
Students in a La Follette High School business club are finding it a little tougher than they expected to sell special headsets offering real-time game coverage to Badger sports fans.
"Sales are slower than we had hoped," said June Anderson, adviser to the school's DECA Club, whose members have been offering the headsets for $20 each as a fundraiser outside Camp Randall before every home football game.
With five home games finished and just two left - on Oct. 31 and Nov. 14 - the students have sold only about 500 of the pre-tuned earpiece radios, or about half the club's goal.
"(Students) know now that they have to take a lot of no's before they get a yes," Anderson said. "They need to know (the radio's) features and benefits and really be able to relate how they will benefit the customer to make the sale easier. That's been a good thing for them to learn."
In the Madison School District's four large high schools last week, students were given checkbooks and profiles detailing their life circumstances such as marriage, children, education and employment. Students then visited stations for typical purchases such as housing, utilities, food, transportation, childcare and entertainment as they tried to stay within their budget. To challenge their decision-making, some students also experienced unexpected setbacks such as illness or unemployment.
"It's really important to know what you are buying and how you are going to buy stuff, especially when the economy is down ... and money is tight," said Andy Yang, a La Follette High School senior.
About 1,400 students participated.
Volunteers from various businesses work at the stations, but bankruptcy trustees were missing this year because they couldn't get away due to their heavy workloads.
In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education. The report, which analyzed data collected by the city's Education Department from more than 200 schools over two years, reported that schools ranked in the top third by graduation rates offered students the most access to arts education and resources, while schools in the bottom third offered the least access and fewest resources. Among other findings, schools in the top third typically hired 40 percent more certified arts teachers and offered 40 percent more classrooms dedicated to coursework in the arts than bottom-ranked schools. They were also more likely to offer students a chance to participate in or attend arts activities and performances. The full report is at caenyc.org.
The dread of high school algebra is lost here amid the blue glow of computer screens and the clickety-clack of keyboards.
A fanfare plays from a speaker as a student passes a chapter test. Nearby, a classmate watches a video lecture on ratios. Another works out an equation in her notebook before clicking on a multiple-choice answer on her screen.
Their teacher at Agoura High School, Russell Stephans, sits at the back of the room, watching as scores pop up in real time on his computer grade sheet. One student has passed a level, the data shows; another is retaking a quiz.
"Whoever thought this up makes life so much easier," Stephans says with a chuckle.
Brady Tynen needed to find out which states have the largest concentrations of people with mixed American Indian-African American ancestry. The Stillwater Junior High ninth-grader could have pored through the U.S. Census database, noted the appropriate percentage, ranked the states in a list and tried to divine some trend.
Then again, his geography class is just 50 minutes long, and Tynen needed to repeat Wednesday's exercise two more times for different groups.
Thankfully, the Census website can show the information on a map with the press of a few buttons. In mere minutes, Tynen could tell that the group he was looking at is concentrated in the eastern U.S., particularly southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia.
"Maps are a good way to find out all sorts of things," he said. "It'd be kind of hard if you didn't have a map because maps organize your data."
The exercise gave students in Sara Damon's ninth-grade Advanced Placement geography class a taste of a technology called geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is simply technology that merges data with maps. Something as basic as Google Maps can be considered GIS because it links a map to data, in that case street addresses.
Stillwater high school offers 17 Advanced Placement classes, according to the AP Course Audit Website.
Politicians and pundits are using results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests to say our kids are falling behind the rest of the world, so maybe we should get some PISA practice. Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, a member of the U.S. advisory board to PISA, offered this sample question for 15-year-olds from the mathematics literacy section of the exam:
For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100m by 50m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?
For years, schools and students have been judged on raw standardized test scores. Experts say this approach is flawed because they tend to reflect socioeconomic levels more than learning.
The "value-added" approach attempts to level the playing field by focusing on growth rather than achievement. Using a statistical analysis of test scores, it tracks an individual student's improvement year to year, and uses that progress to estimate the effectiveness of teachers, principals and schools.
Academics have also used the approach to test many assumptions about what matters in schools. Scholars are still puzzling over what makes for a great teacher or school, but their results challenge orthodox assumptions like these:
All teachers are equal. For decades, schools have treated teachers like interchangeable parts. Value-added results suggest there are sharp differences in teachers' effectiveness.
t's easy to see why United Teachers Los Angeles doesn't like the new Public School Choice policy at L.A. Unified, which allows outside groups to apply to take over about 250 new or underperforming schools. Those groups are likely to include a large number of charter school operators that would hire their own teachers rather than sign a contract with the teachers union.
What's less understandable is why UTLA would minimize its chances of keeping some of the schools within the district, along with their union jobs. Yet that's what appears to be happening. A rift has developed within the union's leadership over whether to allow more so-called pilot schools, and if so, how many and under what conditions. Pilot schools are similar to charter schools, except that they remain within L.A. Unified, staffed by the district's union employees. The staff is given more independence to make instructional and budgeting decisions in exchange for greater accountability and "thin contracts," which contain fewer of the prescriptive work rules that can stultify progress.
No one could argue that the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest report on primary schools for over 40 years, isn't a weighty-looking document. Six years to complete, 600 pages long, one of its main arguments is that British children are starting school far too early, around the four-year mark.
Terrible, cries the report. In the manner of most European countries, children should be starting school at around six years old, in Finland's case, seven. Thereby enabling Britain to catch up in terms of child literacy, numeracy, and well-being. All of which sounds extremely exciting for British education. What a shame they forgot to factor in British parents.
Even today, when there is a report like this, we seem automatically to revert to a template of idealised British family life, circa 1955 (Mummy in her pinny, happily baking jam tarts; Daddy arriving home with his brolly) that has no bearing on modern reality.
Exchange the 1950s fantasy for parents who both have to work, and have other children to sort out. Parents, who already have to pick up, clean up, organise, and juggle, to the point where they feel as though they are trapped within a slow-motion nervous breakdown. And this is the middle class, relatively do-able, version. Into this engorged ready-to-blow scenario they want to introduce the concept of up to two to three years less primary schooling? Are they insane?
Harvard University, one of the world's richest educational institutions, stumbled into its financial crisis in part by breaking one of the most basic rules of corporate or family finance: Don't gamble with the money you need to pay the daily bills.
The university disclosed yesterday that it had lost $1.8 billion in cash - money it relies on for the school's everyday expenses - by investing it with its endowment fund, instead of keeping it in safe, bank-like accounts. The disclosure was made in the school's annual report for the fiscal year that ended June 30.
Typically, companies and big institutions manage their cash conservatively in order to have it readily available, by keeping the money in such low-risk investments as money-market mutual funds.
But Harvard placed a large portion of its cash with Harvard Management Co., the entity that runs the university's endowment and invests in stocks, hedge funds, and other risky assets. It has been widely reported that Harvard Management's endowment investments were battered in the market crash - down 27 percent in its last fiscal year. Not revealed until yesterday was that the school's basic cash portfolio had also been caught in the undertow.
For nine years, Sutoyo Lim's son studied Chinese with private tutors and at language schools. He learned to write in "simplified script," characters with thinly spread strokes commonly used in mainland China.
But that all changed when Lim's 15-year-old son began taking Chinese classes at Arcadia High School this year. He was given two months to make the transition from "simplified" to the more intricate "traditional" script used in Taiwan.
Once the grace period is over, homework and exam answers written in simplified script will be disqualified -- regardless of accuracy. "To me, it does not seem right," Lim said. "I'm not happy with being forced to choose the language that's going to be obsolete."
When Chinese classes were introduced at Arcadia in the mid-1990s, Taiwanese parents pushed administrators to adopt the use of traditional script used in Taiwan and pre-communist China. The traditional form is distinguished by a series of complex and intersecting strokes.
It was three years ago that 15-year-old Eric Hainstock entered Weston High School with a 22-caliber pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun.
Within a few short minutes, Principal John Klang confronted Hainstock, trying to protect his school's students and staff.
After a brief struggle, Klang was shot three times. He died later that day.
Debate continues on exactly what Hainstock intended to do - get the school's attention for the help he needed, or execute a fatalistic death wish for himself and his school.
What is clear is Hainstock had been bullied.
He was bullied by his father who, he says, treated him like a slave and refused to let him wash. At school and after school, he claimed he was bullied by as many as 30 of his fellow classmates. He says he snapped.
We can't know how much of this is true or how much it contributed to the tragedy in Weston. What we do know is that nearly a third of America's school children say they've been the victims of bullying - or been bullies themselves - or both.
We know bullying can destroy a student's self-esteem and ability to learn. We know it can ruin students for the rest of their lives. It can ruin families and ruin schools.
We know it's a problem among girls and boys. We know it can be mental bullying as well as physical. We know it can border on torture for the young minds that are the victims of it.
It's a problem that affects us all. As such, it's a problem we must all help solve.
That's why we're partners with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which just launched its curriculum to help teachers cope with bullying in their classrooms, halls and playgrounds.
The DPI curriculum, called "Time to Act - Time to React," is a set of lesson plans to help teachers identify bullies and bullying and to teach their students how to deal with it.
The WEA Trust, a not-for-profit group health insurance company that insures many of Wisconsin's public school employees, paid for the printing of 1,200 sets of the curricula (one for grades 3-5, another for grades 6-8), and a free, interactive DVD available to teachers in any public grade school and public middle school.
This isn't a state mandate. It's not a requirement. It's a helping hand for teachers who feel they need the extra help to keep their students safe.
The problem is clear. So are the goals.
We, along with a large coalition of groups including those with a focus on schools, mental health, law enforcement and child advocacy, are supporting this effort to help keep our schools safe and healthy.
That's important for insurance companies that feel good mental health is important to a healthy body.
That's important for the wife of a murdered husband whose life was abruptly ended by a young boy out of control.
We're encouraging teachers to use the new curriculum. We're encouraging parents to be aware of what is happening with their children at school. This curriculum is a step in making teachers' and children's lives safer today and tomorrow.
Sue Klang is the wife of John Klang, the Weston High School principal killed trying to wrestle a pistol away from a troubled 15-year-old student on Sept. 29, 2006. Evert is executive director of the WEA Trust, Wisconsin's largest provider of group health insurance for Wisconsin school districts.
As if NAFTA's dismantling of America's manufacturing base and corporate destruction of the middle class isn't enough to challenge the needs of the country's national security, now we have a systematic assault on the nation's educational system.
In Michigan, it is the dumbing down of needed math standards to compete globally; at the national level, it is the drying up of funds used to harness the talent of young people who cannot afford an elitist entitlement system that's cost-prohibitive for many.
The common thread of lost manufacturing jobs, a dying middle class and an impaired educational system that promotes inferior curriculum and economic exclusion all serve to undermine the well-being and national security of the country in ways that hostile external elements could never match. The hypocrisy of weakening America while extolling patriotism is a calculated deviousness that, for the sake of the country and the working class, must be challenged.
A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools.
At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word "personal statements," which have become known as "college essays," and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort.
History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving in college not knowing how to do research or write academic papers.
Why is it that college admissions officers and college professors seem to be working at cross purposes when it comes to student writing? College professors want students to be able to write serious research papers when they are assigned in their history, economics, political science, etc., classes, but that is not the message that is going out to high school applicants from the college admissions offices.
Most of the attention, if not all, in the college counseling offices at the secondary level is on what it will take to gain students admission to colleges, not on whether, for example, they have the academic knowledge and skills to graduate from college. That is someone else's concern. Recently the Gates Foundation has taken up the challenge of trying to find out why students drop out of community colleges in such large numbers.
But in the college admissions world, at the Higher and Lower Education levels, the attention, when it comes to writing, is on the short personal statement to accompany the application. There are several reasons for such a dumbed-down requirement. Admissions officers are too busy, for the most part, to read academic papers by students, and they like to have some personal information by the student to give them a more personal feeling for the applicant. The fact that there is a huge industry of "personal essay" coaches and tutors doesn't seem to give them pause.
With this requirement in place, it becomes the task of the English Department at the high school level to teach students even more about how to write about themselves in 500 words or less. Such writing requires no reading or research of course, which makes it a lot easier (and more dumbed-down).
Meanwhile, students who receive the International Baccalaureate Diploma continue to meet the requirement for the Extended Essay of 4,000-5,000 words, and they, like those published in The Concord Review, arrive in college miles ahead of their "personal statement" peers who have no idea how to write a college term paper.
Part of the problem lies with the Higher Education Faculty, which almost never takes any part in the admissions process, but leaves the 500-word personal essay in place--but then they complain that the students they get can't read, do research, or write very well.
As I have said many times, college coaches routinely take a personal interest in the athletic admissions requirements for the high school students they recruit for their teams, because they need to know if they can play or not, but college professors pay no attention at all, either general or personal, to the academic admissions requirements for the high school students they will see in their classes.
Thus the admissions department at the college and the college faculty work at cross purposes, as the admissions department pursues their interest in the short personal essay, while the college faculty members do nothing to encourage the sort of serious academic writing (and reading) they say they wish the students who come to them had done in high school.
Perhaps college professors might take another look at the reading and writing requirements put out by the admissions offices at their own colleges and universities.
They might even begin to influence the high schools to raise their standards for academic reading and writing, and, in the process, find that they have better-prepared students to take advantage of their teaching, and more students would actually have a chance to complete the work at the colleges to which they are admitted.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Terry Grier, former superintendent of San Diego schools, encountered union opposition when he tried to use the novel method. His fight offers a peek at a brewing national debate.
When Terry Grier was hired to run San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- "value-added" -- sounded innocuous enough. But this number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
It was novel because rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all teachers a passing grade.
In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.
In California, where powerful teachers unions have been especially protective of tenure and resistant to merit pay, Grier had a more modest goal: to find out if students in the San Diego district's poorest schools had equal access to effective instructors.
I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.
Even Rangaswami was taken back. He lived in a different Silicon Valley, from a time when Indians flocked to the U.S. and rapidly populated the programming (and later executive) ranks of the top software companies in California. But the generational difference between older Indians who have made it in the Valley and the younger group in the room was striking. The present reality is this. Large numbers of the Valley's top young guns (and some older bulls, as well) are seeing opportunities in other countries and are returning home. It isn't just the Indians. Ask any VC who does business in China, and they'll tell you about the tens of thousands who have already returned to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The VC's are following the talent. And this is bringing a new vitality to R&D in China and India.
Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina? My team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley polled 1203 returnees to India and China during the second half of 2008 to find answers to exactly this question. What we found should concern even the most boisterous Silicon Valley boosters.
Alan Coulter is working on a short list of goals for students in Milwaukee Public Schools:
A very large majority of them should get good, professional and prompt help learning reading, especially if they're struggling.
The same with math.
The same with behavior problems - good, professional and prompt responses for those acting out too often, getting suspended too often, disrupting classes and so on.
Think about what the impact would be if those goals were met.
Coulter is holding a lever that may make a lot of that happen in the next several years. A nationally recognized expert in special education and a professor at the Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans, he now carries the title of "independent expert" for implementation of a court order dealing with special education services in MPS.
That means he's the lead figure in making MPS change on some crucial fronts because the court order goes well beyond special education to the overall way Milwaukee schools deal with students who aren't on grade level or who are misbehaving frequently. With the backing of the state Department of Public Instruction and the court, Coulter and Alisia Moutry, a former MPS official who is his on-the-ground staff person in Milwaukee, carry a lot of weight now.
A showdown between the White House and the powerful teachers' unions looks, for the moment, a little less likely.
This week in New Haven, Conn., the local teachers union agreed, in a 21-1 vote, to changes widely resisted by unions elsewhere, including tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections for bad teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as the unions, said the New Haven contract could be repeated in other school districts.
Kim Torello, left, and Karen Lavorgna, teachers in New Haven, Conn., discuss the contract that was ratified by their union this week. Terms included tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections.
"I rarely say that something is a model or a template for something else, but this is both," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who helped broker the New Haven deal.
"This shows a willingness to go into areas that used to be seen as untouchable," Mr. Duncan said.
His cause for optimism is this: If teachers' unions start showing flexibility in other cities, the administration's high-stakes push to boost graduation rates and improve test scores at public schools could get a lot easier. That might even spare the administration an unwanted fight with a labor force that gave Mr. Obama a big lift in his election.
Admit it. A lot of us are deeply invested in the argument over Michelle A. Rhee's tenure as chancellor of the D.C. schools. Is she a miracle or a monster? A smart educator or a bad administrator? So when we saw my colleague Nick Anderson's story Thursday revealing that D.C. students have made significant gains in mathematics since Rhee got here, we probably had a pronounced emotional reaction.
I think we should chill out. It is not a bad thing that D.C. math score increases were well above the national average, and that D.C. showed gains in both fourth and eighth grade math in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But it doesn't mean that the city is anywhere near getting out of the deep hole of apathy and dysfunction that has characterized its schools for the last several decades.
One snapshot test result does not make Rhee a genius, as I am sure she would agree. We journalists give big play to such results. That is our job. They are news. People want to read about them. But I don't think they advance the argument between the anti-Rhee people and pro-Rhee people (I am in the latter camp) in any useful way.
Low-income children
were better prepared for success in kindergarten when their preschool teachers
incorporated educational video and games from public media, according to a new
study. The study, conducted by Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) and
SRI International, was commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(CPB) to evaluate video and interactive games from the Ready to Learn
initiative, which creates educational programming and outreach activities for
local public television stations and their communities.
The study examined whether young children's literacy skills -- the ability to
name letters, know the sounds associated with those letters, and understand
basic concepts about stories and printed words -- increased when preschool
classrooms incorporated video and games. Children with the most to learn in
the study gained the most, learning an average of 7.5 more letters than
children in a comparison group during the brief, intensive curriculum.
Charter schools have no bigger fan than President Barack Obama.
The federal government gave Wisconsin $86 million on Thursday to help launch and sustain more charter schools across the state.
State schools chief Tony Evers said $5 million will go to two dozen school districts this year, with the rest of the money distributed over five years.
Madison, to no surprise, wasn't on Thursday's winner list. And don't expect any of the $86 million for planning and implementing new strategies for public education to be heading Madison's way.
That's because the Madison School Board continues to resist Obama's call for more charter schools. The latest evidence is the School Board's refusal to even mention the words "charter school" in its strategic action plans.
In sharp contrast, Obama can hardly say a word about public education without touting charters as key to sparking innovation and engaging disadvantaged students.
Obama visited a New Orleans charter school Thursday (and raised money that evening in San Francisco at a $34K per couple dinner) and is preparing to shower billions on states to experiment with new educational strategies. But states that limit charter growth will not be eligible for the money.
I am in favor of a diffused governance model here. I think improvement is more likely via smaller organizations (charters, magnets, whatever). The failed Madison Studio School initiative illustrates the challenges that lie ahead.
A devastating attack on what is taught in primary schools is delivered today by the biggest inquiry into the sector for more than 40 years.
Too much stress is being placed on the three Rs, imposing a curriculum on primary school pupils that is "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools", it says. The inquiry is recommending sweeping changes to stop children being left disenchanted by schooling at an early age.
Tests for 11-year-olds and league tables based on them should be scrapped, and instead children should be assessed in every subject they take at 11.
The report is heavily critical of successive Conservative and Labour governments for dictating to teachers how they should do their jobs. Professor Alexander cites "more than one" Labour education secretary saying that primary schools should be teaching children to "read, write and add up properly" - leaving the rest of education to secondary schools. "It is not good enough to say we want high standards in the basics but we just have to take our chance with the rest," said Professor Alexander.
Meet us here on October 21, 2009, for the first Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day. This groundbreaking, live interactive web event brings together students and educators from across the country to solve your toughest assignments and explore the power of using Wolfram|Alpha for school, college, and beyond.
The Democratic Party has battled for universal health care this year, and over the decades it has admirably led the fight against poverty -- except in the one way that would have the greatest impact.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers' unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.
President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that -- and one test for the Democrats will be whether they embrace administration reforms that teachers' unions are already sniping at.
It's difficult to improve failing schools when you can't create alternatives such as charter schools and can't remove inept or abusive teachers. In New York City, for example, unions ordinarily prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence -- so the schools must pay failed teachers their full salaries to sit year after year doing nothing in centers called "rubber rooms."
A devastating article in The New Yorker by Steven Brill examined how New York City tried to dismiss a fifth-grade teacher for failing to correct student work, follow the curriculum, manage the class or even fill out report cards. The teacher claimed that she was being punished for union activity, but an independent observer approved by the union confirmed the allegations and declared the teacher incompetent. The school system's lawyer put it best: "These children were abused in stealth."
f not for the two southern states, California students would be at the bottom of the national heap in mathematics, according to the 2009 Nation's Report Card released Wednesday.
The abysmal standing, which reflects in part the state's diverse population, hasn't changed much over the years. California consistently has ranked among the lowest-scoring states in the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated assessment of a sampling of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country.
On the plus side, state students have made steady progress over the years, generally keeping pace with their national counterparts - albeit from the back of the pack.
California's fourth-graders outscored their peers in only the two southern states and the District of Columbia, and tied five states. Eighth-graders outscored only Mississippi and the District of Columbia, and tied four states.
Overall, California students performed at or below the national average regardless of income or ethnicity.
Alongside music, television and the news media, books are surging into the new technology era with digital reading devices.
UW-Madison Libraries were quick to get on board with the latest in electronic reading.
"The cost and convenience factor is really significant," says UW-Madison Libraries director Ken Frazier. "There's an enormous amount of content and book titles that are becoming available."
Frazier says the library has been monitoring the wireless technology since it first emerged, but when Amazon introduced its new Kindle DX in May, Frazier knew it was time to take paperless reading into the classrooms.
Mayor Richard Riordan, your disappointment in the progress of educational reform in the Los Angeles Unified School District, after all you've done as mayor and secretary of education under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was palpable in your Oct. 12 Times Op-Ed article, "Course outline for the LAUSD." This lack of progress breaks my heart too.
At the risk of seeming presumptuous, may I make a suggestion to you and to educational reformers everywhere -- a suggestion that is based on experience, common sense and research?
I was an urban public high school English teacher for many years. I tried hard: I took courses in teaching reading and writing; I prepared for classes; I graded research papers on vacations; I won grants for my schools; I won teacher of the year awards; I got advanced degrees; I supported reform.
Michelle Rhee's senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers' lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn't run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.
But then, Rhee wades in with, "Here's what I think," or "What I don't want," or "This is crap," or "I want someone to figure this out," or "I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna do; we can talk about how we're gonna do it." And that is that. Next order of business, please.
Rhee's style--as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway--has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn't kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers' credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.
On an scathing attack, Sir Terry said that Tesco is the largest private employer in the country and therefore depends on high standards in schools.
"Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces."
He added that too many educational agencies and bodies hamper the work of teachers in the classroom.
"One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system. From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children.
"At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions simple; structures flat; and - above all - we trust the people on the ground. I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, 'less is more'," he said. Sir Terry was speaking at the Institute of Grocery Distribution's annual conference in London.
A kind reader forward this Dutch student curriculum statement:
Lievemaria.nl was een initiatief dat begin 2006 opgezet is door alle wiskunde en natuurkunde studieverenigingen van Nederland. Naar aanleiding van deze actie heeft toenmalig minister Maria van der Hoeven op dinsdag 24 januari 2006 haar plannen met betrekking tot aanpassen van de Tweede Fase aangepast
(Bekijk het nieuwste persbericht, de e-mailconversatie met een medewerker van de minister, het tentamen dat de Kamerleden voorgeschoteld kregen, lees de echte brief (pdf) of de korte versie hieronder)
Wij zijn boos. Wij merken dat wij het universitair niveau eigenlijk niet aankunnen. Er treden dagelijks situaties op waarbij we merken dat we te weinig wiskunde op de middelbare school hebben gehad. Daarom moeten wij nu bijspijkercursussen volgen, of zelfs stoppen met onze studie. Wij horen het geklaag van onze docenten, maar wat kunnen wij eraan doen? Wij zouden willen dat we meer wiskunde hadden gehad op de middelbare school.
Nu bent u bezig om het onderwijs te vernieuwen. Goed idee! Maar we hoorden dat u van plan bent om nòg minder wiskunde te geven. Als u dat doorzet, dan kunnen de nieuwe studenten straks helemaal niets meer begrijpen! Het lijkt ons een beter idee om juist méér wiskunde te geven!
He was on a hang glider, and he slammed the ground hard on his chin. Recovery from surgery on his broken back left the 39-year-old high-school dropout with time for college courses.
From a recliner, the drugged-up crash victim tried to keep his brain from turning to mush by watching a free introductory-biology course put online by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hooked, he moved on to lectures about Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian from an English course at Yale. Then he bought Paradise Lost.
A success for college-made free online courses--except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
"Do I put that I got a 343 out of 350 on my GED test at age 16?" he says, throwing up his hands. "I have nothing else to put."
With states jockeying for extra school dollars from the economic stimulus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan reminded them Tuesday the point is to help kids do better.
Cash-strapped states are competing for $5 billion in grants from the economic stimulus for changes the Obama administration wants, such as charter schools and teacher pay based on student performance.
"It's really not about the money -- it's about pushing a strong reform agenda that's going to improve student achievement," Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.
States can't even apply for the money yet. Still, nine states have changed their laws or made budget decisions to improve their standing. The latest is California, where a bill was signed Sunday allowing student test scores to be used to evaluate teachers.
Duncan said the moves are encouraging. Still, he said states will have to do more than make promises.
The 2009 state NAEP math results were released today, and they're disappointing. Fourth grade scores, which have been a great and under-recognized success story over the last two decades, were flat. Eighth grade scores rose slightly. What to conclude? Most broadly, that most of the claims about national education policy, pro and con, have been overwrought.
Supporters of the No Child Left Behind Act-and I've generally been one of them-hoped that the law would catalyze a major upward move in student achievement. That hasn't happened. Perhaps it's because every state got to choose its own standards; perhaps it's because the law did little to get better teachers in classrooms; perhaps it's because yawning revenue disparities between and within states were largely unaddressed. Whatever was missing, something was missing, probably many things, and the next version of ESEA will need significant changes if we want to achieve more than just more of the same.
All the people participating already knew that dropping out is a bad idea. He needed to invite those prison inmates, those who are unemployed, and those in poverty for the input about what would have been most helpful to have met their needs when they were in school. That's where the answers are.
My own middle school once held annual forums with our students who had gone on to high school, and we purposely wanted to talk, not with just the A-students, but with the C students and the D-minus students. We asked them what we as a middle school could have done better in hopes of finding insights for our continual improvement.
A teacher or counselor can make his/her best "argument" to a young person that his/her life will be more successful if he/she stays in school, but that young person may drop out anyway. We need that person's input by hindsight as to what we all could have done better in the face of what the rest of us see as common sense but, nevertheless, led to a decision for which that dropout was still on his/her own responsibility.
Bennett further cites that Indiana is "raising the bar for every student" through academic standards. While we must always analyze what we expect our students to learn and continuously try to measure their success, raising standards for the sake of raising standards will not save students who are failing in school. That would be akin to requiring students to pass a test on algebra who haven't learned to multiply and divide or requiring students with limited English or learning disabilities to test at the same standards at a chonological age while saying we need, as Bennett said, "targeted, individualized improvement plans for these students."
There seems to be a contradiction here. The state has an ISTEP test that it keeps tweaking and changing, giving little comparison to previous results although those comparisons are made anyway and schools are graded in an apples-and-oranges world. Give the test some time.
Loyola University is launching a new school of education that will focus on solving problems in urban schools and on forging practical relationships between the university and Baltimore's public school system.
The school, which Loyola will dedicate at a ceremony this evening, will house a research center dedicated to innovation in urban education. University officials hope the center will attract top-notch faculty and students with an interest in making practical improvements to Baltimore schools, said Peter Murrell, dean of the school of education.
"It really fits with the Jesuit philosophy that to do good work in the world, you have to get out there and roll up your sleeves," Murrell said.
Murrell has focused his research on urban education and came to Loyola last year after directing a similar research center at Northeastern University in Boston.
Fourth- and eighth-graders in Wisconsin have improved their scores on a national mathematics test since the early 1990s, but the gap between the performance of the state's white and black students has not gotten any better, according to test results released Wednesday.
The state's math results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed little change from the last time scores for those age groups were released two years ago. Fourth-graders in Wisconsin posted the same average score - 244 - that they had two years ago, although the percentage of students deemed proficient or higher in math slid to 45% from 47%. The average score for eighth-graders rose slightly to 288 on a 500-point scale, with the proficiency rate rising as well, to 39%.
"Wisconsin has made slow but steady gains in mathematics achievement for both overall achievement and for most subgroups of students," State Superintendent Tony Evers said in a news release about the results. "However, achievement gaps, in particular for African-American students in Wisconsin, are too large. We must do more."
The NAEP - also called the nation's report card - is given to samples of students to monitor progress on a statewide basis. In Wisconsin, questions from the math test were given to 3,830 fourth-graders and 3,474 eighth-graders from January to March this year. The test does not attempt to gauge performance by individual school districts.
The forces lined up against D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee -- angry teachers, grumpy D.C. Council members, the nation's top teachers' union leader quarterbacking the opposition -- are essentially asking one question: Why can't you behave more like that nice Arne Duncan?
Indeed, with his aw-shucks humility and his anecdotes about playing b-ball with the president, Duncan has undeniable charm. That charm was honed in Chicago, where he never played in-your-face politics and never publicly suggested there was widespread incompetence among the teaching force, qualities that contributed to President Obama's tapping him to be U.S. secretary of education.
By contrast, Rhee appeared on the cover of Time wielding a broom to symbolically sweep incompetence out of her public schools. Yikes.
But there's a reason Rhee plays hardball: She has no choice.
As a presidential aspirant last year, Barack Obama gained the support of the National Education Association -- and the scorn of school choice activists -- when he declared his skepticism of the school choice and accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act. Then in the early months of this year, the newly-elected president further pleased teachers unions when he tacitly allowed congressional Democrats to shutter the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Plan, the school voucher program that helps 1,716 Washington students attend private schools -- even though he avoided sending his own children to D.C.'s abysmal public schools.
Declared Cato Institute Director Andrew Coulson this past May in the Washington Post: "[Obama] has sacrificed a program he knows to be efficient and successful in order to appease the public school employee unions."
Palo Alto Unified school district's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) provides educational opportunities that recognize the performance capabilities of gifted students as well as addresses the unique needs and differences associated with having these abilities. The goals of Gifted and Talented Education can be defined as follows:
To provide students with opportunities for learning that maximize each students' abilities.
To assist and encourage students to acquire skills and understanding at advanced academic and creative levels.
To aid students in expanding their abilities to communicate and apply their ideas effectively.
To engender an enthusiasm for learning.
Program Model
In elementary and middle school, the program model for GATE is differentiation within the mainstream classroom. In 2001, new legislation called for a change in GATE education. Rather than pull children from class for a different curriculum, all differentiation takes place within the context of standards-based instruction in the regular classroom. Teachers enrich and extend the core curriculum for gifted students by differentiating instruction, content, and process. Through differentiated assignments developed to meet their academic and intellectual needs, GATE students are able to explore and expand to their maximum potential. These differentiated curricular opportunities are available to all students, not just those who are formally identified. In middle school, students also have access to the Renzulli Learning System to allow them to individualize their education based on their needs, interests and creative abilities and to explore the curriculum in greater depth and complexity. Advanced math courses are available for the first time in 7th grade and continue through 12th grade. In high school, gifted students are able to take advanced, honors, and advanced placement courses in a wide variety of subjects.
"The philosophy behind the core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could 'approach' books if it were ever necessary to do so."
Caleb Nelson '88 (Mathematics) writing in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990:
Even before Harvard's Core Curriculum made its debut, in 1979, Saturday Review hailed it as "a quiet revolution." The magazine was wrong on both counts: not only was the core unrevolutionary but it rapidly became one of the loudest curricula in America. Time, Newsweek, and other popular periodicals celebrated the new program, which required undergraduates to take special courses designed to reveal the methods--not the content--of the various academic disciplines. "Not since...1945," The Washington Post said, "had the academic world dared to devise a new formula for developing 'the educated man.'" The reform was front-page news for The New York Times, and even network television covered it. Media enthusiasm continues today, with Edward Fiske, the former education editor of The New York Times advising readers of The Fiske Guide to Colleges: "Back in the mid-1970s Harvard helped launch the current curriculum reform movement, and the core curriculum that emerged ranks as perhaps the most exciting collection of academic offerings in all of American higher education."
The core did indeed start a movement. A 1981 report issued by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching spoke of "the Harvard lead" and recommended a general-education program that put more emphasis on "the shared relationships common to all people" than on any particular facts. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill soon adopted the Harvard approach, and other schools have instituted programs that stress skills over facts. The structures of these programs vary, but the Harvard core's singular influence is suggested by Ernest Boyer's 1987 book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America. Boyer's survey of academic deans at colleges and universities nationwide found that the Harvard core was the most frequently mentioned example of a successful program of general education.
For their part, Harvard officials seem delighted with the program. A. Michael Spence, who just finished a six-year term as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, has labeled it "a smash hit"; President Derek Bok has heralded its "enormous success." Indeed, Bok, who will step down next year after two decades at the helm, said in 1983, when the faculty approved the continuation of the core, that the development of the program had given him more satisfaction than any other project undertaken during his presidency. In 1985 the members of Harvard's chief governing board showed that they had no complaints either when the elected the core's architect, Henry Rosovsky, to their number. (Rosovsky, who preceded Spence as dean of the faculty, has now been appointed acting dean while Harvard searches for Spence's permanent replacement.) The program recently marked its tenth anniversary, and no fundamental changes are on the horizon.
Forty-five years ago Harvard had a clear idea of its mission. In 1945 it published a 267-page book laying out goals for educators, with the hope of giving American colleges and secondary schools a "unifying purpose and idea." The thrust of this volume, titled General Education in a Free Society but nicknamed "the Redbook," was that educational institutions should strive to create responsible democratic citizens, well versed in the heritage of the West and endowed with "the common knowledge and the common values on which a free society depends." As James Bryant Conant, then the president of Harvard, once summed up his goal, "Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free."
To accomplish this goal at Harvard, the Redbook recommended that every undergraduate be required to take two full-year survey courses, tentatively called "Great Texts of Literature" and "Western Thought and Institutions," and a full-year course on the principles of either the physical or the biological sciences. The Harvard faculty balked at this specific program, but it endorsed the Redbook's essence. In each of three areas--the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences--it established a short list of approved courses. The general education program was first required in the fall of 1949 and was fully phased in two years later, when all entering students were required to do two semesters of approved coursework in each area.
At the outset the courses strongly reflected Harvard's commitment to instructing students in democratic culture. In 1949-1950 students could choose among "Humanism in the West," "Epic and Novel," "Individual and Social Values," and "Doubt, Inquiry, and Affirmation in Western Literature" to fulfill their basic humanities requirement. The options in the social sciences were "Western Thought and Institutions," "The Growth of Modern Western Society," and "Introduction to the Development of Western Civilization." In the natural sciences students could take "Principles of Physical Science," "Principles of Biological Science," or "The Growth of the Experimental Sciences."
But philosophical and educational fashion moved away from the vision of President Conant and the Redbook, and Harvard let its curriculum follow the new trends. Where once the university had spoken strongly of the need to ground students in the Western tradition, in the mid-1960s the general-education program began to lose its unifying theme. Ever more courses were allowed to meet the basic requirements, until by 1969 the program included more than a hundred offerings. The character of most of these courses, moreover, was far different from that of the original group. The humanities featured titles like "The Scandinavian Cinema," "Creative Arts and Computing Machines," and "Narration in the Film: Theory and Practice." The social-sciences area came to include such classes as "Interplanetary and Intercontinental Cultural Diffusion and Contact," "Drug Use and Adolescent Development," and "The American Indian in the Contemporary United States." The natural-sciences area no longer included "Principles of Biological Science," but it did contain such "relevant" courses as "Biology and Social Issues," "Environmental Effects of Power Generation," and "Introduction to Environmental Health."
The general-education program, which had once tried to provide a Harvard education with an overarching purpose, now tried merely to broaden students by exposing them to courses that did not fit into traditional departments. Faithful to the new theories, Harvard declined to broaden its students in any particular direction; how they chose to fill their minds was their own business, and nobody could say that a course called "The Preindustrial City: Its Physical Form and Structural Characteristics" was any less worthwhile than a course on great literature. Harvard's general-education requirements had become value-free.
The general atmosphere at Harvard was reflected in the rise of independent study. As the associate dean for academic planning Phyllis Keller writes in her 1982 book Getting at the Core: Curricular Reform at Harvard, "By 1967, through student initiative, access to Independent Study had become so flexible that any faculty member could arrange for any student to do virtually anything under the sun for academic credit." Richard Norton Smith, the author of The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986), reports that some students received academic credit for "evaluating the nutritional content of their own diets" and that others were similarly rewarded for scuba diving. The dilution of standards was highlighted in 1979, when Sports Illustrated reported that twenty students were studying the Harvard football team's offense under the tutelage of the quarterback.
But educational fashion changed again, the state of Harvard's undergraduate curriculum began to provoke widespread dissatisfaction, and the administration sought a suitable reform. In 1974 Henry Rosovsky, then the dean of the faculty, called for a review of the curriculum as a prelude to change.
Yet although Harvard officials wanted to reform the curriculum, they did not want to launch divisive arguments within the faculty about which subjects were most important. The Harvard administration had learned long before that to commit itself to a particular educational vision was to draw fire. In 1963, for instance, a group of Harvard professors tried to modify the general-education program, only to be met by what Phyllis Keller calls "the avalanche of faculty criticism that buried every specific proposal to change the structure of requirements." The faculty found itself unable to agree on any specific content for the general-education program, and simply threw up its hands; it encouraged the introduction of all kinds of different general-education courses by directing the program to become "quite sensitive to innovation and change."
With this experience to reflect upon, in the seventies Harvard devised a novel scheme to avoid discord while still reforming its curriculum. If "every specific proposal" for reform raised a fire storm, the college would simply avoid specifics. Rather than emphasize knowledge, the new core curriculum would stress students' critical faculties. The report of the task force that proposed the new requirements explained:
"Everything depends on what questions the faculty tries to answer. If it is asked what bodies of knowledge are more or less important, it almost surely will come to no conclusion. There are simply too many facts, too many theories, too many subjects, too many specializations to permit arranging all knowledge into an acceptable hierarchy. But if the faculty is asked instead what intellectual skills, what distinctive ways of thinking, are identifiable and important, it is not clear that either the 'knowledge explosion' or the size of the faculty has made that question unanswerable."
The intellectual style that elevates subjective process over objective fact meshed perfectly with the administration's reluctance to launch an intrinsically controversial discussion of what subjects should be at the core of a Harvard education. As Anthony Oettinger, a professor of applied mathematics, said about the resulting proposal, "This motion...cannot fail to pass; it has become totally content-free."
f the administration promoted the new core curriculum from a desire to preserve consensus, the faculty had its own reasons for going along. While the curriculum was still being debated, Yale University offered Dean Rosovsky its presidency; Rosovsky declined the invitation on the grounds that he wanted to see the core through. This decision, according to Smith's Harvard Century, had far reaching consequences.
Sociologist George Goethals, who calls the final curriculum "a farce," speaks for many of his colleagues: "It got through the faculty...because everybody loves Henry." This view was seconded by another professor, who credited the dean's refusal to leave Cambridge as a turning point in the faculty's consideration of the reform. "We felt we owed him something," he explained.
Yet it is doubtful that the faculty needed this extra spur to make it accept the core curriculum. As long as debate remained on the level of educational theory rather than course content, most professors seemed bored but acquiescent. After all, as Professor David Riesman said at the time, "a minority of the faculty is interested in educational issues"; thus Professor James Ackerman sensed that the core's passage might be due "more to indifference than enthusiasm." Whatever the motivation, in 1978 the faculty approved the new program in a three-to-one landslide.
The core, which still exists today, is a set of courses divided into ten categories--Social Analysis, Moral Reasoning, Historical Study A & B, Foreign Cultures, and Literature and Arts A, B, & C. Students are required to take at least one course from each of eight of these ten areas; they are exempt from the two areas that most closely resemble their major.
The areas themselves are odd assemblages of specialized classes watered down for the nonspecialist. The following list, drawn from the 1989-1990 course catalogue, gives a sampling of the core:
Foreign Cultures--"Building the Shogun's Realm: The Unification of Japan (1560-1650)"
Historical Study A--"The 'Eastern Question' to the 'Middle East Problem' (1774-1984)"
Historical Study B--"Power and Society in Medieval Europe: The Crisis of the 12th Century"
Literature and Arts A--"Oral Literature: An Introduction to Folklore and Mythology"
Literature and Arts B--"The Art of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent: Art,
Architecture, and Ceremonial at the Ottoman Court"
Literature and Arts C--"The Imagery of the Modern Metropolis: Pictorial and Literary Representations of New York and Berlin from 1880 to 1940"
Moral Reasoning--"Confucian Humanism and Moral Community"
Science A--"States of Matter: Order, Disorder, and Broken Symmetries"
Science B--"Plants and Biological Principles in Human Affairs"
Social Analysis--"Culture, Illness, and Healing: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Medicine in Society"
The core's esoteric course titles strongly resemble those prevalent during the waning days of the general-education program. Indeed, soon after the core made its debut, one junior faculty member called it "old garbage in new pails."
The Harvard administration, though, rejects the notion that the core is merely a strange bunch of distribution requirements. In the words of the course catalogue,
"The Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information, or the surveying of current knowledge in certain fields. Rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education. It aims to show what kinds of knowledge and what forms of inquiry exist in these areas, how different means of analysis are acquired, how they are used, and what their value is."
The philosophy behind the core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could 'approach' books if it were ever necessary to do so. Facts may change or become irrelevant, but analytic faculties will always be useful. "We live in a revolutionary era," Dean Rosovsky once explained to the undergraduate daily, The Harvard Crimson, "where theories and facts can be crammed in, but ten years later, you'll forget them." As Rosovsky later observed, "you have to prepare the mind to deal with change without emphasis on certain facts.
One suspects, however, that Harvard's philosophical commitment to emphasizing analysis over content is weak, because the core is not above stressing content when it seems politically expedient to do so. While all students can meet their core requirements without taking a single course that focuses on Western culture, most are required to study a non-Western culture. Indeed, the rhetoric surrounding the core's Foreign Cultures requirement differs fundamentally from that surrounding all the other core areas; it alone emphasizes matter over method. In the words of the course catalogue, "The Core requirement in Foreign Cultures is designed to expand the range of cultural experience and to provide fresh perspectives on one's own cultural assumptions and traditions."
Foreign Cultures courses do not pretend to teach students to think like cultural anthropologists, well versed in the analytic tools that would let them critically assess other cultures. There is reason to believe, in fact, that the courses actively exclude critical approaches. In the October, 1987, issue of The Harvard Salient, a campus political monthly that I was then editing, a student named Arthur Long wrote about his experience in Foreign Cultures 12, "Sources of Indian Civilization":
"The class strongly discouraged us from critically assessing Indian society, because--in the words of other students--doing so invariably involves looking at matters with 'our own Western preconceptions.' Hence when discussing the caste system, we overlooked how untouchability has institutionalized slavery; instead we asserted that, at least before British imperialists began to impose Western values on India, caste made for a more compassionate universe than we know in America."
The oddities of the Foreign Cultures requirement are highlighted by the absence of any corresponding Western-culture requirement. Although a Western-culture requirement was initially proposed by the task force that developed the core curriculum, it was later scrapped in the face of faculty opposition. Indeed, in the ten years after 1978--when the professor who had taught the basic Redbook course "Western Thought and Institutions" retired--no survey of Western civilization was even offered.
For a school averse to controversial educational stands, this peculiar state of affairs was predictable. Since the sixties, Western-civilization requirements have been loudly denounced as narrow-minded at best and racist at worst. Such requirements, the argument goes, slight non-Western peoples and mythologizes a West that has in fact committed its share of barbarisms. Many universities have accordingly de-emphasized the West. Only relatively recently has the spotlight shifted to the critics--as politically diverse as William Bennett and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.--who observe that whatever its faults the West is the font of freedom, and that since we must ground ourselves in one culture before we can fully appreciate others, it is both natural and necessary for Western schools to teach Western heritage.
Phyllis Keller, whose book on the core's creation staunchly defends the program's underlying philosophy, neglects ethnocentrism when she catalogues the arguments that were used to justify the omission of the Western-culture requirement. But the arguments that she does list are all unpersuasive.
First, Keller reports, "One problem with the survey of Western civilization was that it was often boring for both faculty and students." As a result, "it seemed highly improbable that faculty members would undertake responsibility for such a course with any degree of continuing enthusiasm." This claim says little for Harvard's much-vaunted faculty. If every Harvard professor would be bored by introducing students to the staples of Western literature and philosophy, then Harvard has no business dealing with undergraduates; it should confine itself to specialized graduate study. Fortunately, at least some professors do seem to be interested in teaching a Western-culture survey course. "Western Societies, Politics and Cultures" was introduced last year as a non-core elective in the history department, under the supervision of one or two professors each semester and with guest lectures by a number of other faculty members.
A related argument on Keller's list is that a Western-culture requirement was largely unnecessary: "Many students have studied 'the facts' of history in high school; while such exposure was by no means universal, it was surely widespread." Many students have also read novels in high school, yet literature remains a division of the core. Presumably college courses can treat more topics in more-sophisticated ways than can high school courses. Few ninth-graders, after all, can fully grasp Kant. If Harvard believes that it cannot cover subjects any better than a typical high school, it should shut down.
Keller's list continues:
"The utility of a Western civilization requirement would also depend entirely on strict sequencing: this course would have to be taken before all the other courses for which it was supposed to provide background. That was likely to interfere with course sequences needed for certain concentrations and with other basic college requirements."
Since all freshman are required to take an expository writing class, it is hard to believe that they could not also be required to take a Western-culture class. Columbia University, for example, manages to impose such a requirement very successfully. But, in any event, familiarity with the great works and great events of Western culture is not simply "background" for one's classes in pictorial representations of Berlin. It is important in its own right.
In Keller's opinion, "the most compelling argument" advanced against a Western-culture component of the core was that such a requirement would be inconsistent with the philosophy behind the core, with its stress on analytic methods. Under the core's rationale, "the facts of history--without derogating their importance--appear to be infinitely forgettable." But there is no reason to assume that students can develop their critical faculties only when they are studying esoteric books and events and not well-known ones. Keller's argument, moreover, is vitiated by the fact that Foreign Cultures courses have no pretensions to teaching analytic methods.
It is difficult to imagine that the arguments that Keller lists could, by themselves, have persuaded the faculty to reject a Western-culture requirement. One must suspect that the faculty was also worried that such a requirement would be, or would seem, ethnocentric--a concern that had surfaced repeatedly during the faculty's debates on the core. This suspicion is supported by the fact that when the tides shifted and vocal advocates of teaching Western culture gained prominence in the mid-1980s, the history department created its new "Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures"--the result, a professor told the Crimson, of the increased demand for such a survey course. Even so, Harvard still seems wary of charges of ethnocentrism. According to the Crimson, "History professors said...that the department intentionally refrained from naming the new class 'Western Civilization,' fearing such a title would offend some people."
If the core arose more from the administration's desire to avoid conflict than from any commitment to the ostensible philosophy behind the program, one should not be surprised that the core has failed to live up to the administration's claims. In 1987 the Salient conducted a random telephone survey of 200 undergraduates. More than 80 percent of the students said that most core courses do not "introduce students to approaches to knowledge" but simply "teach students about a particular subject." More than three quarters of the respondents rejected the course catalogue's claim that "courses within each area or subdivision of the [core] are equivalent in the sense that, while their subject matter may vary, their emphasis on a particular way of thinking is the same." The same number of respondents, furthermore, said that departmental courses are at least as good as core courses at introducing students to "approaches to knowledge," and 40 percent believed that departmental courses are better at this task.
Oddly, the college implicitly grants that departmental courses teach students just as much about analytical methods as core courses, and hence that there is no true justification for the core scheme. Since students are not required to take courses in the two core areas that most closely resemble their majors, Harvard must admit either that it lets students graduate without teaching them how to approach their chosen fields or that departmental courses are just as successful as core courses in helping students develop intellectual skills.
The administrations claims about the special nature of core courses can be assessed accurately on the basis of a single episode. In 1988, when a course on the history of jazz moved from the music department to the core, Harvard refused to grant core credit to the students who had taken the course before its move, on the grounds that it had been changed to become suitable for the core. But the administration also refused to let them take the course again, on the grounds that the new core course was not substantially different from its departmental predecessor. When the students angrily objected, Harvard quelled the incipient controversy by changing its mind and granting them core credit.
Professors have seemed equally confused ever since the core system was adopted. In 1980 the Crimson reported that "most professors, section leaders and students interviewed this week were unable to say what made their [Literature and Arts] Core courses different from any other courses."
The problem goes beyond the particular courses that are now in the core: no set of introductory courses could achieve the core's ostensible goals.One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics. To be sure, one can understand the basic steps in the scientific process--forming hypotheses, testing them, revising them--without knowing any scientific facts. But precisely for that reason, such an understanding is so superficial that it is well within the reach of most schoolchildren. To have a deeper awareness of how scientists approach problems, one must be familiar with the complex interplay of the scientific principles that underlie both the problems and their solutions. In short, on must have studied much science before one can have a useful idea of how scientists operate.
Even in the humanities the core's failure to meet its stated goals was inevitable. The core's history courses, for instance, can have little to do with historical methods. Not only must one leave analyses of historical technique to specialists but--since entering students are presumed to be ignorant of scholarly methods--the course cannot very well demand any original research. Of necessity, core history courses focus exclusively on their respective subjects.
Phyllis Keller anticipates this argument in her book , and asserts that the subjects themselves are carefully chosen to impart certain lessons about the utility and complexity of history as a discipline. Historical Study A subjects are selected to show students "how historical study helps to make sense of the great issues of our time"; according to the core planners Keller quotes, while classes in the B group reveal "the confusion of circumstance, purpose, and accident that inevitably shapes people's lives," and thereby teach students that "there are very few heroes and very few villains, and that only false history makes easy judgments possible." These lessons are not necessarily consistent; while the A group points to the patterns in history, the B group seems to deny their existence. But in any event, even students who successfully grasp the lessons acquire no new intellectual techniques. Like students in every other discipline, they can develop the relevant analytic faculties only slowly, through a coherent and comprehensive study of the subject's substance.
If the core's goals were realistic, they would still have little to recommend them. Why, for instance, are lessons about the nature of history as a discipline the most important things for students to learn in their required history course? Students certainly should recognize that history is the testing ground of public policy, and that its study can reveal much about the psychology of people and nations; as Santayana's famous aphorism goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But this lesson about history is useless unless one also learns the actual lessons of history--an accomplishment that requires careful attention to historical facts themselves. When Harvard suggests that its mission is finished once students learn that historical study can be useful, the college abdicates its educational responsibility at a crucial point: it lets students decide for themselves whether to study the actual substance of history, beyond the incidental amount that they find in their core courses. Regardless of their decision, Harvard willingly certifies their educational attainments by awarding them diplomas.
Indeed, the entire core is designed to let Harvard gracefully excuse itself from the controversial duty of making such decisions for students. In Literature and Arts A, for instance, Harvard does not care whether students take a class about Shakespeare or one titled "Beast Literature." The area includes such special-interest courses as "African American Women Writers," "Chivalric Romances of the Middle Ages," and "Epic Fiction International"--for Harvard is unwilling to assert that the novels of Salmon Rushdie are any less important than Shakespeare's plays or the Bible. In the words of the leader of the initial core task force, the idea "was not to make choices for students, but rather to equip them with the ability to make the choices for themselves."
Before the core can ever equip students to make choices, however, students must make an uninformed choice about which core class to take. Those who choose Rushdie learn nothing of Shakespeare; if they opt to take a subsequent course on Shakespeare's works, it is only because they have made another uninformed decision. The core is therefore ill designed even to guide students in structuring their own educations.
The core not only explicitly denies the value of giving students any particular core of knowledge but also skews the range of knowledge that students might be able to pick up. It contains no course on mathematics, a discipline better suited than most to teaching methods of analysis. The core offers no introductory foreign-language course. Its coverage of sciences--especially the more quantitative physical sciences--is widely considered laughable; as Frank Westheimer, a professor of chemistry, asserted when the core was proposed, the program represents science as having "a minor, perhaps only a trivial, place in the intellectual heritage of mankind." The core lacks a general survey of the history of even one Western nation, although it does contain survey courses on China, India, and Japan. It offers students no broad look at literature or art, at music or philosophy.
Ezekiel Emanuel, who five years ago served as the head section leader for the largest core Moral Reasoning course while he attended Harvard Medical School, wrote in a 1983 editorial in the Crimson, "Most Harvard students taking Core courses are no more likely to have read and seriously understood the philosophical, political, or cultural foundations of their own United States than if they selected 32 random courses [the number of courses required for an undergraduate degree] from the catalogue."
In 1978 Henry Rosovsky justified the core to People magazine in this way: "What's at stake is the restoration of common discourse in which all students can share." But that is exactly what Harvard has lost. Common discourse would require students to be familiar with some of the same authors, to know some of the same history, and to have learned some of the same philosophies--in short, to have gone through a program such as the one outlined by the Redbook. It would therefore require Harvard to take the controversial step of defining a canon. The administration is unwilling to do so.
As a result, students can graduate from Harvard without ever having studied the books that are commonly considered great or the events that are commonly considered most important. In the 1989-1990 catalogue, for instance, no core Literature and Arts course lists any of the great nineteenth-century British novelists among the authors studied, nor does any list such writers as Virgil, Milton, and Dostoevsky. In the core's history areas even students who did the impossible and took every single course would not focus on any Western history before the Middle Ages, nor would they study the history of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the American Civil War, or a host of other topics that one might expect a core to cover. To be sure, students can learn about these things on their own or in the individual departments, and they can leave Harvard with a very good education. But the whole point of having a core curriculum is to make the process less chancy.
Harvard's stature and the media's lavish praise have made the core one of the most influential curricula in American, but it is hollow. It owes its existence to Harvard's willingness to sacrifice content in order to preserve consensus. A decade of experience has exposed the poverty of this approach.
W hen Mark Yudof addressed the Uni versity of Califor nia's board of regents recently, what would have normally been a quiet gathering turned into a circus.
Fourteen people were arrested after protesting against cuts in the funding of the UC network, which includes UCLA, Berkeley and San Diego and business schools such as Haas , the Anderson School of Management and the Rady School of Management.
As California grapples with a budget crisis that has affected all public services, the UC system has been asked to absorb a funding shortfall of more than $800m. Student protests on a scale unseen since the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s have been held at Berkeley, while other protests have been held at UCLA and UC Irvine.
Mr Yudof, the president of the UC system, told the regents that steep tuition fee rises were un-avoidable. "What we cannot do is surrender to the greatest enemy of the University of California, which is mediocrity. We have to stabilise our situation and then we can build [again]."
All across Wisconsin, schools received boxes and boxes of stuff they didn't want last week.
Unfortunately, they were about the most important deliveries they'll get this year: Hundreds of thousands of test booklets for the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the state's annual standardized test.
The testing window, one of the biggest events in every school year, is about to open. More than 400,000 students in third through eighth grade, as well as in 10th grade, will be tested in either two or five subjects in coming weeks, with a handful of schools starting this week and the large majority doing the testing in November.
It's the test everyone loves to hate. It takes up large amounts of time and disrupts schedules for days on end. There are widespread complaints about what is actually tested. The test yields almost nothing that is useful to teachers in shaping the way they educate students. It's often a public relations problem and sometimes a nightmare if a school's scores are low or sometimes even just not better than the prior year.
Furthermore, the test is dying a slow death, and everyone knows it.
Just to be contrary, let's say something good about the WKCE. For all its flaws, it's the only broad scale accountability tool we've got in this state. It succeeds in putting a lot of heat on schools across the state, and many of them need it.
And the test scores are actually a pretty good reflection of student achievement in a school - which is to say, I've never heard of a school with low scores that could make a convincing case that the kids were actually doing well and the scores were off base.
But the state testing system is moving toward an overhaul, and for good reasons.
Coming on the heels of the state's unprecedented budget crisis, the federal stimulus--also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)--first received attention in California as a source of extra, much needed funding for schools.
In the months since, it has become increasingly clear that the reforms it embodies could have a bigger and more lasting impact than the nearly $8 billion it is providing to public K-12 education in the state.
The education components of the federal stimulus place a strong emphasis on four reform areas:
Pupils around the world have been telling BBC News about the battle they face to get an education. But why is school worth the effort?
The BBC's 'Hunger To Learn' would like you to tell us how your education changed your life. What was the most important lesson you learned at school?
Did your education transform your fortunes? Or do you feel that the things you learned outside school - with your family, your friends and in your working life - had a greater influence on your destiny?
written by Anti-Racist Parent contributor Deanna Shoss; originally published at Intercultural Talk
My dad and I came to an impasse again recently. It happens whenever we get into a conversation about race. Or more specifically, a conversation about something that happened in the news or real life where people of different races were involved. As in "they believe this way" from him, and "you can't call an entire group of people they" from me.
It always ends with him thinking that I think he's racist, and with me thinking that he thinks I'm all about politically correct language with no real depth of meaning. Rather than digging for clarification, we back away from the conversation. The funny part is that this time we were agreeing about the same thing: Huckleberry Finn should not be banned.
This conversation has been lingering for a few months after my father introduced the book to my 8 year old son, who let me know by announcing that he had learned the 'N' word. I've blogged about it here and here. It reintroduced me to Mark Twain, who really is a brilliant writer, and it created an insight into institutional racism that I hadn't anticipated, when Dillon said "back then this word was okay to use."
A complex maze that used to determine what school students attended has been streamlined into an uncomplicated rule: students' addresses determine their school.
Students entering kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade in the 2010-11 year will be assigned to a school near their home. Students in other grades will remain at their current schools, an appropriate grandfathering that minimizes disruptions.
Many families won't notice a difference. For others, this plan is a huge change. Families living on Queen Anne and in Magnolia have long asked for a neighborhood high school so students weren't bused across the city. They're being assigned to one of the best: Ballard High School.
This shift is the correct route forward. After the district ended bussing for integration purposes, it veered into an expensive and convoluted open choice system. Families could choose any school they wanted but the result was a lack of predictability and stability. Most troubling, the system weighed heavily against less savvy families who were unable to navigate the application process.
These comments are excerpted from a Sept. 16 panel discussion on education and workforce preparation at Santa Clara University. The event, Projections 2010: Leadership California, was hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
Moderator, Marshall Kilduff, Chronicle editorial writer: With a lot of bad news in education, including test scores, declining financial support, what would you do?
Mayor Gavin Newsom: I'll tell you what we've done in San Francisco. I believe not just in public-private partnerships. I believe in public-public partnerships. ... The City and County of San Francisco does not run its school district ... but, nonetheless, we've taken some responsibility to addressing the needs of our public-school kids by building a partnership. ... We focus on universal preschool. We've created a framework, a partnership, that guarantees the opportunity of a four-year college education for every single sixth-grader. It's those partnerships that I'm arguing for.
Aart J. De Geus, CEO, Synopsys: If I look at it as if I were the CEO of education of California, I would look at a company (in terms of), "What are the resources? What are the results? And what is the management system?" I'd say, "Well, let's look at the CEO of the educational system." There is no CEO of the educational system. I know there are commissioners, and whatever they're called, but, to be a CEO, you need to have both responsibility and power.
I want to love Michelle Rhee -- really, I do -- but she makes it so hard sometimes.
The D.C. schools chancellor has made it especially difficult this month with her layoffs of 229 teachers and 159 other staff workers. She picked a spectacularly bad time, just as the school year was shifting into high gear. She also mishandled the theatrics in such a way that she enraged the unions and D.C. Council even more than she usually does.
As a result, labor and political tensions simmering in the city over Rhee's reforms since she arrived in 2007 boiled over last week. The spillage might jeopardize her whole project and poses a significant challenge for her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), as he seeks reelection next year.
The uproar is regrettable because the city and the region have a strong interest in seeing Rhee succeed. She is the first leader of the D.C. schools in recent memory who seems sufficiently tough and determined to fix the shockingly poor school performance that we've tolerated complacently for decades.
I spend seven hours each day next to metamorphosed monsters. The stresses of college applications unfortunately transform perfunctory peers into college creatures. They are predatory and are camouflaged as seniors, but with the right tactics, anyone can survive the jungle of college applications. Among the creatures lurking there:
College crabs scuttle about school hoping to undercut any competition. The crab exhibits its aggressive territorial dance to discourage the approach of other UC Berkeley applicants. A stack of books clasped in its claws and a bulging backpack-induced hunch characterize the agitated crab.
Prestige parrots are like ordinary parrots, squawking the same questions day after day. But these pretentious peers are primarily hunting for a name-brand university and will eagerly cannibalize competitors. Their obnoxious calls from afar warn victims: "Squawwwk, what's your SAT score?"
Fabian Fernandez, a junior at Madison Country Day School, said hosting a student from Japan forces you to look at your own culture, and to consider the differences and similarities.
"You kind of get to re-experience your own culture," said Fernandez, whose family has hosted a number of students from other countries. "Even the small things."
Recently, eight Japanese 10th-graders and one teacher were here for nine days and stayed with host families from Madison Country Day School, which they also attended.
Every other year, the students from Hakuoh High School visit Madison Country Day, a private school for pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students, through a sister-school relationship.
During alternate years, Madison Country Day students visit the school in Ashikaga City, Japan, about 90 miles from Tokyo. This year, five juniors and seniors are considering the trip.
Q How has the school year been going for students at the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, the online school contracted by the McFarland School District?
A Things have gone "remarkably well" so far for the virtual charter school in its first year of operation, said Leslye Erickson, the head of the school.
The McFarland School District contracted with the nonprofit Wisconsin Virtual Academy and K12 Virtual Schools to run and provide the research-based curriculum for the school, which has 488 students enrolled in kindergarten through high school.
Students come from all over the state, Erickson said, so orientations were held before school began to allow students, parents and teachers to meet face-to-face.
That oft-used refrain soon may have new meaning. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed extending the school day, lengthening the school year and adding Saturday classes. Their laudable goal is to prepare the next generation for adulthood in an increasingly complex world.
Is this the way to do it? For at least one group of students, the answer is no. Based on studies I have read, the dropout rate for gifted students is between 5 and 20 percent.
What scourge is stealing so many of our smartest kids? Extreme debilitating boredom coupled with agile minds that can't let them patiently wait for the end of class. If we lengthen their classroom hours, how many gifted kids are likely to stay?
To understand how boredom feels to these kids, imagine making a school's fastest runner sit in a chair next to the track all day, every day, while her teammates are racing past her. Imagine her frustration. Imagine how she's going to feel about running after a few days of that. Most likely, she'll walk off the field and never turn back. By dropping out, that's what these lost gifted children do. Many of the boys leave to get a job. Many of the girls leave pregnant.
Teacher Kristin Bretch snaps instructions to her young charges, reading words from her teacher's guide, pacing in front of the white board like a drill sergeant.
"We're on word three: 'belt.' Spell 'belt,' everyone."
The pupils are second- and third-graders, almost all poor and many of whom could barely speak English when they arrived in Kansas City as refugees from countries like Burundi and Sudan, Vietnam and Somalia. They reply, almost shouting, in unison.
B-E-L-T. Belt.
Here, at the Della Lamb Charter Elementary School, these lessons go on for 227 days, compared with the average 180 days of most U.S. school districts.
The reason is clear:
"To make us smarter. To give us better brains," said Abdirihman Akil, age 9.
Exactly, said President Barack Obama. He and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have reiterated support for the idea of adding hours to the school day to boost academic achievement and compete with other nations.
On the National Key Result Areas, the deputy premier said there were four areas that touched on education.
The first was on efforts for all children to attend pre-school from the present 63 per cent only. Starting next year, he said new schools would be built, starting with 378 classrooms, and in three years, all children would be able to attend pre-school.
"From our research, we found that pre-school is very important and we want to make it possible for everyone to send their children."
Secondly, Muhyiddin said it was the government's target that all children could read and count by the time they were in Year Three.
"We will identify weak students in Year One itself and provide special classes for them to ensure they are not left behind," he said.
The third area was to identify 100 schools in the next three years to be converted into high performance schools. These schools, Muhyiddin said, would cater for excellent students and receive additional assistance from the government.
While I'm recommending books.... I recently read The Global Achievement Gap, by Tony Wagner, an excellent book about the failures of today's secondary schools and how schools prepare students to memorize facts rather than problem solve. He identifies seven skills necessary to survive in the 21st century: critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration across networks; agility and adaptability; initiative and entrepreneurialism; effective oral and written communication; accessing and analyzing information; and developing curiosity and imagination. He takes "learning walks" through schools, and provides snapshots of school days, both good and bad. I wish every principal would read this book, take a learning walk of her/his own, and then implement many of the wonderful suggestions for ways to engage students in a meaningful way.
Pakistan's poor education system has increasingly become a matter of international concern. Lack of access to quality education, which in turn limits economic opportunity, makes young Pakistanis targets for extremist groups, some experts say. The World Bank says nearly half the adult population of Pakistan can't read, and net primary enrollment rates remain the lowest in South Asia. Experts say the system suffers from inadequate government investment, corruption, lack of institutional capacity, and a poor curriculum that often incites intolerance. In August 2009, chief counterterrorism adviser to the White House John Brennan, summing up a concern held by many U.S. terrorism experts, said extremist groups in Pakistan have exploited this weakness. "It is why they offer free education to impoverished Pakistani children, where they can recruit and indoctrinate the next generation," he said. There have been some efforts by the Pakistani government, Western governments, and the World Bank to reform the system, but serious challenges remain.
Third-grade teacher Andy Gomez stood at a whiteboard before 10 of his colleagues on a recent Thursday afternoon at Marie Reed Elementary in Adams Morgan. His students were stumbling over subtraction problems like 700 minus 369, he said -- the zeros were tripping them up.
The solution to their difficulties was coming -- by way of Japan.
For the next half-hour, the group discussed -- down to nitty-gritty details about vocabulary to use or avoid -- what the students' fundamental misunderstandings about numbers might be and how to address them.
This collaborative examination of the mechanics of teaching is part of the school's embrace of "lesson study," a model of professional development for teachers that was developed in Japan. It was pioneered in the District by five teachers at Marie Reed, who began meeting weekly two years ago to study math content and pedagogy.
FOR the past year the pupils of Escuela 95, in a poor neighbourhood of Montevideo, have had a new learning tool. Each has been issued with a laptop computer. This has been of particular help to the 30 or so children with severe learning difficulties, says Elias Portugal, a special-needs teacher at the school. Before, he struggled to give them individual attention. Now, the laptops are helping them with basic language skills. "The machines capture the kids' attention. They can type a word and the computer pronounces it," he says.
Nearly all of Uruguay's 380,000 primary-school pupils have now received a simple and cheap XO laptop, a model developed by One Laptop Per Child, an NGO based in Massachusetts. The government hopes this will help poorer and disadvantaged children do better in school while also improving the overall standard of education. These ambitions will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects. The rest of the world should be intrigued: the first country in Latin America to provide free, compulsory schooling will become the first, globally, to find out whether furnishing a whole generation with laptops is a worthwhile investment. (Peru, a bigger, poorer and less homogenous country, is trying something similar.)
Cultural and academic education shouldn't be separate and unequal, Alaska Commissioner of Education Larry LeDoux said on Wednesday.
"We can prepare kids to engage in any career they have a dream for and still be conversant in their language and their culture," he said.
LeDoux was speaking as part of an education panel at the 97th annual Grand Camp Convention of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood. It's a convention in which education needs for the Native population features prominently: The theme is "Wooch.éen; Gu dángahl: Yes We Can! Cultural Unity through Education and Communication."
ANB President Brad Fluetsch also mentioned the gap between cultural and academic education, giving the example of harvesting a seal.
"To us, it's cultural education, but to the university, it's biology credits," he said.
LeDoux said the department is planning cultural training for new teachers, though it does not yet have funding. Seventy percent of Alaska teachers come from out of state, he said.
One thing for which the department does have funding is hiring a director of rural education, which LeDoux said will happen "any day now."
Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number-48%-say that they themselves plan to get a college degree, according to a new national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages 16 and older by the Pew Hispanic Center conducted from Aug. 5 to Sept. 16, 2009.
The biggest reason for the gap between the high value Latinos place on education and their more modest aspirations to finish college appears to come from financial pressure to support a family, the survey finds.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old survey respondents who cut their education short during or right after high school say they did so because they had to support their family. Other reasons include poor English skills (cited by about half of respondents who cut short their education), a dislike of school and a feeling that they don't need more education for the careers they want (each cited by about four-in-ten respondents who cut their education short).
Latino schooling in the U.S. has long been characterized by high dropout rates and low college completion rates. Both problems have moderated over time, but a persistent educational attainment gap remains between Hispanics and whites.
Herta Müller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism's collapse.
Ms. Müller, born in Romania's Transylvania Banat region, was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said.
"I am very surprised and still can not believe it," Ms. Müller said in a statement released by her publisher in Germany. "I can't say anything more at the moment."
The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers.
Today's speech showed a party committed to micro-managing schools, using policies that have no empirical backing
Michael Gove delivered a speech at the Conservative party conference which played to the prejudices of his audience. His oration was peppered again and again with talk of how the Labour party has failed the country in creating schools which lack discipline and high standards and fail to make our children literate or patriotic. Funnily enough though, he failed to mention that the academy that he felt was a beacon shining in a world of dross was in fact created by the Labour party.
Throughout his speech, he referred to the Labour initiative of academies as a panacea for our educational ills. If in power, the Tories would enable any school to become an academy. In this sense, this flagship policy is no different from Labour's.
The head of Prince George's County schools vowed Tuesday night to "dramatically improve student achievement" as he said that the county had showed strong academic gains.
In his first State of the Schools address since becoming superintendent this year, William R. Hite Jr. said the system should try to "make every child in Prince George's County smarter." He spoke for greater accountability for teachers, more prekindergarten classes, better customer service and alternatives for students who aren't succeeding.
In recent years, Prince George's has experimented in some schools with a pay-for-performance model that offers bonuses to excellent teachers, and Hite said Tuesday that effective teachers can make significant differences.
"We cannot construct a definition [of teacher effectiveness] that does not include student performance as one of the indicators," Hite said.
Three years after calling for a reordering of elementary and middle school math curricula, the nation's largest group of math teachers is urging a new approach to high school instruction, one that aims to build students' ability to choose and apply the most effective problem-solving techniques, in the classroom and in life.
Cultivating those skills will make math more useful, and more meaningful, to students, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics argues in a document scheduled for release this week.
"Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making" is a follow-up to the NCTM's 2006 document, "Curriculum Focal Points," which offered grade-by-grade content standards in math for prekindergarten through 8th grade. "Focal Points" won general praise in math circles, even from some of the NCTM's strongest critics.
The high school document has both a different purpose and a different structure. It is not a suggested set of content standards, but rather a framework that attempts to show how skills that the NCTM considers essential--reasoning and sense-making--can be promoted across high school math.
"Portfolio school districts are promising new developments but they still have big problems to solve," is how Dr. Paul Hill describes reforms in the four big cities being studied by his team at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), University of Washington Bothell.
In New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, school officials are revamping the traditional school district model: from being an operator of a uniform set of schools and related services to being a holder of a diverse portfolio of schools, each meant to meet a particular need, and all subject to evaluation in light of evidence.
"A portfolio district is built for continuous improvement via expansion and imitation of the highest-performing schools, closure and replacement of the lowest-performing, and constant search for new ideas," says Hill. "So far we've found that each city is taking a different approach to developing their portfolio. By the end of our study (in 2011), we think this will tell us a lot more about this approach to public education."
New York City - gave schools freedom over hiring and use of funds in return for accepting performance-based accountability and by adopting pupil-based funding of schools citywide.
A few months ago, 71-year-old Chrissie Maher got a mailing from her bank titled "Personal and Private Banking -- Keeping You Informed." Baffled by its blizzard of terms such as "account facility limit," Ms. Maher replied in simpler language.
"The leaflet needs much more thought if it is to be understood by your customers," she said in a letter to Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. "As it stands, it should be renamed 'Keeping You Confused.' "
After critiquing the pamphlet's "tortuous and ambiguous sentences," she redrafted it, changing terms like "maximum debit balance" to "the most that can be owed."
RBS may have picked the wrong woman to target with financial mumbo jumbo. Ms. Maher is the founder of the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose stated goal is to stem "the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language" that "takes away our democratic rights."
Over the years, Ms. Maher and her group have battled police agencies, expansion planners at Heathrow Airport, and the "frequently bizarre language" of the European Union. (At issue: phrases such as "unlock clusters," "subsidiarity" and "sector-specific benchmarking.") She has blasted local government on the use of "worklessness" to refer to unemployment and once attacked the president of the U.K. Spelling Society over his claim that the apostrophe is "a waste of time."
September 17 is Constitution Day, marking the day 222 years ago in Philadelphia when the Constitution of the United States was signed. Legend has it that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, as he was leaving the constitutional convention, what sort of government had been created. Franklin's reply: "A republic, if you can keep it."
A major justification for supporting a system of public schools has been the promotion of a general diffusion of civic knowledge necessary for a well-informed citizenry. America's founders, hoping to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," knew that our system of ordered liberty would endure only if its citizens understood the nation's guiding principles. The endurance of American liberty, the founders believed, depends upon a broad knowledge of the nation's history and an understanding of its institutions.
Charles N. Quigley, writing for the Progressive Policy Institute, once explained the critical nature of civic knowledge: "From this nation's earliest days, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams recognized that even the well-designed institutions are not sufficient to maintain a free society. Ultimately, a vibrant democracy must rely on the knowledge, skill, and virtues of its citizens and their elected officials. Education that imparts that knowledge and skill and fosters those virtues is essential to the preservation and improvement of American constitutional democracy and civic life.
"The goal of education in civics and government is informed, responsible participation in political life by citizens committed to the fundamental values and principles of American constitutional democracy."1
For its part, the State of Oklahoma also lays out the goals of social studies education. According to the state's academic standards: "Oklahoma schools teach social studies in Kindergarten through Grade 12. ... However it is presented, social studies as a field of study incorporates many disciplines in an integrated fashion, and is designed to promote civic competence. Civic competence is the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of students to be able to assume 'the office of citizen,' as Thomas Jefferson called it.
eachers punished for speaking out. Principals fired for trying to do the right thing. Union leaders defending the indefensible. Bureaucrats blocking new charter schools. These are just some of the people we meet in The Cartel. The film also introduces us to teens who can't read, parents desperate for change, and teachers struggling to launch stable alternative schools for inner city kids who want to learn. We witness the tears of a little girl denied a coveted charter school spot, and we share the triumph of a Camden homeschool's first graduating class.
Together, these people and their stories offer an unforgettable look at how a widespread national crisis manifests itself in the educational failures and frustrations of individual communities. They also underscore what happens when our schools don't do their job. "These are real children whose lives are being destroyed," director Bob Bowdon explains.
The Cartel shows us our educational system like we've never seen it before. Behind every dropout factory, we discover, lurks a powerful, entrenched, and self-serving cartel. But The Cartel doesn't just describe the problem. Balancing local storylines against interviews with education experts such as Clint Bolick (former president of Alliance for School Choice), Gerard Robinson (president of Black Alliance for Educational Options), and Chester Finn (president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), The Cartel explores what dedicated parents, committed teachers, clear-eyed officials, and tireless reformers are doing to make our schools better for our kids.
BETWEEN classes at Fenger High School, on the far South Side of Chicago, hundreds of students churn through the halls. Elizabeth Dozier, the new principal, keeps a watchful eye. "Let's go, gentlemen!" she shouts. "Let's go to class!" Ms Dozier wears a two-way radio to deal with problems the minute they arise. One is small: the girls' toilets have no paper towels. One is bigger: there's a brawl upstairs. It's not to be ignored: on September 24th an honour-roll student was beaten to death near Fenger, swept up in senseless violence.
For an idea of the task confronting Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's education secretary, Fenger is a good place to start. The school lies closer to Indiana's mills than Chicago's Magnificent Mile. From 2006 to 2008 fewer than 3% of pupils met Illinois's meagre standards of achievement. But this year everything is supposed to change. The Chicago school district chose Fenger as a "turnaround". Old teachers have been sacked and new programmes put in place. Fenger faces formidable odds. But if Mr Duncan has his way, the school's transformation will be the start of a larger shift.
After working for the city of Zanesville, Ohio, for 27 years, Sharon Newton had to go back to school.
Newton lost her job this year, and when she went to look for a new one she discovered that, even with all of her experience, she wasn't prepared for the modern work force. When prospective employers asked about her computer skills, she had no answer.
It turns out "that is extremely important," said Newton, who needed help with using spreadsheets and other entry-level office computer tasks. She is now enrolled in computer training courses offered by Zane State University and by Experience Works, a nonprofit national job training organization.
New Superintendent Terry Grier wasn't shy about sharing his opinions at his first workshop with the school board last week.
On technology in HISD: "I think we are very, very far behind in technology for a district our size." I'd expect Grier to push for major technology upgrades in the district, but could he fund them without another bond referendum? In San Diego, Grier oversaw the passage of a bond that included funding for a one-to-one technology package, where every classroom will get
a laptop for every student, an interactive white board, digital cameras and an audio system. Research hasn't always supported the give-every-kid-a-laptop approach, but perhaps HISD can learn from the San Diego experiment.
On principals: Grier said the district has to change how it selects and interviews principals. He said his staff recently brought him a few candidates to interview and he wasn't pleased with the quality. After that, he said he basically told his staff, "If you can't bring me better principals to interview, don't bring them." Just because a candidate is popular with a school board member or the community doesn't mean that person can lead, Grier said. Ouch! Read here about the so-called Haberman interview process Grier implemented in Guilford County (and perhaps in San Diego too).
Anyone who wants to appreciate how strong a grip high school has on the American imagination -- and how clueless some school districts are about this -- should consider the story of Drew Gamblin, a 16-year-old student at Howard High School in Ellicott City.
Drew, a child so gifted he taught himself to write at age 3, craves a high school education and all that comes with it -- debate team, music, drama and senior prom.
After a series of inexplicable decisions by Howard County school officials, such as requiring him to stay in a Howard High algebra class he had already mastered, his parents decided to home-school him and put him in college classes. But Drew insisted on his high school dream.
So he is back at Howard, although it's not clear what grade he is in, and the school district is making it hard to enjoy what the school has to offer. He is being forced to take a world history course he already took at Howard Community College and a junior-year English course he took at home, as well as classes in other subjects he has studied.
If you have ever rolled your eyes when your child says a teacher's grade was unfair, you might want to think again. Your child might be right.
Douglas Reeves, an expert on grading systems, conducted an experiment with more than 10,000 educators that he says proves just how subjective grades can be.
Reeves asked teachers and administrators in the United States, Australia, Canada and South America to determine a final semester grade for a student who received the following grades for assignments, in this order:
C, C, MA (Missing Assignment), D, C, B, MA, MA, B, A.
The educators gave the student final semester grades from A to F, Reeves said.
Why? Because, he said, teachers use different criteria for grading.
The economy has taken central stage in world news for the past few years due to rapidly failing markets the world over. Even with so much attention focused on economic issues if you're not familiar with the field, or simply want a more in-depth look at things, it can be hard to follow just what's going on. These lectures, given by scholars from some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States and around the world can help give you that foundation of knowledge and help you better understand the financial crisis that's been building over the past few years.
Within the next month or two, the district -- at the board's behest -- will hire an individual or team of educational researchers to try to gauge how well North Eugene's "small schools" structure is serving students.
"It's kind of consistent with board goals; we try to have measurable results," board Chairman Craig Smith said. "We decided that, since the first class has come through, it's time to see where we are in terms of progress."
Showing gains -- lower dropout rates, improved student achievement, better attendance and greater college readiness -- has been difficult at many schools that have taken North Eugene's path.
Championed and chiefly bankrolled by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the small schools movement aimed to lift student achievement by creating highly personalized schools where all students were known and held to high standards and teachers worked closely together.
But after investing a goodly share of $2 billion into the creation of hundreds of small schools across the country, the Gates Foundation has shifted direction in its high school reform strategy, focusing less on structure and more on effective teaching and curriculum.
"The structural and design changes in schools we focused on in our earlier work simply did not yield those gains," Vicki Phillips, the foundation's education director, told Congress last May.
A growing number of grant recipients have dissolved their small schools and are going back to a traditional model, sometimes with some small-school elements intact. Most cite disappointing results or burdensome operating costs, or both. Those schools include Portland's Madison High School and Mountlake Terrace High School in the Seattle suburbs, a flagship of the initiative that staff members from North visited during the planning phase.
"smaller learning communities is what they are striving for in high schools. Kiefer says the smaller learning initiative - there is a correlation in decrease in drop out rate with the program."
SIS has many, many posts on the controversy over Madison's implementation of Small Learning Communities.
Ben Chavis: "The Democrats have it wrong, guys," Chavis said Friday at a forum hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. "We have screwed up the public school systems."
Although a Democrat, Ben Chavis, the former principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, is an unlikely advocate for the education reform plan backed by President Obama.
Chavis bucks the conventions typically associated with his party's education platform, which is generally union-friendly.
"The Democrats have it wrong, guys," Chavis said Friday at a forum hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. "We have screwed up the public school systems."
When he took over one of Oakland's worst-performing charter schools, he emphasized the importance of standardized test scores, shamelessly ousted teachers he considered substandard, and employed military-style discipline on his students.
Now, based on California's Academic Performance Index, only four middle schools in California perform better than his Oakland charter school, where 81 percent of kids are classified as low-income.
It is this style of teaching accountability that the Obama administration seeks to employ - much to the chagrin of unions - with Race to the Top, a competitive grant program for schools that the White House unveiled in July.
Hundreds of teachers, social workers, librarians and superintendents made clear in a series of hearings across the state last week the challenges that face the next Virginia governor: Overworked teachers. Shorter library hours. Longer bus routes. Bigger class sizes.
"Virginia is 37th in the nation in per pupil state spending. That is a sad fact," said Jim Livingston, a math teacher from Prince William County, speaking Wednesday night before members of the state Board of Education at West Potomac High School in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County. "Further cuts in funding will make it all but impossible to provide the children of the commonwealth" with a high-quality education.
Both gubernatorial candidates have vowed to improve the public schools by raising teacher salaries and strengthening math and science instruction. Robert F. McDonnell (R) wants to increase the number of charter schools and institute a performance pay system to reward successful teachers. State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) hopes to continue expanding access to pre-kindergarten and create a college scholarship program for students who pledge two years to public service.
My colleague Bill Turque has a terrific story today about D.C. Schools Chancellor MIchelle Rhee's plan to evaluate the effectiveness of her teachers and get rid of those who are not helping students learn.
The idea is full of risks. Rhee's plan to evaluate each teacher's class at the beginning of the year, based on prior test scores and other factors, and set a reasonable mark for their improvement, has not, as far as I can tell, ever been tried before on this scale.
There is only one reason why I think it has a reasonable chance of success, and his name is Jason Kamras. He is now Rhee's deputy for human capital, an unusual title, but I sort of understand what it means.
Turque said Kamras "led the effort to revamp the District's system" for assessing teachers. If Kamras were just another headquarters paper pusher, I would predict doom for his plan.
But he is one of the best teachers in the country. Long ago, I once spent a few days getting his life story and checking him out with other great teachers I know. He taught math at Sousa Middle School in the District, and also offered a photography class for those students, most of them from low-income families.
When education pundits like me talk about the Ben Chavis. He is very different from us data-sifting eggheads. It is not an exaggeration to call him a wild man. He delights in upbraiding lazy students, outraging inattentive teachers and making wrong-headed visitors to the school wish they had stayed home. He has the independent spirit of someone who had a successful career in construction, teaching and business before the then-woebegone AIPCS board asked him to rescue the school. He didn't need the job. He did it mostly as a favor to fellow Native Americans--he was born into a Lumbee Indian family of sharecroppers in North Carolina--and as a challenge. He has many of the habits of some of the best educators I know--a wicked sense of humor, a weakness for shocking the conventionally wise and a deep love of children, particularly those who have had difficult lives. I was not initially surprised when I read his new autobiography, "Crazy Like A Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City," written with Carey Blakely, a teacher and administrator who helped him launch the American Indian Public High School. His story was much like those of other ground-breaking educators I have known.">American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Calif., the conversation is always about the middle school's leader, Ben Chavis. He is very different from us data-sifting eggheads. It is not an exaggeration to call him a wild man. He delights in upbraiding lazy students, outraging inattentive teachers and making wrong-headed visitors to the school wish they had stayed home.
He has the independent spirit of someone who had a successful career in construction, teaching and business before the then-woebegone AIPCS board asked him to rescue the school. He didn't need the job. He did it mostly as a favor to fellow Native Americans--he was born into a Lumbee Indian family of sharecroppers in North Carolina--and as a challenge. He has many of the habits of some of the best educators I know--a wicked sense of humor, a weakness for shocking the conventionally wise and a deep love of children, particularly those who have had difficult lives.
I was not initially surprised when I read his new autobiography, "Crazy Like A Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City," written with Carey Blakely, a teacher and administrator who helped him launch the American Indian Public High School. His story was much like those of other ground-breaking educators I have known.
The increasing use of smart drugs or "nootropics," to boost academic performance, could mean that exam students will face routine doping tests in future, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Despite raising many dilemmas about the legitimacy of chemically enhanced academic performance, these drugs will be near impossible to ban, says Vince Cakic of the Department of Psychology, University of Sydney.
He draws several parallels with doping in competitive sports, where it is suggested that "95%" of elite athletes have used performance enhancing drugs.
"It is apparent that the failures and inconsistencies inherent in anti doping policy in sport will be mirrored in academia unless a reasonable and realistic approach to the issue of nootropics is adopted," he claims.
More on Singapore Math & The Madison School District
Next week's Madison School Board agenda includes a number of pages [PDF] regarding the purchase of Singapore Math materials for elementary schools. Recent activity on this front included the purchase of workbooks without textbooks.
ining up for lunch with their plastic foam trays, students at Francis Lewis High School pile on their choices -- hamburgers here, chicken nuggets there, some steamed vegetables over there.
At Francis Lewis, in Fresh Meadows, Queens, with nearly twice as many students as the 2,400 it was designed for, administrators have been forced to look for every possible nook and cranny of space -- and time -- to cram in more bodies. The first lunch period starts at 8:57 a.m.; the last one ends at 2:46 p.m. Some students begin classes as early as 7 a.m., while others do not finish until 12 hours later.
The flag team practices in the hallway. Hundreds of students are assigned to physical education in room "Outs" -- the schedule abbreviation for outside. When it snows or the temperature drops below 34 degrees, they run in the corridors. A few science classes are held in one tiny square room with no ventilation.
In the wake of a study finding charter schools help close the student achievement gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced a series of steps to expand and otherwise bolster charter schools in the city. (We're not sure why this announcement came from his campaign and not the mayor's office or the education department but it did.)
Much of the plan suggests proposals that charter proponents have sought for a while: lifting the cap on the number of charter schools, giving the schools chancellor the power to grant charters (an authority that now rests with the State Board of Regents) and streamlining the charter review process.
But the statement also provides additional evidence of the mutual back scratching between the Bloomberg administration and the Harlem Children's Zone and its founder, Geoffrey Canada.
In the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence. Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT -- "daedal," "holus-bolus," "calamari" -- are taped to bathroom and dorm walls. And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.
Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast's Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny's.
The Obama administration has set a goal of turning around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, supported by an expected $3 billion in stimulus funds and $2 billion in the 2009 and 2010 budgets. Known in education circles and beyond as an aggressive agent of change, Barr has been in talks with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about how to boost failing schools and whether Green Dot's methods can serve as a blueprint for fixing schools across the country.
It was these same failing schools that inspired Barr to start Green Dot. Having known hard times in his youth, including some time as a foster child, Barr was drawn to improving schools for disenfranchised youth.
After working in politics for many years (and cofounding Rock the Vote), he began researching the push to wire all schools with technology. He saw a map that used green dots to represent schools with the necessary infrastructure to be wired and red dots for schools that lacked that foundation. Barr had the vision that every school should be a green dot, and thus began his crusade.
Green Dot consists of 19 small charter high schools in Los Angeles -- several of which were formerly part of Watts's infamous Locke High School, which Green Dot, in an unprecedented coup, broke down into smaller schools. In addition, Green Dot New York finished its first year last June.
The national mathematics conference on Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) had a strong Madison School District presence, with teachers there as presenters and attendees.
MMSD teachers involved with the Expanding Math Knowledge grant had the opportunity to attend the conference this summer in San Diego. EMK was a two-year grant funded by the WI Dept. of Public Instruction. The MMSD Dept. of Teaching and Learning collaborated with the UW-Madison College of Education to provide continued and expanded math education for approximately 40 teachers in grades 3-5.
Most everything I know about learning design I learned from my former colleague Frances Rowe, Director of Instructional Design at Quinnipiac University Online. The QUOnline team has launched a new blog called Digital Pedagog.
Digital Pedagog is a gorgeous group blog. A great example of the power of team blogging. All the contributors to Digital Pedagog are experts within different domains of learning design and online/hybrid learning.
Beyond getting you to look at Digital Pedagog, my goal is start a conversation about the composition of your learning technology team. Does your team include a combination of professionals with formal training in learning design working in conjunction with people with higher ed. teaching experience?
Academic technology groups benefit having teams made up of people with wonderfully diverse backgrounds. Many of us come from the teaching side, while others come from media production, programming, or design. This diversity is terrific. But our teams need to include members who have received graduate level academic training in learning design, pedagogy, and learning theory.
t's a complex story out of Massachusetts with a simple payoff: The state secretary of education wants charter school authorizations to be based on political considerations, and not on their educational merits.
It begins with reporter Patrick Anderson of the Gloucester Daily Times using a public records request to find a February 5 e-mail from Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Gov. Deval Patrick's school adviser, to Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester. Gov. Patrick, like many other governors, found religion in charter schools soon after the Obama administration made them a centerpiece of Race to the Top funding. But which charter school applications would be approved, and which rejected, seems to be less of an academic concern and more of a matter of political pressure. Here's the full text of the e-mail:
Mitchell,
Hope all's well and warm in AZ. I appreciated our talk today and your openness and flexibility. This situation presents one of those painful dilemmas. In addition to being a no-win situation, it forces us into a political cul de sac where we could be permanently trapped. Our reality is that we have to show some sympathy in this group of charters or we'll get permanently labeled as hostile and they will cripple us with a number of key moderate allies like the Globe and the Boston Foundation. Frankly, I'd rather fight for the kids in the Waltham situation, but it sounds like you can't find a solid basis for standing behind that one. I'm not inclined to push Worcester, so that leaves Gloucester. My inclination is to think that you, I and the Governor all need to send at least one positive signal in this batch, and I gather that you think the best candidate is Gloucester. Can you see your way clear to supporting it? Would you want to do the financial trigger even in light of likely stimulus aid?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan invited an odd pair of allies to classrooms in this city to help tout his multibillion-dollar bid to shake up the country's education system: the liberal Rev. Al Sharpton and the conservative former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"These two guys don't agree on 96% of everything else, but they do agree on the need for dramatic educational reform," Mr. Duncan said.
As the Obama administration forges ahead with the most ambitious federal intervention in education in decades, Mr. Duncan, the former Chicago schools superintendent, needs whatever political support he can get.
The administration plans in just months to distribute $4.3 billion under its new Race to the Top program to help states set new testing standards, boost teacher quality and help rescue or close thousands of the country's worst-performing schools.
The plan has come under fire from powerful teachers unions, which were big backers of President Barack Obama during last year's campaign but are resistant to altering rules for hiring and firing teachers. Some conservatives, meanwhile, are wary of expanding Washington's grip on local school systems.
Natalie Ann Roig completed a marketing internship last spring--while riding the bus, sitting on her parents' couch and lounging at home in pajamas.
The internship, in which she worked 15 hours a week researching and blogging about corporate workplace benefits, was virtual--she needed only a computer and Internet access. Ms. Roig, a senior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, never even met her boss, in Atlanta.
"I didn't have to dress up. I didn't have to sit at a cubicle for hours," says Ms. Roig, a senior studying graphic design. "It was more like work at your own pace and get the work done."
Virtual internships, while relatively rare, are becoming more common, career experts say, fueled by improving technology and the growth of social media. They are most popular among small to midsize companies and online businesses. More than one-fourth of 150 internships posted on UrbanInterns.com, a site that connects small businesses with part-time workers, are labeled virtual, where the work typically involves researching, sales, marketing and social-media development.
With the release of a study showing New York's charter schools are a big success - a study chock-full of stubborn facts - critics of charter schools in New York ought to be learning a lesson.
That's wishful thinking; the critics are simply adjusting their talking points to ignore a reckoning with the increasingly persuasive reality that charter schools are good for kids.
The most important finding of the new study - led by Prof. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University, in collaboration with colleagues from the Wharton School and the National Bureau of Economic Research - is that "a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English," with students attending for shorter periods of time realizing "commensurately smaller" gains.
Spending more, adding extracurricular activities and increasing the percentage of students deemed advanced on state tests could help Wisconsin school districts that want to attract more students through the state's open enrollment program.
Those are some of the main conclusions of a new study examining student transfers between 2003 and 2007 under the state's public school choice program. [Open Enrollment SIS links.]
"There's a lot of surveys saying parents want this or they want that, but when they actually have to take their kid and drive them to school, that reveals what they really want in a school district," said David Welsch, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lead author of the study, which is slated for publication in the Economics of Education Review.
Under the state's open enrollment program, which has been in effect for more than a decade and now serves more than 28,000 students, students can attend any public school district in Wisconsin so long as there is room and they provide their own transportation. State aid - nearly $6,500 this school year - accompanies each open enrollment transfer.
One of the most striking findings in the recent study was that students were more likely to transfer from districts with higher property values and lower tax rates to districts that spend more per pupil. For every $100 difference in spending per student, a higher-spending district could expect about 1.7% more incoming transfers.
On July 11, Brian Betts, principal of the District's Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, was at Dulles International Airport about to leave for a vacation in Spain. He was feeling good. His first year running a school whose students struggle with poverty and neighborhood strife had gone well, he thought. Quarterly test results were encouraging. Attendance was up. Parents were happy. Some of his staff had gone so far as to enroll their children at Shaw.
His cellphone rang. "Principal Betts? This is Chancellor Rhee."
"Hi, chancellor," he said.
"I wanted you to know that I am looking at the DC-CAS scores," the D.C. schools chancellor said, "and you're not going to be happy."
LAST week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan acknowledged standardized tests are flawed measures of student progress. But the problem is not so much the tests themselves -- it's the people scoring them.
Many people remember those tests as lots of multiple-choice questions answered by marking bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, but today's exams nearly always include the sort of "open ended" items where students fill up the blank pages of a test booklet with their own thoughts and words. On many tests today, a good number of points come from such open-ended items, and that's where the real trouble begins.
Multiple-choice items are scored by machines, but open-ended items are scored by subjective humans who are prone to errors. I know because I was one of them. In 1994, I was a graduate student looking for part-time work. After a five-minute interview I got the job of scoring fourth-grade, state-wide reading comprehension tests. The for-profit testing company that hired me paid almost $8 an hour, not bad money for me at the time.
One of the tests I scored had students read a passage about bicycle safety. They were then instructed to draw a poster that illustrated a rule that was indicated in the text. We would award one point for a poster that included a correct rule and zero for a drawing that did not.
Maybe this is the biggest problem facing Milwaukee Public Schools: A panel of national experts ripped reading programs overall in the city, saying they were ineffective, out of date, uncoordinated, led by teachers who were inadequately prepared and who were really doing nothing much to help struggling readers.
We're talking about reading. Reading. The core skill for success in just about any part of education and in life beyond school. A sore point for MPS for at least a couple decades. Last year, 40% of MPS 10th-graders rated as proficient in reading in state tests, a number in line with a string of prior years.
"The status quo will need to be changed - sometimes dramatically," said the report from a three-person review team brought in by the state Department of Public Instruction as part of its efforts under federal law to push change in MPS. The report was issued last December, calling for an overhaul of the way reading is taught in MPS - the curriculum used, the way teachers are trained, the way the whole subject is handled from top to bottom.
Since then, an MPS work group was named. The work group got an extension on the time it had to give a draft plan to the DPI. The draft plan was submitted. DPI officials gave some feedback. MPS officials revised their plan. DPI officials took awhile to respond with requests for more changes. It's late September now. A plan has not been approved. There's a meeting scheduled in early October.
With sound ideas and a commitment to rigorously monitor the states' progress, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has revitalized the school-reform effort that had lost most of its momentum by the closing days of the Bush administration.
His power to press for reforms was dramatically enhanced earlier this year when Congress gave him control of $4.3 billion in grant money -- the Race to the Top fund -- that is to be disbursed to the states on a competitive basis. Mr. Duncan will need to resist political pressure and special pleadings and reward only the states that are committed to effective and clearly measurable reform.
Mr. Duncan's exhortations, and the promise of so much cash, have already persuaded eight states to adopt measures favorable to charter schools, which Mr. Duncan rightly sees as crucial in the fight to turn around failing schools.
To be eligible for the money, every state must also show how student performance will be factored into their systems for evaluating teachers. And Mr. Duncan has asked the states to come up with plausible plans to turn around failing schools -- so-called dropout factories -- and to better serve minority students.
OPPONENTS OF charter schools are going to have to come up with a new excuse: They can't claim any longer that these non-traditional public schools don't succeed. A rigorous new study of charter schools in New York City demolishes the argument that charter schools outperform traditional public schools only because they get the "best students." This evidence should spur states to change policies that inhibit charter-school growth. It also should cause traditional schools to emulate practices that produce these remarkable results.
The study, led by Stanford University economics professor Caroline M. Hoxby, compared the progress of students who won a lottery to enroll in a charter school against those who lost and ended up in traditional schools. The study found that charter school students scored higher on state math and reading tests. The longer they stayed in charters, the likelier they were to earn New York state's Regents diploma for high-achieving students.
Most stunning was the impact that the charters had on shrinking the achievement gap between minority and white students. "On average," the study found, "a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English." Researchers were careful not to draw conclusions, but they highlighted a correlation to practices such as a longer school day, performance pay for teachers, more time spent on English and effective discipline policies.
H arvard Business School is doing it. So is Stern . Sloan and Stanford have been doing it for several years and next year, Wharton will do it, too.
A growing number of business schools are giving applicants the option of taking the GRE (Graduate Record Exam), a standardised test used by a wide range of graduate schools, as an alternative to the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) - the prevailing standardised exam used for admission to MBA programmes.
Schools want to attract a more diverse applicant pool, including dual-degree students, younger applicants, women, international students and applicants who were not previously laser-focused on business studies.
"It's driven by business schools trying to expand their market of good students, not a defect with the GMAT," says John Fernandes, president and chief executive of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business , the industry body.
The GREmeasures verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing skills. It is used by a variety of advanced education programmes and markets itself to students considering a range of professional options. The GMAT, also measures basic verbal, mathematical and analytical writing skills and is billed as a tool that "helps business schools assess the qualifications of applicants for advanced study in business and management".
2009 Dates: October 16 (Friday Afternoon Pre-Conference) and October 17 (Saturday Conference)
CONFERENCE PROGRAM & REGISTRATION: Go to Green Charter School Conference Program & Registration Links at Northland College.
CONFERENCE KEYNOTERS:
Connections Human & Natural: What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person? by William Cronon, Professor of History, Geography, & Environmental Studies, U.W. - Madison
Revitalizing Public Education: Let Teachers Lead the Learning by Joe Graba, Founding Partner, Education / Evolving, forty year professional career in public education most recently as Dean of Hamline University's Graduate School of Education
SMART By NATURE: Schooling for Sustainability is a new book from the Center for Ecoliteracy . It describes the significance of the emerging green schools sector across the country.
"Smart by Nature is must reading for teachers, school administrators, parents, and the concerned public," writes leading environmental educator David W. Orr. "It is an encyclopedia of good ideas, principles, and case studies of some of the most exciting developments in education."
The Green Charter Schools Network and River Crossing Environmental Charter School are featured in Smart By Nature. "We're all concerned about the environment and sustainability," says Jim McGrath, GCSNet President. "That's why we're doing it -- because, really, what could be more important than preparing young people for a sustainable future."
The book documents with firsthand accounts the success stories of green PK-12 schools in preparing students for future environmental challenges. Smart By Nature is 184 pages with 70 photos, charts and illustrations for $24.95 paper from UCPress.
Oakland campus caters to refugees, immigrants The international high school provides an alternative to newcomers, some of whom have never been in a classroom
Samuel Kanwea showed up for what should have been his freshman year in high school illiterate, malnourished and exhausted from years of living in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. His family had never been able to afford the luxury of education, so he spent his early teenage years collecting firewood and selling fish.
When the Liberian refugee started school in Oakland at the age of 17, it was the first time he had set foot in a classroom.
"Everyone was speaking English and it confused me," said Kanwea, a lanky student with a wide smile. "And I felt scared because I think that I was the only one who didn't know how to read."
New immigrants and refugees have long posed challenges for educators in the United States, but Kanwea and others like him present unique problems because they are often strangers to traditional schools. Academic issues are only one facet of their adjustment. Not only must educators teach them English and move them toward graduation, but they also must counsel many students grappling with the trauma of wars, persecution or poverty.
While most school districts in California place newcomers directly into traditional campuses or short-term English-language programs, Oakland Unified School District offers them an alternative campus -- and the option to stay there until graduation. The Oakland International High School opened in 2007 to educate the city's recent refugees and immigrants, and now enrolls about 220 students from around the world, including from Yemen, Mongolia, Russia, Ghana and Honduras.
Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxbyreleased yesterday an update to her 2007 study of charter schools in New York City.1 In the study, she compares the state examination results of students enrolled in the City's charter schools (i.e. those students "lotteried-in") to the results for those students who applied to a charter but were not selected for admission (i.e. the "lotteried-out"). In many respects, this is a good approach as it aims to account for the possibility that charters enroll more motivated families and that it is this motivation, rather than any particular charter school effect, that is the cause of stronger student achievement.
Hoxby's findings are encouraging: by the third grade, the average charter school student was 5.8 points ahead of the lotteried-out counterpart in math and was 5.3 points ahead in English Language Arts.2 As Hoxby follows students' achievement from 2001 to 2008, she also finds that the average charter school student gained 3.6 more points each year in math and 2.4 more points each year in ELA. For an average charter student continuously enrolled in grades four through eight, the effect is larger with annual gains of 5.0 points in math and 3.6 in ELA above the performance of the lotteried-out student. (Last year, nine charters enrolled students across all of these grades.)
To put this in some context, Hoxby explains that the difference between a student not meeting standard and meeting standard is about 31 points in math and 44 points in ELA. She also points out that, on average, students in neighboring and affluent Scarsdale typically out-perform students in New York City by 35 to 40 points. In this context, Hoxby claims that the compounded gains for an average student continuously enrolled in third to eighth grade in a charter nearly closes the "Harlem-to-Scarsdale" achievement gap and implies -- going outside of her dataset -- that the trend will continue.
Just over a year ago, Nature Publishing Group's new Education Division quietly launched the Beta of a revolutionary idea: Replace expensive textbooks with a free collaborative learning space for science. Scitable.com went live in January, 2008 and has quickly become a magnet for serious students of genetics (the first field that Nature is addressing).
Now, a year after its beta, Scitable.com is alive and well. Students and faculty from all over the world are actively using Scitable's resources to teach and learn about genetics.
What can you do on Scitable?
How wild and wonderful imaginings are realized in architecture is the subject of Building on Nature: The Life of Antoni Gaudí, written by San Francisco author Rachel Rodríguez and illustrated by Julie Paschkis (Holt; 32 pages; $16.99; ages 5-8). Curvy structures such as the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona "sparkle and glitter and whisper with joy," according to this charming portrait of their Catalonian designer.
Stylized gouache art pays playful homage to Gaudí, his work and the natural world that taught him about light and form. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when "green" was just a color, he practices recycling. Broken dishes and tiles morph into fantastic surfaces that embody the value-added confluence of imagination and innovation.
The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate. Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores. But higher test scores are not a definition of good education. Students can get higher scores in reading and mathematics yet remain completely ignorant of science, the arts, civics, history, literature and foreign languages.
Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.
But because of our narrow-minded utilitarianism, we have forgotten what good education is.
DIANE RAVITCH
Ravitch is a historian. Her book ''The Death and Life of the Great American School System'' will be published in February.
Do Away With B.A.
Discredit the bachelor's degree as a job credential. It does not signify the acquisition of a liberal education. It does not even tell an employer that the graduate can put together a logical and syntactically correct argument. It serves as rough and unreliable evidence of a degree of intelligence and perseverance -- that's it. Yet across much of the job market, young people can't get their foot in the door without that magic piece of paper.
As President Obama promotes community colleges, he could transform the national conversation about higher education if he acknowledges the B.A. has become meaningless. Then perhaps three reforms can begin: community colleges and their online counterparts will become places to teach and learn without any reference to the bachelor's degree; the status associated with the bachelor's degree will be lessened; and colleges will be forced to demonstrate just what their expensive four-year undergraduate programs do better, not in theory but in practice.
CHARLES MURRAY
Murray is the W. H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of ''Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality."
Charter schools are not a panacea for our education problems. The recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University concludes that disadvantaged students who attended charter schools in New York City for nine years, from kindergarten through eighth grade, can close most of what she calls the "Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap." Hoxby does not say how many students completed nine years in a charter school - a key detail, as the city had only about a dozen small charters in 2000.
The results are impressive, but they are not typical of charter schools across the nation.
Nationally there are about 4,600 charter schools enrolling 1.4 million students. They run the gamut from excellent to abysmal. Even their most ardent supporters recognize that they vary widely in quality. Chester Finn, whose Thomas B. Fordham Institute sponsors charter schools in Ohio, wrote, "Some of the best schools I've ever been in are charter schools, some of which are blowing the lid off test scores in such vexed communities as Boston, New York and Chicago. And some of the worst - and flakiest - schools I've ever been in are charter schools."
There is a dichotomy between the aspirations of high school students to attend college and their success once in college. Annually, over 90 percent of the nation's 2.5 million high school graduates indicate a desire to go to college, and 72 percent of them actually enroll in some form of postsecondary education within two years after graduation. Despite such high levels of aspiration and motivation, once on campus over half of those who matriculate require remedial work. Worse yet, a staggering 41 percent never complete either a two- or four-year degree (Kirst and Venezia, From High School to College). But these data understate the problem because only 68 percent of high school freshmen complete high school on time. Thus, the other 32 percent are not in the pool from which the 90 percent number is calculated (Kuh and McCarthy "Are Students Ready for College? What Student Engagement Data Say." Phi Delta Kappan Vol. 87 No 09). Moreover, other data show that 10 years after their freshmen year in high school, only 18 percent of students have completed a baccalaureate degree (Gorden "Accommodating Student Swirl", Change Magazine Vol. 36 Issue 2). Together, these figures reveal a growing personal and national tragedy that challenges educators at all levels.
It was 1984 when a handful of San Francisco parents embarked on a controversial education experiment to open the first Chinese immersion public school program in the nation.
The idea was to immerse the students in Cantonese from the first day of school, teaching them math, science and other subjects in Chinese and gradually increasing English skills along the way. Success would mean that by the time the children finished elementary school, they would be grade-level literate in both languages.
The pioneering venture, which operates at West Portal Elementary's kindergarten through fifth grades, was launched as U.S.-China relations were just warming. Today, it has become one of the school district's shining stars, gaining steady popularity among families and setting an example for similar programs in San Francisco and across the country.
This year, there were 34 spots for incoming kindergarteners and 446 families trying to get one in the first round of applications, according to district officials.
A group of 13 Madison-area kids and their families replicated the International Space Station at Elver Park Friday, using over a mile of plastic tape, and spanning nearly two soccer fields.
The six families who participated in constructing the two-dimensional model are part of a network of homeschooled children and their parents in the Madison area. Each family chose sections of the space station to research and construct, and then made signs explaining their parts' size and function.
David Dexheimer, activity organizer and parent of one of the children participating, said the goal of the project was to teach the kids about how the space station works. He said he came up with the idea a few weeks ago by looking at a NASA educational website.
"I've always been into space stuff and so is my daughter," Dexheimer said. "This just worked into our curriculum well, in terms of all the math and science you need."
The families arrived at the park around 8:30 a.m. and started constructing the model with plastic barricade tape, secured to the ground with golf tees.
W hen Michelle Rhee was a teenager -- long before anyone imagined she would ever spend her career trying to turn America's inner-city public schools into something more like the elite private school she attended back in Ohio -- she was a stellar student, a good field hockey player and a kind, caring friend. But she already had the mouth for which she has become infamous. She said what was on her mind, even if it stung. Finally, one day, her mother had just had it with her daughter's blunt, even brusque, manner. Inza Rhee said to Michelle, "What is wrong with you? You just don't care what people think of you!"
We say we are buying a house. But for most of us parents, the house is not the whole story. It is the local public school we are investing in, and sometimes it can be a very daunting financial and personal decision.
In the early 1990s, when my journalist wife was making what seemed to me big bucks as a television producer, we could afford to live in Scarsdale, N.Y. That village's public schools cost us about as much in real estate taxes as the tuition at the private schools our kids had attended in Pasadena, Calif. Fortunately, we got what we paid for in Scarsdale. That is not always the case.
How do parents evaluate the schools their children may attend and escape the heartbreak of buying a great house that turns out to be in the attendance zone of a flawed school? Here are 10 ways to make the right choice, in descending importance. Feel free to re-prioritize them based on your personal tendencies:
1. Go with your gut. This sounds unscientific, but I don't care. After you have analyzed all the data and had the conversations outlined below, you still have to make a decision. Consider how you react emotionally to a school. Consult your viscera. If you're not feeling it, don't send your kids there. They will sense you have doubts at a time when they need to believe that this is the place for them.
SINCE Labour came to power in 1997 proclaiming education its priority, one grand policy after another has foundered. Schools were told to run themselves--but forbidden to do the things that matter most, such as paying good teachers more. Parents were encouraged to choose schools--but with too few attractive ones to choose from, many were rejected by the schools they selected. They were urged to lobby local government for new schools--but were largely ignored when they did so. A total of two "parent-promoted" schools actually opened.
The opposition Conservatives, who are on course to form the next government, will be making much of their own grand plans for schools at their party conference beginning on October 4th. Citing Sweden's "free-school" reforms of the 1990s as their model, they say they will smash the state's monopoly by funding new schools, to be run by charities or groups of parents, as generously as state ones. Michael Gove, their schools spokesman, reckons that 220,000 new places--as many as 500 schools--might be made available during their first term in office. The policy could see new suppliers responding to demand, innovating and competing to drive up standards. It could be a revolution.
Or it could be another almighty flop. Among the pessimists is Anders Hultin, an architect of Sweden's reforms and co-founder of Kunskapsskolan, the country's largest chain of free schools. He now works for GEMS, a Dubai-based chain of commercial schools operating in nine countries, including Britain. Of Sweden's 1,000-odd free schools, three-quarters are run for profit, he points out--but the Tories, afraid of the charge that they plan to hand little children over to big business, would ban schools from making profits. "I think it is a tactical decision," says Mr Hultin. "But it will surely mean fewer schools opening."
A cacophony of Mandarin and English echoes through the streets of Singapore's Chinatown as crowds of shoppers buy mooncakes and other seasonal delicacies to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival.
English has long united the ethnically diverse city state, but Singapore's leaders now foresee a time when Mandarin will be its dominant language and they are aggressively encouraging their citizens to become fluent in Chinese.
"Both English and Mandarin are important because in different situations you use either language. But Mandarin has become more important," says Chinatown shopkeeper Eng Yee Lay.
Hit hard by the global slowdown, Singapore is seeking to leverage the language skills of its ethnic Chinese majority to secure a larger slice of the mainland's rapidly expanding economic pie.
In their quest to move out of their rented Rockville townhouse and buy a single-family home, Lisa Hollaender and her husband, Laurent, first considered the Carderock Springs neighborhood of Bethesda, then moved on to Potomac and later explored Olney. They also ventured across the Potomac to Vienna. But they haven't been to a single open house, let alone made an offer.
Hollaender is first finding the school she considers best suited for her son, who is both very bright and physically challenged.
"Ultimately school fit is number one, house location a far second," said Hollaender, whose son recently started kindergarten. The family has decided to stay put in Rockville this year and send him to a private school, but that's a temporary solution. "We cannot continue to pay for private school, plus buy our 'dream home,' " Hollaender said.
The post that has generated the most Comments ever is I Hate Reading Logs by FedUp Mom. If you scroll through, you'll notice that teachers have chimed in, some rethinking their own homework practice, others defending it. I was particularly struck by the openness of a teacher from Virginia, who found the post while looking for a reading log, and ended up rethinking logs altogether.
I also thought the teacher made a very good point about the importance of keeping all discussions between teacher and parent as cordial and as respectful as possible.
Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards"
The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers Inc. reached a tentative agreement Tuesday evening on the terms and conditions of a new two-year Collective Bargaining Agreement for MTI's 2,600 member teacher bargaining unit. Negotiations began April 15.
The Contract, for July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2011, needs ratification from both the Board of Education and MTI. The Union will hold its ratification meeting on Wednesday, October 14, beginning at 7:00 p.m. at the Alliant Energy Center, Dane County Forum. The Board of Education will tentatively take up the proposal in a special meeting on October 19 at 5:00 p.m.
Terms of the Contract include:
2009-2010 2010-11
Base Salary Raise - 1.00% Base Salary Raise - 1.00%
Total Increase Including Benefits - 3.93% Total Increase Including Benefits - 3.99%
Bachelor's Degree Base Rate $33,242 Bachelor's Degree Base Rate $33,575
A key part of this bargain involved working with the providers of long term disability insurance and health insurance. Meetings between MTI Executive Director John Matthews and District Superintendent Dan Nerad and representatives of WPS and GHC, the insurance carriers agreed to a rate increase for the second year of the Contract not to exceed that of the first year. In return, the District and MTI agreed to add to the plans a voluntary health risk assessment for teachers. The long term disability insurance provider reduced its rates by nearly 25%. The insurance cost reductions over the two years of the contract term amount to roughly $1.88 million, were then applied to increase wages, thus reducing new funds to accomplish this.
The new salary schedule increase at 1% per cell, inclusive of Social Security and WRS, amount to roughly $3.04 million. Roughly 62% of the salary increase, including Social Security and WRS, was made possible by the referenced insurance savings.
Key contract provisions include:
Inclusion in the Contract of criteria to enable salary schedule progression by one working toward the newly created State teacher licensure, PI 34. Under the new Contract provision, one can earn professional advancement credits for work required by PI 34.
Additive pay regarding National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, i.e. an alternative for bargaining unit professionals who are not teachers (nurses, social workers, psychologists, et al) by achieving the newly created Master Educator's License.
The ability after retirement for one to use their Retirement Insurance Account for insurance plans other than those specified in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. This will enable one to purchase coverage specific to a geographic area, if they so choose, or they may continue coverage with GHC or WPS - the current health insurance providers.
For elementary teachers, the frequency and duration of meetings has been clarified, as have several issues involving planning time. All elementary teachers and all elementary principals will receive a joint letter from Matthews and Nerad explaining these Contract provisions.
For high school teachers who volunteer for building supervision, there is now an option to enable one to receive compensation, rather than compensatory time for the service. And there is a definition of what "class period" is for determining compensation or compensatory time.
For elementary and middle school teachers, MTI and the District will appoint a joint committee for each to study and recommend the content and frequency of report cards.
For elementary specials (e.g. art, music) teachers, the parties agreed to end the class and a half, which will mean that class sizes for specials will be similar to the class size for elementary classroom teachers.
For coaches, and all others compensated on the extra duty compensation schedule, the additive percentage paid, which was frozen due to the State imposed revenue controls, will be restored.
School year calendars were agreed to through 2012-2013.
Also, MTI and the District agreed to a definite five-year exemption to the Contract work assignment clause to enable the District to assist with funding of a community-based 4-year-old kindergarten programs, provided the number of said 4-K teachers is no greater than the number of District employed 4-K teachers, and provided such does not cause bargaining unit members to be affected by adverse actions such as lay off, surplus and reduction of hours/contract percentage, due to the District's establishment of, and continuance of, community based [Model III] 4-K programs. (See note below.)
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said that he was glad that the parties were able to successfully resolve several matters which were raised in negotiations. In all, 67 Contract provisions were amended or created in this year's bargaining.
Superintendent Daniel Nerad said, "I am very pleased that we have reached this tentative agreement after an extensive period of bargaining. We have addressed a significant number of contract language related items. A key example lies in the area of elementary planning time. Of greatest significance to the District is an agreement over language that would allow for the implementation of a four-year-old kindergarten program."
"Also, in working with MTI we have been able to provide a salary increase, in part, as a result of reductions in health care costs. I appreciate working with John Matthews in accomplishing these insurance savings. I look forward to presenting this tentative agreement to the Board of Education in the near future."
John Matthews said, "But the economic provisions do not adequately reward those who have made the Madison schools among the best in the country. With the State usurping local control as regards to school funding, this is a matter that the State must fix; there is nothing local school boards can do, given the State's heavy hand. The State must realize that their funding formula for education is inadequate, and that it is causing the dissolution of the great education once available to Wisconsin children. That must be fixed and it is up to the Governor and the Legislators to do it."
For more information and to coordinate interviews, contact:
MMSD: Ken Syke, 663-1903 or Joe Quick, 663-1902
MTI: John Matthews, 257-0491
There are three models for how 4-K instruction is delivered, i.e., where and by whom:
Model I - in a school district site and by district-employed teachers
Model II - in preschool/child care centers and by district-employed teachers
Model III - in preschool/child care centers and by center-employed teachers
We education writers receive many books in the mail with terrible titles, real slumber-time stuff. Here are some on my bookshelf: "Learning and Understanding: Improving Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in U.S. High Schools";| "Rethinking High School Graduation Rates & Trends"; and "SREB Fact Book on Higher Education."
Those volumes proved to be pretty good, as evidenced by the fact that I didn't throw them out. I mention this because on top of that stack is a new book that sets the record for largest gap between quality of work and liveliness of title.
I'm glad I did. It is enlightening, maddening, hopeful, frustrating and amazingly informative, all in just 411 pages. I don't like admitting this, but it even changed my mind on a hot issue, the connection between U.S. schools and U.S. economic success.
I probably would have read "Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses" cq that serial comma eventually, because Hanushek is one of the bad boy economists who have been providing some of the most provocative education research. I don't know Lindseth, an attorney and national expert on school finance law, but the chapters on that subject were very good, and comprehensible, so he also deserves some credit.
To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration's first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.
Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools -- all are integral to President Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser.
Labor leaders, parsing the Education Department's fine print, call the proposal little more than a dressed-up version of the No Child Left Behind law enacted seven years ago under Obama's Republican predecessor.
"It looks like the only strategies they have are charter schools and measurement," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "That's Bush III." Weingarten, who praises Obama for massive federal aid to help schools through the recession, said her 1.4 million-member union is engaged in "a constructive but tart dialogue" with the administration about reform.
At the March 24th Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Vital proposed to the Board that together they begin a Master Plan process, to be completed by December. The result of the process will be a detailed plan that will provide the district a clear road map for decision-making over the next several years.
Our school district faces many challenges ahead, and important and difficult decisions about facilities, programs and staffing will have to be made. These decisions will impact all of our community so it is imperative that students, families, and staff - as well as the overall Alameda community - participate in the Master Plan process and face these challenges together.
Steve Jordan, a self-published science fiction novelist, has to make lots of decisions. Although most of them involve plot points, narrative arcs and character development, Mr. Jordan has the added burden of deciding how to deliver the stories he creates to his online audience.
Some of those readers own dedicated devices like Amazon.com's Kindle, some plow through his books on smartphones, some use laptops and maybe a few even employ desktop PCs left over from the last century. (In true sci-fi fashion, Mr. Jordan doesn't publish his novels on paper.)
The options are proliferating quickly for readers and the authors they love. While devices like the Kindle, the Apple iPhone and the Sony Reader get much of the attention, practically any electronic device capable of displaying a few lines of text can be adapted as a reader. The result has been a glut of hardware, software and e-book file formats for readers to sift through in searching for the right combination.
The action plans start on page 30. The Board had requested additional support information. The Administration has added performance measures for each of the strategies. In addition, the plans are cross-referenced to the top critical issues that you identified as a group in your strategic planning meetings. The Board had also asked for a review of the wording for clarity and to lessen the use of educational jargon; a review of priorites to lessen the number of priorities one in the first year; and identification of the connections between various action items as well as connections to oterh plans presented to and/or approved by the Board.
The Board has a meeting scheduled for September 29 at 6:00pm to review/discuss the action plans. If you have any comments prior to that meeting, you can reply on the web or send me an email. I will ensure the Board sees your comments.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Arlene
Letter from Madison School Board members Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on the revised Strategic Plan:
This Tuesday evening, September 29, the School Board will be having a last and, hopefully, final discussion on the Strategic Plan.
Even though the plan has evolved somewhat since our initial meetings, we think that you will find that it represents the spirit and essence of all your efforts.
You may share your views with the Board, Tuesday at 6:00 P.M., in the Doyle Auditorium.
'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.
Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."
According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.
Tatyana Ray has more than 1,200 Facebook friends, sends 600 texts a month and participated in four student clubs during the year and a half she attended high school online, through a program affiliated with Stanford University.
Although top public and private high schools abound in her affluent area of Palo Alto, the 17-year-old originally applied to the online school because she and her parents thought it looked both interesting and challenging. She enjoyed the academics but eventually found she was lonely. She missed the human connection of proms, football games and in-person, rather than online, gossip. The digital clubs for fashion, books and cooking involved Web cams and blogs and felt more like work than fun. Last winter, Ms. Ray left the online school and enrolled at a local community college for a semester.
As online high schools spread, educators are ramping up efforts to counter the social isolation that some students experience. At the same time, sociologists and child psychologists are examining how online schooling might hinder, or help, the development of social skills.
IN YESTERDAY'S Link exchange, I linked to a Henry Farrell post on the economics of 3D-movies, in which Mr Farrell quoted an old piece of his:
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book [Tyler Cowen's "http://www.amazon.com/Good-Plenty-Creative-Successes-American/dp/0691120420/thebel-20">Good and Plenty"] is one that goes on a tangent from Cowen's main argument - his discussion of how changes in the ability of producers to enforce copyright are likely to affect cultural production. Here, he argues that the likely consequences will differ dramatically from art form to art form. Simplifying a little, he adapts Walter Benjamin to argue that there is likely to be a big difference between art forms that rely heavily on their "aura," and art forms that can be transformed into information without losing much of their cultural content. The former are likely to continue to do well - they aren't fundamentally challenged by the Internet. In contrast, forms of art which can be translated into information without losing much of their content are likely to see substantial changes, thanks to competition from file sharing services. Over time, we may see "the symbolic and informational" functions of art [becoming] increasingly separate," as the Internet offers pure information, and other outlets invest more heavily in providing an "aura" and accompanying benefits of status that will make consumers more willing to pay for art (because it is being produced in a prestigious concert hall, exhibited in a museum etc).
I think this is a very nice insight that is likely to prove true. It's not always so easy to determine what kinds of what forms of expression fall into which category, however. I believe that many newspaper producers long believed that the "aura" of reading the newspaper--having the physical item in one's hands--was an important part of news consumption. This may have been true to some extent, but the advantages of information digitisation overwhelmed the aura, with obvious consequences.
The first official draft of proposed national educational standards was released on Monday, a joint project of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The curriculum guidelines detail math and English skills that all students should have by the end of high school. Forty-eight states (Texas and Alaska are the holdouts) have signed on to the effort, called the Common Core Standards Initiative, to write the standards. This is one step on a long road: there is a 30-day comment period, and then the panel convened by the governors association will work on grade-by-grade standards from kindergarten onward.
What are some strengths and weaknesses of the new proposal? What are the obstacles to adopting common curriculum standards? Should this be a national goal, or should education reform efforts be directed elsewhere?
During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons--the many reasons--for what has happened.
First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation's colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):
For the last seven or eight years, I have been trying to get funding for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction (i.e. history) books in U.S. public high schools. No one seems to be interested in such a study, but I have come to believe, from anecdotes and interviews, that the majority of our public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single complete nonfiction book, which would seem to be a handicap for them as they encounter college reading lists in subjects other than literature.
I am told that students in history classes do read excerpts, but those are a pale shadow of the complete work, and they do not discover, unless they read on their own, the difference between an excerpt and the sweep of an entire book.
For example, if high school students hear anything about Harry Truman, they are usually asked to decide whether his decision to drop the atomic bomb was right or wrong.
They miss anything about what he did when he was their age or younger. David McCullough worked on his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Truman for ten years, and here is an excerpt about HST when he was ten:
"For his tenth birthday, in the spring of 1894, his mother presented him with a set of large illustrated volumes grandly titled in gold leaf Great Men and Famous Women. He would later count the moment as one of life's turning points." p. 43
and in high school: "He grew dutifully, conspicuously studious, spending long afternoons in the town library, watched over by a white plaster bust of Ben Franklin. Housed in two rooms adjacent to the high school, the library contained perhaps two thousand volumes. Harry and Charlie Ross vowed to read all of them, encyclopedias included, and both later claimed to have succeeded...History became a passion, as he worked his way through a shelf of standard works on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome...'Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt I wanted and needed.' He decided, he said, that men make history, otherwise there would be no history. History did not make the man, he was quite certain." p. 58
Most of our high school students would have no idea that Harry Truman worked on the small family farm from 1906 to 1914:
"Harry learned to drive an Emerson gang plow, two plows on a three-wheeled frame pulled by four horses. The trick was to see that each horse pulled his part of the load. With an early start, he found, he could do five acres in a ten-hour day"...."Every day was work, never-ending work, and Harry did 'everything there was to do'--hoeing corn and potatoes in the burning heat of summer, haying, doctoring horses, repairing equipment, sharpening hoes and scythes, mending fences...Harry's 'real love' was the hogs, which he gave such names as 'Mud,' 'Rats,' and 'Carrie Nation.' Harry also kept the books...." pp. 74, 75
Perhaps this time on the farm toughed him for his job as commander of artillery Battery 'D' in World War I: "Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. 'I didn't come here to get along with you,' he said. 'You've got to get along with me. And if there of you who can't, speak up right now, and I'll bust you right back now.' There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, 'We got along.' But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn't." pp. 117-118
And in the United States Senate, investigating waste, fraud and abuse: "Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee...'Looks like I'll get something done,' Harry wrote to Bess."..."His proposal, as even his critics acknowledged, was a masterstroke. He had set himself a task fraught with risk--since inevitably it would lead to conflict with some of the most powerful, willful people in the capital, including the President--but again as in France, as so often in his life, the great thing was to prove equal to the task." p. 259
All of these quotes are from David McCullough's Truman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. The book is 992 pages long and there are some other great 'excerpts' in it, of course. My point is to show a bit of how much our high school students might miss in trying to understand the man who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb if they don't read the whole book. Some will say 992 pages is too much for high school students, who have work and sports and extracurricular activities as well as 5-6 hours a day of electronic entertainment already. I would just argue that if students now can take calculus and chemistry, and in some cases, even Chinese, they ought to be able to spend as much time on a complete nonfiction book as they do at football or basketball practice, even if their reading of a complete book is spread out over several weeks. Reading a complete nonfiction (history) book will not only help to prepare them for college (nonfiction) reading lists, it will also give them a more complete glimpse into one of our Presidents, and after reading, for example, Truman, they should have a better understanding of why someone like David McCullough thought writing it was worth ten years of his life, and why the Pulitzer committee thought it should receive their prize.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
For years now, applicants to highly competitive colleges have complained that they feel that they must do more and more to demonstrate why they should be admitted.
This year, following a pattern that had already taken hold among less competitive institutions (for different reasons), some institutions are asking a little less of applicants, at least when it comes to how much they have to write. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is replacing a longer essay (500 words) with several short questions of about 200 words. The University of Pennsylvania has decided to combine two essay questions about the student's fit into the institution into one, saving students maybe 200 words.
For book-writing academics, 200 words here or there may seem irrelevant. But the admissions officers behind the decisions say that they are asking for less out of the view that they may learn more about applicants by not overwhelming them with so many questions. They also said that it may be time for admissions deans to balance more carefully what they would like to know about applicants -- and the demands on applicants' time.
n advisory panel unveiled a proposal yesterday that details the math and English skills every student ought to have by the end of high school, the first step toward what advocates hope will become common standards that help the United States regain world academic leadership.
Discuss
COMMENTS (11)
In math, for example, students would be able to solve systems of equations; find and interpret rates of change; and adapt probability models to solve real-world problems.
In English language arts, they would be able to analyze how specific word choices shape the meaning and tone of a text; develop a style and tone of writing appropriate to a task, purpose and audience; and respond constructively to advance a discussion and build on the input of others.
The proposal, posted at www.corestandards.org, was drafted over the summer by a group that included specialists affiliated with organizations that oversee the SAT and ACT college admissions tests, as well as Achieve Inc., a nonprofit standards advocacy group based in Washington.
New York City students who win a lottery to enroll in charter schools outperform those who don't win spots and go on to attend traditional schools, according to new research to be released Tuesday.
The study, led by Stanford University economics Prof. Caroline Hoxby, is likely to fire up the movement to push states and school districts to expand charter schools -- one of the centerpieces of President Barack Obama's education strategy.
Among students who had spent their academic careers in charter schools, the average eighth grader in Ms. Hoxby's study had a state mathematics test score of 680, compared with 650 for those in traditional schools. The tests are generally scored on a roughly 500 to 800 scale, with 650 representing proficiency.
Ms. Hoxby's study found that the charter-school students, who tend to come from poor and disadvantaged families, scored almost as well as students in the affluent Scarsdale school district in the suburbs north of the city. The English test results showed a similar pattern. The study also found students were more likely to earn a state Regents diploma, given to higher-achieving students, the longer they attended charter schools.
Students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not secure charter school seats, according to a study by a Stanford University economist being released Tuesday.
Charter schools, which are privately run but publicly financed, have been faring well on standardized tests in recent years. But skeptics have discounted their success by accusing them of "creaming" the best students, saying that the most motivated students and engaged parents are the ones who apply for the spots.
The study's methodology addresses that issue by comparing charter school students with students of traditional schools who applied for charter spots but did not get them. Most of the city's 99 charter schools admit students by lottery.
The report is part of a multiyear study examining the performance of charter schools in New York City by Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economist who has written extensively about her research on charter schools and vouchers.
Experts convened by the nation's governors and state schools chiefs on Monday proposed a set of math and English skills students should master before high school graduation, the first step toward what advocates hope will become common standards driving instruction in classrooms from coast to coast.
The proposal aims to lift expectations for students beyond current standards, which vary widely from state to state, and establish for the first time an effective national consensus on core academic goals to help the United States keep pace with global competitors. Such agreement has proven elusive in the past because of a long tradition of local control over standards, testing and curriculum.
In math, the proposal envisions that students would be able to solve systems of equations; find and interpret rates of change; and adapt probability models to solve real-world problems. In English language arts, they would be able to analyze how word choices shape the meaning and tone of a text; develop a style and tone of writing appropriate to a task and audience; and respond constructively to advance a discussion and build on the input of others.
This fall I will be starting my 41st year as a professor at a so co-called "Public Ivy" institution. Some of my colleagues ask me if I'll ever retire. Whenever I give my stock response -- "They'll have to carry me out of here in a box, and bury me on the main university green before I retire" -- my colleagues look at me as if I'm crazy. Perhaps from their perspective I am, but from my own view, I'm very sane. I love the life of academe, in spite of its irritating intellectual rigidities, its sometimes lethal, passive-aggressive competitiveness, its deeply entrenched resistance to change, and, worst of all, its over-the-top superiority complex. Still, I'm here to shout to the world that academe has been good to me, and I consider myself lucky to be a professor. But it is my teaching that fills me up the most, and it is my teaching that has provided the lasting memories.
The past few years I've been reading a lot about teaching and learning as preparation for writing a book on how to help students create meaning both inside and outside the classroom. Most of the work I've read, with a few remarkable exceptions, resounds with critique, regrets, complaints, settling old scores with some perceived enemy, and, worst of all, with belligerent put-downs of millennial and quarterlife students. For many of these authors, today's college students are lazy, preoccupied, unmotivated, poorly prepared, distracted, politically correct, and, above all, "entitled." In a word, students today are "unteachable."
These scholars go on to say that if the academy is to save itself, it must return to the older ideals of a reduced elective curriculum, a stringent, no-prisoners-taken grading policy, an uncompromising commitment to the tried-and-true academic research methodologies, and, most of all, a no-nonsense, lecture-only, close-textual-analysis, stick-to-the-facts/research approach to reading and writing. "Rigor" is the catchword for these writers. Sadly, in the aftermath, "rigor mortis" could very well become, if it hasn't already, the catchword for students.
The District shall provide appropriate educational services for "gifted and talented children" who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, musical, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic areas, and who require learning opportunities or experiences not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities. These educational experiences will be provided at each school through site-developed programs, which are in alignment with the mission of the District's Gifted Education Plan and goals of that plan.
That too many young people come out of high school ill-prepared for college or the work force is little disputed. The questions of why that's so and how to fix the situation, however, have too often resulted in finger pointing, with many college faculty members complaining that high schools are asking too little of their students and high school officials saying that colleges send mixed signals about what they want students to be able to do.
The stagnation and even deterioration created by that logjam has contributed to the situation in which the United States now finds itself: sliding down the list of countries in the proportion of young adults with college credentials, prompting President Obama and others to propose investing tens of billions of dollars to get more people into and out of college. But despite a lot of talk, the "holy grail" solution to the preparation problem -- better aligning high school and college curriculums so that more students leave K-12 ready to do college work or with work-ready skills -- has often seemed out of reach.
Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)
Whether education is best provided by the public or private sector should cease to be an ideological issue, with decisions made purely on the basis of which is the best quality and most cost-effective option, says the World Bank's lead education economist.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Harry Patrinos, co-author of The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education, a report published by the World Bank, said that he believes there is a much greater role for business in education generally, subject to strict conditions.
Mr Patrinos said that, despite Britain pioneering public-private partnerships (PPPs) to build new school infrastructure under schemes such as the Private Finance Initiative over the past decade, real progress will only be made when private suppliers are allowed to hire and fire teachers and manage schools themselves.
"Education is a social investment, as well as a private investment. There is and will always be a government responsibility, but that doesn't have to mean ownership of schools," he said.
Two by two, the students sit at tables in what once was a medical clinic. Next door to the single classroom is their break room. Down the hall, a conference room awaits more permanent furniture.
Much about the Tosa School of the Trades says "work" - not just the building, but the charter school's curriculum as well.
"We want to be kind of almost like a job, because what we're working on is employability skills as well as 21st century skills," said Principal Jason Zurawik, who doubles as an associate principal at Wauwatosa East High School.
The Wauwatosa School District's newest school, which opened this year to 14 students in the basement of a district building on W. North Ave., represents a resurgence of the idea of the vocational high school. Like those schools of old, its students learn trade skills alongside core subjects such as English, math, social studies and science.
But Zurawik also sees the school as training students in what educators refer to as 21st century skills - problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork, self-direction - that will allow them to adapt to different jobs later on.
And as a result, its teachers see the school as the way education should be heading.
At age 3, Aurora Ghere began to read. Now 6, she delves into books that are usually fifth-grade fare, recently finishing "The Call of the Wild'' and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.''
She can also, her mother boasts, count to 1,000.
When the Gheres lived in Maryland, a screening in her school district identified Aurora as a gifted child.
But Green Meadow School in Maynard, where Aurora is in first grade, lacks programs geared toward gifted children. Though administrators have been supportive of Aurora's needs, her mother thinks schools in her town and elsewhere should do more.
"We could care less if our children got into Harvard or MIT,'' said Ghere. "We just want them to love school. School should be a joy.''
WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) led its 10 p.m. news one night a few weeks ago with a story that the Milwaukee School Board had voted to spend up to $250,000 to fight the idea of giving control of the school system to Mayor Tom Barrett.
In the report, board member Tim Petersons told people who support the idea, "You're calling people who voted for us incapable of making the right decisions." And board member Larry Miller said, "We will resist the anti-democratic nature of this declaration."
But democracy is an interesting subject when it comes to the School Board. In reality, Petersons won his first race for the board in 2007 as the only person on the ballot from a district covering the northwest side. Miller was the only person on the ballot when he won his first bid in April in a district covering much of the east side and near south side.
Voter turnout in the election in April, which included hotly contested races for the state superintendent of public instruction and a seat on the state Supreme Court, was just less than 10% citywide. In the February primary election, which included two contested School Board primaries, turnout was 4.3%.
Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.
"I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said.
Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise.
West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.
"It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed merit pay for teachers and lifting the cap on charter schools, the head of the California NAACP stood by his side.
And when the Los Angeles school board voted to approve a plan that could turn over a third of its schools to private operators, Latino members and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa led the charge.
The nation's public school teachers are feeling the squeeze from all sides these days, and some of the heat is coming from unlikely sources: minorities and longtime Democratic allies.
One of them is President Barack Obama, who is irking teachers by suggesting that student test scores be used to judge the success of educators.
The pressure is particularly intense in California, where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the state has "lost its way" with public schools.
In an attempt to improve California's schools, the Obama administration is threatening to withhold federal stimulus money if the Golden State does not rescind a state law that prevents the state from tying test scores to teacher performance.
Museum corridors are often populated by clipboard-bearing school children enjoying a day away from the classroom. These museum trips seem like a good idea, but how much do children really learn from their day out? According to Julien Gross and colleagues, young children actually remember a great deal, especially if they are given the chance to draw as they recount their museum experience.
Fifty-eight lucky New Zealand school children, aged approximately six years, were taken for a day visit to the Royal Albatross Centre and Historic Fort in Dunedin. One to two days later, the amount of information recalled by the children depended to a large degree on how they were tested. Asked to freely recall the visit, the children remembered a significant amount of factual and trivial, "narrative" information, uttering an average of ten factual clauses. Crucially, this amount of factual recall doubled when they were allowed to draw at the same time as they recounted the day's events. By contrast, the children performed relatively poorly when given a traditional comprehension test in the form of 12 questions.
A second study largely replicated these findings with a second group of children who were tested on their memory for the museum visit after seven months. The amount of information they recalled remained substantial but was reduced, as you'd expect after a longer delay. Also, the benefit of drawing now only affected recall of narrative information, not facts.
In Illinois' community colleges, fewer students finish two-year programs in two years, while many flounder in remedial classes before dropping out.
Drawn by low tuition and open admissions, a growing number of students headed back to school at Chicago-area community colleges. For Kyle Perez and thousands of entering freshmen, it may be a little further back than planned.
Coming up short on a standardized math placement exam before beginning classes at Harper College in Palatine, the 18-year-old football player was disappointed to learn he would have to take a full year of remedial algebra and geometry.
"I'm going to be in a high school class, paying the same amount as I would for college," said Perez, a 2009 Rolling Meadows High School graduate. "I'm not going to be getting any college credits for this. It's going to slow me down a little."
An estimated 20 percent of the record number of full-time students enrolled in the state's 48 community colleges in the spring semester were forced to take remedial courses, officials said.
As a result, students are taking longer to earn two-year degrees and more are getting discouraged and dropping out, prompting efforts in Illinois and around the country to better align the curricula of high schools and community colleges.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction statewide value added project results (Including the Madison & Milwaukee Public Schools)
Kurt Kiefer, Madison School District Chief Information Officer [150K PDF]:
Attached is a summary of the results form a recently completed research project conducted by The Value Added Research center (VARC) within the UW-Madison Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER). Dr. Rob Meyer and Dr. Mike Christian will be on hand at the September 14 Board of Education meeting to review these findings.
The study was commissioned by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). Both the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) were district participants. The purpose of the study was to determine the feasibility of a statewide value added statistical model and the development of state reporting and analysis prototypes. We are pleased with the results in that this creates yet one more vehicle through which we may benchmark our district and school performance.
At the September 14, 2009 Board meeting we will also share plans for continued professional development with our principals and staff around value added during the upcoming school year.
In November we plan to return to the Board with another presentation on the 2008-09 results that are to include additional methods of reporting data developed by VARC in conjunction with MPS and the DPI. We will also share progress with the professional development efforts.
I have no doubt our system for certifying teachers is broken. On Aug. 24, I wrote||http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/08/_am_not_a_big.html about a first-rate Prince George's County teacher who was nearly fired because of official confusion over his certification credits. These are courses he must take to keep his job, but the people in charge had given him conflicting information about how many, and which, courses he needed. Since then, scores of educators have sent me their own horror stories---some of which I collected in another column on Sept. 7.
What do we do about this? Many readers have sent their ideas. But it's not going to be easy. Injecting common sense into the process threatens the way our education schools teach and the way our school districts hire. Those powerful interest groups show little willingness to change. But the acidic frustrations expressed by people who contacted me are, thankfully, corroding the resistance to innovation.
The first school in America with a teaching philosophy based on game design opens in downtown Manhattan next month, and the mission statement promises to employ the "design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students."
Quest to Learn is the brainchild of NYC non-profit Institute of Play, and with funding from the Parson's School of Design and a number of independent donors like the Gates Foundation the school promises to instruct students "through an innovative pedagogy that immerses students in differentiated, challenge-based contexts," acknowledging that "game design and systems thinking [are] key literacies of the 21st century."
What that means in common English is that students will ditch chalkboards and class periods in favor of a laptop in every classroom and four 90-minute "domain" blocks centered around the study of a new concept or idea. Some examples cited in a recent Economist article include "Sports for the Mind" (game vernacular and design,) "The Way Things Work" (basic science) and "Codeworlds" (a fusion of English and math.)
Good evening, everyone. I did not mean to burden you with more paper; after all, in life there is so much paperwork, but my administrators urged all teachers to present such a document to you. In my career I have observed that teachers feel somewhat anxious about tonight, but I don't know why.
Tonight we are together for the first of three meetings, the other two being parent-teacher conferences. It seems we are here for different purposes. You care enough to hurry from work, forego a leisurely dinner, and spend a few hours here. Perhaps you are curious about what I look like, or how I dress (by the way, I am out of uniform-I rarely wear a coat and only don a tie once a week), the way I have decorated my room, what this course is about, and if I am knowledgeable, intelligent, and articulate enough to teach effectively. In other words, is it safe for you to turn your child over to me for forty-five minutes every day. But in Twenty-first Century America two lesser but very powerful gods, named "Things to Do" and "Hurry Up" harry us mercilessly, so you must base your first impressions on these brief encounters. Wouldn't it be more relaxing if we could sit around a table over coffee and share ideas and concerns? I am here to tell you who I am and my teaching goals and philosophy. In short, I want not to make myself look good but to speak truly and simply, not to put my best foot forward but my real foot forward. Despite our seemingly different purposes, you and I are here for the same reason: we are involved in the education and development of your child and my student. Whether we agree or disagree and regardless of your reactions to what I do or don't do, let us always remember we are the most influential allies in that essential and crucial process, and permit our alliance to set the tone for our relationship.
My name is Don Regina, and I am ( ) years old. I, and my son . . attended this school, so like you I believe in a private, values oriented education. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Michael's College in Vermont, a Masters Degree in British and American literature from the UW-Madison, and a Lifetime License from the Department of Public Instruction. Yes, I am a lifer. I have taught English here at Edgewood High School for ( ) years-this is my only post-and advise the school newspaper and coach the boys cross country team.
My profession has changed somewhat in the last thirty years. When you and I were in high school, we read and wrote about the classics-A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, and Silas Marner. During the Seventies in college I argued with my fellow student teachers about the relative or apparent merits of something called independent study. And now my subject is called Language Arts. Despite all the superficial changes and glitsy gimmicks, and the history of education is loaded with gimmicks, we are and always will be studying the two Rs-reading and writing. So, unlike math or foreign language teachers, we English teachers must fight on two fronts.
It is not surprising, then, that I have two major goals. First, I must teach students to read carefully and perceptively. They must know what happened and what the author said in the text, and use that knowledge to understand characters such as Macbeth, John Proctor from The Crucible, or Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. They should interpret symbols such as Robinson Crusoe's island, James Joyce's Dublin, or Mark Twain's river town, Dawson's Landing, in Puddn Head Wilson. And, most importantly, they should understand the theme or message the author is conveying. What is Jonathan Swift saying about humanity in Gulliver's Travels? How is F. Scott Fitzgerald portraying his generation in The Great Gatsby? What is Alice Walker expressing about the plight of women in The Color Purple?
My second goal is multi-faceted: to teach students to write competently. They should organize and clearly express their ideas in fully developed paragraphs and complete sentences using appropriate words. And they should 3 master writing's nuts and bolts: correct spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation. As you can see, this is a daunting task.
I can sum up my teaching philosophy, gleaned from my experience, in several points. First, I take as my ideal Chaucer's Oxford Clerk, who would gladly learn and gladly teach. Every encounter in the classroom is a chance to teach something, be it the meaning of a word, the importance or faith in life, or what to do when and electrical appliance fails to work. I think reading should totally engage your intelligence. Parents see a child moving her eyes over an open book. What they cannot see is whether that child's mind is attentive and alert to the text so he or she can retain and comprehend it. I value the hard but rewarding work of learning because you sharpen your mind by absorbing, contemplating, and drawing conclusions from information. Next, a teacher should not only challenge but also help students to succeed, because when we work hard and succeed we feel better about ourselves and are motivated to achieve our potential. I have learned that high school students are like eggs: it doesn't take much to damage their fragile personalities, even if they act hard boiled. So while I must be firm, direct, and definite, I must not be angry, sarcastic, or overly critical. In a classroom discussion every student should participate rather than letting a few answer all the questions, so I call on people by name and everyone feels involved; they even forget themselves and start volunteering answers. I strongly believe that in an English class students should not only read poems, novels, and plays but also learn about authors' lives and times. Any piece of literature starts with a man or woman seated at a table, pen in hand, trying to express something. But what an author says results from all the personal, social and even historical forces at play during the moments of inspiration. Literature is not produced in a vacuum. I mean, why did Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, two devout Puritans, write those poems?
Finally, I have learned to trust my common sense and ignore my need to be right when making decisions. If there wasn't enough time for the test, then allow more time and make a shorter test next time. If the test results are not what they should be, then I must make an allowance for that problem. And if I make a mistake (that's right, teachers make mistakes) then I do what I can to rectify it and then move on. After all, toxic emotions are useless. Finally, I must act with compassion and accomodate students with special needs, but to do so I must know what those needs are. If your child-is struggling with a learning disability or emotional illness, please tell me about it as soon as possible-not after the quarter or semester has ended and irreparable damage has been done-- so that I can take effective steps to help the student succeed. I will hold in strictest confidence whatever you tell me.
Thanks to Don for allowing me to post his words here. I added links to some of the referenced works and cleaned up the OCR scan errors.
Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own.
For many years, Lucy Calkins, described once in Education Week as "the Moses of reading and writing in American education" has made her major contributions to the dumbing down of writing in our schools. She once wrote to me that: "I teach writing, I don't get into content that much." This dedication to contentless writing has spread, in part through her influence, into thousands and thousands of classrooms, where "personal" writing has been blended with images, photos, and emails to become one of the very most anti-academic and anti-intellectual elements of the education we now offer our children, K-12.
In 2004, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in the Schools issued a call for more attention to writing in the schools, and it offered an example of the sort of high school writing "that shows how powerfully our students can express their emotions":
"The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us."
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up, the student wrote,
"High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life."
It is obvious that this "Excellent" high school writer is expressing more of his views on his own high school experience than on anything Herman Hesse might have had in mind, but that still allows this American student writer to score very high on the NAEP assessment of writing.
This year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has released a breakthrough report on writing called "Writing in the 21st Century," which informs us, among other things, that:
"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."
So it has become clear to NCTE that Milton's Areopagitica, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and all those other arguments for free speech and free access to information, failed to warn us that, while it is all right for a society to provide protection for writing, reading is only a dangerous means of social control, and should be avoided at all costs. As Houston Baker warned more broadly when he was head of the Modern Language Association, "reading and writing are tools of oppression."
The 2009 NCTE report goes on to inform us, somewhat inconsistently, that:
"Reading-in part because of its central location in family and church life-tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness-with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair-and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence."
So while, on the one hand, reading is a dangerous method for social control, and on the other hand, in contrast with writing, it is said to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, writing is associated with unpleasantness, which would, naturally, be news to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, George Eliot, and countless other authors who made it their life's work to provide feelings of intimacy and warmth, among other things, to countless readers over the centuries.
But the NCTE report has more to teach us:
"Writing has historically and inexorably been linked to testing."
Testing, the way to determine whether one has learned the tasks to be mastered, is, needless to say, not a good thing in the NCTE world. This odd and narrow "link to testing" might seem a bit far-fetched to all the historians and others whose writing has enriched our lives.
So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like-only this time it will be part of the high school "writing" curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.
NCTE goes on to lament that: "In school and out, writing required a good deal of labor." NCTE has no doubt skipped over the advice: Labor Omnia Vincit, and has apparently come to believe that hard work and enjoyment are somehow incompatible.
To relieve our writing students of the necessity of doing the kind of hard work that is essential for success in all other human occupations, "in school and out," NCTE wants to develop "new models of composing" that will change our students from mere writers to "Citizen Composers."
This recipe for damage only adds to the harm already done, for example in high school English departments, by a truncated focus on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which for most students guarantees that they will move on to college or work unable to write a serious research paper or even a good strong informative memo that makes sense and can be read by others.
Many high school English department focus on preparing their students for the 500-word "essays" about their personal lives that most college admissions departments ask for these days.
According to a survey done by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 90% of college professors think that most high school students who come to them are not well prepared in reading, research or academic writing. That may possibly be because far too few of our high schools challenge their students to do any nonfiction reading or academic expository writing, including the sort of research papers which require, after all, research.
While we do challenge many high school students to take AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP European History, and Calculus, Chinese and Physics, when it comes to the sort of writing controlled by the English department, and recommended as "21st Century Writing" by the National Council for Teachers of English, the standards are as low as they would be if the Math department limited its students to decimals and fractions and never let them try Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, or Calculus.
Even a program for gifted students, for instance the grandaddy of them all, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which has very challenging summer programs in the sciences for students, when it comes to writing, it sponsors a contest for "Creative Nonfiction," which turns out to be only short diary entries by these very able students. They could challenge students to produce good history or literature research papers, but they don't.
Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our public high schools today.
There are some exceptions. Since 1987, I have published 846 [868] exemplary history research papers by high school students from 44 states and 35 other countries. Their average length has been about 5,500 words, although in a recent [Spring 2009] issue (#77), the average length of the papers, including endnotes and bibliography, was 7,927 words.
Many of the American authors come from independent schools like Andover, Atlanta International School, Deerfield, Exeter, Groton, National Cathedral School, Polytechnic, St. Albans, Sidwell Friends School and the like. But many have also come from public high school students. Some of these students have done independent studies, hoping to be published in The Concord Review, but some very good papers have been IB Extended Essays and some have come even from students of AP teachers who do assign serious research papers, even though the College Board has no interest in them.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from Strong American Schools last summer says that more than one million U.S. high school graduates are in remedial courses in colleges each year, and if a student needs a remedial course or two, they are less likely to graduate from college.
The poor academic reading and writing skills of entering freshmen at our colleges and universities are acknowledged to be commonplace, but no one seems to have been able to increase the importance of serious writing or nonfiction reading in the high schools. The English department and the professional organizations are satisfied with preventing high school students from learning how to do research papers, so they continue to graduate students who are incompetent in academic expository writing, and unprepared for college work.
Not one of the new state academic standards asks whether students have read a single nonfiction book in high school or written a single serious research paper. All the attention is on what can be easily tested and quantified, so the skills of academic reading and writing are left out, and our students pay the price for this neglect.
In 1776, Edward Gibbon, in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote about the importance of academic reading and writing:
"...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life...."
No doubt he would be as appalled as our college professors are now to see the incompetence of our high school graduates who have not been asked to read and write before college.
Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own. If we continue to ignore them as we do now, it will not be good for our economy, or for any of the "useful and agreeable arts of life" for our students.
Will Fitzhugh is Editor of The Concord Review and has written and lectured extensively on the assessment of writing and writing skills. He can be reached at: 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts USA, by phone at 978-443-0022; or 800-331-5007, and his website and e-mail are: www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
THE LATEST fad to sweep K-12 education is called "21st-Century Skills.'' States - including Massachusetts - are adding them to their learning standards, with the expectation that students will master skills such as cooperative learning and critical thinking and therefore be better able to compete for jobs in the global economy. Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked.
The same ideas proposed today by the 21st-Century Skills movement were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century. In 1911, the dean of the education school at Stanford called on his fellow educators to abandon their antiquated academic ideals and adapt education to the real life and real needs of students.
In 1916, a federal government report scoffed at academic education as lacking relevance. The report's author said black children should "learn to do by doing,'' which he considered to be the modern, scientific approach to education.
In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.
In his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky noted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV."
In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era:
There was a large touch of irony in an August NY Times post discussing the demise of a fixture in the world of education, the school textbook. The article, In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History, predicts the death of an industry that is becoming "antiquated" with each passing tech innovation.
Though always considered exceedingly expensive, textbooks were once considered as fundamental to the classroom learning experience as the teacher. These tombs were the source of knowledge, the drivers of curriculum, and the teacher's most important resource.
But all that has changed in the digital world. According to experts, there are two critical factors.
First, there is the assessment of the value (learning produced per dollar) of these texts:
Last time Hugo started screwing with the schools, he got himself a coup attempt in response. Since then he's spent a ton of time and money and police effort to try and eliminate all such enemies.
A new August law shoved through the rubber-stamp Parliament "already has the opposition talking of civil disobedience."
Naturally, this will be an American plot, because any such spontaneous popular civil disobedience could ONLY come as a result of American meddling, and not the bad actions of dictators nor their fed-up and brutalized citizens.
Teaching will be structured now according to "Bolivarian doctrine." Hmm, sounds promising all right. The ruling socialist party will run all the schools through their community store fronts known as "communal councils." The central gov will directly determine who gets into college and will take control of the training of teachers.
Minority kids try to enter a school. Angry adults scream at them and try to block their path.
Little Rock, 1957?
Try New York City, 2009.
That was the shocking scene last week at a Harlem building shared by a traditional public school, PS 123, and a charter school, Harlem Success Academy 2.
Charter schools are public schools -- but they're mostly free of burdensome union rules. And they regularly outperform traditional schools, which is why parents are desperate to get their kids into charters.
And why it was ironic to see protesters (mostly teachers-union members) handing out flyers decrying the supposedly "separate and unequal" system that charters create.
Second Annual Wisconsin Charter School Awards Gala
Via an Ingrid Beamsley email:
On November 6th, 2009, the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association is hosting the second Annual Charter School Awards Gala. Once again, it will be at the famous Turner Hall in Milwaukee. This year it will be even bigger and better than last year. Of course, there will be great food and drink and a wonderful band. However, this year we're kicking it up a notch with a red carpet, interviews, and photographs, all to introduce our brand new Charter Schools short film.
This event is about more than getting together and having fun (as important as that is). It is the event to honor not only the excellence of the award nominees and winners?but of the whole charter school community.
Charter schools provide a choice in education for Wisconsin's families and help Wisconsin's public school system improve the quality of education for all students with innovative curriculums.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email or phone Ingrid Beamsley at ibeamsley@wicharterschools.org or 608-261-1120. www.wicharterschools.org
In the airy computer lab at Romero-Cruz Elementary School in Santa Ana, 11-year-old Davis Nguyen quickly completed math problems. Each correct answer let an animated penguin named JiJi take steps across a bridge. The computer game looked simple, but backers say it is part of an innovative and powerful new way to teach math, and standardized test results released Tuesday appear to back up their claims.
Across the state, schools saw a 4.5% increase in the number of elementary students scoring "proficient" or "advanced" in math. But 64 Orange County elementary schools that took part in a math program created by the nonprofit MIND Research Institute saw a nearly 13% increase in the number of students scoring in those top levels.
The achievement buoyed the schools' rating as well.
Seattle Public Schools may do away with a nearly decade-old requirement that all students earn a C average to graduate, and an even-older policy that athletes maintain a C average to play on school teams.
If the School Board approves recommendations endorsed by Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, as well as most district high-school principals and counselors, a D average will be good enough to earn a high-school diploma. Student athletes would need to pass five of six classes with D grades or better.
District officials understand there are concerns about relaxing standards at a time when everyone from President Obama on down is pushing for higher expectations for U.S. students.
And when surveyed by the district last year, a majority of Seattle parents and students preferred to keep the C-average requirement.
But district officials, who plan to talk about the proposal at a School Board meeting tonight, insist they're not watering down expectations, and the change would mirror what most other districts require.
While opposition to Barack Obama's recent "study hard and stay in school" speech perhaps was not grounded in sober assessments of the facts, it did have roots in a much more plausible suspicion: that public schools are rigging tomorrow's politics by indoctrinating kids today. Such fears formed the basis of a special Fox News report--"Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children Are Really Reading"--hosted by the journalist and pundit Tucker Carlson. According to Carlson, the efforts of textbook writers to avoid language that might reinforce ethnic and gender stereotypes suggest an insidious plot. "Entire chunks of the English language have been banned from the classroom, liquidated in a PC purge," Carlson writes in a companion article at FoxNews.com.
What's worse, according to Carlson, is the "hard-edged propaganda that now suffuses history textbooks. A thorough cover-to-cover reading of almost any high school history text leaves you with the impression that the United States is at best embarrassing, and at worst a menace to world peace."
If you ask me, the United States' unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq makes it a menace to world peace almost by definition. And the history of the United States is at least embarrassing. That European colonists and the U.S. government savagely murdered indigenous Americans, stole their land, and pushed them onto reservations is not a fiction ginned up to confuse American kids. Nor was this country's brutal history of slavery and racial apartheid some kind of lie designed to shame junior Americans. These horrors of history are real and they really are shameful.
School's back, and so is Big Homework. Here's what my 7th grade daughter has to do tonight:
1 Math review sheet
1 Science essay
French vocab for possible quiz
History reading and questionairre
English reading and note-taking
About two hours, give or take. This is considered a pretty light load, so as to ramp up gently. Over the next few weeks, it will get up to three hours or more.
Most of us give very little thought to this long-lived combination. School and homework seem as interconnected as cars and gasoline. Kids need homework to get smarter -- right? It's supposed to be how they pick up a good work ethic.
California's chance to receive hundreds of millions of federal educational dollars may rest heavily on an obscure and long-neglected piece of education infrastructure: a statewide data system that tracks students, teachers and administrators year to year.
Such education systems are expensive, complex and do not win elections for politicians. But experts say they are essential to learn how much of the nearly $60 billion that California spends on K-12 education makes a difference, a fact that student achievement tests only hint at.
Last month, California rolled out the first component, a student database known as CalPADS. It will eventually make it possible to measure what works and what doesn't in classrooms throughout the state. The second major component, a teacher and administrator database known as CalTIDES, will not come online until 2011.
After months of whispers about an expensive new assessment program being considered by the Huberman administration, here is -- thanks to several friends of the blog -- a bit of hard information.
They're going with Scantron, it's going to be computer-adaptive (more on that later), there was a "thorough" RFP process, and they're rolling it out starting with elementary schools first (this fall).
It had been derided as a committee of puppets, a rubber-stamp board with no clear power or purpose. So when word came from Albany over the summer that the Panel for Educational Policy would have greater power over the New York City schools, some thought things might be different.
The old days, however, did not seem far behind at the panel's first meeting of the school year on Monday: The "ayes" were nearly unanimous, and friction was virtually nonexistent.
Last month, lawmakers broadened the board's powers when they renewed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's control of the schools, giving the panel oversight over contracts and school closings.
But at Hilton Head Island Middle School and others with high numbers of students with limited English skills, teachers use the devices to help students learn to read.
Five county schools will use iPods in their English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes this year to tailor instruction to students with different levels of English proficiency.
Hilton Head Island Middle School bought a set of 30 iPods last year, and Bluffton High, H.E. McCracken Middle in Bluffton, Red Cedar Elementary in Bluffton and Hilton Head Island School for the Creative Arts elementary school will receive sets this year.
The school district paid about $200 for each iPod Touch using federal money earmarked for ESOL students, said Sarah Owen, the district's ESOL coordinator. The district's contract with Apple Computer Inc., iPod manufacturer, includes training for teachers and a device that can charge and sync about 20 iPods to one computer at the same time.
For generations, school meant books -- lots of books. But not anymore. Around the country, from high school to grad school, textbooks are getting harder to find. Technology has made the library something that can fit into the palm of your hand.
Some schools are doing away with textbooks altogether, turning to computers and even handheld devices such as iPods as educational tools.
Cushing Academy, a private school outside Boston, is dismantling its library altogether, giving away 20,000. Headmaster James Tracy said the decision was simple.
Several Dallas ISD magnet campuses are among the best public schools in Texas, based on a new set of rankings that considers everything from test scores to class sizes to graduation rates.
In prior years, Children at Risk ranked only schools in the Houston area, but expanded to the rest of the state this year.
Many organizations try to pinpoint top campuses, including Newsweek's list of the nation's best high schools, the state's school rating system and a host of education think tank reports. The Children at Risk study ranks Texas elementary, middle and high school campuses based on more measures than most.
For example, Newsweek picks the best high schools solely on the number of students who take Advanced Placement exams. The state determines quality based on test scores and dropout rates.
The Hillsborough County school district is in line for a grant that could top $100 million and fund a program school officials hope would ensure almost every student in America graduates from high school.
"We believe we have it," Hillsborough schools Superintendent MaryEllen Elia said last week.
If so, it would be "the largest grant ever given to a public school district," she said.
The district signed off last week on a memorandum of understanding with the Seattle-based foundation -- the last step before final confirmation, Elia said. Foundation spokesman Chris Williams said it is possible all five finalists will receive money from the Empowering Effective Teachers grant, but award amounts have not been set.
Give Mr. Obama credit for much of what he said, and continues to say, about educational reform. In rhetorical defiance of that major Democratic Party constituency, America's unionized schoolteachers, Mr. Obama deserves credit for talking a good game on merit pay, charter schools, and breaking down the "tenure" barrier that bars removal of ineffective educators.
Unfortunately, in a now familiar pattern, Mr. Obama does not fare as well when one examines his actual actions, in contrast to his rhetoric.
If Mr. Obama favors innovation designed to increase competition and the range of educational options, particularly for underprivileged kids, why on earth did he stand silent on the sidelines last winter as senators from his own party took the fledgling, highly celebrated Washington, D.C., voucher program out behind the barn and shot it?
1) America's two richest universities--Harvard and Yale--did not come out looking so rich or so smart when it was reported that they each lost about 30 percent of their endowments last year due to lousy investments. The median college endowment decline was 18 percent.
2) Cockroaches are not the only animals that can live for some time without their heads.
I had known before about the roach (from a stint I did helping with KidsPost) But, as I was researching something for The Post's new Education Page http://washingtonpost.com/education/, I learned the roaches aren't alone in this stunning feat of nature.
The male praying mantis, for example, apparently stays alive during copulation after the female bites off its head. Enough said.
Community college professor Kathleen O'Neill was setting the ground rules for her psychology students when she came to an issue she didn't normally have to address.
"What do we do if you fall asleep?" she asked. "What's a nice way to gently wake you up? Tap you on the head? Would you want your neighbor to just nudge you?"
Fair question, considering O'Neill's class begins just before midnight and runs until 2:30 a.m.
This semester, Bunker Hill Community College is offering two classes on the graveyard shift in a move to accommodate an unprecedented boost in enrollment attributed to the struggling economy as people look to augment their job skills without having to pay the tuition costs of more expensive schools.
Several university professors in Puerto Rico are protesting a decision to ban five books from the curriculum at public high schools in the U.S. territory because of coarse language.
The Spanish-language books previously were read as part of the 11th grade curriculum, but proofreaders this year alerted education officials about "coarse" slang, including references to genitalia in "Mejor te lo cuento: antologia personal," by Juan Antonio Ramos.
Also among the banned books is the novel "Aura" by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, one of Latin America's most prominent contemporary writers. The other four authors affected are from Puerto Rico.
Magali Garcia Ramis, a communications professor at the University of Puerto Rico, expressed concern Saturday about how books are being evaluated by the island's Department of Education.
"This kind of mentality rejects everything that is art and only associates sexuality with inappropriateness," Garcia Ramis said.
Department of Education spokesman Alan Obrador could not be reached, and the Puerto Rico Teachers Association also was unavailable.
Host Scott Simon speaks with Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Reverend Al Sharpton about President Obama's health care speech to Congress, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst and their upcoming education reform tour. The duo has joined forces with Education Secretary Arne Duncan to push cities to fix failing schools. The tour will make stops in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore.
This site continues to mention math curricula challenges from time to time, and as long as I am around, and have community math experiences, it will continue to do so.
I try to visit Madison's wonderful Farmer's Market weekly. This past weekend, I purchased some fabulous raspberries from an older Hmong couple. Their raspberries are the best. Unfortunately, while I made my purchase, they asked how much change I was due, something I saw repeated with other buyers. They periodically have a younger person around to handle the transactions, or a calculator.
Purchasing tickets at high school sporting events presents yet another opportunity to evaluate high schooler's basic, but ESSENTIAL math skills. A Dane County teenager could not make change from $10 for three $2 tickets recently. I have experienced this at local retail establishments as well.
Unfortunately, the "Discovery" approach to math does not appear work....
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke.
This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.
K-12 spending will not continue to increase at the rate it has over the past twenty years (5.25% annually in the case of the Madison School District). Online education provides many useful learning opportunities for our students. While it is certainly not the "be all and end all", virtual learning can be used to supplement and provide more opportunities for all students. Staff can be redeployed where most effective (The budget pinch, flat enrollment despite a growing metropolitan area along with emerging learning opportunities are two major reasons that the Madison School District must review current programs for their academic and financial efficiency. Reading recovery and reform math are two useful examples).
IN Edgemont, a high-performing Westchester school district, children as young as 7 could recite colors and days of the week in Spanish, but few if any learned to really converse, read or write. So this fall, the district canceled the Spanish lessons offered twice weekly at its two elementary schools since 2003, deciding the time and resources -- an estimated $175,000 a year -- could be better spent on other subjects.
The software replaced three teachers.
Class consolidation in Yonkers resulted in the loss of four foreign-language teaching positions, and budget cuts have cost Arlington, N.Y., its seventh-grade German program, and Danbury, Conn., several sections of middle school French and Spanish.
And in New Jersey, the Ridgewood district is replacing its three elementary school Spanish teachers with Rosetta Stone, an interactive computer program that cost $70,000, less than half their combined salaries.
"There's never a replacement for a teacher in the classroom," said Debra Anderson, a Ridgewood spokeswoman. "But this was a good solution in view of the financial constraints."
South Korea has long felt under-recognized for its many achievements: it built an economic powerhouse from the ruins of a vicious war in just decades and, after years of authoritarian rule, has created one of Asia's most vibrant democracies.
Now, one South Korean woman, Lee Ki-nam, is determined to wring more recognition from the world with an unusual export: the Korean alphabet. Ms. Lee is using a fortune she made in real estate to try to take the alphabet to places where native peoples lack indigenous written systems to record their languages.
Her project had its first success -- and generated headlines -- in July, when children from an Indonesian tribe began learning the Korean alphabet, called Hangul.
"I am doing for the world's nonwritten languages what Doctors Without Borders is doing in medicine," Ms. Lee, 75, said in an interview. "There are thousands of such languages. I aim to bring Hangul to all of them."
f you have school-age children, you may have noticed their handwriting is terrible. They may communicate incessantly via written word--they can text with their heads in a paper bag--but put a pen in their hands and they can barely write a sentence in decent cursive. It's not going to be easy to decipher one either, if they think cursive might as well be cuneiform.
My daughter is in the eighth grade, and I realized several years ago that her rudimentary block-letter printing was actually never going to improve because handwriting had been chopped from the school curriculum. Children today learn basic printing in first and second grade, then get cursory instruction in cursive in the third grade--my daughter was given a cursive workbook and told to figure it out herself. She dutifully filled in every page, but she never understood how these looping letters were supposed to become her handwriting, so they never did.
Antique dealer Antonia White is sitting exhausted on a sofa. She's just returned from yet another three-hour stint looking at secondary schools for her 10-year-old daughter Clare. "I'm shattered," she says. "It's stressful and boring. All the chemistry labs look the same and all the parents look like people we wouldn't want to know."
Her comments will strike a chord with thousands of other parents this autumn, as September and October are peak season for secondary-school open days (parents need to be on the ball as the dates are often only listed on the school's website, sometimes at the last moment). For the next few weeks, those with children approaching the next stage of their school career (both in the state and private sector) will be making their way along packed corridors, trying to spot the "best" school for their child. It can be an uncomfortable process - at some popular London secondaries the queues stretch down the street. (The public school system still has its main entrance point at 13, after prep school.)
Ideally, anyone looking for a school from age 11 should begin the search when their child has just started Year 5. This helps whittle down the choices before the final year at primary school (Year 6). Drawing up a shortlist when a child is 9 or 10 also allows for a year of coaching for 11-plus exams for selective state and private schools.
aplan Virtual Education (KVE) today announced partnerships with three school
districts to launch part- and full-time online learning options for students
throughout Glades, Polk and Miami-Dade counties this fall. Last year, the
Florida Legislature required school districts to offer full-time virtual
programs starting during the 2009-10 school year. The virtual public school
options will provide middle and high school students with a variety of online
courses that feature individualized instruction and an engaging curriculum.
The partnerships will provide online learning alternatives for:
* Sixth through 12th grade students in the Glades County School District
* Sixth through 12th grade students in the Miami-Dade County Public School
District
* High school students in the Polk County Public School District
"Kaplan Virtual Education is excited to offer Florida students an education
solution that provides rigorous, high-quality courses that can be tailored to
meet their unique needs and prepare them for success in the 21st century," said
Charles Thornburgh, president of Kaplan Virtual Education. "Through these
partnerships, students can get one-on-one attention from teachers, take
advantage of engaging learning tools and study virtually anywhere at any time
via the Internet."
was intrigued by a story on the front page of the Post Aug. 9 Written by my colleague Robin Givhan, it focused on a White House internship program for D.C. students that included a recent high school graduate named Clayton Armstrong. Despite his background, he had won the prestigious summer job and a place in the freshman class at the University of Arizona.
The article was so good I wanted to know more. I wondered how Armstrong acquired his obvious academic skills, given that he had graduated from Ballou High School. D.C. has some fine public high schools, but most are bad, and Ballou in my view is the worst. It is part of what is the worst, or next to worst (Detroit is in the running) urban school district in the country.
This year, only 23 percent of Ballou students reached proficiency or above on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests. As far as I can tell, no Ballou student has ever passed an Advanced Placement test.
A growing number of Americans are taking high school equivalency tests in their hunt for any leg up in a bleak labor market.
Adult-education centers across the country report backlogs and waiting lists for prep courses cramming dozens of topics and years of lessons into weeks or months. But the potential for a better job and pay that drives many to seek a General Educational Development diploma comes with a caveat: The certificate generally is of limited value unless students use it as a stepping-stone to further education.
In 2008, the number of people taking the test for their GED diploma grew 6.6% to 777,000 from a year earlier, according to the American Council on Education, which administers the test. Between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009, three states -- Louisiana, New Hampshire and North Carolina -- and the District of Columbia saw at least a 20% rise in the number of test-takers.
The growth has come as the job market has worsened, especially for those with limited education. The unemployment rate in August for people lacking a high-school diploma was 15.6%, compared with 9.7% for high-school graduates without any college, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they've got a nice leg up."
At the mere mention of research papers, Kelly Cronin's usually highly motivated Summit Country Day Upper School students turn listless. Some groan. The Hyde Park Catholic school requires all high school students to write lengthy research papers each year on history, religion or literature.
Cronin's sophomores write history papers. They pick a topic in late September and by May they'll have visited libraries, pawed through card catalogs, and plumbed non-fiction books and scholarly articles.
They'll turn in 200 or so index cards of notes. They'll write and revise about 15 pages.
Cronin gladly grades 35 or more papers with such titles as "The Role of the Catholic Church in European Witchcraft Trials'' and "Star Trek Reflected in President Johnson's Great Society.''
"It's time-consuming," she says. "It takes over your life. But I'm not married, and I don't have any kids."
But most high school teachers aren't like Cronin and most schools aren't like Summit. At many high schools across the country, the in-depth research paper is dying or dead, education experts say, victims of testing and time constraints.
Juniors and seniors still get English papers, says Anne Flick, a specialist in gifted education in Springfield Township. "But in my day, that was 15 or 20 pages. Nowadays, it's five."
High school teachers, averaging 150 to 180 students, can't take an hour to grade each long paper, Cronin said.
The assignment may not be necessary, says Tiffany Coy, an assistant principal at Oak Hills High in Bridgetown. "Research tells you it's not necessarily the length; it's the skills you develop," she said.
But some educators disagree.
"Students come to college with no experience in writing papers, to the continual frustration of their professors," said William Fitzhugh, a former high school teacher who publishes The Concord Review, a quarterly in Massachusetts that selects and publishes some of the nation's best high school papers. [from 36 countries so far]
"If we want students to be able to read and understand college books and to write research papers there, then we must give students a chance to learn how to do that in a rigorous college preparatory program. That is not happening," he said.
Teachers see the problem. Fitzhugh's organization commissioned a national study of 400 randomly selected high school teachers in 2002 that showed:
-95% believe research papers, especially history papers, are important.
-62% said they no longer assign even 12-page papers.
-81% never assign 5,000-word or more papers.
Cronin and others blame the testing culture. Standardized tests, the ACT and SAT, don't require research or lengthy writing. And Advanced Placement puts pressures on teachers and students to pass year-end tests for college credit, although some courses do include essays.
"The emphasis on testing in this country has stifled writing," Cronin wrote in EducationNews.org. "TV pundits want to talk about the latest survey that shows what percentage of high school students can't put the Civil War in the correct decade. States want to grade schools and teachers based on tests that often just want rote memorization."
Angela Castleman, who heads the English department at Simon Kenton High in Independence, agrees to an extent. Teachers are assigning writing to help students get into college, but "our greater mission is to prepare them for what's ahead" once in college, she said.
Students think nothing of texting hundreds of words a day to friends but balk at writing thousands for a research paper--until college.
Achieve Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education reform group, surveyed nearly 1,500 high school graduates and 300 college instructors in 2005. Among graduates at college:
-56% felt they left high school with inadequate work and study habits.
-35% felt they left with gaps in writing.
-40% felt they left with gaps in research skills.
Among college instructors, 62 percent were dissatisfied with high school grads' writing and 50 percent with their research skills, Achieve's study found.
"We may gripe and we may whine, but we know we need to do" research papers, said Melissa Ng, a Summit junior.
Bobby Deye, a junior at Xavier University, said he learned writing at a private high school in Florida, beginning with five pages on the Bermuda Triangle.
Now, facing his first 20-page paper in theology, he wishes he had been challenged more.
At the University of Cincinnati, most of the 3,000 freshmen take an English placement test and land in English Composition classes, said Joyce Malek, director of the program at UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.
"I can't fault the K-12 schools," she said, "because we don't get enough writing across in the curriculum at the university level either...The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they've got a nice leg up."
Until Sharon Draper left teaching to write books in 1997, she was known at Walnut Hills for assigning 10-page papers. Students wore "I survived the Draper Paper" T-shirts.
Now, despite access to computers and software that make papers easier to write and footnote, students are writing fewer pages, she said, but they can still learn to locate and use scholarly sources and structure their notes and writing.
"If I were king of education, all seniors would have to know how to do a research paper," Draper said.
At Miami University, freshmen come with a wide range of skills, said Martin P. Johnson, an assistant history professor. Generally, they'll get assigned long research papers later in college, he said.
But it's up to professors to motivate them, he said.
"Students often display strong knowledge and analysis," he said. "When they do not, I think it is likely more a question of how hard they have worked more than not being ready or prepared in a general way to be able to do the work.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
The schools opened for business this week, one on a $232-million shiny new campus, the other in rented space in a small church. Both have high hopes.
One occupies $232 million worth of serious architecture on a promontory overlooking downtown Los Angeles. The other rents cramped space in a South L.A. church.
One has an address that shouts prestige, with neighbors that include the city's Roman Catholic cathedral and the Music Center. The other is across the street from an apartment building for the recently homeless.
Two new high schools for the arts debuted this week -- a rare enough feat in a down economy. Despite the vast differences in their circumstances, it may be too early to say which of the two has the most potential to nurture the next generation of artists and performers.
The Los Angeles Unified school at 450 N. Grand Ave., perched across the 101 Freeway from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, was years in the making and is housed on one of the most expensive and widely praised campuses in the nation. Yet it is only now shaking off more than a year of controversy and false starts in its launch to become the flagship of the district. The Fernando Pullum Performing Arts High School at 51st Street and Broadway may have the feel of something hastily thrown together out of spare parts, but it is led by one of the city's most respected music educators and has the support of such big-name artists as Kenny Burrell, Jackson Browne, Bill Cosby and Don Cheadle.
As America's newest graduates were packing for college, high school juniors spent their final summer vacation in anything but a relaxed state. Many juniors and their families look on these months as a last chance to pad a growing list of extracurricular activities and experiences that will be meticulously outlined when they fill out college applications in the fall.
Unfortunately, many of these decisions remain driven by perceived "brand value" based on myth, cohort pressures, and word of mouth. As a high-school-based counselor who has many conversations each year with college-bound students, I would like to suggest an antidote to the many unhealthy pressures and groundless expectations: growing "authentic applicants."
Authentic applicants take the long view of an educational journey, as they look at what the college years will actually contribute in the form of skills, knowledge, and values to their goal of living a meaningful life. They avoid getting locked into the quest for a "dream school," a path that would restrict their options. They consider their families' finances, and they research all the options available, including some little-known ones available at the least-expensive schools. At the same time, they don't shy away from a selective school that's right for them simply because it doesn't fit their budgets.
The full impact of the global economic crisis on higher-education systems is still unclear, but as national economies struggle to recover their footing and unemployment levels remain high, "the incentives for individuals to stay on in education are likely to rise over the next years," says a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The report, "Education at a Glance 2009: OECD Indicators," is the latest in an annual series that analyzes data on the education systems in the group's 30 member countries, which include many European democracies, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, and the United States.
You're in third grade, back to school in Texas. Shoes are too tight. Your new shirt is scratchy. And the strange kid sitting next to you -- how's he going to get that pencil out of his nose?
The teachers tell you to file into the gym. They turn on a television. Here comes President Obama. Boorrrrrring. Do you have to listen to this? Is there some kinda test afterward?
Some people in your part of the country didn't want you to hear the president of the United States. It's indoctrination. Socialism. Cult of personality. Stuff you'll learn about on cable news shows.
"This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq," says Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell.
Obama starts talking. He says, "If you quit on school, you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country."
And then he says, "No one is born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work."
School Superintendent Rob Roberts was in Carson City last week, where he definitely knows his way around the capitol building, meeting regularly with legislators and Gov. Jim Gibbons.
Two weeks ago, Roberts was in Las Vegas to attend an invitation-only conference, attended by school superintendents along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Congresswoman Dina Titus, D-Nev., and Nevada Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Steven Horsford along with other dignitaries.
Roberts was the only superintendent asked to address Duncan. "Now, let me tell you about Nye County," Roberts began.
He made the most of the opportunity, telling the secretary of the challenges of educating students in rural communities and the problems encountered with deep budget cuts.
He challenged the legislators to spend one day with him walking the schools. He said a prior speaker spoke in platitudes about a Las Vegas magnet school, Valley High School, where there are highly qualified teachers in every subject, teaching honors classes.
If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you'd probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street's fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three.
But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities.
At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission -- turning teenagers into educated college graduates -- much of the system is simply failing.
Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as "failure factories," and they are the norm.
The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor's degree. Among rich countries, only Italy is worse. That's a big reason inequality has soared, and productivity growth has slowed. Economic growth in this decade was on pace to be slower than in any decade since World War II -- even before the financial crisis started.
So identifying the causes of the college dropout crisis matters enormously, and a new book tries to do precisely that.
Employers Needed for First Annual Job and Career Fair at West High School
via email:
Does your business employ high school students or individuals with a high school diploma?
On Thursday, October 8, from 9:00 AM until 2:30 PM, West High School will host a job and career fair with a focus on employment opportunities during and after high school. West High is looking for employers who provide job and career opportunities for students in high school and individuals with a high school diploma.
This job fair is intended to provide both students and staff information about job and career opportunities for individuals with a high school diploma. Additionally, as a result of attending this job fair, students may obtain employment, arrange internships, set up job shadowing experiences, or network with potential employers.
For a $35.00 entry fee per business, West High will provide tables and chairs, a steady stream of 50 to 75 high school students per hour, a break room, volunteers to provide breaks and to assist with set up and take down, and a sit down meal and snacks provided by their culinary arts students.
For more information and a registration form, contact Jonathan Davis, transition teacher, at (608) 516-9512 or by e-mail at jidavis@madison.k12.wi.us
Yesterday President Barack Obama delivered a pep talk to America's schoolchildren. The president owes a separate speech to America's parents. They deserve some straight talk on the state of our public schools.
According to the just released Education Next poll put out by the Hoover Institution, public assessment of schools has fallen to the lowest level recorded since Americans were first asked to grade schools in 1981. Just 18% of those surveyed gave schools a grade of an A or a B, down from 30% reported by a Gallup poll as recently as 2005.
No less than 25% of those polled by Education Next gave the schools either an F or a D. (In 2005, only 20% gave schools such low marks.)
Beginning in 2002, the grades awarded to schools by the public spurted upward from the doldrums into which they had fallen during the 1990s. Apparently the enactment of No Child Left Behind gave people a sense that schools were improving. But those days are gone. That federal law has lost its luster and nothing else has taken its place.
Specific, detailed, universally-accepted national standards in education are so vital that we have now had them for many decades--in high school sports. Athletics are so important in our systems of secondary education that it is no surprise that we have never settled for the kind of vague general-ability standards that have prevailed for so long in high school academic aptitude tests. If athletic standards were evaluated in the way the SAT measures general academic ability, for example, there would be tests of "general physical fitness" rather than the impressive suite of detailed measures we now use in high school sports.
The tests that we require in football, basketball, track and other sports are not called assessments, but rather games and meets, but they test the participants' ability to "do" sports in great detail--detail which can be duly communicated to college coaches interested in whether the athletes can perform in a particular sport.
These two different worlds of standards and assessment--athletics and academics--live comfortably side-by-side in our schools, usually without anyone questioning their very different sets of expectations, measures, and rewards.
The things our students have to know when they participate in various athletic activities are universally known and accepted. The things they have to do to be successful in various sports are also universally known and accepted across the country.
The fact that this is not the case for our academic expectations, standards, and rewards for students is the reason there has been so much attention drawn to the problem, at least since the Nation at Risk Report of 1983.
At the moment there are large efforts and expenditures being brought to bear, by the Department of Education, the Education Commission of the States, the Council of Chief State School Officers, many state governments, and others, for the development of academic National Standards for the United States.
There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of controversy over what novels students of English should read, what names, dates and issues history students should be familiar with, what languages, if any, our students should know, and what levels of math and science we can expect of our high school graduates.
The Diploma to Nowhere Report, released by the Strong American Schools Project in the summer of 2008, pointed out that more than one million of our high school graduates are enrolled in remedial courses each year when they get to the colleges which have accepted them. It seems reasonable to assume that the colleges that accepted them had some way of assessing whether those students were ready for the academic work at college, but perhaps the tools for such assessment were not up to the universal standards available for measuring athletic competence.
One area in which academic assessment is especially weak, in my view, is in determining high school students' readiness for college research papers. The Concord Review did a national study of the assignment of research papers in U.S. public high schools which found that, while 95% of teachers surveyed said research papers were important, or very important, 81% did not assign the kind that would help students get ready for college work. Most of the teachers said they just didn't have the time to spend on that with students.
Imagine the shock if we discovered that our student football players were not able to block or tackle, in spite of general agreement on their importance, or that our basketball players could not dribble, pass, or shoot baskets with any degree of competence, and, if, when surveyed, our high school coaches said that they were sorry that they just didn't have time to work on that with their athletes.
Whatever is decided about National Standards for the particular knowledge which all our students should have when they leave school, I hope that there is some realization that learning to do one research paper, of the kind required for every International Baccalaureate Diploma now, should be an essential part of the new standards.
If so, then we come to the problem of assessing, not just the ability of students to write a 500-word "personal essay" for college admissions officers, or to perform the 25-minute display of "writing-on-demand" featured in the SAT writing test and the NAEP assessment of writing, but their work on an actual term paper.
As with our serious assessments in sports, there are no easy shortcuts to an independent assessment of the research papers of our secondary students. Since 1998, the National Writing Board, on a small scale, has produced three-page reports on research papers by high school students from 31 states and two Canadian provinces. Each report has two Readers, and each Reader spends, on average, one hour to read and write their evaluation of each paper. Contrast this with the 30 papers-an-hour assessments of the SAT writing test. The National Writing Board process is time-consuming, but it is, in my biased view, one serious way to assess performance on this basic task that every student will encounter in college.
A male graduate in the US can expect to earn $367,000 extra over his lifetime compared with someone who has merely completed high school.
The income boost for men is higher than for any other country in the world and double the rich-country average of $186,000, suggesting that in the US going to college is particularly key to high earnings.
This city's school district is the second largest in the nation, with nearly 700,000 students. But it has far fewer dollars per student than other major urban districts. Overcrowding and teacher turnover are among the worst in the country.
As new city schools Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines prepares on Wednesday to start his first full year at the helm, his strategy for a turnaround is to emphasize those very points.
By shining a spotlight on some of the most egregious failings of the city's schools, Mr. Cortines said he hopes to create enough transparency, embarrassment and even outrage to break a logjam among the school board, city leadership and local teachers union that has stymied past attempts at change.
Mr. Cortines also wants to break a taboo against evaluating teachers' performance and has threatened to reorganize the city's worst schools. "I want this district to be data-driven and transparent about everything," he said. "That means that sometimes we're not going to look so good. But let me tell you, if we're going to improve, we need to know where we are."
As the city's students return to school on Wednesday, thousands will enter classrooms led by a teacher that the Department of Education has deemed low performing on internal reports. But in a sign of how complicated and controversial the reports are, many teachers never received them, and there are no plans to release them to parents.
The reports use standardized test scores to monitor how much teachers have helped students improve from one year to the next and whether they are successful with particular groups of children, such as boys or those who have struggled for years.
During the last school year, education officials distributed some 12,000 reports that considered how well teachers did in educating students, producing a report for any teacher who taught fourth through eighth grade for the last two years. The reports put New York at the center of a national debate over ways to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and the role that test scores should play in the evaluations.
Over these next few weeks, 56 million American kids will start kindergarten through 12th grade. Even before an assignment or test is handed out, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a grade for the system: B.
"We've stagnated," Mr. Duncan says of the U.S. educational system. "Other countries have passed us by."
Few dispute that. An evaluation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the United States 18th among 36 countries in secondary education. Almost 25 percent of U.S. students fail to graduate from high school on time; in South Korea, it's 7 percent.
More money, in the absence of structural reform (in my mind, more charters to start with) will not work. Two useful articles here and here.
If public schools were baseball teams, says Sam Chaltain, Americans wouldn't have a clue who should be in the playoffs.
That's because our current rating system relies heavily on a single set of test scores for nearly 50 million students, showing how a sample of them perform on a one-day math or reading test each spring.
To Chaltain, director of the Washington-based think tank Forum for Education & Democracy, that's like picking playoff teams based on one game's box score.
As Congress gears up to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 law that spells out how federal, state and local governments rate schools and spend billions of dollars, Chaltain is leading a new and unlikely campaign to shift the USA's education conversation away from one-day tests and toward a larger one, focused on "powerful learning and highly effective teaching."
She may soon be American education's next "It" girl. Actually, make that its first and only "It" girl.
Only 24 and barely out of college, Sawyer has undertaken an audacious task: writing and shooting, with the help of a small band of filmmakers, more than 1,000 free, one-minute videos that help students understand and enjoy commonly assigned classic works of literature.
It'll take two years, thousands of hours on a Boston soundstage and countless outfit changes for Sawyer, the only person appearing on camera.
Her website, 60secondrecap.com, is scheduled to go live Tuesday with the first of 100 or so videos covering 10 universally loved (read: hated) works that teenagers have struggled to appreciate since English teachers first walked the Earth. Titles include: The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Great Expectations, Hamlet and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google?
Dictionaries are, after all, giant databases of words compiled by lexicographers who investigate word usages and meanings.
These days, however, Google is our database of meaning. Want to know how to spell assiduous? Type it incorrectly and Google will reply, in its kind-hearted way: "Did you mean: assiduous"? Why yes, Google, I did.
Google then spits out a bunch of links to Web definitions for assiduous. Without clicking on any of them, the two-sentence summaries below each link give me enough to get a sense of the word: "hard working," and "diligent."
Still not satisfied? Fine, click on the Google "News" tab - and you will be directed to a page of links where the word assiduous appears in news stories. Presto, sample sentences and usage examples.
I would give entering freshmen two pieces of advice. First, find out who the good teachers are. Ask your adviser; poll older students; search the Internet; and consult the teacher-evaluation guides available at most colleges. (As a professor, I am against those guides; too often they are the vehicles of petty grievances put forward by people who have no long-term stake in the enterprise. But if I were a student, I would take advantage of them.)
To some extent your options will be limited by distribution requirements (in colleges that still have them) and scheduling. But within these limits you should do everything you can to get a seat in the class of a professor known for both his or her knowledge of the material and the ability to make it a window on the larger universe. Years later you may not be able to recall the details of lectures and discussions, but the benefits of being in the company of a challenging mind will be yours forever.
Second, I would advise students to take a composition course even if they have tested out of it. I have taught many students whose SAT scores exempted them from the writing requirement, but a disheartening number of them couldn't write and an equal number had never been asked to. They managed to get through high-school without learning how to write a clean English sentence, and if you can't do that you can't do anything.
Would we be so eager to embrace a "choose your own math" or "choose your own history" class?
The answer is no. We expect that students learn the curriculum in those courses whether or not they are "into it." Literature is no different, and literature courses shouldn't be treated as glorified book clubs.
By allowing students to bypass difficult texts or texts that don't seem to relate to their contemporary lives in favor of "Captain Underpants," teachers miss a valuable opportunity to teach them that real scholastic and intellectual growth often comes when we are most challenged and least comfortable.
Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else--Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.
That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement --about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?
Doing it right depends on what exactly "it" is. Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The company likes to refer to Google's book search as a "library," but it generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."
About a decade ago, this newspaper ran a series of articles about the problems facing public education. In those stories, three reporters, myself included, each spent a day following typical fourth-grade students in three different school districts.
In one classroom, the teacher asked students about a spinnaker, and a young man answered by explaining he had seen the sailing ship on a trip to Turkey. In another classroom, when a teacher asked what was the first thing they smelled when they went to the movies, the students fell silent. When the teacher exclaimed, ''popcorn,'' we learned many of the students had yet to step into a theater.
Students arrive at the doorsteps of schools each day burdened with backpacks and often varied experiences and economic backgrounds. They are at different learning levels, and for this reason, it is difficult to fairly assess just how much teaching is going on in individual classrooms and buildings and across districts.
During the same period these articles were appearing, the charter-school movement was starting in Ohio. The early advocates for these quasi-public schools pointed to the poor results in urban districts like Akron and especially Cleveland and proudly proclaimed they could teach these failing children better and cheaper.
Choice alone for parents and students was not the early driving force to start charter schools, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Choice would come later, when the promises to teach cheaper and better were less than fulfilled
As young girls, Kristi Gelsomino and Tia Srachta toured the Cave of the Mounds with their Girl Scout troops from Illinois.
Now, years later, they journeyed back to the site with another mom, Jennifer Carroll, and their daughters who visited the cave with Girl Scout Troop 376 out of St Charles, Ill.
This time, the scouts were participating in a program called the GeoQUEST Walk and Talk for Families, which was started this year
The free program, run by the cave, explores the history of the area and geological features outside the cave itself.
"The GeoQUEST is designed to give back a bit of the history and story of this place without charging them a fee," said Kim Anderson, education coordinator at Cave of the Mounds.
The mathematics committee of the junior high schools of Madison has been meeting regularly for four rears with one intention in mind -- to improve the mathematics program of the junior high school. After experimenting with three programs in the 7th grade, the Seeing Through Mathematics series, Books 1 and 2, were recommended for adoption and approved in May of 1963.
The sincerity of the eminently qualified professional mathematicians under Dr. Buck's chairmanship was recognized by both the administration and the committee as calling for reconsideration of the committee's decisions over the past three years relative to the choice of Seeing Through Mathematics 1, 2 and 3.
Conversely, the support of the Scott, Foresman and. Company mathematics program and its instruction philosophy, as evidenced by numerous adoptions throughout the country and the pilot studies carried out in the Madison Public Schoolsvindicated that equitable treatment of those holding diametric viewpoints should be given. It was decided that the interests of the students to be taught would be best served through a hearing of both sides before reconsideration.
A special meeting of the Junior High School. Mathematics committee was held on June 10, 1965.
Meeting 1. Presentations were made by Dr. R. C. Buck, Dr. Richard Askey, and Dr. Walter Rudin of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department, and Dr. J. B. Rosen, chairman-elect of the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department.
The presentations emphasized the speakers' major criticism of the Seeing Through Mathematics series -- "that these books completely distort the ideas and spirit of modern mathematics, and do not give students a good preparation for future mathematics courses. Examples were used to show that from the speakers' points of view the emphasis in Seeing Through Mathematics is wrong. They indicated they felt the language overly pedantic, and the mathematics of the textbooks was described as pseudo-mathematics. However, it was pointed out that the choice of topics was good the content was acceptable (except for individual instances), and the treatment was consistent. A question and answer session tollowed the presentations.
..........
After careful consideration of all points of view, the committee unanimously recommended:
that the University of Wisconsin Mathematics and Education Departments be invited to participate with our Curriculum Department in developing end carrying out a program to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seeing Through Mathematics series and, if possible, other "modern" mathematics series in Madison and other school districts in Wisconsin;
that the committee reaffirm its decision to recommend the use of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, and Algebra: Its Elements and structure, Book 1, in grade nine with Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 1 and 2 in grades seven and eight, and that the Department of Curriculum Developnent of the Madison Public Schools continue its study, its evaluation, and its revision of the mathematics curriculum; and
that en in-service program be requested for all junior high school mathematics teachers. (Details to follow in a later bulletin).
The state Department of Education will conduct field studies of an online version of the Hawai'i State Assessment at every school, with plans to replace the paper and pencil test in 2011.
Once the online version of the assessment is fully rolled out in the 2010-11 school year, officials say the testing window will increase from two weeks to nearly eight months, and teachers will be able to administer the test up to three times per student.
The assessment is the state's measurement under No Child Left Behind. Only the best of the three scores will count toward a school's annual NCLB status, known commonly as "adequate yearly progress."
Modeled after the online Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, superintendent Patricia Hamamoto said administering the Hawai'i assessment by computer will allow teachers to get immediate feedback on how their students are understanding math, reading and science standards. It will also allow teachers to see where students might need more help.
A recent study, reported on the Wall Street Journal's blog, reveals that only 13 percent of Wikipedia's contributors are female. This information manages, somehow, to be both unsurprising -- Wikipedia feels like a guy thing, somehow -- and fascinating, for raising questions about how gender informs the largely anonymous realm of Internet discussion.
One-quarter of respondents who did not contribute said that they hadn't done so because they were "afraid of getting 'in trouble'"
Wikipedia aims for democratic participation: Anyone can contribute, and everyone's contributions are subject to correction by other users. Its subject matter isn't implicitly gendered: It covers almost any topic that's relevant enough to warrant an entry. But, in practice, Wikipedia -- like any other established subculture, offline or on -- rewards some contributors more than others. The site, by its nature, favors people with an intense interest in detail and a high tolerance for debate. (Choosing a discussion page at random, one learns that the entry on frogs once drew critical attention for including a picture of toads. It got slightly heated.)
SINCE the beginning of mass education, schools have relied on what is known in educational circles as "chalk and talk". Chalk and blackboard may sometimes be replaced by felt-tip pens and a whiteboard, and electronics in the form of computers may sometimes be bolted on, but the idea of a pedagogue leading his pupils more or less willingly through a day based on periods of study of recognisable academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, history, geography and whatever the local language happens to be, has rarely been abandoned.
Abandoning it, though, is what Katie Salen hopes to do. Ms Salen is a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, in New York. She is also the moving spirit behind Quest to Learn, a new, taxpayer-funded school in that city which is about to open its doors to pupils who will never suffer the indignity of snoring through double French but will, rather, spend their entire days playing games.
Quest to Learn draws on many roots. One is the research of James Gee of the University of Wisconsin. In 2003 Dr Gee published a book called "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy", in which he argued that playing such games helps people develop a sense of identity, grasp meaning, learn to follow commands and even pick role models. Another is the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative, which began in 2006 and which has acted as a test-bed for some of Ms Salen's ideas about educational-games design. A third is the success of the Bank Street School for Children, an independent primary school in New York that practises what its parent, the nearby Bank Street College of Education, preaches in the way of interdisciplinary teaching methods and the encouragement of pupil collaboration.
In decades past, education in California was a top priority for government, and the state's schools were "the cutting edge of the American Dream." Today, spending per pupil in the state has fallen to 47th in the country. Due to deep budget cuts, California school districts have been laying off teachers, expanding class sizes, closing some schools, and canceling bus service and summer school programs.
As for future funding of public education--the state of California is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The current dilemma stems from a provision in California's Education Code that can be interpreted as ruling out the use by state officials of test scores to evaluate teacher performance and compensation. On the one hand, the Obama administration has informed state officials that this provision represents an unacceptable "firewall between students and teacher data" and must be removed if California is to be eligible to receive an educational grant from the administration's $4.35 billion Race to the Top stimulus fund. On the other hand, California teachers are making it clear through their unions that the use by state government of student test scores to evaluate teachers would be detrimental to education and is an idea that must be rejected.
Taking up this issue has been the Senate Committee on Education, which held a hearing on Aug. 26 chaired by Senator Gloria Romero. The Committee is considering amending California law to ensure that the state qualifies for federal funding. "It is my goal," Romero says, "to do everything possible to ensure that the Golden State has access to precious federal dollars that can help provide our students the best possible education."
With the vast majority of New York City schools receiving A's and B's on the progress reports released this week, Education Department officials said Thursday that they expected to adjust the grading system, in effect ensuring that more schools would receive lower grades next year.
In fact, school officials who helped create the system said they never meant it to be one that would have so many schools earning the highest marks.
"We are going to raise the bar," said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief accountability officer for the department. He said that while he would want to see a wider distribution of the grades, "At the same time, when we set clear goals and schools meet them, they need to be recognized and rewarded for that."
The huge increase in the number of top marks on the city report cards -- 97 percent of schools received an A or B, up from 79 percent in 2008 -- was driven by broad gains on state standardized tests in math and English. This year, the number of students who met state standards jumped to 82 percent in math, compared with 74 percent last year. In English, 69 percent of students passed, up from 58 percent.
District officials revealed Thursday that they commissioned an investigation last summer into possible cheating at 26 public and public charter schools where reading and math proficiency on 2008 standardized tests increased markedly.
The probe, an analysis of incorrect student answers that were erased and changed to correct answers, found "anomalies" at some of the schools that administered the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) test. But officials called the investigation, conducted by the test's publisher, CTB McGraw-Hill, "ultimately inconclusive."
District officials did not name the schools that were investigated, and they did not release a copy of the CTB McGraw-Hill report, which was requested by The Washington Post on May 29 under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials also offered no explanation for the interval between the conclusion of the investigation in March and their decision to disclose it at a news conference called by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) on Thursday.
Anyone who has ever walked the halls of a middle school knows the hormones are hopping and the social drama is intense.
Growing evidence also suggests boys and girls learn best in different ways.
That's why experimenting with same-sex schools and classes is a welcome trend in Wisconsin. If pilot programs in Beaver Dam and a handful of other districts can boost the attention and achievement of both sexes, more schools should consider separating the girls from the boys in targeted grades and subjects.
Beaver Dam educators are separating sixth-graders into two single-gender classrooms for math, science and English this fall. Other classes such as physical education will still be coed.
Educators in Beaver Dam and elsewhere plan to analyze and compare test scores as well as attendance, discipline and behavioral referrals. Results will be vital in determining whether to continue or expand the effort.
School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama's back-to-school address Tuesday - forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation's classrooms.
The White House says Obama's address is a sort of pep talk for the nation's schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to "indoctrinate" students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.
"The gist is, 'I want to see what the president has to say before you expose it to my child.' Another said, 'This is Marxist propaganda.' They are very hostile," said Patricia O'Neill, a Democrat who is vice president of the Montgomery County School Board, in a district that borders Washington, D.C. "I think it's disturbing that people don't want to hear the president, but we live in a diverse society."
The White House moved Thursday to quell the controversy. First it revised an Education Department lesson plan that drew the ire of conservatives because it called for students to write letters about how they can help the president.
When Barack Obama won Florida last November -- the first Democrat to take the Sunshine State since FDR -- many saw it as a sign of centrist GOP Governor Charlie Crist's moderating influence. But lately, Florida's disgruntled Republicans aren't looking very moderate. This week, in fact, the peninsula's GOP registered arguably the loudest outcry over the education speech President Obama plans to deliver to U.S. primary and secondary students via webcast and C-Span next Tuesday. In perhaps the most over-the-top performance, state Republican Chairman Jim Greer called it an attempt to use "our children to spread liberal propaganda" and "President Obama's socialist ideology."
Thanks in large part to the Administration's ham-handed advance work, the strident conservative anger that erupted this summer over health-care reform has shifted from town halls to school halls. On the surface, Obama's intentions for Tuesday seem nothing more threatening than a presidential pep talk about taking education seriously. But some ill-advised prep material from the Education Department -- like suggestions that teachers have students write letters on "how to help the President" and recommendations that those pupils read his books -- has left the door ajar (and that's all it seems to take these days) for Republican charges that Obama "wants to indoctrinate our kids," as Clara Dean, GOP chairwoman of Florida's Collier County, puts it. (Read Joe Klein on Barack Obama's August to forget.)
KAI RYSSDAL: College students, and their parents, who have yet to write this fall's tuition checks may want to bear the following statistic in mind. According to the Department of Education, more students are going deeper into debt to pay for school. Last year, total federal student loan payments increased 25 percent. Are students getting what they borrowed for? Commentator Tyler Cowen says yeah they are, sort of.
TYLER COWEN: There's lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine; people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.
But we're learning that placebos apply to a lot of other areas and that includes higher education. Schooling works in large part because it makes people feel they've been transformed. Think about it: college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates, but studying Walt Whitman rarely gets people a job. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity.
The educators and the administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group of higher earners. If students believe this story, many of them will then live it.
Here's the latest exhibit on how polarized the country is and how much distrust exists of President Obama.
He plans what seems like a simple speech to students around the country on Tuesday to encourage them to do well in school.
But some Republicans are objecting to the back-to-school message, asserting that Obama wants to indoctrinate students.
Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement that he is "absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology" and "liberal propaganda."
Wednesday, after the White House announced the speech, the Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan.
Critics pointed to the part of the lesson plan that originally recommended having students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."
The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama's upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education -- eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.
In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, "Extension of the Speech," one of the points used to say: "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
However, that bullet point now reads as follows: "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
om Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, put out his own statement, with an education-oriented critique of the speech and its lesson plans.
Here's a snippet from his statement:
The White House materials call for a worshipful, rather than critical approach to this speech. For example, the White House communication calls for the students to have 'notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on the board),' and for the students to discuss 'how will he inspire us,' among other things. ...In general, in keeping with good education practice, students should be taught to read and think critically about statements coming from politicians and historical figures.
Just as it quickly became impossible to have a rationale discussion about health care as August wore on, we could be heading that way on education. If you haven't heard (don't get cable news?), President Obama plans to give a speech to the nation's schoolchildren next week. To accompany it the Department of Education prepared a - gasp - study guide with some ideas for how teachers can use the speech as a, dare I say it, teachable moment.
Conservatives are screaming that this is unprecedented and amounts to indoctrination and a violation of the federal prohibition on involvement in local curricular decisions. Even the usually level-headed Rick Hess has run to the ramparts. We're getting lectured on indoctrination by the same people who paid national commentators to covertly promote their agenda.
Please. Enough. The only thing this episode shows is how thoroughly broken our politics are. Let's take the two "issues" in turn.
The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message "entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school," said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.
But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.
Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the "military-industrial complex," his letter offers an equally important -- and relevant -- warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the "mental stress and burden" of democracy.
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he "felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty." He added, "We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth."
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs's note or sent a canned response. But he didn't. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
"I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed," Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. "Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life."
Critical thinking is good for kids and good for society.
I attended a recent Russ Feingold lunch [mp3 audio]. He spoke on a wide range of issues and commendably, took many open forum questions (unlike many elected officials), including mine "How will history view our exploding federalism?". A fellow luncheon guest asked about Obama's use of "Czar's" (operating outside of Senate review and confirmation). Feingold rightly criticized this strategy, which undermines the Constitution.
I would generally not pay much attention to this, but for a friends recent comment that his daughter's elementary school (Madison School District) teacher assigned six Obama coloring projects last spring.
President Obama's plan to speak to America's schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida's Republican Party, in a press release. "President Obama has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves." Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.
This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department's Web site, Mr. Obama "will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning"--hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America's children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech--especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use "notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama's speeches about education" and to "brainstorm" with students about the question "How will he inspire us?" Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include "What resonated with you from President Obama's speech?" and "What is President Obama inspiring you to do?"
Nearly one in 10 students in the class of 2009 did not pass the state's high school exit exam, which is required to receive a diploma. The results, released Wednesday, were nearly stagnant compared with the previous year.
By the end of their senior year, 90.6% of students in the graduating class had passed the two-part exam, compared with 90.4% in the class of 2008.
"These gains are incremental, but they are in fact significant and they are a true testimony to the tremendous work being done by our professional educators . . . as well as our students," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, whose office released the data.
Beginning in their sophomore year, students have several chances to take the exit exam. A score of at least 55% on the math portion, which is geared to an eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English portion, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level, is required.
The achievement gap between white and Asian students and their Latino and black classmates persisted. More than 95% of Asian students and nearly 96% of white students passed the exam by the end of their senior year, compared with nearly 87% of Latino students and more than 81% of black students. But the data did show the size of the gap narrowing. English-language learners and lower-income students also lagged but have made notable gains since the exam was first required.
The Madison School District shared their data with the group and they decided when their next two meetings would be. Compton made some interesting/borderline comments and they have an interesting discussion about race and how housing patterns affect the schools. There was a powerpoint presentation with lots of information, without a handout, so I tried to capture it the best I could.
GETTING STARTED
The meeting was moved from the Mayor's office to Room 260 across the street. The meeting started 5 minutes late with Brian Munson, Marj Passman, Mark Clear, Judy Compton, Dave Porterfield, Brian Solomon and Marsha Rummel were the quorum. Judy Olson absent, but joined them later. City staff of Bill Clingan, Mark Olinger, Ray Harmon and Helen Dietzler. Kurt Keifer from the School District was here to present. (Bill Clingan is a former Madison School Board member. He was defeated a few years ago by Lawrie Kobza.
A few interesting notes:
Clear asks if this reflects white flight, or if this just reflects the communities changing demographics. He wants to know how much is in and out migration. Kiefer says they look more at private and parochial school attendance as portion of Dane County and MMSD. Our enrollment hasn't changed as a percentage. There has been an increased activity in open enrollment - and those numbers have gone up from 200 to 400 kids in the last 8 - 10 years. He says the bigger factor is that they manage their enrollment to their capacities in the private and parochial schools. Even with virtual schools, not much changes. The bigger factor is the housing transition in Metropolitan area. Prime development is happening in other districts
......
Kiefer says smaller learning communities is what they are striving for in high schools. Kiefer says the smaller learning initiative - there is a correlation in decrease in drop out rate with the program. Compton asks about minority and Caucasian level in free lunch. She would like to see that.
.......
Kiefer says that Midvale population is not going up despite the fact that they have the highest proportion of single detached units in Midvale - they are small houses and affordable, but also highest proportion of kids going to private and parochial schools. He says it was because of access because to parochial schools are located there. Kiefer says they think the area is changing, that the Hilldale area has been an attractor for families as well as Sequoya Commons. Family and school friendly areas and he tells the city to "Keep doing that". He is hopeful that Hill Farms changes will be good as well.
Although top-tier business schools such as Harvard, Wharton, Stanford and MIT Sloan have decided to adopt the GRE test as well as the GMAT, there is little appetite for the test in the majority of the US's top business schools, according to a report by Kaplan, the test preparation company.
Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions conducted a survey of admissions officers at 260 of the top MBA programmes in the US. Some 24 per cent already accept GRE (Graduate Record Exam) test scores in addition to GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) scores. Of the remaining schools, however, only 4.3 per cent said they were considering adopting GRE.
The GRE test is the entry test to a range of post-graduate degrees, whereas the GMAT is designed specifically for business students and so gives more accurate predictions of MBA success, says Dave Wilson, president of GMAC, which administers the GMAT test..
A groundbreaking plan to open 51 new Los Angeles schools and 200 existing ones to possible outside control has Randy Palisoc feeling as if salvation is just steps away. A new $54-million campus he covets is rising a block from where his award-winning charter school operates in a rented church.
Palisoc is among many with big dreams since the Los Angeles Board of Education approved its landmark school control resolution last week. The management of about a fourth of all district schools could be up for grabs.
As a result, leading charter school operators anticipate accelerated growth for their organizations and better facilities for some current schools. An 11-school nonprofit group controlled by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is eyeing a new high school south of downtown and may bid for more existing campuses. Momentum is building for internal district proposals.
And even the powerful teachers union, which vigorously opposed the plan, is preparing to take part.
heir faces gaze from billboards and the backs of buses everywhere: well-groomed, serious-looking professionals, often with catchy nicknames. The accompanying text spells out their expertise in various school subjects, such as maths and English.
They may be sitting serenely in their office suites or surrounded by beaming youngsters holding up handfuls of "A" result slips. But this highly public face of the celebrity tutors - who make as much as HK$1 million a month from the desperate desire of parents to ensure their children get good grades at all cost - is only part of the publicity machine Hong Kong's frenzied cram-school industry has built up to lure pupils.
Schools use a web of incentives including star performances, free gifts and gift-redemption points that have children pressing their parents to send them to tutors who have become as much of a status symbol as a designer handbag, and just as expensive.
The stakes will get higher still as uncertainties over the new secondary school curriculum - which Form One pupils will follow for the first time when classes resume this week - and, in due course, the increase in senior secondary pupils it will produce stokes demand for tuition.
I was not screwing around. When I took the first physics class of my life, at age 35, it was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and my professor was Walter Lewin, one of that institution's most respected instructors. Lewin is a man so comfortable with his vectors that he diagrams them in front of a classroom audience while wearing Teva sandals.
OK, I wasn't really "at" MIT. And "took" the class may be a stretch. I was watching the video of one of Lewin's lectures from the comfort of my backyard in Brooklyn, and I too was wearing sandals (but not Tevas; I have standards).
Lewin is the breakout star of MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, what the school calls a "Web publication" of virtually every class taught in its hallowed halls. For his dynamic teaching and frequent stunts (building a human pendulum, firing golf balls at glass panels), he's been downloaded by physics enthusiasts around the globe and profiled on the front page of the New York Times as the first luminary of online open learning. The professor's fans are examples of a new type of student participating in a new kind of education, one built around the vast library of free online courseware offered by many of the world's temples of higher learning, as well as museums, nonprofit organizations and other knowledgeable benevolents.
They worry about the quality of online courses, say teaching them takes more effort, and grouse about insufficient support. Yet large numbers of professors still put in the time to teach online. And despite the broad suspicion about quality, a majority of faculty members have recommended online courses to students.
That is the complicated picture that emerges in "The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences With Online Learning," part of a two-volume national study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities--Sloan National Commission on Online Learning.
The major survey of public colleges and universities found that 70 percent of all faculty members believe the learning outcomes of online courses to be either inferior or somewhat inferior, compared with face-to-face instruction.
Professors with online experience are less pessimistic. Among those who have taught or developed an online course, the majority rated the medium's effectiveness as being as good as or better than face to face. But in a potentially controversial finding, even among professors who have taught online, fully 48 percent feel it is either inferior or somewhat inferior.
It would be good for the blood pressure of everyone involved in criticizing education--state legislators, education policy professionals, professors, school administrators, parents--to take a deep breath. Put aside the statistics, the studies, the anecdotes, and take a look at the big picture.
Here's what Edith Hamilton had to say about education, in The Echo of Greece (1957), one of her many trenchant books on the subject of the ancient Greeks:
"If people feel that things are going from bad to worse and look at the new generation to see if they can be trusted to take charge among such dangers, they invariably conclude that they cannot and that these irresponsible young people have not been trained properly. Then the cry goes up, 'What is wrong with our education?' and many answers are always forthcoming."
Note the droll and ironic, "and many answers are always forthcoming." Perhaps studying people who lived so long ago--people who invented the very idea of education as a route to genuine freedom, and understood freedom to be worthwhile only when coupled with self-control--gave Hamilton one of those calm, stoical uber-minds that comprehends competing pronouncements about education never to be more than opinion.
The Midland Public Schools has created a Q & A sheet for parents and students curious about the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme.
Q: What is the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme?
A: The IB Diploma Programme is a comprehensive and challenging pre-university curriculum for juniors and seniors recognized worldwide.
Q: What exactly does the Diploma Programme involve?
A: The IB Diploma Programme requires students to take six IB classes, three for one year (SL - standard level), and three for two (HL - higher level). Students will also take the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class, and log 150 hours of Creativity/Action/ Service (CAS), which essentially is service to community, involvement in activities and participation in various school-based extracurricular programs. In addition, they will conduct an individual research project culminating in a paper of not more than 4,000 words.
Q: What options are available for my student?
A: Students must take part in all aspects of the IB Diploma Programme in order to earn an IB Diploma. Students may also select individual IB courses and earn IB certificates in those classes. Or, students may sign-up for an IB class, partake in all of the curricular requirements, and earn no IB certificate or diploma since their assessments will not be sent out for external scoring. The IB diploma is separate from the MPS diploma.
Q: What classes will be offered?
A: MPS will offer courses in each curricular area: English - World Literature 1 & 2, Second Language - French, German or Spanish, Science - Physics 1 & 2, Math - Math Studies 1 & 2 (Advanced Algebra & Pre-Calculus) and Math HL 1 & 2 (Advanced Algebra-Trigonometry & AP Calculus BC), Social Studies - History of the Americas & World Topics, and The Arts - Studio Art and Musical Perspectives. In addition, Psychology may count under either Social Studies or The Arts, as will the Business courses of Marketing Management and Entrepreneurship. TOK will be at the core.
The table above (click to enlarge) is based on PSAT scores in 2008 for college-bound juniors for males and females taking the mathematics exam, showing the results for the five geographical regions of the U.S. For both males and females, the highest scores were in the Midwest states, similar to the findings for the SAT test results, reported yesterday on the NY Times Economix blog, "Why The Midwest Rules on the SAT."
The results also show a significant gender gap in favor of males for the mean math test scores in all five regions, with mean male test scores ranging from 3.2 points higher in the Midwest (52.2 for males vs. 49 for females)to a low of 2.5 points higher in the South (50 points for males vs. 47.5 for females). In all five regions, the standard deviation of male test scores was higher than the standard deviation of female test scores, confirming previous findings of greater variability in male intelligence/scores on standardized tests.
To work, the 21st century skills movement will require keen attention to curriculum, teacher quality, and assessment.
A growing number of business leaders, politicians, and educators are united around the idea that students need "21st century skills" to be successful today. It's exciting to believe that we live in times that are so revolutionary that they demand new and different abilities. But in fact, the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history, from the development of early tools, to agricultural advancements, to the invention of vaccines, to land and sea exploration. Such skills as information literacy and global awareness are not new, at least not among the elites in different societies. The need for mastery of different kinds of knowledge, ranging from facts to complex analysis? Not new either. In The Republic, Plato wrote about four distinct levels of intellect. Perhaps at the time, these were considered "3rd century BCE skills"?
What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills. Many U.S. students are taught these skills--those who are fortunate enough to attend highly effective schools or at least encounter great teachers--but it's a matter of chance rather than the deliberate design of our school system. Today we cannot afford a system in which receiving a high-quality education is akin to a game of bingo. If we are to have a more equitable and effective public education system, skills that have been the province of the few must become universal.
A good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It's what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it's also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them. Plot makes perverts of us all.
It's not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it's something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.
Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place--the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us "The Age of Innocence," "Ulysses," "A Passage to India," "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," "Lady Chatterley's Lover," "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Sound and the Fury." Not to mention most of "In Search of Lost Time" and all of Kafka's novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between "The Professor's House," "The Great Gatsby," "Arrowsmith" and "An American Tragedy." (It went to "Arrowsmith." Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century's worth of masterpieces before it was half over.
Maybe our whole back-to-school tradition is the problem.
We think of education as a year-to-year thing. Start school in late summer. Finish in late spring. Then repeat. Learning doesn't work like that. Our fixation on the calendar is getting in the way.
When I was young, I didn't understand that. I accepted the rhythms set by my parents and teachers. So it was a shock to leave school and discover that when working and raising a family, it no longer mattered so much what time of year it was. I had to get that kid potty-trained, and soon! I had to write that story. I had to convince the foreign editor I could succeed overseas. I had to find a publisher for that book idea. I had to master new skills and absorb new information quickly and competently, or my plans for myself and my family were in jeopardy.
The Post tried giving standard job evaluations, sort of grown-up June report cards, but they didn't last. My job was to produce stories that interested readers, a real-world test not tied to the calendar.
Some cities up near the fire have canceled the first day of school, it was supposed to have been today.
A lot of college students around the country have either started classes already, or are about to. And as they choose their course loads for the semester amid rising tuition costs, there's less and less enthusiasm for the old stand-by majors like history or political science or biology. Marketplace's Steve Henn reports that today's students want something that sells.
STEVE HENN: Mark Taylor is a tenured religion professor at Columbia University. But he compares higher education to the Detroit Big Three.
MARK TAYLOR: They are producing a product for which there's no market.
Which wouldn't be so bad if these students also had skills valued outside academia but...
Three factors have conjoined this month to make education reform in Wisconsin a real possibility in the next year and a half:
The announcement by Gov. Jim Doyle not to seek re-election but serve out his term.
The tragic, but courageous incident involving Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a promoter of education reform in Wisconsin's largest city.
The potential of qualifying for new federal education dollars.
The logjam created by the state teachers union's political activities -- which contribute millions of dollars per election year almost entirely on behalf of Democrats -- has led over the past 15 years to no educational policies put forward by Democrats or Republicans.
Some individual legislators have had proposals, but they have not gone far in the legislative process.
The political ground rules in Madison have been too crassly partisan on both sides of the aisle. It goes like this: If the Democrats control Madison, Wisconsin Education Association Council gets what it wants. If Republicans control Madison, WEAC gets nothing that it wants.
This is disheartening to the many people across the political spectrum who want reform and progress.
The newly aligned stars offer a chance to break the logjam. Doyle lacks the need for WEAC because he is not running again. Barrett's popularity has surged after he was injured when he came to the aid of a woman threatened by a pipe-wielding attacker. And the federal aid is a carrot.
Reformers have been helped by President Barack Obama's secretary of education, who called one Wisconsin law on education "ridiculous." That law currently makes Wisconsin ineligible for its share of $4 billion of federal education money.
Wisconsin now has a chance to take advantage of this alignment to make dramatic fixes to the Milwaukee public school system, change Wisconsin law so teachers can be at least partially evaluated by student test scores, and make long overdue changes in K-12 educational funding formulas.
The funding formulas currently in place will, with no doubt, increase property taxes, increase class sizes, and increase teacher layoffs.
One more entity needs to get its star aligned -- the state Legislature. The Democrats do need WEAC in 2010. But I believe there are good people in the Legislature who, I hope, will grab this moment.
The goal of public education is clear and simple: improve student achievement. There are three major items that accomplish this:
Better family structure and parental involvement in schools.
Adequate funding -- without involving students in the unpopular reliance on property taxes, the most unpopular tax of all. Think about it, the funding of our prisons does not involve the property tax wars, but paying to educate our children does.
Appreciated teachers who continue to stimulate students to improve and are evaluated and rewarded for outstanding performance.
These times for reform do not come often.
Cullen, former state Senate majority leader, is a member of the Janesville School Board.
Several letters to the editor on Aug. 24 ("A New Initiative on Education") express concern that greater reliance on standardized tests for students will, in one writer's words, leave "little room for passion, creativity or intellect."
This possibility could occur, but with wise guidelines from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, this need not occur. The main purpose of standardized testing should be to assess the yearly advancement (or lack thereof) of individual students, not to punish teachers.
Students cannot learn if they are not taught at the level at which they are functioning. It is haphazard to teach "Romeo and Juliet" to a ninth-grade student who is reading on a fifth-grade level.
For educators to stick their collective heads into the sand is foolhardy. Educators must come out of the Dark Ages, use test results for diagnostic purposes and then teach students with precision and creativity.
In a previous column, I reported how Arne Duncan has become an embarrassment here in New York City for his misuse of statistics and his slavish support of our billionaire Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is running for re-election to a third term. Duncan also called a series of blatantly propagandistic articles that supported Bloomberg's education record as "thoughtful," published in the NY Post, the tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch.
But the problem is much larger than this: Duncan's policies now threaten to alienate voters nationwide. The latest embarrassment is a national "tour," where Duncan plans to join Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich in cities around the country, pushing for more privatization, including the proliferation of more charter schools.
The fact that Duncan is joining these two disreputable figures reveals troubling insensitivity on his part. The last time Gingrich got involved in the education issue, Newt proposed forcibly removing children from inner-city parents to put them in orphanages and boarding schools.
I'm mentoring a young, ambitious engineer in our company. He's competent and demonstrates his energetic drive every day. However, he constantly makes spelling and grammatical errors in his writings. I've asked him to utilize spell-checking and re-read his emails. But mistakes such as confusing "our" with "are" and "there" and "their" aren't picked up with the computer tools. It's been over a year and he's still making these mistakes. What would you suggest as an appropriate next course of action? I am not sure if there are any additional classes he can take to improve his grammar/spell-checking skills.
A: While it is clear you have casually mentioned to your mentee about his spelling and grammatical errors, it sounds like it is time you have a more formal, direct discussion with him about his mistakes. It may be that he doesn't fully understand the gravity of the problem and the impact it can have on his career. "He needs to know that these mistakes are getting in the way of his success and that his lack of professionalism and inaccuracy is unacceptable," says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a career consulting firm.
Since being confirmed by the Senate this year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been rolling out an aggressive plan to overhaul the nation's lagging public school systems. It is time, in his words, for "fundamental reform."
Congress, at President Barack Obama's urging, is putting billions of stimulus dollars into education. It is a stunning amount of money, and this is a time like none other for American schools.
The nation has a high-school dropout rate of 30 percent, Duncan said, and those who graduate are behind students in other nations. With American students competing for jobs in a world economy, it is important they have the best education possible.
"As the president has said many times, we have to educate our way to a better economy," Duncan said Wednesday in a meeting with the Las Vegas Sun's editorial board.
As the former chief executive of the public school system in Chicago, Duncan understands the variety of issues facing education, including public safety concerns and money woes. He understands the need for change and wants to upend the status quo. Duncan has put together a broad array of plans that, if implemented, could significantly improve schools. To wit:
A well-rounded education. The emphasis under the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's hallmark education policy, was standardized testing that covered a few subjects. Principals and teachers across the country, consequently, "teach to the test." The result often has been a limited curriculum. Duncan wants to see children receive a well-rounded education including physical education, art and music. He said he wants public school students "to have the opportunities private school students have always had."
The Obama administration laid down an appropriately tough line in late July when it released preliminary rules for the $4.3 billion pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. The administration rightly sees it as a way to spur reform by rewarding states that embrace high standards and bypassing those that do not.
Federal regulations are often modified in line with criticisms that arise during the legally mandated comment period. But Education Secretary Arne Duncan will need to hold firm against the likes of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, and others who are predictably clinging to the status quo.
The administration plan would award grants based on how well state applications cover several topic areas. States must, for example, submit plausible plans for improving teacher effectiveness, equalizing teacher quality across rich and poor schools. They must also show how they would turn around failing schools.
That's what state Superintendent Mike Flanagan asked school leaders to do in coming up with plans to reimagine how kids are educated. He said it's necessary to produce better-educated students who are more prepared to compete with their peers around the world.
This reimagine process has the potential to radically transform education in Michigan, where a quarter of students fail to graduate high school on time. Student achievement has seen only modest gains in some subjects, and has actually worsened in others. A troubling 40% of high school students failed the reading portion of the Michigan Merit Exam the last two years.
The reimagine plans could help Michigan win a slice of more than $4 billion in federal funds pledged for states with promising plans to innovate education.
Proposals so far reflect an array of ideas. For instance, students would be able to take college courses at their high school in Fitzgerald Public Schools in Warren. And in Oxford, students will be fluent in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese by the eighth grade -- and start learning a stringed instrument in kindergarten.
It's not easy being E. D. Hirsch, Jr. If the inventive 81-year-old had been a business leader or politician or even a school superintendent, his fight to give U.S. children rich lessons in their shared history and culture would have made him a hero among his peers. Instead, he chose to be an English professor, at the unlucky moment when academic fashion declared the American common heritage to be bunk and made people like Hirsch into pariahs.
In this intriguing, irresistible book, Hirsch tells of life as the odd man out at the University of Virginia. Twelve years ago, for instance, he decided to give a course at the university's education school. As a bestselling author and leader of a national movement to improve elementary school teaching, he thought students would flock to hear him. Instead, he rarely got more than 10 a year. Be grateful for that many, one student told him. They had all been warned by the education faculty not to have anything to do with someone demanding that all students take prescribed courses in world and American history.
For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching "To Kill a Mockingbird," the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.
But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign "Mockingbird" -- or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.
Among their choices: James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled "Maximum Ride" books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the "Captain Underpants" series of comic-book-style novels.
But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: "I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own."
The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America's schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.
AS American children head back to school, the parents of the most academically gifted students may feel a new optimism: according to a recent study, the federal No Child Left Behind law is acting like a miracle drug. Not only is it having its intended effect -- bettering the performance of low-achieving students -- it is raising test scores for top students too.
This comes as quite a surprise, as ever since the law was enacted in 2002, analysts and educators have worried that gifted pupils would be the ones left behind. While the law puts extraordinary pressure on schools to lift the performance of low-achieving students, it includes no incentives to accelerate the progress of high achievers.
Yet the new study, by the independent Center on Education Policy, showed that more students are reaching the "advanced" level on state tests now than in 2002. This led the authors to conclude that there is little evidence that high-achieving students have been shortchanged.
It is startling to realize, as we consider the legacy of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, that this very liberal, very partisan Democrat was key to the consensus that has unified the two parties on education policy for the last two decades.
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I was slow to pick up on this. It wasn't until I looked carefully at the presidential candidate positions in 2000 that I understood how much the two parties agreed on how to make public schools better. George W. Bush and Al Gore were very different people, but their education platforms, once you got past their favorite wedge issue, vouchers, were nearly identical. Both wanted to use test scores to make schools accountable for improving achievement. If Gore had gotten to the White House, he would have produced a law similar to No Child Left Behind.
For some time I have attributed this to the good sense of education experts on both sides of the aisle. The people guiding the candidates on this issue have seen what works in schools, particularly in low income neighborhoods, and have rescued their parties from the kind of anti-testing rhetoric that was so popular with teacher union leaders.
This online column, now in its ninth year, used to be called "Class Struggle." When we shifted that name to my blog, including all three of my weekly columns plus my various rants and outbursts, and the more reasoned discourse of my Post education writer colleagues, we renamed it "Trends." It is a simple name, useful mostly to access our left-side-of-the-page archive of Friday online columns, but proves to be quite apt.
I love following trends in education, particularly those that involve favorite topics such as high-performing charter schools, college admissions practices, great teachers, weak-minded curricular fads and college-level courses in high school. We have two interesting trends in this last category, both having to do with the rise in influence of Advanced Placement, and to a lesser extent International Baccalaureate.
I have been accused of uncritically promoting AP and IB. I insist it's not true. I have written three books looking at these programs in detail. I think that makes me credible when I say they have done more to raise the level of high school instruction than anything else in the last two decades. But they have their flaws, such as the odd ways some schools motivate students to take the courses and tests. One of the two trends is the use of cash bonuses. That approach raises participation and achievement, both good things, but I still consider it troubling.
"Impersonal, disconnected, and unfulfilling." That is how I would have answered if you asked me 10 years ago what I thought of online teaching. As a teacher, I feed off the energy of the crowd and thrive on exciting and entertaining my students to the point of drawing even the most resistant into attending class. When the economy and my growing family necessitated that I teach online as well as in the classroom, I couldn't have been more surprised by the satisfaction and joy that could come from a distance-learning program.
It is not easy. First there are the students themselves. They are generally older, multicultural, and have work and family commitments. Many are in the military or have a spouse in it. Many are single mothers. Some see this chance for an education as their only chance in life, their last option.
To effectively work in the distance-learning realm, your students need to feel close to their classmates and professors, despite the miles between us. Establishing a bond, a common ground, a supportive arena for thought and expression may mean the difference between a successful, compassionate classroom and a lost, detached one.
Is it better for college admissions to take an IB or AP class and receive a C or D or take a standard class and receive an A or B? Our office is decidedly split on this matter. The majority of us feel that it is better to make the grade since GPA is the first cut often for college admissions. We usually advise our students that if they are going to take an IB or AP class they need to get an A or B in the class, and to take an IB or AP class in their strength area.
My Answer:
The high school educators and college admissions officers I know best have convinced me that EVERY student going to college should take at least one college-level course and exam in high school. AP, IB or Cambridge are the best in my view, although a dual enrollment course and test given by the staff of a local college is also good. Students need that taste of college trauma to be able to make a smooth transition their freshman year.
When you consider actual situations, the threat of a bad grade from taking AP or IB fades away. A student strong enough to have a chance of admission to a selective college, the only kind that pays close attention to relative GPAs of their applicants, will be strong enough a student to get a decent grade in an AP or IB class, and a decent score on the exam. If they do NOT get a good grade in the course or the exam, then they are, almost by definition, not strong enough to compete with other students trying to get into those selective colleges. Their SAT or ACT score will show that, even if they don't take AP or IB, and I suspect their overall GPA even without AP or IB will not be that great. If you know of a straight-A, 2100 SAT student who did poorly in an AP course, let me know, and I will revise my opinion. But I have never encountered such a student in 20 years of looking at these issues.
This indisputable fact is the impetus behind the genius blog Dissertation Haiku, which explains itself thus:
Dissertations are long and boring. By contrast, everybody likes haiku. So why not write your dissertation as a haiku?
aI guess that graduate-student writers are just like any other kind of writer in that they do want someone, anyone, to enjoy their work, regardless of how specialized or mind-numbingly dull the subject might be--hence the hundreds who have posted to the blog. So far, my favorite comes from one Mary O'Connor, who is studying ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She writes that her dissertation deals with "the effects of temperature on food webs using coastal marine plants and animals. In general, as water warms by small amounts, fish and crustaceans eat more seaweed. Thus, warming predictably changes energy flow in food webs and the abundance of marine plants and animals." I appreciate the importance of this research (and even find it intriguing), but for the sake of this post, I'll give it a big yawn. Now for the haiku:
Hungry herbivores,
It's warm; feel your tummies growl?
Graze down hot seaweed.
Do bilinguals have an internal switch that stops their two languages from interfering with each other, or are both languages always "on"? The fact that bilinguals aren't forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there's some kind of switch. Moreover, in 2007, brain surgeons reported evidence for a language switch when their cortical prodding with an electrode caused two bilingual patients to switch languages suddenly and involuntarily.
On the other hand, there's good evidence that languages are integrated in the bilingual mind. For example, bilinguals are faster at naming an object when the word for that object is similar or the same in the two languages they speak (e.g. ship/schip in English and Dutch).
Now Eva Van Assche and colleagues have provided further evidence for the idea of bilingual language integration by showing that a person's second language affects the way that they read in their native language.
In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: "Children are fragile. Handle with care." It's a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city's five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day--which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school--typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city's contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved--the process is often endless--they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
"You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you've lived with it," says Joel Klein, the city's schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. "Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence," Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room's "Handle with Care" poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, "entitled to every penny of it." She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she "loves children."
"Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own," Scheiner said. "There was no need to push anyone out." Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write--and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples--everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
Artificial life will be created within four months, a controversial scientist has predicted. Craig Venter, who led a private project to sequence the human genome, told The Times that his team had cleared a critical hurdle to creating man-made organisms in a laboratory.
"Assuming we don't make any errors, I think it should work and we should have the first synthetic species by the end of the year," he said.
Dr Venter, who has been chasing his goal for a decade, is already working on projects to use synthetic biology to create bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas, and algae that soak up carbon dioxide and turn it into hydrocarbon fuels. Other potential applications include new ways of manufacturing medicines and vaccines.
Dr Venter's prediction came after scientists at his J. Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, Maryland, announced that they had developed a new method of transplanting DNA into bacteria, promising to solve a problem that has held up the artificial life project for two years.
It's not every day you move an atom with a mouse click. But this is precisely what I do one day at the Singularity University, a new institution supported by Google and Nasa, which aims to educate a select group of entrepreneurs and scientists about the rapid pace of technology.
The class of 40 students - who are taking time out of their working lives - has settled into a busy routine. Our 12-hour days are crammed with experiments, visits to technology centres including IBM and Willow Garage, and discussion with experts. The purpose is to open our eyes to the pace of change and future possibilities.
On Wednesday we arrive at IBM Almaden research centre, a series of black glass buildings in the hills near San Jose. Unassuming office doors open to reveal scientists working away in a scene reminiscent of a sci-fi movie. We meet Kevin Roche, who is building complex machines that can deposit thin films of atoms to form nano-scale devices.
This is where, in 1989, the physicist Donald Eigler built a scanning tunnelling microscope and demonstrated the ability precisely to manipulate individual atoms by rearranging xenon atoms to spell out IBM. In homage, we use a similar machine and write SU (for Singularity University) by selecting iron atoms with a mouse and nudging them across the screen.
We open another door and witness magnetic "racetrack" memory experiments. This is the idea of storing data in magnetic field domains that can then slide or "race" along nano-wires so they can be read quickly. The idea may help our future portable devices to store hundreds of times more video.
The Overhaul of Wisconsin's Assessment System (WKCE) Begins
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [52K PDF]:
Wisconsin will transform its statewide testing program to a new system that combines state, district, and classroom assessments and is more responsive to students, teachers, and parents needs while also offering public accountability for education.
"We will be phasing out the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE)," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "We must begin now to make needed changes to our state's assessment system." He also explained that the WKCE will still be an important part of the educational landscape for two to three years during test development. "At minimum, students will be taking the WKCEs this fall and again during the 2010-11 school year. Results from these tests will be used for federal accountability purposes," he said.
"A common sense approach to assessment combines a variety of assessments to give a fuller picture of educational progress for our students and schools," Evers explained. "Using a balanced approach to assessment, recommended by the Next Generation Assessment Task Force, will be the guiding principle for our work."
The Next Generation Assessment Task Force, convened in fall 2008, was made up of 42 individuals representing a wide range of backgrounds in education and business. Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, and Joan Wade, administrator for Cooperative Educational Service Agency 6 in Oshkosh, were co-chairs. The task force reviewed the history of assessment in Wisconsin; explored the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches; and heard presentations on assessment systems from a number of other states.
It recommended that Wisconsin move to a balanced assessment system that would go beyond annual, large-scale testing like the WKCE.
The state's top schools official said Thursday that he will blow up the system used to test state students, rousing cheers from local education leaders.
The statewide test used to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law will be replaced with a broader, more timely approach to judging how well Wisconsin students are performing.
"I'm extremely pleased with this announcement," said Madison schools Superintendent Dan Nerad. "This is signaling Wisconsin is going to have a healthier assessment tool."
Task force member Deb Lindsey, director of research and assessment for Milwaukee Public Schools, said she was especially impressed by Oregon's computerized testing system. The program gives students several opportunities to take state assessments, with their highest scores used for statewide accountability purposes and other scores used for teachers and schools to measure their performance during the school year, she said.
"I like that students in schools have multiple opportunities to take the test, that there is emphasis on progress rather than a single test score," she said. "I like that the tests are administered online."
Computerized tests give schools and states an opportunity to develop more meaningful tests because they can assess a wider range of skills by modifying questions based on student answers, Lindsey said. Such tests are more likely to pick up on differences between students who are far above or below grade level than pencil-and-paper tests, which generate good information only for students who are around grade level, she said.
For testing at the high school level, task force member and Oconomowoc High School Principal Joseph Moylan also has a preference.
"I'm hoping it's the ACT and I'm hoping it's (given in) the 11th grade," he said. "That's what I believe would be the best thing for Wisconsin."
By administering the ACT college admissions test to all students, as is done in Michigan, Moylan said the state would have a good gauge of students' college readiness as well as a test that's important to students. High school officials have lamented that the low-stakes nature of the 10th-grade WKCE distorts results.
Based on those recommendations, the Department of Public Instruction has ceased development of new test items for the WKCE. Additionally, the agency will request proposals on a wide range of assessment system components, seeking maximum flexibility to meet Wisconsin's educational and statutory needs as well as cost and implementation constraints. New assessments at the elementary and middle school level will likely be computer-based with multiple opportunities to benchmark student progress during the school year. This type of assessment tool allows for immediate and detailed information about student understanding and facilitates the teachers' ability to re-teach or accelerate classroom instruction. At the high school level, the WKCE will be replaced by assessments that provide more information on college and workforce readiness.
As part of state legislation enacted in 1992, statewide assessments of student knowledge in five subjects were required. Early versions of the WKCE were commercial shelf tests from CTB/McGraw-Hill for grades four, eight, and 10. With enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, the WKCE and Wisconsin Alternate Assessment for Students with Disabilities (WAA-SwD) became high stakes, summative assessments used for federal accountability purposes. Last fall, 430,000 students in grades three through eight and grade 10 took paper and pencil assessments in reading and mathematics. Additionally, to meet state accountability requirements, students in grades four, eight, and 10 took assessments in language arts, science, and social studies. Costs for the assessments last year were about $10 million. A comprehensive and improved assessment system is expected to cost significantly more, especially during thedevelopment years.
"Our next statewide assessments must balance the needs of students, teachers, and parents as well as providing public accountability for student learning," Evers said. "We will be actively pursuing possible funding strategies for test development, including competitive federal assessment funds. Funding must meet demands from the state and federal government, interest groups, and the public for accountability in education."
The state is well poised to develop a comprehensive assessment system. Wisconsin is part of the national Common Core Standards Initiative, which is aligning academic standards to expectations for postsecondary and career readiness. Additionally, draft revisions to Wisconsin's Model Academic Standards for English language arts and mathematics were commended for aligning well with American Diploma Project benchmarks. The American Diploma Project, part of the nonprofit education reform organization Achieve Inc., is working to raise the rigor of high school standards, assessments, and curriculum to better align these expectations with the demands of postsecondary education and work.
"Standards, curriculum, instruction, and assessment are four pillars of the learning process," Evers said. "Wisconsin needs an assessment system that supports our advances in these other areas. New assessments must be based on state standards and provide timely information that can inform instruction, improve student achievement, and support our efforts to ensure every child is a graduate ready for the workforce or further education."
Types of Assessment
Formative - Daily evaluation strategies that provide immediate feedback. May include in-class questions, class discussion, or teacher observation.
Benchmark - Administered periodically to gauge student progress or evaluate how well a program is working. May include graded class work, midterm and end-of-
unit assessments, or commercial products developed for this purpose.
Summative - Monitors national, state, district, school, or classroom progress. May include end-of-course exams; ACT, SAT, and Advanced Placement exams; or other large-scale assessments such as the WKCE and WAA-SwD.
using single numbers in spreadsheets used to model financial risk and instead use a "distribution" - a range of numbers. He says that by using a distribution or "dist" we would be able to not only produce better models of uncertainty but we would avoid fundamental mistakes in modeling financial and operational performance.
Currently, the most widely used method of predicting uncertainty is to use single numbers, usually representing a single average of expected outcomes.
However, models based on average assumptions are wrong on average. This is a paradox that has been known by mathematicians for nearly 100 years, called Jensen's Inequality. Although business schools teach Jensen's Inequality, business managers continue to use average numbers to try to model things like demand, production, and project completion time. And they are constantly surprised by real world outcomes that can be very costly.
THE first time Hugo Chávez made a serious attempt to reshape the Venezuelan education system, the resulting political battle contributed to the coup that in 2002 briefly ousted him from the presidency. A new education law, shoved through parliament on the night of August 13th after minimal debate, already has the opposition talking of civil disobedience.
The government claims that the law will overcome centuries of exclusion, at last giving the children of the poor equal access to education. But its critics argue that it fails to deal with the key causes of inequality--low-quality teaching, crumbling buildings and widespread truancy in state schools. Whereas Mr Chávez's Ecuadorean ally, Rafael Correa, seems sincere in his drive to raise educational standards (see next story), the focus of the Venezuelan leader's reforms is on ensuring the intrusion of politics at every level. Mariano Herrera, an educationalist, predicts that the result will be greater inequality, not less.
Teaching is to be rooted in "Bolivarian doctrine", a reference to Mr Chávez's ill-defined Bolivarian revolution--supposedly inspired by Simón Bolívar, a leader of Latin America's 19th-century independence struggle. Schools will come under the supervision of "communal councils", indistinguishable in most places from cells of the ruling socialist party. Central government will run almost everything else, including university entrance and membership of the teaching profession.
Couched in vague terms, the law acquires coherence when seen against the president's professed intention to establish revolutionary hegemony over Venezuelan society. In a 2007 campaign on a referendum on constitutional change, Mr Chávez lectured a bemused public on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who died in 1937. In essence, Gramsci said that to eliminate the bourgeois state one must seize the institutions that reproduce the dominant class's thought-patterns.
The announcement earlier this year that roughly $100 billion in federal stimulus funds would flow to public schools came with great expectations - both for saving jobs and for fostering reforms in education. But the way the money is being used so far is decidedly more mundane.
In a new survey of 160 school-district leaders, 53 percent say they have not been able to use the money to save teaching positions in core subject areas or special education. And 67 percent say the opportunity to direct the money to reforms has been limited or nil.
"Everybody appreciated getting the money ..., but primarily all the money did was help to backfill the budget deficits they were already facing," says Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) in Arlington, Va., which released the survey Tuesday.
The majority of survey respondents did prioritize saving various personnel positions, along with investing in professional development. Other top uses of the money included buying technology, equipment, and supplies for classrooms and paying for school repairs.
Survey respondents cited several key reasons for not being able to focus more on reforms.
The money is coming through several streams, and the most flexible one, known as State Fiscal Stabilization, was primarily used to fill holes left by declining state and local funding.
The CBO released sharply higher deficit projections predicting the 10-year deficit would reach $7,140bn, some $2,700bn more than it had thought in March. Unlike the White House's calculations, the CBO estimate assumes all policies will stay exactly as they are.
"If you include the administration's fiscal plans, this implies a deficit increase way in excess of $10 trillion over the next decade - the numbers are deeply alarming," said Bill Gale, a senior economist at the Brookings Institution.
The deficit projections are a political millstone for the Obama administration as it seeks to promote health reform and other priorities. However, there is no sign of a rebellion in the bond market, where 10-year Treasuries were on Tuesday yielding 3.44 per cent. This suggests the market still sees a weak recovery ahead, even though data on house prices and consumer confidence suggested the recession was ending.
A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college's composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?
I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues -- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.
As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, "What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities."
In continuation of the program's focus on education issues, guest host Jennifer Ludden checks in with Kavitha Cardoza, a reporter for NPR member station WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., about enrollment problems at the National Preparatory Public Charter School, which is opening next month. More than a third of students in the nation's capitol are enrolled in charter schools -- the largest percentage in the country. But National Prep is having trouble meeting its enrollment figures.
Milwaukee Public Schools should create a new accountability services office that can provide the district with much-needed transparency, oversight and an annual fiscal review, Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds said Tuesday.
Bonds' proposal to comprehensively reform the school system's financial operations isn't directly related to the issue of who should run MPS, but the announcement came on the heels of a news conference he joined at City Hall this week to oppose letting Mayor Tom Barrett appoint members of the School Board and choose the next superintendent.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Barrett this month made public their plans for the mayor to appoint the School Board and pick the superintendent of MPS.
After the news conference at City Hall, local and state political leaders started taking sides: opposing mayoral control on the grounds that it's undemocratic, or supporting Barrett and mayoral control because a long-failing district needs an overhaul.
Milwaukee Ald. Tony Zielinski said the mayoral control plan was aimed at taking away voter rights, and he's been joined in opposition by School Board members Terry Falk and Annie Woodward, state Reps. Christine Sinicki and Annette Polly Williams, both Milwaukee Democrats, as well as members of the NAACP, Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope, the LGBT community and the Service Employees International Union.
A record 116 Ohio school districts have been rated excellent and overall student achievement returned to a 10-year high last year, but the statewide graduation rate fell to its lowest in five years, the state's latest rankings show.
Data released Tuesday show that more schools and districts were rated effective or higher. However, test scores in the fifth and eighth grades -- entry points to middle and high schools -- failed to meet targets in reading, math, science and social studies. The statewide graduation rate for the previous year also fell to 84.6 percent.
And the Youngstown schools descended into academic emergency, the first district to receive the state's lowest ranking since the 2004-05 school year. A special distress commission will be dispatched to the Steel Belt city to help administrators on the problem.
About 15 charter schools could be closed for failing to meet state academic performance standards, said state Superintendent Deborah Delisle.
The rankings will serve as a benchmark for judging the success of an overhaul of the state's ailing public school system that Gov. Ted Strickland championed in his January State of the State address and during this spring's state budget-writing process.
Average scores on the SAT college entrance exam dipped slightly for the high school class of 2009, while gender, race and income gaps widened, according to figures released Tuesday by the College Board.
The average SAT score dipped from 502 last year to 501 on the critical reading section of the test. Math scores held steady at 515, and writing fell from 494 to 493. Each section has a maximum score of 800.
More than 1.5 million members of the class of 2009 took the exam, which remains the most widely used college entrance exam despite recent gains by another test, the ACT. The SAT tries to measure basic college-readiness skills, while the ACT is more focused on what students have learned in the classroom.
Average SAT scores were stable or rising most years from 1994 to 2004, but have been trending downward since. That's likely due in part to the widening pool of test-takers. That's a positive sign more students are aspiring to college, but it also tends to weigh down average scores.
Forty percent of students in this year's pool were minorities and more than one-third reported their parents had never attended college. More than a quarter reported English was not their first language at home.
High-school students' performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.
Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.
Many observers Tuesday viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. "This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "If there's any good news here, I can't find it."
The hallways of Kewaskum High School were hushed, with only the odd staff member quietly shuffling down its corridors, while the school's field house rang with the sound of more than 130 student voices.
"V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, that's our freshman battle cry!" groups of ninth-graders chanted from the bleachers.
With almost a week to go before the start of the school year, nearly three-quarters of Kewaskum High's freshman class has chosen to spend the next few days learning about its new school. Freshmen will look for their lockers, track down classroom teachers and meet or reacquaint themselves with their classmates.
And, hopefully, they will get a head start on what educators consider the most important year of high school.
"If you talk to any high school principal, what they're going to tell you is that when a kid is most likely to fail is in that freshman year," Kewaskum High School Principal Christine Horbas said. "So to get them off on the right foot, I think, is very, very important."
Many schools hold orientation nights or freshman-only times on the first day of school. Kewaskum tried some of those ideas, too, before launching a full warm-up week this year.
The extra time means Kewaskum can hold more fun activities for the ninth-graders - such as teaching them school cheers or playing four-way tug-of-war - as well as refresh skills such as writing exam answers and making measurements.
Four out of 10 students who take the SAT are racial or ethnic minorities, the College Board reported Tuesday morning, a milestone for the nation's most widely used college admissions test. But some performance gaps are widening in comparisons of scores by race and family income.
For the 1,530,128 students in the high school Class of 2009 who took the 3-hour 45-minute test, the composite scores were 501 in critical reading, down one point from the year before; 515 in mathematics, unchanged; and 493 in writing, down one point. The grading scale is 200 to 800 points for each section.
Over the past decade, math scores have risen four points and reading scores dropped four.
The College Board, a nonprofit organization based in New York that oversees the test, stressed participation trends, not the scores. The 40 percent minority share of test-takers was up from 38 percent a year ago and 29.2 percent in 1999.
When Stanley Kaplan began tutoring high schoolers for the Scholastic Aptitude Test in his Brooklyn, N.Y., basement in 1946, the exam was surrounded by secrecy.
The student's score was confidential, revealed only to a college-admissions office and sometimes a guidance counselor -- never to the test taker. The test was uncoachable, according to the College Entrance Examination Board, which oversees the SAT. "If the Board's tests can regularly be beaten through coaching then the Board is itself discredited," the Board wrote in a 1955 report.
Mr. Kaplan, who died Sunday at age 90, changed that. Initially derided as a "cramming school," his private tutoring business eventually launched a $2.5 billion test-preparation industry.
Mr. Kaplan used to pay his grammar-school classmates a dime to let him tutor them for coming tests, but his own history with testing and admissions was troubled. He adopted the middle name Henry after a teacher confused him with another student with the same name and gave Mr. Kaplan the wrong grade. In the mid-1930s, he took the New York Board of Regents college-entrance examination, and received a terrible score -- it turned out to be another grading error.
Mr. Kaplan launched his tutoring service after being rejected from five medical schools in the late 1930s, despite graduating second in his class at the City College of New York. Mr. Kaplan attributed the rejections to being Jewish and his public-college pedigree.
"I remember the admissions process before standardized testing, and I believe tests open doors, not close them," he wrote in a 2001 memoir. "I might have been accepted to medical school if I had been able to display my true potential to admissions officials."
With the new school year set to begin next week, it's time for a back-to-school quiz.
Not for students. This one is for parents with children in Milwaukee Public Schools or anyone concerned about the future of MPS.
In the past few weeks, the future of MPS has been widely debated due to a blockbuster announcement about a plan to take over control of MPS from the Milwaukee School Board and give it to the mayor of Milwaukee.
Under this plan, endorsed by both Gov. Jim Doyle and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, the Milwaukee School Board would become an appointed body rather than an elected one and the responsibility for choosing the next superintendent would lie with the mayor instead of School Board members.
This kind of thing has been attempted in other cities, with no clear track record of success or failure. But just the fact that Barrett, Doyle and others even floated this trial balloon suggests they think it's an idea whose time has come. Which raises the question:
How much do people know about their Milwaukee School Board? Get your No. 2 pencils ready:
In 1997, the Lewisville school district moved its ninth-graders into a separate school as a short-term solution to overcrowding at Lewisville High School.
But the temporary move turned permanent when officials discovered some unexpected benefits from giving freshmen a school of their own: test scores and attendance improved while disciplinary problems and even teen pregnancy rates dropped - from 40 in 1996 to zero the next year.
Today, Killough Lewisville High School North - the district's ninth-grade center that opened in 2005 - is one of LISD's crowning jewels. It achieved an exemplary rating from the Texas Education Agency and was named the No. 1 public high school in the state three years ago by Texas Monthly magazine.
It's been so successful, in fact, that Lewisville school officials are now making plans to create ninth-grade centers for Hebron, Flower Mound and Marcus high schools.
But at the same time they're replicating the ninth-grade model throughout the district, school officials plan to add sophomores to the mix at Killough - a move that has upset parents who feel that the school should remain a freshman haven.
"The ninth-grade center has been great for Lewisville. It's been such a success," said Susan Arthur, whose daughter will attend Killough this year. "We don't understand why they've taken it away."
When Alain de Botton became the writer-in-residence at Heathrow airport this week, he claimed to be producing "a new kind of literature" to engage with the modern world. BAA, which owns Heathrow, has paid the novelist and philosopher £30,000 ($50,000, €34,800) for his seven-day residency at Terminal Five and to write a 20,000-word book. The "literary flow chart" of life among the baggage handlers and sniffer dogs will be published next month.
This is not the first time a company has appointed a literary figure and sought publicity for its cultural largesse. In 2003, Australian novelist Kathy Lette spent three months as writer-in- residence at the £1,200-a-night Savoy hotel in London. Marks and Spencer, Tottenham Hotspur football club, London Zoo and Toni & Guy hairdressers have all taken in authors to produce great works - or just great publicity.
There's nothing wrong with patronage, of course - its history is as long as the history of art itself. Titian got his big break in 1511, paid to paint three frescoes in Padua. Michelangelo actually lived with Lorenzo de' Medici, his benefactor.
In literature, arguably the earliest writer in residence was Britain's poet laureate: in 1668, Charles II appointed John Dryden to spin his verse for the Restoration years. In The Bulgari Connection in 2001, Fay Weldon became the first known novelist to accept payment to mention a company - the Italian jeweller features more than a dozen times.
cation in the Shreveport-Bossier City area is on the dawn of a new era, but barriers at the local and state levels could stifle the potential for improvement, new local education leaders said.
"What education will look like in 10 to 15 years will not be recognizable to many of us because of the ways it will be delivered and ways we will be cooperating," said Centenary College President B. David Rowe. "The ones who don't cooperate, the ones who don't change, the ones who don't collaborate will be left behind."
Rowe, Caddo schools Superintendent Gerald Dawkins, Bossier schools Superintendent D.C. Machen and Bossier Parish Community College Chancellor Jim Henderson are among the area's newest educational leaders. Between them, they are responsible for educating about 70,000 students.
They all have vast experiences in education from working with the state's technical and community colleges to more than 30 years in the same local school system. All four leaders, however, are relatively new to their positions -- ranging from a few weeks to about one year on the job.
Lowe and Behold The controversial (Texas) State Board of Education has a new chair. Here's how she can keep it from becoming the State Board of Embarrassment.
The State Board of Education is the most dysfunctional agency in Texas government. This is quite an achievement, considering the competition: the Texas Department of Insurance, which allows the highest home insurance rates in the land; the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which changes names every few years but not its polluter-friendly policies; the Public Utility Commission, whose chairman, responding to a petition this summer to prohibit electric utilities from disconnecting low-income and elderly customers until the heat wave broke, argued that it wasn't really unusually hot. And let us not forget the Texas Department of Transportation, which can't abide the idea of a highway without a tollbooth on it.
But there is nothing like the idiosyncratic, bitterly divided SBOE, whose fifteen elected members are charged with overseeing public education in Texas. They decide what Texas schoolchildren are supposed to learn. They establish statewide curriculum standards. They determine whether textbooks include the required material. They set graduation requirements. They are responsible for investing the Permanent School Fund, the endowment for the public schools. They accept or reject requests to establish innovative charter schools. At least, that's what the SBOE is supposed to do. What it has really done, for two decades or more, is argue incessantly over peripheral issues: the theory of evolution, sex education, role models for women.
For the past sixty years, the board has been composed of people from the education community: school board members, teachers, administrators. They have operated in relative obscurity and discharged their duties in a routine way. About the only time the SBOE made news was when critics like Mel and Norma Gabler, of Longview, began showing up at meetings to complain that textbooks under consideration had a liberal, anti-Christian point of view. But by the nineties, a new group of conservatives, many motivated by their religious beliefs, targeted the board for a takeover. They have been so successful that today they are the majority faction, and the SBOE has become the front line of the culture wars in Texas.
The graduates of a radical bilingual education program at Alicia R. Chacón International, in El Paso, would have no trouble reading either of these headlines. What can they teach the rest of us about the future of Texas?
On (En) a warm spring morning in east El Paso, I watched a science teacher named Yvette Garcia wrap duct tape around the wrists of one of her best students. We were in a tidy lab room on the first floor of Del Valle High School, in the Ysleta Independent School District, about two miles from the border in a valley once covered with cotton and onion fields but long since swallowed up by the sprawl of El Paso. Garcia taped a second student around the ankles, bound a third around the elbows, and so on, until she had temporarily handicapped a half-dozen giggling teenagers, whom she then cheerfully goaded into a footrace followed by a peanut-eating contest. It was a demonstration of the scientific concept of genetic mutation--or at least I think it was. The lab was taught entirely in Spanish, and my limited skills didn't allow me to follow a discussion of an advanced academic concept. But these kids could grasp the lesson equally well in Spanish or in English, because they had been taught--most of them since elementary school--using a cutting-edge bilingual education program known as dual language.
In traditional bilingual classes, learning English is the top priority. The ultimate aim is to move kids out of non-English-speaking classrooms as quickly as possible. Students in dual language classes, on the other hand, are encouraged to keep their first language as they learn a second. And Ysleta's program, called two-way dual language, is even more radical, because kids who speak only English are also encouraged to enroll. Everyone sits in the same classroom. Spanish-speaking kids are expected to help the English speakers in the early grades, which are taught mostly in Spanish. As more and more English is introduced into the classes, the roles are reversed. Even the teachers admit it can look like chaos to an outsider. "Dual language classes are very loud," said Steven Vizcaino, who was an early student in the program and who graduated from Del Valle High in June. "Everyone is talking to everyone."
To answer the age-old question "When am I going to use this?," school systems in Calvert, Charles and St. Mary's counties are working to enrich their science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs by using hands-on teaching, guest speakers and real-world experiments and applications.
Charles is expanding its Gateway to Technology to all middle schools after a successful pilot program last year, school system spokeswoman Katie O'Malley-Simpson said. The program is part of the nationally recognized Project Lead the Way curriculum, which supports engineering and science.
"It focuses on showing, rather than telling, students how to use engineering in everyday problems," O'Malley-Simpson said. "They see that because they are applying their skills as they learn them."
In a Room for Debate forum this week, experts discussed the value of education degrees, which often drive pay and promotion in public school systems. Many readers, who are teachers, offered their views on whether teacher prep programs are necessary for the classroom, or if other factors, like subject-matter expertise and life experience, matter more. Here are excerpts from their comments.
The Value of Epiphanies
I teach high school English and journalism, and have for more than twenty years. The students in my journalism classes are among the highest achieving students in the school; traditionally more than half of the top ten students each year are in enrolled in my classes. During the summer and after school I teach remedial English skills to students who did not pass our state standardized test.
To evaluate and pay teachers according to student performance based on standardized test scores will not produce better teachers, or better students. If a teacher helps a non-reader to become a reader, if a teacher helps a student realize the value of knowing how to write well, if a teacher opens up just a small window for further learning to occur, he is a fine teacher. Extra pay is not given to teachers who provide epiphanies and a foundation for lifelong learning. How sad it would be to give extra pay to teachers who turn out top-notch standardized test-takers.
-- Pamela
Reading
In PIRLS 2006, the average U.S. 4th-graders' reading literacy score (540) was above the PIRLS scale average of 500, but below that of 4th-graders in 10 of the 45 participating countries, including 3 Canadian provinces (Russian Federation, Hong Kong, Alberta, British Columbia, Singapore, Luxembourg, Ontario, Hungary, Italy, and Sweden).
Among the 28 countries that participated in both the 2001 and 2006 PIRLS assessments, the average reading literacy score increased in 8 countries and decreased in 6 countries. In the rest of these countries, including the United States, there was no measurable change in the average reading literacy score between 2001 and 2006. The number of these countries that outperformed the United States increased from 3 in 2001 to 7 in 2006.
Mathematics
The 2007 TIMSS results showed that U.S. students' average mathematics score was 529 for 4th-graders and 508 for 8th-graders. Both scores were above the TIMSS scale average, which is set at 500 for every administration of TIMSS at both grades, and both were higher than the respective U.S. score in 1995.
Fourth-graders in 8 of the 35 other countries that participated in 2007 (Hong Kong, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Kazakhstan, Russian Federation, England, and Latvia) scored above their U.S. peers, on average; and 8th-graders in 5 of the 47 other countries that participated in 2007 (Chinese Taipei, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan) scored above their U.S. peers, on average.
Among the 16 countries that participated in both the first TIMSS in 1995 and the most recent TIMSS in 2007, at grade 4, the average mathematics score increased in 8 countries, including in the United States, and decreased in 4 countries. Among the 20 countries that participated in both the 1995 and 2007 TIMSS at grade 8, the average mathematics score increased in 6 countries, including in the United States, and decreased in 10 countries.
In PISA2006, U.S. 15-year-old students' average mathematics literacy score of 474 was lower than the OECD average of 498, and placed U.S. 15-year-olds in the bottom quarter of participating OECD nations, a relative position unchanged from 2003.
Fifteen-year-old students in 23 of the 29 other participating OECD-member countries outperformed their U.S. peers.
There was no measurable change in U.S. 15-year-olds' average mathematics literacy score between 2003 and 2006, in its relationship to the OECD average, or in its relative position to the countries whose scores increased or decreased.
Science
The 2007 TIMSS results showed that U.S. students' average science score was 539 for 4th-graders and 520 for 8th-graders. Both scores were above the TIMSS scale average, which is set at 500 for every administration of TIMSS at both grades, but neither was measurably different than the respective U.S. score in 1995.
Fourth-graders in 4 of the 35 other countries that participated in 2007 (Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, and Japan) scored above their U.S. peers, on average; and 8th-graders in 9 of the 47 other countries that participated in 2007 (Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Korea, England, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and the Russian Federation) scored above their U.S. peers, on average.
While there was no measurable change in the average score of U.S. 4th-graders or 8th-graders in science between 1995 and 2007, among the other 15 countries that participated in the 1995 and 2007 TIMSS at grade 4, the average science score increased in 7 countries and decreased in 5 countries; and among the other 18 countries that participated in both the 1995 and 2007 TIMSS at grade 8, the average science score increased in 5 countries and decreased in 3 countries.
In PISA 2006, U.S. 15-year-old students' average science literacy score of 489 was lower than the OECD average of 500, and placed U.S. 15-year-olds in the bottom third of participating OECD nations. Fifteen-year-old students in 16 of the 29 other participating OECD-member countries outperformed their U.S. peers in terms of average scores.
Technical notes about the data sources, methodology, and standard errors are included at the end of this report.
If, as Aristotle said, "Education is the best provision for old age," there is not much ahead for an increasing number of college graduates.
I don't know what is happening, but grading student exams and college papers is becoming a chore, not the pleasant learning experience it used to be. Every semester seems to prove that more and more students should not be in college because they simply don't care and/or don't have the skills to take and pass courses at any level.
Plagiarism is a huge problem. It seems that every take-home exam and paper is an invitation to googling. Then, the procedure is as simple as "cut and paste," usually from Wikipedia but, if more creative, from the first 10 hits. Some students don't even bother to change fonts or formatting. Some plagiarized my own writing! Others invest their time in one general paper that ends up in a variety of courses regardless of the topic assigned.
After an initial denial, "I didn't do it!" that takes an instructor 10 minutes to 10 days to prove otherwise (university procedures), the next customary response is either "I didn't know," or "I do it all the time and other professors have no problem with my work."
This week the American Chemical Society (ACS) is holding its Fall 2009 National Meeting & Exposition in Washington, DC, USA. In honor of professional chemists, educators, and students, we're celebrating chemistry this week. If you are attending the meeting and would like a personal introduction to Wolfram|Alpha or the technology behind it, drop by the Wolfram Research booth, #2101.
Wolfram|Alpha contains a wealth of chemistry data, and provides you rapid computations that ensure accuracy and save time. Wolfram|Alpha is also an incredible learning tool, especially for new chemistry students looking for ways to learn, understand, compare, and test their knowledge of chemistry basics. Many of the topic areas found on an introductory or advanced course syllabus can be explored in Wolfram|Alpha.
Need to compute how many moles are in 5 grams of iron? Query "how many moles are in 5 grams of iron?", and Wolfram|Alpha quickly computes your input and returns a result, along with unit conversions.
Here's a dispatch from my colleague Nick Anderson on the national education beat:
The nation's largest teachers union sharply attacked President Obama's most significant school improvement initiative on Friday evening, saying that it puts too much emphasis on a "narrow agenda" centered on charter schools and echoes the Bush administration's "top-down approach" to reform.
The National Education Association's criticism of Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative came nearly a month after the president unveiled the competitive grant program, meant to spur states to move toward teacher performance pay; lift caps on independently operated, publicly funded charter schools; and take other steps to shake up school systems.
The NEA's statement to the Department of Education came a week before the end of the public-comment period on the administration's proposal, and it reflected deep divisions over the White House's education agenda within a constituency largely loyal to the Democratic Party.
Jeff Raikes has kept a pretty low profile in his first year as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The man who built Microsoft Office now runs the largest private foundation in the world, which gives out more than $3 billion a year from an endowment of $30 billion.
Raikes recently talked about the fallout of the economic crisis on the foundation, the importance of risk taking and failure in philanthropy, and his experience working with Melinda Gates, which he said has been the most fun. He spoke at a breakfast last week sponsored by the Puget Sound Business Journal. (I couldn't get in, but thanks to the Seattle Channel I was able to watch it here).
Not a lot of what he said was new, but he did reveal some insights from his first year, including how serious the stock market plunge hit the Gates Foundation.
"The biggest impact by far is on our partners and the people that our partners and we strive to serve," he said. "It's one of those things if you think about it you get a little depressed."
There it was again last week: A chart from a reputable national education organization that put Wisconsin at the top of the list, provided you were standing on your head.
The New Teacher Project, a private, nonprofit organization that has done a lot of work with Wisconsin and Milwaukee education, created a scorecard of the chances of each state to win some of the $4.35 billion to be given out by the U.S. Department of Education to places where there are bold, well structured plans to improve low-performing schools.
Wisconsin had the worst scorecard of all 51 candidates (including the District of Columbia).
A few weeks ago, there was a report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a program created by the federal government, on the racial gaps in reading and math achievement for fourth- and eighth-graders. The gaps were generally wider in Wisconsin than anywhere else. The scores of African-American students were lower in Wisconsin than in any other state - Mississippi, Louisiana, you name it.
A couple of years ago, Education Sector, a nonprofit organization, rated the states on how they were dealing with the No Child Left Behind education law. Wisconsin was rated as doing the best job in the country of evading the consequences of the law. The organization called it the Pangloss index, after a fictional character who believed everything was in its best possible condition even when it wasn't. We were the most Panglossian state, so to speak.
The state's powerful teachers unions criticize the governor's sweeping proposals, including merit pay for teachers. The plan would help qualify the state for Obama administration funds.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called on legislators Thursday to adopt sweeping education reforms that would dramatically reshape California's public education system and qualify the state for competitive federal school funding.
The governor's proposed legislation, to be considered during a special session that ends by Oct. 5, was met almost immediately by criticism from the powerful state teacher unions, which called Schwarzenegger's plans rushed and unnecessary.
While Schwarzenegger's goal is to boost California's chances to qualify for $4.35 billion in federal grants, known as "Race to the Top," many of his proposals go far beyond those needed for eligibility, and embrace the Obama administration's key education reform proposals.
Schwarzenegger's reforms include:
Adopting a merit pay system that would reward effective teachers and give them incentives to work at low-performing campuses;
Abolishing the current cap on the number of charter schools that can open every year;
Forcing school districts to shut down or reconstitute the lowest-performing schools or turn them over to charter schools' independent management;
Allowing students at low-performing campuses to transfer to a school of their choosing;
Requiring school districts to consider student test data when evaluating teachers, something the federal government believes is prohibited under state law.
The lack of sustained leadership has plagued the Washington, DC public school system for decades. Our nation's capital, home to fifty thousand students, boasts one of the worst school districts in the country. Two thirds of students are far behind in reading, in math, three quarters.
In June 2007 new mayor Adrian Fenty assumed control of the ailing school system, firing the incumbent superintendent and replacing him with Michelle Rhee. Some questioned her lack of experience managing a public school system. Others felt she was exactly what was needed - a change agent from outside the district. In July the city council unanimously voted her in. Since then she has plotted a deliberate, and frequently controversial, course.
This series follows Michelle Rhee's attempts to reform one of the most challenged school districts in America. Can Rhee provide a model of reform for the entire country, delivering on her promise of an excellent education for every child?
Over the next month or so, high school and college students across the world will return to the classroom or begin higher education courses for the first time.
In the past they would have taken pens, paper and textbooks but today's backpacks are laden with laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices.
The choice facing students and their parents is often bewildering so I set out to sift through the options and identify some of my favourite devices for the next generation of scholars.
When my eldest children went to university a decade ago they took with them a desktop PC, printer and a cheap mobile phone. But today most students prefer a laptop for everyday use, and perhaps an all-in-one machine for the dorm along with a multi-function printer, copier and scanner. For communications they want Skype or another low-cost messaging service such as SightSpeed or ooVoo .
In terms of handsets, bragging rights go to those packing a latest-generation smartphone such as Apple's iPhone, BlackBerry's Curve, or HTC's Google Android-powered Magic. Alternatively, students want a text-centric handset with a full qwerty-keyboard such as Nokia's N97 or the Windows Mobile-powered Danger Sidekick .
For years, colleges have asked applicants for their grade-point averages and standardized test scores.
Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students' personalities.
Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring.
Big nonprofits that administer standardized admissions tests, including the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and ACT Inc., are also getting in on the trend. ETS, for instance, which administers the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, recently unveiled a "personal potential index" designed for schools that want to replace traditional letters of recommendation for prospective grad students with a standardized rating.
"There is quite a bit of demand for these [noncognitive] instruments," says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. Educators say the use of such assessments is likely to grow as some schools search for new tools to recruit more minority and low-income students. At the same time, budget pressures are forcing public institutions in states like California and Florida to find new tools for selecting incoming students.
In my debates with American high-tech entrepreneur Bob Compton, I argue that U.S. schools are way ahead of the Chinese, and likely to stay there, at least in the production of creative, job-producing go-getters like Bob. Bob says I am not seeing what a great threat the rapidly improving Chinese education system is to our global economic superiority. Now we have a new book, "Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization," by someone who knows more about this than either Bob or me: Michigan State education professor Yong Zhao.
Just one of his chapters, number 4, "Why China Isn't a Threat Yet," is worth the $27 cost of the book. Born and raised in China himself, Zhao (pronounced Jow) describes in detail what our schools are doing well, and not so well, and does the same with China. He concludes that we are still ahead in developing creative thinkers. The Chinese won't be able to catch up until they do something about---don't laugh--their awful college entrance tests.
Madison school district parents dissatisfied with local schools got a boost after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision which trumped state law and made it easier for students living in the district to attend schools in other districts, a practice known as open enrollment.
The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution's right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation.
Last year it became easier in Madison, and in school districts across the country, for white students to transfer even if it meant increasing the district's racial imbalance.
After a flood of local students left the district last year, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad decided to investigate why.
"We had an interest in knowing ideas from people that had made the decision for open enrollment," Nerad says. "We are attempting to learn from those experiences to see if there are some things as a school district that we can constructively do to address those concerns."
To that end, the district surveyed households of district residents who left Madison schools and transferred to another district for the 2008-09 school year to find out why the families left. The majority of parents who took their kids out of the Madison school district last year under open enrollment said they did so for what the district classifies as "environmental reasons": violence, gangs, drugs and negative peer pressure. Other reasons were all over the map. Many cited crowded classrooms and curriculum that wasn't challenging enough.
Only a few responses pointed directly to white flight.
2009-2010 Read On Wisconsin Book Club Reading List
Via email:
Dear Read On Wisconsin! Book Club Members,
Welcome to the 2009-2010 school year!
We are pleased to announce that we have finalized the book selections! Thanks to the hard work of our Literacy Advisory Committee (LAC), we have decided on wonderful collections for all age groups. Each submission was carefully considered, and we feel that our assortment features inspiring books that will both enrich and entertain students. We think that you will all be very pleased with these engaging and inspiring choices!
We look forward to hosting Reading Days at the Residence this upcoming school year. Please check this website often for dates and details. We remind you that for each book, the LAC has developed discussion questions. Please encourage your students to be active participants in the student web log. As always, we welcome any questions or feedback regarding the book club or Reading Days.
On Wisconsin!
Jessica Doyle
First Lady of Wisconsin
Ashley Huibregtse
Assistant to the First Lady
ead on Wisconsin! Selections 2009 - 2010
SEPTEMBER
Preschool: Link and Rosie's Pets & Link and Rosie Pick Berries by Sharron Hubbard
Primary: Sumis' First Day of School Ever by Soyung Pak
Intermediate: Planting the Trees of Kenya by Claire A Nivola
Middle School: Three Cups of Tea: Young Reader's Edition by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
High School: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollen & Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
OCTOBER
Preschool: Same, Same by Martha Joceyln & Actual Size by Steve Jenkins
Primary: Colorful World by Cece Winans
Intermediate: Just In Case by Yuyi Morales
Middle School: After Tupac and D. Foster by Jacqueline Woodson
High School: Fortunes of Indigo Skye by Deb Caletti & The Good Liar by Greg Maguire
NOVEMBER
Preschool: My Colors, My World/ Mis colores, Mi Mundo by Maya Christina Gonzales
Primary: Bintou's Braids by Sylviana A. Diouf
Intermediate: Silent Music by James Rumford
Middle School: Red Glass by Laura Resau
High School: Nation by Terry Pratchett
DECEMBER
Preschool: Old Bear by Kevin Henkes
Primary: One Thousand Tracings by Lita Judge
Intermediate: The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron
Middle School: How To Steal a Dog By Barbara O'Connor
High School: Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
JANUARY
Preschool: Elephants Never Forget by Anushka Ravishankan
Primary: Little Night/ Nochecita by Yuyi Morales
Intermediate: Knuckleheads by Jon Scieszka
Middle School: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
High School: Box Out by John Coy
FEBRUARY
Preschool: Dance With Me by Charles R Smith Jr
Primary: The Two Mrs. Gibsons by Toyomi Igus
Intermediate: Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson & Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen Levine
Middle School: Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson
High School: A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
MARCH
Preschool: Birds by Kevin Henkes
Primary: You Cannot Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman
Intermediate: Mountain Wolf Woman by Diana Young Holiday
Middle School: The London Eye by Siobhan Dowd
High School: Jerk, California by Johnathan Friesen
APRIL
Preschool: Haiku Baby by Betsy Snyder & Monsoon Afternoon by Kashmira Sheth
Primary: Before John Was a Jazz Giant by Carol Weatherford
Intermediate: Hate That Cat By Sharron Creech
Middle School: Diamond Willow by Helen Frost
High School: Surrender Tree by Mararita Engle
MAY
Preschool: Will Sheila Share by Elivia Savadier
Primary: How to Heal A Broken Wing by Bob Grahm
Intermediate: No Talking by Andrew Clemente
Middle School: Seer of Shadows by Avi & The Postcard by Tony Abbot
High School: Bite of A Mango by Mariah Kamara
SUMMER
Preschool: Duck Rabbit by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld & Scoot by Cathryn Falwell
Primary: Chicken of the Family by Mary Amato
Intermediate: Dussie by Nancy Springer & Boys of Steel by Marc Tyler Nobleman
Middle School: Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney & When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
High School: Name of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss & Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Under pressure from state standards-based reform and No Child Left Behind, and with increasing competition from schools of choice, urban school districts are looking for ways to offer a high-performing mix of schools that meet the diverse needs of their communities.
Many districts see themselves as portfolio managers, operating some schools in the traditional way, hiring independent groups to run other schools, and holding all schools accountable under the same performance standards.
Portfolio management requires school districts to do three things they were not designed to do: judge the performance of individual schools, decide which are effective enough to continue supporting, and decide whether to shore up struggling schools or create new ones. Districts currently adopting a portfolio strategy, partially or fully, include New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Philadelphia, Hartford, and the District of Columbia. Many other districts are considering the strategy.
Performance Management in Portfolio School Districts provides ideas for portfolio school districts and others that are trying to manage schools for performance. Based on studies of other government agencies and businesses that have shifted from inputs- to performance-based accountability, this report:
Sometimes you aim for the moon and get surprisingly close. This summer I'm at Nasa Ames research centre in California, attending Singularity University, a new institution that aims to educate "a cadre of leaders" about the rapid pace of technology and to address humanity's grand challenges, such as climate and health (www.singularityu.org).
The university is the brainchild of Peter Diamandis, who founded the X-Prize challenge to encourage private spaceflight, and Ray Kurzweil, a futurist in exponential technologies. It is supported by Google, Nasa and ePlanet Ventures.
I'm part of the inaugural "student" class of 40 entrepreneurs and scientists from around the world, selected from more than 1,200 applications.
The nine-week course promises lectures and discussions with some of the world's best technologists (such as internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe), Nobel laureates and NGO leaders to share ideas, undertake practical experiments and build businesses. The goal is ambitious - to work out how technology could help a billion people within 10 years.
Arriving at the campus, housed on Federal land, I pass through the nearby town of Mountain View, which is adorned with university flags emblazoned with messages such as "How would you feed a billion people?"
Classes in District public schools start Monday, and 216 students are hoping they won't have to go back. About 70 parents, children and activists joined Thursday in front of the U.S. Department of Education to encourage Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to award vouchers to help the students pay for private school.
The students, who were offered vouchers worth as much as $7,500 toward tuition from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program this spring before Duncan rescinded them in the face of the program's uncertain future, were left to find placements in public and charter schools. Some families have complained that by the time the vouchers were rolled back, there were few spots available at competitive public schools.
"We're hoping that Secretary Duncan is going to look out the window so he can see how strongly the parents support it," said Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, one of the groups that organized the protest. "They just put families into a bad situation."
If you've ever learned a foreign language, you know the vast difference between completing workbook activities and speaking with others. The latter experience can involve sounding out unfamiliar accents or guttural pronunciations and, though intimidating, is ultimately more rewarding. By immersing yourself in a language and navigating through situations, you learn how to speak and eventually think in that language.
Rosetta Stone has long used visual learning without translations by pairing words with images --one of the ways a baby learns to speak. For the past week, I've been testing its newest offering: Rosetta Stone Totale (pronounced toe-tall-A), which is the company's first fully Web-based language-learning program. It aims to immerse you in a language using three parts: online coursework that can take up to 150 hours; live sessions in which you can converse over the Web with a native-speaking coach and other students; and access to Rosetta World, a Web-based community where you can play language games by yourself or with other students to improve your skills.
Totale costs a whopping $999, so if you aren't serious about learning a language it's a tough sell. Rosetta Stone says this program is comparable to an in-country language-immersion school. The company's most expensive offering before Totale was a set of CDs (lessons one, two and three) that cost $549, included about 120 hours of course work and had no online components.
Wisconsin maintained its third-place ranking on the ACT college admissions test, with this year's graduating high school seniors posting an average composite score of 22.3 for the third year in a row, according to data scheduled to be released Wednesday.
That average placed Wisconsin behind only Minnesota and Iowa among states where the ACT was taken by a majority of the Class of 2009.
But within the state's scores were causes for concern. The average composite score - the combined performance on the ACT's English, math, reading and science tests - for African-American students fell from 17 to 16.8. With the average composite score for Wisconsin's white students at 22.9, the state had one of the largest gaps between the two racial groups in the nation.
According to a report from ACT Inc., such scores indicate only 3% of the state's African-American test-takers are ready for college in all four tested areas, compared with 33% of white students. In Milwaukee Public Schools, spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said 6% of district test-takers were deemed college-ready in all four areas.
"Overall, Wisconsin students did well on this national test," state schools Superintendent Tony Evers said in a news release. "However, the results show areas for improvement."
Average composite scores on the ACT, the most popular of the two main college admissions tests in Wisconsin, varied from district to district in the Milwaukee area.
Because the ACT is a voluntary test, schools' average scores can vary based on the number of students who take it from one year to the next. An increase in test-taking usually leads to a score drop.
School districts from Maryland to California are turning their focus outside the United States to fill certain teaching jobs. Gigi Douban reports from Birmingham, Ala.
This just in: Next month, President Obama will appear in a back-to-school special with American Idol Kelly Clarkson and basketball star LeBron James. The 30-minute documentary will air on Viacom stations like MTV and BET. It's part of an education initiative by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called "Get Schooled."
Of course, to get schooled, you need to have a qualified instructor. And you'd figure in this job market there'd be plenty of teachers vying for every slot. But from Maryland to California, school districts are turning their focus overseas to fill certain teaching jobs. From Birmingham, Ala., Gigi Douban reports.
Only about a quarter of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions test have the skills to succeed in college, according to a report on the exam that shows little improvement over results from the 2008 graduating class.
The Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT said 23% of this year's high school graduates had scores that indicated they were ready for college in all four ACT subject areas, or had at least a 75% chance of earning a grade of C or better in entry-level courses. Last year, a similar ACT analysis found that 22% of the class of 2008 was college-ready.
"We're not making the progress we need to be making," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group focused on boosting high-school graduation rates. "The only way you improve these numbers and get them higher is by improving your secondary schools."
About 1.48 million of the 3.3 million members of the high school class of 2009 took the ACT, typically in their junior year. ACT said its report was based on comparing students' ACT test scores in English, reading, math and science with the grades they earned in related courses during their first year in college.
Eleven organizers who planned to open new voucher schools this fall but were rejected by the recently formed New Schools Approval Board have sued State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers and Marquette University.
In a lawsuit filed this month, the organizers contend that Evers and Marquette University violated the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment by turning over the legislative authority to approve voucher schools to a private party, the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette.
The school organizers are asking for an injunction restraining Evers from enforcing the new provisions passed by the Legislature this summer that tightened regulations on schools within the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, or voucher program.
Those provisions required that plans for new voucher schools be approved by the New Schools Advisory Board, part of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, which is led by voucher and charter school advocate Howard Fuller.
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
If you're thinking about going into teaching, take heed of this message from Katherine Merseth, a senior lecturer and director of the teacher education program at Harvard University: "The dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years, and it's time to say, 'Show us what you can do, or get out of the business.'"
Merseth, who spoke at an event in Washington, D.C., this week as part of a panel about how to improve teacher quality, was not trashing her employer, to be sure. Nor was she discouraging aspiring teachers from going to graduate school. Merseth was taking aim at institutions that produce ill-prepared teachers and yet insist on holding a monopoly in awarding teaching degrees. "It's high time that we broke up the cartel," she said. "We need to hold graduate schools of education more accountable." Merseth says that of the 1,300 graduate teacher training programs in the country, about 100 or so are adequately preparing teachers and "the others could be shut down tomorrow."
Each year, ACT releases both national and state-specific reports on the most recent graduating senior high school class. These reports assess the level of student college readiness based on aggregate score results of the ACT® college admission and placement exam.
The foundation of this annual report is empirical ACT data that specify what happens to high school graduates once they get to college or work based on how well they were prepared in middle or high school. ACT believes that, by understanding and utilizing this data, states and districts across the country can help advance and promote ACT's mission of college and career readiness for all students.
The ACT is a curriculum-based measure of college readiness. ACT components include:
Tests of academic achievement in English, math, reading, science, and writing (optional)
High school grade and course information
Student Profile Section
Career Interest Inventory
The ACT:
Every few years, ACT conducts the ACT National Curriculum Survey to ensure its curriculum-based assessment tools accurately measure the skills high school teachers teach and instructors of entry-level college courses expect. The ACT is the only college readiness test designed to reflect the results of such a survey.
ACT's College Readiness Standards are sets of statements intended to help students, parents and educators understand the meaning of test scores. The standards relate test scores to the types of skills needed for success in high school and beyond. They serve as a direct link between what students have learned and what they are ready to do next. The ACT is the only college readiness test for which scores can be tied directly to standards.
Only the ACT reports College Readiness Benchmark Scores - A benchmark score is the minimum score needed on an ACT subject-area test to indicate a 50% chance of obtaining a B or higher or about a 75% chance of obtaining a C or higher in the corresponding credit-bearing college courses, which include English Composition, Algebra, Social Science and Biology. These scores were empirically derived based on the actual performance of students in college. The College Readiness Benchmark Scores are:
Even as Madison's most recent high school seniors continued to outperform their state and national peers on the ACT test, districtwide scores among the class of 2009 edged slightly downward from past years, according to test results released Wednesday.
Sixty-nine percent of Madison's 12th-graders last year took the ACT college admissions test, receiving an average composite score of 24.0 out of a possible 36. The composite score for Wisconsin was 22.3, unchanged from the past two years. Nationally, the average composite score was 21.1.
The largest gain among ethnic groups in Madison was among Asian-Americans, whose average composite score rose from 22.3 to 23.4 this year. Black students' scores declined, from 19.2 to 18.4. Hispanic students' scores also dropped, from 21.7 to 21.4, and white students' scores fell, from 25.4 to 25.0, the district reported.
Over the past 15 years, ACT scores in the district have ranged from 23.5 in 1994-95 to 24.6 in 2006-07.
......
Thirty percent of Wisconsin test-takers met all four ACT benchmark scores, compared with 23 percent nationally.
In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition -- and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but it is finally a force to be reckoned with. Next month there will be close to two million students learning online at home and at school.
Back then I was superintendent in Federal Way Washington, between Seattle and Tacoma. We were a founding district in Microsoft's Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative and began rolling out laptop programs to all of our secondary schools. The brave new world of education blending the best of online and onsite learning seemed right around the corner.
In September 1996, we opened the Internet Academy, the nation's first K-12 virtual school. It was a bootstrapped operation; a group of intrepid teachers staying a day ahead of the kids and testing the application of the state's seat time requirements.
Enrollment quickly grew to over 1,000 students with about half new to public education (i.e., home and private school students) with an even split between students seeking acceleration and those seeking credit recovery. For most of a decade, Internet Academy had Washington's virtual space to itself.
Online public charter schools (or virtual schools) are charter schools under contract with a school board in which all or a portion of the instruction is provided through means of the Internet, and the pupils enrolled in and instructional staff employed by the school are geographically remote from each other.
Virtual schools have become an incredibly popular option throughout the country. In Wisconsin, thousands of families from Green Bay to Lancaster, from Racine to Rhinelander and other communities in every county in the state, have chosen to enroll their children in these unique and innovative public schools. School districts across Wisconsin (including those in Grantsburg, Appleton, Monroe, Fredonia, Waukesha and McFarland) currently offer or are exploring this option.
But in Wisconsin, even though online public charter schools are successful and embraced by parents, teachers and administrators alike, access to this innovation is rationed.
Federal law first insisted in 1975 that public schools educate disabled students. Since then, the portion of students receiving special education services has increased 64%. Today, 13.5% of all public school students have been diagnosed with a disability. Special education, it turns out, is no longer particularly special at all.
Taxpayers pay a substantial price for the growth in special education. In New York state, for instance, in 2007, the average special education student cost $14,413 more to educate than a regular-enrollment student.
What has produced such rapid growth in the percentage of American students identified as disabled? Don't worry--it's not "something in the water."
Better means of identification explain part of special education's expansion. However, a growing body of research points to a less benign cause: Schools see a financial incentive to designate low-achieving students as disabled, while they may not actually be disabled at all.
The contract was approved 727-236, with one ballot thrown out.
The Grand Rapids Board of Education has a special meeting to consider the contract at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the district's administration building, 1331 Franklin St. SE.
After informational meetings last week, several teachers said they were frustrated the pact includes no retroactive salary increase for the two years they worked without a contract and a modest 2 percent salary raise for the coming school year.
Many are also dismayed the contract does not cap class sizes, language they say claim they sought to include.
Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers.
That aggressive use of economic stimulus money by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is provoking heated debates over the uses of standardized testing and the proper federal role in education, issues that flared frequently during President George W. Bush's enforcement of his signature education law, called No Child Left Behind.
A recent case is California, where legislative leaders are vowing to do anything necessary, including rewriting a law that prohibits the use of student scores in teacher evaluations, to ensure that the state is eligible for a chunk of the $4.3 billion the federal Education Department will soon award to a dozen or so states. The law had strong backing from the state teachers union.
Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and several other states have moved to bring their laws or policies into line with President Obama's school improvement agenda.
The problem of education in Sub-Saharan Africa is due to outdated curricula and minimal sustainable reforms undertaken since independence, the Director, Regional Bureau of Education (BREDA) UNESCO, Mrs. Ann-Therese Ndong-Jatta, has said.
Speaking at a regional workshop held yesterday in Abuja on Revitalising Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) provision in the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) region, she said: "It is unfortunate that there is a bifurcation if not undervaluing of skills development in the provision of education.
This, she said, "has resulted in school graduates without skills, and led to the present disenchantment among young people who are loosing faith in education system and political leadership to address their needs."
Education minister Sam Egwu said regular curriculum review, followed by appropriate staff development and the expansion of the knowledge base on information and communication technology, are vital ingredients in reversing the situation.
School choice advocates are gearing up for a final push this week to try to get U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to reverse his decision to rescind scholarships for 216 low-income District students.
The advocates, led by D.C. Parents for School Choice and DC Children First, are planning radio, newspaper and Internet ads. The advocates, who have formed www.savethe216.com, are also holding a vigil at noon Thursday outside the U.S. Department of Education.
The campaign, billed as a major escalation of their efforts, is designed to get Duncan to reinstate the scholarships before the school year begins.
"Time is truly running out for Secretary Duncan to reverse his disastrous decision and to save these 216 children," said former Ward 7 D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous, a Democrat who is heading up efforts to save the students' scholarships. "Scholarship money is already available for the 216 students and there is no law or regulation preventing them from accessing these scholarships. Secretary Duncan needs to show the nation that this administration is serious about reforming education."
In a Room for Debate forum in June on the value of liberal arts master's degrees, one group of readers -- teachers and education administrators -- generally agreed a higher degree was well worth the investment. They pointed out that pay and promotion in public schools were tied to the accumulation of such credentials and credits, specifically from colleges of education.
But current teacher training has a large chorus of critics, including prominent professors in education schools themselves. For example, the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Katherine Merseth, told a conference in March that of the nation's 1,300 graduate teacher training programs, only about 100 were doing a competent job and "the others could be shut down tomorrow." And Obama administration officials support a shift away from using master's degrees for pay raises, and a shift toward compensating teachers based on children's performance.
Should the public schools reduce the weight they give to education school credentials in pay and promotion decisions? Is this happening already, and, if so, what is replacing the traditional system for compensating teachers?
NEA affiliates in California and Wisconsin seem to have different attitudes about their state laws banning student data being used to evaluate teachers. The Obama administration has been insisting that those laws be eliminated or altered before the states can be eligible for Race to the Top funds.
Public schools in the U.S. have added professional marketing to their back-to-school shopping lists.
Financially struggling urban districts are trying to win back students fleeing to charter schools, private schools and suburban districts that offer open enrollment. Administrators say they are working hard to improve academics -- but it can't hurt to burnish their image as well.
A bus in Washington, D.C., carries an ad for the city's public schools, which have seen enrollment plunge from nearly 150,000 students in 1970 to less than 50,000 last year. The district spent $100,000 this spring on a campaign that also included radio spots in an effort to win back students who have left public schools. The ads include quotes from students who say they are glad they stayed in public school.
So they are recording radio ads, filming TV infomercials and buying address lists for direct-mail campaigns. Other efforts, by both districts and individual schools, call for catering Mexican dinners for potential students, making sales pitches at churches and hiring branding experts to redesign logos.
"Schools are really getting that they can't just expect students to show up any more," said Lisa Relou, who directs marketing efforts for the Denver Public Schools. "They have to go out and recruit."
Administrators working on the public-relations push say the potential returns are high. State funding for public schools is based on attendance, so each new student brings more money, typically $5,000 to $8,000 per head. In addition, schools with small enrollments are at constant risk of being shuttered in this recession, and full classrooms help.
Some districts also hope a better image will entice more local business sponsorship and persuade voters to support school levies and bond issues
Substance, such as a rigorous curriculum, strong school leadership, extensive education options (languages, arts, science and math, among others) will always be better than simple pr/marketing/advertising efforts. General Motors tried re-brand their business repeatedly over the past few decades.
The Obama Administration and nearly every state have now endorsed national or common standards. Is this a good thing? Or is now the time to get worried, the logic being that, when 'everyone' is for something, the rest of us should watch out?
I have favored common standards for a long time. When I worked for Bush I in the early 1990s, I helped to launch federally funded projects to develop voluntary national standards in the arts, English, history, geography, civics, economics, science, and other essential school subjects. Some of the projects were successful; others were not. The whole enterprise foundered because a) it was not authorized by Congress, and b) it came to fruition during the transition between two administrations and had no oversight, no process of review and improvement. So, yes, I believe the concept is important.
However, I worry about today's undertaking, first, because it will focus only on reading and mathematics, nothing else; and second, because I don't know whether the effort will become a bureaucratic nightmare. But I won't prejudge the outcome. I will hope for the best, and hope that today's standardistas learned some lessons from what happened nearly two decades ago.
Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., recently introduced a grade called FD to deal with cheaters.
The letters stand for failure with academic dishonesty.
Rob Gordon, the university's director of criminology, said the FD grade was introduced to catch cheaters who use the Internet and was part of a larger package of reforms "relating to student misconduct issues and honesty."
"It is a penalty that can only be imposed by department heads, not by individual professors," Gordon, acting chairman of the university's senate committee on academic integrity, said Thursday.
"It would be used in egregious cases of academic dishonesty."
When Todd Sollar was laid off after 11 years at General Motors, he enrolled at Sinclair Community College in downtown Dayton to study robotics.
"Hopefully, with a degree I'll be marketable for a job," said Mr. Sollar, 32, who has overcome his nervousness about not fitting in because of his age. In fact, he is thriving, getting A's and B's, far better than in high school where he said officials had wrongly pegged him as having a learning disability.
As legions of displaced autoworkers and others face the prospect that their onetime jobs may be gone forever, many like Mr. Sollar will need training for a fresh start.
And perhaps the best place for them will be community colleges, long the workhorses of American higher education, workhorses that get little respect. In an unforgiving economy, these colleges provide lifelines not only for laid-off workers in need of a new career, but for recent high school graduates who find that many types of entry-level jobs now require additional skills.
West High School student Tulika Singh spent part of her summer studying epilepsy in rodents -- an experience that made her feel like a contributor to research being conducted at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Singh, who will be a senior this year, was one of 15 students in a Research Apprentice Program based at the school.
"Tulika (was) basically doing the work that college undergrads do for research experience and credits during the year," said Dr. Thomas Sutula, neurology department chairman. He said apprentices are part of the team for the summer.
Singh, who wrote a research paper and presented it, was involved in a study of how genes influence epilepsy. Her mentor was Craig Levenick, senior research specialist.
"It's just absolutely cool," Singh said of the experience.
In its 29th year, the seven-week Research Apprentice Program is designed to help increase diversity in science and health professions. The program is geared toward incoming juniors and seniors from Dane County high schools. It's based on academic performance and an interest in medicine.
Critics of public education love to point fingers. But condemning teachers unions ("Pay Your Teachers Well," Review & Outlook, Aug. 3) is not only counterproductive to reform, it aims at the wrong target.
School improvement is only possible with the buy-in of teachers, whose collective voices are brought together by their unions. And many unions, notably the two you single out, have initiated a number of successful reforms.
The Baltimore Teachers Union has been deeply involved in efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in city schools, where students have posted double-digit gains the past several years. We are pleased that improvements also are taking place at the KIPP school you highlight. Contrary to your assertion, the union seeks only to have KIPP honor its agreement to pay teachers for their time worked. No other extended-day school in Baltimore has refused to do so.
The new program would help meet the needs of students through better identification and enrichment.
Lorie Raihala had planned for her kids to attend public school -- but over the years, the lack of programming for talented and gifted students proved too frustrating.
"We tried very hard for six years to make it work for them, and we're very supportive of the public school system, so we really wanted it to work," Raihala said. But it affected their emotional well-being, that their needs weren't being met in the classroom."
So Raihala's children moved to a private school. And Raihala joined a group of parents pushing for a commitment by the Madison School District to improve programming for its talented and gifted, or TAG, students.
That group will score a victory Monday night when a plan drafted by the district that would overhaul how TAG students are identified and supported through their school careers comes before the Madison School Board. The three-year plan would replace current TAG policy, which has been out of compliance with state statutes since 1990.
Genetic engineering is beginning to live up to its name. Over the past 30 years it has meant transferring existing genes, one at a time, between organisms. Now - under the banner of "synthetic biology" - scientists are using the principles of systems engineering to transform whole organisms and potentially even to create novel forms of life.
Synthetic biology is sufficiently different from old-style genetic engineering to need a new system of regulation and governance, plus a fresh effort by its practitioners to tell the public what they are up to. Enormous benefits could flow from their work - practical pay-offs, such as new medicines and biofuels, as well as scientific insights into the nature of life.
But there are serious concerns too. First is bio-safety. Synthetic biology involves the production of novel living organisms that are self-replicating and potentially uncontrollable if something goes wrong.
Such fears were voiced in the mid-1970s when scientists first discovered how to snip a piece of DNA out of one organism and splice it into another. Indeed everyone in the field agreed to a voluntary moratorium on genetic engineering while they considered the safety consequences. Soon work resumed and, to this day, no serious accident can be blamed on the genetic manipulation of microbes.
America is at a crossroads. After leading the way in universal primary and secondary education, the academic achievements of American students have fallen behind those in many other countries. Over half of these deficiencies come as a result of the wide achievement gaps that exist along racial/ethnic and socio-economic lines. Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) represents just one of many American school districts combating the challenges of deficient academic performance.
Tulsa Public Schools believes that the best weapon in the battle to bring about greater academic success and college-readiness in the American student is an effective teacher. It is eager to seize the opportunity to become a model and catalyst for change for the rest of the nation.
TPS will swiftly implement its Teacher Effectiveness initiative with the support of a Gates' partnership but is determined to execute this initiative in the absence of a Gates' partnership if necessary. The plan outlined below was developed out of the painstaking work of dozens of teachers, principals, and central office employees. Three Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association officers were intimately involved in every step of the development process. The TPS Board of Education is enthusiastically supportive and will make all necessary changes to local regulations to enable the full implementation. Likewise, Oklahoma legislative leadership and senior executives at the Oklahoma State Department of Education have committed to promoting changes in state law and practice necessary to make these strategies possible. Moreover, local business leaders and philanthropists have pledged to generate local funding support.
Do you really need to go to school to learn about rocking out? Many musicians might say no: Lock yourself in your room with a bunch of records and a guitar, put in your days on the road playing in scummy clubs, and you'll master the craft eventually.
Or, starting this Monday, you could go to the real-life "school of rock" -- the brand-new Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma. The program has true rock cred -- it was started by Steven Drozd and Scott Booker, respectively the guitarist and manager of the Flaming Lips, a Grammy-winning rock band.
"The idea here is not that we're just a school of rock," Booker says. "The idea behind this program is really as much about business and learning how the industry works while you're learning to play better."
Unlike the original Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, England, the University of Central Oklahoma ACM offers an actual college degree. Booker adds, "not only are you taking general ed, but you're also taking aural skills and music theory and those things that anyone who's getting a music degree has to take."
The decision by Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett last week to push for giving Barrett control of some major aspects of Milwaukee Public Schools will prompt a historic, intense and almost surely messy test of the body politic of the city and the state when it comes to education issues.
Here's an early guide on what to watch for when it comes to body parts and their role in the debate:
• Spine: Any major change in the status quo around here takes a lot of backbone - this is Milwaukee, after all. Making a change as controversial as this will take an especially large amount of determination. Are Doyle and Barrett willing to put that much of their spines into this fight?
Are opponents such as the Milwaukee teachers union sufficiently determined to fight a powerful list of backers, including not only Doyle and Barrett but major business leaders, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state school superintendent Tony Evers?
Today's Boston Globe has a good-sized article on "Hot Prospects,"--local high school football players facing "increasing pressure from recruiters to make their college decisions early."
That's right, it is not the colleges that are getting pressure from outstanding students seeking admission based on their academic achievement, it is colleges putting pressure on high school athletes to get them to "sign" with the college.
The colleges are required by the AAU to wait until the prospect is a Senior in high school before engaging in active recruiting including "visits and contact from college coaches," and, for some local football players the recruiting pressure even comes from such universities as Harvard and Stanford.
Perhaps Senior year officially starts in June, because the Globe reports that one high school tight end from Wellesley, Massachusetts, for example, "committed to Stanford in early June, ending the suspense of the region's top player."
The University of Connecticut "made an offer to" an athletic quarterback from Natick High School, "and a host of others, including Harvard and Stanford, are interested," says the Globe.
In the meantime, high school football players are clearly not being recruited by college professors for their outstanding academic work. When it comes to academic achievement, high school students have to apply to colleges and wait until the college decides whether they will be admitted or not. Some students apply for "Early Decision," but in that case, it is the college, not the athlete, who makes the decision to "commit."
Intelligent and diligent high school students who manage achievement in academics even at the high level of accomplishment of their football-playing peers who are being contacted, visited, and recruited by college coaches, do not find that they are contacted, visited, or recruited by college professors, no matter how outstanding their high school academic work may be.
In some other countries, the respect for academic work is somewhat different. One student, who earned the International Baccalaureate Diploma and had his 15,000-word independent study essay on the Soviet-Afghan War published in The Concord Review last year, was accepted to Christ Church College, Oxford, from high school. He reported to me that during the interview he had with tutors from that college, "they spent a lot of time talking to me about my TCR essay in the interview." He went on to say: "Oxford doesn't recognize or consider extra-curriculars/sports in the admissions process (no rowing recruits) because they are so focused on academics. So I thought it was pretty high praise of the Review that they were so interested in my essay (at that time it had not won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize)."
There are many other examples from other countries of the emphasis placed on academic achievement and the lack of emphasis on sports and other non-academic activities, perhaps especially in Asian countries.
One young lady, a student at Boston Latin School, back from a Junior year abroad at a high school in Beijing, reported in the Boston Globe that: "Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of U.S. students could imagine...teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction."
That is not to say that American (and foreign) high school students who do the work to get their history research papers published in The Concord Review don't get into colleges. So far, ninety have gone to Harvard, seventy-four to Yale, twelve to Oxford, and so on, but the point is that, unlike their football-paying peers, they are not contacted, visited and recruited in the same way.
The bottom line is that American colleges and universities, from their need to have competitive sports teams, are sending the message to all of our high school students (and their teachers) that, while academic achievement may help students get into college one day, what colleges are really interested in, and willing to contact them about, and visit them about, and take them for college visits about, and recruit them for, is their athletic achievement, not their academic achievement. What a stupid, self-defeating message to keep sending to our academically diligent secondary students (and their diligent teachers)!!
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Thinking about making the leap to digital books? First, you'll need to add a jumble of new lingo to your dictionary: .epub, pdb, BeBB, and Adobe Content Server 4, just to name a few.
The burgeoning marketplace for e-books is riddled with inconsistent and incompatible formats. That means there's often little guarantee that an e-book you buy from one online store, like the new Barnes & Noble store, will work on popular reading devices like Amazon.com's Kindle or Sony's Reader.
In fact, most popular reading devices and e-book stores use proprietary formats. Amazon only sells Kindle-format books (called ".azw"), which can only be viewed on its Kindle e-reader and with software Amazon has made for Apple's iPhone. Barnes & Noble uses a proprietary format (called ".pdb"), which can only be read with software the bookseller has made for PCs, iPhones and BlackBerrys.
That's why Sony won applause from some e-book watchers by announcing Thursday that its e-book store was switching from a proprietary format called BeBB to Epub, an open standard put together by an industry group called the International Digital Publishing Forum. Sony's Reader has long been able to open files in the Epub format.
President Obama recently announced a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" fund that he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will use, among other things, to "reward states that come together and adopt a common set of standards and assessments." Duncan has championed uniform national standards as a key to educational improvement since taking office. "If we accomplish one thing in the coming years," he said back in February, "it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America."
That goal now seems within reach.
Both the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers recently stepped forward to lead the charge, and 46 states are already behind them. The day may soon come when every student in the country is expected to master the same material at the same age.
You may have heard about Trina Thompson. Unable to find work, she's suing her alma mater, Monroe College, to recover $70,000 in tuition. The Thompson case may not turn out to be the precedent-setter that some theorize, because Monroe makes unusually bold promises to students about post-college success.
But the sad truth is this: Practically all colleges are failing their students nowadays, and in most cases at far greater expense than Monroe failed Thompson.
Historically, criticism of education in America has targeted grade-school and secondary education. Indeed, perhaps the best thing about the K-12 is that in these polarized times, it is the great uniter: Maligned by liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, Red Sox fans and Yankee fans, and just about everyone else in the grand American cultural stew.
Technical colleges throughout the state are bracing for a fall enrollment boom, spurred by unemployed workers who need retraining and students looking for affordable alternatives to four-year universities.
The schools got a glimpse of the heightened demand last year when Blackhawk and Mid-State technical colleges were flooded with new enrollment, giving them double-digit percentage increases for the year. Overall enrollment for the Wisconsin Technical College System increased about 3.2% in 2008-'09, according to system spokeswoman Morna Foy.
But that was then.
"I think it's not going to be too far off to say we're expecting enrollment increases this year about 10% statewide, and that's pretty significant," Foy said.
Final numbers won't be apparent at the state's 16 schools until mid-September, when classes have started and students have settled in for the semester.
But most technical colleges are girding themselves based on what they've seen so far.
Public schools and teachers' unions don't say nice things about those who support school vouchers, sending kids to private schools with public money. Most of the time, such folks just don't get along.
But Wednesday wasn't a normal day.
In a move that experts are calling nearly unprecedented, the Hillsborough County schools and teachers' union have joined forces with a nonprofit Florida voucher group to help train private school teachers.
Step Up for Students -- which runs the state's tax credit voucher program -- plans to spend at least $100,000 on classes for teachers who serve its scholarship students, among the county's most economically disadvantaged children. The school district and union will provide space in the jointly developed Center for Technology and Education.
The state Board of Education on Thursday approved proposed new tests to measure Pennsylvania students' competence to graduate from high school.
The 14-2 vote clears the way for months of regulatory review of the proposed Keystone Exams, including scrutiny by the Legislature, where critics still could block the new requirements if they can muster majority support in both houses.
The Keystone Exams, developed after two years of discussion and revision, would replace the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests now administered in the 11th grade.
Students would take the exams on specific subjects as they complete their course work throughout their high school years , generally grades nine through 12. The scores would count as at least one-third of their final grade.
Proponents say the Keystones would more effectively measure student progress toward meeting statewide academic standards, reducing district-to-district discrepancies evident under the present system, while allowing local districts to substitute their own tests with state approval.
Andrea Byrd, mother of two boys, had enough with her son's school. After she and her older son, Andrae, moved from Mississippi to Memphis a year ago, the formerly straight-A student "started dumbing himself down," she says, to fit in with the other boys at his new school.
"I needed to get my child into a school where there were high expectations," Ms. Byrd says. A charter school had recently opened nearby, but the 34-year-old single mom hesitated over getting an application since Tennessee law required her son to either be considered low-performing--which he wasn't--or attend a low-performing school--which he didn't--in order to get in. But all that changed a few weeks ago, when the state enacted a law for charter schools to also include students from low-income families. Two weeks ago, Ms. Byrd went into the Power Center Academy for an application. Later that same day, she got a call to say Andrae had been accepted.
The U.S. Education Department is engaged in a high-pressure campaign to get states to lift limits on charter schools through a $4 billion education fund, Race to the Top, that encourages more charters as one of the criteria for states to qualify for a piece of the pie. A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia permit charter schools.
In charts and text, the grant application says several times that only 30 percent of the district's 13,000 teachers are "effective." Which means that 70 percent must be "ineffective." Last week, Laura Green of The Post reported those percentages. Of course, teachers have been outraged.
In a "Management Letter" to employees, Superintendent Art Johnson blamed the media. He said it was "unfortunate" that The Post article "left teachers to believe that 70 percent of PBSD teachers are ineffective." He said that conclusion was based on a statistic in the application "which indicated that only 30 percent of PBSD reading and math teachers taught students who achieved MORE than a year's growth in the same year."
Dr. Johnson's blame-shifting is disingenuous. His explanation of the statistics is not in the Gates application, so Ms. Green could not have reported it based on that document. Rather than blame The Post, Dr. Johnson should have accepted responsibility for the confusion and moved on.
And now, we will move on - to the proposal itself. The remainder of the district's application contains remarkable candor and worthy goals. It also hints at - but does not nail down - how to achieve those goals. The foundation's money and a hefty chunk from the district would help provide those specifics.
A big goal is to close racial achievement gaps. The graduation rate for white students is 87 percent, but it's 20 points lower for Hispanics and 30 points lower for African-Americans - in a majority-minority district.
Invited by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to compete for half a billion dollars in teacher-effectiveness grants, Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma put about 80 people to work on a proposal.
Pittsburgh Public Schools, also invited to apply, invested hundreds of employee hours on its plan and worked so closely with outside technical advisers, McKinsey and Co., that it gave them office space at district headquarters in Oakland.
Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida assembled focus groups of teachers, administrators and community members to gather input for a proposal, which has been through nine or 10 drafts.
The proposals had to be turned in by Friday, but the unusually rigorous application process isn't over yet.
In all, 10 invitees -- most of them urban districts in various stages of broad improvement campaigns -- will meet Wednesday in Seattle to make presentations to Gates officials. Then they'll wait to see who is selected for prestigious Gates funding -- and wonder whether Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife will have a hand in the decision-making.
Mike Bloomberg's comments at Monday's press conference announcing plans to extend a test-based promotion policy to grades four and six were eerily reminiscent of Arne Duncan's and Joel Klein's reactions to two reports on social promotion released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research in 2004. The Chicago Consortium, an independent research group studying Chicago schools, examined the effects of promotional gates at the third-, sixth- and eighth-grade levels. (I reviewed one of the draft reports at the request of the Consortium.) The findings were unequivocal: Test-based retention did not alter the achievement trajectories of third-graders, and sixth-graders who were retained had lower achievement growth than similar low-achieving students who were promoted. Implementing the eighth-grade promotional gate reduced overall dropout rates slightly, but clearly lowered the likelihood of high school graduation for very low achievers and students who were already overage for grade at the time they reached the gate.
David Herszenhorn, writing in the New York Times at the time, described a Chicago press conference releasing the reports. He quoted Arne Duncan, then the chief executive of the Chicago public schools, as saying, "Common sense tells you that ending social promotion has contributed to higher test scores and lower dropout rates over the last eight years ... I am absolutely convinced in my heart, it's the right thing to do." Herszenhorn delicately noted that Duncan made claims about the promotional policies that were not supported by the two reports. "While the report drew no such conclusion," he wrote, "[Duncan] credited the tough promotion rules for improvements in the system as a whole, including better overall test scores, higher graduation and attendance rates and a lower overall dropout rate."
In the same article, Herszenhorn suggested that NYC Chancellor Joel Klein had "seemed to push aside the findings." He cited a statement by Klein that, "The Chicago study strongly supports our view that effective early grade interventions are key to ending social promotion and preparing students for the hard work they will encounter in later grades." Klein's statement was patently false: the Chicago studies didn't examine early grade interventions. Rather, authors Jenny Nagaoka and Melissa Roderick pointed out that a great many students in Chicago were struggling well before the third-grade promotional gate, suggesting the desirability of early intervention with struggling students.
Education Commissioner Alice Seagren joins Midday to discuss the latest test results, which show more than 1,000 Minnesota schools did not make "adequate yearly progress" under the No Child Left Behind law.
To maintain the competitiveness of America's workforce and ensure that U.S. students are prepared to succeed in college, states increasingly are recognizing the importance of offering a rigorous, common education curriculum that includes Advancement Placement (AP) courses. A new report from the NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) titled Raising Rigor, Getting Results: Lessons Learned from AP Expansion, has demonstrated that it is possible for states to raise rigor and get results at scale by increasing student access to AP courses.
The report looks at the efforts of six states--Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin--that received funding as part of the NGA Center's Advanced Placement Expansion project toincrease the participation of minority and low-income students in AP courses at 51 pilot high schools in rural and urban school districts.
"Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of smart, ambitious students have the ability, but lack the opportunity, to get a head start on college through AP courses," said John Thomasian, director of the NGA Center. "With nearly two-thirds of jobs in 2014 expected to require at least some college, this report demonstrates that increasing students' participation in challenging coursework bolsters their ability to compete in a highly skilled, 21st century workforce."
Madison East High School ranked "19th in this list of increases in enrollment by pilot school"
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on "What Wisconsin's Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late." 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
In light of this talk, It has been fascinating to watch (and participate in) the intersection of:
Dan Nerad and Erik Kass, our somewhat new Superintendent and Director of Business Services, and
the Administration, and local organizations that receive funding via our school system ("Fund 80", among others)
Several years ago, former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater remarked that "sometimes I think we have 25,000 school districts, one for each child".
I found Monday evening's school board meeting interesting, and perhaps indicative of the issues Zimman noted recently. Our public schools have an always challenging task of trying to support the growing range of wants, needs and desires for our 24,180 students, staff members, teachers, administrators, taxpayers and parents. Monday's topics included:
the proposed Talented and Gifted Plan (with an interesting discussion on how many TAG staff members have training in this area vs those who work in other areas such as special education [45MB mp3 audio file]), and two, seamingly small items on the agenda that identify future initiatives (or, in the case of elementary math, continuing the "reform" model that has been in place for some time):
I've not mentioned the potential addition of 4K, high school redesign or other topics that bubble up from time to time.
In my layperson's view, taking Zimman's talk to heart, our public schools should dramatically shrink their primary goals and focus on only the most essential topics (student achievement?). In Madison's case, get out of the curriculum creation business and embrace online learning opportunities for those students who can excel in that space while devoting staff to the kids who need them most. I would also like to see more opportunities for our students at MATC, the UW, Edgewood College and other nearby institutions. Bellevue (WA) College has a "running start" program for the local high school. Chart via Whitney Tilson.
Richard Zimman closed his talk with these words (@27 minutes): "Simply throwing more money at schools to continue as they are now is not the answer. We cannot afford more of the same with just a bigger price tag".
General Motors as formerly constituted is dead. What remains is a much smaller organization beholden to Washington. We'll see how that plays out. The Madison School District enjoys significant financial, community and parental assets. I hope the Administration does just a few things well.
Painting online textbooks as a boon to student achievement and school district coffers, state Education Secretary Glen Thomas announced today that 10 free digital high school math and science textbooks are ready to be used in California classrooms.
The likelihood of students tapping them when schools open in a couple of weeks is slim, because of school districts' textbook-adoption policies and teacher training needs, but Thomas said the move marks the first step in something that will revolutionize education in California.
"This is a groundbreaking initiative," he told more than 100 representatives of schools, technology companies and others gathered at the Orange County Department of Education. "We think that technology is one of the ways to reform and improve education."
We've published more than 100 comments on our post yesterday about Kate McLaughlin, the California teenager who has already graduated from college and is en route to law school.
Some of you applauded her accomplishments, and her family's willingness to allow her to fast-track her education. Others saw it as too much too soon. And still others weighed in on whether the law was an appropriate career choice. Many of you wrote that you could identify with Ms. McLaughlin.
Missing from the conversation -- other than in the original article in the Orange County Register -- were the voices of Ms. McLaughlin and her parents. Earlier today, though, we received a comment sent by Kate's father, John McLaughlin. We then had a brief phone conversation in which he told me that some of the criticisms posted by readers echoed those that have been lobbed at the family for much of his daughter's life.
After doing some research, including sitting in on classrooms, Valerie Gilbert thought she knew which third-grade teacher would be perfect for her son, Stanley.
Impressed by that teacher's creative, visually stimulating style, the Berkeley, Calif., mother lobbied on Stanley's behalf. "I did my best to make my opinion known," Gilbert said.
The school, however, placed Stanley in a different class. And to his mother's surprise and delight, the year wound up being so successful for him that Gilbert said she is approaching his pending entry into fourth grade in a new way: by vowing to stay out of the process.
"I'm learning to be more open-minded," she said.
With parents becoming increasingly involved in their children's lives and educations, Gilbert's foray into her son's classroom placement process is not unique, particularly around this time of year when anxieties about the coming school year run high.
The one-year project involves 15 seventh-grade teachers in seven Pinellas schools. They will attend workshops and monthly meetings focused on using technology-based curriculum based on advanced math concepts.
The board met 7/22 to discuss district goals for the coming year. The tentative goals, which we will be discussing at Wednesday's board meeting are currently:
1) Achieve measureable increase in student achievement in core academic areas using these assessments: DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT.
2) Develop measures ot assess student achievement in Encore areas and electives.
3) Align curriculum, instruction and assessment wiht standards/skill in core academic areas as defined by DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT.
4) Close the achievement gaps with attention to race, ethnicity and socio economic status, using measureable assessments provide DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT and reduce disproportionality with regard to placement of minority students in special edcuation.
$11,654,078 Additional Madison School District Spending Via the Federal Taxes & US Treasury Borrowing ("Stimulus")
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad [838K PDF]:
As part of Federal Stimulus funding iliat will be made available the district will receive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds to be used over a two year period.
These funds are in IDEA, IDEA EC and Title 1.
Program Costs/FundingiConsultation Service Employment Contract
The district has prepared a two year funding proposal along with a budget analysis for 2009-10 and 2010-11 for each of the sources for your review. The proposal amounts are as follows:
IDEA - $6,199,552
IDEA EC - $293,082
Title I - $5,161,444
Salary Savings
The funding proposals would increase FTE's and include funding sources during the two year period of the ARRA funds
The proposal includes quite a bit of professional development, such as $400,000 for dual language immersion, $1.48M for 4K staff and $456,000 for 4K furniture and $100,000 for talented & gifted assessment.
Plan B, without 4K spending, includes $1,150,000 for professional development in the following areas: Topics include universal design, differentiation, mental health,
inclusive practices, autism, and quality IEPs.
THE first thing you notice about Karen Allen's house is that it is spotless. Even in her teenage boys' bedrooms, not a thing is out of place. And her boys, Thomas and Taylor, are polite and engaging. Your correspondent found himself being grilled about his travels by a boy who had clearly Googled him. In this household, every chance to learn something new is eagerly seized, explains Mrs Allen.
The Allens are home-schoolers. Instead of sending their children to a public (non-fee-paying) or private school, they teach them at home. They are far from alone. A generation ago, home-schooling was rare and, in many states, illegal. Now, according to the Department of Education, there are roughly 1.5m home-schooled students in America, a number that has doubled in a decade. That is about 3% of the school-age population. The National Home Education Research Institute puts the number even higher, at between 1.8m and 2.5m.
Why do people teach their children at home? Many of the earliest were hippies who thought public schools repressive and ungroovy. Now they are far more likely to be religious conservatives. At a public school, says Mrs Allen, her boys would get neither much individual attention nor any Christian instruction. At home they get plenty of both.
In a 2007 survey by the Department of Education, 88% of home-schooling parents said that their local public schools were unsafe, drug-ridden or unwholesome in some way. Some 73% complained of shoddy academic standards. And 83% said they wanted to instil religious or moral values in their children--a number that has risen from 72% in 2003.
I think the article overplays the religious angle.
An educational dream pitched by three Hall County teachers takes flight Monday when 120 students and six teachers come together for the first day of school at the da Vinci Academy.
The pilot program provides innovative learning opportunities for gifted students with a penchant for the arts and sciences. But that's only half of the reason it's making a splash with educators across the Southeast. The program also will operate at about 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost per student compared to a traditional middle school, Hall County school Superintendent Will Schofield said.
Though states have made unprecedented cuts to public school funds, educators are trying to make the most of every penny while pushing programs that engage students and get results.
Schofield said the da Vinci Academy is a great example of how schools can do more with less.
"I think it truly is some Renaissance thinking is these difficult times," he said. "It's the exciting side of chaotic and difficult times.
That's when you see the best in people and that's when you see the worst in people, and I think what we're seeing is the best in terms of innovative thinking, new ways of doing something that we've done the same way for a long time.
MMSD has begun a three-year implementation plan to achieve an equitable and balanced mathematics program at tbe elementary level. The plan was developed and refined through collaboration with teachers, Instructional Resource Teachers and principals over the course of the past several years. The plan includes the materials described below (details via this 64K PDF),
MMSD has provided all Title I schools with the Primary Mathematics (Singapore) workbooks and Extra Practice workbooks for the 2009-2010 school year. All manipulatives have been ordered for Title I schools over tbe past two years and are in place. Non-Title I schools have been and will continue to use ELM funds to purchase tbe student components for the implementation of a balanced mathematics classroom.
At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create -- and share -- lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions -- or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
"Kids are wired differently these days," said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. "They're digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.
Public school systems, like cross-country teams, are only as good as their slowest runners.
Oregon has to remember that as it toes the starting line in the Race for the Top, a competition for $4 billion in stimulus money the Obama administration is offering to states that demonstrate they are ready to adopt serious school reforms, and run with them.
As hard as it is to admit, that doesn't sound much like Oregon. This is a state where the Democratic Legislature, urged on by the state teachers union, just passed a law blocking the expansion of popular virtual charter schools. It's a place where charter schools, performance pay for teachers and other reforms strongly supported by President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are disdained by most of the educational establishment.
Yes, there are Oregon schools, and some entire districts, doing creative, impressive things. The Oregonian's Betsy Hammond last week described the tremendous effort by teachers and administrators that led Clackamas High School to become the largest high school in Oregon to reach every federal performance target. There are many other pioneering, innovative efforts in places such as Redmond, Forest Grove, Sherwood, Beaverton and Tillamook
Kudos and thanks to the Madison School District Board of Education and Superintendent Dan Nerad for their support of arts education opportunities for all students, with additional thanks to members of the Arts Education Task Force.
The task force of art teachers and citizens has worked since 2007 with Board members and administrative and teaching staff on a plan that supports, enhances and sustains arts education in Madison's public schools. The Board approved the plan on July 20.
In adopting the plan, the Board showed support of the arts as a priority for a quality public education.
The process took hard work by committee members, administrative and teaching staff and input from over 1,000 community members who have been thoughtful, inquisitive and dedicated to nurturing students' talent and creativity through the arts. These plans will move forward with leadership, support and a strong partnership between the district and the community.
We are proud to live in a community with educational leaders who understand that arts and creativity are essential components of a 21st century education.
[She] recently completed a Master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her Master's thesis project, she interviewed and surveyed MMSD middle school teachers about the first semester of implementation of standards-based grading. Ms. Hagen is a National Board Certified Teacher of Spanish, which she taught at the high school and middle school levels in Bloomington, Indiana, and Chantilly, Virginia, for eight years.
First Year Implementation Issues and Continual Improvement Efforts [300K PDF] by Teaching & Learning Director Lisa Wachtel.
Survey responses & comments [1.4MB PDF] by Melissa Sherfinski, who is working on her PhD. at the University of Wisconsin School of Education
Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad's memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:
Background Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:
Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;
The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;
An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;
Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and
A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.
Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.
There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD's commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.
MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.
Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:
Goal 1. Comprehensive Identification Process. Develop and maintain an equitable and inclusive identification process for students who exhibit gifted characteristics in the 5 domains.
Action Steps -Expand repertoire of assessment tools and improve use and implementation of existing tools. Ensure identification process is non-biased and serves to equitably identify students from underserved populations
Goal 2. Programming Options for Identified Students. Design and implement a continuum of systematic and continuous K-12 curricula and programming options in the five domains of giftedness in order to meet individual student needs.
Action Steps -Increase curricular rigor in all classes and increase advanced course options at the secondary level. Develop District-wide consistent grouping practices.
Goal 3. Individualized Student Planning. Develop and maintain a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for each identified student that systematically records assessments and plans.
Action Steps -Design a DEP with expanding capability for each TAG domain and corresponding program options.
Goal 4. Socio-emotional Support. Develop and maintain a system for meeting the socio-emotional needs of identified students.
Action Steps -Research, develop and collaboratively pilot non-academic supports to address the socio-emotional needs of identified students including underserved populations.
Goal 5. Professional Development. Facilitate the design and implement professional development opportunities for teachers, administrators and staff to support research-based best practices, expand the knowledge of current talented and gifted research and Wisconsin state laws and dispel misconceptions about talented and gifted education and students.
Action Steps -Facilitate collaborative professional development for target audiences including administrators and teacher leaders at all levels.
Goal 6. Use of Available Technology -Expand relevant technological capabilities to increase ease and efficiency of identification, creation and maintenance of DEP's and monitoring program accountability.
Action Steps -In collaboration with Research and Evaluation, design and implement an electronic DEP to interface with student data.
Goal 7. Consistent and Effective Communication Develop and maintain consistent and effective systems for communicating about talented and gifted education throughout the District and community.
Action Steps -Design Resource Guide, enhance web-based communications and provide regular updates to target audiences.
Goal 8. On-going Program Evaluation -Conduct an on-going evaluation to ensure program effectiveness and program alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
Action Steps -Design an evaluation process to determine quality and effectiveness of TAG programming. Provide review and updates to target audiences at specified intervals.
Two lucky accidents served to take this education out of the realms of the ordinary.
First, the Perse had, years earlier, been home to a remarkable teacher of English who had invented something called the "mummery system." The English classrooms had as a result been converted into mummeries--small theatres complete with stages, costumes, lights, and sound. Four mornings a week, half the class would perform scenes from Shakespeare while the other half would watch and then critique. On some of these days, we would instead have to recite poems or engage in debates with our classmates. On the fifth day we would discuss other readings or study grammar. I owe much to those many hours of oral presentations--it gave me the skills I would one day use in the Oxford Union Society, and a life-long ease with the demands of public speaking. More importantly, acting Shakespeare gave us a familiarity with those plays that went well beyond what was available through reading alone.
The second piece of luck was our history teacher, one "Charlie T," a gentleman of indeterminate age, whose grimy ancient gown trailing halfway down his torn tweed jacket belied a mind of brittle precision, extraordinary passion, and relentlessly demanding standards. Only once in the seven years in which I studied with Mr. T. did I see him use notes (during a lecture on some military campaigns in Turkey). His memory for detail rivaled any I have ever encountered, and his ability to weave these details into compelling accounts left an indelible impression. Several of Mr. T.'s students would later become noted historians--one of international renown. While my pre-O level years--marred by dyslexia--passed with no sign of academic distinction, Charlie T.'s teaching produced a hint of better to come.
The school year is approaching, and teachers around the nation are trying not to think too much about tweaking our courses for the next go-round. Most of us have been blowing it off for months and we really have to give it some thought here in early August. Part of my current focus is inspired by an article printed in the Washington Post this past February. Jay Matthews wrote on the age old educators' debate of breadth vs depth:
The debate goes like this: Should they focus on a few topics so students have time to absorb and comprehend the inner workings of the subject? Or should they cover every topic so students get a sense of the whole and can later pursue those parts that interest them most?
The truth, of course, is that students need both. Teachers try to mix the two in ways that make sense to them and their students. But a surprising study -- certain to be a hot topic in teacher lounges and education schools -- is providing new data that suggest educators should spend much more time on a few issues and let some topics slide.
One of the (probably) unintended side effects to standardized testing is that teachers get together to parse the numbers and figure out what they can afford to skip over in our subjects. Standardized tests become predictable to some degree, enough that teachers can figure out which chapters are valued and which ones are not. In fact, that's the whole point--make sure that every teacher knows what chapters are considered the most important. Make sure they know to cover those topics well.
The agreement between teachers and management at the North Central Charter Essential School is similar to one that may be found at almost any traditional public school. There is a salary scale with lanes and steps, and stipends for extra duties. Some teachers serve as representatives for the larger group in a "collaborative bargaining process."
Absent from the school's teachers' employee handbook, however, is a clause that gives veteran teachers job protection. "Professional status," more commonly known as tenure, doesn't exist there. Everyone is an employee at will, and a teacher of 10 years can be dismissed as easily as a first-year educator.
"If a teacher is not a fit, we have to be honest about that," said Patricia May, principal of the Fitchburg school. "That's not working for anybody."
Having no union affiliations appears to be working for the area's charter schools. Despite a full-court press from the state's second largest teachers union, charter schools in Central Massachusetts haven't hopped onto the union bandwagon. Statewide, only one charter school has signed up with the American Federation of Teachers in the two years the organization has been approaching charters, which are publicly financed but operate outside of school districts.
Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to childhood and enters adultery.
Q: How can you prevent milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
We've all been there. You've been studying hard, the day of the BIG test arrives, you turn over the paper, and 'what the *&%@ does that mean?!' Not a clue.
Some students, rather than admit defeat, choose to adopt a more creative approach to answering those particularly awkward exam questions.
Packed full of hilarious examples, this book will bring a smile to the face of teachers, parents and students alike - and anyone who's ever had to sit a test.
A features writer for the Economist once insisted that the Mandarin character for Africa means "wrong continent". This is perhaps because there is a perception that the teachers have frequently been wrong-headed about Africa, and have tended to get it wrong whenever they have moved out of their comfort zones in trading and infrastructure development.
Such a view is not entirely right, and China has in recent years taken great pains to show the world that it is a well-rounded emerging power with a complete strategy for engagement in places like Africa.
Its Confucius institutes are an interesting feature in this show of sophistication. The Hanban - the Chinese National Office for teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language - began spreading them from 2004 when it set up the first one in the South Korean capital of Seoul.
Top Chinese officials have made no effort to disguise the propaganda value they perceive in the spread of the institutes, but so far very little in the way of a coherent strategy has emerged as to how they can be integrated into the mainstream of Chinese foreign policy, which nowadays is driven, as everyone knows, by a mercantilist view of global politics and economics. Africa has not been spared this ambiguity.
Kate Washburn didn't know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation "NSFW" written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled "Awkward Family Photos." It included shots of a family in furry "nude" suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com--a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms--she discovered what it stood for: "Not safe for work."
"If I would have known it wasn't safe for work, I wouldn't have taken the chance of being inappropriate," says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with--and sometimes police--their children.
Milwaukee Public Schools is not complying with civil rights law in effectively teaching English to Spanish-speaking students, according to a federal complaint filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin.
The complaint, filed at the Office of Civil Rights in the U. S. Department of Education office in Chicago, claims MPS and the Milwaukee School Board are not complying with the Civil Rights Act.
The district receives federal funds for teaching English to students who speak another language, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that school districts must help such students overcome language barriers so they can succeed in all of their classes, said Darryl Morin, state director of LULAC.
"LULAC of Wisconsin has serious concerns regarding the education theory, programming and resources allocated to these efforts at MPS," he said.
Morin said MPS has used uncertified and unqualified teachers in the program.
The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that its Office of Civil Rights has received the complaint. Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the department in Washington, D.C., said the office is evaluating the complaint to determine whether an investigation is appropriate. The evaluation process should take about a month, he said.
MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said district officials can't comment because they just received the complaint Tuesday and have not reviewed it.
The nation's most important education policymakers are holding news conferences these days. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have announced that they want states to strengthen their standards so more students will be ready for college. Dozens of governors have signed on to a plan to align their states' required high school courses so all graduates are prepared for the shock of big papers and two-hour exams at the college of their choice.
Yet in my experience, the most effective work getting high-schoolers ready for higher education is being done by classroom teachers in a thousand different ways as they adjust their rules and experiment with ideas. The innovative teachers I know would laugh if anyone suggested that they call a news conference. They are just trying stuff, they say.
To get a taste of this stealth reform, step into Room 252 at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Fairfax County. That's where Bill Horkan works. The 44-year-old math teacher is a busy man. He is married, with three children ages 6, 8 and 9. His school has the largest portion of disadvantaged students in the county -- 58 percent are low-income. Many of them yearn for a good education, but learning is hard, and math is a particularly daunting challenge.
What has the overburdened Horkan done about this? Last year, he loaded up Room 252 with even more students taking one of the most challenging math courses for students like his -- International Baccalaureate Math Studies. Designed for students who are not planning to major in college math or science, the course offers advanced math topics related to technology.
At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls "all the computer and math stuff" that was part of the job.
"People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis," she said.
Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.
Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand -- and even cool.
"I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians," said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. "And I'm not kidding."
As part of the program's ongoing series focusing on education, host Michel Martin talks to Kavitha Cardoza, a reporter for NPR member station WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C.
Cardoza explains a significant development in the education world: recent test scores of public school children in the nation's capital notably surpassed their charter school counterparts, adding yet another layer to the national debate on the value of charter schools vs. public schools.
"I SET up a Fantasy Football competition between some of my toughest pupils," one young man explains. "They get goal-keeping points for good attendance, and defence points for behaving well. Good punctuation and spelling translate into their midfield performance, and coming up with good ideas, into attack." Around the room, pens scribble furiously. "Pupil X hated me," a woman tells the group; she describes how she changed that with weekly phone calls to his parents and postcards praising his (intermittent) good behaviour. More notes are made.
This is the Teach First summer institute: six weeks in Canterbury, a southern cathedral city, at the end of which nearly 500 new university graduates will teach full-time, for £15,000 ($24,500) a year, in some of England's toughest schools. The 360 who started the programme last year are here too, handing on to the raw recruits their tips for coping with bad behaviour and keeping lessons fresh, and demonstrating to their tutors what they have learned. In another year, those old hands will be qualified teachers, trained on the job and in tutorials and summer schools.
Recruiting the right kind of teachers has been difficult in England for some time, and though recession has brought temporary relief, the task is getting bigger as those hired to teach the baby boom near retirement. Head teachers, worn down by constant official policy changes and an avalanche of paperwork, are retiring early. A study in 2007 by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that countries whose students perform well tend to recruit teachers from the top of the class. But a recent report by Politeia, a think-tank, found that the bar for getting into teacher training in England is, by international standards, unusually low. Trainee teachers can resit basic literacy and numeracy tests as often as they like--and 13% need at least three goes at the latter. Around 1,200 each year graduated with the lowest class of degree, a third.
ver since candidate Barack Obama began promoting the concept of performance pay in 2007, the National Education Association has labored to generate a coherent strategy to stay ahead of the issue. The union realizes a consistent "no, no, no" may be satisfying and direct, but is harmful to its public image and its relationship with moderate Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last year, NEA assigned its teacher quality department to visit six locations that had established alternative compensation models and to interview union officers, members and staff to determine the lessons and pitfalls of various approaches. The results were compiled in a 51-page report (labeled "Not For External Distribution" and "intended for NEA leaders and staff only") titled Alternative Compensation Models and Our Members. I have uploaded the document to EIA's Declassified page.
The six locations were the local school districts of Denver and Eagle County, Colorado, Hamilton County, Tennessee, Helena, Montana, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, along with the state of Minnesota, which has its statewide Q Comp program.
Reactions to the programs were all over the map, with some teachers loving the new system and others hating it, but a few common sentiments were expressed. The most important of these was the lack of simplicity. Many teachers didn't understand exactly how their pay or bonuses were being generated and were forced to trust the district administrators to correctly apply and compute the pay. This is problematic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is knowing how much should be in your check each pay period. This complexity makes the clarity of the traditional salary schedule more appealing by comparison.
Sue Duncan has taught poor kids at her after-school center on Chicago's South Side for 48 years. She says her son Arne spent seven days a week there as he was growing up.
"It was absolutely formative," Arne Duncan, 44, said of working with his mother. He learned that "kids from totally dysfunctional home situations, total poverty, can do extraordinarily well if we give them a chance."
What he absorbed matters because Duncan is now U.S. education secretary, in charge of improving a public school system that ranks below those of other developed nations in some studies. He's armed with $100 billion in stimulus money from his friend, President Barack Obama, more than twice the budget of any of his predecessors.
"We want to put unprecedented resources out there, but the tradeoff is unprecedented reform," said Duncan, who ran Chicago's public schools before taking on the U.S. job in January. He said in an interview he wants to "fundamentally change the status quo" by raising academic standards, holding states and schools more accountable, and luring "the best and the brightest" into teaching.
Nick McDonell ought to be an easy person to dislike. He is young, smart, good looking and ridiculously well connected. His father is Terry McDonell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, and he grew up in the kind of gilded New York household where Joan Didion, Jay McInerney and George Plimpton were drop-in guests. His godfather is Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, who bought Mr. McDonell's first novel, "Twelve," when Mr. McDonell was just 18. He heard news of its acceptance while cruising home in the carpool from Riverdale Country School, where he was president of the student body. Hunter S. Thompson, another family friend, came through with a timely blurb, saying, "I'm afraid he will do for his generation what I did for mine."
Nick McDonell on the New York set of "Twelve," the movie based on his first novel.
If that weren't insufferable enough, Mr. McDonell, now 25, has a third novel, "An Expensive Education," being published on Wednesday by Atlantic Monthly, and "Twelve," meanwhile, is being made into a movie starring Kiefer Sutherland, Chace Crawford and 50 Cent. On your way to meet Mr. McDonell you can find yourself half-hoping that he might be dinged by a pedicab -- not seriously, but enough to give him a limp, say, or an embarrassing facial tic.
As it happens, though, he is the kind 0f overly well-behaved person who waits for the light to change even when there is no traffic. He is also shy, earnest, a little naïve, disarmingly modest, polite almost to a fault. And he writes so well that his connections are beside the point. In The New York Times the book critic Michiko Kakutani said that "Twelve," which is about the downward-spiraling adventures of some druggy New York private-school students over Christmas break, was "as fast as speed, as relentless as acid." "An Expensive Education" ingeniously combines elements of a le Carré or Graham Greene-like international thriller with a campus novel set at Harvard, from which Mr. McDonell graduated in 2007. There are scenes of double-crossing C.I.A. activities in Somalia, as well as of campus rush parties and two cocktail-swilling guys who are famous on campus for ironically wearing tuxedos all the time -- the college-age versions, perhaps, of two adolescent stoners in "Twelve" who are always saying things like "Shiz fo a niz!"
ducation officials have few explanations for what they consider to be a disturbing trend -- year after year Hawai'i's high schools struggle to make "adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Just three of Hawai'i's 33 regular public high schools were able to demonstrate sufficient progress under the federal mandate this year: Campbell, Kaiser and Kalani.
"It's a multitude of reasons. One is the rigor of the federal mandate. But also, in high school, kids are dealing with a lot of different issues," said Gerald Teramae, principal of Kalani High School. "It's tough. The kids are older, they have different agendas."
While Kalani was one of the high schools to make AYP this year, that doesn't mean the school is not struggling under the federal law, Teramae said.
Ninety percent of Kalani's students demonstrated proficiency in reading, but only 48 percent of its students demonstrated proficiency in math concepts. That's just two points above the state mandated benchmark of 46 percent.
Many parents in Britain make huge financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools. Are those sacrifices worthwhile? What return, if any, do they get? Do their children end up in better careers, earning more, than if they have been educated at the expense of the state?Francis Green, Stephen Machin, Richard Murphy and Yu Zhu examine who exactly benefits from the privileges of the Old School Tie.
Breakthrough Cincinnati is a four year, tuition free academic enrichment program that offers both summer and school year programs for under-served Cincinnati public middle school students. Breakthrough students apply in the fifth grade (sixth and seventh graders are welcome to apply, but spots are limited) and attend through the summer preceding their 9th grade year.
School Year Program
Starting in the fall of 2009, Breakthrough Cincinnati will be offering twice a week tutoring, homework help and academic enrichment lessons for all students who participated in the Summer Academic Session. Breakthrough Cincinnati is actively recruiting talented high school and college students to serve as teachers in this program. Please click on the link on the left-hand side of this page for more information on the school year program, including teacher application forms.
In addition, Breakthrough Cincinnati will be hosting a High School information Night and a Reunion Party in the fall. Information on these events will be mailed home and posted on the News and Events section of this web-site as it becomes available.
How to teach university degree programs offered overseas is a complicated question. Does a university rely on faculty from the home campus to travel abroad for a year, semester or month at a time to teach, hire a new cadre of faculty at the overseas location, deliver coursework through distance education, or some combination thereof?
In offering B.S. in economics degrees at three partner universities in China and Hong Kong, Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business uses a different kind of teaching model, similar in some ways to the three approaches but with a significant, and potentially risky, twist. The programs are based on a lead professor/local facilitator model, in which the professors of record at Utah State rely on local instructors, who are not Utah State employees (but are approved by Utah State departments) to deliver much of the course content on the ground.
The degrees in question are Utah State degrees, as opposed to joint or dual degrees with the partner universities, and the arrangement is described in the business school's 2008-9 annual report thus: "Departments assign 'lead professors' to write the course syllabus, pick the text book and other instructional materials, and to write exams and other assignments for the course. The teaching materials are provided to 'local facilitators' (faculty at our partner institutions) who have been approved by the USU department to deliver the lectures and other course material on-site in China and Hong Kong. Lead professors and local facilitators are in contact each week to make sure that the courses are on-track and to deal with teaching and evaluation issues. Final grades are assigned by the lead professor." In other words, the instructor who interacts with the students face-to-face on a regular basis doesn't have the ultimate grading authority, but the professor back in Utah does.
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession's impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government's revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
"Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made," said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
While there aren't any figures for this year, property tax delinquencies have been on a steep climb the last few years, WISC-TV reported.
Delinquencies increased 11 percent in 2006, 34 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008, where there is now more than $16 million in unpaid taxes in the county.
"It affects us in that we have to be sure that we have enough resources to cover county operations throughout the year even though those funds aren't here. And we do that, we are able to do that, but 40 percent increases over time become unsustainable," said Dane County Treasurer David Worzala.
"I can see that there are probably some people that either lost their jobs or were laid off, they're going to have a harder time paying their taxes," said Ken Baldinus, who was paying his taxes Thursday. "But I'm retired, so we budget as we go."
Big portions of those bills must go to school districts and the state. Worzala said the county is concerned about the rise in delinquencies because if the jumps continue the county could run into a cash flow issue in paying bills.
Resolution of the Madison School District - Madison Teachers, Inc. contract and the District's $12M budget deficit will be a challenge in light of the declining tax base. Having said that, local schools have seen annual revenue increases for decades, largely through redistributed state and to a degree federal tax dollars (not as much as some would like) despite flat enrollment. That growth has stopped with the decline in State tax receipts and expenditures. Madison School District revenues are also affected by the growth in outbound open enrollment (ie, every student that leaves costs the organization money, conversely, programs that might attract students would, potentially, generate more revenues).
"If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce." Few would object to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's explanation of why Washington is funneling $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February's giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, China, and others making new education funding part of their anticrisis strategies.
What's far less clear is that this money is going where it's most needed--or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly €10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings--a bonanza for construction companies and popular with parents and teachers, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing for more PCs and Web access in schools--another policy that's popular but considered irrelevant by educators. In the United States, a July audit by the Government Accountability Office found that schools were not using the stimulus money to boost student achievement, as promised by Duncan, but to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities--projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas. "I'm not sure that the people making these decisions even realize the trade-offs involved," says Jamil Salmi, author of the study.
That's particularly unfortunate today, given the economic stakes. According to an April report by McKinsey, the United States' GDP would have been 9 to 16 percent--or $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion--higher in 2008 had U.S. high-school graduates attained the average skills of their peers in Canada, Finland, or South Korea. This fall, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will unveil a similar study in Paris detailing the losses suffered by other laggards. Andreas Schleicher, author of the OECD study, says that "in a whole row of countries, the economic losses of educational underperformance are significantly higher than the costs of the financial crisis." What's worse, he says, countries pay the price for their mistakes year after year.
eacher professional partnerships (TPPs) are formal entities, organized under law (partnerships, cooperatives, limited-liability corporations, etc.), that are formed and owned by teachers to provide educational services. TPPs may enter into contracts to manage entire schools, a portion of a school or to provide some other educational service. Teachers are in charge and they manage or arrange for the management of the schools and/or services provided. The school district is not managing the school; nor is a district-appointed single leader in charge (e.g. a principal).
Because of their emphasis on job skill development and professional certification programs, community colleges have been the traditional province of working people. But as the recession bites deeper, many middle- and upper-class youths are finding their entree to exclusive private colleges or prestigious public universities limited by depleted family funds. The community colleges have become a practical option for the first two years of study for a bachelor's degree.
"Assuming that you're taking transferable courses at Pasadena, you can go to USC your junior year after spending no more than $1,200 total tuition for your freshman and sophomore years," Scott said. "That's compared with roughly $50,000 for the initial two years of tuition at USC. If you lived at home while attending Pasadena, your savings were even greater."
Many issues have created a "politics as usual" atmosphere on Capitol Hill recently, but when it comes to educating our children, it appears President Obama and the Republican Party share some views. This commonality of interest provides the president and the GOP a rare opportunity to cooperate on a major issue.
In a March address on education, the president proposed several reforms, three of which the Republican Party has been championing for years.
First, he called for merit pay for teachers:
"Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools."
Next, he called for removing ineffective teachers:
"Let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance . . . but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences."
Finally, he called for the expansion of public charter schools:
At the end of the school day, as their classmates pile into cars for the commute home, 50 students at the Woodside Priory, near Stanford University, turn and lug their backpacks uphill. These 30 high school boys and 20 girls are already home. They call themselves the "dormers," and they are the last of their kind between San Francisco and Monterey.
"I have roommates instead of a mom. It's better, I think," says sophomore Allegra Thomas, 14, as she sits in a vinyl booth in the mock '50s-style diner in her residence hall. It is 5 p.m., which is right about when she would be getting home to the Santa Cruz Mountains, with her mother shuttling.
"Before being in the dorms, I never really had an opportunity to hang out with people after school because it was such a long drive home," says Thomas, who started the Priory as a freshman day student, then became a boarder midyear. "Because I'm on foot, I can do more things around the school, be part of the community. I like the structure. My grades have been better."
Will Oregon be among the recipients of the Race to the Top Fund, $4 billion in stimulus package money that the Obama administration has set aside to encourage new ways of teaching?
Lost in the clatter of the health-care debate, President Obama quietly launched his plan to transform America's schools in late July. Fed up with sluggish learning gains and stubborn gaps in achievement between rich and poor kids, the administration has leveraged the stimulus package to create several well-endowed venture funds aimed at entrepreneurial states, school districts and nonprofits eager to test new ways of teaching.
The grand prize is the Race to the Top Fund, $4 billion being dangled in front of perhaps as few as a dozen states. The prospect of being among this elite group of innovators has unleashed a cascade of legislation across the country as lawmakers scrambled to align state laws with the Obama vision. Already the fund has altered the K-12 landscape before it's awarded a single dollar.
I enter the lobby of Claire Nightingale's apartment building, here to tell her I have murdered her only son.
"In This Way I Was Saved," a novel by Brian DeLeeuw
My mother says she can't listen to love songs anymore.
"Not That Kind of Girl," a memoir by Carlene Bauer
One evening, as Shahid Hasan came out of the communal hall toilet, resecured the door with a piece of looped string, and stood buttoning himself under a dim bulb, the door of the room next to his opened and a man emerged, carrying a briefcase.
"The Black Album, a novel (republished with "My Son the Fanatic") by Hanif Kureishi
Abigail Call corrects her mother's grammar when they speak Italian and has started to teach her father the language, sometimes making up nonexistent words just to toy with him a bit. She is not quite 4 years old.
"When she's by herself with her dolls, she sings all these songs in Italian," said Abigail's mother, Jessica Hall. "I'm a parent, so of course it makes me want to cry - to think that her little brain, in those unprompted moments of alone time, chooses to do that."
Abigail doesn't know it yet, but she is part of a trend.
Italian playgroups, preschools and language centers for children are proliferating in the Bay Area these days in a manner unequaled anywhere in the country, according to Marco Salardi of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
"It's just exploding," said Salardi, director of the consulate's office of education. "It's very new. And it's becoming bigger and bigger. It's a very nice surprise."
La Piccola Scuola Italiana on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Spazio Italiano Language Center in North Beach. The tiny Vittoria Italian Preschool in the Mission District. Girotondo Italian School and Parliamo Italiano, both in Marin County. Mondo Bambini in Berkeley, purchased a few months ago by Girotondo so it can expand to meet a swelling demand in the East Bay.
As the job market grows softer and less nourishing than a jelly doughnut, reports show more people are returning to school to immunize their careers and feed their souls. But "school" is not necessarily the idyll of leafy campuses and long afternoons arguing philosophy in oak-paneled rooms.
Online education, long an ugly duckling of the ivory towers of the world, is coming into its swan years.
In its annual report on the state of online education, the Sloan Consortium reported in 2008 that online education continues to grow at a much faster rate than its brick-and-mortar competitors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that 2009's economic woes will only accelerate the pattern.
"We have seen our small university double in size this year," says Scott Stallings, director of marketing and admissions for California InterContinental University, a for-profit "distance education" university in Diamond Bar (Los Angeles County). "I believe this can be attributed to our low cost of tuition and the large influx of students who need their degrees to remain competitive."
I hated school. On my first day of kindergarten in Calcutta, India, my mother was late picking me up. I stood on the steps with my bag and water bottle, convinced that it was all an elaborate ploy to abandon me.
Amitava, my new classmate, tall, with sticking-out ears, stood next to me, similarly abandoned. Biting our lips, we stood silently, bound by our common misery. By the time our mothers arrived, we'd become friends. When my father had heart problems, Amitava spent the night at the hospital with me. When I left for America, he drove me to the airport. I flew back to India for his wedding.
It was in school that I learned that some lessons can last a lifetime.
Father Bouche taught me that. A pink-faced Jesuit priest from Luxembourg, he was the prefect at my missionary school. He was the terror of generations - both fathers and sons had gotten a taste of his cane. He would be fired in America. He caned. He smoked. He even blew secondhand smoke on the boys. But he taught me to write, to tell stories simply. We spent hours hanging out in his room, rummaging through his books, begging to see the bullet wound in his knee - a memento of World War II.
The education sector is well- prepared for the new senior secondary, or NSS, academic structure that will be implemented in the coming school year. So too are tutorial centers - they have already launched promotions to attract students.
Apart from preparatory talks, the centers have been offering free trial lessons. Their focus is on liberal studies, a compulsory subject under the NSS and hence one where tutorial centers expect tough competition as they try to boost enrollment.
Brochures show that the leading tutorial centers have their own selling points on liberal studies.
During the recent Hong Kong Book Fair many publishers offered books and learning materials on the subject.
Tutorial centers were not slow to seize the opportunity either.
In June, we appealed to your inner author, asking you to send us original works of fiction that could be read in three minutes or less. And, man, did your inner authors respond! We received more than 5,000 submissions to our Three-Minute Fiction writing contest.
Now, series guide and literary critic James Wood of The New Yorker has picked our first winner: Molly Reid of Fort Collins, Colo. Reid is waiting tables this summer, but during the school year, she teaches freshman composition and literature at Colorado State University.
Wood says that Reid was an early entrant whose work held strong against the hundreds of stories that followed. The narrator of her piece, "Not That I Care," observes a neighbor repeatedly snatching ducks from the street. The missing ducks become part of the narrator's own reflections on loss.
Gov. Jim Doyle is planning a series of education reforms designed to boost student achievement and help the state compete for billions of dollars in federal school improvement grants.
The changes include better tracking of student performance, using test data to help evaluate teachers and raising high school graduation requirements.
"We're going to be working very hard in my administration with the Legislature, with educators in the state, to put together really, I think, a transformational application that will help Wisconsin education for years to come," Doyle said in a recent interview.
But it's unclear whether the state would even qualify for the federal money -- part of a $4.35 billion program dubbed "Race to the Top" -- because of a state law that bars using student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Draft rules for the program prohibit states that have such laws in place from receiving the money. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week called Wisconsin's law "ridiculous."
Make sure teachers' raises aren't jeopardized by the cuts. Check.
Pretend property taxes won't go up. Check.
Begin dismantling Wisconsin's School Choice Program. Check.
Jeopardize Wisconsin's eligibility for new federal education funding. Check.
This is the state of public education in Wisconsin under the leadership of self-proclaimed education governor Jim Doyle and Democrat majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
Governor Doyle and Democrat lawmakers wrote a state budget that cuts school funding $294 million, raises property taxes $1.5 billion, repeals the Qualified Economic Offer, says local school boards can't consider the recession, job loss rates, and property values when negotiating teacher compensation and makes politically-motivated changes to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (School Choice).
Now the governor shrugs off reports that Wisconsin won't be eligible to participate in the Obama Administration's Race to the Top grant program, while Democrat lawmakers remain predictably silent. Approximately $4.35 billion will be doled out to states with plans for reforming public education. Under the proposed application guidelines released by the United States Department of Education last week, only Wisconsin, New York and California would be barred from receiving federal funds.
For the last 14 years, a summer program has found a way to make learning about a particular area of science fun while also exposing elementary and middle school students to blacks who have made a difference in that field.
This year, flight was the theme for the program, called a Celebration of Life. In general, about two-thirds of those in attendance are returning participants like Synovia Knox, who also had four siblings who attended.
"Each year I would leave wanting to be someone else," said Knox, who has attended since third grade. "They just make everyone seem so interesting."
The program, which is held during the morning for two weeks, is divided into two sessions -- one for students entering grades three through five and another for students going into grades six through eight. A total of 28 students attended this year and the organizers hope the numbers will grow, said Barbara Bielec, who helps run the Celebration of Life as the K-12 program coordinator for the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute.
General knowledge, from capital cities to key dates, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be Googled? Brian Cathcart confers with educationalists, quiz-show winners and Bamber Gascoigne ...
One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver "Stamford Bridge", the name of Chelsea's stadium, but he delivered them instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. They missed the game.
Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.
Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.
How much more could you get done if you completed all of your required reading in 1/3 or 1/5 the time?
Increasing reading speed is a process of controlling fine motor movement--period.
This post is a condensed overview of principles I taught to undergraduates at Princeton University in 1998 at a seminar called the "PX Project". The below was written several years ago, so it's worded like Ivy-Leaguer pompous-ass prose, but the results are substantial. In fact, while on an airplane in China two weeks ago, I helped Glenn McElhose increase his reading speed 34% in less than 5 minutes.
I have never seen the method fail. Here's how it works...
Parents and teachers often expect less of students who are the children of Dominican immigrants. This causes their grades and ambitions to suffer.
Now, why some immigrants' children do better in school than others. Yesterday, we heard about the kids of Chinese immigrants and the tensions between what their parents want for them academically and what they want. Today, the achievement gap between Chinese-American students and students of Dominican background. In Boston, researchers have zeroed-in on that gap. They've looked at whether one culture values education more than the other and what role do schools play. NPR's Claudio Sanchez has the second of two reports.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Carmen Merced has had two sons in the Boston Public Schools. Fernando, an eighth grader, and Wildo, her oldest, just finished high school. They were born in Boston and grew up speaking English. In school, though, both were tagged learning disabled. Merced is convinced that it's because they're Latino.
Ms. CARMEN MERCED: (Foreign language spoken)
SANCHEZ: Latinos, even if they know English, are always discriminated, says Merced. It's not something schools even try to hide. Like the time one of Wildo's teachers told him he was never going to amount to anything in life.
Just before the start of spring term, a friend and colleague in journalism sent an e-mail message to our department: Technology had changed, she wrote; perhaps our reporting curriculum should change with it. She planned to teach with a focus on live blogging and Twitter, and suggested that those students not particularly interested in using the new technology should be tracked into the other reporting class.
That is, my reporting class--one in which we emphatically would not use Twitter.
For those not in the know, Twitter is a microblogging service that allows members to report on what they're seeing, thinking, and feeling by posting comments that are limited to just 140 characters each. You can subscribe to someone's Twitter feed and receive what are called "tweets"--brief bits of information like "Sat through another of Prof. Hart's interminable lectures on the glories of literary nonfiction."
The federal government talks tough about requiring the states to improve schools in exchange for education aid. Then it caves in to political pressure and rewards mediocrity when it's time to enforce the bargain. As a result, the country has yet to achieve many of the desperately needed reforms laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and other laws dating back to the 1990's.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is ready to break with that tradition as he prepares to distribute the $4.3 billion discretionary pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. States that have dragged their feet or actively resisted school reform in the past are screaming about the rigorous but as yet preliminary criteria by which their grant applications will be judged.
President Obama gave fair notice of this shift in a speech earlier this year, when he talked about pressuring the states to do better by the country's 50 million schoolchildren. But Mr. Duncan will need cover from the White House to weather the storm.
The long and detailed list of criteria just released by the administration includes a fine-grained evaluation process under which states get points for reforms they have made and points for changes they promise to make -- and conditional funding that can be revoked if they don't make them. The process finally allows the federal government to reward states that have made progress and to bypass slackers.
Thanks to the Virginia Department of Education and the Professor Garfield Foundation, you -- and your kids, of course -- can get an Introduction to Comics on iTunes U. The 15 video episodes encourage children to draw, sculpt, and carve. In fact, Jim Davis -- who created Garfield -- gets the course off to a great start, showing us all how he draws his famous lasagna-loving feline.
I don't much like the SAT. When the SAT-optional movement began to gain momentum a few years ago, I cheered. Dozens of colleges told their applicants that if they didn't want to submit their SAT or ACT scores, they didn't have to. Some restricted this choice to students with high grade point averages, but it seemed to me a step in the right direction.
In my view the SAT does not reflect very well what students learn in high school. It seems more influenced by how much money their parents make. Indeed, SAT prep classes (such as those offered by Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Company's leading revenue source) give kids from affluent families an advantage.
So I was impressed and pleased when the SAT-Optional movement grew so strong that FairTest (the National Center for Fair & Open Testing), a non-profit group that supports the change, noted that 32 of the top 100 colleges on the U.S. News & World Report liberal arts college list no longer require every applicant to submit an SAT or ACT score.
When I started reading Jonathan P. Epstein's article on SAT-Optional schools in the summer edition of the Journal of College Admissions, I expected a careful history of these developments, with no surprises. Epstein is a senior consultant with Maguire Associates in Boston, who specialize in advising college admissions offices. He is not a journalist, and sees no need to deliver the big news at the top of the story.
Like most people, I want to eat rich desserts, but do not want to get fat. I want to enjoy a secure retirement, but I do not want to save towards it. I want lower taxes, and I also want better public services. Of course I do. It would be odd if I did not. Irrationality does not lie in wanting inconsistent things. Irrationality is being unwilling to make choices between inconsistent things.
There was a time when crowds would wait for hours for a once in a lifetime opportunity to see and hear William Gladstone. But technology has steadily increased possibilities for the public to participate in the political process. It has not, however, created a corresponding increase in the time the public wants to devote to the political process. If anything, the opposite: by offering so many other ways to spend leisure time and by spreading prosperity, the modern age has reduced the intensity of public commitment to politics.
Many people take the view that more avenues for participation make democracy more real. They are excited by the opportunities offered by the internet: Barack Obama was elected after a campaign that made extensive use of computers and mobile phones. Our leaders blog and twitter, receive online petitions and e-mails, consult focus groups and monitor opinion polls. If the measure of democracy is the frequency of communication between politicians and their voters, then society is steadily becoming more democratic.
But these developments do not make society better governed. If these methods of participation are extensive, they are also superficial. If democracy is about delivering what the electorate wants, it is not clear that policies that respond to every angry headline in the Daily Mail achieve that result. Popular esteem for politicians and public approval of political decisions have declined, not increased. When Winston Churchill was advised to keep his ear to the ground, he commented that the public would not have much respect for leaders observed in that position. Politicians planning appearances on YouTube might reflect on his advice.
Little Jack Horner sat in the corner
Eating his Christmas pie:
He stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a plum
And said, "What a good boy am I!"
I publish history research papers by secondary students from around the world, and from time to time I get a paper submitted which includes quite a bit more opinion than historical research.
The other day I got a call from a prospective teenage author saying he had noticed on my website that most of the papers seemed to be history rather than opinion, and was it alright for him to submit a paper with his opinions?
I said that opinions were fine, if they were preceded and supported by a good deal of historical research for the paper, and that seemed to satisfy him. I don't know if he will send in his paper or not, but I feel sure that like so many of our teenagers, he has received a good deal of support from his teachers for expressing his opinions, whether very well-informed or not.
From John Dewey forward, many Progressive educators seem to want our students to "step away from those school books, and no one gets hurt," as long as they go out and get involved in the community and come back to express themselves with plenty of opinions on all the major social issues of the world today.
This sort of know-nothing policy-making was much encouraged in the 1960s in the United States, among the American Red Guards at least. In China, there was more emphasis on direct action to destroy the "Four Olds" and beat up and kill doctors, professors, teachers, and anyone else with an education. Mao had already done their theorizing for them and all they had to do was the violence.
Over here, however, from the Port Huron Statement to many other Youth Manifestos, it was considered important for college students evading the draft to announce their views on society at some length. Many years after the fact, it is interesting to note, as Diana West wrote about their philosophical posturing in The Death of the Grown-Up:
"What was it all about? New Left leader Todd Gitlin found such questions perplexing as far back as the mid-1960s, when he was asked 'to write a statement of purpose for a New Republic series called 'Thoughts of Young Radicals.' In his 1978 memoir, The Sixties, Gitlin wrote: 'I agonized for weeks about what it was, in fact, I wanted.' This is a startling admission. Shouldn't he have thought about all this before? He continued: "The movement's all-purpose answer to 'What do you want?' and 'How do you intend to get it?' was: 'Build the movement.' By contrast, much of the counterculture's appeal was its earthy answer: 'We want to live like this, voila!'"
For those of the Paleo New Left who indulged in these essentially thoughtless protests, the Sixties are over, but for many students now in our social studies classrooms, their teachers still seem to want them to Stand Up on the Soapbox and be Counted, to voice their opinions on all sorts of matters about which they know almost nothing.
I have published research papers by high school students who have objected to eugenics, racism, China's actions in Tibet, gender discrimination, and more. But I believe in each case such opinions came at the end of a fairly serious history research paper full of information and history the student author had taken the trouble to learn.
When I get teenage papers advising Secretary Clinton on how to deal with North Korea, or Timothy Geitner and Ben Bernanke on how to help the U.S. economy correct itself, or telling the President what to do about energy, if these papers substitute opinion for research into these exceedingly complex and difficult problems, I tend not to publish them.
My preference is for students to "step away from that soapbox and no one gets hurt," that is, to encourage them, in their teen years, to read as many nonfiction books as they can, to learn how little they understand about the problems of the past and present, and to defer their pronouncements on easy solutions to them until they really know what they are talking about and have learned at least something about the mysterious workings of unintended consequences, just for a start.
Since 1987, I have published more than 860 exemplary history research papers by secondary students from 36 countries (see www.tcr.org for examples), and I admire them for their work, but the ones I like best have had some well-earned modesty to go along with their serious scholarship.
In 1996, an investor named Henry de Kwiatkowski sued Bear Stearns for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. De Kwiatkowski had made--and then lost--hundreds of millions of dollars by betting on the direction of the dollar, and he blamed his bankers for his reversals. The district court ruled in de Kwiatkowski's favor, ultimately awarding him $164.5 million in damages. But Bear Stearns appealed--successfully--and in William D. Cohan's engrossing account of the fall of Bear Stearns, "House of Cards," the firm's former chairman and C.E.O. Jimmy Cayne tells the story of what happened on the day of the hearing:
Their lead lawyer turned out to be about a 300-pound fag from Long Island . . . a really irritating guy who had cross-examined me and tried to kick the shit out of me in the lower court trial. Now when we walk into the courtroom for the appeal, they're arguing another case and we have to wait until they're finished. And I stopped this guy. I had to take a piss. I went into the bathroom to take a piss and came back and sat down. Then I see my blood enemy stand up and he's going to the bathroom. So I wait till he passes and then I follow him in and it's just he and I in the bathroom. And I said to him, "Today you're going to get your ass kicked, big." He ran out of the room. He thought I might have wanted to start it right there and then.
At the time Cayne said this, Bear Stearns had spectacularly collapsed. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank, with its shiny new billion-dollar headquarters and its storied history, was swallowed whole by J. P. Morgan Chase. Cayne himself had lost close to a billion dollars. His reputation--forty years in the making--was in ruins, especially when it came out that, during Bear's final, critical months, he'd spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, seeking to stanch declining enrollment and the exodus of students to the District's fast-growing charter schools, announced Tuesday that 13 public schools will launch plans for specialized programs in science and technology, arts and languages.
Theme-based schools are a widely employed educational idea, and the District has several specialty high schools, including Duke Ellington School of the Arts, McKinley Technology High School and School Without Walls.
What makes Rhee's proposal different is that the "catalyst schools" will remain neighborhood schools open to all eligible students without an application or other admissions requirements. Eaton Elementary, for example, will remain the school for its Northwest D.C. neighborhood but will also develop a Chinese language and culture program.
Rhee said D.C. families should not have to look far from home to find innovative school options for their children.
At the end of my last blog, I said that in my next post I would show why so-called "school reform" has become another empty abstraction, a slogan for politicians. I said I would demonstrate why there is no chance that real school reform will ever happen in Chicago. Here are half a dozen reasons:
(1) For 50 years we -- the public, the critics of education, the education establishment itself -- have known that schooling is in deep trouble, and not just public instruction in ghetto schools. Yet no substantive reforms have been carried out.
Everything has been proposed, everything tried -- several times. The latest cure-all promises tough, real action and painless, revolutionary, unprecedented, serendipitous, timely benefits. Its results have proven to be mixed -- and puny.
The more we talk, the greater the uncertainty about what to do grows. The more ideas put forward, the more difficult practical action becomes. The more we "innovate," the more resistant and hardened the problems of removing ignorance become.
"If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments, if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom, if you turn around failing schools, your state can win a 'Race to the Top' grant that will not only help students out-compete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential," President Obama said.
Some reforms are controversial.
The reforms touted by the Obama administration have supporters and detractors.
California, New York and Wisconsin have laws against tying teacher pay to how their students perform in class. Teacher unions, which are organizations with teacher members that use collective bargaining to get better pay and benefits, are also wary of teacher pay reform.
"The devil really is in the details. On the issues where you have differences, you try to work those out," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Washington Post.
As head of schools in Chicago, Secretary Duncan started a program that paid some teachers according to how their students performed to see if it worked.
If Mayor Richard Daley walks into your office and tells you to remove your car from his parking space, you will do it. If he sends in one of his flunkeys to tell you to move your bloody car, you will do it. The only distinction between the two requests is how much you grovel, bow, and scrape before doing as you are told. Past Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, walked into the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) president's office in 1995 and told her to move her union out of his way because the mayor said so. She did. You would too. That was the whole of Chicago School Reform. It didn't make any difference at all whether the messenger was Vallas, Arne Duncan, new CEO Ron Huberman, or Pee Wee Herman. When Mayor Daley says make a hole, you get out of the way, and you do it with a smile.
Non-educator Vallas did nothing to make schools better for struggling urban youth; non-educator Duncan did less, and the new non-educator Huberman after three months on the job is on paternity leave following his announcing that he and his male partner have a baby. Real educators who previously sat in the CPS superintendent's office did not have direct backing from City Hall. They were weak administrators that chose not to fight the CTU. They may have tried, but not one of them did anything except appear to be busy.
One of the funnest and most instructive concepts in philosophy is the "logical fallacy." Here's an example:
Nothing is better than eternal happiness.
Eating a hamburger is better than nothing.
Therefore, eating a hamburger is better than eternal happiness.
The arguments being advanced by the interest groups that are lining up in opposition to President Obama's and Secretary Duncan's call to tear down teacher-student data firewalls bear a striking similarity to hamburger eating and eternal happiness.
First up, the great state of New York:
1. The Race to the Top Guidance issued by Secretary Duncan on Friday states that:
"to be eligible under this program, a State must not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation."
2. New York law states that:
"The regents shall, prescribe rules for the manner in which the process for evaluation of a candidate for tenure is to be conducted. Such rules shall include a combination of the following minimum standards: a. evaluation of the extent to which the teacher successfully utilized analysis of available student performance data and other relevant information when providing instruction but the teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data."
A Rescue Plan for College Composition and High-School English
By Michael B. Prince:
The new administration in Washington promises fresh resources for our failing school systems. The need is great. Yet at a time when every penny counts, we had better be sure that new investments in education don't chase after bad pedagogical ideas.
I propose a rescue plan for high-school English and college composition that costs little, apart from a shift in dominant ideas. For the sake of convenience and discussion, the rescue plan reduces complex matters to three concrete steps.
First, don't trust the SAT Reasoning Test, especially the writing section of that test, as a college diagnostic, and don't allow the writing test to influence the goals of high-school English.
The news last year that Baylor University paid its already admitted students to retake the SAT in order to raise the school's ranking in U.S. News and World Report would be funny if it weren't so sad. The test is a failure.
Even the manufacturer of the SAT admits that the new test, which includes writing, is no better than the old test, which didn't. As The Boston Globe reported on June 18, 2008: "The New York-based College Board, which owns the test, released the study yesterday showing that the current SAT rated 0.53 on a measure of predictive ability, compared with 0.52 for the previous version. A result of 1 would mean the test perfectly predicts college performance. Revising the SAT 'did not substantially change' its capacity to foretell first-year college grades, the research found."
How could this happen? College professors frequently ask their students to write. Shouldn't a test that includes actual writing tell us more about scholastic aptitude than a test that doesn't? Yes, unless the test asks students to do something categorically different from what college professors generally ask their students to do. Is that the problem with the SAT? You be the judge.
The following essay question appeared on the December 2007 SAT. It was reprinted on the College Board's Web site as a model for high-school students to practice; it was subsequently disseminated by high schools and SAT-prep Web sites. The question runs as follows:
"Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
"'Our determination to pursue truth by setting up a fight between two sides leads us to believe that every issue has two sides--no more, no less. If we know both sides of an issue, all of the relevant information will emerge, and the best case will be made for each side. But this process does not always lead to the truth. Often the truth is somewhere in the complex middle, not the oversimplified extremes.'
"[Adapted from Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture]
"Assignment:
"Should people choose one of two opposing sides of an issue, or is the truth usually found 'in the middle'? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations."
Take a stand on where truth is found and support it with reasons. Could anything be more straightforward? Here is a question that promises not to exclude a single thinking student based on cultural bias. No reading imposes itself to the advantage of some students and detriment of others. There are no instructions about writing correctly, proofreading, and the like, and graders are advised to play down surface errors. The prompt threatens no one and nothing, least of all standard operating procedures in high-school English and college composition, where the brief argument essay is the coin of the realm. As the Globe article reports, "the College Board had said the SAT changes were meant to make the test 'more closely aligned with current high-school curricula.'"
Yes, and that's exactly the problem: The College Board bought stock in the ideas it was supposed to regulate.
Most college professors--especially those outside the humanities--would view the SAT essay prompt as significantly unlike their own writing assignments. First and foremost, we ask students to read. Though we may not say so directly, we also expect students to weave faithful renditions of other writers' ideas into their own papers. A student who can whip up an argument about where truth is located is not necessarily a student who can read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (or any other challenging text) with understanding sufficient to frame an intelligent response. The SAT writing test fails for the simple reason that it ignores reading comprehension, overrates argument, and plays down grammar and prose mechanics. My advice: Toss the test; upgrade the skills it neglects.
But that's not enough. We owe it to our students to trace the influences shaping this failed test. My second remedy for high-school English and college composition is also inexpensive: to examine the assumptions of the critical-thinking movement, which underlie the SAT essay prompt and the field of composition generally--indeed, to think critically, about critical thinking.
Consider the question more closely. What does it ask our students to do? State and support an opinion about how the truth is discovered. This is a question about the methodology of inquiry. Is a dialectical procedure taking in opposing viewpoints a good way to locate the truth? Or does this dialectical procedure cause an oversimplified focus on extreme views at the expense of more nuanced positions in between?
Those of us who pursued advanced degrees in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will be familiar with the assumption behind the question: Humanistic confidence in the value of dialogue is naïve in contrast to a more strenuous exercise of critical reason. The question unmasks the pretensions of dialogue and invites students to apply their critical-thinking skills reflexively to think about thinking. You might assume a standardized test administered to millions of high-school juniors and seniors would be an odd place to rehearse an old theoretical battle, long since won by the anti-humanist camp. Yet the critical thinking, reading, and writing movement is obsessed with the process of thinking, and we see that fascination visited upon our students here. The theory seems to be that students become more literate, better able to succeed in school and profession, when they learn rhetorical techniques of critical analysis and reflect on their own thinking processes.
What if it has all been a huge mistake?
The assumptions of the critical-thinking movement have had a deleterious effect on college composition and its forced imitator, high-school English. Anyone concerned with the fate of English composition should know that the fourth edition (1996) of the best-selling and often-imitated Ways of Reading, by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, begins this way:
"Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on a book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you will begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them--doing their work, continuing their projects--and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda...We have not mentioned finding information or locating an author's purpose or identifying main ideas, useful though these skills are, because the purpose of reading in our book is to offer you occasions to imagine other ways of reading."
Note the order: Students make their mark on the book before it has made its mark on them. The priority is response, not understanding. Note how dismissively the authors treat "useful" skills as opposed to "occasions to imagine other ways of reading." The portentous repetition of the book's title signals its iconic status for the movement.
Let's say our students actually learn what we teach them. What result might we expect from their taking to heart this kind of aggressive constructivism mixed with promise of empowerment? Might not the elixir produce habits of fast judgment from little evidence, of looking away from challenging texts in order to opine--habits, in other words, that predict failure instead of success in academic and professional writing?
High-school systems have had little choice but to follow the movement's strong dictates about what "ready for college" means. To grasp the consequences in a nutshell, just consult one of the most successful suppliers of ideas and texts for K-12 education, America's Choice. According to its promotional material, this nonprofit organization provides thousands of schools across America with "a coherent, comprehensive [educational] design that offers exceptional instructional materials and strategies with first-rate coaching and professional development." For ninth-grade English, America's Choice distributes a rhetoric to teach argumentation. It is divided into two multistage, process-based units. The first asks students to read six biographical sketches with the knowledge that all of the people need an immediate heart transplant, and there's only one heart to go around. Who gets the heart? The second unit excerpts chapters from a popular college textbook, Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz's aptly named Everything's an Argument, in order to teach ninth-graders how to critique advertisements.
The ideas standing behind both the SAT essay examination and the critical-thinking textbooks received their most powerful institutional formulation in 2000, when the Council of Writing Program Administrators issued a proclamation describing "the common knowledge, skills, and attitudes sought by first-year composition programs in American postsecondary education." The purpose of the document was to consolidate existing practice and regulate the teaching of composition throughout America. The first three stated goals are as follows:
"Rhetorical Knowledge
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Focus on a purpose.
Respond to the needs of different audiences.
Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations.
Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality.
Understand how genres shape reading and writing.
Write in several genres.
"Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating.
Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources.
Integrate their own ideas with those of others.
Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power.
"Processes
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.
Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading.
Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and rethinking to revise their work.
Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
Learn to critique their own and others' works.
Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part.
Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences."
Many of those goals are worthy in themselves. Consider their net effect, however. Taken together, they load composition/rhetoric with an elaborate vocabulary for describing itself. The group statement does not say that these theoretical and pedagogical ideas should stand in the background, informing practice. They should be among the topics of study. They are what composition/rhetoric is about. Process becomes its own product; rhetorical knowledge trumps content knowledge; critical thinking geared to ideological critique of texts and images replaces open inquiry and accumulation of knowledge through reading and experiment. The omissions are also glaring: not a word about the quality of readings, or the modest work of arriving at an accurate idea of the meaning of texts. Although the fourth outcome goal, "Knowledge of Conventions," lists "control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling," grammar is a subheading of a subheading, as it is for the critical-thinking movement generally.
Just as critical thinking has passed into policy without losing its rakish edge, so the practices it proscribes--grammar, imitation, précis writing, explication, recitation, reading great works in their entirety--have quietly dropped from view. I urge those charged with leading us out of our educational deficit to consider that ideas long dominant in composition and rhetoric may be detrimental.
I mean no disrespect to those in the trenches teaching high-school English and college composition. Their work is as essential to our schools as it is undervalued in society. But we need to face the possibility that the failure of the SAT essay examination is the canary in the coal mine alerting us to a discrepancy between the skills being emphasized in high-school English and college composition, and the skills most in need in college courses and in all professions. Lisa Delpit has made this same point in defense of students on the margins. She was one of the first to point out a deep confusion among well-intentioned educators who thought they were taking their students' side by lowering expectations, watering down reading lists, ignoring the basics, and emphasizing "process" as much as "product." In The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children (1988), Delpit says the following about process pedagogy:
"Although the problem is not necessarily in the method, in some instances adherents of process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them. Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, that 'product' is not important. In this country, students will be judged on their product...and that product, based as it is on specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit."
Like most educators, Delpit accepts the idea that teachers should present assignments in a coherent way, building from easier to more difficult tasks ("the problem is not necessarily in the method"). However, she objects to current theories of process as undemocratic. They focus too much attention on the way and not enough on the destination (see the seven bullet points after "Processes" in the proclamation above). Supposedly idealistic and egalitarian, process pedagogy enacts the snobbery of those who climb the educational ladder, and then denounce ladders as hierarchical.
That brings me to the third inexpensive change that faculty and administrators can make to foster the success of their high-school English and college composition programs. In addition to ignoring the SAT and re-examining the tenets of critical thinking in composition, I urge all concerned to grasp the continuing relevance of practices that critical thinking dismisses as teacher-centered and traditional. I refer to imitation-based pedagogies that view students less as budding cultural critics and more as apprentices to a craft.
The idea of "craft" is meant to invoke common sense. What are the ordinary ways that ordinary people learn to install a water heater, shoot a free throw, play a musical instrument, perform a dance routine, or conduct an experiment? Answer that question, and you will have your own justification for applying the practices of grammar, recitation, paraphrase, summary, explication, and imitation to the teaching of writing. In The Creative Habit, the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp puts the point this way:
"The great painters are incomparable draftsmen. They also know how to mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative; no task is too small to be worthy of their attention. The great composers are usually dazzling musicians...A great chef can chop and dice better than anyone in the kitchen. The best fashion designers are invariably virtuosos with a needle and thread...The best writers are well-read people. They have the richest appreciation of words, the biggest vocabularies, the keenest ear for language. They also know their grammar. Words and language are their tools, and they have learned how to use them."
So-called basic skills are the muscle and sinew of the best academic writing. Less glamorous than critique, perhaps, they provide the foundation on which any plausible critical interpretation stands. Depriving students of those basics in a rush to make them critical doesn't make sense.
Once high schools and colleges make the changes suggested above, they will be free to uncouple the teaching of writing from the vocabulary of rhetorical analysis. Process will not substitute for content.
What, then, should writing courses be about? Enlightened instructors and administrators will respond that they should be about what all other college courses are about--not writing itself, but a learnable body of information: literature, art history, biology, political science, or any other substantial topic that furthers a students' real education. Yes, there are rhetorical strategies that good writers know and weak writers lack, but those are best taught in every class, by faculty members who themselves have mastered not only a body of knowledge but also the skills for writing publishable work and sharing those skills with apprentices to their craft.
Michael B. Prince is an associate professor of English at Boston University, where he directed the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program from 2000 to 2008.
Join me at the REACH Awards Day next Wed 8/5; Education Reform's Moon Shot; A $4B Push for Better Schools; Taken to school: Obama funding plan must force Legislature to accept education reforms; President Obama Discusses New 'Race to the Top' Program
1) I hope you can join me a week from Wednesday at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 on Aug. 5th at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I'm delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,000 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! Next Wednesday, the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) STOP THE PRESSES!!! Last Friday will go down in history, I believe, as a key tipping point moment in the decades-long effort to improve our K-12 educational system. President Obama and Sec. Duncan both appeared at a press conference to announce the formal launch of the Race to the Top fund (KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg also spoke and rocked the house!). Other than not being there on vouchers, Obama and Duncan are hitting ALL of the right notes, which, backed with HUGE dollars, will no doubt result in seismic shifts in educational policy across the country.
Under Race to the Top guidelines, states seeking funds will be pressed to implement four core interconnected reforms.
-- To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally benchmarked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
-- To close the data gap -- which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction -- states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
-- To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals -- and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren't up to the job.
-- Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture.
The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.
President Obama is leaning hard on the nation's schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid -- and the threat of withholding it -- to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.
The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.
"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama said in an Oval Office interview Wednesday. "And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change."
On Friday, Obama will officially announce the "Race to the Top," a competition for $4.35 billion in grants. He wants states to use funds to ease limits on charter schools, tie teacher pay to student achievement and move for the first time toward common academic standards. It is part of a broader effort to improve school achievement with a $100 billion increase in education funding, more money for community colleges and an increase in Pell Grants for college students.
President Obama launched a competition Friday for $4.35 billion in federal education funds, urging states to ease restrictions on charter schools, link teacher pay to student achievement and adopt common national academic standards to be eligible for the money.
In a speech at the Education Department, Obama joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan in announcing draft criteria for the "Race to the Top" fund, which the administration is billing as the "largest-ever federal investment in education reform."
"America will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters," Obama said. "In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people."
Acknowledging that "our education system is falling short," he said that for years, "we've talked these problems to death . . . while doing all too little to solve them." Now, he said, he is challenging the nation's governors, schools boards, teachers, parents, students and others to meet "a few key benchmarks for reform" in order to compete for and win Race to the Top grants.
"That race starts today," Obama said. He pledged that "this competition will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group" but on "whether a state is ready to do what works."
5) As an example of the impact this will likely have at the state level, here's an editorial in today's NY Daily News:
President Obama has dealt a much-deserved slap to lawmakers in New York and other states who kowtow to teachers unions:
They must get rid of anti-reform limits on holding teachers accountable and opening charter schools, or they will kiss hundreds of millions in federal education grants goodbye.
The choice for Albany could not be clearer: Repeal those now.
The Legislature was dead wrong when it voted last year to bar school officials from even looking at students' test scores when deciding whether a teacher is effective enough to get tenure.
The Legislature was also wrong to cap how many privately operated, publicly funded charters schools could open across the state - first at 100, then at a still-too-stingy 200.
Albany enacted both laws at the behest of teachers unions, which bathe legislators in campaign cash. Union members recoil at being held accountable for progress - or lack thereof - in their classrooms as measured by the objective standards of tests. The unions have also battled charters because they are mostly nonunion and consistently get better results with less money.
But Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are demanding that kids' needs come first. Unveiling a $4.35 billion grant program last week, Duncan warned that states that cap charter schools will put themselves at a "competitive disadvantage" for funding. And schools that block the use of test data in evaluating teachers will be flatly ineligible.
And Duncan made plain his attitude toward New York in a speech last month, saying:
"Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. I think that's simply ridiculous. We need to know what is and is not working and why."
This gives Albany lawmakers a huge financial incentive to do the right thing.
It's an offer they must not refuse.
Q And one more question on this. You say you want to work with teachers unions and not impose a program on them. But there are critics who say, well, if you work with the teachers unions, those are the same entities that are obstacles to reform. How can you work with them and reform at the same time?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I mean, I think that there is a cynical view, oftentimes ideologically driven, that says teachers unions inherently are going to be opposed to reform in our school system. I just don't believe that, maybe because my sister is a teacher and I know how hard she works and how deeply she cares about her kids.
I think teachers, understandably, in the past have been suspicious of reform measures that seem to make them into a scapegoat and don't take into account the extraordinary challenges that they face day in, day out -- everything from having to dig into their own pocket to buy school supplies, to not having the kinds of support services for kids who may have trouble outside of the classroom, to bureaucratic rules that get in the way of them teaching creatively.
So there are a whole range of very legitimate concerns that teachers have. And what we want to do is to assume that teachers want to see kids succeed, solicit their best ideas, and then shape and craft reforms that have their buy-in and have their ownership, because that's going to -- there's going to be greater success.
Now -- but I want to be realistic. There are going to be elements within the teachers union where they're just resistant to change because people inherently are resistant to change. Teachers aren't any different from any politicians or corporate CEOs. There are going to be certain habits that have been built up that they don't want to change.
And what we're saying here is if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there.
And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change.
I think it's important to note, just in terms of the politics of it, the same notion that somehow teachers unions would not accept reform -- the fact is, is that we got this passed. And you've got national teachers unions, both the NEA and the AFT, that have been consulted even as we've been putting this together.
Andrew Delbanco effectively describes the tragedy that is unfolding at American universities: after a generation of expanding of opportunity, both private and public colleges are increasingly out of reach of the lower classes ["The Universities in Trouble," NYR, May 14]. Unfortunately, Delbanco avoids the solution that is sitting right before him: free higher education. That's the way most of the civilized world deals with the cost of higher education. And we have past and present examples in our own nation of providing free higher education--the GI Bill, CUNY, California's community colleges, Georgia's HOPE scholarships. My father went from immigrant to soldier to Ph.D. in the space of a decade, thanks to the GI Bill.
Would this be insanely expensive? The total cost of sending every single public university undergraduate to college for a year (that group makes up 75 percent of the total college enrollment) was $39.36 billion in 2006-2007. That's not chicken feed, but it's less than the bailout amount for two large banks, or the cost of three or four months in Iraq.
Historically, the District of Columbia has struggled to improve the educational opportunities available to students living in the nation's capital. Over the past decade, District residents have witnessed signifi cant changes in the D.C. education system. New reforms have included the creation of nearly sixty public charter schools on approximately ninety campuses; Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michelle Rhee's overhaul of the traditional public school system; and the creation of the federal D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
As policymakers in District government and on Capitol Hill consider the future of these and other education reform initiatives, attention should be paid to the views of D.C. citizens. In July 2009, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice commissioned Braun Research, Inc. to conduct a statistically representative survey of 1,001 registered voters in the District of Columbia.
Why conduct a survey on education issues in the District of Columbia? Why now?
This is a critical moment for the District and its residents. With so many proposals being suggested in the public domain - to initiate, expand, scale back, or eliminate programs and policies - it can be dizzying to policy wonks and casual observers alike. We hope that this survey can bring a pause for perspective. Each of the organizations endorsing this survey's fi eldwork felt it was important to take a step back and refl ect on the wishes of
D.C. citizens regarding their city's education system.
It was sometime in the 1980s, I think, that a basic transformation of the aims of literary criticism was complete. Not the spread of political themes and identity preoccupations, which struck outsiders and off-campus critics like William Bennett, a former secretary of education turned radio host, as the obvious change, but a deeper adjustment in the basic conception of what criticism does. It was, namely, the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object--what a poem means or a painting represents--humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.
The old model of the critic as secondary, derivative, even parasitical gave way to the critic as creative and adventuresome. Wlad Godzich's introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (1983) nicely caught the mood in its title: "Caution! Reader at Work!" People spoke of "doing a reading," applying a theory, taking an approach, and they regarded the principle of fidelity to the object as tyranny. In a 1973 essay in New Literary History titled "The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis," Geoffrey H. Hartman chastised the traditional critic for being "methodologically humble" by "subduing himself to commentary on work or writer"; then he declared, "We have entered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literary-critical texts." A writer has a persona, he stated. "Should the interpreter not have personae?"
Older modes of criticism were a species of performance as well. But they claimed validity to the extent to which the object they regarded gave up to them its mystery. The result, the clarified meaning of the work, counted more than the execution that yielded it. By the late 1980s, though, the question "What does it mean?" lost out to "How can we read it?" The interpretation didn't have to be right. It had to be nimble.
In between summertime activities, recent Oregon High School graduate Erik VanderSanden is focusing on winter as he helps redesign a device that makes cross country skiing accessible to the disabled.
In Dane County, nearly 130 students have participated this school year and into the summer, said Diane Kraus, school to career coordinator for the Dane County consortium of 16 school districts. The county program offers 11 program areas and the most popular right now are health care, information technology, automotive and biotechnology, said Kraus, adding that her program is always looking for more businesses that want to participate.
One of the items VanderSanden worked on for his apprenticeship is a device that allows people to sit while skiing. VanderSanden is now being retained as needed to finish up a prototype, which will be used by Isthmus to manufacture 100 more. The unit was originally designed by UW-Madison mechanical engineering students under professor Jay Martin through the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology, which is also known as UW-CREATe.
"I tried to optimize what they had already done ... and take it a step further than what they had time for in their class," said VanderSanden said.
Madison School District Strategic Planning Update, with Links
Madison Board of Education President Arlene Silveira, via email:
TO: MMSD Strategic Planning Committee
Good afternoon,
I am writing to provide you with a Board update on the MMSD strategic plan. Before getting into details, I again want to thank you for all of the time and effort you put into development of the plan. It is appreciated.
On July 21, the Board of Education held our second meeting to review the strategic planning document that you, our community-based strategic planning committee, submitted. The Board unanimously approved the following components of the new strategic plan. The mission, beliefs and parameters were approved with no changes to the plan you submitted. Some language in the strategic objectives was modified for clarity and completeness.
A story from the trenches -- send me more!; DAVID STEINER ELECTED COMMISSIONER OF EDUC FOR NY; As Charter Schools Unionize; Must unions always block innovation in public schools?; NEA Discovers It Is a Labor Union; So You Want to Be a Teacher for America?
1) If you read anything I send out this year, let this be it. One of my friends responded to the survey I sent around a couple of weeks ago by emailing me this story of his experience as a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (though he's no longer there, he is still (thankfully) very much involved with educating disadvantaged kids). It is one of the most powerful, heart-breaking, enraging things I have ever read -- and perfectly captures what this education reform struggle is all about. Stories like this about what REALLY goes on in our failing public schools need to be told and publicized, so please share yours with me:
Whitney,
Thanks so much for putting this survey together. It brought back some memories well beyond the few questions about what it was like to teach in the South Bronx with TFA back in the late nineties. I want to emphasize here that I no longer teach in the Bronx, so I have little idea how things have changed and have seen the current Administration take a number of important steps that may be making a great impact. I'm not close enough to the ground to know, but my guess is that there are still plenty of schools in the Bronx and in every other low-income community in the country that reflect some of the miserable stuff I saw in my school. You should really start collecting a book of stories like these. Among all the people I know who've done TFA, these stories are just a few among many sad ones.
As I filled out the survey, I was first reminded of the art teacher in our school. She was truly a caricature of bad teaching. Like something out of the movies. She spent almost every minute of every day screaming at the top of her lungs in the faces of 5-8 year olds who had done horrible things like coloring outside the lines. The ART teacher! Screaming so loud you could hear her 2-3 floors away in a decades old, solid brick building. When she heard I was looking for an apt, she sent me to an apt broker friend of hers. I told the friend I wanted to live in Washington Heights. "Your mother would be very upset with me if I let you go live with THOSE PEOPLE. We fought with bricks and bats and bottles to keep them out of our neighborhoods. Do you see what they have done to this place?" This same attitude could be heard in the art teacher's screams, the administration's ambivalence towards the kids we were supposed to be educating and the sometimes overt racism of the people in charge. The assistant principal (who could not, as far as I could tell, do 4th grade math, but offered me stop-in math professional development for a few minutes every few months with gems like "these numbers you see here to the left of the zero are negative numbers. Like when it is very cold outside.") once told me "I call them God's stupidest people" referring to a Puerto Rican woman who was blocking our way as we drove to another school. She also once told me I needed to put together a bulletin board in the hallway about Veteran's Day. I told her we were in the middle of assembling an Encyclopedia on great Dominican, Puerto Rican and Black leaders (all of my students were Dominican, Black or Puerto Rican). "Mr. ____, we had Cin-co de May-o, and Black History Month, and all that other stuff. It is time for the AMERICAN Americans."
Not everyone in the school was a racist. There were many hard working teachers of all ethnicities who did not reflect this attitude at all. But the fact that the leadership of the school and a number of the most senior teachers was either utterly disdainful of the students they taught, or has completely given up on the educability of the kids, had a terrible effect on overall staff motivation. And many of the well-meaning teachers were extremely poorly prepared to make a dent in the needs of the students even if they had been well led. The Principal told more than one teacher there that "as long as they are quiet and in their seats, I don't care what else you do." This was on the day this person was HIRED. This was their first and probably last instruction. He never gave me a single instruction. Ever. And I was a new teacher with nothing but TFA's Summer Institute under my belt. The Principal proceeded to get a law degree while sitting in his office ignoring the school. When we went to the Assistant Superintendent to report that the school was systematically cheating on the 3rd grade test (i.e., the third grade team met with the principal and APs, planned the cheating carefully, locked their doors and covered their windows and gave answers) she told the principal to watch his back. A few months later, inspectors came from the state. After observing our mostly horrible classes for a full day, they told us how wonderful we were doing and that they had just come down to see what they could replicate in other schools to produce scores like ours. And the list goes on and on.
Like when I asked the principal to bring in one of the district's special education specialists to assess two of my lowest readers, both of whom had fewer than 25 sight-words (words they could recognize on paper) in the 3rd grade, he did. She proceeded to hand one of the students a list of words that the child couldn't read and tell her to write them over again. Then she went to gossip with the Principal. After explaining to him in gory detail, IN FRONT OF THE STUDENT, that she had just been "dealing with a case where a father had jumped off a roof nearby and committed double-suicide with his 8 year old daughter in his arms", she collected the sheet with no words on it, patted the child on the head and left. No IEP was filed nor was I allowed to pursue further action through official channels (I lobbied the mother extensively on my own). I never asked for her to come back to assess the other student.
Our Union Rep was said to have tried to push another teacher down a flight of stairs. The same Union Rep, while I was tutoring a child, cursed out a fellow teacher in the room next door at the top of her lungs so the child I was tutoring could hear every word. When I went to address her about it, the other teacher had to restrain the Rep as she threatened to physically attack me. And when the cheating allegations were finally take up by city investigators, the same Union Rep was sent to a cushy desk job in the district offices. I hear that most of the people I'm referencing here are long gone now, and some of them actually got pushed out of the system, but how rare can this story really be given the pitiful results we see from so many of our nation's poorest schools and how far the system goes to protect horrible teachers and administrators like the ones I worked with?
At the same time as all of this was happening, by the way, the few good teachers in the building often became beaten down and disillusioned. One of the best in my building was consistenly punished for trying to make her corner of the school a better place for learning. They put her in a basement corner with no ventilation, no windows and nothing but a 6-foot-high cubicle-style partition separating her from the other 5 classrooms in the basement. After fighting the good fight she went to teach in the suburbs. When I got a financial firm to donate 20 computers, the principal said he didn't have the resources to get them setup for use and refused to allow them into the school. When I had my students stage a writing campaign to get the vacant lot behind the building turned into a playground, the principal wanted me silenced.
The saddest thing about the whole damn mess was that our K-3 kids still REALLY WANTED TO LEARN. Every day they came eager for knowledge. And every day this cabal of cynicism, racism and laziness did everything within their powers to drain it out of them. It was unreal. Don't get me wrong. There were some good teachers there. And some well meaning, but poor teachers. But in many classrooms, the main lesson learned was that school became something to dread, many adults thought you were capable of very little, and some adults couldn't be bothered to lift a finger.
I hope if any of the good, hard-working teachers who fought so hard to rid the school of this mess read this, they'll know I'm not lumping them in with the rest. But the problem was, when I addressed the worst practices in the school at a staff meeting, the bad teachers laughed and the good teachers took it the hardest and thought I was criticizing them.
Thanks again for the survey. Let's make these stories known.
2) Some INCREDIBLE news from NY State: education reform warrior David Steiner was elected NY State Education Commissioner!!!
Currently the Dean of the Hunter College School of Education at the City University of New York, Dr. Steiner is best known for his leadership of the national effort to transform teacher preparation and improve teacher quality....
...At Hunter, Dr. Steiner led a national partnership with the KIPP Academies, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First and Teach for America to create a dedicated teacher preparation program for charter and non-charter school teachers geared to the unique challenges of urban schools. Known as Teacher U at Hunter, the partnership has gained national attention for rethinking what rigorous teacher preparation looks like. This year Teacher U at Hunter will begin a new partnership with the New York City Department of Education to prepare 90 New York City Teaching Fellows in Special Education.
Dr. Steiner, in conjunction with the New York City Department of Education and New Visions for Public Schools, has just launched a Teacher Residency Program aimed at preparing public secondary school teachers in the sciences and English Language Arts.
3) I've blogged about Dean Steiner in the past:
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
In my email last night, I didn't say every school of education is pathetic. One very notable exception is the Hunter College School of Education under the leadership of Dean David Steiner. Dean Steiner has been the skunk at the ed school garden party ever since he published a study a few years ago documenting (according to one article, "the depth to which ed schools impart a leftist leaning "edu-dogma," where discourse is dangerously limited, where there is a lack of important historical and contemporary perspectives, and where pedagogical approaches are championed for their ideology rather than their effectiveness.") To read his article in Education Next about his study, see: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3252116.html
Dean Steiner is on my email list and wrote the following in response (shared here with his permission):
Whitney:
As you may know, I have been an outspoken critic of ed. schools. My research of "top" ed. schools showed programs stuffed with required courses that used little or no research-based material, treated student teaching as if it were a side-show rather than the central element of a serious teacher preparation program, and used required reading materials from only one side (the left) of the political spectrum.
But before throwing contempt on ed. schools, note that Art Levine in his full report cites a number that in his view are doing a serious job. At the school of education at Hunter College, I am proud that three of the best charter school networks -- KIPP, Uncommon Schools and Achievement First -- are partnering with us to co-design and co- teach a certification and masters program. The program, currently in its pilot year, integrates student-teachers' work in their schools with their study of that work in our classrooms, and has its goal as nothing less than demonstrated, measurable impact on student learning. As a whole, we at Hunter are shifting what we do as a school of ed. from inputs to outputs. One example: within three years every one of our students will be videotaped in their student teaching and have those videos rigorously analyzed. At the same time we are indexing those videos so that our entire faculty can use them as case studies. We will use weaknesses we see in the performance of our student-teachers in these videos to back-engineer our programs, focusing on what matters.
Soon we expect that all teacher education programs in New York City will be told where their graduates rank in terms of the value-added they produce in the city's classrooms. The data -- produced in a major study by Pam Grossman, Jim Wyckoff and their team -- currently focuses on childhood education, where the numbers are great enough to generate robust statistics. No matter where Hunter comes out (and the first full data will be at least four years old), I welcome this study as a critical step toward getting serious about holding ed. schools accountable for the quality of their teacher preparation. I cannot wait until our current programs, for which I have responsibility, are measured, and the results made available to me so that I know where improvements to our programs are most immediately required. If any school of ed. consistently graduates teachers who fail to perform effectively in the classroom, then indeed that school of education should be closed down.
If outstanding teacher preparation were not needed, top charter schools would not pour vast resources of time and effort into professional development. I think your readers should know that some of us are indeed working to transform schools of education into true partners in this effort. We are moving deliberately towards becoming results-oriented, accountable institutions dedicated to graduating only effective teachers.
Here in Chicago, where students at several Chicago International campuses have scores among the city's highest for nonselective schools, teachers began organizing last fall after an administrator increased workloads to six classes a day from five, said Emily Mueller, a Spanish teacher at Northtown Academy.
"We were really proud of the scores, and still are," Ms. Mueller said. "But the workload, teaching 160 kids a day, it wasn't sustainable. You can't put out the kind of energy we were putting out for our kids year after year."
Some teachers disagreed. Theresa Furr, a second-grade teacher at the Wrightwood campus, said she opposed unionization.
"Every meeting I went to," Ms. Furr said, "it was always 'What can we get?' and never 'How is this going to make our students' education better?' "
For Joyce Pae, an English teacher at Ralph Ellison, the decision was agonizing. Her concerns over what she saw as chaotic turnover and inconsistency in allocating merit pay led her to join the drive. But after school leaders began paying more attention to teachers' views, she said, she voted against unionization in June.
Baltimore's KIPP Ujima Village Academy is an unqualified success. Despite serving a poor, inner-city population, the charter school routinely posts some of the highest standardized test scores, not just in the city but in the state.
...But a dispute with the Baltimore Teachers Union threatens to derail that. KIPP teachers have been paid 18 percent more than their peers at other schools because of the extra hours they work. But the union says they're being shortchanged. KIPP teachers work nine hours and 15 minutes a day rather than the standard seven hours and five minutes, and the union insists that they should be paid 33 percent more than other teachers. (That doesn't even count compensation for Saturdays or the three weeks of summer classes.) Union officials had let the matter slide for the first seven years of KIPP's existence, but they say they got some complaints from teachers and are now simply trying to enforce the contract.
What that means for KIPP is this: The school day is being shortened to 8 hours, and Saturday classes have been eliminated. Art and music teachers have been fired, along with some administrative staff. Summer school is still in the budget, but it might not be next year.
Will that jeopardize the school's high performance? It's hard to know, but KIPP has good reason to believe that the extra time its students spend at school has been crucial to their success. KIPP Baltimore Executive Director Jason Botel says his students typically come to middle school two to three grade levels behind in reading and math, and there's no shortcut to making up that difference. Furthermore, many of the students come from tough neighborhoods, and the more time they spend in school, the less time they're subjected to the pressure of the streets.
"We know we have a lot of catching up to do. If we want them to perform on the level with their peers from wealthier communities, we need more time to do it," Mr. Botel says. "We're going to work very hard to maintain the level of performance we've been able to lead students to in the past, but we're very concerned about it."
Isn't it ironic? When Andres Alonso moved to Baltimore City two years ago to turn around a failing public school system, the Baltimore Teachers Union fought him over practically everything except which color tie he should wear.
Forget about radical items like merit pay. Marietta English, BTU president, called for his resignation because the union didn't want teachers to give up some individual planning time for group planning. Neither was the union enthused by his decision to move 300 people from school headquarters to schools or out of the system -- or to give more power to principals.
But earlier this week English and a host of other "dignitaries" and a packed house of principals, teachers and other onlookers celebrated what was previously unthinkable two years ago: Students learning in Baltimore City schools.
Whether it was Chanin's retirement, Van Roekel's new emphasis, or a spontaneous paradigm shift, this year NEA finally embraced the labor union label it has downplayed for 25 years...
...He finished by reminding the delegates that NEA's power derived not from its noble mission or righteousness of its cause, but because 3.2 million members send hundreds of millions of dollars in dues money to NEA to fight their battles.
Whatever you think of Chanin, he is to be applauded for his clarity in an age where obfuscation is the norm in politics. We shall not see his like again.
At 50, Paula Lopez Crespin doesn't fit the Teach for America demographic of high-achieving college senior. The program rarely draws adults eligible for AARP membership. In fact, just 2 percent of recruits are over 30.
But what Ms. Crespin lacks in youth, she makes up for in optimism, idealism and what those in Teach for America call "relentless pursuit of results." Ms. Crespin beat out tens of thousands of applicants to get where she is: fresh off her first year teaching math and science at Cole Arts and Science Academy in a gang-riddled section of Denver.
Many friends thought she was crazy to give up a career in banking for a $32,000 pay cut teaching in an urban elementary school. But the real insanity, Ms. Crespin insists, would have been remaining in a job she "just couldn't stomach anymore," and surrendering a dream of doing "something meaningful with my life."
These days, crazy never looked so normal. Teaching has always been a top choice for a second career. Of the 60,000 new teachers hired last year, more than half came from another line of work, according to the National Center for Education Information. Most bypassed traditional teacher education (for career changers, a two-year master's degree) for fast-track programs like Teach for America. But unemployment, actual or feared, is now causing professionals who dismissed teaching early on to think better of its security, flexibility (summers off, the chance to be home with children) and pension. Four of Ms. Crespin's colleagues at Cole are career changers, ages 46 to 54, including a former information technology executive and a psychologist.
Teach for America, the teacher-training program that has evolved into a Peace Corps alternative for a generation bred on public service, is highly competitive and becoming more so: this year, a record 35,178 applied -- a 42 percent increase over 2008 -- to fill 4,100 slots. Eleven percent of all new Ivy League graduates applied.
Teach for America is a young person's game. But that perception may be shifting.
WHAT TO KNOW
Career changers hoping for admission to a competitive alternative teacher-training program should worry less about academic and job accomplishments and more about the personal traits that helped them succeed. Problem-solving skills, emotional intelligence, a belief in the power to create change: these are a few of the elements that generate success in underprivileged classrooms.
Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, which helps career changers get teaching positions across the country and runs the New York City Teaching Fellows program, says he is looking for candidates who are "in it for the right reasons" and not, say, waiting for the current economic wave to pass.
He suggests career changers visit a classroom, observe good teaching and ask, "Is this something I really see myself doing?"
Running Start provides academically motivated students an opportunity to take college courses as part of their high school education.
Students may take just one class per quarter, or take all of their courses on the BC campus. If you are eligible for the program, you will earn both high school and college credit for the classes you take.
Classes taken on the college campus as part of the Running Start program are limited to "college level" courses (most classes numbered 100 or above qualify).
Tuition is paid for by the school district. Books, class related fees and transportation are the responsibility of the student.
Running Start was created by the Washington State Legislature in 1990 and is available at all community and technical colleges in the State of Washington.
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS) at UCLA offers the Master of Science (M.S.) degree delivered On-Line, with the diploma designation "Master of Science in Engineering".
Courses are now offered in 7 areas of study from 5 departments, with 2 new areas being introduced Fall 2009: Aerospace Engineering and Systems Engineering
The primary purpose of this Program is to enable employed engineers and computer scientists to enhance their technical education beyond the Bachelor of Science level and to enhance their value to the technical organizations in which they are employed. The training and education that the Master of Science in Engineering Program offers are of significant importance and usefulness to engineers, their employers, to California and to the nation. It is at the M.S. level that the engineer has the opportunity to learn a specialization in depth. It is at the M.S. level that those engineers with advanced degrees may also renew and update their knowledge of the technology advances that occur, and have been occurring, at a rapid rate.
I try to stay away from the New York Review of Books. It is a trap for aimless readers like me. I may enjoy a piece on the last Khan of Mongolia. But that makes me want to sample a letter about derivatives or a review of what Titian thought of Tintoretto. Pretty soon it's bedtime and I have forgotten to do important stuff like talk to my wife and watch "The Closer" on TNT.
I noticed he did not identify even one person to whom this had happened. Like many writers in the review, Delbanco was observing from the scholarly heights. His was a wide-angle view, full of national statistics and global analysis. That was one of the pleasures of reading the piece, to see all these issues in historical and social context.
Students registering for fall classes this summer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will see a 30% increase in the number of online classes, but the convenience comes with a price: as much as $275 per course on top of regular tuition.
University officials say the increase is part of a strategy to boost enrollment and revenue by meeting a growing demand for the online format, which appeals to students who commute, work full time or have families.
But the move is also a way for UWM to pass more of its costs to students at a time when it faces a $20 million budget cut over the next two years that will be only partially offset by a tuition increase.
The trend toward online courses raises two key questions at a time when UWM students are registering for fall classes: Will the shift in scheduling mean more local students have to take the pricier online courses, and where does the money raised by the online fees go?
The pricing of online courses varies by college, but the fees particularly frustrate some undergraduates in the College of Letters and Science, which charges $275 above regular tuition for each online course.
By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students' questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students' lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have only a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students' questions and providing explicit instruction are "handing it to the student" and preventing them from "constructing their own knowledge"--to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what "discovery learning" actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.
David Page says the problem is that parents are on their own. Teachers have a union. So do principals. School board members get to vote plans up or down and top administrators make decisions in the salmon-pink offices of San Diego Unified.
But parents are often too intimidated to speak up or too star-struck with school staffers to question them, Page said. Education is a world loaded with its own numbing lingo -- categorical funding, supplement not supplant, program improvement -- and it seems overwhelming to understand it, let alone to fight it.
"They think, 'They make six figures and they're educated. Who am I to second guess them?'" Page said.
Yet Page has done just that. If parents at the poorer schools in San Diego Unified did have a union, he might be their leader, with all the fans and foes that entails. Seventeen years after the father of six first walked into a parents' meeting at Ross Elementary in Kearny Mesa, unsure of his rights and unfamiliar with the jargon, Page has become a human encyclopedia on the rules that govern funds for disadvantaged kids and a dogged fighter for parents in communities sometimes left out of decisions.
He is one of the few parents across the state that jets to Sacramento for meetings of the state Board of Education, pores over complex regulations on education spending, and explains it all to befuddled parents at the school district committee that oversees funds for children in poverty, which he has led for six years. Page also leads the nonprofit California Association of Compensatory Education and sits on the board of the Family Area Network, which advises the state on parent involvement.
Dissatisfied with long hours, churning turnover and, in some cases, lower pay than instructors at other public schools, an increasing number of teachers at charter schools are unionizing.
Labor organizing that began two years ago at seven charter schools in Florida has proliferated over the last year to at least a dozen more charters from Massachusetts and New York to California and Oregon.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts, have been a mainstay of the education reform movement and widely embraced by parents. Because most of the nation's 4,600 charter schools operate without unions, they have been freer to innovate, their advocates say, allowing them to lengthen the class day, dismiss underperforming teachers at will, and experiment with merit pay and other changes that are often banned by work rules governing traditional public schools.
"Charter schools have been too successful for the unions to ignore," said Elizabeth D. Purvis, executive director of the Chicago International Charter School, where teachers voted last month to unionize 3 of its 12 campuses.
President Obama has been especially assertive in championing charter schools. On Friday, he and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced a competition for $4.35 billion in federal financing for states that ease restrictions on charter schools and adopt some charter-like standards for other schools -- like linking teacher pay to student achievement.
If you wanted to gain good standing with some guy giving away a mountain of money, you would probably be alarmed if you heard him use that language publicly about you.
You'd have choices at that point. You could get upset and tell him to keep his stupid money. You could try to convince him that you weren't ridiculous without really changing your ways. Or you could change your ways.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is that guy right now. Wisconsin is who he's talking about. And it's certainly clear that only the third option is going to please him. He wants change.
The immediate subject is $4.35 billion that Duncan and the education department will be awarding to states this year and next. Called the Race to the Top program, the goal is to help states that are leading the way in innovation and commitment to improving achievement, particularly among low-income and minority students.
President Barack Obama and Duncan on Friday unveiled proposed rules on how the money will be awarded. One of the firmest: "To be eligible under this program, a state must not have any legal, statutory or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation."
Wisconsin is one of the few states that have such a rule, right there in state law.
Or, as Duncan put it in a New York Times interview: "Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. I think that's simply ridiculous. We need to know what is and is not working and why."
At 50, Paula Lopez Crespin doesn't fit the Teach for America demographic of high-achieving college senior. The program rarely draws adults eligible for AARP membership. In fact, just 2 percent of recruits are over 30.
But what Ms. Crespin lacks in youth, she makes up for in optimism, idealism and what those in Teach for America call "relentless pursuit of results." Ms. Crespin beat out tens of thousands of applicants to get where she is: fresh off her first year teaching math and science at Cole Arts and Science Academy in a gang-riddled section of Denver.
Many friends thought she was crazy to give up a career in banking for a $32,000 pay cut teaching in an urban elementary school. But the real insanity, Ms. Crespin insists, would have been remaining in a job she "just couldn't stomach anymore," and surrendering a dream of doing "something meaningful with my life."
These days, crazy never looked so normal. Teaching has always been a top choice for a second career. Of the 60,000 new teachers hired last year, more than half came from another line of work, according to the National Center for Education Information. Most bypassed traditional teacher education (for career changers, a two-year master's degree) for fast-track programs like Teach for America. But unemployment, actual or feared, is now causing professionals who dismissed teaching early on to think better of its security, flexibility (summers off, the chance to be home with children) and pension. Four of Ms. Crespin's colleagues at Cole are career changers, ages 46 to 54, including a former information technology executive and a psychologist.
Teach for America, the teacher-training program that has evolved into a Peace Corps alternative for a generation bred on public service, is highly competitive and becoming more so: this year, a record 35,178 applied -- a 42 percent increase over 2008 -- to fill 4,100 slots. Eleven percent of all new Ivy League graduates applied.
The average cost of yearly tuition at a private, four-year college in the US this year was $25,143, and for public schools, students could expect to pay $6,585 on average for the 2008-09 school year, according to the College Board. That was up 5.9% and 6.4% respectively over the previous year, which is well ahead of the national average rate of inflation. What that means is that for many people, college is out of reach financially. But what if social media tools would allow the cost of an education to drop nearly all the way down to zero?
Of course, quality education will always have costs involved -- professors and other experts need to be compensated for their time and efforts, for example, and certain disciplines require expensive, specialized equipment to train students (i.e., you can't learn to be a surgeon without access to an operating theater). However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education -- such as administrative costs and even the campus itself -- and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further.
One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN's Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn't afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas.
Cleveland Director of Schools Dr. Rick Denning emphasized today the criteria for graduation rates required by No Child Left Behind are "too extreme," challenging high schools locally, across the state and across the nation.
Cleveland and Bradley County schools received their annual Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) scores for the past year this week and a majority of schools in the two local education systems are in "Good Standing."
These annual scores, released by the Tennessee Department of Education, are based on information provided by the state on district and school-level achievement.
All Bradley County elementary schools, middle schools and Walker Valley High School received marks of "Good Standing" by meeting federal benchmarks as defined by No Child Left Behind.
Cleveland Middle School was removed from "Target Status" with improvements in Special Education Math, for which the school was listed "At Risk" two years ago.
Diverse student learning styles need to be met with a variety of learning tools. Teachers at Cherokee Heights Middle School reflect on the transformation and student growth they see with the introduction of technology such as digital media.
Bill Gates called US immigration restrictions a "huge mistake" while on tour of India today, urging America to open its golden doors for more "smart people."
The Microsoft billionaire spoke out on US immigration at a software CEO forum Monday in New Deli while visiting the country to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament, and Development.
"I have been speaking about some of the immigration restrictions that the US has got involved in, and they are terrible for the US and also terrible for the world," India's national newspaper The Hindu quotes Gates saying. "The US Congress is very tough on immigration, in general. And my position has been, well, that is unfortunate, but what about making an exception for smart people, people with engineering degrees and letting such people come in."
Adding that Microsoft has always been against tougher immigration laws, Gates said stricter US policy would be a "huge mistake."
Maria Mendoza is hunkered over her math workbook, diligently copying a work sheet, "Adding 3 & 4 Digit Numbers." She had copied it once already, and completed the problems. But there were two minor errors and the math teacher, Agnes Kaiser, had returned it to be done over.
Mendoza, 13, happily complied.
"Now I get it," she said, satisfied.
Maria, who will be in eighth grade this fall at Graham Middle School, was one of 81 students from Mountain View in the four-week summer math program that ended Friday at Foothill College in Los Altos.
This is no ordinary summer math camp for students behind many grades in their learning of math. The curriculum used to teach Maria and other students is Math My Way, the program the college has been using successfully for years to teach intensive, remedial math to incoming community college students with elementary-level math skills. The camp was funded with a $77,000 grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, part of an initiative to close the education achievement gap, a learning disparity among different racial groups.
Kimberly Kauer was worried about her 6-year-old daughter's math skills. Her school doesn't assign homework, and Ms. Kauer wasn't sure which math concepts her daughter fully understood.
To quell her fears, Ms. Kauer started her daughter on an online educational program for young children called DreamBox Learning. DreamBox uses interactive games to teach math and analyzes users' progress as they complete lessons.
"It was really well-geared to her age," says Ms. Kauer, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom in Emerald Hills, Calif. "They really tailored their questions to meet her needs." After monitoring her daughter's progress, Ms. Kauer concluded that her daughter was up to par for her age.
DreamBox is one of a number of companies, with names like SmartyCard, Brightstorm and Grockit, that are pitching a new generation of online educational products aimed at supplementing students' education at home. The programs, which parents pay for by subscription, target learners from kindergartners to high-school seniors. The companies hope their interactive programs will draw students wanting to get ahead at a lower cost than hiring a professional tutor.
Yet try to find any mention of charter schools in the Madison School District's new strategic plan and you'll feel like you're reading a "Where's Waldo?" book. You almost need a magnifying lens to find the one fleeting reference in the entire 85-page document. And the words "charter school" are completely absent from the strategic plan's lengthy and important calls for action.
It's more evidence that much of liberal Madison clings to an outdated phobia of charter schools. And that attitude needs to change.
Nearly 10 percent of Wisconsin's public schools are charters. That ranks Wisconsin among the top five states. Yet Madison is below the national average of 5 percent.
Charter schools are public schools free from many regulations to try new things. Parents also tend to have more say.
Yet charters are held accountable for achievement and can easily be shut down by sponsoring districts if they don't produce results within a handful of years.
One well-known Madison charter school is Nuestro Mundo, meaning "Our World" in Spanish. It immerses kindergartners, no matter their native language, in Spanish. English is slowly added until, by fifth grade, all students are bilingual. My daughter attends Nuestro Mundo.
It was a battle to get this charter school approved. But Nuestro Mundo's popularity and success have led the district to replicate its dual-language curriculum at a second school without a charter.
The School Board has shot down at least two charter school proposals in recent years, including one for a "Studio School" emphasizing arts and technology.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira told me Friday she supports adding charter schools to the district's action plans in at least two places: under a call for more "innovative school structures," and as part of a similar goal seeking heightened attention to "diverse learning styles."
I agree. I believe that diffused governance, in other words a substantive move away from the current top down, largely "one size fits all" governance model within the Madison public schools is essential.
Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago's elementary
and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.
There is a general perception that Chicago's public schools have been gradually
improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS
elementary students who meet standards on State assessments appear to be due to
changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real
improvements in student learning.
At the elementary level, State assessment standards have been so weakened that most
of the 8th graders who "meet" these standards have little chance to succeed in high
school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real
student learning in Chicago's elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.
The performance of Chicago's high schools is abysmal--with about half the students
dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th
grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat
over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated
in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high
schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are
prepared to succeed in college.
In order to drive real improvement in CPS and fairly report performance to the public, a credible source of information on student achievement is essential. Within CPS
today, no such source exists. CPS and the State should use rigorous national
standardized tests. Also, the Board of Education should designate an independent
auditor with responsibility for ensuring that published reports regarding student
achievement in CPS are accurate, timely and distributed to families and stakeholders
in an easily understood format.
Efforts to provide meaningful school choices to Chicago's families must be aggressively
pursued--including expanding the number of charter and contract schools in
Chicago. Most of these schools outperform the traditional schools that their students
would otherwise have attended; and the choices that they offer parents will help spur
all schools in CPS to improve.
Michele Kerr (she tells me it is pronounced "cur") is a hard-working educator and Web surfer who is often mean to me. This is probably a good thing. When I post something stupid, Kerr--using her nom de Internet, "Cal Lanier"--is on me like my cat chasing a vole in the backyard.
Her acidic humor is so entertaining, however, and her command of the facts so complete, that I have come to look forward to her critiques. She tends to eviscerate me whenever I embrace anti-tracking or other progressive gospel preached in education schools these days, but I learn something each time.
I wish the supervisors of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) at that university's School of Education had checked with me before they decided Kerr's views and her blogging were inappropriate for a student in their program. They appeared to have decided her anti-progressive views were disrupting their classes, alienating other students and proving that she and Stanford were a bad fit. Kerr says they tried to stifle both her opinions and her blog, and threatened to withhold the Masters in Education she was working toward, based on their expressed fear that she was "unsuited for the practice of teaching."
Kerr's eventual triumph over such embarrassingly wrong-headed political correctness is a complicated story, but worth telling. In her struggle with STEP, she exposed serious problems in the way Stanford and, I suspect, other education schools, treat independent thinkers, particularly those who blog.
STEP retains the right to decide if a student is suited to teaching, and can deny even someone as smart and dedicated as Kerr, who has a splendid record as a tutor, a chance to work in the public schools.
Beating out 100 teams from across the country, one of the four West High Rocket Club teams won first place in the Team America Rocketry Challenge earning them a trip to the Paris Air Show.
EVEN among left-wingers, few talk about banning independent schools nowadays. There are craftier ways of overhauling the education system to fight privilege. One of them hit the headlines this week when the Charity Commission published its first "public-benefit" assessment, including five private schools among its chosen charitable specimens. Two--Highfield Priory in Lancashire and S. Anselm's in Derbyshire--failed the tough new requirement to show that they are helping the general public. The schools have a year to come up with a plan to get on track, or risk being taken over or closed down.
For centuries education has been considered a charitable activity, with no questions asked. In 2006 the rules were changed. Under the Charities Act of that year, schools are no longer entitled to the tax breaks that charitable status confers simply because they provide teaching. Instead, they have to demonstrate that they are actively benefiting the public. It has fallen to the regulator to interpret and apply the law: the commission says charities that charge fees, such as private schools, must ensure that "people in poverty" can use their services. The two schools that the commission flunked did not provide those who cannot afford the fees "sufficient opportunity to benefit".
WHAT relationship there is between the number of participants in a competition and the motivation of the competitors has long eluded researchers. Does the presence of a lot of rivals stimulate action or lead someone to give up hope? It is more than an academic question. Or, rather, it is a very academic question indeed, for it may affect the way that examinations are conducted if they are to be a fair test for all.
To investigate the matter two behavioural researchers, Stephen Garcia at the University of Michigan and Avishalom Tor at the University of Haifa in Israel, looked at the results of the SAT university entrance examination in America in 2005. This test generates a score supposedly based on the test-taker's verbal and analytical prowess.
The two researchers used data on the number of test-takers in each state of the union and the number of test-taking venues in that state to calculate the average number of test-takers per venue in the state in question. They found that test scores fell as the number of people in the examination hall increased. And they discovered that this pattern was also true for the Cognitive Reflection Test, another analytical exam.
U.S. education secretary is expected to withhold millions of dollars in education stimulus money if the state doesn't comply with his demand.
California could lose out on millions of federal education dollars unless legislators change a law that prevents it from using student test scores to measure teachers' performance, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to announce in a speech today.
California has among the worst records of any state in collecting and using data to evaluate teachers and schools.
Moreover, a 2006 law that created a teacher database explicitly prohibited the use of student test scores to hold teachers accountable on a statewide basis, although it did not mention local districts.
Only a few of the state's nearly 1,000 districts evaluate teachers by using their students' scores, though a dozen more are considering such moves, according to state officials. Los Angeles Unified, the state's largest, does not grade teachers based on student performance.
Data-driven school reform is a major focus of the Obama administration's education policies.
President Barack Obama is set to announce on Friday a competition for $4 billion in federal grants to improve academic achievement in U.S. schools, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Obama wants states to use funds from the competition, dubbed the "Race to the Top," to ease limits on so-called charter schools, link teacher pay to student achievement and move toward common U.S. academic standards, the Post said.
Charter schools receive public funding but generally are exempt from some state or local rules and regulations. They are operated as an alternative to traditional public schools.
"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama told the Post in an interview.
"States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier" (Usiskin 98)
Introduction
One of the many challenges facing schools is the decision on how to allocate students to classrooms. Research confirms the empirical observations of many parents and educators that students learn at greatly varying rates (Walberg 1988). These different learning rates are explained by (among other things) differing learning styles, aptitudes and levels of motivation (NECTL 1994). Unfortunately for visions of "equal outcomes," due to differences in understanding, among other things, these differences in learning rates tend to increase as the child moves through the educational system (Arlin, 1984, P. 67). Given the wide variations in knowledge, motivation, and aptitude, schools must choose methods of allocating students to classes, and curriculum to classes and students.
Unfortunately, school administrators face not only conflicting messages in regard to the educational implications of various decisions, but significant pressure to base decisions either partly or mainly on nonacademic factors(1) (Oakes 1994 a, b and Hastings, 1992 for example). Hastings declares ability grouping to be wrong as a "philosophic absolute" and declares its use to be "totally unacceptable." The National Education Commission on Time and Learning, on the other hand, labels the act of providing the same amount of learning time to students who need varying amounts "inherently unequal" (94). They state "If we provide all students with the same amount of instructional time, we virtually guarantee inequality of achievement" (emphasis in original). The Draft for "Standards 2000' from the NCTM (NCTM 98) calls for increased equity by exposing all students, not just the elite, to challenging mathematics. There is no apparent awareness that many students do not find existing materials, whether consistent with the 1989 standards or not, challenging.
Governors and state commissioners of education from across the country committed to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills. The NGA Center and CCSSO are coordinating the process to develop these standards and have created an expert validation committee to provide an independent review of the common core state standards, as well as the grade-by-grade standards. The college and career ready standards are expected to be completed in July 2009. The grade-by-grade standards work is expected to be completed in December 2009.
On July 21, the Board unanimously approved the following components of the new strategic plan.
Mission
Beliefs
Parameters
Strategic Objectives
We have not yet approved any of the action plans.
New Mission: Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
Strategic Objectives:
Student
We will ensure that all students reach their highest potential and we will eliminate achievement gaps where they exist. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, raise the bar for all students, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates.
Curriculum
To improve academic outcomes for all students and to ensure student engagement and student support, we will strengthen comprehensive curriculum, instruction and assessment systems in the District.
Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage and support our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retention of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
Resource/Capacity
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and rigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
Organization/Systems
We will promote, encourage, and maintain systems of practice that will create safe and productive learning and work environments that will unify and strengthen our schools, programs, departments and services as well as the District as a whole.
Next steps:
We did not approve any action plans. We went around the table and listed our priority areas and the Administration will develop action plans to support those areas and bring them back to the Board in August. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion around the action plans brought forward. We have structured our process this way to ensure we keep moving forward as the plan is Important for setting the future direction of the District.
It is a rare joy to see such a stir caused by a document written by someone who resides in the real world and that isn't based on ubiquitous, spurious statistics. It is terrifying that the glimpse of the bleeding obvious that is Matthew Robson's report has senior executives going into meltdown. "Teenagers see adverts on websites as extremely annoying and pointless." I'm gobsmacked! I thought we all went into rapture when screen infestations do their best to disrupt what you're trying to do. Low price (or no price) seems to be critical to all aspects of teenage consumption . . . really? "Teenagers don't use Twitter . . . tweets are pointless" - well actually, not just pointless, a smidgeon tragic unless you don't have anything resembling a life. The near panic caused by Mr Robson beautifully demonstrates that industry is awash with people who try to impose old-world thinking, methods and tools on new-world technology and lifestyles. To make even basic decisions they surround themselves with reports, advisers, consultants and, scariest of all, research. The 15-year-old's work proves there is a canyonesque gap in the market for a "common sense" consultancy.
Who Will Congress Put First? Children or Teachers Unions?; Testing Tactics Helped Fuel D.C. School Gains; Why Cory Booker Likes Being Mayor of Newark; No Ordinary Success; Gates Says He Is Outraged by Arrest at Cambridge Home
3) A wise comment in response to one of my recent emails:
Petrilli is right on the money - I can't tell you how many times I've heard certain reformers denigrate "higher order thinking" and "problem solving" as just more union code words for an anti-accountability agenda. The problem is, when they insist that all that matters is basic skills and proficiency tests, they sound ridiculous to parents and teachers, and that limits their effectiveness. Basic skills, just because they're easily tested, are NOT all that matter, and our pursuit of more and more accountability needs to not be accompanied by a dumbing down of the accountability systems so we can have an easier time measuring and can make an argument against those who inappropriately assert that everything is unmeasurable.
4) A great blog post following the recent death of Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes, who taught in NYC public schools for decades before becoming an author:
Frank McCourt was my English teacher in my senior year at Stuyvesant (class of '74). He introduced us to African literature such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which sounded even more dramatic in his thick brogue.
When one student asked why we should read this book, what possible use would it be to us in our lives, he answered, "You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons. So you won't be a boring little shyte the rest of your life."
It was the most honest answer to such a question I ever heard from any teacher. Whenever the question came to my head about any subject thereafter I fondly remembered Mr. McCourt and resolved not to be a boring little shyte.
The test for Congress is whether to allow Obama and Duncan to continue their efforts with adequate funding - which is being processed right now - and the follow-on to the NCLB, probably to be introduced in January.
Republicans, if they're as serious about school reform as they've claimed for years, ought to rally to the cause because, as Duncan said in a speech in June, "we're convinced that with unprecedented resources must come unprecedented reform.
"Just simply investing in the status quo isn't going to get us where we need to go."
But Democrats may be a bigger problem - especially those beholden to the teachers unions. Some appropriators have cast a skeptical eye on Duncan's efforts to expand charter school funding, foster performance pay, get student test data tied to teachers and teachers colleges, fire persistently bad teachers and close bad schools.
Ultimately, the question for Members of Congress is, are you working to give America's children, especially poor children, a chance to thrive and compete in the world, or to protect industrial-era work rules for union members? Members should be judged on the choice that they make.
I'm quoted briefly:
After Duncan's speech, education blogger Whitney Tilson wrote, "This is a seminal event - an education secretary in a DEMOCRATIC administration went in front of the most important union in the country, that used to OWN the Democratic party and told them a whole lotta things they DIDN'T want to hear.
"This is the equivalent of Dick Cheney speaking at the NRA and espousing gun control."
When Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced the continued growth of standardized test scores for District students Monday, he hailed it as "powerful evidence of the incredible work being done by teachers, principals and most importantly our students."
What Fenty did not say was that the two-year improvement in District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System results -- including an average of nearly 15 percentage points in the pass rates on elementary reading and math tests -- was also the product of a strategy that relied on improved statistical housekeeping.
These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and "cleaning the rosters" of students ineligible to take the tests -- and also likely to pull the numbers down.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of "low-hanging fruit."
The initiatives are neither novel nor improper. They've been in the toolboxes of urban school leaders since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires schools to show annual progress toward a goal of all students passing reading and math tests by 2014.
Rhee, who says she would like to see the law amended to emphasize year-to-year academic growth, said this week that much of what she had done was a matter of common sense.
"In our first year, we found that certain basic things were not happening," she said.
"There were actions we took to ensure we were maximizing our potential to be successful."
However, this article does raise important truths that not all progress is always what it appears. Here's a quote from David Simon, the creator of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, The Wire, in an interview with Bill Moyers:
You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is.
7) A nice article in Time about Cory Booker. Under his leadership, there's been amazing progress in crime fighting -- now he needs control of the schools (whose budget is roughly 50% larger than the entire city budget) to make a similar impact there:
Whether the cameras, Booker's patrols or the Policing 101 measures instituted by McCarthy -- moving more officers to night and weekend shifts, when, get this, crime is more likely to happen -- were most responsible for the turnaround, the results are stunning. Murders dropped 36% in Newark -- from 105 to 67 -- from 2006 to 2008. Shooting incidents dropped 41%. Rapes fell 30%, and auto thefts 26%. Newark went 43 days without a homicide in early 2008, the city's longest such stretch in 48 years. In the first quarter of this year, Newark had its lowest number of homicides since 1959.
How much can schools improve the life prospects of children growing up in poor neighborhoods? This question has divided the education community since at least the 1960s, when a group of researchers led by James Coleman attempted to quantify the extent to which segregation hurt black children. Coleman concluded that differences in family background had a greater impact on student achievement than did differences in school quality.
. The professor who has spent much of his life studying race in America said he has come to feel like a case study.
"There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them," he said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post Tuesday morning. "This is outrageous and that this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It's one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it."
He was still outraged but he said he has had time to take a step back and will now apply the scholarship that has been his life's work to the issue of race in the criminal justice system.
Gates was arrested Thursday at his home near Harvard University after trying to force open the locked front door. The charge of disorderly conduct was dropped this afternoon, the Cambridge police department said in a news release. The department called the arrest "regrettable and unfortunate."
According to the initial police report Gates accused police officers at the scene of being racist and said repeatedly, "This is what happens to black men in America."
Police came to Gates's home to investigate a possible break-in about 12:40 p.m. on Thursday. The department's report said Gates was arrested "after exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior" at his home. Officers said they tried to calm Gates, who responded, "You don't know who you're messing with."
Sykes: The Milwaukee Public Schools have been an educational and fiscal disaster for a long time. Is it time to blow up MPS? Is it time to consider a state takeover?
Walker: It's time to do something dramatic. Whether or not it's a state takeover--Tommy Thompson talked about that a decade ago. An alternative would be to break it up into smaller districts. When you start talking about anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 kids, it becomes very difficult for anybody to get their hands around it.
I would lift the lid entirely on school choice. I would allow schools throughout the county to [participate]. Take Thomas Moore, which has a very successful program, but can't currently operate [as a choice school] because part of its property is in St. Francis. I would allow for expansion, and I would lift some of the limits on charter schools,
Neumann: There is dramatic change needed in education. What's going on in policy in Madison right now is that more rules, regulations and red tape are being thrown at our choice and charter schools so that less and less dollars get to the classroom. They're tying the hands of the innovative people in education. We need to expand the opportunity in choice and charter schools.
Based on your experience working in a traditional public school serving primarily low-income and/or minority students, what percentage of the teachers you worked with were (the numbers in the three boxes must add up to 100):
Good/great (you would be happy to have your child in the class)
Fair, but improvement is possible (you would have reservations having your child in the class)
Horrible and unlikely to ever improve (you would NEVER permit your child to be in the class)
46 people responded and here were the results:
Good/great: 20%
Fair: 35%
Horrible: 45%
This is obviously a very skewed group of mostly TFA teachers in the worst schools, but nevertheless I'm shocked that the horrible number is so high. If this figure is even close to being right, then the problem is even bigger than I thought. I'll have to think about the implications of this, but one obvious one is the enormous importance of changing union contracts (and other factors) that make it impossible to remove horrible teachers -- and let's be clear, everyone knows who they are. There may be some tough calls regarding whether to keep certain teachers in the "fair" category, but horrible ones who are unlikely to ever improve need to find another line of work -- but, esp in this economy, they will fight to the death to keep their very nice jobs...
2) Here's a comment from one person who responded to the survey:
Good/great: 50%
Fair: 30%
Horrible: 20%
I taught in NYC for 5 years, from 2002-2007; I taught 5th grade, all subjects, and I was not TFA, but was NYCTF. One quibble with your survey and its framing: I would not want my daughter in any classroom in my school, regardless of the teacher quality. The curriculum (Teacher's College reading and writing; Everyday Math, virtually zero science, social studies, art and music) was either bad or nonexistent, and the social environment (harsh, chaotic) was not fit for any child. I agree that teacher quality is huge, but it's not enough to overcome all other problems. Great schools are great schools when all or most of the moving parts (teachers, administrators, curriculum, accountability, environment, seriousness of purpose, parental involvement, et al) are working. Planes can fly if they lose an engine, even two. They can't fly on one. At least not for very long.
The seating arrangements are compared to airport traffic patterns. The student schedules are called playlists. And lesson plans are generated by a complicated computer algorithm for the 80 students in the class.
This could be the school of the future, according to the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who visited Middle School 131 in Chinatown on Tuesday to promote a pilot program called School of One.
The program, which is being held in a converted library, consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of every day, and the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day.
Mr. Klein said the program would allow learning in a way that no traditional classroom can, because it tailors each lesson to a student's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the child's interests.
"The model we are using throughout the United States in kindergarten to 12th-grade education is fundamentally the same as it was 100 years ago," Mr. Klein said.
The Indian parliament has passed a bill to provide universal, free and compulsory education for all children aged between six and 14.
The law, passed more than 60 years after India won independence, has been hailed by children's rights campaigners and educationalists as a landmark in the country's history.
India's failure to fund universal education until now, and its focus on higher education, have been cited as factors in its low literacy rates. More than 35 per cent of Indians are illiterate, and more than 50 per cent of its female population cannot read.
Official figures record that 50 per cent of Indian children do not go to school, and that more than 50 per cent of those who do drop out before reaching class five at the age of 11 or 12.
Campaigners say children from poor families are often discouraged by parents who need them to work, while financial obstacles are put in the way of families who would like their children to be educated. Families are often deterred by the cost of school books and uniforms.
The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill will now guarantee 25 per cent of places in private schools are reserved for poor children, establish a three-year neighbourhood school-building programme, and end civil servants' discretion in deciding which children will be given places.
The U.S. must improve its educational standing in the world by rewarding effective teaching and by developing better, universal measures of performance for students and teachers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Tuesday.
Speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual legislative summit, Gates told hundreds of lawmakers how federal stimulus money should be used to spark educational innovation, spread best practices and improve accountability.
Gates, one of the world's richest men, has been a longtime critic of American public schools and has used philanthropy to advocate for a better educational system.
U.S. schools lag their international counterparts because of "old beliefs and bad habits," and it's not clear how to get them back on track without uniform achievement standards, he said.
Singapore Math Workbook Only Purchase Discussion (No textbooks or teacher guides) at the Madison School Board
26MB mp3 audio file. Marj Passman, Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole raised a number of questions regarding the purchase of $69K worth of Singapore Math Workbooks (using Federal tax dollars via "Title 1") without textbooks or teacher's guides at Monday evening's Board Meeting. The purchase proceeded, via a 5-2 vote. Ed Hughes and Beth Moss supported the Administration's request, along with three other board members.
Detroit's public-school system, beset by massive deficits and widespread corruption, is on the brink of following local icons GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy court.
A decision on whether to file for protection under federal bankruptcy laws will be made by the end of summer, according to Robert Bobb, Detroit Public Schools' emergency financial manager. Such a filing would be unprecedented in the U.S. Although a few major urban school districts have come close, none has gone through with a bankruptcy, according to legal and education experts.
But in Detroit -- where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan dubbed the school system a "national disgrace" this spring -- lawmakers and bankruptcy experts see few alternatives, given the deep financial challenges confronting the district and the state.
"Am I optimistic that they can avoid it...? I am not," says Ray Graves, a retired bankruptcy judge who has been advising Mr. Bobb in recent weeks.
As with General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, bankruptcy may not be the worst thing for Detroit's schools. A filing under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, which covers public entities like school districts and municipalities, would allow the district to put major creditors such as textbook publishers, private bus operators and DTE Energy, the local gas-and-electric utility, in line for payment. It also would give Mr. Bobb broad latitude to tear up union contracts without protracted negotiations.
But a filing also could hurt the district's debt rating and ability to float bonds.
The premiere of Mozart's Mitridate, re di Ponto at the Teatro Regio Ducal in Milan on December 26 1770, must have been a memorable occasion. Six hours long, the opera was an immediate hit, and its run extended to 21 performances. "Every evening the theatre is full, much to the astonishment of everyone," the young composer wrote in a letter to his sister. "People say that since they have been in Milan they have never seen such crowds at a first opera." Mozart was 14 at the time.
He is far from being the only teenage genius in musical history; a recent poll to decide music's greatest prodigy in BBC Music Magazine didn't even manage to place Mozart in the top 10. Mendelssohn, who was the winner, composed his brilliant Octet when he was just 16. In second place, Schubert set German song alight by penning "Gretchen am Spinnrade" at 17. Korngold, placed third, completed his sexually saturated opera Violanta at the same age.
EDITOR'S CHOICE
More from Arts - Nov-24
Where are the equivalents to these prodigies today? There is plenty of evidence that young people are as busy composing as ever - the recent Channel 4 television series about 16-year-old British composer Alexander Prior will have alerted the world to that - but very few music-lovers are likely to be aware of them. Spend a year going to concerts in any cultural capital and it would be quite normal not to hear a note of music by a single composer as yet untroubled by middle-aged spread.
If there is one place where youth really has a hold, it is the BBC Proms. The 2009 season opens on Friday and promises the usual admirable spotlight on youth. Young audiences, teenage soloists, family days, youth orchestras all have their place. But what of young composers? Search through the season programme and the score here looks rather different. The youngest living composer in the main evening concerts is 28. There are only three others under 30 out of the 128 composers altogether. By that age Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Bizet had already turned out masterpieces by the armful (and, tragically, each only had a few more years to live).
Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the essay, could also be seen as the begetter of the contemporary curse of self-absorption. Montaigne (1533-1592) made a move, nearly five hundred years ago, that still seems modern and revolutionary. He reversed the whole direction of study, research, investigation; he turned the lens from the observed to the observer. "For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me; and if I do study anything else, it is so as to apply it at once to myself, or more correctly, within myself."
Now you could see this (like other French revolutions) as profoundly dangerous. You could blame Montaigne for the culture of narcissism, the world of endlessly proliferating self-help books, whose sheer number betrays a sense of desperation. Montaigne is indeed the patron saint of self-help books: "You should not blame me for publishing; what helps me can perhaps help someone else."
Now go back to that first quotation, and pause on the subtle but all-important distinction Montaigne makes at the end of it. What is the difference between applying something to yourself and applying it within yourself? When you apply something to yourself, the two entities involved, the something and yourself, don't really change; they may work in tandem for a while, but they can be decoupled. But when you apply something within yourself, that implies a profound transformation from within - a more organic, less violent and more permanent process, a silent but momentous shift in the whole machinery of the self.
First, thank you Jim Z for posting the responses to our questions. I should note that we did not get answers to ALL of our questions. I am uploading the PDF that I sent with my questions in case you are interested in the full set. I apologize for the size of the document - I took the PDF, added notes and highlighting where I was requesting answers, and saved only the pages that were marked up. There are 25 pages in all.
Also, I found the following text while looking for something on the web in my day job. I liked the formulation, so am passing it along:
To meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, our students need not only knowledge, but also the skills to use that knowledge, the responsibilities associated with using it and practice in the integration of that knowledge in new and complex ways.
When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan's success as head of Chicago's public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren't what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.
Mr. Obama noted in December that "in just seven years, Arne's boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%" and that "the dropout rate has gone down every year he's been in charge." But according to "Still Left Behind," a report [158K PDF] by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, "recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning."
Our point here isn't to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.
The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. "State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks," says the report.
I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that's why God created cruise missiles.
But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of "Three Cups of Tea," open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, "Let's just get out of here."
Indeed, Mortenson's efforts remind us what the essence of the "war on terrorism" is about. It's about the war of ideas within Islam -- a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce -- a new generation -- can be educated and raised differently.
Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. "The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime," Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow's jobs if you do not know what tomorrow's jobs will be?
President Barack Obama's call for $12bn (£7.4bn, €8.5bn) of investment in "community colleges" is evidence that the flux Mr Clinton alluded to is ending. Community colleges offer a range of short-term credentialing courses along with two-year and four-year degrees. They are where you go to become a dental hygienist, a cyber-security expert, a nurse or a solar-energy technician. If job-specific training is making more sense, then the job market is probably growing more predictable. The economy may be in a terrible rut, but we are, to a degree, re-entering the world of stable, credentialed work.
Community colleges now accommodate half the nation's undergraduates. Enrolment has leapt by a million students in the past decade, to more than 6m. Most are funded by individual states, which have had to cut their budgets even as demand for spaces has risen, and no one has picked up the slack. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that "community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600)."
Two weeks ago, Mr Robson was pretty pleased at being one of half a dozen London schoolchildren to secure a work experience placement at Morgan Stanley's Canary Wharf offices.
Such positions usually go to the friends and family members of well-connected bankers. In Mr Robson's case, the networking was done by his whippet, Rudy, who dragged his mother into conversation with the wife of one of Morgan Stanley's media analysts while both walked their dogs in Greenwich Park.
After a week of presentations by senior staff, the Kidbrooke comprehensive school pupil felt he had grasped the basics of banking, and was looking forward to a secondment to the European media research desk.
Many a teenage internship has been spent fetching Starbucks orders and being otherwise ignored. But Mr Robson struck lucky when Edward Hill-Wood, the head of the team, asked him to spend a few days pulling together an account of his friends' media and communications habits. Mr Hill-Wood's decision to publish the three- page report Mr Robson handed in has made the 15-year-old the world's most famous intern since Monica Lewinsky.
The report made for stark reading for the bank's clientele. His peers see advertising, the struggling sector's congealing lifeblood, as "extremely annoying and pointless". They "cannot be bothered" to read a newspaper, never buy CDs or use yellow pages directories, and generally try to avoid paying for anything other than concerts and cinema tickets.
While mobile phones are central to their social lives, the friends he canvassed (by text message) avoid expensive handsets for fear of losing them, do not use the mobile internet as it costs too much and prefer games consoles for free chat.
Every two years the State of Wisconsin goes through a process to finalize a two year budget for all governmental programs. This biennial budget process is the source of the State's commitment to public education here in Wisconsin, historically driven by legislative guidance to adhere to two-thirds funding.
The two-thirds funding has changed over recent years, but for the most part the State of Wisconsin was able to continue annual increases to public education in an attempt to keep up with rising costs within this sector.
The biennial budget was sigued into law near the end of June by Governor Jim Doyle after various proposals and with relatively few vetoes. This budget has numerous provisions that will effect the future of public education that include:
Decrease in funding for public education by the state of approximately $147 million
Decrease in the per pupil increase associated with revenue limits
Each of these provisions can and Will have a very unique impact on :MMSD over the years to come. The repeal of the QEO will potentially impact future settlements for salaries and benefits. The decrease in funding for public education by the state is projected to create the need for a tax increase conversation in order to sustain current programs. The decrease in the revenue limit formula will cause MMSD to face more reductions in programs and services fur the next two years at a minimum.
Many public and private organizations are dealing with this issue. It is perhaps a time to make lemonade out of lemons. In the MMSD's case, getting out of the curriculum creation business (teaching & learning) and placing a renewed focus on hiring the most qualified teachers and letting them run.
A phony interpretation of Chicago Public Schools' academic progress isn't the only beast threatening your local schools. For decades now, in every school district with a fireplug, a Walgreens, and a crooked alderman, the test scores of white children have been higher than those of black youngsters. The monster is called the achievement GAP. It slithers into your school even when the black and white students are sitting right next to each other in the same classroom. Furthermore, black middle-class students cannot escape its wrath because the GAP tracks them down even when their parents escape to the suburbs or move uptown.
Boring but important: The stupidly named National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) exams, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education (whew!), reports that the national GAP has narrowed for 9 to 13 year olds in math and reading since 1978, but remains unchanged for the last ten years. But there are isolated pockets of small success where the gap narrowed a bit.
4th Grade Reading: Three states reduced the GAP (1990-2007) -Delaware, Florida, & New Jersey.
Since Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 victory, working familes have been the heart of the Democratic Party. Except for African-Americans, Obama did not win the party's heart in his primary contest with Hillary Clinton. He won with the support of affluent social liberals, well-educated youthful volunteers and superior financial support from the corporate sector.
The public schools' policies of President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan so far suggest this middle-class feeling that in spite of all his gifts Mr. Obama may lack the common touch or grounding in everyday reality may be right.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's agenda seems designed to alienate middle-class teachers and parents who depend on public schools. His school reform proposals lack a well-grounded sense of why schools fail. His agenda includes the following:
4) Curriculum Action Plan - Flexible Instruction (page 44)
Arlene Silveira Is "flexible Instruction" the latest term for differentiation or differentiated teaching/team teaching? If so, we have been doing this for a while in the district. Do we have any evaluation of how this is working?
Lucy Mathiak
Please define "flexible instruction (and in civilian terms vs. eduspeak, please).
Ed Hughes
To what extent, if at all, does the "flexible instruction" action plan contemplate less "pull out" instruction for special ed students?
Madison School District Administration's response:
Flexible instruction is similar to other terms, such as differentiation and universal design. All of these terms mean that teachers begin with explicit standards and/or curricular goals for a unit or course. Teachers then design multiple ways to teach and multiple learning experiences for students for all core standards and/or curricular goals. Flexible instruction is best planned in teams composed of regular education, special education, and ESL teachers so that many aspects of diverse learners, including options for students abovelbelow grade level, are addressed in the original design of lessons. In classrooms with flexible instruction, various groups of students can work together, share and leam from each other even when the different groups of students might be working on slightly different types of experiences.
Although there is no explicit evaluation of how this is currently working, one of the highest priorities of teachers is the time to engage in this type of collaborative professional work.
The last paragraph states "Although there is no explicit evaluation of how this is currently working" gets to the heart of curricular issues raised by a number of board members, parents and those discussed in the recent outbound parent survey.
This document is a must read for all public school stakeholders. It provides a detailed window into School Board governance and the current state of our public school Administration.
The idea that it's enough to simply "find what works, adopt it, and spread it around," notes scientist/blogger Allison over at Kitchen Table Math is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science":
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
"Cargo Cult education seems to be all the rage in lots of communities," Allison notes. "Sure, districts could just start grabbing lessons from high performing schools but that won't make the students suddenly read or write. Unless they understand what's underneath the 'lessons of the high performing school' then it won't matter."
Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. "The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime," Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow's jobs if you do not know what tomorrow's jobs will be?
President Barack Obama's call for $12bn (£7.4bn, €8.5bn) of investment in "community colleges" is evidence that the flux Mr Clinton alluded to is ending. Community colleges offer a range of short-term credentialing courses along with two-year and four-year degrees. They are where you go to become a dental hygienist, a cyber-security expert, a nurse or a solar-energy technician. If job-specific training is making more sense, then the job market is probably growing more predictable. The economy may be in a terrible rut, but we are, to a degree, re-entering the world of stable, credentialed work.
Community colleges now accommodate half the nation's undergraduates. Enrolment has leapt by a million students in the past decade, to more than 6m. Most are funded by individual states, which have had to cut their budgets even as demand for spaces has risen, and no one has picked up the slack. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that "community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600)."
The State Board of Education has made a minor revision in the high school math credit requirements.
During a meeting in Gig Harbor on Friday, the board gave students more flexibility in their choices for high school math.
The board decided earlier that beginning with the class of 2013, high school students will be required to earn three credits of math to earn a diploma.
When the requirement was changed, the state rule said students who took a high school level math class without credit as an eighth grader were required to repeat that same course for credit in high school.
Washington, D.C., Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is pushing forward with her efforts to turn around the local school system. Those efforts have thrust Rhee's agenda onto a national stage, as educators across the country grapple with struggling school districts. Rhee discusses her work, which includes recently narrowing an achievement gap between white and minority students.
When Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced the continued growth of standardized test scores for District students Monday, he hailed it as "powerful evidence of the incredible work being done by teachers, principals and most importantly our students."
What Fenty did not say was that the two-year improvement in District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System results -- including an average of nearly 15 percentage points in the pass rates on elementary reading and math tests -- was also the product of a strategy that relied on improved statistical housekeeping.
These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and "cleaning the rosters" of students ineligible to take the tests -- and also likely to pull the numbers down.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of "low-hanging fruit."
History is a book-based discipline. We read books, we write books, we promote and tenure people on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. But we don't teach our graduate students how to write books.
It's an odd omission. We view statistics, geographic-information systems, languages, oral-history techniques, paleography, and other methodologies as worthy of attention in doctoral study--but not serious writing. Yet careers rise and fall on the basis of what we publish.
It may be that the scientific model of the grant-supported article is becoming more dominant, or that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. Surely one reason is that research seminars offer enough time to compose an essay or a journal article but not a book, or even a book chapter. Perhaps an obsession with historiography has blocked interest in historical writing as literature, or the belief has arisen that the best way to meet the challenges of postmodern literary criticism is to deny its claims altogether, particularly since the contamination of memoir by fictional devices has tainted the whole question of applying "literary" techniques, borrowed from fiction, to nonfiction sources.
It may be simply that most of us don't know how to teach writing--real writing, which is to say, finding the means to express what we want to say. Instead we defer to the off-the-shelf formulas of the favored journals and the thesis-evidence-conclusion style of traditional dissertations. We take students' ideas for books and turn them into dissertations, and then expect them to magically reconvert them back into the books that originally motivated their imaginations and that their subsequent careers will require. While at least some historians are keen to unpack prose, few are eager to teach how to pack it properly in the first place. Whatever the reasons, serious writing isn't taught. There isn't even an accepted name for it.
Over the years my curiosity about that tendency ripened into concern. Then, a few years ago, while visiting at Australian National University, I was asked to lead a seminar on writing. That inspired me to offer a graduate course at my own institution on the theory and practice of making texts do what their writers wished. It would be English for historians, just as we might offer statistics for ecologists or chemistry for geologists. It's been the best teaching experience of my career.
Initially I thought most of the students who enrolled would come from history; almost none of them did. Instead, my students came from biology, anthropology, journalism, English, geography, communications, and undeclared majors who strolled in more or less off the streets. The only historian who took it did so as an override in defiance of her program of study. What all of the students shared was a desire to write better, and generally to write something other than the oft-cribbed, formulaic prose required of their disciplines.
We meet once a week for three hours. Class size matters: The structure of the course doesn't work with fewer than four or more than 10 students. The first 80 minutes or so we discuss the assigned readings--sometimes a book, sometimes essays or sample sections--that illustrate the topic of the day, such as voice, designing, plotting, character, setting, figures of speech, editing, scaling, and so on. We break for 10 to 15 minutes and then turn to the weekly writing exercises. That is where the rubber hits the road.
Each week students electronically submit an exercise of 300 to 600 words on an assigned topic. I select four and post them to the course Web page, and we discuss them intensively. Course evaluations, both formal and informal, are unanimous that this is the most valuable part of the course. To establish the style of the discussion, I use the first class session to demonstrate with a piece or two of my own writing.
Why not evaluate more than four selections? We simply haven't the time, or the concentration. We're exhausted. I try to vary the selections so the same students aren't always showcased. I pick those who did well, those who struggled, and those who wrote interesting or instructive pieces. There is something we can learn from each of them.
However much we might argue that writing requires self-editing and an ability to see ourselves as other readers might, putting words on paper is personal and anxiety inducing. I try to calm students with two strategies for our in-class discussions.
First, the students whose work is selected for us to evaluate in the classroom are anonymous. I post their work only as "Text 1," "Text 2," and so on. Over time, everyone pretty much knows who submitted what, yet the artifice is convenient, and it even allows the authors to comment on their own work. From time to time I throw in something I've written just to keep everyone guessing.
Second, students are graded according to whether they attend class and submit the required exercises. They can miss one without an excuse and still get an A. They don't have to fret over whether a submission is "good enough": If it's submitted on time and to the correct specs, it is.
In the past I had tried to teach writing within the context of a research seminar. The students were terrified. If they did not write well enough, they feared their transcript would suffer; and, just as worrisome, they stood to "lose" a potentially publishable article, which would also diminish their emerging CV. With my graduate course on writing, they have the chance to experiment and, for many, to undergo a literary detox program as they struggle to find their own voice and try to purge the awkward styling they've often inherited from their disciplines that leaves them tripping over their syntactical shoelaces. Rehab can take several months, but their grade won't suffer if they are dutiful with submissions and discussions. That kind of discipline is itself something a writing course should cultivate.
How do we discuss the writing? Pointedly, and gently. My role is not that of instructor so much as editor. We ask, What is this piece about? What is the writer trying to do? And how might we assist him or her in doing it? Then we often step back and ask more generally: What other techniques and strategies might get at this topic? The point is not that the submission is right or wrong, but that there are always many ways to express an idea, and we can use the particular submission before us to explore a range of possible approaches.
That there are always alternatives is the guiding directive of the course. Figuring out how to say what you want without making things up, or leaving things out that need to be in, is where literary imagination comes into play. Aesthetic closure is our duty to art, thematic closure our duty to scholarship, and reconciling style and substance is what the course is about. Who then determines what is the best solution in the end? The writer.
For me, the biggest challenge in teaching a course like this is getting students engaged in the difficult task of analyzing the exercises. I have to push them. They have to learn that a few casual comments of the "I like this a lot" or "This doesn't work for me" variety won't do. They have to analyze why and how it works or not. Many simply don't know how to read for craft. That's the purpose of the assigned readings, which are full of examples. And that's why I need to demonstrate a style by tackling (fairly critically) some writing of my own.
Another problem is that students tend to look to me to offer a "solution" to each exercise. I do comment; we are all expected to join in the discussion. But the trick is to put the burden on them to undertake the heavy editing. Some students do that much better than others, and some classes take to it more readily. The catalyst seems to be having a self-confident and generous student, usually older, who injects a calming presence. So far I've been lucky to have one of those each time I've taught the course.
The deeper institutional issue is granting credit to graduate students for such a course. While there is widespread dismay over poor writing, especially by historians, "good writing" seems to mean, for many faculty members, that "You need to write in the style I like," or "I want to do less copy editing." The idea that writing is an exercise in literary imagination--that it requires thinking about voice, about designing and framing, about diction, about the potential uses of character and setting and plot--is not widely accepted. Too many academics think "good writing" merely means using the active voice, not confusing "its" and "it's," and getting from thesis to conclusion as painlessly as possible.
For some scholarly writing, the prevailing formulas are sufficient, and part of good writing is recognizing when they work. Yet they often falter when confronted with new ideas, and learning how to adapt traditional templates to the actual requirements of the material and the enthusiasms of the writer is a craft that can be learned, and even taught.
Without departmental support, however, writing with literary imagination is not only difficult to teach but detrimental to graduate students because they will not get credited for the work nor be allowed by dissertation committees to use what they have learned. Before writing can be taught seriously to graduate students in history, their professors will have to agree on what good writing means, decide that it matters, and accept themes as well as theses. Before we can educate students about good writing, we may have to re-educate their teachers.
Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction.
Holly Bates, an eight-year-old Florida girl, has such bad allergies that being near nuts or nut-based products--or even being near someone who has recently eaten nuts--can trigger anaphylactic shock. With peanut peril ubiquitous, young Holly is not enrolled in a traditional public school; instead, she attends Florida Connections Academy, a full-time "virtual" school that she accesses from her home computer. Her mother, a former public school teacher, loves the program. "The curriculum is unbelievable," she told the Tampa Tribune in 2007. "It would astound you, the progress these children make."
The Sunshine State is something of a virtual education pioneer. Since the 2003-04 school year, Florida has partnered with two for-profit companies--Connections Academy and K12 Inc.--to provide pupils with the option of attending school online, full-time, for free. But years before that, Florida was promoting other types of virtual education. Florida Virtual School is a statewide program that allows students to take individual courses online, often in subjects not offered at their local school, like Latin or Macroeconomics. It began in 1997 as a small grant-based project with just 77 course enrollments. Today, Florida Virtual School is its own school district and has an annual budget near $100 million. In the 2008-09 school year, according to Education Next, some "84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a ten-fold increase since 2002-03." A newly-minted Florida Virtual School Connections Academy, announced in August 2008, will further expand online learning options and access.
What drew you to working in the education field and what path did you take to end up where you are now?
I was in college during the LA riots of 1992, and seeing how quickly our society could pull apart at the seams really made me want to focus on addressing the underlying inequalities that produce such fragile ties in the first place. I was doing a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity in inner city Boston at the time, and that in turn led me to focus my undergrad studies on affordable housing and the politics of exclusionary zoning in the suburbs of Boston. After a diversion to grad school overseas, I landed back in New Haven, Connecticut for a stint of couch-surfing with friends while I finished up a doctoral dissertation on the impact of government funding on non-profit housing providers. I then took all that book learning and put it to the test by signing on to the management team that was charged with turning around the New Haven Housing Authority from the brink of receivership. It just so happened that one of those friends whose couch I'd been staying on was Dacia Toll, the founder of the Achievement First network of charter schools--and so I got a unique perspective on the incredible power of these schools to transform their students' lives because so many of her kids were coming right out of the very same housing developments that I was managing. Rewarding as it was to help the housing authority's residents reclaim their communities from years of neglect, once I began to appreciate how powerful schools could be in turning the cycle of poverty on its head, I was hooked.
And so about five years ago I was fortunate to connect with ConnCAN's founding Board Chair, Jon Sackler. Together with an array of business, community and higher education leaders we founded ConnCAN on the premise that we need more than pockets of excellence to close Connecticut's worst-in-the-nation achievement gap. We need statewide policies that allow educational innovations like Teach for America or Dacia's schools to spread far and wide. And those policies will never be enacted unless we create the political will for them by building a movement of education reformers. We've been at it ever since, from the early days when it was just me and my dog working out of my house to today, when we've got a fantastic team of ten, and we're well on our way to building a powerful, statewide movement for education reform.
If you visit a four-year college, you can predict what sort of student you are going to bump into. If you visit a community college, you have no idea. You might see an immigrant kid hoping eventually to get a Ph.D., or another kid who messed up in high school and is looking for a second chance. You might meet a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training or a 50-year-old taking classes for fun.
These students may not realize it, but they're tackling some of the country's biggest problems. Over the past 35 years, college completion rates have been flat. Income growth has stagnated. America has squandered its human capital advantage. Students at these places are on self-directed missions to reverse that, one person at a time.
Community college enrollment has been increasing at more than three times the rate of four-year colleges. This year, in the middle of the recession, many schools are seeing enrollment surges of 10 percent to 15 percent. And the investment seems to pay off. According to one study, students who earn a certificate experience a 15 percent increase in earnings. Students earning an associate degree registered an 11 percent gain.
Charter Schools Gain in Stimulus Scramble Cash-Strapped States, Districts Signal Expansion of Public-Education Alternative Despite Some Teachers' Strong Opposition
Some cash-strapped states and school districts are signaling a major expansion of charter schools to tap $5 billion in federal stimulus funds, despite strong opposition from some teachers unions.
Charter schools are typically non-unionized, publicly funded alternative schools that have been widely promoted by conservatives as a needed dose of competition in public education.
Last month, the Louisiana legislature voted to eliminate that state's cap on new charter schools. The Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill expanding charter schools after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan personally lobbied Democrats who had been blocking it. And the Rhode Island legislature reversed a plan to eliminate funding for new charters after Mr. Duncan warned such a move could hurt the state's chances for grant money.
The most striking example may be in Massachusetts. Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino -- both Democrats with histories of strong labor support -- are proposing new state laws that would give them broader power to overhaul troubled schools, open more charter schools and revamp collective-bargaining agreements.
Mr. Menino, who oversees the Boston schools, wants Massachusetts communities to be able to transform traditional public schools into district-controlled charter schools and link teachers' pay to performance.
Formerly a charter-school critic, Mr. Menino said he is fed up with opposition from the Boston Teachers Union. "I'm just tired of it," he said. "We're losing kids."
There's always been lots of talk in this country about income inequality, but very little about lifestyle disparities, differences which are pulling American elites farther and farther away from mainstream America.
These disparities can be as profound as any class distinctions related directly to income; they go beyond having a bigger house, a nicer car or fancier vacations. America has always frowned on the idea of an "aristocracy," but American elites today are increasingly creating their own separate world of activities, removed from the everyday pursuits of average Americans.
As part of a talk I gave at the Aspen Ideas Festival, we compared the lifestyle of the attendees (260 of whom cooperated in a poll sponsored by the conference and one you can take on Facebook) with the changing habits of the American public. The group was drawn from leaders in business, politics, the arts and academia, gathering for a weekend in the Rocky Mountains to examine critical issues of the day.
Forget about huge, sweeping megaforces. The biggest trends today are micro: small, under-the-radar patterns of behavior which take on real power when propelled by modern communications and an increasingly independent-minded population. In the U.S., one percent of the nation, or three million people, can create new markets for a business, spark a social movement, or produce political change. This column is about identifying these important new niches, and acting on that knowledge.
Not surprisingly their income and education levels were very upscale: most had graduate degree and six-figure incomes or more. Most, in this case, had studied in the humanities; few came from math and science backgrounds.
Much more on Mark Penn, who was heavily involved with Hilary Clinton's Presidential campaign, here.
The article is well worth reading and contemplating.
Last August, administrators at Northwest Missouri State University handed 19-year-old Darren Finney a Sony Corp. electronic-book Reader. The assignment for him and 200 other students: Use e-textbooks for studying, instead of heavy hardback texts.
At first, Mr. Finney worried about dropping the glass and metal device as he read. But eventually, the sophomore came to like the Reader. Its keyword search function, he says, was "easier than flipping through the pages of a regular book." Dozens of other participants, however, dropped out of the program, complaining that the e-texts were awkward and inconvenient.
Nationwide, universities, high schools and elementary schools are launching initiatives like the one at Northwest Missouri State, testing whether electronic texts that can be viewed on e-book readers or on laptop computers can cut costs and improve learning.
This fall, Amazon.com Inc. is sponsoring a pilot program for its large-screen Kindle DX e-reader with hundreds of students across seven colleges, including Princeton University and University of Virginia. Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to bring digital math and science textbooks to California's secondary schools as early as this fall. (Heavy old books, the governor says, are useful as weights for arm curls.)
ON A sweltering day in Alexander City, Alabama, summer school was in full swing. Two girls were reading "Julius Caesar" as two others wrestled with maths. A boy worked his way through a psychology quiz, and a teacher monitored an online discussion with students from around the state: Was Napoleon the last enlightened despot or the first modern dictator?
This is not a traditional classroom scene, but it has become common enough in Alabama. The state has many small, rural schools. Because of their size, and the relative scarcity of specialised teachers, course offerings have been limited. Students might have had to choose between chemistry or physics, or stop after two years of Spanish. But thanks to an innovative experiment with online education, the picture has changed dramatically.
In 2005 the governor, Bob Riley, announced a pilot programme called Alabama Connecting Classrooms Educators and Students Statewide, or ACCESS. The idea was to use internet and videoconferencing technology to link students in one town to teachers in another. It was something of a pet cause for Mr Riley, who comes from a rural county himself. He was especially keen that students should have a chance to learn Chinese.
........
Joe Morton, the state superintendent of schools, points to the number of black students taking AP courses. In 2003, according to the College Board, just 4.5% of Alabama's successful AP students (those who passed the subject exam) were black. In 2008 the number was up to 7.1%. There is still a staggering gap--almost a third of the state's students are black--but the improvement in Alabama was the largest in the country over that period. "That makes it all worthwhile right there," says Mr Morton.
The hardwood floor was shiny yet scuffed, from the tiny chairs and desks that have rubbed against it for generations. The open windows let in a cool breeze. The pencil sharpener on the window sill sat at attention, as did Dorothy Faustini's fourth- and fifth-grade math students.
The problem on the chalkboard: What is 72,641 divided by 10?
Hands shot up, hands stayed down. "Do not be afraid of the big numbers," Ms. Faustini reminded the children.
Jacqueline Garcia, 8, sat at the front of the classroom, inside Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx on Wednesday morning. Math does not frighten her. She likes it, because she wants to be a doctor, and to be a doctor, she said, you have to learn math, science and reading.
One of Jacqueline's older schoolmates, Alicia Sylvester, 12, wants to go to Penn State University and learn to be a pharmacist. Another student, Alex Nunez, 10, is undecided on his career path, but he said it's a toss-up between a scientist and an astronaut.
"I can go to space and discover new planets and fix some satellites," Alex said.
Independent public schools may be getting a chance in the Bay State
MASSACHUSETTS ranks at or near the top of national measures of how well schoolchildren do at reading and mathematics. A leader in early-years education, it is also applauded for its vocational, technical and agriculture schools. Still, there are problems. The disparity between students in affluent districts and those in low-income urban ones is shocking. In the Concord/Carlisle school district, for instance, 92% of students graduated from high-school on time and planned to attend a four-year college or university in 2007, compared with just 12.8% in Holyoke, one of the poorest cities in the state.
Many states have turned to charter schools (self-governing publicly-funded schools) to close achievement gaps like that, but charters are a tricky subject in Massachusetts even though the few they do have, such as Boston Collegiate, are among the best in the country. Unions abhor them while the school boards that run most public schools fear losing power and funding. Politicians have been unwilling to take on Massachusetts's mighty unions.
Last year Deval Patrick, the self-styled "education governor" of the state, unveiled a 55-point plan to overhaul the state's education system. The governor's package includes the introduction of three types of "readiness schools" to turn around poorly performing districts. Like charters, they will have greater flexibility, autonomy and will be held accountable for their results. But they will not be fully independent, remaining under the control of local school boards. Mr Patrick will introduce a bill authorising these schools later this month. One sort would have an external partner, such as a university, while another would be teacher-led.
Connecticut is another Northern state where achievement gaps are larger than in states across the South, the federal study shows. That is partly because white students in Connecticut score above the national average, but also because blacks there score lower, on average, than blacks elsewhere".
This validates my personal belief, and something that I have been saying for several years now, that Connecticut does not have great public schools, rather, it has one of if not the highest percentages of households with 4-year and advanced college degrees (CT, NJ and MA are always at the top of this list). This high percentage of well educated households makes Connecticut's public schools look good -- it is the household that is the difference maker, not the public schools. To prove my point, why is it that not one DRG B school does not outperform just one DRG A school?...or just one DRG C school out perform just one DRG B school?...makes no sense if the school were in fact the difference maker. DRG = Demographic Reference Group which is how the Dept. of Ed. here in CT groups all of its school districts to rate performance and other statistical data. It is generally rated by median household income but size of the community and other socioeconomic factors are part of the equation too. A = the most wealthy communities (also the "best" schools) and it goes down form there.
...it is all about socio-economics not how great Connecticut's public schools are, which they are not.
Connecticut's high-performing, public charter schools are making a difference, and that is an objective statement based on proven data.
We should do everything in our powers to embrace the proven Achievement First (Amistad Academy) model and replicate it far and wide. Why it is being stiff-armed by our legislators and the teachers union is simply bewildering. But then again both have proven to put their interests (political careers and pay checks) first and Connecticut's children second -- the teachers union is particularly good at that.
It's getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students' ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year--part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection--parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids' credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with--and maybe even bail out--these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.
Despite unprecedented efforts to improve minority achievement in the past decade, the gap between black and white students remains frustratingly wide, according to an Education Department report released Tuesday.
There is good news in the report: Reading and math scores are improving for black students across the country. But because white students are also improving, the disparity between blacks and whites has lessened only slightly.
On average, the gap narrowed by about 7 points from 1992 to 2007, so that black students scored about 28 points behind white students on a 500-point scale.
There's a joke among snooty Boston-area high-school kids: If they don't get good grades, they'll end up at Cape Cod Community College, or "4 C's by the Sea." In suburban Washington, D.C., the punch line is Maryland's Montgomery College, or "M.K." for short. Kids in Houston use San Jacinto College, long known as "Harvard on the Highway."
Community colleges don't get a lot of respect. Except, as of this week, from President Obama. In a speech Tuesday in Warren, Mich., he proposed sinking nearly $12 billion into revamping the country's community-college system. The plan would provide $9 billion in grant money to boost academic programs and raise graduation rates, plus another $2.5 billion to upgrade school facilities. It would also fund open-source online courses so that schools don't have to build more classrooms to admit more students.
A new report from the U.S. Education Department shows black students are scoring better in math and reading, but not enough to close a nationwide gap between them and white students.
The study also shows Minnesota has one of the nation's largest achievement gaps, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.
The study looked at fourth and eighth-grade math and reading scores from a nationwide achievement test called the NAEP.
The test is scored on a 500-point scale. Of the students the study looked at, black students scored 26-to-31 points below white students in reading and math.
The study concludes that every state still has an achievement gap, but at least that gap isn't getting any bigger. Fifteen states saw their gap shrink on fourth-grade math, but not a single state has narrowed the gap in eighth-grade reading.
The disparity, though, is not caused by black students getting worse. Scores for blacks continue to improve, but they're also improving for white students. Researchers note it's hard to close the gap when everyone is improving.
Minnesota, meanwhile, has one of the nation's largest achievement gaps. But again, that's not necessarily because blacks are slipping, according to Jim Angermeyr, the head of research for Bloomington schools.
There is a lot of talk in California right now about how the budget crisis will affect education investments, and I write investments very deliberately because education spending is a form of investment that is supposed to yield future returns. It's evident that we'll have to deal with the budget hole by cutting education spending rather dramatically, in fact it is absolutely unavoidable because education spending is about 50% of the state budget and when you include all of the other initiative mandated spending, the state government controls less than 20% of the actual budget... with a $26b hole in the budget the state could cut every dollar spent on things not mandated by voters and there would still be a deficit.
Okay, so we're going to have a less generously funded school system, a system that already competes for last place in the country in terms of educational quality. There is also the reality that we will dramatically reduce our funding for community colleges and at the same time raise fees, a reality for the California State University system and the University of California system.
While we are going through this fiscal realignment is it not also appropriate to ask what we are getting out of our education system? K-12 is a basket case and parents with economic means opt out of the system while those on lower income tiers are effectively denied something every child deserves, a quality education.
Maryland's public schools are teaching mathematics in such a way that many graduates cannot be placed in entry-level college math classes because they do not have a grasp of the basics, according to education experts and professors.
College math professors say there is a gap between what is taught in the state's high schools and what is needed in college. Many schools have de-emphasized drilling students in basic math, such as multiplication and division, they say.
"We have hordes of students who come in and have forgotten their basic arithmetic," said Donna McKusick, dean for developmental education at the Community College of Baltimore County. College professors say students are taught too early to rely on calculators. "You say, 'What is seven times seven?' and they don't know," McKusick said.
Ninety-eight percent of Baltimore students signing up for classes at Baltimore City Community College had to pay for remedial classes to learn the material that should have been covered in high school. Across Maryland, 49 percent of the state's high school graduates take remedial classes in college before they can take classes for credit.
For over a thousand years--from the fifth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D.--Greek mathematicians maintained a splendid tradition of work in the exact sciences: mathematics, astronomy, and related fields. Though the early synthesis of Euclid and some of the supremely brilliant works of Archimedes were known in the medieval west, this tradition really survived elsewhere. In Byzantium, the capital of the Greek-speaking Eastern empire, the original Greek texts were copied and preserved. In the Islamic world, in locales that ranged from Spain to Persia, the texts were studied in Arabic translations and fundamental new work was done. The Vatican Library has one of the richest collections in the world of the products of this tradition, in all its languages and forms. Both the manuscripts that the Vatican collected and the work done on them in Rome proved vital to the recovery of ancient science--which, in turn, laid the foundation for the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the Roman Renaissance, science and humanistic scholarship were not only not enemies; they were natural allies.
40 years ago, three human beings - with the help of many thousands of others - left our planet on a successful journey to our Moon, setting foot on another world for the first time. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. aboard. The entire trip lasted only 8 days, the time spent on the surface was less than one day, the entire time spent walking on the moon, a mere 2 1/2 hours - but they were surely historic hours. Scientific experiments were deployed (at least one still in use today), samples were collected, and photographs were taken to document the entire journey. Collected here are 40 images from that journey four decades ago, when, in the words of astronaut Buzz Aldrin: "In this one moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind". (40 photos total)
Wonk alert! I'm posting additional background information on the community college initiative that President Obama announced today, along with a link to the Council of Economic Advisers report, out Monday, called Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow.
The name of Obama's proposal: The American Graduation Initiative
The cost: see what I've underlined below.
The four main features:
The anniversary also brings back glorious memories for Nasa, the US space agency formed more than 50 years ago, and the programme's success contrasts with the relatively pedestrian activities that space agencies perform today.
Here, the Financial Times takes a look back at the Apollo programme through figures. Click on each number to see how it fits into the story of the mission.
"Lessons for Failing Schools" (editorial, July 6) says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with a $100 billion educational stimulus fund at his disposal, is right to focus on transforming 5,000 low-performing schools that account for the majority of minority dropouts. But if it were that easy -- just a matter of spending money -- the country would have probably done it long ago.
What we are facing is more than a school problem caused by the schools alone. It is a pervasive set of problems in some minority communities, including fatherless households, teenage dropout mothers, drugs and a culture that disparages education, along with some incredibly poor teaching.
The first thing Mr. Duncan should do is to ensure that minority children and their families who really want to do well and are trying hard get the opportunity to escape to charter and other schools so they aren't dragged down by the mass failures we are witnessing in public urban education.
Andy Slater, a 22-year-old delivery driver in London, appears oblivious to the fact that the UK is suffering its worst recession since the second world war.
"You gotta have new trainers ain't you? Nike, Adidas, Lacoste - whatever looks good," he says, eyeing up the latest models in the Westfield shopping mall in west London.
He is not alone in his opinion. In a survey conducted by the US-based Westfield group in May, 70 per cent of its shoppers aged between 18 and 35 said they were spending the same or more on clothes and eating out.
Slaves to fashion and free of most financial commitments, young people have kept spending in economic downturns when others have cut back. But today's younger generation is particularly flush with cash and, after growing up during the credit boom, spending is deeply ingrained.
As a result, retailers geared towards the youth market - particularly clothing chains - have been basking in their good fortune.
Wisconsin lags behind the rest of the nation in closing the achievement gap between black and white students, according to a U.S. Department of Education report released Tuesday.
Based on data from 2007, the National Assessment of Education Progress study shows some academic improvement among black and white students nationwide, with the gap in test scores between the two groups narrowing in a number of states. Wisconsin stands out as the only state with a racial achievement gap wider than the national average in all four categories measured: math for grades four and eight, and reading for grades four and eight.
Scores among black Wisconsin students were lower than their national peers in all four categories. White students in Wisconsin scored slightly above the national average in math, but below the national average for reading in grade four. The largest gap between white and black Wisconsin students was in math at grade eight, with a 45-point difference between their test scores on a 0-500 point scale.
.......
Closing the achievement gap is important to the Madison School District, said district spokesman Ken Syke.
"It's not a zero-sum situation," Syke said. "As we work to raise the achievement level of students of color, we still work as educators to continue to raise the achievement level of students who are not of color. It's not like if you're pouring resources into one you're not pouring resources into the other."
Personal story: When my son was in the first grade we had just returned to New York from New Orleans. About a month into the school year I realized that the work he was being given was identical to what he had done the year before. I decided a conference with the teacher was in order. I sat down with her and explained the situation thinking a teacher would know what to do. Instead she said to me "Do you want me to frustrate the other children?' My response was less than cordial. Any wonder why we homeschool now?
Stephanie Tolan, noted author well known advocate for extremely bright children , once said "You don't have the moral right to hold one child back to make another child feel better." To understand her reasoning behind the quote, you must understand that her youngest child was an extremely gifted child and that she has also spent a great deal of time working with the parents of gifted children and advocating for gifted children. An interview of Ms. Tolan tells of her child being humiliating in school as a result of his advanced intelligence.
Back to my story: I did not know, nor do I currently have documentation that my child is gifted, but I do know that the the first grade experience continued through his time in school, and even beyond that. The first grade teacher and administration acknowledged that not only did the child already know the material he was being given, but he also easily absorbed any new information they attempted to give. They held me off by promising to have him tested for the gifted program when the time was right. However, we moved south again, and the schools in GA refused to test him. No one would admit he was possibly gifted until the day I went to de-enroll him so he could be homeschooled. The teacher asked why I would take an obviously gifted child out of school. The look on her face after she realized what she said, made it clear that I didn't have to answer the question.
Realizing that schools are not created to cater to the individual child, is the key to parents creating the best education for their kids. This is not to say that homeschooling is the only solution to giving a child a customized education. This is to say that if parents don't supplement outside of the classroom, your child WILL BE disserviced. This is especially true if that child is bright, talented, or gifted.
Let's face it, schools are only given so much in resources. Because special education needs are much more apparent than gifted needs, it is the gifted students that lose out. For the most part, schools have not purposely committed a moral sin against the gifted child, but ignorance that you have committed a hit-and-run does not make the victim any less injured. Some one has to pick them up, and nurture them back to health. If the schools can't do it, then the parents must. Still we must continue to advocate for proper education of the gifted an advanced child.
People are naturally curious, so why is school such a chore for so many kids? University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham set out to learn why in his new book, Why Don't Students Like School? Part of the answer, he finds, is that thinking can be just plain hard. Unless conditions are right, we'll actually try to avoid the process of thinking. A teacher's challenge, the author says, is to "maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought." The author chats about the learning process.
Q: After all we've learned about the mind and brain, why is it so difficult to make school enjoyable for students?
A: School is all about mental challenge, and that is hard work, make no mistake. Still, people do enjoy mental work or, more exactly, people enjoy successful mental work. We get a snap of satisfaction when we solve a problem. But solving a problem that is trivially easy is not fun. Neither is hammering away at a problem with no sense you are making progress.
So the challenge for a teacher is to find that sweet spot of mental difficulty, and to find it simultaneously for 25 students, each with a different level of preparation. To fight this problem, teachers must engage each student with work that is appropriate for his or her level of preparation. This must be done sensitively, so that students who are behind don't feel like second-class citizens. But the fact is they are behind, and pretending that they are not does them no favors.
The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much of the Bible belongs in American history classrooms.
The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.
Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to put the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion front-and-center in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.
In the recent Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film "Angels & Demons," science sets the stage for destruction and chaos. A canister of antimatter has been stolen from CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- and hidden in the Vatican, set to explode right as a new pope is about to be selected.
Striving to make these details as realistic as possible on screen, Howard and his film crew visited CERN, used one of its physicists as a science consultant, and devoted meticulous care to designing the antimatter canister that Hanks' character, Robert Langdon, and his sexy scientist colleague, Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), wind up searching for.
But there was nothing they could do about the gigantic impossibility at the center of the plot. While the high-energy proton collisions generated at CERN do occasionally produce minute quantities of antimatter -- particles with the opposite electrical charge as protons and electrons, but the same mass, which can in turn be combined into atoms like antihydrogen -- it's not remotely enough to power a bomb. As CERN quips on a Web site devoted to "Angels & Demons," antimatter "would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years."
Almost like being tagged with a barcode, at some point schoolchildren in Georgia will receive a unique number that tracks their test scores and other data from the moment they enter kindergarten until they've graduated.
Such a data system, which would update nightly, school officials say, may sound like a pipe dream. In fact, if the state wants a crack at a huge pot of additional stimulus money from the U.S. Department of Education, that system must one day become a reality.
The money, $4 billion total in what Education Secretary Arne Duncan has dubbed the "Race to the Top" fund, will be distributed next year at Duncan's discretion.
A strong data system is one of four measures the secretary will use in awarding the grants. The others are creating international academic standards, turning around low-performing schools and teacher quality.
Because of the sums of money involved, and because the grants will only go to a few states, the Race to the Top represents a potentially enormous payoff.
The amount of the grants or how they will be distributed is unknown at this point.
Fifteen years ago, when I discovered that many good high schools prevented average students from taking demanding courses, I thought it was a fluke, a mistake that would soon be rectified.
I had spent much time inside schools that did the opposite. They worked hard to persuade students to take challenging classes and tests, such as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge, so students would be ready for the shock of their first semester at college, which most average students attend. The results were good. Why didn't all schools do that?
I still don't have a satisfactory answer. It always comes up this time of year because of my annual rankings of public high schools for Newsweek, which is based on schools' efforts to challenge average kids as measured by participation in AP, IB and Cambridge tests.
Many school superintendents and principals who run schools that restrict access to those college-level courses and tests have disappointing results on the Newsweek list. Some of them object to my methodology. It is clear from my conversations with them that they are smart and compassionate people.
In the coming year New York State will play a leading role in the movement to set one high national standard for all our school children. We will look to raise the bar to require that all students leave high school not only proficient on state tests - but ready for higher education.
But it won't be enough to simply raise standards and hope for the best. We also need to do a much better job preparing our teachers. After all, study after study confirms that teacher quality is the single most important factor in boosting student performance that is under the control of schools.
In cases when our students aren't learning, we must start to question, among other things, the preparation of their teachers.
Improving the quality of teaching in New York will mean partnering with the institutions that train our classroom instructors - SUNY 23%, CUNY 11% and independent colleges 66%.
So how are we going to know if Chicago's public schools are succeeding?
Mayor Richard Daley and school officials boasted this week that Chicago kids' performance on state standardized tests edged higher in all categories and all grades this year. One snapshot: 76.2 percent of 8th graders met or exceeded standards on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.
But we've known for some time now that nobody can put much faith in the ISAT. In 2006, state education officials significantly changed the test. Like magic, the test results took a leap.
What really happened: Illinois responded to pressure from the federal No Child Left Behind law by deciding it was simpler to make the tests easier than make the kids smarter.
The Obama administration and The Post are fascinated with charter schools [editorial, July 5], but charters do not make sense for Virginia. Maybe charter schools are needed in the District or Chicago, but in Virginia they are a solution looking for a problem.
The first question to consider is whether charter schools actually work. A recent study by the Rand Corp. suggests that they produce about the same results as traditional public schools.
Charter schools haven't flourished in Virginia because our school boards already have the autonomy to create specialty schools. In the Richmond area alone we have schools that specialize in the arts; engineering; communication; languages; the humanities; technology; international studies; leadership and government; global economics; the military; science and mathematics; and technology. We have governor's schools, magnet schools and centers for the gifted, and the list goes on and on. Virginia school boards, unlike those in states where charters have proliferated, don't need charter legislation to allow flexibility and innovation. Our school boards have great autonomy and flexibility. They are free to innovate, and they do.
When the Bamberger family opened a haberdashery 65 years ago, they insisted their staff use mental arithmetic to price up customers' purchases.
Despite the arrival of calculators, that attitude has remained unchanged over the intervening years.
But now the family finds itself facing an unexpected maths problem - most youngsters it would like to employ are incapable of working out sums in their heads.
arly childhood mathematics is vitally important for young children's present and future educational success. Research has demonstrated that virtually all young children have the capability to learn and become competent in mathematics. Furthermore, young children enjoy their early informal experiences with mathematics. Unfortunately, many children's potential in mathematics is not fully realized, especially those children who are economically disadvantaged. This is due, in part, to a lack of opportunities to learn mathematics in early childhood settings or through everyday experiences in the home and in their communities. Improvements in early childhood mathematics education can provide young children with the foundation for school success.
Relying on a comprehensive review of the research, Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood lays out the critical areas that should be the focus of young children's early mathematics education, explores the extent to which they are currently being incorporated in early childhood settings, and identifies the changes needed to improve the quality of mathematics experiences for young children. This book serves as a call to action to improve the state of early childhood mathematics. It will be especially useful for policy makers and practitioners-those who work directly with children and their families in shaping the policies that affect the education of young children.
Welcome to Education Sector's online discussion of teachers' work and teachers unions. Last year, we released results from a survey of public school teachers, Waiting to Be Won Over: Teachers Speak on the Profession, Unions, and Reform, which revealed a mix of opinions about the role of unions in school reform. Teachers believe unions are essential, the survey found, particularly for safeguarding jobs. But the survey also found teachers to be surprisingly open to change, and to the idea that unions should drive rather than resist reform. So what does this mean for the future of teachers unions? To delve into this further, we have assembled a group of current and recent teachers from different kinds of schools, different parts of the country, and with different views on this question.
Briefly, they are, Laura Bornfreund, a former Florida teacher who now works for Common Core, an organization focused on the liberal arts in education; Julie Eisenband, a teacher and adviser at SAGE Academy Charter School in Brooklyn Park, Minn.; Arthur Goldstein, who teaches English as a Second Language at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, N.Y.; Caitlin Hollister, a third-grade teacher from Boston Public Schools; and Bruce William Smith from Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles. Education policy expert Paul T. Hill from the Center on Reinventing Public Education is also joining us to provided national context and to discuss research he has done on teachers unions and charter schools. (Panelist biographies here.)
Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb announced Friday that he has hired four educational management companies to turn around 17 of the worst-performing high schools in the district, a move that marks what leaders say is the largest public school district overhaul of its kind in the nation.
"We have not been making the grade," Bobb said at a press conference at Central High School.
School board members expressed shock and dismay Friday -- just one day after they rolled out their own academic plan that they've asked Bobb to fund. Some accused Bobb of overstepping his bounds as a financial manager by launching an academic plan that will affect 20,000 students in three-quarters of the district's high schools without the board's knowledge.
The board was charged with working on the academics, while Gov. Jennifer Granholm brought in Bobb to work on the finances for a year.
"We have asked Robert Bobb to do a very difficult job and he needs the authority to do it right," said Granholm's spokeswoman Liz Boyd, noting Bobb is not overstepping his role. "He doesn't need to be micromanaged."
The district signed multiyear contracts with four out-of-state companies that will be funded through $20 million in federal stimulus dollars. The aim is to improve student achievement, discipline, respect, safety and graduation rates, district officials said.
His cube was one of the most popular and infuriating toys of all time. Now Professor Ernö Rubik is hoping that the sphere will bring sleepless nights to the world's obsessive puzzlers.
The creator of Rubik's Cube is back with his first new puzzle for almost 20 years and early indications are that it is going to be every bit as irritating as the original.
Rubik's 360, which goes on sale next week, features six small balls inside three interlocking spheres. The task is to lock each ball into colour-coded capsules on the outermost sphere. Professor Rubik said of his cube that it was "easy to understand the task, but hard to work out the solution". It is just as aggravating to crack the 360.
In The Times newsroom yesterday, the angry rattles of plastic pellets signified dozens of journalists failing to coax so much as one ball from the centre of the sphere.
The panel created this spring by the Legislature is soliciting advice through July 15 on the key issues it should tackle.
From there, the task force plans to produce a report on high school assessments and accountability. Preliminary recommendations could be out this fall, and the goal is to deliver a final report to the state education commissioner and lawmakers by year's end.
A few weeks ago, Jay Mathews asked readers a tough question in his Admissions 101 forum - which is better: an A or B in a regular course or a C in a more challenging course like an AP or IB class? Jay sided with AP, saying that all students interested in tier 1 or tier 2 schools should take at least 2 AP or IB courses. Even if that means a C on a high school transcript, Jay argued, colleges will appreciate a student who is willing to take on a challenge. Reader reactions have been pouring in ever since:
eloquensa: "My strategy suggestion is a little different from yours - I don't know about the college front in the C-in-AP/IB-or-A-in-regular argument, but if the student is a little more strategic in course and teacher selection it's a lot easier to avoid that dreaded C.
Catharine Bellinger, a Princeton sophomore who has plans to start a campus journal on education policy.
I suggested she practice with a topic provocative enough to get her in trouble, a good place for all writers to be. My question to her, inspired by her experiences in the D.C. schools, is: "Should middle class parents send their kids to KIPP?"
I have written a great deal about that successful network of public charter schools, known for raising the achievement of low-income students in our poorest urban and rural neighborhoods. I am hearing from some middle-class parents who would like some of that teaching for their own children. Here is Bellinger's take on whether that will work. Her email address is cbelling@princeton.edu. Let her, and me, know what you think.
By Catharine Bellinger">:
Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys
Kurt Kiefer, MMSD Chief Information Officer [1.3MB PDF]:
This memo is a summary of the results from the surveys completed during the past school year with various parent groups whose children reside within the MMSD attendance area but receive certain alternative education options. Also included are results of the survey conducted with non-residents who attend MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program (Le., Open Enrollment Enter).
Background
Groups were surveys representing households whose students were enrolled in one of four different educational settings: MMSD resident students attending private/parochial schools, MMSD resident students attending other public schools via the Open Enrollment program, non-resident students attending MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program, and MMSD resident students provided home based instruction.
The surveys were conducted between December 2008 and February 2009. The surveys were mailed to households or they could complete the survey online. Two mailings were conducted - the initial mailing to all households and a second to non-respondents as a reminder request. Total group sizes and responses are provided below.
This document will be discussed at Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting.
UPDATE:
Complete survey results can be found here [250K PDF]
When Father Hesburgh throws down ... How can we know when the tide of respectable opinion has decisively turned against the teachers' unions? When a panel that includes Father Hesburgh, Birch Bayh. Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Roger Wilkins goes medieval on them, saying their resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt "disadvantaged students" and led to "calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers ..."
The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways-such as growth models-to assess student performance.
In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.
The recent job market reminds me of when I finished my doctorate in the mid-1990s. Though the market was not as saturated then, it definitely was not conducive to finding a job. I applied to more than 100 colleges and universities, garnering only a phone interview at one college, where I happened to know two people on the search committee. I made it to a final cut of 10, but no further.
However, I knew that I wanted to teach, so I adjusted my plans and applied for positions at independent high schools (also known as "private schools," but they do not care for that designation). For those struggling in this job market, I would suggest that this path has numerous benefits and few drawbacks, especially for someone beginning a career.
First, independent schools have talented, often highly motivated students. At the first school I worked at, I taught sophomores and juniors, not in Advanced Placement classes or even Honors classes. The sophomores read The Scarlet Letter, among other works, and the curriculum for the juniors included Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Heart of Darkness, and the British Romantic poets. Teachers assigned works such as Moby-Dick to their classes, and none of us were disappointed in the students' responses to the level of difficulty. In fact, we had to move through Heart of Darkness quickly, as the end of the semester was approaching, and neither of my junior classes complained about the pace or load for what is a difficult read for the college sophomores I now teach in a non-majors course at a four-year, liberal arts university.
A state bill up for a hearing today would require Wisconsin public schools to teach the history of organized labor and the collective bargaining process in the U.S.
Labor unions support the requirement. But groups representing school boards and administrators have registered against it saying they don't want the curriculum micromanaged
ouse members have endorsed teaching North Carolina public school students about how thousands of people were sterilized through a state program in the mid-20th century.
The House Education Committee approved legislation Tuesday that would order the eugenics program be included in the public school curriculum. The bill also direct students and professors at University of North Carolina campuses to interview program victims so future generations know what happened.
The Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowship seeks to attract talented, committed individuals with backgrounds in the STEM fields--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--into teaching in high-need Indiana high schools. Learn more...
Funded through a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, the Fellowship offers rigorous disciplinary and pedagogical preparation, extensive clinical experience, and ongoing mentoring. Eligible applicants include current undergraduates, recent college graduates, midcareer professionals, and retirees who have majored in, or had careers in, STEM fields.
Transportation is clearly a consideration to be factored into any discussion of school choice. Yet we know very little about how much it matters in family’s decisions about their children’s school, and almost nothing about how much of a barrier it is to school choice, especially for low-income families. How far does the average family want their child to travel to school? Would they be as comfortable letting their younger children travel as far as they might a middle or high school student? What transportation options are available to low-income families? These are the kinds of questions we tried to address in this study, in order to obtain meaningful data to help shape school transportation policy.
This project first surveyed the landscape of transportation and school choices. It examined the density of large districts in the U.S. The project team contacted large school districts to find out their policies on transportation and choice, then examined district budgets to see how much they actually spend on transportation. Most importantly, the project surveyed families in two cities—Denver and Washington, D.C.—to find out their travel patterns and school choice options. The study breaks down that data, collected from households earning less than $75,000 in annual income, to determine how much transportation is a barrier to choice.
As part of the first major revision of teacher education requirements in 10 years, i nstitutions seeking the NCATE seal of approval must either demonstrate that they are on track to reach an "excellent" level of performance, rather than remain at an "acceptable level," or make transformative changes in key areas, such as:
strengthening the clinical focus of their programs to better prepare educators to meet the needs of today's P-12 students and foster increases in student learning
demonstrating the impact of their programs and graduates on P-12 student learning
increasing knowledge about what works in teacher education to improve P-12 student learning, using a research and development strategy to build better knowledge and help institutions use that knowledge to improve programs, and
addressing critical needs of schools, such as recruiting talented teachers and bolstering teacher retention.
The new accreditation strategy, approved by the NCATE Executive Board last month, creates two alternative pathways to accreditation. The Continuous Improvement track raises the target level of performance beyond the "acceptable" level. The second pathway, the Transformation Initiative track, encourages institutions to build the base of evidence in the field about what works in teacher preparation and help the P-12 schools they serve address major challenges, from raising student achievement to retaining teachers.
Will Judge Sonia Sotomayor's life experience, including attending a private Catholic school, lead to an uncomfortable conclusion--that government-supported school choice is just?
The Obama administration has made Judge Sonia Sotomayor's life story a central part of her introduction to the nation as a Supreme Court nominee. The administration has focused attention on her inspiring, only-in-America path from public housing through elite institutions of higher education to the top of the legal profession.
......
Consequently, we might expect to see these experiences clearly reflected in their positions on three contemporary issues.
First, President Obama ought to be a vigorous defender of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to low-income students in the nation's capital so they can attend private schools.
Second, the president should be expected to act forcefully to save America's urban Catholic and other faith-based schools, which are disappearing at a rapid pace, robbing disadvantaged families of desperately needed private education options.
Third, we should expect Judge Sotomayor to decide in favor of school choice programs while on the bench.
In practice, however, there appears to be a limit to the influence of personal experience. President Obama failed to stand up for the D.C. voucher program, and Democratic congressional leaders went after it with a vengeance. If his 2010 budget is adopted, no new students will be allowed into the program, and it will slowly wither away. Similarly, while his Department of Education has $100 billion in stimulus funding for America's schools, neither he nor Education Secretary Arne Duncan has uttered a word about preserving faith-based urban schools.
For seven months, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the media have bombarded us with tales of how Duncan dramatically boosted student achievement as leader of Chicago Public Schools. Based on two new independent analyses, Duncan's real impact appears to have been near zero.
The usual evidence presented for Duncan's success is the rise in the pass rate of elementary and middle school students on Illinois' own ISAT test. But state tests like the ISAT are notoriously unreliable (they tend to be corrupted by teaching to the test and subject to periodic "realignments" in which the passing grade is lowered or the test content is eased). In January, the Schools Matter blog argued that exactly such a realignment had occurred in 2006.
So to get a reliable measure of Duncan's impact, I pulled up the 4th and 8th grade math and reading scores for Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- a test that is much less susceptible to massaging by states and districts. I then compared the score changes in Chicago to those for all students in Large Central Cities around the nation, and tested if the small differences between them were statistically significant. Not one of them is even remotely significant at even the loosest accepted measure of significance (the p < 0.1 level). Chicago students did no better than those in similar districts around the nation between 2002/2003 and 2007, a period covering virtually all of Duncan's tenure in Chicago.
Compiling final grades for students in Sharon Thoma's Zoology 101 course is fairly simple.
Students take three multiple-choice exams, plus a final, during the semester. The grading scale is spelled out at the start of the year in the syllabus, which also notes there is no way to earn extra credit.
"So it's solely objective and it's pretty clear where you fall," says Thoma, a University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty associate who co-teaches the huge lecture with two professors.
And yet, over the past two years Thoma has observed a surprising uptick in the number of students who e-mail her at the end of the semester, asking if she'd reconsider the grade she awarded them "because they worked so hard."
Thoma estimates she received 20 such e-mails this spring out of some 850 students. "They'll typically say, 'I know you said there won't be any grade adjustments, but I worked really hard and I don't feel that the grade reflects the effort I put into the class,'" says Thoma, who stresses most students work hard in class and understand the ground rules. "And so I have a new standard reply: 'I can't quantitate your effort.'"
As an international city, English has always been at the center of discussions regarding Hong Kong's education system. Regretfully, the standard of English among students has fallen to such a level that it is worthy of attention.
Although I do not work in the field of education, I realize there may be many reasons for falling standards.
However, to my astonishment I heard recently of Hong Kong Institute of Education graduates majoring in English who merely got a D grade in English in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination and Hong Kong Advanced Level yet got degrees to teach senior school students.
On Monday, it was all about maneuvering through a seemingly endless maze of high school hallways. By Tuesday, it was about soaring through the air on a zip line.
It was day two of LIFE, or Learning is for Everyone, a pilot program launched this summer for graduates of Whitehorse and Sennett middle schools. In the fall, the teens will enter La Follette High School as ninth-graders -- both statistically and anecdotally one of the toughest periods of a student's school career.
"Ninth grade can be a really rocky, challenging transition for many students," said Julie Koenke, a grant communications coordinator for the Madison School District who helped write the curriculum for LIFE. "They're not always sure of the change in expectations for them around academics. There's a different school culture, and just the largeness of what a high school can be."
LIFE -- which offers students everything from scavenger hunts at La Follette to learn their way around the school to an athletic ropes course, classes on time management and visits to MATC and UW-Madison -- is part of a trend: High schools are reaching out to freshmen to keep them in school even before the school year begins.
Advanced Placement classes do not begin at Science Park High School until September, but Cristiana De Oliveira will spend many a summer day sitting behind a desk in A.P. calculus for five hours rather than lounging by a swimming pool.
Cristiana is one of 335 students signed up for Newark's new A.P. Summer Institute, in which A.P. courses in calculus, biology, United States history and English language and literature each get an intensive two-week introduction, paid for with $300,000 in federal grants.
Intended to help increase enrollment in the special courses as well as student performance, the new program, which starts on Monday, is expected to reach more than half the students taking Advanced Placement classes this fall in the 40,000-student Newark school district.
"We're in a stressful environment in school, and if we can start now, it will be a lot easier," said Cristiana, 17, a senior who will be getting up at 6:30 a.m. and riding two public buses to reach the high school for the summer program.
Blogs, Twitter, Facebook: these outlets are supposedly cheapening language and tarnishing our time. But the fact is we are all reading and writing much more than we used to, writes Anne Trubek ...
The chattering classes have become silent, tapping their views on increasingly smaller devices. And tapping they are: the screeds are everywhere, decrying the decline of smart writing, intelligent thought and proper grammar. Critics bemoan blogging as the province of the amateurism. Journalists rue the loose ethics and shoddy fact-checking of citizen journalists. Many save their most profound scorn for the newest forms of social media. Facebook and Twitter are heaped with derision for being insipid, time-sucking, sad testaments to our literary degradation. This view is often summed up with a disdainful question: "Do we really care about what you ate for lunch?"
Forget that most of the pundits lambasting Facebook and Twitter are familiar with these devices because they use them regularly. Forget that no one is being manacled to computers and forced to read stupid prose (instead of, say, reading Proust in bed). What many professional writers are overlooking in these laments is that the rise of amateur writers means more people are writing and reading. We are commenting on blog posts, forwarding links and composing status updates. We are seeking out communities based on written words.
Reading literacy of fourth-grade students in Hong Kong showed a remarkable improvement from 2001 to 2006 as shown by international PIRLS studies. This study identified various aspects of the teacher factor contributing to the significant improvement among students. A total of 4,712 students and 144 teachers from 144 schools were randomly selected using probability proportional-to-size technique to receive the Reading Assessment Test and complete the Teacher's Questionnaire, respectively. A number of items pertaining to teachers' instructional strategies and activities, opportunities for students to read various types of materials, practices on assessment, and professional preparation and perception, were found to be significantly correlated with the outcome of students' reading literacy. Stepwise regression procedure revealed four significant predictors for students' overall reading achievement. The most powerful predictor was the use of materials from other subjects as reading resources. Suggestions to improve quality of teaching of reading and further studies are made.
America's community colleges suffer from an image problem at home, but some are experiencing a boom -- especially when it comes to foreign student enrollments.
Take Houston Community College. Thanks in part to an aggressive outreach campaign, the school has the highest percentage of international students of any community college in the U.S.
Betting On An American Education
Even if there were ivy on the walls of Houston Community College, it would wither in the Texas heat. The drab buildings of the school's Gulfton neighborhood campus are typical community college architecture, but that doesn't scare anyone away.
Sejal Desai came here after the college's fame spread -- via word of mouth -- to the small city she comes from in India.
When asked why he thinks the UK is not as entrepreneurial as the US, Mr Smith puts the blame on education. "Teachers and career advisers have been very risk-averse," he says.
"If you can change attitudes in schools and teach entrepreneurship to primary and secondary school children, we will have more role models."
When you got your paper back with a grade of F for plagiarism, you reacted in predictable fashion -- with indignant denial of any wrongdoing. You claimed "you cited everything" and denied that you had committed intentional plagiarism, or ever would.
This response is all too familiar to an experienced professor. Only once in my three decades of teaching has a student I caught plagiarizing owned up to it right away. And in that case, I believe (perhaps cynically) that she (a graduate student) thought a forthright confession might lead me to lighten the penalty. It didn't; I failed her for the course and wrote her up. Indeed, I found out later that she had been caught plagiarizing by a colleague the previous term and let off lightly. I suspect that, because too many professors (many of them adjuncts fearful of student backlash) overlook or are unwilling to pursue plagiarism -- the process can be labor intensive, and it is always unpleasant -- cheating has become a way of life for many students, and they are genuinely surprised at being held responsible for it. So I don't doubt that your shock is real.
Like many teenagers, Ari Weinstein spends his summers riding his bike and swimming. This year, the 15-year-old had another item on his to-do list: Foil Apple Inc.'s brightest engineers and annoy chief executive Steve Jobs.
Ari is part of a loose-knit group of hackers that has made it a mission to "jailbreak" Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. The term refers to installing unapproved software that lets people download a range of programs, including those not sanctioned by Apple.
Since Apple began selling its latest iPhone 3GS on June 19, Ari and six online cohorts spent hours a day probing the new product for security holes. This weekend, one of the member of the group, dubbed the Chronic Dev Team, released the jailbreaking software they've been working on. Ari says the program is a test version with some bugs, but that users have successfully downloaded it. A quarter-million people have visited the site, he says.
"Coding and testing things that may or may not work, and figuring things out, is a really rewarding experience," says Ari, a Philadelphia resident who began hacking when he was 11.
Mr. Duncan has said from the start that he wants the states to transform about 5,000 of the lowest-performing schools, not in a piecemeal fashion but with bold policies that have an impact right away. The argument in favor of a tightly focused effort aimed at these schools is compelling. We now know, for example, that about 12 percent of the nation's high schools account for half the country's dropouts generally -- and almost three-quarters of minority dropouts. A plan that fixed these schools, raising high school graduation and college-going rates, would pay enormous dividends for the country as a whole.
Mr. Duncan can use his burgeoning discretionary budget to reward states that take the initiative in this area. But Congress could push the reform effort further and faster by granting the education department's request for two changes in federal education law. The first would be to come up with new federal school improvement money and require the states to focus 40 percent of it on the lowest-performing middle and high schools. The second change would allow the secretary to directly finance charter-school operators that have already produced high-quality schools.
Thousands of intelligent students seize up during standardized test season. They're the ones in the back of the gymnasium, frantically writing to the last minute and choking under the pressure of an egg timer. I am this student.
Perhaps test anxiety doesn't come from the actual questions sitting in front of us, but rather the fact that these standardized test scores can be life altering. These scores affect our admittance to the right schools, our ability to gain scholarships and our ability to qualify for certain types of aid. The weight of these tests had many of us prematurely self-destructing, and honestly, it doesn't get any easier as we get older.
Want to do an MBA or law degree? Your qualifying test scores could mean the difference between a great life transition and a mediocre one. Below is a list of test prep resources. If you're spending your summer prepping, these might just help you gain the confidence you need to come out on top.
ucation Secretary Arne Duncan recently answered questions about his goals and relationship with the business community. An edited transcript:
QWhy include business in the policy debate about public education?
AWe all need to work together on this stuff, business leaders and educators. Everyone's mutual interests are absolutely aligned.
QBusiness leaders want reform but don't want to pay for it, right?
ANo; there's been unbelievable generosity, not just in resources but in ideas. We've had a great relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable. I've met with a number of CEOs.
When the surgery was over, the worst of the aftermath survived, and the tumor gone, Tony Evers met with his oncologist, Linn Khuu.
"You know, you've been given a second chance," she told him. "Go do something great."
Evers felt a bit insulted at first. He thought he had worked hard and done good things for years. For one thing, he had been deputy state superintendent of public instruction for almost seven years at that point.
Then he decided she was right.
Now, Evers said, he would tell people who went through what he went through, "If you do get a second chance, make the most of it."
At 11 a.m. Monday, Evers, 57, will show what he is doing to make the most of it. He will be sworn in as Wisconsin's 26th superintendent of public instruction - and almost surely the first without an esophagus.
Within months of being told he had a form of cancer that generally has low survival rates, Evers decided to undertake a race for statewide office.
"Once you get over a hurdle, it does make you a bit more fearless," he said in an interview last week.
In her weekly "What Matters Most" newspaper column, Randi Weingarten recently bid the Big Apple farewell. Ms. Weingarten has been elevated to president of the national American Federation of Teachers from head of its New York City affiliate, and she had some notable parting words: "One of the most rewarding (and exhausting) things about working in public education in New York City is that it is the best laboratory in the world for trying new things."
Well, it could be, if it weren't for Ms. Weingarten's union. Since taking over in 1998, she has done everything she could to block significant reforms to New York's public schools. Take her opposition to charter schools. She resisted raising the state cap on charters from 100 unless the union could organize them. (She lost and the cap now is 200.)
Wisconsin education officials are aiming to move into the national mainstream by setting firmer standards for what children should learn in school and finding better ways to measure achievement.
Wisconsin built a reputation in recent years for having loosely written state standards. The state was viewed as setting the bar about as low as anywhere in the country in determining if students were proficient, and taking too rosy an approach to deciding whether schools were getting adequate results.
Several national groups, some of them with conservative orientations but others harder to peg politically, criticized the state for its softness.
The report from the Diploma Project, issued last week, says that in revising its statement of what students are expected to learn in English and math, "Wisconsin has taken an important step to better prepare young people for success in post-secondary education and in their careers."
We make frequent use of the influence of their high school peers on many of our students. We have peer counseling programs and even peer discipline systems, in some cases. We show students the artistic abilities of their peers in exhibitions, concerts, plays, recitals, and the like.
Most obviously, we put before our high school students the athletic skills and performances of their peers in a very wide range of meets, matches, and games, some of which, of course, are better attended than others.
While some high schools still have just one valedictorian, fellow students have little or no idea what sort of academic work the student who is first in her class has done. Academic scholarships may be announced, but it is quite impossible for peers to see the academic work for which the scholarship has been awarded. Here again, the contrast with athletics is clear.
We show high school students the artistic, athletic, and other examples of the outstanding efforts and accomplishments of their peers without seeming to worry that such examples will send their peers into unmanageable depressions or cause them to give up their own efforts to do their best.
When it comes to academic achievements, on the other hand, we do seem to worry that they will have a harmful effect if they are shown to other students. I am not quite sure how that attitude got its hold on us, but I do have some comments from authors whose papers I have published, on their reaction to seeing the exemplary academic work of their peers:
"When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports...As I began to research the Ladies' Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task...In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come."
North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005
"The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college."
Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008
"Thank you for selecting my essay regarding Augustus Caesar and his rule of the Roman Republic for publication in the Spring 2009 issue of The Concord Review. I am both delighted and honored to know that this essay will be of some use to readers around the world. The process of researching and writing this paper for my IB Diploma was truly enjoyable and it is my hope that it will inspire other students to undertake their own research projects on historical topics."
Old Scona Academic High School, Edmonton, Alberta, (Canada) Class of 2008
"In the end, working on that history paper, inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly."
Isidore Newman School (LA) Class of 2003
"At CRLHS, a much-beloved history teacher suggested to me that I consider writing for The Concord Review, a publication that I had previously heard of, but knew little about. He proposed, and I agreed, that it would be an opportunity for me to pursue more independent work, something that I longed for, and hone my writing and research skills in a project of considerably broader scope than anything I had undertaken up to that point."
Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (MA) Class of 2003
Now, whenever a counterintuitive result--like this enthusiasm for a challenge--is found, there is always an attempt to limit the damage to our preconceptions. "This is only a tiny fringe group (of trouble-makers, nerds, etc.)" or "most of our high school students would not respond with interest to the exemplary academic work of their peers." The problem with those arguments is that we really don't know enough. We haven't actually tried to see what would happen if we presented our high school students with good academic work done by their more diligent peers. Perhaps we should consider giving that experiment a serious try. I have, as it happens, some good high school academic work to use as examples in such a trial...
While I entirely agree with David Elmore that the structure of many classrooms can work against the normal ways that young students learn, I must protest the picture of learning which he proposes.
ADD is a real disease. Anyone who "mostly got A's and B's" in school was not ADD. Elmore should spend some time in a class with real ADD students --he will soon see the qualitative difference between their distractibility and the usual kind. Lack of structure is hard for them.
Learning to add numbers or read words is not the same as learning mathematics or reading a sophisticated text: Both require understanding underlying ideas and comparing and contrasting them with other ideas.
Talking to a parent about how invasive taxes are also will not prepare someone for adult conversation. While most of the time people don't know theories, they use them. The first time someone proposes a Hamiltonian view of freedom while yours is Jeffersonian, if you don't know theory, you will not be able to respond convincingly, and you will soon feel pretty stupid.
An exciting school, at any level, gives students not only skills like addition and reading, not only facts without context, but the joy of deep understanding and analysis, which requires teachers and a structure leading students to it.
Sally MacEwen, associate professor and chair of classics at Agnes Scott College
Despite almost 50 years of large and accelerating efforts to improve the school achievement of African-American students, the gap between their achievement and that of whites and Asians remains about as large as ever.
Yet proposals for what to do about it seem basically unchanged: Spend more money and divert existing money to reduce class size and train teachers better, have more students take a rigorous college prep curriculum, work on improving self-esteem, eliminate ability-grouped classes, use cooperative-learning techniques, and reassign top teachers to schools with a high percentage of African-American students.
I have become especially doubtful about whether those approaches will work better in the future than they have in the past when I read this report from the trenches. Usually, we hear only from politicians and education leaders (who also are politicians) spouting lofty rhetoric. Occasionally, we hear of a promising program, but which never turns out to be scalable. Or we see a Hollywood movie about some amazing teacher.
We rarely, however, hear from a more typical teacher who, day to day, teaches low-achieving African-American kids. So it was with interest that I read this truly depressing account from a teacher. I've edited out a couple of unnecessarily snarky sentences, which are irrelevant to the issue. Nonetheless the essay is long yet, I believe, worth your time.)
Doris Broome DeBoe, who became one of the District's leading math teachers, said she was drawn to the subject because it was absolute. Where other subjects were subjective, she said, math was exact.
"Once you understand what you are doing, there is no deviation," she said.
As a teacher, she believed in endless math drills, nightly homework and practice. She described herself not as a harsh instructor but as one who thought algebra is "a skill like ball playing and piano playing. Once you learn the basics, practice is necessary to ensure mastery."
She said every child had the potential to do well in class. "My best dog is the underdog," she told her students.
Her conviction motivated many students. Michael Bell, a student at Bertie Backus Middle School in the mid-1970s, said Mrs. DeBoe was the inspiration for creating his math preparation company, Acaletics, which helps develop curriculums and training programs within the Florida public school system. His company follows the same basic formula as Mrs. DeBoe's teaching: Practice makes perfect.
When the Online School for Girls flickers to life this fall on computer screens across the country, students will take part in an unusual experiment that joins two trends: girls-only schooling and online teaching.
A consortium that includes the 108-year-old Holton-Arms School in Bethesda is driving the project, in the belief that girls can benefit from an Internet curriculum tailored just to them.
"There's been a lot of research done on how girls learn differently with technology than boys," said Brad Rathgeber, Holton-Arms's director of technology. "Part of this is a little bit of theory that we're trying to put in practice to see if it really does play out."
For now, the online collaboration will allow the four participating schools -- Holton-Arms, Harpeth Hall in Nashville, Westover School in Middlebury, Conn., and Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio -- to offer classes that would not have generated enough student interest or teacher support in any one school. When the classes open to the public a year later, the educators hope that students around the world -- including homeschoolers and girls at coed schools -- will be able to take part in a version of the girls' school experience. And they want to prove that single-sex online education works. They can't find anyone who has done anything similar.
There are dorms that are popular on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus: Elizabeth Waters, the scenic hall in the center of campus, or the new Ogg, which has air conditioning and walk-in closets.
And then, for whatever reason, there are the ones that aren't. Whether it be Witte, Cole, Kronshage, or another, officials say they're never sure which dorms will drop to the bottom of the list on any given year, falling victim to the whims of 17- and 18-year-olds.
In particular, the university has had some trouble enticing students to live in dorms they label as learning communities, or those that bring faculty, staff, and unique seminars into dorm life.
There are two full dorms on campus with this mission -- Chadbourne and Bradley -- plus floors with special interest themes like women in science and engineering, entrepreneurship, international interests and more.
Last year, UW-Madison started a program that rewards students for picking these halls by allowing them to choose their room online, a la seat selection with the airlines. The fate of other students are left to a computer program's random picks.
Those of us who spend our days mesmerized by discussions of summer learning loss, looping and longitudinal analysis need a summer break, just like everybody else. We are readers, so on vacation we are likely to have a book in our hands, or if we are very old, a newspaper. For me, bestselling thrillers are too predictable and mysteries too complex. I need something different, something weird, something fresh that taps into my essential nerdiness, and I have found it. "Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality," by Gerald W. Bracey.
The first few chapters are familiar, if you, like me, are a fan of the irascible Bracey and his assaults on the conventionally wise among our education leaders. But in chapter 10 he does something totally unexpected. He resurrects The Eight-Year Study, a 70-year-old corpse, and makes me want to talk about it, even with that guy sprawled out on the next beach towel.
The Eight-Year Study was published in 1942, three years before I was born. That is, to me, a virtue. So few people have heard of it they cannot have any knee-jerk reactions. It was a very large experiment. More than 30 high schools in the 1930s were encouraged to try non-traditional approaches to teaching, like combining Engish and social studies and science into one course, to see how the students who studied that way did when compared to students who did not attend the schools in the study. More than 300 colleges agreed to abandon their traditional admissions procedures in accepting students from the experimental schools.
Jean Bernstein rang a cowbell, her cue to quiet the sixth-graders at Roberto Clemente Middle School for a lesson on multiplying decimals. "You need to settle down," she said.
But that afternoon in Germantown, students seemed intent on chatting, clapping and exchanging high-fives. As the teacher led the class through a sheet of problems, one boy punctuated every answer by exclaiming, "I agree!"
The students might have cut Bernstein some slack had they known that she, too, was being graded.
Last fall, Bernstein entered Peer Assistance and Review, a Montgomery County program that identifies struggling teachers and tries to help them improve. Those who do not face dismissal.
chools specialize in math, science or the arts. Some are Afro-centric, others are religious. They are publicly funded but operate independently of local schools boards and, often, teacher unions.
They all make up the growing charter school movement that the Obama administration would like to see flourish.
"The charter movement is absolutely one of the most profound changes in American education, bringing new options to underserved communities and introducing competition and innovation into the education system," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told attendees at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools' annual conference last week.
Maybe it was brought on by lean times. Or maybe long-simmering angst about the state of Seattle schools is finally boiling over on its own.
But the decision this month to lay off 165 of Seattle schools' newest teachers in a "last hired, first fired" manner has got some of liberal Seattle suddenly sounding more like a conservative red state.
More than 600 school parents have signed an online petition, at supportgreatteachers.com, that calls out the teachers union for causing "great distress and upheaval" in the schools. At issue is the policy of choosing who gets laid off solely by seniority.
"Wake up and see how union refusal to consider merit is damaging the profession and our kids," wrote one parent.
"We want the best teachers, not the oldest, teaching our kids," wrote another.
"Teacher unions are an anachronism," said another.
IF I could change public education, here's what I'd do first: reward the best teachers with higher pay and stature, and fire the worst teachers, because they shouldn't be in the classroom.
My children have gone through a total of 16 years of public schooling in New Jersey. Over the years, I've seen outstanding teachers, and outstandingly bad ones. Our kids have had teachers who introduced them to everything under the sun, and made every day different and fascinating. Some of our daughter's teachers gave up their lunch and stayed late to help her find her way through the maze of math. Two of our son's teachers comforted him when traumatic events laid him low. My daughter's sixth-grade teacher made students feel like real scientists; her language arts teacher covered everyone's papers with useful suggestions. These people put everything they have into teaching. They light sparks that stay lit for years.
But we've also seen teachers who put dents in our children's spirits, day after day, teachers who barely taught anything at all, who, I suspect, chose the profession because they wanted summers off.
My father used to come home from his post office job railing about co-workers who didn't do their share of the work, but couldn't be fired. Watching bad teachers fail to do their jobs, I'm even angrier than he was. How can anyone justify protecting the jobs of teachers who:
As a Seattle community, we can and must speak up to improve the effectiveness of every school, in every neighborhood.
We, the undersigned, ask our leaders to do the following:
1. Delay the immediate assignment of replacement teachers until the effects of attrition and retirement are understood. Keep successful teams intact.
2. In the new contract between the teachers' association and the school district, change the layoff policy to prioritize effectiveness. Put in place a system that promotes, rewards and protects teamwork, expertise, best teaching practices and each site's unique programmatic needs.
3. Ensure that all kids have consistent access to highly effective teachers.
4. Give our principals the tools they need to support and retain effective teachers within their individual schools.
With admissions getting more competitive every year, spots at top American colleges are becoming a globally coveted commodity. In Seoul, one elite South Korean prep school has become the envy of many upper-crust U.S. prep schools with its success at getting its students into Ivy League colleges.
The Korean school's formula is simple: Select the country's brightest and most ambitious students and work them extremely hard.
U.S.-Style Studying 101
Roughly 1,200 students at the private Daewon Foreign Language High School begin their day with a nationally required curriculum of Korean, math and English. Three afternoons a week, about a quarter of them continue their studies in the Global Leadership Program -- a special course that emphasizes the research, writing and analytical skills they will need at top U.S. colleges.
Dan Bontrager is a 54-year-old Amish man with flecks of gray in his long beard. He's also treasurer of the Tri-County Land Trust, an Amish lending cooperative created to support the Amish maxim that community enhances faith in God.
This past spring, Mr. Bontrager was startled when a number of men he has known most of his life tied their horses to the hitching post outside his office and came inside to withdraw their money from the Land Trust.
"We had a run," Mr. Bontrager says. "I don't know if you know anything about the Amish grapevine, but word travels fast. Somebody assumed it was going to happen, and it started a panic."
In a vote preceded by outbursts from board members, the Montgomery County Board of Education on Wednesday selected Barbara Thompson as Montgomery's new superintendent.
The board voted 4-3 along racial lines to offer the job to Thompson, who currently serves as superintendent of New Glarus Public Schools in Wisconsin.
Black board members Mary Briers, Eleanor Dawkins, Robert Porterfield and Beverly Ross voted for Thompson. Voting against her were white members Charlotte Meadows, Heather Sellers and Melissa Snowden, who all wanted to continue the search process.
Thompson was the lone finalist for the job after Samantha Ingram, superintendent of Fairfield County Schools in South Carolina, withdrew on Monday.
Ross, chairwoman of the school board, said she called Thompson shortly after the vote and Thompson accepted the job.
"I am excited that she's excited about coming here," Ross said. "She was already talking about how to get our test scores up."
Thompson, in a phone interview from her house in Wisconsin, said she and the board in the next few days should begin working out the details of her contract, which include salary negotiations.
The right and wrong ways to get more poor youngsters into the world's great universities
LOTS of rich people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have doubled in real terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened. Even in the recession, they are proving surprisingly resilient (see article). A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty more are clamouring to get their children in.
Row, row together
All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world's best universities. Look at any of the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and (especially) American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting children into those good universities.
In both America and Britain recession has so far done little to dent the demand for private education.
"COMPARED with last year, applications are up 14%," says Mark Stanek, the principal of Ethical Culture Fieldston, a private school in New York. All through the application season he and his board of governors had been on tenterhooks, waiting to see if financial turmoil would cut the number of parents prepared to pay $32,000-34,000 a year to educate a child. Requests for financial help from families already at Fieldston had been rising fast, and the school had scraped together $3m--on top of the $8m it spends on financial aid in a normal year--in the hope of tiding as many over as possible. Nothing is certain until pupils turn up in the autumn. Some parents could get cold feet and sacrifice their deposits. Yet so far the school is more popular than ever.
Across America the picture is patchier, but there is little sign of a recession-induced meltdown in private schooling. Catholic parochial schools and some in rural areas are finding the going harder--but this is merely the acceleration of existing trends. Private schools in big cities with rich residents, and those with famous names and a history of sending graduates to the Ivy League, seem to be doing rather well. "Some parents weighing up their options may be worried about what recession will do to public-school budgets," says Myra McGovern of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), which represents around 1,400 of the country's 30,000-odd private schools. "And some may think that if other people are struggling, that will mean their children are more likely to get in."
Today’s lesson comes courtesy of Bernadette Marso, president of the Leominster Education Association in Massachusetts. Her members just voted down, by a 305-47 margin, a five-year, $856,000 grant from the Advanced Placement Training and Award Program. The program, among other things, pays teachers of Advanced Placement courses bonus money “if they successfully recruit more students to take AP courses and if the students perform well on the end-of-the-year AP exam.”
Some district officials and parents complained about the union decision because the bonuses were just one part of the program, which includes professional development and a subsidy to offset the AP exam fee for the students. But the union stood firmly opposed.
“We understand that some people will not understand the vote, but we confronted this from a union perspective,” Marso said. “We have a fair and equitable contract with the district, and to have a third party come in and start paying certain teachers more money than other hard-working teachers goes against what a union is all about.”
It will be interesting to see how the Madison School District's contract negotiations play out with respect to community 4K partners and other curriculuar issues.
"Education is all about continued improvement, and the status quo is not satisfactory," Evers told the audience at a WisPolitics.com luncheon Tuesday at the Madison Club.
In addition to guiding local schools as they navigate state cuts and an influx of federal stimulus funding, Evers is promoting a single federal test and an overhaul of accountability and assessment standards for public education. Under the new system, which Evers said would be formed quickly over the next few months, the state will be able to consistently measure other educational categories aside from test scores.
The test score measurement mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind law drew criticism from Evers for their incomplete picture of education, but he said the federal standard has done educators "a tremendous favor" by showing disparities between performance of white and non-white students.
He also called for a national standard of testing and curriculum, which he said 46 states had backed. He said that Wisconsin isn't able to truly compare its educational growth to other districts and states because 50 different tests are being administered annually. He also called the current system “economically irrational.”
"Public education, even though it's a state responsibility, is a national endeavor, and we have to view it as such," Evers said. "By doing this, we're going to make our system more transparent."
Perhaps nothing will test the new state accountability system as much as Milwaukee. Evers went to great lengths to discuss the “magic” that teachers work with many less fortunate students in the state’s largest school district, but recognized a graduation rate that, despite increasing to about 70 percent, lags well behind the state average.
Choosing a school for one's child must be one of life's toughest decisions. The consequences can last a lifetime - for one's offspring - and have enormous effects upon their wealth and happiness.
The data on which to base a decision are incomplete - even academic league tables such as our own are only a partial measure of a school's "success" in preparing pupils for adult life - and money, or the lack of it, may limit the range of options.
But if money were no object, would it be better to send your child to an independent, or a state school?
On the face of it, evidence in favour of independent schools looks strong. Independent schools educate only 7 per cent of children in the UK, yet they dominate our rankings. Parents who have the financial resources also vote with their pockets.
According to studies by MTM Consulting, a specialist adviser to independent schools, almost a quarter of families who can afford the fees send one or more children to independent schools.
They are therefore spending a lot of cash to buy a private-sector service in preference to one that, in theory, is available free from the state. These parents clearly believe they are buying some added value.
Madison continued its remarkable population surge with a 10.7% increase from 2000 to 2008, top among Wisconsin cities with a population of 50,000 or more. The capital also led Wisconsin in numerical growth, adding 22,491 people, for a total population of 231,916.
"Madison remains a very desirable place to live, and positive growth rates like this reflect that high quality of life," Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said in a statement.
The new estimates are intriguing, both locally and nationally, because they detail America's population at the cusp of the financial meltdown and in the midst of a housing bust. They're also the last estimates to be released before the 2010 census is taken.
"Big cities are resilient," said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "They've been able to survive in a very difficult economy. These cities have diverse economies that can hold their own in these troubled times."
Madison's enrollment was 24,758 during the 1999-2000 school year and 24,189 during the 2008-2009 academic year. More here and here.
Given Madison's academic orientation (UW-Madison, MATC, Edgewood College, not to mention a number of nearby institutions), our students (every one of them) should have access to world class academics.
Teaching science in a school district that for years paid little attention to it will cost $10 million for textbooks alone over the next six years.
The city school board approved the expense Monday night, and also OK'd $2.1 million for more print and Web-based reading materials for students in pre-K through third grade.
Half of the district's students are held back at least one year by the time they are in third grade because they cannot read well enough.
The effects, district officials say, show up in low graduation rates and high dropout and incarceration rates, costing the city millions a year in lost productivity alone and millions more in prison and jail costs.
Since the federal No Child Left Behind mandate was passed in 2002, science has gotten short shrift here because it is not one of the subjects covered under the state exams. Instead, teachers have focused on math and reading, often doubling up class periods to give students a bigger dose of what they must know to pass.
Vinod Khosla is one of Silicon Valley's most successful VCs. I was at the recent SDForum Visionary Awards where Mr Khosla was one of four winners of the 2009 awards.
His acceptance speech was short and very good. Excellent advice for entrepreneurs.
Also, he talks about failure, which I have long advocated is Silicon Valley's strength.
A couple of years ago I met with a delegation of Russian diplomats, VCs, and government officials. They were visiting Silicon Valley and wanted to meet with me as part of their tour. They were looking for ways to create several silicon valley-like regions in Russia.
During our meeting, I told them I would tell them the secret of Silicon Valley. I paused. They all leaned in a little closer...
Over 38,000 Hong Kong students received their A-level results on Tuesday morning - in one of the most eagerly anticipated but stressful days for young people in the territory.
The Examination Authority said this year there were 38,647 students sitting the A-level exams.
Of these, 8,859 were private candidates and 9,711 were repeating the exams. While most are secondary school pupils, some are also mature students. The exams allow people to enter university.
A total of 17,744 students obtained minimum qualifications for university - a rise of 174 over last year, the authority said.
But it said there were only 14,500 government-funded undergraduate places available at universities. This means 3,244 students will have to attend other tertiary institutions.
• Historical videos from the Library's moving-image collections such as original Edison films and a series of 1904 films from the Westinghouse Works;
Original videos such as author presentations from the National Book Festival, the "Books and Beyond" series, lectures from the Kluge Center, and the "Journeys and Crossings" series of discussions with curators;
Audio podcasts, including series such as "Music and the Brain," slave narratives from the American Folklife Center, and interviews with noted authors from the National Book Festival; and
Classroom and educational materials, including 14 courses from the Catalogers' Learning Workshop
Slick. Download iTunes here. MIT's open courseware, among many others is also available on iTunes U.
For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.
Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.
The Education Department examined all kinds of instruction, and found that the number of valid analyses of elementary and secondary education was too small to have much confidence in the results. But the positive results appeared consistent (and statistically significant) for all types of higher education, undergraduate and graduate, across a range of disciplines, the study said.
A meta-analysis is one that takes all of the existing studies and looks at them for patterns and conclusions that can be drawn from the accumulation of evidence.
The proposal to scrap the exam has been called "controversial" because it has divided education leaders from their usual allies in the Legislature.
While Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg say it's not fair to ask our students to risk giving up their diplomas as a result of state budget cuts, many education leaders fear dismantling a centerpiece of California's educational accountability system that was finally implemented just three years ago after years of delay.
But the debate over the exam, a budget line item that represents less than one-third of 0.001 of a percent of the budget shortfall, distracts from the more important "test" by which the state budget should be judged: the effect it will have on our children and on California's future. By just about any measure, the budget on the table in Sacramento now receives a failing grade.
One benefit of being a poet -- as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host -- is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.
The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city's finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi's) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.
Last year alone the 68-year-old Berkeley professor won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection of poems "Time and Materials." From 1995-97 he was America's poet laureate, and he used the post in innovative ways to promote literacy. From 1997-2000 he wrote the popular "Poet's Choice" column for the Washington Post, introducing readers to his favorite poets each week. His translations of Japanese haiku and the works of Czeslaw Milosz -- the late, great Polish poet, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature -- are read the world over.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Arizona has not violated federal laws that require schools to help students who do not speak, read or write English. Despite the federal mandates, these kids often fail to do well in school. So why haven't schools figured out the best way to teach English to non-English-speaking students?
"The research certainly has in the past shown dual language programs to be the most effective," says Nancy Rowe.
Rowe oversees instruction for English-language learners in Nebraska. She swears that building on a child's native language, rather than discarding it, has proven to be the best way to help kids make the transition to English -- but that's neither here nor there, because the actual programs that schools use have less to do with research than with politics and funding.
The Public Policy Forum's latest report, released today, finds that of the 10 career clusters predicted to grow the most over the next five years, seven include occupations requiring strong backgrounds in science, math, technology, or engineering (STEM). Of the 10 specific jobs predicted to be the fastest growing in the state, eight require STEM skills or knowledge and six require a post-secondary degree.
Do Wisconsin's state educational policies reflect this growing need for STEM-savvy and skilled workers? Are Wisconsin education officials focusing on STEM in a coherent and coordinated way? Our new report probes those issues by examining state workforce development data and reviewing state-level policies and standards that impact STEM education.
We present several policy options that could be considered to build on localized STEM initiatives and establish a greater statewide imperative to prioritize STEM activities in coordination with workforce needs. Those include:
Someone always asks the math teacher, "Am I going to use calculus in real life?" And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no. He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age.
As we approach the end of the first decade of the first century of the third millennium of the Christian Era, the corporate members of the new and influential Partnership for 21st Century Skills have begun to look beyond and behind and beneath their earlier commitment to the education of our students in critical thinking, collaborative problem solving, and global awareness.
It has become obvious to industry leaders that more fundamental than all these new student skills for success in the business world is really Critical Likability. While it may be useful for new employees to know that the world is round, and that solving problems is sometimes easier if others provide help, and that real thinking is superior to not thinking at all, these all pale in importance to whether other people like you or not.
Being a great communicator is important, and reading and writing have received some support from the 21st Century leaders, but those are not of much value if no one likes you and no one wants to hear what you have to say, whether oral or written.
Critical Likability, it must be understood, goes far beyond mere popularity in school, although they share some essential tools and characteristics. Future employees must learn, while they are in school, the basic lessons of smiling, personal hygiene (including the control of bad breath and the release of hydrogen sulfide gas), grooming, table manners, the correct handshake, and at least the basics of dressing for success.
At a more advanced level students should be taught to listen, empathize, seem to agree, laugh, hug (only where clearly appropriate), tell jokes, drink (where and when culturally appropriate), play a social sport (like golf), and generally to be likable in the most efficient and effective senses of that word.
Everyone knows that while space in the curriculum must be arranged for instruction in these Critical Likability skills, that will take some time, and, at least for the immediate future, there will still be courses in history, literature, math, science, languages and all that. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that at least math and science can make a contribution to Critical Employability in our modern economy.
Some of this work is still in the planning stages, as the Seven Techniques of Critical Likability are being developed and forged into new curricula. But the work is underway.
As always there will be rearguard efforts to retard progress in teaching these Critical Likability skills to students. Teachers and conservatives educators will fight to defend the sciences and humanities as necessary to leading the good life, and to preparing students for success in college. But if a person is truly likable, "with a shoeshine and a smile," as Willy Loman used to say, they can make at least part of their way in the business world, no matter how ignorant they are of anything beyond the work of their employer. Cultural literacy may be fine for some people, but Critical Likability is what we want for all of America's future 21st Century employees.
Academic subjects and intellectual work will still be provided in our education system of course, but this is a new century, and new ideas are needed in this Post-Recession economy. Some students will probably always be willing to read nonfiction books and to write serious academic research papers, and some teachers will want to help them with that, and surely room can be found somewhere in our economy, and even in our government, for people who do that sort of thing.
Nevertheless, Americans have always been noted for their high likability skills. People in other countries have often noted that while Americans may be ignorant and thoughtless, they are at least likable, and we should be sure not to give up that important advantage, even as other countries like China, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (CHIKSAT) gradually bury us economically, by means of the complete and rigorous academic schooling they are now requiring millions of their students to complete.
If the 20th century proves to be the last and only American Century, and even if other countries stop lending us their money to prop us up, at least we will slide back behind other nations and other cultures with a nice (likable) smile on our faces...
Perfect Failure Commencement Address to Graduating Class of the Buckley School
Paul Tudor Jones, via a kind reader's email:
When I was asked to give the commencement address to a graduating class of 9th graders, I jumped at the chance. You see, I have four teenagers of my own and I feel like this is the point in my life when I am supposed to tell them something profound. So thank you Buckley community for giving me this opportunity. I tried this speech out on them last night and am happy to report that none of them fell asleep until I was three quarters done.
When composing this message I searched my memory for my same experience back in 1969 when I was sitting right where you are. I realized that I could hardly remember one single speaker from my junior high or high school days. Now that could be my age. I'm old enough now that some days I can't remember how old I am. But it could also have been a sign of the times. Remember, I was part of the student rebellion, and we did not listen to anything that someone over 30 said because they were just too clueless. Or so we thought.
Anyway, as I sat there considering this speech further, I suddenly had a flashback of the one speaker who I actually did remember from youthful days. He was a Shakespearean actor who came to our school to extol the virtues of William Shakespeare. He started out by telling us that Shakespeare was not about poetry or romance or love, but instead, was all about battle, and fighting and death and war. Then he pulled out a huge sword which he began waving over the top of his head as he described various bloody conflicts that were all part and parcel of Shakespeare's plays. Now being a 15-year old testosterone laden student at an all boys school, I thought this was pretty cool. I remember thinking, "Yea, this guy gets it. Forget about the deep meaning and messages in the words, let's talk about who's getting the blade."
As you can see, I have a similar sword which I am going to stop waving over my head now, because A) I think you are permanently scarred, and B) the headmaster looks like he is about to tackle me and C) some of you, I can tell, are way too excited about this sword, and you're scaring me a little.
I'm here with you young men today because your parents wanted me to speak to you about service--that is, serving others and giving back to the broader community for the blessings that you have received in your life. But that is a speech for a later time in your life. Don't get me wrong, serving others is really, really important. It truly is the secret to happiness in life. I swear to God. Money won't do it. Fame won't do it. Nor will sex, drugs, homeruns or high achievement. But now I am getting preachy.
Today, I want to talk to you about the dirtiest word that any of you 9th graders know. It's a word that is so terrible that your parents won't talk about it; your teachers won't talk about it; and you certainly don't ever want to dwell on it. But this is a preparatory school, and you need to be prepared to deal with this phenomenon because you will experience it. That is a guarantee. Every single one of you will experience it not once but multiple times, and every adult in this room has had to deal with this in its many forms and manifestations. It's the "F" word.
FAILURE. Failure that is so mortifying and so devastating that it makes you try to become invisible. It makes you want to hide your face, your soul, your being from everyone else because of the shame. Trust me, boys--if you haven't already tasted that, you will. I am sure most of you here already have. AND IT IS HARD. I know this firsthand, but I also know that failure was a key element to my life's journey.
My first real failure was in 1966 in the 6th grade. I played on our basketball team, and I was the smallest and youngest kid on the team. It was the last game of the season and I was the only player on the squad that had not scored a point all season. So in the second half the coach directed all the kids to throw me the ball when I went in, and for me to shoot so that I would score. The problem was that Coach Clark said it loud enough that every person in the stands could hear it as well as every member of the opposing team. Going into the fourth quarter, our team was well ahead, Coach Clark inserted me and thus, began the worst eight minutes of my life up until that point. Every time I got the ball, the entire other team would rush towards me, and on top of that, that afternoon I was the greatest brick layer the world had ever seen. The game ended. I had missed five shots, and the other team erupted in jubilation that I had not scored. I ran out of the gym as fast as I could only to bump into two of the opposing team's players who proceeded to laugh and tease and ridicule me. I cried and hid in the bathroom. Well, that passed, and I kept trying team sports, but I was just too small to really compete. So in the 10th grade, I took up boxing where suddenly everyone was my size and weight. I nearly won the Memphis Golden Gloves my senior year in high school and did win the collegiate championship when I was 19. Standing in the middle of that ring and getting that trophy, I still remember looking around for those two little kids who had run me into that bathroom back in the 6th grade, because I was going to knock their blocks off. That's one problem with failure. It can stay with you for a very long time.
The next time the dragon of failure reared his ugly head was in 1978. I was working in New Orleans for one of the greatest cotton traders of all time, Eli Tullis. Now, New Orleans is an unbelievable city. It has the Strawberry Festival, the Jazz Festival, the Sugar Bowl, Mardi Gras, and just about every other excuse for a party that you can ever imagine. Heck, in that town, waking up was an excuse to party. I was still pretty fresh out of college, and my mentality, unfortunately, was still firmly set on fraternity row. It was a Friday morning in June, and I had been out literally all night with a bunch of my friends. My job was to man the phone all day during trading hours and call cotton prices quotes from New York into Mr. Tullis' office. Around noon, things got quiet on the New York floor, and I got overly drowsy. The next thing I remember was a ruler prying my chin off my chest, and Mr. Tullis calling to me, "Paul. Paul." My eyes fluttered opened and as I came to my senses, he said to me, "Son, you are fired." I'd never been so shocked or hurt in my life. I literally thought I was going to die for I had just been sacked by an iconic figure in my business.
My shame turned into anger. I was not angry at Mr. Tullis for he was right. I was angry at myself. But I knew I was not a failure, and I swore that I was going to prove to myself that I could be a success. I called a friend and secured a job on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange and moved to the City. Today, I will put my work ethic up against anybody's on Wall Street. Failure will give you a tattoo that will stay with you your whole life, and sometimes it's a really good thing. One other side note, to this day, I've never told my parents that I got fired. I told them I just wanted to try something different. Shame can be a lifetime companion for which you better prepare yourself.
Now, there are two types of failure you will experience in life. The first type is what I just described and comes from things you can control. That is the worst kind. But there is another form of failure that will be equally devastating to you, and that is the kind beyond your control. This happened to me in 1982. I had met a very lovely young Harvard student from Connecticut, dated her for two years then asked her to marry me right after she graduated from college. We set a date; we sent out the invitations; and all was fantastic until one month before the wedding when her father called me. He said, "Paul, my daughter sat me down this afternoon, and she doesn't know how to tell you this, but she is really unhappy and thinks it's time for you two to take a break." At first I thought he was joking because he was a very funny guy. Then he said, "No, she is serious about this." I thought to myself, "Oh, my God, I am being dumped at the altar." I'm from Tennessee. Getting dumped at the altar was the supreme social embarrassment of that time. It was a big deal. When all my family and friends found out, they were ready to re-start the Civil War on the spot. I had to remind them that the last Civil War didn't go so well for our side, and I didn't like our chances in a rematch. The reality was that I was a 26-year old knucklehead, and since all my friends were getting married, I kind of felt it was time for me to do the same thing. And that was the worst reason in the world to get married. I actually think she understood that and to a certain extent spared me what would have been a very tough marriage. Instead, I've had an incredible marriage for twenty years to a wonderful wife, and we have four kids that I love more than anything on Earth. Some things happen to you that at the time will make you feel like the world is coming to an end, but in actuality, there is a very good reason for it. You just can't see it and don't know it. When one door closes, another will open, but standing in that hallway can be hell. You just have to persevere. Quite often that dragon of failure is really chasing you off the wrong road and on to the right one.
By now you are thinking, how much longer is this loser going to keep on talking. My kids are all teenagers, and whenever I'm telling them something I think is important, they often wonder the same thing. But the main point I want you to take away today is that some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure. This touches upon the original reason I was invited here today. In 1986, I adopted a class of Bedford Stuyvesant 6th graders and promised them if they graduated from high school, I would pay for their college. For those of you who don't know, Bed-Stuy is one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods. Even the rats are scared to go there at night. Statistically about 8% of the class I adopted would graduate from high school, so my intervention was designed to get them all into college. For the next six years, I did everything I could for them. I spent about $5,000 annually per student taking them on ski trips, taking them to Africa, taking them to my home in Virginia on the weekends, having report card night, hiring a counselor to help coordinate afternoon activities and doing my heartfelt best to get them ready for college. Six years later, a researcher from Harvard contacted me and asked if he could study my kids as part of an overall assessment of what then was called the "I Have a Dream" Program. I said sure. He came back to me a few months later and shared some really disturbing statistics. 86 kids that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years were statistically no different than kids from a nearby school that did not have the services our afterschool program provided. There was no difference in graduation rates, dropout rates, academic scores, teenage pregnancies, and the list went on. The only thing that we managed to do was get three times as many of our kids into college because we were offering scholarships whereas the other schools were not. But in terms of preparing these kids for college, we completely and totally failed. Boy, did this open my eyes. That was the first real-time example for me of how intellectual capital will always trump financial capital. In other words, I had the money to help these kids, but it was useless because I didn't have the brains to help them. I had tried to succeed with sheer force of will and energy and financial resources. I learned that this was not enough. What I needed were better defined goals, better metrics, and most importantly, more efficient technologies that would enable me to achieve those goals. What that whole experience taught me was that starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too late. An afterschool program was actually putting a band-aid on a much deeper structural issue, and that was that our public education system was failing us. So in 2000, along with the greatest educator I knew, a young man named Norman Atkins, we started the Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant for boys. We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city. Now that was an ambitious goal but last year in 2008, Excellence ranked #1 out of 543 public schools in New York City for reading and math proficiency for any third and fourth grade cohort, and our school was 98% African American boys. We never would have done that had I not failed almost 15 years earlier.
So here is the point: you are going to meet the dragon of failure in your life. You may not get into the school you want or you may get kicked out of the school you are in. You may get your heart broken by the girl of your dreams or God forbid, get into an accident beyond your control. But the point is that everything happens for a reason. At the time it may not be clear. And certainly the pain and the shame are going to be overwhelming and devastating. But just as sure as the sun comes up, there will come a time on the next day or the next week or the next year, when you will grab that sword and point it at that dragon and tell him, "Be gone, dragon. Tarry with me and I will cut your head off. For I must find the destination God and life hold in store for me!" Young men of Buckley, good luck on your journey...
Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low- income families, had earned the city's highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.
Botel says a union official replied: "That's not our problem."
Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.
Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English, who was at the meeting, denied Botel's account. But, she added, teacher salaries and working conditions are her priority as a negotiator. I think the union leader is right.
New friendships bloom as an L.A. judge and his college professor wife decide to foot the bill for a talented boy to attend the private school, which his mom can't afford.
When David and Jacki Horwitz read an article in The Times about Lorelei Oliver's struggle to find a good school for her son Kamal Key, their response was immediate: Perhaps, they inquired, there was a fund to which they could contribute to help the 12-year-old, who had been admitted to a prestigious but costly private campus?
Three weeks and several phone calls and e-mails later, Kamal and his family sat in the backyard of the Horwitzes' spacious Pacific Palisades home, laughing as if they had known each other for years. The couple's initial offer of a modest donation for a little boy who was a complete stranger has led to the unexpected meeting of two families whose lives may now be intertwined for years.
The High Mileage Vehicle Club, which designs and builds cars to get the best fuel mileage possible, has taken on new meaning with higher gas prices.
In addition, the club at Evansville High School is having a good run in the three years since it started.
The club's car, which was equipped with a hydrogen booster and got nearly 170 mpg, was one of more than 20 entered in the Super High Mileage Vehicle Competition at the Dunn County Fairgrounds this spring. It took first place in mileage in the concept class and first place among all cars in the other categories as well as being the overall grand champion.
Last year, the club's car -- which had an electric motor and got 498 mpg -- took second place in the individual categories and first place overall. It also earned $1,500 in scholarships, which were distributed among four members. Scholarships were not given out to contest winners this year.
While this year's car got fewer miles per gallon, the students decided to try using a hydrogen booster, which makes fuel burn more completely, because they wanted to experiment with something different.
In the late '90s, software entrepreneur John Zitzner was pretty close to being bankrupt. Yet within six months -- in one of those typical "holy crap" dotcom-era stories -- Zitzner had sold his company and become "a very modest millionaire." Fantastic. And in one of those typical "What do I do with all this money?" stories, he decided to help make the world a better place -- specifically by co-founding a charter school in Cleveland. (Read TIME's report: "How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools.")
That was three summers ago. Fast-forward to last Monday, when Zitzner was in the audience in Washington as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed to a gathering of charter-school operators to "adapt your educational model to turning around our lowest-performing schools." For months now, Duncan has talked about closing 5,000 -- or about 5% -- of the nation's lowest-performing public schools. By throwing down the gauntlet to charter schools, Duncan is challenging an industry that has become very proficient at opening up brand-new schools, but has very little experience in going into a preexisting school and turning those kids from low performers into high-quality students. But Zitzner, whose Entrepreneurship Preparatory has about 200 students in grades 6 to 8, can't wait to dive in. In the past three years his students have gone from fairly abysmal test results to scoring in the top quartile on the Ohio standardized test, and he doesn't see why that model can't be replicated among other underperforming students. "Charter-school people are entrepreneurs -- we like challenges, and this industry needs people who can make order out of chaos."
Tom Menino, the longtime Democratic mayor of this city, is not known for rocking the boat or for eloquence. But earlier this month he stunned many in the city when he gave a powerful speech about school reform.
The speech took aim at the lack of progress in dozens of low-performing, inner-city Boston public schools, many of which have not met adequate yearly progress for five years running.
"To get the results we seek -- at the speed we want -- we must make transformative changes that boost achievement for students, improve quality choices for parents, and increase opportunities for teachers," Mr. Menino said. "We need to empower our educators to quickly innovate and implement what works." With that, Mr. Menino abandoned nearly two decades of personal opposition to nonunion charter schools, which have been bitterly resisted by Massachusetts teachers unions and their political allies. "I believe that the increased flexibility that charters provide can . . . help us close the achievement gap," he declared.
Washington--Ten moderate Senate Democrats today sent a letter to President Barack Obama voicing support for his key education goals and pledging to "lend our voices to the debate as proponents of education reform."
The letter was initiated by Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), leaders of the Senate Moderate Dems Working Group, and signed by seven of their moderate colleagues.
"As legislators, we believe we must embrace promising new approaches to education policy if we are to prepare our children to fill the jobs of the future," they wrote to President Obama. "By 2016, four out of every 10 new American jobs will require at least some advanced education or training. To retain our global economic leadership, we share your sense of urgency in moving an education reform agenda through Congress."
Saying that "now is the time to explore new paths and reject stale thinking," the moderate Democrats commended President Obama for his focus on teacher quality and noted a recent report by McKinsey and Company that highlights the achievement gaps that persist among various economic, regional and racial backgrounds in the United States and the gaps between American students and their peers in other industrialized nations. Based on this report, the senators noted that "had the United States closed the gap in education achievement with better-performing nations like Finland, Iceland, and Poland, our GDP could have been up to $2.3 trillion higher last year."
The senators expressed support for new pay-for-performance teacher incentives and expansions of effective public charter schools. They also endorsed the Obama administration's desire to extend student learning time to stay globally competitive and called for investments in state-of-the-art data systems so school systems can track student performance across grades, schools, towns and teachers.
Other signatories on the letter include Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA) and Herb Kohl (D-WI).
"Our nation must confront the growing challenges of an increasingly competitive global economy: an outdated health care system in need of reform, an energy policy requiring an overhaul, and an economy still on the road to recovery," the 10 senators wrote. "We will not be equal to the extraordinary task before us without a public school system that offers our children the tools needed to reach their potential."
The text of the letter to President Obama is below. Click here for a signed copy.
June 25th, 2009
The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
There is no issue more intricately connected to the future prosperity of our nation than the quality of our public schools. While the latest data show that elementary school students have made promising gains in reading and math, academic achievement is far too low for too many students and over 1.2 million students drop out of high school every year.
As members of the Moderate Democrats Working Group in the United States Senate, we are writing to offer our cooperation in developing legislation to enact a number of ambitious, innovative proposals in your education reform agenda. We plan to lend our voices to the debate as proponents of education reform as we move through this year's appropriations process and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
We are committed to addressing the educational achievement gaps that persist among groups of various economic, regional and racial backgrounds and between the United States and other industrialized nations. These achievement gaps have imposed "the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession" on our country, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Company. Had the United States closed the gap in education achievement with better-performing nations like Finland, Iceland, and Poland, our GDP could have been up to $2.3 trillion higher last year, the report finds.
Solving today's economic challenges means creating new jobs and investing in the growth industries of tomorrow. As legislators, we believe we must embrace promising new approaches to education policy if we are to prepare our children to fill the jobs of the future. By 2016, four out of every 10 new American jobs will require at least some advanced education or training. To retain our global economic leadership, we share your sense of urgency in moving an education reform agenda through Congress.
We support action on a number of education reform proposals put forth in your Fiscal Year 2010 budget proposal. We commend you for the emphasis you have placed on teacher quality. Every teacher touches the lives of countless children, and every adult remembers their favorite teachers and the impact they had. The research confirms what our intuition tells us: nothing has a greater impact on outcomes in the classroom than the quality of our teachers. We must do more to recruit, prepare and reward outstanding teachers, and part of that means overhauling the way we compensate them. Most professions recognize and reward better performance with better pay, but teacher compensation is based almost exclusively on degree attainment and years of service.
We therefore share your support for dedicating increased resources to the Teacher Incentive Fund, which will spur states to develop new ways to identify and retain excellent teachers and attract new talent to the profession. We believe that resources from this fund should support states and districts that recognize student achievement to be the most important indicator of an educator's performance. We look forward to working collaboratively with teachers to develop these new compensation systems--a critical ingredient to their success.
Second, we support expanding the number of effective public charter schools. Like traditional public schools, charter schools vary greatly in quality. We should encourage the replication of the highest-performing public charters and ensure real accountability measures for those who oversee them. We all have charter schools in our states that have demonstrated--through innovative and student-centered approaches--that every child can learn, regardless of socio-economic background. Conversely, charter schools that consistently fail our children should be shut down.
Third, we support your Administration's desire to extend student learning time. The American school year is based on the old agrarian calendar, which gave children two months off to help work on the family farm. Students lose an average of 2.6 months of grade-level equivalency in math skills over the summer --a phenomenon referred to as the "summer slide." While American boys and girls slide, students in China receive an additional 40 days of classroom instruction. We cannot expect to compete with emerging nations when we devote less time to educating our next generation.
Fourth, we believe our education reform agenda should be driven by accurate information, which will require the development of state-of-the-art data systems. Many schools, educators and policymakers currently lack information critical to informed decision-making. We must invest in new data systems that track individual student performance across grades, schools, towns and teachers. Such systems will allow us to examine the pedagogical background of our most successful teachers and find new ways to support that training. Our goal is to achieve the capacity to view, with the click of a button, the path every child has taken through their academic life, linking their achievements and setbacks to every school and classroom they pass through.
We have no illusions that the road to education reform will be free of obstacles. However, we pledge to work in the Senate to lead the fight for accountability and high standards for all students. Every child can learn, and expectations matter. We should endeavor to fulfill the potential of all of our young people, not merely those born to greater privilege. While there are many practical steps we can and must take to strengthen our nation's education policy, now is the time to explore new paths and reject stale thinking. Our country's economic well-being depends upon the quality of the education our children are receiving in classrooms across America today.
Our nation must confront the growing challenges of an increasingly competitive global economy: an outdated health care system in need of reform, an energy policy requiring an overhaul, and an economy still on the road to recovery. We will not be equal to the extraordinary task before us without a public school system that offers our children the tools needed to reach their potential. We thank you for leading us down the path to education reform and stand ready to contribute our ideas and energy as we work together to enact an agenda for change.
Caroline Maria McNeal of Huntingdon is accused of using the passwords of three co-workers without their knowledge to tamper with dozens of grades and test scores between May 2006 and July 2007 at Huntingdon Area High School in central Pennsylvania, the state attorney general's office said.
McNeal, 39, is alleged to have improved her daughter Brittany's grades and reduced those of two classmates to enhance Brittany's standing in the 2008 graduating class.
School officials corrected the grades before the students graduated, prosecutors said.
The Rhode Island House Finance Committee budget unveiled last week slashed $1.5 million for two new charter schools in Central Falls and Cumberland, both of which would serve minority students.
This is a tough year, and cuts must be made. But slashing these funds -- a tiny part of a proposed $7.76 billion budget -- makes little sense, given that freezing out charter schools would put in jeopardy federal aid under the Race to the Top Program, a $5 billion Washington initiative that rewards innovation in education. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said on Monday that Rhode Island may be putting itself at "at a huge competitive disadvantage" for the money.
Innovation in education may be why the two charters, the Mayoral Academy and the Segue Institute for Learning, were spurned. Teachers unions testified against the proposed Mayoral Academy for fear that it would threaten their economic interests, since the school would be permitted to hire and fire teachers without union red tape. A similar school in Harlem has done wonders in helping minority students achieve at a level comparable with students in excellent suburban schools.
Every year, Jay Mathews compiles The Challenge Index, a ranking of schools based on a simple formula - the number of AP, IB, and other college-level tests given out at any given high school divided by the total number of graduating seniors from that school year. The index is not meant to be comprehensive but to give parents, teachers, and students an idea of how much a high school challenges its students.
This week, the blog Schools Matter featured an essay by user teacherken calling foul on Jay's index. Teacherken, who says he is a high school AP U.S. Government and Politics teacher and actually graded AP tests this year, makes a case against The Challenge Index, arguing that schools challenge students in many more ways than just through AP and IB tests:
To make classes more manageable, administrators have enrolled some especially challenging students in Locke 4, an academy whose Opportunities program consists of three classrooms set aside for students who are doing poorly or displaying serious behavior problems. The program also accepts students returning after being convicted of crimes.
On a recent Monday, 14 students sat in an Opportunities class with one teacher and an aide -- Green Dot wanted especially small adult-to-student ratios for these youths. The posted class rules were simple: Stay seated during class; complete all of your work; be polite and respectful.
These expectations failed to achieve traction with several students, including a recently arriving freshman.
"Do you need help?" the teacher asked him.
"You need help," he retorted, looking around for admiration from his peers. "You know, lady, I don't like you."
The group was assigned to organize an essay on juvenile justice after reviewing case studies of four young offenders. If students actually write the essay, they'll get extra credit.
One table over from the ninth-grader, a wiry boy with slicked-back hair said he had landed in Locke 4 after punching a school security guard. He considers gang membership necessary to survive: "That's almost part of life."
Then he paused and offered something close to an endorsement of the new Locke: "Other schools, you have your enemies all the time. In this school everybody gets along. People talk to Bloods and Crips."
RACE AND ACHIEVEMENT
Rigor Recommendation: Develop a clear, consistent operational/working definition of rigor to be used at ETHS.
Supporting Detail:
Communicate the definition of rigor to all ETHS stakeholders. (Means of communication to include, e.g., ETHS website/newsletters and displaying definition of rigor in every classroom and in other locations.)
Ensure a common understanding of rigor by other means, including providing opportunities for all ETHS stakeholders to discuss and better understand the meaning of rigor and what it entails in different ETHS departments, the different expectations associated with rigor by different ETHS stakeholders, and the varying responsibilities of ETHS stakeholders to ensure that rigor is experience by students.
Identify the components of a rigorous classroom and provide illustrations thereof for each ETHS department, including curriculum/assignments, instructional techniques, behavioral expectations, and classroom dynamics/interaction.
Ensure that rigor is provided and experienced in ETHS classrooms by means of classroom observations conducted by outside experts andlor by other appropriate means.
Create and utilize diagnostics to monitor/assess the extent to which rigor actually is being provided at ETHS, to enable teachers to improve the rigor of their classes, and to identify areas where other improvement(s) may be needed. Such diagnostics should include, e. g., assessments that teachers can use in their classrooms to evaluate students' experience of rigor and other questionnaires to be completed by students.
resident Obama, in his May 21 speech at the National Archives Museum in Washington said that "we can defeat Al Qaeda ...if we stay true to who we are...anchored in our timeless ideals." A much more somber note, however, was in a warning by retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter the day before at Georgetown University Law Center.
Deeply concerned at how little knowledge Americans have of how this republic works, Justice Souter cited as an example that the majorities of the public can't name -- according to surveys -- the three branches of government.
Who we are, Souter continued, "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood." What is needed, he said, "is the restoration of the self-identity of the American people. ... When I was a kid in the eighth and ninth grades, everybody took civics. That's no longer true. (Former Justice) Sandra Day O'Connor says 50 percent of schools teach neither history nor civics." Justice Souter continued that when he was in school, "civics was as dull as dishwater, but we knew the structure of government."
This alert to the citizenry was almost entirely ignored by the press.
Admirably, O'Connor is trying to engage students in learning who they are as Americans through her Web site: Our Courts - 21st Century Civics (www.ourcourts.org). The site asks students what part of government they would most want to be a part of. And she invites teachers to click and "find lesson plans that fit your classroom needs."
"I'm sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card -- although . . . there'll be all kinds of protections -- but we're going to have to do it. It's the only way," Schumer said. "The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration."
Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.
Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far.
Microsoft points to the school's rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project's failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform--and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.
The U.S. Supreme Court took a major step toward ending a 17-year legal battle today, deciding Arizona has done enough to help students who haven't learned to speak, read or write English.
The justices reversed the decision of the lower courts and sent the case, known as Flores vs. Arizona, back with instructions to consider improvements the state has made in the way schools teach English learners.
"This is a major step to stop federal trial judges from micromanaging state education systems," said state schools superintendent Tom Horne, who asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the case. "This affirms that important value that we the people control our government and our elected representatives and not ruled over by an aristocracy of lifetime federal judges."
The Supreme Court decided the lower courts concentrated too narrowly on how much the state spent to help language learners and allowed that increases in overall school funding could be considered as a boost to help schools take the appropriate action called for in federal law.
The decision did not weaken Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974, as some civil rights attorneys feared. But the justices' said simply complying with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 did help to satisfy the requirements in the 1974 law to "take appropriate action" to help students overcome language barriers.
Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 245-247
Ironically, "outcomes" were first raised to prominence by leaders of the conservative educational reform movement of the 1980s. Championed by Chester E. Finn, Jr. among others, reformers argued that the obsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought, staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the educational pipeline. Reformers insisted that schools could be made more effective and accountable by shifting emphasis to outcomes (what children actually learned). Finn's emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitly to make schools more accountable by creating specific and verifiable educational objectives in subjects like math, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by the conservatives. Indeed, conservatives were so successful in advancing their case that the term "outcomes" has become a virtually irresistible tool for academic reform.
The irony is that, in practice, the educational philosophies known as Outcome Based Education have little if anything in common with those original goals. To the contrary, OBE--with its hostility to competition, traditional measures of progress, and to academic disciplines in general--can more accurately be described as part of a counterreformation, a reaction against those attempts to make schools more accountable and effective. The OBE being sold to schools represents, in effect, a semantic hijacking.
"The conservative education reform of the 1980s wanted to focus on outcomes (i.e. knowledge gained) instead of inputs (i.e. dollars spent)," notes former Education Secretary William Bennett. "The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent." [emphasis added] Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE's shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an example of a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the original reformers had in mind), Bennett cites the Advanced Placement Examinations, which give students credit for courses based on their knowledge and proficiency in a subject area, rather than on their accumulated "seat-time" in a classroom.
In contrast, OBE programs are less interested in whether students know the origins of the Civil War or the author of The Tempest than whether students have met such outcomes as "establishing priorities to balance multiple life roles" (a goal in Pennsylvania) or "positive self-concept" (a goal in Kentucky). Where the original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult if not impossible to objectively measure and compare educational progress. In large part, this is because instead of clearly stated, verifiable outcomes, OBE goals are often diffuse, fuzzy, and ill-defined--loaded with educationist jargon like "holistic learning," "whole-child development," and "interpersonal competencies."
Where original reformers emphasized schools that work, OBE is experimental. Despite the enthusiasm of educationists and policymakers for OBE, researchers from the University of Minnesota concluded that "research documenting its effects is fairly rare." At the state level, it was difficult to find any documentation of whether OBE worked or not and the information that was available was largely subjective. Professor Jean King of the University of Minnesota's College of Education describes support for the implementation of OBE as being "almost like a religion--that you believe in this and if you believe in it hard enough, it will be true." And finally, where the original reformers saw an emphasis on outcomes as a way to return to educational basics, OBE has become, in Bennett's words, "a Trojan Horse for social engineering, an elementary and secondary school version of the kind of 'politically correct' thinking that has infected our colleges and universities."
=============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
or some time, coaches have grumbled that the AAU's emphasis on building stars and playing games over practicing produces a lot of talented prospects who have great physical skills but limited knowledge of the fundamentals. Now some players are speaking out.
By the middle of the last NBA season, as concerns build about his dwindling playing time and rough transition to the NBA, last year's No. 2 overall pick, Michael Beasley of the Miami Heat, finally conceded a fundamental flaw: No one, at any level in his basketball career, had asked him to play defense. And especially not in AAU. "If you're playing defense in AAU, you don't need to be playing," he says. "I've honestly never seen anyone play defense in AAU."
An AAU official declined to comment for this article.
The chorus of critics ranges from AAU player Alex Oriakhi, a McDonald's All-American center who plans to play for the University of Connecticut, who says shooting guards he's seen in AAU are in for a "rude awakening" to USA Basketball officials and NBA coaches.
Founded in 1888, the AAU's first goal was to represent American sports internationally. AAU teams blossomed in many sports, and the organization became a driving force in preparing Olympic athletes. In 1978, the Amateur Sports Act established a governing body for American Olympic sports, usurping the AAU's role as an Olympic launching pad. Its most notable sport today is basketball, where it counts Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal and LeBron James among its alumni.
I am no NBA fan, having attended my last game, in I think, 1972 - a Milwaukee Bucks playoff game. A one dimensional game is not all that interesting, particularly via sky high ticket prices.
Vineet Nayar is reported to have called Americans graduates "unemployable"; the CEO of IT services vendor HCL Technologies was speaking recently in New York. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers debate racism, stereotyping, sweatshops, and H1B visas.
By Richi Jennings, your humble blogwatcher, who has selected these bloggy tidbits for your enjoyment. Not to mention the best gaming toilets...
Rob Preston reports inflammatory comments with dignity:
Last year, Joseline and Mirelyne De Leon attended free summer school in downtown Los Angeles while their parents worked. It provided more than just a haven during the day. It also gave the two girls, 13 and 10 years old, the academic help they needed to bolster their grades for the following school year.
This year, budget cuts have forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to drop summer classes for elementary- and middle-school students, leaving their father, Rudy De Leon, trying to scrape up the money to pay for a few weeks at a private program that charges $50 a week per student. He is glad his daughters will receive some teaching over the summer. But they won't receive school credit, and Mr. De Leon worries that they might fall behind.
Sierra Everett, a student at Lawrence Central High School in Indiana, had to pay for an online geometry course after her district canceled summer school .
"We'll try to do the best we can," he says.
Families across the country are facing similar dilemmas as state and local budget cuts are hitting school districts hard--forcing many of them to make cuts in summer programs that many educators consider critical to students' academic success.
For the past nearly two months I've been working towards some sort of new normal as I recover from and work with my doctors to figure out how to live with the illness I never dreamed would turn our family life so utterly on its head. Since then we've been taking one day at a time, each day assessing whether I need to spend extra time in bed on pain killers to get over a bad migraine and whether my husband has to once again skip his work obligations to take the children to one of their activities or take me to a doctor's appointment. Our parents have all spent time with us, each taking a one to two week shift caring for our household. It's been an unexpected silver lining for us to have so much time with them, and they give my husband a break to get some of his own work done and get back to academic life. He's taken over as principle provider of domestic services and chauffer, as well as breadwinner, and he said recently that he's looking forward to going back to work full-time so he can have a vacation -- he's exhausted! With our families here, I get many greatly appreciated offers to "just go lie down, I'll take care of this" though it makes it a little more difficult to find 'normal!'
Since my last post, my illness has been diagnosed at different times as brain stem migraine and viral encephalitis, for which I spent 12 days in hospital on a course of intra-venous anti-viral drugs. I should add that despite my tongue-and-cheek tone about the diagnoses, I've been very happy with the excellent medical care I've received and the thoughtful consideration my doctors have made for the fact that I'm the mother of two young children. When they saw how difficult it was for our family to be separated with me in hospital, they arranged for day passes and made accommodations for me to be temporarily unplugged from the IV to visit home. Yesterday was a long awaited appointment with a second neurologist who weighed in on my crazy collection of symptoms with yet a new diagnosis: syndrome of headache, neurological deficits, and cerebrospinal fluid lymphocytosis (or HaNDL, which almost sounds like it was invented as a catch-all for me and my symptoms). Along with the white blood cells in my spinal fluid, migraines, and dizziness, I also have entertaining colorful hallucinations (fairies, dragons, iridescent butterflies, and hammering cartoon characters) which have become an unlikely family source of creativity as I describe the latest over breakfast and my son later reproduces them, based on my descriptions, in his drawing journal at school. Fortunately his teacher is aware of my neurological problems, since I've not yet received any worried phone calls or visits from social workers to investigate my seven-year-old son's involvement with mind-altering drugs as the inspiration for his art.
Separately, Pearson said it will also buy a 17% stake in TutorVista, a Bangalore-based online tutoring company that links Indian tutors with U.S. students.
TutorVista will issue new shares to Pearson as part of its third round of fundraising. It has already received funding from Manipal Educational and Medical Group and private equity fund LightSpeed Venture Partners.
Pearson says its stake in TutorVista will strengthen its position as a supplier of education tools in the U.S., TutorVista's core market.
AMERICA'S universities are the best in the world, but the kindest verdict on its schools is "could do better". It spends enough on them--around the rich-world average of 3.8% of GDP--but its pupils do poorly in tests of reading, writing and mathematics, and too many drop out before completing school. Teaching attracts few ambitious and able graduates; school leaders have little autonomy. The solution, to free-marketeers, seems obvious. Give taxpayers' money not to a state-run monopoly, but to independent schools.
Since Minnesota started the experiment in 1991, most states have introduced independent, or charter, schools in some form. Evaluations have been broadly positive, but their enemies, including the politically powerful teachers' unions, can fairly claim that more research is needed. Do charter schools' pupils do better at tests because they have been coached intensively at the expense of a broad education? Do charters mean the most motivated students cluster in a few schools, to the detriment of the majority? Do they kick out--or coax out--the toughest to teach?
A team of very smart teenagers has set out to discover ways that maggots might make the world a better place. Two are from Loudoun County. Two live more than 9,000 miles away in Singapore.
To many U.S. politicians, educators and business leaders, Singapore's students have become a symbol of the fierce competition the nation faces from high achievers in Asia. But these four students call themselves "international collaborators" and friends.
Even as globalization has fed worries about whether U.S. students can keep up with the rest of the world, it also has spawned classroom connections across oceans. Teachers, driven by a desire to help students navigate a world made smaller by e-mail, wikis and teleconferences, say lessons once pulled mainly from textbooks can come to life through real-world interactions.
"When we talk on Facebook," Joanne Guidry, 17, one of the researchers at Loudoun's Academy of Science, said of her Singaporean peers, "you can't tell they are halfway around the world."
A persistent gap in academic achievement between children in the United States and their counterparts in other countries deprived the US economy of as much as $2.3 trillion in economic output in 2008, McKinsey research finds.1 Moreover, each of the long-standing achievement gaps among US students of differing ethnic origins, income levels, and school systems represents hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized economic gains. Together, these disturbing gaps underscore the staggering economic and social cost of underutilized human potential. Yet they also create room for hope by suggesting that the widespread application of best practices could secure a better, more equitable education for the country's children--along with substantial economic gains.
How has educational achievement changed in the United States since 1983, when the publication of the seminal US government report A Nation at Risk2 sounded the alarm about the "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools? To learn the answer, we interviewed leading educational researchers around the world, assessed the landscape of academic research and educational-achievement data, and built an economic model that allowed us to examine the relationships among educational achievement (represented by standardized test scores), the earnings potential of workers, and GDP.
We made three noteworthy assumptions: test scores are the best available measure of educational achievement; educational achievement and attainment (including milestones such as graduation rates) are key drivers in hiring and are positively correlated with earnings; and labor markets will hire available workers with higher skills and education. While these assumptions admittedly simplify the socioeconomic complexities and uncertainties, they allowed us to draw meaningful conclusions about the economic impact of educational gaps in the United States.
Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment ranks the education levels of 15-year-olds around the world. The most recent test, in 2006, brought back results from 30 industrialized nations that were hardly inspiring for U.S. teachers and parents. American students' science scores lagged behind those of their counterparts in 20 countries, including Finland, Japan, Germany and Belgium. The numbers from the math test were even worse: The U.S. came in 25th. The "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools -- famously so described in 1983 by a government report called "A Nation at Risk" -- would now appear to be about chin-high.
In response to "A Nation at Risk," Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," which identified special-interest groups -- mainly teachers unions -- as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with "Liberating Learning," a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions' political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.
History has had no shortage of outstanding female mathematicians, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Ada Lovelace, and yet no woman has ever won the Fields medal - the Nobel prize of the maths world. The fact that men outnumber women in the highest echelons of mathematics (as in science, technology and engineering) has always been controversial, particularly for the persistent notion that this disparity is down to an innate biological advantage.
AdaLovelace.jpgNow, two professors from the University of Wisconsin - Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz - have reviewed the strong evidence that at least in maths, the gender gap is down to social and cultural factors that can help or hinder women from pursuing the skills needed to master mathematics.
The duo of Janets have published a review that tackles the issue from three different angles. They considered the presence of outstanding female mathematicians. Looking beyond individuals, they found that gender differences in maths performance don't really exist in the general population, with girls now performing as well as boys in standardised tests. Among the mathematically talented, a gender gap is more apparent but it is closing fast in many countries and non-existent in others. And tellingly, the size of the gap strongly depends on how equally the two sexes are treated.
Are men naturally better at math than women or is that just an out-dated stereotype? When former Harvard president Larry Summers said publicly in 2005 that men are innately better at math, many women were outraged. So a couple of women scientists decided to research it. This ScienCentral News video explains their report published this week.
Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch is putting his name and money behind a little-known educational entrepreneur, injecting some star power into the budding industry of online education.
Mr. Welch is paying more than $2 million for a 12% stake in Chancellor University System LLC, which is converting formerly bankrupt Myers University in Cleveland into Chancellor University. It plans to offer most courses online. Chancellor will name its Master of Business Administration program The Jack Welch Institute.
Chancellor's leading investor is Michael Clifford, an entrepreneur who has launched two publicly traded companies in the past year: Grand Canyon Education Inc., which operates Grand Canyon University, and Bridgepoint Education Inc., which operates Ashford University and University of the Rockies.
Investor groups led by Mr. Clifford bought those three institutions out of troubled situations and converted them to primarily online universities.
Mr. Welch's name may help add allure to for-profit, online education, which is growing rapidly despite nagging questions about quality.
Boston research firm EduVentures Inc. estimates that 11% of the roughly 18.5 million U.S. college students took most of their classes online in the fall of 2008, up from 1% a decade ago.
British elementary schools have been advised to scrap one of the most venerable rules in English spelling: "I before e except after c."
The word was given this week in a National Strategies document, "Support for Spelling." The 124-page document includes a lot of words of wisdom for teachers working with young children, like using puns to teach the distinction between pair and pear.
The document has harsh words for the "i before e" rule.
"The i before e rule is not worth teaching," it said. "It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions. There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words."
As a parent of three kids in public schools and as a legislator who has been fighting overreliance on the FCAT for almost a decade, I know overemphasis of the FCAT is doing more damage than good.
First, the problem is not that we have an FCAT -- but that we overemphasize it to the exclusion of other things that matter. The FCAT is the sole organizing principle of our school system. Because a school's grade is only indexed to how many students reach minimal competence in two or three subjects, minimal competence in a few subjects becomes the only metric our school system cares about.
How many parents want ''minimal competence'' as their kids' goal?
Performance in other subjects -- foreign languages, history, civics, higher-level courses -- does not raise a school's grade, so they are ignored. And forget about electives like art, music and subjects that make learning fuller. In Florida's underfunded school system, principles of triage leave those noncore subjects as mere afterthoughts -- if they are thought about at all.
Second, a June 2 Herald editorial, Schools offer a lesson in frugality, pointed to improvement in FCAT scores and Florida's ''top 10'' ranking as proof we can get by without real investment in education. That is incorrect. The editorial came close to drinking the Kool-Aid. The FCAT is no longer ''norm referenced,'' so we can no longer compare ourselves to students' performance in other states. If you do compare us to kids in other states taking SATs and ACTs, Florida's performance is almost always close to dead last -- and has gotten worse since the arrival of the heralded FCAT.
Long division or long stock position? Both are part of the curriculum at Chicago's Ariel Community Academy, a public school sponsored by Ariel Investments, where the kids are managing real-life portfolios.
Each first-grade class is given $20,000 to seed a portfolio. At first, the money is invested on their behalf as they study the savings-and-investment curriculum, a joint project of Ariel Investments and Nuveen Investments.
Finance classes start with counting coins. By sixth grade, students take more control of their portfolio.
Teacher Connie Moran says students usually choose to invest in names they recognize -- Nike, Target, McDonald's. And yes, their investments are down just like yours. Between March 31, 2008, and March 31, 2009, class portfolios fell an average of about 40 percent.
Hawaii conjures up images of palm-fringed beaches and tropical tranquility, but when Gail Awakuni joined James Campbell High School as principal in 2000, it was a place of gang fights, hoodlums and educational failure. The 2,000-pupil comprehensive school was bottom in the state.
"We had violence, the highest non-graduation rate of the state, the highest pregnancy rate, the highest number of dropouts," she says. "In our freshman class, 350 were being detained: they weren't being promoted from ninth to 10th grade. It was out of control."
Yet by 2007, Ms Awakuni and her staff had pushed graduation rates up from 86.4 per cent in 1999 to 98.9 per cent and the numbers going on to post-high school education from 57 per cent to 74 per cent. The amount earned by students in scholarships at colleges and universities soared from US$600,000 to US$7.3 million in the same period.
"This year has been record-breaking," says Ms Awakuni. "One pupil gained a perfect 800 out of 800 in the United States-wide colleges admissions test in maths, another got 760 and a third pupil got 750 in the verbal test."
Campbell High, which has pupils aged 15 to 18, earned Breakthrough School status in 2004 and Ms Awakuni, who reorganised the school into smaller learning communities, was awarded National Principal of the Year in 2004-5.
This is a lucky thing for the Ventura County Public Libraries -- because among Mr. Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. His most famous novel, "Fahrenheit 451," which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel "Something Wicked This Way Comes" contains a seminal library scene.
Mr. Bradbury frequently speaks at libraries across the state, and on Saturday he will make his way here for a benefit for the H. P. Wright Library, which like many others in the state's public system is in danger of shutting its doors because of budget cuts.
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
Property tax dollars, which provide most of the financing for libraries in Ventura County, have fallen precipitously, putting the library system roughly $650,000 in the hole. Almost half of that amount is attributed to the H. P. Wright Library, which serves roughly two-thirds of this coastal city about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
What do one mathematician, one artist, and one musician all have in common? Are you interested in zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories? Get ready to chase me down a rabbit hole into Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Lectures will be a place for crazy ideas to bounce around as we try to pace our way through this enlightening tome. You will be responsible for most of the reading as lectures will consist primarily of motivating the material and encouraging discussion. I advise everyone seriously interested to buy the book, grab on and get ready for a mind-expanding voyage into higher dimensions of recursive thinking.
The tables above show selected statistics from the paper Global Sex Differences in Test Score Variability (see summary here), published by two economists, one from the London School of Economics and the other from the Helsinki School of Economics. Analyzing standardized test scores in reading and mathematics from the OECD's "Program for International Student Assessment" (PISA), a survey of 15-year olds in 41 industrialized countries, the authors found that:
Our analysis of international test score data shows a higher variance in boys' than girls' results on mathematics and reading tests in most OECD countries. Higher variability among boys is a salient feature of reading and mathematics test performance across the world. In almost all comparisons, the age 15 boy-girl variance difference in test scores is present. This difference in variance is higher in countries that have higher levels of test score performance.
A suburban Atlanta principal who resigned during an investigation into cheating on students' standardized tests was arrested Friday and accused of altering public documents.
The school's assistant principal also turned herself in to local police Thursday night in a case that the head of a state teacher's group described as rare. School officials allege that the two changed answers on fifth-grade standardized tests to improve scores and help their school meet federal achievement standards.
Former Dekalb County principal James Berry was arrested at his home on charges of altering public documents, a felony. His assistant principal Doretha Alexander faces the same charges.
Newspaper reporters, a group to which I belonged until recently, usually don't write about old reports, unless of course the documents have been suppressed for years by nefarious government minions. If a reporter tells her editor she has found a neat piece of research from 2007 in the bottom of her drawer, the editor will tell her it isn't news and advise that she put a calendar in her cubicle.
I know. The title is sleep-inducing. But for the millions of people who care about community colleges -- including the nearly half of all U.S. college students who attend them -- it is a must-read.
State schools Superintendent-elect Tony Evers has named Michael Thompson, of Sun Prairie, as his deputy state superintendent.
Thompson, currently executive assistant at the Department of Public Instruction, holds a master's degree and doctorate in educational administration from UW-Madison.
Evers will be inaugurated July 6, at Hi-Mount Elementary School in Milwaukee, which he said was a symbolic location meant to bring "a singular focus to both the successes and challenges facing public education, not only in Milwaukee, but throughout the state."
Jennifer Thayer, currently director of curriculum and instruction for the Monroe School District, has been named as assistant state superintendent in the Division for Reading and Student Achievement. Evers' other cabinet members will include Sue Grady, executive assistant; and assistant state superintendents Richard Grobschmidt, Libraries, Technology and Community Learning; Deborah Mahaffey, Academic Excellence; Brian Pahnke, Finance and Management; and Carolyn Stanford Taylor, Learning Support: Equity and Advocacy.
I am a former Montgomery County public schools employee, a parent of two in the system and a lifelong educator. An accelerated math program is presenting a unique challenge for the whole system.
As a parent, I addressed the issue first with the principal, then at a PTA meeting and then to the director of school performance when I thought that no satisfactory resolution was being looked into. There is still no resolution, and I do not believe the problem is unique to my small school.
Approximately 25 children in my son's fourth grade have been accelerated two grade levels in math instruction. They took what's called Math A (usually for sixth-graders) this year. They are slated to take Math B (usually for seventh-graders) next year, when they are in fifth grade.
In the past couple of years, the few students who qualified for this level of acceleration were bused to a middle school, then returned to the elementary school for the remainder of their day. This year, so many students have been found eligible that parents have requested that instead of sending them to the middle school, a Math B teacher be brought to the elementary school to teach them. This would reduce disruption and be better for their development.
Joining a growing list of top schools nationwide, Illinois College now offers students a choice about whether to submit their standardized test scores as part of the admissions process.
Under the new policy, students who believe their standardized test scores strengthen their application are encouraged to submit them, but students who elect not to submit standardized test scores will not be penalized. An exception will apply to international and home-school students.
"Emerging evidence indicates that a student's academic promise can be accurately evaluated through a variety of means," Barbara Lundberg, vice president for enrollment management, remarked. "We expect that the majority of candidates will submit test scores, but by becoming test-optional, we will have the opportunity to look beyond what a student does during a four-hour period on one day in their high school career."
This change was approved by the faculty earlier this year following a yearlong study of the role of standardized tests in college admissions. Illinois College previously required all prospective students to submit official results of the ACT or SAT test scores in order to be considered for admission.
Lundberg said the new policy will apply to students who begin their freshman year studies in 2010.
"Revolutionize Curriculum"? - Madison School's Proposed Strategic Plan
I supported use of the term "revolutionize curriculum" as part of the proposed Madison School District Strategic Plan. The words contained in the document can likely be used to support any number of initiatives.
I believe, in this day and age, we should strive to hire the best teachers (with content knowledge) available and let them do their jobs. One school district employee could certainly support an online knowledge network. Madison has no shortage of curricular assets, including the UW Math Department, History, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, Sports and Languages. MATC, Edgewood College, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Whitewater and Northern Illinois are additional nearby resources.
You and a friend can now pass the time at a progressivist education seminar with these handy EDUCRAT BINGO cards. Decide your game beforehand, such as simple five-in-a-row for a "brown bag" lunch, all the way to a coverall for an in-service. Cover a square when you hear the matching catch-phrase. Good luck!
Teachers are the bedrock of our schools and the single most important key to student success. To achieve great results, every student needs a great teacher, and every teacher deserves a fair and accurate evaluation that enhances their capacity to grow and improve without fear that the process will threaten their position or their professional standing.
To put the best interests of our children front and center, the School District of Philadelphia is determined to do everything in its power to recruit the best, brightest, and most dedicated teachers; to encourage, reward, and retain our highest performers; to provide meaningful assistance and support for teachers who are struggling to be successful and effective; and to create a comprehensive system that provides all instructional staff with ongoing opportunities for career and talent development.
We stand with President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in placing an aggressive and unrelenting focus on teacher effectiveness as a critical factor in creating better public schools. If we are committed to student success, then it is up to all of us - teachers, administrators, parents, policymakers, and legislators - to make a commitment that all of our teachers will have the skills they need to be successful educators and that all will be equitably placed where their talents are most needed.
We are morally obligated and collectively responsible to ensure that anyone entrusted with the education of our children is capable of doing a great job, is recognized for the excellence of their performance, and is justly rewarded for results. If we care about the success of our students, we must also care about the success of their teachers and treat them as the professionals they are.
Recently, the New Teacher Project released a report on "the nation's failure to assess teacher effectiveness, treating teachers as interchangeable parts." The two-year study describes a "widget effect" that has prevented schools and school districts from "recognizing excellence, providing support, or removing ineffective teachers."
The study, available at www.widgeteffect.org, describes a "national failure to acknowledge and act on differences in teacher effectiveness" and faults teacher-evaluation systems that codify the "widget effect" by allowing excellence to go unrecognized and the need for improvement to go unaddressed. The authors noted that less than 1 percent of 40,000 teachers in the study were ever rated unsatisfactory.
The Philadelphia story is no different. Out of a teaching force of more than 10,000 in the district, only 13 received unsatisfactory ratings, and only five were removed from the classroom. Because struggling teachers who are performing below an acceptable level of effectiveness were not identified, they could not be appropriately assisted and supported and given an opportunity to improve.
We cannot hope to close the opportunity and achievement gap that exists in our school district, help students from all backgrounds achieve at high standards, and realize the goals of our district's Imagine 2014 strategic plan without putting great teachers in the places where students need them the most. To meet the needs of children and schools fairly, our district needs greater flexibility to assign staff to schools that best match the talents of teachers with regard to subject, site, and area needs.
Some Philadelphia public school students do have access to great teachers, effective principals, and excellent programs. However, "some but not all" is not an acceptable standard. All of Philadelphia's children deserve a chance to dream and succeed, and all need skillful classroom teachers able to provide them with love and limits as they strive to learn.
As we end this school year and prepare for the next, let us commit that our school district staff, parents, and community leaders will work together to guarantee that neither students nor teachers will suffer from a "widget effect" in Philadelphia's public schools.
A non-traditional and sometimes iconoclastic law school has announced plans to create a new kind of undergraduate college -- one focused on history.
The new college will offer only the junior and senior years of instruction, will operate in a no-frills manner to keep costs down, and will offer the single major of history. The American College of History and Legal Studies will start offering classes in August 2010 and has been licensed to operate in Salem, N.H. -- just seven miles from the Andover, Mass., campus of the Massachusetts School of Law. While the law school and the history college will be independent of one another in a legal sense, with their own boards, many trustees are expected to serve on both boards, and the two institutions will start with overlapping administrations.
Lawrence R. Velvel, the dean of the law school, said in an interview Friday that he saw a need to promote the study of history in a way that was affordable and might reach new groups of students. "I have been aware that this country is not only ahistorical, but because it doesn't know history and ignores history, it makes the same mistakes over and over again," he said.
Tuition is planned to start at $10,000 a year -- low in comparison to most private colleges.
Considering the billion of dollars and millions of children's lives that are at stake, Education Secretary Arne Duncan's claims about his record in Chicago merit special scrutiny. Mr. Duncan has made it clear that he intends to tie federal education funds to requirements that districts across the nation rapidly replicate the "Chicago model."
Advocates in Chicago have a special vantage point for this effort. We have been comparing Mr. Duncan's rhetoric with reality for several years, and finding significant factual errors and misstatements. For these inaccurate statements to be repeated on the national stage and in service to a potential orgy of spending on programs that have a questionable track record of success puts our children's educational future at serious risk. Chicagoans must speak out and share what we know.
For example, we have learned that independent research on the Duncan reforms (known collectively as Renaissance 2010) by the Rand Corporation (2008) and SRI International (2009) finds that his new schools perform only "on par" with traditional neighborhood schools. We've also found that the new schools serve fewer low-income, special education, and limited-English proficient students.
In other words, Renaissance 2010 has yet to yield academic improvement, even with less-challenging students. Yet Mr. Duncan decries "school officials (who) have been content with changes that produce nominal progress."
Let us end the school year with congratulations to Yolimar Maldonado, Lizbeth Fernandez and Nikki Hill, all finishing their sophomore year at Milwaukee Hamilton High School.
To Kenyon Turner, a freshman who went to Bay View and then Community High School; Myha Truss, an eighth-grader at Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts; and Tyrece Toliver, a seventh-grader at the Milwaukee Education Center. And to dozens of other students in Milwaukee Public Schools, of whom this can be said:
They made strong progress this year in improving their reading, jumping ahead more than a grade, and, in some cases, several grades.
It wasn't easy, either for them or for their teachers.
And it wasn't cheap - MPS spent $3.2 million for 38 teachers to work in the reading improvement program this year, and that alone comes to more than $1,500 per student.
You could have a very substantial conversation about why they each were far behind grade level in reading going into the school year. None is a special education student. And almost all of them were still behind grade level at the end of the year, even with all the progress they made.
Nonetheless, applaud their success.
A program called Read 180 was the vehicle the students rode to better reading. It offers a strongly structured program, sessions on each student's level doing computer-led exercises in spelling and vocabulary, and strong, sometimes one-on-one involvement with a teacher.
It would be interest to compare Read 180's costs with another program: Reading Recovery.
Replacing large, poor-performing high schools with smaller schools in New York City has led to lower attendance and graduation rates at other large high schools, which have struggled to accommodate influxes of high-needs students, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.
Small schools, which cap enrollment at several hundred students and boast themes like environmental science and the performing arts, have emerged as a hallmark of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's education reform efforts. Over the past seven years, the city has closed more than two dozen large comprehensive high schools, which typically enroll thousands of students, and replaced them with smaller schools, which are supposed to foster more intimate relationships and higher student achievement.
The report, conducted by researchers at the New School's Center for New York City Affairs, does not dispute the success of small schools in improving graduation rates of needy students. But it argues that the city should do more to support comprehensive high schools, which have been saddled with large numbers of the high-needs students who do not enroll at small schools.
The 18-month study examined 34 large high schools and found that 14 of them had decreases in attendance and graduation rates from 2003 to 2008, when the number of small schools in the city multiplied.
AT Seattle Public Schools, our primary goal is to provide an education that prepares each student to graduate from high school ready for college, careers and life.
Elliot Ransom, a National Merit scholar from Ballard High School, plans to study engineering; Kenny Setiao dropped out of Cleveland High School, but returned to receive a scholarship to South Seattle Community College; and Nicole Davis won the prestigious National Merit Scholarship. The graduation of these and thousands of other students from Seattle Public Schools is a critical measure of our success as educators.
If college-ready graduation for all students is the goal, how do we get there? First, we have to admit that what we have been doing is not working for all students. Today, almost four in 10 students in Seattle don't graduate on time. In today's world, the benefits of postsecondary education have never been greater.
Second, we must recognize that getting ready for college starts long before students enter ninth grade. When students meet critical milestones -- entering kindergarten ready to learn, reading at grade level in third grade, taking algebra in eighth grade, and passing the WASL in 10th grade -- they are more likely to make it to graduation day. Our strategic plan [636K PDF], called Excellence for All, is our guide to reach this goal.
Interested readers might have a look at this Fall, 2005 Forum on Poverty organized by Rafael Gomez (audio/video). Former Madison School Board member Ray Allen participated. Ray mentioned that his daughter was repeatedly offered free breakfasts, even though she was fed at home prior to being dropped off at school. The event is worth checking out.
I had an opportunity to have lunch with Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad last summer. Prior to that meeting, I asked a number of teachers and principals what I should pass along. One of the comments I received is particularly relevant to Madison's proposed Strategic Plan:
Curriculum: greater rigor
Discipline: a higher bar, much higher bar, consistent expectations district wide, a willingness to wrestle with the negative impact of poverty on the habits of mind of our students and favor pragmatic over ideological solutions
Teacher inservice: at present these are insultingly infantile
Leadership: attract smart principals that are more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, mindful of the superintendent's "inner circle" and their closeness to or distance from the front lines (the classrooms)
I know these are general, but they are each so glaringly needy of our attention and problem solving efforts.
The federal government will spend up to $350 million to help states developing national standards for reading and math, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced Sunday.
In the current patchwork of benchmarks across the nation, students and schools considered failing in one state might get passing grades in another. The Obama administration is urging states to replace their standards for student achievement with a common set.
Every state except Alaska, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas has signed on to the concept, but getting them to adopt whatever emerges as the national benchmark will be politically difficult.
Missouri charter school students, on average, do better in reading and math than students in their peer traditional public schools, according to a national study released today.
The report done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University does not mention specific schools in Kansas City or St. Louis -- the only two places in the state allowed by law to operate charters.
The report's authors say they found great variation in academic achievement among each state's charters.
"An important part of the story is the variations," said Margaret Raymond, director of the Center and lead author of the report.
As charter schools play an increasingly central role in education reform agendas across the United States, it becomes more important to have current and comprehensible analysis about how well they do educating their students. Thanks to progress in student data systems and regular student achievement testing, it is possible to examine student learning in charter schools and compare it to the experience the students would have had in the traditional public schools (TPS) they would otherwise have attended. This report presents a longitudinal student‐level analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States. The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter school impacts.
Charter schools are permitted to select their focus, environment and operations and wide
diversity exists across the sector. This study provides an overview that aggregates charter schools in different ways to examine different facets of their impact on student academic growth. The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.
These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy challenge is how to deal constructively with varying
The list of complaints about the statewide standardized exams that most states have adopted as high school accountability measures is long: professors teach to the test, the standards are pegged to the lowest common denominator, etc. But a new study suggests that a new one might be added in some states: contributing to grade inflation for college-bound students who do well on the tests.
And that finding, if borne out, could complicate the already significant problems of college admissions officers trying to decide among many seemingly highly qualified candidates.
The working paper, which was written by George Mason University's Patrick D. Marquardt and published on the Social Science Research Network, examines the impact that Virginia's Standards of Learning -- and particularly changes that the state made to encourage high school students to take the test seriously -- had on the average high school grade point average of students who attended Virginia's public colleges.
Virginia implemented its statewide high school test in 1998, but after many schools' students fared poorly on the high-stakes exam in its first years, the state, hoping to encourage more students to take it seriously, required all students to pass a certain number of SOL exams to graduate. Marquardt's paper, though, focuses on changes that school districts quietly made to encourage student participation, often involving grade-based incentives. Some, Marquardt says; among the most extreme, gave students who passed an exam an uptick (from B to B+, say), while others let students use the SOL in a particular subject as their final exam, earning an A if they passed it.
Harold O. Levy suggested five disparate ways to improve the educational system in America's schools. Only one of his suggestions, however, even remotely touched on the most fundamental aspect of this daunting challenge: improving our youngest students' reading skills as a means of instilling self-confidence and an interest in learning.
This is something that can be addressed now, without the major financing and structural changes needed to truly reform the system.
High school teachers in Greater Jakarta participating in an environmental workshop Saturday, were encouraged to bring the Green Map system to their students, to raise their environmental awareness.
In one of the workshops, volunteers from the Green Map Indonesia community shared their experience of mapmaking toward a sustainable community development with teachers.
The teachers were expected to be able to deliver the system to their students and start mapping out their green surroundings, volunteer Elanto Wijoyono said during the session.
"Students can start by mapping out their schools before expanding to other areas."
"They can also explore many interesting things they find during the mapping activities," he said, adding the system could be a more enjoyable approach to learning, combined with other subjects in the curriculum.
Creating Green Maps would make students more responsive to preserving the environment, said Marco Kusumawijaya, another Green Map volunteer.
If that newspaper thinks Stamford has taken too long to get rid of academic tracks for K-12 students, how would they report on the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country? Not only does such athletic tracking take place in all our schools, but there is, at present, no real movement to eliminate it, unbelievable as that may seem.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
It is also an open secret that many of our school athletic teams ignore diversity entirely, and make no effort to be sure that, for example, Asians and Caucasians are included, in proportion to their numbers in the general population, in football, basketball, and track teams. Athletic ability and success are allowed to overwhelm other important measures, and this must be taken into account in any serious Athletic Untracking effort.
In Stamford, some parents are opposed to the elimination of academic tracking, and have threatened to enroll their children in private schools. This problem would no doubt also arise in any serious Athletic Untracking program which could be introduced. Parents who spend money on private coaches for their children would not stand by and see the playing time of their young athletes cut back or even lost by any program to make all school sports teams composed of mixed-ability athletes.
The New York Times reports that "Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes."
Perhaps it will be argued that all athletes benefit from mixed-ability teams as well, but many would predict not only plenty of losing seasons for any schools which eliminate Athletic Tracking programs, but also very poor scholarship prospects for the best athletes who are involved in them. Just as students who are capable of excellent academic work are often sacrificed to the dream of an academic (Woebegone) world in which all are equal, so student athletes will find their skills and performance severely degraded by any Athletic Untracking program.
Nevertheless, when educators are more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement, they have eliminated academic tracking and set up mixed-ability classrooms.
Surely athletic directors and coaches can be made to see the supreme importance of some new diversity and equity initiatives as well, and persuaded, at the risk of losing their jobs, to develop and provide non-tracked athletic programs for our mixed-ability student athletes. After all, winning games may be fun, but, in the long run, people can be led to realize that being politically correct is much more worthwhile than real achievement in any endeavor in our public schools. As the Dean of a major School of Education recently informed me: "The myth of individual greatness is a myth." [sic] The time for the elimination of Athletic Tracking has now arrived!
Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.
But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.
So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.
The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)
The image of Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee on newsstands nationwide was causing an uproar among teachers, parents and other constituents. So D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray had to ask her, as she sat in his cavernous, wood-paneled office in December: "Michelle, why would you agree to be photographed with a broom on the cover of Time magazine?"
And he had a follow-up: "What does it get you, to constantly bash those you're trying to get to help you?"
Rhee explained that most of the shoot for the Dec. 8 issue involved images of her with children. The idea for the broom, which she gripped while standing stern-faced in front of a blackboard, came up near the end, she said, according to Gray's version of their meeting. She told Gray that it wasn't her first choice for the cover but that the decision wasn't hers. Gray wasn't satisfied.
"Why did you let the picture be taken in the first place?"
In her quest to upend and transform the District's long-broken school system, Rhee has acquired a sometimes-painful education of her own. The lessons, in many respects, tell the story of her tenure as her second school year draws to a close Monday: that money isn't everything; that political and corporate leaders need to be stroked, even if you don't work for them; that the best-intentioned reforms can trigger unintended consequences; and that national celebrity can create trouble at home.
've spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I'm assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I'm interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There's no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That's what makes it standard. It's hard, but it shouldn't make you a millionaire.
They don't make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don't take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They're out of date and don't match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don't sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, "yes, this is what I want to do!"
For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.
Some prepare for the test at a strict Tianjin boarding school.
Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.
He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.
"I want to study until the last minute," he said. "I really hope to be successful."
China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of "a thousand soldiers and 10 horses across a single log bridge."
bright lime-green T-shirts, groups of parents, students and teachers of the 16 elementary schools in Woodbridge Township and residents in the surrounding areas volunteered their time over the weekend to be part of making the routes to their individual schools safer.
Top and above: Teacher Beth Heagen, from Woodbine Avenue Elementary School No. 23 in Avenel, leads Bhavika Shah and her children Hetri, 8, a third-grader, and Ishika, 6, a firstgrader, as they travel through the streets that they and other students walk each day to get to school, looking for unsafe conditions as well as positive ones.
Dr. Wansoo Im, president of Vertices LLC, a GIS consulting firm, and a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, led the group of a dozen or so people at Woodbine Avenue Elementary School No. 23 in Avenel to kick off the Discovering Safe Routes to School event, which was a walkability assessment, on May 30.
Each person was given a pedometer and took a map of the route, a survey and a digital camera to take photographs of what each one felt needed improvement, such as implementation of sidewalks, dangerous street crossings and overgrown shrubbery, and also what the participants felt worked well in the area.
"This event is an outgrowth of the walk we took with former Olympic racewalker [Mark Fenton] last year," said Mayor John E. McCormac. "Our job as public officials is to keep the kids safe. What is safe to us might not be what is safe to an 8-year-old kid. The kids walk these routes every day."
This graphic, from Boeing's Current Market Outlook (2009-2028) provides a very useful look at the changes our children are facing. The Asia Pacific region is forecast to take delivery of more airplanes than North America, with Europe close behind. We should substantively consider whether the current systems, curriculum and organizations, largely created in the Frederick Taylor model over 100 years ago, are up to the challenge....
Locally, the Madison School District's Proposed Strategic Plan will be discussed Monday evening.
To a significant degree talented and gifted students in our schools are under-served. These students are often left to do it on their own, particularly if that talent is in only one or two areas. Finally, there is something being done about that. Not only is the Global Academy going to be a reality, but surprise beyond belief, eight area school districts, including Madison, are actually cooperating and going to be part of the Global Academy. The presentation and discussion will focus on
What is the rationale and data to support this educational experience?
What school districts are involved and how will it be financed?
What students will be served by the Academy? How will students be selected?
What will be the curriculum and methodology for instruction?
Will these students be prepared for post high school education and work?
Will there be partnerships with MATC, other colleges and universities, community persons and organizations?
How will the students relate with their home schools?
Thanks to Jeff Henriques for recording this event.
Mathematics teachers in one coastal Connecticut school district were frustrated with students' inability to retain what they learned in Algebra I and apply it to Algebra II, so they decided to approach high school mathematics instruction in a new way. The teachers shrank the number of topics covered in each course by about half and published their custom-made curriculum online last fall, the New York Times reports.
The new curriculum's lessons were written by Westport, Conn., teachers and sent to HeyMath! of India, a company that adds graphics, animation, and sound to the lessons before posting them on the Web. But teachers say the new curriculum is as much about bringing classroom instruction into the digital age as it is about having the opportunity to teach students fewer concepts in greater depth.
Westport's decision to rewrite its math curriculum is part of a growing trend to re-evaluate "mile-wide, inch-deep" instruction. In 2006, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics pushed for more basic math skills instruction, and two years later a federal panel of investigators appointed by then President George W. Bush also urged schools to whittle down their elementary and middle school math curricula.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw his weight Wednesday behind a Text"common" education standard for all of America's schoolchildren, saying the current state-by-state system has produced uneven results in which some students "are totally, inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate."
Mr. Duncan, who has been on a cross-country "listening tour" in preparation for submitting revisions for the No Child Left Behind Act, says he's encountered support for the idea of a national standard. "Teachers have been really positive on this idea of common standards," he said at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters. "That has played much better with teachers than I thought it would."
Gov. Sarah Palin has opted out of an effort to develop national education standards for reading and math curricula, a decision that has riled some but satisfied other Alaskan education officials, the Anchorage Daily News reports.
Forty-six states have agreed to help create the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort to allow states to compare their students' academic progress at each grade level using a single rubric. Alaska joins Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas on the shortlist of states that have bowed out of the attempt to form what many believe education in the United States has lacked for too long: a common denominator.
Carol Comeau, superintendent of the Anchorage School District, said she was disappointed in Palin's decision. Alaska's pupils have a right to know how they measure up against their peers in other parts of the country, Comeau said. The Anchorage School District serves nearly half of Alaska's 120,000 public school students.
Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today's landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.
Jay Asher's "Thirteen Reasons Why," which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience--the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.
For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there's Gayle Forman's "If I Stay," which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film "Twilight." The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family's bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one's parents and forge an independent identity?
In a classroom with walls lined with bright pictures, Erin Conway's third- and fourth-grade students are working on mathematical word problems. For the first time in their relatively short educational careers, the problems are in English.
"I think I know the answer," a student tells Conway. But then he gives her the wrong answer.
"It's not that hard," Conway says, repeating the question to him in Spanish. The second time the student tells Conway the right answer.
The classroom looks the same as other third-grade classrooms. The top of the black chalkboard is bordered with the alphabet in cursive. Each number on the clock has its handwritten digital equivalent next to it. The student desks with attached chairs open up to reveal school supplies.
But the population of Conway's classroom makes it different. All of her 16 students are native Spanish speakers, in what's called a transitional education program.
As kindergartners at Leopold Elementary, on Madison's west side, the students were placed in classrooms where 90% of their academic instruction was given in Spanish and 10% in English. In second grade, 80% of their instruction was in Spanish and 20% in English.
President Obama expects all Americans to complete at least one year of postsecondary education, and a report released this week by Education Week highlights both the obstacles to attaining that goal and the hopeful signs that--at least in some states--success appears to be within reach.
"Diploma Count 2009" places the national graduation rate at about 70 percent for the class of 2006 and notes that this rate has increased nearly 3 percentage points since 1996. According to the report, New Jersey has the highest rate, 82.1 percent; Nevada has the lowest, 47.3 percent. But with about 30 percent of American students failing to graduate high school, and many other qualified students opting out of the college application process, the report states, Obama's goal can easily seem unrealistic
Jorge Hirsch had been getting screwed. For years. At a scientific conference in 1989, he presented a paper arguing that the generally accepted theory of low-temperature superconductors--the BCS theory--was wrong. Most researchers at the time held that under certain low-temperature conditions, vibrations in a metal's crystal lattice can allow electrons to become attracted to one another, which drops electrical resistance to zero--a superconducting state. Hirsch said this "electron-phonon interaction" in fact had nothing to do with superconductivity. He was a youngish up-and-comer then, but physics rarely forgives apostasy. After his fateful presentation, similar conferences stopped inviting him to speak. Colleagues no longer sought him out for collaboration. Grants dried up. High-visibility journals shunned his papers.
It's not that Hirsch wasn't getting his work published. He was. And other physicists were still citing his research, implying some acceptance of his views. Hirsch just wasn't able to get his papers into the really high-visibility journals--places like Science, Nature, and, for a solid-state physicist, Physical Review Letters. There's a clear pecking order, established and reinforced by several independent rating systems. Chief among them: the Journal Impact Factor.
When I got to work Monday, I was certain I was about to be pummeled by e-mails telling me what an idiotic column I had written that day praising high schools that were trying to get everyone, even struggling students, to take Advanced Placement courses and tests.
The first e-mail had arrived at 7:56 a.m. I opened it gingerly, expecting harsh language. It was from a teacher -- not a good sign. Many of them find my AP obsession an outrage, particularly since I have never taught a class and would not be competent to do so.
So what did the e-mailer, Michael Willis, a physics teacher at Glen Burnie High School in Anne Arundel County, have to say? He said he liked the column. Hmmm. Maybe he was being sarcastic? Nope. He said he retired from a career in nuclear engineering to teach physics at all levels, including AP, and said "having such low performers in a class does them a world of good." He even offered a rationale for low performers in AP I hadn't thought of: "In these days of economic woe, schools with a historically large percentage of low performance may more easily rationalize the targeting of such classes for cutting due to low enrollments. This would have the effect of locking out the 'smart' kids from classes they need to be competitive with students from districts and schools that are more affluent."
June means the end of high school and the start of summer. Perhaps there will be jobs or other chores, but, as James Russell Lowell wrote in The Vision of Sir Launfal, "what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days..."
Those rare June days are full of mild air, sunshine, leisure, and time, at last, for student to pick up that absorbing nonfiction book for which there has been no place in their high school curriculum.
Why is it that so many, if not most, of our high school graduates arrive in college without ever having read a single complete nonfiction book in high school, so that when they confront their college reading lists, full of such books, they are somewhat at sea?
The main reason is that the English department controls reading in most schools, and for most of them the only reading of interest is fiction, so that is all that students are asked to read.
For the boys, and now the girls too, who may soon serve in the military, and are interested in military history, they have to read the military history books they will enjoy on their own, after school or, better, in the summer. All the students who would love history books on any topic would do well to pick them up in the summer, when their other assignments, of fiction books and the like, cannot interfere.
The story of the world's work and the issues that trouble the world now (and in the past) can only be found in nonfiction books, and for students who can see the time coming when they will be responsible for the work of the world, those are the books which they should read, and have time to read, mainly in the summer months.
Summer reading of nonfiction books also means that when they return to their history, economics, sociology, and even their science and English classes in the fall, they will bring a more substantial and more nuanced understanding of the world they will be studying, with the benefit of the knowledge and appreciation they have gained in their nonfiction reading over the summer.
For those who are concerned with "Summer Loss"--the observed decline in student knowledge and skill over the summer months--the reading of nonfiction books brings a double benefit. The habit and the skill of reading significant material are refreshed and reinforced in that way, and knowledge is gained rather than drained away over the summer. And in addition, engagement with serious topics confirms young people in their primary role as students rather than "just kids" as they read over the summer.
Adults still buy and read a lot of nonfiction books, even in these days of the Internet/Web and Television, and students will have a much better chance of taking part in adult conversations over the summer if they are reading books too.
The objection will surely be raised in some quarters that reading nonfiction books in the summer is too much like work. One answer that could be offered is that, as reported in Diploma to Nowhere, more than a million of our high school graduates every year, who are accepted at colleges, are required to take remedial courses because they have not worked hard enough to be ready for regular courses. The problem then may actually be that our high schools are too much fun and not enough work and we give our diplomas to far too many "fools" as a result.
Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, cites K. Anders Ericsson's research on the difference between amateur and professional pianists, and writes: "Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top musical school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't just work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."
We see those who labor constantly to relieve our students from working too hard academically. They worry about stress, strain, overwork, joyless lives, etc. But that only seems to apply to academics. When it comes to sports, there is nearly universal satisfaction with young athletes who dedicate themselves to their fitness and the skills needed for their sport(s) not only after school, but during the summer as well.
While reading nonfiction books in the summer has not yet been widely accepted or required, high school athletes are expected to run, lift weights, stretch, and shoot hoops (or whatever it takes for their sports) as often in the summer as they can find the time. Perhaps if we applied the seriousness with which we take sports for young people to their pursuit of academic achievement, we would find more students reading complete nonfiction books in the summer and fewer needing remedial courses later.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Last fall, high-school senior Duane Wilson started getting Ds on assignments in his Advanced Placement history, psychology and literature classes. Like a smoke detector sensing fire, a school computer sounded an alarm.
The Edline system used by the Montgomery County, Md., Public Schools emailed each poor grade to his mother as soon as teachers logged it in. Coretta Brunton, Duane's mother, sat her son down for a stern talk. Duane hit the books and began earning Bs. He is headed to Atlanta's Morehouse College in the fall.
If it hadn't been for the tracking system, says the 17-year-old, "I might have failed and I wouldn't be going to college next year."
Montgomery County has made progress in improving the lagging academic performance of African-American and Hispanic students. See data.
Montgomery spends $47 million a year on technology like Edline. It is at the vanguard of what is known as the "data-driven" movement in U.S. education -- an approach that builds on the heavy testing of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Using district-issued Palm Pilots, for instance, teachers can pull up detailed snapshots of each student's progress on tests and other measures of proficiency.
The high-tech strategy, which uses intensified assessments and the real-time collection of test scores, grades and other data to identify problems and speed up interventions, has just received a huge boost from President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Democrats who control the state Assembly voted Thursday to cap participation in Milwaukee's parental choice program at 19,500 students for the next two years - about the same number of students who now attend private schools at state expense.
If it becomes law, the change would reverse a 2006 compromise that would have allowed participation to grow to 22,500.
The 19,500 cap was added to the state budget, which the full Assembly was scheduled to debate at 10 a.m. Friday, by state Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee). It was one of the final decisions made by the 52 Democrats, who ended four days of closed-door caucus meetings that resulted in dozens of proposed changes to the 2010-'11 budget.
Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan (D-Janesville) said Democrats will have enough votes to pass the budget Friday.
"When you look at the document, it's well-balanced, and I think we did a lot of good things," Sheridan said.
An opponent of the choice program, Kessler said it would be the first major reduction in the number of choice students - a number that had been expected to grow next year.
The two-year budget includes $2 billion in tax and fee increases, cuts aid to local governments and schools and would force 6% across-the-board spending cuts by state agencies.
But choice supporters said the cap would be fought in both the Assembly and Senate.
In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.
At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.
But district officials acknowledge difficulty without speciality staff.
"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."
Volunteering as a GED program tutor continues to be one of my most gratifying experiences, but it also has been sobering to realize how many in our community lack basic - high school - education. (GED is the acronym for general equivalency degree, a recognized substitute for a high school diploma.)
Students in GED programs range in age from the mid-20s to the late 40s; many are minorities. They say they've recommitted themselves to furthering their education in order to enhance job skills, to help their children succeed with their education or simply, but profoundly, to regain some self-esteem. GED programs are a lifeline to those who have the courage to "go back" later in life to achieve these goals, but the programs currently serve just a fraction of those who lack a high school education.
You get a sense of the magnitude of the problem by reading a 2008 publication of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center called "Cities in Crisis." The study, which was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, looks at the 50 largest cities in the United States (Milwaukee is No. 25) and the number of kids enrolled in high school in the "focal" district of each city (in our case Milwaukee Public Schools). In the year studied - 2006 - MPS's high school population (grades nine through 12) was estimated to be 25,000.
hese were not multiple-choice tests that computers grade in seconds. They were thick "portfolio" tests representing a year's worth of student worksheets, quizzes and activities. The time-intensive evaluations have proliferated in recent years in response to the testing requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The District and many states, including Maryland and Virginia, use portfolios for students with serious cognitive disabilities. But Virginia has gone much further, expanding their use for students with learning disabilities or beginning English skills. Statewide, the number of math and reading portfolios submitted for such students nearly doubled in a year, from 15,400 in 2006-07 to more than 30,000 in 2007-08, and state officials predict another jump this school year.
Portfolios have long been used for in-depth evaluations because they can gauge more skills and higher-order thinking. Many educators say the year-long portfolios are a fairer way to measure what some students know than a one-day snapshot.
"We all learn differently," said Patrick K. Murphy, assistant superintendent for accountability in Fairfax schools and Arlington County's incoming superintendent. "We also have to recognize there are different ways people can show proficiency beyond a multiple-choice test."
In the state that gave the world Facebook, Google and the iPod, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says forcing California's students to rely on printed textbooks is so yesterday.
The governor recently launched an initiative to see if the state's 6 million public school students can use more online learning materials, perhaps saving millions of dollars a year in textbook purchases.
"California is home to software giants, bioscience research pioneers and first-class university systems known around the world. But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg's printing press," Schwarzenegger wrote in a recent op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News.
In a state with a projected $24 billion budget deficit, Schwarzenegger has asked education officials to review a wealth of sources that already are on the Internet, many of which are free, and determine whether they meet curriculum standards.
pend much time with aggressive Advanced Placement teachers. They tell me, quite often, that students must be stretched beyond their assumed capabilities. Whenever I try to pass on this advice, however, I become a target for ridicule and disbelief from readers.
Here comes more of that stuff. Newsweek unveils this week my annual rankings of America's Top High Schools, with a new twist that skeptics will find even less congenial.
The latest list, to appear on newsweek.com, will include about 1,500 schools that have reached a high standard of participation on college-level AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests. The bad news is they represent less than 6 percent of U.S. public high schools. The good news is that 73 percent of Washington area schools are on the list. The interesting news is that some of those schools have begun to require AP courses and tests for all students, even those who struggle in class.
For the first time, two Madison elementary schools will face sanctions for failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind standards.
Leopold and Lincoln fell short of the federal law's criteria for "adequate yearly progress" for the second year in a row, marking them as "schools identified for improvement," or SIFI. The SIFI list targets schools that miss the same testing benchmark, such as reading scores among economically disadvantaged students, for two or more consecutive years.
Under the sanctions, the schools will have to review their school improvement plans, offer more academic services outside of the regular school day and allow parents to transfer their child to any public school within the School District where space allows. Students performing poorly on statewide tests would get first preference to transfer.
ut when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.
American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour's-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.
Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe's mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month's-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, "summer learning loss". This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.
In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.
At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.
But district officials acknowledge difficulty without specialty staff.
"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."
In an April letter to Waukesha's superintendent, the DPI recommended the district refine its methods for identifying students as gifted and talented and provide professional development for staff on providing special services for such students.
The state audit was performed after a group of district parents filed a complaint last year alleging numerous deficiencies in Waukesha's program for gifted students.
One of those parents, Amy Gilgenbach, said she wishes the audit had focused less on policy corrections and more with what was going on in the program itself. She said the state agency should have looked into what happened to instruction due to the loss in staffing.
"At the elementary level, when you have already overburdened teachers with 28 or more kids in their classes and then expect them to take on added responsibilities without additional training or instruction, obviously you're not creating a good situation for GT students in those classes," she wrote in an e-mail.
"At the middle and high school levels, not having appropriate guidance and course selections and potential college and career paths is a huge pitfall for GT students."
Teen's lessons from China. I am a product of an American private elementary school and public high school, and I am accustomed to classrooms so boisterous that it can be considered an accomplishment for a teacher to make it through a 45-minute class period without handing out a misdemeanor mark. It's no wonder that the atmosphere at Yanqing No. 1 Middle School ("middle school" is the translation of the Chinese term for high school), for students in grades 10-12, seems stifling to me. Discipline problems are virtually nonexistent, and punishments like lowered test scores are better deterrents for rule breaking than detentions you can sleep through.
But what does surprise me is that, despite the barely controlled chaos that simmers just below the surface during my classes at Boston Latin School, I feel as though I have learned much, much more under the tutelage of Latin's teachers than I ever could at a place like Yanqing Middle School, which is located in a suburb of Beijing called Yanqing.
Students spend their days memorizing and doing individual, silent written drills or oral drills in total unison. Their entire education is geared toward memorizing every single bit of information that could possibly materialize on, first, their high school entrance exams, and next, their college entrance exams. This makes sense, because admission to public high schools and universities in China is based entirely on test scores (although very occasionally a rich family can buy an admission spot for their child), and competition in the world's most populous country to go to the top schools makes the American East Coast's Harvard-or-die mentality look puny.
Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of US students could imagine.
And yet, to an American student used to the freedom of debate during history or English class, to free discussion of possible methods for solving different math problems, the work seems hollow and too directed. The average class size is about 45 students (compared with the limit of 28 in Boston that is exceeded by three or four students at most), which severely limits the amount of attention a teacher can give a student.
It isn't that the curriculum is blatant propaganda, or that the answer to every math problem is Mao Zedong. It's more that there is very little room to maneuver: There is one good way to solve a math problem, or one way to program a computer, or one good way to do homework. Every class has the same homework, a worksheet printed on wafer paper, and essays are rare.• Novels are not taught in class, and teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction. The only fiction texts read in class are excerpts from the four classics (Imperial texts that are not considered novels) and Imperial poetry. The point of class is to cram as much information into the students in as little time as possible, all in preparation for entrance exams.
Students lack the opportunity to discuss and digest what they learn. Most rarely participate in political discussions outside class. During a weekend dinner at a classmate's house, I brought up the issue of Tibet and heard my classmate's father complain first about how Tibet wanted independence and second about how his daughter didn't know anything about it. The recent Tiananmen anniversary was a nonissue; the students say they are too busy with work to talk much about politics. Chinese high school students therefore have little practice in the decision-making and circumspection that Americans consider an integral part of education.
Chinese schools have many strengths, but they do not foster many broadly philosophical thinkers.
Annie Osborn is a Boston Latin School student. She recently completed her junior year at School Year Abroad in Beijing.
• [Boston Latin School no longer assigns "traditional" history research papers, they told me...in any case, they have never sent me any...Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review]
Education reform will go nowhere until the states are forced to revamp corrupt teacher evaluation systems that rate a vast majority of teachers as "excellent," even in schools where children learn nothing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was right to require the states that participate in the school stabilization fund, which is part of the federal education stimulus program, to show -- finally -- how student achievement is weighted in teacher evaluations. The states have long resisted such accountability, and Mr. Duncan will need to press them hard to ensure they live up to their commitment.
A startling new report from a nonpartisan New York research group known as The New Teacher Project lays out the scope of the problem. The study, titled "The Widget Effect," is based on surveys of more than 16,000 teachers and administrators in four states: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois and Ohio.
The first problem it identifies is that evaluation sessions are often short, infrequent and pro forma -- typically two or fewer classroom observations totaling 60 minutes or less. The administrators who perform them are rarely trained to do the evaluations and are under intense pressure from colleagues not to be critical. Not surprisingly, nearly every teacher passes, and an overwhelming majority receives top ratings.
Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.
Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the U.S. needs improvement may spur debate. But the fact remains: Of 70 finalists, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and two from the U.S.
TopCoder Inc., which runs software competitions as part of its software development service, operates TopCoder Open, an annual contest.
About 4,200 people participated in the U.S. National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.
Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone -- from student to professional -- and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.
China's showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.
Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors. All of the schools on the list have an index of at least 1.000; they are in the top 6 percent of public schools measured this way.
If you have questions about the list, please contact challenge@washpost.com. Note: Subs. Lunch % is the percentage of students receiving federally subsidized meals. E and E % stands for equity and excellence percentage: the portion of all graduating seniors at a school that had at least one passing grade on one AP or IB test. For more information on methodology, see our FAQ; please leave your comments on the list in the comments box below.
26 Wisconsin high schools made the list with Milwaukee's Rufus King on top at #271 and, locally, Verona High School at #1021 the only Madison area institution on the list.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan knows there are dire problems with the U.S. school system. He sees no other issue as more pressing, and calls it "the civil rights issue of our generation."
Duncan shares his plan for a complete overhaul of the public schools.
HIS hair turned no whiter than a pale auburn, and he was never caught standing on his head, but even in his advanced years Sam Beer continued to surprise--by playing the harmonica in bravura style, for example, or by coming 13th in a skydiving competition among 250 contestants half his age. The vitality that sparkled most brightly, though, was that of the mind. When Harvard's grandest political scientists gathered last year to brief alumni on their activities, the former chairman of the department, then a mere 96, was asked to make a few comments about the study of government during his tenure from 1946 to 1982. "He completely stole the show," said one. Speaking without notes, remembering everyone and everything, he upstaged all the incumbent professors.
Mr Beer was a formidable scholar, the author of countless articles and several books. The best of these, "British Politics in the Collectivist Age", picked apart the country in which he had studied before the war and established him as the foremost authority on modern British politics (which was the title of the British edition). He wrote two other books on Britain, one on the Treasury and one on what he called "the decline of civic culture" or, more politely, "the rise of the new populism". He also analysed his own country, notably in a book that examined the creation of the American nation through the twin lenses of history and political theory.
"Textbooks are outdated, in my opinion," said the film-star-turned-politician. "For so many years, we've been trying to teach exactly the same way. Our children get their information from the internet, downloaded on to their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their phones. Basically, kids feel as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons
"So why are California's school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?"
State officials said textbooks typically cost between $75 (£46) and $100, far more than their digital equivalents.
A spokesman for Pearson said it has been planning for the switch from printed text to digital for a decade, but conceded that the company will collect less money per unit from digital sales. The company added the move would allow it to save money on printing and distribution costs.
I have been a slow, but generally pleased user of electronic books (stanza, kindle and open source) on my iphone. It is time to transition and save money....
Matthew Garrahan & Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson have more:
"But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg's printing press. It's nonsensical - and expensive - to look to traditional hard-bound books when information is so readily available in electronic form."
However, with California facing a record $24bn budget deficit the state could struggle with high start-up costs - particularly as Mr Schwarzenegger has pledged to make digital text books available to each of the state's 2m students.
"The main practicality is that until students have full and equal access to computers, this would be very difficult to phase in," wrote Citigroup analysts in a research note.
The state is one of the biggest purchasers of school textbooks in the world so the transition to digital learning could have big implications for publishers, such as Pearson, owner of the Financial Times.
New Orleans test scores jumped this year across most grade levels and school types, with both charter and traditional schools celebrating gains.
The boost in scores, the third consecutive year of improvement, helped narrow a still-sizable gap in student achievement between the city and the rest of Louisiana.
"In some cases, the gap is closing dramatically, " said Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.
Vallas' district includes 33 traditional and 33 charter schools. Overall, both types of schools saw some growth, although the charters still outperformed the noncharters, echoing last year's scores. The directly run RSD schools, however, must accept students enrolling throughout the year, while charters can cap their enrollment, giving them a more stable student population.
The Swiss essayist Alain de Botton has cultivated a following by unpacking the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of our everyday lives.
His 1997 breakout book "How Proust Can Change Your Life" imparted practical lessons to be found in Marcel Proust's classic "In Search of Lost Time."
He has also written books and hosted television programs on travel, love, and architecture. In his latest book, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work," he examines of the activity we spend most of our waking hours doing: our jobs.
To research this project, Mr. de Botton, who lives in London, shadowed members of various professions including an accountant, a rocket scientist, a cookie manufacturer, and an inventor. He answered our questions by email.
I spend much time with aggressive Advanced Placement teachers. They tell me, quite often, that students must be stretched beyond their assumed capabilities. Whenever I try to pass on this advice, however, I become a target for ridicule and disbelief from readers.
Here comes more of that stuff. Newsweek unveils this week my annual rankings of America's Top High Schools, with a new twist that skeptics will find even less congenial.
The latest list, to appear on newsweek.com, will include about 1,500 schools that have reached a high standard of participation on college-level AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests. The bad news is they represent less than 6 percent of U.S. public high schools. The good news is that 73 percent of Washington area schools are on the list. The interesting news is that some of those schools have begun to require AP courses and tests for all students, even those who struggle in class.
The nation's 4,500 charter schools, free to bend tradition in the name of innovation, are credited with some of the biggest leaps in education reform.
Waiting lists are getting longer. Enrollment has doubled. President Barack Obama wants more of the taxpayer-supported alternative schools as a way to restore America's worldwide education standing.
But in Iowa, charter schools have drawn attention for what's missing. The movement never took off, despite a $4.2 million infusion of federal money and a special law.
Of 10 schools that opened in the past five years, two have dropped their charters. Eight schools are left. Some resemble their traditional public school counterparts, despite their license to break the mold.
An Ohio school district says it uncovered a cheating scheme so pervasive that it had to cancel graduation ceremonies for its 60 seniors -- but will still mail their diplomas.
A senior at Centerburg High School accessed teachers' computers, found tests, printed them and distributed them to classmates, administrators said.
Graduation was canceled because so many seniors either cheated or knew about the cheating but failed to report it, said officials of the Centerburg School District.
Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can't be tolerated.
"I am alarmed that our kids can think that in society it's OK to cheat, it's a big prank, it's OK to turn away and not be a whistle-blower, not come forth," Holden said.
State education leaders have come up with their own analysis in response to our KSL Schools high school rankings. In April, KSL unveiled a comprehensive database on Utah high schools. The state's findings pertain to every parent.
Our KSL Schools research project ranked the top Utah high schools as Park City, Davis, Skyline, Viewmont, Lone Peak and Timpview. State Education leaders compared our rankings to census data showing communities ranked with the percentage of adults who have college degrees.
Superintendent Larry Shumway said, "I thought there would be some correlation, but what I was surprised to see was almost perfect correlation."
The State Office of Education found Park City had the most college educated adults, with 52 percent. The communities that follow virtually mirror our list.
City University president Way Kuo came from a science background, but has a keen interest in educational work. When he was in the United States, he spent a lot of time on educational research despite his busy school administrative duties.
Professor Kuo recently published Clarifying Some Myths of Teaching and Research (Clusty), which he jointly penned with education psychologist Mark E Troy, detailing the results of a study on 10,000 students and 400 teachers.
The study explores the relationship between research work and quality of teaching, and explodes - or confirms - certain myths within education circles, as the book title suggests.
Kuo was invited by the Hong Kong University Graduates Association to give a speech on his new book, and many interesting education- related issues were raised during the talk.
One of the questions concerned whether scholars who engage in research work perform worse in teaching, and whether class size affects teaching performance.
AMERICAN education was once the best in the world. But today, our private and public universities are losing their competitive edge to foreign institutions, they are losing the advertising wars to for-profit colleges and they are losing control over their own admissions because of an ill-conceived ranking system. With the recession causing big state budget cuts, the situation in higher education has turned critical. Here are a few radical ideas to improve matters.
Raise the age of compulsory education. Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.
The benefits of an extra year of schooling are beyond question: high school graduates can earn more than dropouts, have better health, more stable lives and a longer life expectancy. College graduates do even better. Just as we are moving toward a longer school day (where is it written that learning should end at 3 p.m.?) and a longer school year (does anyone really believe pupils need a three-month summer vacation?), so we should move to a longer school career.
"education is the dullest of subjects," Jacques Barzun wrote in the very first sentence of his astonishingly fresh 1945 classic, Teacher in America. Barzun de- spised the idea of "professional educators" who focus on "methods" instead of subject matter. He loved teachers, but knew they "are born, not made," and that most teachers' colleges teach the wrong stuff.
Cut to 2009, when Barack Obama thinks education is the most exciting of subjects. Even so, Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, get Barzun. They understand that the key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't.
Just as Obama has leverage over the auto industry to impose tough fuel--economy standards, he now has at least some leverage over the education industry to impose teacher-effectiveness standards. The question is whether he will be able to use it, or will he get swallowed by what's known as the Blob, the collection of educrats and politicians who claim to support reform but remain fiercely committed to the status quo.
Teacher effectiveness-say it three times. Last week a group called the New Teacher Project released a report titled "The Widget Effect" that argues that teachers are viewed as indistinguishable widgets-states and districts are "indifferent to variations in teacher performance"-and notes that more than 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory. The whole country is like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, except all the teachers are above average, too.
Even when stats are reliable, they may not tell the whole picture. Aldritt pointed to the example of testing results, which may indicate more about success in teaching to a test than in overall education.
The irony of the poor survey results is that, at least according to Mr. Aldritt and independent statisticians, U.K. stats are generally reliable. He says the main problem comes in the beginning and end of the process -- "deciding which statistics should be published, and explaining how they should be used."
However, the authority will have to reserve judgment until it begins issuing its assessments, in the next month or so. And recent statistical snafus elsewhere illustrate that getting the basic numbers right isn't always easy. A government audit of South Korean statistics found that farms with thousands of chickens were reported as lacking the birds, and that unclaimed dead bodies weren't being included in death counts. A spokesman for the National Statistics Office said the office is gathering relevant documents to determine how to punish those at fault.
Illinois has joined a growing list of states that favor common learning guidelines for math and English, a movement that could lead to national testing and what supporters say is a better way for teachers and parents to gauge whether students are improving and measuring up on a nationwide level.
With a deadline for signing onto the idea Wednesday, officials hope to move quickly and have set December as a target for mapping out grade-by-grade standards from kindergarten through senior year.
The initiative would represent a dramatic departure from the past, by ending the current patchwork of state-set expectations and exams that vary widely in rigor. It also could save millions of dollars in redundant tests at a time when governments are struggling with budget deficits.
Backers believe that the groundswell of state support -- together with the endorsement of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a promise of stimulus funds to bankroll the project -- may spell success where past efforts have failed.
Briana Hudson, a senior at Wolfson High School, took her first Advanced Placement class two years ago and received a B.
She was happy with the boost to her grade-point average. She was excited by the chance to receive college credit by passing the national AP exam. She thought her class had prepared her for it, which was the point.
Except it didn't. She didn't pass.
"But if I'm getting B's in the class, and I'm doing all the work and turning everything in and I answer questions and you say that they're right," Hudson, 18, said, "... it's just kind of like everything that I did was basically a lie."
Hudson is one of thousands of Duval County Public Schools students who passed AP classes in the past two years but failed to pass the related AP exams, a Times-Union review has shown.
Duval students passed 80 percent of their AP courses last year with a "C" or better. But only 23 percent of the national AP exams, taken near the end of those courses, were passed.
The national exam pass rate for public schools was 56 percent.
The disparity widens depending on the school: Students in the district's four "A" high schools, whose students are largely white, passed 85 percent of their AP courses and 42 percent of their exams. In the four "F" schools, whose students are largely black or from lower income families, 74 percent of the courses were passed - and only 6 percent of the exams were.
Although many high school students do realize it, they all should be helped to understand that their education is not all about them, their feelings, their life experiences, their original ideas, their hopes, their goals, their friends, and so on.
While it is clear that Chemistry, Physics, Chinese, and Calculus are not about them, when it comes to history and literature, the line is more blurred. And as long as many writing contests and college admissions officers want to hear more about their personal lives, too many students will make the mistake of assuming the most important things for them to learn and talk about in their youth are "Me, Myself, and Me."
Promoters of Young Adult Fiction seem to want to persuade our students that the books they should read, if not directly about their own lives, are at least about the lives of people their own age, with problems and preoccupations like theirs. Why should they read War and Peace or Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice when they have never been to Russia or England? Why should they read Battle Cry of Freedom when the American Civil War probably happened years before they were even born? Why should they read Miracle at Philadelphia when there is no love interest, or The Path Between the Seas when they are probably not that interested in construction projects at the moment?
Almost universally, college admissions officers ask not to see an applicant's most serious Extended Essay or history research paper, to give an indication of their academic prowess, but rather they want to read a "personal essay" about the applicant's home and personal life (in 500 words or less).
Teen Magazines like Teen Voices and Teen People also celebrate Teen Life in a sadly solipsistic way, as though teens could hardly be expected to take an interest in the world around them, and its history, even though before too long they will be responsible for it.
Even the most Senior gifted program in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which finds some of the most academically promising young people we have, and offers them challenging programs in Physics, Math, and the like, when it comes to writing, it asks them to compose "Creative Nonfiction" about the events and emotions of their daily lives, if you can believe that.
The saddest thing, to me, is that I know young people really do want to grow up, and to learn a lot about their inheritance and the world around them, and they do look forward to developing the competence to allow them to shoulder the work of the world and give it their best effort.
So why do we insist on infantilizing them with this incessant effort to turn their interests back in on themselves? Partly the cause is the enormous, multi-billion-dollar Teen market, which requires them to stay focused on themselves, their looks, their gear, their friends and their little shrunken community of Teen Life. If teens were encouraged to pursue their natural desires to grow up, what would happen to the Teen Market? Disaster.
In addition, too many teachers are afraid to help their students confront the pressure to be self-involved, and to allow them to face the challenges of preparing for the adult world. Some teachers, themselves, are more comfortable in the Teen World than they think they would be "out there" in the Adult World, and that inclines them to blunt the challenges they could offer to their students, most of whom will indeed seek an opportunity to venture into that out-of-school world themselves.
We all tend to try to influence those we teach to be like us, and if we are careful students and diligent thinkers as teachers, that is not all bad. But we surely should neither want nor expect all our students to become schoolteachers working with young people. We should keep that in mind and be willing to encourage our students to engage with the "Best that has been said and thought," to help them prepare themselves for the adulthood they will very soon achieve.
For those who love students, it is always hard to see them walk out the door at the end of the school year, and also hard when they don't even say goodbye. But we must remember that for them, they are not leaving us, so much as arriving eagerly into the world beyond the classroom, and while we have them with us, we should keep that goal of theirs in mind, and refuse to join with those who, for whatever reason, want to keep our young people immature, and thinking mostly about themselves, for as long as possible.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
New research at the University of Florida predicts more public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade will take classes online, have longer school days and more of them in the next decade. Academic performance should improve and schools could save money.
While distance education over the Internet is already widespread at colleges and universities, UF educational technology researchers are offering some of the first hard evidence documenting the potential cost-savings of virtual schooling in K-12 schools.
"Policymakers and educators have proposed expanding learning time in elementary through high school grades as a way to improve students' academic performance, but online coursework hasn't been on their radar. This should change as we make school and school district leaders more aware of the potential cost savings that virtual schooling offers," said Catherine Cavanaugh, associate professor at the University of Florida's College of Education. "Over the next decade, we expect an explosion in the use of virtual schooling as a seamless synthesis between the traditional classroom and online learning."
Leaving "No Child Left Behind" does not depend on more teachers or more money, but selfless children
via email:
It's time to move away from "differentiated curriculum" which is really segregated learning, to student-centered cooperative education.
It's time to embrace what the children have to teach our world: their cooperative, creative, and compassionate spirit.
It's a shame we continue to spend more money to prevent children from sharing learning and ideas with each other and our world.
Us adults would stand to learn much on how to alleviate economic woes, if we cooperated with the regenerative spirit that children keep trying to impart in our world.
I've been a sub for a while in this district that continues to bow down to parents who care only about self-serving educational models while exploiting resources, schools, and our community.
The pre-1990 commercial publishing world supported two lengths of manuscript:
the five-page magazine article, serving as filler among the ads
the book, with a minimum of 200 pages
Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of long-copy magazines, such as the old New Yorker would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution system.
Some Mesquite high school students could skip the last week of school next year while others get intensive academic help under a program that could be approved tonight.
Students who pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and their classes would attend class for fewer days, essentially earning extra days of summer vacation.
High school students who haven't passed both would attend the full year and receive intensive help while the other students are off. Those still behind after the end of the school year would go to summer school.
"It just seems like a great opportunity to work with a smaller number of students who may have some more intensive needs," said Jeannie Stone, a district administrator who has been investigating the program.
The school board is expected to adopt the plan, known as the optional flexible year program, at its regular meeting. If approved, Mesquite would be one of the larger districts in the state to use the program
If the sample audiences around the country to whom TC will now send it like UD's lecture, she'll prepare a TC lecture series. Instead of lecturing to fifty or so people every semester, she'll have an audience that spans the nation. She'll become a distance instructor. Big time.
How to wrestle her way clear of this hypocrisy?
Well, how about this:
Universities are one thing, and companies that make educational videos and disks are another. Throughout her years of blogging about universities, UD's been arguing for the survival of four years of liberal arts education on a campus set apart - physically, metaphysically - from the world of the streets. Professors dwarfed by PowerPoints, students invisible behind laptops, destroy the immediacy of human interaction, the give and take of spontaneous, attentive discourse that challenges and changes you in college.
The School Improvement Committee has spent this year investigating academic support models in other schools to begin to develop an effective model for West High School. The committee visited Memorial High School, Evanston High School, Wheeling High School, and New Trier High School, in IL. Some of the common themes that were discovered, especially in the Illinois schools, were as follows:
Many schools have an identified academic team who intervene with struggling students. These teams of support people have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The students are regularly monitored, they develop both short and long term goals and the students develop meaningful relationships with an adult in the building. The academic support team has regular communication with teaching staff and makes recommendations for student support.
There are mandatory study tables in each academic content areas where students are directed to go if they are receiving a D or F in any given course.
Students who are skill deficient are identified in 8th grade and are provided with a summer program designed to prepare them for high school, enhanced English and Math instruction in 9th grade, and creative scheduling that allows for students to catch up to grade level.
Some schools have a family liaison person who is able to make meaningful connections in the community and with parents. After school homework centers are thriving.
Social privileges are used as incentives for students to keep their grades up.
Recommendations from the SIP Committee
Design more creative use of academic support allocation to better meet the needs of struggling students.
Create an intervention team with specific role definition for each team member.
Design and implement an after school homework center that will be available for all students, not just those struggling academically.
Design and implement student centers and tables that meet specific academic and time needs (after school, lunch, etc.)
Identify a key staff person to serve in a specialized family liaison role.
Develop a clear intervention scaffold that is easy for staff to interpret and use.
Design and implement enhanced Math and English interventions for skill deficient students.
Leslie Clark and her husband have been trying to communicate with their autistic 7-year-old son, JW, for years, but until last month, the closest they got was rudimentary sign language.
He's "a little bit of a mini-genius," Clark says, but like many autistic children, JW doesn't speak at all.
Desperate to communicate with him, she considered buying a specialized device like the ones at his elementary school in Lincoln, Neb. But the text-to-speech machines are huge, heavy and expensive; a few go for $8,000 to $10,000.
Then a teacher told her about a new application that a researcher had developed for, of all things, the iPhone and iPod Touch. Clark drove to the local Best Buy and picked up a Touch, then downloaded the "app" from iTunes.
Despite efforts to more equitably distribute teachers, School District data obtained by the Notebook this spring show that schools with the highest concentration of poverty still have the most teacher turnover and the lowest percentages of highly qualified and experienced teachers.
Differences are most striking at middle schools and high schools. For instance, at high schools where more than 85 percent of the students live below the poverty line, nearly one in three teachers is not highly qualified and one in five has two or fewer years of experience. In the highest-poverty middle schools, nearly one in three teachers has two years or less of experience.
The same pattern is true for teacher retention and turnover - higher rates of poverty correlate with higher rates of turnover. Again, the differences are most striking in middle schools. Many schools lose 30 to 40 percent of their teachers or more each year.
But they're off base in implying that alternative certification programs such as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, proposed in SB 175, will mean more students won't have effective teachers.
Research has shown otherwise.
A recent study in "Education Next" showed states with genuine alternative certification programs see higher test scores and more minority teachers. A Brookings Institute study from 2006 showed that teachers who have come through colleges of education are no more effective than teachers who come through an alternative certification program or no certification program at all.
In addition, ABCTE's rigorous teacher preparation program includes nearly 200 hours of workshops on topics such as pedagogy and classroom assessment. Our exams are difficult, with only 40 percent of candidates passing on the first try. As a result, our teacher retention rate is 85 percent after three years, compared to less than 65 percent for traditional certification routes.
I understand Hewson and Knuth's motivation for suggesting that an alternative to traditional certification may not produce great teachers. That philosophy is good for their employer, but not -- as research has shown -- any better for students.
/-- David Saba, president, ABCTE, Washington, D.C./
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. "We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world." Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made--all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the "language of music." It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says states will hurt their chance to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars if they fail to embrace innovations like charter schools.
Duncan was responding to a question about Tennessee, where Democratic state lawmakers have blocked an effort to let more kids into charter schools. President Barack Obama wants to expand the number of charter schools.
While the debate continues about school systems and which type of school works best, thousands of children and families decide that no school provides what they want.
Special needs, bullying, philosophical views or dissatisfaction with a particular school offered are all typical reasons behind home education.
Parents and children talk about why they have chosen this option - or a combination of home and school - for the education they find most appropriate.
Jamie McDonald's mother June founded a home education group in Bedford which was the first to obtain any form of state funding.
Six years ago, her group decided to collaborate with a local secondary school to use the resources of school but keep the autonomy of home education.
The only condition of joining the group is that the children sit national exams.
As Nicole Marshall posed for photos on the eve of her commencement, someone joked, "Smile - think of all the loans you took out for this!" She says she chose St. Michael's, a Catholic liberal arts college near Lake Champlain in Colchester, Vt., because it offered the biggest aid package, "but I'm still leaving with quite a bit of loans" - about $20,000.
Her debt is a little lighter than the national average for graduates of private, four-year schools who borrow: nearly $23,800 as of 2007, according to the College Board in New York.
But if there's any time that students and parents can take such costs in stride, it's during the heady rush of commencement, when the campus is fragrant with fresh blossoms and abundant hope. For added inspiration to help them focus on the value of learning, these families heard a commencement speech Thursday from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Test time begins today for Charlotte-Mecklenburg's elementary and middle school students. And as with almost everything else, the economy will make it more challenging.
North Carolina's end-of-grade exams are designed to gauge whether students in grades 3-8 have mastered reading and math. They influence whether students advance to middle or high school.
The tests themselves aren't getting harder. But with summer school options shrinking because of budget cuts, thousands of students who score below grade level must now keep trying to pass before the school year ends June 10.
In Mecklenburg and across the state, tight budgets are forcing cutbacks in summer school, which is usually an option for kids who need help getting ready for the next grade.
An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria
Thanks much for taking the time from your busy schedule to respond to our letter below. I am delighted to note your serious interest in the topic of how to obtain middle school teachers who are highly qualified to teach mathematics to the MMSD's students so that all might succeed. We are all in agreement with the District's laudable goal of having all students complete algebra I/geometry or integrated algebra I/geometry by the end of 10th grade. One essential component necessary for achieving this goal is having teachers who are highly competent to teach 6th- through 8th-grade mathematics to our students so they will be well prepared for high school-level mathematics when they arrive in high school.
The primary point on which we seem to disagree is how best to obtain such highly qualified middle school math teachers. It is my strong belief that the MMSD will never succeed in fully staffing all of our middle schools with excellent math teachers, especially in a timely manner, if the primary mechanism for doing so is to provide additional, voluntary math ed opportunities to the District's K-8 generalists who are currently teaching mathematics in our middle schools. The District currently has a small number of math-certified middle school teachers. It undoubtedly has some additional K-8 generalists who already are or could readily become terrific middle school math teachers with a couple of hundred hours of additional math ed training. However, I sincerely doubt we could ever train dozens of additional K-8 generalists to the level of content knowledge necessary to be outstanding middle school math teachers so that ALL of our middle school students could be taught mathematics by such teachers.
Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don't believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn't simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren't we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren't answered in the teachers' manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?
The MMSD has been waiting a long time already to have math-qualified teachers teaching mathematics in our middle schools. Many countries around the world whose students outperform US students in mathematics only hire teachers who majored in the subject to teach it. Other school districts in the US are taking advantage of the current recession with high unemployment to hire and train people who know and love mathematics, but don't yet know how to teach it to others. For example, see http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE54L2W120090522
If Madison continues to wait, we will miss out on this opportunity and yet another generation of middle schoolers will be struggling to success in high school.
The MMSD has a long history of taking many, many year to resolve most issues. For example, the issue of students receiving high school credit for non-MMSD courses has been waiting 8 years and counting! It has taken multiple years for the District's math task force to be formed, meet, write its report, and have its recommendations discussed. For the sake of the District's students, we need many more math-qualified middle school teachers NOW. Please act ASAP, giving serious consideration to our proposal below. Thanks.
More than 600 students living in the Madison School District have applied to leave their hometown schools through open enrollment next fall -- more than any previous year.
While district officials say it's likely only about half will actually leave, the district wants to know why so many want to go.
The net number of students who left the Madison district through open enrollment jumped from 156 in 2007-08 to 288 this school year.
One explanation for the jump, district officials say, is that since 2008, the district no longer considers the effect of open enrollment on its racial balance. The district suspended that practice in February 2008, eight months after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling cast doubt on the enforceability of a state law the district cited in denying transfer requests.
Still, Madison superintendent Dan Nerad said the increasing numbers are a concern.
"There's all kinds of reasons that people make this choice," he said, "but it's not a dissimilar pattern than you'll find in other quality urban districts surrounded by quality suburban districts."
Those who don't know their past are bound to repeat it," reads the billboard in the entry hall of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. When I first came here, it was for an interview with two institute researchers who co-authored the book Victims of the Occupation about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion.
After the interview, I asked one of the researchers, Milan Bárta, to find my parents' old communist secret police (StB) file. I wanted to see if there were any pictures of their wedding Jan. 13, 1979, just days before they emigrated to West Germany. My family has no pictures of that day, but my father had always joked that the StB had taken some.
A month later, I was invited to the institute to take a look at my parents' documents.
In my role at my tiny school district in the central valley of California I find myself in a rather unique position. I wear the hats of classroom teacher (computer lit) and tech support and coordinator. I am also an Adobe Education Leader and in that role I have the opportunity to travel throughout the United States as a trainer and presenter. Whenever I am out of my district training I am often engaged in a discussion about one of the most basic frustrations teachers have around the country (these are teachers trying like mad to integrate technology into their curriculum.) Their frustration source-none other than their own district and school technology administrators and tech support personnel!
Why is it that we have become enemies? Teachers all over the United States tell me that they are constantly locked out and filtered out from most, or all, of the fantastic new free web 2.0 tools that are currently available. Not only are the newest and greatest unavailable, they are frustrated because they can't even install a simple Flash or Java upgrade themselves. In their efforts to regulate and "keep safe" their networks, administrators have made decisions that often ignore many of the very reasons their networks exist-to facilitate learning and prepare our students for their future. Today's digital natives are already exploring and using Web 2.0 tools outside schools. Isolating them from these tools at school not only sends them the message that we are outdated and irrelevant, it give them further excuses to tune out, or as they tell me often, to power down, when they enter a traditional classroom.
For those of you who don't know (i.e. those of you less geeky than I am), last night was the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It's the Super Bowl of the super smart. Middle-schoolers from across the country compete for the prestige of knowing how to spell words that are completely unusable in conversation, unless of course the conversation is with Noah Webster's ghost. For instance, laodicean, which apparently means lukewarm or indifferent to religion or politics, was the final word that scored the 13-year-old winner $37,500.
Because I was watching King James tear it up on the court last night, I missed the Bee, but I did watch the semi-finals on ESPN, and noticed these kids have something else that I haven't got:
Mad-crazy-hard-to-spell names. Kavya Shivashankar (winner), Anamika Veeramani, Neetu Chandak, Sidharth Chand ... the list goes on. In fact, I think it stretches all the way to India. Reminds me of the yo' momma jokes of my youth. You know: "Yo momma's so fat name is so long the phone book has to list her in two area codes."**
Parents who homeschool their children are increasingly white, wealthy and well-educated -- and their numbers have nearly doubled in less than a decade, according to findings out today from the federal government.
What else has nearly doubled? The percentage of girls who homeschool. They now outnumber male homeschoolers by a wide -- and growing -- margin.
As of the spring of 2007, an estimated 1.5 million, or 2.9% of all school-age children in the USA, were homeschooled, up from 850,000 (or 1.7%) in 1999.
Of the 1.5 million, just under 1.3 million are homeschooled "entirely," not attending public or private school classes of any type.
The new figures come compliments of the latest Condition of Education, a massive compilation of statistics being released today in Washington by the U.S. Education Department.
Attached to this e-mail is the Proposed Strategic Plan and a cover memorandum to the Board of Education. We invite all of you to the June 15 Special Board of Education meeting at 6:00 p.m. The Plan, along with a way to respond, is on the district's website (www.mmsd.org) on the home page, under Hot Topics. This is the direct link:
After Bethany Martin graduated from high school here last June, she was surprised when the local community college told her that she had to retake classes like basic composition, for no college credit. Each remedial course costs her $350, more than a week's pay from her job at a Chick-fil-A restaurant.
Ms. Martin blames chaotic high school classes. "The kids just took over," she recalls. But her college instructors say that even well-run high school courses often fail to teach what students need to know in college. They say that Ms. Martin's senior English class, for instance, focused on literature, but little on writing.
Like Ms. Martin, more than a million college freshmen across the nation must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree. Poorly run public schools are a part of the problem, but so is a disconnect between high schools and colleges.
"We need to better align what we expect somebody to be able to do to graduate high school with what we expect them to do in college," said Billie A. Unger, the dean at Ms. Martin's school, Blue Ridge Community and Technical College, who oversees "developmental" classes, a nice word for remedial. "If I'm to be a pro football player, and you teach me basketball all through school, I'll end up in developmental sports," she said.
My colleague Dan de Vise's wonderful piece Tuesday about the Darnestown, Md., student who never missed a day of school has had a terrific reaction. Like me, readers appreciated Dan's tribute to old-fashioned values, such as dependability and persistence, which some of us thought had died out in the younger generations.
The research shows that absenteeism is a major educational problem, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods. The fewer days a student spends in school, the lower their level of achievement. But there is a related problem that is more difficult to measure in a way that would allow us to celebrate those students who overcome it. What do we do about students who are forced to miss school when they are in school?
Many people assume that if the kid shows up before the first bell and stays until the final bell, he has gotten a good education that day. If only that were so. Here are some bad habits of modern school administration that, when added up, significantly reduce learning time:
ABC will do a fine job tonight introducing you to the 11 remaining Spelling Bee finalists (and yes, you will watch the Bee instead of, or at worst in addition to, the Cavs-Magic game. There are more than a dozen NBA conference final games most years, but only one Spelling Bee. You know it's true.)
Anyhow, ABC will do a fine job tonight introducing you to the 11 remaining finalists, but still, I wanted to make a few points.
* All day I've been referring to Serena Skye Laine-Lobsinger as Bee Goes Punk, and she sort of was ok with that description.
"I'm kind of adventurous with what I like to wear," the 13-year old from West Palm Beach told me. "I'll wear pretty much anything."
She's particularly fond of bandanas, was sporting some sparkled-out Chuck Taylors, and had four shades of nail polish on (black and white alternating on her right hand, and silver and pink on her left). So, punk?
"You probably could say that," she said. "That's probably how a lot of people look at me."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent billions of dollars exploring the idea that smaller high schools might result in higher graduation rates and better test scores. Instead, it found that the key to better education is not necessarily smaller schools but more effective teachers.
Some people might cringe while recounting how much money the foundation spent figuring this out. But the foundation's new CEO, Jeff Raikes, smiles and uses it as an example to explain that the charity has the money to try things that might fail.
"Almost by definition, good philanthropy means we're going to have to do some risky things, some speculative things to try and see what works and what doesn't," Raikes said Wednesday during an interview with The Associated Press.
The foundation's new "learner-in-chief" has spent the nine months since he was named CEO studying the operation, traveling around the world and figuring out how to balance the pressures of the economic downturn with the growing needs of people in developing nations.
The former Microsoft Corp. executive, who turns 51 on Friday, joined the foundation as its second CEO after Patty Stonesifer, another former Microsoft executive, announced her retirement and his friends Bill and Melinda Gates talked Raikes out of retiring.
Superintendent Dan Nerad's Response to "Action Needed, Please Sign on.... Math Teacher Hiring in the Madison School District"
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad via email:
Dr. Mertz-
Thank you for sharing your thoughts regarding this critical issue in our middle schools. We will continue to follow the conversation and legislative process regarding hiring Teach for America and Math for America candidates. We have similar concerns to those laid out by UW Professors Hewson and Knuth (http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/forum/451220). In particular they stated, "Although subject-matter knowledge is essential to good teaching, the knowledge required for teaching is significantly different from that used by math and science professionals." This may mean that this will not be a cost effective or efficient solution to a more complex problem than many believe it to be. These candidates very well may need the same professional learning opportunities that we are working with the UW to create for our current staff. The leading researchers on this topic are Ball, Bass and Hill from the University of Michigan. More information on their work can be found at (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lmt/home). We are committed to improving the experience our students have in our mathematics class and will strive to hire the most qualified teachers and continue to strengthen our existing staff.
Nineteen area high school seniors are among the 2,800 winners of 2009 National Merit Scholarships financed by colleges and universities. This first wave of the annual awards, valued from $500 to $2,000 for up to four years, will be followed by another group announced in July.
Madison scholarship winners include: Amy Callear (Univ. of Pittsburgh scholarship), Molly Farry-Thorn (Carleton College) and Yang He (UW-Madison) of West High School; Hannah Conley (Univ. of Minnesota) and George Otto (Univ. of Minnesota) of East High School; and Rachel Underwood (UW-Madison) of Edgewood High School.
Stelios Fourakis (Univ. of Chicago) and Annie Steiner (Carleton College) of Middleton High School also are recipients, along with Jennifer Anderson (Univ. of Oklahoma) of Sun Prairie High School, and Amanda Spencer (Washington University in St. Louis) of Verona Area High School.
Other area winners are: Kendall Schneider (Univ. of Minnesota) of DeForest Area High School; Samuel Cahill (Arizona State University) and Megan Wasley (Univ. of Minnesota) of Dodgeville High School; Barry Badeau (Univ. of Minnesota) of Evansville High School; Leah Laux (Washington University in St. Louis) of Kettle Moraine High School; Ewain Gwynne (Northwestern University) of Lodi High School; and Jonathan Means (St. Olaf College) of Watertown High School.
Nita Kopan (Case Western Reserve), of Middleton, who attends Corona Del Sol High School in Tempe, Ariz., and James Foster (Univ. of Chicago), of Verona, who attends Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., also were awarded.
The reigning national spelling champion is a 14-year-old kid whose one-liners kept everyone laughing a year ago. His parents moved to the United States from central India, and he wants to be a neurosurgeon when he grows up.
Last year's runner-up _ and one of this year's favorites at the Scripps National Spelling Bee _ is an all-business 13-year-old Indian-American boy from Michigan. He's also set his sights on neurosurgery.
Another favorite expected to be onstage for Thursday night's nationally televised finals is a 13-year-old Kansas girl with a sweet smile and a last name that's a spelling challenge unto itself. You guessed it: Her family comes from India, and she wants to be a neurosurgeon.
When Scott Brooks got laid off by American Express in February he decided to turn his back on finance and revive a dream he gave up on many years ago -- to become a math teacher.
He happens to live in New Jersey, where state education authorities have long worried about a dearth of math teachers.
Last week he heard about a new program called "Traders to Teachers" being set up at Montclair State University to retrain people in the finance industry who have been laid off in the deepest crisis to hit Wall Street since the Great Depression.
"You get really comfortable with your career, and I was making six figures, and it was nice," Brooks said shortly after an interview at the university to determine his eligibility for the program, which starts classes in September.
"Sometimes the house has to be on fire before you leave its comfort and start on your journey. The credit card business and Wall Street overall is like that house on fire," he said.
The School Performance Report is the annual "report card" that is required under Wisconsin law (Wi.Stat.115.38) to be compiled and published for each public school and public school district. DPI's recent announcement (noted here) that selected School Performance Report information will now be available online at the DPI web site is a step in the right direction, but this important tool for school accountability and information for parents and the public has yet to reach its full potential, due to inconsistent compliance with the requirements of the reporting law.
The School Performance Report has been required since 1991. The items that are to be included in each report are (emphases added):
(a) Indicators of academic achievement, including the performance of pupils on the tests administered under s. 121.02 (1) (r) and the performance of pupils, by subject area, on the statewide assessment examinations administered under s. 118.30.
(b) 1. Other indicators of school and school district performance, including dropout, attendance, retention in grade and graduation rates; percentage of habitual truants, as defined in s. 118.16 (1) (a); percentage of pupils participating in extracurricular and community activities and advanced placement courses; percentage of graduates enrolled in postsecondary educational programs; and percentage of graduates entering the workforce.
2. The numbers of suspensions and expulsions; the reasons for which pupils are suspended or expelled, reported according to categories specified by the state superintendent; the length of time for which pupils are expelled, reported according to categories specified by the state superintendent; whether pupils return to school after their expulsion; the educational programs and services, if any, provided to pupils during their expulsions, reported according to categories specified by the state superintendent; the schools attended by pupils who are suspended or expelled; and the grade, sex and ethnicity of pupils who are suspended or expelled and whether the pupils are children with disabilities, as defined in s. 115.76 (5).
(c) Staffing and financial data information, as determined by the state superintendent, not to exceed 10 items. The state superintendent may not request a school board to provide information solely for the purpose of including the information in the report under this paragraph.
(d) The number and percentage of resident pupils attending a course in a nonresident school district under s. 118.52, the number of nonresident pupils attending a course in the school district under s. 118.52, and the courses taken by those pupils.
(e) The method of reading instruction used in the school district and the textbook series used to teach reading in the school district.
It should be noted (and is acknowledged by DPI) that the School Performance Report information on the DPI site does not cover all of these items.
In 2005, the statute was amended to require that parents be alerted to the existence and availability of the report and given the opportunity to request a copy, and to require that each school district with a web site post the report on its web site (amended language italicized below):
Annually by January 1, each school board shall notify the parent or guardian of each pupil enrolled in the school district of the right to request a school and school district performance report under this subsection. Annually by May [amended from January] 1, each school board shall, upon request, distribute to the parent or guardian of each pupil enrolled in the school district, including pupils enrolled in charter schools located in the school district, or give to each pupil to bring home to his or her parent or guardian, a school and school district performance report that includes the information specified by the state superintendent under sub. (1). The report shall also include a comparison of the school district's performance under sub. (1) (a) and (b) with the performance of other school districts in the same athletic conference under sub. (1) (a) and (b). If the school district maintains an Internet site, the report shall be made available to the public at that site.
This information, if fully compiled and made available as intended by the statute, could be a valuable resource to parents and the public (answering, perhaps, some of the questions in this discussion). There may be parents who are unaware that this "report card" exists, and would benefit from receiving the notice that the statute requires. For parents without access to the Internet, the right to request a hard copy of the report may be their only access to this information.
Districts who do not post their School Performance Reports on their web sites may do well to follow the example of the Kenosha School District, which does a good job of highlighting its School Performance Reports (including drop-down menus by school) on the home page of its web site.
School districts often find it challenging to provide their School District Performance Reports (SDPRs) to the public at their websites, as is legally required (under s.115.38, Wis. Stats.).
The job is easier now that the DPI has created an on-line version of (most of) the SDPR. By simply linking to this page, districts can fulfill almost all of their Internet-based data reporting obligations under the statute.
The Web report covers those SDPR categories which are reported by athletic conference, including achievement, Advanced Placement participation, graduation rates, post-secondary plans, extra-/co-curricular activities, staffing, and financial information. Districts still hold the responsibility for reporting suspension and expulsion data, which are not yet available on the SDPR webpage. The DPI is planning to add that data to the on-line report in the future.
Lauren Kirk had a hamburger in hand, a new friend by her side. On Monday afternoon, she was one of the cool kids.
The 14-year-old from Bloomington, Ind., with the lime-green headband and wild shoelaces wasn't about to skip the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee barbecue to pore over lists of obscure words for the weeklong spell-off.
While a few did choose to hang out at the hotel to study _ with the hope they'll be crowned champion Thursday on prime-time network television _ the rest were in their element at a park in the Virginia suburbs, romping around, playing volleyball, trading autographs and singing karaoke. (ABBA seemed to be a favorite this year).
"It's a lot more social than I thought it would be," said Lauren said, who had a peace sign painted on her temple and yellow-and-black bee on her leg. "It's really nice to be among people who actually get your jokes."
Wisconsin's statewide test given to hundreds of thousands of students each year deserves a poor grade for its own performance.
The test has some of the weakest standards in the nation.
The test takes far too long to process.
The Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination also fails to compare student proficiency at the beginning of a school year with proficiency at the end of the same academic year.
All of that needs to change, as recommended last week in reports by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative study group in Hartland.
Join the Green Charter Schools Network in supporting the development of schools with environment-focused educational programs and practices. "The Real Wealth of the Nation" by Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, describes the Network's beginnings and mission. Please complete and return the GCSNet membership form.
Thank You !
Senn Brown, Executive Director *
Green Charter Schools Network
5426 Greening Lane, Madison, WI 53705
Tel: 608-238-7491 Email: senn@greencharterschools.org
Web: www.greencharterschools.org
* Founding Executive Secretary (2000 - 2007), Wisconsin Charter Schools Association
MY day job is teaching introductory economics to about 700 Harvard undergraduates a year. Lately, when people hear that, they often ask how the economic crisis is changing what's offered in a freshman course.
They're usually disappointed with my first answer: not as much as you might think. Events have been changing so quickly that we teachers are having trouble keeping up. Syllabuses are often planned months in advance, and textbooks are revised only every few years.
But there is another, more fundamental reason: Despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged. Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.
You might think of flash cards and work sheets when you think of grade-school math. But now, thanks to two young brothers from Hinsdale, there's an app for that.
Eleven-year-old Owen Voorhees' iPhone application, MathTime, debuted in the iTunes App Store last week. The simple program, which displays random addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems and their solutions, has been a work in progress for nearly nine months.
"I hope it helps people practice their facts," Owen said, explaining that the application is intended for students a bit younger than himself, such as brother Finn, 9.
Imagine that somewhere in the United States there is a Horace Mann (American educator)">Horace Mann High School, with a student who is a first-rate softball pitcher. Let us further imagine that although she set a new record for strikeouts for the school and the district, she was never written up in the local paper. Let us suppose that even when she broke the state record for batters retired she received no recognition from the major newspapers or other media in the state.
Imagine a high school boy who had broken the high jump record for his school, district, and state, who also never saw his picture or any story about his achievement in the media. He also would not hear from any college track coaches with a desire to interest him in becoming part of their programs.
In this improbable scenario, we could suppose that the coaches of these and other fine athletes at the high school level would never hear anything from their college counterparts, and would not be able to motivate their charges with the possibility of college scholarships if they did particularly well in their respective sports.
These fine athletes could still apply to colleges and, if their academic records, test scores, personal essays, grades, and applications were sufficiently impressive, they might be accepted at the college of their choice, but, of course they would receive no special welcome as a result of their outstanding performance on the high school athletic fields.
This is all fiction, of course, in our country at present. Outstanding athletes do receive letters from interested colleges, and even visits from coaches if they are good enough, and it is then up to the athlete to decide which college sports program they will "commit to" or "sign with," as the process is actually described in the media. Full scholarships are often available to the best high school athletes, so that they may contribute to their college teams without worrying about paying for tuition or accumulating student debt.
In turn, high school coaches with very good athletes in fact do receive attention from college coaches, who keep in touch to find out the statistics on their most promising athletes, and to get recommendations for which ones are most worth pursuing and most worth offering scholarships to.
These high school coaches are an important agent in helping their promising athletes decide who to "commit to" or who to "sign with" when they are making their higher education plans.
On the other hand, if high school teachers have outstanding students of history, there are no scholarships available for them, no media recognition, and certainly no interest from college professors of history. For their work in identifying and nurturing the most diligent, the brightest, and the highest-achieving students of history, these academic coaches (teachers) are essentially ignored.
Those high school students of history, no matter whether they write first-class 15,000-word history research papers, like Colin Rhys Hill of Atlanta, Georgia (published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review), or a first-class 13,000-word history research paper, like Amalia Skilton of Tempe, Arizona (published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Concord Review), they will hear from no one offering them a full college scholarship for their outstanding high school academic work in history.
College professors of history will not write or call them, and they will not visit their homes to try to persuade them to "commit to" or "sign with" a particular college or university. The local media will ignore their academic achievements, because they limit their high school coverage to the athletes.
To anyone who believes the primary mission of the high schools is academic, and who pays their taxes mainly to promote that mission, this bizarre imbalance in the mechanics of recognition and support may seem strange, if they stop to think about it. But this is our culture when it comes to promoting academic achievement at the high school level. If we would like to see higher levels of academic achievement by our high school students, just as we like to see higher levels of athletic achievement by our students at the high school level, perhaps we might give some thought to changing this culture (soon).
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Before D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) took over the city's public schools two years ago, he paid a visit here to learn about a school system at the center of urban education reform.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) had taken charge of the 1.1 million-student system in 2002, naming a litigator with little professional education experience to turn it around.
In seven years as schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein has emphasized accountability and school choice. He has granted principals more autonomy and money in exchange for results, piloted a performance-based teacher compensation plan and raised millions of dollars in private funds to support his initiatives, including $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create smaller, more personalized high schools.
When Maryland's high school class of 2009 graduates next month, it will become the first in the state to prove it can solve an equation such as 12x + 84 =252. (Answer: 14.)
But state officials still don't know the value of another variable: the number of students who won't pass exams in algebra, English, biology and government for a new graduation requirement. As of March, about 4,000 of 58,000 seniors statewide hadn't passed the High School Assessments or met an alternative academic standard. This is the first year that seniors have been required to meet the testing standard.
State and local officials predict that graduation rates will remain roughly the same and that only a handful of seniors will be denied a diploma based on the HSA requirement.
One of the state's oldest and largest virtual charter schools is scheduled to make big changes this year affecting hundreds of students.
Yet there have been no noticeable protests and no parental complaints as students from throughout Wisconsin prepare to attend a different school this fall without changing facilities, principal or staff.
If the No Child Left Behind law, focused on raising test scores, proves to be a dead end, what do we do next? I rarely read or hear intelligent discussion of this question. The Pentagon has battle plans from A to Z. Why do those of us who care about schools keep bickering over the current system, rather than expand the debate to realistic alternatives?
Thankfully, one of the most thoughtful and imaginative education scholars, Richard Rothstein, has come to the rescue. As usual, I am getting to his new book, "Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right," a few months later than I should have, making it the latest selection of my Better Late Than Never Book Club. It is a must-read for anyone who wonders, as I often have, how we might replace or augment standardized testing with measures of what is happening in the classroom beyond just the few days in spring when our kids take the state tests.
Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a former national education columnist for the New York Times. He spent much of his career as an analyst of school district spending. No one knows more than he does about the strange ways we use our education dollars. In the past few years he has become an articulate national spokesman for the view that our urban public schools cannot succeed unless health, social and employment issues are addressed in those communities with the same passion and persistence that the teachers I write about put toward classroom learning issues.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan believes we have what amounts to a "once-in-a-couple-of-generations opportunity" to "push a very, very strong reform agenda" for the nation's schools. His view is based, in part, on the Obama administration's intention to spend billions of additional dollars on public education, though Duncan acknowledges that money alone is not the answer. He also says the country has arrived at a moment when we have the necessary political will to make tough changes.
Not least of the problems that must be addressed can be found in America's high schools, where, Duncan said in a speech last week, "Our expectations for our teenagers in this country are far too low."
In fact, change has never come easily to America's approximately 23,800 public high schools. Since the alarming report A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, we have had "wave after wave of reform"- and little progress, according to Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.
After Irace got his termination papers in June from JPMorgan Chase, he called "Brother K."
Brother Kenneth Hoagland, the principal at Kellenberg, a private Catholic institution, taught Irace at Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York.
Hoagland called Irace in for an interview in August, when he needed a replacement for a math instructor on leave. A month later, the former trader was teaching quadratic equations and factoring to freshmen in five 40-minute periods of algebra a day. He enrolled in refresher math classes at Nassau Community College, sometimes learning subjects a day or two ahead of the kids. This semester, he's teaching sixth-graders measurements and percentages.
Conditioning Drills
Seated at wooden desks, 21 to 39 in each class, they get excited when he flashes the animated math adventures of a robot named Moby onto a classroom projector. After school, Irace, now 198 pounds (90 kilograms), puts a whistle on a yellow cord around his neck and runs girls through conditioning drills as an assistant coach for the lacrosse team. The extra coaching stipend runs $1,000 to $2,000 for the season.
Colorado is making it easier for schools to offer teens a chance to earn an associate's degree while still in high school, a move backers say could help lower the dropout rate and help the state win millions in extra federal stimulus money.
Gov. Bill Ritter signed House Bill 1319 into law along with eight other education bills on Thursday at a high school called the Middle College of Denver.
It's one of a half dozen high schools around the state where students take career classes and earn college credit at nearby community colleges.
Ritter urged the students, packed into the school cafeteria along with lawmakers and education officials, to tell their siblings and friends about the program, which he said would help keep more students in school.
State education officials believe it's the first statewide program of its kind in the nation.
"None of this is really about us. This is about you," Ritter said before sitting down to sign the bills.
While this legislation is well-intentioned, it will ultimately do more harm than good -- and it is the children in the most troubled schools who will pay the price.
Here's why: SB 175 is intended to attract math and science professionals (engineers and scientists) into teaching, based on the belief that they have the necessary subject-matter knowledge. The bill would allow them to get teaching licenses almost entirely on the basis of written tests (a math test, for example), as long as they receive some loosely specified form of mentoring during their first year on the job.
There's nothing wrong with using written tests, and mentoring new teachers is a great idea. But neither is sufficient to protect children from dangerously under-prepared teachers.
Although subject-matter knowledge is essential to good teaching, the knowledge required for teaching is significantly different from that used by math and science professionals. A well-constructed certification program gives beginning teachers a crucial knowledge base (of math or science as well as about teaching) and helps them develop the skills and practices that bring this knowledge to life.
There's a reason that so many certification programs immerse new teachers in classroom tasks gradually: It gives them a chance to make their mistakes and sharpen their skills in more controlled, lower-stakes contexts before handing them primary responsibility for a classroom of students.
I had never been to Madison in my life, and you know what? It was a good decision. Except for one thing: I ignored the data about schools. I didn't believe that a city known for progressive social programs and university filled with genius faculty could have poorly performing public schools. But it ended up being true, and all economic development research says do not move to a place with crap schools—it's a sign that lots of things in the city are not right.
The scourge of teachers surveys the desolation of learning
"SACK the useless teachers!" ran the headline above an interview with Chris Woodhead in 1994. And the newly appointed chief inspector of schools grew no more emollient on the job. Naming and shaming bad schools and teachers would raise standards ("I personally respond to threats"); educational research was "an irrelevance and a distraction"; schools didn't need more money, but to jettison progressive teaching methods. After becoming prime minister, Tony Blair kept the Conservative appointee on as part of the attempt to persuade middle England that New Labour was not in hock to the unions. When Mr Woodhead finally resigned in 2000, after clashing repeatedly with David Blunkett, the education secretary of the day, many schools threw staffroom parties.
Now the scourge of trendy teachers is back, and as intemperate as ever. In "A Desolation of Learning", a book published on May 22nd, Mr Woodhead surveys state schools in England and sees a wasteland. The national curriculum intended to ensure that all children learned the basics has become a "solipsistic daydream". The inspectorate he used to lead is no longer an impartial arbiter but a partisan thought-police, "arguably the most lethal part" of the system. Government oversees "bloated bureaucracies and frenzied initiatives", and the opposition Tories can be as "sanctimoniously utopian" as New Labour.
Poudre School District middle school students will benefit from a new computer curriculum next school year, giving them the most up-to-date technology skills to prepare them for the future.
"We are making a huge paradigm shift in what we are teaching middle school students in technology," said Kathy Hanson, PSD career education coordinator. "Previously, we were teaching a few commonly-used applications. This expands considerably on that base."
The new curriculum, developed by PSD and Colorado State University's Information Science and Technology Center, includes courses for sixth- and seventh-graders that will give them skills for a lifetime.
PSD middle school teachers and school technology coordinators recently completed two of five days of training for the new curriculum.
Timing for the implementation coincides with PSD's grade-level changes to institute middle schools.
Although sex education is optional statewide, Chicago public schools have been teaching abstinence, contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases for at least three years.
Chicago School Board members approved an "age-appropriate'' and "comprehensive'' sexual health education policy for grades six through 12 in 2006, and last year mandated that such classes start in fifth grade.
At the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, physical education director Ken Bringe said sex education is covered freshmen year.
"Right off the bat, they get this," Bringe said. Why? "To prevent pregnancy.''
Bringe believes the class, which uses the Family Health and Sexuality curriculum by Health Teachers, is one reason why the school at 3857 W. 111th St. has only had about two teen pregnancies in seven years.
We are looking for the best history research papers we can find by secondary students from anywhere in the English-speaking world. Papers may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, domestic or foreign, and should be 4,000-6,000 words or more [one of our Emerson Prize winners this year had 15,292 words on the Soviet-Afghan War by Colin Rhys Hill of Atlanta, Georgia...see our website], and with Chicago-style (Turabian) endnotes and bibliography. Authors should send a printed copy to the address below, and may include a Macintosh disk with the paper in Microsoft Word.
We have published 857 exemplary history papers by high school students from 44 states and 35 other countries since 1987. There is a submission form on our website and 60 examples of papers we have published. The submission fee is $40, to The Concord Review, and the author receives the next four issues of the journal. We publish about 7% of the papers we receive.
John Silber of Boston University wrote that: "The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously." Denis Doyle wrote that: "One of the most remarkable publications in American education sails proudly on though it is virtually unsung and almost unnoticed except among a small coterie of cognoscenti: The Concord Review. It is time once again to sing its praises and bring it to the attention of the larger audience it so richly deserves."
Families can spend thousands of dollars on coaching to help college-bound students boost their SAT scores. But a new report finds that these test-preparation courses aren't as beneficial as consumers are led to believe.
The report, to be released Wednesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, criticizes common test-prep-industry marketing practices, including promises of big score gains with no hard data to back up such claims. The report also finds fault with the frequent use of mock SAT tests because they can be devised to inflate score gains when students take the actual SAT. The association represents 11,000 college admissions officers, high-school guidance counselors and private advisors.
"It breaks my heart to see families who can't afford it spending money they desperately need on test prep when no evidence would indicate that this is money well-spent," says William Fitzsimmons, Harvard University's dean of undergraduate admissions, who led a group at the college admissions association that prompted the report.
With the recent release of ELA test scores in New York City, we hear, yet again, that Bloomberg and Klein regard their reforms as a great success. Beyond questioning the test scores themselves, I wonder just how helpful it is to go around proclaiming success in the first place. Is success an unequivocal good? Is it an end in itself?
With failure you learn your limits. You may or may not be able to stretch them, but you find out what they are. Failure is like the molding of a sculpture. The bronze must pour into something. If it spills all over the place in an endless gush of success, it takes no shape at all.
There are too many kinds of failure to enumerate, but here are a few of the common varieties:
When Miriam Flores was in third grade at Coronado Elementary School, her mother, also named Miriam, was surprised to learn that she was getting in trouble.
"Her teacher said she was talking in class," said Mrs. Flores, who speaks limited English. "She had always been a quiet child, but she said she had to ask other students what the teacher was saying because she didn't understand."
At the time, the state provided only $150 extra for each non-English-speaking student like Miriam. Few teachers were trained to help English language learners, and many students in this small, largely Hispanic border town were floundering. So Mrs. Flores and other parents sued under a federal civil rights law, charging that non-English-speaking children were being denied equal educational opportunity.
Much has changed since then: Miriam is now a 23-year-old college student. Under a new Arizona law, Coronado Elementary provides four hours a day of intensive English, in small classes, for students struggling with the language. These days, the Nogales schools spend 10 times as much on their English language learners.
Next month, after 17 years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court will rule on the Flores case, deciding whether Arizona is complying with federal laws requiring public schools to teach children to speak English.
The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply. In recent years, however, government and nonprofit agencies have begun turning things for the better. A brand new, government-subsidized shopping center recently opened on Alabama Avenue, providing one of the few full-service grocery stores in the area, along with a new sit-down restaurant and mainstream bank branch.
But reformers are finding that such initiatives won't fix decades of market dysfunction overnight. Not far from the new Super Giant grocery store and Wachovia Bank are older businesses that continue to draw a steady stream of customers--corner stores that sell little fresh food, fast-food outlets that serve meals low in nutritional value, and tax preparation firms and check-cashing outlets that charge high fees. Markets are complicated, and improving them requires more than just creating incentives for new providers to set up shop.
Repetition doesn't make something true. The latest reminder was a piece by Financial Times columnist Clive Crook, in which he warns that America's long-term economic prospects are bleak because of a "calamitous" failure of schools to produce a high-quality workforce. This alarmist view is not limited to Crook. It has been echoed by Bill Gates and philanthropist Eli Broad, and by a host of organizations, such as the Business Roundtable.
OPEN FORUM
Should job creation favor men? 05.19.09
Now is the time for right-to-repair law 05.18.09
Open forum: Journalism students lead way 05.16.09
More Open Forum »
It's easy to understand why people take at face value what reformers with impressive credentials say about education. They can be intimidating. But that's no excuse. As a wag quipped: In God we trust, all others bring evidence.
So let's look at the evidence.
In October 2007, B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University and Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute concluded that the United States has a problem on the demand side of the equation - not on the supply side. This crucial distinction is lost in the heated debate, resulting in widespread misunderstanding.
Tracking and Inequality: New Directions for Research and Practice Presentation by UW School of Education Professor Adam Gamoran
via a kind reader's email:
Good afternoon. We'd like to invite you to Memorial High tomorrow afternoon for a discussion hosted by our Equity Team. Professor Adam Gamoran, Interim Dean of the UW School of Education, will be presenting paper titled Tracking and Inequality: New Directions for Research and Practice. His article is attached. We will begin at 4:15pm and should end around:15pm, and we'll meet in the Wisconsin Neighborhood Center, which is in the Southwest corner of the building. Please park on the Mineral Point Rd. side of the building, and enter through the doors closest to Gammon Rd. There will signs to direct you from there. Have a good week, and we hope to see you tomorrow afternoon...Jay
Jay Affeldt
James Madison Memorial High School
Professional Development School Coordinator
Project REAL SLC Grant Coordinator
201 South Gammon Road
Madison, WI 53717
jaffeldt@madison.k12.wi.us
608-442-2203 fax
608-663-6182 office
"Upper caucasia" is not the nicest name for one of Washington, D.C.'s "nicest" areas. Situated west of Rock Creek Park and just south of tony Bethesda, Maryland, are a number of neighborhoods -- Chevy Chase, Friendship Heights, Tenleytown -- that offer suburban- style living with an urban address. In a city that is 55 percent black and 17 percent poor, the residents here are, for the most part, white and wealthy.
Most children in this area attend private school, despite the presence of several well-regarded public options. So it was hardly a surprise last November when self-segregated Upper Caucasia erupted into turf wars as the Obamas toured elite preparatory academies, seeking a school appropriate for the first daughters. They settled, predictably, on Sidwell Friends, Chelsea Clinton's alma mater.
But a month later, another prominent family's search for a school went largely unnoticed. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan moved with his family from Chicago, where he had been chief executive officer of the city's public schools, to Arlington, Virginia. High-quality suburban public schools were "why we chose" to live in Arlington, Duncan told Science magazine in March. "It was the determining factor."
Last year, I wrote a defense of high school senioritis as a useful break from academic drudgery. This made me, briefly, a hero to teenagers across the country. Then I returned to my usual theme that classes leading up to that last semester of the senior year should still be tougher, not easier, with less time for play, not more.
I was stuck on the fact that teenagers spend on average two hours a day watching television, compared with less than an hour a day doing homework. When Washington area parents or students complained about school stress, I acknowledged that many of them had a point in this affluent region full of kids who dream of the Ivy League. But elsewhere, the majority of high school students were not studying much at all. As a consequence, reading and math scores for 17-year-olds had seen little improvement in a generation.
Yet it is spring again, a good time to ponder the balance of hard work and fun throughout high school. In last year's piece, I wrote: "High-octane students play it safe. Textbook pages are still memorized. Old exams are mastered. Anything less than a perfect score is cause for concern. Such students need to discover that that is not the way creative and productive work is done in college, or in life. The important part of the learning process is not pounding in the material but thinking it over, talking about it, coming up with new and intriguing ways of connecting it to the rest of the world."
In a region where college preparation often begins at birth, some glossy new public school brochures offer a tantalizing formula for parents who crave assurance that their children are on track: a seven-step pathway to higher education that starts as early as kindergarten.
Montgomery County educators are blitzing parents and students with information on what they call "Seven Keys to College Readiness." The initiative, also promoted on the Web (http://www.mcps7keys.org), spells out in detail the courses and tests that officials say point toward academic prosperity.
Measuring students early and often against lofty goals is part of school culture in the Washington area. School systems in Fairfax, Prince William and Calvert counties, among others, set annual targets in such areas as college entrance testing and accelerated math.
The son of an acquaintance of mine has recently landed a good job on a national newspaper. For the past few months I've been reading the articles written by this boy - let's call him Derek - and thinking how delightfully original they were. Last week I ran into Derek's mother and told her that her son was brilliant and that she must be proud of him. She rolled her eyes and said he hadn't always been a star. He had been expelled from his state comprehensive school at 15, failed dismally academically and had spent his teenage years off the rails. So how, I asked, did he land this most sought after of jobs, one that Oxbridge graduates kill for?
She said that Derek had decided in his early 20s that he wanted to be a journalist and simply refused to take no for an answer. He more or less took up residence outside the newspaper of his choice, bombarding it with e-mails, until eventually he was allowed in as an unpaid intern. He financed his journalism by working night shifts as a hospital porter, until eventually he was offered a job.
We all love an underdog story, and this one vastly cheered me up. All the more so because it seems to belie the conviction of every pushy parent that if a child puts one foot wrong academically they have blown it for life. Both in London and New York there is this feverish notion that the journey to success starts at around three years old. It is vital to get a child into the right nursery school that will get them into Harvard or Cambridge or wherever. And if the child does not land up with straight A grades then clearly their chances of success in life are very low indeed.
This tiresome hysteria has got worse in one generation. When I was at school and at university there was a lot of opportunity for screwing up, and most of us availed ourselves of it at one point or another. In fact, if you cruised effortlessly from one academic triumph to another you were regarded as rather dull. As a schoolgirl, not only did I fail to get straight As, I didn't get any As at all - though I did get an F and even a U (for unclassified).
By law public schools in Wisconsin must administer a rigid, comprehensive set of tests. In the fall of every school year students are tested in reading, math, language, science and social studies. Test results from each district and each school are posted on the Internet, passed along to the federal government to comply with No Child Left Behind requirements and are made available to parents. In an era where measurable student performance is essential, it is expected that Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing will tell us how Wisconsin students are performing. Unfortunately the testing required by Wisconsin state law is not very good.
The purpose of state standards and state-mandated testing is to increase academic achievement. Does Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing advance this goal? From every quarter the answer is a clear no. That is the consensus of independent, third-party evaluators. Wisconsin’s massive testing program has come under fire from the U.S. Department of Education which said that Wisconsin testing failed to adequately evaluate the content laid out in the state’s own standards. Further, a joint report issued by the independent Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association performed a detailed evaluation of testing in every state and ranked Wisconsin 42nd in the nation. The Fordham Institute gave Wisconsin’s testing a grade of “D-minus.”
Perhaps even more troublesome is that many Wisconsin school districts find the testing system inadequate. Over 68% of Wisconsin school districts that responded to a survey said they purchase additional testing to do what the state testing is supposed to do. These districts are well ahead of the state in understanding the importance of timely, rigorous testing.
This report lays out the thirty-year history of testing in Wisconsin and the criticism of the current testing requirement. It is the first of two reports to be issued regarding Wisconsin’s testing program. The second report will show how a new approach to testing will not only meet the standards that parents, teachers and the public expect, but will also allow teachers and policy makers to use testing to actually increase the achievement of Wisconsin’s children.
But perhaps as early as the 2010-'11 school year, things will be different:
Changes are expected in the state standards for what students are supposed to learn in various grades and subjects. The primary goal of the WKCE is to measure how well students overall are doing in meeting those standards. But Mike Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of public instruction, said new standards for English language arts and math should be ready by the end of this year.
As the policy institute studies note, the existing standards have been criticized in several national studies for being among the weakest in the U.S.
The tests themselves will be altered in keeping with the new standards. Just how is not known, and one key component won't be clear until perhaps sometime in 2010, the No Child Left Behind Act could be revised. What goes into the new education law will have a big impact on testing in every state.
The way tests are given will change. There is wide agreement that the wave of the future is to do tests online, which would greatly speed up the process of scoring tests and making the results known. The lag of five months or more now before WKCE scores are released aggravates all involved.
The policy institute studies called for online testing, and the DPI's Thompson agrees it is coming. Delays have largely been due to practical questions of how to give that many tests on computers in Wisconsin schools and the whole matter of dealing with the data involved.
Also changing will be the way performance is judged.
Now, Wisconsin and most states measure which category of proficiency each student falls into, based on their answers. Reaching the level labeled "proficient" is the central goal.
Ernando Minghine would have enjoyed having time to listen to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan talk about the U.S. school system and Detroit Public Schools during a stop last week.
But Minghine, superintendent of Westwood Community Schools, was swamped with a to-do list that included:
Hiring a high school principal.
Finishing months of work in pursuit of a New Tech high school.
Hiring another instructor from China to add to the three he has already teaching Mandarin in grade and middle schools.
Expanding the district's Cyber High School -- which started in February and has been such a hit that the school with 180 students is growing to 500 this fall.
As Duncan made stops at a school in Detroit and Cobo Center, conversing with new Mayor Dave Bing, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and others and sharing his thoughts about the state of Detroit Public Schools, Minghine wished he could have listened in and talked with the education secretary about his district.
Smart, particularly the Mandarin offering in grade and middle schools along with the cyber options.
Politics often produces strange bedfellows. But yesterday, on the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that integrated the nation's schools, when former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich shared the stage at a boisterous rally in front of the White House with the Rev. Al Sharpton, even Gingrich called the two the "Original Odd Couple."
What unites the conservative Gingrich and the liberal Sharpton, Gingrich said, is the urgent mission to close the persistent achievement gap that divides students along racial and socioeconomic lines and to make educational equality the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
"I know it's possible to educate every child from every background," Gingrich said to loud applause from the largely African American crowd that had come to Washington in 70 buses from 22 cities. "We're not telling you what the answer is. But we're telling you to keep changing until you find a solution."
eorgia is in a race to the top and, in many respects, we're leading the way.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced recently that $5 billion in grants are being made available to states that -- in his words -- adopt "college and career-ready internationally benchmarked standards" and "state of the art data collection systems, assessments and curricula to meet these higher standards."
To me, it sounds like Secretary Duncan was reading straight from our Strategic Plan. For six years, Georgia has been focused on implementing a world-class curriculum, raising expectations and using quality data to make decisions. We have received high marks for the policies and standards we've put in place from groups across the nation.
But the journey to "the top" is not always smooth and raising standards is not easy. The truth is that the material that Georgia students are learning today is more rigorous than it has ever been and, consequently, the assessments they are taking are more difficult.
Over the past few years, we've seen the pass rates on our state tests -- like the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests and End of Course Tests -- drop in the first year we've implemented our new curriculum and given the new state exams. This is to be expected: Whenever you raise the bar, there's going to be a temporary drop in the number of people that can reach that bar. That's true in any situation.
"The article describes my experience tutoring my daughter and her friend when they were in sixth grade, using Singapore Math in order to make up for the train wreck known as Everyday Math that she was getting in school. I doubt that the article will change the minds of the administrators who believe Everyday Math has merit, but it wasn't written for that purpose. It was written for and dedicated to parents to let them know they are not alone, that they aren't the only ones who have shouted at their children, that there are others who have experienced the tears and the confusion and the frustration. Lastly it offers some hope and guidance in how to go about teaching their kids what they are not learning at school."
ae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer ... Telling stories from her own education and from her time in space, she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one -- to create bold thinker.
Inclusive schools are places where children and young adults of all abilities, races, and cultures share learning environments that build upon their strengths while supporting their diverse needs.
Utilizing inclusive practices, school staff create flexible goals, methods, materials, and assessments that accommodate the interests and needs of all of their learners. Inclusive schools also allow for the development of authentic relationships between students with and without identified differences.
The MMSD's Dept. of Educational Services is committed to building the capacity of school district staff to provide inclusive educational practices. To address this departmental priority, school district staff have been provided with two unique opportunities to further develop their knowledge and skills in this area.
First of all, in honor of Inclusive Schools Week (December, 2008), the Department provided a year-long opportunity for schools to highlight the accomplishments of educators, families and communities in promoting inclusive schools.
In 1943, the United States Armed Forces Institute published a second edition of War Department Education Manual EM 603 Discovering Music: A Course in Music Appreciation by Howard D. McKinney and W.R. Anderson. The material presented in the book was a reprint of educational material taken from existing standard textbook matter used in American schools and colleges at that time and is significant to this discussion because the text included the following when discussing jazz:
Some may start with an enthusiasm for music of the jazz type, but they cannot go far there, for jazz is peculiarly of an inbred, feeble-stock race, incapable of development. In any case, the people for whom it is meant could not understand it if it did develop. Jazz is sterile. It is all right for fun, or as a mild anodyne, like tobacco. But its lack of rhythmical variety (necessitated by its special purpose), its brevity, its repetitiveness and lack of sustained development, together with the fact that commercial reasons prevent its being, as a rule, very well written, all mark it as a side issue, having next to nothing to do with serious music; and consequently it has proved itself entirely useless as a basis for developing the taste of the amateur.
The mythologizing of Arne Duncan is moving along at a pretty fast past. Bernie Noven alerted me to this adulatory article from the London Economist and urged me to respond using some of the recent data about Arne's record here in Chicago, saying that people "out there" have no idea about the reaiity here in Chicago. Here's what I sent.
"Golden Boy" Arne Duncan is a pleasant fellow who held the position of Chicago Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chicago Public Schools for seven years without losing his cool.
He's so cool, in fact, that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
As a long-time Chicago public school parent advocate, I have had a front row seat at the Arne Duncan show. When Mayor Richard Daley appointed Mr. Duncan to replace Paul Vallas in 2001, there was a palpable sense of relief across the city. The new CEO's Opie-from-Mayberry modesty was a soothing antidote to the previous six years spent with a CEO who could suck the oxygen out of a room.
We soon discovered, however, that Mr. Duncan simply provided a more complaisant and - more importantly - a more compliant cover for City Hall's machinations.
Third Grade Mathematics in Hong Kong and Massachusetts Why Massachusetts Students, the Best in the U.S., Lag Behind
Best-in-the-World Students of Hong Kong
Higher expectations for achievement and greater exposure to more difficult and complex mathematics are among the major difference between Hong Kong, home of the world’s top-performing 4th grade math students, and Massachusetts, which is the highest scoring state on the U.S. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), according to a report by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
While Massachusetts 4th grade students achieved a respectable fourth place when compared with countries taking the 2007 Grade 4 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS-4), Hong Kong students outperformed the Bay State 4th graders in numerous categories.
The Hong Kong performance advantage over Massachusetts was especially large in the percentage of its students achieving at the very highest level. For example, 40 percent of Hong Kong students achieved at the advanced TIMSS level, compared with only 22 percent of Massachusetts students.
To help understand why Hong Kong students outperform Massachusetts students, the AIR study identified differences between the items on Hong Kong’s and Massachusetts’ internal mathematics assessments administered in the spring of grade 3 in 2007 to gather insight into the relative mathematical expectations in Hong Kong and Massachusetts.
The AIR report found that the Hong Kong assessment contained more difficult items, especially in the core areas of numbers and measurement, than the Massachusetts assessment.
“The more rigorous problems on the Hong Kong assessment demonstrate that, even at Grade 3, deep conceptual understanding and the capacity to apply foundational mathematical concepts in multistep, real-world situations can be taught successfully,” said Steven Leinwand, Principal Research Analyst at AIR and co-author of the report.
As those of us in the newspaper business have discovered to our misfortune, productive original thinking is hard, and rare. Even after the Internet began nibble at our toes, we couldn’t come up with a way to do our jobs that would keep us from losing a leg or two, maybe more.
The same is true of original thought in education, but good ideas about schools are more common than people might imagine. My latest example is Sande Caton, a Delaware high school science teacher who has come up with a simple but smart solution to the ongoing battle between Advanced Placement and honors courses for our nation’s teenagers.
Caton revealed her method in an online comment to one of my recent columns on this blog. Her timing is good. In early June, newsweek.com will unveil the new Newsweek Top High Schools list, its annual ranking of the best 1,500 public high schools. Newsweek uses a rating formula I invented in the 1990s. Many readers think this method, called the Challenge Index, has helped AP push honors courses out of our schools. Here comes Caton with a way to make everyone happy.
Many high schools used to offer juniors and seniors a choice of a regular, an honors or an AP course in popular subjects like history or English. In recent years some have removed the honors options, saying they can’t staff three different courses. They feel honors students should be taking the more challenging AP courses anyway. My suggestion, offered with no hope of it ever being accepted, was to remove not the honors option, but the regular option. In my experience, regular students were capable of handling honors or even AP courses if well taught. Why confine them to a regular class taught to the lowest standard?
Transparency is powerful and President Obama has rightly made it a pillar of his administration's approach to policymaking. But transparency also offers the seductive promise of an easy way out for policymakers. It can trap proponents of various policy proposals in an intellectual cul de sac because it becomes easy to see information as sufficient to drive reform rather than just as a predicate for change. The risk is especially potent when proponents are convinced of the obviousness of the changes they seek.
We've seen this repeatedly with federal education policy. The Bush administration assumed the federal No Child Left Behind law would produce a tidal wave of student and school performance data that would swamp opposition to school improvement efforts. Seven years later the political resistance to education reform is as potent as ever and former Bush aides now acknowledge placing too much faith in the power of information.
In 1997, Congress tried unsuccessfully to increase accountability for colleges of education and teacher training programs by requiring them to report more data about outcomes. "Congress asked colleges of education to take stock of quality issues, but instead the colleges mostly whitewashed the problem," says Ross Weiner, a senior adviser at The Education Trust. No Child Left Behind also required states and school districts to issue better report cards about educational performance. There, too, evasion rather than aggressive efforts are the norm.
Action Needed, Please Sign on.... Math Teacher Hiring in the Madison School District
via a kind reader's email: Janet Mertz and Gabi Meyer have written a letter about new math hires that they would like you to sign on to. Please send your name, your school(s), and any relevant identifying information or affiliation to:
To address as quickly as possible the MMSD's need for more middle school teachers with outstanding content knowledge of mathematics, we, the undersigned, urge you to consider filling any vacancies that occur in the District's middle schools for the coming academic year with applicants who majored in the mathematical sciences or related fields (e.g., statistics, computer science, physics) in college, but may be currently deficient in teaching pedagogy. You might advertise nationally in appropriate places that applications from such candidates would be welcome. In recent years, many outstanding graduates with such backgrounds went into the computing, consulting, and financial industries. However, in the current economic climate, such jobs are much less available, especially to new college graduates. Thus, jobs in the teaching profession may be viewed much more favorably now by folks trained in the mathematical sciences despite the significantly lower salary. One indication of this is the fact that applications to Teach for America were up 42% this year. Teach for America had to reject over 30,000 applicants this spring, including hundreds of graduates from UW-Madison, due to the limited numbers they can train and place. Undoubtedly, some of these applicants were math majors who would be happy to live in Madison. Math for America, a similar program that only accepts people who majored in the mathematical sciences, likely also had to turn away large numbers of outstanding applicants. Possibly, the MMSD could contact Teach for America and Math for America inquiring whether there might be a mechanism by which your advertisement for middle school math teachers could be forwarded to some of the best of their rejects. As these programs do, the MMSD could provide these new hires with a crash course in teaching pedagogy over the summer before they commence work in the fall. They could be hired conditionally subject to completing all of the requirements for state teacher certification within 2 years and a commitment to teach in the MMSD for at least 3-5 years.
While the District's proposal to provide additional content knowledge to dozens of its current middle school teachers of mathematics might gradually improve the delivery of mathematics to the District's students, it would take numerous years to implement, involve considerable additional expense, and may still not totally solve the long-term need for math-qualified teachers, especially in view of the continuing wave of retirements. The coincidence of baby boomer retirements with the current severe economic recession provides a rare opportunity to fill our middle schools now with outstanding mathematics teachers for decades to come, doing so at much lower cost to the District since one would be hiring new, B.A.-level teachers rather than retraining experienced, M.A.-level ones. Thus, we urge you to act on this proposal within the next few weeks, in possible.
It is interesting to note that state law provides that "A school board that employs a person who holds a professional teaching permit shall ensure that no regularly licensed teacher is removed from his or her position as a result of the employment of persons holding permits."
The Senate's most outspoken supporter of the D.C. voucher initiative orchestrated more than two hours of uniformly glowing testimony for the program at a committee hearing yesterday and said the dissenting voices he invited turned him down.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, is pushing for reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to $7,500 a year in federally funded tuition to 1,700 D.C. children from low-income families to attend private schools.
Congressional Democrats, supported by teachers unions and other liberal education groups that generally oppose using public money for private education, included language in the recent omnibus spending bill that would end the program in 2010. Last week, President Obama proposed continuing the scholarships so the students currently receiving money can finish high school. The program would be closed to new students.
Lieberman wants to fully revive the program and said yesterday that he has a commitment from Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to bring the matter to the floor for debate and a vote this year.
Madison's only dual-language immersion school, Nuestro Mundo, has been popular with parents and students, but initial low test scores have been a concern. New test results, however, show that students at the east side elementary school are quickly showing improvement in math and reading.
The improved scores are not only important within the confines of Nuestro Mundo, where Principal Javier Bolivar says the school's biggest challenge is to prove that its students can learn proficiently while speaking two languages, but to the school district as a whole. Two more dual-language immersion programs have been approved and are due to open in the next year.
"We are gaining," says Bolivar of the encouraging test scores. "Even if we are gaining one point, it means we are doing what we are supposed to be doing and we are closing the achievement gap."
A public charter school inside Allis Elementary School at 4201 Buckeye Road, Nuestro Mundo started with a kindergarten class in 2004 and has added one grade per year. The school's first kindergartners are now fourth-graders who took the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination for the first time last school year. Third grade is the first year for state testing.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today advocated for Detroit's new mayor to take over the city school system, saying strong change happens when good leaders are in control.
"I am strongly advocating for mayoral control," he said at Detroit's Cody High School, where he was conducting a listening tour to hear from students on how to improve schools.
Duncan, who headed Chicago Public Schools, reiterated his stance when addressing people gathered for the United Way's national convention at Cobo Center.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, who accompanied Duncan on his tour at Cody, said this year is the right time for mayoral control, but added that a ballot measure is preferable to legislative action.
"A lot of the leadership is perfectly aligned to make changes," he said.
Bing, later addressing his first national convention since becoming mayor, said improving the district would be a top priority and that he would rely on partnerships to help get the job done.
Duncan said he hopes Detroit Public Schools can move from being a "national disgrace" to a "national model," and he would like to commit significant federal resources to help the system.
Back when he was on the city council for the District of Columbia, attorney Kevin Chavous would occasionally run into fellow Democrats concerned about the state of the USA's urban schools.
They were open to a lot of ideas, but most Democrats have historically rejected taxpayer-supported private-school vouchers, saying they drain precious cash from needy public schools. Chavous, who served from 1992 to 2005, openly supported vouchers. He would ask others why they didn't.
"Several of them would whisper to me, 'I'm with you, but I can't come out in front,' " Chavous says.
That was then.
While vouchers will likely never be the clarion call of Democrats, they're beginning to make inroads among a group of young black lawmakers, mayors and school officials who have split with party and teachers union orthodoxy on school reform. The group includes Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams.
Our School Report Cards include detailed tables for each school that show how it has done in academics over a number of years. This helps parents select a school for their children and evaluate a school's ongoing performance.
More Informed Parents
By first studying a school's report card, as a parent, you will be better prepared to ask relevant questions when you interview the principal and teachers at the schools you are considering.
You can also use the report cards to determine whether a school is improving over time.
Teachers and administrators can use the report card to compare results for their school with those of other schools whose students share personal or family characteristics. Seeing what other schools have accomplished can help each school's ongoing improvement efforts
Heading west into a Texas sunset, the rented RV clatters along Interstate 20, rolling past cotton fields, windmills and oil derricks that glint gold in the last of the light. Tom Davidson is at the wheel, doing 80 and fighting fatigue.
The former three-term Maine legislator has spent the past two weeks barnstorming the country: schmoozing with economic development officials and community advocates in hardscrabble Trenton; donning a tuxedo for the National Black Chamber of Commerce's inaugural ball at the French embassy in Washington, D.C.; and spending time in Alabama with families of the Tuskegee Airmen, who served in World War II as America's first black fighter pilots.
Yesterday, Davidson presented commemorative certificates to a dozen high school kids in DeSoto, Texas. Tomorrow he'll meet tribal officials at the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo reservation in El Paso. Back east, Davidson's wife is eight months pregnant with their second child; he jokes that she'll probably divorce him by the time he gets home. There's still a week and more than 1,200 miles to go before he wraps up his whistle-stop tour in Long Beach, Calif.
Since the recession began in December 2007, more than 5 million jobs have been lost.
Callers are inundating literacy agencies because they realize they can't compete in this difficult job market without a GED. At the same time, many of those callers are forced to recognize and admit their inability to read simple documents, including a job application.
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
That's why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: "The attached study has changed my life as a scientist."
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children's Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children's Zone schools, but weren't selected.
They found that the Harlem Children's Zone schools produced "enormous" gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
Green Dot charter operator Steve Barr wants to organize grass-roots power to improve public education.
Risk-taking charter school operator Steve Barr is launching an effort through which parents would wrest political control of the L.A. school system from unions, school bureaucrats and other entrenched interests.
The plan is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools, one by one, using the growing leverage of the charter school movement. The goal is to unite a city of overworked and isolated parents with a brash promise:
If more than half of the parents at a school sign up, Barr's organizers say they will guarantee an excellent campus within three years. They call it the Parent Revolution.
With parents, they predict, they'll have the clout to pressure the Los Angeles Unified School District to improve schools. They'll also have petitions, which Barr and his allies will keep at the ready, to start charter schools. If the district doesn't deliver, targeted neighborhoods could be flooded with charters, which aren't run by the school district. L.A. Unified would lose enrollment, and the funding would go to the charters instead of to the district.
Recently we've had Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives on Chinese schools (background here). For balance, a Chinese and a non-Chinese view in the same post!
Reasons I'm offering such long first-hand testimony: (1) no one has to read it! (2) many things about life in China -- and yes, life in other places -- are conveyed not in theoretical summaries but in accumulations of day by day experiences, like those recounted here. Several more still in the queue. Also, bear in mind that the foreigners writing in are ones who generally came to Chinese schools to "do something good." They're not here for the big bucks or the easy life but because they thought it would be valuable as well as interesting to be part of China's development at this stage.
Even teachers need a little bonding time, whether that be team-building exercises or specially designed lectures to discuss today's rapidly evolving education standards.
The Prague British School (PBS) gave its teaching staff a chance to do just that during a two-day conference held last month titled "A Changing World: Challenges for Schools." The event, held at the Prague school campus, was sponsored by the Council of British International Schools (COBIS) and attracted educators from as far away as Malaysia and Brazil. Representatives from a few other British international schools in the Czech Republic also were in attendance.
"Teaching as a whole has just changed. ... Just communication alone has changed so much," notes John Bagust, the head of primary schools at PBS and the organizer of last month's conference. "It's important for schools to look toward the future."
Summer is coming, a time in which many colleges seek instructors to teach online courses. These are cash cows for campuses, a way to enhance the revenue stream without having to keep facilities open. (Or better yet, making those facilities available for outside groups to rent.) Math, business, and computer science professors have blazed the trail, but online teaching remains problematic in word-heavy disciplines such as the humanities, and it has a mixed record in hands-on laboratory-based sciences. (Biologists often complain that computer simulations are, at best, simulacra.) Teaching online can be rewarding, but be wary before you agree to tackle such a course.
There are several seemingly counterintuitive experiences I've had with online courses. In summary:
* Older students generally perform better than younger ones.
* The range of achievement is much narrower.
* Online courses work best when they mirror live classes.
* Discussion is generally more robust online.
* An online course definitely will not run itself!
Younger students love the idea of online courses, but they are often the worst students -- despite their greater facility with technology. Yahoo! runs ads for "Why online college is rocking," and that's part of the problem. Online education is being sold as if it's for everyone, when those finding real success are those who are self-motivated, highly organized, and in possession of well-developed study habits. And how many of your young undergrads fit that profile? Younger students approach online classes as if they're just another "cool" thing to do on the Web. Be prepared to badger them if you want them to get through your course.
California teenagers may be spared having to lug back-breaking loads of textbooks to school under a proposal that would make it easier for campuses to use electronic instructional material.
Allowing high schools greater freedom to spend state money on software to put textbooks on laptops and other electronic devices was backed by the Los Angeles Unified School District and approved Monday by the state Senate.
The Assembly will consider the proposal, drafted by state Sen. Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara). "Today's K-12 students represent the first generation to have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cameras, cellphones and all the other gadgets of the digital age," Alquist said after the 36-0 Senate vote.
"Today's students are no longer the students of blackboards and chalk."
California law limits how school districts can use state funds for instructional materials, requiring them to purchase enough textbooks for all students before spending money on electronic material.
As a result, some districts have purchased materials in both book form and software or have refrained from buying software, Alquist said.
I've read a number of ebooks on my iPhone while on travel. The benefit: light and easy to carry. Downside: it is still quite a different experience, but the text is certainly readable. This is certainly the future, particularly as the small devices become more powerful.
Early in his career, Paul Romer helped solve one of the great puzzles of economics: What makes some economies grow faster than others? His "new growth theory" might one day earn him a Nobel prize.
Then a decade ago, Romer, by then a professor at Stanford University, decided to tackle what may be an even tougher puzzle: Why were so many of his students coming to class unprepared and disengaged?
Romer's quest began with the proposition that the more time students put into their studies, the more they learn. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates in his new book, "Outliers," that's certainly true in many other areas of human endeavor -- the more you practice scales or swing a club, the better you are at playing piano or hitting a decent golf shot. Why should learning economics be any different?
It took some noodling around, but two years later, Romer raised $10 million in venture capital to start a software company he called Aplia. The idea was to develop interactive exercises that students could do in conjunction with the most widely used college economics textbooks. Students would answer questions, then get immediate feedback on what they got right and wrong, along with some explanations that might help them get it right on a second and third try. Aplia's team of young Ph.D. economists and software programmers also devised laboratory experiments in which the entire class could participate in simulated markets that give students a practical understanding of concepts like money supply and demand curves.
Locally, the Madison School Board is discussing a proposed technology plan this evening. Ideally, before any more is spent, the Infinite Campus system should be fully implemented, and used by teachers, staff and students. Once that is done, there are many possibilities, including this example.
The most ambitious US presidency in living memory hardly needs to extend its list of tasks, you might think. Yet the country's long-term economic prospects turn on something that is all too easy to neglect, just as it has been neglected in the past. The US is failing calamitously in primary and secondary education. The average quality of its workforce is falling, and its schools are adding to the problem rather than mitigating it.
Much of what ails the country - including growing economic inequality - can be traced to this source. Politicians recognise the fact, and prate about it endlessly. Barack Obama puts improving the schools alongside health reform and alternative energy whenever he lays out his long-term goals.
The trouble is, fixing the schools is not something that a crisis ever forces you to do. The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely. Many vested interests prefer it that way. Talk about the issue and move on is the line of least political resistance.
Just how badly is the US school system failing? A new study by McKinsey bravely attempts to come up with some numbers - and its estimates, though arrived at conservatively, are pretty startling*.
According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, a long-term comparison project from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the US lags far behind the industrial-country average in a standardised measure of maths and science skills among 15-year-olds. It sits among low-achievers such as Portugal and Italy, and way behind the best performers, such as South Korea, Finland, Canada and the Netherlands. It scores worse than the UK, which is about average on both measures.
If you had $100 billion to fix our schools, what would you do? A surprisingly smart list of suggestions for the education portion of the federal stimulus money is circulating in the education policy world. A group of experts claims authorship. I don't believe committees are capable of good ideas, so I doubt the alleged origins of the list. But let's put that aside for a moment and see what they've got.
Better yet, why not come up with our own ideas? My column seeking cheap ways to improve education yielded interesting results. By contrast, think of what we could do if we had enough money to buy the contract of every great quarterback: guarantee the Redskins a Super Bowl victory. Many expensive school-fixing schemes proved just as insane and just as useless. But Barack Obama is president, and we are supposed to be hopeful.
During a routine conversation about the semester, curriculum, and student population, a colleague of mine burst in with a frustrated comment about grade appeals. He thinks that we're seeing more formal grade complaints than in past years. A dozen contacts at community colleges and universities seem to agree; we're seeing more and more students going to the administration to complain about individual assignment grades, course policies, and final course grades. On a bad week, I will see more students in my office wrangling over assignment grades than those truly hoping to improve their academic performance. It's depressing. Like many of my academic friends, I want to blame the generational divide for what looks like an increase in the number of grade appeals. After watching "I Love the 80's" every night in a week, I want to wail and cry, mumbling that this new generation just doesn't understand. They have no sense of what's appropriate. They don't respect authority. And their sense of entitlement is overwhelming. That, my friend, is what's causing this increase in grade appeals across the nation.
About a year ago, I made the circuit of kindergartens in my town. At each stop, after the pitch by the principal and the obligatory exhibit of art projects only a mother (the student's own) could love, I asked the same question: "What is your policy on homework?"
And always, whether from the apple-cheeked teacher in the public school or the earnest administrator of the "child centered" private one, I was met with an eager nod. Oh, yes, each would explain: kindergartners are assigned homework every day.
Bzzzzzzt. Wrong answer.
When I was a child, in the increasingly olden days, kindergarten was a place to play. We danced the hokeypokey, swooned in suspense over Duck, Duck, Gray Duck (that's what Minnesotans stubbornly call Duck, Duck, Goose) and napped on our mats until the Wake-Up Fairy set us free.
No more. Instead of digging in sandboxes, today's kindergartners prepare for a life of multiple-choice boxes by plowing through standardized tests with cuddly names like Dibels (pronounced "dibbles"), a series of early-literacy measures administered to millions of kids; or toiling over reading curricula like Open Court -- which features assessments every six weeks.
According to "Crisis in the Kindergarten," a report recently released by the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, all that testing is wasted: it neither predicts nor improves young children's educational outcomes. More disturbing, along with other academic demands, like assigning homework to 5-year-olds, it is crowding out the one thing that truly is vital to their future success: play.
China's boxed itself in Its emphasis on math and science has certainly fueled its rapid economic growth, but its lack of creative thinking could rob it of an innovative edge.
Which country -- the United States or China -- will make the 21st century its own?
When President Obama recently called for American young people "to be makers of things" and focus on subjects such as science and engineering, it was partly a nod to China's rapid growth. Had he lived, taught and consulted in China for the last 33 months, as I have, he might have urged American students first to follow his example and study the liberal arts. Only technical knowledge complemented by well-honed critical and creative thinking skills can help us regain our innovative edge. China's traditional lack of emphasis on teaching these skills could undermine its efforts to develop its own innovative economy.
I once challenged my Chinese MBA students to brainstorm "two-hour business plans." I divided them into six groups, gave them detailed instructions and an example: a restaurant chain. The more original their idea, the better, I stressed -- and we'd vote for a prize winner. The word "prize" energized the room. Laptops flew open. Fingers pounded. Voices roared. Packs of cookies were ripped open and shared. Not a single person text-messaged. I'd touched a nerve.
In the end, five of the six groups presented plans for, you guessed it, restaurant chains. The sixth proposed a catering service. Why risk a unique solution when the instructor has let it slip he likes the food business?
Business major Lee Sun Kee is happy that he attended Korea University in Seoul. Lee, a senior, took four courses at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School last fall as an exchange student and feels that his university in Korea offers business programs just as good as those at Ivy League schools. "At Wharton, I met talented students and a couple of star professors whose lectures were impressive," says Lee. "But for other classes, I thought I could have learned better in Korea at one-tenth of Wharton's tuition."
Lee is one of a growing number of students appreciating a drastic makeover undertaken at business schools in Korea. Under a campaign to globalize curricula, faculty, and ways of thinking by students, top universities in the country have rebuilt their programs by modeling themselves largely on leading business schools in the U.S. "Globalization is our new mission," says Jang Hasung, dean of Korea University Business School. While Korean multinationals like Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor have been expanding worldwide for years, Jang says his school long had focused too much on national issues and Korean perspectives.
FOR millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy. One reliable way to solve this problem is through education. The more affordable it is, the longer girls will stay in school and delay pregnancy.
I advise a nonprofit foundation called Innovation for Poverty Action that focuses on keeping girls in school. (We aren't alone; lots of other terrific organizations do this, too.) In a pilot program we ran in Kenya a few years ago, around 5,000 sixth-grade girls in 163 primary schools were given a $6 school uniform free. If they stayed in school, they received a second uniform after 18 months. The dropout rate over the next three years decreased by a third, to 12 percent, and the pregnancy rate fell to 8 percent from 12 percent. Of every 50 girls given free uniforms, then, three stayed in school as a result of the uniforms alone, and two delayed pregnancy.
The Post asked education and political experts to assess the president's plan for D.C. students. Below are contributions from Andrew J. Rotherham, Dick Durbin, Tom Davis, Randi Weingarten, Michelle Rhee, Michael Bennet, Lanny J. Davis, Margaret Spellings, Andrew J. Coulson, Ed Rogers, Michael J. Petrilli, Anthony A. Williams, Joseph E. Robert Jr., Harold Ford Jr. and Lisa Schiffren.
Fresh air and sunshine stream from large windows into the brightly painted basement of Jennifer Schmitt's two-story home where she teaches seven students ranging from first to seventh grade a geometry lesson. Later the students scatter to separate whiteboard-topped tables to work puzzles or to pillow-padded nooks to read.
"Scholars, listen up!" Schmitt said as she gathered the students back together after a break to resume their studies.
It's 8:30 a.m. and the "Schmitt Academy" is in full swing.
Schmitt's students are either home schooled or take classes online through one of the state's several "virtual schools." They go to Schmitt -- a certified teacher whose two youngest children attend a virtual school -- for lessons in math and language arts.
Her operation, now in its fifth year, demonstrates the growing popularity of classrooms that go beyond the traditional brick and mortar.
The Milwaukee Public Schools teachers union has rejected a proposal that would lengthen the school day and pay teachers for the extra time with federal economic stimulus money, says Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.
The MPS chief said Thursday night that the union rejected adding 25 minutes to the school day for teaching math at all elementary and kindergarten-through-eighth grade schools. The union also rejected a proposal that would give all teachers six additional hours a month to work on improving programs in their schools. In both cases, teachers would have been paid for the additional time in line with their hourly rate of pay.
Tom Morgan, executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, insisted Friday that there are better ways to improve education than lengthening the school day.
"We've taken a consistent view that doing the same thing longer is going to produce the same results," said Morgan of the idea to add 25 minutes a day.
Speaking to School Board members at a budget meeting Thursday night, Andrekopoulos called the union decisions "unfortunate" and "disturbing."
Earlier this week, MPS budget officials painted a picture for School Board members that is fast getting uglier when it comes to the $1.2 billion MPS budget and in which there is a dispute over how best to spend tens of millions of dollars in stimulus money.
In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.
In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.
A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.
If there was any doubt that education analyst Gerald W. Bracey doesn't play favorites, that's gone now. After excoriating the Bush administration and its education officials for eight years, after canvassing his neighborhood, donating his own money and voting for Barack Obama for president, Bracey is giving the new president just what he gave the old one -- unrelenting grief.
In a speech to the American Educational Research Association in San Diego last month on "countering the fearmongers about American public schools," Bracey added to his list of non-truthtellers President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "Obama and Duncan seem to be following the long-established line that you can get away with saying just about anything you choose about public schools and no one will call you on it," Bracey said. "People will believe anything you say about public education as long as it's bad."
Bracey and I disagree on many issues, but I have long been one of his most appreciative readers, dating back to the days when I knew him only as a sharp-witted writer whose pieces occasionally appeared in The Washington Post's Outlook section. When I came back to Washington to cover local schools, I introduced myself to Bracey, who was then living in Northern Virginia, and wrote a piece about him and his long battle to persuade policymakers, political candidates and journalists to stop exaggerating our educational problems to win themselves appropriations, votes and attention. He lost at least one job because of his writing. Instead of using his doctorate in educational psychology to get a cushy university or think tank job, he has devoted his life to setting us straight, in his less financially secure role as freelance writer, author and speaker.
Steve Barr stood in the breezeway at Alain Leroy Locke High School, at the edge of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a February morning. He's more than six feet tall, with white-gray hair that's perpetually unkempt, and the bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him was Ramon Cortines--neat, in a trim suit--the Los Angeles Unified School District's new superintendent. Cortines had to be thinking about last May, when, as a senior deputy superintendent, he had visited under very different circumstances. That was when a tangle between two rival cliques near an outdoor vending machine turned into a fight that spread to every corner of the schoolyard. Police sent more than a dozen squad cars and surged across the campus in riot gear, as teachers grabbed kids on the margins and whisked them into locked classrooms.
The school's test scores had been among the worst in the state. In recent years, seventy-five per cent of incoming freshmen had dropped out. Only about three per cent graduated with enough credits to apply to a California state university. Two years ago, Barr had asked L.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school-management organization, Green Dot Public Schools, control of Locke, and let him help the district turn it around. When the district refused, Green Dot became the first charter group in the country to seize a high school in a hostile takeover. ("He's a revolutionary," Nelson Smith, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said.) Locke reopened in September, four months after the riot, as a half-dozen Green Dot schools.
FOR all of the hype that preceded the Tea Parties, the first protest to win some sort of concession from Barack Obama's administration may have been the protests against the end of Washington's school-voucher programme. A month ago, the programme's funding was shamefully struck from the president's proposed budget. This prompted libertarian and liberal groups to fight back, culminating in a protest yesterday. And today comes news of a compromise of sorts:
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District's voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program.
Actually, that's not much of a compromise. That's more of a cover-up. Let's remember that Mr Obama, who sends his own children to private school, made the following promise during his inaugural address:
IT IS hard to find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's young education secretary. Margaret Spellings, his predecessor in the Bush administration, calls him "a visionary leader and fellow reformer". During his confirmation hearings Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and himself a former education secretary, sounded more like a lovesick schoolgirl than a member of the opposition party: "I think you're the best." Enthusiastic without being over-the-top, pragmatic without being a pushover, he is also the perfect embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano--tall and lean, clean-cut and athletic, a Thomas Arnold for the digital age.
Since moving to the Education Department a couple of months ago he has been a tireless preacher of the reform gospel. He supports charter schools and merit pay, accountability and transparency, but also litters his speeches with more unfamiliar ideas. He argues that one of the biggest problems in education is how to attract and use talent. All too often the education system allocates the best teachers to the cushiest schools rather than the toughest. Mr Duncan also stresses the importance of "replicating" success. His department, he says, should promote winning ideas (such as "Teach for America", a programme that sends high-flying university graduates to teach in underserved schools) rather than merely enforcing the status quo.
Nor is this just talk. Mr Duncan did much to consolidate his reputation as a reformer on May 6th, when the White House announced that it will try to extend Washington, DC's voucher programme until all 1,716 children taking part have graduated from high school. The Democrat-controlled Congress has been trying to smother the programme by removing funding. But Mr Duncan has vigorously argued that it does not make sense "to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning". He and Mr Obama will now try to persuade Congress not to kill the programme.
Fighting to save the District's popular school-voucher program, some 1,000 parents, pupils and politicians gathered near Mayor Adrian Fenty's office on Wednesday to protest Congress' plans to end school choice in Washington.
That same day, the Senate approved a $4,500 voucher for cars, encouraging citizens to trade in their old automobiles for newer ones that burn less fuel.
So, Congress thinks that vouchers for schools are bad, but vouchers for cars are good.
Slashing school vouchers spares teachers' unions from competition. On the other hand, car vouchers are supposed to boost demand for cars built by the United Auto Workers. The obvious explanation for this schizophrenia: Congress does whatever helps unions.
A closer look reveals that Congress has it wrong in both cases - which is what happens when lawmakers let interest groups trump common sense.
For many years, Lucy Calkins, described once in Education Week as "the Moses of reading and writing in American education" has made her major contributions to the dumbing down of writing in our schools. She once wrote to me that: "I teach writing, I don't get into content that much." This dedication to contentless writing has spread, in part through her influence, into thousands and thousands of classrooms, where "personal" writing has been blended with images, photos, and emails to become one of the very most anti-academic and anti-intellectual elements of the education we now offer our children, K-12.
In 2004, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in the Schools issued a call for more attention to writing in the schools, and it offered an example of the sort of high school writing "that shows how powerfully our students can express their emotions":
"The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us."
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up, the student wrote,
"High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life."
It is obvious that this "Excellent" high school writer is expressing more of his views on his own high school experience than on anything Herman Hesse might have had in mind, but that still allows this American student writer to score very high on the NAEP assessment of writing.
This year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has released a breakthrough report on writing called "Writing in the 21st Century," which informs us, among other things, that:
"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."
So it has become clear to NCTE that Milton's Areopagitica, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and all those other arguments for free speech and free access to information, failed to warn us that, while it is all right for a society to provide protection for writing, reading is only a dangerous means of social control, and should be avoided at all costs. As Houston Baker warned more broadly when he was head of the Modern Language Association, "reading and writing are tools of oppression."
The 2009 NCTE report goes on to inform us, somewhat inconsistently, that:
"Reading--in part because of its central location in family and church life--tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness--with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair--and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence."
So while, on the one hand, reading is a dangerous method for social control, and on the other hand, in contrast with writing, it is said to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, writing is associated with unpleasantness, which would, naturally, be news to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, George Eliot, and countless other authors who made it their life's work to provide feelings of intimacy and warmth, among other things, to countless readers over the centuries.
But the NCTE report has more to teach us:
"Writing has historically and inexorably been linked to testing."
Testing, the way to determine whether one has learned the tasks to be mastered, is, needless to say, not a good thing in the NCTE world. This odd and narrow "link to testing" might seem a bit far-fetched to all the historians and others whose writing has enriched our lives.
So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like--only this time it will be part of the high school "writing" curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.
NCTE goes on to lament that: "In school and out, writing required a good deal of labor." NCTE has no doubt skipped over the advice: Labor Omnia Vincit, and has apparently come to believe that hard work and enjoyment are somehow incompatible.
To relieve our writing students of the necessity of doing the kind of hard work that is essential for success in all other human occupations, "in school and out," NCTE wants to develop "new models of composing" that will change our students from mere writers to "Citizen Composers."
This recipe for damage only adds to the harm already done, for example in high school English departments, by a truncated focus on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which for most students guarantees that they will move on to college or work unable to write a serious research paper or even a good strong informative memo that makes sense and can be read by others.
Many high school English department focus on preparing their students for the 500-word "essays" about their personal lives that most college admissions departments ask for these days.
According to a survey done by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 90% of college professors think that most high school students who come to them are not well prepared in reading, research or academic writing. That may possibly be because far too few of our high schools challenge their students to do any nonfiction reading or academic expository writing, including the sort of research papers which require, after all, research.
While we do challenge many high school students to take AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP European History, and Calculus, Chinese and Physics, when it comes to the sort of writing controlled by the English department, and recommended as "21st Century Writing" by the National Council for Teachers of English, the standards are as low as they would be if the Math department limited its students to decimals and fractions and never let them try Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, or Calculus.
Even a program for gifted students, for instance the grandaddy of them all, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which has very challenging summer programs in the sciences for students, when it comes to writing, it sponsors a contest for "Creative Nonfiction," which turns out to be only short diary entries by these very able students. They could challenge students to produce good history or literature research papers, but they don't.
Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our public high schools today.
There are some exceptions. Since 1987, I have published 846 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 44 states and 35 other countries. Their average length has been about 5,500 words, although in the most recent issue (#77), the average length of the papers, including endnotes and bibliography, was 7,297 words.
Many of the American authors come from independent schools like Andover, Atlanta International School, Deerfield, Exeter, Groton, National Cathedral School, Polytechnic, St. Albans, Sidwell Friends School and the like. But many have also come from public high school students. Some of these students have done independent studies, hoping to be published in The Concord Review, but some very good papers have been IB Extended Essays and some have come even from students of AP teachers who do assign serious research papers, even though the College Board has no interest in them.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from Strong American Schools last summer says that more than one million U.S. high school graduates are in remedial courses in colleges each year, and if a student needs a remedial course or two, they are less likely to graduate from college.
The poor academic reading and writing skills of entering freshmen at our colleges and universities are acknowledged to be commonplace, but no one seems to have been able to increase the importance of serious writing or nonfiction reading in the high schools. The English department and the professional organizations are satisfied with preventing high school students from learning how to do research papers, so they continue to graduate students who are incompetent in academic expository writing, and unprepared for college work.
Not one of the new state academic standards asks whether students have read a single nonfiction book in high school or written a single serious research paper. All the attention is on what can be easily tested and quantified, so the skills of academic reading and writing are left out, and our students pay the price for this neglect.
In 1776, Edward Gibbon, in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote about the importance of academic reading and writing:
"...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life...."
No doubt he would be as appalled as our college professors are now to see the incompetence of our high school graduates who have not been asked to read and write before college.
Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own. If we continue to ignore them as we do now, it will not be good for our economy, or for any of the "useful and agreeable arts of life" for our students.
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Will Fitzhugh is Editor of The Concord Review and has written and lectured extensively on the assessment of writing and writing skills. He can be reached at: 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts USA, by phone at 978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, and his website and e-mail are: www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
New Mexico Journal of Reading
Spring 2009 Volume XIX, No. 3
Is a change in management enough to transform some of the worst schools in the country? Paul Vallas seems to think so, which might explain why the New Orleans superintendent is one of the biggest cheerleaders for charter schools. Because charter schools are free from district control and often from teacher unions, they have the power to hire and fire, choose the curriculum, and set student rules.
Over half of Vallas' schools are now charters, and most of them are outperforming traditionally-run schools in New Orleans. But Vallas wants to 'charterize' the entire district, even though there's evidence that charters may be abusing their freedom.
A report last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- widely known as the "Nation's Report Card" -- shows that total education spending per pupil has doubled since 1971.
Yet overall test results for our high school seniors remain unchanged.
In effect, we're spending twice as much money to achieve the same results as more than 35 years ago.
If that isn't sad enough, consider these additional facts gleaned from various news stories over the past few weeks:
• A headline from the Wall Street Journal on April 23: "Demand for Charter Schools is High, Seats are Few."
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District's voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program, administration officials said yesterday.
The proposal, to be released in budget documents today, is an attempt to navigate a middle way on a contentious issue. School choice advocates, including Republicans and many low-income families, say the program gives poor children better access to quality education. Teachers unions and other education groups active in the Democratic Party regard vouchers as a drain on public education that benefits relatively few students, and they say the students don't achieve at appreciably higher levels at their new schools.
Reed College President Colin Diver suffered writer's block. Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, wrote quickly but then toiled for hours to cut an essay that was twice as long as it was supposed to be. The assignment loomed over Wesleyan University President Michael Roth's family vacation to Disney World.
The university presidents were struggling with a task that tortures high-school seniors around the country every year: writing the college admissions essay. In a particularly competitive year for college admissions, The Wall Street Journal turned the tables on the presidents of 10 top colleges and universities with an unusual assignment: answer an essay question from their own school's application.
The "applicants" were told not to exceed 500 words (though most did), and to accept no help from public-relations people or speechwriters. Friends and family could advise but not rewrite. The Journal selected the question from each application so presidents wouldn't pick the easy ones. They had about three weeks to write their essays.
The exercise showed just how challenging it is to write a college essay that stands out from the pack, yet doesn't sound overly self-promotional or phony. Even some presidents say they grappled with the challenge and had second thoughts about the topics they chose. Several shared tips about writing a good essay: Stop trying to come up with the perfect topic, write about personally meaningful themes rather than flashy ones, and don't force a subject to be dramatic when it isn't.
This spring's college grads are heading out into a world where jobs are tough to come by. The economic outlook is uncertain and all the older people they know are feeling the pain of stock-market losses.
Worse, there are all kinds of nitty-gritty details to deal with: opening bank accounts, choosing health insurance, finding an apartment, lining up transportation and figuring out how to invest. How is a young person supposed to get ahead in this environment?
It's not easy to master money management during the best times and it's especially hard to navigate the challenges of a recession. Still, many of the same basic principles apply in good times and bad. And getting a taste of a downturn at the start may make current graduates smarter and more thoughtful than those who graduate during boom times.
Here are five broad financial lessons that can pay dividends for a lifetime:
I didn't see many other reporters Tuesday in the narrow, second-floor meeting room of the Phoenix Park Hotel in the District. A U.S. senator's party switch and new National Assessment of Educational Progress data were a bigger draw. But in the long term, the news conference at the hotel might prove a milestone in public education. It isn't often you see a leading teachers union announce it is taking money from what many of its members consider the enemy: corporate billionaires who have been bankrolling the largely nonunion charter school movement.
Of course, it might turn out to be just another publicity stunt. But the people gathered, and what they said, impressed me.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, unveiled the first union-led, private foundation-supported effort to provide grants to AFT unions nationwide to develop and implement what she called "bold education innovations in public schools." The advisory board of the AFT Innovation Fund includes celebrities of my education wonk world: former Cleveland schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Harvard professor Susan Moore Johnson and even Caroline Kennedy, well known for other reasons but identified at the conference as an important fundraiser for New York schools.
Politicians fret these days about how U.S. students stack up in math and science compared with peers in India, China, Singapore and elsewhere. Some of them wonder how many American children could find those countries on a globe. Such talk is driving an effort in Congress to ensure that students learn more about other countries and cultures.
Critics of the No Child Left Behind law, which requires annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight and once in high school, say it has pushed subjects including geography, history and art to the side.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and other lawmakers are trying to change that with a bill called the Teaching Geography is Fundamental Act. The legislation would provide funds for teacher training, research and development of instructional materials.
Van Hollen said he has been distressed by surveys showing that students in the United States have a poor grasp of geography. He said the bill has bipartisan support and 70 co-sponsors.
Some metro Atlanta public high schools that don't grade rigorously produce more graduates lacking the basic English and math skills needed for college, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
Many graduates of those high schools are sent to freshmen remedial classes to learn what high school didn't teach them. As many as a third or more college-bound graduates from some high schools need the extra instruction.
Problems with classroom grading came to light in a February state study that showed some high schools regularly awarded good marks to students who failed state tests in the same subject.
The AJC found that metro high schools where classroom grading appeared lax or out-of-step with state standards tended to have higher rates of students who took remedial classes. And at dozens of high schools, most graduates who received the B average needed for a state HOPE scholarship lost it in college after a few years.
Unprepared high-school graduates are a growing problem for the public university system, where remedial students are concentrated in two-year colleges.
Statewide, the remedial rate has climbed to 1 in 4 first-year students after dropping in the 1990s, said Chancellor Erroll Davis Jr. of the University System of Georgia. The cost to the system: $25 million a year.
Students such as Brandon Curry, 20, a graduate of Redan High in DeKalb County, said they were surprised to learn decent high school grades don't always translate into college success.
Washington, D.C.'s school voucher program for low-income kids isn't dead yet. But the Obama Administration seems awfully eager to expedite its demise.
About 1,700 kids currently receive $7,500 vouchers to attend private schools under the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and 99% of them are black or Hispanic. The program is a huge hit with parents -- there are four applicants for every available scholarship -- and the latest Department of Education evaluation showed significant academic gains.
Nevertheless, Congress voted in March to phase out the program after the 2009-10 school year unless it is reauthorized by Congress and the D.C. City Council. The Senate is scheduled to hold hearings on the program this month, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised proponents floor time to make their case. So why is Education Secretary Arne Duncan proceeding as if the program's demise is a fait accompli?
Mr. Duncan is not only preventing new scholarships from being awarded but also rescinding scholarship offers that were made to children admitted for next year. In effect, he wants to end a successful program before Congress has an opportunity to consider reauthorizing it. This is not what you'd expect from an education reformer, and several Democrats in Congress have written him to protest.
The most recent research from the U.S. Department of Education shows that American 15-year-olds are behind their International counterparts when it comes to problem solving and math literacy.
The report showed the U.S. ranks 24th out of 29 nations.
But a math program, gaining in popularity, is trying to change that.
The program is called Everyday Math.
Lori Rusch is a fourth grade teacher at Middleton's Elm Lawn Elementary. This year she teaches an advanced math class.
On Monday, students in Rusch's class were mastering fractions and percentages.
But her students began learning fractions and percentages in first grade.
"We've been incredibly successful with it," said Middleton's curriculum director George Marvoulis. "Our students on all of our comparative assessments like WKCE, Explorer Plan, ACT, our students score higher in math than any other subject area so we've been very pleased."
According to Marvoulis, Middleton was one of the first school districts in the nation to use the Everyday Math program in 1994.
"The concept is kind of a toolbox of different tools they can use to solve a problem," explained Marvoulis.
PLEDGES are shrinking to aspirations; aspirations are quietly evaporating; no more hoodies are being hugged or huskies stroked (or was it the other way around?). The sunny Californian Conservatism that David Cameron once espoused has been darkened by the crunch. His promise of a happier tomorrow now hangs on a few upbeat policies. Chief among them is education reform--which could make Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, among the most privileged and pressured members of a future Tory government.
Ed Balls, his counterpart in the cabinet, is an equally important figure for Labour, before and after the next general election. Ire over public services often focuses on bad hospitals: death is more heart-wrenching than illiteracy. But pound for pound (and there have been a lot of them), Labour's education spending has been less rewarding than its health splurge. It falls to Mr Balls to defend its record on what Tony Blair proclaimed his main priority--and to soften the recession's impact on teenagers and soothe a rumbling moral panic about harm done by and to children.
Well, it's just about showtime. Soon you will face that grueling week of finals on which the fate of this semester's GPA rests. Sorry, we can't make final's week into a piece of cake. Only your professors can, and we wouldn't be counting on it. But how well you prepare will, in no small measure, determine how well you'll do. So here are our 10 best suggestions on how to prepare for those all-important final exams (together with a brief glance into the professor's mind that will show you why the tips work):
1. Spend a week. Start studying for each exam a week before you are due to take it. This will give you time to divide the material into manageable portions that you can digest over a number of study sessions. This is especially important in the case of a cumulative final in a course with tons of material. Whatever you do, don't try to swallow the whole elephant--the whole course, we mean--in one cram session. (Works because, in most courses, the prof is expecting you to have processed and digested the material--something you can't do in one fell swoop).
Some newspaper and magazine companies, feeling let down by the Kindle electronic reader from Amazon.com Inc., are pushing for alternatives.
A few publishers are forging alliances with consumer-electronics firms to support e-readers that meet their needs. Chief among their complaints about the Amazon portable reading gadget is the way Amazon acts as a middleman with subscribers and controls pricing. In addition, the layout isn't conducive to advertising.
Hearst Corp., which publishes the San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle as well as magazines including Cosmopolitan, is backing a venture with FirstPaper LLC to create a software platform that will support digital downloads of newspapers and magazines. The startup venture is expected to result in devices that will have a bigger screen and have the ability to show ads.
I didn't see many other reporters Tuesday in the narrow, second-floor meeting room of the Phoenix Park Hotel in the District. A U.S. senator's party switch and new National Assessment of Educational Progress data were a bigger draw. But in the long term, the news conference at the hotel might prove a milestone in public education. It isn't often you see a leading teachers union announce it is taking money from what many of its members consider the enemy: corporate billionaires who have been bankrolling the largely nonunion charter school movement.
Of course, it might turn out to be just another publicity stunt. But the people gathered, and what they said, impressed me.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, unveiled the first union-led, private foundation-supported effort to provide grants to AFT unions nationwide to develop and implement what she called "bold education innovations in public schools." The advisory board of the AFT Innovation Fund includes celebrities of my education wonk world: former Cleveland schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Harvard professor Susan Moore Johnson and even Caroline Kennedy, well known for other reasons but identified at the conference as an important fundraiser for New York schools.
It is excusable for people to think of Mediocrity as too little of something, or a weak approximation of what would be best, and this is not entirely wrong. However, in education circles, it is important to remember, Mediocrity is the Strong Force, as the physicists would say, not the Weak Force.
For most of the 20th century, as Diane Ravitch reports in her excellent history, Left Back, Americans achieved remarkably high levels of Mediocrity in education, making sure that our students do not know too much and cannot read and write very well, so that even of those who have gone on to college, between 50% and 75% never received any sort of degree.
In the 21st century, there is a new push to offer global awareness, critical thinking, and collaborative problem solving to our students, as a way of getting them away from reading nonfiction books and writing any sort of serious research paper, and that effort, so similar to several of the recurring anti-academic and anti-intellectual programs of the prior century, will also help to preserve the Mediocrity we have so painstakingly forged in our schools.
Research generally has discovered that while Americans acknowledge there may be Mediocrity in our education generally, they feel that their own children's schools are good. It should be understood that this is in part the result of a very systematic and deliberate campaign of disinformation by educrats. When I was teaching in the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, the superintendent at the time met with the teachers at the start of the year and told us that we were the best high school faculty in the country. That sounds nice, but what evidence did he have? Was there a study of the quality of high school faculties around the country? No, it was just public relations.
The "Lake Woebegone" effect, so widely found in our education system, is the result of parents continually being "informed" that their schools are the best in the country. I remember meeting with an old friend in Tucson once, who informed that "Tucson High School is one of the ten best in the country." How did she know that? What was the evidence for that claim at the time? None.
Mediocrity and its adherents have really done a first-class job of leading people to believe that all is well with our high schools. After all, when parents ask their own children about their high school, the students usually say they like it, meaning, in most cases, that they enjoy being with their friends there, and are not too bothered by a demanding academic curriculum.
With No Child Left Behind, there has been a large effort to discover and report information about the actual academic performance of students in our schools, but the defenders of Mediocrity have been as active, and almost as successful, as they have ever been in preserving a false image of the academic quality of our schools. They have established state standards that, except in Massachusetts and a couple of other states, are designed to show that all the students are "above the national average" in reading and math, even though they are not.
It is important for anyone serious about raising academic standards in our schools to remember that Mediocrity is the Hundred-Eyed Argus who never sleeps, and never relaxes its relentless diligence in opposition to academic quality for our schools and educational achievement for our students.
There is a long list of outside helpers, from Walter Annenberg to the Gates Foundation, who have ventured into American education with the idea that it makes sense that educators would support higher standards and better education for our students. Certainly that is what they hear from educators. But when the money is allocated and the "reform" is begun, the Mediocrity Special Forces move into action, making sure that very little happens, and that the money, even billions of dollars, disappears into the Great Lake of Mediocrity with barely a ripple, so that no good effect is ever seen.
If this seems unduly pessimistic, notice that a recent survey of college professors conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them reported that the students who came to them were not very well prepared, for example, in reading, doing research, and writing, and that the Diploma to Nowhere report from the Strong American Schools program last summer said that more than 1,000,000 of our high school graduates are now placed in remedial courses when they arrive at the colleges to which they have been "admitted." It seems clear that without Muscular Mediocrity in our schools, we could never have hoped to achieve such a shameful set of academic results.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Extensive planning and feedback was conducted during the development of the plan involving many different stakeholders - teachers, library media specialists, counselors, psychologists, social workers, nurses, secretaries, computer tech support staff, principals and administrators, parents, students, community agencies, local businesses and business groups, higher education faculty and staff - in order to create the most comprehensive plan possible that meets all of the community's needs.
Key Issues
Access for All - There is compelling evidence that technology access - especially in regard to Internet access - is not currently equitably distributed within the community (and the nation as a whole) particularly as it relates to the socio-economic status of households. In order to be competitive in a global economy all students (and their parents) must have equitable access to technology in their public schools. The issue extends beyond the school into student's homes and neighborhoods and must be addressed in that context.
Recommendations: Acquire and deploy technology using a strategy that recognizes the socio-economic access divide so that all students can be assured of contemporary technology-based learning environments. Increase public access to District technology resources outside the regularly scheduled school day so that it is open to parents, students and the community. Implement very specific actions to collaborate with all stakeholders within the community to address these issues. Explore options for families to gain access to computers for use in their homes.
Professional Development - Without an understanding of what technology can do, the hardware simply won't be used. The feedback is overwhelming that the teacher is key to any technology strategy. Their learning - and access to technology - must be a high priority.
Recommendations: Create four staff positions that provide technology integration professional development support. Create part-time instructional support roles within each school as coaches for teachers and staff. Embed technology within all content-based professional development. Focus on high leverage, low cost options technology tools such as Moodle, Google Apps, Drupal, wikis, and blogs. Create an offering of basic technology professional development courses - both online and face-to-face for staff to access. Create an annual showcase conference opportunity for teachers to share their learning with each other.
Attending to Basics - The MMSD technology infrastructure has been slow to keep up with changes in network issues such as Internet capacity and bandwidth. Fiber-based Internet access was just completed this school year. Emerging technologies include wireless, which opens many more flexible learning opportunities for students. While the number of computers in Madison schools is not significantly behind volumes in other school districts, the age of the computers is significantly older with a current nine-year replacement rate. The District needs to ensure that the basic infrastructure for the core systems are up-to- date and stable, e.g., email, printing, copying, faxing, and telephony.
Recommendations: Investigate network upgrade options, especially wireless. Deploy these technologies across all schools as rapidly as possible. Implement a personal computing plan that replaces all student instructional computing devices every four years and three years for administrative and instructional staff computers. Explore lower cost mobile netbook and hand held devices to supplement any desktop computers.
The 2008-09 school year marked the fourth consecutive year in which testing in grades 3 through 8 and 10 was conducted in fulfillment of the federal No Child left Behind law. The Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exams (WKCE) is a criterion-referenced test (CRT) where a student's performance is compared to a specific set of learning standard outcomes. The WKCE-CRT includes testing in all seven grade levels reading and math and in grades 4, 8 and 10 additional testing in language arts, science and social studies. Just under 12,400 MMSD students participated in this year's WKCE-CRT.
Under NClB, schools are required to test 95% of their full academic year (FAY) students in reading and math. Madison's test participation rates exceeded 95% in all grade levels. Grades 3 through 8 achieved 99% test participation or higher while the District's 10th graders reached 98% in test participation.
In general, performance was relatively unchanged in the two academic areas tested across the seven grade levels. In reading, across the seven grades tested four grade levels had an increase in the percentage of students scoring at the proficient or higher performance categories compared with the previous year while three grades showed a decline in the percentage. In math, three grades increased proficient or higher performance, three grades declined, and one remained the same.
The changing demographics of the district affect the overall aggregate achievement data. As the district has experienced a greater proportion of students from subgroups which are at a disadvantage in testing, e.g., non-native English speakers, or English language learners (Ells), the overall district averages have correspondingly declined. Other subgroups which traditionally perform well on student achievement tests, i.e., non-low income students and white students, continue to perform very high relative to statewide peer groups. Therefore, it is important disaggregate the data to interpret and understand the district results.
The nonpartisan California Budget Challenge is a free online educational tool from the public-policy group Next 10 that lets users try to balance California's books and see how their choices would affect the state five years into the future.
Users set their own priorities and make tough decisions about what is best for the people of the state. This allows everyday people the chance to consider the effects of important policy choices. This year, Next 10 is taking the challenge on the road, visiting classrooms and diverse communities throughout the state. Staff members teach audiences about the workings of California's finances and give them a flavor for what it takes to balance the state's budget. Here are reactions to Proposition 1A from six Bay Area high school students:
What happens when you have a law that's supposed to improve performance among the nation's school children but instead it creates confusion, lowers expectations and can result in a "dummying down" of state standards?
That's what a panel of educational experts is trying to address with a plan to incorporate common academic standards. They are urging Congress to support a state-led initiative to develop more-uniform, clear and integrated standards that reflect both the global marketplace and Americans' mobility within the country.
Under the 2002 No Child Left Behind law (PL 107-110), states set their own standards -- resulting in what Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls a "dummying down" of state standards in order to meet benchmarks set by the law.
Those who advocate for common standards contend that a system of variable expectations -- ones that are often too low -- leads American students to underperform when compared with their peers in Finland or China. President Obama called for common standards in a March 10 speech, and Duncan has said he would use a portion of a $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund under his discretion to reward states working toward that goal.
The panel -- which included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; former North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt Jr.; and Dave Levin, founder of the KIPP charter schools -- testified April 29 at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing.
Teachers, students, employees, employers, everyone these days, it seems, is being exhorted to think, act, imagine and perform "Outside the Box."
However, for students, there is still quite a bit that may be found Inside the Box for them to learn and get good at before they wander off into OutBoxLand.
Inside the Box there still await grammar, the multiplication tables, the periodic table, Boyle's Law, the Glorious Revolution, the Federalist Papers, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Bach, Mozart, Giovanni Bellini, recombinant DNA, Albrecht Durer, Edward Gibbon, Jan van Eyck, and a few other matters worth their attention.
Before the Mission Control people in Houston could solve the unique, immediate, and potentially fatal "Out of the Box" problems with the recovery of Apollo 13 and its crew, they had to draw heavily on their own InBox training and knowledge of mechanics, gases, temperatures, pressures, azimuth, velocity and lots of other math, science, and engineering stuff they had studied before. They may have been educated sitting in rows, and been seen in the halls at Mission Control wearing plastic pocket protectors, but in a very short time in that emergency they came up with novel solutions to several difficult and unexpected problems in saving that crew.
It seems clear to me that a group of ignorant but freethinking folks given that same set of novel tasks would either have had to watch Apollo 13 veer off into fatal space or crash into our planet with a dead crew on board, in a creative way, of course.
Many situations are less dramatic demonstrations of the clear necessity of lots of InBox education as preparation for any creative endeavor, but even high school students facing their first complete nonfiction book and a first history research paper when they arrive in college would have been much better off if they had been assigned a couple of complete nonfiction books and research papers before they left high school.
Basketball coach John Wooden of UCLA was of course happy with players who could adapt to unexpected defenses on the court during games, but according to Bill Walton, when he met with a set of new freshmen trying to make his team, the first thing he taught them was how to put on their socks...Perhaps some of his (and their) success came because he was not above going back into the Old Box to lay the groundwork for the winning fundamentals in college basketball.
Many teachers and edupundits decry the insufficiency of novelty, creativity and freethinking-out-of-the-box in our schools, but I have to wonder how many have realized the overriding importance of the education equivalent of having students put on their socks the right way?
Basic knowledge in history, English, physics, Latin, biology, math, and so on is essential for students in school before they can do much more than fool around with genuine and useful creativity in those fields.
True, they can write about themselves creatively, but if the teacher has read Marcel Proust, and would share a bit of his writing with the students, they might come to see that there is creativity in writing about oneself and there is also fooling around in writing about oneself.
Samuel Johnson once pointed out that: "The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest, but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted..."
The pleasures of foolish playacting Outside of the Box of knowledge and skill by students (and their teachers: witness the damage shown in Dead Poets Society) may delight them for a time because they are tired of the hard work involved in learning and thinking about new knowledge in school, but the more they indulge and are indulged in it, the lower our educational standards will be, and the worse the education provided students in our schools.
Novelty and innovation have their place and there they are sorely needed, but the quality of that innovation depends, to a great extent, on the quality of the knowledge and skill acquired while students were still working hard Back in the Box.
Net-net is that people aren't successful from passion alone, usually there are other factors or "flukes" that lead to them living in their element. You may have heard successful people say that what made them great is that they were at the right place at the right time. There is some truth to that but they also had enormous passion, put in many hours and were in their "element".
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that passion alone doesn't equate success; the environment, innovation and generational culture shape our success. Below is an Outlier story of my own.
I have two kids. When Rachel started school, she was like a fish to water. She started kindergarten in an accelerated classroom, worked very hard, loved school and recently finished her teaching credential for the sciences. She's planning to spend her adult life in the classroom teaching.
Anthony on the other hand didn't like school enough to even pull his completed homework out of his backpack. In middle school he was a strong D-student,and an exceptional pianist. We contacted the school to see if he could remove Orchestra and PE classes from his schedule so he could devote 4 to 6 hours towards piano practice, they said they'd check with the School District because they "do that kind of thing for athletes". They said, " No," so I pulled him out of public school that very day.
More than a decade ago, when I began investigating the odd uses of Advanced Placement courses and tests in our high schools, I tried to find out why AP participation was so much lower than I expected in my neighborhood public school, Walt Whitman High of Bethesda. At least one high school in neighboring D.C., and many more in suburban Maryland, had higher participation rates than Whitman, even though it was often called the best school in the state.
That is how I stumbled on what I call the Mt. Olympus syndrome. There were, I discovered from talking to students, a few AP teachers at that school who didn’t want to deal with average students. One of them actively discouraged juniors who were getting less than an A in a prerequisite course from taking his AP course when they were seniors. He only wanted students who were going to get a 5, the equivalent of an A on the three-hour college-level AP exam, where a score of 3 and above could earn college credit. That test, like all AP exams, was written and graded by outside experts, mostly high school and college instructors. The only way that teacher thought he could control the number of 5s was to make sure only top quality students--the academic gods of the Whitman High pantheon--were allowed into his course.
You could see the pride in third-grader Kuron Anderson's eyes as he jumped from his tiny chair to talk about his technology project. He called it "The Many Faces of the Man," a digital photo mosaic that he created to celebrate the election of President Obama.
"I worked hard on it, and I did my best," Kuron said.
"This is the before picture," the 8-year-old said, pointing to the cutout on the cardboard display. "And if you step back, you will see his face on the computer. It is made up of cell images."
: Public schools across Wisconsin expect a critical shortage of math and science teachers in the next few years. Supply is not keeping up with demand.
That's why the Legislature should approve Senate Bill 175. This sensible proposal would lure more math and science professionals into classrooms by creating a shorter and less expensive route to a teaching license for anyone with a college degree.
SB 175 also could attract more black men into the teaching profession to serve as role models in urban schools -- a key selling point for Rep. Jason Fields, D-Milwaukee, who is part of a bipartisan group of sponsors.
Computing skills will be put on an equal footing with literacy and numeracy in an overhaul of primary education that aims to slim down the curriculum - but not lose the basics.
Children will be taught to read using internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo in the first few years of school, it is announced.
Pupils in English primary schools will learn to write with keyboards, use spellcheckers and insert internet "hyperlinks" into text before their 11th birthday under the most significant reform of timetables since the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988.
The review by Sir Jim Rose, former head of inspections at Ofsted, also recommends the use of Google Earth in geography lessons, spreadsheets to calculate budgets in maths, online archives to research local history and video conferencing software for joint language lessons with schools overseas.
Sir Jim insisted the changes would not replace come at the expense of traditional teaching, saying: "We cannot sidestep the basics".
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We've let the curriculum become too fat. We need to give teachers the opportunity to be more flexible."
His report, which will be accepted in full by ministers, also proposes more IT training for teachers to keep them ahead of "computer savvy pupils".
Google (and other search engine) users should be aware of the many privacy issues associated with these services. Willem Buiter:
Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women's rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business. It would not be missed.
In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.
Google, with about 50 per cent of the global internet search market, is the latest in a distinguished line of IT abusive monopolists. The first was IBM, which was brought to heel partly by a forty-year long antitrust regulation (which ended in 1996) and partly by the rise of Microsoft.
The Boston Globe has been publishing for 137 years, and the news that it may have to fold has distressed its many readers. Each Fall, Winter and Spring the paper publishes a special section, of 14 pages or so, on notable local public high school athletes and their coaches. There is a mention of athletes and coaches at local prep schools as well.
The latest Boston Globe's Winter "ALL-SCHOLASTICS" section arrived, with the "ten moments that stood out among the countless athletic stories in Massachusetts." There are reports on the best athletes and coaches in Skiing, Boys' Basketball, Girls' Basketball, Boys' Hockey, Girls' Hockey, Boys' Track, Girls' Track, Boys' Swimming, Girls' Swimming, Preps, Wrestling, and Gymnastics. The Preps and Gymnastics parts consolidate boys' and girls' accomplishments, perhaps to save space (and cost).
Each full-page section also features photographs of 9-16 athletes, with perhaps a twitter-sized paragraph on their achievements. In addition, there are 30 photos and tweets about some coaches, spread among the various sports. There are 26 "Prep" athletes mentioned, from various sports, but I didn't see any "Prep" coaches profiled. For each high school sport there are two "athletes of the year" identified, and all the coaches are "coaches of the year" in their sport.
There may be, at this time, some high school "students of the year" in English, math, Chinese, physics, Latin, chemistry, European history, U.S. history, biology, and the like. There may also be high school "teachers of the year" in these and other academic subjects, but their names and descriptions are not to be found in The Boston Globe, perhaps the most well-known paper in the "Athens of America" (Boston).
It may be the case, indeed it probably is the case, that some of the athletes featured in the Winter "All-Scholastics" section today are also high school students of math, history, English, science, and languages, but you would not know that from the coverage of The Boston Globe. The coaches of the year may in many, if not all, cases, also be teachers of academic subjects in the Massachusetts public and private schools, but that remains only a guess as well.
When the British architect Christopher Wren was buried in 1723, part of his epitaph, written by his eldest son, Christopher Wren, Jr., read: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice." If you wanted to judge his interest, efforts and accomplishments, all you had to do was look around you. His work was there for all to see.
The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.
If one seeks a monument to anti-academic and anti-intellectual views and practices in Boston today, one need look no further than The Boston Globe. I read it every day, and I will be sorry to see it fold, if it does, but I will not miss its attention to and recognition of the academic efforts and accomplishments of Massachusetts secondary students and their teachers, because there is none now, and never has been any, no matter how many reports on education reform and academic standards it may have published over the years. If you ask how much The Boston Globe editors (and I am sure The Globe is not alone in this) cares about the good academic work now actually being done by high school teachers and their students in Massachusetts, the answer is, from the evidence, that they do not.
In 2002-2003, 1 million students participated in AP by taking at least one exam. Five years later, nearly 1.6 million did—a 50+ percent increase. But is growth all good? Might there be a downside? Are ill prepared students eroding the quality of the program? Perhaps harming the best and brightest? To find out, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned the Farkas Duffett Research Group to survey AP teachers in public high schools across the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AP program remains very popular with its teachers. But there are signs that the move toward “open door” access to AP is starting to cause concern. Read the report to learn more.
A survey of more than 1,000 teachers of Advanced Placement courses in American high schools has found that more than half are concerned that the program’s effectiveness is being threatened as districts loosen restrictions on who can take such rigorous courses and as students flock to them to polish their résumés.
The study, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educational research and advocacy organization, noted the sharp growth in the A.P. program’s popularity. The number of high school students who took at least one college-level A.P. course increased by 45 percent, to 1.6 million from 1.1 million, from the school year ended 2004 to that ended 2008.
The number of A.P. exams those students took — with hopes, in part, of gaining exemption from some college class work, depending on how well they scored — increased by 50 percent, to 2.7 million.>Dane County, WI High School AP course offering comparison.
By law public schools in Wisconsin must administer a rigid, comprehensive set of tests. In the fall of every school year students are tested in reading, math, language, science and social studies. Test results from each district and each school are posted on the Internet, passed along to the federal government to comply with No Child Left Behind requirements and are made available to parents. In an era where measurable student performance is essential, it is expected that Wisconsin's elaborate system of testing will tell us how Wisconsin students are performing. Unfortunately the testing required by Wisconsin state law is not very good.
The purpose of state standards and state-mandated testing is to increase academic achievement. Does Wisconsin's elaborate system of testing advance this goal? From every quarter the answer is a clear no. That is the consensus of independent, third-party evaluators. Wisconsin's massive testing program has come under fire from the U.S. Department of Education which said that Wisconsin testing failed to adequately evaluate the content laid out in the state's own standards. Further, a joint report issued by the independent Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association performed a detailed evaluation of testing in every state and ranked Wisconsin 42nd in the nation. The Fordham Institute gave Wisconsin's testing a grade of "D-minus."
Perhaps even more troublesome is that many Wisconsin school districts find the testing system inadequate. Over 68% of Wisconsin school districts that responded to a survey said they purchase additional testing to do what the state testing is supposed to do. These districts are well ahead of the state in understanding the importance of timely, rigorous testing.
This report lays out the thirty-year history of testing in Wisconsin and the criticism of the current testing requirement. It is the first of two reports to be issued regarding Wisconsin's testing program. The second report will show how a new approach to testing will not only meet the standards that parents, teachers and the public expect, but will also allow teachers and policy makers to use testing to actually increase the achievement of Wisconsin's children.
WKCE Scores Document Decline in the Percentage of Madison's Advanced Students
For many years now, parents and community members, including members of Madison United for Academic Excellence, have expressed concerns about the decline in rigor and the lack of adequate challenge in our district's curriculum. The release this week of WKCE scores for the November 2008 testing led me to wonder about the performance of our district's strongest students. While most analyses of WKCE scores focus on the percentages of students scoring at the Advanced and Proficient levels, these numbers do not tell us about changes in the percent of students at each particular level of performance. We can have large increases in the percent of students scoring at the Proficient and Advanced levels because we have improved the performance of students who were previously at the Basic level on the WKCE, but yet fail to have any effect on the performance of our district's strongest students. This is the argument that we are improving the performance of our low ability students, but failing to increase the performance of our already successful students. An examination of the numbers of students who are performing at just the Advanced level on the WKCE provides us with some insight into the academic progress of our more successful students.
I decided to examine WKCE math scores for students across the district. While it is not possible to track the performance of individual students, it is possible to follow the performance of a cohort as they advance through the system. Thus students who are now in 10th grade, took the 8th grade WKCE in 2006 and the 4th grade test in 2002. Because there have been significant changes in the demographics of the district's students, I split the data by socio-economic status to remove the possibility of declines in WKCE performance simply being the result of increased numbers of low income students. Although the WKCE has been criticized for not being a rigorous enough assessment tool, the data on our students' math performance are not encouraging. The figures below indicate that the percent of students scoring at the Advanced level on the WKCE decreases as students progress through the system, and this decline is seen in both our low income students and in our Not Economically Disadvantaged students. The figures suggest that while there is some growth in the percent of Advanced performing students in elementary school, there is a significant decline in performance once students begin taking math in our middle schools and this decline continues through high school. I confess that I take no pleasure in sharing this data; in fact, it makes me sick.
Because it might be more useful to examine actual numbers, I have provided tables showing the data used in the figures above. Reading across a row shows the percent of students in a class cohort scoring at the Advanced level as they have taken the WKCE test as they progressed from grades 3 - 10.
Percent of Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring at the Advanced Level on the WKCE Math Test Between 2002 and 2008
Graduation Year
3rd Grade
4th Grade
5th Grade
6th Grade
7th Grade
8th Grade
10th Grade
2005
8
2006
8.8
2007
11
7.7
2008
5.6
8.7
2009
8.5
6.7
2010
9.2
8.4
2011
12
12.5
11.1
8
2012
9.7
10.4
9.5
8.2
2013
15.3
14.7
15.1
11.7
10.8
2014
12
13.6
16.1
13.2
2015
20.1
15
18
11.7
2016
15.4
17.1
18.4
2017
12.9
17
2018
13.8
Percent of Not Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring at the Advanced Level on the WKCE Math Test Between 2002 and 2008
Graduation Year
3rd Grade
4th Grade
5th Grade
6th Grade
7th Grade
8th Grade
10th Grade
2005
47
2006
41.6
2007
49
42.2
2008
33.8
51.5
2009
42
45.2
2010
47.7
45.1
2011
50
45.3
45
38.4
2012
43.4
50.7
53
45.7
2013
50.3
54.8
54.1
54.7
48.2
2014
49.6
56.7
60.9
53.5
2015
60
57.8
60.7
54.2
2016
55.6
56.3
62
2017
57.4
61.4
2018
55.6
While it could be argued that the declining percentage of low income students scoring in the advanced range on the WKCE are simply the result of a relatively stable number of Advanced ability students in this group becoming a smaller and smaller percentage as the overall numbers of economically disadvantaged students increases, an examination of actual numbers reveal an absolute decline in the number of low income students scoring at the Advanced level on the Math portion of the WKCE.
Numbers of Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring Advanced on the Math WKCE Between 2002 and 2008
Graduation Year
3rd Grade
4th Grade
5th Grade
6th Grade
7th Grade
8th Grade
10th Grade
2005
42
2006
29
2007
57
32
2008
26
51
2009
43
40
2010
52
48
2011
64
73
64
52
2012
45
64
59
49
2013
74
87
89
71
69
2014
75
85
71
87
2015
126
96
113
87
2016
112
123
131
2017
86
121
2018
102
In the interest of thoroughness, I am providing enrollment numbers for the Not Economically Disadvantaged students in the MMSD over this period of time. Readers will see that the absolute numbers of Not Disadvantaged students have declined over the past seven years; this simply confirms what we already know (the increase in numbers from 8th to 10th grade reflect the influx of 9th grade students who have attended private schools for their K-8 education, e.g., Blessed Sacrament and Queen of Peace in the West attendance area).
Numbers of Not Economically Disadvantaged Students Enrolled Across Different Grade Levels in the Madison Schools and Taking the WKCE between 2002 and 2008
Graduation Year
3rd Grade
4th Grade
5th Grade
6th Grade
7th Grade
8th Grade
10th Grade
2005
1486
2006
1628
2007
1197
1451
2008
1259
1292
2009
1145
1218
2010
992
1188
2011
1026
1019
1054
1106
2012
1039
847
913
916
2013
1064
954
949
976
952
2014
936
974
939
883
2015
953
973
960
890
2016
894
881
847
2017
950
884
2018
913
Because the percent of students in this group scoring at the Advanced level has declined as well, there are two possible explanations for what has been happening. One explanation is that the district has had a relatively larger decline in enrollments of high ability students amongst this group of Not Disadvantaged students, what is often referred to as "Bright Flight". A more probably explanation is that the math curriculum, particularly in our middle schools and in 9th grade, does not adequately challenge our students and foster their intellectual growth regardless of their socio-economic background, and of course, it is possible that both of these factors are contributing to what we see here.
I should note that I have only examined the math data, and I don't know if the WKCE data for the other subject areas is as dismal. This would seem like an analysis that the District should be doing on a regular basis, but I encourage anyone who is interested to explore the performance of our students in reading or language arts. I also do not know the extent to which the Madison data merely reflects a similar decline in performance across the state. The members of the UW Math faculty that I have talked with in the past have expressed their concerns about the overall level of preparation from Wisconsin students, and our district's data may simply be a confirmation of the failure of currently popular constructionist approaches to adequately teach mathematical concepts. The statewide data is certainly worth exploring as well, and again I invited interested parties to visit the Department of Public Instruction WINNS website and download their own copy of the data.
I will say again that I find these data to be incredibly demoralizing, but perhaps we can take hope that our new superintendent and our School Board will use these data as a rallying point as they finalize a strategic plan and consider the recommendations of the Math Task Force. We have to find ways to raise the performance of all our district's students, and right now it appears we aren't meeting anyone's academic needs.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tells us that "School Reform Means Doing What's Best for Kids" (op-ed, April 22). His cry for "doing what's best for kids" rings a bit hollow when he failed to do what is best for the 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C. who were counting on him. Those kids were given a lifeline -- a voucher to escape schools that continually failed them, schools in a district to which neither Mr. Duncan nor his boss would send their own children. When crunch time arrived, politics trumped educational freedom, at least when it came to poor, inner-city kids in the District of Columbia.
Mr. Duncan speaks eloquently about how the public education establishment must change. He correctly says "we need a culture of accountability in America's education system if we want to be the best in the world." But what greater accountability can there be than that which comes from customers exercising free choices? True accountability in education will only come about when all parents are empowered to choose what they deem is best for their own children, not just those, like President Obama, Mr. Duncan, and most readers of the Wall Street Journal, who have financial means. So my question is, "When will the Obamas, Duncans, et. al. stand up for low-income parents so that they, too, can make choices that are best for their kids?"
Across Wisconsin, educators like Hensgen are part of a growing chorus to reassess the way the state assesses students. Currently, teachers and districts wait five months for WKCE results, so they have little time to react to the findings and adjust their curriculum. The tests eat into a week of class time and are based on standards that, critics say, are too low to give parents and teachers a clear picture of how students measure up globally.
"It's widely agreed that the WKCE is a really lousy test that measures lame standards," said Phil McDade, a departing member of the Monona Grove School Board. "The bigger issue to me in Wisconsin is that there's a sense of self-satisfaction with our school districts, that we're doing fine, that we're Lake Wobegon, that everybody here's above average."
The Department of Public Instruction commissioned a state task force on the issue last fall and is reviewing the group's recommendations, said Michael Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of schools. The state's current testing contract lasts at least another two years.
This is an era of "NO Values" - that is confirmed! Ten years have passed since 1998 and the medium-of-instruction pendulum is swinging again. From one side to the other, or rather, back to square one, although the government refuses to admit the fact and gives the latest policy move a beautiful name: "fine-tuning". Yet, who will feel fine? The Education Bureau? Parents? Teachers? Students?
While the community is deeply involved in the discussion about the so-called labelling effect that could be caused by the fine-tuning policy, what has made the pendulum swing back remains a complete mystery. No one will be interested in the mystery, they will be too busy getting their surfboards ready for the tide to turn again.
However, this mysterious force is pushing our community into an era without beliefs and values. The issue of teaching language should not be considered as something solely related to education, it should be viewed and discussed from a wider angle. It is, in fact, demonstrating how our government formulates and adjusts its public policies.
Let us have a look at the Education Bureau's proposal. The officials are now suggesting that teachers hold a grade six in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), considered appropriate to be able to conduct a lesson in English in the future.
What is IELTS? According to the official webpage www.ielts.org) , it is an internationally recognised English test measuring the ability of a student to communicate in English across all four language skills - listening, reading, writing and speaking - for people who intend to study or work where English is the language of communication.
Just like TOEFL, this is an English benchmarking test for students who wish to further their studies overseas and for people who are applying for migration to an English-speaking country.
How is a person's English-speaking capacity evaluated in IELTS? The oral test consists of two sections. The five-minute section one is a general "getting-to-know-the-candidate" part with common questions such as: "Do you enjoy studying English?" Section two is a two-minute monologue, with the candidate asked to give a presentation on a set topic based on information given on a cue card.
Clearly, the test has nothing to do with English teaching - the results of IELTS are unable to tell a person's ability to conduct a secondary school English lesson.
What makes Education Bureau officials believe so confidently that a non-English teacher holding a grade six in IELTS would be competent to deliver a lesson in biology or geography? Up until now we have not seen any evidence or research to support such a belief. Obviously the government owes the public an explanation.
In terms of command of English, what does grade six in IELTS stand for? In Australia, if a student wants to further his or her studies at a graduate school, a grade eight in IELTS is a must. In Hong Kong, both City and Baptist universities consider IELTS grade six equivalent to grade E in the Hong Kong AS-level Use of English examination. Would the public believe a teacher holding a grade E in Use of English capable of teaching a general subject such as chemistry and liberal studies in fluent English? I am afraid only someone who is ignorant of the exam requirements and content would say "yes".
Does the government know this? Beyond doubt, nearly all officials themselves should have gone through this system and exam themselves some years ago.
Either the government did not know what level of language proficiency an IELTS grade six represented. If so, it means that our officials are ignorant and are not making policy decisions in a professional way. There again, what if the officials did know what an IELTS grade six stood for when they designed the fine-tuning policy?
This is a question we should all ask, and it is why professional teachers and principals are against the proposed fine-tuning policy.
Ten years ago, without giving the public any research findings, the government told secondary schools that code-mixing was something very bad for students and had to be abandoned. Similarly, we have not seen any research to explain why there should be some schools allowed to cling to English teaching, while the government ruled that mother-tongue should be the best teaching language in the classroom.
Couldn't the government foresee that such an odd policy - telling the public that English-medium schools were admitting better students - would harm the fundamental spirit of mother-tongue education at that time?
Now, a generation of students has gone and the government tells the public it is time the pendulum swung back to the original side. Again, no theories, no research and no long-term plans are available to support such a move.
What can we learn from this? The fine-tuning policy move awakes all of us to the fact that we are living in an era of no beliefs and values. We are simply struggling in the ripples of political waves. Our government is not making sensible decisions based on any schools of thought or other rational considerations; it is a machine operating on political concerns.
Where have all our professional beliefs, values and practices gone? Long gone with the political monsoons.
May God bless our children - the future pillars of Hong Kong!
Jonathan Lai Ping-wah.
Alumnus principal of Lee Kau Yan Memorial School, Kowloon (a Chinese middle school since 1964).
Master of Public Administration, University of Hong Kong.
Master of Language Studies, Baptist University.
Bachelor of Arts (Chinese and English), Chinese University.
Teacher's Certificate (special education), Hong Kong Institute of Education.
At a growing number of middle schools and high schools across the country, students no longer receive failing marks when they fail. Instead, they get an "H" -- for "held" -- on their report cards, and they're given a chance to rectify their poor performance without tanking the entire semester.
Educators in schools from Costa Mesa, Calif., to Maynard, Mass., are also employing a policy known in school hallways as ZAP -- or "Zeros Aren't Permitted" -- which gives students an opportunity to finish the homework they neglected to do on time.
While administrators and teachers say the policies provide hope for underperforming students, critics say that lowering or altering education standards is not the answer. They point to case studies in Grand Rapids, Mich., where public high schools are using the "H" grading system this year and, according to reports, only 16 percent of first-semester "H" grades became passing grades in the second semester.
In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%. Aptitude tests suggested I should be doing better, and this was a consistent message on my report cards. I hated school. As my blog bio explains, I was shy, socially inept, uncoordinated and self-conscious. My idea of fun was playing strategy games (Diplomacy and Acquire, for fellow geeks of that era -- this was long before computer games or the Internet) and hanging around the drive-in restaurant.
Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called "independent study", that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C -- 60% -- really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold. There was a core group of 'brainy' students who enrolled immediately. Half of them were the usual boring group (the 'keeners') who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents' behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning. The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.
Facebook may be the social medium of choice for college students, but the microblogging Web tool Twitter has found adherents among professors, many of whom are starting to experiment with it as a teaching device.
People use Twitter to broadcast bite-sized messages or Web links and to read messages or links posted by others. It can be used as a source of news, to listen to what people in certain groups are talking about, or to communicate with experts or leaders in certain fields.
Marquette University associate professor Gee Ekechai uses Twitter to discuss what she's teaching in class with students and connect them with experts in the field of advertising and public relations.
Instructor Linda Menck, who also teaches at Marquette, encourages students to include social media as a strategy in marketing campaigns for clients.
Twitter is helping these professors build community in their classes in a way that appeals to some members of a Facebook-addicted generation. The phenomenon is certainly not ubiquitous, and some professors have found Twitter doesn't do anything for them in the academic realm.
But others, particularly those who teach in communications fields, are finding that Twitter and other social media are key devices for students and faculty to include in their professional toolbox.
Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they're from, etc.?
A. You're looking for a really strong set of values. You're looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you're looking for communication skills.
You're looking for adaptability to change. You're looking at, do you get along well with people? And are you the sort of person that can be a part of a team and motivate people? You know, do you have the emotional I.Q.?
It's not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation. You've got to have the ability to pick people. You've got to have the ability to communicate. When you find really capable people, it's amazing how they proliferate capable people all through your organization. So that's what you're hunting for.
If you wanted to help a Martian understand this sliver of the planet in Rockland County, you might do two things.
First, you would take him (or her or it) to the cavernous Foodmart International on the main drag, Route 59.
The shoppers chatter in the broad, chilly aisles in every language under the sun. The wares include Cuban bread, Thai jasmine rice, Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce, Chinese kidney and liver herb extract, Haitian sugar, Salvadoran pickled vegetables, Honduran cream, Malaysian papaya pudding -- like the provisions for some modern ark.
Then, you would head a mile or so down the road toward Monsey, where you would see gaggles of observant Jews in traditional garb walking on the street, pushing strollers, popping into shops offering kosher pizza, falafel and ice cream.
This would be helpful in understanding not just this area, but disputes along sensitive cultural fault lines that are playing out in several suburban communities. In fact, the East Ramapo school district here is going through the same drama as the district in Lawrence, on Long Island.
Amid cheers and leaps of excitement, Moorpark High School had won the National Academic Decathlon, the fourth time the team has won the highest prize.
"There is joy, there is happiness and there is the academic decathalon," said 17-year-old Zyed Ismailjee, who started sobbing when the results were announced during an awards luncheon in Memphis, Tenn., this afternoon.
Team mates hoisted each other into the air, and the coach lept on to his chair in celebration. Team members also won 30 medals in individual events, as well as several college scholarships.
Moorpark High School has long been among the strongest teams in state and national competitions. The school won a narrow national victory last year over Waukesha West High School of Wisconsin. Today's win marks the fourth national title for Moorpark.
This recent meeting was once again facilitated by Dr. Keith Marty, Superintendent of the Menomonee Falls school district. Non-MMSD attendance was somewhat lower than the initial 2.5 day session.
But the museum also reminds us that East Germany claimed to be engaged in a social experiment based on a utopian vision. A survey of mandated salaries demonstrates that ideological preferences were rewarded over rarefied achievement and training. A picture from a day care center shows children lined up on a "potty bench," where "everyone remained seated until the last one was done." This was more than toilet training, the museum tells us: "It also was the first step to social education."
You can also see the effects of that social education, as its moralism was mixed with tyranny, individuality suppressed in favor of legislated social virtue. Such imposed uniformity could not have been alien to a culture that had nurtured enforced compliance earlier in the century under another regime; here its darkest side can be seen in displays of equipment and eavesdropping devices of the Stasi, the feared secret police. But you can also see evidence of rebellion against such constraints: the persistent interest in Western rock music and fashion and even an East German nudist movement.
When you know the correct way to structure a sentence, the world becomes a scary place - you start to notice how many people get it painfully wrong. The ease of content creation that the web now affords us is making the problem worse, so why not get a basic understanding to help make your text a little more professional?
Before we get into this, let's establish two things.
1. A lot of these 'rules' are different country to country, decade to decade.
The way a proof reader or typesetter might lay out a page in Britain is different to how it might be done in America. How it's done in 1985 is different than how it might be done in 2005. The styles of typesetting can change over time and throughout different regions.
2. Always be consistent, even if it might not be 'correct'.
Buffeted by the twin forces of a slumping economy and a decline in school-age children, enrollment in Wisconsin private schools dropped more than 11% over the past decade.
The decline is more than that suffered by the state's public schools, which saw their enrollments decrease by less than 1%, according to state Department of Public Instruction reports.
The losses threaten the survival of some schools in the Milwaukee area.
St. Luke Parish School in Brookfield already has announced plans to close at the end of the school year. Holy Angels and St. Mary's schools in West Bend are exploring a possible merger, although those involved with the discussions say enrollment drops at both are only one reason for the move.
"Part of it is financially driven, the other part is driven by this is a good idea," said David Lodes, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Archdiocese in Milwaukee, which operates schools in 10 southeastern Wisconsin counties. "We don't need to be competing against each other. We need to be working together as Catholics in a community."
Student enrollment shifts vary from school to school, but the declines have been especially hard on Milwaukee's suburbs. Of the 21 Milwaukee-area private schools that have lost at least half of their enrollments since the 1998-'99 school year, 15 were located in suburban communities.
Here's a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation's top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America.
If you've spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer. Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.
So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.
I am ignorant of many things, but I think I know charter schools, particularly what makes the best ones successful. I have a new book out on that subject. I discuss the issue often in this column. For instance, in a recent piece I sifted reader reaction and concluded the best name for our highest-achieving charters is No Excuses schools, because their teachers believe their students' impoverished backgrounds are no barrier to learning.
But here comes Steven F. Wilson, one of the savviest of charter school scholars, making me look dumb. He has revealed an important facet of No Excuses schools that never occurred to me. I tried to cover my embarrassment when I read his American Enterprise Institute paper, "Success at Scale in Charter Schooling."
Math 111 has been rumored throughout campus to be one of the most failed classes at Oregon State. Many students go into class with that expectation.
"I heard from everyone that I talked to about Math 111, that it was the number one failed class in the university, so I got in the mindset that I was going to fail, and I did," said Mark Stockhoff, a freshman in new media communications and business.
The issues relating to this rumor may be caused by the math placement test, poor math education before college, class size and student effort put into the class.
"We have a placement test, which we ask folks to take, and up until last year, only about 50 percent of entering freshmen placed into a college math course," said Math 111 instructor Peter Argyres.
To address the poor scores, the math department worked to create an online test that wasn't proctored to allow students to take the test in an easier environment and time frame, but the jump in scores was so significant that it was determined students had cheated on the math test.
Editorial cartoonists loved Everett Dirksen (1896-1969)--his position of influence as Minority Leader in the Senate (1959-69), his way with words, and, of course, his distinctive appearance. Over the years, Senator Dirksen's staff compiled a scrapbook containing more than 300 editorial cartoons. Topics covered include Vietnam, civil rights, Republican Party politics, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, reapportionment, Taft-Hartley 14(b), school prayer, Dirksen's recording career, Senate procedures, congressional pay, presidential appointments, and Dirksen's legacy. Naturally, cartoonists also used these topics to depict Dirksen's relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, and with the Supreme Court. In addition, cartoonists sent Dirksen between 50 and 60 original sketches on equally diverse topics.
THE DAY starts in a small office in downtown Manhattan with Zeke Vanderhoek, the principal of The Equity Project, a charter school set to open in the Bronx this autumn. Already the school has attracted national attention—not for its pedagogy, but for its teachers’ salaries: $125,000 annually, plus a performance-related bonus. This pay, easily double or triple what most teachers make, will come out of the school’s grant from the city’s education department—which, as is standard for charter schools, is a good deal less than it spends on its own public schools.
How will he find the money? By hiring great teachers, says Zeke, which will allow him to cut back on everything else: the school will have hardly any non-teaching staff and no assistant principals, just a principal (himself) who earns less than classroom teachers. It will pay for no educational consultants or outside courses: these super-teachers will support each other’s professional development. They will work long, hard days: 8am to 6pm, and each will fill one of the roles normally assigned to support staff, such as chasing up truants. When one is absent, colleagues will cover, rather than the school paying for peripatetic substitutes.
We talk about money and waste in public schools: the programmes started and abandoned; the consultants and other hangers-on, both public-sector and private; the expensive remediation of mistakes made earlier in a child’s education; the even more expensive failure to remediate so that many children leave school having had a small fortune spent on them—and barely able to read.
California's high school exit exam is keeping disproportionate numbers of girls and non-whites from graduating, even when they are just as capable as white boys, according to a study released Tuesday. It also found that the exam, which became a graduation requirement in 2007, has "had no positive effect on student achievement."
The study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Davis concluded that girls and non-whites were probably failing the exit exam more often than expected because of what is known as "stereotype threat," a theory in social psychology that holds, essentially, that negative stereotypes can be self-fulfilling. In this case, researcher Sean Reardon said, girls and students of color may be tripped up by the expectation that they cannot do as well as white boys.
Reardon said there was no other apparent reason why girls and non-whites fail the exam more often than white boys, who are their equals in other, lower-stress academic assessments. Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford, urged the state Department of Education to consider either scrapping the exit exam -- one of the reforms for which state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell has fought the hardest -- or looking at ways of intervening to help students perform optimally. Reardon said the exam is keeping as many as 22,500 students a year from graduating who would otherwise fulfill all their requirements.
Earth Day is one thing, but for Milwaukee Public Schools high school students, Wednesday was also ACT day.
For the first time, every junior in MPS was given the opportunity to take the ACT college entrance exam for free and on a normal school day. MPS officials said indications were that a very large percentage of them did that.
Terry Falk, the School Board member who initiated the plan, said his goal was to get more students, teachers and administrators to take college-readiness more seriously.
"In the long run, it's about holding kids to higher standards," he said.
Falk said he also hoped the step would lead state and local school officials to pay more attention to the performance of students beyond the point early in 10th grade when they take the last round of state standardized tests.
Falk and other MPS officials said the testing Wednesday went smoothly.
I AM in Newark, New Jersey's largest town and long a byword for urban decay. I've been invited by KIPP (the "Knowledge is Power Programme"), the biggest and best known of America's charter-school chains, which has three schools in Newark, with a fourth to open this autumn. Founded by two Teach for America alumni (how familiar that story is getting) in 1994, there are now 66 KIPP schools nationwide, mostly middle schools (ie, with students between 10 and 14 years old). Oddly, none of Newark's KIPP schools are called that: under the state's charter law "brand" names are banned, which reflects early fears that big chains would come in and take over. Those fears have dissipated, and Cory Booker, Newark's mayor since 2006, is a good friend of charters, and wants to see more of them.
I'm actually a bit nervous. KIPP has a fearsome and to my mind not entirely attractive reputation in England for a zero-tolerance approach to discipline--insisting that children keep their gaze on teachers who are speaking, and nod and say "yes" in response to teachers' requests; giving detentions for minor transgressions; and "benching"--that is, seating naughty children separately in class and forbidding other pupils to speak to them during breaks. A certain type of English politician practically drools when talking about KIPP--the ones who, like many of their compatriots, dislike and fear children, and love all talk of treating them harshly. I'm half-expecting to find dead-eyed Marine-sergeant types with crewcuts barking orders at children one-third their size. If it turns out that the only way to maintain order and calm in a tough urban school is to run it like a boot camp, it will make me very sad.
Divided on whether to adopt a recommended new high school textbook program Wednesday, the Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors postponed voting on the issue until next month.
The reason? The attending directors, indicating how they planned to vote, split 3-3 on Wednesday. Director Cheryl Chow, who was absent while traveling, could be the tie-breaker at the board's May 6 meeting.
"This is one of the few times when we have the opportunity to change the direction when it comes to the school district's instruction," board President Michael DeBell said.
No official vote took place, but DeBell said he planned to vote against the math-adoption motion.
Up for approval was a policy that would overhaul the Seattle school district's math program by adopting new textbooks, standardizing its curriculum and renaming its classes. The Integrated Math 2 classes, for example, would become Advanced Algebra, said Anna-Maria de la Fuente, the district's K-12 mathematics program coordinator.
A Seattle Public Schools math committee, after about six months of investigation and debate, recommended a textbook program called Discovering Mathematics for all of the district's math classes, except for statistics.
Policies that give parents the ability to exercise private-school choice continue to proliferate across the country. In 2009, 14 states and Washington, D.C., are offering school voucher or education tax-credit programs that help parents send their children to private schools. During the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation.[1] In 2008, private-school-choice policies were enacted or expanded in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Utah[2]--made possible by increasing bipartisan support for school choice.[3]
On Capitol Hill, however, progress in expanding parental choice in education remains slow. Recent Congresses have not implemented policies to expand private-school choice. In 2009, the 111th Congress has already approved legislative action that threatens to phase out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a federal initiative that currently helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools in the nation's capital.
Congress's Own School Choices
At the same time, many Members of Congress who oppose private-school-choice policies for their fellow citizens exercise school choice in their own lives. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), the chief architect of the language that threatens to end the OSP, for instance, sends his children to private school[4] and attended private school himself.[5]
NEW SURVEY shows that 38 percent of members of Congress have sent their children to private school. About 20 percent themselves attended private school, nearly twice the rate of the general public. Nothing wrong with those numbers; no one should be faulted for personal decisions made in the best interests of loved ones. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if Congress extended similar consideration to low-income D.C. parents desperate to keep their sons and daughters in good schools?
The latest Heritage Foundation study of lawmakers' educational choices comes amid escalating efforts to kill the federally funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools. Congress cut funding beyond the 2009-10 school year unless the program, which provides vouchers of up to $7,500, gets new federal and local approvals. Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited that uncertainty as the reason for his recent decision to rescind scholarship offers to 200 new students. Senate hearings on the program's future are set for this spring, and opponents -- chiefly school union officials -- are pulling out all the stops as they lobby their Democratic allies.
Michelle Rhee, a national firebrand for education reform, urged Colorado educators and lawmakers Thursday night to continue their efforts to change the state of education.
Rhee -- chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools who closed 23 schools in her first year, fired 36 principals and proposed paying more money to good teachers and firing the bad ones -- spoke at a meeting of the Democrats for Education Reform in the auditorium of the Denver Newspaper Agency building.
The standing-room-only crowd included Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien, state Senate President Peter Groff and U.S. Rep. Jared Polis.
"We have public schools so that every kid can have an equal shot in life," Rhee said. "That is not the reality for children in Washington, D.C., today or many children in urban cities today. That is the biggest social injustice imaginable."
Rhee said radical changes are necessary. "Unless we do something massive about this right now, unless we are willing to turn the system on its head . . . then all of the ideals of this country are actually hollow," she said.
The waiting lists for charter schools, already notoriously long, look like they are about to get longer.
President Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, his new education secretary, are trying to entice states into opening more of the alternative schools. But despite brisk enrollment growth and long waiting lines for many existing charter schools, states appear to be in no hurry to oblige.
With 1.4 million students in 4,600 schools, charters are by far the most significant achievement of the "choice" movement that strives to promote educational gains through school competition. Enrollment in charter schools, which are publicly funded, has more than doubled in the last six years.
But obstacles loom to accommodating more charter-school students. The recession has intensified school districts' concerns about competing for public funds with charter schools. Some charter-school supporters say such schools need more oversight. But unions are using any missteps at charter schools, which aren't typically unionized, to oppose their expansion.
For the first time in its six year history, the international Open Education Conference is moving! After five years at the historic Utah State University campus, this year's conference will be held in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, hosted by the University of British Columbia.
President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and most members of Congress have never known the sense of desperation that LaTasha Bennett feels.
Bennett is one of hundreds of Washington, D.C., parents who recently opened a letter from the U.S. Department of Education with devastating news: Her child was no longer eligible to receive a private-school scholarship for the upcoming school year. This sent Bennett and other parents scrambling to find their children spots in good public schools -- a challenge in a city where few students read at grade level and barely half graduate from high school.
President and Mrs. Obama faced the same problem when they moved to the District in January, but they were able to afford a private school for their daughters. And for Secretary Duncan and his wife, finding a good school was a top concern when deciding where to live in the D.C. area. They wound up choosing Arlington, Va., a community with good public schools. Duncan recently told Science magazine: "My family has given up so much so that I could have the opportunity to serve; I didn't want to try to save the country's children and our educational system and jeopardize my own children's education."
He has ladled a trillion or so dollars ("or so" is today's shorthand for "give or take a few hundreds of billions") hither and yon, but while ladling he has, or thinks he has, saved about $15 million by killing, or trying to kill, a tiny program that this year is enabling about 1,715 D.C. children (90 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic) to escape from the District's failing public schools and enroll in private schools.
The District's mayor and school superintendent support the program. But the president has vowed to kill programs that "don't work." He has looked high and low and -- lo and behold -- has found one. By uncanny coincidence, it is detested by the teachers unions that gave approximately four times $15 million to Democratic candidates and liberal causes last year.
Not content with seeing the program set to die after the 2009-10 school year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan (former head of Chicago's school system, which never enrolled an Obama child) gratuitously dashed even the limited hopes of another 200 children and their parents. Duncan, who has sensibly chosen to live with his wife and two children in Virginia rather than in the District, rescinded the scholarships already awarded to those children for the final year of the program, beginning in September. He was, you understand, thinking only of the children and their parents: He would spare them the turmoil of being forced by, well, Duncan and other Democrats to return to terrible public schools after a tantalizing one-year taste of something better. Call that compassionate liberalism.
I recently received a letter from a Vanguard shareholder who described the global financial crisis as "a crisis of ethic proportions." Substituting "ethic" for "epic" is a fine turn of phrase, and it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in traditional ethical standards.
Commerce, business and finance have hardly been exempt from this trend. Relying on Adam Smith's "invisible hand," through which our self-interest advances the interests of society, we have depended on the marketplace and competition to create prosperity and well-being.
But self-interest got out of hand. It created a bottom-line society in which success is measured in monetary terms. Dollars became the coin of the new realm. Unchecked market forces overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries.
The result is a shift from moral absolutism to moral relativism. We've moved from a society in which "there are some things that one simply does not do" to one in which "if everyone else is doing it, I can too." Business ethics and professional standards were lost in the shuffle.
National standards have long been the third rail of education politics. The right chokes on the word national, with its implication that the feds will trample on the states' traditional authority over public schools. And the left chokes on the word standards, with the intimations of assessments and testing that accompany it. The result is a K-12 education system in the U.S. that is burdened by an incoherent jumble of state and local curriculum standards, assessment tools, tests, texts and teaching materials. Even worse, many states have bumbled into a race to the bottom as they define their local standards downward in order to pretend to satisfy federal demands by showing that their students are proficient.
It's time to take another look. Without national standards for what our students should learn, it will be hard for the U.S. to succeed in the 21st century economy. Today's wacky patchwork makes it difficult to assess which methods work best or how to hold teachers and schools accountable. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that the politics surrounding national standards has become a little less contentious. A growing coalition of reformers -- from civil rights activist Al Sharpton to Georgia Republican governor Sonny Perdue -- believe that some form of common standards is necessary to achieve a wide array of other education reforms, including merit pay for good teachers and the expansion of the role of public charter schools. (See pictures of inside a public boarding school.)
The idea of "common schools" that adopt the same curriculum and standards isn't new. It first arose in the 1840s, largely owing to the influence of the reformer Horace Mann. But the U.S. Constitution leaves public education to the states, and the states devolve much of the authority to local school districts, of which there are now more than 13,000 in the U.S. The Federal Government provides less than 9% of the funding for K-12 schools. That is why it has proved impossible thus far to create common curriculum standards nationwide. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush summoned the nation's governors to Charlottesville, Va., to attempt a standards-based approach to school reform. The result was only a vague endorsement of "voluntary national standards," which never gained much traction. In 1994, President Bill Clinton got federal money for standards-based reform, but the effort remained in the hands of the states, leading to a wildly varying hodgepodge of expectations for -- as well as ideological battles over -- math and English curriculums.
QUITE a few Economist journalists have children in private schools, and whenever I write about the astronomical fees they read my articles with keen interest. More than one has asked me, hopefully and with a certain Schadenfreude, whether the global recession means that schools finally have to start cutting their fees? In London, that's doubtful; I want to find out whether Manhattan is any different.
One reason fees in both places have been so high is limited supply: opening a new school in either of these crowded, pricey cities is difficult. So my first stop is Claremont Prep, one of the rare ones that has managed it. It opened just five years ago, in an old Bank of America building just off Wall Street. P.D. Cagliastro, the school's flack, shows me around.
It cost $28m just to open the doors, Ms Cagliastro tells me, and another $7m has been spent since--and I can easily believe it. The former banking hall, its murals carefully restored, is now a grand auditorium; in the student cafeteria the old vault door is still visible, protected behind glass. There is an indoor swimming pool, and a basketball court on the 9th floor. The rooftop garden is surreal--an adventure playground on Astroturf, surrounded by skyscrapers and overlooked by the New York Stock Exchange.
Kindergartner Sylvia Bazsali and eighth-grader Ally Marckesano stood side-by-side as they learned about the formation of earthquakes and mountains by experimenting with frosting, graham crackers and fruit roll-ups.
Marckesano helped Bazsali with the lesson, which ended with a taste test -- the evidence still on Bazsali's lips.
"We've been kind of buddy-buddies lately," said Marckesano, who has four younger siblings.
The activity was part of Wingra School's annual all-school unit when students in kindergarten through eighth grade learn together. The two-week event had a science theme under a camp-like structure this year.
"It energizes the school in a way that's incredible," said Mary Campbell, director of education at the private school at 3200 Monroe St.
Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. "Cornell," wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, "was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity."
In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.
Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities.
Fearing attacks by some opponents, the students smuggled several rifles into the Straight. Rumors of this astonishing act swept the campus, and soon many students and local residents took up their own arms. For several days, Cornell was riveted by escalating tensions, swirling rumors, and frayed nerves as the beleaguered administration sought to strike a resolution. Before long, the students issued another demand: amnesty for those who took over the Straight. Meanwhile, Students for a Democratic Society began rallying campus-wide student support for the AAS.
The administration ultimately agreed to a deal on Sunday that accommodated the students' demands. The students then exited the Straight and marched across campus brandishing their weapons before an audience of astonished onlookers (myself included). A UPI photographer captured the dramatic exit with a photo that made the takeover famous world-wide. The photo won him the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for "Spot News Photography."
Compelled to publicly address the crisis in some fashion, the hapless Perkins made a weak but pivotal speech on Monday afternoon to an anxious campus-wide audience at Barton Hall, the cavernous gymnasium/military training building that stands in the center of campus. The packed house of 10,000 Cornellians longed for an appropriate administrative response, but Perkins amazingly never addressed the issue at hand. According to a Newsweek account, "The president did not refer to the guns, the building seizure or the racial tensions directly; he simply asked everyone to approach the situation as 'humane men.' Many students were angry. 'I wanted to yell, 'Say something already', said one junior."
Perkins' abdication of leadership hurtled Cornell toward chaos. Central authority palpably vanished before everyone's eyes, leaving what one noted professor called a "Hobbesian state of nature" in its wake. What was once unthinkable started becoming thinkable. A revolutionary situation was at hand.
Amnesty required faculty assent; and at an extraordinary meeting on Monday following Perkins' speech, a solid majority of the faculty refused to ratify the agreement. They insisted that support of the agreement--especially under the coercive circumstances--would be contrary to the fundamental principles of the university, which included a commitment to ordered liberty, deliberative reason, and the equal application of rules.
To force the faculty to reconsider its vote, SDS led several thousand students in a takeover of Barton Hall. Meanwhile, over a hundred local sheriff deputies assembled downtown. An administrator acting on Perkins' behalf gave them the green light to enter campus in the event the "Barton Hall Community" decided to seize another building. Interviews with the deputies revealed that many were aching to charge up the hill, guns at their ready.
Late Tuesday night, an AAS leader, Tom Jones--destined later in life to be absorbed into the establishment as CEO of Smith Barney and a leading member of the Cornell Board of Trustees--announced in a speech on the university radio station that Cornell "had three hours to live" if the faculty did not budge from its intransigence. WVBR replayed Jones' speech repeatedly throughout the night, virtually everybody on campus and in town tuning in. With guns and the promise of violence already haunting the campus, Jones's speech pushed Cornell to the brink. Hotels and motels all around Ithaca filled up to "no vacancy" as citizens of Cornell's city on the hill fled the campus to avoid potential violence.
Back at Barton, the assembly decided after explosive debate to wait and see what the faculty did when it met again the next day to reconsider its Monday vote. Everything now hung on the faculty's shoulders. Would they uphold the principles they had defended on Monday? Or would the Barton Community, now reveling in its new-found power, prevail instead? At stake was what kind of university Cornell would become.
The next morning, the faculty reversed its Monday vote in what no doubt remains the most intense and momentous debate in Cornell's history. With this vote to grant the students' demands, the true power in the university was instantly transferred to Barton and the AAS. President Perkins made a humiliating trip to Barton to ritualistically congratulate the assembly. On the stage, an SDS leader took a conspicuous sip out of Perkins' can of Coke--a symbolic gesture noted and understood by all. (Perkins would be gone from Cornell by mid-summer.)
Among other things, the student victory at Barton authorized the new black studies program, as well as a significant restructuring of the university to include students in decision-making. Within a few years, however, the latter spoil of victory died of natural causes as student indifference to such matters returned. With the radicalized black studies program retreating to the outskirts of campus, Cornell eventually returned to normalcy, at least on the surface.
But the faculty surrender inevitably had profound implications. On the positive side was the further commitment of Cornell and higher education to the inclusion of students from minority and other backgrounds. On the negative side were the means by which this further opening came about, and the new philosophy of the university under which it took place: the university as an agent for social justice and identity politics (today reconfigured as "diversity") rather than as an institution dedicated primarily to free inquiry, robust intellectual diversity and debate, and common standards of justice and reason.
By surrendering authority under the circumstances that prevailed in 1969--in the face of coercion and threats of violence, and the widespread intolerance of those who disagreed with the AAS and Barton positions--Cornell leaders failed to defend the core principles that define liberal education, and which make enlightened citizenship and politics possible. Social justice unaccompanied by respect for basic order, freedom of thought, intellectual honesty, and the rights of all individuals is a recipe for tyranny of the majority (or of the activists), not justice. (Indeed, the many minority students at Cornell who opposed the AAS methods and message were targets of threatening abuse. Future Republican presidential candidate, Alan Keyes, a graduate student in political thought, fled to France to get away from death threats targeted at him because of his politics and his relationship with a white woman.).
Though they became the targets of threats and other intimidations, a few professors took courageous stands by publicly protesting the faculty reversal. This group included historians Walter LeFeber, George Kahan, Fred Somkin, James John, Joel Silbey, and Donald Kagan, and government professors Walter Berns, Allan Sindler, and Allan Bloom. (The latter three resigned on the spot.) These individuals understood the principles at stake, and grasped the existential fact that fortitude is needed to defend institutions when things get rough. Trained to embody the peaceable attributes of scholarship, most professors were unable or unwilling to take serious risks to defend academic principles in the face of intimidation---a fact that Tom Jones derisively emphasized in his haunting speech on WVBR.
Many years after the events of 1969, Tom Jones wrote a letter to James Perkins, apologizing for the pain the student rebels had caused the man who had striven to be so understanding and accommodating to their demands. Perkins wrote back, accepting the apology. Jones later wrote a similar letter to Walter Berns, who had been one of Jones' intellectual mentors before his rebel turn. Still smarting from the death threats he received and from what the revolt had wrought, Berns did not deign to reply.
To be sure, many faculty members (and even administrators) believed in these principles, but reversed their vote out of a sense of necessity. Given the potential of mass violence in the event of continued faculty resistance, concerns for life and limb might have justified concession. But given what was at stake, this group (the largest of any faction) could have followed their vote with a meaningful protest, such as resigning, going on strike, or taking leaves of absence to emphasize their disdain. Yet no such collective symbolic action took place.
Three other reasons for the faculty reversal stood out. Some faculty members simply agreed with the new mission of the university, while others had become uncertain of what the university stands for in the face of dramatic social and political upheaval. A last group simply surrendered to their own fears. At its core, Cornell '69 was about such basic matters as courage and conviction.
Since 1969, Cornell has continued to struggle with the dilemmas of a post-liberal university, witnessing threats to free speech, periodic conflicts over race-based dorms and programs, and related problems. More importantly, Cornell `69 was a harbinger of the politics of political correctness (later reconfigured as "diversity"), which involves elevating social justice claims and identity politics over the principles and practices of free inquiry and intellectual conscience. During the last twenty years, universities and colleges across the land have compromised the principles of liberal education by instituting such policies as speech codes, overly broad harassment rules, one-dimensional identity-based programs and departments, and ideologically-slanted orientation and campus life programs--all in the name of promoting social justice as defined by campus leaders who are beholden (consciously or not) to the goals represented by Cornell `69.
Unlike 1969, today's campuses seldom witness violence (or its threat), as this agenda has become part of the established order. If political correctness seems less of a problem today than it did in the 1990s, this might be only because it has metastasized. Meanwhile, many students and faculty members remain committed to the principles of liberal education, but we seldom read of meaningful faculty-led movements to resist this establishment. If the Cornell president and faculty had behaved responsibly in 1969, our campuses might be dramatically different today.
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Donald Downs is a professor of political science, law, and journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He specializes in issues involving law, politics, and society, as well as political thought, and has recently published Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus.
As states and school districts across America begin drawing down the first $44 billion in education funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, they should bear in mind the core levers of change under the law. In order to drive reform, we will require an honest assessment by states of key issues like teacher quality, student performance, college-readiness and the number of charter schools. We'll also have a strategy to address low-performing schools and provide incentives to compel improvement.
When stakeholders -- from parents and business leaders to elected officials -- understand that standards vary dramatically across states and many high-school graduates are unprepared for college or work, they will demand change. In fact, dozens of states are already independently working toward higher standards in education. Union leaders have also signed on.
When parents recognize which schools are failing to educate their children, they will demand more effective options for their kids. They won't care whether they are charters, non-charters or some other model. As President Barack Obama has called for, states should eliminate restrictions that limit the growth of excellent charter schools, move forward in improving or restructuring chronically failing schools, and hold all schools accountable for results.
McKinsey's report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, examines the dimensions and economic impact of the education achievement gap. While much controversy exists on the causes of the gap and on what the nation should do to address it, the full range of the achievement gap's character and consequences has been poorly understood.
This report examines the dimensions of four distinct gaps in education: (1) between the United States and other nations, (2) between black and Latino students and white students, (3) between students of different income levels, and (4) between similar students schooled in different systems or regions.
The report finds that the underutilization of human potential as reflected in the achievement gap is extremely costly. Existing gaps impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession—one substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing. For individuals, avoidable shortfalls in academic achievement impose heavy and often tragic consequences via lower earnings, poor health, and higher rates of incarceration.
Mickey Mouse has a new job in China: teaching kids how to speak English at new schools owned by Walt Disney Co. popping up in this bustling city.
The company says the initiative is primarily about teaching language skills to children, not extending its brand in the world's most populous nation. But from the oversize Mickey Mouse sculpture in the foyer to diction lessons starring Lilo and Stitch, the company's flagship school here is filled with Disney references.
Classroom names recall Disney movies, such as "Andy's Bedroom," the setting of the "Toy Story" films. To hold the attention of children as young as two years old, there is the Disney Magic Theater, which combines functions of a computer, television and chalkboard and is the main teaching tool.
Disney's foray into English-language instruction in China comes as the niche industry is booming. McKinsey & Co. estimates that China's foreign-language business is worth $2.1 billion annually. More than 300 million Chinese are studying English, according to a speech delivered in January by Premier Wen Jiabao.
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.
I won't be celebrating.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.
Today is the conference for which I've travelled to New York. It's at the Rubin Museum, a small, new venue devoted to Himalayan art, which certainly beats the usual hotel. We see the galleries at each coffee break, and at the end of the day there is a guided tour for those inspired to learn more about the art.
The conference features a stellar cast of speakers: educators, researchers and some hard-headed business types too. Lou Gerstner, an ex-CEO of IBM, enthusiastically pitches his plan for school reform: he wants the 15,000 local school districts abolished and replaced by around 70 (the states plus a couple of dozen big cities), national standards in core subjects introduced, with all children tested against them, and teachers paid much, much more.
Jim Rohr of PNC Financial Services talks about "Grow Up Great", the bank's $100m, 10-year investment in early-childhood education, which gives grants to non-profit school-readiness programmes, and sponsors employees to volunteer their time and services. One delegate asks about the lessons learned; Mr Rohr gets a laugh of recognition when he says that the main one is that volunteers face a hideous maze of bureaucratic regulations and permissions--and all because they wanted to help.
Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.
I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.
As The Economist's education correspondent, I've been invited by Economist Conferences, one of the businesses in the Economist group, to chair a conference in New York entitled "Global Education 2020". It's just one day, but if I'm going to make the trip from London, I may as well stay longer and visit some schools. Those in the city's poor neighbourhoods have long been known for having serious problems--violence, astronomical drop-out rates and abysmal standards of achievement--but in the last few years exciting things have been happening under Joel Klein, the chancellor of the city 's department of education, and I want to see some of the success stories with my own eyes.
Monday morning, and I'm off to Starbucks on 93rd and Broadway to meet Wendy Kopp, the Princeton graduate who in 1990 founded Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit organisation that recruits top-notch graduates from elite institutions and gets them to teach for two years in struggling state schools in poor areas. I know the basics already--TFA been widely copied, including in England. But I quickly realise that I've misunderstood TFA's true purpose.
All three are tired. Their classrooms are not much like the rest of the school where they work, and their heroic efforts are only supported by Chester and each other, not by their co-workers. "The first year was unbelievably bad," one tells me. "So many years with low expectations meant a lot of resistance from the kids. Eventually they saw the power and the growth they were capable of--but during the first few months we were just butting heads every day."
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:
Promote international and intercultural understanding;
Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.
Sarah Fine, a 25-year-old English teacher at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School on Capitol Hill, vividly recalls a conference with the mother of a 10th-grader who read at a third-grade level.
"Shawn is a real asset to our class because he's so well behaved," Fine told her, "but I think he might need some extra support to get him up to speed in reading."
The mother said she had heard that before. Shawn had received help in middle school through special education. "But let me tell you, it don't do no good, because the problem is that he's plain lazy," Fine quoted her as saying. "He's failing every one of his classes. You got a solution to that?"
In an essay for Teacher Magazine last month, Fine said the mother's response made her want to squirm. "Shawn's problem is not that he is lazy," she wrote. "To the contrary, when I ask him to read in class he sits quietly, moves his eyes over the words, and laboriously tries to answer whatever writing prompt follows -- despite the fact that the text makes no sense to him. The real issue is that Shawn's deficits make it impossible for him to pass the DC-CAS test given to 10th-graders in April, and so my school, consumed by the imperative to make 'adequate yearly progress,' has few resources to devote to him. He does not qualify for our English Academy program, which targets students whose reading scores indicate that a 'push' might enable them to pass the test, and we do not have a reading specialist because there is no funding for one."
Madison School Board Rejects Teaching & Learning Expansion; an Interesting Discussion
One of the most interesting things I've observed in my years of local school interaction is the extensive amount of pedagogical and content development that taxpayers fund within the Madison School District. I've always found this unusual, given the proximity of the University of Wisconsin, MATC and Edgewood College, among other, nearby Institutions of Higher Education.
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined "success" as merely producing "fewer failures." Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
The fact the Madison's Teaching & Learning Department did not get what they want tonight is significant, perhaps the first time this has ever happened with respect to Math. I appreciate and am proud of the Madison School Board's willingness to consider and discuss these important issues. Each Board member offered comments on this matter including: Lucy Mathiak, who pointed out that it would be far less expensive to simply take courses at the UW-Madison (about 1000 for three credits plus books) than spend $150K annually in Teaching & Learning. Marj Passman noted that the Math Task Force report emphasized content knowledge improvement and that is where the focus should be while Maya Cole noted that teacher participation is voluntary. Voluntary participation is a problem, as we've seen with the deployment of an online grading and scheduling system for teachers, students and parents.
Several years ago, the late Ted Widerski introduced himself at an event. He mentioned that he learned something every week from this site and the weekly eNewsletter. I was (and am) surprised at Ted's comments. I asked if the MMSD had an internal "Knowledge Network", like www.schoolinfosystem.org, but oriented around curriculum for teachers? "No".
It would seem that, given the tremendous local and online resources available today, Teaching & Learning's sole reason for existence should be to organize and communicate information and opportunities for our teaching staff via the web, email, sms, videoconference, blogs, newsletters and the like. There is certainly no need to spend money on curriculum creation.
Poor people have I.Q.'s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.
After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.'s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.
If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, "Intelligence and How to Get It," which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.
California State Schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell spoke to the annual EdSource Forum in Irvine today (April 17).
O'Connell, who holds a nonpartisan office, began his speech with political partisanship:
President Obama won a mandate for change that has placed him in a position to cause a massive shift in the way our government operates and in the manner in which it serves the needs of its citizens....
In just the first few months of this Administration, I can easily and confidently say that we have seen a dramatic shift in the willingness of this White House to be a partner to states -- this is a welcome difference from the previous Administration....
There was more, but you get the general idea.
O'Connell then went on to identify "four key areas" that the Obama administration wants states to concentrate on:
THAT genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as "Rain Man", illustrated above.
A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King's College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the "autistic spectrum", as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed.
The Sixth Inter-School Scrabble Championship 2009 is approaching! Being the organizers, Mattel and BroadLearning are delighted to invite all primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong to join our Scrabble Championship 2009.
The Scrabble Championship gives a valuable opportunity for our students to play and learn at the same time in a fun and exciting environment. The Championship has shown great success since its first launch in Hong Kong 5 years ago. Throughout these years, we really wish to see that our students can enjoy the game and develop their interest and confidence in learning the language with fun.
The championship in 2009 will be open for 2 categories: the Senior Primary students (P4-P6) and the Junior Secondary students (F1-F3). There will be the Semi-Finals and the Grand-Final. Details of date and venue will be coming up soon. We'll start to invite registration for the Scrabble Championship in early January 2009 by email and fax. You may also visit our website http://eclass.com.hk or http://scrabble.broadlearning.net for any updates.
For gifted children to succeed, they must be challenged, according to a panel of experts. Nearly 200 parents and educators filled the auditorium at Westview High School Thursday night to learn about the unique characteristics, best practices and identification methods for Talented and Gifted (TAG) students.
Gifted children lose their motivation when the work is too easy. Having never been challenged, they will lack the tools to deal with difficult work in the future, said Jean Gubbins, associate director of The National Research on the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut. Beaverton, Hillsboro and Forest Grove school districts sponsored the panel as part of an ongoing review of their own TAG programs.
The panelists also stressed the importance of grouping gifted students in middle school, at least during some lessons. "They need time with like-ability peers," said Hilda Rosselli, dean of the College of Education, Western Oregon State University. Educators should also seek out TAG students among English language learners, students from poverty and other under-served children, who are often overlooked as gifted, the panel said.
The first question I have is in the first paragraph. "One aspect of the balanced approach is represented in the four block approach to structuring mathematics lessons. The four blocks include Problem Solving, Number Work, Fluency and Maintenance and Inspecting Equations." There is a missing comma, since it is not clear whether Maintenance goes with the previous word or the last two. However, in either case, "Inspecting Equations" is a strange phrase to use. I am not sure what it means, and when a mathematician who has read extensively in school mathematics does not understand a phrase, something is wrong. You might ask Brian Sniff, who seems to have written this report based on one comment he made at the Monday meeting, what he means by this.
In the next paragraph, there are the following statements about the math program used in MMSD. "The new edition [of Connected Math Project] includes a greater emphasis on practice problems similar to those in traditional middle and high school textbooks. The new edition still remains focused on problem-centered instruction that promotes deep conceptual understanding." First, I dislike inflated language. It usually is an illustration of a lack of knowledge. We cannot hope for "deep conceptual understanding", in school mathematics, and Connected Math falls far short of what we want students to learn and understand in many ways. There are many examples which could be given and a few are mentioned in a letter I sent to the chair of a committee which gave an award to two of the developers of Connected Mathematics Project. Much of my letter to Phil Daro is given below.
The final paragraph for Recommendation 11 deals with high school mathematics. When asked about the state standards, Brian Sniff remarked that they were being rewritten, but that the changes seem to be minimal. He is on the high school rewrite committee, and I hope he is incorrect about the changes since significant changes should be made. We now have a serious report from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel which was asked to report on algebra. In addition to comments on what is needed to prepare students for algebra, which should have an impact on both elementary and middle school mathematics, there is a good description of what algebra in high school should contain. Some of the books used in MMSD do not have the needed algebra. In addition, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has published Curriculum Focal Points for grades PK-8 which should be used for further details in these grades. Neither of these reports was mentioned in the response you were sent.
I have pointed out errors and omissions in Connected Mathematics and Discovering Advanced Algebra to Sniff, and suggested that teachers be informed about these problems and given suggestions for how to work around them. You might ask him what has been sent to teachers about rational numbers and repeating decimals in Connected Math and the geometric series in Discovering Advanced Algebra. I wrote the principal author of Connected Math about their treatment of repeating decimals in the first edition, in 2000 and 2002. Nothing was changed in the second version. It is still a very poor treatment. I will send separately a paper I gave at a meeting in Lisbon last November. It deals with the help teachers should be given, and how inadequate it frequently is.
The National Mathematics Advisory Panel recommended that the geometric series should be done in first year algebra, since it is not hard to derive the sum of a finite geometric series and it has many interesting applications. In Discovering Advanced Geometry, the sum of this series is stated but not derived. What understanding is this giving students?
There never has been a serious public discussion about the direction of mathematics education in the Madison Schools. There should be. There was a committee set up to report and the part which surprised me most was the survey of elementary school teachers, who reported that most of them did not use a textbook as a primary resource. Decades ago my daughter went through a year at Cherokee with a teacher developed program in math. It was a disaster. I wonder about the results mentioned in a Capital Times article on the charter school Nuestro Mundo. Here are the result on WKCE Third Grade tests.
Percentage scoring proficient or advanced in reading
Total
White
Hispanic
Nuestro Mundo
70
74
46
Madison School District
72
88
47
Percentage scoring proficient or advanced in math
Total
White
Hispanic
Nuestro Mundo
49
63
15
Madison School District
72
87
52
Both the reading and math tests were given in English. In every other study I have seen about schools like Nuestro Mundo, the math score relative to the district score is much closer than the reading score is to the district average. Does the math staff at MMSD have an explanation for this dramatic difference?
Here is most of my letter to Phil Daro mentioned above. If you have any questions about what I have written, please feel free to contact me. My phone number is 233-7900.
Richard Askey
Recently I read the announcement of the prizes awarded by ISDDE. The Connected Math award singled out two of their books. The 8th grade book, "Say It With Symbols", had the following written about it:
Say It With Symbols tackles the development of robust fluency in symbolic manipulation (always a high priority) by focusing on "making sense with symbols" at every stage. Work on interpreting symbolic expressions leads on to creating equivalent expressions and thus to sense-making solution of linear and quadratic equations, and to modeling.
Let us look at a little of this book. There is some work on factoring quadratics, but clearly not enough for students to become fluent with it. The quadratic formula is stated but not proven, nor is there a proof (much less a motivated one) in the Teacher's Guide. Completing the square is never mentioned. There are a couple of problems like the following: Page 51 in Second Edition. [I can give comments on the First Edition if that is what you used, but I am giving them a break and using the Second. It has been through even more use than the first, but still has a lot of flaws.]
44. You can write quadratic expressions in factored and expanded forms. Which form would you use for each of the following? Explain. c. To find the line of symmetry for a quadratic relationship Answer: The line of symmetry is a vertical line perpendicular to the x-axis through a point with an x-coordinate half way between the x-intercepts. The factored form can be used to find this point. How about the case when the factors are not real? y=x^2+2x+2. There is still a line of symmetry, but without complex numbers, which few will treat in eighth grade, factoring does not work. Of course one can make it work by subtracting a constant, but this is a book for students who are just learning algebra. Whenever the word "Explain" is used in a question, I look to see what the explanation is. There is no reason given for why half way between the intercepts gives the line of symmetry. A explanation can be given using either form, but the authors do not do this. I can give you many examples where the "Explain" answer in the Teacher's Guide is far from an explanation, and sometimes is wrong.
Part d asks how to find the coordinates of the maximum or minimum point for a quadratic relationship. Here completing the square is clearly the better method at this stage, if one is aiming for the very important goal of fluency in symbolic manipulation, but that is not their goal. They seemingly never make the vital step of changing variables in an expression. There were many places where this could have been introduced and then used to give mathematical closure at the level they deal with, but it is not there.
Let us skip to the end of this book. There is an introduction to tests for divisibility in problem 9 on page 77 and problem 10 on the same page for divisibility by 2 and 4. The answers in the Teacher's Guide are reasonable. Then in problem 41 the problem of divisibility by 3 is considered. The answer pulls out the idea of changing 100a + 10b + c to 99a + a + 9b + b + c and then writes this to get the usual criteria. What is missing is an explanation for why one does this. One looks for the closest numbers to 100 and to 10 which can be divided by 3, which mimics the argument in divisibility by 2 and 4. The teachers will not know this, nor know that this can be extended to divisibility by 11 by a similar argument, although unlike the case of 3 and 9, the step from 11 to 99 to 1001 is only easy for 11 and 99. Before seeing how this extends one cannot just divide 1001 by 11, but write 1001 as 990 + 11. This extends. This is what should be in the Teacher's Guide. One recommendation from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel is that instruction should not be either entirely "student-centered" or "teacher-directed". The problem should have been given with some explanation about how divisibility by 2, 4, and 5 works, and then after remarking that divisibility by 3 cannot come from just looking at the last digit, ask the students to figure out what the closest number to 10 is which is divisible by 3, and then the closest number to 100 which is divisible by 3, and to use this information to try to find a simple test for divisibility by 3.
Let us consider the last problem. Judy thinks she knows a quick way to square any number whose last digit is 5. (Example 25) Look at the digit to the left of 5. Multiply it by the number that is one greater than this number. (example 2*3=6) Write the product followed by 25. This is the square of the number. Try this squaring method on two other numbers that end in 5. Explain why this method works. [Explanation: Students may find it easiest to explain why this method works by forming an equation [sic] to represent the value of any number ending in five, such as (10x+5), where x can be any whole number. Then a student taking the square of this value they [sic] will get (10x+5)(10x+5)=100x^2+100x+25)=100. [The 100 is only part of what should be there. It should be 100x(x+1) + 25.] This equation represents Judy's method of finding the square. [The word "equation" is wrong. They mean "expression".]
If they are going to let x be any whole number, then Judy's method is wrong, since she said to look at the digit to the left of 5, and multiply it by the number that is one greater than this number. So 125^2 would be the same as 25^2, or with careless reading, the same as 2*13 with 25 appended. This is not symbolic fluency in the textbook.
The next to the last problem dealt with divisibility by 6, and the correct statement is given in the Teacher's Guide, but the argument pulls out heavy machinery in the form of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra when it is not needed. However, the related problem of assuming that a number is divisible by 2 and by 4 (rather than 2 and 3) does not imply it is divisible by 8 is missing. That is a mistake since students at this age will often not see the difference.
I have yet to talk to a high school teacher who thought that students who have had Connected Mathematics Project are better at symbolic calculations than those they had had earlier before CMP was introduced. Some, but not all, say the students have better conceptual understanding. Thus I find it strange that fluency in symbolic skills is singled out as a strength of CMP. Have you read the books which were mentioned?
In other areas, such as geometry, CMP has few if any of the problems which are common in East Asian countries, to help students learn how to solve multistep problems, including quite a few nice problems where auxiliary lines need to be drawn. I have books from Nigeria which have better geometry problems than CMP does. You should know this if what I found on the web is correct, that you are helping develop a middle school program based on Japanese models. Instead of giving CMP an award, it would have been much better to have read the first edition carefully and made constructive suggestions about how to improve it. It needs a lot of improvement.
A Canadian researcher who has studied the early education of some of the smartest people in the world has uncovered a link that may confound even the most dedicated parent.
According to the research, the most important quality determining intellectual prowess is not at all connected to familiarity with the latest brainy baby toys, involves no amount of flash-card drilling and may, in fact, have little to do with parental involvement in the child's early academic development.
After examining the backgrounds of more than 50 Nobel laureates, Larisa Shavinina, a gifted-education expert from the Université du Québec en Outaouais, found that what they all had in common was at least one teacher who played "an exceptional role" and went beyond the ordinary classroom practice. "They all had at least one exceptional teacher who acted as a role model."
In a paper presented at a conference on academic excellence in Paris last summer, Prof. Shavinina said the laureates all talked about how these formative teachers taught in a way that was enthusiastic, inspiring and used "a playful spirit" that sparked their charges' enthusiasm for science.
Madison School District Math Program: Proposal to Increase Teacher Training and Teaching & Learning Staff
Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting will discuss a proposal to increase math teacher training and add staff to the Teaching & Learning Department. 215K PDF.
Interestingly, the latest document includes these words:
MMSD Teaching & Learning Staff and local Institute of Higher Education (IHE) Faculty work collaboratively to design a two-year professional development program aimed at deepening the mathematical content knowledge of MMSD middle school mathematics...
It is unusual to not mention the University of Wisconsin School of Education in these documents.... The UW-Madison School of Education has had a significant role in many Madison School District curriculum initiatives.
Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman was less than a week into the job, greeting parents outside an elementary school, when he was first asked how he planned to fix the middle schools.
Last night came his answer: through a massive overhaul.
Sherman, seven months into his tenure, presented a plan for restructuring the city's two middle schools, which have never met federal benchmarks and which, he said, contribute to Alexandria's dropout rate being among the highest in the area.
Locally and across the nation, middle schools have generally been regarded as the problem child for school systems, marking the turbulent teenage years in which test scores and enthusiasm drop. In response, school systems have begun getting creative and investing more resources into those grade levels. The District school system, for example, has a program that pays students for their performance, and Montgomery County schools have committed to a three-year, $10 million plan to accelerate curriculum, train teachers and improve the leadership structure.
Sherman's plan, which he presented to the Alexandria School Board last night, calls for splitting the two middle schools into five smaller ones, each with its own principal and staff. The change would not cost the school system more, he said, adding that staff would be reallocated. If the board approves the plan, the new structure will be in place in time for the next school year.
It is important to note that this work must be approved (and perhaps modified) by the school board, then, of course, implemented by the Administration.
I don’t think it would be possible to make things any more confusing for Milwaukee parents. Their children have become political pawns in a political chess match and it will surprise no one to learn that this group of poor, minority parents is being treated quite shabbily.
The politics that these people are caught up in is being run out of the State Capitol. Governor Doyle went out of his way to tuck a decidedly non-fiscal item into his budget that stands to affect all school choice children. Specifically, he added a long list of regulatory requirements that the schools participating in the Milwaukee’s school choice program would have to follow. Governor Doyle’s list of regulations is torn directly out of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association play book. After all, MTEA worked hard to deliver a totally Democrat state government and they expect a pay off for their effort. And to the glee of MTEA, Governor Doyle delivered.
Lest anyone be deceived, the aim of MTEA has always been to shut down the private school choice program. They want to get all of the kids back into public schools. Their hope is that these new regulations the Governor put in his budget will make it onerous enough for the choice schools that they will be forced to opt out of the choice program. There is logic to the MTEA reasoning given that choice schools operate on tiny budgets that are already strained.
On a recent soggy morning, Mark Theissen covered a lot of ground fast in his first-grade classroom at Vadnais Heights Elementary School. He sprang from station to station, encouraging students to finish and focus -- sound words out, craft Lego configurations mathematically, grip Crayolas in the correct way.
He asked questions but didn't back-pat; he prodded but didn't praise. Nor did he carry the ball, merely offering assists. That's because when Theissen, 36, began teaching in 2000, the backlash against overpraising children was in full swing.
"I try to avoid complimenting them all the time," he said. "If they get strokes for everything, they expect it, they think everything they do is great -- and they don't want to push themselves. I think they need to develop self-drive and the need to perform for personal satisfaction, not recognition from others."
Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to spend a record $5 billion to transform U.S. schools by rewarding states for innovation, providing merit pay to teachers and creating a national scorecard to identify failing schools.
The Education Department has already distributed $44 billion of its $100 billion in stimulus funds to stave off the firing of teachers, Duncan said yesterday in an interview in Washington. An additional $5 billion will be given as an incentive to states that are "fundamentally willing to challenge the status quo," he said.
Duncan, 44, the former head of Chicago's public schools, said the retirement of 1 million teachers in the "next couple of years" gives the U.S. an opportunity to attract and retain a new generation of educators. He said he plans to enlist President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to help recruit teachers, and then reward the newcomers for working in struggling schools and districts.
"Talent matters tremendously," Duncan said. "If we can bring in this next generation of extraordinary talent, we can transform education, and our ability to do that over the next couple of years will shape education in this country for the next 25 or 30 years."
On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.
But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.
In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase thanks to local taxes and stimulus money that the charters lack. New York charters already receive less money per pupil than their district school counterparts; now they will receive even less.
Unions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. New York already has the "card check" unionization procedure for teachers that replaces secret ballots with public arm-twisting. And the teachers unions appear to have collected enough cards to unionize the teachers at two highly successful charter schools in New York City. If unions force charters to enter into collective bargaining, one can only imagine how those schools will be able to maintain the flexible work rules that allow them to succeed.
Four weeks ago, I did a column arguing the mayor should take over Milwaukee Public Schools. I didn't get much from readers disputing my reasoning. Rather, I was told by some insiders that the issue was moot because Tom Barrett doesn't want to take over the schools.
Wrong. He's interested, and that's what last week's report on the finances of MPS was really all about. Coverage by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel went into great depth on the minutia of money that could be saved (which was less impressive than it sounds) while underplaying the real game plan: to lay the groundwork for a governance change.
Barrett is a consensus builder who never moves quickly. He has methodically traveled to Chicago and Washington, D.C., to learn about how a mayoral takeover worked there. He met with President Barack Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, who supports this kind of governance change. "It's no secret Barrett has met with these people," says his chief of staff, Pat Curley. "You have to look at whether the current model (for MPS) works."
There's pressure on Barrett from the business community to do something about MPS to ensure that graduates have the skills needed to function in the workplace. Last week's report by McKinsey & Co. was paid for by the Bader, Bradley, Argosy, Northwestern Mutual Life and Greater Milwaukee foundations, which range from liberal to conservative to centrist in their views, but all have businesspeople on their boards. The first paragraph of the report notes that the economic future of Milwaukee depends on the ability of the schools "to prepare well-educated, highly trained and skilled graduates."
The state Board of Education approved a controversial report on charter schools Tuesday, but it agreed to search for a better comparison for next year's report.
The Free Press raised questions about the report in advance of the meeting, noting that charter schools' scores are more likely to fall short of the test scores of the districts in which they sit.
The Michigan Department of Education's annual report to the Legislature compares all charters to 20 school districts that contain 75% of the state's charter schools. By that measure, charter schools generally outperformed traditional public schools.
It's Thursday afternoon at Madison's Nuestro Mundo Elementary School and teacher Christina Amberson, "Maestra Cristina" to her kindergarten students, speaks in rapid-fire Spanish. If you didn't know better, you would assume Spanish was Amberson's native language. But her impeccable Spanish is a product of many years of studying and teaching abroad in a number of Spanish-speaking countries.
Children respond only in Spanish. The only time they speak English is when English-speaking children are sitting together at tables. If Amberson overhears, she reminds them to use their Spanish.
Amberson's kindergartners -- a nearly even mix of native Spanish speakers and native English speakers -- seem more confident with their language than a typical student in a high school or college Spanish class.
Everything posted on the dual-language immersion school's bulletin boards or blackboards is in Spanish except for a little section of photos and articles about "El Presidente Barack Obama."
President Obama and his team have alternated praise for the goals of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law with criticism of its weaknesses, all the while keeping their own plans for the law a bit of a mystery.
But clues are now emerging, and they suggest that the Obama administration will use a Congressional rewriting of the federal law later this year to toughen requirements on topics like teacher quality and academic standards and to intensify its focus on helping failing schools. The law's testing requirements may evolve but will certainly not disappear. And the federal role in education policy, once a state and local matter, is likely to grow.
The administration appears to be preparing important fixes to what many see as some of the law's most serious defects. But its emerging plans are a disappointment to some critics of the No Child Left Behind law, who hoped Mr. Obama's campaign promises of change would mean a sharper break with the Bush-era law.
Sure, many students take Psych 101, but do they all actually know the same things?
A new approach at some universities, known as education tuning, will require that degrees reflect a defined set of skills, rather than a list of the courses a student took.
President Obama recently electrified the school reform community by calling for the growth of charter schools while ensuring that they are held to the highest standards of accountability.
His announcement represented a watershed moment for the charter school movement, because it confirmed that the political establishment has finally recognized what hundreds of thousands of California parents have long known: that the charter school movement is the most important school reform effort of our time.
Charter schools also offer the greatest hope for reforming public education in Los Angeles. The data coming in is simply irrefutable: More than 70 percent of charter schools in Los Angeles outperform their nearby district public schools. This past week, 10 of Los Angeles's 12 recently recognized California Distinguished Schools were charter schools. On a statewide level, 12 of the state's 15 highest-performing public schools serving low-income students are charter schools.
John Robert Wooden, the revered UCLA basketball coach, used to tell his players: "If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail." According to the Diploma to Nowhere report last summer from the Strong American Schools project, more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at college every year. Evidently we failed to prepare them to meet higher education's academic expectations.
The 21st Century Skills movement celebrates computer literacy as one remedy for this failing. Now, I love my Macintosh, and I have typeset the first seventy-seven issues of The Concord Review on the computer, but I still have to read and understand each essay, and to proofread eleven papers in each issue twice, line by line, and the computer is no help at all with that. The new Kindle (2) from Amazon is able to read books to you--great technology!--but it cannot tell you anything about what they mean.
In my view, the 19th (and prior) Century Skills of reading and writing are still a job for human beings, with little help from technology. Computers can check your grammar, and take a look at your spelling, but they can't read for you and they can't think for you, and they really cannot take the tasks of academic reading and writing off the shoulders of the students in our schools.
There appears to be a philosophical gap between those who, in their desire to make our schools more accountable, focus on the acquisition and testing of academic knowledge and skills in basic reading and math, on the one hand, and those who, from talking to business people, now argue that this is not enough. This latter group is now calling for 21st Century critical thinking, communication skills, collaborative problem solving, and global awareness.
Neither group gives much thought, in my view, to whether any of our high school students have read one complete nonfiction book or written one serious research paper before they are sent off to their college remedial courses.
Of course, reading history books and writing term papers can seem so 19th Century, but as long as higher education and good jobs require people to be able to read and understand quantities of nonfiction material, and to write fairly serious academic research papers, memos, legal opinions, status reports, legislation and the like, it might be a good idea to try to do a better job of preparing our students for those tasks.
The College Board's writing test is a joke (there are lots of prep services helping students write their essays in advance), and the colleges themselves, through their admissions offices, are asking students for 500-word personal statements about their lives and their feelings. The NAEP writing test for 2011 (I was on the Steering Committee, but couldn't influence anyone) asks students for two 25-minute responses to prompts, perhaps on the level of "What is your opinion of school uniforms?" These efforts could hardly do more to convince high schools not to prepare students for actual academic writing tasks now or in their future.
The NAEP argument is that the college, business and military worlds want people who can "write on demand." That is, sit down for 25 minutes and respond to some short shallow prompt, as this "skill" is to be tested. I was a division training manager for Polaroid, back in the day, and it is my understanding that even if a boss comes to an employee and asks on Friday for a report Monday, it is not due in 25 minutes, for a start, but also any such report will be based on lots of knowledge of the subject, coming from doing the job over a period of time and having had time to gather information and reflect on what should be in the report. An impromptu skit may be just what the Second City ordered, but it is no recipe for critical thinking or academic (or business/military) expository writing.
There are a number of problems with trying to persuade high schools to assign complete nonfiction books and serious research papers. Many teachers, if they graduated from teacher education programs, may not have read that many books and may not have been asked to do research papers themselves, so they have little idea how to coach students to do them. But even those teachers who know enough and would be willing to assign serious papers, have no time to assign, guide or assess them. While almost all high schools would say they want students to be able to do academic essays, they set aside no time for teachers to work on them. More time is available in most high schools for tackling practice on the football field and layup drills on the basketball court than for working on term papers in English and history classes.
The 21st Century Skills people and the Core Knowledge people could get together, and agree, perhaps, that students need more knowledge than can appear on multiple-choice tests, and that they need to be able to write more than 500 words about themselves. Standardized testing will not prepare students for college, even if if provides some accountability for basic reading and math skills. And mooning over technology and industry will not raise standards for academic reading and writing, nor will it prepare students to skip remedial work at the college level.
Having published 846 history research papers by high school students from 36 countries since 1987, and having received thousands more as submissions, I know that high school students will rise to the challenge of real preparation for further education. Many of our authors have even been inspired to do long serious (8,000-13,000-word) papers on their own as independent studies, much as high school basketball players and other athletes spend long hours practicing on their own, because they are aware of the high standards that are out there.
If students are willing to meet higher standards, as so many have told Achieve and the National Governors' Association and the Great City Schools that they are, we should be willing to set them, if only to leave fewer of them condemned to remedial courses when they move on.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Charter schools offer hope for the future of our public education system. Charter schools promise options and opportunities for students and their parents that include diverse curricula -- arts and humanities, career and vocational choices. They have unique delivery systems -- distance learning, Montessori programs, special needs, and a mix of accelerated traditional and university courses. All meet high standards; all are accountable; all are independent and are defined as public schools, although with a new, expanded concept of public schools.
There are 25 charter schools in Nevada, two in Carson City, several in Washoe, Douglas and Lyon counties. (Nationally there are over 3,000 charter schools and the movement is fast growing.) Charter school growth has not been as robust in this state as in others, but it continues to receive support from the Legislature. In this legislative session there is a bill (AB489), that if passed will create an 18th school district for charter schools and will enable this new school district to authorize new charters.
I serve on the Silver State Charter High School Board in Carson City. This charter, a public school sponsored by the State Board of Education, is a distance learning school in which students interact with their teachers online as well as meet with them in person. The state has identified the school as "exemplary." It is well managed and has a dedicated, licensed faculty and support staff. This charter school is a life-saver for over 500 kids and their parents.
FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.
The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.
Researchers have discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and "poking" others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.
The findings will confirm the worst fears of parents and teachers. They follow the ban on social networking websites in many offices, imposed to prevent workers from wasting time.
About 83% of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.
"Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying," said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. "Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon."
Anne McCracken Ehlers's third-grade daughter was not doing well in accelerated fourth-grade math at Whetstone Elementary School in Gaithersburg. Becca was spending far too long on her assignments. She was confused. She was unhappy. Ehlers is a teacher herself, in the English department at Rockville High School. So she was polite when she asked for a change, but nothing happened.
Finally, the 8-year-old in the drama decided that enough was enough, prompting this e-mail from her teacher to Ehlers on the afternoon of Feb. 5: "I just wanted to let you know that math bunch was held today from 1:00-1:30. Rebecca chose not to come. I asked her several times to please join us and she refused saying that she would come next week. We went over rounding, estimating, and adding decimals. We also reviewed word problems that include fractions. Please encourage Rebecca to take part in these extra math sessions. Thank you very much for your support."
This paper is a synthesis of case studies of four districts that implemented multifaceted reforms aimed at offering rigorous instruction in mathematics and science for all students as part of a National Science Foundation-supported partnership. A common theory of action aimed for a rigorous curriculum, professional development delivered close to the point of instruction, monitoring of instructional quality, and system coordination. Immersion units would offer an in-depth experience in scientific inquiry to all students. The theory of action was successful in many ways. Excellent access to top management allowed the partnership to assist with multiple aligned dimensions of instructional guidance. The biggest obstacles were turnover in district leadership, loose coupling across departments, attenuation of vertical alignment through overload of instructional guidance, and insufficient budget for adequate school site support (e.g., coaches). Greater coherence resulted from delivery of instructional guidance closer to schools and teachers, as with science immersion. The study suggests that complete, affordable packages of instructional guidance delivered to the school level district-wide might be the best model for district reform.
Students in the New Reflections program of DeForest High School not only tackled the wrenching subject of genocide, they put on a symposium to let others know about the atrocities they researched.
The 20 juniors and seniors in DeForest's alternative high school program set up informational booths in the basement of the DeForest Public Library, where their classes are held. They invited parents, school staff members, School Board members and others to view their displays and multimedia presentations.
"Most high schoolers are never in that position where they are the experts," said alternative school teacher Jen McGorray. "They took this project and ran with it and made it their own."
In the school's cavernous facility there are 30 classrooms, a performance art center, a gym, a literacy center, and nearly 700 students in uniform. It is an oasis in a city that witnesses thousands of assaults in its public schools each year and has engaged in a running debate over whether to arm school security guards. The charter school was founded nearly seven years ago, and is very lucky to own its facilities.
Typically, banks are reluctant to lend to charters because they have little collateral, no long-term funding, and a five-year license to operate that may not be renewed. That is the reality that will confront President Barack Obama if he tries to make good on his promise to expand charter schools. These schools serve a public good, but they are also risky borrowers.
What's more, while charters receive per-pupil funding from the state, they aren't given start-up money to buy or lease classroom space -- one of the misguided restrictions put on charters that hamper their growth. The president may want more charters -- see, for example, his March 10 speech, where he called for increasing the number of charters in states that imposed limits -- but is he willing to do more to help charters cover capital costs? At the moment, private organizations step in to fill the void in public funding for these public schools.
India's lowest castes, the Dalits, are known for their illiteracy and deep poverty. But in rural India, something remarkable is happening: Dalit children are attending elementary school. Peter Wonacott reports from India.
While talks between D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union remain stalemated over salary and job security issues, one critical question is not even on the bargaining table: how the District's educators will be evaluated.
For months, Rhee and her chief "human capital" assistant, Jason Kamras, have been working on an overhaul of the evaluation system that would expand the ways teachers are assessed. In addition to a system of classroom observations and conferences, it is likely to include methods to track how students' standardized test scores grow over time. Several major school systems, including those in Houston, Chicago and Milwaukee, have started limited use of this new "value-added" approach.
Rhee is under no obligation to bargain with the union on evaluations, though the union wants to see it on the table and said so in the contract proposal it delivered a few weeks ago. Congress gave the school system sole authority over the issue in the mid-1990s after the WTU refused to renegotiate the then-existing evaluation system with the District.
Providence schools are set to phase out so-called "bumping" by filling teaching vacancies based on instructors' qualifications instead of their senior status.
Superintendant Tom Brady said in a letter Wednesday to staff that six schools in the district will end the practice of seniority-based staffing decisions.
The change goes into effect in the next school year. The rest of the district is to use the new plan beginning in the 2010-2011 academic year.
he six teenage boys, incarcerated at the District's Oak Hill juvenile detention facility in Laurel file into their classroom after lunch one late January afternoon. They are surprised to see strangers -- five women and two men -- sitting in the chairs that the boys typically occupy.
The students find some empty seats and shrug out of their matching brown coats and mismatched scarves. They are curious about the visitors in a lean-back, fold-your-arms, prove-it kind of way.
"I'm James Forman," begins a 40-something man. "I'm a professor at Georgetown Law School and -- "
"You related to the James Forman?" interrupts 17-year-old Carleto Bailey.
"I'm James Forman Jr."
"That your father? James Forman your dad?" Carleto demands.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within U.S. Department of Education released a study on April 3 of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to a $7,500 annual voucher for students from low-income families in the District of Columbia to attend private schools. Notably, the study found that students who won the lottery to receive the limited number of available vouchers had significantly higher reading achievement after three years than students who lost the lottery.
Yet last month Congress voted to eliminate funding for the program. Columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post, accompanied by the blogosphere, have alleged that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sat on the evidence of the program's success. The WSJ writes that, "... in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year." The Denver Post questions the Secretary's denial of having known the results of the study prior to congressional action, asserting that he was, "at best ... willfully ignorant."
As director of IES through November 2008, I was responsible for the evaluation that is at the center of the controversy. Given the established procedures of IES it is extremely unlikely that Secretary Duncan would have known the results of the study until recently.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is "good for the kids."
Well then, one wonders, why did his Department of Education bury a politically inconvenient study regarding education reform? And why, now that the evidence is public, does the administration continue to ignore it and allow reform to be killed?
When Congress effectively shut down the Washington, D.C., voucher program last month, snatching $7,500 Opportunity Scholarship vouchers from disadvantaged kids, it failed to conduct substantive debate (as is rapidly becoming tradition).
Then The Wall Street Journal's editorial board reported that the Department of Education had buried a study that illustrated unquestionable and pervasive improvement among kids who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn't. The Department of Education not only disregarded the report but also issued a gag order on any discussion about it.
What do we know works to improve student achievement in K-12 STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education?
A.D.: I'd say great teachers, who know the content.
How do we know that? A.D.: I think that's true in any subject area. If you get outstanding teachers, kids learn.
What's the evidence for that? A.D.: Lots of evidence points to the fact that great teachers have an impact.
What is it about effective teachers that makes a difference? A.D.: Lots of factors. It's not one. In this area, it sounds like common sense, but still, having teachers that truly know the content is critically important. You can't teach what you don't know. So that's a starting point. Beyond that, what do great teachers look like? They are passionate, they have high expectations--this is a calling, not a job. They go way beyond the call of duty to make sure that students are getting what they need. And they are really able to differentiate instruction, to work with kids who are struggling and those who are on track to becoming the next generation of chemists and physicists.
You mentioned content. But there are studies that have found what teachers majored in in college doesn't necessarily affect their ability to improve student achievement. A.D.: You're right. I'm not talking about what you major in. I'm saying that you can't teach physics if you don't know physics. You don't have to have majored in physics. Maybe you come out of industry, or out of some other place. I worry a lot about how many folks are teaching classes in which they are not experts in the content. To me, that's a big part of the problem. We don't have enough teachers today who are experts in math and science. This is not just high school, it's also fifth, sixth, seventh grade.
Intel has pledged to help accelerate Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training's e-learning initiative which aims to modernise Vietnam's education system by 2011 and provide opportunities for the country's teachers and students, especially those in remote and rural areas.
An agreement to this effect was signed in Hanoi on April 9 by representatives from Intel Semiconductor Ltd. Vietnam and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) under the witness by Prof. Dr. Nguyen Thien Nhan, Deputy Prime Minister and MOET Minister and Dr. Craig Barrett, Intel Corporation Chairman.
Under the terms of the agreement, Intel and local technology companies will make available one million affordable PCs during the next two years. The "Education PC" program's objective is to provide all Vietnamese teachers with a PC with educational software and broadband Internet connectivity.
"From a very young age, when we would start working with addition and subtraction calculations ... when the standard kids were working with two digits, I was working with three or four digits ...
"I got some pleasure from that," the professor said.
Professor Nash is in Hong Kong for a week-long speaking tour. Yesterday's talk, organised by the university and the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, was designed to give students an opportunity to pose questions.
n the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards - that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.
When the new 1994 California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle was on. New-new math was quickly dubbed "fuzzy crap." By the end of the decade, repentant educators passed solid math standards.
Yet the Math Wars continue in California, as well as in New Jersey, Oregon and elsewhere. In Palo Alto, parent and former Bush education official Ze'ev Wurman is one of a group of parents who oppose the Palo Alto Unified School District Board's April 14 vote to use "Everyday Mathematics" in grades K-5. Wurman recognizes that the "fuzzies" aren't as fuzzy as they used to be, but also believes that state educators who approve math texts "fell asleep at the switch" when they approved the "Everyday" series in 2007.
The "Everyday" approach supports "spiraling" what students learn over as long as two or more years. As an Everyday teacher guide explained, "If we can, as a matter of principle and practice, avoid anxiety about children 'getting' something the first time around, then children will be more relaxed and pick up part or all of what they need. They may not initially remember it, but with appropriate reminders, they will very likely recall, recognize, and get a better grip on the skill or concept when it comes around again in a new format or application-as it will!" Those are my italics - to highlight the "fuzzies' " performance anxiety.
American schoolchildren need to be in class more -- six days a week, at least 11 months a year -- if they are to compete with students abroad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.
"Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short."
"You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year," he said.
Instead of boos, Duncan's remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.
The former Chicago schools superintendent praised Denver schools for allowing schools to apply for almost complete autonomy, which allows them to waive union contracts so teachers can stay for after-school tutoring or Saturday school.
It is indeed, time to move away from the current, 19th century agrarian model.
At 10 p.m. on a recent night, high-school senior Scott Landers was having trouble figuring out differential calculus in order to compare rates of change.
With his professor unreachable and the exam set for the next day, he sent a shot in the dark to Cramster, an "online study community" recommended by classmates.
Within two hours, Mr. Landers was surprised to find his answer pop up in his email, followed by a few more responses the next morning, all pointing in the same direction. "I thought it was cool that there were people out there actually willing to help me," he says.
Web sites such as Cramster aim to revolutionize the way students study, much the way that networking sites like Facebook have changed the way people socialize.
Course Hero, launched last year primarily for college students, already holds a library of more than two million course documents, including homework, class notes and graded essays, uploaded by students enrolled at 3,000 different colleges. Koofers (a nickname at Virginia Tech for old tests passed around at fraternities) allows students from about 25 state universities to submit posts about the difficulty of courses taught by different instructors at their schools. It also offers average semester grades from instructors. Enotes, geared mainly to high-school students, allows peers to form discussion groups and pose questions to experts -- usually teachers -- who are paid by the Web site.
Learning at home in her pajamas before a computer screen, Emily Brown's youngest daughter is picking up things in 6th grade that her older daughter is attempting as a freshman at a Catholic school.
For the former teacher, that's evidence enough that Chicago Virtual Charter School is working.
"The curriculum is better here," Brown said. "It's a grade level higher."
The school, the city's only online program for kindergarten through high school, has become an alternative to traditional public schools for parents such as Brown who believe regular schools often don't challenge children enough or don't give slow learners the extra time they need.
s one of the state's poorest school districts, Newark has long known it has some severe problems. Quantifying them has been another matter.
Now, the district may be one step closer to getting some answers as Superintendent Clifford Janey joined officials at Rutgers University in Newark today to announce an ambitious research collaboration.
Modeled after a 20-year relationship between the University of Chicago and that city's public schools, the project seeks to join a growing trend of universities helping public schools use technology to better track student performance. The relationships are particularly prevalent in cities where impoverished students have long struggled and are the focus of growing national concern.
Before the economy collapsed and thrift became a national watchword, a high school senior named Wei Huang was already scouring New York City for bargains, determined to support herself on the $10 a month she had left after she paid her rent.
Ms. Huang, 20, one of 12 high school seniors named New York Times Scholars this year, immigrated to New York from China with her parents in 2007. But when her parents found the transition to American life too hard and returned to China last year, she decided to stay here alone, entranced by the city's streetscapes and the thought of attending college here one day.
She found a job at a florist paying $560 a month, and a house to share in Ridgewood, Queens, for $550. That leaves $10 a month, which she spends carefully on large bags of rice, chicken leg quarters at 49 cents a pound, and whatever vegetables are cheapest. Throw in the two free meals a day at school, a student MetroCard and the unexpected kind act -- her English teacher, for instance, gave her $100 -- and she manages to get by.
They say there are two things you should never discuss on a first date or at a dinner party: religion and politics. But there has always been another subject that is so taboo that most people would rather arm wrestle over the other two than dare mention it.
That subject is class.
Americans have never liked discussing class status. Unlike our founding cousins over in England where your status is something bestowed upon you by birth, here we believe in a little something called the American Dream; the idea that any person regardless of race, religion or socio-economic background can become anything they want to be, including president.
But unfortunately that Dream is becoming increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans.
Though Madoff and the Wall Street meltdown have forced some of us to finally become more aware of the world beyond our comfortable middle and upper-middle class bubbles, another issue has been lurking for years that threatens to bring about even greater financial Armageddon for our country down the road: America's burgeoning dropout epidemic. Before you decide that this issue has nothing to do with you (and therefore decide to move on from this blog post) consider these facts for a moment:
The cost of textbooks under the new senior academic structure has risen, with some publishers nearly doubling the prices for certain subjects.
The fewer subjects required to qualify for the future Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination, which will replace the HKCEE, meant longer lesson times per subject, which would translate into thicker textbooks, the Educational Publishers Association said.
Compulsory Form Four subjects under the new system, including Chinese, English language and mathematics, registered an average increase of 8 per cent - with prices for English-language textbooks rising 12.3 per cent.
The average prices in elective subjects such as geography (HK$401), physics (HK$510) and economics (HK$414) have also gone up. Biology textbooks will cost an average of HK$476 - an increase of 87 per cent on last year's HK$255.
The Education Bureau released the prices of books for senior secondary subjects yesterday after assessing 152 sets of textbooks submitted by publishers.
At today's education committee hearing, City Council members took turns questioning Department of Education officials on the rise of charters schools. Their questions were passionate, specific, and universally accusatory. They may have also been scripted.
Just before the hearing began, a representative of the city teachers union, which describes itself as in favor of charter schools, discreetly passed out a set of index cards to Council members, each printed with a pre-written question.
One batch of cards offered questions for the Department of Education, all of them challenging the proliferation of charter schools. "Doesn't the Department have a clear legal and moral responsibility to provide every family in the city guaranteed seats for their children in a neighborhood elementary school?" one card suggested members ask school officials. "Isn't the fundamental problem here the Department's abdication of its most important responsibility to provide quality district public schools in all parts of the city?" another card said. (View more of the cards in the slideshow above.)
Several council members picked up on the line of thought. "Shouldn't we aspire to have every school in the city good enough for parents to feel comfortable sending their children?" Melinda Katz, a Council member from Queens, said in questioning school officials. "I remember when Joel Klein became the chancellor," the committee chair, Robert Jackson, said. "Back then, he used to talk about making every neighborhood school a good school where every parent would want to send their children. I don't hear him talk about that anymore."
Asked about the cards, union president Randi Weingarten provided a statement saying that she regretted the tactic. "We are often asked by the council for information and ideas about various issues. Additionally, when I am available, I often respond to what others testify to. In this instance, I was in Washington and couldn't be at City Hall," she said in the statement. "I am proud of the testimony we gave today, but I regret the manner in which our other concerns were shared."
Staving off a spirited run by a political newcomer, Tony Evers went from understudy to Wisconsin's next schools chief Tuesday with the backing of the state's largest teachers union and other professional educators throughout the state.
In doing so, he beat back a challenge from Rose Fernandez, a parent advocate and former pediatric trauma nurse who tried to capitalize on discontent with the educational status quo.
Evers won with the significant help of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and its affiliates throughout the state, which contributed nearly $700,000 toward his campaign.
Evers credited his victory to people's trust in his ability to help improve state schools.
"People recognize that in order to make the changes necessary, we need a candidate with a broad base of support behind him, and we need a candidate with experience behind him," he said.
Evers, 57, was considered the front-runner in the race ever since he declared his candidacy in October.
By taking the nation's education secretary to visit two Denver schools undertaking significant reforms, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet aims to demonstrate why Colorado's innovation should be rewarded with government cash.
But while Denver schools showed some encouraging improvement when Bennet was superintendent, there remains a question whether there is substance behind the buzz at Denver Public Schools.
The two schools Secretary Arne Duncan will visit today -- Montclair Elementary and Bruce Randolph schools -- have made intentional moves to free themselves from district and union rules. Duncan will be watching that kind of innovation as his department decides how to divide $5 billion in stimulus funds nationwide through a program called "Race to the Top."
"This allows the secretary to point to something tangible that should be rewarded in this new world order," said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform. "People watched (President Barack) Obama run on a campaign of change. This is kind of an attempt to show people what that looks like on the ground."
But at both schools, the reforms are in their infancy. One has had some modest success, but scores are still low.
A group of Catholic grammar schools has released details of an alternative to the 11-plus transfer test.
Pupils will sit the tests in English and mathematics on Saturday 21 November at 28 schools across Northern Ireland.
Many state-run schools have already signed up to tests in November run by the Association of Quality Education.
Catholic Heads Association chairman Dermot Mullan said it was not just Catholic schools which had signed up for the exam.
"The schools involved are right across Northern Ireland - we are in discussion with a number of other schools as well," he said.
The tests will be set and marked by the England-based National Foundation for Education Research. Children will receive their results at the end of January.
By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students' questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students' lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have one class and a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students' questions and providing explicit instruction are "handing it to the student" and preventing them from "constructing their own knowledge"--to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what "discovery learning" actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, left, and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, read to first graders at Doswell Brooks Elementary School in Capitol Heights, Md. on Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.
President Obama's stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation's school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. "I'm looking at the data here in front of me," Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. "Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That's real progress."
The NAEP is a federally administered academic testing program for school systems throughout the nation. NAEP documents often refer to the assessments as "The Nation's Report Card".
The NAEP has been of considerable interest in many states, including Kentucky, as it generally offers the only state-to-state comparisions available for fourth and eighth grade academic performance. However, there are often considerable problems involved with making these comparisons, as discussed below.
The NAEP is operated by the US Department of Education at the direction of the Congress. It is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. Since 1988, NAEP policy has been determined by the congressionally created non-partisan National Assessment Governing Board.
Over the years the NAEP has periodically assessed various academic areas.
The NAEP began in 1969 as a strictly nation-wide test, prohibited by law from producing scores for either individual states or local school jurisdictions. The testing samples were drawn from across the entire nation in such a way that the results would actually provide invalid scores even if the students from each state could be separately identified. In succeeding years, more testing has been added to cover both state level results and, most recently, results for some of the nation's largest urban school districts.
In 1993, Microsoft launched an innovative multimedia encyclopedia, Encarta, delivered through CD-ROM. It nearly put the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business. Last week, Microsoft announced that it will close Encarta down.
Encarta could not compete with Wikipedia, which plays by different rules, using the online medium to beat earlier encyclopedias at their own mission. Created and maintained by anonymous people around the world, Wikipedia is by far the biggest and most popular encyclopedia ever. Despite being created by amateurs, it has the potential to become the most professional.
This may be a startling claim. There are infamous inaccuracies, such as the mischief-maker who edited the profile of a well-known journalist to say he'd been accused of assassinating the Kennedys. There have been drawn-out battles about whether the city is Gdansk or Danzig. (And whoever created the entry about me incorrectly listed my ex-wife as my current wife. My actual wife was not amused.)
But Wikipedia is quietly transforming itself into a hybrid of amateurs and professionals. Anyone can create entries -- it has 10 million articles in 253 languages -- but the ultimate editing is increasingly done by well-trained researchers. This trend is important because by some measures Wikipedia is in the top five Web sites, it is often the top result on Google searches, and it gets 97% of traffic to online encyclopedias.
In his timeless 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell condemned political rhetoric as a tool used "to make lies sound truthful" and "to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Were he alive today, Orwell might well be moved to pen a companion piece on the use of financial lingo. Remember those toxic assets? The poorly performing mortgages and collateralized debt obligations festering on the books of banks that made truly execrable lending decisions? In the latest federal bank rescue plan, they've been transformed into "legacy loans" and "legacy securities"--safe for professional investors to purchase, provided, of course, they get lots of cheap government credit.
It's as if some thoughtful person had amassed, through decades of careful husbandry, a valuable collection that's now being left as a blessing for posterity. Using the word legacy to describe phenomena that are causing financial carnage is "crazy," according to George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor of cognitive science and linguistics, because "legacy typically suggests something positive." More insidiously, the word is frequently deployed to deflect blame. Legacy financial issues are, by definition, holdovers from prior regimes. Word sleuths advise me that legacy derives from an ancient Indo-Aryan root meaning, "It wasn't my fault, and I should still get a bonus this year even though we lost billions of dollars."
Lecturers criticised for setting up £4,000 social media degree are fighting back on Twitter
Academics criticised for offering a masters degree covering Twitter and other social networking websites are defending themselves against the media onslaught – where else, but on Twitter.
Students on the £4,000 one-year Social Media degree, offered by Birmingham City University, will explore how we communicate on the websites and how they can be used for marketing.
Other modules on the course will teach students how to start a blog and podcasting techniques. The course is being advertised through a video on the university's website.
The course convenor, Jon Hickman, who is posting regularly today on his Twitter feed, responded to media coverage of the course, saying it was not for "IT geeks".
A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.
Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.
There is no question that lots of people around the nation are concerned about the literacy of American adolescents. They must be worried about the ability of our students to read and write, one would assume. It might also seem reasonable to take for granted that professionals interested in teen skills in reading books and writing papers would give close attention to those students who are now reading a fair amount of nonfiction and writing really exemplary research papers at the high school level.
At this point, expectations need to be altered a bit. Surely coaches of Adolescent Sports have a tremendous fascination with the best teen athletes in the country. There are lots of prizes and even scholarships for high school students who perform very well in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, etc., and there are even college scholarships for good teen cheerleaders. We might think it odd if all high school coaches cared about was physical education classes and even in those, only those student/athletes who were most un-coordinated and incompetent. Not that it is unimportant to worry about teens who are overweight and cannot take part in sports, but nevertheless, coaches tend to focus on the best athletes, and colleges and the society at large seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their job, some would say.
But when it comes to students who read well and write good term papers, the Literacy Community has no interest in them. It is only able to focus on the illiterate and incompetent among Adolescents, and their professional peers seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their real job. And it surely is important for them to help those who need help. They should do research and develop curricula and programs to help teens become more literate. They have been doing this for many decades, and yet more than a million of our high school graduates each and every year are in remedial (non-credit) courses when they are "admitted" (conditionally) to colleges around the country.
Perhaps the current approach to literacy training for young people might deserve a second look. The Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors, 90% of whom reported that they thought the freshmen in their classes were not well prepared in reading, doing research, or writing term papers. Their high school teachers had thought they were well prepared, but college professors didn't see it that way.
No doubt many of those students had the benefit of the Adolescent Literacy Initiatives of AdLit.org, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), Alliance for Excellent Education, Partnership for Reading, National Adolescent Literacy Coalition, Learning Point Associates, Education Development Center, Council of Chief State School Officers, Scholastic, Adolescent Literacy Coaching Project (ALCP), National Governors' Association, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Adolescent Literacy Research Network, Adolescent Literacy Support Project, WGBH Adolescent Literacy website, and the International Reading Association, not to mention the many state and local literacy programs, and yet our students' literacy still leaves a lot to be desired, even if they can graduate from high school.
To me it seems that, unlike coaches, the literacy pros are almost allergic to good academic work in reading and writing by our teens. I am not really sure why that would be the case, but in the last 20 years of working with exemplary secondary students of history from 44 states and 35 other countries, I have not found one single Literacy Organization or Literacy Program which had the slightest interest in their first-rate work, which I have been privileged to publish in 77 issues of The Concord Review so far. They have heard about it, but they don't want to know about it, as far as I can tell.
It does seem foolish to me, that if they truly want to improve the reading and writing of adolescents, they don't take a tiny bit of interest in exemplary reading and writing at the high school level, not only in the students' work, but even perhaps in the work of the teachers who guided them to that level of excellence, just as high school coaches are interested in the best athletes and perhaps their coaches as well.
They could still spend the bulk of their time on grants given them to do "meta-analyses" of Literacy Strategies and the like, but it seems really stupid not to glance once or twice at very good written work by our most diligent teens (the Literate Adolescents).
Of course, I am biased. I believe that showing teachers and students the best term papers I can find will inspire them to try to reach for more success in literacy, and some of my authors agree with me: e.g. "When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports...As I began to research the Ladies' Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task...In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come." Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse, Columbia Class of 2009; North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005......"The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college." Pamela Ban, Harvard Class of 2012; Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008...
But what do they know? They are just some of those literate adolescents in whom the professional adolescent literacy community seems to have no interest.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
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National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
The commute is just long enough to be useful. Over the speakers comes the reflective voice of Harold Bloom, telling the businessman as he sits in traffic about the "The Art of Reading a Poem". Across town on the subway, a student spends the first day of spring break on a visit to the Guggenheim. And overhead, as a plane clears the skyline, a woman unpacks her Oprah edition of "Light in August".
As a still life, the "Age of Mass Intelligence" is compelling. No one doubts that reality TV and gossip journalism increasingly share mental space with Joyce and Ravel. But intelligence is not a matter of pressing more pieces of culture into the great jigsaw puzzle of the mind. Unless operas and concerts are prophylactics against a churlish existence, we are not wising up. We are merely trying to buy wisdom.
This is an Age of Commodified Intelligence, a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded.
Equal measures success and hubris are to blame. By the end of the last century, exponential gains in science and in living standards made advancement seem inevitable, progress a matter of putting one scientific foot in front of the other. The intellectual horizon felt flatter, more intelligible, more accessible. A rise in intellectual exuberance is therefore unsurprising. Enrichment has certainly been on the march.
There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of "The Sopranos"--the soap-opera about a New Jersey mobster whose stressful career brings him to the couch of a psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi. Tony Soprano is annoyed with his teenage son, who has been moaning about the ultimate absurdity of life:
Melfii: Sounds to me like Anthony junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.
Tony: F____' internet!
Melfi: No, no, no. It's a European philosophy.
Quite so; one cannot blame the internet for everything. Existentialism has roots in the 19th-century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it is most famously linked with restless French students in the 1960s and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sure enough, Anthony junior has been assigned Camus's novel "L'Etranger" in class. It also doesn't help his precarious state of mind when his grandmother bitterly tells him "in the end, you die in your own arms... It's all a big Nothing."
Well, plus ça change. It is not only on television that nihilist strains of existentialism continue to tempt young minds, and no doubt the minds of some grandmothers. Last autumn I taught a seminar about ideas of nothingness at the New School, a university in New York. Most of the students were already keen on Sartre and Camus, and among the many facets of nothingness that we looked at in science, literature, art and philosophy, it was death and the pointlessness of life that most gripped them. They showed a polite interest in the role of vacuum in 17th-century physics and in the development of the concept of zero. But existentialist angst was the real draw.
This week brought their latest display of strange bedfellows, as the couple, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the Rev. Al Sharpton, co-sponsored a conference of the Education Equality Project, at which the audience included the left-leaning mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio R. Villaraigosa, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker.
The pair is not lacking for shtick — rarely do they conclude a public performance without referring to themselves as looking something akin to a before-and-after advertisement for hair transplants. (Mr. Klein has a rather sparse scalp next to Mr. Sharpton’s signature bouffant.)
Since forming the alliance nearly a year ago, Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton have raised more than $1 million to promote school improvement across the country.
With a coalition that includes several black and Hispanic elected Democratic officials at all levels, the group has embraced many policies once anathema to the Democratic Party — including increasing the number of charter schools, providing performance pay for teachers and expanding the use of data to measure performance at every level of the schools.
Forty years ago, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull invented business satire with the publication of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. The principle posits that employees are rewarded for competence by being shoved up hierarchies until they reach a position that overwhelms their skills. At that point, they stick. Consequently, "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties," the authors wrote. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan discussed the idea's enduring relevance with Stanford management professor Robert Sutton, who wrote an introduction to the 40th-anniversary edition. (Peter and Hull died in 1990 and 1985, respectively.)
Success in life depends on intelligence, which is measured by I.Q. tests. Intelligence is mostly a matter of heredity, as we know from studies of identical twins reared apart. Since I.Q. differences between individuals are mainly genetic, the same must be true for I.Q. differences between groups. So the I.Q. ranking of racial/ethnic groups -- Ashkenazi Jews on top, followed by East Asians, whites in general, and then blacks -- is fixed by nature, not culture. Social programs that seek to raise I.Q. are bound to be futile. Cognitive inequalities, being written in the genes, are here to stay, and so are the social inequalities that arise from them.
What I have just summarized, with only a hint of caricature, is the hereditarian view of intelligence. This is the view endorsed, for instance, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and by Arthur R. Jensen in "The g Factor" (1998). Although hereditarianism has been widely denounced as racism wrapped in pseudoscience, these books drew on a large body of research and were carefully reasoned. Critics often found it easier to impugn the authors' motives than to refute their conclusions.
BY AMERICAN standards, German culture wars are mild affairs. A spat in Berlin over teaching religion in schools may be an exception. Next month the city will vote on whether schools should teach the subject as an alternative to an ethics course. The debate is only partly about how God fits into the classroom; it is also about how Muslims fit into Berlin.
In most of Germany, the constitution already makes religious instruction part of the curriculum (secular students can opt out). But Berlin and two other states are exempt. The city's godlessness was shaken in 2005 by the "honour killing" of a young Turkish woman. As an antidote, Berlin's government brought in a non-religious ethics course a year later.
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For Berlin's beleaguered believers, this was both threat and opportunity. Enrolment in (voluntary) religious classes outside school hours dropped. But some religious folk spotted a chance to sneak in more traditional teaching. Thus was born Pro-Reli, a movement that has festooned Berlin with red-and-white posters demanding "free choice between ethics and religion" and collected 270,000 signatures to force a referendum.
The debate is over whether religious teaching fosters or hinders tolerance. Pro-Reli's critics fear that separating schoolchildren by religion may undermine social peace. Supporters retort that people with strong religious convictions respect faith, whatever its form. Christoph Lehmann, Pro-Reli's leader, defines tolerance as "accepting everyone as he is". The left, he says, belittles religious differences and calls that tolerance.
The University of the District of Columbia plans to shut down its struggling undergraduate education department, which, officials say, is out of touch with current thinking on how to train teachers and fails to graduate the vast majority of its students.
Usually, 7 or 8 percent of the students who enroll in the department have graduated from it within six years, according to UDC data. Professors said that is primarily because many cannot pass a national standardized test of basic high school-level reading, writing and math skills.
Scores on the statewide math tests have risen for the fourth consecutive year, the Michigan Department of Education announced today. Students' scores in social studies and writing rose overall, as well.
Over 75 percent of students in grades 3-8 tested as "proficient or above" on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) math tests given in the Fall of 2008, including 91 percent of third graders. The greatest improvement was among seventh graders, where 83 percent scored proficient or above, compared to 73 percent the year before.
"There is a direct connection between our kids learning more in the classroom and getting the jobs we need in Michigan's economy," said Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. "We are glad to see these signs of success but we know we have a lot of work to do to give Michigan the best educated workforce in the nation and that must be our goal."
Michigan students were tested in October 2008 on skills learned through the end of the previous year. Students' MEAP scores are divided into four performance levels: Not Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced. Students who place in either the Proficient or Advanced levels are considered to be "proficient or above" in that subject.
There haven't been many upsets in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you'll find that most of the top teams wouldn't even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.
Higher Ed Watch's third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn't on anyone's radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue's 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova's 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.
To their credit, it occurred to the student journalists of Walter Payton College Prep that an important question to ask about nearby Cabrini-Green was whether their own fancy new school sticks in the residents' craw.
For as the Payton student paper, the Pawprint, reports in its most recent issue, the story of Cabrini-Green is now about demolition, gentrification, and displacement. "The people and the culture of Cabrini-Green are slowly being phased out," write Julian Antos and Danielle Bennon, "leaving the few thousand remaining residents struggling to make do with what's left of their homes. . . . The poster child of the transition from a ghetto to a Gold Coast neighborhood is inarguably Walter Payton College Prep, a school filled with good intentions . . . but a school that Edna Morris, a security guard at Schiller [Elementary], thinks of as an outfit that sits in the community but doesn't make an effort to be a part of it."
Antos (a junior) and Bennon (a senior) draw a contrast between Payton, just northeast of Cabrini at 1034 N. Wells, and Schiller, in the heart of the project. "CPS thinks of a school with 35 kids to a classroom, no library or special ed. classes, and no art programs as a well-run institution," Schiller vice principal Brian Billings is quoted as saying. Payton is another world. Someone from the Department of Children and Family Services comments, "You should see the look on a kid's face when he sees a new school going up in his neighborhood and he realizes that they won't let him in"; and Antos and Bennon add, on their own authority, "For better or worse, Payton is part of a movement to phase Cabrini-Green out, making the building all the more frightening to local students."
ast week's Isthmus reminded me that school board elections are happening this April. The lack of discussion this time around stands in stark contrast to the amount of discussion that occurred in 2007. Some of the 2007 issues stick out in my memory, because many of the candidates chose to highlight the value of speech and debate. Two year's later, I wonder if the rhetoric of praising the value of speech and debate has translated into supporting the activity.
In the Spring of 2007, as an assistant forensics coach preparing for the state championship, it was nice to hear that members of the community had taken notice of James Madison Memorial's success. (Memorial won state forensics championships in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. JMM also won last year and they've taken individual championships each year). Back then, we were just about the only game in town. Since then, Madison West, Sun Prairie, and Middleton have developed quality forensic teams. At last year's state forensics tournament, Memorial went home with the championship, West placed eighth, and Sun Praire placed fourth.
Debate, however, is a different story. Madison West has lost most of their debate team; while Middleton has developed one. Madison East and LaFollette, are no where to be found for either debate or forensics. Sure, they have teams. But their teams do not compete in the same way that Memorial/West/Sun Prairie/Middleton do.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation's governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a "Dear Governor" letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation's governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a "Dear Governor" letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
SOME 2,300 years after his death, Diogenes the Cynic dramatically interrupted a recent New York State Senate committee meeting. Wearing a long, white beard and carrying his trademark lamp in broad daylight, the ancient philosopher -- who once described himself as "a Socrates gone mad" -- claimed to be looking for an honest man in politics. Considering the never-ending allegations of financial corruption that flow from the sump of Albany, it's no surprise that he was unsuccessful.
This resurrected Diogenes was, in fact, Randy Credico, a comedian who says he is considering challenging Senator Charles Schumer in the 2010 Democratic primary. Whatever boost Mr. Credico's prank provides his campaign, it might also cause us to reflect a little on the meaning of cynicism -- and how greatly we still need Diogenes.
Cynicism is actually not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word. It bears no real resemblance to that attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness that sees the worst of intentions behind the apparent good motives of others.
Wisconsin is not making as much progress raising student achievement and closing the gaps between have and have-not students as the nation as a whole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Education Trust, an influential, Washington-based nonprofit group.
As with other reports in recent years, the analysis showed the achievement of African-American students remains a major issue overall and that the gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin are among the largest in the United States.
But it also analyzed the progress made in recent years and found Wisconsin lagging when it came to all racial and ethnic groups - and the news was generally not good across a wide range of measures.
Daria Hall, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, said, "What you see is when you look at any of the critical milestones in education - fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, collegiate graduation - Wisconsin and African-American students in particular are far below their peers in other states. This shows that while there has been some improvement, it is not nearly fast enough for the state's young people, communities or the economy as a whole."
For example, consider reading scores for fourth-graders in 1998 and in 2007 in the testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. White students nationwide improved their scores seven points over the nine-year period (on a scale where average scores were in the low 200s), while in Wisconsin, the improvement was one point. For black fourth-graders, the nationwide gain was 11 points, while in Wisconsin it was four. And for low-income students in general, the national gain was 10 points, while in Wisconsin it was two points.
Wisconsin lagged the nation when it came to similar comparisons involving the graduation rate for black students, the percentages of black and Hispanic students graduating college within six years of finishing high school and the degree to which there had been improvements in recent years in the size of black/white achievement gaps.
c Schools, he was seen by some liberal critics as a right wing-toady who had betrayed his old ideology by getting in bed with conservative school choice supporters. That view was always simplistic, as his bold call for reform of school choice, announced last week, proved once again. His new position – which could greatly alter the politics of school choice – raises many questions.
For starters, why the seeming flip-flop by Fuller? The answer is that he’s never been an ideologue. The old Fuller, after all, was a Democrat. He worked to get Democrat Tony Earl elected in 1982 and was rewarded with a position running the state’s Department of Employment Relations. And his commitment to public schools was personified by his work as MPS superintendent from 1991-1995, which included championing an über-liberal referendum to spend some $400 million to construct new schools, which was defeated by the taxpayers.
But Fuller was more often a critic of MPS, among other things proposing (in the late 1980s) to create an all-black school district that would be carved out of MPS. (That idea, too, went down in flames.) Fuller was always a supporter of alternative schools – or any schools, really – that would provide a good education for minority and low-income students. And he was always willing to work with business leaders and politicians of either party to accomplish his ends. For at least the last 10 years, that has meant mostly Republicans, as he embraced school choice as the solution to urban education in Milwaukee.
But the latest results of the five-year study on school choice, reported last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed there is no statistically significant difference in achievement between MPS and voucher schools. The schools are cheaper, but because of the partisan legislation battles over voucher funding, the program’s complicated funding formula awards most of the savings (some $82 million a year) to every place in the state but Milwaukee. This city’s property taxpayers are paying $45 million more annually for a program that appears to be having little positive impact on education.
Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall -- and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night -- those activities have fallen by the wayside.
"She's only a kid for so long," said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. "There's been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired."
Bennett is part of a vocal movement of parents and educators who contend that homework overload is robbing children of needed sleep and playtime, chipping into family dinners and vacations and overly stressing young minds. The objections have been raised for years but increasingly, school districts are listening. They are banning busywork, setting time limits on homework and barring it on weekends and over vacations.
According to a 2005 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student in public schooling. Each of the two countries spends more than $11,000 per student per year, while the average spending in developed countries at $7343. The United States spends 7% of it's GDP on education, second in the world.
Sadly, that doesn't mean U.S. students are roughly 50% better educated than the students in these other countries. In fact, (given the topic it seems appropriate to award it with a grade) American education would most likely earn a sold "C".
The 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) showed U.S. student's science and mathematics scores in the middle of the pack:
Take a look and see what you think of this three-and-a-half minute rant about leveling the preacher-and-congregation model of learning from Jay Cross. I of course love it as you will recognize that is what my knowledge cafes are about. You can hear the story here of how I started the knowledge cafes in response to death-by-powerpoint presentations.
But also read the comments on Jays post. Some people do not agree with him. But note Jay is not saying that we need to get totally away from the teacher-student model of learning more that we need to shift the balance. Jay himself is in preach mode in delivering the rant and I am sure he was well aware of it. My Knowledge cafes also have a chalk-and-talk component.
Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.
The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.
"Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement," wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.
At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They've found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.
The AP Annual Conference is a forum for all members of the AP and Pre-AP communities, worldwide, to exchange experiences, strengthen professional ties, and gain a better sense of how they can help their students to prepare for college success.
The U.S. Library of Congress audio archives are becoming even more accessible now that the recordings are being added to Apple's iTunes Store. The move is part of an effort to bring some 15.3 million digital recordings to the public in an easy to access manner.
Matt Raymond, the Library of Congress director of communications, said "Our broad strategy is to 'fish where the fish are,' and to use the sites that give our content added value -- in the case of iTunes, ubiquity, portability, etc."
So far, there are about 39 podcasts available, and more files are on the way, according to Macworld. The Library of Congress is also adding its video library to YouTube.
"These services are a place to start learning, but our agreements are not exclusive, so other services are certainly possible in the future," said Michelle Springer, Library Web Service Division digital initiatives project manager.
Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown.
Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.
The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may "try to fall behind" or "dumb down".
One boy told researchers: "It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally ... then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn't come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling." This may in part explain boys' perceived underachievement, Francis said.
By the first week of spring, a crowd of shivering daffodils offered a lonely spray of color to a still-dormant garden outside Hollin Meadows Elementary School. But the bright blooms were not safe for long amid the prying fingers of two dozen curious fourth-graders.
Winter coats guarded the children against a chilly breeze, but their mittens came off as they pulled leaf after buttery leaf from the flower and gave names to each of its parts.
"It's breathtaking," said Nikos Booth, 9, as he rubbed the golden pollen from the stamen onto his finger.
Lots of elementary students learn plant anatomy by studying a diagram and labeling the parts or circling terms on a worksheet. At Hollin Meadows in Fairfax County, they get their hands dirty.
Christian Carter's conversation with his mother began last fall just before dinner. The eighth-grader said he didn't like any of next year's D.C. high school choices. The places were too scary or too disorganized, he said. He wanted to stay at Shaw Middle School, a former educational disaster area suddenly doing well. Other classmates had similar chats with their parents, their principal and eventually the chancellor of the city schools.
Now, to the astonishment of nearly every adult involved, class president Christian and his friends have become, as far as historians can determine, the first eighth-graders ever to lobby successfully for a ninth grade at their middle school so they could have an extra year to prepare for the jarring realities of urban high school.
Shelontae Carter, Christian's mother, said he and his co-conspirators, Trevon Brown, Daamontae Brown, Ronald Bryant, Marc Jones, Davaughn Taylor and Velinzo Williams-Hines, were spoiled. They ought to grow up, she said, and adjust to ninth grade in a high school just as she did. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was startled to find the seven boys from Shaw in her conference room, wearing suits and ties and armed with data. She is still not quite sure how they pulled it off.
Bilingual education is supposed to be expanding to more languages - such as Vietnamese and Arabic - but many school districts can't find the teachers to handle the two-language classes.
"The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages," said Shannon Terry, Garland ISD's director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education.
Area districts are recruiting for next school year, searching for tough-to-staff areas such as math and science. But bilingual teachers are also in high demand.
The state requires any school district that has at least 20 students in a grade level who speak a language other than English to provide a bilingual program in that language.
In 2007, the State Board for Educator Certification expanded the bilingual program to include Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. But that doesn't mean more diverse teachers are lining up for jobs.
"It's not common knowledge," said Terry. "The universities aren't designing programs necessarily yet to support teachers in securing those credentials."
Like most principals, Dave Levin believed that parental support was essential to a school's success. So when many families pulled their kids out of his struggling South Bronx charter school after its first year, he thought he was in trouble.
Some parents called him and his teaching partner, Frank Corcoran, "crazy white boys." The two had recruited 46 fifth-graders, barely enough to start the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy, and 12 failed to return for sixth grade. Test scores were somewhat better than at other local schools, but Levin's discipline methods weren't working. By March of his second year he believed that he had no choice but to close the school.
That was 1997. Twelve years later, the academy, saved by a last-minute change of mind, is considered a great success and a model for the 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District. Together, they have produced the largest achievement gains for impoverished children ever seen in a single school network.
A new research study -- based on simulations using actual student applications at competitive colleges that require the SAT or ACT for admission -- has found that ending the requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.
The finding is consistent with what admissions officers have reported at many colleges that have gone SAT-optional. But the basis of this new research goes well beyond the anecdotal information reported by colleges pleased with their shifts. Scholars at Princeton University's Office of Population Research obtained actual admissions data from seven selective colleges that require the SAT or ACT. Using the actual admissions patterns for these colleges, the scholars then ran statistical models showing the impact of either going SAT-optional or adopting what they called the "don't ask, don't tell" approach in which a college says that it won't look at standardized test scores.
These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional. (To date, only one institution -- Sarah Lawrence College -- has taken that step.)
In terms of other measures of academic competitiveness, the study found that going SAT optional would result in classes of students with higher grade point averages. Dropping testing entirely, on the other hand, would result in higher levels of academic achievement in the entering classes at the public institutions studied, but not the privates. The research will be formally presented next month at a conference at Wake Forest University about college admissions, but the Princeton researchers released the findings Wednesday.
In Craig Kohn's classroom at Waterford Union High School, students use traditional Punnett square diagrams to study animal genetics.
But they also use 80-pound Foster, the living, breathing class Holstein calf, and talk about his genetics and which of those traits they can predict his offspring may have generations from now.
Using Foster requires more post-lesson cleanup in the school's agriculture education classroom, but students say Kohn's lessons bring science alive. It is fun, real and far more engaging than memorizing facts and formulas.
The approach represents part of a revolution in agriculture education that is under way across Wisconsin and the United States.
The so-called "cows and plows" high school curriculum - animal science, plant science and mechanics - once dominated by farm kids in Carhartt jackets and Wranglers has morphed into courses that cover turf management, wildlife ecology, landscape design, biotechnology, organic farming, genetic engineering, sustainable water, biodiesel production and meat science.
The developments have exciting implications, from a wave of new student interest in agri-science to ample post-secondary career prospects.
Many school leaders are harnessing the potential of the programs. The Hartland-Lakeside School District is designing an organic farming charter school; state agriculture officials hope a similar urban agriculture school could take root in Milwaukee.
Is the global economy heading from recession to depression? Why did a crisis in US mortgage markets wreak havoc in economies across Europe? The Euro Challenge, an academic contest now in its fourth year, pits teams of high school students against each other as they answer economic and financial questions to showcase their knowledge of everything from ballooning government deficits to rising unemployment.
This year, 72 high school teams from nine states (Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Illinois and Pennsylvania) will compete in the Euro Challenge, which fosters a better understanding of the European and transatlantic economy and supports local learning objectives in the field of economics and finance. Regional rounds kick off on March 30 and culminate in the finals at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on April 29.
Advanced Placement English teacher Allison Beers asked her 11th-grade students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County to critique my annual rankings, in The Washington Post and Newsweek, of public high schools. I use the Challenge Index, a measure of participation in AP and other college-level tests. Here are excerpts of comments from several students, with some comments from me:
I am an optimist, maybe too much of one. I believe, for instance, that our school dropout problem in many instances takes care of itself. Often teenagers leave school because they just cannot bear sitting in class. Eventually they mature, return to school, graduate and have productive lives. Data show that of the 30 percent of students who do not graduate on time, about half have acquired high school diplomas or General Educational Development certificates (GED) by their late 20s.
Many people find my congenital sunniness on this and other issues annoying. My wife, who married me nearly 42 years ago, has always called me "the Pollyanna From Hell." She might have a point. Optimism can lead to error. For instance, I have found a impressive new report on dropouts that suggests my laissez faire attitude toward the issue might keep many young people from being yanked back into school in ways that would do them good.
Arguably the most animated and substantial exchange was between the president and a longtime teacher from Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia who was seated a few feet behind him. The teacher asked Obama for his definition of "a charter school" and "an effective teacher." While Obama quickly dispensed with the first part of the question, he could not get the teacher to answer when he asked whether in her 15 years on the job she has encountered colleagues who she would not want to teach her own children.
"My point is that if we've done everything we can to improve teacher pay and teacher performance and training and development, some people just aren't meant to be teachers, just like some people aren't meant to be carpenters, some people aren't meant to be nurses. At some point, they've got to find a new career," he said.
Calling this a potentially historic moment in Milwaukee education, a key leader of the private school voucher movement called Thursday for major increases in regulation of the participating schools and for a new focus on quality across all the channels of schooling in the city.
Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent who is now a central figure nationally in advocating for school choice, said he wants school leaders to join with Gov. Jim Doyle, legislative leaders and others in working out new ways to assure that students of all kinds have quality teachers in quality schools.
"We can't just keep wringing our hands about these terrible schools," Fuller said. "We have a moral responsibility to our children to not accept that."
He said that he believes Doyle is seeking higher quality and more accountability and transparency for the 120 private schools in Milwaukee that have more than 20,000 students attending, thanks to publicly funded vouchers. Fuller said he was in general agreement on those goals.
Doyle has presented "an opportunity to come together and do something that is truly constructive for our children," Fuller said. "I think it is one of those historic moments that don't come all the time."
Fuller was reacting both to a new set of studies of the voucher program and to a dramatically different situation for voucher supporters in the state Capitol.
Mission statement: On this blog we explore why homeschooling can be a better option for children and families than a traditional classroom setting. We'll also explore homeschooling issues in general, educational thoughts, family issues, and some other random stuff.
High school students in Wisconsin are digging into great world literature that would bewilder older and more experienced readers: "Don Quixote," by Miguel de Cervantes, "Dante's Inferno," by Dante Alighieri, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. All the students need is a chance to try and the right guidance from their teachers. Both of these necessities are provided by the Center for the Humanities.
During the past five years, the center's program Great World Texts in Wisconsin has enabled some 1,000 students to read heady and challenging tomes not found on the young adult reading list. The program is a perfect example of the Wisconsin Idea in action. It creates partnerships between UW-Madison faculty and Wisconsin high school teachers for the benefit of state students.
..A 16-by 10.875-inch rectangle containing precisely 174 square inches of possibility, made from two sheets of paper glued and bound together. Legendary magazine art director and Pentagram partner D. J. Stout calls the science of filling this box with artful compositions of type and images "variations on a rectangle." That is, in any given issue of a magazine--this one, for example--subjects and stories will change, but as a designer, you're still dealing with the same ol' blank white box.
At Wired, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can't animate the infographics (yet). We can't embed video or voice-over (yet). We can't add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can't do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand "Just do whatever you want." That's because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
Think of a young tree, a sapling. With water and sunshine, it can grow tall and strong. But include some careful pruning early in its development--removing low-hanging branches--and the tree will grow taller, stronger, faster. It won't waste precious resources on growth that doesn't serve its ultimate purpose. The same principle applies to design. Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions.
Web site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It's incredible.
The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it's ten times better than either, because it's open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It's easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn't cost a dime.
When Private Schools Take Public Dollars: What's the Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs?
Chester E. Finn, Jr., Christina M. Hentges, Michael J. Petrilli and Amber M. Winkler [458K PDF]:
Of all the arguments that critics of school voucher programs advance, the one that may resonate loudest with the public concerns school accountability. Opponents say it's not fair to hold public schools to account for their results (under No Child Left Behind and similar systems) and then let private schools receive taxpayer dollars--however indirectly--with no accountability at all. We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute don't buy that argument entirely. Private schools participating in voucher programs, tax-credit programs, scholarship programs and such are accountable to parents via the school choice marketplace. But we don't dismiss it, either. For both substantive and strategic reasons, we believe it's time for school choice supporters to embrace accountability, done right.
For too long, school choice supporters have been stuck in a tired internal debate that hobbles the advance of vouchers and other worthy forms of school choice. Staunch free-marketers say "leave the schools alone and let the parents decide." More left-leaning critics say "if they won't play by the same rules as public schools don't give them any assistance at all." Yet this debate has become ever more archaic in a society preoccupied with student achievement, school performance, results based accountability, international competitiveness and institutional transparency.
It's time for the school choice movement to wake up--and catch up to the educational demands and expectations of the 21st century. It's paradoxical to us that even as the demands on K-12 education are escalating and important new forms of choice are emerging (not just vouchers for choice's sake but private schooling as a decent option for kids otherwise stuck in failing public schools, means-tested scholarships for low-income families, corporate and individual tax credit and deduction programs, specialized vouchers for disabled youngsters, and more) the accountability and-transparency discussion seems mired in the 1970s.
Let's restart the discussion. But what does "accountability, done right" looklike in practice? To find out, we sought the assistance of 20 experts in the school choice world--scholars, advocates, program administrators, private school representatives--to help us wrestle with the thorny issues that together embody the accountability question writ large. In this paper, we present their insights, opinions, and advice about how accountability for voucher programs should be structured. We then synthesize their views and offer our own take. Here's an overview.
The school-voucher movement is under assault, as opponents have cut federal funding and states move to impose new restrictions on a form of school choice that has been a cornerstone of the conservative agenda for education overhaul.
Vouchers -- which give students public money to pay private-school tuition -- have grown since a 2002 Supreme Court decision upheld their use in religious schools. About 61,700 students use them in the current school year, up 9% from last year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a voucher advocate.
But earlier this month, Congress voted to stop funding a voucher program for the District of Columbia. Two other prominent voucher programs -- in Milwaukee and Cleveland -- are facing statehouse efforts to impose rules that could prompt some private schools to stop taking voucher students.
Pressure is mounting from other corners as well. President Barack Obama has said he opposes vouchers, and the stimulus bill he signed in February bars its funds from being used to provide financial aid to students attending private schools. On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that two state voucher programs, benefiting foster children and disabled students, violated Arizona's state constitution.
A Pennsylvania mom wrote me this week to say her son was drowning in too much homework.
As a middle-schooler at a demanding private school, this worried mom writes, her son is laden with hours of homework every night, and it seems to be getting the best of him. His grades have sunk to C-minuses from B's; he has begun dodging assignments and has been put in detention for missed work. "I don't remember sixth grade being this much of an ordeal, or any ordeal at all," she writes.
John has posted on why kids hate school, and homework is a major reason. A growing number of schools, including those in several California cities and Broward County, Fla., are putting a ceiling on kids' out-of-school workloads.
Parents remain deeply divided on whether kids get too little or too much homework, as shown by this recent report from Atlanta. Nevertheless, a growing number of school districts have embraced guidelines recommended by Duke University's Harris Cooper: Children should be assigned roughly 10 minutes of homework times their grade level. Thus a first grader would have 10 minutes, a third grader 30, and a high-school senior a couple of hours of homework a night.
Teachers and principals in Russian schools say the government is providing more money for education, but discouraging critical examination of Soviet history. Meanwhile parents complain that widespread bribery for good grades is eroding standards.
That's the gist we got out of the First District's ruling today, in a constitutional challenge to Berkeley's way-complicated system for assigning students to different elementary schools, and to different programs in high school. The upshot: The appeals court unanimously said Berkeley's system is A-OK, despite Prop 209, because it doesn't consider a student's own race at all. Instead, all students in a neighborhood are treated the same -- and the way the neighborhood is treated is based on a bunch of things, like average income level, average education level, and the neighborhood's overall racial composition. The court's opinion calls things like this "affirmative policies" fostering social diversity. That term doesn't sound familiar at all.
Still, Nerad has clearly taken notice. Given the new numbers, he plans to ask state lawmakers to allow Madison to deny future requests based on family income levels, rather than race, to prevent disparities from further growing between Madison and its suburbs.
There is no more A for effort at Prospect Hill Elementary School.
Parents have complained that since the new grading system is based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period.
In fact, there are no more A's at all. Instead of letter grades in English or math, schoolchildren in this well-to-do Westchester suburb now get report cards filled with numbers indicating how they are faring on dozens of specific skills like "decoding strategies" and "number sense and operations." The lowest mark, 1, indicates a student is not meeting New York State's academic standards, while the top grade of 4 celebrates "meeting standards with distinction."
They are called standards-based report cards, part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.
Educators praise them for setting clear expectations, but many parents who chose to live in Pelham because of its well-regarded schools find them confusing or worse. Among their complaints are that since the new grades are based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period (school officials are planning to tweak this aspect next year).
"We're running around the school saying '2 is cool,' " said Jennifer Lapey, a parent who grew up in Pelham, "but in my world, 2 out of 4 is not so cool."
When Mateus Bontempo started preschool at a public school in Long Branch, N.J., he rarely talked and was so shy he'd stand in the classroom doorway until a teacher came to escort him inside.
Anna Dasilva, his mother, says educators worked with Mateus on his social skills, sometimes taking him to other classrooms to meet new children. Four years later, the eight-year-old third grader plays trumpet, participates in math competitions and performs in plays. "They really helped him along," says Mrs. Dasilva, who thinks all children should have the same preschool opportunity.
So does President Barack Obama. As one of the main goals of his education plan, he wants to spend $10 billion to encourage states to offer universal preschool and expand federal early-learning programs like Head Start. The recently passed stimulus bill includes half that spending goal, or $5 billion, for Head Start and related early-childhood efforts.
But the current economic crisis may blunt state-level efforts to broaden access to preschool. Even in better times, building a "universal" preschool system would likely be a slow and expensive proposition, given the patchwork nature of what currently exists.
And as state and federal efforts target early learning programs toward disadvantaged students, some middle-class parents feel that their children are being left out. According to a recent study by Pre-K Now, families earning more than about $40,000 a year are already ineligible for free preschool in most of the 20 states that use income to determine eligibility.
Like any successful negotiator, Randi Weingarten can sense when the time for compromise is nigh. On Nov. 17, after the Election Day dust had cleared, Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, gave a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In attendance were a host of education-policy luminaries, including Weingarten's sometimes-foe Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis van Roekel, and Rep. George Miller of California.
"No issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair for teachers," Weingarten vowed, referencing debates within the Democratic coalition over charter schools and performance pay for teachers -- innovations that teachers' unions traditionally held at arm's length.
The first openly gay president of a major American labor union, Weingarten is small -- both short and slight. But she speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist. In speeches, newspaper op-eds, and public appearances, Weingarten, once known as a guns-blazing New York power broker, has been trying to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy. It is a public-relations strategy clearly crafted for the Obama era: an effort to focus on common ground instead of long-simmering differences.
Notably absent from the audience for Weingarten's post-election speech was D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In the summer of 2007, Rhee, a Teach For America alumna and founder of the anti-union New Teacher Project, took office and quickly implemented an agenda of school closings, teacher and principal firings, and a push toward merit pay. These actions met with their fair share of outrage from both parents and teachers and especially from the local teachers' union. At the time of Weingarten's speech, Rhee and the AFT-affiliated Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) were stalemated over a proposed new contract for teachers.
State Sen. Robert Ford is putting a new face on the long-running fight over whether to spend public education dollars to pay for private schools.
To the dismay of his African American colleagues, the Charleston Democrat is hawking a bill that would give students a publicly paid scholarship or tuition grant to go to a private school.
So far, the push for school choice has had mostly white faces out front. But Ford, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, is making the case that the students who would benefit most from a voucher-style program in South Carolina are African Americans who attend poorly performing schools.
He dismisses those who say his program would hurt already struggling public schools, framing the argument as a choice between protecting schools or giving children the lifeline they need to succeed.
"You're damn right I'm hurting public education, because public education is hurting our kids," Ford said.
Even as schools across the state brace for sky-is-falling budget cuts, the Tucson Unified School District program for gifted and talented students is prepping for dramatic growth in the next school year.
The district plans to double the number of students it tests -- up to 10,000 -- and will send postcards to every family about testing opportunities.
As a result of state and federal requirements, it also will begin offering gifted classes for kindergartners and for juniors and seniors in high school.
Currently, parents request testing to see if their children qualify. That's a system that can be full of pitfalls in lower-income areas where parents miss the newsletter because they may be working two jobs, for example, or where language barriers might lead to missed deadlines, let alone confusion over how to access the program.
Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and Director, Centre for Bioethics, Penn University
There are, it is increasingly said, plenty of reasons why people you know and many you don't ought to have access to your DNA or data that are derived from it. Have you ever had sexual relations outside a single, monogamous relationship? Well then, any children who resulted from your hanky-panky might legitimately want access to your DNA to establish paternity or maternity.
Craig Venter, Against:
As we progress from the first human genome to sequence hundreds, then thousands and then millions of individual genomes, the value for medicine and humanity will only come from the availability and analysis of comprehensive, public databases containing all these genome sequences along with as complete as possible phenotype descriptions of the individuals.
I'm not trying to be a hypocrite. I have supported D.C. school vouchers. The program has used tax dollars well in transferring impoverished students to private schools with higher standards than D.C. public schools. But it has reached a dead end. Congress should fund the 1,713 current voucher recipients until they graduate from high school but stop new enrollments and find a more promising use of the money.
That exasperation you hear is from my friend and former boss, the brilliant Washington Post editorial writer who has been eviscerating Democrats in Congress for trying to kill D.C. vouchers. We don't identify the authors of our unsigned editorials, but her in-your-face style is unmistakable and her arguments morally unassailable.
My problems with what is formally known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program are political and cultural, not moral. The program provides up to $7,500 a year for private-school tuition for poor children at an annual cost of about $12 million. Vouchers help such kids, but not enough of them. The vouchers are too at odds with the general public view of education. They don't have much of a future.
In his recent education speech, President Obama asked the states to raise their standards and develop "assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test." With the No Child Left Behind law up for reauthorization this year, the onus is now on lawmakers and educators to find a way to maintain accountability while mitigating the current tendency to reduce schooling to a joyless grind of practice exams and empty instruction in "reading strategies."
Before we throw away bubble tests, though, we should institute a relatively simple change that would lessen the worst effects of the test-prep culture and improve education in the bargain.
These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they've never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.
Teachers can't prepare for the content of the tests and so they substitute practice exams and countless hours of instruction in comprehension strategies like "finding the main idea." Yet despite this intensive test preparation, reading scores have paradoxically stagnated or declined in the later grades.
This is because the schools have imagined that reading is merely a "skill" that can be transferred from one passage to another, and that reading scores can be raised by having young students endlessly practice strategies on trivial stories. Tragic amounts of time have been wasted that could have been devoted to enhancing knowledge and vocabulary, which would actually raise reading comprehension scores.
Kayla Crowley, 18, is healthy, but she's lying in a financial institution with a thermometer in her mouth.
Two mornings a week, this basement room in the Oregon Community Bank and Trust has served as a bustling training area -- not for lending money, but for lending a hand.
Crowley and 10 other students from Oregon High School are earning both high school and college credit while they prepare for a booming job category: nursing assistant. While courses such as this take place across the region, the Oregon class "has been a real community effort," said Bill Urban, coordinator for Oregon's School 2 Career program, which matches students with on-the-job training.
The bank donated space. Meriter loaned two hospital beds. Oregon Manor contributed two wheelchairs and a Hoyer patient lift.
It's about 9 a.m. on a Friday morning and history teacher Howard Wilen is lecturing on President Theodore Roosevelt's relationship with labor unions.
Roosevelt, Wilen told the class, helped secure better work hours for coal miners but coal prices increased as a result.
Wilen's Advanced Placement U.S. history students have brokered a deal of sorts too, taking a tough class in high school that could earn college credit. For those who do well on the placement exam, many colleges will give credit for the AP history class, saving students money and time down the road.
Participation in AP courses has skyrocketed in recent years as many school districts have adopted open-enrollment policies, allowing any student willing to take on the work a chance to try the college-level courses.
But at Alamo Heights High School, where Wilen chairs the social studies department, admission remains restricted to top students. The district is rethinking that policy now.
Randi Weingarten, the notoriously feisty president of the second-largest national teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), received a hero's welcome at the National Press Club last November. In her speech, she vowed to give ear to almost any tough-minded school reform, and, in a line that thrilled many reformers, promised that the AFT will not protect incompetent teachers: "Teachers are the first to say, 'Let's get incompetent teachers out of the classroom.'"
Weingarten would seem to be donning the reformist mantle of a previous AFT president, Al Shanker, a highly regarded reformer who shook up pro-union liberals by reminding everyone that tough school discipline and achievement standards were civil rights fundamentals. But an approach that worked during Shanker's tenure is more difficult now, with the reformers and unionists pitched in a bare-knuckled fight that is not about lofty, system-changing goals as much as about the thorny specifics of state and local education policy. Caught up in a contentious situation with the Washington, D.C. school system that has challenged her reformist credentials, Weingarten's attempt to satisfy both sides of the debate is being put to the test--the result of which could dictate the future of education reform across the country.
Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 20, 2009 in Education News and Students:
An upstate New York high school student could teach a course in character to the bonus babies of AIG. Nicole Heise of Ithaca High School was one of The Concord Review's six winners of The Concord Review's Emerson Prize awards for excellence this year. But as EdWeek's Kathleen Kennedy Manzo tells the story, she sent back her prize, a check for $800, with this note:
"As you well know, for high school-aged scholars, a forum of this caliber and the incentives it creates for academic excellence are rare. I also know that keeping The Concord Review active requires resources. So, please allow me to put my Emerson award money to the best possible use I can imagine by donating it to The Concord Review so that another young scholar can experience the thrill of seeing his or her work published."
The Concord Review publishes research papers by high school scholars. It's a one-of-a-kind venue for its impressive young authors. Manzo notes TCR "has won praise from renowned historians, lawmakers, and educators, yet has failed to ever draw sufficient funding...It operates on a shoestring, as Founder and Publisher Will Fitzhugh reminds me often. Fitzhugh, who has struggled for years to keep the operation afloat, challenges students to do rigorous scholarly work and to delve deeply into history. His success at inspiring great academic work is juxtaposed against his failure to get anyone with money to take notice."
Young Ms. Heise noticed. Anyone else?
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
trange as it may sound, the mind is not designed for thinking--it's designed to save us from having to think. Because thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain, we rely on memory, not thought, to guide us whenever possible. Nonetheless, we are curious and we do like to think, so long as the issue or problem at hand is neither too easy nor too hard.
Although Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is talking up the idea of converting almost the entire public school system to a year-round schedule, a new study of MPS schools finds mixed evidence, at best, that it increases academic success.
The study, conducted by Bradley R. Carl, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher, finds little difference in the annual improvement between students on year-round schedules and those on the traditional September to June calendar. The study, completed in February, can be found on the MPS Web site.
Andrekopoulos enters the week still promoting the year-round idea, although it got a tepid reception last week and, in addition to Carl's research, there is no agreement among researchers nationally that the revamped schedule improves results.
The superintendent pointed to evidence in the Carl study that students who remained in the same school for two years made bigger gains under the year-round schedule, in which they get shorter summer vacation and longer breaks during the rest of the year.
He said the results showed the importance of reducing the very high percentage of MPS students who change schools frequently - more than 30% are in a different school each September than they were in the year before, not including those who get promoted. A year-round schedule across the city would reduce mobility, Andrekopoulos suggested.
The most unlikely figure in the struggle to reform America's education system right now is Michelle Rhee.
She's a Korean-American chancellor of schools in a city that is mostly African-American. She's an insurgent from the school-reform movement who spent her career on the outside of the system, her nose pressed against the glass -- and now she's in charge of some of America's most blighted schools. Less than two years into the job, she has transformed Washington into ground zero of America's education reform movement.
Ms. Rhee, 39, who became Washington's sixth school superintendent in 10 years, has ousted one-third of the district's principals, shaken up the system, created untold enemies, improved test scores, and -- more than almost anyone else -- dared to talk openly about the need to replace ineffective teachers.
"It's sort of a taboo topic that nobody wants to talk about," she acknowledged in an interview in her office, not far from the Capitol. "I used to say 'fire people.' And they said you can't say that. Say, 'separate them from the district' or something like that."
Click above to watch, or CTRL-click to download this mpeg4 or mp3 audio file. You'll need Quicktime to view the video file. Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira is up for re-election on April 7, 2009. Arlene graciously agreed to record this video conversation recently. We discussed her sense of where the Madison School District is in terms of:
academics
finance
community support/interaction
Leadership (Board and Administration)
We also discussed what she hopes to accomplish over the next three years.
I emailed Arlene, Donald Gors and Lucy Mathiak (who is running unopposed) regarding this video conversation. I hope to meet Lucy at some point over the next few weeks. I have not heard from Donald Gors.
Rose Fernandez regularly refers to herself as an outsider in the race to become the state's next schools chief.
The implication is that her April 7 opponent, Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, is an insider who is unlikely to change what is happening with education in the state.
The outsider candidate who can change things and shake up the status quo has long been a popular thrust in political campaigns. President Barack Obama, although a U.S. senator at the time, used aspects of the tactic in his campaign last fall.
But some wonder whether it will have the same impact in what is likely to be a low-turnout election April 7.
"The advantage to the insider is being able to draw off of established, organizational support," said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The outsider's goal is to try to become visible enough that people unhappy with the status quo can voice their outsider outrage."
From her Web site address - www.changedpi.com - to frequently tying her opponent to the state's largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, Fernandez appears to be trying to capitalize on one of her many differences with her opponent.
"There are perils with entrenchment," said Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and past president of the Wisconsin Coalition for Virtual School Families. "With that there comes an inability to see the problems as they really are."
But being an outsider also has some disadvantages, which Evers is trying to play up as well.
At a recent appearance before the Public Policy Forum, Evers puzzled about Fernandez's stance against a provision in Gov. Jim Doyle's bill that he said was supported by voucher school proponents while she expressed support for voucher schools.
A trio of words -- one that's slang for pizza, another defined as a body's vital life force and a third referring to a snoring sound -- have conspired to change the game of Scrabble.
"Za," "qi" and "zzz" were added recently to the game's official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z's and Q's each have the game's highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort. So now that those high-scoring letters are more versatile, some Scrabble aficionados would like to see the rules changed -- which would be the only change since Alfred Butts popularized the game in 1948.
For non Scrabble-rousers, there are analogs for the proposed re-evaluations in other leisure pursuits. Some notable mispriced assets: Vermont Avenue in Monopoly, three-point field goals in basketball and football and overtime losses in hockey. Yet traditionalists say rules should endure; it's up to players to exploit them.
In Scrabble, players form words on a 15-by-15-space board using 100 tiles -- two of them blanks that can stand in for any letter, and 98 tiles with letters and corresponding point values. Players draw seven tiles to start the game and refresh their set after each turn.
WisPolitics: Evers, Fernandez question each other in We The People debate
3/20/2009
By Greg Bump
WisPolitics
Tony Evers questioned opponent Rose Fernandez's qualifications for the state's top education spot Friday night, while Fernandez countered by trying to portray him as a crony of Wisconsin's largest teacher's union.
The two, vying for the post of superintendent of Public Instruction, laid out competing visions in a We The People debate.
Evers, the deputy superintendent at DPI, touted his 34 years of experience in education while contrasting his resume with the credentials of Fernandez, who is a nurse by trade and has never worked in a public school.
Fernandez, a virtual school advocate, countered by continually trying to lay problems with the state's educational system at the feet of Evers, who has held the No. 2 post at the agency for eight years.
Given the opportunity to question each other, Evers pointed out Fernandez represented virtual schools and has zero experience in the administration of public schools. He asked how parents with children in public schools can trust her to invest in their education rather than funneling money toward special interests.
"My own special interest is the boys and girls growing up in the state of Wisconsin," Fernandez shot back.
Fernandez then stressed Evers' endorsement by the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" the union has spent to support his campaign. She asked him to list three reforms he has supported that WEAC opposed.
Evers answered that the union was unhappy with a settlement DPI reached on allowing virtual schools -- in which districts allow students to take courses on-line -- to continue. He also said he has been a strong advocate of charter schools -- which operate without some of the regulations of other public schools -- something the union has opposed.
"I started charter schools. I know what charter schools are about," Evers said. "I don't need a lecture about charter schools."
Evers also stressed his support from school boards, child advocates, parents and others.
"That's why you have to have a broad coalition," Evers said. "This isn't about this overwhelming group of people driving policy at the state level. That just isn't fact."
Fernandez ripped DPI for not doing enough to help the struggling Milwaukee Public School system address issues like dropout rates and the achievement gap for minority students.
Evers countered that he has worked on the issue with educators in Milwaukee, but there are also socioeconomic factors that are hampering achievement.
"Laying this issue on my lap is irrational," Evers said.
Fernandez also brought up a piece of Evers' campaign lit that referred to voucher schools in Milwaukee as "a privatization scheme."
"Some of the schools have been scheming, and those schools we have drummed out of the program," Evers replied.
Evers warned that Fernandez would run DPI through the prism of the "special interest" of choice schools.
Both candidates agreed that a merit pay system for educators could have benefit, but they disagreed on the details. Fernandez indicated that she would base her merit pay system more on classroom outcomes, while Evers stressed that rewards for training were equally important.
They differed more prominently on the qualified economic offer, which Gov. Jim Doyle has proposed eliminating in his 2009-11 budget plan. Fernandez wants to retain it, saying that without the control on teacher compensation, property taxes could rise sharply.
"Children may become the enemy of the taxpayer," she said.
Evers said he has bargained on both sides of the table, and he opposes the QEO because it hurts the state's ability to stay competitive in teacher pay.
Evers embraced the coming federal stimulus cash, which will pump $800 million into state schools as "a historic event" that acknowledges "educators are the lever that can turn our economy around." He said he would appoint a trustee to oversee the allocation of the funds in Milwaukee schools to ensure the money is getting to the classrooms.
In contrast, Fernandez said she looked upon the federal stimulus with caution in that it is one-time funding that won't be there in the future
And while Evers touted the state's ACT and SAT scores as being among the highest in the nation, Fernandez said those tests are only administered to college-bound students and aren't indicative of the academic struggles in districts like Milwaukee.
We the People/Wisconsin is a multi-media that includes the Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, WISC-TV, WisPolitics.com and Wood Communications Group.
Tony Evers today pledged to continue his long commitment to Wisconsin's charter schools, which provide innovative educational strategies. Dr. Evers has played a major educational leadership role in making Wisconsin 6th in the nation, out of all 50 states, in both the number of charter schools and the number of students enrolled in charter schools.
"We are a national leader in charter schools and I will continue my work for strong charter schools in Wisconsin," Evers said. "As State Superintendent, I will continue to promote our charter schools and the innovative, successful learning strategies they pursue as we work to increase achievement for all students no matter where they live."
Evers, as Deputy State Superintendent, has been directly responsible for overseeing two successful competitive federal charter school grants that brought over $90 million to Wisconsin. From these successful applications, Evers has recommended the approval of over 700 separate planning, implementation, implementation renewal, and dissemination grants to charter schools around the state since 2001.
During the past eight years, the number of charter schools in Wisconsin has risen from 92 to 221 - an increase of almost 150%. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has increased from 12,000 students in 2001 to nearly 36,000 today.
Evers has also represented the Department of Public Instruction on State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster's Charter School Advisory Council. The council was created to provide charter school representatives, parents, and others with the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest and provide recommendations to the State Superintendent.
My suggestions last month [Metro Monday column, Feb. 16] for raising achievement in budget-cutting times inspired an outpouring of reader ideas. Some were interesting, such as tougher honor rolls, more reading clubs and more speaking practice. Some were wild, such as my favorite, eliminating school buses.
A lot of people yearned, as I did, for simpler approaches that drew parents into schooling, thus strengthening family ties and improving education while saving money. Most of us admitted that few, if any, of our suggestions will be adopted, but keep in mind that hardly anyone believed the Boston Red Sox would ever win the World Series again.
I had seven ideas: replace elementary school homework with free reading; eliminate barriers to charter school growth; have teachers call parents to praise their kids; have parents e-mail educators to laud their teaching; require high school students to read at least one nonfiction book; call on every child in every class; and declare a national holiday on which everyone reads. As I expected, my charter school notion was unpopular, but President Obama has since made it a top priority anyway. Good luck with that, Mr. President. All the rest won reader support, particularly the first idea on homework. I will get to that after we review the most intriguing of your suggestions.
Charter schools generally cannot take credit for boosting test scores, but there is intriguing evidence that students at charter high schools may be more likely to graduate and attend college, a national study concludes.
The Rand Corp. study, which was released Wednesday, examined charters in eight states. Rand, a nonprofit research organization in Santa Monica, Calif., also examined charters in Chicago, San Diego, Denver, Milwaukee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Florida.
A year ago, a Rand report on charter schools in Philadelphia found that their students performed about the same as students in district-run schools.
Charter school research has become politically charged, with dueling views. Some reports have concluded that students at the nation's 4,100 charter schools outperform their counterparts in traditional public schools. Other investigators have said charter students do no better than public school students and often do worse.
Researchers involved with the Rand report said they had used performance data of individual students over time to try to evaluate charter schools more accurately. Their work received financial support from several nonprofit foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William Penn Foundation. Bill Gates supports charter schools, and the Gates Foundation has provided millions of dollars to help successful ones expand.
The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public schools (TPSs). In recent years, research has begun to inform this debate, but many of the key outcomes have not been adequately examined, or have been examined in only a few states. Do the conflicting conclusions of different studies reflect real differences in effects driven by variation in charter laws and policies? Or do they reflect differences in research approaches -- some of which may be biased? This book examines four primary research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? (2) What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between TPSs and charter schools? (3) What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and of entering college? (4) What effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs?
Last week, President Barack Obama challenged parents, school leaders and teacher unions to raise their expectations for our children's educational achievement, warning that we cannot maintain our global economic competitiveness otherwise. So Obama has increased the federal government's financial commitment to education and strongly recommended both an increase in the number of charter schools and merit pay for teachers whose students show progress.
But these two initiatives are stopgaps. The real need is to improve the quality of all our teachers. And that goal starts with the colleges of education that prepare new teachers to enter the classroom.
What we need most is a total revamping of teacher-preparation programs. Until this occurs, we'll continue to have second-rate schools no matter how much money we spend.
And now is the time to act. In addition to a president who's identified education as a top priority, we have Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who led one of our country's largest school districts and has a reputation for getting things done; teacher unions that support higher standards for new teachers; and, perhaps most importantly, a $5 billion pot of stimulus funds at Duncan's disposal for educational improvement initiatives.
In each recent year, the number of people saying they are opening voucher schools was similar to this year's total and the number who made it into operation was in the single digits. The schools have substantial hurdles to clear, including getting a building that meets codes and signing up students and teachers.
In addition to the 57 new applicants, just about all of the current roster of voucher schools - around 120, including a few that do not appear to be operating at the moment - have applied to remain in the program next year.
Rising ranks of students
Put it all together and DPI is forecasting the number of low-income students using the state voucher program next year will be equal to about 20,500 full-time students, up from about 19,500 this year, an increase that is line with the pattern of recent years. (The actual number of students is higher than the "full time equivalent" figure because four-year-old kindergartners are funded at a fraction of other students. The actual number in September was 20,244.)
The pediatric nurse and mother of five will be a strong advocate for change -- someone who will use the mostly symbolic post of state schools superintendent as a bully pulpit to press for reforms, many of which President Barack Obama favors.
With so many high school students failing to graduate in Milwaukee, with so much at stake for Wisconsin in the changing, knowledge-based economy, Fernandez is the best candidate to invigorate DPI.
Fernandez, of Mukwonogo, drew public attention last year for her advocacy of public online charter schools. She helped push for a bipartisan legislative compromise that allowed virtual schools to continue serving thousands of students online with more accountability.
In February 2008, the Madison school board - facing mounting legal pressure - overturned a policy that allowed the district to deny transfer requests based on race. Before that, white students were routinely told they couldn't transfer. Madison was the only district in the state with such a policy, which aimed to limit racial inequalities throughout the district, said district spokesman Ken Syke.
With that policy gone, Madison saw a nearly 50 percent increase in students asking to transfer, from 435 to 643.
Madison superintendent Daniel Nerad notes that Madison's numbers had been steadily increasing for years. But he acknowledged that the policy change likely explains some of this year's jump.
"I think we do see some effect of that, but I'm not suggesting all of it comes from that, because frankly we don't know," he said.
Still, Nerad has clearly taken notice. Given the new numbers, he plans to ask state lawmakers to allow Madison to deny future requests based on family income levels, rather than race, to prevent disparities from further growing between Madison and its suburbs.
Other districts that border Madison - including Monona Grove, Middleton and McFarland - are seeing more transfer requests from Madison this year, too.
"The change Madison made ... that certainly increased the application numbers," said McFarland's business director, Jeff Mahoney.
In addition, Verona school board member Dennis Beres said he suspects many Madison parents are trying to transfer their kids from the chronically overcrowded Aldo Leopold elementary school, which is just two miles northeast of Stoner Prairie Elementary in Fitchburg.
Fascinating. I would hope that the Madison School District would pursue students with high academic standards rather than simply try, via legislative influence and lobbying, to prevent them from leaving.... The effects of that initiative may not be positive for the City of Madison's tax base.
Michele Rhee, the District of Columbia's public schools chancellor, has done a lot to shake up schools in the nation's capital.
But for some, change can't come soon enough.
So Rhee is intent on attracting young teachers who aren't vested in the old contractual arrangements with the teachers' union, which Rhee thinks is getting in the way of her reform efforts.
In other words, Rhee is looking for a "new breed" of teachers, mostly 20-somethings fresh out of college, who may not have majored in education but are drawn to teaching; like 22-year-old Meredith Leonard, a sixth-grade English teacher at Shaw-Garnet-Patterson Middle School.
Like many first-year teachers who've poured into Washington, D.C., in the past few years, Leonard is receptive to the changes that Rhee is proposing, such as merit pay and doing away with tenure.
Are Americans flunking science? A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive® reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.
Over the past few months, the American government has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for economic bailout plans. While this spending may provide a short-term solution to the country's economic woes, most analysts agree that the long-term solution must include a transition to a more knowledge-based economy, including a focus on science, which is now widely recognized as a major driver of innovation and industry.
Despite its importance to economic growth, environmental protection, and global health and energy issues, scientific literacy is currently low among American adults. According to the national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences:
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
Erin McKean doesn't look much like a revolutionary. She speaks softly. She sews her own skirts and writes a daily blog entry about vintage patterns. She does work out of a basement, but it's got carpeting and good lighting and roughly 1,500 books, many of whose titles involve the word "words." Her suburban Chicago home is not exactly the picture of subversion.
This week, though, she is slated to launch what may be the biggest revolution in the printed word since, well, printed words.
Ms. McKean's brainchild is called Wordnik, and it combines the best practices of the old-fashioned desk reference with Internet innovations. Words can be tagged like a blog entry, their pronunciation recorded and replayed like streaming radio, their related words cataloged like a list of books customers also bought at an online book depot. When the paper page gives way to the Web page, everything about the way we think of words will change, McKean says. "This project," she predicts in a quiet voice devoid of bravado, "is going to completely revolutionize all of dictionarymaking forever."
Granted, a dictionary is closer to a database than a mystery thriller, its authors nothing like, say, John Grisham. But to McKean, nothing has ever seemed more fascinating than collecting and organizing American words.
All of the speakers were good, but I will admit I really enjoyed listening to Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad talk on the issue of poverty in our schools.
"Oftentimes, the statement is used as follows: Our children are our future. In reality, we are theirs."
Nerad made one more point I found interesting, which was his explanation for why for every one student that comes into the MMSD, two to three students leave it. While MMSD has been well-recognized for having great schools and students, many of the schools have high concentrations of poverty (17 of 32 elementary schools have more than 50 percent of students on free or reduced lunch programs), which Nerad said can lead to perception issues about how MMSD uses its resources.
"From my perspective, it's a huge issue that we must face as a community -- for every one child coming in, two to three come out right now. I worry that a lot of it is based on this increasing poverty density that we have in our school district ... Oftentimes that's based on a perception of quality, and it's based on a perception based on that oftentimes that we have more kids in need, that we have more kids with more resource needs, and oftentimes people feel that their own children's needs may not be met in that equation."
Not long ago, the idea of placing the Milwaukee Public Schools under control of the city's mayor was getting considerable discussion. Then two things happened. The Public Policy Forum did a study of other cities, which found no clear-cut answers as to whether a governance change improved their school districts.
The Forum also convened a panel of community leaders to discuss this, and the feeling was unanimous that this would make no difference to the success of MPS. From teachers union head Dennis Oulahan to business leader Tim Sheehy, there was not "a great deal of support for a change in governance," moderator Mike Gousha concluded.
That seems to have killed the idea. After all, if the experts agree it wouldn't do anything, and the study is equivocal, it must be a bad idea, right?
Wrong. The idea has great merit, and nothing in the study - or the statements of experts - proves otherwise. A system in which, say, the mayor appoints the school board members, much as he appoints the Fire and Police Commission, could have many benefits, including:
More attention to the problem: School Board members are elected in low-turnout elections in which a minuscule percentage of city residents vote. Mayoral elections are high-interest affairs that would automatically elevate the issue of education, while making the city's most important officeholder accountable for the schools. We vote for the mayor based on how he does on property taxes and crime, but not on education, which is just as important to the city's success. Why put so little value on the schools?
A less parochial school board. The teachers union routinely gets candidates elected who readily vote for increases in salaries and benefits. The typical opponent of the union is the business community. The board has swung back and forth between these interests, as their respective candidates get elected. By contrast, the mayor is answerable to the full spectrum of voters. His choices for the board are likely to be more independent.
itizens of Hudson, N.H., are backing their school board's decision to reject an unfunded state mandate to provide free kindergarten. The case gets a hearing Wednesday.
It's 7:30 in the morning and about 30 high school students are chomping on doughnuts and debating the merits of federal dollars used to fund everything from building child-care centers on U.S. Army bases to lead reduction programs.
The scene is a weekly occurrence at Verona High School where advanced placement students are analyzing the 407-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- commonly known as the stimulus bill -- as part of an extra credit project.
The students must report the dollar amount appropriated under each title, summarize that section and react to how the money's being spent.
"I frankly don't see how that will help the economy or is a pressing need," Kaitlin McLean, a Verona senior, said of about $90 million going to facilities that deal with passports and training. "Couldn't $90 million be used to create jobs somewhere else?"
The goal is to have the entire document read by April 3 -- an ambitious objective considering many legislators probably haven't done the same.
When thousands of students ditch home computers and gather in makeshift classrooms across the state today, the future of their cyber charter schools is uncertain.
Testing begins on reading and math portions of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, the measure by which the state determines whether public schools are making "adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Last year, only three of the state's 11 cyber schools -- which educate more than 19,000 students -- achieved AYP.
Traditional schools that fail to do so face corrective action from the state that increases in severity each succeeding year, up to a state takeover. Cyber schools face the threat of the state not renewing their five-year charters, effectively shutting them. Six charters are up in the next two years, and test scores will be a big factor in renewals, said Leah Harris, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
We Should Not Be Surprised at These Outcomes, When We Teach our Children PowerPoint
A recently released "slideument" from General Motors. This document [PDF or [PPT] "explains" their March, 2009 buyer and dealer incentives. Via the Truth About Cars.
THOUSANDS OF PROFESSIONAL JOBS IN THIS COUNTRY have been downsized or offshored, and the Americans who held them have been laid off. Where are those people now? Few have starved to death or the tabloids would have told us. Few have jumped from bridges or the security camera footage would be all over YouTube. All those poor souls somehow have continued to earn enough for bare subsistence, or better.
Like it or not, the underemployed eventually realize that they have become small-business people. They did not register with the SBA for loans; they just began creating wealth for themselves by selling stuff or services to others.
We live in the most adaptable organism on earth. With a computer and a link to a network, we can use our knowledge to adapt and create wealth.
FARMERS AND FACTORY WORKERS could tell us that economic activity has always had a knowledge component. It's hard to create much wealth without skills. Now, for the first time in human history, knowledge is becoming the dominating determinant of wealth creation.
There are giant companies, such as Microsoft, that manufacture almost nothing. They don't ship anything except computer disks loaded with data, and sometimes not even that. Even an old-line "heavy-iron" company like IBM has transformed its manufacturing business into a different kind of wealth-creating enterprise, in which 60% of sales come from service contracts.
When Trevor Patzer was growing up in Ketchum, Idaho, he received an unusual offer from family friend Ric Ohrstrom: get admitted to New Hampshire's prestigious St. Paul's School, and Mr. Ohrstrom would foot the entire bill for his schooling there.
Mr. Patzer was accepted and graduated three years later. He says the experience of someone offering to pay for his high-school education had a profound effect on him, and the gift was always in the back of his mind, even as he moved to college and into the work world.
After graduating from Brown University, Mr. Patzer, now 35, headed off to Andersen Consulting to be a systems integration consultant. "It was that or investment banking," he says. But it didn't take him long to realize that there was more to life than "coding someone else's computers," he says. "I knew it wasn't the best fit for me. I'm a people person." Still, he kept plugging away in consulting for two more years.
During one of his vacations in 1998, he decided to visit Nepal and see "the biggest mountain in the world." While there, Mr. Patzer had another life-changing experience and it had little to do with the majestic awe of Mount Everest. His tour guide for the trip was Usha Acharya, an author and the wife of Nepal's former ambassador to the United Nations. While they took in various historic sites together, she talked to Mr. Patzer about the plight of poor children in Nepal. He decided on the spot that he wanted to fund the education of a Nepalese child, in the same spirit Mr. Ohrstrom had funded his education. When Mr. Patzer asked Ms. Acharya if she knew of such a child, she spoke of a young girl who could benefit from his philanthropy.
The Oakland school board has sued State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, saying he violated state law and financial common sense when he gave city charter schools $450,000 out of the district's bank account.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, is the latest volley in a fight for power and authority over the Oakland schools. O'Connell has controlled the purse strings since the state bailed out the nearly bankrupt district with a $100 million loan in 2003.
O'Connell said giving additional funding to the district's 32 charters schools - about $60 for each of their 7,500 students - was an equity issue. The alternative public schools were left out of a parcel tax passed by voters a year ago.
"Clearly all of the public schools in Oakland are deserving of resources, including the district's charter schools," said O'Connell spokeswoman Hilary McLean.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools must make drastic changes to get money from a special $5 billion fund in the economic stimulus bill.
"We're going to reward those states and those districts that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better," Duncan said Monday at the White House.
Those who keep doing the same old thing, however, won't be eligible for the money, he said.
Schools will be getting tens of billions more dollars through regular channels. On top of that, Duncan will have an unprecedented $5 billion to award for lasting reforms.
To get an award, schools and states must show they have been spending their money wisely. They are supposed to find innovative ways to close the achievement gap between black and Latino children who lag behind their white counterparts in more affluent schools.
Specifically, states are supposed to:
Improve teacher quality and get good teachers into high-poverty schools;
Set up sophisticated data systems to track student learning;
Boost the quality of academic standards and tests;
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may be the Obama cabinet member facing the biggest crisis -- the economic one -- but Education Secretary Arne Duncan may be the one holding the biggest opportunity in his hands.
It is this: He inherits the best chance in a generation to really shake up an American education system that is uneven and underperforming. And he knows it.
"I see this as an extraordinary opportunity," Mr. Duncan says in an interview. "We have a couple of things going in our direction that create what I call the perfect storm for reform."
If the economy ever heals, and if Afghanistan doesn't blow up, this quest to change the way Americans educate their kids may emerge as one of the biggest dramas of the Obama term. Here are the components of that perfect storm for change that Mr. Duncan describes:
There's virtually a national consensus -- one that certainly includes business leaders panting for a better-prepared work force -- that America's ossified education system needs a big shake-up. Moreover, a bipartisan trail toward real change was blazed by the Bush administration (which gets too little credit for doing so).
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos on Sunday called for using tens of millions of dollars in federal economic stimulus money "to disrupt the status quo" in Milwaukee Public Schools in a bid to increase student achievement.
Making school days for kindergarten through eighth grader longer by something less than an hour a day and pushing the entire MPS system to switch to a "year-round" schedule, in which summer vacation is shortened, were two of the ideas suggested by Andrekopoulos.
He also called for improving teaching quality by giving staff members more time to prepare for class and collaborate with other teachers and by providing teachers more training.
Andrekopoulos said the short time frame being set for spending economic stimulus money and the urgency of improving student achievement mean that MPS should aim to implement the changes by the start of the coming school year. Decisions must be made by about May 1, he said.
A set of public meetings will be held, beginning Wednesday, to get public reaction and allow people to make their own suggestions on what MPS should do.
This web site is an outgrowth of an op-ed piece that I wrote on grade inflation for the Washington Post, "Where All Grades Are Above Average" In the process of writing that article, I collected data on trends in grading from about 30 colleges and universities. I found that grade inflation, while waning beginning in the mid-1970s, resurfaced in the mid-1980s. The rise continued unabated at virtually every school for which data were available. By March 2003, I had collected data on grades from over 80 schools. Then I stopped collecting data until December 2008, when I thought it was a good time for a new assessment.
I now have data on average grades from over 180 schools (with a combined enrollment of over two million undergraduate students). I want to thank those that have helped me by either sending information or telling me where I can find it. I especially want to thank Chris Healy and Lee Coursey who, combined, uncovered over 50 web sites with detailed data. Chris Healy has written a research paper with me on the topic of grading at American colleges and universities that we finished March 2, 2009; preprints are available upon request. I also want to thank those that have sent me emails on how to improve my graphics. Additional suggestions are always welcome.
A group of university lecturers have painted a bleak picture of the falling standards of British higher education in a 500-page dossier presented to an MPs' inquiry.
The academics warn of an across-the-board dumbing down with degrees becoming increasingly easy, widespread plagiarism and institutional pressure from university bosses to award students higher grades than they deserve.
The lecturers come from a wide range of universities including Oxford, Birmingham, Cardiff, Sussex and Manchester Metropolitan, reported The Sunday Times.
Graduates throwing mortarboards in the air
The aim of the dossier, which blames the problems on university expansion without adequate funding, is to force Universities Secretary John Denham to take action to safeguard standards of higher education.
One academic to give evidence is Stuart Derbyshire, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birmingham University.
Walking the halls of Cecil D. Hylton High School outside Washington, it is hard to detect any trace of the divisions that once seemed fixtures in American society.
The United States has experienced the greatest surge in immigration since the early 20th century, with one in five residents a recent immigrant or a close relative of one. This series examines how American institutions are being pressed to adjust.
Students in Hylton High School's program for English learners, like Leon Peng and Nuwan Gamage, at right, cross paths in the hallways with mainstream students. But the groups seldom socialize. More Photos >
Two girls, a Muslim in a headscarf and a strawberry blonde in tight jeans, stroll arm in arm. A Hispanic boy wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt gives a high-five to a black student with glasses and an Afro. The lanky homecoming queen, part Filipino and part Honduran, runs past on her way to band practice. The student body president, a son of Laotian refugees, hangs fliers about a bake sale.
But as old divisions vanish, waves of immigration have fueled new ones between those who speak English and those who are learning how.
Walk with immigrant students, and the rest of Hylton feels a world apart. By design, they attend classes almost exclusively with one another. They take separate field trips. And they organize separate clubs.
The National Education Association appears to be humming "Stand By Your Man," even after President Barack Obama promoted both merit pay and an expansion of charter schools in his recent comments about education.
What gives? Whenever a conservative leader talks about pay differences for educators instead of one-size-fits-all raises, teachers' unions say "no," "no" and, "hell, no." And whenever a Republican supports charter schools, NEA members start calling politicians enemies of public schools.
In a statement released after Obama's "cradle-to-career" education speech last week, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel welcomed Obama's "vision" for strengthening public education and said, "He's off to a solid start. ... His 'cradle-to-career' proposal mirrors what NEA and its 3.2million members have been advocating."
The union clearly heard what it wanted to hear (more money) and ignored much of Obama's talk. Merit pay, charter school expansion and more school accountability are not what the union has been advocating. Given the NEA's glowing review, I wondered if the union would even have blinked if the president demanded an end to undemocratic, mandatory unionism. (That was not on Obama's radar, needless to say.)
Create a budget and stick to it. Shop around for the best price. Pay off credit-card balances each month.
Roy Kobert set aside his work as a bankruptcy attorney one Friday morning to teach these and other personal-finance lessons at Boone High School. He starts by showing the 11 students of this senior-level business class a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Parnell touts a book called, "Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford." He garners laughs then delves into the basics.
The students listen up. Three say they already have credit cards. One says his dad makes him read books by personal finance expert Suze Orman. All say most of their friends have no idea how to manage money.
"They spend stuff on little stuff," says Hillary Haskins, a 17-year-old senior. "It adds up."
Mr. Kobert knows many adults never will master what he's teaching. But with the economy spiraling, interest in financial literacy is growing. Nationwide, a movement is spreading, with the emphasis on children and young adults who advocates want to reach before credit-card companies do.
Congressional Democrats succeeded this week in crippling a school choice program operating in the nation's capital. For the last five years, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships have made private schooling affordable to 1,700 poor children. Rather than reauthorizing the program for another five-year term, Democrats have all but ensured it will die after next year.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat, has asked D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to prepare for the return of voucher students to the city's broken public schools.
Sen. Ted Kennedy's office claims the senator opposed the voucher program from the start because it "takes funds from very needy public schools to send students to unaccountable private schools." (The House Budget Committee holds hearings today on the U.S. Education Department budget).
But just how needy are D.C. public schools? To find out, I added up all the K-12-related expenditures in the current D.C. budget, excluding preschool, higher-education and charter school items. The total comes to $1.29 billion. Divide that by the official enrollment count of 48,646 students, and it yields a total per-pupil spending figure of $26,555.
Govanne Martinez said it will be an honor to be in the first ninth-grade class at St. Anthony School.
Sebastian Pichardo said, "I want to test how smart I am, how much I can achieve." The best way to do that, he thinks, is to stay at the school where he has been since he was 4 years old.
The two St. Anthony eighth-graders are among more than 90 students who have enrolled in what will be the first new Catholic high school in the Milwaukee archdiocese in more than 25 years. It also will be the first Catholic high school to operate on the south side and within the boundaries of the city of Milwaukee since St. Mary's Academy closed in 1991.
St. Anthony is already the largest kindergarten through eighth-grade school in Milwaukee, with 1,045 students, all but a handful participants in the publicly funded private-school voucher program. That makes the school one of the largest Catholic grade schools in the United States
And now: St. Anthony, the high school.
School leaders plan to add a grade a year and reach 400 students or more by the fifth year.
A building just north of W. Mitchell St. on S. 9th St. is expected to house the high school for the first couple years, said Terry Brown, president of the school. That's in the block north of St. Anthony church and the several buildings used now by the school's upper grades.
Sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT), ITA is an innovative, 4-year pre-college technology access and training program for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison Public Schools. Our mission is to prepare students for technical, academic, and personal excellence in today's Information Age.
Each year, ITA competitively recruits 30 students in their final semester of 8th grade to participate in the program. Selected students receive four years of intensive training in preparation for high tech, IT related careers; in addition to intensive academic support in preparation for competitive University admissions and study. The Academy's dual focus on academic excellence and technological literacy prepares promising students for learning and leadership in the 21st century digital age, and continues the University of Wisconsin's long tradition of excellence and service.
Through hands-on training, mentoring, leadership development, community service, and internship opportunities, ITA students develop the knowledge and skills to increase their own, as well as their community's access to technology; while gaining valuable skills and experiences as future leaders and professionals.
ITA is one of only five information technology outreach programs for high school students in the State of Wisconsin, and the only program of its kind and scope in the Madison area.
My daughter took the SAT this morning. The essay question she was asked to answer was more or less what you see in the headline. How is that for a coincidence? She thought it was pretty funny to see the question, and in talking to her about her answer she wrote, I got the first hint ever that she had actually read The No Asshole Rule, or at least parts of it. I hope it helped.....
President Obama outlined his reform agenda yesterday for the nation's public schools in a speech before the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He promoted extending the school day, adopting performance pay for teachers, and encouraging the proliferation of charter schools, to name a few.
But what did he say about math, you are wondering.
Here it is - the math report. Obama's speech mentioned math education explicitly four times:
1. He reminded the nation that economic development and academic achievement go hand in hand and that the federal government can play a significant role.
"Investments in math and science under President Eisenhower gave new opportunities to young scientists and engineers all across the country. It made possible somebody like a Sergei Brin to attend graduate school and found an upstart company called Google that would forever change our world," he said.
In his education speech earlier this week, President Barack Obama described the U.S. education system in some pretty dire terms. He used some dramatic numbers to back up his claims.
The problem is that as our ability to get data has improved, the education establishment's ability to evade the consequences of data has improved, too. Most districts don't use data to reward good teachers. States have watered down their proficiency standards so parents think their own schools are much better than they are.
As Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me, "We've seen a race to the bottom. States are lying to children. They are lying to parents. They're ignoring failure, and that's unacceptable. We have to be fierce."
I was born in April. I used to have positive feelings about the month, notwithstanding T. S. Eliot's observation about its cruelty, although lately my birthday has become just another reminder of my rapid decline into irrelevancy and ruin. The other problem with April is that it is, by far, the worst month for college-bound high school seniors. Twelfth-graders are among my best sources, so I sense their pain and want to help ease it.
Everything piles up in April. The month starts with often frightful news about which colleges accepted you and your friends, and which didn't. By the end of the month you have to decide which school should get your unrefundable deposit to reserve a place in its freshman class. Your favorite school may have wait-listed you, and you have to figure out what to do about that. Your Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate final exams are just a month away, and you don't want to embarrass yourself. It's spring, so your social life may be heating up, maybe for the first time in your adolescence if you were a bookworm like me. You have to worry about your parents interfering in all these important personal decisions. They will be concerned about how college is going to fit into the family finances, which don't look so good this year.
Here is my helpful guide to surviving April. Since it is still March, you have time to think and prepare. Let me know how it works for you.
They called Superintendent Carlos Garcia a "champion for charter school equity," saying he helped the charters get funding from the city's Rainy Day Fund and Proposition A's parcel tax.
The bestowers of the award also pat the school board on the back.
"The SFUSD Board of Education has also played a strong authorizing role in recent years and recognizes the special contributions charter schools make to public schools in San Francisco," the association said in its announcement.
I would not be surprised if Madison has more charter schools - in 10 years.
It's not enough to just worry about how your revenues are going to look at the end of this quarter, and it's also not enough to be thinking about how your business is going to adapt to new realities in the coming years. We need to take a serious step back and also analyse the state of education, and what it's going to mean (and look like) in the future.
None of us are going to have any modicum of success if we can't hire, develop and nurture the right talent out of school. It's also going to be increasingly challenging if those young people are not prepared for the new realities of the new workplace.
While in New York City recently for a series of meetings, I was introduced to a senior publishing executive who was intrigued by the topic of my forthcoming book (Six Pixels of Separation, expected in September). It turns out said executive has a son who is about to complete his MBA at an Ivy League school. The problem (according to this industry executive) is: "Where is he going to work? All of those jobs are either gone, or people with tons more experience are willing to do them for a fraction of what they were paying only six months ago." It's not an uncommon concern, and the obvious fear in this father's tone of voice is becoming much more apparent in conversations with other business professionals who have young adult children about to enter the workforce.
There was an impressive breadth of knowledge and a welcome dose of candor in President Obama's first big speech on education, in which he served up an informed analysis of the educational system from top to bottom. What really mattered was that Mr. Obama did not wring his hands or speak in abstract about states that have failed to raise their educational standards. Instead, he made it clear that he was not afraid to embarrass the laggards -- by naming them -- and that he would use a $100 billion education stimulus fund to create the changes the country so desperately needs.
Mr. Obama signaled that he would take the case for reform directly to the voters, instead of limiting the discussion to mandarins, lobbyists and specialists huddled in Washington. Unlike his predecessor, who promised to leave no child behind but did not deliver, this president is clearly ready to use his political clout on education.
It's a classic political face-off: a seasoned professional with a mile-long résumé and a host of influential backers versus a relative neophyte with a fervent grassroots base.
It happened in last year's presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and it's happening in Wisconsin now, in the race to run the state Department of Public Instruction.
Standing in for Clinton is Tony Evers (tonyevers.com), currently deputy superintendent to retiring DPI head Elizabeth Burmaster. Evers, 57, is the choice of the state's education establishment, including unions and professional groups representing teachers and administrators.
This kind of backing has been critical to Burmaster and her predecessors, who've had little trouble dispatching challengers over the last two decades. The easy analysis is that heavy union spending should ensure Evers' victory April 7.
That is, unless Rose Fernandez (changedpi.com) pulls an Obama.
Fernandez, 51, who finished a close second in the five-way Feb. 17 primary, is a pediatric nurse who became a parent activist on behalf of families of children enrolled in "virtual" schools. She led the charge for the online academies after their existence was threatened by a court ruling sought by DPI.
The race is officially nonpartisan, and both candidates eschew identifying with political parties. But as in past races, the candidates and their supporters seem to fall into two camps: center/left (Evers) or right (Fernandez). And the campaigns reflect the ideological fissures dominating discourse regarding education reform.
Henry Tyson shows how urban education can succeed in the right setting.
"I never wanted to be involved in helping the poor. My mother was born in Africa and was always very sympathetic toward the poor and people of other races. But the whole inner-city thing came about during my senior year at Northwestern," says the superintendent of Milwaukee's St. Marcus School.
"I was majoring in Russian, so in the summer of my junior year, I went to Russia. I absolutely hated it - just hated it. So when I got back to school, I realized I had a problem figuring out what to do next," he remembers.
About that time, he was having a discussion with a black friend, "and she basically told me I didn't have a clue what it was like in the inner city. She challenged me to do an 'Urban Plunge,' which is a program where you spend a week in an inner-city neighborhood.
"We were in the Austin neighborhood, on the West Side of Chicago. It was a defining moment for me," he says. "I was so struck by the inequity and therefore the injustice of it all. I couldn't believe that people lived - and children were growing up! - in such an environment, such abject poverty."
"I knew after that week that I wanted to work with the urban poor. I felt a deep tug, like this was what I was meant to do. In my view, it was like a spiritual calling."
The internet is an invaluable resource to self-educated learners. Below is a list of some of the most helpful sites out there including opencourseware materials, free libraries, learning communities, educational tools, and more.
Including links to individual classes would make this list too long. So, I've added umbrella links that will help you find the material you need with just a little searching. For example, instead of listing individual classes, I've provided links to college opencourseware websites and course directories. From there, you'll be able to find the individual subjects you're interested in.
Sometime after my 15th birthday, to judge by the available evidence, I began inscribing my name on the inside of each new book that came into my library, along with the date of acquisition - a habit that continued for 20 years and more. The initial impulse seems very typically adolescent: a need to claim ownership of some little part of the world, and to leave your mark on it.
But there was a little more to it than that. It was a ceremony of sorts, a way to mark the start of my relationship with the book itself. For a while, I also noted when I started and finished reading it.That level of precision came to an end soon enough. In my twenties, the record dwindled to just an indication of the month and year the book reached me. By my thirties the whole routine started collapsing, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of printed stuff coming across my desk. The wide-eyed expectation that any given book might open some new chapter in my life was worn away. It happened, but not that often. Moments of inner revolution occur only just so frequently. In the meantime you had to keep moving.
The impulse to "brand" certain volumes was still there: I developed a fairly precise system for annotating texts, when necessary. But experience had proven the wisdom of Francis Bacon who responded to the publishing explosion of the early 17th century with a plainspoken call for a system of triage in handling the claims on one's attention.
The President's speech today includes a lot of interesting tidbits, a shout-out for performance pay, a call to lift charter school caps, and even a very pro-Broad Prize signal embedded in the data section. I've been lukewarm on some of the stimulus, more on that later, but this is an important speech. They're scrambling on 16th Street...
[National Education Association President Dennis] Van Roekel insisted that Obama's call for teacher performance pay does not necessarily mean raises or bonuses would be tied to student test scores. It could mean more pay for board-certified teachers or for those who work in high-poverty, hard-to-staff schools, he said.
However, administration officials said later they do mean higher pay based on student achievement, among other things.
Hmmm...doesn't seem like they both can be right...
A few basic goals of high school mathematics will be looked at closely in the top programs chosen for high school by the state of Washington. Our concern will be with the mathematical development and coherence of the programs and not with issues of pedagogy.
Algebra: linear functions, equations, and inequalities
We examine the algebraic concepts and skills associated with linear functions because they are a critical foundation for the further study of algebra. We focus our evaluation of the programs on the following Washington standard: A1.4.B Write and graph an equation for a line given the slope and the y intercept, the slope and a point on the line, or two points on the line, and translate between forms of linear equations.
We also consider how well the programs meet the following important standard: A1.1.B Solve problems that can be represented by linear functions, equations, and inequalities.
Linear functions, equations, and inequalities in Holt
We review Chapter 5 of Holt Algebra 1 on linear functions.
The study of linear equations and their graphs in Chapter 5 begins with a flawed foundation. Because this is so common, it will not be emphasized, but teachers need to compensate for these problems.
Three foundational issues are not dealt with at all. First, it is not shown that the definition of slope works for a line in the plane. The definition, as given, produces a ratio for every pair of points on the line. It is true that for a line these are all the same ratios, but no attempt is made to show that. Second, no attempt is made to show that a line in the plane is the graph of a linear equation; it is just asserted.
Third, it not shown that the graph of a linear equation is a line; again, it is just asserted.
Richard Rivera joined the Algebra Project at exactly the wrong time.
After three years at charter schools, Rivera returned to the Los Angeles Unified School District last year as a math coach -- a kind of roving instructor and supervisor -- at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park. He also agreed to work on the Algebra Project, a new program designed to keep low-achieving students involved in math.
But even though Rivera spent a decade teaching in the district, he lost his seniority with L.A. Unified because of his foray into the charter world. Because the district lays off teachers based on the amount of time they've worked for the school system, Rivera is now in danger of losing his job, and the Algebra Project might stall before it even begins.
If Rivera and other younger teachers involved in the program leave, the school goes "right back to square one," said John Samaniego, the principal at Burbank, where test scores have slowly been rising.
Samaniego's dilemma is common throughout the state as districts prepare to issue preliminary layoff notices to teachers by Friday and principals try to determine their plans for next year. The Los Angeles Board of Education is scheduled to vote today on whether to issue these notices to about 9,000 employees, including 5,500 teachers, because of an expected $700-million budget shortfall.
President Obama's education speech this morning was, in my memory, the largest assemblage of smart ideas about schools ever issued by one president at one time. Everyone will have a different favorite part -- performance pay models for teachers, better student data tracking systems, longer school days and years, eliminating weak state testing standards, more money for schools that improve, more grants for fresh ideas, better teacher training, more charter school growth, faster closing of bad charters and many more.
The speech puts Obama without any further doubt in the long line of Democratic party leaders who have embraced accountability in schools through testing, even at the risk of seeming to be in league with the Republican Party. His explicit endorsement of the tough Massachusetts testing system -- a favorite of GOP conservatives -- will irritate many teachers and education activists in his own party, but that group of Democrats has not had a champion who has ever gotten closer to the presidency than former Vermont governor Howard Dean, and we know how his candidacy turned out.
The problem, which the president did not mention, is that he has limited power to make any of these things happen. His speech was full of encouraging words to state and school district officials, who will be the true deciders. True, he has some money to spread around for new ideas. But the vast bulk of the budget stimulus dough will go, as he said, to saving jobs in school systems.
Prince William County elementary schools will continue to teach mathematics with a textbook series that has drawn parent criticism and national scrutiny, despite deep divisions in the community over whether students should be given other options.
The curriculum from Pearson Education, "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," which is used in thousands of classrooms nationwide, has been debated virtually since Prince William began using it three years ago under the administration of Superintendent Steven L. Walts. Critics say it fails to help students learn basic skills and facts.
But educators who have championed "Investigations" say it helps students develop a deeper conception of math fundamentals before they take on complicated topics. The debate shows no signs of going away.
Last week, the Prince William School Board split 4 to 4 on a proposal that would have allowed parents to choose between "Investigations" and a more traditional math curriculum. Opponents of the proposal, which failed Wednesday on the tie vote, said that it would have been cost prohibitive and that education would have suffered.
Our urban and suburban school districts are under tremendous pressure to be all things for all students. Special learning needs and unique learning styles complicate the process of providing each student with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).
I have served in conventional schools and public charter schools in the Milwaukee area. I've found that every school has its strengths as well as its needs to improve.
I am currently a speech therapist in two Milwaukee public charter schools, the Downtown Montessori Academy and Inland Seas High School. Yes, charter schools are actually public schools. Yes, many public charter schools provide special education services for frequently occurring disabilities.
Teaching at a charter school allows me to think outside the box as I serve my students. Public charter schools can offer teachers greater autonomy to be innovative in the classroom. For example, if a school's reading program is not serving the needs of a classroom, charter schools have the autonomy to make changes as needs are identified. I think the ability to initiate necessary changes is where the "can-do" attitude of fellow teachers in charter schools comes from.
Many of Milwaukee's charter schools are based on cutting-edge curriculums that serve a variety of learning styles. One option is referred to as "project based," where students design and carry out a learning project of their particular interest. Another option is the student-led, teacher-guided Montessori environment. Direct instruction is a teacher-led style of learning that uses the repetition of very small, specifically targeted learning goals.
Most college students would likely concur - fifty minute lectures can be a bit much. With current research indicating that attention spans (measured in minutes) roughly mirror a students age (measured in years), it begs the question as to the rationale behind lectures of such length.
Given that it is tough to justify the traditional lecture timeframes, it is no surprise to see online educational programs seeking to offer presentations that feature shorter podcasts. But in an astonishing switch, David Shieh of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently took a look at a community college program that features a microlecture format, presentations varying from one to three minutes in length.
The Micro-Lecture
While one minute lectures may be beyond the scope of imagination for any veteran teacher, Shieh reports on the piloting of the concept at San Juan College in Farmington, N.M. The concept was introduced as part of a new online degree program in occupational safety last fall. According to Shieh, school administrators were so pleased with the results that they are expanding the micro-lecture concept to courses in reading and veterinary studies.
One-in-10 pupils in some areas were given places parents refused to name on application forms amid unprecedented competition this year.
In at least 32 areas, more children were forced to accept unwanted secondary schools for this September compared to 2008.
Across London, almost 4,700 pupils failed to get into any favoured school.
Critics said the disclosure made a mockery of Government claims of school choice in the state education system.
Samantha Jellett, 34, a freelance music teacher from Knebworth, Hertfordshire, failed to win any of her preferred choices for daughter Lydia, 10.
The child was rejected from the sought-after Barnwell School and has been told to attend the Thomas Alleyne Comprehensive in Stevenage, four miles away.
She described the admissions process as "haphazard and unjust".
"They have removed every element of choice we had and placed our children at a school we know little about and have never seen," she said. "Parents should not be put in this situation."
It came as research showed the lengths parents are prepared to go to ensure pupils get into best schools.
The Good Schools Guide used census data to map schools and the postcodes of pupils admitted over the last few years.
Kimberly Lynch, a redhead with freckles, had a keen interest in sunblock. So much so that she spent the past year developing a new method to test the effectiveness of sunscreens and recently submitted the results to a medical journal.
The 17-year-old senior at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, N.J., is quite a bit younger than most scientists submitting papers to accredited medical journals. Then again, Lynch doesn't go to a typical public high school.
Bergen Academies, a four-year high school, offers students seven concentrations including science, medicine, culinary arts, business and finance, and engineering. It even has its own stem-cell laboratory, where Lynch completed her experiments under the guidance of biology teacher Robert Pergolizzi, a former assistant professor of genetic medicine at Cornell University.
The stem-cell lab, where students work with adult stem cells and mouse stem cells, and the nanotechnology lab down the hall, which has a high-powered scanning electron microscope, have hundreds of thousands of dollars of cutting-edge equipment.
"I've done internships at different labs in the area, and none of them had the equipment we have here," Lynch said.
The Hong Kong education system has become far too complex and exam-oriented with regard to teaching English. For example, the Education Bureau's websites are so difficult to understand and navigate that many public schools are hiring native-English-speaking consultants to break down new senior secondary curriculum guides and assessment modules.
This is all being done in the name of the HKCEE, an acronym that strikes fear into many a secondary student. This is a dysfunctional system. English needs to be taught as a means to communicate, not as an end product used to pass exams. The bureau is neglecting the core, instinctive method of learning a language.
The driving forces behind learning a language remain the same whether it is the mother tongue or a secondary one. They include: the need to understand others and to communicate effectively, and the desire to express ones ideas and opinions. It is hard-wired into our brains from birth to strive to master communication, in any form or language. There is what we call "intrinsic motivation". Our children are born with an innate desire to hear and be heard. They seek to mimic, emulate and ultimately understand others. This is not theory, it is fact.
There is a language explosion between the ages of two and six. The average child's vocabulary expands from about 50 words at the age of 18 months to an average of more than 10,000 words by the age of six. Children are not concerned at this age with what language it is, as long as it allows them to communicate their thoughts, emotions and ideas.
If fluent English is the goal for local students, then the whole language and education system in Hong Kong needs to be overhauled and simplified to allow for this crucial period in children's linguistic development. Teaching children in one language and then switching to another simply to prepare for exams ignores the underlying principles of why and how children learn a language. It favours only those who have been immersed in that second language from an early age.
Madison needs to get past its outdated phobia of charter schools.
Charter schools are not a threat to public schools here or anywhere else in Wisconsin. They are an exciting addition and asset to public schools -- a potential source of innovation, higher student achievement and millions in federal grants.
And when charter schools do succeed at something new, their formula for success can be replicated at traditional schools to help all students.
That's what's starting to happen in Madison with the success of a dual-language charter elementary school called Nuestro Mundo. Yet too many district officials, board members and the teachers union still view charters with needless suspicion.
Madison's skeptics should listen to President Barack Obama, who touts charter schools as key to engaging disadvantaged students who don't respond well to traditional school settings and curriculums. Obama has promised to double federal money for charter school grants.
But Madison school officials are ignoring this new pot of money and getting defensive, as if supporting charter schools might suggest that traditional schools can't innovate on their own.
Of course traditional schools can innovate. Yet charter schools have an easier time breaking from the mold in more dramatic ways because of their autonomy and high level of parent involvement.
Several School Board members last week spoke dismissively of a parent-driven plan to create a dual-language charter school within a portion of Sennett Middle School. Under the proposal, Nuestro Mundo would feed its bilingual students into a charter at Sennett starting in the fall of 2010.
I continue to believe that our community and schools would be better off with a far more diffused governance structure, particularly in the management of more than $415,699,322 (current 08/09 budget) for a 24,189 student district. Related: the failed Madison Studio Charter School application.
In gymnastics, performances are judged not just on execution but also on the degree of difficulty. The same system is used in diving and in ice skating. An athlete is of course judged on how well they do something, but their score also includes how hard it was to do that particular exercise.
One of the reasons, in my view, that more than a million of our high school graduates each year are in remedial courses after they have been accepted at colleges is that the degree of difficulty set for them in their high school courses has been too low, by college standards.
Surveys comparing the standards of high school teachers and college professors routinely discover that students who their teachers judge to be very well prepared, for instance in reading, research and writing, are seen as not very well prepared by college professors.
According to the Diploma to Nowhere report issued last summer by the Strong American Schools project, tens of thousands of students are surprised, embarrassed and depressed to find that, after getting As and Bs in their high school courses, even in the "hard" ones, they are judged to be not ready for college work and must take non-credit remedial courses to make up for the academic deficiencies that they naturally assumed they did not have.
If we could imagine a ten point degree-of-difficulty scale for high school courses, surely arithmetic would rank near the bottom, say at a one, and calculus would rank at the top, near a ten. Courses in Chinese and Physics, and perhaps AP European History, would be near the top of the scale as well.
When it comes to academic writing, however, and the English departments only ask their students for personal and creative writing, and the five-paragraph essay, they are setting the degree of difficulty at or near the bottom of the academic writing scale. The standard kind of writing might be the equivalent of having math students being blocked from moving beyond fractions and decimals.
Naturally, students who have achieved high grades on their high school writing, but at a very low level of difficulty, are likely to be shocked when they are asked to write a 10-20-page research paper when they enter college. They have never encountered that degree of difficulty in their high school careers.
It would be as if math students were taking only decimals and fractions, and then being asked to solve elementary calculus problems when they start their higher education.
I was shocked to discover that even the most famous program for gifted students in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which began as a search for mathematically precocious youth, and has very challenging programs for bright students in the summer, when it comes to writing, has sponsored a contest for "Creative Minds" to have students do "Creative Nonfiction." This genre turns out to be like a diary entry about some event or circumstance in the author's life, together with their feelings about it.
This may fit very well with the degree of difficulty in many if not most high school English classes, but, even if is done well (and wins the contest, for example) it falls very short of the expectations for academic writing at the college level.
My main experience for the last thirty years or so, has been with high school writing in the social studies, principally history. I started The Concord Review in 1987, as the only journal in the world for the academic papers of high school students. My expectation was that students might send me their 4,000-word history research papers, of the sort which the International Baccalaureate requires of its Diploma students.
I did receive some excellent IB Extended Essays, and I have now published 846 papers by secondary students from 44 states and 35 other countries, but as time went by, the level-of-difficulty in submissions went up, as did the excellence in their execution.
These students who sent me longer and better essays, did so on their own initiative, inspired, by the chance for recognition, and the example of their peers, to raise the degree of difficulty themselves, even as each set of gymnasts, divers, and ice skaters do for the Olympics ever four years. I began receiving first-class 8,000-word papers, then 13,000-word papers from high school history scholars. The longest I have published was 21,000 words, on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857, by a girl who had also taken time to be a nationally-ranked equestrian, an activity which also features a degree-of-difficulty measure. Students like the ones I publish find themselves mobbed when they get to college, by their peers who have never had to write a research paper before.
We now require too few of our high school students to read nonfiction books--another failure in setting an appropriate degree of difficulty--and we set the degree-of-difficulty level far too low when it comes to academic writing. We should consider giving up this destructive practice of holding the performance of our students to such a low standard, and one that disables too many of them for early success in higher education. Lots of our high school students can and will meet a higher standard, if we just offer it to them.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
This week, education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with " more money than God." Perhaps he was thinking of the $24,600 total per-pupil spending figure I reported last year in the Washington Post and on this blog. If so, he's low-balling the number. With the invaluable help of my research assistant Elizabeth Li, I've just calculated the figure for the current school year. It is $28,813 per pupil.
In his address to Congress and his just-released budget, the president repeatedly called for efficiency in government education spending. At the same time, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have been trying to sunset funding for the DC voucher program that serves 1,700 poor kids in the nation's capital. So it seems relevant to compare the efficiencies of these programs.
According to the official study of the DC voucher program, the average voucher amount is less than $6,000. That is less than ONE QUARTER what DC is spending per pupil on education. And yet, academic achievement in the voucher program is at least as good as in the District schools, and voucher parents are much happier with the program than are public school parents.
In fact, since the average income of participating voucher families is about $23,000, DC is currently spending about as much per pupil on education as the vouchers plus the family income of the voucher recipients COMBINED.
The former engineer has won a national honor for his energetic commitment in the classroom. Last year his young charges, who think he may be the best math teacher anywhere, aced the AP calculus test.
Sam Calavitta presides over what may be the noisiest, most spirited math class in the nation.
He greets each student personally, usually with a nickname ("Butterfly," "Batgirl" and "Champ" are a few) and a fist bump. Then he launches a raucous, quiz-show-style contest.
Boys and girls line up on opposite sides of the room, Calavitta shouts out complex equations from index cards, and the opposing sides clap and cheer with each correct answer.
"State the anti-derivative of the secant function," Calavitta yells.
"The natural log of the absolute value secant x plus tangent x plus c," answers a student correctly.
President Obama's massive education initiative detailed in his proposed budget aims at the right challenge - lifting our schools and narrowing achievement gaps. But huge chunks of his eye-popping $131 billion package, now before Congress, would go for stale federal programs that have long failed to elevate students' learning curves.
Mr. Obama promised a sharp break from President Bush, who often bent scientific findings to advance his favored dogma. Instead, "it's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology," Obama promised at his inauguration.
Few question the president's plea to improve the quality of our schools and colleges, racheting-up our economy's competitiveness. This requires not just retooling auto factories or investing in solar power, but enriching the nation's human capital as well.
To boost school quality Obama declared that he would only fund programs that lift pupil performance. "In this budget," he declared before the Congress, "we will end education programs that don't work." Music to the ears of the empirically minded.
But hard-headed scholars are scratching those craniums over Obama's desire to spend billions more on disparate federal programs that have delivered little for children or teachers over the past decade.
Take Washington's biggest schools effort: the $14 billion compensatory education program, known as Title I, supporting classroom aides and reading tutors for children falling behind. A 1999 federal evaluation showed tepid results at best, largely because local programs fail to alter core classroom practices or sprout innovative ways of engaging weaker students.
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the UC Berkeley, is author of "Standardized Childhood."
Pisa tests 15-year-old students in reading, maths and science. More than 400,000 students from 57 countries and regions took part in 2006 when Hong Kong students came second in science and third in maths and reading. This year, 72 countries and regions will participate. The test takes place from next month until May.
On Monday, the HKCISA appealed to schools to take part after not enough signed up for the test, saying they were too busy dealing with education reforms. The bureau brushed aside the centre's concern the next day, calling it a "false alarm" and saying there was "no question of Hong Kong not participating".
But Professor Ho said the message was wrong. The government failed to "understand the actual situation" and sent out "a wrong message" to the public by misjudging the sampling requirement.
"It was very irresponsible to make such a comment," she said.
Professor Ho also expressed a concern that schools might be pressured by the administration to take part in the test.
"If Hong Kong is lacking students and falls out of Pisa's international rankings, the government will have to take up the responsibility," Professor Ho warned.
She said she had been working on Pisa for 10 years and did not want to see the hard work jeopardised. This year's test was particularly significant because it was the first time Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore would be compared internationally at the same time.
The Wisconsin Virtual Academy, sponsored by the Northern Ozaukee School District, just completed its busiest time of year. As Wisconsin progressed through the open school enrollment period for the 2009-2010 school year, the WIVA bombarded homes around the state with mailings, advertising itself as an online alternative to local schools. School administrators traveled to dozens of locations around the state, offering introductory sessions designed to entice students away from brick and mortar schools, in favor of clicking, scrolling and remotely conferencing through virtual classes.
Wisconsins open enrollment provides more than $6,000 per student in transfer fees to the recipient school district, on behalf of students whose parents choose to send them to public schools outside of their local community. Open enrollment in general carries many benefits for students, providing alternatives in heavily populated areas like Milwaukee, where many different school districts of varying quality and program offerings exist in close proximity. But the WIVA, operated by the McFarland School District, has no geographical association with the majority of its students.
School districts in southern Ozaukee County require between $11,000 and $13,000 in tax revenue per student, collected from federal, state, and property taxes, and other sources. The Wisconsin Virtual Academy receives only the 2008-2009 state transfer payments of $6,322 per student. Unlike traditional schools, the state payment fully funds the virtual program, and coincidentally still provides ample profit for the virtual programs curriculum and software vendors. But any such comparison between a virtual school and a more traditional brick and mortar facility is probably not comparing apples to apples, considering teacher-to-student ratios and well-rounded learning experiences.
The WIVA is operated in partnership with a company called K12, Inc., which even hosts the WIVAs promotional Web site on behalf of the school district. K12 is a publicly-traded, for-profit company based in Virginia, and for the record, the company has no shortage of profit. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008, K12 reported net income of $18 million, on revenues of $226 million, primarily collected from states like Wisconsin, which make tax dollars available to virtual schools.
In what might be the largest number of school closing proposals presented at once, Milwaukee Public Schools officials announced plans Friday to end contracts with six charter schools in the district, including almost all the fledgling small high schools within the North Division complex.
MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said he supported a proposal from School Board Director Michael Bonds, who wants to return North to its original incarnation - a large, comprehensive city high school at 1011 W. Center St.
While Bonds cited the desire from alumni to return North to a large-scale institution, Andrekopoulos said a review of the small schools in the complex revealed failures in test scores and poor student progress.
"We can do better for our kids; the status quo is not acceptable," Andrekopoulos said, though he stopped short of calling the small-schools-within-a-big-school experiment a failure.
"We've created successful small schools," he said. "But we're willing to stand up (and change) something not working."
The high schools in North that could lose their charter contracts include the Truth Institute for Leadership and Service with 171 students, the Genesis School of Business Technology/Trade, Health and Human Services with 233 students, and Metropolitan High School, with 250 students.
The proposal will be discussed at two meetings next week.
Michael Demers is a geography professor at New Mexico State University. He not only uses a standard classroom to teach his students, but also uses the online virtual world, Second Life.
Host Scott Simon speaks with Demers about how this virtual terrain helps his students learn more effectively.
Bill Gates has been quoted as saying (before iPhone) "The computer of the future will be the cellphone". The implications for educators is profound, and should have us re-thinking are attitudes and acceptance of cell phones in the school. I am not blind to the fact that there are sometimes problems associated with the cellphone in the schools, but we should address those by addressing the behavior, not the object. We don't take away a pencil the student is tapping, we address the tapping behavior.
As an administrator for highly at-risk students in a Cincinnati charter high school, I found it much easier to have students use Google SMS to look up words and definitions when they were struggling with reading than using a book. Very few of these students would be caught carrying books home, but they would use their cell phone to help complete assignments.
As we look at HOW cellphones may be implemented today, we also look at Adobe and their role. Captivate lets us easily create microcontent with quizzes, saved in Flash. Flash itself let's students see, create and engage with interactive simulations and games that can have a profound effect on learning. Many Web 2.0 sites are built in Flash, and extend the capabilities of the cellphone beyond what we would have thought possible a few years ago.
When the students of the Conserve School in Wisconsin poured into the auditorium on a blustery morning early this year, they had no inkling of what would follow.
Stefan Anderson, the headmaster, told them that the trustees were essentially shutting down the prep school because of the dismal economic climate. Its four-year program would be converted to a single semester of study focused on nature and the environment.
"We thought we would hear they were cutting financial aid," recalled Erty Seidel, a senior on the wooded campus, which is filled with wildlife and sprawls across 1,200 acres in Land O' Lakes.
Greta Dohl, a student from Iron River, Mich., in her third year at the school, broke down and cried. "I was absolutely heartbroken," she said of the closing.
Now students and parents are banding together and challenging the action, contending the school's underlying financial condition does not look so dire. In fact, the school's endowment would be the envy of many a prep school. With $181 million and 143 students, it has the equivalent of more than $1 million a student.
In a lawsuit filed in State Circuit Court in Wisconsin, the parents argue that the trustees are acting in their own interests -- as officials of a separate, profit-making steel company -- and want them removed from oversight of the school.
Last fall I wrote a post on this blog titled Hacking Education. In it, I outlined my thoughts on why the education system (broadly speaking) is failing our society and why hacking it seems like both an important and profitable endeavor.
Our firm, Union Square Ventures, has been digging deeply into the intersection of the web and the education business in search of disruptive bets we can make on this hacking education theme.
My partner Albert led an effort over the past few months to assemble a group of leading thinkers, educators, and entrepreneurs and today we got them all together and talked about hacking education for six hours.
The event has just ended and my head is buzzing with so many thoughts.
We will post the entire transcript of the event once the stenograpger gets it to us. That usually takes about a week. In the meantime you can see about ten or twenty pages of tweets that were generated both at the event and on the web by people who were following the conversation and joining in.
But here's a quick summary of my big takeaways:
1) The student (and his/her parents) is increasingly going to take control of his/her education including choice of schools, teachers, classes, and even curriculum. That's what the web does. It transfers control from institutions to individuals and its going to do that to education too.
Bruce G. Hammond, a well-regarded educator and former Advanced Placement teacher, is at it again. His organization, Excellence Without AP, has changed its name to the Independent Curriculum Group (ICG). Hammond, based in Charlottesville, is the executive director. The group's new Web site is www.independentcurriculum.org.
I have written before about what I consider his short-sighted opposition to AP, the nation's largest program of college-level courses and tests for high school students. I thought the group's name change was a good sign. I hoped that Hammond had revised a point of view that alienated many AP teachers. I thought he was going to emphasize henceforth his best and most positive point, that good teachers should be able to challenge their students in any way that works best for them, AP or not.
But the announcement of the name change did not go in that direction. Instead, Hammond unveiled a document titled "Twenty of the most fundamental reasons to rethink AP."
I have shared the document with AP teachers I know. They had the same reaction I did: The list betrays an insufferably elitist view of American education. This is not entirely surprising since almost all of the 70-or-so institutions listed on the ICG Web site are small, private schools that cater to affluent families, such as Beaver Country Day in Massachusetts, Putney in Vermont, Fieldston in New York and Crossroads in California. The public schools that I write about most frequently, those that use AP and International Baccalaureate courses and tests to challenge average and below-average students, many of them from low-income minority families, appear to be unfamiliar to the Independent Curriculum Group.
"Even before students learn to write personal essays." !!!
[student writers will now become "Citizen Composers," Yancey says.]
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Eschool News
NCTE defines writing for the 21st century
New report offers guidance on how to update writing curriculum to include blogs, wikis, and other forms of communication
By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor:
Digital technologies have made writers of everyone.
The prevalence of blogs, wikis, and social-networking web sites has changed the way students learn to write, according to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)--and schools must adapt in turn by developing new modes of writing, designing new curricula to support these models, and creating plans for teaching these curricula.
"It's time for us to join the future and support all forms of 21st-century literacies, [both] inside...and outside school," said Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University, past NCTE president, and author of a new report titled "Writing in the 21st Century."
Just as the invention of the personal computer transformed writing, Yancey said, digital technologies--and especially Web 2.0 tools--have created writers of everyone, meaning that even before students learn to write personal essays, they're often writing online in many different forms.
"This is self-sponsored writing," Yancey explained. "It's on bulletin boards and in chat rooms, in eMails and in text messages, and on blogs responding to news reports and, indeed, reporting the news themselves...This is a writing that belongs to the writer, not to an institution."
She continued: "In much of this new composing, we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate."
The report defines this new age of writing as the Age of Composition: a period where writers become composers not through "direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather through what might be called an extracurricular social co-apprenticeship."
Students who go online today and participate in the web's many forms of communication compose their writing in informal contexts, where a hierarchy of the expert-apprentice (or teacher-student) does not exist. Instead, there is a peer co-apprenticeship, where communicative knowledge is exchanged freely.
Yancey provided the recent example of a 16-year-old girl named Tiffany Monk who saved her neighborhood after Tropical Storm Fay hit Melbourne, Florida. By taking pictures and writing eMail messages, she managed to garner enough attention to her stranded neighbors--and all were rescued from the flood.
Everyone was saved because "a 16-year-old saw a need, because she knew how to compose in a 21st-century way, and because she knew her audience," said Yancey. "And what did she learn in this situation? That if you actually take action, then someone might listen to you. That's a real lesson in composition." [Could she have used the telephone?...Will]
Yancey cited another example of composing in which Facebook users decided to write "THIS IS SPARTA" during an Advanced Placement test, then cross it out so that no points would be deducted. More than 30,000 students reportedly participated.
According to Yancey, this light prank shows that students understand the power of networking, and they understand the new audiences of 21st-century composing--their peers across the country and faceless AP graders alike.
"We have moved beyond a pyramid-like, sequential model of literacy development in which print literacy comes first, digital literacy comes second, and networked literacy practices--if they come at all--come third and last," she said.
Her report suggests that multiple models of composing now operate simultaneously, each informed by new publication practices, materials, and vocabulary.
Yancey says there are new questions that writing teachers need to ask. For example:
- The current models of composing deal largely with printed media, and they are models that culminate in publication. When composers blog as a form of invention, rather than a form of publication, what does that do to the print-based models of composing that culminate in publication?
- How do educators mark drafts of a text when revising takes place inside of discrete drafts?
- How and when might educators and their students decide to include images and visuals in compositions, and where might schools include these processes in the curriculum?
- How do educators define a composing practice that is interwoven with eMail, text messaging, and web browsing?
- How does access to the vast amount and kinds of resources on the web alter schools' models of composing? Can we retrofit our earlier models of composing, or should we begin anew?
The report also identifies three tasks that educators should undertake:
1. Articulate the new models of composing that are currently developing. Define composition not as a part of testing or its primary vehicle, but apart from testing. This will bring about a new dimension of writing: the role of writing for the public.
2. Design a new writing curriculum for kindergarteners through graduate students--one that moves beyond an obsessive attention to form.
3. Create new models for the teaching of writing skills. Try not to grade alone; instead, incorporate peer review and networking--and make sure students know how to sift thoughtfully through increasing amounts of information.
NCTE has announced a National Day of Writing (October 20) and plans to develop a National Gallery of Writing intended to expand conventional notions of composition.
Starting this spring, NCTE is inviting anyone to submit a piece of writing for a national gallery of 21st-century composition. Acceptable submissions for this gallery include letters, eMail or text messages, journal entries, reports, electronic presentations, blog posts, documentary clips, poetry readings, how-to directions, short stories, memos, and more.
"By capturing a portrait of how writing happens today--who writes and for what purposes--teachers can better prepare the next generation for success across the full range of 21st-century literacies," said Kent Williamson, executive director of NCTE. "Our hope is that everyone who participates in this initiative will better understand writing as a valuable lifelong practice rather than as something that is done only in school or only by a select group of people."
[Yancey also writes: "Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."] (Take that!, George Orwell!...Will)
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics
Madison School Board: Legislative Session and Fine Arts Task Force
Legislative Informational Community Session: We are holding a special Board meeting to focus on legislative issues on Wednesday April 1 at 6:00pm at Wright Middle School. At this session we will provide updates on school funding and state budget issues that affect the MMSD. We will discuss and share strategies on how the community can get involved in advocating for our schools.
Fine Arts Task Force (FATF) Informational Community Sessions: The focus of each session will be a presentation of the findings and recommendations of the FATF followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete FATF report can be found at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/finearts/ Tuesday, March 10, 6:00-8:00pm, Memorial High School. Thursday, March 12, 6:00-8:00pm, La Follette High School LMC.
"It's like Celsius and Fahrenheit. It's exactly the same thing," he said.
Bob Schaeffer, public education director for the advocacy group FairTest, said a debate over grading scales often reveals the "tyranny of false precision."
"These numbers were not handed down by God on a stone tablet," he said.
To Robert Marzano, a Denver-based education researcher, the typical grading scale is an incomplete measure of student achievement. He recommends bar graphs measuring student achievement on various course topics.
As officials in the Pittsburgh Public Schools prepare to drop a controversial grading scale for a 5-point scale they're calling fairer and more accurate, Dr. Chard, Dr. Marzano and Mr. Schaeffer cautioned that no version is perfect.
All require some degree of teacher subjectivity, and all require careful, thoughtful application, Dr. Chard said.
Mr. Schaeffer said grading scale controversies generate "much more heat than light," yet Dallas and Fairfax, Va., also are in the midst of them now.
Dr. Marzano said as many as 3,000 schools or districts have made some of the improvements he favors, such as expanded report cards with bar graphs breaking down student achievement at the topic level while still giving overall course averages and letter grades. He said the bar graphs can correspond to five-point scales measuring achievement in the topic areas.
The watchword of this year's Brown Center Report is caution--caution in linking state tests to international assessments--"benchmarking" is the term--caution in proceeding with a policy of "algebra for all eighth graders," caution in gleaning policy lessons from the recent progress made by urban schools. State and local budget woes will restrain policymakers from adopting costly education reforms, but even so, the three studies contained herein are a reminder that restraint must be exercised in matters other than budgets in governing education well. All too often, policy decisions are based on wishful thinking rather than cautious analysis. As education evolves as a discipline, the careful analysis of high-quality data will provide the foundation for meaningful education reform.
The report consists of three sections, each discussing a separate study. The first section looks at international testing. Powerful groups, led by the National Governors Association, are urging the states to benchmark their state achievement tests to an international assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). After comparing PISA to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the other major international assessment in which the United States participates, the Brown Center analysis examines findings from a chapter of the 2006 PISA report that addresses student engagement. The chapter presents data on students' attitudes, values, and beliefs toward science.
Scientific knowledge seems to grow at an exponential rate. The sheer amount of data and knowledge and understanding of the world and of the universe keeps growing. That's obvious. But less obvious is the fact that approaches to science education also change over time.
Of course science education still involves teaching students about the current scientific knowledge base. But another part of science education receiving attention is teacher-facilitated inquiry--that is, helping students learn how to ask a scientific question, how to pursue that question through a series of activities, and how to make activities and data sources cohere.
When science teachers adopt innovative curricula, it's important that they structure students' activities as a unit, rather than as a set of linear, discrete events. That's because students learn with deeper understanding when the teacher has woven the concepts and activities into a coherent whole. Recent research by UW-Madison education professor Sadhana Puntambekar has helped to pinpoint how that's done, and how science teachers effectively facilitate classroom discussion.
Coherent presentation of activities in a science unit is especially critical when students use a variety of information resources--for example, books, CD-ROMs, and hypertext systems--along with their hands-on activities. Students need teacher help, or scaffolding, as they work to make sense of all the available information.
It was a rainy Friday evening in Chelsea, and nobody wanted to go home, preferring instead to spit poems from the depths of their tortured teenage souls.
The finals of the New York Knicks Poetry Slam Program were in four days, and a handful of high school poets from around New York City had gathered at the headquarters of Urban Word, a literary arts organization for young people, to cheer Tia-Moné Llopiz as she cried out again in eloquent anguish over her mother's death.
They needed to hear Cynthia Keteku, known as Ceez, come to grips with her girlfriend's dumping her for a boy.
And they could not help but hear Elton Ferdinand III -- even through the walls of the director's office -- crescendo to a state of raging guilt over his mute uncle in Guyana, a man misunderstood.
In their search for identity and their quest to be understood, the teenagers mold metaphors from their jagged-edge experiences and bend rhymes to their own rhythm.
"Ladies and gents, this is more than a silly teen's heartbreak," intoned Lauren Anderson, 16, who attends the Beacon School.
Government guidance that parents should know the results of school entry tests before finalising applications for places is still being flouted.
Research shows more schools in England are using selection tests, and parents already find the system too complex.
The government says its admissions code - which admissions authorities must abide by - is now fairer than ever.
The loophole is that it contains clauses to which admissions authorities "should" adhere - not "must".
On selection tests, the admissions code says: "Grammar schools and other schools, or their admission authorities, which are permitted to use selection by ability or aptitude, should ensure that parents are informed of the outcome of entry tests before they make their applications for other schools."
The high-achieving sixth graders huddled near the gym bleachers to mull their options: African drumming at the Future Leaders Institute, debate team at Democracy Prep or piano at New Heights Academy.
The sixth graders, seven of them, said they were bored with the intellectual pace at Middle School 322 in Washington Heights, so their teachers brought them to the Harlem Education Fair on Saturday to hunt for a new school for the fall.
"I need to be challenged more," said Shirley Reyes, 11, who was checking out the mix of public charter schools and private schools making their pitches. "These schools give you a better opportunity, they give you better test grades."
The bustle inside the gym at City College of New York at 138th Street in Harlem -- organizers said the fair drew about 5,000 people -- reflected just how significantly Harlem's educational landscape has changed over the past decade.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but have latitude in how they operate, are now a major force in the community, with 24 of them serving 6,000 children (across the city, there are about 24,000 students enrolled in 78 charter schools). The neighborhood includes about 70 traditional public schools, 14 Catholic schools and 16 other private schools.
As the demand for higher education has grown, so has the role of community colleges in providing post-secondary education to students. The development of curriculum articulation and school transfer policies is one policy movement that demonstrates the extent to which state policymakers view community colleges as creating greater and broader access for students. Recent research suggests that the presence of a state articulation and transfer policy does not increase the transfer rate of community college students to four-year institutions. However, all such policies are not the same - so we must account for more than just the presence of these policies when assessing their impact, and account for the mechanisms through which they encourage or facilitate student transfers.
We attempt to address this gap in this paper by exploring the relative importance of specific policy components (such as common course numbering or common general education requirements) on post-secondary outcomes, and how such policies differently impact students with different aspirations or economic and ethnic backgrounds. In addition, we explore how the potential impacts of these policies compare with some institution-level policies such as support for tenured faculty, expenditures for student services, or expenditures for instruction. In the end, we find only small effects - concentrated amongst Hispanic students - that state transfer and articulation policies are related to the transfer of students between sectors. In terms of general effects across students, institutional factors regarding faculty tenure at community colleges seem to be more correlated to the propensity of students to transfer between community colleges and four-year institutions.
Wisconsin has won a $2.2 million grant to expand Advanced Placement to low-income students.
Wisconsin's $2.2 million federal Advanced Placement Incentive Program grant will target 46 eligible middle and high schools, benefitting about 26,600 students.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's "Blended Learning Innovations: Building a Pipeline for Equity and Access" grant from the U.S. Department of Education will support a multipronged approach for students from eligible middle and high schools throughout the state. Poverty rates in participating districts range from 40 percent to 83 percent. Statewide, 35 percent of students are economically disadvantaged based on family income levels that qualify them for free or reduced-price school meals.
In the recent Advanced Placement Report to the Nation, Wisconsin had the Midwest's highest participation rate (24.2 percent) for 2008 graduates taking one or more Advanced Placement exams while in high school. Of the 15,677 graduates who took Advanced Placement exams, 973 students, or just 6.3 percent, received a fee waiver because they were from economically disadvantaged families.
State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster noted that the grant employs strategies that engage students at various times in their educational planning and preparation. "We want to increase our support for students so they are ready for the academic challenges of Advanced Placement coursework," she said. "Staff development and business, community, and family partnerships are major components of our effort."
The three-year grant targets 19 high schools and 27 middle schools located in three cooperative educational service agencies (CESAs) and the Madison Metropolitan School District. CESA 7 is headquartered in Green Bay, CESA 9 is headquartered in Tomahawk, and CESA 11 is headquartered in Turtle Lake. The CESAs will coordinate activities associated with the grant.
The Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism seek to increase the understanding and appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout American life. A program of AIGA, these annual awards have been founded by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of the Winterhouse Institute to recognize excellence in writing about design and encourage the development of young voices in design writing, commentary and criticism.
The 2009 awards will be open for entries beginning March 2.
Read about the members of the 2009 jury.
THE TWO TYPES OF AWARDS ARE:
Writing Award of $10,000
Open to writers, critics, scholars, historians, journalists and designers and given for a body of work.
Education Award of $1,000
Open to students (high school, undergraduate or graduate) whose use of writing, in the interest of making visual work or scholarship or cultural observation, demonstrates extraordinary originality and promise.
This awards program is part of a larger AIGA initiative to stimulate new levels of design awareness and critical thinking about design.
ALTHOUGH it wasn't favored to win, and it didn't, "The Class" was film critics' "should win" pick for best foreign-language film. Because this deeply engaging movie addresses the subject of teaching underserved public school students, it points to the obvious larger question of why education itself so often should win, but doesn't.
In the compromised version of the economic stimulus package, it was reported by the Los Angeles Times, education spending was "one of the main sticking points" in securing the necessary votes. While protecting funds for other needs such as healthcare, housing, transportation, green energy, infrastructure, the auto industry, and even banking, why cut education? Why are teaching and learning so routinely deemed expendable when everyone agrees they shouldn't be?
In a bracingly effective way, "The Class" confronts this riddle with the vivid example of a middle school French teacher in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. François Bégaudeau is this teacher as well as the author of "Entre les Murs," the acclaimed novel/memoir on which the film is closely based. Onscreen, he and his actual students make the hectic "ordinaire tragi-comique" of the book three-dimensional. And under the sly direction of Laurent Cantet, their fragmented classroom interactions yield a film celebrated as "seamless" by actor Sean Penn, who headed the jury awarding it the Cannes Festival's Palme d'Or for best picture.
Alexandra Marshall, a guest columnist, is the author of "The Court of Common Pleas" and four other novels.
Ever wish you had the option to get up off the couch and spend the afternoon learning to rock climb, cook, or maybe juggle? Well, we have and that's why we came up with (un)classes. (Un)classes are to continuing education what BarCamps are to conferences -- a lightweight, low-pressure, and most of all fun way to explore topics that interest you without having to make a big up-front commitment.
Unclasses.com is a site to connect people who want to learn about a topic with those in their area who want to teach it. It's basically a marketplace for matching interest with passion. The actual (un)classes can be whatever you want them to be. People in your area suggest things they want to learn, others join, and someone volunteers to teach. It's that simple.
(Un)classes are what we call casual learning, fun people exploring mutual interests in a stress-free (and non-competitive) social setting. And the community is in charge: wanna learn something no one is teaching, create a class and recruit a teacher; have a hobby you love and want to share, offer to teach it and assemble some students.
(Un)classes are all about intellectual curiosity and the joy of learning. They're for people who want to explore the world around them, try out new hobbies, and get out of their boxes one (un)class at a time. If that sounds like you, then you're exactly the type of person we want to form the core of the (un)class community.
Ald. Bob Donovan wrote recently that Bradley Tech High School, the school you made happen with a $20 million gift, is "a disgrace that is likely causing Jane Pettit to turn over in her grave."
Fran Croak, who, unlike Donovan, knew you well as your lawyer and close adviser, is confident you're resting comfortably, because there are a lot of good things going on at the school, which is named after your father and your uncle. Unlike Donovan, he spends time in the building and is a member of the commission of community leaders that oversees what's going on.
I thought I'd fill you in on things I saw and heard when I spent a few hours at Tech the other day, as well as in other visits over the years, in case that's helpful in making up your own mind whether to be pleased or horrified.
The community at large appears to be on the horrified side - at least if you listen to the radio talk shows and some similar chatter. But the folks at the school, both adults and kids, are convinced Bradley Tech is pretty much your typical school, except better than some others. They feel like the kid who incurs the teacher's wrath even though everyone else did worse things - except in this case, it's the wrath of the TV helicopters circling overhead after a fight in the school.
Of course, high schools these days - even in the suburbs (did you hear about the New Berlin Eisenhower mess?) - aren't like they were when you were a student.
There are good aspects to that. A lot of kids, at Bradley Tech and elsewhere, are doing more sophisticated work than you did in high school, not only because of the changes in technology, but because expectations are so different. College wasn't a must in your day the way it is in the eyes of many kids now, including some at Bradley Tech.
Do you want to grow up one day and become rich? If your answer is yes, then you have come to the right place. Future Investor Clubs of America (FICA) is a national financial intelligence training program for kids and teens ages 8-19. Our primary goal is to provide our student members with the skills to earn, save and invest their money. All training and information is designed to help you reach your goals. How do we do it? The first thing you need to know about FICA's training programs is that our face to face and our online training sessions are presented in a Creative, Fun and Interactive way that keeps students wanting to learn more! As a member you will have an opportunity to attend our fun, exciting, informative Field Trips, Summer Camps and Young Investors Workshops. In addition to face-to-face training programs we will help you design your American Dream Plan and keep track of your goals and objectives using our Young Investors Club Network online training system. Need to earn some fast cash? Use our 99 Ways to Earn Extra Cash training system to find moneymaking ideas.
FUN CITY
If it's ok with you, we would like to help you have a little fun along the way. Once we have taken care of business its FUN CITY we know how to have a good time by visiting entertainment centers like GameWorks, Six Flags, Universal Studios, Dave & Busters! That's not all during our training sessions you will have a chance to win prizes of Cash, Savings Bonds, Video Games, Electronics, Trips and more! New friends are on the way. Get ready to meet some awesome, ambitious, fun loving kids and teens just like you! All our member students are committed to learning to become successful and having fun along the way. You will build life long friendships. In addition we have designed informative field trips to local business and financial districts. If you like to travel, join FICA students on trips to the New York Stock Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, Orlando, Florida and Tokyo, Japan! If this all sounds like fun to you then talk to your parents and complete the contact us form and we will get back to you with a registration package.
Parents, teachers and ministers are all engaged in a deception over our exam system says the former chief inspector of schools
Sitting at the back of the classroom, I cringed. A pupil had given an answer that betrayed his complete misunderstanding of the question. His teacher beamed. "Well done, Johnny," she said, "that is fantastic."
Why, I asked her afterwards, had she not corrected his mistake? She looked at me as if I were mad. "If I'd told him that he'd got it wrong he would have been humiliated in front of the rest of the class. It would have been a dreadful blow to his self-esteem." With a frosty glare she left the room.
Have you looked at your children's exercise books recently? The odds are that the teacher's comments will all be in green ink. Red ink these days is thought to be threatening and confrontational. Green is calm and reassuring and encouraging. If you read the comments, you will probably find that they are pretty reassuring and encouraging, too. The work may not be very good, but the teacher appears to have found it inspirational.
One of my Sunday Times readers wrote in recently to ask why her son's headmaster was so reluctant to tell parents whether children had passed or failed internal school examinations. His line was that school tests were meant to diagnose weaknesses rather than to give a clear view of a pupil's grasp of the subject. He wanted to help his pupils do better and he was worried that honesty might demotivate pupils who were not achieving very much. Did I, she asked, think this was a very sensible idea? I replied that I did not.
Kenya appears to be a fave location among educational researchers of late. A relatively stable country where teacher salaries are low (primary teachers make the equivalent of about $3,500 annually) must be the draw. To study the effects of ability tracking in schools, three U.S. researchers provided the funding to 121 Kenyan schools so that they could double the number of their first grade teachers, enabling class sizes of 45 students instead of 90.
Half of the students were assigned to the new first grade classes based on their ability, a practice pejoratively referred to in the U.S. as 'tracking', and the other half were randomly assigned, regardless of their ability. Researchers found that students in the schools with tracking scored higher--though just a little--on a post-test than their peers in nontracked schools. More important was the fact that the improved performance was consistent across the board at all levels, for low-, medium- and high-scoring students.
Given the inordinate differences between class sizes, the results are likely not generalizable to the U.S., but still of interest.
They built them out of pulleys and levers and ramps and marbles.
Small plastic toys flew, water flowed, dominoes dropped, mousetraps snapped, and, when all was said and done, an incandescent light bulb was switched off and energy-efficient light-emitting diodes were turned on.
That, after all, was the goal of the regional Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on Friday at Discovery World, where more than a dozen high school teams showed off their contraptions, which were designed to complete the simple task of turning off one light and activating another in at least 20 steps.
The team from Pius XI High School did it in 48 steps, culminating in a light bulb representing the sun setting over a tabletop football stadium and banks of LEDs in the scoreboard blazing to life.
Of course, the crowd went wild.
"We run everything, and all of the work is done outside of school," said Patrick Kessenich, a Pius junior and co-captain of the 14-student team. "It's fun to be independent, and it's just great to get together with friends and do something fun."
Seems that in the last 96 hours the zeitgeist about “21st Century Skills” has shifted from lively debate and healthy skepticism to a brawl…was it the debate the other day?
…the burden should be on 21st-century skills proponents to prove that their methods offer a better way to prepare students for college and the workplace. So far, they haven’t done that. And while they say 21st-century skills will only complement the state’s current efforts, it’s not clear that the approach can be implemented without de-emphasizing academic content.
Teachers and parents across the state just don’t know enough about 21st-century skills. The unnerving part is that the proponents don’t seem to know much more.
Congress in the Classroom® is a national, award-winning education program now in its 17th year. Developed and sponsored by The Dirksen Congressional Center, the workshop is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and information on teaching about Congress. The Center will join with the new Institute for Principled Leadership in Public Service in conducting the workshop.
Who Should Attend?
Congress in the Classroom® is designed for high school or middle school teachers who teach U.S. history, government, civics, political science, or social studies. Forty teachers will be selected to take part in the program.
What Will I Learn?
Although the workshop will feature a variety of sessions, the 2009 program will focus on two themes: (1) developments in the 111th Congress, and (2) new resources for teaching about Congress.
Throughout the program, you will work with subject matter experts as well as colleagues from across the nation. This combination of firsthand knowledge and peer-to-peer interaction will give you new ideas, materials, and a professionally enriching experience.
"Until now so much of what I did in my class on Congress was straight theory--this is what the Constitution says," noted one of our teachers. "Now I can use these activities and illustrations to help get my students involved in the class and at the very least their community but hopefully in the federal government. This workshop has given me a way to help them see how relevant my class is and what they can do to help make changes in society."
In sum, the workshop consists of two types of sessions: those that focus on recent research and scholarship about Congress (and don't always have an immediate application in the classroom) and those geared to specific ways to teach students about the federal legislature.
Achievement Effects of Four Early Elementary School Math Curricula Findings from First Graders in 39 Schools
Roberto Agodini, Barbara Harris, Sally Atkins-Burnett, Sheila Heaviside, Timothy Novak, Robert Murphy and Audrey Pendleton [693K PDF]:
Many U.S. children start school with weak math skills and there are differences between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds--those from poor families lag behind those from affluent ones (Rathburn and West 2004). These differences also grow over time, resulting in substantial differences in math achievement by the time students reach the fourth grade (Lee, Gregg, and Dion 2007).
The federal Title I program provides financial assistance to schools with a high number or percentage of poor children to help all students meet state academic standards. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Title I schools must make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in bringing their students to state-specific targets for proficiency in math and reading. The goal of this provision is to ensure that all students are proficient in math and reading by 2014.
The purpose of this large-scale, national study is to determine whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement, thereby providing educators with information that may be useful for making AYP. A small number of curricula dominate elementary math instruction (seven math curricula make up 91 percent of the curricula used by K-2 educators), and the curricula are based on different theories for developing student math skills (Education Market Research 2008). NCLB emphasizes the importance of adopting scientifically-based educational practices; however, there is little rigorous research evidence to support one theory or curriculum over another. This study will help to fill that knowledge gap. The study is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education and is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR) and its subcontractor SRI International (SRI).
BASIS FOR THE CURRENT FINDINGS
This report presents results from the first cohort of 39 schools participating in the evaluation, with the goal of answering the following research question: What are the relative effects of different early elementary math curricula on student math achievement in disadvantaged schools? The report also examines whether curriculum effects differ for student subgroups in different instructional settings.
Curricula Included in the Study. A competitive process was used to select four curricula for the evaluation that represent many of the diverse approaches used to teach elementary school math in the United States:
Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (Investigations) published by Pearson Scott Foresman (Russell, Economopoulos, Mokros, Kliman, Wright, Clements, Goodrow, Murray, and Sarama 2006)
Math Expressions published by Houghton Mifflin Company (Fuson 2006a)
Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics (SFAW) published by Pearson Scott Foresman (Charles, Crown, Fennel, Caldwell, Cavanagh, Chancellor, Ramirez, Ramos, Sammons, Schielack, Tate, Thompson, and Van de Walle 2005)
The process for selecting the curricula began with the study team inviting developers and publishers of early elementary school math curricula to submit a proposal to include their curricula in the evaluation. A panel of outside experts in math and math instruction then reviewed the submissions and recommended to IES curricula suitable for the study. The goal of the review process was to identify widely used curricula that draw on different instructional approaches and that hold promise for improving student math achievement.
We've grown so accustomed to Massachusetts' trailblazer stature in education that perhaps we were a little blasé over its decision to participate in the TIMSS, international assessments of 4th and 8th grade mathematics performance. Nor were we all that surprised to learn that the state's students performed relatively well compared to students from other nations.
Less blasé are we about Minnesota, which for years has demonstrated little more than smug satisfaction over its high standing among American states, but which decided to finally prove its mettle by competing against the world and doing fairly well (as is illustrated here).
I may have finally broken a writing block. Aside from two book chapters in the last couple of months I more or less completed a paper length opinion piece for a report ARK are producing on KM in the Legal Profession. The title includes one of those words which has multiple and different meanings namely render which is allowing me to play games between the poetic meaning and that of rendering something down to fat. As a part of that paper I updated my original three rules of knowledge management to seven principles which I share below.
Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can't make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can't determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.
We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.
In introducing his budget last week, Gov. Jim Doyle said he had "identified" $25 million for a state program aimed at ensuring a college education for students who stay straight and study hard.
But what the Democratic governor's budget proposal doesn't do is either spend that money or set it aside for the Wisconsin Covenant program.
Instead, the money in the phantom appropriation for the college guarantee program would be returned, unspent, to the state's main account at the end of the two-year budget in June 2011.
Why do that?
Doyle budget director Dave Schmiedicke said the line item is intended to serve as a placeholder until the fall of 2011, when the first of thousands of Wisconsin Covenant scholars will be entering college.
Over the past two years, 35,000 students in two grades have signed the Covenant, which guarantees a place in a Wisconsin college and adequate financial aid to any eighth-grader who keeps a pledge to do well in school and keep out of trouble. Department of Administration spokeswoman Linda Barth said that the state will start deciding how many students are eligible after they finish filling out their federal student financial aid forms in January 2011.
Heather Lawnicki -- Señora Lawnickci to her students -- sweeps into her fourth-grade classroom at Heritage Elementary and immediately leads students in singing "Buenas tardes," a popular Spanish tune that gets the children primed to think and speak in Spanish.
The clock is ticking and there's no time to waste: Lawnicki has just 30 minutes to cover lessons in both Spanish and social studies -- on this day "los indios" of Wisconsin, the Indians.
While Lawnicki, who is fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese, delivers most of the instruction in Spanish, she often needs to repeat her questions in English. The children, who appear to have a general grasp of the language, sometimes answer in kind until Lawnicki prompts them to respond in Spanish.
It was not a very big surprise that Gov. Jim Doyle endorsed Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers for the top job at DPI, although the governor's endorsement is valuable and important for the teachers-union-backed contender.
Most Democrats will back Evers.
Most Republicans who make endorsements will back virtual schools advocate Rose Fernandez, the conservative with whom Evers is contending in the April 7 election.
But Fernandez has one Democratic -- or at least sort of Democratic -- backer.
study of 88 British kids, aged between 10 and 12, has discovered that those who regularly text have better reading skills despite the use of txt abbreviations.
The increasing use of abbreviations, phonetic spellings and the dropping of vowels is a constant source of irritation to the Daily Mail-reading crowd, who happily quote anecdotal evidence of declining standards. This promoted researchers at Coventry University to take a more scientific approach, and their findings seem to suggest that texting aids literacy rather than damaging it.
The study, published by the British Psychological Society, got 88 children to compose text messages in response to a range of scenarios, then compared the frequency with each child used textisms with tests of their "reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness". The results indicated that the increased exposure to print, in any form, led to greater literacy with those using most text'isms being more literate.
-- Financial education for individuals and stricter risk controls at banks are needed to counter the psychological biases that led to the mortgage crisis, said Yale University's Robert Shiller, a professor of behavioral economics.
"This crisis was the result of psychological contagion and speculative bubbles and also the result of poor risk management," Shiller, who is also chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC, told reporters in Tokyo. "The real problem is that we weren't managing risk."
A variety of biases in human psychology leads people to make decisions that are against their own self interest, behavioral experts including Shiller say. Behavioral economics combines the findings of psychology with economics and evolved as a challenge to the theory that markets are always efficient.
If our nation's high school teachers had $20 for every time they had to endure the Depth vs. Breadth debate, they all would have retired to mansions in West Palm Beach.
The debate goes like this: Should they focus on a few topics so students have time to absorb and comprehend the inner workings of the subject? Or should they cover every topic so students get a sense of the whole and can later pursue those parts that interest them most?
The truth, of course, is that students need both. Teachers try to mix the two in ways that make sense to them and their students. But a surprising study -- certain to be a hot topic in teacher lounges and education schools -- is providing new data that suggest educators should spend much more time on a few issues and let some topics slide. Based on a sample of 8,310 undergraduates, the national study says that students who spend at least a month on just one topic in a high school science course get better grades in a freshman college course in that subject than students whose high school courses were more balanced.
Madison School District's Outbound Open Enrollment for 2009/2010
648 (2.68% of the District's enrollment) students open enrolled out for the 2009/2010 school year. 217 high school, 127 middle school and 304 elementary students. [704K PDF: pages 14, 15 and 16]
Obama may love charter schools, Georgia may be on the fence, but St. Louis school leaders see charter schools as a vice. While researching our upcoming story about the International Community School and charter school facilities, I learned that last year, as the leaders of St. Louis public schools prepared to sell a bunch of empty school buildings, the district barred certain unwanted buyers: "liquor stores, landfills, distilleries, as well as shops that sell "so-called 'sexual toys,' " writes St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter David Hunn. "They also blackballed charter schools."
This despite the city's 17 public charter schools and 9,500 charter students - and eight new charters expected to open by fall 2010 - writes Bill Schulz of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "Porn shops and liquor stores and charter schools, oh my!" he quipped.
Huhn reports: " 'We tried to buy three,' said Susan Uchitelle, board member at Confluence Academy, a charter school with three campuses and 2,700 students in St. Louis. 'We finally just gave up.... It was made very clear they weren't going to sell to us. They'd show them to us. They'd let us walk through them. But then they'd take them off the market.' "
HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk. Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, however, studies gestures carefully--and not out of idle curiosity. Introspection suggests that gesturing not only helps people communicate but also helps them to think. She set out to test this, and specifically to find out whether gestures might be used as an aid to children's learning. It turns out, as she told the AAAS, that they can.
The experiment she conducted involved balancing equations. Presented with an equation of the form 2 + 3 + 4 = x + 4, written on a blackboard, a child is asked to calculate the value of x. In the equations Dr Goldin-Meadow always made the last number on the left the same as the last on the right; so x was the sum of the first two numbers. Commonly, however, children who are learning arithmetic will add all three of the numbers on the left to arrive at the value of x.
In her previous work Dr Goldin-Meadow had noted that children often use spontaneous gestures when explaining how they solve mathematical puzzles so, to see if these hand-movements actually help a child to think, or are merely descriptive, she divided a group of children into two and asked them to balance equations. One group was asked to gesture while doing so. A second was asked not to. Both groups were then given a lesson in how to solve problems of this sort.
If the effectiveness of giving every student a laptop were measured in enthusiasm, the results so far in the West Bend School District would show success.
Just ask some of the students at Silverbrook Middle School who learned late last year they would participate in a 150-student pilot program of one-to-one computing in the district.
"We were all really excited," said eighth-grader Jaclyn Utrie, 14. "We would ask like every day, 'When are we going to get them?' "
The enthusiasm hasn't died four weeks after the computers arrived, but now it's accompanied by responsibility. They have to prove that giving every student a laptop can improve education, not just in West Bend but also to other schools in the area considering a similar step.
Although several schools in the Milwaukee area, mostly small and private, have given laptops to students or required them to bring their own, West Bend could be the first to experiment with a large, multi-school program.
"What I'm hoping is, if this works, then everyone will have the chance to have one," said Tom Balestrieri, 14, another Silverbrook eighth-grader.
The weight's not entirely on the shoulders of the West Bend students. Some other school districts in the state also are starting to experiment with universal laptop programs.
The Pewaukee School District plans to start distributing some sort of portable technology - be it laptop, tablet or hand-held device - to its eighth-graders in fall.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is putting together a group of micro-essay for teaching poetry to beginning writers. Though I'm not really a teacher, he asked me nonetheless. And since I have so many dear dear friends beginning their semesters this week, this goes out to them. Thanks JMW for inviting me to participate.
Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry
Because I work outside of the academic field, I don't get the opportunity to teach very often, but when I do, I'm surprised by how many people read poems as if they can have only one meaning. In my own experience, I find it nearly impossible to hear the beauty and
meditative joy of a poem's lines, or the sensual sounds of a syllable, when I'm reading solely for narrative sense. So, I've come to think that one of the first things to learn about poetry is to simply relax in its mystery. We need to learn that a poem can have many meanings and that it can be enjoyed without a complete understanding of the
poet's intent. On a good day a poem might bring you great joy, on a tough day, the same poem might reveal great agony, but the poem hasn't changed--it's what you have brought to the poem that has changed. The more you read a poem, the more time you spend with it, read it out loud to yourself or to others, the more it will open to you--start to wink and flirt and let you in. A poem is a complex living thing, its multiple edges and many colors are what makes this singular art form so difficult to define. There is an ancient Chinese Proverb that says, "A bird sings not because he has an answer, but because he has a
song." That is how I have come to think about poetry--that a poem isn't a problem to solve, but rather it's a singular animal call that contains multiple layers of both mystery and joy.
President Obama made education a big part of his speech Tuesday night, complete with a stirring call for reform. So we'll be curious to see how he handles the dismaying attempt by Democrats in Congress to crush education choice for 1,700 poor kids in the District of Columbia.
The omnibus spending bill now moving through the House includes language designed to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program offering vouchers for poor students to opt out of rotten public schools. The legislation says no federal funds can be used on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress and the D.C. City Council reauthorize it. Given that Democrats control both bodies -- and that their union backers hate school choice -- this amounts to a death sentence.
Republicans passed the program in 2004, with help from Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, and it has been extremely popular. Families receive up to $7,500 a year to attend the school of their choice. That's a real bargain, given that D.C. public schools spend $14,400 per pupil on average, among the most in the country.
To qualify, a student's household income must be at or below 185% of the poverty level. Some 99% of the participants are minority, and the average annual income is $23,000 for a family of four. A 2008 Department of Education evaluation found that participants had higher reading scores than their peers who didn't receive a scholarship, and there are four applicants for each voucher.
Two Madison teenagers have landed among the 40 finalists in the country's top science competition for high school students, a rare twofer for a public school district.
West senior Gabriela Farfan and Memorial senior Suvai Gunasekaran will compete next month in Washington, D.C., for hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes in the Intel Science Talent Search.
"It's impressive," said John Kalvin, an Intel manager in Chicago, referring to the double finalists from one district. "It's a testament to the kind of teaching taking place here -- and the talent here."
Farfan, 18, a mineral and gemstone collector, broke new ground in trying to determine why a type of feldspar known as Oregon sunstone appears red when viewed from one angle and green when viewed from another. Gunasekaran, 18, focused on developing new methods to inhibit bacterial biofilm growth on the surface of implanted medical devices.
Each student already has won $5,000 and a laptop computer as a finalist.
One May afternoon in Boston, 85 teachers in training arrived at the bayside campus of the University of Massachusetts for a three-hour class called Family Partnerships for Achievement. The instructors had invited several public school parents to come in and offer the future teachers advice. Take advantage of technology, said one parent. Among mobile families in poverty, home addresses and telephone numbers may be incorrect. Cell phones are a better bet. Text messaging really works. Take a walk around the neighborhood. Another suggestion: find out where your students shop and hang out.
Look parents in the eye, added an instructor. Say, "Hi, It's great to see you." It's difficult to discuss academics or ask parents to do anything for you before you get to know them.
Family Partnerships for Achievement is not a course typical of most master's programs in education. The course was designed with one overriding goal: to prepare teachers to be effective in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). This goal drives every aspect of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR), a district-based program for teacher training and certification that recruits highly qualified individuals to take on the unique challenges of teaching in a high-need Boston school and then guides them through a specialized course of preparation.
BTR is one of a new breed of teacher training initiatives that resemble neither traditional nor most alternative certification programs. By rethinking the relationship between training and hiring, these programs have found promising new ways to prepare educators.
President Barack Obama laid out new national goals Tuesday aimed at boosting high school and college graduation rates, but left education experts wondering on how he intends to reach his targets, and how much he is prepared to spend on them.
In his address to Congress, the president signaled a shift in federal education policy toward improving the skills of adults and work-force entrants, following an intense focus on boosting younger students' reading and mathematics attainment under the No Child Left Behind law, the centerpiece of the Bush administration's schools agenda.
Some observers had believed that education would stay on the back burner early in the Obama administration while the president grappled with the economic crisis. But the subject made it to the top tier of the address to Congress partly because Mr. Obama believes he must send Americans a message about the importance of education.
"Of the many issues, this is one where he feels the bully pulpit needs to be used," a White House official said Wednesday.
In his speech Tuesday night, Mr. Obama said "dropping out of high school is no longer an option" and set a goal of the U.S. having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.
According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which tracks college-going among its 30 member countries, the U.S., at 30%, is tied for sixth place in college graduation among those 25 to 34 years of age, 2006 data show, behind such countries as Norway, South Korea and the Netherlands. OECD data suggest that the U.S. was No. 1 until around 2000, but has lost its edge as other countries have stepped up their efforts to promote higher education.
Kevin Carey, policy director of the Education Sector, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., think tank, said the U.S. hasn't been slipping but other countries have been improving. Regaining our former top position represents "a pretty reasonable goal," he says. "It's not moon-shot level."
Achievement test scores at big-city school districts in Texas still lag far behind their suburban and rural counterparts but they're making great strides and narrowing the gap, according to a report by an education think tank released Wednesday.
In Texas, six urban school districts were included in the study: Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.
Three of those -- Dallas, Austin and San Antonio -- are among the top 10 gainers nationally.
The study examined state test scores and demographic information, including race/ethnicity and the percentage of disadvantaged students (those receiving free or reduced lunch), from 2000 to 2007.
It was designed to determine how big-city school districts fared when compared to their suburban and rural peers. The study was able to standardize scores between states, even those using different tests.
Dallas showed the biggest improvement among the large Texas cities, and was 2nd overall nationally. New Orleans topped the list, while Detroit, one of eight districts whose performance declined during the years studied, was last.
In 2000, Dallas was outscored by 100 percent of the state's school districts. By 2007, just 90 percent of suburban and rural districts did better than Dallas -- a significant improvement given its demographics, the study's author said.
Dallas school superintendent Michael Hinojosa embraced the latest findings.
In his address to Congress last night President Obama promised: "We will expand our commitment to charter schools." Today, as the blogosphere buzzes over the speech, education watchers and International Community School teachers alike are taking that commitment seriously.
Calling it "one of the most important lines in President Obama's speech," Kevin Carey, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education's blog Brainstorm, discussed the power presidents have to refocus public education debates. Just as President Bush's focus on testing and accountability all but killed a debate about vouchers that had raged since the Reagan administration, so, Carey argued, "Obama's forceful position on charter schools is likely to have the same effect." Charter school opponents, he wrote: "You're in for a long eight years."
At Politico's blog The Arena, education heavy-hitters weighed in for and against.
"President Obama's enthusiasm for charter schools is baffling. Doesn't he realize that they are a deregulation strategy much beloved by Republicans?" wrote NYU education historian Diane Ravitch, "If he thinks that deregulation is the cure for American education, I have some AIG stock I'd like to sell him."
Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University, was ready to get down to brass tacks. "[The] key," he wrote, "is to switch to funding public schools out of statewide collected taxes instead of funding them out of local property taxes and creating many, many more charter school and private schools where students can cash in the education credit or voucher that their stateought to give them."
Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.
Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.
"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.
Skipping class
Launched less than two years ago, Apple's iTunes university offers college lectures on everything from Proust to particle physics to students and the public. Some universities make their lectures available to all, while others restrict access to enrolled students. Some professors even limit downloads to encourage class attendance, McKinney says.
To find out how much students really can learn from podcast lectures alone - mimicking a missed class - McKinney's team presented 64 students with a single lecture on visual perception, from an introductory psychology course.
Here are the problems from this past Sunday's Moscow Math Festival for Grade 6 [PDF] (1,275 participants) and Grade 7 [PDF] (888 participants), along with a few photos (the competition was held at Moscow State University, using three buildings).
Students from the earliest grades are encouraged to work hard and told that the rewards will follow. Students must realize that a grade is earned for achievement and not for the effort expended.
Yes, some students can achieve at higher levels with far less effort than others.
This mirrors the world beyond college as well.
In my experience as dean, when students complain about a professor's grading, they seem to focus more on their "creative" justifications (excuses) rather than on remedies. Most faculty members stress the remedy that leads to achievement of instructional goals.
The time-honored mastery of the material should remain paramount. After all, this is what our society expects!
Alfred S. Posamentier
Dean, School of Education
City College of New York, CUNY
New York, Feb. 18, 2009
•
To the Editor:
As someone who recently went through the ordeal of contesting a grade, I was quite impassioned on reading your article. I have done this only once in four years, so not all of us take the matter lightly.
I resent the suggestion that students feel "entitled" to "get/receive" good grades.
What is so irrational about believing that hard work should warrant a high grade? I would argue that the very core of the American dream is the sentiment that one can achieve any greatness that he or she aspires to if he or she works hard enough.
When one puts one's all into a class, it's not shameful to hope that grades reflect that. The same applies to professionals and their salaries. Instead of psychoanalyzing their students, perhaps these professors should ask themselves this question: If your students are all really this despicable, why are you teaching?
Aimee La Fountain
New York, Feb. 18, 2009
The writer is a senior at Marymount Manhattan College.
A new report calls on English instructors to design a new curriculum and develop new pedagogies -- from kindergarten through graduate school -- responding to the reality that students mostly "write to the net."
"Pencils are good; we won't be abandoning them," said Kathleen Blake Yancey, author of "Writing in the 21st Century," a report from the National Council of Teachers of English."They're necessary, as a philosopher would put it, but not sufficient to the purpose."
Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University and immediate past president of NCTE, described by way of example the case of Tiffany Monk, a Florida teen who, during a flood caused by Tropical Storm Fay, observed that her neighbors were trapped in their homes. She took photos and sent an e-mail to a radio station; help soon arrived.
"This was composing in the 21st century. She chose the right technology, she wrote to the right audience," Yancey said, during a panel presentation at the National Press Club Monday.
Where did Monk learn to do this? Not in school, said Yancey, where "we write on a topic we haven't necessarily chosen. We write to a teacher; we write for a grade."
Also on Monday, NCTE announced a National Day of Writing (October 20) and plans to develop a National Gallery of Writing intended to expand conventional notions of composition. Starting this spring, NCTE is inviting anyone and everyone to submit a composition of importance to them, in audio, text or video form; acceptable submissions for the gallery include letters, e-mail or text messages, journal entries, reports, electronic presentations, blog posts, documentary clips, poetry readings, how-to directions, short stories and memos.
Amid all the focus on new platforms for writing, a panelist who made his name as a nonfiction writer in pre-digital days, Gay Talese, made a case for old-fashioned research methods. Research, he said, "means leaving the desk; it means going out and spending lots of time with people [or books? Will F.]...The art of hanging out, I call it."
"Googling your way through life, acquiring information without getting up, I think that's dangerous," Talese said.
"The modality isn't what's crucial," said Kent Williamson, executive director of NCTE. What is, he continued, is "a commitment to the process" and deep engagement with a subject.
My schooldays were totally great. I went to an all-girls convent and I just remember us all being extremely silly and laughing a lot at the completely stupid things we did.
There were lots of rules so we became extremely creative and were masters at creating totally believable excuses to manoeuvre our way through the system.
Actually, thinking about it I've never laughed like we did at school. But it was nice laughter and we never hurt anyone.
My happiest memory was winning a dancing competition.
I'd never won anything in my life before.
My worst memory was sewing the same apron for two years. I had to keep unpicking it and doing it again because it was always so bad. Even today just trying to thread a needle can reduce me to tears.
Well-off children and very poor children were mixed together and I felt very sad for some of them but sometimes made up nasty songs about them with the others.
It was my son's decision to board at Eton, even though he already had a scholarship to a prestigious day school," said Mr Bali, an engineer with his own consultancy firm.
"Our misgivings were emotional rather than academic. We are a close family. We see him every weekend. Pastoral care is an important issue when choosing a boarding school.
"In some schools pastoral care amounts to pampering, which might appeal to mothers but I think it should be balanced. Boys must learn to stand on their own two feet."
Mr Bali's son eventually managed to convince him that he should go to Eton but the caring father said parents had to be very careful about which boarding school they picked.
Academic standards had to be on a par with top day schools for boarding to be good value.
He was speaking in the wake of a report that found parents considered boarding schools in Britain to be good value for money despite steep fee rises in recent years.
The first-ever National Parent Survey carried out by Britain's Boarding Schools Association (BSA) found that almost three quarters of parents who chose boarding education for their children said it was worth it.
But the Good Schools Guide warned that although parents were broadly in favour of boarding, fee levels were now approaching the psychological £10,000 (HK$111,000) a term mark and schools would have to work harder to justify the cost.
Dramatic changes to a 7-year-old environmentally focused North Woods boarding school have alumni up in arms and parents frantic about finding new schools for their children.
Administrators for Conserve School in Land O'Lakes announced in January they were laying off about half the school's 60-member staff as they begin transitioning to a "semester school" model, where students from other high schools attend for half their junior year.
The blame for the drastic alteration was placed on market conditions that have challenged the future of the young school's $180 million endowment.
But parents, pointing out that the amount of the endowment puts the 145-student school on a per-pupil par with the likes of prestigious Northeast boarding schools Phillips Exeter Academy and Groton School, question the motives of the Chicago steel executives charged with running Conserve.
"My gut tells me, along with a number of other people, is what they are trying to do is they don't want to run a school," said Bill Meier, who has a sophomore son enrolled at Conserve. "It's a pain in the rear to them."
Meier and other parents have requested Conserve School trustees and administrators meet with them and a mediator to find a way to continue running it as one of only three boarding schools in the state.
Their efforts might be too late.
Conserve Headmaster Stefan Anderson said the school was not likely to stick with the four-year college preparatory academy model. The school already has contacted 80 other schools about the possibility of taking freshmen and sophomores who cannot stay during Conserve's transition year, he said.
Unless you're currently in high school or taking an English class in college, chances are that you don't read much poetry. Maybe you think poetry isn't for you - it seems boring, unfathomable, too erudite, or pointless.
However, there are loads of great reasons to read poetry. Before you dislike something without trying it, consider some of these:
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
- Aristotle
There is a disconnect between high school and university that often catches out those unprepared for academic rigour. Not any more. Not if you are smart. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is inviting top high-school students worldwide to spend three weeks on its campus for a crash course interspersed with liberal doses of fun.
Its Talented Youth Summer Program aims to give students a foretaste of university life, cultivating essential university habits such as academic absorption and reflection, as well as insight into what makes the city tick.
"Programs for gifted children are rare in Hong Kong (administrative region, China), so we wanted to launch a pilot scheme since we have the right resources," said Helen Wong Hom- fong, the program's associate director. "We welcome students from all disciplines as long as they are willing to be challenged academically."
The university will, of course, be going all out to make a suitable impression on the bright young minds by relying on its traditional strengths, with Wong saying the program's main focus will be on the roles of science and technology throughout the history of civilization as they have always been the driving force.
"The curriculum consists of one core course on the main theme and one elective course, in addition to city tours and a talent show," she said.
Lack of understanding of the credit crunch is magnifying its damage
THE BBC's "Today" programme is the main current-affairs show on British radio. Last year it recruited a new presenter, Evan Davis, who is also an economist. An amusing pattern has since developed. Quizzed about the credit crunch, a politician delivers some carefully memorised remark about, say, quantitative easing. Then the guest experiences an audible moment of existential horror, as Mr Davis ungallantly presses him for details.
The tide has gone out and, with a very few exceptions, Britain is swimming naked: almost nobody appears to know what he is talking about. The havoc of the financial crisis has stretched and outstripped even most economists. The British political class is befogged. Ordinary people are overwhelmed. And just as the interaction between banking and economic woes is proving poisonous, so the interplay of public and political ignorance is damaging the country's prospects.
Start with the government, whose ministers are still oscillating between prophesying economic Armageddon and gamely predicting the best of all possible recoveries. Gordon Brown is learned in economic history--indeed, he is at his most animated and endearing when discussing it. But the prime minister's grip on the history he is living through is less masterful. The government's implicit strategy is to try something and, when that does not work, try something else: the approach modestly outlined by Barack Obama, but rather less honest.
Madison School District Middle School Parent Survey
via a kind reader's email:
You are invited to participate in the Madison Metropolitan School District's climate survey for middle school parents. Your feedback is important. Please click the link below to begin the survey.
You are invited to participate in the MMSD climate survey for elementary parents. Your feedback is important. Please click the link below to begin the survey.
Developer Randy Alexander has been a member of Bethel Lutheran Church [Map] downtown for eight years. He grew up with a strong faith-based culture and says having a moral compass is critical for raising children.
"And where better to do that than in a Christian school?" he asked.
That's a big part of why Alexander is part of a church committee to study the market feasibility of a kindergarten through fifth-grade school at the downtown church, 312 Wisconsin Ave. [Map] It's familiar territory for Alexander, whose Alexander Co. specializes in urban infill projects. It recently developed the Capitol West condominiums downtown and is building the Novation Campus business park in Fitchburg.
If Bethel decides to go ahead and start a school, it would become one of about 30 private elementary schools in the Madison area, most of them religiously affiliated.
Matthew Kussow, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Religious and Independent Schools, said the dismal economy is an obstacle for anyone looking to start a school now. Overall, state private school enrollment for the 2008-09 school year saw a slight decline, he said.
"We are sort of bracing ourselves for a steeper decline for 2009-2010 as the full effects of this economy are being felt," Kussow said, adding that he won't know specifically until the spring how many kids are re-enrolling in non-public schools. There are about 900 of them in the state, and they historically enroll about 10 percent of the total student body.
But Kussow also said that in general, private religious schools have a built-in following. So if Bethel identifies a need and believes it can get enough kids to start the school, in the long run, a church school is usually very successful, he said.
IKE buses, not just one but two reviews of primary education in Britain are arriving at the same time. Their titles may be similar but they could hardly differ more.
The Cambridge Primary Review was independently conceived and financed, has been years in the planning and execution, and draws on international evidence and scores of experts. Its final conclusions, due later this year, will synthesise 30 research surveys on all aspects of primary education. The Primary Curriculum Review, by contrast, was commissioned and paid for by the government and is the sole work of a serial government-report writer, Sir Jim Rose. He was asked to look at only the curriculum--not standards, testing or funding--and within that limited remit he was constrained by a tight brief and heavy hints as to the desired conclusions.
On February 20th the Cambridge-led team abandoned their publishing schedule and released the part of their final report that looks at the curriculum. It hopes, somewhat forlornly, to influence government policy. That seems unlikely. The official curriculum agency is already far advanced in creating teaching material along the lines Sir Jim recommends--even though only his interim report has appeared, and that is supposed to be open for consultation until February 28th.
Why am I so ill-tempered when I read a sensible report like "Bridging the Gap: How to Strengthen the Pk-16 Pipeline to Improve College Readiness"?
The authors, Ulrich Boser and Stephen Burd, know their stuff. The sponsoring organization, New America Foundation, has a great reputation. (Bias alert: It also employs one of my sons as a senior fellow, but he does California politics and direct democracy, not national education policy.)
My problem is that smart and industrious experts like Boser and Burd often unearth startling facts but don't follow through. "Bridging the Gap," available at Newamerica.net, details the large percentage of first-year college students in remedial courses and the duplication in federal college preparation programs. This is interesting information of which few people are aware.
But their recommendations follow the standard line: Let's have more meetings and spend more money. Example: "We recommend that the federal government provide states with incentives to come together and adopt national college and work-readiness standards in math, science and the language arts."
Or: "The federal government should work directly with states to foster partnerships between high schools and postsecondary institutions to smooth the transition between high school and college."
You might think that sounds reasonable. I think it misses an opportunity. Why not harness the energy and ambition of a new president to shake things up?
The Obama administration doesn't have much money to spend getting more students ready for college. The Education Department's $100 billion in stimulus funds will mostly go to less sophisticated projects that create jobs fast.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee says the District is no longer exploring the idea of seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a "state of emergency," a move that would have freed it from the obligation to bargain with the Washington Teachers' Union.
In a recent radio interview, Rhee said that the initiative, patterned after a state takeover of schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was never seriously considered.
The proposal appeared in a statement drafted for a Sept. 22 news conference at which Rhee and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty were scheduled to present a series of steps to rid the District of teachers deemed ineffective. The steps, dubbed "Plan B," were based on existing powers the chancellor possessed and fell outside the legal scope of contract negotiations.
As the school year speeds by, rising seniors at Fairfax High are already meeting with their teachers and guidance counselors to decide which classes they should take next year. Up until this point, the math sequence is spelled out -- Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II. After this point, there are plenty of options.
Here are the math classes students in a non-honors Algebra II class can choose from:
Trigonometry (Semester Course)
Probability and Statistics (Semester Course)
Discrete Math (Semester Course)
Pre Calculus with Trigonometry
AP Statistics
AP Computer Science
If they are not pursuing an advanced diploma, they can also choose to take no math class their senior year. That's an option a few students I talked to this week planned to take. Others were aiming for pre-calculus, which will put them on track to take Calculus in college. Others were talking about a combination of the semester-long courses.
In the spring of 2010, nearly 50 children will comprise the first graduating class of the Nuestro Mundo Community School on Madison's East Side.
I am the proud parent of a daughter who will be among them.
My husband and I have spent the past five years marveling as she has acquired a second language, conquered challenging curricula and embraced friends from a variety of races and ethnicities. We eagerly anticipate the years to come as her love for languages and diversity continue to blossom.
But like many other parents, we are very worried about what the next stage of her academic journey will look like.
Nuestro Mundo is a charter school that has applied innovative teaching practices within a dual-language immersion framework. It is in its fifth year of offering elementary school students a dual-immersion curriculum in Spanish and English.
Kindergartners enter Nuestro Mundo as either native Spanish or native English speakers. By fifth grade, the goal is for all students to be proficient in both languages and at least on par, academically, with their peers at other schools. The skills they have cultivated need to continue being nurtured.
Unfortunately, charter schools and the Madison School District have mostly been "oil & water". A few years ago, a group of parents & citizens tried to start an arts oriented charter - The Studio School. Read more here.
Every organization has its challenges and charters are certainly not perfect. However, it is more likely that Madison will see K-12 innovation with a diffused governance model, than if we continue the current very top down approach and move toward one size fits all curriculum. It will be interesting to see what the recent open enrollment numbers look like for Madison. Finally, a Chicago teacher on "magnet schools".
The problem is that there is no dual-language middle school for Nuestro Mundo students to transition into.
Madison School District recently stated it is amenable to creating a dual-language immersion program for middle school students. But it is unclear if the district will allow it to be a charter school.
Nuestro Mundo, Inc., the nonprofit group that holds the charter agreement with the Madison School District for Nuestro Mundo Community School, has been hard at work for three years developing plans for a charter middle school, which would focus on integrating dual-language immersion with project-based learning.
Creating a charter school will have many benefits. The law affords charters greater flexibility to create curricula and measure progress. Students in these schools often have higher rates of achievement because educators have flexibility to design teaching methods that appeal to the needs of each student and to change modalities when they aren't working without being constrained by traditional district practices.
Charters are also eligible for federal funds that are not available to the school district unless it authorizes the charter. The funding is administered through the state Department of Public Instruction and supports planning and implementation of new charters.
If Nuestro Mundo Inc. is allowed to create a secondary charter school, it will be eligible for a series of grants that would bring an estimated $1.1 million into the district over six years. Awarding these grants to a charter reduces the possibility that taxpayers will be asked to support a program.
Since 2004, Nuestro Mundo, Inc. has established itself as the dual-language immersion expert in Madison. We intend to remain viable partners with the Madison School District, sharing a common goal of providing top-notch education to our children, while celebrating our diverse community.
Nuestro Mundo, Inc. hopes to present our proposal to the School Board in March, allowing them time to honor our request prior to the grant submission deadline of April 15.
We need your help. Please contact the School Board and let them know that charter schools in Madison
do
work. Ask them to support a new charter at the middle school level. Tell them how important it is for our community to continue promoting biliteracy and bilingualism through innovative teaching methods.
Implore them to seek alternatives with the potential for significant amounts of federal funding -- without which, we will be forced to create less effective programs.
Our children deserve this chance for continued success.
Kujoth, of Madison, is vice chair of Nuestro Mundo, Inc.
Attention, school officials around the country: If your school is having trouble meeting standards for adequate progress, consider moving the whole operation to Wisconsin.
That was the implication of a study released this week comparing the way 28 states treat the same performance results from schools. More of the 36 schools in the study would be rated as making "adequate yearly progress" in Wisconsin than in any other state. Two schools in the study would be regarded as making adequate progress only in Wisconsin, the report says.
"Although schools are being told that they need to improve student achievement in order to make AYP under the law, the truth is that many would fare better if they just moved across state lines," the report says.
And Wisconsin would be the place to go.
The report, titled "The Accountability Illusion," was issued by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank generally regarded as right of center. The foundation supports having national standards for accountability that are consistent from state to state and said the results of the study show the wide variation in how demanding states are when it comes to school quality.
Congress took a potentially transformative step when it devoted $100 billion in the stimulus package to education. Carefully targeted, this money could revive the reform efforts that began promisingly with President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 -- but later languished when his administration buckled under to political pressures from state officials.
Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, will need to resist those pressures. The Bush administration allowed states to phony-up statistics on everything from graduation rates to student achievement to teacher training and state education standards. As a result, the country has yet to reach not only the goals that were clearly laid out in the law but also farsighted education reforms dating to the mid-1990s.
The stimulus package, including a $54 billion "stabilization" fund to protect schools against layoffs and budget cuts, is rightly framed to encourage compliance. States will need to create data collection systems that should ideally show how children perform year to year as well as how teachers affect student performance over time. States will also be required to improve academic standards as well as the notoriously weak tests now used to measure achievement -- replacing, for instance, the pervasive fill-in-the-bubble tests with advanced assessments that better measure writing and thinking.
Jay Mathews is a bit of a journalistic oddball. Most reporters see the education beat as a stepping stone to bigger things, but much to his credit Mathews, who writes for The Washington Post, returned to covering schools after an international reporting career. He is best known for his book on Jaime Escalante, who taught low-income children in East Los Angeles to excel in AP calculus and was featured in the film "Stand and Deliver." Now Mathews is back to profile two young teachers -- Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin -- who founded the wildly successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a chain of 66 charter schools now educating 16,000 low-income students in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
While I have some quarrels with the book's implicit and explicit public-policy conclusions, "Work Hard. Be Nice" provides a fast-paced, engrossing and heartening story of two phenomenally dedicated teachers who demonstrate that low-income students, if given the right environment, can thrive academically. In 52 short and easily digestible chapters, Mathews traces the story of two Ivy League graduates who began teaching in Houston in 1992 as part of the Teach for America program. Both struggle at first but come under the tutelage of an experienced educator, Harriett Ball, who employs chants and songs and tough love to reach students whom lesser teachers might give up on. Levin and Feinberg care deeply: They encourage students to call them in the evening for help with homework, visit student homes to get parents on their side and dig into their own pockets to buy alarm clocks to help students get to school on time. In Mathews's telling, it's hard not to love these guys.
Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist today launched a grassroots initiative aimed at reforming K-12 education in Tennessee, saying he hopes to ensure that "every child graduates from high school prepared for college or a career."
Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, was among those who joined the Tennessee Republican in announcing the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education at Fall Hamilton Elementary School in Nashville.
Frist said the "citizen-led" initiative will have three main components, including a steering committee that will hold 10 public meetings and ultimately produce a strategic plan for state education reform.
Frist, who announced last month that he won't be running for governor in 2010, said the committee will be composed of education, community, political and business leaders from across the state. He said the idea is to find what education practices are effective and build upon them.
I am not a liberal, but I'm starting to think that decades of tinkering with MPS just may be a smokescreen to ignore the real problems with the system: that in the end, our schools do nothing more than reflect the nature of the city itself.
We've spent generations pretending that isn't the case. I graduated from Pulaski High School just in time to have Howard Fuller present me my diploma. You remember Fuller, right? He was the man who was going to reinvigorate the "troubled" school system and bring hope to Milwaukee.
I walked across that stage in 1992. Exactly what has changed since then? Sure, it's not all bad. Some schools have high attendance, great parental participation and students who perform well.
But that just bolsters my point. If MPS as an entity was the problem, wouldn't all schools fail? Wouldn't all students have to exert an incredible amount of self-determination and willpower just to succeed academically?
Some people, such as School Board member Terry Falk, continue to believe that fiddling is best. Falk's latest theoretical fix? Potentially scrapping K-8 schools - themselves a recent idea - in favor of grades 6-12 facilities.
Enough already. The fault lines seem clear. MPS is operating in a city with dire problems, where some geographic areas continue to prosper while others operate in a climate of poverty and crime. School performance appears often to follow those socioeconomic trends.
For the record, I'm not excusing the poor performance of students who should realize that education is a path to greater prosperity. And I don't have any bright solutions either. Except one: If we're going to keep the questionable practice of throwing money at the problem, quit wasting it on the wrong problem.
When her daughter started talking about not going to college, Maria Victoria Natera knew what she needed to do.
Natera, 40, said she realized not only did she need to earn her general education development credential, or GED, but also go on to college.
"That really bothered me," Natera said. "I want more for my kids than I had ... I need to set an example."
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Natera took the first step when she received the credential -- an accomplishment that was acknowledged at the recent winter commencement ceremony held by Omega School. The event recognized the 32 students who earned either a GED or a high school equivalency diploma.
Omega School, 835 W. Badger Road, prepares students for taking the required tests for the two programs. Many students who come to Omega have tried a number of other ways to get a high school diploma. The age of the students at Omega varies and some are high school age but have not earned enough credits to graduate on time.
"Sometimes they have to try things and have them not work for them to have success here," said Oscar Mireles, Omega executive director. "They have to believe we are in a position to help them."
Dane County Transition School Pay it Forward Campaign 2/23/2009
via a Judy Reed email:
On behalf of all of us at Dane County Transition School (DCTS), I would like to take this opportunity to personally invite you to attend the launch of the DCTS Pay It Forward campaign on February 23, 2009 at 10am at the Villager Mall, 2234C South Park Street. Steve Goldberg from CUNA Mutual Group, students from DCTS, VISTA's Dustin Young and Dean Veneman from the Alexander Foundation will each speak at the Pay If Forward launch.
The Pay It Forward Initiative is a national movement with a very simple concept: do one kind deed for three people and ask each of those people to Pay It Forward by doing another kind deed for three other individuals. Simple. DCTS believes we can make the world a better place one kind deed at a time and the more people who believe, the larger difference we can make.
DCTS would like to celebrate with all of the Partners who believe in the concept of Pay It Forward and in promoting this altruistic effort. (See attached banner for detail listing of over 80 Partners) Imagine all those kind acts and smiles that will begin right here in the Villager Mall.
DCTS has always been a school that believes in the promise of each individual and in the power of good deeds, which is why DCTS is formally launching this Pay It Forward campaign. We truly hope that you can join us for this unique event!
Sincerely,
Judy Reed, Principal
Dane County Transition School - 2326 South Park Street - Madison, WI
(608) 698-6321 - www.dcths.org
IF YOU know what deep learning and functional skills are, then you are already on the way to understanding eduspeak. But there are other terms that must be grasped to attain an A* in the subject.
Satisfactory. One of the four possible judgments of the schools inspectorate (the other three are inadequate, good and outstanding). It means "unsatisfactory". ("Inadequate" for its part means "dire".) This explains the chief schools inspector's pronouncement that satisfactory schools are "not good enough".
Excellence and enjoyment are mutually exclusive. The first is used for what matters (literacy and numeracy), the second for what does not (everything else). "Enjoying reading" and "excelling in music" are howlers in eduspeak.
Non-statutory depends on context. It can mean "optional", but in the National Primary Strategy, a set of "guidelines" on teaching literacy and numeracy, it means "obligatory"--unless a school wants to risk being deemed "satisfactory".
Gifted and talented refer to the top 5-10% in academic and non-academic pursuits respectively, who are to be encouraged in their gifts and talents. The terms are necessary as a sop to middle-class parents concerned that their children are not being stretched enough. To deflect the charge of elitism, levelled by many teachers, the categories have proliferated to include the capacity to "make sound judgments", to show "great sensitivity or empathy" or to be "fascinated by a particular subject".
Education Commissioner Peter McWalters has ordered the city schools to begin filling teacher vacancies based on qualifications rather than seniority, an order that could fly in the face of the teachers' contract.
McWalters, in a no-nonsense letter yesterday to Supt. Tom Brady, said the district hasn't been moving fast enough to improve student achievement and that it was time to intervene in a much more aggressive fashion.
The order should come as no surprise to the district. Over the last two years the commissioner has issued a series of "corrective action" orders that spelled out what the district needed to do to improve student performance.
"This is intervention," McWalters said yesterday. "Every state gets to the point when it's time to stop suggesting. The district can't come back and tell me they can't get it done."
McWalters said that seniority can no longer be the way that teachers are assigned and vacancies are filled. Starting this fall, teachers at six Providence schools, including the new career and technical high school and the new East Side middle school, will be assigned based on whether they have the skills needed to serve students at those particular schools.
The chamber brings together business people and citizens each year to assess the school system.
Metro schools has missed the required No Child Left Behind benchmarks five times in the past six years. That moved the school system into "restructuring" from "corrective action" under the federal act, one year away from a possible state takeover.
The Education Report Card Committee said it was encouraged to see Metro offering a modest incentive pay plan to help recruit teachers in hard-to-staff subjects, as well as Mayor Karl Dean's recruitment of two national nonprofits, The New Teacher Project and Teach for America, to bring new talent into the classrooms.
While there were some improvements in 2008, the committee said the city cannot have another year of waiting for a common vision for the standards the schools want to reach.
HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk. Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, however, studies gestures carefully--and not out of idle curiosity. Introspection suggests that gesturing not only helps people communicate but also helps them to think. She set out to test this, and specifically to find out whether gestures might be used as an aid to children's learning. It turns out, as she told the AAAS, that they can.
The experiment she conducted involved balancing equations. Presented with an equation of the form 2 + 3 + 4 = x + 4, written on a blackboard, a child is asked to calculate the value of x. In the equations Dr Goldin-Meadow always made the last number on the left the same as the last on the right; so x was the sum of the first two numbers. Commonly, however, children who are learning arithmetic will add all three of the numbers on the left to arrive at the value of x.
This study examines the No Child Left Behind Act system and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rules for 28 states. We selected 36 real schools (half elementary, half middle) that vary by size, achievement, diversity, etc. and determined which of them would or would not make AYP when evaluated under each state's accountability rules. If a school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to Wisconsin or Ohio, would that same school make AYP there? Based on this analysis, we can see how AYP varies across the country and evaluate the effectiveness of NCLB.
More schools make AYP in 2008 under Wisconsin's accountability system than in any other state in our sample. This is likely due to the fact that Wisconsin's proficiency standards (or cut scores) are relatively easy compared to other states (all of them are below the 30th percentile). Second, Wisconsin's minimum subgroup size for students with disabilities is 50, which is a bit larger than most other states (the size for their other subgroups is comparable to other states'). This means that Wisconsin schools must have more students with disabilities in order for that group to be held separately accountable. Third, Wisconsin's 99 percent confidence interval provides schools with greater leniency than the more commonly used 95 percent confidence interval. Last, unlike most states, Wisconsin measures its student performance with a proficiency index, which gives partial credit for students achieving "partial proficiency." All of these factors work together so that 17 out of 18 elementary schools make AYP in Wisconsin, more than any other state in the study.
Some schools deemed to be failing in one state would get passing grades in another under the No Child Left Behind law, a national study found.
The study underscores wide variation in academic standards from state to state. It was to be issued today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which conducted the study with the Kingsbury Center at the Northwest Evaluation Association.
The study comes as the Obama administration indicates it will encourage states to adopt common standards, an often controversial issue on which previous presidents have trod lightly.
"I know that talking about standards can make people nervous," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently.
"But the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn't make sense," Duncan said. "A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it's from."
Every state, he said, needs standards that make kids college- and career-ready and are benchmarked against international standards.
The Fordham study measured test scores of 36 elementary and middle schools against accountability rules in 28 states.
Fernandez cleaned up in traditionally Republican (but trending Democratic) Waukesha County, where she won 52 percent of the vote, to just 23 percent for Evers. It was roughly the same split in Washington County. Fernandez even beat Mobley in the other conservative's home county of Ozaukee. Even in more Democratic Racine County, Fernandez won 40 percent to just 26 percent for Evers.
Where did Evers do well? Dane County, where the deputy superintendent won more than 50 percent to a mere 20 percent for Fernandez. Of Evers' 9,905 vote lead statewide, 7,351 votes came from Madison and surrounding communities. Evers won very big in the city of Madison, where Progressive Dane-backed candidate Price actually beat Fernandez (and came close to the frontrunner) in some isthmus wards.
What's the bottom line: Fernandez has proven herself. She is going to be a serious contender, and if she gets some national conservative money -- perhaps shifting from the Supreme Court race -- she could beat Evers.
Of course, in a higher-turnout, bigger-spending race, a lot can change. And Evers will have plenty of union backing. But this is going to be a hot contest right up until April 7. And that could have consequences for the court race; if Fernandez turns out conservatives in big numbers, that could help Koschnick.
Readers may find the 2005 DPI race worth revisiting. Audio & video here.
Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.
Prof. Ellen Greenberger studied what she found to be an increased sense of entitlement among college students.
"Many students come in with the conviction that they've worked hard and deserve a higher mark," Professor Grossman said. "Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before."
He attributes those complaints to his students' sense of entitlement.
"I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C," he said. "That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A."
A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B's just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.
It is an actual true fact that many if not most educators in our high schools do not allow students in general to see the exemplary academic work of their peers in their own school. (Academic work in this case does not include dance, drama, newspaper, music, band, yearbook, etc.).
The feeling seems to be that if students are exposed to this good work they will be surprised, envious, discouraged, intimidated, and more likely just to give up and stop trying to do good academic work themselves.
For these reasons, it is another actual true fact that many history and social studies teachers at the high school level have taken care not to let their students see the exemplary history research papers published in The Concord Review over the last twenty years, for many of the same reasons, including a general desire to protect their students from the dangerous and damaging effects of academic competition, which are believed to have the same risk of producing those feelings of envy, depression, anxiety, and intimidation mentioned above.
Putting aside for the moment those risks seen to be attendant on having students shown and/or told about the exemplary academic work of their high school peers, isn't it about time that we turned our attention to another potential source of those same harmful feelings we have described?
In fact, many, if not most, high school basketball players are known not only to be exposed to and to watch games played by other students at their own school, but also they may be found, in season, watching college basketball games, and even professional NBA games, with no educator or counselor even monitoring them while they do.
Surely, the chances of the majority of high school basketball players getting a four-year college athletic scholarship are slim, and their chances are vanishingly small of ever playing for an NBA team. And yet, we carelessly allow them to watch these players, whose skill and performance may far exceed their own, even though the chance of their experiencing envy, anxiety, intimidation, and so on, must be as great as they would feel in being exposed to exemplary academic work, which we carefully guard them from!
While there may be nothing we can practically do at present to prevent them from watching school concerts, plays, dance recitals, and band performances, or reading the school newspaper, we must take a firmer line when it comes to allowing them, especially in their own homes, or visiting with their friends, to watch college and professional sports presentations.
We should try to be consistent. If we truly believe that showing students and/or telling them about fine academic work by people their own age is harmful, we must take a firmer stand in blocking their access to games and matches, particularly on national television, which expose them to superior athletic performances.
If, on the other hand, we become convinced that HS student athletes of average ability and skill are not really damaged by watching games and matches at a higher level, and if it appears that doing that not only does not evoke unmanageable envy and anxiety in those observers, but also may, in many cases, be a source of feelings of admiration and pleasure, and even a basis for the inspiration to try harder to improve their own athletic performances, then we may be forced to take another look at what may prove to be some slight advantages in showing HS students exemplary academic work by their peers, or at least telling them where to find it.
Of course there are more four-year scholarships for athletes than for the unusually good work of high school students of history, for example, but if we could persist in this effort to be more consistent about what is presented to our students for emulation, perhaps the day may even come when the value seen in academic achievement may more nearly approximate that seen in athletic achievement when the awarding of four-year college scholarships is considered.
These changes will take time, and what is more, they will take a new perspective on the relative value of our high school students' efforts in school. Anti-academic and anti-intellectual attitudes in our education system are almost as widespread as support from booster clubs is for high school sports. But, as we consider the need for 21st Century Skills, perhaps we can gradually learn to place more value on good student academic work than we do now, at least to the extent of showing some of it to our students or perhaps telling them about it.
he gray-and-green warehouse in suburban Concord seems an unlikely headquarters for a statewide detective operation, and the fact checkers at work there insist they are not mercilessly probing the lives of California's teenagers.
Still, there is an element of hard-boiled sleuthing in the University of California's unusual attempt to ensure that its 98,000 freshman applicants tell the truth about themselves and their extracurricular activities. The stakes are high; UC enrollments may be canceled if students are found to be evasive or lying.
Each year, a small number of UC applicants -- fewer than 1% -- are caught fibbing about such claims as performing a lead role in a school play, volunteering as a tutor for poor children or starring on the soccer field.
But UC officials say there is a broader purpose beyond the relatively few "gotchas": to scare everyone else straight.
"We take the admissions process very seriously and we want to uphold the integrity of the whole process," explained Han Mi Yoon-Wu, a coordinator in UC's central admissions operations.
In an era when tough competition for college entrance may lead some insecure or conniving applicants to hype, or invent, parts of their records, experts say many colleges and universities do some informal checking on students' extracurricular claims, especially if something seems fishy. But the UC effort appears to be the only formal, systematic program in the nation, they say.
For many years, UC has checked the final high school grade transcript of each admitted student in the summer before enrollment. Failing grades in the last semester of high school can get a student's admission revoked, as can lies about self-reported grades in previous terms.
Queenly Cate Blanchet turns her attention to Richard II
Cate Blanchett is known for the pale beauty of her face and her vivid film performances. Her latest work marks a significant change of pace. As the curtain rises at the Sydney Theatre, she sits centre-stage, a still figure in a white blouse and trousers, blond hair, high cheekbones. A storm of golden petals drifts down from the ceiling, and she wears a crown.
It has become fairly commonplace for film actors to star in London's West End and on Broadway, but this transposition is different. Miss Blanchett is playing the king in Shakespeare's Richard II, the first part of a rigorously condensed version of the eight history plays. Miss Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, have become artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company, an organisation which already has a fine opinion of itself. "In so far as there is a National Theatre in Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company is it," says Bob Brookman, the general manager.
Sydney's "The War of the Roses" ruthlessly cuts the histories down to two evening performances, each lasting a little under four hours, focusing on the death of kings and the hollowness of their crown. If this production, performed as part of the Sydney Festival and now on tour, is a clue to the nature of Miss Blanchetts' regime, it will be energetic, controversial, ambitious, and, to use one of Miss Blanchett's favorite adjectives, "noisy." Casting her as Richard II was the bold idea of the director, the fearless 36-year-old Benedict Andrews. Having an actress play Richard II is not original: Fiona Shaw did it in London in 1995. But casting a woman as Richard III most certainly is. He is played by Pamela Rabe, one of Australia's most accomplished actors, without a hump and with a heavy sense of irony, which provokes tense laughter in unlikely places.
Miss Rabe is not as self-consciously feminine as Miss Blanchett, who deploys laughter--her own--to dramatise the alienation of the king from his court, and fondly adopts girlish poses during the deposition scene in which Richard passes the crown to Bolingbroke. Shakespearean actors need to drill their vocal cords and Miss Blanchett seemed a little short of training, but she made a likeable, vulnerable, androgynous monarch. Given the extent of the cuts and transpositions, there could be no lingering over the development of character. The playful relationship between Prince Hal (Ewen Leslie) and Falstaff (John Gaden), for example, was speedily established by Hal fellating Falstaff. Sydney was not fazed.
Many of Australia's best actors have emigrated in search of larger audiences and new writers. Miss Blanchett want to bring in a younger audience to the Sydney Theatre Company's performances. "We're hoping to take a more joyous approach," Mr. Upton said recently. Miss Blanchett and Mr. Upton also want to develop the company's reputation abroad as well as at home. Later this year their production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullman with Miss Blanchett as Blanche Dubois, travels to the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In this case of celebrity culture, the emphasis will be on the culture.
This colloquium series is designed to start a broader conversation about equity in STEM (science, technology, engineering, & mathematics) disciplines. The four brown-bags will feature a keynote speaker whose expertise in a particular area of equity will be used as a lens to look at issues in science and mathematics education. There will be an informal presentation followed by a facilitated discussion.
Wisconsin DPI Superintendent: It looks like an interesting race
Despite being outspent $96,129 to $10,500 (WisPolitics) by Tony Evers, Rose Fernandez obtained 31% of yesterday's vote. Tony Evers received 35%. Here's a roundup of the election and candidates:
On Tuesday, he finished just ahead of Rose Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and parent advocate, in a five-person field.
Although she finished the night in second place, Fernandez, 51, characterized her performance as "a victory for real people over the special interests."
In addition to being first to declare his candidacy, Evers also captured endorsements - and contributions - from the Wisconsin Education Association Council as well as other labor and education-based groups. WEAC PAC, the political arm of the state's largest teachers union, contributed $8,625 to Evers' campaign, in addition to spending nearly $180,000 on media buys for the candidate, according to campaign filings earlier this month.
By contrast, the Fernandez campaign spent $20,000. She said that her message of calling for merit pay for teachers and choices for parents had resonated with voters.
"Tonight, we have all the momentum," she said. "This is going to be a real choice. It's going to be a choice between special interests and the status quo, the bureaucracy that is entrenched at the Department of Public Instruction, vs. a focus on the results we are looking for in our investment in education, a push for higher standards instead of higher taxes."
Evers, 57, has distanced himself somewhat from the current schools superintendent, Elizabeth Burmaster, saying it's time to be more aggressive about reforming Milwaukee Public Schools and calling for an increase in the state's graduation rate.
On Tuesday, he denied Fernandez's charge of favoring special interests
For those outside the region, whether a degree-granting institution has to be called a university would seem of little consequence. There are institutions of learning the world over that have high standing and do not feel the need to change their name. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College in the United States, Imperial College in London and Australia's Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology are among them. In the teacher-training sphere, the Hong Kong Institute of Education's (HKIEd's) British and Singaporean counterparts, although affiliated to universities, have retained their separate identities.
In East Asia, particularly in countries steeped in the Confucian tradition, however, institutions are well aware of the added cachet that designation as a university brings. If the name of the Institute of Education in Tai Po was firmly entrenched in the minds of Hongkongers, there might have been less of a problem. But its creation in 1994 from the amalgamation of five colleges of education offering subdegree courses post-dated reforms that put in place the present university system. It has offered full degree courses only since 1998. Although about 77 per cent of its students are studying for degrees, HKIEd is perceived as being inferior to those institutions designated as universities. Because it is not called a university, it has also faced difficulties collaborating with universities overseas.
HKIEd's demand is to be allowed to "rectify" its name as a university. In rejecting its request, the University Grants Committee is not saying that HKIEd has not lived up to the high standards it has set for itself. Rather, the committee has taken the broader view, formed after a review of international trends, that teacher education should take place in a multidisciplinary environment for the benefit of students, staff and the community. The view deserves support; it is intellectually sound and eminently sensible. Single-discipline institutions are the product of a bygone era. All over the world, the trend has been to merge them into bigger entities or allow them to grow by developing new programmes. The aim is to facilitate the cross-fertilisation of ideas and multidisciplinary collaboration.
The taxi driver spoke mangled English; I responded in mangled Cantonese. In the end, I got where I wanted to go, and he received his fare.
For both parties, then, the journey was a success. Moreover, in an elementary sort of way, it was an educational, even a cultural, experience.
But is this the future of English- language education in Hong Kong?
Happy as I was to arrive at my destination that day, I hope we can do better in Hong Kong's schools.
Indeed, in a classroom environment, I would rather lose my linguistic way entirely than find it through the development of a mixed-code patois that, in the end, will get me no farther in the real world than the confines of a Hong Kong taxi or wet market.
There is no question that Hong Kong beyond its small, elite class of political, business and educational leaders is a city that communicates with outsiders in a mixed code that ultimately amounts to really bad English with Cantonese thrown in when that bad English inevitably ends in total collapse.
he cellphone industry has a suggestion for improving the math skills of American students: spend more time on cellphones in the classroom.
Students at Southwest High School in Jacksonville, N.C., were given cellphones with programs to help with algebra studies.
At a conference this week in Washington called Mobile Learning 09, CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, plans to start making its case for the educational value of cellphones. It will present research -- paid for by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cellphones -- that shows so-called smartphones can make students smarter.
Some critics already are denouncing the effort as a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market. But proponents of selling cellphones to schools counter that they are simply making the same kind of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s.
The only difference now between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students.
"This is a device kids have, it's a device they are familiar with and want to take advantage of," said Shawn Gross, director of Digital Millennial Consulting, which received a $1 million grant from Qualcomm to conduct the research.
"I believe that my message of experience has played well so far," Evers said. "I won the primary and I anticipate that we'll just work hard to get the message out. I believe that people do believe experience matters."
Fernandez, who has often been at odds with the state education department over virtual schools, reveled in the fact that she didn't get the WEAC endorsement, touting it as another sign of her being outside the state education bureaucracy.
Fernandez was the only one of the five candidates without any professional education experience. A former nurse, she recently stepped down as president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families.
"Some people have dismissed me as just a mom on a mission, but that's a label I'll be wearing as a badge of honor," Fernandez said. She pledged to overcome WEAC's financial backing of Evers with a broad base of support that taps into teachers, parents and students across the state.
"We're hearing that there's a great hunger out there for our message that higher standards without higher taxes is what they want," she said.
Her campaign called for reforming the state education department, enacting changes to allow for teacher merit pay and protecting alternative education options such as virtual schools, home schooling and Milwaukee's school choice voucher program.
Evers, the deputy under retiring Superintendent Libby Burmaster for the past eight years, emphasized his 34 years of education experience during the campaign. Opponents criticized him as a status-quo insider candidate, while Evers countered he was the best-grounded to initiate reforms, particularly in the Milwaukee schools.
McFarland High School Recognized by the National Council of Teachers of English
McFarland High School [Map] Principle Jim Hickey, via email:
You might note that McFarland High School's (a public high school) student anthology, Driftwood received the Superior rating from the National Council of Teachers of English. Congratulations to Edgewood HS on the top of award. We too are proud of being one of three schools receiving this award in the State.
Given the recent economic news, it seems everyone wants to talk about the long-term impact of short-term thinking. Why not do the same with education and magnet schools? Think of the issues educators faced 30 or 40 years ago: Smart kids not being challenged? Academically under-prepared kids, most of them ethnic minorities, moving in and test scores going down? It's completely logical that they chose a path to create magnet schools. But it was a short-term solution that has had long-term negative consequences.
I take my students to lots of outside events where they are required to interact with students who come from magnet or high-performing suburban schools. What I see time after time is how my kids rise to the occasion, performing as well (or at least trying to) as those students whose test scores or geographic location landed them in much more demanding academic environments.
On a daily basis, I see the same kids who do amazing things when surrounded by their brightest counterparts from other schools slip into every negative stereotype you can imagine, and worse, when surrounded by their under-performing peers at our "neighborhood" school.
When educational leaders decided to create magnet schools, they didn't just get it wrong, they got it backwards. They pulled out the best and brightest from our communities and sent them away. The students who are part of the "great middle" now find themselves in an environment where the peers who have the greatest influence in their school are the least positive role models.
Schools adapted, and quickly. We tightened security, installed metal detectors, and adopted ideas like zero-tolerance. And neighborhood schools, without restrictive admission policies based on test scores, quickly spiraled downward -- somewhat like an economy. Except in education, we can't lay off students who have a negative impact on the school culture. That is why adopting such a business model for the educational system has been and always will be a recipe for failure.
What should have been done was to pull out the bottom ten percent. Educational leaders could have greatly expanded the alternative school model and sent struggling students to a place that had been designed to meet their educational needs.
As happens in every recession, Washington area school systems are cutting back. It's depressing. Here's an antidote: Harness the creativity of educators, parents and students to improve our schools without more spending. Some teachers I trust helped me come up with these seven ideas.
1. Replace elementary school homework with free reading. Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects. One of the clearest (and most ignored) findings of educational research is that elementary students who do lots of homework don't learn more than students who do none. Eliminating traditional homework for this age group will save paper, reduce textbook losses and sweeten home life. Students should be asked instead to read something, maybe with their parents -- at least 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 20 minutes for second-graders and so on. Teachers can ask a few kids each day what they learned from their reading to discourage shirkers.
2. Unleash charter schools. I know, I know. Many good people find this suggestion as welcome as a call from a collection agency. They think charter schools, public schools that make their own rules, are draining money from school systems, but the opposite seems to be true. In most states, charters receive fewer tax dollars per child than regular public schools. Yet they often attract creative principals and teachers who do more with less. School finance experts don't all agree, but I am convinced that charters are a bargain. So let's have more. That won't save money in the District, one of the few places that pay as much for charters as regular schools, but Maryland and Virginia would find more charters a boon if they dropped their suburban, aren't-we-great notions and listened to what imaginative educators in a few little charter schools could teach them.
3. Have teachers call or e-mail parents -- once a day would be fine -- with praise for their children. Some great classroom teachers make a habit of contacting parents when kids do something well. Jason Kamras, 2005 national teacher of the year and now a leading D.C. schools executive, used to punch up the parent's number on his cellphone while standing next to a student's desk. It doesn't take long. It doesn't cost much. But it nurtures bonds among teachers, students and parents that can lead to wonderful things.
Can kids learn anything if they are exposed to a subject for only half an hour a week, with no homework?
When it comes to learning another language, educators say yes.
"The kids getting it for 30 minutes won't become fluent, but that's not the point of those programs," said Julie Sugarman, research associate at the nonprofit Center for Applied Linguistics in the District. "It's to give them exposure to the language. Just because kids aren't able to do calculus in sixth grade doesn't mean we shouldn't teach math in elementary school."
Foreign language instruction is considered more important than ever as the nation's demographics and national security issues change and the world's economies become intertwined.
Sipping a cup of coffee in the Los Angeles courthouse where he is on trial for fraud, math teacher Matthias Vheru said all he wanted to do was write the best algebra book possible to help his students and those of his colleagues.
"I spent my life trying to help underachieving kids," said Vheru, wearing a tie with a mathematical equation that read: 2 teach is 2 touch life 4 ever. "I'm just trying to make the language of math easy to understand."
Prosecutors, however, say Vheru is a crafty entrepreneur who illegally reaped nearly $1 million by conning the Los Angeles Unified School District into ordering 45,000 copies of his textbook without revealing his financial interest in the transaction.
A federal court jury is deliberating whether Vheru, a 20-year L.A. Unified veteran, is guilty of crimes that could send him to prison for up to 10 years.
According to prosecutors, Vheru, 53, saw a chance to make some extra cash by defrauding L.A. Unified in 2004 while he served as interim director of mathematics.
"He's not charged with being a bad teacher," Assistant U.S. Atty. Paul Rochmes told jurors in his closing arguments last week. "This is a case about deception."
Prosecutors allege that Vheru misappropriated $3.7 million of the district's money to purchase his books. He did so, they allege, by circumventing L.A. Unified's guidelines and using federal funds earmarked to assist non-English-speaking students. Prosecution experts testified that although Vheru's book is appropriate for English speakers, it could be difficult to understand for those without a strong command of the language.
A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.
Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. "Don't answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find," she warned.
Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.
"It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!" Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. "That's wrong."
It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability -- or lack thereof -- of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.
Wednesday, while having a car starter installed, I realized I'd left my laptop at home and would be without that particular tool for several hours.
Taking my own advice about using the tools I had around me, I swung by the local Waldenbooks looking for pen and some blank pages (having failed at a card store to find either, or at least, pens that weren't purple ink and writing pads that weren't scented and had frilling on the edges). The determination was not to miss my day's writing just because of a lack of a laptop.
It worked out well, as the store manager there got excited when I signed the Halo novels in stock and asked why I hadn't done a signing. Well, I'd asked twice over the last couple years and been told 'no.' But now they're ordering a bunch of my stock and would like to do a signing, so I gave them my contact info and then purchased a nice pen and a medium sized moleskine.
I sat near a local Panera with some soup and a mango smoothie and wrote the opening pages of the ocean steampunk proposal, and without any distractions it came along fairly nicely. Last night I added some more, and I think the chapter will get wrapped up tonight.
My main fear with paper is the losing of it, of course, so I need to get these moved over to digital soon. But it was nice to get the words out and frame the first chapter for this piece. It's been something I was struggling with how to start.
What comes through when Mr. Bush is asked about education is how radical his views are. He would toss out the traditional K-to-12 scheme in favor of a credit system, like colleges have.
"It's not based on seat time," he says. "It's whether you accomplished the task. Now we're like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don't have a flourishing education system that's customized. There's a whole world out there that didn't exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don't cast young people aside."
This is where Sweden comes in. "The idea that somehow Sweden would be the land of innovation, where private involvement in what was considered a government activity, is quite shocking to us Americans," Mr. Bush says. "But they're way ahead of us. They have a totally voucherized system. The kids come from Baghdad, Somalia -- this is in the tougher part of Stockholm -- and they're learning three languages by the time they finish. . . . there's no reason we can't have that except we're stuck in the old way."
2009 Wisconsin Department of Instruction (DPI) Superintendent Candidates: Primary Election Tuesday 2/17/2009
Five candidates are on the statewide primary ballot this Tuesday, February 17, 2009. One of them will replace outgoing Superintendent Libby Burmaster. The candidates are
For the last twenty years of so, I and others have argued, without much success, that our high schools should assign students complete nonfiction books and serious academic research papers at least once in their high school careers, so that if they decide to go on to college, they will be partly prepared for the reading lists of nonfiction books and the term paper assignments they would find there.
I now realize that I have been going about this all the wrong way. Instead of publishing 846 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 36 countries since 1987, in an effort to inspire high school students and their teachers to give more attention to real history books and research papers, I should have lobbied for a change in the academic requirements at the college level instead!
If colleges could simply extend many of their current efforts to eliminate books by dead white males, and to have students write more about themselves in expository writing courses, and could gradually guide students away from the requirements for reading nonfiction books and writing term papers, then the pressure to raise academic standards for reading and writing in our high schools could be further relaxed, relieving our students of all that pressure to become well educated.
Many colleges are leading the way in this endeavor, abandoning courses in United States history, and reducing the number of assigned books, many of which are even older than the students themselves. It is felt that movies by Oliver Stone and creative fiction about vampires may be more relevant to today's 21st Century students than musty old plays by Shakespeare, which were not even written in today's English, and long difficult history books written about events that probably happened before our students were even born!
Courses about the oppression of women, which inform students that all American presidents so far have been men, and courses which analyze the various Dracula movies, are much easier for many students to relate to, if they have never read a single nonfiction book or written one history research paper in their high school years.
Liberal arts courses in history, literature, philosophy, and the like have now been shown to be of little benefit in preparing students for jobs as technical support people in the computer industry or as insurance adjusters.
Of course there are those conservatives who will maintain that even computer techs, nurses, and schoolteachers need to be able to read, and even to write a little, but why can't they see that it would be so much easier and, at least initially, so much more popular, simply to reduce the academic content and standards at the college level than to keep complaining about the one million U.S. high school graduates each year who have to enroll in remedial math, reading and writing courses when they get to college?
Nowadays, if the graduates of these new, easier, and more practical colleges find they need to know something more than they studied as undergraduates, they can look it up on Wikipedia. If they don't have the academic background, or perhaps the reading skills, to understand what they find on the Web, then perhaps it wasn't that important anyway.
If colleges would just further reduce their clinging to outdated views about the importance of a liberal arts education, and would continue to expand their definition of a general education to include anything that a professor wants to call a course and anything a student wants to get a grade for, all of this crazy pressure to raise academic standards at the high school level could be reduced significantly.
Again, there will be those diehards who think that high schools should continue to offer Calculus, European History, English Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and so on, and schools could continue to offer such courses to those students who think they might be worthwhile. But at least if colleges could cut back on or eliminate the expectation that undergraduates should be able to read nonfiction books and write term papers, then our high schools could continue to graduate the majority of their students who have not been asked to do that sort of thing.
It seems so obvious and so simple that, instead of working so hard to raise academic standards for reading and writing in the secondary schools, we could just lower them even more in our colleges. Why did it take me so long to understand that? But I still don't recommend it.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Geoffrey Stanford, 17, discovered during a Kansas writing test last week that an essay question concerning greenhouse gases incorrectly used the word "omission" for the word "emission," prompting the Wichita East High School junior to point out the error.
"I thought, `Surely they're not talking about leaving out carbon dioxide altogether.' It just didn't make sense," Stanford said. "It had to be a mistake."
The state Department of Education has e-mailed a corrected version of the essay question to test coordinators around the state, but the incident already has caused a lot of red faces at the department, which used a committee of more than 30 state teachers to develop the test almost two years ago.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan would have $5 billion under the stimulus bill to back new approaches to improve schools, a fund that could prod states to raise standards and reward top teachers as the Obama administration presides over a massive infusion of federal education aid.
The Race to the Top Fund, as Duncan calls it, is part of about $100 billion the bill would channel to public schools, universities and early childhood education programs nationwide, helping stave off teacher layoffs, keep class sizes in check and jump-start efforts to revamp aging schools.
But the windfall also could mark the beginning of a deeper transformation of schools seven years after the No Child Left Behind law mandated an expansion of testing and new systems for school accountability.
Take a look at this chart that someone sent to me a couple days ago. I'm making it big so you can see as much detail as possible. Have a look and then come back, okay?
Pretty scary, eh? It's a chart showing the deterioration of major bank market caps since 2007. Prepared by someone at JP Morgan based on data from Bloomberg, this chart flashed across Wall Street and the financial world a few days ago, filling thousands of e-mail in boxes. Putting a face on the current banking crisis it really brought home to many people on Wall Street the critical position the financial industry finds itself in.
Too bad the chart is wrong.
It's a simple error, really. The bubbles are two-dimensional so they imply that the way to see change is by comparing AREAS of the bubbles. But if you look at the numbers themselves you can see that's not the case.
In the national charter school debate, Boston has special significance. The city has unleashed imaginative teachers to run both independent charter schools and semi-independent "pilot" schools, with much of the rest of the country waiting to see which does best.
Teachers unions and charter opponents have put unusual emphasis on this contest. Boston pilot schools were designed to show that schools with collectively bargained pay scales and seniority protections could do just as well as charters, whose teachers are usually non-union.
Charters, independently operated schools with public funding, were not designed to be anti-union. American Federation of Teachers founding president Al Shanker originated the charter idea. But many conservatives who think unions stand in the way of raising student achievement have embraced the charter school cause, thus politicizing the debate. Their side just won the first round in Boston, and they are not likely to let charter opponents forget it.
A study by scholars from Harvard, MIT, Michigan and Duke, sponsored by the Boston Foundation, shows the Boston charters are doing significantly better than pilots in raising student achievement. This includes results from randomized studies designed to reduce the possibility that charters might benefit from having more motivated students and parents. The study is called "Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston's Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools."
People who see charters as a ruinous drain on regular public schools, and a threat to job security and salary protections for teachers, are not going to accept this verdict. The data come from just one city, with many qualifications. For instance, the randomized results apply only to charters so popular they have more applicants than they can accept. Less popular charters were not included in that part of the study; they could have reduced the charters' measured gains if their data had counted.
Milwaukee Public Schools spends significantly more per student than comparable systems around the United States, but, by one measure, has some of the weakest academic results, according to a new analysis by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
In line with other research in recent years, the private, nonprofit research organization based in Madison found that the cost of benefits in MPS was especially high - higher than any of the other 15 districts analyzed.
The practices in MPS of paying large amounts for health care for retirees and for supplemental pensions to encourage early retirement, as well as the high price MPS pays for health coverage for everyone in its system, were listed as factors in the high costs of running the system.
• MPS spent $8,702 per student in 2005-'06 in compensation for employees, third highest among the 16 districts examined. Only Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis were higher.
• Total spending in MPS was $11,277 per student in 2005-'06, also the third highest in the study. The amount spent on instructional costs, $6,825, was the highest among the 16 districts, while the amount spent on central administration costs was the third highest.
• Spending on benefits was $3,195 per student, more than $500 above the second highest school system. Only four of the other districts spent more than $2,000 per student for benefits, including retirement costs and health costs. The MPS benefit costs were 90% above the median of the other 15 districts.
"According to figures from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, MPS health insurance premiums were more than 50% above the average private sector rate in Wisconsin and about 15% higher than the average Wisconsin school district," the report said.
They sound like workout sessions at a gym, but "flex periods" are fast becoming a scheduling strategy among Northern Virginia high schools that want to offer students remediation or enrichment during the school day rather than before or after classes.
High schools in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties have been inserting these chunks of time -- from 40 to 90 minutes, depending on the school -- for several years, often to reduce after-school tutoring costs but also to raise achievement in the era of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The program varies among schools, but the premise is similar: Between regular courses, students are assigned to a flex classroom to review material or work independently. Flex time can also be used for attending schoolwide events. And if a student needs help from a teacher in another part of the building, he or she can get a pass and visit the teacher during flex time.
Parents in Waunakee say they're concerned about a newer teaching technique that's combining Spanish and Social Studies into one class.
The elementary school children are learning Social Studies entirely in Spanish -- and parents said their children are struggling to learn the lessons.
Parents like Jean Magnes said children are missing out on important Social Studies topics because they simply don't understand it in Spanish.
"I noticed something was wrong," Magnes said. "All I knew was that she kept coming home and saying she didn't like Spanish."
Other parents said their children feel like they're failing. Parents are gathering support and forming a grassroots effort to change the teaching style.
Compared with the students in the 1970s, today's accounting students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
I have been teaching full time for over thirty years. If you toss in my apprenticeship teaching as a graduate student, I have taught for almost thirty-five years. During that span of time, one sees many, many students, and it amazes me how different they have been over time, and the inequality continues to grow. Compared with the students in the 1970s, today's students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
Before proceeding, let me enunciate two premises. First, I do not think there is any significant difference between the two groups in terms of native, raw intelligence. Instead, the distinction between yesterday's and today's students when they first set foot on college campuses rests in their educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process. In short, they differ in terms of their readiness for college. Second, I am focusing on the average student who majors in accounting. Both groups arise from a distribution of students. The lower tail of yesteryear's population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.
To begin, today's average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.
I would like to discuss in class the partial derivative of a present value formula to ascertain the impact of changes in interest rates, but that has become a fruitless enterprise. Even if students had a course in calculus, the exams probably had multiple choice questions so students guessed their way through the course, they don't remember what they learned, and whatever they learned was mechanical and superficial.
Of course you know that today is National Handwriting Day, in honour of John Hancock's birthday. But our days of mastering penmanship seem long behind us. Kitty Burns Florey ruminates on this lost art
Did you get one? Nor did I. I stayed home and watched the inauguration on a screen. But a million inauguration invitations were sent out. There was a time when each of these would have been addressed, floridly, by hand, but needless to say these hordes of envelopes were done by machine.
And so is everything. With the exception of the odd thank-you note or letter from Aunt Gertrude in Florida, we seldom see anything handwritten in our mailboxes. I suspect there are actually people alive today who have never received a letter written with a pen on paper and mailed in an envelope with a stamp.
This means investment in education is critical, and I'm really encouraged by the very heavy emphasis on education that's in the stimulus package.
We really need to transform math and science education in America. We need to improve teacher training, teacher quality.
I was talking earlier in the day with some folks about just how many of our math and science teachers don't have the correct training and accreditation, and that stands in the way of us really breaking through.
For those who are already in the workforce, we need programs that provide ongoing education and training, so they can be successful in this knowledge-based economy. For those who are unemployed, we need new technical skills training to give those people a start back up the economic ladder. And we are going to need lifelong learning programs to keep people fresh, as innovation and technology continues to power the economy.
The second thing we need-and I'll tell the Speaker this was written even before our meeting this morning-we need greater government investment in our nation's science and technology infrastructure.
I came in, flew in red eye, was a little groggy this morning when I got here. I sat down with the speaker at 8:00 AM, and she woke me right up. She said there are four things I want you to make sure you understand are a priority: science, science, science, and science. I was awake by the end of the fourth science for sure, and I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly.
The Dirksen Congressional Center of Pekin, Il -- http://www.dirksencongressionalcenter.org -- has partnered with Federal Network, Inc. of Washington, DC -- http://www.fednet.net/ -- to develop a website geared to secondary teachers of Government and Social Studies. Our initial idea is this: the teacher in the classroom, when teaching concepts and terms relevant to the legislative branch, will be able to show sample footage from the House and Senate organized in a glossary format. If, for example, you are teaching about a filibuster, you will be able to click on "filibuster" and see digitized video of senators filibustering.
We are very excited by the prospects for this cutting-edge offering. In order to make this conceptual product a success, we seek your feedback and commentary. The product is for teachers, so we appreciate your thoughtful input. The survey will take less than five minutes to complete.
Thank you for participating. Your feedback is important.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago working and living with young children of color.
These kids were threatened every day. They lacked role models to protect them and guide them to a safe place where learning was valued and rewarded.
Barack and Michelle Obama can be those role models on a national scale--and that's just one reason I am hopeful.
I am also hopeful because the leadership in Congress is so committed to education. They are very passionate about the issue--and they recognize its importance to our future.
I am hopeful because of the incredible progress in school districts, colleges and universities all across the country--developing new learning models--new educational approaches--and bringing new energy and ideas to the field of education.
From Teach for America to the KIPP charter schools to instructional innovations at colleges and universities, we have proven strategies ready to go to scale.
While high schools across the state are toughening their graduation requirements to prepare students for college, one of the state's largest school districts is planning to make it easier for students to graduate.
In a proposal that would cut out health, college and career planning, world geography and earth science as required courses, the Santa Ana Unified School District is seeking to reduce the number of credits necessary to graduate.
Santa Ana's graduation requirement -- 240 credits -- is among the state's highest benchmarks. And like several other school districts, Santa Ana's move to lower the credit requirement to 220 may be an admission that it had pushed too hard, especially in a district where administrators struggle with keeping students in school.
"It will have a positive effect on dropout rates," Deputy Supt. Cathie Olsky said of the proposal. "It puts graduation in reach."
North Carolina's two largest school systems have taken vastly different approaches to two thorny issues -- student reassignment and educating low-income students with hefty academic deficiencies.
Wake County, the state's largest district, has used buses instead of greenbacks to address the academic needs of low-income students.
To meet the demands of growth and support a diversity policy aimed at reducing the number of high-poverty schools, Wake's system moves thousands of students each year to different schools, sometimes sending kids on bus rides of more than 20 miles.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the second-largest district in North Carolina, has shifted to a system of largely neighborhood schools, resulting in a stratified mix of affluent schools in the suburbs and high-poverty schools near downtown Charlotte.
Instead of busing kids to balance out the level of low-income students at each school, the district pours millions of dollars into these high-poverty schools each year to boost the performance of academically disadvantaged students.
Charles J. Sykes, Wisconsin Interest, reprinted in Network News & Views 2/94, pp. 9-18
Joan Wittig is not an expert, nor is she an activist. She just didn't understand why her children weren't learning to write, spell, or read very well. She didn't understand why they kept coming home with sloppy papers filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar and why teachers never corrected them or demanded better work. Nor could she fathom why her child's fourth-grade teacher would write, "I love your story, especially the spelling," on a story jammed with misspelled words. (It began: "Once a pona time I visited a tropical rian forist.")
While Wittig did not have a degree in education, she did have some college-level credits in education and a "background of training others to perform accurately and competently in my numerous job positions, beginning in my high school years." That experience was enough for her to sense something was wrong. She was not easily brushed off by assurances that her children were being taught "whole language skills." For two years, she agonized before transferring her children from New Berlin's public schools to private schools.
After only a semester at the private schools, her children were writing and reading at a markedly higher level. Their papers were neatly written, grammatical, and their spelling was systematically corrected.
Earlier this year, she decided to take her story to her local school board.
Armed with copies of her children's work (before and after their transfer to private schools), she questioned the district's allegiance to "whole language"--a teaching philosophy, Wittig said, where children are "encouraged to write and spell any way they want and the teacher does not correct the spelling so that the child's creativity is not stifled."
"Is this to be considered teaching?" she asked. "Is effective learning taking place?"
She also wondered about the schools' emphasis on "cooperative learning," in which children learn in groups. "I sent my child to school to be taught by a teacher," she said, "not by another student."
A local newspaper story recounted the reaction to Wittig's presentation: "Superintendent James Benfield said such criticism could make school employees feel they are doing something wrong. 'We should not have employees criticized until we change the guidelines,' he said, adding that he would be willing to consider a change."
Change is unlikely. If Wittig left the skirmish puzzled, she is not alone.
A growing number of school districts seem eager to embrace the very techniques Joan Wittig was challenging. And what she saw as the dumbing down of her children's schools is being hailed by state commissions, educational experts, and a growing number of school boards as the latest in educational "reforms."
Many of those "reforms" are being instituted under the rubric of outcome based education (OBE), a term fraught with controversy, ambiguity, and misunderstanding.
The source of the confusion is readily understandable. Different people mean different things when they talk about outcome based education. Adding to the confusion, some districts apparently have adopted OBE techniques, but deny having done so when parents and/or reporters make inquiries.
Lost in the fog of jargon that surrounds OBE are radical differences over the role of schools in society. School administrators who are understandably reluctant to venture into such treacherous waters often downplay, deny, or evade the philosophical underpinnings of the reforms they advocate.
One thing, however, is clear. Outcome based education programs are spreading rapidly at both the state and local level, driven in large measure by efforts to establish national and state "goals" for improving education. That process is likely to accelerate with the Clinton administration's decision to require states to adopt federally approved "goals" as a condition of receiving school aid. Those federal guidelines could very well look a good deal like the "outcomes" advocated by architects of OBE.
This will intensify the level of political controversy over OBE.
But the politics of OBE are anything but simple. OBE programs are bitterly opposed by some conservative parent groups, but have been widely embraced by moderate and conservative business leaders, including those who served on Governor Tommy G. Thompson's Commission on Schools for the 21st Century (known as the Fish Commission after its chairman, Ody Fish). On the other hand, OBE is championed by the education establishment (and is de rigueur at schools of education), but it is opposed by one of the nation's largest teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers.
Much of the confusion over OBE centers on the notion of "outcomes."
Ironically, "outcomes" were first raised to prominence by leaders of the conservative educational reform movement of the 1980s. Championed by Chester E. Finn, Jr., among others, such reformers argued that the obsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought, staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the educational pipeline. They insisted that schools could be made more effective and accountable by shifting emphasis to outcomes (what children actually learned). Finn's emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitly to make schools more accountable by creating specific and verifiable educational objectives in subjects like math, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by conservatives. Indeed, conservatives were so successful in advancing their case that the term "outcomes" has become a virtually irresistible sales tool for educational reform.
The irony is that, in practice, the educational philosophies collectively known as outcome based education have little, if anything, in common with these original goals. To the contrary, OBE, with its hostility to competition, traditional measures of progress, and academic disciplines in general, can more accurately be described as part of a counter-reformation, a reaction to those attempts to make schools more accountable and effective. The OBE being sold to schools across Wisconsin represents, in effect, a semantic hijacking.
"The conservative education reform of the 1980s wanted to focus on outcomes (i.e. knowledge gained) instead of inputs (i.e. dollars spent)," notes former Education Secretary William Bennett. "The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent."
In other words, educationists have adopted the language of accountability to help them avoid being accountable.
Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE's shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an example of a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the original reformers had in mind), Bennett cites the Advanced Placement Examinations, which give students credit for courses based on their knowledge and proficiency in a subject area, rather than on their accumulated "seat-time" in a classroom.
In contrast, OBE programs are less interested in whether students know the origins of the Civil War or the author of the Tempest than whether students have met such outcomes as "establishing priorities to balance multiple life roles" (a goal in Pennsylvania) or "positive self-concept" (a goal in Kentucky). Nothing that Joan Wittig found in her children's classrooms was inconsistent with OBE philosophies or practices.
Consider the differences in approaches to educational reforms:
Where the reformers like Finn cited "outcomes," they insisted on higher academic standards; OBE lowers them.
Where the original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult, if not impossible, to objectively measure and compare educational progress.
Instead of clearly stated, verifiable outcomes, OBE goals are often diffuse, fuzzy, and ill-defined, loaded with educationist jargon like "holistic learning," "whole-child development," and "interpersonal competencies."
Where the original reformers saw their goal as excellence, OBE is characterized by a radical egalitarianism that tends to penalize high-achieving students.
Where original reformers emphasized schools that worked, OBE is experimental. Its advocates are unable to point to a single district where it has been successful.
And finally, where the original reformers saw an emphasis on outcomes as a way to return to educational basics, OBE has become, in Bennett's words, "a Trojan Horse for social engineering, an elementary and secondary version of the kind of 'politically correct' thinking that has infected our colleges and universities."
But while much of Outcome Based Education is genuinely radical, in general, it does not represent anything really very new. Rather, it is a continuation of the decades-old drift in educational circles away from subject content towards technique; from teaching knowledge to emphasizing nebulous "mental skills."
It represents a continuation of the flight from academic rigor and accountability. Ultimately, OBE is less sinister than it is the embodiment of mediocrity as an educational goal.
The architects of OBE envision a world in which no one fails, or at least one in which no one fails in school. "For the most part," declares Albert Mammary, "we believe competition in the classroom is destructive." Mammary has been superintendent of New York's Johnson City Central School District, K-12, where he developed an "Outcomes-Driven Developmental Model" (ODDM), which he describes as the "nation's first comprehensive school improvement model."
The model is built on slogans along the line of "Success for all students" and "Excellence for All."
For Mammary, the first step to success begins with doing away with failure.
Outcome based schools "believe there should be no failure and that failure ought to be removed from our vocabulary and thoughts," he wrote in 1991. "Failure, or fear of failure, will cause students to give up."
Former students may recall that, to the contrary, the fear of failure was an inducement to try harder, a spur that caused papers to be written and formulas memorized. But Mammary sees the threat of failure only as a barrier to enthusiastic learning.
"When students don't have to worry about failure," he insists, "they will be more apt to want to learn."
Mammary apparently feels the same way about differentiation of any sort. He opposes curved grading, ability grouping, and tracking. Tests are also transformed. They are no longer trials of knowledge, but celebrations of success.
"Testing should be creative," he insists, "aligned to learning outcomes, and only given when the students will do well."
This is only the beginning of his redefinition of "success" and "excellence."
Outcome based schools, he declares, "believe excellence is for every child and not just a few." They achieve this not by dragging the top kids down, he writes, but by bringing expectations up for everyone. He does this, however, by insisting that everyone be a winner.
Mammary is explicit on this: "A no-cut philosophy is recommended. Everyone trying out for the football team should make it; every girl or boy that (sic) wants to be a cheerleader should make it; everyone who comes to the program for the gifted and talented should make it."
There is a dreamy, utopian quality about all of this. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were a prom queen; if everybody who dreamed of being a quarterback could be one; if every aspiring pianist could star in a concert. The world, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.
But that is precisely the point. Dreams have such power to fix our imaginations precisely because everyone cannot achieve them. Boys aspire to be quarterbacks because of the level of accomplishment it represents. Not everyone can do it. If anyone could be quarterback, what is left to aspire to?
There is also a practical concern here. A football team that must play anyone who wishes to be quarterback will quickly become a team on which no one will want to play any position.
By abolishing failure (or at least the recognition and consequences of failure) and redefining excellence to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, we deprive success of meaning. In the ideal OBE world, everyone would feel like a success, without necessarily having to do much of anything to justify their self-esteem.
If Mammary appears to be a dreamer, there are practical applications of his philosophy. The most obvious is the hostility of OBE to traditional grades as measurements of achievement.
The emphasis on abolishing grades and traditional tests is central to the philosophy of OBE advocates. "Grading lies at the core of how our current system operates," declares OBE guru William Spady, director of the High Success Program on Outcome-Based Education.
Spady, who has been influential in the establishment of OBE programs in Wisconsin, quotes conservative reformers such as Chester Finn in his writings, but he follows Mammary in calling for the leveling of distinctions based on ability, industry or achievement.
Grades are gatekeepers, separating good students from others. "This, in turn, reinforces the system of inter-student comparison and competition created by class ranks. Such a system, of course, gives a natural advantage to those with stronger academic backgrounds, higher aptitudes for given areas of learning, and more resources at home to support their learning."
His objection appears to be based less on educational grounds than on his suspicion of inequality of any sort. Grades favor the smart and the studious. Spady wants to make up for the unfairness of it all.
Grades are oppressive, Spady writes. "Grades label students, control their opportunities, limit their choices, shape their identities, and define their rewards for learning and behaving in given ways."
Grades pit students against one another, he complains, "implying that achievement and success are inherently comparative, competitive and relevant" (which, in fact, they are, both in school and life). Indeed, Spady sees the issue of grades in terms of class struggle. "The usual result: the rich get richer, the poor give up."
Not necessarily. Occasionally, the student who gets Ds will work to become a student who gets Cs, and the C student will strive to become an A student. The A student may work harder so that he does not become a C student.
But Spady sees no link between grades and motivation to succeed or improve oneself. Instead, he focuses on the potential damage that poor grades might inflict on "young people struggling to define their identity and self-worth." He assumes here that identity and self-worth are independent of achievement.
Like Mammary, Spady envisions a grading system with no failure, but also no bad grades at all. OBE, he explains, eliminates labeling and competitive grading and stresses "VALIDATING that a high level of performance is ultimately reached on those things that will directly impact on the student's success in the future. In other words, all we're really interested in is A-level performance, thank you, so we EXPECT it of all students, systematically teach for it, and validate it when it occurs."
The OBE buzzword for its approved evaluation system is "authentic assessment." Assessment is authentic, apparently, only when it becomes impossible to rank one student's performance ahead of another's.
In this new system, Spady suggests that teachers will be able to "throw away their pens at evaluation and reporting time and replace them with pencils that have large erasers." Although he does not expand on the point, the abolition of "permanent records" has obvious advantages for educationists as well as students. The eraser takes both off the hook at the same time.
One form of accountability especially detested by the educational establishment creates measurements by which academic achievement can be readily compared among schools and among districts. Evaluations that are constantly in flux obviously cannot be compared this way. At most, schools could report progress toward their educational "goals," which may be notoriously difficult to quantify. Those goals, however, will be a benchmark of sorts, and educationists can be expected to point to them as authentic measures of their success.
Indeed, success of some sort or another seems inevitable, since the goals often appear to be set to accommodate the lowest common denominator.
In its goal statement, Milwaukee's suburban Whitnall district declared, "By 1996-97, all students will demonstrate 100% proficiency in the District's performance outcomes."
Whitnall school board member Ted Mueller quotes one astute resident remarking, "If we require all students to be able to stuff a basketball to be able to graduate from high school, the only way you're going to be able to accomplish that is to lower the basketball hoop."
Because material must be taught and re-taught until every student has mastered it, teachers in the OBE classroom necessarily have to narrow their ambitions. OBE advocates describe this as teaching less, but better. Fewer areas of math are covered, but they are covered more intensely. Even so, it is hard to avoid the "Robin Hood effect," in which time and attention are shifted from high achieving students (who quickly master the material) to slower achieving students. This is, of course, exacerbated by OBE's insistence on eliminating tracking or ability grouping.
Robert Slavin, director of the elementary school program at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on Elementary and Middle Schools, notes that OBE (or "mastery learning") "poses a dilemma, a choice between content coverage and mastery."
"Because rapid coverage is likely to be of greatest benefit to high achievers, whereas high mastery is of greatest benefit to low achievers," he concludes, programs such as OBE may be taught at the expense of the quicker students.
"If some students take much longer than others to learn a particular objective, then one of two things must happen," Slavin writes. "Either corrective instruction must be given outside of regular classroom time, or students who achieve mastery early on will have to spend considerable amounts of time waiting for their classmates to catch up..." It is not even clear that such a system benefits slower learners. Slavin's research found that "it may often be the case that even for low achievers, spending the time to master each objective may be less productive than covering more objectives."
One of the most popular features of OBE is also one of the overt examples of the Robin Hood effect. In cooperative learning, students allegedly teach one another. In reality, it serves as a mechanism to keep students working at a uniform pace.
In her presentation to the New Berlin school board, Joan Wittig remarked on the bizarre consequences of such mandatory "cooperation."
"Lazy, poor students rely on the good students to do all the work," she told the board. "Good students are reinforced that they must do everything if it is to be done right."
Another critic is high school senior Marisa Meisters, who wrote to a local newspaper:
As a senior at Arrowhead [High School], I have seen the results of OBE firsthand. The bottom line is that it does not work. The main goal of OBE is to teach students how to work in groups. The students in each group who understand the concept are supposed to teach the others in the group. Instead of moving on to more challenging concepts, the faster students have to wait for the entire group to understand the concept before they move on. Another OBE goal is to allow students to master subjects by retaking any test until the student can pass. The result is that the students do not study. Why should they when they can keep retaking the test? Eventually the student is bound to guess right.
But the genuinely radical vision of OBE's architects is nothing so banal as "less taught but taught well." Theorists like William Spady envision an educational system "grounded on future-driven outcomes that will directly impact the lives of students in the future, not on lesson and unit and course objectives. This means that content details will have to give way to the larger cognitive, technical, and interpersonal competencies needed in our complex, changing world."
Exactly how "exit outcomes" will be divorced from "content details" is unclear. But it seems to mean that details of history (such as who won World War II) might be sacrificed in favor of material that will "directly impact" the lives of young people. Teaching "things," or specific knowledge, is thus downgraded in the service of what Spady vaguely describes as "larger...competencies." This appears to be educationese for saying that one does not need to know where England is as long as one has mastered "spatial" competencies; one need not know history as long as one has attained an interpersonally competent outcome.
Of course, Spady doesn't expect this to come all at once. He acknowledges that schools will have to muddle through for the time being with the existing curriculum content, or what is left of it. Spady envisions a three-part process of transformation.
In the first stage, existing subject areas (science, math, history, English) "are taken as givens and are used to frame and define outcomes." In its infancy, OBE will be content to define outcomes in terms of math abilities, knowledge of history, etc. These are the terms on which OBE is usually sold to parents and school boards. This is, however, only the beginning as far as Spady is concerned.
In the second stage, which Spady calls "Transitional OBE," educrats create "a vehicle for separating curriculum content from intended outcomes and for placing primacy on the latter."
In this stage, traditional curricular content is replaced by outcomes emphasizing Spady's "higher order competencies and orientations."
As if to emphasize how separate these competencies are from the traditional content of the curriculum, Spady stresses that "these broad competencies are almost always content neutral." Indeed, he goes so far as to declare that the "content simply becomes a vehicle through which [higher order competencies] are developed and demonstrated."
By Spady's third and final stage--called "Transformational OBE"--the divorce between course content and the "exit outcomes" is complete and irreversible. Traditional curricular content has faded away altogether. In Transformational OBE, Spady writes, "curriculum content is no longer the grounding and defining element of outcomes."
With content excluded, Spady turns up the flow of educationese to full-bore.
Now he writes, "outcomes are seen as culminating Exit role performances which include sometimes complex arrays of knowledge, competencies, and orientations and which require learning demonstrations in varying role contexts."
Naturally this "dramatically redefines the role of subject content in determining and constraining what outcomes can be." Actual knowledge--the ability to write a coherent letter, add a column of numbers, know the century in which the [U.S.] Civil War took place--should not be allowed to crimp the style of the higher order competencies.
Predictably (and also conveniently), these competencies cannot be measured by tests or other verifiable, comparative measures. Indeed, Spady describes the student of the future as a sort of performance art--a work in progress.
"The bottom line of Transformational OBE is that student learning is manifested through their ability to carry out performance roles in contexts that at least simulate life situations and challenges."
Unfortunately, graduates will not be called on merely to perform in simulations of life. They will face the real thing, a reality unlikely to conform itself to Spady's model.
Perhaps because of the transitional nature of OBE, fuzzy goals clogged with impenetrable jargon seem endemic to OBE.
Kentucky's state educational goals include such "valued outcomes" as: "Listening," which officials defined by saying "Students construct meaning from messages communicated in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes through listening."
This was distinguished from "Observing," which they defined by saying "Students construct meaning from messages communicated in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes through observing."
Other goals included: "Interpersonal Relationships," in which "Students observe, analyze, and interpret human behaviors to acquire a better understanding of self, others, and human relationships;" "Consumerism...Students demonstrate effective decision-making and evaluate consumer skills;" "Mental and Emotional Wellness...Students demonstrate positive strategies for achieving and maintaining mental and emotional wellness;" "Positive self-concept...Students demonstrate the ability to be adaptable and flexible through appropriate tasks or projects;" "Multicultural and World View...Students demonstrate an understanding of, appreciation of, and sensitivity to a multicultural and world view;" and "Ethical values...Students demonstrate the ability to make decisions based on ethical values."
Obvious questions remain unanswered here: Whose ethical values will be used to establish the acceptable outcomes? Will any size fit? How will they be measured? How will schools determine whether a student has met its goals for "Interpersonal Skills" or "Consistent, Responsive and Caring Behavior," or "Open Mind to Alternative Perspectives?"
And haven't the schools gotten themselves into a lot of areas that are, frankly, none of their business?
Academic areas are not neglected, but they often bear only a passing resemblance to traditional fields of study.
Geography is transformed into "Relationship of Geography to Human Activity," in which "Students recognize the geographic interaction between people and their surroundings in order to make decisions and take actions that reflect responsibility for the environment." (Note that this does not actually include knowing something so mundane as what countries border the United States.)
Similarly, the "aesthetic" goal in which "Students appreciate creativity and the value of the arts and humanities" could conceivably by achieved without students having read a classic work of literature or seen a masterpiece of art.
The emphasis on "skills" tends to conceal the basic flaw of such curriculums that are devoid of "facts." As E.D. Hirsch notes, "Yes, problem-solving skills are necessary, But they depend on a wealth of relevant knowledge." Such knowledge plays little, if any, role in what passes for outcome based education these days.
Criticism of OBE's abstract academic goals is not limited to conservatives. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has joined the chorus of OBE critics who question its academic priorities.
"OBE standards include academic outcomes," he notes, "but they are very few and so vague that they would be satisfied by almost any level of achievement, from top-notch to minimal; in other words, they are no improvement over what we have now."
Pennsylvania's writing outcome, for example, called for "All students [to] write for a variety of purposes including to narrate, inform, and persuade, in all subject areas." Remarked Shanker, "In an excellent school, this could mean a portfolio of short stories, several 1,000-word essays, and numerous shorter ones. In a poor school, it could mean three short paragraphs loaded with misspellings.
"Vaguely worded outcomes like this will not send a message to students, teachers and parents about what is required of youngsters. Nor will they help bridge the enormous gap between schools where students are expected to achieve...and schools where anything goes."
As Shanker noted, Pennsylvania was something of a trailblazer in the area of establishing "goals" for outcome based educational programs. Officials there were so enthusiastic that they embraced 51 separate "learning outcomes," of which the vast majority concerned values, feelings, or attitudes.
One "outcome" defined as a base goal in Pennsylvania was that "all students understand and appreciate their worth as unique and capable individuals and exhibit self-esteem." It did not describe how self-esteem would be exhibited or measured.
Other learning outcomes included: "All students develop interpersonal communication, decision making, coping, and evaluation skills and apply them to personal, family and community living." "All students relate in writing, speech or other media, the history and nature of various forms of prejudice to current problems facing communities and nations, including the United States."
Once again, it was not clear how the schools would keep tabs on environmental decisions made in students' private lives or how they would remediate environmentally incorrect behaviors.
The very number of "learning outcomes" is significant. As Shanker notes, the large number of outcomes "sounds demanding, but it's the opposite." That is because teachers are already spread thin and will therefore have to pick and choose among the dozens of mandated "outcomes." It is not hard to predict what sort of choices they will make. Remarks Shanker, "it's a lot easier to schmooze with kids about 'life roles' than to make sure they can do geometry theorems or read Macbeth. In an educational version of Gresham's law, the fluffy will drive out the solid and worthwhile."
Wisconsin, known for its good sense and immunity to the trendy and untested, has not escaped infection. OBE buzzwords have become commonplace in local district mission statements and planning documents. The City of Waukesha School District's Strategic Planning report, for instance, declares that "The process of learning is as important as the content being taught" and that "learning to cooperate is as important as learning to compete."
The movement towards outcome based education was given its greatest impetus, however, by a state commission charged with developing goals for the state's schools. The Governor's Commission on Schools for the 21st Century called for state law to be revised "to state the goals and expectations of Wisconsin pubic schools in language that is compatible with an outcome-based integration education model..." It also called on state officials to ensure "conformity with outcome-based educational objectives."
The Fish Commission embraced an "integrated education model curriculum framework" that says that "every student will give evidence of the knowledge, skills, and understanding in each of the following areas."
There followed a list of "outcomes" and "goals," including: "Leisure Time; Cultural interdependence; Interpersonal skills; Adaptability; Equity; Accepting People; Positive self-image; Application of values and ethics; Risk taking and experimentation; Family relationships; Environmental Stewardship; Positive work attitudes and habits; Racial, ethnic, cultural diversity histories of U.S.; Team Work; Human Growth and Development; Respect all occupations; Shared decision making; Health & wellness.
While the list did include history, geography, computer literacy, and communications among other more traditional subjects, it is still remarkable for its lack of focus and its extraordinarily wide net. The commission did not explain how it would ascertain, measure, or correct students' knowledge, skills, and understanding of family relationships, or why this should be considered a state-mandated educational goal.
In May 1993, I had the chance to moderate a debate on outcome based education. During the debate, I asked an official of Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction (and a proponent of OBE), "Have there been specific, controlled studies conducted to measure the performance of low, medium, and high capability students in Outcome Based Education versus traditional teaching curriculums."
His answer: "Most of the outcome based programs that are in effect now have not been in effect for a long enough period of time for studies of the kind you're talking about to take place."
In other words: no.
The suspicions that OBE might be a stalking horse for politically correct social engineering are fueled by its penchant for setting "outcomes" that relate to social, cultural, and political issues. Comments by some of OBE's most prominent architects tend to contribute to the misgivings of critics. William Spady, who has been paid $2,500 to make presentations to at least one suburban Milwaukee district, has made it clear that his vision of the future of education is dominated by social, cultural, and ideological preoccupations.
At times, his agenda is overtly political.
In 1987, Spady outlined his own assumptions regarding the future which needed to be taken into account when fashioning "exit outcomes."
His first assumption stated, "Despite the historical trend toward intellectual enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has been a major rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, and conservatism with which young people will have to deal."
The implication is that OBE could somehow serve as an antidote to this 'ominous' resurgence of conservative thought.
His remaining assumptions strike a similarly ideological note. He describes the "re-pluralizing of society," the "decline of the traditional nuclear family," and the "gap between 'have' and 'have not' children." He is alarmist about the future of the environment.
"Global climate and ecology," he wrote, "are already shifting in a dangerous direction."
This is not to suggest that all OBE programs have a hidden political agenda. But its authors do seem to have a far more expansive view of the role of schools than more traditional educators ever envisioned. Albert Mammary, for example, writes:
"We believe that if students don't get love at home, they should get it in schools. If they don't get caring at home, they should get it in schools. If they don't belong and aren't connected at home, they should get it in schools. If they don't get food and clothing at home, they should also get that in schools."
This would seem to suggest that schools not only become centers of social work and welfare, but also substitute families. Educators should not be surprised if this ambition is not greeted with enthusiasm from every corner of society.
Designers of OBE scoff at charges that the new curriculums involve social engineering, and they are right to the extent that many programs bear little resemblance to the grandiose visions set out by Messrs. Mammary and Spady.
But, given the vagueness of the jargon-laden "outcomes," it is difficult for parents to know in advance what their students will learn and equally hard to measure success after the fact.
Such confusion provides ample opportunity for abuse. Political agendas can infiltrate curriculums as certain ideas and attitudes become part of the mandated "outcomes," but this is not inevitable.
In most cases, the outcome is less likely to be indoctrination than a pervasive mediocrity. A recent National Geographic article describing the culture of Sweden quoted one ethnologist: "We're taught very early not to stand out from the crowd..." The Swedish word lagom refers to this sense of "appropriateness," or averageness, that dominates Swedish life. "Lagom is best," Swedes are quoted as saying. "To be average is good in Sweden. To be different is bad."
This could well be the slogan for Outcome Based Education.
In a world with no losers and no winners, the overall tone will be blandness and conformity, an outcome that would probably be met with considerable enthusiasm by the designers of Outcome Based Education. No one feels very good, but then no one's self-esteem suffers much either.
What's really wrong with OBE? Its product is likely to be unmotivated, uninspired children who feel good about themselves, but who are unprepared for failure, rejection, and disappointment--and equally unprepared for competition in the 1990s and beyond.
The Madison School District is inviting members of the community to join them in putting into action five priorities for the future identified in a major planning bash last month.
The process was open and inclusive with more than token representation by people of color, committee member Annette Miller on Monday told members of Communities United, a Madison coalition committed to promoting social justice. "I didn't feel like I was the African-American representing the whole African-American community," Miller said.
The process may have been close to the ground, but the priorities developed by the committee smack of "educationalese" (and writing by committee) in the draft report released Monday to Communities United.
As roughly translated into plain English, they are: eliminate the achievement gap between students of color and white students; evaluate programs and personnel, then prioritize and allocate resources equitably; recruit and retain staff members who reflect the cultural composition of the student body; "revolutionize" Madison education with rigorous, culturally relevant and accelerated learning opportunities; provide a safe, welcoming learning environment for all children by building ties to the community, confronting fears about diversity, and being accountable to all.
When English teachers ask students to write personal journals and then turn them in for the teacher to read, the teachers have a chance to learn about the students' hopes, wishes, dreams, fantasies, family life, anxieties, ambitions, fears, and so on.
There are several problems with this practice. The first is, of course, that none of this information is any of the teachers' business. It is personal. The second problem is that asking students to spend time thinking about and writing about themselves for schoolwork is essentially anti-academic.
Teachers and students have real academic tasks. Teachers of literature should bring students to an understanding and appreciation of great writing that is not about the students themselves. Teachers of history have an obligation to introduce their students to historical events and persons well beyond the lives and experiences of the students. Math, science, foreign languages and other disciplines have little interest in the personal lives of the students. Teachers of those subjects have academic material they want students to learn as soon as they can.
However, in the English departments, there seems to be an irresistible attraction to probing the personal lives of the students. For some, the excuse is relevance. It seems hard to get students interested in anything besides themselves, they complain, so why not have students write, if they write about anything, about their own lives. This is seen as reaching out to where the students are, when what they should be doing is encouraging students to reach outside themselves to the grand and wide worlds of knowledge to be found in academic tasks and pursuits.
For some teachers, the excuse is perhaps curiosity. It can be amusing and diverting to read what students reveal about their personal lives, and some teachers may tell themselves that they will be better teachers if they can invade students' privacy in this way, and perhaps tailor their instruction and counsel to each student's personal fears and concerns. But this is not their job, nor is it a job for which they have been trained, educational psychology classes notwithstanding.
Parents, counselors, psychiatrists and others may have a need to know what is going on in a child's personal life, if they are depressed or otherwise having trouble making their way in life and in school, but teachers have an academic job to do.
Not that teachers should be impersonal. If a young student confides in a teacher, it is fine for that teacher to show an interest and feel compassion for the youngster. But it is not the teacher's job to "treat" the student or to persuade them to reveal more of their personal lives than perhaps the student had intended to share.
I am convinced that teachers who are well educated in academic subject matter themselves have a very strong desire to share the contents and the benefits of that knowledge with their students. The enthusiasm of a teacher for their academic subject has, on innumerable occasions, inspired students to take up further study of that subject themselves as they grow through their educational and even their professional lives.
It seems likely that teachers who are not well educated in academic subject matter, which includes far too many who prepare for teaching at graduate schools of education, do not have a strong desire to communicate the knowledge of literature, history, science, math, languages, and the like, which they do not possess. For these teachers, there is an enormous temptation to indulge a curiosity into the personal lives of students, through reading their personal journals and other techniques.
On the one hand, this is an unconscionable violation of the student's right to privacy, and on the other hand, such a focus on personal matters is a clear obstruction which helps to prevent students from acquiring the academic knowledge and skill they need and for which purpose we spend many many billions of taxpayer dollars.
Above and beyond the waste of money and academic opportunity for students, we should just ask teachers to stop assigning personal journals to students. Of course, young people can feel free to write diaries, journals, or whatever they want. But teachers should not demand the right to read them.
Students are already retarded in learning to write competently in school, by the widespread commitment of English teachers to creative writing and the five-paragraph essay. But when it comes to personal writing, teachers must learn to accept the fact that such writing is personal, and truly none of their business.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Children entering Leopold Elementary School next year will have a chance to participate in a dual language immersion program which is designed to have the students proficient in both English and Spanish by the fifth grade.
Madison Metropolitan School District officials said the program will be offered for the first time in the 2009-2010 school year and parents will have an option of choosing either a standard English-only kindergarten program or enrolling students in the dual language program.
While the program is open to all families living in the Leopold Elementary attendance area, school officials said if there is greater demand than openings, a lottery system will be used to determine which students get into the new program.
The school system said it is anticipated that when the program is fully implemented in six years, the dual language program at Leopold will be used in 16 of the school's 44 classrooms.
And informational meeting about the program will be held at the school, at 2602 Post Road, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 24, in the school's cafeteria.
Brian Betts, a new principal in one of the District's most troubled neighborhoods, excitedly displayed his school's latest reading test results. Tall green bars on the graphs meant that in some classes a majority of students were proficient. This was big news for Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, an amalgam of two campuses where failure had been the norm.
Betts's reaction to the quarterly results came in a rush of teachers' names, explosive interjections and expansive adjectives: "Anita Walls! Boom, boom, boom! Unbelievable! Brian Diamond! Boom, boom, boom! Fantastic!"
He had not felt so giddy the week before, when his unit tests -- written by his teachers -- showed that students were still struggling in the mid-to-low-C range. Most of Shaw's faculty members are new to the school, and many are new to teaching. That makes the school a crucial experiment for D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She has put extra resources into it and given Betts, 41, extraordinary power to make his own rules, with the help of two teaching stars he recruited from Montgomery County. But in mid-January he was worried.
Wagner's book is engaging and sometimes points to real defects in American schools. Yet it fails to use research objectively to ascertain what is truly happening in America's 90,000 public schools. Moreover, like all too many education "reformers" Wagner is simply hostile to academic content. Wagner does not seem to care if students can read and write grammatically, do math or know something about science and history - real subjects that schools can teach and policy-makers can measure.
Unfortunately, Wagner dismisses measurable academic content while embracing buzzwords like "adaptability" and "curiosity," which no one could possibly be against, but also which no one could possibly measure. Do we really care if our students are curious and adaptable if they cannot read and write their own names?
The Wayfarer has earned the highest rating in three of the last four years. According to Edgewood Public Information Associate Kate Ripple, the school is the only one in Wisconsin to receive this honor this year, and only one of 50 schools nationally.
Diane Mertens, head of the Edgewood English Department, has led students for the magazine's entire 23 years of production.
Tens of thousands of Chinese have joined a debate on whether students should be separated into science and liberal arts classes in high school, a practice that allows them to stay competitive in college entrance exam by choosing preferred subjects.
The debate came after the Ministry of Education began to solicit opinions from the public on Friday on whether it was necessary and feasible to abolish the classification system, which have been adopted for decades.
In a survey launched by www.qq.com, a Chinese portal, more than 260,000 people cast their votes as of Saturday with 54 percent of those polled voted for the abolishment and 40 percent against.
More than 87,000 netizens have made also their voice heard as of 10 a.m. Sunday morning in the website's forum.
A netizen from Chengdu, capital of southwest Sichuan Province, who identified himself as a high school math teacher, said "students should study both arts and science so they could have comprehensive development and become more flexible in using their knowledge."
"Sciences can activate the mind, while arts could strengthen their learning capability," he added.
Madison Math Task Force Report Public Session: February 11, 2009 @ Cherokee Middle School
The Cherokee PTO [Map] is hosting a discussion of the Madison School District's Math Task Force Report this Wednesday evening, February 11, 2009 in the Library.
Being taught about famous people and events in Wisconsin history in Spanish is not how some Waunakee parents want their fourth-graders learning social studies at school.
"We as parents have been in such an uproar over this," said Keith Wilke about the district's elementary language program in which students learn Spanish by having the language integrated into social studies lessons for 30 minutes three days a week in first through fourth grades. "They're force-fed Spanish."
This is the third year for the program, which has added one grade a year since 2006 and is designed to continue until fifth grade.
"A fair amount of (social studies instruction) has been in Spanish," said Wilke, who has a daughter in fourth grade. "The kids are to the point where they don't understand it."
A state program meant to give only effective Minnesota teachers merit pay raises instead appears to be rewarding nearly all the teachers participating in it with more money.
The program, called "Q Comp," is one of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's top initiatives to improve schools, and many educators say it is strengthening teacher evaluations and training. But others are questioning whether Q Comp has just become a cash handout.
In 22 school districts whose Q Comp practices were examined by the Star Tribune, more than 99 percent of teachers in the program received merit raises during the most recent school year.
Only 27 of the roughly 4,200 teachers eligible did not get a pay raise.
The state gave schools $64 million to spend on Q Comp, which stands for quality compensation, during the 2007-08 school year. Pawlenty is now proposing to increase spending on the program by $41 million next year. But some lawmakers are questioning that step.
"Why should we expand it statewide when there is no evidence that it's improving anything?" asked Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan.
"Let's quit the charade, let's give every district another $300 per pupil, and quit bluffing."
Pawlenty's spokesman Brian McClung defended the program Friday as "a move towards greater emphasis on student achievement and the measures that lead to [it]." He added, "Ideally Q Comp would demand more, but we had to compromise with a Legislature that was uncomfortable going further."
Test data suggest that, so far, students in school districts in at least their third year of Q Comp have not shown more improvement in reading and math than students in schools not participating in the program.
The Minnesota Department of Education asserts that it is too early in the program's life to make substantive comparisons about how Q Comp is affecting student achievement. In a statement Friday, Education Commissioner Alice Seagren said the department has faith in the program.
"We believe that Q Comp will lead to higher levels of student achievement, students who are college-and-work ready upon graduation, and a larger supply of qualified workers for our state's employers," she said.
School superintendents, meanwhile, say the money involved--up to $260 per pupil this year--has been a major draw in an era of budget cuts.
Joseph Brown, superintendent of the Grand Meadow School District, said Q Comp is improving teacher pay in ways that might otherwise not be possible.
"We really felt the only way teachers would get additional income was to generate additional revenue," he said.
Reward or punishment?
Under Q Comp, participating districts and charter schools set up teacher-driven training, such as having them observe one another and work in small groups to share tips.
Each participating district--there were 39 in 2007-08--sets up its own program with the local teachers union, resulting in a complicated patchwork of programs that reward teachers for a variety of things.
In addition to the merit pay raises, teachers can receive bonuses--usually up to a total of around $2,000--for things such as improving student performance, meeting professional development goals, being evaluated by other teachers, and whether their school meets testing goals. In districts the Star Tribune examined, the vast majority of teachers got most of the bonus money available. Many lost portions of the money when students did not meet testing goals.
The merit pay raises that teachers receive--the scale on which virtually all the state's teachers succeed--are mostly based on things such as whether teachers successfully complete evaluations and training, rather than on student performance.
"Is the focus supposed to be growing better teachers or punishing bad teachers?" said Tim Bunnell, program leader for the South Washington County schools, who said he isn't surprised districts aren't withholding pay scale advancement. "That would be a huge punishment."
It could, in fact, mean up to $15,000 or $20,000 lost over a teacher's career in the district, Bunnell said.
Education Minnesota, the state teachers union, has always taken the position that ongoing, high-quality professional development is needed in schools, according to Tom Dooher, the union's president. Q Comp can provide that if it's correctly negotiated with the union, he said.
On Tuesday, the state's legislative auditor is scheduled to release a report on Q Comp, analyzing the Department of Education's oversight of the program.
According to Sandi Jacobs, vice president for policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality, the fact that virtually all the state's teachers are advancing "should really give the state some important food for thought about whether the program is accomplishing their intent."
Teaching can be a lonely profession, with teachers sequestered in classrooms, having too few opportunities to see their colleagues work.
With Q Comp, teachers get a chance to coach and be coached by other teachers. They talk about their craft in small professional development groups, and work together to help students meet goals. Many educators and policymakers applaud this aspect of the program.
In the Brandon School District in central Minnesota, a district with 22 teachers, teachers are observed three times during the school year.
"It's about taking time to reflect," Superintendent Mark Westby said. "I don't think teachers change because they're told they need to. They change because they see on their own what they could do differently."
A June 2008 teacher survey of South Washington County teachers shows that 84 percent of teachers are highly or somewhat satisfied with the district's pay program, and 77 percent report that peer coaching and observation is either "vital and highly effective" or "has an important role" in promoting professional growth.
But not all teachers on the front lines agree, according to Steve Watson, a recently retired Eden Prairie art teacher and a vocal critic of the program.
He says that the program is advertised as paying effective teachers, but points out that the bonus for having students meet testing goals is minimal--usually about several hundred dollars in most districts--compared with what teachers receive for "jumping through hoops."
In more than 30 years of teaching, Watson said, he's seen many other trends in education come and go. This one is different.
"They found out the teachers would buy into it if they just paid them off."
Require it statewide?
There are currently 44 school districts and 28 charter schools enrolled in the Q Comp program, educating about a third of Minnesota's 820,000 students.
Dooher said that Education Minnesota would rather have money currently spent on Q Comp be added to general school funding.
"The system [Pawlenty] has proposed doesn't get at the real crux of the problem," he said. "Our class sizes are too big, we don't have the resources, and we don't have the up-to-date materials to really, really impact test scores and student achievement."
Many participating districts are stressed about the state's financial position: Facing a $4.8 billion two-year deficit going into this year's legislative session, superintendents are worried about professional development advances they've made, and what would happen if the money disappears.
The Orono School District spent almost $800,000 on the program last year, according to the Department of Education.
Neal Lawson, the district's assistant superintendent for business, said, "We just don't have that kind of money sitting around for us to be able to continue the program if the funding is cut."
Staff writer Glenn Howatt contributed to this report. Emily Johns • 612-673-7460
Three area school districts in need of building renovation or expansion are taking very tentative steps toward consolidation -- a touchy topic for residents worried about losing a community's identity.
The Belleville, Monticello and New Glarus school districts, located in Dane and Green counties, are asking the state Department of Public Instruction for $10,000 to study the idea of combining their programs and student populations.
"I think it's just a case of having a nice discussion and getting solid, objective information," said Randy Freese, superintendent for the Belleville School District.
Facing continued tight budgets, districts around the state will be looking at options to save money, and "investigating consolidation is definitely one of those options," said Patrick Gasper, DPI spokesman. "I think we'll see more people looking into it."
Using money approved as part of the 2007-09 state budget, the DPI has funded grants for at least eight other district groups, including Pecatonica and Argyle in Lafayette and Iowa counties.
Mayor Daley also sees an important role for charter schools. "You can't have a monopoly and think a monopoly works. Slowly it dissolves. And I think that charter schools are good to compete with public schools." Nobody says there's something wrong with public universities facing competition from private ones. "I think the more competition we have, the better off we are in Chicago."
But the mayor won't support vouchers. "School choice is hard. You're going back to arguing," he says, trailing off without making clear whether he means the politics. But he does think it's notable that, while federal money and Pell grants can be used to finance an education at a private college, federal money can't be used to help students get a private education at the K-12 level.
Ron Huberman, Mr. Daley's former chief of staff and head of the Chicago Transit Authority, is anything but an education bureaucrat, and that's just what the mayor wants in the man he named to replace Mr. Duncan as chief of Chicago schools. Too often in the past, before the mayor took over, the city would bring in schools chiefs who seemed to be riding an education lazy-susan from school to school. "We'd give them big bonuses to come here and then when we'd fire them they'd go to other school systems."
People my age are prone to what I call geezerisms, such as: What's the matter with kids these days? Why aren't schools good like they used to be? Where can I get a really thick milkshake? Stuff like that.
You don't often run into these outbreaks of cranky nostalgia in educational research, but one has surfaced recently. Several prominent scholars have suggested that teenage reading for pleasure, and verbal test scores, plummeted after 1988 because of the rise of rap and hip-hop music and an increase in television watching.
Changes in youthful cultural tastes and habits always push us senior citizens into rants about declining values, so I wondered whether the researchers -- many of them in my age group -- were giving into one of those recurring bromides that the new music is terrible and will turn our society into a garbage dump.
I couldn't sustain that argument because the scholars involved (including Ronald Ferguson, David Grissmer and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom) are brilliant people whose work always meets the highest standards of professional inquiry. I was trying to decide how to sort this out when University of California at Los Angeles sociologist Meredith Phillips, one of my favorite writers on student achievement, came to the rescue with an intriguing take in a chapter of a new book, "Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap," edited by Katherine Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University and published by the Russell Sage Foundation.
ince September's financial meltdown, community colleges and universities offering free personal-finance courses online have seen a sharp increase in enrollment.
Many people are turning to the more than 180 business courses offered through the OpenCourseWare Consortium -- a group of about 250 universities world-wide, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California-Irvine. These courses aren't exactly classes, but they offer free access to online syllabi and study materials, along with lecture notes and exams.
An MIT initiative called OpenCourseWare offers business courses online.
One course, "Fundamentals of Financial Planning," has seen a 27% increase in traffic since September, according to the school. With 48,000 viewers, it has become the most popular of the University of California-Irvine's OpenCourseWare offerings, the school says. Class takers are given worksheets and assessments to help them negotiate topics like college planning and retirement savings, says Gary Matkin, dean of continuing education. "It's a cross between a reference and a learning experience," says Mr. Matkin. As more people are affected by the downturn, he expects the number of course takers to grow.
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the sort of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 5th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful, data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
Three public schools in California led the nation in helping Latino students outperform their counterparts in other states on Advanced Placement exams in Spanish language, Spanish literature and world history, according to a report released Wednesday by the College Board.
Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach was cited as the public school with the largest number of Latino students from the class of 2008 earning a 3 or better in AP world history. Exams are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, and many colleges and universities give students course credit for scores of 3 or higher. Advanced Placement courses offer college-level material in a variety of subjects.
Latino students at Fontana High School outpaced their peers on the AP Spanish-language exam, and San Ysidro High School in San Diego had the most Latino students who succeeded on the AP Spanish literature exam.
Now that Arne Duncan, President Obama's new education secretary, has presented the administration's $150 billion plan for reviving our education system, it's time to start separating Obama's smart ideas for schools from his dumb ones. The first folly Duncan could dispense with - at an enormous cost saving - would be Obama's desire to outfit the nation's classrooms with new computers. His big push for this idea occurred in December, when he said, "Every child should have the chance to get online," Obama said, "and they'll get that chance when I'm president - because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world."
Really?
Educators have been trying to improve schools with every technology we've ever invented, beginning with Thomas Edison's promise, in 1912, to create "100 percent efficiency" in the classroom through the medium of "the motion picture." Since personal computers and the Internet first arrived in classrooms, in the early 1990s, schools have spent approximately $100 billion on technology. Throughout this campaign, educators and the technology industry have been searching madly for solid evidence of whether the computers were boosting achievement. So little has been found that this data has become education's WMD.
Wagner promotes seven "21st century" skills that he claims are not taught in our schools. These "survival" skills are also being promoted by advocacy groups like the National Educational Association.
Wagner's list seems plausible. Who can argue against teaching students "agility and adaptability" or how to "ask good questions?" Yet these "skills" are largely unsupported by actual scientific research. Wagner presents nothing to justify his list except glib language and a virtually endless string of anecdotes about his conversations with high-tech CEOs.
Even where Wagner does use research, it's not clear that we can trust what he reports as fact. On page 92, to discredit attempts to increase the number of high school students studying algebra and advanced mathematics courses, he refers to a "study" of MIT graduates that he claims found only a few mentioning anything "more than arithmetic, statistics and probability" as useful to their work. Curious, I checked out the "study" using the URL provided in an end note for Chapter 3. It consisted of 17, yes 17, MIT graduates, and, according to my count, 11 of the 17 explicitly mentioned linear algebra, trig, proofs and/ or calculus, or other advanced mathematics courses as vital to their work - exactly the opposite of what Wagner reports! Perhaps exposure to higher mathematics is not the worst problem facing American students!
"There are six-and-half billion people on this planet, and there are 6,500 astrophysicists, so that makes each of us (astrophysicists) one in a million," Tyson said Monday night at the Wisconsin Union Theater as part of the UW's Distinguished Lecture Series.
It's too bad there aren't a lot more like Tyson, who kept the packed house enthralled with his charisma, knowledge and off-the-cuff humor for more than two hours.
Tyson is the 21st century face of space, a mantle previously held by the late, great Carl Sagan. Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium and the host of PBS' "NOVA ScienceNOW" program, aimed at educating a new generation of Americans in science.
And that is no small task.
Tyson pointed out numerous examples of scientific illiteracy in the U.S., including a general lack of understanding and a belief in silly superstitions.
On the screen behind him he showed a photo of the inside of an elevator in a tall building, and how there was no button for the 13th floor.
"We are supposedly a technologically advanced country, and yet people are afraid of the number 13?" he said.
In its first five years on campus, Delta has made a profound impact on UW-Madison's teaching and learning culture. A fall 2008 review found that more than 400 faculty and instructional staff enhanced their teaching practices in some way as a direct result of Delta workshops.
As Delta grows, it continues to receive recognition for its efforts. On Monday, Feb. 9, Delta will be presented with the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education's Award for Leveraging Excellence.
Delta members are encouraged to take Delta courses and small-group-facilitated programs, attend roundtable dinners and seminars, and participate in the Delta internship program to learn how to implement Delta's three pillars -- teaching-as-research, learning community and learning-through-diversity -- into the classroom.
In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. "We want a plan," said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would - and should - unfold.
In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year's experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper - time has done that - but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.
The Singularity University will be based at the space programme's Ames campus in Silicon Valley, USA.
Its chancellor will be the controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose 2005 book The Singularity is Near inspired the name of the school.
He believes that the rapid rise of technology will enable machines in the near future to use artificial intelligence to make themselves cleverer than humans.
Critics of singularity believe such sophisticated technology could end up being a threat to man.
But Mr Kurzweil said it was important to realise the potential of technological development: "The law of accelerating returns means technology eventually will be a million more times powerful than it is today and cause profound transformation."
Singularity University will accept 30 graduate students in its first intake this summer, increasing to 120 next year.
Despite its name, the college is not an accredited university but will offer nine-week courses exploring ways to ensure technology improves mankind's plight instead of harming it.
With four 100-point exams making up most of the grade, it is the kind of course an academically weak student might struggle to pass.
But as the university faces pressure to improve success rates for underprepared college students, one professor's markedly different approach to the introductory psychology course is turning heads.
Professor Diane Reddy has replaced the traditional lecture format with an online version of Psych 101. Students learn at their own pace but also have to obtain mastery, demonstrated by passing a quiz on each unit, before they can move on to the next.
Along the way, students get help from teaching assistants who monitor their online activity, identifying weak spots and providing advice - even if the students don't seek it.
Initial evidence says it works: In a study of 5,000 students over two years, U-Pace students performed 12% better on the same cumulative test than students who took traditional Psych 101 with the same textbook and course content, even though U-Pace students had lower average grades than those in the conventional course.
The online model, the study found, was particularly successful for disadvantaged or underprepared students - low-income students, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with low grades or ACT scores. And students in general do better in the class, too, earning a higher percentage of As and Bs than students earn in traditional Psych 101.
But while this generation of baby-boom teachers has witnessed remarkable transformations in their lifetime -- in women's rights, in civil rights -- the waves of education reforms aimed at remaking our urban schools that they have been dispatched to implement have repeatedly fallen short.
Ms. Huff has taught both basic math and calculus at East High, a failing school under the federal No Child Left Behind law, considered by many here to be the city's most troubled. As I walked in the front door one frigid day last month, ambulance attendants were rolling out a young man on a gurney and wearing a neck brace.
MS. HUFF'S eighth period has just five calculus students -- normally not enough to justify a class -- but the administration keeps it going so these children have a shot at competing with top students elsewhere. No sooner had they sat down and finished their daily warm-up quiz, than there was a loud clanging. "A pull," Ms. Huff said. "Let's go." Someone had yanked the fire alarm. Ms. Huff led her students through halls that were chaotic. Several times when she tried to quiet students from other classes, they swore at her.
For 15 minutes she and her calculus students -- none of them with coats -- stood in a parking lot battered by a fierce wind off Lake Ontario. Everywhere, kids could be seen leaving school for the day, but all the calculus students returned, took their seats, and just as Ms. Huff started teaching, there was another false alarm and they had to march out again.
Seems like a simple question, but given how much time and money we spend on it, it has a wide range of answers, many unexplored, some contradictory. I have a few thoughts about education, how we use it to market ourselves and compete, and I realized that without a common place to start, it's hard to figure out what to do.
So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:
Become an informed citizen
Be able to read for pleasure
Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
Do well on standardized tests
Homogenize society, at least a bit
Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
Give kids something to do while parents work
Teach future citizens how to conform
Teach future consumers how to desire....
The consumption aspects of this list are useful to consider, particularly in light of some reform textbooks.
A 19th-century school that served Prince William County's African American population opens for public tours today in honor of Black History Month.
The Lucasville School, at 10516 Godwin Dr. in the Manassas area, will be open every weekend this month from noon to 4 p.m. The one-room school was the only one in the county solely for African Americans, said Robert Orrison, a historic site manager for the county. A few one-room schools that served whites remain, but most have been converted into homes.
"We opened the school up last February," Orrison said. "It's a great place to learn about segregated schools and how education was done in the 19th and early 20th century."
Built in 1885, the Lucasville School served children in grades one through six until 1926, Orrison said. About 20 to 25 students of different ages would pack into the building each year to learn from a single instructor. The school was filled with benches, not desks, Orrison said, and blackboards were made of pieces of plywood painted black, unlike at white schools, where students had blackboard slates.
Madison School District Survey for Parents Who Have Left
via a kind reader's email:
Superintendent Dan Nerad is conducting a survey of families who left the MMSD and invites your participation.
If you opted to not enroll your child/children in their MMSD school -- if they attend private school, you home school or you moved out of the District -- or you are strongly considering the same and you are willing to participate in this survey, please let Superintendent Nerad know. Send your contact information to his assistant, Ann Wilson (awilson@madison.k12.wi.us or 608 663-1607).
Marshall Middle School in Janesville is in its second year of offering single-gender classrooms, and students and teachers said the program has made a positive difference in their education.
Currently, more than 200 school districts around the country are testing out the teaching method, and about 10 schools in Wisconsin offer a single-gender classroom program.
Marshall Middle School teacher Charles Smith said getting eighth-grade boys and girls to agree on music isn't easy. But his social studies class is girls only, and Smith said the class prefers to study to the music of Beyonce.
"If the kids are comfortable, they feel better about it. Then this is a good place for them," said Smith.
Smith said the single-gender classroom is about making students feel comfortable.
While his students learn, he said he's also learning how to better tailor his lessons.
The process, which included meetings Thursday (1/29/2009) from 8 to 6 Friday (1/30/2009) from 8 to 5 and Saturday (1/31/2009) from 8 to 12, thus far, resulted in the following words:
MMSD Mission Statement (1/30/2009):
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
Draft Strategic Priorities
1. Student:
We will eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring that all students reach their highest potential. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates. (see also student outcomes)
2. Resource/Capacity:
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and vigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
3. Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retent ion of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
4. Curriculum
We will revolutionize the educational model to engage and support all students in a comprehensive participatory educational experience defined by rigorous, culturally relevant and accelerated learning opportunities where authentic assessment is paired with flexible instruction.
5. Organization/Systems:
We will proudly leverage our rich diversity as our greatest strength and provide a learning environment in which all our children experience what we want for each of our children. We will:
Provide a safe, welcoming learn ing environment
Coordinate and cooperate across the district
Build and sustain meaningful partnerships throughout our community
Invite and incorporate (require) inclusive decision-making
Remain accountable to all stakeholders
Engage community in dialogue around diversity confront fears and misunderstandings
Half of Maricopa County's high-school graduates who enter Arizona universities or colleges must take a remedial math class. And just under a quarter must take a remedial English class.
The new findings are helping legislators push for a change in how Arizona decides if its high schools are excelling or failing, a move that would topple AIMS test scores as the main measurement.
Two key House leaders are proposing a pilot program that could lead to making the percentage of students who graduate "college-ready" the prime indicator of how well a high school performs.
Rating schools by AIMS scores sets the bar too low because the state's standardized student tests are based on 10th-grade skills, said Reps. Rich Crandall, a Mesa Republican, and David Lujan, a Phoenix Democrat.
Some educators fear that the new approach would put too much emphasis on college-bound students and not enough on marginal students who need extra help or students who don't want to attend college.
The College Readiness Report calculated how many 2006 high-school graduates could directly enter freshman-level English and algebra classes and how many had to take remedial classes first.
The study tracked graduates at each of 115 Maricopa County districts and charter high schools who entered one of the three state universities or Maricopa Community Colleges. Those students accounted for 55 percent of the county's 2006 graduates, or about 17,400 students.
The results: Seventy-seven percent were prepared to enter a college-level English course without extra help; half were ready for college algebra.
"The glass is half-full or half-empty, depending on how you look at it," said Arizona State University's David Garcia, who conducted the research. All the students in the study had passed Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, passed their high-school courses and earned diplomas, he said.
"After that, the burning question is: 'What did that mean?'. . . Are we aiming at the right place?" Garcia said. "My primary interest in doing this is to put something else out there for public discussion other than AIMS."
The study is the first to track such data for individual high schools. Garcia said he is preparing to conduct the research statewide and include students who attend colleges and universities out of state. He also is working on tracking students who attend trade schools.
The College Readiness Report caught the attention of Crandall and Lujan, who plan to introduce a bill this week that would establish a pilot program using the report's data as the primary measurement of a high school's performance.
The schools would be measured on improvement in the percentage of graduates who entered college without needing remedial classes.
"When you use AIMS as your total measurement, you get 10th-grade results, and that's not good enough," said Crandall, chairman of the House Education Committee. Crandall, once president of the Mesa Unified District governing board, who has already established a legislative task force to examine the future of AIMS. Its recommendations are due in June, and it could suggest changing the AIMS exam, killing it as a graduation requirement, replacing it or adding a college-entrance or another test.
The bill, drafted by Lujan, would keep AIMS scores and graduation rates as part of a new formula to evaluate school instruction, but College Readiness Report data would play the key role. Lujan said it's easier for parents to understand.
In all measures, schools would have to show progress in the percentage of students meeting the new goals.
The AIMS reading, writing and math exam is taken each year by students in third through eighth grades and in 10th grade. It measures how well students are achieving grade-level learning goals, and high-school students must pass the exam to graduate. Test scores are used to rate schools on a six-level scale that ranges from excelling to failing.
"People really don't know what the AIMS test measures," Lujan said. "Looking at how many students have to take remedial classes when they get to college, I think that's a really good indicator."
Schools participating in the pilot would include all the high schools in one district, most likely Phoenix Union High School District, where Lujan still sits on the board, and five charter high schools.
The schools would develop the new formula and use it to determine their rankings by September 2010.
State officials would track and report on the progress of students in schools using the new formula.
Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction, said he, too, wants to push all high schools to improve learning for college-bound students. College-readiness numbers could become a small part of the current formula, but AIMS scores should remain the key indicator, he said.
"I worked very hard to make sure the formula, as a whole, is fair," Horne said. "We must be sure the kids who don't go to college are still well prepared for life."
The transition of students from high school into postsecondary education is an important but under-informed policy issue. To address this research question, the Arizona Community Foundation and Arizona State University tracked high school graduates from the classes of 2005 and 2006 who enrolled in either the Maricopa community college system or one of Arizona's three public universities the year following graduation from high school.
These previously unreleased data provide school-level results on the percentage of high school graduates from Maricopa County district and charter high schools who enter postsecondary education ready for college-level coursework. For the purpose of this study, college-level is defined as any course categorized by the postsecondary institutions as:
English - Freshman English or above (courses designated as Pre-Freshman English and Other Lower Division English were not designated as college-level).
Mathematics - College Algebra or above (courses designated as Pre-Intermediate Algebra, Intermediate Algebra and those designated as Other Lower Division Mathematics were not designated as college-level).
New Jersey high school teacher Peter Hibbard flunked 55 percent of the students in his regular biology class the year before he retired. There were no failures in his honors classes, he said, but many of his regular students refused to do the work. They did not show up for tests and did not take makeups. They did not turn in lab reports. Homework was often ignored.
"Still, the principal told me that the failure rate was unacceptable, and I needed to fix it," Hibbard said. "The pressure to give grades instead of actually teaching increased. A colleague told me that he had no problem. If students showed up, they got a C. If they did some work, they got a B. If they did fair or better on tests, they got an A. No one ever complained, and his paycheck was the same. He was teacher of the year, and a finalist for a principal's job."
I often get helpful letters from teachers. They are fine people who assume I am educable, despite evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, as in Hibbard's case, teachers are so candid and wise I am compelled to quote them, and see if readers share their view of reality.
Rarely in our history have two more critical and incredible moments collided the Inauguration of Barack Obama and the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We feel the excitement of change no matter what our party affiliation may be, and yet our enthusiasm is tempered by what we know lies ahead.
In Sept. of 2008, our financial illiteracy as a nation dramatically revealed itself and the unraveling continues today. The propensity of many to spend beyond their means and make unwise financial decisions demonstrates that many of us don't even know the basics of budgeting or handling debt.
But we have an opportunity to turn this crisis into the ultimate learning experience. Our new leaders, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, fresh from Chicago Public Schools, can help make sure future generations don't repeat our mistakes.
Wauwatosa School District officials have found a home for the trade charter school that will be opening for the 2009-10 school year.
For the first year, the School of the Trades will be housed in the basement of the Fisher Building, 12121 W. North Ave.
Superintendent Phil Ertl said the district is looking at the location for one year as it evaluates the viability and efficiency of the building.
It was determined that the Fisher Building would be the best place to house the district's second trade charter school because it doesn't need major renovations.
"It's all there right now," Jason Zurawik, West associate principal who has been working with the trade charter school committee, told the School Board on Jan. 26.
Several parents from Jefferson Middle School have been meeting with Dr. Nerad and administrators to discuss the evolution of the standards based report cards in Middle School.
After much research on my part, it is clear standard based report cards are the "new" thing and a result of NCLB. It is easily adaptable at the elementary school, but very FEW school districts have implemented these changes in the middle school and in the high school it is almost nonexistent due to the difficulty adapting them for college entrance. It seems the goal of standard based report cards from the NCLB legistation is to make sure teachers teach the standards. It is kind of backwards that way but many teachers feel it makes sure they cover all the required standards.
Our local concerns and response from district include:
Infinite Campus, which was up and running last year is no longer functioning for middle school students.
Their response: Yes there are problems and we have provided training but the staff have not taking us up on the paid training made available.
My response: If you are going to implement a change, since when is it optional to learn a new system the district is implementing. My daughter has no grades, assignments, or anything on IC accept the final grade. When asked if this will be mandatory in the future I was told we have no idea and we can't promise that it will be. It is clear after two meetings and several discussion with Lisa Wachtel that IC will not accommodate standards based grading. Basically elementary students will never be up. She projected 5 years and the middle school while up it is not easy to use the grade book for a program designed for 100% grading. I am only left to believe 2/3 of MMSD students will not benefit from a potentially good way for parents to stay informed about their students progress, grades, test, assignments, etc.....
While some areas are better (Language Arts, Spanish, PE) evaluation includes written, oral,as well as comprehension for the languages, and for PE it includes evaluation for knowledge, skill, and effort.
In Math my child made a 4 on Content 1, 2 on Content 2, 1 on Content 3, and a 3 on Content 4. She received a cummulitative grade of D. When I add 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 and divide by 4 it equals 2.5 which is not a D. After much research I found out each area is weighted different which is not explained on the report card. I also asked and it required much investigation to find out what each content area (1,2,3,4) was evaluating. She clearly understands one of them and has poor understanding in the one weighed higher but I had no idea what they were as they were only labelled by a number.
Administration response: Math is a problem we are working on.
I accept with many reservations that we are doing standards based reporting for middle school students. I am angry that the district picked Infinite Campus at about the same time they were discussing going to Standards Based Report cards and did not realize 2/3 of the students will not benefit from IC. I am also upset that a pilot of the middle school report card was not conducted with staff, parents and student input. At Jefferson the staff feel under trained, overwhelmed and as though this was pushed down their throats. It says to me the staff were not consulted. When the staff person that was in charge of training the rest of the staff at Jefferson is not even using the I.C. it says a lot about the implementation of the middle school reporting. As far as standards based report cards moving to high school for MMSD, this would be very difficult. Not just due to college entrance but because MMSD high schools do not have standards to base the report cards upon.
2009 Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Questionnaire
1.2MB PDF File. This document includes responses from Madison School Board seat 1 candidates Arlene Silveira and Donald Gors, Seat 2 candidate Lucy Mathiak and a number of other local and statewide candidates for office in the upcoming April, 2009 election. Via a kind reader's email.
But there is controversy with 4K, and not just because of the cost. In other districts that have started programs, operators of private centers that stand to lose tuition dollars have emerged as opponents.
That's unlikely to be true for Renee Zaman, director of Orchard Ridge Nursery School on Madison's west side, who said last week that her center would be in a good position to participate with a 4K program because they already teach 84 4-year-olds and because all of their early childhood teachers are state certified.
But Zaman also said she hopes that the district doesn't push a 4K program through too quickly. She is particularly worried that the curriculum might focus too heavily on academics.
One sticking point in past 4K discussions in Madison was concern from the teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., that preschool teachers at off-site programming centers might not be employees of the school district.
But Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews have had many discussions about 4K over the past several months, and Matthews said as long as no district teachers are displaced, he is in favor of the program.
The best women's chess player in the world flipped a dirty diaper into the trash as she pondered her next move after a dominating year.
"I want to open a chess academy online, keep training, doing the podcast," says south Floridian Alexandra Kosteniuk. "But right now, my priority is being a mother."
Kosteniuk, 24, won the Women's World Chess Championship in her homeland, Russia, in September. After several months of travelling the globe, Kosteniuk, her husband, Diego Garces, and their 20-month-old daughter Francesca are home.
About 3,000 people subscribe to her podcast at chessiscool.com, and about 10,000 others log on each month to her website, where they can see photos of Kosteniuk in bikinis and buy her instructional DVDs. "It's the most popular chess site out there," says her husband, 49, who is also her webmaster and publicist.
These successes and failures have underscored the need to aim high and embrace change in America's schools. Our goal as a nation should be to ensure that 80 percent of our students graduate from high school fully ready to attend college by 2025. This goal will probably be more difficult to achieve than anything else the foundation works on, because change comes so slowly and is so hard to measure. Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school's students do better than another school's, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. And as the successes show, some schools are making real progress.
Based on what the foundation has learned so far, we have refined our strategy. We will continue to invest in replicating the school models that worked the best. Almost all of these schools are charter schools. Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.
One of the key things these schools have done is help their teachers be more effective in the classroom. It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving. So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students.
Indian Mound Middle School students are spending study halls in an outdoor classroom right next to their school.
Two groups of sixth-graders trek weekly through the McFarland School Forest adjacent to their school during their study hall period. They participate in various activities such as the recent scavenger hunt to look for and photograph things like deer tracks and evidence of animals eating.
"It's just a good way to get outdoors (and) shed off the extra energy we have," said sixth-grader Dayne Mickelson. "We just have one recess."
The field trips are part of an effort to have students spend more time in the immense natural resource in the school's backyard.
"I would love to take every child in this school out in the woods as much as possible," said Janet Moore, community outreach/school forest coordinator in the McFarland School District. "It is good to kind of get an ongoing relationship with the place."
Are the flowing curves and fancy loops of cursive writing disappearing from elementary school classrooms?
Some fear classic penmanship has been left behind as preparation for state assessment tests dominates class time. Others blame the rise of the Internet, combined with a push to ensure that children are technologically literate, for rendering delicate handwriting an art of yesteryear.
"With all the other subjects we must teach, we just don't have the time to spend a lot of effort on cursive," said Carl Brown, principal of Manatee Elementary in Viera, Fla.
That's a big change from years past. Brown recalled that he had to attend a summertime handwriting camp in Brevard County, Fla., about 25 years ago because of his illegible scrawl.
Pupils in every secondary school should be taught the statistical skills they need to make sensible life decisions, one of Britain's leading mathematicians says.
A basic grasp of statistics and probability -- "risk literacy" - is critical to making choices about health, money and even education, yet it is largely ignored by the national curriculum, according to the UK's only Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk.
David Spiegelhalter, of the University of Cambridge, told The Times that as the internet transformed access to information, it was becoming more important than ever to teach people how best to interpret data.
Familiarity with statistical thinking and the principles of risk could help people to make sense of claims about health hazards and the merits of new drugs, to invest money more wisely, and to choose their children's schools.
Good afternoon students! I'm writing you this email to announce that I'm making some changes in the grading policies I announced two weeks ago when I sent an email with an attached course syllabus. As you know, we now have a new president and I thought it would be nice to align our class policies with some of the policies he will be implementing over the next four years. These will be changes you can believe in and, I hope, changes that will inspire hope, which is our most important American value.
Previously, I announced that I would use a ten-point grading scale, which means that 90% of 100 is an "A," 80% is a "B," 70% is a "C," and 60% is enough for a passing grade of "D." I also announced that I will refrain from using a "plus/minus" system - even though the faculty handbook gives me that option.
The new policy I am announcing today is that those who score above 90 on the first exam will have points deducted and given to students at the bottom of the grade distribution. For example, if a student gets a 99, I will then deduct nine points and give them to the person with the lowest grade. If a person scores 95 I will then deduct five points and give them to the person with the second lowest grade. If someone scores 93 I will then deduct three points and give them to the next lowest person. And so on.
My point, rather obviously, is that any points above 90 are really not needed since you have an "A" regardless of whether you score 90 or 99. Nor am I convinced that you need to "save" those points for a rainy day. Those who are failing, however, need the points--not unlike the failing banks and automakers that need money to avoid the danger of bankruptcy.
After our second examination, I intend to take a more complex approach to the practice of grade redistribution. I will not be looking at your second test scores but, instead, at the average of your first two test scores. In the process, I may well decide to start taking some points from students in the "B" range. For example, if someone has an average of 85 after two tests I may take a few points and give them away to someone who is failing or who is in danger of failing. I think this is fair because the person with an 85 average is probably unlikely to climb up to an "A" or fall down to a "C." I may be wrong in some individual cases but, of course, my principal concern is not the individual.
By the end of the semester I will abandon any formal guidelines and just redistribute points in a way that seems just, or fair, to me. I will not rely upon any standards other than my very strong and passionate feelings concerning social justice. In the process, I will not merely seek to eliminate inequality. I will also seek to eliminate the possibility of failure.
I know some are concerned that my system may impact their lives in a very profound way. Grade redistribution will undoubtedly cause some grade point average redistribution. And this, in turn, will mean that some people will not get into the law school or medical school of their choice. Or maybe some day you will be represented by a lawyer--or operated on by a doctor--who is not of the highest quality.
These are all, of course, legitimate long-term concerns. But I believe we need to remain focused on the short term. I think my new system will immediately help the self-esteem of those failing or in danger of failing. It should also help the self-esteem of those who are not in danger of failing. After all, it just feels good to give--even if the giving is compelled and not really "giving" in the literal sense.
Finally, I want to note that this idea was also inspired by a former presidential candidate named George McGovern. In a debate with the late William F. Buckley, McGovern said that people who earn more money should pay more taxes. Buckley replied that the rich do pay more in taxes--and more as a percentage of their income. McGovern looked confused.
But I don't think there's anything confusing about our pending social responsibilities. Whether we are talking about income or grades it does not matter how much or what percentage we are giving. The question is and should always be "Can we give more?"
Wisconsin parents who want to send their children to a school outside the district in which they live can start applying Feb. 2.
The open enrollment period for next school year ends three weeks later on Feb. 20.
The program has grown in popularity since it started in the fall of 1998. Only about 2,400 students participated that school year. But last year, nearly 26,000 did.
The focus of each session will be a presentation of the findings and recommendations of the Fine Arts Task Force followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete Fine Arts Task Force Report can be found at http://www.mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
We are looking forward to sharing this information with you and hearing your thoughts about the research and recommendations provided by the Fine Arts Task Force.
Feedback from sessions and the recommendations from the Fine Arts Task Force will assist in improving the MMSD K-12 Fine Arts program and opportunities for our students,
If you have any questions or comments, please contact Julie Palkowski at jpalkowski@madison.k12.wi.us
Lisa Wachtel
Executive Director of Teaching and Learning
Julie Palkowski
Coordinator of Fine Arts
Please share this information with others that may be interested in attending these sessions and/or sharing their comments.
he Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously late last night to abandon a strict grading policy it has long upheld as a hallmark of high standards, after a year of intense pressure from parents who have argued that the policy hurts students' chances for college admission or scholarships.
The School Board decided to move toward a more commonly used grading scale that parents have championed. The board also approved a plan to add extra points to the grade-point averages of students who take college level or honors classes.
Two board members, Kaye Kory (Mason) and Martina A. Hone (At Large), were absent for the 10 to 0 vote.
At issue is what it means to earn an A or to pass. Currently, Fairfax students must score 94 percent to earn an A and 64 percent to pass. In most school systems, including those in Montgomery and Arlington counties, 90 percent is an A and 60 percent is a passing grade. Many school systems also add points to the GPAs of students who take more challenging classes.
In the letter, Mr. Gates goes out of his way to acknowledge setbacks. For example, the Gates Foundation made a major push for smaller high schools in the United States, often helping to pay for the creation of small schools within larger buildings.
"Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students' achievement in any significant way," he acknowledges. Small schools succeeded when the principal was able to change teachers, curriculum and culture, but smaller size by itself proved disappointing. "In most cases," he says, "we fell short."
Mr. Gates comes across as a strong education reformer, focusing on supporting charter schools and improving teacher quality. He suggested that when he has nailed down the evidence more firmly, he will wade into the education debates.
"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one," Mr. Gates writes in his letter. "Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school."
I could not agree more. Rather than add coaches and layers of support staff, I'd prefer simply hiring the best teachers (and paying them) and getting out of the way. Of course, this means that not all teachers (like the population) are perfect, or above average!
The argument over what to do about America's struggling schools is still raging. Programs such as No Child Left Behind have achieved some success by introducing a measure of accountability into the process. But American students continue to get clobbered on international tests by other countries whose school systems spend less money per student and have larger average class sizes.
Facing budget realities in a down economy, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently proposed shortening the school year by five days to contribute $1.1 billion in savings toward the state's $42 billion budget shortfall.
State school superintendent Jack O'Donnell vehemently disagreed, saying a longer school year was needed to prepare students for "the competitive global economy."
The operative word here is "competitive." Success in the marketplace depends on being able to produce the best product at the lowest cost. Competition in the business world produces a better product at less cost. Why shouldn't it be so in education? Well, it is.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 70% of the countries that outperformed the U.S. in combined math and science literacy among 15-year-olds had more schools competing for students. Countries ranging from Japan to Latvia all had more education options than American students.
Memphis high-tech entrepreneur Bob Compton, producer of the stirring documentary "Two Million Minutes," has been suggesting, in his genial way, that I am a head-in-the-sand ignoramus. This is because I panned his film as alarmist nonsense for suggesting, based on profiles of a grand total of six teenagers, that the Indian and Chinese education systems were superior to what we have here in the much-beleaguered United States. When we debated the issue on CNBC, Bob told me I should get on a plane and see for myself instead of relying on my memories of living in Asia in the 1970s and 1980s and my reading of recent work by other reporters.
Sadly, even in the days when The Washington Post was flush with cash, there was no money to send the education columnist abroad. But I am happy to report I don't have to go because an upcoming book from education scholar James Tooley goes much deeper into the Chinese and Indian school systems than Bob or I ever have, and takes my side. Tooley shows that India and China, despite their economic successes, have public education systems that are, in many ways, a sham.
Tooley's book, "The Beautiful Tree," reveals him to be the kind of traveler who often strays off the main roads, driving official escorts crazy. He covers not only China and India, but also Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. He wants to discover how the world's poorest people are educating themselves, and surprises himself repeatedly.
KAI RYSSDAL: Like so many presidents before him, President Obama has talked a lot about the importance of education. He's talked about the need for arts in schools. The need for teacher training. Good ideas, but ones that cost money -- money that we're in short supply of these days.
RYSSDAL: You, in the course of writing your book, spent a lot of time in and out of public school classrooms in the United States. What's your take on the biggest problems that are out there?
EATON: Well, I think that the biggest problem is the fact that huge shares of our children in the United States -- disproportionately, children of color; Latino and African American children -- are simply not connected to mainstream opportunities. And our schools are really . . . have not, at least in the last eight years or so -- and probably even more than that -- been trying to connect them to those opportunities.
RYSSDAL: But it does, in a lot of measure, come down to money. Doesn't it?
In many books, more articles, and perhaps 200 appearances a year, Alfie Kohn does what he can to spare United States students the evils of competition. While he can't do much about athletic competition, or economic competition or the unfairness of love and war, he tries hard and successfully to persuade educators that making academic distinctions among students hurts them.
A story is told of an unpopular officer at the U.S Naval Academy who knew he was disliked (his nickname was "The Wedge" as "the simplest tool known to man") and he was always on the lookout for ways to assert his dominance. Once he berated a formation of midshipman for being unsatisfactory by pointing out that while their toes were all lined up, their heels were as much as two or three inches out of line! The officer candidate in charge of the formation replied that he recognized the problem, and would try to see that all midshipmen in future could be issued the same size shoes!
Of course, Mr. Kohn would not, I believe, argue that having different size feet should be corrected to prevent some students from feeling inferior, but he does object to anything in school which might reveal that some are brighter and some more diligent than others. It is not clear how he thinks students can be prevented from noticing this for themselves, but he is insistent that testing and other forms of academic competition should not be allowed to reveal such differences.
Some people feel that in law, for instance, competition among arguments makes arriving at the facts of a case more likely. Competition among the producers of goods and services are thought by some to make improvements in quality and reduction in price more likely. It is even claimed that some works of art and literature are better than others, although serious efforts have of course been made to make such judgments less common.
In the past in the U.S., and in present in the rest of the world, academic competition has been seen as beneficial in inspiring many students to try harder, to learn more, and to become more competent. For much the same reason that every athlete does not receive a gold medal for showing up at the Olympic Games, it is believed that recognizing academic achievement will encourage effort and emulation, and benefit all the students who are willing to try.
Perhaps Mr. Kohn is just hoping to mitigate, in his own small way, the workings of Natural Selection...He may shudder at the characterization of "Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw," and be determined to protect students from all bad feelings and experiences.
One problem is that students are not so easily fooled into believing that they are all equally capable and equally proficient. And for thousands of years, human beings have been able to survive the discovery of such differences. That is not to say there have been no feelings of envy, and no murders and wars, but in general people have found a way to accept, even to celebrate, the achievements of some of their number.
Mr. Kohn, however, continues to make The Case Against Competition, as one of his books is titled, and he evidently continues to think that if all students could be mediocre, all could be spared any invidious and soul-crushing academic distinctions which might otherwise be made.
It might be noted, in a world in which India and China are making great strides in promoting academic achievement and in which the United States students often place near the bottom academically in international assessments, that ideas such as Mr. Kohn's, while very widely admired among some of our educators, only serve to promote even lower academic standards for our schools. Removing challenges, standards and assessments from our education is probably the very best way of ensuring an increase in mediocrity and scholastic incompetence.
Nevertheless, if the goal is keeping students, to the greatest extent possible, from having any disappointments or bad feelings, Mr. Kohn seems to believe that the assault on academic standards and distinctions of all kinds must be carried on, and he is surely our undisputed National Champion in that effort.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
A Dec. 16 article in The Washington Post reported that the Montgomery County school system might end the longtime practice of labeling students as gifted or not in the second grade.
The article ignited a fire within the local gifted-and-talented community. More than 300 people posted comments on http://www.washingtonpost.com, and 9,957 voted in an informal online poll on the merits of scrapping the gifted label. The latest tally was 54 percent in favor of keeping it, 41 percent saying dumping it would be a good idea.
The school system went to the unusual length of responding publicly to the article, clarifying that although the idea was under study, no decision had been made. Gifted policy is ultimately decided by the school board, whose members expect to take up the future of the label sometime this year.
The reaction illustrated the level of community interest in accelerated instruction and underscored the friction between advocates for the gifted and school system officials on a more basic question: Are the needs of advanced students being met?
The Minnesota ACLU has filed suit against TIZA, a charter school in Inver Grove Heights and Blaine, claiming it is promoting the Muslim religion.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed suit Wednesday against a publicly funded charter school alleging that it is promoting the Muslim religion and is leasing school space from a religious organization without following state law.
The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis against Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, known as TIZA, and the Minnesota Department of Education, which the ACLU says is at fault for failing to uncover and stop the alleged transgressions. The suit names the department and Alice Seagren, the state education commissioner, as co-defendants.
Determined inutility is one thing -- Prof. Fish is free to choose that path if he wants to -- but determined ignorance of history is something else again.
It's odd for a scholar to throw around phrases like "today's educational landscape" as if contemporary economic and cultural forces were laying siege to institutions that were founded and managed as ivory towers committed to impractical scholarship. But the truth is that American higher education has always explicitly aimed to mix practical training with pure intellectual and moral formation, and to pursue research with practical consequences as well as understanding abstracted from applications.
Stanley Fish himself was an undergraduate at my own institution, the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded by Benjamin Franklin on this educational premise ("Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania", 1749):
This year marks the ninth year of public reporting on the Board of Education Priorities for reading and mathematics achievement and school attendance. The data present a clear picture of District progress on each of the priorities. The document also reflects the deep commitment of the Madison Metropolitan School District to assuring that all students have the knowledge and skills needed for academic achievement and a successful life.
1. All students complete 3rd grade able to read at grade level or beyond.
Beginning in the fall of 2005-06, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required all states to test all students in reading from grades 3-8 and once in high school. This test replaced the former Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test. MMSD now reports on three years of data for students in grade 4.
District wide 74% of students scored proficient or advanced in reading on the 2007-08 WKCE, which is a 2% decline.
Hispanic and Other Asian students posted increases in percent of proficient or higher reading levels between 2007 and 2008.
2. All students complete Algebra by the end of 9th grade and Geometry by the end of 10th grade.
The largest relative gain in Algebra between the previous year measure, 2007-08, and this school year was among African American students.
Students living in low income households who successfully completed Algebra by grade 10 at the beginning of 2008-09 increased since the previous year.
The rate for Geometry completions for females continues to be slighter higher than their male counterparts.
3. All students, regardless of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic or linguistic subgroup, attend school at a 94 percent attendance rate at each grade level. The attendance rate of elementary students as a group continues to be above the 94% goal. All ethnic subgroups, except for African American (92.5% rate for 2007-08, 93.0% rate for 2006-07 and 93.1% for the previous two years) continue to meet the 94% attendance goal.
This report includes information about district initiatives that support students' goal attainment. In the context of the MMSD Educational Framework, the initiatives described for the literacy and the mathematics priorities focus primarily within the LEARNING component and those described for the attendance priority focus primarily within the ENGAGEMENT component. It is important to note that underlying the success of any efforts that focus on LEARNING or ENGAGEMENT is the significance of RELATIONSHIPS.
Around the country, school districts are urging officials to crack down on charter school growth--and on existing charter schools--because, they assert, there isn't enough money in strapped state budgets to pay for this sector--and of course the districts must come first.
I'm seeing this in Ohio, in Utah and in Massachusetts and do not doubt that it's happening all over the place.
But of course it's completely cockeyed. If every public-school pupil in America attended a charter school, the total taxpayer cost would be 20-30% LESS than it is today. That's because charters are underfunded (compared with district schools) and thus represent an extraordinary bargain--even if their overall academic performance isn't much different from that of district schools. Think of it as the same amount of learning at three-quarters of the price.
Weighing the decision last year, Peter Canale, father of three small children, got caught in the crossfire. Co-workers and family members warned him, "you'd be crazy not to send your kid to some kind of preschool," he says. But the Yonkers, N.Y., financial-services manager, who never attended preschool himself and whose wife stays home with their children, was skeptical; "I thought pre-K was a fad," he says.
Actually, all kinds of kids reap some academic benefits from preschool, a growing body of research shows. Among 22 scholarly studies I reviewed, the five that encompass children from middle- and high-income families show preschool grads enter kindergarten with better pre-reading and math skills than those in other kinds of care or at home with their parents. To be sure, the benefits for mainstream kids are smaller than for children from poor or disadvantaged homes, but they're still significant.
Political indoctrination in the guise of "Residence Life" programs took a pounding during a National Association of Scholars debate.
In last week's Clarion Call, I wrote about the debate over academic freedom at the recent National Association of Scholars conference in Washington, D.C. But equally important was the contentious final session, devoted to the agenda of the "Residence Life" movement.
That movement is a nationwide initiative that has managers of student dorms teaching a leftist political catechism to students under their control in an effort to radicalize them.
The discussion focused on the infamous ResLife program at the University of Delaware. It took some interesting turns, including opposition to the programs from AAUP president Cary Nelson. He is a man of the left, but nevertheless doesn't want to see curriculum and instruction handed over to people who aren't even remotely scholars.
First to speak was Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He explained the objectives of the Residence Life movement generally and concentrated on the University of Delaware, where the program was first seen in all its authoritarian splendor: prying questions, indoctrination sessions, and special "treatment" for students who were either uncooperative or, worse, had the temerity to disagree. Kissel made it clear that the ResLife agenda consists of clumsy, authoritarian indoctrination of students meant to color their thinking toward leftist bromides about the environment, capitalism, institutional racism and so forth.
Kissel told some disgusting stories about the enforcement of ResLife policies. For example, a female student was reprimanded with an official complaint when she refused to cooperate with the questionnaire that asked about intimate details of her life. Even though Delaware paid lip service to student privacy rights, the supposed need to gather information to identify those who have "incorrect" beliefs trumped that. People who are intent on remaking society seldom let little things like privacy, civility or due process get in their way.
The second speaker was University of Delaware education professor Jan Blits. He was instrumental in bringing the school's Orwellian program to light. After a student told him about the program, he went to see the administrator responsible for running it. She gave him a thick folder full of documents, apparently believing that once he read the details, he would be won over. That was a tremendous miscalculation. Not only was Professor Blits not won over, he was appalled at the program.
Its intent, Blits said, was to "shape the whole human being." That "shaping," however had nothing in common with the traditional college liberal arts education; instead, the objective was to "turn" students by getting them to accept an array of politically-charged conclusions. It was telling that the Delaware administrators wanted to avoid any faculty involvement or oversight, fearing that at least some professors would be outraged at this coercive effort at dictating to students what they should think.
Blits revealed a detail about the ResLife program that was astounding, even for listeners already aware of its domineering nature. Dorm RAs, the "front-line troops" of the program, were trained to intervene whenever a political discussion broke out. Students weren't to be trusted to discuss issues on their own. Instead, the RA was supposed to intrude and properly organize the discussion, allowing one student to state his or her view, then the other student, and then to break it up. Just as communists could never trust people to engage in any sort of commercial transaction without the control of the state, at Delaware the ResLife thought police could not trust students to have political discussions without their control.
The crowning irony of the program for Blits was the fact that a university was entrusting an educational mission to people who had little or no knowledge about the subject. The socio-economic subjects that comprise the core of the ResLife belief system are emphatically not matters that lend themselves to simplistic treatment--environmental issues, for example--but it had RAs and other administrators "teaching" about them. It was as if a doctor had his receptionist doing medical diagnoses for him.
Finally, Blits said that the ResLife movement has obviously learned from the shellacking it took at Delaware, but not by shedding its arrogant assumptions and coercive tactics. Instead, the lesson it learned was to be more circumspect so that opponents of its efforts at turning college dorms into re-education camps would find little traction.
The final speaker was Illinois State University English professor John K. Wilson. Wilson, author of The Myth of Political Correctness is a resolute defender of leftist orthodoxy. After the strong arguments of Kissel and Blits, Wilson knew he was in a difficult position, namely wanting to defend the indefensible. He admitted that there were troubling aspects of the Delaware program, but argued that the general goal of the program, to increase political awareness and discussion, was good. For Wilson, the program's compulsion was bad, but its effort at trying to "enhance intellectual activity" in college was good.
There's a gaping hole in Wilson's argument. The sort of orchestrated "learning" under academically untrained people that comprises the ResLife program necessarily crowds out other kinds of learning that students would choose to engage in. The vapid programming of ResLife has, in other words, opportunity costs, including time students might devote to actual coursework, spontaneous discussions of the issues that most matter to students, and independent reading about politics or whatever else students are interested in. Wilson's defense rests on a false dichotomy between the "intellectual activity" of the ResLife program and nothing. But students aren't usually doing nothing. The activities they choose are probably more beneficial (even sleeping!) than the hectoring they get in ResLife.
In the Q and A following the three presentations, Nelson spoke up in opposition to the ResLife program, saying that the college curriculum should be under the control of the faculty, not administrators and students. I'm in agreement with him on that. Again, it's like doctors and receptionists. Doctors aren't always right, but as a rule it's far better to keep the decision-making in the hands of people who have some expertise.
At most schools, the academic curriculum is weak enough as is. Instead of allowing ResLife zealots to engraft another branch, one that is the antithesis of open inquiry and debate, college administrators should firmly veto the idea that students need another curriculum shoved down their throats. Instead they should work to restore integrity to the real curriculum.
It was a great pleasure to speak with you at the National Association of Scholars meeting in Washington. Thank you for sending me information about The Concord Review.
The Concord Review represents an opportunity for high school students to challenge themselves in both History and Expository Writing Skills. It would appear that many of the leading private and selective public schools take advantage of the opportunity to publish in The Concord Review. I am surprised more schools are not taking advantage of the opportunity that The Concord Review is providing, particularly given the state of writing and history in high schools.
I have noticed over the past 10 years that a number of the better public schools in the more financially advantaged suburban towns around Boston have been extending their reach of academic experiences and academic engagements outside of the standard High School Curriculum. I attribute this, in part, to the number of suburban parents that have some children in elite private schools and others in local elite public schools and have brought to the public schools many of the tactics and practices of the private schools.
The Concord Review is an opportunity for high school students to publish and should be more aggressively pursued by the public schools whose students lack writing skills. I am certainly going to make my local high school and its headmaster aware of The Concord Review.
Best Regards,
Tom Oberst
--
Thomas P. Oberst
Principal
Strategic Technology
27 Snow Street
Sherborn, Massachusetts 01770
Anyone viewing President Obama's education plans from a UK perspective will be reminded of Labour's ambitions in 1997.
The incoming US president wants to offer more support for early years children, promote innovation in schools and shut down those that are failing.
There will be a drive to widen access to higher education - with more student funding and awareness-raising.
Obama's education secretary is Chicago school chief, Arne Duncan.
Under the banner of "Zero to five", the new administration is promising extra support for early years - arguing that for every dollar invested, there will be a return to society worth $7 to $10.
Barack Obama was just sworn in as President of the US and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the web. (Several readers have told us that it wasn't Obama that stumbled, it was Justice Roberts.) There were quite a few concepts discussed that we suspect haven't been a part of past inaugural speeches. What words were used most often? We ran the full text of the speech through tag cloud generator Wordle.net for one view of the event, and just for the sake of historical context we ran George W. Bush's second inaugural speech through as well. Update: After one reader suggested it, we've also added word clouds from Bill Clinton's second inaugural speech and Reagan's first below. Second update: By reader request, we've added Lincoln's first and second inaugural speeches as well.
The most common words in the Obama and Bush speeches were dramatically different.
"Home education", where children study at home rather than at school, is to face a review in England.
"There are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need," said Children's Minister Baroness Delyth Morgan.
The government says there are no plans to remove the right to educate children at home.
But home educators' charity, Education Otherwise, said it was "infuriated" by the proposed investigation.
There is no legal obligation for children to be sent to school - but parents have to provide a suitable education.
In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.
This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: "There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining."
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental - valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.
This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber (German sociologist), among others) can really flourish in today's educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic - in the pejorative sense of the word - if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today's climate, does it have a chance?
Tomorrow marks a turning point in the history of our schools as well as our country. Note how the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we honor today, had to confront the cold, hard, in-your-face prejudice of a legally segregated system, while the next president, Barack Obama, speaks of a softer negligence, illuminated by the frequently heard phrase, "These kids can't learn."
These days, those of us interested in schools -- parents, students, educators, researchers, journalists -- are not sure if we believe in teaching or sorting. Is it best to strain ourselves and our children trying to raise everyone to a higher academic level, or does it make more sense to prepare each child for a life in which he or she will be comfortable? The people I admire in our schools want to be teachers. Sorting, they say, is a new form of the old racism but subtler and in some ways harder to resist.
It took me a long time to understand this. My parents were socially conservative but politically and religiously liberal, and they raised me in the United Church of Christ, the same denomination that Obama and his family joined in Chicago. There were few black people in our pews in San Mateo, Calif., however. My public high school had only two black students, my private college not many more. The first African Americans I got to know well were in my Army basic training company. They teased me, the only college graduate in the barracks, about my utter lack of street smarts. They had not done well in school, but they were shrewd, energetic and learned quickly, once subjected to the Army's refusal to tolerate inattention. Many went to college when they finished their service.
The seventh-grade students are playing a round-robin trivia game, excitedly naming the countries on a blank map showing on their classroom's overhead projector. Burkina Faso. Cote d'Ivoire.
Faster and faster, the teacher goes around the room until it's just Justyn and another boy.
The tallest mountain in Africa? Mount Kilimanjaro. The tallest mountain range in South America? The Andes.
And then it's over. Justyn doesn't win the game but he's still smiling, showing off the deep dimples in his cheeks. His 25 classmates erupt into cheers, applauding both students.
This is how it works at the extraordinary Ron Clark Academy, a private middle school tucked among boarded-up houses and graffiti-peppered walls in Lakewood, one of Atlanta's poorest neighborhoods.
The USA's public schools stand to be the biggest winners in Congress' $825 billion economic stimulus plan unveiled last week. Schools are scheduled to receive nearly $142 billion over the next two years -- more than health care, energy or infrastructure projects -- and the stimulus could bring school advocates closer than ever to a long-sought dream: full funding of the No Child Left Behind law and other huge federal programs.
But tucked into the text of the proposal's 328 pages are a few surprises: If they want the money -- and they certainly do -- schools must spend at least a portion of it on a few of education advocates' long-sought dreams. In particular, they must develop:
High-quality educational tests.
Ways to recruit and retain top teachers in hard-to-staff schools.
Longitudinal data systems that let schools track long-term progress.
ust days into his tenure as superintendent in the River Rouge School District, Carlos Lopez started going door to door in a bid to boost enrollment.
He had to get a handle on an enrollment nosedive that today leaves the district with fewer than half as many students as it had 10 years ago. It even exceeded the oft-reported hemorrhaging of Detroit Public Schools, which is down 42%.
An analysis of a decade's worth of enrollment data found it's becoming an increasingly common tale in metro Detroit schools.
In Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties, the growth that spurred multimillion-dollar construction projects a few years ago is quickly fading, with those districts losing a total of 66,030 students in the last five years. This school year alone, almost 50 districts in metro Detroit lost students.
That 5-year, 10% enrollment drop in metro Detroit comes at an enormous financial cost -- as much as $129 million in lost state aid in the last school year, based on unaudited enrollment data. The downward trend has forced districts to close buildings, increase class sizes, eliminate programs and lay off staff.
It looks like the trillion-dollar "stimulus" (read: pork) bill is going to include a hefty dose of spending on schools. Of course, we don't know yet what the proposed bill will contain, and the proposal will undergo a lot of revision when it goes through the congressional sausage grinder. But from the leaks and preliminary reports, respectable observers are estimating that as much as $70 billion or even $100 billion may ultimately end up going to K-12 schools. For comparison, after the radical expansion of federal education spending that came with No Child Left Behind, the feds now spend about $40 billion per year on K-12 education.
Politically, it's a shrewd move. They don't really care what they're building, as long as they're building something, so as long as they're building a bunch of roads and bridges and community centers they may as well build some schools, too. The teachers' unions have successfully spread the myth that schools desperately need more facilities spending, even though facilities spending per student almost doubled from 1990 to 2005 (after inflation). So "New School to Be Built" is always a crowd-pleasing headline.
Many Americans of my generation and older, of all races, who grew up in the 1950s and '60s or before, never could have imagined someone looking like Barack Obama, or me, becoming president of the United States.
During the campaign, I was struck by the optimism and hope of my UMBC students about our country's future. Many of them, like America's younger generation in general, have had different experiences - and therefore different perspectives - from those of us who are older.
On Election Night, students shared with me their sense of enthusiasm about voting for the first time, and I thought about America in 1960, when John Kennedy became president. At that time, he challenged us in his inaugural address to commit to public service and the "struggle against ... poverty, disease, and war."
Almost a half-century later, as President-elect Obama takes office, a new period dawns, and no doubt he, too, will emphasize our common values and purpose as we continue addressing these same challenges.
A couple days after I signed up for the SAT last year, I began to panic. Getting a good score was key to getting into a good college, I thought, yet I hadn't even begun studying. Many of my schoolmates who had gotten good scores had regularly used pricey tutors, and my older brother used a tutor a couple of times to prepare for the ACT. So it seemed natural for me to do the same. And mandatory for me to get the score I needed.
I walked upstairs to where my dad was working and asked him how much he'd be willing to pay for an SAT class or tutor.
"I'll pay as much as you think it's worth," he told me.
I went downstairs and looked over the information I had on the tutor I had picked out. I thought about it for a while and decided it just wasn't worth it. The next day I checked out a book of SAT practice tests from my school at no cost and got to work.
I ended up doing great on it. I'm convinced that the SAT book I borrowed did just as much for me as any tutor would have. Sure, I had to motivate myself to practice -- which wouldn't be necessary with a regular tutor -- but I don't think I lost anything else by not paying for help.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the benefits of a tutor. There have been plenty of times when I've fallen behind in class and getting a tutor would have helped me catch up. And having a regular tutor would have kept me more organized with things like searching for a college. A friend hired a counselor to help her narrow her list of potential colleges and to pick the perfect essay for her applications.
To keep up with competition among virtual schools in the state, the Waukesha School District's virtual charter high school has received the green light to expand its computer-based learning environment to middle school students next year.
The Waukesha School Board approved a proposal last week to add grades six, seven and eight in the 2009-'10 academic year to ">iQ Academy Wisconsin, perpetuating a trend in virtual-school growth that's happening elsewhere around the country.
The 5-year-old iQ Academy is one of 18 virtual schools in Wisconsin that residents can attend for free through open enrollment.
"We're seeing a lot of growth on both sides: Elementary programs that started as K-5 or K-6 are expanding to middle-school programs, and at the high-school level, we're seeing them reaching back to the middle-school grades," Patrick said.
Virtual high schools that expand to middle schools often do so because they want to make sure students are competent in the academic content for core courses at the high school level, Patrick said.
Typically, virtual schools exist in one of two forms. Thirty-four states, including Wisconsin, have part-time virtual schools that serve as supplemental programs for students behind on credits or to offer students a class they can't get in their public school. Students may spend a portion of their normal, supervised school day logging into an online course.
Poor test scores. High dropout rates. Enormous schools. Large class sizes. These are the words that come to Milena Skollar's mind when you ask the transplant about sending her children to school in Georgia.
"It's not fun to be 50th in the nation in SAT scores -- plus the size of the schools is very disturbing," the mother of three said. "I believe in public education. I just wish the schools were better for my children."
Eric Johnson is a Republican state senator from Savannah. Skollar, a New Jersey native, is also a school social worker employed by a metro Atlanta school system. She is among the 68 percent of Georgia voters in a recent poll who support offering parents the option to transfer their children to a private school with a voucher.
As we commence another session of the General Assembly, it's time to start thinking about parents such as Skollar and stop offering a one-size-fits-all education model to Georgia students. It's time to offer a school voucher program for parents who want it for their children who need it.
Because both of her daughters excel in the classroom, Skollar believes her Fulton County public schools cannot challenge them enough as they get older and that a private school with smaller classes may be more appropriate. She would like more options.
It is a familiar drill in nearly all of the nation's Roman Catholic school systems: a new alarm every few years over falling enrollment; church leaders huddling over what to do; parents rallying to save their schools. And then the bad news.
When the Diocese of Brooklyn last week proposed closing 14 more elementary schools, it was not the deepest but only the latest of a thousand cuts suffered, one tearful closing announcement at a time, as enrollment in the nation's Catholic schools has steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago.
But recently, after years of what frustrated parents describe as inertia in the church hierarchy, a sense of urgency seems to be gripping many Catholics who suddenly see in the shrinking enrollment a once unimaginable prospect: a country without Catholic schools.
From the ranks of national church leaders to the faithful in the pews, there are dozens of local efforts to forge a new future for parochial education by rescuing the remaining schools or, if need be, reinventing them. The efforts are all being driven, in one way or another, by a question in a University of Notre Dame task force report in 2006: "Will it be said of our generation that we presided over the demise" of Catholic schools?
I'm always interested in finding new ways to learn better and faster. As a graduate student who is also a full-time science writer, the amount of time I have to spend learning new things is limited. It's important to get the most educational value out of my time as possible. However, retention, recall and transfer are also critical. I need to be able to accurately remember the information I learn, recall it at a later time and utilize it effectively in a wide variety of situations.
1. Memory Improvement Basics
I've written before about some of the best ways to improve memory. Basic tips such as improving focus, avoiding cram sessions and structuring your study time are a good place to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology that can dramatically improve your learning efficiency.
That was the way we did it back in the middle of the last century. My score had room for improvement. So did my friends' scores. But we would have been stunned if any of us tried again. We were regarded as nerds already. Taking the SAT twice would have ended any chance of a girl ever talking to us.
Times, as you know, have changed. The hot topic this year is not whether to try the exam twice, but whether you should be able to hide the worst of the two or three tests it is assumed nearly everyone will take.
The right to obliterate the results of a bad testing day is called Score Choice by the College Board, owner of the SAT test. Some say it is a marketing device to respond to the SAT's rival, the ACT, which has had such a policy for years. The first group eligible under the new rules will be members of the high school class of 2010 participating in this March's test administration. If they don't like their scores on that or any subsequent testing day, they may tell the College Board not to send them to any colleges.
A groundswell of parents have urged the school system, which requires a 94 for an A and a 64 to pass, to adopt the more broadly used practice of giving an A for 90 or better and setting 60 as the passing score. They also have argued that Fairfax should add extra points to the grade-point averages of those who take honors courses or college-level classes. They maintain that the current policy puts students at a disadvantage when they apply to colleges and for scholarships.
On Jan. 2, Dale recommended changing how the school system calculates GPAs but not the grading scale.
In a work session yesterday, board members listed advantages of changing the scale and advantages of keeping it. The list of reasons offered for change was twice as long. For example, members said a change would align Fairfax with other school systems and lessen parents' confusion. But an advantage to keeping the scale, some said, would be that students would work harder for better grades.
The Washington Teachers' Union says the District is improperly withholding the names of instructors who have been given 90 school days to improve their performance or face dismissal.
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said the disclosure would be counterproductive, but the union said she is obligated by contract to share the information. The issue is likely to be discussed at today's D.C. Council hearing on school personnel practices.
The 90-day plans are part of Rhee's attempt to remove "a significant share" of the 4,000-member teacher corps, which she regards as "not up to the demanding task of educating our youth effectively," according to the long-range action document she presented in October.
As a candidate, President-elect Barack Obama promised to reduce the "pervasive achievement gap" that for decades has separated many white, middle-class students from their poor, often minority, peers. As president, he'll have an opportunity to keep his promise. But what should he do first? Four big education thinkers offer their advice:
YOUR VOICE: How do you think Obama should close the minority 'gap'?
Amy Wilkins, vice president of The Education Trust, a non-profit advocacy group for low-income and minority students:
The American education system consistently shortchanges the students with the greatest need on almost everything that matters when it comes to academic success. You need to discard the policies that cheat these students.
This is especially important when it comes to quality teaching. Nothing is more important to high achievement than strong teachers. But the very children who most need our best teachers are least likely to get them. Through personal leadership, the use of federal authority and strategic funding, the president can help change thi
FOR a quarter of a century, surveys of reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federally-funded body, have been favourite material for anyone who thinks America is dumbing down. Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason", for example, cites the 2007 NEA report that "the proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004."
The increase, modest as it is, has thrown educationalists into a tizzy. "It's just a blip," one professor told the New York Times. It is certainly a snapshot. But it is not statistically insignificant. As the NEA's research director, Sunil Iyengar, points out, almost every demographic and ethnic group seems to be reading more.
Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It's the TIMSS (the same test you read about earlier, in the discussion of fourth graders born near the beginning of a school cutoff date and those born near the end of the date), and the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another's.
When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it's so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.
Now, here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math ranking on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident. "It came out of the blue," he says. Boe hasn't even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it's just a bit too weird. Remember, he's not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He's saying that they are the same: If you compare the two rankings, they are identical.
Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe's point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like "No man who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich." *
* note: There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian "persistence." In a typical study, Priscilla Blinco gave large groups of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and measured how long they worked at it before they gave up. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, roughly 40 percent longer.
Abplanalp, who has been working on the 4-K project for the seven years since joining the district as lead elementary principal, said there isn't a timetable in place as to when the program would start.
But she wouldn't count out the 2009-10 school year if three main issues can be ironed out.
"Could we get things in place by the fall? We think we could if we got the go-ahead," Abplanalp said Thursday afternoon. "If not, it's because we have issues to work out contractually with MTI (the teacher's union). ... We also have to work out community site issues, negotiating (contract) issues and financial issues."
Madison Metropolitan School District officials will unveil plans to offer a dual-language program at Leopold Elementary beginning next fall.
The new curriculum for the south side school would include education in English and Spanish, and discussion of the plan is anticipated at a Madison School Board meeting on Feb. 2.
Three sections of kindergarten classes with approximately 48 children will become part of the program, which will progress one grade level each school year until the program's initial students finish fifth grade. The school will join east side's Nuestro Mundo as the second public school in the Madison Metropolitan School District to offer a dual-language program. Nuestro Mundo, a charter school, has been in operation for five years.
Eight of Leopold's 44 classrooms are bilingual, and the school is a perfect fit for the immersion program, according to Assistant Superintendent Sue Abplanalp.
"We know the benefits of dual-immersion programming," Abplanalp said. "This is a perfect place to begin such a program because we know could get the enrollment that we need to make it a viable program for the future.
"We want native speaking Spanish children as well as non-native Spanish children, and that's the population that is at that building," she said.
The local public colleges that enroll the most Boston high school graduates have had a dismal record seeing them through to a degree, with many posting graduation rates of less than 25 percent, according to a study that reviewed the collegiate careers of the city's class of 2000.
Only 20.7 percent of the 150 students from the class who attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston - the most popular four-year public college for Boston high school students - graduated by the spring of 2007. By contrast, the most popular private school, Northeastern University, has handed degrees to 82.5 percent of the 80 Boston students from that class who enrolled there by the fall of 2001.
The rates at other popular public colleges were even worse. Bunker Hill Community College graduated 14.2 percent of its 155 Boston students, while Roxbury Community College had a graduation rate of 5.9 percent for its 101 Boston enrollees, according to new data released by the Boston Private Industry Council at the Globe's request. The council is a group of city business leaders who work on education policy issues.
According to a study released today by the social-policy research group MDRC, a nonpartisan organization perhaps best known for evaluating state welfare-to-work programs, cash incentives combined with counseling offered "real hope" to low-income and nontraditional students at two Louisiana community colleges. The program for low-income parents, funded by the Louisiana Department of Social Services and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, was simple: enroll in college at least half-time, maintain at least a C average and earn $1,000 a semester for up to two terms. Participants, who were randomly selected, were 30% more likely to register for a second semester than were students who were not offered the supplemental financial aid. And the participants who were first offered cash incentives in spring 2004 -- and thus whose progress was tracked for longer than that of subsequent groups before Hurricane Katrina abruptly forced researchers to suspend the survey for several months in August 2005 -- were also more likely than their peers to be enrolled in college a year after they had finished the two-term program. (Read "Putting College Tuition on Plastic.")
Students offered cash incentives in the Louisiana program didn't just enroll in more classes; they earned more credits and were more likely to attain a C average than were nonparticipants. And they showed psychological benefits too, reporting more positive feelings about themselves and their abilities to accomplish their goals for the future. "It's not very often that you see effects of this magnitude for anything that we test," notes Thomas Brock, MDRC's director for young adults and postsecondary-education policy.
But Melinda Gates is especially passionate about improving education here in the United States. The foundation has invested nearly $4 billion in education, with $2 billion going to high schools. It has helped 2,602 struggling schools create new models of teaching and learning to improve performance and graduation rates.
BETA was once part of the failing John F. Kennedy School, which in 2002 had 5,000 students. That big school was divided into five smaller schools with more intense curriculums.
The kids at BETA have made a big turnaround since then. Principal Rashid Davis said 78 percent of the students came into the school performing below grade level, but the school's graduation rate for the class of 2008 is 90 percent. Ninety percent of the students are also going on to college.
"The great thing is that as you see in a school like BETA, these kids can do the work, and it doesn't matter what Zip code they're from," Gates said. "You put kids in a school with a great curriculum, they'll rise up and they'll do it. They like to be challenged. And I see it over and over again in schools across the U.S."
Advanced Math Courses at UW-Madison for High School Students
Tonghai Yang, via email:
Math 234 (Calculus III, after Calculus BC) this Fall on MWF 7:45-8:35am to accomodate advanced High School Students in Madison area so that they can take this course without missing too many their regular school work.
We did it last semester for the first time and had excellent reception from high school students attended (about 20). Another 20 were regular college students. I am teaching this course next Fall.
We will also offer
Math 340 (Linear Algebra) during Spring 2010 onMWF 7:45-8:35am for the same reason. Dr. Meyer will teach this course.
Each year, students from the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District head over to the Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to spend a day stretching their mind.
The activity emphasizes creativity, teamwork and problem solving skills.
Fourth- and seventh-grade students from the district participate on two different days. The event is run by staff members who work with gifted and talented programs in the district-- Ruth Frawley, Kelle Anderson, Jacki Greene, Cheryl Saltzman and Amy Weber.
The creative problem solving day is designed to "give them an opportunity to get away from their normal environment and work with a small team," said Anderson, gifted and talented research teacher in Cross Plains.
"It tests your mind skills," said Derek Rogeberg, a seventh-grader from Glacier Creek Middle School.
For the recent event, 120 fourth-graders and 120 seventh-graders came from Elm Lawn, Northside, Park, Sauk Trail, Sunset Ridge and West Middleton elementary schools and Glacier Creek and Kromrey middle schools.
We constantly think that we need more teachers. That may not be the case. In fact we may need fewer, better teachers in combination with better automation (particularly in college). Some points:
The delta of experience between attending a lecture and watching a video of a lecture? Nada. If anything, the video is better since you can rewind it, view it at the best vantage point (vs. at the back of a big lecture hall), and view it in a quiet relaxed space.
Video lectures (as most colleges are doing now) make it possible to get the best. A dozen of the best lecture series could serve to replace 99% of lectures now being given by less gifted teachers.
Interactive education, like what MIT is providing now, is highly computerized. Almost all of it could be done online.
The interactive process of learning/application via collaboration is something that is perfectly suited for virtual worlds. JIT information in combination with simulated real world application within a collaborative environment is something that is going on with WoW right now (on a massive scale).
The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.
The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T.
"The people who wanted to understand," Professor Mazur said, "had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, 'Let me figure this out.' " But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.
Certainly worth exploring as part of Madison's strategic plan. School Board member Ed Hughes has mentioned virtual learning and collaboration a number of times.
WORKLESS children were "idling in the streets" and "tumbling about in the gutters", wrote one observer in 1861 of the supposedly baleful effects of a reduction in the use of child labour. Such concerns eventually led to schooling being made mandatory for under-tens in 1880. The minimum school-leaving age has been raised five times since then and now stands at 16; but panic about feral youths menacing upright citizens and misspending the best years of their lives has not gone away.
Today's equivalent of the Victorian street urchin is the "NEET"--a youth "not in education, employment or training". And the same remedy is being prescribed: by 2013 all teenagers will have to continue in education or training until age 17, and by 2015 until 18. Now there are political rumours that the education-leaving age could be raised sooner, perhaps as early as this autumn. Bringing the measure forward is said to be among the proposals being prepared for the "jobs summit" Gordon Brown has grandly announced.
During downturns young people tend to have more difficulty finding, and staying in, work than older ones. So a policy that would keep them off the jobless register has obvious appeal for the government. Youngsters who have studied for longer may, moreover, be better placed for an eventual upturn, whenever that might be. And, unlike other measures on Mr Brown's wish-list, this one is achievable by ministerial edict.
Your editorial "A Charter Setback in Florida" (Jan. 7) might lead some people to infer that my administration is not a champion of school choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as a state senator I co-sponsored the original 1996 legislation that created charter schools in Florida. Florida now ranks third nationally in the number of charter schools and fourth in the number of charter-school students, and I am committed to championing school choice in Florida.
Charter schools are not only critical to a successful public education system, but they also represent the ingenuity of communities throughout the Sunshine State.
Florida has made great strides when it comes to education, as evidenced by the "2009 Quality Counts: Portrait of a Population" report released this week. Issued annually by "Education Week," the report tracks state policies and performance across key areas of education. Florida's education ranking jumped from 14th to 10th in the nation, and its overall grade improved from a C+ to a B-. Among our many achievements, we are also closing the achievement gap between minority students and white students -- and have even eliminated it when you consider the number of Florida's Hispanic students passing Advanced Placement exams in 2007. Students in the Sunshine State excel in AP course participation and performance, with more than one-fifth of 2007 graduates passing an AP exam.
In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.
That appalling four-year gap is even worse in high-poverty high schools, which often are dropout factories. In Detroit, just 34% of black males manage to graduate. In the nation's capital -- home to one of the worst public-school systems in America -- only 9% of ninth-grade students go on to graduate and finish college within five years. Can this really be the shameful civil-rights legacy that we bequeath to poor black and Hispanic children in today's global economy?
This achievement gap cannot be narrowed by a series of half-steps from the usual suspects. As you observed when naming Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education, "We have talked our education problems to death in Washington." Genuine school reform, you stated during the campaign, "will require leaders in Washington who are willing to learn from students and teachers . . . about what actually works."
We, too, believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment. And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to "what works" to dramatically boost academic achievement -- rather than clinging to reforms that we "wish would work."
With two massive parental revolts nearing victory in Fairfax County, and mothers and fathers elsewhere in the area plotting similar insurgencies, it is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know: As much as they deny it, they really don't like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.
I don't like that either. Do you? We know what we are doing. Most other folks don't. We are polite to outsiders, but only to mollify them so we can hang up and get back to work.
The problem is that schools, unlike most institutions, are handling parents' most precious possessions, their children. That aggravates the emotional side of the discussion. It makes it more likely that smart educators are going to write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.
I was a school parent for 30 years. The last kid graduated from college in 2007, but a grandchild has just appeared. That sound you hear is California teachers muttering at the thought of me at their door, brimming with helpful suggestions. I know how this works. The school people smile and nod, but nothing happens. Sure, some parent ideas are daft. But important queries are also shrugged off.
As Chicago schools chief, Arne Duncan has found innovative ways to skirt the restrictive cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in Illinois, thus expanding opportunities for low-income kids. So it's instructive to contrast Mr. Duncan's can-do attitude with that of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose inaction last week handed a victory to opponents of school choice.
On December 2 a Florida District Court struck down a law that created the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission, an alternative authorizer of charter schools formed in 2006 under Governor Crist's predecessor, Jeb Bush. The state had 30 days to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court but let the deadline pass last week.
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The upshot is that only local school boards will be able to authorize charter schools, creating a fox-in-the-hen-house situation in which the same institutions that most oppose school choice will be in a position to block its expansion. Charter schools compete with district schools for students and teachers. And the teachers unions that control the traditional public school system fear that more charters mean smaller school districts and fewer dues-paying union jobs.
In Milwaukee, students have a choice - and many of them, along with their parents, spent Saturday checking out options at the Great Schools Milwaukee High School Fair at the Shops of Grand Avenue.
More than 1,000 students and their families were expected to attend the event that showcased 53 schools.
The goal of the fair that resembles an exhibition of colleges or potential employers is to give Milwaukee families one place to gather information about local public and private schools, said Jodi Goldberg, director of Great Schools Milwaukee, a local affiliate of the San Francisco-based organization that focuses on parental involvement in school choice.
"We still want them to visit the schools, because it's not enough to just have a packet of information to make a decision," Goldberg said. "But here, parents can see what's available for their child."
Madison Math Task Force Public Session Wednesday Evening 1/14/2009
The public is invited to attend the Cherokee Middle School PTO's meeting this Wednesday, January 14, 2009. The Madison School District will present it's recent Math Task Force findings at 7:00p.m. in the Library.
A participant asked why the report focused on Middle Schools. The impetus behind the effort was the ongoing controversy over the Madison School District's use of Connected Math.
Madison's math coordinator, Brian Sniff, mentioned that the District sought a "neutral group, people not very vocal one end or the other". Terry Millar, while not officially part of the task force, has been very involved in the District's use of reform math programs (Connected Math) for a number of years and was present at the meeting. The 2003, $200,000 SCALE (System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators" (Award # EHR-0227016 (Clusty Search), CFDA # 47.076 (Clusty Search)), from the National Science Foundation) agreement between the UW School of Education (Wisconsin Center for Education Research) names Terry as the principal investigator [340K PDF]. The SCALE project has continued each year, since 2003. Interestingly, the 2008 SCALE agreement ([315K PDF] page 6) references the controversial "standards based report cards" as a deliverable by June, 2008, small learning communities (page 3) and "Science Standards Based Differentiated Assessments for Connected Math" (page 6). The document also references a budget increase to $812,336. (additional SCALE agreements, subsequent to 2003: two, three, four)
Task force member Dr. Mitchell Nathan is Director of AWAKEN [1.1MB PDF]:
Agreement for Releasing Data and Conducting Research for
AWAKEN Project in Madison Metropolitan School District
The Aligning Educational Experiences with Ways of Knowing Engineering (AWAKEN) Project (NSF giant #EEC-0648267 (Clusty search)) aims to contribute to the long-term goal of fostering a larger, more diverse and more able pool of engineers in the United States. We propose to do so by looking at engineering education as a system or continuous developmental experience from secondary education through professional practice....
In collaboration with the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), AWAKEN researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER) will study and report on science, mathematics, and Career and Technical Education (specifically Project Lead The Way) curricula in the district.
I am particularly interested in what the ties between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District mean for the upcoming "Strategic Planning Process" [49K PDF]. The presence of the term "standards based report cards" and "small learning communities" within one of the SCALE agreements makes me wonder who is actually driving the District. In other words, are the grants driving decision making?
High schools are supposed to produce graduates. But some schools are dubbed drop out factories. At Chicago's Robeson High, on the city's South Side, the graduation rate is just 39 percent. It is a place where more students quit than graduate. Almost all of the 1,300 kids here fail to meet state standards. But everyday, there are administrators, teachers and students who come to school hoping to make a difference. We're spending time at Robeson High because we want to understand the complex issues that go into a student's decision to quit. And we want to know why other students in the same place hang in there and graduate against the odds.
"This school is not for the faint of heart."--Principal Morrow.
Related: Meet the students and teachers from 50/50: The Odds of Graduating.
A week before school starts, Robeson staff gathers in the media center to go over what to expect.
On one wall of my cubicle is a large chart extracted from Tom Luce and Lee Thompson's 2005 book "Do What Works: How Proven Practices Can Improve America's Public Schools." It shows that a study of 78,000 Texas students found college graduation rates much higher for those who, while in high school, took Advanced Placement exams -- but failed them -- than those who took no AP exams at all.
At this point, you may be saying, "Huh?" We AP wonks are an odd breed. We often cite statistics that make no sense to normal people. But I will try to explain this one, and why it was greeted with such excitement by AP teachers four years ago.
AP courses are given in nearly 40 subjects. They allow high school students to earn college credit, or at least skip college introductory courses, if they do well on the final exams. Many AP teachers argue that students' grades on the three-hour exams, given in most U.S. high schools every May, are not as important as taking the college-level course and exam and getting a taste of college trauma. Many of their students who flunk the AP exam still report, when they come back to visit after their freshman year of college, that the AP experience made it easier for them to adjust to fat college reading lists and long, analytical college exams. They may have failed the AP exam, but by taking it, and the course, they were better prepared for the load of stuff dumped on them in college. When they took the college introductory course in the subject that had been so difficult for them in high school AP, they did much better.
The Texas study showing that failed AP students were more likely to graduate from college than non-AP students was thus greeted as proof that the AP teachers' view on this issue was correct. But the researchers who had done the work cautioned against putting too much weight on it. There were too many variables to reach hard conclusions.
On pages 35 and 36 of their report, the Texas researchers revealed what was for me the most interesting of their many new disclosures. They show that even students who only get a 2 on their AP exams after taking the AP course have significantly better college outcomes than non-AP students. Students who get 1s on the exam do not do better than non-AP students, but as I have often heard AP teachers say, they have no chance to build those students up to a 2 or a 3 unless they are allowed in their courses.
These are complicated issues. This study is not the last word. Critics of AP may say that these researchers' work is tainted by the fact that the College Board, which owns the AP program, paid them for their study. But there is no question they are reputable, independent scholars, and their data is there for all to see.
Fartun Warsame, a Somali immigrant, thought she was being a good mother when she transferred her five boys to a top elementary school in an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Besides its academic advantages, the school was close to her job as an ultrasound technician, so if the teachers called, she could get there right away.
"Immediately they changed," Ms. Warsame said of her sons. "They wanted to wear shorts. They'd say, 'Buy me this.' I said, 'Where did you guys get this idea you can control me?' "
Her sons informed her that this was the way things were in America. But not in this Somali mother's house. She soon moved them back to the city, to the International Elementary School, a charter school of about 560 pupils in downtown Minneapolis founded by leaders of the city's large East African community. The extra commuting time was worth the return to the old order: five well-behaved sons, and one all-powerful mother.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, were conceived as a way to improve academic performance. But for immigrant families, they have also become havens where their children are shielded from the American youth culture that pervades large district schools.
The curriculum at the Twin Cities International Elementary School, and at its partner middle school and high school, is similar to that of other public schools with high academic goals. But at Twin Cities International the girls say they can freely wear head scarves without being teased, the lunchroom serves food that meets the dietary requirements of Muslims, and in every classroom there are East African teaching assistants who understand the needs of students who may have spent years in refugee camps. Twin Cities International students are from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan, with a small population from the Middle East.
The diversity of Minneapolis charter schools is one reason my niece and her family remain in the city, rather than retreating to the burbs.
Before he was a war president, George W. Bush fashioned himself as an education president. He campaigned as a school reformer and held his first policy speech at a Washington elementary school, where he began laying the groundwork for the controversial No Child Left Behind education law.
Nearly eight years later, Bush devoted his final public policy address to the same topic, traveling to an elementary school in Philadelphia yesterday to claim success in education reform and to warn President-elect Barack Obama against major changes to the landmark federal testing program.
Bush argued that No Child Left Behind has "forever changed America's school systems" for the better, forcing accountability on failing public schools and leading to measurable improvements among poor and minority students.
"I firmly believe that, thanks to this law, students are learning, an achievement gap is closing," Bush told the audience at General Philip Kearny School.
He also suggested that Obama, who has vowed to overhaul the program, should tread carefully before following through on promises of reform. "There is a growing consensus across the country that now is not the time to water down standards or to roll back accountability," Bush said.
The most interesting part of this evaluation is the continued poor rating our standards receive. Those lovely standards we are basing our new middle school report cards upon. Otherwise Wisconsin stacks up pretty well.
The Madison School District Administration held a public input session on the recent Math Task Force report [3.9MB PDF] last evening at Memorial High School. Superintendent Dan Nerad opened and closed the meeting, which featured about 56 attendees, at least half of whom appeared to be district teachers and staff. Math Coordinator Brian Sniff ran the meeting.
Task force member and UW-Madison Professor Mitchell Nathan [Clusty Search] was in attendance along with Terry Millar, a UW-Madison Professor who has been very involved in the Madison School District's math programs for many years. (Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater recently joined the UW-Madison Center for Education Research, among other appointments). UW-Madison Math professor Steffen Lempp attended as did school board President Arlene Silveira and board members Ed Hughes and Beth Moss. Jill Jokela, the parent representative on the Math Task Force, was also present.
THE baby is just one day old and has not yet left hospital. She is quiet but alert. Twenty centimetres from her face researchers have placed a white card with two black spots on it. She stares at it intently. A researcher removes the card and replaces it by another, this time with the spots differently spaced. As the cards alternate, her gaze starts to wander--until a third, with three black spots, is presented. Her gaze returns: she looks at it for twice as long as she did at the previous card. Can she tell that the number two is different from three, just 24 hours after coming into the world?
Or do newborns simply prefer more to fewer? The same experiment, but with three spots preceding two, shows the same revival of interest when the number of spots changes. Perhaps it is just the newness? When slightly older babies were shown cards with pictures of household objects instead of dots (a comb, a key, an orange and so on), changing the number of items had an effect separate from changing the items themselves. Could it be the pattern that two things make, as opposed to three? No again. Babies paid more attention to rectangles moving randomly on a screen when their number changed from two to three, or vice versa. The effect even crosses between senses. Babies who were repeatedly shown two spots perked up more when they then heard three drumbeats than when they heard just two; likewise when the researchers started with drumbeats and moved to spots.
had my first day back in class today. We started with a lesson on graphing quadratic equations. Tricia Colclaser, the teacher, gave a mini-introduction and walked around the room while we practiced.
As she checked in with everyone, Colclaser got some props from a student, who was getting it. He said: "I like math when I have a good teacher."
Of course, teacher quality is the laser focus of education reform lately. Pretty much any study shows it's the most important factor for student learning. But few experts can tell you what it means or how to evaluate it.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point" and "Outlier" and a former Washington Post reporter, had an interesting piece in The New Yorker recently about this very issue. He likened teacher recruiting to recruiting quarterbacks in the NFL. You never know how they will do until they get onto the field, under pressure, with split-second decisions to make and everything at stake.
He dropped in on a group of education researchers at U-Va. who have determined that teacher feedback, or the ability to respond meaningfully to each student, is linked most strongly to academic success. This kind of talent, as well as the ability to have eyes in the back of your head, or defuse problems before they erupt...all have nothing to do with the academic credentials of the teacher or the scores on their Praxis test, or the things that the federal government and states are focusing on.
Ten-year-old Cole Curtiss is no stranger to assessment tests.
As a third-grader last year at Portage's Amberly Elementary School, here's what Cole took:
• The Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests, which involves more than eight hours of testing during two weeks in October.
• The Standardized Test for Assessment of Reading, a computer exam given four times annually to determine his grade-equivalent reading level.
• The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills test, administered three times during the school year to check reading progress.
• The Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, which is essentially an IQ-type exam.
This year, Cole won't take the Otis-Lennon test, but otherwise he is taking the fourth-grade versions of all the other exams.
"It's a lot," said Cole's mother, Shari Curtiss, who has mixed feelings about assessment testing.
While "it's reassuring" to see hard data on her children's academic abilities, Curtiss said, "It seems that schools live or die by the MEAP."
Portage Public Schools is not unique in its increased reliance on assessment tests, a trend that some find unsettling but others see as one of the most positive recent developments in education through high school.
Advocates say assessment tests help school districts measure the quality of their curricula and instruction. They also help pinpoint children's strengths and weaknesses and have encouraged schools to develop broader supports and strategies to deal with educational issues.
Via the Madison City Clerk's Office, Seat 1 will have a competitive race with Donald Gors, Jr. facing incumbent Arlene Silveira. Arlene has served as President for the past two years. The current occupant of seat 2, Lucy Mathiak is running unopposed.
School starts again today after the winter break. I hope everyone found some time to relax. I did! I will find out tomorrow how much math I forgot when my class meets again.
One big change we're likely to see in the new year in Fairfax schools is a new grading policy. Superintendent Jack D. Dale recommended Friday that the school system add extra points to the grade-point average for students who take Honors or AP/IB classes.
This would not effect my own GPA, as my class is just regular old Algebra II! But it would effect the thousands of students who are enrolled in college-level and honors classes.
The change is a response to a huge parent-led movement to level the playing field for Fairfax students who are competing for colleges and scholarships with kids who are racking up astronomical GPAs elsewhere thanks to the extra weights. (It's not uncommon in some districts to earn a 5.4 GPA on a 4.0 scale).
W hy are some parents in Fairfax and Loudoun counties up in arms about whether an A in a high school course means the student averaged a 90 or a 94?
The controversy coming to the Fairfax School Board this month is about one thing: anxiety over college admission. That emotionally fraught issue has blurred the vision of many parents, who have come to believe that if only schools would artificially pump up their little sweeties' grades, their just-slightly-less-than-perfect children just might get into colleges that otherwise would give them the big dis.
Fairfax uses a six-point grading system in which you need a 94 to get an A. Loudoun's scoring grid is similar. But in many parts of the country, an A represents a numerical grade of 90 or more.
Parent groups in the two Virginia counties contend that college admissions officers cannot comprehend these distinctions and therefore put applicants from these two strong school systems at a competitive disadvantage.
Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation -- mathematician -- has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S.
"It's a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school," says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of 3D-visualization software in San Francisco. "It's the science of problem-solving."
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. (CareerCast.com is published by Adicio Inc., in which Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. holds a minority stake.)
The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of "Jobs Rated Almanac," and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz's own expertise.
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions -- indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise -- unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren't expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching -- attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber.
The study also considers pay, which was determined by measuring each job's median income and growth potential. Mathematicians' annual income was pegged at $94,160, but Ms. Courter, 38, says her salary exceeds that amount.
Parents and citizens have another opportunity to provide input on this matter when Brian Sniff, Madison's Math Coordinator and Lisa Wachtel, Director of Madison's Teaching & Learning discuss the Math Report at a Cherokee Middle School PTO meeting on January 14, 2009 at 7:00p.m.
It grates on me when I hear people talk about "soft skills." Although definitions vary, soft skills generally refer to the ability to communicate effectively, knit a group of people together toward achieving a goal, and create a sense of shared community and purpose. CareerBuilder.com's Kate Lorenz describes these as "interpersonal skills and leadership qualities to guide teams of diverse professionals."[i]
"Firms today are having a very difficult time finding managers who have superior 'soft skills' says John P. Kreiss, president of SullivanKreiss, a recruitment and placement firm for design and construction professionals.[ii] Based on my own consulting practice, I would have to agree that most workplaces could do with more soft skills.
Our language is part of the problem. By calling them "soft," we are demoting this constellation of abilities and skills to something frilly, mushy and largely unimportant. Let's find a more fitting term for them.
It usually goes unnoticed, but each year at this time, the state issues its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) prepared by the state controller using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). This year's CAFR puts the state's 2008 GAAP deficit at $2.5 billion. Relative to population or state income, Wisconsin has the largest GAAP deficit of all 50 states.
N o newspaper, pundit, major Web site, or broadcast outlet covered it. No politician or pressure group commented on it. Yet release of the state's official financial statements for the most recent fiscal year contained a major news item: Wisconsin closed its books on 2007-08 with a $2.5 billion (b) deficit.
CAFR reports official deficit
The deficit figure is buried in the state's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). The report was prepared by the state controller, audited by the Legislative Audit Bureau, and recently posted on a state government Web site (ftp://doaftp04.doa.state.wi.us/doadocs/2008CAFR_Linked.pdf).
Did government avoid this tsunami of overspending? Of course not, it bellied up to the trough and blithely went about spending money it simply did not have. We all know about the skyrocketing federal debt, but state governments have found ways around their balanced budget requirements. For example, Wisconsin state accountants recently closed the books on the last fiscal year showing a deficit of $2.5 billion. That was the deficit as of July 31, before the current recession hit full stride.
When we see state government carrying a deficit of that size from year to year, it should set off warning lights. State government spending is unsustainable even in good times. It is logical then to use this time of fiscal stress to confront the unsustainable level of state spending, to reassess, to change, to shrink. It would be good for everyone to have government spending reduced to a sustainable level. But that is probably not in the cards.
Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, articulates the philosophy that will drive the thinking as to how Wisconsin will address its budget crisis. "It's true that the economy is shrinking. But that's the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending too," wrote Krugman. Krugman's line of thought is not only wrong; it stands to make Wisconsin's long-term prospects much worse.
The ranks of America's home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. "There's no reason to believe it would not keep going up," says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.
Traditionally, the biggest motivations for parents to teach their children at home have been moral or religious reasons, and that remains a top pick when parents are asked to explain their choice.
The 2003 survey gave parents six reasons to pick as their motivation. (They could choose more than one.) The 2007 survey added a seventh: an interest in a "non-traditional approach," a reference to parents dubbed "unschoolers," who regard standard curriculum methods and standardized testing as counterproductive to a quality education.
"We wanted to identify the parents who are part of the 'unschooling' movement," Mulligan says. The "unschooling" group is viewed by educators as a subset of home-schoolers, who generally follow standard curriculum and grading systems. "Unschoolers" create their own systems.
A PILOT program in which teenagers used iPods for school work has increased attendance and increased enthusiasm for homework.
A class of year 8 students at Shepparton High School in central Victoria are the first in Australia and among the first in the world to use iPod touches in the classroom for a global "mobile learning" project.
The students use the hand-held media players to search the internet, download music, do quizzes, research and submit assignments and collaborate with a school in Singapore.
Preliminary research on the program found students were more willing to come to school, did more homework and used their iPods more than laptops or desktop computers.
Five people are vying to become the next superintendent of education in Wisconsin, a position that will help shape education policy in the state for the next four years.
The five come from a variety of backgrounds -- one is a school superintendent, two are college professors, one is a virtual schools leader, and another is the deputy superintendent.
Tuesday is the deadline for those who want to run for the position to file signatures with the state. It's also the deadline for all other spring elections, including judicial openings and the state Supreme Court.
The field for the education secretary race and any other with more than two candidates will be narrowed to two in a Feb. 17 primary. The election is April 7. The new education secretary takes over July 1 for Libby Burmaster, who decided against seeking a third term.
The state superintendent is largely an administrative post, with little actual power over setting policy, but able to use the position to advocate for their priorities across the state.
The superintendent is responsible for governing Wisconsin's public schools, administering state and federal aid, and offering guidance to teachers and administrators. The superintendent also crafts a spending request every two years to run the agency and provide state aid to public schools, which is subject to approval by the Legislature.
Despite the diverse field seeking the post this year, all five candidates agree on many issues such as the need for reform statewide, changes to the No Child Left Behind Law, and improving Milwaukee schools. But they also disagree on major areas, such as the need to repeal a law affecting teacher salaries, that could play a major factor in who wins.
American Students Set International Benchmark in Academic Expository Writing!
The Concord Review is the only journal in the world for the academic expository writing
of secondary students, and provides a benchmark for students in other countries to
try to reach. In this case, it is the performance mostly of United States secondary students that sets the world benchmark/standard which other countries can aspire to emulate...:
JAMES OTIS, JR.'S, ATTACK ON WRITS OF ASSISTANCE: A TURNING POINT IN THE LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS AND THE BIRTH OF INDEPENDENCE IN AMERICA by Brandon Hopkins [PDF]
If you're looking for good news about Milwaukee Public Schools, consider this: The graduation rate has risen steadily in recent years and is more than 18 percentage points higher than it was in 1996-'97.
Those who say only half of MPS students graduate are right - if they're using figures from a few years ago. But they're wrong now. The official graduation rate is pushing 70%, and even independent analysts, using different ways of calculating the rate, put the figure at closer to 60%.
It appears clear that MPS is doing a better job of keeping teens in school and getting them to the point where they cross a stage and receive a diploma.
Maybe the cause is the creation of a couple of dozen small high schools or changes in the programs inside some of the remaining big schools. Or maybe it's simply success in spreading the message that a diploma is important. But dropout rates are down and kids who used to drift away from school are staying connected.
Before you get too cheery about the improving picture, however, you might want to consider a few more aspects of the crucial question of whether MPS is graduating a sufficiently large number of students who are ready for life after graduation.
To sum up: There just isn't much evidence that MPS high school students are actually doing much better academically. In short, graduation is up, but actual readiness to take on the world might not have changed much.
Geeta Dawar takes her seventh grade science students outside their Madison school to examine cracks in the sidewalk.
David Spitzer gets his Madison elementary students to notice flocks of migrating geese overhead as the kids walk to school.
And David Ropa has his seventh graders, even on an arctic morning, use their bare hands to dip testing vials into Lake Mendota.
Nature is on the rise in many schools across Wisconsin, as educators strive to reverse a major societal shift toward technology and indoor activities. Today's students are the first generation in human history raised without a strong relationship with the natural world, said Jeremy Solin, who heads a state forest education program at UW-Stevens Point for students in kindergarten through high school.
The phenomenon of "nature deficit disorder" -- a term coined by author Richard Louv in his 2005 book "Last Child in the Woods" -- is contributing to childhood obesity, learning disabilities, and developmental delays, experts say.
While their friends played video games in pajamas or vacationed in the tropics, a dozen sixth graders spent winter break at Elite Academy in Flushing, Queens, memorizing word roots. Time was ticking as they prepared to face the thing they had talked about, dreamed about and lost sleep over for much of the past year: the Hunter College High School admissions exam, a strenuous three-hour test that weeds out about 90 percent of those who take it.
On Wednesday, the final day of test-prep boot camp before the Jan. 9 exam, there seemed to be nothing more terrifying to these 11-year-olds than the risk of failure.
Some had taken up coffee; others, crossword puzzles and cable news shows to glean vocabulary words. A few of their parents had hired private tutors and imposed strict study hours, and several had paid up to $3,000 for a few months of English and math classes at Elite, a regimen modeled on the cram schools of South Korea, China and Japan.
The five girls and seven boys at Elite on Wednesday seemed to delight in their onerous routine, unwilling or unable to imagine life any other way.
USC and UCLA fans will be able to see several players who have committed to their teams.
For the Trojans, playing on the White team: Santa Ana Mater Dei quarterback Matt Barkley; Calhoun (S.C.) County wide receiver Alshon Jeffrey; and Agoura High offensive lineman Kevin Graf.
For the Bruins, also playing on the White team: Rancho Cucamonga Los Osos quarterback Richard Brehaut; Carson High receiver Morrell Presley; and Kapolei, Hawaii, offensive lineman Stan Hasiak.
You may have come across Blue Man Group over the years -- the humanoid trio with blue heads who play weird instruments on stage and do crazy things. But Blue Man Group is no longer three quirky performance artists; they are a multimillion dollar operation with seven companies in North America, Europe and Japan.
The original founders of the group have started a preschool in New York's East Village that is called -- appropriately -- Blue School.
At first glance, Blue School seems very normal in comparison to the blue-headed performance artists. There are cheery classrooms, books, clay, blocks -- all the things expected in a good preschool. There are a few Blue Man things, like the speaking tubes that snake along the ceiling and allow kids to speak to each other from a distance.
Online education is established, growing, and here to stay. It is creating new opportunities for students and also for faculty, regulators of education, and the educational institutions themselves. Much of what is being learned by the practitioners will flow into the large numbers of blended courses that will be developed and delivered on most campuses. Some of what is being learned will certainly improve pedagogical approaches and possibly affect other important problems, such as the lengthening time to completion of a degree. Online education is already providing better access to education for many, and many more will benefit from this increased access in the coming years.
Among the recommendations from a task force that recently completed a one-year study:
• Switch to full-time math teachers for all students in grades five through eight.
• The math task force's executive summary and full report
• Substantially boost the training of math teachers.
• Seriously consider selecting a single textbook for each grade level or course in the district, rather than having a variety of textbooks used in schools across the district.
The task force was created in 2006 by the Madison School Board to independently review the district's math programs and seek ways to improve students' performance.
The history we are taught usually features the lives and times of the great and the good, of the haves but not the have-nots. However, the monarchs, aristocrats and magnates could not have existed without the battalions of minions who performed the tasks that were beneath their masters and mistresses.
In this website, we take you on a journey through 2,000 years of British history and the worst jobs of each era, as seen in both Channel 4 Worst Jobs series. Tony Robinson has devised a quiz to see how suited you would be to certain jobs, and we have an extract from his book on the worst children's jobs. The skills agency learndirect has provided information on offbeat careers, and we show you how to take your interest further.
The NCAA Graduation Success Rate (GSR) and the Academic Success Rate (ASR) were developed in response to college and university presidents who wanted graduation data that more accurately reflect the mobility among college students today. Both rates improve on the federally mandated graduation rate by including students who were omitted from the federal calculation.
The GSR measures graduation rates at Division I institutions and includes students transferring into the institutions. The GSR also allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.
The ASR measures graduation rates at Division II institutions and is very similar to the GSR. The difference is that the ASR also includes those freshmen who were recruited to the institution but did not receive athletics financial aid.
Like many motivated, focused high-school students, Lillian Kivel had worked hard academically and in community service in hopes that her efforts would win her acceptance into a good college. It did. Trouble was, Ms. Kivel's focus was much less clear when she had to decide which college to attend -- the Boston-area senior had applied to 38 schools because her interests were so varied.
At the suggestion of friends, Ms. Kivel decided to take a gap year -- a year outside of academia between high-school graduation and college matriculation. It wasn't rest and relaxation that Ms. Kivel sought, but rather an opportunity to gain life experience and focus her goals. Gappers, as they're called, typically feel that taking a year off will give them a head start in college -- and life. "I [have] the opportunity to explore my interests, like medicine and China, outside the classroom," she says.
Ms. Kivel eventually decided to attend Harvard College, but deferred entrance until fall 2009. Ms. Kivel lived at home this fall and interned at the Boston branch of Partners of Health, a global health outreach nonprofit. She's also serving as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts Statehouse. And she's auditing at anthropology class at Harvard.
A school district in Westminster struggling with declining enrollment and falling test scores will try something revolutionary next year that many say never has been accomplished in the Lower 48.
Adams 50 will eliminate grade levels and instead group students based on what they know, allowing them to advance to the next level after they have proved proficiency.
"If they can pull this off, it will be a lighthouse for America's challenged school districts," said Richard DeLorenzo, the consultant who implemented a standards-based model in Alaska and is working with Adams 50. "It will change the face of American education."
A district of 10,000 students and 21 schools, Adams 50 serves a working-class suburb north of Denver. Seventy-two percent of its students are poor enough for federal meal benefits, two-thirds are Latino, and 38 percent still are learning English.
When Janet Webber's three youngest children head to school, they don't meet up with the yellow buses rolling through their Cumming subdivision.
Instead Roni, the seventh-grader, spreads books across the kitchen table and logs onto the computer. Webber leads her other two children --- a first- and third-grader --- upstairs, to a sunny room with two desks, a laptop computer and bookcases filled with textbooks.
The three kids spend the next five hours or so completing lessons designed by the Georgia Virtual Academy. The online charter school started in 2007 and has quietly become one of the largest public schools in the state. It teaches about 4,400 elementary and middle school students from 163 of the state's 180 school districts.
Internet-based schools have popped up across the country in the past few years because of improved technology and changing education laws. As of January, there were 173 virtual charter schools teaching about 92,000 students in 18 states, according to the North American Council for Online Learning.
Nationally, little research has been done on the effectiveness of such online schools. They're just too new.
But Roni, 12, has no doubts about her school.
"I do everything else on the computer, so why not go to school that way?" she said.
For the Webber children, the computer is their classroom.
At Cameron Elementary School west of downtown, most kids don't know the alphabet when they start kindergarten, nearly all are poor, and one was jumped by a gang recently, just off campus. But the school this year posted its highest reading and math scores ever -- a feat that earned cash bonuses for teachers, administrators, even janitors.
City schools chief executive Arne Duncan, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for education secretary, pushed that performance-pay plan and a host of other innovations to transform a school system once regarded as one of the country's worst. As Duncan heads to Washington, the lessons of Chicago could provide a model for fixing America's schools.
"Obama chose Arne Duncan for a reason, and part of that reason is the experimentation that Duncan has done in Chicago and his real attention to data and outcomes," said Elliot Weinbaum, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. "Duncan's willing to try new things and see if they work, hopefully keep the ones that do and drop the ones that don't. I expect that experimentation to continue on a national scale."
About 13% of public school students in New York State are enrolled in special education. Educating each of them costs taxpayers many thousands of dollars more than it does to educate a regular student. With the financial crisis compelling Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg and other officials around the state to make cuts that have the least impact on services to which we have become accustomed, now is the time for them to give a special-education voucher program a second look. Aside from offering better educational outcomes, such a program would significantly reduce expenditures.
Contrary to popular belief, tuition charged by private schools, where vouchers can be used, is actually lower than public school per-pupil expenditures. Take Florida, which is home to the nation's first voucher program for disabled students. Under the program, all disabled students are eligible for a voucher that is worth the lesser of the amount the public school would have spent on them or the tuition at a chosen private school. The value of the average voucher for disabled students there is $7,295. Not only is this far less than what the state spends to educate a disabled student in a public school, it is even below the state's much lower average per-pupil cost of educating all students, both disabled and regular enrollment.
In other words, the public system actually saves money when it pays for students to attend private school, and even more money when those students are disabled.
When an unusual coalition of Republicans and Philadelphia Democrats led by State Rep. Dwight Evans joined forces to pass a law bringing charter schools to Pennsylvania, they spoke in glowing terms about this "innovative" alternative to troubled public schools.
At that time - 11 years ago - few could have predicted the explosive growth - and controversy - that now surround the charter movement.
About 67,000 students are enrolled at 127 charter schools statewide, including several in Philadelphia that are now under criminal investigation.
The "innovation" most in evidence at the Philadelphia Academy Charter School in Northeast Philadelphia, as The Inquirer has reported, has led to allegations of nepotism, conflicts of interest and financial mismanagement, all now under investigation by federal authorities.
IB coordinators at Bosse High School and Signature School told the Evansville Courier & Press that the program helps create well-rounded students. Students in the challenging IB program study a foreign language, social sciences and the arts as well as math and experimental sciences.
When Bosse and Signature were approved as IB schools three years ago, they were only the eighth and ninth Indiana schools to offer the program. The number since has doubled, and 18 Indiana schools now offer IB programs.
As the Scottsdale Unified School District debated closing a school earlier this year, a parent group petitioned the district to let the school grow from providing pre-K through fifth grade into providing pre-K through eighth grade (K-8).
The group included one parent who said she was terrified to send her child to a middle school, which provides sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
K-8 schools have become the norm in the Valley in recent years, although research remains inconclusive on which school structure is better for students.
"By the time they leave eighth grade and go into high school, it's too late," said Al Summers, director of professional development for the National Middle School Association.
However, the most recent results for the 2008 ACT-tested high school graduating class are alarming: only one in five ACT-tested 2008 high school graduates are prepared for entry-level college courses in English Composition, College Algebra, social science, and Biology, while one in four are not prepared for college-level coursework in any of the four subject areas (ACT, 2008).
Current international comparisons of academic achievement show students in the United States at a deficit compared to students in many other nations. According to the most recent results of the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), U.S. eighth graders rank fifteenth of forty-five countries in average mathematics score and ninth in average science score (Gonzales et al., 2004). The most recent results of the PISA (Programme forInternational Student Assessment) rank U.S. 15-year-olds twenty-eighth of forty countries in average mathematics performance, eighteenth in average reading performance, and twenty-second in average science performance (Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development, 2004).
Recent ACT research has investigated the multifaceted nature of college and career readiness. We first analyzed the low level of college and career readiness among U.S. high school graduates in Crisis at the Core (ACT, 2004). The critical role that high-level reading skills play in college and career readiness in all subject areas was the focus of Reading Between the Lines(ACT, 2006a). And when ACT data showed that many high school students were still not ready for college and career after taking a core curriculum, we examined the need for increased rigor in the high school core curriculum as an essential element of college and career readiness in Rigor at Risk (ACT, 2007b). The Forgotten Middleextends this research. This report examines the specific factors that influence college and career readiness and how these factors can have their greatest impact during a student's educational development. This report suggests that, in the current educational environment, there is a critical defining point for students in the college and career readiness process--one so important that, if students are not on target for college and career readiness by the time they reach this point, the impact may be nearly irreversible.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gathered information about athletes' admissions qualifications from 54 public universities nationwide. We surveyed the members of every Bowl Championship Series conference, plus the University of Memphis and the University of Hawaii, two other public schools that finished in the 2007-08 season's football or men's basketball Top 25s.
The information listed here was calculated from data contained in a report, called an NCAA certification self-study, that each school files once every 10 years. Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh refused to provide the information. The University of Kansas and West Virginia University said their most recent NCAA certification self-study did not include the information. Kansas State University deleted all of its sport-by-sport data.
The SAT scores are on the 1600-point scale that predates the addition of an SAT writing component. For schools that reported ACT scores, we derived comparable SAT scores using the NCAA's conversion chart. Some schools refused to provide men's basketball SAT scores on the grounds it would violate the privacy rights of individual athletes.
Lesson One: You can and will work at a desk for seven hours straight, routinely. For several years, I have been teaching 18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students. The lectures have been good training in dealing with mass behavior. Every sentence must be perfectly enunciated, preferably twice. Examples on the board must be relevant, if not downright fascinating. Every 15 minutes or so, the lecturer is expected to come up with an interesting aside, joke, historical anecdote, or unusual application of the concept at hand. When a lecturer fails to conform to these inexorable requirements, the students will signify their displeasure by picking by their books and leaving the classroom.
Despite the lecturer's best efforts, however, it becomes more difficult to hold the attention of the students as the term wears on, and they start falling asleep in class under those circumstances should be a source of satisfaction for a teacher, since it confirms that they have been doing their jobs. There students have been up half the night-maybe all night-finishing problem sets and preparing for their midterm exams.
Four courses in science and engineering each term is a heavy workload for anyone; very few students fail to learn, first and foremost, the discipline of intensive and constant work.
Lesson Two: You learn what you don't know you are learning. The second lesson is demonstrated, among other places, in 18.313, a course I teach in advanced probability theory. It is a difficult course, one that compresses the material typically taught in a year into one term, and it includes weekly problem sets that are hard, even by the standards of professional mathematicians. (How hard is that? Well, every few years a student taking the course discovers a new solution to a probability problem that merits publication as a research paper in a refereed journal.)
Students join forces on the problem sets, and some students benefit more than others from these weekly collective efforts. The most brilliant students will invariably work out all the problems and let other students copy, and I pretend to be annoyed when I learn that this has happened. But I know that by making the effort to understand the solution of a truly difficult problem discovered by one of their peers, students learn more than they would by working out some less demanding exercise.
A doctorate in biophysics and biochemistry from Yale. Influential work as a science adviser in Washington.
And now: founder and head of a small high school on the south side, where low-income students are being pushed to commit themselves to two things: High expectations. High performance.
In its second year, many of the 140 students of Carmen High School of Science & Technology show signs they are making those commitments. And Hoben shows the traits that make schools like this succeed: Unrelenting dedication, clear vision, an ability to bring people together, and a positive outlook.
Hoben's personal path to founding the charter school is definitely different from the personal paths, up to this point, of Carmen's students, more than 90% of them Latino, almost 90% low-income.
That hasn't stopped them from coming together. It's too early to see definite results, but the school seems to have its act together more than many schools with such short histories.
Attendance is high, averaging 92%. There is a serious-minded feeling in classrooms and even (comparatively speaking) in the lunchroom. Kids appear to be on-task a high portion of the time. The dress code includes ties for the boys and buttoned shirts with collars for both boys and girls. The aim here is to give teens from an impoverished neighborhood something much like a private high school experience.
In the quest to find the perfect middle school for her 10-year-old daughter, Aimée Margolis has zig-zagged across Manhattan for 11 school visits, grilled pre-teenagers at a school fair on music classes and the preferred attire at dances, and compiled a dog-eared folder full of notes.
After a 90-minute tour of the Clinton School for Writers and Artists in Chelsea, Ms. Margolis casually slipped away for what appeared to be a quick pit stop. She carefully occupied a stall, waited for a cluster of students to walk in, and listened.
"It gives you a glimpse behind the scenes," Ms. Margolis explained of her sub rosa research. "At the tour everybody's ready for you, everybody has a happy face. They say what they want to say, and you hear what they want you to hear."
As the Bloomberg administration has created hundreds of new schools, centralized the admissions process and publicized the options, there is a wave of panic among many parents of fifth graders facing the next step. And throughout the country, middle school is increasingly seen as a kind of educational black hole where raging hormones, changes in how youngsters learn and a dearth of great teachers can collide to send test scores plummeting.
In one of the all-time most popular Gel talks, Geoffrey Canada describes how his nonprofit, the Harlem Children's Zone, works to help young people in inner-city Harlem. Canada issues a sober indictment of failing schools, then describes the solution he has created.
Canada was recently profiled in the book Whatever It Takes, on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and two years ago on 60 Minutes. If you don't know about Geoffrey Canada, you should. This video is a good place to start.
Globe Editorial
The Boston Globe
In college, but only marginally
December 23, 2008
MUCH SOUL-SEARCHING is taking place on local college campuses after a recent study showing that college was a bust for almost two-thirds of Boston high school graduates in the class of 2000. Students attending two-year community colleges--the least-expensive option--fared the worst in the survey by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, with an abysmal 12 percent graduation rate.
Specific results for all public and private colleges in the study should be available shortly after Christmas. But some figures are trickling in. Roxbury Community College fell flat. Of the 101 students from the high school class of 2000 who enrolled in RCC shortly after high school, only 6 percent would go on to earn a diploma there--or anywhere else--by June 2007. Quincy College, a low-profile, two-year college on the South Shore, did comparatively well (but not good enough) by its 62 Boston students, posting a 19 percent graduation rate. Bunker Hill Community College, which drew 155 enrollees from Boston's class of 2000, yielded a 14 percent graduation rate.
The study, which was funded by the Boston Foundation, strips away some of the hype about college attendance rates in Boston. Seven out of 10 public school graduates may get into college, but many lack the preparation to succeed. At Bunker Hill, for example, more than 80 percent of the Boston students from the class of 2000 required a remedial math course. Wisely, Bunker Hill and Boston school officials are now introducing students at some city high schools to the placement exams they will face on campus in the coming year.
The study should put an end to common claims by community college officials that their graduation rates don't reveal much because many of their students transfer to four-year colleges before earning associate degrees. In this study, a student merely needed to earn a diploma or certificate from any institution of higher education, not just the original college. And by providing at least a six-year window, the study made allowances for students who often juggle college with work or family obligations. Rationalizations are now off the table.
Bad numbers as motivation
There will be more than a few red-faced college officials when the final statistics are released. Only about one-third of students at four-year state colleges pulled through. Students at four-year, private colleges fared best, with a 56 percent graduation rate. Still, the study is proving to be a good motivator. UMass-Boston, which struggles with graduation rates, is expected to take a lead role in crafting solutions. And the Boston Private Industry Council, a co-author of the study, is keeping up the pressure with plans to publish graduation data for future Boston public school classes.
The stakes are highest at the community colleges, a traditional choice for students who struggled in high school. Mary Fifield, Bunker Hill Community College president, has launched a program that pairs remedial courses with college-level classes for incoming full-time students. Students are grouped by ability or academic interest and placed with handpicked professors who take an interest in their academic achievement and social adjustment. The college is also planning a "survival skills" class for freshmen, focusing on everything from reading class schedules to maximizing financial aid.
At Roxbury Community College, officials say they are also launching initiatives with the help of a Lumina Foundation grant to provide more intensive advising and tutoring, as well as a mandatory course on study skills for first-semester students. Impending cuts in the state budget, however, threaten these offerings.
Progress on the South Shore
Self-supporting Quincy College, a public community college operated under the auspices of the South Shore city, may have a lot to teach in tough times. Although the college offers few formal retention programs and no on-site day care for its roughly 4,000 students, it manages to outperform some of its state-operated counterparts. College president Sue Harris says that student advisers are widely available in the evening.
The college also offers so-called "nested semesters" that allow students to take accelerated courses over 10- or even 5-week periods in addition to the traditional 15-week schedule. The faster pace creates a sense of urgency missing on many campuses. Minority students, who make up 42 percent of the student body, appear to fare especially well at Quincy College. Black and Hispanic graduation rates for a recent class, says Harris, outstripped that of Asian students.
No one believes that ill-prepared urban students will suddenly cruise through college. But any college that can't help at least half to the finish line needs to reexamine what value it is adding to the educational experience.
The campus has long been intended as a local school, mostly serving students from surrounding neighborhoods. Critics say the district's best resources shouldn't be restricted geographically.
With just nine months left before it opens, a new arts high school in downtown Los Angeles still lacks a principal, a staff, a curriculum, a permanent name and a clearly articulated plan for how students will be selected -- critical details for a school that aims to be one of the foremost arts education institutions in the United States.
Central High School No. 9 does have a completed campus, believed to be the second most expensive public high school ever built in the United States. But the very fact that it offers what may be the finest such facilities in the region has fueled a debate over the district's plan to operate it primarily as a neighborhood school, with fewer than one-quarter of its slots allotted to students citywide.
After a trek in the Himalayas brought him face-to-face with extreme poverty and illiteracy, John Wood left his position as a director of business development at Microsoft to found Room to Read, an award-winning international education organization. Under his leadership, more than 1.7 million children in the developing world now have access to enhanced educational opportunities. Room to Read to date has opened 725 schools and 7,000 bilingual libraries, and funded more than 7,000 scholarships for girls. Wood talked with Knowledge@Wharton about the launch of Room to Read, the book he wrote called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World and his personal definition of success.
Knowledge@Wharton: Our guest today is John Wood, founder of Room to Read. John, thank you so much for joining us.
John Wood: Thank you.
Knowledge@Wharton: I read your book back in 2006. You began it with the epiphany you had during your trip to Nepal which inspired you to do what you're doing now and led to the creation of Room to Read. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?
Wood: Certainly. The book is called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. The nice thing is I got that title before Bill Gates could get that title for his book, because, of course, Bill has now left Microsoft and is going to do amazing things to change the world through the Gates Foundation. My own personal journey to devoting my life to education was undertaken because, in so many places where I've traveled, whether it be post-Apartheid South Africa or post-Khymer Rouge Cambodia or the mountains of Nepal, you just find so many kids who have so little opportunity to gain the gift of education. To me, it just seemed like a very cruel Catch-22, that you would meet people who say, "We are too poor to afford education, but until we have education, how will we ever not be poor." Throughout places I traveled, be it India, Nepal, Cambodia or Vietnam, I kept meeting kids who wanted to go to school but they couldn't afford it. I would have kids ask me for a pencil. I thought, "How could something so basic be missing?"
A judge on Friday blocked a plan to make California the first state in the nation to require algebra testing for all eighth-graders.
The ruling sidelines an ambitious mandate approved by the state Board of Education in July after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recommended it over the concerns of California's school superintendent and education groups.
The board pushed through the effort in order for the state to meet federal testing requirements or face losing up to $4.1 million in funding. The mandate would have affected students in the 2011-12 school year.
But the California School Boards Association and the Association of California School Administrators sued in September to overturn the requirement. They questioned whether the state had the money, staff and training to comply with the state board's decision.
Don't despair if you can't get all, or most, or even more than a few, of them right. Anyone who has all this arcane knowledge cluttering up his brain is immediately eligible for a grant from the Get-A-Life Foundation.
As in years past, there are no prizes at stake, only the smug satisfaction that you probably know more about the world than a would-be vice president.
In a week or two, I'll print the inevitable corrections and clarifications.
1. Little Diomede Island was discussed constantly during the recent presidential election, although almost never by name. What is its claim to fame?
2. It's officially known as the Archipelago of Ecuador. What do we more commonly call it?
3. If you're in Windsor, Ontario, but would rather be in Detroit, which direction should you head?
Main point. Topic sentences. Supporting paragraphs. Organization.
Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Kopp ticked through her lesson on essay construction. Then she gave her sophomores one more tip for their upcoming language arts test from the state.
"Please, don't panic and say, 'I can't write,' " she called out. "Your ideas are good enough to put down on paper and have someone else read."
Part educators, part cheerleaders, Kopp and her colleagues in Arrowhead's special education department cajole students to finish their math homework, help them learn new reading strategies and prepare them for the state's annual testing regimen.
Last year, the school's 10th-graders with disabilities fell short of the state's reading proficiency standard under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under President George W. Bush's signature change to federal education law, schools are evaluated based on how their students perform on state tests in math and reading.
A child-centered school finance policy that supports the choices of parents can create higher-quality schools and more equality in the educational opportunities available to children. The only way to ensure that all children have the same educational opportunities and equal resources to obtain them and at the same time create powerful incentives to improve school performance, is to adopt a student-centered school funding system.
Public schools are nominally "free," but pricing, which implicitly occurs through housing markets, fundamentally limits access to better schools and consigns less wealthy families to less desirable schools. The subsequent separation of students along class lines also means that the non-financial inputs critical to good schools, such as peer and family influences, can be even more unevenly distributed than financial resources. The unequal distribution of opportunity remains even when state aid is targeted at the "neediest" schools. state money that simply equalizes financial resources will have limited effects on the root causes of education inequities.
This report outlines an alternative approach that seeks to overcome the limits of past attempts to equalize opportunities. It investigates the combined policies of open enrollment (in public, charter, and private schools) with financial support that follows the child. such a system will make the differences in local resources for education funding largely irrelevant. We limit our report to the mechanics and implementation issues of such a system, but to highlight how key policy choices would affect its implementation and costs. The report and demonstrate its fiscal impacts. our purpose is not to argue for particular policies within such a systeis an introduction to and not the final word on a fundamental shift in school finance policy in Ohio. As such, it will invite many questions and concerns that will deserve further research.
The report:
highlights the need for a reform of ohio's school finance system.
Documents ohio's level of financial support and compares it to other states.
Discusses the role of property taxes in funding schools.
outlines the basic structure of a child-centered school finance system.
Presents a basic weighted system of per-pupil financial support and creates a matrix of students in ohio schools to estimate the expenditures required to fund each child under a child-centered finance system.
Presents a model to calculate the expenditures required to fund a child-centered system at different levels of per-pupil financial support and under various policy choices.
Analyzes the implications for property taxes within communities under different policy choices within a child-centered funding system.
Estimates how much money businesses and individuals would contribute towards the education of deserving, needy students after the introduction of a tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations.
In the fall of 1990, I somewhat reluctantly joined my high school debate team. My first debate focused on whether the United States should increase manned space exploration. I was completely lost; it seemed I had forgotten how to speak. Thankfully, I had a supportive community in my hometown of Nevada, Missouri, and a talented coach by the name of Tim Gore. I quickly found there is nothing quite like watching the faces in the audience as people realize you have taken control of the debate. I admit I became intrigued by the idea of intellectual combat.
As an educator today, I draw on the writings of University of Washington political science and education professor Walter Parker, who has noted that "engaged citizens do not materialize out of thin air. They do not naturally grasp such knotty principles as tolerance, impartial justice, the separation of church and state, the needs for limits on majority power, or the difference between liberty and license." If our students are to understand the pressing issues of the day, they must be exposed to myriad viewpoints and able to synthesize information from multiple sources.
Forensics challenges students through events in both speech and debate. In the discipline of platform speaking, students select a controversial subject and conduct extensive research before trying to persuade the audience. Competitors in extemporaneous speaking have 30 minutes to prepare a seven-minute response to a question, complete with source citations. Topics the National Federation of State High School Associations developed for extemporaneous speaking contests in 2008 included, Should public schools be allowed to segregate along gender lines? Should phone companies that aided in illegal wiretaps by the government be immune from prosecution? Should China relax its one-child policy?
DURING the election campaign the economy submerged most talk of education. But beneath the surface, a debate churned between the self-proclaimed reformers and the teachers' unions. By choosing Arne Duncan, Chicago's schools chief and one of his own basketball buddies, Barack Obama this week has managed to please both sides.
School reformers had been edgy for weeks, noting that Mr Obama's transition team included Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University. Ms Darling-Hammond is a vocal critic of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal law that promotes testing and accountability. Many feared that she would nudge Mr Obama towards the unions or even become education secretary herself.
If Ms Darling-Hammond represented one end of the debate, at the other extreme were Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, chancellors of the school systems of New York and Washington, DC, respectively. Both have supported charter (independently-run but government-funded) schools and paying teachers by results. Both have championed tough accountability. But both have infuriated unions, and Mr Obama has opted not to pick a fight.
The leader of an independent coalition for families of students who attend virtual schools wants to become the Wisconsin state superintendent.
Rose Fernandez announced her candidacy for education secretary on Wednesday.
She joins three other announced candidates. They are Beloit schools superintendent Lowell Holtz, Concordia University professor Van Mobley and deputy state superintendent Tony Evers.
There wasn't much celebration yesterday for Barack Obama's nomination of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education from either the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (who praised Duncan for helping "students with the greatest needs") or from National Education Association honcho Van Roekel (who said nothing at all). The unions, long used to getting their way with Democratic Party leaders, were more disappointed that their favorite pick -- Obama adviser and No Child Left Behind Act critic Linda Darling-Hammond -- didn't get the nod.
But the real celebration came from another corner of the Democratic National Committee -- the motley crew of centrist city officials and liberal activists who have long-championed (and helped pass) No Child in the first place. Declared former Daily News reporter, Joe Williams, who runs the New York-based Democrats For Education Reform: "[Duncan] will lead the charge of breaking the existing ideological and political gridlock to promote new, innovative and experimental ideas in education."
It remains unclear whether the merit pay program for teachers in Texas is yielding the results its proponents have advocated - higher student achievement.
But a two-year evaluation of the Texas Educator Excellence Grant program released Thursday shows that 90 percent of the eligible schools have participated in the voluntary initiative. That means teachers and schools are interested in the concept, said Matthew Springer, the lead author of the report and director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College.
The study also found that turnover is lower among teachers who received bonus pay than those who did not.
The report said the greatest problem two years into the new system is that too many schools have to discontinue the program too quickly. A majority of the schools eligible to participate one year did not return the following year because they failed to meet eligibility requirements.
To be eligible, schools must have a high percentage of low-income students. They must also earn a recognized or exemplary state rating, or passing rates on the state math and reading tests must rank in the top quarter of Texas schools.
More than 10,000 people signed up to join a coalition supporting school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs over the past five weeks, the Alliance for School Choice announced today. The Alliance, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., had anticipated reaching its goal of recruiting 10,000 new supporters by the end of January.
The new supporters are members of the School Choice Works campaign, which officially launched in mid-November. Membership in School Choice Works is free. School Choice Works is the first national interactive and social media campaign launched by the coordinated school choice movement. More information is available at www.LetParentsChoose.org.
The Alliance, which is the nation's largest organization promoting school choice, provides members with free bumper stickers, e-mail action updates, free news magazines, and information on how they can help promote education reform in their states.
"The quick and overwhelming success of this campaign is testament to the strength of support for school choice across the country," said Andrew Campanella, national campaign director for the School Choice Works project. "We look forward to continuing to recruit individuals who want to make a difference in education reform in their states."
The Obama administration's selection of Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan as education secretary signals an intent to maintain a rigorous system of standardized tests in public schools, while experimenting with reforms disliked by unions, such as teacher merit pay.
In announcing the appointment Tuesday at a Chicago news conference, President-elect Barack Obama said he and Mr. Duncan share a "deep pragmatism" and a willingness to tap ideas often associated with conservatives. "Let's not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids," Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Duncan's "strength is really his openness to ideas and a real interest in data and how things are working," said John Easton, executive director of the Consortium of Chicago School Research, a University of Chicago program that has studied the city's schools.
One of Mr. Duncan's first tasks will be deciding what to do about the federal No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, and now due for reauthorization. The statute, which has divided educators, requires all students to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Schools that don't make adequate progress on tests measuring student achievement face sanctions.
Barack Obama has chosen Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan to be his Secretary of Education. As scarred veterans of the school-reform wars, we applaud the choice with great caution.
We've long said there is no more urgent domestic issue than the collapsed state of inner-city education. Going back to the Clinton Presidency, we have argued on behalf of vouchers that would let parents of students in the poorest public schools have the same shot at a sound education as do more affluent children, such as those of Mr. Obama. The opposition from public teachers' unions to this or almost any significant reform is legendary. Thus, we listened closely when Senator Obama said nearly nothing during the campaign that would offend the unions, mostly urging more spending on preschool and after-school programs.
We now read that Mr. Duncan is an ardent proponent of public charter schools, though probably not of vouchers for private schools. Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a frequent contributor to this page on school reform, likes Mr. Duncan. "He's a proven and committed and inventive education reformer," Mr. Finn wrote yesterday on the Institute's blog, "not tethered to the public-school establishment and its infinite interest groups."
Students in the District's charter schools have opened a solid academic lead over those in its traditional public schools, adding momentum to a movement that is recasting public education in the city.
The gains show up on national standardized tests and the city's own tests in reading and math, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Charters have been particularly successful with low-income children, who make up two-thirds of D.C. public school students.
A dozen years after it was created by Congress, the city's charter system has taken shape as a fast-growing network of schools, whose ability to tap into private donors, bankers and developers has made it possible to fund impressive facilities, expand programs and reduce class sizes.
With freedom to experiment, the independent, nonprofit charters have emphasized strategies known to help poor children learn -- longer school days, summer and Saturday classes, parent involvement and a cohesive, disciplined culture among staff members and students.
If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?
That's the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop the program. As my colleague Kate Galbraith reports, their teacher was proud of them for all the time they spent campaigning to keep the recycling program alive.
My colleague Andy Revkin suggests that the West Virginia students might be learning something useful about the interplay of economics and ecology, but I fear they and their teacher have missed the lesson. The reason that public officials cut back the program, as Matt Richtel and Kate reported, is the market for recyclables has collapsed because the supply vastly exceeds the demand. This could be a valuable learning experience for the students about markets and about the long-term tendency of prices of natural resources to fall while the cost of people's time rises.
Most people think textbooks are important. Schools that don't have all of theirs might find themselves accused of dereliction of duty. The Washington Post, for instance, was aghast last year that several thousand D.C. schoolbooks hadn't yet left the warehouse when classes began.
My colleague Michael Alison Chandler underlined this in her story two weeks ago about an effort by some Virginia teachers to break the $8 billion-a-year textbook industry's tight grip on science instruction, which often stops abruptly about the time Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity in 1905.
The fact that such obsolescence is tolerated shows how much faith we put in textbooks. So does our acceptance of the difficulty most students have reading through a standard textbook without falling asleep. Reid Saaris, founder of the D.C.-based Equal Opportunity Schools Organization, remembers teaching 12th-grade history in Beaufort, S.C., with a particularly tedious required text. The few seniors who chose his class usually did so for inappropriate reasons. One year, five boys showed up, gave Saaris disappointed looks and said they had enrolled only "because of the hot lady who was supposed to be teaching the class."
Three years of math, three years of science - start getting ready, all you sixth-graders in Milwaukee Public Schools.
A School Board committee voted 3-0 Monday night to increase the requirements for graduating from MPS from two years each of math and science to three, effective with the class of 2014-'15, members of which are currently sixth-graders.
In addition, students would need to complete a half-year's worth of either an online course, community service or a service-learning project.
The proposal will go to the full board tonight and is expected to be approved.
Free business courses are a great way to get a university-level education without the hassle of student loans. There are a number of top-ranked universities that offer free business courses online. Examples include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley.
The Milwaukee School Board on Tuesday night will face a serving of a stew with many of the ingredients that make life complicated in Milwaukee Public Schools. How it decides what parts to eat or not eat will say a lot about the prospects for change in the system.
The board will take up a multi-part proposal from north side member Michael Bonds to realign a cluster of schools in the vicinity of W. Hampton and W. Silver Spring avenues from N. Green Bay Ave. to N. 35th St.
Included in the proposals are closing Carleton School, converting McNair Academy to a middle school with an emphasis on arts and science, and attempting for the first time to provide short-distance bus service to nearby schools as an alternative to busing to distant parts of town. For families living in the affected area, busing options to schools elsewhere would be restricted as a way of encouraging enrollment in the local schools.
Bonds' proposal is one of the boldest attempts in years to reduce busing and invigorate the idea of attending schools near home. It comes after the board agreed in principle to make major cuts in busing - a stand that has not been translated into action yet.
But two School Board committee meetings last week brought out how many factors are at play. Among them:
Busing: Do people put their kids on buses to distant schools because they want to or because they don't have much choice? Milwaukee has one of the most expansive busing policies in the country. The $102 million neighborhood school plan in recent years failed to persuade parents to take their kids off buses. Is anything different now?
K-8 vs. middle schools: Middle schools have been in sharp decline in MPS as schools offering kindergarten through eighth grade programs have increased rapidly. Is that because parents really want K-8s or because they haven't been given quality choices in middle schools? The prevailing thinking in MPS has been that K-8s are popular, but there appears to be a growing counter-movement, with Bonds as a leading voice for middle schools.
An Update on Madison's Small Learning Community / High School "Redesign" Plans
The Madison School Board recently received a presentation (25mb mp3 file) from the Administration on its plans for High School "redesign" and the use of the $5,500,000 Small Learning Community grant funded by our federal tax dollars. Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash along with representatives from the four large high schools participated in the discussion. The Board asked some interesting questions. President Arlene Silveira asked how this initiative relates to the District's "Strategic Planning Process"? Vice President Lucy Mathiak asked about opportunities for advanced students.
The British government's latest crack at reforming schools is yet another step towards contentless learning
"NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life." How horrible for the pupils at Professor Gradgrind's school; Charles Dickens pulled out all the grim stops in describing it. No one today really thinks that school, especially in the early years, should consist of nothing but dreary rote learning.
But children do love learning real things--why trees have leaves, how two minuses make a plus, the number of wives' heads Henry VIII removed. Only if they begin to build up a core of knowledge can they develop the habits of mental discipline that must last them a lifetime. You cannot look up on Google something you do not know exists; and the ability to hold facts in your head is a prerequisite for many careers--the law, say, or engineering. It is not enough in primary school to learn about learning; children need to learn actual stuff.
So it is a particular disappointment that the interim version of the biggest review of British primary schooling in decades nudges the country a little further down its path toward factfree education (see article). The existing curriculum is not without its faults: repeatedly re-engineered since it was set in place 20 years ago, it is now cluttered and prescriptive. And Sir Jim Rose, once Britain's chief inspector of primary schools, was dealt some marked cards for his review: computer skills had to be ranked alongside literacy and numeracy (though employers complain not that young job-seekers are clueless online but that they are illiterate); room had to be made to teach a modern foreign language (thank heavens); and a gaggle of personal-development goals (learning not to set fire to your friends or trash the classroom) were to be emphasised.
Menomonee Falls Superintendent Dr. Keith Marty to Facilitate Madison's "Strategic Planning Process"
A recent Madison School Board meeting discussed the planned "Strategic Review" 10MB mp3 audio. Superintendent Dan Nerad mentioned that he planned to retain Menomonee Falls Superintendent Dr. Keith Marty to facilitate the process. Links:
Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison
The College Board recently updated their AP Course Audit data. Dane County offerings are noted below, including changes from 2007-2008:
Abundant Life Christian School: 3 Courses in 2007/2008 and 3 in 2008/2009
Cambridge High School: 1 Course in 2007/2008 and 0 in 2008/2009
De Forest High School: 8 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
Madison East High School: 12 Courses in 2007/2008 and 12 in 2008/2009
Madison Edgewood High School: 11 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009 (11 are on offer this year. There's been a paperwork delay for the 11th course, AP Biology due to a new teacher)
Madison LaFollette High School: 12 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Madison Memorial High School: 18 Courses in 2007/2008 and 17 in 2008/2009
Madison West High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 0 in 2008/2009 (I'm told that West has 6, but the College Board has a paperwork problem)
Marshall High School: 5 Courses in 2007/2008 and 5 in 2008/2009
McFarland High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Middleton-Cross Plains High School: 8 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
Monona Grove High School: 9 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
Mt. Horeb High School: 5 Courses in 2007/2008 and 5 in 2008/2009
Oregon High School: 9 Courses in 2007/2008 and 9 in 2008/2009
Sauk Prairie High School: 10 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009
Stoughton High School: 7 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009
Sun Prairie High School: 15 Courses in 2007/2008 and 17 in 2008/2009
Verona High School: 10 Courses in 2007/2008 and 11 in 2008/2009
Waunakee High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Wisconsin Heights High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to announce his choice for education secretary, there is mystery not only about the person he will choose, but also about the approach to overhauling the nation's schools that his selection will reflect.
Despite an 18-month campaign for president and many debates, there remains uncertainty about what Mr. Obama believes is the best way to improve education.
Will he side with those who want to abolish teacher tenure and otherwise curb the power of teachers' unions? Or with those who want to rewrite the main federal law on elementary and secondary education, the No Child Left Behind Act, and who say the best strategy is to help teachers become more qualified?
The debate has sometimes been nasty.
"People are saying things now that they may regret saying in a couple of months," said Jack Jennings, a Democrat who is president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy in Washington. "Unfortunately, they're all friends of mine, which makes it awkward."
Like all unions, teachers unions have a vested interest in restricting the labor supply to reduce job competition. Traditional state certification rules help to limit the supply of "certified" teachers. But a new study suggests that such requirements also hinder student learning.
Harvard researchers Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler compared states that have genuine alternative certification with those that have it in name only. And they found that between 2003 and 2007 students in states with a real alternative pathway to teaching gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal standardized test) than did students in other states.
"In states that had genuine alternative certification, test-score gains on the NAEP exceeded those in the other states by 4.8 points and 7.6 points in 4th- and 8th-grade math, respectively," report the authors in the current issue of Education Next. "In reading, the additional gains in the states with genuine alternative certification were 10.6 points and 3.9 points for the two grade levels respectively."
The study undermines the arguments from colleges of education and teachers unions, which say that traditional certification, which they control, is the only process that can produce quality teachers. The findings hold up even after controlling for race, ethnicity, free-lunch eligibility, class size and per-pupil state spending.
Forty-seven states have adopted a pathway to teaching, alternative to the standard state certification otherwise required. Is this new pathway genuine or merely symbolic? Does it open the classroom door to teachers of minority background? Does it help--or hinder--learning in the classroom? Claims about all of these questions have arisen in public discourse. Recently, data have become available that allow us to check their validity.
To receive a standard state certification in most states, prospective teachers not only must be college graduates but also must have taken a specific set of education-related courses that comprise approximately 30 credit hours of coursework. Prospective teachers are well advised to pursue studies at a college or university within the state where they expect to teach, because it is often only within that state that students can get the courses required for state certification in the subject area and for the grade levels that they will be teaching.
Such certification requirements limit the supply of certified teachers, and as a result, serious teaching shortages are regularly observed. For example, in California, one-third of the entire teacher work force, about 100,000 teachers, will retire over the next decade and need to be replaced, compounding what the governor's office calls a "severe" current teacher shortage. Other states are facing a similar situation. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics projects a shortfall of 280,000 qualified math and science teachers by 2015. As former National Education Association president Reg Weaver put it, "At the start of every school year, we read in the newspaper...stories about schools scrambling to hire teachers."
State of the Art OLIVE GARDEN ASKS KIDS HOW TO USE THE INTERNET TO BETTER THEIR COMMUNITIES
Olive Garden's 13th-annual Pasta Tales essay contest begins October 6, 2008
Kids and teens lead the digital revolution, sharing their ideas online every day. Now Olive Garden wants them to channel that knowledge and creativity to make a difference in their local communities. This year, Olive Garden's 13th-annual Pasta Tales essay writing contest asks students in first through 12th-grade: "How would you use the Internet to change your community for the better?" The grand prize winning essay is worth a three-day trip to New York and a $2,500 savings bond.
Beginning Monday, Oct. 6 through Friday, Dec. 19, Olive Garden will accept essays of 50 to 250 words from students in the U.S. and Canada. Entry forms and complete rules will be available beginning Oct. 6 at local Olive Garden restaurants or by logging on to www.olivegarden.com/company/community/pasta_tales_entries.asp
The grand prize is a trip to New York, dinner at the Olive Garden in Times Square and a $2,500 savings bond. A winner also will be chosen in each grade category and will receive a $500 savings bond and a family dinner at their local Olive Garden.
Entries must be titled, include the writer's name, complete address, phone number with area code, grade, date of birth including year and a statement that the work is their own. Entries must be submitted either online or postmarked by Friday, Dec. 19 and sent to Pasta Tales, PMB 2000, 6278 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 33308-1916.
Submissions are judged based on creativity, adherence to theme, organization, grammar, punctuation and spelling by the Quill and Scroll Society of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Iowa with finalists selected by Olive Garden.
For more information about Pasta Tales, call Katie Lennon at (954) 776-1999, ext. 240 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST.
Olive Garden is the leading restaurant in the Italian dining segment with 662 restaurants, more than 80,000 employees and $3.1 billion in annual sales. Olive Garden is a division of Darden Restaurants Inc. (NYSE:DRI), the world's largest full-service owned and operated restaurant company.
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Winners Announced in Olive Garden's 2008 Pasta Tales National Essay Writing Contest
Thirteen students around the nation recognized
ORLANDO, Fla. - Michelle Fauber's favorite family activity is the time she spends gathering with her father, stepmother and younger sister to watch home videos of her late mother. Fauber's moving description of why this is special to her was chosen by judges as the grand prize winner in the 12th-annual Olive Garden Pasta Tales national essay writing contest.
A 12th-grader at Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pa., Fauber's essay was selected from more than 28,300 entries, the most ever received in the history of the contest. Students in first through 12th grade were asked: "What is your favorite family activity and what makes it so special?"
In her essay, Fauber recounts the cherished details of her mother brought to life on video. "There she was: laughing, touching the arms of her friends, making bad jokes that sounded frighteningly like my own. A woman with strikingly pale skin and jet black hair; a person with a life, a laugh, a voice that seemed strangely unfamiliar and yet exactly as I thought; my mother," Fauber wrote. "I saw on that night that the ability to look back on a painful yet indispensable past and to be smiling in the present in the company of each other. ..."
Fauber's essay was "happy and sad, optimistic, inspiring and nostalgic. There wasn't a wasted word, and in only a handful of sentences she brought readers into a whole new world. ... Her moving, efficient, genuine tone had no match in this contest," noted one of the judges from the Quill and Scroll Society of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Iowa who reviews the essays.
As the Pasta Tales grand prize winner, Fauber received a $2,500 savings bond, a trip with her family to New York City and dinner at the Olive Garden in Times Square.
"Michelle's beautifully written essay was heartfelt and shared an intimate look into a very special moment for her family," said Mara Frazier, spokesperson for Olive Garden. "Every year, we are impressed by the creativity and talent of these young writers. Thanks to them for their efforts, as well as to the parents and teachers who encourage them to express their thoughts and emotions through writing."
IF YOU are in your 40s and British, it is quite possible that your spelling is an embarrassment. You may never have been taught the distinction between "there", "their" and "they're", or perhaps even your times tables. If you moved house during your primary years you may have entirely missed some vital topic--joined-up writing, say. And you may have struggled to learn to read using the "initial teaching alphabet", a concoction of 40 letters that was supposed to provide a stepping stone to literacy but tripped up many children when they had to switch to the standard 26.
Those days of swivel-eyed theorising and untrammelled experimentation--or, as the schools inspectorate put it at the time, "markedly individual decisions about what is to be taught"--ended in 1988 with the introduction of a national curriculum. But though that brought rigour and uniformity, it also created an unwieldy--and unworldly--blueprint for the Renaissance Child. Schools have struggled to fit it all in ever since. Now, 20 years later, the primary curriculum is to be cut down.
As soon as next year, if La Follette or Memorial high school students reach into their wallets and find they're short on cash for lunch, they might step up to an in-school teller window and withdraw money from their own savings account.
Business teachers Darrin Graham and Dave Thomas presented a proposal last week to the Madison School Board that could bring on-campus financial institutions to the two high schools as early as the 2009-10 school year, and they got an enthusiastic response. The board gave the teachers a green light to send out request for qualification materials to potential banks and credit unions, and they plan to bring back a proposal in February.
Graham and Thomas would like to get branches running by September, but the timetable will depend on the financial institution.
The minute I saw that Coolidge High School in the District had given a startling 750 Advanced Placement tests last May, and that only 2 percent of those exams had received passing scores, I knew I was in trouble.
For 10 years I have been ranking high schools based on participation in AP, International Baccalaureate and other college-level exams. I call this the Challenge Index. It is the system used by Newsweek in its annual list of top high schools and by The Washington Post in its annual ratings of all Washington area schools, published today in The Post Extra sections and on washingtonpost.com.
Every year I receive thousands of e-mails about these lists, and my refusal to include test scores in the ranking calculations. Some readers praise me for recognizing schools that work hard to prepare students from poor families for college-level courses and tests, even if their scores aren't good. Others denounce me for giving high ratings to schools full of such students, because many people think low scores should disqualify a school from appearing on anybody's best schools list.
In the comments on TIMSS-07 math scores, one important aspect
has not been mentioned.
Grade 8
US
Minn.
Korea
Singapore
Number
510
537
583
597
Algebra
501
515
596
579
Geometry
480
505
587
578
Data and Chance
531
560
580
574
Korea and Singapore have balanced scores, the US and Minnesota do not. The first three areas are the core areas of mathematics on which otherthings are built. We have to improve on them.
U.S. fourth- and eighth-graders improved their math scores in a closely watched international test, but continued to lag well behind peers from top-performing Asian countries. U.S. students also failed to show measurable gains in science.
The U.S. and other governments on Tuesday released the results of the test, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the world's largest assessment of international achievement. Some 425,000 students in almost 60 countries took the exam, administered every four years, starting in 1995.
Today we present readers an in-depth interview with Ira David Socol, author of "The Drool Room" and the web site "SpeEdChange." Our interest in talking with Ira centered upon three critical factors.
First, there is little doubt that Ira is passionate about education and the process of learning. More importantly, that passion is relentlessly focused on creating a learning process that is responsive to the needs of learners.
Second, to be frank, Ira shares some of our views on how best to reform education. He notes that there are a multitude of ways to create positive learning opportunities for students but our current school structures prevent the flexibility necessary to provide alternate paths. Like OpenEducation.net, he is also a strong proponent of the use of technology yet does not buy into the "digital natives" nonsense.
Even more troubling are two sobering facts. First, Wisconsin continues to experience a net loss of college degree earning workers, leaving our work force trailing the national average in terms of the number of people in our work force with a college degree. Second, of the 10 fastest growing jobs in Wisconsin, nine only require a high school degree or less. All of which makes clear that, unless we can take steps now to change these trends, future revenue streams from the existing income tax structure will be limited by a comparatively smaller work force earning comparatively less robust wages.
Over the last three years, Hopes, Fears, & Reality has provided new evidence and analysis about what is going on in charter schools, how well they are doing, where they need to improve, and what can be learned from the research on these types of public schools. Past volumes have outlined how achievement studies should be conducted and interpreted, suggested how to achieve more effective public oversight of charter schools and how to eliminate barriers to growth, and presented nationwide trends in the number of charters opened and closed and the characteristics of these schools.
In this year's edition, the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP) brings new evidence to some of these past questions and turns to some new ones.
What is striking throughout this year's essays is that charter schools are more different than alike, not only in terms of the populations they serve, the academic missions they pursue, and the results they produce, but also in their response to local need and capacity.
The essays in this volume show, for example, that:
National charter school achievement is promising overall, but highly varied
Informational and Community Discussion Sessions on the Madison Mathematics Task Force
Date: January 6th, 2009
Time: 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Where: LaFollette High School - LMC
Date: January 7th, 2009
Time: 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Where: Memorial High School - Wisconsin Neighborhood Center
You are cordially invited to attend an information session and discussion about the findings and recommendations of the Math Task Force which recently completed a review of the MMSD K-12 Mathematics program. Please also share this information with others who may be interested in attending.
At each session, there will be a brief informational presentation followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete Task Force Report can be found at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/math/.
We are looking forward to sharing this information with you and learning about your reactions to the research and recommendations included in the report. Your thoughts are important to us as we work to improve the MMSD K-12 Mathematics program.
Questions/comments? Please contact Brian Sniff at bsniff@madison.k12.wi.us
Looking forward to seeing you on January 6th or 7th.
High School Elites (no HS history scholars need apply)
$100,000 WINNERS ANNOUNCED IN THE 2008 SIEMENS COMPETITION IN MATH, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
TEXAS AND NORTH CAROLINA STUDENTS TACKLE LIFESAVING RESEARCH IN CHEMISTRY AND GENETICS, TAKING HOME THE GRAND PRIZE AT NATION'S PREMIER HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE COMPETITION
$100,000 WINNERS ANNOUNCED IN THE 2008 SIEMENS COMPETITION IN MATH,SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Wen Chyan of Denton, Texas, Wins Individual Grand Prize;
Sajith M. Wickramasekara of Raleigh, North Carolina and Andrew Y. Guo of Cary, North Carolina, Win Team Grand Prize
NEW YORK, NY, December 8, 2008 - The nation's brightest minds and the innovators of tomorrow bravely took on groundbreaking research of life-threatening infections and deadly side effects of chemotherapeutics. As a result, Wen Chyan and the team of Sajith M. Wickramasekara and Andrew Y. Guo were named $100,000 Grand Prize winners in the 2008 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. The prestigious Siemens Competition, a signature program of the Siemens Foundation, is administered by the College Board. The annual awards were presented this morning at New York University, host of the Siemens Competition National Finals.
Wen Chyan, a senior at Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science in Denton, Texas, won the $100,000 scholarship in the individual category for chemistry research on combating hospital-related infections. Sajith M. Wickramasekara and Andrew Y. Guo, both seniors at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, North Carolina, won the $100,000 prize in the team category, which they will share equally, for genetics research of chemotherapy. The three science superstars have an exciting journey ahead; they will ring The Closing Bell™ at the New York Stock Exchange in February among other honors.
"These remarkable students have achieved the most coveted and competitive high school science recognition in the nation," said Thomas McCausland, Chairman of the Siemens Foundation. "There is no doubt that these scholars will change the world, starting right now, with their passion for math and science," he said.
The national finals were judged by a panel of nationally renowned scientists and mathematicians headed by lead judge Dr. Joseph Taylor, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University. Eighteen national finalists competed in this year's national finals, including six individuals and six teams. The finalists previously competed at one of six regional competitions held at leading research universities throughout the month of November.
The Winning Projects
Wen Chyan won the top prize, and a $100,000 college scholarship, for his bioengineering research of antimicrobial coatings for medical devices. Mr. Chyan looked to design a specialized coating for medical devices aimed to prevent common hospital infections, called nosocomial infections, which afflict more than two million patients each year, killing more than 100,000 of those patients. Mr. Chyan's project is entitled, Versatile Antimicrobial Coatings from Pulse Plasma Deposited Hydrogels and Hydrogel Composites.
"This research was not only a creative idea, but required a proactive approach where cross-disciplinary initiatives had to be taken. The fields of electrochemistry, material science and biology all had to be explored in depth by Mr. Chyan," said W. Mark Saltzman, Goizueta Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, a competition judge. "With further testing, these findings have the potential to improve a wide range of medical devices from intravascular devices at hospitals or catheters used in insulin pumps."
Mr. Chyan would like to major in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering once in college. Upon completing his studies he would like to pursue a position in academia, preferably at a research university where he can continue conducting research and teach at the same time. His various honors in science include recognition from the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad, U.S. Biology Olympiad and Texas Science and Engineering Fair. He is the recipient of the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science Summer Research Scholarship (2008), and also founded a student chapter of the American Chemical Society at the University of North Texas. He also composes music and plays piano and violin in his spare time.
Mr. Chyan developed an interest in science with the encouragement of his parents, both scientists, whom would take him to tour their laboratories and perform demos since an early age. His mentor for this project was Dr. Richard B. Timmons, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Sajith Wickramasekara and Andrew Guo won the team category and will share a $100,000 scholarship for their genetics research that has the potential to easily identify new chemotherapeutic drugs and greatly improve existing ones. Their project is entitled, A Functional Genomic Framework for Chemotherapeutic Drug Improvement and Identification.
"Mr. Wickramasekara and Mr. Guo used a modern way of screening for drugs with yeast to address an important problem regarding the limitations of chemotherapy including resistance, toxicity and discrimination," said Dr. Jeffrey Pollard, Louis Goldstein Swan Chair in Women's Cancer Research, Department of Developmental and Molecular Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a competition judge. "The project required a very large amount of work, organization, and discipline to obtain and then fully verify these results, which the team did in three ways. Sophisticated, innovative bioinformatics also enabled them to identify new therapeutic targets and potential drugs. Not only is this a process currently done by many large pharmaceutical companies, with much more resources, but my own graduate students have done similar work for their graduate theses."
Mr. Wickramasekara is the team leader and heard about the Siemens Competition in 2006 when seniors from his high school were selected as Regional Finalists. Mr. Wickramasekara is Captain of his school's Science Bowl and has participated in various science competitions including the 2008 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the North Carolina State Science and Engineering Fair as well as the North Carolina Junior Science Humanities Symposium. He is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America and dreams of one day owning his own biotech startup, specializing in personalized medicine.
Mr. Guo is a Science Olympiad winner and Co-Captain of the Quiz Bowl. Mr. Guo received First Place State Team in the Goldman Sachs National Economics Challenge. Mr. Guo was captain of the 2008 State Champion Varsity Tennis Team and plays Ultimate Frisbee as part of his extracurricular activities. Mr. Guo speaks Mandarin Chinese and aspires to manage his own company one day. Mr. Guo's mother works in the field of genetics and sparked his interest to study the sciences by discussing her work and activities at home, and he credits his father with helping him become who he is today.
Both team members co-founded the Student Journal of Research of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics; they both serve as Editors of the publication. Additionally, Mr. Wickramasekara and Mr. Guo were recently named 2009 National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists.
The team's project combined traditional genetics with cutting-edge computational modeling to streamline the gene discovery process. Their project addresses the need in the field to identify new genes to target for cancer therapy. The team worked on this project with the help of their mentor, Dr. Craig B. Bennett, Assistant Professor, Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, and their high school advisor, Dr. Myra Halpin, Dean of Science, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, NC.
The other national winners of the 2008 Siemens Competition were:
Individuals
$50,000 scholarship - Eric K. Larson, Eugene, Oregon
$40,000 scholarship - Nityan Nair, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
$30,000 scholarship - James Meixiong, Evans, Georgia
$10,000 scholarship - Hayden C. Metsky, Millburn, New Jersey
Teams
$50,000 scholarship - Eugenia Volkova of South Salem, New York and Alexander Saeboe of Katonah, New York
$40,000 scholarship - Erika Debenedictis and Duanni (Tony) Huang of Albuquerque, New Mexico
$30,000 scholarship - Christine S. Lai and Diyang Tang of Acton, Massachusetts
$20,000 scholarship - Raphael-Joel (RJ) Lim of Indianapolis, Indiana and Mark Zhang of Sugar Land, Texas
$10,000 scholarship - Aanand A. Patel and William Hong of Fullerton, California
The Siemens Competition
The Siemens Competition was launched in 1998 to recognize America's best and brightest math and science students. In another record setting year, 1,893 students registered to enter the Siemens Competition with a total of 1,205 projects submitted - this includes an increase of more than 10 percent in team and individual project submissions and an increase of more than 16 percent in the number of registrations. Entries are judged at the regional level by esteemed scientists at six leading research universities which host the regional competitions: California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Georgia Institute of Technology; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Notre Dame; and The University of Texas at Austin. Winners of the regional events compete at the National Finals which take place at New York University in New York City, December 5 - December 8, 2008. Please visit http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/competition.htm for more information.
About the Siemens Foundation
The Siemens Foundation provides more than $7 million annually in support of educational initiatives in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math in the United States. Its signature programs, the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology and Siemens Awards for Advanced Placement, reward exceptional achievement in science, math and technology. The newest program, The Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge, encourages K12 students to develop innovative green solutions for environmental issues. By supporting outstanding students today, and recognizing the teachers and schools that inspire their excellence, the Foundation helps nurture tomorrow's scientists and engineers. The Foundation's mission is based on the culture of innovation, research and educational support that is the hallmark of Siemens' U.S. companies and its parent company, Siemens AG. For more information, visit www.siemens-foundation.org.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
U.S. students are doing no better on an international science exam than they were in the mid-1990s, a performance plateau that leaves educators and policymakers worried about how schools are preparing students to compete in an increasingly global economy.
Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), released yesterday, show how fourth- and eighth-graders in the United States measure up to peers around the world. U.S. students showed gains in math in both grades. But average science performance, although still stronger than in many countries, has stagnated since 1995.
Students in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong outperformed U.S. fourth-graders in science. The U.S. students had an average score of 539 on a 1,000-point scale, higher than their peers in 25 countries.
The first story Bernie Glaze ever told me was about Kevin and Duc, two basketball-crazed teens who felt her Theory of Knowledge class at Mount Vernon High School was not their thing. All that talk of Kant and Aristotle and other dead guys with no jump shot made their brains hurt, they told her.
But one day she heard them talking about an NBA playoff game. They were interpreting, predicting, differentiating and synthesizing. Ha! She had them. "Listen to yourselves," she said. "Your brains know what to do. Just treat Plato as though he were Michael Jordan."
Bernie died Nov. 20 of complications from lung cancer. She was 62. Some people might remember her as the talkative woman who unaccountably left the faculty of the celebrated Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, with its 7 percent annual bonus for all teachers, to help start an International Baccalaureate program at Mount Vernon High in Fairfax County, then considered one of the worst schools in Northern Virginia. I remember her as the dynamo who helped turn Fairfax, known for gifted education and science prodigies, into a national model for teachers, like her, who preferred to spend their days looking for the hidden potential in C students.
If there were a math-and-science Olympics for elementary and middle schoolers, USA students could hold their heads high -- they're consistently better than average. In math, it turns out, they're improving substantially, even as a few powerhouse nations see their scores drop.
But at the end of the day, the USA never quite makes it to the medal podium, a dilemma that has educators and policymakers divided, with some saying factors outside school play a key role in both achievement and productivity in general.
For the first time since 2003, the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, a battery of international math and science tests among dozens of nations, are out -- and they paint a somewhat mixed picture of achievement: On the one hand, the USA ranks consistently above international averages in both subjects.
On the other hand, several nations consistently outscore our fourth- and eighth-graders, with a few countries turning in eye-popping performances.
First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It's like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have. On both TIMSS math and science, the U. S. has a much higher proportion of "advanced" scorers than the international median although the proportion is much smaller than in Asian nations.
Second, test scores, at least average test scores, don't seem to be related to anything important to a national economy. Japan's kids have always done well, but the economy sank into the Pacific in 1990 and has never recovered. The two Swiss-based organizations that rank nations on global competitiveness, the Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum, both rank the U. S. #1 and have for a number of years. The WEF examines 12 "pillars of competitiveness," only one of which is education. We do OK there, but we shine on innovation.
Innovation is the only quality of competitiveness that does not show at some point diminishing returns. Building bigger and faster airplanes can only improve productivity so much. Innovation has no such limits. When journalist Fareed Zakaria asked the Singapore Minister of Education why his high-flying students faded in after-school years, the Minister cited creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge, all of which he thought Americans excelled in.
First of all, were you warned that your speech was going to be taped and secondly, did you think it would be made available to the general population?
I knew it would be videotaped, and now that I am 72, and hear "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," I don't mind who sees it, although it seems likely that few in "the general population" will bother with it.
Five Texas education leaders, including former Education Commissioner Mike Moses, are proposing college or workplace readiness as the standard for all high school graduates in their plan to improve public education.
They also advocate a better accountability system, more money to improve student performance and a shared partnership between the state and local school districts.
The education leaders have often disagreed on education ideas but drafted a framework of shared principles they believe can serve as a starting ground for continued debate.
The five are attorney David Thompson, a school finance expert; Sandy Kress, who helped President Bush develop No Child Left Behind; Don McAdams, president of the Center for Reform of School Systems and a former member of the Houston Independent School District board; Jim Windham, former chairman of the Texas Association of Business; and Moses, education commissioner under Gov. George W. Bush.
The Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have chronicled her battles with the Washington Teachers' Union. The PBS "NewsHour" and "60 Minutes" have trailed her up and down school corridors. She can be seen at A-list gatherings, from Herbert Allen's annual Sun Valley, Idaho, retreat for corporate moguls to education summits hosted by Bill Gates and the Aspen Institute.
Last week, on the cover of Time, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee cemented her status as the national standard-bearer of tough-minded, no-excuses urban school reform. She is photographed at the front of a classroom, stern-faced and clutching a broom, symbolizing her promise of sweeping change.
For journalists and pundits who follow education, Rhee's narrative has elements that are irresistible. A slight, young Korean American woman with no big-city school leadership experience is plucked from the nonprofit world by a reform-minded mayor in June 2007 to fire bad teachers, face down their union and take on hidebound bureaucrats, all in the name of turning around a system with a legacy of failure. The stories are not uniformly glowing, but they generally depict Rhee as a gutsy, gritty agent of change driven to turn around the District's schools.
"Michelle Rhee charged in as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools wielding BlackBerrys and data -- and a giant axe," said the Atlantic's November issue.
Closer to home, Rhee's media stardom has inspired a mix of praise, puzzlement and resentment. Boosters say her high profile can only help the District overhaul its schools. Others see her pursuing a national platform for a message that is hostile to older, experienced teachers and partial to younger instructors from nontraditional training programs such as Teach for America, where she started her career.
The High School Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University, 2004) found that 55% of the 80,000 students surveyed said they did fewer than three hours of homework each week, and most received As and Bs anyway.
I just received a paper by a HS student from Oregon, and her information sheet
included a listing of the hours per week she spends on activities:
Equestrian Team: 5 hours a week [52 weeks a year]
Theater/Drama: 15 hours a week [13 weeks a year]
Teach Africa: 3 hours a week [40 weeks a year]
Volunteering at the Hunt Club: 1 hour a week [50 weeks a year]
Volunteering for NARAL: 10 hours a week [1 week a year]
Scholars' Alliance: 3 hours a week [10 weeks a year]
Food Drive: 15 hours a week [2 weeks a year]
Total outside of homework and school: 52 hours a week for one or more weeks.
[To be fair, the "Scholars' Alliance" is a Saturday seminar taught by the superintendent
of the district on critical thinking skills, metacognition, the Art of War, the Tao, etc.]
Even so, it might be instructive to note this level of commitment (52 hours/week), in addition to any computer games, television, and instant messaging and other social activities during perhaps an average HS student week--the Kaiser Foundation has found that the average American teen spends nearly 45 hours a week on electronic entertainment media--and compare it with the Indiana University finding of half the HS students spending less than three hours a week on homework.
Could this have something to do with current levels of academic achievement? Is the question of the number of hours American HS students spend on non-academic activities during their waking periods each week worthy of a research study? I think so. If this has been done, please refer me to the study.
Superintendent Jerry D. Weast cited competing magazine rankings as evidence Maryland's largest system, with 139,000 students, now offers arguably the premier AP program in the nation.
Three county high schools appear on a list of the nation's top 100 from U.S. News & World Report, published online last week and based in part on AP and International Baccalaureate test performance. Weast said only the million-student New York system had more "gold medal" schools.
Six Montgomery schools rank among the top 100 on Newsweek magazine's 2008 Challenge Index, a measure of AP and IB test participation created by Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews. Weast said no other school system had as many schools at the top of that list.
Speaking at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Weast said the county's students "are doing things that are historic, are doing things that, no matter who's measuring them, are coming out at the top of the chart in the United States."
Montgomery students took 25,921 AP tests this year, representing a 53 percent increase over six years. Of those tests, 18,306 earned a score of 3 or higher on a 5-point scale, a threshold for college credit.
The Advanced Placement English class at Scarsdale High School used to race through four centuries of literature to prepare students for the A.P. exam in May. But in this year's class, renamed Advanced Topics, students spent a week studying Calder, Pissarro and Monet to digest the meaning of form and digressed to read essays by Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon -- items not covered by the exam.
A similarly slowed-down pace came at a cost for some students in one of Scarsdale's Advanced Topics classes in United States history; it was still in the 1950s at the time of the exam, whose main essay question was on the Vietnam War.
Sarah Benowich, a senior, said that the A.T. approach had improved her writing but that she would have liked more dates and facts worked in. Despite studying Advanced Placement exam review books on her own, she still felt "shaky on some of the more concrete details," she said.
A year after Scarsdale became the most prominent school district in the nation to phase out the College Board's Advanced Placement courses -- and make A.P. exams optional -- most students and teachers here praise the change for replacing mountains of memorization with more sophisticated and creative curriculums.
Practical advances in medicine ruled the day in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the nation's most coveted student science awards, whose winners were announced Monday morning at New York University.
While highly regarded, a Tamari lattice, a mathematical structure, and Bax and Bak, two proteins, lost out to a project by Wen Chyan, 17, a senior at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science in Denton, Tex. Mr. Wen won the top individual prize -- a $100,000 scholarship -- for research on fighting hospital-related infections with antimicrobial coatings for medical devices.
For genetics research that has the potential to identify new chemotherapeutic drugs and improve existing ones, Sajith M. Wickramasekara and Andrew Y. Guo, both 17 and seniors at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, N.C., took home $50,000 each -- the top team prize.
Trailing not far behind, four high school seniors in the New York region won a total of $100,000 in scholarships.
Extraordinary times command extraordinary measures and grant extraordinary opportunities. Our state's budget crisis calls already for kids and schools to sacrifice. It does not have to be. This is Olympia's chance to substantially improve our entrenched education system and save some money.
Here are three problems Olympia must tackle to make a real difference:
1. Washington taxpayers support 295 independent school districts. Each district is top-heavy with too many administrators: superintendents, assistant superintendents, executive directors, curriculum directors, special ed directors, human resources directors, finance directors, transportation directors, purchasing directors and other nonteaching executives.
2. The second problem is lack of stability. Administrators introduce too often "new" educational theories. With each new administrator come new ideas. What was the silver bullet in education one year ago is toxic with a new principal or new superintendent.
I experienced over a period of 12 years changes from a six periods day to a four periods "block system" (several years in the planning). After starting the block, my school planned for two years to establish five to six autonomous Small Schools, but only one was eventually organized. In the midst of those disruptive changes, Best Practices was contemplated but never enacted; special ed and ESL students were mainstreamed, and NovaNet, a computerized distant learning, was initiated with former Gov. Gary Locke present and praising our vision. Finally, all honors classes were abandoned and differentiated instruction was introduced.
Eventually, all these new methods were delegated to the trash heap of other failed educational experiments. By 2008, the school was where it had been in 1996, minus some very good teachers and more than a few dollars.
3. The third problem is the disconnect between endorsements and competency. A sociology major gets a social sciences endorsement from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and may teach history, or math, or Spanish. A PE teacher may instruct students in English literature or history. A German or English teacher may teach U.S. history.
The voucher funding flaw is a bigger problem than ever and is costing Milwaukee property taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
The voucher funding flaw effectively no longer exists, and the publicly funded program that allows children to go to private schools is saving Milwaukeeans property tax dollars.
Can both of those things be true?
Decide for yourself.
When Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and leaders of the Milwaukee Public Schools system look at the issue, one number jumps out: 14.6%. That's how much the property tax levy to pay for schools in the city is going up this year.
They associate a lot of that increase with the impact on local taxes of the school voucher program, which is allowing 20,000 low-income Milwaukee children to attend private schools this year.
The way vouchers are paid for now, through a combination of money from state government and Milwaukee property taxes, is a major reason why the property tax increase is so large, they say. If the formula were fair, in the eyes of Barrett and the MPS leaders, the school tax increase would be in the neighborhood of 4%, and maybe less. They say changing the voucher funding system is an urgent priority for the Legislature to tackle.
When leaders of School Choice Wisconsin, an influential group of supporters of the voucher program, look at the issue, a different number jumps out: $123. That's how much more is being spent in property taxes this year on each student in MPS than on each voucher student.
Bill Gates was all over DC yesterday, talking about charter schools at every stop. He told the President-elect that investing in charters is a great example of how to think long-term while trying to rescue the economy, and repeated that thought in chatting with Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Then he stopped by George Washington U to talk to an invited audience about poverty, recession, and education - and delivered some remarkably forceful endorsements of charter schools and the charter model itself. Full text of this important speech here.
Here's his central economic-strategy point. Note how he prioritizes charters:
"In a crisis, there is always a risk that you take your eyes off the future - and you sacrifice long-term investments for near-term gains...But I want us to have a bigger goal than getting the economy growing again. I want us to expand the number of people who are contributing to the economy and benefiting from it. The young woman who needs help paying for college, the young man whose charter school needs government support, the children whose parents need AIDS drugs, the poor family trying to farm in Ghana--if we don't make these people part of our investments, when the economy comes back, they won't be coming back with it."
A powerful new media example for education. This piece is well written, nicely illustrated and in the end, adds depth to our understanding of Congo's recent history. Links to sources and further information would be useful.
Math Task Force Feedback Sessions Slated for January
Last year the MMSD School Board appointed a committee to look at the math curriculum in the district. The task force recently presented their findings to the School Board. We accepted their report and referred it to the Superintendent for recommendations. The next step in the process is a community input session.
Sessions were originally scheduled for December 8 and 9. Those sessions have been postponed until January in order to better publicize the sessions and avoid conflicts with holiday-season events. The dates have not yet been selected, and I will post the dates, places, and times when they have been confirmed.
If you want to comment directly on the math curriculum/task force recommendations, you can send e-mail comments@madison.k12.wi.us or post here. I'll make sure the Superintendent receives your feedback.
Parker Goyer has certainly tasted her share of success even if she is just 23-years-old.
Following her graduation from Duke, Goyer received a fellowship from the Robertson Scholars Program, a merit scholarship program that seeks to encourage social entrepreneurship and to increase collaboration between Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Goyer was the only non-Robertson Scholar to be selected for the one year fellowship.
That same year, the 2007 graduate would go on to see her benchmark concept, the Coach for College Program, come to fruition. Securing nearly half-a-million dollars in funding, Goyer led a group of college student-athletes to Vietnam to deliver the first ever edition of the program to 200 middle school-aged children.
Yet, when it comes to recognition for a job well-done, the first-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently hit new heights even for her. On Saturday, November 22nd, the Coach for College founder learned she was one of 32 American students chosen to receive a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship.
St. Andrews has 1,230 Americans among its 7,200 students this year, compared with fewer than 200 a decade ago.
The large American enrollment is no accident. St. Andrews has 10 recruiters making the rounds of American high schools, visiting hundreds of private schools and a smattering of public ones.
With higher education fast becoming a global commodity, universities worldwide -- many of them in Canada and England -- are competing for the same pool of affluent, well-qualified students, and more American students are heading overseas not just for a semester abroad, but for their full degree program.
Ryan Ross of Annapolis, Md., applied only to St. Andrews; McGill University in Montreal; and Trinity College in Dublin. "I knew I wanted a different experience," said Mr. Ross, now a freshman studying international relations at St. Andrews.
The international flow has benefits, and tradeoffs, for both sides.
For American students, a university like St. Andrews offers international experience and prestige, at a cost well below the tuition at a top private university in the United States. But it provides a narrower, more specialized course of studies, less individual attention from professors -- and not much of an alumni network to smooth entry into the workplace when graduates return to the United States. For overseas universities, international students help diversify campuses in locations as remote as coastal Fife, home of St. Andrews.
The SEED School of Wisconsin said Tuesday that the Elizabeth A. Brinn Foundation is pledging $2 million towards SEED's campaign to bring a public, urban boarding school to the state.
The boarding school is being proposed by a local coalition of leaders, cooperating with The SEED Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that operates boarding schools in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Both schools are publicly funded and educate children who start, on average, with skills two to three years behind grade level. More than 98 percent of SEED school graduates have been accepted at a four-year college, according to The SEED Foundation.
"The children of Milwaukee and other challenged communities around the state will benefit from the Brinn Foundation's gracious gift," said Robert Sowinski, president of The SEED School of Wisconsin's board of directors.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
New York: Little, Brown, 2008, pp. 247-249
"Rice Paddies and Math Tests"
Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It's the TIMSS...and the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another's.
When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of questions, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.
Now, here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough to focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident. "It came out of the blue," he says. Boe hasn't even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it's just a bit too weird. Remember, he's not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He's saying that they are the same: if you compare the two rankings, they are identical.
Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe's point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. [Mainland China doesn't yet take part in the TIMSS study.] What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kind of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."
John Corcoran made a splash in the 1990s with his memoir, The Teacher Who Couldn't Read. A vivid account of his nearly five-decade struggle to conceal his illiteracy -- and of his first successful attempts to read, at age 48 -- the book thrust Corcoran into the national spotlight.
He appeared on 20/20, Oprah and Larry King Live, was profiled in Esquire and became the only "adult learner" to serve on the advisory board of the National Institute for Literacy.
Now 70 and president of a charitable foundation bearing his name, Corcoran has a new book, The Bridge to Literacy (Kaplan Publishing, $24.95), which lays out his vision for eliminating illiteracy in the USA.
Corcoran has dubbed the book a "call to action" for literacy efforts and says reading programs need "a bigger, broader and more universal vision." He says K-12 schools and universities must train principals and teachers -- especially new teachers -- in the most up-to-date, research-based reading instruction.
I SUPPOSE I could be described as financially literate. I have a doctorate in economics; my dissertation focused on financial decision-making. I write about economics and finance, and I've worked in the financial industry, designing investment strategies. But, when I look at the balance of my brokerage account (those low-fee global-equity index funds do not seem like such a good idea at the moment) or my credit card statement (peppered with frivolous impulse purchases), I question my financial savvy.
Nonetheless, I have volunteered to provide financial-literacy training to young mothers at a local homeless shelter. This is the first time I have volunteered since school, when my guidance counsellor forced me into it. She thought the experience would look good on my college applications.
I always justified not volunteering by figuring that my actual time was worth less to the charity than the monetary value of my time. But something about this project intrigued me. I thought I'd learn from the experience; it could make me a better economist. I even spent weeks fancying myself the next Suze Orman, empowering the financially downtrodden with my economic knowledge.
The average high school physics class in Virginia traverses 2,000 years of thinking, encompassing the Archimedes principle of buoyancy and Newton's laws of motion, and stopping abruptly at about the turn of the 20th century. Educators want the course to advance to today's string theorists and atom-smashing particle physicists.
But before they can modernize physics education, they need a breakthrough in a textbook system that often leaves courses in physics and other subjects decades behind the times.
Rather than waiting two years for the Virginia Board of Education to review its science standards, then another year for publishers to print new physics texts, the state secretaries of education and technology asked a dozen teachers to write their own chapters in biophysics, nanotechnology and other emerging fields and post them online.
By February, physics teachers from Vienna to Tappahanock should be able to rip, mash and burn new chapters in real-time physics, said Secretary of Technology Aneesh P. Chopra. The virtual pages, which cost the state and schools nothing except teacher time, will be an optional, free supplement to hardbound books.
Jesse wished he could run away, far away. Someplace where no one knew him. A place where everything wasn't his fault and nothing was beyond his reach... Jesse Hardaway is used to things being his fault. It's just him and his mom at home, and she's always yelling at him. School is like home, only about ten times worse! He's in fifth grade special education and has to battle ADHD and an anger/behavior disorder every day. If he isn't in trouble, he's getting into it. The only thing Jesse is sure of is that the world is against him, and he is ready to give up.
One good thing Jesse has in his life is his best friend Davess, who never stops trying to look out for him. At school, Mrs. Abogar and Ms. Dubose try to look out for him too, though Jesse doesn't know why and wishes they would stop.
Here it comes, Jesse thought, the thing that drives me nuts. That irritating thing that they are so known for. That thing that makes you wonder whether you should hug them or yell at them. The famous Punishment-with-a-Smile. I hate it... But very soon he is about to discover that these two women not only understand him, for some reason they actually care about him.
In a detailed look at nearly 30 years of research on how television, music, movies and other media affect the lives of children and adolescents, a new study released today found an array of negative health effects linked to greater use.
The report found strong connections between media exposure and problems of childhood obesity and tobacco use. Nearly as strong was the link to early sexual behavior.
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Yale University said they were surprised that so many studies pointed in the same direction. In all, 173 research efforts, going back to 1980, were analyzed, rated and brought together in what the researchers said was the first comprehensive view of the topic. About 80 percent of the studies showed a link between a negative health outcome and media hours or content.
"We need to factor that in as we consider our social policies and as parents think about how they raise their kids," said lead researcher Ezekiel J. Emanuel, director of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, which took on the project with the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media. "We tend not to think of this as a health issue, and it is a health issue."
The average modern child spends nearly 45 hours a week with television, movies, magazines, music, the Internet, cellphones and video games, the study reported. By comparison, children spend 17 hours a week with their parents on average and 30 hours a week in school, the study said.
"Our kids are sponges, and we really need to remember they learn from their environment," said coauthor Cary P. Gross, professor at Yale School of Medicine. He said researchers found it notable how much content mattered; it was not only the sheer number of hours of screen time. Children "pick up character traits and behaviors" from those they watch or hear, he said.
Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort--not on intelligence or ability--is key to success in school and in life.
A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability--along with confidence in that ability--is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a "growth mind-set," which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
MMSD Board of Education Progress Report - November, 2008
The major focus of our meetings in November was on aligning the work of the Board to the district's mission and research regarding effective school boards. The emerging literature regarding the role of school board governance in improving student achievement suggests that the manner in which the Board does its work can lead to positive student achievement results. Superintendent Nerad has provided us with great amount of research and experience to guide us in our discussions. An overview of some of our major changes is below. There are a lot of details behind each of the items listed below. If you have any questions, please let us know via email: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Arlene Silveira (516-8981)
Committees: We voted to replace the existing committees with the committees listed below in order to create a greater focus on student achievement and the need for improved student achievement and related development outcomes for the district. The committees are structured along key governing lines. Each committee is composed of the board as a whole with co-chairs.
Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring: Focuses on the district's mission and will consist of matters related to factors leading to the improvement of student learning. Governance function: district's mission - work and related accountability for student learning. Co-chairs: Johnny Winston Jr., Maya Cole
Planning and Development: Focuses on ensuring effective planning related to the district's strategic plan, demographic planning, facility planning and budget planning. Governance function: planning for improved results. Co-chairs: Ed Hughes, Marj Passman
Operational Support: Focuses on financial management, building maintenance and operations, land purchase and district administrative operations, retention and hiring of staff and staff equity issues. Governance function: internal functions and ensuring quality business, finance and human resource systems. Co-chairs: Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss
Engaging/Linking Stakeholders: We are expanding engagement practices with the goals of determining stakeholder perceptions about the district and educating members of the public to build public will and support.
6 Regular board meeting/year will be held in different schools. As part of the agenda, principals and staff will present learning data and their School Improvement Plan.
Each Board member will serve as a liaison to 7 schools to assist the Board in understanding the learning-related work in our schools.
The Board will schedule 4-6 meetings/year within the community to collect input from community stakeholders regarding "big" questions related to the district's strategic plan and/or educational programs/services.
Ensuring a Focus on Results and Accountability:
Data retreats: As part of the work of the Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring committee, 4 meetings/year will include a data presentation related to specific student achievement and student performance measures.
Program evaluation: As part of the Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring committee, a schedule of program evaluations will be identified and implemented.
Improvement benchmarks: When the district's strategic plan is completed. District level improvement benchmarks will be identified for each student based strategy within the plan.
Rupert Murdoch has used his fourth Boyer Lecture to slam Australian schooling. No punches pulled here. "Our public education systems are a disgrace" was almost his opening sentence. And the reason is clear : "despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less."
A residual affection for the land of his birth is probably the main driving force of his critique. His country is going down the gurgler. It is a realistic assessment of the situation we are in. India and China especially are poised to wipe us out. Finland irks. Singapore and Korea also graduate students who both know more and think better than Aussie grads. Intellectual sophistication in Australia is an increasingly rare and obviously endangered phenomenon. Football commands the Aussie imagination. Those who study think of learning as work, from which escape must be regularly programmed in order to maintain sanity.
Explanations for poor results abound. The teaching staffs of our schools manifest a huge compassion for instance, for the children who have a low SES (Socio-Economic Status) rating, and stress that these children don't/can't learn because they don't have space at home to do their homework. Murdoch is properly scathing about this and about all the other various excuses offered to explain why so many children are learning so little:"a whole industry of pedagogues (is) devoted to explaining why some schools and some students are failing. Some say classrooms are too large. Others complain that not enough public funding is devoted to this or that program. Still others will tell you that the students who come from certain backgrounds just can't learn."
While George Bush may be reasonably classified as a major disaster, someone seems to have provided him with a memorable, useful and highly pertinent assessment. (The US Dept of Ed has been a good deal more useful to humanity than its Dept Of Defence).His words were resonant. He said we should overthrow "the tyranny of low expectations".(I have written more extensively on this dereliction of professional duty in a paper that can be read at http://review100childrenturn10.blogspot.com)
Murdoch is of the same view, that all our students need us to have high expectations of them, and"the real answer is to start pursuing success".
While the economic news has most Americans in a state of near depression, hope abounds today that the country may use the current economic crisis as leverage to address some longstanding problems. Nowhere is that prospect for progress more worthy than the crisis in our public education system.
So, from someone who realized rather glumly last week that he has been working at school reform for 40 years, here is a prescription for leadership from the Obama administration.
We must start with the recognition that, despite decade after decade of reform efforts, our public K-12 schools have not improved. We can point to individual schools and some entire districts that have advanced, but the system as a whole is still failing. High school and college graduation rates, test scores, the number of graduates majoring in science and engineering all are flat or down over the past two decades. Disappointingly, the relative performance of our students has suffered compared to those of other nations. As a former CEO, I am worried about what this will mean for our future workforce.
It is most crucial for our political leaders to ask why we are at this point -- why after millions of pages, in thousands of reports, from hundreds of commissions and task forces, financed by billions of dollars, have we failed to achieve any significant progress?
Answering this question correctly is the key to finally remaking our public schools.
This is a complex problem, but countless experiments and analyses have clearly indicated we need to do four straightforward things to bring fundamental changes to K-12 education:
Set high academic standards for all of our kids, supported by a rigorous curriculum.
Greatly improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms, supported by substantially higher compensation for our best teachers.
Measure student and teacher performance on a systematic basis, supported by tests and assessments.
Increase "time on task" for all students; this means more time in school each day, and a longer school year.
Everything else either does not matter (e.g., smaller class sizes) or is supportive of these four steps (e.g., vastly improve schools of education).
In 2004, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, a San Francisco think tank, launched an effort to address "anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism" in American education, from K-12 to higher education. Its book, The UnCivil University, focused on the USA's colleges and universities.But the effort also gave rise to an extensive survey on the political, religious and social beliefs of university faculty -- some of whom admitted to holding strong prejudices against evangelical Christians.
The researchers say they found a politically active, vocal minority -- especially within Middle East studies departments -- that held strong anti-Israel positions. Many of the same professors holding what the researchers found were strong political biases are often tapped to review K-12 social studies, history and geography textbooks, which explain religious history, among other topics, to very young children, the institute says.
So authors Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra looked at 28 textbooks over nearly five years -- finding what they call "glaring distortions and inaccuracies," many centered on the books' treatment of Israel, Judaism and Christianity. Aside from their findings on how religions are treated, their new book, The Trouble With Textbooks (Lexington Books, $21.95), which appeared on shelves this fall, in part explores problems with the textbook approval process.
In the past year, 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are apathetic about ethical standards.
Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today's young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.
"The competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically," said Mel Riddle of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "They have opportunities their predecessors didn't have [to cheat]. The temptation is greater."
Michael Josephson, the institute's founder and president, said he was most dismayed by the findings about theft. The survey found that 35 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls -- 30 percent overall -- acknowledged stealing from a store within the past year. One-fifth said they stole something from a friend; 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative.
Physician & Author Gabor Mate, via a kind reader's email:
Among the major challenges we face, as a society, is the widespread lack of resilience of many young people. Resilience is the capacity to overcome adversity, to let go of what doesn't work, to adapt and to mature. Growing evidence of its absence among the young is as ominous for our future as the threat of climate change or financial crisis.
A disturbing measure is the increasing number of children diagnosed with mental-health conditions characterized by rigid and self-harming attitudes and behaviours, such as bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders and "conduct" disorders. Hundreds of thousands of American children under 12 are being prescribed heavy-duty antipsychotic medications to control behaviours deemed unacceptable and unmanageable.
Canadian statistics are less dire but typically follow that trend. University of British Columbia psychologists have warned that today's children between 6 and 12 "will be the first generation to have poorer health status as adults than their parents, if measures are not taken now to address their developmental needs." Their report was presented in Winnipeg at last week's National Dialogue on Resilience in Youth. The conference itself was a marker of the alarm among those concerned with the well-being of youth - educators, business people, people in government.
Beyond mental pathology, many young people exhibit difficulties adapting, as indicated by burgeoning drug use, aggression, bullying and violence. These tendencies all manifest alienation and frustration - that is, an inability to deal creatively and powerfully with life's inevitable setbacks. The less resilient we are, the more prone we become to addictions and aggressive behaviours, including self-harm. We also become more attached to objects. A young Ottawa man was recently killed when he refused to surrender his iPod to a knife-wielding assailant. "I'd rather be stabbed than give up my iPod," a 17-year-old woman told The Globe.
Interestingly, though Rhee is a Democrat, she almost voted for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"It was a very hard decision," Rhee says. "I'm somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education."
What does President-elect Obama think? Tough to say. He has supported merit pay for teachers, which teachers' unions oppose, and heralded Rhee. He has been a strong advocate of charter schools and in 2002 said he was "not closed minded" on the subject of vouchers, though since then he has come out against vouchers. Over the Summer, I asked him why.
"The problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom," he said. "We don't have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools. So what I've said is let's foster competition within the public school system. Let's make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let's make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.
"But what I don't want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools," Obama continued. "That's going to make things worse, and we're going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country."
In March, Josh Patashnik of The New Republic took a closer look at PEBO and education, writing that Obama "has long advocated a reformist agenda that looks favorably upon things like competition between schools, test-based accountability, and performance pay for teachers. But the Obama campaign has hesitated to trumpet its candidate's maverick credentials. As an increasingly influential chorus of donors and policy wonks pushes an agenda within the Democratic Party that frightens teachers' unions and their traditional liberal allies, Obama seems unsure how far he can go in reassuring the former group that he's one of them without alienating the latter. And this is a shame, because Obama may represent the best hope for real reform in decades."
A new UCLA study, part of the growing research into the effects of technology on the brain, shows that searching the Internet may keep older brains agile - it's like taking your brain for a walk.
It's too early to conclude that technology will help vanquish Alzheimer's disease, but "our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively," said psychiatrist Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center.
The new study, which will be published next month in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, comes at a time when medical experts are forecasting that Alzheimer's cases will quadruple by 2050. In response to such projections, "brain-gyms" and memory-building computer programs have proliferated.
The subjects in Small's nine-month study were 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 to 76, with similar education levels. They were assigned two tasks: to read book-like text on computer screens and to perform Internet searches.
The teacher's marker flies across the whiteboard, drawing characters most Americans see only on menus.
"Ma ma," "be be," "ge ge," the first-graders call out, often before teacher Hongmei Zhao has finished more than a few strokes with her pen.
"What's ge ge?" Zhao asks.
"Big brother," a girl answers.
While most elementary schools would consider themselves lucky to have any foreign language program, Meadowview Elementary School and this class of first-graders have scored what might be the ultimate coup: an elementary program in Mandarin.
For a half-hour every day, first- and second-graders at Meadowview receive instruction in China's official language from Zhao, a private school teacher from Beijing.
The rare opportunity comes with the help of the Chinese government. Zhao and Xiaoman Song, who is teaching Chinese language classes at Oak Creek East Middle School and Oak Creek High School this school year, were provided to the district through a guest teacher program sponsored by Hanban - also known as China's Office of Chinese Language Council International - and by the College Board.
I received a message from a young woman named Erika Owens recently that was so honest and so important to our national argument about teachers that I decided to coax responses from smart people on both sides of the issue. It is an uncomfortable topic, making it all the more important that we pick at it a bit.
Owens described her effort to join the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program, and her reaction to the prevailing view in that organization that good teachers should be able to raise the achievement of even the poorest kids. That is my belief, and the belief of the educators I most admire. But most Americans, including Owens, think people like me are wrongly discounting the effects of poverty and thus hurting, rather than helping, the national movement to raise the level of instruction in impoverished neighborhoods.
The issue can get very personal, which might explain why I rarely hear discussions of it. It is too easy to make one side think they are being called racists and the other side think they are being called bullies. So this time, it is a debate at a distance, nobody in the same room, just sending e-mails to a nosy columnist. Owens is up first, then several people who know schools well, then me.
Private schools across New York City say they are thriving this fall, with record numbers of applicants and no significant decline in donations. Yet almost daily, even brand-name schools are finding that they have to reassure jittery parents about shrinking endowments and dispel rumors that requests for financial aid are pouring in, and that economically squeezed families are pulling their children out and enrolling them in public schools.
Trinity's interim head of school, Suellyn P. Scull, issued a letter taking issue with recent news reports that 45 families had given notice that they were leaving. Trinity, among the most competitive schools in the city, received 698 applications for the 60 kindergarten spots in this year's class.
The school is not yet releasing admission numbers for next year's class, but Ms. Scull wrote, "This year's admissions season has been perhaps busier than usual, and to date we have had no reports of families planning to leave us."
But the shrinking economy is taking a toll on investment returns at Trinity, whose endowment has fallen to $40 million from $50 million in July, and at other private schools, affecting what they can spend on programs and activities. "There's no way of escaping it," said Lawrence Buttenwieser, a former trustee at Dalton. "If it happens at Harvard, it will happen to everybody."
In 11th grade, Allante Rhodes spent 50 minutes a day in a Microsoft Word class at Anacostia Senior High School in Washington. He was determined to go to college, and he figured that knowing Word was a prerequisite. But on a good day, only six of the school's 14 computers worked. He never knew which ones until he sat down and searched for a flicker of life on the screen. "It was like Russian roulette," says Rhodes, a tall young man with an older man's steady gaze. If he picked the wrong computer, the teacher would give him a handout. He would spend the rest of the period learning to use Microsoft Word with a pencil and paper.
One day last fall, tired of this absurdity, Rhodes e-mailed Michelle Rhee, the new, bold-talking chancellor running the District of Columbia Public Schools system. His teacher had given him the address, which was on the chancellor's home page. He was nervous when he hit SEND, but the words were reasonable. "Computers are slowly becoming something that we use every day," he wrote. "And learning how to use them is a major factor in our lives. So I'm just bringing this to your attention." He didn't expect to hear back. Rhee answered the same day. It was the beginning of an unusual relationship.
The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
"It was a very hard decision," Rhee said of her vote. "I'm somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education."
No word on whether the intermediary was Jason Kamras, a top Rhee aide who advised the Obama campaign on education issues.
Now that Obama has won office, Rhee has reasons for both hope and alarm.
Before clinching the nomination, Obama bucked the National Education Association to introduce a Senate bill that would reward teachers according to the sort of statistically-based rating system Rhee champions. In his book "The Audacity of Hope," Obama also stressed the need for linking increased teacher pay to greater accountability. And in his last debate with McCain, Obama even praised Rhee, describing her as "a wonderful new superintendent ... who's working very hard with the young mayor ... who initiated, actually supports, charters." (Rhee said she slept through that moment.)
n Washington, we have these arguments every time a rich Democrat sends his kids to private schools, which is very often. The real issue is why the public schools are unacceptable to pretty much anyone, liberal or conservative, who has other options.
Most Washington public schools are hellholes. So parents here -- including the first family -- find hypocrisy a small price to pay for fulfilling their parental obligations.
According to data compiled by the Washington Post in 2007, of the 100 largest school districts in the country, D.C. ranks third in spending for each student, around $13,000 a pupil, but last in spending on instruction. More than half of every dollar of education spending goes to the salaries of administrators. Test scores are abysmal; the campuses are often unsafe.
Michelle Rhee, D.C.'s new school chancellor, in 17 months has already made meaningful improvements. But that's grading on an enormous curve. The Post recently reported that on observing a bad teacher in a classroom, Rhee complained to the principal. "Would you put your grandchild in that class?" she asked. "If that's the standard," replied the principal, "we don't have any effective teachers in my school."
So if Obama and other politicians don't want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that's no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.
It was reported last week that the Obamas have chosen the elite, $30,000 per year Sidwell Friends School for their daughters. On blogs, there are the predictable arguments about whether President-elect Obama should have chosen a public school instead, with reasonable ripostes about the daughters' safety.
These arguments, overall, are mundane and avoid the point since the Obamas enjoy the same freedom of personal decision as everyone else in terms of choosing a school within the limits of their finances. Furthermore, no matter what school they attend, Malia and Sasha Obama have all of the advantages in the world. If they truly couldn't be expected to turn out as decent, 18-year-old products of the District of Columbia School system, then the whole enterprise of public schooling should conceivably be scrapped.
I taught students the same age as Malia and Sasha for a few years in urban Los Angeles. My school was 100% racial minority: 75% Hispanic, 25% African-American. While Sidwell's exhaustive website notes that the school's missions include "prizing diversity" and "environmental stewardship," our motto was simply, "Be respectful, responsible and safe." I made sure my students abided by that credo, and I've lived to write a book and numerous articles about those experiences.
Gwinnett County Public Schools is seeking freedom from the state to overhaul its methods for improving student performance.
The proposal, which includes flexible teacher pay, increasing class sizes and using aides as stand-ins for teachers, is being crafted by Gwinnett school administrators to give the state's largest school district the flexibility to opt out of restrictive state education mandates.
Some school officials view the mandates as hindering the system's ability to significantly raise standardized test scores.
School administrators have submitted a 104-page draft proposal to the state that details how the system could restructure and reassign teachers with the goal of closing the achievement gap between white, black and Hispanic students by 10 percent annually and improving participation in high-level academic courses.
"We are looking at a number of factors that may be outside the box of what the current rules in the state say," Gwinnett school board member Louise Radloff said. "The key is making sure students are more successful. Having flexibility would allow us to try some things differently."
Montgomery County's high school consortiums, set up partly as a tool for desegregation, have done little to reverse racial isolation or white flight, according to a new report from a government oversight group released this week.
But school system leaders say the programs have succeeded in giving students a measure of choice about their education and have allowed administrators to shift school populations without a painful exercise in redrawing school boundaries.
Eight of the county's 25 high schools belong to two consortiums, which allow students to choose from a menu of programs and schools, rather than settle for a neighborhood school or compete for a selective magnet program.
"They do provide a lot of choice, and we get a lot of positive feedback from parents that they like having those options," said Marty Creel, director of enriched and innovative programs for the school system.
But the consortium programs have not done much to erase socioeconomic inequities, according to the 64-page report, released Tuesday by the county's Office of Legislative Oversight. It finds that "neither consortium reversed minority isolation nor improved socio-economic integration." Poverty rates have continued to increase at schools in the programs, sometimes at a faster rate than in the county as a whole. The percen tage of white students has dwindled at all eight schools, as in the county generally.
WF: A group of professors, teachers, business people, lawyers and community people invited me to speak at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about the work of The Concord Review since 1987, and about the problems of college readiness and academic writing for high school students.
The Boston Public Schools just reported that 67% of the graduating class of 2000 who had gone on to higher education had failed to earn a certificate, an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree by 2008. Also, the Strong American Schools program just reported that more than a million of our high school graduates are in remedial education in college each year.
I recommend their report: Diploma to Nowhere, which came out last summer. While many foundations, such as Gates, and others, have focused on getting our students into college, too little attention has been paid to how few are ready for college work and how many drop out without any degree.
2) "We believe that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities." This is a quote from The Concord Review. Now, I am asking you to hypothesize here--why do you think high schools across America seem to be preoccupied with sports and not academics?
WF: In Madison I also had a chance to speak about the huge imbalance in our attention to scholars and athletes at the high school level. I had recently seen a nationally televised high school football game in which, at breaks in the action, an athlete would come to the sidelines, and announce, to the national audience, which college he had decided to "sign" with. This is a far cry from what happens for high school scholars. High school coaches get a lot of attention for their best athletes, but if the coach also happens to be a history teacher, he or she will hear nothing from a college in the way of interest in his or her most outstanding history student.
When Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a very tall high school senior at Power Memorial Academy in New York, he not only heard from the head coaches at 60 college basketball programs, he also got a personal letter from Jackie Robinson of baseball fame and from Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, urging him to go to UCLA, which he did. That same year, in the U.S., the top ten high school history students heard from no one, and it has been that way every year since.
The lobby of every public high school is full of trophies for sports, and there is usually nothing about academic achievement. For some odd reason, attention to exemplary work in academics is seen as elitist, while heaps of attention to athletic achievement is not seen in the same way. Strange...The Boston Globe has 150 pages on year on high school athletes and no pages on high school academic achievement. Do we somehow believe that our society needs good athletes far more than it needs good students, and that is why we are so reluctant to celebrate fine academic work?
3) Many years ago, Gavriel Solomon once wrote "Telelvision is easy and print is hard." Have we become a nation of watchers instead of writers?
WF: A student has to learn how to read, but not how to watch tv. Too many of our students have never read a nonfiction book in school, so when they get to college lots of them are in remedial reading courses, and as the Diploma to Nowhere report says: "While more students took remedial math, a student's need for remedial reading makes him or her much more likely to drop out. Some experts refer to college remedial reading as the kiss of death. One study found that of the students who took remedial reading, more than two thirds were in three or more other remedial courses and only 12 percent eventually earned a bachelor's degree. For the students in remedial reading, the issue is unfortunately simple--if you can't read well, you can't perform well in any other college classes. Without basic literacy, students are stuck without a collegiate future."
Playing video games, watching television, instant messaging, exchanging gossip and photos, and the like, all combine to make this generation of students less able to read and write and more likely to fail in higher education.
4) Your journal, The Concord Review is literally a beacon of writing and scholarship. Has it gotten the recognition you feel it deserves?
WF: High School artists, dancers, singers, and so on, are eligible for $4 million or more in complete college scholarships. Athletes get college scholarships. Exemplary history students at this level receive basically no attention and no money for their work in history. For most people, if student academic work can't be pasted on the refrigerator door, it has no value. There are exceptions, of course, in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Both the Intel Science Talent Search and the Siemens-Westinghouse Competition offer a $100,000 first prize for high school students. But for high school students whose achievements are in writing and scholarship there is no attention apart from The Concord Review, and there is almost no support for that.
The people at the Gates Foundation told me: "We are mostly interested in Math, Minorities and Science." Even after 21 years of The Concord Review people (with a few exceptions) don't believe that high school students can be scholars, or that they can write academic papers worth giving to their HS peers to read, as examples of good writing and for the history they contain.
5) Many years ago, there was a book entitled Dumbing Down Our Kids, by Charles J. Sykes. Has America begun to lower standards and focus less on academic excellence?
WF: Of course there has been a strong federal push, almost as strongly resisted, to promote accountability for some levels of student competence in math, reading, and writing, but the standards are very low, and for some people they are not low enough. The Massachusetts Teachers Association spent $600,000 on ads to defeat the MCAS, the state test given at the 10th grade level before awarding a high school diploma. And, as I said, of those who pass the MCAS and get their diploma, only about a third complete college at any level. Anti-intellectualism in American life has not gone away since Douglas Hofstadter's day, and it is especially strong in the schools, where many social studies teachers would rather get students out of the classroom protesting something, or they want to teach them only social justice issues, while they let military history, political history, economic history, and diplomatic history just slip through the cracks and disappear.
6) Will, over the past 20, 30, 40 years, more and more children with special needs and exceptionalities have been "mainstreamed" or "included" in regular education classrooms. Has this stretched teachers beyond what they are capable of doing?
WF: I understand there is no pressure to have poorly-coordinated gym students pushed onto school football, basketball, soccer and baseball/softball teams. The coaches would not allow it, saying that they could not prepare their best athletes for success in sports if they had to deal with all those klutzes during their practices. But teachers have been faced with an analogous situation for a long time. Disabled and disturbed students, who need and demand a lot of personal attention, just reduce the time and effort that teachers can devote to the other 28 students in their classes.
Of course, in the name of inclusion, this just degrades the quality of education for all the students in every classroom in which it occurs, just as it would destroy any sports team where that was the situation. This is just one more example of the ways in which we treat sports with more seriousness than we give to academics. And students get that message all the time. If the coach were forced to fail at his job, students might conclude that sports can't be that important, but when a teacher is prevented from doing good academic work, students can conclude that academics must not be that important. Is this the message we want to be sending?
7) Almost all teachers know about No Child Left Behind and Annual Yearly Progress. Have these things taken precedence over in-depth scholarly research and writing?
WF: Teaching to the test can be a real problem, whether it is helping students get ready for the Bar Exam or for No Child Left Behind tests. However, I have never understood why those who complain that they can't teach history, because the testing forces them to focus on reading, can't assign some history reading while they are at it. My understanding is that students who are provided with a demanding academic curriculum tend to do well on the state tests, whether they were ever "taught to the test" or not. For too many educators, in my view, complaining about the tests is just one more way to avoid the hard work of talking to students about the nonfiction books they have read, or about the serious research papers they have written.
School systems can't be forced into bankruptcy, as the Big Three automakers may be, but perhaps some should be. The Washington, DC public schools are considering asking for legislation that will allow them to declare a "state of emergency" which might let them give more attention to the academic work of students than they are now forced to give to the Teachers' Union.
8) How can people learn more about your journal, The Concord Review and how can teachers encourage their students to submit their exemplary work?
I am happy to report that our website (www.tcr.org) is about to pass 400,000 visitors. It has submission forms, sample essays, a topic list from the first 75 issues, and, at last, video clips of interviews with the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bill Fitzsimmons (Dean of Admissions at Harvard) and Sarah Valkenburgh, one of our Emerson Prize winners. I may also be contacted by students, teachers and others who are interested in academic writing at the high school level at: fitzhugh@tcr.org. We encourage students to submit their best history research papers on any historical topic, ancient or modern, domestic or foreign. While we publish only about seven percent of the ones we receive, we have published 835 papers by students from 44 states and 35 other countries since 1987.
The Concord Review remains the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and I have been happy to publish exemplary history papers by freshmen and sophomores as well as by juniors and seniors. Students and teachers will learn more from the website, and should feel free to send me an email at any time. I am always looking for the best papers I can find.
Published November 23, 2008
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Bill and Melinda Gates go back to school Their crusade to fix schools earned a "needs improvement," so they have a new plan. The most surprising beneficiaries? Community colleges.
ince 2000 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $2 billion in public education, plus another $2 billion in scholarships. Most of it went into efforts to improve high schools that serve poor and minority students - mainly breaking up big, urban high schools and creating smaller, friendlier, and in theory more scholastically sound academies. (All told, the Gates Foundation gave money to 2,602 schools in 40 school districts.) Overall, it hasn't worked. [Much more on Small Learning Communities]
"We had a high hope that just by changing the structure, we'd do something dramatic," Gates concedes. "But it's nowhere near enough."
The results were a disappointing setback. So Gates and his $35 billion foundation went back to school on the issue. They spent more than a year analyzing what went wrong (and in some cases what went right). They hired new leaders for their education effort, while Gates turned his attention to philanthropy full-time after stepping away from his operating role at Microsoft last summer.
In mid-November, when Gates and his wife, Melinda, were finally ready to unveil their fresh direction, they delivered the news at a private forum at the Sheraton Seattle for America's education elite, including New York City schools chief Joel Klein, his Washington, D.C., counterpart, Michelle Rhee, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and top advisors to President-elect Obama.
The upshot is that Education 2.0 is bolder and more aggressive in its goals, and it involves even more intensive investment - $3 billion over the next five years. This time the focus isn't on the structure of public high schools but on what's inside the classrooms: the quality of the teaching and the relevance of the curriculum. It steers smack into some of the biggest controversies in American education - tying teacher tenure and salaries to performance, and setting national standards for what is taught and tested.
And it looks beyond high school. "Our goal, with your help, is to double the number of low-income students who earn post-secondary degrees or credentials that let them earn a living wage," declared Melinda French Gates at the Seattle gathering.
Georgia teachers differ with the federal government as to how qualified they are, according to a national report released Tuesday.
While about 95 percent of Georgia's middle and high school teachers met the federal requirement of "highly qualified," only 65 percent of the teachers said in a survey that they had the appropriate certification, according to the study from the Education Trust, a child advocacy group.
The two percentages come from different reports completed during the 2003-04 school year, the last time the teacher survey was conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. The two reports also defined teacher quality differently.
The survey asked teachers to indicate whether they have full state certification in the subject they are assigned to teach.
The "highly qualified" label is mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act to ensure that all students have effective teachers. Congress passed the law in 2001 and allowed each state to develop its own definition of what constitutes a "highly qualified" teacher.
Georgia teachers are "highly qualified" if they have an academic degree in the subject matter they're teaching; or if their college course work is equivalent to a major in that area; or if they pass a state content test in the subject.
Many seniors in the Class of '09 -- that's more than 3.3 million students -- are now applying to college. For many, it's a time fraught with paperwork, essays, interviews and road trips. And after all that work, it comes down to a letter or an email: In or out?
Admissions are expected to be as competitive as ever, and many schools say even the economic downturn has not slowed the onslaught of early applications. At Cornell University, early applications are up 9% from what they were this time last year; at Amherst College, they are up 5%; and at Barnard College, the rise is 8%. The acceptance odds are still long; many highly selective schools accept fewer than 20% of applicants.
Counselors, admissions staff and parents can all provide useful advice for getting in, but some of the best tips can come from the most recent veterans of the application frenzy: college freshmen. We've asked a range of students to share what they've learned.
Dare to Dream
Matthew Crowley was set on going to Stanford University last fall, but all the signs told him he wouldn't make the cut. He plugged his grades and test scores into a computer program that tracked college-acceptance statistics and came out on the low end of a graph for Stanford. Guidance counselors at Kent Denver, a private school he attended in Englewood, Colo., did not include Stanford on a list of suggested colleges. And he says a college adviser his family hired for $2,800 told him not to bother applying.
It's over. My long-running battle with you and the numbers you seek to define me by is finished. As my final act of surrender, I seek to prove, once and for all, that your tests say nothing about me or any creative student who submits to them.
First of all, to assuage my terrible relationship with math, every day for one month last year I went to my math teacher at six o'clock in the morning to mend it. I go to one of the top and most intense magnet schools in Los Angeles, take challenging classes, and am in the top 10% of my class. I read because I love to read, not because I'm forced to. I respect my teachers and I am absolutely addicted to learning. I am in multiple clubs and hold several leadership positions. I voluntarily wake up early and stay out late on Saturdays to protest for equal rights. I do community service around my city and around the world. I'm highly curious about everything. I play three instruments and write my own music. I have amazing friends from multitudes of cultural backgrounds and I am simply and enthusiastically passionate about living -- qualities that don't amount to a College Board number.
High school trains us to find our own voices, to figure out in our own innovative ways how to make a difference. Colleges advertise themselves as wanting to accept individuals willing to challenge themselves and be involved in their communities. How, then, does it make sense to judge us each by the same exact test?
Math can be hard enough, but imagine the difficulty when a teacher is just one chapter ahead of the students. It happens, and it happens more often to poor and minority students. Those children are about twice as likely to have math teachers who don't know their subject, according to a report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group.
Studies show the connection between teachers' knowledge and student achievement is particularly strong in math.
"Individual teachers matter a tremendous amount in how much students learn," said Ross Wiener, who oversees policy issues at the organization.
The report looked at teachers with neither an academic major nor certification in the subjects they teach.
Among the findings, which were based on Education Department data:
_In high-poverty schools, two in five math classes have teachers without a college major or certification in math.
_In schools with a greater share of African-American and Latino children, nearly one in three math classes is taught by such a teacher.
Math is important because it is considered a "gateway" course, one that leads to greater success in college and the workplace. Kids who finish Algebra II in high school are more likely to get bachelor's degrees. And people with bachelor's degrees earn substantially more than those with high school diplomas.
For a few hours every other afternoon, Latin and Greek roots rain on Phil Rosenthal's etymology class at Park View High School in Sterling. Etymology -- the study of the origin and evolution of words -- might be considered the domain of tweedy types who reek of pipe smoke. But Rosenthal tries to give his 20-some students a sense of the stories and shades behind the words they use every day.
"Kids see a word that to them is foreign, and they run away from it," Rosenthal says. He started the class with a group of other Loudoun County teachers in 1990, and it remains one of the few of its kind in the country.
Today's topic is one that impacts gifted kids in schools on a regular basis. In the past, gifted children were often placed into special gifted classes or special, accelerated learning groups. The thinking went that gifted children learned at a faster pace than other kids, and if you could group gifted children together it was easier for those students and their teachers to move at a faster pace through a class' subject matter.
However, the practice of grouping students by ability has become a controversial topic in many schools. As a result, during the last few years we have seen the dismantling of special gifted classes. We've seen teachers move away from the use of ability groups in their classrooms.
How are gifted students affected by this change and does it make sense to move away from ability grouping?
Three weeks after its launch, the program at La Follette is operating smoothly, according to officials and students at the school.
Joe Gothard, who is in his second year as La Follette principal, said he sought to bring the tutoring program to the school to involve the community in raising achievement levels.
"We're not going to settle for our students of color to be unsuccessful," Gothard said.
Over the past several years, the school's African American students have been less likely than their peers to complete algebra by 10th grade, although in some years the rate still exceeds the overall average for African American students in the Madison School District.
Gothard is troubled by the patterns on another measure of student achievement, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, which show that the proportion of 10th graders demonstrating math proficiency ranks lower at La Follette than at any other major high school in Dane County. Just 53 percent of La Follette students received ratings of proficient or advanced on the test, compared to 65 percent in the district and 69 percent in the state.
"Initially there's that burning in your stomach," Gothard said, describing his reaction to such data, which was followed by a vow: "We are not going to accept going anywhere but up."
Kindergartners would be expected to be able to count to 100, not just to 30. Perimeter and area would be introduced and explored in third grade, instead of in second grade.
Those are among many proposed revisions to Virginia's math standards that are part of a national movement to strengthen and streamline math education to prepare all students to learn algebra and higher concepts.
The standards prescribe in detail concepts students are expected to learn in each grade, and the state verifies whether those expectations are met each year through the Standards of Learning tests. Now the standards are being revised for the second time since their introduction in 1995.
In June, AP teachers and college faculty members from around the world gather in the United States for the annual AP Reading. There they evaluate and score the free-response sections of the AP Exams. AP Exam Readers are led by a Chief Reader, a college professor who has the responsibility of ensuring that students receive grades that accurately reflect college-level achievement. Readers describe the experience as an intensive collegial exchange, in which they can receive professional support and training. More than 10,000 teachers and college faculty participated in the 2008 Reading. Secondary school Readers can receive certificates rewarding professional development hours and Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for their participation in the AP Reading. In addition, Readers are provided an honorarium of $1,555 and their travel expenses, lodging, and meals are reimbursed.
Readers are particularly needed for the following AP courses:
Chinese Language and Culture
Japanese Language and Culture
World History
She starts off with a poem titled "Round Like Bubbles": "Round like a big fat green birthday balloon kissing the sky," Gayle Danley begins, then turns her backside to the audience of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at Deerfield Run Elementary School in Laurel and adds, "Why can't I have a round one like J. Lo?"
The 275 students giggle nervously, immediately certain that this rather loud 43-year-old woman, a nationally renowned slam poet in jeans and a green maternity blouse, isn't going to be teaching them any kind of poetry they've ever heard before. This stuff doesn't rhyme. And, what? Did she just mention Jennifer Lopez in a poem?
"How come I don't look like J. Lo?" the poet nearly shouts, plaintively stressing the word "I," with a Southern accent, as the children titter. "You ever look in the mirror and go, 'How come I don't have hair that sings down my spine? How come?' " A few lines later, she switches gears: "I don't need to be Halle Berry, I don't need to be Alicia Keys, I don't need to be bald-headed Britney" -- they really crack up at that one -- "I have it going on, because I have you."
Can Barack Obama bring change to American education? The answer is: Yes he can. The question, however, is whether he actually will. Our president-elect has the potential to be an extraordinary leader, and that's why I've supported him since the beginning of his campaign. But on public education, he and the Democrats are faced with a dilemma that has boxed in the party for decades.
Democrats are fervent supporters of public education, and the party genuinely wants to help disadvantaged kids stuck in bad schools. But it resists bold action. It is immobilized. Impotent. The explanation lies in its longstanding alliance with the teachers' unions -- which, with more than three million members, tons of money and legions of activists, are among the most powerful groups in American politics. The Democrats benefit enormously from all this firepower, and they know what they need to do to keep it. They need to stay inside the box.
And they have done just that. Democrats favor educational "change" -- as long as it doesn't affect anyone's job, reallocate resources, or otherwise threaten the occupational interests of the adults running the system. Most changes of real consequence are therefore off the table. The party specializes instead in proposals that involve spending more money and hiring more teachers -- such as reductions in class size, across-the-board raises and huge new programs like universal preschool. These efforts probably have some benefits for kids. But they come at an exorbitant price, both in dollars and opportunities foregone, and purposely ignore the fundamentals that need to be addressed.
What should the Democrats be doing? Above all, they should be guided by a single overarching principle: Do what is best for children. As for specifics, here are a few that deserve priority.
The leaders supported the efforts of APEC Education Ministers to strengthen education systems in the region including ongoing support to the APEC Education Network.
They welcomed the research-based steps taken by APEC in the areas of mathematics and sciences, language learning, career and technical education, information and communication technologies and systemic reform.
They pledged to facilitate international exchanges, working towards reciprocal exchanges of talented students, graduates and researchers.
America's nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation's teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores--things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. "Let's be honest," darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University's Teachers College last February. "What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?" It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation's teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)--self-actualization, following one's joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity--but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one's own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to "professionalize" teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats' pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in "Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education" that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson's course doesn't give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn't either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by "building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing." On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they're doing." I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
"Developing the subtext" turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and--most admirably--quickly checking the students' weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light "texts," both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; "What excites me about teaching?" "What concerns me about teaching?" and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: "What was it like to do this writing?"
This last question triggers a quickening volley of self-reflexive turns. After the students read aloud their predictable reflections on teaching, Professor Nelson asks: "What are you hearing?" A young man states the obvious: "Everyone seems to be reflecting on what their anxieties are." This is too straightforward an answer. Professor Nelson translates into ed-speak: "So writing gave you permission to think on paper about what's there." Ed-speak dresses up the most mundane processes in dramatic terminology--one doesn't just write, one is "given permission to think on paper"; one doesn't converse, one "negotiates meaning." Then, like a champion tennis player finishing off a set, Nelson reaches for the ultimate level of self-reflexivity and drives it home: "What was it like to listen to each other's responses?"
The self-reflection isn't over yet, however. The class next moves into small groups--along with in-class writing, the most pervasive gimmick in progressive classrooms today--to discuss a set of student-teaching guidelines. After ten minutes, Nelson interrupts the by-now lively and largely off-topic conversations, and asks: "Let's talk about how you felt in these small groups." The students are picking up ed-speak. "It shifted the comfort zone," reveals one. "It was just acceptance; I felt the vibe going through the group." Another adds: "I felt really comfortable; I had trust there." Nelson senses a "teachable moment." "Let's talk about that," she interjects. "We are building trust in this class; we are learning how to work with each other."
Now, let us note what this class was not: it was not about how to keep the attention of eight-year-olds or plan a lesson or make the Pilgrims real to first-graders. It did not, in other words, contain any material (with the exception of the student-teacher guidelines) from the outside world. Instead, it continuously spun its own subject matter out of itself. Like a relationship that consists of obsessively analyzing the relationship, the only content of the course was the course itself.
How did such navel-gazing come to be central to teacher education? It is the almost inevitable consequence of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine, born in a burst of quintessentially American anti-intellectual fervor in the wake of World War I. Educators within the federal government and at Columbia's Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students then flooding the schools take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. "Life adjustment," not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education.
The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about. Knowledge is changing too fast to be transmitted usefully to students, argued William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, the most influential American educator of the century; instead of teaching children dead facts and figures, schools should teach them "critical thinking," he wrote in 1925. What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a "lifelong learner."
Two final doctrines rounded out the indelible legacy of progressivism. First, Harold Rugg's The Child-Centered School (1928) shifted the locus of power in the classroom from the teacher to the student. In a child-centered class, the child determines what he wants to learn. Forcing children into an existing curriculum inhibits their self-actualization, Rugg argued, just as forcing them into neat rows of chairs and desks inhibits their creativity. The teacher becomes an enabler, an advisor; not, heaven forbid, the transmitter of a pre-existing body of ideas, texts, or worst of all, facts. In today's jargon, the child should "construct" his own knowledge rather than passively receive it. Bu the late 1920s, students were moving their chairs around to form groups of "active learners" pursuing their own individual interests, and, instead of a curriculum, the student-centered classroom followed just one principle: "activity leading to further activity without badness," in Kilpatrick's words. Today's educators still present these seven-decades-old practices as cutting-edge.
As E.D. Hirsch observes, the child-centered doctrines grew out of the romantic idealization of children. If the child was, in Wordsworth's words, a "Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!" then who needs teachers? But the Mighty Prophet emerged from student-centered schools ever more ignorant and incurious as the schools became more vacuous. By the 1940s and 1950s, schools were offering classes in how to put on nail polish and how to act on a date. The notion that learning should push students out of their narrow world had been lost.
The final cornerstone of progressive theory was the disdain for report cards and objective tests of knowledge. These inhibit authentic learning, Kilpatrick argued; and he carried the day, to the eternal joy of students everywhere.
The foregoing doctrines are complete bunk, but bunk that has survived virtually unchanged to the present. The notion that one can teach "metacognitive" thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge. Moreover, if you don't know in what century the atomic bomb was dropped without rushing to an encyclopedia, you cannot fully participate in society. Lastly, Kilpatrick's influential assertion that knowledge was changing too fast to be taught presupposes a blinkered definition of knowledge that excludes the great works and enterprises of the past.
The rejection of testing rests on premises as flawed as the push for "critical thinking skills." Progressives argue that if tests exist, then teachers will "teach to the test"--a bad thing, in their view. But why would "teaching to a test" that asked for, say, the causes of the [U.S.] Civil War be bad for students? Additionally, progressives complain that testing provokes rote memorization--again, a bad thing. One of the most tragically influential education professors today, Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, an advocacy group for increased teacher "professionalization," gives a telling example of what she considers a criminally bad test in her hackneyed 1997 brief for progressive education, The Right to Learn. She points disdainfully to the following question from the 1995 New York State Regents Exam in biology (required for high school graduation) as "a rote recall of isolated facts and vocabulary terms": "The tissue which conducts organic food through a vascular plant is composed of: (1) Cambium cells; (2) Xylem cells; (3) Phloem cells; (4) Epidermal cells."
Only a know-nothing could be offended by so innocent a question. It never occurs to Darling-Hammond that there may be a joy in mastering the parts of a plant or the organelles of a cell, and that such memorization constitutes learning. Moreover, when, in the progressives' view, will a student ever be held accountable for such knowledge? Does Darling-Hammond believe that a student can pursue a career in, say, molecular biology or in medicine without it? And how else will that learning be demonstrated, if not in a test? But of course such testing will produce unequal results, and that is the real target of Darling-Hammond's animus.
Once you dismiss real knowledge as the goal of education, you have to find something else to do. That's why the Anything But Knowledge doctrine leads directly to Professor Nelson's odd course. In thousands of education schools across the country, teachers are generating little moments of meaning, which they then subject to instant replay. Educators call this "constructing knowledge," a fatuous label for something that is neither construction nor knowledge but mere game-playing. Teacher educators, though, posses a primitive relationship to words. They believe that if they just label something "critical thinking" or "community-building," these activities will magically occur...
The Anything But Knowledge credo leaves education professors and their acolytes free to concentrate on more pressing matters than how to teach the facts of history or the rules of sentence construction. "Community-building" is one of their most urgent concerns. Teacher educators conceive of their classes as sites of profound political engagement, out of which the new egalitarian order will emerge. A case in point is Columbia's required class, "Teaching English in Diverse Social and Cultural Contexts," taught by Professor Barbara Tenney (a pseudonym). "I want to work at a very conscious level with you to build community in this class," Tenney tells her attentive students on the first day of the semester this spring. "You can do it consciously, and you ought to do it in your own classes." Community-building starts by making nameplates for our desks. Then we all find a partner to interview about each other's "identity." Over the course of the semester, each student will conduct two more "identity" interviews with different partners. After the interview, the inevitable self-reflexive moment arrives, when Tenney asks: "How did it work?" This is a sign that we are on our way to "constructing knowledge."...
All this artificial "community-building," however gratifying to the professors, has nothing to do with learning. Learning is ultimately a solitary activity: we have only one brain, and at some point we must exercise it in private. One could learn an immense amount about Schubert's lieder or calculus without ever knowing the name of one's seatmate. Such a view is heresy to the education establishment, determined, as Rita Kramer has noted, to eradicate any opportunity for individual accomplishment, with its sinister risk of superior achievement. For the educrats, the group is the irreducible unit of learning. Fueling this principle is the gap in achievement between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and other minorities on the other. Unwilling to adopt the discipline and teaching practices that would help reduce the gap, the education establishment tries to conceal it under group projects....
The consequences of the Anything But Knowledge credo for intellectual standards have been dire. Education professors are remarkably casual when it comes to determining whether their students actually know anything, rarely asking them, for example, what can you tell us about the American Revolution? The ed schools incorrectly presume that students have learned everything they need to know in their other or previous college courses, and that the teacher certification exam will screen out people who didn't.
Even if college education were reliably rigorous and comprehensive, education majors aren't the students most likely to profit from it. Nationally, undergraduate education majors have lower SAT and ACT scores than students in any other program of study. Only 16 percent of education majors scored in the top quartile of 1992-1993 graduates, compared with 33 percent of humanities majors. Education majors were overrepresented in the bottom quartile, at 30 percent. In New York City, many education majors have an uncertain command of English--I saw one education student at City College repeatedly write "choce" for "choice"-- and appear altogether ill at ease in a classroom. To presume anything about this population without a rigorous content exit exam is unwarranted.
The laissez-faire attitude toward student knowledge rests on "principled" grounds, as well as on see-no-evil inertia. Many education professors embrace the facile post-structuralist view that knowledge is always political. "An education program can't have content [knowledge] specifics," explains Migdalia Romero, chair of Hunter College's Department of Curriculum and Teaching, "because then you have a point of view. Once you define exactly what finite knowledge is, it becomes a perspective." The notion that culture could possess a pre-political common store of texts and idea is anathema to the modern academic.
The most powerful dodge regurgitates William Heard Kilpatrick's classic "critical thinking" scam. Asked whether a future teacher should know the date of the 1812 war, Professor Romero replied: "Teaching and learning is not about dates, facts, and figures, but about developing critical thinking." When pressed if there were not some core facts that a teacher or student should know, she valiantly held her ground. "There are two ways of looking at teaching and learning," she replied. "Either you are imparting knowledge, giving an absolute knowledge base, or teaching and learning is about dialogue, a dialogue that helps to internalize and to raise questions." Though she offered the disclaimer "of course you need both," Romero added that teachers don't have to know everything, because they can always look things up....
Disregard for language runs deep in the teacher education profession, so much so that ed school professors tolerate glaring language deficiencies in schoolchildren. Last January, Manhattan's Park West High School shut down for a day, so that its faculty could bone up on progressive pedagogy. One of the more popular staff development seminars ws "Using Journals and Learning Logs." The presenters--two Park West teachers and a representative from the New York City Writing Project, an anti-grammar initiative run by the Lehman College's Education School--proudly passed around their students' journal writing, including the following representative entry on "Matriarchys v. pratiarchys [sic]": "The different between Matriarchys and patriarchys is that when the mother is in charge of the house. sometime the children do whatever they want. But sometimes the mother can do both roll as mother and as a father too and they can do it very good." A more personal entry described how the author met her boyfriend: "He said you are so kind I said you noticed and then he hit me on my head. I made-believe I was crying and when he came naire me I slaped him right in his head and than I ran...to my grandparients home and he was right behind me. Thats when he asked did I have a boyfriend."
The ubiquitous journal-writing cult holds that such writing should go uncorrected. Fortunately, some Park West teachers bridled at the notion. "At some point, the students go into the job market, and they're not being judged 'holistically,'" protested a black teacher, responding to the invocation of the state's "holistic" model for grading writing. Another teacher bemoaned the Board of Ed's failure to provide guidance on teaching grammar. "My kids are graduating without skills," he lamented.
Such views, however, were decidedly in the minority. "Grammar is related to purpose," soothed the Lehman College representative, educrat code for the proposition that asking students to write grammatically on topics they are not personally "invested in" is unrealistic. A Park West presenter burst out with a more direct explanation for his chilling indifference to student incompetence. "I'm not going to spend my life doing error diagnosis! I'm not going to spend my weekend on that!" Correcting papers used to be part of the necessary drudgery of a teacher's job. No more, with the advent of enlightened views about "self-expression" and "writing with intentionality."
However easygoing the educational establishment is regarding future teachers' knowledge of history, literature, and science, there is one topic that it assiduously monitors: their awareness of racism. To many teacher educators, such an awareness is the most important tool a young teacher can bring to the classroom. It cannot be developed too early. Rosa, a bouncy and enthusiastic junior at Hunter College, has completed only her first semester of education courses, but already she has mastered the most important lesson: American is a racist, imperialist country, most like, say, Nazi Germany. "We are lied to by the very institutions we have come to trust," she recalls from her first-semester reading. "It's all government that's inventing these lies, such as Western heritage."
The source of Rosa's newfound wisdom, Donald Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know, is an execrable book by any measure. But given its target audience--impressionable education students--it comes close to being a crime. Widely assigned at Hunter, and in use in approximately 150 education schools nationally, it is an illiterate, barbarically ignorant Marxist-inspired screed against America. Macedo opens his first chapter, "Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies," with a quote from Hitler and quickly segues to Ronald Reagan: "While busily calling out slogans from their patriotic vocabulary memory warehouse, these same Americans dutifully vote...for Ronald Reagan...giving him a landslide victory...These same voters ascended [sic] to Bush's morally high-minded call to apply international laws against Saddam Hussein's tyranny and his invasion of Kuwait." Standing against this wave of ignorance and imperialism is a lone 12-year-old from Boston, whom Macedo celebrates for his courageous refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
What does any of this have to do with teaching? Everything, it turns out. In the 1960s, educational progressivism took on an explicitly political cast: schools were to fight institutional racism and redistribute power. Today, Columbia's Teachers College holds workshops on cultural and political "oppression," in which students role-play ways to "usurp the existing power structure," and the New York State Regents happily call teachers "the ultimate change agents." To be a change agent, one must first learn to "critique" the existing social structure. Hence, the assignment of such propaganda as Macedo's book.
But Macedo is just one of the political tracts that Hunter force-fed the innocent Rosa in her first semester. She also learned about the evils of traditional children's stories from the education radical Herbert Kohl. In Should We Burn Babar? Kohl weighs the case for and against the dearly beloved children's classic, Babar the Elephant, noting in passing that it prevented him from "questioning the patriarchy earlier." He decides--but let Rosa expound the meaning of Kohl's book: "[Babar]'s like a children's book, right? [But] there's an underlying meaning about colonialism, about like colonialism, and is it OK, it's really like it's OK, but it's like really offensive to the people." Better burn Babar now!...
Though the current diversity battle cry is "All students can learn," the educationists continually lower expectations of what they should learn. No longer are students expected to learn all their multiplication tables in the third grade, as has been traditional. But while American educators come up with various theories about fixed cognitive phases to explain why our children should go slow, other nationalities trounce us. Sometimes, we're trounced in our own backyards, causing cognitive dissonance in local teachers.
A young student at Teachers College named Susan describes incredulously a Korean-run preschool in Queens. To her horror, the school, the Holy Mountain School, violates every progressive tenet: rather than being "student-centered" and allowing each child to do whatever he chooses, the school imposes a curriculum on the children, based on the alphabet. "Each week, the children get a different letter," Susan recalls grimly. Such an approach violates "whole language" doctrine, which holds that students can't "grasp the [alphabetic] symbols without the whole word or the meaning or any context in their lives." In Susan's words, Holy Mountain's further infractions include teaching its wildly international students only in English and failing to provide an "anti-bias multicultural curriculum." The result? By the end of preschool the children learn English and are writing words. Here is the true belief in the ability of all children to learn, for it is backed up by action....
Given progressive education's dismal record, all New Yorkers should tremble at what the Regents have in store for the state. The state's teacher education establishment, led by Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, has persuaded the Regents to make its monopoly on teacher credentialing total. Starting in 2003, according to the Regents plan steaming inexorably toward adoption, all teacher candidates must pass through an education school to be admitted to a classroom. We know, alas, what will happen to them there.
This power grab will be a disaster for children. By making ed school inescapable, the Regents will drive away every last educated adult who may not be willing to sit still for its foolishness but who could bring to the classroom unusual knowledge or experience. The nation's elite private schools are full of such people, and parents eagerly proffer tens of thousands of dollars to give their children the benefit of such skill and wisdom.
Amazingly, even the Regents, among the nation's most addled education bodies, sporadically acknowledge what works in the classroom. A Task Force on Teaching paper cites some of the factors that allow other countries to wallop us routinely in international tests: a high amount of lesson content (in other words, teacher-centered, not student-centered, learning), individual tracking of students, and a coherent curriculum. The state should cling steadfastly to its momentary insight, at odds with its usual policies, and discard its foolish plan to enshrine Anything But Knowledge as its sole education dogma. Instead of permanently establishing the teacher education status quo, it should search tirelessly for alternatives and for potential teachers with a firm grasp of subject matter and basic skills. Otherwise ed school claptrap will continue to stunt the intellectual growth of the Empire State's children.
[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal]
Neither man set out to be an educational leader. One did research and taught electrical engineering. The other coached high school football.
Circumstances, opportunities, new interests and inspiration led both from their roots in Evansville, Ind., and Charleston, Ark., to two of the most visible education posts in Madison -- chancellor of the state's flagship university and superintendent of the state's second- largest public school district.
As leaders, neither shied away from controversy. And, as they stepped down from those posts in mid-2008, accolades far outnumbered criticisms.
Now, John Wiley and Art Rainwater -- the former UW-Madison chancellor and Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent, respectively -- are sharing their experience and knowledge with current and future leaders through the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA).
"One of our strengths has been our close ties to the fields of practice," says Paul Bredeson, professor and chair of ELPA. The department has a long history of working with professional associations, school districts and leaders, and in bringing seasoned leaders to campus to teach and help shape research.
"People like Art and John help us think about what we're working on," Bredeson adds.
"After 43 years of experience, I think I can provide a practitioner's view of leadership in K-12 education," says Rainwater. "I've been in a position to implement and lead school change. I want to return some of that knowledge."
"I've got a pretty good overview of administrative positions in the academic setting," says Wiley, whose résumé includes department chair, associate dean, dean, provost and chancellor.
From engineering to education
Years after administrative roles at UW-Madison pulled him away from teaching and research, Wiley wryly says that the College of Engineering doesn't want him back, but the School of Education has been willing to take him.
The emeritus chancellor's campus commitments also include serving as interim director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and in appointments at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE).
ELPA has tapped Wiley in the past to lecture on issues in higher education. Whenever he speaks, he invites questions, which run the gamut, but frequently include ones about the relationship with the legislature and finance.
"People are curious how a person ends up a chancellor or provost," he says. "Bad luck," he jokes. He then explains, "It's incremental... and at some point, irreversible."
He describes his own rise through the administrative ranks as a reluctant one. Like many faculty members, he took his turn serving as department chair and associate dean, both part-time commitments that allowed him to continue his teaching and research.
Nominated by a colleague as a candidate for dean of the Graduate School, Wiley used the opportunity to air his criticisms of the Graduate School. He had hoped to be passed over for the full-time post, but then-Chancellor Donna Shalala insisted that Wiley take it.
It introduced Wiley to the scope of activities across campus. He says he would have been perfectly content to remain in this position and rise no further.
But David Ward, who stepped up from provost to chancellor when Shalala left, had a tough time finding someone to succeed him in the university's second-highest post. He convinced Wiley to serve as interim provost, and then later dropped the "interim" part.
By the time Ward retired, Wiley had recognized that his transition from engineering professor to campus administrator had become irreversible, and that factored into his decision to seek the chancellor's job.
Interest in learning blossoms
Initially, all Rainwater wanted to do was coach football. Teaching in the classroom was something he had to do to coach. But over time, working in schools in Arkansas, Texas and Alabama, his interests evolved.
"The more I was involved with kids as a coach, the more conscious I became about what was going on in the classroom," he says. "We're learning more and more every day about how children learn. The classroom grew more important."
He credits a professor in Texas for inspiring him toward instructional leadership and a Catholic high school principal in Dallas for recognizing his potential.
"Brother Adrian saw in me an administrator," he says. "He gave me opportunities to explore what I knew about learning."
His career path led to Kansas City, Missouri, where he designed and led one of the district's first magnet public high schools. He rose to the district's second-highest position, which made him responsible for the district's desegregation initiatives.
"I learned a lot about constitutional law," he says.
Rainwater came to the Madison Metropolitan School District in 1994 as Cheryl Wilhoyte's deputy superintendent, and then succeeded Wilhoyte when she left in 1998.
"I'm very much data and research oriented," he says, citing that as a major reason the Madison district hired him.
For his part, he welcomed the opportunity to work in a district so closely associated with a leading university for education research, and enjoyed having access to scholars on the cutting edge of education research.
Since retiring as Madison's superintendent, his association with the university has become even closer. In his ELPA role, he says, "I'll do whatever they need me to do."
That includes teaching, giving guest lectures, advising students, and consulting with colleagues in the department and in the field. He has spoken on school finance, district-wide planning and professional development as tools for school improvement.
Rainwater also will help ELPA maintain strong relationships with professional associations, school districts and other school leaders, says Bredeson, who points out that Rainwater isn't the first former superintendent in ELPA.
James Shaw, Wisconsin's 2001 Superintendent of the Year, joined the department in 2003 as a clinical professor, after serving 10 years as superintendent of the Menomonee Falls School District. Shaw left in 2008 to become superintendent of the Racine Unified School District.
Part of Rainwater's UW-Madison appointment is with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), which involves working with the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN).
He was one of the founders of MSAN, a national coalition of two dozen multiracial districts seeking solutions to disparities in achievement. The network moved its base to UW-Madison to tap into WCER's research capacity.
He also wants to work with WCER's Value-Added Research Center, which has been helping school districts such as Milwaukee and Chicago improve their collection and use of data for school improvement.
New way to have an impact
"I'm looking forward to getting back to the classroom and interacting with students," Wiley says.
He points out that it won't be quite the same as teaching undergraduates, since ELPA is a graduate department that attracts a large number of practitioners. But he says that teaching students who are bound for top positions in higher education will give him "a leverage point for having an impact over our educational system."
"John Wiley brings a wealth of executive leadership experience at a Research One institution," Bredeson says. He says Wiley has thought a great deal about how organizations work and can provide valuable input into ELPA's research agenda.
For his first ELPA course this spring, Wiley plans to teach about accreditation -- which he calls "inherently a very boring topic, but critically important." It's also timely, he says, since UW-Madison currently is undergoing its 10-year re-accreditation.
Wiley -- who has been serving on and currently chairs the board of directors of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation -- describes accreditation as "peer regulation," a complicated process that has flaws, but mostly works.
Without such a system, he says higher education would be governed by a Ministry of Education, which he sees as a significant weakness in the educational systems of other countries.
"I also have a personal interest in higher education finance, which is a complete mess nationwide," Wiley says.
Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington's elite.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden's grandchildren attend Sidwell -- as did Chelsea Clinton -- where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. The Obama girls have been students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where tuition runs above $21,000. "A number of great schools were considered," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. "In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now."
Note the word "selected," as in made a choice. The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington's public schools are among the worst in America.
The Pioneer Institute [April 2006]
A Review of E.D. Hirsch's The Knowledge Deficit (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
by Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who published Cultural Literacy in 1987, arguing that there was knowledge which every student ought to have, has now published another book, The Knowledge Deficit, (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) suggesting that the bankruptcy of the "transfer of thinking skills" position has lead to preventing most U.S. schoolchildren, and especially the disadvantaged ones who really depend on the schools to teach them, from acquiring the ability to read well.
Not too long after the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. mental measurement community convinced itself, and many others, that the cognitive skills acquired in the study of Latin in school did not "transfer" to other important tasks, one of which at the time was teaching students "worthy home membership."
As a result, not only was the study of the Latin language abandoned for many students, but at the same time the "baby"--of Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Tacitus, Virgil and others--was thrown out with the "bathwater." In losing the language, we also lost Roman history, law, poetry, and prose.
In place of this classical knowledge which had been thought essential for two thousand years, the mental measurement community offered "thinking skills," which they claimed could be applied to any content.
Professor Hirsch reaches back beyond the mental measurement folks to Thomas Jefferson, for someone who shares his view of the value of the knowledge in books:
"In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift. Jefferson's plan of book learning was modest compared to the Puritan education of the seventeenth century as advocated by John Milton." (p. 9)
Professor Hirsch believes the Romantic notion that with the right skills, somehow knowledge will arrive by itself, without the need to resort to books, has been responsible for the steady decline in U.S. students' reading scores, compared to our international colleagues, the longer they stay in school.
In the 1980s, the Harvard faculty was once more debating what to put in a common core of knowledge to be taught to all the students. After much disagreement, professors who didn't want to teach survey courses, and perhaps believed in the transfer of thinking skills from one discipline to another, decided not to require any general knowledge in particular and to teach "ways of thinking" as they focused on whatever topics they were studying at the time themselves.
In 1990, Caleb Nelson, a recent graduate in Mathematics from Harvard College, published an article in The Atlantic Monthly, called "Harvard's Hollow Core." He noted that the 1945 Harvard statement of goals said that "educational institutions should strive to create responsible democratic citizens, well-versed in the heritage of the West and endowed with the common knowledge and the common values on which a free society depends." Mr. Nelson reported, however, that by the 1970s, Harvard would develop a "Core Curriculum" that was somewhat different. "Yet although Harvard officials wanted to reform the curriculum, they did not want to launch divisive arguments within the faculty about which subjects were most important...in the seventies, Harvard devised a novel scheme to avoid discord while still reforming its curriculum. If every 'specific proposal' for reform raised a fire storm, the college would simply avoid specifics. Rather than emphasize knowledge the new core curriculum would emphasize students' critical faculties...As Anthony Oettinger, a professor of applied mathematics said about the resulting proposal, 'This motion cannot fail to pass; it has become totally content-free.'...The philosophy behind the core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts, but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever encounter any, and who could 'approach' books if it were ever necessary to do so."
While the Harvard Core has been widely imitated, and has thus done more damage than anyone could have anticipated, this is not what Professor Hirsch has focused on in his new book. He is concerned about the fact that reading instruction which slights the essential requirement of knowledge is spreading the "Matthew effect" in reading. "Those who already have good language understanding will gain still more language proficiency, while those who lack initial understanding will fall further and further behind." (p. 25) Even with the advances in reading recently made by a general return to direct instruction in phonics, without knowledge the student will not be able to read much.
"After mastering decoding, a student who reads widely can indeed, under the right circumstances, gain greater knowledge and thence better reading comprehension. But such gains will only occur if the student already knows enough to comprehend the meaning of what he or she is decoding! Many specialists estimate that a child or an adult needs to understand around 90 percent of the words in a passage in order to learn to understand the other 10 percent of the words. Moreover, it's not just the words that the student has to grasp the meaning of; it's also the kind of reality that the words are referring to. When a child doesn't understand those word meanings and those referred-to realities, being good at sounding out words is a dead end." (p. 25)
All of this would seem to be obvious: if you don't know what someone is talking about, you can't very well understand what they are saying. If you don't know the basic subject matter of a passage in a book, you won't know what the passage is about. But this sort of common sense has yet to penetrate the educrats' wonderful world of reading "skills." And there are consequences.
Many now seem puzzled that 32% of our high school students drop out before graduating with their class. ACT has just reported that of the high school graduates they tested, 49% cannot understand reading at the level of difficulty of freshman college texts.
Professor Hirsch points out that knowledge is necessary for making advances in reading (and learning) by relying on the work of those who have done the research in this area:
"Cognitive psychologists have determined that when a text is being understood, the reader (or listener) is filling in a lot of the unstated connections between the words to create an imagined situation model based on domain-specific knowledge...To understand language, whether written or spoken, we need to construct a situation model consisting of meanings construed from the explicit words of the text as well as meanings inferred or constructed from relevant background knowledge. The spoken and the unspoken taken together constitute the meaning. Without this relevant, unspoken background knowledge, we can't understand the text." (p. 38)
Professor Hirsch is arguing that in deliberately putting the pursuit of knowledge aside, educators are ensuring that far too many of our students, and in particular those who cannot rely on their homes to provide them with a good background of knowledge, are being prevented from reading to learn. Phonics may teach them to decode words, but only knowledge can give them the base they need to understand what they find in books. As Caleb Nelson said in his article on Harvard's Core:
"The problem goes beyond the particular courses that are now in the Core: no set of introductory courses could achieve the core's ostensible goals. One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics...If the core's goals were realistic, they would still have little to recommend them. Why, for instance, are lessons about the nature of history as a discipline the most important things for students to learn in their required history course? Students should certainly recognize that history is the testing ground of public policy, and that its study can reveal much about the psychology of people and nations; as Santayana's famous aphorism goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But this lesson about history is useless unless one also learns the actual facts of history--an accomplishment that requires careful attention to historical facts themselves."
The anti-intellectualism and anti-knowledge attitudes that Professor Hirsch has found among so many professors and teachers in education, are not limited to the elementary schools or to Harvard College. The fondness for "critical thinking" without much knowledge may have reached some sort of peak in the suggestion of the Creation Science people that secondary students be encouraged to "think critically" about the theory of evolution. Has any of them stopped to consider that if high school students spent all four years on the study of the evidence evolutionary biologists have published, not only could they study nothing else, but they would only have scratched the surface of the scientific evidence in the field? It might be less onerous for students to "think critically" about all the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the last ten years. It would perhaps be easier for them to "think critically" about capitalism if they understood the difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy and their differing effects.
Professor Hirsch, a scholar of the history of ideas, has quite clearly identified the two intellectual forces that battle against the value of knowledge:
"The two ideologies or philosophies that dominate in the American educational world, which tend to corrupt scientific inferences, are naturalism and formalism. Naturalism is the notion that learning can and should be natural and that any unnatural or artificial approach to school learning should be rejected or deemphasized. This point of view favors many of the methods that are currently most praised and admired in early schooling--'hands-on learning,' 'developmentally appropriate practice,' and the natural, whole-language method of learning to read. By contrast, methods that are unnatural are usually deplored, including 'drill,' 'rote learning,' and that analytical, phonics approach to teaching early reading. We call such naturalism an ideology rather than a theory because it is more a value system (based on the European Romantic movement) than an empirically based idea. If we adopt this ideology, we know in advance that the natural is good and the artificial is bad. We don't need analysis and evidence; we are certain, quite apart from the evidence, that children's education will be more productive if it is more natural. If the data do not show this, it is because we are using the wrong kinds of data, such as scores on standardized tests. That is naturalism.
"Formalism is the ideology that what counts in education is not the learning of things but rather learning how to learn. What counts is not gaining mere facts but gaining formal skills. Along with naturalism, it shares an antipathy to mere facts and the piling up of information. The facts, it says, are always changing. Children need to learn how to understand and interpret any new facts that come along. The skills that children need to learn in school are not how to follow mindless procedures but rather to understand what lies behind the procedures so they can apply them to new situations. In reading, instead of learning a lot of factual subject matter, which is potentially infinite, the child needs to learn strategies for dealing with any texts, such as 'questioning the author,' 'classifying,' and other 'critical thinking' skills." (p. 135)
Both Professor Hirsch, in 1987, with Cultural Literacy, in 1996 with The Schools We Deserve, and now, in 2006, with The Knowledge Deficit, and Caleb Nelson in 1990, have tried to show us the reasons why so many of our students are ignorant, and thus unable to comprehend good lectures and read serious texts. No wonder so many of our students give up on school or on college, when we have arranged it so that far too many of them don't know what educated people are talking and writing about. As the Nation At Risk Report said in 1983, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
Professor Hirsch, in his timely new book The Knowledge Deficit, provides the insights and the recommendations needed to help us protect our students against the anti-intellectual and anti-knowledge forces they face every day now in our schools (and in our colleges), and instead try to give them the knowledge they will need to help them read, listen, and gather more knowledge in the future.
[E.D. Hirsch told me this was the first serious review of his book, and he liked it.]
Tyler Lehmann could read "Harry Potter" books before he started first grade, yet an anxiety disorder left him unable to speak to his teacher and all but one of his classmates in Woodbury. Simon Fink attends a school for gifted students in St. Paul, but Asperger's syndrome can make it hard for him to interact with peers and focus on lessons.
School can be tough for kids with challenges ranging from emotional disorders to ADHD or dyslexia. For gifted students, too, it's not always a cakewalk, between boredom and the sense of isolation that can result from being a "brainiac."
Then there are students such as Tyler and Simon, who fall into both categories.
Raising children with learning barriers is a task in itself, "but when they're bright and gifted and have a high IQ, it's even more frustrating, because the teachers just don't understand how to work with these kids," said Bloomington parent Chelle Woolley, whose 17-year-old son, Matt, was in fifth grade when he tested out for both giftedness and attention deficit disorder.
A growing awareness of so-called "twice-exceptional" or "2X" students, many of whom qualify for both gifted and special education services, is prompting some researchers to take a closer look at their needs. This fall, educators at the University of St. Thomas and four metro-area school districts are using a $490,000 federal grant to launch a five-year project aimed at developing better ways to teach 2X children, helping schools identify them and training teachers to work with them.
A recent visit by six exchange students from Ecuador enhanced the global view embraced by Madison Country Day School.
The students stayed for two weeks, attending classes at the private school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the town of Westport and staying with students' families.
They also shared aspects of their culture, in part by dancing at the school's weekly assembly.
"It's just one facet of the whole international program here," said Fabian Fernandez, a sophomore at Madison Country Day School. "The whole culture exchange -- it really shakes you out of a routine ... . You can really become a member of the global community."
Community Input on Math Task Force Recommendations - SAVE THE DATES!
Hi - there will be 2 community input forums to gather input from the community on the recommendations of the Math Task Force. The report of the MTF can be found at:
Monday, December 8 from 6:00-8:00pm at Memorial High School
Tuesday, December 9 from 6:00-8:00pm at LaFollette High School
I am not sure of the format yet but know this is a busy time of year so wanted to give you an opportunity to mark your calendars if you plan on attending on of the forums. I'll send more information when available.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's wonderful that the Obamas had such a broad range of public and private school choices available to them. What's puzzling is that the president-elect opposes programs that would bring that same easy choice of schools within reach of families who lack his personal wealth. By his actions, Senator Obama is demonstrating that he is not willing to wait for his own policy prescriptions to "fix and improve" public schools, but he expects folks with less ample bank accounts to patiently await his hoped-for change.
And while many reports will no doubt trumpet the $25,000+ tuition at Sidwell Friends, implying that this is extravagantly beyond what is spent in D.C. public schools, they will be mistaken. As I wrote in the Washington Post and on this blog, D.C. public schools also spent about $25,000 per child in the 2007-08 school year.
It's not that president-elect Obama is against spending a lot of money on other people's kids -- he's just against letting their parents choose where that money is spent.
It is the Quaker ethos that is the most striking feature of Sidwell Friends School, the one chosen by President-elect Obama for his daughters Sasha and Malia. A sense of community, equality and friendship runs through every classroom: children are encouraged to strive for their best, but to value above all their relations with each other and their place in the school family.
For any president trying to ensure that his children enjoy as normal an education as possible, such an ethos is invaluable. However rich, influential or politically important the parents - as many at Sidwell are - what matters is the "inner light" in every child. Pupils are not ranked by academic scores, and Sidwell never releases its SAT scores or college admission list. In race, wealth and nationality and in all else, all are treated the same. The two Obama girls will find their White House address is officially all but irrelevant.
Sidwell, founded in 1883 and now enrolling more than 1,000 children from kindergarten to 18, was a committed pioneer of integration and coeducation. More than one third of its intake belongs to ethnic minorities and one fifth receives financial assistance to help with the fees. The only preference is to those with Quaker connections. Since my wife and I went to Quaker schools, our daughter spent three happy primary years there during my time as bureau chief in Washington.
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.
"How can political leaders make informed decisions if they don't understand the American experience?" he added.
The exam questions covered American history, the workings of the US government and economics.
Among the questions asked of some 2,500 people who were randomly selected to take the test, including "self-identified elected officials," was one which asked respondents to "name two countries that were our enemies during World War II."
Only four Tennessee public high schools are preparing students to pass basic academic courses when they go on to college, if their ACT entrance exams are the indicator.
The ACT is one of the most high-profile, high-stakes tests in the country. In Tennessee, a score of 21 out of a perfect 36 is one of the requirements to earn a lottery scholarship.
Students from Hume-Fogg and Martin Luther King magnet schools in Metro Nashville, Merrol Hyde Magnet in Hendersonville and Gatlinburg-Pittman in East Tennessee averaged ACT scores high enough over a three-year period to be considered ready for basic college coursework. Only 18 percent of Tennessee's class of 2008 students who took the test met that standard, compared with about 22 percent of students nationally.
Education experts in the state and region say that's more evidence of what they've been saying about Tennessee's high school curriculum: It's too easy.
"We see high school valedictorians who are forced to take remedial courses," said Alan Richard, spokesman for the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit network that focuses on learning in the South. "That means there's a gulf between what high schools teach and what colleges expect."
Darling-Hammond, a teacher-friendly educator, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to head his transition team on education policy.
Her name appears on some - not all - of the guessing-game lists put out by education observers speculating about who Obama will pick to head the huge U.S. Department of Education. And she is the subject of an online petition begun by a teacher in Hawaii that's attracted thousands of people - many of them teachers - urging the president-elect to choose her.
"I have no idea who it will be," says Darling-Hammond, switching the topic to what she described as an education agenda "more bold and ambitious than anything we've seen since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 ... and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act" a decade later.
At this point, it's still all about big money and big concepts: $10 billion to develop preschool programs for all children; $8 billion to narrow the achievement gap in elementary and secondary schools; $11 billion to send more students to college.
It's early in the season for Academic Decathlon, but several previously successful Milwaukee-area schools are already out of the game.
The problem isn't a lack of smarts for the battle of the brains between school teams - it's a lack of coaches.
Wisconsin Academic Decathlon last week announced the 60 schools that advanced to the regional competition on Jan. 9. Officials from previously successful institutions that failed to make the list - Nicolet, Wauwatosa West, Bay View and Kettle Moraine high schools - said they didn't field teams because they couldn't find coaches to lead the groups.
"Funding has been easier to get than teachers," state Academic Decathlon Director Mollie Ritchie said. "Usually a school drops its program because a coach left or retired."
For schools around Milwaukee, and Rhinelander High School in northern Wisconsin, filling the shoes of a coach who left or gave up the position has posed problems because of the nature of the job - a time consuming, seven-month commitment if the team is successful, not counting hours inevitably spent fund raising.
Major changes in how Milwaukee Public Schools teaches reading and writing are coming soon, according to school Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.
He said a team of outside experts has been evaluating MPS literacy efforts and he expects to get its report in December. He said he has been given indications of what the experts will recommend.
"I think you will see this report turning things upside down, changing some past practices, and making some bold changes that we hope will improve the performance of our kids," he said earlier this week.
He said the state Department of Public Instruction had put together the expert team and was paying for the study as part of plans aimed at bringing MPS into compliance with goals set by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"We're going to take it to heart, what's in that report," he said. "The status quo is unacceptable. . . . We realize if we just continue to do the same thing, we're going to get the same results."
He did not provide details of what is expected to be in the report.
Only six weeks have passed since my last cranky diatribe about teaching what are called "21st-century skills" in our schools. I think the 21st-century skills movement is mostly a pipe dream, promoted by well-meaning people who embrace the idea of modernity but fail to consider how these allegedly new and important lessons can be taught by the usual victims of such schemes, classroom teachers.
I telephoned Silva to express my concern that we differ on this issue, since she always knows what she is talking about and I sometimes don't. Our conversation reassured me. She has the same doubts I do about the loose and overheated way the 21st-century skills concept has been marketed, and the failure to give teachers useful guidance on what to do with it. She agrees with me that much of what is labeled 21st-century learning is not new, but represents what our best educators have been teaching for several centuries.
I'm dropping the pretense of having no rooting interest this week. I'm rooting for Myron Rolle as if he's a blood relative. I'm rooting for his flight from Birmingham, Ala., to Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport to be on time. I'm rooting for him to make it to Byrd Stadium by halftime at the very latest, for him to get into uniform and play as many snaps as possible for Florida State. Most of all, I'm rooting for him to wow the panelists in his Rhodes Scholarship interview earlier in the day.
Texas Tech and Oklahoma will get the majority of the college football attention this weekend, but Rolle is the best story. He's not the first football player up for one of 32 Rhodes Scholarships. In fact, a Yale defensive back, Casey Gerald, will be in Houston today as one of 13 region finalists. But while Yale is as much a part of college football's history as Florida State, let nobody suggest that the football pressures in the Ivy League match those at a school such as Florida State, where Rolle's defensive coordinator once suggested the kid might be devoting too much time to academics and not enough to football.
The proposal, which could go into effect as early as next school year, would allow four years of sports to count as elective credits toward graduation instead of the current maximum of two years.
The board's 10-5 vote followed often emotional debate, with both Dallas members - Republican Geraldine Miller and Democrat Mavis Knight - voting no.
Supporters said the move would keep kids in school and spur them to do well in academic courses. Critics charged that the plan would de-emphasize academics and return to the days of "football comes first."
Ms. Miller was among the most vocal opponents, insisting the plan would "completely dismantle" many of the education reforms enacted in Texas over the last two decades.
"This takes us back to the way things used to be," she said. "Our school reform movement put everything in perspective, with academics coming first. Now, we are opening the door to water down all the efforts we have made to strengthen standards in our schools."
But Craig Agnew, the Brenham High School coach and teacher who petitioned the board to adopt the rule, said an "unfair burden" exists for student athletes who must meet stringent course requirements to retain their athletic eligibility.
Bryk said, noting that less than 0.25 percent of the overall education budget -- an estimate based on education as a $500 billion a year industry in the United States -- is allocated to research and development. By contrast, he noted, in fields such as medicine and engineering, 5 to 15 percent of the total budget is spent on R&D.
Bryk expressed, moreover, concern that most research is being conducted in the university setting where, as he wrote, "new theory development is more valued than practical solutions." This environment, he said, is not conducive to the creation of workable solutions in education reform -- not as long as scholarly articles in journals are considered the acme of accomplishment in educational research.
FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages.
Are they correct? To get an answer, we need to first decide on a good measure of "academic success." Given inconsistent grading standards for college courses, the most easily comparable metric is the graduation rate. Students' families and society both want college entrants to graduate, and we all know that having a college degree translates into higher income. Further, graduation rates among students and institutions vary much more widely than do college grades, making them a clearer indicator of how students are faring.
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages? If we look merely at studies that statistically correlate SAT scores and high school grades with graduation rates, we find that, indeed, the two standards are roughly equivalent, meaning that the better that applicants do on either of these indicators the more likely they are to graduate from college. However, since students with high SAT scores tend to have better high school grade-point averages, this data doesn't tell us which of the indicators -- independent of the other -- is a better predictor of college success.
From the corner of N. 27th St. and North Ave., Transition High School looks more like a strip mall than a place where teenagers are turning their lives around.
The Milwaukee public school, which opened in March, is home to students working through challenges beyond the scope of what most traditional high schools can handle. Some have been expelled. Others have served sentences in the House of Correction or a youth facility. Some have been truant for more than a year.
But on a recent day, as they wrapped up online coursework and got ready for an afternoon of off-campus rock climbing, students talked about how safe they felt.
"This is a non-violent place," said Charles Banster, 16, and a sophomore. "Nobody has problems here."
Another student, who said he had spent time in a large school on the city's south side, agreed. The small environment makes him feel like he's among family.
"I don't like too many people around me," said 14-year-old Tim Owens-Rice. "I just feel paranoid." In the past, that need to define and defend his personal space has led to fights, he said.
The big-box aesthetic does not immediately lend itself to any other use. The buildings are often upward of 150,000 square feet. There simply aren't many enterprises that need that much space, and because the buildings are built for a single-use purpose, it's not so easy to break them up into smaller units. Yet all over the country, resourceful communities are finding ways to reuse these buildings, turning them into flea markets, museums, schools--even churches.
">Tamar Lewin:
Record numbers of American students are studying abroad, with especially strong growth in educational exchanges with China, the annual report by the Institute on International Education found.
The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent, and the number of Chinese students studying at American universities increased by 20 percent last year, according to the report, "Open Doors 2008."
"Interest in China is growing dramatically, and I think we'll see even sharper increases in next year's report," said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. "People used to go to China to study the history and language, and many still do, but with China looming so large in all our futures, there's been a real shift, and more students go for an understanding of what's happening economically and politically."
Revamped security and discipline policies, more specialized schools, a "Parent Academy" to help District parents take charge of their children's education and the possibility of more school closures are part of the long-term vision proposed by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee in a new document.
The 79-page "action plan," which Rhee will present to the D.C. Council tomorrow, pulls together a broad variety of ideas that have been only hinted at publicly, including a possible end to out-of-school suspensions and an increase in the number of "theme" schools, focusing on high technology, language immersion, or gifted and talented students.
Other goals in the draft document -- the need for new and better-paid teachers, higher test scores, closing the achievement gap between white and minority students -- are ones she has frequently articulated. Taken together, they provide the most detailed picture of Rhee's aspirations for the 120-school system, which is affected by declining enrollment and poor academic performance.
You are Invited: Varsity Academics in Madison Tonight, 11/19 @ 7:00p.m.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; 7:00p.m. in Madison. [PDF Flyer] Lecture Hall 1345 Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC) 750 Highland Avenue Madison, WI [Map]
We hope that Mr. Fitzhugh's appearance will create new academic opportunities for Wisconsin students.
Parking
Metered parking is available at the University Hospital (UWHC) Patient/Visitor Lot [Map], just south of the HSLC. Free parking is available in Lot 85, across the street from the HSLC and next to the Pharmacy Building at 2245 Observatory Drive [Map].
About the Speaker:
Low standards led Will Fitzhugh to quit his job as a history teacher in 1987 and begin publishing the journal [The Concord Review] out of his home in Concord, Mass.
Concerned that schools were becoming anti-intellectual and holding students to low standards, he thought the venture could fuel a national--even international--interest in student research and writing in the humanities.
"As a teacher, it is not uncommon to have your consciousness end at the classroom wall. But I came to realize that there was a national concern about students' ignorance of history and inability to write," he said.
During his 10 years of teaching at Concord-Carlisle High School, the 62-year-old educator said in a recent interview, he always had a handful of students who did more than he asked, and whose papers reflected serious research.
Those students "just had higher standards, and I was always impressed by that," Mr. Fitzhugh said. "I figured there have got to be some wonderful essays just sitting out there. I wanted to recognize and encourage kids who are already working hard, and to challenge the kids who are not."
Fitzhugh will discuss the problems of reading, writing and college readiness at the high school level. There will be an extended discussion period.
For more information, or to schedule some time with Mr. Fitzhugh during
his visit, contact Jim Zellmer (608 213-0434 or zellmer@gmail.com), Lauren Cunningham (608 469-4474) or Laurie Frost (608 238-6375).
Wisconsin Poll on Public Education: A Slight Majority Believe They Received a Better Education than Students Do Today Residents Support Major Reforms in Teacher Compensation
There are some issues that seemingly never change. Twenty years ago 49% of Wisconsin residents thought they had received a better education in elementary and secondary schools than students today. In 2008, 47% of Wisconsin residents had the same view. Twenty years ago 70% of our residents rated their local schools as excellent or very good. Today, 69% rated their local schools as excellent or good.
Twenty years ago 76% of our residents supported merit pay for teachers; today 77% of our residents support merit pay for teachers. Twenty years ago 58% of our residents thought that discipline in our public schools was too lenient; today 60% hold this view.
These are among the key findings about statewide policy issues from the most recent survey of 600 Wisconsin residents conducted by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Inc. and Diversified Research between November 9 and 10, 2008.
The Overall Quality Of Education
47% of the respondents in this survey thought that they had received a better education at the elementary and secondary level than students do today; 44% disagreed. Twenty years ago 49% thought they had received a better education and 45% thought they had not. Demographically there is a large gap in this response based on race--46% of Whites in 2008 thought they had received a better education, but 90% of Black respondents thought they had received a better education and only 10% thought that students today received a better education.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday that given the economic crisis, her union would be willing to discuss new approaches to issues like teacher tenure and merit pay.
"Faced with declining tax revenues, state and local governments are cutting" education budgets nationwide, Ms. Weingarten said in a speech to education policy makers in Washington.
"In the spirit of this extraordinary moment, and as a pledge of shared responsibility, I'll take the first step," she said. "With the exception of vouchers, which siphon scarce resources from public schools, no issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair to teachers."
It is unclear how much practical effect Ms. Weingarten's speech will have on the stance her 1.4-million-member union and its locals take in negotiations with school districts or in lobbying state legislatures.
The Minneapolis School District is close to finalizing the sale of three of its shuttered buildings. But unlike previous real estate deals, the district this time entertained offers from charter schools.
St. Paul, Minn. -- Minneapolis School Board member Pam Costain calls the sale of Franklin, Putnam, and Morris Park Schools "uncharted territory." That's because, even though the district has leased space to private schools before, there used to be a policy banning the sale of any of district buildings to charter schools -- with the idea that they're the competition.
But that's exactly who's in line to move into these buildings, in North, Northeast, and South Minneapolis.
For a while, the fight over how to improve public schools seemed to be quieting down. During the presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic education advisers happily finished each other's sentences on such issues as expanding charter schools, recruiting better teachers and, in particular, rating schools by how much students improve.
Moving to the growth model for school assessment, by measuring each student's progress, seems to be the favorite education reform of the incoming Obama administration. Up till now, we have measured schools by comparing the average student score one year with the average for the previous year's students. It was like rating pumpkin farmers by comparing this year's crop with last year's rather than by how much growth they managed to coax out of each pumpkin.
The growth model appeals to parents because it focuses on each child. It gives researchers a clearer picture of what affects student achievement and what does not. Officials throughout the Washington area have joined the growth model (sometimes called "value-added") fan club. The next step would be to use the same data to see which teachers add the most value to their students each year.
Third-graders at Hunters Woods Elementary School are required to learn the fundamentals of the violin. They know how to stand up straight, how to hold their instruments and how to use the tippy tips of their fingers when they press on the strings so they don't make what their teacher calls "an icky sound."
After learning a grand total of eight notes, they also know how to make music. Their repertoire one fall morning included pieces from a range of cultures and styles: "Caribbean Island," "Seminole Chant," "Good King Wenceslas."
In Fairfax County and elsewhere, students often begin studying violin in fourth grade. Hunters Woods, an arts and science magnet school in Reston, gives them a one-year head start. Experts say the earlier children begin, the more likely they are to succeed in music.
Hunters Woods, with 950 students, is one of more than a dozen local schools in which teachers are trained through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to infuse arts education into other subjects. For instance, students might build instruments from recycled materials, learn science through lessons on sound and vibration or study math through measurement and patterning. Some also compose songs with lyrics inspired by Virginia history.
But music programs and the rest of the education budget are under scrutiny as the county School Board seeks to close a $220 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins in July. One proposal to save about $850,000 would trim band and strings teaching positions, making it tough to keep such programs in third and fourth grades, said Roger Tomhave, fine arts coordinator for Fairfax schools.
The analysis of data from 27 elementary schools and 11 middle schools is based on scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a state test required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Madison is the second Wisconsin district, after Milwaukee, to make a major push toward value-added systems, which are gaining support nationally as an improved way of measuring school performance.
Advocates say it's better to track specific students' gains over time than the current system, which holds schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
"This is very important," Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. "We think it's a particularly fair way ... because it's looking at the growth in that school and ascertaining the influence that the school is having on that outcome."
The findings will be used to pinpoint effective teaching methods and classroom design strategies, officials said. But they won't be used to evaluate teachers: That's forbidden by state law.
"... The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum."
The head of the American Federation of Teachers signaled the union's willingness Monday to work broadly on education reform with the incoming Obama administration. It said that, with the exception of school vouchers, "no issue should be off the table."
AFT president Randi Weingarten cautioned lawmakers nationwide against a "disinvestment in education" in the face of the economic meltdown. She warned that cutting aid to schools "places our economy in a race to the bottom for years to come."
Weingarten already has told Congress that schools must be included in economic stimulus plans. She testified last month that lawmakers should add $20 billion to a social-services block grant to help state and local governments balance budgets without cutting education. She also said schools need $286 billion for buildings improvements.
As the Obama family prepares to transition into the White House, one of the most pressing matters is choosing a school for their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. Mary Lord, of D.C. State Board of Education; Mark Gooden, an education professor and Jay Matthews, education columnist for the Washington Post talk about the sometimes complicated choice between public or private schooling for children.
The A-through-F grading system for New York City schools is billed as a public information tool, helping people sort out which schools are teaching children and which schools are just moving them along. Instead of inscrutable education jargon and endless score charts, the letter grades act like billboards broadcasting achievements and failures.
But for parents shopping for the best schools, the letter grades can obscure some of the most salient information, because they are determined largely by how much progress students make year to year rather than how well their skills stand up against objective standards.
While the question of how effective teachers are at moving students forward is a critical one for their bosses, many parents are equally interested in which schools are most likely to, say, have students reading at grade level or ensure that sophomores are mastering algebra. The heavy emphasis on peer comparisons to schools serving similar populations is clearly a fairer yardstick for educators, but it can hide schools burdened by particularly challenging demographics.
Barack Obama's election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.
We can't solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?
Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn't fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist.
An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions....
About two-thirds of the city's high school graduates in 2000 who enrolled in college have failed to earn degrees, according to a first-of-its-kind study being released today.
The findings represent a major setback for a city school system that made significant strides in recent years with percentages of graduates enrolling in college consistently higher than national averages, according to the report by the Boston Private Industry Council and the School Department.
However, the study shows that the number who went on to graduate is lower than the national average.
The low number of students who were able to earn college degrees or post-secondary certificates in a city known as a center of American higher education points to the enormous barriers facing urban high school graduates - many of whom are the first in their families to attend college. While the study did not address reasons for the low graduation rates, these students often have financial problems, some are raising children, and others are held back by a need to retake high school courses in college because they lack basic skills.
The students' failure to complete college could exacerbate the fiscal problems in the state's economy, which requires a highly skilled workforce, say business leaders and educators. While tens of thousands of students around the globe flock to the region's colleges each fall, many of them leave once receiving their degrees.
In response to the study, Mayor Thomas M. Menino plans to announce this morning a major initiative, starting with this year's high school seniors, to increase the college graduation rate by 50 percent and then double the rate for students who are currently high school sophomores. The Boston Foundation, which financed the study along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has pledged $1 million this year toward that goal and hopes to allocate the same amount for each of the following four years.
"We want to make sure all our kids in Boston get a good education and graduate from college," Menino said in an interview Friday at City Hall. "It's not just about getting into college but how to stay in college."
Paul Reville, the state's education secretary, said he welcomed the announcement of the mayor's ambitious goals, which comes as the state is trying to create a seamless education system that caters to state residents from birth to college graduation.
"It's clear we are not doing well enough to support students through graduation," Reville said in a phone interview this weekend. "They need more help. We have to think more broadly about our approaches and the mayor is challenging us to do that."
Two years ago, a report by the Boston Higher Education Partnership suggested the city school system needed to do a better job of preparing its graduates. That report found that half of the city's high school graduates who studied math when they arrived at local colleges in fall 2005 had to take remedial courses, which a quarter of them failed.
The report being released today represents the city's first effort to track the college completion rates of its high school graduates. Similar analyses are underway for subsequent graduating classes. Previous studies have followed high school graduates for only a year after graduation.
The Class of 2000 left Boston public schools with big dreams: 64.2 percent of the 2,964 members enrolled in college, about 3 percentage points higher than the national average. They went in greatest numbers to Bunker Hill Community College, followed by the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Roxbury Community College, Massachusetts Bay Community College, Northeastern University, Quincy College, and UMass Amherst.
Yet seven years later, only 675 of those who enrolled, or 35.5 percent, had earned a one-year certificate, an associate degree, or a bachelor's degree. The study suggested that rate was about 8 percentage points below a national average generated by a mid-1990s tracking study that, similar to the Boston study, examined the same types of degrees.
"This puts us on notice that we have to do more and be more aggressive in our efforts to prepare our students and work closely with higher education institutions,"Boston schools Superintendent Carol R. Johnson said in an interview Friday at City Hall. "A lot of our students are first-generation college-goers and some are first-generation high school graduates. So when you have students like that, you have to make sure you put in all the safety nets they need to be successful, not just in high school, but in college, too."
The study revealed sharp disparities in success among various ethnic and racial groups. Hispanics had completion rates of 23.9 percent, and blacks 28.2 percent. By contrast 53.3 percent of whites earned degrees, while Asians were slightly below that.
Overall, women were slightly more apt to graduate from college than men. But when gender was broken down by ethnicity and race, huge gaps emerged. Just 19 percent of Hispanic men who enrolled in college went on to graduate, while 27 percent of Hispanic women did. The gap between black men and women was similar.
The study also found that exam school graduates were vastly more prepared than other city graduates. Slightly more than 59 percent of exam school alumni who enrolled in college earned some type of degree, compared with 24 percent of all others.
Menino offered few details about his plan but said some of the Boston Foundation money will expand existing nonprofit programs, such as Bottom Line in Jamaica Plain, that have had success in helping students get into and through college.
"The mayor knew there was going to be some unhappy news in the study," said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation. "The fact he was willing to do the study anyway says a lot about his commitment to education."
The efforts will be in addition to ongoing improvements in the Boston public schools, which include ramping up academic rigor by offering more college-level courses.
The superintendent also has proposed creating a "newcomers academy" for new immigrant students and also is exploring the feasibility of same-gender classes, which studies have suggested can increase student achievement.
Calling attention to college completion rates is a much-needed "game changer" in education overhaul efforts nationwide, which have largely focused on elementary and secondary schools while overlooking colleges, said Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, a group of city business leaders that works with educators and other officials on education policy. The study could have significant impacts on state and federal budgets.
"A graduate of a four-year college will make almost $1 million more than a high school graduate over a lifetime," said Sullivan, citing a report his group did recently. "We need to help students every step of the way earn the prize: a college degree."
National debates over college graduation rates have been growing louder in recent years. Chicago did a study similar to Boston's within the past few years, and Friday the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education will discuss ways to bolster the state's low graduation rates at community colleges, according to Reville.
J. Keith Motley, the UMass Boston chancellor, said he believes all colleges should set a goal of a 100 percent completion rate, which he said his university has been working toward.
He said that the success rate at his university for Boston public school graduates who had participated in special programs at his campus while still in high school is about 85 percent.
"We are glad there will be a spotlight because we want to demonstrate these students are capable," Motley said. "The mayor is pushing us to pay attention to all those students from the neighborhoods and we should be doing that."
Excerpt: "A main strategy of the schools, breaking large high schools into smaller units, on its own guaranteed no overall success, Gates said.
He said the New York City small schools were an example of successes in raising high school graduation rates -- but a disappointment in that their graduates were no likelier than any city student to be prepared to go onto college.
Gates said the small number of successful schools did well not because they were structured as small schools, but because they enacted many different innovations: improved teaching quality, a longer school day, innovative instructional tools, a focus on tracking student achievement data."
This is the third year Edgewood is participating in the SMART (Students Modeling A Research Topic) Team program where students learn what active research scientists investigate in their labs. Along the way, students learn hands-on molecular modeling to better understand biochemistry and what happens when diseases occur.
"It tries to show students what research science is like," said Edgewood Campus School teacher Dan Toomey. "Science is not a collection of facts."
Toomey's three eighth-grade science classes are participating in the program, which was integrated into his classroom after he first ran it as an after-school program.
For one activity this year, the students created a three-dimensional model of amino acids to learn how they interact.
"It's a lot easier than, like, seeing a picture," said eighth-grader Anna Heffernan.
It's a brisk Friday morning and a skinny little boy in a large blazer stands shivering by locked school gates. Close beside him are his mother, his father and his two grandmothers, both in saris. The trembling child is right to be anxious. He is about to sit the entrance tests for Queen Elizabeth's School in Barnet, north London, one of England's leading grammar schools, and the odds against him passing through this narrow gateway to academic success are extremely slim. There are just 180 places available in the school's Year Seven each year and 1,200 boys hoping to fill them.
Grammar schools have always been popular but with the financial meltdown affecting many affluent families, a free education in a traditional environment is looking highly attractive to parents of bright 10-year-olds. Fees for three children at independent secondary schools cost £50,000 or more a year, and four out of five parents pay those fees out of income.
Jenny Jones, secretary of the National Grammar Schools Association, a non-political body of parents, teachers and heads promoting grammar schools, confirms that "there have definitely been more applications from families who would normally go to independent schools".
In 2005, when Boston mayor Thomas Menino announced his plan to make prekindergarten available to all four-year-olds in the city, parents and early childhood advocates applauded this initiative to add a 14th year to the city's public school system.
Three years later, after preK classrooms were established in 50 of the city's 67 elementary schools, educators say implementing the mayor's vision has proved to be a major challenge. There were facility issues: none of the classrooms had running water or bathrooms, so administrators lobbied to build toilet facilities in the rooms--at the cost of $35,000 each. There were oversight issues: many of the elementary school principals weren't sensitive to the needs of four-year-olds, so Boston established a professional development academy for administrators faced with the prospect of educating preschoolers.
Then there was the impact on the elementary schools where those four-year-olds were getting ready for kindergarten. When those students turned five, they were so well prepared that the district had to retool its kindergarten curriculum to keep pace with children much more ready to learn.
A teacher with the sign-on name of pfelcher posted a provocative comment on the Web version of my Nov. 3 column for the Post's Metro section. I was repeating for the 4,897th time my view that even low-income students who have not performed well in school can learn in a college-level high school course, like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, if given extra time and encouragement.
Pfelcher would have none of my argument. To support his opinion, he cited a personal experience in his classroom. I always find first-person accounts helpful when debating this issue. I decided to send his comment to a few other AP teachers I knew, and see what they had to say.
Here is the post from pfelcher, whom I do not know and cannot identify further, followed by the reactions of three teachers, plus a student who sent me his view. If we want to make our high schools better, we have to work this out. I think such exchanges help us figure out what to do:
......
It's not about who wins in a class of students with such disparate preparation and skill; it's about who loses. The students ready to march ahead are forced instead to grind to a halt as the other students have to be taught the basics with which they should have entered the class.
At the end of the year, those unprepared students who might have gained from my class but who still had too far to go to attain the literacy and competence the test requires, failed miserably on the AP exam. So, did these lower-end students gain from the experience? Yes, they did to some degree, even though egos that had never really been tried suffered when they saw how they compared to the nation.
A Chicago suburb beats out thousands of other communities around the U.S. as the best, most affordable place to raise kids.
Mount Prospect, Ill., is a quiet Chicago suburb with a population of just over 56,000. It is a tight-knit town where over the past eight years Prospect High School's football team won three state championships, its Marching Knights picked up their 26th straight grand champion title at the annual state marching band festival, and just last month the school itself ranked 12th among all state high schools. Now the town is also the winner of Businessweek's second annual roundup of the Best Places in America to Raise Kids.
Founded by German immigrants and incorporated in 1917, Mount Prospect hasn't strayed far from its values of fiscal conservatism and community involvement, even as it has expanded to include new immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Korea, and India. It is a middle-class community with low crime, affordable homes, award-winning schools, ethnic restaurants, a major regional mall, and a small-town charm that makes the big city less than an hour away seem much farther away.
Other cities mentioned include: Euless, TX, Murfreesboro, TN, Huntsville, AL and Eau Claire, WI.
A 3.7 grade-point average and a schedule stacked with honors classes may be enough for Tempe High School sophomore Fabian De La Cruz to attain his goal of attending Harvard University.
A new program slated for implementation at his school next year could only help the aspiring surgeon reach his dream and become the first person in his family to go to college.
The International Baccalaureate program comprises a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes an international perspective and critical and creative thinking skills.
Teacher Karen McKiernan's science class at Dr. Charles R. Drew Elementary School seemed more like a lesson in art appreciation than the laws of physics as students focused on a poster of an abstract painting propped against the blackboard.
The room buzzed with questions as the fifth-graders at the Silver Spring school queried each other about the piece, "People and Dog in the Sun," by Joan Miró.
"What would this painting look like if it was not abstract?" 10-year-old Annesha Goswami asked her classmates.
"Why do you think there are so many dark colors and only one bright color?" asked Elizabeth Iduma, 10.
The students, participants in the school's talented and gifted magnet program, were practicing a thinking routine called "creative questions" which was designed to help them "think outside the box," McKiernan said. For the class's next meeting, McKiernan said, she planned to have students relate their thoughts about the artwork to the concepts of force, motion and energy that the fifth-graders had been studying.
Under the labyrinthine regulations that govern technical colleges nationwide, the Principal K.M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy must provide 168 square feet of building space for each student. The rule is intended to ensure students have enough space to learn. But it effectively caps enrollment at 300, even though students are spread so thinly in the eight-story building that the top floor remains unused, its lecture halls padlocked.
The rules also stipulate the exact size for libraries and administrative offices, the ratio of professors to assistant professors and lecturers, quotas for student enrollment and the number of computer terminals, books and journals that must be on site.
"I am not free to run this school as I wish," Ms. D'Mello, 51 years old, says. "I am at the whim of unrealistic demands."
"We have not found a way to do it. We have not been very successful at it...the problem we tend to run into is that the most influential and well-educated people either have their kids in private schools, or they have their kids in an enclave inside the high school that are called honor's courses, where the teaching is pretty decent and so, if we go to a school and say, let's change things here, they say, no way, you're going to mess our little enclave up. All the kids go through the same front door, but really it's a separate school inside there that's allowing us not to be part of that insanity, and so don't mess with the thing that works well for us. And I do think, if you want to stand up to some of the practices that are not focused on the needs of the students, you need a broad set of parents. I think we're very weak on this point.
During the presidential election, we had two advocacy efforts. One about global development, and one about education. And we didn't end up spending the amount of money that we had available for the advocacy because most of what we were causing people to do was to mouth platitudes. ... On global development, which I thought was the harder of the two, we actually succeeded because people never even talked about it at all, and we actually got them to talk about it."
One foggy morning last November, officer Kang Jin-jin heard the distress call on his police radio: An 18-year-old girl about to take the national college-entrance exam had left her admission ticket at home.
Mr. Kang dashed off to the girl's apartment, got the ticket from her father, and raced across town on his motorcycle, arriving at the school just in time for the test.
"I had to ignore traffic signs and turn on the siren," he said. "It was a bit risky, but I tried my best."
Mr. Kang's heroic effort is hardly an isolated one. On the day each November that high-school seniors take the college-entrance test -- Nov. 13, this year -- South Korea is a changed country.
Many offices and the stock market open at 10 a.m., an hour later than usual, to keep the roads free for students on their way to the test. All other students get the day off to keep schools quiet for the test takers. And while students are taking the listening portions of the tests, planes can't land or take off at the nation's airports. Aircraft arriving from other countries are ordered to circle at altitudes above 10,000 feet.
The Boston Globe reported recently that Michelle Wie, the 16-year-old Korean-American golfing phenomenon, not only speaks Korean and English, but has also taken four years of Japanese, and is beginning to study Mandarin. She is planning to apply early to Stanford University. I would be willing to bet, however, that in high school her academic writing has been limited to the five-paragraph essay, and it is very likely that she has not been assigned a complete nonfiction book.
For the last two years, and especially since the National Endowment for the Arts unveiled the findings of its large ($300,000) study of reading of fiction in the United States, I have been seeking funding for a much smaller study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools. This proposed study, which education historian Diane Ravitch has called "timely and relevant," has met with little interest, having so far been turned down by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a number of foundations and institutes both large and small.
Still, I have a fair amount of anecdotal evidence some of it from people who would be quite shocked to hear that high school English departments were no longer assigning any complete novels that the non-assignment of nonfiction books on subjects like history is unremarkable and, in fact, accepted.
A partner in a law firm in Boston, for instance, told me there was no point in such a study, because everyone knows history books aren't assigned in schools. This was the case, he said, even decades ago at his own alma mater, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was assigned only selections, readings, and the like, never a complete book. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said when I lamented that I couldn't find anyone who agrees that high school students should read at least one nonfiction book, "The only hope is parents introducing their kids to reading, and that's a mighty slim hope."
For the last two decades, I have been working to encourage the writing of history research papers by high school students. But it has become apparent to me that one of the problems involved in getting students to undertake such a task is that so many do not read any history, and so have little to write about. Even so, as I began to try to find out about the reading of nonfiction books, I found more and more apathy and acceptance of the situation. As long as the English department controls reading and writing in schools, the reading will be fiction, and the writing will be personal, creative or the five-paragraph essay.
Why is this important? ACT found last Spring that 49% of our high school graduates (half of the 70% who do graduate) cannot read at the level required by freshman college texts. Common sense, buttressed by such work as that of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., would lead to the conclusion that perhaps the reason so many students need remedial work in college and don't return for sophomore year, is that they have never faced a nonfiction book, and thus have so little knowledge that they don't know what their professors are talking about.
These days, of course, there is a great deal of attention given to many educational issues, and one of the current Edupundit maxims is that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality. So lots of attention and many millions of dollars go into teacher training, re-training, professional development, and the like.
The truth may lie elsewhere. The most important variable in student academic achievement is, in my view, student academic work. Those who concern themselves with teacher quality only assume that better teachers will lead to more student work. If they would care to look, however, examples of both lousy teachers with students who do well, and superior teachers with students who do no academic work are everywhere to be found.
Ignoring academic writing and the reading of nonfiction books at the high school level can only prolong our national bout of remediation and failure in college. Let's find out whether our high school students are indeed discouraged from reading a history book and writing a serious term paper. Then we may be able to turn more of our attention to assigning the kind of academic work that leads to the levels of academic achievement we wish for our students.
Will Fitzhugh is the founder of The Concord Review, a journal of high school student research papers, based in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He also founded the National Writing Board, in 1998, and the TCR Institute in 2002, to encourage student writing in history. He can be reached at fitzhugh@tcr.org
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that, "the campaign against homework goes on. Its success will guarantee a steady decline in the very activities that matter most in education: independent reading; thoughtful writing; research projects."
It is clearer and clearer that most high school students, when they do read a book, read fiction. The College Board's Reading List of 101 Books for the College-Bound Student includes only four works of nonfiction: Walden, Emerson's Essays, Night, and The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Nothing by David McCullough, David Hackett Fischer, or any other great contemporary (or past) historian is suggested for the "College-Bound Student."
The SAT, ACT, and NAEP writing assessments, and most state writing standards, require no prior knowledge and challenge students to write their opinions and personal stories in 25 minutes. Unless college history professors start assigning term papers by saying: "'History repeats itself.' See what you can write about that in 25 minutes and turn it in six weeks from now," our high school graduates will continue to find that they have been sadly misled about the demands for academic writing they will face.
A national study done for The Concord Review in 2002, of the assignment of high school history term papers, found that 81% of public high school history teachers never assign a 20-page paper, and 62% never assign a 12-page paper any more, even to high school seniors. The Boston Latin School, a famous exam school, no longer assigns the "traditional history term paper."
One reason for this, I believe, is that teachers find that by the time their students are Juniors and Seniors in high school, they have done so little academic expository writing that they simply could not manage a serious history research paper, if they were asked to do one.
For eight years, I have suggested, to those who doubt the ability of U.S. high school seniors to write academic history research papers, that schools should start on our Page Per Year Plan, which would work as follows:
Each first grader would be required to write a one-page paper on a subject other than herself or himself, with at least one source.
A page would be added each year to the required academic writing, such that, for example, fifth graders would have to write a five-page paper (five sources), ninth graders would have to write a nine-page research paper, with nine sources, and so on, until each and every senior could be asked to prepare a 12-page academic research paper (twelve sources), with endnotes and bibliography, on some historical topic, which the student could choose each year.
This would gradually prepare students for future academic writing tasks, and each senior could graduate from high school knowing more about some important topic than anyone else in the class, and he/she might also have read at least one nonfiction (history) book before college. This could reduce the need for remedial instruction in writing (and perhaps in remedial reading as well) at the college level.
At each grade level, teachers would need more time to help students plan their papers and to evaluate and comment on them when the papers came in, but with our Page Per Year Plan, all students would be likely to graduate from U.S. high schools with better academic expository writing skills and better reading skills.
In our public schools, the power over reading and writing belongs to the English Department, and many social studies and history teachers, perhaps especially those who are preparing students for AP exams, do not believe their students have the time to read a history book or write a history research paper.
While this is the rule, there are exceptions, and I have been glad to publish [835] history papers written by AP history students [from 36 countries] in the last 20 [21] years of The Concord Review. But all too often, those exemplary papers were written by students putting in the extra time and effort to do an independent study, of the sort that Diane Ravitch believes is now in steady decline in our schools.
Of course it is rewarding for me to receive letters, like one from Shounan Ho when she was at Notre Dame Academy in Los Angeles, which included a comment that: "I wrote this paper independently, during my own time out of school. My motives for doing so were both academic and personal. Although history has always been my favorite subject, I had never written a paper with this extensive research before. After reading the high quality of essays in The Concord Review, I was very inspired to try to write one myself. I thought it was a significant opportunity to challenge myself and expand my academic horizons. Thus during the summer before my Senior year, I began doing the research for my own paper." She is now a John Jay Scholar at Columbia University, and it seems likely she found that she had prepared herself well for college work.
But what about those students who depend on educators to set academic standards which will prepare them for the reading and writing tasks ahead? For those students, I recommend that teachers consider the Page Per Year Plan to help their students get ready. Again, this plan would also make it somewhat more likely that our high school graduates would have been asked to read perhaps one complete history book before they leave for college or for work.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh (founder)
Consortium for Varsity Academics® (2007)
The Concord Review (1987)
National Writing Board (1998)
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, MA 01776 USA
(800) 331-5007; (978) 443-0022
fitzhugh@tcr.org; www.tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Q: My son is in elementary school and has already gotten far more homework than last year, going from fourth to fifth grade. The work isn't difficult, but there's a lot of it. Keeping him on task is a nightly struggle at our house. I've talked with his teacher and she says no one else has complained. How much is too much homework?
A: I hate homework. Do I lose my mom sash and crown for admitting that?
I understand the importance of homework: It gives students a chance to review what they're learning in class; it is feedback for teachers so they'll know whether students understand the subjects covered in school; it's a way to extend learning by having students discover new information about a subject; it's practice; it gives parents an opportunity to be involved in their kids' education. That's all positive. But some nights, the homework routine in our house makes me feel like a crinkled, crumpled sheet of notebook paper.
Seattle Public Schools requires its teachers to assign homework. The district's homework policy was adopted way back in 1983 and hasn't been modified since. Here are the district's guidelines for the minimum/maximum amount of homework a student should receive:
Grades K-2: Five to 10 minutes per day or 20 to 40 minutes each week Grades 3-4: 10 to 20 minutes per day, 40-80 minutes each week Grades 5-6: 20 to 40 minutes per day, 80-160 minutes a week Middle School: One to two hours per night, five to 10 hours per week High School: Two hours per night, 10 hours each week
With the federal government under pressure to rescue banks, auto makers and homeowners, as well as a federal budget deficit that could double to $1 trillion this fiscal year, many observers question whether Mr. Obama will undertake education measures that require significant spending.
Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, said he expects Mr. Obama to sidestep most major issues involving public schools and instead focus on small, symbolic initiatives in the mold of former President Bill Clinton's promotion of school uniforms as a way to instill discipline in classrooms.
Economically, the new president faces a "tough, tough balancing act," said Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools and an education adviser to Mr. Obama. Even so, Mr. Duncan said education has been pivotal to Mr. Obama's personal story, and he predicted "a very strong, aggressive and comprehensive strategy" on the issue. "This is something that is hugely important to him," said Mr. Duncan, who has been mentioned as a possible secretary of education in the Obama administration.
Incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, speaking on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, said stimulating the economy and getting people back to work will be the new administration's top priority. But he added that the president-elect sees the financial crisis as an opportunity to make changes in energy policy, health care and education. "Those issues that are usually referred to as long-term are immediate," he said.
The melody was familiar - "Frere Jacques," the nursery rhyme sung by generations of schoolchildren - but the words weren't.
"Xia zhou jian, Xia zhou jian," intoned Xu Chen to the final notes of the song. Gathered around her, the children attending the first day of the first Panda Academy at the Racine Montessori School followed along even if they didn't know what they were saying. Roughly translated it meant "See you next week," and it was the phrase which students would be expected to repeat as they left the room following their first lesson in the Chinese language.
The academy, which began Sept. 27, grew out of a desire to teach adopted Asian children about their heritage, to offer the language of a nation important to modern commerce, and to eliminate long drives for parents.
"I think every community has a burgeoning Asian population and not necessarily by adoption. The percentage of Asians in the country is very small, but it's the fastest-growing," said Kelly Gallaher, one of the people who organized the academy.
For students in the Washington region, picking a college entrance test has become a multiple-choice question.
The SAT has long dominated the bustling college-prep market in the District and its suburbs. But the rival ACT is making inroads, buoyed by a shift in conventional wisdom, which now holds that the tests are of about equal value and that a student would be wise to take both. Colleges are driving the trend because admission officers are spreading the word that it doesn't matter which test students take.
The ascendance of the ACT has brought Hertz-Avis style competition to the test-obsessed D.C. region. It's a boon to students, who find they have more ways than ever to impress colleges. The SAT tests how students think. The ACT measures what they have learned. Each is a better fit for some students than others.
Four Southern California charters and one L.A. Unified campus are among the top 15 serving students living in poverty.
The burgeoning charter school movement in California has largely made its mark as an alternative to low-performing inner-city schools. An analysis being issued today suggests that, at their best, charters are doing that job well, outperforming most traditional public schools that serve children in poverty.
Using the Academic Performance Index as a measuring tool, the California Charter Schools Assn. found that 12 of the top 15 public schools in California that cater primarily to poor children are charters.
"These results show that charter schools are opening doors of opportunity for California's most underserved students, and effectively advancing them on the path to academic success," said Peter Thorp, interim head of the association. He urged traditional public schools to study the charters to replicate their success.
The association, which is an advocate for charter schools, focused on schools where at least 70% of the children qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Of more than 3,000 public schools statewide that fit that description, the highest API score -- 967 -- was earned by American Indian Public Charter, a middle school in Oakland whose students are primarily Asian, black and Latino, and have a poverty rate of 98%. It was followed by its sibling, American Indian Public High School, with a score of 958.
The man who boasts of walking seven miles to school, barefoot, every morning, happily drives his own grandchildren ten blocks in an S.U.V. We have become convinced that the surest path to success for our children involves providing them with a carefully optimized educational experience: the "best" schools, the most highly educated teachers, the smallest classrooms, the shiniest facilities, the greatest variety of colors in the art-room paint box. But one need only look at countries where schoolchildren outperform their American counterparts--despite larger classes, shabbier schools, and smaller budgets--to wonder if our wholesale embrace of the advantages of advantages isn't as simplistic as Carnegie's wholesale embrace of the advantages of disadvantages.
In E. J. Kahn's Profile, he tells the story of a C.E.O. retreat that Weinberg attended, organized by Averell Harriman. It was at Sun Valley, Harriman's ski resort, where, Kahn writes, it emerged that Weinberg had never skied before:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today unveiled new directions for its education giving, which include working to double the number of students who complete some kind of postsecondary degree.
Efforts also would be made to identify and reward good teaching, help average teachers get better, devise better tests and create a national set of learning standards for high schools.
Bill and Melinda Gates announced these and other plans today to a group of about 100 guests in Seattle that included many big names in U.S. education.
The leaders of the nation's two largest teachers unions were there, as well as superintendents of some of the biggest districts in the country, including New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Advisers to president-elect Barack Obama also were present, as were several people who are rumored to be in the running to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education.
Years after graduation, he's hearing the ring of the school bell at Sherman Middle School on Madison's north side.
"I've had an effect on a number of the kids' math scores," said Schmidt, 44, whose background is in computer software design. "I know they're doing better because they tell me they're doing better."
He said that he isn't happy to take the credit, which is something that almost has to be pulled out of him. But the five students who he tutors weekly in math as part of the "Schools of Hope" tutoring program sing his praises when he's out of the room.
"Monty's awesome," said seventh-grader Henrietta Allison.
"They know that when he comes in on Monday, he's going to be asking, 'Did you do your homework? What are you missing?'" said teacher Chrissy Mitlyng. "They expect that, and I think that's a really good relationship to have."
Teachers report that students who work with the tutors are more confident after their sessions, and are more likely to speak up in class and participate in group work. While classroom confidence might be the most notable impact, it trickles down to fill the racial achievement gap the program was designed to help close, WISC-TV reported.
In 1995, 28.5 percent of black students in the Madison Metropolitan School District tested below the minimal standard on the third grade reading test, along with 9.7 percent of Latino students, 24.2 percent of Asian students and 4.1 percent of white students.
On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
......
What the superintendent is saying is that MMSD has closed the achievement gap associated with race now that roughly the same percentage of students in each subgroup score at the minimal level (limited achievement in reading, major misconceptions or gaps in knowledge and skills of reading). That's far from the original goal of the board. We committed to helping all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level as demonstrated by all students in all subgroups scoring at proficient or advanced reading levels on the WRCT.
At Clarksburg High School in Montgomery County, teacher Jeanine Hurley's English class finished "The Canterbury Tales" and just started "Hamlet." Senior Raphael Nguyen says he doesn't spend a lot of time on homework because Hurley doesn't give much.
At Langley High School in Fairfax County, teacher Kevin Howard's English class is studying "Othello" after reading William Faulkner's "Light in August." Senior Ryan Ainsworth, 17, said he does an average of 75 minutes reading and writing each night because Howard can pour it on.
Although students in these classes don't read the same works, they are taking the same course: Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition. And their teachers have the same goal: for students to learn how to connect text to meaning through skills assessed on the AP exam in May.
High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That's the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders. Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state's community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school. (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)
Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams -- which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests -- as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year. "We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education," says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire's Commissioner for Education. "And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there."
The number of Milwaukee children attending private schools using publicly funded vouchers has crossed 20,000 for the first time, according to data released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
At the same time, the number of students in the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools elementary, middle and high schools has fallen below 80,000 for the first time in well over a decade and declined for at least the 10th year in a row.
Amid a host of other factors shaping the school landscape in Milwaukee, those two trends point to some of the key stresses and looming issues for both MPS, which remains one of the nation's larger school systems, and the voucher program, the largest, oldest and arguably most significant urban school voucher program in the United States.
For MPS, declining enrollment means greater financial pressure, a need to close school buildings and a continual search for ways to attract students and raise overall levels of achievement.
For the voucher program, the increase means the state-imposed cap on its size is coming into view, and issues related to the property-tax impact of the funding program are becoming more urgent. In addition, with Democrats having gained control of the state Legislature, efforts to impose more regulations on schools with voucher students are likely to become much more serious.
Nationwide, the momentum behind support for voucher programs such as the one in Milwaukee has been limited, and most likely has lost further steam with the election of Sen. Barack Obama to be president. Although Obama favors charter schools - generally, independent publicly funded schools that have more public accountability than private schools - he has not favored vouchers, and the Congress, controlled firmly by Democrats, is not going to support such plans either.
Her dazzling fastball and sizzling bat have been on the radar of college coaches for quite a while. As a junior at Ashland High School, Nicole D'Argento was named the state's softball player of the year.
Letters from colleges started arriving for D'Argento, a senior this year, in the summer of 2005, before her freshman year. Now, that stack of letters sits in her living room and "looks at least a foot tall," she said recently with a laugh.
Softball has long been a year-round commitment for D'Argento. Her older brother, Russ, played baseball at Old Dominion and the University of Connecticut after helping propel Ashland High to the Division 3 state title in 2000.
Last spring, Nicole hurled the Clocker softball team to a perfect 28-0 season, and the Division 2 state title. She has a career earned-run average hovering under 0.50 and she will enter her senior season just 16 strikeouts shy of the exclusive 500 mark for her high school career.
With so many colleges lining up for her services, D'Argento made her decision early.
Last fall, she made a nonbinding verbal agreement to attend Boston College, which nosed out the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia.
Last fall, she made a nonbinding verbal agreement to attend Boston College, which nosed out the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia.
On Wednesday, the first day that nonfootball student-athletes are allowed to officially commit, D'Argento will sign her letter of intent to Boston College, joining a number of other local area athletes who will make their college choice official as early as possible.
It's a decision she is glad to be done with.
"You have no idea," D'Argento said. "All my friends right now are looking at schools, visiting schools. They always tell me how lucky I am. It's such a relief; I couldn't be happier."
The early-signing period starts Wednesday and ends Nov. 19. According to the NCAA, early signees accounted for 52 percent of scholarship athletes that signed for the 2007-2008 academic year, an eight percent increase from 2006-2007.
"For athletes that are getting full scholarships, the early-signing period allows them to cease the recruiting process," said Cindy Scott, Bentley University's assistant athletic director, who oversees compliance for the Waltham school. Before arriving at Bentley in 1997, Scott served as the women's basketball coach at Southern Illinois for 21 seasons. "A lot of them have seen the process begin much earlier for them, sometimes their freshman and sophomore years. It lets them end a stressful process faster, because it's lasted longer for them."
For many athletes such as D'Argento, the process can be stressful. College coaches are not allowed to make direct contact with prospective student-athletes until the July 1 before their senior year. Student-athletes may be contacted by mail and are allowed to call coaches themselves.
Making a decision early relieves a lot of the anxiety, at least for some students.
Elaine Schwaiger, the women's softball coach at Merrimack College, said "most of the time, you can sense what a kid wants and how sure they are of it.
"Some kids know what they want; they have a vision for their future and they're all business. When you have a kid who knows what she wants, the early-signing period is perfect. When you have one that doesn't, it could make things more stressful because it's one more deadline to deal with."
However, Elaine Sortino, University of Massachusetts softball coach, wonders if the early-signing process is "pigeon-holing kids."
"I think that you're seeing fewer multi-sport athletes," said Sortino, entering her 30th season in Amherst.
"We're having dialogue right now with juniors; I can feel their level of stress."
D'Argento has starred at Ashland High, but she was essentially recruited through her play with the Polar Crush, a Worcester-based select team that traveled to showcases all over the country during the summer. Ashland High coach Steve O'Neill said that he never received an inquiry from a college coach regarding D'Argento.
Erik Murphy, a 6-foot-10 senior on the basketball team at St. Mark's School in Southborough, was on the watch list early on. Clemson sent him a mailing before his freshman year, and Boston College made an offer a bit later. His father, Jay, had starred for the Eagles during the Tom Davis era.
He considered BC but verbally committed to the University of Florida in January.
"I never really stressed out," said Murphy, who will sign his letter at St. Mark's on Wednesday. "My dad helped me out a lot because he went through the same thing; we went through all of the visits together. When I did Florida, I knew I was in the right place.
"When I got my first offer from BC, I was real excited, obviously because my dad went there. At first, that was where I thought I was going to end up, but my dad sat me down and had me weigh my options. He told me to take my time, and make my decision based on what I thought was the right fit."
One of his teammates, 6-foot-9 junior Nate Lubick of Southborough, the son of St. Mark's coach Dave Lubick, verbally committed to Georgetown last month.
Weston High pitcher Sahil Bloom, who gave a verbal commitment to Stanford in July, said that he started receiving standard, nonpersonalized letters two to three times per week as a sophomore.
So with the aid of coaches and a personal trainer, he started to get the word out on himself, through e-mails and letters. A leap in his athleticism didn't hurt; his fastball was clocked this summer in the low 90s. By the time he committed to Stanford, a number of other schools were on his trail.
Once things started picking up, Bloom was receiving personalized letters, some of them handwritten.
"You really always want baseball to be fun, and it wasn't for a little while," Bloom said. "I started thinking about recruiting way too much during the high school season. It kind of alienated me from my teammates who weren't going through the process. They couldn't understand what I was going through."
Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High senior Derek Lowe can relate. A senior captain on the football team, he verbally committed to play baseball at William & Mary in August. He recalls receiving at least one call a day.
"It was brutal," he said, laughing and sighing at the memory.
Brendan Hall can be reached at bhall59@hotmail.com.
Free and compulsory education for all children in the age group of 6-14 has become a fundamental right under the Constitution. Its objective is to improve the socio-economic status of the backward communities.
But it is not an easy task to enforce this because a majority of the children in this age group continue to remain half-fed and educationally backward. The goal of education for all seems a distant reality because states have been lagging behind in implementing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and owing to poverty there has been severe discrimination against girls in having access to schooling. The World Education Forum has urged removal of gender disparity for equal enrolment of girls and boys to achieve education for all.
At the same time, the need for quality education should not be overlooked. The backward communities must have access to quality education to uplift them to improve their living standards. It is proposed that some seats be reserved for children of poor families in the affluent private schools to provide them with quality education. But it is argued that this step may be detrimental to their interests as the children from a poor background may develop an inferiority complex while interacting with children from a higher status; this could be embarrassing to their respective families
Decentralization must be accompanied by transparency so the public easily understands how tax dollars are being used or misused. One way to make education financing more transparent is to simplify the way Washington doles out money. Federal dollars could be attached to the individual child -- so-called backpacking -- and that money would be portable, meaning it would follow the child to whichever school he or she attends.
Dan Lips, an education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, notes that federal Title I dollars, which are supposed to go to disadvantaged students but because of complicated financing formulas result in wide per-student funding differences from school to school, "could be delivered through a simple formula based on the number of low-income students in a state" and "states could be allowed to use Title I funds in ways that make it follow the child." The result would be a "simple and transparent system of school funding."
Furthermore, Republicans should advocate for widespread state-based parental empowerment, specifically through school-choice options, to ensure that the state and local affiliates of Mr. Obama's friends at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers do not hijack decision-making power. Only if all children, not just those who are poor or have special needs, have an exit ticket out of the public school system through, say, a voucher or a tuition tax credit will state and local officials have the incentive to use their greater powers for the benefit of students rather than special interests.
My publisher and I had a fight over the subtitle of my upcoming book, "Work Hard. Be Nice," about the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Okay, it wasn't a fight exactly. My editor at Algonquin Books, Amy Gash, is too polite and professional for that. It was a spirited discussion. Gash said the Algonquin view was that my subtitle, "How Two Inspired Teachers Created America's Best Schools" was off-putting and hyperbolic. Who was I to say what was best and what wasn't?
I defended the loaded adjective because I thought it was accurate and would inspire useful arguments about how to make schools better. Nonetheless, Algonquin seemed more interested in selling books than encouraging my pugnacious tendencies, and I saw their point. We considered more than 100 alternatives before settling on "How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America." That seems like a trivial change, but it's not. A new research assessment by Columbia University scholar Jeffrey R. Henig suggests it is the right way to think about these intriguing but still developing schools, and about other new approaches to schooling that may bloom in the future.
The 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District feed off the work of KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, who started teaching impoverished children in Houston when they were just out of college in 1992. The first KIPP class began in 1994. It had a longer school day, required summer school, required homework, frequent contact with parents, consistent methods of discipline, imaginative and energetic teaching and lots of singing and fun. It has become the best known and most researched network of independent public charter schools in the country.
That's the theme of the Green Charter Schools Network, an organization headquartered in Madison that links environmental charter schools around the nation. It was also the theme of a conference Saturday at the Pyle Center that drew 200 people from around Wisconsin and more than 10 other states.
"We hope to make this a national movement," said Jim McGrath, president of the new Green Charter Schools Network. "We have identified 135 green charter schools around the country, and we believe there are another 150."
That includes 18 in Wisconsin, in locations as far flung as Green Lake, Merrimac, Rhinelander, Oshkosh and Stevens Point.
Charter schools are innovative public schools that provide educational choices for families and school-site accountability for results. Forty states allow charter schools, and they are formed in Wisconsin when a contract is signed between a charter school and its school district or school board. The arrangement gives the school more autonomy, more on-site decision-making, but also considerable responsibility for results.
Deputy Superintendent Richard Moniuszko said he will direct principals to prepare a grade distribution chart for this year's seniors to show, for example, how many students earned 4.0 or 3.0 grade-point averages at a given school. The form, meant to accompany college applications, also will be sent as an addendum to thousands of early applications that have been filed by students in the region's largest school system.
The action was prompted by parents who are lobbying to change the county's grading scale, which requires 94 percent for an A and gives no extra credit for honors courses. They say the policy is punitive compared with the 90 percent standard used in many other places, including Montgomery County, and puts their children at a disadvantage in applying for colleges and scholarships. Fairfax County gives half a point for Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, less than what many other school systems give.
My name is Lindsay Brown, and I am the chair of the history department at St. Andrew's School in Delaware. I have been thinking about the role of academics and athletics in college placement for some time, and being at a boarding school I wear many hats and so see multiple sides of this issue. I do a great deal of work with athletes that I coach in the sport of rowing, helping them to be recruits for college coaches. I began talking to people and commenting about how I had never done any recruiting for our top history students, and that there was a significant contrast between athletic and academic interest in the admission process for colleges.
With these vague thoughts, I decided to write something, possibly to send to some publication(?) or maybe just to do some therapeutic venting on my keyboard. I sent a draft of my thoughts to several of my colleagues, including our librarian who is a relentless researcher. In response to my short essay, she sent me your article on the "History Scholar" on very similar ideas--I guess I wasn't as original as I thought! But I wanted to send you my thoughts, ask if you had a moment to give me any feedback, and then also ask if you think it was acceptable for me to potentially send my essay out--where exactly I'm not sure.
In any case, I was impressed with your work and your information on this topic.
The headlines are meant to grab our attention and alert us to a crisis in education: "High school graduates are not ready for college" or some variation on this idea that college freshmen can't do the work their professors demand of them. Colleges and professors lament this situation, and, in a related vein, often complain that athletics and athletic recruiting are running out of control to the detriment of the academic mission of their institutions. And not just the big schools that compete for national championships in football or basketball are sounding this alarm; even top tier, highly selective colleges and universities sing a similar melody. What should happen to correct this situation?
Ironically, I would like to suggest that colleges look to their athletic departments for inspiration and a possible way to improve the academic strength of their student body.
I am a high school history teacher and chairman of the history department at a boarding school that sends 100% of its graduates on to colleges and universities, including many of the most selective schools. I am also the boys' varsity crew coach, and many of our athletes compete in the world of college rowing. There is an overlap in many cases between the most selective academic and rowing colleges, and the Ivy League schools would be at the top of that list but there are many others including schools such as Cal, Trinity, Wisconsin, Williams, Colby to name a few.
There are numerous articles available that bemoan the poor level of preparation of high school students for college academics, or that assert that college athletics have run wild, destroying academic integrity. In my dual roles as teacher and coach, I have some observations to offer from the perspective of a high school teacher, albeit a teacher at a rigorous, selective boarding school, and the perhaps counterintuitive suggestion that if colleges are serious about improving the quality of their students, they should learn from their coaches. Here is the crux of the matter: during my 22 years of working as a teacher/coach, I have fielded innumerable calls and emails from rowing coaches asking me for direct information about my top athletes. Coaches want to learn about the athletes they are recruiting, and they want to get past the basic numbers--height, weight, or score on a rowing machine--and determine if the athlete would contribute to their program. In that same time I have never once had a professor or department head call me and ask for information about our top history scholars. Professors seem to be totally separated from the admission process of their college while coaches are working closely with admissions to try to bring the best athletes to the school. Why don't professors, or at least department heads, work more directly with their college and with high schools to recruit the top students?
Rowing is not a widespread sport; there are no youth rowing leagues, for example, that students join at age 5. There is, however, a rowing machine that serves to give basic information about a rower's strength, stamina, and therefore athletic potential. It is called a Concept 2 Ergometer, and the score a rower earns on this machine can be compared with any other rower anywhere in the country, or even the world. It is an SAT for rowing, so to speak, with many the same drawbacks of that standardized
test. Brute force on the rowing machine does not necessarily tell a college coach about the athlete's commitment to his team, his love of the sport itself, his attitude, his work ethic, or his willingness to take learn and take coaching. On the other hand, an athlete from a small or obscure high school rowing program can get noticed and even recruited if he can achieve a top score on the machine. In other words, a coach looks at an athlete's score, assesses potential, and then follows up by contacting the coach to learn what lies beyond the mere numbers.
When coaches call me, they ask questions such as "does this student work hard?" Or "does he contribute to the team spirit?" They ask about his technique while rowing, and his general level of athleticism. They are searching for information about the intangibles of the sport that will give them a better picture of the applicant. I am friends or at least friendly with many of these college coaches, having gotten to know them
over the years, and I give a positive but always honest evaluation of the athletes I coach. Then, if a coach decides that he likes the profile of the athlete, he will talk with his college admissions office and offer his support for the athletes application. The admissions office might ask further questions of the coach, but there is a working relationship there that in the end is trying to find student/athletes that are good fits for
the school.
Do college professors or department heads do the same thing? Do they seek out high school students who are interested in their subject area and make the effort to improve the quality of the students they teach by recruiting? Do they take the time to talk to the admissions office on behalf of high school students with particularly strong talent? As far as I can tell, they do not. So then I wonder why professors lament the poor quality of the students they teach and why sometimes those same professors complain that athletics are dominating their school. It seems to me that the better response would be to follow the model of the coaches and talk to high school teachers about their top students, build a relationship with those students and assist them in the process of applying to their school.
Furthermore, when I talk to our alumni about their college experience, it seems that most find their coach is the adult with whom they have the closest personal relationship. Their coach is the one who knows them by name. Their coach is the person who shows a genuine interest in their general health and well-being, including their academic progress. In the best rowing programs, the coaches work with the athletes to make sure those athletes are finding success academically: they put their athletes in study hall or get them help with study skills if that is needed. In the best-run rowing programs, the coach is actually a strong supporter of the academic program. For one thing, in rowing there is no professional league and no potential lucrative rowing contracts out there, so coaches know that it will be success in academics that will lead to each athlete's future employment. Furthermore, rowers as a group tend to be driven, goal-oriented, and self-disciplined, and my experience has been that the best students are often the best rowers. They know how to work hard: both in sports and in academics. Rowers generally insist on keeping their academic work strong, and a coach who ignores the rowers' desire to achieve success academically risks losing athletes. Again, coaches understand that they get the best performance by connecting with their athletes and caring for them. Could the academic side of colleges learn
from this example?
I know that I worked hardest for those professors I believed had my best interests at heart and who made the effort to get to know me as an individual. I have tried to do the same with the students I teach and with the students I coach.
Having challenged colleges and professors to think like their athletic colleagues and work to "recruit" top students in their respective fields, I also want to challenge high school students to work in their own self-interest and pursue academic, departmental-specific recruiting. Just as athletes contact college coaches and try to get support from those coaches in the admissions process, students with a special talent or interest in a given subject area should contact department chairs at colleges of interest. In the world of rowing, I am confident that when a rower makes such a telephone call or sends off an email, the coach will respond and follow up. They will have a conversation, and the coach will make some initial decisions about the compatibility of the athlete with
their program. The coaches not only ask questions about rowing prowess, they also, even first, ask about academic strength, because they know that this is the first and highest hurdle for any potential recruit. The key point, though, is that there is a conversation, and the coach follows up with any potential recruit. My rowers know this, and so they are motivated to seek out the assistance of a coach. Since no one has ever heard of a history department chair working actively to recruit a top history scholar, my top students don't even think to make such a call. I wonder what would happen if they did?
I will be talking with coaches soon about the rowers who have applied to their college from my school--I know those calls are coming, and I look forward to talking about the strengths of our athletes. I am still waiting to hear from any history chair at any of these same schools about the many fine history scholars we have here; I would love to explain our history curriculum and give them a picture of the students beyond the score of any of the standardized tests.
A group of city officials are exploring a program that would pay for Racine high school graduates to attend college.
The idea is based on the Kalamazoo Promise, a program started three years ago in Kalamazoo, Mich. to attract families to the city. The program is simple: If a child graduates from a Kalamazoo High School, their tuition is paid to any Michigan university or tech school. That could amount to $36,000 for a student attending the University of Michigan. The only requirement is that a student maintains a 2.0 GPA and makes continual progress toward their high school diploma.
Aldermen Aron Wisneski and Greg Helding, and City Administrator Ben Hughes, are seeking two $8,000 grants to study creating a similar program here. The City Council is expected to grant permission to pursue the grant on Wednesday.
The state's new superintendent of public instruction said he would begin his tenure by taking a long look at the Indiana Department of Education as an organization to make sure it is run as efficiently as possible.
"I want to make this a customer service resource that school districts can depend on," Republican Tony Bennett said.
He defeated Democrat Richard D. Wood, who had been superintendent of Tippecanoe County Schools, on Tuesday.
Bennett, superintendent of Greater Clark County Schools, said another priority will be to reduce regulations from the state Department of Education so districts can work on improving student achievement.
"We need to see some deregulation," he said. "Regulation handcuffs the schools from pursuing their agendas. I intend on spending the first 60 to 90 days going through each state regulation and deciding which are restrictive and which are not."
The issue is not about the quality of education for the children who can afford it. It is about a serious lack of access for those who cannot.
One of our national problems that has been swept under the carpet because of the preoccupation with the current political crisis is our education system.
With a high youth literacy rate and a primary school attendance ratio at 98 per cent, you might feel there is nothing to worry about. But sighing with relief will be our big mistake.
Although the constitution ensures every child's right to a free 12-year education, many are still falling through the cracks. And that starts early; only 88 per cent of primary school pupils make it to lower secondary and a mere 69 per cent to higher secondary. It is the same pattern when the pupils move up the education pyramid.
The issue here is not about the quality of education for the children who can afford it. It is about a serious lack of access for those who cannot - even though compulsory education is supposed to be free.
According to a recent study by Thai Education Watch Network, more than 1.3 million children still do not have access to compulsory education. They are primarily poor children from ethnic minorities along the borders as well as those in the restive deep South, and immigrant children. Other vulnerable groups include street children, slum children and those who live in very remote villages.
Tuesday's historic election of Barack Obama was, to most onlookers, a watershed event -- a political game-changer, a passing of the generational torch and a defining moment in American race relations.
To the students in Gil Stange's second-period AP Economics class at Towson High School, it was a chance to test a theory: What if the Republican candidate had been the African American and the Democrat the 72-year-old white guy?
"Is it really overcoming race?" asked Allison Rich, 17, dressed in a bright-red University of New Hampshire sweatshirt. "Or is it just a party issue?"
As the results of the election sank in Wednesday, teachers in high school classrooms across the USA found themselves debriefing a group of young people who are, by all accounts, more informed and civic-minded than any in recent memory. They came of age after 9/11, after all.
Students at Wyoming Virtual School don't have to worry about what to wear on the first day of school. They just stay home, log on to personal computers lent by K12 Inc., and start the day.
The Herndon, Va., technology-based education company provides specialized curriculum and educational services to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. It launched its first offering seven years ago for 900 students in two states. Since then, it has seen enrollment climb. K12 now enrolls about 40,800 students in 21 states and the District of Columbia.
K12 says virtual schools are a viable alternative for students in a range of different circumstances. For instance, it might help students who are gifted, have special needs, are unhappy with the education in the local schools, or are located in rural areas. The services also can alleviate overcrowding in urban schools, the company says.
One of K12's founders was William J. Bennett, the former U.S. education secretary, although he subsequently resigned as chairman. The company's stock went public in December.
K12's growth may be challenged, however, by education budget cuts on the local, state and federal levels, mounting competition and opposition coming from proponents of traditional education.
To get ahead in India's increasingly competitive auto market, Toyota Motor Corp. is building a new plant and freshening its lineup. It has also made an unusual investment: It opened a school.
Built on a rugged hillside in southern India that is populated by wildcats and monkeys, Toyota's sprawling technical training school, which opened last year, gives about 180 junior-high-school graduates an education in everything from dismantling transmissions to Japanese group exercises.
Toyota wants to turn students like Satish Lakshman, the son of a poor farmer, into a skilled employee who can boost the auto maker's fortunes in this key emerging market. "We are learning discipline, confidence and continuous improvement," says Mr. Lakshman, an energetic 18-year-old.
Competition for entrance to Toyota's school is tough. The institute received 5,000 applications for 64 slots when it opened last year. The draw for these young men, all from poor families, is a free education and a job if they do well. The first class will graduate from the three-year program in 2010, when Toyota plans to open the plant to make its new small car.
Since she started working at the mall six months ago, Joy Stout has come close to draining her bank account to buy clothes and eat out with friends.
The Cleveland High School senior hoped to save about half the cash from her weekend job at Jamba Juice in the Lloyd Center but found she was going paycheck to paycheck.
She's getting better -- her parents encouraged her to open a bank account and keep track of where her money went. And this fall, only a couple of months into her first personal finance class, she's learning lessons about spending and saving that can take years to master.
"When you are trying to figure out whether to buy something, you got to ask yourself if you want this or if you need it," says Stout, 18. "If you only want it, is it worth spending on if you could save money for later? I want to save money to have a car."
I received a newsletter in the mail yesterday from Toki Middle School, where my son is now a sixth-grader. The principal's letter says:
"With the introduction of standards-based middle school report cards, we decided to send first quarter progress reports only to students currently not meeting grade level standards in curricular areas."
So, assuming my child meets the standards, he just doesn't matter? He's not worth the time to figure out how to fill out the new report cards? The teachers are taking an extra half day today (early release: 11:30) to work more on dealing with these new report cards - and they've already taken at least one or two other days - but it's still too hard to give my child a report card?
What if I want to know how well my child is doing? What if I want to know if he's EXCEEDING the standards? Oh, wait.... I forgot. MMSD doesn't care if he exceeds them. They just want to know if he MEETS them. God forbid I learn how MUCH he's exceeding them by, or if he's just skating and is merely meeting the standards. Or if he excels in one subject but is simply OK in another. We went through this in elementary school, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it's happening in middle school.
I know there's a teacher conference coming up, but if they're not giving us report cards, then I'm thinking 15 minutes isn't enough time to really lay out my child's strengths and weaknesses in several different subjects. It's not enough time for the teacher to give me a thorough assessment of my child's progress. Oh, wait....I forgot. MMSD doesn't care about giving me a thorough assessment. Judging from our experience in elementary school, the teachers just want you in and out of there as quickly as possible. They don't want to answer my questions about how we can help him at home so he can do better in any subjects. ("Your son is a joy to have in class. He's doing well in all subjects. He talks a little too much, but we're working on that. Thanks for coming!")
They DID send home a note asking if I needed to meet with any of his Unified Arts teachers (in addition to just his homeroom teacher) - but I checked no, because I assumed we'd be getting report cards with information from all his teachers! Nice of MMSD to wait until AFTER those papers had been turned in to let us know we wouldn't be GETTING report cards. (Yes, I'll be emailing the principal to let her know I've changed my mind.)
Oh, and I CAN sign in to Infinite Campus to see what's going on with my child's record (which hopefully is updated more often that the Toki Web site, which we were told would be updated every three or four weeks, but hasn't been updated since before the beginning of school). But to do this, I have to **go into the school during school hours** with a photo ID. I can't just use social security numbers or anything else to access this online. Could they be more clear in the message that they'd rather you not use Infinite Campus?
Isn't it bad enough that MMSD doesn't do thorough third-quarter report cards, because they believe not enough time has elapsed between the second and third quarters to make any discernible improvement? If my child isn't making any improvement, if my child's work isn't worthy of a report card, then WHAT'S HE DOING IN SCHOOL?
We moved here four years ago, so looking forward to the "great" Madison schools. We couldn't have been more wrong. My bright children are lagging. My sixth-grade son who tested as gifted before we moved to Madison is no longer (witness his dropping test scores - oh, wait...they're still average or above, so MMSD doesn't care).
I've brought up my concerns repeatedly. I've offered constructive suggestions. I've offered to help, at school and at home. I did two years as a PTO president in the elementary school and struggled unsuccessfully to get improvements. I might as well have thrown myself in front of a semi truck for all the good it's done and for how beaten down I feel by this school system. The minute this housing market turns around, I'm investigating the nearby schooling options with an eye toward getting the heck out of here. I'm SO FED UP with MMSD and it's reverse-discrimination against children who are average and above.
One of the most eye-catching elements of Boston School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson's reorganization plan - the creation of two single-gender academies - seems to have just one problem: They appear to be illegal in Massachusetts.
Public schools cannot deny a student admission based on gender under state law, which could prevent Boston from trying a strategy that has been gaining momentum in other cities nationwide and that advocates say leads to much higher rates of learning.
The problem could lead to one of several possible changes to the reorganization plan, which Johnson is scheduled to revisit with the School Committee tonight after passionate objections were raised by many parents, students, and teachers who do not want their schools to close.
The School Committee requested more details on the plan to close about a dozen schools, which would leave five buildings empty while the others would be used to house new schools or expand popular ones.
Last June, when Los Angeles performance artist and public radio commentator Sandra Tsing Loh helped lead a rally to the California Capitol for more school funding, perhaps no one was more surprised than Loh herself. Her transformation from popular author and comic to public schools activist began four years earlier, when her plans to get her older daughter into a good kindergarten went awry. She eventually started an organization called Burning Moms. Loh recounts the journey in Mother on Fire (Crown, $23). She talks with USA TODAY about her experience.
Q: It's 2004. You, your musician husband and your two daughters live in Van Nuys. Your 4-year-old is in preschool and you begin searching for a kindergarten. What happens next?
A: We're a middle-class family, which feels like we're the last middle-class family in Los Angeles -- the last one had packed up the Volvo wagon and gone to Portland a year earlier. When kids hit school age, people just start fleeing the city unexplained. So I didn't have much real information. ... I'd go on www.greatschools.net, look at the statistics, freak out and not even visit my local school, which is what many parents do.
Q: You began looking into private schools, but many had "nosebleed tuition."
A: I found that the religious ones were more affordable -- the more religious, the more affordable. Catholics were more expensive, Lutherans middle and Baptists were the only ones we could afford. The Quakers were off the charts, particularly if there's the word "Friends" in the title -- or if the kids were being taught in an old Quaker wooden schoolhouse with authentic Shaker furniture.
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used. This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.
The ninth-grader slouched in the chair one fall day, avoiding the principal's glare. He had the body of a boy, but he was deciding right there what kind of man he would be.
At the start of the school year, this child's education was flying off the rails. Mark E. Fossett, principal of Suitland High School in Prince George's County, called up the boy's attendance record on a computer and rattled off a lengthy list of days missed and classes cut. Unless something changed, he would fail ninth grade.
As schools push to raise graduation rates, many educators are homing in on ninth grade as a moment of high academic risk. Call it the freshman factor.
Last week, Maryland reported that one of every six seniors statewide is at risk of not receiving a diploma in spring because they have not reached minimum scores on four basic tests in algebra, biology, government and English. At Suitland High and countywide in Prince George's, more than a third of seniors are in jeopardy. But for many of those students, troubles began in their freshmen year. That's often when the state algebra test is taken.
The Madison Metropolitan School District [724K PDF]:
The following document explores enrollment trends based on four different factors: intemal transfers, private school enrollments, inter-district Open Enrollment, and home based enrollments. The most current data is provided in each case. Not all data are from the current school year. Certain data are based on DPI reports and there are lags in the dates upon which reports are published.
Summary
Most internal transfers within the MMSD are a function of two factors: programs not offered at each home school (e.g., ESL centers) and students moving between attendance areas and wishing to remain in the school they had been attending prior to the move. Notable schools in regard to transfers include Shorewood Elementary which has both a very high transfer in rate and a very low transfer out rate, Marquette which has a high transfer in rate, and Emerson which has a high transfer out rate.
Based on data reported to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), private school enrollments within the MMSD attendance area have held fairly steady for the past several years, with a slight increase in the most recent two years. The District's percentage of private school enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts. Using data supplied annually to the MMSD by ten area private schools it appears that for the past three year period private school elementary enrollment is declining slightly, middle school enrollment is constant, and high school enrollment has been variable. Stephens, Midvale, Leopold, and Crestwood Elementary Schools, and Cherokee and Whitehorse Middle Schools have experienced declines in private school enrollment during this period. Hawthorne and Emerson Elementary Schools, Toki and (to a lesser extent) Sherman Middle Schools, and West and Memorial High Schools have experienced increases in private school enrollments. The East attendance area has very limited private school enrollment.
Home based education has remained very steady over the past six years based on data reported to the DPI. There is no discernible trend either upward or downward. Roughly 420 to 450 students residing within the MMSD area are reported as participating in home based instruction during this period. Like private school enrollment, the MMSD's percentage of home based enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts.
Open Enrollment, which allows for parents to apply to enroll their Children in districts other than their home district, is by far the largest contributor to enrollment shifts relative to this list of factors. In 2008-09, there are now over 450 students leaving the MMSD to attend other districts compared with just under 170 students entering the MMSD. Transition grades appear to be critical decision points for parents. Certain schools are particularly affected by Open Enrollment decisions and these tend to be schools near locations within close proximity to surrounding school districts. Virtual school options do not appear to be increasing in popularity relative to physical school altematives.
Jason Crocker, an educational consultant in Prince George's County, is exasperated with me and my rating of high schools, called the Challenge Index, based on how many college-level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests schools give. In response to one of my columns, Crocker vowed to refute anything nice I say about AP, particularly in his county.
He reflects the views of many in the Washington area. People wonder why kids are taking wearisome three-hour AP exams (or five-hour IB exams) in history, calculus or physics when their grades aren't that good and their SAT scores are low. Crocker, who is African American, is particularly worried about what all this testing is doing to black students.
"Mr. Mathews, AP in Prince George's County is about setting African American students up for failure to satisfy your Challenge Index," he said. "The flip side of this is that most of these new students taking the exam are not adequately prepared for the exam and Prince George's County cannot recruit enough teachers to teach the exam who are highly qualified."
Let me suggest that Gerald Bracey is not an appropriate person to quote when dealing with mathematics education. First, it was TIMSS in 1995 rather than 1999 when students in the last year of high school were tested. Second, while some of our students who took the advanced math test had only had precalculus, all of them had studied geometry and we did worse in geometry than we did in calculus. Bracey never mentions this. Check the figures yourself to see the disastrous results in geometry.
We had 14% of our students take this test so the fact that some other countries did not test students in vocational tracts is irrelevant since they have a much larger fraction of their students in academic programs than 14%, as we do. About the ETS restudy, while they claim that the original sample was not comparable with other countries, their population was also not comparable with that of other countries. When you take the top say 7% of our students, judged by the courses they take which is not a perfect match but
not bad, and compare them with the top say 20% of the students in another country, that is not the same as comparing them with the top 7% in another country. ETS never mentions this in their press releases on this study.
The inducements range from prepaid cellphones to MP3 players to gift certificates. But most of them are cash: $10 for New York City seventh-graders who complete a periodic test; $50 for Chicago high school freshmen who ace their courses; as much as $110 to Baltimore students for improved scores on the Maryland High School Assessments.
Desperate for ways to ratchet up test scores and close the achievement gap separating white and minority students, school officials from Tucson to Boston are paying kids who put up good numbers.
The District joined the list this fall, launching a one-year study of 3,300 middle schoolers who can earn up to $100 every two weeks for good grades, behavior and attendance. On Oct. 17, the first payday for the Capital Gains program, students collected an average of $43.
The efforts vary widely in scope and objective. But nearly all trigger pa
A FEW weeks ago, the youngest of the 20,953 students at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut went shopping for a calculator. Colin Carlson, who lives in nearby Coventry, took his mother along, as she had the driver's license and the money. He also took a reputation well beyond his 12 years.
Another male student spotted him and said, "Hey, Colin, I hear you're a babe magnet." The boy smiled. But with a full course load and the usual schedule of public appearances ahead of him, he had yet to make finding a girlfriend a priority. So he suspected a bit of social manipulation afoot. The guys know that several female students have become friendly with Colin, and, in his view, they're cozying up to him so that women will notice them.
Even at Colin's tender age, his emergence at Storrs is no longer an oddity. He became a full-time student this fall, but has been a familiar face since he was 8, beginning with a course in French, and a year later in environmental physics and European history. This made him a local celebrity but also resulted in a view in some academic quarters that he is too small for his breeches.
MiShawna Moore has been a hero in the worn neighborhoods behind this city's venerable mansions, a school principal who fed her underprivileged students, clothed them, found presents for them at Christmas and sometimes roused neglectful parents out of bed in the nearby housing projects.
As test scores rocketed at her school, Sanders-Clyde Elementary, the city held her up as a model. The United Way and the Rotary Club honored her, The Charleston Post and Courier called her a "miracle worker," and the state singled out her school to compete for a national award. In Washington, the Department of Education gave the school $25,000 for its achievements.
Somehow, Ms. Moore had transformed one of Charleston's worst schools into one of its best, a rare breakthrough in a city where the state has deemed more than half the schools unsatisfactory. It seemed almost too good to be true.
It may have been. The state has recently started a criminal investigation into test scores at Ms. Moore's school, seeking to determine whether a high number of erasure marks on the tests indicates fraud.
The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.
The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data.
In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year's new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.
Parents, teachers and principals involved in the programs, already worried at reports this spring that the new system tilted programs for the gifted further toward rich neighborhoods, have complained since school began that they were wasteful and frustrating, with high-performing children in the smallest classes in a school system plagued by pockets of overcrowding.
A survey shows more young people today can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told a packed auditorium Friday at the University of Tennessee. Civic education has "really lost ground" in the United States, and "unless we do something to reverse that disturbing trend, the joke may be on us," O'Connor said at the 1,000-seat Cox Auditorium at the UT Alumni Memorial Building.
O'Connor was at UT to celebrate the opening of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.
"Only an educated citizen can ensure our nation's commitment to liberty is upheld. If we fail to educate young people to be active and informed participants at all levels, our democracy will fail," said O'Connor, the first woman on the nation's high court.
She spoke about the need for civic education, citing three problems with what she calls "civic illiberty": the lack of time schools spend teaching civics; a static approach to civic education; and the lack of modern teaching methods such as computer programs in teaching civics.
"Creating engaged and active citizens is too important a priority to shortchange in curriculum planning in schools," she said.
George W. Bush rode to the White House pledging high standards for all students. He'll leave Washington with the nation's public education system focused on teaching basic skills to disadvantaged student populations, with the United States lagging in international comparisons of educational attainment, and with his signature education law plagued by so many problems and mired in so much controversy that it has put at serious risk two decades of work to improve public schooling by making educators accountable for their students' success.
The most important thing Barack Obama or John McCain could do quickly to salvage the accountability movement is change the way that the federal No Child Left Behind Act judges schools. Not by abandoning NCLB's focus on students' meeting standards, a move that would be unwise on both policy and political grounds, but by making the law a more legitimate report card of school performance, one that provides a fair and accurate gauge of educators' contribution to their students' achievement. Since its inception, NCLB has instead held schools responsible for factors they can't control and perversely encouraged states to set standards low.
It's critical in any accountability system that the metrics used to judge performance reflect accurately the contributions of those being judged. In education, that means measuring how much progress a school's students make during the school year, a "value added" approach that accounts for the disadvantages (or advantages) students may bring to school because of the quality of prior instruction or their family backgrounds. It's a strategy that pressures schools working with disadvantaged students to work hard in their students' behalf without penalizing educators for taking on tough assignments. And it's a strategy that doesn't reward rich schools merely for having privileged students.
Maryland's state school board made a final decision yesterday to hold firm and require this year's high school seniors to pass four subject tests to graduate in June, although it left open the possibility of exemptions for special education students and those learning English.
The decision leaves 9,059 students across the state - or about 17 percent of the Class of 2009 - at risk of not getting a diploma, according to data released yesterday.
Only 70 percent of African-Americans statewide and 50 percent of special education students have met the requirements. But the group most likely to be barred from graduation are immigrants who are learning English. Many have not yet taken all the tests, and only 15 percent have met the requirements.
It's a staggering statistic: one in four American teenagers drops out of school before graduation, a rate that rises to one in three among black and Hispanic students. But there's no federal system keeping track of the more than 7,000 American teenagers who drop out of school each day.
That appears to be changing. On Oct. 28, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings issued new rules that will force states to adopt a common system to monitor dropouts. Critics of No Child Left Behind have long accused the federal legislation not only of leading more schools to teach to the test, but of letting -- or perhaps even encouraging -- struggling students to drop out before they can lower average test scores. But Spellings is trying to address this problem with new regulations that will set a uniform graduation rate so that a high school's annual progress will now be measured both by how students perform on standardized tests and by how many of them graduate within four years.
Schools that do not improve their graduation rates will face consequences, such as having to pay for tutoring or replace principals. "For too long, we've allowed this crisis to be hidden and obscured," Spellings said in her announcement, made nearly seven years after No Child Left Behind was signed into law. "Where graduation rates are low, we must take aggressive action."
Michael Ashworth slumped by his computer, weary from another rough day in the stock market. All his favorite picks -- Domino's Pizza Inc., Hershey Co. and Gap Inc. -- were down.
I'll be honest with you," he confided. "Before all this, I asked my mom to get me stocks for Christmas," but then "I told her not to do it. I asked for a parakeet instead."
Michael, a 13-year-old at Wilmington's Skyline Middle School, is one of 700,000 players in the "Stock Market Game," a scholastic contest in which students from grades four through 12 get a hypothetical $100,000 to invest in stocks, bonds or mutual funds.
The game is run by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Wall Street's biggest trade group. Schools pay about $16 a team for a curriculum that includes access to a computer system that executes the simulated trades and ranks teams by states and age group. At the end, the teams in each state with the best returns take home bull-and-bear trophies, gift certificates or other prizes.
If art really does imitate life, then a peek into the interracial dynamics of high school life in Madison can be found every morning inside Room 272 at West High School. There, the students, hand-picked because of their ethnicity, respond to bullying, gang-related activities, body awareness issues and racial stereotyping by creating skits that mimic common situations students experience in school.
Lounging on pillows and passing around a bag of suckers at 9 a.m., the students, from varying backgrounds including Hmong, Chinese, African-American, Albanian and Laotian, are at ease with one another. This is not a dynamic reflected by every student in every school.
Sometimes an inspiration for a skit can be found right outside the classroom door, as junior Louisa Kornblatt found out on a recent morning when a student yelled, "Watch where your tall white ass is going, bitch," during a break between classes. Although Kornblatt returned to the classroom with a flushed face, asking if anyone else had heard the comment, most of the students reacted to it nonchalantly.
"That's just part of a day," said senior John Reynolds, one of the students in the Multico theater group, which performs in schools all over the district. "You learn to ignore it. West is a culturally diverse place, and you'll hear those kinds of statements in the hallways. You just need to learn to focus on the good, not the bad."
The Center for Digital Education (CDE) interviewed state education officials across the nation to evaluate the overall landscape of online learning. The rankings reflect the vision, policies, programs and strategies that states have deployed around online learning in an effort to transform their academic environment to meet the needs of students. Certain characteristics deemed to have a greater impact on statewide leadership and education (such as states with state-led online programs and/or significant policy directives) played a more significant role in the rankings than others.
The national rankings are as follows: (Florida is #1, Minnesota 9, Illinois 13, Iowa 20, Wiscnsin 37)
In the past six years, science has slipped as a priority in public schools while reading and mathematics have grown dominant.
But in coming years, experts say, the same federal law that elevated reading and math could spark a resurgence of science in the classroom.
The 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test students in science starting in the 2007-08 year, on top of reading and math assessments mandated from the start. Virginia has given science tests since 1998, but the exams are new for Maryland and the District. (Separately, Maryland tests high school students in biology as a graduation requirement.)
Unlike the reading and math test results, science scores won't be used to grade schools for accountability. But education leaders predict that the scores will matter when disseminated to the public.
So how did we choose the best high schools on this honor roll? The Academic Performance Index (API) scores range from 200 to 1000 and are calculated from the results for each school's students on statewide tests. Public schools in Los Angeles County were considered for this analysis if their 2006-7 API score was at least 800, the median of a basic score (725) and a proficient one (875) and the state's performance goal for all schools. In addition, schools had to meet minimum standards: an enrollment of 200 students for all schools, a graduating class of 50 students for public schools, and a graduating class of 65 students for private schools. Schools were excluded if they declined to participate or if data were not available. Our index is based on a weighted average of scores assigned to five variables: API score, student-teacher ratio, percentage of students going to college, dropout rate, and advanced placement ratio (this ratio represents the number of AP sections offered, divided by the number of graduates). Private schools had to meet similar standards to avoid exclusion; their index is based on a weighted average of scores assigned to a slightly different set of variables, including the average SAT score for students enrolled at the school. The SAT is scored on a scale of 200 to 800 in each of three sections--writing, mathematics, and critical reading--allowing for a total possible score of 2400. SAT scores were used in evaluating private schools but not public schools. Scores for API testing (taken by public school students only) are considered a more accurate form of measuring students' academic abilities. If a school was missing only its SAT result, the number was projected through a technique known as imputation.
Progressive educators often argue that a focus on standards, testing and accountability prevents teachers from exercising their creativity and imagination on the job. As an experiment in imagination, I offer the following suggested parallel universe.
In this universe, there is an Edupundit who gives 200 lectures a year to athletic directors and administrators in the schools (at $5,000 each) on the subjects of competition, standards, testing, and accountability (keeping score) in athletics.
He points out that exercise is a bad idea, that physical fitness is harmful, and that sports destroy a sense of community in education. He argues that rewarding coaches for good performance by their teams and individual athletes is "odious," and about merit pay for such work, he says, "If you jump through hoops, we'll give you a doggie biscuit in the form of money."
He reveals that poor athletes often fail to succeed in sports and that this constitutes "what could be described as" athletic "ethnic cleansing." He says that the number of games and matches student athletes take part in is "mind-boggling."
Keeping score in games and matches, he says, is "not just meaningless. It's worrisome." And concludes that "Standards," scoring, "and Other Follies" (like competition) have no place in the athletic program in the schools. He has written popular books calling for an end to discipline, rewards, and competition in sports.
This may be all very well in that universe, but how would it play in ours? When it comes to athletics, I doubt very much if anyone advocating such views would be invited to speak by a high school athletic director anywhere in the country. And I assume that books making those arguments would have no sales at all.
However, in our own space-time situation, we do have Alfie Kohn, whose books include: The Homework Myth; What Does it Mean to be Well-Educated?, and More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies; Punished by Rewards; No Contest: The Case Against Competition; The Case Against Standardized Testing; Beyond Discipline, etc.
It has been reported that he does indeed give 200 speeches a year, mostly to administrators and educators, at $5,000 each, and that in them he fights against academic work, standards, testing, discipline, competition, and accountability just as his imaginary counterpart opposes all those things for athletics in that other universe.
But Alfie Kohn's books do sell here, he gets invited to share these ideas of his, and large audiences of our educators come to be told that if they do their jobs very well, and receive financial rewards, they are good dogs and are being given doggie biscuits for jumping through hoops.
It is not clear whether he regards his own lecture fees as doggie biscuits, but he does claim that when students do poorly in school, the remedy is not more and better homework, because he has already made the case against homework. And rather than calling for higher academic standards, and more student diligence in school, he thinks what we need is an end to "educational ethnic cleansing" instead.
The damage done by such an Edupundit to the effort to achieve educational reform through higher academic standards and better accountability is not easy to gauge. Perhaps some who attend his 200 lectures think he is funny, somewhat like those progressive educators who are so intent on "hands-on learning," "field trips," and "social activism" on the part of students that one can almost imagine them saying to students, in effect, "Step away from that book and no one gets hurt!"
Surely Mister Kohn is one of a kind, but we would not have achieved the high and world-renowned levels of mediocrity in our nation's schools if there were not thousands of educational workers who think as he does, and dedicate themselves each day to keeping academic standards low, preventing students from being challenged academically, and fighting hard against any information which might come from tests which could hold them accountable for the ignorance and academic incompetence of their (our) students.
We need to find educators for our schools who have succeeded academically themselves and as a result are not trying to block the academic achievement of their students. Steve Jobs of Apple Computer used to say that "A people hire A people, and B people hire C people." We need more 'A' people looking for their peers to help them raise academic standards for our students. Educators who have done poorly in school may like Mr. Kohn's arguments. Most of those who have done well would not.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
EVERY German schoolchild learns to revile Hitler, but what about Erich Honecker, boss of communist East Germany? He was not a dictator, or so most teenagers from eastern Germany seem to think. And the dreaded Stasi, which jailed and tortured citizens who stepped out of line? Just an intelligence service, say young easterners. These findings, from a survey of 5,200 schoolchildren by Berlin's Free University, dismayed those who think national identity and democratic values rest on shared judgments about the traumatic past.
The ignorance is unevenly spread. Young western Germans know more of East Germany's history. In Bavaria just 39% of schoolchildren had "little or very little" knowledge; in Brandenburg 72% were ill-informed. A third of eastern German students thought that Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, two western giants, actually governed the east. The same proportion judge West Germany's political system to have been the better; two-thirds of westerners do. Such differences persist even among children of western and eastern parents who attend the same Berlin schools.
The students in the jewelry and metalsmithing class at Pelham Memorial High School painstakingly coiled copper and brass wires into necklaces the other morning, while across the hall, the history of rock 'n' roll class pondered the meaning of Don McLean's "American Pie."
These are two of the 17 electives added this year to the curriculum in this affluent Westchester County suburb, redefining traditional notions of a college-preparatory education and allowing students to pursue specialized interests that once were relegated to after-school clubs and weekend hobbies. Now, budding musicians take guitar lessons, amateur war historians re-enact military battles, and future engineers build solar-powered cars -- all during school hours, and for credit.
"It's letting people learn about what they love rather than dictating what they should be learning," said Morgan McDaniel, a senior who added the rock 'n' roll class to her roster of Advanced Placement classes in calculus, biology, European history and studio art.
Eleven students in Edgewood's advanced environmental field education class spent two weeks this summer studying mussel, rusty crayfish, mushroom, beaver and frog populations in Minnesota's enormous St. Croix State Park. A first for the school, seven of the students will present their research at the Rendezvous at the Warner Nature Center at Marine on St. Croix, Minn.
The National Park Service at the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, which is in eastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin, will include the students' research in data it is compiling.
"It was hard -- messy. You're out there every day ... all hours," said Arial Shogren, a senior this year who studied crayfish. "Our work does get used and that's exciting."
They include Howard and Mattie Smith Academy, a K-3, 9-12 school proposed for Minneapolis, named for two legendary preachers at Shiloh Temple Church. Another is The Academy, a 10-12 Minneapolis school, and the third is a 7-12 school, St. Paul Rising Sun.
A new charitable organization, Minnesota Education Trust (MET), has applied to sponsor all three schools, and at one point sought to assume sponsorship of a fourth -- the Academy for Food Sciences and Agriculture, whose name evokes Minnesota's heartland. "Minnesota Education Trust" sounds pretty generic, but the name seems to convey a clear sense of the organization's mission.
Or does it?
MET's "principal goals" are set forth in its articles of incorporation, filed with the secretary of state in May 2007. The first goal listed is "to promote the message of Islam to Muslims and non-Muslims and promote understanding between them." Other goals include building a virtuous society and providing education to children and adults. The final goal is to "support schools, community centers, mosques and other organizations that serve the above goals."
To understand D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the educational insurgency she is part of, you have to know what happened when she taught at Baltimore's Harlem Park Elementary School in the early 1990s.
The Teach for America program threw well-educated young people such as Rhee -- bachelor's degree from Cornell, master's from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government -- into classrooms full of impoverished children after only a summer of training. "It was a zoo, every day," she recalled. Thirty-six children, all poor, suffered under a novice who had no idea what to do.
But within months, for Rhee and other influential educators in her age group, the situation changed. She vowed not "to let 8-year-olds run me out of town." She discovered learning improved when everyone sat in a big U-pattern with her in the middle and she made quick marks on the blackboard for good and bad behavior without ever stopping the lesson. She spent an entire summer making lesson plans and teaching materials, with the help of indulgent aunts visiting from Korea. She found unconventional but effective ways to teach reading and math. She set written goals for each child and enlisted parents in her plans.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.--Mark Twain
The "goody bags" may have been the tipping point.
In August, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation highlighted massive waste and failure in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS): after spending more than a $100 million on neighborhood schools, the paper reported, many of the new buildings were unused and the classrooms empty. "With a few exceptions" the paper reported, "student achievement has shown little improvement--and in some cases it has fallen dramatically--at 22 schools that were among the largest beneficiaries of the district's school construction program."
But it was the bags that caught the public's attention.
A week after the series on the failed building project, columnist Dan Bice reported that Milwaukee School Board member Charlene Hardin, accompanied by a high school data-processing secretary, had junketed at taxpayer expense to Philadelphia in mid-July, ostensibly to attend a conference on school safety. But organizers of the conference said that Hardin never showed up for any of the conference itself.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union -- aided by its national parent organization -- are digging in for what could be a protracted struggle over Rhee's plan to fire instructors deemed to be ineffective.
School officials have posted job openings for an unspecified number of "helping teachers" to counsel instructors who have received notice to improve or face termination. Principals have been asked to identify teachers who can be placed on the so-called 90-day plan, which gives teachers 90 school days -- or about five months -- to upgrade their performance. The helping teachers will also document all assistance given to instructors and report to central office administrators, according to the job description posted on the D.C. schools Web site.
Alex Gould paced the stage of an auditorium at Stanford University last week, imploring students to think about why the U.S. Treasury bought preferred stock rather than common stock in nine major banks, and how the nation's economic meltdown began with home mortgages.
Gould, who teaches a course at Stanford on money, banking and the financial markets, searched the faces of his 100 students, many of whom are preparing to graduate in the spring. Students asked questions about their midterm exam, but many grappled with a bigger question: What does a destabilized economy mean for their future?
Educators across the Bay Area are using the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to teach everything from behavioral finance and social justice to the recasting of capitalism.
"What's happening now affects every one of us," Gould said. "It provides an unparalleled laboratory of real-world applications upon which to test theories."
American education has a tattered reputation in many respects, except for our colleges and universities. They are world leaders in quality and accessibility. The desire to provide our children the best in higher education unites Americans in a unique way.
So it dismays me to report that on one issue, the leaders of nearly every four-year college in the country have shown appalling ignorance and hypocrisy. They say they want high schools to provide challenging courses for students thinking of college, but at the same time they discriminate against the most demanding college-level program in high school: International Baccalaureate.
College officials in Maryland, Virginia and the District have proven especially dense on this subject. In February, I wrote about their refusal to give credit to students who did well on final exams in one-year IB courses while giving credit to students who did well in final exams for similar (but in many cases less-demanding) one-year Advanced Placement courses. The culprit seemed to be an old committee report that had wormed its way into university regulations without any data behind it. IB students can generally get college credit only after taking two-year IB courses.
In the comments to a CNET article discussing One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO computer, the commentator below perhaps hit a key point.
by tudza October 24, 2008 5:55 PM PDT Let's not forget that almost all the K12 classes in the U.S. get are getting a bad reputation for not teaching those students well. Switching technologies from new to old doesn't necessarily get you any better results.
The true solution is to buy everyone Korean parents.
Korean parents for sale
You say you're not all
That you want to be
You say you got a bad environment
Your work at school's not going well
Korean parents for sale
You say you need a little discipline
Someone to whip you into shape
They'll be strict but they'll be fair
Look at the numbers
That's all I ask
Who's at the head of every class?
You really think
They're smarter than you are
They just work their ***** off
Their parents make them do it
In 2000, Memorial became the first Madison school to land one of the U.S. Department of Education grants. It was awarded $438,000 to create its neighborhood social structure. West High School became the second, winning a $500,000 grant in 2002 and reorganizing its ninth and 10th grades around core courses.
In August, district officials were thrilled to learn the district was awarded $5.5 million over five years for its four major high schools -- Memorial, West, La Follette and East -- to build stronger connections among students and faculty by creating so-called "small learning communities" that divide each high school population into smaller populations.
Officials cite research showing that schools with 500 to 900 students tend to be the most effective, and recent findings suggest that students at schools with small learning communities are more likely to complete ninth grade, less likely to become involved in violence and more likely to attend college after graduation. However, the latest federal study failed to find a clear link between small learning communities and higher academic achievement.
Each Madison high school will develop its own plan for how to spend the grant money. Their common goals: Make school feel like a smaller, friendlier place where all students feel included. Shrink the racial achievement gap, raise graduation rates, expand the courses available and improve planning for further education and careers.
The high schools, with enrollments ranging from 1,600 to 2,000 students, are being redesigned as their overall scores on state 10th grade reading and math tests are worrisome, having declined slightly the past two years.
Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."
I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!
Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that failing public schools pose her greatest national security concern, one she warned could undermine the United States' ability to lead and to compete in a global economy.
Equal access to educational opportunities, she said, also lies at the heart of one of the nation's most important core values -- the belief in the United States as a true meritocracy.
Rice, a Stanford University professor before joining the Bush administration, spoke at a conference of women organized by former TV journalist Maria Shriver, the wife of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As an educator, Rice said it broke her heart to see "kids who might be the next Nobel Prize winner ... trapped in some public school that's just basically warehousing them."
THE REAL WEALTH OF THE NATION; Green Charter School Conference - Madison 11/7 - 11/8
Tia Nelson:
Wisconsin has long been an incubator for prescient ideas about the connection between human society and the natural environment.
John Muir's boyhood in the backwoods near Portage, Wis., provided a foundation for his early leadership in a dawning environmental protection movement.
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold's description of the area around his Sauk County, Wis., home, has inspired natural stewardship throughout the world and is required reading for anyone with an interest in conservation.
My father, the late U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, launched the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, as an annual day of observance and nationwide teach-in about environmental issues because he recognized the significance of educating children and young adults about the natural world.
Today, as we reap the effects of pernicious economic activity, a failing energy policy and atmospheric warming, I find my father's words both foreboding and reassuring:
"Forging and maintaining a sustainable society is The Challenge for this and all generations to come. At this point in history, no nation has managed to evolve into a sustainable society. We are all pursuing a self-destructive course of fueling our economies by drawing down our natural capital--that is to say, by degrading and depleting our resource base--and counting it on the income side of the ledger. ... [T]he real wealth of a nation is its air, water, soil, forests, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats, and biodiversity."
Papa often talked about the importance of raising the next generation with environmental ethics so they make informed decisions about the use of our natural resources, which are the authentic foundation of a healthy economy. Imagine a robust and equitable economy with clean and abundant energy resources, sustainably managed farms and forests, where innovation and green jobs give us healthy choices that can lead us to a better future.
As a result of impassioned summertime conversations about the present urgency of my father's words, environmental scientists, educators and other citizens from throughout the United States will travel to storied Central Wisconsin in November for a seminal discussion of the dual imperative for public schools to recognize sustainable "green" values as a critical aspect of citizenship and use charter-school operating arrangements to research and develop the comprehensive environmental education and conservation curricula we need to dramatically change our culture, preserve natural capital and enjoy a good life that does not deprive future generations.
It has become clear to many of us who have been focused on environmental issues that it is now critical for our nation to rethink the ways public education serves its crucial role in the development of a sustainable society.
Green educational programming is flourishing in public charter schools because these schools can break the mold of traditional school, which is bound by bricks-and-mortar, industrial-era ideas about classrooms and instruction--the boundaries that may limit our exploration of new terrain. Charter schools allow public school districts to pilot fresh programs and policies that can vary considerably from other more traditional approaches.
With 15 green charter schools, Wisconsin is leading the nation in using charter-school operating arrangements to develop contemporary environmental values.
River Crossing Charter School, a public school nestled in the region that inspired Muir and Leopold, offers a unique environmental-based educational program that uses the rich natural resources and industrial history of Wisconsin as an outdoor learning laboratory, offering hands-on programming and investigative sites along the Wisconsin and Fox rivers--waterways that extend from the paper mill towns along Lake Michigan to the Mississippi.
Earlier this year, a fledgling national network of green charter schools was organized in Wisconsin to build a collective knowledge base about environmental education that provides students the academic knowledge, technical skills and personal dispositions they need to solve our nation's thorniest public problems.
The issues presently confronting our nation challenge us to develop a sustainable economy and culture through fundamentally transformed schools.
The first Green Charter Schools National Conference is scheduled for November 7 - 8 at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
"At the Heart of a Green Curriculum: What It Means to Be An Educated Person," a foundational message delivered by WILLIAM CRONON, the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will open the program.
MORGAN BROWN will speak about "Green Chartered Schools: A Systemic View" at the noon plenary session. Brown is Assistant Commissioner, Minnesota Dept. of Education.
The conference is presented by: Green Charter Schools Network
Since her arrival, in the summer of 2007, Rhee, just 38 years old, has become the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide. She and her cohort often seek to bypass the traditional forces of education schools and unions, instead embracing nontraditional reform mechanisms like charter schools, vouchers, and the No Child Left Behind Act. "They tend to be younger, and many didn't come through the traditional route," says Margaret Sullivan, a former education analyst at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. And that often means going head-to-head with the people who did.
Rhee, responsible not to a school board but only to the mayor, went on a spree almost as soon as she arrived. She gained the right to fire central-office employees and then axed 98 of them. She canned 24 principals, 22 assistant principals, and, at the beginning of this summer, 250 teachers and 500 teaching aides. She announced plans to close 23 underused schools and set about restructuring 26 other schools (together, about a third of the system). And she began negotiating a radical performance-based compensation contract with the teachers union that could revolutionize the way teachers get paid.
Her quick action has brought Rhee laudatory profiles everywhere from Newsweek to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and appearances on Charlie Rose and at Allen & Company's annual Sun Valley conference. Washington is now ground zero for education reformers. "People are coming from across the country to work for her," says Andrew Rotherham, the co-director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank. "It's the thing to do." Rhee had Stanford and Harvard business-school students on her intern staff this summer, and she has received blank checks from reform-minded philanthropists at the Gates and Broad foundations to fund experimental programs. Businesses have flooded her with offers to help--providing supplies, mentoring, or just giving cash.
Two years ago, Marilyn Wilhelm of Annapolis faced a difficult decision. Her husband had lost his job, and the family of six couldn't make it on the single income of a school day-care worker. Her sister suggested she look into a computer networking career, so she enrolled in the Cisco Networking Academy at Anne Arundel Community College.
After two semesters of working part time and living off savings, Wilhelm became a Cisco-certified network associate. The entry-level certification ensures technicians know how to connect and manage the wiring and switches to link computers and provide Internet access. The college held a career fair last year with companies that had partnerships with California-based Cisco Systems Inc.
Her training and enthusiasm landed her a summer internship and later a job at Chesapeake Netcraftsmen, a networking company in Arnold. This year, she began teaching the basic networking courses she took at the college and started studying for higher-level certification through her company.
One of the more consistent, ongoing suggestions for improving America's educational system centers upon the creation of greater competition amongst public schools. The reason for the steady drumbeat centers upon a belief that a change to the free market system would be one of the best methods for creating better educational opportunities for children.
In direct response to the push for greater competition, forty states across America have now initiated legislation to allow the construction of new public schools called charter schools. Minnesota was the first state to pass laws regarding charter schools, doing so in 1991.
The concept is definitely catching on. Today, according to USCharterSchools.org, there are nearly 4,000 charter schools across our country educating more than 1.1 million children. The state of California, the second to enact such legislation, has more than 600 such schools educating about one-fifth of all charter school students.
While the number of schools continues to grow, large numbers of Americans, many even within the field of education, simply do not know what a charter school really consists of or how this new school concept differs from traditional public schools. Today at OpenEducation.net, we provide our readers the fundamentals of the charter school concept.
Can Interdistrict Choice Boost Student Achievement? The Case of Connecticut's Interdistrict Magnet School Program
Robert Bifulco, Casey Cobb & Courtney Bell [320K PDF]:
In response to a landmark civil rights ruling, the state of Connecticut has adopted models of choice-based interdistrict desegregation that appear to satisfy current legal constraints. In this paper, we focus on Connecticut's interdistrict magnet schools, and estimate the effects these schools have had on student achievement. We use longitudinal data on individual student test performance and information from admissions lotteries to implement quasi-experimental, regression-based, and propensity score estimators. Preliminary analyses show that lottery based methods, propensity score methods, and regression analysis provide similar estimates of achievement effects of for the small set of schools for which all three methods can be implemented. We then proceed to use the latter two methods to estimate effects for all of the interdistrict magnet high schools and middle schools that serve students from Hartford, Waterbury and New Haven. Results indicate that, on average, interdistrict magnet high schools have positive effects on both math and reading achievement, and interdistrict magnet middle schools have positive effects on reading achievement. Extensions of our analysis indicate that interdistrict magnet high schools have positive effects particularly on the achievement of students in Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury and do so regardless of how much attending an interdistrict magnet high school reduces racial isolation. The positive effects of magnet middle schools appear to be limited to suburban students, except in those schools that are able to achieve substantial reductions in racial isolation for their central city students.
After overhauling its K-12 sex education curriculum this summer with the help of community partners and health experts, Milwaukee Public School district officials have released the first draft of lessons to be taught to kids in kindergarten through fifth grade.
The problem: Despite calls to every elementary school principal for help in reaching parents, and a link to the proposed human growth and development curriculum on the MPS home website, only a handful of people have offered feedback.
"I'd like to hear from anyone in the community, but I really need parents," said Brett Fuller, curriculum specialist for health, wellness and safe and drug-free schools.
Expedient feedback is important to the district for several reasons. For one, sex education can be a touchy subject and the more people who see the proposed changes, the better chance there is of everyone feeling comfortable with what's being taught.
Primary school children are to be given compulsory lessons in sex education and the dangers of drugs, the Government confirmed.
The shake-up of lessons is aimed at cutting Britain's high teenage pregnancy rate and steering youngsters away from drug and alcohol misuse.
It will mean primary school children will learn about puberty and the facts of life from the age of seven. From the age of five, pupils will be taught about topics such as the parts of the body, relationships and the effects of drugs on the body.
As pupils progress through school they will be given detailed information about contraception and sexually transmitted infections as well as the risks of drug and alcohol misuse.
Students in six major U.S. cities are performing on par or better in mathematics than their peers in other countries in grades 4 and 8, according to a new study by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). However, students from five other major cities are not faring as well, and overall, U.S. student performance in mathematics falls off from elementary to middle school grades -- and remains behind many industrialized nations, particularly Asian nations.
The AIR study offers the first comparison between students from large U.S. cities and their international peers. The study compares U.S. 4th grade students with their counterparts in 24 countries and 8th grade students with peers in 45 countries.
"Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off...it is the economic equivalent of a force of nature... like the wind and water" (Bill Clinton)
If you are a student today competing for jobs in a global economy, the good jobs will not go to the best in your graduating class--the jobs will go to the best students in the world. Large urban cities are intimately connected to the nations of the world. Large corporations locate their businesses in U.S. cities; foreign students attend U.S. schools; and U.S. businesses export goods and services to foreign nations. Large urban cities need to know how their students stack up against peers in the nations with which the U.S. does business. This is especially important for students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The students in these fields will allow our future generation to remain technologically innovative and economically competitive.
This report provides a comparison of the number of mathematically Proficient students in Grades 4 and 8 in 11 large cities in the United States with their international peers.
This comparison is made possible by statistically linking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003 and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2003 when both assessments were conducted in the United States in the same year and in the same grades.
After the statistical linking was completed, it was possible to compare the most recent NAEP results (from 2007) to the most recent TIMSS results (from 2003). How the United States compares to the overall international average.
At Grade 4, five countries (Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Chinese Taipei, Japan, and the Flemish portion of Belgium) performed significantly better than the United States (Figure 1). However, the United States (at 39% proficiency) performed better than the international average (27% proficiency) of all 24 countries (Figure 13).
At Grade 8, eight countries (Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Republic of Korea, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Belgium (Flemish), Netherlands, and Hungary) performed significantly better than the United States (Figure 1). However, the United States (at 31% proficiency) performed better than the international average (21% proficiency) of all 44 countries (Figure 14).
....
Because of the persistent requests of urban school districts, the U .S . Congress authorized NAEP to assess, on a trial basis, six large urban school districts beginning in 2002 . Since then, more districts have been added, resulting in 11 school districts in 2007 (and plans are underway to include even more districts in the future) . The urban school chiefs in these 11 large school districts, which voluntarily participated in the 2007 NAEP, recognized the global nature of educational expectations and the importance of having reliable external data against which to judge the performance of their students and to hold themselves accountable . They should be commended for their visionary goal of trying to benchmark their local performance against tough national standards. National standards provide a broad context and an external compass with which to steer educational policy to benefit local systems . The purpose of this report is to further help those systems navigate by providing international benchmarks.
Even if the findings are less-than-stellar, he says, they should help local officials focus on improving results.
"In that sense, I think it could be a very positive thing to use in-house, in the district, to keep their nose to the grindstone," says Kepner, a former middle- and high-school math teacher in Iowa and Wisconsin."If they can show they're improving, they might be able to attract more companies to a system that's on the move."
Phillips says the findings prove that in other countries "it is possible to do well and learn considerably under a lot of varied circumstances -- in other words, being low-income is not really an excuse when you look around the rest of the world."
cross the USA, a small but growing number of school districts are experimenting with teacher-pay packages that front-load higher salaries and offer bonuses -- sometimes tens of thousands of dollars' worth -- if student test scores improve or if teachers work in hard-to-staff schools.
At least eight states are moving away from a traditional pay model, which increases salaries based on seniority and advanced degrees. Many of the pay packages are funded by private foundations. In dozens of districts, test scores already have earned teachers more money. A few examples:
In Chicago, teachers at a handful of schools can earn up to $8,000 in annual bonuses for improved scores, while mentor teachers and "lead teachers" can earn an extra $7,000 or $15,000, respectively.
In Nashville, middle-school math teachers can earn up to $15,000 based on student performance.
AMID her other distractions Angela Merkel's attention will on October 22nd shift to a new issue: the poor state of German education. She is gathering the premiers from all of Germany's 16 states for an "education summit" in Dresden. Its vaunted aim is to transform Germany from a mediocre performer into a dazzling "education republic". Yet the chancellor's powers to achieve this goal are limited.
Nobody thinks that Germany can afford mediocrity. If its performance on international tests improved from average to excellent, growth would rise by 0.5-0.8 percentage points in the long run, says Ludger Wössmann, an economist at Ifo, a research institute in Munich. But the real stakes are higher still. Almost half the children in some cities come from immigrant families; many speak mainly their mother tongue. In Germany parents' social status plays a bigger role in children's fates than in most other rich countries. As many as 8% of 15-17-year-olds are school dropouts; unemployment among them is three times higher than among university graduates. Yet, with Germany's population ageing, "who will pay our pensions, if not the migrants?" asks Jörg Dräger, head of education at the Bertelsmann Foundation.
Although the chancellor's public relations offensive helped put education in the political spotlight it also raised expectations for the summit - some say to too high a level.
This was a risky strategy given the profound suspicion among Germany's 16 states - responsible for most aspects of education policy - of federal government interference in these issues.
"Education is unequivocally for the Länder [states] to decide," Wolfgang Böhmer, Christian Democrat premier of Sachsen-Anhalt told a German newspaper before the event.
Such is the tension between Berlin and the regions, and between the CDU and coalition partner the Social Democrats, that many of the most pressing issues never made it onto the agenda.
Schools that improve test scores do so at the expense of other subjects and ideas, he said.
"When the scores go up, it's not just meaningless. It's worrisome," Kohn told hundreds of educators on the last day of the convention. "What did you sacrifice from my child's education to raise scores on the test?"
Kohn, who's written 11 books on human behavior, parenting and schools, spent nearly two hours Friday morning ripping into both established and relatively new education concepts. He slammed merit pay for teachers, competition in schools, Advanced Placement classes, curriculum standards and testing--including Utah's standards and testing system -- drawing mixed reactions from his audience.
"Considering what we hear a lot, it was pure blasphemy," said Richard Heath, a teacher at Central Davis Junior High School in Layton.
Kohn called merit pay--forms of which many Utah school districts are implementing this year--an "odious" type of control imposed on teachers.
"If you jump through hoops, we'll give you a doggie biscuit in the form of money," Kohn said.
He said competition in schools destroys their sense of community. Advanced Placement classes, he claimed, focus more on material but don't do much to deepen students' understanding. He said standardized tests are designed so that some students must always fail or they're considered too easy, and often the students who do poorly are members of minority groups.
"We are creating in this country before our eyes, little by little, what could be described as educational ethnic cleansing," Kohn said. He called Utah's standards too specific and the number of tests given to Utah students "mind-boggling."
He called on teachers to explain such problems to parents and community members.
"The best teachers spend every day of their lives strategically avoiding or subverting the Utah curriculum," Kohn said.
Many teachers said they agreed with much of Kohn's talk, but disagreed on some points.
Shauna Cooney, a second grade teacher at Majestic Elementary School in Ogden, said it's important to have standards that give all children equal opportunities to learn certain concepts before they move forward.
Sidni Jones, an elementary teacher mentor in the Davis School District, agreed that current standardized tests are not as meaningful as other types of assessment, but she said it is hard to fight the current system.
"You can't just openly rebel against standardized testing because they're mandated," Jones said. "That's part of our jobs."
Rep. Kory Holdaway, R-Taylorsville, who is also a special education teacher at Taylorsville High School, said he walked out of the speech.
"We have got to have some degree of accountability for the public," Holdaway said. "The public demands it. Sometimes we forget who our customers are in terms of children and families."
Others, however, largely agreed with Kohn.
"It was awesome," said Claudia Butter, a teacher at the Open Classroom (good grief, are there still Open Classroom schools around??? Lord help us!) charter school in Salt Lake City. "With little steps we might be able to effect a change."
UEA President Kim Campbell said the UEA doesn't necessarily agree with everything Kohn advocates, but chose him as the keynote speaker because of his thought-provoking ideas.
"We want our members to constantly be challenging themselves and be thinking about new ideas and what they're doing in the classroom," Campbell said.
Tomorrow morning my husband and I are going on our very first public school tour. Our son is only 3, but he'll be attending universal pre-kindergarten next year and we hope to make use of the good public schools in our area. We've also been encouraged to attend tours at two other elementary schools in our district and to make use of a kindergarten fair held at a nearby YWHA next week. It seems awfully soon to think about kindergarten for a kid who enters in fall of 2010. But as other parents have pointed out to me, there's a lottery system in place in New York City and knowing which schools you are most interested in is important.
After I got over the surprise of school tours taking place a full four months before applications were even available, I realized something. I don't really know what to look for in a school. Outside of a desire for smaller class size, caring teachers and a decent reputation in the community, I'm not really sure what these tours and fairs are supposed to teach me.
NGC roams the halls with students as they tell their unvarnished accounts of high school life. Through student video diaries and personal accounts, NGC offers an exclusive glimpse into this gritty young world.
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Assessing Writing EdNews.org Houston, Texas, 24 January 2007
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org:
1) I understand that you have just finished a stint on the ACT/NAGB Steering Committee for the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Assessment. What was that like? (And what does NAGB stand for?)
WF: NAGB is the National Assessment Governing Board, which runs the NAEP, "America's Report Card," as they say. I was glad that Diane Ravitch recommended me for the Steering Committee for the new national writing assessment scheduled for 2011. I was very impressed with the intelligence and competence of Mary Crovo, representing NAEP, and Rosanne Cook, who is running the project for American College Testing. Many people on the Committee were from the National Council of Teachers of English and the College Composition world, which have little interest in having students read history books or write history research papers. In fact that world favors, or has favored in the past, personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which do a terrible job of preparing high school students for the nonfiction books and the academic term papers most will be asked to cope with in college.
2) Given the paucity of writing that goes on in the high schools of America, is it really fair to ask high school students to engage in a robust writing assessment?
WF: It would not be fair to ask high school students to play in a football game if they hadn't had an opportunity for lots of practice, and it is very hard to ask high school students to do the sort of academic expository writing they should be doing if they have never done it in all their years in school. But we need to start somewhere. Every high school student does not need to be able to play football, but they all need to be able to read nonfiction books and write serious term papers.
3) On the other hand, since so much of the college experience is writing, are high school teachers doing students a disservice by NOT requiring more writing?
WF: High school teachers would make terrible football coaches and their teams would lose most if not all of their games, if the teacher/coaches did not have time to practice their teams. We take football seriously, and we take band seriously, so ample time and money are made available to produce the best teams and the best bands the high school can manage. We allow really no time for a public high school teacher to work with students on heavy-duty term papers. We don't make time for them, because we don't think they are that important. Not as important as drama practice, yearbook, chorus, debate or a host of other activities. As a result our high school students are, once again, ill-prepared for college reading and writing. AP courses in history do not require, in most cases, that students read a complete nonfiction book, and most of the AP teachers say they don't have time to ask the student to write a research paper, because they "have to get students ready for the AP Exam."
4) Most English teachers would cry "already overworked "or "dealing with under-prepared students" if we asked them to do more writing instruction. Is the answer smaller class sizes? Or fewer mainstreamed kids?
WF: I have suggested the "Page Per Year Plan," which would ask first-graders to write a one-page paper about something other than themselves, and so on, with 8th graders writing an 8-page paper, 11th graders writing an 11-page paper, etc. This would provide English and History teachers with more students who were ready to do serious term papers, and the students would not all have to be started from scratch, like someone going out for football for the first time in their senior year in high school. In addition, if we are serious about term papers and book reports, English and History teachers should be given five class days each semester to supervise such work, and to assess it when it is handed in. We don't do that now, so most teachers feel they are really too busy to assign these vital projects to their students.
5) I have often seen "The American public wants more attention paid to writing" phrase. In spite of public outcry, educators or politicians don't seem to respond. Are there just a lot of lone voices crying in the wilderness?
WF: When there is a response, as from the National Commission on Writing in the Schools, the writing sought is almost inconceivably superficial, formulaic, sentimental, and bland. It is hard for anyone concerned about writing to understand how these and other groups concerned about "Adolescent Literacy" keep their standards so very low. Young Adult sections in bookstores and libraries are full of fiction which panders to teen interests. None of the great history books can find a place there, as teens are assumed to be interested in only little fictional stories which are basically about them and their friends. Dumbing Down doesn't get much plainer than that.
6) Doing a national assessment of writing must involve a lot of different opinions about writing. What were some of the fundamental issues discussed at this meeting?
WF: The assessment planned was hobbled by the need to do the evaluation on two 25-minute samples which require no background knowledge, and could be written by students who had never spent a day in school. Nothing learned in school is required and the prompts are accordingly necessarily superficial. In addition, the claim is that "writing on demand" is somehow the standard to be met. Some claim that they are asked at work to produce something written in a short time (not 25 minutes I suppose), but even that writing is based on all the knowledge they have from their job and their schooling. For the most part, any decent writing, whether at college or in the workplace, depends on time to gather knowledge, to write, to reflect, and to re-write at least at a basic level. Writing for a prompt in 25 minutes tells us basically nothing about students' ability to acquire and understand knowledge or to organize their thoughts in a paper. A lot of work was done on this assessment, but I believe the constraints imposed requiring no knowledge and no time for thought or re-writing, make this assessment sadly uninformative about the real academic reading and writing skills of our students.
7) You recently published "Math and Reading: A Lament for High School History and Writing " in The Historical Society's Historically Speaking, November/December 2006, pp 36-37. What were the main points that you were trying to make in that article?
WF: My basic concern is that if Edupundits don't care about serious reading and writing, and Educators limit their students to fiction and to writing very short personal stories and the like, we cripple our children's ability to read and write at the necessary level. There seems to be no awareness or desire for awareness of the absence of nonfiction books in our high schools and our (The Concord Review) study from 2002 found that the majority of high school teachers are no longer assigning 12-page term papers. Many of our high school graduates find that they need remedial writing courses when they get to college, and many also find the nonfiction books on their reading lists overwhelming, which is not surprising. If they had not played football in high school, they would not last long on a college football team. When it comes to reading and writing, we seem content to deprive our students of the practice they would need to manage college work when they get there. Many drop out as a result of this, in my view.
8) Good writing, like good piano or violin playing, probably takes time, effort, and energy. But what are the payoffs to good writing for high school students?
WF: Reading is the path to knowledge in the liberal arts, not to slight the value of science labs and the like, and writing is the path to making knowledge one's own. If students have not practiced academic reading and academic writing they will literally be "out of mental shape" as they approach more difficult academic material. Some will adjust, but many too many will not, and we will lose them, at least for a while, from the opportunity for a higher education.
9) What question have I neglected to ask ?
WF: Why have history, which might have helped us as we considered our plans in Iraq, and academic writing, which allows thinking to develop, been so neglected in our schools? There is a tremendous interest in the Arts, which are thought to be good for the soul, and for science, which is thought to be the key to economic success, but as one of the major foundations told me, "We are interested in Math, Minorities, and Science" so they can't support history, writing, and the like. But Minorities also need to read and write, and so will all our future legislators, mayors, judges, lawyers, and all citizens of our democracy, no matter what their path in life. We need science and math, of course, but we also need, desperately, I believe, to do a better job of teaching academic reading and writing to a higher standard than we have allowed to prevail in our schools.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Dr. Shaughnessy is currently Professor in Educational Studies at Eastern New Mexico University and is a Consulting Editor for Gifted Education International and Educational Psychology Review. In addition, he writes for www.EdNews.org and the International Journal of Theory and Research in Education. He has taught students with mental retardation, learning disabilities and gifted. He is on the Governor's Traumatic Brain Injury Advisory Council and the Gifted Education Advisory Board in New Mexico. He is also a school psychologist and conducts in-services and workshops on various topics.
Will Fitzhugh is the Founder/Editor of The Concord Review, a quarterly review of essays by students of history. Since 1987 The Concord Review has published 748 [836] history research papers by high school students [from 36 countries] on a wide variety of historical topics. This quarterly is the only one in the world for the academic work of secondary students. In this interview, he responds to questions about the need for writing, and some of his current endeavors.
McCain: Education's Disruptor-in-Chief? The Republican took an early lead over Obama in supporting disruptive innovation in education that can revamp how today's classrooms are run
For a candidate who's been criticized as being out of touch on technology, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been refreshingly ahead of the curve when it comes to disruptive innovation in education.
While Republican Presidential candidate McCain and the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), both see the benefits of using technology in revamping how classrooms run, McCain's campaign early on embraced the benefits of nontraditional online education in some key ways.
Whichever candidate prevails on Nov. 4,, the most successful educational policies will be those that approach education challenges from an innovation perspective.
CUSTOMIZATION IS KEY
One of the core reasons schools struggle is because their structure compels standardization in the way they teach and test. This standardized, monolithic experience would be fine if all students learned in the same way. But as we know from our own experience, we all learn in different ways. Different things motivate different people, we each have different intelligence strengths and learning styles, and people learn at different paces. Standardization in schools therefore will not do the trick. We need customization.
If high-school education is failing in the U.S., maybe Web video can help. Founded last April, Brightstorm is a Web video site that brings bright, talented teachers together with students who need some extra help. Backed by Korea's KTB Ventures, which invested the entire $6 million in the startup's A round, Brightstorm is launching today to the public.
There are about 20 teachers on the site offering video courses in subjects such as Geometry, the SAT, and A.P. U.S. History. Each course is broken up into episodes that are about 10 to 20 minutes each. Each course is $50, which is split between Brightstorm and the teachers. Students can watch a free promotional video to decide if they like the teacher and want to purchase the course. These tend to be overproduced with cheesy video graphics (stop with the jump cuts already), but they do the job of getting across each teacher's personality and teaching style.
The videos are supplemented with interactive challenges, pop-up quizzes, and other bonus material. You can certainly see the appeal. If you were a high school student who needed a tutor, wouldn't you rather watch videos on your computer for ten minutes a day than endure a live tutorial for an hour or more? Now, whether you are actually going to learn more is still debatable.
Mayors Go Door to Door, Personally Encouraging Students to Stay in the Game for Their Own Good -- and for the Sake of the City
As the financial meltdown and economic slump hold the national spotlight, another potential crisis is on the horizon: a persistently high dropout rate that educators and mayors across the country say increases the threat to the country's strength and prosperity.
According to one study, only half of the high school students in the nation's 50 largest cities are graduating in four years, with a figure as low as 25% in Detroit. And while concern over dropouts isn't new, the problem now has officials outside of public education worried enough to get directly involved.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors [PDF Report] is focusing its education efforts on dropouts. Mayors in Houston and other Texas cities go door to door to the homes of dropouts, encouraging them to return to school. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin meets on weekends with students and helps them with life planning. Other cities, like Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo., have dropout prevention programs.
Some new studies show far fewer students completing high school with diplomas than long believed. "Whereas the conventional wisdom had long placed the graduation rate around 85%, a growing consensus has emerged that only about seven in 10 students are actually successfully finishing high school" in four years, said a study by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, a nonprofit group based in Bethesda, Md. It was released this year by America's Promise Alliance, a nonpartisan advocacy group for youth. In the nation's 50 largest cities, the graduation rate was 52%.
As many as 5,000 middle school teachers in Chicago could be required to go back to school for additional training to continue teaching under a plan expected to be approved by the Board of Education this week.
Under the proposal, 6th-, 7th- and 8th-grade teachers would be asked to gain an "endorsement" noting they are qualified for specific subjects at those grade levels, said Xavier Botana, head of elementary education for the Chicago Public Schools.
While teachers must be state-certified to teach in the district, currently neither the district nor the state requires teachers to gain the additional credential for classes such as math, English and science. Chicago is following many other districts in toughening requirements, officials said.
Botana said that while potentially 5,000 middle school teachers are affected, many already may have the necessary credits.
"Going forward, all of our kids in 6th through 8th grades will be taught by somebody who has a deeper level of content area knowledge than what is currently required," he said. "We need to aim higher."
Mary McClure, a Chicago Teachers Union official, said the union supports the move and has been working with the district to make sure teachers have enough time to take the classes.
One of the more interesting discussions taking place among technology experts is the need for teachers to move from a pedagogical focus to one that features an andragogical approach. The shift comes in direct response to the greater push to implement technology in today's classrooms.
To get a clear indication of the two concepts, pedagogy and androgogy, we turn to Wikpedia. Accordingly, we find the following definition and explanation of the term pedagogy.
"Pedagogy or paedagogy is the art or science of being a teacher. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction.
Welcome to the Airbus Fly Your Ideas challenge, a global competition designed to encourage innovative thinkers to develop ideas that can shape the future of aviation and deliver a further reduction in the industry's impact on the environment.
The competition is open to college and university students from around the world, studying a degree, Masters or PHD in any academic discipline, from engineering to marketing, business to science and philosophy to design.
Airbus is offering €30,000 for the team whose idea demonstrates the greatest short or long term potential to reduce the impact of our industry on the environment, as well as a range of other prizes available throughout the competition (see Prizes for more information).
FRANCE may think of itself as a literary society, but real prestige is reserved for mathematics. Excellence in maths determines access to the elite, via ultra-selective grandes écoles such as the École Nationale d'Administration or the Polytechnique. More French mathematicians have won the Fields Medal, a top international prize, than those from any other European country. Top maths graduates working in French banks have pioneered some of the market's most complex equity derivatives. So there has been some head-scratching at the idea that Xavier Darcos, the education minister, is now considering an end to the pre-eminence of maths in the baccalauréat school-leaving exam.
Early education advocates want you to believe that the case for universal preschool is so airtight that raising any questions about it is an act of heresy. But there is a strong and growing body of literature showing that preschool produces virtually no lasting benefits for the majority of kids.
Proponents of universal preschool claim that when kids attend quality preschools, they grow up to be smarter, richer and more law-abiding. But this is a fairy tale not based on research.
More kids who attend preschool enter kindergarten knowing their ABCs and counting their numbers than their stay-at-home peers, it is true. But these gains fade, as study after study has shown.
Consider Oklahoma and Georgia, two states that have spent billions implementing universal preschool. Georgia's fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading score in 1992, when it embraced universal preschool, was 212 - three points below the national average. Last year, after years of universal preschool, it was 219 - still one point below the national average. Its math score was three points below the average in 1992. Last year, it was 235 - four points below the national average.
A vision of greater state school independence has been set out by the new academies minister, with a prediction that "self-governing schools" will become the "dominant" model for secondary education.
Jim Knight's comments, in an interview with the Financial Times, suggest Labour is determined to avoid being outflanked by the Conservatives as both parties vie to outbid each other in giving schools greater autonomy - a policy attractive to many families.
Mr Knight was schools minister but has now added academies to his responsibilities after Andrew Adonis's move to transport in the recent cabinet reshuffle.
His first interview about academies since taking on the portfolio will soothe fears of sponsors and education officials over the departure of Lord Adonis, who conceived and ran the academies programme.
Sponsors are concerned that Ed Balls, the schools secretary, wants to give a bigger role to local authorities and is less enthusiastic about faith and independent schools becoming academies. Officials also say that without Lord Adonis's "obsessive" commitment to establishing new academies, the programme will lose drive.
The hierarchy of needs is an idea associated with one man, Abraham Maslow (see article), the most influential anthropologist ever to have worked in industry. It is a theory about the way in which people are motivated. First presented in a paper ("A Theory of Human Motivation") published in the Psychological Review in 1943, it postulated that human needs fall into five different categories. Needs in the lower categories have to be satisfied before needs in the higher ones can act as motivators. Thus a violinist who is starving cannot be motivated to play Mozart, and a shop worker without a lunch break is less productive in the afternoon than one who has had a break.
The theory arose out of a sense that classic economics was not giving managers much help because it failed to take into account the complexity of human motivation. Maslow divided needs into five:
It's a difficult time for Madison schools to be asking property taxpayers for more money.
But it also is a very tough time for Madison schools to be reducing services for students -- a large and growing percentage of whom need extra or tailored help to succeed.
That's why Madison should vote "yes" on its school referendum Nov. 4 -- with one big demand in return. Moving forward, school leaders and, especially, the teachers union need to commit to more innovation and evaluation of existing school programs.
That means more charter and specialty schools to excite parents and to give struggling students concrete evidence of a successful career path after graduation
Minority voters have long favored the Democratic Party's push for increased federal funding for public schools. But over the past few years, some of these voters have embraced the conservative-backed idea of private-school vouchers for low-income students.
Pro-voucher voters among racial minorities overwhelmingly support Barack Obama, but they are baffled by the Democratic nominee's opposition to vouchers. They also say they are frustrated that Democratic leaders appear to be more concerned about keeping the peace with teachers unions -- which adamantly oppose vouchers -- than about finding alternatives that could advance desperately needed education reforms for minority students.
Obama's "change" message has attracted millions of minorities, particularly African-Americans. Yet he cannot afford to lose minorities who are demanding greater school choice for their children.
In February, Obama seemed open to the idea of private-school vouchers. In an editorial board meeting with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, he was asked about his opposition to Wisconsin's voucher program. If he saw more proof that vouchers are successful, Obama said, he would "not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn.... You do what works for the kids."
But at the American Federation of Teachers convention this year, Obama repeated his attack against spending government money to help low-income students attend private schools. He criticized John McCain's school-choice reform as "using public money for private-school vouchers," and he called instead for overhauling public schools.
Moving the Los Angeles Schools to the 21st Century
Charles Kerchner, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and a specialist in educational organizations, educational policy and teacher unions, writes::
While the financial markets have reached the point of panic, a longer-running crisis has enveloped Los Angeles' school system. For at least a decade, people have called the Los Angeles Unified School District a system in crisis. Even when it does things well, it gets little credit.
In a crisis, a special type of politics is supposed to take hold. People of all political stripes are supposed to come together to fashion a solution, the very kind of politics we are witnessing in response to the financial markets' dysfunction. But unlike that situation, there is no sure resolution of the school's systemic failure, and no sense of urgency. So LAUSD bumps along in a state of permanent crisis.
Getting past permanent crisis and creating a 21st century institution of public education requires only that those interested in the district's future learn from its history. After half a decade of studying efforts to transform the district, my colleagues and I have five policy ideas that we think would move the district beyond permanent crisis.
"Education creates prospects - multilingualism opens new horizons. With our partner schools abroad we not only want to give children access to the German language and education but also to awaken an interest in and understanding for each other. Openness to cultural diversity and tolerance towards other people's distinctiveness are not mutually exclusive. To help children grasp this even better we need, more than ever, places where they can meet, learn and be creative together. The earlier we realize that we are an international learning community, the more capable we will be of solving our shared problems. Our partner schools abroad want to contribute towards that goal."
-- Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier
Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has launched the "Schools: Partners for the Future" Initiative. Its goal is to build up a worldwide network of at least 1000 partner schools through which to awaken young people's interest in and enthusiasm for modern-day Germany and German society. Additional funds to the tune of 45 million euro have been earmarked for the initiative in 2008. It will be coordinated by the Federal Foreign Office and implemented in cooperation with the Central Agency for Schools Abroad, the Goethe-Institut, the Educational Exchange Service of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Academic Exchange Service.PDF Brochure and Teacher's Abroad.
Ambassador Klaus Scharioth visited the Smith Academy of International Languages in Charlotte, North Carolina, to present a check for $22,101 on September 22, 2008. The school is one of the 16 new members in the US of the worldwide partner school network, which currently has around 500 partner schools.
The State University of New York Board of Trustees approved the charter application last week for the New Roots Charter School, an innovative new high school that will be one of the first fully integrated models of education for sustainability at the secondary level in the nation. Students in my spring 2007 "Teaching Sustainability" course contributed to the development of the initial school concept paper, which provided the foundation for the charter application submitted in June.
Why this school, why here and why now? New Roots Charter School answers the call of the U.N. Decade for Education for Sustainable Development for the rethinking of education necessary to address the problems of the 21st century. Gov. David Paterson was quoted as saying, "Global warming presents each of us with a question. Do we continue with the status quo or are we ready to make significant cultural and lifestyle alterations?"
Consider our energy crisis, expanding poverty and the degradation of essential ecosystem services, and Paterson's conclusion becomes even more urgent. "Future actions will require a fundamental change of philosophy in how we live our lives," he said.
HER giggling friends suddenly quiet down when Jamilka Carrasquillo, her large silver hoop earrings swinging, describes the day her class killed chickens.
"We actually had to go up to the woods to do it," she says, perched on the back of a chair in a classroom at Common Ground High School in New Haven.
Each student who wanted one got a bird. Following a modified-kosher method (no rabbi), the students stunned the birds with an electric shock, hung them upside down and cut the jugular vein. They call the chickens "meat birds" to maintain emotional distance, but the experience can be difficult.
Jamilka cried; others, even teachers, did too. A lot emerged as vegetarians. Jamilka did not, but she says she came to understand that the pinkish slabs wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf actually come from living animals. She pledged not to waste food.
A prominent RTI educational organization recognized for achieving positive sustainable results in schools, published the latest volume of its Reading Review this week.
This newspaper is designed for Directors of Curriculum, Teachers, Principals, and Superintendents, sharing the stories of schools' successes, LETRS Coaching, RTI Implementation and other rewarding articles. Read the Reading Review today to discover what success is actually occurring in today's classrooms.
ONE morning early last month, long after that frantic hour between 7 and 8 when most New York City parents were hustling their 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds out the door and into their first day of kindergarten, Benny Rendell, the 5-year-old son of Joanne Rendell, a novelist, and Brad Lewis, a New York University professor, lay sprawled asleep in his bed, enjoying what his mother described as his first day of unkindergarten.
Benny stayed asleep, as is his habit, until well past 11 a.m., while his mother, whose first book, "The Professors' Wives' Club," was just published by NAL Accent, worked on her new novel. When Benny awoke, he and his mother slowly made their way to a friend's house in Brooklyn, with Benny reading the subway stops out loud on the way, and counting out change at a vegetable stand.
They spent the afternoon in a Fort Greene backyard; while Benny played with his pals in the mud, the grown-ups looked on, and shared a cold one.
Problems Without Figures For Fourth to Eighth Grade
A Math book for "High Schools and Normal Schools by S.Y. Gillan [9.6MB PDF]:
Arithmetic can be so taught as to make the pupil familiar with thc fact that we may use a number in a problem without knowing what particular number it is. Some of the fundamentals of algebra may thus be taught along with arithmetic. But, as a rule, whenever any attempt is made to do this the work soon develops or degenerates into formal algebra, with a full quota of symbolism, generalization and formulae -- matter which is not wholesome pabulum for a child's mind and the result has been that teachers have given up the effort and have returned to the use of standardized knowledge put up in separate packages like baled hay, one bale labeled "arithmetic," another "algebra," etc.
Every problem in arithmetic calls for two distinct and widely different kinds of work: first, the solution, which involves a comprehension of the conditions of the problem and their relation to one another; second, the operation. First we
decide what to do; this requires reasoning. Then we do the work; this is a merely mechanical process, and the more mechanical the better. A calculating machine, too stupid to make a mistake, will do the work more accurately than a
skillful accountant. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing do not train the power to reason, but deciding in a given set of conditions which of these operations to use and why, is the feature of arithmetic which requires reasoning.
The problems offered here will furnish material to promote thinking; and a few minutes daily used in this kind of work will greatly strengthen the pupils' power to deal with the problems given in the textbook.
After consultation with teachers, the author decided to print the problems without regard to classification. They range all the way from very simple work suitable for beginners up to a standard adapted to the needs of eighth grade pupils. As a review in high school and normal school classes the problems may be taken in order as they come, and will be found Interesting and stimulating. For pupils in the grades, the teacher will Indicate which ones to omit; this discrimination will be a valuable exercise for the teacher.
A few "catch problems" are put in to entrap the unwary. To stumble occasionally into a pitfall makes a pupil more watchful of his steps and gives invigorating exercise in regaining his footing. The groove runner thus learns to use his wits and see the difference between a legitimate problem and an absurdity.
It is recommended that these exercises be used as sight work, the pupils having the book in hand and the teacher designating the problems to be solved without previous preparation.
S. Y. GILLAN.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 21, 1910. Many thanks to Dick Askey for providing a copy (the!) of this book.
From the book:
To answer in good, concise English, affords an excellent drill in clear thinking and accurate expression. This one is suitable for high school, normal school and university students, some of whom will flounder in a most ludicrous fashion when they first attempt to give a clear-cut answer conforming to the demands of mathematics and good English.
224. After a certain battle the surgeon sawed off several wagon loads of legs. If you are told the number of legs in each load and the .price of a cork leg, how can you find the expense of supplying these men with artificial legs? Writeout a list of twenty other expense items incurred in the fighting of a battle.
225. The American people spend each year for war much more than for education. If you know the total amount spent for each purpose, how can you find the per capita expense for war and for schools?
227. A boy travels from Boston to Seattle in a week. Every day at noon he meets a mail train going east on which he mails a letter to his mother in Boston. If there is no delay, how frequently should she receive his letters?
Baylor University in Waco, Tex., which has a goal of rising to the first tier of national college rankings, last June offered its admitted freshmen a $300 campus bookstore credit to retake the SAT, and $1,000 a year in merit scholarship aid for those who raised their scores by at least 50 points.
Of this year's freshman class of more than 3,000, 861 students received the bookstore credit and 150 students qualified for the $1,000-a-year merit aid, said John Barry, the university's vice president for communications and marketing.
"We're very happy with the way it worked out," Mr. Barry said in a telephone interview. "The lion's share of students ended up with the $300 credit they could use in our bookstore. That's not going to make or break the bank for anybody. But it's sure been appreciated by our students and parents."
The offer, which was reported last week by the university's student newspaper, The Lariat, raised Baylor's average SAT score for incoming freshmen to 1210, from about 1200, Mr. Barry said. That score is one of the factors in the rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report.
The Brownsville Independent School District in Texas won what may be the nation's most important prize for excellence in urban education on Tuesday, the same day that Texas authorities announced that the district had failed to meet achievement targets for two years under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Erica Lepping, a spokeswoman for the foundation that administers the $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, said the 10-member prize jury, which included two former secretaries of education, was aware that Brownsville had missed its testing targets under the federal law last year but had considered many other academic quality indicators in making its choice.
A vast majority of the nation's largest urban districts, including three of the four runners-up for this year's Broad prize, also failed to meet the federal law's annual targets, Ms. Lepping said.
"The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued."
The idea that the U.S. won't even properly develop the skills of young people who could perform at the highest intellectual levels is breathtaking -- breathtakingly stupid, that is.
The authors of the study, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluded that American culture does not value talent in math very highly. I suppose we're busy with other things, like text-messaging while jay-walking. The math thing is seen as something for Asians and nerds.
A state-by-state analysis by The New York Times found that in the 40 states reporting on their compliance so far this year, on average, 4 in 10 schools fell short of the law's testing targets, up from about 3 in 10 last year. Few schools missed targets in states with easy exams, like Wisconsin and Mississippi, but states with tough tests had a harder time. In Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Mexico, which have stringent exams, 60 to 70 percent of schools missed testing goals. And in South Carolina, which has what may be the nation's most rigorous tests, 83 percent of schools missed targets.
With economic issues sucking up so much political oxygen this year, K-12 education hasn't received the attention it deserves from either Presidential candidate. The good news is that school reformers at the local level continue to push forward.
This month the Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF), a charter school network in Los Angeles, announced plans to expand the number of public charter schools in the city's South Central section, which includes some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the country. Over the next four years, the number of ICEF charters will grow to 35 from 13. Eventually, the schools will enroll one in four students in the community, including more than half of the high school students.
The demand for more educational choice in predominantly minority South Los Angeles is pronounced. The waitlist for existing ICEF schools has at times exceeded 6,000 kids. And no wonder. Like KIPP, Green Dot and other charter school networks that aren't constrained by union rules on staffing and curriculum, ICEF has an excellent track record, particularly with black and Hispanic students. In reading and math tests, ICEF charters regularly outperform surrounding traditional public schools as well as other Los Angeles public schools.
Surveys show that cheating in school -- plagiarism, forbidden collaboration on assignments, copying homework and cheating on exams -- has soared since researchers first measured the phenomenon on a broad scale at 99 colleges in the mid-1960s.
The percentage of students who copied from another student during tests grew from 26 percent in 1963 to 52 percent in 1993, and the use of crib notes during exams went from 6 percent to 27 percent, according to a study conducted by Dr. Donald McCabe of Rutgers. By the mid-1990s, only a small minority said they had never cheated, meaning that cheating had become part of the acceptable status quo.
Dr. McCabe's later national survey of 25,000 high school students from 2001 to 2008 yielded equally depressing results: more than 90 percent said they had cheated in one way or another.
Dr. Jason Stephens of the University of Connecticut has now embarked on a three-year pilot program to reduce cheating. His premise is that honesty and integrity are not only values but habits -- habits that can be encouraged in school settings, with positive benefits later in life.
1. Mortgage on future property with permanent increase: Asking taxpayers to refinance/mortgage their futures and that of the school district with a permanent increase of $13 million yearly for the operations budget. It has been stated the district needs the money to help keep current programs in place. It is expected that even after 3 years of this referendum totaling $27 million, the Board is projecting a continued revenue gap and will be back asking for even more.
2. No evaluation nor analysis of programs and services: The Board will make budget cuts affecting program and services, whether or not this referendum passes. The cuts will be made with no assessment/evaluation process or strategy for objective analyses of educational or business programs and services to determine the most effective and efficient use of money they already have as well as for the additional money they are asking with this referendum.
3. Inflated criteria for property value growth: The dollar impact on property to be taxed is projected on an inflated criteria of 4% growth in property valuation assessment; therefore, reducing the cost projection for the property tax levy. The growth for property valuation in 2007 was 3.2% and for 2008 it was 1.0%. Given the state of the economy and the housing market, the growth rate is expected to further decline in 2009. [10/13 Update: The above references to property valuation assessment growth are cited from City of Madison Assessor data. See ACE document "Watch List Report Card" [2008 Referendum Watch List 755K PDF] for State Department of Revenue citations for property valuation base and growth rate used for determination of MMSD property tax levy.]
4. No direct impact on student learning and classroom instruction: There is District acknowledgement of a serious achievement gap between low-income and minority student groups compared with others. There are no plans evident for changing how new or existing money will be spent differently in order to have an impact on improving student learning/achievement and instructional effectiveness.
5. Lack of verification of reduction in negative aid impact on taxes: District scenarios illustrating a drastic reduction in the negative impact on state aids from our property-rich district is unsubstantiated and unverified, as well as raising questions about unknown possible future unintended consequences. The illustrated reduction is from approximately 60% to 1% results by switching maintenance funds from the operations budget and 2005 referendum proceeds to a newly created "Capital Expansion Fund--Fund 41" account. [Update: 10/13: The reduction in the negative aid impact will take affect regardless of the outcome of the referendum vote. See the ACE document "Watch List Report Card" [2008 Referendum Watch List 755K PDF] for details.]
6. Full disclosure, accountability and transparency: Data and information has not been presented to show and verify criteria, assumptions, base lines, calculations and analyses for stated efficiencies, effectiveness, savings, past and current projects, cuts and reductions. [Update 10/13: The new administration is gathering and preparing information and data on a pro-active, but limited, basis.]
7. No cost-sharing and collaborative initiatives with other governments: Discussions and negotiations have not taken place with city and county governments for cost-sharing and collaborative initiatives to reduce costs, minimize duplication of services, and create better defined roles and responsibilities.
8. Making schools safe for students and staff: There are no specific plans or strategies for changes in the response system for safety, use of appropriate technology and curriculum helping students and staff develop shared responsibilities and conflict resolution. [Update 10/13: The administration is engaging input from school staff, students, parents and city officials for the development of plans. They are also working on identifying funding sources to provide for safer access from outside walk-ins to the buildings.]
9. Impact of economics and affordability: The impact of tax increases becomes staggering when put in the total context of a school referendum increase and an operations increase; a City of Madison projected 4-6% budget increase; a County of Dane projected 4-6% budget increase; the State of Wisconsin budget expense deficit and decrease in revenues; and the national economic scene of increased food and fuel costs along with the lack of stability in the financial and housing markets.
10. Expected approval of future Maintenance Referendum included in tax impact: The District states that their figures showing the tax impact with approval of the current referendum includes the current Maintenance Referendum (approximately $5 million per year) running through 2009-10 will be approved again past 2009-10. [Update: 10/13: Projections are now available excluding the tax impacts of the current and projected maintenance referendums.]
11. Board discussing another new elementary school: The Board of Education has authorized the administration to seek property in south Madison to build a new elementary school. Planning initiatives are underway to propose a referendum for building an elementary school building in the near future. [Update: 10/13: The administration is not taking any action on this initiative at this time.] See ACE document "Watch List Report Card" [230K PDF Version] for detailed information on 'key issues'
New England History Teachers Association
Newsletter Fall 1999
In Hamlet, Polonius offers his introduction to the players by describing them as: "The best players in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral or poem unlimited."
Modern American education has been visited with an echo of this brief 1602 disquisition on what a cool combinatorial plaything the permu-tations of presentation can be in the right hands. Our version is called Multiple Intelligences, and an article in the Magazine of History lays out a simplified version of a lesson plan for teaching the Spanish-American War. It offers the basics of this new orthodoxy--methods which can cater to: Intrapersonal Intelligence, Verbal/ Linguistic Intelligence, Musical/Rhythmic Intelligence, Visual/Spatial Intelligence, Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelli-gence, and Mathematical Intelligence.
This is clearly the introductory form of this approach, and does not try to get into the more arcane techniques of Mathematico-Spatial-Verbal or Linguistic-Rhythmic-Kinesthetic or Interpersonal-Intrapersonal-Visual-Bodily methods of curriculum design.
The founder of this new way to develop individual learning plans for each student and all combinations of students in a class is Howard Gardner, MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was interviewed, not too long ago, on public radio in Boston, and when he was asked why he chose the term Multiple Intelligences, he quite candidly replied, "If I had called them Talents, no one would have paid any attention."
To be fair to this academic psychologist looking for a new field to make a name in, it is quite likely that he has very little conception of the damage he has done in American education. Polonius was in part a figure of fun, although he does have some of Shakespeare's most famous lines ("To thine own self be true"), but Professor Gardner cannot get off quite so easily, because his work is not recognized as comical by enough of our educators.
He has made it possible for teachers everywhere to say that whatever they feel like doing in class, from gossiping about scandal to reminiscing about Vietnam to showing travel slides, to you name it, is designed to appeal to one of the many talents (Intelligences) that students bring to school with them.
When students who cannot read a comic book come to get their high school diplomas, their teachers can say that they have been dealing with the rich complexity of their Cranial Multiplicity, and so had no time to teach them to read and write.
In fact, it could be much worse. Professor Gardner recently revealed that he has discovered something which he might call spiritual intelligence. Someone must have pointed out to him the existence of religious activity among human beings over the millenia, and he has now decided that there must be some new form of Intelligence involved in the search for the will of God.
But he could have made things even more silly. Any pro football scout will tell you that there is wide receiver intelligence, interior offensive lineman intelligence, fullback intelligence, and strong safety intelligence, and a similar list could be provided for every other sport. These Intelligences, along with joke-telling intelligence, dating intelligence, job-search intelligence, and hundreds of others, are brought into the high school classroom each day, in varying strengths, by at least some of the members of each group of students, but, mercifully, Professor Gardner has put off his investigations and recommendations for dealing with these varieties of Multiple Intelligence for a later time.
While the classroom teachers who have enlisted themselves in this venture to redecorate instruction beyond all hope of imparting necessary information, and of training students to read and write, may feel they can employ a superior taxonomy of human existence, and they can describe what they do in a classroom in terms which could make Polonius blush for them, it seems unlikely that their students are getting an education. What a waste of a Harvard Professor and the time of countless students...
It would be hard to find a more advanced math class in public schools than the one Robert Sachs teaches at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
That's because it isn't really high school math.
Complex Variables is usually taught to college juniors and seniors. It is offered at selective Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County because students demand the challenge.
"This class is pretty difficult," said Bobbie Pelham Webb, 17, a senior. "It is one of the first math classes that is challenging to me. Calculus was easy."
Another well-intentioned report on the future of American schools reached my cubicle recently: "21st Century Skills, Education and Competitiveness: A Resource and Policy Guide." It is available on the Web at www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php. It is full of facts and colorful illustrations, with foresight and relevance worthy of the fine organizations that funded it -- the National Education Association, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Ford Motor Company Fund and the Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a leading education advocacy organization that also produced the report and sent it to me and many other people.
So why, after reading it, did I feel like tossing it into the waste basket?
Maybe this is just my problem. Maybe everyone else who obsesses about schools loves these reports. There certainly are a lot of them. I seem to get at least one a month. There must be a big demand.
This year the theme for the Academic Decathlon curriculum is Latin America with a focus on Mexico and two area teams plan to go right to the source to study it.
About a dozen members from each of the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon teams at the high schools in Sun Prairie and McFarland will visit Mexico City from Oct. 29 to Nov. 3.
Participants agree that the trip is about more than just a great way to gather information outside of their regular meetings.
"It's a really good team bonding time," said Scott LaWall, a senior at Sun Prairie High School. "During the school year, just (meeting) after school, it's difficult to really get to know your teammates."
Boston high school students may soon be marching to the beat of their own drums. Or the oompah of their own tubas. Literally.
Tucked into Superintendent Carol R. Johnson's ambitious plan to reorganize the school system is a small but splashy proposal: revive the tradition of a high school marching band in a city bereft of one for about four decades.
"I think it would be pretty exciting," Johnson said. "In a city where we have a lot of great historical celebrations and athletic celebrations, it would make us proud to have BPS students marching down the street. I believe there is enough talent in this city to make it happen."
The city would have to find just a few dozen students - out of more than 18,000 high school students districtwide - suit them up and make sure they can play their instruments while marching in synchronized steps. Sounds simple enough, but prior attempts have flopped.
In the mid-1980s, the district proposed a 200-piece citywide marching band with much fanfare and later unveiled a uniform inscribed with the words "Pride of Boston." But rehearsals were never held, and newly purchased drums, cymbals, and horns ultimately collected dust in a school closet.
This past weekend my colleagues and I gave a presentation at the Performing the World conference in Manhattan, which brought together educators, artists, therapists, scholars and activists from dozens of countries who are interested in using performance and drama in a variety of ways. Our presentation was on the role of the arts and performance at our school and how it complements and expands the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IBPYP), an enriched curriculum that we have been using in our classrooms.
The IBPYP model is based on inquiry, participation in the process of learning, and exploration. It is learner-driven, not-teacher dominated. Teachers act as facilitators in the learning process and children's questions and interests are at the center of the classroom. The program originates with the International Baccalaureate Organization, founded in 1968 and based in Geneva, Switzerland. Thousands of schools around the world have adopted IB frameworks.
For the children at our school, some of whom face difficult issues at home -- poverty, isolation, domestic violence, trauma and stress, to name a few -- learning that emphasizes performance, inquiry, and artistic exploration is vital. That is why on any given day at I.C.S., you will see a multitude of creative projects going on: storytelling, puppetry, drama, dance, music, movement, role-playing, book clubs, chess, painting, cooking, yoga, writing, gardening, and active inquiries all around. In the current national climate of testing, we have to make time for creative expression. It is urgent. Children need some constructive form of release.
It's been nearly four years since Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, made his controversial comments about the source of the gender gap in math and science careers. Still, the ripple effect continues - most recently in a study made public today on the world's top female math competitors.
The study, to be published in next month's Notices of the American Mathematical Society, identifies women of extraordinary math ability by sifting through the winners of the world's most elite math competitions. It found that small nations that nurtured female mathematicians often produced more top competitors than far larger and wealthier nations.
The message: Cultural or environmental factors, not intellect, are what really limit women's math achievements.
The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.
The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math -- the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers -- they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls -- and boys, for that matter -- from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
"We're living in a culture that is telling girls you can't do math -- that's telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math," said the study's lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world's most-demanding math competitions. "Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, 'If I'm not an Asian or a nerd, I'd better not be on the math team.' Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they're not even trying."
Many studies have examined and debated gender differences and math, but most rely on the results of the SAT and other standardized tests, Dr. Mertz and many mathematicians say. But those tests were never intended to measure the dazzling creativity, insight and reasoning skills required to solve math problems at the highest levels, Dr. Mertz and others say.
Dr. Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of math, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.
The Alverno College Research Center for Women and Girls, in collaboration with the Women's Fund of Greater Milwaukee, the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Women's Council, is pleased to present our collaborative exploration of the status of girls (ages 10 to 19) in Wisconsin. After the Status of Women in Wisconsin reports were issued in 2002 and 2004, these organizations and others that serve girls in the State raised awareness for the need for companion research on girls as a natural next step. Since a great deal of information about Wisconsin girls is scattered in many different and often difficult-to-find places and documents, a primary goal of this project has been to centralize the information and to make it accessible, not only in print but also via the internet, to a variety of agencies, groups and institutions who have the needs and interests of Wisconsin's girls in mind.
"Woosh! Splat!' A gooshy, white spitball whizzed past Julia's ear. It smushed onto the blackboard and stuck. Julia watched a wet stream travel down from the wad. It left a shiny black trail on the board. There was only one person in the room who would do such a thing. Julia knew who it was.
Julia knew what would happen next. It was the same thing that happened every time Teddy Parker misbehaved.
Miss Crawford, the teacher, spun around and faced the class like a fighter squaring off against an opponent. "Who made this spitball?" she demanded.
Julia clamped her skinny legs together and froze in her seat. Her knobby knees bumped each other.
"Who made this spitball?" Miss Crawford repeated.
"It wasn't any of the sixth graders," said Frank O'Malley, a blond haired, Irish boy. He stood, as was the custom, to speak for his age group.
Julia knew she was expected to answer. She was the only fifth grader in the room who spoke English. The other fifth grade girl sat wide-eyed with sealed lips.
Julia wished they didn't have to go through this ritual every time Teddy Parker acted up. Teddy's family came to Phippsburg long before Julia's. Teddy lived in a real house. Julia's family lived in an old boxcar that had been taken off of the rails. There were other families from Italy, Ireland, and Greece living in the boxcar section of town.
Julia didn't know why Teddy was a trouble maker. He was luckier than all of the other kids. Teddy's father ran the coal mine where everyone else's father worked.
The fourth graders didn't do it," said a girl popping up and down in one motion.
Julia had missed her turn to answer.
"It wasn't any of the third graders, Miss Crawford," said another girl.
"The second graders didn't do it," said Teddy's sister, Paulina.
A small boy stood. "It wasn't the first grade, Teacher," he said.
There will be a punishment for this, "Miss Crawford Said.
"Whoever made this spitball will have to come to the front of the room."
Julia watched Miss Crawford focus on Teddy. He shifted in his wooden seat at the end of the sixth grade row.
"What do you have to say, Teddy?" asked Miss Crawford.
Julia looked at Teddy sitting in his new clothes from Denver. He wore a new shirt under a new sweater, new knickers, and new knee socks. Julia guessed his underwear was new, too. Teddy's clothes were the right size, not patched and baggy hand-me-downs like Julia's. Most of the kids were dressed like her, in clothes that had once been worn by their parents.
Julia watched Teddy slowly rise. He stepped out to the side of his desk. Julia waited for Teddy to make his confession. It was his chance to show off every day. She knew in a moment he would proudly walk to the front of the room, stand on tip toe, and place his nose on a chalk dot Miss Crawford drew on the board. The class would watch him stand there on pointed toe while he took his punishment. Miss Crawford wouldn't make Teddy stand at the board for a whole hour like she would any other student. Teddy was her pet. She'd call off his punishment after five or ten minutes.
It was the same every time. Nothing exciting ever happened in Phippsburg. Why couldn't it be a little bit different this once?
Julia reached up and felt a rag curl in her hair. Mama tied the rags into her hair last night. Julia liked how the curls made a soft half circle around her plain face.
Julia closed her eyes and made one silent wish. "Please let something exciting happen today for a change."
She opened her eyes and blinked three times for good luck.
Miss Crawford was waiting for an answer. Teddy straightened his shoulders and drew in a long, deep breath.
Everyone knows that the Internet is changing the way the world works, plays, and connects. Yet its most powerful applications only seem obvious after some entrepreneur has brought them to life. Of course the web is a great way to distribute books, but it took Amazon to make this clear. Of course the Internet is a smart way to distribute movies, but it took Netflix to make it happen.
So it is with adult learning. Most professionals would rather develop their skills online, on their own schedule, at their own pace, than sit in daylong, mind-numbing "workshops" that bring a lot of boredom and frustration but little intellectual stimulation. So it's not surprising that as long ago as 2006 (eons in Internet time) the American Society for Training and Development reported that across all sectors almost 40 percent of professional development (PD) was delivered via technology (See figure 1). (Surely the numbers are even higher now.)
Starting with those applying this fall for admission to all three Rutgers campuses, high schools will no longer be asked to submit applicants' transcripts. Instead, applicants will themselves enter all of their grades and high school courses in an online application form. An official transcript will eventually be reviewed for every applicant who is admitted and indicates a plan to enroll.
As New Jersey high schools learned of the change, the question everyone has been asking is: Will this lead to a new variety of grade inflation, as applicants (accidentally of course...) somehow transcribe themselves into honors students? Rutgers officials say that won't happen because the transcript checks of accepted applicants who plan to enroll will cover every single student. If you inflate your grades, your admission offer will be revoked -- period.
There is evidence that some combination of honesty and fear can in fact work to keep the self-reported transcripts accurate. The University of California, the pioneer in this type of admissions system, reports extremely low rates of transcript errors. This year, the university admitted 60,000 students to enroll as freshmen at its 9 undergraduate campuses and -- as has been typical in recent years -- campuses don't have more than 5 admitted students each where there is a discrepancy between the reported grades and those verified after the admissions decisions. Applicants are required to sign a statement indicating that admissions offers may be revoked based on false information provided in the process, including high school grades.
Texas school districts say a state proposal to standardize the way they calculate high school grade point averages will "dumb down" public education and discourage students from taking rigorous courses.
Later this month, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will consider approval of a new regulation designed to help Texas colleges and universities better assess the academic records of high school students.
Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said the current system for calculating GPAs is not consistent. A 4.0 in one district, for example, could vary greatly from a 4.0 in another district.
"There's no uniformity in the way GPA is calculated," said Dr. Paredes. "It's very difficult for universities to know what grade points mean."
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for "the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane." Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that "Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education--a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation," and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: "Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!"
As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers's school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for "social justice" in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing "reform" movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation's largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.
In the new paper, however, they concluded that "systematic differences in school quality appear much less important in explaining the differences in test-score trajectories by race, once the data are extended through third grade; Blacks lose substantial ground relative to Whites within the same school and even in the same classrooms. That is, including school- or teacher-fixed effects [does] little to explain the divergent trajectories of Black and White students between kindergarten and third grade. . . . By the end of third grade, even after controlling for observables, the Black-White test-score gap is evident in every skill tested in reading and math except for the most basic tasks such as counting and letter recognition, which virtually all students have mastered."
How to narrow this yawning gap? Start by thinking more concretely about the cognitive deficits of those Harlem ten-year-olds Fryer mentioned. Inner-city black children, research shows, begin school with only half the vocabulary of white middle-class children. Typically, they soon fall behind in trying to decode how the written English language blends the sounds made by letter combinations into words. "Difficulties in decoding unfamiliar words rapidly are at the core of most reading problems," says Reid Lyon, former head of reading research at the National Institutes of Health.
The government said Sunday it will expand the education budget to develop training programs for English teachers and recruit more native English-speaking teachers. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced Sunday that it will spend a total of 19.5 billion won ($15.9 million) next year, up 12.2 billion won from a year earlier, for English education programs at elementary and secondary schools.
Under the plan, the ministry will recruit more native English speakers as well as ethnic Koreans for the ``Teach and Learn in Korea (TaLK)'' program, which was introduced last April to give opportunities for students in rural areas to learn English from native English speakers.
Also, the ministry will introduce intensive English training programs for state-run universities specialized in fostering elementary school teachers across the country and distributing English teaching manuals to school teachers.
Cash incentives for high school students to perform better in school are growing in popularity, but we understand very little about them. Does paying students for better Advanced Placement (AP) test scores encourage enrollment in AP classes? Does it lead to more students taking the tests and achieving passing scores? Do cash incentives lead to more students going to college?
I set out to determine the impact of a cash incentive program operating in a number of Texas high schools. The Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP) is a novel initiative that includes cash incentives for both teachers and students for each passing score earned on an Advanced Placement exam. The program is targeted to schools serving predominantly minority and low-income students with the aim of improving college readiness. The APIP was first implemented in 10 Dallas schools in 1996 and has been expanded to include more than 40 schools in Texas. The National Math and Science Initiative awarded grants to Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington to replicate the APIP and plans to expand these programs to 150 districts across 20 states.
Using data from the Texas Education Agency, I evaluated how the APIP affected education outcomes in participating schools in the years following implementation. I studied whether the program increased AP course enrollment and the share of students sitting for AP (or International Baccalaureate [IB]) examinations. Since improved AP outcomes may not necessarily reflect increased learning and could come at the expense of other academic outcomes, I also looked beyond these immediate effects to the broader set of outcomes, such as high school graduation rates, SAT and ACT performance, and the percentage of students attending college.
Jim Delisle tells the story of a bright little girl who went with her parents to buy a bicycle.
After the bike had been selected, the parents presented their credit card to complete the purchase.
"Don't you know the interest rate they charge on credit cards?" the girl said in a scolding tone. "If we wait until Christmas, Santa will bring it -- and it won't cost anything!"
The anecdote illustrates the challenges that can be involved in parenting a gifted child, who may be light-years ahead of the pack intellectually but all too typical in other respects.
A two-day seminar at Blue Harbor Resort and Conference Center, which concluded Friday, addressed issues specific to the development and education of gifted children and was attended by more than 300 schoolteachers, administrators, parents and students.
A politician after politician and CEO after CEO have pontificated for 20 years about what is wrong in American schools, all the while offering simple-minded solutions (higher expectations girded by more high-stakes testing), nearly all have ignored the great elephant in the classroom: poverty. Their behavior said, "If we pretend it isn't there, either it will go away or cease to exist."
Before looking at the single most intelligent approach to urban school woes (see Harlem solution below), let's look at what most impacts the classroom from outside the classroom. It is the weight of poverty that rides the at-risk child like a six-ton elephant. Consider the observations of Pulitzer-winning reporter David K. Shipler:
About 35 million Americans live below the federal poverty line. Their opportunities are defined by forces that may look unrelated, but decades of research have mapped the web of connections. A 1987 study of 215 children attributed differences in I.Q. in part to 'social risk factors' like maternal anxiety and stress, which are common features of impoverished households. Research in the 1990's demonstrated how the paint and pipes of slum housing -- major sources of lead -- damage the developing brains of children. Youngsters with elevated lead levels have lower I.Q.'s and attention deficits, and -- according to a 1990 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine -- were seven times more likely to drop out of school.
Take the case of an 8-year-old boy in Boston. He was frequently missing school because of asthma attacks, and his mother was missing work so often for doctors' appointments that she was in danger of losing her low-wage job. It was a case typical of poor neighborhoods, where asthma runs rampant among children who live amid the mold, dust mites, roaches and other triggers of the disease."1
The inherent suggestion in NCLB is that all of that will go away if we just expect more of our teachers and students. That is an insult to both of them and it diminishes the enormity of the problem while doing nothing to solve it.
The red pen. In our still largely decentralized public school system, it's no big surprise that this old-fashioned instrument of ill repute gets starkly different treatment from district to district and state to state. Three locales, in fact, have recently reopened the question, "what's in a grade"--and come up with very different answers. Perhaps by evaluating these recent conversations, we can imagine what standard GPAs might look like.
Fairfax County, Virginia, parents are outraged that their children must score a 94 to receive an A. Neighboring counties give As for a mere 90, they argue, and they and their kids are being unfairly penalized when competing for college admission, national merit awards, even a lower car insurance bill. Parents have taken up arms in hopes that extended pressure on the district to follow the example of nearby school systems will lead to a lower bar; Fairfax is contemplating doing so.
Fairfax's one-county crusade against grade inflation is probably sacrificing its students on the altar of its ideals, as parents allege, and remedying that problem is not difficult. Despite cries of the old "slippery slope," shifting the letter-number ratio to match neighboring counties will ultimately benefit Fairfax students (in the short term at least) when it comes to college admissions and the like.
Pittsburgh has tackled the other end of the grading spectrum. All failing grades (those of 50 or below) will henceforth be marked down as 50 percent credit in grade books. Long on the books but only recently enforced, this policy, the district claims, is simply giving students a better chance to "catch up" in the next quarter since quarters are averaged into semester and yearlong grades. "A failing grade is still a failing grade," explains district spokeswoman Ebony Pugh. Seems not to matter if it's a 14 or a 49. Round up to 50.
Locally, the Madison School District is implementing "Standards Based Report Cards" in the middle schools.
I've wondered what the implementation of this initiative tells parents, citizens and taxpayers, not to mention students about the new Superintendent? See his memo on the subject here. More here.
... The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.
Those of us who help students and their families prepare college applications know how much more competitive the process has become in the last several years. Students are getting rejected from colleges that older and less accomplished siblings are now attending.
This is because the current crop of seniors is part of the "echo boom," which is expected to peak with 3.3 million children of baby boomers graduating in 2009 and to remain near this level for another seven years. Many more students will be vying for spaces in college.
Teenagers are working harder than ever at challenging themselves with honors and AP courses and filling after-school hours with extracurricular activities, community service programs and SAT prep courses. But it seems like a cruel joke that coinciding with this increased competitiveness, they are required to take a longer and more rigorous Scholastic Aptitude Test.
A cash incentive program that rewards both teachers and students for each passing score earned on an Advanced Placement (AP) exam has been shown to increase the percentage of high ACT and SAT scores earned by participating students, and increase the number of students enrolling in college, according to new research by Cornell University economist Kirabo Jackson published in the fall issue of Education Next. The program appears to have the biggest impact on African American and Hispanic students, boosting participation in AP courses and exams.
The Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP) is targeted to Texas schools serving predominantly minority and low-income students. On average, there is a 22 percent increase in the number of students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT in schools with the APIP. The increase rises each year the program is in place so that by the third year there is roughly a 33 percent increase.
The percentage increases in students achieving higher SAT and ACT exam scores are similar among white, African American, and Hispanics students--about 5 percentage points from the third year on. However, the differences in impact relative to the prior performance of each group are sizable, notes Jackson. While there is about a 12 percent relative increase in white students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT, there is a 50 percent relative increase for Hispanics and an 80 percent relative increase for black students.
The NACAC Testing Commission has just released its report [PDF]on the benefits of, and problems with, current standardized admission tests. The Commission says that "a 'one-size-fits-all' approach for the use of standardized tests in undergraduate admission does not reflect the realities facing our nation's many and varied colleges and universities."
It might be pointed out, by an outside observer, that standardized tests not only do not reflect the realities of acceptance for high school students receiving athletic scholarships, but such tests have nothing whatever to do with whether high school athletes are recruited or not and nothing to do with whether they receive college athletic scholarships or not.
Athletic scholarships are based on athletic performance in particular athletic activities, not on tests of the athletic or physical fitness of high school athletes. The cost of failure for college coaches is too high for them to think of relying on any standardized test of sports knowledge or of anything else in their efforts to recruit the best high school athletes they can.
The NACAC Testing Commission also says that standardized tests may not do a good enough job of telling whether applicants to college are academically fit. They recommend the development and use of good subject matter tests which are "more closely linked to the high school curriculum" than the SAT and ACT exams.
This suggestion begins to approach the rigor of assessment in the recruiting and selection of high school athletes, but there are still important differences. The high school athletic curriculum includes such subjects as football, basketball, soccer, baseball, etc., but college coaches do not rely on tests of athletes' knowledge of these sports as determined by sport-specific tests. They need to know a lot about the actual performance of candidates in those sports in which they have competed.
The parallel is not perfect, because of course students who can demonstrate knowledge of history, biology, literature, math, chemistry, and so on, are clearly more likely to manage the demands of college history, biology, literature, math and chemistry courses when they get there, while athletes who know a lot about their sport may still perform poorly in it.
But college academic work does not just consist of taking courses and passing tests. In math there are problem sets. In biology, chemistry, etc., there is lab work to do. And in history courses there are history books to read and research papers to write. Such performance tasks are not yet part of the recommended tests for college admission.
It is now possible, for example, for a student who can do well on a subject matter test in history to graduate from high school without ever having read a complete history book or written a real history research paper in high school. That student may indeed do well in history courses in college, but it seems likely that they will have a steep learning curve in their mastery of the reading lists and paper requirements they will face in those courses.
New standard college admissions tests in specific academic subjects will no doubt bring more emphasis on academic knowledge for the high school students who are preparing for them, but a standard independent assessment of their research papers would surely make it more likely that they would not plan to enter college without ever having done one in high school.
The reading of complete nonfiction books is still an unknown for college admissions officers. Interviewers may ask what books students have read, but there is no actual standard expectation for the content, difficulty and number of nonfiction books high school students are expected to have read before college.
The increased emphasis on subject matter tests is surely a good step closer to the seriousness routinely seen in the assessments for college athletic scholarships, but it seems to me that some regular examination of the reading of nonfiction books and an external assessment of at least one serious research paper by high school students would help in their preparation for college, as well as in the assessment of their actual demonstrated academic fitness which, as the Commission points out, is not now provided by the SAT and ACT tests.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. I conducted an experiment to try to answer that question for one group of students.
For my fall 2006 course, Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), I administered the same final exam I had used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical, and the classes contained approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshman class.
The content of the calculus I course had not changed and, from a math standpoint, using the old exam was completely appropriate.
The average exam score for my 2006 calculus I class was significantly lower than for my 1989 class. Comparing the effects of scaling in the two years reveals the extent of the decline. In my 1989 class, 27 percent of students received As on the test and 23 percent Bs. When I graded my 2006 class on my 2006 scale, 32 percent received As and 37 percent Bs. But if I instead graded my 2006 class on the 1989 scale, only 6 percent would have received As and 21 percent Bs. If I graded the 1989 class on the 2006 scale, 52 percent would have received As and 26 percent Bs.
Why did my 2006 class perform so poorly? With the proliferation of AP calculus in high school, one might think that the good students of 2006 place out of calculus I more frequently than did their 1989 counterparts. However, in 1989, 30 percent of the Arts and Sciences freshmen either took the harder engineering calculus course or a higher level mathematics course (calculus II or III, linear algebra, or differential equations). The percentage in 2006 is only 24 percent.
No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools
Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh, National Council on Teacher Quality1.5MB PDF:
American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test.
He was never much of a student, but Jason Robert Brown was a precocious kid. Growing up in Monsey, N.Y., about an hour north of Manhattan, he became enthralled by music at age 4, was taking lessons at 5. At his first recital -- age 6 -- he not only outplayed his teacher's other students, he also supplied the verbal patter of a natural entertainer.
"He just started chatting with the audience," his mother, Deborah Brown, recalled. "I was floored. Nobody knew where it came from."
Once, before he could write in script, he filched a checkbook from one of his parents, wrote out a check and sent it to a mail-order record club. Fortunately he didn't get all the particulars right, and the check was returned because it was unsigned. Teachers plucked him from third grade and plopped him into the fourth, not because of straight A's but because he wasn't paying attention.
"He was good in everything, but if it wasn't music, he didn't do the work," said Mrs. Brown, a former English teacher.
Aug. 29, 2008, marked the end of the second week of my second year teaching at Craig Elementary school, one of nearly 35 public schools that make up the Recovery School District, a state run system created in 2005 to reform New Orleans' failing schools.
The date had a much greater significance for my students and our city, of course -- it was both the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastating landfall, and the day before Mayor C. Ray Nagin would declare a mandatory evacuation in preparation for what could be "the storm of the century," Hurricane Gustav.
As we neared dismissal that day, my students buzzed around the wooden shelves that housed their binders of classwork.
"The goal and responsibility and moral imperative of this administration is to make sure that each child gets an excellent education," said Rhee, who had hinted broadly in recent weeks that she was ready to invoke what she has dubbed "Plan B."
The blueprint includes a new teacher evaluation system based primarily on student test scores and other achievement benchmarks. She has also decided to employ rules that are on the books but seldom used, including one that allows her to deemphasize the importance of seniority in deciding which teachers would lose jobs in the event of declining enrollment or school closures. Seniority would become one of multiple factors taken into account.
Exactly how teachers will be evaluated on the basis of test scores is still under review, Rhee said. The provision allowing a 90-day review of teacher performance, however, could have a more immediate impact.
I got an e-mail titled "An Angry American With An Idea." This e-mail must have gone viral, because I received it a half-dozen times. You probably got it too. Here is what it said:
"I'm against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG. Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a 'We Deserve It Dividend.' To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000 bona fide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/-, counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up. So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion. That equals $425,000. My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a 'We Deserve It Dividend.' "
The letter goes on and describes the many wonderful things that could happen in America if each adult had an extra $425,000.
Now the funny part. Friends and colleagues--they shall remain anonymous--who passed this e-mail along would append a note: "You should read this." "This actually makes sense."
Not once did anyone point out the Angry American's wee calculation flaw. Eighty-five billion dollars divided by 200 million people is $425, not $425,000.
Identify community goals for Madison Metropolitan School District K-12 Fine Arts education including curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular.
Recommend up to five ways to increase minority student participation and participation of low-income students in Fine Arts at elementary, middle and high school levels.
Make recommendations regarding priorities for district funding of Fine Arts.
Members of the Task Force will present the findings and recommendations to the MMSD School Board on Monday, October, 6, 2008, at 6:15 pm, in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street, Madison.
Students, parents and the general public are encouraged to attend to show support for the role of the arts in ensuring a quality education for every MMSD student. Attendees can register in support of the report at the meeting.
Nineteen community members, including 5 MMSD students, were appointed by the School Board to the Task Force, which met numerous times from February 2007 through June 2008. The Task Force received a great deal of supportive assistance from the Madison community and many individuals throughout the 16 month information gathering and , deliberation process. More than 1,000 on-line surveys were completed by community members, parents, artists, arts organizations, students, administrators and teachers, providing a wealth of information to inform the task force?s discussions and recommendations.
The full Task Force report and appendices, and a list of Task Force members, can be found at http://mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
Fine Arts Task Force Report [1.62MB PDF] and appendices:
Knowledge@Wharton High School is an interactive site for high school students interested in finding out more about the world of business. It's a subject that touches your lives in many ways -- from the malls you shop and the plastics you recycle to the entrepreneurs, sports managers, fashion designers, stock brokers, artists and other leaders that you might become. At KWHS, you will find features about the companies you know and the people who run them, games to improve your financial skills and test your commitment to a greener marketplace, tools to explain how business works, and podcasts and videos that spotlight the world's most creative and colorful people. As part of a network of global online business publications published by The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, KWHS will show you how your ideas can change the world.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Mr. Fitzhugh [fitzhugh@tcr.org] is Editor and Publisher of The Concord Review and Founder of the National Writing Board and the TCR Institute [www.tcr.org].
Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg was short. Indeed, the President had spoken and taken his seat before many in that large crowd gathered outdoors even realized that he had spoken. Fortunately, an alert reporter took down his words. Short as the speech was, it began with a date and a fact--the sort of factual content that is being drained away from student writing today.
The very idea of writing without content takes some getting used to. I was taken aback not long ago to read the comments of a young woman who had been asked how she felt about having a computer grade the essays that she wrote on the Graduate Management Admission Test (Mathews, 2004). She replied that she didn't mind, noting that the test givers were more interested in her "ability to communicate" than in what she actually said.
Although style, fluency, tone, and correct grammar are certainly important in writing, folks like me think that content has value as well. The guidelines for scoring the new writing section on the SAT seem to say otherwise, however. Readers evaluating the essays are told not to take points off for factual mistakes, and they must score the essays "holistically"--at the rate of 30 an hour (Winerip, 2005).
Earlier this year, Linda Shaw of the Seattle Times (2006), reported that the the rules for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) do not allow dictionaries, but "when it comes to the writing section, there's one rule they can break: They can make things up. Statistics. Experts. Quotes. Whatever helps them make their point." According to Shaw, the state's education office announced that "making up facts is acceptable when writing nonfiction, persuasive essays on the WASL."
Lest you conclude that writing without content, or writing nonfiction with fictional content--think James Frey's A Million Little Pieces--is limited to the Left Coast, think again. Across the United States, even the most prestigious writing workshops for teachers generally bypass the what to focus on the how.
All writing has to have some content, of course. So what are students encouraged to put down on the page? In its 2003 report, The Neglected 'R', The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, gave us a clue. According to the report, the following passage by a high school student about the September 11 terrorist attacks shows "how powerfully children can express their emotions."
"The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us."
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up and awakens to himself, the student wrote,
High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life." (p. 22)
As these two excerpts show, both the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges and the NAEP seem to favor emotional and personal writing, at least at the high school level. If personal memoir and "fictional nonfiction" were the sorts of writing that college courses required--not to mention in business, government and other lines of work--then perhaps it wouldn't matter. After all, top executives at ENRON wrote quite a bit of fiction before their arrests, not to mention some well-known journalists who substituted fiction for fact in their reporting.
The problem is that students must know facts, dates, and the viewpoints of various experts and authors to write their college term papers. The Boston Globe has reported some frightening statistics about students' knowledge gaps. Sixty-three percent of students graduating from Massachusetts high schools and attending community colleges are in remedial courses, as are 34 percent of those attending four-year colleges. (Sacchetti, 2004)
A survey of leading U.S. companies revealed that organizations are spending more than $3 billion each year in remedial writing courses for both hourly and salaried employees (National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, 2004).
Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay
As it happens, some teachers and students in U.S. high schools know that writing serious, factual history research papers is good and necessary preparation for future writing tasks, and that it's a superb way to learn history and practice scholarship. One student, whose history essay appeared in The Concord Review (see "Raising the Bar for Expository Writing," p. 46) was so interested in the trial and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson in the early 1600s that she spent several months during her Junior year doing independent study at a public high school in Massachusetts. Her 13,000-word research paper won The Concord Review's Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize.
The student found Anne Hutchinson's independence inspiring. In the following extract from her paper, the student discusses the accusations made against Hutchinson during the trial in which this courageous woman was excommunicated for questioning in private the authority of the ministers as the sole source of God's wisdom:
"...This bitter speech, made by a man who had seen his entire career threatened by the woman now standing before him, opened a trial marked by extraordinary vindictiveness on the part of the men presiding. Why? Because their regulatory power had been, up to this point, thwarted. Hutchinson had done nothing in public, nothing that could be clearly seen and defined, nothing that could be clearly punished. The principal accusation leveled against her was failure to show proper respect to the ministers, but again, she had made no public speeches or declarations, and the court would soon find that producing evidence of her insolence was very difficult.
The assembly did not immediately strike to the heart of the matter: Hutchinson's disparagement of the ministers of the colony as under a covenant of works. Instead, the presiding ministers first accused her of disobeying the commandment to obey one's father and one's mother by not submitting to the 'fathers of the commonwealth,' as [Governor] Winthrop termed it. Next, Hutchinson's meetings were condemned, despite her citation of a rule in Titus exhorting the elder women to teach the younger."
This is factual writing about a historical event--a trial--in which the facts of the case were of the greatest importance. Fiction was not the focus here. The author's emotions, and her "experiences in high school," were distinctly of secondary--if any--importance in her account of these events in American religious and legal history.
Some readers may mistakenly assume that writing with content is common in schools. In 2002, the Roper Organization conducted a study for The Concord Review and found that in U.S. public high schools, 81% of teachers never assign a 5,000-word research paper--that's 8,000 words shorter than the previously cited award-winning essay--and 62% never assign a 3,000-word nonfiction paper. (The Concord Review 2002). Although 95% of teachers surveyed believed that research papers were "important" or "very important," most reported that they did not have time to assign and grade them.
When Support Trumps Rigor
In her report for the Fordham Foundation on state social studies standards in the United States, researcher Sandra Stotsky (1999), cited a newspaper article about a Hispanic high school student named Carol who was unprepared for college work. Described as a top student, the girl was stunned by the level of writing that her Boston college demanded of her. Although the students said that she had received encouragement and support from her high school teachers, she wished that her teachers had given her more challenging work. According to the reporter, the student discovered that "moral support is different from academic rigor." Stotsky noted that teachers often substitute self-esteem-building assignments for rigorous work. The same newspaper article described a high school teacher,
who had had her students "write a short story about their lives" because, in the teacher's words, it allowed them to show "a high level of writing ability" and to realize that "their own experience is valid and useful." This teacher is also quoted as believing that this assignment reflected her "high expectations" for her students. It apparently did not occur to the reporter that this kind of writing assignment today, especially for high school students from minority groups, is more likely to reflect a concern for their self-esteem rather than a desire to challenge them intellectually. A regular flow of such writing assignments may be part of the reason that Hispanic students like Carol are not prepared for college-level writing. (pp. 269-270)
Students like Carol who belatedly discover their lack of preparedness for college work are far more numerous than one might think. Through a survey of recent high school graduates (Achieve, Inc., 2005), the National Governors Association learned that a large majority of students surveyed wished that their teachers had given them more challenging work. Moreover, the High School Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University, 2004) found that 55% of the 80,000 students surveyed said they did fewer than three hours of homework each week, and most received As and Bs anyway.
Anything But Knowledge
Writing about oneself can be the work of genius, as Marcel Proust demonstrated so well in his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. But limiting students to thinking and writing almost entirely about themselves in school is, well, limiting. The Boston Globe, which annually celebrates essays on Courage, asks students to submit short essays--not about someone else's courage, but about their own. Of course, famous people like Anne Hutchinson, Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King, Jr., don't have a monopoly on courage. But it would be refreshing for students to look outside themselves from time to time to reflect on such qualities in others. Unfortunately, solipsism seems to have become the order of the day; the lack of a sustained focus on objectivity and rigor in writing is showing up in poor literacy rates, greater numbers of remedial classes in college, and higher college dropout rates.
In 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the idea of "truthiness" into the English language. The term characterizes speech or writing that appears to be accurate and serious, but is, in fact, false or comical. In college, I learned that one of the tasks of thought is to help us distinguish appearance from reality. The goal of "truthiness" is to blur that distinction. On satirical news programs, like The Daily Show this dubious practice brings the relief of laughter, but on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning--in which students are told that it's OK to make things up and to invent experts and "quote" them--it just brings confusion, even to the task of writing of "nonfiction." Postmodernists and deconstructionists at the university level have long been claiming that there is no such thing as truth, but here we have high school students being told, on a state assessment, that when writing nonfiction, it is OK just to make things up, for instance to invent an expert, and then "quote" him in support of an argument they are making.
The danger is that practices like these can lead high school students to believe that they don't need to seek information about anything outside of their own feelings and experiences. However, college students are still expected to read nonfiction books, which obviously deal with topics other than their personal lives. Students also have to write research papers in which they must organize their thinking and present material coherently. Too many students are not prepared to do this, and many end up dropping out of college. What a terrible waste of hopes and opportunity!
References
Achieve (2005). Rising to the challenge: Are high school graduates prepared for college and work? PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Peter D. Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies. Available: www.achieve.org/files/poll.ppt http://www.achieve.org/files/poll.ppt
The Concord Review, (2002). History research paper study (conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis). Available: www.tcr.org/tcr/institute/historytcr.pdf http://www.tcr.org/tcr/institute/historytcr.pdf
Indiana University. (2004) High School Survey of Student Engagement. Bloomington, IN: [Martha McCarthy]
Mathews, J. (2004, August 1). Computers weighing in on the elements of essay; Programs critique structure not ideas. The Washington Post
National Center for Education Statistics. (2002). The Nation's Report Card: Writing Highlights 2002. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main/2002/2003531.asp
National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges. (2003). The neglected 'R'; The need for a writing revolution. New York: College Board. www.writingcommission.org http://www.writingcommission.org
National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges. (2004). Writing: A ticket to work...or a ticket out: A survey of business leaders. www.writingcommission.org http://www.writingcommission.org
Sacchetti, M. (2005, June 26) Colleges question MCAS success; many in state schools still need remedial help. The Boston Globe.
Shaw, L. (2006, March 17). WASL writing: Make it up as they go along. The Seattle Times, p. B1.
Stotsky, S (1999). Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason. New York: The Free Press, pp. 269-271
Winerip, M. (2005, May 4). SAT Essay rewards length and ignores errors. The New York Times. www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/satessay.html
This article was first published by Educational Leadership in October 2006, and is reprinted with permission of the author.
=================
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Professional development. What thoughts and feelings do those words conjure up for you? Excitement? Boredom? A chance to improve your skills and learn new, interesting teaching strategies? Or a painful time of listening to someone talk about a topic you already know?
We've all been there--sitting in a required in-service class listening to someone go over Bloom's Taxonomy or some other concept or strategy that we've been using effortlessly for years. We grumble our way through the session, irritated that we have to sit on our butts "re-learning" a topic we could have taught just as well ourselves, if not better. Partly we're irritated because we have so much else to do! Many teachers would categorize a situation like this as wasted time.
Of course, not all professional development is like that. But I use the example because it is a great way to help teachers relate to what a gifted kid experiences when the material being taught in class is not at the right readiness-level for him or her. We don't like it when someone else puts us into that kind of a situation, yet we routinely do the same to the gifted students.
For decades, critics of standardized testing -- and especially of the SAT - have said that these examinations fail to capture important qualities, resulting in admissions systems that favor certain groups over others, while failing to represent test takers' full identities. And generally, these critics have said, the qualities that the SAT is best at identifying are those that wealthy white students are more likely than others to possess.
On Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the College Board -- the creator and defender of the SAT -- said pretty much what critics have been saying all along. The board presented the most detailed results yet of new approaches to standardized tests that would measure non-cognitive qualities and could become what some have called the "SAT III."
Thus far, the board has found that there are specific non-cognitive qualities that relate to college success, and that these qualities can be measured. Further, board research suggests that if the admissions process included these qualities in addition to traditional measures, black and Latino enrollments would increase significantly while white and Asian enrollments would drop -- the latter significantly at the most competitive colleges.
During deliberations on House Bill 119 - the state budget bill for fiscal years 2009-10 - the Strickland administration worked with the Legislature to invest an unprecedented amount of money in higher education, recognizing its importance to Ohio's future success.
A major player in these discussions was former state senator and current Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, who was appointed by Strickland in 2007 to help expand access to Ohio's higher education institutions, increase the number of Ohioans with college degrees and help attract and retain talented students that will strengthen the state's workforce and grow our economy.
I believe the governor made the right decision in choosing Fingerhut. In more than a year on the job, he has done many good things and has broadened support for higher education. In fact, in March, the chancellor unveiled a 10-year strategic plan for higher education, which includes the goal of enrolling 230,000 more students in Ohio's colleges and universities by 2017.
By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.
Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state's top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students' academic performance to assess where students need help. "Accountability," for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.
Kowalczyk, who has traveled to 55 countries in five continents, decorated her room with a variety of artifacts such as wood carvings and masks from Ghana, batik sarongs from Malaysia and Indonesia, mud paintings from the Ivory Coast, mola cloth from Panama, puppets from India and books from around the world.
"My philosophy is build interest, give them background," said Kowalczyk, who was named the Wisconsin Middle/Junior High School Teacher of the Year.
As Teacher of the Year, she received $3,000 from Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., through the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation. She was recognized by state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster along with the other three 2008-09 Teachers of the Year during the recent State of Education speech and awards ceremony at the Capitol.
MidAmerican also sees promise in BYD's battery technologies for storing wind energy and solar energy, Mr. Sokol said. Difficulties in storing energy for when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining have limited the deployment of these renewable energy technologies.
More broadly, Berkshire Hathaway wants to tap into China's engineering talent and is doing so through BYD, which has 11,000 engineers and technicians among its 130,000 employees.
Mr. Buffett did not attend the news conference, but said in a statement that he was impressed with Mr. Wang's record as a manager.
Unlike past charter school studies, which focus on student achievement, the authors analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment. They find that charter high schools in Florida and in Chicago have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, univariate probit estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college. Using the proximity of charters and other types of high schools as exogenous instruments for charter high school attendance, they find even stronger effects in bivariate probit models of charter attendance and educational attainment. While large, their estimates are in line with previous studies of the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.
Differentiated instruction--the theory that teachers should work to accomodate and build on students' diverse learning needs--is not new. But it's unlikely that anyone has done more to systematize it and explicate its classroom applications than University of Virginia education professor Carol Ann Tomlinson.
A former elementary school teacher of 21 years (and Virginia Teacher of the Year in 1974), Carol Ann Tomlinson has written more than 200 articles, chapters, and books, including The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners and Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching. Characterized by a rigorous professionalism and a strong underlying belief in both teachers' and students' potential, her work has given many educators both practical and philosophical frameworks for modifying instruction to meet the individual needs of all students.
When charter school directors step into the job, they step onto a high wire with no safety net below them. Though they take on a broader set of responsibilities than traditional public school leaders, charter directors rarely have the "back office" administrative support of a district central office. Instead, it is up to them to secure and manage facilities, recruit students and teachers, raise and manage funds, and coordinate curriculum and instruction.
How are charter school leaders facing this challenge? In Working Without a Safety Net: How Charter School Leaders Can Best Survive on the High Wire, authors Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross explain that today's charter school directors, though deeply motivated by their school's mission and the students they serve, can have their confidence shaken by many of the extras they face.
Drawing from a six-state survey, the authors find that, like traditional public school principals, today's charter school directors often come to their positions from other jobs in education and with training from schools of education. However, charter school leaders tend to be younger and newer to leadership positions; many have only a couple years of experience in school administration.
In this installment of Education Watch, Bruce Fuller and Lance T. Izumi discuss the candidates' positions on bilingual education. Go to Mr. Fuller's post.
Lance T. Izumi, a senior fellow in California studies and the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, is the co-author of the book "Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice." (Full biography.)
Making effective appeals to Hispanic voters is a tricky business. Barack Obama's education proposals are a case in point.
Mr. Obama's campaign notes that, "African-American and Latino students are significantly less likely to graduate than white students," which is true. To combat such achievement gaps, Mr. Obama's education plan specifically advocates, among other things, "transitional bilingual education" for English-learners. Yet, the question for Mr. Obama is whether his commitment to bilingual education, which emphasizes classroom instruction in languages other than English, overrides his interest in closing achievement gaps.
The answer isn't simply investing more in computer equipment and technology for schools, either. The United States has spent more than $60 billion equipping schools with computers during the last two decades, but as countless studies and any routine observation reveal, the computers have not transformed the classroom, nor has their use boosted learning as measured by test scores. Instead, technology and computers have tended merely to sustain and add cost to the existing system.
That schools have gotten so little back from their investment comes as no surprise. Schools have done what virtually every organization does when implementing an innovation. An organization's natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is perfectly predictable, perfectly logical -- and perfectly wrong.
Student as Consumer
The key to transforming the classroom with technology is in how it is implemented. We need to introduce the innovation disruptively -- not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to target those who are not being served -- people we call nonconsumers. That way, all the new approach has to do is be better than the alternative -- which is nothing at all.
To convey what we mean, we need to briefly explain the disruptive-innovation theory. In every market, there are two trajectories: the pace at which technology improves and the pace at which customers can utilize the improvements. Customers' needs tend to be relatively stable over time, whereas technology improves at a much faster rate. As a result, products and services are initially not good enough for the typical customer, but, over time, they improve and pack in more features and functions than customers can use.
Dan Nerad opened his remarks by stating his commitment to efforts for always continuing change and improvement with the engagement of the community. He outlined four areas of focus on where we are going from here.
Funding: must balance district needs and taxpayer needs. He mentioned the referendum to help keep current programs in place and it will not include "new" things.
Strategic Plan: this initiative will formally begin in January 2009 and will involve a large community group process to develop as an ongoing activity.
Meet people: going throughout the community to meet people on their own terms. He will carefully listen. He also has ideas.
Teaching and learning mission: there are notable achievement gaps we need to face head-on. The "achievement gap" is serious. The broader mission not only includes workforce development but also helping students learn to be better people. We have a "tale of two school districts" - numbers of high achievers (including National Merit Scholars), but not doing well with a lot of other students. Low income and minority students are furtherest away from standards that must be met. Need to be more transparent with the journey to fix this problem and where we are not good. Must have the help of the community. The focus must be to improve learning for ALL kids, it is a "both/and" proposition with a need to reframe the issue to help all kids move forward from where they are. Must use best practices in contemporary assessment, curriculum, pedagogy and instructional methods.
Dr. Nerad discussed five areas about which he sees a need for community-wide conversations for how to meet needs in the district.
Early learning opportunities: for pre-kindergarten children. A total community commitment is needed to prevent the 'achievement gap' from widening.
High schools: How do we want high schools to be? Need to be more responsive. The curriculum needs to be more career oriented. Need to break down the 'silos' between high school, tech schools and colleges. Need to help students move through the opportunities differently. The Small Learning Communities Grant recently awarded to the district for high schools and with the help of the community will aid the processes for changes in the high schools.
School safety: there must be an on-going commitment for changes. Nerad cited three areas for change:
a. A stronger curriculum helping people relate with other people, their differences and conflicts.
b. A response system to safety. Schools must be the safest of sanctuaries for living, learning and development.
c.Must make better use of research-based technology that makes sense.
a. Good news: several recommendations for curriculum, instruction and policies for change.
b. Bad news: our students take less math than other urban schools in the state; there are notable differences in the achievement gap.
Fine Arts: Cited recent Fine Arts Task Force Report. Fine arts curriculum and activities in the schools, once a strength, has been whittled away due to budget constraints. We must deal with the 'hands of the clock' going forward and develop a closer integration of the schools and community in this area.
Dr. Nerad introduced Mr. Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services who made the following remarks:
He is leading the management team in a revisit of the budget model and looking at the financial system; how the district does business; and, how effectively are we spending the money.
He will be looking to the city and county for partnerships and shared services
His mission with the Board of Education and the public is to present information in ways which ensure that information is accurate, honest, understandable and accessible.
Following are questions and comments from DCPAC members and guests with responses from Dr. Nerad.
John Pinto: a) what if the referendum fails? [Nerad: engage the community in priorities. He has an idea list of cuts, but is not sure if those are cuts in the right places.] b) how to get teachers less into 'politics' and more into school? [Nerad: there is a need to separate the work of teachers from politics in the schools. Continuing professional development in teaching and learning and by encouraging new teachers who make teaching their 'first' career choice.]
Nancy Mistele: a) urged engaging former board members and other community people with historical perspectives, expertise, etc. to offer the district; b) Fund 41 a good idea. [Nerad: the benefit of Fund 41 will be to reduce the negative impact on the Madison property tax payers for state aid and Fund 80 will reduce the amount of tax authority outside the revenue caps]; c) what does it cost to educate a child in this state and what does it cost not to educate children properly? [Nerad: The answer to those questions are very complex and involve community priorities and the state legislature engaging in proactive efforts.]
Don Severson: What are your thoughts and plans for cost/benefits/results analyses of programs and services on both sides of the house--educational and business? [Nerad: Outcome assessments should be tied to the strategic plan. He is very much interested in program evaluation - what is the cost and how it is done. He believes application of experimental research methodology for program assessment is questionable.]
Jonathon Barry: Stated his thanks to Dr. Nerad for his clear enunciation of the issues and directions. Barry remarked about his involvement with the :Fresh Start" program. There are 4000 disconnected youth in our area. Stated that MMSD will not contract with Fresh Start and that the Madison Teachers contract is a barrier to the issue. [Nerad: will contact Barry to set up a meeting. He needs to evaluate and determine where the district is with alternative programs. The principals are asking for help. We need more alternatives--it is all about students.]
Judy Reed: She is the principal of the Dane County Transition School, not associated with MMSD, but believes there also should be a working arrangement. Relationships are the key with the disconnected kids. Asked why does there need to be one dropout? [Nerad: will contact Reed to arrange a meeting.]
Gary Schmerler: Requested consideration for MMSD involvement in the county consortium for charter schools. [Nerad: he has asked that MMSD be at the table for the consortium dealing with career-based alternatives. He raised the question for further discussion as to: why do people want charters and how can we be more responsive in our programming in the district?"]
Phil Salkin: Suggested Nerad and others connect with www.wisconsinway@wcgpr.com for a statewide initiative underway to look at funding for education in Wisconsin and how individuals and groups can participate in that effort. He stated it was refreshing to hear about the initiatives for cost analyses, workforce development, etc., but the community and state must provide funding for education.
Chan Stroman: Stated that the district and community can't continue to excuse the problem of school safety fixes until school finance is fixed. She also stated that it does cost more to educate students from low-income families and for special needs students.
Dave Glomp: Expressed thanks to Nerad as a: breath of fresh air" and for his transparency. Requested the district to address the teacher contract as out of sync, collaborative, with the budget process. [Nerad: he will look at all of that. Also stated that teaching needs to be a profession of first choice. There also needs to be more of a balance of male and female teachers, especially at the elementary level.]
Final statement by Dr. Nerad: He is committed to keep communications open and the community engaged in the issues and problem resolutions. He urged individuals and the group to communicate with him their suggestions and needs.
One of them, Barack Obama, was awakened at four in the morning in Jakarta to study from a correspondence course; the other, John McCain, attended grade school in old airplane hangars. Both went on to elite private high schools.
Today we have a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Law (Obama) taking on a graduate of the Naval Academy and National War College (McCain). Harvard boasts seven presidents as alumni (including George W. Bush's business degree); the Naval Academy, just one (Jimmy Carter). But it is the early schooling--how did they get there?--that is most fascinating. George Washington's early education is remarkable for what is not known about it, but there is general agreement that if he had much formal education, it ended at about age 15. Teddy Roosevelt, said to have had an "uneven" education at home (strong in biology, French, and German but deficient in math, Latin, and Greek), graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. Harry Truman, the only president since 1897 who did not graduate from college, got up early too, at five in the morning, to practice piano.
Last week I wrote that building the best possible business environment in America was the key to attracting jobs and investment to Indiana. Our state has recently achieved top-tier rankings as a place to do business, with low taxes and utility costs, reduced regulation, new infrastructure investments, and the highest credit rating in history. But we will not maximize these advantages if we do not also have enough well-educated workers. Jobs and investment that would otherwise come to Indiana will wind up somewhere else if we can't provide a large enough pool of skilled labor.
As our economy diversifies, jobs in all sectors, including manufacturing, increasingly require skills and knowledge beyond high school. Right now, too many of our workers lack the education and training they need to perform -- or even qualify for -- the kinds of skilled jobs that we want to bring to or grow here in Indiana. Thousands of jobs are open and waiting in fields such as information technology, health and logistics, but are not being filled because of this skills mismatch.
At Brookfield East High School, Laura Turner is the kind of student who shouldn't have to worry about getting into the college of her choice.
She's articulate, mature and enthusiastic, a hard worker with high marks -- a 3.88 grade-point average -- who organized hundreds of students last year in Waukesha County to sleep in a parking lot and raise thousands of dollars for displaced Ugandan citizens.
But ranked against her peers in terms of GPA, Turner isn't in the top 25% of her senior class.
The stratification caused by class rank, which arguably makes a student such as Turner appear less accomplished, compelled the Elmbrook School District last week to start looking at whether its two high schools should quit tracking the data. It's a move that's been implemented within the past five years at Whitefish Bay and Shorewood high schools, where administrators say they've seen more seniors being accepted into the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When I covered the Detroit Public Schools for the Free Press in the mid 1990s, writing umpteen stories about failed programs, stolen money and incompetent management, I reached a point where it seemed to me better just to shut the system down and start fresh, to build something that worked, rather than continuing with what clearly didn't.
People laughed when I would say that out loud. What would you do with the kids? You can't just give up on the whole thing.
But who'd be laughing now? If I said it's time to embrace the rapid decommissioning of the very idea of a Detroit Public Schools system, would I even get a chuckle?
The truth is that the system is imploding, and every family with the ability to roll with something other than DPS appears to be grabbing that choice. The student population plummeted by an estimated 17,000 over the past year, equal to the total number of people living in Auburn Hills.
The East Hartford Public Schools District Improvement Plan represents the evolution of work begun five years ago. Although it has undergone several transformations as a result of extensive professional development, it continues to serve as the blueprint for action and a path to excellence.
The generally upward trajectories in student achievement confirm the application of researched-based strategies can make a difference in student achievement. This result has provided encouragement and motivation to staff.
Although pleased with the district's accomplishments and the progress we have made, sustained focus, reinforcement, and fidelity of implementation must continue to be priority. Accomplishments, along with current work in progress, encompass many important areas of focus:
The board of education has unanimously endorsed a state-mandated district improvement plan that aims to raise standardized test scores, reduce school suspensions and narrow significant achievement gaps between black and white students and poor students and their wealthier peers.
Superintendent of Schools Marion H. Martinez will present the plan, approved Monday night, to the State Board of Education on Oct. 2. It will then be detailed for the public at a local board meeting on Oct. 6. The state requires such plans when districts or schools have been deemed "in need of improvement" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The plan calls for raising the percentage of students reaching proficiency in reading, writing and math scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test and Connecticut Academic Performance Test by at least 15 points over the next three years. It also calls for reducing the test score gap between racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups by 30 percent in the same three years. Currently, for example, there is a 30 percent average gap in reading scores between those groups in grades 3 to 9, and the plan calls for the gap to be narrowed by 9 percentage points -- a 30 percent drop -- by 2010-11.
When fixing schools, beware of miracle cures. Every week people send me ideas they say will change the future of education and lead all humanity to enlightenment. So, when management expert William G. Ouchi let me look at his new work on the surprising power of total student loads per teacher, or TSL, I was skeptical.
He says when middle or high school principals are given control of their schools' budgets -- a rare occurrence in big districts -- they tend to make changes in staffing, curriculum and scheduling that sharply reduce TSL, the number of students each of their teachers is responsible for. Some urban districts have TSLs approaching 200 kids per teacher. But after principals get budgeting power, the load drops sharply, sometimes to as low as 80 kids per instructor. When that happens, the portion of students scoring "proficient" on state tests climbs. A group of New York schools had a surge of 11 percentage points after they reduced average TSL by 25 students per teacher.
I hear the mumbles out there. Yes, correlation is not causation. Test scores are not a perfect measure. Many other factors could explain the rise in achievement. For instance, the principals might be using their new powers to hire good teachers and fire bad ones.
TTUISD has a comprehensive curriculum - coursework is offered in all required subject areas from kindergarten through high school. Our Credit by Examinations (CBEs) allow students to test out of subjects.
TTUISD offers all courses required for a high school diploma in the state of Texas. Our elementary level lesson plans require no prior teaching experience to use, and all TTUISD courses are written by Texas-certified teachers.
TTUISD high school students may choose between a Minimum Graduation Plan and a Recommended Graduation Plan (College Preparatory Program). Students who successfully complete high school requirements and pass the exit-level TAKS will earn an accredited Texas high school diploma.
Students must take a minimum of four full courses to be considered a full-time TTUISD student. CBEs do not count when determining full-time student status.
Perhaps nearby UW-Madison will give K-12 another try?
On Oct. 21, the education advisors to the two candidates -- Lisa Graham Keegan for McCain; Linda Darling-Hammond for Obama -- will face off in a debate at Teachers College, the venerable education school at Columbia University in New York. The debate, which begins at 4 p.m. PDT, will be webcast by Education Week. The moderator will be Susan Fuhrman, the president of Teachers College.
In the meantime, you can read the education platforms for McCain here and Obama here. And here is Edweek's blog on the campaign. For those who don't want to go to that much trouble, we'll helpfully reduce the platforms to fit on the head of a pin: McCain believes in school choice and local control; Obama believes in an expansion of early childhood education and increased federal funding for education.
Yes, yes, we know that you've been an outstanding high school history student and that you'd like to major in that subject in college, but we're not sure why you're inquiring about scholarships here. Wait, not so fast: it's certainly impressive that you've had some original research published, and your grades are indeed outstanding. But if, as you say, you're looking for a scholarship, we'd like to hear about your curve ball. Oh, you didn't play baseball in high school? Well, then how about football or basketball? No? Lacrosse, soccer, swimming, maybe? Golf, bowling, tennis? In that case, do you sing or dance? You don't appear to have any disabilities, not that we'd ask.
No, sorry, speaking fluent French is not really what we had in mind by "diversity." Do you by chance play the xylophone? What's that? History scholarships? You mean something geared specifically towards outstanding high school history students? Ho! Ho! Good one.
No, not here. Haven't heard of 'em anywhere else, either. Where'd you come up with that idea anyway? Look, we're not sure we can do anything for you at this point unless...wait a minute, did you say you were a cheerleader? Sit down. I think we're finally on to something. Yes, that's right, we have several scholarships for cheerleaders. Can you send us all of the relevant information about your high school cheerleading experience? We may also be able to direct you to other sources of support for promising college cheerleading prospects. Why didn't you tell us this at the outset, instead of getting sidetracked with all of that stuff about history? We're very busy in this office, you know. No doubt you're an outstanding history student, and by all means major in it if you like, but that's not going to get you anywhere if you're looking for a scholarship. Good thing you mentioned the cheerleading angle, especially since we have to be careful to choose only the most outstanding applicants.
I made up this little drama, but it is based on the "true facts." History scholarships are rare. Cheerleading scholarships are pretty common--even at colleges and universities that one might think value intellectual achievement over human pyramids.
Will Fitzhugh is a former high school history teacher who, frustrated with the lack of opportunities to showcase academic achievement among young students, in 1987 founded The Concord Review, (www.tcr.org) a quarterly journal devoted entirely to outstanding research essays by high school students. Anyone who doubts the possibility of impressive research skills and consummate writing ability among some of today's secondary school students should read at least one issue of the Review, where future historians and teachers might well be making their first appearances. These students don't need remedial English, and could probably be bumped up beyond the usual introductory survey courses in history to begin work as history majors on the fast track.
Trouble is, as Will has pointed out to us, the students who write in The Concord Review don't get much recognition beyond that, to say nothing of scholarship assistance. A few colleges--most notably Reed College--have recently started supporting The Concord Review financially--which is bound to encourage some bright, highly capable students to consider attending college out in Portland, Oregon. But by and large, the prospect for students winning scholarships on the basis of outstanding ability to engage in historical scholarship isn't very bright.
The same in fact, could be said about exceptional students in other specific disciplines: foreign languages, literature, physics or mathematics, etc. Although such students may eventually receive recognition, for example, as National Merit Scholars, based on a standardized intelligence test, their outstanding work in individual fields will remain unacknowledged and unrewarded. College recruiters will come eagerly seeking athletes, musicians, dancers--and cheerleaders, but not historians, linguists or scientists.
Those academically talented students may have a good chance of being admitted to top programs, but they are seldom specifically recruited. History and English professors, unlike coaches, make no attempt to scout the best prospects among outstanding high school seniors. Nor do we see private benefactors interested in sponsoring such students. As Will recently observed:
"When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level."
I don't in the least intend to belittle football stars, figure skaters, or distance runners. Cheerleaders--maybe a little. Yes, I know from the movies (Bring It On, 2000) how exciting and competitive cheerleading can be and how demanding the athletic skills are, but are we really to suppose that excellence in cheerleading is more important than, say, excellence in writing?
We're here to cheer our winning team,
Come on, everybody scream!
Feel the spirit movin' in
Cause tonight we're gonna win!
Cheerleading experts teach "cheering and chanting with self confidence" and "dance makeup for cheerleaders." Somehow it just doesn't seem that it would rise to the level of a Title IX crisis for American women if some of the funds for cheerleading scholarships were diverted to, say, students who think instead of scream.
The Stereometry book adapted from Russian by A. Givental is the second part of the legendary Kiselev's Geometry. It first appeared in 1892 as a second half of a single textbook and, for a long time, the two co-existed between the same covers. Indeed, the idea of a plane was introduced on page 1 while the last chapter of the book (that followed the stereometry part) was devoted to the geometric constructions in two dimensions. Kiselev's Geometry has demonstrated an unusual staying power, being in an uninterrupted circulation for a good part of a century. (For the historic outline, see the review of the first part.) As a matter of fact, the first part of the book met with stiffer competition so that, while its rule was weakened in the 1960s, the second part reigned in the textbook market well into the 1970s.
The combined 1980 edition came out under the title Elementary Geometry for teacher colleges with a Foreward by A. N. Tikhonov who observed, albeit with some reservations, that the pedagogical mastery with which the book was written, the simplicity and consistency of the exposition, kept the book from becoming obsolete.
Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economist, has often complained that while pharmaceutical companies have poured billions of dollars each year into studying new drugs and Boeing devoted $3 billion to develop the 777 jet, there has been little spent on efforts to scientifically test educational theories.
Now Dr. Fryer has quit his part-time post as chief equality officer of the New York City public schools to lead a $44 million effort, called the Educational Innovation Laboratory, to bring the rigor of research and development to education. The initiative will team economists, marketers and others interested in turning around struggling schools with educators in New York, Washington and Chicago.
Backed by the Broad Foundation, founded by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, and other private groups, the research is intended to infuse education with the data-driven approach that is common in science and business, Dr. Fryer said. He compared the current methods of educational research to the prescriptions of an ineffective doctor.
It looks like students can be open-minded after all: When provided with the option to view lectures online, rather than just in person, a full 82 percent of undergraduates kindly offered that they'd be willing to entertain an alternative to showing up to class and paying attention in real time.
A new study released today suggests not only a willingness but a "clear preference" among undergraduates for "lecture capture," the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for concurrent or later viewing.
The study, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's E-Business Institute, tackles the much-discussed question of students' preferences for traditional versus online learning with unusual rigor. Based on a survey of more than 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the university, the study had a response rate of over 25 percent. Almost half of the undergraduates -- 47 percent -- had taken a class with lectures available for online viewing.
"MORE will mean worse," wrote an angry Kingsley Amis in 1961, contemplating plans to expand university education. His prediction has been tested past anything he could have imagined, as that era's new universities were joined by the ex-polytechnics in the 1990s, and the proportion of youngsters who go on to university rose from less than 10% to almost 40% now. The 430,000 new undergraduates heading off to freshers' weeks later this month will find themselves part of Britain's largest university cohort ever.
Similar rumblings have continued since Amis's jeremiad. With less government money (in real terms) per student than in his day, universities have to pack them in and keep them in to balance the books. Paul Buckland, an archaeology professor at Bournemouth University, resigned when administrators overruled his failing grades for ten students (last month he won a case for "constructive dismissal"). In June a barnstorming lecture by Geoffrey Alderman, of Buckingham University, gained wide attention with its claims of impotent external examiners, widespread unpunished plagiarism and a "grotesque bidding game" in which universities dished out good grades in order to claw their way up league tables.
Four area high school students were named semifinalists for the National Achievement Scholarship Program competition and are eligible for scholarships for Black American students through the National Merit Scholarship Program.
Middleton students Zowie L. Miles and Kristina M. Teuschler, Matthew Bowie-Wilson from Madison West and Taylor M. Behnke from Madison Edgewood, along with 13 other Wisconsin students, made the list.
More than 150,000 juniors requested consideration for the 2009 National Achievement Scholarship Program competition by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, a test which served as an initially screening of the applicants.
It's the third week of pre-school. Kids are still settling in, and many are still crying when their parents drop them off in the morning. During these first weeks of school, pre-school teachers do a lot of waiting and wondering -- waiting patiently for the separation tears to end and wondering what fascinating young characters will begin to emerge in this year's class. My students' parents, however, are already thinking about next year -- they're worried about getting their kids into kindergarten.
As a pre-school special needs teacher in New York, I've learned that the city's culture of cut-throat competition extends to kindergarten admissions. And from that, an unexpected part of my job has evolved -- providing psychological and emotional support to parents as they undertake the daunting task of finding an appropriate placement for their child. Securing a good spot in an oversubscribed New York City kindergarten, whether public or private, is difficult enough for most parents. But for the parents of children with special needs, it is especially challenging.
The new union-friendly charter school in the Bronx I wrote about last week is not the only big project that Green Dot Public Schools has taken on this fall. The other is the attempted transformation of Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The school, which currently has about 2,500 students, has long been notorious as one of the worst in the city, with what the L.A. Times recently described as a "reputation for student fisticuffs and an appallingly high dropout rate."
Green Dot was founded by Steve Barr, a garrulous, outspoken Irish American in his late 40s who helped start Rock the Vote in 1990 and nine years later decided his role in life was to run high schools. His organization now manages 10 of them, mostly in L.A., and his new mission is to transform the way public education works in the city (and then in the rest of the country).
Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call "counterintuitive" but to the teacher means simply being honest. The historian sees the election not through the latest news blast but in the context of presidential politics from George Washington to the present. The biologist sees a natural world that's not calmly picturesque but a jostling, striving, evolving contest of creatures in quest of reproduction and survival. The literature professor won't accept the current run of standard clichés but demands bursting metaphors and ironies of an insinuatingly serpentine sort. The philosopher demands an argument as escapeproof as an iron box: what currently passes for logic makes him want to grasp himself by the hair and yank himself out of his seat.
Good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives. Sometimes they do so in ways that are, to say the least, peculiar. The philosophy professor steps in the window the first day of class and asks her students to write down the definition of the word "door." Another sees that it's hard to figure out how the solar system works by looking at the astronomy book. So he takes his friends outside and designates one the sun, the other the earth and gets them rotating and revolving in the grassy field. (For reasons of his own, he plays the part of the moon.) The high-school teacher, struck by his kids' conformity, performs an experiment. He sends the hippest guy in the class off on an errand and while he's gone draws pairs of lines on the board, some equal, some unequal. When the hip kid comes back, the teacher asks the class, who are in on the game, which lines are the same length and which are different and, as they've been instructed, they answer the wrong way. They're surprised at how often the cool kid disobeys the evidence of his own eyes and goes along with the pack. A few hours later, at home, they're surprised at how good they were at fooling their friend and how much pleasure they took in making him the butt of the experiment.
Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, "Real Education," that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor's degree. Yes. Let's stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let's talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.
The new state policy of requiring algebra in the eighth grade will set up unprepared students for failure while holding back others with solid math skills, a new report has concluded.
These predictions, based on national data, come in the wake of an algebra mandate that the state Board of Education, under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, adopted in July. That decision won widespread praise from some reform advocates and the Bush administration, putting California out front in a national debate over improving mathematics instruction.
The policy also led to a lawsuit filed this month by groups representing school districts and school administrators. They contend that the state board adopted the new rules illegally. Their underlying concern is that the algebra policy is unworkable and unfunded.
The new study, released today by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., looked at who is taking eighth-grade algebra and how they are doing.
And there was some ostensibly good news. Nationwide, more students are taking algebra than before. Over five years, the percentage of eighth-graders in advanced math -- algebra or higher -- went up by more than one-third. In total, about 37% of all U.S. students took advanced math in 2005, the most recent year in the analysis.
Want to read another story about the dumbing down of American students? How far SAT scores have dropped or standards fallen?
If so, look elsewhere.
We wish instead to draw your attention to one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape: The Concord Review. The first and only academic journal dedicated to the work of high school students, The Concord Review has published essays on everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Harlem Renaissance. Appropriately enough, it is published out of the same town where, more than two centuries back, embattled farmers fired the shot heard 'round the world.
The Review is the child of Will Fitzhugh, a Harvard alumnus who started publishing it out of his own home in 1987 while a high school teacher himself. The next year he quit his job and dedicated himself to the journal full-time. Not least of the spurs behind his decision was having witnessed two of his fellow Concord teachers propose an after-school program to help a select group of students prepare a serious history essay-only to be shot down by the administration on the grounds of "elitism."
Like most such academic adventures, the Review isn't going to challenge People magazine any time soon; it still has only about 850 subscribers, and among the high schools that don't subscribe are a number whose students have been published in the Review itself. But it is attracting attention. The Concord Review has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who says "there should be a copy in every high school." Another fan is James Basker, a Barnard and Columbia professor who also serves as president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
"Students rise to the expectations you have of them," states Mr. Basker. "All you have to do is show them they are capable of writing serious historical essays, and off they go." To emphasize the point, his institute will on June 10 inaugurate three annual Gilder Lehrman Essay Prizes in American History drawn from Concord Review essayists. This year's first prize, for $5,000, goes to Hannah S. Field for her contribution about library efforts to suppress Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz.
All this acclaim notwithstanding, Mr. Fitzhugh believes today's culture retains a pronounced bias against academic achievement and excellence. He cites the example of a Concord Review essayist from Connecticut who subsequently went on to Dartmouth and will be studying medicine this fall at Harvard. When Mr. Fitzhugh paid a visit to her high school, he found that though everyone knew she was all-state in soccer, no one knew that an essay of hers had appeared in the Review, beating out hundreds of the finest student essays from not only the U.S. but other parts of the English-speaking world. It's one of the things that tells him that the need for such a journal remains strong.
"Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere," Mr. Fitzhugh says. "We've decided to celebrate varsity academics."
Algebra in eighth grade was once reserved for the mathematically gifted student. In 1990, very few eighth graders, about one out of six, were enrolled in an algebra course. As the decade unfolded, leaders began urging schools to increase that number. President Clinton lamented, "Around the world, middle students are learning algebra and geometry. Here at home, just a quarter of all students take algebra before high school."1 The administration made enrolling all children in an algebra course by eighth grade a national goal. In a handbook offering advice to middle school students on how to plan for college, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley urged, "Take algebra beginning in the eighth grade and build from there."2 Robert Moses ratcheted up the significance of the issue by labeling algebra "The New Civil Right," thereby highlighting the social consequences of so many poor and minority students taking remedial and general math courses instead of algebra.3
The campaign was incredibly successful. Several urban school districts declared a goal of algebra for all eighth graders. In 1996, the District of Columbia led the nation with 53 percent of eighth graders enrolled in algebra. From 1990 to 2000, national enrollment in algebra courses soared from 16 percent to 24 percent of all eighth graders.
The surge continued into the next decade. Eighth-grade enrollment in algebra hit 31 percent nationally in 2007, a near doubling of the 1990 proportion. Today more U.S. eighth graders take algebra than any other math course.4 In July 2008, the State of California decided to adopt an algebra test as its eighth-grade assessment of student proficiency. The policy in effect mandates that all eighth graders will be enrolled in algebra by 2011.
Nobody writing about schools has been a bigger supporter of getting more students into eighth-grade algebra than I have been. I wrote a two-part series for the front page six years ago that pointed out how important it is to be able to handle algebra's abstractions and unknown quantities before starting high school. I have argued that we should rate middle schools by the percentage of students who complete Algebra I by eighth grade.
Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.
The report (to be available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx ) reprints this simple NAEP problem:
There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees are in the company this year?
A) 9
B) 81
C) 91
D) 99
E) 100
The correct answer is D. Ten percent of 90 is 9. Add that to 90 and you get 99. How many of the misplaced students got it right? Just 9.8 percent. Not good.
A commission convened by some of the country's most influential college admissions officials is recommending that colleges and universities move away from their reliance on SAT and ACT scores and shift toward admissions exams more closely tied to the high school curriculum and achievement.
The commission's report, the culmination of a yearlong study led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, comes amid growing concerns that the frenzy over standardized college admissions tests is misshaping secondary education and feeding a billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests.
A growing number of colleges and universities, like Bates College in Maine, Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Smith College in Massachusetts, have made the SAT and ACT optional. And the report concludes that more institutions could make admissions decisions without requiring the SAT and ACT.
"It would be much better for the country," Mr. Fitzsimmons said in an interview, "to have students focusing on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare them well for college and also prepare them well for the real world beyond college, instead of their spending enormous amounts of time trying to game the SAT."
The report calls for an end to the practice of using minimum-admissions-test scores to determine students' eligibility for merit aid. And it specifically urges the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to stop using PSAT scores as the initial screen for eligibility for recognition or scholarships. The National Merit Scholarship competition "contributes to the misperception of test scores as sole measures of 'merit' in a pervasive and highly visible manner," the report says.
Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can't, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can't teach, teach sex education.
Judged by its results - not a bad way of judging - sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government's teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.
Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people - half of them under 25 - were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.
When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.
Preliminary 2008-9 enrollment numbers show a total of 3076 students "in seats" as of 9/10. This includes 85 4k students and community daycare sites, 107 4k students at Maywood and TP, and 133 open enrollment in (vs. 39 oe out).
It will be interesting to see County and Statewide open enrollment numbers.
Two hundred students from 23 school districts across the country will convene in Madison for the annual Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) Student Conference Sept. 24-27. This year's theme will be "Futura De La Juventud: Laying Foundation, Affirming Our Identity, Building Relationships."
"One of the things that the conference is really focused on is engaging the kids in discussion about the achievement gap and what barriers that students of color face in their school environment," says Lisa Black, special assistant to the Superintendent for Race & Equity and the planning chair for the MSAN Conference. "Our goals really are to increase access to post-secondary options."
African American and Latino students from around the country will gather at Monona Terrace to share experiences and develop strategies for improving student academic achievement and school climate in their home districts.
Black stresses that the students have really taken ownership of the planning for the conference.
"The students really set the agenda. We shared with them what MSAN is all about and they studied the gap and all the data in the district, and they are taking it from there," she says. "It's important that their voices and views are heard, and [that] it's not always adults setting the agenda."
Each year, MSAN holds a student conference in a different city across the United States where teams of students of member district schools engage in discussion and plan for follow up activities related to improving the effectiveness of their schools in educating African American and Latino youth.
Ever wonder who decides what your kids are taught in school? It's not their principals and teachers. Nor is it their school's superintendent. The Legislature, maybe? Not quite; the Legislature's responsibility is to write the education code, fund the schools, and keep the state's commitment to an accountability system. Every once in a while a lawmaker might pass a bill that authorizes Bible classes or requires daily recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the Texas flag, but the Legislature isn't responsible for curriculum. Okay, then, how about the Texas Education Agency and the commissioner of education? Sounds right, but you're wrong again. The TEA's role is simply (or not so simply) to administer the education code.
Ready for the answer? The folks who decide what Texas schoolchildren will learn are the fifteen members of the State Board of Education. Don't worry if you can't name a single one. Almost nobody can! Members of this obscure panel are elected in down-ballot races that generate about as much media attention as an appointment to the Funeral Service Commission, but they are the ones who determine the classroom content for every public- or charter-school student in Texas. The board, currently composed of ten Republicans and five Democrats, oversees the process that establishes curriculum standards--known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills--and adopts or rejects textbooks. Members serve four-year terms and receive no financial compensation. (You heard right: They do this for free.) So how well do you know the powerful volunteers who control your children's education? Take this quiz and see.
Students, families, and educators in Georgia still are struggling to make sense of how a school district recently lost its accreditation and what impact the ruling will have on the students' chances of getting into competitive colleges. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major accrediting agencies, revoked the Clayton County school system's accreditation in late August after the district's leaders failed to achieve eight of nine mandates for improvement set by SACS in February. Some of the unmet mandates include establishment of a responsible school board, removal of outside influences that disrupt the district's ability to function, and adherence to a code of ethics.
SACS Chief Executive Officer Mark Elgart said the board's problems permeated the system, but that dysfunction did not directly affect the quality of learning offered by the 50,000-student district located just south of Atlanta. Revocation of accreditation, he said, was the only way to prevent further damage to that system. The last school system to lose its accreditation in the United States was Florida's Duval County in 1969.
A third of the elementary classrooms in the Madison School District are multi-age. That figure, which has held steady for more than five years, makes Madison one of the biggest users of multi-age classrooms -- some educators say the largest user -- in Dane County.
Also, Madison's Sennett Middle School is in its 33rd year of offering a unique multi-age classroom setting that blends sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
"I think it really does foster that sense of family," said Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz, who said the arrangement is so popular that several former students have returned to teach at the East Side school.
There's nothing new about putting children of more than one grade level into a single classroom.
"Look at the one-room schoolhouse. That was all multi-age. That's where we started in the United States," said Sue Abplanalp, the assistant superintendent overseeing Madison's elementary schools.
"Nothing like a little math to wake you up in the morning," teacher Tricia Colclaser said this month after a taxing round of word problems.
Abstract math is not known for its stirring effect on U.S. teenagers. But algebra is viewed as increasingly essential for students preparing for college or careers in a fast-changing, technology-based economy. Some advocates call it the new literacy.
Strengthening the math abilities of all students is a steep challenge. Educators must reinforce basic concepts early on, attract teachers talented enough to go beyond dictating formulas, and, not least, overcome an anti-math bias many students harbor long into adulthood, that all the hours spent mixing letters and numbers yield more punishment than possibility.
How hard can it be?
The question led this education reporter back to high school to try again, as a student in Colclaser's class. To prepare, I reviewed a recent version of Virginia's Algebra II Standards of Learning exam. The 50 questions conjured a familiar wave of anxiety but little actual math. I then fumbled through a state Algebra I test, getting at most 10 answers right.
One of the benefits of finding public schools that work is the chance to study them and discover exactly what they are doing that other schools are not doing. Sadly, this rarely seems a blessing to the educators at those schools, who have to fill out surveys, sit for long interviews and have strangers recording their every move. Often they feel like Michael Phelps might have felt, told to take a drug test every time he won an Olympic gold medal.
I sense these often intrusive assessments have been particularly galling for many teachers at KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). It has become the most studied school network in the country, one more indication that it is probably also the best. KIPP serves children from mostly low-income minority families at 66 schools in 19 states and the District, a network way too big for most researchers to handle. But since KIPP began to expand in 2001 from the two successful charter middle schools created by co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, scholars have been examining pieces of the growing enterprise.
The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement. The survey was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center and was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The primary findings in the survey of 1,102 youth ages 12-17 include --
Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories.
Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.
Since opening inside a Hanover office park three years ago, the county's only public charter school has delivered strikingly high standardized test scores and, this year, produced a semifinalist - the only one in Anne Arundel County - in a national science competition.
But Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School has also struggled. It faced the threat of closure after it failed to adhere to the county school system's standards in special education, and in administrative and staffing matters. Fulfilling its plan to expand to include high-schoolers, the charter school expanded to ninth-graders last year but was ultimately forced to downsize back to sixth through eighth grades amid space concerns.
Though it remains on probation through June, administrators at the school said the outlook for this year is bright, pointing to improved communication with school system officials that has led to a greater understanding of expectations.
College scholarships for specific abilities and achievements are not news. There are football scholarships and volleyball scholarships and music scholarships and cheerleading scholarships, and so on - there is a long list of sources of money to attract and reward high school students who have talent and accomplishments if those are not academic.
Consider an example: there is a high school student in Georgia, in an IB program, who spent a year and a half working on an independent study of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. This paper, a bit more than 15,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography was published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic research papers of secondary students, and it is a strong candidate for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. If he were an outstanding baseball player, a number of college baseball coaches would have heard about him, and would be doing what they could to persuade him to accept an athletic (baseball) scholarship to their colleges.
But suppose he were not a HS athlete, but only a HS history students of extraordinary academic promise at the high school level. Would college professors of history know about and take an interest in his work? No. Would there be college history scholarships competing for him? No. Would his teacher, who worked with him on his independent study, attract attention from his peers at the college and university level? No.
I hope I am wrong, but based on what I have found out so far, there are no college scholarships available specifically for outstanding secondary students of history. There is abundant moaning and gnashing of teeth by edupundits and professors about the widespread ignorance of history among our young people, but when someone shows unusually strong knowledge of history at the Lower Education Level, no one pays any attention at the Higher Education Level.
In 21 years of working to publish 824 history research papers by secondary students of history from 44 states and 34 other countries in The Concord Review, I have not learned of a single instance of an author being offered a college scholarship based on their academic work in history.
When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level.
Behavioral psychology argues that by ignoring some behavior you will tend to get less of if, and by paying attention to and rewarding other behavior you are likely to find that there is more of it.
I know that students are being recruited for college scholarships in cheerleading, and I would dearly love to hear from anyone who can tell me of students being recruited for their specific academic work in a high school subject, like history, literature, physics, Chinese, chemistry and so on.
I realize there are scholarships for disadvantaged students, for students of high general intellectual ability, and the like, but where are the scholarships for specific HS academic achievement? After all, athletic and dance scholarships are not awarded on the basis of general tests of physical fitness, but because of achievement in the actual performance of particular athletic or artistic activities.
It is said that you get what you pay for, and it seems likely that you get more of what you value and reward in academics as well. If we continue to overlook and ignore the academic achievement of our secondary-level scholars of history and other subjects, that does not mean that some students will no longer work hard in their areas of academic interest. There may be fewer of them, and fewer teachers who see the point of putting in the extra coaching time with exceptionally diligent students, but if we continue down this road, at least folks in Higher Education ought to be aware that they are working just as hard to discourage good academic work at the secondary level as anyone, and they should stop complaining about the attitudes toward scholarship of the students in their classrooms, which, after all, are in part a result of their own contempt for and neglect of academic work at the secondary (aka "pre-college") level.
Will Fitzhugh [founder], Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987], Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998], TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org, Varsity Academics®
David Morales never thought much about going to college. But in 12th grade he watched his aunt graduate from The Richard Stockton College in Galloway Town-ship.
"After seeing her succeed in everything she wanted to do and watching her face light up with her own accomplishment, this inspired me to change my mind," Morales told the state Board of Education on Wednesday.
It was too late to switch to college preparatory classes, but Morales thought that since he had received all A's and B's in his courses, he could still handle college. But when he took the Accuplacer placement test at Cumberland County College, he found he would have to take remedial courses first.
"Now I will be in school a year longer to get my degree (in radiology)," he said.
Morales was one of three current and former Cumberland County College students who spoke to the board about their high school experiences. CCC President Ken Ender brought them to the meeting to demonstrate the consequences for students who meet the current high school graduation requirements but are still not ready for college.
How migrants fare in school, and what schools can learn from them.
MOST teachers admit that occasionally, when a lesson is going badly, they suspect the problem lies not with the subject or pedagogy, but with the pupils. Some children just seem harder to teach than others. But why? Is it because of, say, cultural factors: parents from some backgrounds place a low value on education and do not push their children? Or is it to do with schools themselves, and their capacity to teach children of different abilities?
It might seem impossible to answer such a question. To do so would require exposing similar sorts of children to many different education systems and see which does best. As it happens, however, an experiment along those lines already exists--as a result of mass migration. Children of migrants from a single country of origin come as near to being a test of the question as you are likely to find.
It's a tough lesson for millions of students just now arriving on campus: even if you have a high school diploma, you may not be ready for college.
In fact, a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.
"That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that's the cost to the students," said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report "Diploma to Nowhere" on Monday. "These students come out of high school really misled. They think they're prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn't adequate."
Christina Jeronimo was an "A" student in high school English, but was placed in a remedial course when she arrived at Long Beach Community College in California. The course was valuable in some ways but frustrating and time-consuming. Now in her third year of community college, she'd hoped to transfer to UCLA by now.
Like many college students, she wishes she'd been worked a little harder in high school.
"There's a gap," said Jeronimo, who hopes to study psychology. "The demands of the high school teachers aren't as great as the demands for college. Sometimes they just baby us."
As a host of new charter schools opened this year in the metro area, trying to lure disaffected parents away from public school systems, both Minneapolis and St Paul public schools are rolling out new programs and programming changes to keep these families - and the state funding dollars that come with them - in the school systems. In particular, Minneapolis public schools have fired the opening salvo in a multi-year offensive against their poor reputation, with a thorough-going re-design of district high schools.
St Paul
Fortunately for St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS), the district does not have as serious a credibility problem as Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). St Paul school board members Tom Goldstein and Keith Hardy told this reporter in July that district leadership believes not all parents want a "one-size-fits-all" public school. Some parents, Hardy said, are looking for specific types of programming, such as gender-segregated education or career-specific training in high school, and the district has to provide these or risk losing these families to charter schools.
"The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn't change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue."
You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would "cave in" to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to "freeze" policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.
There exist dozens of students per year in the MMSD whose academic needs are not adequately met to the courses currently offered by MTI teachers, including through the District's online offerings. These include students with a wide variety of disabilities, medical problems, and other types of special needs as well as academically gifted ones. By taking appropriate online and correspondence courses and non-MMSD courses they can physically access within Madison, these students can work at their own pace or in their own way or at an accessible location that enables them to succeed. "Success for all" must include these students as well. Your deal with MTI will result in dozens of students per year dropping out of school, failing to graduate, or transferring to other schools or school districts that are more willing to better meet their "special" individual needs.
Your rush to resolve this issue sends a VERY bad message to many families in the MMSD. We were hoping you might be different from Rainwater. Unfortunately, it says to them that you don't really care what they think. It says to them that the demands of Matthews take primarily over the needs of their children. Does the MMSD exist for Matthews or for the children of this District? As you yourself said, the MMSD is at a "tipping point", with there currently being almost 50% "free and reduced lunch" students. Families were waiting and hoping that you might be different. As they learn that you are not based upon your actions, the exodus of middle class families from the MMSD's public schools will only accelerate. It will be on your watch as superintendent that the MMSD irreversibly turns into yet another troubled inner city school district. I urge you to take the time to learn more about the MMSD, including getting input from all interested parties, before you act in the future.
VERY disappointingly yours, Janet Mertz
parent of 2 Madison West graduates
"Tuesday's agreement also will implement a measure that requires a licensed teacher from the bargaining unit supervise virtual/online classes within the district. The district and union have bickered on-and-off for nearly seven years over the virtual/online education issue. Matthews said the district was violating the collective bargaining contract with development of its virtual school learning program that offered online courses taught by teachers who are not members of MTI.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Though Nerad has been on the job for less than three months, Matthews said he is pleased with his initial dealings and working relationship with the new superintendent.
"This is that foundation we need," Matthews said. "There was a lot of trust level that was built up here and a lot of learning of each other's personalities, style and philosophy. All those things are important.
"It's going to be good for the entire school district if we're able to do this kind of thing, and we're already talking about what's next."
The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop "Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin"
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [150K PDF], via a kind reader's email:
Wisconsin needs a comprehensive assessment system that provides educators and parents with timely and relevant information that helps them make instructional decisions to improve student achievement," said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster in announcing members of a statewide Next Generation Assessment Task Force.
Representatives from business, commerce, and education will make recommendations to the state superintendent on the components of an assessment system that are essential to increase student achievement. Task force members will review the history of assessment in Wisconsin and learn about the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches. They will hear presentations on a number of other states' assessment systems. Those systems may include ACT as part of a comprehensive assessment system, diagnostic or benchmark assessments given throughout the year, or other assessment instruments and test administration methods. The group's first meeting will be held October 8 in Madison.
For the next president, one of the first domestic challenges will be to reshape the No Child Left Behind law, hailed six years ago as a bipartisan solution to America's education troubles.
But in their race for the White House, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are distancing themselves from what has become a tainted brand.
Education experts say the candidates have offered, at best, a fuzzy vision for the future of the No Child Left Behind law. Obama pledges to "fix the failures" of the law, while McCain seeks to avoid mention of it.
At a joint news conference at MTI headquarters, Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews said the settlement resolves issues that have festered for up to eight years.
Among other things, the agreement reinstates Boyce Hodge, the longtime West High School athletic director, to that position and as coach of the boys basketball team for the current school year. The district's other three major high schools also will have full-time athletic directors.
The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, any instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn't change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.
Matthews said he was pleased with the negotiations and agreements, and added that he's enjoyed working with Nerad.
"I think probably the over-reaching issue that this resolution provides is an improved problem-solving relationship between the union and the school district that's possible now with the coming of Dan Nerad as the superintendent in Madison," Matthews said.
Fascinating and an interesting look at new Superintendent Dan Nerad's approach.
Because the first year of high school is considered crucial to a student's success, more campuses are sheltering freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
As Jessica McClain, 14, stood in line to get her student ID picture taken on her first official day as a Muir High School student, she was a churning mix of anticipation and anxiety.
"The campus is huge," a wide-eyed McClain said as she looked at hundreds of freshmen lined up in the school's cavernous gymnasium. "I am excited, but I'm nervous. New school. Bigger school. Bigger people."
But for McClain, freshman year will be a more intimate experience than for earlier generations. Ninth grade is crucial to a student's eventual academic success, so secondary schools across the nation, including Pasadena's Muir High, are increasingly sheltering their freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
"We really wanted to make sure our freshmen have a strong, solid foundation and are able to bond with the school," said Edwin Diaz, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District. "If they don't connect well in ninth grade, they tend to disappear in 10th. A high percentage drop out."
Anthony Brooks, Jeremy Miller, Seppy Basili, Sara Mead and Jordan Meranus:
How to improve under-achieving schools in America's poorest communities has vexed policy makers for generations. President Bush's No Child Left Behind law insists on accountability. But critics charge it encourages teaching to the test at the expense of real learning.
The law still sparks a loud argument -- but as one of our guests today writes in the current issue of Harper's magazine, there's debate that test-prep companies such as Kaplan are profiting handsomely from the federal mandate to test, and test, and test again.
Almost half of children with special needs failed their high school exit exam this year. Legislation calls for identifying new ways to assess performance and devising new methods.
The predictable result came in last week from forcing students with disabilities to pass a high school exit exam in order to earn a diploma. Nearly half failed.
Failed. Demoralizing words for some kids who struggle daily to perform tasks most teens carry out with ease.
The psychological damage "is horrific," says Sid Wolinsky, director of litigation for Disability Rights Advocates, which fought unsuccessfully for alternative ways to measure the knowledge of special education students.
"We had dozens of sworn declarations from parents about the deep depression that their disabled children went into when they didn't pass the exit exam," Wolinsky says. "When you're a child with a disability, you start with problems of stigma, societal stereotyping and self confidence.
"Then you're shattered when you can't pass the exit exam. You blame yourself and have terrible problems with self worth."
The school system in coastal Baldwin County -- 60 miles by 25 miles of Alabama farmland framed on two sides by waterfront towns -- was short on teachers, especially in courses such as math and science.
So short, in fact, that district officials went around the world last year, with expenses paid by a teacher recruiting firm, and brought back Michel Olalo of Manila and 11 other Filipinos to teach along the shores of the Gulf Coast and Mobile Bay and in the communities in between.
That raised some eyebrows in Baldwin County, where nine out of 10 people are white, just one in 50 is foreign-born and, as the county's teacher recruiter Tom Sisk noted recently, "Many of our children will never travel outside the United States."
Yet school administrators throughout the U.S. are plucking from an abundance of skilled international teachers, a burgeoning import that critics call shortsighted but educators here and abroad say meets the needs of students and qualified candidates.
Jeremy Miller is the author of "Tyranny of the Test," the September cover story. The article, which explains how No Child Left Behind has changed the structure of our schools-and how "teaching the test" takes more away from students than it gives-was based on his years of experience working as a test-prep "coach" for Kaplan, Inc. Associate Editor Ben Austen follows up with Jeremy Miller now that the issue is on newsstands.
1. At some point last year, you decided you wanted to write about working for Kaplan in New York City's public schools. This kind of reporting, in which the participant's journalistic intentions are not made explicit, is always complicated. But the issues here seemed to be compounded by your background as a full-time classroom teacher and by your desire to succeed at a job that you increasingly saw as problematic. What were some of the difficulties you faced in reporting this story?
It's a tough lesson for millions of students just now arriving on campus: even if you have a high school diploma, you may not be ready for college.
In fact, a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.
"That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that's the cost to the students," said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report "Diploma to Nowhere" on Monday. "These students come out of high school really misled. They think they're prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn't adequate."
Christina Jeronimo was an "A" student in high school English, but was placed in a remedial course when she arrived at Long Beach Community College in California. The course was valuable in some ways but frustrating and time-consuming. Now in her third year of community college, she'd hoped to transfer to UCLA by now.
Like many college students, she wishes she'd been worked a little harder in high school.
"There's a gap," said Jeronimo, who hopes to study psychology. "The demands of the high school teachers aren't as great as the demands for college. Sometimes they just baby us."
Sandra Tsing Loh, making sense, continues her whirlwind media tour, this time at the Washington Post (thanks to a kind reader's email for this link):
Yea, public school parents' priorities are routinely placed below those of building inspectors, plant managers, even, given an errant bell schedule, cafeteria workers. Although, teachers are down in the bunkers with us, too. You'd be amazed how many extraordinary schoolteachers, who've served faithfully, conscientiously, daily for 40 years, just keep their heads down at this point.
Since most politicians have never dealt with U.S. public schools as customers themselves (in the same way that precious few of them put their own children in the Army), it might shock you, Mr. Future President, how poorly parents are treated out here in Public-School-Landia. You know how when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a McDonald's, someone greets you with, "Hello! May I help you?" It's startling how seldom you can expect this basic courtesy in public schools, how often we parents approaching the counter are treated as felons, or more often simply ignored by the frantically typing office-administrator-type-person. It's a peculiar thing, in this 21st century. Forget best-practice research and technology-driven classrooms. I really believe if anyone in the multibillion-dollar industry called U.S. public education were ever listening to us, improved schools would start, simply, with this: "Hello! May I help you?"
Where does this culture of committee-oriented time wastage -- even for parents who work -- spring from? Here's a clue. L.A. Unified recently faced such a budget shortfall that the district was actively recruiting potential save-our-schools spokesparents to submit their resumes and come to the central offices for "media training" if selected. Cut to the bone as it is, though, next year's budget still slates a hefty $78.8 million for consultants (last year a consultant was paid $35,000 to teach our superintendent how to use a computer). And yes, I realize that I'm getting off-message by noting that our school district wastes money.. . . That's like waving red meat in front of America's seniors, who'll probably vote to cut taxes again! Even though it's not the bureaucracy, but the children who get squeezed. That's all budget cuts mean, in the end. My kids have their assemblies on cracked asphalt. Now the cracked asphalt will have weeds.
But here's the good news, Mr. Future President. In a testament to the incredible can-do American spirit (and I mean that in the most drop-dead-serious way), activist public school parents are fighting back against U.S. public education's wasteful and unresponsive corporate "professionalism." (Remember George Bernard Shaw's quip about the professions being "conspiracies against the laity"?) City by city, homegrown "parents for public schools"-style Web sites are springing up daily, little rebel force fires on the horizon. From New York to Chicago, Seattle to San Francisco and beyond, activist parents are starting to blog their outrage over millions of education dollars wasted on non-working computer technology, non-child-centered programs and, of course, those entities whose education dollars are never, ever cut -- the standardized-testing companies.
Some years ago, I sketched a chart illustrating the influence of various factions on our nearly $400M local school system. Topping the list were Administrators of both the school system and local teachers union. Far down were teachers (think of the "downtown math police") and parents. Further still were students themselves. Taxpayers were not represented.
Observing public education rather closely for a number of years, it seems to me that all players, especially teachers, parents and students, would be better off with a far more diffused governance model (charters, smaller districts/schools, choice?).
Barack Obama, whose campaign is heavily funded by teachers unions, plans to funnel more money into the existing public education system. In this system, poor kids remain the only ones who don't get to choose which school they attend. Mr. McCain is a strong supporter of school choice and has a record of this in Arizona.
As a teacher of 30 years, I am outraged that the liberal leaders in this country pretend to champion the poor, while, through their opposition to school choice, they act to keep the poor uneducated and poor.
Hoosiers need to re-evaluate level of emphasis they place on education.
High school life for millions of teenagers in the United States is filled with football games, part-time jobs, text messages and prom. And, oh yes, a dash of biology and geometry.
While their peers in other nations dig deep into academics, many American teens seem content to skim the surface.
Or at least that's the premise of a documentary called "Two Million Minutes," which revolves around the lives of six high school seniors -- two each from China and India, and two from Carmel High School.
The documentary isn't without its critics, who contend that executive producer Robert Compton set out to make the film with a predetermined point of view. Many educators also say the film fails to note the United States' universal approach to education, in contrast to other nations' more selective practices.
As a kid, going back to school was never quite like this.
As part of a shipboard education program, Marty Zafman, a retired human-resources consultant, worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and dined in Havana -- while Fidel Castro spoke to him and his classmates for four hours.
On a hunt for fossils in Mexico, Warren Stortroen, a former insurance-claims manager, led a paleontologist and fellow diggers to the remains of a giant glyptodont, a three-million-year-old ancestor of the armadillo that's the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
And as part of a cultural tour of Morocco this spring, Paul Tausche, a retired international marketer, rode a camel to the top of a desert dune at sunset, then enjoyed dinner and a musical performance around a campfire before retiring to a nomadic tent.
America's university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.
To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. "Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood," John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. "Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings." If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become "capable and cultivated human beings" in Mill's sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.
Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:
The reason I think the Harlem Children's Zone is so important--the reason I wrote a whole book about the program--is that I think it's the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.
What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt--a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.
In one of Kurt Vonnegut's most enduring short stories, Harrison Bergeron, everyone is finally equal thanks to the efforts of the Handicapper General. However, one of the many lasting messages of the story is a derisive one. In the futuristic world of Harrison Bergeron, accomplishment is no longer the measure of stature. Instead, it is all about trying, of recognizing effort, regardless of result.
However, a recent summary of three decades of research reveals that when it comes to raising smart children, developing their work ethic is in fact the most critical component. Whether it is success in school or in life, research indicates that innate intelligence and ability are simply not as important as a person's level of effort.
We have some of the top schools in the country in Arlington County. Is there some point with our children at which we could back off and not continue to push for rising achievement, an official goal of the county schools? Is there a way we can say, good enough is good enough?
My oldest son is in middle school. He is a talented but not gifted math student. Midway through this past school year, it was clear that he was not ready for algebraic thinking, and his seventh-grade math teacher compassionately helped us help him decide to move back to a more appropriate math level. Because I teach human development, I was able to help him understand that this wasn't about being dumb, but a developmental marker he had not yet hit. He moved back to repeat the math class he took last year.
Now I have a boy who is not enthusiastic about math. He doesn't believe he is good at it and doesn't think math is fun, all because we want rising achievement for all students.
Amid the tag-team commotion of three new teachers prepping a science class for summer school finals one recent morning, one teacher sits alongside a student for what seems an eternity.
The exchange is perfectly ordinary, except that in post-Katrina New Orleans, little is ordinary.
The student, a young mother forced to move four times in the 15 months after the storm, is 20 years old.
As usual, Bruce Fuller and Lance Izumi , my fellow Education Watch contributors, make some fascinating points, none more startling to me than Lance's casual throw-away that Barack Obama sends his children to private school. As a rabid public school Democrat, I crumpled in despair at the news.
Look, I am not in politics, I get no money from foundations, I do not get invited to lecture on third world eco-sustainability on luxury cruises. I have no highly placed blue-state friends and I will soon be a divorced woman because my die-hard Democratic husband will not brook any dissent, public or private, about our party.
WHERE WE STAND: America's Schools in the 21st Century
Via a kind reader's email:
Monday, September 15th
9:00 p.m. on Milwaukee Public Television (Channel 10)
11:00 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Television stations
In 1995, America's college graduation rate was second in the world. Ten years later, it ranked 15th. As so many nations around the world continue to improve their systems of education, America can no longer afford to maintain the status quo. In an ever-changing, increasingly competitive global economy, is the U.S. doing all it can to prepare its students to enter the workforce of the 21st century and ensure our country's place as a world leader?
WHERE WE STAND: America's Schools in the 21st Century examines the major challenges for U.S. schools in the face of a changing world. Divided into five segments, topics include globalization; measuring student progress; ensuring that all students achieve; the current school funding system, and teacher quality.
WHERE WE STAND is airing at a critical time in our country's history. Along with its companion website and a variety of dynamic outreach activities across the country, the program will inspire a national dialogue in the weeks prior to the November elections. Nationally recognized education experts and leading proponents of educational reform will put these examples in context. They include Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone; Diane Ravitch, education historian; Wendy Puriefoy, President of Public Education Network; Chester Finn, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute; Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies, AEI; Michael Rebell, Executive Director of the Campaign for Educational Equity; and Sharon Lynn Kagan, Associate Dean for Policy, Teacher's College at Columbia University.
WHERE WE STAND introduces students, parents, teachers and administrators whose stories illustrate the overwhelming odds and shining successes of education in America. They include Bin Che, an educator from mainland China who teaches Mandarin in rural Ohio; Cherese Clark, principal of a high-poverty school struggling under the pressure of low test scores; Alex Perry, who, at age 16, has already taken three college-level math classes, and Finnish exchange student Anne Kuittinen, who earns no school credit for her year in the U.S. despite her straight-A record.
Hosted by Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the documentary visits a range of socioeconomic and geographic school districts. The program features schools in Ohio, an important swing state, but this program is about all of our schools and where they stand.
Where We Stand: America's Schools in the 21st Century companion website (www.pbs.org/wherewestand <http://www.pbs.org/wherewestand> ) launches on September 15th in conjunction with the premiere. The program can be streamed in its entirety online.
Scientists have for the first time established a link between a primitive, intuitive sense of numbers and performance in math classes, a finding that could lead to new ways to help children struggling in school.
A study involving 64 14-year-olds found that the teenagers who did well on a test that measured their "number sense" were much more likely to have gotten good grades in math classes.
"We discovered that a child's ability to quickly estimate how many things are in a group significantly predicts their performance in school mathematics all the way back to kindergarten," said Justin Halberda, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University who led the research, published online yesterday by the journal Nature. "It was very surprising."
I ask students on the first day of my journalism classes to fill out a questionnaire. Most questions inquire about their interest in journalism and any experience they have that is journalism-related. One question is: "What do you read, at least fairly regularly?"
Used to be, they would say The New York Times or Newsweek or Sports Illustrated. A few would list the local newspaper, or The New Yorker or The Economist to impress me. In recent years, the answers more often have been CNN.com, ESPN.com, blogs and other Internet offerings.
And then, at the beginning of the last semester, a student who claimed to be interested in journalism wrote this about what she reads: "Nothing."
Her answer astonished me but shouldn't have, because it epitomized the lack of intellectual curiosity in students that I have noticed in recent years, along with a decline in such basic skills as grammar, spelling and simple math. A sense of history? History is what happened since they left middle school.
As both a teacher and a father of two multi-tasking teenage daughters, I had long suspected that something was going on. While some students seem just as smart or smarter than they did 15 years ago, I'm also confronted with college sophomores who can't identify Henry Kissinger or perform simple percentage exercises; who argue, as one did, that misspelling someone's name was no big deal because I knew who she meant; students who begin sentences with lower-case letters and embellish news stories by adding their own facts.
Thanks to a kind fellow traveller for pointing this out.
Columbia Public Schools' chief academic officer said the district is ready to compromise with the community when it comes to elementary math. But Sally Beth Lyon, who oversees district curricula, stopped short of saying concepts-based math would be replaced by a more traditional program.
"We're going to figure out how to get something done so we can all move forward," she told the Tribune. "We're still at the table and will discuss the best way to move forward and include and acknowledge the community concerns we're hearing."
Lyon's comments followed last night's Board of Education meeting, where board member Ines Segert accused the district of appointing people to district math committees who are biased toward investigative math programs and not appointing mathematicians who favor more traditional math instruction.
Segert cited three University of Missouri math education professors who serve on district committees and have received grant funds to train Columbia teachers how to use concepts-based math materials. "They instruct teachers in a certain ideology that happens to be used in these textbooks we have in class," said Segert, a vocal advocate of returning traditional math to classrooms.
Lyon's comments followed what was almost a scolding from board member Ines Segert during last night's board meeting. Segert criticized the district for appointing math education professors on math committees who seem to benefit from investigative math curriculum. She also accused the district of giving people incomplete data and summaries that skew results to justify current practices.
Lyon denied that anyone making curricula decisions receive district dollars. Any grant money they get comes from federal and state sources, she said.
I WAS born and raised in Milwaukee, the youngest of five children. My mother worked as a postal clerk, and my father was a welder and line supervisor.
My parents set a goal that all of their kids would go to college. All five of us have college degrees. My mother had started college at 16, but had finished only a year and half when her mother became ill and she had to quit. My father never had the means to go to college.
Recently, my mother told me, "Our best friends were the people at our credit union." My parents borrowed money at the beginning of each school year and hurried to try to pay back that loan before the next school year started.
Their unspoken message was that the sky is the limit. They never said that because you are an African-American, you can go only this far or do only this or that. They just said, "Go for it."
Q. It seems sometimes that the Journal Sentinel does nothing but bash the Milwaukee Public Schools. There are a lot of people working for MPS who work hard to make a difference in kids' lives. They are writing grant proposals to make it possible for kids to attend camps they couldn't otherwise attend, and creating programs to keep kids involved in school and off the streets. As a former camp counselor and volunteer in the classroom, I know how important these things are.
A. I share your concern that our coverage can seem, at times, negative - not just about MPS, but about any number of community institutions we cover. It is an issue we talk about a great deal because we don't just report on this area - we live here ourselves. What I would ask you to think about is that what drives us to report what may seem like a negative story is actually our concern, our passion, for our community.
When we write about a school board member going to a convention but never attending its sessions, it is because that money could have been used to improve the educational experience of students and teachers. When we write about the failure of the $102 million Neighborhood Schools Initiative building plan, it is because that money could have been used for other projects to transform the lives of students, teachers and staff alike. When we write about the district receiving a low level of funding to educate disabled children, it is because other districts seem to be taking better advantage of available money to improve the lives of children who already face so many challenges.
Rae Ann Forester was losing confidence in Grand Prairie High School's academic program. Even though she was president of the Parent Teacher Student Association, she took a decisive step away from the school.
Parents whose children attend struggling public schools may feel like there's no way out. But Ms. Forester and other persistent parents are taking control of their children's education and finding options.
"What do you do in a school that's low-performing?" Ms. Forester asked. "If we can't get what we need from that specific campus, we do what we need to as a family. I do want people to have options, and that's what I'm advocating."
After the Texas Education Agency rated Grand Prairie High School "academically unacceptable" the previous two years, the school's poor reputation prompted some families to act.
William Cronon is UW-Madison Professor of History, Geography & Environmental Studies. His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world and how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, He is the author of several books, including Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
Morgan Brown --- Assistant Commissioner Morgan Brown oversees charter school programs, special education policy, food and nutrition services, adult basic education, and American Indian education programs at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). Previously, he served as the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Innovation & Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education.
New state test results show that Prince William County's third-graders are struggling to score at the highest level since the implementation of a controversial math program that was intended to boost performance.
The scores, which are the first state Standards of Learning (SOL) results to gauge the new program's effectiveness, reveal that fewer than half of Prince William's third-graders scored in the advanced category this year, the first that the Pearson math program "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" was taught in that grade. Last year, third-graders who had not begun "Investigations" posted the same results.
The flat scores are a sizable decline since 2006, when 56 percent of third-graders reached the advanced level in math.
" 'Investigations' didn't cure the problem," said Vern Williams, a Fairfax County teacher and former member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel who was invited by the Prince William School Board to speak at its work session later this month.
It will be interesting to see what, if any effect the soon to be released Madison Math Task Force report has on the local curriculum.
Thomas Chun took the SAT college entrance exam twice, scoring well within qualifying range for prestigious research universities, if hundreds of points short of the top mark.
Still, Chun believed his score, 2090 out of a possible 2400, might not stand up against those of other whiz kids at Whitney High, his selective magnet school in Cerritos. So he took the other admissions test, the ACT, and scored a perfect 36.
"I was never a big fan of the SAT," said Chun, 17, of Cerritos, who since sixth grade has dreamed of going to Yale. "The ACT tests you on what you learned in high school rather than what you learned in test prep academy."
The ACT was once the overlooked stepsister to the SAT. It was popular in the Midwest and the South but less established on the East and West coasts. Now, however, the ACT is growing faster than its rival, not only nationally but also in SAT strongholds such as California, where 50% more students in the class of 2008 took the ACT than their 2004 counterparts. Nationwide, the ACT was taken by 1.4 million students in the 2008 class, compared with 1.5 million who took the SAT, according to the test companies.
This interactive video webcast is hosted by The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates. The Center is funded by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. The webcast will highlight the following:
Recommendations from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel
Instructional strategies to foster deep "conceptual and procedural knowledge of fractions"
Video clips from teacher training sessions and elementary classrooms
There is no charge for this event. It is open to the public, so please invite your colleagues to join in. Registrationis required, and minimal information is requested.
The St. Paul School District this fall is planning on engaging community members, parents and school district staff in an indepth discussion about the district's future with one major premise: Things need to change.
The district, which serves about 38,800 students, faces considerable challenges. It has made more than $93 million in budget cuts over the last nine years. Only half its students are proficient in reading, the achievement gap between white students and students of color is among the widest in the nation, and federal and state expectations for student achievement are accelerating.
The district "is at a crossroads," according to a presentation that district staff made to school board members on Thursday night. "Business as usual is not a sustainable option for achieving our mission."
The St. Paul district's efforts to comply with federal and state desegregation laws over the past 30 years and retain students have resulted in a complex network of magnet and neighborhood schools.
Let's remember back for a moment to the excitement of 2001. Gail Littlejohn, a retired corporate attorney, and three allies won four seats on the school board, taking control with a majority and promising big changes that would help lead the district back to respectability.
And for the first few years, the Kids First team had a remarkable run of successes. They replaced a well meaning but floundering superintendent with an efficient manager in Percy Mack, a move that was well received in the community. They put a reform in place that emphasized teacher training and focused on math and reading instruction. They got the NAACP and the state to agree to settle the 20-year-old desegregation case, bringing millions in cash and releasing the district from court supervision. They got a huge bond issue passed to rebuild all the schools in the city. Eventually, Dayton even had enough test score gain to jump from "academic emergency to "continuous improvement" in the state ratings. And for at least those first few years, Kids First got support from the rest of the school board, business leaders and much of the community.
Like many other foreign journalists, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Helsinki, Finland, to learn how this country has climbed to the top spots in key international rankings measuring economic, political and social success. The answer, I was told, is amazingly simple.
First, the facts. Finland ranks first among 179 countries in Transparency International's index of the least corrupt nations in the world (the United States is No.20); No.1 in Freedom House's ranking of the world's most democratic countries (the U.S. ranks No.15); No.1 in the world in 15-year-old students' standardized test scores in science (the U.S. ranks No.29), and is among the 10 most competitive economies in the World Economic Forum's annual competitiveness index (the U.S. topped the list this year).
A small country of 5.3 million, which only two decades ago was by most measures the poorest country in northern Europe, Finland also boasts the headquarters of the world's biggest cellphone maker -- Nokia -- and cutting-edge paper and pulp-technology firms.
ill Long Thompson unveiled a handful of education initiatives Wednesday while Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels introduced five campaign commercials, three of which focus on his own education proposals.
The two face off in November's gubernatorial election.
"I don't have all the answers, but we are not meeting our objectives," Long Thompson said at a Statehouse news conference Wednesday.
One of her proposals is to provide a free book every month to all Hoosier children from birth to age 5. This is modeled after Tennessee's partnership with Dolly Parton's "Imagination Library," but Long Thompson's program would be paid for with private donations.
She also wants to allow kids who need the extra time and help to attend a fifth year of high school in an effort to improve Indiana's graduation rate of about 76 percent.
Kohl spoke at length about education, especially the failure of the public school system in Milwaukee, "where many neighborhoods are not inhabitable ... a problem spread across the country. When we have a large number of people unproductive, who do you think pays for it? We all do."
In answer to a question about school choice, and what the questioner called the "horrible" academic gap here in Racine, Kohl responded: "Anybody who had the answer would be lauded and sainted."
He mentioned meeting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NY School Chancellor Joel Klein, and hearing from them "how important high standards and accountability are. We all know it's not only the schools that fail; it's the homes and neighborhoods the kids come out of. I would have very high, very high accountability, and reward good teachers, measure teachers. We need to find a way to pay teachers more, and the better ones more than that, and schools that fail should be closed."
Kohl related his approach toward education to his firing of the Bucks GM and coach last year. "We were not getting the job done." Ditto in education. "For too long we've not been willing to do enough to get the job done."
Over the past few weeks, much has been said by Senator Clinton, Michelle Obama and Senator Obama about "world class education". Those three words have resounded in all of their speeches of late. I would like to acknowledge some "world class writing" which has recently appeared in The Concord Review, edited by Will Fitzhugh.
Below are the papers, the authors, and the high school with which the student is affiliated or enrolled. We should acknowledge the teachers, and principals of these schools, as well as the parents of these fine "world class writers".
Congratulations to these fine young scholars on their exemplary research and writing.
Confederate Gold....Steffi Delcourt....Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia
Max Weber...Diane (Elly) Brinkley....Dalton School, Manhattan Island, New York
I daresay that social studies, history teachers and even history professors would learn a great deal about a variety of topics by reading these essays.Further, I would hope that these essays would serve as models of excellent scholarship and writing for high school students across America.
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."
Sometimes it's unclear which of Manuel Santos' classes are college prep and which are vocational. Last year, he took medical terminology, classified as vocational but heavy on the advanced vocabulary he'll need if he majors in pre-med in college.
And though the Sweetwater High School senior has taken all the advanced science courses he needs to be admitted to his top college choice, the University of California Berkeley, it may be another vocational course, medical assistant training, that is best preparing him for pre-med.
National City's Sweetwater High and schools across San Diego County are developing a new brand of education that is a hybrid of college-prep and job training, a series of classes that will equip high school graduates to simultaneously impress employers and university admissions counselors.
New and more sophisticated job-training classes have emerged as a response to calls from industry for a skilled, homegrown work force and the rising awareness of a dropout epidemic among students who don't find school relevant.
t looks like part of a documentary from a cable TV nature channel, with dramatic music, video of frogs and a narrator solemnly warning that a fungus is killing the animals around the world.
It's posted on iTunes, available for downloading. And it was produced by elementary school students in Montclair.
Students there and in four other New Jersey school districts will take a leap in classroom technology this year, using Apple's iTunes store to post and share educational material.
Lectures, student projects, orientation videos and other media can be posted on iTunes, available free to students and parents in the five districts, or anyone else. Other New Jersey districts taking part are East Orange, Hunterdon Central Regional High School, Perth Amboy and Union City.
"The idea is that there are educators and others producing digital content that really can have value for others," said Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, which helped Apple roll out the program, called "K-12 on iTunes U." It is modeled after iTunes U, started about two years ago for colleges and universities.
School leaders in OECD countries are facing challenges with the rising expectations for schools and schooling in a century characterized by technological innovation, migration and globalization. As countries aim to transform their educational systems to prepare all young people with the knowledge and skills needed in this changing world, the roles and expectations for school leaders have changed radically. They are no longer expected to be merely good managers. Effective school leadership is increasingly viewed as key to large-scale education reform and to improved educational outcomes.
With 22 participating countries, this activity aims to support policy development by providing in-depth analyses of different approaches to school leadership. In broad terms, the following key questions are being explored:
For 20 years Sandra Tsing Loh has taken satirical shots at Los Angeles and her own growing pains without making the tiresome error, committed by nonnative observers from Joan Didion to Caitlin Flanagan, of conflating the two. Her aim is generally dead-on; her gun emplacement is even better. We not only can read the Malibu-raised Loh in The Atlantic Monthly, where she's a contributing editor, on her Los Angeles Times blog, and in comic memoirs like A Year in Van Nuys. We can also hear her on KPCC and see her turn her elegant Chinese German face to Silly Putty in performance pieces.
Whatever the target--eye bags, ethnicity, envy, Christmas--Loh's a linguistic Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging at a pace that would drive a hummingbird to wing splints. At times her approach has left some of her frailer subjects exhausted along with her audience. With Mother on Fire (Crown, 320 pages, $23), her new memoir expanding on the one-woman show of the same name that debuted in 2005, she's taken on an issue scary enough to warrant her biggest guns: getting your child an education.
How harrowing, you tax-gouged nonparents may wonder, can this be? In my experience the trauma of a difficult birth is nothing compared with the scars of being polite to a teacher who has forbidden a second grader to look at a book that intrigues her "because it's too hard." These don't fade even after said child has obtained a graduate degree. Schooling, in short, pushes buttons. In Los Angeles, it's also tied to a full range of inflammatory issues, from immigration to celebrity.
When Jamie Hyneman and I speak at teacher conventions, we always draw a grateful crowd. They tell us Thursday mornings are productive because students see us doing hands-on science Wednesday nights on our show MythBusters, and they want to talk about it. These teachers are so dedicated, but they have difficulty teaching for the standardized tests they're given with the budgets they're not given. It's one reason the U.S. is falling behind other countries in science: By 2010, Asia will have 90 percent of the world's Ph.D. scientists and engineers. We're not teachers, but our show has taught us a lot about how to get people interested in science. Here are three humble suggestions that might help reinvigorate American science education.
by Unnamed MMSD Educators [RSS]. The blog touches on the "Standards Based Report Card" initiative among a number of other topics.
What about . . . THE 6th GRADE STUDENT READING AT A 2nd GRADE LEVEL?
From the district Curricular Standards:
"These Grade Level Performance Standards describe behaviors typical at the specified grade level. They represent behaviors students generally exhibit as they move from novice to expert in their ability to take control of language processes. It is important to remember, however, that literacy learning may not be sequential and each child has a unique developmental pattern."
The 6th grade student reading at a 2nd grade level earns a ONE (remember, no zeroes) for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Why? For not meeting the "behaviors typical at the specified grade level " (6th).
Now, if said student raises her/his reading level to that of a 4th-grade student, guess what. That student still does not meet the 6th grade standard and will still earn a ONE for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Effort and improvement are not taken into consideration in this constricted construct for grading.
Henri Cartan, one of the leaders of a revolution in mathematics, dies at 104
In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn't like what they saw. The practice of mathematics at the time was dry, scattered and muddled, they believed, in need of reinvention and invigoration.
So they took up arms: pens and typewriters. Using the nom de plume "Nicolas Bourbaki" (after a dead Napoleonic general), they wrote a series of textbooks laying out mathematics the right way. Though the young mathematicians started out only intending to write a good textbook for analysis (essentially an advanced form of calculus), they ended up creating dozens of volumes which formed a manifesto for a new philosophy of mathematics.
The last of the founders of Bourbaki, Henri Cartan, died August 13 at age 104. In addition to his work in Bourbaki, Cartan made groundbreaking contributions to a wide array of mathematical fields, including complex analysis, algebraic topology and homological algebra. He received the Wolf Prize in 1980, one of the highest honors in mathematics, for his work on the theory of analytic functions. Two of his students won the Fields medal, sometimes considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics, one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel.
A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.
Flat World Knowledge is the brainchild of two former textbook industry executives who learned from the inside about the wacky economy of textbooks.
In a nutshell, there is a huge, inelastic demand for college texts, even though textbook prices are high. Because of this there is a lot of piracy and a robust secondary market for textbooks -- but not for long, because they are updated every couple of years, rendering old editions virtually worthless.
Edgewood High School senior Matthew Everts recently learned he's just about perfect -- when it comes to the two major college-entrance exams, anyway.
Matthew, who hopes to attend a university on the West Coast, received a 36, the highest possible composite score, on the ACT.
He remembers feeling focused when he took the ACT in June, a week before tackling the SAT.
"I knew that if I did well I wouldn't have to take the test again," Matthew said Tuesday. "Not having to take a four-hour test is always a good thing."
On the SAT, Matthew received a perfect 800 on critical reading and math, two of the three SAT Critical Reasoning Tests, along with a 740 out of a possible 800 on the writing test.
Matthew also took the SAT in three subject areas -- chemistry, math level two and U.S. history -- and received a perfect score on all three tests.
(Adam) Schneider, who plays trumpet in the Middleton school band and is a member of the ecology club, expects to attend college and study biology at UW-Eau Claire or St. Olaf College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. He also plans on working toward a graduate degree in botany, doing field research and teaching once he finishes school.
Schneider is one of six Dane County students to post perfect marks on the ACT test during the 2007-08 school. Others who earned perfect marks were Mary Kate Wall and Matthew Everts from Edgewood High School, Axel Glaubitz and Dianna Amasino from Madison West High School and Alex Van Abel from Monona Grove High School. All the students were juniors when they took the test.
At the state level, 22 students received perfect scores on the ACT test last school year. On the national level, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of students that take the ACT test earn a perfect mark.
Meanwhile, six Madison Metropolitan School District students earned perfect test scores in 2006.
The following was released today by The Heritage Foundation:
One of every four children in America's public schools isn't going to graduate. And in many large cities, the graduation rate is twice as bad: two of every four kids will fail to graduate.
Staying in school doesn't guarantee a good education, either. Fewer than a third of 12th-graders can identify why the Puritans sailed to these shores. Only four in 10 know the more recent significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
These and other eye-popping facts make for compelling reading in A Parent's Guide to Education Reform, a new, 35-page booklet from The Heritage Foundation ( http://www.heritage.org/). Taxpayers, it makes clear, aren't getting much of a return on the roughly $9,300 a year they spend on each child in public schools.
So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.
Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we've decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that's exactly what we've done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead School. I wanted to go with something like: "The School of Revolutionary Resistance," but Celeste said that was just inviting trouble.
The reason we've broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It's because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.
Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession's nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don't know where those schools are.
A wise friend recently mentioned that "choice is good". It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Madison School District math review addresses ongoing concerns over reduced rigor. Math Forum audio / video.
This is the table of contents to the final findings from the research study of Ohio school district performance on the OPT and OSRC. This site is the data, graph, links, and comment page for Hoover's research study of Ohio school district proficiency test and school report card performance accountability. These data and findings have been released to the public as of February 27, 2000. The entire study is available online for your use. If you wish to be included in the emailing list of updates about OPT and OSRC issues, click on the logo at the top of this page and send me your request.
The graphs and data presented here are from the final replication of the study. This final analysis represents the culmination of several hundred hours of work put forth to gain empirical insights into OPT performance across all Ohio school districts. At the time the study was completed there were 611 school districts in the State of Ohio. This study uses data from 593 districts out of the 611 total. 18 districts were not included in the study because of incomplete data or because the districts were too small such as North Bass Island. All data were taken from EMIS online data and no data other than the data presented by the State of Ohio were used. My confidence level is high that there are very few errors in the data array. Though errors are certainly possible, I am confident that if they exist they are minor and do not significantly affect the overall conclusions of this study. (RLH)
As happens in many urban school systems, D.C. school and D.C. Council officials have been in a tiff over the repair and renovation of aging buildings. Nobody wants children to walk into schools with peeling paint, leaky roofs and windows that won't open. Many inner-city educators believe such neglect sends the dispiriting message that nobody cares about these kids.
But are fresh plaster, up-to-date wiring and fine landscaping real signs of a great school?
Take a look at the 52-year-old former church school at 421 Alabama Ave. in Anacostia. Teachers say some floors shake if you stomp on them. Weeds poke out from under the brick walls. Yet great teaching has occurred inside. Two first-rate schools, the Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School and the KIPP DC: AIM Academy, have occupied that space in the past few years, and the Imagine charter network, also with a good record, is opening a school there. Or check out the School Without Walls, a D.C. public high school sought out by parents with Ivy League dreams. Its building, now being renovated, was a wreck, but inside, students embraced an A-plus curriculum.
How about the suburbs? Drive past the rust-stained, 44-year-old campus at 6560 Braddock Rd. in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County. Dean Tistadt, chief operating officer of Fairfax schools, says the place needs an electrical upgrade. A lot of windows should be replaced. He is sorry that his crews can't do the major work until 2012. It doesn't look like a place I would want to send my kids, yet the sign in front says it is the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, maybe the best public school in America.
Ten years ago, I wrote a book about high schools with golden reputations in some of the country's most expensive suburbs. They were full of Advanced Placement classes and fine teachers, but I was astonished at how bad some of the buildings were. Mamaroneck High School, in one of the most affluent parts of Westchester County, N.Y., had three 66-year-old boilers that repeatedly broke down and many clocks that didn't work. La Jolla High School, north of San Diego, full of science fair winners, was a collection of stained stucco classrooms and courtyards of dead grass.
Matthews is right, great teaching is key. Somewhat related, it will be interesting to see what Madison's new far west side elementary school's (Olson) enrollment looks like this month.
A couple of years ago I debated Chris Peters, a thoughtful and energetic high school teacher in San Bernardino, Calif., about vocational education. He thought it had more value than I did and could energize students who can't stand dry academics. I thought high schools were incapable of doing vocational ed well, and too often made it a dumping ground for students from low-income families thought incapable of college.
We did not convince each other, but my recent column on the surprising results of research into high school career academies, showing they had great benefit for students' job and family prospects, led him to conclude I was still educable on the subject. He came back to me with a plan to shake up high school in a way that would give both college-oriented and job-oriented students an equal chance, rather than force kids who don't like school to stew in English and science classes.
Peters' plan, which he conceived without benefit of well-paid staff, shares important elements with the very expensive report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which Peters had not seen until I pointed it out to him. Many people, it seems, want to fix high school in this way, which I trashed in a previous column.
Fifth and sixth grades are in the newsroom, middle school dominates the Clinton campaign's War Room, and seventh-graders have the run of the sports department.
While some cities try to lure athletic teams, mega-retailers or a few large employers to revitalize their downtowns, Little Rock is getting an economic-development boost from an unlikely source: eStem charter schools, which have taken over the old Arkansas Gazette building and is bringing new life to a formerly abandoned part of the city.
The Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for its courageous coverage and editorials on the Central High desegregation crisis, but lost a drawn-out newspaper war with the Arkansas Democrat and closed on Oct. 18, 1991.
After that, the Gazette's building was used temporarily by the Clinton presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, and by an occasional retailer. But for the most part, it sat vacant. Over time, the surrounding neighborhood began to slump as well. A grand, wide-columned building across the street once called home by the Federal Reserve is empty. A building catty-corner from the school -- an urban-renewal atrocity that once headquartered Central Arkansas' NBC-TV affiliate -- sits idle too. Before eStem schools opened, you could work downtown and never find reason to pass by the Gazette building. (Full disclosure, the Gazette building is owned by the newspaper I work for, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which leases it to eStem.)
Now it's busy enough that some folks worry about traffic jams, as parents drop their kids off and head to work, or pick them up for lunch.
On July 21, eStem schools opened the doors. There are actually three schools in one historic 1908 building: an elementary, middle and high school. The schools' name stands for the economics of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And their curricula, which emphasize languages like Latin and even Mandarin Chinese, as well as economics and the sciences, are proving to be popular.
In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America's newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?
Bailey replied, "I don't know."
That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution -- an institution that would encourage research and development throughout the country. It would find its value, Herty said, "in the stimulus which it gives" to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in the field.
Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH's ability to stimulate innovation.
Today, the shame of our cities isn't bubonic plague; it's ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that "America's lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited." Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.
Mayor Tom Barrett and the Milwaukee School Board agree on this much: The community needs an accurate reading on the district's finances.
Unfortunately, that may be the only thing they agree on.
Both are moving separately on plans to get the numbers. The School Board wants to spend $50,000 of taxpayers' money to perform an audit to see where the Milwaukee Public Schools can be more efficient. Barrett is seeking funding from local foundations for an assessment of the struggling district's financial and operational situation -- a study that also could take the next step and recommend restructuring and how to best direct resources to the classroom where they can most help educate Milwaukee's kids.
On paper, we believe Barrett's plan goes beyond that of the School Board, because it will home in on a half-dozen or so top priorities that, when funded adequately, will improve MPS performance and increase the district's credibility among parents, taxpayers and decision-makers in Madison.
For Barrett's plan to have bite, he needs the support of foundations to retain a firm expert in urban school system finance and operations. Then the mayor needs to pressure the board and administration to get to work.
You want truly radical education reform in Milwaukee?
Form a countywide system so that Milwaukee children can, without restrictions, attend schools in Whitefish Bay and Greendale. Or launch a regional onslaught against the economic, housing and transportation disparities that, in the absence of locally owned breweries, now make Milwaukee famous.
Unfortunately, it's not likely to happen. If you even mention the region's divides, you are labeled as anti-suburban.
Luckily, the U.S. Census Bureau isn't afraid of Milwaukee's culture of silence about such realities. Once again (I've lost count of the many similar reports) Milwaukee made the news last week, for having the seventh-worst poverty rate of any major city. Waukesha County, in contrast, had the fifth-lowest poverty rate of any major county.
A county school system in metropolitan Atlanta on Thursday became the nation's first in nearly 40 years to lose its accreditation, and the governor removed four of its school board members for ethics violations.
The school system in Clayton County, just south of the Atlanta city limits, was ruled unfit for accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's six major private accrediting agencies, after school board members failed to meet the group's standards for leading a school system.
An investigation by the agency found that county officials had not made sufficient progress toward establishing an effective school board, removing the influence of outside individuals on board decisions, enforcing an ethics policy or meeting other requirements for accreditation, Mark A. Elgart, the chief executive of the association, announced Thursday at a news conference.
County officials said they were planning to appeal the decision.
Many seniors at L.A.'s West Adams Preparatory High School are actually looking forward to returning to school. The brand new institution is based on a mission to help students realize their dreams in a multicultural world. This is far from common in Southern California.
Everyone, it seems, has a complaint about the schools. Indifferent bureaucracy, change-averse unions, faddish curricula, soaring school taxes matched with mediocre student performance -- the list is long and seemingly unchanging.
At the start of yet another school year, it's time for some radical change in your local schools -- a specific change that only parents can bring about. It's a thing already being done in some far-off countries but that remains strangely rare here in America. It's something I've tried -- and, despite the skepticism of friends and neighbors, it seems to work.
What is this miracle that lies within the reach of nearly every family? It's simple. All you have to do is to start insisting that your children fully apply themselves to their studies -- and commit yourself to doing your part. That means making sure they do all the work expected of them as well as their abilities allow. It also means making sure everything at home stands behind these principles and supports the idea of learning.
These will sound like obvious ideas. In fact, given all the distractions of modern life, it is a radical departure from the normal order of things. Let's face it: More than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.
I'm going to step back from economics for a moment and write about teaching economics to both undergraduates and graduate students. Based on that experience, I have some advice for talented high school students: Don't go to college.
And advice for talented college graduates: Don't get a job.
A Complete Education
Of course there is a caveat. You should do both of them eventually, just not right away. Take a year off, either after high school or after college.
Use that year to do something interesting that you'll likely never be able to do again: write a book, hike the Appalachian Trail, live with your grandparents, trek in Katmandu, volunteer at a health clinic in India, or serve your country in the military.
Just do something that will make you a more complete person. I suspect that it'll also make you appreciate your education more (and, ironically, make you more attractive when you do apply for college or enter the job market).
ast week all hell broke loose regarding the fate of Milwaukee Public Schools. Mayor Tom Barrett proposed an outside audit of the system. As a candidate for mayor, Barrett floated the idea of a mayoral takeover of the schools, so this looks like a first step toward establishing control - and a clear message the MPS ship is sinking.
Meanwhile, a new group called Milwaukee Quality Education was formed, led by Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce President Tim Sheehy and former MPS Superintendent Howard Fuller. Reforms tried in other cities were supposed to be discussed, with the obvious aim of dramatically changing MPS. "We have urgency coming out of our ears," Sheehy declared.
Add to this the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's three-part series suggesting MPS wasted most of a $100 million effort to cut back busing, and the takeaway message is that a dysfunctional school system needs rescue.
Meanwhile, the Greater Milwaukee Committee has been engaged in an ongoing effort to improve MPS, creating a plan of "corrective action." One insider tells me Sister Joel Read, former Alverno College president, was very influential in formulating the plan.
There is an old story about a worker, at one of the South African diamond mines, who would leave work once a week or so pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. The guard would stop him and search the sand thoroughly, looking for any smuggled diamonds. When he found none, he would wave the worker through. This happened month after month, and finally the guard said, "Look, I know you are smuggling something, and I know it isn't diamonds. If you tell me what it is, I won't say anything, but I really want to know. The worker smiled, and said, "wheelbarrows."
I think of this story when teachers find excuses for not letting their students see the exemplary history essays written by their high school peers for The Concord Review. Often they feel they cannot give their students copies unless they can "teach" the contents. Or they already teach the topic of one of the essays they see in the issue. Or they don't know anything about one of the topics. Or they don't have time to teach one of the topics they see, or they don't think students have time to read one or more of the essays, or they worry about plagiarism, or something else. There are many reasons to keep this unique journal away from secondary students.
They are, to my mind, "searching the sand." The most important reason to show their high school students the journal is to let them see the wheelbarrow itself, that is, to show them that there exists in the world a professional journal that takes the history research papers of high school students seriously enough to have published them on a quarterly basis for the last 21 years. Whether the students read all the essays, or one of them, or none of them, they will see that for some of their peers academic work is treated with respect. And that is a message worth letting through the guard post, whatever anyone may think about, or want to do something with, the diamonds inside.
And of course some teachers are eager to show their students the work of their peers....
The Concord Review -- Varsity Academics®
I am happy to send along this letter describing both "logistical" and pedagogical dimensions of how I have used The Concord Review in class since employing the first class sets in the 1988-1989 academic year. You know from the fact that we have expanded our class subscription "coverage" from all U.S. History classes to all U.S. History and World History since 1500 classes that we have been very satisfied with the Review. In fact, I am glad to say that, due to an expanding school enrollment, our class set for this year will number about 80 subscriptions.
In terms of "logistics," the system we have employed here has been simple and consistent with the way we deal with texts in all disciplines. Our students purchase their texts, so as students move through our bookstore before school opens, they mark the texts they need on a list, and the above-noted classes simply have The Concord Review listed as a text.
Pedagogically, I (or other appropriate instructor) view each issue with an eye toward an article or articles which are appropriate for any part of the material under current or imminent study. Because of the wide range of subjects and chronological eras covered in each issue, it is pretty easy to discern immediately one or more articles which will be applicable and useful. I do not feel compelled to put the Review in student hands the day the issues arrive, but rather plan ahead. For example, I might be covering mid-19th century reform in U.S. History when new issues arrive, but will hold off until we are doing the Civil War to distribute the Reviews and assign an article on some phase of the Civil War. The girls are told to treat each issue of the Review as an extension of their texts, meaning that they must hold on to each issue, for additional articles may be assigned from a given issue later in the year. Again, given the wide range of topics and eras covered in the typical issue, it is not unusual for me to be able (again, as an example) to assign an article from one issue on the Civil War in December, then go back to the same issue in April for an article on some portion of mid-20th century history. Students have been great about this, and are thus prepared throughout the year.
As to the articles themselves, I have found several uses for them. An obvious advantage of the articles in the Review is that they are scholarly and informative, and, as my students have noted, a refreshing break from the text (this is a comment I frequently hear). Secondly, the articles, in addition to being scholarly, are readable, and the "right size," and thus readily accessible to high school students. Even "popular" history, such as found in American Heritage and the like, can be "too much" for high schoolers, as the articles can be too long or presume too much a priori knowledge. The articles in The Concord Review are substantial and appropriately challenging, yet "intellectually digestible" for all students, not just the gifted few in an AP section, for example.
In addition to providing excellent reading, allowing for deeper exploration and discussion of some aspect of history, the Review provides an excellent methodological model. All students in History at Santa Catalina must write research papers based on both primary and secondary sources, with the length and quality expectations of the papers escalating appropriately from freshman to senior year. Sometimes, as you well know from your own teaching experience, explaining "arcane" items like where to put footnotes, etc. to students can be like trying to explain what "pink" looks like to a person who has never been able to see. The Review puts in students' hands excellent history, not only in terms of content, but in terms of methodology as well: footnotes, bibliography, placement, and all the other details. I have found it helpful not only to have students read an article for its content, but then to dissect it methodologically, asking my students (as appropriate to their level) to identify primary as opposed to secondary sources, to suggest what other sources might have been helpful, which sources might have the most credibility, and so on. We can thus effectively and efficiently combine quality reading with critical thinking/analysis and a methodology "practicum." The fact that teenagers are always highly interested in what other teenagers are doing is helpful, for the articles hold something of a natural attraction to the students. In addition, they are always impressed that students like themselves can produce such high-quality work. Many teens are used to hearing how poorly their age group is doing academically, but the Review is refreshing proof that such is not universally the case!
I could go on anecdotally for quite a while, but I think that would result in an excessively long epistle! Suffice it to say that my students (yes, even those who don't "like History") find the Review informative, accessible, and instructive, not only in terms of material they are learning, but also in terms of critical thinking and mastery of historical methodology. In a time when those of us who teach History frequently find ourselves hard-pressed for classroom time in meeting our goals, the Review is truly "triply rewarding" for students and instructors. I cannot imagine a junior high or high school history course which could not benefit immediately and tangibly from having its students use the Review.
December 2002, Broeck N. Oder,
Chair, Department of History, Santa Catalina School, Monterey, California 93940
The Concord Review (800) 331-5007 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, MA 01776 fitzhugh@tcr.org; www.tcr.org
SAT Comparison: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan and Iowa
The average SAT scores for Wisconsin and the neighboring states are summarized below. The higher the percentage of students who take the test, the lower
the average score is likely to be.
State
% Taking Test
Critical Reading
Math
Writing
Minnesota
8
596
609
579
Illinois
7
583
601
578
Michigan
6
581
598
572
Wisconsin
5
587
604
577
Iowa
3
603
612
582
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Press Release [255K PDF] only compared Wisconsin to the National Average, below.
In a makeshift waiting room of the warehouse that serves as the headquarters for public schools, three young prospective teachers sit.
As superintendent, Paul Vallas could someday be their boss. As he passes through the room, he stops to shake hands. Then he tries to persuade them to teach someplace else.
He has more than enough teachers for the new school year, which began last week, he explains. Have they considered Baton Rouge?
"I know Baton Rouge doesn't have the French Quarter," he says. "That's OK. It's OK to be far from the French Quarter -- keep you out of trouble."
As Vallas begins his second and probably final year trying to rebuild the ailing public school system, he not only has more teachers than he needs. He has eye-popping funding, nearly unchecked administrative power and "a sea of goodwill" that stretches across the USA.
The biggest question isn't whether he'll be able to turn around the system, at least in the short term. It's whether there's anything standing in his way.
If Vallas succeeds, observers say, he'll show that with a clean slate, extra cash and a few big ideas, a hard-charging reformer can fix an ailing system and create a template for other districts. If he doesn't succeed, they worry, Americans' faith in urban public schools could burn out for good.
My Lovely Wife and I are great believers in public schools in the American sense of the word. Hey, we reason, if it was good enough for us. . . . And yet when we lived in Oxford we sent our daughters to public schools in the English sense of the word: that is, private, or as they say these days over in Blighty, "independent." The state school in our neighborhood came highly recommended but was so oversubscribed that we couldn't be sure there'd be room.
And so our then-14-year-old went to a private girls' school, and our then-16-year-old was a day student at a boarding school. Both girls were at the tops of their classes, which at first worried all of us, so deeply entrenched is that anti-American prejudice.
Beatrice, our younger daughter, decided that the English are even more obsessed with teaching to the test than we are in the No Child Left Behind USA. Her classmates were gearing up for a standardized test called the GCSE, which they wouldn't take till the following year. She spent much of her time bored by the slow rate they moved at, as teachers spent months on a single Shakespeare play and studied glaciers at a pace that can only be described as glacial.
As families across Wisconsin get ready to send their kids back to school, it is important to focus on how we are going to continue to improve student achievement for all our children. As chairman of the state Assembly Education Committee and having my son Will entering the ranks of pre-school, I understand the need to constantly look to improve our education system in Wisconsin so our kids and grandkids can compete in a competitive global economy and be productive citizens.
To increase student achievement in Wisconsin, I recently announced a comprehensive K-12 education improvement plan that I believe will reduce property taxes, make our school finance system more sensible, modernize student assessments, and direct more resources to classroom instruction. First, however, it is necessary to point out the current financial commitment to K-12 education in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin has 426 school districts educating approximately 868,000 students. The current state budget will spend more than $12.3 billion during the next two years on K-12 education, the most amount of money ever spent on education in our state's history. This amount represents 44 percent of our state's general purpose revenue (our tax dollars) and appropriately is our number one state financial commitment. In 2008-09 it is estimated local school districts, primarily through property taxes, will spend another $5 billion. When all funding is combined, including the $600 million we receive from the federal government, we spend about $12,600 per student. In 2005-2006, our state spending level ranked Wisconsin 14th nationwide, according the US Census Bureau.Related: Local, state, federal and global education spending charts.
"Part of what we're going to be doing is writing the next chapter of the story of this school district," Sherman, the school system's new superintendent, said he told them.
Educators often spend their days running from decision to decision. Sherman said he thinks it is important for them to sometimes stop, find a quiet moment and reflect on what they are trying to achieve for the students.
Sherman, 58, is the Washington region's newest superintendent, on contract for $250,000 a year through June 2012. A former superintendent in Tenafly, N.J., he replaces Rebecca L. Perry in heading the 10,600-student system.
Sherman said his first task involves being a "good anthropologist."
The CEO of the reform group New Leaders for New Schools, also an adviser to Barack Obama's campaign, got a prime seat on the stage of the Democratic National Convention Monday night during the first of three American town halls.
The 15-minute town hall meeting managed to cram in issues including health care, tax reform, and education
The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests in Minnesota has increased, as well as the number of students getting scores worthy of college credit.
There was a 6 percent increase in the number of students taking the tests, which are taken near the end of an Advanced Placement course to earn college credit, according to information released Tuesday by the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, .
Data show 27,605 students took 44,281 exams during the 2007-08 school year.
Almost 8 percent more tests also had a score of at least three out of five, meaning that 28,138 of the tests could be used by colleges to award credit to entering students.
Sen. James Meeks' (D-Chicago) proposed student boycott of Chicago public schools next month has sparked furious controversy. Should students miss their first day of class for the worthy goal of promoting equity in public school spending? Leaders such as Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan are worried about the disruption involved as Meeks seeks to enroll Chicago students at New Trier High School in Winnetka.
Missing from the discussion is a bigger point: The main reason New Trier's students achieve and graduate at much higher levels isn't per-pupil expenditure; it's differences in the socioeconomic status of the student bodies in Chicago and New Trier.
Decades of research have found that the biggest determinant of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from and the second biggest determinant is the socioeconomic status of the school she attends. The main problem with Chicago schools isn't that too little is spent on students but that the school district has overwhelming concentrations of poverty.
In the 2005-06 school year, Chicago public schools spent $10,409 per pupil, much less than New Trier ($16,856), but slightly more than several high-performing suburban school districts, including ones in Naperville ($9,881) and Geneva ($9,807). The key difference is that while 84.9 percent of Chicago students come from low-income homes, New Trier has a low-income population of 1.9 percent, Naperville has 5 percent and Geneva 2.4percent.
When 850,000 Maryland students head back to classrooms this week, a tiny but growing percentage will be in public schools that had only been imagined a decade ago. There's a primary school that lets children work at their own pace, an elementary school where 7-year-olds speak French a good portion of the day and a middle school where a sixth-grader can experience the outdoors.
In the first few years of Maryland's experiment with charter schools, Baltimore led the way with an explosion of new schools of all varieties. More slowly and cautiously, county districts are following the city's lead, allowing more of these publicly funded and privately operated schools to open as alternatives to the traditional public-school education.
Baltimore County's first charter school expects to open Tuesday in the Woodlawn area, and charters already operate in Harford, Frederick, St. Mary's and Anne Arundel counties. The newest additions this week will bring the statewide total to 34 schools and nearly 8,000 students.
Yet charters still face hurdles in getting started - from the local school officials who view them as competition to the pressure of construction costs. Of the 20 charter applications received statewide last school year, 16 were denied.
David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote "Evolution" in the rectangle of light on the screen.
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.
"If I do this wrong," Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, "I'll lose him."
In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state's public schools to teach evolution, calling it "the organizing principle of life science." Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.
Damian Creamer, founder of Primavera Online High School, was the guest last week on Live Talk Wednesday, talking about secondary education via the computer.
Creamer formerly was an enrollment counselor at the University of Phoenix.
"Their (online) program was in its infancy and it was a unique opportunity to be involved with such a dynamic organization as they pioneered online education at the post-secondary level," he said.
Afterward, he helped a small charter school in the West Valley found two additional charter schools.
Creamer opened Primavera Technical Learning Center (the predecessor to Primavera Online High School) in 2001.
" In its first year, Primavera had a few hundred students. Last year, I believe that we carried an average daily membership of 2,700 students," Creamer said.
Last year, Primavera graduated 469 students, according to Creamer.
his week, in a lawsuit brought against the State of Illinois and the State Board of Education, the Chicago Urban League and Quad County Urban League called on the courts to end the discriminatory and unconstitutional way public school education is funded in Illinois. This is not just an educational issue, but a civil rights issue, too, for thousands of African-American and Latino students whose social and economic future is being shortchanged by a flawed state policy.
After more than a decade of legislative gridlock on education funding reform, set against a bleak backdrop of crumbling schoolhouses, moldy books and shamefully low graduation rates--the time has come to dismantle the current property-based system of school financing.
That system is discriminatory in its impact, sustaining huge funding gaps between black and white schools.
It makes quality education nearly impossible for thousands of students of color. It confounds the best efforts of well-meaning parents, teachers and administrators. And it puts children on a pathway to lifelong poverty and social pathologies that squander their potential and exact enormous social costs.
For the second consecutive year, SAT scores for the most recent high school graduating class remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade, according to results released Tuesday.
But the College Board, which owns the exam, attributes the lower averages of late to a more positive development: a broader array of students are taking the test, from more first-generation college students to a record number of students -- nearly one in seven -- whose family income qualifies them to take the test for free.
"More than ever, the SAT reflects the face of education in this country," said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, which owns the test and released the results.
The class of 2008 scored an average of 515 out of a possible 800 points on the math section of the college entrance exam, a performance identical to graduating seniors in the previous year. (See SAT stats.)
Scores in the critical reading component among last spring's high-school seniors also held steady at 502, but the decline over time has been more dramatic: The past two years represent the lowest reading average since 1994, when graduating seniors scored 499.
The SAT's writing section has proven to be the most predictive section of the test for determining first-year college performance, as evidenced by recent studies by the College Board and independent studies by the University of California and the University of Georgia. The College Board analysis, which evaluated data from about 150,000 students at 110 four-year colleges and universities, also found the writing section to be the most predictive for all students and therefore across all racial/ethnic minority groups.
Of all three sections of the SAT, the writing section is the most predictive of students' freshman year college performance for all students, demonstrating that writing is a critical skill and an excellent indicator of academic success in college.
The writing section is also the most predictive section for all racial/ethnic minority groups, which demonstrates that the SAT is a fair and valid test for all students.
Wisconsin's 2008 graduates posted an average score of 604 points in mathematics on the SAT college admissions test, an increase of six points from last year and 89 points above the national mean score of 515. Along with solid SAT results, preliminary data on the College Board's Advanced Placement program showed continued growth of the program in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin had 3,522 public and private school graduates who took the SAT during high school. They represent about 5 percent of the state's graduates. Their critical reading score averaged 587, the same as last year; mathematics was 604, up six points from last year; and writing was 577, up two points. Nationally, 1.5 million graduates, about 45 percent of all graduates, took the SAT. The national overall mean scores were the same as in 2007: critical reading, 502; mathematics, 515; and writing, 494. On the ACT college admissions tests, more popular in Midwestern states, 67 percent of Wisconsin's 2008 graduates took the exams. Their scores also were well above national averages.
KAI RYSSDAL: The Democrats have gathered in Denver. They'll be partying and schmoozing and, yes, talking policy for the rest of the week. While the convention's in session, we've asked some prominent Democratic policy types to complain. That is, tell us where they think the party has gone astray on key issues. Today, commentator and education reformer Steve Barr says Democrats are behind the curve on education.
STEVE BARR: Check out any national poll on issues important to Americans, and they'll tell you the same thing: On education, voters trust Democrats more than they do Republicans. And it's been that way for decades.
But my fellow Democrats haven't done much in recent years to earn that trust. Party leaders aren't addressing education in a real way. And when they do, it's usually to condemn No Child Left Behind or to make a vague appeal for better schools. Rarely do Democratic party leaders offer a clear vision for what a 21st century education should look like.
Now, the Dems don't have it easy. There are two warring tribes in their ranks -- teachers unions and school-reform advocates who are wary of teachers unions.
So, let me offer a new progressive vision to my beloved party, so it can challenge these tribes to come together: Community-based, decentralized school districts composed of small schools.
Study after study shows that a smaller school gives a kid the best chance to succeed. A decentralized district would streamline money to school sites, where each school would control its own budget. School leaders, including teachers, would make the hires.Clusty Search: Steve Barr. Green Dot Public Schools
In protest of Chicago's failing school system, Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) is staging a field trip of sorts. He's urging kids from his legislative district to skip the first day of school, board buses, travel to Winnetka, and attempt to enroll in New Trier High School.
One can understand why Meeks would want better educational options for Chicago kids. But on his way to Winnetka, the senator might want to take a look out the window where there are already many Chicago public schools--charter schools--that are performing on par with top-notch suburban and downstate schools. One such school, Chicago International Charter School, graduates its students 86 percent of the time--comparing quite favorably with public schools Downstate and suburban Chicago, which have an average graduation rate of 84 percent. Overall, charter public schools in Chicago graduate 77 percent of their students, compared with a citywide average of 51 percent.
Why aren't there more charter schools in Chicago? Because state law caps the number of charters in the city at 30. Today, approximately 13,000 Chicago public school children are on a waiting list to get into charters--schools that have offered a proven formula for success. To give inner-city kids the opportunities they deserve, the charter-school cap should be lifted.
America's leading voices on education reform joined in Denver to call on Democratic leaders to steer public education in a new direction. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, more than two dozen progressive elected officials, education reform advocates, school leaders and civil rights groups from across the country gathered at the Denver Art Museum to release the Ed Challenge for Change, which highlights new ideas for closing America's devastating achievement gap.
"An entrepreneurial explosion has occurred over the last few years in public education," said Joe Williams, Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform, the organization responsible for conceiving the Ed Challenge for Change. "The creativity exhibited by this new group of educators is helping raise student achievement, empower teachers, close the minority learning gap, and bring hope to places where it's been in very short supply. It's a movement that we believe Sen. Obama and other Democrats have taken to heart, and we hope to see these reforms increase in schools across America during the Obama Administration."
An eclectic mix of Democratic wunderkinds, tough-talking education reformers and one elder statesman - former Gov. Roy Romer - are challenging their party to step away from teachers unions and return to fighting for the educational rights of poor and minority children.
"It is a battle for the heart of the Democratic Party," said Corey Booker, the 39-year-old rising star mayor of Newark, N.J.
"We have been wrong in education," Booker said of his party and its alliances with teachers unions that put adults before children. "It's time to get right."
Booker was among those who appeared Sunday at the Denver Art Museum to challenge the Democratic Party to reconsider its course on education.
In references sometimes veiled and sometimes blunt, they tackled the party's often- cozy relationship with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which typically support - financially and otherwise - Democratic candidates.
One panelist--I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children's agenda meets the adult agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often." Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically--and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention! "The politics are so vicious," Booker complained, remembering how he'd been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice, how early on he'd gotten help from Republicans rather than from Democrats.
Tests measure what students know. Like a Polaroid, they give a snapshot of knowledge frozen at one moment in time. But what if you could measure how much a child learns over the course of a school year? What if you could gauge what a school actually adds to a child's learning experience?
In Ohio, you can. This year's district and school report cards, which will be released Tuesday by the Ohio Department of Education, for the first time will include a measurement known as value-added. The revolutionary formula, designed more than two decades ago by a homespun statistical guru from the rolling hills of eastern Tennessee, has rocked the education world. Put simply, value-added tracks whether a year's worth of learning is actually happening in the course of a school year -- regardless of whether a child passes a test at the end of that year.
Milwaukee's children are the city's future, and their education is a profound concern to all of us. Milwaukee Public Schools is responsible for ensuring students have the knowledge and skills to be capable workers and good citizens.
Like other urban school districts in the country, MPS struggles against mighty odds to fulfill this mission. There are major successes and many problems. Trying to overcome these problems is crucial, and there is room for all sectors of the city and region to share in the work.
A new initiative to audit or otherwise examine MPS could be very helpful if the analysis addresses all the fundamental issues at play, including the following:
• The households MPS students come from are in increasing economic distress, and almost one in five students come to the classroom with special needs -- emotional, physical and cognitive -- that require additional personnel and resources.
Karen Royster is executive director of the Institute for Wisconsin's Future; Jack Norman is the institute's research director. The institute is funded by national foundations and does not receive money from state or local teachers unions.
Auer Avenue Elementary School was "the poster child," as one school official put it, for why Milwaukee Public Schools needed a Neighborhood Schools Initiative.
The reason was obvious: In the fall of 1999, kids from the attendance area for the school at N. 24th St. and W. Auer Ave. were enrolled in more than 90 schools all over Milwaukee, many of them no better than Auer Avenue.
So MPS spent $2 million to improve facilities for the school's students, added sixth-, seventh- and eight-grade classes and added before- and after-school services, all to encourage neighborhood enrollment.
The result? Today, students in the area attend more than 90 schools elsewhere in Milwaukee. The percentage of students in Auer Avenue who are from the neighborhood has actually gone down, as has total enrollment in the school.
Those facts tells you an awful lot about how little impact the $102 million neighborhood school plan has had.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett must act to bring radical change to the city school district. Everything must be on the table this time -- even dissolution.
For years, the Journal Sentinel has chided, prodded and coaxed the administrators and the School Board of Milwaukee Public Schools. We've backed plan after plan to "fix" MPS. Time after time, we've been disappointed.
Now Journal Sentinel reporters have laid bare the mind-numbing incompetence of those who implemented the Neighborhood Schools Initiative. This $102 million building plan was forced on the city's parents and taxpayers, and then many of those millions were thrown to the gentle wind, even after it was clear that the plan was failing.
For the sake of the thousands of kids MPS is leaving behind, fundamental change is a necessity. It might even be time to dissolve MPS and start over.
Large organizations (public or private) rarely make significant changes.
An enormous red-and-gold banner stretches down the gray masonry front of the No. 19 High School in this northern Chinese city, proclaiming its proudest achievement: Ninety-two percent of this year's graduates won admission to universities.
Like most Chinese high schools, No. 19 has no sports teams and no gymnasium. On the pavement outside, there are a handful of basketball hoops and a set of rusty metal parallel bars. The playground was completely empty on a recent summer afternoon.
"The cool kids are the ones who do best at their studies," says Niu Shibin, 18. Mr. Niu, who will be a junior in September, says he likes to play basketball, but his nearly 12 hours a day of school work leave him little time.
China's elite young athletes may be winning a lot of medals at the Olympics. But in China, organized sports still aren't really something for regular kids.
Less than 3% of Chinese secondary-school students attend schools with sports teams. Children with exceptional athletic prowess or physical attributes are pulled out of ordinary schools early on and sent to the special academies that train the country's sporting elite.
Varsity Academics
Hello from the Ice Cream Capital of the World!
On the morning of July 7, I had my TV on in the other room while I was getting ready for the day. I overheard an interview on the Today Show that Matt Lauer did with swimmer Dara Torres. The day before, she had managed to qualify for her fifth Olympics at the age of 41, even breaking an American record (for the ninth time in that event!) in the qualifying process.
Near the end of the interview, Matt asked Dara how she did it, noting his age and noting hers. (They know each other off-camera, it might be important to mention.) "When I turned 40," he said, "I had trouble going up stairs. I was winded more easily."
After describing her workout regimen and then outlining how she was proactively being regularly blood-tested to prove that she was doing all this cleanly, she said to Matt, good-naturedly and with a twinkle in her eye,
"And besides, you know, maybe I'm a little more athletically gifted than you are."
A new group calling itself the Milwaukee Quality Education Initiative has joined the accelerating, behind-the-scenes conversations about the future of the city's schools, and is hosting a retreat this weekend at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine.
The group's goal is to brainstorm ways to improve K-12 education in the city, including public, voucher and charter schools, Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce President Tim Sheehy said Friday.
"We didn't come down here to blow up MPS," he said Friday when reached at Wingspread. "We came down here to figure out what action steps we might take to reach a starting point to a broader conversation in the city."
Sheehy, voucher school advocate and former MPS superintendent Howard Fuller and former state Secretary of Commerce Cory Nettles launched the group several months ago but hadn't made their efforts known to the larger public, Fuller said. He added that their work hasn't been particularly influenced by events this week such as Mayor Tom Barrett's call for an independent audit of MPS or a Journal Sentinel investigation of the district's Neighborhood Schools Initiative.
Marvin Pomerantz will be remembered for many accomplishments: successful self-made businessman, powerhouse in Iowa politics, generous philanthropist. But his greatest public achievement is his longstanding commitment to improving the quality of education for all Iowa youngsters.
Pomerantz, a Des Moines resident who died Thursday at age 78, was one of nine children of Polish Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines and the University of Iowa, and wanted others to benefit from getting an outstanding education, just as he had.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced plans yesterday to boost dismal achievement at half the city's middle schools by offering students an unusual incentive: cash.
For years, school officials have used detention, remedial classes, summer school and suspensions to turn around poorly behaved, underachieving middle school students, with little results. Now they are introducing a program that will pay students up to $100 per month for displaying good behavior.
Beginning in October, 3,000 students at 14 middle schools will be eligible to earn up to 50 points per month and be paid $2 per point for attending class regularly and on time, turning in homework, displaying manners and earning high marks. A maximum of $2.7 million has been set aside for the program, and the money students earn will be deposited every two weeks into bank accounts the system plans to open for them.
The system has 28 middle-grade schools. Rhee will select the schools to participate in the pilot program.
"We believe this is the time for radical intervention," Rhee said at a news conference outside Hardy Middle School in Northwest Washington. "We're very excited about this particular program."
Since the release of "A Nation at Risk" 25 years ago, we have seen the introduction of top-down standards (including the No Child Behind Act), the spread of a bottom-up school-choice movement (including vouchers and charter schools), and the advent of entrepreneurial programs, like Teach for America, that combine a market-oriented approach with a focus on academic results.
Meanwhile, record numbers of students aspire to higher education, not least because the economic returns to a college degree are, despite a recent leveling off, indisputable. Thus all sorts of people are busy trying to make sure that more high-school grads get a shot not only at enrolling in college but at finishing it.
None of this much impresses Charles Murray. In "Real Education," he suggests that teachers, students and reformers are all suffering from a case of false consciousness. "The education system," he says, "is living a lie."
The problem with American education, according to Mr. Murray, is not what President Bush termed the "soft bigotry of low expectations" but rather the opposite: Far too many young people with inherent intellectual limitations are being pushed to advance academically when, Mr. Murray says, they are "just not smart enough" to improve much at all. It is "a triumph of hope over experience," he says, to believe that school reform can make meaningful improvements in the academic performance of below-average students. (He might have noted, but doesn't, that such students are disproportionately black and Hispanic.)
School officials hope to reorganize the city's six public high schools into specialty magnet schools designed to connect students with real-world experiences and increase their chances for success after graduation.
The proposal presented to the community on Friday calls for partnering with businesses, increasing the number of rigorous classes and strengthening existing programs.
"Our high schools aren't broken," said Fort Wayne Community Schools Superintendent Wendy Robinson. "They're just not as good as they need to be."
Officials plan to have public meetings to solicit input from the community and to meet with business leaders about possibly funding portions of the plan. Each high school will offer a different program of study, and students can take courses based around the subject to give them a taste of the career path.
Metro high school students did something last year that most school districts only dream of -- 80 percent reached math proficiency, or better, as compared with 69 percent the year before.
Definitions of proficiency aside, some testing experts call the 11-percentage-point jump unprecedented.
"If the numbers are accurate and represent the change in learning, that's a tremendous gain," said David Silver, a statistician at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA.
"For comparison, over the past five years in California, we saw a total increase of eight points in mathematics in grades 2 to 7," he said. "The biggest gain we ever saw in that time from year-to-year was four percentage points."
In the latest study of student-incentive programs, researchers examining a 12-year-old program in Texas found that rewarding pupils for achieving high scores on tough tests can work. A handful of earlier studies of programs in Ohio, Israel and Canada have had mixed conclusions; results of a New York City initiative are expected in October. Comparing results is further complicated by the fact that districts across the country have implemented the programs differently.
Still, school administrators and philanthropists have pushed to launch pay-for-performance programs at hundreds of schools in the past two years. Advocates say incentives are an effective way to motivate learning -- especially among poor and minority students -- and reward teaching skills. Critics argue that the programs don't fix underlying problems, such as crowded classrooms or subpar schools.
In Texas, high-school students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes who got top scores on math, science and English tests were paid up to $500. (AP classes are considered more difficult than traditional high school curricula, and some colleges award credit for AP coursework.) The research, by C. Kirabo Jackson, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that over time, more students took Advanced Placement courses and tests, and that more graduating seniors attended college. Most of the gains came from minority students in the 40 high schools studied, accounting for about 70,000 students in all. The study, set for release on Thursday, will appear in the fall issue of Education Next, a journal published by Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Wisconsin high school seniors have the second-highest average ACT scores in the U.S. However, ACT finds that only 29% of those tested have a 50% chance of earning a B or a 75% chance of earning a C in each of four college freshman courses: English composition, algebra, social sciences, and biology. Among African-American students, that chance is 4%.
In studying 2007 high school graduates, ACT found that only 29% (boxed in table below) of 46,430 Wisconsin students tested met college-readiness benchmarks in four core subject areas; the national percentage was even lower (23%). In its report "College Readiness: Rigor at Risk," the ACT testing service concluded that "our high school graduates are in danger of entering college or the workforce without sufficient academic preparation."
The ACT testing service has urged high schools to offer--and students to pursue--core curricula of sufficient depth and rigor to ensure college success. The minimum core (detailed in the table above, col. 1) includes four years of English and three years each of social studies, math, and science. Unfortunately, ACT has found that the current "quality and intensity--inother words rigor--of the high school curriculum" is not adequate to prepare students for college unless they take courses beyond the core. Calling that "neither realistic nor justifiable," ACT says it is "essential" that we "improve the quality of core courses that really matter in preparing students for college and work."
The testing firm goes onto observe that much of the loss in momentum toward college readiness "appears to be occurring during the last two years of high school." Data in the table support ACT's concern. The first four columns show the "core" curriculum, as well as a maximal course load ("core plus") that includes math through calculus. The final two show the percentages of Wisconsin-tested students who met the readiness benchmarks, having pursued one of the two curricula. The need for rigor in all high school courses is reflected in the "collegeready" percentages of Wisconsin students taking four or more years of classes in all areas ("core +").
Americans clearly have had their fill of a sluggish economy and an unpopular war. Their frustration now may also extend to public education. In this, the second annual national survey of U.S. adults conducted under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University, we observe a public that takes an increasingly critical view both of public schools as they exist today and, perhaps ironically, of many prominent reforms designed to improve them.
Local public schools receive lower marks than they did a year ago. More significantly, perhaps, survey respondents claim that their local post offices and police forces outperform their local schools. Meanwhile, support for the most far-reaching federal effort to reform public schools--the No Child Left Behind Act--has slipped. A considerable portion of the public remains undecided about charter schools. And the poll found no enthusiasm for the use of income rather than race as a basis for assigning students to schools.
This does not mean that Americans are unwilling to explore alternate ways of educating young people. A large majority of Americans would let their child take some high school courses for credit over the Internet. An equally large majority favor the education of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in separate classrooms rather than "mainstreaming" them, as is common practice. A plurality support giving parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls public school. And a rising number of Americans know someone who is home schooling a child.
These and other findings appear in the 2008 Education Next -PEPG survey, which once again examines the views of U.S. adults taken as a whole, as well as those of white, African American, and Hispanic subgroups. In addition to the opinions of respondents from different ethnic backgrounds, we
take a special look at those of public school teachers. Responses for the public as a whole and for the subgroups are reported at the bottom of each of the pages that follow. We have also posted responses to additional questions not discussed in this essay.
Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid.
The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress -- or its absence -- over time.
The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes.
Most states that report strong performances on their own tests do poorly on the more rigorous and respected National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is often referred to as NAEP and is also known as the nation's report card. That test is periodically given to a sample of students in designated grades in both public and private schools. States are resisting the idea of replacing their own tests with the NAEP, arguing that the national test is not aligned to state standards. But the problem is that state standards are generally weak, especially in math and science.
In discussing how some states game their student test results, you state, "The federal government could actually embarrass the laggard states by naming the ones that cling to weak tests." The evidence on these states has been available for some time.
In 2005, Tennessee tested its eighth-grade students in math and found 87 percent of students performed at or above the proficiency level, while the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, test indicated only 21 percent of Tennessee's eighth graders proficient in math.
In Mississippi, 89 percent of fourth graders performed at or above proficiency on the state reading test, while only 18 percent demonstrated proficiency on the federal test. In Alabama, 83 percent of fourth-grade students scored at or above proficient on the state's reading test, while only 22 percent were proficient on the NAEP test.
Other states were also found guilty in their determinations of proficient when compared with the federal NAEP test.
The No Child Left Behind Act will never be able to realize its potential as long as entire states are left behind because of the duplicitous efforts of their state officials. If Congress adopted national standards with a corresponding set of national exams in its reauthorization of the law, it could effectively minimize or eliminate these individual state shenanigans.
As students prepare to return to school here Monday, teachers and parents criticized the relaxation of the district's grading policies in a state that helped trigger national testing requirements.
The Dallas Independent School District's new policies give students who do poorly more chances to improve their grades. Among the changes: High-school students who fail major tests can retake them within five school days, and only the higher scores count.
School officials say the changes are designed to reduce one of the highest dropout rates in the state. According to the Texas Education Agency, 25.8% of students in the Dallas district who enrolled as ninth-graders in 2003 dropped out before their class's scheduled 2007 graduation.
But the policies have sparked criticism since the Dallas Morning News reported them last week, with angry parents and teachers contending that the district is watering down educational standards for its more than 160,000 students.
Would-be reformers are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college materials by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost online texts.
The annual college textbook rush starts this month, a time of reckoning for many students who will struggle to cover eye-popping costs of $128, $156, even $198 a volume.
Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.
"I was disappointed in the uptake," McAfee said recently at an outdoor campus cafe. "But I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200."
McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts.
The rising cost of college textbooks has driven Congress and nearly three dozen states -- including Maryland and Virginia -- to attempt to curtail prices and controversial publishing practices through legislation. But as the fall semester begins, students are unlikely to see much relief.
Estimates of how much students spend on textbooks range from $700 to $1,100 annually, and the market for new books is estimated at $3.6 billion this year. Between 1986 and 2004, the price of textbooks nearly tripled, rising an average of 6 percent a year while inflation rose 3 percent, according to a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office. In California, the state auditor reported last week that prices have skyrocketed 30 percent in four years.
"It's really hard just paying for tuition alone," said Annaiis Wilkinson, 19 and a student at Trinity Washington University who spends about $500 a semester on books. "It really sets people back.
Well worth looking into, including in the K-12 world.
This report examines the new developments in the implementation of state high school exit exams in the 26 states that currently implement or plan to implement these tests. The report specifically focuses on the states' move away from minimum-competency and comprehensive exams toward end-of-course exams.
Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »
brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
The American public school system, once the envy of the world, is now a cesspool of political correctness, ineptitude and violence, yet its administrators demand - and receive - far more funding per child than do higher-performing private and religious schools.
From "teachers" who can barely comprehend English to the elevation of foreign cultures and ideals above our own, from the mainstreaming of violent juvenile felons to demands that "queer studies" be considered as vital as math, our classrooms have become havens for indoctrination, sexual license and failed educational fads.
In From Crayons to Condoms, you'll experience today's public schools as never before, through the voices of parents and children left stranded in the system, the same voices that teachers unions and school administrators are determined to stifle. Here's a "must-read" for every parent concerned about their child's future, and for every taxpayer sick of being dunned endlessly to prop up a failed system.
For awhile I figured that didn't matter. These schools are raising student achievement to new heights without a cool, overarching label. Maybe they don't need one. But I changed my mind about that after reading David Whitman's splendid new book about these schools, "Sweating the Small Stuff."
My problem is this: I hate his subtitle, "Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism." And I like his decision to refer to this group as "the paternalistic schools" even less.
Imagine this scenario: You are the head of a declining business. Without much fanfare, you have developed a new product that is highly effective and wildly popular when test-marketed on a limited basis. What would you do? Most likely, expand the new product as rapidly as possible while you reach out to potential new customers.
This first part of this situation exists in our own city in a key enterprise with great significance for the region: the Boston public school system. The product is the pilot school, which gives autonomy to individual schools, enabling them to control their budgets, staffing, schedule and curriculum. Research has established that Boston school students thrive in pilot schools, outperforming their peers in traditional schools. They test better, accrue fewer suspensions, are less likely to drop out and more likely to further their schooling.
First it was the Sats fiasco. Then results for 14-year-olds revealed that more than 30 per cent of boys were three years behind in reading. Finally, last week's A-level data exposed a north/south divide in achievement that shattered Labour's claims that huge investment was changing the fortunes of children in the poorest communities.
And with GCSE results out this week, which are expected to show a similar disparity, the exam season is making life distinctly uncomfortable for the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
But while Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, and Jim Knight, the schools minister, scramble round trying to distance themselves from the mess, one minister has gone about his business seemingly untouched by the fallout.
Lord Adonis, the architect behind city academies, has - at least for the moment - the plum education job. Late last month, at the height of the general condemnation over the Sats debacle, he emerged heckle-free from a speech he gave at a teachers' conference. While national newspapers slam the mind-boggling inefficiency of Sats administration, the culpability of the department, and A-level grade inflation, local papers carry positive pieces about schools bidding to become academies.
We begin the presentation by focusing on why is there a problem. And we wanna first and foremost point out that the issues affecting this school district are issues that are also occurring in other school districts in the state. While there may be some circumstances, and there are circumstances that are unique to one place or another, we know that this funding dilemma and the gap that exists between what the current state funding formula provides and how expenses are being dealt with in school district is not unique to this school district. Although we have our story here that is certainly unique. And again I want to emphasize that it really lies at the heart of it is the constraint between the current formula that was put into place in 1993 which basically asserted that the state provide more resources to schools through the two thirds funding if, in turn, school districts would control their costs in two ways. One was through the revenue cap and the second was through the qualified economic offer. And so that was the kind of exchange or the quid pro quo that was made at that time in public policy; to be able to provide more state funding for schools at the same time to place limitations on how much a school district could spend.
In the document we point out examples of this dilemma as it is affecting some of the top ten school districts in the state. Ranging in, for example Waukesha school district of 2.6 million dollar program and service reduction for the 08/09 school year. The district that I am most recently familiar with, Greenbay with a 6.5 million program and service reduction. And just to point out the difference we mentioned we seen there, we use a wording increase revenue authority that represents their gap but that's also, its described that way because of having more authority through a successfully passed referendum to exceed the revenue cap within that community. So that is what's meant by an increase revenue of authority.
Now the funding formula is one that school districts across the state are wrestling with. You know the history that this school district has had in terms of the types of decisions that have been made which we are going to underscore in just a minute to accommodate that funding formula but as I turn this over to Eric for the bulk of the rest of the presentation, I'll conclude its all with the idea yes there is a need to have school funded but its around the assertion that our kids have to have a high quality education to be successful in the world that they are growing into. And yes we do have a fiscal responsibility to use community resources in the most cost effective manner and the reality of it is there are constraints in meeting that proposition. So with that, and I will return for the conclusion, I'll turn it to Eric who will provide us with more detail of the nature of the problem.
COUNT me a technological optimist, but I have always thought that the people who advocate putting computers in classrooms as a way to transform education were well intentioned but wide of the mark. It's not the problem, and it's not the answer.
Yet as a new school year begins, the time may have come to reconsider how large a role technology can play in changing education. There are promising examples, both in the United States and abroad, and they share some characteristics. The ratio of computers to pupils is one to one. Technology isn't off in a computer lab. Computing is an integral tool in all disciplines, always at the ready.
Web-based education software has matured in the last few years, so that students, teachers and families can be linked through networks. Until recently, computing in the classroom amounted to students doing Internet searches, sending e-mail and mastering word processing, presentation programs and spreadsheets. That's useful stuff, to be sure, but not something that alters how schools work.
Even if there were money to pay for it, the state's new algebra mandate would still be a bad idea.
ow that the State Board of Education is foolishly requiring every eighth-grader to take algebra, starting in three years, all that remains to be figured out is, how on Earth is this going to happen when so few kids are on track to get there?
The solution, according to state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, is to spend $3.1 billion on a "California Algebra I Success Initiative" that would recruit and train math teachers, lengthen the middle-school day, reduce class sizes in math and so forth.
The ideas are good enough. Essentially, though, they're a political ball tossed to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who pushed for the eighth-grade requirement. (O'Connell opposed it.) The governor took on the easy part of school reform, in which he got to call for an unrealistic standard and proclaim that California was the first in the land with such high expectations. Will he now refuse to pay for the math requirement that he said was so necessary? That's a possibility. The algebra funding would add about 5% to the state's total allocation for public education, money that is not readily available even in a good budget year.
But it wasn't only sympathy for the survivors of Katrina that drew them to New Orleans. The city's disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood -- many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city's public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate -- poor African-American kids -- can achieve high levels of academic success.
Katrina struck at a critical moment in the evolution of the contemporary education-reform movement. President Bush's education initiative, No Child Left Behind, had shined a light on the underperformance of poor minority students across the country by requiring, for the first time, that a school successfully educate not just its best students but its poor and minority students too in order to be counted as successful. Scattered across the country were a growing number of schools, often intensive charter schools, that seemed to be succeeding with disadvantaged students in a consistent and measurable way. But these schools were isolated examples. No one had figured out how to "scale up" those successes to transform an entire urban school district. There were ambitious new superintendents in Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Chicago, all determined to reform their school systems to better serve poor children, but even those who seemed to be succeeding were doing so in incremental ways, lifting the percentage of students passing statewide or citywide tests to, say, 40 from 30 or to 50 from 40.
Fascinating. Innovation occurs at the edges and is more likely to flourish in the absence of traditional monolithic governance, or a "one size fits all" approach to education.
Many educators and visitors had an opportunity to learn how Colorado is addressing education reform during the back-to-school kick-off workshop Wednesday at Cañon City High School.
"Gov. Ritter and I are doing (this) all over the state" to kick off the beginning of the school year, Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien said prior to her speech. "We want to talk about changes that we're implementing through the P-20 Education Coordinating Council. P is for preschool and the 20 is to get us all ready for graduate school."
During her presentation, she explained how several recommendations were passed through the Legislature that took affect July 1.
Why should issues such as citizenship, sustainable development or multiculturalism be included in higher education curricula?
Because they are really pressing issues, which the world is facing today. If we think about the traditional role of higher education, when it first began, it was very socially engaged. In fact, the early universities really grew from the need from the church to actually engage in society and the role of the universities reflected that. Overtime, I think universities have become more removed from society and gradually have been involved in a production of knowledge, which tends to objectify reality. In fact, the multiple realities of the world are very complex. So it is very hard to see how that kind of learning, based on a belief in an objective truth, really can be maintained within many higher education systems at the moment when we see so many challenges facing people: of living in multicultural contexts or in contexts where there is violence and conflict; where they are trying to understand much better their relationship with wider society and with the state, and are thinking how they can engage in acting on the problems and the challenges that they face on a daily basis, either individually or collectively.
My reason for wanting to see an integration of those ideas in the curricula of universities is to enable people to learn in a way that is different from simply being passive recipients of preformed ideas. For me, education is about learning and learning is about change. So where we see the need for social change, for human and social development, which really is rooted in issues of rights, power and voice of people, then I think it is absolutely necessary for higher education to actually build the curricula upon these issues, not just to add them but actually to integrate them and use them as foundations for learning and teaching.
Pregnant at 18, Telisa Haynes said she cried when she saw her classmates in caps and gowns, knowing she would not be joining them for graduation.
Now, 23 years later, Haynes is on the verge of fulfilling her goal of earning her General Educational Development certificate, commonly called the GED.
It hasn't been easy.
"What makes it hard is your life," she said. "When you get ready to do this, you have to be focused. . . . You have to want it. You have to want it badly."
A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.
Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.
Otero's ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university's system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero's rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
As the sun was dipping behind the pine hills surrounding this rural campus one recent Monday, Chung Il-wook and his wife drove up with Min-ju, their 18-year-old daughter. They gave her a quick hug and she hurried into the school building, dragging a suitcase behind her.
Inside, a raucous crowd of 300 teenage boys and girls had returned from a two-night leave and were lining up to have their teachers search their bags.
The students here were forsaking all the pleasures of teenage life. No cellphones allowed, no fashion magazines, no television, no Internet. No dating, no concerts, no earrings, no manicures — no acting their age.
All these are mere distractions from an overriding goal. On this regimented campus, miles from the nearest public transportation, Min-ju and her classmates cram from 6:30 a.m. to past midnight, seven days a week, to clear the fearsome hurdle that can decide their future — the national college entrance examination.
The ACT High School Profile Report for each state provides information about the performance of 2008 graduating seniors who took the ACT as sophomores, juniors, or seniors. The reports focus on performance, access, course selection, course rigor, college readiness, awareness, and articulation.
Minnesota high school students have top scores, but only a third reach the benchmark for college preparedness, and minority students' scores lag.
Is being the best good enough? When it comes to how Minnesota's high school graduates fared on the ACT college entrance exam, that's a question educators are facing.
For the fourth consecutive year, Minnesota's seniors recorded higher scores than seniors in other states where at least half of the students took the test. But there are significant concerns as well.
Fewer than a third of the 2008 Minnesota high school graduates who took the ACT reached the benchmark for college readiness in all four of the subject areas of English, math, reading and science. Minority students continue to score much lower than white students in the state.
Iowa students have ranked second in the nation in the ACT college entrance exam, according to a new report from state education officials.
The average ACT score for Iowa students rose by 0.1 percentage point to an average composite of 22.4 out of a possible total of 36. That ranks Iowa second highest among states testing a majority of graduating high school seniors, the report said.
Minnesota is again first in the nation, with an average score of 22.6. The national average for the college entrance examination is 21.1.
Although it is the first week of school, my husband and I refused to send our twins, Aaron and Abigail, to our local Fulton County high school.
With its low test scores and dangerous incidents on campus, we have been hoping and praying for a miracle to find the money to return them to private school. Over the years, we have depleted our savings, our retirement funds, used our home equity, taken extra jobs and received gifts to send our four older children to private school to escape failing public schools.
But as our two youngest enter ninth grade, we have hit the end of our financial road.
To read the resistance to school vouchers editorialized at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution makes us want to ask opponents if they would like to spend a day in our family's shoes.
State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster and Cooperative Educational Service Agency (CESA) 9 Administrator Jerome Fiene announced the launch of the Wisconsin Web Academy (WWA), a partnership of the two agencies which makes online courses available to students throughout Wisconsin.
The WWA operates as a supplemental online course provider, which means that students taking courses through the academy remain enrolled in their home districts. They also receive credit for their WWA courses through their home district.
"Virtual education is an innovative reality in the 21st century and an effective educational strategy for some students," said Burmaster. "The Wisconsin Web Academy will ensure that all children in our state, regardless of where they live, will have access to quality online courses taught by appropriately licensed educators."
The newest, hottest idea in school reform seems to be paying students to learn. New York City and Baltimore made national headlines when both launched pilot programs this year, and other cities and towns are considering the notion.
A $5.5 million federal grant will boost efforts to shrink the racial achievement gap, raise graduation rates and expand the courses available in the Madison School District's four major high schools, officials announced Monday.
The five-year U.S. Department of Education grant will help the district build stronger connections to students by creating so-called "small learning communities" that divide each high school population into smaller populations.
Many of those structural changes already have been implemented at two high schools -- Memorial and West -- and similar redesigns are planned for East and La Follette high schools.
Under that plan, East's student body will be randomly assigned to four learning communities. La Follette will launch "freshman academies" -- smaller class sizes for freshmen in core academic areas, plus advisers and mentors to help them feel connected to the school.
"The grant centers on things that already are important to the school district: the goals of increasing academic success for all students, strengthening student-student and student-adult relationships and improving post-secondary outlooks," Nerad said.
Expected plans at Madison East include randomly placing students in one of four learning neighborhoods, while faculty and administrators at La Follette will create "academies" with smaller classes to improve learning for freshmen in core courses. Additional advisors will also be assigned to aid students in academies at La Follette.
The interesting question in all of this is: does the money drive strategy or is it the other way around? In addition, what is the budget impact after 5 years? A friend mentioned several years ago, during the proposed East High School curriculum change controversy, that these initiatives fail to address the real issue: lack of elementary and middle school preparation.
Finally, will this additional $1.1m in annual funds for 5 years reduce the projected budget "gap" that may drive a fall referendum?
In our information-rich society there is an ever increasing demand for workers in the fields of computers, health care, science and space technology—much of it driven by the demands of the retiring baby boomers. If you like to plan ahead, here is sampling of some of the jobs that will be hot in the next several years and beyond.
1) Organic food Industry
By 2010, organic food and beverage will represent about 10 percent of the total market — a tenfold increase from 1998. Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation says the industry will soon need more organic food producers, certification experts, retailers and scientists as organic becomes mainstream.
Bria Heard, 14, a rising sophomore in Prince William County, had a couple of options after she failed world history last year. She could retake the course over six weeks in summer school or during the next school year and try to improve her grade.
Or, she could choose a fairly novel program available in the school system. She could do the course work using a new computer-based program that would not improve her grade, but would allow her to earn the credits needed to stay on track to graduate in four years. To her, the benefits outweighed the cost of not getting a better grade. The program is free and can be completed in days.
"You can go at your own pace and it's quicker," Bria said recently while stumbling through questions on Russian history. "I didn't know if I should do it, but then I realized it was easier than taking the full course."
For the second consecutive year, the best basketball player in the state's senior class is packing up and heading to prep school.
Peoria Central guard and Illinois recruit DJ Richardson announced on Monday that he will spend his senior season at Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nev.
That's the same school that Washington's DeAndre Liggins spent his senior year at last season.
"It was my family's idea," Richardson said. "It's because of the ACT. I had a good GPA, just not the ACT. I'm not far off. I just took it two times. I think I could do better. There is no reason to take chances so I'm just going to prep school."
According to Richardson, the Illinois coaching staff gave him a list of prep schools to choose from.
Even as Visa restrictions have tightened in the United States since September 11, foreign students are still banging down the doors at American universities. They now regularly represent more than 10 percent of students at elite schools, many of which have taken up campaigns to broaden their global appeal. And the overwhelming source of these new students? Not the established European and American boarding schools that have always placed a respectable bloc of graduates into the best colleges. Instead, a new crop of prep schools is rising in other parts of the world, particularly South Korea. In a Wall Street Journal survey last December, only two foreign schools ranked in the top 40 for best admission rates to eight leading American universities, including Harvard, Princeton and MIT. Both are in South Korea.
Minjok Leadership Academy, a 12-year-old high school located in a remote mountain village in South Korea, has a track record comparable to the best American prep schools. Of its 77 graduates who applied to American universities for this year, 25 were accepted into the Ivy League, 19 by UC Berkeley and 10 by New York University. The remainder will attend Stanford and other leading institutions. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul has a similar success rate. In 2000 it began to focus on foreign universities, and by the end of last year had sent 263 graduates to the top 50 U.S. universities. Last year alone, 36 got into Ivy League schools.
Looking for a way to improve your mind and make some money? Check out the latest "critical thinking" courses. Many come up on a Google search. Many promise better grades and higher test scores. Without much effort, you can create your own course and tap into this hot topic.
The only thing is, it turns out such programs don't work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators. A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations.
Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject--facts, concepts and trends--before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.
Re: “Still reaching’ 25 years after ‘A Nation at Risk,’ education struggling,” Aug. 3 Perspective article.
The ideas expressed by Dick Hilker about the problems with public education are echoed throughout our society. Parents, legislators and school administrators bemoan the fact that many students do not measure up to the proficient level in reading.
Mr. Hilker and the rest of the people who blame schools need to face reality. Scoring “proficient” on the CSAP test in reading, math or any other subject is the equivalent of getting a B on a report cards in years past. Not every kid in class when I was in school scored all B’s and A’s.
Yes, every kid can learn, and it is the school’s job to take every student to their limit. But to expect teachers to get everyone in their class to the proficient level in all classes ignores the fact that not all kids are average or above.
As a whole, the results of the exam — released Thursday by the Michigan Department of Education -- illustrate how ill-prepared many Michigan teens are for college. The new exam, which the state debuted in spring 2007, includes the ACT, a college entrance test. The exam is rounded out with a workplace skills test, and tests aligned with the state’s standards in math, science and social studies.
“We have not made any significant improvement,” Sharif Shakrani, codirector of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, said of this year’s scores.
The exam, given this spring, was taken by nearly 124,000 students.
The percentage of students scoring at the top two levels on the math exam was 46%, unchanged from last year. In reading, it was 62%, up from 60%. In writing it was 41%, up from 40%. In science it was 57%, up from 56%; and in social studies it was 80%, down from 83%.
John Stossel (of television's "20-20") produced an outstanding report entitled "Stupid in America" which reported that a South Carolina governor would not send his own children to public schools because---it would "sacrifice their education". The governor wanted to allow the free market to deliver an alternative to public schools. Teacher unions and politicians (who are controlled by teacher unions) complained. They asked, "How can we spend state money on something that hasn't been proven?" In other words, it's better to spend state money on something that is proven NOT to work.
Stossel described how the national School Board's Association (NSBA) claimed, "America's Public Schools out perform Private Schools when variables are controlled." Actually, the Private School students scored higher on the tests, but there were adjustments for race, ethnicity, income, and parent's education backgrounds. That may be a valid statistical tool, but it's prone to bias and leads to statistical hocus-pocus.
Many public school teachers are nice people trying to make a living, but the number of good teachers and administrators, whether Christian or not, has been decreasing from retirement. The good teachers that remain are entangled victims of the agenda that controls what they can do. Textbook publishers are puppets of the education establishment thereby making it nearly impossible for well-meaning teachers to avoid participating in the indoctrination.
The weakest and most vulnerable element in education, particularly in the developed world, is the education of adolescents in our secondary-school systems. Relative economic prosperity and the extension of leisure time have spawned an inconsistent but prevalent postponement of adulthood. On the one hand, as consumers and future citizens, young people between the ages of 13 and 18 are afforded considerable status and independence. Yet they remain infantilized in terms of their education, despite the earlier onset of maturation. Standards and expectations are too low. Modern democracies are increasingly inclined to ensure rates of close to 100 percent completion of a secondary school that can lead to university education. This has intensified an unresolved struggle between the demands of equity and the requirements of excellence. If we do not address these problems, the quality of university education will be at risk.
To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.
Raise, not lower standards. Quite a concept. Clusty Search: Leon Botstein.
Ren Brown is banking on the work experience she gains while at college to give her a competitive edge over other young job seekers -- an advantage increasingly sought by students and employers amid a weak economy and a changing workplace.
Schools and education groups are seeing growth in established programs that link students with employers, who also are showing increased interest. Many point to student concerns over job competition in a tight labor market and employer needs to replace retiring baby boomers.
"Historically, interest in cooperative education increases when the economy slumps, especially since it does seem to give people a leg up in the job market," said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education.
But this time, the group has an unlikely adversary in its long-shot effort to gut NCLB. It's being opposed by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights -- a coalition of 192 organizations, including the NEA -- that supports "the enactment and enforcement of effective civil rights legislation and policy."
The Leadership Conference says NCLB is civil rights legislation. Given the yawning achievement gap in public schools between whites, blacks and Hispanics, the umbrella group argues that improving public education is a civil rights issue.
"While NCLB is a flawed law -- and we have repeatedly called on Congress to make improvements through the reauthorization process -- NCLB has been crucial in exposing the extent of the opportunity and achievement gaps plaguing chronically underperforming schools and creating an atmosphere conducive for fundamental education reform," Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said last month.
The bill pending in the House would temporarily exempt states from enforcing some NCLB accountability requirements until fixes are made to the 2002 law. But in an editorial earlier this month, The New York Times called the House bill "a stealth attempt to gut the national school accountability effort."
That's my girl, I thought, as Olivia tore away from us to join the other 5-year-olds for circle time — legs crossed, hand stick-straight in the air in response to the teacher's question about how the kids spent Father's Day.
My husband and I exchanged knowing glances, convinced that she was a shoo-in for admission, and left Olivia with her uniform-clad peers so we could tour the British prep school in the quaint red-brick Victorian building.
The e-mail came a week later. It asked us to please call the head teacher, the equivalent of a school principal in the United States.
We were back at home in Washington D.C., thinking about what to store, ship and toss as we prepared for our family move to London. The change is a big one for all of us, but I didn't realize quite how different things would be for Olivia until that phone call.
The head teacher and I exchanged pleasantries, and then she laid it out. My daughter, who commonly invokes the Mandarin word for little brother and usually wins at the game hangman, has a significant "learning gap" when compared with her British peers — especially in literacy.
Bria Heard, 14, a rising sophomore in Prince William County, had a couple of options after she failed world history last year. She could retake the course over six weeks in summer school or during the next school year and try to improve her grade.
Or, she could choose a fairly novel program available in the school system. She could do the course work using a new computer-based program that would not improve her grade, but would allow her to earn the credits needed to stay on track to graduate in four years. To her, the benefits outweighed the cost of not getting a better grade. The program is free and can be completed in days.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) is reviewing a plan that would require all Virginia high schools to meet certain graduation-rate requirements by 2014 to receive accreditation under a new assessment system.
Under the proposal, state officials would use a computer system to track students throughout their academic careers to determine the number of diplomas, GEDs and other certificates that schools award during any given year. Schools would receive accreditation based on those results. Current accreditation standards are based on pass rates on the annual Standards of Learning exams.
As part of the accreditation process, schools would be rated on a points system. For instance, schools would be awarded 100 points for each student who received a diploma; the school would earn 75 points if a student received a general equivalency diploma. If a student earned a certificate of completion, given to those who don't earn high-school diplomas or their equivalent, the school would receive 60 points.
You see it all the time, in the brochures and advertisements from liberal arts colleges and other non-gargantuan institutions. “Small class sizes,” they promise, and for good reason, because everyone knows that small classes are better than large. No cavernous lecture halls where the professor is little more than a distant stick figure, they say — raise your hand here, and someone will stop and listen. Plus, he or she will be a real professor, the genuine tenure-track article, not a part-timer or grad student but someone who really knows his or her stuff. Because everyone knows that real professors are better than the other kind.
Except, they don’t.
Nobody actually knows whether small classes are better than large. Pascarella and Terenzini’s How College Affects Students, the bible of such matters, says “We uncovered 10 studies that focus on the effects of class size on course learning. All of the investigations are quasi-experimental or correlational in design …. Unfortunately, five of the studies used course grade as the measure of learning … the conflicting evidence and continuing methodological problems surrounding this small body of research make it difficult to form a firm conclusion.”
Shakespeare never grows old. He was an outstanding observer of life and created many immortal characters that profess human nature. His characters often capture traits that are universal. He used rich literary devices, compelling plots, and had an enduring wisdom and wit. He also wrote many unforgettable lines that are imbedded in our culture. He continues to be the most-quoted author in the English language.
There are many resources available to help teach about Shakespeare. Here are just a few.
For parents like the Timmermons in Milwaukee, who diligently pre-screen G-rated movies and forbid their daughter from playing with the made-up and mini-skirted Bratz dolls, when and how to start talking about the human body and sex can be a bit of a mystery.
Schools face a similar dilemma. Many districts teach what's broadly known as human growth and development, but the thoroughness of the information varies widely among districts, schools and classrooms, based on an informal survey of schools by the Journal Sentinel.
Over the summer, Milwaukee Public Schools is addressing the unevenness in its human growth and development curriculum by revamping the entire program from kindergarten through high school, and making a plan to train teachers on how to deliver the information.
The Wisconsin Center for Education Research was founded 44 years ago this month.
via email:
Part of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Center for Education Research receives $29 million in current funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and private foundations.
One of WCER’s strengths is the interdisciplinary nature of its work. While most of its researchers make their academic home in the School of Education, one-third come from other fields, including astronomy, business, chemistry, economics, engineering, human ecology, law, mathematics, sociology, and social work. Each discipline brings its own way of learning and thinking. Together these researchers focus on problems of learning, teaching, assessment, and policy in today’s education systems.
In August 1964 then-University president Fred Harvey Harrington signed an agreement with the U.S. Office of Education to establish what was then called the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Learning and Re-education. “It was an adventure of opportunity that was in line with the University’s traditional commitment to innovation and experimentation in teaching, to the union of basic and applied research, and to outreach tying the Madison campus to progress in the state and beyond,” he writes in the introduction to the book, The Wisconsin Center for Education Research: 25 Years of Knowledge Generation and Educational Improvement” (WCER, 1990).
WCER’s funding sources represent a broad mix of federal, private, state, and district level agencies. Of $29 million in current funding, fees for service account for 44%, while private foundations account for 21%. The U.S. Education Department accounts for 19% of current funding and the National Science Foundation 7%. The State of Wisconsin and school districts including Milwaukee and Chicago account for 9%. This array of sources attests to WCER’s breadth of research across disciplines, and its depth of reach from the federal level to local school districts.
The establishment of the Center, Harrington wrote, was “a part of a major movement of our time—the conscious attempt to enlist higher education in research-and-action efforts to help solve pressing problems and improve the quality of life in the U.S. and abroad.”
A list of 48 education experts and topics of research interest is available. Contact Paul Baker, pbaker@wisc.edu
50+ Years Post Brown v. Board of Education, Schott Foundation Report Reveals that States and Districts Fail to Educate the Majority of Male Black Students
The release of the 2008 Schott Foundation Report entitled "Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education for Black Males," details the disturbing reality of America's national racial achievement gap. State-by-state data demonstrate that districts with large Black enrollments educate their White, non-Hispanic peers, but fail to educate the majority of their Black male students.
This section includes United States Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics state and district data for Black and White male students for states in which there are districts listed in the preceding section and for those districts themselves. Data are also included from the United States Department of Education Office of Civil Rights 2004 Elementary and Secondary School Survey concerning Special Education, Gifted and Talented and Discipline reports; National Assessment of Educational Progress; and Advanced Placement.
This year's Sats results suggest, for the third year in a row, that only 67 per cent of pupils are achieving the writing standard required of them. For boys, the figure is worse, with just 60 per cent able to put pencil to paper with any proficiency. I use the word "any" advisedly. I think that many people would be pretty shocked to see the unimpressive level of literacy that is needed for pupils to manage a pass. Yet the numbers achieving even this modest benchmark, teachers themselves say, offer an exaggerated picture of the writing ability of schoolchildren.
Nearly all secondary schools now feel obliged to re-test their intake when they start this new phase of their education. They cannot trust what Sats tell them, and feel obliged to find out for themselves what sort of remedial input a child really needs. Such measures attest that the problem is not marginal. It is not without the bounds of probability to infer that as many as half of all boys are going into secondary education without having mastered the basic skills needed to express their thoughts on paper. How dismal.
This miserable state of affairs gives the lie to the fantasy that has been long promulgated by the Government, which insists that primary education is fine, and all the trouble begins at secondary school. Of course pupils will run into difficulties at secondary school, if the groundwork laid down in their previous six years of education has not been thorough. This has been happening for years.
At this juncture, several board members won't say if they favor a referendum, instead choosing to wait to hear what the public has to say and to discover what Nerad's recommendations are. But it is widely expected that a referendum will be the path they will take in order to close a gaping hole in the budget.
One other topic of discussion that was brought up at Monday's meeting was Nerad's stance on implementing 4-year-old kindergarten. Nerad and Eric Kass, the district's assistant superintendent of business services, are working on a cost analysis of bringing 4K to the district. Fully exploring the options of how the program can be funded until it generates revenue is Nerad's main concern, and though Kass is gathering the data, the district won't be ready to present the data in time for a possible fall referendum.
"My preference would be to see if there are any other options short of a referendum to address the first two years of the funding," Nerad said. "I will also say that I haven't closed my mind at all because if those other options don't work, then we need to have the discussion about addressing this in any other way."
The property tax effect of a potential referendum will be unveiled in two weeks, Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said Monday.
At the Madison School Board's meeting on Aug. 18, Nerad plans to recommend whether the School Board should ask voters for additional money to avoid deep budget cuts.
The district's budget shortfall is projected to be $8.2 million in the 2009-10 school year and about $5 million each of the following three years.
My Post colleague Marc Fisher had a terrific rant on his Raw Fisher blog last week about a story I did on the strange case of Matthew Nuti. Matthew is a bright if somewhat disorganized 16-year-old, recently expelled from the very selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology because his grade point average slipped below 3.0.
Marc objected to this new and extraordinary school policy. "Grades are a means of communication and motivation," he said. They won't work in that way, Marc said, if you turn "mediocre grades into a death sentence." You can't motivate a corpse, just as you can't urge greater effort out of a student who has been kicked out of your school.
Marc's reminder of the importance of motivation in education inspired me to resurrect one of the best books I have read on the topic, and add it to the Better Late Than Never Book Club, my official list of works I should have read when they actually arrived in the mail. This latest entry is a particularly hideous example of my slothful tendencies. "Engaging Minds: Motivation and Learning in America's Schools" by David A. Goslin was published in 2003.
Jan Morrison of the Gates Foundation recently posed a rhetorical question that perfectly sums up the state of K-12 education: “Do our schools still look like they did in the 1950s – now ask yourself, do our companies still look like they did in the 1950s?"
The answer is quite clear – the world economy has changed dramatically since the 1950s, and any company that refuses to keep up is soon out of business. The same cannot be said of American schools, where the curricula are largely unchanged since the 1950s and classroom technology isn’t much better. Even our school calendar is still based on an agrarian society. How many bushels of corn has your child harvested this summer?
Although our schools are not going out of business, their results are akin to a company ready to file for Chapter 11. While 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs in America require some postsecondary education, about a third of our nation's students do not even finish high school in four years. Our highest-performing state, Massachusetts, can only boast that 51 percent of its eighth grade students are proficient in math. There is a growing consensus that education reform is critical to our nation’s competitiveness, and there should be when confronted by statistics like these.
The Sats disaster is depressing, but I’m afraid that as someone who’s marked them for ten years, it’s not altogether surprising. In the early days of the National Curriculum tests — the Sats — I was a Key Stage 2 Science marker, sworn to Masonic-like secrecy about this mysterious testing process. In my innocence I had expected it to be a straightforward procedure, but I hadn’t allowed for the serial incompetence, the human error, the vagaries of postal deliveries, and most important: the political pressure.
Several times my expected parcels of scripts were initially sent to another marker by mistake, and I received scripts for the wrong subject; scripts of pupils would routinely be missing without explanation, requiring query letters and a wait for a response — all of which delayed the process. We markers came to accept such things as the norm, including the frequent change of the official organisation charged with overall responsibility for the marking process (each time with the empty promise that things would be so much more efficient under the new body).
A year ago, Will Fitzhugh was wondering if the next issue of The Concord Review, the renowned history journal he founded in 1987 to recognize high school students’ outstanding history research papers, would be the last. On a tattered shoestring budget, Fitzhugh has just published the Summer 2008 edition [18/4], and with some support from schools and other fans in the private sector, he has hopes for four more issues over the next year.
But the former high school history teacher is proceeding mostly on a wing and a prayer, and a driving passion for promoting rigorous academic work for teenagers. Last year, the salary for the curmudgeonly 71-year-old was a measly $8,600. This for a scholar who has won widespread praise among education thinkers in the country for demanding, and rewarding, excellence and earnestness in the study of history. Thousands of high school students—mostly from private schools, but many from public schools, including diverse and challenged ones—have responded with work that has impressed some prominent historians and many college-admissions officers.
So how is it that such an undertaking is only scraping by, while other worthy programs, such as the National Writing Project and the Teaching American History Grants, manage to garner millions of dollars each year in federal and foundation support?
Right now, the Review is staying afloat on the commitment of Fitzhugh and some 20 secondary institutions that have ponied up $5,000 each to join a consortium that was created a year ago to cover the costs of publishing the journal. The National Writing Board, also founded by Fitzhugh, brings in some money from students who pay for an evaluation of their research papers that can be sent in with their college applications.
Why is it that some extraordinary efforts in education, which seem to have vision and the right end goal, struggle so?
In the race for the Superintendent of Public Instruction, two deserve to move beyond the primary: incumbent Terry Bergeson and Randy Dorn, a former lawmaker and union leader.
Both candidates must spend the time between the primary and the general election engaging the public far more than they have. Both are guilty of too many sound bites and political salvos and few compelling ideas on education funding, graduation requirements and the role of standardized testing.
That's for starters. The next state schools chief should be able to articulate the complexities of the persistent challenges of the day — a growing special-education population, dropout rates and racial disparities in academic achievement — and then offer cogent solutions to them.
The students swapped stories of little sisters, brothers and cousins who were taking above-grade-level math and getting good grades, yet did not seem to have a firm grasp of the material. The curriculum is being "narrowed and shallowed," Walstein said. "The philosophy is that they squeeze you out the top like a tube of toothpaste. That's what Montgomery County math is."
Several students nodded their heads. This thesis has become Walstein's obsession: In its drive to be the best, please affluent parents and close the achievement gap on standardized tests, the county is accelerating too many students in math, at the expense of the curriculum -- and the students. The average accelerated math student "thinks he's fine. His parents think he's fine. The school system says he's fine. But he's not fine!" Walstein declares on one occasion. On another, Walstein is even less diplomatic. " 'We have the best courses and there's no achievement gap and everything is wonderful,' " he says, parroting the message he believes county administrators are trying to project.
Nowhere are the limitations of conventional thinking any more apparent than in education policy. After decades of hearing the same big promises from the public education establishment, and seeing the same poor results, it is surely time to shake off old ways and to demand new reforms. That isn’t just my opinion; it is the conviction of parents in poor neighborhoods across this nation who want better lives for their children.
Just ask the families in New Orleans who will soon have the chance to remove their sons and daughters from failing schools, and enroll them instead in a school-choice scholarship program. That program in Louisiana was proposed by Democratic state legislators and signed into law by Governor Bobby Jindal. Just three years after Katrina, they are bringing real hope to poor neighborhoods, and showing how much can be achieved when both parties work together for real reform. Or ask parents in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. whether they want more choices in education. The District’s Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.
Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last month, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, “tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.” All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?Beth Fouhy:
John McCain, the father of private school students, criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama on Friday for choosing private over public school for his kids.
The difference, according to the Arizona Republican, is that he — not Obama — favors vouchers that give parents more school choices.
"Everybody should have the same choice Cindy and I and Sen. Obama did," McCain told the National Urban League, an influential black organization that Obama will address on Saturday.
More schools from North Texas and across the state improved their annual performance ratings this year helped by higher student test scores and, in many cases, special exceptions from the state.
A Texas Education Agency report Friday showed a slight decline in the number of school districts and campuses that were rated academically unacceptable, the state equivalent of an F.
Most of those were tripped up by poor showings in science and math on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, state officials said.
The number of schools getting the highest marks jumped from a year ago. Statewide, 996 out of more than 7,500 campuses – a record number – were rated exemplary, which is equal to an A. In North Texas, 260 schools hit that mark, up from 184 last year.
Three area districts – Highland Park, Carroll and Lovejoy – were named exemplary overall.
As we have read, the Accountability Ratings have been published and Kent mentioned something that troubles me as a middle school teacher. We have a ton of elementary schools with Recognized and Exemplary ratings but the number of middle schools with similar ratings is almost nil.
I'm not placing the blame or accusing anyone of anything in this post but I'm just befuddled as to why these kids move from an elementary school with such high marks and the middle school they go to can only scrounge up an "acceptable" rating.
I didn’t know Ted very well. I met him last year, when I spoke at the Middle School Math Fest he organized in Madison. I expected to lecture to a dozen or so overachieving and dutiful students — instead, I found the CUNA cafeteria packed with close to a hundred pre-teens, still fizzy and enthusiastic after a full morning of math activities led by an equally energetic cadre of teachers and high school students from Madison East. And Ted, fizzier if possible than the pre-teens themselves, at the center of it all. Very few people have the drive and know-how even to put together an event like this, let alone to make it such a success. Madison was lucky to have somebody like Ted helping young students find joy in math; from the Cap Times article linked above, it sounds like the students who learned from Ted in the classroom were pretty lucky too.
The vast majority of low-achieving students in Colorado are not making enough progress to reach grade level in three years, according to growth model date the Colorado Department of Education released Tuesday.
Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien is optimistic the new information — which compares individual students’ academic growth to their academic peers over time — will help educators determine which strategies work and which don’t, she said.
“It’s about helping students get the education they need,” O’Brien said Tuesday when the Colorado Student Assessment Program test results were released at the Department of Education in Denver.
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey grew up with two parents who were also opinionated doctors that often brought work into their Seattle home. She followed their lead, and upon graduating from Harvard University, began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Her specialty: geriatrics. She later chaired several federal advisory committees including a White House task force on healthcare reform. Today she is the first African-American – and the first woman -- to head the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest philanthropy dedicated to health care in the U.S. Despite a full schedule, she also practices medicine at a community health clinic in New Jersey. Writer Dennis Nishi spoke with Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey about her career path. Edited excerpts follow.
Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.
Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.
As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.
In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
To help meet the economic and business challenges ahead and retain Michigan's position as the state with the highest percentage of engineers in the nation, Michigan high-school students will get significantly increased chances to develop critically needed engineering, science and math skills in 2009, thanks to a restructuring of the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) in Michigan.
"Although it is impossible to predict the future, including the economic opportunities and challenges Michigan may face, it is clear that to re-energize our economy we need more than a favorable business tax environment and financial incentives alone," said Bloomfield, Mich. resident and FIRST in Michigan Director, Francois Castaing.
"We need a steady flow of new engineers and technicians who will help existing and new industries tackle international competition and environmental challenges," he continued. "Michigan needs the next Larry Page to start another Google or to invent a new fuel from crab grass."
It seems likely to me that when these students get to college and find reading lists in their courses in History, Political Science, Economics, and the like, which require them to read nonfiction books, they will be somewhat ready for them, having read at least two serious nonfiction books in their Lower Education years.
For the vast majority of our public secondary students this may not be the case. As almost universally, the assignment of reading and writing is left up to the English departments in the high schools, most students now read only novels and other fiction.
While the National Endowment for the Arts has conducted a $300,000 study of the pleasure reading habits of young people and others, no foundation or government agency, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, has show an interest in asking whether our secondary students read one complete nonfiction book before graduation and if so, what book would it be?
Although I studied English literature at Harvard and later at Cambridge University, and I still find the reading of novels a pleasure, in the last thirty years most of my reading has been in history, and I am greatly puzzled by the apparent willingness of Edupundits and educators to leave all assignments of complete books in the hands of the English Departments.
When our students reach Higher Education, they can no longer rely on their ability to read novels alone. They will be expected to manage fairly serious nonfiction books, in history and in their other courses. How did we decide to leave them so unprepared to do that?
Of course, fiction, poetry and drama may be the focus of concern for the National Endowment for the Arts, but would not the reading of history books in the schools be a focus of interest for the National Endowment for the Humanities? So far, apparently not.
Somehow a consensus has emerged that high school students do not need to be assigned complete nonfiction books and that the History or Social Studies Departments may confine their homework to short readings and readings in a textbook. Have we decided, for some odd reason, that the work of historians is perhaps too difficult for our high school students? They may be capable of studying Calculus, Latin, Chemistry and Chinese, but a work by David McCullough, for example, is judged to be beyond their ability to read or understand?
I realize that English is required every year in high school and that Social Studies Departments have in some cases almost completely cut their ties to the field of History, but even in the other Social Studies there are complete nonfiction books which could be assigned. But it appears that they are not.
The high schools are at fault, of course, for not encouraging or requiring teachers to assign serious complete nonfiction books as a preparation for Higher Education and for good jobs, but why have our Edpundits, Eduscholars, and University Professors, of Education and other disciplines, been so indifferent and so careless as to have no curiosity about whether our high school students are reading one nonfiction book before graduation or not.
If our students were taking no math courses, or science courses, or language courses, or literature courses, there would surely be concern and studies and the like. But if our students come to think that all books are novels, as many now do, and graduate quite unprepared to take on a serious nonfiction book, as they now are, no one seems to notice or to mind.
I have no children, but if I did, I would certainly want them to attend a secondary school like Providence Academy, in Plymouth, Minnesota, which would introduce them to at least a few great history books before they graduate, and I wish that those who do have children in high school could now have that opportunity in much greater numbers.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
More than a year ago, Kaiser Aluminum Corp. was looking for a spot to build an $80 million office-and-research center that would employ 150 workers.
After considering cities in three different states, the maker of aluminum products settled on Kalamazoo, Mich., a once-prosperous manufacturing city that had lost thousands of jobs in the last decade or so.
One of the draws: The Kalamazoo Promise, a program that provides at least partial college tuition to all graduating seniors who spent their high-school years in the city's public schools.
Just as Kaiser was gearing up its search, a group of wealthy philanthropists who have remained anonymous unveiled the Promise as a gift to the city. The lure of the program as a benefit for Kaiser employees, and its potential to produce a highly educated work force, proved a big attraction, says Martin Carter, vice president and general manager of common alloy products at Foothill Ranch, Calif.-based Kaiser.
A federal judge in Phoenix has scheduled a wide-ranging November hearing on the adequacy and funding of Arizona's programs for educating students who are learning English.
In the meantime, U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins on Friday left intact a state mandate that school districts begin using a new instructional model that many districts contend is inadequately funded.
Few could call Milwaukee’s Rufus King High School shy about divulging how it stacks up on Newsweek magazine’s annual report on the nation’s best public high schools.
"Newsweek: Top-Ranked School in Wisconsin" blares the headline on the school's Web site, with a link to the magazine's site and a rundown on how Rufus King has topped other Wisconsin schools in previous years of comparisons.
This honor distinguishes the school, Rufus King Principal Marie Newby-Randle says in a written statement on the Web site, and it proves its students "are truly among the brightest and the best."
Colleges have their U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Ahmad Hattix looks preoccupied as he is about to be relaunched.
It could be because he has spectators - his father, his fiancée, young children bouncing around in a hallway at Gateway Technical College in Racine, where he's about to graduate. Maybe he's just eager to get moving.
Which happens. People assemble around tables, officials speak, men come up to receive certificates. Hattix, now smiling, makes several trips, as he has not only graduated but has earned some other honors. He is a changed man.
Hattix has been changed by technical education, by Gateway's "boot camp" in the sort of high-end computerized metalworking called CNC machining. Hattix, 31, of Racine has a prison record and practically no job experience. But thanks to the boot camp, he has bright prospects. As of his graduation July 18, he already has a job offer in Kenosha.
Compton is a successful high-tech entrepreneur who made himself into an first-rate polemicist. His one-hour documentary film, "Two Million Minutes," pushes our most sensitive cultural buttons. He argues that kids in India and China are studying much harder than U.S. students. In the film he chronicles two fun-loving teens in Carmel, Ind., an affluent Indianapolis suburb, and shows how little attention they pay to their homework compared to two students of similar age in China and two in India.
I interviewed Compton and responded to his film twice, in a Feb. 11 column and in a piece in the spring issue of the Wilson Quarterly. I confessed I, too, was distressed to see, in his film, Carmel High's Brittany Brechbuhl watching "Grey's Anatomy" on television with her friends while they were allegedly doing their math homework. I said I agreed we had to fix our high schools, not because of the threat of international competition but to end the shame of having millions of low-income students drop out and fail to get the education they deserve. I said I admired Compton's consistency in insisting that his daughters spend more time on their studies just as he wants all American teens to do.
Seven years ago, I watched my daughter, Janet, receive her diploma from Johnston High School, in East Austin. No parent will ever do that again: In June, Johnston ceased to exist. A few days before this year’s graduation ceremony, Texas education commissioner Robert Scott informed the Austin Independent School District that he was invoking the nuclear option authorized by the Texas Education Code to close the school after five consecutive years of “academically unacceptable” performances on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. Scores improved this year, but not enough to save the school. State rules mandate that three fourths of Johnston’s teachers and half of its students be reassigned when the 2008—2009 academic year begins (some students and teachers can opt to remain at the current campus, which will be “repurposed”). The Johnston name will be expunged, and AISD must produce a plan for some sort of educational triage.
I was saddened to read about Johnston’s fate—but not surprised. For almost two years I had served on its campus advisory council (CAC) with other parents, teachers, administrators, and representatives of the community. I knew Johnston’s problems all too well. In one of my first meetings, we learned that 50 percent of the freshman class had failed all four core courses (English, math, science, social studies) the previous year. In an educational environment dominated by high-stakes testing, Johnston got the black mark, but the roots of the problem reached back into the elementary and middle schools that had failed to prepare their students for high school.
Schools run by private enterprise? Free iPods and laptop computers to attract students?
It may sound out of place in Sweden, that paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare. But a sweeping reform of the school system has survived the critics and 16 years later is spreading and attracting interest abroad.
"I think most people, parents and children, appreciate the choice," said Bertil Ostberg, from the Ministry of Education. "You can decide what school you want to attend and that appeals to people."
Since the change was introduced in 1992 by a center-right government that briefly replaced the long-governing Social Democrats, the numbers have shot up. In 1992, 1.7 percent of high schoolers and 1 percent of elementary schoolchildren were privately educated. Now the figures are 17 percent and 9 percent.
In some ways the trend mirrors the rise of the voucher system in the U.S., with all its pros and cons. But while the percentage of children in U.S. private schools has dropped slightly in recent years, signs are that the trend in Sweden is growing.
Oklahoma State University has agreed to sponsor a proposed charter high school in Tulsa that would recruit juniors and seniors from across the state to study arts and other subjects "through the lens of art," as leaders described it.
The Oklahoma School for the Visual and Performing Arts is still seeking the Legislature's approval to create the school and to fund about $5 million annually for operations, said David Downing, the school's co-chairman with his father-in-law, John Brock, a retired Tulsa oilman and philanthropist.
Leaders plan to raise $20 million in private donations to pay for land, buildings and equipment, Downing said.
Scores from 7 million students nationwide show that girls and boys do equally well on tests. But Minnesota's high school girls still lag.
When it comes to math scores, high school girls are measuring up, reports a national study challenging the persistent notion that boys are naturally better with numbers.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison study released Thursday in the journal Science reported that, overall, U.S. girls and boys got equal math scores, from second through 11th grades. The results of the study, the largest of its kind, represented marked improvement over a 1990 study showing measurable differences in complex problem-solving, starting in high school.
For Trinity Wilbourn, teaching high school via the Internet offers a heartening and maddening prism into the teenage mind-set.
Sitting one day at her home office overlooking a golf course, the Prince William County teacher received a snarky comment in all capital letters from a devil-may-care summer school student. But the next moment, she marveled at another male student's frank e-mail: "[W]hen I first went to high school, I did not know who I was for awhile. . . . I tried being someone I could not be."
"I feel like, what kind of guy is going to say that out loud in his class?" Wilbourn said.
Educators who supplement or replace their day jobs with online teaching for local public schools are discovering that the perks of working at home come with hurdles: grappling with awkward or confusing lines of communication with their pupils; gauging student performance without seeing facial expressions; and struggling to withstand the urge to check e-mails from students during weekends.
Texas schools with student dropout problems are getting a break in the state’s performance ratings this year – a move likely to spare dozens of school districts and campuses from being slapped with “academically unacceptable” ratings.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott has decided to excuse schools that fail to meet minimum criteria under the new federal definition for dropouts as long as their passing rates for all student groups on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills are satisfactory.
The decision means that no school district or campus can receive an unacceptable rating solely for dropout or student completion rates that fall short of the federal standards.
Those standards basically require a high school completion rate of at least 75 percent and an annual dropout rate of no more than 1 percent of the students in grades 7 and 8. The current completion rate refers to the percentage of ninth graders from five years ago who graduated in the Class of 2007.
Earlier today I had the high privilege of visiting and being given a tour of the Oakland Military Institute, a charter school in the Oakland (California) School District. Summer school was in session so I did get to see some cadets, but I look forward to visiting again some time when the full student population is present--that's the only way to get a true feel for a school.
The school board and local teachers union were hostile to the creation of OMI from the very beginning; it was only the persistence of then-Mayor Jerry Brown (former CA governor, current attorney general), that allowed the school to get off the ground. For its first few years, OMI was located at the former Oakland Army Base. But that facility became needed, and OMI had to find a new home. There was a closed elementary school in a residential neighborhood...
In my State of the State address this year, I outlined six principles that will guide me as I draft my plan for education. We will follow these in pursuit of one clear standard: schools that rank among the best in the world and meet the needs of every Ohio child.
This is not an issue that can be fixed overnight. It involves a grassroots effort and collaboration among communities, governmental leaders and education stakeholders to develop a plan and put it into action.
That's why I'm holding regional meetings across Ohio. I want to give you the opportunity to vet proposed ideas for creating a system of education that is innovative, personalized and linked to economic prosperity.
As we conduct these conversations, I will engage parents and students, teachers and school administrators, business and community leaders, school board members, and education advocates across the state.
Julie Chang is spending the summer learning calculus at a college prep school. In the fall, she's going to take calculus again, as a junior at Plano Senior High.
Her strategy is simple: Learn as much as possible about the subject over the summer so there's a good chance of acing the class when it really counts – during the school year.
And maybe she can reach her goal of being valedictorian for the Class of 2010
Mayor Villaraigosa announces a program to train students in culinary arts and tourism while they complete high school. The goal is to prepare them for both a career and further college education.
A $1.2-million program designed to curb galloping high school dropout rates will send Santee Education Complex students to Los Angeles Trade Technical College to train in culinary arts and tourism Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Tuesday.
Funded by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation,, the three-year program will combine college classes with hands-on work experience to produce graduating seniors who are both college-ready and qualified to join the workforce, officials said. Currently, nearly half of Santee's mostly low-income students drop out.
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
The banality and sense of entitlement of rich students at Harvard left John H. Summers feeling his teaching had been degraded to little more than a service to prepare clients for monied careers
I joined the staff of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University in 2000. As tutor, then as lecturer, I advised senior theses, conceived and conducted freshman and junior seminars and taught the year-long sophomore tutorial, Social Studies 10, six times. The fractured nature of my appointment, renewed annually for six successive years while never amounting to more than 65 per cent of a full-time position in any one year, kept me on the margins of prestige and promotion even as it kept me there long enough to serve three chairmen of social studies, two directors of study and three presidents of Harvard.
The post-pubescent children of notables for whom I found myself holding curricular responsibility included the offspring of an important political figure, of a player in the show business world and the son of real-estate developer Charles Kushner.
Beyond Google, Wikipedia and other generic reference sites, the Internet boasts a multitude of search engines, dictionaries, reference desks and databases that have organized and archived information for quick and easy searches. In this list, we’ve compiled just 100 of our favorites, for teachers, students, hypochondriacs, procrastinators, bookworms, sports nuts and more.
DROPPING OUT of high school isn't just a teenager's personal problem. It's a loss for the Massachusetts economy, which needs educated workers.
Recognizing that schools can't single-handedly solve this problem, a promising bill in the state House would bring in powerful partners to help.
In the 2006-07 school year, more than 11,000 teenagers - nearly 4 percent of the state's public high school students - dropped out. More troubling is the cumulative number of students who enter ninth grade but, four years later, fail to graduate. Statewide, while 81 percent of the class that entered ninth grade in 2003 graduated on time in 2007, 9 percent dropped out. And 6.6 percent were still in school.
Time can be punishing. Once dropouts reach their 20s, they are no longer seen as youngsters in need of academic help. And their own motivation to get a high school degree can fade. That's why the state needs a dropout prevention and recovery system that can respond quickly when students quit school. It also needs more alternative programs that meet the needs of young adults who seek diplomas, but who won't sit in a classroom full of younger students.
Ruby Payne and Jawanza Kunjufu had never shared the stage before Friday, but their careers have intertwined for years in a debate over how American teachers differ from their students.
Both believe teachers fail to make connections with students because of differences in cultural backgrounds. Payne, a white former principal, believes poverty is the root of that disconnect. Kunjufu, a black educator, says that theory ignores race.
The two have sparred in writing and in separate appearances but spoke together for the first time Friday at Indiana Black Expo to a room of hundreds of educators from around the state.
"They do not agree on many issues, but they have agreed on one important thing: They have agreed to come together and talk to us and help us better understand their views," Brownsburg Schools Superintendent Kathleen Corbin said in an introduction.
Ellen Estrada is principal of Walter Payton College Prep High School on the near north side of Chicago, near downtown. The public magnet school, which opened in 2000, is named in honor of the legendary Chicago Bears football player, who died shortly before it opened. In 2006, Walter Payton won a prestigious Goldman Sachs Prize for Excellence in International Education. Almost all students take four years of a foreign language and have the opportunity to travel abroad. Videoconferences have been held with students in Iraq, South Africa, Morocco, China and Chile, among other places. The school's reputation for nurturing global citizens brought U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the school for a visit in February. Estrada was interviewed by Linda Lantor Fandel, deputy editorial-page editor.
Jordan Nolan didn't have to show up after school on a Friday in late May for a discussion about the invisible children of Uganda. Neither did about 30 other teenagers sprawled on couches and chairs in a classroom at Walter Payton College Prep High School in Chicago.
But after a brief presentation by four students, they engaged in a spirited, hour-long debate about just whose responsibility it is to try to end a civil war fought with kidnapped child soldiers.
The turnout wasn't surprising, not even at the end of a week near the end of the school year.
Not at a public high school that's an American showcase for how to prepare young people for a globally competitive economy in the 21century.
While the national and international conversation grows louder about how to define a world-class education, Payton is a real-life laboratory.
No Child Left Behind can't catch a break lately on the campaign trail. Barack Obama last week slammed its "broken promises" and John McCain called it "a good beginning" that "has to be fixed."
Ask first lady Laura Bush and she'll tell you that, come what may, the 2002 education law, championed by President Bush, will be a lasting part of her husband's legacy.
Its requirement for annual testing in reading and math for virtually all children in grades three through eight has led critics to charge that it focuses too much on testing, but Mrs. Bush says she doesn't buy it.
"We would never go to a doctor and say, 'I'm sick, you can't try to diagnose me … you can't use any kind of test," she says.
Early in her career teaching special education, Beverly Levett Gerber once had an unusual mix of students; some had behavior problems, others developmental disabilities and some were gifted.
It was quite the challenge, but she knew how to achieve harmony.
“There were few things we could do together, but we could do the art work together at their rate and level,” Gerber said. “When you reach them at their level, they succeed.”
Gerber, a professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University who still teaches a course each semester, is a nationally recognized star in the fields of both art education and special education, most noted for combining the two seemingly divergent fields. Gerber taught at her alma mater, Southern, for 33 years before retiring from full-time work in 2003.
“Because of the uniqueness of the two fields coming together, I call myself a matchmaker,” Gerber, of Milford said with a twinkle in her eye.
Gerber’s commitment to the notion that art is a vehicle for special needs students to learn other subjects, to express themselves emotionally and show their level, has led to such groundbreaking progress in the field that colleagues from the National Art Education Association established The Beverly Levett Gerber Lifetime Achievement award to go each year to an outstanding art educator who works with special needs children.
Believe it or not, walking the halls of local high schools this summer are students not forced to make up courses they flunked in the spring, but ones who maybe — just maybe — want to be there.
And not just because they want to learn how to drive. They’re taking classes so they can have more time for elective offerings and Advanced Placement classes during the regular school year, or maybe pick up an internship, or even graduate early.
“You’re able to take everything you want if you take a lot of classes during the summer,” said Aaron Redlich, an incoming senior at Nicolet High School in Glendale who is enrolled in physical education and creative writing classes this summer.
Local school officials took another early step Monday toward creating a Verona-based magnet school that could offer area high school students specialized classes they might not get otherwise.
With Madison Area Technical College searching for a new place to build a campus in southwestern Dane County, six area school districts are lining up behind the idea of a "Global Academy," where high schoolers could learn job skills and earn post-secondary credits.
The Verona Area school board Monday approved the spending of $6,750 to hire a consultant to put together a detailed plan for how the six districts could work with MATC - and possibly the University of Wisconsin - to create such a campus.
That money will pool with similar amounts from five districts - Oregon, Belleville, Mount Horeb, McFarland and Middleton-Cross Plains - eager to see MATC land nearby, too.
The consultant, expected to start Aug. 15, will be asked to hone the concept of the school, including how it could be organized and how the consortium would work together.
Though the academy is currently little more than a concept, board member Dennis Beres said that if it comes to fruition, it could be a huge addition for the district.
Administrators from six Dane County school districts are planning to create a program called The Global Academy, a hybrid of high school and college courses offering specialized skills for high school juniors and seniors.
The consortium of districts includes Verona, MiddletonCross Plains, Belleville, McFarland, Mount Horeb and Oregon.
The Global Academy would offer courses in four career clusters: architecture and construction; health science; information technology; and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
"We really see a need for vocational and technical programs and career planning," said Dean Gorrell, superintendent of Verona Schools. "It's tough to keep those going."
What would it take for Iowa - and the nation - to fully prepare students for the globally competitive world of today and tomorrow?
What does that mean for the curriculum, training of teachers and expectations for students? What is the best way to transform classrooms to deliver this world-class education, not just to elite students but to everyone? Are national standards the answer, or should that be left to states?
Those are some of the questions The Des Moines Register's editorial board has asked in recent months. We've talked with educators and policymakers, we've visited schools and we'll visit others here and abroad.
everal things are clear from conversations to date:
One is a growing, though hardly universal, concern that the United States must better educate students to keep its competitive edge in a fast-changing global economy. The rise of Asia and the flattening of the world with technology - allowing jobs to move virtually anywhere in the world - create great opportunities but also pose significant threats. That's especially worrisome when American youngsters perform so poorly in math and science on international tests compared to their peers in many other places.
Elementary students in Sioux City and Wales have been getting together occasionally for years to talk about holiday traditions, sports and school lunches, said Jim Christensen, distance-learning coordinator at the Northwest Area Education Agency in Sioux City. They've made presentations and held interactive question-and-answer sessions.
"It's easy to say, 'What does that have to do with the curriculum?' But it has everything to do with learning to communicate and a perspective on the world that's unbelievable," he said.
Colin Evans, head teacher of the school in Wales, echoed those thoughts in an e-mail: "Exchanging e-mails or written letters and photographs would be a poor substitute for these experiences. This has brought a whole new dimension to the curriculum... Use of technology is uniting two schools 6,000 miles apart into one global classroom."
HIGH school can be hard to shake. Some people never make it out of the cafeteria; they’re still trying to find the cool kids’ table. With “American Teen,” opening nationwide on Friday, Nanette Burstein can claim a certain expertise on the subject. This movie earned her the documentary directing award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and set off a bidding war. It’s also something of an exorcism. Ms. Burstein was co-director, with Brett Morgen, of two highly regarded documentaries: the Oscar-nominated “On the Ropes,” about three young boxers hoping to fight their way out of poverty, and “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” a portrait of the flamboyant Hollywood producer Robert Evans. But the impetus for "American Teen" was more personal: her own intense high school experience two decades ago in Buffalo.
To make the 90-minute film Ms. Burstein moved to Warsaw, Ind., and, deploying multiple cameras, gathered 1,000 hours of footage as she and her crew followed four 17-year-olds through their senior year at the town’s large, modern high school. The students could almost be the template for a John Hughes teen pic: the pampered queen bee Megan, whose imperious will to power masks a terrible secret; the basketball player Colin, who must win a sports scholarship or forgo college for the Army; the gifted bohemian Hannah, ready to break away but terrified that she may have inherited her mother’s bipolar disorder; and the lonely band nerd Jake, funny and appealing but afflicted with vivid acne flare-ups that complicate his wry, determined search for a girlfriend.
To watch these real teenagers is to see egos and identities in raw, volatile formation; on the verge of entering a larger world, they are reaching for a sense of self.
Wall-e (for it's brief look at assembly line education and cultural homogonization) and the controversial Idiocracy (for its look at ongoing curriculum reduction initiatives) are also worth watching.
State reading and math tests taken by Maryland students were shortened and tweaked this year, leading some critics to question whether the shifts contributed to surprisingly strong gains in achievement.
State officials said the changes to the Maryland School Assessments, used to measure academic progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law, had no significant impact on performance. They said an outside panel of education experts determined that the tests were as difficult as last year's exams or those administered in previous years.
Scores released Tuesday attracted attention because of dramatic gains -- some of the largest since the federal law was enacted in 2002. Statewide, the share of students who received scores of proficient or better jumped six percentage points in reading to 82 percent, and four percentage points in math to 76 percent.
by Leonard Pitts Miami Herald lpitts@miamiherald.com
This will be the last What Works column.
I reserve the right to report occasionally on any program I run across that shows results in saving the lives and futures of African American kids. But this is the last in the series I started 19 months ago to spotlight such programs.
Let me begin by thanking you for your overwhelming response to my request for nominations, and to thank everyone from every program who allowed me to peek behind the scenes. From the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City to SEI (Self-Enhancement Inc.) in Portland, Ore., I have been privileged and uplifted to see dedicated people doing amazing work.
I am often asked whether I've found common denominators in all these successful programs, anything we can use in helping kids at risk. The short answer is, yes. You want to know what works? Longer school days and longer school years work. Giving principals the power to hire good teachers and fire bad ones works. High expectations work. Giving a teacher freedom to hug a child who needs hugging works. Parental involvement works. Counseling for troubled students and families works. Consistency of effort works. Incentives work. Field trips that expose kids to possibilities you can't see from their broken neighborhoods, work.
Indeed, the most important thing I've learned is that none of this is rocket science. We already know what works. What we lack is the will to do it. Instead, we have a hit-and-miss patchwork of programs achieving stellar results out on the fringes of the larger, failing, system. Why are they the exception and not the rule? If we know what works, why don't we simply do it? Nineteen months ago when I started, I asked Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone why anyone should pay to help him help poor kids in crumbling neighborhoods. He told me, "Someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3,500 a year on 'Alfred.' Alfred is 8. OK, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year." Amen. Forget the notion of a moral obligation to uplift failing children. Consider the math instead. If that investment of $3,500 per annum creates a functioning adult who pays taxes and otherwise contributes to the system, why would we pass that up in favor of creating, 10 years later, an adult who drains the system to the tune of $60,000 a year for his incarceration alone, to say nothing of the other costs he foists upon society? How does that make sense? Nineteen months later, I have yet to find a good answer.
Instead, I find passivity. "Save the Children," Marvin Gaye exhorted 27 years ago. But we are losing the children in obscene numbers. Losing them to jails, losing them to graves, losing them to illiteracy, teen parenthood, and other dead-ends and cul-de-sacs of life. But I have yet to hear America – or even African America – scream about it. Does no one else see a crisis here? "I don't think that in America, especially in black America, we can arrest this problem unless we understand the urgency of it," says Tony Hopson Sr., founder of SEI. "When I say urgency, I'm talking 9/11 urgency, I'm talking Hurricane Katrina urgency, things that stop a nation. I don't think in black America this is urgent enough. Kids are dying every single day. I don't see where the NAACP, the Urban League, the Black Caucus, have decided that the fact that black boys are being locked up at alarming rates means we need to stop the nation and have a discussion about how we're going to eradicate that as a problem. It has not become urgent enough. If black America don't see it as urgent enough, how dare us think white America is going to think it's urgent enough?"
In other words, stand up. Get angry. Stop accepting what is clearly unacceptable. I'll bet you that works, too.
By usual measures of student progress, America's high school career academies have been a failure. One of the longest and most scientific education studies ever conducted concluded they did not improve test scores or graduation rates or college success for urban youth. People like me, obsessed with raising student achievement, saw those numbers and said: Well, too bad. Let's try something else.
And yet, because the career academy research by the New York-based MDRC (formerly known as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.) was so detailed and professional, we have just learned that the academies accomplished something perhaps even better than higher passing rates on reading exams. They produced young men who got better-paying jobs, were more likely to live independently with children and a spouse or partner and were more likely to be married and have custody of their children.
This is a remarkable finding. It has the power not only to revitalize vocational education but to shift the emphasis of school assessment toward long-range effects on students' lives, not just on how well they did in school and college.
Established more than 30 years ago, Career Academies have become a widely used high school reform initiative that aims to keep students engaged in school and prepare them for successful transitions to postsecondary education and employment. Typically serving between 150 and 200 students from grades 9 or 10 through grade 12, Career Academies are organized as small learning communities, combine academic and technical curricula around a career theme, and establish partnerships with local employers to provide work-based learning opportunities. There are estimated to be more than 2,500 Career Academies operating around the country.
Since 1993, MDRC has been conducting a uniquely rigorous evaluation of the Career Academy approach that uses a random assignment research design in a diverse group of nine high schools across the United States. Located in medium- and large-sized school districts, the schools confront many of the educational challenges found in low-income urban settings. The participating Career Academies were able to implement and sustain the core features of the approach, and they served a cross-section of the student populations in their host schools. This report describes how Career Academies influenced students’ labor market prospects and postsecondary educational attainment in the eight years following their expected graduation. The results are based on the experiences of more than 1,400 young people, approximately 85 percent of whom are Hispanic or African-American.
In June of last year, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declared the racial-integration efforts of two school districts unconstitutional. Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could no longer assign students to schools based on their race, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his lead opinion in Meredith v. Jefferson County School Board (and its companion case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1). Justice Stephen Breyer sounded a sad and grim note of dissent. Pointing out that the court was rejecting student-assignment plans that the districts had designed to stave off de facto resegregation, Breyer wrote that “to invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown.” By invoking Brown v. Board of Education, the court’s landmark 1954 civil rights ruling, Breyer accused the majority of abandoning a touchstone in the country’s efforts to overcome racial division. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” he concluded.
Breyer’s warning, along with even more dire predictions from civil rights groups, helped place the court’s ruling at the center of the liberal indictment of the Roberts court. In Louisville, too, the court’s verdict met with resentment. Last fall, I asked Pat Todd, the assignment director for the school district of Jefferson County, which encompasses Louisville and its suburbs, whether any good could come of the ruling. She shook her head so hard that strands of blond hair loosened from her bun. “No,” she said with uncharacteristic exasperation, “we’re already doing what we should be.”
Todd was referring to Louisville’s success in distributing black and white students, which it does more evenly than any district in the country with a comparable black student population; almost every school is between 15 and 50 percent African-American. The district’s combination of school choice, busing and magnet programs has brought general, if not uniform, acceptance — rather than white flight and disaffection, the legacy of desegregation in cities like Boston and Kansas City, Mo. The student population, which now numbers nearly 100,000, has held steady at about 35 percent black and 55 percent white, along with a small and growing number of Hispanics and Asians.
As the excitement builds this fall with the upcoming election, teachers and parents will want to have good resources at hand to help gifted students understand the election process. Here are just a few resourses. If you have other good resources to share, please list them in the comments area of this blog entry.
Specific Curricula
Rutherford Public Schools in New Jersey has developed curricula for their gifted program, grades 7–8. The information is very general and includes objectives, course outline, curriculum content standards, assessments, resources, and activities.
One of the resources used in the Rutherford Public Schools curriculum is the Interact simulation The Presidential Election Process. Interact recommends this curriculum for grades 5–8. If you scroll down on this page, you will see that Interact materials were recommended in my June 28, 2008 blog entry.
PS 49 in Queens used to be an average school in New York City's decidedly below-average school system. That was before Anthony Lombardi moved into the principal's office. When Lombardi took charge in 1997, 37 percent of fourth graders read at grade level, compared with nearly 90 percent today; there have also been double-digit improvements in math scores. By 2002, PS 49 made the state's list of most improved schools. If you ask Lombardi how it happened, he'll launch into a well-practiced monologue on the many changes that he brought to PS 49 (an arts program, a new curriculum from Columbia's Teachers College). But he keeps coming back to one highly controversial element of the school's turnaround: getting rid of incompetent teachers.
Firing bad teachers may seem like a rather obvious solution, but it requires some gumption to take on a teachers union. And cleaning house isn't necessarily the only answer. There are three basic ways to improve a school's faculty: take greater care in selecting good teachers upfront, throw out the bad ones who are already teaching, and provide training to make current teachers better. In theory, the first two should have more or less the same effect, and it might seem preferable to focus on never hiring unpromising instructors—once entrenched, it's nearly impossible in most places to remove teachers from their union-protected jobs. But that's assuming we're good at predicting who will teach well in the first place.
Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close.
In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents.
"The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul."
For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases.
The changing racial mix is stirring up quarrels over class and culture. Beloved institutions in traditionally black communities -- minority-owned restaurants, book stores -- are losing the customers who supported them for decades. As neighborhoods grow more multicultural, conflicts over home prices, taxes and education are opening a new chapter in American race relations.
At the urging of major employers and state officials, the Washington state Board of Education is about to adopt tough new high school graduation requirements.
But students might not notice a difference.
That’s because the so-called Core 24 requirements would not take effect until the Legislature comes up with money to pay for them. Educators say the state already falls about $1 billion short of meeting its mandate to finance basic education.
One exception: The board next week is expected to adopt a required third math credit starting with the class of 2013. And that class will have to be at the level of Algebra II or above.
Katie Harris, 11, is telling me that she recently spent a lesson making paper aeroplanes and measuring how far they flew. What did she learn? “It was really enjoyable. It wasn’t just about one subject like maths, there was science in there as well,” she replied.
Katie is a pupil at Bursted Wood primary in Bexley, southeast London, one of eight schools in the borough at the forefront of a stampede back to “creative learning” and progressive teaching methods that were popular more than a decade ago.
Despite the bad press such methods got back then, when they were blamed for turning out thousands of children who couldn’t read or write properly, a survey of 115 primary schools last week revealed that four out of five are returning to teaching based around “topics” such as chocolate.
At Bursted Wood, traditional secondary-school style classes in subjects such as history, geography and maths have been ditched for topics planned out on “creative learning wheels”.
Schools must spend more on early childhood education, steer students as young as 16 into college and pay teachers six-figure salaries if Americans are to succeed in today's international labor force, a national expert told Georgia education leaders Thursday.
Mark Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, outlined a report he wrote two years ago during the kickoff meeting of a "working group" appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue to develop a long-term education reform strategy to make Georgia more competitive in the global economy.
In "Tough Choices or Tough Times," Tucker wrote that the school systems of developing countries including China and India have begun producing young adults who are just as capable of filling highly skilled jobs as their U.S. counterparts but who are willing to do the work for significantly lower wages. At the same time, he said, more and more jobs are becoming automated. Tucker said the result is two enormous downward pressures on American wages.
Bob Marcusse calls the link between education and economic development a virtuous circle -- good educational programs attract new business, which leads to more financing for schools, which attract more people to an area to work at those companies.
"We and (educators) clearly understand the symbiotic relationship between education and economic development," said Marcusse, CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council.
Educational resources act as an economic driver in numerous ways. Schools are obviously responsible for producing the work force in any given area, but they also help recruit businesses and residents, foster research that can generate money and spawn new business, and directly funnel money back into the economy through building projects and tourism dollars.
Tax base expansion (as opposed to tax rate increases) is a good idea.
Back in 1996, Money credited Madison schools for high test scores and parent satisfaction. But this week, Money cited Madison for below average test scores in math. Reading scores also fell behind cities on the list.
Madison 's property taxes weren 't mentioned as a problem back in 1996. But this week, Money listed them as $600 higher than the average city on its list.
The county fared slightly better than the state, which posted a four-year dropout estimate of 24.2 percent – nearly one in four students.
The new statistics, based on the 2006-07 school year, painted a grim picture of a crisis that educators Wednesday said exacts an enormous cost on society.
“It represents a tremendous loss of potential,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.
The statistics were particularly alarming among Hispanic and black students statewide. An estimated 30.3 percent of Hispanic students drop out of school between ninth and 12th grade, while more 41.6 percent of black students will drop out over that period.
teve Wozniak helped kick off the personal-computer revolution decades ago when he and Steve Jobs started Apple Computer in a garage in Silicon Valley, and he says education was one of the key uses he saw for computers from the beginning. The eccentric engineer talked about his passion for education and told tales of the early days of Apple during a keynote speech yesterday at Blackboard Inc.’s user conference in Las Vegas.
We continue our special series this week on preparing your children for the new school year. This year high school students are required to take more math. School Solutions' Kim Covington explains that's no sweat for the students of a Tempe teacher.
A record number of students at Desert Vista High School in Tempe got perfect scores on their SAT. That's 26 students, but another 40 just missed one.
Many of those students attended Desert Vista's popular 4 hour summer math camp. The 5th-8th graders who take part breezed through Algebra in just a few weeks. Teacher Larry Strom started the math camp two years ago. The Math Department Chair says, "we tell them to take Algebra as early as they possibly can."
There've been lots of complaints that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has neither much interest in education policy, nor the capacity to deal with it. But his precipitous plunge into the algebra wars last week and the state Board of Education's sudden decision to bow to his demand makes you wish that that he had less interest or a lot more capacity.
The leap, in the form of a letter urging the board to require that every eighth-grader take beginning algebra and the board's overnight agreement to mandate it within three years is like trying to make a scrawny horse pull a heavier load with a bigger whip. At best, it won't work; at worst, it will kill the horse.
The state has for some years had an admirable "goal" that every eighth-grader take algebra, combined with a set of incentives for districts to get all students there. The incentives – essentially penalizing schools by reducing a school's Academic Proficiency Index for each student who takes only general math – have worked. More than half of California's eighth-graders now take either algebra or geometry.
Pediatricians have long said children younger than 2 shouldn't watch any television. But in new findings from a small-scale study, researchers say that even having a TV on in the background could be "an environmental hazard" for children.
For the study, released today, researchers observed 50 children, ages 1 to 3, for an hour at a time as they played alone in a small room with a variety of toys. Parents sat nearby, and for half of each session (starting either at the beginning or 30 minutes in), a small TV broadcast a taped episode of Jeopardy.
After videotaping and carefully analyzing the children's reactions, researchers found that kids watched the TV only in snippets but that it modestly shortened their playtime. TV decreased play's intensity and cut by half the amount of time children focused on a given toy.
The researchers chose Jeopardy on the theory that it would be "nearly incomprehensible" to toddlers.
Middle school students at the Crossroads School near Fells Point were evaluated by teachers every single day last school year, with the results driving the next day's instruction.
At East Baltimore's Fort Worthington Elementary, about a quarter of the school's parents turned out for MSA Family Fun Night and sampled questions from the Maryland School Assessments.
Alexander Hamilton Elementary, situated in a West Baltimore neighborhood that the principal calls "gang-infested," started a gifted education program last year to challenge students to learn beyond their grade levels.
The principals of the three schools credit those and myriad other initiatives with making their schools among of the most improved in Baltimore, during a year in which the school system overall posted historic gains on the standardized tests administered under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
If the testing firms suspect fraud, they simply cancel the student's score -- but they never tell schools why.
A group of students at a Los Angeles high school is suspected of cheating on the ACT college entrance exam by paying a former student, who used fraudulent identification, to take the tests. The testing agency recently began investigating the claims, which could result in cancellation of scores provided to colleges.
But those colleges will not be told why the scores are invalid, nor will the students' high school be clued in.
I've been convinced that a comment I made on another thread about Ted Widerski deserves to be shared as a post. --LAF
"I'll miss him" only begins to capture it for me. Ted was HUGELY important to the student advocacy work I do in the District. I think I/we won't know -- fully -- what we've lost until the school year begins to unfold.
People have said that Ted was a tireless and “courageous" advocate for TAG students, and that he was. I couldn't agree more. At the same time, I can’t help but think “why should it require boundless courage and limitless persistence simply to get smart kids’ educational needs met?” Sigh.
On a more positive note, it has occurred to me that there are two things each of us could do to honor Ted's memory. The first is to donate to the “Ted Widerski Mathfest Fund." There is no better way to honor Ted than to insure that the mathfests he worked so hard to create, implement and protect KEEP HAPPENING. Send your check -- appropriately marked “Ted Widerski Mathfests” -- to the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools, 455 Science Drive, Madison, WI, 53711.
The second thing each of us could do to honor Ted's memory is to approach the coming school year with the happy intention of becoming more like him. So much of what we are up against in our advocacy work is a matter of misunderstanding, misinformation and misguided attitude. With a change in all of that – and few, if any, more dollars – the situation for our students could be profoundly different.
Practically speaking, what might it mean to "become more like Ted?" Well, here are a few beginning thoughts about that. I’m sure some of you will have many more.
If you are a parent ...
... Make sure your student is being appropriately challenged and learning something at school. Don’t assume they will be fine, “no matter what.”
... If your own child's needs are being well met at school, put your time and energy to the larger cause.
... Depending on your student’s age, advocate for their educational (and other) needs or support their learning how to advocate for themselves.
... Be on the lookout for other students in your child’s classroom who need additional challenge, but who may not have an adult to advocate for them.
... Remember that according to the new state law regarding “gifted and talented” identification, you are a key player!
... Join WATG (Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted) and donate to WCATY (Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth).
If you are a teacher ...
... Don’t always make your bright students learn by themselves.
... Don’t assume your bright students will be “just fine,” no matter what.
... Don’t use your bright students as assistant teachers.
... Make sure your bright students have learning peers.
... Don’t be afraid to create ability-based groups.
... If you do “cooperative learning groups,” make sure that all students are pulling their own weight.
... When a parent expresses concern that their child is bored and under-challenged, take their concern seriously.
If you are an administrator ...
... When a parent expresses concern that their child is bored and under-challenged, take their concern seriously.
... Let your teachers create ability-based groups.
... Make sure every academically talented student in your school is in a classroom with learning peers.
... Support the District’s efforts to implement early identification programs.
... Hire teachers with subject-specific certification (e.g., math and science).
... Familiarize yourself with the Wisconsin statutes on gifted students and gifted education.
If you are a School Board member ...
... Familiarize yourself with the Wisconsin statutes on gifted students and gifted education.
... Get some of the District data Ted requested repeatedly. A good start would be several years' worth of algebra data, broken down by letter grade, so that we can finally compare "C's and above" with "D's and below." Ted was adamant in his belief that a "D" in algebra was not a passing grade, that a student who earned a "D" in algebra had not learned anything (had maybe even gotten the "D" rather than an "F" simply for showing up). He saw grouping the "D's" with the higher grades as yet another thing the District did to look better in its own eyes, but at the expense of students’ genuine learning.
... Work to reverse the homogenization of high school curriculum that has occurred in some of the District’s high schools in recent years. In your heart of hearts, you know it’s not the answer to the problem.
... Insist on empirical support for curricular and structural changes in our schools, both before and after changes are made. Make sure you understand what the data are saying. Example: West High School’s English 10 curriculum was implemented in the fall of 2006 in the hopes that certain groups of students would take more rigorous, writing-intensive English electives as juniors and seniors. Do the data indicate that that has happened?
... Whichever side of the isthmus you live on, embrace the schools on the other side and stop this silly “east-side-versus-west-side” thing. (No more statements like “You West parents have nothing to complain about,” like I heard from one recently retired BOE member on multiple occasions.) We’re all in this together – period – and those of you who are on the School Board, especially, have an obligation to students and families from ALL corners of the District. (O.K., that’s me talking, not Ted – but I’m sure Ted would have agreed with me 100%.)
... Always -- and I mean always -- put our kids' needs ahead of politics.
If you are a School Board member who talked a lot about the need for improved “gifted” identification in your campaign ...
... Become the District’s resident expert on the new state law regarding the identification of “gifted and talented” students (http://dpi.wi.gov/cal/gifted.html ). To that end, keep abreast of complaints filed with the DPI by parent groups in other Wisconsin school districts over their district’s failure to comply with this and other “gifted and talented” statutes and rules.
... Become the MMSD’s champion of early identification efforts. Make sure there is financial and other support for efforts being developed to comply with the new state identification law – for example, plans for the universal assessment of all MMSD first graders (that’s every student!) in 2008-09. Help expand the effort to include third graders next year.
If you are a special education advocate ...
... Become a member of the Council for Exceptional Children, a national organization that includes “talented and gifted” children in its special education mission.
If you are a parent who has withdrawn their child from the Madison schools because they were not being challenged ...
... Write to the School Board and the new Superintendent and tell them your family's story. Tell them why you "went private" or are homeschooling.
If you are a student ...
... Familiarize yourself with the Gifted Children's Bill of Rights.” (Just google it.)
... Fulfill your intellectual potential, insist that your school meet your educational needs, choose work that you love, live your life with integrity and love, and do not be afraid to “speak Truth to power.”
One thing both sides of the math-wars debate should agree on is this: Educators can set high standards, but the higher standards only help students if the students have a base of knowledge from which they can rise. In 1997, when the state board of education issued math standards that called for eighth graders to learn Algebra 1, they knew that California teens could not instantly meet that goal.
Rather than set a strict mandate for eighth grade Algebra 1, the board used other policies to set incentives for moving more students into higher-level math, and disincentives for failing to do so - with the goal of having all eighth graders learn Algebra 1 by 2014. The ratio of eighth graders who took Algebra 1 or even higher level math grew from 16 percent in 2000 to 52 percent today. Those 52 percent of students are in a strong position to make it through the college track. Supporters believe this progress - especially the doubling of African American students in eighth-grade Algebra 1 - represents a coup in the struggle to close the achievement gap.
Summertime means school for an increasing number of high school students who have struggled in their math courses. But the system could be contributing to the kids’ poor performances.
Sam Cooke once cooed: "It's summertime, and the living is easy."
Tell that to the increasing number of middle and high school students who will be sweating out summer school this year because of their meltdown in math.
It isn't absurd enough that we test high school students with a High School Exit Exam that is pretty much on a par with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) required of teachers, but now we are all congratulating ourselves with a decision to test eighth graders for algebra. At least state schools chief Jack O'Connell has learned from his own past mistakes and opposed this decision. If only he had the guts to say he blew it on advocating for the exit exam, which is not only a complete waste of tens of millions of dollars, but sends more and more kids into the streets and trouble with the law when they fail to graduate because they do not test as well as others. (About 10 percent of high school students must "fail," otherwise it isn't a "test.")
I tutored algebra to younger students when I myself was in high school. Later I taught it in public high schools for nearly 20 years, concurrently with other math courses, including geometry, pre-algebra and seventh and eighth grade math. I taught in some of the highest achieving, and some of the lowest achieving middle and high schools in the state. So, maybe my perspective is broader than the average citizen's. Still, anyone who thinks it is a good idea to begin testing all eighth graders in algebra is simply delusional. It would be more PC to say uninformed, but I am at wit's end.
The fiasco over delayed school test results affecting millions of children could result in the company responsible being sacked and forced to pay back tens of millions of pounds.
Ken Boston, the head of the exams regulator, said after an emergency hearing of MPs yesterday, that the testing system was under stress and needed modernising. He added that problems were unlikely to be resolved in time for next year’s tests.
Thousands of parents are expected to challenge the results, encouraged by the adverse publicity surrounding this year’s exams.
This week Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said schools were reporting “all kinds of problems” with marking, and told parents that they should not rely on SATs [national curriculum test] results as the sole indicator of their child’s progress. He urged schools to give parents teachers’ assessments of pupils, as well as SATs results, and advised that these be treated as “provisional”.
This week's dust-up over whether all of California's eighth-graders should be taking algebra encapsulates one of the state's overarching educational dilemmas: Is it wise to set educational standards that apply to all students, even though they have an astonishing and ever-widening array of innate abilities and cultural, economic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and advocates of educational rigor are hailing the state Board of Education's vote to impose the algebra requirement in response to pressure from federal officials about creating more uniformity in standards and testing.
However, state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell, who wanted to modify the decade-old state policy of introducing eighth-graders to algebra to comply with the federal demands, claims that the decree will leave many kids behind because the state is unprepared, educationally and financially, to implement it.
The conflict echoes, ironically, the controversy over the decree that high-schoolers must pass an exit exam before being awarded graduation diplomas - a standard that O'Connell vigorously championed as legislator and state schools chief.
James Gee kicked off the 4th Games, Learning, and Society Conference with a talk entitled “Beyond Games & the Future of Learning.” Gee is Professor of Literacy at Arizona State University and the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003) and Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul (2005).
Gee sees the current U.S. educational system as inadequate to the task of addressing the problems of an increasingly complex world. He stated that “21st century learning must be about understanding complex systems,” and he believes many video games do a better job at this than the antiquated sender-receiver teaching model that dominates American classrooms.
“We're at the point where we must make choices. What do we want to be about?” Gee sees two separate educational systems operating today: one a traditional approach to learning; the other what Gee calls “passion communities.” In Gee's view, the latter produce real knowledge. Video games, virtual worlds and online social networks provide environments in which theses passion communities can form and thrive.
"The narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment," Loveless writes, should not "overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students." He adds: "Their test scores are not being harmed during the NCLB era, but they are not flourishing either. Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one. The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end."
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
As early as fourth grade, students who will be at risk of failing the high school exit exam – a state requirement to earn a diploma – can be identified based on grades, classroom behavior and test scores, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.
“From a political standpoint, such spending seems necessary. However, our results strongly suggest that these 11th-hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results,” according to the report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Instead, the authors suggested, “moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades – when the students are still in school – could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure.”
It is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and, at the same time, promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large. Investing in disadvantaged young children is such a policy. The traditional argument for providing enriched environments for disadvantaged young children is based on considerations of fairness and social justice. But another argument can be made that complements and strengthens the first one. It is based on economic efficiency, and it is more compelling than the equity argument, in part because the gains from such investment can be quantified—and they are large.
There are many reasons why investing in disadvantaged young children has a high economic return. Early interventions for disadvantaged children promote schooling, raise the quality of the work force, enhance the productivity of schools, and reduce crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. They raise earnings and promote social attachment. Focusing solely on earnings gains, returns to dollars invested are as high as 15 percent to 17 percent.
The equity-efficiency trade-off that plagues so many public policies can be avoided because of the importance of skills in the modern economy and the dynamic nature of the skill-acquisition process. A large body of research in social science, psychology and neuroscience shows that skill begets skill; that learning begets learning. There is also substantial evidence of critical or sensitive periods in the lives of young children. Environments that do not cultivate both cognitive and noncognitive abilities (such as motivation, perseverance and self-restraint) place children at an early disadvantage. Once a child falls behind in these fundamental skills, he is likely to remain behind. Remediation for impoverished early environments becomes progressively more costly the later it is attempted.
President Bush has often spoken about education reform as a civil rights issue. So we're not entirely surprised to see civil rights groups now defending the No Child Left Behind law against attempts to gut its most effective provisions.
Last month, Representative Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, introduced the NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, which would essentially suspend the law's accountability provisions but not the funding. Under Mr. Graves's bill, schools would no longer have to file progress reports that expose achievement gaps between kids of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The Boston School Committee will soon weigh proposals to open two new pilot schools, reinvigorating a more than decade-old Boston school program that Governor Deval Patrick is using as a model for statewide improvements.
The leaders of the two high schools would be able to exercise greater control over budget, staffing, curriculum, and governance, while working under fewer restraints from teachers unions.
Pilot schools, along with the governor's proposed readiness schools, are similar to charter schools, except that charter schools function as independent school districts, while pilot and readiness schools are, or would be, overseen by local school committees. Patrick recently proposed creating 40 readiness schools across the state, drawing upon the pilot school model.
Boston's two proposed schools, Harbor Pilot High School and Mary Lyon Pilot High School, draw on the popularity of two lower-grade schools, one of which is a pilot school, Harbor School in Dorchester. The other school is Mary Lyon K-8 School in Brighton. Collectively, the two new schools would serve about 600 students.
The government is launching a three-year initiative to boost technical education.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development will head the effort designed to overhaul India's education system, which lags other developing countries. Officials said the effort aims to improve the quality of Indian education by expanding the capacity of institutions and creating new ones.
Regional, social and gender disparities in higher and technical education are also being addressed in the new strategy, which is being bolstered by a nine-fold budget increase for technical education. At the same time, the ministry said, regional governments need to do more to support technical education.
The federal government plans to establish eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, known for producing top researchers for global technology firms. Also planned are two more Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research. Twenty new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are also planned.
How many teachers does it take to make a pingpong ball launcher?
More than one, 84 high school and middle school teachers participating in a two-week training class at the Milwaukee School of Engineering found out.
On Friday, they finished learning how to work cooperatively to make pingpong ball launchers and marble sorters, and to rip apart everything from flashlights to strap hinges so they could remake them to work better.
As a result, each is now certified to teach one Project Lead the Way class in digital electronics, civil engineering and architecture, or another engineering topic.
The Project Lead the Way-trained teachers are part of a push that powerful forces in the state have gotten behind.
Half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online by 2019, predicts a new report.
Rather than send her kids off on the yellow bus, Briana LeClaire has school come to her home. Her kids attend a virtual public school, connecting online to teachers and coursework. Everything from books to microscopes to radish seeds arrives via brown trucks.
Mrs. LeClaire describes it as the 21st-century, middle-class version of the private tutor. Her 6th-grader can move quickly through her strong subjects, such as literature, and spend more time on her weaker areas, like math.
Enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. That's just the start, says a new paper by the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. Its authors predict that by 2019 half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online.
As a first-year TFA teacher in Charlotte, it sounds like Guarino experienced some sporadic and haphazard mentoring. It’s an experience from which we can learn. She references four different mentors giving her advice with four different visions of what their roles were. Four mentors?!?! Egads! That might sound like an embarrassment of riches, but certainly it isn't if the mentors are operating at cross-purposes and if they haven't been trained for the role.
Guarino is correct in saying that "Mentoring is more complicated than it seems." That’s a lesson that policymakers and district leaders need to learn. It is not enough simply to require mentoring. It’s not enough merely to assign a mentor to every new teacher. There’s much more that goes into designing induction and mentoring programs to produce the desired impact on teaching and learning.
They sighed with relief when the college applications were completed, and celebrated when the acceptance letters poured in. But even after graduation on Thursday, one more job remained for the high school’s college counselor and principal: hound their students to make sure they have completed every last task to enroll in their college classes in the fall.
So it goes at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where many in the school’s first graduating class of 79 seniors are from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and have struggled academically for years. Yet they received the kind of personal attention more commonly associated with the priciest prep schools.
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom. But many of these schools have struggled with problems of high faculty turnover or of sharing space with other schools. Still, when Education Department officials say the strategy is working, they point to examples like Thursday’s graduation at Law and Justice, where 93 percent of the senior class — nearly all collegebound — collected their diplomas, far higher than the city’s graduation rate of roughly 50 percent.
Milwaukee has long been called "ground zero" of education reform in America, due mostly to our nearly two-decade-long "experiment" with publicly-funded private school vouchers. Now New Orleans, LA (NOLA) threatens to revoke our title as the epicenter of school choice by heeding the lessons learned here in Milwaukee and advancing the policy design with its new voucher program.
Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is set to sign the nation's fifth voucher program into law, allowing impoverished students in under-performing New Orleans public schools to leave for other options. The NOLA program's legislation looks designed to avoid many of the failings of Milwaukee's program: it borrows certain elements of our program, building on Milwaukee's strengths, yet limits our deficiencies.
Arguing about Advanced Placement, the college-level program found in most U.S. high schools, can be confusing. Some critics say AP courses and tests, like the similar but smaller International Baccalaureate and Cambridge programs, are too deep for most high school students. Other critics say they are too shallow. Some say AP teachers follow a boring, trivia-filled script. Others say AP teachers are the most creative and engaging instructors they know.
Two well-crafted op-ed pieces, by Chicago high school student Tom Stanley-Becker in the Los Angeles Times and by Stanford University graduate fellow Jack Schneider in the Christian Science Monitor, have recently illuminated this split. They point toward a more intelligent way of seeing AP and other college-level high school courses as a useful whole, rather than as large and clumsy devices with contrary parts.
Do you know the difference between an "alleged father" and a "presumed father?" Your child soon will.
The Texas attorney general's office has created a new parenting curriculum that will be required in every public high school this fall. It will cover everything from the legalese of paternity to dealing with relationship violence.
State officials say the goal is twofold: They want to teach teenage parents their legal rights and they want to show other students the difficulties of being a parent in hopes that they'll wait to have children.
The program, which has already drawn some skepticism, promises to bring personal and family values out of the home and into the classroom.
"The purpose is to help young people make responsible decisions about their futures," said Janece Rolfe of the attorney general's child support division. "What we're hoping to do is prevent children from having to enter the child support system."
Georgia is one 23 states that likely will be hard-pressed to make needed improvements under the No Child Left Behind Act before the law's 2014 achievement deadline, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.
The center issued its report at the midway point of the 2002 NCLB law, which requires states to bring all students to grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2014 and allows each state to set up its own track to get there.
Georgia opted for the backloaded approach, which requires less progress in the early years followed by substantially higher gains closer to the deadline.
Now, some states will need to increase the percentage of students reaching proficiency on state assessments by 10 points or more each year in the six years left to meet the NCLB goals, the report said.
"Many states may have originally set lower achievement goals for the first few years under NCLB in hopes of getting systems into place or gaining some flexibility from Washington later on," Jack Jennings, president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy, said in a statement released Tuesday. "But right now, they are still on the hook for the academic equivalent of a mortgage payment that is about to balloon far beyond their current ability to pay."
But even those states that took an incremental approach to hitting achievement targets also will face difficulties in reaching 100 percent proficiency, the report said.
Now the 8,400-student East Ramapo school district in this verdant stretch west of the Palisades is going further, having revived a controversial retention practice widely denounced in the 1980s to not only hold back nearly 12 percent of its first graders this spring but to segregate them in a separate classroom come fall.
The special classes, which are limited to 15 students and follow a pared-down curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic, are called the Gift of Time and come with extras like tutoring and field trips to a local farm.
After a school year marked by academic and administrative controversy, Prince William County Superintendent Steven L. Walts retains rock-solid School Board support as he seeks to raise the reputation of Virginia's second-largest school system. But his relationships with many parents have fractured, and some local officials wonder when, if ever, test scores will rise to levels found among the county's neighbors.
Hundreds of parents protested an elementary math program Walts championed, prompting board members to reevaluate it. Two of the county's top-performing high schools and a third of its elementary schools remain overcrowded. Teachers in Prince William continue to earn less than those in neighboring counties.
Test scores from Walts's third year are not yet public. But results from the first two after his 2005 arrival were uneven: SAT and state test scores remained among Northern Virginia's lowest. The decline in the county's average SAT score -- from 1504 to 1486, by far the steepest drop among the area's major districts -- meant that Prince William continued to lose ground to Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington counties.
Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.
Students who failed math exams — as well as those who might have failed reading — can retake the exam this summer. Schools will provide optional free classes to get them ready. Students who failed the social studies exam don't face any consequences under Georgia law.
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox said test scores in both subjects dropped because students took harder tests to match the state's tougher and more rigorous curriculum.
"When you raise standards and expectations, it is not unusual to see a temporary dip in the percent of students who are meeting those expectations," Cox wrote in a statement released Monday afternoon. "We have seen this in other grades and other areas of the curriculum."
ersonally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.
The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.
While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.
This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.
On-going research stresses that the single most important factor in the classroom is the quality of the teacher. Teachers being the most important variable, have a major impact on a student's success or their failure. Delia Stafford and Janie Feinberg have spent the majority of their professional lives ensuring that students get the best teachers.Ms. Stafford, president of the Haberman Educational Foundation, teaches research-based strategies to assist school districts identify teachers and principals of excellence. Ms. Feinberg, president of JP Associates,provides ongoing staff support in classrooms to assist teachers via her exemplary coaching strategies.In this interview, they respond to a number of questions about teacher quality, teacher evaluation and alternative certification.
ON the morning of her Regents Exam in English language arts earlier this month, Sheile Echie-Davis, an 11th grader at Roosevelt High School, pointed to a blemish just below the swirls of pink and purple polish that covered her long fingernails and explained its meaning. “I’ve been writing so much, I’m getting bruises from holding my pencils,” she said, her tone conveying pride rather than concern that the results of weeks of intense studying were so visible.
Sheile, 16, expected to do well on the exam, judging by her past results: She scored 88 percent on her Regents Exam in United States history last year, even though the subject is her least favorite.
Three years ago, Sheile was an unlikely candidate for academic success given her chronic truancy from school. Skipping class regularly led to her having to repeat eighth grade in her Brooklyn middle school. Parental pressure and visits from truancy officers did little to budge her belief that the classroom was not where she belonged. Dropping out, she said, was a foregone conclusion.
The spark plug igniting this creative combustion is engineering school Dean Stan Jaskolski, who returned to his alma mater five years ago after retiring as chief technology officer at Eaton Corp. and a stint on the board of the National Science Foundation.
Jaskolski is re-engineering the engineering program with money, innovation and collaboration. The new engineering complex will link up faculty and students from all levels and disciplines, along with sales and marketing students and labs. Out of this intellectual stew, Jaskolski believes, will come a better prepared, more innovative engineering graduate. The school has raised $60 million out of the $100 million needed to build the complex.
Wisconsin’s improved performance on a noted ranking of science and technology is a plus. But the state still must work harder to turn good ideas into jobs.
Wisconsin is far better positioned in the knowledge economy than it was four years ago, with larger pools of risk capital and better coordination of the state’s best research.
That's one way to read a new report from the well-respected Milken Institute. The state finished five spots higher at No. 22 in Milken's State Technology and Science Index (www.jsonline.com/765102).
But the state's policy-makers and business leaders must figure out how to turn more of the state's best ideas into jobs across the state, not just in Madison. And perhaps how better to tap the wealth of intellectual property in southeastern Wisconsin.
While Wisconsin moved up five notches, it still ranks only middling overall and still lags far behind on some of the measures. Furthermore, it's arguable how much such state-by-state rankings tell us in a world where the competitor as easily could be in Bangalore as in Buffalo.
WHY is it that significant reform is opposed with the claim that research is needed, yet proposals to conduct such research are also opposed?
WHY does the present system not only lack a research base but much of it functions in direct contradiction to research findings?
WHY, for example, do we educate students by building a box called a school, inside of which are little boxes called classrooms, occupied by students in rows facing the front of the room, where an adult talks 75-80% of the time;
that is, the adult talks three to four times as much as all of the students combined?
WHY does secondary schooling use arbitrary time blocks after each of which students move to another room for a separate subject of instruction?
Thousands of Tucson-area middle and high school students who fail key subjects continue to progress through Pima County's largest school districts every year toward graduation, a 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star has found.
In the 2006-07 school year alone, nine in 10 students were moved to the next grade level, but data show that nearly a third of them failed basic courses in English, math, science or social studies. At least 94,000 students failed essential classes during the past six years.
The analysis confirms what has essentially been an open secret in education for years, what critics call social promotion, and shows it is pervasive throughout Tucson's schools.
The practice is not only causing major academic problems now, but is setting up what could be a major blow to the region's economy.
The underlying problem, experts say, is low student achievement compounded by the lack of concrete promotion policies and systemic pressure not to flunk children.
The Star's analysis found, that because grade inflation is likely occurring in Tucson-area schools, not only are thousands of children being socially promoted every year, but many other students are receiving passing grades they may not deserve.
A report from the Minnesota legislative auditor's office says test scores are lower than average and the schools can use more oversight. It urged legislators to tighten the controls.
Minnesota's charter schools need more oversight and post poorer test scores than their regular district school brethren, but have made big strides toward financial health, according to a report released Monday by the office of the legislative auditor.
The report offered a mixed bag of pluses and minuses for Minnesota's 143 charter schools, which have higher turnover and much higher populations of minority and low-income students than regular schools. The report's authors termed oversight of charter school operations and finances "unclear and often quite complicated," and called for legislation to tighten controls.
We evaluated the performance, oversight, and accountability of charter schools. We found that, in general, charter schools do not perform as well as district schools; however, after accounting for relevant demographic factors and student mobility rates, the differences in student performance were minimal. Additionally, we found that charter school oversight responsibilities are not clear, leading to duplication and gaps in oversight. We recommend the Legislature clarify the roles of the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and sponsors (organizations that authorize, monitor, and evaluate charter schools) and that MDE implement standards for sponsors. We also recommend that the Legislature strengthen conflict of interest laws for charter school boards.
A poll conducted by the Associated Press has found that more than half of people polled claim that U.S. high schools are falling short when it comes to readying students for adulthood. In addition, the same number of American’s polled believe that schools are focusing too much on some subjects and neglecting others, leading to an unbalanced education and a lack of “survival skills” needed for life after high school.
“When you get out of high school, what are you educated to do?” Mused California firefighter Jamie Norton. “A lot of kids, when they get out of school, are kind of lost.”
The AP poll revealed that parents from a minority group tend to believe that their children are receiving an education than they actually are. Three-fourths of adults polled also claimed that their children’s schools were emphasizing the wrong subjects – music, art, English – and not spending enough time on “important” subjects, such as math or biology. Parents are also frustrated by the seeming lack of assistance available during school hours for children who may be struggling with math, and are often unwilling to dedicate time at home to work on their children’s math homework.
Most individuals polled claimed that the U.S. is far behind other world countries when it comes to education. In reality, U.S. students fall somewhere in the middle when compared to students from other countries.
THE children at Kulosaari primary school, in a suburb of Helsinki, seem unfazed by the stream of foreign visitors wandering through their classrooms. The head teacher and her staff find it commonplace too—and no wonder. The world is beating a path to Finland to find out what made this unostentatious Nordic country top of international education league tables. Finland’s education ministry has three full-time staff handling school visits by foreign politicians, officials and journalists. The schools in the shop window rotate each year; currently, Kulosaari is on call, along with around 15 others. Pirkko Kotilainen, one of the three officials, says her busiest period was during Finland’s European Union presidency, when she had to arrange school visits for 300 foreign journalists in just six months of 2006.
Finland’s status as an education-tourism hot spot is a result of the hot fashion in education policy: to look abroad for lessons in schooling. Some destinations appeal to niche markets: Sweden’s “voucher” system draws school choice aficionados; New Zealand’s skinny education bureaucracy appeals to decentralisers. Policymakers who regard the stick as mightier than the carrot admire the hard-hitting schools inspectorate and high-stakes mandatory tests in England (other bits of Britain have different systems).
The Boys & Girls Club (BGC) and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) announced today a new joint initiative that intends to double the number of minority and low-income students who plan to pursue four-year college and technical college degrees upon high school graduation. The launch of the initiative is made possible through private commitments of $2.6 million to the Boys & Girls Club covering 50% of the first five years of the programs cost.
"We are so excited to partner with the Madison Metropolitan School District on this groundbreaking initiative, said Mary Burke, President of the Board of Directors for the Boys & Girls Club. "combining the school district’s AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program with the Boys & Girls Club Teens Of Promise program (TOPs) we will make a difference, not only in the lives of the students involved in the program but also in the community at large. The health of our community is closely tied to having an educated, skilled workforce. This initiative is designed to do just that."
The AVID program is a rigorous in-school elective that students take throughout high school to their improve study skills, grades, time management, reading and writing skills to better prepare them for college. The TOPs program offers summer job internships, mentors, scholarships, field trips, career exploration and financial support for tutoring. Students commit to staying on the college track, maintaining a 2.5 GPA, taking courses that will prepare them for college and having a good attendance record.
Impressed with the success of the 28 East High students enrolled in the program last year, the Boys and Girls Club of Madison has committed to raising $2.6 million, half the funding needed to increase enrollment to 100 students districtwide this fall and to add 100 each year until an 800-student cap is reached.
"This will fund college preparation for students not currently getting that opportunity," said Boys and Girls Club board President Mary Burke.
Developed in California and based partly on a similar Milwaukee program, AVID is aimed at students from low-income households who want to develop the motivation to succeed in school. It is a daily elective students take throughout high school to improve their study skills, grades and time management.
Madison School District leaders on Monday announced a partnership with Boys and Girls Club of Dane County aimed at doubling the number of minority and low-income students who will be ready to enter college after high school.
District officials stressed that the new offering was not a remedial program or a free ride but instead was geared to help motivated students with average grades who have the desire to attend college but lack the practical skills and knowledge to get there and be successful.
And to do that really well, it was vital to involve the community, Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for the district 's four high schools, said at a news conference at East High School.
Some prominent Denver foundations are working on a plan that could create new schools for thousands of poor children in Colorado in the next few years.
The idea is to pool money and knowledge to help jump-start the creation or replication of schools that have proved successful with students from low-income families.
That includes expanding homegrown models such as West Denver Preparatory Charter School on South Federal Boulevard, which Head of School Chris Gibbons wants to grow from a single school to three by 2015.
Six years ago, the Philadelphia School District embarked on what was considered the country's boldest education privatization experiment, putting 38 schools under private management to see if the free market could educate children more efficiently than the government.
If it worked, the plan seemed likely to become a model for other struggling urban school districts, such as Washington's, suffering from a lack of funding, decaying buildings and abysmal student test scores.
This month, the experiment suffered a severe setback, as the state commission overseeing Philadelphia's schools voted to take back control of six of the privatized schools, while warning 20 others that they had a year to show progress or they, too, would revert to district control.
Students at Philadelphia's schools have made improvements overall, the commission said. But the private-run schools are not doing any better than the schools remaining under public control.
Haugen teaches eighth-grade science in Denver, and he is on a unique summer project. To raise awareness of childhood obesity and encourage Americans to get outdoors, he's attempting to climb the highest point in each of the 50 states in 50 days.
Haugen is joined on the trip by avid climbers Lindsay Danner from Denver and Zach Price from Seattle, and Jordan Mallan, an independent film producer from Los Angeles who is preparing a documentary on the trip. The group is traveling to all sites in the lower 48 in a midsize SUV with a trailer.
The effort may set a record, now held by Ben Jones of Lynnwood, Wash., who reached the top of all 50 in 50 days, 7 hours and 5 minutes.
Haugen's 50-50 challenge started June 9 when he reached the top of 20,320-foot Mount McKinley in Alaska. As he reaches down to tag the benchmark on Timm's Hill Saturday at 1 p.m., he notches his 30th peak in 19 days.
"Immune Attack" is still in its final stage of development and is not on shelves yet, but can be downloaded for free at their website. The game has already been evaluated in 14 high schools across the country with nearly a thousand more educators registered to evaluate it in the next phase of development. The reaction among teachers who have used the game has been positive.
Woodbridge, Va., high school AP biology teacher Netia Elam says the video game brought the concepts of immunology to life for her students.
"[With text books] they might read something, drag vocabulary words onto paper, or use their math, but they're not really integrated into it," Elam said. "Because they are playing video games, they were really engrossed in what they were doing. They took on more of an interest and more of an initiative to pay attention."
Society does not “have a grip” on whether or not I feed or clothe my children. Why does it need to : “have a grip” on their education? The law leaves the primary responsibility for education with parents and provides for measures to be taken against parents who do not educate their children, just as it does for parents who neglect their children. What more is required?
U.S. News has collected data from more than 12,000 graduate programs to bring you this year's rankings. Start by selecting a discipline for access to our top program rankings.
The San Francisco Unified School District should dump its "confusing, time-consuming, alienating" system of assigning students to schools and instead allow them to go to ones in their neighborhoods, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury said in a report released Thursday.
The grand jury focused on the way kindergarten students were assigned to schools in the 2007-08 school year. The district's system, dubbed "the diversity index," is used for students of all ages entering new schools.
Under the current system, families submit their top seven school choices and a number of socioeconomic indicators, but not race. The vast majority of families get one of their seven choices, but families who can't get their child into a school in their neighborhood have complained it's unfair. Studies have shown schools are becoming increasingly resegregated.
The grand jury blasted the system for being expensive to run, driving families away from the district and not doing much to diversify schools.
Thomas Birmingham's phone has been ringing a lot this week, in the wake of Governor Deval Patrick's plan to overhaul public education.
The former state Senate president was one of the last people to take on the task of reforming education in Massachusetts, in 1993. It was a valiant effort, but ultimately not enough.
"I don't think anybody thought in '93 that a bright day had dawned and that we would move on because all our education problems had been solved," Birmingham said yesterday.
The overriding issue then was the wild disparity between different communities in spending on education. But that emphasis proved simplistic.
The achievement gap was not nearly as well understood as it is now. "I think perhaps the disadvantages that poverty imposes were beyond what we might have accomplished, that it is a harder problem than we realized," he said. "We smuggle a host of issues into schools that are not educational."
What do you think about the CPS effort to bring more algebra into middle schools?
From Catalyst: "The June board meeting included a brief presentation on student achievement from the Office of Instructional Design and Assessment. A recap of statistics showed that while 40 percent of 8th-graders across the country take algebra, only 8 percent of CPS 8th-graders do.
"With this in mind, Chief Officer Xavier Botana noted how the district is revamping algebra instruction: 8th-grade algebra will now be called “High School Algebra in the Middle Grades,” a name change that Botana said will help parents and others understand that students are tackling high-school-level material.
A commenter nails the issue:
The exit exams have to be real. They can't be given credit for high school algebra, then show up in high school unprepared to take second year algebra.
Of course, they would only be prepared to take algebra in 8th grade if they have had rigorous math instruction before that. I believe these suburban schools with 40% of 8th graders taking algebra also have pre-algebra programs for kids in the 7th grade.
I'm all for offering rigorous classes; but there has to be some support to help kids get there.
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test.
Most of the nation's undergraduate education programs do not adequately prepare elementary teachers to teach mathematics, according to a study released Thursday by an education-reform advocacy group. Utah State University is among the 83 percent of surveyed programs that didn't meet what the National Council on Teacher Quality calls an emerging "consensus" on what elementary teachers must learn before joining professional ranks.
"There's a long-standing belief in our country that elementary teachers don't really need to get much math. The only thing you need to teach second-grade math is to learn third-grade math," said Kate Walsh, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based group. "We haven't put much attention to fact the elementary teachers are the first math teachers kids get. Their foundational skills have long-term ramifications whether that child will be able to do middle and high school math."
The NCTQ's findings are similar to a reading report the group released two years ago, claiming that 85 percent of undergraduate elementary education programs fail to adequately prepare students to teach reading.
Joanne has more. It will be interesting to see of the Madison Math Task Force addresses the question of teacher content knowledge. Related:
More than 100,000 California students quit high school each year, but the path toward dropping out begins long before high school. Three new studies from the California Dropout Research Project reveal how and why academic success in middle school is critical to graduating from high school.
The studies, based on data from four of California's largest school districts, found that both middle school grades and test scores predicted whether students graduated from high school. The strongest predictor was whether students passed all their core academic subjects in math, English, history and science.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, only 40 percent of students who failed two or more academic classes in middle school graduated within four years of entering ninth grade. In Fresno, Long Beach and San Francisco only a third of the students who failed two or more courses in seventh grade graduated on time.
An ambitious public pre-kindergarten program in Oklahoma boosts kids' skills dramatically, a long-awaited study finds, for the first time offering across-the-board evidence that universal preschool, open to all children, benefits both low-income and middle-class kids.
The large-scale study, by researchers from Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute and Center for Research on Children in the United States, looked at the skills of about 3,500 incoming kindergartners in Tulsa, where state-funded pre-kindergarten has been in place for 18 years — and offered universally for nearly a decade.
The researchers found that as the kids entered kindergarten those enrolled in the state program had better reading, math and writing skills than kids who were either not enrolled in preschool or who spent time in the federally funded Head Start program.
Previous research has shown that high-quality preschool pays off in better skills, especially for low-income kids. But until today's findings, even the biggest studies stopped short of making the case that universal programs, with children from all backgrounds, benefit virtually all of them.
Education has long been a passion of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, stretching back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Texas Legislature. While serving as chief domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, she was an architect of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act. Its goal is for all children to become proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In 2005, the same year she became education secretary, Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to look at how to improve post-secondary institutions. Spellings is the first mother of school-age children to serve as education secretary, and only the second woman to be appointed to the post. In her final few months on the job, much of her time has been devoted to shoring up support for the No Child Left Behind law.
Q. Does the United States need to create world-class schools in every community, and, if so, why?
A. Absolutely, emphatically, yes. And why? Because we pride ourselves on being the center of innovation and creativity, and that has brought us the Internet and other technologies, but we are at risk of losing that. Our country has gotten more diverse [in terms of poverty and children learning to speak English as a second language], so some of the work is more challenging. More education is necessary for everybody. We have to pick up the pace. No Child Left Behind is about that.
any of the governor’s proposals, such as those aimed at closing achievement gaps, better preparing teachers, and reducing the number of school districts in the state, have been unveiled over the past two days. Patrick has talked a lot this week about his ideas for pre-kindergarten to Grade 12.
However, the report issued this morning provides fresh details and outlines a few initiatives that had yet to be unveiled.
For example, the plan contains a host of recommendations for higher education. They include: closing the pay gap between faculty at Massachusetts colleges and universities and those at peer institutions in other states; increasing needs-based financial aid in the 2010 budget; guaranteeing that credits will be transferrable between the state’s public higher-education institutions; and supporting legislation that would allow undocumented children to pay in-state rates at public colleges and universities.
A new audit says Michigan's annual school progress reports from 2004-05 and 2005-06 contained some errors that might have artificially improved some schools' results.
The Office of the Auditor General report [1.6MB PDF] released Wednesday dealt with the Michigan Department of Education's school report cards and adequate yearly progress reports based on federal No Child Left Behind rules.
The problem stemmed in part from inaccuracies and inconsistencies in computer programming logic used to calculate the scores. But there were other problems cited in the audit, including insufficient monitoring of data supplied by school districts -- some of which may contain inflated favorable self-reporting and missing information.
The plan makes Oregon one of several states moving past the "one-size-fits-all" high-stakes testing that became commonplace in many U.S. high schools in the 1990s. In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education is considering a three-pronged approach similar to Oregon's plan, while in Maryland, students who can't pass the state tests could be allowed to do a senior project instead.
But some say such choices allow some students _ and states _ to take the easy way out.
Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children, points to New Jersey, where up to 80 percent of students at high schools in poor cities like Newark and Camden receive alternative diplomas after not passing the state tests. The number falls to about 3 percent in wealthy areas like Princeton, N.J., she said.
In an increasingly wired (and wireless) world, an online presence is becoming indispensable for institutions ranging from businesses to nonprofits to government agencies. Grasping this new reality, Baltimore County education officials last year wisely launched a pilot online education program that served 106 students - almost all of them previously home-schooled.
This initiative deserves to be made permanent. The county executive's office disagrees and denied a $2 million request for online education in the 2008-2009 school budget, blaming poor economic conditions. That reasoning is understandable but shortsighted.
Unless the school board can find the funding in its current budget to keep the program, it stands to lose state dollars when some - perhaps most - of those 106 students return to home-schooling in the fall. Worse, it would also lose the opportunity to become a pioneer in an area that will doubtless play a major role in the future of education.
A coalition of prominent Milwaukeeans working to establish an urban boarding school for at-risk youth today announced its intention to raise between $30 million and $40 million in private funds to support opening a school in three years.
The Wisconsin Coalition for a Public Boarding School also plans to attempt to persuade legislators to allocate state funding for the college-prep program, the initiative's leaders said today at a media event at the Charles Allis Art Museum.
The school would open in 2011 with 80 sixth-grade students and with an initial state contribution of around $2 million. If the coalition can persuade the Legislature to back the initiative, the school would reach full public funding by 2017 with an annual state contribution of around $10 million, said Jeanette Mitchell, community adviser to the Washington, D.C.-based SEED Foundation.
It's called podcasting, and is increasingly popular in education, with many colleges and universities offering free online lectures. A podcast is an audio or video file that automatically downloads to subscribers over the Internet, and is often listened to or watched on a mobile media player such as an iPod or Zune.
For Fort Sumner Spanish teacher Sandra Wertheim's class, the boost from the little device made it much easier to deal with weekly vocabulary words: Her voice rang through the ears of students who got the lesson through the Zune.
"Most incoming (community college) students are not ready for college-level work," the report says. "In addition, relatively few of these students reach proficiency during their time (in community college)."
That's interesting, but it also raises this question: Since virtually all of those community college students graduated from high school, what is that telling us about the level of K-12 instruction?
One presumes, perhaps naively, that if someone possesses a California high school diploma, thus signifying 12 years of education costing taxpayers around $130,000, that someone must possess basic reading, writing and computational skills.
Remember, we're not talking about the roughly one-third of California's teenagers who don't graduate from high school; with few exceptions we're talking about graduates who have enough gumption to attend community college, and yet, this report says most don't have the appropriate basic skills for college-level studies. By the way, that also doesn't count the large numbers of high school graduates – well over a third – who require remedial instruction after being accepted into the California State University system.
Because he has moved so often, 9-year-old Richard Kennedy has already attended four different schools in Flint. In his mother’s latest rental house the other day, he described how it felt to enter an unfamiliar classroom.
...
In New York, board of education officials said that while they did not have data on trends in student mobility, it had been a prime reason behind efforts to standardize curriculums, so students switching schools would not find their math classes, for example, far out of sync.
High turnover can undermine a multiyear improvement plan. “It becomes a different school, because the core of the students you’re educating has changed,” Dr. Kerbow said.
Even the students who do not switch schools suffer, because teachers must spend more time reviewing materials for newcomers and tend to introduce less material, Dr. Kerbow said, citing what his research had found in Chicago. “The learning trajectory over time is flattened,” he added.
Seems like a useful idea, rather than trying to standardize curriculum across the board. Locally, Mayor Dave recently proposed using suburban housing assistance to reduce urban low income concentration.
The number of Wisconsin schools that didn't meet standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act and could face sanctions increased from 95 to 156 this year, including the entire Madison Metropolitan School District.
Of the 156 schools on the list released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, 82 were in the Milwaukee Public School district. Seven of the schools on the list were charter schools.
Besides individual schools on the list, four entire districts made the list for not meeting the standards. That lists includes the school districts of Beloit, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine.
Bill Novak (Interestingly, this Capital Times article originally had many comments, which are now gone):
Superintendent Art Rainwater told The Capital Times the list is "ludicrous," the district doesn't pay attention to it, and the district will do what's best for the students and not gear curriculum to meet the criteria set by the federal government.
"As we've said from the day this law was passed, it is only a matter of time before every school in America is on the list," Rainwater said. "It's a law that impossible to meet, because eventually if every single student in a school isn't successful, you are on the list."
NCLB's biggest problem is that it's designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, "adequate yearly progress" goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB's perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB's first "needs improvement" list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB's power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, "We don't lower standards in this state!" A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. "Michigan stretches to do what's right with our children," Mr. Watkins said, "but we're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot."
Madison's Leopold and Lincoln elementary schools were among the list of schools failing to attain the standards, marking the first time that a Madison elementary school made the list.
Three Madison middle schools — Sherman, Cherokee and Toki — also joined the list, which continued to include the district's four major high schools: East, West, La Follette and Memorial. Madison's Black Hawk Middle School, which was on the list last year, made enough academic progress to be removed from it.
The main problem lies not with salaries for teaching, which are competitive with other jobs in Mexico, but with the quality of teachers. The government has been trying to solve the problem since 1992, when it introduced annual bonuses linked to teachers' participation in training courses and their scores on tests. This system is far from perfect. A study last year by the Rand Corporation, an American think-tank, found that the tests given to teachers required “only low level cognitive responses”, while the criteria for evaluation were fuzzy and subject to manipulation.
The new agreement between Mr Calderón and Ms Gordillo has two aims. First, there is a promise to improve the fabric of the 27,000 schools—around one in eight—that are in poor repair (though no new money was allocated to this as part of the agreement). Second, it seeks to break the hold of the union over teachers' careers. Under the agreement, teachers would be hired and promoted according to how they fare in a set of tests devised and marked by a new independent body.
I am ranking them by one of the most common, and to me most annoying, measures of high school worth--average total reading and math SAT scores. Those test results are most closely tied to the income of the families that raise these fine students. There is something of that relationship at these schools too. But once you get this many bright students together, SAT becomes largely irrelevant, since they have all gone far beyond the 10th-grade reading comprehension and math puzzles that make up those exams. Notice, for instance, the surprises. Some very well-known elite schools have much lower average SATs than some others. Some selective high schools with terrific reputations, like Lowell in San Francisco, do not have high enough SAT averages to make the Public Elites list and so remain on the main list. It shows how little significance SAT numbers have.
I am still amazed that there are high schools whose average scores would be high enough to get any student who got that score, with a little luck, into the Ivy League. Our rule is if a non-traditional school's average is 1300, or 29 or above on the ACT, it goes on the Public Elites list. We picked 1300 and 29 because those scores are just above the highest average scores of any regular enrollment public school in the country.
Schools receive local property tax money through levies and federal money, but the majority of funding comes from the state.
The current public education funding system emerged from a 1977 state Supreme Court decision in which Seattle schools sued the state over inadequate funding. The ruling held that the state must fund equally across districts a "basic education" program that went beyond reading, writing and math. Subsequent court rulings over the years have expanded the formula, resulting in an extremely complex system.
It's been called antiquated, outdated, ossified. Even Byzantine.
"Our system is pretty equitable now in that everyone gets ripped off," Hyde said. "Just think, do you live now like you lived 30 years ago?"
The formula begins with all schools receiving a basic education allocation per student. The allocation varies from district to district based on teacher experience and education levels, teacher-student ratios, allocations for administrators and classified staff and several other factors.
The article includes a number of interesting comments.
High school students seeking to put the best shine on their college applications will soon be able to choose which of their SAT scores to share with admissions officers and which to hide, the College Board said Friday.
The new policy, starting with the class of 2010, will allow students to take the widely used college entrance exam multiple times without admissions officers seeing their less-than-stellar efforts. Now, colleges receive scores of all the times a student attempted the dreaded test, whether the results were spectacular, mediocre or worse.
"Students were telling us the ability to have more control over their scores would make the test experience more comfortable and less stressful," said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT. ". . . We can do that without in any way diminishing the value and integrity of the SAT."
It was early in the school year. A young professional French horn player named Alana Vegter, a thoroughbred musician trained by elite teachers, took a handful of trumpet and trombone players into an equipment supply room. Speaking in the flat tones of the Chicago suburb where she grew up, Ms. Vegter tried to coax notes out of each player. A tall sixth-grade trumpeter named Kenny Ocean, his pants sagging around his hips, played too high, then too low. A smile spread across his face when he hit it right.
“You see, every time you do it, it gets easier,” Ms. Vegter said. On her cue they all bleated together. “I’m starting to hear everybody making nice, healthy sounds,” she said, half in praise, half in hope.
So began Ms. Vegter’s year in Ditmas Junior High School, Intermediate School 62, in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. It was a year that would teach her the satisfaction of tiny victories in a place where homelessness means that some kids cannot take their instruments home to practice, where chronic asthma forces some to switch from wind instruments to percussion, where the roar of a lunchroom leaves a newcomer stunned.
In its second season, which ended this month, the academy extended fellowships to 34 graduates of leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons in a two-year program. They play concerts on Carnegie’s stages and participate in master classes. Part of the deal is a commitment to teach one and a half days a week at a New York public school, which pays the academy $13,200 for the service.
1997 saw the height of the Math Wars in California.
On the one side stood educrats, who advocated mushy math - or new-new math. They sought to de-emphasize math skills, such as multiplication and solving numeric equations, in favor of pushing students to write about math and how they might solve a problem. Their unofficial motto was: There is no right answer. (Even to 2 +2.)
They were clever. They knew how to make it seem as if they were pushing for more rigor, as they dumbed down curricula. For example, they said they wanted to teach children algebra starting in kindergarten, which seemed rigorous, but they had expanded the definition of algebra to the point that it was meaningless.
On the other side were reformers, who wanted the board to push through rigorous and specific standards that raised the bar for all California kids. Miraculously, they succeeded, and they took pride in the state Board of Education's vote for academic standards that called for all eighth-graders to learn Algebra I.
Over the last several years, the references to “IB” schools seem to be just about everywhere. IB, or International Baccalaureate, Schools are schools certified by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). President George W. Bush cited IB programs as a model for boosting student achievement in science and math. The U.S. Department of Education started a pilot program to bring IB programs to low-income students. The Michigan Department of Education, in its 2006 recommendations to the State Board of Education for College Credit Earning Opportunities, recommends that Advanced Placement (AP) or IB courses be made available to every student in every high school in Michigan. University admissions offices are working to determine their scoring or ranking for students matriculating with an IB diploma. Oakland University is spearheading an IBO teacher certification program. This article will look at the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, explain its roots, mission, programming, and try to assess whether an IB program is a good fit for gifted students.
Andre Cowling, who just finished his first year as principal of Harvard Elementary, one of the poorest-performing schools in Chicago, said the South Side’s eighth-grade celebrations are like “Easter Sunday on steroids.”
In a speech last Sunday at a Chicago church, Barack Obama took on the pomp and purpose of these ceremonies. “Now hold on a second — this is just eighth grade,” he said. “So, let’s not go over the top. Let’s not have a huge party. Let’s just give them a handshake.” He continued: “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”
Mr. Obama was wading into a simmering debate about eighth-grade ceremonies and their attendant hoopla. Do they inspire at-risk students to remain in high school and beyond? Or do they imply finality?
While some educators are grateful that notice is still being paid to academic achievement, others deride the festivities as overpraising what should be routine accomplishment. Some principals, school superintendents and legislators are trying to scale back the grandeur. But stepping between parents and ever-escalating celebrations of their children’s achievements can be dicey, at best.
At a time when overall Minnesota school enrollment is declining, enrollment in charter schools in the state soared by a record number last year, according to a study released Thursday.
The study, conducted by the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, found that the number of students attending charter schools rose by 4,337 during the 2007-08 school year. That marks the biggest enrollment increase since 1991-92, when the charter school option was first made available to Minnesota students and parents.
Total enrollment for charter schools stands at 28,206. That's almost three times the enrollment in the 2001-02 school year. The total public school enrollment last year in Minnesota was 796,757, a number that has been declining for several years.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush rallied the troops Thursday, telling a supportive crowd that their often-unpopular visions of reform are the best path to modernizing schools.
"The world is much more interconnected, much more technologically advanced and it is much more interdependent," Bush told a packed ballroom at a Disney resort. "And yet our education system is an eight-track system living in an iPod world."
The duo delivered brief, keynote addresses at a summit organized by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which Bush formed last year.
Among the 400 guests expected to attend over two days were dozens of policy wonks who believe more school choice and testing can help deliver a higher quality education to more students.
Spellings mounted a vigorous defense of No Child Left Behind.
The school overhaul plan being unveiled next week by Gov. Deval Patrick includes a proposal to allow high school students as young as 16 to take an international evaluation test that would allow them to graduate, The Associated Press learned today.
A report from the year-old Readiness Project will also include recommendations to make credits universally transferrable through the state college, community college and university system. It also features a so-called dual-enrollment program that would allow high school students to receive credit for classes taken on college campuses, a senior administration official familiar with the report said.
Overall, the goal is to personalize education rather than continuing to rely on the more formulaic approach in which all students march in annual progression from elementary school through high school and undergraduate education — all between the ages of 6 and 22.
According to prosecutors, the two individuals used stolen passwords and usernames to hack into school computers to change their grades from D's and C's to A's and B+'s. Khan was also accused of stealing tests before they had been given and for loading spyware which would enable him access servers remotley to change the grades of 12 other students.
While hunting in my archives for something else I dug up this exercise in scenarios. It was a small game Brian Eno and I played to loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future. We were both struck at how improbable current events would be to anyone in the past, and how incapable we are at expecting the improbable in the future.
This list of unthinkable futures -- probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking -- was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.
* American education works. Revived by vouchers, a longer school year, private schools and for-profit schools, the majority of Americans (though not the most disadvantaged) get the best education in the world.
The report, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB," uses scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to compare changes in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of students since the introduction of No Child Left Behind.
The good news is that NCLB seems to be making progress toward its goal of closing the "achievement gap," states the report: In fourth-grade reading, for example, NAEP scores for the bottom tenth increased 16 points from 2000 to 2007, compared to 3 points for the top tenth.
But what does the narrowing of that gap mean for students scoring at the top of the spectrum?
"The progress of our top students has been modest at best," said the report, noting that the focus of NCLB on bringing students to the "proficient" level might result in the neglect of gifted students who are already proficient.
"People can look at this data and say, 'This is great news,' and maybe that's what our national education policy should be," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute. "But you see that the performance of the high-achieving students is languid, and the question is whether languid is going to cut it in a global economy."
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: "Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school -- we're not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive".
Pre-school children should spend time cooking with their parents and playing with numbers to help improve their maths skills, a Government review has recommended.
The report by Sir Peter Williams, Chancellor of Leicester University, also advised that every primary school should have a specialist maths teacher and called for more mental arithmetic in class.
He called for urgent action to change England's "can't do attitude" to the subject, and said that every child should have mastered the basics of the subject by the age of seven.
To help achieve this children should be playing with shapes, time, capacity and numbers to foster their "natural instincts" from a young age
Hailed as a hard worker by district peers and teachers, in person, Nerad is a quiet and astute listener who weighs opinions, questions and ideas in a thoughtful manner.
It's the quiet that marks the greatest contrast with outgoing Superintendent Art Rainwater, a former football coach with a commanding physical presence. Rainwater's assertive, booming voice resonates in the Doyle Administration Building's auditorium with or without a microphone.
Asked what the biggest difference is between Rainwater and Nerad, School Board President Arlene Silveira said it "will be Dan being out in the community and being more communicative. I think he will be more available and more accessible to the community as a whole. ... I think people should feel very comfortable and confident that stepping in, he will be able to start making decisions and leading us from day one. I think that's a big deal and very positive for us."
Her learning marked her as different in her neighborhood and her home. And that was the conundrum she presented to the benefactor driving her home for summer break from the last day of school on Thursday.
Her family lives in one of the roughest housing projects in Washington, D.C. But for the past three years, the 15-year-old ninth-grader has been attending the SEED School in that city, which meant she lived at the school five days a week, except in the summer. It is a boarding school of the type that a core group of influential Milwaukeeans wants to establish here — providing remedial and college-prep, wraparound services that cocoon students from tough family and neighborhood circumstances so that they may better acquire the academic and life skills to succeed.
This girl represents one of the reasons Milwaukee and state leaders should get behind this proposal, contributing to a capital campaign that must raise $30 million to $60 million in private money and injecting a commitment in the governor’s upcoming budget for direct state funding in 2011.
“Ms. Poole, I’m concerned,” the girl said, as Lesley Poole, the schools director of student life, tells it on the day it happened. “I think I’m getting smarter and know more than anyone in my house, and that’s unfair to my mom. I know more words than she does. . . . I can out talk her.”
Students from Kenosha, Green Bay, and Madison are among the top Braille users in the United States and Canada, winning a competition held earlier this spring at the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Janesville, as a part of the international Braille Challenge.
The three Wisconsin winners are eligible to attend the finals of the international Braille Challenge, which will be held in Los Angeles on June 27th.
The winners, Baylee Alger of Green Bay, Zachary Morris of Kenosha, and Amelia King of Madison, competed in reading comprehension, proofreading, spelling, dictation, and charts and graphs events as part of the challenge. Alger and Morris won top honors in the apprentice category for students in the first and second grades. Both attend their local school districts and receive Braille instruction from teachers of the blind: Alger from Kathleen Ford and Morris from Harry Ostrov. King has placed as a finalist twice before and won the competition in 2004. She currently attends the Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped in Janesville and has been a student at Madison Memorial High School.
Wisconsin took an important step Wednesday toward new academic standards which will provide the rigor and relevance students need to succeed in the 21st century.
During the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) Best Practices Forum (Institute.21) in Madison, State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster received final recommendations for revising and then implementing Model Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics.
The recommendations represent the work of leadership and design teams made up of educators, legislators, parents, and business representatives.
The Catholic University and Trinity Washington University are well-regarded institutions located next to each other in a verdant section of northeast Washington. Yet there is a huge gap between them in the relative graduation rates of their black and white students.
Trinity, with an enrollment of about 1,600 mostly female undergraduates, graduated 51 percent of its black students entering in 2000 within six years, higher than the national black graduation rate of about 40 percent and almost identical to Trinity's white graduation rate, 53 percent. Catholic, with an enrollment of about 6,200, has a six-year graduation rate of 25 percent for black students and 72 percent for white students who entered in 2000, one of the largest discrepancies in the country in this vital statistic.
Kevin Carey, a noted graduation rate researcher, merely reveals this interesting divergence in the data about the two schools. He does not explain it. But his startling new report, "Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority," which can be found online at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=678433, identifies the most likely sources of such differences and provides more hopeful data about raising the graduation rates of low-income and minority students than I have seen gathered in one place.
Wouldn't it be great if there were a single solution to our most vexing problems?
We could add productive workers, cut crime, reduce teen pregnancies and save money, too. Well, just click your heels, because we already have that power; we just have to recognize it and act on it.
The magic lies in early education: all the emotional, physical, social and cognitive learning kids do between birth and 5.
But when people talk about the power of education, it's usually only K-12 education they're thinking about, which may be why we just keep talking.
Last week a group of educators and social activists declared education a civil-rights issue.
The head of the school systems in New York City and Washington, D.C., were among the people who formed a new group to advocate for shaking up public education to eliminate achievement gaps based on race and income.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels wrote in The Seattle Times last week about urban areas as the foundation of U.S. prosperity and said the quality of education kids get affects our ability to address other problems cities face.
Budget cuts. Teacher layoffs. In this time of budget crisis, can our public schools really afford to continue funding arts and music education?
The appropriate question is: Can California schools afford not to?
The Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium recently identified a direct correlation between arts experiences and both academic achievement and personal development. The research shows that students who are exposed to the arts demonstrate increased overall academic success beyond just test scores, are connected to the world outside of school, and have more self-confidence.
What's more, the report found that training in the arts leads to higher levels of reading acquisition, motivation, extended attention spans, information recall in long-term memory, and understanding of geometric representation. For example, specific pathways in the brain can be identified and improved during performing and visual arts instruction.
Not convinced by the academic research? Then look at the economics.
Germany’s shortage of engineers has become so acute that some of its leading companies are turning to nursery schools to guarantee future supplies.
Industrial giants such as Siemens and Bosch are among hundreds of companies giving materials and money to kindergartens to try to interest children as young as three in technology and science.
Many European countries from Switzerland to Spain suffer shortages of graduates. But the problem is especially acute in Germany, renowned as a land of engineering. German companies have 95,000 vacancies for engineers and only about 40,000 are trained, according to the engineers’ association.
“It is a new development in that we have seen we need to start very early with children. Starting at school is not good enough – we need to help them to understand as early as possible how things work,” said Maria Schumm-Tschauder, head of Siemens’ Generation21 education programme.
March 7, 2008 Meeting [rtf / pdf]. Well worth reading for those interested in the use of Connected Math and Core Plus, among others, in our schools.
A few interesting items:
Mitchell Nathan proposed a change to the name of the Work Group to more authentically describe its intent. There was consensus to accept the change in designation for the Work Group from "Curriculum Review and Research Findings" to “Learning from Curricula."
"Addresses the misconception that there is one curriculum. There are a number of curricula at play, with the exception of the narrowing down at the middle school level, but teachers are also drawing from supplementary materials. There are a range of pathways for math experiences. The work plan would give an overview by level of program of what exists. "
"Could say that variety is good for children to have places to plug into. Could expand on the normative idea of purchasing commercial curricula vs. richer, in-house materials. Standards tell the teachers what needs to be taught. Published materials often are missing some aspect of the standards. District tries to define core resources; guides that help people with classroom organization." Fascinating, given the move toward one size fits all in high school, such as English 9 and 10.
"Want to include a summary of the NRC report that came out in favor of Connected Math but was not conclusive—cannot control for teacher effects, positive effects of all curricula, etc. "
"Would like to give some portrayal of the opportunities for accelerated performance -- want to document informal ways things are made available for differentiation. "
"Include elementary math targeted at middle school, e.g., Math Masters. There is information out there to address the Math Masters program and its effect on student achievement."
"Data are available to conclude that there is equity in terms of resources"
"District will have trend data, including the period when Connected Math was implemented, and control for changes in demographics and see if there was a change. No way to link students who took the WKCE with a particular curriculum experience (ed: some years ago, I recall a teacher asked Administration at a PTO meeting whether they would track students who took Singapore Math at the Elementary level: "No"). That kind of data table has to be built, including controls and something to match teacher quality. May recommend that not worth looking at WKCE scores of CM (Connected Math) student or a case study is worth doing. "
The Parent Survey will be mailed to the homes of 1500 parents of students across all grades currently enrolled in MMSD math classes. The Teacher Survey will be conducted via the district’s web site using the Infinite Campus System.
One recent report, young Americans don't write well.
In a survey, Internet language -- abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging -- seeping into academic writing.
But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending death of the English sentence.
Librarian of CongressJames Billington, for one. "I see creeping inarticulateness," he says, and the demise of the basic component of human communication: the sentence.
This assault on the lowly -- and mighty -- sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.
He has a point. The sentence itself is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something happens in a sentence. Without subjects, there are no heroes or villains. Without verbs, there is no action. Without objects, nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or created.
It's apparent from The Times editorial, "Hope for Locke High,” and two previous articles why this newspaper deserves its poor reputation among local educators and informed community members when it comes to public education. A runaway bureaucracy, top-down authoritarian school administrations and a decided lack of collaboration are the real issues. It's too bad that they remain hidden behind The Times' blame-the-bad-teacher cries and charter-school cheerleading.
Can we at least talk about the real problem, the state budget, for a moment? Because California is one of the largest economies in the world, it's a crime that the state ranks among the lowest in per-pupil spending and has such large teacher-student ratios. It would make sense to give a much greater financial priority to public education. What we don't spend on now, we will have to spend much more on later. Incarceration, healthcare and welfare already cost our society too much.
Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines (who really should be called the superintendent in light of the vacant leadership of David L. Brewer) was clear and correct in taking responsibility for the latest outburst of violence at Locke High School. The Los Angeles Unified School District has "abdicated [its] responsibility” for too many years at a host of schools in inner-city Los Angeles. Years of inexperienced or despotic administrators have helped drive excellent, experienced teachers away. A lack of true collaboration with teachers and parents, turning a blind eye to the collective bargaining agreement and ignoring student-centered reforms lowered morale. When teachers aren't valued, they try to find places where they are.
Madison's team: Marshaun Hall, Maria Lee and Carrie Zellmer. The team was coached by Cherokee Middle School's Learning Coordinator Jeff Horney. Enis Ragland, founding President of the Madison chapter and Ken Black, current President of the 100 Black Men of Madison accompanied the team (a team from Madison Memorial High School competed in the Senior Division).
Finally, this photo of the Madison team notifying friends and loved ones that they advanced to the finals provides a useful look at the zeitgeist of a 14 year old, circa 2008.
From Wisconsin Heights on the west to Marshall on the east, 10 Dane County school districts and the private Eagle School in Fitchburg are among more than 170 Wisconsin public and private school systems purchasing tests from Northwest Evaluation Association, a nonprofit group based in the state of Oregon.
The aim of those tests, known as Measures of Academic Progress, and others purchased from other vendors, is to give educators, students and parents more information about students ' strengths and weaknesses. Officials at these districts say the cost, about $12 per student per year for MAP tests, is a good investment.
The tests ' popularity also reflects widespread frustration over the state 's $10 million testing program, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.
Critics say that WKCE, which is used to hold schools accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law, fails to provide adequate data to help improve the teaching methods and curriculum used in the classrooms.
They complain that because the tests are administered just once a year, and it takes nearly six months to receive the results, the information arrives in May -- too late to be of use to teachers during the school year.
The testing controversy is "a healthy debate, " said Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, whose agency contends that there 's room for both WKCE and MAP.
....
"It 's a test that we feel is much more relevant to assisting students and helping them with their skills development, " said Mike Hensgen, director of curriculum and instruction for the Waunakee School District, who acknowledges he 's a radical in his dislike of WKCE.
"To me, the WKCE is not rigorous enough. When a kid sees he 's proficient, ' he thinks he 's fine. "
Hensgen contends that the WKCE, which is based on the state 's academic content for each grade level, does a poor job of depicting what elite students, and students performing at the bottom level, really know.
The Waunakee School Board, in a letter being distributed this month, is urging state legislators and education officials to find ways to dump WKCE in favor of MAP and tests from ACT and other vendors.
At what point does a publicly funded charter school with strong Islamic ties cross the line and inappropriately promote religion?
That's a question now facing us in Minnesota. For the past five years, the Tarek ibn Ziyad AcademyBritannica, in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., has operated in close connection with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota. The school accepts public funds, and thus the broader constitutional requirements placed on all public schools. Nonetheless, in many ways it behaves like a religious school.
The school is named for the Muslim general who conquered Spain in the eighth century. It shares a building with a mosque and the headquarters of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota. The cafeteria serves Halal food. Arabic is a required subject. There is a break for midday prayers.
On Fridays, many students join with Muslim teachers and attend religious services in the school's gym. There are voluntary Islamic Studies classes held "after" school, but before the buses leave to take the school's 400 students home. Most of the students are the children of low-income Muslim immigrants.
The question of the week is: Which camp is Barack Obama in?
His advisers run the gamut, and the answer depends in part on what month it is. Back in October 2005, Obama gave a phenomenal education speech in which he seemed to ally with the reformers. Then, as the campaign heated up, he shifted over to pure union orthodoxy, ripping into accountability and testing in a speech in New Hampshire in a way that essentially gutted the reformist case. Then, on May 28 in Colorado, he delivered another major education speech in which he shifted back in a more ambiguous direction.
In that Colorado speech, he opened with a compelling indictment of America’s school systems. Then he argued that the single most important factor in shaping student achievement is the quality of the teachers. This seemed to direct him in the reformist camp’s direction, which has made them happy.
But when you look at the actual proposals Obama offers, he’s doesn’t really address the core issues. He’s for the vast panoply of pre-K and after-school programs that most of us are for. But the crucial issues are: What do you do with teachers and administrators who are failing? How rigorously do you enforce accountability? Obama doesn’t engage the thorny, substantive matters that separate the two camps.
He proposes dozens of programs to build on top of the current system, but it’s not clear that he would challenge it. He’s all carrot, no stick. He’s politically astute — giving everybody the impression he’s on their side — but substantively vague. Change just isn’t that easy.
Obama endorses many good ideas and is more specific than the McCain campaign, which hasn’t even reported for duty on education. But his education remarks give the impression of a candidate who wants to be for big change without actually incurring the political costs inherent in that enterprise.
I agree with virtually everything Web Hutchins wrote questioning the value of the test-based WASL, Advanced Placement and the very real value of small class sizes ["Test-based education is shortchanging students," Times, guest commentary, June 11]. He does leave out a few things, however.
I've always thought that the education lobby has resisted teacher-competency evaluation to the point that testing students with the WASL has become the alternative to testing and evaluating teachers. What does education certification really mean? It certainly doesn't mean competence in the classroom. Why is the education lobby so afraid of giving parents more choice in the selection of schools and teachers? I don't think it's about classroom size.
D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and education officials marked the first anniversary of his takeover of the city's beleaguered public schools yesterday by listing a series of improvements, mainly in business functions and school facilities, and outlined their goal of improving student achievement in the second year.
School system officials acknowledge that the efforts, while serving as a foundation for better instruction, probably will show little immediate effect on performance, as rated on test scores due later this summer.
A five-page, mostly single-spaced handout detailed 46 initiatives. They include a new textbook distribution system, refurbished high school athletic fields, spruced-up buildings, more art and music teachers and digitized personnel files that eliminated 4.6 million documents in disarray.
This week's summit — as sponsors call it — of Jeb Bush'sFoundation for Excellence in Education might seem like a mere "school choice" pep rally with a bonus excursion to the Magic Kingdom, but it's happening at a time when the Legislature has decimated school funding. Moreover, this is an election year.
Headliners at the conference at the Disney World Contemporary Resort include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a slew of usual suspects from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, plus Barbara Bush and state Sen. Dan Webster, whose valedictory piece of legislation was a resolution instructing Floridians to pray away hurricanes on June 1.
And, of course, Jeb Bush himself.
Three of the nine amendments Floridians will vote on this November will determine the course of public education in this state. Amendment 5 (Clusty / Google) gets rid of local property taxes designated for schools, requiring the Legislature to raise sales taxes or perform some other voodoo economics to make up the funding gap. Amendments 7 (Clusty / Google) and 9 (Clusty / Google) would demolish Florida's separation of church and state and repeal the part of the Constitution that calls for a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education." The state would simply be obligated to provide education "fulfilled at a minimum and not exclusively" by public schools.
Out of office ain't out of power — Amendments 7 and 9 come courtesy of Jeb Bush and his band of true believers.
Diane Roberts is professor of English at Florida State University.
For its advancement placement courses and high test stores, PCS was named California's top charter school in 2006, followed by rankings in two national news magazines as a top U.S. charter school and public high school. But Goldenkranz's departure is one of many big changes to hit the school of nearly 440 students in what has become a sweeping period of transition.
In April, a fractured board voted to support increasing enrollment over the next few years as a way to increase ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, as well as create more revenue for teacher salaries. Goldenkranz supported the growth, as did a majority of the school's 31 faculty members.
In May, Santa Cruz City Schools announced the district and PCS had failed to reach accord on renewing the school's lease. PCS officials said the district wanted the school to more than double its current annual $200,000 lease payments.
Ross said the nine-year-old school, which educates grades seven through 12, is preparing a Proposition 39 request of the district to provide facilities for the 71 percent of PCS students who live within its boundaries. PCS has waived its rights under Prop. 39 for the past five years in order to keep all of its students together, but now says it can't afford the market rates the district wants to charge.
District supporters say the school could pull from its healthy reserves to pay more rent or buy a building. According to records at the county education office, PCS currently has a $1.2 million ending fund balance, equal to more than a third of its overall $3 million 2007-08 operating budget.
Watkins said he unsuccessfully encouraged the district to work out an arrangement to allow the school to stay put.
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Instead of flinging mortar boards into the air, students playfully batted around a beach ball. "Pomp and Circumstance" was replaced by an all-staff rendition of Crosby Stills Nash and Young's "Teach Your Children." One student even replaced the traditional cap and gown with a tie-dyed bandana, peace sign T-shirt and pearl white blazer.
It was just another normal graduation for Shabazz City High School (Map).
The school honored its graduates Thursday night in an informal ceremony where teachers described their students' strengths and most memorable experiences. All 36 graduates were given time to speak their mind and thank the teachers and parents who helped them along the way.
"I learned so much more here than at any other school I've ever been to," said departing senior John Baudhuin in a short speech echoed by many other students. "If I hadn't gone here, there is no way this many doors would be open to me."
From 1991-92 through 2004-05, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled according to Open Doors 2004. Representing an increase of roughly 145%, the raw numbers translate to about 71,000 students in 1991-92 to almost 175,000 in 2004-05.
Many in recent years have steered away from studying in Europe due to the falling dollar. Though most still list places like Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam as their number one choices, sticker shock has many students turning towards other areas of the world.
However, at least two young ladies have followed their dreams of studying abroad in Europe. Emily and Rachel are both graduate students at the University of Amsterdam where they are in the ‘Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ master’s program run by the Cognitive Science Center, Amsterdam (CSCA).
Each has also made the most rare of commitments - neither is doing a simple semester or year abroad. Each has made the commitment to complete an entire degree program in a foreign land.
Gov. Bobby Jindal moved one step closer Wednesday to final approval for a $10 million pilot program that would pay private school tuition for some children in Orleans Parish public schools.
The 25-12 Senate vote sends House Bill 1347 by Rep. Austin Badon, D-New Orleans, back to the lower chamber for its reconsideration. Some form of the measure, one of Jindal's top legislative priorities, is now certain to reach the governor's desk, with the plan slated to start this fall.
The vote represents another victory for social conservatives since Jindal took office in January. The grants also would pierce a philosophical veil, adding Louisiana to the list of states willing to direct public money to private K-12 schools.
Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, called that a great victory for 1,500 children who she said are more important than doctrinaire allegiance to public schools.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hasn't said much about how to fix America's schools. But an adviser yesterday said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee supports using federal dollars for teacher merit pay and wants to change the No Child Left Behind law championed by President Bush.
Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona superintendent of public instruction and a McCain education policy adviser, said McCain wants annual testing to stay, and that schools would continue to be required to report those scores. But she said he wants educators to have more say in how to fix struggling schools.
"The federal government cannot position itself continually as the bully in this," Keegan told a group of reporters today at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit involved in education reform. "No more will we say that's what 50 states are going to do, because he doesn't believe that's our best hope for improvement."
Minneapolis schools are hoping a new cooperative agreement with African-American parents will smooth some of the hard feelings over school closings last year and help close the district's student achievement gap.
The idea is for black parents to help get their children ready to learn while the school district works with parents to help the kids succeed.
On average, black kids in Minneapolis schools do about half as well as their white classmates. They get disciplined more often. They get fewer diplomas.
That education gap has been the source of an increasingly bitter struggle in the city, but a group of parents and the school board have decided to call a truce.
The district voted Tuesday, to work with parents on what they're calling a memorandum of agreement. It's modeled on other agreements, like a pact with the NAACP and St. Paul Police and American Indian families and Minneapolis schools.
With the recent news about Salem-Keizer's talented and gifted program under scrutiny again, I would like to commend the parents for their continual push and voice. Too often, important issues in education are dropped because the matters are not repeatedly brought to light.
Gifted students deserve appropriate learning opportunities and academic challenges so that they may become talented. We certainly reward competent athletes. It would be unthinkable to eliminate varsity or college football; we value the process of preparing professionals. Should we not then strive to add to our society highly talented artists, exceptional engineers, literary geniuses and the like?
School districts do not worry about their gifted students because from them, districts get better attendance, great test scores and graduates. School leaders view the parents as an annoyance and tune out their voices whenever possible. Yet the message has been sent and stands clear: Gifted and talented students are a special population needing special services.
What happens to bright, active learners when they aren't challenged is they challenge the system. The underperforming gifted and talented become intellectually depressed in an academic environment that fails to challenge them. They are the "too smart for their own good" students who can pass every test without doing any of the time-filling work created to fill mandatory seat time.
When a gifted learner senses that learning opportunities are absent, he or she responds with challenging behavior. Wouldn't it be wiser for teachers to be in the place of challenging learners rather than creating and managing challenging behaviors?
Again, district and schools respond to the needs of gifted and talented learners with blank stares, especially at the high school level. Students who attend, pass state tests and graduate do not arouse the attention of bureaucrats. Teachers cannot implement what is not programmatically available. They need tools, resources and time to challenge learners.
BIG-STATE, social-democratic Sweden seems an odd place to look for a free-market revolution. Yet that is what is under way in the country's schools. Reforms that came into force in 1994 allow pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state's expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself—a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child's age and the school's location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis—there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.
The reforms were controversial, especially within the Social Democratic Party, then in one of its rare spells in opposition. They would have been even more controversial had it been realised just how popular they would prove. In just 14 years the share of Swedish children educated privately has risen from a fraction of a percent to more than 10%.
At the time, it was assumed that most “free” schools would be foreign-language (English, Finnish or Estonian) or religious, or perhaps run by groups of parents in rural areas clubbing together to keep a local school alive. What no one predicted was the emergence of chains of schools. Yet that is where much of the growth in independent education has come from. Sweden's Independent Schools Association has ten members that run more than six schools, and five that run ten or more.
The educational nonprofit was founded in East Palo Alto in 1997 to help low-income students boost their grades, apply to college and obtain scholarships.
Students must apply to the after-school supplement to their high school studies and maintain a 3.0 grade point average. Those who falter are steered into a counseling group called Inspire, which tries, through group chat sessions, to motivate them to try harder.
There's fun, too - summer field trips to Yosemite and Tahoe, because many students have never experienced the outdoors. And tucked into all this is counseling. College Track officials find there are times when they have to cajole parents into allowing their children to attend college out of the Bay Area or out of state. Parents who don't speak English often look to their children as leaders, relying on them for help with translating and enlisting them in child care duties. They want their children close to home.
A group of education and business leaders are trying to improve school boards across Georgia.
This new Commission for School Board Excellence was formed at the request of the State Board of Education. The group includes representatives from the Georgia and Metro Atlanta Chambers of Commerce and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
The new group listed a few places where weak board struggle: micromanagement of staff, poor decision-making and mismanaging money.
These are severe problems. This new group may have good ideas on how to help school boards, but do you think board members will listen to the advice?
High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.
Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.
On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.
“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.
For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.
"Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in," said Mr. Jones. "Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen."
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.
It was after lunch in a social studies classroom at North Shore Middle School in Hartland when seventh-graders began tapping out messages to students in Germany, France, Kosovo and Bosnia on a fleet of shiny Apple laptops.
The modernized electronic version of paper-and-stamp correspondence the children were using, called ePals, is one of several programs being piloted in suburban districts this year as teachers and curriculum coordinators seek ways to extend learning beyond the physical limitations of the classroom.
The next big step, say officials in suburban districts, as well as in Milwaukee Public Schools, is exploring a 1-to-1 student laptop initiative or the possibility of issuing every student a hand-held computer, such as an iPod touch.
"There's a far greater use of technology (in schools) when you make it mobile," MPS Director of Technology Jim Davis said.
Because economists tend to point out things like this, it is not surprising that I was not invited to give a commencement address. But if I had been, my message would have been a simple one.
Don't worry. You made the right decision.
Recent earnings data indicates the essentiality of education. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) annual earnings for Colorado's full-time workers without a high school diploma averaged $25,916 in 2006. For Centennial State residents holding a high school degree only, annual earnings averaged $34,698. Over just 15 years, a (crude) calculation shows the high school diploma is worth about $132,000.
High school graduates are also less likely to live in poverty. CPS data from 2005 indicate 22.1 percent of Colorado's adult population without a high school diploma lived in poverty. By comparison, the state's high school only graduates had poverty rates of 11.6 percent.
CPS Secondary Math Curriculum Coordinator Chip Sharp provided average ACT scores reported by course enrollment which are used in the figures below. Plotting the data in several ways gives food for thought regarding the differences between algebra and integrated math pathways offered at CPS.
The data don't distinguish between which students are sophomores, juniors or seniors when they take the ACT, which students may have repeated courses or what year they started the pathway (7th, 8th or 9th grade). But it does give some idea of how much math "preparation" each course pathway provides at least for the years for which data is available.
I've heard that Madison's Math Task Force will render a report prior to Superintendent Art Rainwater's June 30, 2008 retirement. Related: Math Forum.
pare a thought this morning for teachers whose schools have the lowest results in the country, waking up to a warning from the Government that they have 50 days - 50 days! - to produce an “action plan” or face closure or merger.
Some of these schools may deserve the opprobrium that ministers are inviting us to heap upon them. Many more will not. Most “failing” schools take the toughest kids from the most socially disadvantaged areas. They are not dealing with the problems you and I might be worrying about: whether the curriculum is broad enough for Sophie's myriad interests, or when Jamie will fit in the third language you want him to learn.
These schools are dealing with children with deprived and disruptive family backgrounds many of whom cannot read or write English, lack any positive parental support and have already given up on their chances in life before they walk through the school gates at 11.
One of Britain's leading universities is to introduce an entrance exam for all students applying to study there from 2010 because it believes that A levels no longer provide it with a viable way to select the best students.
Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, London, suggested that grade inflation at A level meant that so many students now got straight As that it had become almost “worthless” as a way of discriminating between the talented and the well drilled.
Last year one in four A-level marks was a grade A and 10 per cent of A-level students achieved at least three As.
“We can't rely on A levels any more. Everybody who applies has got three or four As. They [A levels] are not very useful. The International Baccalaureate is useful but again this is just a benchmark,” Sir Richard said.
In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.
The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.
These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.
If Alegra Holt had $100, she would spend $1 on candy, buy some clothes, give some to charity and see if she had enough left to buy a Chihuahua.
If Alegra had to write a short essay on what she'd do if she had $100, she'd sign on to a program called My Access, using a computer in the basement computer lab of Carleton Elementary School, 4116 W. Silver Spring Drive.
The 10-year-old fifth-grader at Carleton would fill in blanks in a "cluster web" on her screen to begin shaping her essay. From the central idea of using $100, she would put "buy candy" in one branch of the web, with what kind of candy or what store she'd go to in sub-branches, then do the same in other branches for her other plans.
Then she'd begin to type the assignment in sentences and paragraphs.
The elementary school at La Tinaja -- Escuela Primaria 18 de Marzo -- is named after one of the most famous dates in Mexico history. On March 18, 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the country's oil industry, kicking out foreign-owned companies.
Principal Socorro Lara has been at the school 15 years and in the Ocampo municipality 35. She doubles as a teacher. In the mornings, she substitutes, and in the evenings, she teaches kids who are struggling.
There are a total of about 50 schools in Ocampo, and this is the best, municipality education official Jose Juan Salazar says.
One day in August 2005, Dan Swinney went to the Chicago public schools for help in his crusade to revive manufacturing here. Instead, Mr. Swinney left his meeting with some homework: design a new high school to train the workers needed to make that revival happen.
This past fall, the school, Austin Polytechnical Academy, opened inside a building that had once housed a mammoth, violence-prone high school on the city's struggling West Side. Now, Mr. Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, has plans to open two more high schools and an elementary school in other areas of the city.
Mr. Swinney says American manufacturing is adapting to globalization by shifting to higher-value products. But with the baby boomers' looming retirement, the education system isn't producing the workers and managers needed to take over the highly skilled jobs that are most in demand.
"There's a window that's open that will allow us to sustain and expand our competitive advantage, but it's only open for a few years," Mr. Swinney says. Training poor students to fill these positions can "address deep social problems," while giving industry the work force it needs.
On a sunny afternoon recently, half a dozen South Korean mothers came to pick up their children at the Remuera Primary School here, greeting one another warmly in a schoolyard filled with New Zealanders.
The mothers, members of the largest group of foreigners at the public school, were part of what are known in South Korea as “wild geese,” families living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States. The mothers and children live overseas while the fathers live and work in South Korea, flying over to visit a couple of times a year.
Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.
BENEATH the medieval cloisters and bleak 1960s campuses of Europe's universities, the ground is trembling. For years, Europeans have talked of doing something about higher education, so as to prepare better for the “knowledge economy”. But lingering taboos—over tuition fees, private finance, or competition—have inhibited the timid and frustrated the bold. Now, however, there are the first stirrings of genuine change.
The shortcomings of Europe's universities are well-known. Only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) are in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's global top 20. Europeans spend an average of $10,191 per student, measured at purchasing-power parity, next to $22,476 in America. They devote only 1.3% of GDP to higher education, compared with 2.9% in America, and—unlike in America—almost all of it is public money. Only 24% of working-age Europeans have a degree, compared with 39% of Americans. And Europe bags an ever-declining share of Nobel prizes.
I am no match for Chester E. Finn Jr. in a debate. The president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and author of "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik" (Princeton University Press) is feared by many ideological adversaries for his sharp wit and inexhaustible erudition. But I am taking him on anyway in this column because he suggested recently in his own weekly Gadfly column that I was promoting Advanced Placement courses for all students, even those unable or unwilling to handle their difficulties. I thought this would also be a good way to explore the limits of the movement to make high schools more challenging, a very lively issue in our highest-performing schools. Here we go:
Mathews: I want to get to the broader issues pretty quickly, but let's deal first with your wicked poke in my ribs. I don't believe I have ever said AP is for everyone. My view has always been that AP is for far more people than are allowed to, or encouraged to, enroll in AP (and International Baccalaureate) courses. There is lots of data to support this, including College Board analysis of PSAT scores showing two or three times as many people could handle and benefit from AP than actually take the course. Have you got a citation showing I said any such silly thing? If not, please debase yourself with an apology to my readers so we can get to the fascinating topic of how much AP and IB should kids have.
A new report says students in Milwaukee's private choice high schools are much more likely to graduate: Such schools had a graduation rate of 85% last year, compared to 58% in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
In flesh-and-blood terms, that means Babatunde Saaka unexpectedly has a future.
The figures are the latest from what is now a five-year report by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren. Milwaukee students using vouchers are pulling farther ahead. If 2003's MPS freshmen had done as well in 2007 as students in choice schools, there'd be 1,517 more high school graduates in Milwaukee.
That's a theoretical number. In life, graduation is more concrete - do or don't, succeed or fail.
Saaka once expected to fail. When the Milwaukee teen graduates from the Hope School this weekend as part of its first graduating class, he will be the first in his family merely to make it through high school. A young man who grew up in fatherless poverty, he's going on to Wisconsin Lutheran College, planning to become a youth counselor, to make a difference for other poor children.
The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found "kids just watching movies" in classes where "low expectations were the norm."
Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.
For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers -- critics call them opportunists -- seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other's top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.
Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting "The Wealth of Nations" author Adam Smith">Adam Smith -- he of the powdered wig and invisible hand -- flutter over the campus food court.
Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel's 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book's message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.
Next time it rewrites its statewide standardized math test, the state Department of Education might consider this challenging question:
With a statewide high school graduation rate of 58.1 percent in 2005 and an improvement rate of 2.6 percentage points over the previous five years, when can Georgia expect to achieve a 100 percent graduation rate?
Answer: 2110.
One hundred and two years is a long, long time —- too long, in fact. But with the sluggish response of state leaders to holistic and meaningful education reform, accelerating that time frame will be very difficult.
While Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced graduation coaches to identify and deflect potential dropouts in high school, there's far more to be done to reclaim children in the early grades, where most kids wander off track. And rather than whittling away at instructional funding, as Georgia has done in recent years, the state ought to be investing in programs to prepare low-income 3-year-olds for school and to help struggling third-graders learn to read.
To truly transform its low-performing schools, Georgia has to take an honest look at its financial commitment to education. That starts with the governor, who continues to maintain that his administration has not shortchanged education and is, in fact, spending more than ever on a per-pupil basis.
Moneyball tells about a system that did not want to change; of practices held steadfast in tradition; and of how a leader, with the right motivation and insight, innovated for success. So, as this season winds down and you sit watching nine innings, consider these nine lessons for educators drawn from an unlikely place: America’s simple favorite pastime—baseball.
1. Don’t go for the home runs … just get on base and the rest will come. Beane didn’t win baseball games by hoping for home runs. Home runs are rare, and hope doesn’t win games. He understood that individual players don’t win games; teams do—when they work together in a process of creating runs. In education, we identify isolated strategies that we hope will be our home runs. But experience tells us that a better approach is to get solidly and clearly “on base.” Then, the system can work, each piece supporting the other, stepping up when necessary and stepping back to “sacrifice” if that is what will win the game. The only way the system can work is if everyone buys in and does his or her part.
2. Money is important, but it is not the answer. Beane had to spend his team’s meager $40 million wisely; other clubs had several times that amount. So he set out to identify ways he could use his money more efficiently. As Lewis writes, “[I]n professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.” Instead of investing in one big star, Beane sought out those players who were regularly and consistently getting on base (see lesson one). We in education need to find ways to get on base. Small steps are enough if they are consistent and well informed. The smartest strategies don’t necessarily cost the most money. Indeed, some of them don’t cost anything at all.
One constant cry in the debate over educational reform is that we must save our public schools. But proponents of that argument assume that a public school system must be exactly what we have today: schools clustered in districts governed by centralized bureaucracies that oversee every detail of what goes on in individual schools, from budgets to personnel to curricula. That's like saying that our steel industry should center on open-hearth furnaces and giant corporations rather than the nimble mini-mills that have largely superseded them. Let's agree, for argument, that a public school system is a good thing: but why should it look just like it does today—which is what it looked like 50 years ago?
There's nothing sacrosanct, after all, about the current structure of our public education system. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century, when a geographical community would club together to hire and pay a teacher and later, when things got more complicated, would tax property to provide a local school and then appoint or elect a few people to a small board that would oversee it and hire its teacher. As the communities grew into towns and cities, it seemed logical to expand the governing mechanisms already in place. Tiny school boards slowly swelled into today's bloated and dysfunctional school districts, responsible for running not one but 5 or 25 or 50 schools.
If we want to save the public schools, we mustn't confuse the ideal of public education—that every child has the right to a good K-12 education at public expense—with any particular system, including the one we've got. Surely we can come up with a modernized definition of public education fit for a new millennium. In Arizona, where I'm Superintendent of Public Instruction, that's just what we're trying to achieve. Our new approach, aimed at shifting power from bureaucrats to students and families, has three key, equally essential parts: student-centered funding, parental choice, and tough, objectively measurable, standards.
Start with student-centered funding. In Arizona, we've all but replaced an older and more typical system, in which school districts assess and use local property taxes to fund schools, with one in which the state raises the money (including for capital construction) through a statewide tax, straps an equal amount of it to each student's back, and releases it only when he walks into the school of his choice.
Today's district is a rigid command-and-control system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don't like the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them. Moreover, like the Soviet Union with its five-year plans, the districts do a poor job of management, for the reason F. A. Hayek pointed out: command-and-control systems suffer from an information deficit. How can a distant district office bureaucrat know how to run a school better than the principals and teachers who work there? Too often, the district just lays down a single set of policies to govern all its schools, imposing one-size-fits-all curricula and disciplinary policies on schools that may have very different needs. The system also seems impervious to reform from within. In my experience, those who join district boards, even those who start out reform-minded, eerily become co-opted and wind up defending the system tooth and nail. It's just like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
If you need an additional reason to abolish the traditional property-tax funding system, consider this: it's unfair. Funding education through local property taxes is deeply regressive. It lets rich districts spend more per pupil, at much lower tax rates, than poor districts. After all, a rich district's citizens who pay $3,000 per year on their $300,000 houses are paying 10 percent in taxes; the poor district's citizens who pay $1,200 on their $100,000 houses are paying 12 percent.
The Green Bay School District, currently run by incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad spent $11,441 per student ($232,232,000 total budget) in 2006/2007 while Madison spent $12,422 per student ($329,596,000 total budget) during the same period according to School Facts 2007 by WISTAX.
A few other interesting comparisons between the Districts (2006/2007):
To anyone casually observing the two in an effort to divine differences between the candidates, the disagreements seemed small.
Both Obama and McCain believe in rigorous standards and rich curricula to help students compete in a global economy. Century even suggested that American kids should be "trilingual," not just bilingual, to compete with the rest of the world.
Both candidates support publicly funded, but privately run, charter schools.
For now at least, both oppose using taxpayer dollars for large-scale voucher programs. (In a later session with reporters, though, Keegan pointed out that McCain actually supported the push in 2003 for a small-scale voucher that now operates in Washington, D.C., public schools. She added that if a state asked McCain to support a voucher program, "he might be supportive." But she said he doesn't currently support changing the provisions of No Child Left Behind to allow for private school vouchers. Currently, students in under-performing schools can get taxpayer dollars for free tutoring or transfer to a better-performing public school.)
Speaking of No Child Left Behind, both candidates would tweak it in ways that, for the most part, only education wonks can appreciate. They'd both fund it differently. Keegan says McCain would figure out more efficient, focused ways to spend what she says is NCLB's "unprecedented" increase in funding to schools. Century says Obama believes NCLB "was insufficiently funded and poorly implemented."
They both bemoan the law's inability to ensure that low-income children get high-quality teachers and they'd both push for so-called "value added" provisions that would give schools credit for test score gains that children make each year, even if all children don't meet a pre-set proficiency goal in reading or math.
This bothers the Finnish government. “As a country that thinks its future is purely dependent on its know-how, we cannot afford average results in universities,” says Jyrki Katainen (pictured), the finance minister.
This is my last appointment before I fly back to London, and Mr Katainen is telling me that his government thinks greater independence and a bit of capital may help the country's universities to specialise and innovate. So it has offered any universities willing to set up charitable foundations a deal too good to refuse: any money they raise by 2010, the government will top up by 2.5 times as much.
Finland is hardly the only country worried about the global reputation of its universities. As with schools, the advent of international rankings has made list-watchers of everyone. The Shanghai Jiao Tong and THE rankings are enormously important both for universities, which are increasingly reliant on international students, and for countries, who take their positions on the charts quite seriously.
In honor of RFK on the 40th anniversary of his death, I offer excerpts from the transcripts of the hearings on ESEA in 1965. RFK called for accountability among educators and proposed national testing to make sure that those receiving federal funds were using it improve student learning.
He proposed NCLB 35 years before Bush did. To be fair, NCLB is just the reauthorization of ESEA with a new name.
It was conceived to send federal dollars to offer more educational opportunities to disadvantaged students, and was packaged as part of LBJ's larger War on Poverty. Student failure in school was linked to adult poverty, so Congress got to work to pass Johnson's bill to help educate poor kids.
This is from the hearing on ESEA, by the Senate Education subcommittee, 89th Congress. Congress was considering whether to spend an additional $1 billion in the following year to improve education, which would double federal spending on schools. Most of the additional money would go to Title I.
Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
"I didn't see this happening," she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
"We had sworn that we'd never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid," Olsky.
via a kind reader's email - David A. Mittell, Jr., a fascinating look at the political sausage making and special interests behind, or blocking school "reform":
THE (Deval) PATRICK administration is big on reform when it comes to organizational charts, which in the to and fro of politics are accidents of history; are aesthetically displeasing to social scientists; and more often than not downright inefficient. It is the last point that deserves attention. The Patrick administration seems partly inhabited by people concerned with the second point and partly by people impatient for more power to do what they want by direct administrative order, rather than having to cajole semi-autonomous boards and authorities.
Mitt Romney had plans along the same lines and was pleased with himself when, early in his term, he was able to persuade the legislature to eliminate the notoriously inefficient Metropolitan District Commission and transfer its functions to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. How much actual efficiency was achieved is debatable.
Mr. Romney also tried to eliminate the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. As a Republican governor he had no chance of eradicating this termites' nest, despite its many public failings. Thereafter, wisely, he resolved to do what he could with the rusty tools that hehad. The danger of persisting in trying to clean up the flow chart in the face of political opposition was that, even had he succeeded to some extent, he would have spent his whole term doing it. Redirectin the mission of state government would have been lost.
With more than a third of his own term gone by, Mr. Patrick faces the same conundrum. He too wants to put the Turnpike Authority and all other transportation-related agencies under his direct control. That will need a column of its own. Here I want to deal with his partly completed effort to put all education-related agencies under his control.
That's not my list and I do not endorse it. But the evidence to date is that the critics have the politics right. Not only does Governor Patrick seem to be moving to quash some of the most hopeful aspects of education reform, appointed minions are acting on his behalf in petty and vindictive ways:
On Feb.12, the legislature approved exhuming the corpse of a cabinet-level secretariat of education, which, with good reason, Gov. William Weld had persuaded the legislature to bury in 1996. The old education secretariat -- created with the idea of giving the governor clear line-authority to get things done -- had become a static extra layer of bureaucracy that got in the way of getting things done. The "corpse," which had only been alternately hibernating and estivating for 12 years, has been resuscitated with the same noble words about "action" that were spoken at its first founding.
On Jan. 17, after a long search, the Board of Education approved Mitchell Chester to be commissioner, succeeding the retired David Driscoll. He was chosen over two other finalists, including Karla Baehr, who was the clear favorite of education insiders. Later, on March 10, by an executive order, Governor Patrick stripped the Board of Education of its 170-year-old independence -- dating to its founder, Horace Mann -- and put it under the authority of the resuscitated education secretariat. He also enlarged its membership, packing it with his own people.
Unlike the Turnpike Authority, the Board of Education was not made up of "termites." Its members were distinguished gubernatorial appointees of both parties and different points of view. If ever there was a board that didn't need the bureaucratic shuffle dance, this was it.
From the beginning, activists from the Patrick gubernatorial campaign seemed to have it in for the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability. Created in 2001, operating on a $2.97 million budget, EQA served as an independent monitor of the progress of public schools spending almost $9 billion a year in state and local funds. Last year it was phased out in the budget and is currently in limbo. On April 11, its director, Joseph Rappa, was asked to leave a meeting of the governor's Educational Management Audit Council so it could go into executive session. A majority of three Patrick-appointed members then voted to fire him.
Mr. Rappa's contract was expiring anyway, and he was perfectly prepared to move on without in any way embarrassing the governor. But on April 16, as he was cleaning out his Ashburton Place office, in Boston, the governor's Education Advisers Office got into the act. Sydney Asbury and Michele Norman of that office had two State Police troopers eyeball Mr. Rappa as he cleaned out his desk, and then escort him out of the building. Thanks to these two goons (the bureaucrats, not the troopers), the public is assured that Mr. Rappa did not take any of the people's pencils.
On May 6, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings came to Boston to mark National Charter Schools Week and visit the successful Edward Brooke Charter School, in Roslindale, founded in 2002 and named after the former Republican senator from Massachusetts. Governor Patrick could not fit her into his schedule and did not attend a meeting with top state education officials chaired by Paul Reville, the incoming secretary of the no-longer hibernating cabinet-level Department of Education.
In an hour-long roundtable discussion the term "charter schools" did not come up, despite their being the reason for Secretary Spellings's visit to Boston. Nor did Secretary-designate Reville see fit to call on Commissioner-designate Mitchell Chester, who was on a telephone hook-up. It appears likely that this capable outsider is going to be shunned by the embittered friends of Karla Baehr.
So it goes. These are political games, and I here use the words child and student for the first time in this column. For their better being we must fear.
David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal's editorial board.
An article that got some attention in Japan last week was this one (in Japanese), which says the Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe urged employees to show self-restraint and stop the wasteful practice of using PowerPoint for the creation of documents (what I call slideuments). The CEO made this statement while talking about the need to reduce costs at Toyota. He is reminding employees to be cost conscious and he used the practice of using PowerPoint as an example of waste. Watanabe said that (in the good old days?) they used to use one piece of paper to make a clear point or proposal, or to summarize an issue, but now everything is in PowerPoint, he says, which uses many sheets of paper and expensive colors...but it's a waste. The CEO is not saying that PowerPoint is necessarily harmful (he does not mention its use for actual presentations), but he is saying printed "documents" made with the presentation tool tend to have less content, less clarity, and yet use more paper/ink and take more time. In the context of a challenging economy and an atmosphere of reducing costs, what would you say of any business practice that (1) takes more time, (2) costs more money, and yet (3) appears to be less effective? In the spirit of kaizen (continuous improvement), even if the waste is small, it must be eliminated.
Many forces are at work in the dumbing-down of the world: censorship, historical amnesia, the collapse of general education, doctrinaire domination of the airwaves and other media outlets, the spread of religious fundamentalism, creationism, and other forms of ignorance.
Microsoft’s market-leading “slideware”—software that produces virtual transparencies for use in public presentations—is responsible for “trillions of slides each year,” writes the statistician, publisher, and design guru Edward R. Tufte in his provocative booklet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And not just any old slides. PowerPoint’s popular templates, Tufte argues, are responsible for an explosion in useless data stupidly displayed, for these ready-made designs “usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”
TEN years to the day after California banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama Botones”, she intones—“the clown's name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a question in English, she responds in Spanish. It is an improbable scene. But the abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody expected.
Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other subjects in their native tongue (usually Spanish) while they gently made the transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have since followed suit.
In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.
Jay Greene is dubious about Response To Intervention -- trying to educate children well so they’re not diagnosed as learning disabled — because he thinks schools have an incentive to put kids in special ed.
Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.
THE OECD's PISA studies are exhibit A for the excellence of Finland’s schools. Finland routinely comes top, or occasionally second, in tests every three years of 15-year-olds' abilities in reading, mathematics and science. It is impressive, but the suspicious-minded (or perhaps just the begrudgers?) wonder if it is really all down to brilliant schools.
I have a suspicion of my own. When I lived in Finland in the 1990s I learnt rather little Finnish (they speak great English, and I'm lazy), but I learnt to read words and say them correctly in about half an hour. Each letter corresponds to one sound, and only one; there are no exceptions and no combinations of letters that make different sounds, like “sh” or “th”. If a letter is repeated, it is simply said for twice as long. Is it, perhaps, just easier to learn to read and write in Finland than practically anywhere else?
There is a school on Milwaukee's near south side that should be a beacon of light to the many schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools that are having trouble keeping about 50% of their students in attendance and graduating.
It is Notre Dame Middle School, a Catholic school for girls in fifth through eighth grade. I tutored there for almost two years, and it was a great experience.
The school accepts Hispanic girls from that area who have spent the first few years of elementary school at MPS. Few come from what could be called "advantaged" homes. Most struggle with their studies. Many of them speak only Spanish at home because that is the only language their parents know. Then they must adjust to English the next morning when they return to school.
In spite of these challenges, the school shows an impressive record, with 96% of the girls graduating from high school after they leave Notre Dame and 76% of those continuing with a post-secondary education. How do they do it when more advantaged students drop out of school rather than apply themselves
When a local businessman asked teacher Dick Anderson if his woods technology students could build a covered bridge, Anderson said "sure.''
He envisioned an ornamental garden structure.
Instead, what the client wanted — and what the high school students built — is a 14-ton, 44-foot long timber-frame covered bridge that spans a ravine and can carry fully loaded trucks.
A partnership between a city farm and a Milwaukee trade school will build an urban agricultural training space atop a "green" garage in the Riverwest neighborhood, complete with year-round, rooftop garden.
The project, called Growing Spaces, is a joint venture of the non-profit farm Growing Power Inc., 5500 West Silver Spring Road, and Bradley Tech High School, 700 S. 4th St. Details are to be announced at a 3 p.m. press conference today at the school.
Bradley Tech seniors in carpentry, electrical and plumbing classes will build the 3.5-bay garage beside a private home in Riverwest, starting in the fall. The homeowner, Kate Halfwassen, will coordinate the project and lease the garage back to Growing Power in what amounts to at least a five-year donation of the space, Halfwassen said Tuesday.
I AM feeling nostalgic. I spent two years in Finland in the late 1990s on a European Union post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland, and haven't been back since. I wonder how much things will have changed—the country had only just joined the European Union back then, and has since joined the euro and experienced an economic boom.
First stop this morning is Kulosaari comprehensive school, in a suburb of Helsinki. Finnish comprehensives teach children from seven to 16; after that almost all youngsters spend another three years in either grammar or vocational schools.
Kulosaari school is lovely. The children are calm (far calmer than those at my son's primary school in Cambridge, England) and talk to adults respectfully, but as equals.
Dan Wood, from Maidstone in England, one of two native English speakers on the staff, teaches children in the school's bilingual programme. He has been in Finland for ten years now, and has no intention of leaving. “My mum works in a school at home,” he tells me. “I really just don’t want to go back to that system, the stress of school inspections.”
The Seattle School Board approved a five-year plan Wednesday that sets specific targets for raising test scores, graduation rates and even the number of credits earned by ninth-graders.
By 2012, for example, the district wants 88 percent of third-graders to pass reading on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, and 95 percent of the 10th-graders to do the same. Some of the most ambitious goals are in math and science, especially a passage rate of 80 percent on the science section of the 10th-grade WASL. In spring 2007, 33 percent passed.
To reach those and other goals, the plan calls for everything from better math and science instruction, to more consistency in what's taught from school to school, more tests to track student progress, and hiring teachers earlier so classes don't start the year with substitutes.
District officials have described the goals as ambitious, but achievable. And some of the most ambitious ones simply match what's required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or reflect increasingly tough graduation requirements for high-school students.
Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson at Wednesday's School Board meeting said her plan doesn't cover everything, but that a strategic plan is meant to focus on "deficits."
I SPEND my second day in Sweden with representatives of Kunskapsskolan, Sweden's biggest chain of independent schools (it has 21 secondaries and 9 gymnasiums). It has recently been awarded a contract to open two “academies”—independent state schools—in London, and I have been intrigued by what I’ve heard about its highly personalised teaching methods.
At Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a few kilometres from the centre of Stockholm, I am met by Christian Wetell, its head teacher, and Kenneth Nyman, the company's regional chief. They explain the “voucher system” from which they make their money. For each pupil the school teaches, it receives from the local government what it would have spent educating the pupil in one of its own schools; in return, independent schools cannot charge anything extra, and must accept all students who apply. Provided schools follow Sweden’s national curriculum, they have wide latitude in their methods and pacing.
Kenneth sheds an interesting light on the thorny comparison with Finland. You have to look, he says, at what sort of students each country’s system wants. Sweden aims to produce socially conscious generalists. The Finnish system, by contrast, drives rather narrowly at academic success.
A small but growing number of schools are using experimental therapies to retrain students' hearing and vision, in essence reteaching them to hear and see. It's a bid to reverse problems with the ability to focus and learn brought on by years of excessive TV, poor nutrition and, for some, in vitro drug exposure.
At Gordon Parks Elementary School, a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., 60% of kindergartners in 2004 failed a visual-skills test. Most had 20/20 vision, but they struggled to focus on moving objects, track lines of print and refocus from near to far.
That fall, Gordon Parks began regular lessons in visual skills. Therapist Cheryl Steffenella says dangerous neighborhoods and the ubiquity of TV and video games means many of her students "aren't doing kid things" — climbing trees, jumping and running — that help develop visual and motor skills. Even playing video games that require a lot of eye movement exercises children's vision minimally, she says.
The results for the WKCE test administered in November 2007 were finally released on May 30th. That is more than six months after the test was given. Worse, the data files containing the detailed results that can be used for proper statistical analysis of the results are STILL not available for download. Assessments are information that degrades over time. The fact that it takes six months to get the data out (whatever its other shortcomings) cheats the taxpayers of the full value of their investment.
At the very least the WI DPI should be embarrassed by the fact it takes this long to release the test results. Personally I find it outrageous. I had an email exchange with DPI officials concerning this long delay and the loss of value, this is an excerpt from part of that response (italics mine):
... The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.
Does anyone else find the fact that the state issues WKCE results to individual students surprising given the above statement?
The Madison School District, together with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is using local WKCE results for "Value Added Assessment".
Next fall, 26 of the sharpest fifth-grade minds at Potomac Elementary School will study seventh-grade math. The rest of the fifth grade will learn sixth-grade math. Fifth-grade math will be left to the third- and fourth-graders.
Public schools nationwide are working to increase the number of students who study Algebra I, the traditional first-year high school math course, in eighth grade. Many Washington area schools have gone further, pushing large numbers of students two or three years ahead of the grade-level curriculum.
Math study in Montgomery County has evolved from one or two academic paths to many. Acceleration often begins in kindergarten. In a county known for demanding parents, the math push has generated an unexpected backlash. Many parents say children are pushed too far, too fast.
Sixty Montgomery math teachers complained, in a November forum, that students were being led into math classes beyond their abilities.
It was the first week of February, and Jesse Sharkey's students were doing the math.
They were not amused.
Most of his juniors and seniors at Chicago's Senn High School are Barack Obama supporters — Obama is from Chicago, after all. So they wanted to know why Obama, who had won 14 of 22 states on Super Tuesday, had barely scored more delegates than Hillary Clinton.
(Answer: Democrats award delegates based on percentage of votes received.)
And why was he still behind in the total count? And what's a superdelegate anyway?
When it was becoming clear that the tide of World War II was turning, after Battle of Midway, after Battle of Stalingrad, when Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was on the run, an unknown, first-term congressman introduced a resolution that would help shape the post-war world.
The freshman congressman was J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas. His resolution was only one sentence, as "plain as an old hat," said Life magazine at the time: "Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring) that the Congress hereby expresses itself as favoring the creation of appropriate international machinery with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace among the nations of the world, and as favoring participation by the United States therein."
In June of 1943, an isolationist Republican from Ohio, John Vorys, rose to voice his approval, and the resolution was passed. Vorys's conversion marked the beginning of the United States's bipartisan, multilateralist foreign policy that would lead to the forming of the United Nations, reversing America's decision after World War I not to join the League of Nations.
Fulbright, a former Rhodes Scholar and University of Arkansas president, was elected to the Senate the following year. He would go on to become the only senator to vote against the appropriation for Senator Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee, and, afterward, as the longest serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which so ably illuminated the absurdities of the Vietnam War.
Flowing from his early internationalist resolution came the creation of the Fulbright Scholar Program, signed into law by Harry Truman in 1946. It promoted educational exchanges between foreign students and Americans to facilitate "mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world." It is a program I have been involved with over the years.
“This is a prestigious award we have received for the Education Scholastic Tourism Program (Smile) which we launched in 2005 in cooperation with the Ministry of Education,” Prince Sultan ibn Salman, secretary general of the Supreme Commission For Tourism (SCT), told newsmen at a packed press conference at the SCT headquarters held here yesterday to celebrate the award which was given in in Madrid on Wednesday.
The prince formally presented the award to Education Minister Dr. Abdullah Saleh Al-Obeid, whose ministry was instrumental in implementing the program for 150,000 students during the past three years.
Thanking the ministry of education for its unstinted cooperation, the prince recalled that during the past two years, the program — Smile — has covered 150,000 students and 1,800 teachers in 2,700 schools in 42 education department offices. “We want to extend this proven program to another 900,000 students — both boys and girls — in the intermediate and high schools,” Prince Sultan added.
THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds' reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it’s my turn.
And since I'm coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.
Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden’s Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.
In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.
Private religious schools were originally intended to provide a sound secular education to children in their formative years, together with religious instruction and the experience of the life and culture of their faiths. In recent decades, however, as ongoing social and economic challenges have led to the deterioration of the public school system, private schools have been looked to as possible alternatives for educating public school children through such programs as tax-funded school vouchers.
But can these institutions be trusted to provide quality education without bias? In the last half century, Supreme Court opinions discussing public education and the Establishment clause have reflected a general distrust of parochial school systems. Public perception of religious schools has also changed little. The author argues, however, that private religious schools - in particular Catholic schools - have evolved to become more professional, more ecumenical, and more financially transparent, and thus are well positioned to offer viable alternatives to provide quality educational opportunities to public school children. But in order for these programs, such as school vouchers, to succeed, the public must be assured that religious schools will not divert taxpayer dollars into self-interested sectarian purposes.
A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.
Test scores released last week clearly show one of the primary tasks confronting Madison School District 's incoming superintendent, Daniel Nerad:
The district should find more effective ways to educate its rapidly growing populations of foreign-speaking students and lower-income students.
Students from immigrant families and students from lower-income families continue to score low on the annual tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
That 's the chief reason the Madison district fell below the state average in 22 of 23 scores.
Benesse Corp., the nation's largest correspondence study company, launched Friday a preparatory school in Tokyo for high school students aiming to get into Harvard University in the United States.
The move came in response to an increasing demand from high school students keen to attend prestigious overseas colleges.
The preparatory school, named Route H, offers a course on the SAT Reasoning Test--a standardized college admission test in the United States--and includes lessons on how to write a statement of purpose and an essay in English, as well as how to make a good impression during an interview. All the lessons are especially tailored for people striving to enter Harvard.
Harvard University, established in 1936, is known for its excellent research programs. It topped The Times-QS World University Ranking 2007 list, published by The Times Higher Education.
Due to the small number of applicants from Japan, information on admission procedures for prestigious overseas colleges is scarce, according to a Benesse official. But in recent years, the company has received an increasing number of inquiries regarding admission to top-notch colleges abroad, with 30 schools across the nation making inquiries in the last academic year.
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox threw out this year's results, citing a disconnect between test questions, what the state expects students to learn and what teachers taught. About 71 percent of sixth-graders and 76 percent of seventh-graders failed the tests, according to preliminary results.
Middle schools began using the new social studies curriculum this year. The CRCT exams were based on the more rigorous standards.
Cox convened the teachers' panel to recommend improvements to the social studies standards, which she said were too vague. Once the revisions are approved, other committees will revise the social studies CRCT for sixth and seventh grades — a lengthy process that takes between one to two years.
The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. So what am I doing here?
Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”
Words from an e-mail conversation with Rasmussen scroll across my brain as I glance around Lakeside: “Absolutely no doubt … one of the best decisions … that’s how valuable.”
A lot of families are like the Rasmussens. In Seattle, almost one out of four students attends private schools, according to an estimate from Seattle Public Schools. The national average is one in 10.
I’ve talked with the president of Seattle Preparatory School, the mom of a Holy Names Academy student, researchers at the Center on Education Policy and a local education author. They’ve given me a better understanding of why private education is extraordinary and also what public schools do well. Which is better for my kids? For your kids?
I think we've decided where Belle is going to kindergarten. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, she'll be attending our neighborhood school in the fall.
When I last wrote on this subject, we were really torn between the two options, the neighborhood school and the public "Open" school. Since that writing, I did a classroom observation at the Open school, which was required as part of the application process, and liked what I saw overall. I did wish that they hadn't put me in a student teacher classroom, but I suppose that's a reality that is good to observe, too.
We went ahead with being entered in the lottery, and we drew number 45. The lottery was in the end of March, and as of now they are at number 38 on the list. Historically, people who draw numbers in the 40s usually get in, but it can be as late as July or August. So all through April and May, Kevin and I put off discussing the issue because we figured we'd hash it out if/when we got in and there was a decision to make. (Of course, that didn't stop me from getting opinions on both schools from anyone and everyone I could.) We told Belle that there were two schools we were considering for her, and she was OK with it being up in the air.
Big city school boards and superintendents have generally failed to provide the accountability and leadership needed to educate the many disadvantaged children they serve. Mayors and the federal government must take stronger roles in improving urban schools.
In an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy, nothing is more important to the future of cities and to the nation as a whole than education.
America's beleaguered cities cannot rebound without good public schools, now plagued by lack of money, unresponsive bureaucracies, declining enrollments, high dropout and poverty rates, and low academic standards. State and federal contributions to school budgets have not made up for huge inequities in local support.
At their best, public schools give the most disadvantaged children a chance to succeed, but rarely the clear path that children find in affluent districts. More than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case declared segregation unconstitutional, the nation's schools remain practically as unequal as ever -- and in places such as metro Detroit, nearly as segregated as they were in 1950.
When students return to classes in the fall, it'll mark the first time in six decades the Madison School District hasn't offered a program in agricultural education.
And that leaves Mary Klecker, who is retiring after three decades of leading the program, feeling angry.
"As I retire, I feel a strong sense of betrayal by this School District," Klecker wrote in a letter last week to members of the School Board and top state officials.
"It will be a sad end to a wonderful program that provides our students learning and career opportunities for a lifetime."
Fifty-three students are enrolled in agricultural education courses this year at East High School.
The program, which has included courses in introduction to agriculture, animal science, conservation and environmental science, leadership skills with the FFA, and horticulture, attracted more than 200 students at three high schools during its heyday in the mid-1990s.
In her letter and an interview, Klecker railed against district leaders, whom she said "lack a grasp of our state's agricultural heritage" and the importance of agribusiness and "are totally clueless" about related, outstanding programs at Madison Area Technical College and UW-Madison.
Across the nation, charter laws have spawned certain schools that are so successful they’re being replicated in other towns and states.
Nonprofit providers of these nationally acclaimed schools have been wooed and welcomed into communities hungry for better, more-effective options. The best of these models can prove their strategies’ merits with lots of encouraging data, testimonies from happy parents and impressive stories about their successful students.
These networks include the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First and the Green Dot Schools, among others. Pop down to New Haven, Conn., to see the thing of beauty that is the Amistad Academy run by Achievement First. Or drive up to Lynn, Mass., to take in a KIPP.
Can Rhode Island benefit from these proven successes? In a word, no.
Our laws fiercely protect Rhode Island’s educational status quo, as though it were a real treasure like Narragansett Bay or our historical architecture. The protectionist laws make it impossible for outside providers to do business in the state. (One could argue that the state laws make it impossible even for local schools to do business effectively. Certain Rhode Island charter schools are now being crushed by our protectionist culture.)
Take as only one example Rhode Island’s General Law 16-13-6 which cements teacher tenure, seniority and “bumping” into place, leaving Rhode Island administrators little if any control over the quality of their staff. No school providers from saner states can possibly assure us that they can be successful here if they can’t retain the stability of their staff and let ineffective teachers go, when necessary. Longtime Rhode Island residents have been drinking the protectionist Kool-Aid for so long they forget what effective school governance might look like.
SCHOOL LEADERS IN Holyoke are no strangers to finger-wagging state reports on student achievement at the Lynch Middle School. It was eight years ago this month that the state education department first declared the Holyoke school, which has a student-poverty rate of 84 percent, "underperforming." In the years since then, state officials have paid visit after visit to Holyoke, documenting shortcomings in written reports and recording the steps the school was taking to try to address them.
The Lynch was one of the first schools in Massachusetts to earn that unenviable distinction, which is part of the accountability system established by the landmark education reform bill passed in 1993. And today it is still among the 114 schools in the state - nearly all of them serving high-poverty populations - that are officially "underperforming." Of all the schools that have made this list, only nine have been able to climb off of it. Lynch, and many other schools, land on the list and tend to stay there.
Fifteen years into education reform, a growing number of critics charge that the effort has hit a wall. With MCAS, the sometimes controversial achievement test, the state has become quite good at identifying schools where performance is lagging. But it has failed at the crucial next step: fixing the schools.
Just returned from Providence where I spent two days learning about Rhode Island's diploma system, which includes a number of performance-based assessment requirements. Today at Portsmouth High School I saw students present their senior projects to groups of teachers, classmates, and outside community judges. Beginning this year, to graduate, all 200+ seniors at Portsmouth are required to complete a year-long senior project, consisting of the "4Ps" -- a research paper, a tangible product, a process portfolio, and today's oral presentation. Students select their projects, submit a letter of intent, and work closely with a school or community mentor. And, the projects really are diverse. The first student I saw today presented the stage set she'd designed for the school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Another student's project consisted of running a marathon and fundraising to support leukemia research.
The students were, of course, outstanding. But, what surprised me most were my conversations with the principal, teachers, and state officials about the cultural changes that were emerging from the senior project requirement. Roy Seitsinger, Director of RI High School Redesign, was emphatic that this work was "about transformative cultural change."
Zeum is a non-profit multimedia arts and technology museum with a mission to foster creativity and innovation in young people of all backgrounds, communities and learning styles. By providing hands-on experiences in four core creative processes (animation, sound and video production, live performance and visual arts), we encourage youth to share their stories, build their voices, and use multimedia tools for creative self-expression.
Hall of Famer Rod Carew felt right at home Wednesday morning speaking to a group of Temple City High School teachers as part of a traveling education workshop put on by the Hall of Fame, right down to receiving a school hat with a "TC" logo much like his old Minnesota Twins cap as a gift.
Carew told the enthralled group of Southern California educators the story of his life and career, from growing up in Panama, to not making his high school team, to being discovered by a Twins scout on a sandlot field in New York, to becoming an 18-time All-Star elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
Because of his life journey, he often tells kids not to let anybody tell them they can't do something, because anything can happen in life.
"It's OK to dream, because dreams do come true," said Carew, whose career proves that point. "No matter what walk of life you take."
If administrators in the Centennial School District are right, all it takes is a few minutes a day to get many of their struggling readers on track.
The district's five elementary schools are finishing the first year of the Centennial Early Reading Foundations program (CERF), a K-3 literacy initiative created to reduce the number of special education referrals, to lift more students to grade level, and to improve children's social development, through increased small-group instruction and assessment, tailored to each child's needs. Much of the extra work occurs right in the classroom.
"We recognize that literacy is a cornerstone to the success of our children," said Dan Bittman, the district's director of elementary and secondary schools. "Literacy affects achievement in all areas and prepares them for the global world."
Results for statewide testing show an overall upward trend for mathematics, stable scores in reading, and a slight narrowing of several achievement gaps. This three-year trend comes at a time when poverty is continuing to increase among Wisconsin students.
The 434,507 students who took the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE) and the Wisconsin Alternate Assessment for Students with Disabilities (WAA-SwD) this school year showed gains over the past three years in mathematics in six out of seven grades tested. Reading achievement at the elementary, middle, and high school levels was stable over three years. An analysis of all combined grades indicates a narrowing of some achievement gaps by racial/ethnic group.
"These three years of assessment data show some positive trends. While some results point to achievement gains, we must continue our focus on closing achievement gaps and raising achievement for all students," said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster.
But in the Madison School District, just two of the 23 proficiency scores improved, while five were unchanged and 16 declined, according to a Wisconsin State Journal review of the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school year data from the state Department of Public Instruction.
Madison's scores trail the state average in 22 of the 23 scores. Typically the percentage of Madison students attaining proficient or advanced ratings trails the state average by several percentage points.
"The fact that we're able to stay close to the state average as our demographics have made dramatic changes, I think is a positive," said Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater, who added that the district's "strong instructional program" is meeting many of the challenges of immigrant and low-income students while ensuring that "high fliers are still flying high."
A district analysis shows that when the district's students are compared with their peers across the state, a higher percentage of Madison students continue to attain "advanced" proficiency scores — the highest category.
Madison students who aren't from low-income families "continue to outperform their state counterparts," with higher percentages with advanced scores in reading and math at all seven tested grade levels, the district reported.
Rainwater said he's long feared that the district's increasingly needy student population, coupled with the state's revenue limits that regularly force the district to cut programs and services, someday will cause test scores to drop sharply. But so far, he said, the district's scores are higher than would be expected, based on research examining the effects of poverty and limited English abilities on achievement.
This school year, 43 percent of Madison students are from low-income families eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, while 16 percent of students are classified as English language learners — numbers that are far above those of any other Dane County school district.
Rainwater noted that students with limited English abilities receive little help while taking the reading and language arts tests in English.
Reading test scores for Madison students changed little compared to 2006-07, but math results decreased in six of the seven grades tested. Of 23 scores in five topics tested statewide, Madison lagged behind state peers in 22 of 23 of those scores.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater attributes the district's performance and trends to the growing population of English language learners in the district.
Officials now are able to draw upon three years of results since Wisconsin began administering testing to students in grades three through eight and grade 10 in reading and mathematics. Based on state regulations, students in fourth, eighth and 10th grade were also tested in language arts, science and social studies.
But there is little room for debate about what the scores say about the need for improvement in the outcomes for Milwaukee Public Schools students: The gaps between Milwaukee students and the rest of the state remain large, and school improvement efforts of many kinds over the years have not made much of a dent.
The problem is especially vivid when it comes to 10th-graders, the highest grade that is part of Wisconsin's testing system. The gap between sophomores in Milwaukee and those statewide has grown larger over the last two years, and, once again, no more than 40% of 10th-graders in MPS were rated as proficient or better in any of the five areas tested by the state. For math and science, the figure is under 30%.
Back in 1995, when the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV began a civic journalism project to study the racial achievement gaps in our schools, the statistical measures of student achievement and reading in third grade put the issue in sharp focus.
United Way and our community partners' efforts, through a variety of strategies including the Schools of Hope tutoring program, relied on those strong, focused statistics to measure the success of our 1-on-1 and 1-on-2 tutoring.
By 2004, Superintendent Art Rainwater was able to announce the elimination of the racial achievement gap in third grade reading scores, because our community had focused on stable statistical measure for over 10 years.
A standard graduation rate formula would create the same public focus for our nation's efforts to increase high school graduation rates.
On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
Ed Hughes wrote a fascinating piece in 2005 on the local budget, collective bargaining and school climate. The piece includes this gem:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker -- and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member -- believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
As more and more Chinese go to college, U.S. universities are trying to grab a piece of this growing market. Even smaller schools feel they must have some sort of exchange program with Chinese schools. Exchange students were once motivated by a desire to spread international understanding, but now many feel that global education is important to their success in the job market.
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation.
Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and the movement, exhausted by its own rhetoric and disputes within its ranks, sputtered out. It's back.
Spelling reform is currently enjoying a renaissance in the U.S. and Britain. At a time when young people are inventing their own shorthand for email and text messages, the reformers see a fresh opportunity 2 convert people 2 the cause.
In recent years, the ranks of Britain's Spelling Society and the American Literacy Council have swelled from a few stalwart members to more than 500, which in this effort is a lot. Reformers are energized: Some are writing to dictionary editors urging them to include simplified spellings in new editions. Others are organizing academic conferences, including one on June 7 in Coventry, England, on "The Cost of Spelling." The American Literacy Council just allocated $45,000 of its $250,000 private endowment to develop a series of DVDs using simplified spelling to teach English to international students. The Spelling Society has hired its first publicist.
Students have 2 million minutes—the time from the beginning of eighth grade to high school graduation—to build the intellectual foundation they'll need for professional success. That's the premise of a new documentary, Two Million Minutes, that's making waves in education and political circles.
The film tracks six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. The Indian and Chinese students work diligently on math and science, while the American students work hard but appear less focused and leave plenty of time for video games and social lives. The message is that because of our education system, we're getting left behind.
Two Million Minutes provides a provocative glimpse of the global competition now facing U.S. students. And the conclusion many are drawing is that to keep our edge, our children need to study more math and science and work harder. It is true that the U.S. education system should be improved; that's essential for economic success.
But the solution isn't for us to become just like our new competitors. We need to do what we do better.
On June 30th, Art Rainwater is stepping down as superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
It's a position the 65-year-old never expected to fill, in Madison or anywhere else.
"My only career goal was to be a high school football coach," says Rainwater.
He was in 1965. Rainwater's career kicked off in Arkansas. The teacher-coach then moved to Texas. Next, Rainwater took a principal job in Alabama. His path eventually led to administrative work in Missouri. Then, in 1994, Rainwater became deputy superintendent in Wisconsin's Capitol City.
"I've served at almost every level of the K-12 education system that you can serve," he says.
In 1998, he added interim superintendent to his resume, replacing Cheryl Wilhoyte. During her tenure the district hit plenty of road bumps. Tensions were high.
"I think there was a lot of dissatisfaction, across the community, with the school district, at that time," says Rainwater. "So, the damage control was pretty obvious, (it) was going to happen."
Rainwater came in with three immediate goals. Smooth things over with the teachers union. Repair the district's relationship with the UW. And, gain the support of the business community.
"I thought by doing those three things, it would put the new superintendent, in place, to come in and hit the ground running," he adds.
Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues have just published the results of a study which suggests that culture explains most of the difference in maths, at least. In this week's Science, they show that the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains.
Dr Guiso took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Some 276,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries sat the same maths and reading tests. The researchers compared the results, by country, with each other and with a number of different measures of social sexual equality. One measure was the World Economic Forum's gender-gap index, which reflects economic and political opportunities, education and well-being for women. Another was based on an index of cultural attitudes towards women. A third was the rate of female economic activity in a country, and the fourth measure looked at women's political participation.
Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound (ELS) is a comprehensive K-12 educational design. Our approach combines rigorous academic content and real world projects -- learning expeditions -- with active teaching and community service. The ELS design focuses on teaching in an engaging way. Faculty members receive intensive professional development in curriculum, teaching practices, and building a strong school culture. Expeditionary Learning is now being implemented in over 140 urban, rural, and suburban schools.
The original bill required only "a statement of the level of support" for the plan by school employees, students and parents, and the community. The amended bill requires a four-part test of support among various constituencies: "a majority of administrators," "a majority of teachers" and a "majority of the school advisory council," plus "a statement of the level of support" among other school employees, students and parents, and the surrounding community.
The amendments add a requirement to the application process - a description of the elements of any collective bargaining agreement that would need to be waived for an innovation plan to work.
Second (really) big change
The original bill gave innovation schools blanket exemption from laws and rules on: performance evaluations, authority of principals, employment of teachers, transfer of teachers, dismissal of teachers, salary schedules, teacher licensing and teacher salary payment.
All of that was struck by the amendments and replaced with language allowing a school board to waive any requirements deemed necessary to an innovation plan, except provisions of the school finance law, the exceptional children's educational act, data requirements necessary for School Accountability Reports, laws requiring criminal background checks of employees and the children's Internet protection act. (The original language barred any waivers of CSAP and No Child Left Behind requirements, and those remain in the bill.)
Third (really) big change
The original bill allowed innovation schools to be removed from a district's entire collective bargaining agreement by a vote of a majority of the personnel at the affected school or schools.
The amendments require "waiver of one or more of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement" (italics added) to be approved by vote of "at least sixty percent of the members of the collective bargain unit who are employed at the innovation school."
We have a simple (but not easy) mission: Revolution education.
Our goal is to create a platform to allow live learning to take place over the Internet anytime from anywhere.
Most importantly...for anyone. We’re the first people (we know) to create something that’s totally open and community-driven (rather than closed and transaction-driven).
We’re excited to create tools for people to teach and learn what they love in ways they never imagined possible.
If changing the world is your thing and you’re as passionate about education and learning as we are, please get in touch.
There is certainly a revolution underway in education - largely occurring outside the traditional school models. Innovation always starts at the edges, in this case homeschooling, and non-traditional school leaders and teachers. Much more on technology & education here.
"We get 100,000 students a year, aged from 3 to postgraduates," says Patrick Spottiswoode, the Globe's education director, "and at our busiest, we have 800 in a day. Children often arrive bored and cynical, but once they’ve been introduced to Shakespeare, they become animated and positive." His PA, Adrienne Gillam, sees it for herself: "It’s wonderful to watch an audience of kids come alive," she says.
The education programme is run by 23 members of staff with the help of 60 freelancers, usually actors who have been specially trained in each year group’s syllabus and can help students of all ages to create a production in less than a day.
The events have come a long way since 1984 when Patrick arrived — by coincidence, on Shakespeare’s birthday. He recalls: "I was working on a PhD and decided to take a year off, but 24 years later, I'm still here. There were only two members of staff, and the job advertisement was for someone to run an arts centre, museum and cafe. In reality, I started the arts centre with L200 of my own books, the museum was in a leaking warehouse and the cafe consisted of a kettle."
Obama backed into his answer, praising charter schools and suggesting the federal government encourage innovation both by the president's "bully pulpit" and by advertising "best practices" for schools to observe and emulate.
But, he went on, "this has always been a problem when it comes to education reform policies. There are always good schools in every state, in every school district and at every income level. You can go into every state and you can point to one school or five schools or ten schools that are doing a great job of educating their kids. The question we have to figure out is how do we scale up? How do we take the lessons of a great school like MESA, and have a hundred good schools like MESA?
"And there are a lot of ingredients to that, but probably the biggest challenge is making sure that we've got great educational leaders, both teachers and principals, in those schools and we've got to produce more and more of those.
During the question and answer period, Obama was asked about bilingual education, especially given current climate of immigration. Obama believes that everyone should be bilingual or even “trilingual.” “When we as a society do a really bad job teaching foreign languages – it is costing us when it comes to being competitive in a global marketplace,” he said.
He was also asked about the federal government’s role in a world of charter schools and the success of private foundations on small school public education, such as the school where he was appearing. Obama immediately expressed his support for charter schools, citing the importance of “innovation at the local level.” But Obama treaded lightly, saying that there are always good schools in every state. Earlier in his speech, Obama referred to the ongoing teacher talks in Denver. Dozens of teachers in two different public schools called in sick in opposition to their ongoing contract negotiations.
At the Wednesday event, Obama regurgitated the (inaccurate) slam that NCLB relies on a "a single, high-stakes test," according to this report (Obama tours Colorado school, touts education plans EdWeek) and did the whole curriculum narrowing thing, too, about which I have my doubts.
He's also proposing a national service-type thing that to my eye looks an awful lot like a federal version of TFA. Just what schools (and school reform) doesn't need -- more FNG short-timers making everyone feel good about high-need schools (Full text of Obama's education speech). Yeah, I'm against that.
Bob Nicholson can make the sun rise in the west, the stars come out at noon and the moon wax and wane with his whims.
"I will show you what the sky will look like on your last day of fifth grade," the 56-year-old educator told students gathered one afternoon this month in the domed planetarium at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.
"This is not only a space machine," he continued, "it's a time machine."
Open-mouthed, the Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy fifth-graders stared up as the sun suddenly took Nicholson's cue, rising and setting on the course it would take June 19, the last day of school.
Gwinnett County Schools began to prepare teachers for higher than normal failure rates on the standardized math exam for middle-schoolers long before the state announced the troubled scores.
Tougher standards made the new middle school math section of the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test more challenging for students. New curriculum changes also proved to be more difficult for some educators to teach and students to grasp.
When you have a new assessment on a new curriculum you usually anticipate that you will have a dip in performance," said Sloan Roach, spokesperson for Gwinnett Schools.
Planning ahead for problems, Gwinnett administrators asked more middle school teachers than usual to stick around for summer school, so the district wouldn't be overwhelmed by eighth-graders seeking help in math. Eighth-graders are required to pass the CRCT for promotion to high school.
A father from Thailand recently observed the power of international exchange programs in an e-mail to Wisconsin staff about his daughter's visit to the state: "She has learned many things and felt very connected to her host, friends and you. I think this is the best part of this program: to get people to know each other, understand each other and feel that they belong to the same family. It is very amazing that only few weeks can make this strong relationship."
Another opportunity to build international relationships is now here. Schools and districts have until June 6 to apply to host visiting teachers from Japan this fall.
The Japan-Wisconsin Education Connection, now in its 12th year, gives a select number of K-12 Wisconsin school districts the opportunity to host a talented elementary, junior or senior high school teacher from Japan.
Some parents in the Elmbrook School District have complained about their district's move away from weekly, one-hour early releases to a schedule that dismisses students two hours and 15 minutes earlier than usual less frequently.
Kettle Moraine's plan has yet to be shared with all of the school's parents, said Kotlowski, although she said it has the near unanimous support of teachers.
The school should look into whether it could offer activities to occupy the student body while teachers are meeting as an alternative to sending them home early, Kettle Moraine board member Colin Butler suggested. He said students in Vermont, where he previously served on the school board, were allowed to ski free on the days when they went home early from school.
"Time given away will be very difficult to retrieve later on," Butler said.
It's a late Wednesday morning and these three high school students from Meriden should be hunkered down in the classroom. But here they are, jammed around a digital monitor at the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, fingers hovering over the touchscreen display that morphs scorpions and other critters through evolutionary time.
"Oh, wow," says Alexis Rivera, 16, neck craning and eyes fixed to the screen. "This is crazy."
Rivera was among 40 biology students from Orville H. Platt High School who fanned across the museum last week for a field trip on biodiversity, peering at ecological dioramas and touching interactive displays. To education experts, this is "informal" or "free-choice" science learning, which means it's happening outside of school.
"When we're in class, we can say, 'Do you know that bird, the so-and-so?'" says Walt Zientek, the school's special-education teacher for science. He is standing in the dimmed exhibit hall on Connecticut birds as his students weave their way through the museum's three floors.
Pennsylvania is taking steps to make gifted education available to more students, but that has done little to quell long-standing tension between parents and school districts over how the state's brightest are educated.
The proposed changes on course to become final this summer make clear that districts must use more than an IQ score to identify gifted students - as most other states do.
The state sets a 130 IQ as the trigger for gifted education and allows districts to choose the other criteria, such as teacher recommendations and classroom work.
Just how much impact the clarification will have is uncertain. State officials had no estimate of how many more students would be identified or the potential cost to districts.
While most area school administrators interviewed said they already use more than an IQ score to evaluate students, education advocates disagree.
Journalists, particularly me, tend to get excited about charter schools, the independently run public schools that have produced -- at least in some cases -- major improvements in achievement for children from low-income families. The charter educators I write about are often young, energetic, witty, noble and pretty much irresistible. But their charter schools, which use tax dollars with little oversight, are relatively new and untried. Like all experiments, they could easily fizzle.
That is the point of a short, readable and fact-filled new book, "Keeping the Promise? The Debate over Charter Schools," available for $16.95 at http://rethinkingschools.org. The seven chapters make the best case I have ever read for a skeptical attitude toward the nation's 4,000 charter schools. For reasons I will explain, it did not change my view of charters, but it should spark, as the subtitle says, a thought-provoking debate.
A second round of results comparing high school graduation figures for Milwaukee Public Schools and a group of private schools in the city's publicly funded voucher program has reached the same conclusion as a report issued in January: Students who attend voucher schools are more likely to graduate than those who attend MPS.
The second report, issued today, adds data for the class of 2007 to its figures. The earlier report had figures for the classes of 2003 through 2006.
The report was funded by and released by School Choice Wisconsin, the main organization for advocacy for Milwaukee's voucher program, which is the oldest and largest of its kind in the United States. About 19,000 students attended about 120 private schools in the city this year, with public funds of up to $6,501 per student going to the schools.
The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.
In retrospect, professors who must have disagreed fundamentally with works such as David Donald's "Lincoln Reconsidered" (with its celebrated explanation of the abolitionists' contempt for Lincoln in terms of the loss of status of their fathers' once-privileged social group) assigned them for our open-minded academic consideration. My professor of Tudor-Stuart history, emerging from the bitter Oxbridge debates over explanations of the English Civil War in terms of class conflict, assigned Jack Hexter's stunning "Reappraisals in Social History" to us. When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor's own prior work, he replied, "You're absolutely correct." These were not uncommon experiences in Princeton's classrooms, and I knew, then and there, that I wanted both to do history and to teach.
The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing to examine a recent report released by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel on the state of math education and instruction in the United States. Among other things, the report found that the nation's system for teaching math is "broken and must be fixed" if the U.S. wants to maintain its competitive edge.
Skip Fennel's wide ranging testimony can be read here [66K PDF]:
However, I would add that at a time of teacher surplus at the elementary school level, it is perhaps time to scrap the model of elementary teacher as generalist. Why not have specifically trained elementary mathematics specialists starting from day one of their career? Our country can’t wait until such specialists are graduate students.
SEED Maryland was admitting boys and girls beginning in sixth grade. They will live in a dormitory — insulated from the turmoil of their neighborhoods. In Washington, nearly all SEED graduates have gone on to four-year colleges, including Princeton and Georgetown.
Because its schools are financed by both private and public funds, SEED can offer this once-in-a-lifetime, small-class-size, prep-school education for free, but it can’t cherry-pick its students. It has to be open to anyone who applies. The problem is that too many people apply, so it has to choose them by public lottery. SEED Maryland got more than 300 applications for 80 places.
The families all crowded into the Notre Dame auditorium, clutching their lottery numbers like rosaries. On stage, there were two of those cages they use in church-sponsored bingo games. Each ping-pong ball bore the lottery number of a student applicant. One by one, a lottery volunteer would crank the bingo cage, a ping-pong ball would roll out, the number would be read and someone in the audience would shriek with joy, while everyone else slumped just a little bit lower. One fewer place left ...
One morning, students at Walbridge School used their fingers to trace letters representing sounds in a mix of sand and sparkling glitter on a paper plate.
When a student was squeamish about the task, he asked if he could trace with a pen instead of his finger.
This lesson is an example of the multisensory approach taken by Walbridge School, which was founded in 1986. The private, nonprofit school enrolls children in grades 1 through 8 at 7035 Old Sauk Road on the Far West Side.
"We teach children who learn differently, who cannot succeed with traditional ways of learning," said Gary Lewis, head of the school.
The primary concerns for students at Walbridge are learning issues rather than behavioral, he said. Some have specific disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and attention deficit disorder.
Some students have other concerns such as confusion over space and time.
The "Ed in '08" campaign got $60 million to try to make education a prominent issue in the race for the White House. Former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, the chairman of the nonprofit in charge of the project, talks with Ari Shapiro about why the topic hasn't been high on the candidates' radar.
Here at the Forum we have long bemoaned the lack of data with which to measure the success of Milwaukee's various education reform efforts. From the 32-year-old Chapter 220 integration program to the 10-year-old open enrollment program (not to mention the 18-year-old private school choice program), our policymakers have become expert at funding reform programs long-term without measuring their effectiveness at improving student achievement.
It turns out we're not alone. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district's pre-K Bright Beginnings program, which later became a model for a similar statewide program, was passed with the promise of better middle and high school outcomes. However, the inaugural class of Bright Beginnings preschoolers is now part of the high school freshman class and the district cannot say whether they are doing better than their peers who did not attend preschool.
What kind of reforms are you planning for the district?
The budget crisis is not over. We've got to look at closing small schools. There are 40 with enrollments under 400.
How would you help the district's poorest-performing schools?
I'd like to look at lowering class size to an average of 15 (students) in grades kindergarten, one and two at 10 to 15 of our most impacted schools. Some of these schools have a tremendous mobility factor; I'd to treat them like magnets and provide busing if (students) move, as many of them often do for various reasons, so they can continue at the same school.
What about the rest of the district?
I want schools to have flexibility. But one thing I think – and research says – all schools could benefit from is creating a sense of community by keeping cohorts of children together in kindergarten, first and second grades.
What about high schools?
I'd like every high school to offer at least 10 Advanced Placement courses. It's not ethical to deny some students access to this curriculum.
I got it from the whirling blades of the latest helicopter parents to hover over my head now that the semester is inexorably subsiding like a California mudslide into the onslaught of finality which is known as "end of semester" time.
The question before us, ladies and gentlemen, is if it possible for Sugarplum to increase his semester average 8 percentage points in the next six school days. Never mind that Sugarplum has never come within sniffing distance of the grade that this parent has suddenly just plucked out of the ether as their "dream grade."
Sugarplum has come to after school help sessions 4 times over the entire year. I speak to Sugarplum every single day after class for at least five minutes-- or for as long as I can take his whining about how something is "not fair!" or his wheedling for me to increase his grade on the latest assignment because he "tried really hard"-- as I have my planning period and Sugarplum has lunch. Never mind that I have to repeat every single thing I say to Sugarplum, and yet he still tells his mom that I never told him about deadlines. I actually like Sugarplum, since if you haven't gotten to the point that you can tolerate this behavior, you would go batty as a teacher. But liking Sugarplum and buying the crock he's selling are two different things.
Leibovitz told the graduates of Corcoran to keep their eyes open.
"The artistic process is still about seeing. Things don't stop unfolding in front of you. As you go out in the world, keep in mind the possibilities," she said.
The photography majors, in particular, leave school with a new sense of perspective.
"Everything starts to look different through the lens," Anthony said.
The best thing about her education, she said, was the exposure -- to new ideas, new techniques, new artists.
The work of Leibovitz, Richard Avedon and other commercial photographers is usually the first thing photography students see, Anthony said, the first thing that gets them excited about the field. At school, Anthony learned about edgier, lesser-known artists, and she experimented with color and interactive pieces.
For some board members, though, it came down to process and a different educational approach. The prevailing side wants grammar taught separately instead of incorporating it in the context of writing.
We believe you need to know those skills first, and then you can incorporate them into your writing," said member Terri Leo, R-Spring. "We feel the other side thinks that you are going to learn things by osmosis, by just writing."
The existing approach is not adequately preparing students for college, Leo said, noting the significant need for remedial work necessary before college students acquire basic writing skills.
Board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, said neither approach is particularly wrong nor right. "But you are going to vote for the one you believe in," he said.
Leo said she and other board members represent more than teacher groups.
"My district, for the most part, supports going back to those basic skills," she said.
The board voted unanimously in March on a tentative plan, calling for teachers and others to improve a document published in the Texas Register, which serves as the official bulletin of state agency rule-making.
Jennifer Glickman, a 17-year-old high school junior, gets so stressed some days from overwork and lack of sleep that she feels sick to her stomach and gets painful headaches.
A straight-A student, she recently announced at a college preparatory meeting with her mother and guidance counselor that she doesn't want to apply to Princeton and the other Ivy League schools that her counselor thinks she could get into.
"My mom wants me to look at Ivy League schools, but my high school years have been so stressful that I don't want to deal with that in college," says Ms. Glickman. "I don't want it to be such a competitive atmosphere. I don't want to put myself in this situation again."
High school has long been enshrined in popular culture -- from the musical "Grease" to television shows like "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Friday Night Lights" -- as a time of classes, sports and overwrought adolescent drama. But these days, junior year is the worst year in high school for many ambitious students aiming for elite and increasingly selective colleges -- a crucible of academic pressure.
ACLU Lawsuit Against Kentucky Single Sex Classrooms
WORT's 8 o'clock Buzz: Emily Marton of the ACLU on Sex Segregation in the Classroom Kentucky Public School. 30MB mp3 audio file. Interesting interview. Discussion topics include the lack of data to support the success of sex segregation in the classroom, curriculum reduction, and that "a lot of people would be shocked if they knew what their local school systems were doing". Much more on the ACLU's lawsuit here.
On behalf of five families, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Kentucky filed an amended complaint in federal court today charging that segregating classes by sex Breckinridge County Middle School is illegal and discriminatory. The ACLU’s lawsuit expands a previous lawsuit filed by a private attorney against the Breckinridge County School District and other county entities to include the U.S. Department of Education.
“The Breckinridge County sex-segregated classrooms are not only unlawful because they deny boys and girls equal opportunities in education these kinds of experimental programs are also misguided in that they distract from efforts that we know can improve all students' education like improved funding, smaller classes, more parental involvement and better trained teachers," said Emily Martin, Deputy Director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project.
When I left Eton College, aged 17 in 1975, the headmaster Michael McCrum, a remote figure who had had very little impact on our lives over the past five years, presented each of us with a signed copy of the poems of Thomas Gray. At the time it seemed one of the most meaningless of the many arcane rituals and traditions that gave the school its peculiar flavour (the wearing of Victorian undertakers’ dress, the playing of bizarre games involving walls and mud, the private language).
Gray, author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, wasn’t even the best old Etonian poet. But unfortunately Percy Bysshe Shelley was a rebel, an atheist and a proto-socialist advocate of free love – not the sort of man whose poems you hand out to teenagers.
But Gray did write “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”, the poem that distils nostalgia for a carefree adolescence spent rowing and playing cricket near those “distant spires” and “antique towers which crown the watery glade”. The ode ends with the famous lines, “Where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise,” which seem an unlikely advertising slogan for an expensive and exclusive seat of learning.
Venture capitalists are chasing hot areas with planet-scale problems: energy, water, global warming. Industry legends, including John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, have become prominent spokesman for the issues and have pumped huge sums of capital into these markets.
In our enthusiasm for green, however, there's a forgotten society and industry segment that remains woefully unaddressed--namely, education.
With the advent of social media, and with the revival of entrepreneurship and investments in consumer Internet services, technology-enabled education looks like a huge opportunity for wealth creation.
Why have entrepreneurs and investors ignored education? "The market is relatively tough to crack due to its seasonal nature and the dysfunctional sales cycle which results in wary investors," says Edward Fields, chief executive of HotChalk, a free online community application that aims to connect teachers, students and parents from kindergarten through grade 12. Unlike many other efforts, HotChalk seems to be getting real traction.
For two-plus years, the monopoly known as College Board has plagued my life. Whether it was the PSAT, AP tests, or the SAT, I have found myself preparing for, resting for or stressing over the tests this company convinces students they need to take. But last Thursday, I faced my last examination administered by College Board.
I was not sure exactly what to expect when I walked out of the AP literature exam. I didn’t know how I would feel when I finished that test, and my relationship with College Board. I didn’t know what I would do with my spare time, if not constantly checking the site for my scores.
But when I woke from my boredom-induced sleep (largely because of the three essays I was forced to write) and it was time to head out to an early lunch, I felt little of the relief that I expected.
The AB/IB Committee, co-chaired by Drs. Prendergast and Bacotti, and comprised of administrators, teachers and three parents, conducted a comprehensive study of the current AP program and researched the possibility of implementing the IB program. They then compared the two and presented their recommendations to the Board.
"It is clear that some of the issues that we realize are out there with AP programs may in fact be addressed by a rigorous IB program," said School Board President Kenneth Monaghan. He gave the example of the study of world language. Many students do not pursue foreign language study at the AP level because the course and exam are recognized to be extremely difficult and students are concerned with how it might affect their overall grade point average.
"It's not that the AP program is irrelevant. It's not," he continued. "Nor is it a matter of whether or not the IB program is more relevant. The question is whether or not the two together, or in combination, may balance out each other's shortcomings and help us devise a program which has greater relevance for our students going forward, in particular for the vast majority of our students who are going on to collegiate work. We want to make sure that they are as prepared as possible."
The committee will take their research to the next level by establishing contacts with other high-performing districts that are offering the IB program and expanding the number of parents on the committee. Committee members plan to attend a Guild of IB Schools of the Northeast orientation seminar in Commack on June 7th and file an official "Intent to Apply" interest form with the International Baccalaureate Organization. After they file the interest form, teachers and administrators will be allowed to attend professional development Level 1 workshops. The committee will report back to the Board in the fall.
alifornia's nearly half-million African American students often get lost in the state's policy debates about improving student achievement, in part because they represent less than 8% of the K-12 student population. This 24-page report asks:
How are African American students in California's public school system doing?
What do we know about how and where these students are succeeding academically?
The report finds that although the academic achievement of the state's African American students is improving, California educators and policymakers still have much to do to ensure that these students are served more effectively and consistently within the K-12 system. But the report also finds good reason to hope that this is possible. Behind the state-level numbers, African American student achievement varies widely across California districts and schools, with these students doing well academically in many places.
Do you know the difference between an "alleged father" and a "presumed father?" Your child soon will.
The Texas attorney general's office has created a new parenting curriculum that will be required in every public high school this fall. It will cover everything from the legalese of paternity to dealing with relationship violence.
State officials say the goal is twofold: They want to teach teenage parents their legal rights and they want to show other students the difficulties of being a parent in hopes that they'll wait to have children.
The program, which has already drawn some skepticism, promises to bring personal and family values out of the home and into the classroom.
The question to a focus group of Dunbar High students was: What did they like best about going to school there?
"Freedom," said one who takes Advanced Placement classes at the school in Northwest Washington. "We can do whatever we want at this school. That's the only good thing about this place."
At Green Elementary School in Southeast, one child urged: "Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know."
"They let us struggle," a student at Lincoln Middle School in Northwest said of the teachers. "They let you know you are failing, but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school."
A couple of weeks ago in these pages, Marc Eisen had some harsh words for the work of the Madison school district's Equity Task Force ("When Policy Trumps Results," 5/2/09). As a new school board member, I too have some doubts about the utility of the task force's report. Perhaps it's to be expected that while Eisen's concerns touch on theory and rhetoric, mine are focused more on the nitty-gritty of decision making.
The smart and dedicated members of the Equity Task Force were assigned an impossible task: detailing an equity policy for me and other board members to follow. Equity is such a critical and nuanced consideration in school board decisions that, to be blunt, I'm not going to let any individual or group tell me what to do.
I am unwilling to delegate my responsibility to exercise my judgment on equity issues to a task force, no matter how impressive the group. Just as one school board cannot bind a future school board's policymaking, I don't think that the deliberations of a task force can restrict my exercise of independent judgment.
Admittedly, the task force faced a difficult challenge. It was obligated by the nature of its assignment to discuss equity issues in the abstract and offer up broad statements of principle.
Not surprisingly, most of the recommendations fall into the "of course" category. These include "Distribute resources based on student needs" and "Foster high academic expectations for all students." I agree.
The Washington Teachers' Union is discussing a proposed three-year contract from the school system that would eliminate seniority, giving Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee more control in filling vacancies, a union member familiar with the talks said yesterday.
Without seniority, Rhee could place teachers based on qualifications or performance rather than years of service, said the union member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. The union member said Rhee sought the provision as a recruiting tool so she could offer talented candidates the position of their choice. She would be able to fill positions with less experienced teachers.
Under the proposed contract, teachers would give up seniority in exchange for annual raises of about 6 percent, more personal-leave days and more money for supplies, the union member said. In the last contract, which expired in the fall, teachers received a 10 percent raise over two years.
Rhee "does want to infuse some new blood [into the schools]. She wants to make it attractive for young people coming in to advance," said the union member, adding that the union's negotiating team will meet with her tomorrow or Friday. "We've come to realize we're going to have to give in to her."
The nearest alternative to the Higher School Certificate is the International Baccalaureate. Though it is expensive and considered exclusive, it proposes a wider programme.
LBIS is committed to offer its students an environment and a pedagogy that promotes interaction between pupils. They are not judged on comparison with others but on their own capacities.
Our secondary education system has been under continuous criticism as being too bookish, and not training young people to think out of the box and not preparing them both for university or working life. Out of the 189 secondary schools in Mauritius, only two - Northfields International High School and Le Bocage International School (LBIS) - offer an alternative programme for the last two years of secondary, which leads to the International Baccalaureate (IB). The only hitch is that it is very expensive and out of reach for many parents. The entry fee to LBIS is Rs 40 000 and the monthly school fees amount to Rs 10 000 while at Northfields, the fees are quite similar
The West Bend School Board, chastened by a two-to-one defeat of its $119 million referendum for improved facilities, is seeking input from the community on how to go forward.
To their credit, district leaders have done that all along. But they still missed the mark on gauging what the community wanted.
One thing is clear: just coming back at a slightly reduced total will probably not work. The margin of defeat was too large. So, some creative thinking is needed.
My own guess is that the referendum failed on two counts: its sheer size in dollars was too much for taxpayers to swallow and it lacked vision.
It’s hard to get excited about bricks, mortar and maintenance, necessary as they are.
It would be exciting, though, to come up with a program of study that would allow our young people to compete better in the globalizing world.
A stunning new book, "The Post-American World," by Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek columnist and perhaps the most insightful journalist in the country, outlines the challenges facing the United States and its next generations.
He calls it "The Rise of the Rest" and generally says the rise into prosperity of other countries can be a positive for America if we react in the right way.
Over the years, I've had the opportunity to interview hundreds, perhaps thousands, of successful men and women.
I almost always ask the same question: What is it in your life that made the difference? What caused you to end up where you are now, rather than someplace else.
My favorite answer came from a very successful Madison businessman, who spent a few minutes extolling the virtues of hard work and can-do attitude and, then, asked "you do know that I married the owner's daughter, don't you?"
Most often, however, the answer I get is some variation of this: "Well, there was this teacher. . ."
There was this teacher who convinced me that mathematics could be fun. There was this teacher who took the time to help me repair my car. There was this teacher who dug into her own pocket when she observed that I couldn't see the blackboard and bought me a pair of glasses.
Students these days are keen to pursue engineering rather than medicine. A few dream of becoming scientists at an early age, but by the time they grow up, they want to become engineers. "Interest in medicine is falling and students don't want to pursue medicine and rather go for engineering, mainly due to socio-economic reasons," observes Dilip Kumar Bedi, principal, Apeejay School, Pitampura.
Most educators feel that an interest in science education is gradually declining among students. To this end, the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) has recently proposed setting up of a mission, headed by the Prime Minister to transform the entire scenario of science education and research in the country. The commission has suggested that a science and mathematics mission be constituted with a team of 40-50 'brightest of the bright' Indian scientists and mathematicians below the age of 45 years. Furthermore, the NKC said that such an initiative would be effective only if it is launched across the country covering every school, college, university and institution.
When the State Journal this week published the list of the top 4 percent of this year 's graduating seniors from Dane County high schools, girls outnumbered boys by nearly two to one.
That academic gender gap highlights a national problem with costly consequences: Boys are falling behind in the American educational system.
The dominance of girls among high school honors students is only the tip of the problem. The most alarming aspect is the scarcity of men earning college degrees.
Since 1970, the number of women enrolling in college has risen three times faster than the number of men.
Women now receive 60 percent of all associate, bachelor 's and master 's degrees.
Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education presents a comprehensive look at girls’ educational achievement during the past 35 years, paying special attention to the relationship between girls’ and boys’ progress. Analyses of results from national standardized tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the SAT and ACT college entrance examinations, as well as other measures of educational achievement, provide an overall picture of trends in gender equity from elementary school to college and beyond.
LIKE a football coach before a big game, James Carlo, a vice principal at the Newton Street School, ticked off last-minute pointers to a group of 32 middle-school students hunkered silently around folding metal tables in the cafeteria.
Do not waste time. Do not get distracted. Do not get nervous.
“Please, please, please pull up what strength you have and what concentration you have and just attack that test,” Mr. Carlo told the students on a recent Wednesday morning. “It shouldn’t just be all the schools and districts around us that are scoring high on this test.”
As public schools everywhere gear up for the annual state assessments, few others have as much to prove — or as much at stake. Newton, with 500 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, has come under escalating sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law because many of its students have scored below proficiency on the standardized test known as NJ ASK, which covers language arts, math and science. It is one of only 4 schools in this city — and among 38 schools in New Jersey, 57 in New York and 6 in Connecticut — that have missed testing benchmarks for seven consecutive years and now risk being shut down or overhauled if there is no sign of improvement.
In an approach based in Green Bay that has spread down the Lake Michigan shoreline, about 40 Wisconsin districts (though not Madison) belong to a consortium called the Einstein Project, a nonprofit group that buys the kits from publishers, leases them for a nominal fee to schools and arranges teacher training on their use.
Hailed as a national model by the National Science Teachers Association, the Einstein Project began on a shoestring and now has 10 employees, two kit warehouses and a $1 million annual budget supported by the rental fees, year-round fundraising and private and corporate backing.
But critics of the hands-on movement charge that without textbooks and the structured reading, teacher-driven learning and broad memorization of facts that traditionally define classroom science, kids are being short-changed on core knowledge.
A major fight over science curriculum in California got national attention in 2004, as the state weighed a proposal to allow no more than 25 percent of science classroom time for hands-on activities. But in an abrupt reversal after intense debate, the adopted standard reads that at least 25 percent of science classroom time has to be hands-on.
Stanley Metzenberg, an assistant biology professor from California State University-Northridge, said in congressional testimony that reading is critical for scientists and that children are best served through traditional textbooks and teacher-directed instruction.
It starts when you’re in the first grade. All of a sudden, reading is no longer this exciting thing you just figured out how to do, it has become “good for you.” You’re given free books through a program that says Reading Is Fun-damental, way before any of your teachers will tell you what “fundamental” means. Soon after you’re bribed with a free pizza from Pizza Hut if you can finish five whole books. The message is clear: reading is not something you’re supposed to enjoy, it’s something that will make you a better person.
It continues on into adulthood. We’re given continuous updates on the state of reading in our country as if it were the unemployment rate. Orlando Bloom shows up on posters in libraries, holding a book that you’re slightly surprised to see is right side up. “Read!” he tells us. Read, and you can be as effeminate as he is. If you’re the type of person who enjoys reading — and not just enjoys it, but takes four books on a five-hour flight just in case you finish one and then your back up book isn’t as compelling as you thought it would be and the thought of not having reading material fills you with dread — all of this can be confusing. I would get a lot more reading done if you would stop yelling in my ear about how important reading is, thank you very much.
Vietnam is developing the UNICEF 'friendlier school' model to boost primary education
Vietnam will expand UNICEF’s "Friendlier School" model across the nation. The concept, which has already been applied experimentally, has been found to improve educational quality and help students enjoy studying, said Nguyen Thien Nhan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training.
The minister was speaking at a ceremony yesterday to launch a campaign to extend the model developed at Van Phuc secondary school in Ha Dong City in the northern province of Ha Tay.
The model’s purpose is to create a safer, fairer educational environment, attract students to study, ensure their rights and improve teaching quality. Creating an interesting educational environment is focused on keeping students from being bored so that they can enjoy their studies.
"Being friendlier is also a good way of preventing students from leaving schools," said Associate Professor Tran Kieu, former director of the Institute of Educational Sciences.
Recently, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) released a report showing that by March, 2008, about 147,000 students had quit school.
One of the 10 reasons given was the rigid and uninspiring teaching environment that had limited students’ interest in studying.
Esther Jantzen's article, "Literacy begins at home" provides an excellent explanation of what parents can't or won't do by themselves.
However, I greatly fear that, unlike Alexander Pope's warning that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," our leadership prefers a little learning, but not too much. American consumerism supports the oligarchic wealth that rules this country. And a truly well-educated majority, well-versed in history, might threaten the "greed is good" axiom that has enslaved so many by seductive credit options.
The high-stakes state exams measure campus' achievement each year. Getting students to show up is a major concern; dull pencils and the wrong type of scratch paper can create havoc as well.
Five-foot-two Erica O'Brien pushes a tall stack of gray cartons across the floor, straining as if they were full of coal, not tests. The office on the top floor of Banning High School is stuffy, even though it's only 6 a.m. But when the phone rings, O'Brien answers affably.
"Penthouse," she says.
That's what life is like these days for testing coordinators such as O'Brien. After weeks of preparing in the background, they suddenly become the most important person on campus. Students across the state last week took high-stakes standardized tests, which can bring a school glory through improved test scores, or, in the worst-case scenario, state sanctions. To make sure the tests go smoothly, O'Brien distributes tests, sharpens pencils and deals with the unexpected.
There's a note next to her computer screen that reads "Vomit."
"A kid threw up on his test, so we had to find him a new one. Poor guy," O'Brien explained.
Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.
Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.
TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is "establishing Islam in Minnesota." The building also houses a mosque. TIZA's executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.
Today we wrap up our four-part series on education in the Netherlands with a final look at the vocational training track available to students. Whereas in America we continue to try and force feed students of all abilities and interests through a high school program that is almost entirely academic-based, the Dutch school system has created an extremely viable option for students who prefer hands on learning and a career in the skilled trades.
Though we have used the term track to refer to this option, particularly since students are assigned to one of the secondary school options based on test results and performance at the primary level, it should be noted that the model does not mirror American school tracking. Instead of students essentially taking the same classes as they progress through school but being placed in those classes based on ability (the American tracking system), the Dutch offer both different programming and outcome expectations for the various tracks.
There is an understanding that students may not be able to (or for that matter, want to) pursue academics at a university. More importantly, there is an understanding that students who do not attend such a post-secondary option must develop specific labor skills to have some form of work option available to them. Yet, even within that component of studies there is additional delineation between those who will become laborers and those who will become designers, administrators and even company owners.
Learning Latin, attending Catechism and hurrying along draughty corridors to prayer, two dozen boys are experiencing old-fashioned British boarding school life -- deep in the French countryside.
Boxing, folk-dancing and Gregorian chant also figure on the curriculum at Chavagnes International College, a traditional Catholic English boys' boarding school in the Vendee wine-growing region on France's Atlantic coast.
Housed in a 200-year-old former seminary in a region marked by France's wars of religion in the mid-16th century, it says it attracts parents who are disillusioned by the British state school system or the values of modern life.
The fees are also significantly cheaper than in Britain, at 15,000 euros (11,800 pounds) for boarders per year compared with an average of about 22,000 sterling in Britain, according to figures from the Independent Schools Council.
Some Horizon Elementary School students may be eyeing their surroundings differently now.
That's the hope of architect Arlan Kay, who recently presented a program called an Afternoon of Architecture for some third and fifth graders in the Sun Prairie School District. He brought boxes of miniature bricks, blocks, bridge parts and other materials to teach the students about building design and city planning.
Kay told the students they were "architectives" because they were considering architecture as detectives — unlocking the mystery to why buildings are constructed a certain way and look the way they do.
"It's a discovery. They're investigating," he said later. "It's to try and make them look and discover the built world around them."
In an interview afterward, it was clear that Kay succeeded with fifth-grader Annie Benzine.
The Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school's effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
The list below includes all public schools with a rating of 1.000. There are nearly 1,400 -- the top 5 percent of all 27,000 U.S. high schools in encouraging students to take AP, IB or Cambridge tests. Also listed are the name of the city or school district and the percentage of a school's students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches and who also apply for that program. The portion of subsidized-lunch applicants is a rough indicator of a school’s poverty level. High-poverty schools are at a disadvantage in persuading students to take college-level courses, but some on this list have succeeded in doing so anyway.
The Equity and Excellence rate is the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit. The average AP Equity and Excellence rate for all U.S. schools is about 15 percent.
Milwaukee Rufus King ranked highest among the 21 Wisconsin High Schools at #209. The only Madison area high school to make the list is Verona at #808.
This week, Newsweek magazine and its Web site Newsweek.com unveil this year's Top High Schools list, based on a rating system I invented a decade ago called the Challenge Index. The index ranks schools based on college-level course participation, adding up the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-level tests in a given year for a given school, and dividing that total by its number of graduating seniors.
Several weeks ago I asked students, teachers and parents to tell me how this annual ranking affected their schools. Here is a sampling of several points of view, both critical and complimentary.
* * *
So, with regard to your Challenge Index -- it really is a quick and dirty way of assessing schools. Very ambitious and probably very imperfect. However, there isn't anything else out there like it. I think the reason our school systems are not very good compared to other countries is that we underestimate the abilities of our children. I think too the education field is fuzzy -- not very good data or evidence to support the programs that are out there. . . . More and better research is needed. And of course there are the socioeconomic/family issues of some schools/districts that cannot/will not be fixed with just higher expectations.
When principal Debbie Brockett announced a policy last fall of not allowing teachers to issue any score less than 50 to failing students, she thought she was adopting a means of leveling out an unfair grading curve.
To many outraged teachers at Las Vegas High, however, Brockett's plan amounted to fuzzy new math designed to offer unfair assistance to low-achieving students.
They protested, and she backed down. But in the process, both sides stepped into one of the hottest grading debates within academic circles today. Across the USA, education experts and school administrators are trying to determine how and whether to reform grading systems to give failing students a better chance to catch up.
"I made a bad call at the time, going with past experience, and I didn't expect it to become controversial," says Brockett, who had just been promoted from a middle school where her minimum-F policy was in place. "Now it's an ongoing conversation we're having."
Charles M. Payne has been a scholar of urban education long enough to see many fashions of public-school reform come and go. The School of Social Service Administration’s Frank P. Hixon professor, Payne first developed an interest in education in 1969, while a Syracuse University undergraduate. Administrators there, Payne recalls, had brought an inner-city school to campus with a bold, if naive and unfocused, purpose: “to change this.” The program failed to establish a model for effective school reform, Payne says, because “none of us understood how hard this was going to be.”
With a sociology PhD from Northwestern University and 40 years of research and advocacy under his belt, Payne believes that the same core problem—a misunderstanding of the difficulties involved—continues to hinder school-reform efforts. His years as founding director of an education nonprofit in Orange, New Jersey, and studying schools in Chicago and around the world have taught him that the solution to school failure is deep and fundamental. Initiatives that focus on particular grade levels or types of students don’t work, Payne says. In a book out this May, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008), he argues that rather than searching for the silver-bullet program that will turn a school around, would-be reformers must strike at the “culture of failure” that perpetuates dismal school performance.
Question: What is Wisconsin's high school graduation rate?
Answer: About 91 percent, ranking among the top five states in the nation.
Or 86 percent, in the top 10.
Or 77 percent, ranking 11th.
It all depends on who is counting — the state government, the federal government or independent analysts.
Shouldn't there be one straight answer?
Yes.
That's why Congress ought to approve the Bush administration's plan to require all states to calculate graduation rates by the same formula — one endorsed by the National Governors Association in 2005.
A standard graduation rate formula is central to evaluating and solving one of the nation's biggest social problems — the high school dropout rate.
Last week MPs on the education select committee jumped on what might well now be an unstoppable bandwagon and demanded an urgent rethink of the national curriculum tests in primary schools. Terrified by the prospect of a poor league table position, too many schools were, its members argued, force-feeding their pupils. Joy, spontaneity and creativity have been driven from the classroom. Something must be done, and now.
The fact that the problem might lie not with the tests, but with teachers who cannot accept the principle of accountability does not seem to have occurred to the committee. Neither did its members explain how problems in failing schools can be solved if we do not know which schools are failing.
At the moment, children are assessed by teachers in English and maths at seven and sit more formal tests in English, maths and science at 11. Two periods of testing in four years of primary education. What’s wrong, moreover, with some preparation for tests if the tests assess worthwhile skill and knowledge?
At a time when the nation is faced with tough economic challenges at home and ever-increasing competition from abroad, it’s incredible that more is not being done about the poor performance of so many American high schools.
We can’t even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job. Someone please tell me how this is a good thing.
At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa has four positions. He is a neurosurgeon who teaches oncology and neurosurgery, directs a neurosurgery clinic and heads a laboratory studying brain tumors. He also performs nearly 250 brain operations a year. Twenty years ago, Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa, now 40, was an illegal immigrant working in the vegetable fields of the Central Valley in California. He became a citizen in 1997 while at Harvard.
With a meter stick in his hand, Ben Senson instructs his ninth-grade science students on how to calculate formulas for force using levers and fulcrums.
He sketches out an equation on the whiteboard, turns around, adjusts the meter stick on a spring scale and calls for a reading.
"Where do I put the weight for a third-class lever?" the Memorial High school [Map] teacher quizzes.
No one answers.
"Come on, man," Senson cajoles. "We have to pre-read our labs so we know what we're going to do. If you're running short of time, make sure you get the spring scale reading. Do the math later."
Grabbing their lab sheets and purple pens, the freshmen split into groups to complete the assignment for an Integrated Science Program.
"The equations are hard to remember," Shannon Behling, 14, tells a classroom visitor. "It gets confusing." But she sees the value of the assignment: "We may not use this stuff, but it gets your brain to think in a different way."
A Law case in which, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that no state may deny equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction. The decision declared that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. Based on a series of Supreme Court cases argued between 1938 and 1950, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka completed the reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had permitted “separate but equal” public facilities. Strictly speaking, the 1954 decision was limited to the public schools, but it implied that segregation was not permissible in other public facilities.
For nearly a decade, the lesson that the world is interconnected — call it Globalization 101 — has been bandied about as much in education as in economics, spurring a cottage industry of internationally themed schools, feel-good cultural exchanges, model United Nations clubs and heritage festivals.
But the high-performing Herricks school district here in Nassau County, whose student body is more than half Asian, is taking globalization to the graduate level, integrating international studies into every aspect of its curriculum.
A partnership with the Foreign Policy Association has transformed a high-school basement into a place where students produce research papers on North Korea’s nuclear energy program or the Taliban’s role in the opium trade. English teachers have culled reading lists of what they call “dead white men” (think Hawthorne and Hemingway) to make space for Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee and Khaled Hosseini. Gifted fifth graders learn comparative economics by charting the multinational production of a pencil and representing countries in a mock G8 summit.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Odyssey Project held its fifth annual graduation ceremony for its 2007-2008 graduates on May 7. Family, friends, and loved ones gathered at the UW Memorial Union to celebrate the students’ accomplishments and the exciting journey that lies ahead of them.
"This is the beginning of a journey: for some, a journey to college, while others are returning to college," said Odyssey Project Director Professor Emily Auerbach.
The Odyssey Project offers members of the Madison community an opportunity to begin a college education through an intensive, two-semester course. The program’s goal is to provide wider access to college for nontraditional and low-income students by offering a challenging classroom experience, individual support in writing, and assistance in applying for admission to college and for financial aid.
Auerbach said that the Langston Hughes poem "Still Here" embodies this remarkable class’s collective sentiment, after they had spent a year engaged in rigorous study while handling financial and family responsibilities that had previously made a college education seem little more than a dream deferred. "Sometimes you can make a way out of no way. If you open the door to education, you can change lives," Auerbach said.
Re “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores” (news article, May 7):
We’re pleased to see that New Orleans schoolchildren are making academic gains, such as improving their scores on the latest Louisiana Educational Assessment Program.
As your article points out, post-Katrina schools have invested in reforms like intensifying tutorial and after-school programs. These reforms have long been promoted by the United Teachers of New Orleans.
But one should not get the impression that the higher scores are a direct result of importing new teachers to the city. We applaud the efforts of every teacher who has come to work in New Orleans schools. But some of our most successful schools, like Bethune Elementary and Sophie B. Wright, are those that employ the highest percentages of veteran teachers who are familiar with their students’ communities
This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools -- its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.
Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways.
Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.
More than a decade after charter schools became legal in Pennsylvania, it is safe to say the schools, once considered experimental and still sometimes controversial, are here to stay.
About 64,000 students are enrolled in 126 charter schools statewide, and about 20,000 are on charter school waiting lists, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools.
Nearly half of the schools are in Philadelphia. But parents of Western Pennsylvania students -- including 2,355 children living in Pittsburgh -- also have chosen charter schools, which can be bricks-and-mortar buildings or cyber schools.
Their staying power will be in evident this week as the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools, a statewide advocacy and support organization, conducts its state convention at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center, Uptown. The meeting, which began yesterday, runs through tomorrow and is expected to attract more than 1,000 people.
Prince William County, after years of longing, may finally get a selective magnet school to serve as a mini-rival to Fairfax County's prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
The Prince William, Manassas and Manassas Park school systems recently won a $100,000 state grant to design a regional "governor's school" that would open by fall 2010 and specialize in math, science and technology.
The yet-unnamed school, which would have rigorous admissions requirements, would differ in key respects from Thomas Jefferson, a full-day governor's school in the Alexandria section of Fairfax that draws students from across Northern Virginia. Students would still attend neighborhood schools, traveling to the new magnet campus only for high-level classes.
We are proud to announce the national finalists and alternates for the 2008 Wisconsin History Day State Event held on May 3, 2008. The national finalists represented Wisconsin at the national contest June 15-19, 2008 at the University of Maryland - College Park.
The first and second alternate in each category are offered the opportunity to attend the national contest in the event that the finalist entry is unable to attend.
Each finalist designs their entry to reflect the annual theme. The entries below reflect the annual theme for 2008: Conflict and Compromise in History.
This year's local winners: Amanda Snodgrass (Mount Horeb High School), Joanna Weng (Velma Hamilton Middle School), and Alexandra Cohn and David Aeschlimann (Madison West High School). The following students from Eagle School were also winners: Hannah O'Dea, Carolyn Raihala, Sophie Gerdes, Sonia Urquidi, Nate Smith, Jeffrey Zhao and Eli Fessler.
First of all, what exactly is this Haskins Literacy Initiative?
Haskins Literacy Initiative promotes the science of teaching reading in three main ways.First, we provide comprehensive professional development, coaching and classroom support to make teachers masters of effective literacy practices. Teachers, not programs, teach children to read.By becoming informed consumers about the myths and realities of teaching reading, teachers can become "method-proof," knowing what to teach which child when.
Second, we conduct field research about how knowledge and practice impacts student reading achievement.
Our parent, Haskins Laboratories, has conducted more basic reading research for over 40 years.Finally, we engage in advocacy to inform public policy to improve reading achievement for every child.
Reinventing our schools with a greater emphasis on student needs and community engagement is, I believe, one of the most broadly beneficial ways to apply the "think globally, act locally" philosophy. Indeed, many students, parents, teachers, administrators and education experts would probably agree that our education system must be radically retooled to increase its relevance and effectiveness in ways that enable all individuals to prosper in what's already shaping up to be an extremely challenging century.
That was what I and some of my fellow high school students were thinking in 2002, even if we didn't express it in quite those words. Nonetheless, by 2003 we'd helped develop an Oakland high school called YES (Youth Empowerment School), part of the city's Small Schools Initiative. Last year, I graduated from UC Berkeley. I'm now working as a substitute teacher and language tutor, and I've recently interviewed for a fall 2008 faculty position at YES.
In 2002, and today, Oakland's students and its schools were coping with problems endemic to education in big cities across the United States.
In Peanuts, when we see Lucy offering Psychiatric Help for a nickel, we know it is a joke: ("The Psychiatrist is IN"), but when English teachers in the schools insist that students write about the most intimate details of their private lives for school assignments, that is not a joke, it is an unwarranted intrusion.
There are a couple of major problems with the "personal writing" that has taken over so many of the writing assignments for the English classes in our schools.
First, the teachers are asking students to share information about their personal lives that is none of the teachers' business. The vast majority of English teachers are not qualified as psychologists, much less as psychiatrists, and they should not pretend that they are.
Second, the time spent by students writing assignments for their teachers in their personal diaries is subtracted from time they need to spend learning how to do the academic expository writing they will need to be able to do when they leave school, for college and for work.
I will leave it to others to explain why English teachers have gone down this road in so many of our schools. I have written a number of articles about Creative Nonfiction and Contentless Writing, and the like, to try to encourage some attention to the retreat (or flight) from academic writing in our schools.
But I urge parents and others concerned about the preparation their children are receiving in reading and writing to find out why so many students are being assigned this personal writing which does not belong in the school, and the information in which is, or should be, of no concern of their English teachers, who need instead to focus on reading, grammar, literature and academic writing, instead of setting themselves up as nickel psychiatrists without either the training or the permission to practice on our children.
Our students are doing poorly in NAEP examinations of reading and writing, and having their teachers spend time as untrained therapists is no help with that at all.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
There is no reason to expect that setting a “world-class standard” will cause “world-class achievement.” Indeed, a recently released research study using the NAEP scale and state standards and achievement scores found little relationship between the rigor of a state’s standard and the overall achievement of its students.2
What happens when the overall reading and mathematics achievement in grades 4 and 8 on NAEP 2007 in the three Peterson and Hess “world-class standards” states is compared to the overall achievement in one of their “low expectation” states such as Idaho? Zero correlation! This is clearly illustrated in the following table:
“Proficient” has several meanings. It is important to understand clearly that the [NAEP] Proficient achievement level does not refer to “at grade” performance. Nor is performance at the Proficient level synonymous with “proficiency” in the subject. That is, students who may be considered proficient in a subject, given the common usage of the term, might not satisfy the requirements for performance at the NAEP achievement level.3
2 McLaughlin, D.H., Bandeira de Mello, V., Blankenship, C., Chaney, K., Esra, P., Hikawa, H., Rojas, D., William, P., and Wolman, M. (2008). Comparison Between NAEP and State Reading Assessment Results: 2003 (NCES 2008-474). National for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC. Retrieved May 13, 2008, from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008474
3 Loomis, S.C., and Bourque, M.L. (Eds.) (2001). National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement levels 1992-1998 for reading. National Assessment Governing Board, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C. Retrieved May 13, 2008, from http://www.nagb.org/pubs/readingbook.pdf
"I’ve tackled some of the sacred cows in my recommendations, such as the issues of contracts, how much money we could receive from that. Such as the issue of health benefits, and how much money we could receive by capping that. And increasing the co-pay."
Cortines was at times unsparing of LAUSD's failures, saying that the district is organized for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the children they are hired to serve. He said the school board passes too many resolutions that "aren't worth the paper [they're] printed on." And he said the district had "abdicated our responsibility" for Locke High School, which is about to be turned over to Green Dot Public Schools, the big charter operator. Students didn't get a pass, though: He said the district needs to enforce "a code of behavior" based on the idea that they don't just have rights -- they also have responsibilities.
I am a retired elementary school principal from Long Island, N.Y. I was also a teacher, counselor and school psychologist during my 39 years in public education.
It was, to say the least, appalling to learn in John Merrow's "Student Tests -- and Teacher Grades" (op-ed, May 9) that teachers' unions prevailed, at least in New York state, in eliminating the quality of student performance in determining a teacher's tenure. Besides violating common sense, it is counter to most other evaluations. For instance, aren't coaches in any sport evaluated by the performance of their respective charges, be they teams or individuals?
In my estimation, the evaluation of a teacher's performance for tenure consideration at K-12 level should be based primarily on that teacher's students performance, i.e., results, just as we judge the quality of performance in many other activities, be it sports, sales, etc.
Leon W. Zelby
Norman, Okla.
Blame the teachers and the unions -- how often do we have to hear the same old tired arguments as to why the American educational system is failing?
I taught music for 20 years in both public and private schools, and there have always been good students and bad students.
Sorry, parents -- when your kids don't do well in school, it is usually due to lack of discipline at home. Parents who acquiesce to the whims of a child, refuse to impose rules, and blame the teacher are begging for their child to fail. Through the years, I watched as good teachers left the profession in disgust. For all their hard work, the pay is still low, administrators and parents still lack respect, and when something goes wrong, well, we still blame the teacher.
I teach people who want to become public school teachers. Although the needs of our children and schools have never been greater, the number of people going into teaching has dropped by 23 percent between fiscal 2001-02 and 2004-05, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. California has about 300,000 teachers, half of whom are over 45 years of age. We need approximately 10,000 new teachers each year. But as our teachers age and get closer to retirement, and younger teachers enter the profession in increasingly smaller numbers, who will teach our children?
I have been a teacher educator for 11 years, and I teach in a high-quality program, but there are at least four critical reasons why we are not attracting enough teachers to California's public schools.
Williams, 53, is not just any retired player. He has been a shining light of the N.F.L., his name even floated around when the commissionership was open a couple of years ago. And he won awards for citizenship and sportsmanship while playing in two Super Bowls.
Before the 1982 Super Bowl near Detroit, not far from his childhood home in Flint, Mich., he told reporters how he had been underachieving in the third grade until his teacher, Geraldine Chapel, sent him off for tests that proved he was quite smart but hard of hearing. The hearing improved, and so did his self-image and his schoolwork.
Williams majored in psychology at Dartmouth and was all-Ivy linebacker for three years as well as an Ivy heavyweight wrestling champion. Undersized at 6 feet and 228 pounds, Williams merged his intelligence and his outsider’s drive to make the Bengals.
They won a legal battle to force Maryland to increase public funding for charter schools more than 60 percent. They opened two charter schools in Prince George's County and befriended the superintendent there even though the county had a reputation as hostile to the charter movement. They run one of the largest charter school networks in the country.
Yet Dennis and Eileen Bakke remain relatively unknown in local education circles.
Dennis, 62, and Eileen, 55, live in Arlington County. He knows business; she is into education. Few people guess, and the Bakkes never volunteer, what an impact they have had on education in the region and beyond. Their Imagine Schools organization, based in Arlington, oversees 51 schools (four in the Washington area) with 25,000 students. By fall, it plans to have 75 schools with 38,000 students.
Jason Botel, who directs KIPP charter schools in Baltimore, is one educator who knows what the Bakkes have accomplished. "Their funding of advocacy efforts has helped make sure that . . . charter schools like ours can provide a great education for children in Maryland," he said.
In Milwaukee, one out of three school-aged children lives in poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Milwaukee ranks sixth highest in the nation. Many of these children do not have access to quality education at an early age, which gives them a disadvantage when entering school. It also affects their academic achievement, odds of graduating and potential for earning a family-sustaining wage as adults.
In other words, early childhood literacy is crucial to breaking the cycle of poverty.
Research shows that successful programs don't teach just children. Academic performance improves when parents are involved. This might seem obvious, or even easy. But, for the single mother of three working two jobs, it's anything but easy. It's much harder to help with homework when you're focused on getting food on the table.
For the past four years, the Fleck Foundation has supported United Way's early childhood education initiative because the programs it funds require parents to be involved. We know that this key component leads to success. As a result, each year we challenge the community to support the initiative by matching donations dollar-for-dollar that are designated to address early childhood literacy. Our hope is to stimulate growth in donations and increase attention to this important issue.
One program in particular, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters or HIPPY, conducted by COA Youth and Family Centers, sends "coaches" to the homes of low-income families. The coaches show parents how to teach their children through reading.
Check the Facts: Few States Set World-Class Standards Summer 2008 (vol. 8, no. 3) Table of Contents CHECK THE FACTS: Few States Set World-Class Standards In fact, most render the notion of proficiency meaningless
As the debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes its murky way through the political swamp, one thing has become crystal clear: Though NCLB requires that virtually all children become proficient by the year 2014, states disagree on the level of accomplishment in math and reading a proficient child should possess. A few states have been setting world-class standards, but most are well off that mark—in some cases to a laughable degree.
In this report, we use 2007 test-score information to evaluate the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards against the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an achievement measure that is recognized nationally and has international credibility as well. The analysis extends previous work (see "Johnny Can Read...in Some States," features, Summer 2005, and "Keeping an Eye on State Standards," features, Summer 2006) that used 2003 and 2005 test-score data and finds in the new data a noticeable decline, especially at the 8th-grade level. In Figure 1, we rank the rigor of state proficiency standards using the same A to F scale teachers use to grade students. Those that receive an A have the toughest definitions of student proficiency, while those with an F have the least rigorous.
Measuring Standards
That states vary widely in their definitions of student proficiency seems little short of bizarre. Agreement on what constitutes "proficiency" would seem the essential starting point: if students are to know what is expected of them, teachers are to know what to teach, and parents are to have a measuring stick for their schools. In the absence of such agreement, it is impossible to determine how student achievement stacks up across states and countries.
One national metric for performance does exist, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP is a series of tests administered under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP tests measure proficiency in reading and math among 4th and 8th graders nationwide as well as in every state. The NAEP sets its proficiency standard through a well-established, if complex, technical process. Basically, it asks informed experts to judge the difficulty of each of the items in its test bank. The experts’ handiwork received a pat on the back recently when the American Institutes for Research (AIR) showed that NAEP’s definition of "proficiency" was very similar to the standard used by designers of international tests of student achievement. Proficiency has acquired roughly the same meaning in Europe and Asia, and in the United States—as long as the NAEP standard is employed.
Critics of the federal No Child Left Behind law, including Democratic presidential candidates vowing to overhaul or end it, have often accused it of being too harsh. It punishes weak schools instead of supporting them, as Sen. Barack Obama puts it.
But when it comes to the worst-performing schools, the 2001 law hasn't shown much bite. The more-radical restructuring remedies put forth by the law have rarely been adopted by these schools, many of which aren't doing much to address their problems, according to a federal study last year.
The troubles in the restructuring arena reflect broader questions about whether NCLB is a strong enough tool to bring about the overhaul of American education. In many ways, the law was an outgrowth of "A Nation at Risk," a pivotal 1983 federal report that warned that a "rising tide of mediocrity" in education could undermine the nation's competitiveness. That report ushered in the era of accountability and testing, which eventually spawned NCLB.
Supporters maintain the law is helping to fuel learning gains. In the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders rose compared to 2005, albeit only by a few points.
But NCLB gave states -- not the federal government -- authority to set the academic standards for local schools. And so, while NCLB requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, states determine what proficiency is and how they will test for it. A 2007 federal study found states don't exactly agree on proficiency.
Four new programs on the BadgerLink website make it easy to learn how to make the most of the BadgerLink databases. BadgerLink is a free service for Wisconsin residents which provides access to articles from thousands of newspaper and periodical titles, image files, and other specialized reference materials and websites. BadgerLink is a project of the Department of Public Instruction, in cooperation with the state's public, school, academic, and special libraries and Internet service providers.
The new videos cover how to use databases such as EBSCO, Kids Search, Searchasaurus, TeachingBooks, ProQuest, Newspaper ARCHIVE, the African American Biographical Database, and LitFinder
As you're out and about over the next couple of days, I want you to notice all the jobs that don't require a college degree.
I'll get you started with a few – bus driver, cashier, plumber, cop, construction worker, waiter, sales clerk, janitor, child care worker, mechanic, appliance technician, cable installer, postal carrier, carpenter, barber, truck driver ...
OK, you get the idea.
Now, let's think about a pervasive philosophy in public education. It's summed up in a bumper sticker I saw last week: "Our Students Are COLLEGE BOUND."
That particular sticker was from the Garland Independent School District, but it's the same mantra expressed in every district these days.
Our schools have turned into Lake Woebegone ISD, where every student is above average and on the way to a Ph.D.
Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren't even identified -- especially in low-income and minority schools.
If you reviewed Dalton Sargent's report cards, you'd know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation's classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students -- who usually perform well on standardized tests -- too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students -- whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems -- deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.
But many gifted students who might benefit from the program are never identified, particularly those in economically disadvantaged communities, advocates say. Legislation sponsored by state Sen. Louis Correa (D-Santa Ana) aimed at training teachers to identify gifted students from low-income, minority and non-English speaking families stalled last year after estimates found that it could cost up to $1.1 million.
Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder -- and far more expensive -- proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the "parenting" business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
"Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7," he told the Tribune. "We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There's a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack ... where there isn't a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets."
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it's not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It's also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.
The younger Edelman served for four years as the principal of The SEED School, the nation's oldest and most successful urban boarding school. Located in Washington, D.C., the public, college preparatory campus serves 300 students from 7th through 12th grades.
Nearly 72 percent of SEED students, who hail from low-income and sometimes troubled backgrounds, go on to four-year colleges.
Edelman said Chicago Public Schools officials are interested in several models, including SEED, in which students live and attend school in the same building. Other options would include an arrangement in which students live in one building and ride the bus to a nearby school or a large central dormitory in which students live in one building but attend several schools.
All of these settings could allow students to go home on weekends, or stay at the facility 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Officials said they would look at both options or a combination.
Edelman said his experience at The SEED School proved to him that family and community involvement are paramount to making a boarding school successful.
In Chicago, children would attend the school only after the parents or guardian choose the option. Schools would then work with parents to ensure that the students' academic and social needs are being met.
"This is not about doing something to parents because parents are bad," Edelman said. "This is about doing something in conjunction with parents and the community."
Chicago flirted briefly with the idea of public school residential facilities in the mid-1990s, when a private group proposed transforming a 16-story unit at the Robert Taylor Homes into a dormitory for 800 students. The proposal died when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the CHA.
A few years later, then-schools chief Paul Vallas floated the idea of opening a boarding school for neglected and homeless children. Students would live at the school until the Department of Children and Family Services was able to place them in foster care or with relatives. The plan collapsed because of the high price tag.
Now the district is hoping to launch a pilot program in September 2009, operated by North Lawndale College Prep. The charter group, which runs two Chicago high schools, is working on a proposal to create an off-site dormitory, initially for about 15 to 20 of its homeless students.
The teenagers would live in the building 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Teen Living Program, which works with federal, state and city government to provide shelter and support for homeless teens, would run the residential units.
John Horan, director of expansion for the charter group, said officials are looking for a building that could house the students and are working through funding and liability issues that go along with operating a residential facility.
The charter group and Teen Living plan to present the proposal to their respective boards of directors in the summer. The proposal then would have to go before the Chicago Board of Education for final approval.
Horan said between 6 and 8 percent of North Lawndale's 400 students are homeless, either because their parents are in prison or have disappeared. Some teachers have stepped in as parents, allowing students to bunk at their homes or, in some cases, taking temporary guardianship of the students.
"It's not sustainable; you can't really depend on your staff to do that," Horan said. "Our notion now is if you are going to be serious about providing college prep for kids who are from [poor] communities you have to deal with the housing."
But housing is an expensive proposition.
Illinois already has one residential school, the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a state-funded 10th through 12th-grade college prep high school that enrolls about 650 gifted students. The price tag: about $23,000 per student each year.
Providing the same services for low-income urban students who face more significant life problems is certain to be most costly. The SEED School is opening a second school in Baltimore. The cost per student: $34,000.
Chicago spends about $7,000 per pupil in operating costs.
"This is a big idea that has residual effect beyond the kids," said Cheye Calvo, director of expansion for The SEED School. "In the long term, this is better for society because the economic impact of failure affects us all. But opening a boarding school requires political leadership to step forward and provide the resources."
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SEED success
72%
of students at The SEED School go on to four-year colleges. The school, the nation's oldest urban boarding school, serves students from 7th through 12th grades in Washington, D.C.
His lead paragraph read: "Students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes at two schools in the Northern Valley Regional High School District in Bergen County are now required to take the AP exams this month -- or receive a failing grade in the courses under a new school policy being questioned by some parents and students."
Take the AP exam or you flunk the course? It seemed un-American. U.S. high schools are famously forgiving of students who don't want to subject themselves to the three-hour college level exams at the end of AP courses. Most leave it up to the student. Some remove the AP designation on their transcript if they don't take the exam. In a few areas, such as Northern Virginia, the schools require that all AP students take the AP exams in May, but if they decide at the last minute to spend those lovely days at the beach, the only penalty is they don't get the extra grade-point credit for taking an advanced course. To a senior who has already been admitted to college by May, that has no more sting than a disappointed look from his mother.
Like many large districts throughout the nation, L.A. Unified has been trying to increase the number of smaller learning communities, hoping that personalized instruction would boost student achievement and offer an alternative to charter schools, including the five Green Dot campuses near Jefferson.
The academy, one of four Los Angeles Unified campuses that opened almost two years ago, is partially funded through the New Tech Foundation, a Napa, Calif.-based nonprofit that supports 35 schools throughout the country. Two of the others, Arleta High School of Science, Math and Related Technologies and the Los Angeles High School for Global Studies, have increased their test scores dramatically. However, at Jordan New Tech High School, the API score was 25 points lower than that on the regular Jordan High campus.
Unlike charters, which are publicly funded but are not regulated by L.A. Unified, New Tech schools are run by district administrators. "We're under a lot of pressure: pressure from parents, pressure from the public, to find results that work," said Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, adding that New Tech "clearly works."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says Microsoft Corp. executive Jeff Raikes will be its next CEO.
The world's largest charitable foundation has been looking for a new leader since chief executive Patty Stonesifer announced in February that she would be stepping down.
Raikes has been the top executive in Microsoft's business software division, responsible for such things as the Office software suite, Microsoft's server software and applications that help businesses track customers and business processes.
CONGRATULATIONS, Jeff Raikes, on your great new job as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And good luck: you will certainly need it.
Unlike most other foundation CEO jobs, this is unlikely to be a comfortable pre-retirement sinecure. The Gates Foundation is by far the biggest charitable organisation in the world, and growing quickly. Next year, it is expected give away at least $3 billion, up from barely $1 billion a couple of years ago. Some insiders expect that number to rise as high as $6 billion in the near future.
If you reviewed Dalton Sargent's report cards, you'd know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation's classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students -- who usually perform well on standardized tests -- too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students -- whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems -- deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.
Linda Scholl @ Wisconsin Center for Education Research: SCALE Case Study: Evolution of K-8 Science Instructional Guidance in Madison Metropolitan School District [PDF report]
In addition, by instituting a standards-based report card system K-8, the department has increased accountability for teaching to the standards.
The Department is struggling, however, to sharpen its efforts to reduce the achievement gap. While progress has been made in third grade reading, significant gaps are still evident in other subject areas, including math and science. Educational equity issues within the school district are the source of much public controversy, with a relatively small but vocal parent community that is advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students. This has slowed efforts to implement strong academic equity initiatives, particularly at the middle and early high school levels. Nonetheless, T&L content areas specialists continue working with teachers to provide a rigorous curriculum and to differentiate instruction for all students. In that context, the new high school biology initiative represents a significant effort to raise the achievement of students of color and economic disadvantage.
Scholl's error, in my view, is viewing the controversy as an issue of "advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students". The real issue is raising standards for all, rathing than reducing the curriculum quality (see West High School Math teachers letter to the Isthmus:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined "success" as merely producing "fewer failures." Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
)
A friend mentioned a few years ago that the problems are in elementary and middle school. Rather than addressing those, the administration is trying to make high school changes.
Most students at Mildred Avenue Middle School come from low-income, minority families and have parents who didn't go to college. Many don't speak English at home and have no plans to attend college.
Which is exactly why officials decided to make it the only middle school in Boston with a full-time college counseling office. They want to convince the school's 560 students that college is attainable.
Middle school offices specifically dedicated to college guidance are part of a growing trend at schools across the country as officials try to make sure students don't begin planning too late.
"Middle school is when students are still open to all the opportunities and options they have, because by the time they get to high school they are often at the point where they say 'Oh, I can't do that,"' said Jill Cook, assistant director of the American School Counselor Association.
Across the nation, educators are struggling to turn around troubled schools. In the District of Columbia, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has teams seeking to overhaul 27 schools targeted for “restructuring” by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
This is hardly uncharted territory. Reformers have spent decades proposing new remedies for low-performing schools. Magnet programs, schools without walls, block scheduling, site-based management, and a litany of other popular ideas have emerged, only to disappoint.
Today, NCLB’s mandated restructuring of schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” for five consecutive years has fueled extensive new efforts. NCLB spells out five options for such schools: reopening as a public charter school; replacing most staff; contracting out operations to a new organization; turning the keys over to the state; or adopting “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.” Modest variations of the amorphous fifth option have proven the most popular, by far.
More than 2,000 schools across the United States are currently in the process of restructuring, which has given rise to a nascent “turnaround” industry. The Louisiana School Turnaround Specialist Program is recruiting and grooming a cadre of school leaders. In New York, the Rensselaerville Institute runs a school turnaround program. At the University of Virginia, the graduate schools of education and business have partnered to train “turnaround specialists.” In Chicago, the Chicago International Charter School has launched ChicagoRise to provide management expertise and support for turnaround projects.
Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation's first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on.
Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven't tried to reinvent the wheel. They've just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that's all they did, that's way more than enough.
Carey is spot on. Cracking the legacy public school governance monolith is essential to progress. "Progress requires conflict".
Oh, look. There’s a new film that portrays American teenagers as distracted slackers who don’t stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America’s public schools. If we don’t do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go- getters.
The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between after school jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in ’08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.
Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates’s distress at seeing Carmel High’s Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey’s Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half hearted stabs at their math homework.
New research into the progress of 500 children published today shows that young children who were the poorest readers - and the very lowest-achieving in their class - can go on to outperform the national average within two years. They must be given four to five months of one-to-one tuition by specially trained Reading Recovery teachers for about 30 minutes a day while the children are aged six.
The research by the Institute of Education into the Every Child a Reader project shows that boys benefit to the same extent as girls and that one-to-one tuition helps to reduce the gender gap. The presence of Reading Recovery teachers also helps the other children in the school who do not attend the Reading Recovery lessons.
The two-year research project looked at the reading and writing progress of the lowest achieving children in 42 schools in ten inner London boroughs with the biggest social problems. The eight poorest readers in each class, then aged six, were selected. Eighty-seven of these children had the benefit of the Reading Recovery special tuition programme and their progress was compared to a group of children of similar ability and backgrounds, who did not receive the same tuition.
After one year children who had received the tuition had reading ages that matched their chronological age, and were 14 months ahead of the children in the comparison group.
In Madison, where schools Superintendent Art Rainwater in a 2004 memo described 4K as potentially "the next best tool" for raising students' performance and narrowing the racial achievement gap, years of study and talks with leaders of early childhood education centers have failed to produce results.
"It's one of the things that I regret the most, that I think would have made a big impact, that I was not able to do," said Rainwater, who is retiring next month after leading the district for a decade.
"We've never been able to get around the money," said Rainwater, whose tenure was marked by annual multimillion-dollar budget cuts to conform to the state's limits on how much money districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
A complicating factor was the opposition of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, to the idea that the 4K program would include preschool teachers not employed by the School District. However, Rainwater said he's "always believed that those things could have been resolved" if money had been available.
Starting a 4K program for an estimated 1,700 students would cost Madison $5 million the first year and $2.5 million the second year before it would get full state funding in the third year under the state's school-funding system.
In comparison, the entire state grant available to defray Wisconsin districts' startup costs next year is $3 million — and that amount is being shared by 32 eligible districts.
One of those districts, Green Bay, is headed by Daniel Nerad, who has been hired to succeed Rainwater in Madison.
"I am excited about it," said Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, who is envious of the 4K sign-up information that appears on the Green Bay district's Web site. "He's gone out and he's made it work in Green Bay. That will certainly help us here as we start taking the message forward again.
Madison's inability to start 4K has gained the attention of national advocates of 4K programs, who hail Wisconsin's approach as a model during the current national economic downturn. Milwaukee, the state's largest district, long has offered 4K.
"It's been disappointing that Madison has been very slow to step up to provide for its children," said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a national nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for kindergarten programs for children ages 3 and 4.
"The way 4K is being done in your state is the right way."
Related:
Marc Eisen: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign
MMSD Budget History: Madison's spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
After four years and a number of embarrassing public-relations gaffes, Seattle Public Schools plans to cut its controversial Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support as part of a central office shake-up.
The move is part of the first phase of a staff reorganization aimed at saving money, helping departments collaborate more and better aligning resources with the goals in Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson's upcoming strategic plan.
The reorganization will go into effect in July and will merge some departments in the district's "learning and teaching" division, elevate some positions and combine others.
About 15 managers and other staff members in the district's "learning and teaching" division will lose jobs, but can apply for other district work, including nine new positions.
Though the Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support will be eliminated, its responsibilities will be transferred to other departments, district spokeswoman Patti Spencer said Thursday. "The district's dedication to this work remains as strong as ever," she said.
Tom Kealey has taught a lot of writing classes at Stanford University, but never one that asked students to consider the dramatic pause provided by the "page flip."
Or how wide to draw "the gutter."
Kealey and co-instructor Adam Johnson taught a winter course titled The Graphic Novel, and assigned their students to write, edit and illustrate a collaborative final project. The result is a 224-page graphic novel titled "Shake Girl," based on the true story of a Cambodian karaoke performer named Tat Marina who was the target of an "acid attack" after she had an affair with a married man.
"In a normal writing class, you'd write a poem or finish a chapter and you'd own it," Kealey said. "In this class, we had to collaborate every step of the way, every idea, and make compromises. It was the most difficult and rewarding class I ever taught."
While the study of comics and graphic novels has steadily become an acceptable part of college curricula - "Maus" creator Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University last year - the project-based graphic novel class offered at Stanford appears to be the first of its kind.
The move has been criticised by traditionalists, who claim students are being denied the chance to properly appreciate the playwright. The comments come amid claims that the league table culture is narrowing the curriculum as schools are forced to "teach to the test" to inflate their position on national rankings.
Suppose a swimming instructor told his 10-year-old students to swim the length of the pool to demonstrate what he'd taught them, and half of them nearly drowned? Would it be reasonable to make a judgment about his teaching ability?
Or suppose nearly all the 10-year-old students in a particular clarinet class learned to play five or six pieces well in a semester? Would it be reasonable to consider their achievement when deciding whether to rehire the music teacher?
These questions answer themselves. Only an idiot would overlook student performance, be it dismal or outstanding.
However, suppose test results indicated that most students in a particular class don't have a clue about how to multiply with fractions, or master other material in the curriculum? Should that be considered when the math teacher comes up for tenure?
Whoops, the obvious answer is wrong. That's because public education lives in an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching.
Retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater's view on the District's structural deficit and the decline in it's equity (Assets - Liabilities = Equity; Britannica on the The Balance Sheet) from $48,000,000 in the year 2000 to $24,000,000 in 2006 (it is now about 8% of the budget or $20M). (See Lawrie Kobza's discussion of this issue in November, 2006. Lawrie spent a great deal of time digging into and disclosing the structural deficits.) Art also mentioned the resulting downgrade in the District's bond rating (results in somewhat higher interest rates).
Marj asked an interesting question about the K-1 combination and staff scheduling vis a vis the present Teacher Union Contract.
Lucy asked about specials scheduling (about 17 minutes).
Maya asked about the combined K-1 Art classes ("Class and a half" art and music) and whether we are losing instructional minutes. She advocated for being "open and honest with the public" about this change. Art responded (23 minutes) vociferously about the reduction in services, the necessity for the community to vote yes on operating referendums, ACT scores and National Merit Scholars.
Beth mentioned (about 30 minutes) that "the district has done amazing things with less resources". She also discussed teacher tools, curriculum and information sharing.
Ed Hughes (about 37 minutes) asked about the Madison Family Literacy initiative at Leopold and Northport. Lucy inquired about Fund 80 support for this project.
Maya later inquired (45 minutes) about a possible increase in Wisconsin DPI's common school fund for libraries and left over Title 1 funds supporting future staff costs rather than professional development.
Beth (about 48 minutes) advocated accelerated computer deployments to the schools. Lucy followed up and asked about the District's installation schedule. Johnny followed up on this matter with a question regarding the most recent maintenance referendum which included $500,000 annually for technology.
Lucy discussed (52 minutes) contingency funds for energy costs as well as providing some discretion for incoming superintendent Dan Nerad.
Rick Berg notes that some homes are selling below assessed value, which will affect the local tax base (property taxes for schools) and potential referendums:
But the marketplace will ultimately expose any gaps between assessment and true market value. And that could force local governments to choose between reducing spending (not likely) and hiking the mill rate (more likely) to make up for the decreasing value of real estate.
Pity the poor homeowners who see the value of their home fall 10%, 20% or even 30% with no corresponding savings in their property tax bill, or, worse yet, their tax bill goes up! Therein lie the seeds of a genuine taxpayer revolt. Brace yourselves. It's gonna be a rough ride.
The budget for Montgomery County's public schools has doubled in 10 years, a massive investment in smaller classes, better-paid teachers and specialized programs to serve growing ranks of low-income and immigrant children.
That era might be coming to an end. The County Council will adopt an education budget this month that provides the smallest year-to-year increase in a decade for public schools. County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) has recommended trimming $51 million from the $2.11 billion spending plan submitted by the Board of Education.
County leaders say the budget can no longer keep up with the spending pace of Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who has overseen a billion-dollar expansion since his arrival in 1999. Weast has reduced elementary class sizes, expanded preschool and kindergarten programs and invested heavily in the high-poverty area of the county known around his office as the Red Zone.
"Laudable goals, objectives, nobody's going to argue with that," Leggett said in a recent interview at his Rockville office. "But is it affordable?"
It's a question being asked of every department in a county whose overall budget has swelled from $2.1 billion in fiscal 1998 to $4.3 billion this year, a growth rate Leggett terms "unacceptable."
Montgomery County enrolls 137,745 students and spent $2,100,000,000 this year ($15,245/student). Madison's spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
I've not seen any local media coverage of the District's budget this week.
Aspiring early childhood and elementary school teachers will have to prove they know how to teach reading on a test the State Board of Education has added to Connecticut's teacher certification requirements. The change, which was made Wednesday, comes amid worries about stagnating or declining student reading scores statewide and concerns that not all state teachers know the mechanics of teaching reading.
"This sends a message to teacher preparation institutions that they need to make sure they have a focus on the art and science of teaching reading," state Department of Education spokesman Tom Murphy said.
Introducing a test on teaching reading was among the recommendations offered by educators at a reading summit the state education department held last fall. Legislators also have pushed for adding a test on reading instruction to certification requirements.
Related by Jason Kottke regarding Malcolm Gladwell's forthcoming book:
A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.
Madison teachers who participate in the Schools of Hope tutoring program were recognized Tuesday for their role in narrowing the racial achievement gap among students over the last 10 years.
"That's what school districts around the country are trying to do, and Madison is accomplishing it," First Lady Jessica Doyle told more than 50 elementary school teachers treated to the first outdoor reception of the season at the governor's residence overlooking Lake Mendota on National Teacher Appreciation Day.
"Because of you and that extra energy you put in," Doyle said, "more students can succeed and this whole community can be living with hope."
The most noticeable change is a dramatic increase in students taking accelerated math classes in the middle years, an initiative that seems to have spread to every school system in the region. Educators view math acceleration as a gateway to advanced study in high school and, in turn, to college. Higher-level math classes have helped middle schools cultivate a community of students similar to those in honors and Advanced Placement high school classes.
At Samuel Ogle Middle School in Bowie, the number of students taking Algebra I, a high-school-level course, has doubled from 60 to 120 in the past two years.
As part of Weekend Edition Sunday's monthlong education series, we hear from teacher Chela Delgado. She once hated standardized tests and didn't want to make her students take them, but then she started listening to some of the children's parents. Her commentary reveals how families in under-resourced schools are pursuing what they see as best for their kids.
THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th's Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.
The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.
Writer of the Week: I Would Go Out of my Way to Step on That Crunchy-Looking Leaf
"Featured Writer of Week:
Yael's defining quality as a writer is her rich imaginary aesthetic. She received a 2008 gold regional key from the Scholastic's Art & Writing Awards for her latest piece. Please celebrate Yael's accomplishment by reading:
When I first heard the question I thought it was rather ridiculous. “Would you go out of your way to step on a crunchy-looking leaf?” It seemed so… strange. Really, who but a child would? Of course I replied in the negative and received a look from the man in return that was somewhere midway between pity and disappointment. I don’t see what made me deserve that response; how does he know that I’m just not a leaf-crunching kind of person? Maybe the sound of leaf-crunching is my pet peeve. It isn’t, but that’s not the point. Apparently I can’t possibly enjoy life without stepping on crunchy leaves. I suppose I wouldn’t know, but that man doesn’t seem too experienced in life-enjoyment either, as he always acts as though he’s got a stick up his a*#.
A broad education overhaul under way here has produced improvement in test scores, results released Tuesday showed, though many students are still struggling.
The number of fourth graders who passed a state promotional exam increased by 12 percentage points over the previous year, and eighth graders improved by four percentage points.
School officials also noted significant increases in the numbers of students with passing scores in the test’s various components — English, math, science, social studies and reading.
Nonetheless, more than half the students who took the test in those grades did not pass, and 60 percent of high school students got an unsatisfactory ranking in standardized English and math tests, a figure three to four times higher than the percentage throughout Louisiana.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption is investigating tutorial center Popular Modern Education and top tutor K Oten over alleged buying of Hong Kong Certificate of Education examination papers.
The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority said yesterday the case has been "forwarded to the law enforcement agency."
The center and the tutor were accused of texting messages on the HKCEE English-language examination during a 45-minute break.
The messages allegedly contained an "immediate analysis" helpful to answering questions.
Oten, 32, yesterday denied cheating and bribing invigilators to acquire the papers, saying it is a "deliberate defamation."
The tutorial center also denied providing the service to students. It said it will look into the matter and that it has terminated Oten's services.
The matter came to light when some students claimed the tutor had unlawfully obtained the papers and used them for commercial gain.
Part of the reason KIPP charters have seen success is because of their rigorous standards and extended learning day. These are both concepts that the campaign has been advocating since its beginning -- we believe that charter schools, when coupled with high standards, effective teachers, and time and support for learning, hold bold promise for academic excellence.
The easiest way to demonstrate that our education system is designed to create order instead of embracing creative chaos is the morning traffic jam. Let’s take the people traveling on Interstate 35 E into Dallas: Every morning they’ll find that starting somewhere in Oak Cliff the traffic will come to a virtual standstill, until the last 3 or 4 miles into Dallas often turns into a 20- to 30-minute drive. And every morning you will find thousands upon thousands of drivers wasting gas, fuming in their cars that something needs to be done about congestion. Yet there is an easy answer: All they have to do to zip into Dallas quickly is take the South Marseilles exit, go 1.5 blocks north and turn right on E. Jefferson Boulevard. It’s that simple.
Crossing the Jefferson Street Viaduct with the 30 other drivers who have made that same quick critical decision to improve their morning commute, you can look south and see, extending for miles, a traffic jam that avoiding took you only two quick turns and cut 15 minutes off your commute. So why do thousands of intelligent people each and every day go through the same frustrating and wasteful ritual, when an easy and satisfying answer to the problem has always been there? That’s how we were taught.
Stuck in your car, waiting impatiently in traffic is exactly like being in sixth grade when your class filed into the cafeteria; you were told to stand there quietly without complaining, no matter how hungry you were. It’s this ingrained habit of non-critical thinking and unquestioning acceptance that makes morning traffic jams worse than they need to be. It makes ideology — obedience to a concept, as opposed to reasoning through a solvable problem — the basis for our daily decisions.
Unfortunately, in a recent editorial regarding the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, the St. Petersburg Times employs worn-out diversionary tactics to obfuscate the issues and conceal its true position — the paper's editorial board despises the concept of providing school choice options to low-income students. Let's end the theatrics and address the real questions going before the Florida people on November's ballot. This debate is on keeping the promise of a quality education for all of Florida's students.
Florida students are no longer just competing with students in Georgia, California, New York and Texas for coveted high-wage jobs. They are competing with their peers around the world. Countries like China, Sweden and Singapore are focusing on tomorrow's economy and placing a premium on education and innovation to ensure they can keep pace with their rivals. For decades, America set that pace, and now we are falling behind.
We need all schools — here and in the 49 other states — to get better for our country's future. The only way to improve student performance is through continual and perpetual reform of education. Florida needs a 21st century education system for a 21st century world, and school choice can be an important catalyst to make this vision a reality.
In their recent report analyzing the politics of charter school laws, Christiana Stoddard and Sean P. Corcoran of Education Nextrelied upon The Center for Education Reform’s (CER) Charter School Law Rankings and Profiles to study the success of the charter school movement.
As they recognized, the strength of a law could impact the way in which healthy charter schools grow and how they serve students. Having laws with certain components is critical.
CER welcomes this scrutiny and the dozens of other research reports, which utilize its rankings as a guide for assessing policy. We also recognize that not all researchers find the work we have done for ten years on law strength compelling. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder find our data and conclusions a bit hard to swallow. They argue that what CER considers strong components of a law – flexibility, autonomy, equitable funding – are actually weaknesses. Despite their claims that the weakest are actually the strongest, the data do not lie. States with strong laws by our standards (and those shared almost universally by the research community whether friend or foe) create strong schools.
ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.
But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.
“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.
Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.
Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year. Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.
"I find it reassuring . . . that students are still reading the classics I read as a child," said Roy Truby, a senior vice president for Wisconsin-based Renaissance Learning. But Truby said he would have preferred to see more meaty and varied fare, such as "historical novels and biographical works so integral to understanding our past and contemporary books that help us understand our world."
Michelle F. Bayuk, marketing director for the New York-based Children's Book Council, agreed. "What's missing from the list are all the wonderful nonfiction, informational, humorous and novelty books as well as graphic novels that kids read and enjoy both inside and outside the classroom."
The four Malcolm Elementary School fourth-graders have their sales pitch polished, just in case the Federal Emergency Management Agency is interested.
Forget trailers and temporary shelters in sporting arenas. The next time a natural disaster strikes, these video-game-playing, Harry-Potter-reading preteens want the government to hand out backpacks that expand into four-room houses.
"It's called THE Shelter," said C.J. Atkinson, 9. "The T stands for temporary. H is housing. E is emergency."
The team designed the shelter-providing gadget for the national ExploraVision competition, which challenges students to dream up technology that will help humanity in the future. The Charles County team's idea was one of 24 chosen as regional winners, beating more than 4,500 other entries. The program is sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association and Toshiba.
"They want us to take technology from the future and make it real," said Timothy "Timmy" Olsen, 9.
Technology-based forces of "disruptive innovation" are gathering around public education and will overhaul the way K-12 students learn—with potentially dramatic consequences for established public schools, according to an upcoming book that draws parallels to disruptions in other industries.
Clayton M. Christensen, the book's lead author and a business professor at Harvard University, is well respected in the business world for his best-sellers The Innovator’s Dilemma, published in 1997, and The Innovator’s Solution, published in 2003.
Those books analyze why leading companies in various industries—computers, electronics, retail, and others—were knocked off by upstarts that were better able to take advantage of innovations based on new technology and changing conditions.
School organizations are similarly vulnerable, Mr. Christensen contends.
"The schools as they are now structured cannot do it," he said in an interview, referring to adapting successfully to coming computer-based innovations. "Even the best managers in the world, if they were heads of departments in schools and the administrators of schools, could not do it."
Under Mr. Christensen’s analytical model, the tables typically turn in an industry even when the dominant companies are well aware of a disruptive innovation and try to use it to transform themselves
There's no doubt that a revolution is underway in education. LIke other industries, it is doubtful that many of the current players will make the turn, which is likely why issues such as credit for non MMSD courses is evidently such a problem. Two related articles by Cringely provide useful background.
More:
Like the leaders in other industries, the education establishment has crammed down technology onto its existing architecture, which is dominated by the "monolithic" processes of textbook creation and adoption, teaching practices and training, and standardized assessment—which, despite some efforts at individualization, by and large treat students the same, the book says.
But new providers are stepping forward to serve students that mainline education does not serve, or serve well, the authors write. Those students, which the book describes as K-12 education’s version of "nonconsumers," include those lacking access to Advanced Placement courses, needing alternatives to standard classroom instruction, homebound or home-schooled students, those needing to make up course credits to graduate—and even prekindergarten children.
By addressing those groups, providers such as charter schools, companies catering to home schoolers, private tutoring companies, and online-curriculum companies have developed their methods and tapped networks of students, parents, and teachers for ideas.
Those providers will gradually improve their tools to offer instruction that is more student-centered, in part by breaking courses into modules that can be recombined specifically for each student, the authors predict.
Such providers’ approaches, the authors argue, will also become more affordable, and they will start attracting more and more students from regular schools.
After children leave home, many parents with empty nests must search hard for new pursuits to give their lives meaning. After Pat Rosenberg's two daughters left for college, Ms. Rosenberg, 61, a longtime volunteer in the Houston public schools, found new purpose in mentoring a student -- a poor teenager who, by his own account, was drifting toward a life of crime in his tough inner-city neighborhood.
In his unusual relationship with Ms. Rosenberg and other adult mentors, Tristan Love, now 18, says he found the strength to turn his life around, becoming a sought-after public speaker committed to attending college and pursuing a career in law. Ms. Rosenberg tells the story:
The Challenge: "We moved to Houston in 1986 for my husband David's career, before our two daughters entered school. I got deeply involved in the schools right away and stayed involved as our daughters' grew up. I was a room mother and headed the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) in both middle school and high school. When they were at school, I was often at school, too.
"After our second daughter left for college 2-1/2 years ago, our house became incredibly quiet. It was a real period of adjustment. All of a sudden, this person who has been sitting at your dinner table with you, and going out and coming home late, and keeping you worried all the time, is gone.
At 27, Deanna Singh is determined to change the dismal statistic that only 5% of African-American adults in Milwaukee have a four-year college degree.
So determined that she has launched her own charter school, where her inaugural sixth-grade students already identify their class by the year they will graduate from college.
She aims to build a culture that refuses to accept what she witnessed years ago as a volunteer in Washington, D.C., schools - 11th- and 12th-graders who could barely read or write.
Both students and staff at her Milwaukee Renaissance Academy, 2212 N. 12th St., follow the succinct dictum of a mural in the school's stairwell: "No excuses!"
High expectations propelled Singh from her father's north side gas station - where she spent much of the first five years of her life - through Elmbrook Schools and on to the top-notch East Coast universities where she received her college and law degrees.
The future educational path for the United States should come from looking within the country rather than lionizing faraway test-score champions. Our analysis3 of the data suggests two fundamental problems that require different approaches. First, pedagogies must address science literacy for the large numbers of low-performing students. Second, education policy for our highest-performing students needs to meet actual labour-market demand.
In the United States, a decade's worth of international test rankings based on slender measures of academic achievement in science and maths have been stretched far beyond their usefulness. Perhaps policy-makers feel it is better to motivate policy by pointing to high-scoring Czechs with fear, instead of noting our high-scoring Minnesotans as examples to emulate. But looking within the United States may be the best way to learn about effective education. As the PISA authors emphasize in their report, 90% of the variance in the scores is within countries rather than between countries. Therefore, most of what one can learn about high performance is due to the variation in factors within the nation's borders. It would seem far more effective to transfer best practices across city and state lines than over oceans.
Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times, is in advanced talks about acquiring a chain of private schools in Shanghai, the first time it would own an education institution anywhere in the world.
Although the size of the deal for LEC is low – its 15 schools made revenues of less than $10m – it offers a way of entering the heavily regulated Chinese education market.
LEC schools provides after-school education for children aged five to 12 whose parents pay for them to learn English. Pearson has made forays into China through FTChinese.com and Penguin. At its annual meeting last month, it announced board appointments aimed at growing its education business outside the US.
The LEC deal, which has been in the works for at least a year, would run counter to competitors in the education market who have been abandoning or selling up their international operations to private equity and focusing on the US.
Pearson insiders say the shift in education is moving towards technology platforms and software in education rather than printed textbooks, and the LEC schools offer among other benefits a way of showcasing products such as interactive boards.
Wisconsin
WI - Appleton - Theresa S. Ryckman, Appleton West High School
WI - Germantown - Travis J. Serebin, Germantown High School
WI - Madison - Reuben F. Henriques, West High School
WI - Madison - Brian W. Ji, James Madison Memorial High School
WI - Madison - Laurel A. Ohm, West High School
WI - Menomonee Falls - Evan E. Mast, Menomonee Falls High School
WI - Menomonee Falls - Angela M. Zeng, Hamilton High School
WI - Racine - Adam J. Barron, Jerome I. Case Sr High School
WI - River Falls - [ * ] Kacey R. Hauk, St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists
WI - River Hills - Lisa R. Koenig, University School of Milwaukee
WI - Saukville - Spencer D. Stroebel, Cedarburg Senior High School
WI - Waukesha - [ * ] Adam G. Blodgett, Interlochen Arts Academy
Monday evening's (5/5/2008) meeting agenda (PDF) includes a discussion of the proposed $367,806,712 budget. It will be interesting to see what type of changes to retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater's last budget are discussed. Perhaps, a place to start would be the report card initiative from the District's curriculum creation department (Teaching & Learning). Watch a presentation on the proposed "Standards Based" report cards. Contact the Madison School Board here comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Seeking strategies to lower suspensions and raise the graduation rate, Milwaukee Public Schools officials will travel to Cincinnati this week to check out a district that's drawn national attention as a model of urban school reform.
Cincinnati Public Schools has reported that between 2000 and 2007, it raised its graduation rate from 51% to 79% and eliminated the gap in graduation rates between African-American and white students.
Along the way, the district in southwest Ohio, which has about half the students of MPS, changed the way schools handle student discipline problems, referring misbehaving students to in-school suspensions rather than sending them home.
This specific change caught MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos' eye.
"We suspend a lot of kids," Andrekopoulos said. "What we need to do now is to leverage more time on-task for children in the classroom."
Last school year, nearly half of MPS ninth-graders were suspended at least once, and a quarter of MPS students were suspended. African-American boys in special education faced the sanction at the highest rate.
The Waukesha school finished behind a California competitor by just 23 points, which amounted to one question out of hundreds asked during the academic competition.
"That's just the way it goes," said Randy Brown, a member of the Waukesha team.
Out of a possible 60,000 points, Waukesha West students scored 53,096, which is higher than the score that won the school its first championship in 2002.
But this time, Moorpark High School [Clusty Search] of Moorpark, Calif., was a little better, winning the title with a score of 53,119.
The razor-thin margin made the second-place finish all the more disheartening for Waukesha students.
Duane Stein, coach of the squad, said several competitors became emotional when they realized how narrowly they had missed the championship.
"My kids are kind of stunned right now," Stein said.
"I'm just so proud of these kids," he added. "They worked very, very hard."
Do Americans have an accurate grasp of how much is currently being spent on public education? Not according to a recent analysis of national survey results by University of Chicago’s William Howell and Brown University’s Martin R. West published in the summer issue of Education Next. The average respondent surveyed in 2007 thought per pupil spending in their district was just $4,231 dollars, even though the actual average spending per pupil among districts was $10,377 in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are available).
Howell and West also found Americans think that teachers earn far less than is actually the case. On average, the public underestimated average teacher salaries in their own state by $14,370. The average estimate among survey respondents was $33,054, while average teacher salary nationally in 2005 was actually $47,602.
Almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.
Howell and West also looked at whether some citizens are better informed about education spending than others. In general, they found that the responses of men were closer to the truth than those of women, and that parents of school-aged children gave more accurate responses about teacher salaries. Homeowners also appeared to be much more responsive than other Americans to higher spending levels in their districts. In districts spending more than $10,000 per pupil, for example, the responses of homeowners were closer to actual spending levels than those of individuals who rented or lived with other families. Homeowners appeared better informed about teacher salaries too, offering responses that were $7,502 higher than non-homeowners’ responses.
When the state Catholic Schools Junior High Academic Decathlon begins today in Chula Vista, a small mid-city school will be representing the Los Angeles Archdiocese for the third time, having beaten more than 100 other parochial schools to get there.
Cathedral Chapel School represented the archdiocese in the state competition in 2002 and 2005, winning the state title in 2002 and earning a reputation as the tough little school that nobody had heard of.
Though the Catholic competition may not have the name recognition of its public high school counterpart, the members of Cathedral's Academic Decathlon team are about the biggest guns on campus and the pride of the neighborhood.
At a pep rally this week, the elementary school's 285 students whooped and hollered for two hours in a frenzied buildup to the team's departure.
The Cathedral decathletes, mostly the sons and daughters of working-class immigrants, are more than just academic heroes. Scores of families are attracted to the school because they view the decathlon team's success as a reflection of the campus' overall academic excellence.
As other parochial schools face severe financial strains and even closure because of declining enrollment, Cathedral is financially stable and its enrollment has increased.
As guidance counselors it's a struggle when we hear our students say, "I came to see you about planning for next year, but you were booked up for the entire week. So I put my name down for next week, but can you remind me about it when you see me?"
Solid theories about how to work with a disengaged student or a high achieving student do not take into account that we have very little time to devote to students in this regard. Research suggests different ways to help high school students navigate traditional academic coursework but none of the research accounts for the distorted ratios we have of student to staff.
Thanks to a grant from the Aristos Program and the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools, at West we've developed the online Personal Education Plan (PEP). The heart of PEP is it collects and stores information students enter into it on the subjects we discuss with them throughout their four years in high school. Even more valuable, the information is accessible to the student, parent, teacher, counselor, or principal, to help support that student in their schoolwork and goals for their future.
For example, an 11th grade male student expresses boredom with classes and is not engaging in school activities. With PEP, I access his profile and note that in 10th grade he expressed interest in an "artistic/humanities path."
Mr. William Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
I am happy to tell you that I was admitted early action to Yale and will be going there this fall. I also want to thank you again for including my [10,453-word] paper on the Philippine War in the Winter 2007 issue of The Concord Review. I was honored to have my work included among so many impressive pieces.
Writing my essay gave me a chance to learn something not only about a specific historical event, but also about the nature of scholarship. Throughout high school I have been an inquisitive and capable history student, but my papers did little more than synthesize the views of other historians. When I decided to submit a paper to you for consideration, I started from one I had written for my tenth-grade American history class. As I edited the essay, I became motivated to steep myself in primary materials—from soldiers’ accounts to congressional testimony to newspaper articles, many of them conflicting—in an attempt to piece together some sort of orderly narrative from these fragmented and contradictory stories. I then turned to secondary sources, considering the views of different historians, assessing their sources, and always trying to draw my own conclusions.
This process of revision was challenging and exciting. I enjoyed reading the stories and first-person narratives. But I also learned to think more critically, and to draw parallels between past events and the present. In the words of H.G. Wells, “History is a race between education and catastrophe.” Perhaps through careful study of the past, we can glean insight as to how to approach the future.
Even if the Review had not accepted my paper for publication, doing this research and writing would still remain one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences of my high school years. I am deeply honored that you chose to publish it and I thank you again.
"When Michelangelo turned 13-years-old he shocked and enraged his father when told that he had agreed to apprentice in the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. After about one year of learning the art of fresco, Michelangelo went on to study at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens and shortly thereafter was invited into the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent...During the years he spent in the Garden of San Marco, Michelangelo began to study human anatomy. In exchange for permission to study corpses (which was strictly forbidden by The Church), the prior of the church of Santo Spirito, Niccolò Bichiellini, received a wooden Crucifix from Michelangelo (detail of Christ's face). But his contact with the dead bodies caused problems with his health, obliging him to interrupt his activities periodically.
"Michelangelo produced at least two relief sculptures by the time he was 16 years old, the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs (both 1489-1492), which show that he had achieved a personal style at a precocious age..."...(and later) “Michelangelo also did the marble Pietà (1498-1500), still in its original place in Saint Peter's Basilica. One of the most famous works of art, the Pietà was probably finished before Michelangelo was 25 years old.”
My apologies for quoting at such length from a biography, but I have seen his Pietà in Rome on several occasions, and it seems clear to me that it took a gifted young man, with great acquired skill in the craft of shaping marble with hammer and chisel, perhaps two years to achieve this masterwork.
Fast forward to the modern period, when we learn from The Boston Globe, in an article in February 2002 by Dave Barry, that:
“...Another important British artist is Damien Hirst. He won the Turner Prize in 1995, for an entry that consisted of (I am not making any of this up) a cow and a calf cut in half and preserved in formaldehyde. Last October, a London gallery threw a party to launch an exhibition by Hirst. When it was over, there was a bunch of party trash—beer bottles, ashtrays, coffee cups, etc.—lying around. Hirst, artist that he is, arranged this trash into an ‘installation,’ which is an artistic term meaning ‘trash that the gallery can now price at 5,000 pounds (sterling) and try to sell to a wealthy moron.’ The next morning, in came the janitor, who, tragically, was not an art professional. When he saw the trash, he assumed it was trash and threw it away. ‘I didn’t think for a second that it was a work of art,’ he later told the press. When members of the gallery staff arrived, they went out and retrieved the artistic trash from the regular trash, then reassembled the original installation, guided by photographs taken the night before.”
A similar astounding contrast may be discovered between artists whose works depend on carefully developed skill and great diligence, such as Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Johannes Vermeer, among hundreds of others, and the newer artists whose work requires no craft at all, as, for example, quoting again from Dave Barry’s Globe article:
“The 2001 Turner Prize went to an artist named Martin Creed, whose entry was titled The Lights Going On and Off. It consists, as the title suggests, of lights going on and off in a vacant room. They go on for five seconds, then off for five seconds. That’s it. In other words, this guy got 20,000 pounds (sterling) for demonstrating the same artistic talent as a defective circuit breaker. Here’s the scary part. He deserved to win. I say this because, according to the BBC, his strongest competition was an artist whose entry consisted of a dusty room ‘filled with an array of disparate objects, including a plastic cactus, mirrors, doors, and old tabloid newspapers.’ Some gallery visitors mistook this for an actual storeroom before realizing that it was art. So Martin Creed’s blinking lights probably looked pretty darned artistic to the Turner Prize jurors. The prize was formally presented by Madonna, who said: ‘Art is always at its best when there is no money, because it has nothing to do with money and everything to do with love.’ That Madonna! Always joking! You should know that the artistry of Martin Creed is not limited to blinking lights. Another of his works is titled A Sheet of A4 Paper Crumpled Into a Ball. It’s a piece of paper crumpled into a ball.”
So now, instead of hard-earned craft and artistic masterworks, we have junk that shows us that “Art is...everything to do with love.” I am appalled by all this, as one who loves the art of Vermeer, Michelangelo and others, but I am also concerned because some of the same debased and mindless standards are working their way into the expectations for and evaluation of academic writing in our schools. Students are encouraged and rewarded for personal and “creative” writings which seem to be judged by the same standards which gave the Turner Prize for lights going on and off. Students are praised and given prizes for writing brief diary entries which involve as much craft as making breakfast with cereal from a box. Students are “protected” from engaging in the difficult craft of writing just as modern artists seem to have been released from any expectation that art should be the result of a long apprenticeship in a craft, such as sculpture or painting. It is true as was said about learning to play the cello, that “There are no shortcuts” in academic expository writing or in art. Artists and writers who try to take a shortcut and skip learning their craft turn out junk. Perhaps we should consider expecting our students, if not our modern artists, to try for a little higher level of achievement than craft-free junk?
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Much to its credit, the Madison school board has mostly ignored the March 2007 recommendations of the district's Equity Task Force. This earnest but unhelpful committee delved into the abstractions of what distinguishes "equity" from "equality," how the board might commit to equity and what esoteric guidelines could measure that commitment.
.............
This point needs to be emphasized. Madisonians aren't afraid to tax themselves. They just want good services in return and know that their money isn't being wasted.
But I can't for the life of me see them rallying around a pompous and abstruse equity policy, especially one that reads like it was formulated by the UW Department of Leftwing Social Engineering. (Example: "Equity will come about when we raise a generation of children tolerant of differences and engaged in their democracy to stop the processes leading to inequity.")
The school board, after a suitable 14-month delay, should politely shelve the task force's recommendations when it finally gets around to voting on them in May.
Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron provides a timely read after Marc's article.
The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards (WMAS) articulate what students should know and be able to do in each curricular area. Community leaders and staff in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) elaborated upon these state standards to frame district curriculum and instruction.
Curriculum can be thought of as the planned educational experiences taught in each subject area at each grade level. Standards-based instruction focuses on teaching the knowledge and skills which support students' continual progress toward meeting the standards.
This article focuses on assessment, the process of using multiple strategies to measure student learning.
The remainder of this article will use mathematics as an example of a content area to demonstrate the use of standards-based assessment. MMSD teachers assess the content standards (i.e., number and algebra) as well as the process standards (i.e., communication, problem solving, and reasoning).
Research indicates that in addition to quizzes and tests, a variety of daily assessment tools (i.e., questioning, observations, discussions, and presentations) are needed to create a more thorough picture of what a student understands.
Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."
I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!
Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.
Citizen-run boards have suddenly been thrust into managing individual schools all over the city. Neophyte teachers barely out of college instruct students sometimes older than they are. A wide range of teaching styles has been employed, from the rotelike call-and-response methods of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation school to more traditional textbook-based approaches. For the first time, parents are being asked to choose schools for their children (though in many cases the parents are absent, and the student is being raised by relatives).
Success will be a tall order in a school district where 85 percent of some 32,000 students are a year and a half to two years below their grade level. In a typical district, the figure would be around 15 percent, said Paul G. Vallas, the new superintendent here.
Worse, a third of the students here are some four years below grade level, a challenge that Mr. Vallas, a veteran of the Chicago and Philadelphia schools, calls “extreme.”
Yet nearly a year into the job, Mr. Vallas professes to be unfazed. With no politics in his way — he answers neither to the neutered parish school board nor to the mayor, but to the state — he is far freer to plan grand schemes than in the much larger cities where he made his mark.
Children who participate in the $1-billion-a-year reading initiative at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law have not become better readers than their peers, according to a study released today by the Education Department's research arm.
The report from the Institute of Education Sciences found that students in schools that use Reading First, which provides grants to improve grade-school reading instruction, scored no better on reading comprehension tests than peers in schools that don't participate. The conclusion is likely to reignite the longstanding "reading wars," because critics argue the program places too much emphasis on explicit phonics instruction and doesn't do enough to foster understanding.
Reading First, aimed at improving reading skills among students from low-income families, has been plagued by allegations of mismanagement and financial conflicts of interest. But the Bush administration has strenuously backed the effort, saying it helps disadvantaged children learn to read. About 1.5 million children in about 5,200 schools nationwide, including more than 140 schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District, participate in Reading First.
The congressionally mandated study, completed by an independent contractor, focused on tens of thousands of first-, second- and third-grade students in 248 schools in 13 states. The children were tested, and researchers observed teachers in 1,400 classrooms.
Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program's purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.
The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.
"EVERYBODY wants it. Nobody understands it. Money is the great taboo. People just won't talk about it. And that is what leads you to subprime. Take the greed and the financial misrepresentation out of it, and the root of this crisis is massive levels of financial illiteracy."
For years John Bryant has been telling anyone who will listen about the problems caused by widespread ignorance of finance. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, he founded Operation HOPE, a non-profit organisation, to give poor people in the worst-hit parts of the city “a hand-up, not a handout” through a mixture of financial education, advice and basic banking. Among other things, Operation HOPE offers mortgage advice to homebuyers and runs “Banking on Our Future”, a national personal-finance course of five hour-long sessions that has already been taken by hundreds of thousands of young people, most of them high-school students.
The council is not short of expertise. It is chaired by Charles Schwab, eponymous boss of a broking firm. Its other members include the head of Junior Achievement, which has been teaching children about money since 1919, and a co-author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, a self-help bestseller. Already, it has approved a new curriculum for middle-school students, "MoneyMath: Lessons for Life". (Lesson one: the secret to becoming a millionaire. Answer: save, save, save.) It is starting a pilot programme to work out how to connect the “unbanked” to financial institutions. And it is supporting what, echoing the Peace Corps, is called the Financial Literacy Corps: a group of people with knowledge of finance who will volunteer to advise those in financial difficulties.
Yet another math curriculum. One of the things I noticed when paging through the large Connected Math (CMP) textbooks a few years ago was the consumer oriented nature of the content (as opposed to a creative approach).
What makes Sophia Wallace a typical member of her generation?
The 28-year-old New York resident has a master's degree from a prestigious university, a successful career in photography, stamps in her passport from around the globe and, until recently, personal finances that were out of control. "Oh my God, I overspent!"
When Wallace graduated with a student-loan debt of $60,000, she found herself overwhelmed to the point of financial paralysis. She tore through a $5,000 loan from her dad as bills stacked up. She had no idea where her money was going -- despite making what she defines as a good salary. The sense of powerlessness crippled her.
When friends recommended she hire an accountant, Wallace packed a FedEx box with bills, receipts and mail and sent it off.
A Bush administration proposal to require that all states use the same formula to calculate high school graduation rates is winning applause from education experts who say it will shed light on the nation's dropout problem.
The proposed regulation is among several the administration introduced last week. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said she is using regulatory power to tweak the No Child Left Behind law because efforts in Congress to overhaul it have stalled.
The 2002 law requires schools and states to report graduation rates, but states have been criticized for understating the number of students who don't receive a diploma. Under the administration's plan, most students would be expected to graduate on time after four years of high school.
Former West Virginia governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group seeking to improve high schools, said a uniform formula would give parents, educators and policymakers a better picture of student performance.
As a task force begins this spring to revamp Seattle Public Schools' approach to special education, it's likely many classrooms around the district will begin to look more like Eckstein's. The details haven't been worked out, but in general, the district will try to deliver services to the students instead of bringing the students to the services.
A consultant recommended Seattle try to include more students in general-education classes and educate more special-education students at their neighborhood schools.
As the diagnosis of disabilities becomes more refined, school districts nationwide are faced with students whose needs are more complicated. At the same time, districts face federal requirements to meet individual students' educational needs in the least restrictive environment possible.
Balancing those two realities can be difficult, said Doug Gill, the director of special education for the Washington state Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction.
"What I see is districts serving kids, sometimes with more complex needs, and as you see kids served with more complex needs, you need, really, a more specialized environment," he said.
I don’t dispute Mr. Herbert’s claim that American high school students are not getting a good education, but I question the evidence he is using to prove it. His examples are factual (knowing who Hitler was or when the Civil War was fought).
Students today can Google that kind of information in seconds. What is more important is that they can’t do what I’m doing right now: they can’t identify claims and evidence and evaluate them. Those skills are what constitute “critical thinking” and what our students need to learn in order to succeed in college and beyond.
High schools need to focus on critical-thinking skills, not facts. Nancy Rehm
Biglerville, Pa., April 22, 2008
The writer is a teacher of gifted high school students.
To the Editor:
Bob Herbert correctly points to the dismal state of education in this country today. However, the irony of Bill Gates’s complaining that American students don’t measure up to the rest of the world is too rich to pass up.
It is precisely because of Bill Gates and his ilk that students are told by the educational reformers that they don’t have to “know” anything — they can just look it up on the Web. Instead, they say, let students focus on feel-good exercises that foster “deep learning” and other chimerical and trendy educational goals.
Is it any wonder that our students don’t know the history of their own country, much less that of the rest of the world? A global society, indeed.
Gary Kappel
Bethany, W. Va., April 22, 2008
The writer is a history professor at Bethany College.
A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and -- perhaps most striking -- exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.
"A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. "They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there's racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools -- their schools look more like prisons."
The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city's poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low -- and then shove students beneath it.
In fact, the student organizers said they don't like to use the word "dropout" to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer "pushout," because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.
New group the State of Black Madison Coalition said it is out to "change the plight of African Americans in the community," and members warned if that doesn't happen, Madison could see the major problems that plague Beloit and Milwaukee.
The new coalition of African American focused groups, armed with a new report called "The State of Black Madison 2008: Before the Tipping Point," issued a call to action Tuesday to the entire Madison community.
It said Madison is on the precipice of change and if problems of disparity between whites and blacks are not addressed, the city might, as the one coalition member put it, "plunge into intractable problems that plague most major urban cities."
The reports details the state of African Americans in Madison, saying if trends from 1990-2005 continue, it will take 265 years for the income gap between blacks and the rest of the Dane County community to disappear.
"A city should be measured by how close the weakest link is to the strongest link. My friends, in Madison we are football fields apart," said Scott Gray, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison
African-American city leaders say the black community is in trouble and hope a new report called the State of Black Madison will be a catalyst for change.
The summary report, Before the Tipping Point, was released today by the State of Black Madison Coalition. They based their findings on information from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and other recent research. Among the discoveries: racial disparity is most prevalent in the areas of criminal justice, education, health care and housing. 37-percent of African Americans in Dane County live in poverty today, as compared to just 11-percent of the community as a whole. And if trends that turned up between 1990-2005 continue, it will take 265 years for the income gap between blacks and the rest of the county to disappear.
“Nearness learning” is a more appropriate term for what the Open University's business school offers, according to its dean in an interview for Which MBA, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit
When the Open University (OU) was founded in 1969, it represented one of the most important educational innovations of the 20th century, not just in Britain, but across the world.
Established by Britain's then prime minister, Harold Wilson, it is considered by many to be the first university to offer genuinely high-quality degrees through distance learning. It was originally to be called the “University of Air”, because most of its lectures took the form of late-night broadcasts on the BBC. Indeed, for many Britons of a certain age the Open University will be a formative memory. Long before Britain had transformed itself into a 24-hour society, most will remember the sinking feeling of finding out that, come midnight, the only thing on their television was a hirsute OU professor, dryly working his way through the laws of thermodynamics.
Something to consider with respect to the clash between District and Student interests.
Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor in Northwestern University’s sociology department, has discovered that students aren’t nearly as Web-savvy as they, or their elders, assume.
Ms. Hargittai studies the technological fluency of college freshmen. She found that they lack a basic understanding of such terms as BCC (blind copy on e-mail), podcasting, and phishing. This spring she will start a national poster-and-video contest to promote Web-related skills.
Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?
A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.
Q. What demographic groups are less Web-savvy?
A. Women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education, which is a proxy for socioeconomic status.
Join us for a live Web chat about the impact of A Nation at Risk and the potential for using international comparison data to improve academic standards and student achievement in U.S. schools.
Twenty-five years ago, a federal commission issued the landmark report that declared a "rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. education posed a threat to America's prosperity and status in the world. Today, many policymakers and members of the business and education communities are sounding the same alarm bells.
Some experts are recommending that the United States put more stock in measuring itself against other countries, including having individual states benchmark their progress against those countries to get a clear and true picture of the status of American education. Would that help improve education in America? What can the United States do to improve education and continue to compete globally? Are the problems with the U.S. education system, compared with those of other industrialized countries', overblown? Join us for this discussion.
About the guests:
• Dane Linn, is the director of the education division of the National Governors Association, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization that has taken an active role in examining how states might align their academic standards and practices to those of top-performing nations
• Iris C. Rotberg, is the co-director of the Center for Curriculum, Standards, and Technology at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.
TOMORROW is the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a remarkable document that became a milestone in the history of American education — albeit in ways that its creators neither planned, anticipated or even wanted.
In August 1981, Education Secretary T. H. Bell created a National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine, in the report’s words, “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” Secretary Bell’s expectation, he later said, was that the report would paint a rosy picture of American education and correct all those widespread negative perceptions.
Instead, on April 26, 1983, the commission released a sweeping 65-page indictment of the quality of teaching and learning in American primary and secondary schools couched in a style of apocalyptic rhetoric rarely found in blue-ribbon commission reports.
“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people,” it warned. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Seeking to calm a backlash at traditional Los Angeles schools, a top district official promised this week to reconsider offers of classroom space on those campuses to charter schools.
The idea of privately operated charter schools sharing space with regular schools was met with fury at many affected campuses, including Taft High in Woodland Hills and Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles. Teachers and parents have complained that their own reforms and programs would be harmed.
Charter operators aren't too happy either: Many still await offers, while others are considering whether proposed deals are affordable or adequate.
Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines stepped into the fray with unscheduled remarks at a "town hall" this week before a standing-room-only audience of more than 800 in Taft's auditorium.
"I want to review each issue," Cortines said. "We had to pause, take a breath and look at . . . what we must do for charter schools but also how it affects . . . the regular school."
Under state law as well as a recent settlement of litigation, the Los Angeles Unified School District must share facilities "fairly" with charter schools. Charters are independently run public schools that operate with less state regulation in exchange for boosting student achievement.
I received a letter a few weeks ago from a mother in Prince William County, home to one of the Washington area's big suburban school systems. It starkly captured the parental frustration at the heart of the national debate over what to do with very gifted students. I ran her letter, with a short response, in my weekly Post column, "Extra Credit," in which I answer reader mail. That column produced so many letters that I decided to lay out the debate in this column, using the limitless space of the Internet. I have not been very sympathetic with parents of gifted kids. Some of the reaction below echoes things I have said. But I find it difficult to justify forcing Nancy Klimavicz's son to spend valuable time on busywork. If anyone has any good way out of this impasse, e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com.
Dear Extra Credit:
I've started this letter many times over the past several months. After my gifted son received rejections from Virginia Tech, James Madison University and William and Mary, I figured it's time to warn other parents. If you have a very bright student, home-school him.
My son was reading a college-level book in third grade when the gifted education specialist recommended just that. Academically, we figured he'd learn and grow regardless of the environment, but his weakness was social interaction with his peers. We believed childhood should include high school sports teams and clubs, and we remembered being influenced by one or two teachers who were passionate about their subjects. We decided to leave him in public school.
Will C. Wood Middle School faced a vexing situation when last year's test results came out in August. Most students had met the mark set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students' math scores fell far short of it, bringing the school into failing status in the eyes of the federal law.
One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn't count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.
"You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble."
Over the past two years, 80 California schools got "out of trouble" with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.
The state allows school officials to comb through test results every August, changing students' demographic information to correct mistakes that can happen, for example, when clerks register new students or when districts swap student files.
It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.
Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.
“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.
It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.
“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.
Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.
How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills key to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.
Fairfax County school officials have agreed to review their grading policies in response to parents' concerns that relatively stringent standards mean their children are losing out on scholarships and college admissions.
More than 2,800 parents and students signed an online petition urging the school system to adopt a 10-point grading scale and give extra weight for honors, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. The current system requires a score of 94 or higher for an A, and gives no extra credit to honors courses. AP courses are given half a point.
Many competing school systems, including Montgomery County, give A's for lower scores and graduate students with similar backgrounds but higher GPA's, the parents contend. Their concerns come as competition for admission to big-name colleges is at a high and tuition more expensive than ever.
Louise Epstein, president of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted, said the current policies are unfair. "They cost families money and reduce good opportunities for students just because they go to Fairfax schools," she said.
by Nisa Islam Muhammad - Special to the NNPA from The Final Call
(NNPA) — For too many Black students going to high school means fitting a stereotype of what it means to be “Black” developed by images in music, movies and media. It means “acting Black” to fit in a peer group or in response to social pressures.
According to researchers, “acting Black” is contributing to the education and achievement gap between Black and White students. They also believe it is one reason why Black students are underrepresented in gifted programs.
“If you are a Black student and are doing well in school you are accused of “acting White.” Black students performance then begins to suffer,” study author Donna Ford, professor of special education and Betts chair of education and human development at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, told The Final Call.
“Part of the achievement gap, particularly for gifted Black students, is due to the poor images these students have of themselves as learners. Our research shows that prevention and intervention programs that focus on improving students’ achievement ethic and self-image are essential to closing the achievement gap.”
The research, one of the first to examine the concept of “acting Black,” was published in the March 2008 issue of Urban Education.
“A quarter of a million Black students are missing out on the opportunity of being in gifted programs. They just don’t see themselves in the class. Being successful is seen as being White,” said Dr. Ford.
The study found that 40 percent of Black girls and 60 percent of Black boys were underrepresented in gifted and talented programs.
When Nina Washington was in the 10th grade teachers recommended her for Advanced Placement (AP) classes.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she told The Final Call. “I thought those classes would be too hard. None of my friends were in them and I would rather be with them.”
That was before she told her mother, Sandra Washington.
“I was shocked. I couldn’t understand why she would want to diminish her skill and talent to be with friends. I told her she was definitely taking the AP classes and if they were hard we would get a tutor or whatever she needed to be successful. She could be with her friends between classes, during lunch and after school,” Sandra Washington told The Final Call.
Several AP classes later, Nina will graduate with honors this June.
There is also double standard for Black and White students who act out or demonstrate youthful exuberance.
“White students can be hippies, have long hair, dress differently and still go on to become president, while Black students who wear baggy pants and have long hair will find their social security numbers in a database,” explained report co-author Gilman Whiting, assistant professor of African American and Diaspora studies at Vanderbilt, to The Final Call.
“Acting Black is not about acquiescing to Whites, but rebelling. It’s more indicative of their thought pattern. It’s their way of rebelling to the White power struggle by their dress, music and language. However, it’s looked at as negative aspects of Black life by Whites. It’s an outlaw culture.”
According to a 2004 document by the National Education Association, 90 percent of public school teachers are White and 40 percent of public schools have no teachers of color.
The new report encourages teachers to be as quick to recommend Black students to gifted and talented programs as they are to recommend them special education program.
The researchers surveyed 166 Black 5th-through 12th-graders identified as gifted in two Ohio school districts.
They described “acting White” as speaking properly, being smart or too smart, doing well in school, taking advanced courses, being stuck up, and not acting your race. Terms used to describe “acting Black” were having a “don’t care” attitude, being laid back, being dumb or uneducated and pretending not to be smart.
The authors also found that while Black students agree that hard work in school leads to success, they do not necessarily believe that this holds true for Black people.
“This doubt and second-guessing may result in the child believing that an education benefits or pays off for some groups, but not others, namely Blacks,” the authors wrote. “Some of these students, specifically if discouraged, believe that hard work is a waste of time and energy given the reality of social injustices.”
Without saying the words these students see the dual reality of Black life in America: More educated Blacks than ever, more unemployed than and under employed Blacks than Whites, more educational opportunities and more Black men going to jail.
“Our children are taught every day that they can’t do the work in school. Public schools are warehouses for our children,” said Lateefah Muhammad, an education consultant in Fredericksburg, Va.
“Acting Black is a mind-set today. The AP classes and gifted programs are the public school systems last attempt to keep their children preserved to rule this global society. We are assessing programs that are not designed for us to achieve. There is a systems gap in America. If we just focus on the Black gap we miss the American education gap with the rest of the world which is greater,” she said.
What can educators and parents do to help Black children?
“There must be aggressive and proactive leadership by educators in diversifying the teaching force. We have to hold teachers responsible for where they refer Black students,” said Dr. Ford. “Peer pressure is real for all students. They are called nerds, sissies and more. The difference is that Black students take it to heart … The achievement gap is real, the achievement gap is complex, the achievement gap is stubborn; we — educators and families — must be just as stubborn and diligent in our efforts to eliminate the gap.”
Officials overseeing the Advanced Placement program have announced that they intend to drop AP classes and exams in four subject areas, in a pullback expected to affect about 12,500 students and 2,500 teachers worldwide.
Following the end of the 2008-09 academic year, there will be no AP courses or exams in Italian, Latin literature, French literature, and computer science AB, said officials at the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand.
The College Board has in past years withdrawn one undersubscribed AP course at a time, but has never taken so many courses off its table of offerings in the half-century since the program started as a way for students to take college-level courses and potentially earn college credit while still in high school.
Trevor Packer, the College Board vice president who oversees the AP program, said the decision was made at a trustee meeting on March 27, and that AP teachers in the affected subjects were notified by e-mail April 3. “Of course, it’s sad for them,” he said of the teachers.
Mr. Packer said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.
Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.
The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic.
“For us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Mr. Packer said.
He added that no additional AP courses would be cut for at least the next five years.
He said the decision was not connected to results from the recently released national audit of AP course syllabuses. ("Number of Schools Offering AP Falls After First Audit of Courses," March 14, 2007.)
Mr. Packer noted that the Italian program was 400 percent over budget, owing to the small number of students taking the exams.
The Italian program is the only one among the subjects that would not be represented in some other way in the AP program.
The College Board will continue to offer AP French Language, for example, and introductory-level computer science.
Mr. Packer also held out the possibility that the Italian program might be saved if outside money were forthcoming.
“This wasn’t a situation of us going to the trustees and saying we need to cut costs,” he said, but a question of deploying resources “less diffusely.”
The controversial new writing portion of the SAT is actually a better predictor of grades for freshmen college students than the older, more-established, critical reading and mathematics portions, according to preliminary results of two new studies.
The College Board, which administers the SAT, studied test scores from 150,000 freshmen entering 110 colleges in 2006 and then looked at their GPAs at the end of their freshmen year, says Wayne Camara, vice president of research.
"Our study suggests that the writing test is the best single predictor" of freshman grades, he says. The study won't be finalized until summer, he says.
The University of California drew a similar conclusion from an analysis of its incoming 2006 freshmen and their GPAs, says Sam Agronow, coordinator of admissions research and evaluation at the University of California's office of the president.
One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)
“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”
Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.
A unanimous Milwaukee School Board agreed Thursday night "to reduce massive busing" in Milwaukee Public Schools, but to soften a proposed timetable for achieving ambitious cuts.
But while all nine members generally agreed on the goal of getting more kids off buses and into improved neighborhood schools, what will actually result will not be clear for perhaps several years.
The board action, in effect, fired the starting gun on a process that will require balancing the desire of thousands of parents to send their children to schools somewhere other than their neighborhood with the desire to see more money spent in classrooms and less on buses.
Board member Michael Bonds, who proposed the resolution, said, "This is an opportunity for us to put millions of dollars back into the classroom, to provide our students with a quality, comprehensive education."
Last night MPS board members moved to reduce voluntary busing, for a potential savings of millions of dollars. In our recent meeting with Directors Spence and Thompson, busing has been identified as a source of tremendous savings. Despite the Neighborhood Schools Initiative, students are still being bused all over city to schools that are not citywide.
All members seem to support the idea of reducing busing, but several are concerned about options for parents who use the bus as child care. It's important for the district to keep in mind that its main mission is to educate children, first and foremost. It can't be in the position of sacrificing the academic goals of the district in order to provide services for parents that it can no longer afford.
A Look at Sacramento's High School "Redesign" Initiative
Linking Education and Economic Development and the Sacramento City Unified School District [488K PDF]:
Over the past five years, the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in partnership with LEED—Linking Education and Economic Development, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has implemented a system-wide redesign of the District’s high schools. With the assistance of community members, teachers principals, and especially parents and students, we have worked to create new models for high school learning in the 21st Century. To share the results of this effort, including accomplishments, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges, partners came together to create the "Report to the Community on the Education for the 21st Century (e21) High School Redesign Initiative: 2002-2007 and Beyond". This Executive Summary captures some of the key elements of this Report
student angst, the Legislature is about to approve a major revamp of Florida's public-school testing program -- from what students are expected to know to when they take the exam.
Rallies and motivational speakers meant to boost FCAT scores would be banned during class time. For the first time, middle-school students would be tested on their social-science knowledge. And schools could not buy new textbooks that mention the FCAT.
While the House and Senate differ on some details, it appears almost sure that the testing, now done each February, will be pushed later in the school year. That will give teachers more time to cover material that could be on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, given in grades 3 through 11.
Pending House and Senate bills would schedule the writing exam on March 1, with testing on other subjects delayed until April 15 at the earliest. On Friday, the House approved its bill 110-0.
A few years ago, I signed on as a volunteer tutor at my local elementary. I was matched with a student — I'll call him Eddie — who was failing miserably at both the math and English portions of the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills), a statewide minimal skills test that was the precursor to today's TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills).
I took him on in math, it being the worst of all his subjects, and began a series of one-on-one weekly meetings. It soon became apparent that while Eddie's multiplication and division skills were very shaky, his ability to subtract once we got into double digits was no better. Asked to compute 25 minus 17, Eddie's eyes darted around the room looking for an escape hatch. There were too many numbers to count on his fingers.
Twenty-five years ago this week, Americans awoke to a forceful little report that, depending on your point of view, either ruined public education or saved it.
On April 26, 1983, in a White House ceremony, Ronald Reagan took possession of "A Nation at Risk." The product of nearly two years' work by a blue-ribbon commission, it found poor academic performance at nearly every level and warned that the education system was "being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity."
It kick-started decades of tough talk about public schools and reforms that culminated in 2002's No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration law that pushes schools to improve students' basic skills or face ever-tougher sanctions.
Twenty-five years later, the sole teacher on the 1983 panel says the tough talk was just what the doctor ordered.
"In order to move a nation to make changes, you have to find some very incisive language," Jay Sommer says. Now 81 and teaching Hebrew at a suburban synagogue, Sommer was a high school language teacher in New Rochelle, N.Y., when tapped to help produce the report.
Despite earning B averages in high school, at least one in 10 HOPE Scholarship recipients receives some type of remedial help during the first year of college.
Put simply, some college freshmen who seemed to excel in high school still need help in basic math and English.
Twelve percent of college freshmen who have the HOPE Scholarship, awarded to Georgia students who graduate from high school with at least a B average, received learning support in fall 2006, according to the University System of Georgia.
The reasons why run the gamut, with blame placed at the state level all the way down to the student.
"It's hard for me to say the causes of that," said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education.
But part of the reason for the state's continuing overhaul of the public schools' kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum is to get students out of remediation and make them more prepared for college work, he said.
"The curriculum">curriculum before was way too broad and way too vague," Tofig said.
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.
"We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world," said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as "actually pretty scary, alarming."
Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.
When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.
Mr. Golston noted that the performance of American students, when compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly dismal as they move through the higher grades:
Nicholas Colangelo is director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, Iowa City, established in 1988 at the University of Iowa. His hands-on experience includes teaching middle-school social studies in New York and serving as an elementary-school counselor in Vermont in the 1970s. Four years ago, he co-authored with colleagues the report "A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students."
Q. The alarm has been sounded that U.S. students are not prepared for the growing global competition they face. But is that true of this country's brightest students? Are our most gifted students being challenged with sufficient rigor?
A. When it comes to matching top students to top students, we are probably pretty close. But what concerns me is that the top students in the United States do not necessarily get the challenge they need across the board. It really is about ZIP code. We have taken for granted that our top students are getting what they need. If we gave our top students more opportunities to take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate and other [accelerated opportunities], they would reveal they are capable of doing much more than we think.
Q. Has the federal No Child Left Behind law affected the ability of schools to challenge all students to excel?
A. As far as I'm concerned, the No Child Left Behind law has done nothing on behalf of high-ability students. Essentially, No Child Left Behind has focused on kids below a standard, ignoring kids above that standard. You should have no law that makes a portion of the students invisible. They are all our kids, and they all deserve our attention and energy.
Children are fantastic little learning machines. They are hardwired to play with ideas and absorb knowledge. Adults, alas, are not. That is why the challenge of adult education and lifelong learning is more difficult – and ultimately more important – than childhood education. Societies that are serious about raising their standard of living should focus on enhancing the productivity of parents rather than boosting teenage test scores.
The economic rationale is clear. Ageing populations of Europe, China and North America increasingly enjoy long and healthy lives. Yet as they grow older, wealth creation depends on the ability to acquire and convert information, skills and technologies into new value. In this environment, hard-won expertise, rather like expensive capital equipment, often depreciates with astonishing speed. The cruel “human capital” jibe, that many workers do not have 20 years’ experience but one year’s experience 20 times over, has assumed new poignancy.
The premise that quality education during life’s first two decades matters more than for decades four and five has become literally counterproductive. Demographic realities and dynamic economies have made “ageing adults” today’s most underappreciated – and underappreciating – capital asset class.
Improving returns on that asset requires neither great sums of money nor greater flights of imagination. The key is to rethink and reorganise how busy but anxious adults can benefit from education and training opportunities. Technology makes meeting that challenge far more affordable, entrepreneurial and compelling. Adult education is a market ripe for rapid global transformation.
Educators argue often whether their work should be judged by test scores. There are thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. We journalists tend to focus on exam results because so many of our readers say that is what they want, and such information is relatively easy to get from regular public schools.
Private schools, unfortunately, rarely provide such information, and data from public charter schools have also been difficult to obtain. Charters are public schools; their students, unlike private school students, take the same state tests regular public school students do. But they are not part of the public school systems that have staffs assigned to gather and release test score results, so their data sometimes emerge in a haphazard way, or not at all.
Thank goodness, then, for those few charter school groups that focus intently on test data and make that data readily available to the public. Those school networks include Achievement First, Aspire, Green Dot, Edison, IDEA, Noble Street, Uncommon Schools, YES and a few others designed to give children from low-income families the extra time, encouragement and great teaching they need.
School districts in Stoughton, Columbus, Deerfield, Sauk Prairie and Janesville were among 32 statewide named Monday to receive Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction grants to start kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds.
But it may not be enough for at least one area district.
Getting 4-year-olds enrolled in kindergarten is a key step to raising student achievement levels and graduation rates, particularly among children from low-income families, national research has shown, DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper said.
School districts' efforts to launch 4K programs have been hampered because it takes three years to get full funding for the program under the state's school-finance system, according to DPI.
That's what these grants are supposed to address with $3 million announced for 4K programs to start this fall.
Columbus, one of the school districts that qualified for the grant, would get an estimated $62,814 to enroll 87 children this fall.
The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district's proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they're still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That's why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin's 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children "to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers."
For many years, recognizing the value to both children and the community, Madison Teachers Inc. has endorsed 4-year-old kindergarten being universally accessible to all.
This forward-thinking educational opportunity will provide all children with an opportunity to develop the skills they need to be better prepared to proceed with their education, with the benefit of 4- year-old kindergarten. They will be more successful, not only in school, but in life.
Four-year-old kindergarten is just one more way in which Madison schools will be on the cutting edge, offering the best educational opportunities to children. In a city that values education as we do, there is no question that people understand the value it provides.
Because of the increasing financial pressures placed upon the Madison School District, resulting from state- imposed revenue limits, many educational services and programs have been cut to the bone.
During the 2001-02 budget cycle, the axe unfortunately fell on the district's 4-year-old kindergarten program. The School Board was forced to eliminate the remaining $380,000 funding then available to those families opting to enroll their children in the program.
This includes its opposition to collaborative 4-year-old kindergarten, virtual classes and charter schools, all of which might improve the chances of low achievers and help retain a crucial cadre of students from higher-income families. Virtual classes would allow the district to expand its offerings beyond its traditional curriculum, helping everyone from teen parents to those seeking high-level math and science courses. But the union has fought the district's attempts to offer classes that are not led by MTI teachers.
As for charter schools, MTI has long opposed them and lobbied behind the scenes last year to kill the Studio School, an arts and technology charter that the school board rejected by a 4-3 vote. (Many have also speculated that Winston's last minute flip-flop was partly to appease the union.)
"There have become these huge blind spots in a system where the superintendent doesn't raise certain issues because it will upset the union," Robarts says. "Everyone ends up being subject to the one big political player in the system, and that's the teachers union."
MTI's opposition was a major factor in Rainwater's decision to kill a 4-year-old kindergarten proposal in 2003, a city official told Isthmus last year (See "How can we help poor students achieve more?" 3/22/07).
Matthews' major problem with a collaborative proposal is that district money would support daycare workers who are not MTI members. "The basic union concept gets shot," he says. "And if you shoot it there, where else are you going to shoot it?"
At times, Matthews can appear downright callous. He says he has no problem with the district opening up its own 4K program, which would cost more and require significant physical space that the district doesn't have. It would also devastate the city's accredited non-profit daycare providers by siphoning off older kids whose enrollment offsets costs associated with infants and toddlers.
It can't be easy for U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. She's passionate about all things to do with school. "This is my life's work, my calling," she says. Yet, here she is, in the final year of the Bush administration, and instead of continuing the grand work of remaking America's schools, she's stamping out brush fires in college-lending caused by the credit crunch and rattling the cages of fat cats in higher education. She doesn't like to say it out loud, but despite her very best efforts, things haven't worked out like she (or her boss) had planned.
At lunch this week with NEWSWEEK, she was determined to look forward, not back. She's had a great ride. She came to Washington, first as senior domestic policy adviser in 2001, with a popular Republican president who promptly wrested education away from the Democrats, the ones who had traditionally dominated the issue. Back then, President Bush spoke loud and often about the raw deal poor and minority kids were getting in public school. Instead of a bleeding heart, he showed a kind of flinty compassion for the poor by condemning what he famously called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that plagued our inner cities. He coupled that with an inspired can-do attitude about making real, lasting change that disarmed even his fiercest opponents.
Julie Maurer hopes to see a day when parents of children with special needs, parents like her, don’t have to advocate for their children in public school
Maurer hopes the system changes and schools accept children, like her daughter, Jenny, as easily as children who will never carry a label like “learning disabled” or “emotionally disabled.”
Maurer’s daughter, now 20, attends the University of Wisconsin-Parkside after graduating from Racine Unified.
A small group of parents, educators and disability advocates spent a few hours Saturday at the United Way of Racine County, 2000 Domanik Drive, with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee education professor Elise Frattura, clearing up the confusion of including special education students in regular education classrooms.
Those years, from elementary school through high school, were marked by Maurer’s struggles to get her daughter into regular classrooms instead of being isolated from the rest of the children her age.
A preschool teacher encouraged Maurer to read the federal special education law, so as to understand what she should expect her daughter to receive in school.
"If we don't teach this to them," Joan Fecteau, an MPS instructional technology leader, told me, "then we are doing as much of a disservice as not teaching them to read or write."
But you can't teach driving by sitting at a desk. You have to get behind the wheel. Let's give kids hands-on experience under teacher supervision.
Fecteau not only teaches students but teachers as well. "Some teachers don't know enough about the Internet to understand how to avoid viruses and tracking devices. For example, clicking on a pop-up window can lead to malicious spyware or unintended Web pages being displayed."
It is apparent to parents that most kids are far beyond their teachers' and parents' understanding. The one institution that has the mission to teach is not keeping up. We need to give schools the nod and the resources to do it - which is code for funding. Oh, no, did I say that?
In my view, technology, per se, is not the core issue. Critical thinking and knowledge come first, then tools. Tools we purchase today will be long obsolete by the time our children graduate (maybe this argues for some technology presence in high school). Ideally, our schools should have fast fiber and wireless (open) networks, and as Momanonymous noted, perhaps teacher compensation might include a laptop/mobile device allowance.
I am generally against teaching kids powerpoint, particularly before they've mastered the art of writing a paper.
On April 16th 2008, Toronto Canada became one of the first jurisdictions in North America to pass a substantive homework reform policy.
The policy reduces the homework burden on middle school and high school students and all but eliminates homework in the elementary grades. In addition, homework will no longer be allowed during vacations.
The new policy mandates that teacher’s co-ordinate their efforts and that the homework that is sent home is “clearly articulated and carefully planned” and “require no additional teaching outside the classroom”.
This policy is a major breakthrough for those of us who have been advocating for homework reform.
When I started to write this it was intended to be a “how to” guide for anyone who wanted to replicate what we have achieved in Toronto. But when I read it it seemed preachy.
I guess what I really want to communicate is, just start. Every situation is different, every school board is different, and every community is different, but just start somewhere.
There's more to Milwaukee Public Schools than state test scores and dropout rates, but the realities of life in the classroom rarely bubble up to top district officials.
This was the message of about 100 MPS educators who met last week to discuss what they called the deteriorating conditions of teaching and learning and to brainstorm solutions.
The meeting was sponsored by the Educators' Network for Social Justice, a local advocacy group, and the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association.
Teachers face daily pressures to teach for various tests and accommodate cuts in arts and library budgets, many participants said.
"Stop talking about this being a data-driven district, and start talking about it being a child-centered district," said Amy Gutowski, a third-grade teacher at Thoreau Elementary School.
Parents of an estimated 166,000 children in California are eagerly awaiting a state appellate court ruling on whether they have a constitutional right to home-school their children without a teaching credential.
That question sprouted unexpectedly on Feb. 28, when a panel of three judges ruled that parents or tutors of children who are home-schooled must be certified by the state, basing their ruling on a rarely enforced state education law. Few parents knew the law existed.
The court's ruling -- since suspended pending a June rehearing -- threatens to send back to the classroom those children who now spend their days studying math, Spanish or the Bible in the comfort of their living rooms.
Reaction to the ruling quickly spread through the state, home to the nation's largest number of home-schoolers, and across the country.
When Bethesda high school student Jenna Kusek first saw where she'd be living for three weeks in Tanzania, she thought, "You've got to be kidding."
This hole in the ground is the toilet? A trickle of cold water from an elevated hose is the shower?
But Kusek soon gained a new perspective. The white stucco house she shared with other teen volunteers last summer was a mansion by local standards, and better than the concrete-block house they would spend their days building for a local teacher. A cold shower, she realized, was a luxury unavailable to the village kids. A year after the trip, tears come to her eyes when she talks about how guilty she began feeling about having access to any kind of shower.
"Compared to how people lived in the village, our housing was too good to be true," says Kusek, 18, a senior at Walt Whitman High School. "I knew before I went to Africa that I was blessed, but I had no idea how lucky I was. I can't believe now the things we once took for granted."
In light of West High School Principal Ed Holmes's budgetary decision to shut down the Writing Lab after almost 40 years in existence, I share this recent column from Barbara Wallraff, who writes the column Word Court.
America's eighth-graders and high school seniors got their writing "report cards" the other day -- the results for the writing part of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress were announced. Just a third of eighth-grade students and a quarter of high school seniors are "proficient" in writing. Oh, dear! And yet federal authorities consider this encouraging news -- that's how bad the situation is.
Granted, the average scores are a few points higher than they were when the test was given in 2002. And the improvement is almost across the board, at least among the eighth-graders. Students in every ethnic group except American Indians are doing better, and the gap white and black eighth-graders is narrowing. Also granted, better is better -- and mountains of behavior modification research demonstrate that praising successes is a more effective way to bring about change than criticizing failures.
But still, isn't cheering because a third of the kids are doing well like congratulating ourselves that we made it a third of the way to the finish line in a race? Or that we managed to pay a third of our bills? Speaking of thirds, a 2003 survey by the College Board concluded that a third of employees at America's blue-chip corporations are pretty bad at writing and need remedial training. And speaking of writing, can everybody see the handwriting on the wall? The message is terribly disheartening. Writing isn't just a skill that people tend to need to earn a good living -- it's one of our basic means of communication.
The question is what to do about the two-thirds or three-quarters of our young people who are less than proficient. Keeping on doing whatever we've been doing isn't suddenly going to start yielding different results. Admittedly, the sorry state of America's writing skills is a vast, long-term problem to which experts have devoted whole careers. So who am I to propose a solution?
Writing is different from other skills. In math, you either get the concept or you don't. In history, you either know who did what when or you don't. But writing isn't right or wrong, just better or worse. Learning to write is something each of us does individually, in our own way -- which makes me suspect that sweeping initiatives, no matter how brilliant and well-funded (hah!), aren't what's needed.
May I suggest, instead, that anybody who has the time , energy and interest in young people encourage them, one at a time, to write -- and read? (Reading skills and writing skills go hand in hand.) Ask kids to write you emails. Lend them a favorite book , and tell them what the book has meant to you. Ask them about what they've been reading.
If you're a parent, you're probably doing this for your own kids, and you probably know the statistics about what a huge advantage it gives kids if their parents take an interest in their education. If you're only, or also, a concerned citizen -- well, there are plenty of kids who aren't lucky enough to be growing up in your family. Wouldn't it make you proud to help a few of them?
New research into what is commonly called the black-white “achievement gap” suggests that the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children.
As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.
“We care about achievement gaps because of their implications for labor-market and socioeconomic-status issues down the line,” said Lindsay C. Page, a Harvard University researcher, commenting on the studies. “It’s disconcerting if the gap is growing particularly high among high-achieving black and white students.”
Disconcerting, but not surprising, said researchers who have studied achievement gaps. Studies have long shown, for instance, that African-American students are underrepresented among the top scorers on standardized tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Fewer studies, though, have traced the growth of those gaps among high and low achievers.
The reasons why achievement gaps are wider at the upper end of the achievement scale are still unclear. But some experts believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find.
Thousands of Massachusetts public high school graduates arrive at college unprepared for even the most basic math and English classes, forcing them to take remedial courses that discourage many from staying in school, according to a statewide study released yesterday.
The problem is particularly acute in urban districts and vocational schools, according to the first-of-its kind study. At three high schools in Boston and two in Worcester, at least 70 percent of students were forced to take at least one remedial class because they scored poorly on a college placement test.
The study raises concern that the state’s public schools are not doing enough to prepare all of their students for college, despite years of overhauls and large infusions of money.
The findings are also worrisome because students who take remedial courses, which do not count toward a degree, are far more likely to drop out of college, often without the skills needed to land a good job. That has broad implications for the state’s workforce, economy, and social mobility.
The report, conducted jointly by the state Departments of Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education, found that the problem crossed socioeconomic lines. One third of high school graduates in suburban Hanover took remedial classes, as did 27 percent of graduates in Lynnfield and Needham.
“This is a statewide problem,” said Linda M. Noonan, managing director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, a nonprofit group that supports tougher educational standards to create a better workforce. "There's something systemic that we're not doing to get these kids ready to do college-level work."
High school administrators said they welcomed the new information, and pledged to use it to make the high school diploma a true sign of readiness for college.
"If you're a good district, this is information you want," said Paul Schlichtman, who coordinates research, testing, and assessment for the Lowell schools, where about half of graduates who went on to a state college or university in Massachusetts took remedial classes. "Your high school diploma needs to be a credential for a two- and four-year school, and it's something that we take very seriously."
The study tracked more than 19,000 students who graduated from public high schools in 2005 and attended an institution within the state's higher education system. Overall, it found that 37 percent of the graduates enrolled in at least one remedial course in their first semester in college. In many urban districts, a majority of the graduates studied took at least one remedial class their first year.
Among the roughly 8,500 students in the study who attended community colleges, nearly two-thirds took a remedial course. Many college administrators blame remedial courses for the high dropout rate at the state's two-year schools.
The results also cast doubt on the MCAS exams as a predictor of college readiness at a time when state education leaders are urging high schools to require a more rigorous course load to boost MCAS scores, as required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
High school students who received special education instruction in high school, low-income and limited-English speaking students, and Hispanic and African-American students, were more likely to enroll in remedial classes, the study found.
The report marks the first time education researchers have detailed how public high school graduates from individual school districts perform in Massachusetts public colleges. State education officials distributed the reports last week to nearly 300 high schools across the state, and hope the information will spur improvements.
"We're hopeful high schools will regard this very seriously," said Paul Reville, chairman of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, who will take over as the state's education secretary in July. "This tells us that higher standards are necessary. We're not fully preparing students for non-remediated college work."
The report showed that students who barely pass the MCAS tests are far more likely to take college remedial classes. For example, half of students who scored a "needs improvement" on the 10th-grade MCAS math test were forced to take developmental math classes, as opposed to 20 percent who received the score "proficient."
In November, state education officials unanimously approved a recommended core high school curriculum in response to growing concerns about the number of students taking remedial classes. The recommended program includes four years of English, four years of math, three years of science, and three years of history.
Beginning this fall, students who do not reach the proficiency level on the English and math MCAS exams will be required to take more core classes and periodic tests to gauge their progress. Reville also said administrators have discussed giving high school seniors college placement tests.
Patricia F. Plummer, commissioner of the Department of Higher Education, said research has shown that students who take math and English in all four years of high school are far more likely to succeed in college.
"It's tremendously discouraging for them to be in college and not taking college-level work," she said. "And in terms of economic development, we can't afford to lose them."
More than ever, students need college education and training to compete for entry-level positions and launch a good career, Plummer said.
Education officials said they were encouraged by one finding: 80 percent of first-time, full-time students enrolled for a second year of college in 2006.
At Bunker Hill Community College, educators said the MCAS had not improved performance on college placement tests, and that some high school graduates show up woefully unprepared for basic college work.
"I haven't seen any significant change," said Deborah Barrett, the college's coordinator of student assessment. "It's very frustrating for students. They think that they've graduated from high school, they passed the MCAS, so they're ready for college."
Almost 90 percent of Bunker Hill students end up taking remedial math, and 63 percent take remedial English. Some graduates are writing at such a poor level that they must take the most introductory remedial class, she said. Only 20 percent of students complete their remedial work within two years, she said.
Educators and researchers said the study suggested that students who merely pass are not necessarily ready for college.
"The dirty little secret is that MCAS doesn't test 10th grade skills, much less college skills," said Robert Gaudet, an education researcher at the University of Massachusetts' Donahue Institute. "Passing is not that hard, it's getting to proficient that's tougher."
Imagine a program that produced a fourfold increase in the number of students recognized for academic achievement. What if that initiative also resulted in three times as many students elected to leadership positions at their schools? And imagine that these children would be four times as likely to be in math or science fairs, and also to perform community service. On top of all that, they would also be three times as likely to win an award for exceptional school attendance.
If public school administrators and government officials knew of such a program, I would demand that it be implemented in our schools and that we invest in it immediately. Guess what? We already know of such a program that does achieve all those benefits: It’s called the arts.
According to Americans for the Arts, children deeply involved in arts programs receive the aforementioned benefits, and then some. Yet, paradoxically, schools are cutting arts programs — ranging from band to theater to painting — because of funding limitations.
Back in the day [1980], Articulation was the name given to the process to ensure that elementary students were not surprised by the demands of seventh grade, and middle school students were not surprised by the demands of ninth grade (or tenth grade).
Educators had meetings in which they discussed articulation - not better diction for all, but a better fit between different levels of schooling - and it was always a problem. Each level wanted control over what it taught and when, and what academic standards would be enforced, and there was a lamentable inclination by high school educators to look down a bit on middle school educators and for middle school educators to look down a bit on elementary school educators.
While I am sure that this never happens now, in the new Millennium, there is another articulation problem which I believe gets far less attention than students deserve. It has been reported recently that nationally about 30% of our high school students in general drop out of high school and that the percentage rises to a shocking 50% for black and Hispanic students.
But what about the 70% (or 50%) who do graduate and get the diploma certifying that they have met the requirements of an American high school education? In Massachusetts, of those who pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System [MCAS] tests and get their diplomas, 37% are now found to be "not ready for college work," according to a report last month in The Boston Globe.
In an article on EducationNews.org on student writing in Texas, Donna Garner quoted a parent who said about the writing her daughter is doing for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills [TAKS] tests: "She basically just writes about her feelings on anything of her choice and often is encouraged to just make things up as long as it is flowery and emotional. This is apparently what they look for on TAKS.” And Donna Garner observed: “It is no wonder that college professors think our Texas high-school graduates are not ready for college. The brutal fact is that they are not ready."
In California, Sherry Saavedra of The San Diego Union-Tribune, on April 12, 2008 reported that of the students entering the California State University system (i.e. those who have received their California high school diplomas saying they are high school graduates), 46% were unprepared for college-level English. She quotes Ethan Singer, associate vice president for academic affairs at San Diego State University, that: “They have one year to catch up through remedial classes if they want to remain...About 45% don’t make it to their sophomore year....Their academic preparation is questionable.”
One of these California high school graduates said: “I took a lot of AP classes in high school, so I thought I was more prepared.” She graduated from Serra High School in Tierrasanta, but she was told she needed to take a remedial writing course at SDSU. She reported: “I was, like, mad. It’s frustrating because you think you’re doing well and find out you’re not up to the standard.”
Once again, Articulation rears its head, but for some reason the high school people who hand out diplomas, based on whatever the HS academic criteria are, and the college people who administer the college readiness tests, based on their academic criteria, seem not to talk to each other, and each almost acts as if the other didn’t exist.
Why should students, who jump all the required hurdles, in Massachusetts, Texas and California (and elsewhere) to be awarded a high school diploma in a graduation ceremony, find, when they enter the college to which they have been accepted and for which they believe themselves to have been academically prepared, that 37% or 46% or more of them, are judged not capable of college-level work and must enroll in remedial courses in order to (again) earn a place in college?
How terribly difficult could it be, I wonder, for the people who write the high school graduation exams (MCAS, TAKS, etc.) and the people who write the college-readiness exams, which find so many high school graduates unprepared, to sit down and look at each other’s tests and perhaps try to reconcile their expectations, so that high school students could find out sooner what they need to do to get ready for college work.
It is truly inexcusable for college educators to admit high school graduates and then find them incompetent to do college work, and at the same time to ignore the HS assessments being conducted to determine whether students should receive a high school diploma or not.
Some people have made a few efforts at articulation between colleges and high schools, but clearly the high percentage of our diploma-bearing high school graduates who are still being surprised by the results of college assessment tests shows that college educators don’t care enough to fix an articulation problem the consequences of which should not fall so heavily on so many of our unsuspecting and unprepared students.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Former Wisconsin Governor, U.S. Senator, and Earth Day Founder Gaylord Nelson spoke often about the importance of educating young people about the environment and protection of natural resources.
Environment-focused charter schools offer choices in public education and empower young people to help make the world a better place for everyone and everything.
May 13 (Tuesday) at Oshkosh - Environment-Focused Charter Schools Workshop. Morning session at EAA Lodge – Essential design components of charter schools with environment-focused educational programs and practices (Oakwood Environmental Education Charter School and River Crossing Charter School). Afternoon session at Oakwood Environmental Education Charter School and Sheldon Nature Area. Registration per person is only $25, which includes continental breakfast, lunch, program, and materials. For info, contact Senn Brown at sennb@charter.net
Mid-August at Oshkosh -- Oakwood Environment-Focused Teachers Academy -- Elementary school teachers are invited to attend (free) a two-day academy in mid-August at the Oakwood Environmental Education Charter School in Oshkosh, WI. See program and registration info.
What’s NEXT? Linda Keane, new GCSNet member, is interested in strengthening the ability of schools to address environmental issues and design thinking across traditional curricula. She invites you to explore , an art + design + environmental eco-web community that connects the wealth of learning resources on the Internet with the wonders of the natural world.
See "About GCSNet" (ATTACHED) for names of founding directors, GCSNet’s vision / mission, an "Ed Week" story and a MEMBER APPLICATION.
Learning comes naturally in green charter schools.
Senn Brown, * Executive Director
Green Charter Schools Network
5426 Greening Lane
Madison, WI 53705
Tel: 608-238-7491
Email: sennb@charter.net
Web: http://www.greencharterschools.org
* Founding Executive Secretary (2000-2007), Wisconsin Charter Schools Association
FEE-PAYING schools have long played a giant part in public life in Britain, though they teach only 7% of its children. The few state-educated prime ministers (such as the current one) went to academically selective schools, now rare; a third of all MPs, more than half the appointed peers in the House of Lords, a similar proportion of the country's best-known journalists and 70% of its leading barristers were educated privately. There is no sign that the elevator from independent schools to professional prominence is slowing: nearly half of the undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge were privately schooled too.
Many ambitious parents would like to set their children off on this gilded path. But there is a problem: the soaring cost. Fees at private day schools have more than doubled in the past 20 years, in real terms; those at boarding schools have risen even faster (see chart). Since 2000 fees have risen by at least 6% every year, according to Horwath Clark Whitehill, a consultancy—double retail-price inflation and half as much again as the growth in wages. If this continues, a four-year-old embarking on a career in private day schools this autumn will have cost his parents around £170,000 ($335,000) in today's money by the time he completes secondary school. So even though more Britons than ever before describe themselves as comfortably off, the share of children being educated privately is barely higher than it was two decades ago.
Cal State schools are a long way from their goal of seeing 90 percent of entering freshmen ready for college-level work.
Instead, 37 percent of freshmen entered a California State University campus last fall needing remedial math, while 46 percent were unprepared for college-level English, according to new data.
Locally, a quarter of freshmen at San Diego State University started school needing remedial math; 48 percent at Cal State San Marcos needed it. About one-third of SDSU freshmen were not proficient in English, compared with more than half at Cal State San Marcos.
The CSU system pours millions of dollars into outreach efforts aimed at making high schoolers more prepared for college, and it often bails them out with remedial classes when they're not. But the past seven years have produced only modest improvements in math among Cal State's 23 campuses, and there have been no changes in English.
Since last year, the math proficiency rate improved by less than half a percentage point, but the English rate slid by triple that amount.
Students are often sent to remedial courses when they don't demonstrate proficiency on a CSU place
This spring marks the fourth in a row that Sara and Christopher Nerone will cross their fingers and apply to the Compass School, hoping that their daughter Sophie, 9, will finally be accepted to the free, public charter school in South Kingstown.
The Nerones will also try — for the third year — to get their younger daughter, Phoebe, 6, into the small, environmentally focused school, which emphasizes student projects rather than traditional textbook learning.
Chances are slim. It’s tougher to get into the Compass School than Harvard, which has a 9-percent acceptance rate. For the last couple of years, Compass has received about 200 applicants for 10 available spots, after giving 10 spaces to siblings of current students. The majority are kindergarten spots, plus a few last-minute openings each year in grades 1 through 8.
This year, 234 families have applied. That means more than 200 families will be disappointed when the Compass School holds its annual lottery this Wednesday.
Competition for Rhode Island’s charter schools is fierce. Nine of the state’s 11 charter schools are so popular, they conduct lotteries each spring to fill the few dozen places each has available. Hundreds of students languish on wait lists with little hope of ever getting in.
Most of the high-school teens selling at today's livestock auction at the Maricopa County Fair are members of the National FFA Organization. But it doesn't mean they're all future farmers.
Sarah Carter, a senior at Dobson High School in Mesa and president of her school's FFA club, hopes to use profits from selling a goat she raised to help pay for college. She plans to be a veterinarian.
Students who take part in FFA are a holdover from an era when Future Farmers of America clubs were a bigger part of life in schools around the nation. However, fewer clubs today raise livestock. Instead, the group has evolved to focus more on biotechnology and other areas of science.
There is a new genre of teenage writing in town: Creative Nonfiction. It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in "essay contests" by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as “How do I look?" and "What should I wear to school?"
This kind of writing is celebrated by Teen Voices, where teen girls can publish their thoughts about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, etc. and by contests such as the one sponsored by Imagine, the magazine of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
College admissions officers also ask applicants to write about themselves, rather than, for example, asking to see their best extended research paper from high school. The outcome is that many of our public high school graduates encounter college term paper assignments which ask them to learn and write about something other than themselves, and thanks to the kudzu of Creative Nonfiction, this they are unprepared to do.
How teen autobiography came to be a substitute for nonfiction reading and academic writing is a long story, but clearly many now feel that a pumped-up diary entry is worthy of prizes in high school “essay contests,” and may be required in college application materials.
Of course teen girls should write about anything they want in their diaries, that is what diaries are for, after all, but it is a crime and a shame to try to confine their academic writing experiences in such a small, and poorly-gilded, cage of expectations.
Since 1987, The Concord Review has published long serious history research papers by high school girls on such subjects as the trial of Anne Hutchinson, the Great Awakening, the reform efforts of Peter the Great, the Seneca Falls Convention, the administrative and doctrinal confusions after the merger between the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church in the fourth century, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857, among many hundreds of other academic topics.
Now that the President of Harvard, the Secretary of State, the CEO of Pepsi Cola and one of the principal presidential candidates are female, perhaps it is not too soon to revisit the notion that all high school girls must be asked to write about is themselves.
Of course high school girls like to think and write about themselves and their friends, just as many boys still like to play Grand Theft Auto–San Andreas, but why should that lead to the practice of limiting their academic writing to personal matters, whether that writing has been re-branded as “Creative Nonfiction” or not.
Shakespeare is still generally credited with good creative writing, even if it was not nonfiction, but at his elementary school in Stratford, according to a recent article in Academic Questions, he “would have studied Latin and Greek over the course of eight years, in a curriculum that exposed students to essential masters, including: Lucian, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Caesar, Salust, Origen, Basil, Jerome et al.” One can only speculate about how much more creative he would have been if he had been allowed to do some real Creative Nonfiction in school about his own daily personal life in Stratford!?
International competitions have shown us how poorly our high school students perform in math and science, but there is no international comparison of academic writing standards and performance that I know of. Perhaps that is lucky, as it seems likely that having our secondary students write about themselves most of the time has guaranteed that their writing would seem silly, superficial and solipsistic when compared with, for example, the International Baccalaureate Extended Essays, which are generally not about high school student hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), parents, and those perennial dilemmas: “How do I look?” and “What should I wear to school?”
Of course we can do better. We have high school students tackling calculus, Chinese, chemistry, European history and many more challenging academic subjects. Why can’t we free them as well from the anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual and anti-academic Creative Nonfiction writing assignments which so many students are now being given on which to waste their precious time?
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
The families allege that state officials have allowed the quality of Iowa's education system to significantly slip, so much so that high school graduates are inadequately prepared for college or the workplace.
"The quiet, ugly truth is that Iowa's educational system is but a shadow of its glorious past, and our leaders are whistling by its graveyard," the lawsuit says.
Pomerantz said that over the past 30 years he has lobbied for Iowa's education system to change. It hasn't, so Pomerantz said he had no choice but to back the lawsuit that asks the state to adopt measures such as creating a statewide, mandatory curriculum to ensure equal opportunities for all students.
A national expert said similar court cases have taken up to 10 years to resolve, and in most cases the courts are broad in their directives and reluctant to dictate to legislatures or schools specific steps to take. Other states have faced education equity lawsuits that mostly challenge whether schools have adequate resources. The Iowa lawsuit appears to be unique because it challenges programming available to students.
The transition to high school made Kayla Owens nervous.
Entering high school, I was getting ready for another step in my life: harder work, a different mind-set, different people.
She had been one of the older students at Hartford University School, a kindergarten through eighth-grade program on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, and didn't know what to expect at the all-girls Catholic school where she was headed.
"I was getting ready for another step in my life: harder work, a different mind-set, different people," said Owens, now a junior at St. Joan Antida High School.
This fall, the high school will launch a new program aimed at helping its first-year students - who come from dozens of feeder schools around the city - identify with their new school and get on the college prep path. The yearlong program will assign a team of teachers to work with ninth-graders on study skills and will try to get their parents involved from day one.
Many of the school's first-year students need early academic intervention, said Elizabeth Stengel, St. Joan Antida's admissions officer.
In the ongoing debate over school choice in its various dimensions such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, a stepping back to obtain a broader overview seems to be virtually nonexistent, or at least it is rare to find such an observation. The fact of the matter is that school choice is already a reality for the overwhelming majority of students and their parents.
The largest such category consists of those choosing the public school they attend. A few years ago a survey of public school parents as to why they live where they do found a majority, about 53%, said it was so the children could attend school in the district, or even to live in the attendance area of the specific school being used. Fifty-three percent of about 50,000,000 public school students is twenty-six million.
As an aside this leads to a few pertinent considerations as well. Opponents of school choice, especially of the use of vouchers, regularly base that opposition on the view that this would permit wholesale flight from the public schools. This, of course, is actually not just a weak defense of their position but strengthens the pro-voucher view because it is saying that students, or at least huge numbers of them, are being forced to attend public schools against their will and, in the words of former National Education Association (NEA) President Keith Geiger, they can't be allowed to "escape."
Moreover it shows a lack of awareness of the public opinion poll and its implication that 26 million students are not going to go anywhere, vouchers or no, since they are already where they and/or their parents want to be. And there are perhaps at least a few million more who are happy where they are but didn't show up in the poll because they aren't where they are because they specifically moved there for that purpose but coincidentally already lived where they find the schools to be satisfactory. However, that number, whatever it may be, will not be included here because its actual size is unknown.
Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant "sofa" made of tree stumps and twigs.
The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path -- deep into the woods.
Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or "forest kindergartens," in which children spend their days outdoors year-round. Blackboards surrender to the Black Forest. Erasers give way to pine cones. Hall passes aren't required, but bug repellent is a good idea.
She basically just writes about her feelings on anything of her choice and often is encouraged to just make things up as long as it is flowery and emotional. This is apparently what they look for on TAKS."
---
"It is no wonder that college professors think our Texas high-school graduates are not ready for college. The brutal fact is that they are not ready."
"An Expose of the TAKS Tests" (excerpts)
[TAKS: Texas Assessment of Knowledge/Skills
ELA: English/Language Arts]
by Donna Garner
Education Policy Commentator EducationNews.org
10 April 2008
....Please note that each scorer spends approximately three minutes to read, decipher, and score each student's handwritten essay. (Having been an English teacher for over 33 years, I have often spent over three minutes just trying to decipher a student's poor handwriting.) Imagine spending three minutes to score an entire two-page essay that counts for 22 % of the total score and determines whether a student is allowed to take dual-credit courses. A student cannot take dual-credit classes unless he/she makes a "3" or a "4" on the ELA TAKS essay...
...The scorers spend only about three minutes scanning the essays and do not grade students down for incorrect grammar, punctuation, spelling, and capitalization unless the errors interfere significantly with the communication of ideas. Students are allowed to use an English language dictionary and a thesaurus throughout the composition portion of the test, and they can spend as much time on the essay as they so choose...
On April 5, 2008, a worried parent sent me the following e-mail:
Hi Donna,
“Our 3rd graders are taking a district wide 4th grade writing benchmark this week...Because (name of her daughter) was sick, I got to see her initial work because the teacher sent it home to be redone. What do you know... the comments on it were ‘not catchy enough’; ‘how did this make you feel’; and ‘needs more adjectives.’ The only thought organization was a ‘word web’ (looks like a wheel w/different paragraphs relating to the main topic on the spokes...At this point (3rd grade) the kids should be learning how to do research for papers, how to organize their thoughts for the papers, and how to draft the papers. My kids know none of this. But they sure are learning about flowery, descriptive writing (with little organization behind the writing)! I will be tutoring them over the summer on how to put together and write both research and persuasive essays in order to get them ready for private school in the fall since this is what they are learning in the private schools.”
...POINT #7: A CONVERSATION WITH A SCORER
Several years ago I had a unique dialogue with an experienced ELA TAKS scorer (grader). In the course of our e-mails, she revealed that she had never been a teacher. In fact, she said that most of the scorers were not teachers because the ELA TAKS is given in February. She stated that 200+ scorers were usually required per grade level (4th, 7th, 9th, 10th, and exit level). She said that she had a degree in English, but her e-mails to me were filled with grammatical/usage errors. She told me that she worked for Pearson Educational Measurement which had a contract with the TEA to score both the multiple-choice and short-answer portions and that the graders were hired and trained based upon TEA requirements.
POINT #8: WRITTEN COMPOSITION ABUSES
More important than any other problem with the ELA TAKS is that the test drives classroom instruction. “Whatever is tested is what teachers are going to teach.” Because the TAKS essay is overly weighted (i.e., “2 Rule” and conjunctive policy), students and their teachers do not see a real reason to spend much time on correct grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Therefore, in their compositions and in their speaking, students are not being expected to follow standard English. Playing the “TAKS game” has become more important than paying attention to basic writing skills.
Texas public-school English teachers used to teach their students the four different modes of paragraph writing—expository, persuasive, descriptive, and narrative. Students could easily understand these terms: expository exposes facts; persuasive persuades; descriptive describes; and narrative tells a story.Students learned how to weave smoothly all four modes of writing into their compositions as needed.
Along came the ELA TAKS, and personal victimization narratives became the norm. Instead of students’ writing solid fact-based persuasive essays with good argumentative content and a substantial amount of expository information based upon actual knowledge, students are now taught to emote.
“Voice” has become the big factor toward a student’s receiving a “4.” Voice is a literary term that basically means “personality.” Students have learned the way to “play the TAKS game” is to reveal something personal about themselves, give their opinions and feelings, and tap into an emotion usually through explaining how they have been a victim of society. Students’ compositions have to demonstrate uniqueness in order to catch the grader’s eye, and many students have learned to fabricate persona. This informal style welcomes dialect, poor grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. I have received e-mails from experienced teachers who have told me they had minority students with serious syntax problems who made passing grades on the TAKS essay yet had other students with good writing skills who failed.
This is an example of an essay prompt from the TAKS Released Version, Exit Level, July 2006: “Write an essay explaining the value of the small, everyday events of life.” The more students can spin their tales of adversity, the higher their TAKS essay grades will be—even if students have to make up examples. In essence, Texas schools are teaching students to lie.
Then when Texas students get to college and have to write their first formal expository or persuasive compositions, they simply saturate them with “voice,” personal opinions, experiences, and emotions—no real fact-based substance or deep content. It is no wonder that college professors think our Texas high-school graduates are not ready for college. The brutal fact is that they are not ready.
One concerned parent of a college student told me recently that she is very worried about the dumbing down of her daughter’s college course. The daughter is a student in a major Texas university. So many of the students in her class have not written formal research papers that the professor has been forced to lower his expectations. Now the students present their research in a poster format. The student puts together his/her poster, displays it, and answers questions orally.
Just a few weeks ago, an assistant superintendent in a Central Texas school district sent me the following e-mail:
Donna,
“Our students had to score a ‘3’ on the ELA Exit Level essays in order to be eligible for English 1301/dual credit at MCC (Community College). Last Monday the professor came to school to sit down with each individual and explain why he had scored their papers so low. They were covered in red marks, and our students were crushed by the grades. He wanted no flowery and fluffy language but wanted substantive persuasive and expository content!”
These students take the ELA TAKS in February, school ends in May, and in August they have to be ready to write to a new style under much more rigorous expectations. This school year, the teachers will have less time to prepare these dual-credit students because the TAKS ELA has been moved to March...
On October 23, 2007, the Houston Chronicle ran a story telling about a writing program between the University of Texas and college-bound seniors at Houston Jack Yates High School. Jim Warren, a University of Texas postdoctoral fellow, is coordinating the program. “Jim Warren...noted even accomplished writers can be in for an unpleasant surprise when they hit a mandatory freshman writing course at UT. ‘We were getting a lot of students who were under-prepared to read and write as we asked them to do...Warren said most high school students have little experience with analytical writing because they’re coached to master narrative skills needed to score well on TAKS tests. But narrative sentences...won’t cut the mustard in college rhetoric courses.’”
This is a comment posted by “A Parent” on EdNews.org on April 3, 2008:
Comment #15 (Posted by A Parent) Rating:
“...My daughter is a public school student, and we plan to pull her out of school at the end of this year. We will enroll her in a highly respected and rigorous private school. While her English class is very “fun” and she likes her teacher, we feel she is learning almost nothing about writing and the class reads very little. Nearly all of the writing she does is something called an “OP”. She basically just writes about her feelings on anything of her choice and often is encouraged to just make things up as long as it is flowery and emotional. This is apparently what they look for on TAKS. We’re not experts, but this doesn’t seem to teach her how to think logically (but then again she is a teenager). We have not seen a single essay that is persuasive or expository, and we are worried that she will not learn how to write papers correctly for college someday. We have not seen any instruction that teaches her to organize her thoughts or support a thesis coherently. I wish I could say that this is an off year, but most of her English classes have been like this. When we see that so many college students need remediation in English, reading and math it is a little scary...”
===============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
A new term could bring a new emphasis on education to City Hall, as elected officials push for a stronger voice on an issue they say is vital to Milwaukee's future.
Otherwise, many of the issues will be familiar when a new term starts Tuesday for Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council.
Such perennial themes as economic development, public safety, transportation, taxes and state aid will continue to dominate the agenda over the next four years, Barrett and leading aldermen said in separate interviews.
On April 1, voters re-elected Barrett and 13 of 15 aldermen by comfortable margins. New to the council will be Aldermen-elect Milele Coggs, who defeated the jailed Ald. Michael McGee, and Nik Kovac, replacing Ald. Mike D'Amato, who did not seek re-election. Both the new and returning officials will be sworn in Tuesday.
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , KS , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam:
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie', 'play', and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 65 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
The public schools, perhaps more than any other institution in American life, are afflicted with "sounds good" syndrome. Let's teach kids about the dangers of smoking. Sounds good. Let's improve math scores with a new curriculum called "whole math." Sounds good. Let's reduce teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by teaching sex ed. Sounds good. Let's have cooperative learning where kids help one another. And so on.
The Fairfax County, Va., schools (where my children attend) recently joined a nationwide "sounds good" trend by introducing a character education curriculum. Students were exhorted to demonstrate a number of ethical traits like (I quote from my son's elementary school's website) "compassion, respect, responsibility, honesty." It would be easy to mock the program -- each trait, for example, is linked to a shape (respect is a triangle, honesty is a star). The intention to help mold character is a laudable one. But this program, like so much else about the public schools in the "sounds good" era, has foundered.
The curriculum made news recently when a report ordered by the school board evaluated student conduct for "sound moral character and ethical judgment" and then grouped the results by race. Oh, dear. It seems that among third graders, 95 percent of white students received a grade of "good" or better, whereas only 86 percent of Hispanic kids did that well and only 80 percent of black and special education students were so rated.
Martina A. "Tina" Hone, an African-American member of the school board, told the Washington Post that the decision to aggregate the evaluations by race was "potentially damaging and hurtful."
When the superintendent brought in auditors to look at the Indianapolis Public Schools bus operation in December, the department couldn't say how many routes it runs each day. Auditors had to guess.
When the school district tried to dismiss 14 administrators this year, it missed a deadline to notify the employees and now must pay their full salaries for another year.
Although the district struggles to hire teachers and is chronically short-staffed, it has 10,000 job applications that have never been reviewed.
That confusion and lack of oversight represent what may be the biggest challenge to the state's largest school district as it continues efforts to reform.
Over the past three years, Superintendent Eugene White has tackled classroom shortcomings such as weak teaching and poor discipline. Now he has started to remake the crippling bureaucracy behind practices that are often inefficient, sometimes illegal and occasionally dangerous to children.
Others before him have tried, only to be defeated by a culture steeped in an attitude of "this, too, shall pass."
"I've heard it ever since 1971 that I've been in IPS: 'Just wait it out,' " said Jane Ajabu, the district's personnel director. "Unfortunately, the people in the district have adopted the attitude of: 'It's mediocre, it's ineffective, that's just how it is.' "
Large urban school districts are notoriously inefficient, and at least one measure suggests IPS may be worse than other Indiana districts. Its bureaucracy has an unusually high proportion of licensed educators working outside classrooms.
For every 53 students, IPS has one licensed educator working in a nonteaching job. Across the state, only Gary Public Schools has as high a ratio of administrators to students. Other Marion County districts have 86 to 156 students per licensed educator in a job outside the classroom.
Yes, it is. Parents are horning in on their teenagers' lives through text messaging. Sending shorthand cellphone messages used to be the province of the younger set -- under the dinner table, in the car, at all hours of the night.
Now, parents are responding with their own quick dispatches -- "RU there," "Running L8" -- and becoming the fastest-growing demographic in text messaging, which is one of the biggest areas of the mobile-phone industry
The report's key recommendations include, for grades PreK-8, spending more time teaching fewer concepts and focusing more on basic skills critical to learning algebra such as whole numbers, fractions and aspects of geometry and measurement. "It has a lot of implications for math instruction not just in Utah but throughout the country," said Brenda Hales, Utah state associate superintendent.
This week, a month after the national panel released its findings, 10,000 math teachers from across the country and several panel members gathered in Salt Lake City and discussed the panel's recommendations as part of the annual math teachers' conference.
Some educators said they might not be able slow down and teach fewer topics more in-depth as the report recommends because states and the federal government require them to teach and test on a certain number of topics each year under No Child Left Behind.
Dennis Bunyan showed up for his first-semester senior English class at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem so rarely that, as he put it, “I basically didn’t attend.”
But despite his sustained absence, Mr. Bunyan got the credit he needed to graduate last June by completing just three essay assignments, which he said took about 10 hours.
“I’m grateful for it, but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous,” Mr. Bunyan said. “There’s no way three essays can possibly cover a semester of work.”
Mr. Bunyan was able to graduate through what is known as credit recovery — letting those who lack credits make them up by means other than retaking a class or attending traditional summer school. Although his principal said the makeup assignments were as rigorous as regular course work, Mr. Bunyan’s English teacher, Charan Morris, was so troubled that she boycotted the graduation ceremony, writing in an e-mail message to students that she believed some were “being pushed through the system regardless of whether they have done the work to earn their diploma.”
Currently, only 70 percent of all students in public high schools graduate and this number drops to just 53 percent of students from low income families. By the end of fourth grade, low income students, by various measures, are already two years behind other students. By the time these students reach 8th grade, they are three grade levels behind in reading and math. If they reach 12th grade, low-income and minority student achievement levels are about four years behind those of other young people. Low graduation rates are evidence that, in the earlier grades, schools are not meeting the fundamental achievement needs of low-income students.
The bottom line should be alarming for all Americans. A very high proportion of our students are leaving public schools unprepared to gain access to our country’s economic, social and political opportunities. As we strive to become a nation in which no child is left behind, all U.S. public school students deserve the opportunity to graduate from high school and college.
Now that Madison School Supt. Art Rainwater is on his way to retirement, it's time to reexamine programs, staffing and curricula throughout the district.
Let's face it, again. African American and Latino academic achievement pales in comparison to that of white and Asian American students, though some segments of the Southeast Asian community struggle as well.
Daniel Nerad, the new superintendent, should dust off all the research that the district has gathered over the past 40 years, look at the recent studies pointing to excellence in education and put together a new approach to ending the achievement gap.
Things are already cooking at the Ruth Doyle Administration Building. Restructuring the high schools is in the works. Pam Nash, former Memorial High School principal and now assistant superintendent for secondary schools, is taking on this enormous task. Based on her work at Memorial, she's the right person for the task.
Nash acknowledges the concerns and complaints of African American parents, educators and community leaders. It's time to raise those achievement scores and graduation rates. She's fully aware of a solid approach that didn't fare well with Rainwater, so she's left to figure out what else can be done.
"The Nation's Report Card" is going to start giving grades for Milwaukee Public Schools.
Milwaukee was named Thursday as one of seven urban school districts that will join the testing program of the National Assessment of Education Progress. NAEP is the closest thing to a nationwide testing program at levels below college admission tests. The government-funded organization that runs NAEP has trade-marked the "Nation's Report Card" label for the program.
There were no results for Milwaukee specifically in that round of testing, or in earlier tests that showed huge gaps in Wisconsin between white and black students in reading and math.
Nearly one-third of freshmen at Iowa's community colleges took at least one remedial course last fall, but an even larger percentage of the freshmen needed additional high-school-level instruction in one or more subject areas, a Des Moines Register survey has found.
The trend has educators frustrated and concerned.
While community colleges have long accepted that part of their role is to be a bridge between high schools and four-year colleges and universities, some community college advocates are becoming exasperated with the number of ill-prepared students arriving from high schools.
"I just think it's unfortunate that such a large percentage of students who arrive at our door are in need of additional remediation to come up to the college level," said M.J. Dolan, executive director of the Iowa Association of Community College Trustees.
The Register's survey of the community colleges found that 31.5 percent of incoming freshmen last fall took one or more remedial courses to improve their understanding of certain academic subjects.
In the latest rebuke to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s agenda, state lawmakers have decided to bar student test scores from being considered when teacher tenure determinations are made.
Legislators said the move was the final detail negotiated as part of the budget, which they expect to complete on Wednesday. It was a setback to efforts by the mayor and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer to hold teachers accountable by using student performance data, and a boon for the teachers’ unions, which hold enormous influence over the political process in the capital.
The new language being prepared for the state law says that for the next two years student scores will not be considered in decisions on teachers’ tenure; in the meantime, a commission is to be created to study the issue.
The move was denounced Tuesday night by the Bloomberg administration.
ARTS AND HISTORY, business and management, education, social sciences, languages and information technology will be covered in 10 more units of courseware that have been added to the Open University of Hong Kongs suite of free courseware on the web.
New units include The Development of the Chinese Communist Party (1927-1937), which introduces the establishment of the party and explains Mao Zedongs rise to power.
Apart from the learning materials such as text, maps and charts, an audio clip of a lecture is also included to help people better understand the course and the influence of the Long March. References and recommended book lists are also given as supplements.
Those seeking additional business knowledge can choose Management and Developments in Management Thinking and The Mathematics of Finance.
The new law guarantees the online schools can open this fall. Their future was in doubt after an appeals court ruled in December that one school - the Wisconsin Virtual Academy run by the Northern Ozaukee School District - did not qualify for state aid of $5,845 per student.
The measure was a workable compromise that allows the schools to continue while the effect of the virtual school system on students and taxpayers is studied, Doyle spokeswoman Jessica Erickson said in a statement.
Rose Fernandez, president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families, said in a statement her group would fight to remove the cap but hailed the new law for keeping the schools open.
"This was grassroots democracy at its finest; a blow to powerful special interests; and, most important, a win for Wisconsin's children," she said in her statement.
One bright spot as the Legislature adjourned its regular business for the year was a compromise allowing virtual schools to stay open.
Gov. Jim Doyle signed Senate Bill 396 into law Monday, capping an unfortunate roller-coaster ride for the parents and their 3,400 children who attend about a dozen online schools across Wisconsin.
The bill modernizes out-of-date state laws that failed to anticipate the advent of certain students learning from home over the Internet.
The bill also improves accountability and instruction for online schools.
Only certified teachers will be allowed to develop lesson plans and grade assignments. Teachers must be trained to effectively teach online and respond quickly to student and parent inquiries.
After three months of reviewing research on homework and meeting with parents, principals, and teachers, the Toronto, Canada, School District Board is now taking a very close look at a new proposed homework policy. The proposal focuses on quality, not quantity, suggests that homework in the early grades be limited to reading, talks at length about the value of family time, and recommends that all homework assignments be differentiated.
The draft proposal, although not perfect, is one of the very best I’ve seen short of those recommending abolition of homework and is definitely worth reading. If you’re trying to change homework policy in your community, there is very good language that you might want to adopt. Read it here [PDF].
I teach a seminar called "Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge." I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word "rendition."
Not one hand went up.
This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation's newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.
I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.
It was a bold headline, befitting the seriousness of the problem: "State black 8th-graders rank worst In nation in writing."
And it was pretty damning stuff when you consider we're talking about 14-year-old kids here.
The Journal Sentinel's front-page headline last Friday pointed an accusing finger squarely at young African-American students in Wisconsin who apparently can't keep up with their contemporaries. The worst writing students in the nation, that's what national data found when it came to Wisconsin's black students, including the distinction of having the lowest average scores and worst gap between black and white students anywhere.
These depressing results were taken from a national study often referred to as "The Nation's Report Card," which means this is one test we flunked badly. There's always plenty of blame to go around when things get this dismal. I'm talking teachers, principals, politicians, business leaders, and of course, the parents of all those low-achieving students. But don't worry about blaming the kids.
They already got theirs in that screaming headline.
For families with children, the quality of local schools is often a key factor in deciding which house to buy.
Buyers trying to determine if the schools in a neighborhood will meet their needs can find plenty of data on the Internet about standardized tests, but they shouldn't neglect the value of visits to the schools and old-fashioned word of mouth, real estate agents and education experts say.
If you're working with an agent, don't expect him to judge the schools for you.
"When my clients begin to ask questions about the quality of the school system, I try to be careful with labeling schools as 'good' or 'bad' that could be construed as code words to discourage certain groups of people from buying a home in a particular neighborhood, which is a violation of the Fair Housing Act," said Thomas Minetree, a real estate agent in Weichert's Gainesville office.
At one of Florida's largest public schools, students take classes in English literature, Spanish and calculus. They join clubs, enter science fairs and talk one on one with their teachers.
But no one complains about mystery meat from the school cafeteria, no one ever gets asked to — or snubbed at — a school dance, and there is no football team to cheer for.
A decade after its founding, the Florida Virtual School has become a quiet force in the state's education system. It's an Internet-based school that offers free, accredited classes for middle school and high school students in Florida. More than 54,000 students took courses last year, and it's growing.
"They are the largest state-led virtual school program based in the United States,'' said Susan Patrick, president of the North American Council for Online Learning. "I think that they have one of the most innovative education solutions for how we can better serve students."
Janice Barnard, whose 17-year-old daughter is taking Virtual School classes in a program affiliated with Tampa's Blake High School, says, "It's not for everyone. You must have a self-motivated child, somebody who wants to learn, who wants to achieve."
By this September, the number of teachers who work for the Mequon-Thiensville School District is expected to have shrunk 17% since January 2001, Superintendent Robert Slotterback said last week.
The district, like many others in Wisconsin, is functioning with fewer teachers and dealing with smaller student enrollments, rising costs and an electorate that in referendums in 2006 and 2002 told the district that it could not spend significantly more money.
Slotterback maintains, though, the district has not reduced its course offerings or lowered its standards.
"We have not really had to eliminate student options," he said. "Your class size may have gotten bigger, but I am not aware of any class option that we have eliminated. We have not purposely shrunk the options for kids up to this point."
rivulet: A small stream or brook. The ancient rivulet was conducted according to customs that were centuries old. The children enjoyed wading in the rivulet. The manuscript needed only minor rivulets before publication. A pleasant rivulet trickled through the fields.
firth: A narrow inlet or arm of the sea. (A firth may refer to any narrow arm of the sea or more particular to the opening of a river into the sea. Because the coast of Scotland is dotted with so many firths, the word has come to be associated with that country.) The soldier explored the firths that cut into the coastline. The young child was severely reprimanded for having committed the firth. After swimming across the firth, he was completely exhausted. The coast was cut with many narrow firths, which were ideal hideouts for smugglers.
You won’t find ten-year old children reciting Shakespeare soliloquies, acting out the Cuban Missile Crisis or performing Sophocles plays in most American classrooms today. But Albert Cullum’s elementary school students did all this and more. Combining interviews with Cullum and his former students with stunning archival footage filmed by director Robert Downey, Sr., A TOUCH OF GREATNESS documents the extraordinary work of this maverick public school teacher who embraced creativity, motivation and self-esteem in the classroom through the use of poetry, drama and imaginative play.
Regarded by academics as one of the most influential educators of the 1960s and ‘70s, Cullum championed what is, by today's standards, an unorthodox educational philosophy: the belief that the only way teachers can be successful with children is to speak directly to their hearts and to their instinctive and largely ignored capacity to quickly understand and identify with the great personalities, ideas and emotions found in classical literature. To that end, Cullum regularly taught his elementary school children literary masterpieces, exposed them to great works of art and engaged them in the events of world history. Without leaving the classroom, his students visited King Tut's tomb, attended joint sessions of the U.S. Congress, operated on “bleeding” nouns in his "grammar hospital," and clamored to play the timeless roles of Julius Caesar, Lady Macbeth and Hamlet.
When Cullum was an elementary school teacher in the New York City suburbs during the 1960s, his friend Robert Downey helped film several student plays and classroom events. In A TOUCH OF GREATNESS, these lush black and white films, with original music created by Tom O'Horgan, capture the work of this radical teacher and his students’ love of learning.
This week's revelation that 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates below 50% surely saddened many. But it surprised few people attuned to the state of U.S. public education. Proponents of education choice have long believed that dropout rates fall when families can pick the schools best suited for their children.
So news that Sol Stern, a veteran advocate of school choice, is having second thoughts about the ability of market forces to improve education outcomes is noteworthy. Mr. Stern explains his change of heart in the current issue of the indispensable City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute. And his revised views on the school choice movement warrant a response.
Inside of two decades, charter school enrollment in the U.S. has climbed to 1.1 million from zero. Two tiny voucher programs in Maine and Vermont blossomed into 21 programs in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Tuition tax credits, once puny and rare, are now sizeable and commonplace. The idea that teacher pay should be based on performance, not just seniority, is gaining ground. Not bad for a small band of education reformers facing skepticism from the liberal media and outright hostility from well-funded, politically connected heavies like the National Education Association.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its 2007 eighth-grade writing scores today. These scores have particular significance to Texas because we are engaged in an intense battle over the rewrite of the English / Language Arts / Reading standards.
One side, the Coalition made up of eleven organizations with ties to NCTE and other national organizations, has joined up with the bilingual organizations to impede progress toward changing the way our state teaches students how to read, write, and speak English.
By looking at the NAEP writing results below, it is obvious that Texas needs to change the status quo. Anyone can see that the way English is being taught right now is simply not working.
Those of us who want change are strongly advocating that students need to be taught explicit grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization so that they will have a strong foundation upon which to build good writing skills.
In the new ELAR standards, our side wants to have a separate strand for oral and written conventions so that these skills will be emphasized among our Texas students.
The classic three R's of education - reading, writing and arithmetic - became the three R's of educational alarm for Wisconsin with the release Thursday of nationwide data on eighth-graders' writing ability.
While Wisconsin students on the whole did better than the national average and better than in 1998, the last time the same tests were given here, Wisconsin's African-American students had the lowest average score in the nation, and the gap between black and white scores in Wisconsin was the second worst in the United States.
The writing scores lined up with results released in September from national testing that showed the average reading scores of fourth- and eighth-grade black students in Wisconsin were the lowest in the U.S. The gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin in reading were the largest in the nation, and the situation for math scores was nearly as grim.
The overall message appears clearly to be that something is seriously off course in the education of African-American children in the state, decidedly more so than in other states. Gaps between whites and Hispanics and between kids from lower-income homes and those from higher-income homes are serious but not nearly the size of the racial gaps.
"Once again, we see Wisconsin at the bottom of the pack when it comes to the performance of African American students. In fact, Wisconsin was one of just three states that lost ground for its African American students between 1998 and 2007. When you compare Wiscosnin to a state like Arkansas, in 1998, Wisconsin was doing much better for its black students than Arkansas. But Wisconsin has since lost a lot of ground, whereas Arkansas gained a lot of ground, and now you see African American students in Arkansas are doing better than African American students in Wisconsin. We know that Arkansas, for example, has been working diligently for the last 10 years to raise expectations for both teachers and students in terms of the kind of content they are supposed to master, and they've also had an explicit focus on insuring that there is coordination across the curriculum so that students are writing not just in a prescribed writing block, but they're writring in their science courses and in their mathematics couses and in their history courses. You're seeing the pay off here. Wisconsin would be very well advised to look at the practices of states that have frankly passed it by.
It's easy for old farts like me to assume everybody will learn the way we did, but that's unlikely simply because the underlying assumptions are changing. When I was a kid human labor was cheap and technology was expensive. Today technology is cheap and getting cheaper, while human labor is expensive and becoming more so. Yet our model of education technology is still so defined by that remembered Apple IIe in the corner of the classroom that is it difficult for many to imagine truly pervasive educational technology.
This is in large part because there is no way that Apple IIe or any PC is going to somehow expand to replace books and teachers and classrooms. For education, the personal computer is probably a dead end. It's not that we won't continue to have and use PCs in schools, but the market and intellectual momentum clearly lie elsewhere.
So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games.
I say "digital games" rather than "video games" or "PC games," or "handheld games," because the platform doesn't matter as much as the application. Whether it is a PC or Mac, xBox or PS3, PSP or Nintendo DS, gaming has done an excellent job of proving that the application is more important than the platform on which it runs.
Stories came out this week from the NPD Group announcing that 72 percent of Americans play PC or video games with 58 percent of those played online. Those numbers -- which apparently don't include kids, by the way -- are HUGE and explain all by themselves much of what is happening to traditional mass media like TV, magazines and newspapers.
We're spending so much time playing games that we don't have as much time for those older pursuits. Only drive-time radio thrives and that's just because we don't have a practical model for playing games while driving.
Digital games are a bigger business than Hollywood movies, than book publishing, than television, than music.
My vision for future digital education has a key difference from traditional 20th century education. A fundamental aspect of education has always been that it comes to abrupt and quite specific endpoints associated with various cultural rites of passage. We graduate. There is a first day of school and a last day of school. At some highly specific and anticipated moment we disconnect from the education mother ship and go off on our own, often never to return.
Why?
Well to make room in school for someone else, of course.
Why?
In my future model the "school" is only a PC/game machine/mobile phone/headset thingee that clues me in about everything around me and helps me learn what I need to know. Why would I ever give that up?
Identifying what needs to be fixed in the field of education is easy: the No Child Left Behind Act, currently up for reauthorization but stalled in Congress pending the next election. The elaborate law requires schools to test the bejeezus out of elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math, to test them again in high school, and to sprinkle in a few science tests along the way. Schools posting consistently poor test scores are supposed to be punished so that they'll clean up their acts and allow NCLB's ultimate goal to be achieved in 2014. The act imagines that essentially all students across the country will be "proficient" in that year, meaning that they'll all pass the battery of standardized tests required by the NCLB. Hence the act's catchy title.
NCLB was enacted in 2001 with huge bipartisan support, though many Democrats in Congress have since disclaimed if not denounced it, presumably having had some time to read it. The act is at once the Bush administration's signature piece of education legislation, its most significant domestic policy initiative, and the most intrusive federal education law in our nation's history. The federal government provides less than 10 percent of all education funding, yet NCLB drives education policy in every school district in the country. In short, it's a big deal. It's also in need of repair. No one—conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican—doubts that.
California's perennial debate over how much it is and should be spending on its largest-in-the-nation public school system has escalated sharply this year as the state faces a whopping budget deficit and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes – whether seriously or not is uncertain – to take a big bite out of the schools' money to close it.
The educational establishment and its allies in the Democratic leadership of the Legislature are howling about the governor's proposal that school spending be whacked by $4.8 billion from what the constitution otherwise would require it to be through the 2008-09 fiscal year.
The Democrats have vowed to block any budget that makes a substantial reduction in state school aid and the California Teachers Association and other school groups have resumed their high-decibel complaint that California's per-pupil spending is already near the bottom of the states.
Republicans and other critics, meanwhile, complain that California is wasting much of its school money on bloated administration and ineffective, faddish educational nostrums. They cite the state's near-bottom rankings in national educational achievement test scores.
In the midst of this Sturm und Drang, the Census Bureau on Tuesday issued an extremely detailed accounting of what states (and the District of Columbia) are spending on their schools. It undercuts the mantras being chanted by both of the Capitol's warring political factions.
The Madison School District is making the full transition to a standards-based educational system. Here is the third in a series of articles about a standards-based system, with this one focusing on instruction.
Introduction to a standards-based system... instruction
The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards (WMAS) articulate what students should know and be able to do in each curricular area. Madison Metropolitan School District staff elaborated upon these state standards to frame district curriculum and instruction.
Curriculum is the planned educational experiences taught in each subject area at each grade level. This issue focuses on instruction, which is the action or practice of teaching the curriculum.
Instruction is standards-based when the knowledge and skills that are the primary focus of the lesson support students' continual progress toward meeting the standards.
This article shares an example from language arts to show how instruction in the MMSD is standards-based.
Computing is essentially math on steroids. So, at first glance, it would seem no surprise that the recent report by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel would include computer-based instruction among its recommendations to address the “mediocre level” of math achievement by American students.
But the champions of computing in the classroom have hailed the math panel report as an encouraging win for their side. It suggests, they say, that computing should be seen as a valuable tool in mainstream education, like math and science, in kindergarten through high school curriculums.
“There is a real battle going on to determine the role that computing is going to play in K-12 education,” observed Robert B. Schnabel, a computer scientist at Indiana University, who is chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery’s education policy committee. “Is it going to be integrated into math and science curriculums or is it going to be more like shop?”
This report presents the results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment. It was administered to a nationally representative sample of more than 165,000 eighth- and twelfth-graders from public and private schools. In addition to national results, the report includes state and urban district results for grade 8 public school students. Forty-five states, the Department of Defense schools, and 10 urban districts voluntarily participated. To measure their writing skills, the assessment engaged students in narrative, informative, and persuasive writing tasks. NAEP presents the writing results as scale scores and achievement-level percentages. Results are also reported for student performance by various demographic characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and eligibility for the National School Lunch Program. The 2007 national results are compared with results from the 2002 and 1998 assessments. At grades 8 and 12, average writing scores and the percentages of students performing at or above Basic were higher than in both previous assessments. The White -- Black score gap narrowed at grade 8 compared to 1998 and 2002 but showed no significant change at grade 12. The gender score gap showed no significant change at grade 8 compared with previous assessments but narrowed at grade 12 since 2002. Eighth-graders eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch scored lower on average than students who were not eligible. Compared with 2002, average writing scores for eighth-graders increased in 19 states and the Department of Defense schools, and scores decreased in one state. Compared with 1998, scores increased in 28 states and the Department of Defense Schools, and no states showed a decrease. Scores for most urban districts at grade 8 were comparable to or higher than scores for large central cities but were below the national average. Trend results are available for 4 of the 10 urban districts.
About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.
The test, administered last year, showed that there were modest increases in the writing skills of low-performing students since the last time a similar exam was given, in 2002. But the skills of high-performing eighth and 12th graders remained flat or declined.
Girls far outperformed boys in the test, with 41 percent of eighth-grade girls scoring at or above the proficient level, compared with 20 percent of eighth-grade boys.
New Jersey and Connecticut were the two top-performing states, with more than half their students scoring at or above the proficient level (56 percent in New Jersey, 53 percent in Connecticut). Those two and seventeen other states ranked above New York, where 31 percent of students wrote at the proficient level.
The attack on the National Curriculum, which has dictated school timetables for 20 years, could spell the end of separate classes in history, geography, literature, languages, art and music.
Instead, schools would be allowed to decide how they teach big themes such as global warming, conflict and healthy living.
The present list of subjects would be reduced to little more than English, mathematics and computing. The National Association of Head Teachers, responding to a select committee inquiry into whether the National Curriculum is "fit for purpose", said its structure of 14 compulsory subjects should be replaced by a "minimum framework" that would be "skills and competence-based, rather than prescriptive and knowledge-based".
Growing calls for flexibility, coupled with a series of curriculum reviews ordered by ministers, represent a serious threat to the future of the traditional timetable.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says she will soon propose rules that would require all states to use the same formula to calculate high schools' graduation rates. She said she would require schools to disaggregate data by socioeconomic status, race, and other categories—just as schools are required to do for test scores under NCLB.
She announced the plan in a speech she delivered at an event kicking off a series of summits on drop outs sponsored by America's Promise Alliance. But she left many questions unanswered.
To some readers, “clear, specific content” may sound like a euphemism for “script.” But Core Knowledge demonstrates that standards could—and should—be heavy on content and light on pedagogy. By clarifying what to teach, but letting teachers decide how to teach, Core Knowledge supports good instruction.
Instead of writing a typical standards document, Core Knowledge developed a bare-bones “sequence” of content for grades K-8. It then developed a detailed teacher handbook for each grade that provides key information—like vocabulary, background knowledge, and connections to other subjects. Teachers can use the sequence to quickly see what is taught in the grades above and below theirs, and the handbook to guide their lesson planning and teaching. Here, we show the full fourth-grade language arts sequence, which includes speeches by Patrick Henry and Sojourner Truth, and the speeches section of the fourth-grade teacher handbook (p. 34-37).
The handbooks have some teaching suggestions, but they do not mandate any particular way of teaching, and they don’t offer anything that even resembles a script. But don’t just take it from us, read what two teachers have to say about it. We asked Kethkeo Vichaiyarath and Xia Lee to discuss how they have used the handbook as they developed lessons on the speeches. Both have nine years’ experience and currently teach fourth grade at Phalen Lake Elementary in St. Paul, Minn. Nearly 70 percent of the students are English language learners and roughly 90 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Core Knowledge provides Kethkeo and Xia the rich content their students need. —Editors
Pasadena 'school in crisis' requires all teachers to reapply for their jobs as part of arduous restructuring.
The statistics at John Muir High School are alarming: five principals in six years and test scores so dismal that the state has been monitoring the Pasadena school for four years. To turn around the troubled school, administrators, teachers and community members are undertaking an ambitious -- and unusual -- effort that includes requiring all teachers and staff to reapply for their jobs.
The rehiring process, the most emotionally difficult piece of the school's reconstitution so far, was completed Friday, but educators predict a tumultuous road ahead.
"It is a school in crises," said Renatta Cooper, a member of the Pasadena Board of Education. "Turning a school around is always very difficult. People are so protective of Muir that the amount of change that is going to have to take place to really change the academic climate at the school is going to make people uncomfortable."
Muir High School, a mission-style complex nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, serves nearly 1,300 students from northwest Pasadena and Altadena. Open as a high school for more than half a century, Muir occupies a sentimental spot in the community, most visible in the large alumni turnout at the annual Turkey Tussle football game between the Muir Mustangs and arch-rival Pasadena High School's Bulldogs.
The people revising the way students learn math in Washington would like the adults in the state to do them a favor.
Please stop saying: "Math is hard. I've never been good at it."
But if math is so easy, why is the process to revise the state's math standards taking so long?
The journey that began in the summer of 2006 with a consultant-led review of the old learning requirements is nearing its second anniversary. The new completion goal — a third extension granted by the Legislature earlier this month — is the end of summer.
Lawmakers and education officials say the process is taking so long because they want to make sure they get it right. They have a lofty goal: to finish the process with the best math system in the country.
Who is going to be our next education president? I know, but I'm not telling. Most of The Washington Post's political reporters these days are young, strong and potentially dangerous. They have warned me about previous attempts to tread on their turf. So I am going to confine myself to helpful advice for our future chief executive, without revealing that person's name.
I have gotten some astute assistance in this effort from Sharon L. Nichols, an educational psychologist who is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and David C. Berliner, Regents' Professor of education at Arizona State University. Their 2007 book "Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools" is the latest selection to our Better Late Than Never Book Club, this column's way of spotlighting good work that I really should have read when it appeared months, sometimes years, before.
Nichols and Berliner attack from all sides the state testing that we use to assess schools under the No Child Left Behind law. Their analysis is clear, their arguments strong. What particularly impressed me was their willingness to suggest viable alternatives to testing as a way for us voters, parents and taxpayers to know which of our schools are doing well and which are not, a service to which some critics of testing seem to think we are not entitled.
Last month, St Xavier's College of Kolkata, one of the most orthodox educational institutions in India, announced collaboration with the University of Manitoba, Canada.
For St Xavier's, one of the country's oldest and most prestigious educational institutions that has steadfastly stuck to its independent values, this collaboration is significant - it is its first partnership with any external institution in its 150-year history. Despite being affiliated with a local university, St Xavier's resisted all types of external intervention and insisted on autonomy, which it finally gained two years back.
"It is significant because for one, St Xavier's has become sufficiently flexible to make educational collaboration workable," said Professor Michael Trevan, dean of the University of Manitoba, Canada. "[And also because] this bilateral agreement may be used in future to create multi-lateral pacts globally where St Xavier's could be a part of such pacts."
St Xavier's is not alone. Over the past two years, India has seen an influx of many marquee names, including Harvard, Kellogg, Michigan University, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology (all in the US), Grenoble Ecole de Management (France), and Aston Business School (United Kingdom), while research-oriented institutions like the London Business School, Stanford University and University of California Los Angeles Anderson School of Management, and many others from the world over are working towards setting up bases in India.
In late March and early April, anxious high school seniors wait for little white envelopes or big fat mailing packets indicating whether they gained admission to the college of their choice. They did everything they could to make the grade. And for 75 percent of them or more, according to a national study conducted by Duke University, that included some form of cheating.
Yet despite the prevalence of academic cheating - ranging from copying homework to plagiarizing off the Internet to purloining test answers - and the concern that without ethics you get Enron, there are no statewide or school-district wide academic integrity standards. Perhaps it's time to make curbing cheating part of the public policy agenda.
Among the consequences of letting it go unchecked is student and teacher alienation. As I reported in the Chronicle Magazine last September, many students, under intense pressure to get good grades for college admission, believe they're chumps if they don't cheat. And many teachers report that when they catch cheaters red-handed, the administration doesn't back them up.
Excerpt from the Framework for Grade Ten—World History, Culture, and Geography: The Modern World
World War I and Its Consequences
The growth of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism provides the backdrop for consideration of World War I, which permanently changed the map of Europe and deeply affected the rest of the world. Students should understand the political conditions that led to the outbreak of the war in Europe. Caused in large measure by nationalism, the war stimulated even greater nationalist impulses by dissolving old empires, unleashing irredentist movements, and promoting the spirit of selfdetermination. Within the context of human rights and genocide, students should learn of the Ottoman government's planned mass deportation and systematic annihilation of the Armenian population in 1915. Students should also examine the reactions of other governments, including that of the United States, and world opinion during and after the Armenian genocide. They should examine the effects of the genocide on the remaining Armenian people, who were deprived of their historic homeland, and the ways in which it became a prototype of subsequent genocides.
cores of English teachers urged the State Board of Education on Wednesday to reject proposed curriculum standards that would spell out what literary works their students should read, insisting they are best suited to make those decisions.
Educators from North Texas and across the state said board members should listen to teachers before they adopt curriculum standards for English that will remain in place for the next decade, influencing not only what is taught in the classroom but also providing the basis for state tests and textbooks used in public schools.
Carrollton-Farmers Branch English teacher Elsa Anderson said a board proposal to establish reading lists for English and reading classes is a mistake and would “tie teachers’ hands and deprive them of making decisions about books that are best for their students.”
Ms. Anderson, representing the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, said the book titles included in the board proposal — most of them classics — are “extremely limited in diversity” and would have a negative impact on the reading achievement of minority students.
Nearly 20 years ago, the nation coalesced around a sound idea for improving schools: standards-based reform. The standards were supposed to establish what students ought to know and be able to do and, as a result, offer clear guidance to teachers, curriculum writers, textbook and assessment developers, and professional development providers. They were supposed to result in a well-aligned system that provides teachers all the resources and supports they need—at least, that's what we were promised.
Teachers know all too well just how broken that promise is. The typical state's standards are nowhere near strong enough to serve as the foundation for a well-aligned, coherent educational system. The AFT has been reviewing state standards for more than a decade, and our findings—that state standards are, for the most part, either much too vague or much too long (and sometimes, oddly, both)—have been confirmed by many other reviewers.
We should be outraged. As readers of American Educator know, cognitive science has established that knowledge builds on knowledge-the more you know, the faster you learn.* And so it's imperative that standards offer carefully sequenced content from the beginning of kindergarten through the end of high school. But they don't. And as a result, we have some serious problems:
The difference between the two stories is striking.
The first is two nearly bare pages, with two garbled sentences, illustrated by a single pencil drawing. The second, a tale about a little girl's morning routine, has much more detail, the words and pictures filling three full pages. The cheery sketches are carefully labeled: house, flowers, fence, sun.
The author is a second-grader who is learning English as a second language -- and the two stories were written just over two months apart.
"It's so incredible to see the growth," said Dan Coles, the literacy program manager for Seattle Public Schools.
Thanks to the Writer's Workshop program, such rapid progress is becoming more common for Seattle students, he said.
The curriculum, developed by Columbia University Teachers College, has been in place in Seattle middle schools and in various grades at K-8 schools since fall 2006. Four elementary schools are testing out the Writer's Workshop program this year: Coe, Olympic Hills, Madrona and Loyal Heights. District officials hope to eventually expand the program to all the elementary schools.
The basic format is the same at each school: A daily mini-lesson to introduce a new writing technique, followed by about 40 minutes of writing to help students hone their skills.
Let's consider for a moment what many readers will find to be a politically incorrect position: because of cheap computers and the Internet, the ability to solve problems ad hoc has become more efficient than teaching kids about problems and issues that will never face them. As a result, the United States has let itself become less competitive by putting so much money into a product (a kid) making both its cost and its ability globally uncompetitive. So, instead of putting more effort into making globally competitive products, we put more effort into blaming those who are smarter at using technology that was mostly invented here.
If the idea is to give everyone a nice comfortable pension, if the same money invested each year in a typical kid's education was instead invested in an IRA, it would give that kid a very comfortable living upon reaching age 65.
Well this is a terrible position to take, don't you think? It treats our children like capital goods and denies them any ability to excel, dooming them to mediocrity.
Really?
My Mom (Mrs. Cringely to you) once said, "I may not have been the best mother, but at least I got all my kids through school."
"No you didn't," I replied (this is a true story, by the way). "We would have made it through school with or without you." And we would have.
Not wanting to put too much of a Libertarian spin on it, because I am certainly not a Libertarian, this is a fact that is missed by so many people. There will always be achievers, whether they go to public schools, private schools, home schools, magnet schools, charter schools, or no schools at all. While it is fine for society to create opportunities for advancement, what's more important is removing BARRIERS to advancement. And for the most part that's not what we are about.
What we tend to be about as a society is building power structures and most of those power structures, including schools and governments, are decidedly reactive. This is not all bad. After all, the poster child for educational and government proactivity in the 20th century may have been the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But while Matthews laments the failures of government to improve teaching and learning, he glosses over his own pivotal role in local educational leadership. That role includes standing in the way of programs like 4-year-old kindergarten that could help the district meet its educational objectives.
Beginning in the next few weeks, a school board made up mostly of rookies will begin to address the challenges ahead. A new superintendent starting July 1 — Daniel Nerad, formerly top dog in Green Bay — inspires hope of new solutions to nagging problems. But the third pillar of power is John Matthews. He's been around the longest and arguably knows the most.
Already, Matthews has cemented his legacy from building a strong, tough union. But now, some are wondering if Matthews will also leave behind a legacy of obstructing key educational change.
Glendale Elementary may be failing by test-based standards, but it's succeeding by human ones.
The question of how we recognize good schools and bad ones has become a pressing issue.
In Washington, Congress is debating the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind legislation. Locally, Madison and Sun Prairie parents have recently been upset over boundary changes that some see as sending their children to less desirable schools.
At the same time, the movement toward inclusivity in special education, a growing minority population and increasing poverty rates throughout Dane County, particularly in Madison, have put a sharp point on some important questions:
Do advanced students suffer when they share a classroom with struggling students?
How should schools address the stresses of poverty?
Are test scores a reliable measure of a school's effectiveness?
This story doesn't attempt to answer those questions; educational researchers have been struggling with them for decades. Instead, it puts one Madison elementary school under the microscope where all those currents come together -- a school that by No Child Left Behind's test-based standards is clearing failing. Yet, by the assessment of a number of parents, volunteers and other fans, the school is succeeding beyond all expectations.
A closer look at Glendale Elementary, a 50-year-old Madison school within the noisy shadow of U.S. 51, shows a school where success is occurring in ways that test scores can't measure and poverty rates don't reveal.
When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.
One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.
The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.
“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”
Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.
Imagine for a moment that you are a new fourth-grade teacher with 25 children squirming in front of you. There’s a test at the end of the year, though you really aren’t sure what’s on it, and there are stacks of enormous textbooks— too enormous to tackle cover-to-cover—on the shelf. The one thing that is abundantly clear is that you are supposed to teach to the standards.
So, when you open up that standards document, do you hope to see something like this?
Analyze the style or structure of a text.
or something like this?
Describe the differences of various imaginative forms of literature, including fantasies, fables, myths, legends, and other tales.
Example: After reading some of the Greek or Norse myths found in such books as Book of Greek Myths or Book of Norse Myths, both by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire, discuss how myths were sometimes used to explain physical phenomena like movement of the sun across the sky or the sound of thunder.
Both are from current state standards, but one, obviously, offers much more guidance as to what your fourth-graders need to learn. If your instruction is guided by the first standard, you may or may not adequately prepare students for the test—or for fifth grade. But if your instruction is guided by the second standard, your students have a much better chance of being on grade level. And we can imagine an even clearer, more specific standard that would give you greater confidence that your instruction was on target.
For example, instead of merely suggesting books to draw from, the latter standard could specify exactly which myths, fables, legends, etc. students should read and ensure that none of those selections is repeated in other grades.
All states should have clear, specific, grade-by-grade, content-rich standards. When they don't, it's the students who miss out on a top-notch education and the teachers—especially the new teachers—who find more frustration than fulfillment. Below, we hear from a new teacher who laments the lack of direction she received in her first year on the job. We have withheld her name and school district to allow her to speak frankly and to emphasize that new teachers across the country are facing similar challenges.
–Editors
First days are always nerve-racking—first days attending a new school, first days in a new neighborhood, and especially first days at a new job. My first day as a high school English teacher in a large, urban public school was no exception. It was my first "real" job after graduating college just three months earlier, and to add to my anxiety, I was hired just one day, precisely 24 hours, before my students would arrive. But my family and friends, mentors, and former professors all assured me that, like all other first days I had conquered, this day would be a successful start to a successful career. Unfortunately, this time they were wrong.
My first day on the job, I entered the building expecting to be greeted by the principal or chairperson, guided to my classrooms, and provided with what I considered to be the essentials: a schedule, a curriculum, rosters, and keys. Instead, the only things I received were a piece of paper on which two numerical codes were written, and a warning not to use the women's bathroom on the second floor. After some frantic inquiring, I learned that the codes signified that I would be teaching ninthand tenth-grade regular English. As various colleagues pulled at my paper to get a glance, some nodded approvingly, while others sighed sympathetically. Eager to make a judgment of my own, I asked a question that, two years later, has yet to be answered: "What is taught in ninth- and tenth-grade regular English?" In response, I was given book lists containing over 20 books per grade, ranging from Robert Lipsyte's The Contender to William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew on the freshman list alone, and even greater disparities on the other three lists. I was told to select six books from the appropriate list for each grade I taught, and "teach a book for every six weeks of the school year." Unsatisfied with this answer, yet slowly beginning to feel foolish for asking (Should I know the answers to these questions? Am I unqualified to be a teacher if I don't know what ninth- and tenth-grade English means?), I gathered the courage to inquire further. "What concepts are we supposed to teach the students through these books?" Now growing visibly agitated, several colleagues responded, "Teach literary elements and techniques. They need to re-learn those every year, and prepare them for the state test, and teach them some grammar and vocabulary as well as whatever concepts each book calls for."
Like other forward-looking organizations, the American Federation of Teachers believes that we need to have better state standards if we are truly going to improve K-12 education. I’ve earnestly stated that same view. That’s no doubt why I’ve been invited to write on this subject.
I’m genuinely flattered. But after living with this question for more than two decades, my views have become so definite (some might say extreme) that I decided to conceive of this piece as a guest editorial where no one should think I am speaking for anyone but myself. That will allow me to speak my mind, which will I hope be more useful to readers than an attempt to find and express a consensus view on behalf of American Educator and the AFT on this controversial subject.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of many articles and books, including the bestselling Cultural Literacy and The Schools We Need. He is a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation. His most recent book is The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children.
The subject is controversial in part because some teachers do not like explicit subject-matter standards. In my own state of Virginia, some teachers are quite annoyed with me personally because many years back my writings influenced the Virginia Board of Education when they introduced the “Virginia Standards of Learning”—the much debated, often dreaded SoLs. But let me say to those teachers, and to other teachers, that the state did not pay attention to what my colleagues and I said back in 1988. We said that subject-matter standards and tests of them should be just two prongs of a four-pronged policy. Standards and tests needed to be accompanied by good teacher training in the subject matter specified in the standards and by good classroom materials that clearly indicate what to teach, but not how to teach it. The last two prongs have never come properly into existence in Virginia, nor to my knowledge in any other state. Moreover, the Virginia standards (not to mention the tests) are not nearly as good as they should be. other state standards are even worse. No wonder there is such dissatisfaction!
But many teachers I have talked to have agreed that they would very much prefer to work in a more coherent system, one that ensured that students who entered their classrooms were adequately prepared.
THIRD grade has always been a hard year for Rahmana Muhammad’s children, and therefore for her. All of a sudden, it seems to this mother of four, their textbooks have fewer pictures, their homework lasts for hours, and their test scores plummet.
So Ms. Muhammad, 39, was not sure what to expect last month when she arrived at the Newton Street School in Newark to pick up a report card for her youngest child, Dyshirah, 9, who is in third grade. After climbing the concrete stairs to Dyshirah’s classroom, Ms. Muhammad greeted the teacher, Kevin Kilgore, and hunkered down at a low table with the report card. Opening it, she found a C in reading, and a D in math.
Ms. Muhammad looked over at Dyshirah, a slight girl with a head full of braids, who was tracing sentences in a book with her finger. Mr. Kilgore, 22, assured Ms. Muhammad that Dyshirah had made a lot of progress, earning an average of 51 percent on her class math tests compared with 17 percent at the beginning of the marking period.
“I’m not happy but I’m optimistic,” said Ms. Muhammad, a supermarket customer service representative who graduated from Newton in 1982. “I see the changes. Before, I couldn’t pay her to read anything, and now she’ll come in and say, ‘Can I read this to you?’ ”
When Richard Colosi wanted to teach his first-grade class about insects, he turned to the Web for help. Mr. Colosi, who works at Canandaigua Primary School in upstate New York, went to his laptop and put on a video parody of "The Dating Game" that featured different types of insects. The video was produced by a teacher in another school district and posted on TeacherTube, a video-sharing site for students and educators.
Video in the classroom has evolved since the days when teachers wheeled in film projectors on carts. More teachers are using online video-sharing sites modeled after Google Inc.'s YouTube to engage with students. And video is no longer a one-way channel of communication; students are participating in the creation of videos, too.
On TeacherTube, educators share material, such as instructional math videos, with classrooms around the world. Another site, SchoolTube, mainly hosts videos produced by students in class with the help of their teachers.
Teachers who use the sites say they value the opportunity to see what other educators are doing in their classrooms, and students say they enjoy having an outlet to showcase their work. Also, "kids are becoming more technologically inclined," says Mr. Colosi, and such video helps to hold their interest.
When senior Zack Jackson wanted to take a class in mythology, he wasn't out of luck just because his small high school in rural Virginia didn't offer it. Instead, he headed online.
The course comes courtesy of Virtual Virginia, a state program that offers dozens of online classes to middle and high school students. The program allows children to take classes that aren't offered at their schools. Nationwide, programs like Virtual Virginia help hundreds of thousands of students take the kinds of unusual courses that make colleges sit up and take notice.
Most of the 3,000 students in the Virtual Virginia program enroll in online advanced placement courses. And thanks to the program, Zack's school, Rappahannock County High, can offer more AP classes, allowing it to compete with local private schools, which often use AP courses as a selling point.
Principal Robyn Puryear says students have to be self-directed to succeed in an online class. Since online courses are self-paced, there's a temptation to procrastinate — and that leads to trouble.
Abramson's article includes a chat with online Mandarin teacher Susan Cox. Virtual courses would seem to be ideal for a number of subjects that are often sparsely offered. Mandarin for example, is only available at Madison's Memorial High School.
The state Board of Education today will consider a new process for identifying "gifted" children and beefing up the monitoring of gifted programs, steps advocates say would help provide a mind-stretching education for the state's top students.
Under the current law, students are classified as gifted if they score at least 130 on an IQ test and meet other criteria, such as performing one or more years above grade level and excelling in one or more subject areas.
The proposed change would classify students as gifted if they meet the IQ threshold or meet multiple other criteria. Advocates said the change is needed because IQ tests don't always flag gifted students, particularly those from disadvantaged homes, children with disabilities and deep-thinkers who don't do well on timed tests.
"There are many school districts that will look at that and say, 'If you do not have the magic number, you are not in,' " said David Mason, president of Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education and a retired York County school administrator.
Advocates said they didn't consider the potential change a watering down of eligibility criteria or something that would swell the ranks of gifted students. About 70,000 of the state's 1.8 million school-age children receive gifted services, according to the state board.
It's the second week of school, and Phil Farmer's pre-algebra class at Diablo Valley College already has empty seats.
His roll call brings silence after several names. Call it a result of the January rain, or even of the agonizing early semester parking space hunt, but definitely call it a problem.
Statistically, it's safe to say that only 30 percent to 40 percent of Farmer's students will advance to basic algebra.
Community colleges nationwide labor under the weight of ill-prepared students. Some colleges estimate that nearly every student is unprepared in math, reading or writing -- or all three.
Consider the sheer magnitude of California's problem:
Nearly 670,000 California college students were enrolled in basic English and math courses last year, with additional students in remedial reading courses and English-as-a-second-language classes. It's estimated that far more students need remedial work but don't enroll, and half the remedial and second-language students leave school after their first year.
One in 10 students at the lowest remedial levels -- community colleges sometimes have up to five courses below the lowest college-level course -- reaches a college-level course in that subject. The numbers are worse for black and Latino students.
Nearly three-quarters of the students who take placement tests are directed to remedial math courses, compared with 9 percent being placed in college-level courses.
In one key way, the Madison school district is no different than any other urban school system in the country -- poor kids and kids of color just aren’t learning as much as other students.
We asked the two Madison school board candidates on the April 1 ballot -- Marj Passman is the lone candidate for Seat 6, while Ed Hughes is running unopposed for Seat 7 -- how they would address the achievement gap.
Interestingly, both see early education as part of the solution, but both also stopped short of endorsing the introduction of 4-year-old kindergarten in Madison.
We ended our five-week series of questions for the candidates with an open-ended query on what they felt were an overlooked issue in the schools.
Both gave thoughtful responses.
Passman suggested the schools needed to do more about the pervasiveness of substance abuse among teenagers, while Hughes said the district needs to pay more attention to why parents pull their children out of the Madison schools.
When the College Board announced last year that every high school Advanced Placement teacher would have to prove he or she was actually teaching a college-level course, there was widespread fear the process would purge worthy teachers from the program, weeding out good courses along with the bad.
They needn't have worried. In the first quality-control audit of the AP program, no AP teacher or course was rejected in the Fairfax, Montgomery, Prince George's or District school systems, according to area education officials. Of the 146,671 AP courses submitted for review nationwide, 136,853, or 93 percent, were approved.
The year-long audit, which ended in January, addressed mounting concern that rapid expansion of the college-preparatory program over the past decade had brought about a decline in the rigor for which it is known and that some students were not learning material worthy of an introductory college course.
But the ease with which many teachers passed the audit has prompted some to question its value. Thousands of teachers submitted exact copies of course outlines from colleagues who had been previously audited and approved. The College Board condoned the practice, as long as everyone submitting the same syllabus vowed to teach more or less the same course.
Parents at Green Acres, a private school in Montgomery County, complained this month when a teacher read to a group of third-graders from a book containing gruesome descriptions of violence against enslaved Africans and the conditions on the ships that brought them to the United States. They said the children were too young for the difficult theme and graphic language.
At Deal Junior High School in the District, some parents wondered why their children were reading books this year that they considered too easy for advanced seventh-grade students ("Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson) or books without much literary merit ("The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens" by Sean Covey.)
The episodes illustrate how difficult it is for librarians, teachers and parents to match children with the right book at the right age in an effort to turn young people into lovers of reading. And experts say that process is becoming increasingly complicated.
Elizabeth Byers didn't really worry about having the academic chops to get in to college.
She was a valedictorian at Reedsburg Area High School, had a 4.0 GPA and had a nice set of scores: a 29 on the ACT and a 1980 on the SAT.
Still, when Lawrence University in Appleton asked if she wanted her test scores to be considered, she checked the "no" box - and breathed a sigh of relief.
"I was just sort of, like, 'Oh! That's nice!' " Byers said. "So many kids are really great students and don't have great test scores. I have good test scores, but if they were going to recognize me for what I did in school, I wanted to take advantage of that."
Lawrence is among a growing list of more than 750 colleges and universities that have some kind of test-optional admissions, according to FairTest, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that opposes heavy reliance on the tests. The trend comes as standardized tests have faced increased scrutiny for possible bias against students who are the first in their family to go to college, minorities or non-native English speakers.
One Colorado school district is going to shake things up by getting rid of grades.
The move includes traditional letter grades and grade levels.
The Adams County School District 50 school board approved a new system that lets students progress at their own pace.
Students will need to master 10 skill levels to graduate. They could end up graduating earlier, or later than fellow classmates. It just depends upon how long they need in order to master the skills.
District administrators says the new system will focus on students' competence, rather than achievement for grades.
There are other school districts across the country that have adopted this type of system.
The district says it will put an explainer on transcripts for students applying to college, since the students will not have grade point averages or class rankings.
High school junior Aliya Deri, from Pleasanton, Calif., has been crowned the National Vocabulary Champion in the second year of a contest that's already attracting more than 100,000 kids for a spot at the title and $40,000 in scholarship money.
In November 2006, Jack Li's father, a longtime Caterpillar employee in Beijing, was transferred to Peoria, Ill. Jack enrolled in high school as a ninth-grader. His parents, good friends of mine for almost a decade, weren't particularly worried about their son adapting to a new school in a foreign country -- at least not academically. They believed that China has better K-12 education than the U.S.
Jack didn't disappoint them: Three months later, he scored high enough on the SATs to put him in the top 3% in math and well above-average in writing and reading. Last fall, he transferred to Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a college-prep program for Illinois students. He took advanced chemistry last semester and will study basic calculus next semester.
Chinese students like Jack are examples of why Microsoft's Bill Gates asked Congress today to spend more to improve American education in math and science. Unless more students can be attracted to those subjects, Mr. Gates warned, the U.S.'s competitive advantage will erode and its ability to create high-paying jobs will suffer.
I know many Americans don't believe him. They argue that American kids may not be as good at math and science as Chinese and Indian kids, but they're more well-rounded. But that's increasingly untrue. For example, Jack isn't your stereotypical Chinese nerd. He's the captain of IMSA's sophomore basketball team and tried out for the tennis team today.
Low graduation rates, high tuition and a disconcerting achievement gap at Minnesota colleges and universities, especially among minorities, are revealed in a new study.
Minnesotans pay twice as much as the national average to get a public college education, but they're not getting double the results.
Fewer than 40 percent of students at Minnesota's colleges and universities graduate in four years, according to a report released this week by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education. In addition, students of color have less than a 50-50 chance of graduating at all.
For a state where high school students traditionally fare well on college entrance exams, that's disconcerting to those in charge of assessing the quality of higher education in Minnesota.
"Part of our concern is that we start out so high, and then once the students get into school, our results tend to be really national average," said Susan Heegaard, director of the Office of Higher Education. "The question for Minnesota as a state is, 'Is this where we want to be?' If we want to compete nationally and internationally, our argument is that we need to do better than average."
Slow to graduate: For high school students who entered a four-year school in the fall of 2000, only 36.7 percent of them graduated in four years and 57.5 percent graduated in six years. Only five of the state's 36 four-year schools -- public or private -- had a four year graduation rate of better than 70 percent.
Rates are particularly low at schools in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system. According to the report, only 20.6 percent of MnSCU students graduated in four years, and fewer than half had graduated after six years.
Die-hard charter school advocates are rethinking their approach to school reform and the ability of competition and charter schools alone to transform American urban schools and their awful student achievement rates.
It's a surprising change and it's hardly common, particularly at the grassroots level.
Still, in recent weeks a number of the country's leading pro-charter think-tanks and leaders have published pieces, announced policies or made statements indicating their reconsideration -- and it likely will have an enormous impact on policymaking and Republican politics.
From New York City to Detroit to Atlanta, charter advocates have echoed writer Sol Stern, an important conservative voice on education reform, when he wrote in a recent edition of the City Journal: "education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom."
"It's hard to generalize about home-schoolers, but if there's one thing we know, it's that we are changing the world, or at least the world of education choices. Others, though, see us as either misguided or a threat -- and probably cheered last month's California appeals court ruling that all children in the state must be taught by credentialed teachers. ... Nonetheless, home-schooling is booming. In 2003 the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that the home-schooled population nationwide was 1.1 million. The National Home Education Research Institute estimates that it may be growing at double-digit rates. ... The results? Studies have shown that home-schooled children outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized academic tests but also on tests of social skills."
Gregory J. Millman, co-author of the forthcoming "Homeschooling: A Family's Journey," will be online Monday, March 24 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his Outlook article about home-schooling and the ways it improves upon conventional public education.
The Challenge Index, my device for assessing high schools on college-level course participation, was born 10 years ago this month in The Post and Newsweek. At the beginning it was mostly a way to draw attention to a book I had written, "Class Struggle: What's Wrong (and Right) with America's Best Public High Schools." I feared that my prose was far too stuck in the minutiae of classroom life to win much of an audience but hoped that a list of schools ranked in a new way might tweak some curiosity.
In May, Newsweek will again publish its annual Top High Schools list, using the Challenge Index rating method, just as The Post published its annual Challenge Index list of D.C. area schools in December. These lists have taken on a life of their own. Newsweek's Top High Schools was the most visited feature on the Newsweek.com Web site last year. The Post's local list is also popular, and both are targets of controversy, producing by far the most questions and comments coming to my e-mail boxes.
Is this good? I would like you to tell me. These past 10 years I have been quoting regularly from the lists' most acidic critics, as well as their warmest friends. But the arguments on both sides have grown stale and predictable. I have a new idea for advancing the debate.
First, I would like to ask all high schools that have strong Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge programs and have NOT gotten the Newsweek list entry form to e-mail highschools@newsweek.com right away and request one. If you gave at least as many AP, IB or Cambridge exams last May as you had graduating seniors last year, you should qualify for the Newsweek list. We gather all of our information for the list directly from the qualifying high schools. We have sent out thousands of forms, but we don't want to miss anybody. If you know of a high school that you think has been overlooked, please forward this column to the principal. I figure the more schools on the list, the more varied and interesting the opinions of the list.
Because their educators waste time on crap like this:To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure.
Instead of calling these schools "underperforming," the Board of Education is considering labeling them as "Commonwealth priority," to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.
Schools in the direst straits, now known as "chronically underperforming," would get the more urgent but still vague label of "priority one."
The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students' self-esteem.
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.
I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.
But does it?
These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn't the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.
Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?
This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.
There's no question that revolution is in the air. The education process is ripe for change for a number of reasons, including those mentioned by Cringely. We've seen substantial education spending increases over the past decade, which are unlikely to continue growing at the same pace, given other spending priorities such as health care and infrastructure. The ongoing flap over the proposed Madison report card changes is another example of change in the air. Links:
The modern academy is notoriously immune from accountability, as Larry Summers so painfully learned at Harvard. So it is worth noting, and applauding, the achievements of Hank Brown, the best college president you've never heard of, who retired this month from the University of Colorado.
Mr. Brown took over as interim president in April 2005 when the school of 50,000 was in turmoil. This was a couple of months after CU professor Ward Churchill had become infamous, and a year after the school's athletic department was accused of offering alcohol and sex to recruit football players. A former U.S. Senator, Mr. Brown was reappointed in 2006 in a permanent capacity.
Mr. Brown proceeded to oversee a complete examination of Mr. Churchill's work, and the ethnic studies professor was eventually fired because of fraudulent scholarship, not his politics. Mr. Brown then initiated a complete review of CU's tenure policies, making it easier for his successors to get rid of deadwood. He also took on the equally sensitive subject of grade inflation, insisting that the university disclose student class rank on transcripts. If a B average puts a student at the bottom of his class, future employers will know it.
Frederick Hess, who researches higher education at the American Enterprise Institute, says there may be plenty of other people who know how to fix a university. But the reason there are so few Hank Browns goes back to Machiavelli. "When a leader tries to wrestle with these things," Mr. Hess notes, "there are influential constituencies that he upsets. It's much easier to manage the status quo than to enforce change."
Resources for teaching economics to students is not something we hear a lot about and yet knowledge in this area is something that is vital for one’s entire life. Strategies for teaching this are available for all ages. As a teacher, parent, or student, here are some you might want to investigate.
There’s an article in The Duke Gifted Letter that reviews two board games for parents who are interested in teaching their children the complexities of the stock market: Bull Market, by the Great Canadian Game Company Inc. for ages 8 to adult, and Stock Market Tycoon, by Vida Games LLC for ages 12 to adult.
The eternal language of numbers is reborn as a form of communication that people all over the world can use—and, increasingly, must use
BRILLIANCE with numbers is a curious thing. Paul Erdos, a Hungarian who died in 1996, used to travel the world and stop briefly at the offices and homes of fellow mathematicians. “My brain is open,” he would announce as, with uncanny intuition, he suggested a problem that, without realising it, his host was already half-way to solving. Together they would find the solution.
In a discipline-wide joke, grateful mathematicians still use “Erdos numbers” to indicate how close they were to contact with the great man: “Erdos 1” describes his co-authors, “Erdos 2” indicates their co-authors, and so on. And in all seriousness, the fruits of Erdos's 83-year life include more than 1,500 jointly authored publications, and a network that extends via his collaborators not only into most areas of mathematics but into many other fields—physics, biology, linguistics and more.
One point I should have made at the beginning of the previous post is the distinction between unschooling and homeschooling. Most home schooling is not unschooling--the parents have a curriculum and are following something closer to the conventional model than we are. And one can do unschooling in a school. Our kids were in a very small private school modeled on Sudbury Valley School for some years. Eventually problems arose, we switched from school unschooling to home unschooling, and on the whole found it more satisfactory. Hence the titles of these posts.
When our daughter was five, she was going to a local Montessori school. Her mother thought she was ready to learn to read; they didn't. So Betty taught her to read, using Doctor Seuss books. Our son, three years younger, observed the process and taught himself. We heard about the local Sudbury school, new that year, brought our daughter over to visit. She decided she preferred it to the Montessori school, so we shifted her. A few years later we added her brother, a few years after that shifted to home schooling.
The Sudbury model includes classes if students want them. When our daughter was about ten there was a class, lasting somewhat over a year, in math. It started assuming the students knew nothing, ended with the early stages of algebra. That is pretty much all of the formal instruction either of them had. In addition, we required them to learn the multiplication tables, which are useful to know but boring to learn. That, I think, was the closest thing to compulsory learning in their education.
The British mathematician J. E. Littlewood once began a math class for freshmen with the following statement: "I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now."
People involved in the debate about how math is best taught in grades K-12, must feel a bit like Littlewood in front of yet another first year class. Every year as objectionable math programs are introduced into schools, parents are alarmed at what isn't being taught. The new "first-year class" of parents is then indoctrinated into what has come to be known as the math wars as the veterans - mathematicians, frustrated teachers, experienced parents, and pundits - start the laborious process of explanation once more.
It was therefore a watershed event when the President's National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMP) held its final meeting on March 13, 2008 and voted unanimously to approve its report: Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
The black-white gap in U.S. education is an issue that continues to occupy the efforts of a great many scholars. Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt have poked at the issue repeatedly; a recent study by Spyros Konstantopoulos looked at class size as a possible culprit, to little avail.
We gathered a group of people with wisdom and experience in this area — Caroline Hoxby, Daniel Hurley, Richard J. Murnane, and Andrew Rotherham — and asked them the following question:
How can the U.S. black-white achievement gap be closed?
The Bloomberg administration won approval for a new eighth-grade promotion policy last night at a meeting repeatedly interrupted by the chanting and heckling of parents who contend that the policy amounts to blaming students for the failings of the city’s middle schools.
The policy requires next year’s eighth graders to pass classes in core subject areas and to score at a basic level on standardized English and math exams to be promoted. The Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees the city schools, approved the policy by a vote of 11 to 1 in its meeting at Tweed Courthouse, the Education Department’s headquarters. Eight of the 13 members on the panel — there is one vacancy — are appointed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and the five borough presidents appoint one each.
From the moment the meeting began, it was punctuated by parents chanting, “Postpone the vote” and “No plan, no vote,” a reference to what they said was the department’s lack of a comprehensive plan for fixing the city’s middle schools.
Two area school districts will begin offering kindergarten for 4-year-olds in the fall.
A third will do it, but only if it gets state help.
The Stoughton and Deerfield school boards voted Monday night to provide half-day 4K.
The Cambridge School Board approved it, but made its approval contingent on receiving state money.
Cambridge Board Vice President Marcia Staubli said today, "If we don't get the grant, we're going to revisit the issue" on April 28, the next regular board meeting.
Stoughton and Deerfield officials said they also plan to apply for state start-up grants, for up to $3,000 per student.
They join Marshall and Wisconsin Heights, which now offer 4K, and Monona Grove, which will begin in the fall. About two-thirds of districts statewide now have 4K. To enroll, children must be 4 years old by Sept. 1, 2008. Conventional kindergarten starts at age 5.
How can Milwaukee Public Schools support its high-achieving programs while meeting its mandate to improve struggling schools?
That's the central question at a web site parents at Milwaukee German Immersion School have launched to weigh in on the district's budget process for the 2008- '09 school year.
District officials have asked the specialty elementary school, which has just over 580 students and consitently gets more than three-fourths of them scoring in the proficient or advanced range on state test scores, to cut around $180,000 from next year's budget.
Last month, principal Albert Brugger and the school's Governance Council responded by submitting a proposal that cuts music and physical eduation from the school's offerings. The school has lost its assistant principal and art teacher in recent years due to budget constraints.
Sanctions would be eased for some schools that narrowly miss academic targets in a pilot program the Education Department announced yesterday, marking a significant shift for enforcement of the No Child Left Behind law.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, using her administrative authority, said she will allow 10 states to move away from the 2002 law's "pass-fail" system, which makes no distinction between a school in which many students fail reading and math tests and one that misses targets because a few students fall short. She said the pilot will allow states to focus on schools with students that need the most help.
First, our research project is supported by a large consortium of philanthropies with diverse positions regarding school choice but a uniform commitment to non-interference in the research. We would not conduct this research under any other conditions. Our funders include the Annie E. Casey, Joyce, Kern, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Robertson and Walton Family foundations.
We listed this complete set of funding organizations at the start of each of our five reports. Unfortunately, Alan J. Borsuk's Feb. 26 Journal Sentinel story about the studies ("Voucher study finds parity,") reported the names of only three of the six philanthropies. The omission created a false impression - subsequently repeated by Mary Bell ("Voucher school achievements are still not measurable," March 8) - that the evaluation is primarily backed by "pro-voucher" foundations.
That is simply not true.
Second, no reliable conclusions about the effectiveness of the choice program can or should be drawn from these initial descriptive data. We provided that important guidance throughout our reports. Nevertheless, many commentators chose to ignore it.
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
At Harvard University, the Harvard Graduate School of Law is called Harvard Law School, the Harvard Graduate School of Medicine is called Harvard Medical School, but Harvard Education School is called the Harvard Graduate School of Education—surely that indicates something...
In any case, Harvard Education School is kind enough to offer, on its website, an insight into the research interests of its faculty. Their centers for research include: “The Center on the Developing Child; Change Leadership Group; Chartering Practice Project; Civil Rights Project; Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education; Dynamic Development Laboratory; Everyday Antiracism Working Group; GoodWork Project; Harvard Family Research Project; Language Diversity & Literacy Development Research Group; National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL); NICHD Study of Early Child Care & Youth Development; Project IF; Project on the Next Generation of Teachers; Project Zero; Projects in Language Development; Project for Policy Innovation in Education; Public Education Leadership Project (PELP); and Understanding the Roots of Tolerance and Prejudice.”
The mission of some may be less clear. The “GoodWork®” Project explains that: “The GoodWork® Project is a large scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society.” There is no indication that they are interested in good academic homework. Project IF is about “Inventing the Future.” Project Zero is home to work on multiple intelligences, among other things.
If you dig down further into the research interests of individual faculty, also kindly provided on the site, you may have the same difficulty I do in finding anyone interested in the work of the schools in teaching math, science, history, literature and foreign languages. There may be exceptions, but the overall impression is that academic work, of the sort we are asking students to do in our schools, gets little attention.
There is concern for finding and retaining teachers, but not too much for seeing that they have the academic preparation to be successful in promoting the study of math, science, history, literature, and foreign languages among their students.
It would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the focus of Harvard Education School is not on academics, but rather on a variety of social change, school management, “dynamic development,” and race, gender and ethnicity issues.
Education has many important and significant aspects, and surely Harvard Education School devotes its attention to some of them, but it seems equally clear that student academic work, and the preparation of teachers to help students in doing it, should be fairly prominent among the concerns of faculty there.
As far as I can see, they are not. In addition, it has been observed, from time to time, that other institutions may follow what Harvard does in organizing their own approaches to education. If this is the case in Education Schools, then there may be widespread national neglect of academic work in many of them.
It has been noted elsewhere that those who pursue degrees in Education have much lower Graduate Record Examination scores, in general, than those who pursue graduate degrees in medicine, law, engineering, the sciences and even the liberal arts.
Which gives rise to the question, for me, of whether lack of success in academic pursuits may incline those who seek degrees at Harvard Education School actually to have less interest in academic subjects than other graduate students have. I believe that those who are considering work with children in our schools, if they are academically weak, sometimes decide that if they do not know much about math, science, history, literature, foreign languages and the like, at least they “know about people.” By some quirk of logic, they may think that “being good with people” is a fine substitute for knowing and caring about academic work in our schools.
Perhaps academic schoolwork has comes to seem mundane, banal—really beneath them—so they decide to give their attention to “higher” concerns like multiple intelligences, child care, everyday antiracism, inventing the future, and "dynamic development." To some, it may appear that many of these topics might better be studied in a school of social work or in a graduate department of psychology, but if Harvard Education School feels that academics are not that important for teachers and students in the schools, they have to do research on something, I suppose, and to me it seems that what has occurred as a result might be called the psychologyzation of an education school.
Now, if our public school students were already doing splendidly in academic work, perhaps there would be a need to look beyond plain academics as a subject of study, but my impression is that this is not yet the case in the United States.
I think it would be great if Harvard Education School, and others, would, until our students are more proficient academically, spend more time working on ways to teach academics and to encourage our students to do academic work in the schools. Then, when our students are doing a lot better in academics, the Ed Schools can go back to roaming around in social justice, everyday antiracism, child development, inventing the future, and all the other subjects to which they are now devoting themselves.
Will Fitzhugh has an A.B. from Harvard College and an Ed.M. from Harvard Education School
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Two engaging books came out a year ago, each so compelling I planned a major column with guest commentators and debates and confetti and dancers and rock music. Then life intruded. I never got it together. Now my only face-saving option is to make these books the latest selections to our Better Late Than Never Book Club, this column's way of heralding works that I never get around to reading when I should.
I need to issue a bias alert for " 'It's Being Done.' " Chenoweth is a former Washington Post columnist whose work I have admired for many years. She said she was hired by the Achievement Alliance--a coalition of five educational organizations--to find and describe "schools where poor children and children of color do better than their peers in others schools." She profiles several regular public schools that meet her criteria. But the most interesting part of the book is her description of a school she removed from her list, even though its test scores looked good.
Failure is not an option in Linda Jarzyniecki's math classes. If Jarzyniecki needs to give a pep talk or threaten to call parents to get the job done, then so be it.
"Students come into my class hesitantly," says Jarzyniecki (Jar-za-NEEKY), or "Mrs. J.," who teaches advanced algebra, trigonometry and calculus at Greenville High. "I want to challenge my students, but I want them to experience some success so they don't become discouraged and they remain in mathematics."
Mrs. J. faces challenging demographics. Greenville High is a school with about 750 students in a rural central Alabama town of about 8,000. The median income for a family of four is about $25,000 a year, according to Census figures, and 69% of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
"Despite the high poverty rate our children live with, many students are diligent, industrious young people who have a goal to complete a two- or four-year college or technical school," she says. But they often feel pressure to work to help support the family.
Congratulations, dear seventh grader, for nailing science class.
Your science grade this quarter is A, 4, 3, 3, M, S, R.
Now, let's take a look at your English grade...
That's a preview of how, beginning in the fall, parents of middle school students might read a new type of report card coming to the Madison School District.
The change will make Madison one of the first districts in Dane County to adopt middle school report cards based directly upon how well students are mastering the state's standards that list what they're supposed to learn in every subject.
In some ways, Madison's change isn't radical. The district is retaining traditional report card letter grades. And the district's elementary students, like many around the state, already receive report cards based upon the state's academic standards.
The shift is being met, however with a mixture of criticism and hope.
Sitting in the back row of her South Fayette High School economics class, Emily Cord waved off her teacher as he passed out voter-registration cards.
"I'm not 18 till June," she said.
An hour later, however, she was sitting in ECO102, Principles of Macroeconomics, at Community College of Allegheny County, with classmates beyond not just the voting age but the drinking age.
Emily is one of thousands of Pennsylvania students enrolled in both high school and college classes through the state's dual enrollment program, which pays part of the college tuition.
A state report released last month notes "extraordinary demand and interest on the part of students" in the program. Since the dual enrollment program started in the 2005-06 school year, state funding has doubled, to $10 million for the current school year.
In the 2006-07 school year, the number of participants increased 69 percent from the previous year, from 7,270 students to 12,267 students statewide.
The Assembly overwhelmingly voted for a bill protecting virtual schools Tuesday - a compromise measure Gov. Jim Doyle and other key Democrats support.
The bill was passed in a flurry of activity as the Legislature winds down the regular session that ends Thursday. The Assembly also approved a bill to remove teacher residency requirements in Milwaukee, and the Senate passed a bill requiring new police officers to undergo psychological exams.
Democrats in the Assembly were unsuccessful in attempting to force a vote on the Great Lakes compact.
Tuesday also marked the all-but-certain death of a bill requiring the state to provide information about involuntary mental health commitments to a federal database checked for gun purchases. Supporters of the measure, including Doyle, said the bill was necessary to help avoid shootings like the one last year at Virginia Tech.
The virtual schools bill passed 96-1 Tuesday; Rep. Dave Travis (D-Waunakee) voted against it. The agreement was reached after Doyle said he would sign a bill on virtual schools only if it capped enrollment.
Q: What does a major state university do when test scores on a precalculus math exam for incoming freshmen continue to decline year after year, while at the same time high school GPAs of incoming freshmen are going up?
A: If your answer is "make the test easier," go to the head of the class!
According to an independent research group, Wisconsin has the nation’s 11th highest graduation rate. However, the rate reported by the group is lower than estimates by the state Department of Public Instruction and the U.S. Department of Education.
That and other facts about the state’s schools are included in a new report card released today by the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy organization that has pushed hard in recent years to increase the rigor of the nation’s secondary schools. (One of the members of the organization’s governing board, by the way, is Clinton-era U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley.)
Although apparently updated, the report includes mostly recycled data, including a reference to the controversial notion that some of Wisconsin’s schools are “dropout factories” where 60% of students fail to reach 12th grade after four years.
Waukesha West High School's Academic Decathlon team marched to a seventh straight state championship Tuesday, aided by veteran and new teammates as well as a seasoned coach.
The team won in a dominating fashion. Its overall score of 52,111 out of a possible 60,000 points set a state record. Nearly 10,000 points separated West from the second-place team from Sun Prairie High School.
"All our hard work has finally paid off," said West student David Haughney. "It's just an exhilarating feeling. It's awesome. It's mind-blowing."
The latest win sends the team to California for the national championships at the end of next month. Waiting for them is a team from Moorpark High School, a California school that West beat at the national event in 2002 and placed second behind the following year.
Today, my English teacher shared with our class the quite saddening news that the West High Writing Lab [Ask | clusty | google | Live | Yahoo], a venerable institution of many years, is slated to be cut next year as part of the annual round of budgeting. For those on this listserv who don't know, the Writing Lab provides a place for students of all grades and abilities to conference one-on-one with an English teacher about their work. Everyone -- from the freshman completely lost on how to write his first literary analysis to the AWW alum who wants to run her college application essay by someone -- is welcome to stop by during three or four hours of the day as well as before school, during lunch, and after school. I know that in my four years at West, I've found this an immeasurably useful resource, not only to help me polish papers for my classes, but also as a way to get editing help on college essays and other extracurricular writing. And judging by the reaction in my English class, I'm far from alone.
Which is why I am so distressed by this development. I've always considered the English department, by and large, as one of West's finest. The array of classes at every ability level is wonderful, and the fact that I've been able to take IWW and AWW -- two classes designed solely to improve my writing itself -- has been great. These classes do a fabulous job of teaching students to write -- but an important part of writing well is being able to receive feedback on that writing, being able to dialogue with someone about it, and then being able to "have another swing at things." But of course, it's simply impossible for a teacher in any English class to meet, one-on-one, with every student. The Writing Lab has provided a great way for students to ensure that they will have this valuable opportunity.
A few of the robots charged out of their starting positions as if fired from cannons, blazing across the track, extending wiry metal arms and slapping huge, brightly colored balls off a catwalk hovering above.
Some robots limped a few feet before sputtering to a stop. Others collided with their mechanical teammates, spinning out of control.
It's a good thing Thursday was just practice.
The idea of battling robots might conjure up images of smashing and bashing, but at the FIRST Wisconsin Regional Robotics Competition today and Saturday at the U.S. Cellular Arena, it's all about technology and teamwork.
Sixty high school squads from nine states are competing, including 27 from Wisconsin. The event is free and open to everyone, and the players promise to put on a show.
I have a pet peeve. Well, my sister would tell you that I have more than one pet peeve … but when it comes to the education of gifted children, there’s something that really irritates me. I have a few examples that will help me to explain and illustrate…
A month or two ago, a tiny article appeared deep in an area newspaper with the headline, “Chancellor wants math, science program for elite high schoolers.” The article stated that the chancellor at Montana Tech (an excellent engineering, math, science, and mining school) is considering creating a residential program for about 40 of Montana’s top math and science students. They would be dual enrolled in high school and college for the two year program. The students would be selected based on test scores, interviews, and recommendations, and would have to be Montana residents at least 15 years old. An anonymous donor is willing to help significantly with the program’s costs.
While many, if not most, of you live in states where Governor’s Schools and other such similar options are available for some of your gifted students, nothing of the sort exists here in Montana. To my knowledge, this would be the first option of its kind in my state.
I excitedly read the little article until I came upon the last paragraph. And that’s when my ears started steaming: “Concerns include the effect on local school districts if their top students transferred to the program at Tech. Districts’ financial support is based partly on the size of enrollment, and outstanding students often help to boost schools’ composite scores on standardized tests.”
The National Mathematics Advisory Panel was convened by President Bush in April 2006 to address concerns that many of today's students lack the math know-how needed to become tomorrow's engineers and scientists. The 24-member panel of mathematicians and education experts announced recommendations to improve instruction and make better textbooks and even called on researchers to find ways to combat "mathematics anxiety."
Larry R. Faulkner, panel chairman and former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the country needs to make changes to stay competitive in an increasingly global economy. He noted that many U.S. companies draw skilled workers from overseas, a pool he said is drying out as opportunities in other countries improve.
"The question is, are we going to be able to get the talent?" Faulkner said in a briefing before the report's release. "And it's not just a question of economic competitiveness. In the end, it's a question of whether, as a nation, we have enough technical prowess to assure our own security."
In 2005, just 45% of the fifth-graders at Ramona Elementary School in Hollywood scored at grade level on a standardized state test. In 2006, that figure rose to 76%. What was the difference?
If you answered 31 percentage points, you are correct. You could also express it as a 69% increase.
But there is another, more intriguing answer: The difference between the two years may have been Singapore math.
At the start of the 2005-06 school year, Ramona began using textbooks developed for use in Singapore, a Southeast Asian city-state whose pupils consistently rank No. 1 in international math comparisons. Ramona's math scores soared.
"It's wonderful," said Principal Susan Arcaris. "Seven out of 10 of the students in our school are proficient or better in math, and that's pretty startling when you consider that this is an inner-city, Title 1 school."
Ramona easily qualifies for federal Title 1 funds, which are intended to alleviate the effects of poverty. Nine of every 10 students at the school are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. For the most part, these are the children of immigrants, the majority from Central America, some from Armenia. Nearly six in 10 students speak English as a second language.
This month, I want to use this forum to publicize a report that came out last fall with solid advice for how to improve our schools. As we think about K-12 mathematics education, as we engage in the debate of what should succeed No Child Left Behind, I believe that this report provides a useful, research-based framework in which to situate that debate. And I believe that this report has implications for how we think about mathematics teaching in our colleges and universities, a topic to which I shall return in later columns.
The report in question was issued by McKinsey & Company in September, 2007, How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top [1]. Their procedure was straight-forward. They took the ten top-performing countries according to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea, and asked what practices are common among them. They tested their conclusions by comparing these practices with those in the US school systems that have seen the most dramatic increase in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or TIMSS scores or have been consistent finalists for the Broad Prize for Urban Education. These school systems are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Ohio.
None of their conclusions should be surprising. The three practices that they identified are on most people’s lists of what they would like to see. What is eye-opening is how effective these practices can be and how important it is to focus on them. In my own paraphrase, they are
Recruit teachers from among the most highly literate and numerate college students.
Support teachers with continual coaching, peer-mentoring, and professional development.
Have clear standards for system performance, intervene quickly and effectively when problems arise, and allocate resources so that those with the greatest need get the most support.
Patrick Mattimore -- lawyer, teacher and freelance journalist -- is one of the most insightful writers about schools I know. So when he published a piece in Education Week criticizing the rapid growth in Advanced Placement courses in the country, I read it carefully and asked him to discuss it with me in this column. Mattimore is not only an astute judge of AP policy, but until recently, he was an AP Psychology teacher in San Francisco. He knows the territory like few others, and unlike many people in the debate over how to use AP, he has accomplished the rare feat of changing his mind after discovering facts at odds with his views.
His March 5 Ed Week commentary points out that if you look at all high school graduates, the percentage taking and passing AP exams is increasing. But if you look at the percentage of exams with passing grades -- 3 or above on the 5-point tests -- that is declining in many subjects. To Mattimore, this means the program is growing too fast -- a 10 percent jump every year in the number of exams taken. He says the rapid expansion ought to be reined in until school systems improve instruction in lower grades so students are better prepared for the rigors of AP.
"The College Board would like to continue the expansion of the AP program, and suggests that equity demands all students have access to the most advanced instruction high schools can provide," he writes. "The back story of AP expansion, however, is not that it is a means of benefiting minorities, but that it has become an out-of-control shootout for top students vying for spots at selective colleges. Before we invest more dollars in expanding the Advanced Placement program, we must provide the pre-AP infrastructure in our middle schools to ensure that students are prepared to meet the challenges of the program. Otherwise, we can expect that our AP failure rates will continue to climb."
Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) will be hosting a "Conversation With the Madison School Board Candidates" on Tuesday, March 11, at 7:00 p.m. in the Wright Middle School LMC, 1313 Fish Hatchery Road. Marjorie Passman and Ed Hughes are running for Seats 6 and 7, respectively. Both are running unopposed. Please join us for a relaxed and productive dialogue, sans political sparring. Bring your questions, comments, concerns and ideas. The candidates are as eager to listen as they are to speak.
Fourteen-year-old Kara Walla of Hales Corners gave God a lot of credit for her victory Saturday in the 2008 Badger State Spelling Bee.
God and good genes.
Home-schooled by her parents with her four siblings, the teenager comes from a family of spellers -- her father, Wade, placed ninth in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1982 representing Montana, and her aunt, Theresa Walla, came in 27th in the national contest in 1976.
After 16 rounds of spelling against 48 other contenders at Monona Grove High School, Kara carved her own place in the family legacy by spelling ampicillin (an antibiotic).
Before that, she correctly spelled the Greek word echinoderm (a category of marine animal), which 12-year-old Sam Maki of Owen had missed. Third was Natalie LaPointe of Bayfield, who missed the word disciform (of round or oval shape).
Madison city champion Erich Wegenke went out in the fourth round on the word sassafras.
After months of practice and grueling drills, 180 Wisconsin teenagers will converge on Madison next week to face tough competition.
For these young people, the contests are academic, not athletic. They'll be competing in the finals of the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon, which this year includes Dane County teams from McFarland and Sun Prairie high schools.
It's among a growing number of academic extracurricular activities that help students flex their brains, polish their skills and pump up pride in their schools and communities.
After six straight state championship years, with nearly half of last year's winning team returning, what worries could face Waukesha West High School's Academic Decathlon team going into next week's state competition?
"We talk about the New England Patriots," West's veteran decathlon coach Duane Stein said. "We think anybody can fall on any day."
So the nine members of West's team have been staying late at school and studying in their spare time to try to avoid repeating at Wisconsin's academic Super Bowl the performance of a certain undefeated football team that lost its final game of the season.
Give them a few dollars -- and some financial common sense.
Want to make sure your children grow up to be money-smart adults? Check out the four experiments below.
My advice: Try these tricks on your kids, talk to them about the lessons to be learned -- and then quietly muse about whether you, too, fall prey to these financial traps.
Favoring today. If children are to save diligently once they're adults, they need to learn to delay gratification. Yet this skill doesn't come easily.
Want proof? Let's say you give your kids $5 a week in pocket money. When it's next time to fork over their allowance, offer them a choice: They can have the usual $5 right away -- or they can have $7, equal to a whopping 40% more, if they're willing to wait a week.
"It's about immediate gratification," says Shlomo Benartzi, an economics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Getting nothing right now doesn't sound good, so they'd probably go for the $5."
Harvard Family Research Project’s (HFRP) Issues and Opportunities in Out-of-School Time Evaluation briefs highlight current research and evaluation work in the out-of-school time field. These documents draw on HFRP’s research work in out-of-school time to provide practitioners, funders, evaluators, and policymakers with information to help them in their work. This brief looks at 10 years of research on after school programs and finds implications for the future of the after school field.
This research brief draws on seminal research and evaluation studies to address two primary questions: (a) Does participation in after school programs make a difference, and, if so (b) what conditions appear to be necessary to achieve positive results? The brief concludes with a set of questions to spur conversation about the evolving role of after school in efforts to expand time and opportunities for children and youth in the 21st century.
In the past weeks, judges, legislators, parents and school district staff throughout Wisconsin have created a lot of buzz around virtual charter schools. Meanwhile, the Madison Metropolitan School District quietly, but proudly, launched a long-awaited and much-needed program named Madison Virtual Campus (MVC) that has avoided the virtual school controversy through careful and thoughtful planning.
MVC is not an online school, but rather is a group of online educational options that serve students and staff across the district. The district recognizes that high school students sometimes have learning needs that may not fit the typical school attendance model.
For example, high school students are now able to register for up to two online high school courses at any time during a school year. To assure success, online students are guided and supported by online teachers at each of the district's high schools.
The fact that 66 out of 99 residents in the Meadowbrook Farms single-family home development in Pewaukee are willing to spend an average of $700 more in property taxes to leave the Waukesha School District says something about the disturbing trend in what the district is offering its families.
If the district and taxpaying voters in the district want to become more attractive to families moving into Waukesha County, they're going to have to find ways to reverse that trend and be willing to pay the price.
As the Journal Sentinel's Amy Hetzner detailed in a Tuesday article, two sets of property owners plan to ask a state panel to overrule the Waukesha School Board's denial of their requests to detach from Waukesha and join Pewaukee's school system
In a recent class at Abraham Clark High School in Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte LLP.
"Consider a career you may never have imagined," the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."
The curriculum, provided free to the public school by a nonprofit arm of Deloitte, aims to persuade students to join the company's ranks. One 18-year-old senior in Ms. Govahn's class, Hipolito Rivera, says the company-sponsored lesson drove home how professionals in all fields need accountants. "They make it sound pretty good," he says.
Deloitte and other corporations are reaching out to classrooms -- drafting curricula while also conveying the benefits of working for the sponsor companies. Hoping to create a pipeline of workers far into the future, these corporations furnish free lesson plans and may also underwrite classroom materials, computers or training seminars for teachers.
The programs represent a new dimension of the business world's influence in public schools. Companies such as McDonald's Corp. and Yum Brands Inc.'s Pizza Hut have long attempted to use school promotions to turn students into customers. The latest initiatives would turn them into employees.
If California hopes to stop hemorrhaging the billions of dollars it spends by producing so many high school dropouts, the state needs to give schools better incentives to hold on to troubled students, change its graduation requirements and do more to plug the problem, researchers warn.
Each year, about 120,000 students fail to get a diploma by age 20, according to the California Dropout Research Project, which on Wednesday released detailed recommendations for state lawmakers and educators.
Each annual wave of dropouts costs the state $46.4 billion over their lifetimes because people without a high school diploma are the most likely to be unemployed, turn to crime, need state-funded medical care, get welfare and pay no taxes, according to the report.
"California uses a number of strategies to reduce dropout rates ... but together they are insufficient to address the problem," say the researchers, led by education Professor Russell Rumberger of UC Santa Barbara.
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.
The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.
School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.
While designing a new core curriculum at Virginia Commonwealth University to help graduates thrive in the 21st century, Vice Provost Joseph Marolla seized on an old standard to ensure its success: teaching students to write better.
This school year, all freshmen at Virginia's largest university began taking a two-semester course called Focused Inquiry that replaces English 101 and targets specific skills, writing chief among them.
The same thinking was behind a shake-up at the 50,000-student University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where an initiative was launched this school year, and a new department created, to make writing an essential element of every student's education.
The push to improve writing is taking hold at many colleges and universities amid a national debate about what higher education in 21st century should look like in the face of government projections that nearly two-thirds of all high-growth, high-wage jobs created in the next decade will require a college degree -- a degree only one-third of adults have.
The curriculum debate started at least 200 years ago when Thomas Jefferson grew tired of trying to change the curriculum of the College of William and Mary and founded the University of Virginia to launch the "liberal arts." It is being played out at schools that are revamping curriculum to meet the demands of business leaders who want workers better trained in problem solving and collaboration and academics dedicated to a broad, intellectually rich education.
"We don't want college to be a trade school," Marolla said. "Everybody understands that. But as we've moved into the 21st century, we know that college kids have to have certain skills to be able to be successful over their lifetime."
Across the country, governors are rushing to pour more and more tax dollars into state-run preschool programs. Today, all but ten states offer some sort of taxpayer-funded preschool for some three and four year olds — primarily based on need.
According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, more than $3.3 billion is spent on the nearly 950,000 children who used these programs each year. And last year, 28 states increased government funding by a combined 13%.
Reaching our youngest and most vulnerable children early with the basics of a good education is a good idea. The problem is many states are locking these students into dysfunctional and underperforming public education systems just a few years early.
If governors and legislatures want to expand public preschool, they should be mindful of the mistakes of the past. Instead of ceding more authority and tax dollars to entrenched educational bureaucracies and teachers' unions, parent empowerment and education choice programs should be considered. And, if parents choose parochial or faith-based schools, so be it.
The real strength of America's education system is in the diversity of educational opportunities. This diversity has allowed competition, preserved choice, and increased educational experimentation. Any valid proposal to improve educational opportunity for our youngest children will build on both of these strengths.
Here in Massachusetts these days, we are hearing more and more from the Governor and educators about “The Whole Child.” They say we should be sure, in our schools, not to get distracted from a focus, in a holistic way, on the whole child.
I have heard about this “whole child,” but I have yet to have anyone explain what that could mean. I know that it has been said, of boys, for instance, that they are made of “snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” and of girls, that they are mostly “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but I can’t believe that completes the inventory.
Each student may be considered from a neuro-psychological, socio-economic, philosophical, dental, muscular-skeletal, ethnic, spiritual, academic, motivational, personality configuration, family, allergic, drug-resistant, blood-type, intellectual, gastrointestinal and athletic point of view, among a large group of other perspectives.
This raises the question of what parts of the whole child the school might be best qualified and equipped to work with? Surely no imaginable set of teachers, nurses, hall monitors, principals, bus drivers, coaches, and so on can deal with all the various characteristics of each human being who comes as a student to their school.
It would appear that a school and its staff might have to choose which aspects of the whole child should be their focus. In recent decades, self-esteem, tolerance, social consciousness, respect for differences, and environmental awareness have taken up a good deal of time in the schools. Perhaps as a consequence, our students tend to be in-numerate and a-literate. The Boston Globe reports today that: “37 percent of public high school graduates who enter public higher education may not be ready.”
In addition, our students, when compared with students taught abroad, often perform below average on international examinations of their academic fitness.
Some educators, who may not have been all that academically inclined themselves in school, and who have experienced a focus in their graduate education programs on social justice, self-esteem, diversity training, environmental awareness and so on, find that they really do not know enough history, mathematics, science, literature, foreign languages and so on to teach them very well, and they may want to fall back on the sort of thing they studied at their schools of education and offer that to their students instead.
When confronted with those, such as parents, who would like them to teach students history, mathematics, science, literature, foreign languages, academic expository writing and the like, many educators defend themselves by claiming that they cannot focus so much on academics because they have a holistic interest in the whole child.
As it turns out, our society has people who can help them with this unwieldy burden. There are priests, rabbis, ministers, rishis and others who can help with young people's spiritual needs. There are medical professionals who can help students with their physical and mental health problems. There are activist organizations of many kinds to help them with social justice and environmental concerns. And there are many other social organizations, not excluding families, who can relieve our educators of the need they feel to “address” the whole child.
Happily this allows educators to return to their original and traditional mission of teaching our students knowledge and academic skills, such as reading, writing and calculating. With the extra time available to them, now that they no longer have to worry about improving every aspect of their students’ lives, they can do much more to see that their students may enter college with the academic readiness they will need to survive there, and to enter the workforce with the literacy and numeracy skills so many employers have been begging for.
It may be a wrench to give up the ambitious project of holistically taking on the whole child, with their multiple intelligences and so many other characteristics, but a new focus on academic work may, by itself, help to reduce the contempt in which so many of our schools and educators are now held by the nation whose young people they could be serving so much better.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
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Varsity Academics®
The results of the PISA survey (http://www.jyu.fi/ktl/pisa/) have brought about satisfaction and pride in Finland. Newspapers and media have advertised that Finnish compulsory school leavers are top experts in mathematics.
However, mathematics teachers in universities and polytechnics are worried, as in fact the mathematical knowledge of new students has declined dramatically. As an example of this one could take the extensive TIMSS 1999 survey, in which Finnish students were below the average in geometry and algebra. As another example, in order not to fail an unreasonably large amount of students in the matriculation exams, recently the board has been forced to lower the cut-off point alarmingly. Some years, 6 points out of 60 have been enough for passing.
This conflict can be explained by pointing out that the PISA survey measured only everyday mathematical knowledge, something which could be - and in the English version of the survey report explicitly is - called "mathematical literacy"; the kind of mathematics which is needed in high-school or vocational studies was not part of the survey. No doubt, everyday mathematical skills are valuable, but by no means enough.
Basic school teacher Antero Lahti expressed (HS 28.2.) the opinion that the concern of over 200 university teachers for the mathematics teaching (HS 17.2.) were merely academic criticism.
In fact, about one half of those signing are teachers at polytechnics (universities of applied sciences) and technical universities. They do not teach "academic" mathematics but mathematics needed in technical practice and engineering sciences. Over 12 000 students start engineering studies yearly.
The mathematics skills of new engineering students have been systematically tested during years 1999-2004 at Turku polytechnic using 20 mathematical problems. One example of poor knowledge of mathematics is the fact that only 35 percent of the 2400 tested students have been able to do an elementary problem where a fraction is subtracted from another fraction and the difference is divided by an integer.
If one does not know how to handle fractions, one is not able to know algebra, which uses the same mathematical rules. Algebra is a very important field of mathematics in engineering studies. It was not properly tested in the PISA study. Finnish basic school pupils have not done well in many comparative tests in algebra (IEA 1981, Kassel 1994-96, TIMSS 1999).
Mrs. Potter grabbed a chunky stack of flashcards, stood in front of the classroom and flipped through them every day when I was in second grade: 6 + 6 = blank, 7 + 3 = blank, 5 + 6 = blank. In unison, we responded 12, 10, 11. Our robotic pace slowed a bit when she held up subtraction cards.
That’s so old school.
The triangles my second-grade son brought home from school this year have plus and minus signs in the middle, with one number on each point. Students learn number families. For example, on a triangle of 6, 8 and 14 students see that 6 + 8, 8 + 6, 14 – 6 and 14 – 8 are all related.
Math triangles are part of the reform math curricula taught in more than one quarter of the nation’s schools. (See article “Math Wars” for a history of U.S. math education.) Seattle’s public elementary and middle schools teach reform math. This month the Seattle School Board will hear a recommendation for a new high school math curriculum that will be reform based. A key feature of this type of instruction is an emphasis on concepts, as opposed to computations.
In a traditional classroom, solving 89 + 21 involves lining the numbers up, carrying the one and arriving at 110 as the answer. Students learning reform math would think about the problem and reorganize it in several ways: 80 + 20 + 10, or 80 + 30, or 90 + 20. Same answer, different method.
A Northwestern University study investigating the effects of class size on the achievement gap between high and low academic achievers suggests that high achievers benefit more from small classes than low achievers, especially at the kindergarten and first grade levels.
"While decreasing class size may increase achievement on average for all types of students, it does not appear to reduce the achievement gap within a class," said Spyros Konstantopoulos, assistant professor at Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy.
Konstantopoulos' study, which appears in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, questions commonly held assumptions about class size and the academic achievement gap -- one of the most debated and perplexing issues in education today.
The Northwestern professor worked with data from Project STAR, a landmark longitudinal study launched in 1985 by the State of Tennessee to determine whether small classes positively impacted the academic achievement of students.
Considered one of the most important investigations in education, STAR made it abundantly clear that on average small classes had a positive impact on the academic performance of all students.
War has broken out over the under-fives. As the Government moves to bring in a compulsory "nappy curriculum" for pre-schoolers, thousands of protesters are lobbying to keep children's early years out of the hands of Whitehall bureaucrats. Their case is being brought before Parliament, and early-childhood experts from around the world are backing their cause.
The latest of these is educational psychologist Aric Sigman, who, in a research paper commissioned by the campaigners, sets out the evidence that early computer-based learning, which the new curriculum explicitly encourages, has a negative effect on language, maths, reading and brain development.
"Parents and the educational establishment should, in effect, 'cordon-off' the early years of education," he concludes, "providing a buffer zone where a child's cognitive and social skills can develop without the distortion that may occur through the premature use of ICT."
The cause of the furore is the Government's early years foundation stage, which sets out a detailed learning framework for the under-fives. Everyone who works with young children, be they childminders, play assistants or nursery teachers, will be required to use it from this September. The framework stresses that although children develop at different rates and young children learn by play and exploration, it lists 69 goals that most children should attain by the age of five, and outlines how children must be assessed against them.
Every time I hear from a teacher, I learn something. It may be a new reading report, a promising homework technique, a story of a student's success. And sometimes it is a taboo-busting, eye-widening, troublemaking idea. Consider the e-mail that Michael Goldstein, founder of the MATCH Charter Public High School in Boston, sent, saying that if a kid wants to drop out, let him.
I would usually hit the delete button on something that impolitic. But Goldstein has created one of the most successful inner-city high schools in the country. He has proven to me time and again that he knows what he is talking about.
I think our awful dropout rate -- only half of urban low-income students complete high school -- is the most difficult educational problem in the country. It may require much more than our usual buzzword solutions such as "engaging lessons," "personal contact" or "individualized instruction." What Goldstein wants to do is sort of educational jujitsu: Let the force of the kid's rush out of school bring him back, somewhat later, with enough money to get the learning he finally realizes he needs.
I am going to quote Goldstein's e-mail in full, because anyone who is willing to risk his splendid reputation to this degree should have a chance to explain all the details. He wrote in response to my request for solutions to the hopelessness found in many of our urban high schools, exemplified by Washington Post Staff Writer Lonnae O'Neal Parker's two-part series in November on Calvin Coolidge Senior High School senior Jonathan Lewis, a potential dropout if there ever was one.
Sam is a top student in a high-pressure high school just outside New York City who openly admits he "cheats along the way" to academic success.
The 16-year-old sees nothing wrong with looking at another student's paper during a quiz or borrowing a classmate's ideas.
He insists "90 percent or higher" of the students at his school engage in cheating — from tucking vocabulary crib sheets under their hats to stealing math exams.
But Sam insists he has a moral conscience — he won't use his last name for this article — and he swears he will never cheat in college. But he justifies his cheating.
"My parents would consider this cheating, but I don't have any major problems with it," Sam told ABCNEWS.com. "It's school, and you're cheating your way through the system."
Sam is typical of most American students. An estimated two-thirds of all high school students admit to "serious" academic cheating, according to a national survey by Rutgers' Management Education Center in New Jersey.
Massachusetts may have one of the highest rates of students going to college, but the first statewide school-to-college report shows that 37 percent of public high school graduates who enter public higher education may not be ready.
The joint report released Thursday by the Massachusetts Department of Education and the Board of Higher Education analyzed the performance of the class of 2005 and indicated that students lagging behind needed remedial courses in college.
State education officials say about 80 percent of Massachusetts high school students go to college. The report found that more students from low-income families, some racial and ethnic minorities, those who do not speak English as their first language, and those who receive special education services in high school go to community colleges, where most of them need remedial academic help.
Higher education officials were not surprised by the finding, saying they hope the report leads to new efforts to help students.
Vikki Reyes has had it with Locke High, the school her daughters attend in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She walked in on class one day and recalls “the place was just like a zoo!” Students had taken control, while the teacher sat quietly with a book.
Frank Wells has also had it with Locke High. When he became principal he says gangs ruled the campus. He tried to turn things around but ran into a “brick wall” of resistance from the school district and teachers union.
They came to cheer. They got a lecture. The crowd went wild.
During a Barack Obama town-hall meeting on the economy, the topic turned to education, which, the Illinois senator said, could not be remedied by spending alone. "It doesn't matter how much money we put in if parents don't parent," he scolded.
The line is one the Democrat delivers often, but on Thursday in Beaumont, Texas, he struck a remarkable chord with his mostly African American audience.
"It's not good enough for you to say to your child, 'Do good in school,' and then when that child comes home, you've got the TV set on," Obama lectured. "You've got the radio on. You don't check their homework. There's not a book in the house. You've got the video game playing."
Each line was punctuated by a roar, and Obama began to shout, falling into a preacher's rhythm. "Am I right?"
"So turn off the TV set. Put the video game away. Buy a little desk. Or put that child at the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don't know how to do it, give 'em help. If you don't know how to do it, call the teacher."
By now, the crowd of nearly 2,000 was lifted from the red velveteen seats of the Julie Rogers Theatre, hands raised to the gilded ceiling. "Make 'em go to bed at a reasonable time! Keep 'em off the streets! Give 'em some breakfast! Come on! Can I get an amen here?"
Madison School Board Detailed Agenda Posted Online - Including a Proposed Wisconsin Center for Education Research Contract
A reader's email mentioned that the Madison School Board has begun posting more detailed agenda items on their meeting web page. Monday, March 3's full agenda includes Superintedent Art Rainwater's discussion of the proposed Middle School report card changes along with a recommendation to approve an agreement with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (1.5MB PDF):
The focus of this project is to develop a value-added system for the Madison Metropolitan School District and produce value-added reports using assessment data from November 2005 to November 2007. Since the data from the November 2007 assessment will not be available until March 2008, WCER will first develop a value-added system based on two years of state assessment data (November 2005 and November 2006). After the 2007 data becomes available (about Ma r c h 1 2008), WCER will extend the value-added system so that it incorporates all three years of data. Below, we list the tasks for this project and a project timeline.
Task 1. Specify features o f MMSD value-added model
Task 2. Develop value-added model using 2005 and 2006 assessment dat a
Task 3. Produce value-added reports using 2005 and 2006 assessment data
Task 4. Develop value-added model using 2005, 2006, and 2007 assessment
Task 5. Produce value-added reports using 2005-2007 assessment data
Location: Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary
Dates: Sunday, March 2 – Friday, March 7
Times (EST): 11 am, 12 am, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm
Program Length: 30 minutes
How do you get kids to say “I want to be a scientist when I grow up?” Dr. Robert Ballard, known for discovering the Titanic among other scientific breakthroughs, may have the answer. The renowned oceanographer’s latest quest is not to discover underwater secrets, but to inspire the next generation of ocean explorers by introducing kids to the thrill of discovery and encouraging them to pursue the science and environmental careers so critical for the health of the planet.
From March 2–7, 2008, Immersion Presents Monterey Bay, a cutting-edge, interactive educational program led by Dr. Ballard and a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other institutions, will use telepresence technology – a combination of satellite and Internet connections – to transport young people live to a scientific expedition in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Students will explore in real-time one of the planet’s most spectacular and most important biodiversity hotspots where they will experience majestic 100-foot-tall kelp forests, take a day trip out to the deep sea in NOAA’s research vessel R/V Fulmar, and study endangered marine mammals like the grey or blue whale and the threatened California sea otter.
“When kids see scientists in action, whether diving a kelp forest, exploring with an ROV, or getting up close to a whale, they immediately discover that being a scientist means much more than wearing a white coat in a lab," said Dr. Ballard, founder of Immersion Presents. "With everyone talking about ‘going green,’ now more than ever we need kids to get excited about the environmentally focused careers that will help protect the planet. Immersion expeditions show kids that science is not only far from boring or nerdy, it is absolutely essential to preserve one of our most threatened resources, the oceans.”
“Many of our kids only know what a jellyfish is from watching Sponge Bob on television,” said Hector Perez, club director of the Chicago’s Union League Boys & Girls Club, which participates in the program. “It’s hard for kids to imagine being part of something that they’ve never seen before. Immersion Presents’ virtual science expeditions open their minds, transporting them to a whole new world of ocean discoveries, new technology, and exciting career opportunities.”
As the Legislature heads into the last days of its session, Democrats and Republicans remain far apart on bills that would protect virtual schools and expand health coverage for children with autism.
With the clock running out, nothing may happen this year on those issues. Then again, in the final frantic moments of legislative sessions, surprise compromises can arise, just as one did Thursday on ending the pay of fired Milwaukee police officers charged with serious crimes. Now, those officers continue to receive pay until they exhaust their appeals, which can take years.
The legislative session ends March 13, but lawmakers have not announced any meetings past next week.
The Assembly's latest meeting - which adjourned just before 5 a.m. Friday - bogged down over the autism bill. Democrats delayed a vote on the bill until Wednesday after Republicans who control the house rewrote it.
The version Senate Democrats passed Tuesday would require insurance companies to cover treatment for autism. Assembly Republicans changed the bill Friday to drop the insurance mandate and instead plow $6 million in state taxpayer money into a state autism program.
In the Lone Rock classroom of elementary teacher Lisa Bowen, hand puppets were all the rage last week. Study them. Borrow six from a library. Write a play. Perform.
The scene was quite different in another elementary classroom in the River Valley School District, where teacher Mike McDermott placed homemade yellow Post-it checklists on students ' assignments to help them assess the fluency of their writing. Oh, and the room in Plain Elementary contained a lean-to of 12-foot trees -- a representation of a scene in a novel being read by students.
In River Valley High School in Spring Green, echoes of the Holocaust and warnings that it could happen again filled a line of display cases -- a project that brought together regular and special education students from several classes throughout the school.
"Overall, we 're just really lucky, " sophomore Rakelle Noble said as she and five classmates reflected upon recent examinations of the Holocaust and teenage health issues such as eating disorders and self-cutting.
"We have a lot of things other kids don 't get to experience. "
Take the idea of “constructivism.” Yes, I agree with you that we all “construct” knowledge as we encounter new ideas. We try to make sense of new ideas by fitting them to what we already know, using the vocabulary and experiences that we have already accumulated. If we have a meager vocabulary—or none at all, as when we visit a foreign country and are unfamiliar with the language—and if we have no experiences that are connected to the new ideas, then we will not be able to do much constructing of knowledge.
So the job of the school becomes one of conscientiously, purposefully building the vocabulary and background knowledge of students so that they can use them dynamically to understand new ideas and enlarge their knowledge.
There is another sort of constructivism in which students are busily discovering whatever they want to discover or trying to figure out through inquiry what the teacher knows but refuses to teach them or sitting around idly because they don’t know what they feel like discovering today. This is not the sort of classroom I admire. I have never much cottoned to the idea of the teacher as a “guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage.” I tend to like the happy medium: the teacher who has clear aims, who knows what knowledge he or she is trying to convey, and who figures out imaginative, creative, innovative ways to teach it.
Tech-savvy teenagers are increasingly paying a heavy price – including criminal arrest – for parodying their teachers on the Internet.
Tired of fat jokes and false accusations of teacher-lounge partying or worse, teachers and principals are fighting back against digital ridicule and slander by their students – often with civil lawsuits and long-term suspensions or permanent expulsions.
A National School Boards Association (NSBA) study says that as many as one-third of American teens regularly post inappropriate language or manipulated images on the Web. Most online pranks deride other students. But a NSBA November 2006 survey reported 26 percent of teachers and principals being targeted.
"Kids have been pulling pranks on teachers and principals since there have been schools in the US, but now there's an edge to it – the tone and tenor of some of these attacks cross the line," says Nora Carr, a spokeswoman for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina.
In the growing backlash against these cybergoofs, however, real-world norms of propriety are being pitted against the uncertain jurisdictions of the Digital Age. A new test may be emerging on how far online lampooning can go, say First Amendment experts – and to what extent schools can control off-campus pranks.
What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart? Finland's teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why.
High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.
Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive workers.
The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland's students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland's combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the OECD's test, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The U.S. placed in the middle of the pack in math and science; its reading scores were tossed because of a glitch. About 400,000 students around the world answered multiple-choice questions and essays on the test that measured critical thinking and the application of knowledge. A typical subject: Discuss the artistic value of graffiti.
More:
The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines. Teachers must hold master's degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.
Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.
innish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn't translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: " 'Nah. So what'd you do last night?'" she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely "glue this to the poster for an hour," she says. Her Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to repeat the year when she returned.
Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they find classes too easy. He says he is trying to make his schools more rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.
Loveland High School used to offer watered-down math for students flunking geometry and algebra.
Then the geometry and construction teachers created a course that's all the rage at Loveland High — a house-building class where students learn the slope of a line by determining the pitch of a roof.
The school started with two classes last year and now has six. Enrolled students have outperformed their classmates on state tests. And now Thompson School District is creating an algebra course where students will convert a gas-guzzling car to an electric one.
That creative course design is an illustration of what Gov. Bill Ritter envisions under his new education initiative — a revamping of curricula from preschool to college to produce courses focused more on content than titles.
Details of the governor's initiative are still sketchy, though a 28-page draft of the legislation is likely to become official this week.
Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492.
The survey results, released on Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, said the group that commissioned it, Common Core.
The organization describes itself as a new research and advocacy organization that will press for more teaching of the liberal arts in public schools.
The group says President Bush’s education law, No Child Left Behind, has impoverished public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics, but in no other subjects.
Politically, the group’s leaders are strange bedfellows. Its founding board includes Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, a union that is a powerful force in the Democratic Party, and Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University who was assistant education secretary under the first President George Bush.
A new round of cutbacks by Detroit's automakers carries a larger message – that America's manufacturing workers are under new pressure in jobs where labor unions had once been able to command middle-class wages for assembly-line jobs.
The point was punctuated this week as General Motors announced the largest ever annual loss by a maker of automobiles. In a bid to restore profitability, GM said it would offer incentives to convince older, highly paid assembly workers to retire early. Ford and Chrysler are pursuing similar worker buyouts.
The moves signal what some analysts say is an accelerating effort to trim wages and workforces. Essentially, the old Big Three are becoming a much smaller three. The pressures facing Detroit fit a larger pattern. Many US manufacturers are facing rising pressure from foreign rivals. The good news is that US factories are becoming more competitive. The bad news is that the needed streamlining is coming at the expense of American workers.
"Those jobs are going and they're not coming back," says Gary Chaison, a labor expert at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. In part, he says, manufacturers see moves such as the job buyouts as "a path for them to become low-cost producers by eliminating the high costs of American labor."
Many people look to the future with fear. We see this fear throughout the web. Right-wing sites describe the imminent end of America: overrun by foreigners, victim of cultural and financial collapse. Left-wing sites describe “die-off” scenarios due to Peak Oil, climate change, and ecological collapse - as the American dream dies from takeover by theocrats and fascists.
Most of this is nonsense, but not the prospect of massive changes in our world. But need we fear the future?
The past should give us confidence when we look ahead. Consider Dodge City in 1877. Bat Masterson is sheriff, maintaining some semblance of law in the Wild West. Life in Dodge is materially only slightly better from that in an English village of a century before. But social and technological evolution has accelerated to a dizzying pace, and Bat cannot imagine what lies ahead.
Well worth reading as Madison prepares for a new Superintendent and two new school board members.
Madison School Board PA Committee Credit for Courses Taken Outside the District Discussion
Watch the public appearances (including a discussion about the proposed report card changes) along with the Committee's discussion on this matter. Janet Mertz's latest post can be read here, along with a number of related links.
Update on Madison BOE policy regarding students taking non-MMSD courses:
The February 25, 2008 Meeting of the Performance & Achievement Committee was devoted to developing a policy regarding students taking non-MMSD courses. The proposal Pam Nash suggested to the committee was essentially identical to the highly restrictive one she had originally proposed during the December, 2006 meeting of this committee: students would be permitted to earn a maximum of TWO ELECTIVE credits for course work and only when no comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the District. Even Rainwater felt these rules were overly restrictive. He seemed willing (i) to increase the number of credits a student could earn, and (ii) to permit students to take a course offered elsewhere in the District if the student could not reasonably access the District's course. Discussion of the Nash proposed policy ensued, but no specific revisions to it were made during this committee meeting. Both Maya and Johnnie (2 or the 3 members of the committee) suggested that the District needed to research the topic better, e.g., investigate what other comparable school districts in WI (e.g., Appleton which has in place a much less restrictive policy) were doing and to obtain feedback from the guidance departments of each of the 5 high schools, before the BOE should vote on approving a policy. Lawrie, chair of this committee, bypassed having a vote on whether to recommend the Nash version of the policy to the full BOE since she clearly would have lost such a vote. Instead, she simply stated that she had ALREADY placed this topic on the agenda for a special meeting of the BOE to be held March 10th, a meeting at which public appearances will NOT be permitted. Why the urgency now after we have been waiting for 6 years for the District to develop a policy in this matter? Possibly, the new Board that starts in April would approve a different policy, one that better meets the needs of students. Thus, folks, your only remaining opportunities to influence this policy to be approved by the BOE on March 10th are (i) to email and phone members of the BOE between now and March 10, telling them your opinions and why, ideally with examples of specific students, and (ii) to attend the March 10th meeting so the Board members will know you are watching how they vote.
This is the time of year many parents seek advice on how to find a good elementary, middle or high school, public or private, for their children. Usually I send them a Washington Post article I wrote on this subject three years ago. But this is such an important topic to so many families, I decided to update my thoughts. Here are 10 suggestions, in no particular order. As you'll see in recommendation number 10, your own thoughts and feelings should always be the deciding factor.
1. Buy an expensive house and you can be almost sure that the local school will be good.
This is an admittedly cynical notion, but there is truth in it. Newcomers often say to themselves, "Let's find a school or school district we like and then find the house." Yet most school systems in this area are so good, and parental affluence is so closely tied to educational quality, that if you buy a pricey house, the nearest school is almost guaranteed to be what you are looking for.
2. Look at the data.
In my opinion, based on 22 years of visiting schools and looking at data, the two largest school districts in the Washington area, Fairfax and Montgomery counties, are so well run that even their low-income neighborhoods have schools and teachers that compare with the best in the country. I think the same is true for public schools in Arlington, Clarke, Loudoun and Prince William counties, and the cities of Falls Church and Alexandria. (I'm based in Northern Virginia, so I have closer first-hand knowledge of school systems on that side of the Potomac River.) I also think all the D.C. public schools west of Rock Creek Park are as good as those in the suburbs.
My beliefs are influenced by data on how much schools challenge all of their students, even those with average records of achievement, to take college-level courses and tests before they finish high school. I call this the Challenge Index. (For more on the index, see recommendation No. 9 below.) I want to stress that other systems in the area have some fine public schools. Case in point: All four public high schools in Calvert County appear to be pushing students solidly toward college-level work. There are also some good charter schools. But in some places, you have to look more carefully to find them.
It's a Sunday afternoon and class time for 39-year-old IT worker Seema Shetty. Her feet curled under her in a swivel chair, she sits in front of a computer monitor, adjusts a set of headphones, and scribbles in a notebook. Shetty, who works for consulting firm Mastek in Mumbai, is in a virtual classroom in the Vile Parle suburb, where a dozen computers link students to some of India's elite management institutions. Today's class is a three-hour general management lecture, part of the online education course conducted by the Xavier Labor Relations Institute in Jamshedpur, in the remote northern Indian state of Jharkhand.
A consultant for various industries from insurance to banking, Shetty signed up for an online certificate course to "learn more about my clients' business requirements," she says. By enrolling in the 14-month, six-hour-per-weekend online course, at a cost of $4,600, she can further her education without having to take a two-year career break to get an MBA. Learning online, says Shetty hopefully, "will definitely boost my job prospects."
3) What information are most parents and teachers seeking the most?
The first thing that parents want to know once we start talking about their situation with the district is whether or not they are crazy.
Oftentimes the situation the parent describes to me during an initial conversation defies any sort of logic - for example, the 3rd grade child is two or three grades above level in several, perhaps all, his or her courses.
The educational services the gifted child needs are not offered or even discussed with the parent because the district holds a vague concern about some future social experience such as the Senior Prom or driving a car. Parents often aren't sure how to respond effectively to those sorts of statements.
The second thing parents want to know is what they can do about it. There are many options available, but there is a specific order in which any of the available options should be done.The starting point for the initial conversation is always the same: What are the gifted child's present levels of educational performance? Phrased another way, the starting question for advocacy is this: How much of the district's curriculum does the child already know?
At my Intermediate Unit and district-oriented trainings, teachers and administrators want to know about present levels of educational performance testing. Districts tend to make this kind of testing more complicated than it needs to be. Teachers and administrators also want the regulations and requirements explained to them in practical day-to-day terms
An audit to help gauge how virtual schools are performing in Wisconsin is reasonable.
But slapping a cap on how many children can enroll in online schools is unnecessary and potentially harmful.
Gov. Jim Doyle 's last-minute demand for a cap threatens to ruin a solid bipartisan deal to keep these interesting schools going.
The governor should drop his veto threat, and the Legislature should give Doyle and the teachers union the audit they want.
That way, a dozen virtual schools in Wisconsin serving 3,500 students can stay open and expand if more parents choose to enroll their children.
Key state lawmakers recently put together compromise legislation to keep virtual schools going after a court ruling threatened to shut them down. A court ruled in December that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, based in suburban Milwaukee, violates state laws controlling teacher certification, charter schools and open enrollment.
It is the policy of the Board to expand the opportunities for students to take courses outside of the District without increasing the costs to the District and without undermining the integrity of the diploma a student receives from the District. A student may receive credit for taking such outside courses. No District funds shall be utilized to pay for the costs to a student taking courses under this policy.
Taking outside courses if a student wishes to receive credit toward graduation.
By May 1 of the previous school year for first semester courses and by December 1 for second semester courses, the student shall submit to his/her principal or the principal’s designee the student’s request to take a course under this policy. Within 15 school days after receiving the student’s request, the principal, in consultation with the appropriate staff member(s), shall make a recommendation to the Superintendent or his/her designee as to whether the course shall be approved. Within 15 school days after receiving the principal’s recommendation, the Superintendent or his/her designee shall notify the student whether his/her request has been granted or denied.
A student may receive credit toward graduation. The grade will be recorded but not counted in the GPA.
Credits toward graduation shall be granted in the following manner:
No more than 4 credits per year.
No more than 11 credits may be applied to the total graduation requirement.
The student’s transcript shall include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, and the grade.
No grades shall be included as part of a student’s grade point average (GPA).
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the student and/or his/her parent/guardian.
Taking outside courses if a student does not wish to receive credit.
By May 1 of the previous school year for first semester courses and by December 1 for second semester courses, the student shall submit to his/her principal or the principal’s designee the students’ request to take a course under this policy. Within 15 days after receiving the student’s request, the principal, in consultation with the appropriate staff member(s), shall make a recommendation to the Superintendent or his/her designee as to whether the course shall be approved. Within 15 days after receiving the principal’s recommendation, the Superintendent or his/her designee shall notify whether his/her request has been granted or denied.
The student’s transcript shall include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, and the pass/fail grade unless the student or his/her parent/guardian request that the student’s letter grade appear on the transcript in which case the student’s letter grade will appear on the transcript.
No grade shall be included as part of the student’s GPA.
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the student and/or the student’s parent/guardian.
On January 8, 2007, the Board took the following action:
lt is recommended that the Board direct the Administration to: 1) freeze new procedures or guidelines for credit towards graduation for courses taken outside the MMSD until the Administration reports to the Board about whether current MMSD policies need to be updated or changed in view of any technological changes in the law and other opportunities; 2) develop a proposal on either the implementation and communication of the policies and procedures to parents and students for consistency across the District at the levels affected; and 3) have the Administration give the Board the pros and cons of adopting a policy like the one proposed by Dr. Mertz as a draft proposal. It is further recommended that the Administration review all nine of the policies, including the proposed "Guidelines for Coursework Outside the MMSD'" for possible revision, consolidation, or propose a newly created policy.
Attached is Exhibit 1, an amended draft of the policy previously submitted to the Board in a memo from Pamela Nash dated May 4, 2007. The amendments modify the timing of a student's appiication to take courses outside the MMSD and the response time of the District. This time frame is modeled after the Youth Options time frame.
Also attached to this Memorandum is a copy of a policy proposal previously submitted by Dr. Janet Mertz, Exhibit 2A, and the District's analysis of that proposal,
Exhibits 2 and 2B. These documents were also submitted to the Board of Education under cover of Dr. Nash's memo of May 4, 2007. This matter is scheduled to be heard before the Performance and Achievement Committee on February 25, 2008.
At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE's Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District's Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District's Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District's Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District's comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions "located in this State" (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford's EPGY and Northwestern's CTD).
The Attorney's memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled "Educational Options" that would include, as well, a policy regarding "Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD". Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one "to be developed". It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the "freeze" the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?
Links:
11/26/2007 Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting Video and Audio
Announced nine months ago by Mayor Adrian Fenty to a mixed chorus of applause and boos, Michelle's appointment is part of two trends. The first is mayoral control of schools; the second is appointing "uncredentialed" or "unlicensed" leaders to fill the post of superintendent (or in the case of DC and NYC, chancellor).
The nightmare of credentialing is ordinary thought of in terms of teachers, a challenge that reformers like Michelle and Wendy Kopp have taken on in their respective spheres; credentials in their earliest incarnation were meant to be a floor beneath which teachers would not fall. In their modern incarnation they have become a ceiling through which they may not pass. For example, the head of the Washington DC based Sidwell Friends math program, a trained mathematician with 30 years experience of superlative high school teaching couldn't get a job in a public school. Nor could Einstein.
Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on MMSD Math
The Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) meeting of 21 February 2008 offered a question and answer session with Welda Simousek, TAG coordinator, Lisa Wachtel, Director of Teaching and Learning, and Brian Sniff, Math Coordinator, each of MMSD.
The video of the meeting is about 1 hours and 30 minutes long, but does not include the last 15 minutes of a spirited discussion. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
The topics covered during remarks and the question and answer sessions are
Middle School Math Assessment
Math Task Force
Teacher Certifications in Math
Connected Math Curriculum in Middle Schools
High School Math Curriculum and variations among schools
The slide materials for Lisa's and Brian's presentation are included in Powerpoint format and PDF format. (Thanks to Brian for sending).
NB: The last slides discussed during this meeting are slides numbered 15 and 16 (Math Physics, Math Chemistry, respectively). These latter slides prompted the spirited discussion mentioned above, but is not part of the video. Slides 17-19 were neither discussed nor displayed.
The best explanation - I mean the funniest - as to why the state Senate put a poison-pill enrollment cap on virtual schools was from state Sen. Russ Decker, the Weston Democrat who helped do it.
The fault lies with the schools, he says. Just too many parents were opting for them. In growth, "some of those virtual schools are pushing the envelope."
Leave aside that pushing the envelope - inventing a new way to deliver a good education - is the point. On its face, the sentiment that the schools were growing faster than legally proper is nonsense.
Parents choose virtual schools, in which students are taught at home via daily online lessons, by the same law that allows any parent to send her child to any other public school. This open enrollment law has no upper limit and is now used by 23,000 students statewide. As for virtual schools, which account for 3,300 of those, the law did not limit their growth either until two months ago when a lawsuit by the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's dominant teachers union, hit the jackpot. Decker's envelope exists solely in his head.
So the Senate, on party lines with the exception of one honorable Democrat, installed one - dictating that for two years, virtual schools can grow no larger. They can inch up to 4,500 students by 2014, but senators also set auditors to studying the program. All this was needed, says Decker, because Gov. Jim Doyle wouldn't agree to let the schools stay open otherwise.
There is still time to save Wisconsin's virtual schools, but the clock is ticking after a state Senate vote this week that unwisely capped enrollment and blew up a bipartisan compromise.
In a letter to legislators on the eve of the vote, Gov. Jim Doyle called for a cap on enrollment and recommended a study to determine how well virtual schools were serving students and what their fiscal impact was on existing public schools and property taxes.
The request for a study is sensible enough, but the cap is a solution looking for a problem. And now, despite exceptions for siblings of existing students and for students who signed up during the current open enrollment period, some children may be denied the opportunity to learn in an environment that is best suited to their needs.
Legislation was needed after a state Court of Appeals ruled in December that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District, was not eligible for state aid. That ruling threatened the existence of all 12 online schools in the state, which serve more than 3,000 students.
The compromise plan was a good one that balanced the need to legalize virtual schools while imposing new standards on them. It had the support of the state Department of Public Instruction.
The Senate vote sends the measure back to the Assembly, where Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon) said Thursday he would draft new legislation that includes a financial audit but not a cap. He also planned to send a letter to Doyle inviting the governor or his staff to a hearing on Monday to explain why a cap is necessary.
When I was a kid, my mom, Carol, was an expert at saying "no" when we asked for money. With four kids and little income, she often found it hard to pay for food and rent, let alone luxuries such as the electronic games and designer clothes my brothers and sister and I constantly begged for.
But as we grew into adults, something odd happened. My mom suddenly found it difficult to refuse when her kids came to her with their financial problems, whether she had the cash to spare or not.
Over the years, I've chided her for constantly dipping into her own savings to help my family members out, asking: "How are they going to learn to manage money if you're forever bailing them out?"
I spoke from hard experience. In college I piled up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, auto loans and credit-card debt. When I left school, I found my entry-level salary barely able to keep up with my debt payments, and the temptation to turn to my parents for a handout was strong. But at the time my mom and dad were getting divorced, and dealing with their own emotional and financial issues. The last thing I wanted to do was add to their burdens, so I resolved to handle my debt on my own. In doing so, I learned how to budget and came to understand the real cost of accumulating debt.
Having learned my lesson, I'd urged my mom to consider the harm she was doing by not allowing other family members to do the same. And I'd point out that she really didn't have the money to spare. Mom would reply that helping her children helped her, because it pained her to see her kids suffer. Then she'd assure me with a smile: "When you're a mom, you'll understand."
In the era of No Child Left Behind, principals are increasingly held accountable for student performance. But are teacher labor agreements giving them enough flexibility to manage effectively? The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America's Fifty Largest School Districts, answers this question and others.
The main findings:
Thirty, or more than half, of the 50 districts have labor agreements that are ambiguous. The collective bargaining agreements and the formal board policies in these districts appear to grant leaders substantial leeway to manage assertively, should they so choose.
Fifteen of the 50 districts are home to Restrictive or Highly Restrictive labor agreements. Nearly 10 percent of the nation's African-American K-12 students population attend school in the 15 lowest-scoring districts-making these contracts major barriers to more equal educational opportunity.
The study also found that districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students tend to have more restrictive contracts than other districts-another alarming indication of inequity along racial and class lines.
The executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards said today that he is disappointed that compromise legislation that would have ensured the survival of the state’s virtual schools seems to be falling apart.
“We had a bipartisan legislation that virtual schools could continue and meet our state standards and now we’re getting into some last-minute politicking and I think that’s very disappointing,” said John Ashley, whose group includes nearly all of the state’s 426 school boards.
“It was a legitimate bipartisan effort that’s unraveling,” he said. “And I think the real effect is going to be on our students. It’s unfortunate to see politics at this stage. I mean we don’t have that much of a (legislative) session left.”
In contrast, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which brought a lawsuit that now threatens the ability of the state’s virtual charter schools to enroll students statewide and collect taxpayer dollars, released a statement by its president supporting the state Senate’s latest action.
Alan is one of about 200 Madison middle and high school students who, having previously struggled in traditional school settings, now are thriving in the new homes of alternative education programs in elementary schools and in an office building.
Halfway through the school year, a controversial relocation of four alternative education programs appears to have been completed smoothly.
Some parents feared there'd be problems when the alternative programs for older students were moved to buildings with elementary students — the first time in at least a decade such an arrangement has been tried in Madison.
Students in the alternative programs long have assisted in the schools as part of their program requirements, but there were concerns that basing the programs' classrooms there could expose young children to older students' harsh language, smoking and violence.
While more American public school students are taking Advanced Placement tests, the proportion of tests receiving what is deemed a passing score has dipped, and the mean score is down for the fourth year in a row, an Education Week analysis of newly released data from the College Board shows.
Data released here this week by the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand shows that a greater-than-ever proportion of students overall—more than 15 percent of the public high school class of 2007—scored at least one 3 on an AP test. The tests are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, the highest score.
Yet, as the number of AP exams taken in U.S. public schools has ballooned by almost 25 percent over the four years that the College Board has released its “AP Report to the Nation,” the percentage of exams that received at least a 3—the minimum score that the College Board considers predictive of success in college—has slipped from about 60 percent to 57 percent.
The mean score on the nearly 2 million AP exams taken by students in last year’s U.S. public graduating class was 2.83, down from 2.9 in 2004.
“That happens,” said Jennifer Topiel, a spokeswoman for the College Board. “Any psychometrician can tell you that as participation grows, scores go down.”
Still, Ms. Topiel said the score declines are a major concern for the organization, as are widening score gaps between some racial and ethnic groups, “particularly those among underrepresented students who are not being prepared and not having the same resources.”
Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act, directly contributes to lower graduation rates, according to new research. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language students.
It will take a new Capitol compromise to keep Wisconsin's virtual schools open after action Tuesday by the state Senate.
t the request of Gov. Jim Doyle, the Senate voted to cap enrollment for online schools at the current level - now about 3,500 students statewide - while a study is done on virtual learning.
Under the Senate changes, that number of online students could not go up again until the 2011-'12 school year, and then only by about 875 students. Dozens of parents and virtual school students came to the Capitol on Tuesday to fight the enrollment cap.
The 18-15 vote by the Senate - controlled by Democrats - sends the measure to the Assembly, which is run by Republicans.
The Assembly will meet for only a few more days before its scheduled adjournment next month. There might not be time to negotiate a compromise to changes dictated by Doyle, who promised to veto any bill without an enrollment cap.
If the Assembly does not act, virtual schools might not continue. In a ruling that threatened all online schools, the Court of Appeals ruled in December that the 800-student Wisconsin Virtual Academy, operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District, was not eligible for state aid, now $5,845 per student per year.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee plans to establish an experimental program that would offer customized lessons for disabled, regular and gifted students in the same classroom, a key component of her strategy to reduce exorbitant special education costs.
Rhee's proposal would launch a "differentiated learning" laboratory at West Elementary School in Northwest Washington, then replicate it citywide. Under the proposal, which is being met with skepticism from some West teachers and parents, the system would hire a private special-education school to run the program.
The proposal is among several actions Rhee is taking to overhaul special education, which for years has lacked high-quality programs for learning-disabled and physically disabled students. The system spends about $137 million on private school tuition annually for about 2,400 children (out of more than 9,400 disabled students) whom it cannot serve in the public schools.
Since 2006, the D.C. public schools have been under a federal court order to eliminate a backlog of more than 1,000 decisions from hearing officers regarding placement of students in special education programs. The order stemmed from a consent decree that settled a class-action suit filed by parents protesting the system's long delay in providing services for the students.
Federal law requires schools to practice "inclusion" -- putting special education students in regular classrooms whenever possible -- a mandate the system has ignored in countless cases, advocates say. Under differentiated learning or differentiated instruction, an approach that has been used in schools in Prince George's and Montgomery counties and across the nation over the past decade, students are grouped in the same classroom according to their ability levels and learning styles. They get the same lesson but are given different assignments and tasks based on their abilities.
For instance, a third-grade class in St. Louis recently was assigned to report on Martin Luther King Jr., with some students writing a timeline, others illustrating pages and others comparing the era of the slain civil rights leader to today.
Rhee is proposing to go a step further than most other districts using the concept. She wants to treat all students in the differentiated instruction classrooms much like special education students, with each getting an education plan outlining how teachers would address the child's specific strengths, weaknesses and learning style.
Special education "is about individualization of instruction -- that is going to be the overarching theme of these schools. Every kid -- gifted kids -- need really good individualization," Rhee said in an interview. "All kids will benefit when we're operating in that manner."
Greg Barlow, an Air Force officer in the defense secretary's office at the Pentagon, was helping his 8-year-old son, Christian, one recent night with a vexing problem: What is 674 plus 249?
The Prince William County third-grader did not stack the numbers and carry digits from one column to the next, the way generations have learned. Applying lessons from his school's new math textbook, "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," Christian tried breaking the problem into easier-to-digest numbers.
But after several seconds, he got stumped. He drew lines connecting digits, and his computation amounted to an upside-down pyramid with numbers at the bottom. His father, in a teacherly tone, nudged him toward the old-fashioned method. "How would you do that another way?" Barlow asked.
In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts. Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra.
The debate over "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," a Pearson School series used in thousands of elementary classrooms, including some in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Howard counties, is one of the newer fronts in the math wars. Such battles over textbooks and teaching methods are fueled in part by the anxieties of parents who often feel powerless over their children's education, especially in subjects they know.
The curriculum, introduced in the 1990s and updated in a second edition issued last fall, offers one answer to the nation's increasingly urgent quest for stronger elementary math education. The nonprofit organization TERC, based in Cambridge, Mass., developed "Investigations" with support from the National Science Foundation.
Stoecker never studied diversity issues, at least not directly, in high school. And that's something at least one Milwaukee-area school district is trying to change: Starting this fall, Muskego High School will offer a cultural diversity class to 11th- and 12th-graders. The elective course will address issues such as white privilege in a community that is at least 97% Caucasian, Associate Principal John LaFleur said.
Meanwhile, area higher education institutions have spent the last several years ramping up multiculturalism course offerings and activities, in some cases requiring that students take diversity courses as part of their general education. More often than not, professors say, students arrive from high school largely ignorant about the four traditionally defined minority groups - African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and American Indians.
"I think part of why this is attracting attention is that all the metaphors we used to use - melting pot, mosaic - just aren't working anymore, because they let us skirt the ideas of injustice and equal distribution of goods," said Christine Krueger, an associate professor of English at Marquette University and the director of core curriculum.
On the state Senate's calendar today is a bill that would keep alive the state's virtual schools by imposing standards on them and making sure funding for the schools continues. On Monday, various groups were in discussions on what form the final bill would take and whether it would be amended to include such items as a cap on the number of students allowed to enroll in the schools.
The Senate should reject such amendments and any attempt to weaken this bipartisan compromise measure that was carefully crafted by Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon) and Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon). It is backed by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Right now, the state has 12 virtual schools that serve more than 3,000 children, according to the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families. The future of those schools was put in jeopardy after the state Court of Appeals ruled in December that they were not entitled to state aid. The bill put together by Lehman and others would restore that funding by requiring virtual schools to meet specific standards, among them having the same number of hours of instruction per year as traditional classrooms and using certified, licensed teachers.
Virtual schools are a sound alternative for some children, and it's clear from state test scores that most kids in virtual schools do well. It's also clear that their parents care passionately about the schools.
The brainchild of Memphis businessman Robert Compton, Two Million Minutes takes its title from the amount of time most students spend in high school absorbing, one hopes, enough math, science, literature and history to compete in an increasingly flat, competitive world.
It contrasts Brittany's and Neil's easy suburban lives with those of two Indian teenagers and two Chinese teenagers, making the case that the foreign students are just plain hungrier for success.
"You just want to shake America and say, 'Wake up. We are falling behind daily,' " Compton says.
And Two Million Minutes finds plenty to be worried about: not enough study or homework time, not enough parental pressure, not enough focus on math or engineering. American teens, it argues, are preoccupied with sports, after-school jobs and leisure.
The film repeatedly contrasts foreign students' drive with what seems like American cluelessness: In one scene, Chinese 17-year-old Hu Xiaoyuan diligently practices the violin — then we cut to bone-crunching rock 'n' roll and the Friday night lights of Carmel's top-ranked football team.
In another, an Indian science teacher explains an experiment to students, then snaps, "Why are you standing simply there?"
But the scene that seems to get audiences worked up most shows Brittany and friends watching Grey's Anatomy as they study.
I am breaking the rules of book-reviewing by admitting right away that I like Chester E. "Checker" Finn Jr., whose memoir, "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik," just came out. For an education reporter, Finn is a godsend -- the most quotable man in his field. But that also means he is funny, irreverent and often as irritating as he can be.
I think that's good. I don't know him well personally, other than seeing him in the supermarket occasionally. (A very picky shopper, he is murder on the produce.) We don't always agree, particularly over a recent column of mine that criticized a report by his Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
But I love the fact that no one is spared his acidic sense of humor. That makes him a first-class writer, and "Troublemaker" may be the best of his many books. It's $26.95, from Princeton University Press, though you can buy it for less online. The book offers one of the most enjoyable, astute and fair-minded reviews of the topsy-turvy course of our national effort to improve schools. It flavors that complex tale with the story of Checker Finn, a smart kid from Dayton, Ohio, who wisely attached himself to some of the most thoughtful political figures of his era and brought their practical approach to fixing schools to a new generation. Among them were Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as a Democratic senator from New York from 1977 to 2001; William J. Bennett, a Reagan administration education secretary; and Lamar Alexander, an education secretary in administration of President George H. W. Bush and now a Republican senator from Tennessee.
For years now, college students have been busy committing themselves to extracurricular activities. On the whole, such commitment can be constructive. It contributes to civic engagement by the young and helps them to develop personal responsibility and character. Meanwhile, college officials claim that would-be employers are now demanding that colleges provide evidence that graduates are prepared to deal with real world issues and conflicts that will arise in the workplace. Many educators are starting to respond to this concern.
In recent days, the president of the University of Wisconsin system has risen to the occasion by proposing to the Board of Regents that students have two transcripts upon graduation. The first transcript would be the traditional one, which would list the classes the student took, and the grades that he or she received. The second transcript would depict what the Wisconsin State Journal described as "the student's personal development during college, such as whether the student interned for a company, directed a play, or edited the student newspaper." The University of Wisconsin system would be the national pioneer in this movement. This effort is supported by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, whose vice president recently said that companies seek graduates who can work "with diverse groups and have a sense of social responsibility and ethics," according to the State Journal story.
According to Reilly, the university needs to institute this policy because business leaders want "workers who can work with diverse groups and have a sense of social responsibility and ethics," according to the State Journal story. The second transcript would involve more than a typical resume. It would have to be approved by a faculty member, and show how the student's experiences outside the classroom represented a meaningful application of the student's classroom work. "We know when students get to the end of their time with us, employers and graduate school admissions officers want to know what you did besides get and A or B in philosophy," Reilly told the State Journal. "We think this will capture some of the educational experience."
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs -- students' declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year -- are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?
Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy -- or an ensemble of literacies -- will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can't yet envision.
That's what has always happened as writing and reading have evolved over the ages. It was less than 100,000 years ago that our human predecessors first made meaningful marks on surfaces, notating the phases of the moon or drawing animals on cave walls. Within the past 5,000 years, societies across the Near East's Fertile Crescent began to use systems of marks to record important trade exchanges as well as pivotal events in the present and the past. These marks gradually became less pictorial, and a decisive leap occurred when they began to capture certain sounds reliably: U kn red ths sntnz cuz Inglsh feechurs "graphic-phoneme correspondences."
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
A teacher friend once mentioned that "if we're doing such a good job, why do so few people vote?"
Time was that a fifth grader’s greatest concern about gym was whether he or she would be picked last for the kickball team. Now, in schools in Hartford, that 10-year-old would-be athlete is being graded on how he or she “establishes and maintains a healthy lifestyle by avoiding risk-taking behavior.” In music class, students are being graded on how they make “connections between music and other disciplines through evaluation and analysis of compositions and performances.” That is pretty far from just trying to sing “Yankee Doodle” on key.
These examples come from a new report card, introduced last November in all of Hartford’s elementary schools. It measures 58 academic, social and behavioral skills and, including other information, can run as long as seven pages.
Not surprisingly, the language was produced by a committee. Some of the wording is clear; anyone can understand “shows courtesy and respect toward others.” But the academic measurements, which are designed to grade areas of student performance that are also measured on state standardized tests, seem more likely to confuse than illuminate.
Christopher Leone, the spokesman for the Hartford school district, said that the goal was to give parents more detailed information about the progress of their children. He says that so far the response from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. The district hasn’t surveyed the teachers, but the report card made me appreciate, as nothing else has ever done, why teachers say they are buried in paperwork.
Consider the eighth-grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline. Since 1998, the state has improved significantly in the number of eighth-graders reading at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels: Massachusetts now has the largest percentage of students reading at that higher level, and it is No. 1 in average scores for the eighth grade. That is because Massachusetts decided in 1997 that students (and teachers) should learn certain explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.
E.D. Hirsch Jr. is an author, most recently of "The Knowledge Deficit," and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.
Madison Middle School Report Card/Homework Assessment Proposed Changes
Michael Maguire, via email:
I'm interested in gathering more information on this topic, as outlined in a message I received from a neighbor and PTO member. I appreciate more background info, if you have it (or a suggestion of where else I can go/with whom I can speak) to find out more: ["On Wednesday, February 20, at 7 pm Dr. Pam Nash and Lisa Wactel from MMSD will present the new format for middle school report cards. The meeting is in the LMC at Hamilton Middle School [Map].
The district is changing the middle school report cards to the same as the elementary: proficient, at grade level, needs improvement (or whatever those categories are). They will eliminate the letter grades: A, B, C, etc.
Another factor in the report cards is that homework will not count toward the grade. Teachers can still assign homework, but that will not count toward your child's assessment."]
Michael Maguire
RugbyMaguires@aol.com
(608) 233-1235
Teens appear to be willing to curtail illegal downloading when told they face fines or jail time.
This finding, among many in a survey published by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Wednesday, is the basis for the software company's new campaign to teach teens respect for intellectual property rights.
"Widespread access to the Internet has amplified the issue of intellectual property rights among children and teens," said Sherri Erickson, global manager of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative, in a statement. "This survey provides more insight into the disparity between IP awareness and young people today and highlights the opportunity for schools to help prepare their students to be good online citizens."
Microsoft's survey found that about half of the teenagers surveyed (49%) said they are not familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading content from the Internet. Only 11% understood the rules well, and of those, 82% said downloading content illegally merits punishment. Among those unfamiliar with the law, only 57% supported punishment for intellectual property violations.
It's not clear whether Microsoft's statement to teen respondents -- "When you do not follow these rules you are open to significant fines and possibly jail time" -- is entirely accurate, particularly when teens under the age of 18 are involved. Emily Berger, an intellectual property fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is skeptical. "I think it's being used as a scare tactic," she said. "It's a real stretch of the law to say it's theoretically possible."
Apropos to my recent post on student understanding of college eligibility, a discussion on student grades seemed to be in order.
As students review the syllabus for my classes on day one of school, there is the occasional frown at the third paragraph: "Please be aware that there is a ‘no D’ grading policy in regards to your final grade. As classes receiving a D grade are not recognized by most universities, you will be receiving an A, B, C, or F at the end of the semester." The actual grading scale remains the same in the class – anything below 70% earns a fail. This being the second year I’ve implemented the policy, I can say I’m happy with the results. I’ve yet to actually fail a student who would have earned a D if the policy was not in place. Many students are comfortable with the idea of doing just enough to pass – they’ve expressed frustration at not being able to get "just a D," and actually do the required amount to earn a C or better. In this sense, I feel the policy encourages students to work harder than when they were able to use a meager D as a crutch for doing the minimum required (the minimum is now simply 10% more work). I know college may not be for everybody. However, I make every effort to prepare students for and encourage students to consider college as a viable and enticing future. Everyone who passes my class is at least one step closer to being able to make a decision about college. What happens from here is up to them.
After breakfast at Mother's, Marty, Felice and myself took a cab deep into the French Quarter to the McDonogh School, where the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation was presenting the music program with a slew of instruments. That's what the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation does, grant instruments to school music programs. It was started by Michael Kamen, who composed the music for the movie. He wanted students to have the same opportunity he had, to learn an instrument in school, to be fulfilled, to be enriched. Felice runs the Foundation.
I'd been hearing about all the great work the Foundation had been doing in New Orleans for two years. And on a site visit a couple of months back, Tricia had encountered Kelvin Harrison and his program. She believed they were worthy, they deserved the instruments. The program had started after Katrina with no instruments. Mr. Harrison had taught his students on recorders when the ordered instruments hadn't arrived. But now he was up and running, he needed more. And that's why we were there.
The environment in the building was completely different from my educational experience. Instead of sterility, I found vibrancy. Silhouettes graced the cafeteria, with explanations of each. One student said his creation was as big as the 24" rims on his older brother's car. That cracked me up. But I loved the banner on the far side of the room: "Climb the mountain to college." There were aphorisms all over the place. Informing the students to pay attention now, to apply themselves now, to prepare, for otherwise, in the future, they'd be left out.
And after reading the display about Black History Month, learning exactly who Booker T. Washington was, we ascended the stairs to the third floor, where Mr. Harrison was warming up the band. Brass members were playing notes. I prepared myself. This was going to be awful. An endurance test. You know what it's like being in the vicinity of someone learning an instrument. You want to support them, but the sound is grating, you can't read, you can't watch television, you just want the noise to stop.
After quieting everybody down, Mr. Harrison looked at the assembled multitude and said the band was going to play a couple of numbers. They were going to start with "Oye Como Va".
Oh, I know it wasn't a Santana original. But that's where I heard it. Coming out of John "Muddy" Waters' room in the dorm all of freshman year. I've come to love "Abraxas". I bought it on vinyl. And have a gold CD. I've got all the MP3s. I love "Oye Como Va". I was trepidatiously excited. Then the two players on keys rolled out the intro, the drummers started hitting the accents, the horn players lifted their instruments to their lips and the band started to swing!
I couldn't believe it! Fifth graders? My high school's band wasn't this good. This was good enough for college! The flutes are wailing. I notice the drummer is a girl. And yes, that tiny figure behind the keyboard, she's hitting every note. Trombone players got up and soloed. Tears started coming to my eyes. This was education! If I could play in a band like this, I'd want to come to school!
And when they finished, there was raucous applause. And then they lit into Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". These little kids, they had soul!
Then we went back to the cafeteria. Where the curtain was parted and the students saw the sousaphone, the tympani, the other instruments the Foundation was granting. The excitement, the whooping, it was not something learned on MTV, it was not the fakery of the peanut gallery standing in front of the stage at a televised awards show, it was genuine. They were excited for the school, for themselves.
Then Felice said they weren't done. That our mission wasn't complete. We had another item on our agenda. To honor Mr. Harrison's greatness, he was being awarded a Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation Teacher Award. Which granted him $10,000 to spend as he pleased. And that the check would be delivered in a ceremony, in April, on the stage of Carnegie Hall.
Kelvin Harrison was in shock. You should have heard the shriek when the dollar figure was announced. To little kids ten grand is a million! Kelvin kept rubbing his nose, trying to keep his composure. But he couldn't. Tears were welling in his eyes.
As they were in mine. A veritable waterworks. Who knew such great work was being done, especially in an area almost totaled by a hurricane. And sure, Mr. Harrison wanted to get paid, but it wasn't about the money. The sense of accomplishment, the glow on his students' faces was enough.
Eventually, the kids went back to class. School business resumed. I wandered the halls. I had an urge to stay. The work being done here was so important. Not only were children being educated, they were being given hope. Because people cared.
More than 15 percent of the public high school class of 2007 achieved at least one AP® Exam grade of 3 or higher1—the score that is predictive of college success. This achievement represents a significant and consistent improvement since the class of 2002 when less than 12 percent of public school graduates attained this goal.
Out of all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, Vermont captured the largest increase in the percentage of high school graduates who scored a 3 or higher on an AP Exam.
In its fourth annual "AP Report to the Nation," the College Board (the not-for-profit membership association that owns and administers the AP Program), focuses on educators' quantifiable successes in helping a wider segment of the nation's students gain access to and achieve success in college-level work. Of the estimated 2.8 million students who graduated from U.S. public schools in 2007, almost 426,000 (15.2 percent) earned an AP Exam grade of at least a 3 on one or more AP Exams during their high school tenure, the report documents. This is up from 14.7 percent in 2006 and 11.7 percent in 2002.
Earning a 3 or higher on an AP Exam is one of "the very best predictors of college performance,"2 with AP students earning higher college grades and graduating from college at higher rates than otherwise similar peers in control groups, according to recent reports from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley,3 the National Center for Educational Accountability,4 and the University of Texas at Austin.5,6
New York, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Massachusetts and Connecticut all saw more than 20 percent of their students graduate from high school having earned an AP Exam grade of 3 or higher. AP achievements for each state's class of 2002, class of 2006 and class of 2007 are detailed in the report. (See "The 4th Annual AP Report to the Nation," Table 1, page 5.)
"Educators and policymakers across the nation should be commended for their sustained commitment to helping students achieve access to and success in AP courses and exams" said College Board President Gaston Caperton. "More students from varied backgrounds are accomplishing their AP goals, but we can't afford to believe equity has been achieved until the demographics of successful AP participation and performance are identical to the demographics of the overall student population."
Though 75 percent of U.S. high school graduates enter college,7 dropout rates and the fact that about half of all college freshmen are taking at least one remedial course indicate that secondary schools must dedicate themselves to more than college admission,8 the report asserts.
"Remedial course work in college costs taxpayers an estimated $1 billion a year,"9 Caperton said. "To shrink the gap between those who enter college and those who complete a degree, we must target the divide between high school graduation standards and the skills that all students need to be prepared for the rigors of college. The critical reasoning, subject-matter expertise and study skills students must develop to succeed on the three-hour college-level AP Exams fortify high school graduates for a successful transition into their freshman year at college. This makes providing better readiness for—and access to—AP courses absolutely essential."
When No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, teachers suspected there'd be some casualties—they just didn't think field trips would be one of them. Since the federal government's landmark overhaul of U.S. schools, class trips have plummeted at some of the country's traditional hot spots for brown-bag learning. The new emphasis on standardized testing has resulted in "a reluctance to take kids out of the classroom," says Natalie Bortoli, head of the visual-arts program at the Chicago Children's Museum, which has lost more than a tenth of its field-trip business since 2005. At Mystic Seaport, a maritime museum on the Connecticut coast, school traffic has slowed more than a quarter since 2005, while Boston's New England Aquarium has lost nearly the same amount since 2003. Even NASA's Johnson Space Center has started to see its figures stagnate, says marketing director Roger Bornstein, "and stability is not our goal."
Teachers blame the bear market in part on No Child Left Behind, which requires schools to get students up to state targets in reading and math by 2014 or face sanctions that could result in school takeovers or closings. "Curriculums are so much tighter than they used to be," says Susan Lewis, an elementary-school teacher in San Antonio, Texas. Add in rising transportation costs, and field trips are fast becoming history. Compton Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles has halved its trips in the past three years. "They were all academically based," says principal Claudia Ross, but they no longer fit a budget focused on test scores, not general enrichment.
Matt Miller has a radical but simple proposal to improve the nation's public schools: federalize funding to eliminate disparities in per-pupil funding between poor and affluent communities. He also proposes a single set of federal standards for math, science and reading, instead of letting each state set its own standards. Scott Simon speaks with Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Walbridge School is unique state wide in teaching children with different learning styles to become successful. With a full-day curriculum, Walbridge School teaches grades one through eight with individualized instruction focusing on strengths rathers than weaknesses. Walbridge School will host a summer school program from July 7 through August 1 offering creative courses in reading, writing, and math. Please call for more details at 608.833.1338, email: walbridge2006@yahoo.com.
Bob Compton may be wrong about American students losing out to our hard-working Indian and Chinese competitors, but he is astonishingly sincere in his views. Even if his country doesn't react to the international threat, he will. He has hired special tutors for his daughters, even though they already have top grades at a premier private school.
Compton, 52, is a high-tech entrepreneur and investor based in Memphis. His documentary film, "Two Million Minutes," has become a key part of a campaign known as ED in '08, which aims to push the next president toward big changes in U.S. schools. Compton and the ED in '08 backers, including billionaire Bill Gates, support the growing movement for more instructional and study time. Compton's message is that American kids are wasting much of their four years of high school--about 2 million minutes--on sports and jobs and television while Chinese and Indians are studying, studying some more and then checking in with their tutors to see what they still need to study.
I am not friendly to Compton's argument. I think the Chinese and Indian threat to the American economy is a myth. I have been convinced by economists who argue that the more prosperous they are, the more prosperous we are, since they will have more money to buy our stuff. I also believe that prosperity in previously troubled countries such as China and India promotes democracy and peace.
I do, however, like Compton a lot, and agree with him that our high schools need to be much better--not in order to beat the international competition but to end the shame of having millions of low-income students not getting the education they deserve. I admire a dad who applies his arguments to his own life in ways I never would. He is significantly increasing the amount of time his children are devoting to their studies, whether they like it or not.
The entire texts of all books in the collection can be searched. Searches will retrieve every title containing the search term. Clicking on a title link recovers bibliographic information about the book and a list of pages where the search term was located. Choosing a link to an individual page displays an image of the page.
Later this month, a new contract between Dr. Daniel Nerad and the Madison Metropolitan School District will signal the end of an era. For over a decade, Art Rainwater has been at the helm of Madison's public schools, guiding the district during a period of rapid demographic change and increasingly painful budget cutting. Both admirers and critics believe Rainwater has had a profound impact on the district.
Retiring Madison schools superintendent Art Rainwater may have the name of a poet, but his first ambition was to be a high school football coach.
"I grew up loving football -- still do -- especially the intellectual challenge of the game. I was obsessed with it," Rainwater explained in a recent interview.
In fact, during his early years as an educator, Rainwater was so consumed by his football duties for a Catholic high school in Texas he eventually switched from coaching to school administration for the sake of his family.
In some ways, Rainwater has been an unusual person to lead Madison's school district -- an assertive personality in a town notorious for talking issues to death. His management style grows out of his coaching background -- he's been willing to make unpopular decisions, takes personal responsibility for success or failure, puts a premium on loyalty and hard work and is not swayed by armchair quarterbacks.
Much more on Art here. Like or loath him, Art certainly poured a huge amount of his life into what is a very difficult job. I was always amazed at the early morning emails, then, later, seeing him at an evening event. Best wishes to Art as he moves on.
Following a December appeals court decision that questioned the legality of about a dozen virtual schools in the state, officials with those schools worked hard to convince their students' families they would remain open until summer.
Now, amid the three-week application period for participation in the state's open enrollment program, they are trying to convince both current and prospective families that they will be around for at least another year. And they are doing so through a blitz of online open houses, information sessions and advertising hitting all corners of Wisconsin.
"Some of them (parents) are real concerned and some of them don't seem concerned at all," said Kurt Bergland, principal of Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a virtual charter school run by the Northern Ozaukee School District. "I guess the proof will be in the pudding when someone actually puts us down on their open enrollment application."
WIVA is under perhaps more pressure than other virtual charter schools in the state, as the target of a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Education Association Council charging it operated in violation of state laws regarding teacher licensure, charter schools and open enrollment. A three-judge panel of the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha issued a decision with statewide implications that sided with WEAC, the state's largest teachers union.
Seems like a sweet deal for Minnesota high school students looking to save money on college. But after operating for more than a year, state education officials are finding a lot fewer takers than they expected for the College-Level Examination Program.
About 900 tests have been taken since the state began paying the exam fee in 2006 - far fewer than the 5,000 initially projected for last year and 7,500 hoped for this year.
Part of the problem, officials say, is that CLEP toils in the shadows of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other better-known options for high school students trying to get a jump on college credit.
Another issue: While the tests are recognized by some 2,900 schools across the country, including the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities grants credit for only a few of the 34 CLEP exams and sets the bar for passing higher than other schools.
Despite low exam participation to date, officials say they're buoyed by the jump in student interest last year - particularly from schools in greater Minnesota - and are trying to spread the word to high schools and home-schoolers about the opportunity. This school year, students have until June 30 to take as many as six CLEP exams paid for by the state, with the only cost being an administrative fee that runs about $15 to $25 per test.
an attempt to create science and engineering interest in middle school students. Ballard said that if we've not generated such interest by the 8th grade, it is too late.
Education reform is often stifled by the vested interests that resist accountability and new models like charter and pilot schools. In Massachusetts, the independence of the state Board of Education provided the continuity that allowed reform to be successfully implemented year after year.
The board was responsible for the initiatives that were the heart and soul of reform, like the MCAS exam, teacher testing, and academically rigorous curriculum frameworks. It was the board that followed a prudent course by creating rigorous charter school approval and closure processes.
Each of these reforms was the target of substantial resistance from a powerful and change-averse education establishment. Only an independent Board of Education, insulated from politics, could have made them a reality.
Despite these unparalleled successes, all we have achieved is now at risk. A proposal to eliminate the Board of Education's independence seems to be breezing through the Legislature. The proposal would make the board just another part of Governor Patrick's administration and thus politicize an institution that has been insulated from politics since 1837, when Horace Mann was its first leader.
Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew rolled out a proposal Thursday to provide students throughout the county with greater access to specialty programs such as magnet schools, International Baccalaureate programs and K-8 Centers.
The proposed plan, dubbed the Equity & Access Plan, will create rigorous, specialized academic programs in areas that don't yet have them, Crew said. It would run for three years, beginning in 2008, and cost about $6 million.
''When you look at the map, what you'll essentially see is that the distribution [of programs] here has been at best, or possibly at worst, random,'' Crew said. ``This conversation was based largely on the need to change that map so you have more children having access to high-demand programs.''
Currently, most K-8 centers are clustered in the southern half of the county or near Aventura. Many urban neighborhoods, other than downtown Miami, do not have magnet programs nearby.
And the lone specialty school for math and science, the Maritime and Science Technology Academy, is tucked away on Key Biscayne.
Among Crew's recommendations:
Develop 10 new International Baccalaureate programs, to join the 14 existing programs. Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior, Miami Carol City Senior, and Miami Beach Senior would be among the host schools.
Open two new mathematics and science senior high school programs. One would be a senior high school for medical technologies at the former Homestead Hospital. The other would be in northwest Miami-Dade County.
Develop six new magnet programs, four of which would be housed in schools in the southern part of the county.
While Crew said he is prepared to raise money to fund future projects, likely through federal and state grants, he said his initial goal was to take a strategic look at the placement of academic programs.
One of the three finalists for the Madison Superintendent position, Steve Gallon, hailed from Miami-Dade.
The future of the state's 12 virtual schools was unclear after the state Court of Appeals ruled in December that they were not entitled to state aid. This bipartisan bill, which is moving through both houses of the Legislature, would impose new standards and ensure that funding continues.
But with Wisconsin schools knee-deep in the open enrollment process and legislative time at a premium, Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) and Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) must make this bill a priority.
And the state teachers union, which brought the lawsuit that led to the Court of Appeals decision, should resist the impulse to try to force changes to the legislation or derail it.
The bill has not been scheduled for action yet, but the legislators who negotiated the compromise - state Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon) and Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) - want the measure to be considered as soon as possible.
Among the bill's provisions: Virtual schools must have the same number of hours of instruction per year as traditional classrooms; must use only certified, licensed teachers to develop lesson plans and to grade assignments; and must make all records available under the state open records law. In addition, the state Department of Public Instruction, which backs the bill, could operate an online academy to advise districts that want to start their own online schools.
College-bound or not, all juniors at Monona Grove High School will spend more than four hours this spring filling in tiny bubbles as part of a mandatory ACT test.
District administrators say the school will be the first in the state to administer the college preparatory test to all juniors, and will foot the $11,000 bill.
Although not a novel idea -- five states require the test of all juniors -- the idea of using the ACT to better judge proficiency in areas such as reading, math and science appeals to other area districts.
"All students need to have college-readiness skills in areas like reading and math no matter what they plan to do after high school, " said Bill Breisch, curriculum director for Monona Grove School District. "Graduating with college-readiness skills is no longer just for some of our high school students. "
By requiring the test of juniors, the district is also offering college-bound students a year to get on track if their scores show them weak in a certain area, Breisch said. That way, seniors aren 't blindsided when they take the ACT and find out they have to take remedial math in college, he said.
Case studies are produced as part of a larger study of middle schools conducted during the 2006-07 school year. Research teams investigated ten consistently higher-performing and six consistently average-performing middle schools based on student performance on New York State Assessments of 8th-grade English Language Arts and Mathematics.
Research teams used site-based interviews of teachers and administrators, as well as analysis of supportive documentation, to determine differences in practices between higher- and average-performing schools in the sample.
Teachers across the country offer to take the class outside when the weather is nice, but one program offered by a high school in northern Vermont holds classes outdoors all year long.
The Walden Project is an alternative program focused on environmental studies and on the teachings of Henry David Thoreau, who did some of his best thinking outdoors at Walden Pond.
Indiana University researchers are studying a ground-breaking theory that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining.
Their theory, which they have explored with 12- and 14-month-olds, takes a radically different approach to the accepted view that young children learn words one at a time -- something they do remarkably well by the age of 2 but not so well before that.
Data mining, usually computer-assisted, involves analyzing and sorting through massive amounts of raw data to find relationships, correlations and ultimately useful information. It often is used and thought of in a business context or used by financial analysts, and more recently, a wide range of research fields, such as biology and chemistry. IU cognitive science experts Linda Smith and Chen Yu are investigating whether the human brain accumulates large amounts of data minute by minute, day by day, and handles this data processing automatically. They are studying whether this phenomenon contributes to a "system" approach to language learning that helps explain the ease by which 2- and 3-year-olds can learn one word at a time.
"This new discovery changes completely how we understand children's word learning," Smith said. "It's very exciting."
Online and face-to-face courses are often viewed and studied as two distinct worlds, but the social field of the teacher who teaches them may well include both, and both the teacher and the courses he or she teaches may be transformed by the movement from one environment to the other. Susan Lowes explores this two-way interaction between face-to-face and online teaching, addressing two important questions: Do teachers who move between face-to-face and online classrooms transfer ideas, strategies, and practices from one to the other? If so, which strategies and practices do they transfer? Particularly, Lowes focuses on the constraints and affordances of the online environment itself and how these affect face-to-face classroom practice.
Charter schools -- public schools that have been exempted from selected state and local regulations -- are changing the competitive landscape of American elementary, middle and high schools. Some have had a rocky track record; some have been plagued by mismanagement and poor performance. But overall, the exchange of greater autonomy for greater accountability has worked. Those that have failed to perform have been shut down.
In Los Angeles, which has more charter schools than anywhere in the nation, charters are the key to raising the performance of all public schools. And they offer a lesson that can be applied elsewhere.
Consider the stark reality of the Los Angeles Unified School District: Of the more than 700,000 students in the nation's second-largest district, only 44% graduate in four years. For Latino students, that number drops to 41%.
Now look at the graduation rates of high-performing charter schools, which usually replace lower-performing public ones: Green Dot Public Schools, which operates 12 charter schools in Los Angeles, has an 80% graduation rate. Of those students, nearly all go on to college, and two-thirds attend four-year universities. In the next five years, Green Dot will expand to serve a remarkable 8% of all high school students in Los Angeles.
Quite a debate among advocates of school choice has been ignited by Sol Stern's article on school choice in the current number of City Journal.
Mr. Stern is a longtime advocate of school choice, whose book "Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice" is a bible to many in the voucher movement.
Now Mr. Stern, in "School Choice Isn't Enough," suggests that for choice to work, close attention must be paid to how and what children are taught in the classroom. Without such attention, Mr. Stern argues, the choice movement is doomed and may already be failing, as evidenced by results in Milwaukee, the largest venue where a voucher system exists, and in New York City where a grab-bag of incentivist proposals has been put in place by Mayor Bloomberg.
Mr. Stern contrasts these results with those in Massachusetts, where choice has not taken hold but where a tough curriculum, a testing regimen for both students and teachers, and rigorous academic standards have been put into place.
On the recently released NAEP tests, Massachusetts topped the list on fourth and eighth grade math and fourth and eighth grade reading. This has been peripherally touched on in the presidential campaign, as Mitt Romney raises these impressive results on the campaign trail. Pitted against Mr. Stern and his fellow "instructionists" is another Manhattan Institute heavyweight, Senior Fellow Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas. Mr. Greene, the pure incentivist, has lashed out at Mr. Stern in a reply just posted on the City Journal Web site.
Private tutoring of children has reached "epidemic proportions" as competition intensifies for entry to the best schools, according to a leading education guide.
Parents are paying up to £60 an hour to prepare children for entrance exams to leading independent and grammar schools.
Experts say the trend is being driven by parents who have been priced out of private education for their primary-school-age children and are using a mixture of state schooling and private tutoring to help win a place in an independent school at 11.
Others are paying tutors to help their children with GCSEs and other exams.
The Good Schools Guide, which will be published next week, has for the first time included a chapter on the booming private tuition industry.
Sue Fieldman, the guide's regional editor, said: "We interview up to 10,000 parents for each edition to ask them about the best schools, and the noticeable trend this year is the use of tutors.
"The traditional route from prep school to senior school is being rejected by an increasing number of families. We cover schools everywhere, from the South of England through to Wales and Scotland, and we have seen this phenomenon throughout the country."
An impressive group of what Sister Joel Read called "good, critical friends" came together Monday to announce that it was launching an effort aimed at providing both support and pressure for Milwaukee Public Schools to meet the ambitious goals of its new strategic plan.
Representatives of the business community, labor, education institutions, community groups and the state and local political worlds took part in the session at the new downtown headquarters of Manpower International, led by Read, the retired president of Alverno College.
"You've got a buy-in here," said Mayor Tom Barrett, who will be a member of the committee, known as the Accountability and Support Group. "We all know what's at stake here - the future of the city."
Jeff Joerres, chief executive officer of Manpower, told the group that life needs to be put into the strategic plan because the future of the economy of the city depends on education and commitment to success. There is no option about whether to make sure there is momentum in improving education, he said.
The group will meet quarterly to look at how things are going in MPS, beginning in May, Read said. She said she expected the meetings to be demanding and detailed.
"We'll do the things that good, critical friends do," she said.
Circuit Judge Carl Ashley, a member of the group, said this is a time of necessity and opportunity for MPS - necessity because of the importance of improving educational results, and opportunity because "there is a coordinated community response" to what is going on.
So here comes Columbia University political scientist Jeffrey R. Henig, in a new book, saying I should keep trying but strive to do better. He insists that education researchers, journalists and policy makers can learn to communicate well and that readers will benefit.
Henig is professor of political science and education at Teachers College of Columbia University. He interviewed many education researchers and journalists, including me, for the book, "Spin Cycle: How Research Gets Used in Policy Debates, The Case of Charter Schools," 288 pages, $21.45 on amazon.com. It is well-written, and makes good use of its central case study--how the educational research community got into a spectacular shouting match over an Aug. 17, 2004, story in The New York Times by Diana Jean Schemo, "Charter Schools Trail in Results, U.S. Data Reveals."
At the time I thought Schemo's story was interesting, and the harsh words exchanged by various scholars seemed to be just more of what I had been seeing for years when journalists, myself included, write stories that seem to favor one side over the other. Henig's account of the controversy brings all that out, but then he points out many new approaches that could have turned the charter school data into something that raised understanding, rather than sowed confusion.
Among his suggestions, five have potential, if you believe that research and journalism operate under Darwinist laws in which the most productive of our practices gradually replace less sensible routines. He thinks we would do better if the federal government gave up on education policy, if researchers were encouraged to focus more on subjects that interested journalists, if scholars stopped wishing for the killer study that changes everything, if we had an education journal with the quality and prestige of the New England Journal of Medicine and if we had more faith in our readers' interest in research findings without any immediate relevance to the latest hot issues.
Expecting the feds to butt out of education debates, forget about No Child Left Behind and let states carry the load seems somewhat unrealistic, but consider: When is the last time you heard any presidential candidate spend more than a minute discussing education in any debate? Henig notes that once issues like charter schools acquire a state-level focus, they become more concrete and more likely to inspire discussion that actually produces better schools.
When Iris Liu was in elementary school, she'd check out a half-dozen library books at a time and plow through them one after another, like candy. Looking back, it strikes her as nerdy, but at the time, it was pure delight. She'd read 100 or more books a year just for fun.
Flash forward to eighth grade at Lake Oswego Junior High. Halfway through the school year, Iris has finished one book -- one -- beyond those assigned at school.
She hasn't lost her love of reading, she says. It's just that she is so busy -- primarily with hours of homework every night, plus daily play rehearsals, family dinner hour and stolen moments spent texting friends.
Ten new and 40 existing charter schools will share $5.8 million in federal funding awarded by the state Department of Public Instruction after new scrutiny over whether the schools meet federal requirements for what constitutes a charter school.
Omitted from the list of grantees, which the agency plans to release today, is the Waukesha School District's latest charter school, the Waukesha Engineering Preparatory Academy.
Among those that have received charter school grants are Milwaukee Business High School, Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes (ALBA), Hmong Peace Academy and Humboldt Park Charter School in Milwaukee; Tosa School of Health, Science and Technology in Wauwatosa; and Academy of Learning, 21st Century Skills Model, in West Allis.
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.
It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
Teachers have long said that success is its own reward. But these days, some students are finding that good grades can bring them cash and luxury gifts.
In at least a dozen states this school year, students who bring home top marks can expect more than just gratitude. Examples:
•Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso last week promised to spend more than $935,000 to give high school students as much as $110 each to improve their scores on state graduation exams.
•In New York City, about 9,000 fourth- and seventh-graders in 60 schools are eligible to win as much as $500 for improving their scores on the city's English and math tests, given throughout the school year.
•In suburban Atlanta, a pair of schools last week kicked off a program that will pay 8th- and 11th-grade students $8 an hour for a 15-week "Learn & Earn" after-school study program (the federal minimum wage is currently $5.85).
As families' application deadline looms, many are wondering whether the Madison School District will halt its practice of using race as the reason for denying some white students' requests to transfer to other districts.
The answer could begin to emerge as early as Monday, the first day for Wisconsin families
to request open-enrollment transfers for the coming school year.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater and the district's legal counsel will confer Monday night with the School Board. It's possible that after the closed-door discussion, the board will take a vote in open session to stop blocking open-enrollment requests on the basis of race, School Board President Arlene Silveira said.
"This is a serious decision for our school district, " Rainwater said.
"It is our responsibility to take a very careful look at legal issues facing our school district. "
Last year, Madison was the only of the state's 426 school districts to deny transfer requests because of race, rejecting 126 white students' applications to enroll in other districts, including online schools. Many of the affected students live within the district but weren't enrolled in public schools because they were being home-schooled or attended private schools.
He's a senior at Milwaukee's Rufus King High School, he's a good student, and he's a big sports fan.
You can serve all that on a silver platter.
At least that's what Mohammad did this week at a program honoring him and 92 fellow students for completing lengthy research papers as part of their work at the school.
The 3,000- to 4,000-word papers - "extended essays" - are required for students who want to receive the International Baccalaureate diploma. For those who complete such a paper - a process that begins in the spring of their junior years - it is a tradition to present the final product on a silver platter to the teacher who advised the student along the way, followed by the student and the teacher each commenting on what was learned.
The silver platter ceremony was held this week, and the 93 who presented their work are the largest group to complete the formidable research project in King's nearly 30-year history as an IB school.
The topics they researched included matters from the worlds of science, history, art, religion and beyond. Daniel Gatewood, one of the advisers, said as he commented on one of his student's papers, "I didn't learn to write like this until graduate school."
Mohammad said, "Every time I get one of these papers, I try to incorporate sports into it." He chose as his topic the effects on American and Soviet psyches of the "Miracle on Ice" victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Russians at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Milwaukee Public Schools is hiring more than 200 new teachers and undertaking more than $16 million in new spending for the second semester, with the goals of improving students' reading and math abilities and improving high school programs.
Frequently using the phrase "a sense of urgency," Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said this week that the unusual midyear shakeup in the status quo in many MPS schools is causing stresses in some parts of the system and on many adults but will benefit children.
Speaking about a new program to teach reading to older students who are reading poorly, he said: "We've done something we haven't done before, create a sense of urgency around improving children's reading. . . . Sometimes, if that makes people uncomfortable, so be it."
The initiatives are clearly stretching the capacity of the system, from the central office, which is scrambling to hire teachers, to individual schools, where sometimes major changes in schedules are being made at midyear and with short deadlines for implementation.
In part because of the new programs, MPS has an unusual number of teaching positions available - 397 such openings were listed on the system's Web site as of Monday, the most recent update. That equals about 7% of all teaching jobs in the district. Andrekopoulos said that without the new jobs included, the total openings would not be so unusual for this time of year.
PBS' new area on iTunes U includes teaching content, such as K-12 teachers' classroom resources organized by content like Earth and Space Science and Engineering; content on global history in regions including Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East; series including Ken Burns' The War and The Jewish Americans; and QUEST: Science and Nature.
You’re invited to an important discussion about “green” public schools with environment-focused educational programs and practices.
Date: February 11, 2008 (Monday Afternoon)
Time: 1:30pm to 3:30pm
Site: U.W.- Madison Arboretum
Join this facilitated discussion among educators, students, environmental leaders, policymakers, green charter school friends, news media, school officials, and founding directors of the new Green Charter Schools Network.
Discussion & Reception
Facilitator: Doug Thomas, Director, EdVisions
Share your opinions about:
Green Charter School Choices in Public Education
Student Experiences at Green Charter Schools including River Crossing Charter School Students
What’s It Mean to Be an Educated Person?
Creating the Capacity for Change
Young People and the Environmental Legacies of: Aldo Leopold Gaylord Nelson Sigurd Olson
Innovating with School and Schooling -- "Innovating" linked at Education / Evolving
VICTORIA RYDBERG and STUDENTS from River Crossing Charter School will join us at the February 11 discussion along with TIA NELSON, Gaylord Nelson’s daughter; JEFF NANIA, Director, Wisconsin Waterfowl Association; SARA LAIMON, Teacher, Environmental Charter High School, L.A., California; JIM McGRATH, JULIE SPALDING, & JIM TANGEN-FOSTER, Educators & Founders of Green Charter Schools; STEFAN ANDERSON, Headmaster, Conserve School, and many other environmentalists and educators.
Matthew Michael Wage, 17, of Appleton, submitted an Intel Science Talent Search mathematics project that extended earlier results on arithmetic functions. The starting point for Matt's project in number theory is Lehmer's Conjecture, still open, that an arithmetic function defined by Ramanujan, the tau-function, is nonzero at each natural number n. Murty, Murty and Shorey showed that tau takes on any given value only finitely often. Matt extends this result to a wider class of arithmetic functions, sometimes at the cost of adding restrictions to the choice of n. Matt attends Appleton High School East where he is active in varsity football, varsity tennis and the ping pong club. Matt has won regional competitions in math, and his volunteer efforts as a coach helped the school's math team earn the top rank in the state. He also enjoys playing chess, bridge and guitar. Matt's quest for understanding the world around him has fueled his passion to learn everything from ideal gas laws to the propaganda genius of Genghis Khan. The son of Michael Wage and Kathy Vogel, Matt plans to study mathematics and medicine and pursue a career as a physician or mathematician.
Weekday mornings, three of Tracie Weldie’s children eat breakfast, make beds and trudge off to public school — in their case, downstairs to their basement in a suburb here, where their mother leads them through math and other lessons outlined by an Internet-based charter school.
Half a million American children take classes online, with a significant group, like the Weldies, getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.
One of the sharpest debates has concerned the Weldies’ school in Wisconsin, where last week the backers of online education persuaded state lawmakers to keep it and 11 other virtual schools open despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union. John Watson, a consultant in Colorado who does an annual survey of education that is based on the Internet, said events in Wisconsin followed the pattern in other states where online schools have proliferated fast.
“Somebody says, ‘What’s going on, does this make sense?’ ” Mr. Watson said. “And after some inquiry most states have said, ‘Yes, we like online learning, but these are such new ways of teaching children that we’ll need to change some regulations and get some more oversight.’ ”
Two models of online schooling predominate. In Florida, Illinois and half a dozen other states, growth has been driven by a state-led, state-financed virtual school that does not give a diploma but offers courses that supplement regular work at a traditional school. Generally, these schools enroll only middle and high school students.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has given supporters of the state’s virtual charter schools another reason to hope the Legislature is able to alter state law to save online education.
Yesterday, the publication committee for the appeals court approved publishing a decision by a three-judge appellate panel from Waukesha issued last December. The move means that decision – which found that a virtual school operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District violated several statutes – now applies statewide.
The state Department of Public Instruction has said that it would not distribute aid through open enrollment if the opinion were published. That could mean that school districts like Waukesha and Appleton, which like Northern Ozaukee operate virtual schools with large numbers of open-enrollees, lose out on millions of dollars of state aid.
The share of kindergarten students in the county who can read simple books has risen from 39 to 93 percent in six years, according to school system data culled from reading assessments given each spring. Achievement is so high, and across so many demographic groups, that school officials plan to test future kindergartners on more challenging text.
"This is the collapsing of the gap," Weast said, speaking to an audience of parents, students and educators at College Gardens Elementary School in Rockville.
The news conference was called partly for the benefit of the County Council, whose members have been examining the superintendent's record with the achievement gap. Last week, the county Office of Legislative Oversight released a somewhat critical report on the school system's progress toward erasing performance disparities among students of different demographic groups.
The report found that the gap has narrowed under Weast's leadership, particularly on tests of reading and math given in the lower grades. Pass rates on the kindergarten assessment ranged from 87 to 97 percent among students of different races. Progress is slower in the middle grades, and the gap has widened on a few high school measures, such as SAT performance and rates of student suspension.
No school district in the nation has yet managed what Chicago officials proposed last week: a sweeping, simultaneous overhaul of a cluster of failing schools.
Experts say the plan to fire the staffs of eight schools and replace them with better qualified educators is somewhat of a gamble, one that will require an almost perfect alignment of stellar principals, committed teachers and re-invigorated curriculum and programs to succeed.
But that's no guarantee.
"No one knows if turnarounds work," said Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. "We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school."
As Chicago parents began to digest the proposal first reported in the Tribune on Thursday, many seemed willing to roll the dice -- in part, an acknowledgment that even partial success is better than what their children face now.
Fara Bell, a Morton Career Academy parent, said turning around both Orr High School and Morton, an elementary school that feeds into it, is the only way to guarantee wholesale change.
Reading is the key to everything. Teaching children to read is a fundamental moral obligation of the society. That 27 percent are at serious risk of crippling illiteracy is an outrageous scandal.
This is a bleak picture for an old Democrat. Face it, the schools are not run by Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats but by perfectly nice, caring, sharing people, with a smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks like my old confreres. Nice people are failing these kids, but when they are called on it, they get very huffy. When the grand poobah Ph.D.s of education stand up and blow, they speak with great confidence about theories of teaching, and considering the test results, the bums ought to be thrown out.
There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, especially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed.
Teachers at a school in northeast Denver seeking freedom from union and district rules will move forward with their autonomy plan, despite failing to get wholesale approval from their union.
Teachers and administrators at Bruce Randolph School want control over the school's budget, teacher time, incentives and hiring decisions and to be free from union and district red tape that they say is impeding student progress.
Denver's school board last month agreed to the Bruce Randolph autonomy proposal, but the teachers union balked Tuesday at permitting much of the school's request — which sought waivers from 18 articles of the union contract and parts of six other articles.
A Washington Post poll this month revealed, once again, that D.C. residents put the most blame for their failing public schools on apathetic and uninvolved parents. Many Americans feel the same way about the same school troubles in their areas. They are wrong, but in such a convoluted way that it is difficult for us parents to get a good grasp on what role we play in making our schools bad or good.
Do unsupportive parents create pathetic schools or do pathetic schools create unsupportive parents? It is the most frustrating of chicken-and-egg questions. Many education experts will say it is a bit of both, but that's a cop-out. Most of our worst schools are full of low-income children in our biggest cities. No one has yet found a way to revive those schools in any significant way by training the students' parents to be more engaged with their children's educations. It is too hard to do and too unlikely to have much impact on the chaotic school district leadership.
What has worked, again and again, is the opposite: Bring an energetic and focused leader into the school, let that person recruit and train good teachers and find ways to get rid of those who resist making the necessary changes. Great teaching makes great schools, and once you have a good school, parents become engaged and active.
To middle school teacher Chad Pavlekovich, most science textbooks are dull and lack the context students need to understand scientific principles. That's why he is exposing students in the town of Salisbury on Maryland's Eastern Shore to three new textbooks that are unorthodox in concept, appearance and substance.
The "Story of Science" series by Joy Hakim tells the history of science with wit, narrative depth and research, all vetted by specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first book is "Aristotle Leads the Way," the second is "Newton at the Center" and the third is "Einstein Adds a New Dimension." The series, which has drawn acclaim, chronicles not only great discoveries but also the scientists who made them.
I just received an e-mail from a parent stating the Middle School report cards are converting to the elementary format of 1 - 4 and they are dropping the A - F grading system. She spoke to Lisa Wachtel, Head of Teaching and Learning to confirm that this is the direction the district is headed.
DO any of you have any info on this? They claim it is on the website but other than the Standards Base System info, which is pretty general I can not locate this info. This greatly concerns me if it is true.
When Curtis Thomas, a 14-year-old from a poor family living in St. Rose, La., arrived here two years ago to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, he brought little more than a pair of jeans and two shirts. That would hardly do at a 227-year-old prep school where ties are still required for boys in class.
So Curtis’s history teacher, armed with Exeter funds, took him shopping for a new wardrobe.
That outlay was just a tiny fraction of what Exeter spends on its students. With its small classes, computers for students receiving financial aid, lavish sports facilities and more, Exeter devotes an average of $63,500 annually to house and educate each of its 1,000 students. That is far more than the Thomas family could ever afford and well above even the $36,500 in tuition, room and board Exeter charges those paying full price.
As a result, like the best universities to which most of its students aspire, Exeter is relying more and more on its lush endowment to fill the gap.
Despite Exeter’s expanding commitments, which include a new promise to pay the full cost for any student whose family income is less than $75,000, the school’s endowment keeps growing. Last year — fueled by gifts from wealthy alumni and its own successful investments — it crossed the $1 billion mark, up from just over $500 million in 2002.
The Legislature may actually complete an important assignment quickly and on time, earning high marks from voters.
Yes, we are talking about the Wisconsin Legislature, the same group of truants who logged one of the longest and latest budget stalemates in state history last year.
Maybe the Capitol gang is finally learning the importance of punctuality and cooperation.
Let 's hope so.
Key lawmakers announced a compromise bill Thursday that will keep open a dozen online schools in Wisconsin. The proposal also seeks to improve the quality of learning delivered via computer to educate more than 3,000 students in their homes.
The state Court of Appeals had put the future of virtual education in jeopardy last month. The District 2 Court in Waukesha ruled that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, based in suburban Milwaukee, violates state laws controlling teacher certification, charter schools and open enrollment.
Congratulations to virtual school students, virtual school families, forward-thinking school districts around the state**, and to all Wisconsinites dedicated to high quality education for all. As reported in several news outlets yesterday, legislators have agreed to a compromise that guarantees the survival of virtual schools in Wisconsin.
**Thank you Lee Allinger, AASD Superintendent, and your staff, for preparing testimony in support of continuation of Wisconsin Connections Academy.
Thank you and congratulations to the Coalition of Virtual School Families, who issued this press release of thanks (and relief) yesterday.
But mostly, hallelujah! for democratic process and to kids and families who made a difference. Kids and families – 1100 of whom showed up in Madison last week to plea for their cause. Wow.
And congratulations to State Rep. Brett Davis and Senator John Lehman, who were able to reach across the aisle (political pressure didn’t hurt – see above) and find a solution.
New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests.
The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.
While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.
“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”
Forget those uncomfortable, plastic classroom chairs and their 12-inch, fold-down, wannabe-desk extensions.
Millions of college students around the country attend class from living-room sofas, kitchen tables, home offices and even park benches -- part of an ever-escalating trend of attending school online.
The trend is being set largely by community colleges, with their propensity for nontraditional students who need an easier, more flexible way to earn degrees. The number of students taking online classes in Washington has jumped 75 percent in just four years.
In Seattle, North Seattle Community College is leading the way with a course catalog that lists an increasing number of online options.
Sabrina Hutchinson, a busy staffing account manager and recruiter who works as an event planner on the side, enrolled at North Seattle this quarter to see whether she could juggle two jobs and college classes. It had been more than a decade since Hutchinson attended college. She decided on the high-tech option: an online course examining how the study of dinosaurs overlaps with a number of scientific fields.
Wisconsin lawmakers announced a compromise Thursday that would allow virtual schools to remain open and receive the same amount of state aid.
The breakthrough potentially resolves an emotional debate over online education that has been watched closely in national education circles. A court ruling and a stalemate in the Legislature had threatened to close a dozen Wisconsin schools starting as early as next year.
The compromise rejects a Democratic plan that would have cut the schools' funding in half, after an outcry from school superintendents and other advocates. Instead, they would continue to get nearly $6,000 for each open-enrollment student.
The plan announced by Democratic and Republican lawmakers at an afternoon news conference also would add new regulations to ensure quality education at the schools. Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, said the state's dozen virtual schools would be allowed to continue operating with few changes.
"Allowing parents to choose virtual schools helps keep Wisconsin a national leader in education policy," said Davis, chair of the Assembly education committee.
A group of Prince William County parents is mounting a campaign to repeal a new elementary school math curriculum, using an Internet discussion group and an online petition to gather support and fuel criticism.
The group, whose members include parents from such elementary schools as Westridge, Ashland and Springwoods as well as teachers from various schools, plans to present the Prince William County School Board in February with its petition, which has about 500 names. Parents in the group, whose Web site ( http://www.pwcteachmathright.com) lists several of their complaints, say that the Investigations curriculum is putting their children behind grade level and is too convoluted.
The group's formation comes right after the school system presented a year-long study of the curriculum that showed 80 percent of second-graders and 70 percent of first-graders are proficient on all 10 subtests of the Stanford Diagnostic Mathematics Test. The school system wants to continue studying the program and incorporate data from student performance on the state Standards of Learning exams.
School Board member Julie C. Lucas (Neabsco) said in an interview that she wants to examine the program inside a classroom to assess its effectiveness. She added that she has been hearing positive reviews from at least one principal in her district but that she wants to withhold making public comments until she visits schools.
The Investigations program has been undergoing a phased-in implementation since the School Board adopted its materials in 2006. In the 2006-07 academic year, kindergarten through second grade started the program; this year, third-graders began it; and next year, fourth-graders will use the material.
Investigations teaches children new ways of learning mathematics and solving problems. For instance, a student may not need to learn how to add 37 and 23 by stacking the figures on top of each other, and carrying the numbers. They may learn to add up the tens and then combine the seven and three to arrive at 60.
Why this website?
...Because our children - ALL children - deserve a quality mathematics education in PWCS!!
In 2006 PWCS directed mandatory implementation of the elementary school mathematics curriculum TERC - "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" in all PWCS elementary schools. The traditional, proven, successful mathematics program was abandoned for a "discovery learning" program that has a record of failure across the country.
Of all the VA Department of Education approved elementary math text/materials, "Investigations" least adequately supports the VA Standards of Learning. Yet it was somehow "the right choice" for PWCS children. Parents of 2nd and 3d graders are already realizing the negative impact of this program in only a year and a half's worth of "Investigations." Children subjected to this program end up two years behind where they should be in mathematics fluency and competency by the end of 5th grade. PWCS is committed to experimenting with our children's future. We think our children and our tax dollars deserve better.
Colleges have been scrambling over the past year to respond to recommendations from a national commission that they be clearer to the public about what students have learned by the time they graduate.
Sometime in the next several weeks, for example, a national online initiative will be launched that allows families to compare colleges on measures such as whether they improve a student's critical-thinking skills.
Tools for such measurements were recommended by the national commission, which was created by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The group released its recommendations in late 2006.
Now, a sampling of the nation's employers have weighed in. And they are not terribly impressed.
As a life-long resident of southern Florida, school superintendent candidate Steve Gallon III grimaced, then grinned, when asked about how he liked Wisconsin weather.
Known as a motivational speaker as well as a top teacher, principal and administrator in the Miami/Dade County public school system, Gallon quickly got back on message: He sees his experiences as an educator and a leader as a good match for the school district here, especially given its rapidly changing demographics and challenges in funding.
He said the issue of underperforming students is not so much one of ethnicity but of economics.
"What we have to do is embrace the reality that gaps in achievement exist," Gallon said. Much of it, he said, has to do with economic disadvantage.
"It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room. You must acknowledge that work needs to be done before you're going to be successful in dealing with it," he said.
Gallon, 39, is one of three finalists for the position of school superintendent here. He talked with community members and the media in a meet and greet session late Monday afternoon at Monona Terrace. There will be similar sessions today and Wednesday for candidates James McIntyre, chief operating officer for the Boston public schools and Daniel Nerad, superintendent of the Green Bay district.
In responses to questions from the audience, Gallon applauded the notion of working closely with the resources of the University of Wisconsin, said he believed in the least restrictive environment for special education students and cautioned that problems facing schools in terms of funding weren't likely to be solved easily.
Callie Broughton had an eventful freshman year at Florida State University -- in Spain.
Ms. Broughton, now a 20-year-old junior, opted to study abroad in Valencia through a program for first-year students at Florida State. For one year, she lived in an apartment and took classes with other FSU students at the university's Valencia Study Center. In her spare time, she explored Europe.
There were downsides to going abroad the first year of college. "Missing Thanksgiving and stuff I had never missed in 18 years was definitely weird," she says. But the benefits outweigh the disadvantages: "You're getting to see the world at such a young age," she says. Ms. Broughton, an education major, is now a student recruiter for the program.
Freshman year has typically been considered a time for students to settle in and try living on their own for the first time, plan their course schedules and decide on a major. Now, a growing number of schools are expanding their study-abroad options for first-year students. "This was something that was very rarely done at all up until a few years ago," says Brian Whalen, president and chief executive of the Forum on Education Abroad and executive director of the Office of Global Education at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
Spending freshman year abroad presents challenges for younger students: easy access to alcohol, lack of supervision and, given the weak dollar, surprisingly high prices for basic goods and services.
With millions of dollars in aid to schools at stake, the Milwaukee School Board has put the brakes on a main element of a plan to get MPS off the list of districts not measuring up under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"I dare them to take money out of kids' classrooms," board member Jennifer Morales said. She has led the charge to oppose two steps required under a plan the board agreed to in September for dealing with MPS' label of District Identified for Improvement under the federal law.
Morales said she had reached the point of refusing to cooperate any further with the requirements of what she called a failed law distracting MPS from doing things that actually improve student achievement.
"Now is the moment when we just say 'enough,' " she said. "If we don't hold the line and say, 'No way, we're not going to play this stupid game and waste the taxpayers' money,' who is?"
At a meeting Thursday night, board members reluctantly approved one of the steps in the DIFI plan, but halted the other. The board voted to delay hiring required under the plan, yet a disputed reading program will begin.
"Your essay, which I have now read twice, is terrific.
You are way ahead of everyone on this."
email 17 January 2008 from: Education Reporter Sara Rimer of the New York Times
This is the one she refers to:
The Bridgespan Group, working for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has just released a report called "Reclaiming the American Dream." The study was intended to find out how to get more U.S. high school students prepared for and through college.
Much of the report is about getting kids to go to college, and it finds that if there is enough money provided, and if parents, peers, counselors and teachers say going to college is important, more high school students are likely to go.
The major weakness of the report, in my view, is its suggestions for the kind of high school work that will help students to do college work and to graduate.
One of the concluding statements is that “Inertia is particularly difficult to overcome when people are unaware that a problem exists or that the potential for solving it is real.” What a useful insight. What they recommend for high school students is “a rigorous college preparatory curriculum.” What could be wrong with that?
Two very simple and basic things are wrong with that. Current “college preparatory” curricula, including AP courses, do not include the reading of complete nonfiction books or the writing of serious research papers.
That is almost as if we had a crisis in preparing high school football players for success in college and recommended a standard preparation program which did not give them practice in running, blocking and tackling. ACT found last spring that 49 percent of the high school students it tested could not read at the level of college freshman texts. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a survey in which 90 percent of college professors thought high school students were not well prepared in reading, writing and doing research. A true college education requires reading serious books and writing substantial papers although many schools have watered their requirements down. High school students should be ready for in-depth study.
If high school football players haven’t done much blocking or tackling in high school, no one would expect them to play well in college, but somehow we expect high school students in a college preparatory program which includes no nonfiction books and no real research papers to do well with college reading lists and with college term paper assignments.
In my state, Massachusetts, 34 percent of the students who go to state four-year colleges are in remedial classes, according to The Boston Globe. Those students had the expectations, support, access and aspiration for the college dream, but when they got there, they were not ready to do the work.
The Gates report says that “the high school environment needs to provide students with high expectations and strong teaching...” but without any real focus on students’ independent academic reading and writing, that environment doesn’t do the job of preparing students for college work.
If we want students to be able to read and understand college books and to write research papers there, then we must give students a chance to learn how to do that in a ”rigorous college preparatory program” in high school. But that is not happening, and just about no one is paying attention to the fact that it is not happening.
The inertia in this case that is “particularly difficult to overcome” is the exclusive focus on what teachers do and what courses cover in textbooks. There must be more attention to the actual academic work that students are required to do—at least in the humanities. Perhaps in mathematics and the sciences, some students are really doing the kind of academic work that prepares them, but in the world of academic reading (nonfiction books) and academic writing (serious research papers), most schools badly serve their students. This report, like so many others, completely misses that.
The Business Roundtable reported in 2004 that their member companies were spending more than $3 billion each year on remedial writing courses for both salaried and hourly employees, so even many of our college graduates may not have achieved a very satisfactory level of academic competence in reading and writing these days. With so many ill-prepared students coming into college, many professors have taken the path of least resistance and watered down their courses.
Our high school programs for students who hope to succeed in college and beyond should require them to write extended essays and papers which are rigorously graded. They should also require students to read at least one serious complete nonfiction book every year. While this may be beyond the prevailing and generally feeble educational standards of the moment, if we don’t do it, most U.S. high school students will continue to be unprepared for higher education.
Will Fitzhugh (fitzhugh@tcr.org) is the founder of The Concord Review; http://www.tcr.org
Our public education system should be designed to meet the needs of all students. For the last few years, online schools have provided an important public school option for many of Wisconsin's families, proving to be a perfect fit for a wide range of students requiring the freedom and flexibility to set their own pace and learn on their own time.
Unfortunately, the recent state Court of Appeals decision regarding the Wisconsin Virtual Academy has created some ambiguity. This has directly affected WiVA, and some have suggested it has broader implications for all virtual education. However, we don't believe the ruling affects iQ Academy Wisconsin, an online high school that is part of the Waukesha School District, and other schools that operate like us.
Unlike WiVA, iQ Academy relies solely on state-certified public school teachers to provide formal instruction. Our teachers are employed by and largely located inside the Waukesha School District. We are confident that iQ Academy complies with all relevant state laws.
Nevertheless, as a strong advocate of online education options, I urge our government officials to clarify any ambiguity and set virtual education on a firm footing.
If there is a positive from this ruling, it is the additional attention focused on online education. Many who may not have been aware of the high quality of education being provided online are taking a closer look. We welcome that.
Our students score above average on standardized tests, pass Advanced Placement tests at leading rates, and enjoy the quality education and unique courses a virtual education provides. For example, on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination standardized test last year, our students scored about 10 percent higher overall than peers in traditional public schools. Students of the iQ Academy also earned ACT scores 3 percent higher than those of other Wisconsin public school students.
While students work from home on a school-supplied laptop, they must meet the same curricular standards and take the same standardized tests as students in traditional schools.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, student contact with teachers may actually be greater than in a traditional school. Many students who would be uncomfortable raising their hand to ask a question in a traditional classroom find themselves more engaged through online discussions, e-mail and real-time tutoring sessions. The help of a certified teacher is never more than a click away.
In the same way brick-and-mortar schools encourage parental involvement with their students, iQ Academy also encourages the active role of parents in helping to keep their kids on track, meet deadlines and strive for excellence. Parents are not, however, expected to teach any courses.
Providing a first-class curriculum with individualized attention from experienced teachers, iQ Academy offers one of the widest ranges of honors and Advanced Placement courses, including extensive science and foreign language options. The school also offers a wide range of extracurricular activities, including student government, National Honor Society and newspaper/yearbook, as well as social events such as dances and prom and group outings.
The open enrollment period for charter schools in Wisconsin, which includes virtual schools, is Feb. 4-22. Additional details on these educational opportunities are available through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction at www.dpi.wi.gov. To learn more about iQ Academy Wisconsin, go to www.iqacademywisconsin.com or call 866-468-4672.
Lisa McClure is director of iQ Academy Wisconsin, an online public charter school in its fourth year of operation. A program of the Waukesha School District, iQ Academy has 1,100 students in grades 9-12.
Olusanya is one of thousands of parents scrambling to find good school fits for their families during MPS' three-week enrollment period, through next Friday.
A new tool in the search this year is the Milwaukee School Chooser, a 100-plus-page directory of MPS schools and charters, independent charters and private schools, published this month by the local affiliate of the San Francisco-based Great Schools organization.
Milwaukee is at the front of the national conversation about parental choices largely because of its charter schools and the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program, said Jodi Goldberg, who directs Great Schools' local office, which opened in November.
"It seemed like a great opportunity to come in and work on behalf of parents so that no matter what their needs are, they know what's available to them," said Goldberg, a longtime Milwaukee education activist who is married to MPS School Board member Danny Goldberg.
Great Schools' efforts in Milwaukee are funded by the Walton Family, Joyce and Robertson foundations.
In writing this blog, I quite often find that I get a question for which I am not the best person to compose an answer. This was the case here; so I turned to Sandra L. Berger, the author of our recently published, The Ultimate Guide to Summer Opportunities for Teens.
I'll post Sandra's Response below. Because the parent posing the question was from Michigan, that state is slightly more represented in the response.
The following programs will have information and/or sponsor courses that may interest your son. This is not a complete list, but it should give you a good start. Please do not be put off by the word "gifted" in the program titles. The term describes a program, not a child. These programs often include a diversity of children who are interested in advanced topics.
At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.
And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.
Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.
A requirement that students pass a series of state exams before being allowed to graduate from Pennsylvania’s public high schools was unanimously approved Thursday by the State Board of Education.
The requirement faces a yearlong review process involving, among other groups, the state House and Senate Education Committees. If the measure survives, Pennsylvania will join 22 other states with similar requirements, according to the Center on Education Policy, an advocacy group in Washington.
Four additional states — Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma and Washington — will require graduation exams by 2012, two years before the Pennsylvania requirement would take effect. Connecticut is debating the idea.
Policy makers like the requirement because “communities are telling them that American kids are leaving high school without adequate skills,” the education center’s president, John F. Jennings, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
Seventh grader Marcy Thompson is caught in the middle of a national policy debate that could close her school and help determine the future of online education.
Thompson is one of a growing number of students nationwide trading home schooling and public schools for virtual ones where licensed teachers oversee her progress from afar.
She is enrolled in the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a charter school based north of Milwaukee, but spends her days 130 miles away at home studying everything from literature to algebra under her mother's guidance and a curriculum provided by the school district.
The international educational community needs a comprehensive collection of articles on research and policy in acceleration. To fulfill IRPA's mission to serve as that clearinghouse, we will use this Web site to organize, reflect on, and make available research on acceleration.
As a starting point, we make available the 11 articles that form the research core of Nation Deceived, provide links to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) studies on acceleration options for high school students, and list titles of books, handbooks, and book chapters that touch on some aspect of acceleration.
This site is in its infancy. As it matures, it will encompass extant research as well as new work from IRPA and researchers dedicated to providing answers about acceleration.
When was the last time a college history professor made it her business to find out the names and schools of the best high school history students in the United States?
When was the last time a college basketball coach sat in his office and waited for the admissions office to deliver a good crop of recruits for the team?
When was the last time a high school history teacher got scores of phone calls and dozens of visits from college professors when he had an unusually promising history student?
When was the last time a high school athlete who was unusually productive in a major sport heard from no one at the college level?
Not one of these things happens, for some good reasons and some not-so-good reasons.
Before you think of the reasons however, we should be aware that sometimes the high school coach who is besieged with interest from the colleges is the same person who is ignored by colleges as a teacher. And sometimes the athlete who gets a number of offers from college coaches is the same person who, as an outstanding student, draws no interest at all. Not only do they observe this demonstration of our placing a higher value on athletics than on academics at the high school level, but their peers, both faculty and student, see it as well, and it teaches them a lesson.
Now it is obvious that if college coaches don’t scramble for the best high school athletes they can find, they may start to lose games, and, before long, perhaps their jobs as well.
College professors wait for the admissions office to deliver their students to them, and, while they may then complain about the ignorance of those students, and their inability to read or write well, they feel no need to search for high school students who are working hard and doing well in their field. Their jobs do not depend, they imagine, on finding good students to come to their college.
It is difficult to estimate the number of high school athletes who are contacted by college coaches each year, but if there are 3,400 colleges and for example 16 varsity sports, all of them needing players, and if only 16 athletes are contacted at each of the 20,000 high schools in the U.S. (a very conservative estimate), then 320,000 student athletes get contacted by colleges each year.
It is important to remember that National Merit Scholars are selected on the basis of their NMSQT scores, not on any achievement in history, physics, literature, or math. The equivalent process for athletics would be that scholarships were awarded on the basis of a physical fitness test, with no regard for the athlete’s specific achievement in basketball, track, football, baseball, gymnastics, etc.
Not only do coaches make it their business to know who are the best high school athletes they are likely to be able to attract, they know a lot about them. If they are recruiting a basketball player, not only do they know if he is hard-working and scores a lot, they also know the stats on his average minutes of play, blocks, free throws, steals, assists, fouls, field goals, three-point shots, and perhaps other things.
College professors not only do not know who the best high school students are, they also know nothing about their specific academic accomplishments.
College Admissions officers are routinely nagged by coaches on the one hand, to admit good prospects, but on the other hand they can almost never find any professor to take the slightest interest in the college freshman class they are trying to assemble for the coming year.
Anti-academic messages do not come from colleges alone. The Boston Globe has about 150 pages of coverage each year on high school sports, and also three seasonal 16-page supplement sections on local all-scholastic athletes, with pictures, data, a few interviews, etc. For all practical purposes, their coverage of high school academic achievement of any kind is non-existent.
Alumni of colleges also take an interest in good high school athletes, and the word "elitist” never occurs to them (or anyone else) in this context. When Lew Alcindor [Karim Abdul Jabbar] was a tall high school senior, not only did he get pursued by the head coach at every major basketball program in the country, but he got personal letters from Ralph Bunche (at the United Nations) and from Jackie Robinson (integrated baseball), urging him to go to UCLA and play basketball, which he did.
Why is this "double vision" important to high school teachers and students? During these times of great public concern over the level of academic achievement of our high school graduates, a double message is regularly and reliably being sent: "Athletics matter; Academics do not.” Both high school teachers, even those who are not coaches, and high school students, even those who are not athletes, get this message in the clear.
We should remember to be thankful for those students and teachers who continue to take high school academics seriously anyway.
At $6,000 per child that's about $16 million per year. At $9,000 per child, that's about $23 million per year. If we kept 332, that would be $2-3 million more per year.
Also, MMSD not only lost students, which has a negative effect on what the district gets under revenue caps, we've increased our low-income population, which means that for every dollar the district gets, more of those dollars need to be spent on non-instructional services.
This site is about literacy--basic reading and writing and numeracy, and other "literacies:" celestial, geographic, economic, biological, nutritional, etc.
I am a retired resident of San Francisco with a long-time interest in child and adult literacy. I am offering my free program on the Web to help parents and tutors teach children to read, write, spell, and reckon. I have also included a program on English grammar and composition for good measure. In addition I have Web pages reflecting my interest in other subjects in which I want to be "literate."
If you have an interest in any these subjects, I invite you to check them out:
Tutoring for Mastery of Reading and Writing and Arithmetic
Tutoring English Grammar and Composition
Finding and Reading eBooks
Beginning Urban Skywatching
Physical Geography of the U.S.
Economic Literacy
Global Warming and Warning
Approaching the Bible
Islam: One American's Findings
DNA: Life's Common Denominator
Nutrition: What should we eat?
Help for Microsoft Windows XP
Bread Machine Baking
Tips for No-Knead Bread Baked in a Pot
Links to Video Performances of Great Arias
The Home Library, an electronic home reference library
A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Judging from the courses that the nation’s leading education colleges offer, however, balance isn’t a goal. The schools place far more emphasis on the political and social ends of education than on the fundamentals.
To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word “math.” We then computed a “multiculturalism-to-math ratio”—a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate. Our survey covered the nation’s top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren’t among the top 50—a total of 71 education schools.
The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82 percent more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” while only three contain the word “math,” giving it a ratio of almost 16.
Key Republican and Democratic leaders launched competing efforts on Thursday to rewrite Wisconsin 's laws for online schools, just weeks before families begin filling out applications to transfer from their traditional home school districts.
Their proposals, described as attempts to clarify confusion after a recent court ruling, quickly came under attack from the opposing party.
Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, proposed that online schools, also known as virtual schools, be allowed to continue operating with few restrictions. About 3,000 Wisconsin students attend online schools.
Sen. John Lehman, D-Racine, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he 's introducing a measure restricting online schools to half of the approximately $6,000 in state aid they currently receive for each student who transfers from a home district.
"I really believe it 's important to wring the profits out of these operations, " said Lehman, who contends that Davis ' approach forces taxpayers to pay too much to online schools such as the Northern Ozaukee School District 's Wisconsin Virtual Academy. The district north of Milwaukee, with curriculum from a Virginia-based firm, K12 Inc., operates the online school that was the focus of the recent court ruling.
When Jay Schalin asserted in his Jan. 1 Point of View article "Misguided agenda for universities" that "the presence of disengaged students will only lessen a high school's ability to focus on students who are interested in learning," he skimmed over the larger problem of the falling educational standards caused by such policy initiatives.
When schools cater to business and popular demands to increase graduation rates and college attendance rates, they are forced to pass less intelligent and less productive students simply to meet the new quotas, usually by curving tests or lowering expectations for the same grade. This demeans and devalues a high school diploma or bachelor's degree in the job market due to the ease of obtaining one as well as the higher number of potential employees with such degrees. In such cases, the best students are punished, suffering through a dull curriculum for little payoff without postgraduate education.
America's schools have fallen into a giant trap. This trap is epic in its dimensions, because the people capable of leading us out of it have been silenced, and the initiative that could help us is being systematically squashed.
Policymakers and the public have been seduced by a simple formulation. No Child Left Behind posits that we have troubled schools because they have not been accountable. If we make teachers and schools pay a price for the failure of their students, they will bring those students up to speed.
But schools are NOT the only factor determining student success. Urban neighborhoods are plagued by poverty and violence and recent reports in The Chronicle show that as many as 30 percent of the children in these neighborhoods suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fully 40 percent of our students are English learners, but these students must take the same tests as native English speakers. Moreover, a recent study provides strong evidence that family-based factors such as the quality of day care, the home vocabulary and the amount of time spent reading and watching television at home account for two-thirds of the difference in academic success for students. Nonetheless, NCLB holds only the schools accountable.
Teachers are realizing that this is a raw deal. We can't single-handedly solve these problems, and we can't bring 100 percent of our students to proficiency in the next six years, no matter how "accountable" the law makes us, and no matter the punishments it metes out. But if we speak up to point out the injustice and unreasonableness of the demands on our schools, we are shouted down, accused of making excuses for ourselves and not having high expectations for our students. Thus, teachers have been silenced, our expertise squandered.
Prof Nguyen Lan Dung, a National Assembly Deputy who has devoted himself to Vietnam’s education system for the last 51 years, while chatting with a VTC News reporter on the New Year, said that he is unhappy with poor curriculums and outdated and unremarkable textbooks
I failed to persuade the National Assembly and the Ministry of Education and Training that the currently applied curriculum and textbooks are greatly different from all others in the world. I do not intend to stop addressing this issue and will still try my best to persuade relevant ministries that it is necessary to make changes.
You have a strong attachment to and interest in the national education system. You may well know that Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Thien Nhan has been taking drastic measures to solve various problems. Do you think he will bring about change?
I well understand that Mr. Nhan is also adamant about addressing education and training shortcomings. That explains why he has started the “say ‘no’ to exam fraud and wrongdoing. Resultantly, 400,000 pupils failed the high school final exam. If you drive too fast, and then you put on the emergency brake, you will crash your motorbike. The consequence of drastic action was that 400,000 students have no degree, and a bleak future ahead.
As a journalist, you may well know that a lot of students dropped out after this movement was implemented I’ve never in my life seen so many give up school; its downright dangerous.
Since my forced resignation from the High Council of Education, I have received hundreds of testimonials from teachers, parents, students and plain citizens of all social groups. Among these messages I have been particularly struck by those parents who have written me, in substance, “We have been so deceived, and we are so appalled, by what has become of the schools that we have decided to remove our children from there, and to teach them ourselves.” Or, “We have joined with other parents and are pooling our talents to form our own classes for our children”. Or, again, “Despite the financial sacrifice it represents, we have placed our children into private schools.” And finally, those most numerous messages which say: “Our children go to school, yes, but every evening we put them to work using old textbooks, and do what we can to give them the kind of rigorous instruction that is no longer given in their classes. But what a labor for them, and what a responsibility for us!”
That parents should go so far as to remove their children from school, to teach them themselves, at home, or to form parallel classes for them in which they, themselves, are the teachers, to prefer a school to which they must pay the fee to the free public school, or to impose on their children and themselves the burden of a night school added to the day school they consider to be nothing but a holding pen, all this became and remains for me a theme of profound dismay. And I notice as well that these are surely the parents who enjoy a high level of education and – for those who can pay the fees of a private school – of income. And then I think of the other children, who do not have the benefits of having been born into families similarly favored.
Students, all the students, are the primary victims of the destruction of the school. This destruction has resulted from educational policies of all the governments of the last few decades. It is not the teachers who are responsible for it, for they are victims themselves: firstly in that they have been prevented from teaching correctly, by the publication of national curricula which are increasingly disorganized, incoherent and emptied of content; then because the knowledge gaps accumulated by their students over the course of years have made the conditions of teaching ever more difficult, and have exposed them to incidents of increasing incivility and violence on the part of adolescents who have never been taught either the elementary understandings, the habits of work, or the self-control which are indispensable to the progress of their studies; and finally because the younger generation of teachers has suffered from an already degraded educational program, so that their own understanding is less certain than that of their elders, and, with the exception of some well tempered characters, has been disoriented by the absurd training so prodigally distributed by the teachers colleges.
Kathy Hennings [Hennings teaches at the Wisconsin Virtual Academy]:
Imagine if you were a member of a union whose actions hurt children and cost you your job.
Welcome to my world.
I am a teacher with the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, one of Wisconsin's most successful public virtual schools. Prior to working at WIVA, I spent 30 years employed in traditional brick-and-mortar public schools. I am also a dues-paying member of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
Public virtual schools offer students a unique opportunity within the public school realm. A rigorous and rich curriculum, which meets Wisconsin standards, is provided for each child enrolled. In my school, licensed, experienced teachers instruct students and partner with parents (who strongly value their child's education) to ensure the curriculum is carried out. Online scripted lessons, written by professionals in the field, are presented to the students at their own pace. Because a student does not need to move along with the masses in a classroom of 25 to 30, individualized attention can be given.
..........
That WEAC, my union, doesn't care that these schools successfully educate kids at a substantial savings to taxpayers is a disgrace.
I hope the Supreme Court and lawmakers who may address this situation will agree with parents and teachers and not with WEAC. Otherwise, 3,000 kids in a half-dozen schools across the state will be forced out of the public schools that work best for them.
The Saturday Enrichment Program provides a student-centered environment to explore a wide range of interests and new academic areas to empower 5th-8th graders to ask and learn about career options, interests, and choices. Students utilize state-of-the-art campus resources and interact with UW-Madison faculty, staff and community professionals in this pre-college program sponsored by the School of Education. This program has open enrollment with course registrations on a first come, first served basis.
Bright children are being failed by teachers who do not stretch them enough or give them the individual attention they need, Government research has found.
Gifted pupils are routinely put in the wrong ability groups and are set targets that are too low, a study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families discovered. In many schools, young people who show early promise are left to fall behind.
Almost a quarter of the 140,000 children who achieve an above-average level 3 in assessments at the age of seven do not go on to score high marks in tests at 11.
The results are a significant blow to the Government, which has spent almost £400 million in the past decade on gifted and talented programmes in an attempt to convince many middle-class parents that bright children will be nurtured in the state sector.
The report, Able Pupils Who Lose Momentum, found shortcomings in the 37 primaries across England visited by Government advisers.
Demetrius Sims' quest to become an entrepreneur began one day after school, when he joined 36 other middle school students — triple the number expected — for a workshop aimed at helping them land jobs during this winter's holiday break.
"Babysit. Shovel. Melt ice. Christmas gift wrapping," Demetrius, 11, wrote as instructor Sara Winter, career development specialist for the Urban League of Greater Madison's Careers Program, told the students to list jobs they could perform.
"What else can I do?" Demetrius said softly to himself as Winter pressed the students to come up with as many types of jobs as possible.
So while it might surprise a visitor to this small city in Walworth County that Latino children are just shy of 40% of the district enrollment, longtime residents know the stories of families drawn to the area by a range of jobs, including work at nearby farms, canneries and resorts.
But despite the rich ethnic diversity, youths in this district of a little more than 2,700 students often found themselves on different academic tracks for years, based on how quickly they could grasp the difference between scene and seen or wade through vocabulary words specific to a chemistry class.
That's changing this year as the district pushes to better integrate English language learners into mainstream classrooms, pairing up content-area teachers with those who previously specialized in English as a Second Language or bilingual education.
The implications for the schools and the community as a whole could be far-reaching.
"Now that they're all in the room together, they're really seeing the commonalities," said Carole Schroth, who along with fellow veteran teacher Sonia Lee is leading the change. "And hopefully that will feed into the cafeteria and the hallways."
Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.
Despite an improved economy, many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.
Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.
And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.
Berkeley's on YouTube. American University's hoping to get on iTunes. George Mason professors have created an online research tool, a virtual filing cabinet for scholars. And with a few clicks on Yale's Web site, anyone can watch one of the school's most popular philosophy professors sitting cross-legged on his desk, talking about death.
Studying on YouTube won't get you a college degree, but many universities are using technology to offer online classes and open up archives. Sure, some schools have been charging for distance-learning classes for a long time, but this is different: These classes are free. At a time when many top schools are expensive and difficult to get into, some say it's a return to the broader mission of higher education: to offer knowledge to everyone.
And tens of millions are reaching for it.
For schools, the courses can bring benefits, luring applicants, spreading the university's name, impressing donors, keeping alumni engaged. Virginia Tech, for example, offers some online classes free to its graduates.
Marcy Newberger grew up in Montgomery County and attended Churchill High School. Then she moved to Fairfax County and had children, who attended McLean High School. Both were fine schools in good systems, with one irritating difference.
Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.
Parents nationwide are increasingly frustrated with wild variations in grading systems that, they say, are costing their children thousands of dollars in merit-based scholarships and leaving them disadvantaged in college admissions.
Sensitivity to grading is particularly acute in Fairfax and Montgomery -- large, affluent counties that send more students to college each year than other local school systems. But grading disparities also have enraged students and parents elsewhere.
Adam Nystrom remembers being taunted by classmates in middle school for needing so many special-education courses.
"They'd say, 'Oh, that's the retard class,' and everybody would laugh," recalls Adam, who suffers from a learning disorder that impedes reading ability. "I wouldn't really say anything because there isn't anything funny about it."
Adam, now 20 years old, spent a tumultuous 13 years in the local public-school system. He played pranks on teachers and disrupted lectures with a talking pen that delivered punch lines from the movie "Napoleon Dynamite." At Choctawhatchee High School, he struggled to pass Florida's mandatory graduation test, taking the exam six times. Once, he drew a suspension.
But Adam's academic journey ended in success. He became a varsity wrestler and was selected three times to be a part of the homecoming king and queen's royal court. After graduating in 2006, he joined the Army, fulfilling a childhood dream.
A major force behind his turnabout: the school district's program for mainstreaming special-education students into regular classrooms.
As the momentum for such programs has accelerated across the country, many have faced serious obstacles. Special-education students account for a disproportionate amount of discipline problems and sometimes commit violent acts. Teachers say they often lack the training and resources to handle them. Many parents have fought to keep schools and classrooms segregated, saying school administrators have used mainstreaming, also known as "inclusion," as a pretext for cost cutting.
To free up funds for his special-education overhaul -- which initially focused on elementary-school reading -- Mr. Gaetz began by making deep cuts in central-office spending. He eliminated more than 40 administrative positions, saving the district about $6 million a year. Some displaced personnel took special-education positions in the schools, which were given additional funds and broad latitude to hire more psychologists, social workers and special-ed teachers as they saw fit. Educators say such site-based management of mainstreaming programs was rare at the time.
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once,” wrote English essayist Charles Lamb.
Now, it seems, the lawyers are children. Well, maybe not quite. But here in Gotham, a handful of law-themed high schools and middle schools are teaching student the ropes of legislation and litigation. Law-themed high schools? Yep, you heard that right.
The curricula at the public schools, some of which are part of the New Century Initiative, a decade-long effort to improve schools in the inner-cities, isn’t all-law-all-the-time. Students are expected to follow the curriculum outlined by the Department of Education, so reading, writing and ‘rithmetic stay on the agenda.
But much of the curricula relates directly to law. At the Urban Assembly Academy of Government and Law in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for instance, freshmen take U.S Government for two semesters. By their sophomore year, students begin taking an American law course taught by a former attorney.
Freshmen at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn preside over a hypothetical case involving injury suffered from Fluffy, a ferocious dog, and an apartment building owner that is sued as a result.
Global economic growth has brought "hundreds of millions” of people out of abject poverty, particularly in Asia, the former Fed chief pointed out, and that has been the result of market forces at work.
"The most extraordinary example is China. China is moving towards capitalism. that’s precisely what it’s doing,” Greenspan said. Nevertheless, Greenspan argued, rising inequality of income is creating new problems, and declining U.S. education standards, especially in math and science, are doing harm to the historic "balancing” of income levels.
While Iowa's school system continues to rank high nationwide, it is no longer at the top in reading or math as it was in the early 1990s, according to results from a highly regarded exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
"We're not competitive," said Des Moines businessman Marvin Pomerantz, a longtime education advocate who has criticized the results produced on Jeffrey's watch. Pomerantz even threatened to sue the state last fall over what he called a failure to provide an adequate education for all children.
"We don't win when we compete with other kids and countries," he said. "We used to win. We were best in the nation. Now we're not the best."
Results from the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, published last fall, showed that seven states had children who ranked above Iowans in fourth-grade math, four did better in fourth-grade reading, seven ranked higher in eighth-grade math and three scored better in eighth-grade reading. Nearly half the nation's students recorded average scores similar to Iowa's, according to the report.
Long after the final bell at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Anaheim, more than 100 students from first through sixth grade sit quietly at their desks. The only sounds are of pencils moving, chairs squeaking and the occasional whisper.
This is homework time for one of the 46 schools where 4,800 students are enrolled in Anaheim Achieves, an after-school program operated by the Anaheim Family YMCA.
In room 16, first-graders have finished their homework assignments and are drawing a picture of a cat from a book. Some glance at others' work. Some giggle. Some are fully absorbed. Once done, students must write a sentence describing what is happening in the picture.
"It helps them with their comprehension skills," said Julia Turchek, a first-grade teacher who volunteers every Monday and Wednesday.
Now in its ninth year, the program works closely with several Orange County school districts, such as Magnolia, Savanna, Centralia and Anaheim, and collaborates with other support groups, including the city of Anaheim, Orange County Department of Education, Boys and Girls Clubs of America and AmeriCorps. Together they help address the academic and mentoring needs of children.
Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.
Parents nationwide are increasingly frustrated with wild variations in grading systems that, they say, are costing their children thousands of dollars in merit-based scholarships and leaving them disadvantaged in college admissions.
Sensitivity to grading is particularly acute in Fairfax and Montgomery -- large, affluent counties that send more students to college each year than other local school systems. But grading disparities also have enraged students and parents elsewhere.
Our nation's classrooms no longer emphasize substantive expository and persuasive writing built upon strong foundational knowledge. This dumbing down of students' writing and reading is one of the main reasons that students are not ready for college after graduating from our high schools.
During this last decade, public-school teachers have been forced to teach the personal victimization narrative (with an emphasis on "voice") to get their students ready for the state-mandated tests which contain writing prompts such as "the importance of understanding your heritage," "a time you made an important choice," "the importance of accepting others as they are," "the affect someone you admire can have on your life," "whether it is important to seek friendships with people who are different from you," or "the importance of participating in an activity you enjoy."
Students have been taught that they will get a higher score on these writing prompts if they will build up a dramatic social injustice, victimization essay even if the personal references are bogus. Correct grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation, and capitalization are not factored into the final score so long as they do not "disrupt" communication; and if the student makes a high enough score on his essay, the questions on the multiple-choice editing/revising section count very little.
School’s out for the holidays, and it’s probably the last thing on anyone’s mind. But in the marginalized world of music education, a good deal of serious thinking needs to be done. Now that Charles Dickens’s Christmas ghosts have made their rounds for the year, perhaps they might be enlisted to provide perspective and encourage some soul-searching.
The crisis of the moment has partly to do with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s announcement last summer that New York City schools would be required to teach the arts, and that principals would be rated annually on their success, much as they are in other subjects. In theory this could put some muscle behind the adventurous curriculum (or blueprint, as it is called) that the city’s Department of Education and a panel of arts consultants drew up in 2004: a kindergarten-through-12th-grade program that envisions choral and instrumental performance, the fostering of musical literacy and the consideration of the role music plays in communities and the world at large. The music proposed for this course was admirably boundary-free, cutting a swath from Beethoven and Puccini through folk songs, spirituals, jazz and pop.
The problem is that the 2004 blueprint is recommended rather than required. Given the paucity of music teachers in the system — there was one music teacher for every 1,200 students in 2006, Education Department officials have said — schools that could execute it in all its glory were few. Exactly how (and how quickly) that can change is unclear.
I took an Introduction to American Politics honors class with Professor John J. Pitney this past semester. He is a masterful teacher and this post will capture the lessons I drew on how to effectively engage a class. I hope it's useful for other teachers reading this.
Be respected as an authority on the material: In any place where students are intellectually curious, they first want to be assured that you know your stuff. At most good high schools or colleges, it's assumed teachers know the material. But effective teachers will provide background on how and why they know what they're talking about. As students, we're trained to be skeptical, so convince us.
Tell stories. This is a universal Good Thing for effective communicating, no less in formal teaching. His stories are all the more vivid since he was there (earlier in his career) -- in D.C., in Albany, in the back room, wherever. 1) Make a statement, 2) Illustrate with a story, 3) Repeat.
Be weird and wacky. Pitney stomped and jumped all over the classroom. He did weird impersonations. He raised his voice, lowered his voice. He laughed. He showed odd videos. All this made him memorable. Weird is good.
Teach for America, a high-profile organization that recruits college graduates to work at least two years as teachers in low-performing schools, might be coming to Milwaukee.
Wendy Kopp, the founder and chief executive officer of the New York-based organization, visited recently, primarily in an effort to raise money but also to talk about the organization adding Milwaukee to the list of more than two dozen locations nationwide where it places teachers.
There would be substantial hurdles to clear before the idea could go forward. At minimum, there wouldn't be Teach for America people in Milwaukee classrooms until September 2010.
"We're at such the beginning stages of even thinking about this - the conversation around whether it would ever make sense to build a Teach for America presence here in Milwaukee," Kopp said in an interview. But she said the idea had appeal.
Jim Rahn, education program officer for the Kern Family Foundation, based in Waukesha, said: "I've felt for a long time . . . that it would be a benefit, a blessing to Milwaukee, and you could add Racine and Kenosha, if we could find a way to work with Teach for America to provide another vehicle for talented, committed youth to enter the field of education, serving particularly in high-needs schools."
The Kern foundation has emerged as a major force in local philanthropy and was one of two destinations for Kopp during her visit. The other was the Bradley Foundation.
An understanding of basic math and reading is a better indicator of future academic success than behavior is in preschool and kindergarten students, according to a recent study led by a Northwestern professor.
SESP professor Greg Duncan led an 11-person team in a four-year study researching factors affecting how well students do in school.
"We were interested in assessing the relational predictive power of various skills … kids had when they entered school," Duncan said.
The researchers studied students entering school, looking at their academic performance, sociability and the number of fights they were involved in. They looked at data for students, in some cases up to seventh grade, and found that those who mastered elementary math and literacy skills early on were more likely to succeed in school, regardless of behavior, than those who were well-behaved but didn't master academics. The study controlled for economic and family factors.
Freedom to Learn (FTL) is a statewide initiative aimed at improving student achievement and engagement in our Michigan schools. FTL is the catalyst for changing the way students learn and teachers teach. The demands of a 21st century educational system make this change necessary.
FTL empowers teachers to individualize instruction for every child -- truly to leave no child behind. FTL creates an environment where every child can have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), where learning occurs anytime and anywhere, where students are motivated by their own medium of expression. FTL accomplishes this new educational vision through a one-to-one learning environment, in which every student and teacher has access to his or her own wireless laptop in a wireless environment.
6. One-to-One Education Is Accepted As the Global Goal. Three-quarters of U.S. school superintendents are planning for it. Maine, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Utah; England, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Nigeria, India, and China are implementing it. If your state or country is not planning for this, you will be left behind in the 21st century. Using global digitized knowledge to teach and learn will become the only obvious solution in education; the goal becomes connecting every child to this knowledge via the Net.
They are bored -- so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration.
Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don't know how to study.
They are the nation's gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don't serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Statistically, 20 percent of U.S. school dropouts test in the gifted range, said Jill Adrian, director of family services at the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit founded by philanthropists Bob and Jan Davidson out of a concern that the nation's most gifted and talented children largely are neglected and underserved.
Two of the most popular -- and most insidious -- myths about academically gifted kids is that "they're all rich, white kids" and that, no matter what they experience in school, "they'll do just fine." Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.
When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:
Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved
This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.
"I see it as a social justice issue--I want them all to be in excellent schools. The kids in Tenleytown are getting a wildly different educational experience than the kids in Anacostia, so our schools are not serving their purpose."
So says D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has brought an unusual sense of urgency to her new job. One of her first decisions was to get rid of the furniture. When she arrived last summer, she says, there was a whole area, complete with couch and chair and TV for lounging in her sprawling, pink-carpeted office. Wasted space, she thought, "When am I ever going to have time to sit?"
That was a pretty good prediction for a woman whose first five months on the job have been a whirlwind of jousting with the dinosaurs in the city's education bureaucracy. So far, in her quest to turn around the public school system, she's taken on the unions, the city council and, most recently, hundreds of angry central-office workers.
This week, the city council gave preliminary approval to Chancellor Rhee's request for authority to fire nonunion employees in the central office. She knew it was going to be a political firestorm, but she's worked hard to convince her skeptics that protecting an ossified bureaucracy isn't in anyone's best interests. "I think it's a critical piece of this equation," she says of the personnel legislation, "and if someone like me can come in, guns blazing, and make all the hard calls . . . we can actually see how much progress we can make for the kids."
What should be done about the quality and quantity of standardized testing in U.S. schools? We touched on the subject in Freakonomics, but only insofar as the introduction of high-stakes testing altered the incentives at play — including the incentives for some teachers, who were found to cheat in order to cover up the poor performance of their students (which, obviously, also indicates the poor performance of the teachers).
Personally, I used to love taking standardized tests. To me, they represented the big ballgame that you spent all season preparing for, practicing for; they were easily my strongest incentive for paying attention during the school year. I realize, however, that this may not be a common view. Tests have increasingly come to be seen as a ritualized burden that encourages rote learning at the expense of good thinking.
So what should be done? We gathered a group of testing afficionados — W. James Popham, Robert Zemsky, Thomas Toch, Monty Neill, and Gaston Caperton — and put to them the following questions:
Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more? Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?
Perhaps the most bizarre of all of the school restructuring programs is mathematics. Math is an exact science, loaded with absolutes. There can be no way to question that certain numbers add up to specific totals. Geometric statements and reasons must lead to absolute conclusions. Instead, today we get "fuzzy" Math. Of course they don't call it that.
As ED Watch explains, "Fuzzy" math's names are Everyday Math, Connected Math, Integrated Math, Math Expressions, Constructive Math, NCTM Math, Standards-based Math, Chicago Math, and Investigations, to name a few. Fuzzy Math means students won't master math: addition, subtraction, multiplications and division.
Instead, Fuzzy Math teaches students to "appreciate" math, but they can't solve the problems. Instead, they are to come up with their own ideas about how to compute.
Here's how nuts it can get. A parent wrote the following letter to explain the everyday horrors of "Everyday Math." "Everyday Math was being used in our school district. My son brought home a multiplication worksheet on estimating. He had 'estimated' that 9x9=81, and the teacher marked it wrong. I met with her and defended my child's answer.
The teacher opened her book and read to me that the purpose of the exercise was not to get the right answer, but was to teach the kids to estimate. The correct answer was 100: kids were to round each 9 up to a 10. (The teacher did not seem to know that 81 was the product, as her answer book did not state the same.)"
Social, political, multicultural and especially environmental issues are rampant in the new math programs and textbooks. One such math text is blatant. Dispersed throughout the eighth grade textbooks are short, half page blocks of text under the heading "SAVE PLANT EARTH." One of the sections describes the benefits of recycling aluminum cans and tells students, "how you can help."
In many of these textbooks there is literally no math. Instead there are lessons asking children to list "threats to animals," including destruction of habitat, poisons and hunting. The book contains short lessons in multiculturalism under the recurring heading "Cultural Kaleidoscope." These things are simply political propaganda and are there for one purpose - behavior modification. It's not Math. Parents are now paying outside tutors to teach their children real Math - after they have been forced to sit in classrooms for eight hours a day being force-fed someone's political agenda.
As a classroom teacher who taught English for over 33 years, I have worked with literally thousands of students; and I am tired of the education elites and high-paid consultants who tell educators never to use the "drill and kill" method for fear of boring their students.
7) What do you see as the top ten concerns in education? What are the biggest concerns in the Washington Circle?
My concerns or Washington's? I will go with mine:
Low standards and expectations in low-income schools.
Very inadequate teacher training in our education schools.
Failure to challenge average students in nearly all high schools with AP and IB courses.
Corrupt and change-adverse bureaucracies in big city districts.
A tendency to judge schools by how many low income kids they have, the more there are the worse the school in the public mind.
A widespread feeling on the part of teachers, because of their
inherent humanity, that it is wrong to put a child in a challenging situation where they may fail, when that risk of failure is just what they need to learn and grow.
The widespread belief among middle class parents that their child must get into a well known college or they won't be as successful in life.
A failure to realize that inner city and rural schools need to give students more time to learn, and should have longer school days and school years.
A failure to realize that the best schools--like the KIPP charter schools in the inner cities---are small and run by well-recruited and trained principals who have the power to hire all their teachers, and quickly fire the ones that do not work out.
The resistance to the expansion of charter schools in most school district offices.
Ten years after I am dead and gone, I suspect only two people will give much thought to me, and their names are Henry and Hannah.
They're my legacy, so I hope they thrive -- and I sure hope they remember me fondly.
Henry and Hannah are, of course, my children, now ages 15 and 19, respectively. Like any parent, I spend a lot of time thinking about my kids, including how I can best help them financially.
This isn't simply about coughing up dollars and cents, though the sums involved have been frighteningly large. Rather, what it's really about is passing along values.
Yes, I want my kids to be financially successful. But mostly, I want them to be competent, contented managers of their own money, so they don't spend their lives agonizing over their finances and dogged by foolish mistakes.
I am not claiming to have the road map for every parent. We all have different values, different incomes and strong ideas about how best to raise children -- and you will likely scoff at some of the things I've done. With that caveat, here are a dozen ways I have endeavored to help my kids financially.
Insight School of Wisconsin, one of the state's newest publicly chartered virtual schools, could not disagree more profoundly with the recent Court of Appeals ruling that a virtual school violated Wisconsin law because its teachers and students are not entirely located within one school district's borders.
The ruling is a step back for education. It hurts Wisconsin's quest to be economically competitive in a high-tech, online educational world. Most disturbingly, it hurts some of the neediest students we're all trying so hard to help.
The Appeals Court ruling denies what is already happening in schools. As a former teacher and principal, let me point out the obvious: Technology has changed the classroom. Online schools, video programming and Web-based distance learning have obliterated school district borders. The world is now our classroom.
Visit a school today and you'll likely see that it's already linked to one of the state's 33 distance learning networks. You might see a distance-taught class over BadgerNet taught by teachers in another city, state or country.
The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school's effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
When students from her 10th-grade honors class returned from summer break, Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Nelson organized an online open-house activity to discuss three novels they had read during their time off.
After six hours, the English teacher at the Hartland school had a 178-page transcript of her students' dialogue and a new appreciation of the power the remote technology of the Internet can lend to the sometimes intensely interpersonal field of teaching.
"You think of computers as being cold," she said. "But they were really into some deep topics."
Even as fully virtual schools face an uncertain future after a state appeals court this week found one such school violated state laws, most of today's students are more likely to encounter an online learning experience like that practiced in Nelson's honors English classroom.
Instead of replacing the face-to-face interaction of a brick-and-mortar school with a virtual-school experience, Nelson and other teachers throughout the Milwaukee area are using online discussion boards, textbooks, surveys and collaborative features to extend class time beyond the traditional school day.
For years, Jonathan Schuster's mother begged the public schools here to put her son in a special program where he could get extra help for his emotional problems. By 11th grade, Jonathan had broken his hand punching a wall and been hospitalized twice for depression -- once because he threatened to kill himself with a pocket knife.
But teachers insisted that Jonathan, who suffers from attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities and bipolar disorder, could get by in regular classrooms. His mother, Kathleen Lerch, says the reason was cost. "It was all about the bottom line," she says. Citing confidentiality, school officials declined to discuss Jonathan's case but said they seek to provide an appropriate education to all children.
Advocates for the disabled have long promoted the inclusion of special-education children in regular classes, a practice called mainstreaming. Many educators view mainstreaming as an antidote to the warehousing of children with special needs in separate, and often deficient, classrooms and buildings.
Now, some experts and parents complain that mainstreaming has increasingly taken on a new role in American education: a pretext for cost-cutting, hurting the children it was supposed to help. While studies show that mainstreaming can be beneficial for many students, critics say cash-hungry school districts are pushing the practice too hard, forcing many children into classes that can't meet their needs. Inclusion has evolved into "a way of downsizing special education," says Douglas Fuchs, a Vanderbilt University education professor.
Districts have a powerful motivation to cut special-education costs. U.S. schools spend almost twice as much on the average disabled student as they do on a nondisabled peer, according to a 2004 federal study. But the study also found that, in recent years, per-student special-education costs rose more slowly than for the general population. One of the likely reasons, researchers found, was cost savings from mainstreaming.
The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district's proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they're still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That's why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin's 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children "to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers."
The Washington Post sports pages this weekend were full of detailed analyses of our beloved local football, basketball and baseball teams. It was inside stuff, lapped up by readers like me who care about these sports and love to see the latest numbers.
Why can't we get that excited about what is happening inside our schools? Okay, watching great teachers explain the mysteries of plate tectonics or cultural assimilation is not as exciting as seeing Todd Collins complete a pass to Ladell Betts for a touchdown. But our schools do have some intriguing statistics, just like sports teams. I spent my weekend using them to look inside several high schools in the Washington area and finding some thrilling surprises.
Last week's column was about the new best high schools list in U.S. News & World Report, and how it compares to the Challenge Index list in Newsweek. That is, as the economists say, the macro part of the school assessment game, the big picture. Today, I want to look at the micro part, the inside-the-school perspective, aided by the latest Challenge Index rankings of this region's 186 public high schools, coming out in The Post and on this Web site Thursday.
The Challenge Index ranks schools by their college-level test participation rates -- the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-credit exams given at each school, divided by the number of graduating seniors. I do not factor in how well students do on those exams in the main rankings, because I have been convinced by successful AP and IB teachers that even students who struggle with the exams are much better off academically than if they did not take a college-level course and test at all.
Just as modern technology is allowing many people in our country to work out of their home, innovative public school districts nationwide are allowing students to learn from home via virtual schools without having to attend a traditional brick-and-mortar school. Our education system in Wisconsin utilizes virtual schools, which are changing the way education is delivered to some students. As we prepare our children for the 21st Century workplace, we have to seriously consider the role of virtual schools and how they can enhance student achievement. We must ensure our state laws allow public schools to continue offering this important alternative school setting.
Virtual schools are not for every student. They certainly are not meant to, and will not, replace traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Virtual schools simply are an option for certain students who learn better outside of the traditional classroom setting. Gifted and talented students, as well as students with special needs, can benefit from this model of learning. To ensure high quality, state licensed teachers monitor a student's progress, while parents play an active role in the daily education of their child.
Since first posting about the Court of Appeals decision that eliminated funding for the so-called Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA) last week, I have had a fairly active and interesting comment thread (as has, way on the other side of the issue, Rick Esenberg).
I spent some time engaging on the comments with some of the usual suspects saying the usual things – Dad29: "In the end, the Leftist State will have unfettered power and control over all its citizens. So the ideology is about control (power.)"; karl marx: "What a surprise!! Mike Plaisted is against children and for the UNION." There were also the K12 talking-points to deal with on mainstream radio (MSR) and the wing-nut blogs – you know, WEAC is just interested in money and protecting their union hacks in the classrooms; the opinion means we can’t our kids with homework anymore; and blah-di blah blah.
Maryland's attempts to turn around its worst schools in the past several years have largely failed, according to a report by a Washington-based nonprofit education research group.
Of the 76 schools labeled failing for at least five years, only 12, or 16 percent, have improved significantly since 2004, the Center on Education Policy found.
"Even in an advanced state like Maryland, that has tried to deal with these problems for a decade ... we just don't know what to do," said Jack Jennings, president of CEP.
Jesus Reyes, a fifth-grader at Dodge Elementary School, stands in front of a green piece of fabric in the school's library, reading a script he wrote about last week's Grand Island sewer emergency.
As the camera on a MacBook laptop records him, an image on its screen replaces the fabric with photos Jesus took on a trip to the city's wastewater plant this week.
Later, a classmate, Dayne Jaros, records an introduction to Jesus' piece, handing his Internet viewers off to "our on-the-spot reporter, Jesus."
The end result, an audio and video broadcast accessed over the Internet, is miles beyond kids fiddling around with their parents' video camera for a school project.
In fact, increasingly elaborate podcasts like Jesus and Dayne's are giving several area schools a medium for largely self-directed projects that provide a whole new realm to bring writing, reading and listening skills to life.
With podcasts, "learning becomes more than just a grade in the gradebook," said Jamey Boelhower, who teaches English at Centura public school near Cairo. "It matches the culture and the world they're growing up in."
At Lincoln Elementary School, about a dozen students are working on a range of podcasting projects, most of them with only basic staff instruction, said Maura Hendrickson, the school's integration specialist.
These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.
At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations. The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.
When it’s time to cram, the replay services beat listening to a cassette recording of a class, said Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, a marketing research company in New York.
“Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time,” she said. “You don’t need to train them.”
Professors who know less than their students do about MP3 players won’t be at a disadvantage, because the systems require little technical skill to operate. “The best lecture-capture solutions simply require the speaker to turn on a mike and push a button to start the recording,” she said. “They are simple to use.”
Metro Schools Director Pedro Garcia's legacy as an idea man has hit a snag.
The school chief once enjoyed strong support for his ideas on reforming Nashville's public education. But after Metro failed to meet No Child Left Behind requirements for four years in a row — one of the first two Tennessee districts to do so — state officials have a louder voice in how the district is run.
And its leaders are listening.
Board members want to take the state's advice and hold off on Garcia's new ideas until the district gets a handle on the basics. The attitude marks a significant shift in the dynamic between the board, the director and the state Department of Education.
"Some things have come back to haunt us," said District 7 board member Edward Kindall, who represents north Nashville. "I can't totally blame Dr. Garcia or the administration. I think in some instances, we haven't focused on the right thing."
Amid the innovations, many of Metro's students have been struggling to learn math and reading. Poor reading scores among Hispanic and black students and dismal math scores across the county prompted the failing marks under No Child Left Behind.
"Clearly the administration has tried to make a lot of big splashes with their innovation, but they haven't always given a lot of thought to what they're doing," said Erick Huth, president of the Metro Nashville Education Association, the teachers union.
What is the rationale for all United States high students passing three advanced courses in math and science to receive a high school diploma? What is the rationale for "all" high school graduates satisfying the requirements for admission to a four-college program? There is none!
The United States is the uncontested leader of the world in scientific research in respect to published accomplishments, Nobel Prizes, volume of research and expenditures on scientific research. The United States is the leader of the world in technology and the unchallenged leader of the world in the global economy. The United States dominates the world because of its educational systems, including K-12 public education, post-secondary colleges and universities that produce the most highly educated, productive and successful workforce in the world.
Money and effort aren't enough to impart the skills and knowledge needed in a cut-throat world
SPOOKED by the effects of globalisation on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the United States, it has been proclaimed that no child will be left behind. Whether this programme, launched by George Bush in 2002, has raised standards will be a big issue in the 2008 presidential election. Next year Britain will introduce ambitious new qualifications, combining academic and vocational study. For the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), average spending on primary and secondary schooling rose by almost two-fifths in real terms between 1995 and 2004.
Oddly, this has had little measurable effect. The latest report from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment shows average attainment staying largely flat. This tome, just published, compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took centre stage.
Encouraging teens to drive safely, honor a curfew, or simply make good choices is an enormous task. However, there's something else parents should add to their list -- something that can open many opportunities for high school students: persuade them to take advanced math.
Trust me. I know how hard it can be to convince high school students of the importance of taking a course they may not want, particularly when many seem to have an aversion to this subject. However, as a college admissions professional, I've seen the difficulties students experience without an adequate math background. I've seen how the lack of math skills limits their choices.
Chances are your son or daughter may not want to put down the video game remote to pick up a scientific calculator. They may even believe their deepest aspirations don't require a lot of math. However, the reality is that more than 50 percent of students change their majors at least once. So, even if the major they choose now doesn't require advanced math, the odds are good the one they pick later probably will.
And that's not the only good reason for improving math skills. In high school, you get up to 40 weeks to learn the material. In college, you get about 15. Students who enter college without the necessary math skills are often required to take non-credit skill-building courses. This extra review could mean a crammed first semester schedule or an additional semester in college.
Math doesn't have to be a teenager's nightmare. Encourage them to ask questions in class, stay for help, find a tutor, access math Web sites, take advantage of WXXI's Homework Hotline or find out if your school offers math-specific study halls.
MIT recently announced the completion of its OpenCourseWare project, a pioneering effort launched in 2002 to digitize classroom material for all of MIT's 1,800 academic courses. The course material is available for free online for anyone to use.
At the completion celebration on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass., university President Susan Hockfield announced a new portal for OCW, one specifically designed for high school teachers and students, called "Highlights for High School." The portal's home page provides MIT's introductory science, engineering, technology, and math courses, with lecturer's notes, reading lists, exams, and other classroom information. The OCW resources, including video-taped labs, simulations, assignments, and hands-on material, have been specifically tailored to match the requirements of high school Advanced Placement studies.
Since its launch five years ago, the data on usage has been impressive. On a 50-course pilot site, an estimated 35 million users logged in, with about 15 percent being educators, 30 percent students, and the rest being what MIT calls "self learners" with no education affiliation, says OCW's Steve Carson. The recently formed OCW Consortium has 160 member institutions creating and sharing their own course materials sites based on MIT's model.
One of the most surprising findings is that two of MIT's course videos, "classical mechanics" and "differential equations," ranked in iTunes top 10 videos, at number three and number seven, respectively. "This expresses, to me, the hunger in this world for learning, and for good learning materials," says Hockfield.
Improvement in math and science education is a priority in Madison, as it is across the nation.
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) training is not only of growing importance to our technology-dependent society, these disciplines also represent esthetically compelling advances in human knowledge that all students should have the opportunity to appreciate.
Since 2003, UW Madison and the Madison School District have been involved in a unique partnership, funded by the National Science Foundation, to reform science and math education from kindergarten through graduate school.
Preliminary results are encouraging. This five-year endeavor, SCALE -- System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators -- has partners that include three universities and large school districts in Madison, Los Angeles, Denver and Providence, R.I. The NSF made exploring new forms of partnership its key feature.
Improving STEM education has proven resistant to traditional "you do your thing, I 'll do mine " approaches. SCALE 's successes underscore the wisdom of NSF 's emphasis on partnership.
SCALE incorporates research on student learning and teacher professional development. SCALE puts premiums on increasing teachers ' STEM subject matter knowledge and boosting their teaching skills.
In one preliminary study, teachers showed a significant increase in content knowledge after attending SCALE science professional development institutes in Los Angeles.
SCALE partners believe the most important resource in a school is its teachers, an idea that has not always been central to reform. However, the final measure of effectiveness is increased student understanding and performance. In 2009-2010, a randomized study involving 80 elementary schools in Los Angeles will provide definitive data on SCALE 's impact on student performance in science.
In Madison, SCALE teams of district math teachers and UW-Madison faculty have designed and provided content and in-service teacher professional development institutes. Each institute focused on a set of key concepts in middle school mathematics.
During 2004-06, these teams presented 19 workshops involving about 425 attendees. Teachers showed significant gains in math content knowledge, allowing them to create better learning environments in their classrooms, and UW faculty benefited from these experiences. Due to the success of this program, it has been adapted and extended to elementary mathematics and middle school science.
We also must attend to the preparation of future teachers at our universities, and to the "gateway " courses, such as calculus, for students aspiring to STEM-related occupations.
SCALE has been supporting partnerships to explore improvements in these areas at our three universities. For example, SCALE is helping cross institutional and cross-disciplinary committees in the redesign of UW math and science teacher content courses at the elementary and middle school level.
The primary SCALE lesson is the importance of meaningful, imaginative partnerships. To quote Benjamin Franklin: We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Millar is a mathematics professor and associated dean of the graduate school at UW-Madison.
December 12, 2007 HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Meeting
All are invited to the monthly meeting of the HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) meeting on Wednesday, 12/12, 6:30-8:00pm at Escape Coffee House, 916 Willy St. [Map] Featured will be brief presentations by UW Professor John Witte regarding recent research on school choice and charters, and Bryan Grau of Nuestro Mundo Community School regarding what the NMCS Board has learned navigating MMSD.
Name Lauren Cunningham
E-mail: cunningham.lauren@sbcgobal.net
Telephone 221-9338
Teenagers in a majority of industrialized nations taking part in a leading international exam showed greater scientific understanding than students in the United States—and they far surpassed their American peers in mathematics, in results that seem likely to add to recent consternation over U.S. students’ core academic skills.
New results from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, released today, show U.S. students ranking lower, on average, than their peers in 16 other countries in science, out of 30 developed nations taking part in the exam.
On Dec. 13, The Washington Post will mark the 10th year of the Challenge Index, my high school rating system, with our latest ranked list of all 185 public schools in the Washington area. Since 1998, Newsweek magazine also has been publishing its national best high schools list using the same method.
I am particularly excited this time because we have some competition. U.S. News & World Report, at the urging of Andrew J. Rotherham, my friendly adversary on this issue, has just published its own "America's Best High Schools" list at usnews.com. I have long celebrated what I call the School Rating Scoundrel's Club, composed of those of us who think that rating and ranking -- despite their many critics -- are useful ways to help readers figure out which schools are best for them. I admire the U.S. News college rankings and am intrigued by its new high school list. It is strengthened by Rotherham's commitment to improving schools, but it is also too complicated for its own good.
The Challenge Index rates and ranks schools by just one number, the college-level test participation rate, calculated by dividing the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests -- college-level exams given in high school -- by the number of graduating seniors. The U.S. News list mixes together several numbers. It looks for schools in the 40 states for which it has data whose average state test scores exceed statistical expectations and whose minority proficiency rates exceed state averages for those groups. Schools that survive that initial screening are then ranked based on a weighted formula that includes both AP test participation and AP test scores.
The essential differences between the two ways of ranking reflect the differences between Rotherham and me. Only 36, Rotherham has served as an education adviser to President Bill Clinton, has founded two education policy and research organizations and is a member of the Virginia Board of Education, the youngest appointee to that board in modern times. He is a policy maker. His high schools list is based on key factors in the policy process: test scores, minority achievement and college readiness as measured by AP participation and success. U.S. News and the statisticians at Standard & Poor's, led by Paul Gazzerro, the director of analytical criteria for School Evaluation Services, have compiled the list using a basic policy-making tool--data collected each year by state government
Girls won top honors for the first time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the nation’s most coveted student science awards, which were announced yesterday at New York University.
Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.
Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
The three girls’ victories is “wonderful news, but I can’t honestly say it’s shocking,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The students with the highest Advanced Placement exam scores in Wisconsin are both graduates of Marshfield High School.
Noah Elmhorst and Jamie Robertson, Wisconsin 's 2007 Advanced Placement state scholars, were to be recognized at a ceremony at the school, Assistant Principal Elizabeth Dostal said last week.
"We have had past AP State Scholars, but we have never had the top male and the top female in the same year, " Dostal said. "We were just pleasantly surprised. "
Marshfield High has 1,385 students and offers 23 AP classes, Dostal said. Elmhorst took 17 of the advanced classes, while Robertson took 13, she said.
Statewide, 25,020 Wisconsin students took 39,811 AP exams in the 2006-2007 school year. More than 68 percent of those students earned a grade of three or higher.
Nationwide, more than 1.4 million high school students took more than 2.5 million AP exams in 2007.
On Tuesday of this week, in a Waukesha courtroom, the state governmental agency responsible for our public schools and a labor union came before the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and pleaded with the judges to keep parents out of public schools. Yes, that's right. The state and the teachers union are at war with parents and I'm mad as heck about it. (Madder than heck, actually, but trying to keep this blog family friendly).
According to the Department of Public Instruction and the state teachers' union, parents are the problem. And these bureaucracies know just how to fix it. They want to keep parents, and indeed anyone without a teaching license, out of Wisconsin public schools.
DPI likes it because ........well, could it be just because WEAC does?
The lawsuit before the Court of Appeals was filed by WEAC in 2004 in an effort to close a charter school that uses an on-line individualized curriculum allowing students from all over the state to study from home under the supervision of state certified faculty. The school is the Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA). The Northern Ozaukee School District took the bold step of opening this new kind of school in the fall of 2003 after DPI approved their charter. Hundreds of families around the state enrolled their children under open enrollment that first year and mine was one of them. WIVA has grown every year since and this year has more than 800 students.
In January of 2004, WEAC filed their lawsuit against the school and DPI who authorized its existence. Later that year in a stunning reversal DPI switched sides and moved to close its own public school. DPI alleges that parents are too involved in their own children's education.
That's right. They argue parents are too involved.
I've always thought parental involvement in a child's education was a good thing. What do I know? I don't have a teacher's license.
In this education nirvana, teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone -- neither teachers nor students -- what to wear.
These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.
If Brewer passes on the delegation's proposals, the union can go directly to the seven-member Board of Education. Employee unions recently have had success in getting the board to overrule the superintendent on health benefits for some part-time workers and on school staffing.
At stake now is the Los Angeles Unified School District's effort to turn around its 34 most troubled middle and high schools. The data suggests the urgency: As many as three-quarters of the students in these "high priority schools" scored well below grade level across multiple subjects on last year's California Standards Tests.
Whatever remedy emerges is likely to become a blueprint for widespread reform efforts. Brewer and his team are working on their 11th draft; the drafts have evolved significantly since September because of resistance inside and outside the school system.
Wisconsin has the worst black/white achievement gap in the country. The Milwaukee Public Schools have big truancy, security and parental apathy problems. The system graduates about 50% of its students. How hard can it be to graduate from MPS with D's, yet half don't? Encounter an illiterate adult, and it'll break your heart.
You'd think parents, the education establishment and politicians would be running around like their hair was on fire, but they're not even cutting their bangs.
Don't look to the teachers union for answers. They're advocates for teachers, not kids. They just go with the slogan "Every kid deserves a great school" because it has a better ring to it than "We want more money." The slogan also implies that they think MPS is great. They will even protect some bad teachers.
When I took my first serious history course in college, the president of the university (a history buff himself) spoke to our class and encouraged us to submit our papers to various journals for publication. Being rather inexperienced, it had never occurred to me to submit anything I had ever written to anyone for publication. In my mind, I was "just" a student and couldn't imagine anyone being interested in what I wrote.
Now it is possible not only for serious college students to publish their work, but it is also possible for serious high school history students to publish the papers that they have researched. The Concord Review gives young people this opportunity. The Review is the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic expository research papers of secondary history students. Papers may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, foreign or domestic.
Many of these young authors have sent reprints of their papers along with their college application materials. Their research has helped them to gain admission to some of the nation's (and world’'s) best universities.
High school teachers also use The Concord Review in their classes to provide examples of good historical writing. What a wonderful opportunity for students to see the work of age peers who have taken their work seriously.
Included on The Concord Review Website [www.tcr.org] are over 60 sample essays for both students and teachers to view so they can get an idea of the quality of work accepted.
At this site, you will also find information about The National Writing Board, an independent assessment service for the academic writing of high school students of history. Each submission is assessed by two readers who know nothing about the author. These readers spend more than three hours on each paper. Three-page evaluations, with scores and comments, are then sent, at the request of the authors, to Deans of Admissions at the colleges to which they apply.
As Jackie Robson rushed off to Japanese 101, a pink sign on the main door of her college dorm reminded her to sign out. There were more rules: an 11 p.m. curfew, mandatory study hours, round-the-clock adult supervision and no boys allowed in the rooms.
Jackie is 14. She never spent a day in high school.
Like the other super-bright girls in her dorm, the Fairfax County teen bypassed a traditional education and countless teenage rites, such as the senior prom and graduation, to attend the all-female Mary Baldwin College in the Shenandoah Valley.
The school offers students as young as 12 a jump-start on college in one of the leading programs of its kind. It also gives brainy girls a chance to be with others like them. By all accounts, they are ready for the leap socially and emotionally, and they crave it academically.
Last spring, Jackie finished eighth grade at Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston. This fall, she's taking Psychology 101, Japanese 101, English 101, Folk Dance and U.S. History 1815-1877: Democracy and Crisis.
When today's college graduates get together for a reunion someday, they may decide to do it by computer. That's because right now, nearly one in five college students takes at least one class online, according to a new survey.
For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.
Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn't end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.
Cordell sits at her computer in her campus office to chat with a half-dozen students gathered in front of their screens: One is in Tennessee, another in California's central valley, another in Ohio. They're all here to talk about Thomas Hardy's 19th-century novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
For many urban youth in poverty moving from school to work is about as likely as having a career in the NBA.While urban schools struggle and fail at teaching basic skills they are extremely effective at teaching skills which predispose youth to fail in the world of work.The urban school environment spreads a dangerous contagion in the form of behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology.This ideology "works" for youngsters by getting them through urban middle and secondary schools.But the very ideology that helps youth slip and slide through school becomes the source of their subsequent failure.It is an ideology that is easily learned, readily implemented, rewarded by teachers and principals, and supporting by school policies.It is an ideology which schools promulgate because it is easier to accede to the students' street values than it is to shape them into more gentle human beings.The latter requires a great deal of persistent effort not unlike a dike working against an unyielding sea.It is much easier for urban schools to lower their expectations and simply survive with youth than it is to try to change them.
The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining.Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment.What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.
The dropout problem among urban youth--as catastrophic as it is--is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment.We need be more concerned for "successful" youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected.They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most.In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as "successful" but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.
Last fall, 10 Massachusetts public schools embarked on an experiment: Lengthen the school day by at least 25 percent, give students extra doses of reading, writing, and math, and let teachers come up with creative ways to reinforce their lessons.
The extra time appears to be working.
As a whole, schools with longer days boosted students' MCAS scores in math, English, and science across all grade levels, according to a report to be released today. And they outpaced the state in increasing the percentage of students scoring in the two highest MCAS categories.
The data, to be presented at a national conference in Boston on expanded learning time, is the first comprehensive look at the effectiveness of extra time. The promising state test results show that a longer school day, with more opportunities for hands-on learning, has had a positive impact on student achievement, educators said.
Whenever I hear about elementary schools that have cut out social studies and science instruction in order to devote 90 minutes or even two hours a day to reading instruction, my main question is, “What on earth are the kids reading for all that time?”
It’s a rhetorical question because I pretty much know what they are reading—they are reading folk tales, adventure stories, relationship stories, some humor (the author of Captain Underpants must be very wealthy by now). Sometimes they will read some non-fiction, but not usually in any kind of coherent fashion. The kids will read a story about butterflies and then one about bicycles and one about Martin Luther King, Jr. None of this is objectionable, but it is not providing them the real intellectual nutrition children need and crave—a carefully chosen course of reading in science and history that will allow them to understand those stories about butterflies and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The reading blocks kids have been sentenced to are not devoted solely to reading. They often spend an inordinate amount of time on “reading strategies,” which give me a headache just thinking about them—predicting, summarizing, outlining, making text-to-text connections, identifying the “purpose” of reading a particular work—the list goes on and on. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of them, but a little of them goes a long way. The countless hours that are being spent on reading strategies would be much better spent on building the store of background knowledge children need to be able to comprehend sophisticated text, including textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and all the things educated citizens are expected to be able to read.
We analyzed data from thousands of schools to produce our list of the nation's best. The top schools are a diverse bunch, and each one has found its unique way to best teach our future leaders.
As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children's schools are delivering the goods -- consistently getting students into top universities.
It's a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year's freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway -- Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall -- but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined -- that's more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students' high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.
Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life.
Growing Pains
Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.
Update on Credit for non-MMSD Courses, including Youth Options Program:
At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE's Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District's Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District's Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District's Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District's comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions "located in this State" (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford's EPGY and Northwestern's CTD).
The Attorney's memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled "Educational Options" that would include, as well, a policy regarding "Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD". Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one "to be developed". It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the "freeze" the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?
Links:
11/26/2007 Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting Video and Audio
Monday: After a long day at his New York City private school, Ben, 16, heads to my creative writing lab to work on his heartfelt memoir about his parents' bitter divorce. Tuesday: Alison, 15, rushes from her elite private school in the Bronx to work on her short screenplay about a gifted, mean and eccentric boy. Lily, 13, pops in whenever she can to polish her hilarious short story narrated by an insomniac owl.
Ben, Alison and Lily, along with another few dozen who attend my afterschool writing program, also attend top-notch New York private schools that cost upwards of $25,000 a year. So why, one might wonder, do these kids need an extracurricular creative writing coach? The answer is simple, though twisted: Their schools -- while touting well-known athletic teams -- are offshoots of the "progressive education" movement and uphold a categorical belief that "thought competition" is treacherous.
Administrators of these schools will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions, including the most prestigious creative writing event in the country: the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. So we at Writopia Lab help these kids to join the 10,000 young literati from across the country who are hurrying to meet the event's January deadline, as well as deadlines for other competitions.
For decades now, psychology and pedagogy researchers have been debating the impact of competition on young people's self-esteem, with those wary of thought competition taking the lead. Most New York parents of public or private school students have felt the awkward reverberations of this trend -- which avoids naming winners -- when Johnny takes home a certificate for "participation" in the school's science fair. (Do you hang that one up on the wall?)
But some, and ironically those who attend some of the most desirable schools in the region, feel the reverberations in deeper, more painful ways. "Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition," says one mother, "he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn't allowed to win the same honors for his gifts." Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.
Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, believes the impact of the collaborative education movement has been devastating to an entire generation. When students are rewarded for participation rather than achievement, Dr. Levine suggests, they don't have a strong sense of what they are good at and what they're not. Thus older members of Generation Y might be in for quite a shock when they show up for work at their first jobs. "They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they're doing," says Dr. Levine.
In a decade and a half, the charter school movement has gone from a glimmer in the eyes of a few Minnesota reformers to a maturing sector of America’s public education system. Now, like all 15-year-olds, chartering must find its own place in the world.
First, advocates must answer a fundamental question: What type of relationship should the nascent charter sector have with the long-dominant district sector? The tension between the two is at the heart of every political, policy, and philosophical tangle faced by the charter movement.
But charter supporters lack a consistent vision. This motley crew includes civil rights activists, free market economists, career public-school educators, and voucher proponents. They have varied aspirations for the movement and feelings toward the traditional system. Such differences are part of the movement’s DNA: a National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) study found that the nation’s charter laws cite at least 18 different goals, including spurring competition, increasing professional opportunities for teachers, and encouraging greater use of technology.
Because of its uniqueness, chartering is unable to look to previous reform efforts for guidance. No K–12 reform has so fundamentally questioned the basic assumptions—school assignments based on residence, centralized administrative control, schools lasting in perpetuity—underlying the district model of public education. Even the sweeping standards and assessments movement of the last 20 years, culminating in No Child Left Behind, takes for granted and makes use of the district sector.
conducted a survey in September 2007, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about state data systems to determine the number of states that have built the infrastructure to tap into the power of longitudinal data. Similar surveys were conducted by NCEA in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This website provides an overview of the findings of the survey in addition to a state-by-state analysis of the policy implications of each state's data system.
The Power of Longitudinal Data
Longitudinal data matches individual student records over time, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and into post secondary education. States are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve student achievement. But without quality data, they are essentially flying blind. Policymakers need to act now to put in place the policies and resources to ensure that each state has a longitudinal data system and the culture and capacity to translate the information into specific action steps to improve student achievement. When states collect the most relevant data and are able to match individual student records over time, they can answer the questions that are at the core of educational effectiveness. Longitudinal data (data gathered on the same student from year to year) makes it possible to:
David Klein, a mathematics professor at California State University at Northridge, says he was pleased to review Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate math courses for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He respects institute President Chester E. "Checker" Finn Jr., a longtime leader in the movement to improve U.S. schools. Among the views Klein shares with Finn is that overuse of calculators can interfere with students' mastery of analytical skills.
But their collaboration on Fordham's analysis of AP and IB did not turn out the way either of them hoped.
On June 4, Klein submitted his report on two courses, AP Calculus AB and IB Mathematics SL. Klein's analysis of AP and IB math was more negative and his grades lower than what the experts on AP and IB English, history and biology courses submitted to Fordham. He would have given the AP math course a C-plus and the IB math course a C-minus. The other reviewers thought none of the courses they looked at deserved anything less than a B-minus.
Still, Klein says, he got no indication from the Fordham staff of any problems until the edited version of his material came back to him for review on Sept. 28, a week before the deadline for completing the report. Many of what he considered his strongest points, he discovered, had been deleted. He had Fordham remove his name as a co-author of the report, "Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?" which was released Nov. 14.
After agreeing to the name removal, Finn told Klein in an e-mail: "I imagine we'll also reduce your overemphasis on calculator use and probably change the grades (upward). Thanks, tho, for your help." Klein's grade of C-plus for AP was not changed, but his grade of C-minus for IB got a big jump to a B-minus, meaning the report was saying that IB math was better than AP math, the opposite of what Klein had said.
Not long after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced plans last year to give grades of A through F to schools, principals at some of New York City’s coveted specialized high schools grew concerned. With the city looking to reward gains among the lowest-achieving students, how would the elite schools be judged?
The principals peppered the administration with ideas for extra credits for their schools: perhaps counting how many Advanced Placement tests students pass or the college credits they accumulate. In the end, the city decided to tie bonus points for these schools to high scores on state Regents exams.
That served the gold-standard Stuyvesant High School well, propelling it from a high B to a comfortable A. But the principal of Brooklyn Technical High School, Randy J. Asher, called the decision “ridiculous,” saying it contradicted a core principle of the report cards: the need to gauge how far students have come, rather than simply how they perform.
“I think we all really came to the table saying, let’s find something fair for schools like ours,” Mr. Asher, whose school earned a B, said in a recent interview. “And I don’t think we succeeded.”
Last fall, groups who favor placing disabled students in regular classrooms faced opposition from an unlikely quarter: parents like Norette Travis, whose daughter Valerie has autism.
Valerie had already tried the mainstreaming approach that the disability-advocacy groups were supporting. After attending a preschool program for special-needs students, she was assigned to a regular kindergarten class. But there, her mother says, she disrupted class, ran through the hallways and lashed out at others -- at one point giving a teacher a black eye.
"She did not learn anything that year," Ms. Travis recalls. "She regressed."
As policy makers push to include more special-education students into general classrooms, factions are increasingly divided. Advocates for the disabled say special-education students benefit both academically and socially by being taught alongside typical students. Legislators often side with them, arguing that mainstreaming is productive for students and cost-effective for taxpayers.
Some teachers and administrators have been less supportive of the practice, saying that they lack the training and resources to handle significantly disabled children. And more parents are joining the dissenters. People like Ms. Travis believe that mainstreaming can actually hinder the students it is intended to help. Waging a battle to preserve older policies, these parents are demanding segregated teaching environments -- including separate schools.
They're not mentioned under No Child Left Behind. They're not assisted by federal funding or programs.
Gifted students in Pennsylvania must rely on the state Department of Education to make sure public schools challenge them intellectually.
So with changes proposed to the state's gifted education regulations, known as Chapter 16, a network of parents and advocates are weighing in.
As they see it, the changes being reviewed in Harrisburg don't go far enough.
''The state board missed an opportunity so far in making any meaningful difference to help parents and schools avoid conflicts,'' said Jay Clark of Lancaster, a parent of two gifted children who has testified before legislative committees about the proposals.
If your definition of "public school" is the regular public school system, you are talking about a slice of Milwaukee's educational infrastructure in which the student population is getting smaller each year.
But if your definition means any school where public dollars pay for children's educations, you're talking about a bigger pie, with more ingredients - a pie unlike anything served elsewhere in the United States.
Voucher schools, charter schools, alternative schools, ways of sending kids to schools in other communities - parents, especially those with low income, continue to have a wide array of choices in Milwaukee, all of them funded by public dollars.
Thousands of parents are taking advantage of that. Enrollment statistics for this year show more than 30% of all Milwaukee kids whose educations are paid for with tax dollars attend schools outside the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools. That appears to be the highest percentage on record.
While enrollment in MPS elementary, middle and high schools fell almost 4% to 81,681, the number of students using publicly funded vouchers to attend 122 private schools in the city rose 8% to 19,233.
Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.
Proponents of gifted education have forever complained of institutional neglect. Public schools, they say, pitch lessons to the broad middle group of students at the expense of those working beyond their assigned grade. Now, under the federal mandate, schools are trained on an even narrower group: students on the "bubble" between success and failure on statewide tests.
Teachers struggling to meet the law's annual proficiency goals have little incentive, critics say, to teach students who will meet those goals however they are taught.
"Because it's all about bringing people up to that minimum level of performance, we've ignored those high-ability learners," said Nancy Green, executive director of the District-based National Association for Gifted Children. "We don't even have a test that measures their abilities."
On one hand, as children we’re taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison’s famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children’s museums: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
On the other hand, good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates.
We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.
Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades.
“Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks,” she said. In particular, those who believe that intelligence is fixed and cannot change tend to avoid taking chances that may lead to errors.
Often parents and teachers unwittingly encourage this mind-set by praising children for being smart rather than for trying hard or struggling with the process.
For example, in a study that Professor Dweck and her researchers did with 400 fifth graders, half were randomly praised as being “really smart” for doing well on a test; the others were praised for their effort.
Then they were given two tasks to choose from: an easy one that they would learn little from but do well, or a more challenging one that might be more interesting but induce more mistakes.
The majority of those praised for being smart chose the simple task, while 90 percent of those commended for trying hard selected the more difficult one.
The difference was surprising, Professor Dweck said, especially because it came from one sentence of praise.
Whenever I speak about my book, It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, I know I will face at least a few skeptics—and sometimes more than a few. They can easily be identified by their questions and comments. For example, they ask whether the schools I profile in the book are magnet schools or in some way select their students. I patiently explain that they don’t. Or, they will say, “I have unions in my school,” as though that would explain why they can’t make any improvements. Since some of the most impressive schools I profile in the book are in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Paul—all places with very powerful and serious teacher unions—I tell them that unions by themselves don’t seem to be an obstacle. Or, they say, “I have a lot of low-income kids in my district,” allowing that fact to speak for itself as an explanation for why their schools are low-performing.
I always answer as fully as I can, but I know that I probably haven’t convinced them that the schools are as I report them to be—high achieving or rapidly improving with student populations that are mostly either students of poverty or students of color or both. I know many people in my audience simply cannot envision schools that are as good as I say they are or educators who are as uncompromising and frank as I portray them.
In 2003, the American Historical Association got out of the business of adjudicating complaints of plagiarism, saying that the association could best promote good scholarship by issuing standards and promoting education about them. Journals, other publishers and colleges and universities are better suited than an association to consider plagiarism complaints, the AHA said, and they all have various sanctions they can impose.
The move was controversial within the association, in part because it came at a time of several well publicized incidents of alleged plagiarism in the profession.
The association has just released an analysis on how plagiarism is handled by journals in the discipline and the answer appears to be that editors favor ad hoc approaches over policy.
“Very few journals have written plagiarism policies, and many journals are reluctant to develop them,” said the study, which was published in the AHA’s magazine, Perspectives. At the same time, the study found that 9 of the 35 history journals participating in the survey reported dealing with plagiarism accusations at least once.
I think the people running our high schools, as well we parents, need to stop making compromises that sustain the cycle of failure. Kind and thoughtful educators and parents, such as the ones in Parker's articles, are trying to get through each day without hurting too many feelings or forcing too many confrontations. When the choice is between letting standards continue to slip or making a scene, few people want to be drama queens, which is too bad.
The best inner-city educators begin each day knowing they are going to have to confront apathy again and again. They shove it away as if it were a kidnapper trying to steal their children. To succeed, a high school like Coolidge needs a unified team of such people, who follow the same standards of regular attendance, daily preparation for school, high achievement and attention and decorum in the classroom.
It sounds impossible, but it's not. There are inner-city schools right now, including some charter, religious and private schools that operate that way. It takes strength and intelligence and humor and love for young people, and an abhorrence for the limp compromises that have created such sickly schools as Coolidge.
I asked several expert educators how they would fix schools like that. Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, said: "These problems did not occur overnight and will not be resolved easily or in a short time." Michael Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, said: "Anyone who thinks there is a quick fix, that taking a couple of dramatic steps will make this situation better overnight, is kidding himself."
Today, it’s less important how students in Iowa or Oregon compare to those in Alabama or Virginia on a national test. What matters most is how students in North Carolina or Texas compare to those in Denmark or Russia, and so on.
In short, educational protectionism is outdated and ignores the realities of the 21st century global economy.
In the Global Competitiveness Report 2007–2008 released last month by the World Economic Forum, the United States again ranked as the world’s most competitive economy. Yet the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) study, administered in 46 countries, found that U.S. eighth-graders ranked 14th in mathematics achievement. And on the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, U.S. students placed below average in math, science and problem-solving among countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is a major concern because the most important factor in competitiveness is education and training of the labor force. Thus, U.S. education performance today is the best indicator of America’s competitiveness tomorrow.
Earlier this year it organised a conference for history teachers at which Mr Putin plugged a new history manual to help sort out what he called “the muddle” in teachers' heads. “Russian history did contain some problematic pages,” Mr Putin told the teachers. “But so did other states' histories. We have fewer of them than other countries. And they were less terrible than in some other countries.” His message was that “we can't allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”
This is the thrust of the manual, entitled “A Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006: A Manual for History Teachers”. Were it not for the Kremlin's backing, it would probably be gathering dust on bookshelves. But Mr Putin's endorsement has made it one of the most discussed books of the year. New textbooks based on it will come into circulation next year. Russian schools are still free to choose which textbook to teach. But the version of history now proposed by the Kremlin suggests that freedom may not last.
The manual's choice of period is suggestive: from Stalin's victory in the “great patriotic war” to the victory of Mr Putin's regime. It celebrates all contributors to Russia's greatness, and denounces those responsible for the loss of empire, regardless of their politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not seen as a watershed from which a new history begins, but as an unfortunate and tragic mistake that hindered Russia's progress. “The Soviet Union was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.”
Madison School District Administration Presentation on High School Redesign
The Madison School viewed a presentation from the Administration Monday evening on their proposed High School redesign. Listen via this mp3 audio file (or watch the MMSDTV Video Archive).
"Sometimes institutional history can be a weight around your neck," Rainwater noted. "This can be an opportunity to bring in new ideas, and new blood," he added.
Rainwater has said change is necessary because high schools today look and feel much like they have for generations but that students will live and work in a world that has changed dramatically, and which demands new skills and abilities.
He acknowledged that the path was likely to be bumpy, and noted that the plan -- which has been developed thus far without public input -- recognizes that there are major concerns in the community regarding changes to Madison's school system.
Some of those concerns include worries about trying to balance resources among students of widely varying abilities, about "dumbing down" the curriculum with inclusive classrooms, the potential for the high schools to lose their unique personalities and concerns that addressing the broad ranges of culture in the district will not serve students well.
High School Redesign Committee (currently there are no parent or community members - Susan Troller "which has been developed thus far without public input")
Curriculum Acceleration/Middle School Charter Meeting: November 26 at 11:30 a.m.
A group of parents will be gathering to discuss developing a public school charter (or other educational alternatives) for middle schoolers who need an advanced level and faster pace of instruction (curriculum acceleration). Our first meeting will be Monday, November 26 at 11:30 am for lunch at the Sun Print Cafe, 1 South Pinckney Street [Map], in the US Bank building. If interested, please email Bonnie at pbe@terracom.net.
In the charter school movement's endless quest to recruit students, some of the best independent public schools support each other by word of mouth. The KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a high-performing middle school, has sent 15 graduates to Washington Mathematics Science Technology, one of the better charter high schools. But KIPP teachers steer their graduates away from some charter schools.
"If I said which they were, the principals would kill me," said Susan Schaeffler, KIPP DC's executive director.
Now, some charter leaders in the city that is a national epicenter for their movement are planning to take the next step in this sifting process. They say they want to create a "gold standard designation," to publicly identify for the first time which charters are doing the most to raise teaching quality and academic achievement for low-income students.
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, likened the initiative to a certification system to show "what high quality really means in terms of children of color from impoverished backgrounds, which is the vast majority of the students charter schools educate here."
Soon after the first sudoku puzzles began to appear in newspapers a couple of years ago, there came hurried reassurances from worried editors. Sudoku might be a number grid, they soothed, but don't let all those nasty ones, twos and threes frighten you, because you don't need to be any good at maths to do it.
It was a message that summed up the national attitude to maths. Numbers are something inherently difficult, to be feared and mistrusted. The subject carries a lasting memory of childhood shame and frustration from which we never recover. Maths is for geeks, nerds and misfits; the rest of us get by on a wing, a prayer and a calculator.
Andrew Hodges, maths lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford, takes a different view of the addictive puzzle. "Sudoku may not require long multiplication or division," he says, "but it is a very good puzzle that replicates the pattern of thinking required to solve quite complex logical problems in maths. But no one dares mention the association, for fear of putting off all those who like doing it."
Amy's Game is a field manual for parents, teachers, and leaders who want to give our children the education they deserve. The author draws on over 30 years experience and hundreds of studies to expose education's hidden structure responsible for our schools' decline. Tactics for reversing that slide are given along with inexpensive, well-researched instructional methods that anyone-parent to professor-can use to improve our children's education.
Amazon Link. Thanks to Larry Winkler for the link.
In the process of researching where the U.S. ranks internationally in science and math education, I discovered that one of the Democratic presidential candidates (the one who’s governor of a Southwestern state) keeps citing our nation’s current rank as No. 29 (or, on a good day, No. 28) after our having been No. 1 throughout the world.
Apparently neither statistic is true, however, which suggest that it may be Bill Richardson himself who needs a bit of remedial math.
This is not the first time our national educational system has been politicized. Fifty years ago, a global scientific effort called the International Geophysical Year (IGY) encompassed 11 Earth sciences: aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, longitude and latitude determinations (precision mapping), meteorology, oceanography, seismology and solar activity.
The Soviet Union celebrated IGY by launching the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) one month into the event on Oct. 1, 1957. We countered with the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts and the discovery of mid-ocean submarine ridges, which was an important confirmation of plate tectonics.
Immediately following the successful orbiting of Sputnik, attendant paranoia regarding U.S. loss of the space race converted our collaboration with the country into a major retooling of the nation’s school curricula. The focus would now be on science and mathematics.
It’s impossible to deny a general decline in these areas nationally versus India and a handful of other countries that emphasize science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education on a cultural level. In recent years, Minnesota has been adamant and resolute about creating and maintaining collaboration between the private and public sectors to improve these areas of learning among K-12 students statewide.
Proposed math books for elementary school children and their teachers have resulted in one computation that publishers would just as soon erase – 109,263.
That's the number of errors that were uncovered in proposed math textbooks that are under review by the State Board of Education for distribution to schools in the fall of 2008.
The total number of errors was nearly five times the total for last year, thanks to one publisher whose books contained more than 86,000 errors – 79 percent of the total.
Publishers will have until the spring to clean their books up. After that, they can be fined up to $5,000 for every error that makes it into the final editions of books shipped to Texas schools.
There are casual days at Milwaukee College Preparatory School when it comes to what students can wear. Polo shirts (red for almost all the students and yellow for standouts who have earned privileges) are the uniform for those days. Other days, students have to wear blazers and ties.
But there are no casual days at the school when it comes to academics, even down to the kindergartners.
"Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go," eighth-grade math teacher Edward Richerson exhorts his students as a half dozen head toward the blackboard to solve some equations. They're not moving fast enough for him.
A couple of them falter in their explanations. "What I've told you not to do is get lazy on these equations, which is what you've done," Richerson says. If you're not getting them, it's not because you're not smart enough, he says. "Since we are overachievers," he begins as he tells them why they have to be as picky about the details of the answers as he is.
In a 5-year-old kindergarten class, children do an exercise in counting and understanding sequences of shapes. Four-year-olds are expected to be on the verge of reading by Christmas.
In national education circles, phrases such as "no excuses" and names such as "KIPP" have come to stand for a hard-driving approach to educating low-income urban children, and that includes longer days, strict codes of conduct, an emphasis on mastering basics and a dedication among staff members approaching zeal. The Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, operates 57 schools in cities around the country and has a record that is not perfect but is noteworthy for its success.
Milwaukee College Prep, 2449 N. 36th St., is the prime example in Milwaukee of a no-excuses school. The charter school, which is publicly funded and was chartered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is not formally a KIPP school, although it is affiliated with the KIPP movement.
Educators and politicians these days make a point of saying that U.S. schoolchildren aren't just competing locally for good, high-paying jobs — they're competing globally.
A detailed study lets them know just how well kids may do if they really compete globally someday — and it's not exactly pretty.
Crunching the most recent data from a pair of U.S. and international math and science exams for middle-schoolers, Gary Phillips, a researcher at the non-profit American Institutes for Research (AIR), a non-partisan Washington think tank, finds a decidedly mixed picture: Students in most states perform as well as — or better than — peers in most foreign countries.
But he also finds that even those in the highest-scoring states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are significantly below a handful of top-scoring nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
In mathematics, students in 49 states and the District of Columbia are behind their counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Students in Massachusetts are on a par with Japanese students, but trail the other four nations. In science, students in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin trail only students in Singapore and Taiwan, while performing equal or better than students in the other 45 countries surveyed.
“More than a century ago Louis Pasteur revealed the secret to invention and innovation when he said ‘chance favors the prepared mind’. The take away message from this report is that the United States is loosing the race to prepare the minds of the future generation,” said Dr. Phillips.
Students in the District of Columbia had the lowest U.S. performance in mathematics (they did not participate in the science test). In math, the average D.C. student is at the Below Basic level, putting them behind students in 29 countries and ahead of those in 14 countries. In science, nine states are at the Below Basic level: Florida, Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Alabama, Hawaii, California and Mississippi.
This report includes an updated Pangloss Index, based on a new round of state reports submitted in 2007. As Table 1 shows, many states look about the same Wisconsin and Iowa are tied for first, distinguishing themselves by insisting that their states house a pair of educational utopias along the upper Mississippi River. In contrast, Massachusetts—which is the highest-performing state in the country according to the NAEP—continues to hold itself to far tougher standards than most, showing up at 46th, near the bottom of the list.
Wisconsin - especially the state Department of Public Instruction - continues to avoid taking steps to increase the success of low-performing children in the state, a national non-profit organization says in a report released today.
For the second year in a row, Education Sector put Wisconsin at the top of its Pangloss Index, a ranking of states based on how much they are overly cheery about how their students are doing. Much of the ranking is based on the author's assessment of data related to what a state is doing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
"Wisconsin policy-makers are fooling parents by pretending that everything is perfect," said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for the organization. "As a result, the most vulnerable students aren't getting the attention they need."
DPI officials declined to comment on the new report because they had not seen it yet. In 2006, Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, objected strongly to a nearly identical ranking from Education Sector and said state officials and schools were focused on improving student achievement, especially of low-income and minority students on the short end of achievement gaps in education.
The report is the latest of several over the last two years from several national groups that have said Wisconsin is generally not doing enough to challenge its schools and students to do better. The groups can be described politically as centrist to conservative and broadly supportive of No Child Left Behind. Education Sector's founders include Andrew Rotherham, a former education adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the group describes itself as non-partisan.
Several of the reports have contrasted Wisconsin and Massachusetts as states with similar histories of offering high-quality education but different approaches toward setting statewide standards now. Massachusetts has drawn praise for action it has taken in areas such as testing the proficiency of teachers, setting the bar high on standardized tests and developing rigorous education standards.
The Education Sector report and Carey did the same. The report rated Massachusetts as 46th in the nation, meaning it is one of the most demanding states when it comes to giving schools high ratings.
Carey said that in 1992, Wisconsin outscored Massachusetts in the nationwide testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But Wisconsin is now behind that state in every area of NAEP testing, he said.
"Unlike Wisconsin, Massachusetts has really challenged its schools," Carey said.
Watch out. Tumultuous days are ahead in the war of advocates for college-level high school courses such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, particularly with the rise of some schools that say their teachers can do a better job without AP or IB.
Insults are flying. Good people could get hurt. I have a peace plan, but first let's inspect the battlefield.
The AP vs. IB topic on my Admissions 101 discussion group at the Web site has 1,233 posts and more are pouring in. At the same time, educators who want to banish AP from their schools just launched a new Web site, ExcellenceWithoutAP. On Wednesday, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute at edexcellence will release one of the most detailed AP vs. IB comparisons ever: "Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?"
The Fordham report looks like a peace-making gesture, since it concludes that both programs "set high academic standards and goals for learning" and provide exams that allow students to "apply their knowledge in creative and productive ways." But the AP vs. IB combatants will likely squabble over slight differences in the grades Fordham gave AP and IB courses in biology and math. And the ExcellenceWithoutAP people are going to hate the parts of the Fordham report that warn against attempts, like theirs, to make college-level courses in high school more thematic and deny students -- at least in Fordham's view -- the solid facts, such as "the names, dates, events, documents and movements important to our history."
The College Board still dominates the battlefield, with more than 14,000 high schools using its AP program. IB has only about 500. ExcellenceWithoutAP lists about 50 schools that have dropped or never had AP. This is a big jump from the 12 schools identified in this column two years ago. But even this group is made up of schools so small that they produce less that one-fifth of 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors graduating each year.
So while the Milwaukee School Board considers whether teachers in charter schools should be certified in each academic subject they teach, an inconvenient truth remains: A teaching certificate is not a guarantee of teaching competence.
Yes, a teaching certificate proves that certain standards have been met, that the bearer has studied education theory and teaching techniques and demonstrates basic mastery of an area of academic study. But does this translate directly into the ability to help individual students? A roomful of students?
If a teacher is certified to teach English but not science, does that mean science is hopelessly out of his league? Or does it merely mean that the teacher in question has jumped through the hoops required to gain an English certificate?
The teachers union would have you believe that a teaching certificate is akin to a sacred talisman, as if only those who possess the talisman are qualified to share their unique knowledge. Actually, it would be preferable if the union phrased it that way - it would be easier to recognize the union's specious argument. Instead, the union tries to frame it as a quality-control problem.
"Professional is professional," said Dennis Oulahan, president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association at an October School Board committee meeting, according to an Oct. 12 Journal Sentinel article. "If we're willing to play with that, how serious are we about moving student achievement forward in this district?"
Peter Schmidt in The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "(t)he Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit research organization, favorably reviews several Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs in a report scheduled to be released this week.
The study evaluated course materials, teacher’s guides, and examinations used in connection with Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs in biology, English, history, and mathematics. Based on reviews of the materials conducted by experts in the fields covered, the report concludes that the courses generally merit praise. The biology offerings in particular deserve high marks, it says.
The researchers did not examine how well the courses are actually being taught, and its report warns that “successful implementation of these programs depends on the availability of talented, motivated, and well-educated teachers.”
The institute plans to make the report available online as of Tuesday, although it is not scheduled for release to the public until the following day."
My daughter asked the other day about why the sky is blue. It turned into a talk about light waves. Sure, it was a teachable moment but my bad; I'm not a licensed teacher.
I now know how wrong I was. I heard it from a state lawyer arguing before an appeals court about the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Parents are incompetent to recognize such moments - that's what he actually said - so the public charter school needs to be shut down now.
The lawyer, who represents the Department of Public Instruction, was siding with the big teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council. The union four years ago sued the department to shut down the academy, a public school that offers classes to 850 students statewide. Now, the state has switched sides and says the school is breaking the law, a claim already rejected in court. All the school is breaking is paradigms.
Here's how it works: Children log on with software made for virtual schooling. They go to a virtual class with a live teacher, or they have lessons assigned by a teacher, or they do one-on-one work with a teacher, or they get their homework evaluated by a teacher, or they talk on a phone or meet face to face with a teacher. Notice who's involved.
Why, it's the child's parent, claim the educrats and the union. The nub of the case is that because parents help when children are stuck or act as an on-hand coach, it means they're really the teachers. They're unlicensed; ergo, the school's illegal. Let this be a warning when your tot asks for homework help.
The state's lawyer, Paul Barnett, said that when teachable moments come to academy kids, parents can't recognize them. "This school depends on unlicensed, untrained, unqualified and, um, adults who are not required to prove competence," he told the court.
He later says that the state wants parents involved in schools. Just wipe your boots first, you peasants.
Aside from what insults the state hurls at the academy's parents, "it really is almost demeaning to the work our teachers do," says Principal Kurt Bergland.
"I home-schooled before," says parent Julie Thompson of Cross Plains. "This is different."
The academy does mean that Thompson's seventh-grade daughter learns at home, except when she joins other academy kids for hands-on science. But Thompson doesn't plan the curriculum, teach the lessons or evaluate progress. The school's 20 teachers do. Children move on only when those teachers say they're ready.
The parents' role adds to this. Some describe it as being a teachers aide, and Bergland, for years a teacher and administrator in a brick-and-mortar public school, says they get training similar to what aides get. "But the thing that they have way beyond most aides I've worked with is an understanding of their learner," he says.
Naturally, the results are good. Even the state's lawyer said so, only he claims they're irrelevant.
Arizona's student testing model is flawed, and the state's top education official is exaggerating student success on standardized tests, a conservative researcher charged Thursday.
"It's a bit like watching Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa beating these baseball records," said Matthew Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute. "It could be that they're just better baseball players. Or it could be that the ball is juiced or the players are taking steroids."
Ladner debated Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, at an annual meeting of education researchers held at Arizona State University's Downtown Phoenix Campus.
Horne called Ladner a "demagogue" and said the Goldwater Institute is selective with facts and spreads false information as a scare tactic.
"They can't stand the idea that there could be anything good in public education," Horne said.
In a notebook on her desk at Rock View Elementary School, Principal Patsy Roberson keeps tabs on every student: red for those who have failed to attain proficiency on Maryland's statewide exam, an asterisk for students learning English and squares for black or Hispanic children whose scores place them "in the gap."
Roberson and the Rock View faculty are having remarkable success lifting children out of that gap, the achievement gap that separates poor and minority children from other students and represents one of public education's most intractable problems.
They have done it with an unusual approach. The Kensington school's 497 students are grouped into classrooms according to reading and math ability for more than half of the instructional day.
The technique, called performance-based grouping, is uncommon in the region. Some educators believe it too closely resembles tracking, the outmoded practice of assigning students to inflexible academic tracks by ability.
Educators say Rock View, however, is using the same basic concept to opposite effect, and the results have been positive. While some other Montgomery County schools serving low-income populations have posted higher test scores, few have shown such improvement or consistency across socioeconomic and racial lines.
Mayor Francis Slay has laid the groundwork for a new system of hand-picked public charter schools, meant to rival the city's sinking school district and draw families back to the city.
Today, Slay's office will send roughly 70 letters to local educators, Midwest nonprofit education groups, and big charter school companies across the country.
Those letters will invite each of them to start a school here.
His goal is to open quality schools. How many? Realistically, he thinks two or three a year, adding as many as 30 in the next 10 years.
The schools would steer thousands of kids away from the St. Louis Public Schools.
"Our city is cleaner, safer and more beautiful than it has been in a long time," Slay wrote in the letter. "In short, St. Louis has it all — except enough quality public schools."
But some say the plan would create a cycle disastrous to the city school district.
"It sounds like a plan, then, to abandon half the children in St. Louis," said Peter Downs, president of the elected St. Louis School Board. "It's like setting up two fire departments, two police departments. If you try to do it at the same cost, you have a lot more impoverished schools."
IN THE 1990s New York City's success in cutting crime became a model for America and the world. Innovative policing methods, guided by the “broken windows” philosophy of cracking down on minor offences to encourage a culture of lawfulness, showed that a seemingly hopeless situation could be turned around. It made the name of the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, now a presidential aspirant.
Hopeless is how many people feel about America's government-funded public schools, particularly in the dodgier parts of big cities, where graduation rates are shockingly low and many fail to achieve basic levels of literacy and numeracy. As with urban crime, failing urban schools are preoccupying countries the world over. And just as New York pointed the way on fighting crime, under another mayor, Michael Bloomberg, it is now emerging as a model for school reform.
On November 5th Mr Bloomberg announced a new “report card” for the city's schools, designed to make them accountable for their performance. The highest-graded schools will get an increased budget and perhaps a bonus for the principal (head teacher). Schools that fail will not be tolerated: unless their performance improves, their principals will be fired, and if that does not do the trick, they will be closed. This is the culmination of a series of reforms that began when Mr Bloomberg campaigned for, and won, direct control of the school system after becoming mayor in 2002. Even before the “report cards”, there have been impressive signs of improvement, including higher test scores and better graduation rates.
Progress Reports grade each school with an A, B, C, D, or F. These reports help parents, teachers, principals, and others understand how well schools are doing—and compare them to other, similar schools. Most schools received pilot Progress Reports for the 2005-06 school year in spring 2007. Progress Reports for Early Childhood and Special Education schools will be piloted during the 2007-08 academic year.
To find the Progress Report for your school, go to Find a School and enter the school’s name or number. This will bring you to the school’s Web page. Click on “Statistics,” which is a link on the left side of the page, where various accountability information can be found for each school. You can also ask your parent coordinator for a copy of your school’s Progress Report or e-mail PR_Support@schools.nyc.gov with questions. Click here to view the Progress Report results for all schools Citywide.
Schools that get As and Bs on their Progress Reports will be eligible for rewards. The Department of Education will work with schools that get low grades to help them improve. Schools that get low grades will also face consequences, such as leadership changes or closure. This is an important part of our work to hold children’s schools accountable for living up to the high standards we all expect them to achieve.
Bringing accountability and competition to New York City's struggling schools.
THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn's impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher's alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.
Like the other charter schools that are fast multiplying across America, Excellence is an independently run public school that has been allowed greater flexibility in its operations in return for greater accountability, though it cannot select its pupils, instead choosing them by lottery. If it fails, the principal (head teacher) will be held accountable, and the school could be closed. Three years old, Excellence is living up to its name: 92% of its third-grade scholars (eight-year-olds, the oldest boys it has, so far) scored “advanced” or “proficient” in New York state English language exams this year, compared to an average (for fourth-graders) across the state of 68% and only 62% in the Big Apple. They did even better in mathematics.
OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg's accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven't had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we're seeing change from the bottom up.”
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity [AskGoogleLiveYahoo] in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.
When Lindsey Jones was deciding which high school to attend in a district that offers nearly three dozen options for secondary education, she was swayed by the Boston Community Leadership Academy’s claims that it would prepare her well for college. She didn’t realize how well until she started classes at the 400-student academy, part of a network of small schools the Boston district established more than a decade ago to provide alternatives outside its traditional system of large, comprehensive high schools and selective exam schools.
A four-year study of that network, released this week, shows that the academy and the nine other “pilot” high schools in the 56,000-student district are seeing more students through to graduation than regular high schools here. They also have significantly higher promotion and graduation rates, fewer dropouts, and fewer disciplinary issues.
Conceived in 1994 as the district’s response to charter schools, pilot schools have won praise from educators, business leaders, and community groups for providing school choice and innovation within the city’s public school system.
Still, some observers say their results are due more to the schools’ ability to choose or remove teachers, lower proportions of high-needs students, and the control they have in selecting students or weeding out those who are not likely to succeed in them.
If you feel like work is getting harder, it's not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.
The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we're all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.
"I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine," says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. "It's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."
Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries' models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.
When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?
We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it's not that we're going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We're going to have to graduate more people from high school who've done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.
Seeking Parents' Help in Saving a Great Elementary School Program
The program is a small, mixed-age classroom for first through third graders at the Montessori Children's House on Madison's west side, where my eldest child currently attends preschool. It is in danger of being eliminated because of diminishing enrollment. I think that this would be a horrible loss to many academically talented children who would do so well there. They do so many things right there, such as:
Nurturing, home-like environment in which intense curiosity is normal
Mixed-age classroom, which encourages children to work at their own pace
Elegant learning materials
Freedom of movement and plenty of outside time
Freedom to follow their own intellectual curiosity
No busy work
No homework (unless the child chooses to keep working on something after school)
Emphasis on peace and global citizenship
Healthy snacks provided, healthy lunch to be brought from home
Parental involvement welcomed (the school is a parent run co-op)
As a small community, it would only take a few more children to keep the program viable. If you are the parent of a child who would benefit from such an environment, would you please look at the school's website http://www.madisonmontessori.org/programs/elementary/Elem_intro.html and maybe take some time to observe the classroom?
Our family is committed to public schools, and we know that a school district needs talented kids and engaged families to thrive. This program would allow kids to integrate back into the public schools at a fairly young age, while protecting and nurturing them through a critical period of development.
Upon re-reading this message, it sounds like I'm making a blatant marketing pitch (which, frankly, I am). Please forgive me and understand that my only interest in the program is that it survive so that it is an option for my two children, ages 4 and 1, when they are old enough to need it. I hope that there are a few families here who might find a home there. Sincerely, Dawn M. Rappold [drappold@gmail.com]
Since March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the foundation of how schools do business.
A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues.
He can visit the website and comment on what works and what doesn't. He can modify lessons to suit his students' needs and post the modifications online: Think of a cross between a first-grade reading workbook and Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia written and edited by users.
If Deutsch wants to see a lesson taught by someone who already has mastered it, he clicks on a YouTube video linked to the site and sees a short demo. "I find it's more teacher-friendly than a textbook," he says.
"I didn't have any of my own children at the time when I started doing this," Guy said. "The program started through our church and I thought investing time instead of just writing a check would be a great way to give back."
At many schools, Guy would stand out as a hero for his volunteerism.
Here, he's a star, but stars don't stand out. There's just too many of them.
Mimosa Elementary, a public kindergarten through fifth-grade Fulton County elementary school, bills itself as The Little School That Could.
The school is a throwback of sorts — or maybe it's a look ahead. Despite its 808 students, it is a place where everyone knows your name. It is the community-gathering place, catering to children and adults, where people look after each other. That's mostly by design, said Principal Cheryl Williams, who has worked 17 years at the school, the past three as principal. As the community around Mimosa changed, so did the needs of the students and the parents.
The more Mimosa got involved in the community, the more at ease parents became. And with time, the easier it got for Mimosa to apply for, and receive, grant money to offset the costs of some of the before-school and after-school programs.
"Mimosa's success is because of how the staff here and the teachers support the kids," Williams said. "There are nights when I have to make teachers leave the building at 8:30 or 9 at because they were still here doing some kind of volunteer work."
At a party of a friend recently I got into a discussion with someone about education and the use of computer technology. The person I was conversing with suggested that educational software could and should be developed to relieve teachers of the technical aspects of teaching. Why should each teacher have to figure out how to teach reading or arithmetic when the best minds could solve that problem and create a computer program to teach the children these basic skills? Having software relieve teachers of this technical aspect of teaching, he argued, would free teachers to do the work that needed human interaction teaching critical and creative thinking. This suggestion makes me uncomfortable.
We agree that helping students to learn to use their minds well, in critical and creative ways, is given far too little attention in the large majority of classrooms. This is especially true in classrooms serving low-income and minority students. Because these students generally do less well on standardized tests, the schools that serve them are pressured to focus on raising those test scores.
Free-Reading is an “open source” instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it's open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It's designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical “core” or “basal” program.
For-profit management of public schools is still in its infancy, and many wonder whether it can have a positive effect on student learning. In Philadelphia, that idea has been put to the test. The results, as we report in a paper issued last Friday by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, would not surprise Adam Smith.
The 18th-century economist explained that those who need to make a profit have strong incentives to do well by their customers. But can Smith's theory actually work when one is talking about educating students in the most challenging of urban schools -- at the very heart of a major metropolis? The answer appears to be yes.
When for-profit management of public schools was first proposed in Philadelphia six years ago, many in that city were extremely skeptical, if not aggressively hostile. So the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the entity responsible for the innovation, gave only the 30 lowest performing schools to for-profit companies, while another 16 were given to nonprofit organizations, including two of the city's major universities (Temple and the University of Pennsylvania). Others were reorganized by the school district itself.
In an empty classroom on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Walter H.G Lewin, a physics professor, is practicing one of his lectures on the science of everyday phenomena.
Lewin has been teaching at MIT since the 1960s, and his courses are legendary among generations of students there. But he wants to get this lecture -- where he dives into the science of rainbows, musical instruments and pacemakers -- exactly right. The audience is not just his students at MIT. It could be anyone around the world with access to a computer and Apple's iTunes store.
MIT is one of 28 colleges that have posted courses, campus speeches and other events on a section of iTunes known as iTunes U. Since the site was launched last spring with 16 institutions, material from it has been downloaded more than 4 million times.
Unlike other offerings from Apple's music store, where songs cost 99 cents, everything on iTunes U is free. Penn State University offers instruction on information management. Users can download a general chemistry class from Seattle Pacific University, a lecture on the psychosocial aspects of health care from Northeastern University or a class on Ben Franklin from Stanford University. (No universities in the Washington area participate.)
Finally, there was some really good news about education. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the percentage of proficient readers in the third grade had increased from 64.8% in 1998 to 87.4% in 2005. And this improvement was broad-based - every minority group advanced substantially.
If only it were true
Deception No. 1: Test questions, their scoring and definitions of "proficiency" changed constantly. The number of test items, the kinds of items (multiple choice vs. short answer) and their content varied every year the test was given. The score needed for proficiency dropped more than 40%, from 50 in 1998 to 29 in 2005.
That sleight of hand entailed complex statistics to estimate how hard the revised test might be for the next crop of third-graders. That estimate, rather than criteria for effective reading, became the cutoff for proficiency. Obviously, even if mathematics could prove that two tests are equally hard, changing the questions every year meant that subsequent tests weren't assessing the same thing. The tests were apples and oranges, and the mathematics a red herring.
Deception No. 2: Reading skills were less important than student guessing, and the test's margin of error. Fifty-three of the test's 58 items were multiple choice with four possible answers. So on average, students guessed 13 answers correctly. In addition, the test's margin of error was six points.
Now remember, only 29 correct were needed for "proficiency" in 2005. So with 13 for guessing and six for test error, we have 19 of those 29 (65%). And that's only the beginning. The statistical estimates of proficiency contributed additional error margins that were never added to the students' scores.
Besides that, schools teaching to the test add even more points. Then there's this: To move up from being a "minimal" reader to a "basic" reader required only 14 points - one more than random guessing and far less than guessing plus the error margins just described. The assessment data say more about the test than student reading.
Deception No. 3: Data on ethnic groups. The third-grade data reported by the DPI indicated that, from 1998 to 2005, every minority improved between 20% and 44%. But yearly average increases ranged from only 2.5% to 5.5%, less than the test's margin of error.
That means each year's improved scores could have resulted from testing error and how well students were prepared to take the test - not improved reading. And even if we concede the reality of those 2.5% to 5.5% improvements, they are still minuscule compared with what's obtained with well-researched reading programs. There was no reason to celebrate those data in the first place.
So what do the data tell us?
One, nobody knows how well those third-graders read and, according to the state, third-grade test data don't predict student reading levels even a year later. That makes sense: Without an accurate measure of current reading skills, how could we predict future performance?
Two, parents need an independent, deception-free appraisal of student learning.
Three, decades of research on education's fads amply demonstrate how those boom-to-bust cycles last about five to seven years. The third-grade test was used seven years - it was junked right on schedule following its retirement party, where the state school superintendent declared, "When people come together, we can see results," according to a July 13, 2005, article in the Journal Sentinel.
Why should we assume that the agency responsible for that third-grade test turned in a better performance the next time it evaluated our children and schools?
Roger Frank Bass of Port Washington is a professor of education at Carthage College. His e-mail address is rfb53074@aol.com
WHEN Peter and Jill Feuerstein sit around the dinner table with their teenage children, Betsy and Ben, it’s not unusual for them to have an animated discussion about a remote village in China, India or Zimbabwe. But unlike many people in their hometown of Larchmont, N.Y., the Feuersteins have a personal connection with these places. In June 2002, they embarked on a yearlong journey around the world with their two kids, then ages 14 and 11, in tow.
“The result is that all of these places matter to us now,” Mr. Feuerstein said. “The trip was a watershed experience for all of us.”
They are not alone. A growing number of American families with school-age children are turning their wanderlust into reality, say travel experts. Missions to expose children to cultural diversity and spend quality time together are among the reasons some parents are willing to exchange violin lessons and after-school sports for, say, a chance to dig for sapphires in New Zealand or to learn about land mines in Laos.
I receive many reports on how to improve our schools. This is an occupational hazard. Reading them is often confusing, depressing, disorienting and maddening. But there is no help for it. The academic papers, commission recommendations and task force action plans are usually written by some of the smartest experts in the country. They have stuff I need to know, so I plow through them.
It is best that I be vague, however, about what the margins of these reports look like after I have finished with them. I have just gone through, for instance, a paper by two leading experts, W. Norton Grubb of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jeannie Oakes of the University of California, Los Angeles. I looked forward to reading their report, "'Restoring Value' to the High School Diploma: The Rhetoric and Practice of Higher Standards. 432K PDF" It was published by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. They focus on the push for rigor in high schools and argue that the discussion spends too much time on narrow definitions of rigor, based on test scores and demanding courses, and ignores other conceptions, such as more sophisticated levels of understanding and the ability to apply learning in unfamiliar settings.
The authors write well and know their stuff. Nonetheless, here are some of the words I wrote on the margins: "stupid," "so what?" "no! no!" "recipe for disaster," "booo!" "who cares?" and a few others I may not quote on a family Web site.
Ordinarily, I would use this column to flay Grubb and Oakes for disagreeing with me on how to fix high schools, my favorite topic. But I am writing this on a lovely Saturday, with the leaves turning and the birds happily washing themselves in the little puddles left by my garden-watering wife. Why don't I, just this once, write about this report's good points? They include at least seven astute warnings about sloppy thinking in the high school reform debate. Here they are, plus one mistake in their thinking that I could not resist trashing.
The making of a UPS driver When big brown found that its twentysomething drivers were flunking out in droves, it had a serious problem on its hands: how to train generation y for a hard blue-collar job.
It's 9:45 A.M., and at 93 degrees and 1,000% humidity, Saddle Brook, N.J., feels more like the Serengeti than suburbia. I'm in a doorless truck, wearing high-waisted shorts, facing a day full of handcarts and heavy boxes. When I arose at 5:45 this morning - an hour I haven't seen the daytime side of since ... ever - the day had something of the adventurous about it. Like more of my Generation Y peers than one might expect, I'd never worn a uniform, or even properly nine-to-fived it for that matter, and here at last was my chance.
UPS would soon fix me, though. At 8:15, after touring the huge open warehouse of concrete and conveyor belts that is UPS's Saddle Brook center, I met Vincent "Vinny" Plateroti, a UPS "driver service provider," or DSP - that's UPS for driver - of 21 years and my escort for the day. At 8:45, we attended the "pre-work communications meeting," or PCM - UPS for morning meeting - which included reports from the previous day and a short but detailed lecture on hydration.
Critics with a bent for sarcasm, for years, have derided the No Child Left Behind law by giving it what they think is a more descriptive title.
No Child Allowed Ahead, they call it.
And it's not hard to see why. Newspapers and news magazines across the country have documented state after state and district after district gutting or eliminating millions of dollars in funding for programs for their highest-achieving students, diverting that money into programs for low-achieving students in order to meet the mandates of the law.
"I don't think we've seen a tremendous change in our district, for which I'm grateful," said Salina School Board president Carol Brandert, who later described the situation as "fortunate."
If Brandert -- a former English teacher well-known for being a stickler for using the right word -- is using words that sound oddly passive, there's a reason.
The question of cutting programs for top students has never come up, she said.
When Kay Scheibler first started heading the gifted program at Salina Central High School, 13 states mandated programs for top students. Today, Kansas is the only state with such a mandate.
"It's mandated, so we're not going to see any major changes without some legislative action," she said.
"We're unique, one out of 50," confirmed Kansas Commissioner of Education Alexa Posny.
State law regarding those formally identified by their school as gifted closely parallels that for special education students, even using the same terminology -- gifted students have an "Individual Education Plan."
I wrote on Friday that St. Anthony's, largest elementary school in Milwaukee's choice program, shows that parents will opt for rigor. It shows, as well, that choice schools can handle difficult cases.
Virtually all of St. Anthony's students are from low-income families. About 98% come from homes where Spanish is the language, says Principal Ramon Cruz. Many come, he says, because of St. Anthony's approach to language.
You wouldn't think that. Classes are not bilingual. The school is an immersion in English from the first day. Parents want this, says Cruz. They can get the alternative, having their children taught for at least a while in Spanish, at the nearby public school.
"The parents come to me and say, 'We want the kids to learn the English language,' " says Cruz, an ex-MPS principal for whom English is a second language.
So tots in 4-year-old kindergarten are working on their English vocabulary. Nearby, another group works with a Spanish-fluent aide, in English, on letter names. They'll start to read by January, says school president Terry Brown.
SCHOOL enrollments are increasing year by year, but qualified teachers are leaving the classroom in droves. More than a million veteran teachers are nearing retirement, and more will follow.
More than two million new teachers will be needed in the next decade alone, according to the National Education Association, and we should hope that they start lining up soon.
Economic research shows that an educated work force is the foundation of a stable economy. A good education does more than just increase a person’s earning potential. Studies find that regions that produce well-educated high school graduates have a higher rate of business start-ups and more economic activity. Graduates also provide communities with a continuing pool of taxpaying labor.
As teacher rosters shrink, the question is this: How long will such regions be able to hold onto those benefits?
Inside Wingra School, the day is just beginning, and already Lisa Kass is commandeering a discussion about violence sparked by storyboards written by her fourth- and fifth-grade students.
"Why do you play violent videogames?" she asks. "Do you think the violence affects you?" This leads to a 45-minute discussion that temporarily pushes back a math lesson.
"It's cartoon violence, it's not real violence," says one boy. "Well, really the goal is to kill people," admits another. That, says a third student, is why he plays mostly strategy videogames.
The students at Wingra are articulate, reflective and eager to share their opinions. They refine their thoughts as Kass prods them to be more specific or clearer.
Kass, a 19-year veteran Wingra teacher, says later: "I don't want to censor them, but I want them to think about what's appropriate and what effects violence might have on them and others."
The magic of charter schools isn't so much the innovation they strive to achieve. The magic is the effect these schools have on parents.
At the Nuestro Mundo charter school on Madison's East Side, you have to win a lottery to get your child into the program. This is true even for parents like me who live just a few blocks from Allis Elementary School, where Nuestro Mundo (which means "Our World " in Spanish) is housed.
Imagine that -- parents flooding a city school with enrollment applications for their kids. This is the opposite trend that Madison fears and must avoid.
Though rarely discussed in a frank way, Madison is increasingly nervous about middle- to upper-income parents losing faith in city schools and moving to the suburbs. As so many Madison leaders love to say: "As the schools go, so goes the city. " Madison doesn 't want to become Milwaukee.
The letter published in the Reston Connection four years ago said the program at Langston Hughes Middle School promoted "socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty."
The Middle Years Program, part of the International Baccalaureate system, was just getting started at Langston Hughes, and it wasn't the first time an IB program had been slapped around in Fairfax County. W.T. Woodson High School had thrown out its IB courses in 1999, in part because some parents and teachers thought they were too global and played down American history. Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell reported in 2004 that Fairfax parents were in revolt against IB. It was an exaggeration, but there was enough of a fight to raise concern about the program's future in the Washington area's biggest school district.
Some parents and teachers at Langston Hughes, and next door at South Lakes High School, where the MYP continued for ninth- and 10th-graders, distrusted a program invented in Switzerland and alien to what they remembered of their own more traditional middle school days. Other parents and teachers thought the MYP was wonderfully rigorous, with its commitment to global awareness, foreign languages and writing. The differences of opinion appeared to reflect tension between Americans who thought the country was too soft and those who thought the country was too dumb.
Who won? A visit to Langston Hughes this fall reveals that the people favoring smarter students have beaten those fearing foreign influence to an apparently invisible pulp. It is hard to find anyone who even remembers when the school's unusual curriculum was considered a threat to American values. Instead, past and present Langston Hughes parents are greeting an unexpected jump in SAT scores at South Lakes -- the biggest this year in Fairfax County -- as proof that they were right to go with the MYP, perhaps the most challenging middle school program in America for non-magnet schools.
High school dropouts are costing North Carolina taxpayers millions of dollars each year, according to a new report, but there's sharp disagreement on what is the best way to solve the problem.
The report released Wednesday by the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation says a single year's group of dropouts costs the state's taxpayers $169 million annually in lost sales tax revenue and higher Medicaid and prison costs. It's the first time a specific dollar figure has been given for the cost of dropouts in this state.
"In additional to the personal consequences it has on dropouts, this has a very real cost for taxpayers," said Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. The group instigated the report as part of its efforts to get public money vouchers for students to attend private schools.
The report's recommended solution of using taxpayer-funded vouchers to help students pay for private schools has drawn a sharp dividing line between supporters and critics of public schools.
With thousands of special-education students in Maryland high schools failing the state's graduation exams, parents and advocates are deeply divided about whether these students should have to pass the tests.
The discussion is taking place as part of a larger debate by the state school board over whether all students, beginning with the Class of 2009, must pass High School Assessments in English, algebra, biology and American government before they can receive a diploma.
While about two-thirds or more of students are passing the tests, only about one-third of those in special education are doing so. There are about 30,000 special-education students in Maryland high schools.
Madison School Board Discussion of School Models, Including Basic and Alternative Approaches
The Madison School Board's Performance and Achievement Committee recently discussed alternative education models. Watch the video here (or download the mp4 file via a CTRL Click. mp4 files can be played back on many portable media players such as iPods). Listen via this mp3 audio file.
With school in full swing, many kids are shouldering hours of nightly homework. When students are stumped, they can turn to their (sometimes clueless) parents or head to a flurry of online homework help sites.
We looked around for sites appropriate for our sixth-grade tester. And we wanted help solving this geometry problem: what is a better buy? A square pizza measuring 8 inches by 8 inches that costs $10 or a round pizza with a 9-inch diameter that also costs $10?
Our first site was thebeehive.org. Created by the not-for-profit One Economy Corp. as a tool to help low-income families, the site offers easy access to information on a wide range of topics. By clicking on "school" on the home page (none of the other topics looked at all relevant), we got right to homework help. The section is divided into elementary-, middle- and high-school help.
Our answer was just a few clicks away. "Math" in the high-school section took us to Webmath.com, which offered a coherent explanation of how to do the problem along with a "circle calculator" on which to do the arithmetic. We went to "geometry problem solver," then to "geometry-circles," and there was the formula; we plugged in the information we had, the diameter, to get the answer: the square pizza is bigger.
But her autistic son, who spends most of his time in a special-education classroom, is years behind. He “can read some words, can add a little and can barely draw a straight line.”
An editorial writer, Riley has backed high standards since she tutored a 30-year-old high school graduate with a third-grade reading level. But she agreed that students with special needs should have alternative ways to show mastery of the standards, such as providing a portfolio of work.
Its topic, in brief, is the relationship between education and regret – how each one creates the conditions for the other. The books you read at a certain age can put you on the wrong path, even though you don’t recognize it at the time. You are too naively ambitious to get much out of them — or too naive, perhaps, not that it makes much difference either way. And by the time you realize what you should have read, it’s too late. You would understand things differently, and probably better, had you made different choices. You would be a different person. Instead, you wasted a lot of time. (I know I did. There are nights when I recall all the time spent on the literary criticism of J. Hillis Miller and weep softly to myself.)
The booklet consists of transcripts of two meetings of N+1 contributors (a mixture of writers and academics, most in their 20’s and 30’s) as they discuss what they regret about their educations. Each contributor also submits a list of eight “Books That Changed My Life.”
The structure here seem to involve a rather intricate bit of irony. There is an explicit address to smart people in their teens, or barely out of them, offering suggestions on what to read, and how. It can be taken as a guide to how to avoid regret. The reflections and checklists are all well-considered. You could do a lot worse for an advice manual.
The web is an amazing educational resource. The quantity of information available on any given topic is more than most people will ever need, and probably more than they can handle. This vast amount of information is the web’s greatest strength, but also creates major usability problems. If you try to educate yourself online without a clear strategy, you’ll quickly find yourself frustrated and misinformed.
Effective online education goes beyond finding answers. It requires you to process numerous information sources, evaluate them based on credibility and relevance, and piece together a mosaic-like picture of the truth.
In an effort to transform the city’s gifted and talented programs, which he has long derided as a hodgepodge of offerings that have favored children in certain neighborhoods and with well-connected parents, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced a plan yesterday to limit the programs to students who score in the top 5 percent on admissions tests.
At a news conference yesterday announcing his plan, the chancellor estimated that roughly half the children in gifted programs now might not meet the new standards because they did not score in the 95th percentile or above on admissions tests. There have been no standard citywide cutoffs on admissions exams; last year, available slots in gifted programs were filled by the top scorers in each school district, and before that the admissions process varied throughout the city.
“In some districts you’ll find that half the kids that got in wouldn’t have met the 95th percentile threshold, and in other districts you’ll find a much different number,” Mr. Klein said. “The number is significant, and if you talk citywide, about half, that could be certainly in the ballpark.”
Ten years ago, I had the good fortune to win the confidence of two energetic teachers, Cliff Gill and Don Phillips at Mamaroneck High School in Westchester County, N.Y. They told me exactly how they assessed their students.
Gill, a math teacher, was tough. If a student missed two homework assignments, five points were subtracted from the student's 100-point report card grade. A third missed assignment meant another five points off. Everyone at that school knew how hard it was to get an A in Mr. Gill's class.
Phillips, a social studies teacher, was easy. He called himself the Great Grade Inflator. If a student with poor writing skills did his best on a paper, Phillips was inclined to give the student just as high a grade as a top student who turned in college-quality work. About 90 percent of the grades in Phillips's history courses were 90 or above on that 100-point scale.
No one asked Phillips to raise his standards. No one asked Gill to ease up. Grading at Mamaroneck High, as at most of the public high schools I have visited, is considered the teacher's prerogative, a matter of academic freedom. A teacher who gives many F's may be pressured to raise some of those grades to keep parents happy, but that is about as far as principals will go in interfering with teachers' assessment decisions.
Robert M. Hartranft, a retired nuclear engineer in Simsbury, Conn., does not like this at all. He cannot understand why public school administrators, who so often declare their commitment to equal treatment of every student, put up with such outrageous and inexplicable variation in what remains the most important assessments their students get--grades on report cards.
n its fourth year, the Madison school district's Spanish-English charter school is so popular that the parents who helped found the East Side school are having trouble getting their children in and there's talk of expanding the program.
The district's other charter school, Wright Middle, is one student above capacity and this year has a waiting list for the first time.
A growing number of residents say Madison needs more places, like charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Wright, that offer unique options to students. In response, the School Board has begun probing possibilities.
"The critical issue is, 'What do we need to do to engage a broader range of students in what's happening in school?'" board member Carol Carstensen said at an Oct. 22 Performance and Achievement Committee meeting that examined ways the district could create programs or schools.
In Dane County, charter schools operate in the Madison, Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona, Marshall and Deerfield districts.
In a move applauded by some charter school advocates, the state Department of Public Instruction has approved only 10 of 50 applications so far this year for federal funding aimed at expanding independent public schools.
Triggering the new scrutiny was a reminder this year from the U.S. Department of Education about requirements for the grants. That included ensuring Wisconsin applicants met the federal definitions for such terms as "eligible applicant" and "charter school," according to Education Department spokeswoman Elaine Quesinberry.
The 20% approval rate contrasts to previous years, when state administration of charter school grants helped fuel a boom of such schools. In 2006 alone, the DPI approved 100 of 121 applications, an 83% acceptance rate.
The federal intervention addresses concerns about the degree to which entities using the charter school title are autonomous and accountable, said Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
As information technology leaders convened for the Educause meetings Thursday in Seattle, they talked about some of the same issues that are attracting attention in higher ed outside of technology circles: links to K-12, making courses more engaging and measuring what students learn.
Looming over the proceedings was the stepped-up pressure from state governments, accreditors and the Department of Education that has led in recent years to a greater focus on assessment and learning outcomes. The implication of the accountability movement on information technology is clear in an example offered by Blackboard’s Peter Segall, the company’s president for higher education in North America: The two-year public colleges in Mississippi have adopted the company’s outcome system to track student progress against specific goals, he said. The reason? To “demonstrate accountability” to the citizens of the state.
New media literacy is the key missing component from our schools curricula. If you are to provide to your kids the mental tools and the manual skills required by today society you must help your sons master early in their teenage years how to express and communicate in person as well as through analog and digital media.
The teachers your government pays for are often the least media literate people you can find around, while leaving this key education component to the self-learning opportunities that the online world offers without any preparation, is akin to trying to learn singing from soccer stadium fans.
But the heart of the matter is not just the training of young mind in the skilled use of new media technologies, but rather the development of their critical thinking skills, their research and analysis methods, as well as their own individual and very personal voice: their public voice.
Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects
Charles T. Clotfeler, Helen F. Ladd and Jacob L. Vigdor [488K PDF]:
We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the non-random distribution of teachers and students among classrooms within schools. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials affect student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant. As a result, the uneven distribution of teacher credentials by race and socio-economic status of high school students – a pattern we also document – contributes to achievement gaps in high school.
Intel Teach uses a "Train the trainer" model to provide both face-to-face and online instruction to help teachers around the world integrate technology into their classrooms. Teachers create lesson plans that can be immediately implemented and that meet local and national education goals and standards.
Working with governments - national, regional or local - worldwide, Intel introduces the program in interested countries and communities, which are selected based on strength of their commitment to the program. Intel then works with an initial group of teachers to help them become Intel Teach trainers themselves. These trainers in turn are responsible for sharing their new skills with other teachers in their region.
To ensure that program curriculum maintains relevancy and reflects lessons learned from feedback and research, Intel regularly provides updated material to the Intel Teach trainers.
On its iTunes U portal, Apple’s digital-music store has already built up an impressive empire of recorded college lectures and events, all available for downloading. Now iTunes U is casting its gaze outside the ivory tower.
The portal has unveiled a new section, “Beyond Campus,” which collects educational material from museums, radio stations, and other public institutions. iTunes users can still watch lectures from Berkeley and guest speeches from Duke, but they can now also view live music performances from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Sound Live series and take video walkthroughs of Richard Serra’s sculptures the Museum of Modern Art.
Nate Fisher isn’t teaching English any more at Guildford High in Guildford, Connecticut. The untenured teacher resigned under pressure after being accused by a ninth-grade girl’s parents of giving her a graphic novel, Eightball #22, by Daniel Clowes, an acclaimed artist who recently drew a cartoon series for the New York Times. The book, also known as Ice Haven, depicts or discusses sex, partial nudity, and a man watching a woman in the shower.
Dual enrollment courses are usually community college or four-year college courses taken by high school students, either at the college or at their high schools with instructors paid by, or at least supervised by, the college. Looking at the records of 299,685 dual enrollment students in Florida, the researchers found that taking dual enrollment courses correlated to higher rates of high school graduation, enrollment in two-year and four-year colleges and academic performance in college. Students who took dual enrollment courses while enrolled in Florida high schools had higher college grade point averages and more college credits three years after high school graduation than similar students who had not done dual enrollment.
A review of the records of 2,303 New York students found those in the "College Now" dual enrollment program were more likely to pursue a bachelor's degree and have better college grades their first semester than students of similar backgrounds who did not do dual enrollment.
Despite the evidence that these college courses -- like AP and IB -- give high school students a taste of college rigor that can bring college success, the researchers reported that many students are being denied a chance to take them. The ill-considered limits on high schoolers who want to take college-level courses is also a big problem for AP, and suggests that most of our high school administrators and many state education officials are in dire need of an attitude adjustment.
Nash's "Guidelines" state that no credit will be permitted for non-MMSD courses whenever THEY deem they offer a comparable course (i.e., regardless of format) ANYWHERE in the MMSD. Even when the MMSD doesn't offer a comparable course, they will permit a maximum of TWO ELECTIVE credits, i.e., they can not be used to fulfill specific requirements for graduation. Thus, if these Guidelines are allowed to stand, no credit whatsoever will be permitted for any high school or college course the district offers that a student takes, instead, via WCATY, EPGY, UW-Extension, online, correspondence, etc., regardless of the student's ability to access the District's comparable course.
Andrea Martin needed high school credits in biology and health, but the alternative school in Indianapolis Public Schools she attends doesn't offer those classes.
Instead of forgoing the credits, Martin enrolled in IPS' new virtual school, which offers basic courses for students like her, remedial courses for those who have fallen behind, and advanced courses.
Each evening after her shift at a KFC restaurant, Martin goes home and logs on to her classes for up to five hours a night. She likes that she can go as fast or slow as she wants but sometimes wishes a teacher were there to help answer a question or clarify a point.
"It's good, but sometimes it's a little hard because you're teaching yourself, and it's hard to find the answers," she said. "It's kind of hard where you can't ask but have to do it on your own."
A teacher is available to consult with students, but the online classes are much more self-directed than a typical high school classroom. So far the costs have been small but will increase as staff and courses are added.
When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy.
I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends -- most but not all of them white -- whom I've chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached school age:
I'm sorry. You were right. I was wrong.
After nearly 20 years in the city's Takoma neighborhood, the last six in a century-old house that my wife and I thought we'd grow old in, we have forsaken the city for the suburbs.
What that advice overlooks is that when a school is in danger of not meeting the AYP standards, all students in the school are affected, not just those who are in danger of failing the test. Last year at our neighborhood elementary school in Silver Spring, the principal said there was a real chance the school would not meet the standard. Consequently, the entire focus of the school was on the Maryland School Assessment tests. For example:
All the students at the school, even kindergartners, were drilled on how to answer "brief constructed responses" (short written answers to essay questions), because they are an important part of the MSA. My son was in second grade last year and did not even take the assessment tests, but BCRs came home regularly in his backpack.
The focus of the leadership meetings in the school is on the MSA. I'm active in the school and attended one of those leadership meetings last year, and know from other parents who attended other meetings that most of the discussion at those meetings is on the MSA and what the school needs do to ensure it will make AYP.
THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. “The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions”—you name it, it's been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.
Minnesota New Country School is not your typical high school. There are no classes, no teachers and no walls. Students work on projects at their own computers. The experiment seems to be working: The school sends 90 percent of its graduates to college.
Mike Caulfield points to this video which, he says, “does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become.” The large lecture hall shown in that video certainly reinforces the point. Seeing it reminds me of a telling episode this past April. I was writing about Darwin and I recalled something I’d heard in a biology lecture I’d heard the previous spring on one of the Berkeley podcasts.
I went back to the site and wound up referring to the current year’s version of that lecture in video form. As I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline looking for the part I remembered, my daughter — who was then between high school and college — watched over my shoulder. Eventually she said: “So, the students just sit there?”
That was the first of three revelations. The second was my realization that I’d certainly absorbed those lectures more fully on a series of bike rides, breathing fresh air and soaking up sunshine, than had the students sitting in the lecture hall.
The third revelation came when I found the part I was looking for, and realized that it wasn’t as good as last year’s version, which had been overwritten by the current version.
WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”
Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future. But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life no longer seem all that important?
Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago — as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992 and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session, where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former beatnik.
Early in May of this year I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of Chicago Press. “I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ ” he said. “I put that on my reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. “We had a social life that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class. They would argue night and day in the lounge!”
Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison's Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application
I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:
I'm writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd's high school "reform" initiative, particularly in light of two things:
The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?
In other words, how do you feel about accountability? :)
They replied:
Marj Passman:
I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students -- especially the college bound - but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I'm all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about "accountability" and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I've seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I'd like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I'm all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction - bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked - so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I'm sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette's four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole's post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.
ne of the central lessons of No Child Left Behind is that if school sanctions are tied to test scores, the testing tail can wag the schooling dog. And a key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren't measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.
While a debate rages about whether our tests should be created at the national or state level, this argument is focused on the wrong issue.
We need to focus on the quality of our standards and assessments rather than fighting over who administers them. Unless we change the way we think about learning and testing, it won't matter who makes the tests. They will still be a major part of the problem of American education, rather than the solution.
The plain truth is that the United States is falling far behind other nations on every measure of educational achievement. In the latest international assessments, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in math - on par with Latvia - 20th in science, and 19th in reading, even further behind than a few years ago. In addition, these other countries surpass us in graduation rates and, over the last decade, in higher education participation as well.
What if the whole program were moved into the Marshall High School building, giving it more room, and maybe even taking the Marshall name?
Milwaukee Public Schools leaders are doing a lot of thinking along those lines, prodded by a strong desire by Morse Principal Rogers Onick and others at his school to expand into high school programming.
"There currently are discussions with the staff at Morse Middle School about relocating," MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said. "There seems to be some interest in pursuing that."
Behind those cautious statements lies a potentially bold change in MPS. Onick says there is no high school in Wisconsin whose entire program is aimed at gifted and talented students.
And if Morse took that route, it could have an impact on high schools such as Rufus King and Riverside, generally college-bound programs that are frequently the choice of Morse graduates.
Q.You were obviously unhappy in the book at times about what kids (at Tyler Heights) weren't doing - social studies, geography, just orientation to the world, opening their minds in a broader sense. . . . What were kids missing by having this kind of testing and drill-oriented curriculum?
A. I think critical thinking. Skills that they really needed to be starting to build at that age that they weren't necessarily developing outside of school, as you would have liked. Also, engagement in what this all is about. . . . I think a lot of teachers felt sort of constrained by the sort of structure they were in and couldn't take the tangents they wanted to take to help the kids understand, and sometimes couldn't take the time they wanted when the kids needed to back up and learn some basic skills but the pacing guide insisted you need to move along. . . . It was just a very sort of structured and sometimes even Spartan day.
Q.You went to Maple Dale (School) in Fox Point yourself. Compare Maple Dale and Tyler Heights.
A. If I had to say the two things that they had in common, they were: an abundance of adults who clearly cared about the children and connected with them, and I still appreciate that to this day. That was evident at Tyler Heights. . . . The other thing was that we had resources. We had all the books we needed, we had a perfectly acceptable facility, the building was clean, and we had the equipment and tools we needed. Tyler Heights, even though the student population is low income, has a lot of resources, mainly because it is in an affluent district and it receives Title 1 funding from the federal government.
Proponents of No Child Left Behind - including the odd couple of President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - received uplifting news last month: The nation's fourth-graders had finally stirred on federal tests, showing gains in reading and math. Eighth-graders saw little progress in reading, but they did experience an uptick in math.
The news reached Capitol Hill in the nick of time, as Bush and Democratic leaders struggle to renew Washington's controversial education reforms. No Child adherents had waited five long years - and spent more than $90 billion - before seeing these tepid yet encouraging results.
Still, Bush's signature domestic policy is in deep political trouble, and even its Democratic sponsors continue to ignore its fundamental flaws.
Some business groups side with Bush and Pelosi, urging quick renewal and even tougher love for local educators, such as tying teacher pay to student learning curves.
But two recent polls reveal that a majority of Americans believe that No Child should be rewritten or simply scrapped, and are worried that the law is narrowing what children are taught and forcing them to spend countless hours getting ready for nonstop tests.
Support for No Child is weakest among suburban Democrats and independent voters, a fact not lost on Sen. Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates who now speak harshly against the law.
Politics aside, is this massive federal experiment boosting children's achievement beyond the long-running benefits of states' own accountability programs, which focus on helping teachers instead of dinging them? Evidence to date suggests the answer is no.
The NAEP 2007 reports leave me without real understanding of the results, and charts included in the reports do not help. Looking at the state and ethnic data in a slightly different but very simple way, information that seemed to be lacking in the official reports stand out.
For the first steps, we'll look at only the 4th grade math scores by state.
The following is the state (jurisdiction) data by ethnic groups which I will use throughout. I've highlighted several of our neighboring states: Wisconsin in red, Michigan in blue, Iowa in yellow, Ohio in green, Minnesota in lavendar.
Using a simple 2-level stem and leaf plot shows a general skewed normal (bell curve) distribution for each ethnic group. Scores of the states mentioned above are in a larger font, with Wisconsin further in red. The stem portion of this chart consists of the first two digits of a state's score (with a - or =), and the leaves are the final digit. A stem ending with - will have final digits of 0-4, a stem ending with = are for scores ending with 5-9.
The Hispanic score seems bi-modal, with the White distribution showing a slight tail on the high side, Blacks and Asian distribution showing low end tails. Asian scores show a definite tendency to score on the high end of states scores, while white scores are definitely skewed to the low end. What can be seen here also, but subtly, is there does not seem to be an overlap of the aggregated state scores for whites and blacks. For Blacks in Wisconsin generally, the chart visually represents the quality of education Wisconsin they are receiving here -- very poor.
Of course, this says nothing about how well individual students did on the test -- aggregation hides most information that is necessary to make data-driven decisions.
We need to spread out this chart's distributions to detect other interesting facts.
In this 5-level stem and leaf chart, the stem values end with the symbols -, t, f, s, =, where the - bin is for scores ending with 0 or 1, t for 2 and 3, f for 4 and 5, s for 6 and 7, = for 8 and 9.
Now we can see most definitely that the distributions for blacks and whites do not overlap, that Wisconsin Black scores are way out in the tail of the distribution. Looking at the extremes of these distributions show surprising results (at least to me). Notice that DC whites score at the top and might be statistical outliers, while DC Blacks are at the opposite end and also may be statistical outliers, and the NJ Asians are at the top, but unlikely to be outliers due to the wide spread of their state average scores. (Outliers are points that are numerically distant from the main distribution).
The DC results by ethnicity for whites was surprising. Looking only at the state scores without separating by ethnicity, the distribution of points look like:
A separate calculation shows that indeed, DC is an outlier when ethnicity is ignored and is only 2 points away from being an extreme outlier. (The outlier cut-score is 224 and the extreme outlier cut-score is 212, DC score is 214).
Going back to the disaggregation by ethnicity the summary calculations are
The 9-Number Summaries are used to calculate outliers, and determine drift in the distributions. Each row of the summary table is a kind of percentile. Line M is the median, H represents the low and high 25%, E is the low and high 12.5%, D is the 6.25% cut point, and R represents the range lowest and highest values. (The numbers following these letter designations are the score rank at these cut points).
With a score of 212, Wisconsin Blacks score in the lower 6% of the states (D4 is 213) but this score does not make it an outlier, but that is hardly a badge of honor given how poorly all states are doing. Wisconsin Hispanics score at the median of all Hispanics with a score of 229, and Wisconsin Asians score on the cusp of the lower 25% of all Asians at 245, and Wisconsin whites score on the cusp of the upper 25% of all whites at 250.
The drift calculations (in the Median column) do not show distribution drift, but outlier calculations do show that DC whites are high-end outliers. (A little preview of the NAEP 8th grade math: NAEP numbers show that there was not enough whites in DC public schools by 8th grade to be measured -- in our nation's capital, the public schools are fully segregated?)
Surprisingly, Hawaii (HI) in the Asian category is on the cusp of being an outlier at the low end with a state score of 233.
The HI score was surprising to me since it has a very large Asian/Pacific Islander population, and I expected this ethic group to have the political power to ensure schools would function for them. However, further reading indicates that whites are the upper class and have the power, followed by people of Chinese descent. The rest, native Hawaiians, Japanese, and other Pacific Islander groups are at the bottom of the power and wealth hierarchy. Without a better ethnic categorization, the NAEP test will not show the likely educational imbalance among franchised and disenfranchised.
Continuing with the Asian/Pacific Islander category, I was surprised to see NJ as the top state. At 267, NJ is not an outlier (the cut point is 271), but it is close. An improvement of 1/3 grade level (assuming 12 points separates one grade from the next), would bring them to high-end outlier status.
Looking at the scores for Wisconsin Blacks, it's quite clear that Wisconsin (Milwaukee schools primarily?) are doing very poorly for Blacks. It's not just a matter of how the scores rank among states, but how Wisconsin fits within the distribution of all states. The data above shows not only low rank but Wisconsin Blacks are educated with far below the efforts of other states, represented by the main body of the distribution.
It is now widely acknowledged that GCSEs don’t stretch the most able, so how do schools with only bright pupils cope?
My nephew, a bright boy, goes to the type of school where everyone gets an A* in their GCSEs. On the morning his own results were published, he couldn’t be bothered to find out what they were. Instead, he went off to play tennis.
For able children, GCSEs have become what Tony Little, headmaster of Eton, described as boy scouts’ badges. More than half of those taking this year’s edition were awarded an A* or A and, if you narrow the field down to the top selective schools, independent and state, the figure shoots up to over 80 per cent.
GCSE doesn’t distinguish sufficiently well at the top, says Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Education Research at the University of Buckingham and a special adviser to the All-Commons Education Committee. They award persistence and care, not talent and ability.
But those who teach the talented and able as well as the diligent and the careful have increasingly tried to find ways to make the exam system more relevant to their pupils.
Wisconsin high school students may apply to attend one or two courses in nonresident school districts, while remaining enrolled in their resident school districts for the majority of their classes.
ACCEPTANCE OR REJECTION—RESIDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT
No later than one week before the start of the course, the resident school district is required to notify the student if the application is denied (notification is not required for approval).
The resident school district may deny a student’s application only for the following reasons:
the cost of the course creates an undue financial
the course conflicts with the individualized education program (IEP) for a student who needs special education.
No later than one week before the start of the course, the resident school district must also notify the student if the course does not meet the high school graduation requirements in the resident school district (although the student may attend the course even if it does not meet the high school graduation requirements.)
Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.
Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”
The short answer, he said, is no.
If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.
“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”
The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.
Guess what’s been happening?
“We’ve had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states,” said Dr. Koretz. “We’ve had maybe six good studies that ask: ‘If the scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?’ And all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.
“In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids didn’t actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you saw no improvement.”
System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) research project at UW-Madison
I would like to direct readers' attention to our our web site where we have highlighted key concepts of the System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) research project here at the Wisconsin Center for Research Education, UW Madison. The vision of the SCALE partnership is to make it the rule, instead of the exception, for every student, every year, to experience high-quality teaching of core mathematics and science concepts. The partnership brings together mathematicians, scientists, engineers and education practitioners to build a new approach to reforming K-12 mathematics and science education. The partnership seeks to improve the mathematics and science achievement of all students at all grade levels in the four partner school districts (MMSD is one of them) by engaging them in deep and authentic science and mathematics instructional experiences. Simultaneously, the partnership seeks to improve pre-service and in-service mathematics and science professional learning. Finally, the partnership seeks to improve models of collaboration among K-12 and post-secondary institutions in ways that more fully integrate engineering, mathematics and science faculty. The goal is to provide a seamless K-through-Infinity education system in the service of mathematics and science education for all.
I will periodically provide updates for the community so that you can read what the Board of Education (BOE) is working on during the year. I also do so when I have particular interest in, or concerns regarding, decisions made on behalf of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).
One area that I believe is of utmost importance and may be on the mind of the public is high school reform.
I am particularly interested in answering two questions as they relate to this issue.
First, what are the problem(s) we are trying to address as a district in our high schools?
Second, how does the current high school framework align with the skills and knowledge required by colleges and employers and in the overall reform movement of standards and accountability?
To address this issue as a board member, I look for specific timelines, benchmarks and periodic updates.
I think it would well serve the community and the entire board to know exactly where we are in the process. Originally, high school reform in MMSD was presented to the community in a BOE Special Meeting and referred to as a "blank slate."
Recently, the district submitted an application for a Small Learning Communities (SLC) federal grant. It was not awarded. It was at this time that I had requested that the BOE review the process of high school reform in MMSD at a BOE Special Meeting. I have also raised concerns that the administration has decided to apply for the grant again. The board has been told that we have a good chance that we will get the grant on the second round. I have again requested that the board meet as soon as possible.
However, as a board member of seven – there must be four BOE members willing to submit such a request to put this topic on the agenda. So far, I am the only member requesting this motion.
I raise this issue because of my firmly held belief that my role as a BOE member is to represent the community and provide, to the best of my ability, an accessible, open process when major decisions are made on behalf of the community.
It appears that as of today, the grant will be resubmitted before the only scheduled BOE meeting on high school reform on the 19th of November.
A little history. The high school reform process should be transparent and accessible to the entire community. I am trying to get a handle on this process myself. Here is a look at what has transpired so far:
“I believe that discussion concerning the way in which our schools prepare all students for post secondary education and employment in an increasingly global economy is too important to rush.
Interest in this topic is high and we can best serve our future students, our broader community and our beliefs as educators by taking the quality time necessary to hear from parents, students, staff, business people, post secondary institutions, and others who value what a high school education can provide.
I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses. We need a tableau rosa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.”
And by November 27, 2006 I heard this from the superintendent regarding his presentation to the Board: “Change occurs more effectively, when the broad public has something to react to.”
It appears however, that when it comes to high school reform, the public may have little to react to as we move our high schools into the SLC model.
Now I recognize that the driving force may be the reality that there are limited resources for funding improvements to our high schools. This, of course, is in direct relation to a broken public education finance system in Wisconsin. But once the SLC check is presented, who in their right mind will question taking the money or back away from the SLC model?
We will be committed to this model without adequate input from the public for the next few years and we will place this in the lap of a new superintendent.
We will be committed to this model without an accessible, district-wide set of diagnostic and longitudinal benchmark assessments that have been determined to lead to continued academic and/or professional success once our students leave high school.
We will be committed to this model without adequate discussion in a public and open format among all members of the community.
We will be committed to this model without ever bringing to light our evaluation of current programs implemented at our high schools now so as to ensure that they are instructionally effective.
I have been told that the high school redesign is an initiative of the administration and was defined by the high school principals, the Assistant Superintendent and the Superintendent. The Board is essentially being told to wait to see what gets reported from this administrative exercise.
Much of what I have learned from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards over the past few years tells me that this should be a decision with broad community input. It is the duty of the Board to set the long-term vision of our high schools of the future first; and then, instruct the administration to make it happen.
My question as a board member is this: Is high school reform in Madison really a blank slate or has it become a black box? Community members, you tell me; I welcome public discussion.
This study, based on an analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000, finds that, once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools. The study also found that students attending traditional public high schools were as likely to attend college as those attending private high schools. In addition, the report also finds that young adults who had attended any type of private high school were no more likely to enjoy job satisfaction or to be engaged in civic activities at age 26 than those who had attended traditional public high schools.
When the young people who run washingtonpost.com recruited me to moderate the Web site's new "Admissions 101" discussion group, they said it would be a breeze. All I had to do was come up with a few provocative topics each week and stand back. Our readers would be the ones who would make it interesting. I wouldn't have to miss any of my afternoon naps.
As proof of both the washingtonpost.com staff's honesty, and my decrepitude, take a look at this topic on the discussion group list: "Will AP or IB REALLY get you college credit?" I put it up more than five months ago, on May 22. As of yesterday, it had more than 250 posts and was still going strong. How many of those posts were mine? About five. Some of the discussion group members are irritated by my absence from their intriguing debate, for which I offer a couple of lame excuses below.
What this topic has taught me is that the battle between pro-Advanced Placement and pro-International Baccalaureate people is a bigger deal than I thought it was. AP and IB both offer college-level exams to high school students that can earn credit at many colleges. I consider the argument trivial, like comparing a Mercedes to a BMW. They are both very fine cars; whether you choose one or the other doesn't make much difference.
But I was wrong about the importance of the AP-IB choice to other people. The Admissions 101 debate indicates it is a big deal and is likely to become even more important as IB -- at the moment tiny compared to AP -- continues its rapid growth. The number of people posting on the issue is relatively small, but they are unusually articulate and well-connected advocates for their point of view. As AP and IB continue to increase their influence over the American education system, the argument is going have an impact.
This is Phil-180, also known as "Philosophy & Star Trek."
"It's got a better title than 'Metaphysics, Metaphysics and More Metaphysics,' " Wetzel joked. "But seriously, the show can display the philosophy, doing the job for you in a way that a thousand words can't."
Courses such as the one Wetzel designed, which frequently attract students because they are unconventional, engage students in the learning process better than traditionally conceived classes, educators say. But, they add, there just aren't anywhere near enough of them.
"I think some courses are being designed better today, but to put that in context, that means we've moved from 10 percent to maybe 25 percent," said L. Dee Fink, an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma and an instructional development expert. "There's still a massive percentage of poorly designed courses."
In 2002, two of Congress' liberal Democratic lions - Rep. George Miller of Martinez and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy - stood behind President Bush as he signed the No Child Left Behind Act, a law they promised would shine a bright light on the failures in America's public schools and kick-start reforms.
Five years later, Miller, now chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, is still a believer. But after traveling the country - listening to complaints from parents, teachers, school administrators and governors about the law's testing regime and stiff sanctions - he now admits it needs fixing.
"We've learned a lot, and we shouldn't ignore that evidence," said Miller, who is leading the overhaul of the law in the House, which starts this week. "What we're trying to do in this reauthorization bill is to look for those changes to make this a smarter, fairer, better law."
Reform is coming to No Child Left Behind, but the question is what kind. Teachers unions, which bitterly oppose the law, are pushing to relax its rigid testing rules and penalties. Business groups, eager for better-educated workers, want to see the tough accountability measures preserved or expanded. Many states and local school districts are clamoring for more flexibility in implementing the law, which expires this year.
Miller is seeking a middle ground: He wants to keep the law's requirement of annual tests in reading and math for third- to eighth-graders and 10th-graders, but add other measurements - such as percentage of kids in college-prep classes - to help schools show they are meeting the law's demands to make yearly progress in student achievement.
The d.school's first major venture in the world of K-12 education opened this week at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA. Called the Innovation Lab, the project is a 3500 square foot space where students in the K-8 school will develop their design thinking skills. The project cycle was rapid with needfinding in April and May, conceptual prototype in June, and full-scale prototyping at Sweet Hall in July. July's prototype sessions brought 20 kids a week to campus and deeply informed everything from how to brainstorm with 1st graders, to how high to build the tables. The team also conducted a 3-day teacher workshop with Nueva faculty where teachers reported they rediscovered the importance of play and one was quoted as saying, the Innovation Lab, "is not just a space, it's a movement."
At age 13, Luis Sanchez's mother kicked him out of the house -- permanently -- for misbehaving.
"She just brought me to court and was just, like, you know, 'I don't want him,'" Luis explains.
The memory hurts. For two weeks he lived on the streets.
A year later, angry and on drugs, he arrived at MATCH in Boston, a high school where school starts at 7:45 a.m. and the day lasts until 5, or even 8 p.m. -- late hours required for any kid falling behind.
MATCH, opened its doors in September 2000, aiming to close the achievement gap by preparing inner-city students not just to get a spot in college, but to succeed in college as well.
Like other charter schools, it is a tuition-free, independent public school. MATCH receives two-thirds of its operating support from the state, and must raise the rest privately.
The school is supported by Boston University, which provides use of athletic facilities and allows students to audit courses, and with other colleges, universities and local businesses.
Students are admitted by blind lottery. Almost all of them are minorities, the majority live in poverty, and most arrive at MATCH well behind in math and reading.
MATCH provides a mix of rigorous rules, demanding academics and regular tutoring. The rules are posted everywhere at MATCH. Principal Jorge Miranda says signs dictate, "everything from the dress code, unexcused absences, tardiness, poor posture in class."
High expectations. One would think, with Madison's abundant intellectual, community and financial resources, that these kinds of opportunities should be available here.
The parents of Damion Frye’s ninth-grade students are spending their evenings this fall doing something they thought they had left behind long ago: homework.
So far, Mr. Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.
If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.
The point, he said, is to keep parents involved in their children’s ’ education well into high school. Studies have shown that parental involvement improves the quality of the education a student receives, but teenagers seldom invite that involvement. So, Mr. Frye said, he decided to help out.
The program Friday included a tour of some choice schools in Milwaukee. I’ve done tours like this in other places, including Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Michigan. They are always enlightening. We had one especially inspiring visit to a school called the Milwaukee College Preparatory School.
The school began as a Marva Collins concept school (using the teaching strategies of the famous Chicago educator) and has evolved into a K-8 program that seeks to place its graduates in top high schools in Milwaukee and prep schools around the country.
Principal Robert Rauh is a former teacher in a prep school who wanted to take the high expectations and rich curriculum he was used to into poor neighborhoods and challenge low income kids to achieve.
In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Public Economics, economist Rajashri Chakrabarti, find that public schools were motivated to improve after 1999, when religious schools were allowed to take vouchers and the public schools lost more money for every student who used a voucher to leave.
The Silk Road Project is a not-for-profit arts, cultural and educational organization founded in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who serves as its artistic director, and led by Laura Freid, executive director and CEO. The Project has a vision of connecting the world’s neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences around the globe. Inspired by the cultural traditions of the historic Silk Road, the Silk Road Project is a catalyst promoting innovation and learning through the arts.
Along the Silk Road explores the vast ancient network of cultural, economic, and technological exchange that connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. Students learn how goods, belief systems, art, music, and people traveled across such vast distances, resulting in interdependence among disparate cultures. Yo-Yo Ma has referred to the Silk Road as the “Internet of antiquity,” and by studying this network of trading routes, students not only learn about the historical interconnectedness of people and ideas throughout the world, but also gain a new perspective on contemporary issues of globalization.
Along the Silk Road is a multidisciplinary course of study including materials appropriate for social studies, geography, art and music classes.
But that clear and present danger is not here today. It’s a slowly growing problem that we haven’t really faced up to, that we are rapidly losing our lead in this war for minds. The Cold War is over. The arms race is over. It’s now a mind race.
Countries like China, India, and Korea have invested heavily in education over the last decade. They are now producing more scientists and engineers than we are. It is my concern that as we look to the future, innovation is going to come from the other side of the world.
Lacking a clear and present danger, the American education system is not mobilizing to support science, technology, engineering and math. Today’s generation of kids is the most technology savvy group that this country has ever produced. They are born with an iPod in one hand and a cell phone in another. They’re text messaging, e-mailing, instant messaging. They’re on MySpace, YouTube & Google. They’ve got Nintendo Wiis, Game Boys, Play Stations.
Their world is one of total interactivity. They’re in constant communication with each other, but when they go to school, they are told to leave those “toys” at home. They’re not to be used in school. Instead, the system continues teaching as if these kids belong to the last century, by standing in front of a blackboard.
Education has not changed, and that’s a problem. It was a good system when I came through, but today’s kids have changed, and that’s the part that educators are not realizing. It’s the kids that have changed, and our education system needs to change along with them.
We have completed our review of applications received under the Smaller Learning Communities Program (CFDA 84.215L) [MMSD SLC Application]. The Department received a total of 236 eligible applications in this competition. Of these, 38 were selected for funding. Unfortunately, your application was not selected for funding this year.
Each application received a comprehensive review b y external reviewers who had experience implementing, documenting, or evaluating policies, programs, or practices at the national, state, or district level to improve the academic achievement of public high school students. Panel members included teachers, school, district, and state administrators, technical assistance providers, education researchers and program evaluators. Using the criteria published in the Federal Register notice, three reviewers independently rated each application and documented strengths and weaknesses.
The Department does not return copies of unfunded application to the applicant but we will retain a copy of your application until the end of this calendar year in the event that you wish to discuss it with us. We are enclosing a copy of the reviewers' evaluations and comments, which you may use to strengthen your proposal for future competitions. To that end, please check our website beginning in November 2007 for information about the next Smaller Learning Communities grants competition: http://www.ed.gov/programs/slcp/applicant.html.
We appreciate the time and thought that went into the planning and preparation of your application. Your ongoing school improvement efforts are critical to improving educational services that will meet the unique needs o f high school students. Again, we do regret that we are unable to support your application and thank you for your effort.
Please forward any further inquiries to me at smallerlearningcornmunities@ed.gov.
The first reviewer noted (page 3) that "(5) As part of the district's strategic planing there is no examination of the successes and weaknesses of previous SLC initiatives (pages 15-16).".
The 2007 state testing data is out and I thought I'd take another look. Again I'm looking here at Dane County area schools only compared with each other and state-wide as well. The data you will see only includes non-poor students -- you can read more about why below.
Some Madison Elementary Schools are Tops
As you can see, Madison schools are simultaneously excellent and terrible. The top 8 are MMSD schools as are 6 of the bottom 10. Wow!
Not only does MMSD have top elementary schools in the area but the top 8 are above the 95% percentile statewide. That means those 8 schools are better (with respect to my measurements) than 95% of the other elementary schools in Wisconsin.
Furthermore, MMSD schools Lowell, Randall, and Van Hise are the #1, #2, and #3 elementary schools STATEWIDE. Yes you heard right. According to my ranking those are the 3 best elementary schools in the state for non-poor students.
Of the top 25 schools statewide, 7 are MMSD schools. No other area schools make the top 25.
You might consider moving to one of those attendance areas because these schools and the students in them are really, really good.
The study found that "cut scores" - the line between proficient and not proficient - vary widely among the 26 states, casting doubt on the question of what it means when a state says a certain percentage of its students are doing well. Those percentages are central to the way the federal No Child Left Behind education law works.
The law's accountability system, which focuses on things such as whether a school or district is making "adequate yearly progress," is driven largely by how many students meet the standards a state sets for proficiency in reading and math. The goal is that all students, with a handful of exceptions, be proficient by 2014.
"Five years into implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, there is no common understanding of what 'proficiency' means. . . . This suggests that the goal of achieving '100 percent proficiency' has no coherent meaning, either," says a summary of the study, issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
To illustrate the differences among the states, the study's authors gave an example in which a fourth-grader in Wisconsin would be regarded as proficient if the child could correctly answer a fairly simple question involving cats and dogs, while a child in Massachusetts would not be proficient if he or she couldn't answer a formidable question about the meaning of a passage by Leo Tolstoy.
From the Fordham Institute report:
Cats and Dogs vs. Tolstoy
Wisconsin
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Wisconsin's proficiency cut score (16th percentile).
Which sentence tells a fact, not an opinion?
A. Cats are better than dogs.
B. Cats climb trees better than dogs.
C. Cats are prettier than dogs.
D. Cats have nicer fur than dogs.
Massachusetts
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Massachusetts' proficiency cut score (65th percentile).
Read the excerpt from "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by Leo Tolstoy
So Pahom was well contented, and everything would have been right if the neighboring peasants would only not have trespassed on his wheatfields and meadows. He appealed to them most civilly, but they still went on; now the herdsmen would let the village cows stray into his meadows, then horses from the night pasture would get among his corn. Pahom turned them out again and again, and forgave their owners, and for a long time he forbore to prosecute anyone. But at last he lost patience and complained to the District Court.
What is a fact from this passage?
A. Pahom owns a vast amount of land.
B. The peasant's intentions are evil.
C. Pahom is a wealthy man.
D. Pahom complained to the District Court.
Source: Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The correct answers are B for the first item and D for the second.
A new study of state achievement tests offers evidence that the No Child Left Behind law's core mission -- to push all students to score well in reading and math -- is undermined by wide variations in how states define a passing score.
YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.
The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
The Math Task Force was not funded by NSF. We have received funding from the University to conduct the Mathematics Evaluation part of the proposal that went to NSF. The rest of the proposal funded a case study of the actual process used by the Task Force we will not conduct that part.
We were notified last week that the Smaller Learning Communities Grant was not funded. We are reviewing the critique from the reviewers with plans to reapply in November.
I asked a high school kid walking along Commonwealth Avenue if he knew who the vice president of the United States was.
He thought for a moment and then said, “No.”
I told him to take a guess.
He thought for another moment, looked at me skeptically, and finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the U.S.
Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children are raising children of their own in an ever more technologically advanced and globalized society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.
A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge.
What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.
“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve got a bunch of little things that we think are moving in the right direction, but we haven’t stepped back and thought, ‘O.K., how big an improvement are we really talking about?’ ” Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.
Herbert is spot on. The same old, same old (or, "Same Service") strategy at ever larger dollar amounts has clearly run its course.
Herbert's words focus on addressing teacher quality
"Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom."
, and alternative school models:
The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. It has worked in cities big and small, and in rural areas. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.
Said Professor Kane: “These alternative models that involve the longer school day and a much more dramatic intervention for kids are promising. If that’s what it takes, then we need to know that, and sooner rather than later.”
Jim and Robyn Dahlin knew replacing the roof of their home in Greenbrae, Calif., would be expensive. But they hadn't planned to spend an extra $15,000 on solar panels. For that, they have their 8-year-old son, Luke, to thank.
After Luke acted in a school play about global warming, he went on a campaign to get his parents to install the panels. He routinely lectured his dad from the backseat of the minivan about how reducing their energy consumption could help save the planet.
Mr. Dahlin says he put Luke off at first, not wanting to "just give in and sound like a big wet-noodle parent." But after doing more research about the energy savings, he relented. Luke, he says, "is proud that we're trying to do our part."
In households across the country, kids are going after their parents for environmental offenses, from using plastic cups to serving non-grass-fed beef at the dinner table. Many of these kids are getting more explicit messages about becoming eco-warriors at school and from popular books and movies.
More than 1.2 million students are attending more than 4,000 charter schools in 40 states and the District, up from 200,000 students in just 600 charter schools a decade ago. Charters are hot commodities, the public school equivalent of hybrid cars or left-handed relief pitchers. But many people are puzzled why that is so.
Charters are independent public schools that don't have to follow many school district rules. They can usually choose their own curriculums and hire and fire staff without dealing with the teachers union. Those freedoms are enough to win the support of some parents, but most, I think, also want to know what such schools would do for their children.
That is where the allure of charters becomes harder to figure out. Several studies have shown that, on average, they don't raise student achievement more than regular public schools with students of similar backgrounds. Yet many charters, even some with mediocre academic records, get lots of applications. What is going on?
They proclaim to hate textbooks, but River Crossing Environmental School students now have a soft spot for at least one, because they are featured in it.
The "Hands On, Feet Wet," book chronicles the five-year history of the charter school through stories, photographs and a DVD. Publication was made possible through the Department of Public Instruction Charter Schools Dissemination Grant.
"I get very bored when I am sitting at a desk reading a textbook, but here I have something I can look forward to in the morning," said Aaron Christensen, 12. "There is a different way of learning."
The grant, $84,217, was used toward the book and the first phase of a math curriculum, according to Victoria Rydberg, River Crossing teacher. She submitted the grant in December 2005, and by this summer Rydberg was suffering from writer's cramp.
"If I could do it again, I would definitely recruit more help for the DVD and writing. Many of the people who contributed writing did so on a very tight timeline," Rydberg said. "It was a great experience, and I hope that next summer, I can get out on the river and kayak."
Ask Victoria Rydberg, teacher / author, to send you a FREE copy: rydbergv@portage.k12.wi.us
In addition to hearing testimony at three public hearings in August, the state Department of Public Instruction also accepted written statements through the end of the last month on its proposed changes to the rule guiding the identification of gifted students in Wisconsin [PDF File].
Tucked among those 16 pages of comments was this perspective (with some editing for space):
“I am a fifteen-year-old home schooled student, and currently a full-time special student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I spent nine years at EAGLE School of Madison, and one year at James Madison Memorial HS (MMSD).
“I also belong to two organizations for gifted students: Cogito (cogito.org) and Gifted Haven (giftedhaven.net). Cogito is run by the Center for Talented Youth, an organization sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. It is primarily populated by math- and science-oriented kids and teens who live in the United States, and who participated in a talent search in middle school. Membership is by invitation only. (I am not an active member of the community.)
Tacoma’s eighth-through-12th-grade algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus students are cracking open new math textbooks worth more than half a million dollars. It’s the fourth math series to be used in the city’s high schools in the last seven years.
“Like everybody else, we’re in a constant quest to find that program that’s going to best work to get kids to standard,” assistant superintendent Michael Power said.
School district officials believe the new curriculum is easier to use, better aligned with local and state standards and gives kids a higher chance at success than previous math program.
“We weren’t getting the growth (in achievement) that we wanted to see,” said secondary math facilitator Patrick Paris. “Our scores at the high school level were relatively flat.”
Administrators realized early this year that the Saxon math program implemented last fall wasn’t working out in the upper grades. They asked a curriculum review team to find a replacement.
The team scrutinized available programs for high school study before settling on the Prentice Hall algebra-geometry-algebra series of texts and Houghton Mifflin pre-calculus and calculus books.
The School Board approved the $530,000 plus tax and shipping purchase Aug. 23.
Saxon math remains in the lower grades, where its back-to-basics approach is credited, in part, with helping raise scores this year.
There are many important variables to consider in evaluating the causes for academic failure or success in the high school classroom. The training of the teacher, the quality of the curriculum, school safety, the availability of books, and so on, are factors studied extensively, and all of them play a part.
But I would argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work, including classroom work.
Why do so many of our high school students do so little academic work? Because they can get away with it.
A close study of the academic demands on students in the vast majority of our high school classrooms would disclose, I feel certain, that one of the principal reasons for students’ boredom is that they really have nothing to do but sit still and wait for the bell.
In most classrooms, the chances of a student being called on are slight, and of being called on twice are almost non-existent. If a student is called on and has not done the required reading or other class preparation, most probably the teacher will just call on someone else. There are no real consequences for being unprepared. As a result, many, if not most, students are not contributing in class and that can only deepen their boredom.
By contrast, on the football or soccer field, every player is called on in every practice and in nearly every game. Even for players on the bench, there is a constant possibility that they will be asked to perform at any time. If they don’t know what to do then, the embarrassment and disapproval will be swift and obvious. The same also could be said for high school theater productions, performances of the band or chorus, participation in model United Nations, and most of the students’ other activities.
In extracurricular activities, the student faces a kind of peer pressure to do well that is usually lacking in the classroom. Peers in the classroom may even think it is cool for another student to “get away with” having done no preparation.
This may offer insight into findings from the 2005 Indiana University High School Survey of Student Engagement [2005 Survey PDF] [Clusty | Google Search]. Of the 80,000 students questioned, 49 percent indicated that they did only three to four hours a week of homework, and yet they still reported getting As and Bs. I cannot think of a single high school sport that asks for only three or four hours a week of practice. So little time spent preparing would easily lead to an athletic failure to match the academic failure of so many of our students.
The absence of serious academic demands on the attention and effort of students in our high school classrooms results not only in boredom and daydreaming, but allows students to spend, according to the 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation study, an average of 6.3 hours a day (44.5 hours a week) with various electronic entertainment media—not homework on the computer—but entertainment.
Somehow, in addition to all that time spent entertaining themselves, high school students usually find time for an active social life, perhaps a job, and often sports or other student activities.
While we have lots of research studies on test results, teacher training, per-pupil expenditures, new curricula, professional workshops, and a host of other educational topics, I believe there is a striking need for close study of what students actually are being asked to do while they are in class. The remarkable fact to me is not that our high school dropout rate is so high, but that so little is being asked of those who do not drop out.
We sometimes claim that if only the teacher is brilliant or entertaining enough, boredom can be banished, or if we show enough movies, PowerPoint presentations and DVDs on “relevant” subject matter, the students will not sleep in class, either with their eyes open or closed. But imagine how absurd it would be to expect students to stay committed to a sport where they spent all their time sitting in the stands while the coach told wonderful stories, showed great movies and talked amusingly about her/his personal athletic history. The students come to play, as they should, and their motivation to participate is rewarded by their chance to participate, often with sweat, strain, and even potential injury.
When we make so few demands on students in the classroom we should not wonder why so many check out, and are really “absent from class,” whether they are sitting there or not. If they have nothing to do, and nothing is asked of them, and they are not challenged academically, then really they are better off if their attention and their minds are on other things that may offer them greater rewards than sitting still and doing nothing.
The education research community should consider undertaking studies that compare the academic demands on students in the typical high school classroom with those that students face in the other activities in which they take part.
Let’s try to discover high school classrooms that resemble those in law schools or business schools, where students are expected to be prepared each day and are at risk of being called on to demonstrate that readiness at a moment’s notice, as they are in the high school games and matches in which their energy and commitment are so commonly understood to be essential.
If we want our high school students to do more academic work, let’s try to figure out how to stop boring and ignoring them in our classes. Let’s give them better reasons not to be “absent from class.”
Will Fitzhugh is the founder and president of The Concord Review, a unique international journal of academic writing by high school students, and the National Writing Board, both located in Sudbury, Massachusetts [www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org]
How do we educate our children to be active, critical thinkers and not dumb passive consumers serving someone else interests? For however strange this may sound to you, it may have been "marketing" itself to bring us the terrible education system most civilized countries have adopted in the last century or so.
"The advent of mass production required a growth in mass consumption as well, but back then most people "considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need".
"We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform.
Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all.
"
Non-sense, paranoia?
Prof. Cubberley, who was Dean of Stanford's School of Education, wrote in his 1922 book entitled Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
The essay I present here today, "Against School" by John Taylor Gatto, is a definitive eye-opener for all those buying into our present education system without any critical perspective.
"We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer.
...
And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say", even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
"
This is what Prof. Gatto writes without hesitation. He looks in depth at our present education system and analyzes the history and motives that have brought about "school" as we know it today.
And the more I look at it, the more I see how devastatingly negative, traditional school really is. As I have, if you are a parent to some young minds, consider well and deeply where and how to give them an education, and how to avoid the pitfalls of those paralyzing psychological handicaps that the traditional education system imposes on everyone.
"School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. "
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom.
Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there.
When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that.
Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children.
Every parent should take some time to read their children's textbooks, particularly Connected Math, which appears to take a more consumer oriented approach to math education.
THE release this week of national test scores in reading and math was an embarrassment for the state Department of Education. Scores nationally and in many individual states showed modest gains from 2005 to 2007, but New York did not - even though the Education Department had trumpeted "gains" on its tests just weeks earlier.
The federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is known in the education world as the gold standard of testing. In 2002, Congress authorized NAEP testing in every state to serve as a check of the states' own claims about their progress. (Congress rightly worried that individual states would dumb-down tests that they themselves develop and administer.)
Just a few months ago, the state Education Department celebrated large gains for eighth-grade students in both reading and math. In May and June, The New York Times ran front-page stories heralding major improvements in the state test scores for eighth-graders: "Eighth Graders Show Big Gain in Reading Test" and "City Students Lead Big Rise on Math Tests."
In grade 8, the Education Department reported, the share of students meeting state reading standards jumped from 49.3 percent to 57 percent - a remarkable single-year rise, especially in a grade where academic performance had stagnated for several years. Similarly, the portion of eighth-graders meeting state math standards jumped from 53.9 percent to 58.8 percent.
These are very impressive gains. Unfortunately, they all failed to show up in the NAEP results (a fact the Times mentioned not on its front page but at the end of a story on page A20).
9/24/2007 Performance & Achievement Meeting: 4 Year Old Kindergarden & "A Model to Measure Student Performance with Ties to District Goals"
The Madison School Board's Performance & Achievement Committee met Monday evening. Topics discussed included:
4 Year Old Kindergarden
A Model to Measure Student Performance with Ties to District Goals (39 Minutes into the mp3 file). Growth vs status goals. MMSD proposes to adopt a "Valued Added" which will "control for the effects of different external factors":
poverty
mobility
parent education
english language proficiency, and
race and ethnicity.
District Goal: Look at the composite overall average growth for the district across all schools and all grade levels in the areas of reading and math. Based on the WKCE scores.
Notes: 56 minutes (Maya Cole): "Why are we using WKCE and how is that going to tie into our curriculum and student improvement so that it ends up back in the classroom and not just measuring test scores?". Art Rainwater responded that "this kind of measurement is not expected to do the day to day informing of instruction inside the classroom", "informing the instruction occurs inside the classroom on a day to day basis". Art also mentioned the District's "Student Intervention Monitoring system [also SIMS]. [1:00]".
The 2007 NAEP results have just been released. There are many interesting results one can learn by looking at this data. In addition to the very serious racial gap in Wisconsin which has been commented on by The Educational Trust [Grade 4 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF ] [Grade 8 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF] and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [172K PDF], there are strong indications of other problems in mathematics education in Wisconsin. Consider the following data comparing results for whites and blacks in Ohio and Wisconsin from the first year NAEP results were given by states and the 2007 results. As background, 12 points on NAEP is generally thought to be about the change from one year to the next on a given test. This is not a good estimate when looking over 15 to 17 years, since part of the rise in the test score likely came from changes made in textbooks and in what teachers teach because of the change in the NAEP Framework in the early 1990s.
For example, in Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, fourth grade math was tested in 1995 and 2003, and the results were flat while the NAEP results went up enough to allow statisticians to conclude the increase was statistically significant.
I assume that some of the rise in NAEP over this period is because students are learning more about the topics covered in NAEP, but that this is not the only
reason for the rise in NAEP scores.
The data below is comparison data between the results in two states at two different years, so the point estimate for a year of schooling seems to be a reasonable guideline. If so, Wisconsin has lost about a year to Ohio. Something needs to be done about this.
Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham, two of my favorite educational researchers, have inspired me to save the charter school movement with five brilliant if perhaps too far-sighted suggestions for reform.
The Washington-based think tank Education Sector www.educationsector.org has just published their paper, "A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling." They may be horrified by what I have done with their facts and insights, but I think my ideas will push charters in the right direction -- more good ones and fewer bad ones.
In theory, charter schools are a great idea. There are now more than 4,000 of them with more than 1 million students in 40 states and the District. These independent public schools give smart educators with fresh ideas a chance to show what they can do without the deadening hand of the local school system bureaucracy around their necks. They also give public school parents more choice. The problem is, as one former state charter school official told me, there are a lot of loons out there starting charter schools. We don't seem to be able to get rid of their loony schools as easily as the original advocates of charter schools promised. That is one reason why charter schools, despite including some of the best public schools I have ever seen, do no better on average than regular public schools in raising student achievement.
Here are my suggestions for fixing that situation, based largely on what I learned from Mead and Rotherham:
1. Stop letting local school boards authorize charters. Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, and Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, used a grant from the Annie E.Casey Foundation to analyze reports they oversaw on charter schools in California, Minnesota, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, Florida and Michigan and four cities: New York, Indianapolis, Chicago and the District. They conclude that "perhaps the most significant lesson of the charter school movement to date" is that the number and quality of charter schools depend on who does the authorizing and how well they do it. State school boards, universities and independent bodies like the D.C. Public Charter School Board appear to do a better job of authorizing charters than local school boards, which see charters as competition for students, funds and prestige. California, Colorado and Florida have built strong charter systems with local school boards as the prime authorizers, but only by creating alternative authorizers for charter proposals that get turned down by local school boards.
Ho-hum: Another study suggesting good results from school choice in Milwaukee, not that it will make much of a dent with the opposition.
This tells you something about the opposition.
The latest study links the ability of poor parents to take state aid to religious schools to improvements at Milwaukee Public Schools.
Researcher Rajashri Chakrabarti found that while school choice showed little effect on MPS early on, it showed a much bigger effect after key changes in late 1990s: The Wisconsin Supreme Court cleared the way for religious schools to take part, greatly increasing the options, and changes in funding made MPS feel the loss of students more keenly.
Math, language arts and reading scores at Milwaukee's public schools showed more improvement after new competition came into the picture, says Chakrabarti. Scores improved more at schools that were more subject to competition - schools where a greater proportion of students were poor and could use a voucher if their parents chose. This shows the improvements weren't driven by other changes in MPS, such as new leadership. It was the increased competition, she says.
It's plain to Fuller, a former MPS superintendent, that choice helps public schools, too. "It gives a superintendent leverage," he says. While there are many in MPS who try improving schools out of professionalism, there are some teachers and administrators who resist reform. Competition strengthens the reformers' hand.
From a story by Alan J. Borsuk in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
The average reading ability for fourth- and eighth-grade black students in Wisconsin is the lowest of any state, and the reading achievement gap between black students and white students in Wisconsin continues to be the worst in the nation.
Those are among the facts found in a mass of testing results released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education, the latest results from a long-standing federal program called the National Assessment of Education Progress. It is the closest thing to a nationwide standardized testing program for reading and math ability.
The gap between blacks and whites was worse in Wisconsin than, say, Louisiana? Yes.
The average score for black fourth-graders in reading was lower than, say, Washington, D.C., or Alabama? Yes.
Maria Allen worried about her son Matthew's prospects in high school and beyond. He had always been regarded as an underachiever by his teachers. He received B's in middle school with virtually no effort because he did well on what were, she thought, very easy tests.
Every new school year, the Reston mother donned her Super Nag persona, got on his case and tried to turn around his bad habits and attitude. It never worked. By the second quarter, whenever her attention turned to other matters, he stopped working, and his teachers started complaining.
So she was more than a little surprised when Matthew asked if he could take an Advanced Placement biology course online at the beginning of eighth grade, when he was only 14 years old. She knew where he got the idea. His big brother, a high school junior, had signed up for online AP biology so he would have time for other courses during the school day. She laughed. Good joke, Matthew. But he brought it up again. He was serious. Even when she showed him the demanding syllabus on the Web site apexlearning.com, he did not back down.
Well, she thought, why not? Her Super Nag act had not worked. She paid the $600 course fee and waited, without much hope, to see what would happen next.
"Matthew continued to put negligible effort into his middle-school work," Allen told me, "but in biology, he started to work hard, very hard, in fact. And, even more remarkably, he continued to work hard throughout the year."
She said he took a full complement of eighth-grade honors courses, but they demanded very little. "Unencumbered by any significant homework," she said, "Matt had plenty of time available to log on to AP bio for a few hours each evening, and so he often did better on AP quizzes and assignments than my high school junior, who was always swamped with homework and competing deadlines from several other challenging courses."
Happy Birthday, Sputnik. Fifty years ago, a small Soviet satellite was launched, stunning the U.S. and sparking a massive technology research effort. Could we be in for another "October surprise"?
Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine?
More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for "traveling companion." Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the "October surprise" changed computing forever.
Although Sputnik fell from orbit just three months after launch, it marked the beginning of the Space Age, and in the U.S., it produced angst bordering on hysteria. Soon, there was talk of a U.S.-Soviet "missile gap." Then on Dec. 6, 1957, a Vanguard rocket that was to have carried aloft the first U.S. satellite exploded on the launch pad. The press dubbed the Vanguard "Kaputnik," and the public demanded that something be done.
The most immediate "something" was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to "prevent technological surprises," and in those first days, it was heavily weighted toward space programs.
Speaking of surprises, it might surprise some to learn that on the list of people who have most influenced the course of IT -- people with names like von Neumann, Watson, Hopper, Amdahl, Cerf, Gates and Berners-Lee -- appears the name J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA.
Armed with a big budget, carte blanche from his bosses and an unerring ability to attract bright people, Licklider catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from time sharing to computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet.
Congress has taken up renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, with a major hearing in the House education committee. Unfortunately, despite little evidence that NCLB has done any good, there's no reason to believe Congress will improve it. After more than a century of industrial-era schooling, policy-makers are still unwilling to do what's necessary and turn public education on its head.
NCLB's results have been ambiguous at best. The most positive news has come from the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, which found that scores on state tests have risen under NCLB. But CEP only had usable pre- and post-NCLB scores for 13 states and could do full analyses for only seven.
Nationally representative measures offer worse news: Improvements on National Assessment of Educational Progress math exams have slowed under NCLB, and reading outcomes have either stagnated or declined, depending on the grade.
These outcomes should be no surprise. The federal Institute for Education Sciences recently confirmed that states are in a race to the bottom on standards, setting them as low as possible so they're easy to hit. But that's just symptomatic of a more basic problem: No matter how revolutionary politicians say laws like NCLB are, they always preserve the same institutional structures we've had for more than a century, in which politicians and bureaucrats have all the power, and parents and children have none.
Education is the best investment not only for workers but also for the economy in a time of continuing competitive strain, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday.
"Education - lifelong education for everyone - from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers - is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole," said Bernanke. He spent most of his professional life as a teacher and is married to one.
Economists have long recognized that the skills of the work force are an important source of economic growth, the Fed chairman said in a speech.
Although the United States has long been a leader in expanding educational opportunities, it also has long grappled with challenges such as troubling high-school dropout rates, particularly for minority and immigrant youths, as well as frustratingly slow and uneven progress in raising test scores, he said.
Dedicated to everything from architecture to sports medicine, "career academies" claim to offer high school kids focus, relevancy, and solid job prospects. Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.
The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the "new reality," though they hasten to add that the school isn't focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it's no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.
Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language."
Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.
The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.
"One of the things our research demonstrates conclusively is that an increase in what we call civic knowledge almost invariably leads to a use of that knowledge in a beneficial way," says Josiah Bunting, chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. "This is useful knowledge we are talking about."
Much of the global boom in spending on schools has been wasted by governments who have poured money into unreformed education systems, a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development said on Tuesday.
Wastage is so great that the results currently achieved by the world's pupils could be achieved with 30 per cent less finance if better teaching techniques were introduced and more efficient ways of running schools developed.
On the other hand, if resource levels were maintained, education systems could improve their results by 22 per cent if all education institutions performed at the same level of efficiency as the world's most efficient schools.
The annual Education at a Glance Report said that of all the 24 countries surveyed the US and Italy were getting the most disappointing results out of their schools despite spending some of the largest amounts on their students.
Australia, Canada and Japan were among the countries that performed more strongly than might have been expected from their level of investment in schools, when the data was corrected to take into account differences in class background.
The US is the second highest spender on educational institutions in the OECD, but only a comparatively small proportion of those resources "reach the classroom”, according to Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD's education analysis department.
However, the biggest spenders do not get the best outcomes. For example, Korea and the Netherlands have some of the most-able 15 year-olds in the world, according to international tests of their aptitude in maths, science and reading, despite having cumulative education expenditure below the OECD average.
The report said productivity in education has generally declined in recent years "because the quality of schooling has broadly remained constant, while the price of inputs has markedly increased”.
Unlike other professions, the report said, the education sector has not "reinvented itself” to improve outcomes and productivity. Instead, it has remained labour intensive and teachers' salaries tend to rise simply according to length of service and qualifications held.
Other factors responsible for the different outcomes include how many hours teaching pupils receive and the number of layers of management in a school system.
cross OECD countries, governments are seeking policies to make education more effective while searching for additional resources to meet the increasing demand for education.
The 2007 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems. The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it and how education systems operate and at the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of student's performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults' chances of employment.
The ExcelTM spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts are available via the StatLinks printed in Education at a Glance.
How effective is whole-school high school reform, such as the Schools-Within-Schools (SWS) model? What benefits does it have for students and in which areas does it fall short? This book seeks to answer these questions through the compelling stories of five public high schools that have embraced the SWS method. In order to fully understand the effectiveness of such a system, Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready have delved into every aspect of the reform in these settings, including participants’ reactions, curriculum structures, governance and leadership, and the allocation of students to the schools. The result is a thoughtful look at the SWS model that considers the benefits and problems of implementation, along with issues of equity and access.
The idea that many U.S. high schools are too large and impersonal to serve students well has gained considerable credence in research and policy circles.
But starting over from scratch with thousands of small, stand-alone high schools is also often seen as expensive and impractical. As a result, many districts in recent years have pursued the cheaper option of simply breaking up their large high schools into smaller schools within schools.
A new book tells a cautionary tale about that understudied alternative, training its sights on five high schools examined closely over time. What emerges is largely a story of the differences between theory and reality, of what can go wrong if school officials aren’t careful, and of many missed opportunities to make the most of a smaller learning environment. Probably the single most salient finding of Schools Within Schools: Possibilities and Pitfalls of High School Reform is that the approach led to increased stratification of students by race, academic ability, and socioeconomic status. The authors also describe as surprisingly rare the cases of instructional innovation tied to the smaller structure.
The book says that, typically, the same campuses would have separate academies, or subunits, as the authors call them, ranging from those known to be “full of brains” to others that were deemed “dumping grounds” for weak students.
...........
The authors note that while there has been substantial research on high school size and small schools, “very little research” has specifically evaluated the effectiveness of the schools-within-schools model.
“Similar to many other educational reforms,” the book says, “the SWS reform has been promoted and implemented without a solid base of empirical evidence to support it.”
As students return to school in Virginia, there's something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.
The mandate is in response to concerns about sex offenders and other adults preying on young people they've met through social-networking Web sites such as MySpace. It's one of several steps states are taking to try to protect children and teenagers online.
George Washington High School in Danville, Va., is one of the largest schools in southern Virginia. But there's one thing almost all of its 1,800 students have in common — MySpace pages.
Gene Fishel, an assistant Virginia attorney general, came to the school auditorium to give a lesson about Internet safety — especially on social-networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga that teenagers often use to communicate, and criminals sometimes use to prowl for victims.
When Heather Schaeffer heard she could get free tutoring for her children, she didn't think twice.
"I said, 'Thank you, God.' Because I didn't read until junior high. My father had to get a second job so I could go to Sylvan," Schaeffer said Wednesday night, as she attended a tutoring provider fair at Northwest Elementary. "I just raced right over."
Last year, Schaeffer had no problems getting her son, Sylvester, and daughter, Gretchen, into the federally funded program, a component of the No Child Left Behind Act. In Pasco County, as nationally, just a small percentage of the children eligible for services actually took advantage.
This year, the number of eligible students has grown along with the generally favorable word of mouth. Schaeffer worries that her kids won't get access to the services that the federal government promises to low-income children who attend schools that don't make adequate yearly academic progress for three or more years.
"I read a quote from a young lady in New York. She said, 'I don't ever remember taking an exam. They just kept passing me along. I ended up dropping out in the 7th grade. I basically felt nobody cared.'"
There was no national requirement to test and measure all students, to make sure everyone knew how to read and write, do basic math. The president told the crowd in Ohio that the United States needs testing; he called it the "right" thing for America.
"I understand taking tests aren't fun," the president quipped. "Too bad. We need to know in America. We need to know whether or not children have got the basic education."
And testing was just the beginning. The more ambitious endeavor: equalize education. To do that, the law set up a new definition of what it means to be a good school. This new definition, adequate yearly progress, or AYP, requires schools to show they're raising test scores among each group of students. Schools can't hide in good averages anymore. They must prove their poor and minority students are passing the tests too. This new definition of what it means to be a good school is having a dramatic impact on everything about education.
Four years after President Bush signed No Child Left Behind, there's a different kind of celebration going on in the media center of Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina. The walls are decorated; there are cakes and casseroles on the tables. Veteran English teacher Angela Johnson is calling it quits, abruptly, in the middle of the school year. Students, colleagues and friends from her 30-year career have gathered to say goodbye. Someone hands her a microphone, and she pulls her glasses up onto her nose, the prepared English teacher, ready with a speech.
The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition
The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition is a grassroots group of concerned parents, educators, and community members who believe creating and sustaining new educational options would strengthen MMSD. New options in public schools would benefit students, families, teachers, and our community. Options are needed because "one size does not fit all"! The diversity of students' backgrounds and learning styles requires a diversity of learning models.
The HOPE Coalition met last week to discuss the superintendent search. We found 3 characteristics to be important for our incoming superintendent. Using the points below, and/or your own words, please make your voice heard! You may copy and paste the below paragraphs if you are pressed for time. The superintendent should:
be an innovative problem solver. The candidate should have a demonstrated record of running a district that has successfully implemented new ideas and creative approaches (charter schools, magnet schools, 4K, etc.) to serve a diverse population of learners. The new superintendent should be committed to offering a variety of educational models within public schools so that families have options that can address the needs of students with a wide range of strengths, interests and learning styles.
demonstrate a collaborative leadership style. The candidate should have a history of fostering open, frequent communication with parents and other taxpayers; non-profit organizations; university faculty; and city, county and state government officials. The new superintendent should build collaborative partnerships that bring parents, teachers and community members together for the benefit of students.
cultivate a climate of less centralized authority throughout MMSD. The candidate should empower staff both at the district and individual school sites, giving them the authority to use their specific expertise to its fullest potential. The superintendent should allow local school administrators the flexibility to run their school, in collaboration with teachers, so that it most effectively addresses the needs of the students and families that it serves. School-based decisions may involve curriculum, budgeting, staffing, extracurricular programming, etc.
Make your voice heard...
... to the Board! Email them all (comments@madison.k12.wi.us) or contact them individually (go to www.mmsd.org/boe and scroll down to find contact information). This may be the most influential means of sharing your opinion!
... to the consultants hired for the search! Complete their survey by going to www.mmsd.org/topics/supt and scrolling down to find the link to it. You will also find information about the community input sessions. Please attend one! and tell us your impression of how successful it was.
Encourage friends, neighbors, and coworkers to make their voices heard too! Please contact Sarah Granofsky (s.granofsky@gmail.com) or Lauren Cunningham (cunningham.lauren@sbcglobal.net) with any questions or suggestions, or if you would like to learn more about HOPE for Madison.
New reports looking at how the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are playing out in the nation’s classrooms suggest that, while compliance with the 5½-year-old federal law is widespread, problems and inequities persist and, in the end, labeling a teacher “highly qualified” is no guarantee of effectiveness.
“I think the high compliance rate suggests there were states that set the bar low and, in a way, grandfathered in a lot of teachers,” said Kerstin Carlson Lefloch, a primary author of “Teacher Quality Under NCLB: Interim Report,” a large-scale study released last week by the U.S. Department of Education [PDF]. “To get to the real story, you have to look below the surface, and that’s where we’re still seeing variation and still seeing inequities.”
Under the wide-ranging federal law, which is up for congressional reauthorization, states had until the end of this past school year to ensure that they were staffing 100 percent of their core academic classes with highly qualified teachers. Such teachers are defined as those who have a bachelor’s degree, are fully certified, and can show mastery of the subjects they teach, either by completing coursework, passing state subject-matter tests, or meeting some other state-set criteria.
Lucy,
A week ago Laurie Frost and I posted the following, but you haven't posted a response:
Lucy, Would you be willing to tell us -- preferably with some substance and detail -- how the BOE has been involved in the development and submission of the SLC grant? What role have you played? What on-going discussion has there been? What impact have you had? And so forth. I confess, it's a mystery and a concern to me, as well. Thanks.
Posted by: Laurie Frost at September 7, 2007 5:04 PM
-------------------------
To make the issue even simpler, Lucy, do you support the direction of high school reform outlined in the grant application?
If yes, say no more.
If no, go back and answer Laurie's questions.
Posted by: Ed Blume at September 7, 2007 7:44 PM
Would you please answer, Lucy? It's part of being responsive to the citizens you serve and accountable for what you do or don't do when you hold a public office -- concepts foreign to the MMSD BOE in the past and the present.
Aaron Olson is confident he's ready for UW-Madison.
He graduated from Memorial High School last year with a 3.6 grade point average, scored a 28 on the ACT exam and did it all while being an athlete.
But University of Wisconsin-Madison officials continue to struggle to attract minority students like Olson, and even more importantly, to retain them through graduation.
The freshman enrollment of targeted minorities (meaning all of them except foreigners and Asians not connected to southeast Asia) increased from 254 in 1996 to 541 in 2006. Less than 58 percent of targeted minorities who started college in 2000 had graduated by 2006, however, compared to 79.2 percent of students overall.
So what is it that makes it hard for many minorities to succeed at UW-Madison.
wo Madison high schools easily outpaced any other high schools in Wisconsin in the number of students who qualified as semifinalists for the 2008 National Merit Scholarships. Thirty-one students at West High School qualified and 24 qualified at Memorial in the prestigious scholarship competition.
Schools with the next highest numbers of semifinalists were Mequon's Homestead High School in Ozaukee County with 17 semifinalists and the University School of Milwaukee with 16 semifinalists.
Four students at East High, two students at La Follette and one student at Edgewood also qualified for a total of 62 National Merit semifinalists from Madison.
Other Dane County high schools with qualifying students include Middleton (10 students), De Forest (5 students), Monona Grove (3 students), Verona (3 students), Oregon (2 students), Sun Prairie (2 students), Mount Horeb (2 students, including a student who is homeschooled), Deerfield (1 student) and Waunakee (1 student).
A new learning and networking platform that combines the unmatched resources of The New York Times with the best educators from leading institutions. Online.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 set ambitious new goals when it required the states to improve public schooling for all students — and to educate poor children up to the same standards as their affluent counterparts — in exchange for federal aid. The country still has a long way to go to reach those goals. And they will never be met if Congress, which must now reauthorize the law, backs away from provisions that hold schools accountable for how well and how much children learn.
The country’s largest teachers’ union, the politically powerful National Education Association, would like to see the law gutted. Fortunately, the chairman of the House education committee, George Miller, Democrat of California, has resisted those pressures. Even so, his proposed changes in the law’s crucial accountability provisions, put forth in a draft version of the House bill, may need to be recast to prevent states from backing away from the central mission of the law.
As a former charter school student, I can attest to how valuable they can be to a child's education. When they're properly planned, a charter school can give a student exactly what he or she needs to succeed later on in life. I feel I owe many of my present successes to my charter school upbringing.
However, we need to cut back on the number of educational options in Wisconsin, specifically in the Fox Valley.
In the last decade, there has been an explosion of charter schools in Appleton alone. Programs like the Classical Charter School, Magellan Charter School, Tesla Engineering School and the Renaissance School for the Arts are examples of the numerous alternative schooling opportunities now available to parents and their children.
Despite my earlier comments about the good qualities of charter schools, the increasing number of programs isn't beneficial to anyone, especially the student. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing.
Take the charter school I participated in, for example. When most kids would have gone to middle school, my parents opted to send me to the Magellan program. It allowed gifted students to take classes at a high school setting with high school teachers at an accelerated pace.
Not only did the Magellan students learn a great deal more about traditional subjects then they would have normally, they were also exposed to a world of new opportunities at Appleton West, where the program was located. Students in the program were allowed to join the debate team as well as many other character-building activities and organizations.
Magellan was exactly what the students needed — accelerated learning in a high school locale with endless possibilities for development.
A visit to a public school classroom will reveal the immense range of learning styles among students.
There's the boy sitting seemingly idle in the back corner. He says little, but his test scores indicate he's among the intellectually gifted.
In the middle of the room is the student who can play anything he wishes on the piano, but simply can't comprehend long division.
There's the student who finds it difficult to learn from a lecture, but she makes great academic strides while doing a hands-on project.
Charter schools allow for more academic freedom. They're publicly funded schools that have been released from some of the regulations that apply to other public schools, and instead are accountable for producing certain results written in the school's charter.
Charter schools can avoid many of the procedural obstacles that distract other schools' resources and energy away from the goal of education. Diversity in learning styles, a sense of community and potential benefits to public schools make expanding charter schools in the Fox Valley a good decision.
One reason why charter schools should be expanded is to address the diversity in learning styles.
As a seventh-grader, Kelsey-Anne Hizer was getting mostly D's and F's and felt the teachers at her Ocala middle school were not giving her the help she needed. But after switching to a virtual school for eighth grade, Kelsey-Anne is receiving more individual attention and making A's and B's. She's also enthusiastic about learning, even though she has never been in the same room as her teachers.
Kelsey-Anne became part of a growing national trend when she transferred to Orlando-based Florida Virtual School. Students get their lessons online and communicate with their teachers and each other through chat rooms, e-mail, telephone and instant messaging.
"It's more one-on-one than regular school," Kelsey-Anne said. "It's more they're there; they're listening."
“MARCH on,” wrote the Lebanese-American philosopher and poet Khalil Gibran, “and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path.” Thus did the pupils, staff and administrators of the institution named after him march through a storm of controversy and into the doors of the Khalil Gibran International Academy this week.
The school, which will teach Arabic as well as Middle Eastern history and culture and will inevitably discuss Islam, has been under scrutiny since the New York Department of Education announced its creation last February. Conservative commentators have muttered that it will be a training ground for terrorists. Many portrayed Debbie Almontaser, the school's Yemeni-American principal, as an apologist for suicide-bombers after she insufficiently denounced an Arab women's group that produces “Intifada NYC” T-shirts.
Colorado's speaker of the house is traveling the state in daylong jaunts - driving on unpaved roads to meet with kids, eating lunch in restaurants decorated with rusted farm tools, singing America the Beautiful with the Lions Club - to learn more about rural schools.
It's not always a pretty picture.
In the San Luis Valley, the high school's only math teacher is too busy with other subjects to teach calculus; in Ordway, the gym weights are prison castoffs; in tiny Joes, a teacher applies for Gerber Foods grants to buy textbooks.
In repairs alone, K-12 schools statewide need $6 billion to $10 billion. Which is why Romanoff may propose, for the first time in Colorado history, a statewide ballot measure to build and repair schools.
As a new school year opens, we look at the new challenges and recurring demands facing education and ask what can be done to aid our classrooms and students
The start of the school year is always a time when children, parents, teachers and administrators have to rush to take care of a zillion small questions, from what to wear on the first day to whether there's a teacher in every classroom.
But it is also the start of the next round of the wrestling match with the largest questions hanging over education, especially in urban places such as Milwaukee.
Here are 10 of the big questions facing Milwaukee as the school year begins in earnest today and thumbnail thoughts on how they are being answered.
1) What works? Want to hear a recitation of all the reforms that haven't really succeeded in getting better educational outcomes for Milwaukee children? Neither do we. Nonetheless, there are bright spots on the local education scene - specific schools that are doing well - and they tend to have common traits, including excellent principals, united and stable staffs, a strong commitment to clear education programs and a willingness to keep working with each child to get the child engaged and to the point of success.
"Strike two," said Brian Hill as his stepdaughter Briana DeLeon, 11, rotated the dial on her red locker, searching for the number 39 through slightly crooked, wire-framed glasses. "Left, right, left," he coached, as she spun it around. After the third misdial, her mother gave it a go. Then Hill rolled up his sleeves. "Let me try."
After a few more strikes, a teacher parted the crowd of sixth-graders and parents at Seneca Ridge Middle School's orientation last week in Sterling and helped Briana and her family cross the first of many potential middle school hurdles to come: opening her locker.
For the first days of school, the anxieties of moving from the familiarity of the one-teacher classroom in elementary school to a bigger, more anonymous middle school can be boiled down to a three-digit combination.
Worries include "I could be late to class," "I could grab the wrong book" and a myth that Jack Berckemeyer, assistant executive director of the National Middle School Association, said is "passed down from generation to generation: 'I could get locked in there.' "
Students of David Keener, an ex-priest who teaches at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, almost always pass the Advanced Placement biology exam. So when the teacher submitted a description of his course for the College Board's first quality-control audit of the AP program, nobody thought there would be a problem.
A clean audit was also expected for Frazier O'Leary of Cardozo High School in the District. The College Board has often asked the highly regarded AP English teacher, who has long experience in urban education, to help train others to meet the challenge of teaching at a college level.
Yet Keener, O'Leary and other AP veterans in the last few months have met with a surprising initial response from auditors: rejection. Most ultimately win approval, but the new audits begun this year have rubbed raw the already bruised relations between some high school AP teachers and the college professors who are rating them.
As many of you know, I have been in touch with the District and West HS administration -- as well as with our BOE -- with a request for "before-and-after" data on the English elective choices of West's juniors and seniors. The reason for my request is that one of the primary reasons why English 10 was implemented was the concern that some groups of West students were not choosing to take challenging electives in their upper class years. Here are links to my earlier posts:
On August 29, I received the following email from Pam Nash:
Laurie-
Our Research and Evaluation staff reported today that the district does not keep course requests and course assignments beyond one year. Therefore, we cannot retrieve information that shows, historically, what English courses were chosen by whom over time.
We will be able to give you this year's information by the end of next week.
Pam
That same day, I wrote to Pam:
Are you saying you do not know what this year's seniors took last year, as
juniors? Or is their data still available (along with this year's juniors)?
Pam wrote back:
Laurie-
R&E says that they do not save an archive base of course requests. They do still have the Spring 2007 requests.
To which I replied today:
Hi, Pam. Thanks for the update on the data situation. It's somewhat good news. I think. Assuming that I understand what you're saying.
I think you're saying that we still have the senior English elective choices made by the current senior class, the last class to not have English 10, the last class to take English electives as sophomores.
I assume it also means that we still have the junior English elective choices made by the current 11th grade class.
By all means, don't let anyone destroy that data! It may be the only thing we have for a "before and after" comparison.
Or is it? My son pointed out to me that surely West must have complete transcripts for all current seniors. Right? (Maybe even the complete transcripts for several recently graduated classes, it occurs to me.) Doesn't that mean we have a listing of any and all courses that the current seniors have taken while at West? If so, that must mean we still have information about which junior year English electives the current seniors took. And that would obviously be the better comparison to the choices of the current junior class.
Something I really don't understand, Pam, is that if there was such concern about the English electives being taken by different groups of West students, where are the data that justify that concern?
I also do not understand why -- if English 10 was instituted largely to rectify that specific problem -- no effort was made to collect, save, organize and analyze the data that would tell us if the new core curriculum is having the desired effect?
In any event, I look forward to receiving any and all relevant data. At the very least, I hope there is a way to retrieve the current seniors' junior year elective choices, so that a comparison can be made with this year's juniors' elective choices.
Laurie
It would be nice if one of our school board members would request these data analyses.
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast marched down a hallway on the first day of classes in the newly modernized Parkland Magnet Middle School in the Rockville area, trailed by a retinue of students. Then he stopped and asked, "Who's taking algebra?" Three hands went up.
A few years ago, the question would have seemed more fitting in a high school. But today, half of Montgomery students take high school algebra before they leave the eighth grade, part of a regionwide trend toward more rigorous instruction in middle school.
Middle schools are the center of attention as Washington area school systems enter the 2007-08 academic year, which began yesterday in Montgomery, Howard, Anne Arundel and Charles counties and in the District. Four of eight middle schools in Charles, eight of 19 in Anne Arundel and 11 of 38 in Montgomery missed their achievement targets this year under the No Child Left Behind law.
The College Board announced SAT® scores today for the class of 2007, the largest and most diverse class of SAT takers on record. Nearly 1.5 million students (1,494,531) in the class of 2007 took the SAT, and minority students comprised nearly four out of 10 test-takers.
"The record number of students, coupled with the diversity of SAT takers in the class of 2007, means that an increasing number of students in this country are recognizing the importance of a college education and are taking the steps necessary to get there," said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. "I am encouraged by the greater numbers of students from all walks of life who are taking on the challenge of the SAT and college.
This year's average score in critical reading is 502, a 1-point decline compared to last year, or a change of 0.20 percent. The average scores in mathematics and writing declined 3 points each compared to a year ago, bringing the scores to 515 and 494, or a change of 0.58 percent and 0.60 percent, respectively.
The Class of 2007 posted the lowest SAT averages in several years, according to scores released this morning. Scores from the second year of an expanded, three-section college-entrance test declined by double digits in Maryland and the District, by five points in Virginia and by seven points nationwide, compared with the previous graduating class.
Education leaders said the modest decline reflected an ever larger and more diverse population of students taking the test. More blacks, Asians and Hispanics took the SAT in this year's graduating class than in any previous class; two-fifths of test takers are now minorities.
Last week, we got the annual good news that Wisconsin “scores near top on ACT once again,” as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline declared. Aping her predecessors, state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster hailed the results as proof of how dandy we’re doing in Badgerland. The “composite score speaks well of our students’ academic achievement and the support they receive from their parents and teachers,” she declared.
But are we really doing that well? A close look at the ACT test data offers some reason for caution. Yes, Wisconsin’s average score of 22.3 was high compared to the national average of 21.2 (with scores ranging from 18.9 for Mississippi to 23.5 for Massachusetts), but the percentage of students taking the test here is lower than in 15 states. While 70 percent of Wisconsin students take the test, the percentage is 100 in Illinois and Colorado, 96 in Tennessee and Mississippi, and ranges from 71 to 82 percent for another 11 states.
Why does this matter? As the percentage of students taking the test increases, you are likely to include more low-attendance and low-performance students in the mix, pushing the average score lower.
Burmaster brags that Wisconsin has maintained its high ACT score even as the percentage of students taking the test rose. But the increase was minimal, rising from 68 percent in 2002 to 70 percent last year. That includes a steady rise in the number of African-American and Hispanic students taking the test, but they still remain underrepresented.
“We allow people in this state to pound their chest while ignoring the fact that Milwaukee has significantly fewer kids taking (the ACT),” Milwaukee School Board member Terry Falk declared in the JS story. (Falk, a former contributor to Milwaukee Magazine, sure knows how to give good quotes.)
As a reality check, I looked at state scores combined with the percentage of students taking the test to estimate which states we might actually trail. A state like Mississippi, for instance, can be quickly rejected: Yes, 96 percent of students took the test, but the average score of 18.9 was abysmally low, worst among all 50 states. Even if Wisconsin tested 96 percent of students, its average score would never drop that low.
Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.
# What Berlin wall?
# Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
For this fall's incoming college class, "off the hook" could mean "excellent" or escaping blame, but for sure it has nothing to do with telephones.
"Here's Johnny!" That's Jack Nicholson in The Shining, not the intro for Johnny Carson's monologue, according to today's 18-year-olds.
Professors had best update their lingo if they want to communicate with the Class of 2011 (on the assumption that anyone actually finishes in four years anymore).
Here to help is the 10th annual Beloit College Mindset List, released today by the small Wisconsin liberal arts college.
After his divorce, Gregg La Montagne found it hard to help his 15-year-old daughter with her schoolwork since she lives in another state. So for her Spanish class recently, Mr. La Montagne told her to write her assignment in an online word-processing application made by Google Inc.
Mr. La Montagne, a sales manager in Austin, Texas, then accessed his daughter's homework online, using the same software through his Web browser at home. A native Spanish speaker, Mr. La Montagne was then able to suggest grammar changes, which he typed in at the bottom of the paper. His daughter, who was online at the same time, was able to see her father's notes almost instantaneously as her screen refreshed, and then in turn correct the document for him to see.
"It makes it easier to participate," says Mr. La Montagne, 50 years old. "It's not the same as being with her, but it's at least a step in that direction."
Mr. La Montagne is one of a growing number of parents now using Web-based applications to review and aid their children's educational work. Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which Mr. La Montagne used, provides word processing and spreadsheets that a consumer can access using just a Web browser.
West HS English 10: Request for Data -- Reply from Pam Nash
I received the following reply to my request for English 10 data from Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash:
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:27:48 -0500
From: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us>
To: lauriefrost@ameritech.net, eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us, hlott@madison.k12.wi.us, arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us, mbking1@wisc.edu
Laurie-
Mr. Holmes and his staff will do this. Pam
Pamela J. Nash
Assistant Superintendent
for Secondary Schools
Madison Metropolitan School District
(608) 663-1635
(608) 442-2149 (fax)
And here's what I wrote back:
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:21:06 -0500
To: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us, eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us, hlott@madison.k12.wi.us, arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us, mbking1@wisc.edu
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: Re: English 10 early results request
Cc: asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us, lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com, lucym@charter.net, jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us, mcole@madison.k12.wi.us, bmoss@madison.k12.wi.us, ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us
Thank you, Pam. I will look forward to receiving the data.
I know you all probably see me as a thorn in your side. Please try to understand, I am simply trying to keep you honest with the public ... and empirically based.
If the results are positive -- if English 10 is associated with a significant change in the target variable of concern (rigor of elective choices in 11th and 12th grade) -- wouldn't you want to know?
And if the results are not positive, wouldn't you want to know?
Here is an email I sent to the BOE, asking them to request important outcome data for West HS's English 10 initiative. Embedded in the email is my own request for such data. As both a content and a process issue, I should think this would be of interest to all SIS readers. By all means, feel free to write to these people with your own request. --LAF
August 22, 2007
Dear BOE (especially Performance and Achievement Committee members Kobza, Winston and Cole):
Please see my email below to various people involved with the West HS English 10 initiative. Thank you for taking the appropriate and expected responsibility to obtain these data and make them public. We need to know if the things we are doing to our high school students are actually having the desired impact, in part, to guard against our doing things for our own misguided adult reasons (things like politics and stubborn pride).
I should think that the gap-closing effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a core course in 10th grade English at one of our four high schools would be of significant interest to community members throughout the District, including parents, teachers and students at the other three high schools ... and especially members of our School Board.
Many thanks,
Laurie
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:42:39 -0500
To: hlott@madison.k12.wi.us,mbking1@wisc.edu,eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,arainwater.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: English 10 early results request
Dear All:
One of the primary reasons for the implementation of English 10 at West High School was concern about the failure of some groups of West students to take rigorous English electives in their upper class years.
Can you please send me the data regarding the English electives chosen by this year's 11th graders when they registered for classes six months ago? (Needless to say, I would also like to see the English elective data for the past few years, so that a meaningful comparison can be made between the choices of English 10-era versus pre-English 10-era students.)
This is the first group of West students to take English 10, so a look at the early results of the curricular initiative seems appropriate, as does sharing that information with the West community. I assume that the data are appropriately disaggregated by race and SES, given your concerns and your hypotheses about the impact of the new core course.
On June 25, 2006, Michael Bredemeyer threw his tasseled cap in the air and cheered after getting his high school diploma. Two days later, his parents mailed the diploma back.
Michael, now 19 years old, has learning disabilities and finished high school at a seventh-grade reading level, despite scoring above average on IQ tests. The Bredemeyers say he passed some classes because teachers inflated his grades and accepted poor work. By awarding him a meaningless diploma, they say, school officials avoided paying for ongoing instruction.
"I felt proud because he had worked so hard," says Michael's mother, Beverly, her voice breaking. "You don't want to take that away from him. But you knew it wasn't real. What's he going to do in the future? Will he be able to go to college and get a job?"
The Bredemeyers represent a new voice in special education: parents disappointed not because their children are failing, but because they're passing without learning. These families complain that schools give their children an easy academic ride through regular-education classes, undermining a new era of higher expectations for the 14% of U.S. students who are in special education.
Years ago, schools assumed that students with disabilities would lag behind their non-disabled peers. They often were taught in separate buildings and left out of standardized testing. But a combination of two federal laws, adopted a quarter-century apart, have made it national policy to hold almost all children with disabilities to the same academic standards as other students.
One of the reasons that I have devoted more time than I should to analyzing the outcomes from the District's SLC grants (way too much time, given that I don't get paid for this and given that the District is going to continue on its merry way with restructuring our high schools into Small Learning Communities no matter what the data indicates) has to do with the frustration I experience when I try and find consistency in the District's data. Frankly, there isn't any. MMSD is consistently inconsistent with their numbers, see for example my earlier post trying to identify what the District spent in 2004/05.
The District's latest press release trumpeting the success of our high school students on the ACT is just the latest example of this problem. According to MMSD, the percentage of Madison students who took the ACT is significantly higher than the percentages that are reported by DPI.
The District reports that "Sixty-nine percent of all MMSD 12th grade students participated in the ACT during 2006-07, compared to 70% last year. Over the last 13 years, MMSD participation has ranged from 67-74% (see pg. 2 table)."
According to DPI, a much smaller percentage of the District's 12th graders have taken the ACT in their junior or senior years. (The table below is taken from DPI)
ACT Results - Composite - All Students
Madison Metropolitan
Enrollment
Grade 12
Number Tested
% Tested
Average Score - Composite
1996-97
1,552
982
63.3
24.5
1997-98
1,650
1,016
61.6
24.5
1998-99
1,639
1,014
61.9
24.4
1999-00
1,697
1,127
66.4
24.2
2000-01
1,728
1,091
63.1
24.1
2001-02
1,785
1,113
62.4
24.4
2002-03
1,873
1,126
60.1
23.9
2003-04
1,920
1,198
62.4
24.2
2004-05
2,055
1,247
60.7
24.3
2005-06
2,035
1,244
61.1
24.2
2006-07
1,983
1,151
58.0
24.6
An examination of minority student participation in the ACT reveals that the percentage of African American and Hispanic students taking the test has declined over the last three years. Only 20.1% of African American students in the District took the ACT as compared to 34.6% of African American students across the state.
I am more than willing to believe that DPI's numbers are inaccurate, but don't they get this data from the District? Several months ago I was attempting to clarify discrepancies between MMSD and DPI in the cost per student data, and that experience is perhaps informative here. I wrote to clarify this issue:
I am writing to ask about the data that the district lists on its web site regarding cost per pupil. The excel spreadsheet t1.xls on the page (http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/re/dataprofile.htm) lists numbers that do not match those listed on DPI's web site (http://data.dpi.state.wi.us/data/selschool.asp). Specifically, the numbers that MMSD lists as the state average cost per student are greater than the numbers that DPI lists on its site, while at the same time the MMSD cost per student listed is less than what DPI states that our District spends per student.
I am attaching the spreadsheet I downloaded from the District web site, along with the numbers that I got from DPI. If you could help me understand the discrepancy in these numbers it would be most appreciated.
The response that I got back from Roger Price was:
Jeff,
Both data sources are from the DPI. They calculate both tables. I am not sure what the differences are between the two. We utilize the "Basic Facts" data as published by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Roger
Why the District with its extensive Data Warehouse has to rely on the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance to tell it what they spend per student is beyond me, but it doesn't fill me with any confidence about the accuracy of their data.
Don't fund Small Learning Community grant sought by MMSD
August 20, 2007
Gregory Dennis
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW., room 3W243 FB6
Washington, DC 20202-6200
Dear Mr. Dennis,
As a long-time advocate for academic excellence in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD, Madison, Wisconsin), I urge the Department of Education to reject the MMSD’s recent application for a Small Learning Centers grant, Smaller Learning Communities Program CFDA #84.215L.
Please visit a popular Madison blog, schoolinfosystem.org, where you will find long threads with comments, questions, and concerns about the grant application, as well as the MMSD’s pilot efforts in small learning centers.
Blog commentators, some of whom as statistics instructors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, clinical psychologists, and other professionals with advanced degrees, express little support for the MMSD’s implementation of small learning communities.
When people try to get evaluation data from the MMSD on the current small learning communities, the district cannot or will not produce the information. The little available information about the MMSD’s small learning communities does not point to success, but rather to no impact on academic achievement. (See the evaluation on the MMSD Web site by Bruce King, whose services the MMSD wrote into its grant proposal.)
As the MMSD implements small learning schools, it simply amounts to closing the achievement gap by limiting opportunities for academic success of advanced students without raising the academic performance of low-performing ones.
Finally, the MMSD would be better off not to launch a major program change, especially when the current superintendent, the champion for the changes, will leave the district in the summer of 2008.
Where a student attends public school in the five-county metropolitan Milwaukee area can make a difference of as much as four weeks' time in the classroom per year, according to data reported to the state.
For the last two school years, the school districts of Burlington, Cudahy, Kettle Moraine, Mukwonago, Slinger, South Milwaukee and Wauwatosa reported that most - if not all - of their schools held classes at least 65 hours longer than the minimum hours set by state law.
Meanwhile, the Oak Creek-Franklin and Waukesha school districts met for the minimum amount of hours, and a large number of schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system fell below the standard in 2006-'07.
"There's nothing more important than time with the classroom teacher," said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction. "And, if that's continually taken away, the state of Wisconsin would have an obligation that doesn't happen."
By and large, most public schools in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Washington and Waukesha counties reported similar annual total instructional hours for their students for the past two years, the only years for which data was available from the DPI.
The Elmbrook School Board is considering plowing new ground by extending weighted-grade options to courses taken by students preparing for technical colleges rather than only four-year universities.
Elmbrook would be "blazing new territory" because no other area school district that Elmbrook considers high-achieving has this weighted-grade policy, said Elyce Moschella, Brookfield Central High School's coordinator of gifted and talented students.
The move would touch sensitive issues such as grade point averages and class rank. The policy change would extend weighted grades to Elmbrook classes that provide dual credit at both technical colleges and universities.
Those classes are college accounting, principles of interior design, mechanical drafting and computer-aided design, engineering computer-aided design seminar and auto systems and tuneup. Students taking those courses would earn an extra 0.025 on their grade point per semester, the same added quarter-point that students earn for taking advanced placement and fifth-year foreign language classes.
But in pre-NCLB (No Child Left Behind) days, Tyler Heights students weren’t critical thinkers and creative writers: Only 17 percent passed the MSA in 2000. Many went on to fail in middle school and drop out of high school.
Principal Tina McKnight, a fanatically hard-working woman, started the turnaround in 2000. Superintendent Eric Smith brought in Saxon Math and Open Court, a phonics-first reading curriculum that tells teachers — often inexperienced — exactly what to say.
Because it has so many poor students, Tyler Heights gets extra funding to pay for very small classes and a variety of pullout programs for students who aren't doing well. Half the third-grade class receives some kind of special help.
District SLC Grant - Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 3
Because the recent MMSD Small Learning Communities (SLC) grant submission failed to include any discussion of the success or failure of the SLC initiatives already undertaken at Memorial and West High Schools, I have been examining the data that was (or in some cases should have been) provided to the Department of Education in the final reports of those previous grants. Earlier postings have examined the data from Memorial and the academic achievement data at West. It is now time to turn our attention to the data on Community and Connection, the other major goal of the West SLC grant.
West's SLC grant, which ran from 2003/04 to 2005/06 (and highlighted in the tables below), targeted 6 goals in the area of increasing community and connection amongst their students.
2.a. Suspension and Expulsion data
2.b. Safe and Supportive Climate
2.c. Stakeholder Perceptions
2.d. Extracurricular Participation
2.e. Student Leadership
2.f. Parent Participation
The available data suggest that West's restructuring has not had the anticipated effect on these measures. While I have been more than skeptical about the impact of the SLC restructuring on academic performance, I did expect that there would be positive changes in school climate, so I am surprised and disappointed at the data.
2.a. Suspension and Expulsion data -The final report claims that "Progress has been made overall for both suspensions and expulsions at West High." We reach a very different conclusion when we examine the data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). I don't know what to make of the large discrepancies in the numbers reported by West in their final report and those on the DPI website (West reports a much higher number of suspensions), but I am inclined to believe that the data DPI collected from the District is the data we should rely on. That data shows that number of students suspended and more importantly the percentage of students suspended has actually increased over the time course of the SLC grant. Note that percentages are the more appropriate statistic to examine because they take into account the number of students enrolled which has declined over this period of time.
Total Suspensions
West Final Report
Total Suspensions
DPI WINSS Data
Suspensions (% of Students)
DPI WINSS Data
African Am. Suspensions
West Final Report
African Am. Suspensions
DPI WINSS Data
African Am. Suspensions
(% of Students)
DPI WINSS Data
2000/01
280
189
9.0%
100
71
23.1%
2001/02
265
154
7.3%
145
82
26.0%
2002/03
230
142
6.6%
115
71
24.0%
2003/04
255
142
6.7%
147
79
27.6%
2004/05
160
159
7.5%
90
89
28.1%
2005/06
not reported
181
8.9%
not reported
98
34.6%
Examining the suspension data on the DPI website revealed that the increases in the suspension rates amongst West High students were particularly pronounced for 9th and 10th grade students - the students specifically targeted by the SLC restructuring and implementation of a core curriculum.
Suspension Data for 9th & 10th Graders
9th Grade Suspensions
10th Grade Suspensions
2000/01
13.1%
8.5%
2001/02
9.9%
9.3%
2002/03
10.2%
6.4%
2003/04
11.0%
9.3%
2004/05
11.3%
9.9%
2005/06
14.8%
10.1%
2.b. Safe and Supportive Climate - This goal was supposed to be assessed by examining changes in ratings of physical and emotional safety and school connected-ness on the District climate survey. Although climate data is supposedly collected from students each year, this data is not presented in West's Final Report. However, information presented in the recent MMSD proposal suggests that there haven't been any changes at West. In that proposal, it is noted that 53% of West students agreed with the statement "I am an important part of my school community." This percentage is essentially unchanged from the 52% of students in 2001/02 whom West said reported feeling attached to their school, when the school applied for their initial SLC grant.
2.c. Stakeholder Perceptions - Two types of data were to be examined: There were supposed to be student, staff, and parent surveys developed during Year 1 of the grant. The only survey data presented in the Final Report is an examination of staff survey data (as a parent, I never saw any parent survey). While the report notes the majority of survey items that had increases in positive responses from 2004 to 2006, there was also a significant decline in the number of staff responding to the survey, and this subject attrition leads one to wonder if there has been a change in staff perception over time or if those staff who did not support the grant simply decided not to respond. The report notes that 90 staff members responded in 2004 and only 60 responded in 2006. This 1/3 reduction in the number of respondents is even more striking when you consider that West had 238 staff members listed in its directory for 2006/07, so we have gone from a response rate of less than 50% to a rate of just above 25%.
The second type of data used to examine this goal was the number of police calls to West High, and the Final Report notes that "trends are positive" I don't have access to Madison Police Department data for the entire period of the grant. However, police department data available on the Madison Parents' School Safety Site indicates that there were 80 police calls to West during the Fall 2006 semester alone, much higher than the 60 reported in the Final Report for the entire 2005/06 school year.
2.d. Extracurricular Participation - While the Final Report notes that "Overall, student leadership and participation in extra or non-academic activities, two goals of the SLC initiative at West and both important for affiliation with the school, seem to have been enhanced by the One Lunch, Advisory, and Resource Hall restructuring.," no actual numbers are reported.
2.e. Student Leadership - Evidence of student leadership was supposed to be the number of student leadership opportunities at West. As noted above, no data is presented to support the claim that the number of these opportunities have changed.
2.f. Parent Participation - This was supposed to be examined by analyzing the percentage of parents of color who attended school functions. There is no mention of this data, in fact, there is no mention of this goal, in the Final Report. Anecdotally, I can report that over the last 3 years of PTSO meetings there have not been any noticible increases in the number of parents of color in attendance.
As a statistician and as a social scientist, I want to say that I am appalled by the quality of the data that has been assembled to support the contention that the restructuring at Memorial and West has produced the desired changes in student achievement or in school "connected-ness." I don't see any evidence that leads me to believe that the current SLC grant proposal will be any more successful.
When Richard Eng isn't teaching English grammar to high-school students, he might be cruising around Hong Kong in his Lamborghini Murciélago. Or in Paris, on one of his seasonal shopping sprees. Or relaxing in his private, custom-installed karaoke room festooned with giant Louis Vuitton logos.
Mr. Eng, 43 years old, is one of Hong Kong's best-known celebrity "tutor gods."
Hong Kong parents are often desperate to help their children succeed in this city's pressure-cooker public-examination system, which determines students' college-worthiness. That explains why many are willing to pay handsomely for extracurricular help. Mr. Eng and others like him have made a lucrative business out of tapping that demand. They use flashy, aggressive marketing tactics that have transformed them into scholastic pop stars -- "tutor gods," as they're known in Cantonese.
Private tutoring is big business around the world. Programs that help people prepare for standardized tests -- such as SAT-prep courses in the U.S. -- have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Tutoring agencies are also booming in places like mainland China and Japan. Several years ago, Hong Kong's government estimated that the city's families spent nearly half a billion dollars a year on tutoring.
Hong Kong stands out, though, for instructors who boldly tout their success rate -- and their own images. They pay to have their faces plastered throughout the city on 40-foot-high billboards and the sides of double-decker buses. They're also known for buying ads that take up the entire front page of newspapers -- space more commonly filled by banks and property developers. One local television station is even preparing to launch a fictional drama series based on the lives of the tutor gods.
Luis Rosario just completed fifth grade but he already thinks about attending an Ivy League college. And he would seem to be on his way. He won first prize in his district’s fifth grade science fair, scored high on the state math test, gets straight A’s and is fascinated by robotic sciences.
His mother, Judith Pena, wanted to get him into a program to prepare him for one of the city’s specialized high schools. Then she learned about the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering. ”This is even better,” she said. And so, next month Luis Rosario will join the first sixth grade class of Columbia Secondary, a new select school in upper Manhattan.
Columbia Secondary is aimed at top students like Luis, students who one would expect to attend an elite public high school. But over the years the so-called specialized schools have not attracted a large number of gifted black and Hispanic students. In fact, over the past decade, the percentage of students from the city’s large black and Hispanic population who attend these select schools has decreased significantly.
Under the banner “strength in diversity,” Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering will try to change that. The school, a partnership of the Department of Education and Columbia University, is aggressively recruiting black and Hispanic students and plans to try out new methods to achieve a more equitable racial balance.
"It's hard to find opportunities like this, where a company will give you that start," Rewolinski says, loud enough to be heard over the fan that cools him. "A lot of companies now, they want you to have the experience right away. And with a program like this, I can get that start, and then I can move on and maybe move to something better or stay here and just get better at it."
Educators have always insisted they not leave out the "three Rs": reading, writing and arithmetic. That paradigm may be shifting to "three Rs and a G" - and world enterprise is most appreciative.
The "G" is for geography - the science that links a range of interests and information from a variety of cultures based on a visual map. This subject is moving to the forefront of the minds of educators as its utility, later in life, in developing business strategy within public and private sectors around the world becomes more and more evident.
As a nation, the United States has received a clear signal from studies like the 2006 National Geographic/Roper survey, which followed an earlier survey in 2002. In the latest survey, young adults aged 18 to 24 in nine countries were surveyed and the results showed that Americans were outperformed in geographic literacy by young adults in seven countries - Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Great Britain and Canada. Only 13% of the Americans surveyed correctly identified Iraq on a map of Asia and the Middle East. Only about half of young Americans were able to locate landmasses such as Japan and India on a global map. And 20% of those surveyed could not find the Pacific Ocean.
But set aside our less-than-satisfactory performance at a Geography Bee, and jump ahead to the terrain of public and private firms where geography has become one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal. Maybe our educational system does not play out well in a Geography Bee, but you need to look at the extra edge firms are getting when they embrace not just geography, but the story that it tells. With the coming of age of GIS, the geography story becomes one where decisions can be made like never before. Almost anything can be plotted on a map.
The principal effort is led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2003 the NSF gave the university a five-year, $10-million grant to establish the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning. The center has worked with more than 1,000 new faculty members and graduate students at Madison and other universities to try the new teaching methods and conduct research on the process of putting them into practice.
The project also works on ways to attract science professors to join in the innovation. Trying the new teaching methods, the center's leaders say, should be viewed as conducting an experiment with measurable results — an approach that appeals to the instincts of researchers. Organizers also argue that the new methods are more professionally satisfying than delivering conventional lectures.
Observers hope that the Wisconsin project will show results different from those of a similar NSF-financed effort that ran from 1993 to 2002. An evaluation of that program found that participants, who were graduate students, rated it highly but felt pressure to "conceal" the work from their professors, who viewed it as distracting them from research. What's more, the new teaching methods often did not take root in the students' departments, which was a goal of the project.
If young researchers delay trying the new teaching methods until their careers are established, though, they may put the attempt off for good, advocates say. And if American science is to stay competitive, that is a problem. "We don't really have the time to wait around for another 20 years," says Madison's Ms. Millar, "for this kind of sea change to occur."
Want an education? Open up a browser. With the information available online, you could probably get a complete education without ever leaving your house.
But for more traditional students, as well as their parents and teachers, it can be tricky to find online information that is safe, relevant and age-appropriate. You don't want your kids to jump knee-deep into DNA sequences if they haven't even reached their third grade Mesozoic-era workshop.
Here is Wired News' selection of the best educational resources on the net. Sure, the sites on this list aren't going to replace Wikipedia or Google, or even a trip to the local public library. But if it's education you want, and you're at a computer, these sites are great places to start.
District SLC Grant - Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
An earlier posting examined the results of the small school initiative at Memorial high school. This post aims to examine West's SLC grant. Similar to the Memorial grant, the goal of West's SLC grant was to reduce the achievement gap and to increase students' sense of community.
The final report is a major source of frustration for anyone who values data analysis and statistics. Essentially, there are no statistics reported. The data is presented in figures that are cluttered and too small, which makes them difficult to interpret. Changes over time are discussed as trends without any sort of statistical tests being reported. Most of the data presented are no more detailed than what anyone can pull off the DPI web site.
Before examining the impact of West's restructuring on student achievement and on students' connection to the school, it is necessary to identify just a few of the components of the West proposal that were never enacted:
"C.2.c Advocate Mentor. Each student will have an adult advocate from their learning community (LC) who stays with them through their years at West. Students will meet weekly with their advocate to review academic progress and attendance, preview the upcoming week, discuss school or personal issues, etc." A rather ambitious aspect of the proposal, and considering District finances a totally unrealistic proposal. It was not implemented.
"C.2.d. Academic/Career Pathways. Beginning early in freshman year, each student will work with their LC guidance counselor and parent(s) to develop an Individualized Graduation Plan (IGP) that includes (1) personal, academic, and career/avocation exploration goals, and (2) academic coursework and learning experiences beyond the classroom that help students achieve these goals. Updated periodically, the IGP will be based on the student's academic record and a current assessment of their skills and competencies, intellectual interests, and personality." As far as I know, this never happened, at the very least parents were never involved.
"C.5.e. Strategies for securing/maintaining staff, community, and parent buy-in. ... We will provide frequent formal (e.g., surveys, focus groups) and informal chances for staff and other stakeholders to raise concerns with the project leadership (Principal and hired project staff)." Parents were never surveyed and the only focus groups that I am aware of were two meetings conducted following parents' uproar over English 10 ...
"The SLC Coordinator will also provide frequent progress reports through a variety of school and community-based media (e.g., special staff newsletter and memos from the principal; school newsletter sent home; media coverage of positive developments, etc.). Also our community partners will serve as ambassadors for the project via communications to their respective constituencies." There were two presentations to the PTSO summarizing the results of the grant. I am not aware of anything in the school newsletter or in the "media" that reported on the results of the restructuring.
"E.1 Overall Evaluation Strategy
Third-Party Evaluator. ... He will develop survey instruments and analyze the formative and summative data described below, and prepare annual reports of his findings for all stakeholder groups. Parents (one of the stakeholders) never received annual reports from the evaluator, and I have no idea about what surveys were or were not developed ...
Also the outcome data for West will be compared to the same data elements for a school with similar demographic characteristics that is not restructuring into learning communities." Rather than comparing West's outcome data to a comparable school, the final report compares West's data to the District's data.
Finally, one of the goals of the grant (2.f. Parent Participation) was to increase the % of parents of color who attend school functions. This data was to come from attendance logs collected by the LC Assistant Principals. This objective is not even listed as one of the goals on the Final Report, and if attendance at PTSO meetings is any indicator, the SLC grant had no impact on the participation of parents of color. It is interesting to note that the recently submitted high school redesign grant does not include any efforts at increasing parental participation. Given the extensive literature on the importance of parental involvement, especially for low income students (see the recent meta analysis by Jeynes (2007) in Urban Education, Vol. 42, pp. 82-110), it is disappointing to see that the District has given up on this goal.
On to the data...
Academic Achievement
Goal 1.a. Attendance - "Attendance rates for many sub-groups of students have declined since the 2000-01 school year, and a number of them remain below the district target of 94%." (p. 19) In fact, the only groups that have shown an increase in attendance over this period of time are white and non-low income students.
Goal 1.b. Access to challenging coursework - The data on page 21 of the final report show that enrollment in Advanced Placement courses has declined for ELL and Other Asian students, remained unchanged for African American students and had a slight increase for Hispanic students, "... and the gap among groups persists."
Goal 1.c. College Entrance Exams - "Participation in the ACT is up slightly, but down for the SAT over the last few years. Disaggregated data for the ACT show the persisting gap across racial/ethnic groups." (p.21) While more than 60% of white students take the ACT, the percentage of minority students taking this test has essentially not changed, and is still below 10%.
Goal 1.d. Grade Point Average - "Trends in overall GPA’s are flat or increasing for some groups, but decreases for ELL students, Hispanic students, and students who are not low income (after steadily rising) are troublesome. GPA’s for students of color, low income students, and students with disabilities remain well below those for White, Asian, and economically advantaged." (p.19) Only White and Other Asian students show increases in gpa over the last five years. For an indication of the extent of the achievement gap, the average gpa of African American and low income students was less than 2.0 for the last year data was available, while White students had gpa's of over 3.0. The difference between groups has only gotten larger in the last five years.
Goal 1.e. Content Area Proficiency - There is some indication from WKCE scores that the restructuring has benefitted some students: "In comparison to the MMSD as a whole (shown below), the increase in percent of students at the advanced and proficient levels was greater for West for 6 of 9 student sub-groups in reading and 7 of 9 in math." The increases for West's White and limited English proficiency (LEP) students, however, were smaller than their counterparts across the District.
A major goal of West's SLC grant was to reduce the achievement gap. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the school is making progress in this area. Recall that the first year of the grant was 2003/04, and in that year the only impact of the restructuring was that students were assigned to SLC's. It was not until the next year that students began to be assigned to their core courses within their SLC, i.e., changes in curriculum began in 2004/05. Looking at the table below, we can see that the achievement gap, as reflected in WKCE scores, is unchanged since 2003/04.
WKCE
2002/03
2003/04
2004/05
2005/06
2006/07
Reading
African American
34.0
53.7
51.5
50.7
53.5*
Hispanic
35.0*
52.3
40.7*
60.5
40.0
White
91.0
92.1
93.9
94.2
90.4
Low Income
34.0
48.6
44.0
48.2
34.7
Not Low Income
88.0
88.5
88.1
92
92.7
Math
African American
31.0
48.1
39.7
38.7
51.2*
Hispanic
45.0*
50.0
40.7*
55.8
42.2
White
91.0
91.5
90.3
93.5
92.1
Low Income
35.0
48.6
38.5
43.0
46.5
Not Low Income
88.0
88.0
83.1
91.2
92.7
* note. includes 4 Native American students 02/03 and 06/07, 1 Native American student 03/04
Goal 1.f. Graduation - "With some fluctuation, trends are in the right direction for all groups except student with disabilities. The gaps in graduation rates among the different groups merit ongoing attention." (p.20) However, when we look at this figure, we see that it only presents data through 2004/05, and there is no change in the graduation rates for the two years of the grant for Hispanic or African American students.
Given the data that West presents in their final report, one would be hard pressed to say that the restructuring has had a positive impact on student performance, and it appears that it failing in several major areas such as decreasing the achievement gap, increasing parental participation, and increasing attendance. I'll examine the issue of School Community and Connectedness in another post, but I'll leave you with this tidbit: the Final Report does not include any data from the student climate surveys.
The first thing I noticed about the KIPP School Summit, the annual meeting of the country's most intriguing public school network, was the food. It was cheap, simple and abundant -- potato chips, popcorn, corn chips, juice bars, hamburgers and fajitas available outside the many meeting rooms last week. This was fuel for teachers half my age, about 1,200 of them, nearly all in their 20s and early 30s.
The second thing I noticed were the principals. Each time I met a school leader, as they are called at KIPP, my generational surprise alarm sounded. Forgive me, but my 62-year-old brain still thinks of principals as men in the middle to later years of their lives. About half of the KIPP school leaders were women. Nearly all of them were, like the teachers, also in their 20s or early 30s, and much more representative of inner-city ethnicities than any other school organization I have seen.
KIPP is short for Knowledge Is Power Program. Each school is an independent public school, typically a charter or contract school that does not have to follow the usual rules in its district. Most are fifth-through-eighth grade middle schools, but some KIPP high schools and elementary schools have been established. The schools are small, usually about 300 students. The school leaders are carefully selected from the best available teachers and given a year of special training. They have power to hire and fire their staffs and use any curriculum they like as long as it produces significant gains in the achievement of their students, more than 80 percent of whom are from low-income families.
Susan Wagner Cook stands at the front of a third-grade classroom, an unfinished equation printed neatly on the whiteboard.
4 + 3 + 6 = __ + 6
"I want to make one side," she says, as her left hand sweeps under the left side of the equation, "equal to the other side," she continues, now sweeping her right hand under the right side of the equation.
It's a concept that third-graders are just ready to learn: The total value on one side of an equal sign should equal that on the other.
Some kids get it quickly as Cook goes through her carefully choreographed tutorial. Others take longer. But what none of them know is that they are subjects in an experiment that is helping scientists understand one of the most familiar and yet mysterious components of human behavior: the hand gesture.
A leading scientist has dismissed the latest approach to teaching that has been endorsed by the Government and embraced by teachers.
Under the new system children are considered to have different "learning styles" and instead of being taught by the conventional method of listening to a teacher, they should be allowed to wander around, listen to music and even play with balls in the classroom.
But now Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, has dismissed as "nonsense" the view that pupils prefer to receive information either by sight, sound or touch.
She said that the method of classifying pupils on the basis of "learning styles" is a waste of valuable time and resources.
The approach, first introduced in the United States following research on brain development, is being adopted by an increasing number of schools, colleges and local authorities and forms a key part of the Government's drive for "personalised learning". In effect, it dismisses so-called "chalk and talk" teaching as inadequate.
Caitlyn & Marguerite sat knee to knee in a sunny room at the Hawks Camp in Park City, Utah. On one wall was a white board with these questions: What’s your favorite vacation and why? What’s your favorite thing about yourself? If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Caitlyn, who is 13, and Marguerite, who is 16 (I’ve used only their first names to protect their privacy), held yellow sheets of paper on which they had written their answers. It was the third day of the weeklong camp, late for icebreakers. But the Hawks are kids with autistic disorders accompanied by a normal or high I.Q. And so the main goal of the camp, run on a 26-acre ranch by a Utah nonprofit organization called the National Ability Center, is to nudge them toward the sort of back and forth — “What’s your favorite video game?” — that comes easily to most kids.
Along with Caitlyn and Marguerite, there were nine boys in the camp between the ages of 10 and 18. They also sat across from one another in pairs, with the exception of one 18-year-old who was arguing with a counselor. “All I require is a purple marker,” the boy said over and over again, refusing to write with the black marker he had been given. A few feet away, an 11-year-old was yipping and grunting while his partner read his answers in a monotone, eyes trained on his yellow paper. Another counselor hurried over to them.
I noticed the district is applying for a grant to the BOE in relation to the High School Small Communities. I have a couple of thoughts relating to this issue.
First of all, I applaud your effort in making our large high school more intimate. It seem in an emotional way logical that the high school would be divided into smaller communities to allow for connectiveness.
The funny thing is, as I celebrate my 25th year since I was in high school this year, I look back and see this same thing occurred back in my day. It was called clubs, athletics, and band.
High schools have been a breeding ground for fun, involvement, participation and community building. MMSD has been cutting this very foundation you are asking for a grant to "Create through artificial means" since I moved here in 2000. The non-academic athletics, the non-essential music, the unnecessary theater and arts have been cut, cut and cut some more. I understand the need for cutting and you can't cut curriculum, but now we are going to create the "connectivity" artificially.
My son loves sports. He matriculates to others like him. He has met kids from Toki, Hamilton, Spring Harbor and even private school from sports. If you ask him where he wants to go to High School next year he will tell you Memorial to play BB or some other sport. He has a strong since of community based on his interest.
My daughter loves the arts. Drawing, acting, and especially singing. If you ask her where she wants to go to high school she will tell you Memorial because she has seen several plays there and want to participate in the drama club. She is also a pretty good swimmer and has senior role models on Memorial Swim Team.
Neither will say Memorial because the Math is great! They already have established a type of community through their interest, as we did as kids. It is so sad that NONE of the MMSD schools have a marching band, as that club can involve hundreds of students and attach them to a community of students of all ages and interest through music. Instead we are trying to create the communities randomly, via what a computer, that does not account for interest.
It is also sad we are cutting our athletics slowly but surely. This year it is the AD at the High School Level. I heard the BOE at MMSD was unwilling to raise the fees to allow these actives that provide a community for low, middle and high income students. Since many of you do not have children participating in sports let me clue you in on a few things.
Dane County Youth Football League: $160 per student, includes cost to cover scholarships. Run, coached and executed by parent volunteers.
West Madison Little League: $150 per player, includes cost to cover scholarship, parents provide transportation, pictures, snack for needy, and executed and run by parents.
Magic Soccer: $150 per player. Covers all fees and scholarships, coaching and organization provided by parents.
56er Soccer: $700 plus. Also parent run with paid coaches. No scholarships I know of because it is an Elite Club.
Tri County Basketball: $150, scholarships provided and coaches provide transportation for needy. Parents coach, volunteer, organize and run.
Summer swim leagues: I pay $600 plus $35 per 3 kids to have them swim in the summer. No scholarships provided. Parent run and organized.
Badger Aquatics: I pay an outrageous amount close to $500 for one session for one child. If there are scholarships available I would be amazed.
Swing Basketball: UAA basketball, $700, plus, travel competitive basketball for 4 - 12 grade. No scholarship provided as this is an Elite club.
I spend my summer/fall/winter/spring coaching, volunteering, driving and donating an enormous amount of time, money and energy to all of the above for not only my children but several that live in the Wexford and Allied Drive area. These kids LIVE for these activities and there are Black, Asian, and White children that participate on the non-elite clubs. These activities cost money to run but are run very effectively and efficiently by so many parents.
The district clearly wants the community to take over these activities and they are. You will see more 56'er teams for the elite, swim team for the elite, UAA teams for the elite, Private swim teams for the elite and WEALTHY.
As you are concerned for the poor and borderline families and you eliminate High School Sports, you are pushing parents that volunteer and families and students that are interested to private clubs and such. Those families you are concerned about will be excluded and the activities left at the high school level will be a joke. (At the Jr. High level it is already a huge joke and none of the students find it remotely interesting to participate when there is no coach, team, practice, etc for the so called basketball and volleyball teams) I already see this with swimming and UAA basketball.
Fee based, coaches paid, activities will take over this community. A few sports will survive but the others will become elite clubs and the HIGH SCHOOL COMMUNITY building will be lost to these private clubs.
I remember my high school years of pep club, tennis, basketball, going to watch my friends play sports and the half time band. I did One Act Plays, debate club and even took part in a community volunteer club. All supported by my high school. I learned a LOT through those activities and I built a since of community. Our town would participate and watch, and the whole community supported us. I have never been to a 56ers game but I have seen Memorial Football, Basketball, Soccer and Cross Country. I would never go see a UAA basketball game but I will go see the Spartans.
Too bad. We have an easy way to build a community through sports, bands, arts, but we just keep cutting and cutting. Instead we will build the community through an artificial raffle of names. The data is obviously out on the effectiveness of the small learning communities at Memorial because no data is available to clarify if it's reached it's established goals. I on the other hand have the e-mail address of all my basketball buddies from high school! That's a community. I wonder if the Memorial small learning communities have each others email address's after they graduate?
At the beginning of the 2005-06 school year, there were 969 seniors left in Indianapolis Public Schools' graduating class.
By the end of the school year, nearly 1,300 seniors collected diplomas from the district.
Yes, you read that correctly. IPS had 33 percent more graduates than seniors who began the year, the second consecutive school year it has done so.
There's no way that IPS, which promoted a mere 31 percent of the eighth-graders who made up the original graduating class, experienced a sudden influx of transfers. The fact that just 52 of them would have graduated the previous year shows that holdovers don't account for this.
As the nonprofit Education Trust notes in a report released today, parents and state officials "cannot allow such dubious figures to go unexplained -- or unchallenged."
That admonition must also extend to the Indiana Department of Education and its boss, Superintendent Suellen Reed. After all, IPS' graduation numbers reflect the agency's longstanding difficulty in accurately reporting the condition of education in our state.
Second, the legislation will encourage a rich and challenging learning environment, and it will promote best practices and innovation taking place in schools throughout the country.
In so many meetings I have had in my district and elsewhere, employers say that our high school graduates are not ready for the workplace. Colleges say that our high school graduates are not ready for the college classroom. This is unacceptable.
In my bill, we will ask employers and colleges to come together as stakeholders with the states to jointly develop more rigorous standards that meet the demands of both. Many states have already started this process. We seek to build on and complement the leadership of our nation’s governors and provide them incentives to continue.
District SLC Grant - Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 1
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) recently submitted a five year, $5 million grant proposal to the US Department of Education (DOE) to support the creation of Small Learning Communities (SLCs) in all four high schools (See here for post re. grant application). While the grant proposal makes mention of the two smaller SLC grants the district received earlier, there is no examination of the data from those two projects. One would think that DOE would be curious to know if MMSD's earlier efforts at creating SLCs had produced the desired results before agreeing to provide further funding. Furthermore, one would think it important to examine if the schools implemented the changes that they proposed in their applications. It is my intention to provide some of that analysis over the course of several posts, and I want to encourage other community members to examine the Memorial grant proposal and final report and the West grant and final report themselves.
We begin by examining Memorial High School's SLC grant which was funded from 2000-2003. Memorial's SLC grant is a good place to start, not only because it was the first MMSD SLC grant, but because they lay out clearly the outcome measures that they intend to evaluate and their final report provides hard numbers (as opposed to graphics) over a number of years before and after the implementation of the SLC grant. Memorial had two goals for their SLC grant: 1) to reduce the achievement gap and 2) to increase students' connectedness to the school.
Examining student achievement suggests mixed results for Memorial's restructuring. Student GPA's indicate a slight narrowing of the achievement gap for African American students and essentially no change for Hispanic students when compared to their fellow white students over the period of the grant.
Difference Between
2000
2001
2002
2003
White & African American
1.35
1.35
1.16
1.24
White & Hispanic
0.75
0.87
0.74
0.79
Student WKCE performance can be considered an external indicator of student success, and these data indicate no change in the proportion of students scoring at the Proficient and/or Advanced levels, an especially noteworthy result given that the criteria for the WKCEs were lowered in 2002/03 which was the last year of the grant. I've included data up through this past school year since that is available on the DPI website, and I've only presented data from math and reading in the interests of not overloading SIS readers.
WKCE
99/2000
2000/01
2001/02
2002/03
2003/04
2004/05
2005/06
2006/07
Reading
African American
45.09
54.90
36.00
33.00
40.5
45.8
42.9
29.8
Hispanic
63.16
80.00
47.00
54.00
53.6
51.7*
53.1*
29.3*
White
93.33
85.55
86.00
89.00
90.2
86.2
89.0
84.2
Low Income
53.33
56.36
36.00
36.00
32.9
40.7
43.7
25.7
Not Low Income
88.00
86.9
84.7
89.8
80.2
Math
African American
18.00
27.45
20.00
29.00**
39.2
32.2
27.3
39.4
Hispanic
42.11
40.00
33.00
49.00
42.9
62.1*
59.4*
36.2*
White
77.44
76.48
68.00
90.00
89.7
89.3
89.0
86.4
Low Income
18.64
16.37
16.00
29.00**
29.4
38.4
38.7
35.7
Not Low Income
90
85.8
86.9
89.2
84.2
* note. data for Hispanic students includes 4 Native American students in 03/04 and 2 in the following two years
** note. DPI actually reports higher percentages of students scoring proficient/advanced: 34% and 37% respectively for these two cells
The data from DPI looking at ACT test performance and percentage of students tested does not suggest any change has occurred in the last 10 years, so the data presented here would suggest that Memorial's SLC restructuring hasn't had any effect on the achievement gap, but what about the other goal, student connectedness?
Memorial's final report presents data on student suspensions and expulsions as their quantitative indicators of student connectedness. It should be noted that in their grant proposal, Memorial was going to examine student responses to the annual climate survey as a way to track students' sense of belonging and relationship with the school, but, regretfully, that information isn't presented. When we look at the information we are provided with, there appears to be no change, but DPI data suggest that things have declined in recent years: suspension rate the year prior to the grant (99/00) - 4.3%, suspension rate last year of grant (02/03) - 6.1%, suspension rate for most current year's data (05/06) - 10.2%. The picture is the same for student expulsions: 99/00 - 0.20%, 02/03 - 0.23%, 05/06 - 0.6%. Data from DPI also suggest that there has been no change in attendance rates or in the percentage of students habitually truant.
The goals of the District's SLC proposal are admirable. However, this data does not suggest that the Memorial model will produce the desired results. Next time we look at West.
Superintendent Art Rainwater gave a presentation on "Value Added Assessment" to the Madison School Board's Performance & Achievement committee Monday evening. Art described VAA "as a method to track student growth longitudinally over time and to utilize that data to look at how successful we are at all levels of our organization". MMSD CIO Kurt Kiefer, Ernie Morgan, Mike Christian and Rob Meyer, a senior scientist at WCER presented this information to the committee (there were two others whose names I could not decipher from the audio).
"That is, there is no way of knowing whether previous WKCE tests were easier or harder than today's, and also, DPI has changed the curve. For both reasons, we can't use WKCE to gauge student progress (or lack of it) over time.
Pause and think about this. DPI says WKCE cannot tell us whether the academic skills of Wisconsin students are improving, staying the same, or getting worse over time."
The fact that the School Board is actually discussing this topic is a positive change from the recent past. One paradox of this initiative is that while the MMSD is apparently collecting more student performance data, some parents (there are some teachers who provide full report cards) are actually receiving less via the report card reduction activities (more here and here). Perhaps the school district's new parent portal will provide more up to date student data.
A few interesting quotes from the discussion:
45 minutes: Kurt has built a very rich student database over the years (goes back to 1990).
46 Superintendent Art Rainwater: We used to always have the opinion here that if we didn't invent it, it couldn't possibly be any good because we're so smart that we've have thought of it before anybody else if it was any good. Hopefully, we've begun to understand that there are 15,000 school districts in America and that all of them are doing some things that we can learn from.
47 Art, continued: It's a shame Ruth (Robarts) isn't sitting here because a lot of things that Ruth used to ask us to do that we said we just don't have the tools to do that with I think, over time, this will give us the tools that we need. More from Ruth here and here.
55 Arlene Silveira asked about staff reaction in Milwaukee and Chicago to this type of analysis.
69 Maya asked about how the School Board will use this to determine if this program or that program is working. Maya also asked earlier about the data source for this analysis, whether it is WKCE or NAEP. Kurt responded that they would use WKCE (which, unfortunately seems to change every few years).
71 Lawrie Kobza: This has been one of the most interesting discussions I've been at since I've been on the school board.
Lawrie, Arlene and Maya look like they will be rather active over the next 8 months.
Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the school’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.
Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.
That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.
Through the intercession of Ms. Geiger, Miss Fernandez was permitted to retake the final after receiving two days of personal tutoring from another math teacher. Even though her score of 66 still left her with a failing grade for the course as a whole by Mr. Lampros’s calculations, Ms. Geiger gave the student a passing mark, which allowed her to graduate.
A surge of action and proposed action, a president who wants his hands on a lot of things and bad blood between board members - the heat is growing at Milwaukee School Board meetings, and it is creating an environment in which Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is facing the stiffest political challenges of his five years in office.
The election in April of Michael Bonds to replace Ken Johnson on the board, followed by the election of Peter Blewett as the board's president, have put into power two people with strong feelings about doing things differently from the way Andrekopoulos wants.
And they are acting on those feelings.
A central role for the board president is to name members of the committees that do most of the board's work. The president usually gives his allies the dominant positions but doesn't put himself in many roles.
Blewett has done much more than that - he named himself chairman of two committees, one that handles the budget and strategic direction of Milwaukee Public Schools and one that handles questions of policy and rules, and he named himself as a member of two other major committees, handling finance and safety. He also named Bonds to head the Finance Committee, an unusual step, given that Bonds was brand new.
Blewett and Bonds, who have formed a generally close relationship, have also been submitting a relative flood of proposals for the board to take up. Since May 1, the two have submitted 34 resolutions between them, with nine others coming from the other seven members of the board.
Some seek major changes in MPS practices or to reopen issues previously decided by the board. Included would be reopening Juneau High School, reuniting Washington High School into one operation (it has been broken into three), restoring ninth-grade athletics and building up arts programs in schools.
The total of 43 resolutions is more than board members submitted in the entire year in six of the eight previous years. Seventeen resolutions were introduced at a board meeting last week, 14 of them written or co-written by Blewett or Bonds.
Although this might seem like a bureaucratic matter, it is a key element of efforts by Blewett and Bonds to shake up the central administration of MPS. They are challenging Andrekopoulos openly in ways not seen in prior years, when a firm majority of board members supported Andrekopoulos.
He and Bonds have been critical of Andrekopoulos and the previous board for not doing enough to listen to people in the city as a whole and for not providing enough information to the board.
Blewett said his main agenda item as president is "to engage the community." Just holding public hearings or meetings around the community is not enough, he said, referring to a round of community meetings last fall on a new strategic plan for MPS as "spectacular wastes of time and money." He said people who work in schools, parents and the community in general need meaningful involvement.
"I really want to make sure that we're investigating every opportunity to engage the public and provide our students with quality learning experiences that get beyond reading and math," he said.
Bonds said, "I have a very aggressive agenda to change the direction of the School District."
He was strongly critical of policies such as the redesigning of high schools led by Andrekopoulos in recent years, including the creation of numerous small high schools.
"Given the resources we (MPS) have, we should be providing a better product," he said. "I feel the administration has led us down a failed path."
There are similar issues at play in Madison. The local school board's composition has significantly changed over the past few years - much for the better. Time will tell, whether that governance change translates into a necessary new direction for our $339M+, 24, 342 student Madison School District. Alan Borsuk is a Madison West High Grad.
CUNY Plans to Raise Its Admissions Standards: "the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared""
The City University of New York is beginning a drive to raise admissions requirements at its senior colleges, its first broad revision since its trustees voted to bar students needing remedial instruction from its bachelor’s degree programs nine years ago.
In 2008, freshmen will have to show math SAT scores 20 to 30 points higher than they do now to enter the university’s top-tier colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — and its six other senior colleges.
Students now can also qualify for the bachelor’s degree programs with satisfactory scores on the math Regents examination or on placement tests; required cutoffs for those tests will also be raised.
Open admissions policies at the community colleges will be unaffected.
“We are very serious in taking a group of our institutions and placing them in the top segment of universities and colleges,” said Matthew Goldstein, the university chancellor, who described the plan in an interview. “That is the kind of profile we want for our students.”
Dr. Goldstein said that the English requirements for the senior colleges would be raised as well, but that the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared.”
1. Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District's K-12 math curriculum. The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.
What's needed is a regional response, which should include more involvement of businesses outside Milwaukee County in MPS and other school districts' programs, more collaborative efforts such as the Kern Family Foundation and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Lead the Way program and a debate on what fundamental changes need to be made at MPS and other troubled districts, including whether to change their governing structure. Such a debate should be considered for other local governments, the idea being to make them more manageable, more accountable and more in control of their own affairs and budgets.
Businessman Sheldon Lubar of the Greater Milwaukee Committee put his finger on the problem early in the discussion: "You cannot reach the levels that I think all of you want to see us reach if you have a dropout rate of 50% of your high school students."
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said one of his biggest surprises after taking office was the need to improve work force development. "If there's one issue where I would love to take this community and shake it by the shoulders, it is how important education is in this world economy now," he said.
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker talked about breaking up MPS into several districts; Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas argued for the need to reduce health care costs, the single biggest driver of government and school district costs; state Rep. Jason Fields (D-Milwaukee) talked about the politics of changing the educational system.
"This issue has been occurring for the last 20 years, but nothing's been done about it," Fields said. "If I sit at this table and we all agree that we need to do something, when we leave this room not a damn thing will change, and those black kids, kids in my neighborhood and my community, will still be in the same position."
That needs to change for the sake of giving those kids a reasonable chance at a better life but also for the sake of southeastern Wisconsin's ability to compete in the global marketplace.
And now his successor, Bart Peterson, a Democrat, has laid down a bold challenge to the city’s troubled public school system: improve or see your students migrate to the city’s growing roster of impressive charter schools authorized by the mayor himself.
This is no idle threat. In the 2006–07 academic year, the mayor oversaw 16 charter schools serving 3,870 students. Peterson is currently the only mayor in the nation running a charter school authorizer out of his office and has proven himself willing to be judged by the results. The charter school office issues an annual report on its schools that, in its candor and analytical sophistication, rivals just about any report out there. But what makes the mayor’s experiment far more interesting than, say, improvements in the city’s bus service, is that his charter schools are achieving results—in some cases, great results—with seriously disadvantaged kids. The Indianapolis experience shows that government, when ably led, can adapt and usher in its own set of reforms.
The story also shows that charter schools are much more than a right-wing hobbyhorse—that Democrats, too, are capable of using them to buck the system. Peterson himself says, “I’m not interested in striking ideological notes,” but he has certainly struck a chord with education thinkers like Andy Rotherham, former education adviser to President Clinton and co-founder of Education Sector in Washington, D.C. Rotherham says Peterson’s example proves that school choice is perfectly compatible with the philosophy of the left. Such a philosophy, however, must be a “liberalism of people,” devoted above all to the interests of students and families, not a “liberalism of institutions,” devoted to preserving the bureaucracy and the unions.
In the five years since a federal law mandated an expansion of reading and math tests, 44 percent of school districts nationwide have made deep cutbacks in social studies, science, art and music lessons in elementary grades and have even slashed lunchtime, a new survey has found.
The most detailed look at the rapidly changing American school day, in a report released today, found that most districts sharply increased time spent on reading and math.
The report by the District-based Center on Education Policy, which focuses on a representative sample of 349 school districts, found recess and physical education the only parts of the elementary school day holding relatively steady since enactment of the No Child Left Behind measure in 2002.
The survey provides grist for critics who say the federal testing mandate has led educators to a radical restructuring of the public school curriculum in a quest to teach to new state tests. But backers of the law, which is up for renewal this year, say that without mastery of reading and math, students will be hampered in other areas.
“Next year is the 25th Anniversary of the publication of ‘A Nation at Risk,’ the landmark study that showed how American students were falling behind students in other nations – and the consequences we would face if it continued. Well, it did continue – and it got worse. Much worse. Today, our schools are further behind than they were 25 years ago –even though we’ve doubled education spending over the last several decades. If you did that with your 401(K) or your pension fund, you’d work for the rest of your life and die broke!
“In many cities, including New York, the money was squandered by politicians and special interests who protected their own jobs first, and worried about classroom learning second. A generation of students paid a terrible price, and let’s face facts: No group of children paid more than African-Americans.
“Today, black and Latino 12th graders – who should be reading college catalogs – are reading at the same level as white 8th graders. And a shockingly high percentage of black and Latino 4th graders – who should be reading Harry Potter – cannot even read a simple children’s book. This is not only not acceptable – it’s shameful. Whitney Young Jr. must be turning over in his grave!
“Here we are in the greatest country on earth – home of the best universities in the world. Is this really the best we can do? No way. We’re better than that. But let me tell you something. Let me tell you exactly who’s at fault: Us. That’s right. We are the ones to blame. And here’s why: Politicians have pandered to us by selling us on the idea that all we need is more money and smaller classes – and we’ve bought it. They’ve given us cheap platitudes and slogans instead of real solutions – and we’ve bought it. Whoever’s in power, they’ve pointed fingers at the other party when nothing improves – and we have bought it!
Tucked amid a block of rowhouses around the corner from Camden Yards is an elementary school with a statistical profile that often spells academic trouble: 76 percent of the students are poor, and 95 percent are minorities.
But George Washington Elementary has more academic whizzes than most of the schools in Howard, Anne Arundel, Carroll and Baltimore counties.
These students don't just pass the Maryland School Assessment - they ace it. About 46.2 percent of George Washington students are scoring at the advanced level, representing nearly half of the school's 94 percent pass rate.
An analysis by The Sun of 2007 MSA scores shows that most schools with a large percentage of high achievers on the test are in the suburban counties, often neighborhoods of middle- and upper-middle-class families. But a few schools in poorer neighborhoods, such as George Washington, have beaten the odds.
Statewide, Howard County had the highest percentage of students with advanced scores, and Montgomery and Worcester counties weren't far behind.
Of the top five elementary schools, two are in Montgomery County, two in Anne Arundel and one in Baltimore County.
Whether they are in wealthy or poor neighborhoods, schools with lots of high-scoring students share certain characteristics. They have experienced teachers who stay for years, and they offer extracurricular activities after school. Sometimes, they have many students in gifted-and-talented classes working with advanced material.
Madison Metropolitan School District: A Tale of Two Cities-Interrupted
Smaller Learning Communities Program CFDA #84.215L [Clusty Search]
NEED FOR THE PROJECT
Wisconsin. Home of contented cows, cheese curds, and the highest incarceration rate for African American males in the country. The juxtaposition of one against the other, the bucolic against the inexplicable, causes those of us who live here and work with Wisconsin youth to want desperately to change this embarrassment. Madison, Wisconsin. Capital city. Ranked number one place in America to live by Money (1997) magazine. Home to Presidential scholars, twenty times the average number of National Merit finalists, perfect ACT and SAT scores. Home also to glaring rates of racial and socio-economic disproportionality in special education identification, suspension and expulsion rates, graduation rates, and enrollment in rigorous courses. This disparity holds true across all four of Madison’s large, comprehensive high schools and is increasing over time.
Madison’s Chief of Police has grimly characterized the educational experience for many low income students of color as a "pipeline to prison" in Wisconsin. He alludes to Madison’s dramatically changing demographics as a "tale of two cities." The purpose of the proposed project is to re-title that unfolding story and change it to a "tale of two cities-interrupted" (TC-I). We are optimistic in altering the plot based upon our success educating a large portion of our students and our ability to solve problems through thoughtful innovation and purposeful action. Our intent is to provide the best possible educational experience for all of our students.
This document is a fascinating look into the "soul" of the current MMSD Administration ($339M+ annual budget) along with their perceptions of our community. It's important to note that the current "high school redesign" committee (Note Celeste Roberts' comments in this link) is rather insular from a community participation perspective, not to mention those who actually "pay the bills" via property taxes and redistributed sales, income and user fees at the state and federal level.
Last week Pomona College president David Oxtoby tried to educate me in this column about what he sees as the flaws of the Advanced Placement program, the college-level courses and tests given in high school of which I am American journalism's biggest supporter. This column will look at AP from the perspective of a well-informed parent in Anne Arundel County, Md., who thinks the program has fallen prey to the worst aspects of the movement to make public schools accountable through regular testing.
I was pretty aggressive with Oxtoby, since I know him well and figure he is used to being disrespected by self-important reporters. In the discussion below, I am much more polite to Anne E. Levin Garrison, since she is under no obligation to talk to me and has a very personal perspective that even a know-it-all like me has to respect. Part of this column's role as asource of information on AP, International Baccalaureate and other efforts to improve our high schools is my insistence that it be the most important forum for criticism of AP and IB. So I am thankful to both Oxtoby and Garrison for helping me fulfill that obligation and hope other critics will email me when they have something to say.
Two stories recently caught my eye, one in the Washington Post that discussed the publication of a new Russian teaching manual, written ”in-part by Kremlin political consultants,” that is very nationalist in outlook and a BBC report that a new Israeli textbook to be used in Israeli-Arab schools provides a more nuanced and balanced view of Israel’s creation in 1948, acknowledging that some Arabs consider it a “catastrophe” and that some Palestinians were expelled and lands confiscated following statehood. (These are but two examples of controversies that regularly arise over history textbooks; for example, Japanese textbooks and their portrayal of that country’s imperial history have always been a lightning rod throughout Asia.)
"I cannot imagine anything more destructive to how hard people in this community are trying to work together," the city's school superintendent said when we called to ask him the best way to compare Dane County's high schools.
And yet.
It's lost on no one, least of all Rainwater, that education is increasingly a game of numbers, that numerals have practically replaced consonants in our national dialogue on schools.
Take the feds, who are at this moment gathering mountains of data on schools to satisfy the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Add the state, which harvests a bumper crop of test scores and school statistics each year. And throw in the institutions themselves; while they understandably don't like statistics because numbers can never tell the whole story, high schools still, for example, condense the whole story of every senior into one make-or-break number: the class rank. (And don't let any school tell you it doesn't--whether by actual number or by some version of a "grade-distribution" grid, high school guidance counselors routinely document for colleges where a given student ranks scholastically in relation to his or her peers.)
For numbers you need-- and can actually use--we turned to experts: parents, counselors, principals, consultants. Does academic achievement matter when it comes to ranking schools? Absolutely, say college admissions advisors and parents. So we included each school's average score on the state Knowledge and Concepts Exam and on the national ACT test. How about a school's overall learning environment? Some of the ways to measure that, say the consultants, are to look at graduation rates, student-to-teacher ratios, and the number of courses and advanced-placement courses offered by each school. How about measuring a climate that's more cultural than academic? Take extracurriculars into account, advise experts. Schools that offer a healthy number of sports programs and academic and social clubs accomplish two things at once: They give students good chances to participate and they enrich the overall fabric of the school.
With two new manuals for high school history and social studies teachers, written in part by Kremlin political consultants, Russian authorities are attempting to imbue classroom debate with a nationalist outlook.
The history guide contains a laudatory review of President Vladimir Putin's years in power. "We see that practically every significant deed is connected with the name and activity of President V.V. Putin," declares its last chapter. The social studies guide is marked by intense hostility to the United States.
Both books reflect the themes dominating official political discourse here: that Putin restored Russian strength and built what the Kremlin calls a "sovereign democracy" despite American efforts to isolate the country.
The principal author of the history manual -- "The Newest History of Russia, 1945-2006" -- is Alexander Fillipov, deputy head of the National Laboratory of Foreign Policy, a research institute affiliated with the Kremlin.
John Taylor Gatto, honored on several occasions as New York City and New York state teacher of the year, has made it the second part of his life's work to determine why our government schools are so ineffective -- why he always had to fight the bureaucracy above him in order to empower his young charges (many of them minority kids, given to him as "punishment" because the administrators thought them "hopeless") to spread their wings and learn.
What Gatto discovered is enough to cause a massive paradigm shift for anyone who reads his books, whether you start with the slim "Dumbing Us Down" or his weightier master work, "The Underground History of American Education."
America's schools aren't failing, Gatto discovered. They're doing precisely what they were re-designed to do between the 1850s and the early 1900s, when America embarked on our current imperial/mercantilist adventure -- that is, to churn out little soldiers and factory workers with mindless obedience drilled in and with the higher critical faculties burned out of them through the process of feeding them learning in small unrelated bits like pre-digested gruel, till they neither know how nor feel any inclination to discern higher patterns, which might lead them to challenge the "party line."
Who dreamed up such a system?
Thus, if we want to see what our "reverse-engineered" copy of the German school system has in mind for us, it might pay to simply take a look at what's happening with government-run schooling ... in Germany.
HISTORY is becoming an endangered subject as growing numbers of children drop the subject at 14, according to Ofsted, the education watchdog.
Less than a third of pupils study GCSE history, meaning few learn about important historical themes when they are "mature enough" to do so.
In a critical report published today, inspectors said pupils were being driven away because of overloaded timetables and lessons that were often dumbed down.
Ofsted insisted the curriculum focused on a "relatively small number of issues" with pupils failing to make connections between different periods or answering the "big questions" thrown up by the past.
The report also said the Government's drive to promote so-called "Britishness" was being undermined by lessons that focus too strongly on England while shunning Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
When Bruce Poch, the dean of admissions at Pomona College, sees a high school transcript listing courses in AP Philosophy or AP Middle Eastern History, he knows something is wrong. There is no such thing. Neither subject is among the 37 in the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.
“Schools just slap AP on courses to tag them as high-level, even when there’s no Advanced Placement exam in the subject,” Mr. Poch said. “It was getting to be like Kleenex or Xerox.”
But now, for the first time, the College Board is creating a list of classes each school is authorized to call AP and reviewing the syllabuses for those classes. The list, expected in November, is both an effort to protect the College Board brand and an attempt to ensure that Advanced Placement classes cover what college freshmen learn, so colleges can safely award credit to students who do well on AP exams.
“We’ve heard of schools that offered AP Botany, AP Astronomy, AP Ceramics, and one Wyoming school with AP Military History,” said Trevor Packer, director of the board’s Advanced Placement program. “We don’t have those subjects. One of the reasons colleges called for the audit was that they wanted to know better what it means when they see an AP on a transcript.”
I recently examined the four most widely used texts sold to faculty in schools of education to teach "learning" to future teachers. The courses these texts are used in are well known to teacher educators. They carry titles such as "Principles of Learning for Teachers," or "Introduction to Educational Psychology," or "Learning in Classrooms." There is no accredited teacher preparation program in the country that does not require at least one such course. There is no state department of education that does not require such courses before they will accredit a college or university as having an approved program of teacher education. No other academic discipline has any where near such total control and influence over the "knowledge" required of future teachers.
As I scanned these texts I asked myself a simple question. If I were a classroom teacher how would the learning theories being presented in these texts help me to deal with the following subgroups in a class of 25 to 35 students:
1.4-6 students feign helplessness regardless of how much the assignments are watered down and never complete assignments.
2.6-8 students need for attention prevents them from staying on task and interferes with the work of others.
3.1-2 students see themselves as having been hurt by teachers and seek revenge regardless of the task or assignment at hand.
4.3-4 students challenge the teacher for control of the classroom
5.6-8 students come to school everyday and function as observers rather than participants. They devote most of their time to observing the interactions ( i.e. the cold or hot war) between the teacher and each of the four student groups cited above.
Ultimately, this group comprises the majority of school dropouts; these are students with very low achievement who declare they quit school because it was"boring."
6.4-6 officially labeled special needs students with IEP's.
It is important to understand that the causes of feigned helplessness, the need for constant attention, assurance, control, revenge, or to observe rather than participate cannot be fully explained by psychological constructs.At least a dozen academic disciplines provide valid theoretic and research based constructs that explain these student behaviors. Thinking of classes in real schools comprised of these six subgroups I found little in the texts that explain either why students take on these roles or what a teacher could do to best teach students assuming these roles. But worst of all, I found no connection anywhere in the four texts between the endless lists of recommended behaviors given to prospective teachers and any theory of learning. In a desperate attempt to convince myself that surely these texts on "learning" would have some relevance to the real world I looked up the terms "classroom management" and "discipline" in their glossaries. Each of these volumes consisted of over 300 pages. In each case I found less that two pages of do's and don'ts dealing with discipline and no connection of these recipes to any theory of learning.The volumes themselves are endless lists of things teachers should do without any connections whatever between their endless admonitions to any psychological theory. The reason for this is simple. The interminable advocacies are not based on or derived from any psychological theory… none.
On its Web site, the Seattle Public Schools Office of Equity and Race Relations details what it expects of the students from four Seattle high schools who are being sent to the eighth annual White Privilege Conference April 18-21 in Colorado Springs. The SPS white privilege conference "expectations" document states that for student attendees, ensuing goals should include: "educate youth and people who work with youth about issues of privilege;" and, "support and develop youth leadership for social and economic justice." White privilege, as I discuss in a Seattle Times op-ed today, is about the pernicious cult of individualism and self-determination.
More spending doesn’t necessarily buy you better schools. With property taxes rising across the country, we took a look at per-pupil spending in public schools and weighed it against student performance--college entrance exam scores (SAT or ACT, depending on which is more common in the state), exam participation rates and graduation rates.
Winners in this rating system are counties whose schools deliver high performance at low cost. The losers spend a lot of money and have little to show for it.
Marin County, Calif., provides the best bang for the buck. In 2004 Marin spent an average of $9,356 ($6,579 adjusted for the cost of living relative to other metro areas in the U.S.) per pupil, among the lowest education expenditures in the country. But in return Marin delivered results above the national average: 96.8% of its seniors graduated, and 60.4% of them took the SAT college entrance exam and scored a mean 1133 (out of 1600). The others in the top five are Collin, Texas; Hamilton, Ind.; Norfolk, Mass.; and Montgomery, Md.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Alexandria City, Va., which sits just six miles outside of our nation’s capital, spent $13,730 ($11,404 adjusted) per pupil, but its high schools registered only a 73% graduation rate, with 65.0% of the seniors participating in the SAT for a mean score of 963. According to John Porter, assistant superintendent, Administrative Services and Public Relations for the Alexandria City Public Schools, their graduation rate is reflective of a large number of foreign-born students who may take longer than the traditional four years to graduate. He also noted that their performance measures are rising, along with their expenditures. Per-pupil spending in Alexandria City is now over $18,000. Others on the bottom of the list include Glynn, Ga.; Washington, D.C.; Ulster, N.Y.; and Beaufort, S.C.
Using research provided by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C., Forbes began with a list of the 775 counties in the country with populations greater than 65,000 that had the highest average property taxes. From this list we isolated the 97 counties where more than 50% of per-pupil spending contributions comes from property taxes. ( Click Here For Full Rankings)
Since it costs more to educate a student in New York than Alabama, we adjusted expenditures for each metropolitan area based on Economy.com’s national cost of living average. We then chose to compare spending to the only performance measures that can be used to compare students equally across the country. With a nod toward recognizing the importance of education, performance was weighted twice against cost. Performance and cost numbers are county averages; individual school districts within a county can vary greatly.
Education scholars and school system officials greeted the study as a flawed answer to a fascinating question: Which school districts deliver the best results for the tax dollars citizens invest?
"The value of this kind of analysis is to remind us that simply pouring more [money] into existing school systems is no formula for producing higher achievement out the other end," Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, said in an e-mail.
But Finn derided this analysis as "just plain dumb" for failing to consider other factors, such as wealth and parent education, that affect test scores and graduation prospects.
The Forbes study takes the unusual approach of rating school systems from a stockbroker's perspective -- or, more specifically, the perspective of a stockbroker raising a family in the D.C. suburbs. Rather than simply rank them by SAT participation or outcome or graduation rate, it considers all three measures and a fourth, dollars spent.
The endeavor is skewed toward affluent and suburban schools, educators said, because of the focus on local property taxes; wealthier jurisdictions tend to pay a greater share of education costs from their own tax coffers. The top three systems in the resulting ranking are all suburban: Marin County, just north of San Francisco; Collin County, near Dallas; and Hamilton County, outside Indianapolis.
An entering student at Pomona College last fall submitted the results of 14 Advanced Placement tests, all but one with the top score of 5. In all, 20 members of the entering class each reported the results of 10 or more such exams. Obviously, these are highly talented students who will benefit from the broad range of advanced courses that Pomona offers. But it is far from clear that this proliferation of AP courses — along with the accompanying pressures — truly makes for the best high-school education, or, for that matter, prepares students to get the most out of their college years.
When I was a high-school student in the 1960s, students in good schools might have taken several AP courses, all during their senior year. Now, however, in order to accumulate 10 or more AP exams, it is necessary to begin far earlier. At some high schools, a 10th-grade chemistry course (the first chemistry course a student takes) is now designated as "advanced placement" so that introductory as well as college-level material can be compressed into a single year of work. In a few subjects, AP courses are now available as early as ninth grade. Can a ninth grader truly be said to be doing "college level" work in European history?
David Oxtoby is one of the most interesting men in American higher education today. He first strikes you as another brilliant but nerdy scientist, which is how he got started, with a doctorate in chemistry from Berkeley and a splendid record as a professor and researcher. But he also had people skills and became president of Pomona College just as my daughter was arriving in 2003 for the start of her freshman year.
I think he is a terrific person and teacher, which is why I was so upset when I saw he had written a piece for the April 27 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Rush to Take More AP Courses Hurts Students, High Schools and Colleges."
I think he is wrong, and wrong in a way that reveals the frustrating refusal of some of our best colleges to see what great benefits AP and other college courses are bringing to the vast majority of high schools that rarely, if ever, send students to extremely selective colleges like Pomona.
When leaders of the North East Independent district realized some students weren’t succeeding, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work. The results were dramatic.
The North East Independent School District, serving part of the city of San Antonio, cherishes its image as a diverse system of high-achieving students bound for college. But two years ago, the 61,000-student district received a jolt when 10 of its 61 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. At each, the performance of students with disabilities tipped the scale downward. Four were considered “academically unacceptable” under state standards, a rating that was successfully appealed but still a blow.
Superintendent Richard A. Middleton, who has led the district for 17 years, said the results were demoralizing: “When we have a school that for the large part is very successful, if a smaller cell of student scores creates a low ranking, there’s an air of disbelief and confusion.”
The plan required both a practical and a philosophical change for district professionals. Principals, in partnership with district-level data-coaching teams, dug deeper into student achievement data than they ever had before. All students, particularly those with disabilities, had to be taught the most rigorous classwork teachers believed they could master. Administrators were asked to internalize a belief that all students could learn—no excuses.
Not every school leader was immediately on board. Linda Skrla, an associate professor at Texas A&M University, in College Station, and a graduate school classmate of Ms. Thomas’, gave a presentation to district administrators the summer after the 2005-06 test administration. Along with James J. Scheurich, Ms. Skrla wrote a book called Leadership for Equity and Excellence, contending that unconscious biases can lead administrators to have low expectations for students. The authors urge administrators to confront those biases and institute reforms.
A new study out of Chicago suggests that low-achieving and high-achieving students haven't benefited from No Child Left Behind.
When comparing changes in Chicago students' test scores pre- and post-NCLB, researchers Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach found a "strikingly consistent pattern" in the test scores of students with lowest-achievement test scores. They scored "the same or lower" under NCLB's accountability system than they did in the 1990s under the Chicago's accountability measures.
When looking at gifted students, the researchers found "mixed evidence of gains" in the NCLB era.
Kids in the middle--the ones closest to proficiency--performed better under NCLB than they did before.
This study lends credence to common critiques of that law encourages teachers to focus on the so-called bubble kids--the ones that are close to reaching proficiency.
I like small schools, but I also like middle-size schools. About ten years ago, Valerie Lee of the University of Michigan did a study in which she asked what was the ideal size for a high school, and she concluded that the ideal school was small enough for kids to be known by the teachers, but large enough to mount a reasonable curriculum. The best size for a high school, she decided, based on a review of student progress in schools of different sizes, is 600-900 students. You may think this is too large, but it sure beats schools of 2,000-3,000. I think we can all agree that the mega-schools that were created in the past forty years or so are hard, difficult environments for adolescents, where they can easily get lost in the crowd. Anonymity is not good for kids or for adults, either.
Anyway, American education seems to be engaged in yet another statistical sham, this time involving small high schools. Everyone wants Gates money, so almost every big-city school district is breaking up big schools into small schools. To make sure that they look good and get good press (the same thing), the leadership of some districts stack the deck by screening out the lowest performing kids—the special education students, the limited-English speakers, and kids with low test scores.
School districts across the country are having financial problems, and charter schools are increasingly getting blamed. Charters are accused of taking money from “the public schools,” although they are public schools themselves. Charters are even taking the blame for rising taxes. These assertions certainly paint a clear picture of some district administrators’ feelings about charter schools – but they don’t tell the full story.
In fact, high-quality public charter schools have positive financial impacts for communities that more than offset the obvious and immediate revenue losses to districts. Accurately measuring the financial impact of charters requires looking at not only the revenue shifts for the school district but also these benefits to the broader community.
Is it a radical and experimental shift - a real break with the traditional subject-driven timetable - as the curriculum experts argue?
Or is it just a gentle nudge on the tiller, cutting away a certain amount of "waste and duplication" in order to find a little more space for teachers to focus on the basics, as the government wants us to think?
I believe it is the former and that the government has either been hoodwinked by its advisers or, more likely, is too nervous of being accused of going all soft and trendy to be really honest about the radical nature of this change.
We live in a sea of information, as Britannica’s Web 2.0 Forum has made plain. Sometimes that sea is full of algal blooms. Sometimes there’s raw sewage floating on it. Sometimes that sea is so choppy that it’s dangerous to enter. In a time of educational crisis, when reading and analysis are fading skills, teaching students how to recognize the condition of the waters seems an ever more difficult task. Yet, for all the doomsaying of some observers, including some of my fellow conferees here, I prefer to be optimistic, to think that with a little coaching we all have in us the makings of champion freestyle surfers on that great ocean of data, knowing just where to look for tasty waves and a cool buzz, to quote the immortal Jeff Spicoli, and knowing too just where the riptides are.
Appleton's Board of Education hopes to maintain momentum — or what one member calls the "wow factor" — the school district has built in attracting outsiders, especially in an increasingly competitive landscape.
In tight budget times, the district's financial health and survival depends on it.
John Mielke said the school cannot rest on its laurels.
"I think the charter schools have developed a 'wow factor,'" Mielke said at the annual school board retreat recently. "We are a leader in the charter school movement and I think people look at what we've done with charters and think: 'Other things must be interesting in that district.' Our challenge is what's the next 'wow factor.' You can't exist on just the wow factor of charter schools. What's the next step up?"
During the June 25-26 retreat, he and other board members learned that while many larger Wisconsin districts are losing students, Appleton, the sixth largest in the state, is an "aberration," owed in large part to the draw of its charter schools to outsiders.
Last school year 879 students, or 6 percent of the district's total enrollment of 15,228, open enrolled to Appleton from outside the district. A total of 617, or 70 percent who came into the district attended charter schools.
Charter schools are public schools that are allowed to waive state regulations to deliver their programs. Appleton offered 13 charter schools last school year, offering families choices for students interested in everything from the environment and fine arts to engineering and such approaches as Montessori, Core Knowledge and online virtual education.
By contrast, 160 students open enrolled out of the district.
The document, produced by the Washington-based American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, provides descriptions of 50 teacher-education programs around the country. Although the report does not identify any single program or approach as most effective in swelling the ranks of math and science teachers, it says that more institutions are establishing stronger ties between colleges of education, which focus on teacher preparation, and academic programs, which are devoted to training undergraduates in specific academic subjects.
Barriers between those academic departments sometimes prevent talented math and science undergraduates from considering teaching careers, advocates for improved teaching have argued. Those intrauniversity divides also make it more difficult for aspiring teachers to obtain vital content knowl-edge in math and science before entering the classroom, some say.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
The Fourth of July is fireworks, festivities and images of a gathering of remarkable men determined "to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."
For me the Fourth of July is those things and a question: What sort of education produced these men? What schools might produce their like again? There are clues. The author of the Declaration of Independence had much to say about educating the very young.
Thomas Jefferson lobbied the Virginia General Assembly to implement a system of publicly-funded schools. He failed. It would be sixty years before Horace Mann traveled the state of Massachusetts on horseback advocating a system of "common schools" and decades more before most states would follow Massachusetts' lead.
Jefferson's vision for public education is, nonetheless, illuminating and provocative. The main source is his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785. Here are some of the key features of his plan — in the original spelling, where quoted:
Attendance is voluntary. "It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent's refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father." (1)
Every child is entitled to three years of instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The reading for the primary school years is mainly history. "The first stage of this education . . . wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction, the principal foundations of future order will be laid here. Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history."
And later in the text, Jefferson writes that "of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
The "best genius in the school of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education" is entitled to a fourth and fifth year at a "grammar school."
Students at grammar schools study "Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic."
After a trial period of one or two years, the best student at each grammar school is selected for six years of further instruction. "By this means . . . the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as the grammar schools go."
After the sixth year, the best half of these go to college. "At the end of six years instruction, one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with future masters); and the other half, who are to be chosen for the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent and continued three years in the study of such sciences as they shall chuse, at William and Mary college.
Jefferson believed in selection by merit from an early age: "By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of youths of genius from the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought and cultivated."
Nor can some of his arguments about the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind be denied. For example, the law's requirement that states test students annually and show progress toward proficiency has caused some states to lower standards and water down assessments. It's difficult, though, to see how giving states even more flexibility will solve this problem. Wasn't the trouble caused by letting states decide what's good enough?
We've been unequivocal in our support of standards that have rigor and meaning. It's encouraging that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a proponent of No Child Left Behind who chairs the education committee, has identified this as one of his priorities. Some promising ideas come from the nonprofit advocacy group Education Trust. One is to encourage states to raise their standards to a "college-and-career-ready level" with the trade-off of getting more time to reach more realistic goals of proficiency. The law's original goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014, while laudatory, may be unrealistic.
Fifty years on, and exponential scientific advance later, it seems unlikely that the response of dinner guests would be much different. I was reminded of Snow's test when reading the new book by Natalie Angier, science editor of the New York Times. Angier's book is called The Canon, and subtitled 'A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science'. It is not a long book and it contains, as the title suggests, a breathless Baedeker of the fundamental scientific knowledge Angier believes is the minimum requirement of an educated person.
In many places, I found myself cringeing all over again. I've read a fair amount of popular science, tried to follow the technical arguments that underpin debates about global warming, say, or bird flu, listened religiously to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, but still I discovered large black holes in my elementary understanding of how our world works. Angier divides her book into basic disciplines - biology, chemistry, geology, physics and so on - and each chapter offers an animated essay on the current established thinking.
The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school - full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: 'This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.' For physics: 'Almost everything we've come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.' Along the way there are all sorts of facts that stick: 'You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent', for example; or, if you imagined the history of our planet as a single 75-year human life span: 'The first ape did not arrive until May or June of the final year... and Neil Armstrong muddied up the Moon at 20 seconds to midnight.'
Thanks, Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said yesterday that the federal No Child Left Behind law has created a culture that has education leaders nationwide "shooting way too low" and that it has spawned a generation of statewide tests that are too easy to pass.
In a meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters, Weast said the federal mandate, with its push for 100 percent proficiency on state tests, has driven states toward lower standards that don't prepare most students for college or careers.
"I think we've got to adjust up," he said. "Or at least give some flexibility for those who would like to adjust up."
Although some states, including Maryland, have been praised for holding children to comparatively high standards, Weast said the state curriculum, the statewide Maryland School Assessment and the High School Assessment all measure a minimal level of academic proficiency. The reason, he said, is that Maryland and most other states have leaders who want their kids "to look good" on such assessments.
Black students in Montgomery and Fairfax high schools are far more successful in Advanced Placement testing than their peers in nine of the 10 school systems in the nation with the largest black populations, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Participation in the AP program has more than doubled in 10 years. But this surge in college-preparatory testing has not reached most African American students, according to a review of 2006 exam results in 30 school systems with about 5,000 or more black high school students.
Still, black students in both Montgomery and Fairfax counties passed AP tests in spring 2006 at the rate of more than eight tests for every 100 black students enrolled in the high school grades, the analysis found.
That is far greater than the success rate of African Americans nationwide, who produced about one passing AP test for every 100 students. None of the other school systems studied produced successful AP tests at even half the rate of Maryland's and Virginia's largest school systems.
Area 1 – Meeting NCLB Teacher Quality Objectives: Grade C
Wisconsin has better data policies than many states, which can help it ameliorate inequities in teacher assignments. The state’s subject matter preparation policies for future elementary teachers need improvement. Its requirements for future high school teachers are adequate, but its expectations for middle school teachers are insufficient. The state also needs to define a subject matter major. Wisconsin is phasing out the use of its HOUSSE route.
Area 2 – Teacher Licensure Grade F
Wisconsin’s teaching standards do not clearly refer to the knowledge and skills that new teachers must have before entering the classroom. State policies do not ensure that teachers are prepared in the science of reading instruction. New teachers are allowed to teach for up to two years before passing state licensure tests. The state needs to reduce its obstacles to licensure for out of state teachers. Wisconsin does not recognize distinct levels of academic caliber at the time of initial certification for new teachers.
Area 3 – Teacher Evaluation and Compensation Grade D
While Wisconsin’s minimal teacher evaluation guidelines require subjective observations, they do not ensure that evaluations are based primarily on a preponderance of evidence of classroom effectiveness that includes objective measures. Teacher accountability is further undermined by only requiring evaluations once every three years, by a lack of value-added data, and by not ensuring districts wait five years prior to granting teachers tenure. The state does not burden districts with a minimum salary schedule.
Area 4 – State Approval of Teacher Preparation Programs Grade D
Wisconsin does not do enough to hold its programs accountable for the quality of their preparation. It has failed to address their tendency to require excessive amounts of professional coursework. Wisconsin does require applicants to pass a basic skills test and has a sensible accreditation policy.
Area 5 – Alternate Routes to Certification Grade F
Wisconsin does not currently provide a genuine alternate route into the teaching profession. The alternate routes the state offers have serious structural flaws combined with low and inflexible admissions standards. Wisconsin does not ensure that programs do not require excessive coursework, and it does not ensure adequate support is provided to new teachers. In addition, the state collects little objective performance data from alternate route programs and does not use the data to hold programs accountable for the quality of their teachers. Wisconsin has a restrictive policy regarding licensure reciprocity for teachers from out of state who were prepared in an alternate route program, making it difficult for some teachers to transfer their licenses.
Area 6 – Preparation of Special Education Teachers Grade D
Wisconsin’s standards for special education teachers do not ensure that teachers will be well prepared to teach students with disabilities. The state places no limit on the amount of professional education coursework that its teacher preparation programs can require of special education candidates, resulting in program excesses. While elementary special education teachers are required to pass a subject matter test, this policy does not sufficiently ensure that candidates will have the knowledge relevant to all of the topics they will have to teach. The state’s secondary special education candidates are likely to finish their preparation program highly qualified in at least one subject area, but the state has not developed a streamlined HOUSSE route to help them meet additional subject matter requirements once they are in the classroom.
Deputy state superintendent Tony Evers attributes the state's low marks to a difference in philosophy over teacher education. The state believes in a mixture of subject matter, such as English and science, and courses on how to teach, while the council wants more of an emphasis on content.
Evers also said that the report represented only a superficial view and he took particular issue with a D grade for Wisconsin's preparation of special education teachers.
He said that teachers in that area are so well-trained that there is a problem with other states recruiting them away.
Until a few years ago, America's elementary and secondary schools generally escaped our national obsession with lists. Almost every week another ranking of best communities, most beautiful people or top hospitals is published.
But in 1998 Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post, began publishing a list of "The 100 Best High Schools in America." The ranking is based on "The Challenge Index," a measure developed by Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews. The list, published annually the past few years, has become increasingly influential. Other media outlets now cover it like a horserace, and high schools all over the country are reacting to the scrutiny.
Unfortunately, the Challenge Index is a flawed proxy for America's "best" high schools. Using publicly available student performance data, we have found that many schools in Newsweek's ranking have high dropout rates or glaring achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, many schools that fail to make the Newsweek list may be doing a better job educating all of their students.
The Challenge Index is a simple measure: It's the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Cambridge tests a high school's students take, divided by its number of graduating seniors. This simplicity is both its primary virtue and fatal flaw.
IT IS early evening in Berkeley, California, and Chrissy Schwinn, a sinophile environmentalist, walks ten feet from her kitchen to her home office for her Chinese lesson. She has already listened to that day's dialogue, which arrived as a free podcast, on her iPod. She has also printed out the day's Chinese characters, which arrived along with the podcast. Now her computer's Skype software—which makes possible free phone calls via the internet—rings and “Vera”, sitting in Shanghai where it is late morning, says Ni hao to begin the lesson.
One might call it “language-learning 2.0,” says Ken Carroll, an Irishman who in 2005 co-founded Praxis, the company that provides Ms Schwinn's service, after hearing about these “Web 2.0” technologies from his slightly geekier co-founders, Hank Horkoff, a Canadian, and Steve Williams, a Briton. The penny dropped at once.
Praxis Language www sites and rss feeds: Chinese | Spanish.
Record numbers of Madison children -- and their parents -- this summer are enrolled in programs aiming to make sure children are ready when they begin kindergarten.
The significant rise in publicly and privately funded kindergarten-readiness efforts is an investment that will pay off, educators and parents say, in students' higher rates of success in school and as adults.
"My daughter needs to learn lots of things," said Claudia Diaz, who has signed up for a new privately funded program called KinderReady with her daughter, Michelle Villegas-Diaz, 3.
"And if I learn these, in the future Michelle is going to be a better person."
While Diaz and her daughter are receiving help at home and at a day-care center, record numbers of incoming kindergartners are heading off to summer school across Madison.
Those three companies along with 27 others are members of the Northwest Education Cluster, a four-year-old organization in the Portland area that holds quarterly meetings at which these entrepreneurial companies can share ideas on directing sales efforts to school districts and teachers’ conventions, or on the intricacies of staffing, finances and other routines of managing a company.
Most Cluster members are relatively small. Vernier Software has $30 million in revenue and 75 employees; Learning.com has under $20 million in revenue and 50 employees; and Saltire has $1 million in revenue and nine employees.
Saltire, which often works on grants from the National Science Foundation, wants to expand use of its geometry program in high schools across the nation. “That’s where the big market for scientific calculators is today,” said Philip Todd, Saltire’s founder.
Chan Stroman posted a valuable and in-depth examination of the District's WKCE scores, and is it in the spirit of that posting that I would like to share my own little examination of our most recent test results. Rather than focusing on the scores of our students, this is an investigation of the numbers of MMSD students who took the WKCE exams. My intention is to simply present the data and let the reader draw their own conclusions.
This journey began with a question: How did students at West High School do on the WKCE exams now that the school has completed their three year Small Learning Communities grant. A relatively straightforward question that can be addressed by a visit to the DPI web site. However, in the process of looking at West High School's test data from the Fall of 2006, it was surprising to see that only 39 African American students had been tested. Certainly there had to be more than 39 African American 10th graders at West this year, and if we want WKCE scores to provide an accurate assessment of the
"success" of a school, it is important that there isn't any bias in which groups of students provide the assessment data.
The District makes available a number of breakdowns of student enrollment data by grade, by school, by ethnicity, by income status, and combinations thereof. However, there is not a breakdown that provides enrollment numbers by school by grade by ethnicity. Thus, if we want to know the number of African American 10th graders at a particular school we have to make an educated guess. We can do that by taking the percentage of African American students enrolled in the school and multiplying that by the number of students in the 10th grade. This gives us a rough estimate of the number of students enrolled. We can then compare that to the number of students who took the WKCE test to estimate the percentage of missing students.
West High School had 517 10th graders enrolled this past year, and 14% of the student body was African American. This suggests that there should be approximately 73 African American 10th graders at West which means that 34 students or 46.6% were not tested. This is very different from the overall proportion of West 10th graders not tested: 14.5% (DPI data show that 442 of the 517 students in the 10th grade were tested this past year). However, this is only one year's data at one of our high schools. We need to put this data in context if we are to draw any conclusions. So here is the data for the four high schools for the past five years.
High School
Year
MMSD Enrollment
Proportion African American Enrolled
Predicted AA 10th Graders
African American Tested
Total 10th Grade Tested
% AA Missing
% Total Missing
Discrepancy (AA% - Total %)
West
2002/03
624
14%
85.86
73
529
14.99%
15.22%
-0.24%
2003/04
591
14%
79.45
54
484
32.04%
18.10%
13.93%
2004/05
523
15%
77.09
68
457
11.78%
12.62%
-0.83%
2005/06
563
14%
77.91
75
489
3.74%
13.14%
-9.41%
2006/07
517
14%
72.98
39
442
46.56%
14.51%
32.05%
East
2002/03
598
21%
125.91
85
481
32.49%
19.57%
12.93%
2003/04
538
22%
116.39
91
437
21.81%
18.77%
3.04%
2004/05
538
21%
113.54
94
444
17.21%
17.47%
-0.26%
2005/06
501
23%
114.15
93
443
18.53%
11.58%
6.95%
2006/07
472
22%
105.64
81
385
23.32%
18.43%
4.90%
La Follette
2002/03
416
12%
50.23
42
373
16.38%
10.34%
6.05%
2003/04
464
14%
63.72
41
385
35.66%
17.03%
18.63%
2004/05
427
16%
67.40
50
355
25.81%
16.86%
8.95%
2005/06
456
17%
79.57
53
389
33.39%
14.69%
18.69%
2006/07
466
21%
96.88
76
413
21.55%
11.37%
10.18%
Memorial
2002/03
577
14%
80.75
74
502
8.36%
13.00%
-4.64%
2003/04
612
13%
87.55
74
528
15.47%
13.73%
1.75%
2004/05
592
15%
92.74
59
491
36.38%
17.06%
19.32%
2005/06
552
14%
96.48
77
471
20.19%
14.67%
5.52%
2006/07
542
14%
94.01
94
488
0.01%
9.96%
-9.95%
What about other ways to look at the number of high school students who took the WKCE's?
More than race or ethnicity, research clearly shows that school performance is strongly linked to socio-economic status. Thus we can ask are low income students represented to the same degree on the WKCE as non-economically disadvantaged students. Again because the posted enrollment statistics for the district don't provide a breakdown of economic status by grade within a school we have to estimate the numbers of students from the overall school percentages. Given that we know that the percentage of free and reduced lunch students are increasing in our high schools, the use of a whole school perecentage to estimate the 10th grade population will likely underestimate the numbers of low income students, but these numbers are still a starting point.
Here are those data for our four high schools:
High School
Year
MMSD Enrollment
Proportion Low Income Enrolled
Predicted Low Income 10th Graders
Low Income Tested
Non-Disadvantaged Tested
% Low Income Tested
% Non-Disadvantaged Tested
Testing Gap (Low Income - Non-Disadv.%)
West
2002/03
624
18.7%
116.62
73
407
104.61%
80.22%
-24.4%
2003/04
591
24.1%
142.63
54
410
51.88%
91.44%
39.56%
2004/05
523
24.0%
125.42
68
379
62.19%
95.33%
33.14%
2005/06
563
25.2%
142.06
75
375
80.25%
89.09%
8.84%
2006/07
517
27.0%
139.81
39
341
72.24%
90.41%
18.17%
East
2002/03
598
31.8%
190.17
154
327
80.98%
80.18%
-0.80%
2003/04
538
39.0%
209.65
65
372
31%
113.29%
82.29%
2004/05
538
35.3%
189.69
118
326
62.21%
93.59%
31.39%
2005/06
501
42.0%
210.32
178
265
84.63%
91.16%
6.53%
2006/07
472
43.5%
205.27
161
224
78.43%
83.98%
5.55%
La Follette
2002/03
416
17.5%
72.90
66
307
90.54%
89.48%
-1.06%
2003/04
464
23.7%
110.04
61
324
55.44%
91.53%
36.10%
2004/05
427
26.4%
112.65
74
281
65.69%
89.39%
23.70%
2005/06
456
32.2%
146.87
113
276
76.94%
89.28%
12.34%
2006/07
466
36.7%
171.25
143
270
83.50%
91.60%
8.10%
Memorial
2002/03
577
19.2%
110.69
114
388
102.99%
83.21%
-19.78%
2003/04
612
22.3%
136.74
85
443
62.16%
93.21%
31.05%
2004/05
592
23.5%
139.25
86
405
61.76%
89.45%
27.69%
2005/06
552
27.8%
153.26
119
352
77.64%
88.28%
10.63%
2006/07
542
28.8%
156.34
140
348
89.55%
90.24%
0.69%
It is hard to tell if there is any pattern in the data, though it does look like we, as a District, are gradually getting better at getting our low income students tested at similiar rates as our non-economically disadvantaged students. However, when you look at overall percentages of students tested, it does not seem that Madison is doing a very good job of testing students. This is what DPI says about student participation:
All students are expected to take WSAS assessments except students who are excused by their parents. Only a fraction of a percentage of students statewide are excused from WKCE testing by their parents. An extended testing window is provided so that students who are absent on any given day can take make-up tests. Some students are not assessed possibly due to long-term absences or other reasons.
Ninety eight to Ninety-nine percent of students statewide are generally expected to take WKCE during the three-week testing window, but actual participation rates are lower especially among student groups with the lowest achievement levels (e.g. students of color and economically disadvantaged students). One to two percent of students statewide take WAA in lieu of WKCE.
While this suggests that MMSD is not meeting the expectations of DPI regarding student assessment, it is reasonable to ask how other similar districts around the state are doing in their testing of 10th grade students. For this comparison, I examined enrollment data and number of students tested for Green Bay, Appleton, Kenosha, and Milwaukee school districts. All of these numbers come from DPI and reflect students in all high schools and alternative programs. As an aside, I will note that the third Friday enrollment numbers listed by MMSD do not match those posted on the DPI website, and it is for the sake of an honest comparison that I have used DPI numbers for all five districts.
Year
MMSD Third Friday 10th Grade Enrollment
DPI Reported 10th Grade Enrollment
2002/03
2274
2274
2003/04
2252
2263
2004/05
2129
2158
2005/06
2111
2106
2006/07
2058
2104
When we look at these data, we see that MMSD tests fewer of its 10th graders than all four of the chosen districts, even Milwaukee tests a larger percentage!
So there it all is for you, the reader, to chew on. What do you think it means and what do you think it says about our district?
When Margaret Spellings visited the Southeast Valley this spring, she was asked to respond to the question about the effects of No Child Left Behind on the average and above-average students.
Her response was frightening.
Spellings declared that No Child Left Behind is about the "vast, vast number of young Americans who lack the ability to be successful in our country. That is our prime directive, our highest priority."
The highest public education official in our country essentially stated that public schools should be dedicated to below-average students. This may be seen as a call for all parents of average to above-average students to run, don't walk, to their nearest private school.
Spellings takes it a step further by defining the problem as related to race, saying, "We're only graduating half of our Hispanic and half our African-American students on time."
Did I hear you say public education is dedicated to underachieving students of color? Political correctness aside, these are not the only students who lack the ability to be successful. Would you be surprised if we told you that many of our best and brightest students fit this category?
As many as 40 percent of all gifted students are underachievers, according to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, and between 10 and 20 percent of all high school dropouts test in the gifted range.
Consider, then, that many other populations of students are being left behind, especially as funds are diverted into meeting the mandates of this narrow legislation.
For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.
Here in Minneapolis, for instance, the teachers’ union is cooperating with Minnesota’s Republican governor on a plan in which teachers in some schools work with mentors to improve their instruction and get bonuses for raising student achievement. John Roper-Batker, a science teacher here, said his first reaction was dismay when he heard his school was considering participating in the plan in 2004.
“I wanted to get involved just to make sure it wouldn’t happen,” he said.
But after learning more, Mr. Roper-Batker said, “I became a salesman for it.” He and his colleagues have voted in favor of the plan twice by large margins.
I had a history teacher in high school who thought I should be on a different track. He got together with a couple of other teachers and put me in all advanced-placement classes. As a result, I graduated first in my high school class and was able to graduate from college in three years and save a year’s tuition.
A few years ago, he sent a note through the general e-mail of our company’s Web site. He had seen my name and wanted to know if I was the Kathleen Murphy he had taught 20 years ago. He just wanted to say hello and know how I was doing. He had taken such a personal interest in me. Teachers can change the face of a nation.
WHEN educrats call for "a broader definition of rigor," beware. What they really want is to broaden the definition of rigor until it includes dumbed-down drivel.
National Education Association President Reg Weaver used those words in March when he spoke to Congress as it sets out to reauthorize President Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation. The NEA's idea of rigor, of course, is to make it harder to tell if schools are failing students. How? By going after standardized tests, because Weaver regurgitated, their scores "reflect little more than a student's ability to regurgitate facts."
As Don Soifer, education analyst for the Lexington Institute noted, such talk harbors "a worse case scenario for the American public -- all of the money for NCLB and none of the accountability."
I was requested to conduct an evaluation. However, very little quantitative data on student outcomes were available and, given the time-frame, none could be gathered. I, therefore prefer to call this a qualitative criterion-referenced assessment. However, more than sufficient quantitative formative (as opposed to summative) data and extensive qualitative data were gathered. This qualitative criterion-referenced assessment is based on criteria generated by the literature on the education of the gifted. These are included in the appended list of references; most especially, in this order of priority: Richert, Cox, Van Tassel-Baska, Renzulli, Roeper, Kaplan and Tannenbaurn.
The potential benefits to citing the questionable numbers are clear: Raise awareness and rally support. The downsides are more subtle. Boiling down research into misleading soundbites risks credibility of the larger argument advocating early reading, and it obscures other indicators that have equal or greater impact on a child's intellectual development.
Todd Risley, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Alaska and longtime children's development researcher, argues that the amount and quality of parents' talking to their young children is more significant.
"In even the 'best' of families, 'shared reading time' occupies very little of a child's time," he says. And income is a weak predictor of parental-child chatter, he adds, "so any statements about middle class and low income might be a little too glib."
Accelerated Biology Update: "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics"?
When last I wrote about the status of Accelerated Biology at West HS, I was waiting to hear back from Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. I had written to Pam on June 8 about how the promised second section of the course never had a chance, given the statistical procedure they used to admit students for next year.
On June 11, I wrote to Pam again, this time including Superintendent Rainwater. I said to them "I do hope one of you intends to respond to [my previous email]. I hope you appreciate what it looks like out in the community. Either the selection system was deliberately designed to preclude the need for two sections (in which case the promise of two sections was completely disingenuous) or someone's lack of facility with statistical procedures is showing." I heard back from Art right away. He said that one of them would respond by the end of the week.
On 6/13, he did, indeed, write:
Laurie,
I finally have time to reply to your concerns. In our meeting I agreed that selecting an arbitrary number of 20 students for accelerated biology was not fair. I agreed to examine this and develop a process that would allow all students who meet a set criteria to be provided the accelerated biology class. I used two sections as an example. Obviously it would be just as wrong to set an arbitrary 2 sections as it would be to set 20 as an arbitrary number. Our intent was to set a cut score on the placement test and allow everyone who met the cut score to be enrolled in the class. After reviewing the previous years test data we selected the mean score of the last student admitted over the past several years. I understand that you believe that is not the way to select. However, I am very comfortable with this approach and approved it as the means of selecting who can be enrolled. Thank you for your continued concern about these issues. Please feel free to bring to my attention any other inequities that you see in our curriculum.
Art
I quickly replied, twice. Here is my first reply (6/13):
Quickly, I have one question, Art (and will likely write more later). Each year, four slots are reserved for additional students to get into the Accel Bio class in the fall. These might be students who are new to the District, who didn't know about the screening test in the spring, or who want to try again.
Were the screening test scores of students admitted into the class in the fall included in the selection system used on this year's 8th graders?
Thanks,
Laurie
(SIS readers, the reason why it is important to know if the fall scores were included is that it is highly likely that the scores of the students who enter the class in the fall are lower than the cut score used for selection purposes in the spring. It is simply too hard to believe that four students scoring higher than the cut score would magically appear each fall.)
Art wrote back simply (6/13):
There are two slots remaining.
I wrote back again (6/13):
My question is about the set of scores that were used to determine the cut score for this year. Were the scores of students admitted into the class in the fall over the past several years included in the set of scores used to determine this year's cut score?
Art, parents would like to see all of the test scores from recent years -- that is, we would like to see the frequency distribution of all scores for each year, with the cut score indicated and the scores of the fall entires into the class included.
Laurie
Meanwhile, my second initial email (6/13) consisted of a forward to Art of the email he wrote to me on February 12, with a cover line:
Art, see below. FWIW, there is no ambiguity or equivocation in your email here. --L
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 08:04:40 -0600
From: "Art Rainwater"
To: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: Re: West HS follow-up: Accelerated Biology
Laurie
We have followed up with Ed and there will be an additional Advanced Biology class.
Art
After seeing a copy of his own email, Art replied (6/13):
Laurie,
Creating two accelerated biology classes solely for the sake of having 40 students taking the class is no different than having a class for 20 students arbitrarily selected. If you feel that I broke some promise to you based on this email I am sorry. The responsibility for these decisions is mine and I am going to make the one that I feel is in the best interest of the district. I believe this decision is fair and removed the arbitrary nature of the previous class selection.
My decision is final.
Art
I have not yet written back, but here is what I will say: "Art, I do feel you broke your promise to me. I also feel you broke your promise to future West HS students. Selection based on high scores is not "arbitrary." And 40 is no more or less "arbitrary" a number than 20. "Arbitrary" means "for no particular reason." But you had a reason. For whatever reason, you (or someone) wanted to make sure there was only one section of the class after all. If you (or that same someone) had wanted there to be two sections of the class, then you (or they) would have come up with selection criteria designed to insure that outcome."
Meanwhile, I forwarded Art's emails to the three other West parents who attended the meeting with him in January. To a one, we recall the same thing very clearly, that Art agreed there should be a second section of Accelerated Biology at West due to consistently high interest and demand at the school and in order to create greater access to a particular learning opportunity, the same expanded access there is at the other high schools. My best guess is that Art ran into unanticipated and powerful opposition to a second section in some key places at West and so is now changing his story.
In my mind, I keep going back to how poorly the Accelerated Biology screening test was publicized at Hamilton; how the Hamilton staff were told by the West counselors to "downplay" the opportunity to the students; and how that West staff person responded so carefully, "IF there is need for a second section, then the current teacher has been asked to teacher it." All that, combined with a selection procedure that so clearly guaranteed only one section's worth of eligible students (a point that no teacher or administrator seems to understand).
Now I'm hearing that at least some parents of students who did not get into the class are reluctant to say anything because they fear repercussions from the West staff.
Mission accomplished? I guess so, though it depends on what your mission is.
Interestingly, today's SLC grant focus group at West included a long discussion of the fact that we have no PTSO officers for next year and what sort of parental frustration and dissatisfaction with the school might account for that.
The much-reviled Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) could be a surprising role model for the Madison school district as it begins formulating a plan to refashion its high schools for the demands of the 21st century.
MPS, which educates a student body that is overwhelming minority and deeply ensnared in the tentacles of poverty, has a horrid record of academic performance.
But MPS’s very desperation has prompted the state’s largest school district to begin experimenting with small specialty high schools that range from 100 to 400 students. This is an intriguing venture.
The schools’ individualized programs, which promise a shared focus and personalized relationships with staff and families, are startlingly diverse.
How about a high school that uses Montessori instructional methods for an international baccalaureate program? Or one that mixes social justice projects with bilingual instruction? Or how about a four-year heaping of Great Books and Advanced Placement courses? Or a school that stresses visual and performing arts? Or one that couples Maasai-inspired African education with community-service projects? Or another that stresses teaching Chinese and Spanish in the context of international business?
Marc raises many excellent points. Absent changes in the generally monolithic (some might say Frederick Taylor, assembly line) approach taken locally, Milwaukee will certainly have a far richer K-12 environment over the next 20 years than Madison.
Yet, already, providers can't keep up with demand because of a dearth of publicly funded classes. Across the U.S., "the problem is not the unwillingness of immigrants to learn English," says Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group. "The problem is we don't provide enough classes." The cost of attending private language centers is out of reach for most new immigrants.
Since the 1960s, programs that teach English-as-a-second-language (ESL) have been funded through the federal government's adult-education program, as well as money from states and municipalities. Typically, immigrants attend classes at community centers, libraries and nonprofit organizations that compete for public funds each year.
Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. As a corollary to that proposition which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
…so if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.
Hi, everyone. We are writing to share a few thoughts about Monday night's Special Meeting on the High School Redesign and SLC grant. We are writing to you and copying the Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent -- rather than writing to them and copying you -- in order to underscore our belief that you, the School Board, are in charge of this process.
It seems clear to us that the SLC grant requirements and application process will be driving the District's high school re-evaluation and redesign. (So much for the "blank slate" we were promised by the Superintendent last fall. With the SLC grant determining many of the important features of the redesign, obviously some redesign possibilities are already off the table -- whether or not we are awarded the grant, we might add.)
Given that cold, hard fact, it seems to us essential -- ESSENTIAL -- that we understand how our local SLC initiatives have fared before we move forward. That is why Laurie asked on Monday night how the community can access the before-and-after SLC data for Memorial and West.
Memorial and West are, in effect, our "pilot projects." It seems to us that we need to be thoroughly familiar with the results of our pilot projects in order to write the strongest follow-up grant proposal possible. It further seems to us that we need to know if the SLC restructuring programs we have implemented in two of our high schools are achieving their objectives (or not) before we expand the approach to our other high schools (and before we commit to continuing the approach, unchanged, at the first two schools). Let's not forget that our highest priority is to educate and support our students (not to get grant money). In order to do that as well as we possibly can, we need to know what's working for us and what's not working for us. (We imagine the Department of Education will also want to know how our pilot programs have fared before deciding whether or not to give us additional funding.)
The Superintendent said on Monday night that the High School Redesign Committee had "gathered all of the relevant data from each of the four high schools" as part of their early work. And yet, it did not sound like before-and-after SLC restructuring data was part of that effort. We found that very confusing because what data from Memorial and West could possibly be more relevant to the present moment than whether and how their SLC restructuring programs have worked?
With all that as background, we'd like to ask you, the BOE, to:
compile the before-and-after SLC data for both Memorial and West, as well as all progress and final reports that Memorial and West have been required to submit to their granting agency (presumably the DOE);
make those data and reports widely available to the community;
convene two study sessions -- a private one for yourselves and a public one for the community -- where the background and empirical results for the Memorial and West SLC initiatives are thoroughly reviewed and discussed.
Based on our reading of the SLC literature, as well as our direct knowledge of the West grant proposal and daily life at West, we think there are a couple of other things we need to know.
We need to know and understand the extent to which the Memorial and West initiatives are consistent with the recommended "best practices" in the SLC literature. Example: the literature recommends a maximum SLC size of 400 students and that students select into their (ideally, content or theme-based) SLC. In contrast to those recommendations, West students are assigned to their (generic, unthemed) SLC based on the first letter of their last name ... and there are 500 or more students in each SLC.
We need to know and understand the extent to which Memorial and West are actually doing what they told the DOE they would do in their grants. In general, there is a lot that is promised in the West grant that has never happened. (We are in the process of compiling a detailed list.) Example: a huge and important piece of any successful SLC initiative is communication with and outreach to parents, with the clear goal of increasing parental involvement with the school. At West, responsive communication from the school is so far from the norm, the PTSO leadership had to talk with the principal about the complaints they were receiving. In addition, there has been very little targeted outreach to parents aimed at enhancing involvement. What little there has been (PTSO meetings and other events held off-site, in West attendance area neighborhoods) have had dismal attendance, with no follow-up from the school. Interestingly, we don't even have PTSO officers for next year!
A final word about Monday night's meeting --
We found the meeting to be way too structured, to the extent that it prevented open and free-flowing dialogue. Most of what community members were allowed to say had to be in response to things the administration asked, which means the administration controlled the evening's conversation. There was neither time nor support for audience members to ask what they wanted to ask, or to share their full reactions, concerns and recommendations. Ultimately, it felt like a somewhat shallow gesture of interest in community input, not a genuine desire for real, substantive, collaborative dialogue.
We hope you will make sure that we all have the opportunity to educate ourselves about the details of the Memorial and West SLC initiatives, as well as a chance to have real conversation about the future of our high schools.
As always, thank you.
In partnership,
Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques
West High School Parents
Achievement Gaps, Advanced Placement Exams, Demographic Shifts and Charter Schools: What Do They Add Up To for Students?
We seem to be doing a bit better educating our most disadvantaged students. But many educators think that is not enough.
The numbers displayed in the graphic smorgasbord known as "The Condition of Education 2007," from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, reveal the struggles of a generation to make schools work for all children.
Enrollment in publicly funded day care increased significantly from 1991 to 2005. The portion of black children using such services rose from 58 percent to 66 percent. For Hispanic children, the figure rose from 39 percent to 43 percent; for non-Hispanic whites, from 54 percent to 59 percent.
More public day care does not necessarily mean more learning is going on, although the quality of such centers appears to be improving as more states increase support for pre-kindergarten classes and in some cases make them available to all who want them. The relatively low number of Hispanic children in such programs might be a problem, as improving their grasp of English is crucial to the educational success of the largest minority group.
The MMSD ballyhooed its effort to be reinstated for eligibilty to apply for Reading First funds, even after the superintendent returned more than $2 million in Reading First funds in 2004.
In reponse to my question about the status of being reinstated, MMSD employee Joe Quick last week said that the MMSD has recieved no substantive response from the Department of Education.
Improving primary and secondary education. US school students are outperformed in international tests by their peers in many other countries. Although the causes of this are unclear, a partial explanation is that decentralised standards, curriculum and examinations are undemanding. Federal legislation that aims at addressing such system weaknesses is in general well conceived. However, it could be strengthened, for instance by extending the legislated framework of standards, assessment and accountability through high school. Responsibility for education lies primarily with the states and local authorities, which have to adopt and implement more challenging standards.
After decades of reforms, three out of four students fall below math standards. More money is spent running the schools than on teaching. And urgent repair jobs take more than a year . . . Dan Keating and V. Dion Haynes:
Yet a detailed assessment of the state of the school system, based on extensive public records, suggests that the challenge is enormous: The system is among the highest-spending and worst-performing in the nation. Kelly Miller is one small example of a breakdown in most of the basic functions that are meant to support classroom learning.
Tests show that in reading and math, the District's public school students score at the bottom among 11 major city school systems, even when poor children are compared only with other poor children. Thirty-three percent of poor fourth-graders across the nation lacked basic skills in math, but in the District, the figure was 62 percent. It was 74 percent for D.C. eighth-graders, compared with 49 percent nationally.
The District spends $12,979 per pupil each year, ranking it third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on teachers and instruction.
There has been no shortage of solutions for improving the nation's public schools. School leadership, teacher quality, standards, testing, funding, and a host of other issues have crowded reform agendas. But an important trend in public education has gone largely unnoticed in the cacophony of policy proposals: the rise of a completely new class of public schools—"virtual" schools using the Internet to create online classrooms—that is bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools.
Virtual schools served 700,000 students in the 2005–06 school year, mostly at the high school level. Although that is only a fraction of the nation's 48 million elementary and secondary students, it is almost double the estimate of students taking online learning courses just three years earlier, and it's a number that is likely to continue to rise rapidly. In 2006–07, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, and South Dakota became the latest of the two dozen states to establish state-run virtual high school programs. And in Michigan, the legislature went a step further with a mandate requiring students to complete an online learning experience to graduate from high school.
I have a friend who is fond of saying "never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence." These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS -- and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town -- have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.
I first became aware of Accelerated Biology just over three years ago, when my oldest son was a second-semester 8th grader at Hamilton MS. Somehow, I learned that then-West HS Principal Loren Rathert was going to be eliminating the single section of the course that had existed for some number of years. I contacted Mr. Rathert and put the word out to 8th grade parents (and others) whom I thought would care. We wrote to Mr. Rathert and the School Board and the single section of Accelerated Biology was saved, at least for the time being. My son got into the class and had -- in a word -- a phenomenal learning experience.
For two years, the status of Accelerated Biology did not affect my family directly. And yet, by maintaining contact with the teacher and with families I know in the grade levels between my two sons, I stayed abreast of any threats to the course and I continued to lead advocacy efforts to keep Accelerated Biology intact (if not expanded). Along the way, I learned that East HS and LaFollette HS offer two or three sections of TAG/Advanced Biology (the roughly analogous course goes by different names at the different high schools), depending on yearly demand and need. (Memorial has structured its science curriculum differently, such that all 9th graders take an integrated science course; however, beginning in 10th grade, Memorial students have access to TAG and even AP science classes.) In stark contrast, the selection method at West has always been that interested 8th graders take a screening test for admission into Accelerated Biology and the top 20 scorers get in. (Four spaces have historically been reserved for a variety of "late entries" into the class.) My understanding is that the science faculty at West are as intensely divided over the very existence of Accelerated Biology as the West English faculty were over the creation of English 10. Arguments from the community that student interest and demand (and, most likely, ability) are very high (well over 100 8th graders typically take the screening test each year) and that the selection process makes the course unnecessarily selective have fallen on deaf ears. Ditto the cross-school comparison and educational equity argument.
Nevertheless, this year seemed like the right time to advocate again for a second section of Accelerated Biology at West. On a personal level, my second son was an 8th grader at Hamilton. On a broader level, there has been much talk about our high schools this year, including the needs of the District's highest ability students and important gaps in cross-school equity. Thus in December, my husband and I met with Superintendent Rainwater to talk very specifically about our younger son, his educational needs, and how West was going to meet them. Then in January, several current and future West parents met again with Art to discuss the situation at West for "high end" learners and how the SLC restructuring and concomitant curriculum changes (specifically, the 9th and 10th grade core courses) were not serving these students well. As a result of this meeting (and other behind-the-scenes advocacy efforts), West expanded and improved its system for allowing students who are advanced and talented in language arts to skip over either English 9 [rss] or English 10 [rss] (their choice). As well, in an email dated February 12, 2007, Superintendent Rainwater told me that he had followed up with West Principal Ed Holmes and that there would be an additional section of Accelerated Biology at West next year. Needless to say, this was all very good news. (Unfortunately, the dissemination of information about both of these learning opportunities was handled very, very, very poorly. I hope things go better on that front next year.)
Seventy-seven incoming West 9th graders took the Accelerated Biology screening test at the very beginning of May. This is significantly fewer test-takers than in any previous year since I have been keeping track. It is unclear if the very poor publicity and communication with parents contributed to the lower turnout.
Fast forward to this past week. After the June 4 PTSO meeting, my husband (the West PTSO Treasurer) had reason to email the Accelerated Biology teacher about PTSO funding for an incredible Earth Watch trip she is taking eight students on to Brazil this summer. As a postscript, he asked her about Accelerated Biology. She told him to contact Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash about it.
Jeff and I both wrote to Ms. Nash for an update (especially since we had heard through the grapevine that there was only going to be one section of the class after all and that the West administration didn't want the notification letters to go out until after the school year was over.) Here is my email of June 5:
Hi, Pam. We have been told by the folks at West to direct our questions about Accelerated Biology to you.
As you well know, Art and Ed have promised us two sections of Accelerated Biology at West next fall. Interested 8th graders took the screening test at the very beginning of May, over a month ago. Presumably, the tests have been scored. And yet, we have been told that the West Guidance Department does not want the letters to go out until after the school year is over. As the saying goes, "what's up with that?"
An update from you would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Laurie
And here is Pam's reply:
Laurie-
Acceptance letters went out today, June 6.
Pamela J. Nash
Assistant Superintendent
for Secondary Schools
Madison Metropolitan School District
I wrote back and thanked her for getting back to me. But the next day, June 7, I wrote to her again:
BTW, I assume there will be two sections of the class?
On June 8, I received this reply:
Laurie-
As you know, West High School has always had only one section of accelerated biology and used a floating score on the screener to keep it to one section. We were prepared to have two sections if scores warranted such a move. We took the median score used over time and made that the cut off. In order to have two classes we would have had to dip 20 points below that median.
That was not reasonable given the rigor of the course.
Pam
In addition to posting this email correspondence and thoughts about it on the Madison United for Academic Excellence list serve (where -- needless to say -- others shared their reactions), I wrote again to Pam Nash:
Pam,
What is the range of scores on the screening test? I ask this question because the range provides context for understanding what 20 points really means on the screener.
What are the numbers/scores that have identified the top 20 scorers in the past several years? (Can you simply list them out for me?)
What was the score used this year?
Pam, I think the selection method may have guaranteed that only one class worth of students would make the cut.
Think about it. If you use a measure of central tendency (in this case, the median -- though I wonder if you actually meant the mean) on the distribution of numbers that has cut off the top 20 scorers over the years, assuming that the same test instrument was used and that the distribution of test scores over the years has been fairly similar, then wouldn't that number -- the median cut-score -- tend to identify the same number of students for admission this year as have been identified in previous years?
Or think of it this way --
Say each year the 85th percentile score (approximately) is used to identify those top 20 students who will be allowed into the Accelerated Biology class. If you create a distribution of the 85th percentile scores over the course of several years, compute a measure of central tendency for that distribution, and then use the resulting number as the cut score for a new distribution of scores (that is, this year's scores), you will cut off approximately the top 15% of the new distribution.
I think the only way that this would not happen -- that is, the only way that more students would have been identified this year (enough for two sections) -- is if the distribution of this year's scores was very negatively skewed (i.e., included a lot more high-scoring students than previous years' distributions).
If my reasoning is correct, then the second section Art assured us would happen back in February never had a chance. As well, "rigor" is being defined as "that which is done by the top 20 students over the years," and not by the course or the screener.
It seems to me that the priority was not to create a second section of Accelerated Biology; the priority was to maintain the status quo and to not allow more students access to greater intellectual challenge.
I hope you will reconsider this decision.
Laurie
And that, folks, is where it currently stands, though I have remembered that -- at the time of the screening test -- a parent I know was told by someone on the West staff, when she asked about who would teach the second section of Accelerated Biology, "if there is a need for a second section," the teacher of the first section had been asked to do it. "If there is a need for a second section ... ?" Hmmmmm.
I promised a cross-school comparison, aimed at putting my frustration with these recent events at West into sharper relief. Here it is. About a month ago, an East HS friend wrote this to me:
Laurie -- It has been a wearing year in a number of respects, so I want to pass along a couple of positive things I learned at last night's East High United meeting. First, despite the allocation cuts, Alan Harris cobbled together the funds for a position that is half-time literacy coordinator and half-time TAG coordinator. Since I gather it's been awhile since schools have been putting new resources into TAG, this seems notable. Also, Alan also said that East would be instituting an AVID program next year. I hadn't heard of this but it sounds great -- it identifies about 25 kids from each freshmen class with some academic promise but who have been underachieving, and who typically would be the first from their families to go to college. It works with the kids to improve their study skills and other habits with the goal the by their junior and senior year they'll be taking TAG and AP classes and will then go on to college. It's the best way to attack the achievement gap -- help kids in the middle or lower pull themselves up to the top. Here's a link I found to a website the described the program. So a few rays of sunshine cutting through the clouds.
Doesn't the AVID program (not to mention a school-based half time TAG coordinator) sound incredible? Wouldn't it be a welcome addition at any of our high schools?
In that vein, I'd like to say that practically every substantive letter I have written to the Superintendent, School Board and West HS administration about "TAG" issues over the past several years has included a plea to expand access and diversity of participation. I know that many other West area parents have made similar arguments, pointing out time and time again that when these learning opportunities are taken away, it is the high ability and high potential students of color and poverty who suffer the most (a point that research confirms). I would also like to remind readers that Jeff and I are the ones who first brought Donna Ford to Madison in early 2005 and that we are the ones who brought and have kept the District dropout data from the late 1990's into public view. I also recently thanked Jim Z for reminding us of the words of the West math teachers in their April, 2004, letter to the editor of Isthmus:
Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority ... talent earlier and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined "success" as merely "producing fewer failures." Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
I guess my bottom line here is that I do not understand first, how West can get away with what it is getting away with and second, why there are these fundamental and frustrating differences between the attitude and programming at our high schools? Parents and teachers at East have made it clear that they do not want to become like West. West parents and teachers have been sounding an alarm over the 9th and 10th grade core curriculum and arguing for an expansion of West's most rigorous learning opportunities, combined with substantive efforts (starting well before high school) to identify and support high potential learners from all backgrounds. And yet the differences between the schools persist. It's probably paranoid to wonder if maybe the Administration is working to maintain the East-West differences (and the East-West stereotypes) for its own "divide-and-conquer" purposes. Right?
In October, 2005, MUAE guest speaker Jan Davidson encouraged us to be "pleasantly persistent" in our advocacy work. I have tried hard to do just that. But I must say, it's feeling pretty difficult to maintain that attitude right now.
What students must learn to be deemed academically proficient varies drastically from state to state, the United States Department of Education said today in a report that, for the first time, showed the specific extent of the differences.
The report supports critics who say the political compromise of the federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s signature education initiative, has led to a patchwork of educational inequities around the country, with no common yardstick to determine whether schoolchildren are learning enough.
The law requires that all students be brought to proficiency by 2014, but lets each state set its own proficiency standards and choose its own tests to measure achievement.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), states are required to report the percentages of students achieving proficiency in reading and mathematics for grades 3 through 8. For each subject and grade combination, the percentages vary widely across states. For grades 4 and 8, these percentages can be compared to the estimated percentages of students achieving proficiency with respect to the standard established by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Again, large discrepancies are observed. This variation could derive from differences in both content standards and student academic achievement from state to state, as well as from differences in the stringency of the standards adopted by the states. Unfortunately, there is no way to directly compare state proficiency standards because states are free to select the tests they employ and to establish their own performance standards.
The growth of education bureaucracy constitutes what former Education Secretary William Bennett once called "the education ‘blob.’"
A 1998 study by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution defines "the blob" as nearly 40 Washington-based organizations, with more than 3,000 employees and combined budgets of more than $700 million. They have inter-locking directors, share staffs that move between groups and in and out of the revolving door of government, and generally stand united on every major education issue.
But while this national education establishment is often the subject of critical commentary, left undiscussed is the growth of smaller "mini-blobs" at the local, district level. With class size reduction and school size reduction on the public’s mind, educators are coming to the realization that bigger is not always better – but school district size has not yet made it onto the education policy agenda.
In 1937, there were 119,001 school districts. By 1970, that number had dropped to 17,995. In 1996, there were only 14,841. For decades, Americans have accepted the premise that a large city requires one mammoth school district. But evidence suggests that the larger a school district gets, the more resources it devotes to secondary or even non-essential activities. Schools provide transportation, counseling, meals, child care, health services, security, and soon these "support" functions require support of their own.
In sum, large school districts engage in "mission creep," building support activities which rapidly lose any connection to the original goal of educating children.
ver want to attend a world-class university like Stanford or Harvard but don't have the time, opportunity or grades? Now, thanks to the magic of podcasts, all you need is a portable audio player and an Internet connection to enjoy the growing body of online lecture courses provided for free by top colleges.
As the podcast snowball continues rolling - podcast users accounted for 12 percent of the Net's population in 2006 - universities are beginning to jump on the bandwagon. Now, everyday folks around the world can listen to lectures like "Geography of World Cultures," "The Historical Jesus" or "European Civilization From the Renaissance to the Present" during a jog or a long commute.
According to the November, 2005, report by SLC Evaluator Bruce King, the overriding motivation for the implementation of West's English 10 core curriculum (indeed, the overriding motivation for the implementation of the entire 9th and 10th grade core curriculum) was to reduce the achievement gap. As described in the report, some groups of West students were performing more poorly in English than were other groups of West students. Poor performance was defined as:
not electing to take the more rigorous English electives offered at West during 11th and 12th grade and
failing one or more English classes.
The current West 10th graders -- the first class to take English 10 -- has almost finished two semesters of the new course. As well, they registered for their 11th grade courses several weeks ago. Seems to me it's about time to take a look at the early data.
I would like to know what English courses the current 500 or so West sophomores signed up for for next year and if the distribution of their course selections -- broken down by student groups -- looks significantly different from that of previous 10th grade classes? When final grades come out later this month, I would also like to know what the impact of the first two semesters of English 10 has been on the achievement gap as defined by the "grade earned" criterion.
Thinking about the need to evaluate the impact of English 10 brings to mind the absence of data on English 9 that became so glaringly apparent last year. [English 9 -- like English 10, a core curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes -- has been in place at West for several years. And yet, according to Mr. King's report, it is not clear if English 9 has done anything to reduce the achievement gap in English among West students. (More precisely, according to email with Mr. King and others after the SLC report was made public, it is not clear that the impact of English 9 on the achievement gap at West has even been empirically evaluated. Readers may recall that some of us tried valiantly to get the English 10 initiative put off, so that the effect of English 9 could be thoroughly evaluated. Unfortunately, we failed.)] I would like to know what has been done this year to evaluate the impact of English 9 on the gap in achievement between different groups of West HS students.
Bruce (King), Heather (Lott), Ed (Holmes) and Art (Rainwater), I do hope you will soon "show us the data," as they say, for West's English 9 and English 10. And BOE, I do hope you will insist on seeing these data asap.
While we're at it, what do the before-and-after data look like for Memorial's 9th grade core curriculum? (In contrast to West, Memorial implemented only a 9th grade core curriculum. TAG and Honors classes still begin in 10th grade, as does access to Memorial's 17 AP classes.)
With the District in the process of applying for a federal grant that may well result in the spread of the West model to the other three comprehensive high schools, we should all be interested in these data.
So should officials in the Department of Education.
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
The Task force includes David Griffeath, who, according to this document, provided by a reader, has been a paid math consultant for the Madison School District.
This website is an integrated collection of the indicators and analyses published in The Condition of Education 2000–2007. Some indicators may have been updated since they appeared in print.
CES released their annual report this morning on the condition of education in the U.S. They took the opportunity to highlight high school coursetaking trends. More states are requiring more coursework for graduation, and overall, the average number of course credits completed by graduates increased from 21.7 in 1982 to 25.8 in 2004. More students are taking more math, science, and English courses with no declines in art or social studies, but to the detriment of study halls, vocational education, and career training. They’re taking more advanced courses as well. The number of students taking at least one AP exam doubled between 1997 and 2005.
Great news. Bust open the bubbly. Surely additional credit hours in the basics translates to higher test scores, right? That is the assumption behind the drive for the basics, no? Actually, the data suggests there was minor, incremental, or even no change. On NAEP in 1971 in reading, 17 year olds averaged a scale score of 285. On NAEP in 2004 in reading, 17 year olds averaged a scale score of 285. That’s not a typo. During the same time frame, math scores increased from 300 to 307, a 2.3% increase over 33 years. For some comparability, the coursetaking trend discussed above is a 19% increase since 1982. The numbers don’t quite compute.
When asked about this conundrum, Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, admitted there was a “legitimate concern” that courses had been watered down. He labeled it a top priority to analyze what exactly these courses are teaching, and said data including course syllabi and the textbooks used in the classes exists, but has yet to be fully analyzed. That’s why I left “the condition of education 2007” feeling like I had been bombarded with statistics without much context.
“I know you’re restless today, but I need to see you sitting at your desks. Angel, that means you, too!” In the second-grade classroom at the Washington school where I volunteer, the teacher turned to me and said with a sigh, “It’s testing week.” In fact, her class wasn’t suffering through the standardized ordeal, just tiptoeing around while others did. The “adequate yearly progress” (A.Y.P.) assessments mandated by the No Child Left Behind legislation, which was enacted in 2002 with high hopes of closing the achievement gap for minorities, don’t kick in until third grade. But when it comes to tests, N.C.L.B. is fulfilling its inclusive mission all too well: nobody — not even kids too young to be filling in the bubbles yet — escapes the atmosphere of exam-induced edginess.
The president’s signature domestic initiative, now due for its five-year reauthorization, was supposed to be a model of the hardheaded rigor it aims to instill in America’s schools. “No ‘accountability proposals’ without accountability,” a Bush education adviser declared early on. So one of the most glaring legacies of No Child Left Behind is surprising: it has made a muddle of meaningful assessment. Testing has never been more important; inadequate annual progress toward “proficiency” triggers sanctions on schools. Yet testing has never been more suspect, either. The very zeal for accountability is confusing the quest for consistent academic expectations across the country.
At my local recycling center, the first bin is labeled “commingled containers.” Whoever dreamed up this term could have taken the easy way out and just written “cans and bottles.” But no, the author opted for a term out of the bureaucrat’s style book. He chose the raised pinky elegance of a phrase distant from normal English. He also added poor spelling (“comingled is spelled two different ways), and pointless redundancy (the concept of “co” is already embedded in the word “mingled”). How did they pack so many writing errors into two words of modern environmental prose?
George Orwell, at the beginning of his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” made clear that he thought the language had become disheveled and decadent. That was in 1946. Intending shock, Orwell offered five examples of sub-literate prose by known writers. But these examples don’t look as ghastly to us as they did to Orwell, because language is so much worse today. If you doubt this, I offer a few examples.
What the law doesn't mandate is how students such as Adam will be educated - even though state legislators have identified programming for students with gifts and talents as one of 20 essential components of public education. The result? A mixed bag of approaches for how Wisconsin students identified as gifted are educated. Some are taught in regular classes with alternative activities to help speed them through lessons. Others are pulled out of class for about an hour a week of special instruction. Some may find a spot in a magnet program with other gifted students. And others get no special instruction at all.
These inconsistencies have led parents and others to sound alarms about the state of gifted education, invoking some of the same civil-rights arguments that spurred landmark legislation in the 1970s for students with disabilities.
They say gifted kids need special attention and programs, too.
Jefferson Lighthouse School has the largest pupil-teacher ratio of any public elementary school in Racine.
Parts of its building are more than 100 years old. Its technology is nearly non-existent. Its librarian works half time.
And every year, parents of about 10 times as many children as the school plans to admit in the fall line up in the hallway, hoping for a chance at enrollment.
"It's like a lottery ticket to get in here," said Principal Soren Gajewski.
What makes Jefferson Lighthouse desirable to so many parents living in Racine, those connected to it say, is its commitment to teaching students with intellectual gifts and the perception that it has few behavioral problems.
The school is able to meet the needs of many of the district's gifted students, as well as siblings and others lucky enough to get in on the lottery, without added expense. In fact, given that the school has the second-lowest per-pupil costs of the Racine Unified School District, parents say such a program is a cost-effective way to ensure that gifted pupils get needed attention while the school remains open to educating non-gifted students as well.
It's no secret to most high school students that taking the required courses, getting good grades and receiving a diploma don't take much work. The average U.S. high school senior donning a cap and gown this spring will have spent an hour a day on homework and at least three hours a day watching TV, playing video games and pursuing other diversions.
This is sometimes a surprise to adults, particularly state legislators and school board members who thought that by requiring a number of courses in English, math, science and social studies they had ensured that students would dig in and learn what they need to succeed in college.
Guess again, says a new study, "Rigor at Risk: Reaffirming Quality in the High School Core Curriculum [350K PDF Report]," by the Iowa City-based testing company ACT Inc. "Students today do not have a reasonable chance of becoming ready for college unless they take a number of additional higher-level" courses beyond the minimum, the report said. Even those who do, it concluded, "are not always likely to be ready for college either."
Does assigning fifty math problems accomplish any more than assigning five? Is memorizing word lists the best way to increase vocabulary—especially when it takes away from reading time? And what is the real purpose behind those devilish dioramas?
The time our children spend doing homework has skyrocketed in recent years. Parents spend countless hours cajoling their kids to complete such assignments—often without considering whether or not they serve any worthwhile purpose. Even many teachers are in the dark: Only one of the hundreds the authors interviewed and surveyed had ever taken a course specifically on homework during training.
The truth, according to Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, is that there is almost no evidence that homework helps elementary school students achieve academic success and little evidence that it helps older students. Yet the nightly burden is taking a serious toll on America’s families. It robs children of the sleep, play, and exercise time they need for proper physical, emotional, and neurological development. And it is a hidden cause of the childhood obesity epidemic, creating a nation of “homework potatoes.”
In The Case Against Homework, Bennett and Kalish draw on academic research, interviews with educators, parents, and kids, and their own experience as parents and successful homework reformers to offer detailed advice to frustrated parents. You’ll find out which assignments advance learning and which are time-wasters, how to set priorities when your child comes home with an overstuffed backpack, how to talk and write to teachers and school administrators in persuasive, nonconfrontational ways, and how to rally other parents to help restore balance in your children’s lives.
Shanghai — NO one paying attention to recent musical trends in Asia can have failed to notice it: The Chinese are crazy about piano playing. Among city dwellers, there's been nothing like this enthusiasm since the '80s, when an embrace of the Japanese-originated Suzuki teaching method created a national army of child violinists. According to some estimates, as many as 15 million hopefuls in China — most of them young — are toiling to gain proficiency in this highly competitive skill, and the number is growing. Those unable to make it through the tough entrance exams of the country's nine overflowing conservatories opt for one of hundreds of private piano schools sprouting all over.
The sheer availability of pianos — one company alone, Pearl River, claims to turn out 280 every day — seems also to have focused many middle-class parents' aspirations, especially in a country that still enforces a single-child policy. For these people, the incentive to see their kids seated at a keyboard is less about artistry or copying the West than about producing offspring of demonstrable excellence.
Enter the iRobot Create Challenge and Earn Your Rightful Title as Creator Extroidinaire plus Win a $5,000 Cash Prize! Use the iRobot® Create™ Programmable Robot platform to develop your own innovative, useful, entertaining, fun or simply amazing robot and you could win $5,000. Visit http://www.tomshardware.com/irobot for details about the contest and entry instructions.
Test scores from the November 2006 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) and companion Wisconsin Alternate Assessment (WAA) were released by the state Department of Public Instruction this week. The MMSD press release on Madison students' scores ("Despite changes and cuts, Madison students test well") reports the following "notable achievements":
that reading scores have remained steady and math scores have gone up;
that non-low income MMSD students score better than their non-low income peers statewide;
that a higher percentage of MMSD African-American students perform at the highest proficiency level than do other African-American students across the state as a whole; and
that a consistently higher percentage of MMSD students perform at the highest proficiency level than do students across the state as a whole.
Let's take a closer look at the PR and the data:
1: "Reading scores have remained steady and math scores have gone up."
[boxed text and charts excerpted from MMSD press release]
This chart is misleading. In 2002, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction revamped the scoring scale for the WKCE to lower the cut score (or threshold) for the "proficient" category (which is apparent in the jump between pre-2002 and post-2002 scores, as shown above). The DPI web site clearly states that "Proficiency data for November 2002 and later are not comparable to earlier years."
To provide an accurate basis for comparison, the chart should have looked like this:
The corrected chart shows that the percentage of MMSD students scoring at the advanced+proficient levels in reading declined from 2003 to 2006, and that the increase in the percentage of MMSD students scoring at the advanced+proficient level in math increased only slightly from 2003 to 2006. Although numeric percentages aren't specified, it's apparent that the percentage decline in reading exceeded the percentage increase in math. (So, if reading proficiency levels are being described as having remained "steady" because the decline wasn't statistically significant, the minimal change in math proficiency levels can't be touted as a noteworthy increase.)
2: "Non-low income MMSD students score better than their non-low income peers statewide."
There's no question about the data here. But what about the rest of the picture?
In reading and math, a greater percentage of MMSD low-income students scored at the basic+minimal levels (i.e. below grade level) than their peers statewide this year (scores below are for combined grades).
(This and all data are from the DPI web site, using WKCE+WAA scores.)
Looking at 4th grade scores, the percentages of low-income MMSD students performing below grade level in reading and math grew from 2003 to 2006, and grew at a faster rate than statewide peers.
MMSD
State
2003
33.1%
29.6%
2006
43.2%
31.8%
Table 2: 2003 and 2006 reading, low-income, basic+minimal, 4th grade
MMSD
State
2003
47.5%
41.4%
2006
48.7%
38.2%
Table 3: 2003 and 2006 math, low-income, basic+minimal, 4th grade
Looking at more 4th grade scores, a greater percentage of non-low income MMSD students score at the advanced level in reading and math than low income MMSD students, and this gap between high-performing non-low income and low income MMSD students grew from 2003 to 2006.
Low income
Non-low income
Gap
2003
19.1%
56.7%
37.6%
2006
16.8%
64.5%
47.7%
Table 4: 2003 and 2006 reading, advanced, MMSD 4th grade
Low income
Non-low income
Gap
2003
9.7%
43.4%
33.7%
2006
15.0%
57.8%
42.8%
Table 5: 2003 and 2006 math, advanced, MMSD 4th grade
This gap between low and non-low income performance at the advanced level exists across the state, but MMSD's gap grew at a faster rate.
MMSD
State
2003
37.6%
27.8%
2006
47.7%
29.2%
Table 6: 2003 and 2006 reading, advanced, 4th grade, gap between low-income and non-low income
MMSD
State
2003
33.7%
21.5%
2006
42.8%
25.3%
Table 7: 2003 and 2006 math, advanced, 4th grade, gap between low-income and non-low income
3: "A higher percentage of MMSD African American students perform at the highest proficiency level than do other African American students across the state as a whole."
The scale of the percentage range (y-axis) in this chart is magnified in a way that exaggerates this "achievement". (Even so, it's clear that grade by grade, black students don't outperform their state peers in grades 3, 4, or 10.)
MMSD
State
Difference
Combined grades
17.1%
15.0%
2.1%
4th grade
16.3%
16.3%
0.0%
Table 8: 2006 reading, advanced, African-American
The scale for math is even more exaggerated, and the achievement somewhat less than "especially significant."
MMSD
State
Difference
Combined grades
9.7%
7.9%
1.8%
4th grade
9.0%
10.5%
-1.5%
Table 9: 2006 math, advanced, African-American
What is especially significant, however, is the achievement gap between black and white students at the advanced level. MMSD's achievement gap exceeds that for the state, and has grown at a significantly faster rate.
MMSD
State
2003
38.1%
31.7%
2006
48.9%
31.9%
Table 10: 2003 and 2006 reading, advanced, 4th grade, gap between white and black students
MMSD
State
2003
36.5%
24.4%
2006
48.6%
30.3%
Table 11: 2003 and 2006 math, advanced, 4th grade, gap between white and black students
4: "A consistently higher percentage of MMSD students perform at the highest proficiency level than do students across the state as a whole."
However, MMSD's racial and economic achievement gaps at the advanced level exceed those for the state.
MMSD
State
Reading
46.1%
34.8%
Math
41.4%
29.2%
Table 12: 2006, advanced, combined grades, gap between white and black students
MMSD
State
Reading
45.0%
29.8%
Math
39.7%
24.5%
Table 13: 2006, advanced, combined grades, gap between non-low income and low income students
5: "A significant change in testing procedures resulted in a significantly increased percentage of students scoring in the lowest proficiency category."
Without more data (Exactly how much of the percentage increase in this category was attributable to this testing procedure change? How did this increase compare to other districts and the state as a whole, since they were also affected by this same testing procedure change?), this is not sufficient to explain away the increase in the below-grade level category.
Further thoughts:
Curriculum Effectiveness: It's reasonable to assume that students in outperforming categories (white and non-low income) are more likely to have extracurricular educational support and supplementation than other students, and are more likely to be able to overcome curriculum deficiencies they encounter in the MMSD. Any inference that the MMSD deserves all the credit for such students' achievements is misplaced. On the other hand, the success or failure of students at the bottom of the widening racial and economic achievement gaps (and who are likely to lack those extracurricular advantages) is highly dependent on the effectiveness of MMSD's curriculum and instructional choices. For example, we might look at the schools that would have qualified for the Reading First funding that was rejected by the MMSD in 2004, and the percentages of students in 4th grade that are reading below grade level:
2003
2006
Increase
Orchard Ridge
18.4%
28.6%
10.2%
Hawthorne
30.6%
30.6%
0.0%%
Glendale
20.6%
47.4%
27.4%
Lincoln
25.0%
50.0%
25.0%
MMSD
18.4%
22.7%
4.3%
State
17.4%
18.1%
0.7%
Table 14: Reading, basic+minimal, 4th grade
Rigor of WKCE: NAEP scores for 2007 (when they're released) should be compared against WKCE scores as a reality check on whether WKCE testing and standards are consistent or are softening.
Hidden achievement gap: The WKCE scores in the "proficient" category should be examined on a disaggregated basis. If historically underperforming groups are clustered at the lower end of the category (yet are still being identified as "proficient" due to the lowering of the cut scores when the category standards were redefined in 2002), this is an achievement gap too, and shouldn't be ignored.
Local high school students graduate from Information Technology Academy
On Saturday, June 2, 14 area high school students will receive Certificates of Graduation for completing an intensive information technology training program through the University of Wisconsin-Madison called the Information Technology Academy (ITA).
ITA is a four-year precollege program that provides hands-on training and access to technology for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison public schools. During their four-year ITA experience, the students meet biweekly during the academic year to learn Web design, animation, graphic design and other technology skills. They also participate in two-week technology training camps in the summer, hone their technical skills in short-term internships and strengthen their leadership skills through community service projects. Their learning and development is further enhanced through matches with mentors, who help guide and support students during their involvement with the program.
The graduation event will be held from 11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m. on June 2 in the Alumni Lounge at the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., Madison. The program will include a keynote address by Carl Grant, a professor with the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
One hundred percent of this year's graduating class members are going to attend higher education institutions this fall. To date, 51 students have graduated from ITA, and 49 of them are now enrolled at UW-Madison or other postsecondary educational institutions.
Additional funding has allowed ITA to begin an expansion process this year that will double the size of the program by the 2009-10 school year. A new cohort of 30 students will be selected by mid-May to begin their first year of the program in August.
ITA is made possible by the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT), the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administration, the Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence, Berbee, Dell Computers and many other sponsors.
For more information about ITA or the graduation program, contact Erica Laughlin at (608) 265-2408.
Special BOE Meeting to Discuss HS Redesign and SLC Grant
The MMSD BOE will hold a special meeting and public information session to discuss the High School Redesign initiative and the Small Learning Communities (SLC) grant at the following time and place:
Thursday, June 7
6:30 p.m.
Wright MS gym
1717 Fish Hatchery Road
Three years ago, the gap between white and black high school sophomores in Milwaukee Public Schools in reading proficiency was 33 percentage points. This year, it was 35 points.
In math, the gap was 36 points three years ago and 42 this year, according to the data released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction and MPS.
Two years ago, 37% of black sophomores in MPS were rated proficient or advanced in reading, based on their performance on the statewide standardized tests. This year, it was 31%. In math, the figure is 18%, down from 20% in each of the prior two years.
That means the results for 10th grade, the most advanced point in which standardized tests are given in Wisconsin, are important.
That means it matters in the big picture that at Custer High School, only 27% of 10th-graders who had been in the school for a full year were proficient or better in reading. In recent years, that figure has gone up and down a bit. What was it four years ago? 27%.
It matters that at Genesis, a small high school in the building that was formerly North Division High, only 14% of sophomores were proficient in reading and 4% in math.
By the late 1990s, California voters and the University of California regents had banned admission preferences for minorities in the UC system, and several members of the faculty at the University of California-San Diego were not happy about it. Scholars like Cecil Lytle, Bud Mehan and Peter Gourevitch thought public universities had been created to break down the old barriers of race, privilege and class and give the state's most disadvantaged students the life-changing advantages of a higher education. What could they do?
It seemed obvious to them. If the university was not allowed to admit low-income students who could not compete academically with advantaged middle class applicants, then the only alternative was to create public schools that would give those low-income and minority students the encouragement, good teaching and extra time they needed to make them just as ready for college as students from the better neighborhoods.
Wisconsin students' performances improved in math and held steady in reading, language arts, science and social studies, according to annual test data released today.
Dane County students generally matched or exceeded state averages and paralleled the state's rising math scores, although test results in Madison slipped slightly on some measures of reading, language arts and science.
Madison educators touted the overall performance of their students, noting that the portion of students scoring proficient or advanced — the two highest of four grading levels — has grown or held steady over the past seven years on reading and math exams even as the district's populations of students with limited English skills and low-income backgrounds have increased.
Limited English proficiency and poverty are two of the strongest predictors of poor academic performance in Madison and schools across the nation.
Improved scores in math led state and local school officials to put generally positive faces on the picture painted by student test results being made public today by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Higher percentages of students in every grade from third through eighth were rated as "proficient" or "advanced" in math in this year's round of statewide testing than in the previous year. The 10th-grade figure remained the same.
In reading, the statewide percentage of proficient or better students was steady or slightly improved at every grade level.
"We are on the right track," Elizabeth Burmaster, state superintendent of public instruction, said in a statement. "Despite increased poverty in Wisconsin, we saw gains at nearly every grade level in mathematics and rising or stable scores for reading."
Overall, better than 4 out of 5 fourth-graders in Wisconsin were proficient or advanced in reading, and about 3 out of 4 met those standards in math. For 10th-graders, 3 out of 4 were proficient in reading, and 7 out of 10 in math.
Madison schools' improved math scores might seem to defy some of the laws of logic or probability.
The Madison district, like its counterparts across the state, saw a generally positive trend on math scores, according to data released today regarding scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations that students took last November.
"Our students continue to perform well despite a number of challenges that would normally predict falling scores. We're pleased, of course, but not surprised that has not been the case here," Superintendent Art Rainwater noted in an interview this morning.
Rainwater said that changing demographics that include increasing numbers of children from low-income families and those who have limited proficiency in English generally go hand-in-hand with falling scores, but that has not been true in Madison, where test results in reading generally have been holding steady, or in mathematics, where almost all grade levels have improved.
The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school's effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
Milwaukee's Rufus King is Ranked 259th. Marshfield High is ranked 348th. Whitefish Bay is ranked 514th, Shorewood 520th. New Berlin West 604th. Brookfield Central is 616th. Hartland Arrowhead is 706th. Nicolet is 723rd. Verona is 738th. Grafton 810th. Nathan Hale (West Allis) is 854th. Brookfield East is 865th. Greendale is 959th. Riverside University School (Milwaukee) is 959th. Madison Memorial is ranked 1084th. Salem's Westosha Central is 1113rd. West Bend West is 1172nd while West Bend East is 1184th.
The Challenge Index list of America's best high schools, this year with a record 1,258 names, began as a tale of just two schools. They were Garfield High School, full of children of Hispanic immigrants in East Los Angeles, and Mamaroneck High School, a much smaller campus serving very affluent families in Westchester County, N.Y. I had written a book about Garfield, and the success of its teachers like Jaime Escalante in giving low-income students the encouragement and extra time they needed to master college-level Advanced Placement courses and tests.
I was finishing a book about Mamaroneck, and was stunned to find it was barring from AP many middle-class students who were much better prepared for those classes than the impoverished students who were welcomed into AP at Garfield. That turns out to be the rule in most U.S. schools -- average students are considered not ready for, or not deserving of, AP, even though many studies show that they need the challenge and that success in AP can lead to success in college.
Nearly everyone I met in New York thought Mamaroneck was a terrific school because its parents were rich and its state scores high, even though its building was in bad shape and its policy of reserving AP only for students with top grades made no sense. Nearly everyone I met in Los Angeles thought Garfield was a terrible school because its parents were poor and its state scores low, even though it was doing much more to prepare average and below-average students for college than any other school I knew. It was like rating restaurants not by the quality of their food, but by the bank accounts of their customers.
I was covering Wall Street for The Washington Post at that time, and not liking the job much. My life was ruled by indexes¿the Dow Jones, the Standard & Poor's. I decided to create my own index to measure something I thought was more important --which schools were giving their students the most value. This would help me show why Garfield, in a neighborhood full of auto-body shops and fast-food joints, was at least as good a school as Mamaroneck, in a town of mansions and country clubs.
Matthews participated in an online chat regarding the Challenge Index. A transcript is available here.
Philip Streich's science project may be difficult to comprehend.
But the awards for his work on nanotubes are clear.
Streich, a 16-year-old who is home-schooled in Belmont and takes classes at UW-Platteville, was one of three students out of 1,500 to take home top honors last week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Albuquerque, N.M.
"This is huge. This is Stanley Cup. This is the Super Bowl of science and Philip has just done an amazing job," said James Hamilton, a chemistry professor at UW-Platteville and Streich's mentor. "Working with him is like working with a Ph.D in the field of chemistry and physics."
Streich's prizes included a $50,000 scholarship, about $20,000 in cash and savings bonds for winning other categories at the competition and a trip to China's Adolescent Science and Technology Innovation Contest in August.
Recent government education policies seem to assume that academic achievement as measured by test scores is the primary objective of public education. A prime example is the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to bring all of their students to “proficient” levels on math and reading tests by 2014. Many state accountability plans judge schools on the basis of these tests alone, and some states and school districts are considering tying teachers’ compensation to student test results. Yet education historically has served a variety of functions (e.g., socialization, civic training), and public support for music and art in school suggests that parents value things beyond high test scores.
Are test scores the educational outcomes that parents value most? We tackle this question by examining the types of teachers that parents request for their elementary school children. We find that, on average, parents strongly prefer teachers whom principals describe as best able to promote student satisfaction, though parents also value teacher ability to improve student academics. These aggregate effects, however, mask striking differences across schools. Parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent to student satisfaction. In wealthier schools the results are reversed: parents most value a teacher’s ability to keep students happy.
Federal officials reported yesterday that students in 4th, 8th and 12th grades had scored modestly higher on an American history test than five years earlier, although more than half of high school seniors still showed poor command of basic facts like the effect of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War.
Federal officials said they considered the results encouraging because at each level tested, student performance had improved since the last time the exam was administered, in 2001.
“In U.S. history there were higher scores in 2006 for all three grades,” said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, at a Boston news conference that the Education Department carried by Webcast.
The results were less encouraging on a national civics test, on which only fourth graders made any progress.
The most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.
The extent of outsourcing, for instance, is not yet high enough to have much effect on American wages. Even if a call center is set up in India, this helps American business expand at home. Most generally, the net flow of investment is into the United States, not away from it. It appears that more American jobs are “in-sourced” than outsourced.
Nor should we be distracted by the gains of the top 1 percent. The goal should be to elevate the poor, not knock down the tall poppies. Microsoft has created cheap software and many jobs, and its co-founder, Bill Gates, is giving away most of his fortune.
With Simplified Code, Programming Becomes Child's Play
Carolyn Johnson:
After school lets out on Fridays at the Jonas Clarke Middle School , two dozen boisterous students descend on the computer lab to fiddle with the computer code that powers their projects, from a "Star Wars" lightsaber duel to a flying hippo animation.
The school has been beta-testing Scratch, a new programming language being released today by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The program, named after the technique hip-hop DJs use to mix music, gives novices the ability to create dynamic programs without wading through a manual, teaching computer programming concepts while encouraging students to play.
The goal: turn a daunting subject usually taught in college and considered the domain of geeks into an integral part of education for the grade-school set. MIT researchers hope the program will promote a broader cultural shift, giving a generation already comfortable using computers to consume content online a set of new, easy-to-use tools to change the online landscape itself.
Check out Scratch here (Mac and Windows versions).
Broadway plays host to one nearly every night with an award-winning musical about six overachieving spellers in "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." Hollywood has embraced them too: "Akeelah" would be nothing without her "Bee," not to mention "Bee Season." And the Scripps National Spelling Bee, set for May 30 and 31, is popular enough for the finals to be televised in prime time for a second year.
Still, don't expect to find a spelling bee in Sue Ann Gleason's first-grade classroom at Cedar Grove Elementary School in Loudoun County. She doesn't think much of them.
"They honor the children who already know how to spell, but they do little to support those who need explicit instruction," she said.
According to an independent survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp., 77 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents claim math and science are the most difficult homework subjects for students, yet only 36 percent of parents feel capable to help their children. While parents and teachers struggle to find the time or knowledge to provide their kids with adequate assistance in math and science, students can grow frustrated by the lack of resources and the amount time it may take to find relevant guidance in these difficult subjects. To address these issues, Microsoft has developed a low-cost, comprehensive resource for middle school, high school and entry-level college students.
Today Microsoft releases Microsoft® Math 3.0, a new software solution designed to help students complete their math and science homework more quickly and easily while teaching important fundamental concepts. Microsoft Math 3.0 features an extensive collection of capabilities to help students tackle complicated problems in pre-algebra, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, physics and chemistry, and puts them all in one convenient place on the home PC. Similar to a hired tutor, Microsoft Math 3.0 is designed to help deepen students' overall understanding of these subjects by invoking a full-featured graphing calculator and step-by-step instructions on how to solve difficult problems.
Only one-quarter of high school students who take a full set of college-preparatory courses — four years of English and three each of mathematics, science and social studies — are well prepared for college, according to a new study of last year’s high school graduates released today by ACT, the Iowa testing organization.
The report analyzed approximately 1.2 million students who took the ACT college admissions test and graduated from high school last June. The study predicted whether the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers.
The study concluded that only 26 percent were ready for college-level work in all four core areas, while 19 percent were not adequately prepared in any of them.
The Studio School Charter School:
In a couple of years I hope to take another try at leading a charter school initiative. I continue to read so much educational research and literature that strongly supports The Studio School concepts. As you know, we spent some time looking into ways to create TSS as a private school but just couldn't see how it could be affordable to everyone and be sustainable. Even as a sliding-scale-tuition cooperative, there would have to be some tuition paid and that leaves out so many children. It still looks as though a charter school is the best alternative. So maybe there will be some changes in our school district and administrators/ board members will become more actively supportive of charter schools, innovation, and the Studio School concept. Am I overly optimistic?
Programs in my home:
Currently, I'm working with some people to piece together a rather eclectic "menu" of educational programs (art, Spanish, yoga, tutoring, early childhood, etc.) in my home that is licensed for child care for ages 4 - 17. The programs being offered are philosophically aligned with the Reggio Approach - experiential, child-centered, multi-modal learning. I don't have a final name for this yet but the concept is that of a "learning studio" that offers a variety of enriching programs that will provide children with a variety of "languages" for learning and expressing their ideas. (This summer I am offering an Art & Architecture program for 5-8 year old children on Wednesday mornings and we will be working with recycled materials.) If the "eclectic" studio concept is successful, the plan is to move the program out of my house into a public space in the next year or so. I recently met with someone involved in the Hilldale Mall redevelopment project and a location there might be a possibility down the road. And/or it could be offered through community centers or other neighborhood organizations. It's also my hope that if I could somehow provide real life examples of the Reggio Approach to teaching and learning, people might be better able to envision the amazing positive impact it could have in an elementary school.
Community Partnerships:
I intend to continue meeting with people who are interested in new educational initiatives and who might want to work together to create programs and schools that include the arts & technology for all Madison children. So I want to keep reaching out to neighborhood groups and community members. Please let me know if you run into any folks who might be interested in talking with me about this and I will be happy to contact them. Thanks
The Rocky Mountain News series, "Leaving to Learn [Denver Public Schools Enrollment Gap]," tells a painful and accurate story about the state of our school district. It is hard to admit, but it is abundantly clear that we will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way. The evidence in Denver and from big-city school districts across the country is undeniable. Operating an urban school district in the 21st century based on a century-old configuration will result in failure for too many children. It is long past time to admit this. As a district and a community, we must gather strength and have the courage to make change, knowing that the changes we face are much, much less perilous than the status quo.
Many believe that our system is intractable and impossible to fix. They look at our high dropout rate, our low achievement rate, and decades of failed reform efforts in Denver and around this country, and conclude it cannot be done.
This answer is obviously intolerable for the 72,000 children in our school district, and for the tens of thousands of children who will receive a public education in Denver over the next decade. We must refuse to accept that this is the best we can do for the next generation, or, worse, that this is all we can expect of them.
In view of the current discussions in Denver about whether to close schools after years of declining enrollment and shifting demographics, now is the time to re-examine how our system works. No matter how compelling the arguments for school consolidation, school closures create pain and upset expectations about daily life. In the shadow of this potential dislocation, we are obligated to reconsider the way we do business to ensure that our schools and our students will succeed. In the coming months and years, we must renew and rejuvenate the educational opportunities available to all of Denver's children.
Cities all across the country face dramatic change sooner or later. For a variety of reasons, we think Denver is in a position to create the first 21st century urban school district in the United States. Not the least of these reasons is our tremendous faith in the committed people who work for DPS and in the citizens of Denver. We must not make the easy, but terrible mistake of confusing a lack of confidence in the system with a lack of confidence in ourselves or our children.
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is proud to announce the Beta version of a powerful new online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders combat the graduation crisis.
The EPE Research Center calculated graduation rates for each district, as well as every state and the nation as a whole, using data from a single federal data set. The Cumulative Promotion Index, developed by Research Center director Christopher Swanson, estimates the probability that a student in the 9th grade will complete high school on time with a regular diploma.
Educators and politicians have pushed the goal of a laptop for every student. But a number of early adapting schools say the laptops aren't helping, and critics argue that the computers are simply a distraction.
Businesses want to build better employees, but will that really mean a better education for your child? Elizabeth Weiss Green:
It took less than a year for Algene Patrick to learn all she needed to know about William H. Brazier Elementary School: rock-bottom test scores, spoiled milk in the cafeteria, and teachers who logged more absences than their students. These were the lessons her granddaughter, Lawrenesha Williams, brought home from kindergarten. When Patrick, who is Lawrenesha's custodial guardian, asked the principal about the 50 absences Lawrenesha's teacher had logged, he just cited the teacher's personal problems. The grandmother decided enough was enough, and she put Lawrenesha in parochial school.
For Trinity Gardens, a poor neighborhood in Mobile County, Ala., that sends children to Brazier Elementary, the neglect wasn't a huge surprise. In 1965, a nearby Air Force base closed-taking away 10,000 jobs-and a series of paper mills shut down in the 1990s, stealing at least 3,000 more. Most of the Gardens' residents live below the poverty line, holding two jobs to get by. Who had time to care how many fifth graders passed a state writing test? (In 2003, only 7 percent.)
But in 2004, Brazier Elementary suddenly began to change. In just one year, workers cleaned up the halls, new teachers poured in, and test scores shot up. Noting the change, parents like Patrick sent their kids back to Brazier. Patrick thanks Brazier's new principal, Merrier Jackson, for the turnaround, calling her "a godsend." But it was actually a less heavenly group that sent Jackson to Trinity Gardens: CEOs.
In the book of Proverbs we are told: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
Somehow that lesson gets lost for many families when it comes to teaching children about money -- even though there are a number of government agencies, nonprofit organizations and private companies promoting financial literacy.
As parents, we know it's imperative to teach our kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. But can we honestly say we're doing enough to help them fend off consumerism and credit dealers? I'm doing my best, but I could do better.
Most important, are you training your children to live off an average salary as young adults? Or are they now living so large based on your income that they will be incapable of managing their finances on a modest starting salary once they get into the real world?
LARRY BISIG grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he went to Catholic school and where he now runs a local marketing firm. He has seen his local school district's history from several angles. In 1975, when a court-ordered desegregation drive began, his public-school friends started waking up at five o'clock to be bussed to new schools across town. His Catholic school made reassuring intercom announcements, saying that the public-school buses had arrived safely—despite the violent protests and threats. And he remembers the sudden influx of new students into his own school, as white Protestant families chose a Catholic education for their children rather than sending them to public school with blacks.
By the 1990s, however, the Jefferson County school district, which includes Louisville, was far more racially integrated (see chart). Its public schools had also become much more attractive to the white families who had stayed in the district, and Catholic schools had such a hard time keeping students that Mr Bisig's marketing firm began working with some of them to handle the stiffer competition. These days, Jefferson County is eager to keep the racially integrated school system it has created. But that integration—which began with a federal court order driven by Supreme Court precedents—is now under threat from the Supreme Court itself.
Schools in metro Milwaukee must adapt to a knowledge-based economy, which is demanding that they perform better than they ever have. Their mission requires hard work, creativity and fiscal reforms.
At one time, men and women could get ahead in life without much by way of a formal education. Now, a high school diploma, and the learning it implies, is a prerequisite for success.
Schools must better adapt to their more demanding mission. They must continue to change their orientation from adults to children and to search for new ways to reach the kids they are not now reaching. They must also engage the community.
The state must help solve the fiscal crisis that grips many school districts. The community must recognize that all schools - public and private, secular and religious - serve an important public purpose. And other institutions must do their duty with respect to children; for instance, families must raise children right, and businesses must give them hope by spreading around jobs.
Much higher test scores and graduation rates, greatly improved attendance, reduced discipline problems and stronger parent involvement - the draft version of a grand plan for Milwaukee Public Schools sets specific, ambitious goals for major improvements over the next several years.
The strategic plan is the product of extensive work by administrators, School Board members and teachers union members. The process of creating the plan, which included more than 40 meetings across the city in recent months, is being paid for by the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a private group of civic leaders.
"We cannot achieve different results without doing things differently," an opening message signed by MPS and union leaders says. "We are at a crucial turning point."
The plan is short on specifics for how to achieve many of its goals, but it does give a detailed version of what the characteristics of a higher-functioning school system would be, including what to expect of a successful principal, how a school community should function and what the role of the central office should be. It calls for continuing the current MPS strategy of focusing on improving the teaching and curriculum in a specific list of low-performing schools and reducing the size of that list year by year.
Also for the first time, some Alabama elementary and middle schools, including Mobile's Council Traditional, that can feed into IB high schools will within the next few years begin offering IB programs for younger students.
"This is a great thing for the whole area," said Mobile County Public School System Superintendent Harold Dodge. "It sort of ratchets up our expectations one more level."
The three local high schools are on track to allow their current ninth-graders to take IB classes beginning their junior year in fall 2008, officials said.
By taking IB's rigorous courses, students will be able to earn up to a year's worth of college credit before they graduate from high school. They'll also be more attractive candidates for scholarship money.
The three schools are in the application process and still must meet some requirements before receiving official approval from the Geneva, Switzerland-based agency that oversees International Baccalaureate.
1. Kennedy Heights Community Center with the support of many other individuals and groups is organizing a walk from Kennedy Heights Community Center to Gompers Elementary School to raise awareness about the potential closings of Lindbergh Elementary School and Black Hawk middle school. Neighborhood Schools are a community resource for the children and families in Kennedy Heights and the northside; closing the schools would negatively impact our neighborhood, our community center, and the families that live here. Please come and walk with us to keep northside schools open.
The walk will start at the Kennedy Heights Community Center at 4:00 PM on Monday April 23rd - we will walk together from Kennedy Heights to Gompers Elementary school about 1.3 miles. At Gompers their will be a brief discussion and Popsicles for kids. All are welcome please distribute widely.
PS I know that school board members have a meeting at 5:00 PM, but I hope you can join us
for the beginning of our walk.
2. Join a grassoots rally: “An Hour For Marquette” - On Friday, April 27, from 1:30 - 2:30 come to Marquette and pull your Marquette student from class to protest the proposed consolidation (All concerned parents, students, and other community members are welcome to join in). We will rally at the school. Bring a sign that expresses your feeling about Marquette. We will be working to get press coverage and a visit from the Mayor. If you are interested in attending the rally e-mail Dea Larsen Converse at dealarsen@yahoo.com or Maria Moreno at mcmoreno@tds.net so we can give a head count to the papers.
(Note that this is not a PTG sponsored event)
It’s not over yet! Let’s keep the pressure on!
The MMSD could save one or more teaching positions by combining two positions – public relations and government relations.
The government relations position seems unnecessary given the excellent work of Arlene Silviera and the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools. They have done more in a few short months than the MMSD has ever done to raise awareness about inadequate state funding.
Additionally, most district do not employ a lobbyist, but rely on the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, Wisconsin Council for Administrators of Special Services, and other organizations lobbying in the state Capitol
The PR position doesn’t seem necessary because the press seems to want to talk to the superintendent, not the PR guy.
Put the two positions together and the MMSD loses nothing and saves services delivered directly to students.
Curriki is more than your average Website; we're a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world.
Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our name is a play on the combination of 'curriculum' and 'wiki' which is the technology we're using to make education universally accessible.
Verizon Thinkfinity offers the highest quality, standards-based, K-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools and Web sites in seven academic disciplines. A companion professional development program prepares educators to effectively utilize these exceptional resources to support student learning and achievement. Follow the links below to learn about Thinkfinity resources for K-12 Education.
Six elementary schools to have different principals
Six elementary schools will have different principals next year in a series of transfers and changes within the Madison School District. The principals who are transferring have been at their current schools from four to ten years.
The list of new assignments, by principal, with current school and length of service:
Deborah Hoffman to Lincoln from Franklin (10 yrs.)
Beth Lehman to Hawthorne from Lincoln (6 yrs.)
Catherine McMillan to Franklin from Hawthorne (10 yrs.)
Michael Hertting to Lapham from a leave of absence
Kristi Kloos to Lake View from Lapham (4 yrs.)
Joy Larson to Allis from Marquette (4 yrs.)
Allis Principal Chris Hodge and Gompers Principal Sherrill Wagner will retire this summer, and Lake View Principal Linda Sweeney will take a leave of absence for career exploration. Hertting will come off a similar leave; previously he led Orchard Ridge for five years. Vacancies will be filled within the next few months.
"We believe these assignment changes are good for the students, the staff, the principals and the district," said Superintendent Art Rainwater. "Last year, we shifted six other elementary principals after stays of similar length."
Parents at each of the schools were notified yesterday. The changes will take place over the summer in time for the Tuesday, September 4 start of the new school year. Each of the principals will assist her successor in the transition to make it more effective and efficient.
Constant shuffling of principals damages the effectivenss of the MMSD. All the rhetoric about building relationships amounts to nothing but words, when these actions speak louder.
The superintendent named no principal at Marquette. Apparently, he plans to "consolidate" Lapham and Marquette regardless of whether the board votes for it or not.
With the uncertainty and stress about staff cuts and school closings, the changes could not come at a worse time.
Is the superintendent hell-bent on destroying the MMSD?
After more than two years of study, a group of Waukesha educators has drafted a set of guidelines that challenge some traditional notions of grading.
Among the recommendations:
Removing evaluations of student participation, effort, attendance and behavior from academic results.
Ending the use of zeros for late or unfinished work, a "potentially damaging practice in a 100 point scale," in favor of other methods that motivate students to complete their assignments.
Allowing homework used for practice or preparation to account for no more than 10% of a grade, with project work getting more weight.
Replacing averages, which allow single grades to skew final class assessments, with medians, which more accurately reflect a student's overall class performance, in final grades.
School District officials stress that the guidelines, which are in the midst of being distributed to principals and teachers and go before a School Board committee today, are just that - guidelines. They insist the district is not interested in mandating universal changes to how teachers assign grades, often considered among a teacher's most personal tasks.
The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is pleased to announce the launch of the AWEA Educational Scholarship Fund. In cooperation with the generous support of Suzlon Wind Energy and Vestas Americas, this new scholarship program was created to provide complimentary conference registration for individuals interested in enhancing their knowledge of the wind industry, including full-time students, faculty and staff of K-12 institutions among others who want to attend those interested in attending the WINDPOWER 2007 Conference and Exhibition in Los Angeles, June 3-6, 2007.
The deadline for submitting an application for WINDPOWER 2007 Conference and Exhibition is April 28, 2007.
For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.
6th Grade Textbooks: Connected (left) and Singapore Math.
UPDATE: A reader emailed this:
I noticed that there were 10 student books in the 6th grade pile for CMP. That was surprising since there are only 8 in publication. Then I looked at the teacher editions and noticed there were 10 as well. There are two copies of both How Likely is It? and Covering and Surrounding.
The statement, "A quick look at the size of the Connected Math textbooks compared to the equivalent Singapore Math course materials illustrates the publisher and author interests in selling these large volumes irrespective of curriculum quality and rigor (not to mention the much larger potential for errors or the lost trees....)" is following the picture in one of the discussions. Taking a look at the Singapore Math website It appears that in addition to the 2 textbooks pictured and student workbooks pictured, there are Intensive Practice books, Extra Practice Books, and Challenging Word Problems books, as well as other resources. Also, the white book on the bottom of the pile appears to be an answer key. There are also teacher guides for 6A and 6B that are not in the picture.
I'm not suggesting the statement above is false, I would just like to point out that the picture being used is not an accurate comparison. I hope you find this information valuable.
Where there once were 15 large high schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, there will be about 50 high schools of all different sizes under the MPS umbrella this fall, and many have untraditional names.
The options outside MPS used to be primarily a handful of large Catholic and Lutheran high schools. Many of those schools still are thriving, but the array of non-MPS options is growing, thanks to the private school voucher program for low-income families and to charter schools authorized by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Milwaukee's City Hall. New schools in those ranks are also set to open in the fall.
A fresh wave of MPS charter high schools is almost certain to get approval from the School Board on Thursday night. Each of the proposals was approved by a board committee last week and was given preliminary approval by the board months ago.
Here's a snapshot of new schools coming before the board this week:
William Lichten, the distinguished Yale professor emeritus of physics, is at it again, trying to keep U.S. high schools from giving so many Advanced Placement courses and tests to racial minorities and low income students. Too many of those people fail the tests, he says. They should be given something easier to do.
Most of the AP teachers I know think Lichten is out of his depth on this issue. I agree with them. He is a brilliant man who knows the dynamics of the forces of nature, but he does not understand the dynamics of American public high schools. What he sees as harmful failure on AP college-level tests is actually beneficial exercise of flabby academic muscles. Interviews with many students, and some major studies, indicate that struggling with hard courses in high school helps prepare students for the academic demands they will face in college.
High school teachers often try not to think about the true sources of irritation in their lives. The perfidy of principals and the selfishness of parents can sometimes be too much to bear and are best ignored. Such denial has its virtues. But maybe the faculty of Scarsdale High School has taken it too far. They have decided that the best way to recover the love of learning at their famously competitive campus is to get rid of the Advanced Placement program.
The Scarsdale faculty make their case in their "Proposal for Advanced Topics Implementation," a plan to create a set of courses deeper, more challenging and less prone to grade grubbing than AP. Their proposal is worth considering. It will appeal to teachers across the country. It also will help destroy the myth that Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses and tests are the major cause of student anxiety in our most affluent neighborhoods because anyone who knows Scarsdale can see that AP is not their biggest problem.
First, a disclaimer. I am far from an expert on most of the topics which will be illustrated by questions. One of my aims in giving this talk is to let others know about a serious problem which exists beyond the problem of mathematical knowledge of teachers.
I have written about the problem in mathematics and hope that some others will use the resouces which exist to write about similar problems in other areas.
In his American Educational Research Association Presidential Address, which was published in Educational Researcher in 1986, Lee Shulman introduced the phrase "pedagogical content knowledge". This is a mixture of content and knowing how to teach this content and is the one thing from his speech which has been picked up by the education community. However, there are a number of other points which he made which are important. Here is an early paragraph from this speech:
We begin our inquiry into conceptions of teacher knowledge with the tests for teachers that were used in this country during the last century [the 19th] at state and county levels. Some people may believe that this idea of testing teacher competence in subject matter and pedagogical skill is a new idea, an innovation spawned in the excitement of this era of educational reform, and encouraged by such committeed and motivated national leaders as Albert Shanker, President, American Federation of Teachers, Bill Honig, State Superintendent of Schools, California, and Bill Clinton, Governor of Arkansas. Like most good ideas, however, it's roots are much older.
It took Wisconsin almost 20 years to adopt this "good idea".
What students learn in high school doesn't match with what they need to know as college freshmen, according to a national study released yesterday.
Professors believe high school teachers should cover fewer topics with more depth to prepare students for college. That is one of the findings of the survey by ACT, a nonprofit educational and testing organization.
“A really common complaint from (college) faculty is students not being able to put together a complete sentence properly,” said Erin Goldin, director of the Writing Center, which provides tutoring at Cal State San Marcos.
“When students come in here, . . . I try to explain the rules, but they don't seem to have learned the structure of a sentence.”
You’re invited to join educators, environmentalists and others at the Environmental Charter Schools Workshop.
Date: May 2, 2007, Wednesday
Time: 9:00am to 2:30pm
Site: MADISON, UW Arboretum
Workshop Program: Unique features of “green” charter schools, integrated environmental curriculum, standards and accountability, charter partners supporting sustainable schools, and implementing a green charter school. Learn more at Green Charter Schools.
Presenters, Partners & Discussion Leaders: JIM McGRATH, founder and former principal of Oshkosh Environmental Charter School; VICTORIA RYDBERG, Teacher, River Crossing Charter School; JULIE SPALDING, Educator, Fox River Academy, and INGRID BEAMSLEY, WCSA Deputy Director
Registration: The registration fee is only $20, which covers the conference, lunch and materials. Send registrant’s name and email address, along with a $20 check payable to the WCSA, to: Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, PO Box 1704, Madison, WI 53701-1704 . Questions? Contact the WCSA at: Tel: 608-661-6946 or Email: info@wicharterschools.org or FAX: 608-258-3413
As a 15-year-old high school sophomore with a demanding course load, I read your article with interest.
On regular weekdays, my evenings fill up quickly with daily homework assignments and extracurricular activities. My weekends are my opportunity to catch up on projects and essays, review notes and study for upcoming tests — which leaves hardly any time to relax.
Spring break is a rare occasion for me to unwind, reflect, rejuvenate and prepare for the onslaught of work when I return to school. It’s the only way I keep going.
In recent years, that has become the most common response to questions I pose to my law students at Georgetown University. It is usually asked while the student glances up from the laptop screen that otherwise occupies his or her field of vision. After I repeat the question, the student's gaze as often as not returns to the computer screen, as if the answer might magically appear there. Who knows, with instant messaging, maybe it will.
Some years back, our law school, like many around the country, wired its classrooms with Internet hookups. It's the way of the future, I was told. Now we are a wireless campus, and incoming students are required to have laptops. So my first-year students were a bit surprised when I announced at the first class this year that laptops were banned from my classroom.
I did this for two reasons, I explained. Note-taking on a laptop encourages verbatim transcription. The note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give and take of classroom discussion. Because taking notes the old-fashioned way, by hand, is so much slower, one actually has to listen, think and prioritize the most important themes.
Across the world, approaches to teaching children about their nation's past are hotly contested—especially at times of wider debate on national identity.
IF THE past is a foreign country, the version that used to be taught in Irish schools had a simple landscape. For 750 years after the first invasion by an English king, Ireland suffered oppression. Then at Easter 1916, her brave sons rose against the tyrant; their leaders were shot but their cause prevailed, and Ireland (or 26 of her 32 counties) lived happily ever after.
Awkward episodes, like the conflict between rival Irish nationalist groups in 1922-23, were airbrushed away. “The civil war was just an embarrassment, it was hardly mentioned,” says Jimmy Joyce, who went to school in Dublin in the 1950s.
Educational software, a $2 billion-a-year industry that has become the darling of school systems across the country, has no significant impact on student performance, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education.
The long-awaited report amounts to a rebuke of educational technology, a business whose growth has been spurred by schools desperate for ways to meet the testing mandates of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law.
The technology -- ranging from snazzy video-game-like programs played on Sony PlayStations to more rigorous drilling exercises used on computers -- has been embraced by low-performing schools as an easy way to boost student test scores.
The Bush administration is letting more children with disabilities take simplified tests under the No Child Left Behind education law.
The change, outlined in final regulations Wednesday, would triple the number of children who can take tests that are easier than those given to most students under the 2002 law.
Roughly 10% of special education students - those with the most serious cognitive disabilities - currently can take simplified, alternative tests and have the results count toward a school's annual progress goals.
Under the new rules, about an additional 20% of children with disabilities could take alternative tests and have those count toward a school's progress goals.
A major federal study of reading and mathematics software has found no difference in academic achievement between students who used the technology in their classrooms and youngsters who used other methods.
The $10 million study of 15 educational software products is the most extensive federal study yet to follow methods that the U.S. Department of Education considers scientifically rigorous.
Extra effort could garner two diplomas upon graduation
From a story by Shawanna Robinson in the Daily Journal, Park Hills, Missouri:
Farmington High School Senior Jake Goff will graduate from Farmington High School this May with not only his high school diploma, but an Associate of Arts Degree from Mineral Area College as well.
He is the first of what the district hopes will be many students accomplishing such a feat. The Early College Pathway Program recently received a stamp of approval by both the Farmington R-7 Board of Education and the Mineral Area College Trustees.
The Early College Pathway Program is one where the Juniors and Seniors enrolled would finish their senior year with their high school diploma and either a transcripted 42 (credit hours) general education block from Mineral Area College transferable to most Missouri four-year universities or, such as Goff, with a 62 (credit hours) Associate of Arts degree from Mineral Area College. Goff will actually graduate with 64 credit hours this May.
From the Wisconsin Newspaper Association via the DPI newsletter of State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster:
Student journalists are invited to enter their best work, published in their school newspapers during the 2006-07 academic year, in the high school "Better Newspaper Contest," sponsored by the Wisconsin Newspaper Association (WNA).
The entry deadline is April 16 for awards to be presented in May at end-of-year assemblies. The contest period has been shifted from previous years to allow awards to be presented during the current academic year.
The contest annually recognizes student achievements in high school newspapering. The panel of judges from Wisconsin's newspapers includes publishers, general managers, editors, reporters, photographers, copy editors and other staffers.
Any student enrolled in a Wisconsin public, parochial or private senior high school may enter. Information is available at WNA Student Newspaper Contest.
A column by Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Words tumble to mind by way of description. Words like desolate. Words like tough. Words like hard and mean and grim and sad. Words like dead. Bail bonds and liquor stores are what passes for industry here. Ragged row houses, many boarded and abandoned, crowd one another like strangers in a bus shelter.
Now consider the girl who goes to school here. Danielle Branche, 16, is tiny, has a pretty smile and speaks with self-possession about her dreams.
''When I graduate, I want to go to either Antioch College in Ohio or Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and I want to get my bachelor's in both dance and business management so I'll be able to open my own dance company,'' she said.
Consider the neighborhood. Consider the child. If they seem not to fit each other, well, that's the point. Welcome to St. Frances Academy. Welcome to What Works.
Nancy Donahue, one of the organizers of The Studio School, sent this message to SIS:
I have had the opportunity to talk with Maya Cole twice in the past two weeks and I am convinced that she would be an excellent addition to our school board ...someone who can see the big picture and incorporate it into a vision for our schools and our community. A change agent? Moreover, Maya is unfettered by the MTI machinery and political agenda so I can trust that her votes are guided by her own judgment. I am also supporting Rick Thomas for many of the same reasons.
I think that it is imperative that we make every effort to ensure that the people we elect are not "beholden" to any large organization to support their campaigns. MTI's questionnaire flagrantly and publicly advertises that candidates must comply with the MTI agenda if they want MTI political support (which would be difficult to pass up). But the campaigns are just the beginning of an insidious political relationship. Along with MTI support comes the continual threat of repercussions (i.e., public criticism and withdrawal of support) if, once elected, a candidate should muster the personal integrity to cast a vote that runs counter to the MTI position. I prefer that our school board members feel free to cast votes based on information rather than intimidation.
I know that most SIS readers are well aware of this situation but I thought it deserved mentioning again...and again...and again. It probably goes deeper and reaches farther than people realize. Throughout the process of developing our proposal for The Studio School I had opportunities to talk and meet with MMSD teachers. I find it very interesting that early in the process they would come to planning meetings, meet with me in coffee shops, email me, and talk on the phone...but they never seemed to feel comfortable attending school board meetings or speaking out publicly in support of The Studio School. Why was this? Were they intimidated? I think they were. I did have a couple of conversations in which teachers expressed concern about going against MTI and/or the impact it would have with other teachers (i.e., coworkers). Is this really the kind of climate in which we want our teachers and children to spend their days? A climate where people are intimidated into silent complicity? I am also concerned that principals work in a similar climate. I thought that our country was rooted in freedom of thought and speech. Freedom to choose our own ideologies. I thought that Madison valued thoughtful, informed and independent thinking. I want my children to attend a school and to live in a community that supports personal integrity and responsibility. A safe place where they feel free to act and speak out in accordance with their convictions; without fear of intimidation, insult or injury from others...especially school or community leaders. Hmmm...isn't this something we learned about in school?
And speaking of leaders, I still wonder why Johnny Winston, Jr., our school board leader, withdrew his support during the final few weeks before the BOE vote on our proposal. In late December, Mr. Winston assured me that he would "not vote no." Yet, after consistently saying (privately and publicly) that he supported The Studio School, he suddenly had a change of heart and voted "no." (By the way, he remains endorsed by MTI. ) Sparing the details, the net effect of Mr. Winston's support was that it undermined our efforts - it certainly didn't advance them. At best, I now question his leadership, reliability, and effectiveness in supporting an issue. At worst, I question the motives behind any vote he casts - especially if it involves an issue that could require standing up to the MMSD and MTI power structures.
Regarding The Studio School, we are continuing in our efforts to open The Studio School in the fall. So please check our website www.madisonstudioschool.org to follow developments.
When parents need a tutor for their children, they can find a wide variety in Madison. Several have been pleased with the progress their children made at the Madison Reading and Learning Center.
Reading Recovery, a popular one-to-one tutoring program that Bush administration officials sought to shut out of a high-profile federal reading program, has gotten a rare thumbs-up from the federal What Works Clearinghouse.
“I think this is good news for all the school superintendents who kept Reading Recovery alive in their schools,” said Jady Johnson, the executive director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America, a nonprofit group based in Worthington, Ohio. “I’m hoping this report will signal a change in direction for the [U.S. Education] Department.”
In the What Works review, posted online March 20, the clearinghouse said the program had “positive” effects—the highest evidence rating possible—on students’ alphabetic skills and general reading achievement. The reviewers also determined that the program had “potentially positive” effects, its next-highest rating, on reading fluency and comprehension.
That’s high praise from the clearinghouse, which the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences created in 2002 to vet research on “what works” in education. So few education studies meet the clearinghouse’s tough research-quality criteria that some critics have dubbed it the “nothing works” clearinghouse.
On the clearinghouse’s “improvement index,” a measure used to provide a common metric on program effects, researchers found that the average 1st grader who completed Reading Recovery could be expected to score 32 percentile points higher in general reading achievement than similar students not in the program.
Yet some of the program’s early critics said in interviews last week that many of their original concerns remained.
“I never said Reading Recovery is ineffective,” said Jack M. Fletcher, one of 32 researchers who signed a widely circulated 2002 letter critiquing the program. “The real issue with Reading Recovery is the idea that it has to be done individually, when there’s a substantial research base on small-group interventions that shows there’s no drop-off in effectiveness.”
The 7th annual Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference, co-sponsored by the WCSA and DPI, will be attended by educators, parents, students, school officials, university people, community leaders, state officials, and many other charter friends. Conference Flyer (PDF).
Dates: April 15-17, 2007 (Sunday afternoon through Tuesday)
The Sunday afternoon (4/15) Wisconsin Charter Schools FAIR is open and FREE to the public. Conference sessions on Monday and Tuesday (4/16-17) will focus on planning, authorizing, implementing and operating high-performance charter schools.
I have a few comments on separate courses for students of different abilities
I think that it is important to have opportunities for advanced students to obtain seperate instruction is subjects they excel in. It is my belief that by doing this we don't sacrifice diversity, we actually increase it.
My logic is as follows. If gifted students are not given the challenge they need in school, they will not achieve as much as they can. If the public schools are not able to provide for these childern, then parents of gifted kids will pull them out of school. Unfortunately, only involved parents with money will have the ability to give their kids the alternative education like private school. Thus, the public schools will be left with few children at the top end of the education spectrum since it can't provide for them.
My belief that this is true comes from my home town in California. We have one elementary school in a wealthy area that is known to have much better educational opportunities for students. Parents in other districts constantly try to move their children to this school. Due to declining enrollment, other school districts have stopped letting students switch schools. To still provide for the children, the school in the wealthy area became a charter school. Now, parents can move their children there without incident. But, the other public schools are left without their brightest students. If the other public schools could provide for their brightest, the public schools would include all of the students.
The importance of public education providing for gifted students becomes especially apparent when you look at personal examples. I did not attend the wealthy school, but through an individually tailored math eduacation, I was able to enter high school in trig. The other freshmen in this course were ALL from the wealthy school, though this school only has around 1/5 of students in the area. Some of my classmates at the wealthy school were from advantaged backgrounds. But, one student in particular was not. This student, "John", was given the ability to excell at the wealthy school and performed excellently. By the end of high school, he had completed a large portion of a standard undergraduate mathematics major by taking courses at the local college. He recieved a large scholarship to attend a prestigious liberal arts school. He graduated with a math and physics degree after three years.
If the opportunities that were given the students at the wealthy school and the abilitiy to take college classes while in high school were not there, the wealthier students would not be affected much academically. My area has several private and charter schools that many wealthy kids attend when the public schools aren't good enough. My friends that switched to these schools were predominately the children of doctors, lawyers, and local businessmen. Unfortunately for advanced but disadvantaged students, theirs only chance to succeed is the public schools. If the public schools are not providing for the brightest, the ones with resources shall go elsewhere and the ones without resources will lose out.
My parents told me that had my schools not been willing to give me individual instruction, I would have been homeschooled. My parents felt it was important to see the many culures and personalities in the public school system. But, they would not sacrifice my education for it.
In the 1930’s, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting “the only thing we need to fear is itself,” which desdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success. In the end, the American economy pulled out of the depression and succeeded communism.
Does that paragraph read like an excerpt of an essay with “reasonably consistent mastery” and that “effectively develops a point of view” and “demonstrates strong critical thinking, generally using appropriate examples"? Those are the College Board’s descriptions of the kinds of qualities that earn an essay a score of 5 (the second highest possible) on the essay portion of the SAT, a new and controversial part of the exam. And that is the score an essay with that paragraph (all punctuation, spelling, FDR’s new middle name and other “facts” verbatim) received from two readers when a student submitted it in October, having been coached on how to do so by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When sixth-grade teacher Rachel Yurk created a blog for her classroom this year, she began the online learning experiment with a simple, engaging question: "What's your favorite book and why?"
By that night, Yurk's e-mail had exploded with about 200 messages - each one notifying her that another comment had been posted to the online discussion.
Safely nested in Virtual Office, a secure system that New Berlin Public Schools is piloting and plans to take districtwide by next year, Yurk's classroom blog engages students in a common discussion tool without exposing them to uncensored activity in the real-world blogosphere.
"The students are more willing to talk about things, and they can type so fast," Yurk said. "Pencil and paper is boring to them. The first day we opened up Virtual Office, one student's sister - a high school kid - thought it was cool and put up a post about what book she thought the younger students should read."
Blogs, or online discussions that usually host time-stamped entries in order of newest to oldest, have struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream K-12 education.
This is a very useful example of why it's important for us not to continue to be caught up in the Frederick Taylor style education process as the world changes around us.
Consider this high-minded conclusion in their report: A successful high school should show high levels of student achievement, graduate almost all of its students and not let any demographic subgroup suffer at the expense of others. In a perfect world, I would not dispute that. But in the real world that means C. Leon King High School in Tampa does not belong on the best schools list because of its high dropout rate and low average test scores, even though Newsweek ranked it 73rd in the country in AP and IB test participation last year.
Asked to comment on the notion that her school ought to be taken off the list, Susie L. Johnson, assistant principal for the school's IB magnet curriculum, said: "Honestly, that is ridiculous."
Whoops. Did I say she runs the magnet curriculum? The Education Sector report dismissed magnets, special programs that draw students from outside school boundaries, as a sneaky way for schools like King to look good on the Newsweek list. In fact, it said, a school with a small number of students taking many tests will receive a high Challenge Index score even if it is providing a lousy education to the rest of it students.
As some of you may recall, back in December, I posted a few questions to the members of Madison Partners for Inclusive Education. As a result of that posting, several members of each group have met a couple of times in order to try and make personal connections and identify areas of shared concern and potential joint advocacy. It is too early to say how that effort is going. I, personally, am ever hopeful that we can find the patience and persistence needed to build a foundation of mutual understanding and trust, a foundation upon which we can ultimately work together for all children.
I would like to share a recent exchange from the MUAE list serve (where MPIE members have been welcome since the get-go -- in fact, more than one are longtime MUAE list serve members). In response to a post about one of the BOE candidates, an MPIE member wrote the following:
I would like to clarify something that was misstated in a recent post. Madison Partners for Inclusive Education (MPIE) does NOT promote or endorse COMPLETELY heterogeneous classrooms ALL the time. The group does not think completely heterogeneous classrooms all of the time is in the best interest of children with disabilities. Their website goes on to explain their philosophy: http://www.madisonpartnersforinclusion.org/whatisinclusion.html Thank you for understanding this and clarifying in future posts.
I then replied:
Thanks for the clarification, though I really think we are in agreement on this point. Certainly the inclusion decision for students with disabilities should be a flexible one, based on the specific nature of the disabilities, the specific educational needs, and the family's preference for their child. Most of us know, for example, about IDEA and the K-12 IEP process. We know, too, that our high schools offer alternative classes and other learning options for those students with disabilities for whom the "regular" classes are not appropriate.
I am sure we get sloppy with our language, at times; but our language errors are surely inadvertent, mostly because -- like all parents -- we are simply thinking about our own children, whether or not they are thriving, and whether or not their needs are being well met by our schools. We are guilty of being good parents. Nevertheless, we apologize.
The fact is, we do not want much of anything to change for students with disabilities. (We would like to see the state and federal governments pay a larger portion of the tab for special education -- can we encourage your group to take the lead on that issue at the local level?). We support all of the flexibility, all of the options, and all of the tailoring of educational programming that goes on for them during their years in the MMSD. MUAE stands absolutely with MPIE on that, as I see it (though obviously I really can't speak for everyone). We are your partners there.
We ask the same of you.
I wonder, will you be our partners in getting our children's educational needs met in the same way that the needs of students with disabilities are met? Just as you do not think placement in completely heterogeneous classrooms all of the time is in the best interest of children with disabilities, so do we think such placement is inappropriate for our children. Full days spent in "regular" classrooms does not necessarily meet our children's educational needs any better than it does your children's needs. We are told the District is committed to giving each student the appropriate "next level of challenge." And yet too many of us know (or have) "formerly bright" students who have become turned off to school as a result of too many years of insufficient challenge and chronic boredom. They are miserable. They are in pain. They are not growing well at all. Meanwhile, our advocacy efforts on our children's behalf are too often met with disdain, deception and complete stonewalling. We do not yet have the same legal foundation on which to stand as you do.
We at MUAE are simply asking for the same flexibility -- in thinking, in approach, in educational opportunity and in classroom placement -- for the District's highest potential, highest performing students that students with disabilities experience. Nothing more; nothing less.
Join Education Week on Monday, March 19, from noon to 1 p.m., Eastern time, for a live Web chat with Karen Isaacson and Tamara Fisher, the co-authors of "Intelligent Life in the Classroom—Smart Kids & Their Teachers," a new book from Great Potential Press of Scottsdale, Ariz. This is the second in a regular series of chats on education books.
Isaacson and Fisher make a unique writing pair: Isaacson is the mother of five gifted children, while Fisher is the K-12 gifted education specialist for a school district located on an Indian reservation in northwestern Montana.
In "Intelligent Life in the Classroom," the two authors draw on their own experiences and real-world anecdotes to offer insights into the way gifted children’s minds work and the best ways to reach and engage them in the classroom. With humor and understanding, they write about the imperative to harness gifted children’s potential, to nurture their curiosity, and to channel their intensity. They cite a common saying among teachers—that gifted children are children first and gifted second.
"Isaacson and Fisher have contributed a refreshingly welcome perspective concerning the complexities of smart kids and the teachers who reach them,” Marcia Gentry, the associate director of the Gifted Education Resource Institute at Purdue University, says of the book.
“Karen Isaacson and Tamara Fisher are connoisseurs of young learners, studying and savoring the variety of kids who come their way. They remind readers of a number of non-negotiables of superior teaching,” Carol Ann Tomlinson, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Virginia, writes in the book’s foreword.
Ms. Isaacson and Ms. Fisher will be online to answer your questions about teaching and better understanding gifted children.
Submit advance questions: http://www.edweek-chat.org/question.php3#question
No special equipment other than Internet access is needed to partipate in this chat. Go to the link provided to enter. A transcript of the chat will be posted after its completion.
While we are gathering this data, I want to use the next few columns to dig into the meaning of high school quality. This has become a controversial topic. Educators have a wide range of views. Some tell me the Newsweek list, which rates schools on the very narrow basis of participation in college-level tests, is a wonderful way to recognize schools with great staffs who are working hard to prepare average and sometimes below-average students for college. Others say the list distorts the images of many schools, particularly those in wealthier neighborhoods, by giving less emphasis to test scores and by ignoring special school qualities that cannot be reduced to a single number.
It is not just educators and journalists who are concerned about how we measure schools. Probably the most enthusiastic consumers of high school data are real estate agents, and their millions of clients. A recent study on how school statistics affect home prices dramatizes once again how powerful average test scores are in shaping public perceptions, even when many experts think there are better ways to assess schools.
This is in response to the NY Times article about Madison's reading program. Of course a quick response is often inadequate. But here goes.
The simple fact is that correct decoding is necessary but not sufficient to comprehend what one is reading. Necessary but not sufficient appears to be a concept that escapes most of the field of education. What's so hard about it, I wonder? You have to have water to stay alive, but that's not sufficient to keep you alive. You have to have air to stay alive, but that's not sufficient to keep you alive. Look at that dead person there. We gave him water and he still died. That must prove that water kills you!
However good the points made by the DC teacher, e.g., readers need to think about what they are reading, vocabulary development is critical, comprehension is the point of reading it provides NO support for the ridiculous teaching used to open the article about Madison. My gosh, the teacher thinks that the child should know that if a word isn't "pumpkin," because it is too short to be "pumpkin," the child should be able to guess that the word is instead "pea." Decoding or "word calling" must be accurate and facile so that the reader can turn their attention to comprehension. Guessing won't get you there.
The most breathtakingly stupid assertion in the whole NY Times article is: "They also contend that children drilled in phonics end up with poor comprehension skills when they tackle more advanced books."
That is the same as saying "People given water end up dead" when they starved to death. Research shows that learning how to decode via phonics is more efficient, leaving more time, eventually for work on comprehension. Therefore, the opposite is true.
If I were to be really generous I would guess that they are looking at at-risk, low SES children who have very limited word knowledge as well as limited world knowledge. The ONLY way they even learn to decode is via phonics--but then there is an additional job to be done in vocabulary and background knowledge instruction. If this is not done, or done a couple of years behind schedule, then these students taught with phonics methodology (probably only after they have failed to learn by guessing for years!) will indeed show low in comprehension.
People who use that data to conclude the above absurd statement are simply being obtuse. And we can't afford to play stupid when children's lives are at stake.
Amid the whir of an overhead projector, Concord High School biology teacher Ellen Fasman sketched out the long, chubby legs of an X-shaped chromosome with her erasable marker.
"What do you remember from seventh grade about mitosis?" she asked the class.
Her question on cell division met with blank stares. From underneath his baseball cap in the back of the room, sophomore Vincent Thomas muttered in confusion.
"Wait, I don't get this," Thomas said. "We learned this in seventh grade?"
Even in her college prep biology class, students come less and less prepared each year, Fasman said.
"They're every bit as bright as they've ever been," said Fasman, who has taught for 16 years. However, they increasingly come hampered by smaller vocabularies, lacking knowledge of basic cell biology and unable to deal with fractions, she said.
"Their math skills are rather poor," Fasman said. "When we do the metric system at the beginning of the year, it's a killer for them. When we get into genetics, sometimes it's hard for them, understanding ratios."
American students -- particularly those in California -- come up short in math and science.
Smart and successful
March, 2007
By Superintendent Art Rainwater
For children growing up today, becoming a successful adult requires much more than mastering reading, writing and arithmetic. The requirements for success are very different in an era when work on a single project may involve several countries, languages and cultures. Success requires much more than “book learning.” Success means having the “basic skills” to interact productively and have positive relationships with people who come from many different backgrounds.
The ability of today’s students to play a vital role in this changing world requires us to think differently about what constitutes a “basic” education. For many years we lived by the credo that students must primarily have the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. No one disputes the essential nature of these skills. There are people who still believe that these are the only essential skills needed for success. In a world that brings together a truly diverse group of people every day in the workplace and society, being successful means much more than the advanced application of reading, writing and arithmetic.
To have all the skills needed for success, we must understand that each of us is different and that being different is not only okay, but valued, important and interesting. Success requires understanding that interacting with other cultures enriches every one and that communicating in any language is a beautiful human gift. Potential success is enhanced by learning in a diverse environment which provides continuing opportunities for children to create a broad and inclusive view of the world.
School is all about creating that successful adult. Sometimes that very simple mission gets lost in the political rhetoric and ideological debates that have come to characterize the discussions around our education system. For children to be successful we have to move back to the simple premise that our fundamental role is to prepare children for their life as adults.
Being successful means having the ability to hold a family supporting and fulfilling career. It means gaining the knowledge and understanding about our society and government to be an active citizen. It means living in and helping to create a society which provides for the next generation to achieve.
The students of the Madison Metropolitan School District have the best learning environment because of the richness of our diverse learning community. We provide a world class education in preparing for success. Our students work and play everyday with children who are different in many ways. They learn about different families and different beliefs. They experience and work with children with a wide range of abilities. They can hear over 60 different languages and learn that truth can be expressed in every one of them. They learn that the way someone looks and talks does not define his or her character or value.
Our diversity is a gift to be valued and used. Our diversity is not a barrier to be overcome, but a great opportunity to help make all of our children successful world citizens.
But in choosing to send her children to a middle school, Allen is part of a declining breed of parents in the city.
Next year, Milwaukee Public Schools officials expect about 8,750 middle school students, down about 10% from this school year and nearly 35% from four years ago.
The School District has long planned to put more children of middle school age in kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools. Over the last few years, the number of K-8 schools has grown from about a dozen to about 60. But recent developments raise the question of whether your run-of-the-mill middle school will survive, particularly in some urban areas.
Milwaukee, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland and Cincinnati are only a few of the cities that have shifted heavily to K-8s in recent years. In Philadelphia, district leaders have said they plan to phase out middle schools entirely, replacing them with K-8s. Many parents and school officials consider that grade configuration to be safer and more nurturing, particularly in city schools. The trend is more of an urban than a suburban one, and nationally there are still more middle schools than K-8s.
Jessica Stark, a 17-year-old from Abilene, Texas, earned $600 for some hard work last year. It wasn't flipping burgers or waiting tables. She made the money for passing six of the toughest examinations in high school at $100 apiece.
Ms. Stark is part of a movement that is going national: paying kids to take Advanced Placement tests. Success on these exams, administered by the nonprofit College Board, often gives students college credit and sometimes encourages them to pursue study and careers in the field. Ms. Stark plans to become an engineer and has already been admitted to the Colorado School of Mines. "I do homework all the time," she says. "I don't have too much of a social life. ... Study parties -- we're pretty good at those."
A new initiative, aimed at encouraging careers in math and science, plans to replicate these AP bonuses across the country. Teachers get them, too -- at times, $5,000 annually or more -- for helping their kids pass AP classes in math, science and English. The money is provided by a network of private donors. Along with cash, students in Texas sometimes get gifts, such as iPods, as door prizes for attending weekend prep classes.
The program's proponents say AP incentives have succeeded at getting more students to pass the tests in Texas, and they expect the broader initiative to encourage more students to go on to careers in math and science. But some critics question whether cash bonuses are an appropriate and effective way to engage students in the subjects. Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a critic of standardized tests, calls the approach "basing education reform on a series of bribes to kids and bounties to teachers" and says the money would be better spent on broader efforts to improve instruction.
Madison Superintendent's 2007-2008 Proposed Budget Changes
Art Rainwater on the reductions in increases to the proposed 2007-2008 MMSD Budget [1.4MB PDF]:
Dear Board of Education,
The attached is my recommendation for the service reductions required to balance the budget for 2007-2008. They are provided to you for review in advance of my Recommended Balanced Budget for 2007-2008 which will be available on April 12, 2007. You requested that the service reductions be presented to you in advance to provide sufficient time for your study and analysis.
After 14 years of continuous reductions in our services for children there are no good choices. While these service reductions are not good for children or the health of the school district they represent our best professional judgment of the least harmful alternatives.
The process that we used to study, analyze, consider and finally recommend the items presented was done over a period of weeks. We first reviewed each department and division of the district and listed anything that could be reduced or eliminated legally or contractually. We narrowed that list to those items which we believed would do the least harm to:
Our academic programs,
The health and safety of our schools,
The opportunities for student involvement,
Our ability to complete our legal and fiscal requirements
The document presented to you today is the result of those discussions. The items are broken into four categories:
Reductions to balance the budget ( Impact Statements provided)
Reductions analyzed, discussed and not included (Impact statements provided)
Reductions reviewed and not advanced
Possible revenues dependent on legislative action
The administration is prepared to provide you further analysis and respond to questions as we continue to work to approve a final working budget in May.
Illinois elementary school pupils passed the newly revamped state achievement exams at record rates last year, but critics suggest it was more the result of changes to the tests than real progress by pupils.
State and local educators attribute the improvement to smarter pupils and teachers' laser-like focus on the state learning standards—the detailed list of what pupils should know at each grade level. They also say that the more child-friendly exams, which included color and better graphics, helped pupils.
But testing experts and critics suggest that the unprecedented growth is more likely the result of changes to the exams.
Most notably, the state dramatically lowered the passing bar on the 8th-grade math test. As a result—after hovering at about 50 percent for five years—the pass rate shot up to 78 percent last year.
While the number of test questions remained generally the same, the number that counted on pupil scores dropped significantly.
It’s an article of faith that the key to success in real estate is location, location, location.
For young black boys looking ahead to a difficult walk in life, the mantra should be education, education, education.
We’ve watched for decades — watched in horror, actually — as the lives of so many young blacks, men and boys especially, have been consumed by drugs, crime, poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice, misguided social pressures, and so on.
At the same time, millions of blacks have thrived, building strong families and successful careers at rates previously unseen. By far, the most important difference between these two very large groups has been educational attainment.
If anything, the role that education plays in the life prospects of black Americans is even more dramatic than in the population as a whole. It’s the closest thing to a magic potion for black people that I can think of. For boys and men, it is very often the antidote to prison or an early grave.
A new report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that young adults in general have been struggling in the labor market. Many have been left behind by the modest economic recovery of the past few years, especially those with limited education credentials.
The report, which focuses on black males, emphasizes the importance of education in overcoming this tough employment environment:
“For males in each of the three race-ethnic groups (blacks, Hispanics and whites), employment rates in 2005 increased steadily and strongly with their educational attainment. This was especially true for black males, for whom employment rates rose from a low of 33 percent among high school dropouts to 57 percent among high school graduates, and to a high of 86 percent among four-year college graduates.
“The fact that only one of every three young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of job during an average month in 2005 should be viewed as particularly distressing, since many of these young men will end up being involved in criminal activities during their late teens and early 20s and then bear the severe economic consequences for convictions and incarcerations over the remainder of their working lives.”
There is no way, in my opinion, for blacks to focus too much or too obsessively on education. It’s the fuel that powers not just the race for success but the quest for a happy life. It represents the flip side of failure.
The differences in rates of employment between white men and black men narrow considerably as black men gain additional schooling. After comparing the percentage of the male population that is employed in each race or ethnic group, the Northeastern study found:
“The gap in [employment to population] ratios between young white and black males narrows from 20 percentage points among high school dropouts, to 16 percentage points among high school graduates, to eight percentage points among those men completing 1-3 years of college, and to only two percentage points for four-year college graduates.”
For anyone deluded enough to question whether education is the ticket to a better life for black boys and men, consider that a black male who drops out of high school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor’s degree.
Black males who graduate from a four-year college will make, over the course of a lifetime, more than twice the mean earnings of a black high school graduate, which is a difference of more than a million dollars.
According to the study, “Black males with college degrees and strong literacy/math skills also are far more likely to marry and live with their children and pay substantially more in taxes to state and national government than they receive in cash and in-kind benefits.”
This is not a close-call issue. It is becoming very hard for anyone to succeed in this society without a college education. To leave school without even a high school education, as so many males — and especially black males — are doing, is extremely self-destructive.
The effort to bolster the educational background of black men has to begin very early. It’s extremely difficult to turn a high school dropout into a college graduate. This effort can succeed on a large scale only if there is a cultural change in the black community — a powerful change that acknowledges as the 21st century unfolds that there is no more important life tool for black children than education, education, education.
Extensive conversations on the part of Marj and Johnny to lobby the state and federal governments for more money. Maya wondered how successful that strategy might be given that our own State Senator Fred Risser failed to sign on to the Pope-Roberts/Breske resolution and that there are many school districts much poorer than Madison who will likely obtain benefits first, if new state tax funds are available. Maya also mentioned her experience at the state level via the concealed carry battles.
The challenge of supporting all students, including those with special needs. Several candidates noted that there is white flight from the MMSD (enrollment has been flat for years, while local population continues to grow)
Mandatory classroom grouping (heterogeneous) was also discussed
I applaud the West PTSO for holding this event. I also liked the way that they handled questions: all were moderated, which prevents a candidate supporter from sandbagging the opposition. I attended a forum last year where supporters posed questions before local parents had the opportunity.
Video and mp3 audio clips are available below. Make sure you have the latest version of Quicktime as the video clips use a new, more efficient compression technique.
Question 1: For Seat 3 Candidate Beth Moss (vs. Rick Thomas) regarding Madison's High Schools: Videomp3 audio
Question 2: What did you do to pass the last referendum and what will you do for the next? Videomp3 audio
Question 3: What values do you bring to the ($333M+ budget) decision making process? Videomp3 audio
Question 4: The MMSD's demographics are changing with more students with special needs while many families feel that they have less resources available for their "normal" students. How would you balance the needs of these various constituencies so that the families without special needs students don't leave the Madison Metropolitan School District? Videomp3 audio
Question 5: for Marj Passman (opposed by Maya Cole); Answering a recent Isthmus question about "How do you play with others", you said that you saw your role as convincing fellow board members as to the correctness of your views. You didn't say anything about listening to others. What role does listening play in your new board member job description? Videomp3 audio
Question 6: Given the statistics in Sunday's paper that only about 30% of Madison households have kids, how does that affect your approach to "selling" another referendum? Videomp3 audio
Question 7 – All Candidates
Please explain your views on additional charter schools given the success of Nuestro Mundo here in Madison and several offerings in Appleton just to name a few?
Question 8 – All Candidates
How can the school district provide for second languages to be taught to all students starting in Kindergarten and continuing through all grades?
Question 9 – All Candidates
The Board will be hiring a new superintendent. Please discuss what you believe is the top 3 criteria for a superintendent. You are free to ignore my request to address communication between Board and Administration/Superintendent, Boards communication with public, Superintendent and Public.
Question 10 – All Candidates
What role should School Board, Parents and Educator play in changing state law which adversely affect our schools?
Question 11 - Rick and Maya
What accountability mechanisms do you envision?
Question 12 – All Candidates
What is your position on the health insurance issue for teachers, that is the WPS option versus HMO’s?
“Still, there is not an absolute guarantee that a course [called] one thing someplace has the same rigor somewhere else,” Reason said.
Part of the challenge is judging the standards of one AP class from another at different high schools, and Reason said the level of trust colleges and secondary schools have with one another is one way colleges try to establish relationships with high schools. But Reason said he is concerned about the competition level at high schools in terms of coursework because schools in some areas do not have the same rigor in their coursework with respect to others.
The article includes a comment regarding Madison West High School's limited approach:
In fact, there are only a handful of AP classes at Madison West, and most students aren't interested in them. They'd rather take more stimulating and challenging classes.
Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can't be learned from reading a manual.
I recently saw a textbook used to teach computers in the third grade. One of the chapters ("The Big Calculator") featured detailed instructions on how to format tables of numbers in Excel. All very good, except that the new Excel version features a complete user interface overhaul, in which the traditional command menus are replaced by a ribbon with a results-oriented UI.
Sadly, I had to tell the proud parents that their daughter's education would be obsolete before she graduated from the third grade.
The problem, of course, is in tying education too tightly to specific software applications. Even if Microsoft hadn't turned Excel inside out this year, they would surely have done so eventually. Updating instructional materials to teach Office 2007 isn't the answer, because there will surely be another UI change before today's third graders enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years -- and even more before they retire in 2065.
SB1 would provide $10,000 grants to help schools start advanced-placement courses. Students scoring highly on the AP exams and who receive free or reduced-price lunches would be eligible for $200 to $300 in state scholarships.
Under SB2, teachers could get salary bumps if they perform well on the teacher-certification tests in math, chemistry and physics.
The two-year cost of the bills is estimated at $4.7 million and $9.2 million, respectively. The savings to students from exam costs and tuition assistance is estimated at $7.9 million for the two years.
By comparison, giving every teacher in Kentucky a 1 percent raise would cost the state $23 million a year, Kelly said.
The Senate has passed both bills, and they are now awaiting assignments to House committees.
Supporters of the measures include University of Kentucky President Lee Todd and the influential Lexington-based Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.
The primary opponent is the KEA, which represents 38,000 public school teachers in Kentucky.
In 2005, Asian/Pacific Islander graduates took a tougher course load than white and black graduates, with 63 percent completing at least a mid-level curriculum. The rate was 44 percent for Hispanic graduates.
The study did not include transcripts of high school dropouts, an important caveat because dropout rates vary widely among racial and ethnic groups.
Experts also point out that the study based its definition of course rigor on titles and descriptions, not necessarily on the delivered content. Known as course-title inflation, that means a class might be called calculus but really teach only algebra. Experts say minority students are often disproportionately affected by such inflation.
"You see all the time that courses are being dumbed down even if they have tough-sounding titles," said Erich Martel, a history teacher at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in the District.
It fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional and theoretical studies is where it very strength lies — it produces "doers", Black Swan hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and "cultural" states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people's ideas. (I hold, against the current Adam Smith-style discourse in economics, that the American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the environment — "cheap options"— not much because of competition and certainly less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith, nor to some extent, those of Karl Marx, seem to be conscious about the role of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style causation and cannot separate skills and payoffs.)
Congress, which is preparing to reauthorize both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Higher Education Act, needs to take a hard look at these scores and move forcefully to demand far-reaching structural changes.
It should start by getting the board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing to create rigorous national standards for crucial subjects. It should also require the states to raise the bar for teacher qualifications and end the odious practice of supplying the neediest students with the least qualified teachers. This process would also include requiring teachers colleges, which get federal aid, to turn out higher quality graduates and to supply many more teachers in vital areas like math and science. If there’s any doubt about why these reforms are needed, all Congress has to do is read the latest national report card.
But more important, let's say that for the sake of argument that only 10 percent of America's children suffer from homework overload (although we believe it's much more). Isn't it still a problem for that 10 percent, for all the reasons listed by the many psychologists, educators and health experts whom we interviewed? If "only" 10 percent of America's children suffered from depression or diabetes, wouldn't it still be worth addressing? We found many such children and they are definitely suffering and losing their love of school and learning. Just because homework overload might not affect every child doesn't make it any less serious.
What's bad, according to Roby Blust, Marquette's dean of undergraduate admissions, is that some of those courses labeled as AP aren't really Advanced Placement courses, as trademarked by the College Board.
"They're not going through what we know is the AP curriculum for English, but they're listing it as an AP course," Blust said. "So they're mislabeling, I guess."
That could be about to change.
Pressured by colleges and universities with similar stories, the College Board is launching its first major oversight effort of the popular courses this year. By fall, the organization responsible for the AP program and its associated tests expects to have reviewed detailed descriptions of what's being taught in about 120,000 courses throughout the world bearing the AP label.
The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has just published the proceedings of their recent conference on high potential learners of poverty. The book is called "Overlooked Gems: A National Perspective on Low-Income Promising Learners" and includes chapters by Donna Ford, Alexinia Baldwin and Paula Olszewski-Kibilius.
To download or order a free copy of "Overlooked Gems," go to www.nagc.org and click on "New at NAGC: Conference Proceedings."
Also on the NAGC website, a brief article by Paul Slocumb and Ruby Payne entitled "Identifying and Nurturing the Gifted Poor". Slocumb and Payne are the authors of "Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty."
. . . last year i reported some of my teachers who didn’t teach me to the state, all we did was watch “R”movies and my other teacher fight and drew chairs, but the school did nothing and they gave me “A’s.
(The principal) is doing nothing about it he tells my mom that the SCHOOL has more rights and power than me and the parent.
The proportion of high school students completing a solid core curriculum has nearly doubled since 1990, and students are doing better in their classes than their predecessors did.
But that good news is tempered by other findings in two federal reports released here today. The performance of the nation’s high school seniors on national tests has declined in reading over the past decade, and students are lackluster in mathematics. A third of high school graduates in 2005 did not complete a standard curriculum, which includes four credits of English and three credits each of social studies, math, and science.
The 12th grade reading and math results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are based on a nationally representative sample of 21,000 seniors at 900 public and private schools who took the tests between January and March of 2005. The report on their performance was accompanied by the latest NAEP transcript study, which analyzes the coursetaking patterns and achievement of high school graduates.
Two-thirds of the 26,000 graduates who were followed for the transcript study also participated in the 2005 NAEP math and science assessments.
No Improvement in Reading
On the reading test, 12th graders’ average score has declined significantly since the first time the test was given in 1992. The test-takers averaged 286 points on a 500-point scale, a 6-point decline over 13 years, but statistically the same score as in 2002. Achievement levels in reading have also declined since 1992; 80 percent of the students tested that year scored at the “basic” level or better, but only 73 percent did so on the 2005 test, the same proportion as in 2002. In addition, the gap in scores between members of minority groups and higher-scoring white students has not narrowed significantly.
In math, the scores are not comparable with those from previous tests since the 2005 test was based on a new framework. Students scored, on average, 150 points on a 300-point scale. Just 61 percent of the 12th graders demonstrated at least basic command of the subject, with 23 percent considered “proficient” and 2 percent “advanced.”
Among 2005 high school graduates, 68 percent completed at least a standard curriculum, while 41 percent took a more challenging course load, and 10 percent took more-rigorous classes. In 1990, just 40 percent of graduates completed at least a standard curriculum, and 36 percent took additional courses, while 5 percent took what was deemed a rigorous course load.
"No place is perfect, but I wanted the place that was the most perfect for us and them," says Ms. O'Gorman, 44. "To me, it's better than leaving them a house or my 401k."
Across the country, a small but growing number of parents like the O'Gormans are dramatically altering their families' lives to pursue the perfect private school for their children. While past generations of parents might have shifted addresses within a town to be near a particular school, or shipped junior off to boarding school, these parents are choosing school first, location second. "I hear about it all the time," says Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, or NAIS, in Washington, D.C.
Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia says four families have moved to the area in the past two years so their children can attend the school. Hathaway Brown School, an all-girls school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, reports five such families, four of which moved in the past few years. "It's been a little more frequent in the last two or three years," says Sally Jeanne McKenna, admissions director at Polytechnic School of Pasadena, Calif.
Teachers, take back the online research process! (If you are asking the question: "Did we ever have control of the online research process in the first place?" then you get a gold star for your healthy skepticism).
Before Google and other search engines got so good, I think we did have some control. I remember the days, not so long ago, when kids couldn't always find material for their research topics using Google, especially if their topics were just a little unusual or offbeat. They would then be forced to ask for help, and I took advantage of some great teachable moments to help students refine their keywords and search techniques.
Being with students as they refine search skills leads naturally to the next opportunity: helping students evaluate the reliability and credibility of the sites we'd find together.
I’m no different. I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired, and challenged in school. Too often—in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness—that isn’t happening in the Madison schools.
Advanced classes are being choked off, while one-size-fits-all classes (“heterogeneous groupings”) are created for more and more students. The TAG staff has been slashed nearly in half (one staffer is now assigned to six elementary schools), and even outside groups promoting educational excellence are treated coolly if not with hostility (this is the fate of the most excellent Wisconsin Center For Academically Talented Youth [WCATY]). And arts programs are demeaned and orphaned.
This is not Tom Friedman’s recipe for student success in the 21st century. Sure, many factors can be blamed for this declining state of affairs, notably the howlingly bad way in which K-12 education is financed and structured in Wisconsin. But much of the problem also derives from the district’s own efforts to deal with “the achievement gap.”
That gap is the euphemism used for the uncomfortable fact that, as a group, white students perform better academically than do black and Hispanic students. For example, 46% of Madison’s black students score below grade level on the state’s 3rd grade reading test compared to 9% of white students.
At East, the state’s 10th grade knowledge-and-concepts test show widely disparate results by race. With reading, 81% of white kids are proficient or advanced versus 43% for black students. The achievement gap is even larger in math, science, social studies, and language arts. No wonder TAG classes are disproportionately white.
Reality is that the push for heterogeneous class grouping becomes, among other things, a convenient cover for reducing the number of advanced classes that are too white and unrepresentative of the district’s minority demographics.
I happened to sit next to the Curriculum Coordinator (20+ years in that District) for a large, growing US School District recently ( north of 100,000 students). I found some of the comments interesting:
They cycle through superintendents every 2 to 3 years. The Supers are paid $300K+ with "lots of benefits".
The new super is decentralizing all over the place, pushing control down.
They use trailers as enrollment moves around the community.
The new super wants to require any children in grades K-3 not reading at grade level to have only one task per day (beyond lunch, recess and PE) - read. This involves tracking.
I asked what sort of curriculum they used for reading: Whole language with "lots of phonics". I asked if they used Reading Recovery. The person said that they evaluated RR but felt it was "far too expensive".
Offer a great deal of IB and AP courses. They also have magnet schools, though the person said that they are less popular now that the district has gone back to neighborhood schools (evidently there was a successful reverse discrimination lawsuit). They have evidently received "a great deal of federal funds" to support IB and AP.
8th graders who cannot read at grade level will go to a different set of curriculum or school than those who are at or above.
This district spends about $7,900 per student annually (Madison is in the $12,500 range).
Interestingly, this is the 2nd time during the past 12 months that I've sat next to an educator on their way to a conference sponsored by curriculum publishers.
But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.
For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)
Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?
Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.
Tom Ashbrook talked with Bronson, Carol Dweck and Bob Younglove. Listen here.
In his State of the State speech last month, Pawlenty argued that too many Minnesota students coast through high school with no plan for what they are going to do after graduation.
To combat that, the Republican governor wants lawmakers to give $75 million over the next two years to high schools so they can teach tough courses that clearly relate to future careers or majors and to require every student to earn one year of college credit before they graduate.
He also wants all high school students to take four years of a foreign language and to get workplace training and internships so they can be qualified for jobs at companies that will have to compete in a global economy.
Almost 15 percent (Wisconsin = 15.8%) of public school graduates from the class of 2006 achieved during their high school years an AP® Exam grade of 3 or better (the score predictive of college success 1). This achievement represents a significant improvement since the class of 2000, when just 10 percent of public school graduates were achieving this result. The College Board, the not-for-profit membership association that administers the AP Program, released the third annual Advanced Placement Report to the Nation, which also showed that since 2000, all 50 states and the District of Columbia achieved an increase in the percentage of high school graduates that had earned an exam grade of 3 or higher on the college-level AP Exams.
The Report also highlights new independent research, which bolsters previous research findings that students who participate in AP have significantly better college grades and college graduation rates than academically and economically similar students who did not take the demanding courses and exams.
Media and others occasionally rank states, districts, and schools on the basis of AP Exam results, despite repeated warnings that such rankings may be problematic. AP Exams are valid measures of students' content mastery of college-level studies in academic disciplines, but should never be used as a sole measure for gauging educational excellence and equity.
More high schools across the nation are offering Advanced Placement courses to help students get into college and get ready for its academic rigors. In the process, however, many minority students who often need help most urgently are missing out.
“Taking rigorous courses is good for high school students, and there’s a lot of evidence that kids who have taken A.P. courses — even if they don’t do well on the tests — do better in college,” said Mike Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization created by state governors and business leaders that works to raise academic standards.
As increasing numbers of high schools offer the courses, minority enrollment in them has become a focus of study. Although African-American students were underrepresented last year, Asian students were the opposite; 11 percent of students who took the tests were Asian, while only 6 percent of the student population was Asian. About 62 percent of students who took the exams were white, while 65 percent of the nation’s student population was white, the report said.
How many Advanced Placement courses are enough? Here in the Washington area, a hotbed of AP mania, the College Board provided an answer for the first time yesterday: Five is plenty in a high school career. Any more, the official response suggested, might be just showing off.
Trevor Packer, executive director of the AP program, said he had spoken to a number of college officials about how many of the college-level courses were needed to impress admissions officers and prepare for the rigors of higher education. They told him that "three, four or five AP courses are sufficient" in a high school career, he said. Under that scenario, a student could max out with one AP course as a sophomore and two each in junior and senior years. "Beyond that, they are interested in seeing students participate in other activities."
A story by Sol Stern posted on City Journal highlights the success of Reading First and includes striking parallels to our superintendent's response to the program:
Reading First, though much maligned, succeeds in teaching kids to read. . . .
A comprehensive study by an outside evaluator will appear in 2007, measuring Reading First’s influence on student achievement nationally. But some states and districts are already seeing significant improvement. When the relevant congressional committees hold hearings on NCLB reauthorization, they might start by looking to neighboring Virginia, where they’ll discover a dramatic example of Reading First’s power. With apologies to Dickens, we might call it a tale of two school districts—one welcoming Reading First, the other disdaining it.
The first, Richmond, offers a classic profile of an inner-city school district. Of its 25,000 students, 95 percent are black, more than 70 percent are poor enough to be in the free-lunch program, and 44 percent change schools during the year. Until 2001, Richmond’s student test scores were among Virginia’s worst. Only five of the district’s 51 schools achieved the status of full state accreditation.
But 2001 is also when Richmond school officials embarked on an ambitious reform, whose centerpiece was a standardized reading program based on evidence from the NICHD studies. By the time Reading First funds were available in 2002, Richmond was already up and running with a phonics-based reading program called Voyager Universal Literacy. The district channeled the modest $450,000 Reading First grant into a handful of its lowest-performing schools. But the principles of scientific reading instruction took hold throughout the district.
Since then, Richmond’s test scores have skyrocketed. By 2003, the number of the district’s schools achieving full state accreditation had climbed to 22. The next year, it rose to 39 and has now reached 44.
Because NCLB requires disaggregation of student performance data by race, we can further appreciate the extent of Richmond’s turnaround by comparing the district with the Fairfax district, just across the Potomac from the congressional committees due to review Reading First.
Fairfax, one of the richest suburban areas in the U.S., consistently draws in new residents because of the perceived quality of its public schools. SAT scores for Fairfax’s high school graduates stand well above the national average, and 90 percent of those grads go on to some form of higher education. But 17,000 of Fairfax’s 164,000 students are African-American, and they’re not doing so well; in fact, they’re performing far worse than Richmond’s black students. In 2004, only 52 percent of black Fairfax kids passed the state’s third-grade reading test, compared with 62 percent for Richmond’s black students. In 2005, the gap widened to 15 percentage points, with 59 percent of the Fairfax black students passing compared with 74 percent of their Richmond counterparts.
Even more remarkable, Richmond’s third-grade reading scores are closing in on wealthy Fairfax’s scores for all its students, 79 percent of whom passed the third-grade reading test in 2005. Since enacting its reforms, Richmond has moved from 114th in the state in reading (out of 132 districts) to 50th, compared with Fairfax’s 36th.
Fairfax officials have said publicly that they’re mystified by the low performance of the district’s black students. It certainly has nothing to do with money. Millions of extra dollars for remediation programs have poured into the district’s schools with higher proportions of blacks. One thing the district proudly refused to do, though, was take money from Reading First. The then-superintendent said that he didn’t want the federal government dictating how his district taught reading and that he preferred the reading programs he already was using. One of these, costing the district $10 million per year, is Reading Recovery, the same whole-language program that the inspector general accused Chris Doherty of trying to keep from getting Reading First grants—which suggests that Doherty did something right after all.
As principal of Wisconsin Connections Academy (WCA), the state’s first virtual K-8 school, I see on a daily basis the benefits a standards-based virtual education provides for students from around the state.
Every student has unique learning needs. Some students learn best by reading, others by listening and still others by doing. In the same manner, a traditional school is best for some students and a virtual school is best for others. Wisconsin has been an educational leader for many years, and virtual schools are just one of the ways in which Wisconsin is staying at the forefront of education.
Virtual school teachers work with each student to modify lessons, and generally meet the student’s unique needs and learning style. This personalized approach to education is a good option for students who may be far ahead of or behind their peers, for students who need a more flexible schedule, or for students who learn best outside the walls of a traditional school, such as Jacob Martin.
Jacob is an 8th grade student at WCA. Because of his autism, Jacob benefits from learning in a more personalized setting: his home. Jacob recently wrote an essay about why he likes attending a virtual school, and he explained in his own words why a virtual school works best for him.
Hathaway, who hopes to be a novelist, is among 1 million kindergarten through high school student enrollments in virtual schooling across the nation, according to the North American Council for Online Learning, a nonprofit organization for administrators, teachers and others involved in online schooling.
Enrollment, counted as the total number of seats in all online classes, not the number of students, has grown more than 20 times in seven years, and the group expects the numbers to continue to jump 30% annually.
To deal with the growth, the University of California is launching an extensive effort to make sure applicants' online high school courses are on par with traditional classroom instruction.
Nearly half the states offer public school classes online, and last year Michigan became the first in the nation to require students to take an online course to graduate from high school. In California, a state senator introduced a bill last week to allow public high school students to take online classes without depriving schools of the state funding they receive for attendance.
Non-union teachers could be used online
By Susan Troller
The prospect of a virtual school program in Madison is causing a confrontation in the real world between the Madison school district and John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers' union.
At issue is whether the Madison district will be violating its collective bargaining contract with local teachers if it develops a virtual school learning program that includes courses taught online by instructors who are not members of MTI.
A virtual learning proposal, under development by the district for over a year, will be presented to the school board for consideration within the next month or so.
"Our position is that only MTI teachers can instruct kids," Matthews said in an interview. "If someone providing the online instruction is not a licensed teacher in our district, I can't tell you what the quality of the education will be."
Matthews wrote a letter this week chastising Board President Johnny Winston Jr. for his advocacy of the online school proposal.
Winston had written in a letter dated Dec. 14 that "the main purpose of the MMSD Virtual School Program is to meet the educational needs of students who are not having their needs met by the District...an online course is just another tool."
Matthews maintains that online instruction is a form of subcontracting prohibited by the MTI contract.
But Superintendent Art Rainwater said in an interview Friday that the district had been meeting with MTI in its efforts to develop the online program, and that he felt that when all was said and done, it would meet the needs of students, staff and would comply with MTI requirements.
"It's my belief that what we haven't worked out yet we will be able to resolve," Rainwater said. He added that students taking online courses would be supervised and graded by MTI teachers.
Bill Cosby talks about what teachers need to do better.
Teacher Magazine:
Published: January 1, 2007
Tough Love
Bill Cosby talks about what teachers need to do better.
By Denise Kersten Wills
Bill Cosby made headlines in October when he urged teachers to do a better job of explaining to students the importance of the subjects they teach.
—Erinn
The comedian, best known as the beloved Dr. Huxtable from TV’s long-running hit The Cosby Show, has been outspoken in recent years about what the black community needs to do to close the racial achievement gap.
The Cos isn’t a classroom veteran, but neither is he a stranger to education—he holds master’s and doctorate degrees in the field.
We followed up with Cosby and asked him to explain his remarks.
Recent newspaper accounts said you had attacked teachers for not doing enough to help kids.
They heard me, but they didn’t print what I did. What came out was, ‘Well, he’s at it again, and now he’s after the teachers.’
You’ll find the answer in the ATTACHED article from the “Wisconsin School News,” monthly journal of the Wisconsin School Boards Association. Appleton Embraces Charter Schools by Annette Talis. [650K PDF]
In the midst of a national debate over whether Advanced Placement courses place too much pressure on U.S. high school students, a team of Texas researchers has concluded that the difficult courses and three-hour exams are worth it.
In the largest study ever of the impact of AP on college success, which looked at 222,289 students from all backgrounds attending a wide range of Texas universities, the researchers said they found "strong evidence of benefits to students who participate in both AP courses and exams in terms of higher GPAs, credit hours earned and four-year graduation rates."
A separate University of Texas study of 24,941 students said those who used their AP credits to take more advanced courses in college had better grades in those courses than similar students who first took college introductory courses instead of AP in 10 subjects.
Christine Sleeter
California State University, Monterey Bay
christine_sleeter@csumb.edu
Being a teacher educator these days can be a strange experience. Over the past several months, I have given numerous presentations depicting teaching as intellectually challenging, complex work. Using case studies of teachers in diverse classrooms, I have argued that learning to teach well is complicated, partly because excellent teachers know how to engage their students in thinking deeply about things that matter, while embedding the teaching of skills and basic content in broader ideas and problems that have relevance to their students. Ron Berger's descriptions of teaching and learning in An Ethic of Excellence are not only brilliant and inspiring, but helpful illustrations of what classroom teaching and learning can be.
As teacher educators, this is the kind of teaching we try to promote. Linda Darling-Hammond's most recent book Powerful Teacher Education develops excellent portraits of the best in preservice teacher education. [Highlights Alverno College in Milwaukee - LJW]. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education has been sponsoring an Iterative Best Evidence Syntheses program, connecting research on teaching to diverse students' learning, and to teacher professional development. For example, professional development linked to enhanced children's learning incorporates teachers' knowledge and skills, provides theoretical content knowledge related to practice, involves teachers in analyzing data from their own settings, and engages them in critical reflection that stretches their thinking and challenges their assumptions most recent issue of Harvard Educational Review, Betty Achinstein and Rod Ogawa examine two cases of beginning teachers whose students were out-scoring those of their peers on state tests, but who were pushed out of their teaching positions because of their refusal to follow the script.
What is going on here? It is true that teacher education as a whole has not done nearly as well as it could in preparing teachers to teach all students well. At the same time, reducing learning to teach to learning to follow a script greatly shortchanges what teaching and learning could be. It is ironic that teaching has become exceedingly prescribed and determined at a time when the U.S. is aggressively exporting its version of democracy and personal liberty. Not only is tolerance for diverse perspectives currently the lowest it has been in my lifetime, but support for intellectual inquiry and creativity in education seems to have disappeared.
To prompt consciousness-raising, curriculum theorist Thomas Poetter wrote a novel, The Education of Sam Sanders. Set in about 2030, it tells the story of a student who rebelled against rote learning and test preparation because he wanted to read whole books of his own choosing. His rebellion awakened some teachers' memories of a time when teaching and learning involved harnessing reading, writing, and math skills to explore interdisciplinary themes of significance to the lives of students. Books that had been banned were brought out of a locked vault. Teachers began working collaboratively to design engaging curricula. You'll have to read the book to find out what happened.
I believe it is essential that we demand more for students. In part, this means demanding more from our own teacher education programs. Our work as teacher educators needs to be grounded in the realities of the diverse students who populate classrooms today. But rather than acquiescing to formulas and scripts, we must re-invigorate a vision of, in the words of Maria de la Luz Reyes and John Halcón, The Best for our Children.
Madison's Mendota Elementary School beats the odds
What does it take to truly create a school where no child is left behind?
That question defines what is probably the most pressing issue facing American public education, and a high-poverty school on Madison's north side west of Warner Park seems to have figured out some of the answers.
Mendota Elementary is among a small handful of schools in Madison where the percentage of children from low-income families hovers above 70 percent. But contrary to what most research would predict, Mendota's standardized test scores meet or beat Madison's generally high district averages, as well as test scores from throughout the state, on the annual Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.
In fact, Mendota's test scores even exceed those of many other local schools where the majority of students come from more affluent homes with a wealth of resources to devote to child raising, including both time and money.
From "Successful schools, successful students" by reporter Susan Troller, The Capital Times, January 26, 2007.
So what is it about Mendota Elementary that has made it a success, helping many of its kids and families beat the daunting odds stacked against them?
"I think it's the whole high expectations thing," said former Mendota parent Jill Jokela, who, like many others, credits Mendota Principal Sandy Gunderson for the school's surprising success.
"Sandy absolutely understands that demographics may be predictors of performance, but they're not an excuse for a school to give up. In fact, she knows that everyone associated with the school must believe that their kids will succeed," Jokela said.
After Mendota's former longtime principal retired, the school blew through multiple temporary principals.
Poverty rates at the school had reached 60 percent, and teachers were disheartened by the uneven leadership and direction.
Parents were worried about safety, and alarmed that their neighborhood school was in a downward spiral, with test scores showing that only half of the students were scoring proficient or advanced on standardized tests in core subjects. At the time, the literacy rates at Mendota were the lowest in the district.
"It was very chaotic," Jokela admitted. But she hung in there, and she has nothing but positive words for Gunderson, who is now in her 10th year at Mendota.
Parents express confidence in the school, and there is a palpable sense of creative energy in the classrooms. Teachers and the rest of the dedicated staff work closely with each other, focusing on every child and his or her progress.
Ten years ago, staff undertook a school improvement plan that unflinchingly looked at where the problems were, and what kind of resources would be necessary to address them.
Getting Mendota officially identified as a high-poverty school has been critically important to get resources to limit class sizes and provide extra materials for the school, reading specialist Amy Horton said. Even basics like books were a problem.
"We simply had no materials," Horton recalled. "Teachers were spending their own money, and it caused us to be horrible hoarders. Under the circumstances, it was hard to feel very collaborative."
But she says that has changed dramatically. Today, Mendota's book room is a richly stocked and perfectly organized resource where teachers can easily access appropriate materials to supplement lessons and curriculum for students of widely varying skills and abilities.
Gunderson has promoted an integrated curriculum and strong sense of teamwork among the teachers at Mendota, a system that is geared toward making sure every child's needs are well known to staff members, and not just teachers.
The halls and classrooms are bright with student art and immaculately clean. The students greet custodians Ed Carberry and Dan Zimmerman enthusiastically by name. In turn, they are also greeted by name.
Teachers, meanwhile, systematically share information about how each student is doing and ideas for improvement.
"There is a lot of curriculum continuity here. All teachers get the big K-5 picture, and I think the teachers are really empowered to supplement any gaps they see. Honestly, I believe that every day each teacher knows where every student is academically," Gunderson said.
Each morning at Mendota begins with a breakfast program in the cafeteria, with older students eating first and the kindergarten, first- and second-graders getting their food second. They sit by classroom, under the eagle eyes of their teachers.
"This is where we figure out how every child is feeling, what kind of mood they're in. We want them to get off to a good start every morning," Gunderson explained.
'The Mendota way': There is a high degree of discipline and control at Mendota, from a strict dress code to how students behave in hallways and classrooms.
To teach kindergartners what Gunderson calls "the Mendota way," small children moving from class to class learn to walk with their arms folded, or held behind them. And they are quiet. It looks regimented, and it is.
"They learn to occupy their own space," Gunderson noted.
There are evenly spaced tape marks on rugs and kindergartners are expected to keep their bottoms on the floor, their legs crossed in place and their eyes forward. They are praised for being attentive listeners, and while the atmosphere is fun and lively, there is a definite emphasis on structure, routine and predictability.
A former special education teacher, Gunderson notes that all kids, but especially special needs children, seem to thrive in calm classes.
The staff, including Gunderson, is warm and demonstrative with students, and students are both affectionate and remarkably polite.
But when a small girl bolts from a line where her teacher is giving instructions to embrace Gunderson, the principal firmly turns her around and sends her away with the words, "This is not hugging time, this is listening-to-your-teacher time."
On several recent days, fourth- and fifth-grade classes felt almost serene.
Students spoke quietly, and worked attentively in small groups on assigned tasks. There was surprisingly little horseplay under the watchful eyes of teacher Kim Ireland.
The same was true in Janice Bartholow's combined fourth- and fifth-grade class as she worked alongside students on math problems that looked like they could stump many high school students, or older journalists.
Most children walk to Mendota, and Gunderson said that the surrounding community has embraced the school, with a strong sense of neighborhood and the feel of a small town where everyone seems to know everyone else.
Both the Vera Court Community Center, which shares a back yard with Mendota, and the Packers Townhouses Community Center, work closely with the school to keep an eye on kids and help make strong connections with families. Teachers and staff have been encouraged to reach out to students and their parents, and that work is paying off.
At recent parent-teacher conferences, more than 50 percent of the classes had 100 percent participation, and all classes had better than 80 percent participation.
When Kim Davis and her husband moved to Madison from Chicago less than six months ago, they scouted schools and neighborhoods across the city for a place to buy a home and set down roots for their young family, which includes a kindergartner, a toddler and an infant.
Davis is a former high school chemistry teacher, and a stay-at-home mom. She said her top priority was finding a school where students were performing well academically. She and her husband also wanted a school that was diverse.
They spent time at Mendota and were impressed, and were not put off by the school's high poverty rate.
They recently purchased a home within easy biking distance.
"We are thrilled," she said. "The atmosphere at the school is so friendly, and my daughter loves it. Teachers are willing to speak to me any time, not just during a conference, which means a lot.
"Mrs. Gunderson goes above and beyond if I ask for something. And if she doesn't know the answer, she says, 'Kim, I'll get back to you with the answer.' And she does.
"Coming from Chicago," Davis added, "we really appreciate the fact that there is art and music in the elementary schools. As a former teacher, I love this school."
Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. This paper answers that question for one group of students.
For my fall 2006 Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences course I administered the same final exam used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical and the classes were approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshmen. The 2006 class had significantly lower exam scores.
This is not a traditional research study in mathematics education. The value of this study is probably in the rarity of the data, which compares one generation to another.
....
Nineteen eighty-nine is, in mathematics education, indelibly tied to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ publication, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989), which downplayed pencil and paper computations and strongly suggested that calculators play an important role in K-12 mathematics education. My 2006 students would have been about two years old at the time of this very influential publication, and it could easily have affected the mathematical education many of them received. Certainly, one possibility is that mathematics preparation is down across the country, thus limiting the pool of well prepared college applicants.
Wilson is a Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.
Should he have learned about such math concepts well before getting to college? Probably.
But the reality is, he hadn't. And remedial education classes - or developmental coursework, as many colleges prefer to call it these days - offer Lythjohan, who's considering a career in nursing or business, that second chance.
Lythjohan is far from alone.
According to a 2004 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, 28 percent of incoming freshmen nationwide enrolled in at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course at postsecondary institutions in 2000. At public two-year colleges, the figure jumps to 42 percent.
Some of the nation's most competitive schools are changing their homework policies, limiting the amount of work assigned by teachers or eliminating it altogether in lower grades. There also is an effort by some schools to change the type of homework being assigned and curtail highly repetitive drudge work.
The moves are largely at elite schools in affluent areas, including the lower school at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Calif., Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles and Riverdale Country Day School in New York City. The effort is by no means universal, and in fact some national statistics show that the amount of homework is continuing to grow.
Still, the new policies at such schools are significant because moves by institutions of this caliber are closely watched by educators and often followed.
Seventeen-year-old Jacob Simon endorses the new approach. When he gets home from school, he usually watches sports on TV. But the senior at Gunn High School isn't slacking off: He's taking five Advanced Placement courses this year, including calculus and physics. What's changed is his school's efforts to -- in the words of one of its teachers -- "make the homework assignments worthy of our students' time." Mr. Simon says, "It's nice to be able to relax a little."
When her 5-year-old lost his winter hat, he somberly apologized to his mother, saying: "I know it's my responsibility." Without Lecus asking, her 7-year-old holds doors open for other people. And her fourth-grader has become a leader on the playground, helping other kids when they struggle or fall.
Lecus does not take all the credit. Instead, she cites a new character education program at Milwaukee's Whittier Elementary School, where her children attend. With the nudging of a parent, Whittier has started making a more conscious effort to teach students values such as honesty and responsibility.
In doing so, Whittier joined what Michael Swartz, superintendent of the Jefferson School District, west of Waukesha, calls a "national movement."
Motivated by a declining sense of values in a society in which people are more likely to curse and less likely to offer their seat on the bus, schools in Wisconsin and across the country are turning the teaching of character into a formal part of the curriculum.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.
But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized--it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.
We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.
We're often told that problems aren't always as big as they seem, and that a little creativity may bring a solution.
So when North Carolina's governor confronted his big problem — one of the worst high school dropout rates in the country — his creativity kicked into overdrive, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reports.
"One way to get the high school dropout rate down is to do away with high school," says Gov. Michael Easley.
Sound far-fetched? The Legislature didn't think so.
"When I put this in the budget for the first time, I thought there'd be a big fight over it. And everybody said 'this is a great idea, let's do it,'" the governor says.
A three-year, $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor will allow the Milwaukee Area Technical College to recruit and train 1,600 workers in five areas of advanced manufacturing where local businesses are projected to have critical shortages.
The money also will help MATC build a more strategic career-planning system, said Duane Schultz, associate dean in the division of technology and applied sciences for MATC. The goal: to anticipate earlier what jobs will be available locally and train students in those areas.
MATC surveyed about 30 local companies, including Master Lock, General Automotive Manufacturing and Rockwell Automation. In all, they said they would have roughly 1,745 openings in the next three years for computer numeric control machinists, welders and fabricators, maintenance technicians, quality inspectors and production manufacturing technicians.
Average entry-level wages for these jobs range from $11 to $15 an hour.
"We targeted our (program) around manufacturing because it's such a strong part of the southeast Wisconsin job base," said John Stilp, vice president of MATC's Mequon campus.
"Do you want innovative public school options in Madison?
If you do, then your support of The Studio School charter school proposal is critical. Please let the school board know. Write letters. Email them [comments@madison.k12.wi.us]. Call them. Attend the meeting on January 22nd! I have heard from a board member that if the "pressure" to vote for opening this school in the fall isn't strong enough, board members will not vote in favor of this proposal January 29th.
The opportunity to offer this innovative educational option with the possibility of up to $450,000.00 of federal funding over the next two years will not be available to MMSD again.
For more information to find out how to help, community members are invited to join us for our planning group's general meeting on January 17th (this Wednesday) at 6:30 PM at the Sequoya Branch of the Public Library [Map]. You can also go to our website for more information.
The state Department of Public Instruction must write more specific rules for how Wisconsin school districts should identify gifted and talented students, a Dane County circuit judge ordered Friday.
The ruling by judge Michael Nowakowski gave a rare court win to advocates for gifted student education. Yet the judge rejected a request that the DPI create rules detailing what programs districts have to provide to gifted students and provide a more vigorous enforcement of its standards.
Todd Palmer, the New Glarus parent and attorney who filed the suit, called the judge's ruling "a tremendous victory for gifted students in this state."
It comes at a time when Palmer and others argue that services for gifted children are in danger because of the twin pressures of school budget constraints and efforts to raise proficiency levels among low-performing students.
Currently, DPI's rules on identifying students in need of gifted and talented services require only that school districts use "multiple criteria that are appropriate for the category of gifted including intelligence, achievement, leadership, creativity, product evaluations, and nominations."
Financially Support Madison Schools' Math Festival
Ted Widerski:
The Talented and Gifted Division of MMSD is busy organizing ‘MathFests’ for strong math students in grades 4 – 8. These events are planned to provide an opportunity for students to interact with other students across the city who share a passion for challenging mathematics. Many of these students study math either online, with a tutor, by traveling to another school, or in a class with significantly older students.
These events will be hosted by Cuna Mutual Insurance and American Family Insurance. Students will have an opportunity to learn math in several ways: a lecture by a math professor, group learning of a new concept, and individual and small group math contests. Over 300 students from 38 schools will be invited to participate.
The funding for this project is challenging as there are no significant MMSD funds available. A plea for funding in the last several weeks has resulted in gifts totaling about $1000. Those gifts will guarantee that the middle school Mathfest will be held on Wednesday, February 21st.
In order to hold the Elementary MathFests on each side of Madison would require additional donations. Gifts totaling $1600 would provide the necessary support to provide 200 students with a very special experience. If anyone or any group would like to contribute, it would be most appreciated. Please contact me: Ted Widerski, TAG Resource Teacher at: twiderski@madison.k12.wi.us
A judge says Preston Hollow Elementary segregated white kids to please parents. The reality is deeper and maybe more troubling.
On a sunny September morning in 2005 Preston Hollow Elementary School hosted Bike to School Day. Dozens of grinning children with fair skin played and talked outside in the courtyard, relaxing happily after rides through their North Dallas neighborhood of garish mansions and stately brick homes. Parents shared tea and fruit, capturing the smiles of their kids with digital cameras. A police officer gave the group a friendly lecture on bicycle safety. Inside the classrooms surrounding the courtyard, other children watched glumly. Many of them lived in the modest apartment complexes off Central Expressway, separated from their school by busy roads and shopping centers. Those kids, nearly all them Hispanic and black, took the bus to school.
As their classmates parked their bikes and snacked on fruit and juice the other children waited in English as a second language (ESL) classes. A federal judge would later rule that many of them shouldn't have been there. Their language skills were good enough to be in the same classes as the kids who rode their bikes to Preston Hollow.
From Dallas Observer, January 11, 2007.
A parent volunteered to organize the morning activities and the school's PTA posted pictures of the event on its Web site. The images show a crowd of cheerful kids who look like they came out of central casting for a 1950s musical. Nearly all of them are white. In a school where 66 percent of the children are Hispanic a Latino kid can hardly be found in any of the photos. Parents with the PTA say they sent everyone notices in English and Spanish about Bike to School Day, but some parents didn't know about the event until days later.
Lucresia Santamaria a mother of three children at Preston Hollow, asked her children about Bike to School Day. They told her Latino children weren't invited. Unlike many of the school's Hispanic mothers and fathers, Santamaria lives close to Preston Hollow in a cozy stone and brick house surrounded by newly constructed mansions. Her husband is an industrial engineer. But at Preston Hollow, Santamaria didn't fare any better than the Hispanic parents in the faraway apartment complexes. Her children were also confined to ESL and bilingual classes for no good reason.
Santamaria's children were not that upset that they were left out of the event. That's just how things were at Preston Hollow they said.
"They'd heard in school that the white kids were the most intelligent. They already knew they were more advanced. They felt separate," she says. "So to them, it was normal."
A few months after Bike to School Day an exasperated Santamaria, along with another Preston Hollow mother, Ana Gonzalez, met with Principal Teresa Parker and members of the PTA. The two parents wanted to know why their children were in ESL and bilingual classes even though their language scores suggested they should be with the other children. But they didn't accomplish anything, and the parents left the school feeling that they had to at least consider legal action, or else nothing would change.
After the meeting Donna Flores, who helped translate the meeting for the parents and whose children graduated from public schools in Dallas, had an impromptu conversation with an assistant principal. A few months later, Robert McElroy would tell a federal court that the principal unfairly placed minority children in ESL classes in order to keep the Anglo children together. Parker did that to placate the neighborhood parents, McElroy speculated, but up until that moment, he didn't stand up and take on Parker. Instead, he acted as if Preston Hollow operated in its own universe with its own rules.
"I turned around and asked him 'Do you see anything wrong here?'" Flores recounts. "And he said, 'There are some things that are going on, but nobody can do anything about it.'"
Flores then asked McElroy to elaborate but he spoke vaguely. Like Santamaria's children, he seemed resigned to how Preston Hollow worked. "This is how the school is run, and nobody is going to do anything about it," she says McElroy told her. "People try to do things, but nobody listens."
Last November a federal judge both listened and acted, issuing a bluntly worded ruling that stigmatized Preston Hollow as a corrosive school that is purposefully and systematically segregated at all grade levels. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay ruled that Parker was personally liable and ordered her to pay $20,000 to one of the two mothers who sued the school. His 106-page opinion recounting volumes of classroom data and testimony from teachers, illustrated how the school marginalized dozens of Hispanic and black children, placing them in ESL classes for no sound academic reason. Instead, Lindsay opined, the principal isolated too many minority children in ESL classes so that the white children from the surrounding neighborhood could stay together, even if this created a school polarized along racial and ethnic lines. The judge has given Dallas Independent School District until mid-January to assign students into more racially mixed classes.
Like many schools in North Dallas Preston Hollow draws from both affluent neighborhoods and low-income apartment buildings. As a result, the school struggles to serve two disparate constituencies. There are Hispanic children, who may grow up in households where English is never spoken, and far wealthier Anglo children who come to school with considerable advantages. Those kids have completely different needs.
The goal of public education is to have all different kinds of kids learn as much as possible in the same classroom but it takes a smart, coordinated effort from teachers, parents, administrators and the district itself to make that happen. Most of all it takes common sense. Maybe someone at Preston Hollow should have realized that having a Bike to School Day is going to leave a lot of children on the inside, looking out. DISD is perhaps the most obstinate and secretive public institution in the city, unwilling to answer the most basic questions about how it educates children. Barraged by a never-ending parade of exposés about its shoddy spending and hiring practices the district has developed a bunker mentality in which it seems to view itself as immune to scrutiny. So when the district had to explain itself to a federal judge, it's hardly surprising that it did so halfheartedly. With Preston Hollow and the district on trial and with the entire school system's reputation at stake, DISD chose a rather tepid, clumsy defense. Calling only a handful of witnesses, most of whom wound up inadvertently helping the plaintiffs' case, DISD argued from both sides of the fence: No, the school never wrongly placed minority children in ESL classes, but if it did, no harm was done. The judge rejected the first part of this defense by citing the district's own damning data, then castigated the second as the infamous separate-but-equal argument that was used to justify segregation before the Civil Rights Movement.
The court's ruling assigns blame for Preston Hollow to DISD administrators and PTA board members. Most of all the judge directs his ire toward Parker, who last week was transferred to an administrative job. He ridiculed her testimony, accused her of a cover-up and criticized her for orchestrating the errant placement of minority students into ESL classes to keep the Anglo children together.
"Principal Parker's behavior over the years demonstrated a total lack of concern for the constitutional rights of Latino children to learn in integrated classrooms," he wrote. "When public officials break the law they must be held accountable."
When the judge released his opinion about Preston Hollow Anglo parents were stunned. This looked nothing like the school they knew and loved. They adored Parker, and their kids were always in classes with blacks and Hispanics. But on a Saturday morning in November, after Lindsay issued his opinion, the parents woke up to read the following on the front page of The Dallas Morning News: "For years, it was an open secret at North Dallas' Preston Hollow Elementary School: Even though the school was overwhelmingly Hispanic and black, white parents could get their children into all-white classes."
In fact the News missed the finer point of the judge's ruling, which found the school to have purposefully placed white neighborhood children in the same mixed classes keeping the white kids together even if it meant unfairly placing minorities in ESL classes. But there were no all-white classes at Preston Hollow. It was never that egregious.
Still the daily's mistake only galvanized the Anglo parents who felt like everyone from the media to their own school district was against them. In the judge's opinion, they came off as stodgy and domineering, so much so that they chose to showcase Anglo kids in a brochure for the school at the expense of the other children. Despite drawing the ire of the court and even after taking a battering in the press, the parents defend their efforts to market the school to their neighbors.
"We're the minority in this school," says Joe Bittner whose wife, Meg, is the president of the Preston Hollow PTA. "We're trying to attract more minorities. Why is it OK for UT to want more black students, but it's not OK for us to want more white students?"
The Anglo parents along with many teachers at Preston Hollow, have taken the judge's portrayal of their school personally. Together, they offer a volume of elaborate theories to explain why he threw the book at their school. They say that the teachers who testified against the principal were merely disgruntled and that the parents who filed the suit had ulterior motives. They speculate that the district's legal strategy was to sacrifice the principal to save itself from the court's wrath. Most of all, they say the judge simply doesn't understand bilingual education, in which decisions that may seem prejudiced actually serve the best interests of the child.
Of those explanations only the last one has a ring of truth. There are Hispanic children who may test out of ESL but still learn more in that setting. Teachers, administrators and even parents have the discretion to make that call. Bilingual education at DISD follows a fluid, haphazard process. For whatever reason, DISD has no clear policy on how it fills up its ESL classes, and not only does each school have a different understanding of how to place children, different teachers at the same school don't always agree how that should work.
Still the vagaries of ESL classes at DISD don't begin to explain what happened at Preston Hollow. Too many Latino kids with good language scores wound up in an ESL class. That's what DISD's own witness said. And why exactly were the black kids there with them? Maybe the judge did oversimplify what has been happening at Preston Hollow, but he recounted enough incriminating data and testimony that shows that the school had a problem, from the principal to the district and everyone in between.
"The court is left with the distinct impression that the primary objective of fairly educating students was lost," the judge wrote. "And substituted in its place was an effort to prevent white flight from Preston Hollow." In June 2005 Parker met with the school's PTA parents to talk to them about their upcoming kindergarten class. According to the testimony of teacher Sally Walsh, Parker told the parents that "the neighborhood children" would be placed in the same general education class. Some of the parents remember this as well. Nearly all of the neighborhood children that Parker was talking about were Anglo. That year, of the 46 children enrolled in kindergarten at Preston Hollow only 10 were white. All of them were in the same general education class where they made up the majority. Parker kept her promise. But by keeping the neighborhood kids together in one room, Preston Hollow wound up having too many ESL classes for all the other kids. Assigning students to ESL classes can be somewhat makeshift, but there is supposed to be some sort of process. When parents enroll their child, they indicate what language is spoken at home. If it's something other than English, the children take a standardized language exam called the Woodcock-Muñoz test. How children perform on that test largely determines if they fall under a formal category awkwardly titled "Limited English Proficient," or LEP. LEP kids as they're often called, are placed in ESL or bilingual classes, while non-LEP kids are ready to learn in general education classes with their English-speaking peers.
There can be sound academic reasons to place a kid who speaks English well in an ESL class particularly if their parents feel that they can use the extra drilling on their language skills. But by and large, most ESL classes are for kids who have trouble with English. That wasn't the case at Preston Hollow. In fact, the district's own expert, Dr. Gilda Alvarez-Evans, said that throughout the elementary school and not just in kindergarten there were simply too many ESL classes and she could find no explanation for that.
Last year at Preston Hollow only five or six kindergarten children fell into the LEP category. But the school had two ESL classes, spreading those LEP kids into both. Preston Hollow could have easily created one ESL class for the six LEP students, filling up the remaining spots with borderline students, and had two general education classes for everyone else.
But if the school had done that the neighborhood kids would have been split between two general education classes. Those children then wouldn't have been the majority in either classroom. But by keeping the neighborhood kids together in the same class, the school wound up having an unnecessary ESL class. As a result, Preston Hollow had as many as 26 kids who could have been in the same general education class as the neighborhood children. Ana Gonzalez's daughter was one of them.
If you only heard her speak English you might mistake Ana Gonzalez for a tentative, soft-spoken woman not likely to stick up for herself. It is only when she talks in her native Spanish that you see a glimpse of the woman who helped upend a school. In Spanish, she speaks rapidly and forcefully; her sense of indignation seeps out without ever clouding her story.
When Gonzalez enrolled her daughter in kindergarten at Preston Hollow she filled out a language survey. Asked what language her daughter speaks the best, Gonzalez put Spanish first and English second. That meant her daughter had to take the Woodcock-Muñoz language test. The girl scored a five the highest possible score. She also tested as gifted and talented, but Gonzalez's daughter was placed in an ESL class with no Anglo students.
Almost immediately the girl started to feel as though she were somehow different from the Anglo children.
"My daughter started saying 'My hair is ugly.' She started saying, 'Mom, I want to have blond hair.' I told her all hair colors are pretty," Gonzalez says.
After a few months Gonzalez became concerned about her daughter's progress. Within a year, she would score lower on a standardized test than she did prior to enrolling at Preston Hollow. In January 2006 Gonzalez and others had a meeting with Principal Parker along with officials from the district. The purpose was to find out how the school was placing its students.
"We had lots and lots of questions," she says. "Why in my daughter's class, were there so many kids who weren't LEP? What was happening?"
But everybody was ducking the questions.
Finally Gonzalez asked Parker directly why her daughter was placed in an ESL class. The mother would testify that the principal gave a rather unimpressive answer: "The children were assigned to [ESL] classes according to their origin and what country they came from." That's not exactly how the system is supposed to work.
Parker would deny to the court she ever gave that explanation but another parent at the meeting, Lucresia Santamaria, corroborated Gonzalez's account.
Not long after the meeting with Parker Santamaria and Gonzalez decided to contact the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Within weeks, they would file a lawsuit against the school, the district and Parker.
"My son says he wants to be like his father [an engineer]," says Santamaria who has sent three children to Preston Hollow. "I realized they'll never get to go to college if they don't get out of these classes."
Today classes at Preston Hollow are far more integrated. A recent tour of the school reveals a more harmonious place than anyone would have guessed. During the trial, people at the school testified that kids of different races rarely interacted with each other, and when they did, their encounters were fraught with tension.
But during one lunch period at least black, Hispanic and Anglo children eat at the same table. They seem at ease with each other, talking, joking and even getting into trouble as a group. Their parents can learn a thing or two.
For a day at least Preston Hollow looks like a model school. A tiny Hispanic girl in a green skirt hugs an Anglo parent. He asks her if she won the science fair last year. She flashes an adorable smile and says yes. Her parents came to Texas from Mexico and don't really speak English, but she talks without an accent. "Where then did you learn how to speak English?" she's asked.
"Preston Hollow," she says beaming.
If only DISD had called her to the stand. Located in the center of North Dallas Preston Hollow Elementary is tucked in a tree-lined neighborhood that handily lives up to the stereotypes of that part of town. New money is on the move, and bad taste is on display. Sprawling McMansions are gobbling up older brick homes, creating an architectural mishmash of traditional styles and trendy designs. One new house looks like a castle and is built to the edge of the lot. It makes the nearby homes look like servant quarters. Many of the wealthier families in Preston Hollow send their children to private schools, but there has been a long line of Anglo parents who have supported Preston Hollow Elementary School. George W. and Laura Bush lived in the neighborhood before he was elected governor in 1994 and both their daughters went to Preston Hollow. In fact, Laura Bush served on the school's PTA.
At the time the girls attended Preston Hollow Anglo students made up nearly half the student body. Now it's closer to 18 percent. But what hasn't changed as much is the school's PTA. Today Anglo parents dominate the organization. They coordinate nearly all the activities, make up most of the volunteers and fill the leadership positions. In fact, parents say they can't remember the last time a Hispanic parent served on the board.
Ana Gonzalez joined the PTA shortly after her daughter enrolled at the school in 2005. Because her English was only so-so she couldn't understand some of the meetings, but she figured it would make sense to attend anyway. But Gonzalez says that although she tried to make an effort, the Anglo parents largely ignored her and other Hispanics.
"The white parents would only talk to us if they were asking for money for something," she says.
By the end of the fall Gonzalez turned from a meek member of the PTA to its most strident critic. In November 2005 the president of the PTA, Meg Bittner, sent an e-mail to a Preston Hollow employee by the name of Graciela McKay about an upcoming photo shoot for the school's brochure. McKay, who is Hispanic, showed the e-mail to Gonzalez, who was shocked at what she read.
In her e-mail Bittner wrote that the purpose of the brochure was to lure more neighborhood parents who live in "big, expensive houses" to reconsider their private school tuitions and send their kids to Preston Hollow. One way to do that, she implied, was to leave Latino kids out of the picture. Literally.
"While our demographics lean much more Hispanic we try not to focus on that for this brochure. A big questions [sic] that neighborhood parents have is about the ethnic breakdowns of our school population. Our neighbor school, being mostly Hispanic, throws the neighborhood families off a bit."
Bittner explained why she wanted more of those families. "If I can get more neighborhood families my PTA membership goes up, the fundraiser makes more and we have a good donor base for more of our projects."
In that same e-mail Bittner wrote, "I just don't want any hurt feelings if we use one or two Hispanic kids in the shot."
When McKay showed Bittner's e-mail to Gonzalez she was hurt and surprised. Even if she wasn't getting the warmest welcome at the PTA meetings, she didn't think they would do this to her.
"I had been a part of the PTA all year," she says. "How is it possible they wouldn't include the Latino kids?"
The next day Gonzalez showed up at the school to discover where the PTA was shooting its brochure. The principal told her she'd help but then left and never returned. Gonzalez later walked in on the session just as it was ending.
The photographer took a few shots of Latino children but few of them found their faces in the PTA's advertisement. In fact, when it was finished, it included almost all Anglo children, including one where out of nine children pictured, six were white.
That brochure wound up being perhaps the most controversial tract in the literary history of the PTA. It came up repeatedly during a federal trial and has since been dissected in the Morning News and on local blogs. At the time it was released teachers complained that it didn't reflect the demographics of the school. The judge agreed. The brochure also drew the ire of the school's black assistant principal, McElroy, who sent his boss Parker an e-mail.
"It has come to my attention that my children were possibly used as 'tokens' for the photo shoot for the...brochure," he wrote.
Even after the controversy the material stirred Anglo PTA parents don't have any regrets.
"It was our intention to have more neighborhood kids in the brochure," says Joe Bittner who since the trial has emerged as the school's and the PTA's top defender. "That's marketing. People want to see people they're comfortable with."
Skip Hollandsworth a writer for Texas Monthly and a Preston Hollow parent, says that Meg Bittner's e-mail and the subsequent brochure may seem politically incorrect, but it was intended to make a statement to the school's wealthier neighbors.
"To me the ad said, 'get over this idea that your child is too good for us' that you have to pay $15,000 to $20,000 a year for a private elementary school. We've got a great school right here with teachers and academic programs just as good as yours. And yes, my fellow neighbors, there are white kids there our kids. They're right there in the middle of those sea of brown and black faces and we're damn proud of them."
As for Meg Bittner herself she declined to comment on her e-mail and the brochure because of ongoing litigation in the case. The tall, blond Bittner has come to encapsulate the image of the school's Anglo-dominated PTA, but she's not that easy to pigeonhole. Just look at an e-mail she wrote to fellow PTA parents in October 2005 urging them to help welcome a new group to their organization: The Hispanic Advisory Parents Committee.
"We sit in PTA meetings and lament on how to embrace the Hispanic culture in our school. We finally have an opportunity. They have so much to offer. Please dig deep and find a way you can get this off the ground." Teresa Parker has emerged as an elusive, mysterious figure in the wake of the judge's ruling, keeping a low profile ever since the court acted. Like all principals, Parker had her share of adversaries and allies. Schools are gossipy, political places that make it almost impossible for any principal to build a strong base. But Parker seemed to have more supporters than the average school administrator: Some of her teachers think so highly of her that they wish DISD would have enlisted them to testify on her behalf. Many of the PTA parents, meanwhile, avidly support their now former principal. They reject the belief that they ever pressured her to keep their children together or that she would listen to such a request. Mainly though, they remain indignant at the public slights to her reputation.
"I hope people remember that this woman has spent most of her career at public schools with lower-income minority kids. She's devoted her life to improving their education," Hollandsworth says. "The idea that she would jeopardize her career by putting white kids together just because white parents asked her is crazy."
But at the trial the plaintiffs put forth evidence that Parker did just that. Before the 2005-2006 school year a sixth-grade teacher submitted classroom assignments to Parker in which the teacher divided the Anglo children evenly among three classes, but Parker changed it and put all the Anglo students in the same class.
Just as the kindergarten Preston Hollow's sixth grade seemed to have too many ESL classes for the number of students whose English was limited. In fact, in one of those ESL classes, only two out of 22 kids fell into the category of limited English proficiency.
Teachers at Preston Hollow say that all types of children can benefit from an ESL class not just those who are learning English. These classes, which are typically taught in English, employ more visual strategies and that can benefit native speakers too. Other experts inside and outside the district agree with that, saying that including different types of students in the same class even an ESL class can benefit everyone. Interestingly the sixth-grade teacher at Preston Hollow originally assigned four Anglo students to a pair of ESL classes.
But Parker changed that placement keeping all the white students in the same classroom. In any case, if ESL is for all children, why at Preston Hollow did Anglo students almost always end up in general education classes? And those who didn't, one source says, typically came from outside the immediate neighborhood. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of the school's black students wound up in ESL classes.
Some parents speculate that black students were placed in ESL classes as a way to remedy their poor reading scores. But while some schools may occasionally use ESL for that purpose in Texas, those classes are intended primarily for kids who live in Spanish-speaking households. English-speaking kids who struggle with reading won't usually have their needs met by ESL classes.
In any case David Hinojosa, the attorney for the plaintiffs, points out that when the teachers themselves were deposed, they couldn't explain why so many black and Latino kids wound up in ESL classes, even though they qualified for general education classes.
"One of the teachers we deposed ended up crying in her deposition," Hinojosa says. "We showed her one of the exhibits and asked her where these numbers came from and she ended up broke down."
As the judge would say far too many black and Hispanic kids were assigned to ESL classes "without regard to their language abilities." One of those was Santamaria's son, who in the judge's ruling is referred to as Doe No. 1. During the trial DISD conceded that Doe No. 1's language skills could have placed him in a general education class but say that he wasn't harmed in an ESL setting.
Santamaria knows better. She says that her son was bored in his ESL class and complained that he was learning the same things over and over. Soon he lost interest in school. Sometimes he refused to go, and now he's fallen behind other kids his age.
"It's taken a lot of work to try and get him caught up," Santamaria says in Spanish. "We got a tutor for him. But he says 'For what? What's it going to do now?'"
Staff writer Megan Feldman contributed to this story.
The West High School PTSO met on January 8, 2007 with featured guest West teacher Heather Lott,
coordinator for the Small Learning Community grant implementation. The video below only includes Heather Lott's presentation and questions that followed. It does not include other portions of the meeting such as Dr. Holmes report of the West Principal, nor reports from West PTSO officers.
The video of the meeting is 117MB, and 1 hour and 27 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
Lott presented an overview of the three-year Federal SLC grant (Year 1, 2003-2004; Year 2, 2004-2005; Year 3, 2005-2006), what changes were begun in the year prior and the changes and goals for the 2006-2007 school year, post-SLC grant. She emphasized that the SLC plan would take 7 years to "complete" and that the remaining 4 years would need to be funded. The 3 year federal grant paid her salary and for professional development only. Budget cuts for the 2006-2007 year and continuing fiscal problems in the district will hamper making the desired progress.
When asked how much, minimally, West would need make acceptable progress in the implementation of the SLC plan, Dr. Holmes suggested $20,000.
She also presented data showing discipline improvements and academic achievement improvements over the SLC years.
Discussions also included the topics of differentiation and heterogeneity, and general discussions from parents of incoming West students on the social aspects of the small learning communities.
Slides for Heather Lott's presentation are in PowerPoint and PDF for your convenience.
Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and Superintendent Hires Since 1992
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater's recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.
In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
It didn't work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students' achievement hadn't improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged.(1)
The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district's desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, "No one's ever tried."
Art, the only applicant, was promoted from Acting Superintendent to Superintendent in January, 1999. Chris Murphy's January, 1999 article includes this:
Since Wilhoyte's departure, Rainwater has emerged as a popular interim successor. Late last year, School Board members received a set of surveys revealing broad support for a local superintendent as opposed to one hired from outside the district. More than 100 of the 661 respondents recommended hiring Rainwater.
Hanson said the shortfall is partly due to about $1 million in underestimated expenditures. The largest of these are health, dental and othertypes of insurance costs that came in $300,000 over estimates; extended employment and extra duty costs, $300,000; and teacher salaries, $250,000.
In addition, the district did not receive as much as expected in areas suchas disabled tuition, Chapter I aid, food service income and interest income.
School board President Nan Brien also said the board and district are in a tough spot because so many programs have been cut to bring the budget proposal ($149M) under the cap.
``The cuts he made are going to give the board some real difficult times,''Brien said.
Brien said she was satisfied that Travis appeared to make his cuts across the board rather than in one area of the budget.
Travis cut $2.3 million in staff requests. Cuts include a phasing out of the birth to age 2 program for children with special needs and $86,000 in funding to the Bootstrap program for students at risk of not graduating.
Other cuts include 11 regular teachers and seven special education teachers, four positions in health services and about 10 custodial positions. Reductions also include $157,000 for a new child care program that would have helped students in the district's School-Age Parenting Program, more than $35,000 for staff training and professional improvement, and $33,000 for an after-school program (AIMS) for minority students.
At its November 21, 2006, meeting, the MMSD Student Senate discussed many issues of interest to this blog community (e.g., completely heterogeneous high school classes, embedded honors options, etc.). Here is the relevant section from the minutes for that meeting:
Comments and Concerns:
regular classes don’t have a high enough level of discussion
students who would normally be in higher level courses would dominate heterogeneous class discussions
bring students up rather than down
honors classes help students who want to excel to do so
array of advanced and regular classes in every subject
honors and AP classes are dominated by a certain type of students (concerning ethnicity, socio-economic status, neighborhood, family, etc.)
honors within regular classes -- response to whether or not regular students are an integral part of the class:
not isolating
discussion level is still high
homework is the same (higher expectation for essays; two textbooks)
teachers don’t cater to one type of student in discussions
there’s a risk of losing highly-motivated students to private schools
being in a classroom with students of similar skill levels is beneficial
teachers teach very differently to honors/advanced/AP students than they do to regular students
least experienced teachers are given to students who need the most experienced teachers (new teachers get lowest level classes)
sometimes split classes will be divided so that the honors students will be doing work in the front of the classroom while the regular students are doing lab work in the back
the problem is with the average classes
won’t help anything to cut TAG classes
mental divide among students in classes where honors and regular students are in the same classroom
more behavioral problems in regular classes (possibly more behavioral problems) à cycle teachers through so that one teacher isn’t stuck with the same type of student for an extended time
college is a factor to consider
Main problems to bring to BOE:
higher standards for all students *
division within classes creates too many boundaries *
not bad to keep advanced classes in some disciplines *
voluntary peer education *
colleges consider accelerated course loads (factor to consider) *
*Group majority
On December 4, 2006, BOE Student Representative Joe Carlsmith made a presentation about recent MMSD Student Senate activities to his BOE colleagues. Here is the relevant portion of the BOE Regular Meeting agenda for that date:
Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous class grouping; Multi-level divisions within classrooms at West.
Voted consensus, though no official motion, on the following:
1. We need to work toward higher standards at all levels.
2. Motivated teachers result in motivated students.
3. Total elimination of TAG or AP classes would be detrimental to the overall curriculum.
4. Honors or AP divisions within classes create too many barriers between students.
When I asked Joe if Item #4 referred specifically to embedded honors options, he replied: "We came up with item four as a general consensus on a discussion we had specifically about West's embedded honors program." In other words, as he explained to me on the phone, the Student Senate does not support embedded honors options in our high schools because of the divisions they create within a classroom.
I have invited Joe (and the other members of the Student Senate) to come to the Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on January 23 (7:00 in Room 209 of the Doyle Building) because our focus that evening will be our high schools. As well, we will have at least one student and one parent from each of our four high schools present at the meeting, prepared to give a brief update on what's been going on at their school and to answer any school-specific questions that might come up.
With the debate about high school redesign and the furor over the four-block schedule at LaFollette, I looked at DPI data for Madison's high schools. On nearly every indicator, LaFollette ranks third behind West and Memorial, with East ranking fourth.
First, educators created junior high schools, believing preteens needed to be treated like adults. But those students weren’t ready to be treated as high school students, either. So reformers created the concept of middle schools, which were supposed to be a warm bath to ease the transition. Now, an increasing number of schools across the country, including in Baltimore and Philadelphia, are shifting the middle grades back to elementary school.
But some research suggests that may not be the solution, either. So the age-old issues persist, with some variation from decade to decade: surging hormones make students irritable and sleepy. They struggle to relate to their peers and gain independence from their parents. To hear some parents tell it, one day their babies are innocent elementary schoolers in overalls, the next they’re dressing like Paris Hilton and simulating sex on the middle-school dance floor. How do you solve a problem like adolescence? Is there anything schools can do?
The move toward middle schools, after the push for junior high that started in the late 19th century, was supposed to create environments that were more serious than the story-hour life of elementary schools, though less impersonal and confidence-zapping than the controlled chaos of high schools.
West High School Small Learning Community Presentation 1/8/2007 @ 7:00p.m.
Madison West Small Learning Community Coordinator Heather Lott is giving a presentation at Monday evening's PTSO meeting: "SLC Post-Grant Update and Discussion". Location: Madison West High School LMC [Map] West's implementation of Small Learning Communities has been controversial due to the move toward a one size fits all curriculum (English 9 and English 10).
Recently profiled on ABC's 20/20, the soon-to-be published book Fame Junkies highlights anecdotes and research on the attitudes of American kids (and adults) regarding fame.
Fame Junkies chronicles journalist Jake Halpern’s journey through the underbelly of Hollywood and into the heart of the question that bedevils us all: Why are Americans so obsessed with fame and celebrities?
We live in a country where more people watch the ultimate competition for celebrityhood – American Idol – than watch the nightly news on the three major networks combined. So what are the implications of this phenomenon? In his new book, Fame Junkies, Halpern explores the impact that celebrity-obsession is having on three separate niches of Americans: aspiring celebrities, entourage insiders, and diehard fans.
Halpern begins his journey by moving into a gated community inhabited almost entirely by aspiring child actors. During his stay, he interviews dozens of kids and teenagers, who seem to have an almost religious conviction that fame is a cure-all for life’s problems. What’s truly impressive is that these anecdotes are then supported with hard evidence. As part of the extensive research that he did for this book, Halpern teamed up with several statisticians and orchestrated a survey involving three separate school systems and over 650 teenagers. Many of his findings were deeply troubling. For example – when given the option of “pressing a magic button” and becoming stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful – boys in the survey chose fame almost as often as they chose intelligence, and girls chose it more often. Among today’s teenagers, says Halpern, fame appears to be the greatest good.
In second part of his book, Halpern becomes an honorary member of the Association for Celebrity Personal Assistants (ACPA) where he spends a great deal of time with Annie Brentwell who has slavishly devoted every iota of her personal and professional life to celebrities like Oliver Stone, Sharon Stone, and (most recently) Dennis Hopper. In her spare time, when she is not serving Hopper, Brentwell teaches at a school that the ACPA runs to teach aspiring assistants; and, of course, Halpern tags along. This section of Fame Junkies also investigates a fascinating vein of psychological research on what type of people are most likely to “bask in reflected glory” or BIRG. For example, college students with low self-esteem are far more likely to embrace their school’s football team when it wins and dissociating themselves from that same team when it loses. Halpern goes on to consider how BIRG research applies to Hollywood.
Looking for the path to effective education, leaders of the Milwaukee Public Schools have long slogged through the wilderness of school reform only to end up where they started. All used to be centralized at MPS. Then decentralization became the watchword. Now centralization is again in.
This lunging between two opposite approaches is in a way understandable. Getting big-city school systems to work is no easy task, to judge from the rarity of the accomplishment. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is right in being dissatisfied with the slow pace of improvement and in searching for ways to step it up. And recentralization does carry the force of logic for decentralized schools that have failed to improve.
Still, as onetime MPS chief Howard Fuller reminded us when we reached him in New Orleans, where he is consulting, neither centralization nor decentralization is a magic bullet. The key ingredient for great schools are "people committed to do whatever it takes to educate our children."
n doing so, MPS must minimize the red tape, which has clogged school operations. Another trick the system must manage is to refrain from hurting the schools that have thrived under decentralization, an example of which is Hamlin Garland Elementary School on Milwaukee's south side. Borsuk highlighted the school in another article this week.
Madison appears to be rather centralized, with a push for standardized curriculum, generally lead by downtown Teaching and Learning staff. I often wonder how practical this actually is, given 24,000+ students and thousands of teachers and staff. Perhaps, in 2007 and going forward, the best solution is to support easy to access internet based knowledge tools for teachers where they can quickly review a variety of curriculum (including those not blessed by the central administration) with notes and links from others. This could likely be done inexpensively, given the wide variety of knowledge management tools available today.
"We've made more progress in the last five years than the previous 28 years," Spellings said. "Can the law be improved? Should we build on what we've done and all of that sort of thing? You bet. But I don't hear people saying: 'You know what? We really don't need to have education for all students.' "
Her remarks come as various groups begin to weigh in on the law and what they believe works and what does not. The No Child Left Behind law is scheduled to be reauthorized by Congress, but it is uncertain when lawmakers will act.
The Forum on Educational Accountability -- a coalition that includes education, religious, civil rights and disability rights groups -- said yesterday that the law overemphasizes standardized tests and arbitrary academic targets. The coalition also criticized penalties the law imposes on schools that fail to meet standards.
"We don't have to throw out the whole law and make a big political battle," said Reginald M Felton, a senior lobbyist for the National School Boards Association, a member of the coalition. "But we need to change from the punitive, 'gotcha!' kind of approach to actual support for progress."
James Smith, a health economist at the RAND Corporation, has heard a variety of hypotheses about what it takes to live a long life — money, lack of stress, a loving family, lots of friends. But he has been a skeptic.
Yes, he says, it is clear that on average some groups in every society live longer than others. The rich live longer than the poor, whites live longer than blacks in the United States. Longevity, in general, is not evenly distributed in the population. But what, he asks, is cause and what is effect? And how can they be disentangled?
He is venturing, of course, into one of the prevailing mysteries of aging, the persistent differences seen in the life spans of large groups. In every country, there is an average life span for the nation as a whole and there are average life spans for different subsets, based on race, geography, education and even churchgoing.
But the questions for researchers like Dr. Smith are why? And what really matters?
Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation are struggling to rethink middle school and how best to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.
The difficulty of educating this age group is felt even in many wealthy suburban school districts. But it is particularly intense in cities, where the problems that are compounded in middle school are more acute to begin with and where the search for solutions is most urgent.
In Los Angeles, the new superintendent, David L. Brewer III, has vowed to transform middle schools as a top priority, and low-performing schools are experimenting with intensive counseling.
In Philadelphia and Baltimore, school systems are trying to make the middle school problem literally disappear, by folding grades six through eight into K-8 schools. In one Columbia, S.C., school district, all five middle schools have begun offering some form of single-sex classes, on the theory that they promote self-esteem and reduce distractions.
Not every student at Bannockburn is above average. But 70 percent of the third-grade class has been identified as gifted, based on tests and other academic indicators. The school serves one of the largest concentrations in the region of students capable of working beyond their assigned grade, sometimes well beyond.
"We're constantly trying to find things to pique their interest," said Peterson, whose students have lately practiced dividing numbers into 32nds in their heads.
The bumper crop of gifted children at Bannockburn is a result not of some exclusive magnet program but of Montgomery County's aggressive policy on identifying academic talent. The county screens every second-grader for extraordinary ability. In most other school systems, it's left to parents or teachers to initiate the process. Also, Montgomery's criteria for "giftedness" are unusually broad, covering not just intelligence data but also classroom performance and the impressions of teachers and parents.
That approach drives up the numbers -- 40 percent of Montgomery's 139,000 students carry the label -- and creates a gifted majority at schools such as Bannockburn, which serves an affluent, highly educated neighborhood.
The American Montessori Society, based in New York, reported 7 percent membership growth in just the past year, and many of the schools are getting ready to celebrate the centennial of the Montessori beachhead.
Once considered a maverick experiment that appealed only to middle-class white families in the States, Montessori schools have become popular with some black professionals and are getting results in low-income public schools with the kind of children on which Montessori first tested her ideas.
The stubborn Italian physician and her contemporary, U.S. philosopher and psychologist John Dewey -- who believed that learning should be active -- are considered perhaps the most influential progressive thinkers in the modern history of education.
Madison has at least two Montessori schools, here and here.
This note comes from a listserve, and I thought that it was worthwhile to pass it on:
Internet Scout, a 12-year-old UW-Madison online research project, unveiled its new national math and science educational project, the Applied Math and Science Education Repository.
The picture that the team painted was not pretty. Clearly favoring a strong central administration, the team said decentralization in MPS had "gone too far."
"Decentralization has rendered the central office instructional unit (in MPS) irrelevant to the process of raising student achievement," the report says. The team said some schools were using a hodgepodge of materials to teach students, and no one was leading these schools to be more effective. From the School Board to the classroom, there was not a clear vision of what it takes to succeed.
ut the report particularly is critical of the attitude among the 70-plus people the team interviewed, from top MPS leaders to teachers and parents.
"MPS has seen only small, incremental gains in student achievement over the last several years," it says. "More problematic, however, is that many people in the district see these marginal improvements as acceptable. . . . A sense of urgency to raise student achievement is not apparent throughout the organization. The board, administration and staff appear fairly complacent."
The report adds, "Interviews with MPS staff indicated that most were proud of the gains that the district had made, even though scores reflected minimal progress."
Direct Instruction is just curriculum that uses direct, systematic, and explicit instruction. Any one of the direct instruction curricula would improve academic performance if it were used in the MMSD.
This comes from an Education Week article in 1999:
When an independent research group evaluated the research backing up 24 popular school reform models this year, it found two surprises.
The first surprise was that only three programs could point to strong evidence that they were effective in improving student achievement. The second surprise was that Direct Instruction, a program long scorned by many educators and academics for its lock-step structure, was one of them.
Direct Instruction grew out of studies on the teaching of beginning reading that Siegfried Engelmann began at the University of Illinois in the 1960s. Thirty years later, only 150 schools across the country use on a schoolwide basis the program he developed. By comparison, Success for All, another reform model with high marks for its solid research base, is used in more than 1,100 schools.
Thousands more schools, however, use Direct Instruction's commercially produced materials--usually in remedial classrooms, special education resource rooms, or special programs for disadvantaged students.
"We were sort of like the plague for regular education," says Mr. Engelmann, now 67 and a professor at the University of Oregon. "Regular education would have nothing to do with us. It wasn't until the last few years that we started to break the mold."
The No Child Left Behind Act broke new ground when it required the states to educate impoverished children up to the same standards as their affluent counterparts, in exchange for federal aid. The law did not just drop out of the sky. It represented a deliberate attempt by Congress to ratify and accelerate the school reform effort that swept the country in the early 1990’s, when the states began to embrace standards-based accountability systems that quickly showed promising results.
The achievement gains have fallen far short of what Congress hoped for when it passed the landmark federal law — and also far short of what the country needs to keep pace with its economic rivals. In addition, student performance has flattened in recent years. In many cases, that is because states that reaped all of the early, easy gains that are typically achieved by merely paying attention to a long-neglected problem failed to do the tougher work necessary to sustain their reforms.
Recent studies offer sobering news about the challenges that lie ahead. Happily, there is also encouraging news from the states that have stayed the course and continued to build rigorous, standards-based reforms.
Second, the story highlights my colleague Tom Toch's criticism that a lot of tests states are using under NCLB are pretty basic. That's exactly right. I'm all for better tests, but isn't that, you know, an indictment of schools that can't even get kids over a pretty low bar rather than an indictment of the law? In other words, excepting some fine-grained issues around special populations, NCLB can't be wildly unrealistic in what it demands of schools and really basic at the same time, can it? The story doesn't sift through that in detail but would be nice if some journo would.* The reality is that we don't deliver a very powerful instructional program in a lot of schools, and that's not the fault of NCLB.
......
*Related, there is a tension between high-performing students and low-performing ones in terms of where to put resources and attention. Not completely binary, and plenty of students falling behind today could be high performers in better schools. But still there and mostly talked about in code words rather than forthrightly: Are we as a nation better off really focusing on the millions of kids at the wrong end of the achievement gap even if its suboptimal for kids on the high end? And spare me the rhetoric about how you can easily do both. You can to some extent but constrained resources, carrots and sticks in policy, and time constraints all make tradeoffs a reality.
A few other readers have mentioned that this is a conversation Madison needs to have.
Educators, parents and teenagers in Northern Virginia say there is a growing demand for exclusive magnet schools similar to Thomas Jefferson, a regional "governor's school" in the Alexandria section of Fairfax that admits fewer than 20 percent of applicants. They believe such schools are more desirable because their high-level math and science courses and stringent application process make them look formidable to university admissions officers.
Prince William's proposal comes two years after neighboring Loudoun County created its own exclusive magnet school, the Academy of Science. It screens students based on grades, performance on a standardized test and a creative writing sample. The school on average admits fewer than 30 percent of students who apply. Academy Director George Wolfe said it is the only public school in Northern Virginia aside from Thomas Jefferson that has rigorous academic admissions criteria for the entire student body.
Most frustrating, Chavez-Palmer said, is the difficulty in getting students and parents to follow through on her recommendations for tutoring and other services. At a recent meeting, only 20 parents showed up.
There is little Chavez-Palmer and the other counselors can do to compel middle school students to work harder. A district policy requiring principals to hold back eighth-grade students who fail to meet minimal standards in English and math is largely ignored, said Collins, the chief instructional officer.
The small piece of leverage counselors do have over failing students — threatening to ban them from informal graduation ceremonies schools hold for eighth-graders — often does little to sway students.
"As long as I go on to the ninth grade," a 14-year-old boy shrugged when Diane-Chavez raised the prospect.
"You didn't pass the majority of your classes in seventh grade and went on to eighth. The same will happen this year," the blunt-talking counselor replied. "But what's going to happen next year? How many times do you think Huntington Park High School is going to allow you to do this?"
Madison Studio Charter School: A Final Push - You can Help
Dear Supporters of The Studio School:
As you probably know, we met with the MMSD Board members last Wednesday and are satisfied with how the Board meeting went. Many individuals took the opportunity to speak at the meeting and each of them did a fantastic job! THE OUTCOME OF THE MEETING IS THAT WE NEED TO PREPARE A RESPONSE TO THEIR QUESTIONS and have very limited time to accomplish this since they need to have it by January 18th. So here's our plan:
We need to put together three short-term task forces:
"money team" to work on the budget and financing
Determine what an accurate and detailed representation of costs and revenues would look like and fill in the numbers.
Consider creative ways to finance the school with the implementation grant Help! We need more school finance expertise for this one.
We still need money to file for tax exempt status ($750) Help! If we could get a/some contributions to cover this cost, we have found an attorney who will file it pro bono...
So if we could get a sizable donation to get this school started since the district's finances are in such a bad state, the Board would be more favorably disposed to our proposal. (This would be added to federal grant funds of $340,000.)
"people team" to reach out to a more diverse population (Kristin Forde is going to organize this.)
Meet with or provide information to people we haven't had an opportunity to connect with so we can share information about the school and encourage them to attend the January 22nd meeting to express support and interest in The Studio School Help! We could use some marketing expertise.
"plan team" to develop a clearer description of the school and how it would actually work, including the technology
Develop a more detailed implementation plan and a clearer representation of how it will operate and look. Help! I can work on this but I would like some people (parents, educators, interested parties) to collaborate with me in order to figure out how to communicate it more clearly.
If you or anyone you know can help out over the next few weeks, please have them contact me. This is our last opportunity to pull it all together and make The Studio School a choice for Madison children - this means that we need to start the new year ready to get it done.
We have made it to this point because of the dedication and hard work of our core planning group and the assistance and support from people like you. We are almost there! A "final push" kickoff meeting is scheduled for January 3rd at 6:00...location to be determined. After that, we have two weeks to get it all done. So please let me know ASAP if you, or someone you know, can lend us a hand.
Thank you for your continued support. We are looking forward to celebrating and sharing our success in February after the final vote on January 29th!
WITH WARM WISHES TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILIES....
Nancy Donahue
218-9338 The Studio School, Inc.
In Fall 2007, the Madison Metropolitan School District will celebrate a "grand opening" of the Madison Virtual Campus which will be able to serve staff and students with opportunities to learn using online tools and methods. While the Madison Virtual Campus will provide online learning services across the entire district, students and teachers will benefit in particular.
Over the next nine months, staff from all divisions within the Teaching and Learning Department will be developing ways to deliver professional development to teachers in buildings across the district. Teachers will be able to receive training to support and improve their classroom instruction without the need for traveling to workshops across the district or planning for substitute teachers during their intermittent absences to receive instructional training.
"I want to know why these charter options exist in other parts of the state, but not in Madison," said Christina Navaro. "Here in the shadow of this amazing university, why don't we have the choices that will keep parents in the public school system?"
Becky Van Houten, director of the Preschool of the Arts, where Donahue had taught, tried to give a historical perspective on the importance of a Reggio education.
"The educators who created Reggio were reacting to the terrors of fascist regimes," she said. "They wanted to educate students who would not simply go along with what they were told."
Jane Healy, an educational psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds and What We Can Do About It doesn't agree that video games and computers for children will give them a leg-up in the competitive world of the 21st Century. "Behind the big push to get kids onto computers is this idea that if we don't, they won't become functional members of the 21st century," she says. "That's not only false, it's dangerous."
In Healy's opinion, electronic gaming at a young age can lead to shorter attention spans, a lack of internal motivation, difficulty with problem solving and a lack of creativity. She thinks kids should avoid computers entirely until the age of 7.
But while harried parents may love the videos, to suggest that it therefore means they're good for kids is like suggesting that Coca-Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ) is a health drink because millions of customers love it.
Good learning games, on the other hand, can be simple and cheap. A game of jump rope, for example, promotes fitness, coordination and social skills, while basic board games like Hasbro's (nyse: HAS - news - people ) Candy Land and Snakes and Ladders teach children about rules and consequences.
So, by all means, give your kids a leg up on learning when picking out their gifts this year. But consider doing so with a set of blocks, a board game or a jump rope.
It is a well-written 28-page summary of good research design and the problems that can and do occur and the inappropriate conclusions drawn from poorly-designed and implemented research.
It should certainly stop all of us from merely repeating opinions and articles as though they were true, even when they support our own prejudices.
I'm reminded of a quote (paraphrased), I believe from John Tukey: "You can lie with statistics, but you can't tell the truth without statistics."
Quoting from the Executive Summary of this report:
Purpose and Executive Summary
This Guide seeks to provide educational practitioners with user-friendly tools to distinguish practices supported by rigorous evidence from those that are not.
The field of K-12 education contains a vast array of educational interventions - such as reading and math curricula, schoolwide reform programs, after-school programs, and new educational technologies - that claim to be able to improve educational outcomes and, in many cases, to be supported by evidence. This evidence often consists of poorly-designed and/or advocacy-driven studies. State and local education officials and educators must sort through a myriad of such claims to decide which interventions merit consideration for their schools and classrooms. Many of these practitioners have seen interventions, introduced with great fanfare as being able to produce dramatic gains, come and go over the years, yielding little in the way of positive and lasting change - a perception confirmed by the flat achievement results over the past 30 years in the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and many federal K-12 grant programs, call on educational practitioners to use "scientifically-based research" to guide their decisions about which interventions to implement. As discussed below, we believe this approach can produce major advances in the effectiveness of American education. Yet many practitioners have not been given the tools to distinguish interventions supported by scientifically-rigorous evidence from those which are not. This Guide is intended to serve as a user-friendly resource that the education practitioner can use to identify and implement evidence-based interventions, so as to improve educational and life outcomes for the children they serve.
Table of Contents:
Title Page
Coalition Board of Advisors
Purpose and Executive Summary
Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported By Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide
I. The randomized controlled trial: What it is, and why it is a critical factor in establishing "strong" evidence of an intervention's effectiveness.
II. How to evaluate whether an intervention is backed by "strong" evidence of effectiveness.
III. How to evaluate whether an intervention is backed by "possible" evidence of effectiveness.
IV. Important factors to consider when implementing an evidence-based intervention in your schools or classrooms.
Appendix A: Where to find evidence-based interventions
Appendix B: Checklist to use in evaluating whether an intervention is backed by rigorous evidence
Middle school isn't an easy time for anybody, but it was especially difficult for Jordan Johnson.
His fellow students teased him about the cane he used, and his teachers frequently forgot to provide worksheets and other materials in the large type he needed because of a progressive vision loss called retinitis pigmentosa. He would fall behind and frequently lose work, but his parents wouldn't learn of his problems until quarter grades came out, said his mother, Sally.
That ended when he transferred to the Waukesha School District, under the state's open enrollment program, to use the district's virtual high school, iQ Academies at Wisconsin, which allows students to attend classes via computers set up in their home.
"Ever since, I've been getting pretty good grades," said Jordan, 16, whose family moved to Hudson recently.
Hunting for the best education for her three young children, Traci Pietra fretted about low test scores at her Arlington neighborhood school. Then the principal told her about Randolph Elementary's affiliation with one of the most prestigious and rapidly growing brands in education: IB.
International Baccalaureate is best known for a high school diploma program geared to the university-bound academic elite. But Pietra and her husband, Peter, were sold on the lesser-known elementary version of IB. Both were attracted to the IB emphasis on global understanding, Pietra said, and added: "He was like, 'Our kids are going to an Ivy League school, and we need an education that's going to get them on the right track.' "
Cardozo High School in Washington, DC, is a national pioneer in introducing Advanced Placement courses to disadvantaged students. It has found ways to build student skills so that they can begin to get passing grades on the AP exams. One of its star AP teachers, Frazier O'Leary, taught the school's first AP class 10 years ago and, since then, has become a frequent speaker and adviser to school districts around the nation.
What if the solution to American students' stagnant performance levels and the wide achievement gap between white and minority students wasn't more money, smaller schools, or any of the reforms proposed in recent years, but rather a new education system altogether?
I think we need to think more daringly, yes, but I don't think we tried everything or nearly hard enough to improve American schools within the current context. But I think that is sort of irrelevant today because the context has changed so much and consequently more of the same amounts to trying to make the current system work to do things we don't want it to do anymore anyway.
Madison United for Academic Excellence, 12-December-2006 Presentation
The Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) meeting of 12-December-2006 offered a Question and Answer session with Madison Director of Teaching and Learning, Lisa Wachtel, and Brian Sniff, District K-12 Math Coordinator.
A list of questions was prepared and given to the speakers in advance so they could address the specific concerns of parents.
The video
of the meeting is 130MB, and 1 hour and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video.
The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
Listing of Superintendent's Goals for comprehensive review, as set by the Board of Education
K-5 Math Standards, Resources, and role of Teaching and Learning
Professional development for K-5 teachers
5th Grade Math Assessment Pilot project for advanced students
Middle school math, 6th to 8th grade
Math certification of middle school math teachers, with an extended discussion of the statistic that only 5% of middle school math teachers are math certified,
comparing Wisconsin to bordering states
WKCE tests and testing in general
Discussion by audience of recent studies and trends in math preparation for college
The education achievement gaps between African-American and white children in Wisconsin remain among the worst in the United States, according to an analysis released Wednesday by an influential education group.
To a degree that's good news. That's better than in 2004, when a similar analysis by the Journal Sentinel showed the proficiency gaps in several key measures between African-American and white children were larger in Wisconsin than in any other state.
Using more recent results of the same series of tests - the National Assessment of Educational Progress - the Education Trust found that in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math, Wisconsin was near the bottom of the list, which included the states and the District of Columbia. In eighth-grade math, Nebraska had a bigger gap. In fourth-grade reading, Wisconsin was sixth from worst in gap size and eighth from the bottom when it came to the average score of black students.
The results, said Daria Hall, a senior policy analyst for the organization and the main author of the report, "show just how far Wisconsin has to go in order to ensure that all kids, particularly poor kids and kids of color, are getting equal opportunities to meet high standards."
Hall - herself a graduate of Milwaukee Public Schools - said Wisconsin should look to states with much smaller gaps and with gaps that have been narrowed in recent years to see what it should do. She named Massachusetts and Delaware as examples.
Massachusetts has eliminated funding gaps between school districts serving high-income and low-income students, she said. But it's not only about money, she added. The state has created rigorous education standards and accountability systems.
Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, said the analysis showed that the scores of African-American and Latino students in Wisconsin had risen in recent years while the scores of white students stayed flat - which he called "slightly good news."
Milwaukee Public Schools may go digital with some learning resources as the district selects about $7.7 million worth of new language arts, foreign language, technology education and social studies textbooks.
With a new wireless network expected to bring free broadband Internet access into the homes of MPS students by next semester, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said the district could start to "expand its textbook options" and look at more paperless models. But questions remain about if and how the district would make the most necessary resource - computers - available to a largely low-income population of students.
"This is the first time we've started looking at online options, especially with language arts material," Andrekopoulos said last month, after a School Board committee voted to move forward with the textbook adoption process. The committee's recommendation was approved by the full board on Nov. 30.
Aquine Jackson, chief academic officer for MPS, said electronic options could improve some of the literacy curricula that need supplemental resources. At a district-estimated $6.7 million worth of materials, language arts texts for grades K-8 and spelling for grades K-5 constitute the bulk of material that's up for adoption.
The Challenge Index, my system for rating high schools based on college-level test participation, grew from watching a low-income school in East Los Angeles -- Garfield High -- find ways to challenge average students that most high-income schools never thought of. As The Washington Post unveils its 10th annual Challenge Index rankings of Washington area public schools this week, I want to see how low-income schools in this region are doing.
The Challenge Index rates each school by taking the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests the school gave in 2006 and dividing by the number of seniors who graduated from the school this year. High school educators who have learned, as the teachers at Garfield did, that even average students benefit from AP and IB are more likely to have more students taking those exams and do better on The Post's list. High school educators who stick with what is still the majority view about AP and IB in America -- that the programs are suitable only for top students -- do not do so well.
In many cases, the list defies the conventional wisdom that schools with lots of low-income students are bad and schools with few such students are good. That is not to say that most low-income schools do well on the list. Most do not. Many of their teachers and administrators accept the widespread assumption that their students can't do AP or IB. But the few schools in poor neighborhoods that break out of this mindset are worth studying.
Starting with the Class of 2009, all Maryland students will be required to pass exams in algebra and data analysis, English, government and biology in order to graduate. All of the students in Guinn's classroom failed the test in algebra last school year. Her class, part of a new program in Prince George's County called the Twilight Academy, is meant to give students the extra push they need to pass the tests, known as the High School Assessments, which they will retake in January.
The county's performance on the tests has improved, and students can take the tests multiple times. But more than half of the 24,000 freshmen and sophomores in Prince George's are still at risk of failing to graduate. In the last school year, the county's passing rate in algebra was 46.1 percent; in biology, 42.5 percent; in government, 55.5 percent; and in English, 45.9 percent. The results were well below state averages. The Prince George's and Baltimore school systems together accounted for 45 percent of the students who did not pass the algebra test.
Public Comments Regarding Credit For Non-MMSD Courses
Parents Jeff Henriques, Larry Winkler and Janet Mertz appeared in front of the Madison School Board's Performance & Achievement Committee regarding credit for non-MMSD courses. Watch the video.
Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (thanks!) posted a rather remarkable summary of recent activity today. I thought it would be useful to recall recent Board Majority inaction when reviewing Johnny's words:
The Community has expressed extensive concern over a variety of curriculum issues. Previous Board majorities said that they "don't do curriculum" despite their responsibility under Wisconsin law (February, 2006). There's a difference between policy and implementation.
All of these issues, and more, affect our next generation.
The Board's recent actions to stop the controversial curriculum changes at East High School (already in place at West) reflects thinking about our children first (see Gamoran discussion here and here [Jason Shephard] (discussion tabled in the Spring of 2005), rather than experimenting with their opportunities:
I have the beginnings of an idea for a project to do later in Spring, for the exponential functions unit, in conjunction with our freshman College Readiness classes.
I was thinking about when I was a freshman in college, and how there were always tables set up by credit card companies who would attract crowds of freshmen with such irresistable items as Citibank t-shirts and Bank of America frisbees. They would give a credit card to just about anyone. There have been lots of reports about how so many college students get into incredible credit card debts because they don't know how to manage a credit card, and they are preyed on by these vultures.
Important new information about credit for non-MMSD courses issue.
"In preparation for the December 11, 2006 meeting of the BOE's Performance and Achievement Committee, Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash prepared a memo dated December 5, 2006 along with 10 "exhibit" appendices for distribution to the BOE. "Exhibit 10" is a copy of the "Guidelines for Taking Coursework Outside the District" that she wrote in October, 2006, and I previously posted on SIS. In her memo she states "All the other nine procedures described herein, except this one, are governed by law or Board Policy. This process (her new Guidelines) was created by the MMSD to expand the opportunities for students to take courses outside the MMSD without increasing the costs to the MMSD and without undermining the integrity of the diploma a student receives from the MMSD. The "Guidelines for Taking Coursework Outside the MMSD" is the process and procedure currently used when, for example, a student who wants to take outside courses, but does not have any other option available to him/her. The cost for taking courses under this procedure is the responsibility of the student/parents. The procedure requires pre-approval by the principal and if the student wants credit for taking the course, he/she will receive elective credit if the District does not offer a comparable course. If the District offers a comparable course, the student will not receive credit. The student's transcript will only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, if any, and the pass/fail grade."
As I had stated previously on SIS I believe this is a new policy. It is definitely different from the one used in the recent past at Madison West HS in several crucial respects. It has never previously been brought before the BOE for formal approval. At the November 13, 2006 meeting of the Performance and Achievement Committee, I presented Superintendent Rainwater and members of the BOE with a copy of these "Guidelines". Superintendent Rainwater responded by stating that these Guidelines only apply to "Independent Study" and do not represent a change in policy. I interpreted his comments to mean they are simply a restatement of Board Policy 3545 - Independent Study. However, Nash's December 5th memo to the BOE quoted above seems to indicate that her "Guidelines" are to be interpreted as a catchall, meant to apply not just to independent study, but to ALL course work not specifically governed by State law or existing MMSD Board Policies, i.e., her exhibits 1-9. In other words, it is to apply as well to UW courses taken outside of the YOP, WCATY courses, online courses such as Stanford's EPGY taken outside of the InSTEP Program, UW-Extension courses where the District claims to offer a comparable course (even though in a very different format), etc., i.e., a variety of different types of formal course work offered through certified, non-MMSD programs. If so, shouldn't these "Guidelines" need formal BOE approval as a new Board Policy since, as Nash states in her memo, they are not currently covered under any existing Board Policies?
Nash's "Guidelines" state that no credit will be permitted for non-MMSD courses whenever THEY deem they offer a comparable course (i.e., regardless of format) ANYWHERE in the MMSD. Even when the MMSD doesn't offer a comparable course, they will permit a maximum of TWO ELECTIVE credits, i.e., they can not be used to fulfill specific requirements for graduation. Thus, if these Guidelines are allowed to stand, no credit whatsoever will be permitted for any high school or college course the district offers that a student takes, instead, via WCATY, EPGY, UW-Extension, online, correspondence, etc., regardless of the student's ability to access the District's comparable course.
I believe these new "Guidelines" will be harmful to a wide variety of alternative learners. They shut off the one safety value students currently have whose needs are not being adequately met by their own middle and high schools. Without it, more families will leave the MMSD for alternative schooling options if they can afford to do so and more students who stay will fail to graduate. If you agree with me, please express your concern by either (i) attending Monday's BOE meeting at 5:45 pm in the Doyle Administration Building, or (ii) writing a letter or email to all BOE members, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater."
This is a very important issue for academically gifted students who would like to be able to substitute higher-level, faster-paced, or more-readily-accessible-to-them (e.g., because of transportation problems) courses taken via WCATY, EPGY, APEX, UW, etc. for ones offered by their local middle or high school. It is an important issue for other types of alternative learners (e.g., special ed students, temporarily ill or disabled students) as well. It has taken years to get this topic placed on the BOE's agenda. This coming Monday may well be our best opportunity to influence MMSD policy relating to this matter.
Thus, I urge ALL of you who are concerned about this issue either (i) to attend this BOE meeting prepared to give a 3-minute speech during the Public Comments period, or (ii) to send an email this week to Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and all BOE members (via their comments email address) describing why it is important for their students to be permitted to receive credit toward fulfilling graduation requirements for qualified high school- and college-level courses taken at UW, MATC, TAG summer programs, online, or via correspondence."
As I look over the course catalogs for the four high schools, I see that each school has both a Special Education Department and an English as a Second Language Department (although they may not be called exactly that at each school). Each of these departments in each of the four high schools offers an extensive range of courses for students who qualify and need the specialized educational experiences offered within these departments. Many of the courses offered by these departments fulfill graduation requirements and so can be used as curriculum replacement for the "regular" courses.
Here are my questions:
Does MPIE advocate having the District dismantle the Special Education and English as a Second Language Departments in our high schools? (I assume the answer is "no.")
Does MPIE advocate having the District deny high school graduation credit for any and all courses offered within these departments, so that truly ALL students will be required to take 9th (and -- at West -- 10th) grade core courses at our high schools? (Again, I assume the answer is "no.")
If MPIE advocates full inclusion, why aren't the answers to the above two questions "yes -- absolutely, yes"?
Does MPIE advocate getting rid of all advanced, honors, accelerated, TAG and Advanced Placement classes at our four high schools? In 9th grade? In 10th grade? In all four grades? What is your vision with regard to advanced and accelerated classes?
Please help me understand the logic that says it's O.K. to have entire departments within each high school devoted to the specialized educational needs of some groups of students (not to mention adjustments to high school graduation requirements designed to meet those students' needs), but it is not O.K. to have even a few sections of classes aimed at meeting the specialized educational needs of other students? (IMHO, this way of thinking is really best described as a belief in "selective inclusion.")
Can you see the inherent illogic, inequity and unfairness of that position?
How do you decide which groups of students with specialized educational needs get to have their educational needs met and which groups of students do not?
It seems to me that a big part of the answer to that question should come from the research done from the perspective of the group of students under consideration. Do you agree or disagree with that premise?
Are you aware of the consistency (of findings, of conclusions, of recommendations) within the literature on how best to meet the needs of high performing students (a.k.a. "best practices")?
Why does MPIE prefer the policy of getting rid of advanced high school classes over the policy of working with all K-8 students (and their families) in such a way as to increase the diversity of the students in those classes?
What do some middle and upper middle class parents of children with special education needs find so threatening about the thought of having their schools meet the educational needs of high ability, high performing, even academically talented students with the same thoughtfulness and commitment that they meet the needs of students with other special educational needs?
Are you aware that MMSD and national data indicate that approximately 20-25% of high school dropouts are academically gifted and have a demonstrated history of high academic performance? (In our District, that number is significantly higher at West HS than at the other three high schools and a disproportionate number of the "high performing" dropouts throughout the District are poor and minority students.) How do you understand those data and what do you think should be done about the situation?
Have you read this American Psychologist article on "the two tails of the normal curve," co-authored by nationally recognized experts on the educational needs of students in each of the two "tails"? http://psych.wisc.edu/henriques/papers/two_tails.pdf If so, what do you think of it?
Would any of you would be willing to meet over coffee to talk about how we can work together on these issues and to see if we can find common ground?
It's too late. The students that are behind in 5th grade rarely catch up. The 2/3 combinations are by far the worst academic combination for elementary students, yet we continue this practice to save money, and to save SAGE. I understand the pull out combination system is a great way to deal with cost and transient students....but does it really help? Can't we negotiate with the Union to allow 4 year kindergarten? This is really annoying that we have to bow to the Union for the sacrifice of the lower income students.
The middle school years has a great resource of teachers. My children have had teachers that felt students are undergoing hormonal warfare and felt they should teach less so as not to upset the students. As I quote a teacher my child had in a "Charlie Brown teachers voice", "Less is more and as long as they learn a couple of concepts during the year I feel I have done my job". This fortunately is not the normal approach my children have received. Most of the Jr. High teachers have been focused on preparing the students for Memorial. I wonder if this is the model for most of the Jr. High Schools throughout the district?
The district currently has the highest number of National Merit Scholar graduates in the state, I would assume we send hundred of students to college each year and those that are from higher income families do well. I wonder if the problem is less racial gap and not more economic gap. Please follow the link to the following Newsweek article released by the North Carolina Democratic Party....http://ncdp.org/node/1081. This is an article about how North Carolina kept their struggling students, drop out prone students and low income students engaged in high school by offering them an option to attend a local community college (MATC) and receive not only their HS diploma upon graduation but also an associate degree in an area of interest so that staying in school had meaning....and graduating means getting a real job. Currently all we can offer students that graduate from high school is they will have a diploma and they can essentially get the same jobs in this area with or without that diploma....with an associates degree they can make more than their teachers in computer repair, Xerox repair, IT, health associate degrees and others. Please think about raising the standards and the options for the struggling students, not lowering the standards for the top tier students. This IDEA and a proven method could benefit the entire community and raise the standard of living for lower income families. Please read this article.
It says the typical state math curriculum runs a mile wide and an inch deep, resulting in students being introduced to too many concepts but mastering too few, and urges educators to slim down those lessons.
Some scholars say the American approach to math instruction has allowed students to fall behind those in Singapore, Japan and a dozen other nations. In most states, they say, the math curriculum has swelled into a thick catalogue of skills that students are supposed to master to attain "proficiency" under the federal No Child Left Behind mandate.
“We are relentless,” Dr. Cashin said in a recent interview. “The secret is clear expectations. Everything is spelled out. Nothing is assumed.” She provides her principals, for instance, with a detailed road map of what should be taught in every subject, in every grade, including specific skills of the week in reading and focus on a genre of literature every month.
Dr. Cashin is obsessed with writing, and in most of her schools, student work lines the walls — not just the final product but layers of drafts. Even first graders have writing posted on the walls.
A feature used in every school is the four-square graphic organizer, a worksheet with four boxes like a window pane and a rectangle at its center that helps children develop a five-paragraph essay. Some progressive educators scorn it as a crutch; Dr. Cashin insists that it works.
While the city’s reading program focuses on story books, Dr. Cashin layers on lots of nonfiction. And, responding to research showing that impoverished children often lack vocabulary and basic facts, she has adopted a curriculum called Core Knowledge, which teaches basics like the principles of constitutional government, events in world history and well-known literature.
Superintendent Rainwater and I engaged in a lengthy series of e-mails when I questioned the truth of a statment in a letter he wrote to Wisconsin congressmen to seek their help in reinstating the MMSD's eligibility for funds from Reading First.
In his letter the superintendent said that the MMSD was told "we had to use one of the preferred reading packages authorized by USDOE."
At first the superintendent denied that he said such a thing and asked me to retract the quote from the letter.
After I sent him a link to his letter, he kindly wrote:
I apologize. I did not recall the wording of the letter to our congressional delegation and the fact that we simplified the process in writing them. You are correct that this letter does not accurately reflect everything that happened during the process. Although it was made clear throughout the process that we could opt for one of the pre-approved programs and move ahead the choice was never presented that we had to do that. The final choice that we were faced with was to make the final changes that they required to our program, accept one of the pre-approved programs or reject the grant. Art
As I always say, take nothing from the MMSD at face value.
The teaching of civics presently in the United States is dismal and startling. It used to be, when I was a kid, that there were classes in civics and you learned not only the checks and balances, but hows and whys and wherefores. And you learned what was the reasoning behind the creation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. …
If you think that running a government like ours is, arguably, more complicated than running a pharmaceutical company or an auto company — and it is — then we should train people to the running of the country. …
We want to … define the necessity of civics: What is it and is it necessary? If it's necessary, is it urgent? And, if it's urgent, what do we do? And then [we should start] to proceed to literally design classes.
It is time that we simply revive the notion that we can learn how to run the country — and learn not for Republicans and not for Democrats, but learn how to learn the Constitution. The idea of people having power to pursue a notion of happiness or control of their own lives is a new thing and a miracle. America is a miracle.
One Small Step in the Right Direction at West HS ...
In light of recent events regarding curriculum and other issues in our high schools, there has been a small step in the right direction at West HS. Superintendent Rainwater announced at our 11/29 MUAE meeting that he has been in discussion with West HS Principal Ed Holmes about providing West 9th and 10th graders who are advanced in language arts the opportunity to skip over English 9 and/or English 10. Advanced placement decisions will be based on grades, teacher recommendation, writing samples, WKCE scores, and ACT/SAT scores. Details will be worked out by Mr. Holmes, the West English Department and District TAG staff.
This small -- but important -- change brings West more in line with Memorial, the only other high school that has a core English 9 curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes. Every year, four or five academically advanced Memorial freshmen are allowed to go into English 10 -- specifically, English 10 Honors. (FYI: Unlike West, Memorial has honors classes in 10th grade; as well, 10th graders can take some of Memorial's 17 AP classes.) East and LaFollette, of course, have two or three levels of ability/interest-grouped classes for freshman (and sophomore) English -- called regular, advanced and TAG at East and regular and advanced at LaFollette -- and will continue to have them for at least the next two years.
If you are the parent of a West area 8th or 9th grader who is advanced and highly motivated in English, you might want to consider having your student take either the ACT or SAT through the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) in order to support a request for single subject acceleration. There is still time to register for the MATS online: http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/mats/index.html
IMPORTANT NOTE: As I see it, this development does not in any way mean we should slow down our lobbying efforts vis a vis the BOE and Administration to get them to make West more like the other high schools -- in terms of course offerings and other oportunities for academically advanced students -- during the two years of the high school redesign study introduced by Superintendent Rainwater at the 11/27 BOE meeting.
Students are required to be in school longer-much longer-than their peers in traditional public schools.
Pupils are tested, and re-tested, to measure achievement. Lesson plans, teaching strategies, even whole curricula are adjusted based on how well, or poorly, students are learning what they should. Moreover, teachers are closely monitored and constantly working to improve their skills.
Students’ behavior and values are aggressively shaped by school leaders and instructors.
What is complicated, however, is implementing these changes within today’s rule-bound, bureaucratic system, with its collective bargaining constraints, bureaucratic regulations, and the inertia of 100-plus years of public education. It’s no coincidence that all of Tough’s profiled schools are charters, and as such have the freedom to do things differently and take control of their own destinies. In turn, this greater autonomy allows them to attract many top-notch, talented, and energetic teachers who are willing to work long hours for mediocre pay because they yearn for a results-oriented, break-the-rules environment. Replicating this atmosphere in the traditional system would be hard-maybe even impossible. But expanding charter schools–and getting more good ones-is no easy feat, either.
We yearn so much for data on the Advanced Placement program -- a powerful influence on high schools today -- that one of the most cited pieces of recent AP research actually does not yet exist, at least in any published form.
This is the report on AP and college science courses by Philip M. Sadler and Robert H. Tai. The only publicly available account of what they found is a Harvard News Office press release with the headline: "High school AP courses do not predict college success in science." They argue that students who took AP science in high school do not do as well in college science courses as AP advocates say they should, and that taking AP science in high school may hurt science education by letting more students avoid college biology, chemistry and physics.
I might have left this issue alone until Sadler and Tai had their work published, but their conclusions are so provocative that the Harvard press release, and the powerpoint slides they used at a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have already been cited in several news articles and at least one book, Alfie Kohn's "The Homework Myth." Kohn is one of the most fastidious writers I know, always checking and footnoting his sources. If he thinks it is okay to cite this study before it is published, then it is time to discuss it in this column, which claims to be on top of all things AP. The Sadler-Tai work deserves close attention for many reasons, one of them being I think it is being given more credence than it deserves, at least in its fetal state.
The incumbent policy is more of the same. Both parties in Washington champion more government involvement in primary education and more subsidies for existing colleges and universities.
The innovative policy is to support any alternative to our current education system. Ultimately, we would trust consumers to keep the best alternatives and discard the rest.
.......
While politicians champion more homogeneity in education (national standards; send everyone to college), my guess is that what we need is more differentiation. Students are heterogeneous in terms of their abilities, learning styles, and rates of maturation. Putting every student on the same track is sub-optimal for large numbers of young people.
Some students -- probably more than we realize -- are autodidacts, meaning that they teach themselves at their own pace. One of the brightest students in my high school statistics class simply cannot handle the structure of a school day. He is motivated to learn on his own (he was curious to read my book on health care and asked me for a copy), but he is demotivated by most of his classes.
Some students are not suited for academic study. We speak of the proverbial auto mechanic, but in fact the best career path for many of these students in today's economy would be in the allied health fields. Unfortunately, this career path is blocked by occupational licensing requirements, which prevent many otherwise capable students from pursuing careers in dental hygiene, physical therapy, or similar professions. If we had the equivalent credentialism at work in auto repair, you would need four years of college plus two or three years of post-graduate education just to work on a car.
Interesting timing. I spoke recently with a Madison parent (pre-K child) who agrees with this sentiment (balancing education power with parents via greater local choice).
Curriculum changes halted as district eyes study group
JStanding in front of a giant projection screen with his wireless remote control and clip-on microphone, Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater on Monday unveiled his grand vision for Madison’s four major high schools. But the real backdrop for his presentation before the Madison school board was the criticism of changes implemented last year at West High and proposed this year at East. Both involved reducing course offerings in favor of a core curriculum for all students, from gifted to struggling.
Rainwater stressed his intention to start from scratch in overhauling all aspects of the education provided at West, East, Memorial and La Follette, whose combined enrollment tops 7,600 students. The move follows consolidation of practices in the city’s elementary and middle schools. But it may prove more challenging, since the high schools have a longstanding tradition of independence.
Over the next two years, Rainwater would like a steering committee of experts to study best practices in high school education. Everything, Rainwater stresses, is on the table: “It’s important we don’t have preconceived notions of what it should be.”
Heterogeneous classes, which until last week were the district’s preferred direction for high school changes, are, said Rainwater, “only one piece” of the redesign. But curriculum changes are clearly going to happen.
“It’s not acceptable anymore to lecture four days a week and give a test on Friday,” Rainwater declared. Teachers must learn how to teach students, rather than teach content.
The 50 parents and teachers in the audience reacted coolly, judging from the comments muttered among themselves during the presentation and the nearly two-hour discussion that followed.
Tellingly, the biggest applause came when board member Ruth Robarts said it was “high time we as a board start talking about high school curriculum.” Robarts chastised Rainwater for not including teachers and parents on the steering committee, which will “reinforce a perception that is not in our favor.” She said the district was giving critics only two options: accept the changes or “come down and protest.”
On Nov. 16, East Principal Alan Harris unveiled plans to eliminate several courses in favor of core classes in ninth and 10th grades. Attendees said the plan was presented as a “done deal.” In e-mails to the board, parents called the plan “short-sighted and misguided,” and one teacher warned: “Don’t do it.”
Rainwater, apparently recognizing the damage to parent and teacher relations, sent a memo to principals last week.
“I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses,” he wrote. “We need a tabula rasa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.”
The four high schools will remain under their current programs until the steering committee gets to work. Chaired by Pam Nash, deputy superintendent of secondary schools, it will include several district administrators as well as experts from the UW-Madison, Edgewood College and MATC.
Rainwater sought to assure board and audience members that teachers and parents will have ample opportunity for input. His plan calls for three separate periods of public comment, after which subcommittees will make revisions. The school board will then vote on the recommendations after additional hearings and debate.
“You get better input if people have something to react to,” Rainwater said, adding that involving teachers in all stages would be impractical, because it would be difficult to cover their teaching assignments. That comment drew a collective groan from teachers in the audience.
Rainwater’s call for a revamping of the city’s high schools suggests the current approach isn’t working. And that poses a dilemma for school officials. The district likes to tout its record number of National Merit semifinalists and state-leading ACT scores as proof that its high schools are successful. Many parents worry that those high-end benchmarks are under attack.
But Madison’s schools continue to fail countless kids — mostly low-income and minority students. This is a profound challenge hardly unique to Madison, but one that deserves more attention from policymakers.
Research in education, the starting point for Rainwater’s steering committee, offers promising solutions. But the district risks much in excluding teachers from the start, since inevitably they will be on the front lines of any change. And excluding parents could heighten the alienation that has already prompted some middle- and upper-class families to abandon the public schools.
While struggling over details, most board members conceptually support the study. During their discussion Monday, Lawrie Kobza cut to the chase.
“What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” she asked. “And is this how we solve this problem?” Kobza professed not to know the answer. But these are the right questions to ask.
By 2014, just eight years from now, the No Child Left Behind Act mandates that there be no racial achievement gap in American education -- none. All children -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian -- will be performing on the same bell curve of test scores.
It's a tough deadline and a beautiful idea. Trouble is, despite Bush administration claims, most studies show it is not happening.
Test score gaps show up in kindergarten, and just get worse, except where they don't. There are trend-bucking success stories in this country - remarkable schools where that gap is being closed, child by child.
This hour On Point: we talk with three principals in the trenches who have made it happen in the war on America's education achievement gap.
Jason Brown doesn't know what to do if his 14-year-old son doesn't get into a good high school next year, namely Rufus King or Riverside.
ellow Milwaukee Public Schools parent James West feels equally uneasy about finding that a teacher had given a near-perfect score to what he called a near-incoherent essay by his daughter.
Anthony Drane, who works in a supplemental instruction program at Milwaukee Area Technical College, fears for his children's futures when he encounters former MPS students who lack basic study skills such as note taking.
The problem, the three fathers have concluded, is not just that Milwaukee's public schools are in crisis but that there aren't enough parents like them who are alarmed and trying to do something about it. They hope to change that with the North Milwaukee Parent Association, a citywide group that intends to motivate parents by giving them the knowledge and support to participate in the school system.
The idea, they said, is that empowering Milwaukee's youths must start with educating their guardians.
Three times in the past week, I've witnessed parents of young children ponder whether to trust education of their offspring to Seattle Public Schools.
In raising children, however, families cannot afford mistakes. When a young life gets off on the wrong track, its retrofit can get more complicated than putting new rails in a tunnel.
And a city increasingly populated by singles and childless couples badly needs families with children. A disastrous mandatory busing program drove working families from Seattle during the 1970s and '80s.
Loss of confidence now threatens public schools with an institutional death spiral.
What happens? People use their doubts and subpar average test scores -- which shouldn't mean much to the middle class, given scores' correlation with poverty -- to justify leaving, without really exploring, what is offered by their local school.
ALL knowledge and skills essential to reading are essential for ALL learners. Absolutely every proficient reader must master all of the following:
a. Phonemic awareness: hearing the separate sounds and syllables in words and words in sentences;
b. Alphabetic principle: knowing which sounds go with which letters; using knowledge of which sounds go with which letters to sound out or decode words;
c. Fluency: reading words and connected text quickly and accurately;
d. Vocabulary: knowing the meanings of words;
e. Comprehension: making sense of text.
Every “school” of reading instruction agrees on these five, whether the schools are Direct Instruction or constructivist (whole language and balance literacy).
However, direct instruction makes certain that every child masters every skill. Direct instruction leaves nothing to chance.
On the other hand, constructivist theory lets the child “discover” these five skills. Consequently, some children will discover them all; some will discover some of them; some may not discover any of them.
In short, learning is too important to be left to chance.
But Secondary Education Director James VanSciver and other Seaford educators became convinced that with extra help, many more students could be taking algebra in middle school and college-level courses in high school. Four years ago, they began offering special tutoring, summer classes and Saturday classes. The number of Advanced Placement classes at Seaford High swelled from four to 14.
The focus on helping average students also boosted minority enrollment in the most rigorous classes. The district has about 3,400 students, 40 percent black and slightly more than half white. Through the initiative, administrators found more black students doing well and going on to college.
Julius Mullen, who directs a Saturday program for young African American males in Seaford, said the students discovered they could advance if given more time and the assurance that they had their friends with them. "When expectations are raised, I think students will grab for them if they have the support programs in place," Mullen said. "They have to see their friends achieving success."
The author concludes that low-income minority students need better educational opportunities than their middle class white counterparts. If there is a limited budget for education, does this mean then that those middle class students must accept less? Is it this thinking that is driving the elimination of diversity in our high school curricula? As I read this article, the greatest chance of overcoming disparities resides in early childhood and elementary experiences, not in dismantling the high school curriculum.
The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.
Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren’t meeting those goals. The schools’ leaders believe in frequent testing, which, they say, lets them measure what is working and what isn’t, and they use test results to make adjustments to the curriculum as they go. Teachers are trained and retrained, frequently observed and assessed by their principals and superintendents. There is an emphasis on results but also on “team building” and cooperation and creativity, and the schools seem, to an outsider at least, like genuinely rewarding places to work, despite the long hours. They tend to attract young, enthusiastic teachers, including many alumni of Teach for America, the program that recruits graduates from top universities to work for two years in inner-city public schools.
Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.
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At KIPP’s Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year’s statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located — in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx — it isn’t even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.
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Toll put it this way: “We want to change the conversation from ‘You can’t educate these kids’ to ‘You can only educate these kids if. ...’ ” And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.
The most malignant element of the original law was that it required all states to achieve proficiency but then allowed each state to define proficiency for itself. It took state governments a couple of years to realize just what that meant, but now they have caught on — and many of them are engaged in an ignoble competition to see which state can demand the least of its students.
The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement.
But there are still those few schools, mostly charters, that really do seem to have found the right formula: high standards, a structured instructional approach, character education, long hours, great teachers and development of a esprit d’corps.
And while Tough laments the fact that teacher unions have constrained the growth of charter schools, it is clear that there is little, if anything, these schools are doing that could not be done in a unionized school – unless of course we expect that schools that rely on teachers working twice the hours (15 or 16 a day, he says) can be replicated systemwide without increasing teacher salaries proportionally. (In fact, those strategies are precisely what the UFT and Chancellor Crew built into the Extended Time Schools back in the 90s, and many of them are working today in the UFT Charter Schools in East New York.)
On weekdays, during what are normal school hours for most students, the Billings children do what they want. One recent afternoon, time passed loudly, and without order or lessons, in their home in a North Side neighborhood here.
Hayden Billings, 4, put a box over his head and had fun marching into things. His sister Gaby, 9, told stories about medieval warrior women, while Sydney, 6, drank hot chocolate and played with Dylan, the baby of the family.
In a traditional school setting, such free time would probably be called recess. But for Juli Walter, the children’s mother, it is “child-led learning,” something she considers the best in home schooling.
“I learned early on that when I do things I’m interested in,” Ms. Walter said, “I learn so much more.”
Does Closing the Minority Achievement Gap Require a Downward Rush to the Middle
The prime motivator for taking MMSD's high schools from an academically rich curriculum to the one-room schoolhouse model has been to close the minority achievement gap. Thus, I read with interest the following NYTimes letters:
A Racial Gap, or an Income Gap? (7 Letters)
Published: November 24, 2006
To the Editor:
In emphasizing race-based achievement gaps, “Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races” (front page, Nov. 20) pays insufficient attention to the significant role of socioeconomic inequalities in explaining these gaps.
For social scientists studying the No Child Left Behind law, the slow progress comes as no surprise. The education researcher David Berliner has noted that “poverty is the 600-pound guerilla in the classroom.”
As long as proponents of No Child Left Behind continue to dismiss the examination of the economic backgrounds of students as an example of what President Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” or as an excuse for low achievement by low-income students, standards-based reforms like No Child Left Behind will have limited effects.
It is time for policy makers to place as much emphasis on reducing poverty as they do on improving the schools attended by poor children. Both are necessary, but are alone insufficient to reduce the achievement gap.
Alan R. Sadovnik
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is a professor of education, sociology and public affairs at Rutgers University in Newark.
•
To the Editor:
Yes, the achievement gaps remain persistent. But perplexing? Come on.
Having 10 years’ experience teaching in low-income, largely black districts, and also having raised three middle-class white children, I consider it a no-brainer why my children achieve well in school while many of my students do not: I am one mother to three kids, but a teacher to 25.
Aside from the socioeconomic differences between my kids and my students (a separate, undoubtedly more important perspective on achievement disparities), my children get more of my attention, period.
I want to give all of my students the same advantages I’ve given my own kids, but how can I possibly meet 25 individual needs with as much sensitivity and precision?
Why does this discussion always ignore class size as a contributing factor?
Why not lower the teacher-student ratio to 1 to 10 for a few years and then study the outcomes? The obvious answer is cost. But perhaps over the years this would be offset by the savings built from a better-educated and more productive group of graduates.
Mary Scheffler
Ocean, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
No Child Left Behind, signed into law by President Bush in January 2002, has not closed the achievement gap between minority and white students, but it has had a major effect on education in America.
The law has had a major impact on the privatization of education. With financing now available from school vouchers, increasing numbers of both minority and white families are placing their children in private and religious schools.
In addition, American schools are increasingly becoming racially segregated as white parents remove their children from public education.
Martin Gittelman
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
All the tests in the world will not close the achievement gap. When politicians and business leaders stop blaming the schools and start focusing on the real reasons for the achievement gap — the economic gap, the health care gap and the racial gap — poor and minority students may have a fighting chance.
Until then, the more than $2 billion testing industry will continue to reap a bonanza as our nation falls further and further into the educational abyss.
Judy Rabinowitz
Ocean, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
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To the Editor:
How can you discuss the test-score gaps between minority and white students without attributing some of the problem to the child poverty rate of almost 18 percent, the child hunger rate of 17 percent and the 19 percent uninsured rate for poor children, when African-Americans and Hispanics bear the brunt of those disadvantages?
Yet the education experts quoted in your article speak as if poverty and hunger, and the illnesses associated with them, had no effect on children’s school attendance and capacity to learn.
That’s not the way the principal of a school that narrowed the gap between black and white students saw it. You write that he “credited a prekindergarten program and a school health clinic that helped keep poor students from missing class.”
No Child Left Behind is big on testing and promises. But it does far too little to address the social and economic needs of black, Hispanic and poor white children — needs that are inextricably linked to school achievement.
Milton Schwebel
New Brunswick, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is the emeritus dean of the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University.
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To the Editor:
Standardized tests may be relatively efficient to administer, but they do not provide the information educators need to understand and work to close the achievement gap. Teachers need detailed information about their students’ strengths and areas of need. All they get from a standardized test is a number.
If we want to make greater progress toward the goal of leaving no child behind, let’s shelve those standardized tests and work together to truly understand the nature of the achievement gap and the academic, social and economic factors that contribute to it.
Howard Miller
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is an associate professor of literacy education at Mercy College.
•
To the Editor:
A new approach to closing the education gaps between races is needed.
Instead of looking at the performance of unsuccessful schools, unsuccessful teachers and poorly performing minority students, why not look for the factors that underlie success?
A study of the successful Asian students who outperform whites and other minority students might yield some interesting insights that could be effectively applied to solving the problem of those “left behind.”
by Joe Quick, Legislative Liaison/Communication Specialist
Sens. Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, along with Rep. Tammy Baldwin have requested that the U.S. Department of Education investigate Madison Schools' loss of an estimated $3.2 million after the district refused to dismantle its successful reading program two years ago, and seek to have the grant re-instated.
A scathing internal audit this fall claimed that USDOE officials managing the $1 billion program knowingly broke the law with unethical practices surrounding the program. In a letter to the above named members of Congress, Supt. Art Rainwater said, "In light of the government audit of the federal Reading First program contending that USDOE ignored the law and violated ethical standards to steer money the way it wanted, I am asking that you request reinstatement of the lost resources to the Madison Metropolitan School District due to USDOE's faulty conclusions that the audit makes obvious."
In a letter to Terrell Halaska , USDOE assistant secretary for legislative and Congressional affairs, the Wisconsin Congressional members said, "The report from the Office of Inspector General questions the program's credibility and implies the Department broke the law by interfering in the curriculum decisions made by schools, thereby failing to follow proper grant review procedures.
"We would appreciate your review and investigation of the concerns expressed by the Madison Metropolitan School District. Specifically, they are seeking reinstatement of lost federal resources to the Madison Schools from the Reading First program."
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now referred to as No Child Left Behind) is before Congress for reauthorization in 2007. Discussion of Reading First is sure to be part of Congress' examination of needed modifications to the law.
Redesign acknowledges failure to close achievement gap
The high school dumbing down (aka high school redesign) shows the MMSD administration’s loss of will, as well as its refusal to adopt curriculum changes needed to close the achievement gap.
The gap begins in elementary school: 46% of black students score below grade level on the third grade reading test, but only 9% of the white students.
The gap remains into high school: 49% of black 10th graders score below grade level in reading, while only 12% of the white students are at the minimal or basic levels.
The gap remains because the superintendent and administrators refuse to use curricula that will raise performance. For example, the MMSD clings to expensive and ineffective Reading Recovery and fuzzy math in the lower grades, while refusing to expand Read 180 which the district’s reading staff trumpeted for its success in upper grades.Previous boards and some current members share the responsibility too, because of their insistence that they have no role in curriculum issues.
The uproar over proposed changes in East High School's curriculum has apparently prompted Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater to announce a halt to any plans to change programming at Madison's four major high schools.
Here's Rainwater's message to his principals:
To: John Broome, Bruce Dahmen, Alan Harris, Ed Holmes
From: Art Rainwater
Re: High School Redesign Proposal
On Monday, November 27, at the Board meeting I will be putting forth a proposal concerning our high schools. I believe that discussion concerning the way in which our schools prepare all students for post secondary education and employment in an increasingly global economy is too important to rush.
Interest in this topic is high and we can best serve our future students, our broader community and our beliefs as educators by taking the quality time necessary to hear from parents, students, staff, business people, post secondary institutions, and others who value what a high school education can provide.
I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses. We need a tableau rosa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.
More Than English 10: Let's REALLY Talk About Our High Schools
First, I want to say BRAVO, RUTH, for putting it all together and bringing it on home to us. Thanks, too, to the BOE members who overrode BOE President Johnny Winston Jr's decision to table this important discussion. Finally, deepest thanks to all of the East parents, students and teachers who are speaking out ... and to the many West parents, students and teachers who have also spoken out over the past few years.
As we begin what will hopefully be a thoughtful and thoroughgoing community-wide conversation about what's going on in our high schools, I'd like to clear up some muddiness about what's happened at West in the past few years. I think it's important to have our facts straight and complete. In doing so -- and in comparing what's happened at West to what's now going on at East -- I'd like to draw on the image of an animal experiment (that apparently never happened). In one condition, a frog is put into a bath of cool water, the temperature is gradually raised to boiling, and the frog dies without a struggle. In another condition, a frog is put into a bath of boiling water, immediately jumps out, and lives to tell the tale. As I see it, West was put in the first condition. The administration implemented small changes over the course of several years, with the ultimate goal of turning 9th and 10th grades into two more years of middle school. Students and parents were lulled into thinking that everything was O.K. because, hey, what's one small change? East, in contrast, has been put in the second condition. There, the administration seems to have the same goal of turning 9th and 10th grade into two more years of middle school, but has introduced all of the changes at once. Like the frog placed in the boiling water, East has been shocked into strong reaction.
So what's been going on at West? Advanced learning opportunities have been gradually whittled away, that's what.
This year, as everyone knows, West HS implemented it's new core sophomore English curriculum, English 10. (Did you know that West has also implemented a single Social Studies 10 curriculum this year? More on that in a moment.) It is also true that some of the old English electives (perhaps 5 or 6 -- not the dozen that was recently reported somewhere else on this blog) are no longer offered at West. That's because they have been "rolled into" the single English 10 curriculum. Not necessarily a bad thing.
All West sophomores are now required to take English 10. West sophomores used to be able to choose their English courses from (almost) the full range of English electives. (Certain honors electives required the permission of the student's 9th grade English teacher.) Within English 10, students may elect to take an "embedded" honors option. From what we have heard from current sophomores and their parents, the implementation of this embedded honors option (which also now exists in biology and 10th grade social studies) has been highly variable across teachers. We have heard about one teacher who discouraged her students from taking the honors option because it was just more work. Another teacher, we have been told, lets her students sign up for the honors option but makes no distinction between the honors and non-honors students in the class, in terms of course work requirements. Yet another class we've heard about has 10 honors option students and is essentially functioning as an honors section because of the high level of student-led discussion. It does not appear that anyone is overseeing the implementation of the embedded honors "program" in English 10. Of course, West does not have a full-time TAG coordinator, as is being proposed for East.
Some other details --
While taking the required English 10 course, West sophomores can also take certain additional English electives (mostly the lower level, less challenging ones). Yes, that would mean taking two English courses in one or both semesters of 10th grade.
Finally, this year, a very small number (7 out of 500-plus) of West sophomores were "instepped" over English 10 and allowed into the full range of English electives as 10th graders. These accelerated placement decisions were, for the most part, based on these students' 8th grade WKCE scores in reading and language arts (taken during the first semester of 8th grade). Interestingly, 9th grade students were not allowed to use their 8th grade reading and language arts WKCE scores in order to be "instepped" over English 9. In fact, no West student is allowed to test out of English 9 anymore, although it used to be that some advanced 9th graders were allowed to skip over the second semester. In contrast, at Memorial -- the only other MMSD high school with a single 9th grade English curriculum right now -- 4 or 5 freshmen are allowed to skip English 9 and go right into English 10 Honors each year.
It is important to note that the chief reason the West community was given for the implementation of English 10 was, in a nutshell, the achievement gap. (Indeed, the achievement gap was the rationale for the entire Small Learning Communities initiative.) We were told that certain groups of students have high failure rates in English, as well as low participation rates in the more challenging English electives at West. The hope was that English 10 would boost these students' achievement and self-confidence, such that they would voluntarily elect to take the more challenging English electives as juniors and seniors. The thing is, West's English 9 was similarly intended to close that achievement/participation gap and -- according to a November, 2005, report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King -- there is no evidence that English 9 has had an impact on what is clearly a very serious problem. That absence of evidence is why West parents pleaded with school and District officials last year to stop plans for implementing English 10 and instead take the time to evaluate and fix English 9. No one listened -- at West or "downtown" -- and West went ahead with its plans.
I mentioned that West has also implemented a single 10th grade social studies curriculum this year. The single curriculum replaces the three "flavors" of 10th grade social studies that used to exist. (West sophomores used to be able to choose between courses with a greater emphasis on a particular time in history -- e.g., the Middle Ages or the Ancient World.) A few years ago, there was also an integrated English-Social Studies option. It, too, has gone away. The overriding reason why these courses have disappeared is that they produced ability grouping; that is, higher performing and more highly motivated students were self-selecting into certain courses and not others, creating ad hoc honors classes. This was seen as a problem. The solution was to get rid of the classes.
I also mentioned that embedded honors options are now available in biology and Social Studies 10. I have not heard anything about how they are going. I do know, though, that many people see the embedded honors option in regular biology as a threat to the single section of Accelerated Biology that parents have had to work so hard to save in recent years. In contrast to the situation at West, the number of sections of Advanced/TAG Biology offered each year at LaFollette and East are adjusted to meet demand.
The SLC initiative has been "blamed" for many of the curricular changes that have been implemented at West -- though no one has ever explained to us why we couldn't have honors sections of many of these courses in each of the four SLC's, a plan that would increase the accessibility of honors courses and could easily be combined with efforts to increase the diversity of the students who take honors classes. (Actually, I've heard that some high-level administrators favor that plan. I am hoping they make their preference known soon.)
In any event, there are several important issues in all of this:
There is an absence of adequate school-based and/or District-based data supporting the specific changes being implemented (West) and proposed (East).
There is an absence of adequate evidence from the empirical literature supporting the specific changes being implemented (West) and proposed (East). (Why, even UW Professor Adam Gamoran told the Superintendent and BOE last January that they are operating on "belief." And did you know that research consistently shows that the students who are hurt the most by "de-tracking" are poor and minority students of high ability?)
It is not clear how the bulk of these changes are going to help the huge percentage of high school students in our District who are reading below grade level and who, therefore, are at risk for poor performance and less learning in most any other course they may take.
There has been an all-but-complete absence of adequate community dialogue about these issues and changes. The community has not been allowed to have a meaningful impact on the planning. There has been only the appearance of partnership. This is because plans have been presented to community members (sometimes even BOE members) after most of the decisions have been made. We are asked to "tweak" and "ask clarifying questions" only. At West, the stonewalling by District officials was more than severe.
The appropriate District professionals (for example, TAG staff) and their expertise have not been included in a respectful, substantive, meaningful way.
There is a cross-high school equity issue regarding how students of similar high ability and motivation are treated and what educational opportunities are made available to them. (State and federal mandates -- as well as the District's fear of litigation -- insures far greater equitability of educational services for other groups of students -- which is not to say they are necessarily well-served.)
As the East community experiences and reacts to a concentrated version of what the West community has experienced, dribbled over the past several years -- and especially as the BOE, the press, and even the District Administration take greater notice than ever before of what we are all saying to them, East and West -- I am hopeful that the tide may be turning, and that meaningful dialogue is about to begin.
Report on the State of American Schools Shows High School Students Challenged by Math and Science
High school students in the United States are consistently outperformed by those from Asian and some European countries on international assessments of mathematics and science, according to The Condition of Education 2006 report released today by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Fourth-graders, by comparison, score as well or better than most of their international peers, although their counterparts in other countries are gaining ground.
“While our younger students are making progress on national assessments and are ahead on some international measures the same can not be said at the high school level,” said Mark Schneider, NCES Commissioner. “U.S. students do relatively well in reading literacy when compared to their international peers, but they are outperformed in mathematics and science and our 15-year-old students trail many of our competitors in math and science literacy.”
The Condition of Education is a congressionally mandated report that provides an annual statistical portrait of education in the United States. The 50 indicators included in the report cover all aspects of education, from student achievement to school environment and from early childhood through postsecondary education.
The report shows that U. S. public schools have the most diverse student population than at any other time in history. In addition, more individuals are enrolling in postsecondary education, and more bachelor’s degrees have been awarded than in the past.
"This is a discussion killer and it's an education killer because it's going to make kids feel uncomfortable," Collin said Monday of the emerging plan, which would take effect in the fall.
This morning, Collin and other students - he says it may involve 100 of the school's 1,834 students - plan to protest the planned changes by walking out of the school at 2222 E. Washington Ave. Some may try to meet with Superintendent Art Rainwater at his Downtown office.
East Principal Alan Harris said he's heard talk of a student protest. Students refusing to attend class would be dealt with for insubordination, he said, and could face suspension, particularly if he determines their conduct is unsafe.
Harris said he's met with parents, staff members and students, and more private and group meetings are planned, to hear their concerns.
However, Harris said he believes he remains on the right track. East, he said, must change.
Read the extensive discussion on the Madison School District Administration's High School redesign plans here. The Madison School Board will meet to discuss the proposed high school changes on November 27, 2006.
The October 30, 2006 Board of Education met to discuss a series of resolutions, and approve the final 2006-07 MMSD Budget, and approve the AFSCME Local 60 contract. The video of the meeting is 210MB, and 2 hours and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
Public Appearances
There was a public appearance by Barbara Lewis who expressed concern over the apparent change in policy of MMSD in granting high school credit for courses taken at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Both Superintendent Art Rainwater and Director of Alternative Programs Steve Hartley discussed the issues with the Board and clarified that the policy statement which Ms. Lewis had received, and which apparently was being misinterpreted by some high school staff referred only to Independent Study. The Board, noting confusion of parents, school staff and themselves, requested that these issues be placed on the Board agenda as soon as possible.
Agenda Item #4
Resolution supporting expenditures for school security be placed outside the revenue caps.
Agenda Item #5
Resolution supporting language by the Superintendent and other superintendents that the State adopt the Adequacy Model for school funding.
Agenda Item #6 - Discussion and Approval of 2006-2007 Budget
This portion of the meeting begins at approximately 20 minutes into the meeting and continues until the Board votes to approve the tax levy amount at 2 hours into the meeting. Final approval of the full budget is rescheduled for a later meeting. The discussions included issues of fund equity, the fund reserve, the unexpected decrease of State support, liquidation of earnings on Chavez building funds, changes in the budget necessary to offset decrease in State support, and the minimum decisions the Board needed to make to meet budget deadline.
Agenda Item #7
Approval of the AFSCME Local 60 contract, in which the District and Union agree to a health care package containing only HMOs, saving the District significant healthcare costs, in exchange for a generous wage increase.
Montgomery County public schools this year passed a milestone in college preparation: Half of the 9,737 black high school students are enrolled in honors or Advanced Placement courses.
Five years ago, barely one-third of African Americans participated in such classes, despite the county's reputation as a national leader in college prep. Now, a black student in Montgomery is more likely to take an AP test than a white student elsewhere in the nation.
Kalema took all the honors courses available to her in the ninth grade, then progressed into AP. As a senior, she is taking AP geography, calculus and English literature. She partly credits her counselor, Scott Woo, with her advancement.
"It's always been Mr. Woo saying, 'I think you can take this class,' " she said.
The county's achievement is striking because the national surge in Advanced Placement testing has largely left black students behind.
The success of urban schoolteacher Jaime Escalante with a group of minority AP students in East Los Angeles in the 1980s convinced public educators that motivation and hard work might be just as important as standardized test scores in predicting AP success. Over the past few years, that philosophy has become pervasive in the Washington region.
Principals and teachers in Montgomery high schools began looking for reasons to include students in AP courses, rather than reasons to keep them out. The process evolved into a science: All students now take the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT, a strong predictor of AP potential, in the ninth grade. Principals get spreadsheets that allow them to sort students by PSAT score and grade-point average to identify those capable of AP study not enrolled in an AP course.
Kalema was being groomed for AP while still in middle school. She took Algebra I, a high school course, in the eighth grade; the school system has dramatically expanded advanced math study in elementary and middle schools as a pipeline to future AP and IB study.
Despite concerted efforts by educators, the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school.
“The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few signs of closing,” Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at Columbia University. One ethnic minority, Asians, generally fares as well as or better than whites.
The reports and their authors, in interviews, portrayed an educational landscape in which test-score gaps between black or Hispanic students and whites appear in kindergarten and worsen through 12 years of public education.
Some researchers based their conclusions on federal test results, while others have cited state exams, the SATs and other widely administered standardized assessments. Still, the studies have all concurred: The achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.
But in the increasingly frenzied world of college admissions, even Zalasky is nervous about his prospects. He doubts he'll get in to the University of Wisconsin, a top choice. The reason: his grades.
It's not that they're bad. It's that so many of his classmates' are so good. Zalasky's GPA is nearly an A minus, and yet he ranks only about in the middle of his senior class of 543 at Edina High School outside Minneapolis.
That means he will have to find other ways to stand out.
. . . The average high school GPA increased from 2.68 to 2.94 between 1990 and 2000, according to a federal study. Almost 23 percent of college freshmen in 2005 reported their average grade in high school was an A or better, according to a national survey by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute. In 1975, the percentage was about half that.
GPAs reported by students on surveys when they take the SAT and ACT exams have also risen — and faster than their scores on those tests. That suggests their classroom grades aren't rising just because students are getting smarter. Not surprisingly, the test-owners say grade inflation shows why testing should be kept: It gives all students an equal chance to shine.
More than 70 percent of schools and districts analyzed by an education audit company called SchoolMatch had average GPAs significantly higher than they should have been based on their standardized test scores — including the school systems in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver, San Bernardino, Calif., and Columbus, Ohio.
Last year, amid the uproar that followed West High School’s replacement of more than a dozen elective offerings with a core curriculum for 10th-grade English, Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater told the school board that such changes would be a “major direction” in the district’s future.
Some people see signs that this shift is now occurring.
Concerns about eliminating course offerings are being aired at East High School, which has traditionally offered an array of elective courses in core subject areas. Principal Alan Harris is expected to unveil the plan at a parent meeting on Thursday; officials declined to release details before then.
“There are a lot of reasons to be concerned,” says Lucy Mathiak, a school board member whose son attends East. “It does sound a lot like the West model, and that’s not what East parents asked for,” especially those who participated in this spring’s planning group called East 2012.
"No district operating budget has been used to build the Virtual Campus," according to the memo (original emphasis).
Based on Johnny Winston's comment, "Why don't people know about this," I can only assume that the administration spent $1.34 million without ever informing the Board of Education. That's just plain wrong (my emphasis).
Two new studies shed light on how the achievement gaps between groups of students grow as they move from elementary to middle school.
The studies—one by researchers Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin and the other by the Northwest Evaluation Association—both found that black students start out school trailing behind their white counterparts, learn less over the course of the school year, and fall further behind as they progress through school.
But the studies diverge as they try to pinpoint potential causes for those learning gaps.
Mr. Hanushek and Mr. Rivkin, both university-based economists, suggest that the growth in the size of the learning gaps that occur as children move from kindergarten through 8th grade can be explained by certain differences in the schools that black and white children attend.
Today, the Faculty will begin to take on the central and difficult question of what students should know to graduate from Harvard. The Task Force on General Education has produced a serious and thoughtful answer to this question. It has proposed that the College train students for citizenship in a global society and, to that end, require students to take courses in ten diverse areas from reason and faith to analytical reasoning. I fear, however, that the proposal goes too far in rejecting the Core Curriculum’s “approaches to knowledge” in favor of teaching knowledge itself. Methodology, particularly the scientific approach to human society, should play a prominent role in general education.
Like any self-involved faculty member, I could argue that the proposed program gives too little attention to my own field of economics while spending too much time on other less important disciplines. In extreme fits of economo-centrism, I can certainly convince myself that reading, writing, and breathing are pretty irrelevant relative to understanding the laws of supply and demand. I am not, however, writing this column to argue that my discipline deserves more recognition in general education. Indeed, I do not profess to know how much space in the general education curriculum should be allocated to any field, and I do not know what subjects should be focused on in other fields. I do, however, know that with regards to economics, the report focuses too much on social science topics but too little on social science methodology.
Critics say standardized testing has robbed schools of the creative clash of intellects that make Plato's dialogues still absorbing. "There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all," said educational psychologist Gerald W. Bracey, research columnist for the Phi Delta Kappan education journal.
Historians call the rise of testing an inevitable outgrowth of expanding technology. As goods and services are delivered with greater speed and in higher quantity and quality, education has been forced to pick up the pace.
Only the suburban bargain the Ophirs thought they were getting turned out to be no bargain at all. They chose the Yorktown school system, a relatively well-off district whose students consistently outscore their peers on state tests. But the Ophirs came to view the schools as uninspiring and unresponsive, and now they pay $51,000 a year for their children, 11-year-old Dylan and 9-year-old Sabrina, to attend the private Hackley School here — on top of $23,000 annually in property taxes.
The key players involved - a group that you would not have found at the same table often in the past - are the GMC, which is generally composed of business and civic leaders; the Milwaukee School Board; schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos; and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, the union representing more than 8,000 MPS employees.
Sister Joel Read, the retired president of Alverno College who chairs the Greater Milwaukee Committee's education committee, said Milwaukee is a risk-averse city and change in MPS would involve risks for everyone, but she was optimistic about what will result from the effort.
"I think there's a new day here in Milwaukee," she said.
The effort will begin with more than two dozen meetings beginning this week and running into January with a wide range of people who have stakes in the success of MPS. The meetings will include sessions with teachers, principals, business leaders, parents and philanthropists. There will be a public session in each of the eight school board districts
East High School to Follow West's One Size Fit's All 9/10 Curriculum?
From a reader involved in these issues:
The plan for East HS is to have only regular classes (that is, no Advanced (formerly AcaMo) and no TAG classes) and AP classes (which, presumably, only juniors and seniors will be able to take). East currently offers 9 AP classes. This means there will be a core curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes (except for the special ed and ESL classes) across the boards in 9th and 10th grades. Our source did not specify if this means the end of Paul DuVair's renowned TAG Biology class. There also is no word on embedded honors options, like West now offers (though we have heard many reports about how profoundly uneven implementation is -- aside from the fact that embedded honors options rarely give students the critical opportunity to learn together at a high level).
The only exception to this plan will be math, largely because the kids enter East already ability grouped (i.e., some into Algebra, some into Geometry, etc.).
Additional info --
-- the official word is that this plan is coming from Alan Harris himself (yeah, right)
-- the other official word is that one of the reasons for this drastic change is that the TAG students were "coasting" (huh?)
So please spread the word -- especially to East attendance area parents that you know, including parents of younger kids -- and please attend, if you can. And if anyone can videotape ...
Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."
The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.
New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.
Tommy Franks issued battle orders in Iraq via Powerpoint [see also Thomas Ricks "Fiasco"]. One can imagine the techniques a future General will use....
Though Asian-Americans constitute only about 4.5% of the U.S. population, they typically account for anywhere from 10% to 30% of students at many of the nation's elite colleges.
Even so, based on their outstanding grades and test scores, Asian-Americans increasingly say their enrollment should be much higher -- a contention backed by a growing body of evidence.
Whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake is becoming a big concern in college-admissions offices. Federal civil-rights officials are investigating charges by a top Chinese-American student that he was rejected by Princeton University last spring because of his race and national origin.
The agenda of the meeting was to cover which topics would be the focus of this academic year's meetings, and received a report on ESL from the ESL Coordinator Amy Christianson.
One of the better-kept secrets in Madison is that the school district currently offers more than 100 online courses for city high school students. The program is called the Madison Virtual Campus.
“It turns out Madison is a leader in this technology,” says Johnny Winston Jr., the school board president. “My first question was, ‘Why don’t people know about this?’” He thinks virtual schools could help keep students who might leave for other options.
“As the second-largest school district in the state, we should be leading the way,” Winston says. “And to find out that yeah, we’re already doing this but nobody knows about it, I’m like, c’mon, let’s make this happen.”
But officials have purposely kept the program under wraps as they’ve fine-tuned it. There’s no mention of the program on the district’s Web site, and most parents have never heard of it. The district has spent five years building infrastructure, training staff and convincing stakeholders of the growing demand for virtual learning.
“We’re close to crossing a threshold in this district,” says Kelly Pochop, the district’s online learning facilitator. “Keep your ears open. We’re actively exploring options with our administrative team.”
The big question is how fast the district wants its students to take advantage of the Madison Virtual Campus. Currently, only eight high school students are taking online courses for credit. Another 14 middle school students are taking an online geometry course through the Kiel school district, with a Madison teacher providing support, to meet demands by the local teachers union.
The experiment — an attempt to downsize the American high school — has proven less successful than hoped.
The changes were often so divisive — and the academic results so mixed — that the Gates Foundation has stopped always pushing small as a first step in improving big high schools. Instead, it's now also working directly on instruction, giving grants to improve math and science instruction, for example.
Most of the dozen-and-a-half Washington schools with so-called "conversion" grants have ended up only as hybrids — a mix of small-school elements added to big-school features.
Going forward, the foundation is advocating a core curriculum that all high-school students would be expected to take, he said. And it wants to help improve math and science instruction by backing efforts to increase math requirements for high-school students, and to train more math and science teachers and pay them better.
Many parents are actively researching educational options for their young children. Increasingly, they are expecting more from public schools than the one-size-fits-all model schools have traditionally offered. Across the state, school districts are opening more charter schools and boosting their offerings of online and virtual classes to diversify educational approaches.
Some see these alternatives as necessary for the future of public school districts — especially urban ones struggling to eliminate the racial and income achievement gaps while expanding opportunities for both struggling and high-performing students.
“While the system serves many children well, it doesn’t serve all of them well,” says Senn Brown of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. “By recognizing that kids learn differently, and by creating options to serve them, school districts do better for all kids.”
Take away the glasses, and Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater bears a passing resemblance to Rodney Dangerfield, the late comedian whose tag line was, “I don’t get no respect.”
The Madison Metropolitan School District has compiled an impressive record of student achievement through the years and has shown heartening progress in reducing the racial performance gap — a gap that has been documented in many districts across the land. But despite this, Rainwater has faced an increasingly restive constituency and a growing public perception, justified or not, that Madison schools are in decline
I am collecting the Challenge Index data now. The early returns indicate our local schools will set a record for the number of AP and IB tests being given. In fact, there appears to be no other region in the country that has as high a level of participation in college-level courses and tests.
That, I think, is a good thing. The Washington area is going to look good on most educational measures because it has some of the highest levels of parental income and education. All the research shows that students who come from affluent families with parents who went to college do better in school than students without those factors. But most of our school districts have done something most other U.S. districts have not done. Our districts have opened these challenging courses to all students, not just to those with affluent, well-educated parents. And they have prepared many students from disadvantaged homes so well that they are passing these college-level tests and not only earning college credit but also getting a useful sense of how to handle the heavy reading lists and long final exams that make college, for many students, such a difficult adjustment.
Two large studies in California and Texas have shown that good grades on the three-hour AP tests correlate with higher graduation rates in college. I have interviewed hundreds of AP and IB teachers and students over the past 20 years. They almost all say that the courses and tests are the best academic experiences their high schools have to offer, and they recommend that more high schools use them.
There's been discussion on this website about taking UW classes and the WI Youth Options Program - who pays and who gets credit, what are the District's policies. Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has a website with a brochure and frequently asked questions on this program - http://dpi.wi.gov/youthoptions/yocolcont.html. The website also includes the state law on this topic.
The Youth Options program allows all public high school juniors and seniors who meet certain requirements to take postsecondary courses at a Wisconsin technical college or institution of higher education. An institution of higher education (IHE) includes UW System institutions, tribally controlled colleges and private, nonprofit institutions. Youth Options Program Brochure
On Monday, November 13th at 6:15 p.m., McDaniels Auditorium, the Board of Education's Performance and Achievement Committee's second topic for discussion isCredits for courses outside the MMSD.
Two questions from DPI's FAQ on the Youth Options Program that may pertain to next Monday's Performance and Achievement Committe's discussion on this topic:
1. May a school district limit the number of credits a student takes through the youth options program?
Yes, if a school district has a board policy in place, the school district may limit a student to 18 college credits over the two years the student is eligible for youth options. {§118.55(7t)(a), Wis. Stats.} The school district is not authorized to set the number of credits lower than 18, however the district may set the number of credits higher or not set a limit.
2. Can the number of college credits per semester be limited?
The number of college credits per semester may be limited by the post-secondary institution, but the school district does not have authority to limit the number of credits in a semester.
In the post "Audit Faults Wisconsin's Reading First Grant Process" the author, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, in Education Week wrote, "There is also no explanation of the decision by officials in the Madison school district to give back its $2 million grant shortly after it was approved. Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater decided to drop out of the program after federal consultants told district officials they would have to abandon their existing literacy initiative and adopt a commercially published core reading program, he wrote in a detailed memo to the school board. ("States Report Reading First Yielding Gains," June 8, 2005.)"
I thought MMSD, per the Superintendent, did not continue the process rather than turned down an approved $2 million grant, because he felt the District was being pressured into a curriculum that did not support what was currently underway in the District, and the Superintendent felt the District's curricula was better for Madison's kids.
Does anyone remember the process? Was the School Board involved?
I'm sick to my stomach about the Dept. of Education's administration of the Reading First grant dollars. Does anyone know if children's reading achievement has improved due to Reading First?
Levi Clancy's special needs can't be met by his local public schools, so his mother enrolled him a school where he's able to learn. But the district won't pay the cost, because the 14-year-old boy (aka Levi Meir Levi) is a junior premed at UCLA. The mother's suit for special ed compensation for the "profoundly gifted" -- in this case college tuition -- was heard by the California First District Court of Appeals in Sacramento two weeks ago. The suit asks for vouchers for gifted students whose needs can't be met in the normal K-12 schools. The state says it has no "constitutional duty" to offer a free education beyond the high school level, even to students who are required by law to attend school.
The New York Sun tells the story of a progressive superintendent who eliminated classes for gifted and talented students in her New York City region, driving out middle-class families and radically reducing the number of students who qualify for specialty high schools. In the name of equity, smart kids are denied the chance to learn at their own level.
"You have been quarreling because there have been no proper standards for a day's work," Mr. Taylor chided bosses. "You do not know what a proper day's work is. We make a bluff at it and the other side makes a guess at it, and then we fight."
The second part of Mr. Taylor's system was a task-bonus wage plan. Each worker was given a daily production target. If he made it, he got a high price per piece. If he failed, he received a much lower rate. At one machine shop, for example, Mr. Taylor set a rate of 35 cents apiece if the machinist finished 10 pieces a day, 25 cents if he finished nine or fewer.
Skeptical manufacturers wondered whether better productivity would be more than offset by higher wages. Mr. Taylor's answer: If his time study had been carried out correctly, it would be very difficult for a worker to beat the target.
DPI has grants for after-school academic enrichment
The Department of Public Instruction has announced the availability of grant funding through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, funded under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Funds may be used to build or expand after school programs that provide academic enrichment in reading and math, as well as other youth development and recreation activities during the hours when school is not in session. For centers new to DPI funding, grants awarded through the competition will provide an average of $100,000 per center, per year, for a period of five years, assuming adequate funds continue to be appropriated by Congress.
DPI will give priority to applications which address higher levels of economic disadvantage than the minimum requirement, and program services to be provided in a school, or with students primarily attending schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress or are identified for improvement. Workshops and other resources will be available to assist applicants in preparing proposals. See the complete story at http://www.dpi.wi.gov/seachange/sea0532_4.html for further information on eligibility, program requirements, priorities, and additional resources on best practices may be found on the DPI website.
One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in America’s urban public schools. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish small schools to ensure that students receive sufficient attention—the list goes on. While these approaches have had a dramatic impact on individual schools, they have failed to produce a single high-performing urban school system.
Despite these initiatives and a doubling in annual public spending on education over the past 30 years, to approximately $450 billion in 2005, no one has figured out how to achieve excellence on a broad scale—at every school in a district. One reason is that educators, researchers, and policy makers often see the district office—the organization headed by the superintendent that oversees and supports all the schools in the district—as part of the problem and not as a crucial part of the solution. This is a mistake.
School-based solutions, while important, aren’t enough. If they were, and low-performing schools could heal themselves, urban systems today would be chock-full of highly functioning schools. Achieving excellence on a broad scale requires a districtwide strategy for improving instruction in the classroom and an organization that can implement it. Only the district office can create such a plan, identify and spread best practices, develop leadership capabilities at all levels, build information systems to monitor student improvement, and hold people accountable for results. One of the main reasons reform efforts haven’t scored any districtwide successes is they have neither helped the district office play this role nor created a viable substitute.
To serve in this capacity, district offices will have to transform themselves. Business leaders, who care about their communities and know that their companies need well-educated workers in order to be competitive, have a big stake in assisting with this transformation. They have been extremely generous with money and counsel for urban districts, only to be frustrated by the results. As some corporate executives are beginning to realize, urban school systems are vastly more complex than businesses, yet the knowledge about how to manage them is amazingly sparse.
States should expand precollegiate online learning by allowing teachers to teach across state lines and removing student seat-time requirements, according to a report that tracks the fast growth of state virtual-learning programs. More states could add online programs if policies meant for traditional schools could be amended to take into account the "anytime, anywhere" aspects of online learning, say the authors of "Keeping Pace," slated for release this week at the Virtual School Symposium in Plano, Texas. The symposium is an annual conference sponsored by the Vienna, Va.-based North American Council for Online Learning, or NACOL, a nonprofit advocacy and research organization.
But at Scarsdale High, my son was told he could not get into the course unless he did well on an entrance test given to every prospective AP U.S. history student. He passed the test, got into the course and did well, as I expected. That was not my problem. What bothered me was the assumption, deeply imbedded in that school and that community, that AP courses should not be used as great learning experiences for all students headed for college, as they were at Garfield, but instead should be used as rewards for good grades and test scores. At Scarsdale High, only the students with the highest entrance test scores, or highest grade-point averages and strongest teacher recommendations, were considered worthy of admission to an AP course. Not surprisingly, this approach reflected the Ivy League college admission system that is such an obsession in Scarsdale and places like it.
I have always been grateful to Scarsdale High's educators for exposing me to this dysfunctional view of AP because I soon learned that they were not the exception, but the rule. Most U.S. schools, then and now, felt as Scarsdale did that AP should be used as a sorting exercise, not a teaching tool. Eventually, in reaction to what I learned at Scardale, I created the Challenge Index, a way of rating high schools by AP and IB test participation. The index is used by Newsweek for its "America's Best High Schools" list. Many Scarsdale people don't like it because it penalizes them for restricting AP admittance. They think the school deserves to be much higher than number 176 on that list.
Mr. Hartranft, a nuclear engineer who had been forced to retire early because of Parkinson’s disease, came up with what he thinks is a rigorous mathematical model to compare the school’s demanding grading system with more lenient grading in other schools. The model, he and some local school administrators say, is a bold new way to think about grades.
“I’m giving you a G.P.S. navigation system, as opposed to scraps of maps,” Mr. Hartranft said. “If all you have are scraps of maps, which is all that admissions offices get in the existing protocol, then this gives you an overall orientation.”
Mr. Hartranft created an analytical method he calls the g.p.a. plot; it uses national data on grade-point averages and SAT scores to compare national grading norms with those at the local high school. The purpose, he said, is to reduce the variability and subjectivity of grades — and to make it absolutely clear to college admissions offices that a B or B-plus at Simsbury may be the equivalent of an A at most high schools.
Simsbury has included his statistical comparison in its admissions submissions for the last four years. In the suburb just to the north, Granby Memorial High School is using the g.p.a. plot for the first time this fall.
Here in Simsbury, administrators and parents appear satisfied with the results of the model, even though it is unclear whether it has helped increase the number of Simsbury students admitted to elite colleges. Neil Sullivan, the high school’s principal, said the proportion of students admitted by the most selective universities had increased somewhat over the last four years, after dipping slightly when the number of A’s dropped sharply between 1998 and 2001. But the number of A’s given out by Simsbury teachers has also increased in recent years.
He took the scores of 1.5 million students and graphed them against the students’ grade-point averages, as reported by the students on their SAT exams. In a given year, for instance, the analysis might show that on average nationally, students with an A average had a combined SAT score of 1,150, under the old two-part aptitude test. Then he would perform the same comparison for students at Simsbury, where, on average, a student with an A average might have a combined score of 1,220.
I recently asked principal Alan Harris about English 9 and whether it would continue to be divided into three ability groupings: TAG, Academically Motivated, and regular. I was pleased to find out that they no longer call one section Academically Motivated. Instead, it's called Advanced.
At any rate, Alan told me that assistant principal David Watkins is the best contact for all information regarding core academics (English, Math, Science, Social Studies). He also told me that they are in the current planning stages for next year and can't say whether ability groupings will be offered.
Alan stated: "At our East High United meeting on November ninth, at 7:00 we will be discussing our Vision 2012 goals related to high expectations. Advanced classes, TAG programming and curriculum expectations will be a part of this discussion."
If TAG programming, high expectations, and academic rigor are important to you, please attend this meeting and voice your concerns.
Thank you,
Alan Sanderfoot
H 608.242.7344
E sanderfoot at charter.net
Garfield is a so-called Abbott school district, one of 31 poor districts that have received a total of $35 billion in state aid since 1997 as part of an ambitious court-ordered social experiment to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor students, whites and minorities. In a decision that set a precedent for school equality cases nationwide, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the poorest urban school districts should be given the resources to spend as much on their students as the wealthiest suburban districts do.
In the meantime, state education officials plan to audit all 31 Abbotts in the next year after finding that the highest-spending districts were making the fewest gains. Asbury Park spent the most, $18,661 per student, in the 2004-5 school year. Still, slightly fewer than half the district’s fourth-grade students were proficient in state language arts and math tests in 2005. “What we know is lots of money has been spent, and in some places, there is very little to show,” said Lucille E. Davy, the education commissioner.
For their part, the Abbott districts have criticized what they see as a bureaucratic system that undermines local authority and forces them to adopt programs that they do not need. For instance, Patrick Gagliardi, the Hoboken superintendent, said that he is required to provide full-day preschool to every 3- and 4-year-old child in his district, regardless of income, a mandate that now benefits many affluent families. “The court intended to help poor people, not the wealthy,” he said. “Now it’s costing the state more money, and it’s inefficient and flawed.”
By the end of the day one thing was clear: Parents, teachers and community organizations want an equal say in determining how the district will be remade.
illaraigosa acknowledged as much in his opening remarks to the group of 100 or so people, who represented church groups, businesses, human services agencies, city and county departments, law enforcement, city councils and numerous schools.
"This issue of 'mayor control' is a misnomer," he told the meeting — billed as an education retreat — at the Doheny campus of Mount St. Mary's College near downtown. "This is the perfect example of a partnership. I don't need to bring 200 people together if I was just going to do it alone."
A close observer of the Madison public education scene for a number of years, I've seen this tension grow, something reflected in recent referenda resultsandboardelections.
On the one hand, we have statements from top Administrators like "we have the children" to teachers, on the other; staff and parents very unhappy with a top down, one size fits all approach to many issues (see the most recent example of substantive changes without public discussion). Parental interest and influence (the use of the term influence does not reflect today's current reality) ranges from those who are extremely active with respect to systemic issues and those active for individual children to various stages of participation and indifference.
In 2006, I believe that parents and citizens continue to have a much smaller role in our K-12 public system governance than they should, given our children's interests and the District's source of funds such as property taxes, fees, sales and income taxes recycled through state and federal spending. Madison's school climate is certainly not unique (Nielsen's Participation Inequality is a good read in this context).
Peter Gascoyne asked some useful questions in response to Gene Hickok's recent Washington Post piece. I "think" that Hickok was driving in the direction of a much more substantive parental role in education.
What if we were to start from scratch? Would we design a similar system? Hopefully not. To the contrary, we would recognize that schooling should fit the cultural and economic system of which it is a part, and we are a long way from the agrarian calendar and factory model which inspired the modern school. Today’s reality is latch-key kids, working moms, high tech, high touch (games and tools): in a word, multitasking. The social order kids are part of is a world with few adult role models. It is the peer group that dominates, which is impressionable, with no institutional memory, flexible to the point of chaos, open, innovative and more than ever in need of structure and adult guidance.
Indeed, the two most pressing needs of modern culture and the economy are a safe place for children to be from dawn till dusk, year ‘round, and mastery of the knowledge and skills kids need to take their place in society when they grow up. No social institution (save only the family) is better prepared to serve these needs than the school. But not as it is presently organized. It should look like the modern high tech firm – open 24/7, year ‘round, with rank established not by time in the saddle but by demonstrated accomplishment.
Imagine a school which is open when the family needs child care and that provides a constant stream of academically oriented enrichment activities; one that is standards-based (not age-based) in which you advance at your own pace. These deceptively simple structural changes would have a profound impact – for example, for whatever reason, students could “stop out” for days, weeks or months at a time, returning to where they left off when they came back. They could do so to join an expedition, live abroad, prepare for exams, participate in Olympic training, or simply take a break.
As the baby boom generation slowly exits the U.S. workplace, a new survey of leaders from a consortium of business research organizations finds the incoming generation sorely lacking in much needed workplace skills — both basic academic and more advanced “applied” skills, according to a report released today.
The report is based on a detailed survey of 431 human resource officials that was conducted in April and May 2006 by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management. Its objective was to examine employers’ views on the readiness of new entrants to the U.S. workforce — recently hired graduates from high schools, two-year colleges or technical schools, and four-year colleges.
“The future workforce is here, and it is ill-prepared,” concludes the report.
The findings reflect employers’ growing frustrations over the preparedness of new entrants to the workforce. Employers expect young people to arrive with a core set of basic knowledge and the ability to apply their skills in the workplace – and the reality is not matching the expectation.
With the shift from manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, the call for workers schooled in the sciences, technology, engineering and math is expanding. At the same time, the region also needs more jobs in the sciences to stimulate greater pursuit of those careers.
"Every job out there incorporates science into it," says Creapeau, who has an associate's degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College. "Science isn't just your chemistry, physics, classes like that. It's analytical skills. It's being able to figure something out with the variables you're given. You know, that's present in every job."
It's an area of social justice in our school district," says Lauren Baker, coordinator of career and technical education at Milwaukee Public Schools. Too few Milwaukee students are exposed to scientists and engineers and need to discover the opportunities in those fields, Baker says. "Our kids can do the kinds of jobs they see around them, but it won't get them out of poverty," Baker says. "STEM occupations get kids out of poverty."
Using broad measures of occupational employment, the four-county Milwaukee area is on par with the national average for jobs in the sciences, math and engineering, especially when health care is included. But Milwaukee lags behind rates in some other nearby cities, including Minneapolis, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Omaha, Neb., and Madison.
"My gut reaction is we're not doing all that well. Madison is doing much better," says Jill Zoromski, managing director for the Milwaukee-based employment recruiting wing of Capital H Group.
Educational Attainment by State: Wisconsin 9th in High School Graduates and 33rd in College Grads
US Census Bureau. The data is aggregated a variety of ways, including by state. Minnesota ranks first in the percentage of population 25 and older who have a high school diploma (Wisconsin is 9th) while Connecticut ranks first in the percentage with Bachelor's degrees at 36.8% (Wisconsin is 33rd at 25%). .xls file.
Adults age 18 and older with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $51,554 in 2004, while those with a high school diploma earned $28,645, according to new tabulations released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Those without a high school diploma earned an average of $19,169.
The series of tables, Educational Attainment in the United States: 2005, also showed advanced-degree holders made an average of $78,093.
It will be interesting to see which way the Madison school district goes - one size fits all ala West High's English 9 & 10 [Bruce King's report] or toward a more rigorous, college prep/technical curriculum. One hopeful sign is Johnny Winston Jr.'s recent statement that education is "not one size fits all". We'll see how this plays out and if the school board is active on this question.
Deasy has vowed to raise the county's test scores, which have increased in recent years, by reallocating staff to the system's worst-performing schools, bolstering teacher recruitment and retention, improving parental participation, and giving children more opportunities and better training to participate in Advanced Placement courses.
"You need not be concerned about the level of gravity in which we take it," Deasy told the board. "You need to be concerned about the celebration when we meet our goals."
Latest on the Madison School District's Policy Change Regarding Credit for Non-MMSD Courses
Here is the official wording of the new MMSD policy regarding students taking non-MMSD courses. 78K PDF. See my earlier post on this unpublished change:
A. Taking outside courses (other than Youth Options) if a student wishes to receive credit toward graduation.
The course must be pre-approved by the principal.
The course may only be an elective.
A student may only receive elective credit toward graduation provided the District does not offer a comparable course, if a student receives credit it will be reflected as pass/fail.
Elective credits toward graduation shall be granted in the following manner:
No more than 1 elective credit per year. No more than 1 elective credit in the same subject. more than 2 elective credits may be applied to the total graduation requirement.
The student’s transcript shall only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, if any, and the pass/fail grade.
No grades will be included as part of a student’s GPA.
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the guardian of the student or student.
B. Taking outside courses if a student does not wish to receive credit.
The course must be pre-approved by the principal.
The course may only be an elective.
The student’s transcript may only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, and the pass/fail grade unless the student or his/her parent/guardian request that the student’s grade appear on the transcript in which case the student ’s grade will appear on the transcript.
No grades shall be included as part of a student’s GPA.
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the parent of the student or student.
Millions of American children struggle in school daily because of serious learning problems. The causes are often unknown, specific problems can be difficult to pinpoint, and the long-term effects hard to predict.
Research in the field of learning problems took off in the 1960s, when the first federal funds were earmarked to support children with specific learning disabilities. Experts know more now than ever before, but the evolution of that knowledge also parallels the rise of standardized tests and the current era of high-stakes testing. The tension between the demand for academic success and the stubborn reality of a problem makes learning difficulties one of the most contentious topics in an increasingly competitive and educated society.
It comes as no surprise that when a child can't read or write or pay attention -- and when the problem doesn't go away -- parents, educators, experts, and policymakers often collide in an earnest struggle to find answers.
The landscape of learning problems encompasses a range of expert opinions. Different approaches to terminology and treatment reflect that range. Some learning specialists use the phrase "learning differences" to describe cognitive strengths and weaknesses without labels that they believe may erode children's self-esteem and motivation to succeed. Neurologists and other learning specialists prefer the phrase "learning disabilities" to describe specific neurocognitive breakdowns in otherwise bright children and to underscore the existence of disabling conditions.
Some students crave a class that their school doesn’t offer. Others want to fortify their high school transcripts before college-admissions officers review those records.
Jessica B. Byerly, 17, had her own reasons for signing up for an online course as a junior: Her schedule was so packed with academic classes the previous year, she was forced to give up her lunch period. She wanted it back.
"I was stressed out all the time," recalled Ms. Byerly, now a senior at University High School in Normal, Ill. Taking an online Advanced Placement literature and composition course outside the traditional school day "gave me a lot of options," she said. "I liked the flexible scheduling of it."
Interest in online school courses is surging nationwide, especially at the high school level, according to those who follow trends in educational technology. Much of that demand is coming not from home-school students or students seeking to take all their courses online, but from those, like Ms. Byerly, who enroll in just one or two classes a year to meet a particular academic need or resolve a scheduling hang-up.
From Nancy Salvato, a Head Start teacher in Illinois:
In the Summer of 2001 Dame Marie Clay, creator of the New Zealand based Reading Recovery program, and her entourage came to the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, to speak with House Education Committee Staffer Bob Sweet. Her purpose was to ascertain whether Reading Recovery would be eligible for Reading First funding once the bill was passed. Bob explained to Ms. Clay that explicit, systematic phonics instruction had to be included in any program eligible for RF funding because it was one of the necessary key components of reading instruction that had been established through decades of carefully conducted quantitative research.
These findings had been validated in the Report of the National Reading Panel in 2000 and were now going to become an essential part of the Reading First Law. He pleaded with Ms. Clay to use her extensive network of teacher training programs all over the US to help in the implementation of the RF program. He encouraged her to provide the leadership within the RR family to make the modifications necessary, and thus make RR eligible for RF funding consideration.
With a stare as cold as ice, Marie Clay replied that RR would not be making any changes to their program; however, Mr. Sweet could be certain a new description of its components would be written in such a way as to bring it into compliance with the RF law. Momentarily dumbfounded, he maintained that Reading Recovery could not be eligible for RF funding without modification, and his initial estimation then still stands today.
By this time next year, students from across the country could be attending Madison schools online.
The Madison Metropolitan School District is developing a virtual campus and curriculum. The idea has been in the works for several years, but the district hopes to make it widely available for the 2006-2007 school year.
WISC-TV caught up with one Sun Prairie family who uses online education to home school nine of their 10 children.
"I like curriculum with a lot of diversity that's a bit challenging," said Leonard. "Not too heavy on the writing part, not lots of homework, not lots of extra assignments. I just want them to focus on the basics."
I said Ken De Rosa of D-Ed Reckoning would write more on why constructivism doesn't work. He has. See part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
Natalie Solent looks at reasons why constructivism (aka "discovery, experiential, problem-based or inquiry learning" ) remains popular despite lack of results. She thinks people who were good at school are generalizing from their own ah-hah! experiences, forgetting the non-ah-hah! moments and flattering themselves that they figured things out without help. Also, she says, "they don't want to look bossy."
But they're plenty bossy when they teach prospective teachers, writes Tin Drummer.
An education research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive $3 million from the MacArthur Foundation to study the impact of digital media on youth culture, learning, and literacy.
MacArthur's total $50 million investment will support 24 national studies of different aspects of the digital revolution and its educational and societal implications.
"What MacArthur is actually trying to do, with this grant to us, is establish the field of video games and learning," said James Paul Gee, principal investigator in the UW-Madison project.
"It's a new field," Gee said, "We will do the research to establish what the key issues, topics, and approaches in the field ought to be, and the implementation of new programs."
Mike Greiner teaches grammar to high school sophomores in half-hour lessons, inserted between Shakespeare and Italian sonnets. He is an old-school grammarian, one of a defiant few in the Washington region who believe in spending large blocks of class time teaching how sentences are built.
For this he has earned the alliterative nickname "Grammar Greiner," along with a reputation as one of the tougher draws in the Westfield High School English department.
Or, as one student opined in a sonnet he wrote, "Mr. Greiner, I think you're torturing us."
Greiner, 43, teaches future Advanced Placement students at the Chantilly school. Left on their own to decide where to place a comma, "they'll get it right about half of the time," he said. "But half is an F."
Ten or 20 years ago, Greiner might have been ostracized for his views or at least counseled to keep them to himself. Grammar lessons vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. A generation of teachers and students learned grammar through the act of writing, not in isolated drills and diagrams.
Today, Greiner is encouraged, even sought out. Direct grammar instruction, long thought to do more harm than good, is welcome once more
One of my high school English teachers was just like Greiner.
The first comprehensive look at New York City’s failing students has found that nearly 140,000 people from ages 16 to 21 have either dropped out of high school or are already so far behind that they are unlikely to graduate.
The study, which the New York City Department of Education is to present to the State Board of Regents today, for the first time sheds light on a population of students who for decades have been relegated to the shadows of the city’s sprawling school system. The study was conducted by the Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting group, and was paid for with $2.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I think we need to be careful about what we assume when we are talking about students of color in the schools. The children of color in our schools include a growing number of children whose parents, regardless of racial or ethnic identity, are highly educated with degrees ranging from the BA/BS levels to PhD, law, and medical degrees. Many have attended schools or come from communities with high numbers of professionals of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, or American Indian heritage. As our businesses and higher educational institutions hire more diverse professionals, we will see more children of color from middle and upper income families.
Children of color with highly educated parents historically have had trouble getting access to advanced educational opportunities regardless of their academic preparation or ability. And we are seeing a concurrent relocation to private schools, suburbs, and other cities because the parents have every bit as high expectation for their children as any other parents.
A major study of restructuring the state's school funding system has produced a plan its author predicts could double academic achievement among Wisconsin students for 6.8% more money annually than the state spends currently.
The study by Allan Odden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor, is more than a year in the making and has included input by some of the state's most influential education policy makers. However, members of the task force who have been advising Odden say it is still a work in progress, and major disagreements arose Friday at a meeting at which he released detailed cost estimates for his plan.
"Nobody agrees with everything," Odden conceded, "but there's been no great revolts."
Odden is slated to present the plan at a hearing next week of a special legislative council on the school-aid formula, which is headed by state Sen. Luther Olsen ( R-Ripon), a member of Odden's task force.
The council will also hear about two other plans, one from Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) and the other from the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, Olsen said.
Jack Norman, research director for the Institute for Wisconsin's Future, who helped draft the funding plan for the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, called Odden's plan "really terrific." But he disagreed with some of the details, including how it would fund special education and its reduced funding for high school electives.
It is difficult to get through a day in an American school without hearing maxims such as these: "To succeed, you must believe in yourself," and "To teach, you must relate the subject to the lives of students."
But the Brookings Institution is reporting today that countries such as the United States that embrace self-esteem, joy and real-world relevance in learning mathematics are lagging behind others that don't promote all that self-regard.
onsider Korea and Japan.
According to the Washington think tank's annual Brown Center report on education, 6 percent of Korean eighth-graders surveyed expressed confidence in their math skills, compared with 39 percent of U.S. eighth-graders. But a respected international math assessment showed Koreans scoring far ahead of their peers in the United States, raising questions about the importance of self-esteem.
Reading First: The Lie of Robert Sweet of Errors and Misconceptions in Washtington Post
Trying to find the truth in education, like in most areas in American society, is fraught with dilemma -- most public commentors are either incompetent or bald-faced liars.
Robert W. Sweet, Jr. likely falls into both categories.
See previous posts of regarding his comments on this site, and his letter to the Washington Post here. Robert Sweet's title is Former Professional Staff Member Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives Committee Staffer for the Reading First law.
First, let's place all this into context. The Inspector General's Reading First report (hereafter IGRF), published September 2006, audited the Reading First Grant Application Process and reported problems. Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post wrote an article about the IGRF Report, and Robert Sweet responded to the Grunwald article in a letter to the Washington Post editor. The crux of the Sweet letter was to allege, point-by-point, each significant error made the Grunwald in his article interpreting the IGRF findings.
I'm not going to review either Grunwald's article nor Sweet's response point-by-point, and I have not read or studied the IGRF fully, so I'm not prepared to do so. To prove Robert Sweet a liar will only require comparing one, his first, claim of "error" he's alleged with the actual language of the IGRF.
Here is Sweet's first alleged error by Grunwald.
1. Grunwald: "The Reading First panels that oversaw state applications were stacked with department officials and other phonics fans."
Correction: Department officials were not on panels that judged state applications.
Sweet's comment shows his art of misdirection -- his "correction" does not refute Grunwald's interpretation. It's true that Department officials were not on the panels, but as the IGRF details, quoted below, it was the Department officials who actually judged the applications from the States' perspective.
Let's read the actual language of the IGRF report, at length (with minimal editting).
Section 1203(c)(2)(A) states that the Secretary, in consultation with the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL), shall convene a panel to evaluate applications and that, at a minimum, the panel shall include: three individuals selected by the Secretary, three individuals selected by NIFL, three individuals selected by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and three individuals selected by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). We have determined that each of the four organizations nominated at least three individuals to serve on the expert review panel; however, the Department failed to ensure that each State application was reviewed by a properly constituted panel.
After selecting the panelists, the Department created subpanels made up of five panelists each to review the State applications and recommend either approval or disapproval to the Secretary. None of the subpanels possessed adequate representation from each of the organizations identified [as required by law].
The Department created a total of 16 subpanels to review the State applications. A majority of the panelists were nominated by the Department for 15 of the 16 subpanels; and 7 of the 16 subpanels consisted entirely of Department-selected panelists. None of the subpanels included a representative from each of the nominating organizations and there is no indication that the subpanels ever met as one large panel to review the State applications and/or recommend approval or disapproval to the Secretary.
The Department created the Reviewer Guidance for the Reading First Program (Reviewer Guidance), which describes the process by which panelists will review applications and provide their comments. The Reviewer Guidance, which the Department provided to panelists, states that it is the reviewer’s responsibility to provide a rating for each review criterion and constructive strength and weakness comments on the Technical Review Form. The guidance states that the panel chair will complete an additional summary sheet, called the Panel Chair Summary, which will reflect a consensus rating and supporting comments for each criterion. The guidance also states that the Panel Chair Summary will provide an overall consensus recommendation for approval or disapproval of the application.
The Reading First Guidance also states that SEAs “will have an opportunity to address the issues and concerns raised by the expert panel reviewers.”
The panelists adequately documented their reasons for stating that an application was unready for funding. The panelists recorded their individual comments on the Technical Review Forms, and then met to discuss these comments. The panel chair then entered a consensus rating on a Panel Chair Summary, which was submitted to the Department’s Reading First office. The Panel Chair Summary appeared to contain constructive comments to support the panel’s ratings.
After the panel chair submitted the Panel Chair Summaries to the Reading First office, the Reading First Director and his assistant created what they called an “Expert Review Team Report.” This report was provided to the States. No other documents reflecting the expert review panel’s comments were provided to the States.
The Reviewer Guidance states: “the conference call between the panelists and the SEA that will take place after the review of the SEA’s application has been established so that the State may receive direct feedback from the expert review panel.” In actuality, only the Reading First Director and his assistant conducted these calls. By conducting these conferences and writing the document that was sent to the SEA, the Reading First Director and his assistant cut off any direct contact between States and the expert review panelists and effectively controlled the feedback States received on their applications.
According to the Reading First Director, he and his assistant created the Expert Review Team Reports to give States a distilled, organized version of the panel’s comments that would show them which areas they needed to address. However, we found the Department’s Expert Review Team Reports were not always accurate representations of the expert review panelists’ comments. The Reading First Director and his assistant changed panelists’ comments, left off others, and added comments of their own. In a number of cases, the Department generalized or omitted specific questions or suggestions. In other situations the Department’s Expert Review Team Report exaggerated or misstated the panelists’ concerns.
The IGRF then preceded to give examples of how this process affects the States. The example states were Nevada, New York, Georgia, Virginia, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. Here's what the IGRF says about the Wisconsin experience:
Wisconsin submitted its application four times prior to receiving approval. The Panel Chair Summaries for Wisconsin’s submissions often included comments that ran several pages for each criterion. One Panel Chair Summary was 88 pages long while the Department’s Expert Review Team Report was only 4 pages and failed to capture most of what was prepared by the panel chair. Further, the Department’s Expert Review Team Report often did not include any of the panel chair’s specific concerns and simply restated the application criteria requirements instead.
Q.E.D. The proof is complete. Without question, Robert Sweet is a liar. It only required reading the first 14 pages of the IGRF to prove that. That he lied regarding a clear statement in Audit, should we assume mistake only, and argue that "Okay, he made a mistake there, but his other points are true"? I think not.
I remember a famous H.L. Mencken story which is apropos. Understanding that Mencken was a misogynist doesn't change its effect for me. As the story goes (in the 1930's), Mencken was to have said to others, that he can get any woman to sleep with him for enough money. So at a dinner party, he asks a woman across the table if she would sleep with him for $10,000. She thought about it a little, then said "yes". Then Mencken asked if she would sleep with him for $5. "What kind of woman do you think I am?", she retorted. To which Mencken replied, "I've already established that. Now we're just negotiating the price."
I've already established the character of Robert Sweet. Further discussion of his character and views is a waste of time.
Here's a math problem for you: Count the excuses people are trotting out for why schoolkids in New York City and State did poorly in the latest round of math scores. The results showed just 57% of the city's and 66% of the state's students performing at grade level - and a steady decline in achievement as kids got older.
It's about family income, said an article in The New York Times. "The share of students at grade level in affluent districts was more than twice as big as in impoverished urban districts."
It's about unfair funding levels, said state education Secretary Richard Mills.
It's about class size, said activist Leonie Haimson.
Wrong again, claimed other observers. The real culprit was a new test.
If, like me, you're running out of fingers - and patience - there's a reason. Nobody spinning the test scores is zeroing in on the single biggest reason math achievement in New York City and state lags and will continue to lag: Our schools use a far-too-fuzzy curriculum that fails to give kids rigorous instruction in the basics.
In New York City, the program required in the vast majority of schools is called Everyday Mathematics. Chancellor Joel Klein swears by it. If you ask administrators to explain it, they'll use just enough jargon to make it sound decent.
But the truth is, Everyday Math systematically downplays addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, which everyone knows are the foundations for all higher math. Instead of learning those basic four operations like the backs of their hands, students are asked to choose from an array of alternative methods, such as an ancient Egyptian method for multiplication. Long division is especially frowned upon.
The performance of American students in mathematics is mediocre at best. In many cases, mathematics instruction is not serving our children's best interests. In order to help all students achieve success in school mathematics courses, have access to adequate preparation for the broadest options in high school math and science courses, and the opportunity to advance into mathematics based college courses and careers, it is important to examine the direction of recent attempts at mathematics education reform.
Thinking about getting an online education? USNews.com's E-Learning Guide lays out detailed information gathered directly from more than 2,800 traditional colleges and virtual universities. Select one of the options below to find the online degree or certificate that's right for you.
n this report, which draws on data from Chicago public elementary schools in the 1990s, the authors present a framework of essential supports and community resources that facilitate school improvement. The authors provide evidence on how the essential supports contribute to improvements in student learning, and they investigate how community circumstances impact schools’ ability to embrace the essential supports.
The authors offer empirical evidence on the five essential supports—leadership, parent-community ties, professional capacity, student-centered learning climate, and ambitious instruction—and investigate the extent to which strength in the essential supports was linked to improvements in student learning, and the extent to which weakness was linked to stagnation in learning gains.
The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.
Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.
The purpose of high school is to ensure that all of our students leave ready for college, jobs and civic involvement. Our traditional, comprehensive high schools today look and feel much like they have for generations. However, the world our students will live and work in has changed dramatically.
The structure of high schools has served society well by preparing young people for the world they were entering. There were good, family supporting jobs that didn't require a high school diploma. The type of classroom teaching strategies that were employed worked well for the post high school plans of our students.
It is becoming increasingly clear however, that not only four year colleges, but also any post secondary education or job training program requires a substantial background in mathematics, science, social studies and language arts.
We need to dramatically change our high schools. This is not a reflection of current high school teachers or their teaching methods. It is a reflection of a changing society. The needed reforms at high school have to be concentrated on making a high level of demanding coursework accessible to all students. To accomplish this goal requires that we change the way we relate to students and that we implement a wide variety of teaching strategies in every class.
The education world has not been oblivious to this need for change. There have been many efforts, across the country, to change high schools, including in our own district. However, high school reform has rarely addressed the underlying problem -- the high school classroom.
To meet the needs of every student, the student, not the content of the course, must be at the center of our work. It's obvious that the content is critical, for that is what will prepare students for adult success. But first, everything from our teaching methods to the way we inculcate positive behaviors must begin with the student and not the textbook. We have to use our knowledge of how children learn to create classroom strategies that connect with students' own experiences and relate what we want them to learn to its use in the real world.
Regardless of how our high schools look there must always be three goals for our students: ensure that every student gains the knowledge and skills to be a successful adult, provide the opportunity for every student to grow academically and socially, and to learn to be an active participant in the society in which they live.
To reach these three goals we must continue to foster high academic achievement; we must close the achievement gap among different groups of students and we must promote civic and personal growth among our students.
We are beginning the journey of redesigning our high schools. This will take creativity, commitment and our best thinking. It will take all of us, collectively, having the will to find the way so that a diploma from our high schools can provide a ticket to the future for all of our students.
Conference on High School Task Force recommendations
The State Superintendent will host a conference on October 20 on the recommendations of the High School Task Force, which she appointed:
A: Encourage educators and policymakers to move outside of existing structures and pursue innovation.
B: Give students the opportunity to engage in rigorous, authentic learning experiences that are relevant to their learning needs and future ambitions.
C: Create smaller, personalized learning environments and require learning and lifelong education plans for individual students.
D: Promote and enhance partnerships among schools, parents, businesses, and communities, linking community resources with school programs and curriculum
New Castle School District of New Castle, Indiana, is deploying the Meru Networks Wireless LAN System across its district to enable its more than 4,000 students and 500 staff and faculty to access a broad range of wireless voice and data applications. When completed, the wireless deployment will span New Castle's seven elementary schools, a middle school, high school and vocational school, the district's administration building and its technology center.
With a wireless LAN and several mobile computer labs, New Castle could allow entire classrooms to use computing resources efficiently and cost-effectively. In addition, the district wanted a solution that could be used for both data and voice over IP, allowing staff to keep in touch as they move about the school's campus during the workday.
"Education is not one size fits all" - Johnny during a discussion of the initiatives underway within the school district (the last 12 minutes) such as online learning, the Studio School and differentiation.
Levitan asked Art Rainwater if, during his 8 years as Superintendent, the education our children receive is better than it was in 1998? Art said it was and cited a number of examples.
The first month of school is now over for my son who is in first grade. Let me summarize what has transpired in the first 1/9 of the school year so far. Bear in mind that most of my information comes from a six year old with the attention span of a flea.
One assignment asked them to draw pictures of things having numbers, like a clock or calendar. Another asked them to find a picture that told a math story--there are three dogs and two cats in this picture, how many are there all together.
He's learning about math, instead of learning math. Clearly, the focus is on "understanding," and not on developing proficiency in basic math skills. There are opportunity costs associated with this high constructivism approach as well. Time spent on these contrived exercises is time lost in which basic math skills, like addition, could have been taught and practiced.
I hesitate to call what's going on reading since there is so little actual reading going on. The kids were given a DIBELS test and broken up into reading groups. Whether they were broken up by ability, I do not know. Teaching consists mostly of letting kids pick out books they like and letting them "read" them independently. If the kids can't read yet, they can look at the pictures. That's nice.
Again, we see a pedagogy that favors higher performers. Kids who can read already, practice their reading skills. Kids who can't read, practice their picture viewing skills. Which kids do you suppose will make more progress learning to read this year?
There's no more popular education program among politicians and teachers than reducing class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. No other program, however, has spent more tax dollars for less result. Now lawmakers are pushing a bill that would fund class-size reduction (CSR) for additional grades.
SB 1133 would spend nearly $3 billion over seven years to decrease class size in fourth through eighth grade down to 25 students. California's current CSR law has spent around $16 billion over the last 10 years reducing class size to 20 students per K-3 classroom. The ultimate goal of the program, says the state Department of Education, is to "increase student achievement, particularly in reading and mathematics." Under this criterion, CSR comes up short.
A state-sponsored consortium of top research organizations analyzed the program and found no association between the total number of years a student had been in reduced size classes and differences in academic achievement. Further, there's no evidence that CSR helps at upper grade levels. Stanford education professor Michael Kirst says that research has focused on elementary grades, not middle-school levels, as SB 1133 would do. Also, that research has examined reducing class sizes to 20 students or fewer, not to 25 students as the bill would require. Says Kirst, "This is really a dark continent in terms of any research."
In spite of this lack of evidence, some top state education officials believe that SB 1133's minor provisions aimed at improving teacher quality in low-performing schools make the bill worthwhile. Unfortunately, teacher-quality problems in California plunge to a much deeper level. Consider the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) given to prospective teachers in California.
The CBEST was designed, "to test basic reading, mathematics, and writing skills found to be important for the job of an educator," according to the official CBEST website. While teachers should be proficient in these areas, the CBEST sets such low standards that it proves nothing.
One Bay Area teacher who took the test in 2003 described the experience as "a joke" and said: "Compared with other standardized tests like the SAT and GRE, the CBEST is laughable. The math section tests maybe for a fourth-grade skill level, and the verbal sections are hardly better."
Re “Demoting Advanced Placement,” by Joe Berger (On Education column, Oct. 4):
As a college history professor, I see the demotion of Advanced Placement courses as a step toward (not away from) the “frenzied” race toward college and the dumbing down of American education.
In my classes, students who have taken A.P. history are consistently better prepared for intensive college-level work. They know how to read maps and analyze primary sources. They understand that “huffing and puffing through chronological parades of facts and documents” is indeed necessary for any serious understanding of “The Grapes of Wrath,” Montesquieu or Freud.
They understand that history is about change over time, and that yes, the most lively discussion of Reconstruction should give way to study of women’s suffrage, and to the connections between the two topics.
Eliminating rigorous survey courses at the high school level means that colleges have to do remedial work with even the most “elite” students.
Atina Grossmann
New York, Oct. 4, 2006
The writer is a professor of history at Cooper Union.
To the Editor:
Advanced Placement courses are rigorous, but they are not just rote memorization. Students are challenged by the structure, pace and demands of these courses and need that challenge before college.
Many universities award course credit for A.P. scores. Early graduation is possible at some colleges. My daughter graduated early from college using A.P. credit, saving $16,000 in tuition.
Some argue that equally rigorous courses would replace A.P.’s. I’m not convinced. Even the best teachers could lack the time and resources to develop equally challenging replacement curriculums.
Taking Advanced Placement courses as a résumé builder for college can put undue pressure on students not ready for college-level work. Avoiding that pitfall falls to vigilant staff members who limit admission to A.P. courses, parents who are willing to face their child’s true ability level and college admissions policies that penalize students with poor performance in A.P.’s.
Janet Berger
Livingston, N.J., Oct. 5, 2006
The writer is a private college counselor.
•
To the Editor:
Joe Berger’s Oct. 4 column about the possible discontinuation of Advanced Placement courses at Scarsdale High School saddened me.
As a 1987 graduate of another well-regarded public school (Millburn High School, in Millburn, N.J.), I count my A.P. classes among the best aspects of my high school experience, as well as important influences on my undergraduate and graduate paths at Harvard.
Mr. Berger suggests that some schools may discard A.P. classes because it may be too challenging to mix novel reading, debate and discussion with the teaching of the people, places and events essential to survey courses. He also notes that the College Board acknowledges that it does need “to do a better job” explaining how flexible such courses really can be.
Here’s my suggestion: Ask for guidance from my former A.P. teachers at Millburn. They fostered the freedom and creativity — by teaching with primary documents, historical re-enactments, creative writing exercises and discussions of novels and nonfiction books not necessarily on the A.P. syllabuses — that Mr. Berger’s article suggests may be lacking elsewhere.
And they simultaneously covered the “basics,” which simply cannot be neglected.
Erika Dreifus
Westport Island, Me., Oct. 4, 2006
•
To the Editor:
As a teacher of the Advanced Placement language and composition course for many years, I found the A.P. curriculum not only intellectually challenging, but also adaptable to all kinds of creative classroom activities and assignments geared to the analysis of rhetorical devices and logical fallacies.
Rather than insisting on a prescribed reading list of authors and sources, the curriculum focuses on the development of critical thinking, reading and writing skills.
The purpose is to instill in youngsters more awareness of language whose purpose is to manipulate and perhaps exploit, whether in politics, literature, advertising, journalism or any other form of written or spoken communication.
Rather than eliminating such a course, schools should recognize its value for all students. There is nothing esoteric or elite about it, and taking the A.P. test can be optional.
Carol Lefelt
Highland Park, N.J., Oct. 4, 2006
•
To the Editor:
I am a senior in high school, and I take three Advanced Placement courses. I received a 1,250 on my SAT. I have a 3.6 grade point average. It’s not good enough, not by a long shot.
The intense pressure in nearly every school across America to become a success is wearing us down. Four or five A.P. classes is the average for an academically competitive student at my school, and taking seven (out of a seven-period class schedule) is not unusual.
Colleges, parents, teachers, strangers — all want more from us than we can give. A 17-year-old should not have to spend a week in the hospital for exhaustion. Students shouldn’t have to drag themselves through each and every school week on 28 hours of sleep or take a handful of Advil to get through soccer practice or calculus class.
To help African American students experience success in school districts and meet the challenges of the state graduation requirements, Seattle Alliance of Black School Educators in partnership with Seattle Public Schools, Pearson Scott Foreman, National Urban Publishing Companies, and other community organizations will host an Educational Summit on October 13 & 14, 2006 at Mercer Middle School in Seattle.
Many African American students have been left behind in the public education system in the state of Washington, and a transformed education system is needed that honors all students in a holistic manner—accounting for their various worldviews, languages, learning styles, cultural heritages, and multiple intelligences. Therefore, it is critical that our parents and communities must partner with schools, churches and other service providers to maximize resources and to improve student learning outcomes.
Knowing that America is hated in many corners of the world, some of our best high-school students have a few requests.
Their school curricula require them to study the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Why, they ask, aren't they also learning about the Iranian Revolution of 1979?
They're taught foreign languages -- lots of verbs and nouns -- but not enough about the cultures where these languages flourish. Why, they ask, are they not given more insight into the politics and religions of those countries?
I learned of these and other concerns last week, when I interviewed about 70 students taking advanced-placement government and international-affairs courses at two suburban Detroit schools. These juniors and seniors -- they were the 11- and 12-year-olds of Sept. 11, 2001 -- had a good sense of the issues threatening the nation they will inherit. Aware that many of their contemporaries overseas are being taught to hate the U.S., they wonder what confrontations lie ahead when their generation reaches adulthood.
This town’s public high school, well known for turning out some of the nation’s finest college prospects, is contemplating a step that would seem to betray its competitive reputation: eliminating Advanced Placement courses.
Scarsdale High School is a place where 70 percent of the 1,500 students take an A.P. course, and many take five and six to impress college admissions officers with their willingness to challenge themselves. But like a few private schools, Scarsdale is concluding that the A.P. pile-on is helping turn the teenage years into a rat race where learning becomes a calculated means to an end rather than a chance for in-depth investigation, imagination, even some fun to go along with all that amassing of knowledge.
“People nationwide are recognizing what an inhuman obstacle course college admission is, and a big element of that is A.P.,” said Bruce Hammond, director of college counseling at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, which dropped A.P. courses a few years ago.
The panel also will recommend some shifts in teaching techniques, said a panel member, Dr. Susan Landry of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. These include having at-risk children spend more time in small groups that address their specific weaknesses; emphasizing skills like blending sounds (C + AT = CAT), which have been found to be good performance predictors; and training parents to reinforce school lessons.
To be able to blend C+AT, a student must first have a command of phonemic awareness, i.e., the ability to hear three sounds. To be able to read (and therefore blend) C+AT, the student must have a command of sound-symbol correspondence, i.e., the child must know what sounds the letters make when pronoucing C, A, and T.
This is true of absolutely every child, regardless of their so-called learning style.
Effective reading programs (like direct instruction curricula) make absolutley and systematically certain that students possess phonemic awareness and sound-symbol correspondence.
Less effective reading programs (like Reading Recovery and balanced literacy) leave the student to discover or construct phonemic awareness and sound symbol correspondence hapazardly on their own.
Unfortunately, children who struggle to read do not easily (and sometimes never) make these discoveries on their own. Even those who learn to read easily benefit from instruction that builds mastery of phonemic awareness and sound-symbol correspondence.
It's probably natural for leaders of organizations to be upbeat about their institutions, and the nation's school children might not be well-served by superintendents and principals who see public schools as places of disappointment, failure and ineptitude. Even so, the positive, almost buoyant outlook of school leaders nationwide captured in this fourth installment of Reality Check 2006 may come as something of a surprise to reformers and critics, including regulators enforcing No Child Left Behind. In many respects, local school leaders seem to operate on a very different wavelength from many of those aiming to reform public schools. The two groups have different assumptions about how much change today's public schools really need. Even when they see the same problems, they often seem to strive for different solutions.
To most public school superintendents - and principals to a lesser extent - local schools are already in pretty good shape. In fact, more than half of the nation's superintendents consider local schools to be "excellent." Most superintendents (77 percent) and principals (79 percent) say low academic standards are not a serious problem where they work. Superintendents are substantially less likely than classroom teachers to believe that too many students get passed through the system without learning. While 62 percent of teachers say this is a "very" or "somewhat serious" problem in local schools, just 27 percent of superintendents say the same.
Some highlights:
93% of superintendents, and 80% of principals, think public schools offer a better education than in the past, and most (86% and 82%) think the material is harder.
Despite the call from the business community for a great focus on science/math, 59% of superintendents and 66% say that the statement “kids are not taught enough science and math” is not a serious problem in their schools.
77% of superintendents and 79% of principals say that the statement “academic standards are too low, and kids are not expected to learn enough” is not a serious problem in their schools.
51% of superintendents say that local schools are excellent; 43% say they are good.
Only 27% of superintendents, compared with 62% of teachers, say it’s a serious problem that too many students get passed through the system without learning.
76% of superintendents and 59% of principals, compared with 33% of high school teachers, say that students graduating from middle school have the reading, writing, and math skills needed to succeed in high school.
This week, the Virginia Consortium of Social Studies Specialists and College Educators launched a campaign here to get its educational niche a more prominent place in the law as Congress begins to consider revisions in the coming year. The group aims to include social studies test scores in federal formulas used to rate schools.
As the law now stands, the group said Tuesday, subjects such as history, government and geography sometimes get short shrift while schools increase time spent on reading and math.
As a former East High School student who lived through four years of closed campus for lunch, and a parent of current East High students -- one a freshman, the other a junior -- I applaud East High Principal Alan Harris.
I think next year he should be brazen and close campus for lunch for all students, unless they are involved in an off-site program. Ease the hectic lunch schedule of the upperclassmen and set an example for the rest of the city.
Talk about taking back the school! This principal is the best one we have seen since Milt McPike. We are cheering for him in our home.
But that will require another strong group of candidates to step forward.
At least one seat on the board will be open because board member Ruth Robarts is retiring after a decade of service. Board president Johnny Winston Jr. has announced he'll seek re-election. Member Shwaw Vang has not yet said if he'll seek another term.
Among the findings: 5-year-old Montessori students had better reading, math and social skills than 5-year-old non-Montessori children, and 12-year-old Montessori students wrote essays that were more creative and sophisticated than those by 12-year-old non-Montessori students. The study tested two groups of Milwaukee Public Schools students: those who by luck of a lottery got into Craig Montessori on the city's northwest side, and those who didn't.
It reaffirms the benefits of a system started by Maria Montessori 100 years ago, local administrators said, while also boosting the reputation of a city that has increasingly made public school Montessori options available to a poor, urban population.
BOSTON (Reuters) - Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour -- in India.
"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.
Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.
Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English -- a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.
"I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks' coffee," Robison said. "We did our own form of summer school all summer."
The outsourcing trend that fueled a boom in Asian call centers staffed by educated, low-paid workers manning phones around the clock for U.S. banks and other industries is moving fast into an area at the heart of U.S. culture: education.
When Dylan and Matthew Goode bounded into the Score Educational Center in Alameda, Dylan, 6, asked for a turn with the ladybug-shaped computer mouse. And Matthew, 4, wanted to know when he could shoot hoops, the reward for finishing each hourlong lesson.
Once in front of computer screens with headphones on, they slumped in their chairs, swung their legs and talked back at animated math and phonics sessions.
The academic push now starts before kindergarten. Parents worried about the rigors of elementary school enroll their tots in tutoring programs and academic preschools or sit them in front of videos that promise to teach children as young as 15 months their ABC basics in a few short weeks.
AB 2975 would have labeled California students "proficient" if they were on track to pass the state's graduation exam, which requires partial mastery of 7th and 8th grade math and 9th and 10th grade English by the end of 12th grade. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto message was succinct.
Redefining the level of academic achievement necessary to designate students as 'proficient' does not make the students proficient."
Not unless the word means "no more than four years below grade level."
Demands for more tests and more academic rigor are spurring schools to consider something that makes most students shudder: more time in class.
Massachusetts is paying for longer days at 10 schools this year. Minnesota is considering whether to add five weeks to the school calendar. A smattering of schools nationwide, including schools in Iowa, North Carolina and California, already have increased the time some students spend in class.
The argument that students should spend more time in school isn’t new.
“A Nation at Risk,” the landmark 1983 report dissecting America’s education challenges, recommended that schools run seven hours (up from about six today) and 200 to 220 days (up from a current average of 180) to accommodate more rigorous instruction. KIPP charter schools, started in 1994, rely on longer days and Saturday school to teach students.
But the argument is gaining support as increased math and English testing required by the federal No Child Left Behind law has forced schools to focus on the basics at the expense of the arts, physical education and recess.
Loudoun County School Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III announced a partnership this week between the school system and Inova Loudoun Hospital to develop courses that will give more high school students hands-on training in medical professions.
The Claude Moore Charitable Foundation has given the venture a push with a $150,000 donation, which was presented to the partners before Hatrick's "State of Education" address at a Chamber of Commerce meeting Tuesday morning.
The training programs could offer a solution to staffing shortages at hospitals and become a national model, said J. Hamilton Lambert, executive director of the Fairfax County-based foundation.
Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, and students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D.
Out of 50 schools surveyed, Cal ranked 49th and Stanford 31st in how well they are increasing student knowledge about American history and civics between the freshman and senior years. And they're not alone among major universities in being fitted for a civics dunce cap.
Other poor performers in the study were Yale, Duke, Brown and Cornell universities. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the tail-ender behind Cal, ranking 50th. The No. 1 ranking went to unpretentious Rhodes College in Memphis.
One of the biggest concerns of parents for the new school year is this: What kind of kids are in my child's classroom? The answer to this question is particularly difficult for parents of average students, the most forgotten group today.
All parents want their children to be with the nice kids, the bright and well-behaved types who will pull classes up, rather than with kids who will drag them down. In big, economically and ethnically diverse high schools such as mine, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., where there is enormous variation in academic abilities, average kids run the risk of ending up in one of two tracks: in classes full of students with weak skills and lousy attitudes or in so-called advanced courses where they find themselves in over their heads.
A major part of the problem is the anti-tracking movement, which began in the mid-1980s. Since then, tracking has become to education what abortion and gay marriage are to politics — an incendiary topic with fanatics on both sides. So-called progressive teachers and administrators, whose mantra is "every child can learn," want to do away with tracking.
Good teachers, and fancy sounding course labels such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, are supposed to raise the level of all students no matter how varied their skills or abilities. In truth, social engineering — mixing of races and ethnic groups in classes — is what many administrators really prize, while giving lip service to academic rigor.
On the other end of the tracking wars are fanatical parents — usually white, in my experience — who think their kids are geniuses, who must be protected from less talented kids and who are entitled to every advantage and resource the school system has to offer.
They began by seeking balance, and wound up finding perfection.
An unprecedented six Madison School District students attained a perfect score on recent ACT college entrance exams, district officials said Friday.
Just 11 Wisconsin students received a score of 36, the top possible mark, out of 45,500 tested in April and June.
During that period, 178 of 837,000 students nationwide received a perfect composite score in the assessment of English, mathematics, reading and science skills.
"I want to start by saying, 'Wow!' " Pam Nash, the assistant superintendent overseeing Madison's middle and high schools, told the students, their parents and educators Friday at a celebration at West High School.
Though Nash argued the quality of Madison’s public high schools contributed to the scores, she added natural talent, intelligence and hard work from the six students was also crucial to their success.
“Reading is important, and Madison emphasizes that,” Nash said. “But the kids themselves ... chose the academic route.”
But Poppe, a Madison West senior surprised with the outcome of the test, attributes his perfect score to a healthy breakfast and a little practice.
“I did one of the practice tests and made sure to get a good breakfast,” he said. “I think a lot of the classes I took earlier in high school helped, but I think some people are more comfortable in a testing environment.”
Many educators acknowledge that over the past 30 years Alberta has quietly built the finest public education system in Canada. The curriculum has been revised, stressing core subjects (English, science, mathematics), school facilities and the training of teachers have been improved, clear achievement goals have been set and a rigorous province-wide testing programme for grades three (aged 7-8), six (10-11), nine (13-14) and twelve (16-17) has been established to ensure they are met.
It is all paying off. Alberta's students regularly outshine those from other Canadian provinces: in 2004 national tests, Alberta's 13- and 16-year-olds ranked first in mathematics and science, and third in writing. And in international tests they rank alongside the best in the world: in the OECD's 2003 PISA study, the province's 15-year-olds scored among the top four of 40 countries in mathematics, reading and science (see table).
Prior to this fall, students could receive high school credit for non-MMSD courses as long as they obtained prior written approval that the courses they planned to take were deemed worthy of high school credit. I have recently learned that this is no longer true. Rather, the only non-MMSD courses that can currently be approved for high school credit are ones in which a comparable course is not offered ANYWHERE in the District.
Why the change in policy?
Why was it permissible to implement this change in policy without first having open public discussions regarding its pros and cons followed by a BOE vote whether to approve it? This policy change will adversely affect a wide variety of students with learning needs that differ from the norm. These alternative learners include students who attend Shabazz High School or other alternative programs within the MMSD, students with disabilities or long-term illnesses, academically gifted students who learn at a faster pace, and students who lack the means to transport themselves in a timely manner to a District school that offers courses their neighborhood school does not.
The cost to the MMSD of the previous policy was essentially zero, if not negative. On the other hand, the new policy will be highly detrimental to some students who now may fail to graduate from high school due to lack of sufficient high school credits or specific courses required by the District or State of Wisconsin.
Some students affected by this policy change may leave the MMSD for other school districts or alternative schooling options such as home schooling. The latter will lead to loss of $s to the MMSD. Students lose. The MMSD loses. Thus, I urge you to place this item on the agendas for upcoming BOE and Curriculum and Achievement Meetings.
Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures, the New Haven, Connecticut-based school said.
The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They include "Introduction to the Old Testament," "Fundamentals of Physics" and "Introduction to Political Philosophy."
Since I finally have a moment to pause and reflect, I thought I would use one of my infrequent posts to put down some of the things I've discovered thus far. In no particular order...
1. The achievement gap is very, very real. Most of my fourth graders don't know the meaning of simple words like "show" and "pair." Most can't do their 2s times-tables. Most read at least a grade level behind. Most have writing skills that could charitably be called atrocious. It's a miracle that so many of them can find Arizona on a map, because they certainly can't find anything else (but, to be fair, 7th graders were placing "Europe" in Oregon and "Greenland" in Montana).
Then there's the one non-special ed. nine-year-old who I last week taught to read the word "the."
It's not that they can't do it. My kids are a bright, energetic, inquistive bunch. Nor is it that they have no prior knowledge -- it's just floating around in shards, unconnected to anything meaningful. I have to ask this question, though: If thirty students have gone through 4 years of many different schools and understand so little, isn't that a sign that something has gone horribly wrong?
During a visit in March to an honors sophomore English class in an impoverished area of Connecticut, Robyn R. Jackson heard the teacher declare proudly that her students were reading difficult texts. But Jackson noticed that their only review of those books was a set of work sheets that required little thought or analysis.
Jackson, an educational consultant and former Gaithersburg High School English teacher, sought an explanation from a school district official. He sighed and told her, "We have a lot of work to do to help teachers understand what true rigor is."
In an American education system full of plans for better high schools, more and more courses have impressive labels, such as "honors," "advanced," "college prep" and "Advanced Placement." But many researchers and educators say the teaching often does not match the title.
One of the biggest misperceptions among the public is that NCLB sets high academic standards for students and schools, and punishes those who do not meet them. In reality, NCLB does not set any standards, nor does it specify which tests are used to measure student outcomes against those standards. Rather, it only tells the states that they must set their own academic standards, and that they must select the tests used to measure student achievement. (See here for a good overview of the law.)
High school dropouts are significantly less likely than better-educated Americans to vote, trust government, do volunteer work, or go to church, according to a new report that reveals a widening gap in "civic health" between the nation's upper and lower classes.
The report, a portrait of civic life in the United States, finds that Americans' disengagement from their communities during the past few decades has been particularly dramatic among adults who have the least education. Among people who lack a high school diploma, the percentage who have voted plummeted from 1976 to 2004 to 31 percent -- half the 62 percent of college graduates who voted in 2004.
The class divide is the most striking finding of the report, prepared by leading social scientists and released yesterday by the National Conference on Citizenship, a nonprofit organization created by Congress. "High school dropouts are . . . nearly voiceless in a system that fails them," said John Bridgeland, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bush who is chief executive officer of Civic Enterprises and leads the conference's advisory board.
It's the lurking fear of every private-school parent: The kid next door is getting just as good an education at the public school -- free of charge.
Ben and Courtney Nields of Norwalk, Conn., agonized over the issue last year when they moved their daughter Annie from the New Canaan Country School, set on a 72-acre campus, to a public school for first grade. The move was primarily economic -- they have twins entering kindergarten this year and faced tuition bills of $22,500 per child.
"It was like taking your child out of the Garden of Eden," says Mrs. Nields. But Annie thrived at the school. Her confidence grew and the teacher, say the Nieldses, was phenomenal.
Across the country, some schools and education professionals report a growing movement from private to public. Among the possible reasons: Private-school tuition has grown sharply, while some colleges are boosting the number of students they take from public schools. New studies have suggested that public-school students often tested as well or better than their private school peers. And increasingly, public schools are enriching their programs by holding the same kinds of fund-raisers often associated with private schools, such as auctions and capital campaigns.
"But lately there's strong anecdotal evidence of frequent movement from private schools to public schools. There are more choices for parents now."
Some public schools are actively recruiting private-school students. At Torrey Pines Elementary in La Jolla, Calif., Principal Jim Solo began holding monthly tours and meetings for private-school families four years ago. Many students had left for private or charter schools. While he says it was not a main motivator, having students return to the school increased state funding, as the district is paid on a per-pupil basis.
Locally, I've seen movement both ways. A number of parents have left over curriculum and climate issues while others have jumped back in because the public schools offer services or curriculum not available in the private school world. Homeschooling is another growing factor.
Should the grade-level a student is in be based entirely on how old he is or at least partially on how skilled he is? This is the fundamental question underlying the debate over social promotion — the practice of moving students to the next grade regardless of whether they have acquired the minimal skills covered in the previous grade. Advocates of social promotion suggest that it is best to group students by age rather than by skill. Students who are held back a grade are separated from their age-peers and, the argument goes, this social disruption harms them academically. Opponents of social promotion favor requiring students to demonstrate minimal skills on a standardized test before they receive automatic promotion to the next grade.
Until now the bulk of the research favored social promotion. Most studies found that students who were retained tended to fare less well academically than demographically similar students who were promoted. The problem with this previous research is that it was never entirely clear whether retained students did worse because they were retained or because whatever caused them to be retained led to worse outcomes. This is especially a problem because these previous studies examined retention based on educator discretion. If teachers decide that one student should be retained while another demographically similar student should be promoted, they probably know something about those students that suggests that the promoted student has better prospects than the retained student. When researchers match students on recorded demographic factors they cannot observe or control statistically for what a teacher saw that led that teacher to promote one student while retaining the other.
I've been something of a cheerleader on the use of new media in the classroom, principally in the form of digital textbooks. But similar to what we've already seen with the calculator, such technology has the potential to inflict damage in the classroom.
Exhibit A: Right Wing Prof flipped his lid a couple of days ago over a math lesson titled "Making Money from Lemons" (produced by Microsoft no less--oh, the irony). Just one problem: the lesson didn't actually involve any, you know, math. Just a bunch of mouse clicks that an orangutan could be trained to perform.
Exhibit B: Educomputer vendor Steve Hargadon did an interview with author Larry Cuban on his 2001 book "Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom". I highly recommend all of Hargadon's post, but I find this paragraph particularly important:
The MATS provides an opportunity for academically advanced students in grades three through nine to take an out-of-grade-level standardized test. Students in grades three through six may take the Explore test (essentially an ACT designed for eighth graders); students in grades six through eight may take the SAT test; and students in grades six through nine may take the ACT test. For students who routinely hit the ceiling of their district and state level tests, an out-of-grade-level test may be the only way to truly know what they know. Test results may be used for advocacy purposes, as well as to access a wide array of advanced educational experiences across the country.
The state laid out Tuesday what it wants every kindergarten student to know, an exhaustive list that includes everything from writing letters and identifying shapes to understanding that hurting others is wrong and the value of a sense of humor.
Illinois has had broad learning goals for all students since 1997 but until now hadn't specified what that meant for kindergarten students. Specific goals for clusters of other grades and preschoolers already have been established.
The 172 new "benchmarks," or skills, cover language arts, math, science, social science, physical development and health, fine arts, foreign language and social/emotional developme
The nation's best-known researcher on homework has taken a new look at the subject, and here is what Duke University professor Harris Cooper has to say:
Elementary school students get no academic benefit from homework -- except reading and some basic skills practice -- and yet schools require more than ever.
High school students studying until dawn probably are wasting their time because there is no academic benefit after two hours a night; for middle-schoolers, 1 1/2 hours.
And what's perhaps more important, he said, is that most teachers get little or no training on how to create homework assignments that advance learning.
The controversy over homework that has raged for more than a century in U.S. education is reheating with new research by educators and authors about homework's purpose and design.
No one has gone as far as the American Child Health Association did in the 1930s, when it pinned homework and child labor as leading killers of children who contracted tuberculosis and heart disease. But the arguments seem to get louder with each new school year: There is too much homework or too little; assignments are too boring or overreaching; parents are too involved or negligent.
Sixty-seven students at six Madison high schools have been named semifinalists in the 52nd annual National Merit Scholarship Program, announced today. It is one of the most prestigious academic competitions for high school students nationwide. In addition, 23 students from the surrounding area have also been named semifinalists.
Dropping out of high school has its costs around the globe, but nowhere steeper than in the United States.
Adults who don't finish high school in the U.S. earn 65 percent of what people who have high school degrees make, according to a new report comparing industrialized nations. No other country had such a severe income gap.
Adults without a high school diploma typically make about 80 percent of the salaries earned by high school graduates in nations across Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Countries such as Finland, Belgium, Germany and Sweden have the smallest gaps in earnings between dropouts and graduates.
The figures come from "Education at a Glance," an annual study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The report, released Tuesday, aims to help leaders see how their nations stack up.
Perhaps homework really is out of control in certain (generally affluent) schools and districts. But that would be a far narrower problem than the national epidemic these authors describe. Their books are best understood as part of a broader ideological struggle over the direction of American education. From his approving invocation of Noam Chomsky to his denunciation of testing and other accountability-based reforms, it's clear that Kohn sees homework as just one more instrument of social control. Even the valid points he makes (for instance, that the correlation between homework and academic achievement in some grades doesn't necessarily imply causation) are undercut by his tendentious approach. There's no small irony in a professional provocateur like Kohn accusing respected researchers of being "polemicists" who cherry-pick studies to buttress their preexisting views. Bennett and Kalish, though less overtly political, are just as apt to cast children in the role of an oppressed class.
It's a shame these volumes aren't more credible. Averages notwithstanding, some kids certainly do get buried in assignments of dubious worth -- and in those cases Bennett and Kalish's lobbying tips could prove useful. Similarly, Kohn's insistence that schools justify both the quantity and quality of the work they're assigning is perfectly reasonable. But in the absence of more persuasive evidence that American kids are plagued by excessive, rather than insufficient, academic rigor -- homework included -- parents and policymakers should look elsewhere for a nuanced and reliable guide to this eminently worthy subject. ·
For $9.95 a page she can obtain an “A-grade” paper that is fashioned to order and “completely non-plagiarized.” This last detail is important. Thanks to search engines like Google, college instructors have become adept at spotting those shop-worn, downloadable papers that circulate freely on the Web, and can even finger passages that have been ripped off from standard texts and reference works.
A grade-conscious student these days seems to need a custom job, and to judge from the number of services on the Internet, there must be virtual mills somewhere employing armies of diligent scholars who grind away so that credit-card-equipped undergrads can enjoy more carefree time together.
e represented Wisconsin in the National Spelling Bee. Now Robert Marsland III has another claim to fame.
The Madison high school senior earned a perfect score on the SAT college entrance exam, a feat all the more impressive because the test was revamped and expanded this year, with a writing essay added.
Last year, 1,050 students got a perfect 1600 score, according to the College Board, which administers the test. This year, just 238 students earned the new perfect score of 2400.
in March, The New York Times published a major education story under the headline “Schools Cut Back Subjects To Push reading and Math.” The article claimed that “thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math requirements laid out in No Child left Behind [...] by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.”1 The headline appeared “above the fold” in the Sunday edition of the Times, the most valuable and influential real estate in american print journalism.
Predictably, the rest of the media quickly picked up the story in a series of ripples extending outward to other newspapers and magazines to radio and finally to television, cycling back to newspapers in the form of outraged editorials. By the time the story hit the late-night talk shows and drive-time airwaves, commentators had begun to express near hysterical dismay that social studies, science, and the arts were all but disappearing from american schools.
Not so fast. as often happens when complex educational issues encounter the popular media, the extent of the problem was blown out of proportion. The original study on which the Times based its story had actually found that about one third of districts reported that their elementary schools had reduced social studies and science “somewhat” or “to a great extent,” and about one fifth said the same of art and music.
The United States, long the world leader in higher education, has fallen behind other nations in its college enrollment and completion rates, as the affordability of American colleges and universities has declined, according to a new report.
The study, from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, found that although the United States still leads the world in the proportion of 35- to 64-year-olds with college degrees, it ranks seventh among developed nations for 25- to 34-year-olds. On rates of college completion, the United States is in the lower half of developed nations.
“Completion is the Achilles’ heel of American higher education,’’ said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in San Jose, Calif., and Washington.
Wisconsin's "Report Card" [200K PDF]: Preparation: B+, Participation A-, Affordability: F, Completion: A, Benefits: B- and Learning: I. 2004 Report Card.
In a striking experiment about stereotypes and academic achievement, African-American seventh graders performed better in school months after they were asked to spend 15 minutes thinking about their identity and values.
The results of the study, published in today's issue of the journal Science, demonstrate how racial stereotypes can adversely affect minority students and how simple interventions can partly counteract those stresses, researchers said on Thursday. . . .
At the time, in 2004, the small-schools movement was growing across the country, and it had a powerful backer in Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
But just two years later, criticism from parents and educators has put the future of small schools in jeopardy across the country.
``We made a mistake trying to push autonomy really hard, and the community blew back at us," said Mark Whitson, a journalism teacher at Lebanon High School. ``Parents want us to slow our pace of change until they know what we are doing."
The small-schools concept calls for dividing large high schools into groups of about 300 students with similar academic interests. (Lebanon was divided into ``academies" devoted to communications; farming, natural resources, and health; arts, business, community and family affairs; and engineering and other technical fields.)
The groups then take classes together for four years, with the same teachers. Proponents say students learn more because they and their teachers get to know one another better.
I have a friend that teaches at MATC--she tells me that she is shocked at the lack of math and writing ability of the Madison high school students coming to MATC's two year technical programs. MATC is very important to Wisconsin's future. What is happening at the high school level that these students are not prepared properly? Anyone have any thoughts?
Two weeks ago, Kerry and Lee Schmelzer left their Montana dream home and relocated to a rental in Reno. Pulling up stakes wasn't easy, but, they ultimately decided, it had to be done. Their 13-year-old daughter, Emma, needed a new school.
For years, the Schmelzers had struggled to challenge Emma academically at their local public schools. Although some years were better than others, they believed Emma wasn't getting what she needed. "She learned a lot of things," says her mom, Kerry. "But she learned them really, really quickly. She spent most of her time waiting around for her classmates to catch up." In spite of skipping two grades by the ninth grade, Emma remained well ahead of her peers at school, and the family agreed that they needed to make a change.
Last week, Emma began attending the Davidson Academy, a school for profoundly gifted students.
In many respects, Emma's story is not unusual. The needs of many gifted children are largely overlooked, some educational experts say. Not only does this practice prevent these students from reaching their full academic potential, but it has other surprisingly serious consequences for them as well.
"There is a pervasive myth that gifted kids will be fine on their own," says Jane Clarenbach, director of public education at the National Assn. for Gifted Children. "I think it's simply an excuse not to deliver the necessary services."
Many states, including Maryland and Virginia, are reporting student proficiency rates so much higher than what the most respected national measure has found that several influential education experts are calling for a move toward a national testing system.
A recent study by Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, found that states regularly inflate student achievement. In 12 states studied, the percentage of fourth-graders proficient in reading climbed by nearly two percentage points a year, on average.
What I think is unfortunate is that Mathews' article has set off something of a false debate, namely about whether all these people who support using NAEP as a national test are right or wrong. Thing is, the Fordham report (pdf) looked at a multiple routes to national standards including my favored route of common standards developed by the states themselves. I actually think using the NAEP for this is a lousy idea and that the states are not going to enforce anyone else's standards anyway, hell they mostly won't enforce their own now under No Child. Worth reading the entire report not just the clips.
At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?
Eighteen and temperamental, Mickey, as everyone calls him, hounded the dean, insisting that she take another look at his placement exam. The dean stood firm. Mr. Walton’s anger grew. He took the exam a second time. Same result.
“I flipped out big time,’’ Mr. Walton said.
Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.
Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.
According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology.
For many students, the outlook does not improve after college. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently found that three-quarters of community college graduates were not literate enough to handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce.
“It’s the math that’s killing us,’’ Dr. McKusik said.
The sheer numbers of enrollees like Mr. Walton who have to take make-up math is overwhelming, with 8,000 last year among the nearly 30,000 degree-seeking students systemwide. Not all those students come directly from high school. Many have taken off a few years and may have forgotten what they learned, Dr. McKusik said.
As part of University of Colorado president Hank Brown's decision to tackle the tough issue of grade inflation, CU regent Tom Lucero is inviting members of the public to contribute their thoughts on the subject:
Even cum laude graduates sometimes lack the skills needed to succeed in today's workplace. This can prove to be an expensive and frustrating problem for new employers who must allocate the time and resources to adequately train new-hires.
I would like to invite you to participate in a discussion about grade inflation and its impact on the quality of our college graduates.
--What influence does grade inflation have on individuals, society and the economy?
--What are your experiences with the caliber of work from recent college graduates?
--What measures can be taken to better prepare students for life in the real world?
We are beginning a debate at the University of Colorado about the important issue of grade inflation. Please send your comments and thoughts to tom.lucero@colorado.edu.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni took up grade inflation in its 2003 report, Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation. It's a good starting point for anyone interested in thinking about the issue.
arents and teachers call him St. Paul's low-key whiz kid. Jake Heichert grew up spurning studying, sleeping through the occasional exam — and, most recently, earning a rare pair of perfect scores on the ACT and SAT.
Last week, his family sat around their living room, wondering how it all happened.
Rich and Susan Heichert's only child received a 2400 on his SAT college assessment test in May. In February he scored a 36 on his ACT. He earned perfect 5s on his Advanced Placement tests in chemistry, U.S. history, and government and politics.
Oh, and calculus, Jake added. Almost forgot.
His parents searched for an explanation.
"Do you study, Jake?" Susan asked.
"We've never seen it," Rich added.
"They told us he might have a learning disability," Susan said of the day Jake was born, oxygen deprived.
Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services today announced it has identified 20 Wisconsin schools that have significantly narrowed the achievement gap between higher- and lower-performing student groups during the 2003-04 and 2004-05 school years. This is the first year Standard & Poor's conducted an achievement gap analysis in Wisconsin.
The 20 schools are located in 19 school districts throughout the state. One school district--Madison Metropolitan School District--has two schools that have significantly narrowed at least one achievement gap between student groups. And one of those two schools, was able to narrow the gap among multiple student groups.
Of the 20 Wisconsin schools that have narrowed the achievement gap, one school is recognized for reducing its black-white gap, two schools for narrowing the gap between Hispanic and white students, and 17 schools are recognized for narrowing the gap between economically-disadvantaged students and all students.
Brown Deer Middle School in the Brown Deer School District was the only school recognized for narrowing the achievement gap between its black and white students.
Two schools: Preble High School in the Green Bay Area School District and Cherokee High School in the Madison Metropolitan School District are recognized for narrowing the gap between Hispanic and white students.
Black Hawk Middle School and Cherokee Middle School were hailed along with 18 other Wisconsin schools for significantly narrowing achievement gaps between groups of students in different demographic groups.
Madison was the only district to have two schools cited for progress in this area, which has drawn increased scrutiny and concern among educators and parents nationwide over the past decade. In addition, Cherokee was the only school that was able to narrow the gap among multiple student groups.
"This is a great boost for our staff as we go back to school next week," Cherokee Principal Karen Seno said. "It's an absolute recognition of their professionalism, commitment and the effectiveness of their practices."
Saying that the federal government has "done about as much" as it can in many ways, Spellings noted that states need to do much of the remaining work on NCLB in order to meet the goal of reading proficiency by 2014.
"They have made a lot of progress on standards, measurement, data and focusing on teachers' credentials," she said, adding that there is still work to be done involving school structure. Among areas for focus, she cited how courses are allocated, the use of personnel and academic rigor.
"There are a lot of issues that relate to the grown-ups and that is the next big thing. I mean, how is Joel Klein going to do school restructuring in low-performing schools?" she said, referring to the chancellor of New York City schools.
he numbers are astonishing and unfortunately all too familiar – while four in five high school students expect to complete a college degree, fewer than a third will actually emerge from the high-school-to-college pipeline with a baccalaureate six years after high school graduation. A growing number of parents see a college degree as absolutely necessary for their child’s success, and more students believe that they will attain this goal. But the sad fact is that only one in three will complete a college degree. This policy brief examines the troubling gap between educational aspirations, what students (and parents) need to do to achieve those expectations, and what states are doing to better communicate to students and parents the importance of being academically prepared for college and the steps to take to achieve that level of preparation.
Students (and their parents) expect they’ll finish high school and go to college
Most high school students today (and their parents) believe they should – and will – graduate from high school and complete some form of postsecondary education. As the graph below makes clear, this expectation has been rising since 1980 for every racial and socioeconomic group.
Madison students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scored significantly above their state and local peers, continuing a trend of more than a decade.
Madison students' composite score was 1251, well above Wisconsin students' composite score of 1188 and the national composite of 1021. (See tables below for details.) The composite score combines a student's math and verbal scores on the test. Each section of the test is worth 800 points.
For the first time, the SAT was expanded to include a writing test, however, several Madison seniors took the SAT prior to the change, so the writing sample is not included in the composite totals. But the 370 Madison students who did take the writing test had a mean score of 599, compared with 577 for state students and 497 nationally.
The participation rate by Madison seniors was 22.6%, down from 24% last year. Only 402 students took the SAT test. Most Madison students take the ACT college entrance exam, with 70% of Madison seniors taking the ACT in 2005-2006.
At a press conference in Washington, College Board officials blamed the drop in scores not on increased test difficulty, but on fewer students taking it more than once. They emphasized, however, their concern that SAT reading scores have been virtually unchanged in the past 30 years and that students are reporting a decline in the amount of composition and grammar lessons they are getting in their English courses.
The officials rejected the view of many students, counselors and SAT preparatory course teachers that the score drop was the result of fatigue from the longer test. The new SAT is 3 hours and 45 minutes and can take more than four hours, counting breaks.
The highlight of the standards report is: It Takes a Vision: How Three States Created Great Academic Standards by me [200K PDF
]. Working as a freelancer, I analyzed the development of standards -- the politics, the players and the passion -- in Massachusetts, California and Indiana, all of which got top ratings from Fordham.
Whatever the reason for the drop, it hit a sour note just as students nationwide are launching or are about to launch a new school year.
The combined drop in reading and math scores on the nation's most widely used college entrance exam was 7 points, from 1028 out of a possible 1600 last year to 1021 this year.
Officials of the College Board in the past have said increases of similar size were significant good news. This time, they said little should be read into the downturn.
The decline contrasted with the largest one-year increase in 20 years nationwide in scores on the ACT, the other major college entrance test. ACT officials said this month that the average rose from 20.9 a year ago to 21.1 this year, on a scale of 1 to 36.
In some ways, Wisconsin didn't play much of a role in either the SAT or ACT trends - and that was good news because of how well Wisconsin students do on each of the tests, officials said.
Instead, the officials attributed the drop to a decline in the number of students who took the exam more than once. The board said 47 percent of this year’s students took the test only once, up from 44 percent last year. The number taking the test three times fell to less than 13 percent from nearly 15 percent.
Students typically gain 14 points a section when they take the test a second time, and another 10 or 11 points a section on the third try.
The SAT writing test includes a 25-minute essay, which counts for about 30 percent of the writing score, and 49 multiple-choice questions on grammar and usage, which count for the rest. The average score on the writing section was 497 out of a possible 800, the board said.
Also gaining attention is the impact of the new writing section on average male-female SAT score differences. Historically, men have had higher average scores than women, not just on the SAT overall but also on both its verbal and math subsections--a departure from other assessments where men tend to do better than women on math (with a few caveats), but women tend to do better on verbal skills. But women did do better than men, on average, on the new writing section, lowering the the male-female score gap from 42 points in 2005 to 26 points this year. In addition to the writing section, the new critical reading section, which eliminated the infamous verbal analogies, probably also made the test more female-friendly, since verbal analogies are one of the few areas of verbal skills in which men typically outperform women, and the difference between men's critical reading scores this year and their verbal skills last year is larger than that for women.
California education officials call AP Spanish Language an important gateway to success in other honors classes -- a way for struggling students to sharpen Spanish skills and gain confidence to try advanced English, math and science courses later.
"For the Latino students, the key is getting them to see success in their language," said Sallie Wilson, the Advanced Placement consultant at the California Department of Education.
"We want the underrepresented students to get one under their belt and learn what the whole process is about," she said. "It's all about the peer relationship that says, `Hey man, this is a pretty cool class".
Many schools see their AP tests as a springboard for minority groups that historically were shut out from the upper echelons of the classroom. And now those schools are doing more to encourage Latino students to take a chance on any of the 34 rigorous tests -- from biology to Latin -- that can translate to college credit.
Some students say a stigma can deter them and their Latino classmates from trying challenging classes.
It's the fourth time in three months that a national study has accused state officials of shirking their responsibilities, particularly to minority students and those from low-income homes. Two national education reformers said Monday that Department of Public Instruction officials have misled citizens about their work to improve the quality of education in Wisconsin.
In June, a different group ranked Wisconsin No. 1 in the country in frustrating the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Also in June, a third organization focused on Milwaukee and Wisconsin as examples of places where more inexperienced - and therefore, less proficient - teachers are disproportionately assigned to high-needs schools. And two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education rejected as inadequate Wisconsin's plans for dealing with federal requirements that every student have a "highly qualified" teacher.
Is there a drumbeat in the bad grades for Wisconsin's efforts to raise the bar in education?
Not surprisingly, DPI officials disagreed on almost every point. Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, said the DPI was moving forward in addressing the concerns in all of the reports, was meeting all the requirements of federal law, and had made closing the achievement gaps in Wisconsin a high priority.
He said that, separate from the Fordham report, the DPI was getting started on redoing the state's academic standards, which have not changed in a decade or so.
Evers said if there is a theme common to the four reports, it is that all are premised on creating more of a national system of standards and testing for students, something Wisconsin educators do not favor.
Quiz: Of the 10 largest school systems, which have made the best gains in student scores? Answer: Philadelphia and New York. Between 2002 and 2005 for grades K-8, Philly gained 19.5 points in proficiency on the state assessment system, while NYC schools posted a 13-point increase on state exams. Even if you normalize for the different gains made in various states, you get the same rankings: Philly No. 1, NYC No. 2.
In 2002, only 21% of Philadelphia students were proficient. By 2005, that nearly doubled to 40%. At its current pace, Philadelphia will increase the proficiency of its students by more than 25 points across five years. That has life-changing consequences for a quarter of its students: One who would have dropped out might now graduate. Another who would have gotten into college might now get into a better one.
In sharp contrast to years past, most big public school systems are now producing achievement gains. That's to be applauded, but educational leadership can learn much from two cities with multiyear trajectories two to three times those of their similar-sized peers. Each has managed to put (and keep) together a group of factors that drive academic success, and that others may want to replicate:
..
The fourth success factor may seem at odds with the third. While Messrs. Vallas and Klein believe in a robust, central system to support their schools, they promote educational competition within their cities. Have they concluded that it may not be possible to move to a complete free market of education in the near term; and, in the meantime, the old but improved system should coexist with a bevy of new educational providers? Or do they believe that one major educational provider with multiple smaller competitors is a preferable course that pushes all schools to higher performance levels? Whatever their philosophy, their actions are clear. Mr. Vallas now presides over a district where roughly 25% of schools are charters or managed by private institutions. Mr. Klein has increased the presence of charters and alternative providers -- and argued that New York's legislature should lift the cap on charters. He's also given unprecedented freedom to a quarter of the sites within his system, those he deems to be most capable of managing their freedom -- as long as they agree to be held accountable if their children fail to improve.
You might recall the legislation I introduced to increase Wisconsin's high school graduation requirement from two- to three-years of math and science. Based on a recent television ad by Jim Doyle, you might be led to believe that this bill was signed into law.
It wasn't.
However, the issues of increasing our math and science requirements and the lack of academically prepared high school graduates keeps surfacing. Constituents talk to me about it at their doors and at public forums, and it's the subject of national publications and state studies:
Revamping high school graduation standards to more closely mirror college-entrance requirements and employer needs was a nearly unanimous recommendation of the U.S. Department of Education's 19-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education this month.
The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance recently studied the lack of academically prepared students entering the University of Wisconsin System. Almost 17 percent of all UW freshmen took remedial math courses in 2004. At two campuses, more than half the freshmen class needed remedial math instruction. It seems wasteful that our colleges need to spend additional resources preparing students to be there. Among the recommendations of the study was more rigorous exposure in high school curricula.
The recently released national ACT college entrance exam scores showed that the majority of ACT-tested graduates are likely to struggle during their first year of college. Only 42 percent of test-takers are expected to earn a C or higher in college algebra, and only 27 percent are prepared enough to succeed in college biology.
I HAVE NEVER claimed that a third year of math and science for all high school graduates was a cure-all. Yet, a refocus on our core academic areas is obviously part of the solution. We need more rigorous high school curricula and the courage to increase our expectations of student performance. We also need to re-focus on the purpose for publicly funded high schools.
Elon Journalism Professor and Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Skube:
The schools are no different, even if their stake in creativity is more defensible. And so, in the middle schools and even elementary schools, students scribble away in journals, write skits and sketches, labor over sentences littered with misspelled words (this is called "creative spelling") and faulty grammar. The aim is not competency in the plain carpentry of prose but self-expression and creativity. It is the Little League of Art. Nothing wrong with self-expression. But it's worth asking when self-expression devolves into self-spelunking and the preening narcissism evident everywhere on the Internet.
Parents know teenagers can rattle away with ease when instant messaging friends. But for many young people, the expedient baby talk of IM-ing and text-messaging becomes "real" English, as natural as conversation and often a preferred substitute.
Ask them to write straightforward English and you would think it was a second language, even for kids whose ancestors have been here generations. Sentence structure, punctuation, the parts of speech — they are almost completely unfamiliar with any of it. Wanting to sound as if they are someone they are not, college students invariably button their verbal collars, straighten their ties and turn out sentences stiff as starched shirts.
As we’ve said before, alternatives end up being a way out of educating high school students. Take New Jersey for example. New Jersey enacted an alternative to their high school exit exam for students deemed “test phobic.” Over time, though, the results told a different story: In New Jersey’s high poverty high schools, almost half of the students graduate under the alternative – in some urban high schools the fi gures rise to a full 80 and 90 percent of students. Conversely, at schools serving the fewest numbers of low-income students, only 3 percent of students take the alternative assessments. Recognizing that the alternative became a way to keep chronic low performance out of public view and under the state’s accountability radar, New Jersey has decided to cease its alternative.
All the while, as adults in Sacramento debated changes to the CAHSEE and the litigation attempting to cease the exam ensued, we heard from students, teachers and administrators who said they believed the consequences were never going to kick in, so they didn’t even try. Now, instead of focusing on ways out, there are new questions to answer. Do we believe all kids can meet a minimum standard by the end of high school and are we going to do what it takes to support them and their teachers? Can we challenge and change the cycle of low expectations that we hold for ourselves, and our leaders hold for our communities?
With Hyperwords™ installed in your web browser, select any text and a menu appears: searches, references, emailing, copying, blogging, translation, & more
Since Texas in 1987 first required students to pass a standardized test before being awarded a high school diploma, half the states have adopted similar requirements, with mostly successful results.
Educators say the tests encourage students to take more rigorous courses and require teachers to work harder. But critics say they deny diplomas to the most disadvantaged students and force teachers to "teach to the test."
"It really depends on who you ask. ... The studies go in both directions," said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for Education Sector, a Washington think tank.
Fourth-graders in traditional public schools nationwide did somewhat better on average than those in charter schools in reading and mathematics in 2003, a long-awaited federal report said yesterday.
Earlier versions of the data have been used as weapons in a lively political and academic war between charter school advocates and opponents, but the new National Center for Education Statistics study appeared to provide little new ammunition for either side and little guidance for people trying to judge their schools.
More than a decade after the city created a special institute to prepare black and Hispanic students for the mind-bendingly difficult test that determines who gets into New York’s three most elite specialized high schools, the percentage of such students has not only failed to rise, it has declined.
The drop at Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School mirrors a trend recently reported at three of the City University of New York’s five most prestigious colleges, where the proportion of black students has dropped significantly in the six years since rigorous admissions policies were adopted.
The changes indicate that even as New York City has started to bridge the racial achievement gap in the earlier grades, it has not been able to make similar headway at top public high schools and colleges. Asian enrollment at all three high schools has soared over the decade, while white enrollment has declined at two of the three schools.
Re “In Elite Schools, a Dip in Blacks and Hispanics” (front page, Aug. 18):
We do not need test results to tell us what we already know. Black children in urban schools receive an inferior education. No amount of test preparation can make up for years of social, cultural and educational neglect.
Any real gains in the closing of the so-called achievement gap in the early grades in New York City are lost in the middle grades. These are the years when black children, boys in particular, are destroyed by the school system.
Can we blame institutional racism? Absolutely! Black children too often suffer from less qualified teachers and inadequate facilities.
The Campaign for Fiscal Equity successfully sued New York State over school financing. Now someone should challenge New York City for its educational neglect of black children.
Bernard Gassaway
Jamaica, Queens, Aug. 18, 2006
The writer is a former principal of Beach Channel High School and a former senior superintendent of alternative schools and programs for New York City.
•
To the Editor:
Any analysis of the declining minority populations at New York’s specialized public high schools must consider one factor: it is impossible to get a passing score on the admissions test without taking the test, and the city’s middle schools vary widely in the percentage of their students who take this test.
I offer a proposal: Administer the specialized high school exam during the school day, and make it standard for all New York City eighth graders, rather than only for those who come in on a weekend to take it.
This would not solve all the inequalities in the school system, but it would move the specialized high schools a step closer to reflecting New York City’s diversity.
Benjamin W. Dreyfus
New York, Aug. 18, 2006
The writer is a teacher at Stuyvesant High School.
•
To the Editor:
More than 20 years ago, when I was director of Manhattan East Junior High School, a public school in East Harlem, high-achieving and unquestionably competitive black and Hispanic students year after year did not make the cut score on the specialized high school test.
Disgusted by the failure of these tests to accurately assess our students’ knowledge and skills, we connected these students to elite private high schools like Dalton and St. Paul’s, which were impressed enough to give them full scholarships.
These students went on to get scholarships from prestigious Ivy League universities like Harvard and Dartmouth and become very productive citizens.
How tragic that the Department of Education continues a policy that keeps out some of its best and brightest students.
Jacqueline Ancess
New York, Aug. 20, 2006
The writer is co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University.
•
To the Editor:
The effort to help minority students test into the best science high schools does not work because the city preparatory program spends too much time on remedial work and not enough time on test preparation.
The highest-performing students are bored by the needless repetition of material they have already covered in regular class.
If New York City wants to address the racial imbalance in its best high schools, it should hire the companies that have done such a good job with Asian students and offer test preparation that works.
The Department of Education might also consider the effect of the existing racial imbalance at Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science. How many black and Hispanic students tested into those schools but chose to go elsewhere? Minority students and parents may see the stark racial imbalance as an unwelcoming environment.
One of the most important, and seemingly intractable, policy problems facing the state of Ohio is how to improve student achievement in public schools. This report rigorously analyzes the factors most commonly thought to affect student achievement. It uses quantitative econometric techniques to separate the factors that truly matter from the ones that only distract policy makers from effective change. To capture the changing dynamics of both different academic subjects and students at different ages, this analysis evaluates student performance in five subjects (math, reading, writing, science and citizenship) across grades 3 to 12. This combination gives us 21 separate analyses, or mathematical models. Controls were also included for geography, student socio-economic status, race, and learning disability.
This study breaks new ground by also analyzing the factors that influence student performance in charter schools. Charter schools are a new system of public schools, created by the legislature in 1997. To date they are authorized only in large cities. By assessing whether the inputs that affect achievement in traditional public schools are similar to those that affect achievement in charter schools, we can determine to what degree these two public institutions are similar.
News editors and book publishers are susceptible to Robbins's argument because many of them live in such places, where family incomes are in the top 5 percent nationally and talk about school stress in rampant. It would be almost a relief to many educators if these families, and their highly motivated students, were typical and overachievement were the greatest threat to high school education today. But the sad truth is quite the opposite.
And what of that overload of AP courses? Newsweek's annual high school rankings indicate that only 5 percent of U.S. public high schools have students averaging more than one AP test a year. The demands made on our most disadvantaged students in the inner cities, who are almost never mentioned in Robbins's book, are pitifully below even the low standards for our average suburban neighborhoods. Some educators think this lack of academic challenge is one reason why nearly half of college students eventually drop out.
If they are not doing much homework in high school, what are they up to? The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research collects time diaries from American teenagers. These documents make clear our youth are not taking long walks in the woods or reading Proust. Instead, 15- to 17-year-olds on average between 2002 and 2003 devoted about 3 1/2 hours a day to television and other "passive leisure" or playing on the computer. (Their average time spent in non-school reading was exactly seven minutes a day. Studying took 42 minutes a day.)
Teaching mathematics has been my profession in New York City public schools since 1969, first at I.S. 201 in District 5, then at J.H.S. 17 in District 2, and since 1983, at Stuyvesant High School. I'm also the father of a 10-year-old daughter who attends District 2 schools and a member of an organization, Nychold (nychold.com), dedicated to bringing sanity to math education.
I'm a firm believer in public education, the great equalizer. Sadly, over the past 10 years, I've witnessed how badly things can go wrong. I am referring specifically to the constructivist math curricula that abound in our city public schools in general and more specifically in District 2, where I live, teach, and raise my daughter.
Constructivist curricula, such as TERC and CMP, forsake algorithms, postulates, and theorems (the foundation of math) as well as teacher-centered learning. Instead, they have students working among themselves in groups, loosely guided by the teacher in a drawn out attempt to "discover" math truths.
In my Upper East Side neighborhood, an incredible number of intelligent young students from the fourth grade and up are seeing private math tutors. Many of these are not the type of children who would normally struggle in arithmetic or elementary algebra. As a result of the way they're taught elementary math, they find themselves unable to do real math. When they're taught math in a more traditional way by their tutors, they invariably find themselves relieved and highly critical of the way they've been taught mathematics.
At Stuyvesant, we have a disproportionate number of freshmen from District 2 taking our introductory algebra course. Most Stuyvesant students have already completed that course before they enter our school. The ratio of District 2 students to non-District 2 students in those classes is close to twice that same ratio in the freshman class as a whole.
In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows -- in their writing and even in their conversation.
A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.
"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.
At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.
"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"
I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)
As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will have a new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it won't be long before one professor whispers to another: Did no one teach these kids basic English? The unhappy truth is that many students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences, to tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to distinguish between "then" and "than." Yet they got A's.
Exit exams have become almost a necessity because the GPA is not to be trusted. In my experience, a high SAT score is far more reliable than a high GPA -- more indicative of quickness and acuity, and more reflective of familiarity with language and ideas. College admissions specialists are of a different view and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.
To that end, Deasy proposed that by the 2007-08 school year each of the county's 22 major high schools should offer at least eight AP courses, which are meant to introduce students to college-level study. Currently, AP offerings in the county vary widely. Many high schools have only a few.
The College Board, which oversees the AP program, will help the school system train a new corps of 200 AP teachers over the next year. In addition, the school system plans to expand subsidies for AP test fees to help ensure that needy students take the tests.
"It's a monumental culture shift," Deasy said. "AP will be on the tongue of every kid around here before too long."
Michael Marchionda, a College Board official working on the project, called it "a multiyear effort" to widen student access to AP. "It's very comprehensive," he said.
The county school board will consider the plan Thursday and is expected to support it.
"People asked for rigor," said Chairman Beatrice P. Tignor (Upper Marlboro). "We've got rigor."
The prop room on the fourth floor of Houghton Mifflin Co.'s offices here holds all manner of items, including a blackboard, a globe, an aquarium -- and a wheelchair.
Able-bodied children selected through modeling agencies pose in the wheelchair for Houghton Mifflin's elementary and secondary textbooks. If they're the wrong size for the wheelchair, they're outfitted with red or blue crutches, says photographer Angela Coppola, who often shoots for the publishing house.
Ms. Coppola estimates that at least three-fourths of the children portrayed as disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren't. "It's extremely difficult to find a disabled kid who's willing and able to model," she says. Houghton Mifflin, which acknowledges the practice, says it doesn't keep such statistics.
Houghton Mifflin's little-known stratagem illustrates how a well-intentioned effort to make classroom textbooks more reflective of the country's diversity has led publishers to overcompensate and at times replace one artificial vision of reality with another.
To facilitate state approval and school-district purchasing of their texts, publishers set numerical targets for showing minorities and the disabled. In recent years, the quest to meet these targets has ratcheted to a higher level as technological improvements enable publishers to customize books for individual states, and as photos and illustrations take up more textbook space.
"There's more textbook space devoted to photos, illustrations and graphics than there's ever been, but frequently they have nothing to do with the lesson," says Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor and author of "The Language Police," a 2003 study of textbook censorship. "They're just there for political reasons, to show diversity and meet a quota of the right number of women, minorities and the disabled."
Joel Klein, Chanceller - New York City Department of Education [pdf]. Andrew Rotherham has more:
education reform involves changing a culture that has inhabited our school systems for decades. It is a culture that claims to be in the business of educating children but puts schools, and the people who work in them, at the bottom of the organizational chart. It is a culture that stifles innovation. It is a culture that seeks to preserve the existing arrangements for the adults who work in the system, and, all too often, it does so at the expense of the kids who most need our schools to work for them.
Not to sound like a giddy big think type, but we really are at a transformative time in public education. The pressure to shift to a system that focuses on performance is firmly embedded in public policy and generational shift is taking place in the leadership, teaching, and policymaking communities. Both are enormous challenges but also enormous opportunities. What makes Klein a lightening rod is not that everything he's tried in New York hasn't always panned out, it's that he's on the edge of this change and so almost regardless of the results he's going to be catching hell for a while.
The shift from uniformity to differentiation could be the most important over time for the continued success of public education as a broadly supported institution."
To generations of students and their teachers, the College Board has been synonymous with the SAT test. But these days it has broader ambitions and wants to reach deeply into high school and even middle school classrooms nationwide.
The board is marketing new products, like English and math curriculums for grades 6 through 12. It has worked with New York City to start five College Board Schools, with plans to open 13 more in New York and other cities by 2007. It is also trying to improve existing schools, starting this fall with 11 public high schools outside New York State and adding 19 next year. In November, it will open an institute for principals.
The board says it is eager to bring new rigor to education. But these efforts are also being driven by the fact that the board, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, is no longer an unrivaled force. It faces strong competition from the ACT in college admissions testing, and some colleges are making the SAT optional. Recent gaffes in SAT scoring raised questions of confidence in the test and the organization.
“We should not say that one size fits all,” said George H. Wood, the principal of Federal Hocking High School in rural Ohio. His school does not offer A.P. courses other than calculus, Mr. Wood said, because they are “too restrictive in terms of content.”
Kati Haycock, director of Education Trust, an advocacy group that supports testing, said she was concerned about adding even more testing, as some of the board’s products do. “It’s a little bit of a problem, with testing, testing, testing,” she said. “School officials are getting sick of it all.”
Still, Ms. Haycock said her group had reviewed the board’s SpringBoard program, which helps shape what is taught in English and math in grades 6 through 12, and found it “fabulous.”
ACT scores are best in 20 years, with a catch, MMSD Curriculum & Upcoming Elections
The issue of curriculum quality and rigor continues to generate attention. P-I:
The good news is that the high school class of 2006 posted the biggest nationwide average score increase on the ACT college entrance exam in 20 years and recorded the highest scores of any class since 1991.
The bad news is that only 21 percent of the students got a passing grade in all four subject areas, including algebra and social science.
"The ACT findings clearly point to the need for high schools to require a rigorous, four-year core curriculum and to offer Advanced Placement classes so that our graduates are prepared to compete and succeed in both college and the work force," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in Washington, D.C.
Wisconsin high school graduates are better prepared to succeed in college than students nationwide - but that means only that more than 70% of state students are at risk of having trouble in one or more freshman-level subjects while the national figure is almost 80%, according to ACT, the college testing company.
The message still isn't getting across," Ferguson said in a telephone news conference. If students want to go to college and do well, they have to take high school seriously and take challenging courses, he said.
ACT results showed that students who took at least four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies in high school did substantially better on the tests (22.9 in Wisconsin, 22.0 nationwide) than those who took lighter loads in those core areas (21.0 and 19.7, respectively).
Elizabeth Burmaster, Wisconsin's superintendent of public instruction, said she believes that if schools in Wisconsin stay focused on efforts such as early childhood education and small class sizes in the early grades, combined with strong academic programs in middle school and high school, achievement will go up and racial and ethnic gaps will close.
The Madison School District issued a press release on the recent ACT scores (68% of Wisconsin high school graduates took the ACT - I don't know what the MMSD's percentage is):
Madison students who took the 2006 ACT college entrance exam continued to outperform their state and national peers by a wide margin, and the scores of Madison's African-American test takers increased significantly. Madison students' composite score of 24.2 (scale of 1 to 36) was higher for the 12th straight year than the composite scores of Wisconsin students and those across the nation (see table below). District students outscored their state peers by 9% (24.2 vs. 22.2,) and their national peers by 15% (24.2 vs. 21.1).
Compared to the previous year, the average ACT composite score among the district's African-American students increased 6% — 18.8 vs. 17.7 last year. The gap between district African-American and white student ACT scores decreased this year. The relative difference this year was 24% (18.8 vs. 24.8) compared to 30% last year.
Scores also increased this year for the district's Asian students (22.1 to 23.0) and Hispanic students (21.5 to 21.8).
In the Waunakee information I sent to Jim Z, our mean for the Class of 2006 comes first, followed by the core/non-core in parentheses. So, our mean composite score for our 157 seniors who sat for the ACT was 23.3, the mean composite for those completing the ACT suggested core was 24.3, the mean composite for those who did not complete the core was 21.5.
With ACT profile reports, the student information is self-reported. It's reasonably accurate, but some students don't fill in information about course patterns and demographics if it is not required.
Please let me know if there are any other questions.
McFarland data:
It appears that Jim Z's chart comparing scores uses Waunakee's "Core score" as opposed to the average composite that the other schools (at
least McFaland) gave to Jim Z.. If Jim Z. wishes to report average "Core" for McFarland it is 24.5. Our non-core is 22.2 with our average composite 23.7.
More on the meaning of "Core":
Probably everyone is familiar with the ACT definition of core, but it's 4 years of English, and three years each of math, science, and social studies. ACT is refining their position on what course patterns best position a student for undergraduate success, however.
Sunday's WaPo op-ed by Florida Governor and first brother Jeb Bush and New York Mayor and Michael Bloomberg is sort of mystifying the Eduwonk. Sure, they are big names, but the op-ed is vapid. It would be like some big name foreign policy type penning an op-ed saying that the problem in the Middle East is that people just don't seem to get along with each other. Would the WaPo publish that?
Anyway, Bush and Bloomberg lay out four big think reforms for No Child Left Behind. If this is what passes for big think in the Republican Party right now then Democrats have no excuses for not eating the Rs lunch on this issue in 2008. Bush and Bloomberg want to:
Still On the Slippery Slope of West HS's English 10?
Last week, families of rising juniors at West High School received a copy of the Junior School Counseling Newsletter. On page 2, there is a section entitled "English Course Selections for 2006/07." The paragraph reads as follows:
Students are required to earn four credits of English for graduation, and this must include one semester of composition beyond tenth grade. Students in grades 11 and 12 are given a choice of non-sequential semester electives, each providing one-half credit towards graduation. College preparatory students, however, should check the colleges of their choice to be sure about what courses are acceptable for college admisison, i.e., some colleges might not accept courses in such areas as theater or media for admission.
The second half of the first sentence (assuming it is not a typo) reflects an important change in the English requirement for graduation at West -- one that has never been discussed with students and parents and one that is surprising and confusing, given the stated goals and content of English 10.
It is also not consistent with what's stated in the 2006-07 course catalogue. (Thanks for bearing with me for including the complete entry here.)
Students are required to earn four credits of English for graduation. Ninth and tenth grade English is required of all students; in grades 11-12, students are given a choice of nonsequential semester elelctives, each providing one-half credit towards graduation. College prepatory students, however, should check the colleges of their choice to be sure about what courses are acceptable for college admisison; i.e., some colleges might not accept courses in such areas as theater or media for admission.
The classes of 2007 and 2008 must take one semester of composition beyond ninth grade; any one of three composition offerings meets this requirement. Please note: Intermediate Writing Workshop (IWW) will be offered ONLY first semester, 2006. A student may select more than one English course in a semester. Students wishing to apply to college are advised to take a minimum of seven semesters of writing, literature, and/or grammar.
Some courses may not be offered both semesters. The number of sections of a course is dependent on student selection and teacher allocation.
As I put all of this together, it seems to me that -- sometime between the printing of the 2006-07 course catalogue and the printing of the Junior School Counseling Newsletter -- the West administration has decided to require an additional semester of composition for graduation.
Now, I'm all for people (of all ages) becoming better writers. I value the written word and admire the ability to craft a sentence. I fully expect my sons -- both of them excellent writers -- to happily and voluntarily take more writing courses than will be required of them in high school. While I value good, clear exposition, however, I do not support secrecy and unilateral decision-making -- especially in highly charged contexts, which West's English 10 has so clearly been.
I also cannot help but wonder what the motivation has been for the additional requirement? (In case it hasn't occurred to you, the new requirement will mean that West juniors and seniors will be able to take fewer English electives, many of which are honors courses ... unless they are willing to take extra English courses.)
Another parent has suggested that the new requirement seems to reflect an expectation that English 10 will fail. Why? Well, if you recall, English 10 was created by integrating the contents of the several most popular 10th grade English courses, including "Intermediate Writing Workshop" ("IWW"). One of the goals of English 10 is to integrate writing assignments with the reading of great literature, something that did not happen in IWW. The rationale -- which I find quite reasonable -- is that the lessons of good writing will be more easily learned and more deeply retained if they are taught that way. But if that's supposed to be an improvement over the old system, why start requiring yet another semester of composition (especially without discussing it with students and parents)?
Another frustration is that many of us parents suggested additional English requirements like this as a more pointed and potentially more effective strategy for addressing the problem of underperformance of certain groups of students in English -- y'know, something for the administration to try instead of the complete overhaul known as English 10. It just seemed reasonable to us that if one of the problems was that some groups of students weren't taking certain types of English courses (the composition ones and the more challenging ones), one good solution might be to require them to take one or more of those courses. Oh, well.
Gosh, I am hoping this is a typo in the newsletter. I have a call in to the West Counseling Department about it (even though another parent has been unable to get an answer to the same question). Stay tuned.
As the start of the school year approaches, schools are going back to the basics with a vengeance. Many Milwaukee students, and some suburban ones, will arguably spend more time on reading and math than during any time in recent memory, although some educators argue that the trend is to the detriment of other subject areas, such as science and social studies.
In a set of lower-performing Milwaukee elementary schools, students will have at least two hours a day of reading instruction and an hour a day of math this fall by decree of the central administration. The time will be much more focused and prescriptive than it has been in the past in terms of what is being taught, and how. These schools will join the ranks of several others that already have beefed up the amount of time spent on the so-called three R's - reading, writing and arithmetic.
At St. Marcus Lutheran, a private school in Milwaukee, middle-school students get 90 minutes of math each day - as opposed to the 45- to 50-minute block of five years ago.
I previously posted links to articles discussing the inappropriate use of Powerpoint - particularly in lower grades. I've been reading Thomas Rick's "Fiasco" . Ricks' mentions that Powerpoint was used to draft and communicate battle and reconstruction plans in Iraq:
[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: "It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense…In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."
Yet, Powerpoint is widely used in schools. Garr Reynolds has more.
Some alternatives - outliners that help conceptualize a work prior to expressing it in words. Internet outliners are extraordinarly powerful:
Mary Battaglia's post on a Curious Social Development began to raise some fundamental questions about who the public schools should serve, and a healthy discussion on this blog might help clarify differing views on some of the current trends being implemented in the MMSD.
To set the discussion, let me offer that schools serve roughly three populations: the neediest, the average, and the brightest -- not too startling a breakdown.
Which group should the schools target?
If schools target one, should the schools just let the other two groups fend for themselves? For example, should schools place their priorities on raising the academic accomplisments of the lowest performing students, on the assumption that the average will get by and the brightest will succeed regardless of what schools do? Or maybe schools should triage the groups? Let the neediest drop by the wayside, target the average, and just expect the brightest to do well.
How then do we determine whether the schools succeed? Do we measure success by the number of National Merit Scholars or by the increase in the performance of the neediest?
I think schools should and can successfully serve all three groups by using curriculum and programs to challenge all students academically.
I hope that many will candidly post their opinions.
Ed
ps. To the grammarians, I know that the title should be "Whom should public schools serve?" But "whom" sounds so stilted.
The catch phrase is financial literacy... the understanding of money and it's meaning in our society. And according to Michael Gutter, UW Extension Financial Specialist, "Wisconsin, like almost every other state, is failing the grade."
With young people having more access to money and credit, it's become painfully evident that many of them don't have the skills to manage it wisely. "Bankruptcy rates for people under 25 are at an all time high and growing at an all time fast rate. This is of a lot of concern, because people who have to file for bankruptcy so early limit their choices for the next few years," says Gutter, who points out that the ripple effect could impact the economy as a whole; those young people won't be buying like normal consumers, because of their bankrupt history.
I've asked you, Neal Gleason and others, but all of you avoid the question. Let's try one more time.
Do you believe a 50%-60% success rate for Reading Recovery is about all that can be achieved because 1) some students just can't learn or 2) no one knows how to teach struggling first graders or 3) the MMSD doesn't know how to teach those first graders?
The Madison School District's Fall $23.5M Referendum Question will be in front of voters 3 months from today. The question asks voters to fund 3 iniatives with a single yes or no vote:
The question is on the ballot of a "high turnout" election (including the Governor's race), rather than the recent practice of holding special $100K+ elections.
The board, lead by a Johnny Winston, Jr. initiative, recently passed a new advertising policy. This initiative will, over time, generate new revenue sources for the district (I wonder if this policy would have ever seen the light of day under previous board majorities?).
The community has long supported Madison's public schools via above average taxes and spending (while enrollment has largely remained flat) and initiatives such as the Schools of Hope and the Foundation for Madison Public schools, among many others. The November 7, 2006 question will simply be one of public confidence in the governance and education strategy of the MMSD and the willingness to spend more on the part of local property taxpayers.
Imagine you're about to put a chunk of your life savings into a mutual fund. Now imagine you peruse the various "best mutual fund" guides on the news rack, only to find they're all missing crucial pieces of information. The guides list where the fund managers went to college, how much investment capital they've attracted, and what kind of "experience" investors had at the annual fund meeting. But they don't tell you what you most want to know: What the funds' rates of return have been--or if they've ever made a dime for anyone. You might still decide to invest in a mutual fund, but it would be a heck of a crapshoot. And with their scorecard hidden, fund managers wouldn't be under much pressure to perform, let alone improve.
That imaginary mutual-fund market pretty much shows how America's higher-education market works. Each year prospective college students and their parents pore over glossy brochures and phone-book-sized college guides in order to decide how to invest their hard-earned tuition money--not to mention four years of their lives. Some guides, like the popular rankings published by U.S. News & World Report, base ratings on factors like alumni giving, faculty salaries, and freshman SAT scores. Others identify the top "party schools," most beautiful campuses, and most palatial dorms.
But what's missing from all the rankings is the equivalent of a bottom line. There are no widely available measures of how much learning occurs inside the classroom, or of how much students benefit from their education. This makes the process of selecting a college a bit like throwing darts at a stock table. It also means that colleges and universities, like our imaginary mutual-fund managers, feel little pressure to ensure that students learn. As anyone who's ever snoozed through a giant freshman psychology 101 lecture knows, sitting in a classroom doesn't equal learning; knowledge doesn't come by osmosis.
Sure, for some of us, Texas A&M evokes imagery of the weak being forced into a locker by the strong, but that doesn't change the numbers. At 60th place on the U.S. News rankings, Texas A&M may not be celebrated, but few other schools can compare when it comes to churning out great engineers and scientists in high numbers. It has a healthy level of ROTC enrollment, and it uses federal work-study money towards community service. Texas A&M thus breezes to fifth place on our list.
We love the ladies.
Three cheers for Bryn Mawr College, 21st on the U.S. News list but first on our list of liberal arts colleges, and the same to Wellesley, fourth on the U.S. News list but second on ours. On every front--social mobility, public service, and research--both schools perform near the top. Does their gender ratio, 100:0 women-to-men, have an influence? We don't know, but it doesn't look like an argument for admitting men.
Emory gets no love from us.
Emory, 20th on the list of U.S. News, comes in at 96th on our list. It ranks lowest on our list of any of the U.S. News top 25, and it's a full 42 spots behind runner-up Carnegie Mellon. Its social mobility score puts it at 104th place. (Its number of Pell recipients is low, its SAT scores are relatively high, yet its graduation is relatively low.) By spending its money on recruiting applicants with high SAT scores (a way of boosting one's U.S. News ranking) Emory has apparently decided reaching out to poorer students is a low priority. Nor does it do especially well in public service or research. That's not great for a school with an endowment of $4.5 billion, the eighth-highest in the nation. Boo, Emory.
The New School University: "unusual intent" meets non-existent results.
The New School University in New York doesn't engage in a lot of U.S. News jockeying, but it boasts of goals that are exactly of the sort this guide rewards. Its website speaks of the school's "unusual intent" to bring "actual, positive change to the world." The reality: it's at 228th place on our list. By every measure we have, it drops the ball. (By contrast, The Evergreen State College in Washington State, which approvingly quotes a description of itself as "ultra-progressive," scores much higher, at 47th place.) The best candidate for "actual, positive change" may in fact be the New School.
The Big Ten slaughters the SEC.
Of the 11 members of the Big Ten Conference--University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of Iowa, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Pennsylvania State University--all 11 make our top 75. Of the 12 members of the Southeastern Conference--we'll not list them all--only Vanderbilt University and the University of Florida even crack it. Football is fine for schools, as long as they're Midwestern.
UC schools continue to rule.
Sorry, red-staters. By our yardstick, University of California, Berkeley is about the best thing for America we can find. It's good by all of our measurements. The same goes for the rest of the schools in the UC system, four of which make our top 10, the rest of which make our top 80.
Our son is poised on the knife's edge between middle and high school, and we have arrived -- as if by time machine, it seems -- at the moment when we must decide where he will spend his last four years of mandatory education.
We are welcomed, and given an overview from several educators, including Arlington Superintendent Robert Smith, and about half an hour later parents splinter off to presentations in various rooms around the school. Represented here are the four Arlington high schools: Washington-Lee, which has the International Baccalaureate option; high-achieving Yorktown; H-B Woodlawn, with its hugely popular alternative approach; and Wakefield, which is open to all Gunston Middle students who want to continue in Spanish immersion. Each of these schools appeals to us in some way, so I want to get information on all of them. Topping the list at the moment, though, is the continuation of Spanish immersion, so I follow our close-knit group of parents to where Wakefield is presenting.
Wakefield's principal, Doris Jackson, is very charismatic. She's been with Arlington Public Schools for 15 years -- this is her fifth as Wakefield principal, and the staff members standing behind her this evening in Room 110 smile at us with pleasant zealotry. Jackson says the school believes fervently that the makeup of Advanced Placement classes should mirror the racial, ethnic and economic makeup of the general student body. To this end, in the spring of 2004, Wakefield launched an effort to support any and all students who want to take AP classes: a preparatory program called AP Bridge, which is designed to help entering students overcome their hormone-induced brain scramble by strengthening their time management and study skills. Visualizing Sebastian's junk heap of a desktop, I scratch a large "!" in my notes.
The US patent, 6,988,138, reads in incredibly broad terms. No doubt the defendant and rival learning management companies such as Angel are checking into prior art and obviousness defenses.
Course management systems (aka learning management systems) are de rigueur in higher education now, and fast spreading across K-12 education. Students find the syllabus, read the course reading materials, collaborate, and take tests, all online. They are used for on-campus and distance education applications. This is a huge market and this is likely to be a huge and ugly battle.
Every May a large number of high school students across America take AP exams. In May 2005 over 1.2 million high school students took over 2.1 million AP exams. AP allows students to pursue college-level studies while still in high school. Over 3000 colleges accept AP exam scores for either college credit or placement in higher level courses. AP was developed by The College Board and is one of the most successful and respected academic programs in the nation.
There have been numerous studies and articles proclaiming the advantages of AP. AP test scores have been found to be very good predictors of college grades and college graduation. A National Center for Educational Accountability study (2005) indicated that passing AP exams shows a strong and consistent relationship to college graduation rates. Recently, there has been considerable reporting on the benefits of AP courses and exams for minority students and students from poverty backgrounds. Such students exceed their educators’ expectations on AP (when given the opportunity). AP tests and minority students were made famous with the movie “Stand and Deliver” portraying the high success of inner-city Latino students on the AP Calculus exam.
While there is some controversy over AP (e.g., too much material covered in a short time; more breadth than depth) there is strong agreement (backed by research) by educators that AP courses and exams are a rigorous and meaningful indicator of academic preparation for college. Also, AP exams provide a uniform standard of academic accomplishment across geography, economic status, ethnicity and school size. AP exams cover 34 subject areas and exams are scored on a scale of 1-5, with 5 considered top level work (a grade equivalent of an "A") in a corresponding college course. A score of 3 or better is often accepted for either college credit or placement.
Colangelo said he thought paying close attention to each school's AP DATA would be a good way to encourage Iowa schools to be more challenging. Only four Iowa public schools qualified for the latest Newsweek list of the country's most challenging public high schools. Colangelo discovered that of the 389 public and private high schools in Iowa, only 213 had at least one student take an AP exam in 2005. Of that group, 187 schools--171 public and 16 private--consented to participate in the Iowa AP Index. "The top 25 schools range in class size from 11 to 378," said the report, co-authored by Colangelo, Susan Assouline, Damien Ihrig and Clar Baldus. "There are 20 public and 5 private schools in the top 25. The #1 school is Rivermont Collegiate High School, a small private school in Bettendorf. The biggest school (based on graduating seniors) in the top 25 is Iowa City High School in Iowa City, Iowa [378 seniors]. The smallest school is Russell High School in Russell, Iowa [11 seniors]." The University of Iowa researchers even found an Iowa school, Roosevelt High in Des Moines, that qualified for the Newsweek list but that I had missed, a mistake I plan to rectify soon.
She said she has asked 85 college admissions officers in the past two years what was the first thing they look for in applicants' transcripts. She said each told her it was "the level of difficulty of the courses taken by a student. It is an automatic assumption that if an able student does not take AP courses when his or her high school offers them, then he or she has chosen not to challenge him or herself."
The mission is clearly defined. I proposed ideas, but did not cross the line of micromanaging. The measurement of success is clear: improved MEAP scores and a smaller achievement gap.
One can argue more patience and planning is prudent. Well, this has persisted for years, and while perhaps the administration is already trying things, I believe we need something more bold and aggressive.
I proposed to try this for a year or two and see if it can make a difference. We need to address this issue district-wide, but we need to start where the need is the greatest.
The response I received from some board members seemed to focus on everything but the proposal.
Their concerns over "surprise motions" ring hollow. Mrs. Reseigh's recent motion to cut board member comments from the minutes came without notice, as did Mr. Greimel's motion when he reversed himself on May elections.
And if they liked the idea, but wanted time, why didn't they move to table it until the next meeting?
Cries of "politics" ignore the fact that I have nothing to gain politically by trying to help these schools. It's what I was elected to do. If proposed a month ago, there would've been louder cries of "politics" due to the board election.
It's also puzzling some couldn't understand the plan; it's not complicated, and this board rarely seeks details anyway. For example, there's a budget item of $300,000 for high school reform with absolutely no details whatsoever.
I even suggested the funds could be contingent on a more detailed plan if that's what they wanted.
What began as a long-shot attempt last year by Pearson Plc to sell California educators digital materials to teach history and politics, collectively known in U.S. schools as social studies, has become reality in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books from classrooms.
The company also said its success in California, where about 1.5 million students aged 5-11 will use the program in classrooms this year, has led it to plan the same approach in additional states and with more subjects.
I have long admired Marc Eisen's thoughtful prose. But his recent struggle to come to grips with a mutli-ethnic world vvers from xenophobia to hysteria ("Brave New World", 6/23/06). His "unsettling" contact with "stylish" Chinese and "turbaned Sikhs" at a summer program for gifted children precipitated first worry (are my kids prepared to compete?), And then a villain (incompetent public schools).
Although he proclaims himself "a fan" of Madison public schools, he launches a fusillade of complaints: doubting that academic excellence is high on the list of school district pirorities and lamentin tis "dubious maht and reading pedagogy." The accuracy of these concerns is hard to assess, because he offers no evidence.
His main target is heterogeneous (mixed-ability) classes. He speculates that Madison schools, having failed to improve the skills of black and Hispanic kids, are now jeopardizing the education of academically promising kids (read: his kids) for the sake of politically correct equality. The edict from school district headquarters: "Embrace heterogeneous classrooms. Reject tracking of brighter kids. Suppress dissent in the ranks." Whew, that is one serious rant for a fan of public schools.
Eisen correctly observes that "being multilingual" will be a powerful advantage in the business world; familiarity and ease with other cultures will be a plus." Mare than 20 years ago, my kids began to taste this new world in the diverse classrooms of Midvale-Lincoln Elementary, and continued on through West High with its 50-plus nationalitities and a mix of heterogeneous and advanced classes.
They did just fine in college and grad school, emerged bi-and tri-lingual with well worn passorts, and started interesting careers at high tech internationl companies. How will Eisen's kids acquire modern cultural skills if they are cloistered in honors classes, sheltered from daily contact with kids of varied ability?
IN HIS EYE-OPENING book, "The World Is Flat," New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman warns that the United States is in a "quiet crisis" and that "we should be embarking on an all-hands-on-deck, no-holds-barred, no-budget-too-large crash program for science and engineering education immediately." If we don't, Friedman points out, our society will not be able to compete with such countries as India and China in today's unprecedented open market. Millions of American jobs could be at risk.
This is the crucial context of the California high school exit exam. Right now, in order to graduate, seniors in the state need to pass a test — a test, mind you, that they can take as many as six times before the end of senior year. This exam only assesses whether students have attained 8th-grade math levels and 10th-grade English skills. That's correct; students only need to demonstrate middle school math skills to pass a high school exit exam. And we hope to prepare our next generation for the fierce global job competition ahead?
Most states failed to meet federal requirements that all teachers be “highly qualified” in core teaching fields and that state programs for testing students be up to standards by the end of the past school year, according to the federal government.
The deadline was set by the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s effort to make all American students proficient in reading and math by 2014. But the Education Department found that no state had met the deadline for qualified teachers, and it gave only 10 states full approval of their testing systems.
Faced with such findings, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who took office promising flexible enforcement of the law, has toughened her stance, leaving several states in danger of losing parts of their federal aid.
"There are high expectations" for the top students, "and expectations that we'll perform miracles on the low end." -- Third-grade teacher Natalie Brady
In the first six weeks of school, Leigha Groves, whose daughter is one of Brady's top students, asks for a syllabus repeatedly and meets with Brady several times. Early on, she only saw math homework coming home and dismissed it as simple.
"When you hear the University of Chicago, you know they want the best, but it's not a gifted program," says Groves, a 39-year-old police officer and college grad. "I wondered where the challenge would come from."
Her daughter, Aleigha, transferred from a gifted program at South Loop elementary. Groves also wanted her daughter with more black students.
Nicole Miller says she thinks her son is changing, for the worse
Pittsburgh has hired a private company to write a coherent curriculum for city schools, reports the Post-Gazette.
Because course content is uneven and out of sync with state standards, the Pittsburgh Public School district is paying New York-based Kaplan K12 Learning Services $8.4 million to write standardized curricula for grades six through 12.
. . . Teachers in other districts have complained that Kaplan's detailed curriculum turned them into automatons and deprived them of time to cover material in adequate detail or help students with individual needs.
. . . Pittsburgh school officials cite an urgent need to bring coherence and rigor to what's taught and tested in the district's classrooms.
Interesting. Perhaps an RFP looking for different ideas might be useful. Public and private organizations could respond. One only has to look at the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" to see the power of a community vs a top down approach. Leadership, particularly that which embraces the community is critical - as Lucy Mathiak recently pointed out:
Later, she added: "I think one of the fundamental questions facing our district is whether we treat parents as resources or problems. Any parent who is concerned about safety, discipline or academic issues needs to feel confident that their concerns are going to be heard. We have to court the parents. The future of our schools depends on their confidence that we are working as partners with them."
In South Carolina, several large school districts such as Richland 2 and Lexington 1 offered online courses. For example, Richland 2's virtual school employed 27 teachers and had students register for a total of 559 online courses last year, said Margaret Walden, the district's instructional technology coordinator.
Despite the efforts of individual districts, no statewide program existed to help students in rural areas keep pace.
"This levels the playing field," Appleby said. "These online courses are available to any student in any district in the state."
The virtual school has been able to cut down on costs by relying on the same technical software used by teachers for online professional development.
Students at Charleston high schools such Academic Magnet and North Charleston have experience with online courses, but the state's program will expand access, district spokeswoman Mary Girault said.
Only 11 states met the union’s criteria for strong standards and tests that “align” with them, it says, and 20 states “have much work to do”—beefing up their standards, matching up tests with standards, or showing what they have done online.
“The systems in those states aren’t smart enough yet to bear the weight of the accountability functions they are asked to serve,” said Antonia Cortese, the AFT’s executive vice president. As one example of such a function, she cited the “in need of improvement” label applied to schools if they don’t meet measures of adequate yearly progress, or AYP. The label triggers a series of consequences for the schools.
In their study, the AFT researchers looked for standards to be clear, explicit by grade level, and rooted in the knowledge and skills for the particular subject, as well as accessible on the Web. Similarly, documentation of the relationship between the standards and the tests had to be available online.
The researchers contend that such “transparency” helps teachers do their jobs and builds trust in the system among educators and the public.
The union, which from 1995 to 2001 published an annual report evaluating states’ academic standards, found significant progress on that front. The standards that relate to NCLB testing are more specific and more often set out by grade levels—a help to teachers and test-makers—than the across-the-board standards examined five years ago, the report says. The progress is particularly noteworthy because of the pressure on state education departments to respond quickly to the sweeping federal law’s mandates, which include annual tests in reading and mathematics in grades 3-8 and once in high school and, starting next year, three tests of science spread across grade levels.
Full PDF study can be found here. The report noted that only 1 to 25% of Wisconsin's state tests aligned to "strong content standards".
There is an interesting post and series of comments about homework at The Daily Grind.
I agree that homework needs to be assigned every class period. But, like every teacher, I've struggled with how to best hold students accountable for not just completing it, but understanding it. In our freshmen math courses (Algebra 1, Numeracy), we give students full credit on an assignment if it is completed and turned in on time (we don't assess it for correctness at all). We also don't accept late work, unless students have an excused absence. The purpose of this is to build the ethic of doing homework and turning it in - as many students seem to come to high school with out having done much - if any - homework in the past. We are pretty successful at getting students to turn in their work by the end of freshman year. Getting them to really think about it, try hard on questions they don't understand, and seek help when they have difficulties is another thing altogether.
The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children’s chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken and that students of all kinds need to be given vouchers to attend private or religious schools at public expense.
This belief, though widespread, has not held up to careful scrutiny. A growing body of work has shown that the quality of education offered to students varies widely within all school categories. The public, private, charter and religious realms all contain schools that range from good to not so good to downright horrendous.
What the emerging data show most of all is that public, private, charter and religious schools all suffer from the wide fluctuations in quality and effectiveness. Instead of arguing about the alleged superiority of one category over another, the country should stay focused on the overarching problem: on average, American schoolchildren are performing at mediocre levels in reading, math and science — wherever they attend school.
Madison School Board Superintendent Review Discussion
The Madison School Board discussed the Superintendent review process Monday evening. 46MB Video | 7MB MP3 Audio. The discussion included references to curriculum.
Antonucci Commentary on Public vs. Private School NAEP Scores
Mike Antonucci on the recent Education Department report comparing private and public school math and reading scores:
If I read the wonderfully titled report Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling correctly, there is virtually no difference between the math and reading test scores of public and private school students when corrected for various characteristics of students, teachers and schools.
This is bad news for private schools (and when the same results exist for charters, for them as well). If you are going to sell yourself as the superior alternative to traditional public schools, you have to produce results. Reading and math scores on the NAEP tests are excellent measures of academic results, though -- as my friends at NEA and AFT always tell me -- not the only measures.
National Education Association President Reg Weaver was correct when he told the New York Times that had the results been different, "there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools."
Where Reg went wrong, however, was when he said that the results showed public schools were "doing an outstanding job." Standardized test scores are the measures used by the bad guys -- you know, people like me -- to evaluate schools. What about all the measures the unions claim are important?
Private schools spend about two-thirds what public schools spend.
L.A. Unified plans to spend millions to train, recruit and keep math and science teachers, who are a hot commodity nationwide.
Recognizing the critical need to boost math and science test scores, the Los Angeles Unified School District has taken several steps — including offering bonuses — to attract and keep teachers in those fields at the district's neediest schools.
Perhaps the most encouraging trend in public education today is the growing willingness of educators and policymakers to embrace choices and customization, while turning away from the notion of one-size-fits-all corporatism that dominated 20th century school reform. In education, though, no good deed long goes unpunished. In a barely coherent 5-2 decision, Florida's Supreme Court used recklessly broad language to overturn the state's private school voucher program. In doing so, it set an unfortunate precedent that stretches far beyond the question of school choice.
Florida's Opportunity Scholarship program is the oldest, and smallest, of three private-school choice plans in Florida and has been the focal point of the legal and political battle between school choice proponents and opponents in Florida. In deciding to declare the program unconstitutional, the court read the constitutional requirement that the state provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education” as decreeing a constitutional “uniformity” in operations. The decision was greeted with great fanfare by the National School Boards Association, the NAACP, and the teachers unions.
Let's look at the recent "Nation's Report Card," published annually by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.
Nationally, in reading, only 13 percent of black fourth graders, and 11 percent of black eighth graders score as proficient. Twenty-nine percent achieve a score of "basic," defined as a partial knowledge and skills needed to be proficient in the grade. Fifty-nine percent score below basic, lacking necessary knowledge and skills. It's the same story for black eighth graders, with 40 percent scoring basic and 49 percent below basic.
In math, it's roughly the same story. For black fourth graders, 12 percent score proficient, 47 percent score basic and 40 percent below basic. For black eighth graders, 8 percent score proficient, while 33 percent score basic and 59 percent score below basic; however, 1 percent of black fourth graders and eighth graders achieved an advanced score in math.
Teachers and politicians respond to this tragic state of affairs by saying more money is needed. The Washington, D.C., school budget is about the nation's highest with about $15,000 per pupil. Its student/teacher ratio, at 15.2 to 1, is lower than the nation's average. Despite this, black academic achievement in D.C. is the lowest in the nation. Reading scores for D.C.'s fourth-grade black students are: 7 percent proficient, 21 percent basic and 71 percent below basic. For eighth-graders, it's 6 percent proficient, 33 percent basic and 58 percent below basic.
This report explores the possibility of reaching higher standards for all students in all schools and suggests the principles and practices for doing so. Of course, moving any school system from knowing what high-performing systems do, to doing what high-performing systems do is a complex process. Strong agreement about what high-performing systems do will begin to bring some order to that process.
One practice, which relates to the Framework theme of Curriculum and Academic Goals, is the pursuit of rigorous course content across a broad range of academic levels in high-performing schools. This includes higher expectations for the work of students characterized as "average" or "below average," more aggressive efforts to enroll borderline students in advanced classes, and more frequent access to the school's top teachers for average students. At Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Florida, educators said that the "culture of high expectations is applied to students at all performance levels, not just to the academically advanced." Students in all academic courses expect homework assignments that require approximately two hours of time each day to complete for each class.
The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well as or better than comparable children in private schools in reading and mathematics. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.
The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind public schools on eighth-grade math.
The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.
This study compares mean 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics scores of public and private schools in 4th and 8th grades, statistically controlling for individual student characteristics (such as gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, identification as an English language learner) and school characteristics (such as school size, location, and the composition of the student body). In grades 4 and 8, using unadjusted mean scores, students in private schools scored significantly higher than students in public schools for both reading and mathematics. But when school means were adjusted in the HLM analysis, the average for public schools was significantly higher than the average for private schools for grade 4 mathematics and not significantly different for reading. At grade 8, the average for private schools was significantly higher than the average for public schools in reading but not significantly different for mathematics. Comparisons were also carried out between types of sectarian schools. In grade 4, Catholic and Lutheran schools were compared separately to public schools. For both reading and mathematics, the results were similar to those based on all private schools. In grade 8, Catholic, Lutheran, and Conservative Christian schools were each compared to public schools. For Catholic and Lutheran schools for both reading and mathematics, the results were again similar to those based on all private schools. For Conservative Christian schools, the average adjusted school mean in reading was not significantly different from that of public schools. In mathematics, the average adjusted school mean for Conservative Christian schools was significantly lower than that of public schools.
The majority of statewide virtual schools, which mostly are geared toward high school students, offer courses that supplement traditional brick-and-mortar schools. But a growing number of virtual charter schools are offering high schoolers the option of earning their diploma the digital way, without ever stepping foot in a classroom.
There are now 24 states with statewide programs that offer credit for online courses, according to John Watson, researcher for the annual Keeping Pace [PDF File] report that tracks virtual programs.
And more states are hopping on the virtual bandwagon. This year, Missouri and South Dakota enacted laws paving the way for a statewide virtual learning program. In April, Michigan made an online class a high school requirement, starting with the class of 2011. Georgia, which had its inaugural virtual education program in the last school year, enacted a new law to allow for cyber charter schools, while Illinois will open its first public virtual elementary school this fall.
The largest state programs are Utah’s Electronic High School, which opened in 1993 and taught a course to about a third of the state’s recent graduating class, and Florida Virtual School, which serves grades 6-12 and opened in 1997.
Utah’s program has more than 52,000 students. Florida’s program has 31,000 students and 65,000 course enrollments, the most in the country.
Many of the schools’ students are making up credits, trying to graduate early, or taking classes their schools don’t offer. Students in rural districts that don’t offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, for example, can take those classes online.
Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.
As editions pass, the names on the spine of a book may have only a distant or dated relation to the words between the covers, diluted with each successive edition, people in the industry, and even authors, say.
In the case of the two history texts, the authors appeared mortified by the similarities and said they had had nothing to do with the changes.
My 13 year old son was complaining the other day about how "hard" it was he had to get up and swim at 7 a.m. for his local swim club. (7 is a little early when it's cold but...) He then complained about umpiring a Little League game because a coach yelled at him.
As a calm and understanding parent I lost my temper, "They created summer for farm children to get up at sun rise and pick corn, cotton, etc... and all you have to do is play sports and relax. I had to haul hay and clean rental homes for my dad, you need to work more that is your problem!" Which of course, as a parent I am completely guilty of making this life too easy for my children, and I will be correcting that problem next summer...my motto now is if they are bored give them a chore.......
Which reminded me of an idea I had when I was in high school, and again when I was teaching high school, and again when I recently read an article in Newsweek...
In North Carolina there are several school districts that have an agreement with their local community colleges (MATC) that allows Junior and Senior students in high school to receive credits for both a skill and high school. When these students graduate they have a degree from High School and an associates degree in whatever interest them. WOW! That was my idea 20 year ago. I noticed when I was in high school that many of my friends and myself left school at 3:00 and went to work. Some were so interested in work and the skills they learned they left school to make money and pursue a more interesting skill.
We could reduce the drop out rate if we arranged a similar association with MATC for our students not bound for college. They would be ready for a job, have a diploma, and excited about their future. If they changed their mind they still have a H.S. degree and could go to college. 16 and 17 year olds get into trouble because they are bored....and they are bored because we wait until they are 18 to treat them as participants in society. We assume they are all interested in calculus and becoming lawyers, of course that is not true. Most other industrialized countries realize this and have created "prep" schools for those that will attend college. The great part about the N.C. plan is they will have a degree and can change their direction or mind to attend college, because 16 is a young age to decide your future, but at least they would have a skill to fall back on.
I remember how busy I was the last two years of high school, not studying but doing all kinds of activities, taking college courses, working a couple of jobs, and I was not even away from home yet. We need to advance these capable students forward to an area that interests them. Utilize their endless energy. Let's look at this model and see if this would help resolve our gap, dropout rate and problem students for MMSD. We have the community college right here and plenty of educators.....this is an issue that should be discussed.
Please help to make THE STUDIO SCHOOL -- an option for parents and children within the public school district.
You're invited to attend a planning meeting of local parents, educators, community leaders and others:
Date: July 19 ( Wednesday ) Time: 6:00 - 8:00 pm Site: MADISON Library - Sequoya Branch 513 South Midvalle Blvd. [Map] --
See the summary description of the proposed school -- executive summary
BRYAN GRAU, co-founder of Nuestro Mundo Community (charter) School in Madison, has been invited to the July 19 meeting to discuss the charter school authorization and implementation process.
Here’s additional background info for your review …..
On June 19th the board held a brainstorming session to discuss future district directions. This included developing agenda items for the board and committees. For the 06-07 school year, the entire board will focus on: 1) Attendance, Dropouts, Truancy and Expulsions; 2) Budget Process; 3) Math & Literacy; and 4) Equity. Many items were discussed for committee agendas and the committees themselves will prioritize them
More than once in the last several weeks, I asked Carol Carstensen via e-mail whether she'd support a task force or pilot program to look at more effective reading programs than those used by the district, and she has not given me an answer.
Here is what I posted on May 26:
Carol Carstensen provided the third grade reading scores for students who had been in Reading Recovery in first grade. According to the 2003-04 WRCT results of former Reading Recovery students, only 57% scored at or above grade level, not 89% as Carol suggested in a comment. . . .
I suggested to Carol that it might be wise for the district to pilot a curriculum stressing systematic, direct, and explicit instruction, since Reading Recovery does little of those. A pilot would tell the board whether another curriculum would help students even more.
Participation in a rigorous secondary school program of study may qualify a postsecondary student to receive an ACG, if otherwise eligible. The Secretary recognizes at least one rigorous secondary school program of study for each state annually. States may submit proposals for recognition or may elect to accept rigorous secondary school programs of study pre-recognized by the Secretary. The following are recognized rigorous secondary school programs of study for each state for the 2006-07 award year.
Q. The gap is a huge issue in Milwaukee. What would you do if you had full power to do something about things here?
A. When we look at the districts that are making the biggest gains, in terms of both overall achievement and narrowing gaps between groups, what seems to set them apart is their focus. They have very, very clear and high goals for kids. They focus a lot on instruction.
“The schooling system was in much better shape 50 years ago than it is now,” says Friedman, his voice as confident as reinforced concrete.
A big fan of freedom, Friedman objects to public schools on principle, arguing — as he says most classic liberals once did — that government involvement by nature decreases individual liberty. But it’s the decline of schooling at the practical level, especially for the poor, that seems to exasperate him.
Friedman puts much of the blame on centralization.
“When I went to elementary school, a long, long time ago in the 1920s, there were about 150,000 school districts in the United States,” he says. “Today there are fewer than 15,000, and the population is more than twice as large.”
“It’s very clear that the people who suffer most in our present system are people in the slums — blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the underclass.”
When I ask him about the “achievement gap” separating low-scoring black and Latino students from better-scoring whites and Asians, he blames my “friends in the union.”
“They are running a system that maximizes the gap in performance. . . Tell me, where is the gap between the poor and rich wider than it is in schooling? A more sensible education system, one that is based on the market, would stave off the division of this country into haves and have-nots; it would make for a more egalitarian society because you’d have more equal opportunities for education.
Jonathan Kozol, author of “Savage Inequalities” and other books of education journalism, has noted that the parents who whine that “throwing money at education” doesn’t solve the problem are usually those spending $15,000 or $30,000 a year to send their kids to private schools. I ask Friedman about the obvious implications of that.
“In the last 10 years, the amount spent per child on schooling has more than doubled after allowing for inflation. There’s been absolutely no improvement as far as I can see in the quality of education. . . . The system you have is like a sponge. It will absorb the extra money. Because the incentives are wrong.
He created Reasoning Mind because he had a dismal opinion of American education, from kindergarten through high school.
This Web-based math program "does not merely incorporate technology into teaching. It is based in technology and capitalizes on the power of technology to deliver information and content," Dr. Alexander R. "Alex" Khachatryan said.
The results from a pilot program during the 2005-06 school year were impressive. At-risk students at a Houston school and advanced math students at a school in College Station were introduced to Reasoning Mind.
"At the inner-city school, the test group's average improvement from the pre-test to the post-test was 67 percent, while the control group improved 6 percent," Dr. Khachatryan said.
"The test group students also demonstrated extraordinary results – a 20 percent higher passing rate – on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test, despite the fact that only three out of 48 problems directly checked students' knowledge of the two math units covered by RM in the pilot," he said.
Many of the nations that have left the United States behind in math and science have ministries of education with clear mandates when it comes to educational quality control. The American system, by contrast, celebrates local autonomy for its schools. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, it tried to address the quality control problem through annual tests, which the states were supposed to administer in exchange for federal dollars. But things have not quite worked out as planned.
A startling new study shows that many states have a longstanding tradition of setting basement-level educational standards and misleading the public about student performance. The patterns were set long before No Child Left Behind, and it will require more than just passing a law to change them.
Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a research institute run jointly by Stanford and the University of California, showed that in many states students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is currently the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.
The study analyzed state-level testing practices from 1992 to 2005. It found that many states were dumbing down their tests or shifting the proficiency targets in math and reading, creating a fraudulent appearance of progress and making it impossible to tell how well students were actually performing.
Two centuries after Jefferson, social studies are lacking at public schools.
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of July 4, 1776, church bells rang out in Philadelphia celebrating the official adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress.
Andrekopoulos said in his speech that from about 1988 through 2000, the leadership of MPS made it a priority to decentralize control of the district, allowing many schools to operate more independently and choose approaches to education. Some schools flourished as a result, but many did not, he said, and the focus was not on student achievement.
Now, he said, the focus must be on student achievement, and the central office must make sure that good teaching is going on in schools.
"We need to move away from a system of schools to a school system," he said, reversing one of the catch phrases that was used by advocates of decentralization - including Andrekopoulos himself, when he was principal of Fritsche Middle School.
Kimberly Green figured she was ready for college. And why not? She had a diploma from Duncanville High School with a B-minus average.
But then she got to Mountain View College and had to take four remedial courses, three in math and one in reading.
"I'll admit, I was kind of down that I had to take developmental classes," Kimberly said. It was tough enough adjusting to college without having to catch up, she said.
This isn't to place all the blame on Duncanville; Kimberly has plenty of company. Half – yes, half – of students entering public colleges and universities in Texas need some type of remedial help, according to the state's higher education board.
But the investments in China's modernization that are most impressive of all are in human capital. The blunt fact is that many young Chinese in cities like Shanghai or Beijing get a better elementary and high school education than Americans do. That's a reality that should embarrass us and stir us to seek lessons from China.
On this trip I brought with me a specialist on American third-grade education — my third-grade daughter. Together we sat in on third-grade classes in urban Shanghai and in a rural village near the Great Wall. In math, science and foreign languages, the Chinese students were far ahead.
My daughter was mortified when I showed a group of Shanghai teachers some of the homework she had brought along. Their verdict: first-grade level at a Shanghai school.
Granted, China's education system has lots of problems. Universities are mostly awful, and in rural areas it's normally impossible to hold even a primitive conversation in English with an English teacher. But kids in the good schools in Chinese cities are leaving our children in the dust.
Last month, the Asia Society published an excellent report, "Math and Science Education in a Global Age: What the U.S. Can Learn from China." It notes that China educates 20 percent of the world's students with 2 percent of the world's education resources. And the report finds many potential lessons in China's rigorous math and science programs.
Yet, there isn't any magic to it. One reason Chinese students learn more math and science than Americans is that they work harder at it. They spend twice as many hours studying, in school and out, as Americans.
Chinese students, for example, must do several hours of homework each day during their summer vacation, which lasts just two months. In contrast, American students have to spend each September relearning what they forgot over the summer.
China's government has developed a solid national curriculum, so that nearly all high school students study advanced biology and calculus. In contrast, only 13 percent of American high school pupils study calculus, and fewer than 18 percent take advanced biology.
Yet if the Chinese government takes math and science seriously, children and parents do so even more. At Cao Guangbiao elementary school in Shanghai, I asked a third-grade girl, Li Shuyan, her daily schedule. She gets up at 6:30 a.m. and spends the rest of the day studying or practicing her two musical instruments.
So if she gets her work done and has time in the evening, does she watch TV or hang out with friends? "No," she said, "then I review my work and do extra exercises."
A classmate, Jiang Xiuyuan, said that during summer vacation, his father allows him to watch television each evening — for 10 minutes.
The Chinese students get even more driven in high school, as they prepare for the national college entrance exams. Yang Luyi, a tenth grader at the first-rate Shanghai High School, said that even on weekends he avoided going to movies. "Going to the cinema is time-consuming," he noted, "so when all the other students are working so diligently, how can you do something so irrelevant?"
And romance?
Li Yafeng, a tenth-grade girl at the same school, giggled at my question. "I never planned to have a boyfriend in high school," she said, "because it's a waste of time."
Now, I don't want such a pressured childhood for my children. But if Chinese go overboard in one direction, we Americans go overboard in the other. U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.
I don't think we could replicate the Chinese students' drive even if we wanted to. But there are lessons we can learn — like the need to shorten summer vacations and to put far more emphasis on math and science. A central challenge for this century will be how to regulate genetic tinkering with the human species; educated Chinese are probably better equipped to make those kinds of decisions than educated Americans.
During the Qing Dynasty that ended in 1912, China was slow to learn lessons from abroad and adjust its curriculum, and it paid the price in its inability to compete with Western powers. These days, the tables are turned, and now we need to learn from China.
That said, government should not be looking for ways to haul the rich down. Rather, it should help others, especially the extremely poor, to climb up—and that must mean education. Parts of the American system are still magnificent, such as its community colleges. But as countless international league tables show, its schools are not. Education is a political football, tossed about between Republicans who refuse to reform a locally based funding system that starves schools in poor districts, and Democrats who will never dare offend their paymasters in the teachers' unions.
The other challenge is to create a social-welfare system that matches a global business world of fast-changing careers. No country has done this well. But the answer has to be broader than just “trade-adjustment” assistance or tax breaks for hard-hit areas. Health care, for instance, needs reform. America's traditional way of providing it through companies is crumbling. The public pension system, too, needs an overhaul.
Inequality and the American Dream
Jun 15th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The world's most impressive economic machine needs a little adjusting
MORE than any other country, America defines itself by a collective dream: the dream of economic opportunity and upward mobility. Its proudest boast is that it offers a chance of the good life to everybody who is willing to work hard and play by the rules. This ideal has made the United States the world's strongest magnet for immigrants; it has also reconciled ordinary Americans to the rough side of a dynamic economy, with all its inequalities and insecurities. Who cares if the boss earns 300 times more than the average working stiff, if the stiff knows he can become the boss?
Look around the world and the supremacy of “the American model” might seem assured. No other rich country has so successfully harnessed the modern juggernauts of technology and globalisation. The hallmarks of American capitalism—a willingness to take risks, a light regulatory touch and sharp competition—have spawned enormous wealth. “This economy is powerful, productive and prosperous,” George Bush boasted recently, and by many yardsticks he is right. Growth is fast, unemployment is low and profits are fat. It is hardly surprising that so many other governments are trying to “Americanise” their economies—whether through the European Union's Lisbon Agenda or Japan's Koizumi reforms.
Yet many people feel unhappy about the American model—not least in the United States. Only one in four Americans believes the economy is in good shape. While firms' profits have soared, wages for the typical worker have barely budged. The middle class—admittedly a vague term in America—feels squeezed. A college degree is no longer a passport to ever-higher pay. Now politicians are playing on these fears. From the left, populists complain about Mr Bush's plutocratic friends exporting jobs abroad; from the right, nativists howl about immigrants wrecking the system.
A global argument
The debate about the American model echoes far beyond the nation's shores. Europeans have long held that America does not look after its poor—a prejudice reinforced by the ghastly scenes after Hurricane Katrina. The sharp decline in America's image abroad has much to do with foreign policy, but Americanisation has also become synonymous with globalisation. Across the rich world, global competition is forcing economies to become more flexible, often increasing inequality; Japan is one example (see article). The logic of many non-Americans is that if globalisation makes their economy more like America's, and the American model is defective, then free trade and open markets must be bad.
This debate mixes up three arguments—about inequality, meritocracy and immigration. The word that America should worry about most is the one you hear least—meritocracy.
Begin with inequality. The flip-side of America's economic dynamism is that it has become more unequal—but in a more complex way than first appears (see article). America's rich have been pulling away from the rest of the population, as the returns for talent and capital in a global market have increased. Even if American business stopped at the water's edge, Bill Gates and the partners of Goldman Sachs would still be wealthy people; but since software and investment banking are global industries, Mr Gates is worth $50 billion and the average pay-and-benefits package for Goldman's 22,400 employees is above $500,000.
On the other hand, the current wave of globalisation may not be widening the gap between the poor and the rest. Indeed, the headwinds of the global economy are being felt less by Americans at the bottom than by those in the middle. The jobs threatened by outsourcing—data-processing, accounting and so on—are white-collar jobs; the jobs done by the poor—cleaning and table-waiting, for example—could never be done from Bangalore.
Those at the bottom have different fears, immigration high among them. Their jobs cannot be exported to rival countries perhaps, but rival workers can and are being imported to America. Yet there is surprisingly little evidence that the arrival of low-skilled workers has pulled poor Americans' wages down. And it has certainly provided a far better life for new arrivals than the one they left behind (see article).
A long ladder is fine, but it must have rungs
To many who would discredit American capitalism, this sort of cold-hearted number-crunching is beside the point. Any system in which the spoils are distributed so unevenly is morally wrong, they say. This newspaper disagrees. Inequality is not inherently wrong—as long as three conditions are met: first, society as a whole is getting richer; second, there is a safety net for the very poor; and third, everybody, regardless of class, race, creed or sex, has an opportunity to climb up through the system. A dynamic, fast-growing economy may sometimes look ugly, but it offers far more hope than a stagnant one for everybody in the United States.
This is not to let the American system off the hook when it comes to social mobility. Although the United States is seen as a world of opportunity, the reality may be different. Some studies have shown that it is easier for poorer children to rise through society in many European countries than in America. There is a particular fear about the engine of American meritocracy, its education system. Only 3% of students at top colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. Poor children are trapped in dismal schools, while richer parents spend ever more cash on tutoring their offspring.
What, if anything, needs to be done? A meritocracy works only if it is seen to be fair. There are some unfair ways in which rich Americans have rewarded themselves, from backdated share options to reserved places at universities for the offspring of alumni. And a few of Mr Bush's fiscal choices are not helping. Why make the tax system less progressive at a time when the most affluent are doing best?
That said, government should not be looking for ways to haul the rich down. Rather, it should help others, especially the extremely poor, to climb up—and that must mean education. Parts of the American system are still magnificent, such as its community colleges. But as countless international league tables show, its schools are not. Education is a political football, tossed about between Republicans who refuse to reform a locally based funding system that starves schools in poor districts, and Democrats who will never dare offend their paymasters in the teachers' unions.
The other challenge is to create a social-welfare system that matches a global business world of fast-changing careers. No country has done this well. But the answer has to be broader than just “trade-adjustment” assistance or tax breaks for hard-hit areas. Health care, for instance, needs reform. America's traditional way of providing it through companies is crumbling. The public pension system, too, needs an overhaul.
These are mightily complicated areas, but the United States has always had a genius for translating the highfalutin' talk of the American Dream into practical policies, such as the GI Bill, a scholarship scheme for returning troops after the second world war. The country needs another burst of practical idealism. It is still the model the rest of the world is following.
Brave New World: Are our kids ready to compete in the new global economy? Maybe not
Marc Eisen:
Most of us have had those eerie moments when the distant winds of globalization suddenly blow across our desks here in comfortable Madison. For parents, it can lead to an unsettling question: Will my kids have the skills, temperament and knowledge to prosper in an exceedingly competitive world?
I’m not so sure.
I’m a fan of Madison’s public schools, but I have my doubts if such preparation is high on the list of school district priorities. (I have no reason to think things are any better in the suburban schools.) Like a lot of parents, I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired and challenged in school. Too often -- in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness -- that isn’t happening.
Brave New World: Are our kids ready to compete in the new global economy? Maybe not
Last summer I saw the future, and it was unsettling.
My daughter, then 14, found herself a racial minority in a class of gifted kids in a three-week program at Northwestern University. Of the 16 or so kids, a dozen were Asian or Asian American.
The class wasn't computer science or engineering or chemistry -- classes increasingly populated by international students at the college level -- but a “soft” class, nonfiction writing.
When several hundred parents and students met that afternoon for the introductory remarks, I spotted more turbaned Sikhs in the auditorium than black people. I can't say if there were any Hispanics at all.
Earlier, I had met my daughter's roommate and her mom -- both thin, stylish and surgically connected to their cell phones and iPods. I casually assumed that the kid was a suburban princess, Chinese American division. Later, my daughter told me that her roommate was from Hong Kong, the daughter of a banker, and had at the age of 14 already taken enrichment classes in Europe and Canada. Oh, and she had been born in Australia.
Welcome to the 21st century.
In the coming decades, you can be sure the faces of power and influence won't be monochromatic white and solely American. Being multilingual will be a powerful advantage in the business world, familiarity and ease with other cultures will be a plus, and, above all, talent and drive will be the passwords of success in the global economy.
Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, his chronicle of the rapid economic and social changes wrought by the mercury-like spread of new technology, serves as an essential primer for understanding this new world.
In a nutshell, we shouldn't bet on American hegemony in technology and economic growth in the 21st century. In a ramped-up, knowledge-based, digitalized economy, there are no borders. The built-in advantage the U.S. enjoyed after World War II -- our industrial based was untouched, while the rest of the developed world's was in ruins -- has finally run its course. Today, many tech jobs can just as easily be performed in Bangalore and Beijing as in Fitchburg.
Whether America's youth, raised in the lap of luxury with an overpowering sense of entitlement, will prosper in this meritocratic environment is an interesting question. And what of America's underprivileged youth, struggling in school and conspicuously short of family assets: How well will they fare in the new global marketplace?
My own a-ha! moment came a year ago at about the same time I dropped my youngest daughter off at Northwestern. Out of the blue I received an e-mail from a young man in India, offering his services to proofread the paper. Technically, it was no problem to ship him copy, and because of the 12-hour time difference he could work while the rest of us slept and played -- if we wanted to go down the outsourcing road.
Most of us have had those eerie moments when the distant winds of globalization suddenly blow across our desks here in comfortable Madison. For parents, it can lead to an unsettling question: Will my kids have the skills, temperament and knowledge to prosper in an exceedingly competitive world?
I'm not so sure.
I'm a fan of Madison's public schools, but I have my doubts if such preparation is high on the list of school district priorities. (I have no reason to think things are any better in the suburban schools.) Like a lot of parents, I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired and challenged in school. Too often -- in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness -- that isn't happening.
Instead, what we see in Madison is just the opposite: Advanced classes are choked off; one-size-fits-all classes (“heterogeneous class groupings”) are mandated for more and more students; the talented-and-gifted staff is slashed; outside groups promoting educational excellence are treated coolly if not with hostility; and arts programs are demeaned and orphaned. This is not Tom Friedman's recipe for student success in the 21st century.
Sure, many factors can be blamed for this declining state of affairs, notably the howlingly bad way in which K-12 education is financed in Wisconsin. But much of the problem also derives from the district's own efforts to deal with “the achievement gap.”
That gap is the euphemism used for the uncomfortable fact that, as a group, white students perform better academically than do black and Hispanic students. More to the point, mandating heterogeneous class grouping becomes a convenient cover for reducing the number of advanced classes that fail the PC test: too white and unrepresentative of the district's minority demographics.
The problem is that heterogeneous classes are based on the questionable assumption that kids with a wide range of skills -- from high-schoolers reading at a fourth-grade level to future National Merit students -- can be successfully taught in the same sophomore classroom.
“It can be done effectively, but the research so far suggests that it usually doesn't work,” says Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, head of Northwestern's Center for Talent Development, which runs an enrichment program for Evanston's schools.
I have to ask: After failing to improve the skills of so many black and Hispanic kids, is the Madison district now prepared to jeopardize the education of its most academically promising kids as well?
Please don't let me be misunderstood. Madison schools are making progress in reducing the achievement gap. The district does offer alternatives for its brightest students, including college-level Advanced Placement classes. There are scores of educators dedicated to improving both groups of students. But it's also clear which way the wind blows from the district headquarters: Embrace heterogeneous classrooms. Reject tracking of brighter kids. Suppress dissent in the ranks.
The district's wrongheaded approach does the most damage in the elementary-school years. That's where the schools embrace dubious math and reading pedagogy and shun innovative programs, like those operated by the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth, a nonprofit group that works tirelessly to promote gifted education. (Credit school board president Johnny Winston Jr. for cracking the door open to WCATY.)
In a perfect world, Madison would learn from Evanston's schools and their relationship with WCATY's peer, the Center for Talent Development. Faced with predominantly white faces in its advanced high school classes, this racially mixed district didn't dump those classes but hired Olszewski-Kubilius' group to run an after-school and weekend math and science enrichment program for promising minority students in grades 3-6.
In other words, raise their performance so they qualify for those advanced classes once they get to high school. Now there's an idea that Tom Friedman would like!
MARC EISEN IS EDITOR OF ISTHMUS.Email: EISEN at ISTHMUS.COM
Imagine what would have happened if a city the size of Beloit had sprung up in Dane County over the past five years.
That's almost what happened. Dane County's population grew by 31,580 from 2000 to 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released last week.
No other Wisconsin county gained as many people.
The population increase extended a trend. Over the past 15 years Dane County has gained 91,000 people, almost equal to the population of Kenosha, Wisconsin's fourth largest city. Projections call for the growth to continue.
MMSD Lost 174 Students While the Surrounding School Districts Increased by 1,462 Students Over Four School Years. Revenue Value of 1,462 Students - $13.16 Million Per Year*
MMSD reports that student population is declining. From the 2000-2001 school year through the 2003-2004 school year, MMSD lost 174 students. Did this happen in the areas surrounding MMSD? No. From the 2000-2001 through the 2003-2004 school year, the increase in non-MMSD public school student enrollment was 1,462 outside MMSD.
The property tax and state general fund revenue value of 174 students is $1.57 million per year in the 2003-2004 MMSD school year dollars (about $9,000 per student). For 1,462 students, the revenue value is $13.16 million per year. Put another way, the value of losing 174 students equals a loss of 26-30 teachers. A net increase of 1,462 students equals nearly 219 teachers. There are more subtleties to these calculations due to the convoluted nature of the revenue cap calculation, federal and state funds for ELL and special education, but the impact of losing students and not gaining any of the increase of students in the area is enormous.
Business Week has a cover story this week about Bill and Melinda Gates’ small schools efforts. The story starts in Denver, where the Gates folks made a mess of breaking up that city’s lowest-performing school, “a complete failure,” in the Denver superintendent’s words. Summarizing reporters’ visits to 22 Gates-funded schools around the country, the article finds that “while the Microsoft couple indisputably merit praise for calling national attention to the dropout crisis and funding the creation of some promising schools, they deserve no better than a C when it comes to improving academic performance…Creating small schools may work sometimes, but it’s no panacea.”
The article points to some real successes. Some are in New York City, and the article says part of the reason for the success is Gates’ partnership with New Visions for Public Schools, which has been in the small-schools business a lot longer than Bill and Melinda. Mott Haven Village Prep HS [pdf] is one example. But of all the Gates schools in NYC, the report says one-third had ineffective partnerships, many have rising “social tensions,” and suspensions have triped in the new schools over the last three years to reach the system average. We are never snippy but we told you so. The UFT’s 2005 Small Schools Task Force found too many of the Gates-funded small schools have been started with little planning, inexperienced leadership, minimal input from staff or stakeholders and no coherent vision. Some are little more than shells behind a lofty–sometimes ridiculously lofty–name.
There are serious gaps between the high school graduation rates that states report and the actual number of students who receive a diploma, according to a new report. The study, from the journal Education Week, estimates that in the school year that just ended, 1.2 million students failed to graduate.
Imagine yourself the parent of an otherwise bright and engaging child who has reached the fourth grade without learning to read. After battling the public school bureaucracy for what seems like a lifetime, you enroll your child in a specialized private school for struggling readers. Over the next few years, you watch in grateful amazement as a child once viewed as uneducable begins to read and experiences his first successes at school.
Most parents are so relieved to find help for their children that they never look back at the public schools that failed them. But a growing number of families are no longer willing to let bygones be bygones. They have hired special education lawyers and asserted their rights under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which allows disabled children whom the public schools have failed to receive private educations at public expense.
Federal disability law offers public school systems a stark choice: The schools can properly educate learning-disabled children — or they can fork over the money to let private schools do the job.
In fact, if you look at things like math and science and the relative ranking of the U.S., you'd say, "Wow, that's of great concern." It's a system that a lot of resources are put into. Education's a big part of the economy. And yet the outcomes you get are so drastically different, depending on how well it's done.
And so we mostly focus on high schools. That's where the U.S. goes from being pretty decent to being pretty bad relative to other developed countries. And it is an area where there hasn't been much in terms of taking successes and getting them well understood and getting them to be used broadly.
On recent studies, funded by the Gates foundation, that found that math results at schools receiving money from the foundation are lower than at traditional high schools
Melinda One of the things we have to look at is what is it about the teachers today and the curriculum today that's making math not successful in these schools? We just recently had those results. The best thing the foundation can do is really look at that and talk with our partners and say: "Do we need to change something about how we're helping teachers teach math? Do we need to help change the curriculum in the schools?"
As high school graduates across the region accept their diplomas this month, one tradition has changed greatly. The title of valedictorian -- the coveted top slot for the brainiest student -- is no longer necessarily reserved for the single best student.
A growing number of schools, such as Robinson, bestow the title on every graduate who earns a grade-point average of 4.0 or higher. Montgomery and Howard county schools have done away with the distinction to ease competition in a system that was producing increasingly more 4.0 students. Other districts -- Prince George's and Loudoun counties, Alexandria and the District included -- have stuck with the traditional route: Pick one valedictorian and a salutatorian. (Unless a tie forces a few students to share the glory.)
This website is an integrated collection of the indicators and analyses published in The Condition of Education 2000–2006. Some indicators may have been updated since they appeared in print
--A huge fraction of U.S. school children now attend “schools of choice”: more than half of K-12 parents reported in 2003 that they had the “opportunity” to send their kids to a “chosen public school.” It appears that 15 percent actually sent them to a “chosen” public school (including charter schools), to which must be added the 10 to 11 percent in private schools, the 1 to 2 percent who are home schooled, and what seems to be 24 percent who moved into their current neighborhood because of the schools. Though there is some duplication in those numbers, it looks to me like a third to a half of U.S. schoolchildren’s families are exercising school choice of some sort.
--Class-size data are elusive but it’s easy to calculate the student/teacher ratio in U.S. public schools, which has been below 17 to 1 since 1998. Even allowing for special ed, AP physics, and 4th year language classes with 5 kids in them, one may fairly ask why a country with fewer than 17 kids per public-school teacher remains obsessed with class-size reduction. (When I was in fifth grade, the national ratio was about 27:1.)
--Total expenditures per pupil in U.S. public schools reached $9,630 in 2003—up 23 percent in constant dollars over the previous 7 years. At 17 kids per teacher, that translates to almost $164,000 per teacher. Why, then, are teachers not terribly well paid? Because (using the NCES categories) the U.S. spends barely half of its school dollars on “instruction.”
Wisconsin Superintendant of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster was on the agenda to speak at the meeting, so I was looking forward to hearing her elaborate on Wisconsin's super-efficient approach to tackling the difficult, contentious issue of what do with under-performing schools and districts: pretend that virtually none of your schools and districts are under-performing.
Instead, she offered a "spirited defense" of the state's policies, insisting that "We have in no way tried to game the system." She also promised that the new list of schools missing AYP, due out this week, would be longer.
She was right, the new list is longer, upping the number of schools identified from 49 to 92. But before any congratulations are offered, it's important to keep in mind that this mostly just represents an extension of the state's general attitude/approach to public education, which is "Everything here is just fine, in fact fact better than fine, except for Milwaukee, which doesn't really count, in that Milwaukee is (A) A city, and (B) Populated with people who aren't...like the rest of us."
Of the 92 schools identified, the majority (58) are in Milwaukee. And the number of districts identified statewide changed from 1 out 426 to...(drum roll)...1 out 426. Still just Milwaukee.
Don't assume that a school is bad just because it's not making adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. That comment came today from Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak, whose children attend or have attended East High School.
East and three other Madison public high schools were cited for not making the necessary progress outlined by No Child Left Behind legislation, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. In addition to being cited for not making adequate yearly progress, East was also rapped for not having made sufficient progress for two straight years.
La Follette High School, which was on the list last year for not making progress two years in a row, was removed from that list this year. However, there were other areas this year where La Follette did not meet the required proficiency levels for some groups of students.
"I'm not saying I'm thrilled to see the results," Mathiak said. "But it's not as if all schools have equal populations of students facing huge challenges in their lives, chief among them issues of poverty."
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, said the preliminary list of schools that didn't make adequate yearly progress, which the Department of Public Instruction released Tuesday, "didn't tell us anything we didn't know."
"Sooner or later, between now and 2013, every school in America is going to be on the list," Rainwater said.
Rainwater said there are students at all schools who aren't learning at the level they should be, and that the district has been working hard to address the needs of those students.
It's a list no school wants to land on. In Wisconsin, the number of schools not meeting federal guidelines more than doubled, from 45 last year to 92 in 2005-06. The lists can be seen here. One list contains schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for one year. Schools in need of improvement are schools who have failed to meet AYP for two or more years in a row.
Of the 92 schools were the four main Madison high schools, though Superintendent Art Rainwater cautioned against reading too much into it.
At many local schools this past school year, only one or two segments of students failed to score high enough on state tests.
In Madison, East, La Follette, West, and Memorial high schools all did not make enough yearly progress. The state department of public instruction cited low reading scores at three of those four.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said those lower scores came from special needs and low-income students. "Certainly this in a very public way points out issues, but the fact that they didn't do well on this test is secondary to the fact that we have children who are in the district who aren't successful," said Rainwater.
Staff at Memorial and LaFollette were already working on changes to those schools' Read 180 programs, including adding special education teachers.
The list has "broken some barriers relative to different parts of the state," Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers said. Still, the majority of schools on the list are from urban districts such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine.
Few educators these days want to go back to the early 19th century, when often the only opportunities for learning were one-room schoolhouses or, if you were rich, private tutors. But a report from the University of Iowa says at least those students had no age and grade rules to hold them back.
What was lost in the 20th century was "an appreciation for individual differences," scholars Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline and Miraca U.M. Gross conclude in the report, "A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." Now, the report says, "America's school system keeps bright students in line by forcing them to learn in a lock-step manner with their classmates."
This is an update on the inner workings of the California school system. Unfortunately, not much has changed from last year, but I found out more regarding the educational bureaucracy and about various administrative policies that seem to cause more harm than good.
Overall, the classes are better, in that they are less dumbed-down than they were last year. This is partly because most of my classes were AP or Honors classes, and would probably apply to schools across the country. If you know someone whose child is bored, I would recommend that they take AP or Honors classes next year. The downside is an increased homework load, but for many students (including myself), the homework is worth having three weeks after AP testing in which to relax.
Another reason for the increased rigor of the classes, at least at my school, is the number of dropouts. Many of those students who think school is a waste of time leave somewhere in their sophomore year, and by junior year, the average interest of the students has been pushed up. Interestingly, the counselors at my school lie about the number of dropouts, and I know they are lying because a) several teachers agree that the number was definitely more than 3 last year, b) I speak Spanish and have heard immigrants talking to each other about friends who have dropped, and c) the freshman class is almost a thousand each year, while the graduating class is always close to 500 students. Believe me, those kids aren’t all transferring to other schools.
Reprinted from the newest West High School publication, The Scallion.
In response to the popularity of the recently proposed English 10 curriculum, school administrators have begun to plan English 11, a standardized syllabus they believe will promote "equality in the school and confidence in the student." The course is to be implemented in the 2009-2010 school year so that West High School can end the decade "with a bang!"
However, many teachers and officials disagree on which books to feature. One faction desires a challenging curriculum that would include Othello, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and the short stories of William Faulkner. Noting that this list may expose intellectual differences between students and will thus lessen the net confidence gain of the school, an opposing faction has titled their proposal "The Life Works of Dr. Seuss: from The Cat in the Hat to Green Eggs and Ham."
The growing rift between the two factions has increasingly been manifested through harsh words. One teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, referred to the more classical curriculum as "pandering to the bourgeois interests of the University Heights junta." In response, the classical teachers noted that while "Dr. Seuss is a widely respected author and his rhymes are humorous and entertaining, his works are inappropriate for the High School setting."
Augmenting the current debate, the feminist movement has made clear their opposition to the Dr. Seuss curriculum. Says junior Anna James, "we don't need to place another dead white man up on a pedestal. The Dr. Seuss proposal is representative of the sexist academia placing the unqualified man over the more qualified woman." James has proposed her own curriculum of Virginia Wolff and Maya Angelou in a gesture the MENS club referred to as "reverse sexism."
In the end, it seems likely that Dr. Seuss will feature prominently in the English 11 curriculum. As Art Rainwater says, "why have intellectual standards when you can have artificially contrived equality that engenders undeserved confidence and intellectual apathy in the students?"
Many thanks to the Scallion staff responsible for this humorous and insightful piece.
You see the most heart-warming and admirable things in Milwaukee's large public high schools.
Except for when you don't.
You meet great kids, kids who are going to go on to great things. They're engaged, hardworking, goal-oriented, involved in extracurricular activities. You find them in every school, even those with the weakest reputations.
Except, in many schools, they are outnumbered by kids who trudge up to school doors carrying no backpacks or book bags - how many of them actually had homework last night? - and plod through the day, sullen, unengaged, unmotivated and often unchallenged by what is going on around them. And that's not to mention the kids who aren't present at all - generally about 20% of the total high school enrollment with unexcused absences on any given day.
But there is a crisis for many of those who graduate, too - a crisis of educational quality and rigor that generally goes unspoken, perhaps for fear that it's not politically correct to talk about it.
If students who graduate from MPS - still the largest single body of high school students in southeastern Wisconsin and by far the most diverse - are to be successful, they need to be better prepared than they are.
The diploma gap can be seen in the scores on ACT college entrance tests. The composite score for MPS students taking the tests in 2004-'05 was 17.5, the lowest in at least the last nine school years. Statewide, the average was 22.2. At Homestead High, one of the better local schools, the average was 25.
Eric Key, a math professor at UWM who analyzed the scores of incoming students on math placement tests, looked at data on the average math scores of MPS students on the ACT and said, "These scores are basically saying they're ready to start ninth grade." It's not an official judgment - ACT doesn't say what a ninth-grader ought to score - but the point stands. ACT does say what a student ought to score to have a reasonable chance of doing well in a first level college math course - a 22. The MPS average score in math: 17.
The degree to which low rigor is a problem varies not only between MPS and other districts but within MPS, where some high schools are clearly more challenging than others.
Significant improvements in student learn ing require real change at the heart of instruction: the interaction of students and teachers around the content to be learned. This paper suggests a set of design specifications for strengthening this interaction of student, teacher and content and increasing student performance across a school district.
These designs have six components. The first two focus on what the job of effective high school teaching looks like and on getting and keeping teachers who can do this job. They offer a new teacher “job description” that places accountability for results and the use and refinement of effective practices at the core of teaching and also suggest approaches for recruiting and retaining high school teachers who have the will and capacity to embrace this job description and increase student learning. The next four components describe an infrastructure for improving high school instruction that is consistent with this new job description, that provides the concrete supports needed to help new and veteran teachers know what and how to teach effectively, that enablesteachers to elicit higher performance from their students,
and that rests on a teacher-based system for continuously improving results.
These six components are:
A new vision of teacher professionalism that supports instructional improvement
A comprehensive strategy to attract and retain highly effective high school teachers
Clear expectations for high school instructional practices
Anchor standards and aligned assessments that support effective instruction
Core curriculum, common lessons and tools based on the anchor standards and assessments
The District sent literature to various teachers offering credit to those who enroll in the above-referenced courses. As an enticement for the Reading Recovery Teacher Leader course, the District offers "salary, tuition, and book costs." The program will run after work hours during the school year. Regarding the Middle School Math Master’s Program, every District teacher, who teaches math in a middle school, is "expected" to take three (3) District inservice courses in math, unless they hold a math major or minor. The District is advising teachers that they must complete the three (3) courses within two (2) years. The courses are 21 hours each. The program is scheduled to run during the school day, with substitute teachers provided on the days the courses will be taught.
The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission has previously ruled that an employer offering financial incentives, including meals and lodging, or release time, to employees in conjunction with course work or seminars is a mandatory subject of bargaining between the school district and the union.
On paper, the schools appear troubled: low-income students, low state test scores. But a closer look reveals 13 are doing better than expected.
The challenges are not uncommon at schools such as Dayton's Bluff that serve mostly low-income students. But Siedschlag had faith in the teachers she said nurtured students, and she thought things would get better.
They did. A new principal arrived in 2001 and renewed the school's energy. Expectations became clear. Students respected teachers. And staffers now go out of their way to support parents.
School visits and interviews showed that the factors seen as critical to success at Dayton's Bluff also are found at many of the other schools: They have strong principals and a cohesive staff who offer students consistency and structure. They emphasize reading and writing above all else. And they focus instruction on the needs of individual students rather than trying to reach some average child.
These successful schools have focused on basics — reading, writing and math — as they educate their at-risk students. They also have shifted to small-group learning and one-on-one instruction.
"We used to teach to this mythical middle student," said literacy coach Paul Wahmanholm, who has taught at Dayton's Bluff for eight years. Now, "we got away from this one-size-fits-all approach and focused on individualized instruction."
So shouldn't the level of poverty be taken into account when determining how well schools teach kids?
No, say educators and researchers who contend that doing so would create two classes of U.S. schools and eviscerate the No Child Left Behind federal education law, which aims to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014.
"Changing that would create a two-tier system of education — one with high expectations for the wealthy and a set of lower expectations for low-income students," said Diane Piché, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights.
"It's simply not fair for students born into poverty to expect less of them when we know what's possible," she said. "That's what we should focus on, rather than what's likely.
But the experience -- eight-hour school days, tiny classes with demanding teachers, and Saturday sessions -- was more trying than any of them expected. The students, who delayed high school a year to attend Beacon, have emerged with a sense of how satisfying a tough school can be, but also of how unchallenging their public school experiences had been.
``In the beginning, I felt like it was way too much work times two," said Dennishia Bell, 14, a former honor roll student at the Umana Barnes Middle School in East Boston. ``I didn't realize that I wasn't really being challenged in school until I came to Beacon Academy. If I stuck to the Boston Public Schools, I almost feel like they were cheating me out of my education."
A group of educators and entrepreneurs, including former prep school teachers and administrators, established Beacon last summer because of the concern that too few bright, motivated urban public school students could pass the entrance exams and meet the academic standards required for competitive prep schools and the city's exam schools, said Marsha Feinberg, one of the founders. The goal was to prepare students for the academic rigors, as well as the social environment, of prep schools, often filled with children of the rich and famous.
All students can learn from each other if given a chance
A letter to the editor
Dear Editor: I want to respond to the story about the Baraboo School Board member who talked about the uselessness of trying to teach students with "nothing upstairs."
I taught a class called Interpersonal Communications, often in conjunction with the speech classes I taught at Madison West High. The course helped students learn effective communication skills to build and maintain interpersonal relationships in their world. The class was made up of 10th- through 12th-graders, so many didn't know each other.
One semester on the first day, I divided the students, as I often did, in small groups, to learn something about each other. One group had a boy who was a "special ed" student. He started to draw wide circles and ramble a bit to himself. The other students drew back with looks at each other, and everyone was very uncomfortable.
I had not been told the student had various disabilities, but that day I went to the chair of the department and told him to find a way to keep "Robert" out of class the next day. Then I asked him to come to my class and tell the students just what Robert's disabilities were and what the goals for him were. Those goals included Robert being able to find the right bus to take him home, and maybe, someday, to have and keep a simple job. The students listened and learned.
The next day, Robert was back in class, and I asked the students to again meet in groups. Robert's group said, "Come on, Robert, you're with us!" From then on, all the students helped him, made friends with him, and all of us saw the joy in his face as he felt part of the class and advanced his communication skills as well.
The lesson for this might be, it is not what you have, it's what others find in you and themselves. I have a lot of stories like this - and it's how my young students made my teaching such a gift to each other and to me.
Nxt month hundreds of 17- and 18-year- olds in the Madison area will graduate from high school, bound for college. Hundreds more will graduate with plans to enter training programs, join the military or go directly to the world of work.
Those graduates will represent a piece of the American dream.
But what about the teenagers left out of that dream?
An estimated 3,500 young people of high school age in metropolitan Madison area are not in school.
It is a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland idea. If you do not finish high school, head straight for college.
But many colleges — public and private, two-year and four-year — will accept students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees.
And in an era of stubbornly elevated high school dropout rates, the chance to enter college through the back door is attracting growing interest among students without high school diplomas.
Colleges across the country are reporting a drop in SAT scores this year. I've been tutoring students in New York City for the SAT since 1989, and I have watched the numbers rise and fall. This year, though, the scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800). Colleges and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know?
Before 1994, the verbal section of the SAT was about 65% vocabulary (55 out of 85 questions) and 35% reading comprehension. Then the Educational Testing Service shortened and reworked the test, devoting half of the 78 questions to each area. Last year ETS changed the test again, and now it is heavily skewed toward reading: 49 of the 68 items require students to read, synthesize and answer questions.
In such a way, ETS has increased the penalty for not reading throughout one's school years. Studying vocabulary lists before the test--a long-favored shortcut to lifting scores--just won't cut it anymore. Students who read widely and often throughout their elementary and high-school years develop the kinds of reading skills measured by the new SAT. Students who avoid reading don't--and can't develop them in a cram course.
Bridging Differences A Dialogue Between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch
May 24, 2006
By Deborah Meier & Diane Ravitch
In the course of the last 30 years, the two of us have been at odds on any number of issues - on our judgments about progressive education, on the relative importance of curriculum content (what students are taught) vs. habits of mind (how students come to know what they are taught), and most recently in our views of the risks involved in nationalizing aspects of education policy.
Meeting recently to prepare for a debate on the federal No Child Left Behind Act, however, we found ourselves agreeing about the mess that has been generated by local and state testing. Both of us agreed that the public needs far better information about both inputs and outcomes, without which the public is woefully uninformed and too easily manipulated. As we discussed what the next policy steps should be, Diane preferred a national response, and Deborah preferred a local one.
As we talked further, we were surprised to discover that we shared a similar reaction to many of the things that are happening in education today, especially in our nation's urban school districts. Recent trends and events seem to be confirming our mutual fears and jeopardizing our common hopes about what schooling might accomplish for the nation's children. We might, we agreed, be getting the worst of both our perspectives.
Unlike Deborah, Diane has long supported an explicit, prescribed curriculum, one that would consume about half the school day, on which national examinations would be based. Diane believes in the value of a common, knowledge-based curriculum, such as the Core Knowledge curriculum, that ensures that all children study history, literature, mathematics, science, art, music, and foreign language; such a curriculum, she thinks, would support rather than undermine teachers' work. Deborah, while strongly agreeing on the need for a broad liberal arts curriculum, doubts that anyone can ensure what children will really understand and usefully make sense of, even through the best imposed curriculum, especially if it is designed by people who are far from the actual school communities and classrooms.
Yet both of us are appalled by the relentless "test prep" activities that have displaced good instruction in far too many urban classrooms, and that narrow the curriculum to nothing but math and reading. We are furthermore distressed by unwarranted claims from many cities and states about "historic gains" that are based on dumbed-down tests, even occasionally on downright dishonest scoring by purposeful exclusion of low-scoring students.What unites us above all is our conviction that low-income children who live in urban centers are getting the worst of both of our approaches.
Deborah is a pioneer of the small-schools movement. Diane, while not an opponent of that movement, has questioned whether such schools have the capacity to offer a reasonable curriculum, including advanced classes. Yet here, too, we both fear that a good idea has too often been subverted by the mass production of large numbers of small schools, without adequate planning or qualified leadership and with insufficient thought given to how they might promote class and racial integration, rather than contribute to further segregation.We found that we were both dismayed by efforts in New York City to micromanage what teachers in most K-8 schools do at every moment in the day.
While Deborah allies herself with many of the so-called constructivist ideas about teaching that are now in vogue in New York, she believes that the very idea of constructivism is mocked by the city's too often lock-step and authoritarian approach to implementing such ideas. In our shared view, the city's department of education has no curriculum at all, just a mandated and highly prescribed pedagogy in grades K-8, after which time the state Regents examinations - tests that have been dramatically simplified in recent years - serve as an implicit curriculum.We concur that teachers must be free to use their best professional judgment about how to teach, and we agree on the importance of a strong professional culture in which teachers are encouraged to question and re-examine pedagogical assumptions and practices.
Deborah would want teachers to continually re-examine curricular assumptions. Diane urges the adoption of a prescribed curriculum that includes at least the central academic disciplines and the arts. She believes that a policy of letting a thousand flowers bloom without tending is likely to produce hundreds of weeds and only a few rare flowers. Deborah agrees; good gardens need tending. She would leave most of the details to the local school community.
What unites us above all is our conviction that low-income children who live in urban centers are getting the worst of both of our approaches. New York City is a prominent example. No central, abiding definition of what constitutes a well-educated person unites or rationalizes the mandates that flow from central headquarters. The substance of education - history, science, social science, literature, art, music - never sufficiently honored in most of our schools, is being sacrificed to narrowly focused demands to produce higher test scores in reading and math.Principals and teachers, regardless of their experience, are ordered to comply with mandates about how to teach - down to the minute in many elementary schools - undermining not only their professionalism, but often their common sense.
A particular style of teaching has been elevated to a cult, for fear that teachers might err if given more leeway to make decisions and do what they think best. Fear is widespread among teachers, principals, and kids alike, none of whom have any strong countervailing institutions to count on for support.
The ends of education - its purposes, and the trade-offs that real life requires - must be openly debated and continuously re-examined. Young people need to see themselves as novice members of a serious, intellectually purposeful community.Almost all the usual intervening mediators - parent organizations, unions, and local community organizations - have either been co-opted, purchased, or weakened, or find themselves under siege if they question the dominant model of corporate-style "reform."
All the city's major universities, foundations, and business elites are joined together as cheerleaders, if not actual participants, offering no support or encouragement to watchdogs and dissidents. This allows these elites the opportunity to carry out their experiments on a grand, and they hope uninterrupted, "apolitical" scale, where everything can, at last, be aligned, in each and every school, from prekindergarten to grade 12, under the watchful eye of a single leader. If they can remain in power long enough, it is assumed (although what actually is assumed is not easy to find out) that they can create a new paradigm that no future change in leadership can undo.
The so-called reforms of the day are too often a perverse distortion - one might say an "evil twin"of the different ideas that each of us has advocated.Deborah considers NAEP to be flawed in ways not dissimilar to most standardized tests, and she regards its cut scores and norms as equally politically determined and, at present, absurdly high. She notes that the view of the federal government as the guarantor of equity was the product of a particular time and place in our history, and sees no reason to assume that the federal government is likely to be better intentioned about education policy now, or in the future, than local communities are. She believes that certain conservatives favor national standards and testing because they are in power.
Diane points out, however, that most conservatives are adamantly opposed to any national standards, while President Clinton actively supported a national system of standards and testing. In any event, she reasons, the development of national standards and tests is a project for the next decade, and should be outside partisan interests or control. As for NAEP's norms and cut scores, Diane contends that the assessment's standards are entirely nonpolitical and benchmarked to international standards. Deborah thinks that Diane's hopes for unbiased, apolitical benchmarking are well-intentioned but inaccurate as a description of all the current tests, including NAEP. Having abandoned the normal curve, she believes, we're stuck with the fallibility of human judgment.
Madison students tested on the 2005-06 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) surpassed their state peers in the "advanced" category — the highest category — at all grade levels and in both reading and math, district officials said today. More than 12,000 of the district's 24,490 students took the tests.
This level of achievement is significant because the number of students tested doubled, due to first time testing in grades 3, 5, 6, and 7 (in addition to 4, 8 and 10 grades). For example, 38% of the district's 10th graders taking the math test scored in the advanced category, compared with 25% statewide. Madison third graders taking the math test topped their state peers in the advanced category by 44% to 32%.
Madison students across the seven tested grades average five percentage points higher in the advanced score range than their statewide peers in the reading tests, and are over eight percentage points higher in the math test.
"Madison's high-fliers really fly high," said Superintendent Art Rainwater. "While we continue to work hard to narrow the minority student achievement gap, it's important to note that high achieving students prosper and excel in our community's schools."
A new statewide assessment used to test the knowledge of Wisconsin students forced a lowering of the curve, a Madison school official said.
The results showed little change in the percentages of students scoring at proficient and advanced levels.
But that's because this year's Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations- Criterion Referenced Tests proved harder for students than last year's assessment, said Kurt Kiefer, director of research and evaluation for the Madison School District, prompting adjustments to the statewide cut-off scores for determining minimal, basic, proficient and advanced levels that were in line with last year's percentages, Kiefer said.
"The intent was not to make a harder test," Kiefer said, adding that the test was particularly more difficult at the eighth- and 10th-grade levels. "It had nothing to do with how smart the kids were."
While scores can differ from district to district, Kiefer said, increases in students testing proficient and advanced are not as profound as districts might have hoped.
But Wisconsin's remarkable district success rate is mostly a function of the way it has used its flexibility under NCLB to manipulate the statistical underpinnings of the AYP formula.
We went from a district which was above the State average to one with scores at best at the State average. The State Test was changed from a nationally normed test to one written just for Wisconsin, and the different levels were set without a national norm. That is what caused the dramatic rise from February 2002 to November 2002. It was not that all of the Middle Schools were now using Connected Mathematics Project, which was the reason given at the meeting for these increases.
This year's results also underscore a vexing question: Why does the percentage of students who are proficient or advanced drop from eighth to 10th grades? The decline was true almost across the board, including across ethnic groups, except in language arts. In reading statewide, the percentage of students who were advanced and proficient held close to steady from third through eighth grade and then dropped 10 points, from 84% to 74% for 10th grade. The decline was even steeper for black and Hispanic students - in each case, 17-point drops from eighth to 10th grade.
Overall, lower test scores at 10th grade are part of a broader picture of concern about how students are doing in high school that has put that level of education on the front burner nationwide, whether it is special programming from Oprah Winfrey or efforts by the National Governors Association, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or others.
But assistant state schools superintendent Margaret Planner said one factor in the 10th-grade drop simply might be that many students at that level do not take the tests very seriously. Their own standing is not affected by how they do, although the status of their school could be affected seriously. She referred to the tests as "low stakes" for students and "high stakes" for schools under the federal education law.
Critics on both the Left and the Right have charged that the No Child Left Behind Act tramples states' rights by imposing a federally mandated, one-size-fits-all accountability system on the nation's diverse states and schools.
In truth, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute “proficiency”—the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.
The Pangloss Index ranks Wisconsin as the most optimistic state in the nation. Wisconsin scores well on some educational measures, like the SAT, but lags behind in others, such as achievement gaps for minority students. But according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the state is a modern-day educational utopia where a large majority of students meet academic standards, high school graduation rates are high, every school is safe and nearly all teachers are highly qualified. School districts around the nation are struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the primary standard of school and district success under NCLB. Yet 99.8 percent of Wisconsin districts—425 out of 426—made AYP in 2004–05.
How is that possible? As Table 2 shows, some states have identified the large majority of districts as not making AYP. The answer lies with the way Wisconsin has chosen to define the AYP standard.
NCLB requires states to base AYP designations on the percentage of students who score at the “proficient” level on state tests in reading and math. That percentage is compared to a target percentage, which must be met by both the student body as a whole and by “subgroups” of students, such as students from specific racial and ethnic populations. Districts that fail to make AYP for multiple consecutive years become subject to increasingly serious consequences and interventions.
Wisconsin has a relatively homogenous racial makeup and many small school districts, resulting in fewer subgroups in each district that could potentially miss the proficiency targets. But Wisconsin's remarkable district success rate is mostly a function of the way it has used its flexibility under NCLB to manipulate the statistical underpinnings of the AYP formula.
Then comes the final pox-on-both-their-houses flourish, "what does any of it, really...." Maybe there are people out there who really don't think that reporting accurate public information about the success of the school system has anything to do with the success of the school system. I just didn't expect to find newspapers among their number.
According to the data on DPI's Web site, the combined percentages for minimum and basic categories (these are below grade level) for MMSD's 10th graders on the WKCE reading test in November 2004 were:
All students - 26%
African American - 53%
Asian - 29%
Hispanic - 51%
White - 15%
The real shame lies, not in the scores, but in the MMSD's lack of any systematic program to raise these students' reading abilities before graduation.
Pam Nash illustrated the MMSD's weak commitment to Read 180 in a response to my question on how much money the current budget includes for Read 180. Pam wrote:
The district has not included any specific budget for 2006-07 that would be utilized for READ 180. Individual building principals may utilize existing supply/formula and staffing allocations to provide READ 180 strategies within existing curriculum offerings. Read 180 will be offered at all four high schools and Brearly Street Alternatives. (emphasis added)
Given that implementation of Read 180 costs about $40,000 per school, according to district figures, Read 180 won't be expanded to schools currently without it.
From the WKCE scores, probably 20% to 26% of MMSD graduates cannot read their diploma, let alone read well enough to continue their education or land a job that pays a living wage. (The percentage might be lower than 20% since many non-readers may drop out before graduation.)
Additionally, the superintendent and some board members like to brag that the MMSD closed the achievement gap because children of color are no longer over represented in the minimum category on the third grade reading test. Obviously, that's a pitiful claim when more than half of Madison's African American 10th graders can't read at grade level.
In the wake of the annual EdWeek Technology Counts issue, there has been some discussion surrounding the idea that technology is education is harmful. I attribute this to a few factors, including to overstated claims for educational technology in the past, concerns about very specific uses of technology in education like calculators, and the comfort some of us take in the instructional environments we experienced. This rejection of technology is unfortunate, however. Effectively utilized technology has an important role to play in increasing the effectiveness of our schools.
The focus on technology as an end in and of itself is very misplaced in K-12. Instead, districts should focus on providing an adequate level of infrastructure for staff and students and then using technology where it can improve student and staff productivity, allow for a more personalized learning experience, and provide an interactive learning experience.
READ 180 is an example of an application that meets all three of these criteria. Web-based homework like WebAssign meets two of these criteria. Practiced use of a learning management system like Moodle or Blackboard can also meet two or three of these criteria. The MAP assessment that several other area districts use also meets all of these criteria.
There are specific skills with applications that students should have. Keyboarding proficiency is the most important, but all students should have a base level of skill in the use of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. Students might elect courses where more specific skills would be developed if they had an interest in music, digital art, engineering, or specific vocational training. But overall, the specific tools should not be the objective. They're just tools and they change rapidly.
Even in Waunakee’s Photoshop and Animation courses, the emphasis is not so much on Photoshop or Cinema 4D as the visual qualities the student wants to arrive at and the planning of how to arrive at that product.
Mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations don't facilitate executive planning and creativity. Judging by the comments I’ve seen, that is generally accepted here at least.
Most recognize that technology has strongly promoted productivity in private sector enterprises, but that success is not uniform and there is no reason to expect that technology use should provide uniformly successful outcomes in schools. Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT has used firm-level evidence to demonstrate that the impact of technology on private sector productivity is a function of the level of capital investment, training (professional development in education terminology), and compensation incentives. Purchasing technology is not enough and using it effectively is illustrated by what Brynjolfsson terms the “Wal-Mart-Kmart difference.”
However, the capital investment, providing access to technology in the first place, is a cornerstone. The cornerstone does not guarantee a cathedral, but there will be no cathedral absent the cornerstone. We shouldn’t be asking whether technology can make a difference in K-12 education. It will. Instead, we should be asking how we can use technology to improve learning outcomes for students. Productivity, personalization, and interactivity are the best indicators of whether technology use will deliver those improved learning outcomes.
Using technology effectively is predicated on making an adequate investment consistently. In many Wisconsin districts, including Madison, the investment in technology is inadequate. This limits the ceiling for improvement.
Schools in seven Wisconsin metro areas rated highly
Seven metropolitan areas of Wisconsin are in the top 25 metros for public schools in the country, according to a survey ranking U.S. school districts with 3,300 students or more. The survey was conducted by Expansion Management Magazine, a monthly business publication for executives of companies that are actively looking to expand or relocate facilities within the next three years. The seven metropolitan areas of Wisconsin—Sheboygan (5), Eau Claire (7), Madison (8), Wausau (11), Appleton(16), Oshkosh-Neenah (20), and Fond du Lac (24)—appeared in a list of the 25 Top Metros for Public Schools. Schools in these areas, plus Green Bay and La Crosse, were named to the magazine’s 5-Star Public Schools Metros list.
“I am extremely proud of Wisconsin teachers and students for their dedication to quality teaching and learning, and their hard work shows in this survey of the best metropolitan school systems in the nation,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster. “Our students, overall, consistently score among the very best in the nation on the major college entrance exams and high school graduation rates. This affirmation of the quality of Wisconsin schools from an independent, unbiased study, underscores our students’ dedication to excellence in learning and academic achievement, and the support they
receive from their teachers, families, and communities.
“Public education in Wisconsin is moving forward, supported by our early learning and classsize reduction programs. This recognition tells us that we are on the right track and must continue to invest in education, pre-kindergarten through university. Our sustained efforts as students, educators,parents, community volunteers, and citizens will ensure that our students graduate with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in postsecondary education, the workplace, and as citizens of our 21st century global society,” she said.
The magazine rated the metro area schools as a way of providing a basis for executives to compare the type of work force they are likely to encounter in various communities around the country. Using the data from its 15th annual Education Quotient ratings, which compared 2,800 secondary school districts throughout the country, Expansion Management grouped school districts into Metropolitan
Statistical Areas (MPAs). Public schools in those 362 MPAs were compared according to a variety of categories, including college admission test scores, graduation rates, beginning and average teacher
salaries, per pupil expenditures, and student-teacher ratio.
Bill King, chief editor of Expansion Management Magazine, speaking to the importance of quality schools to business success, said, “Today’s workers, most of whom are high school graduates, must possess skills far beyond those needed just a generation ago. Clearly, the quality of the public schools is a pretty good indicator of the type of manufacturing work force a company is likely to encounter in a
particular community.”
NOTE: A list of the Best Overall U.S. Metros for Public Schools with 3,300 students or more, according to Expansion Management magazine, follows.
Top Metros for Public Schools
1. State College, Pa.
2. Ithaca, N.Y.
3. Lawrence, Kan.
4. Iowa City, Iowa
5. Sheboygan, Wis.
6. Charlottesville, Va.
7. Eau Claire, Wis.
8. Madison, Wis.
9. Columbia, Mo.
10. Harrisonburg, Va.
11. Wausau, Wis.
12. Ames, Iowa
13. Missoula, Mont.
14. Grand Forks, N.D.-Minn.
15. Billings, Mont.
16. Appleton, Wis.
17. Bloomington, Ind.
18. Flagstaff, Ariz.
19 Glens Falls, N.Y.
20. Oshkosh-Neenah, Wis.
21. Blacksburg-Christianburg-Radford, Va.
22. Jonesboro, Ark.
23. Burlington-South Burlington, Vt.
24. Fond du Lac, Wis.
25. Ocean City, N.J
For further information, contact Joseph Donovan, Communications Officer, DPI, 608.266.3559
Assist students who enter high school with poor academic skills
A report from an organization called MDRC strikes a responsive chord because the report stresses the need to "assist students who enter high school with poor academic skills" instead of dumping them in English 10 and to improve instructional content and practice:
[The report] offers research-based lessons from across these evaluations about five major challenges associated with low-performing high schools: (1) creating a personalized and orderly learning environment, (2) assisting students who enter high school with poor academic skills, (3) improving instructional content and practice, (4) preparing students for the world beyond high school, and (5) stimulating change in overstressed high schools.
The overall message of this synthesis is that structural changes to improve personalization and instructional improvement are the twin pillars of high school reform. Small learning communities and faculty advisory systems can increase students’ feelings of connectedness to their teachers. Especially in interaction with one another, extended class periods, special catch-up courses, high-quality curricula, training on these curricula, and efforts to create professional learning communities can improve student achievement. School-employer partnerships that involve career awareness activities and work internships can help students attain higher earnings after high school. Furthermore, students who enter ninth grade facing substantial academic deficits can make good progress if initiatives single them out for special support. These supports include caring teachers and special courses designed to help entering ninth-graders acquire the content knowledge and learning skills that they missed out on in earlier grades.
But I can't help it. My focus has always been on what is going on in the classroom, rather than the principal's office or the school board meeting room or the exhibition floors of all those education conferences that look like software fairs. In the classes I visit, plenty of students are working on computers. I am happy they are mastering the essential tools of modern life. But I wish there were more evidence that those hours tapping keyboards are making them better at reading, writing and math.
I used to get considerable pleasure from debunking school computer miracle stories. One of my proudest moments in the 1990s was a story about a New Jersey middle school hailed by President Clinton for its sharp increase in achievement scores after computers were installed. I visited the school, talked to the teachers, checked the arrival date of the new technology and discovered that the test scores had gone up before the computers got there. The real heroes were a very energetic principal, a great faculty and an innovative curriculum.
The reduction of over $680,000 of ESEA Title 1 entitlement grant dollars challenges the district to change the way students and teachers are supported under Title 1. The current direct service model of student support cannot be supported in the long run with current funding. The administration will use the first semester of next year to develop a new model. (Page 252, Department & Division Detailed Budgets)
The MMSD uses Title 1 money to fund Reading Recovery. Does the statement above mean the end of Reading Recovery in the district?
Nearly all states are building high-tech student data systems to collect, categorize and crunch the endless gigabytes of attendance logs, test scores and other information collected in public schools — and the projects in some states seem to have gone haywire.
In North Carolina, a statewide school computer system known as NC WISE is years behind schedule, and estimated costs have risen to $250 million. Teachers have nicknamed it NC Stupid. California has spent $60 million on a system, and officials estimated that the state would spend an additional $60 million in coming years to help school districts connect to it.
I wish I were shocked at a last-minute judicial fiat that runs roughshod over a much-needed school reform -- much as, in a different age, a French aristocrat's coach might ram over peasants unfortunate enough to stand in the way. In this brave new world, if anyone tries to improve schools -- and you can't improve schools without raising standards -- no matter how weak those standards are, some court likely will step in to quash the reform lest it hurt someone.
Recently Utah schools have been given an F for technology use in the classroom (or lack thereof). This is one area I hope Utah continues to fail in. Technology has been touted as a fabulous tool for teaching math and other subjects, but it’s not. Technology teaches technology; you still have to learn math separately if you want to know math too.
I agree. The basics come first - technology, which changes frequently and may not always be appropriate (see Powerpoint, and here.)
In the first year of the YES College Preparatory School, community service was as important as reading, writing and mathematics. The public charter school's name stands for Youth Engaged in Service, and its mostly low-income students moved through city neighborhoods like young social workers, practicing their academic skills by collecting information on bus routes, health clinics and many other real-world topics.
Georgia's Preschool System Gets High Marks, proclaims the LA Times. Georgia provides full-day preschool to all four-year-olds, regardless of financial need. The program, which started in 1995, is very popular. But the academic gains fade away in a few years.
Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science. You will have cause to forget that fact very soon.
Mention public education in the United States and the word "reform" is soon to follow. The need to reform the nation's schools is almost as old as public education itself. Invariably the debate about how to improve public schools focuses on what's wrong with them.
But across the country there are examples of schools that work; classrooms abuzz with creativity and the excitement of learning. They're run by committed teachers, overseen by innovative principals and supported involved parents.
Participants include:
Jay Mathews, Contributing Editor for Newsweek Magazine and Education Reporter for the Washington Post
Robert Schwartz, Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education
Michael Satarino, Principal of Talented and Gifted Magnet School in Dallas, TX - Newsweek's #1 public high school in the United States
Spencer Kern, senior at Martin Luther King school in Nashville, TN, Newsweek's #39 public high school in the United States
Over the last five years, Wakefield, which has the highest percentage of immigrant and minority students of any high school in the county, has significantly increased participation in Advanced Placement tests.
More than half of Wakefield students qualify for federally subsidized lunches, and nearly 83 percent are members of a minority group. The school's students come from more than 60 countries and speak more than 40 languages. Almost 17 percent speak a first language other than English.
"I think that this school is a particularly effective school, and it gets better every year," said School Superintendent Robert G. Smith. Wakefield High plans to use the money from the award to expand college-preparatory programs.
In spring 2004, the school instituted a program called the Wakefield High School AP Network, designed to increase the diversity of the students taking honors and AP courses.
Last month, the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote a column trumpeting the value of teaching civics to American students. He interviewed Sandra Day O’Connor and former Colorado Governor Roy Romer (now serving as Superintendent of Los Angeles’s schools), both of whom are spokespersons for the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (CMS).
A trip to CMS’s website reveals many applause-worthy sentiments—indeed, simply acknowledging the importance of civics education is commendable.
Yet both CMS and Broder’s fawning column make the same mistake that plagues many civic education initiatives. Instead of proposing that students learn civics through rigorous study of historical events, meaty biographies of important Americans, or lessons that integrate American history and politics with philosophy and character education, CMS offers a different model. One that puts the cart before the horse.
CMS offers “six promising approaches to civic learning” of which “Guided discussion of current local, national, and international issues and events” is one. What does this look like? The organization envisions teachers discussing “issues students find personally relevant ... in a way that encourages multiple points of view.”
The problems with this proposal are legion. It says that issues discussed be limited to those that “students find personally relevant.” One wonders how relevant most 14-year-olds would find many international events, such as the recent country-wide protests in Nepal or Chinese President Hu Jintao’s U.S. visit. A major objective of civics instruction should be to educate students and make international events and issues relevant in their lives. It doesn’t work the other way around.
Announcement from Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (and the 04 / 07 elections)
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. MMSD email:
It is with great humility that I announce that I have been elected to serve as President of the Madison School Board. I am honored to have the opportunity to provide leadership to our school district and community. Serving as President is the culmination of part of a life long dream to be a public servant.
I was elected to the board in 2004. During my tenure, I have served as Chair of the Finance and Operations and Partnership Committees and most recently as role of Vice President. I welcome working with the entire elected school board. Some of the critical matters for us to address include but are not limited to: the building of new schools to accommodate our growing district, student achievement, parent involvement and strengthening communication and partnership efforts in our community. Together, we can identify and implement creative solutions to these issues.
Another interesting element in all this is the proposed fall referendum for a new far west side elementary school [west task force] and the Leopold expansion (I still wonder about the wisdom of linking the two questions together...., somewhat of a do-over for Leopold linked to another question). Have the local prospects for passing a referendum improved since the May, 2005 vote where two out of three failed (including a much larger Leopold expansion)?
I think it's hard to say:
I agree with Ed that Monday's civilized board meeting absent any bullying is a good sign.
There's been some board turnover since that vote that may be helpful.
On the other hand, there's the ongoing effort to kill 4th and 5th grade strings (5th year of the Administration's "onslaught" - not even a rounding error in the District's 332.9M budget),
It will be an interesting year. I wish the entire Board well as they address these matters. It's never too early to run for school board :) Check out the election pages for links and interviews.
I am a product of Madison schools thus believe in the vital role they have in our community. I welcome this opportunity to collaboratively lead the school board for the betterment of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
(608) 441-0224
The Madison Metropolitan School District is located in Madison, Wisconsin and is the second largest in the state. It has 53 schools/programs including two charter schools and several alternative programs. Enrollment is 24,491 students pre-kindergarten thru twelfth grade. 44% are students of color. 42% receive free and reduced lunch. The district is one of the largest employers in Madison and Dane County with 5,921 employees. The budget for the 2006-07 school year is $332 million.
To survive in poor communities, Ms. Payne contends, people need to be nonverbal and reactive. They place priority on the personal relationships that are often their only significant resources and rely on entertainment to escape harsh realities. Members of the middle class, in contrast, succeed or fail through the use of paper representations and plans for the future. They value work and achievement.
. . . teachers must recognize that children from poor families often benefit from explicit instruction and support in areas that could be taken for granted among middle-class students. Those include the so-called unspoken rules, mental models that help learners store symbolic information, and the procedures that it takes to complete an abstract task.
A teacher attentive to the needs of her low-income students fills the day with pointers and checklists. She puts tools for organizing information into her students’ hands, and helps them translate it from its “street” version to its school one. She spells out reasons for learning.
Wisconsin State Journal editorial
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Madison should take a bow and be proud of its decade-long effort to improve early reading skills and boost school achievement for all racial groups.
Yet the hard work isn't over and may be getting harder.
UW-Madison education researchers hailed Madison this week for shrinking its racial achievement gap more than probably any urban area in the country. And at the same time, test scores for white students in Madison kept improving.
More young students of all backgrounds can read.
More older students of all backgrounds are graduating.
Madison's formula for success, according to the researchers, is largely the result of three things:
One-to-one tutoring by trained volunteers.
The Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) helped launch a decade ago the Schools of Hope civil journalism project that stressed the recruitment and training of volunteer reading tutors. The United Way now oversees the effort and counts about 1,000 tutors working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Organizers say the effort will continue and possibly expand until at least 2011.
Small class sizes in the earliest grades.
The state is contributing millions to Madison schools for poor children to benefit from the extra attention smaller class sizes allow during kindergarten through third grade.
Better teacher training.
This might be the hardest element of Madison's success to maintain, much less improve. With relatively flat school enrollment and high property values in Madison, the state steers a lower percentage of aid our way. And voters have shown they're skeptical of approving higher operational spending than a state cap otherwise allows.
That means other areas of school spending should be cut before teacher training is reduced. Or perhaps the district can develop creative, lower-cost ways to train those teachers who most need it.
Madison just might become a national model for closing the racial achievement gap if existing trends continue. But that won't be easy given financial constraints and a growing influx of students who lack English skills.
But hope is high. Volunteers are energetic. Educators passionately want students to succeed.
Let's stay at it, Madison, and show the nation the way.
Madison made more progress than any urban area in the country in shrinking the racial achievement gap and managed to raise the performance levels of all racial groups over the past decade, two UW- Madison education experts said Monday in urging local leaders to continue current strategies despite tight budgets.
"I've seen districts around the United States, and it really is remarkable that the Madison School District is raising the achievement levels for all students, and at the same time they're closing the gaps," Julie Underwood, dean of the UW- Madison School of Education, said in an interview.
Underwood said she's heard of no other urban district that reduced the gap so significantly without letting the test scores of white students stagnate or slide closer to the levels of lower-achieving black, Hispanic or Southeast Asian students.
"The way that it's happened in Madison," she said, "is truly the best scenario. . . . We haven't done it at the expense of white students."
Among the most striking trends:
Disparities between the portions of white and minority students attaining the lowest ranking on the state Third Grade Reading Test have essentially been eliminated.
Increasing shares of students of all racial groups are scoring at the top levels - proficient and advanced - on the Third Grade Reading Test.
Graduation rates have improved significantly for students in every racial group.
Underwood commented after one of her colleagues, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, presented a review of efforts to attack the racial achievement gap to the Schools of Hope Leadership Team meeting at United Way of Dane County.
Gamoran told the 25- member team, comprised of community leaders from the school system, higher education, nonprofit agencies, business and government, that Madison's strategy parallels national research documenting the most effective approaches - one-to-one tutoring, particularly from certified teachers; smaller class sizes; and improved training of teachers.
"My conclusion is that the strategies the Madison school system has put in place to reduce the racial achievement gap have paid off very well and my hope is that the strategies will continue," said Gamoran, who as director of the education-research center oversees 60 research projects, most of which are federally funded. A sociologist who's worked at UW-Madison since 1984, Gamoran's research focuses on inequality in education and school reform.
In an interview, Gamoran said that Madison "bucked the national trend" by beginning to shrink the racial achievement during the late 1990s, while it was growing in most of America's urban school districts.
But he warned that those gains are in jeopardy as Wisconsin school districts, including Madison, increasingly resort to cuts and referendums to balance their budgets.
Art Rainwater, Madison schools superintendent, said Gamoran's analysis affirmed that the district and Schools of Hope, a civic journalism project of the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) that grew into a community campaign to combat the racial achievement gap, are using the best known tactics - approaches that need to be preserved as the district makes future cuts.
"The things that we've done, which were the right things to do, positively affect not just our educationally neediest students," Rainwater said. "They help everybody."
John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, and Rainwater agree that the progress is fragile.
"The future of it is threatened if we don't have it adequately funded," Matthews said.
Leslie Ann Howard, United Way president, whose agency coordinates Schools of Hope, said Gamoran's analysis will help focus the community's efforts, which include about 1,000 trained volunteer tutors a year working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in grades kindergarten through eight.
The project's leaders have vowed to continue working until at least 2011 to fight gaps that persist at other grade levels despite the gains among third- graders.
"I think it's critical for the community to know that all kids benefited from the strategies that have been put in place the last 10 years - the highest achievers, the lowest achievers and everybody in between," Howard said.
"To be able to say it's helping everyone, I think is really astonishing."
Only 30 percent of high-school students take any Advanced Placement courses at all; by the time Frausto graduates later this month, she will have taken 16 of them -- in many cases earning the highest grade, a 5, on the three-hour final exam.
That is because Frausto's school, the Talented and Gifted Magnet School near downtown Dallas, is one of a growing number of high schools trying to make AP as much a part of students' lives as french fries and iPods. Located in a run-down neighborhood not usually associated with high-level learning, Talented and Gifted -- "TAG" to its students -- tops NEWSWEEK's list of America's Best High Schools. Members of its racially mixed student body say they feel united by the challenge. "What I really love about TAG is the atmosphere," said Frausto, who will be attending MIT on a scholarship in the fall. "There is so much closeness."
Large studies in Texas and California done over the past two years indicate that good grades on AP tests significantly increase chances of earning college degrees. That has led many public schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods to look for ways to get their students into AP and a similar but smaller college-level course program called International Baccalaureate (IB), in hopes that their students will have the same college-graduation rates enjoyed by AP and IB students from the country's wealthiest private schools and most selective public schools.
A one-size-fits-all approach no longer works for everyone, the new thinking goes; a more individualized experience is better.
"We are changing the goal of high school and what it's possible to achieve there," says Tom Vander Ark, executive director of the Gates Foundation's education initiative, which has spent $1 billion in 1,600 high schools in 40 states plus the District of Columbia over the last six years.
For parents and students, these schools mean an often bewildering array of choices -- small schools within larger schools, specialized charter and magnet schools for things ranging from fashion design to computer programming, even public boarding schools for budding physicists or artists.
Newsweek's Top 1138 US High Schools (16 Wisconsin high schools including one from Madison - Memorial ranked #924).
How can U.S. high schools do a better job? A new study identifies key characteristics of high schools that work. And at Granger High in Washington state, the principal demands high standards for students and staff.
Science students from West High School will be competing against students from all 50 states in May after winning the 2006 Wisconsin Science Olympiad state tournament last weekend at the UW Engineering Department.
La Follette High's A team finished second and its B team was sixth, while Memorial High was seventh out of 46 teams.
Students competed in 28 events at the state meet, ranging from food chemistry and nuclear science to astronomy and protein modeling.
West High School sophomore Haya Khatib, 16, is already planning a career as a physician. And even though she hasn't even picked a college yet, Khatib had an opportunity Monday to perform her first operation.
A nonprofit Web site called Edheads.org lets visitors wield a scalpel through a virtual knee surgery, and beginning Wednesday, a virtual hip replacement surgery. Developed with the help of UW Health doctors, this is the latest addition to an online education site that offers interactive experiential learning programs. Students at West are testing the program before its national launch.
The program was funded through a grant from Zimmer, an orthopedic products company in Warsaw, Ind.
The members of Duke University's computer programming team had solved only one problem in the world finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in San Antonio on Apr. 12. The winning team, from Saratov State University in Russia, solved six puzzles over the course of the grueling five-hour contest. Afterward, Duke coach Owen Astrachan tried to cheer up his team by pointing out that they were among ``the best of the best'' student programmers in the world. Edwards, 20, still distraught, couldn't resist a self-deprecating dig: ``We're the worst of the best of the best.''
It looks like a solid study, but I have one caveat. One of the findings is that successful schools are aligned with the State Standards and success is then measured by these standards. This does raise questions about the content of these standards. The creation of these standards has been highly political and in some cases the resulting standards leave much to be desired. For an earlier California story, see Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross Dunn's History on Trial.
Similar Students, Different Results
by Trish Williams & Michael W. Kirst — January 25, 2006
Why do some California elementary schools serving largely low-income students score as much as 250 points higher on the state's academic performance index (API) than other schools with very similar students?
That’s the research question asked by a new, large-scale EdSource-led study that surveyed principals and teachers in 257 such schools across the state. What we learned is that the higher performing schools tend to have four interrelated practices at the core of their operation—prioritizing student achievement; implementing a coherent, standards-based curriculum and instructional program; analyzing student-assessment data from multiple sources; and ensuring availability of instructional resources.
Many studies have examined successful schools as a group, in an effort to understand their methods or best practices. This study—conducted by EdSource and researchers from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the American Institutes for Research—took a different tack. Rather than looking at a specific performance zone, we examined elementary schools within a specific, fairly narrow socioeconomic and demographic band but across the full range of school performance.
Specifically, we garnered the participation of 257 out of the 550 elementary schools that fall within the 25–35th percentile band of California’s School Characteristics Index (SCI). This band of schools has high levels of students from low-income families, or from ethnic minorities, and/or who are learning English as a second language. Our dependent variable was the school’s Academic Performance Index (API), which is based annually for these schools on student scores in English Language Arts and math on the California Standards Tests in grades 2–5. We surveyed all the principals and 80 % of the K–5 classroom teachers at the schools in our sample, giving us 257 principal surveys and over 5,500 teacher surveys.
Our surveys included over 300 items each covering seven broad domains often associated with effective schools. The questions were updated to reflect California’s current standards based reform environment, asking specifically what principals and teachers were doing, and how frequently. Once the data was collected, we used a weighted analysis to assure that results were statistically representative of all public, non-charter elementary schools in the 25–35th SCI band. We then used several types of regression analyses to determine which school practices differentiated the highest performing schools from the lowest performing ones.
WHAT SCHOOLS DO CLEARLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE
We’ve heard people say that you can guess a school’s Academic Performance Index (API) score by the zip code of its students. But the 250-point difference in API between schools serving similarly disadvantaged students shows that’s not true. What do the higher performing schools do differently? From the school district through to the classroom, they focus on improving student achievement against the state’s academic standards and align all their practices around that goal. Of the seven domains we studied, these four had the biggest impact on a school’s API:
Prioritizing Student Achievement. Where teacher and principal answers to multiple survey questions indicated higher expectations for students, their schools had, on average, higher API scores than schools whose staffs indicated lower expectations. In more successful schools, teachers and principals alike reported that their schools have well defined plans for instructional improvement and that they put priority on meeting the state’s API goals and the federal adequate yearly progress goals. Teachers and principals also report that their schools set measurable goals for exceeding the mandated API student subgroup growth targets for improved achievement.
Implementing a Coherent, Standards-based Curriculum and Instructional Program. Teachers who report the following were more likely to be in higher performing schools: instructional consistency within grades; curricular alignment from grade-to-grade; classroom instruction guided by state academic standards; curriculum materials in math and language arts aligned with the state’s standards; in a district that addresses the instructional needs of English learners at their school. Principals were more likely to be in higher performing schools if they reported that the district has clear expectations for student performance aligned with the district’s adopted curriculum and that the district evaluates the principal based on the extent to which instruction in the school aligns with the curriculum.
Using Assessment Data to Improve Student Achievement and Instruction. Strongly correlated with a higher school API was the extensive use of student assessment data by the district and the principal in an effort to improve instruction and student learning. For example, principals more often reported that they and the district use assessment data from multiple sources (including frequent curriculum program tests and annual California Standards Tests) to evaluate teachers’ practices and to identify teachers who need instructional improvement. Principals report using this data to develop strategies to follow up on the progress of selected students and help them reach academic goals. According to these principals, the district expects all of its schools to improve achievement, evaluates principals based on student achievement, and provides support for site-level planning related to improving achievement.
Ensuring Availability of Instructional Resources. Where more teachers reported having regular or standard certification for teaching in California, schools had, on average, higher API scores. The same was true of schools where principals more often reported that their districts provide sufficient and up-to-date instructional materials as well as support for supplementary instruction for struggling students and for facilities management. Teachers with at least five years of full time teaching experience were more likely, on average, to be from schools with higher APIs. Principal experience was also correlated with higher school achievement.
The survey also included questions related to schools’ efforts to involve parents, teacher collaboration and development, and the enforcement of high expectations for student behavior. Although each of these types of practices made some contribution to a school’s API score, and were likely practiced by most of the schools in the sample, they were not nearly as strongly correlated with higher school performance as were the four key interactive, interdependent school improvement practices described above.
WHAT THE STUDY FINDS ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING
Our study underscores that there is no single silver bullet for school success; multiple factors and practices are at work. Yet it appears that in the context of standards based, accountability-driven reform, at least for elementary schools with large numbers of low-income students, a major implication is that the caliber of teaching and learning appears directly related to the level of system-wide coherence. The clearer the strategic through line from district to school to classroom, the more likely it is that higher achievement will result. Put another way, the more all the requisite pieces are aligned, seen as interdependent parts of a whole, and overtly structured to support the work of teachers in the classroom, the stronger the benefits to learning.
The study provided some glimpses of how this looks in action:
District practices include setting clear expectations that schools meet API and AYP growth targets, including for subgroups, as well as providing schools with achievement data and evaluating principal performance and teacher practices based on that data. They also include ensuring that math and language arts curricula are aligned with state standards, that instruction is focused on achievement and that schools have adequate facilities and textbooks as well as resources for struggling students.
Principal leadership is redefined to focus on effective management of the school improvement process. In general, API scores were higher in schools with principals whose responses indicate that they act as proactive managers of school improvement, driving the reform process, cultivating the school vision, and extensively and personally using student assessment data for a wide variety of school improvement areas of focus, including evaluation of teacher practice and assistance to struggling students.
An effective teaching staff appears to be characterized by certain ingredients. In higher achieving schools, principals reported that a higher proportion of their teaching staff had, in order of priority: a demonstrated ability to raise student achievement, strong content knowledge, characteristics that made them a good fit with the school culture, training in curriculum programs, and the ability to map curriculum standards to instruction. These teachers were also supportive of colleagues’ learning and improvement, able to use data from student assessments, familiar with the school community, excited about teaching, and familiar with state standards.
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS
An interrelated question we plan to follow up on is the relationship between school-wide use of specific curriculum packages, other curricular and instructional school practices, and school performance. In addition, our teacher survey included a robust set of questions around EL instruction that have yet to be analyzed.
Reference
Williams, T., Kirst, M., Haertel, E., et al. (2005). Similar students, different results: Why do some schools do better? A large-scale survey of California elementary schools serving low-income students. Mountain View, CA: EdSource.
The initial findings report, Similar Schools, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better?, including appendices with more details on the research methodology and the demographics of the school and student sample, can be found at www.edsource.org
Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: January 25, 2006
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12299, Date Accessed: 4/25/2006 3:24:06 PM
I recently posted a comparative list of the English courses offered to 9th and 10th graders at Madison's four high schools. The list showed clearly that West High School does not offer its high achieving and highly motivated 9th and 10th grade students the same appropriately challenging English classes that are offered at East, LaFollette and Memorial.
Here is the yield from a similar comparison for 9th and 10th grade Social Studies and Science.
Social Studies -- Ninth Grade
East: U.S. History 9, TAG U.S. History (U.S. History or TAG U.S. History required)
LaFollette: Exploring U.S. History, Challenges of Democracy (a.k.a. Advanced U.S. History) (Exploring U.S. History or Challenges of Democracy required)
Memorial: American Experience 1 and 2, 9th grade elective -- .25 credit course "Interdisciplinary TAG" (American History 1 and 2 required)
West: U.S. History (required)
Social Studies -- Tenth Grade
East: World History, TAG World History, Ethnic Studies, Social Psychology (consent of instructor required for 10th graders only), American Politics and Government (World History or TAG World History required)
LaFollette: World History, Civilizations (a.k.a. Advanced World History), Challenges of Democracy, American Women's History, AP European History, AP Psychology (World History or Civilizations required)
Memorial: World History, World History AP, American Politics Today, International Relations and National Security Issues, Women In U.S. History, The Ancient World, Modern European History AP (World History required; World History AP can replace World History)
West: Western Civilization 10, Tools for Success in the Social Sciences (World Civilization 10 required)
Science -- Ninth Grade
East: Biology I, Biology 9 for Talented and Gifted (number of sections depends on demand)
LaFollette: General Biology I, Honors Biology I (number of sections sections depends on demand)
West: Biology (embedded honors option available beginning 2006-07), Accelerated Biology (one section of 24 students, regardless of demand)
Science -- Tenth Grade
East: Chemistry, Chemistry for Talented and Gifted, Earth Science 1, Earth Science 2, Biology I, Physical Science Chemistry, Physical Science Physics, Advanced Laboratory Science
LaFollette: General Biology I, Honors Biology I, Practical Biological Science, Biology II, Physical Science, Practical Physical Science, General Physics, Math Physics 1 and 2
Memorial: Earth Science 1, Fundamentals of Biology, Biology, General Physics, Chemistry in the Community, Math Chemistry, Chemistry AP, Aircraft Construction (Biology AP is available to 11th and 12th graders -- Biology is not a pre-req for Biology AP)
West: Biology (embedded honors option available beginning 2006-07), Biology II, Earth Science, Chemistry, Chemistry in the Community
I have asked the District and West High School administrations to please explain to me how the more limited course offerings at West fulfill the District's legal responsibilities to the school's academically talented and highly motivated 9th and 10th grade students, under the requirements set forth by Wisconsin State Standard t.
I have also asked if the District has plans to "re-design" our four high schools with an eye on equity of educational opportunity, in the same way the District's eleven middle schools were evaluated this year. I have asked if the plan is to bring West in line with the other three high schools or vice versa.
t is simply nothing short of catastrophic that so many Milwaukee youngsters are being left behind in a world in which a bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma. It's a trend that bodes ill for the region's capacity to grow and compete.
Yes, Milwaukee again makes a list it should wish it weren't on with a ranking that should properly make every Milwaukee Public Schools official, School Board member, teacher, parent and taxpayer intensely introspective, not to mention angry.
That's because, whether the graduation rate is 45% - ranking it 94th among the 100 largest school districts in the country, according to the generally conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute - or 61% or 67%, what, respectively, the state and district say it is, that's too few high schoolers graduating.
And the gap between African-American and white achievement in Wisconsin (and between boys and girls) should be topics getting more focus than they have to date. The Manhattan Institute study, released Tuesday, says Wisconsin overall enjoys an 85% graduation rate, but for African-Americans statewide, it's 55%, the second lowest in the country.
Yes, we know all the societal factors involved in low graduation rates, mostly revolving around poverty. However, these graduation figures also point to a degree of failure in the district in dealing with these realities
West HS English 9 and 10 Again -- No Child Moves Ahead
Several of us received the following email today from Ted Widerski, MMSD TAG ("Talented and Gifted") Resource Teacher for Middle and High Schools. Ted has been working with other District and West HS staff to find a way to allow West 9th and 10th graders who are advanced in English to grade accelerate in English, whether through the INSTEP process or some other method.
Here is what he wrote:
Parents -
On Wednesday, April 12th, Welda Simousek and I met with Pamela Nash, Mary Ramberg, Mary Watson-Peterson, Ed Holmes, and Keesia Hyzer to discuss In-STEP procedures for students in English 9 and/or 10. Through this discussion, it became clear that there was no reasonable method available at this time to assess which students might not need to take English 9 or 10 because part of what is learned in English classes comes through the processes of analysis, discussion, and critical critiquing that are shared by the entire class. An alternative assessment approach was discussed: having students present a portfolio to be juried. This approach would require a great deal of groundwork, however, and would not be available yet this spring. It will be looked at as a possibility for the future.
Please keep in mind that it is the intention of West High School to offer meaningful and challenging English courses for all levels of students. It is also the usual TAG Classroom Action Summary and In-STEP approach to have students be present in a classroom for a period of time before it is possible to assess whether they are extremely beyond their classroom peers and need a different option. Welda will follow up with teachers and students in the fall to ascertain progress for students during the first semester. The use of the Classroom Action Summary and In-STEP approach (with a brainstorming of possible options) will be reviewed again at the end of semester one.
Please feel free to contact me with further questions.
Ted Widerski
Talented and Gifted Resource Teacher
Madison Metropolitan School District
I replied to Ted (copying many others, including parents, Teaching and Learning staff, Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, the BOE, and West HS staff), saying that this is a case of unequal access to appropriate educational opportunities because of how poorly West HS provides for its 9th and 10th graders who are academically advanced in English, as compared to the other three high schools.
Here is my reply:
Dear Ted,
Thanks for your email and update. I agree with the other parent who wrote to you that this outcome is very disappointing. I second his concerns and his several requests. I would like to ask that you please send your replies and future updates to this entire list.
I am especially distressed by this outcome because it means that academically advanced ninth and tenth graders at West will continue to have fewer appropriate educational options than their counterparts at the other three MMSD high schools. Below is a list of what is offered to and required of high school freshman and sophomores at our four high schools in their first two years of English.
Note: Required courses offered are listed first; electives are listed in parentheses; classes intended for academically advanced students are listed in bold.
Ninth Grade English
East: English 9, special section of English 9 for those enrolled in Reading 180, English 9 for the Academically Motivated, English 9 for Talented and Gifted
LaFollette: English 9; Advanced English 9
Memorial: English 9 (In addition to English 9, Memorial freshmen may elect to take a .25 credit course in the Humanities Department entitled "Interdisciplinary TAG.")
West: English 9
Tenth Grade English
East: English 10, English 10 for Academically Motivated, English 10 for Talented and Gifted (Electives available to 10th graders = Introduction to Journalism, Theater Arts)
LaFollette: English 10, Advanced English 10 (Electives available to 10th graders = Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing, Writing for the Media)
Memorial: English 10, English 10 TAG (Electives available to 10th graders = Drama 1, Drama 2, Reading Improvement)
West: English 10 (Electives available to 10th graders = Writing for Publication; Language, Usage and Grammar; Contemporary Literature; Dramatic Literature; The Bible as Literature; Science Fiction; Film Study; Public Speaking; Theater Arts I; Mass Media)
In my humble opinion, the disparity between West HS and the other three high schools with regard to the learning opportunities provided for the highest achieving 9th and 10th graders in English constitutes a situation of gross inequity of educational opportunity and access across the District. It makes it hard to believe that "it is the intention of West High School to offer meaningful and challenging English courses for all levels of students," as you say in your email.
I think it is time to revisit the possibility of having honors sections of English 9 and English 10 at West H.S. -- perhaps one section per SLC -- into which West students may self-select. In the absence of said honors sections, West 9th and 10th graders who are academically advanced and highly motivated in English are being deprived of the educational opportunities that are available at every other high school in the District. Meanwhile, parents of high achieving middle and elementary school students in the West attendance area continue to make their decisions about where to live and where to send their children to school (especially high school).
Thanks so much for your efforts in this matter, Ted. I appreciate how hard you worked on this issue. I also fully realize that there is only so much that you -- as an individual and as an educational professional who so clearly cares about academically advanced students -- can do.
Finally I attended a valuable workshop on high- and low-context learners. Suddenly I could understand why certain students wanted to know about the whole semester’s work at the start of the first few classes. And why other students were happy to have information parceled out at two-week intervals. Desperate to improve retention, I rewrote my class materials again. I drafted a day-by-day course outline that provided not only important due dates, but guidelines of what we’d be doing in each class. Some were general ideas; others were specific instructions, listing handouts and work to be done.
My high-context students were thrilled. They immediately skimmed the course outline and highlighted certain dates. Armed with knowledge, they started to feel more accountable. Many spent more time on assignments, saw tutors, and turned in better work. My low-context students, of course, were not affected. They simply read what was immediately due the next day and accomplished that one piece. A few read ahead — if only to avoid scheduling problems with their busy social lives. Others only consulted the syllabus minutes before class
started.
Madison School Board to Vote on a Proposed Charter Elementary School of Arts & Technology
The Madison Board of Education is scheduled to act on Monday evening (4/24) on a request relating to a proposed charter elementary school of arts and technology.
The Board will vote on whether or not to support a grant application to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for funds to support planning of The Studio School by a group of educators, parents and others. See info about The Studio School, including the proposed planning grant application at: http://www.madisonstudioschool.org .
The Board's meeting, which begins at 5:00 pm, will be held in the McDaniel's Auditorium at the district offices at 545 West Dayton Street. [map]
As we know, curriculae like Everyday Math, Core Math, Reading Recovery, Balanced Literacy and the Literacy Collaborative are based on the constructivist theory of education. Indeed, the Literacy Collaborative (a trademarked name for Balanced Literacy) states that its framework is based on the theories of Vygotsky, Bruner and Clay.
For an interesting exercise, do a google search with all three of these keywords "constructivist marxism vygotsky" [ask | clusty | google | msn | yahoo]
Now before the constructivists out there accuse me of labelling them as marxists, let me say I am not. I am, however, making the point that the curriculae you advocate has deep roots in marxist egalitarian theory.
Today a parent of students at Elvejhem Elementary asked Madison School Board members why the teachers only reported on 10% of content areas. I have asked Superintendent Art Rainwater for a response to the parent's concerns.
From the Elvejhem Parent:
Have you seen this quarter's elementary grade reports? The teachers at Elvejhem Elementary only reported on about 10% of the evaluated areas. A letter accompanying the report card stated that the students were only being ranked on areas that related to standardized testing. I don't recall whether the letter stated this to be a district wide policy nor was the letter clear as to why this approach was being taken. I hope that this is not some political point that teachers are making, because that would be a wholly inappropriate way to treat our kids.
In any event, I find that this grade reporting was totally inadequate and does not justify the day off that they took to prepare these reports. The ambiguous standards employed on these report cards provides little clear guidance when all of the areas are completed. But if all they can complete is 10% of that, well then, if this is all they can tell me about the progress of my children, they could have saved their ink.
Finally, the combined grades classes that the Elvejhem Elementary School forced upon us (they provided no option for single grade classes) have been a combined disaster. Parents at the soccer fields talk openly about the failure of this approach to adequately challenge the upper grade students. In fact, it has begun having an effect on Sennett M.S. as students leave elementary wholly unprepared for middle school challenges by their 4/5 grade experience at Elvejhem.
I hope that you will look into whether this quarter's grade reporting was some sort of political stunt to make a statement about standardized testing. For the rest of the district, I hope that this practice was limited to this school. This is certainly being perceived as a political stunt by a large number of parents that I have spoken with.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Does a school’s performance on California’s Academic Performance Index (API) relate to the use of a particular curriculum program? An analysis released today by EdSource from a large-scale survey of elementary schools serving similarly-challenged students suggests an answer.
School APIs are based on student test scores on the California Standards Tests, which measure how well students at the school are mastering grade level academic standards. According to many experts, California’s K-12 academic standards, adopted in the late 1990s, are among the most challenging in the nation.
The new analysis found that for English language arts, using the Open Court curriculum program school-wide did appear to make a difference in a school’s API score. Open Court appeared to be most effective when it was:
used intensively—i.e., all teachers in the school reported using Open Court daily;
combined with a coherent, school-wide, standards-based instructional program; and
combined with the frequent use of student assessment data to improve instruction.
Open Court is one of two main English language arts curriculum packages currently approved by the State Board of Education in California. The new findings are the result of an extended regression analysis of survey data collected last spring from 5,500 K-5 classroom teachers in 257 schools from 145 different districts.
Some parents say the Madison School District's spending cuts, combined with its attempts to close the achievement gap, have reduced opportunities for higher-achieving students.
Jeff Henriques, a parent of two high-achieving students, said one of the potential consequences he sees is "bright flight" - families pulling students with higher abilities out of the district and going elsewhere because their needs aren't being met.
One of the larger examples of this conflict is surfacing in the district's move toward creating "heterogeneous" classes that include students of all achievement levels, eliminating classes that group students of similar achievement levels together.
Advocates of heterogeneous classes say students achieving at lower levels benefit from being in classes with their higher-achieving peers. But some parents of higher-achieving students are concerned their children won't be fully challenged in such classes - at a time when the amount of resources going to talented and gifted, or TAG, programs is also diminishing.
Working in conjunction with the Schools of Hope project led by the United Way of Dane County, the district has made progress in third-grade reading scores at the lowest achievement levels. But racial and income gaps persist among third-graders reading at proficient and advanced levels.
Other initiatives are taking place in the middle and high schools. There, the district has eliminated "dead-end classes" that have less rigorous expectations to eliminate the chance that students will be put on a path of lower achievement because they are perceived as not being able to succeed in higher-level classes.
In the past, high school students were able to take classes such as general or consumer math. Now, all students are required to take algebra and geometry - or two credits of integrated mathematics, combining algebra, statistics and probability, geometry and trigonometry - in order to graduate.
One of the district's more controversial efforts has been a move toward "heterogeneous" classes that include students of all achievement levels, eliminating classes that group students of similar achievement levels together.
Advocates of heterogeneous classes say students who are achieving at lower levels benefit from being in classes with their higher-achieving peers. But others say the needs of higher-achieving students aren't met in such classes.
And in addition to what schools are already doing, Superintendent Art Rainwater said he would like to put learning coaches for math and reading in each of the district's elementary schools to improve teachers' ability to teach all students effectively.
The concept of Talent Development rests largely on two pillars. One is a special ninth-grade "academy" that focuses extra attention on freshmen, who are at the highest risk of dropping out. Once students make it to 10th grade, the odds are strong that they will graduate.
The other pillar involves a different way of scheduling classes. Known as the "four-by-four block schedule," it breaks the school year into quarters, and the school day into four 90-minute classes. The idea is to make each course more intensive, collapsing a semester's work into 10 weeks. It also gives students the opportunity to take more courses over a school year — 16, compared with 12 in a typical schedule. If a student flunks a class, there are more opportunities to make it up.
John Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley adopted the four-by-four schedule in 2004, along with other aspects of the Talent Development program. Last June, 92% of its ninth-graders had enough credits to move up to 10th grade, about one-third more than the previous year.
Five years ago we moved to Madison. A big factor in this decision was the expectation that we could rely on Madison public schools to educate our children. Our eldest went through West High School. To our delight the rigorous academic environment at West High transformed him into a better student, and he got accepted at several good public universities.
Now we are finding this promise betrayed for our younger children. Our elementary school appears to be sliding into disarray. Teachers and children are threatened, bullied, assaulted, and cursed at. Curricula are dumbed down to accommodate students who are unprepared for real school work. Cuts in special education are leaving the special needs kids adrift, and adding to the already impossible burdens of classroom teachers. To our disappointment we are forced to pull one child out of public school, simply to ensure her an orderly and safe learning environment.
Unless the School Board addresses these challenges forcefully and without obfuscation, I am afraid a historic mistake will be made. Madison schools will slip into a vicious cycle of middle class flight and steady decline. The very livability of our city might be at stake, not to mention our property values.
To me the necessary step is clear. The bottom five to ten percent of students, and especially all the aggressive kids, must be removed from regular classes. They should be concentrated in separate schools where they can receive the extra attention and intensive instruction they need, with an option to join regular classes if they are ready.
Meanwhile regular schools should be populated by children who can actually remain in their seats and do school work. Money can be saved by increasing class size. Achievement of underprivileged kids would improve when harmful distractions are removed and teachers can focus on teaching instead of constant discplinary management.
I have boiled things down to three theses, which I imagine most Madisonians would agree with:
I am willing to pay higher taxes to share the burden of those families who struggle to raise disabled children or other kinds of children with special needs.
I am willing to pay higher taxes to provide the special educational services needed to give underprivileged children a fair chance to succeed.
But I am NOT willing to sacrifice my children's education and happiness in school for either of the goals above.
I sincerely hope we can maintain a viable city and its great schools. In the case of Madison these two are inextricably tied together.
The Times is to be congratulated for its tough-love posture on No Child Left Behind legislation (editorial, April 9). Too many states shortchange too many students with "loophole" diplomas by lowering their standards on their way to the deadline of 2014 for all students being "proficient" in math and English. This inevitable fiasco could be avoided if the U.S. went to a national curriculum, with corresponding assessments and standards to be met by all students nationwide. Talk about equity and equal access for all.
Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan — the top five performers on math exams — all benefit from this standardization of what's expected in their schools. So could the United States.
Black students in Fairfax County are consistently scoring lower on state standardized tests than African American children in Richmond, Norfolk and other comparatively poor Virginia districts, surprising Fairfax educators and forcing one of the nation's wealthiest school systems to acknowledge shortcomings that have been masked by its overall success.
Even within Fairfax schools, black elementary school students are outperformed on reading and math tests by whites and some other students, including Hispanics, poor children and immigrants learning English.
Last year, Joan Blair's daughter enrolled at A. Mario Loiederman Middle School, the new creative and performing arts school in Silver Spring. She is learning high-school-level Spanish, ranks above grade level in math, and takes theater and arts courses that she loves. But her science and social studies classes, where students of different academic levels are grouped together, are not rigorous enough, Blair said.
"As a teacher, how are you going to meet the needs of all students if they are all mixed together?" Blair asked.
She was among the more than 100 parents, teachers and educators who filed into Francis Scott Key Middle School in Silver Spring on a recent Monday night to offer concerns and suggestions at a community outreach session aimed at helping the Montgomery County school system improve its middle schools. The event was the last of three such sessions that drew crowds of county residents and educators eager to participate in a middle school reform initiative launched last fall.
The initiative was partially prompted by a middle school audit released last year that showed a lag in achievement, particularly among African American and Hispanic students, students learning English, students with disabilities and those living in poverty. The independent audit found that county middle schools are not consistent in the application of curriculum standards, the quality of school improvement programs, teacher training opportunities and discipline procedures.
Like many journalists, I love to read other people's mail. West Potomac High School parent John Dickert kindly sent me an exchange of messages with Ann Monday, assistant superintendent for instructional services for the Fairfax County public schools. Their dialogue shows why Fairfax County educators disagree with many parents over the new policy of eliminating honors courses in 11th grade and leaving students a choice of a regular class or an Advanced Placement course in humanities subjects such as history.
Today's New York Times has an interesting article about whether the Advanced Placement program is actually worthy of its reputation.
The Advanced Placement program, administered by the College Board, began 50 years ago as a way to give a select few high school students a jump-start on college work. But in recent decades, it has morphed into something quite different - a mass program that reaches more than a million students each year and is used almost as much to impress college admissions officers and raise a school's reputation as to get college credit. As the admissions race has hit warp speed, Advanced Placement has taken on new importance, and government officials, educators and the College Board itself have united behind a push to broaden access to A.P. courses as a matter of equity in education.
The poll of California 9th- and 10th-graders, conducted for the James Irvine Foundation, found that six in 10 students didn't particularly like school and weren't motivated to succeed. But of those disaffected students, more than 90% said they would be more motivated if their school offered classes relevant to their future careers.
The poll was conducted to coincide with the launch of an Irvine Foundation center dedicated to encouraging the growth of career-oriented education in California. The foundation is spending $6 million on a new San Francisco-based center called ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career.
They like to spend it, but young people don't know much about how money works. On average, high school seniors answered correctly only 52.4 percent of questions about personal finance and economics, according to a nationwide survey released Wednesday....
The school board race has exposed beliefs among some citizens that I thought I had escaped by moving to a progressive city.
The people of Madison should be proud of the school board's efforts to create a real world environment for our kids in the classroom, a real world made up of all types of learners of all economic backgrounds. To say that a teacher cannot teach a variety of students in the same classroom is an insult to Madison's teachers.
Creating homogeneous classrooms would harm all students because it would deprive them of learning the skill and art of "getting along" with those who are different. The attitude that students should be segregated is outdated and prejudicial. It is also against the law. Students learn and absorb so much more in school than the content of a lesson.
I will vote for Arlene Silveira and Juan Jose Lopez because they are committed to maintaining an inclusive environment in our classrooms.
- Beth Moss, Madison
Letter to the Editor
Wisconsin State Journal, March 30, 2006
Sunday 10 a.m., Channel 3's For the Record will feature a debate among the four candidates for school board.
Here is my email to Neil Heinen regarding the station's coverage including a discussion of some of the issues at stake in the race: To: Neil Heinen Subject: Sunday show
Dear Neil,
A new post up on SIS (http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/) discusses a debate at East yesterday covered by your station. Thank you for this and for dedicating Sunday's show to the race.
One point that I'm not sure was reported correctly however, is the assertion in your coverage that the current board has not said who they support. The five-member majority has clearly stated their support for Silveira and Lopez (who is of course part of that majority and a candidate) while Robarts and Kobza have stated their support for Mathiak and Cole.
This race truly is for control of the majority and will dictate how we go forward on matters of heterogeneous classrooms (the dismantling of honors and possibly AP at West is part of that), school boundary changes, the construction of new and closure of existing schools, budget concerns, how to responsibly provide teachers health insurance, etc.
The Silveira/Lopez line is that Mathiak and Cole are focused merely on "process". This significantly minimizes what's at stake. The board is currently divided and removed from community input. For instance, when a school board member can't get an item on the agenda because she's in the minority, or she can't get information she has requested from the superintendent, we've got closed, dysfunctional governance. Mathiak and Cole may not always vote the same with each other or Kobza or Robarts, but the four of them are dedicated to transparency and public participation. With that, I believe the community will be better informed and more likely to support the hard decisions facing our district as we go forward into a land of $40 million more in budget cuts over the next five years.
But there's an even bigger topic that might be coming up soon. I'd appreciate if you could ask the candidates what they'd look for in a new superintendent. Rainwater has made no secret of his plan to retire in the not too distant future and it's no stretch to believe that the next board majority will determine whether we hire someone like Art or someone who is less, shall we say, autocratic/didactic, someone who takes his direction FROM the board on policy matters rather than dictating it TO them?
Let me close by focusing on hetergeneous classes. The trend everywhere else is to have more not less AP and honors classes. I met a woman recently who is an education professor at Marquette. She was shocked to learn of MMSD's policy changes, pointing out that in Milwaukee even the most impoverished schools have AP, with the focus being how to increase participation by more students, especially minority students. Extending the K-8 model into high school is irresponsible. The data clearly indicate that this model is failing our students. Indeed, even at West, the internal data show that the one-size-fits-all English 9 and now English 10 doesn't work as advertised. Our children attend Stanford and Macalester. Almost all their classmates have had the full range of AP courses in their high schools, even those coming from small towns. Especially in science and math, this is critical. Success after MMSD is a measure that doesn't get much play, but it really should be the ultimate measure of our students' success, not just those who go on to college and post-graduate careers, but all our students. Are they prepared to participate meaningfully in society. Do they have the skills they need to be good critical thinkers, to make informed decisions.
As our district grows increasingly more diverse ethnically, and as the disparity socieconomically widens, we have to ask whether we can meet all students' needs with the little red school house approach, if that model ever worked in a town our size. More important, perhaps, will be how the community will perceive this---a posting a few months back on SIS looked at the district's demographic data and demonstrated that brain flight has already happened out of the West HS district. Folks will be voting with their feet if they feel those setting policy don't care about all the children.
How we see ourselves and whether Madison continues to draw new folks to our community depends heavily on the strength of our schools. Obviously I believe we need a fresh start, but however you come down on it, the stakes are high.
I was leaving for a trip the other day and scooped up some reading material off my desk for the plane ride. I found myself holding three documents: one was the Bush administration's National Security Strategy for 2006; another was a new study by the Economic Strategy Institute entitled "America's Technology Future at Risk," about how America is falling behind the world in broadband. And the third was "Teaching at Risk," a new report by the Teaching Commission, headed by the former I.B.M. chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., about the urgent need to upgrade the quality and pay of America's K-12 teachers.
The contrast was striking. The Bush strategy paper presupposes that we are a rich country and always will be, and that the only issue is how we choose to exercise our power. But what the teaching and telecom studies tell us is that key pillars of U.S. power are eroding, and unless we start tending to them in a strategic way, we aren't going to be able to project power anywhere.
Because we've long been rich, there is an abiding faith that we always will be, and those who dare question that are labeled "defeatists." I wouldn't call Lou Gerstner a defeatist. He saved I.B.M. by acknowledging its weaknesses and making dramatic changes — beginning with scrapping I.B.M.'s arrogant assumption that because it was such a great company, it could do extraordinary things with average people. Mr. Gerstner understood that an extraordinary company could stay that way only if it had a critical mass of extraordinary people. This is the message of his Teaching Commission: We cannot remain an extraordinary country without a critical mass of extraordinary teachers.
"If teaching remains a second-rate profession, America's economy will be driven by second-rate skills," Mr. Gerstner says. "We can wake up today — or we can have a rude awakening sooner than we think."
The Teaching Commission notes that "our schools are only as good as their teachers," yet this "occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations." Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers' base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach (theteachingcommission.org).
Meanwhile, the report by the Economic Strategy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, is equally harrowing. It notes that while the U.S. led the world in broadband Internet access in 2000, it has now fallen to 16th place. In 2000, 40 percent of the world's telecom equipment was produced in America. That share is now 21 percent and falling. The U.S. ranks 42nd for the percentage of people with cellphones.
In an age when connectivity means productivity, when communications infrastructure is at the heart of any innovation ecosystem, these things matter for job creation and growth. The lack of ultra-high-speed networks in the U.S. "makes it impossible for U.S.-based companies to enter key new business sectors" — one reason venture capitalists are moving their R.&D. start-ups to Asia, E.S.I. noted.
"The wealth and long-term economic growth of the United States," it added, "have long depended upon technological advancement as a means of competing with our foreign rivals. ... America's emphasis has always been on achieving such high levels of productivity that it could be the low-cost producer while still paying high wages." The study offers a variety of regulatory and investment prescriptions (econstrat.org).
It's not surprising that the Bush strategy paper is largely silent about these educational and technological deficits, as well as about the investment we need to make in alternative fuels to end our oil addiction. Because to acknowledge these deficits is to acknowledge that we have to spend money to fix them, and the radical Bush tax cuts make that impossible. It would be one thing if we were going into debt to solve these problems that affect our underlying national strength. But we are going into debt to buy low-interest houses and more stuff made in China.
We're like a family that is overdrawn at the bank just when the parents need to send their kid to college, buy a computer and a D.S.L. line, and replace a gas-guzzling furnace. Whatever "strategic plan" that family has for advancement, it won't get anywhere until it rebalances its books.
From a 1996 MTI document. Note the emphasis on appropriate support and funding, and the statement "MTI opposes the exclusive use of any full inclusion model." Can anyone posting to this blog tell us whether this is still the MTI position (and I am not criticizing it) and what this means for the push to extend heterogeneous classrooms to all Madison Schools, as one of a parent noted in board testimony in early February?
MTI believes that Inclusion exists when student(s) with disability(ies) attend age appropriate regular education class(es), with appropriate support and funding.
MTI believes that Inclusion is one option in the full continuum of services and full range of delivery models available to students with disabilities as determined by the Individualized Educational Plan (IEP).
MTI believes that Inclusion requires additional Federal and State funding. This funding is mandatory prior to the implementation of Inclusion and will continue for as long as this option exists.
MTI believes that coordinated planning time for all educational employees involved is a requirement for successful Inclusion.
MTI believes that the impact of Inclusion must be bargained.
MTI believes that regular educators, special educators and support personnel must be involved as full partners in the planning for and implementation of Inclusion.
MTI believes that inservice education for all educational employees involved in the implementation of Inclusion must be provided.
MTI believes that modification in class size, scheduling, and curriculum design may be needed to accommodate the shifting demands that Inclusion creates.
Madison Teachers Inc. believes the prime consideration in the placement of all students should be the welfare of each student thereby requiring a full continuum of placement options. MTI opposes the exclusive use of any full inclusion model. Any decision concerning the placement of an exceptional student must be a majority opinion of those participating in the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) team meeting. MTI further believes that adequate safeguards must be provided for the classroom teacher to ensure that a proper classroom atmosphere be maintained at all times.
Using inflammatory "tracking" vs. "inclusion" rhetoric, the authors clearly misrepresent my position on the current debate, which was posted through the Isthmus on-line questions to candidates two weeks ago. I have stated my position in front of the board and in several forums attended by their group. I also have asked for dialogue with Barb Katz on more than one occasion and she has declined my request to learn more about her position.
Under the circumstances, I can only believe that the authors would prefer not to be confused by the record, which is:
Mathiak: Despite noble rhetoric in favor of this plan, I have deep reservations about the current push for "mixed ability grouping" (a.k.a. "heterogeneous grouping"). The district has failed to clarify whether the goal is to achieve a perfect demographic balance in each classroom or address the historic segregation of Madison's advanced academic programs.
These are two very different objectives that would require different strategies to succeed.
Since 2000, the district has known that 27% of high school drop outs scored above the 84th percentile in the 5th grade math test; this group includes a large number of low income and minority students. If the district wanted to desegregate advanced academics it would require:
Early testing of all students to identify and nurture high ability students of color and low income students.
Reform of the middle school and high school guidance system to encourage rather than discourage advanced classes among students of color and low income students.
Creation of enough places in advanced classes to accommodate all students capable of success.
If the goal is to achieve a perfect population mix, we need to have a plan that meets the needs of all of the students in that mix. This means addressing several factors identified in successful models but which are not part of Madison's current public school practice including:
The ability to control who attends the school and under what terms
The ability to require teachers to be trained in and to implement differentiated curriculum (one expert recently testified that this takes ten or more years to put in place).
Generous levels of in-stepping for students who are significantly above grade level.
Adequate numbers of support staff -- social workers, psychologists, learning disabilities specialists, librarians, TAG specialists, and other core staff -- to allow teachers to teach to all levels.
Dear Editor: We are dismayed that two of the candidates running for the Madison School Board, Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole, would work toward reversing access for students by promoting ability-grouping and tracking. In fact, Cole called the district's efforts to provide more heterogeneous classes that all students could access "worrisome."
Consider these points:
• The research has clearly shown that ability-grouping and tracking lead to unequal educational opportunities for students, particularly students of color, poor students and students with disabilities.
• Madison schools are regularly studied and visited by other urban districts looking for successful ways to increase inclusion.
• Only nine-tenths of 1 percent of MMSD's African-American students are taking advanced placement classes, while more than 30 percent receive special education support.
• The achievement gap between white, middle-income students and all other students in the district is just starting to show improvement.
This is an issue of civil rights and full access for traditionally marginalized groups. Mathiak, Cole and their supporters can point to no hard data showing that including all students in classes with appropriate supports, services and differentiated curriculum harms the highest echelon. At most, they claim that some high-achieving students may be "bored." Hardly a concern when the dropout rates, AP course access, and postgraduate outcomes for traditionally marginalized students continue to be both a nationwide and an MMSD problem.
Using words like "cookie cutter" approach and "one size fits all," they portray the issue of access as one of "dumbing down" to low achievers. Nothing could be further from the truth in successful differentiated classes, where all students access curriculum at the learning levels that are appropriate for their individual needs and goals.
In fact, teaching in a fully inclusive model requires the best-trained, most creative and hardest-working school staff available. While Mathiak and Cole say it sounds good in theory, we have seen effective inclusive education in classrooms all over the district.
That's why Madison Partners supports strong leadership, high-level training and total team teaching as strategies to improve Madison schools and outcomes for all students. Just because inclusive strategies are challenging doesn't mean these research-proven methods aren't worth doing.
We encourage the community to step forward on this critical civil rights issue.
Kelli Betzinger, Kristina Grebener, Helen Hartman, Barb Katz, Jane and Randy Lambert, Lisa and Mike Pugh, Tom Purnell, Beth Swedeen and Terry Tuschen on behalf of Madison Partners for Inclusive Schools
Published: March 28, 2006
Copyright 2006 The Capital Times
Lost in this consumer’s plight is the student’s struggle to figure things out for his or herself. Gained is a concentration of power in the state.
What may be most egregious about the plan is that with the inevitable succession of self-proclaiming experts will come the further diminishment of a teacher’s authority in the classroom. Teenagers may think this sounds cool, but several years later, in the real world, they will find themselves terribly misled. The Senate should resist the powerful forces at hand, reject Gov. Bush’s proposal and relegate adolescents back to where they belong: in high school, without a clue.
Despite nearly 30 years of improvements in U.S. children's overall quality of life, their basic academic skills have barely budged, according to research led by a Duke University sociologist.
The "educational flatline," as measured by scores on math and reading exams, defies researchers' expectations, because other quality-of-life measures, such as safety and family income, have improved steadily since 1975.
More recently, even areas that had worsened in the 1970s and 1980s, such as rates of teen suicide, have improved dramatically, so researchers had expected that education improvements would soon follow. They didn't.
Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.
Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.
The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.
"Public education is the foundation of our democracy"
George Lucas, writing about education and his Foundation (via Maya Cole's post on Effective School Boards:
Public education is the foundation of our democracy -- the stepping stones for our youth to reach their full potential. My own experience in public school was quite frustrating. I was often bored. Occasionally, I had a teacher who engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. Those were the teachers I really loved. I wondered, "Why can't school be exciting all of the time?" As a father, I've felt the imperative to transform schooling even more urgently.
Traditional education can be extremely isolating -- the curriculum is often abstract and not relevant to real life, teachers and students don't connect with resources and experts outside of the classroom, and schools operate as if they were separate from their communities.
Project-based learning, student teams working cooperatively, students connecting with passionate experts, and broader forms of assessment can dramatically improve student learning. New digital multimedia and telecommunications can support these practices and engage our students. And well-prepared educators are critical.
Our Foundation documents and disseminates the most exciting classrooms where these innovations are taking place. By shining the spotlight on these inspiring teachers and students, we hope others will consider how their work can promote change in their own schools.
A few of us from the high school got together with a couple of our middle school counterparts a while back. They wanted to meet with us to see how they could help align the skills and content they teach to help support their students who want to take AP level courses in high school. This was a watered down version of a concept known in AP world as "vertical teaming."
What finally came out after we got finished talking about specific things like creating a thesis statement and analyzing documents and pictorial evidence was this: they have gotten the message from administrators that their only function in an NCLB world is to reinforce the English curriculum. They were meeting with us in a bid to justify their existence as an independent department. Of course, this situation is already in jeopardy when you have not one soul teaching a social studies class in two of the three grades in one of the middle schools who has an actual major in social studies or history.
Maya Cole wants to expand the district's island of excellence if she's elected to the school board.
What islands of excellence would you expand?
The islands might be a particular teacher, an afterschool program, an academic program, or a particular class. Just list what you'd like to expand and briefly tell how you'd expand it.
To get things started, I'd expand the championship chess at West High School by recruiting chess enthusiasts to teach chess after school at each school in the district.
New Glarus Parent Files Gifted Ed Lawsuit Against DPI, DPI Superintendent Burmaster
New Glarus parent and Madison attorney Todd Palmer has filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and DPI Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster for their failure to promulgate rules for the identification and appropriate education of Wisconsin's 51,000 academically gifted students, as is required by Wisconsin state law. Here is the press release; a link to the lawsuit itself may be found at the end.
Todd will be joining us for the beginning portion of our Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on Thursday, March 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building. We will also be discussing the INSTEP process and the District's new TAG education plan, currently under development. Come share your experiences and offer your input. All who care about rigorous curriculum and high educational standards are welcome.
CONCERNED PARENT FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION CONCERNING GIFTED AND TALENTED EDUCATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 13, 2006
On March 2, 2006, a lawsuit was filed in Dane County Circuit Court against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster. The lawsuit challenges DPI’s failure to promulgate rules to govern public school districts in educating pupils identified as gifted and talented.
At present, DPI estimates that there are over 51,000 Wisconsin school children enrolled in Wisconsin’s public schools who are gifted and qualify for special educational programs. However, Wisconsin lacks a comprehensive, objective and clearly defined set of rules to ensure that all 426 school districts in our state meet the needs of these students. A recent Legislative Audit Bureau investigation demonstrated that in the absence of these rules, the needs of these gifted and talented students are not being met. According to DPI, this problem is only getting worse.
DPI has acknowledged that, “Wisconsin state law requires school districts to establish programs for these pupils, but the fiscal pressures facing many school districts has led a growing number of them to severely curtail or eliminate these programs.” DPI has acknowledged that gifted students are the most underserved pupils in public schools and that “too often, these pupils are ignored, restricted or underachieving and, if not part of the typical dropout statistics, have become in-school dropouts.”
On November 29, 2005, approximately 200 parents filed a Petition with DPI asking that DPIcreate rules to ensure that the educational needs of gifted children are being met. By letter dated February 1, 2006, DPI refused to issue those rules. The March 2, 2006 lawsuit challenges DPI’s denial of that Petition and asks the Court to order that DPI create these rules that are required by state law.
According to Todd Palmer, a parent and the attorney who filed the lawsuit, “Many school districts simply ignore the needs of gifted and talented students because adequate rules are not in place to define appropriate programs for these children and to ensure those requirements are enforced.”
According to Palmer, “Recent surveys show that 60% of the Wisconsin school districts plan to cut or altogether eliminate their talented and gifted programs despite the statutory mandate that requires these programs to be offered to students.” He believes this state’s problem is exacerbated by a lack of federal funding for gifted education, “recent estimates predict that only 3/10 of a penny per $100 spent on education in this country is devoted to gifted children.”
###
Media Contact:
Todd Palmer
DeWitt Ross & Stevens S.C.
608-252-9368
tep@dewittross.com
Bill, I heard you speak a few weeks ago at Davos, when you told a large audience that education is the biggest challenge for the future. You are right about that. You pointed to the 1,500 or so small high schools that the Gates Foundation has funded as evidence of your commitment to make a difference. If you are worried about our nation's future competitiveness, I am not so sure you made the right investment.
Small schools are not always the best answer to low achievement. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. Poor academic results can be found in large schools and in small schools. Great academic results can be found in schools of any size. Success is the result of a solid curriculum, dedicated teachers, a strong principal and students who arrive in high school with the skills and motivation to succeed.
There is another investment that you could make that would be far more effective in raising student achievement than churning out another thousand or so small high schools. As the chief executive officer of the largest software company in the world, you have a certain competitive advantage. Your company really knows how to use advanced technology to teach people almost anything.
American students are accustomed to using computers and getting instant answers. Yet, when they open their textbooks, they find wooden prose. Instead of inspiring them to dig deeper into their studies, the textbooks more often than not simply turn them off. The medium itself is a problem, especially when compared with what they are used to doing for themselves on a computer. Textbooks have never been known for their sparkling prose, but today more than ever their obsolescence is apparent when they compete with new technologies.
The problem is that you have this tail of this big grant from the Gates Foundation wagging this policy dog at the Department of Ed. Because Gates has a big priority to start small schools, the Department of Education is jumpstarting 50 a year, year after year. It's just impossible to have quality opening up schools in that kind of frenetic way. It also means a lot of these schools get opened up with these ultra-niche academic orientations – sports careers or architecture – that I think are really preposterous for a ninth grader. I think what they tend to do is serve the interests of community organizations that are sponsors. These may be perfectly well-intended sponsoring groups, but that doesn't mean that the high school as a whole is going to work with a curriculum that is defined that narrowly, especially when there is a good reason to put more emphasis on language, science, math and a lot of the core subjects.
Gotham Gazette: Jonathan Kozol recently wrote an article for Gotham Gazette Segregated Schools: Shame Of The City, in which he argued that one issue that is being ignored is racial segregation. He said that until that is confronted, other reforms will not accomplish much. What is your perspective on that?
Jessica Siegel: What is the percentage of the public schools students that are children or color? Eighty-five percent? It's not even relevant. That's who is in the public schools. To me it's not an issue of segregation so much as what kind of education you are going to give to the kids there.
Samuel Freedman: I completely agree with Jessica. Kozol espouses a point of view you pick up in education schools. But it is a high-minded excuse for paralysis.
. . . It's part of educational suicide to say now, however well intentioned you are, that until you solve poverty or segregation nothing can happen in the schools. Something has to be able to happen in the schools.
A free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
Lopez, Silveira support one-size-fits-none classrooms
From an article in The Capital Times by Susan Troller:
Noting that he grew up poor in a segregated school district, Lopez said firmly, "I don't like segregating kids." He said that there are real advantages for all students in classes that reflect the real world. He also said that he believes young people benefit from teaching to, and learning from, each other.
Silveira, who has an eighth-grade daughter and has been involved with school issues as a volunteer for almost a decade, agreed with Lopez.
"I'm a proponent of the heterogeneous classroom," she said.
Heterogeneous classrooms mix students of all skill levels. For example, English 10 at West places non-readers and college-level readers in the same classroom.
While the board still investigates the appropriateness of one-size-fits-none, it's disappointing to have two candidates whose minds are already made up.
On March 14, 2006 Intel Corporation and Science Service awarded the top 10 college scholarship awards for the Intel Science Talent Search (STS) at a black-tie banquet in Washington, D.C.
Nicholas Michael Wage from Appleton East placed fourth, winning a $25K scholarship.
Nicholas Michael Wage, 17, of Appleton, studied generalized Paley graphs, an important class of graphs, for his Intel Science Talent Search project in mathematics. Given a prime p such that 4 divides p-1, we obtain a Paley graph by taking as vertices the integers (0, 1, ..., p-1), with an edge between x and y just in case x - y is a square modulo p. These, together with similarly defined graphs and directed graphs form the class called "generalized Paley." In the case above, when p - 1 is divisible by 4, Nick found the asymptotic limit, as p increases, for the number of complete subgraphs of a fixed size. He showed that this limit equaled that which Paul Erd”s (incorrectly) conjectured for all graphs. Nick also counted the number of three cycles for members of the larger family of generalized Paley graphs. His proofs used results from number theory, including Weil's deep theorem on the Riemann Hypothesis for finite fields. Nick, who attends Appleton East High School, earned 800s on his critical reading and math SAT scores. His paper is published in the journal Integers. Son of Drs. Michael Wage and Kathy Vogel, he plans to study math at Harvard or the University of Wisconsin.
Wage was one of only two semifinalists (out of a group of 300 chosen throughout the U.S.) from Wisconsin. The other was Michael James Pizer from Milwaukee's University School. Martin Weill has more. David Pescovitz has photos.
It is recommended practice for all secondary schools to offer two curriculum levels for all core subjects at each grade, with one offering providing advanced academic coursework.
In 1998, the first year of open AP enrollment for all students, both the numbers and the diversity of students increased throughout the County. In this same year, all students taking AP courses were also required to take the end-of-course AP exams. Enrollment in AP has increased consistently with 2005 having the highest AP participation yet with 13,995 students enrolled in AP courses. . . .
FCPS is committed to providing students with challenging courses offering preparation for life in a competitive society. . . . If you have questions about particular courses or guidance policies regarding dropping and adding courses, please discuss the matter with your local guidance department and school administration.
Madison School Board candidates differ on classroom mix
From an article by Susan Troller in The Capital Times:
Citing the example of her own family, Madison School Board candidate Lucy Mathiak says she does not believe that a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching is a good idea. Mathiak, who is running against incumbent Juan Jose Lopez in the upcoming April 4 spring election, was one of a quartet of candidates featured Wednesday at the Downtown Madison Rotary meeting.
Tuesday afternoon, the Madison Masonic Center was the setting for the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon State Competition. About 800-900 people were there, almost all of high school age. It had all the youthful enthusiasm and cheer of a pep rally, except this time mental achievement was being honored, not physical. School mascots were in attendance, and competing cheers filled the auditorium before quiztime.
Twenty high school teams of nine students each competed in the final Super Quiz Oral Relay. During this section of the competition (the written portion was held the day before), each member went down to sit at tables facing a screen where a multiple choice question was displayed that was read out by News 15’s John Stofflet. Competitors then had ten seconds in which to “bubble-in” their response. Correct responders were known immediately as they were asked to raise their hands. Each team’s cheering section would then erupt with glee (provided a hand had been raised).
Each team member answered five questions; there were 45 questions in all. And they were tough, all having to do with the Renaissance. Waukesha West were declared the state champions at a dinner held at the Madison Concourse Tuesday night. They will get to compete in the national finals in San Antonio, TX on April 27-29. Wilmot was second and Sun Prairie third. McFarland also made the finals. Madison and Middleton were not amongst the 114 teams fielded this 2005-06 season.
This was the 23rd annual competition, and quite possibly the last, as the event costs about $220,000 annually, and depends on private donations for two-thirds of that amount; this year, donations fell $50,000 short. I am writing this as thousands arrive in Madison on a snowy day to watch three days of state high school basketball competition. As well they should; it’s a culmination of a long and exciting season for those twenty schools. But I can think of no more exquisite demonstration of our society’s values than the hoopla at the hoops this weekend versus the media’s nigh-silent coverage of the noisy and exuberant academic decathlon. The WSJ had a four-sentence description beneath two photos; the Capital Times had nothing at all.
The debates that dominate the discussion of the transition from high school to college today assume that the sole function of high school is to prepare graduates to succeed in college courses. If we look at secondary education from the point of view of the liberal arts, however, we can discover a fundamentally different concept of its purpose — and of the capabilities of adolescents. A liberal-arts focus shows how different American assumptions are from those of the other industrialized nations with whom we compete globally today.
Let me start with two points. First, liberal education (by which I mean an engagement with the major aspects of human knowledge and values) is not a throwaway, a bauble for rich kids in select institutions who are going to get good jobs no matter what they study. Liberal education is, or should be, at the core of training our youth to serve themselves, their country, and the world. Second, liberal education is a process laden with content that stretches over an extended period of schooling — at the very least from the third year of high school through the second year of college — and arguably over the entire eight years for those who attend the two institutions.
The question I want to raise is whether we, in the United States, assume that the majority of students aren't ready to take on a challenging liberal-arts curriculum until they get to college. Have we implicitly taken for granted that adolescents are not capable of tackling the liberal arts? And must we assume, as I think we do, that college students need to get through studying them as quickly as possible, in order to go on to more-professional studies?
Most everyone in the political and policy world was fixated on all the "what does it mean" questions about Sunday's NYT Mag story on Mark Warner. But there was also some chattering about the Outlook spread on No Child Left Behind in the Wash. Post. It was well done including reactions from DC-area principals, an NCLB primer by Jay Mathews, and a map of DC-area schools (pdf) not making "adequate yearly progress" or AYP.
But despite the primer, readers might have been left wondering about these adequate yearly progress targets. That's understandable, it's confusing, and they're not the result of a single calculation. Instead, it's a multi-step process with opportunities to increase or decrease the level of difficulty at each one. It goes something like this:
First, the state chooses a test to use. This can be a pre-existing test used elsewhere, a custom-designed one based on the state's standards, or a combination of the two. Obviously, the degree of difficulty is a big issue here.
Second, the state decides what the cut score on the test will be for a student to be "proficient" as well as "basic", "advanced", and any other delineations of performance the state wants to have. In other words, how many questions does a student need to answer correctly? For No Child Left Behind the most important category is proficient because that is what the law's "adequate yearly progress" ratings are based on. There are several methods for determining cut scores. What's most important to remember about them is that they all rely on professional judgment. There is no revealed source of truth about what a fifth-grader or a high school student needs to know and be able to do. At the risk of oversimplifying too much, the three most common methods are based on using expert judgment from a panel of experts to come up with cut scores, comparing and contrasting how various groups of test takers do on the test, and scaling the questions from easy to hard and determining various delineations for performance along the scale. Again, plenty of chances to increase or reduce the level of difficulty in this process.
But, while newspapers commonly report the percentage of students passing a test, they rarely report on what the cut scores are and when and how they are set. The composition of the professionals involved also matters a lot. Is it just K-12 teachers, or outside experts for instance representatives of higher education, too? Lack of attention to this process is unfortunate because there is plenty of opportunity for mischief and a state with a difficult test and a high cut score, say 40 out of 50, is going to have different results than a state with an easier test or a low cut scores. But, cut scores of half to 2/3 of the questions correct in order to be "proficient" are not at all uncommon. All this is public information or can be obtained through a FOIA. And it's all extremely relevant to all this.
You talk about education and the bottom-up effect that millions more people will play in societal advances. How do you see this unfolding?
We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop, and bootstrap the way they learn outside of school. We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.
Creative expression (is another area). No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them. Easy-to-use programs allow kids to compose everything form ringtones to full-fledged operas. It will change the meaning of creative art in our society.
We are already seeing early signs of it in blogs. The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts.
Schools to share what works through charter dissemination grants
State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster has announced $1.3 million in dissemination grants to 12 charter schools in nine school districts. The grants are part of the state's $52 million, three-year federal funding to create 100 new charter schools in Wisconsin. Four of the grants renew previous dissemination projects; eight are for new projects, some of which include partnerships with existing schools to improve student achievement.
“Charter school practices keep getting better each year of the program,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster in announcing $1.3 million in dissemination grants to 12 charter schools in nine school districts. . . .
New charter school grants went to
• Appleton Area School District, Appleton eSchool, $40,000;
• Eau Clare Area School District, Chippewa Valley Montessori Charter School,$149,760;
• Kiel Area School District, Kiel eSchool, $40,000;
• Milwaukee Public Schools, Fairview Charter School, $150,000;
• Portage Community School District, River Crossing Charter School, $84,217;
• Stevens Point Area School District, McDill Academies, $150,000, and Wisconsin River Academy, $150,000; and
• Waukesha School District, Harvey Phillip Alternative Charter School, $47,575.
Renewal grants for existing dissemination projects went to
• Milwaukee Public Schools, Whittier Elementary School, $150,000, and Wisconsin
Career Academy, $150,000;
• Oshkosh Area School District, EAA/OASD Third Grade Aviation Charter School,
$150,000; and
• Racine Unified School District, McKinley Middle Charter School, $75,000.
There's no doubt that Isthmus has the juice in this campaign. The traditional daily newspapers haven't covered any substantive issues in this race. I'd like to see some links/words that contrast my opinion on their lack of "beef" (Have they attended any forums?). Focusing on personalities is a simple, self made "pass" that avoids issues critical to our children:
Leadership that can pass referenda (will the current approach and personalities be successful?)
Transparency with respect to the District's growing $321M+ budget. Again, will the current approach pass the necessary referenda?
Isthmus's work represents the best of local journalism. Rather amazing, given the resources they have vs the enormous dailies. Interestingly, the Fitchburg Star has posted some useful articles as well.
The Memorandum to Local Media represented one attempt to at least look at the issues rather than simply compare and contrast personalities.
This fall I gave my students grades for the first time. Of course, my students have received grades from me before, but I was always of the philosophy that those grades should be the ones they had earned.
This semester, that changed. I began giving A's like gifts. Why? I need to get tenure.
At my midtenure review, I performed excellently in all areas but one -- the computerized scores calculated from student evaluations of my teaching. Despite my solid scholarship, a wide range of academic service, great rapport with colleagues, and, most significantly, many strong written testimonials from students praising my teaching, I was warned that my computer scores needed to rise significantly in order for me to be sure of tenure at my small college.
On the written evaluations, students attest that my high standards, impressive expertise, and challenging assignments mean that they learn a great deal in my class. Many students express gratitude for that.
This is very long, and the link may require a password so I've posted the entire article on the continued page.
TJM
http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=11566
Standards, Accountability, and School Reform
by Linda Darling-Hammond — 2004
The standards-based reform movement has led to increased emphasis on tests, coupled with rewards and sanctions, as the basis for "accountability" systems. These strategies have often had unintended consequences that undermine access to education for low-achieving students rather than enhancing it. This article argues that testing is information for an accountability system; it is not the system itself. More successful outcomes have been secured in states and districts, described here, that have focused on broader notions of accountability, including investments in teacher knowledge and skill, organization of schools to support teacher and student learning, and systems of assessment that drive curriculum reform and teaching improvements.
The education reform movement in the United States focused increasingly on the development of new standards for students: Virtually all states have begun the process of creating standards for student learning, new curriculum frameworks to guide instruction, and new assessments to test students’ knowledge. School districts across the country have weighed in with their own versions of standards-based reform, including new curricula, testing systems, accountability schemes, and promotion or graduation requirements.
The rhetoric of these reforms is appealing. Students cannot succeed in meeting the demands of the new economy if they do not encounter much more challenging work in school, many argue, and schools cannot be stimulated to improve unless the real accomplishments─ or deficits─ of their students are raised to public attention. There is certainly merit to these arguments. But will standards and tests improve schools or create educational opportunities where they do not now exist? What evidence do we have about the success of standards-based reform strategies, especially for the students in America’s urban school systems where educational needs are greatest? In this paper I review evidence about the outcomes of different approaches to standards-based reform in states and districts across the country with an eye toward evaluating whether and how they improve educational opportunities and student learning.
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS OF STANDARDS-BASED REFORM
Some proponents of standards-based reforms have envisioned that standards that express what students should know and be able to do would spur other reforms that mobilize more resources for student learning, including high quality curriculum frameworks, materials, and assessments tied to the standards; more widely available course offerings that reflect this high quality curriculum; more intensive teacher preparation and professional development guided by related standards for teaching; more equalized resources for schools; and more readily available safety nets for educationally needy students (O’Day & Smith, 1993). For others, the notions of standards and accountability have become synonymous with mandates for student testing which may have little connection to policy initiatives that directly address the quality of teaching, the allocation of resources, or the nature of schooling (see, e.g., Educate America, 1991).
In addition to these differences, distinct change theories have emerged around the idea of standards-based reform. Some argue that standards for learning and teaching should be used primarily to inform investments and curricular changes that will strengthen schools. They see the major problem as a need for teacher, school, and system learning about more effective practice combined with more equal and better-targeted resource allocation. Others argue that standards can motivate change only if they are used to apply sanctions to those who fail to meet them. They see the major problem as a lack of effort and focus on the part of educators and students.
Policy makers who endorse the latter view have emphasized high-stakes testing─ that is, the use of scores on achievement tests to make decisions that have important consequences for examinees and others─ as a primary strategy to promote accountability. Some high-stakes decisions affect students, such as the use of test scores for promotion, tracking and graduation. Others affect teachers and principals when scores are used to determine merit pay or potential dismissal. Still others affect schools, as when schools are awarded recognition or extra funds when scores increase or are put into intervention status or threatened with loss of registration when scores are low. Some policies take into account differences in the initial performance of students and in the many nonschool factors that can affect achievement. Some do not, holding schools to similar standards despite dissimilar student populations and resources.
Many questions arise from this policy strategy. Will investments in better teaching, curriculum, and schooling follow the press for new standards? Or will standards and tests built upon a foundation of continued inequality simply certify student failure more visibly and reduce access to future education and employment? In states where standards accompanied by high-stakes tests have been imposed without addressing inequalities in access to qualified teachers and appropriate, a new generation of equity lawsuits has emerged. Litigation in California, Florida, New York, and elsewhere has followed on the heels of recently successful ‘‘adequacy’’ lawsuits in Alabama and New Jersey.
A growing body of research has found unintended consequences of high-stakes tests. Some studies have found that high-stakes tests can narrow the curriculum, pushing instruction toward lower order cognitive skills, and can distort scores (Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, & Stretcher, 2000; Koretz & Barron, 1998; Koretz, Linn, Dunbar, & Shepard, 1991; Linn, 2000; Linn, Graue, & Sanders, 1990; Stetcher, Barron, Kaganoff, & Goodwin, 1998). In addition, grade retention as a response to low test scores appears not to improve educational achievement for those who are held back and increases their likelihood of dropping out (Hauser, 1999). Finally, there is evidence that high-stakes tests that reward or sanction schools based on average student scores can create incentives for pushing low-scorers into special education, holding them back in the grades, and encouraging them to drop out so that schools’ average scores will look better (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1992; Darling-Hammond, 1991, 1992; Figlio & Getzler, 2002; Haney, 2000; Koretz, 1988; Shepard & Smith, 1988; Smith et al., 1986). School rankings tied to test scores have sometimes punished schools for accepting and keeping students with high levels of special needs and rewarded them for keeping such students out of their programs through selective admissions, transfer, and even push out policies (Smith et al., 1986).
In a recent paper citing concerns about the negative outcomes of test-based promotion and graduation policies, Robert Hauser (1999) voiced skepticism about whether many states’ or districts’ high-stakes testing policies are likely to result in positive consequences for students:
It is possible to imagine an educational system in which test-based promotion standards are combined with effective diagnosis and remediation of learning problems, yet past experience suggests that American school systems may not have either the will or the means to enact such fair and effective practices. Such a system would include well-designed and carefully aligned curricular standards, performance standards, and assessments. Teachers would be well trained to meet high standards in their classrooms, and students would have ample notice of what they are expected to know and be able to do. Students with learning difficulties would be identified years in advance of high-stakes deadlines, and they and their parents and teachers would have ample opportunities to catch up before deadlines occur. Accountability for student performance would not rest solely or even primarily on individual students, but also, collectively, on educators and parents. There is no positive example of such a system in the United States, past or present, whose success is documented by credible research. (p. 3)
Hauser’s concerns appear apt, given the research on such policies that has been available to date. In this paper, I review additional data indicating on the outcomes of test-based accountability systems. I also examine research on urban districts that have substantially improved their students’ performance by focusing on the improvement of teaching (by attending to professional accountability) rather than on sanctions for students (by emphasizing test-based accountability). In the course of this article, I argue for a broader conception of accountability that examines whether the actions undertaken by policymakers in fact produce better quality education and higher levels of learning for a greater share of students and whether they work to address shortcomings in children’s opportunities to learn.
TYPES OF EDUCATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY
To expand our frame for examining accountability, it may be useful to recognize that there are many different conceptions of accountability that have influenced U.S. education policy and interact with one another in today’s systems. They include at least the following:
Political accountability: Legislators and school board members, for example, must regularly stand for election and answer for their decisions.
Legal accountability: Schools are to operate in accord with legislation, and citizens can ask the courts to hear complaints about the public schools’ violation of laws.
Bureaucratic accountability: Federal, state, and district offices promulgate rules and regulations intended to ensure that schooling takes place according to set procedures.
Professional accountability: Teachers and other staff are expected to acquire specialized knowledge, meet standards for entry, and uphold professional standards of practice in their work.
Market accountability: Parents and students may in some cases choose the courses or schools they believe are most appropriate (Darling-Hammond, 1989).
All of these accountability mechanisms have their strengths and limitations, and each is more or less appropriate for certain goals. Political mechanisms can help establish general policy directions, but they do not allow citizens to judge each decision by elected officials, and they do not necessarily secure the rights of minorities. Legal mechanisms are useful in establishing and defending rights, but not everything is subject to court action and not all citizens have access to the courts. Bureaucratic mechanisms are appropriate when standard procedures will produce desired outcomes, but they can be counterproductive when clients have unique needs that require differential responses by those who must make non-routine decisions. Professional mechanisms are important when services require complex knowledge and decision making to meet clients’ individual needs, but they do not always take competing public goals (e.g., cost containment) into account. Market mechanisms are helpful when consumer preferences vary widely and the state has no direct interest in controlling choice, but they do not ensure that all citizens will have access to services of a given quality.
Because of these limits, no single form of accountability operates alone in any major areas of public life. The choices of accountability tools─ and the balance among different forms of accountability─ are constantly shifting as problems emerge, as social goals change, and as new circumstances arise. In most urban public school systems, legal and bureaucratic accountability strategies have predominated over the last 20 or more years. These have especially focused on attempts to manage schooling through standardized educational procedures, prescribed curriculum and texts, and test-based accountability strategies, often tied to tracking and grouping decisions that are meant to determine the programs students will receive.
Few have experimented with market accountability until very recently. Most notable among them are New York City, which launched more than 150 small schools of choice in the 1990s to add to the many dozens that existed before that time, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has had a system of choice-based schools for more than 15 years. Finally, a very few urban districts have launched well-developed professional accountability strategies tied to standards for teaching as well as student learning. New York City’s District #2, New Haven, California, and several cities in Connecticut, a state that launched a highly successful state-wide reform focused on teaching quality are among these, and are described later.
STANDARDS AS ASSESSMENT: ATTEMPTS TO CREATE ACCOUNTABILITY THROUGH HIGH-STAKES TESTING
Since the mid-1800s, urban school systems have periodically used student test scores to allocate rewards or sanctions to schools or teachers. (For historical accounts, see Callahan, 1962; Tyack, 1974.) Many states and districts have approached standards-based reform through this familiar strategy, claiming to implement new standards even when the tests are not aligned to the standards and when students are not assured of receiving qualified teachers, curriculum aligned with the standards, or schools organized to support them. ‘‘Standards-based reform strategies’’ that have used test scores as the basis for promoting students from grade to grade, determining program placements (e.g., to compensatory or gifted and talented classes), and making graduation decisions have received a great deal of publicity in the mid- to late-1990s as ‘‘new’’ reforms; however, they replicate policies that have come and gone many times before.
In contrast to schools in most European and Asian countries, U.S. schools have a long tradition of retaining students in a grade if they seem not to be succeeding at school. It has been estimated that the United States has an overall retention rate of 15–20% of its students annually (most of them at-risk students in central cities), placing U.S. public schools on a par with countries like Haiti or Sierra Leone and in stark contrast with countries like Japan, which has less than a 1% rate of grade retention, and European nations that bar grade retention (Smith & Shepard, 1987; Hauser, 1999). During the early 1980s, grade retentions increased as school districts instituted policies that linked standardized test scores to student promotion and placement decisions. Many of these policies failed and were repealed by the late 1980s, only to be reinstated less than a decade later.
For example, New York City experienced many of the problems associated with grade retention when the Promotional Gates Program was put in place in elementary and junior high schools during the early 1980s. At that time, gateways in grades four and seven were created through which students could pass only if they demonstrated a specified level of performance on the standardized citywide reading and mathematics tests. Students who did not meet the minimum standards were retained, sometimes repeatedly, until they were able to achieve the necessary score on the tests. Instead of strengthening most students’ academic performance, however, the program created cohorts of students who had been retained repeatedly without learning gains; sometimes they had been held back for so long that their advanced age and physical size led to increased misbehavior and decreased achievement for both the retained students and others in their classrooms. The students retained had lower achievement, greater incidences of disciplinary difficulties, and higher dropout rates than students at similar achievement levels who had previously been promoted. A district study found that 40% of the students retained in seventh grade had dropped out within 4 years, as compared to 25% of a comparison group, and that, while those who received intensive services in the Gates year improved their achievement temporarily, neither the services nor the students’ progress were sustained (New York City Division of Assessment and Accountability, 2001). Eventually, in the face of national and local evidence about the failures of this approach, the program was ended by Chancellor Fernandez in the late 1980s (Gampert & Opperman, 1988).
A decade later, with no sense of irony or institutional memory, the New York Times reported in September, 1999, that 21,000 students would be held back under the City’s ‘‘new’’ policy to end social promotion (Wasserman, 1999). Two weeks later the newspaper reported that the social promotion policy was in disarray as two-thirds of the 35,000 students forced to take summer school still did not pass the tests and, further, that 4,500 students’ test scores had been misreported and as many as 3,000 had been forced to take summer school by mistake (Hartocollis, 1999). Similar news headlines appeared in Los Angeles, where a policy to ‘‘end social promotion’’ resulted in more than 10,000 students being threatened with grade retention, only to find that the schools could not accurately identify who had passed or failed and could not find qualified teachers to teach the summer school programs that were supposed, miraculously, to catch these students up. The New York City Division of Assessment and Accountability (2001) has noted that a sharp increase in dropout rates between the classes of 1998 and 2000 (from 15.6% to 19.3% of each class) is likely a function of both the ‘‘new’’ city promotional standards and the state’s new test-based graduation requirements.
These outcomes have been replicated in other recent test-based promotion and graduation reforms. For example, the much publicized Chicago effort, which sought to end social promotion by requiring test passage at Grades 3, 6, and 8, appears to have failed to improve the learning of the thousands of students it retained. In the first two years under the policy, more than one-third of third, sixth, and eighth graders failed to meet the promotional test cutoffs by the end of the school year. Despite the fact that there were large-scale waivers for students with limited English proficiency and special education students, more than 20,000 students were retained in grade in 1997 and 1998, during the first two years of the program. Although average test scores improved, an evaluation by Consortium on Chicago School Research concluded that:
Retained students did not do better than previously socially promoted students. The progress among retained third graders was most troubling. Over the two years between the end of second grade and the end of the second time through third grade, the average ITBS reading scores of these students increased only 1.2 GEs (grade equivalents) compared to 1.5 GEs for students with similar test scores who had been promoted prior to the policy. Also troubling is that one-year dropout rates among eighth graders with low skills are higher under this policy. . . . In short, Chicago has not solved the problem of poor performance among those who do not meet the minimum test cutoffs and are retained. Both the history of prior attempts to redress poor performance with retention and previous research would clearly have predicted this finding. Few studies of retention have found positive impacts, and most suggest that retained students do not better than socially promoted students. The CPS policy now highlights a group of students who are facing significant barriers to learning and are falling farther and farther behind. (Roderick, Bryk, Jacob, Easton, & Allensworth, 1999, pp. 55–56)
These findings confirm those of a substantial body of research that has demonstrated that retaining students does not appear to help them catch up with peers and succeed in school; however, it does contribute to high rates of academic failure and behavioral difficulties. Studies comparing the learning gains of students who were retained with those of academically comparable students who were promoted have typically found that retained students actually achieve less than their comparable peers who move on through the grades. Students do not appear to benefit academically from grade retention regardless of the grade level or the student’s initial achievement level (for reviews, see Baenen, 1988; Holmes & Matthews, 1984; Illinois Fair Schools Coalition, 1985; Labaree, 1984; Meisels, 1992; Oakes & Lipton, 1990; Ostrowski, 1987). Shephard and Smith (1986) conclude in their review of research: ‘‘Contrary to popular beliefs, repeating a grade does not help students gain ground academically and has a negative impact on social adjustment and self-esteem’’ (p. 86).
When students who were retained in a grade are compared with students of equal achievement levels who were promoted, the retained students consistently suffer poorer self–concepts, have more problems of social adjustment, and express more negative attitudes toward school at the end of the period of retention than do similar students who are promoted (Eads, 1990; Holmes & Matthews, 1984; Illinois Fair Schools Coalition, 1985; Shepard & Smith, 1988; Walker & Madhere, 1987).
In addition, many studies have found that grade retention increases dropout rates (Anderson, 1998; Hess, 1986; Hess, Ells, Prindle, Liffman, and Kaplan, 1987; Safer, 1986;Smith & Shepard, 1987; Temple, Reynolds, & Miedel, 1998). Researchers have found that the odds of dropping out increase significantly for retained students, increasing the probabilities from 70% (Anderson, 1998) to as much as 250% (Rumberger & Larson, 1998) above those of similar students who were not retained.
The notion of holding students back is a crude remedy for educational problems derived from the factory assembly line model of schooling developed during the early years of the twentieth century: The assumption was that a sequenced set of procedures would be implemented as a child moved along the conveyor belt from 1st to 12th grade. If a particular set of procedures didn’t ‘‘take,’’ the procedures should be repeated until the child was properly ‘‘processed.’’ There are a number of reasons why grade retention is not generally a productive answer to low achievement, however. First, students develop at very different rates, and in the early grades the wide range of development that produces many of the differences in achievement measures evens out by about third or fourth grade. However, students who are held back often develop a conception of themselves as incapable, which then often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as it affects their motivation and willingness to attempt difficult tasks. Second, if there is a real problem with a student’s learning, wholesale grade retention does not typically lead to diagnosis of special learning needs or the use of more appropriate teaching strategies targeted to those needs. Finally, grade retention does not address system problems of poor teaching; nor does it promise better teaching in the subsequent year. In fact, low-achieving students are generally assigned to the least experienced and qualified teachers, exacerbating their learning difficulties.
Generally, the premise of grade retention as a solution for poor performance is that the problem, if there is one, resides in the child, rather than in the school setting. Rather than looking carefully at classroom practices and student needs when students are not achieving, schools send students back to repeat the same experience over again. Very little is done to ensure that the experience will be either higher in quality or more appropriate for the individual needs of the child. In short, grade retention provides little accountability for the quality of the educational experience students receive.
While it is certainly true that both students and their parents bear a measure of accountability for attending school, putting forth effort, and striving to meet expectations (and policies that set standards appropriately seek to mobilize those efforts), it is important for accountability policies to fairly assess what children and parents can do and what they system must do to enable successful efforts. This is especially important given the clear evidence that children in the United States receive dramatically unequal access to high-quality curriculum and teaching, and that these differentials are strongly related to their achievement (see Darling-Hammond, 1997, for a review).
Despite the rhetoric of American equality, the school experiences of students of color in the United States continue to be substantially separate and unequal. More than two thirds of ‘‘minority’’ students attend predominantly minority schools, and one third of Black and Latino students attend intensely segregated schools (i.e., 90% or more minority enrollment), most of which are in central cities (Orfield & Gordon, 2001). Currently, about two thirds of all students in central city schools are Black or Hispanic (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997a). This concentration facilitates inequality. Not only do funding systems and tax policies leave most urban districts with fewer resources than their suburban neighbors, but schools with high concentrations of low-income and ‘‘minority’’ students receive fewer resources than other schools within these districts. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many ‘‘minority’’ students within schools, allocating still fewer educational opportunities to them at the classroom level.
In their review of resource allocation studies, MacPhail-Wilcox and King (1986) summarized the resulting situation as follows:
School expenditure levels correlate positively with student socioeconomic status and negatively with educational need when school size and grade level are controlled statistically. . . .Teachers with higher salaries are concentrated in high income and low minority schools. Furthermore, pupil-teacher ratios are higher in schools with larger minority and low-income student populations. . . . Educational units with higher proportions of low-income and minority students are allocated fewer fiscal and educational resources than are more affluent educational units, despite the probability that these students have substantially greater need for both. (p. 425)
The situation has not improved in most states over the last decade and has grown substantially worse in some, as recent lawsuits challenging inequalities in Alabama, California, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere have demonstrated. In combination, policies associated with school funding, resource allocations, and tracking leave poor and minority students with fewer and lower quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high quality curriculum. The fact that the least qualified teachers typically end up teaching the least advantaged students is particularly problematic, given recent studies that have found that teacher quality is one of the most important determinants of student achievement (for a review, see Darling-Hammond, 2000). Low-income and minority students are least likely to receive well-qualified, highly effective teachers (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997a; Sanders & Rivers, 1996). Some evidence suggests that differences in the quality of teachers available to poor and minority children may explain nearly as much of the variance in student achievement as socioeconomic status (Ferguson, 1991; Strauss & Sawyer, 1986).
Unequal access to qualified teachers exacerbates the disparate effects of test-based promotion and graduation policies. Nationally, retention rates for low-income children are at least twice those for high-income students. Students who are retained in grade are disproportionately representative of racial and ethnic and populations whose dominant language is other than English (Illinois Fair Schools Coalition, 1985; Shepard & Smith, 1986; Walker & Madhere, 1987). Thus, the students who receive the scantiest resources, the least qualified teachers, the poorest physical facilities, and the most restricted access to quality learning opportunities are supposed to be ‘‘fixed’’ by being held back.
The Chicago study noted that the failure to invest in improved teaching was an unrecognized problem in the city’s reform strategy, which had tried to rely on a highly scripted centrally developed curriculum (which by design assumes, inaccurately, that students learn in the same ways and at the same pace) and grade retention as its major tools. The authors noted: ‘‘Thus the administration has worked to raise test scores among low-performing students without having to address questions regarding the adequacy of instruction during the school day or spend resources to increase teachers’ capacity to teach and to meet students’ needs more successfully’’ (Roderick et al., 1999, p. 57).
Where the failure to learn is a result of inadequate teaching and where the system’s primary response is to require children to experience that inadequate teaching again, it is doubtful that such a policy increases the system’s accountability to parents and students. The educational system’s accountability to the greater society is also reduced when a side-effect of the policy is that large numbers of students drop out of school, thus creating a societal burden of undereducated youth who are unable to function in the labor market and who increasingly join the welfare or criminal justice systems rather than the productive economy. Society as a whole does not benefit from school policies that claim to heighten accountability by pushing low achievers out of school to make test scores look better─ a result that has been documented in several studies─ or by failing to offer education that enables these students to learn.
INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES TO TEST-BASED INCENTIVES
Unfortunately, most cities and states have used test-based reform strategies that rely on cross-sectional measures of student scores for different populations of students (e.g., average scores for eighth graders in a given year are compared to average scores for a different group of eighth graders in the prior year), rather than longitudinal assessments of student gains for students who remained in a given school over a period of time. Because schools’ average scores on any measure are sensitive to changes in the population of students taking the test, and such changes can be induced by manipulating admissions, dropouts, and pupil classifications, policies that use schools’ average scores for allocating sanctions have been found to result in several unintended negative consequences. As noted earlier, these include labeling low-scoring students for special education placements so that their scores won’t ‘‘count’’ in school reports, retaining students in grade so that their relative standing will look better on ‘‘grade-equivalent’’ scores, excluding low-scoring students from admission to ‘‘open enrollment’’ schools, and encouraging such students to leave schools or drop out. This occurs because the policies create incentives for schools to keep out of the testing pool─ or the school itself─ students who will lower the average scores. Smith and colleagues explained the widespread engineering of student populations that he found in his study of New York City’s implementation of performance standards as a basis for school level sanctions:
(S)tudent selection provides the greatest leverage in the short-term accountability game. . . . The easiest way to improve one’s chances of winning is (1) to add some highly likely students and (2) to drop some unlikely students, while simply hanging on to those in the middle. School admissions is a central thread in the accountability fabric. (Smith et al., 1986, pp. 30–31)
In some cases, policies that reward or punish schools for average test scores have created a distorted view of accountability, one in which beating the numbers by manipulating student placements overwhelms efforts to serve students’ educational needs well. These policies may also further exacerbate existing incentives for talented staff to opt for school placements where students are easy to teach, and school stability is high. Capable staff are less likely to risk losing rewards or incurring sanctions by volunteering to teach where many students have special needs and performance standards will be more difficult to attain. This outcome was recently reported as a result of Florida’s recent use of aggregate test scores, reported as cross-sectional averages and unadjusted for student characteristics, for school rewards and sanctions. Qualified teachers were leaving the schools rated D or F ‘‘in droves’’ according to news reports at the start of the 1999 school year (DeVise, 1999; Fischer, 1999), to be replaced by teachers without experience and often without training. As one principal queried, ‘‘Is anybody going to want to dedicate their lives to a school that has already been labeled a failure?’’
Ironically, this approach to accountability compromises even further the educational chances of disadvantaged students, who are already served by a disproportionate share of those teachers who are inexperienced, unprepared, and underqualified. This outcome will be further exacerbated by policies that plan to reduce federal funds to schools that have lower test scores. Critics have argued that applying sanctions to schools with lower test score performance penalizes already disadvantaged students twice over: having given them inadequate schools to begin with, society now punishes them again for failing to perform as well as other students who attend schools with greater resources. Such sanctions can discourage good schools from opening their doors to educationally needy students and place more emphasis on manipulating scores by eliminating or keeping out low-scoring students than on improving schools.
These outcomes have been noted of reforms in several states. For example, after the Regents Test reforms of the early 1980s in New York State, studies found evidence of schools retaining students and placing them in special education to increase average school performance in critical grade levels used as benchmarks for accountability policies (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1992) and encouraging low-scoring secondary students to leave school entirely (Smith et al., 1986). By 1992, New York’s graduation rates had dropped to only 62%, leaving the state ranked 45th in the country on this measure (Feistritzer, 1993).
Similarly, Atlanta, Georgia, instituted a pupil progression policy in 1980 based on test score thresholds for each elementary grade. High failure rates and repeated retentions led to increased dropout rates. The high school completion rate in Atlanta dropped to 65% by 1982 and to 61% by 1988. A 1988 state policy set up additional test thresholds for promotion and graduation. This policy exacerbated the declines in graduation in Atlanta and elsewhere across the state. As Gary Orfield and Carole Ashkinaze (1991) noted:
Although most of the reforms were popular, the policymakers and educators simply ignored a large body of research showing that they would not produce academic gains and would increase dropout rates. In other words, this was a policy with no probable educational benefits and large costs. The benefits were political and the costs were borne by at-risk students. The damage was psychological as well as educational, increasing the likelihood that at-risk students would drop out before receiving their diplomas; school districts were also hurt by the diversion of resources to repetitive years of education for many students. (p. 139)
An analysis of the test-based reform strategies enacted in 1983 and 1984 in Georgia and South Carolina, both of which tied rewards and sanctions to annual tests at each grade level found that neither state realized gains in achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress during the 1990s, although both experienced declines in high school graduation rates (Darling-Hammond, 2000). (See Figure 1.)
Recent analyses of test-based reforms instituted in Texas in the 1980s have pointed to these and other problems. Although ostensible gains in
Figure 1. Student Achievement in Reading National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1992–1998 scores on the TAAS tests have caused the state’s reforms to be hailed as the Texas Miracle, a number of studies have suggested that the outcomes may be less positive than they appear. First, studies by the Center for Research and Evaluation on Testing (Haney, 2000) and by the Intercultural Development Research Association (1996) have found that both retention rates in ninth grade and dropout or attrition rates for high school students increased substantially since the 1980s. Both studies found that fewer than 50% of African American and Latino ninth graders progress to graduation 4 years later, and only about 70% of White ninth graders reach graduation. Haney (2000) found evidence that a growing number of low-scoring students leave school as early as eighth or ninth grade, before their scores are factored into school accountability rankings. The effects are most pronounced for students of color:
In 1990–91, Black and Hispanic high school graduates relative to the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in grade 9 three years earlier fell to less than 0.50 and this ratio remained just about at or below this level from 1992 to 1999. (The corresponding ratio had been about 0.60 in the late 1970s and early 1980s). . . . From 1977 until about 1981 rates of grade 9 retention were similar for Black, Hispanic, and White students, but since about 1982, the rates at which Black and Hispanic students are denied promotion and required to repeat grade 9 have climbed steadily, such that by the late 1990s, nearly 30% of Black and Hispanic students were ‘‘failing’’ grade 9 and required to repeat that grade.
Haney’s report and Texas Education Agency (TEA) analyses agree that dropout rates in Texas are substantially higher for students retained in ninth grade than for any other group.
TEA data find that rates of dropping out are at least 3 times higher for this group, even though they provide a rosier picture of overall graduation rates, since they do not count as dropouts the large number of students who are transferred to GED programs and fail to finish them.
Several recent studies have produced empirical data that cast doubt on the gains noted on the state TAAS tests, observing that Texas students have not made comparable gains on national standardized tests or on the state’s own college entrance test (Haney, 2000; Gordon & Reese, 1997; Hoffman et al., in press; Klein et al., 2000; Stotsky, 1998). These studies have variously suggested that teaching to the test may be raising scores on the state high-stakes test in ways that do not generalize to other tests that examine a broader set of higher order skills; that many students are excluded from the state tests to prop up average scores; and that passing scores have been lowered and the tests have been made easier over time to give the appearance of gains.
The American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education have issued standards for the use of tests that indicate that test scores are too limited and unstable a measure to be used as the sole source of information for any major decision about student placement or promotion. A recent report of the National Research Council on high stakes testing concluded:
Scores from large-scale assessments should never be the only sources of information used to make a promotion or retention decision. . . . Test scores should always be used in combination with other sources of information about student achievement. (Heubert and Hauser, 1999, p. 286).
The test-based accountability systems in dozens of states and urban school systems stand in contravention to these professional standards. However, the negative effects of grade retention and graduation sanctions should not become an argument for social promotion─ that is, the practice of moving students through the system without ensuring that they acquire the skills that they need. What are the alternatives? There are at least four complementary strategies that evidence suggests can improve student learning without grade retention:
Enhancing preparation and professional development for teachers to ensure that they have the knowledge and skills they need to teach a wider range of students to meet the standards;
Redesigning school structures to support more intensive learning─ including creating smaller school units (within an optimal size of 300– 500) and schools that team teachers to work with smaller total numbers of students for longer periods of time;
Employing school-wide and classroom performance assessments that support more coherent curriculum and better inform teaching; and
Ensuring that targeted supports and services are available for students when they are needed.
Some urban districts have used these strategies to upgrade student learning and to create a more genuine accountability to parents and students. Though all of these districts continue to face difficulties and challenges, their substantial successes offer a very different model for standards-based reform, one that rests on the use of standards and assessments as a stimulus for professional development and curricular reform rather than as punishments for schools and students. Three examples are offered here: the statewide reforms in Connecticut that have supported substantial improvements in a number of cities (featured here are New Britain, Norwalk, and Middletown─ among the state’s lowest-income and once lowest-achieving districts); New York City’s School District #2, and New Haven, California.
Connecticut
Connecticut provides an especially instructive example of how state level policy makers have used a standards-based starting point to upgrade teachers’ knowledge and skills as a means of improving student learning. Since the early 1980s, the state has pursued a purposeful and comprehensive teaching quality agenda. The Connecticut case is a story of how bipartisan state policy makers implemented a coherent policy package over more than 15 years. They used teaching standards, followed later by student standards, to guide investments in school finance equalization, teacher salary increases tied to higher standards for teacher education and licensing, curriculum and assessment reforms, and a teacher support and assessment system that strengthened professional development.
Connecticut’s teacher assessments and preparation requirements ensure that every entering teacher has strong content and pedagogical knowledge to enable him or her to teach a wide range of diverse learners well─ including those who have special education needs and English language learning needs. Standards-based professional development opportunities have dramatically upgraded the knowledge and skills of the veteran teaching population. Student assessments are aimed at higher order thinking and performance skills and are used to evaluate and continually improve practice. While the public reporting system places strong pressure on districts and schools to improve their practice, the student assessments are not used for rewards or punishments for students, teachers, or schools. Rather than pursue a single silver bullet or a punitive approach that creates dysfunctional responses, Connecticut has made ongoing investments in improving teaching and schooling through high standards and high supports.
Dramatic gains in student achievement (accompanied by increases rather than declines in student graduation rates) and a plentiful supply of well-qualified teachers are two major outcomes of this agenda. By 1998, Connecticut’s fourth grade students ranked first in the nation in reading and mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), despite increased student poverty and language diversity in the state’s public schools during that decade (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997b; National Education Goals Panel, 1999). (See Figure 1.) The proportion of Connecticut eighth graders scoring at or above proficient in reading was also first in the nation, and Connecticut was not only the top performing state in writing, but the only one to perform significantly better than the U.S. average. A 1998 study linking the NAEP with the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) found that, in the world, only top-ranked Singapore outscored Connecticut students in science (Baron, 1999). The achievement gap between white students and the growing minority student population is decreasing, and the more than 25% of Connecticut’s students who are Black or Hispanic substantially outperform their counterparts nationally (Baron, 1999).
In explaining Connecticut’s reading achievement gains, a recent National Educational Goals Panel report (Baron, 1999) cited the state’s teacher policies as a critical element, pointing to the 1986 Education Enhancement Act, as the linchpin of the teacher reforms. In this omnibus bill, Connecticut coupled major increases in teacher salaries with greater equalization in funding across districts, higher standards for teacher education and licensing, and substantial investments in beginning teacher mentoring and professional development. An initial investment of $300 million was used to boost minimum beginning teacher salaries in an equalizing fashion that made it possible for low-wealth districts to compete in the market for qualified teachers. The average teacher’s salary increased from a 1986 average of $29,437 to a 1991 average of $47,823 (Fisk, 1999). These grants were provided on an equalizing basis to enable poor districts to better compete in the market for qualified teachers. Districts were given incentives to hire qualified teachers because salary grants were calculated on the basis of fully certified teachers only, and emergency credentials were phased out.
To further ensure an adequate supply of qualified teachers, the state offered incentives including scholarships and forgivable loans to attract high-ability teacher candidates, especially in high-demand fields, and encouraged well-qualified teachers from other states to come to Connecticut through license transportability reforms. An analysis of the outcomes of this set of initiatives found that they eliminated teacher shortages, even in the cities, and created surpluses of teachers within three years of its passage (Connecticut State Department of Education, 1990). These surpluses have been maintained since, allowing districts─ including urban school districts ─ to be highly selective in their hiring and demanding in their expectations for teacher expertise.
At the same time, the state raised teacher education and licensing standards by requiring a major in the discipline to be taught plus extensive knowledge of teaching and learning as part of preparation (including knowledge for all teachers about literacy development and the teaching of special needs students); instituted performance-based examinations in subject matter and knowledge of teaching as a basis for receiving a license; created a state-funded beginning teacher mentoring program which supported trained mentors for beginning teachers in their first year on the job; and created a sophisticated assessment program using state-trained assessors for determining who could continue in teaching after the initial year.
Connecticut also required teachers to earn a master’s degree in education for a continuing license and supported new professional development strategies in universities and school districts. Recently, the state has further extended its performance-based licensing system to incorporate the new INTASC standards1 and to develop portfolio assessments modeled on those of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. As part of ongoing teacher education reforms, the state agency has supported the creation of professional development schools linked to local universities and more than 100 school-university partnerships. In addition, Connecticut has developed courses on teacher and student standards that can be applied toward the required master’s degree. The state also funds and operates a set of Institutes for Teaching and Learning.
Connecticut’s portfolio assessments for beginning teacher licensing are modeled on those of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; they examine directly whether a teacher is able to teach to Connecticut’s student learning standards in specific content areas. The performance assessments examine teacher plans, videotapes of lessons, student work, and teacher analyses of their practice. They are developed with the assistance of teachers, teacher educators, and administrators: Hundreds of educators are convened to provide feedback on drafts of the standards, and many more are involved in the assessments themselves, as cooperating teachers and school-based mentors who work with beginning teachers on developing their practice, as assessors who are trained to score the portfolios, and as expert teachers and teacher educators who convene regional support seminars to help candidates learn about the standards and the portfolio development process. Preparation is organized around the examination of cases and the development of evidence connected to the standards.
Together, these activities have had far-reaching effects. By one estimate, more than 40% of Connecticut’s teachers have gone through the process as new teachers or have served as assessors, mentors, or cooperating teachers. By the year 2010, 80% of elementary teachers, and nearly as many secondary teachers, will have participated in the new assessment system as candidates, support providers, or assessors. Because the assessments focus on the development of teacher competence, are tightly tied to student standards, and lead to sophisticated analysis of practice, the assessment system serves as a focal point for improving teaching and learning.
In addition to the state’s major investments in teaching quality, the Goals Panel report also pointed to the thoughtful use of student standards and assessments in Connecticut. In 1987, following the teaching reforms, student learning standards were adopted in an early effort to link teacher education standards with expectations for teaching. In 1993–1994, the student standards were updated to emphasize higher order thinking skills and performance abilities, and new assessments were developed; these include constructed response and performance assessments that measure reading and writing authentically and reflect more challenging learning goals than the previous tests.
Also critical is the fact that, in line with professional standards for testing, the law precludes the use of these assessments for promotion or graduation of students. Instead, they are used for ongoing improvements in curriculum and teaching. The Goals Panel report noted the benefits of the state’s low-stakes testing approach, which emphasize reporting and analysis strategies that support the wide dissemination of the standards and test objectives along with widespread professional development around literacy and the teaching of reading. The State Department of Education also supports the use of test results for educational improvement by giving districts computerized data that allow analyses at the district, school, teacher, and individual pupil level. The Department assists districts in analyzing the data in ways that permit diagnosis of needs and areas for concentrated work (Baron, 1999). The state then provides targeted resources to the neediest districts to help them improve, including funding for professional development for teachers and administrators, preschool and all-day kindergarten for students, and smaller pupil-teacher ratios, among other supports.
The Goals Panel study notes that this approach to assessment has enabled districts to clarify their teaching priorities and has helped galvanize district efforts to make major revisions and improvements in their reading instruction. At the same time, the targeted provision of resources to the state’s neediest districts through categorical grants has enabled these districts to enhance their reading initiatives and to begin to close the gap between their scores and those statewide (Baron, 1999).
Among the 10 Connecticut districts that made the greatest progress in reading between 1990 and 1998, three─ New Britain, Norwalk, and Middletown─ are urban school systems in the group identified as the state’s ‘‘neediest’’ districts based on the percentage of students eligible for free lunch programs and their state test scores.
District
Grade Level
1993 CMT Index Score
1998 CMT Index Score
Gain in Average CMT Score
STATE
Grade 4
56.9
65.5
+ 8.6
AVERAGE
Grade 6
68.0
74.2
+ 6.2
Grade 8
69.9
75.5
+ 5.6
Middletown
Grade 4
51.8
65.7
+ 13.9
Grade 6
67.0
74.2
+ 7.2
Grade 8
64.7
75.6
+ 10.9
Norwalk
Grade 4
46.6
58.6
+ 12.0
Grade 6
55.3
62.7
+ 7.4
Grade 8
53.8
66.4
+ 12.6
New Britain
Grade 4
36.3
47.4
+ 11.1
Grade 6
35.0
45.6
+ 10.6
Grade 8
38.5
52.3
+ 13.8
Follow up studies in these districts identified a number of state-level policies and related local strategies as contributing to this success (Baron, 1999). Among them were teacher policies that have enabled districts to hire and retain highly qualified teachers who had been prepared to teach a wide range of learners, and the required beginning teacher program that provided state training for all mentors, thus increasing the knowledge and skills of veteran teachers along with beginners involved with the program. In addition, district respondents described state- and locally supported intensive professional development around the teaching of reading. Consistent with the student standards and the state assessments, professional development funds were orchestrated to improve teachers’ knowledge of how to teach reading through a balanced approach to whole language and skill-based instruction, how to address reading difficulties through specific intervention strategies, and how to diagnose and treat specific learning disabilities. Most of the districts had developed cadres of teacher trainers or coaches who were experts in literacy development and who were available to work with colleagues in the schools, offering demonstration teaching as well as classroom coaching. A number used state grants to sponsor intensive summer literacy workshops focused on the teaching of at-risk readers.
The approaches to reading instruction used in sharply improving districts rely on the enhanced teacher knowledge spurred in Connecticut’s teacher education reforms and represented in the state’s teaching assessments: systematic teaching of reading and spelling skills (including linguistics training that goes beyond basic phonemic awareness); use of authentic reading materials─ children’s literature, periodicals, and trade books─ along with daily writing and discussion of ideas; ongoing assessment of students’ reading proficiency through strategies like running records, miscue analyses, and analysis of reading, writing, and speaking samples; and intervention strategies for students with reading delays, such Reading Recovery, which was used in 9 of the 10 sharply improving districts and is widely used across the state (Baron, 1999).
District administrators noted the importance of the system’s coherence in allowing them to pursue these sophisticated strategies for teaching and learning. In addition to their work on teacher development, they described how they had realigned district curriculum and instruction to the student learning standards and assessments, and how they had used the rich information about student performance made available by the CSDE as the basis for school problem solving and teachers’ individual growth plans (the latter are part of the teacher evaluation system). They also credited the fact that the state assessments measured reading and writing in authentic ways, the preparation and professional development programs were supportive of the same approaches, and beginning teachers were coming to them better prepared to teach to these standards using successful pedagogical strategies, while veterans also had many opportunities to develop.
The quality of teaching in Connecticut can be traced directly to the implementation of an increasingly well-developed statewide infrastructure that has been designed to encourage high-quality teaching by (a) linking salaries to high standards for preparing, entering, and remaining in teaching, (b) providing intensive support and assessment of beginning teachers, and (c) requiring and supporting continued high-quality professional development for teachers and administrators. These factors have helped establish a foundation of professional expertise that can ensure the success of other organizational policies and practices, such as analysis of student achievement results, linking school improvement plans and teacher evaluations to student achievement, and aligning expectations and assessments for students with high standards for teachers.
New York City District #2
A remarkably similar set of strategies has produced similar results in New York City’s Community School District #2, an extremely diverse, multilingual district of 22,000 students of whom more than 70% are students of color and more than half are from families officially classified as having incomes below the poverty level.2 More than 100 different languages are spoken in the collective homes of District #2 students, a large share of whom are recent immigrants. During the decade-long tenure of superintendent Tony Alvarado, from 1987 to 1997, the district rose from 11th to 2nd in the city in student achievement in reading and mathematics, scoring above New York State norms as well as New York City averages, even while the population of the district grew more more language diverse.
Studies of District #2 have attributed these gains to the district’s decision to make professional development the central focus of management and the core strategy for school improvement. The strong belief governing the district’s efforts is that student learning will increase as the knowledge of educators grows (Elmore & Burney, 1997). Rather than treating professional development as a discrete function implemented with a set of disparate nonsystemic activities, District 2 makes professional development around common standards of teaching the most important focus of all district efforts, its most prominent discretionary budgetary commitment, and a key part of every leader’s and every teacher’s job.
After consolidating categorical funds and focusing them on a coherent program of professional learning, District 2 moved most of its central office personnel positions back to school sites to focus on the improvement of practice. In a set of moves intently focused on enhancing professional accountability, Alvarado aggressively recruited instructionally knowledgeable teachers and principals, created pointed expectations and opportunities for professional development around the deepening of instructional practice─ first in literacy and then in mathematics─ and replaced through retirements, ‘‘counseling out,’’ and personnel actions those underskilled principals and teachers who were unable or unwilling to develop their practice. Both principals and teachers were expected to learn about best practices in teaching literacy and mathematics, and school leaders were held accountable for their own and their colleagues’ increasing skill, for the quality of instructional practice in their buildings, for recruiting well-prepared new teachers, and for moving ineffective teachers out of the district.
While he was transforming the composition and skill set of the district staff, Alvarado created 17 Option Schools, small alternative schools that reorganized instruction to focus on greater personalization and more performance-based assessments to guide teaching, while encouraging the redesign of other schools. These efforts leveraged the creation of more small schools along with grouping practices that keep teachers and students together for more than one year, schedules that allow collaborative planning and professional development for teachers within the school day, and more coherent, intellectually challenging curriculum supported by ongoing diagnostic and performance assessments of student learning.
School redesign was joined with professional development in a conscious strategy to improve both teachers’ expertise and schools’ ability to support in-depth teaching and learning. Well-known for his efforts to create restructured schools and schools of choice when he was previously superintendent in District #4, Alvarado found that the creation of new alternatives, while useful for the schools where dynamic educators coalesced, did not go far enough in building knowledge for better practice in all schools and classrooms. As he explained, ‘‘When I moved to District 2, I was determined to push beyond the District 4 strategy and to focus more broadly on instructional improvement across the board, not just on the creation of alternative programs’’ (Elmore & Burney, 1997).
Staff development in District 2 differs substantially from the one-shot workshop that expects teachers to take generic ideas unconnected to their ongoing work and apply them in the classroom. Rather, the prevailing theory is that changes in instruction occur when teachers receive continuous support embedded in a coherent instructional system that is focused on the practical details of what it means to teach effectively. The district’s extensive professional development efforts, which have paid off in rapidly rising student achievement, include several vehicles for learning. Instructional consulting services allow expert teachers and consultants to work within schools with groups of teachers in sustained ways develop to particular strategies, such as literature-based reading instruction. Intervisitation and peer networks are designed to bring teachers and principals into contact with exemplary practices. The district budgets for 300 total days each year to provide the time for teachers and principals to visit and observe one another, to develop study groups, and to pair up for work together. Off-site training includes intensive summer institutes that focus on core teaching strategies and on learning about new standards, curriculum frameworks, and assessments. These are always linked to followup through consulting services and peer networks to develop practices further. The Professional Development Laboratory allows visiting teachers to spend 3 weeks in the classrooms of expert resident teachers who are engaged in practices they want to learn. Oversight and evaluation of principals focuses on their plans for instructional improvement in each content area, as does evaluation of teachers. There is close, careful scrutiny of teaching from the central office as well as the school and continual pressure and support to improve its quality. As Elmore and Burney (1997) explain:
Shared expertise takes a number of forms in District 2. District staff regularly visit principals and teachers in schools and classrooms, both as part of a formal evaluation process and as part of an informal process of observation and advice. Within schools, principals and teachers routinely engage in grade-level and cross-grade conferences on curriculum and teaching. Across schools, principals and teachers regularly visit other schools and classrooms. At the district level, staff development consultants regularly work with teachers in their classrooms. Teachers regularly work with teachers in other schools for extended periods of supervised practice. Teams of principals and teachers regularly work on districtwide curriculum and staff development issues. Principals regularly meet in each others’ schools and observe practice in those schools. Principals and teachers regularly visit schools and classrooms within and outside the district. And principals regularly work in pairs on common issues of instructional improvement in their schools. The underlying idea behind all these forms of interaction is that shared expertise is more likely to produce change than individuals working in isolation.
A key feature of these strategies is that they have focused intensely for multiple years on a few strands of content-focused training designed to have cumulative impact over the long term, rather than changing workshop topics every in-service day or picking new themes each year. The district has sponsored 8 years of intensive work on teaching strategies for literacy development and 4 years on mathematics teaching. District 2’s approach began with reading and writing because this focus provided a readily available way for the district to demonstrate improvement in academic performance in an area that was important on city-wide assessment measures and because literacy was important in the context of the district's linguistic and ethnic diversity. New York City's development of more performance-oriented assessments in reading and mathematics in
Leaders of Hawai'i's P-20 Initiative say students and families need to start thinking about getting through high school and beyond as early as the middle- school years to avoid pitfalls in the education system.
Also troubling is the amount of remediation needed by students enrolled in Hawai'i's community colleges. According to the P-20 Initiative's new strategic plan, 89 percent of students in Hawai'i's two-year colleges require remediation in math, and 68 percent require remediation in English.
That's especially troubling to national Education Trust advocate Kati Haycock.
"Having to take one brush-up course is not a big deal," Haycock said. "But students who have to take two or three end up never completing anything in college, so it's something you want to fix."
Gov. Jennifer Granholm last year called for the more rigorous courses in an effort to make Michigan's workers more competitive. The state now requires only a half-credit civics course, with other requirements set by the local districts.
Rep. David Hildenbrand, R-Lowell, voted for the graduation requirements even though he was leading an effort to delete Algebra II from them. A vote to drop Algebra II wasn't taken, but Hildenbrand said he will try when the legislation comes back from the Senate.
"I'm all for rigor, and I think Algebra II is right for most kids, but not every kid,'' he said after the vote. "I think it's important that we have that local flexibility.''
The continued public discussion of "some" versus "no" ability grouping originally scheduled for tonight's Performance and Achievement Committee meeting has been postponed. Instead, according the the District website, the agenda for tonight consists of a 2005 Summer School report and 2006 budget recommendations.
In response to a suggestion that the discussion has been postponed because U.W. Sociology Professor Adam Gamoran's January 30 presentation to the Performance and Achievement Committee had not provided the "green light" on heterogeneous grouping that the BOE had hoped for, BOE President Carol Carstensen wrote, "I am not putting off the discussion on heterogeneous classes because of any information, pro or con, from any of the presentations so far. I have always said that this should be a complete discussion - and that the Board should not rush into any decisions. I am hoping that we can continue these discussions in May and early June." Ms. Carstensen also reminded us that Shwaw Vang is chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee.
In expressing our disappointment at this turn of events, we reminded Ms. Carstensen that as the BOE makes sure not to rush into any decisions, individual schools continue to make and implement curriculum decisions and individual families continue to make educational decisions for their children. (We perhaps should have also noted that as the BOE is careful not to rush into things, the District-wide middle school redesign plan moves forward with the core assumption of three years of complete heterogeneity in all curricular areas except math, where quite a lot of good thought has been given to the problem of how to meet the full range of educational need. It seems important to ask why the same level of thoughtfulness and responsiveness has not been brought to our middle schoolers' educational needs in the areas of language arts, social studies and science.)
If you would like to communicate with Ms. Carstensen and her BOE colleagues your own disappointment or frustration with this postponement -- or perhaps your own plans to move, go private, or home school your child -- please send an email to comments@madison.k12.wi.us. Because Mr. Vang tends to not check his email, feel free to call him at home -- 240-3552.
Finally, here is the summary we compiled for Ms. Carstensen -- at her request -- of the research on the effects of ability grouping on the academic performance and academic self-esteem of high ability students. The summary also contains a few articles on the performance and self-esteem of the remaining students when the highest performing students are allowed to leave the otherwise heterogeneous class. We have strongly encouraged Ms. Carstensen and Mr. Vang to invite U.W.-Whitewater Professor Pam Clinkenbeard and U.W.-Madison Professor Corissa Lotta to address the BOE on these issues. Both are nationally recognized experts on the educational (PC) and counseling (CL) needs of gifted students. As we wrote to Ms. Carstensen, "[we provided you with a summary of the research], but Pam and Corissa could really bring the literature to life for you and your BOE colleagues, as well as answer any questions you might have. Both of them are excellent speakers."
The study, titled The Silent Epidemic (pdf doc), funded by the Gates Foundation and conducted by Civic Enterprises, was compiled from information gathered from interviews with recent dropouts. John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises says, "the problem is solvable." In part, it's solvable because it's not necessarily a case that dropouts are intellectually incapable of keeping up with classes. 90 percent of the dropouts interviewed for the study reported they were passing in all of their classes. So, what are the forces causing kids to close their eyes to the fact of getting placed behind the power curve by virtue of dropping out.
The analysis also raises questions about the rigor of state tests and standards, putting a spotlight on the huge disparities in student performance on state tests and on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) [an issue raised recently by UW Math Professor Dick Askey]. Just 29 percent of the nation’s eighth-graders demonstrate proficiency in reading and math on federal NAEP assessments. But most states report much higher proficiency rates on their own tests. The report provides a 50-state look at student performance on both tests.
Among the report’s key findings:
Overall achievement gains were most consistent in the elementary grades, where math achievement increased in 29 of 32 states examined, and reading achievement increased in 27 of 31 states. Math achievement declined in one state, reading achievement in three.
In middle school math, 29 states improved overall achievement while one lost ground and one saw no change. The picture in middle school reading, however, is less positive. Overall reading achievement increased in only 20 of 31 states examined, while achievement declined in six states and did not change in five others.
High school math results increased in 20 of 23 states and decreased in only two. High school reading results increased in 17 of 24 states and decreased in five.
While important, overall trends do not tell the whole story. To ensure that all students meet grade-level standards, schools must increase achievement for all students while accelerating gains for poor and minority children who are often the furthest behind. Many states are meeting this goal in the elementary grades, but the results in middle and high school are disturbing.
After months of constructing miniature cardboard buildings and houses, more than 800 students from 10 Dane County elementary schools brought their box cities to Monona Terrace Friday.
The young architects and carpenters-in-training also brought their yellow hard hats with them, and spread their cities, like urban picnics, on green tarps representing the land, applying duct tape for roads and blue construction paper as water.
Each school created its own model city. A typical display filled the space of about three dinner tables.
The models showed whatever the children thought belonged in a city: people, cars, hospitals, police and fire departments and even schools.
The study raised questions about the rigor of state tests and standards because of the large disparity in student performance between state and federal standardized tests. While most states report high proficiency rates on their own tests, just 29 percent of the nation’s eighth-graders did well in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test.
In Delaware, 85 percent of fourth-graders scored as proficient or above in reading in the Delaware Student Testing Program, but only 34 percent of the same group scored proficient or above on the federal test. In math, those numbers are 77 percent on the state test versus
36 percent on the federal test.
“They set proficiency on the NAEP pretty darn high,” Woodruff said. “I feel our [minimum] score for meeting the standard is reasonable, but we need to get our students beyond proficient. This business of ‘meeting the standard is enough’ is not OK.”
What about heterogenous classes with high-track curriculum?
It's clear from educational research that "tracking" high school students into low to high-level courses based on their prior academic achievement denies opportunities to low income students and many students of color. De-tracking is clearly in order for school districts seeking to offer equal educational opportunity to all students.
However, de-tracking can be done in many ways. The MMSD administration's plan for tenth grade English courses at West High School follows one model: eliminate high level courses, require all students to take the same course and depend on teachers to "differentiate" instruction so that students of all ability levels and interest are challenged and gain academically.
A diverse suburban district in New York has narrowed the achievement gap in math by offering its high-track curriculum to all students. Rather than offer a mid-range materials with special opportunities for very capable students to accelerate to all students, the district has offered the same high-level courses to all students. Students having difficulty with the course material also attend special support classes and receive afterschool help four days a week. Closing the Achievement Gap by Detracking?
The resulting gains in student achievement are worth our consideration.
Most students who drop out of high school in the United States admit they made a mistake by quitting and some say they might have stayed if classes were more challenging, according to a report released on Thursday.
Researchers said they were surprised to find that a majority of the 467 dropouts they interviewed were not what most people would consider underachieving troublemakers and losers.
One-third said they were failing in school, but more than six out of 10 were maintaining C averages or better when they quit. Almost half said they were bored or that the classwork seemed irrelevant.
"The teacher just stood in front of the room and just talked and didn't really like involve you," a young female respondent from Baltimore said.
Bridging the Achievement Gap: Positive Peer Pressure - Just the Push Students Need to Succeed Cydny Black:
The decisions we make, especially as adolescents, are influenced by the people who surround us, and by how we feel about ourselves. I’ve found that the encouragement of my friends and family, and the examples they set, have a lot to do with my academic success. My friends challenge themselves and encourage me to do the same. This concept is known as peer pressure—a term that often has a negative connotation. In many situations, however, peer pressure can be positive and powerful. Positive peer pressure can give students the push they need to succeed.
It occurs to me that friends who value academic success help give us the support we need to do well. Not only does it help to have friends who push us to do better in school, but these friends also help us to feel better about ourselves.
In school, I notice that many students who are not making the leap over this gap are students who are surrounded by negative reinforcements. These students often lack friends who value education. Negative friends don’t challenge themselves by taking difficult classes, or holding Thursday night study sessions. Negative friends don’t work with you to prepare for final exams.
So what can we do? For all the students reading this who are succeeding in school, my advice is to step out and lend a helping hand to those who are not as successful. Be a supportive classmate, and more importantly, be a good role model. Promote the idea that getting good grades does not mean you’re acting “white” or “selling out” and it definitely does not mean you’re nerdy.
We went wrong in the 1970's. That was when the core curriculum in America's public schools changed and the the classical civics classes were dropped. I had no problem with expanding the curriculum, particularly given the absence of 'real' history. I had and still have a problem that most pubic schools do not have at least one required course at both the elementary and the high school level on American institutions, civics, or history that covers among other things, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Then maybe half, instead of ten percent, of all Americans would know their freedoms.
My high school government teacher (a Vietnam Vet) drilled these rights and words into our brains (drilled).
Now, a series of competing, sometimes contradictory studies have begun to look at the effectiveness of AP and IB in meeting their central purpose -- preparing students such as Palma for college. Some parents and students are questioning whether the college-level courses are placing too much strain on children and supplanting useful honors courses. And the College Board, which sponsors the AP program, has begun to ask schools to examine the content of their AP courses to make sure they meet the program's standards.
Palma is taking AP psychology but decided on the regular history course, calling the AP class "beyond my capabilities." Choices such as hers are part of a debate over AP that shows no signs of abating as the program undergoes growing pains.
At a meeting on February 22 (audio / video), representatives of the Madison Metropolitan School District presented some data [820K pdf | html (click the slide to advance to the next screen)] which they claimed showed that their middle school math series, Connected Mathematics Project, was responsible for some dramatic gains in student learning. There was data on the percent of students passing algebra by the end of ninth grade and data from the state eighth grade math test for eight years. Let us look at the test data in a bit more detail.
All that was presented was data from MMSD and there was a very sharp rise in the percent of students scoring at the advanced and proficient level in the last three years. To see if something was responsible for this other than an actual rise in scores consider not only the the Madison data but the corresponding data for the State of Wisconsin.
The numbers will be the percent of students who scored advanced or proficient by the criteria used that year. The numbers for Madison are slightly different than those presented since the total number of students who took the test was used to find the percent in the MMSD presented data, and what is given here is the percent of all students who reached these two levels. Since this is a comparative study, either way could have been used. I think it is unlikely that those not tested would have had the same overall results that those tested had, which is why I did not figure out the State results using this modification. When we get to scores by racial groups, the data presented by MMSD did not use the correction they did with all students ( All 8th grade students in both cases)
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
40
30
Feb 99
45
42
Feb 00
47
42
Feb 01
44
39
Feb 02
48
44
Nov 02
72
73
Nov 03
60
65
Nov 04
71
72
This is not a picture of a program which is remarkably successful. We went from a district which was above the State average to one with scores at best at the State average. The State Test was changed from a nationally normed test to one written just for Wisconsin, and the different levels were set without a national norm. That is what caused the dramatic rise from February 2002 to November 2002. It was not that all of the Middle Schools were now using Connected Mathematics Project, which was the reason given at the meeting for these increases.
It is worth looking at a breakdown by racial groups to see if there is something going on there. The formats will be the same as above.
Hispanics
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
19
11
Feb 99
25
17
Feb 00
29
18
Feb 01
21
15
Feb 02
25
17
Nov 02
48
46
Nov 03
37
38
Nov 04
50
49
Black (Not of Hispanic Origin)
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
8
5
Feb 99
10
7
Feb 00
11
7
Feb 01
8
6
Feb 02
13
7
Nov 02
44
30
Nov 03
29
24
Nov 04
39
29
Asian
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
25
22
Feb 99
36
31
Feb 00
35
33
Feb 01
36
29
Feb 02
41
31
Nov 02
65
68
Nov 03
55
53
Nov 04
73
77
White
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
54
35
Feb 99
59
48
Feb 00
60
47
Feb 01
58
48
Feb 02
62
51
Nov 02
86
81
Nov 03
78
73
Nov 04
88
81
I see nothing in the demography by race which supports the claim that Connected Mathematics Project has been responsible for remarkable gains. I do see a lack of knowledge in how to read, understand and present data which should concern everyone in Madison who cares about public education. The School Board is owed an explanation for this misleading presentation. I wonder about the presentations to the School Board. Have they been as misleading as those given at this public meeting?
Kambwa, who served as emcee for the Closing the Gap conference, gave the younger students five guidelines for bridging the achievement gap:
Ask younger students how they're doing in school.
Recommend a good book to a peer or younger student.
Help younger students with their homework. Quiz them on their knowledge of academic subjects. Let them know you are there for questions.
Raise your hand in class, or sit in front while you're in class. Set a positive example for your peers.
Adopt a new attitude. Don't be afraid to say what you're about: "I think it's cool to get good grades. I plan to go to college."
In Wisconsin, the gap is greatest between white and Hispanic students when comparing high school graduation rates. White students graduate at a rate of 90 percent, compared to only 63 percent for Hispanic students. For Asian students it's 89 percent, Native Americans 73 percent and black students 72 percent.
Charles Peterson, 17, another Free Press editor, called the achievement gap "huge" and said it is only getting wider.
As a young black male, Peterson has done well at La Follette despite expectations to the contrary.
"I get a lot of negative attention from all colors for doing well in school and for not fitting stereotypes," he said.
U.S. students lag behind their peers in other modern nations -- and the gap widens dramatically as their grade levels rise. Our high school pupils (and graduates) are miles from where they need to be to assure them and our country a secure future in the highly competitive global economy. Hence, any serious effort at education reform hinges on our setting world-class standards, then candidly tracking performance in relation to those standards. Even when gains are slender and results disappointing, we need the plain truth. Which is why recent attempts by federal and state governments to sugarcoat the performance of students is so alarming.
NAEP vs. State test scores was discussed during the recent math forum.
This is not meant as a suggestion that MMSD should take this approach but I do think that we should be aware of what similar districts are considering and doing.
Schools consider Afrocentric curriculum
Evanston-Skokie district's proposal targets achievement gap between blacks and whites
By Lolly Bowean, Tribune staff reporter. Freelance writer Brian Cox contributed to this report
Published February 15, 2006
Hoping to better capture the attention of African-Americans and close the achievement gap between black and white students, a group of parents and educators is pushing for adoption of an African-centered curriculum in Evanston/Skokie School District 65.
The curriculum would keep state-required core subjects such as reading, language arts and math but include the history and culture of Africans and African-Americans in daily school lessons.
But while parents and educators across the district of 6,755 pupils agree that the achievement gap has to be closed, some voiced concern at a school board committee meeting this week that the proposal could further segregate the schools in a district that prides itself on diversity.
Supporters urged board members to launch a pilot program in kindergarten through 2nd grades at two elementary schools where almost half of the pupils are African-American. The program could start in the fall, though the school board has yet to vote on it.
If approved, the initiative would be rare for a suburban school district, according to experts, who say that Afrocentric courses are more common in urban schools with majority black populations.
What troubles school board member Jonathan Baum, who led Monday's committee meeting, is "how do we explain this to our children?"
Martin Luther King Jr. brought blacks and whites together, and the Afrocentric curriculum could mean that students would be separated based on race, because whites and Latinos may opt out of the classes, Baum said.
The idea behind Afrocentric curriculum is that the lessons focus on black students and, in addition to teaching them basic skills, build their self-esteem and confidence, said Cheryl Ajirotutu, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who is co-author of the book "African-Centered Schooling in Theory and Practice."
There is no standardized national or state curriculum; each district or school crafts its own teaching plan. The curriculum proposed for Evanston schools hasn't been developed yet.
In District 65, where about 44 percent of pupils are African-American, educators have tried techniques to bridge the achievement gap, but scores still reflect a divide.
Former school board member Terri Shepard, who now heads the curriculum panel for the African-American Student Achievement Committee, has monitored test scores for 20 years.
While 94 percent of white pupils in District 65 met or exceeded standards for 3rd-grade reading, only 47 percent of black pupils did, according to the latest Illinois State Achievement Tests. In 3rd-grade math, 96 percent of white pupils met or exceeded standards, and 69 percent of black pupils met standards.
"We all say we support diversity," she said. "For that reason, we want all the kids sitting together. But the statistics show having all the kids in the same room has not benefited students of color. Why not give these kids a chance to thrive?"
Schools with culture-based curriculums have become popular in major cities where blacks are in the majority of the public school population, such as Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, Ajirotuto said.
Now, "other school districts are wondering how do you turn the tide of school failure."
In Evanston, supporters, including the NAACP, have researched the topic for a few months, and although they have a general idea how the curriculum would look, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. They include who would be in charge of the program, how much it would cost and what effect would it have on the racial make-up of general-education classes in the district.
When Shepard visited Woodlawn Community School, a Chicago public school, she was impressed that state test scores have climbed since 2001.
"I always believed the reason white children achieved is because everything was for and about them," she said. "There was nothing that showed a child of color at the center. With an African-centered curriculum, the kids see themselves everywhere."
But there's no proof that the concept actually works, said Harvard University's Ron Ferguson, who teaches and writes about educational issues.
"It's not something to be afraid of or terribly enthusiastic about," he said. "They are groping for a way to get black kids engaged academically. If you get some charismatic teachers on board, you may get results. But those same charismatic teachers might try another technique and it would work too."
The subject is touchy in Evanston because schools there have been integrated since the early 1950s--before Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated the nation's public schools--and district officials have been careful to try to make sure all schools are diverse.
And though the pilot program would be implemented at Oakton Elementary School, which is 49 percent black, and Kingsley, which is 41 percent black, it could be divisive if only African-Americans volunteer for the program, according to some at Monday's meeting.
Baum, of the school board, questioned whether it was a good idea to start another experimental program at Oakton, which has an immersion program for Spanish-speaking pupils.
"I'm not saying [the curriculum] would not be a good choice for Oakton School, but there has to be a design that is a choice for everyone," said Candace Hill, co-president of the school PTA.
Chante Latimore, who supports the proposal, said that when she asks her 5-year-old daughter what she learned in class that day, she gets the same answer: "Nothin'."
Except during Black History Month in February, when Cheyenne Buford's eyes open wide as she tells her mother about Martin Luther King and Maya Angelou. "Then she remembers everything she learns," Latimore said.
She believes an African-centered curriculum would have that effect all year long.
Kerry Berns, a resource teacher for talented and gifted students in Madison schools, is worried about the push to group students of all abilities in the same classrooms.
“I hope we can slow down, make a comprehensive plan, [and] start training all teachers in a systematic way” in the teaching methods known as “differentiation,” Berns told the Madison school board earlier this month. These are critical, she says, if students of mixed abilities are expected to learn in “heterogeneous” classrooms.
“Some teachers come about it very naturally,” Berns noted. “For some teachers, it’s a very long haul.”
Following the backlash over West High School replacing more than a dozen electives with a single core curriculum for tenth grade English, a school board committee has met twice to hear about the district’s efforts to expand heterogeneous classes.
The school board’s role in the matter is unclear, even to its members. Bill Keys told colleagues it’s “wholly inappropriate” for them to be “choosing or investigating curriculum issues.”
Superintendent Art Rainwater told board members that as “more and more” departments make changes to eliminate “dead-end” classes through increased use of heterogeneous classes, his staff needs guidance in form of “a policy decision” from the board. If the board doesn’t change course, such efforts, Rainwater said, will likely be a “major direction” of the district’s future.
Most elementary and middle schools long ago abandoned “tracking” students based on test scores or prior grades. Now some question whether the “one size fits all” model is best for high schools.
In summarizing the research, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, urged board members to keep a close eye on failure rates and standardized test scores. [video from the recent performance and Achievement meetings: 1/30/20062/13/2006]
Heterogeneous classes aren’t a panacea, but Gamoran said grouping kids by ability has in the past led to lower-tracked classes with weaker teachers, lower standards and higher percentages of minorities.
Others share this same concern.
“While we can tell kids and we can tell each other that…we’re all the same, we’re all equal, separateness doesn’t communicate equality, and it doesn’t produce equality,” said Amanda Bell, a sixth grade teacher at Sherman Middle School. Indeed, she told the board, ability-grouping was “feeding into racism.”
But Jeff Henriques, a member of the group Madison United for Academic Excellence, told the board high-achieving students deserve to be challenged in classrooms of like-minded students. And Lucy Mathiak, who is challenging incumbent Juan Jose Lopez in April’s school board election, says heterogeneous classes aren’t the only solution to racial disparities in classes.
“You want to desegregate [advanced placement] and upper level classes?” Mathiak asked board members. “Then start desegregating the guidance system,” which she says often encourages minority students to take less challenging courses.
With scientific expertise sweeping the globe, the next generation of American scientists and engineers are going to face unprecedented competition, and college is too late to begin preparing them for it, according to the National Science Board.
The board released its “Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006″[pdf] report Thursday. The report, which focused on elementary and secondary education, cast a foreboding tone. According to the report, while the scores of American students on national math assessments have risen slightly in recent years, the same cannot be said for science. According to the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics Science Study , fourth and eighth graders in the United States performed better in math and science than the international average of industrial nations, but improvement since 1995 was modest for eighth graders, and fourth graders took a slight step backward.
Even a fourth grade student who is getting his or her first exposure to science might already be left in the starting blocks, according to Jo Ann Vasquez, a National Science Board member and the lead author of the report. “[Kids] have to get science by third grade,” she said, “or that wonderment disappears.”
Wouldn't the proper way to answer the question of why Blacks and Hispanics are lagging behind Whites and Asians be to conduct research on the factors that may be causing the discrepancies and remedy those rather than setting up a phony group of gifted students whose only gift may be that they have a teacher who holds self-esteem and looking diverse in higher regard than children actually learning anything?
With such unscientific inquiry, it is no wonder more and more parents are homeschooling or turning to private schools to educate their children. I foresee that the more schools substitute "diversity" for education, the more parents will take flight from the public schools.
Middle School Design Team: Final Report to the Superintendent
The Madison schools middle school curriculum design team's final report is now available [1.7MB pdf]. Topics addressed include:
Math
Music
Art
World Languages
Health/Family and Consumer Education
Information and Technology Literacy
Student Services
The report closed with a discussion of the Future Areas for Discussion:
The Design Team had a very specific charge. As the team met, it quickly became apparent that additional areas that pertain to middle level education are ripe for discussion. The final recommendation from the team includes a wish to continue this discussion over time. The areas that are of interest include:
K-8 model
Scheduling around part-time staff. Sharing staff.
Distance Learning, i.e. district on-line course offerings
Mental health and severe behavioral issues
Alternative educational settings
Bus safety
Regular articulation meetings between middle and high school staff in all content areas
Regular articulation meetings between middle and high schools among student
services staff to increase communication and develop a set of agreed upon
expectations and practices regarding 8th to 9th transition.
Advisories
Safety issues, i.e. bullying, climate
City-wide projects and competitions
Revisit the juxtaposition of the MMSD Educational Framework, the Equity Framework, the MMSD Middle School Common Expectations, and the current middle school models used in MMSD.
The Madison Metropolitan School District is, in my opinion, at a tipping point. We need to adopt a new way of looking at education. Our community is growing and is beginning to look more and more like an urban school district. Debate in the public forum is healthy when it comes to addressing issues of equity and education.
The Learning First Alliance, a partnership of leading education organizations was founded in 1997, is looking at this type of leadership model in school districts. The goals of the Alliance are to: ensure that high academic expectations are held for all students; ensure a safe and supportive place of learning for all students; and, to engage parents and other community members in helping students achieve high academic expectations.
Middle school magnet programs in Montgomery County have traditionally operated as schools within schools, offering specialized curriculum to a few select students -- who have been mostly Asian and white.
The first Toolbox provided the most powerful argument by far for getting more high school students into challenging courses, my favorite reporting topic. Using data from a study of 8,700 young Americans, it showed that students whose high schools had given them an intense academic experience -- such as a heavy load of English courses or advanced math or Advanced Placement -- were more likely to graduate from college. It has been frequently cited by high school principals, college admissions directors and anyone else who cared about giving more choices in life to more students, particularly those from low-income and minority families.
The new Toolbox is 193 pages [pdf] of dense statistics, obscure footnotes and a number of insightful and surprising assessments of the intricacies of getting a college degree in America. It confirms the lessons of the old Toolbox using a study of 8,900 students who were in 12th grade in 1992, 10 years after the first group. But it goes much further, prying open the American higher education system and revealing the choices that are most likely to get the least promising students a bachelor's degree.
Toward the end of the report, Adelman offers seven tips. I call them the "College Completion Cliff Notes." They are vintage Adelman, very un-government-report-like, so I will finish by just quoting them in full:
"1. Just because you say you will continue your education after high school and earn a college credential doesn't make it happen. Wishing doesn't do it; preparation does! So . . .
"2. Take the challenging course work in high school, and don't let anyone scare you away from it. Funny thing about it, but you learn what you study, so if you take up these challenges, your test scores will inevitably be better (if you are worried about that). If you cannot find the challenge in the school's offerings, point out where it is available on-line, and see if you can get it that way. There are very respectable Web sites offering full courses in precalculus, introductory physics, humanities, music theory, and computer programming, for example.
"3. Read like crazy! Expand your language space! Language is power! You will have a lot less trouble in understanding math problems, biology textbooks, or historical documents you locate on the Web. Chances are you won't be wasting precious credit hours on remedial courses in higher education.
"4. If you don't see it now, you will see it in higher education: The world has gone quantitative: business (obviously), geography, criminal justice, history, allied health fields -- a full range of disciplines and job tasks tells you why math requirements are not just some abstract school exercise. So come out of high school with more than Algebra 2, making sure to include math in your senior year course work, and when you enter higher education, put at least one college-level math course under your belt in the first year -- no matter what your eventual major.
"5. When you start to think seriously about postsecondary options, log on to college and community college Web sites and look not so much for what they tell you of how wonderful life is at Old Siwash, but what they show you of the kinds of assignments and examination questions given in major gateway courses you will probably take. If you do not see these indications of what to expect, push! Ask the schools for it! These assignments and questions are better than SAT or ACT preparation manuals in terms of what you need to complete degrees.
"6. See if your nearest community college has a dual-enrollment agreement with your school system, allowing you to take significant general education or introductory occupational courses for credit while you are still in high school. Use a summer term or part of your senior year to take advantage, and aim to enter higher education with at least six credits earned this way -- preferably more.
"7. You are ultimately responsible for success in education. You are the principal actor. The power is yours. Seize the day -- or lose it!"
Let's start by trying to clarify what I consider the most deceptive phrase in education today: "teaching to the test."
Teaching to the test, you may have heard, is bad, very bad. I got 59.2 million hits when I did a Google search for the phrase, and most of what I read was unfriendly. Teaching to the test made children sick, one article said. Others said it rendered test scores meaningless or had a dumbing effect on instruction. All of that confused me, since in 23 years of visiting classrooms I have yet to see any teacher preparing kids for exams in ways that were not careful, sensible and likely to produce more learning.
Will Standards-Based Reform in Education Help Close the Poverty Gap
Reader Paul Baker emails:
February 23, 2006, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Gale VandeBerg Auditorium, Pyle Center Room 121, 702 Langdon Street
Cosponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty, WCER, and the School of Education. Presenter: Barbara Foorman, University of Texas-Houston. Respondent: William Clune, UW-Madison. More about this event is available here.
School officials said they are weighing several options, including encouraging more non-honors or non-AP students to enroll in Algebra II by sophomore year instead of participating in an easier, two-year Algebra I course; financing the PSAT for sophomores and perhaps freshmen; and, on a more basic level, adding more testing sites within the county so that students can take the exam in a comfortable setting without having to commute long distances.
Perhaps these fiascos could be avoided if public officials first tested proposed policy changes on a small scale (instead of blindly applying them to tens of millions of students with no insight on the potential impact). At this point, so much damage has been done to so many people, I'm uncertain how the situation can be rectified (except perhaps to save future generations of students).
— MARC
'Learning … Is Work'
Get rid of calculators … [and get rid of the] false belief that learning should be fun! Learning, the repeated cycles of drill and mastery, is WORK!
— KATHRYN
'Squeaky Wheel'
Parents need to be more involved, and this involvement has to originate from the schools. With the large numbers of students whose parents do not speak English, the schools must do a better job of bringing these parents into the school community and getting them involved in their child's education. Many a night I sat frustrated and nearly on the verge of tears because I couldn't help my son. My son was lucky, though, I was the proverbial squeaky wheel that ensured he was not passed over, but most students aren't that lucky.
— PAUL ROBINSON
'Individual Attention'
As a member of a school board in Ventura County (not the rich part), I can say that I think there are two reasons that LAUSD is failing its students. First, the system is simply too large. How can a school of 4,000 do everything well? Our kids need individual attention, and I just don't see how any massive organization like LAUSD can succeed. Second, I believe that because politics are involved in such an intimate way in these large districts, the kids get left in the dust. The unions are fighting for ever more of the financial pie (most districts spend 85% to 90% of their total [budget] on personnel and benefits); the administration is beholden to the myriad rules and regulations coming at them from both the state and federal level; and less and less control is at the local level. The politicians don't want to pay for raises for employees or lower student-staff ratios, so the existing dollars must be stretched. That means more students per class, more students per counselor, more students per custodian, maintenance person, etc. And we wonder why the kids feel like no one cares about them?
— JOHN G.
These links include many more words and are well worth reading.
The path toward post-secondary education formed naturally for 18-year-old Wekeana Lassiter.
Her mom always emphasized the importance of learning. An older sister attends college at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. And Lassiter is a studious Green Bay Preble High School senior with aspirations of becoming an architect.
If college was a given, the Advanced Placement courses that are preparing her for it — as well as allowing her to earn college credit — made just as much sense for Lassiter, who will attend UWM in the fall.
"Originally, why I took AP classes was to get credit," said Lassiter, who is enrolled in AP physics and AP calculus. "Now that I'm in them, they're really difficult, (but) it's awesome. You get kind of a feel about how college classes are going to be."
But the doors that have opened for Lassiter, who is black, have in many cases stayed closed for some of her peers, say officials in the Green Bay School District.
Minority participation in AP courses continues to lag behind that of their white counterparts, with a lower percentage of minority students, by about 15 percentage points, taking AP courses than that of whites during 2004-05, data show.
But the figures are improving, and district officials say new initiatives can help alter the disparity.
A class of sixteen high school juniors and seniors is meeting everyday in the Doyle building to learn video production and journalism skills. This district-wide High School Video News Production class is being offered for the first time thanks to the efforts of Mary Ramberg, Director of Teaching and Learning and Gabrielle Banick, Coordinator of Career and Technical Education and a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
If nothing is expected of a man, he finds that expectation hard to contradict.
Frederick Douglas
The converse of what Frederick Douglas learned from his life experience has been tested and verified by educational researchers.
Research in Chicago schools looked at what happens when teachers expect more of students. In other words, if teachers expect much of students, are those expectations affirmed? The answer is "YES."
When students are expected — and supported — to do high quality work and to learn important content, that's exactly what they do.
More to the point, others wonder: Is the Gates Foundation making the right calls? The early results of its high school reinvention efforts--with many foundation-backed schools now in their fourth year of existence--are mixed at best. Outside researchers hired by Gates have found "positive cultures" at the new and redesigned schools but raise serious questions about such issues as the teacher burnout, attendance, and the quality of math instruction.
Particularly troublesome has been the effort to transform existing high schools rather than start from scratch. "Improving struggling schools remains a challenge," admits Vander Ark. Indeed, the foundation's own studies show that these restructured schools are often bogged down in their early years with questions about facilities, schedules, and staff. In some cases, says Vander Ark, instead of beginning with structural change, "it may be better to start with curriculum--getting rid of dead-end classes and encouraging students to take more challenging courses--and improving the quality of instruction."
I received a copy of this personal essay -- a letter to the Administration and BOE -- last night. The author said it was fine for me to post it, if I thought it was worth it. I most definitely think it's worth it because it so poignantly describes a family's real life experience and frustration in our schools ... not to mention their agony over whether or not to move elsewhere.
Our kids are in 5th, 4th and 1st grades. I am really very concerned about our son going into sixth grade next year. He has some special education needs related to Asperger Syndrome, such as sensory defensiveness and skills to do with what some have called "theory of mind" (self-control, recognizing and assessing others' points-of-view and feelings, anger management). I love the idea that Spring Harbor is smaller because of his sensitivities to light, personal space issues, noise levels and the like. I do not like that they are relatively inflexible in meeting special needs otherwise because they are small and missing some services - or severely limited - due to space and spending constraints. I also do not like that we would have NO options as to who his special ed case manager/teacher would be, because there is essentially one person to cover it all for each grade, whether or not they display and apply the kind of flexibility that being a "cross-categorical" special ed teacher demands.
His teachers at XXXXX have generally managed to meet his needs relative to AS pretty well, but they are kind of at a loss as to what to do with his obvious degree of intellectual ability because they can only address so many different needs at once, and for him, it has repeatedly come down to crisis management. He has had very competent and caring teachers much of the time, but when there are a variety of academic levels and associated needs in one classroom, some of them just can't keep more than about half of the class engaged at any one time. His 4/5 teachers (for example) have been teriffic, but his 2/3 teacher(s) did not understand him or his needs at all (for example, including one of his special ed teachers (!), they had no idea of his level of intellect and thought that when he had nervous breakdowns and "meltdowns", he was "misbehaving" and needed "consequences for his misbehaviors").
Our 4th grade daughter skipped over first grade, going from Kindergarten to second (after not having been allowed to start Kindergarten "early" even though she could read and do basic math). Even then, as far-and-away the youngest in a 2/3 class, she was a 2nd grader grouped mainly with 3rd graders in most areas (hurrah for her teacher for daring to group them and reach out to all levels!!), and was at loose ends by the beginning of 3rd grade because all of her academic peers were gone (on to 4th grade). It is a very good thing that her teacher thought she was the best thing since sliced bread, or her fidgeting, non-linear thought patterns and concomittant anxious perfectionism in 3rd grade would have alienated the poor woman completely. That teacher continued to let her go as far as she wanted to in math (with one boy as a peer there), occupy her own spelling group, and read as much as she could on the side while also keeping up (easily) with the highest book group/reading group the teacher could run (she felt they needed at least three people to read the same book and try to discuss it at all!). When our daughter was working on other subjects during other groups' discussion times, she did her own work well and listened to the groups going on around her enough that she used to blurt out answers during reading groups other than her own. Her teacher used to joke that she was in ALL the (5) reading groups! For science, they were as cramped as everyone else by the standardized "blahness" of Foss, because that is what they have to use, and it does not allow any room at all for creativity and differentiation by even the best teachers (much less by a typical elementary teacher who generally feels that science is their shallowest subject).
Now, in 4th grade in a 4/5 class, she has a teacher who cannot seem to differentiate to save her (or my daughter's) life. She has all of the kids on the same page in the same math textbook at the same time, in her fourth grade math. Thank God we finally approached the teacher she teams with across the hall and who teaches the 5th graders from both their classes math, and worked out to have our daughter switched over to there by Thanksgiving - but it took months and she was a basket case mentally and emotionally, from not being challenged at all in math, and having the naughtiest kids around assigned seats next to hers (so she could "calm them down" and "help them", I'm sure), resulting in a complete lack of concentrated work time to do the work in the first place. She literally is on medication for the stress and anxiety resulting from being in this class. And she is too damn nice to share what she shares with us with her teacher, because she wants everyone to like her. So it sounds like we are claiming she feels this, that and the other, even with her trying to soften the blow with "well-kind-ofs" or, "it's-been-better-latelys" when we do get in to see her teacher with her along.
I am so tired. I am tired of being the brass, obnoxious mom who seems to think only her kids are gifted (which is not true - I teach special ed myself, and I know what brilliance lurks behind some learning disabilities and what level of boredom and frustration being some emotional disabilities), and I am tired of having to come up with all the suggestions for solutions and new ideas myself. At least they have been willing to try those suggestions recently, but I honestly don't think they understand that we are not harping on our daughter to "be the best" and "work more", and expecting that the teacher concentrate only on her and her needs. Anyway, I am just tired. If I am going to do most of the instruction myself, then at least I should be homeschooling her or be her "learning coach" for virtual schooling, and get some of the credit for it. On the other hand, I also hate to take her out of our school now, because they need more kids like her who care and work hard, not fewer!!
I am sorry: I know you have heard all this a million times. I believe in quality public education and I hate the thought of everyone with kids who need more challenge than is typical out of our public schools. But I also need to do what's right for my own kids. I don't know how much to tell of what to whom, and not have them just think I am yet another annoyed white upper-middle class parent who thinks her children are the smartest around and just wants all the educational services to go to them. I am not, and I don't.
I meant it when I said I almost cry when I start thinking about all this junk, and let it start getting to me. I know what it is like myself, to be a really bright (okay, "gifted") kid who is afraid to show it because everyone will think you're stuck-up or just a complete geek that no one would ever want to spend time with in any circumstance beyond allowing you to do all the work on a "group, cooperative learning project". And my teachers were largely supportive of me - I hate to think of what would have happened to me if I had not gotten the support I needed from my teachers and my school(s). Especially my daughter who reminds me so much of me - I don't want her to end up with even more insecurities and emotional problems than I had to go through. (said with a rueful smile, but at least 75% seriously)
I know what it is like as a teacher to have 21 kids with 21 wholly different sets of needs, staring at you and expecting help in learning what they need to know, day after day. It is bad enough when you have seven 7th graders in a reading class, ranging from two who cannot even identify letters and sounds, all the way through two who can "read" at a low third grade level but not understand more than half of what they read. When I think of trying to meet their needs at the same time as trying to meet the needs of ten other learners who range from "average", through "gifted" and on into "highly gifted/genius" levels...? I can't sleep at night trying to imagine that! It is hard enough trying to actually engage learners at levels "only" five to two grade levels below expectations. Trying to engage learners from typical through gifted in the same class at the same time, is almost impossible, even if you DO know how to differentiate well. And teachers are not paid enough for the kind of planning time that would take, on top of what they already work at teaching and planning for classes of learners even close to the same abilities.
Video of Performance and Achievement Meeting Available
The video of the Performance and Achievement meeting of December 19, 2005 is available in the Performance and Achievement blog site.
This meeting is the second meeting concerning the Middle School Design Team work, with a presentation by Pam Nash explaining the current status, focus groups involved, role of the Board, access by the Board to draft decisions and general approaches being considered by the Team and Administration.
Videos of the Performance and Achievement committee meetings of January 30 and February 6 are available in the Performance and Achievement blog.
The topics of these meetings were heterogeneous vs. homogeneous classroom instruction. Professor Adam Gamoran, Director of WCER, made a presentation at the January 30 meetng. His Powerpoint presentation and a research paper are included.
The following week continued with presentations by Mike Lipp, West HS Biology teacher; Linda McQuillen, Math Resource teacher; Jenny Ruef, Math teacher at East HS; Lisa Wachtel, Science and Environment Coordinator, and Pam Nash, Asst Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
Wisconsin students should learn to be financially savvy enough not to succumb to two huge national problems - low savings and high debt.
The state Department of Public Instruction, with help from educators, lawmakers, money managers and others, introduced voluntary state standards last week. Now it's up to local school districts to adopt them.
For The Record: An Interview with Editors and Writers from the Simpson Street Press on the Achievement Gap
Neil Heinen hosted an interesting conversation Sunday morning with editors and writers (Andrea Gilmore, Ashley Crawford) from the Simpson Street Press on the achievement gap. Video and audio, available: (audio feed | video feed) or a popup window. Slick.
Fragile Futures: Risk and Vulnerability Among Latino High Achievers
Patricia Gándara
Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service
December 2005
The achievement gap usually refers to the chasm between low- and higher-performing students. But, as this study makes clear, disparities are just as pronounced among separate groups of high-achieving students. For example, in 2002 the top fifth of Latino test-takers scored means of 598 and 646 on the SAT verbal and math sections, respectively. Their white peers’ mean scores were 65 points higher on the verbal section and 74 points higher in math. Yet of the hundreds of studies reviewed for this report, hardly any “acknowledge… that high-achieving students might need support and that this support might differ from what is needed by their lower-achieving peers.” It’s tempting to think that smart youngsters, regardless of socio-economic situations or ethnic backgrounds, will turn out just fine. But as these data show, that’s not always true. Bright Latino students, who often come from low-income families and have parents with little education, are particularly susceptible to becoming frustrated or discouraged with schoolwork and the school environment. These kids require just as much encouragement, support, and instruction as their lower-performing peers, albeit in different ways. They, too, need goals, and information on where academic achievement can lead (college). But too often, they don’t receive it. Even when Latino students earn good grades in high school, register for the SAT (not an insignificant step), and do well on the exam, many still make poor college decisions. We cannot address achievement gaps by continuing to ignore these bright youngsters.
Rigor means different things to different people. Some people think rigor and rigidity are the same. In this case, academic rigor might look like teacher inflexibility — an "it's my way or the highway" kind of attitude. Some people think rigor and harshness are the same. In this case, academic rigor might mean that student work is an endurance test and only a predetermined number of students can receive high grades. Neither of these views of rigor matches the MMSD understanding of rigor in an academic setting.
"What? Me Worry? is the attitude of education researchers, writes Douglas Reeves, CEO of the Center for Performance Assessment, on Education Gadfly. Reeves cites a study by Peggy Hsieh and Joel R. Levin, which ran in the Journal of Educational Psychology on "ed researchers' continued retreat from accepted research methodology. In this case, randomized experiments."
Randomized experiments, aka field trials, whereby an experimental group that receives an intervention (say, Whole Language) is compared with a control group that receives no intervention, have been standard operating procedure since rats were first run through mazes. But who needs control groups in the age of feelings-based research?
. . . Hsieh and Levin report that "The percentage of total articles in these four journals [Cognition & Instruction, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Experimental Education, American Educational Research Journal] based on randomized experiments decreased over the 21-year period in both the educational psychology journals (from 40 percent in 1983 to 34 percent in 1995 to 26 percent in 2004) and the American Educational Research Journal (from 33 percent to 17 percent to 4 percent)."
Education policy makers are eager for the latest magic bullet and reluctant to think through fundamental changes, Reeves argues. via Joanne
Two interesting notes, among many, I'm sure from Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting:
Johnny Winston, Jr. introduced a motion for the Administration to look at acquiring land in Fitchburg for a new school. This motion passed 5-1, with Bill Keys voting no (and Juan Jose Lopez absent).
Ruth Robarts advocated curriculum changes as a means to attract more families to certain schools. She mentioned the use of Singapore Math (Note that some Madison residents are paying a chunk of money to send their children to Madison Country Day School, which uses Singapore Math).
Speaking of Math, Rafael Gomez is organizing a middle school math forum on February 22, 2006, from 7 to 8:00p.m.
After nearly five hours of discussion, the Madison School Board decided to put off asking tax payers for a new school in April and says voters may have to head to the polls this fall instead.
That potential option was added to the mix regarding how the Madison School District could deal with growth and overcrowding on the west side following a special School Board meeting Monday night.
Board Vice President Johnny Winston, Jr. led a motion to ask district administrators to explore land sites and options for a possible new school in the rapidly developing areas south of the Beltline in Fitchburg, including land currently in the Verona and Oregon school districts.
Board member Lawrie Kobza supported Winston's motion and said she may be willing to support a new elementary school in the south Fitchburg area as part of a long-range plan for the district. Kobza does not support an addition at Leopold, saying the school already has more than 650 students, which the district has deemed its maximum acceptable capacity.
The Madison School Board voted Monday to direct district administrators to investigate purchasing land for a future school in south Fitchburg as a long-term solution to crowding at Leopold Elementary School, while board members continue to explore a more immediate solution to the problem.
Focus groups have been held with parents, middle school teachers, current high school students, current middle school students, and representatives of community organizations that are connected to our middle schools through tutoring, mentoring or other programming. Summaries of those focus groups are attached.
The design team has set one additional all day meeting to draft the recommendations. This meeting will be held on December 20. The report will go to the Superintendent and will also be made available to the original parent focus group for their feedback and suggestions.
Throughout this process, information, questionnaires and summaries of input have consistently been made available on the district website.
The design is going to focus on specific, consistent recommendations regarding length and duration of classes in middle school in the areas of FiFine Arts, Life Skills, Mathematics, Wellness, Student Services, and World Languages.
Honor students who can't pass California's graduation exam should be angry, writes Ken at It Comes in Pints? They should be angry at teachers who gave them A's they didn't deserve.
While the hardest questions on the graduation exam require 10th grade English skills and algebra (allegedly an 8th grade skill in California), students with basic skills who guess blindly on the harder multiple-choice questions should be able to get a minimum passing grade in their first, second, third, fourth or fifth try at the test. The minimum passing grade is 60 percent for English and only 55 percent for math.
In Tracy, a girl who claims a 3.6 grade point average says she's failed the math exam five times because teachers didn't teach her right. She doesn't seem to question the validity of her A's and B's.
What Is The Black Star Project? The Black Star Project is a Chicago-based nonprofit that works around the country to help preschoolers to collegians succeed. The group focuses on low-income black, Hispanic and American Indian students in low-achieving schools.
Problems of school districts that teach Black children and the solutions
The steady pings of hammers on molten metal, the grinding of stone and scraping of plaster fill the workshop of a new school that seeks to pass on old-world building techniques in an age of cookie-cutter construction.
The No Child Left Behind law requires consistently failing schools that serve mostly poor children to offer their students a choice if they want it: a new school or tutoring from private companies or other groups, paid for with federal money — typically more than $1,800 a child in big cities. In the past the schools would have been under no obligation to use that Title I federal poverty grant to pay for outside tutoring.
City and state education officials and tutoring company executives disagree on the reasons for the low participation and cast blame on each other. But they agree that the numbers show that states and school districts have not smoothed out the difficulties that have plagued the tutoring — known as the supplemental educational services program — from its start as a novel experiment in educational entrepreneurship: largely private tutoring paid for with federal money.
Officials give multiple reasons for the problems: that the program is allotted too little federal money, is poorly advertised to parents, has too much complicated paperwork for signing up, and that it has not fully penetrated the most difficult neighborhoods, where there are high concentrations of poor, failing students.
More African-American kids at Morgan Park passed their AP exams in two courses -- English language/composition and European history -- than at any other high school in the nation offering AP courses last year, AP officials said.
The number of Morgan Park students required to achieve that feat was 32 in English language and 26 in European history.
That may not sound like much, but those numbers translate roughly into 1-1/2 classrooms full of kids, all of them testing at college-level standards, and all of them African American -- the racial group most under-represented in AP classrooms across the nation, state and city. Two sections of each course were offered last year at Morgan Park, where the student body is 93 percent African-American.
According to the second annual report from the College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement program, about 60 percent of American high schools now offer Advanced Placement courses, and the average high school offers a choice of eight such courses.
"The number of students participating in A.P. has more than doubled in 10 years, and today almost 15,000 U.S. schools offer A.P. courses," said Gaston Caperton, the president of the board, a New York-based nonprofit organization.
The percentage of American high school students passing A.P. exams increased in all 50 states last year, the report said. In the class of 2005, 14.1 percent of students received an A.P. exam grade of 3 or higher on one or more A.P. exams, up from 13.2 percent of the class of 2004, and 10.2 percent of the class of 2000.
A.P. exams in 35 subjects are given in May, at a cost of $82 each. They are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 representing A-level college work, and 3 representing about a C+.
Barb Schrank earlier noted that East offers 8 AP courses, LaFollette 13, Memorial 16 and West 8. The District's efforts in these areas appear to be going in different directions, with a growing effort to provide a one size fits all curriculum (West and Sherman examples) while recently receiving a grant to increase the number of AP classes. The District's approach to Athletics has apparently not changed, though Kurt Vonnegut via his short story Harrison Bergeron, notes that 2081 might be the year for that.
American high school seniors took more than 1.5 million Advanced Placement exams last year, closing the gap with the SAT test and dramatizing the rising influence of AP on school curriculums, college admissions and assessment of schools and state education programs.
Schools spend fewer dollars per student in Utah than in any other state, but more fourth-graders there improved reading and math scores over the past decade than in more than half of the states.
Maine, for example, spends nearly twice as much on a comparable student population -- $9,300 a student vs. $4,800 in Utah. But fewer Maine fourth-graders improved their math scores -- and their reading scores actually declined in the past decade.
Both states ranked just above the national average on 2005 national reading and math tests, known as the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. But Utah stands out for its success in boosting the number of students to pass the tests since 1992, the first year of state-by-state NAEP testing, despite ranking dead last for spending.
State by State Test Scores and Per Pupil Spending (.xls)
UPDATE: a reader emails:
The relevant comparison to make on the data on school funding and NAEP scores is Minnesota versus Wisconsin. We have a somewhat higher level of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, over 10% higher funding per pupil and lower NAEP scores.
Reader Reed Schneider on Curriculum and School Boards
Reed Schneider emails on recentposts regarding a School Board's role in curriculum policy:
I agree that the school board should be responsible for the district's curriculum. In fact, it is the most important thing they are charged with. 10 or more years ago, before widespread internet availability, the non-edu-estab person on a board would have the excuse that it would be impossible for them to know which curricula works. All decisions would be deferred to the so-called experts. That excuse doesn't work any more. Any board member can now go to www.nrrf.org and discover opinion and independent research showing programs like Reading Recovery and balanced Literacy have serious flaws. They can go to www.mathematicallycorrect.com and discover that math programs recommended by the NCTM like Everyday Math fail our children.
Even if the board becomes involved, it will take board members willing to do this. Just because they become involved with curriculum will not automatically mean they will critically evaluate administrators recommendations. Far too often they simply rubber stamp what the curriculum specialist puts in front of them.
The parents and tax payers are the only ones with the power to change this. A good question at a board candidate's forum would be: "What is your opinion of reading or math programs based on constructivist theory?" If they don't understand the question, can't answer, hem and haw, or embrace it, don't vote for them. It's really that simple.
MMSD School Board Says They Don't Do Curriculum: WI State Law Says Otherwise
The Madison School Board is directly and legally responsible for the curriculum taught in their district. The WI Administrative Code, which is law, sets forth the legal requirements for public instruction. Public Instruction, Chapter PI 8.01 (Download Admin. Code Public Instruction - School Standards)says:
2. Each school district board shall develop, adopt and implement a written school district curriculum plan which includes the following: a. A kindergarten through grade 12 sequential curriculum plan in each of the following subject areas: reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, health, computer literacy, environmental education, physical education, art and music.
Does this mean the Madison School Board is responsible for designing and creating curriculum and curriculum plans? No, of course not. I feel, however, they are responsible a) for making sure a process is in place so that academically rigorous, sequential curriculum plans are developed and evaluated regularly for meeting stated goals (and with opportunity for public comment along the way) and b) for approving curriculum plans developed under the guidance of the administration. How does the process currently this work? It's not publicly clear, perhaps, because the Madison School Board has no written curriculum board policy and no written administrative procedures (that I could find and I've asked - see below) for the development and approval of curriculum plans.
I have been told by board members the Superintendent and his staff "do curriculum," because they are the experts. What does that mean? Of course, we hope they are the experts; and, being experts in education administration, we hope and expect they use the teachers and other professionals who are experts in their field to develop curriculum plans using a well defined process that is clear and known by all. Yet, the sentiment from the board that was heard again in the their discussions of heterogenous classes is simply, "We don't do curriculum." When I first heard this type of statement from board members several years ago, I was puzzled and then I found the WI Admin. Code, which identifies the Board's responsility over approval of curriculum plans. My question for the Madison School Board is: How do and will you execute your legal responsibility? How can the School Board make this clear to the public? Written board policies and procedures that are discussed and approved by a school board are how board members spell out publicly how they will execute their legal responsibilities. I feel such policies and procedures for curriculum, which ties directly with a board's top priority of student achievement, would be illuminating and helpful for the board, public, teachers, administrators, etc.
I'd like to share my understanding of what I've learned. Curriculum plans are legally required, must be approved by the local School Board; and, as I've learned, these plans are different from standards. Basically, standards identify what we want children to learn in a particular field, at a particular time in their development; and standards are most useful when they are developed by grade. At the state level, DPI's standards are developed for grades 4, 8 and 10, and in many cases, these standards were developed with input from professionals in the field, businesses, parents, community members, other. National and professional standards in a field might guide this, but groups with broad representation refined and recommended standards used as guidelines (not law) by DPI. Locally, to help guide their board-level oversight of student's achievement, standards by grade level would seem to be more appropriate to guide both administrators and teachers.
School districts in Wisconsin are required to have locally approved K-12 sequential curriculum plans in above identified subject areas that specifies objectives, course content, course sequence, resources, specified instructional time to meet the curriculum, and a program evaluation method. MMSD's School Board did develop standards in the late 1990s, but board approved curriculum plans are a bit trickier to locate. I know sequential, K-12 curriculum plans exist per state law and are current with state and national standards exist for music and visual art education. These documents were approved by the School Board. I don't know for other areas, but I would hope and expect that each teacher has the K-12 curriculum plan for the field(s) they are teaching. As a parent, I feel I ought to be able to walk into my daughter's school and ask for a K-12 sequential curriculum plan for math, science, etc.
At a March 3, 2003 Performance and Achievement meeting, I spoke during public appearances, asking about the curriculum process. From the approved minutes: "Barbara Shrank said she has not been able to find information about the process by which changes are made to curriculum plans that have been approved by the Board of Education, and at what point professional staff members are involved. (Art Rainwater responded that curriculum change - content - is not part of the budget process and would only come into play if the budget prevented implementation. Up to this point content has not been affected by budget cuts. If the district were not able to deliver curriculum standards, it woud become a curriculum issue.)"
My questions are: the admin does what, how? What's the process, who's included (for example, admin, teachers, non-MMSD professionals, parents), etc. A School Board curriculum policy would spell out the Board's expectation, including procedures, and a written policy would make this clear for all Board members, the administration, other MMSD staff and for the public of what is expected and how it is to be done. I feel a School Board curriculum policy is lacking and I would like to see the Madison School Board take the leadership steps to develop a board level curriculum policy. Without one, anyone can say and do anything about curriculum on whatever timeline in whatever way, and that sometimes appears to be the case to the public, giving the perception of confusion. A board policy could begin to change that.
Notes from Performance & Achievement Meeting on Ability Grouping
At this past week's meeting, Adam Gamoran from the UW Center for Educational Research spoke to the Board about ability grouping. Dr. Gamoran talked about how ability grouping often ends up grouping students by race and SES because these students enter school having had different early childhood experiences and different educational opportunities (recall Donna Ford discussing the number of books in the homes of low income and middle income families).
Dr. Gamoran noted that there are often differences in the classroom experiences of high and low ability groups of students in regards to teacher expectations, academic rigor, and teacher ability.
He also emphasized that there is no simple solution to the achievement gap. Heterogeneous or homogeneous grouping by themselves will not reduce the gap in achievement. However, there are some clear cut solutions that are obvious according to Dr. Gamoran.
No more dead end classes like general math for the low ability students;
high academic expectations for students of all ability levels; and
teachers should not be assigned in a way that results in only the newest and least experienced teachers working with the low ability students, in other words, all students deserve quality instruction.
In discussing heterogeneous grouping, Dr. Gamoran noted that differentiation is hard work for teachers, and they need a lot of support and training in order to be successful.
Dr. Gamoran also shared an example of a school where heterogeneous grouping was successful. This was a school that was 51% free and reduced lunch, but because the school had a strong, dynamic leader and had gotten grants, they were able to recruit a top notch staff. Not only was the principal able to select which teachers worked in the school, but approximately half of the student body had to go through an interview process to get into the school, so this magnet school was selective about its teachers and its students. Class size was kept to 15 students and instruction went at a fast pace. Students who were struggling were expected to attend tutoring sessions on Saturdays. I think there was an expectation that parents would be involved in their student's education, but I am not sure about that.
Obviously the situation in the Madison schools is different from this ideal, and that's why I think it is important for the Board and the administration to hear from students and parents what it is like in the classroom. I should add that Bill Keys was very annoyed that the Board was even discussing this issue because he believes that the Board has no place in the classroom. According to Mr. Keys this is the responsibility of the teachers and administrators and they know better than the members of the Board what should be done in the classroom. However, I would argue that the teachers and administrators don't know any better than the Board does about what happens in the classroom, and they certainly don't know what it is like for high ability students in those classes. Those of us who have sat around the kitchen table while our children talk about their boredom, frustration, and lack of challenge need to help them understand and make our voices heard.
The relationship with student performance in mathematics is striking. Students who have used computers for several years mostly perform better than average. By contrast, those who don’t have access to computers or who have been using computers for only a short time tend to lag behind their class year.
According to the OECD study, students who had been using computers for less than one year (10% of the total sample) scored well below the OECD average. By contrast, students who had been using computers for more than five years (37% of the total sample) scored well above the OECD average.
Via the Economist. My view on this, fwiw, is that we need to get the curriculum right first, then apply technology where it makes sense.
We know the paradox. Education improves earnings but most formal schooling appears to be a waste of time. Many economists claim that education is mostly a means of signaling quality.
I view education as a self-commitment to being a more productive kind of person. Education is about self-acculturation.
Men are born beasts. But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.
THE subjects were typical for a seventh-grade classroom: a summary of a mealworm's metamorphosis, strategies on improving memory and making studying easier and a story about a classroom candy thief.
But the discussions last fall at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wis., were not taking place only for their classroom to hear. They were recorded as part of a series of podcasts the students produced and syndicated over Apple's iTunes music store.
"Their audience has moved to the entire world," said Jeanne Halderson, one of two seventh-grade teachers at Longfellow who supervise the podcasts. "The students find that exciting. It's a lot more motivating to write something that the whole world can hear, rather than just something for a teacher to put a grade on."
Podcasting - posting an audio recording online that can be heard through a computer or downloaded to a mobile device like an iPod - is following blogs and online classes as yet another interactive technology catching on as a teaching tool. Currently, iTunes lists more than 400 podcasts from kindergarten through 12th-grade classes, while Yahoo has nearly 900 education-related podcasts. Some are produced by teachers wanting to reach other educators with teaching tips, while many are created by students, like the La Crosse seventh graders with their podcast, at lacrosseschools.com/longfellow/sc/ck/index.htm.
"The growing performance gap is largely influenced by socioeconomic factors beyond the influence of schools," McDade said. "Property wealth, poverty and race were found to affect student performance."
The per-student spending difference was much smaller than the difference in test scores and actually was smaller in 2003-'04 than it was seven years earlier, leading McDade to conclude that increased spending would not be a key to closing the gap.
Even though the roots of the gap are in matters such as poverty, McDade suggested that policy makers consider steps to increase academic performance of high school students, including stronger graduation requirements, tougher admissions standards to University of Wisconsin campuses and increased emphasis on sending more high school graduates to college.
According to the report, Madison High Schools (along with Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, Wisconsin Heights, Monticello, Monona Grove and Waunakee) were in the top 10% based on 1996-1997 WKCE results in. However, they (Madison) were no longer present in the top 10% based on 2003/2004 results (Deerfield, Dodgeville, Middleton-Cross Plains, McFarland, Waunakee and Verona were in the top 10% based on the 2003/2004 data).
For a decade we’ve been told that our kids, just as they seem to be getting taller with each generation, are also getting brighter. Every year new waves of children get better GCSE, A-level and degree results than their predecessors. Meanwhile, in primary schools, the standards in national maths and English tests at 11 head in one direction — relentlessly upwards.
Last week came the bombshell that blew a gaping hole in this one-way escalator of achievement.
Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.
In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water? “It’s frightening how many children now get this simple question wrong,” says scientist Denise Ginsburg, Shayer’s wife and another of the research team.
Another question involves two blocks of a similar size — one of brass, the other of plasticine. Which would displace the most water when dropped into a beaker? children are asked. Two years ago fewer than a fifth came up with the right answer.
This year, Florida will introduce the largest reform package since the sweeping changes we made in 1999.
These reforms include differentiated pay and performance-based pay for teachers to attract and retain talented educators in critical subject areas, encourage them to teach in economically challenged schools and reward them for improving student performance.
Our proposed reforms will bring rigor and relevance to middle schools by requiring students in grades six through eight to earn 12 credits in math, science, language, arts and social studies for promotion to high school, and requiring those who cannot read at grade level to get reading instruction.
We're also looking to revamp high schools to better prepare students for the future and for postsecondary education by creating career academies, where students can major or minor in math and science, or fine arts, or on career and vocational skills, depending on their goals and interests. The goal is for students to graduate knowing what they want to do with their lives, so they leave school armed with college credits toward their goal or, if they choose a vocational route, with certified skills for a specific industry.
On a September day 4 1/2 years ago, nearly 1,100 ninth-graders — a little giddy, a little scared — arrived at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. They were fifth-generation Americans and new arrivals, straight arrows and gangbangers, scholars and class clowns.
On a radiant evening last June, 521 billowing figures in royal blue robes and yellow-tasseled mortarboards walked proudly across Birmingham's football field, practically floating on a carpet of whoops and shouts and blaring air horns, to accept their diplomas.
It doesn't take a valedictorian to do the math: Somewhere along the way, Birmingham High lost more than half of the students who should have graduated.
It is a crucial question, not just for Birmingham but for all American schools.
High school dropouts lead much harder lives, earn far less money and demand vastly more public assistance than their peers who graduate.
Lucy Mathiak posted MMSD dropout data, including those who showed high achievement during their elementary years.
The University of Missouri offered podcasts of lectures through its school network before it signed up with Apple last summer as a pilot school. But "iTunes U" offered a software and service package for free, said Keith Politte, the development officer at the university's School of Journalism.
Jason Shepherd recently wrote an article on the Madison School District's Affiliated Alternatives Program. This differentiated program supports about 150 students:
Many of the school's students have multiple problems, from severe learning deficits to turmoil at home. A countywide survey found they use alchol and marijuana at three times the rate of other students in Dane County.
Academic classes follow state standards but are tailored to students' interests and needs, with a focuse on practical life skills.
One of the delights in spending time at Affiliated Alternatives is watching Principal Fischer in action.
It's clear she's in command, and she's set high expectations for staff and students. She talkes to students with respect, and kids say they feel as if they can share problems with her.
Sort of related: Carol Carstensen mentioned that the Board's Performance and Achievement committee, in a somewhat rare meeting, will discuss heterogeneous groupings at 5 p.m. Monday, January 30, 2006. This is apparently the first of several meetings on this topic. West High School's imminent English 10, one curriculum for all (apparently 40+ sophomore English electives reduced to none) has created no small amount of heterogeneous grouping discussion. I'm glad that a Board committee willsoondiscusscurriculum, in my view, the District's #1 priority.
I am a member or the MMSD's Student Senate. I am currently involved in a group discussing a draft of a proposed food policy which I feel is rather Draconian. The draft has not yet been made public (I am told this is because it is a "draft" and thus not ready for release) and that the issues have been publicized. However, I am concerned about some measures of the policy and feel that they have not been highlighted for interested parents. I think some of you might have concerns as well. Here are some of the propositions that my committee has voted against altering as well as what parents were told at the January 17th meeting about the policy
"When beverage vending is available, the only beverages that be offered for sale [not me wording] or permitted in schools at all sites accessible to students will be water, milk, fruit juices composed of 100% fruit juice with no added sweeteners of caffeine, and electrolyte replacement ("sports") beverages that do not contain caffeine or more than 42 grams of added sweetener per 20 oz serving."
"No food will be sold to students in vending machines"
This is currently true of all elementary schools and most middle schools, but not the high schools. Vending sales at the four major high schools bring in roughly $15-20 thousand a year for the school (some of a principal's only discretionary income). Personally, I feel eliminating all sales of soda and snacks seems extreme, especially considering the current financial pressure schools are under. The "cold turkey" elimination of all of these sales starting with the 06-07 school year seems like too much.
"Candy will not be given or sold to students nor offered for sale at school or to the community by the school during the school day. The sale of candy and snacks [this language will be revised to be more specific] is not permitted on school grounds during the school day."
This would mean that clubs that rely on sales of such items would have to search for new methods. Bake sales would be eliminated. Students would be able to buy a giant cookie in the lunchroom, but not a small one in support of a club.
From the information packet from the parent meeting on the 17th, it seems the district made it's intentions somewhat clear here. "Should we continue [vending/fundraising sale of soda/snacks] in light of what we know about the relationship of food intake to the increase in overweight and obese children?" The document does not mention the proposed elimination of such sales.
The district was less open about some other issues. For example, while healthier lunch was discussed, the following was not:
"All 'a la carte' items that are available during the school breakfast/lunch program that is served to students during the school day will have no more than 40% (35% by 9/1/2007 and 30% by 9/1/2008) of total calories derived from fat and no more than 10% of calories derived from saturated fat."
On the surface, this sounds like a good idea. However, the realities would be, quite simply, stupid. Students would be able to purchase pizza as part of a meal, but not just as a slice. What this would mean, since many students who buy meals don't eat the included fruit and milk, is that they would end up paying more for the same slice.
Also: "No food preparation or cooking is permitted in the classrooms other than Family and Consumer Education classes or other classes with the express purpose of teaching cooking In these classes, no peanuts or nut products will be used."
Thus, foreign language classes would no longer be allowed to prepare tradition dishes (a common practice in my experience) and elementary school classes would not be able to cook (I know some of these schools have special school-day programs involving cooking that would have to go).
On these issues, parents were only given questions asking what would be done to ensure the safety of children with food allergies without unduly infringing on the food choices or others' and how the safety of none Food Services prepared foods could be insured. No mention of the proposed policies was made (which is especially egregious considering some of the provisions under the food allergies section that were modified just today).
I know some of your views may differ from mine, but I feel that what is most important is that you are not kept in the dark about what is going on in this district. There will be a second parent meeting held this Thurs. the 26th. I can't seem to find the time or location on the district web site so if you are interested, good luck finding it. Sometime in late March or Early April, this issue will go before the full Board of Education (I will try and let you know when that meeting will take place) so you will have another opportunity to voice your opinion.
“We have the critical mass to get serious about this sector of our economy,” Jim Leonhart, a biotech executive said Tuesday at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon.
“We don’t have any option but to promote life science technologies, including stem cell research here in this state,” added Leonhart, who heads the Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Device Association.
Obiviously, our young people will need to tools (curriculum) to play in this era.
My Jr. High student at Jefferson has been informed that there is a good chance his Family and Consumer Education (FCE) and his Technology classes will not be at Jeffferson next year. I have heard ramblings about foreign language being reduced at Jr. High level as well.
This is where I begin to think Public Schools are going to continue to lose students. My son would never choose to take a foreign language or FCE. He is my "jock" and the wonderful cultural and diverse information he is receiving from foreign L.A. and F.C.E are the reason we keep sending our kids to a public school. If the public offerings dwindle to nothing, why would we, a middle to high income family continue to send our children to public schools? If MMSD continues eliminate the diversity and class selection, they can continue to see the decrease in high income students. Money is required to offer these classes, however, if the extra-curricula activities and interesting diverse classes are eliminated, the district will deal with less students, higher numbers of low income students, and the continual decrease of middle and high income students. Many will not see the significance of these numbers, but it is significant as costs rise to educate students that demand more social and psychological needs. The district needs to evaluate the long term effects of eliminating these programs.
Student achievement is a top priority of all school boards. To me student achievement in any subject area results from how well the student is able to learn and to experience what’s being taught. Multitudes of factors effect how well students are able to learn –for example, a students’ personal socioeconomic background and parents’ education, the school environment, teacher training, etc. There is something else that can effect how well each and every child will learn – curriculum.
What is the school board’s responsibility regarding curriculum? In the next few blogs, I’ll be posting some information I’ve gathered and thoughts/questions I have about curriculum policy and school board responsibility. Personally, I feel that developing and overseeing curriculum policy is one of the most important roles of any school board if that board’s top priority is student achievement. What is the MMSD School Board's curriculum policy?
Madison United for Academic Excellence [www site] held a Madison School Board candidate forum Tuesday evening, January 17, 2006. Maya Cole, Michael Kelly, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira participated (election website). Candidate statements and questions appear below:
What strategies/ideas do you have that can elevate academic success for ALL MMSD students while avoiding the pitting of parent groups against each other? [Video]
What is one of the most important things you want to accomplish as a board member? [Video]
Many people in our group are concerned that the District's single-minded strategy for closing the achievement gap is to eliminate "high end" learning opportunities and give all students -- regardless of ability, motivation or interest level -- the same curriculum, delivered in completely heterogeneous classrooms. They see this approach being enacted, for example, in the West HS "small learning communities" restructuring and they fear that it will permeate and determine the results of the middle school redesign effort. Do you think that this is a sound strategy for closing the achievement gap? [Video]
As a Board what oversight is currently in place to assess whether the district is sufficiently meeting the academic needs for gifted students? Do you believe the current oversight is sufficient? In particular for both the student population as a whole and on an individual student basis: How is/should progress be measured in the gifted context? [Video]
The school district is once again faced with the dilemma of cutting between 6-10 million dollars from the budget. Where do you think these cuts should come from in the budget? Please tell me where the money is going to come from without suggesting that state or federal funds are not important for all programs. [Video]
How would you address the often heard complaint that special education programs drain too much money from the budget? (Jeff): I later provided some additional information for this question: there are approximately 5000 special education students in the district and special education programs and services account for more than $15 out of every $100 that the district spends. [Video]
Almost three years ago, during the public comments section of a budget-focused BOE meeting, a parent was asking the BOE to put "TAG" ("talented and gifted") services on the "do not cut" list. In response, a BOE member said to him, "Friend, this has nothing to do with minority students. Why should I support it?" Q: How do you react to that assertion/position/logic? Do you think the "TAG" dollars have anything to do with the District's minority students? [Video]
Can you name five good things about the Madison [public] schools? [Video]
The measure, backed by the Bush administration and expected to pass the House when it returns next month, would provide $750 to $1,300 grants to low-income college freshmen and sophomores who have completed "a rigorous secondary school program of study" and larger amounts to juniors and seniors majoring in math, science and other critical fields.
It leaves it to the secretary of education to define rigorous, giving her a new foothold in matters of high school curriculums.
Mindful of the delicate politics at play when Washington expands its educational role into matters zealously guarded as local prerogatives, senior Department of Education officials said they would consult with governors and other groups in determining which high school programs would allow students to qualify for grants.
Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees - and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees - have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The study was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Teachers and administrators want to keep challenging students in the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district [MN], but traditional college-prep courses may not be enough.
That's why the International Baccalaureate program might be introduced into the curriculum districtwide. The program's rigorous courses demand critical thinking and hands-on learning from students of all ages while focusing on international components for each subject. The IB program is taught in 1,597 schools in 122 countries.
There are three International Baccalaureate programs for grades K-12. They have common components, such as relating subjects and finding connections in local and international communities.
"We want to make sure we have something that gives our students an advantage. We want our students to stay in our district," Babbitt said. Adding the programs to District 191's curriculum would cost an estimated $100,000, district administrators said.
Rufus King, Milwaukee WI , known as the Rufus King International Baccalaureate High School is a WI urban, citywide, college preparatory high school that is strongly committed to math, science, technology, and the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program. Well over 1000 students each year now vie for the 350 freshmen seats. Rufus King is consistently in the top 50% of schools in the U.S., and the top 3.5% of schools worldwide in the number of IB examinations given.
I think we need to be careful about what we assume when we are talking about students of color in the schools. The children of color in our schools include a growing number of children whose parents, regardless of racial or ethnic identity, are highly educated with degrees ranging from the BA/BS levels to PhD, law, and medical degrees. Many have attended schools or come from communities with high numbers of professionals of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, or American Indian heritage. As our businesses and higher educational institutions hire more diverse professionals, we will see more children of color from middle and upper income families.
Children of color with highly educated parents historically have had trouble getting access to advanced educational opportunities regardless of their academic preparation or ability. And we are seeing a concurrent relocation to private schools, suburbs, and other cities because the parents have every bit as high expectation for their children as any other parents.
We also need to take a look at ALL children - including low income and/or children of color - when we are planning for advanced academic opportunities and placement in our schools. According to an MMSD study a few years ago, a significant portion of our high school drop outs are African American males who tested at the high end of the scale at the elementary level.
MMSD Withdrawal/Did Not Graduate Student Data
(1995 - 1999)
When the District analyzed dropout data for this five year period, they identified four student profiles. One of these groups, it could be argued, would have benefited from appropriately challenging learning opportunities, opportunities which might have kept them engaged in school and enabled them to graduate.
Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved
This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.
Characteristics of this group:
• Grade 5 math scores 84.2 percentile
• Male 55%
• Low income 53%
• Minority 42%
• African American 31%
• Hispanic 6%
• Asian 5%
Group 1 dropouts (expressed as the % of total dropouts for that school)
High School
East 25.9%
La Follette 23.8%
Memorial 23.4%
West 32.4%
We all - including the Madison School Board - need to ask whether we are doing enough to identify and provide opportunities for gifted and talented youth among children of color or children from low income backgrounds. Then we need to create sufficient classes and class space to allow ALL children who are capable of succeeding access to the highest level of classes possible. Creating false shortages for advanced academics helps no one, from individual students to entire schools.
Many of our schools now enroll populations that are 40% - 60% students of color. To have advanced classses with only a few - if any - students drawn from this potential talent pool, defies the statistical odds for the population. We can change this if, as a school community, we have the will to do so and the courage to talk openly about our priorities, practices, and assumptions.
School Lunches 101. The Chicago Magazine article refers to the partnership by Natural Ovens Bakery with Perspectives Charter School. Natural Ovens Bakery, Manitowoc, collaborated also with Appleton Central Alternative (Charter) School in a significant healthful foods initiative that was featured a year ago on Good Morning America and in the film Super Size Me.
The following message was sent to me by the moderator of another group that I'm in. Everyone needs to be aware of it as Yahoo is tracking people now, even when they are not on the Yahoo site.
If you belong to ANY Yahoo Groups - be aware that Yahoo is now using "Web Beacons" to track every Yahoo Group user. It's similar to cookies, but allows Yahoo to record every website and every group you visit, even when you're not connected to Yahoo.
Look at their updated privacy statement at: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy. About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says WEB BEACONS.
In my view a blog is a far more effective, and safe tool to use for group activities. We're happy to help set one up for you. Just email zellmer at mailbag_dot_com Safe computing - think, be aware and practice it :) The EFF has more on privacy and other electronic rights topics.
At some schools, online courses - originally intended for nontraditional students living far from campus - have proved surprisingly popular with on-campus students. A recent study by South Dakota's Board of Regents found 42 percent of the students enrolled in its distance-education courses weren't so distant: they were located on campus at the university that was hosting the online course.
Numbers vary depending on the policies of particular colleges, but other schools also have students mixing and matching online and "face-to-face" credits. Motives range from lifestyle to accommodating a job schedule to getting into high-demand courses.
While serving as a member on the Long Range Planning Committee for the West/Memorial Task Force I came to a few insights I would like to share.
Our charge was to seek solutions for the over-crowded schools in Memorial and Leopold attendance area as well as address the low income disparity throughout the area.
Overcrowding in Memorial - with current data and projected growth to be over 100% capacity in 5 of the elementary schools I believe the only solution to this problem is a new school. With the purchase of the far west land the board must believe this as well. This should be the number one priority of the growth solution for MMSD. There is space at Toki/Orchard Ridge and a few seats at Muir for this attendance area and additions could be made to Falk, or an update and expansion of Orchard Ridge/Toki could be made, but otherwise there is no room without changing programmatically.
Leopold overcrowding is much more complicated, as you know. This huge expansive slice of Madison and the entire city of Fitchburg attendance area has somehow become one elementary school. I do not support an addition to this school for many of the same reasons I did not like two schools on the same land. It is lots of seats in one part of town and you create problems for the future. If Shorewood or Crestwood had 1000 seats we would be busing kids from Fitchburg to that school because that's where the space is. An addition without a new school means a principal, staff and others at this school are functioning like the other 4 - 5 hundred space schools but with double the students, is that fair to the staff of that school? Would you want to be the principal of 800 - 900 students? I would rather have a school in Fitchburg or south of the Beltline off of 14 to help Leopold and the Allis attendance area that currently is sent to the other side of Monona.
There is space at Midvale/Lincoln, Randall, Shorewood,and there is 110 seats at Hamilton, 94 seats at Wright, and 118 seats at Cherokee. And of course the strange building of Hoyt that must have ghost or something since no one wants to touch it. There is space in West. The move of Leopold to Chavez is wrong minded since it shifts the West area problem to the overcrowded Memorial area.
The Elephant in the Room throughout the entire Task Force was Midvale/Lincoln and the perceived lack of quality at that school. There is 75 seats at Lincoln and 62 seats at Midvale this year and each time the suggestion was made to shift students from Leopold to M/L it was met with distaste, (except for two apartment buildings of 30 students) as the memo from the Swan Creek neighborhood (see attachment) was an example. That memo, while it outraged me, is a glaring example why we can't solve Leopold overcrowding (see memo [pdf] from Midvale Parent Jerry Eykholt to the Swan Creek Parents). On the task force Leopold was sent to Chavez, Randall/Franklin, Thoreau over and under M/L, but somehow those 137 seats at M/L seemed too far away. I think the district is failing Midvale/Lincoln.
Our low income since 1989 has doubled in the district while it has not in the community. Pairing Midvale Lincoln did not solve the income disparity problem and I fail to see the solution in changing boundaries. If you move poor students you upset those relationships and it seems like busing, if you move a high income neighborhoods into the area you risk losing those kids to private schools. Midvale/ Lincoln has over 100 students electing to not attend public school because of the perceived problems. I have an interesting solution that would be progressive and possibly irritate the district's mode of all schools looking exactly the same: Use M/L as a "test site" for the always boasted curriculum of Singapore Math and Direct Instruction. Announce that to improve the (Achievement) Gap you are going to test these curricula at this school, which has a high rate of low income to see if the test grades there improve at a greater pace than a similar school using the districts accepted curricula. You would have higher income parents coming back to the school, reducing the disparity, improving the schools image and also show you are progressive and willing to do a scientific approach to curriculum selection for the district. You could test these two curricula, that are often sighted as better than what MMSD offers, and really analyze the improvement. If it works ....say in 5 years great...if not go back to the districts accepted curriculum.
The doubling of our low income in such a short period of time (as well as the minority data) show the district is no longer a reflection of the community and we are losing students to the private sector, like most urban schools. MMSD has always had a wonderful reputation and has boasted how well the community attends the public school compared to other communities. We are quickly losing that grip and I feel it is less about "boundaries" but about quality of the education or "perceived" quality. While I am not downing the diversity that I enjoy and elect to have my children be a part of, you must see the problem with losing middle and high income students in a district that needs all those parents to participate in the community schools. Improving the curriculum and making it overwhelmingly attractive to all is the best way to solve the disparity issues at many of these schools, not all of course. The Math stinks in this district and I know you hear this all the time but look at the data, you are losing kids because of the curriculum, not due to boundary lines.
And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved … We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money.
I'm impressed ABC devoted so much effort to education. The article includes full text and video.
The seven stupid arguments for cutting gifted education
Michael F. Shaughnessy recently interviewed Frances R. Spielhagen about Gifted Ed in the new millennium. Dr. Spielhagen has engaged in both funded and non-funded education research and policy analysis. As an Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow in 1991-1992, she explored perspectives of achievement among gifted females, ages 9-26. She continues her work on acceleration policies in mathematics, working in collaboration with Dr. Joyce Van Tassel-Baska, of the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Dr. Spielhagen has recently spoken out against cuts in gifted education, and has identified "seven stupid arguments" that are offered as explanations for cutting gifted education.
# 1: All children are gifted
#2: It is not fair to offer special services for gifted students.
#3: Gifted students learn on their own.
#4: Gifted programs are elitist.
#5: Gifted programs are racist.
#6: Gifted children are weird.
#7: Why bother? Gifted students pass the state tests.
Four years ago this week, President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, designed to raise test scores and close the achievement gap between rich and poor and white and minority students. What has it achieved so far?
Some students think it's OK to be average. They know they could do better, but figure why bother?
Besides, it's not cool to do well in school. Their friends tell them so through classroom put-downs.
Gary Gilmer, 15, a freshman at Mount Pleasant High School, found that out when he signed up for a program the school started this year called Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID. Through AVID, school officials select average students who are making C's and D's, but have the potential to do better, and put them in honors and college-prep classes.
What's the point of high school for the majority of our kids? Even at a school as successful on paper as Cajon, most of the kids I see every day are literally having their time wasted by a curriculum that is at least 80 percent college preparatory. I know that in the last decade the concept of "school-to-work" connections, "career academies" and "smaller learning communities" has been all the rage. But the reality that I've seen is that most of these have been pretty ineffectual due to the counter-trend of steadily beefing up college prep curriculum requirements - to the point that virtually all high school students are required to follow a course of study that will qualify them for a four-year college, even though less than half have any mathematical hope of doing so.
Clarification of plans for 9th and 10th grade science at West HS
If you were at the West HS PTSO meeting last night (report to be posted soon for anyone who was unable to attend -- the topic was an update on the SLC initiative by SLC Coordiator Heather Lott), then you know that the question of what 9th and 10th grade science will look like next year and thereafter was left somewhat unanswered. I had the following clarifying email exchange with West HS Principal Ed Holmes today:
Dear Ed,
I am writing to ask for clarification about your plans for 9th and 10th grade science in the coming years.
Very specifically, there was considerable confusion last night about Chemistry. Will there would be "Chemistry" and "Chemistry in the Community" next year ... or not? You and Heather seemed not to be in agreement, and we noticed afterward that the document Heather handed out described 10th grade science as "TBA," which was confusing, and worrisome.
Also, in response to a parent question, you said there would be Accelerated Biology next year, that there would be "no changes" in science next year. Can we trust that?
All in all, the science situation was left in a bit of a muddle, so I am asking you to please go on record here and make it very, very clear what the plans are for next year and what the plans/hopes/goals are for the years after next.
1) Will there be Accelerated Biology next year, yes or no?
2) If yes, how many sections of Accelerated Biology will there be next year?
3) What will the procedure be for getting into Accelerated Biology for next year?
4) What is your plan for Biology -- your vision, your goal, your intention -- in the years after next?
5) Will both "Chemistry" and "Chemistry in the Community" be offered next year, as separate classes (i.e., not a blend of the two within the same classroom, somehow) ... or not?
6) What is you plan for Chemistry -- again, your vision, your ultimate goal, your hope -- in the years after that?
Please, Ed, if your plan is to ultimately have only one form of biology offered at the 9th grade level and only one form of chemistry offered at the 10th grade level (with perhaps only what you're calling an "embedded honors" option available in each course for the brightest and most motivated students) -- if that is your vision and what you are working towards -- then I ask that you be straight with us about that right now.
Thank you.
Respectfully,
Laurie
P.S. I still feel like we parents have never been given an adequate explanation (empirically supported, not just rhetoric) as to why you refuse to have an honors/accelerated section for each 9th and 10th grade course (i.e., English, science, social studies) per each of the four SLC's. (I assume that's how it's done for math?) A plan like that -- combined with efforts to increase the diversity of the students in these honors/accelerated sections -- would make a huge difference in how this turns out for West, in the end. Perhaps you could provide an answer to that question now?
Laurie,
In response to your questions regarding next years course selections:
1) Yes, there will be Accelerated Biology.
2) There will be one section of Accelerated Biology.
3) The procedure for getting into Accelerated Biology will be the same
as in years past. There will be an exam given to determine who will be
in the Accelerated Biology class.
4) Next year there will be an honors option embedded in the
traditional biology class for students who opt to take honors level
biology. My plans are to continue with the aforementioned system for
offering Biology at West. I do not foresee a change in what we offer at
this time.
5) Yes, both Chemistry and Chemistry in the Community will be offered
as separate classes.
6) At this time I do not foresee a change in the way we offer
chemistry at West.
The courses listed above are found in next years Program of Study book.
The book has gone to print and has been returned to us. I do not plan
to change what we have printed and will be disseminating to the public.
If you are interested in a copy of the 2006 -2007 West High Program of
Study book they are available in Theresa Calderon's office, Highland
SLC.
I will most likely be out of town over the next several days on matters
of a personal nature. I will respond to any further questions you might
have upon my return.
Thank you for your continued interest and concern.
Ed Holmes, Principal
West High School
Ed,
Thank you so much for your speedy reply ... and for the clarification. It is much appreciated.
Needless to say, I am happy to hear that you do not foresee any changes in either biology or chemistry in the coming years. (Please correct me if I have misunderstood.)
I am also happy to hear about continued accelerated and honors options in biology and the continuation of the math-rich course in chemistry, all of which are needed by many West students. As I have said many times, I truly believe this is the better course for West to chart in order to insure the school meets its professional and moral responsibility to the full range of students -- and to insure that those students who need accelerated and honors options do not leave the West attendance area. It also makes the educational opportunities at West more like those at our other three high schools, a form of equity that is at the heart of the middle school redesign effort.
I will ask you again to please consider offering accelerated and honors classes within each SLC for English and social studies, as well.
In high school now, at Madison Memorial, I see this achievement gap more clearly than ever. Where are all the minority students in my advanced placement classes? Or more specifically, where are all the black students? In my advanced classes I can count them on one hand. And of these students, most are from middle to upper class families. Their parents have degrees of some sort, and their parents have pushed education—just as my parents encouraged me.
This leads me to ask, “What happens to all the kids whose parents don’t have degrees and who aren’t pushed to learn?” It seems to me that in a lot of these cases, they get trapped in the system, just like the two boys who fought at my school. And do teachers and administrations really know how to help them? It surprises me that we are taught history, math, science, and English but we are never given answers to some of the more difficult questions. The questions that deal with our society and our lives as young people growing up.
What does all of this mean for the African American youth who are struggling? How will they advance in school, and what’s more, in society?
"They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!
Two of the most popular -- and most insidious -- myths about academically gifted kids is that "they're all rich, white kids" and that, no matter what they experience in school, "they'll do just fine." Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.
When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:
Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved
This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.
Characteristics of this group:
Grade 5 math scores - 84.2 percentile
Male - 55%
Low income - 53%
Minority - 42%
African American - 31%
Hispanic - 6%
Asian - 5%
Put in words, more than one-quarter of the District's dropouts during the second half of the 1990's had exhibited high academic achievement early in their school careers. (The report actually uses the word "astounding" to describe these students' previous achievement.) In addition, over half of this group of early achieving dropouts were poor, more than two-fifths were minority students, and almost one-third were African American. (Note: this number - 27% - is roughly comparable to what is found nationwide regarding the percentage of dropouts who have tested and/or performed in the gifted range -- that is, across the nation, gifted students don't do "just fine" no matter what happens to them in school.)
During this same time period - the second half of the 1990's - the percentage of MMSD high school students who were from low income families was about 16% and the percentage who were minority was about 25%. Thus low income and minority students were significantly over-represented in this high achieving group of dropouts (53% versus 16% and 42% versus 25%).
Point: The best way to insure that poor and minority students of high academic ability are not "lost" is to work at finding them in the first place, and then to support and follow them throughout their school careers - i.e., to have in place a broad-based system of early and ongoing identification (one that does not require parental advocacy), as well as a set of ongoing support and retention strategies.
Point: The best way to insure that all students of high academic potential have equal access to adequately challenging learning opportunities is to have enough of these appropriately rigorous learning opportunities, in all of the District's schools and at all grade levels.
To the extent that "high end" learning opportunities and District services for high potential students decrease, it hurts all academically talented students in the District. That goes without saying. But these data suggest that as those services and programming are eliminated, we may be doing particular harm to those academically talented students who come from less advantaged backgrounds. These students are less likely to have parents who can advocate effectively for them, thus they are less likely to have access to the ever shrinking pool of appropriately rigorous learning opportunities available in our schools. These students are also less likely to have parents who can provide them with opportunities for advanced learning outside of school, not to mention transfer them to private school, when their learning needs are not met in the public system.
A case in point: West High School
Because of the curricular changes currently occurring at West High School -- changes which threaten the historically broad range of challenging courses West has offered its high end learners -- we'd like to draw your attention to a further breakdown of these data, from the same District report:
High School
Group 1 dropouts (% of total dropouts for that school)
East
25.9
La Follette
23.8
Memorial
23.4
West
32.4
Put in words, from 1995 to 1999, West had a significantly higher percentage of dropouts who exhibited high academic achievement early in their school careers than did any of the District's other three high schools, each of which had about the same percentage of Group I dropouts. (Note: 32.4% is also significantly higher than the national estimate.) There is no reason to assume that the demographic characteristics of West's Group I dropouts are significantly different from those of the District-wide group of Group 1 dropouts -- that is, it is likely that many of the West Group 1 dropouts were either minority students, from low income families, or both. This suggests that as West contemplates getting rid of ever more "high end" courses (arguably as a result of the Small Learning Communities initiative), they may be moving in the wrong direction -- assuming that the goal is to maximize minority achievement, as opposed to simply minimizing minority failure. As 10 of West's 18 math teachers put it in an April, 2004, letter to the Isthmus:
It seems the administration and our school board have redefined 'success' as merely producing 'fewer failures.' Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community? (bold, italics and underline added)
A recent report from the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable speaks to the complexity of the challenge of closing the achievement gap while also maintaining a commitment to high academic standards for all -- and the importance of keeping the big picture in full view.
Conclusion: The two most popular myths about "high end" students is that they are all rich, white kids and that no matter what they experience in school, "they will do just fine." The above data from our own district illustrate well just how untrue those two statements are. Students of high academic potential come in all colors and from all cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. To think otherwise is, quite simply, racist. Furthermore, students at any point along the performance continuum disengage from school when they feel misunderstood, unappreciated, and poorly taken care of by their schools. In that regard, "high end" students are no different from any others.
Note: Unfortunately, the 2000-20004 dropout data have not been analyzed in the same way the 1995-1999 data were and we have been told that there are no plans to do those analyses. A request has been made to reconsider that decision.
Additional note: According to a December, 2004, MMSD Research and Evaluation report, the District-wide high school dropout rates for the years 1995 -1999 were 21%, 17%, 19%, 18% and 19%, respectively (average equals 19%). For ease of computation, consider a West high school class of 500 students. Given an average 19% dropout rate, that means 95 students not graduating each year, more than 30 of them with a history of high academic performance - including 15 - 20 academically talented poor and/or minority students.
Final note: The percentage of West students who are minority and the percentage who are poor have both increased significantly since the late 1990's. Currently, the West student population is approximately 24.9% low income (compared to 14.6% in the late 1990's) and 35.8% minority (compared to 26.3% in the late 1990's). This may well mean that even more poor and minority students of high academic potential are not graduating.
Bottom line question: Are we really prepared to sacrifice so many potential scholars and leaders of color?
Wisconsin Scores "F" on State Science Standards (Redux)
In my Dec 12, 2005 entry, I described the 2005 Fordham Institute report giving Wisconsin an "F" on its State Science Standards. As I mentioned, then, having a quality state standard is not synonomous with quality implementation. The Fordham report also included comments by the evaluators, disparaging the pedagogical approaches taken by schools.
To make the issue of Standards vs. Implementation more concrete, here is a year 2000 report by Dr. Gerald Bracey comparing Fordham's prior report with the NAEP and other tests.
His analysis showed that the states scoring highest in the Fordham study ranked at the low end of the scale on NAEP and the international TIMSS study, while the states that the Fordham study ranked "irresponsible" occupied 7 of the top 10 on NAEP-TIMSS.
I briefly reviewed the latest published NAEP Science report (2000) for a similar comparison. The Fordham "A" states of California, New Mexico, and South Carolina scored significantly below the National average; the "A" states of Indiana and New York scored average; and only the "A" states of Massachusetts and Vermont scored as above average. (Wisconsin was not included in the report).
So, now I ask, as I asked and suggested in a previous comment, where is the data and reliable information to make informed decisions? or even to have an informed opinion?
Tamar Lewin writes in the New York Times January 8, 2006, about Advance Placement Classes - students and parents believe AP classes are important preparation for college, colleges have mixed feelings about students who take AP classes.
"We've been put off for quite a while about the idea of teaching to the test, which is what a lot of A.P.'s are," says Lynn Krahling, guidance director of the Queen Anne's School in Upper Marlboro, Md. "We're convinced, as an educational institution, that they're not as valuable as what we could be offering on our own.
"But," she says, "I think we're going to stick with A.P.'s - purely out of fear. Parents are so terrified that if we drop our A.P.'s it would really affect college admissions that I think some of them would jump ship."
EVERY summer, there is a fabulous moment at the Greensboro, N.C., "Cool to Be Smart" celebration, for students who have passed five or more Advanced Placement exams - the moment when one of them selects a lucky key and wins a new car and balloons cascade from the ceiling.
"I was so surprised when my key fit in the door that I just stood there for a couple seconds, and the balloons came down and everybody was clapping and cheering and my dad came screaming and yelling from the audience," says Laura St. Cyr, last year's winner, now a freshman at nearby Elon University.
In the last four years, the Guilford County School District has given away four cars, 20 laptop computers and 22 scholarships of $1,500 each - all in the service of coaxing students into more rigorous courses.
When Terry B. Grier became superintendent of the district, which serves more than 67,000 students, the two high schools with the most affluent students offered at least 15 Advanced Placement courses; the 12 others offered only a handful. So Dr. Grier decreed that every high school would have at least 15 A.P. courses, every student who took an A.P. class would be required to take the A.P. exam, paid for by the district, and every A.P. teacher would have special training. He cajoled local businesses to donate the prizes to create momentum for the program.
"Why should your ability to access a quality academic course be bound by where you live in our community, in our country?" says Dr. Grier. "A.P.'s are not for the elite, they're for the prepared. And it's our job to prepare these kids."
His efforts have doubled the number of students taking A.P. courses, doubled the scholarship money they receive from colleges, and tripled the number of A.P. students who are black, in a district that is about half minority. Last year, 246 students qualified for "Cool to Be Smart," and while Laura St. Cyr was the only one to get a Honda CRV, all of them were eligible for college credits that could save them on tuition. (Many universities award credit for courses when students score at least a 3 - out of 5 - on the exam.)
Tactics differ, but Mr. Grier's commitment to the Advanced Placement program has become part of the gospel of improving education in hundreds of struggling urban and rural districts. Schools are doing all kinds of things to nudge students into A.P. classes, which are intended to mirror introductory college survey courses.
At some schools in Dallas, students get $100 for every test on which they score 3 or higher, thanks to a partnership with Texas Instruments; their teachers also get $100, in addition to $20 an hour for tutoring them. In New Jersey, Hackensack High School attracted 300 students to a new summer-school program to help hard-working students move into A.P. classes. Arkansas, Florida and South Carolina pay for all their students' exams, which would otherwise cost $82 a shot. Minnesota will join the list this year.
The Advanced Placement program, administered by the College Board, began 50 years ago as a way to give a select few high school students a jump-start on college work. But in recent decades, it has morphed into something quite different - a mass program that reaches more than a million students each year and is used almost as much to impress college admissions officers and raise a school's reputation as to get college credit. As the admissions race has hit warp speed, Advanced Placement has taken on new importance, and government officials, educators and the College Board itself have united behind a push to broaden access to A.P. courses as a matter of equity in education.
But at the very time that schools like those in Guilford County, Dallas and Hackensack are jumping on the A.P. bandwagon, many of the elite schools that pioneered A.P. are losing enthusiasm, looking for ways to cut their students loose from curriculums that can cram in too much material at the expense of conceptual understanding and from the pressure to amass as many A.P. grades on their transcripts as possible. A few have abolished A.P. programs altogether, and many have limited students to taking three a year, fearing burnout and bad scores.
It's not that a large number of private schools shun A.P. courses - to the contrary, the number offering them rose 15 percent last year - but teachers and college counselors at many top-notch schools, public and private, confess to discomfort with the way the program seems to hijack the curriculum.
"We've been put off for quite a while about the idea of teaching to the test, which is what a lot of A.P.'s are," says Lynn Krahling, guidance director of the Queen Anne's School in Upper Marlboro, Md. "We're convinced, as an educational institution, that they're not as valuable as what we could be offering on our own.
"But," she says, "I think we're going to stick with A.P.'s - purely out of fear. Parents are so terrified that if we drop our A.P.'s it would really affect college admissions that I think some of them would jump ship."
Sixty percent of American high schools now participate in the program, which offers courses in 35 subjects, from macroeconomics to music theory. Last year, 1.2 million students took 2.1 million A.P. exams, and the number of students taking A.P. courses has increased tenfold since 1980. Newsweek magazine has gone so far as to rank the nation's best public high schools using the number of students who merely show up to take A.P. or International Baccalaureate tests as the sole criterion. (I.B. is another advanced curriculum, though far less common; Dr. Grier counts it for his "Cool to Be Smart" program.)
No wonder, then, that more than 3,000 students took seven or more A.P. exams last year. No wonder, either, that some students use the A.P. program tactically, knowing that their senior-year A.P. course listings will appear on their transcripts, and be counted in admissions decisions, long before they take the A.P. exam in May - if they ever do. (The A.P. brand is a curious one: students can take the exams, which run three hours, without taking the courses.) Part of the pressure to take A.P. classes also springs from the fact that most schools weigh A.P. grades more heavily than others - an A in A.P. is often worth five points, while a regular A is worth four - so savvy students know that A.P. courses can raise their G.P.A.'s, one of the most important elements in college admissions.
SO many more students are arriving at colleges with a slew of A.P. courses under their belts that some institutions have become more choosy about giving them credit. Harvard, for example, no longer gives credit for scores below 5. And A.P. classes have spread so widely that the College Board is concerned that some schools are putting the label on courses that offer a diluted curriculum. So starting next month, it will begin to audit the 15,000 high schools that offer A.P. classes to make sure students everywhere get the same quality of curriculum.
"It's really important that we not give students in traditionally underserved schools a watered-down version of A.P.'s," says Trevor Packer, director of the Advanced Placement program. "This is a massive outreach effort to help even the playing field."
Despite its explosive growth, only 23 percent of last year's public high school graduates had taken at least one A.P. class, he says, adding: "Among those who take A.P. exams, 1 in 10 students in urban schools score 3 or higher, compared to 6 in 10 in suburban schools."
At many urban schools, superintendents, principals and teachers talk about how the Advanced Placement program exposes students to new subjects like economics and psychology. They say A.P. courses help identify opportunities for those who might otherwise not think of themselves as college material, and help solve discipline problems when bored students acting up in lower-level classes are put with higher achievers. Even students who score only a 2 on an exam, or never even take the exam, they say, benefit from having challenged themselves.
So while high-end schools are capping the number of A.P. classes a student can take, burnout is less a concern at schools where exposure to the curriculums is considered a virtue in itself.
"I've had students who made a 2 come back from college and tell me they did really well in freshman English because they'd been so well prepared by their A.P.," says Michael Watkins, director of guidance at W. T. White High School in Dallas, which has the $100 bonuses for successful exam scores. "I used to work at a suburban high school, all Anglo, where they said no student could handle more than three A.P.'s. We have the opposite view here: They can take as many as they want. I had a student, from Vietnam, who took 20 A.P. exams. If they're willing to do the work, our teachers will help them, tutoring before and after school and on weekends. We had one student who got 60 hours of college credit. That saves a lot of tuition money. And we're very proud that our A.P. classes are racially mixed."
One of the most troubling aspects of American education has long been an intractable achievement gap, with white students outpacing blacks in academic performance, a disparity reflected - and, many say, caused - by ability-grouping systems that cluster white students in honors classes and minorities at lower levels. At some racially mixed schools, a peek through classroom doors at skin color is a good indication of what level the class is. Advanced Placement classes have traditionally been viewed as part of the problem, but with an open-door policy, some educators say, they can be part of the solution.
In the last 10 years, the number of black students taking A.P. exams has tripled, to 68,000, and the number of Latino students has nearly quadrupled, to 151,000. While the percentage of Latinos taking the exam matches their percentage in the school population (about 13 percent), the percentage of blacks taking the exam, 5.5 percent, is only a third of the percentage of blacks in the high school population.
For all the excitement in struggling districts, though, it is unclear just how much taking an A.P. class does to raise academic achievement, particularly for students who never take the exam. Research shows that good scores on A.P. exams are strong predictors of college success. But last year, a study of University of California freshmen by two Berkeley professors found that the number of A.P. courses on students' transcripts bore little or no relationship to their college performance. So, the authors suggested, selective colleges should reconsider their use of A.P. enrollment as a make-or-break criterion in admissions. Another study, in Texas, found that A.P. classes had no advantage over other kinds of college-prep classes in raising a student's performance once in college.
In 2002, a committee of the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, sharply criticized A.P. math and science courses for cramming in too much material at the expense of understanding and failing to keep up with developments in the subjects. The College Board is now revamping its science and history courses.
ONE striking oddity of the Advanced Placement program today is that while many less-than-distinguished public high schools have open-door policies about who can enroll in A.P. courses, many academically superior schools still act as gatekeepers, allowing only top students to enroll. At many suburban and private schools, students must have good grades or a teacher recommendation or both. And at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, the two most competitive public high schools in New York, demand is so great that only students with the highest grades get into the popular A.P. classes.
Some of the most academically demanding private schools - among them, in New York, Brearley, Fieldston and Dalton - take a different approach: they do not offer Advanced Placement, although many of their students still take the exams.
"At Dalton, advanced classes aren't called A.P.'s, but I think most of my grade took A.P. exams last spring," says Nell Hawley, a senior who took three exams last spring and scored 5 on each. "But not having A.P. classes at Dalton means that you get to learn for the sake of learning, not taught to the test."
At Friends Seminary, a small New York private school, A.P. biology was dropped recently in favor of a faculty-devised advanced biology course. The change was not a happy one for Audrey Reynolds, the director of college counseling. "It was much to my chagrin, since 85 to 90 percent of our students were getting a 4 or 5 on the A.P. bio exam, but our department thought the A.P. didn't give the extensive lab work we think is necessary," she says.
While it is the department's job to make that decision, she says, her job is to make sure that colleges accept the new course on the same basis as the A.P. Schools typically send course descriptions along with transcripts so admissions officials can judge a student's achievement level.
At Friends, for each student who takes the new advanced bio course, Ms. Reynolds adds a page-and-half attachment setting forth its track record with A.P. and the rigors of the new curriculum - and, she says, "referring to the National Academy of Sciences report that A.P. bio covered so much material that students spent the year racing through it rather than getting into depth."
Two seniors at Friends, Eden Wall and Annie Perretta, say they have learned an enormous amount in their A.P. courses but wish there had been more room for discussion. Sometimes, they say, the pace can be overwhelming.
"In our physics A.P., we had a test where our whole class did badly, and we asked our teacher if we could slow down and review," Eden says. "We love our physics teacher, and he understood, but he said we had so much material to get through before the break that there was no time for review. I think he was as frustrated as we were."
Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, became critical of A.P. courses based on the experience of his daughter, Sara, who decided on Brown but has deferred enrollment.
"When Sara would go on her college tours, everywhere she went, they said, 'We will be looking to see if you took every challenging course you could, and that's how you will be judged,' so of course she took as many as she could," he says, adding that it seemed misguided for high school students to try to place out of classes they should be looking forward to taking in college.
"Even where the A.P. courses got the kids excited," Mr. Weschler says, "the excitement would immediately be doused. In European history, the kids got very involved in the causes of World War I and wanted to talk about it, but the teacher said they couldn't because they had to move on and cover all the material for the test. And in A.P. English, in the Pelham school system, the assignment for the poetry unit was to take a poem home at night and come up with two multiple-choice questions on it that could be on the test."
Many counselors are troubled at the extent to which Advanced Placement has become a weapon in the college-admissions arsenal, especially when students forgo electives they might have preferred.
"On one hand, many of the classes are ambitious and wonderful, and I'm glad we have them," says Scott White, a counselor at Montclair High School in New Jersey. "I also understand that colleges have no good way to consistently assess the highest level kids, and A.P.'s can provide an external paradigm for doing that. But from the student's point of view, there is a horrific rise in the expectations on the part of colleges, almost a sense that if a student isn't taking the highest level in every course, there's something wrong. So we have students taking five A.P.'s, grinding away at all that memorization in a way that's more appropriate to boot camp than to kids growing up."
Some schools say there is now a sense that Advanced Placement classes have become inevitable.
"Part of it is that the College Board has done a very good job in marketing their products, working to increase access and enrollment, and the more students take the A.P.'s, the more they perpetuate the idea that students should take A.P.'s," says Emmi Harward, director of college counseling at Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, Va.
"Five years ago," she says, "our English and history faculty developed some elective seminar-style courses for seniors, very rich college-level courses on the ethics of war and the power of myth. Even though the courses were very appealing, they felt like a risk to some students and parents who know there are colleges out there that just circle the number of A.P.'s on the transcript."
WHEN all is said and done, how important are A.P. courses in college admissions?
That depends. Certainly, most schools count them in an applicant's favor. One common approach is used at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where admissions officers tally the number of foreign language, math and science courses an applicant has taken, along with the number of A.P. or other advanced courses. Community college courses, often taken by advanced students in districts that lack an A.P. program, count, too, says Kristine Shay, director of undergraduate admissions, but "not exactly on the same basis, since they don't have that known national curriculum."
SUNY Binghamton takes a different tack. Admissions officers look at the grade point average and SAT scores, circle the number of A.P. and honors courses, consider what coursework was available at the high school and make a nonnumeric judgment: "All things being equal, if we had a kid with an 88 average and three A.P.'s, versus a kid with a 90 average and no A.P.'s, we'd probably take the one with the A.P.'s - but make it an 85 average and three A.P.'s and I'm stumped," says Cheryl Brown, director of undergraduate admissions. She adds that almost 100 students arrived on campus this academic year with enough credits for sophomore standing.
Admissions officers at the most elite colleges say, in almost identical words, that they want students who have taken "the most rigorous program the school offers" (Marlyn McGrath Lewis, Harvard); "the most demanding program they can take at their high school" (Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth); "courses that challenge them academically" (Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale); and "the most challenging program that's available and that they can handle" (Richard Nesbitt, Williams).
"We don't expect students to take every A.P. that's offered, but if their school has 15 A.P.'s and they've avoided them all, that would certainly say something," Mr. Nesbitt says.
While admissions officers acknowledge that taking the most difficult A.P. courses, like Calculus BC, indicates a strong academic background, they take pains to say that there is no magic, no numeric formula - and no penalty for students from schools that do not have an A.P. program.
"Sheer A.P. firepower, having 10 A.P.'s, doesn't impress us," says Mr. Brenzel. "It's just one factor in evaluating a student's background and preparation."
NOT too long ago, Hackensack High School set its best students on an honors track that included few minorities, though two-thirds of the student body is black and Hispanic. But a summer tutoring program that began last year has helped ambitious students move into Advanced Placement and pre-A.P. classes, which are now inching closer to the school's overall racial mix.
"I push it with all the parents, some of whom still think about A.P.'s as an elite thing," says Mark Porto, the principal. "I had an African-American mother come in, upset that her son had been suspended. He's a bright boy and I told her that what we really should be talking about was why he wasn't taking any A.P.'s."
In the A.P. American history class, Hackensack students read excerpts from J. P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, analyzing their tones for clues as to whom these leaders were trying to reach and whom they wanted to protect, while placing the writings in the broader social context of the emerging progressive and consumer movements.
Many in the class have always been among the school's top performers, but others, like Theo Idigo, entered the A.P. world through the summer program, where the same teacher helped prepare him.
"I never thought about A.P.'s until my brother went away to college, and started telling me how I should take as many A.P.'s, as many difficult courses, as I could, because that would help me prepare for college," he says, adding that he hopes to apply to Princeton, Temple and elsewhere. "Now I think they're good."
In an English literature A.P., Hackensack students work in small groups, as their teacher floats from table to table, asking questions: "Who's speaking in this poem, and who's he talking to?" she asks. "He's a farmer, right? Is he an educated man? No. And what kind of imagery is he using? Right, animal imagery. And why? Because that's what he knows. And what do you think is his attitude toward his wife?"
Slowly, the students tease out the story: this is an older farmer, married to a very young woman who remains scared and distant from him, and he longs for closeness. "They probably met online," a student says.
Marc Paulo Guzman, Hackensack's top-ranked senior, takes the literature class, along with A.P. biology and A.P. calculus.
"I wish there were more A.P.'s offered," he says. "They're fast-paced, and you learn a lot." Marc, whose family emigrated from the Philippines in 1993, is applying to Princeton, Yale and Duke. "I've done a lot of research about college on the Internet," he says, "and I know A.P.'s can help you get in."
Tamar Lewin is an education reporter for The Times.
State Superintendent Jack O'Connell delivered a tough-love message Friday to nearly 50,000 high school seniors still hoping to escape a new requirement that they pass the state's exit exam to get a diploma in June:
The answer is "no,'' he said. There will be no way for this year's students who fail the test to graduate with their classmates.
His message was a response to demands from critics of the exit exam that he find some alternative to this high-stakes test.
"I have concluded that there is no practical alternative available that would ensure that all students awarded a high school diploma have mastered the subject areas tested by the exam and needed to compete in today's global economy," O'Connell said.
MERRILL, WI -- Gov. Doyle last night endorsed higher math and science requirements for high school graduation during a town hall meeting set up to preview his January 17 State of the State Message to the Legislature.
Doyle focused on education, health care and environmental proposals during the session. “I want to make sure every kid in Wisconsin gets a quality education,” he said, pointing to his vetoes in the current budget to restore twothirds funding for public schools. He said three years of science and three years of math should be required in Wisconsin high schools.
With “Wisconsin Values” emerging as the theme of his upcoming speech, Doyle told a crowd of about 100 at the T. B. Scott Library here, “Trust Wisconsin values and they’ll take you in the right direction.” He concluded his hourlong session with the admonition that “we need to sell our quality of life.”
“We’ve got to brag about who we are and what we have to offer,” he said, again emphasizing his “Wisconsin Values” which included “hard work,” a “commitment to education,” and “looking out for each other.”
On health care, Doyle said there was “no doubt” the current system is directed to “treatment rather than prevention.” He said Medicare is the fastest growing segment of the state budget and is so because of “deeply misguided policies in Washington (DC).”
“I want a more flexible system,” he said. “I want to reach more people than now in BadgerCare and SeniorCare.”
Doyle also said there needs to be more emphasis on early childhood development. He said children are going to school without a good breakfast and added, “We could double the amount we’re spending (on school breakfasts) and still be 50th in the nation in spending.”
In addition to expanding the breakfast program, Doyle said “really good exercise and physical education programming should be built into the course of the school day.” And, “If I could do one thing,” he said. “It would be that no kid started smoking cigarettes until after the age of 21.”
On the environment, Doyle said forests in Wisconsin are under “great pressure” and the state must take steps to protect them. He said it is vital to maintain the Stewardship Fund, look for creative ways to help the paper industry (such as buying forest lands and obtaining lifetime easements), and improve the quality and quantity of the Great
Lakes water system.
Doyle also said the opportunities for small business in the state are “enormous” because of the Internet and high speed access to it. He said his goal is to get 100% high speed access to the Internet statewide over the next couple of years.
On the high cost of energy, he said he hopes Congress will take action to allow the states to deal with natural gas rates, called again for oil companies to contribute some of their post-Katrina profits to low income heating assistance, and noted the PSC has cut rate increase requests by electric utilities.
Doyle continues his pre-State of the State town hall meetings today at noon in Oshkosh. (END)
He wrote the legal brief that persuaded the Supreme Court in 1958 to order the integration of Little Rock's public schools, and four decades later, his wavy black hair having long turned into an unruly gray cumulus, he was in court fighting to preserve a desegregation program for the St. Louis region.
In the past several years, though, Mr. Taylor has added a more controversial line to his résumé, as a public advocate for the No Child Left Behind law. From conferences of state legislators to conclaves at education schools, he has defended a statute closely associated with President Bush, parting ways with many of his lifelong allies on the left and bewildering the audiences that would otherwise venerate him.
This small event says a lot about global competition. Traveling around Asia for most of the past month, I have been struck by the relentless focus on education. It makes sense. Many of these countries have no natural resources, other than their people; making them smarter is the only path for development. China, as always, appears to be moving fastest.
But one thing puzzles me about these oft-made comparisons. I talked to Tharman Shanmugaratnam to understand it better. He's the minister of Education of Singapore, the country that is No. 1 in the global science and math rankings for schoolchildren. I asked the minister how to explain the fact that even though Singapore's students do so brilliantly on these tests, when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics.
Beautiful Minds: An Innovative Math Program Helps Change the Face of Gifted and Talented Education
By John O'Neil (from NEA Today, January, 2006)
"Friendly fractions" are the day's topic, but Alison Foley's 20 fourth-graders can't dig into that concept until they've tallied and graphed their favorite desserts. Votes for ice cream, brownies, cake, and cookies—even a lone vote for cannoli—go up on the board.
"What about ice cream cake?" one student asks. "If we were doing a Venn diagram, we could put that in the intersection," Courtney offers. Soon, desks and chairs are pulled aside and Foley's kids use yarn and their bodies to make a human pie chart illustrating their data, then go on to calculate what fractions result when you add various categories together.
Foley's math curriculum—which presents concepts several years above grade level—isn't the only thing unusual about her classroom at Smith School in West Hartford, Connecticut. Smith is one of 10 schools in Connecticut and Kentucky piloting an innovative project, Mentoring Mathematical Minds (Project M3), aimed at identifying children in grades 3–5 capable of handling advanced mathematics. Developed at the University of Connecticut, the program is designed to expand the population of students typically served by gifted and talented programs. Sure enough, look around Foley's classroom—which draws students from Section 8 housing as well as million-dollar homes—and you'll see students as diverse as their favorite desserts, with Black students elbow to elbow with Hispanic, Asian-American, and White pupils.
National figures on gifted education programs suggest such diversity is unusual. Data collected by the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights show that White and Asian students are typically overrepresented among programs for the gifted, while other minorities tend to be underrepresented.
The University of Connecticut project is part of a movement to broaden the scope of gifted and talented programs, which in some communities are fighting for survival. Some advocates for gifted programs say the federal so-called No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), which mandates that schools raise all students' performance to minimally acceptable standards, has school officials focused on average or underachieving learners.
"Teachers who used to teach AP are now teaching remedial reading instead," notes Jane Clarenbach, director of public education and affiliate relations for the National Association for Gifted Children. More bad news: President Bush has proposed eliminating federal Jacob Javits grants, which support research on gifted education (including programs like Project M3).
While research consistently shows the advantages of offering gifted students content tailored to their needs, many buy into the notion that it's not necessary—they say gifted kids will do just fine, even without special curricula. Indeed, with NCLB pressures mounting and district budgets tight, some see gifted programs as offering extra resources to kids who already have all the advantages.
But Clarenbach and others argue that forcing gifted students to march in lockstep with their peers holds them back. Nine-year-old Courtney would probably agree. She spent part of last year in Smith School's regular third-grade math class, and part of the year receiving Project M3's enriched curriculum. Looking back at her grade-level math work, Courtney recalls, "I'd just zip through it in five minutes and have to wait half an hour for everyone to finish. It gave me headaches when I had to do the same things over and over again, honestly."
Clarenbach points out that the issue can be further complicated because the gifted population itself is diverse. For example, some gifted students excel in a single content area but are weak in others; some even have learning disabilities. Still, that doesn't mean areas of strength should be ignored. Project M3 Director Kathy Gavin, who works at the Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Connecticut, cites the example of one student who was almost held back in second grade because of reading difficulties, but who it was thought could benefit from the M3 program. The student was placed in it and "has excelled," she says.
Broadening the Pool
Without a special math program like Project M3, the talents of children like Courtney, a vivacious African-American who has already mapped out her life's goals, might go unchallenged. Kathy Gavin says she's met an urban principal who told her flat-out, "I don't have any gifted kids in my school." But Project M3 helps find them. Kids are selected based on multiple criteria, including a special assessment of nonverbal math ability, which measures such things as spatial sense and reasoning, and standardized tests when available. Teacher recommendations and prior grades also factor in. Opening up the selection process (gifted programs in the past often selected students based on IQ scores alone) has allowed students with less obvious talents to benefit, says Gavin. Once they're in, kids take four units of about six weeks each, with content pitched several years beyond grade-level standard: the fourth-graders in Foley's class, for example, studied a unit on algebra in which they solved for variables. The lessons focus on conceptual understanding, with lots of time for reflection and discussion.
Early results show that the program has promise. Students taking the M3 curriculum at the 10 schools where the program is being piloted have posted "significant gains" on standardized math tests compared with control groups, with lower-income students recording the highest gains, says Gavin. Alison Foley's fourth-graders were among those who showed gains, and, to her relief, her kids also swept through their district-level tests. She had worried about the results, because the M3 curriculum was such a departure from the standard (and tested) math curriculum in the district.
Foley sees other benefits too—especially for girls who traditionally have been underrepresented in advanced math programs. In regular math classes, boys tend to be more assertive, blurting out answers, while girls hang back. In the M3 classrooms, students often work in pairs and discuss solutions, Foley says, and that helps girls rehearse their answers and support their thinking.
Students like Mariam are benefiting. When the class began, says Foley, "Mariam was overshadowed by the other kids, especially the boys." But as the year went on her confidence grew. In a recent algebra unit, she argued her point against the entire class—and she was right, says Foley. "That was a huge step for her, and now she has become, in a subtle way, a leader."
Courtney, who pronounces Project M3 "just awesome," appreciates being in a class with kids who share her passion for numbers. "The difference between this class and the others is that the kids in the other math classes do it for the rewards, because they're going to get gum or chocolate or something," she says. "And when they come out of math, they look so unhappy! But when we come out of math, we have smiles on our faces because we love it."
Scouting For Talent
Look around your classroom. Could bored Brittany, loquacious Lakisha, or rambunctious Robert benefit from gifted education services? Here's how to find out:
* Know the signs. Gifted students often demonstrate advanced performance in one or more disciplines and abstract or complex thinking. They may also have an increased ability to make connections and see relationships. Varying your assignments can bring out the best in some students: For example, try letting kids show what they know through skits, poems, or dioramas.
* Pre-test. Find out what students know before you teach a new topic. Both formal assessments (quizzes or interest inventories) and informal (observations or class discussion) can help you identify students who require enrichment activities or an accelerated pace.
* Watch for clues. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. A kid who seems bored or disinterested (even acting up) may, in fact, need more challenging work. Talk with the child, a parent, or his or her former teacher to track the behavior pattern and address the issue.
* Allow for differences. All students have academic strengths and weaknesses. A gifted student who excels in science may struggle in writing. Try to make sure students are working at the appropriate level of challenge in each subject area to ensure their growth.
The Daily Telegraph reports on the collapse of the most accepted and widely used reading methodology in England and the United States:
The abandonment by teachers of the traditional method of teaching reading, known as phonics, precipitated the greatest educational catastrophe of the past 50 years.
Their steadfast refusal to re-introduce the method, in the face of overwhelming evidence of sharply falling reading standards, represents the greatest educational betrayal of the past 20 years, reducing the life chances of an estimated four million children.
Yesterday's carefully worded but withering report by Jim Rose (176K PDF), a former chief inspector, accepted instantly and in its entirety by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, should finally draw a line under this shocking example of the profession's capacity for collective pig-headedness and self-delusion.
Jim Zellmer previously posted a BBC story on the report by Rose.
I don't think there is a more important story in this new year of 2006 than what happens to the country's growing charter schools.
But no matter what happens to the federal law, we are going to continue to try to improve schools in this country, one way or another. I would prefer to spend my time looking at the most interesting and encouraging efforts to do so, and that means checking on the charter schools -- independently run public schools -- since they have the most freedom to innovate.
(What follows started out as a comment in response to the 12/27 entry and 1/3 comment on gifted education and equity, but has grown to entry status.)
Here is another relevant link -- http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=538. It's to a page on the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) website. The page is entitled "Why We Should Advocate for Gifted and Talented Students."
I think it's important, when speaking about these issues, to know where the education money is going. It's really quite sobering to learn the truth and should put anyone who feels guilty about advocating for the needs of really bright, academically advanced kids at ease. Remember, the bright kids who suffer the most as a result of the lack of dollars and appropriate curriculum -- the ones whose potential remains untapped and undeveloped -- are the ones whose parents cannot provide for them when the schools fail to. In addition, as learning continues to be watered down, more and more students will need additional challenge beyond what they receive in the regular classroom -- if they are to thrive, that is, rather than just get by. Of course, much of what we are dealing with these days is less a matter of money than it is a matter of attitude.
By the way, in case you didn't know, gifted programming is mandated in the state of Wisconsin -- http://dpi.wi.gov/cal/gifted.html. It's just not funded (until this year, when fewer than $200,000 were included in the budget for a new gifted and talented consultant at DPI and some AP and middle school programming). Not only that, but for well over a decade there hasn't been a g/t consultant on the staff of DPI (see last sentence -- that will be changing in February). That means no one to oversee the delivery of services to the 51,000 gifted students in Wisconsin and no one to monitor districts' compliance with the state statutes.
What about the MMSD? Well, the MMSD has been out of compliance with Wisconsin state statutes for gifted education since 1990. (Yes, 1990. That's not a typo.) It's "Talented and Gifted Program Plan" was written in 1991. I'm trying to get it posted on the District website.
Anyway, here is the excerpt from the NAGC website:
Gifted Education Programs Require Funding
Although gifted education programs and services yield increased learning gains for high-ability students, gifted education funding at the state and local levels ebbs and flows with the economy. 17 states allocated no state funds for gifted programs in 2002.
In 2005, .00029% of the federal K-12 education budget goes to gifted and talented students.
By comparison, 3% of the federal K-12 education budget goes to the Reading First Program, 2% to Drug Prevention, and 2% to English Language Acquisition. 57% covers the rest of the programs in the No Child Left Behind Act, and 31% is dedicated to children with disabilities through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). (Note: although some states classify gifted students without disabilities in the "special education" category, federal funds from IDEA does not support these programs.)
When looking at the federal K-12 budget for FY 2005 in smaller increments, the Javits program, the only federally funded gifted education initiative, receives 3 cents out of every $100 spent on education. In contrast, Reading First gets $3.50, English Language Acquisition gets $1.80, all other No Child Left Behind programs (in aggregate) receive $57.75, and IDEA programs receive $31.10.
Again, you ask, what about the MMSD? Well, this year's total MMSD budget is 321 million dollars, of which 600,000 are allocated for talented and gifted salaries and services. That's 19 cents per 100 dollars of expenditure. Compare that figure to other expenditures by perusing the budget: http://www.mmsd.org/budget/mmsd/0506/Budget_Amendments_and_Tax_Levy_2005-06.pdf.
One more number: according to the functional analysis conducted for the District by Virchow Krause in 2002, an estimated 5000 MMSD students (of 25,000 total enrollment) receive and benefit from TAG services.
Interesting interview with Burt Rutan on his approach to space travel (low cost, efficient) vs. the traditional NASA approach (very expensive).
I found it interesting to listen to Rutan's young engineer's discuss the challenges and opportunities in their work. Two related articles worth reading:
The Education process is clearly at a tipping point in terms of conventional vs. new approaches. A teacher friend recently strongly suggested that we need to start from scratch (would that be a 0 based budget?).
The D.C. public school system's college-level test participation rate increased slightly in 2005, with the largest high school, Wilson, making the greatest gain, according to The Washington Post Challenge Index survey of area schools.
The participation rate for D.C. schools, calculated as the number of college-level tests per graduating senior, went from 0.776 in 2004 to 0.820 in 2005, an increase of almost 6 percent
One place where such heroic work is taking place is the Watts Learning Center (WLC) charter school, one of the most improved charter schools in California.
From 2000 to 2005, the WLC rose from a low test-score ranking to a level near the state’s proficiency target score of 800. The K-5 charter school was able to defy low expectations and accomplish this feat with a student population nearly all African American and low income. In an example of what the President called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” these two factors are too often considered indicators of educational failure. WLC charter school proved defied that expectation.
Gene Fisher, founder and president of WLC, says that the school’s mission is to create a culture of learning and high expectations for students, parents, faculty and staff. He points out that, "The job of our teachers includes an emphasis on a proven curriculum while also reinforcing these high expectations – a belief that students can and will succeed."
The school uses the structured phonics-based Open Court reading program. WLC chose Open Court before the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted the same program. Open Court emphasizes continuous review and practice of already learned material. Sandra Fisher, the school’s executive director, says that it is important that the curriculum be structured because so many students lack structure in their lives.
Not surprisingly, with the entire curriculum geared to ensuring that every last child reaches grade-level proficiency, there is precious little attention paid to the many children who master the standards early in the year and are ready to move on to more challenging work. What are these children supposed to do while their teachers struggle to help the lowest-performing students? Rather than acknowledging the need to provide a more advanced curriculum for high-ability children, some schools mask the problem by dishonestly grading students as below proficiency until the final report card, regardless of their actual performance.
As a matter of pure politics, how can you expect to retain public support for a school reform regime that short-changes high-achieving students, whose parents, whether rich or poor, are likely to be more politically engaged and influential than the parents of low-performing students?
"Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers' union, faulted the administration for using a "Robin Hood" approach. "You have to simultaneously work to help your struggling students in particular schools and keep your middle class - you have to do both these things at the same time," she said.
"When you do one at the expense of the other, you get the rebellion and revolt you see in District 3," she said, referring to the Upper West Side, where some parents have complained that their children were suddenly being shut out of admission to top public school programs.
Part of the sense of grievance in the middle class comes from how much energy those parents typically pour into searching for schools and then, once their children are accepted, into working to support the schools. They organize libraries. They donate toilet paper and crayons and cash. And when there's not enough, they raise funds for more."
Some of the very changes that Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made his hallmark - uniform programs in reading and math for most schools; drilling that helped produce citywide gains last spring on standardized tests; changes in rules for admission to programs for the gifted and talented, designed to make them more equitable - have caused unease among that important constituency.
Many parents say, however, that there are extremely limited public school options in the middle school years, and some chafe at how the new rules for gifted programs in the elementary schools and for certain select schools have made competition for admission stiffer.
City officials say that judging by the number of children eligible for free lunch, the class divide in the system remains stable: About 80 percent of the children are poor, with no increase in middle class flight.
Yet Emily Glickman, a consultant who advises parents in the city on winning admission for their children to private schools, said, "The last two years the interest in private schools has exploded, as I see it with people coming to me."
Here are two stories from the December 23, 2005, issue of the West HS student newspaper, The Regent Review. I reprint them here just as they appear in print (that is, with all misspellings, grammatical errors, etc.). (Note: the faculty advisor for The Regent Review is West HS English teacher Mark Nepper. Mr. Nepper has been involved in the development of English 10. Some of you may recall that Mr. Nepper joined English Department chair Keesia Hyzer in presenting the plans for English 10 at the November 7 West PTSO meeting.)
From the front page: "A new English 10 expected for next year," by CI, a senior at West HS and co-editor of the student newspaper:
In an attempt to bridge the minority gap and continue with the smaller learning communities, Madison West High will tentativly be changing to a core English for all sophomores.
Ed Holmes, current West High principal, says he is doing his best to continue our tradition as a "School of Excellence." To achieve this ideal excellence, Holmes recognizes that he not only has to raise the standards of the struggling students but also continue to push accelerated students to be better each day.
The goal is to have this new English ciriculum continue to push West's excellence. The cirriculum will incorporate the current classes of FWW, IWW, With Justice for All, Writers in their Time, and Modern Literture. Now students will read and learn writing habits at the same time so that they can incorporate the new techniques that they are learning into the papers that they write.
During the first semester, all sophomores will learn the same material and read the same books at the same time. The 2nd semester will also include a Shakespeare festival. That semester, however, will give the students a choice between the themes of justice or identity. The students who choose justice will read more books from the current course With Justice for All while the students who choose identity will read books from Modern Literature.
At this point about 80% of sophomores take the five classes that are being eliminated to form English 10 and only about 35 sophomores take an honors English class. These statistics show that even when given a choice, most sophomores would choose classes that are now incorporated into English 10.
Because these five courses will be included into one, they will be eliminated from the elective choices. The first two years that this program is implemented, certain students will miss out on the opportunity to read those books but after that they will have already read them in English 10.
As with all changes, there are many people who are against the new core English 10. A major fear is that 10th grade English will be too hard for the struggling students and too easy for the accelerated ones.
English department chair Keesia Hyzer says that "West is a different school than it was 30 years ago," and it is time for West to look at how it teaches. She continues by giving statistics that West is currently a 40/60 ration minority to white, illustrating this difference.
Cindy Neusen, an English teach at West, agrees, saying that it is an "opportunity to make changes." Neusen recognizes that structure and consistancy is a positive thing and that it is currently not being reached with the electives in 10th grade.
Holmes states that it is impossible to implement the SLC's and have the English department work the way that West currently does with 26 electives. "We are trying to create a course that is engaging and rigerous" he says.
The key to success behind this program is the idea of collaboration. Without the English staff working together, this project will never get off the ground. Neusen states that "colaboration between the staff brings a lot of good things."
Holmes also uses the word "Colloboration" frequently, emphasizing the idea that the school needs to work together to make SLC's work.
Another positive that will come from the English 10 class is the extended amount of time that a student and teacher will have together. Sophomores "will see the same people and the same teacher for a year," says Neusen. "It takes about six weeks to get to know a student" and then after a semester you might never see them again. By having the same teacher for an entire year, the sophomore will be able to form a better bond with their English teacher, hopefully increasing their success since they won't have to get used to an entirely new class at semester.
Although all students are able to take whatever English class they want to, the student body knows what classes are going to be challenging and which ones you won't have to attend. They also know which teacher will give the A and which teacher you will have to work hard for a B. The English 10 ciriculum will eliminate this "tracking or self selecting below ability" says Neusen.
Many students have heard rumors about an honors component being added during students' lunch period. This rumor is, however, false. The English department is still working on the plan for the English 10 class, but there will not be an honors component added that requires students to give up a lot of their lunch time. Students who are struggling will be expected to seek help when they can, which may be during the one hour lunch, but that is an expectation in all classes, not solely an English 10 concept.
There are still many questions that will need to be answered. Steve olson, an English teacher at West High, is still skeptical about many aspects of how English 10 will work. His questions include: Who is making the decisions? How will they incorporate a fair honors component into this English program? Has the 9th grade core English worked well? How will this change effect what other departments at West are doing?
The staff working on this project is still pondering many of these questions, trying to find an acceptable answer that will lead to success. Holmes states that he is still looking at the question of "What should West be like?...As a school evolves we need to be reflective."
And from page 5, an opposing piece by West HS junior SB:
"West does not need a unified English 10: Student Response"
Our West High School is famous nationwide for its superb achievement levels in English largely because of our highly skilled teachers and the wide breadth of courses they offer. We have woven together an outstanding program of studies we should be proud of, one that has worked admirably for decades. However, the new Small Learning Community program wants to cut it down to size by snipping away at sophomores' right to choose their courses.
The plan, which is roughly outlined in the November 7 report from the West PTSO meeting (located at the following website: http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/report_from_wes.php), is to replace the wide range of classes sophomores can choose from with a single class called "English 10."
The new English 10 class is designed to cram FWW, IWW, Modern Literature, Writers in Their Times, and With Justice for All into a year-long course that every sophomore will have to take. This means that each course will include both students who may need extra help and students who won't be sufficiently challenged.
Naturally, any such program where students of such different levels are required to be in the same class will be problematic. The result will be that those that are already behind will slip even further behind because the course work is too challenging, and those who are already advanced will be bored utterly out of their minds. The average students will not receive the attention they need and deserve because the teacher is too busy attending to the needs of the rest of this students.
The supposed goal for this program is to "close the achievement gap," but placing students in an environment where no one benefits is not the way to go about it. In the end, no one wins; the students will suffer academically, and the teachers will have to work much harder.
The administration has tried to toss a few paltry bones at those concerned that many students' needs won't be met by suggesting that students who don't feel challenged can meet during lunch for extra study time! This is ridiculous -- no student would willingly give up their lunch hour for extra studying, and, even if they did, lunchtime is a valuable time for students to relax, eat, and hang out, in addition to studying and seeking help from teachers.
Even ignoring all this, what plans has the program made to accommodate students who might find the class too challenging? None.
In fact, the new standard curriculum itself is the most damaging of all. The literature is selected from an extremely narrow range; virtually all of it is American, and deals with the themes of either multiculturalism or oppression.
In addition, there is considerable emphasis placed on topics every single student in the class will have already been thoroughly grounded in: basic grammar and basic essay formats. Indeed, ingraining such rigid essay formats in the students' minds is actually thought to lock away much of their creativity, and in more advanced writing courses teachers frequently have to struggle to leech away the damage that has already been done.
The only flaw with this program is not only that it will wreak serious havoc in students' academic careers, but also that it will be much less enjoyable for the students. Students are not just inanimate objects rolling along an assembly line -- they are people and have their own interests they want to pursue, and when they get to choose their own courses they can select classes that will interest them and help them realize their own goals. By establishing English 10, the administration, is unwillingly making West a much less enjoyable place.
I have a younger sister who will be attending West in a few years, and I hope that she will be able to receive the same excellent education that my classmates and I are. But if the students lose the right to chose their 10th grade English education, that future grows a little furthe away.
Starting in the 2007-08 school year, any high school that offers an AP class will have to prove it meets certain College Board requirements. Teachers and administrators will have to perform annual self-audits and submit materials, including syllabi, to the College Board.
Prestigious universities value the letters AP (i.e., Advanced Placement) on an applicant's transcript, maintaining that success in AP courses is the best indicator of success in college. But students looking to score points with admissions officers have begun gaming the system. Many enroll in AP courses but never sit for the accompanying AP exam. And high schools—bowing to student pressure for more AP courses—are lowering expectations so that more students can have the coveted letters on their transcripts (see here for more on AP's expansion).
Bracey has been exposing statistics abuse for years. But I have never seen him put together all that he knows as well as he has in this book. It has some of the best explanations of educational numbers manipulation I have ever read, particularly issues like SAT scores, year-to-year school comparisons and argument by graph that are most likely to deceive us innocents. The book has Bracey's deft prose and sure touch with clarifying examples. I also appreciate the fact he trimmed much of his sharp ideological edge, loved by many of his fans, but not by me. He acknowledges several times that no combatant in the bitter education policy wars has an unquestionable grasp on the truth.
The Simpson Street Free Press will be holding a city-wide "Beat the Achievement Gap" conference on February 25 at 2:00 p.m. At this conference, students will take the following pledge: "I will be an active role model for younger students. I will work to spread a positive message of engagement at my school and in my community. I will encourage academic success among my peers."
For more information, see "The Gap According to Black: A Feature Column by Cydny Black" and the inspiring two-page spread entitled "Education: Bridging the Achievement Gap" in the January, 2006, issue of The Simpson Street Free Press. Additional information will soon be posted at www.simpsonstreetfreepress.org
The Highland School District, which has about 300 kindergarten through high school students, learned early this month they are one of 79 nationwide recipients of a $300,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development grant.
School Board president Brad Laufenberg said one of the disadvantages of being a smaller school district is the inability to provide a large and varied number of courses to their students.
"The distance learning lab will enable us to provide many more of those courses to both our students and the rest of the community," he said.
We live in a world instantly connected via satellites, computers, and other electronic technology. Our children embrace the technology that makes those connections possible, but need the educational background through cultural and linguistic experiences that will prepare them for the global world of today and their international future.
Burmaster raises some useful points. Clearly, it is no longer sufficient to compare Madison's curriculum and achievement with Racine, Green Bay or Kenosha. Rather, the question should include Bangalore, Helsinki, Shanghai, Taipei and Osaka, among others.
We asked our nine districts what their biggest barriers were in achieving excellence at scale, and they described five categories of management challenges:
Implementing a district-wide strategy
Achieving organizational coherence in support of the strategy
Developing and managing human capital
Allocating resources in alignment with the strategy
Using performance data for decision making and accountability
If "homogeneous" is bad, is "heterogeneous" better?
An article from American Educator, a magazine of the American Federation of Teachers:
. . . detracking accomplished many transformations in a few short years. It transformed teaching from difficult to impossible. It transformed the ideal of equal instruction for all into practices offering less instruction for all. It transformed faster students from motivated allies to disengaged threats . And it transformed teachers from detracking enthusiasts into advocates for a return to tracking. These results pose challenges for researchers and practitioners. While tracking often has bad outcomes, detracking
is not necessarily better.
Researchers who have played a role in criticizing tracking must also consider the potential problems of detracking. Until such studies are done, high school practitioners should be cautious about proceeding to detracking reforms just because they sound appealing. There is too much at stake, and there is great risk of unanticipated negative outcomes. These teachers’ experiences indicate that good intentions and hard work are not enough to make detracking successful.
Substitue "homogeneous" for "tracked" and "heterogeneous" for "detracked," and see whether the article has any application to West's Curriculum Reduction Plan.
Larry Winkler called attention to the figures in the recent assessment of literacy among adult Americans, as reported in the New York Times. An article in the Capital Times brings the issue closer to home:
. . .Wisconsin has the second highest high school graduation in the country for whites, it has the worst (50th out of 50 states) for African-Americans, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy reports.
Community-based literacy councils attempt to help those with the lowest literacy skills, said Erickson, whose nonprofit statewide organization provides support, training and advocacy to its 45 member literacy councils.
"They are on the frontlines serving the adults in the very lowest levels of literacy skills without access to most of the federal and state funding," she said.
Most, in fact, rely on volunteers to tutor adults with limited literacy skills.
In 2004, more than 1,000 adult learners were served by the Madison Area Literacy Council, 264 of whom got the skills needed to get a job, while 280 learners were able to become active in the education of their children, said Executive Director Greg Markle.
Here is the email I wrote earlier today to Ed Holmes, Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, Mary Gulbrandsen, and the seven members of the BOE, followed by the reply I just received from Ed Holmes:
I wrote:
Hello, everyone. I wonder if one of you would please send us a status report on the plans for 10th grade English at West for next year? Many of us have written to you multiple times about this matter, but without any reply. We are trying to be patient, polite, collaborative and upbeat (despite the fact that we are feeling frustrated, ignored and stonewalled).
Specifically, would one of you please tell us:
1) what will be printed in the 2006-07 West course catalogue about 10th grade English? (when is the printer deadline, by the way? has it already passed? if so, please send us a copy of the text that will appear for the English Department course offerings)
2) when will an English 10 update be posted on the West website? (we were told it would be there early this week -- it's still not)
3) when will we be provided with West HS and MMSD data that support this proposal as a way to address the low achievement in English for some groups of West students (as described and defined in the West SLC report on English 10)?
4) when will we be provided with the citations for the empirical studies upon which this proposal -- and the apparent District-wide move to heterogeneous classes in our middle and high schools -- is being based? (presumably you have already done a literature search on this topic, so a reference list must exist somewhere that can easily be sent to us)
5) we heard a rumor almost two weeks ago that the English 10 curriculum will be tried as a pilot project only next year; is that true? (we have written to several of you, asking specifically about that rumor; but no one has replied)
6) has anyone followed through on my idea to connect with Emily Auerbach and the Odyssey Project (www.odyssey.wisc.edu), either for West only or for the District, generally?
Thanks for getting back to us with the answers to these questions as soon as possible.
Laurie
I received the following reply from Ed Holmes:
Laurie,
We had hoped to have the information regarding English 10 online early this week. We are still working on the final piece of information before it is to go out to the public. We are really close. We have a number of people reviewing the plan to be sure all aspects of the proposal are clear and correct. We have not submitted anything that will be an official course description for English 10 at this time. I know the course of study deadline is of concern but we will delay its submission until we have all the accurate information needed.
This process is one where we must be meticulous. What we say must be clear and accurately reflect our plan. Anything that comes from West High school becomes part of the public domain. It is not only a reflection of me but everyone who is a part of the West High school community. I cannot release the information until it complete.
I appreciate your patience and understand your frustration in this challenging process.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings outlined new testing rules for disabled students yesterday, formalizing an initiative that has already helped more than 100 public schools in Maryland and Virginia meet the standards of the No Child Left Behind law.
The board had decided that any student who wanted to take a high school honors or college-level course could do so. The only prerequisite was a desire to work hard.
The School Board also said that anyone taking difficult Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses had to take the special AP and IB exams written and scored by independent experts and administered in May. The number of exams nearly doubled, and passing rates on those college-level tests dropped sharply. In 1998, 75 percent of students taking AP tests in the county received passing scores. In 1999, that figure was only 62 percent.
Here in this integrated, upper-middle-class Cleveland suburb, you would think they would be boasting. African-Americans' combined math and verbal SAT scores average 976, 110 points above the national average for black students. The number of black sixth graders scoring proficient on the state math test has nearly doubled in three years and is more than 20 percentage points above the Ohio average for blacks.
A black parent group here has sponsored many projects aimed at narrowing the gap, including a summer enrichment program started in 1997. In October, Alisa Smith opened a parent room at the high school to encourage more adult involvement. Ms. Smith, a Columbia graduate and a stay-at-home mother, and her husband, a doctor, have three children in the schools, including Andre, the MAC scholar. While she says her children have been underestimated at times because they are black, over all she is delighted with the schools.
Education Trust: "How Some High Schools Are Boosting Student Achievement."
The Education Trust:
The Education Trust's two newest reports highlight the practices of high schools that are getting the job done and improving student achievement, especially for the poor and minority children traditionally underserved by the American high school.
Improvements in standards in primary and secondary schools in England are being marred by poor levels of literacy and numeracy, Ofsted inspectors say.
Pupils with below average abilities in reading, writing and maths are not getting enough help, Ofsted reports.
According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Black parents, especially Black parents of children in urban schools, strongly support school choice. This result should be unsurprising: The futures of their children are directly, if not irrevocably, compromised by the continuing failure of urban schools. At the same time, most longstanding civil-rights organizations — like the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) — strongly oppose school choice. The following assertions of LCCR, contained in its platform statement on educational matters, is typical:
The Michigan State Board of Education is set to approve a new graduation requirement today that would make every high-school student in the state take at least one online course before receiving a diploma.
The new requirement would appear to be the first of its kind in the nation. Mike Flanagan, the Michigan state superintendent of public instruction, said he proposed the online-course requirement, along with other general requirements, to make sure students were prepared for college and for jobs, which are becoming more technology-focused.
"We don't want our kids left in the global dust," Mr. Flanagan said. "It's an experience we need to have."
Forget the philosophies about heterogeneous versus homogenous classrooms. Forget English 9. Forget Shakespeare.
English 10 just ain’t gonna’ work for struggling and advanced student, who we’re told can meet with teachers twice a week during the lunch hour.
A few quick calculations show the glaring impossibility of success for these students.
* Twenty-percent of West’s 10th graders cannot read at grade level.
* Let’s assume a perfect bell shaped curve, which would mean twenty percent can handle work beyond the regular coursework.
* Soooooo, 40% of the 10th graders should be meeting with teachers during lunch.
* West has 535 9th graders this year, meaning that next year 214 10th graders will need to meet with a teacher during the lunch hour. (535 x 40% = 214)
* If they meet with a teacher twice a week, that produces 428 contacts of some sort in the week. (214 students x twice a week = 428)
* Those 428 contacts spread over five days in the week mean that 85 10th graders need to see a teacher during the lunch hour each day.
* Let’s assume that 10 English teachers will be available, meaning that each teacher will be able to meet with 8 students during a lunch hour.
* Going further, let’s assume that in between eating and getting to the class after lunch, the schedule allows 40 minutes for students to meet with teachers.
* If each teacher meets individually with each of the 8 students during those 40 minutes, each student will have 5 minutes with a teacher.
What’s a struggling student or an honors student going to learn in 5 minutes?
Or, maybe West could create 3 or 4 more sections of English 10 to meet during those 40 minutes for those 85 students each day, leading us right back to asking whether those classes should be grouped heterogeneously or not.
In short, the planning for West’s English Curriculum Reduction Plan needs to deal with the reality of only a few minutes a day during lunch to meet the academic needs of 214 students. It needs to deal with the reality of providing academic challenge and producing academic excellence for each and every student at West. The students deserve it.
ps. See what else goes on at lunch at West by visiting the school’s page on more than 100 Lunch and Learn Activities, which run AODA Use Support Group to English Help groups five days a week.
Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: A Look at the Educational Histories of the 29 West HS National Merit Semi-Finalists
Earlier this semester, 60 MMSD students -- including 29 from West HS -- were named 2006 National Merit Semifinalists. In a 10/12/05 press release, MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater said, "I am proud of the many staff members who taught and guided these students all the way from elementary school, and of this district's overall guidance and focus that has led to these successes."
A closer examination of the facts, however, reveals that only 12 (41%) of West High School's 29 National Merit Semifinalists attended the Madison public schools continuously from first grade on (meaning that 59% received some portion of their K-8 schooling in either private schools or non-MMSD public schools). Here's the raw data:
NMSF #28: Montessori pre-K through 2nd; Shorewood 4th-5th; Eagle 5th-8th
NMSF #29: Shorewood K-5th; Hamilton
Looking at the sample in a little more detail, we find the following:
Elementary school (K-5) history: 31% attended private school for three or more years (an additional 21% attended non-MMSD public schools for three or more years -- total: 52%).
Middle school (6-8) history: 28% attended private school for two or more years (an additional 14% attended non-MMSD public schools for two or more years -- total: 42%).
K-8 schooling history: 28% attended private school for five or more of their K-8 school years (an additional 17% attended non-MMSD public schools for five or more of their K-8 school years -- total: 45%)
Although we do not have K-8 attendance data for the entire class, it seems unlikely to think that almost 30% of current West seniors attended private school for five or more of their pre-high school years. Thus on this single demographic variable, the 29 West National Merit Semifinalists are probably different from their classmates, generally.
Descriptive data like these are certainly interesting, though they often raise more questions than they answer. And of course, they don't prove anything. Nevertheless, with 45% of the West HS National Merit Semifinalist sample attending non-MMSD schools for over half of their K-8 years, it is recommended that the District temper its sense of pride in and ownership of these very accomplished students.
Many thanks to each of these fine young people for speaking with us on the telephone. Congratulations and good luck to each and every one of them!
The report is in two parts. In the first, the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP) provides new data that inform questions such as: Is the charter school movement growing or slowing down? Do charter schools serve more or fewer disadvantaged children than regular public schools? Are charter schools innovative? It also identifies several important questions on which state and local record keeping needs to be improved.
The second part of this report takes up issues and controversies that have characterized the discussion of charter schools in the past year. NCSRP's goal is to provide essays that examine these controversies in a broad context and assemble evidence in as balanced and informative way as possible. The essays are unlikely to settle any of these issues definitively, but they may establish a more constructive basis for continued discussion.
EDUSAT, sent into space last year, is India’s first educational satellite. It will allow American instructors to lead classes in remote classrooms, thousands of miles away, via Web cast.
“Any Indian village could set up a receiving station and receive a signal, and schools would need only a computer and a simple Web camera to view the lessons,” Sanjay Limaye, senior scientist at the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center, said in a release.
The targets of the satellite are rural Indian communities, which are plagued by a lack of educational infrastructure and a lack of good teachers.
"Ninth grade in America's public schools has become an increasingly severe hurdle to student progress," said Walter Haney, a Boston College education professor who has done much research on why more ninth-graders are being held back and eventually dropping out.
Q: So what can parents do to fight for better schools?
A: Former American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker said the New York City union needed to "become a disaster" to be taken as seriously as a hurricane that had worked its way up the East Coast. Parents also need to be a "disaster." No one who has power in education got it by asking nicely. Public education is about politics, politics is about power, and if parents want control over what happens to their kids, they have to go out there and steal power from someone else. I'm not suggesting that parents be out there running schools, but if they were a little more demanding, we wouldn't be in this mess.
12/9/05 Reply to West Principal Ed Holmes re: English 10
Hi, Ed. Thanks for writing. I look forward to seeing the material you're putting up on the website.
A couple of other questions --
I'm curious to know what Shwaw Vang has asked you for? In particular, did his request include outcome data for English 9? As you know, many of us think a thorough evaluation of English 9 is the wisest (and most responsible) first step to take in developing English 10. Wouldn't it be a shame not to avail ourselves of the several years' worth of data there for the picking?
Also, given that one of the concerns driving the English 10 initiative is concern that some students don't take the higher level electives and some get through West without any bona fide literature and writing courses, did anyone think about requiring a certain number of upper level electives, literature courses, and writing courses for graduation? That seems to me the most straightforward approach to the stated problem.
I am glad to know that you are starting to see us as your partners in this process -- not your adversaries -- and that you are grappling with the Very Challenging Truth that West's diverse student body does not have exactly the same learning needs throughout, thus the needs cannot be met effectively with standardized, cookie-cutter solutions.
Speaking of partnership and the diversity of solutions needed, later today I will be dropping off the 20-minute DVD on the Odyssey Project that Emily Auerbach sent me. I would appreciate getting it back by winter break. Feel free to share it with Keesia, Pam, Art and any others. It's really powerful. When I think of some of the students who appear in the film being available to dialogue with students and teachers at West, well, I get really hopeful.
Finally, please know that no one is questioning the excellence or commitment of anyone involved in this conversation and struggle. Never have been. I truly believe that we all have the kids as our highest priority.
Gov. Jim Doyle supports the push to increase the math and science proficiency of high school students, which is primarily coming from business leaders.
They say a lack of these skills among those entering the labor pool is putting Wisconsin at risk of losing jobs because there won't be enough qualified workers to fill positions ranging from manufacturing jobs to computer specialists, from engineers to mathematical, life and physical scientists and engineering and science technicians.
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, supports increasing the state requirements. Madison high schools require two years of each subject, but in recent years the district has strengthened its math requirement so that all students must now take algebra and geometry to graduate, Rainwater said.
If the state does not increase its math and science requirements, the district will likely consider raising them, he said.
But School Board President Carol Carstensen said she isn't certain requiring more courses is the way to best prepare all students to succeed after high school.
And just increasing the requirements (emphasis added) won't make the classes more rigorous, said Lake Mills chemistry teacher Julie Cunningham, who recently won the prestigious Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award.
Additional links and background on math and science curriculum.
SIP Goal #2: Literacy-All students at John Muir will be proficient readers by the end of third grade.
Rationale: 50% of African Americans beginning fourth graders have minimal or basic reading skills as measured by the WKCE test. As a school, all students need to demonstrate proficient or advanced reading and writing skills. All classroom teachers will implement components of a Balance Literacy program. Students will have increased opportunities to read and practice their skills using a variety of ficion and non-fiction texts.
Reply from West HS Principal Ed Holmes to request for update on English 10
Hi Laurie,
The discussion about 10th grade English and 10th grade core continues. There will be a statement and responses to questions that have been raised by parents, community, and staff online in the form of a link from the West High website early next week. I will also submit information to MMSD School Board member Shwaw Vang as per his request regarding direction of 10th grade English.
I have been working with some of the best eductors in the field to address the concerns that have been raised in order to develop the best plan possible to meet the academic needs of all students at West High. I am excited that we are having this discourse and that everyone's perspective is being heard. This process challenges everyone to work hard to come up with the best possible plan to meet the academic needs of our students.
I expect to hear a strong voice and challenge from a community and parents that are as informed and concerned as the parents and community of West. I will continue to do my best as Instructional Leader at West to meet the needs of all students, maintain high academic standards, and preserve the reputation of West as a school of academic excellence.
This is indeed challenging and exciting work. Thank you for your continued interest, perspective, and concern.
Catholic and private schools in Dayton have seen a 20 percent decline in enrollment over the past five years in the face of changing demographics and intense competition from charter schools, which are tuition-free public schools run by private operators.
But the U.S. educational system is failing in precisely those areas that underpin our competitiveness: science, engineering and mathematics. In a recent international test involving mathematical understanding, U.S. students finished 27th among the participating nations. In China and Japan, 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively, of undergraduates receive their degrees in science and engineering, compared with 32 percent in the United States.
I've recently had an opportunity to review these trends as chairman of a 20-member committee created by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. Congress asked the committee to examine the threats to America's future prosperity. The panel was a diverse group that included university presidents, Nobel laureates, heads of companies and former government officials. We agreed unanimously that the United States faces a serious and intensifying economic challenge from abroad -- and that we appear to be on a losing path.
The Madison Metropolitan School District has been a leader in creating inclusive educational opportunities for children. Since the District's closing of Badger School in 1977, there has been steady progress toward fully including our children with disabilities in the general educational experience in our schools. Most children with disabilities now attend their neighborhood school where special education and classroom teachers work collaboratively to ensure that the learning experience is appropriate for every child in the classroom.
The sense of community and relationships between students with and without disabilities that develop in the school setting set the stage for many of our disabled citizens to join a pluralistic society as adults. Our community at large is enriched by providing valuable opportunities for children with disabilities to move into the world of work and be productive citizens.
First, let me say a hearty and heartfelt "thank you" for replying to my 12/2 email request -- and so promptly. One of the major frustrations parents have experienced over the many months we have been expressing our concerns about what's happening at West HS is the chronic non-responsiveness of the people we have been trying to dialogue with. (Frankly, I am continually amazed to see how little understanding District officials seem to have about how their silence makes difficult situations much, much worse than they need to be.)
Also, I am glad to know that you see the issue of heterogeneous versus homogeneous grouping in classrooms as "a broader policy issue" that the BOE has a responsibility to involve itself with. I hope you will also agree that the conversation -- if it is to be a responsible and meaningful one -- must be empirically based. To that end, parents have repeatedly asked District officials for MMSD data and empirical studies from the educational literature that support, for example, the changes being made at West and the District's drive, generally, towards heterogeneous classes in our middle and high schools. I hope you, too, will insist that those data and studies be brought forward and evaluated thoroughly before any actions are taken.
You say, Carol, that we have to give this time. Well, let me fill you in a bit so that you can appreciate that we have, indeed, given it time and, in fact, have been quite patient.
I wrote my first email to a West HS administrator regarding my concerns about the plans for West in April of 2004, several months before I became a West parent. (My email exchange with Mr. Rathert actually became his monthly column in the Regent Reporter the next month.) Similarly, I corresponded with current West Principal Ed Holmes (and members of his staff) about the same issues and concerns several times last year and met with him in his office for almost 90 minutes in May. At that time, I offered to be part of the team that was going to be working on the science and English curricula over the summer. I also asked to please be kept abreast of developments. I didn't hear anything further about anything Mr. Holmes and I had discussed (despite multiple inquiries over the summer and early fall) until I read the October issue of the Regent Reporter. In a word, I was outraged that I and the many other concerned parents I know who had written to and met with Mr. Holmes had been shut out of the process so completely.
Carol, over the course of the past almost two years, I have made the same points over and over -- to administrators, teachers, superintendents, BOE members -- regarding my concerns that the curriculum changes occurring at West are not able to meet the learning needs of all students, specifically, the highest and lowest performing 15-20% of students. Appropriate learning opportunities for certain groups of students at West (in particular, the "high flyers") are clearly eroding, making it an ever more different learning environment for them than exists for their counterparts at our other high schools. Sometimes my focus has been science (e.g., the need for additional sections of Accelerated Biology); more recently, it has been English 10. In all of my correspondence, I have requested hard data and empirical studies that support the decisions being made. Many other parents have written to and met with the same District staff. They have expressed the same concerns and made the same requests for data. All of our efforts have been to no avail.
You also need to know, Carol, that at the 11/7 West PTSO meeting (which was the first time the West administration shared with parents the details of the plans for English 10), it was mentioned that the 2006-07 course catalogue is due at the printer in December. That's this month. As well, West students will be registering for their 2006-07 courses in early February. Alas, despite our best efforts and quite enormous patience, really, we have been unable to avoid a time crunch because of the clear use of the well-worn District strategy of stonewalling-plus-letting-the-clock-run-down.
Personally, I think we have given the Performance and Achievement Committee adequate opportunity to act on this matter. As you know, I wrote to them on 11/21 (hand-delivering my letter to Shwaw Vang) and again on 11/28. I also left a message for Mr. Vang on his home answering machine the morning of 11/29. In each communication, I stressed the urgency of the matter; but still no response. Carol, if you can promise us that West will not go ahead with its plans for English 10 (nor will the District proceed with any concrete plans that involve heterogeneous grouping in our middle schools) until there has been a thoroughgoing, data-driven, community-wide conversation about the fundamental issues involved (for example, what is the evidence that English 9 has had a positive impact on the achievement gap at West? shouldn't we know that before we expand the approach into 10th grade?), then I promise to relax and assume a less urgent stance once again. I will also wait patiently until January for that conversation to start. I am sure that others will join me, but if and only if they see that the clock on these projects has truly been stopped in order to allow for a better process.
I have every confidence that you understand the wisdom of such a course of action for our great community ... and that you can make it happen.
If a student were to arrive at one of our high schools with, say, phenomenal basketball skills (shooting 90% from the free throw line and over 50% from the three-point line, dominating the backboard like nobody's business, etc.) -- the result of a combination of natural ability, hard work, and years of play outside of school and at specialized summer camps -- would we make him play on the freshman team (i.e., take Basketball 9)? Or would we immediately put him on the varsity squad (i.e., into AP Basketball)? Would we hold him back out of concern for the feelings of all the kids (like mine) who aren't that good at basketball or don't like basketball, insisting that he be patient, play at a level far lower than what he is capable of, and not learn anything new while we worked to bring all the others up to some common level of play? No way. Not in a million years. You know as well as I do that he'd be put on the varsity/AP team immediately, he'd get lots of media and community attention, and people would thrill at the thought of him playing for our side for a four full years.
Why is this a "no-brainer" in the world of sports, but a "no-no" in the world of academics? Any thoughts or insights would be greatly appreciated.
No tide of cash from virtual schools
Online efforts aren't the big revenue source many had foreseen
By AMY HETZNER, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
ahetzner@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Dec. 4, 2005
With a contract to open the first statewide virtual high school before them, the mood of the members of the Waukesha School Board at their January 2004 monthly meeting was effusive.
A cost simulation showed that the school - called iQ Academies at Wisconsin - could start generating as much as $1 million for the school district by the 2006-'07 school year.
School Board members gushed.
"Pretty sweet," board member Daniel Warren said about the numbers.
A little more than a year into the iQ's operation, however, the school has yet to come close to matching the board's high hopes.
Expected to run $1.2 million in the red by next summer, the school faces possible closure unless administrators show they can stop the financial bleeding.
"There are not a lot of options," Warren said in a recent interview. "One option is to not proceed in the third year, to shut the program down because it's not working financially for us."
What has happened with the Waukesha school caught not only its board members but other school officials in the state off-guard.
And it raises questions about a previously uncontested notion about virtual schools - that they save money.
"I think the assumption was everybody saw it as a quick way to make a dollar. And it's not," said William Harbron, superintendent of the Northern Ozaukee School District, which runs the Wisconsin Virtual Academy.
Grandiose expectations
When the idea of virtual schools with students attending from home via computer first emerged, it seemed a sure-fire way for a savvy school district to make some extra cash.
Without the physical facilities of traditional school systems and the related transportation concerns, the schools could lure students from around the state, bringing more than $5,000 each under the state's open enrollment system, while still operating below the cost of a regular school.
The Appleton Area School District was the first to jump on board in 2002 when it signed an agreement with Sylvan Ventures to open Wisconsin Connections Academy to elementary-age students statewide. The Northern Ozaukee School District followed in 2003 with another virtual elementary school before Waukesha launched its new high school in 2004.
Finances in Connections Academy's first year were not picture perfect, Appleton Assistant Superintendent Todd Gray said.
That year, the school had to fend off a lawsuit filed by the state's largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council. In addition, the school had planned for a larger staff than was necessary after receiving applications from 1,000 students, only 400 of whom ended the 2002-'03 school year enrolled in the Appleton charter school, Gray said.
Even today, with a formula in place to account for the large student attrition rate common to virtual schools, the district is fortunate to break even at the end of the year, Gray said.
"I'll be honest with you, our margin's pretty close," he said. "I mean, we didn't go into this to make money. If we make 30 to 40 thousand a year net, that's fine."
Northern Ozaukee's Harbron also said that money was not his district's motivation when it opened Wisconsin Virtual Academy two years ago. Since then, however, the school has provided an extra $120,000 annually for the district's operating fund, which Harbron said offsets funding losses caused by declining enrollment in the district's brick-and-mortar schools.
Any savings the school has comes from its large student-teacher ratio, he said, which could be threatened by a lawsuit filed by WEAC that contends the school violates state law because it relies too much on parents to fill the role of certified teachers.
While Northern Ozaukee isn't losing money, the same can't be said for K12 Inc., the educational company once headed by former education secretary William Bennett that is contracted to run Wisconsin Virtual Academy.
As it has expanded to become the country's largest operator of online public schools, K12 has yet to turn a profit, said Jeff Kwitowski, the company's director of public relations.
But much of that is because the company is still developing its product, a full K-12 online curriculum with associated materials, he said.
"We're not looking to make profit off the management side," Kwitowski said. "Our product is where we're going to eventually be successful. . . . Then we're going to, I think, see our product kind of take off and sell itself as districts are saying, 'Hey, this is great stuff.' "
Careful contractual agreements have protected the Appleton and Northern Ozaukee school districts from major losses in the first years operating their virtual schools.
Waukesha school defended
Waukesha School Board member Kurt O'Bryan thinks his district's contract with KC Distance Learning does the same. So far he's in a minority in his district.
Splitting its losses with KC Distance Learning, the private company that the Waukesha School District contracted with to start iQ Academies last year, the district is on pace to lose $716,720 by the end of the school year because of iQ, according to a November report by the district's business office.
A number of factors are at work. Revenue has been below expectations, with fewer students bringing fewer dollars to the school than originally predicted. In addition, the state's open enrollment reimbursement amount, which had been increasing by between $125 and $231 a year, rose only $50 per pupil last school year.
Costs also have been running higher than expected, with more teachers on staff than can be justified by the number of students who eventually enroll.
iQ Principal Kristine Diener suggested that the school could increase its pupil-teacher ratios and start writing its own curriculum instead of purchasing it from outside vendors as cost-saving measures.
Closing is not an option to Diener.
"I think everyone feels that we're meeting some very important needs," she said. "The main thing is we want to have this available for our students internally."
Waukesha's virtual school is vitally important to students such as Sammuel Kimball, a former home-schooler who enrolled at iQ this year so he could have access to upper-level math teachers, said Sammuel's father, Arthur Kimball.
"I would say the Waukesha School Board should be applauded at every corner," he said. "To take the risk to open the school up and to allow this educational opportunity, it's totally amazing, and it's above and beyond the call of duty."
Aggressive recruiting of more students like Sammuel who would not be as well served by traditional schools would be a better answer than closing iQ, Kimball said.
Sixteen-year-old Sammuel agreed.
"It is a really good opportunity for a lot of people," the high school junior said. "It's just not known enough."
the state Department of Public Instruction to create rules forcing Wisconsin schools to offer uniform programs for gifted and talented students.
State law already requires districts to identify students who qualify as gifted and talented and offer appropriate programming.
But Todd Palmer, a Madison attorney spearheading the parents' effort, said Thursday schools have pulled resources away from those programs because of ongoing budget problems. The parents filed a petition for rulemaking, a rarely used option to ask the agency to create new rules.
DPI Petition:
My name is Todd Palmer and I am a parent of three students enrolled in Wisconsin public schools. I am writing to ask for your help on a matter which should not take more than several minutes of your time.
Specifically, I am asking you to sign a Petition requesting that DPI promulgate rules to govern public school districts in providing access to appropriate and uniform programs for pupils identified as gifted and/or talented. This Petition was filed with DPI on November 29, 2005 under the signatures of several parents and educators. However, this effort could use additional support from you. This would involve a minimal effort on your part, but has the potential to greatly benefit your children and/or students.
If you support the Petition, please print and sign the signature page (p. 16). Please include your signature, printed name, address and date.
Either fax, e-mail or snail mail the signed petition to me at the following address (or mail directly to DPI):
Todd Palmer
2 East Mifflin Street, Suite 600
Madison, WI 53703-2965
Facsimile: 608-252-9243
Phone: 608-255-8891
E-mail: tep@dewittross.com
Spread the word in your community and gather more signatures. Contact friends and acquaintances to request their signatures as well.
By signing the Petition you are supporting a request that DPI establish rules to do the following:
Establish clear and objective criteria for the uniform identification of gifted and talented pupils enrolled in Wisconsin public schools.
Establish clear and objective criteria to ensure that all school districts provide uniform, systematic and continuous instructional activities to fully develop the capabilities of gifted and talented pupils.
Establish clear and objective criteria to ensure that gifted and talented pupils have access to appropriate programs.
Establish an infrastructure within DPI with sufficient staffing and resources to assist school districts in meeting these requirements.
Establish an inspection, auditing and enforcement program to ensure that all school districts are meeting these obligations.
Establish a process for pupils, and their guardians, to appeal decisions made by school districts with regard to gifted and talented education.
Establish a Gifted and Talented Education Council to advise DPI on education issues, including the development of these rules.
Establish a requirement that the president of each school district Board annually certify to their district's compliance with all gifted and talented education mandates.
Establish a talented and gifted teacher certification process with requirements that teachers participate in periodic, continuing education courses.
Several individuals have put many hours of thought and work into this Petition. These efforts were not undertaken to benefit their own children. Rather, they are trying to improve the educational opportunities for all gifted and talented children throughout the state-including your children and students. I implore you to take several moments and complete the very simple task of signing the Petition and getting a copy returned to me.
There are over 51,000 GT students in this state. If we band together we maybe able to improve the resources devoted to their educational experience.
It is easier to be a genius when you don't have to pay the rent. We live in a world that values dependability over brilliance and where jobs that reward curiosity may not support a family. The time to explore and take bold risks is a luxury few of us, genius or not, can afford once we leave school. Measuring programs for gifted children by the success of their adult graduates overlooks the significant hurdles that lie just after graduation.
Kate Wing
San Francisco
I have found that there is often an inverse relationship between what I perceive to be a genuinely innovative thinker in my third-grade classroom and the attitude of the parents. The most intellectually curious and imaginative problem solvers have parents who are supportive of rather than ambitious for their child. And each year I am struck by how some of the most perceptive children come from families whose parents have no time to advocate for them and no "gifted" agenda to pursue.
Who would believe that I’d call any MMSD data excellent?
It’s true!
But first, the critical point: I respectfully urge the board of education to approve funding in the next budget to expand Read 180 to West as part of West’s English 9 and English 10. Read 180 would help those students who cannot read well enough to succeed in those courses, as well as all other West courses.
Now the background.
After I asked and asked for data on the costs of various programs, the MMSD finally posted (without any fanfare) useful figures on the cost of Read 180, a successful program used in Wisconsin and across the nation to teach reading to adolescents.
The MMSD praised Read 180, but the superintendent said the district had no funds to expand the program.
Now we see that the computer-based Read 180 curriculum costs about $40,000 per school for hardware and software, according to the MMSD figures.
Read 180 could address the lack of any current proposal for instruction for poor readers in English 9 and 10.
With real numbers about costs, the board of education can now decide whether it’s willing to find $40,000 in the next budget to round out West’s English curriculum. Once low-skilled readers can actually read at grade level, core English might begin to make sense. But not until all the students can read at grade level.
Consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal study released last month. It found that, despite some improvement, American kids remain academically underwhelming. Only 31 percent of fourth-graders, for instance, were rated ''proficient'' or better in reading. Just 30 percent of eighth-graders managed to hit that mark in math.
In recent years, I've taught writing at an elite public high school and three universities. I've been appalled at how often I've encountered students who could not put a sentence together and had no conception of grammar and punctuation. They tell me I'm a tough grader, and the funny thing is, I think of myself as a soft touch. ''I've always gotten A's before,'' sniffed one girl to whom I thought I was being generous in awarding a C-plus.
It occurs to me that this is the fruit of our dumbing down education in the name of ''self-esteem.'' This is what we get for making the work easier instead of demanding the students work harder -- and the parents be more involved.
So this new white flight is less a surprise than a fresh disappointment. And I've got news for those white parents:
A reform effort launched by Charlotte-Mecklenburg in the late 1990s focused on shifting more district funds to low-performing schools from schools that were doing better -- a move that has lately created some backlash. The district also reduced class sizes in those schools and offered to pay graduate-school tuition for teachers who agreed to work in those schools for at least two years. The district also required all of its elementary schools to adhere to a strict, phonics-based reading program.
And it brought more learning-disabled students back into mainstream classrooms and paired up teachers who had been teaching them separately. Now, "you have a great combination of teachers who are very, very versed in reading and teachers who are very, very versed in additional learning strategies," says Frances Haithcock, the district's interim superintendent.
Fifty years after Milton Friedman first proposed the idea of education vouchers, school choice proposals come in all shapes and sizes. We asked a dozen experts what reforms they think are most necessary and promising to improve American education. We also asked them to identify the biggest obstacles to positive change. Here are their answers. Comments should be sent to letters@reason.com.
Currently -- having failed to receive any reply from BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang to our request that he investigate this matter and provide an opportunity for public discussion -- we are trying to get BOE President Carol Carstensen to put a discussion of the English 10 proposal (and the apparent lack of data supporting its implementation) on the agenda for a BOE meeting. Aside from the fact that there is serious doubt that the course, as proposed, will meet the educational needs of the high and low end students, it is clear we are witnessing yet another example of school officials making radical curricular changes without empirical evidence that they will work and without open, honest and respectful dialogue with the community.
As the bumper sticker says, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!"
11/7/2005: West PTSO meeting, where the plans for English 10 were first introduced. A videotape of the English 10 portion of the meeting (along with additional background information) may be found here.
11/9/2005: After hearing from two independent sources who attended the 11/8 West faculty meeting that West Principal Ed Holmes represented the parents who attended the previous night's PTSO meeting as very supportive of the English 10 proposal, I write Mr. Holmes a forceful, clarifying letter.
11/9/2005: I request a copy of the report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King that someone mentioned at the 11/7 PTSO meeting. I am told by West Principal Ed Holmes that the report is a "confidential" and a "draft."
11/14/2005: After several days of investigation and writing to the proper District authorities, I obtain a copy of the SLC report from MMSD Attorney Clarence Sherrod. http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/evaluation_of_t.php
11/14/2005: I re-send to West Principal Ed Holmes the list of questions that several of us submitted to him and West English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer before the 11/7 PTSO meeting because most of the questions were not answered at the meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
11/18/2005: Several West HS attendance area parents meet with Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash. We discuss many important issues pertaining to the English 10 plan and request data and empirical studies that support what is being done at West.
11/20/2005: I send Pam Nash a follow-up email of thanks, reinforcing our request for West and MMSD data -- as well as empirical studies -- that support the implementation of English 10 and the move towards heterogeneous classes in our middle and high schools. I include the list of talking points that our group generated before our meeting with her because we did not get to all of them in our meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
11/21/2005: I pen a request to BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang (copying several other District officials), asking that he obtain the data that forms the basis for a couple of important points in Bruce King's SLC report, points regarding the apparent failure of English 9 to impact the achievement gap. Several others sign the request. We ask that the data be made public and that the P& A Committee hold a public discussion of the data. Knowing that Mr. Vang doesn't "do" email, I hand-deliver a copy of my request to him, along with a hard copy of the SLC report. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Mr. Vang and his committee members (Ruth Robarts and Bill Keys), asking about the status of our request and stressing the time urgency of the situation. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Pam Nash, urgently requesting an update on the situation at West. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Ms. Nash.)
11/29/2005: I leave a message on Mr. Vang's answering machine asking for a status report on our request. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
11/30/2005: I receive an email from Bill Keys, essentially a forward of a brief message from Art Rainwater.
11/30/2005: I write back to Bill, copying Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and Mary Gulbrandsen.
12/02/2005: I write an email to Madison Board of Education President Carol Carstensen that the Board discuss plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
Chronology with emails follows below:
11/7/2005: West PTSO meeting, where the plans for English 10 were first introduced. A video of the English 10 portion of the meeting (along with additional background information) may be found here:
11/9/2005: After hearing from two independent sources who attended the 11/8 West faculty meeting that West Principal Ed Holmes represented the parents who attended the previous night's PTSO meeting as very supportive of the English 10 proposal, I write Mr. Holmes a forceful, clarifying letter.
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:15:05 -0600
To: eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: English at West HS
Cc: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com,robarts@execpc.com,ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us,jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us,svang7@madison.k12.wi.us,jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Dear Ed,
I have it on very good authority that you misrepresented Monday night's PTSO meeting at your full faculty meeting yesterday. It is not clear if this was a matter of positive spin, selective inattention, or willful calculation. Yes, parents were calm, well-behaved and non-combative, and they tried to compliment the good they saw in the proposed curriculum. There are some great books on the list (though someone has since pointed out that most are by male authors), plus we appreciate the goal of integrating the writing assignments with the literature being read. As I see it, though, our good behavior speaks to our respectfulness and willingness to collaborate, not to our support of the plan as presented.
More specifically, I would estimate that approximately 80%, possibly more, of the parent comments Monday night were not positive and accepting of the plans for English 10 as they currently stand. Almost every parent who spoke expressed concern about how the plan does not meet the needs of the students of high ability and enthusiasm in language arts. There was also concern that the curriculum is not a good match for students who struggle with reading. Parents were very critical of the details of the proposed honors designation and pessimistic about its effectiveness and success. You were asked several times to consider creating an honors section of English 10 in each SLC. (Same for English 9 and Accelerated Biology.) Why? Because, as parents pointed out, most any literary work can be taught at a wide range of levels, depending on the teacher and the students. Put another way, a student's experience of rigor, high expectation and intellectual stimulation in a class depends on the level, quality, depth and pace of the conversation in the room; and that, in turn, depends on who is in the room. There are very real limits on the number of grade levels across which even a masterful teacher can teach. It is also unfair to ask students who simply want to have their educational needs met to give up two lunch periods per week, along with the opportunity to participate in school clubs and other activities. That would not be necessary if the appropriate level of rigor were provided in their classroom experience.
Please stop the plans to implement the English 10 core as it was presented on Monday night until there has been a thoroughgoing, community-wide discussion about it and until you provide hard data -- from West and from the research literature -- that support it. (Note: this includes the recent report written by the SLC evaluator, Bruce King.) Otherwise, you risk alienating a large segment of the West community and hastening the "bright flight" that has already begun in our attendance area. (Did you know that almost one-third of the approximately 70 parents who attended the meeting were parents of elementary and middle school students in the West attendance area who are watching these developments very closely?)
Laurie Frost
Here is a link to a more complete report on what transpired at the West PTSO meeting on 11/7:
A videotape of the portion of the meeting dealing with the English 10 proposal will posted on schoolinfosystem asap.
11/9/2005: I request a copy of the report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King that someone mentioned at the 11/7 PTSO meeting. I am told by West Principal Ed Holmes that the report is a "confidential" and a "draft."
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 09:49:28 -0600
To: eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us,hlott@madison.k12.wi.us
From: TAG Parents
Subject: SLC report request
Cc: arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,csherrod@madison.k12.wi.us
This is a formal request for a copy (electronic, if possible, perhaps as an attachment) of SLC evaluator Bruce King's recent report on the progress of the SLC initiative at West HS.
Please send this report as soon as possible, as time is of the essence. If it is easier for you, I would be happy to pick up a hard copy in the West HS office. Just let me know by email or phone call (238-6375) and I will drop by.
Thank you.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost
_____________________________________________
Madison TAG Parents
Email: tagparents@yahoogroups.com
URL: http://tagparents.org
The document you have requested is a confidential draft that was sent
to me by our Smaller Learning Communities Grant Evaluator, Bruce King.
Clearly the front cover of the document says DRAFT and CONFIDENTIAL. I
want to be clear that it is Bruce King who has requested that this
information be kept confidential and that I will be honoring his
request.
Bruce King is currently working on an Executive Summary that will
outline his findings regarding establishment of the 10th Grade English
course at West. That document will be distributed to anyone interested
in reviewing his evaluative statement regarding the merits of the
process and the plans for implementation of the course.
As soon as I recieve the aforementioned document I will be happy to
pass it on to you.
Thank you for your ongoing interest in this important curriculum review
process.
Ed Holmes, Principal
West High School
_____________________________________________
Madison TAG Parents
Email: tagparents@yahoogroups.com
URL: http://tagparents.org
11/14/2005: After several days of investigation and writing to the proper District authorities, I obtain a copy of the SLC report from MMSD Attorney Clarence Sherrod. http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/evaluation_of_t.php
11/14/2005: I re-send to West Principal Ed Holmes the list of questions that several of us submitted to him and West English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer before the 11/7 PTSO meeting because most of the questions were not answered at the meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
Note: These questions were first sent on 11/3 -- several days before the PTSO meeting -- and again on 11/14. "Kathy" is West PTSO President Kathy Riddiough.
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 09:38:15 -0600
To: eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us,ricciridd@tds.net
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: Questions for 11/7 PTSO meeting
Cc: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us
Hello, Kathy and Ed. Below are the questions a group of us submitted before last week's PTSO meeting. It seems to us that Questions 5, 8, 13 and 15 were answered, Question 10 was addressed by parents only (and constituted the bulk of the Q and A), but the rest were not addressed at all. Many of the parents who were present at the meeting would appreciate having the answers to the remaining questions asap.
We are especially interested in seeing West HS data that indicate the need for the structural/curricular change being proposed and West HS data and empirical studies from the education literature that indicate the likely success of the proposed change in addressing the problem. Please include, in particular, the studies you believe best indicate the effectiveness of heterogeneous grouping for educating well the full range of high school students.
We would also like to know what will be happening -- and when (there is some urgency, after all) -- to continue the dialogue that has only barely begun by the West administration and the parents of the children who will be affected by this change.
Thanks for your timely attention to this matter.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost
I. Questions about 10th grade English
1) What are the West HS data that indicate there is a problem with the current system for 10th grade English?
2) What are the data that suggest the solution being proposed (i.e., a standardized, homogeneous curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes) will fix the problem? (Are there empirical studies you can tell us about?)
3) What are the data that indicate all students' educational needs will be well served by the proposed solution? (Again, are there empirical studies you can tell us about?)
4) What are the data that indicate no students will be harmed or poorly served by the proposed solution? (And again -- empirical studies?)
5) If the 10th grade English core is implemented, will some English electives be dropped from the course offerings? If so, which ones?
6) Will advanced students be allowed to "test out" or be "teacher-recommended out" of the 10th grade English core? If so, when would this happen? When they register for their 10th grade classes? At the end of 9th grade? At the beginning of 10th grade? In between semesters in 10th grade? Some or all of these times?
7) Will you extend this option to advanced 9th graders and allow them to "test out" or be "teacher-recommended out" of 9th grade English? (It is our understanding that this used to be allowed.)
8) Would you consider keeping the current system in place and adding the new curriculum as an additional elective for those students for whom it is a good educational match?
9) Will the grant be jeopardized or lost if you do not implement a homogeneous 10th grade English core? (If you are not sure, would you be willing to check into it and get back to us?)
10) We fear that the plan to offer an honors designation in 10th grade English that requires two lunchtime meetings per week is likely doomed to failure for the following reasons: a) it seems highly unlikely that students who have just endured a year of required "freshman resource time" during their lunch hour will be willing to give up two-fifths of their hard-earned midday freedom as sophomores; b) the plan puts having an honors distinction (which is really not the point -- having an appropriately challenging curriculum and the opportunity to learn with similar-ability peers is the point) in direct competition with participation in clubs and other activities that meet during lunchtime; c) the plan forces students to choose between more academics and social time or "down" time. Because so many reasons for students not to choose the honors option are being built into the plan, we feel the plan is likely to fail and that you will then use that as justification for discontinuing the option due to "lack of interest." Would you please comment on our concerns? What are your thoughts about the potential success or failure of the proposed honors designation, as it is currently defined?
11) Who conceived of the proposal to restructure sophomore English by eliminating electives and implementing a standardized curriculum to be delivered in heterogeneous classrooms (i.e., what are their names, please)?
12) Were District TAG staff included or consulted in the development of this proposal?
13) Who is developing the 10th grade English core curriculum (again, what are their names, please)?
14) Were District TAG staff included or consulted in the development of the new curriculum?
15) What is the process the group is using to develop the English 10 core curriculum?
II. General -- but nevertheless relevant -- questions
16) Would you please explain to us the difference between "tracking" and "flexible ability grouping"?
17) Would you please share with us your understanding of the research on ability grouping?
III. SLC questions
18) What were the West HS data that were used to justify the need for a change this drastic at West?
19) What were the data and studies that were used to justify the selection of this particular smaller high schools model for West?
20) Whose idea was the SLC initiative originally? That is, what is the name of the person who conceived of the idea in the very beginning?
21) What are the specific outcome measures that are being used to assess the impact of the SLC initiative?
_____________________________________________
Madison TAG Parents
Email: tagparents@yahoogroups.com
URL: http://tagparents.org
11/18/2005: Several West HS attendance area parents meet with Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash. We discuss many important issues pertaining to the English 10 plan and request data and empirical studies that support what is being done at West.
11/20/2005: I send Pam Nash a follow-up email of thanks, reinforcing our request for West and MMSD data -- as well as empirical studies -- that support the implementation of English 10 and the move towards heterogeneous classes in our middle and high schools. I include the list of talking points that our group generated before our meeting with her because we did not get to all of them in our meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 23:10:50 -0600
To: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: thanks, and more ...
Dear Pam,
Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us on Friday to discuss the matter of English 10 and related issues at West HS. We greatly appreciated your time, your honesty, your patience and your perspective. We would very much like to continue the dialogue with you as things unfold at West in the coming weeks and months. I am happy to continue as your contact or "point person" for the group.
As a follow-up to our meeting, I cannot overstate parents' interest in seeing both West HS data and empirical studies from the education literature that support the District's increasing use of a homogeneous curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classrooms at both the middle and high school level. We want to know more about the research base that the Administration is using as the empirical foundation for this reform, as well as about the evidence from within the MMSD that attests to its effectiveness for all students.
We came on Friday with several talking points, but didn't get to all of them. I've pasted in the entire list below. If you have thoughts to share about any of the ones that didn't come up in our meeting, please feel free to respond.
Again, thanks so much for taking the time to start a dialogue with us.
Sincerely,
Laurie
Talking points for 11/18 meeting with Pam Nash
1. The SLC report makes it clear that English 9 – a standardized curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes – hasn’t had the desired effect on the achievement gap at West, on the English 9 failure rates for certain groups of West students, or on the participation rates in the more challenging English electives of those same students. It thus makes no sense to us to expand the approach into 10th grade English. The first order of business should be to understand why English 9 is not working as hoped, and fix it.
2. The English 10 course – as currently planned – is a set up for failure for struggling and low achieving students for whom the reading and writing demands will likely be too great. It is also not fair to expect high performing and highly motivated students to get their need for challenge met during the lunch hour and through extra independent work. Students in honors classes report that the single most important feature of those classes for them is the high level of discussion, a result of who is in the class. Thus, students at the upper and lower most ends of the performance distribution will not be well served by this plan.
3. One way to modify the plan would be to have one honors section and one skills and enrichment section in each of the four SLC’s. Students would self-select into these special sections of English 10 and – in the honors sections – would have to maintain adequate performance in order to remain in the section. The special sections would be less exclusive than, for example, the single section of Accelerated Biology at West because four sections would provide significantly more access for a wider variety of interested students. According to the SLC report, having special sections like this in each SLC is not inconsistent with the SLC model.
4. Such a modified plan would also bring West in line with Madison’s other high schools. East HS, for example, has TAG, AcaMo and regular classes in English, science, and social studies, as well as several different levels of math.
5. Increasing the number of AP classes at West would address another important disparity between our high schools, one that affects the educational opportunities for West’s high performing students. (We hope the AP grant that the MMSD has just received, along with several other Wisconsin school districts, will be used to do this.)
6. In general, the significant differences across our four high schools with regard to how and how well the learning needs of the high performing students are met is of great concern to us. We are concerned about the “bright flight” that is occurring, from one attendance area to another and to neighboring districts.
7. Middleton HS was just named a Blue Ribbon School for its academic excellence by the U.S. Department of Education, one of only two in the state. Middleton HS offers a diversified curriculum in each content area and thus appropriate educational opportunities for students with widely varying interests, abilities, and career aspirations. It seems to us that Middleton understands that “equal” and “equitable” are not the same thing; that equal educational opportunity and heterogeneous grouping are not synonymous.
8. What are the major empirical studies upon which the District’s move towards completely heterogeneous classrooms at both the middle and high school levels is based?
9. Are you aware of the District’s dropout data for the second half of the 1990's? The data indicate that 27% of the dropouts for that period had a history of high academic achievement and that over half of this high achieving group of dropouts were poor and over 40% of them were minority students. Of the four high schools, West had the largest percentage of formerly high achieving dropouts. How do you understand those data? (I will bring hard copies.)
10. Can you provide us with an update on the plans for Accelerated Biology at West next year?
11. Is there any update since the 11/7 PTSO meeting we should know about?
12. A point about the process -- the lack of partnership -- the stonewalling -- which has become part of the problem. In contrast to the way things have unfolded at West, East had a community-wide meeting last week, at the beginning of their process, and has set up a task force to review high end curriculum.
13. Would we ever keep a talented 9th grade basketball player off of the varsity team? No. We'd celebrate his ability and be excited about having him play varsity for four years. And we wouldn't worry about hurting the feelings or self-esteem of any less capable or motivated students. Why is this attitude so acceptable in sports, but not in academics?
14. We would like to see honors/accelerated/more rigorous classes throughout the curriculum -- e.g., English 9, Accelerated Biology, social studies, etc. Why not one honors section per SLC?
15. What do the data show regarding how (matched samples of) students from Wright, Hamilton and Cherokee do at West? We think much could be learned by taking a look and seeing if there are differences.
Laurie A. Frost, Ph.D.
Isthmus Psychotherapy & Psychiatry
222 South Bedford Street
Madison, WI 53703
(608) 256-6570
11/21/2005: I pen a request to BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang (copying several other District officials), asking that he obtain the data that forms the basis for a couple of important points in Bruce King's SLC report, points regarding the apparent failure of English 9 to impact the achievement gap. Several others sign the request. We ask that the data be made public and that the P& A Committee hold a public discussion of the data. Knowing that Mr. Vang doesn't "do" email, I hand-deliver a copy of my request to him, along with a hard copy of the SLC report. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:02:40 -0600
To: svang7@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West HS SLC report -- request for examination and public discussion of 9th grade English data
Cc: robarts@execpc.com,wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us,ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us,jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us,lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com,arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,talkingoutofschool@isthmus.com,edit@isthmus.com
Dear Shwaw,
We are writing to you in your capacity as Chair of the BOE Performance and Achievement Committee to ask that you address a critical situation currently unfolding at West High School.
Enclosed you will find a copy of a report entitled "Evaluation of the SLC Project at West High School," written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King and dated November 2, 2005. The report focuses on the West administration's plans to overhaul 10th grade English.
For many years West sophomores -- like West juniors and seniors -- have chosen their English courses from an impressive list of electives that range in content and difficulty level. According to the report, the overarching reason for changing the existing system for 10th grade English is the concern that the elective structure contributes to unequal educational opportunities across different student groups. Specifically, there is concern that some groups of students do not sign up for the more rigorous, higher level electives. There is also concern that some West students complete their English credits without taking any literature courses. In essence, the proposal makes 10th grade English a lot like English 9 -- a standardized curriculum delivered in heterogeneous classes. The thing is, English 9 has not had the desired effect on these indicators of student achievement.
When you read the report, you will discover that English 9 -- which has been in place at West for several years -- has not done much to close the gap in achievement in English among West students. Thus the report recommends that "ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses [is] needed [in order to] address ... concerns [such as] the failure rate for 9th grade English and which students are failing [because] it is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap" (emphasis added).
The report also states that "in addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently, it hasn't helped some groups of students that much (emphasis added). Why? What needs to be changed so it does, and so the 10th grade course does, as well?"
In a word, we find it unconscionable to think that the West administration would expand a program into the 10th grade that has so clearly failed to achieve its objectives in the 9th grade. We can't help but suspect that a look at the hard data would convince any reasonable person that the appropriate and responsible course of action, at this juncture, would be to figure out why English 9 hasn't worked and fix it before making any changes to the 10th grade curriculum.
As Chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee, would you please take responsibility for obtaining from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Department the 9th grade data that goes along with the above statements from the report? Would you also please make these data public and schedule a public discussion of them at a Performance and Achievement Committee meeting?
We must stress to you the time urgency of this matter. At the November 7 West PTSO meeting -- when the West administration and English Department first introduced the proposal for English 10 -- it was mentioned that the West course catalogue is due at the printer in December. This leaves very little time for the public discussion that should have been an essential element of this curriculum change process. Consequently, we ask that you please obtain the data and hold a public discussion of them immediately.
Many thanks for your prompt attention to this urgent matter.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost, Jeff Henriques, Larry Winkler, Jim Zellmer, Joan Knoebel, Michael Cullenward, Ed Blume, Kathy Riddiough, Jane Doughty, Janet Mertz, Stephanie Stetson, Nancy Zellmer, Jan Edwards, and Don Severson
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Mr. Vang and his committee members (Ruth Robarts and Bill Keys), asking about the status of our request and stressing the time urgency of the situation. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:23:18 -0600
To: svang7@madison.k12.wi.us,wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,robarts@execpc.com
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West HS English 9 data request
Dear Shwaw, Bill and Ruth --
We are wondering about the status of our 11/21 request that the Performance and Achievement Committee obtain the West HS English 9 data that goes along with the comments in the text of Bruce King's report regarding the course's failure to impact the student achievement gap at West; make the data public; and hold a Performance and Achievement Committee meeting to discuss it?
The update from our end is that we have not heard from Pam Nash since our 11/18 meeting with her; we still have not heard from Ed Holmes about the answers to those questions we posed to him before the 11/7 PTSO meeting, but that were not answered at the meeting; SLC Evaluator Bruce King held two parent focus groups tonight; there is a 20-minute English Department meeting on Wednesday to discuss which English electives will be discontinued; and we understand English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer is working on an English 10 course catalog description.
Please, time is of the essence. Please get back to us. Please get those data. And please slow down the process that is unfolding at West, even as I write this email.
Laurie
P.S. I heard about yet another West family looking to move further west today.
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Pam Nash, urgently requesting an update on the situation at West. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Ms. Nash.)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:33:42 -0600
To: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: update?
Pam,
Is there anything to report on the English 10 situation at West? Any data? Any articles? Any news about follow-up from the West administration or with you?
Parents are getting increasingly agitated again. Although there were two one-hour focus groups held this evening, it's not clear they were anything more than an opportunity for parents to say their piece -- i.e., they felt much like the 11/7 PTSO meeting, in terms of not having any real impact on the process.
That's in part because we understand that the English Department is having a 20-minute meeting on Wednesday to discuss which electives will be discontinued, and that Keesia Hyzer (English Department chair) is working up an English 10 course catalog description. It appears that everything is proceeding as planned, as if parents had never said a word, as if the SLC report told a glowing success story about English 9.
What's going on?
Please get back to us asap.
Thanks,
Laurie
11/29/2005: I leave a message on Mr. Vang's answering machine asking for a status report on our request. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
11/30/2005: I receive an email from Bill Keys, essentially a forward of a brief message from Art Rainwater.
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Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:46:39 -0600
To: "Laurie A. Frost"
From: Bill Keys
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: West HS English 9 data request
Cc: Art Rainwater
X-Spam-Flag: Unchecked
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Laurie,
This is what I intended to send: Art's response, in bold and italics.
Bill Mary G, Pam and I met with Bruce King today. Bruce was very clear with us that his report did not say that the ninth grade English class had failed. What he actually said in the report was there was no data to make any kind of judgement about the success of the course. They would need to talk to Bruce about what data he has. My understanding was that he has none.
Art
11/30/2005: I write back to Bill, copying Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and Mary Gulbrandsen.
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 12:57:58 -0600
To: wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West HS English 9 data request
Cc: arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,mgulbrandsen@madison.k12.wi.us
Bill --
First, thanks so much for responding and getting involved in this urgent matter.
Second, we have Bruce's report!
In fact, the following paragraphs from my email request to Shwaw contain verbatim quotes (in bold) from Bruce's report:
When you read the report, you will discover that English 9 -- which has been in place at West for several years -- has not done much to close the gap in achievement in English among West students. Thus the report recommends that "ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses [is] needed [in order to] address ... concerns [such as] the failure rate for 9th grade English and which students are failing [because] it is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap" (underline added).
The report also states that "in addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently, it hasn't helped some groups of students that much (underline added). Why? What needs to be changed so it does, and so the 10th grade course does, as well?"
Speaking as a well-trained social scientist with that whole other career behind me, I guess I see two ways to interpret these statements. One is that the West administration has looked at the data for English 9 and it does not show any effect on the achievement gap -- i.e., there is no effect on either the failure rate of certain groups of students (presumably in English 9) or the participation rate of certain groups of students in the more rigorous English electives. The other way to interpret the statements is that it's not clear if English 9 has had an impact on the achievement gap (i.e., those two specific indicators) because they have not yet looked at the data.
Now, Art says his understanding is that Bruce has no data. In all honesty, that possibility hadn't occurred to me. Wow. If that's true, I am even more appalled and outraged than I was before.
Bill (and all those I've copied), please try to understand, this is the kind of professionally irresponsible decision-making behavior that parents across the District are so enormously frustrated with. Think about it. A radical school-wide change is being implemented at one of our high schools -- one that will affect thousands of students -- despite an absence of data supportive of the change, that absence apparently due to the fact that the appropriate and necessary data have not even been collected and examined! I see that as a serious violation of the trust we parents have put in all of you, the decision-makers of our school district.
Please, I implore you once again, put a stop to this English 10 business and figure out what's going on with English 9 first!
Laurie
Here are the unchanged verbatim quotes from Bruce's report:
from page 4 ---
"Ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses are needed. This analysis should address different but interrelated concerns:
1) The failure rate for 9th grade English, and which students are failing. It is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap."
From page 6 --
"In addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently it hasn't helped some groups of students that much. Why? What needs to be changed so it does and so the 10th grade course does as well? " p. 6
At 07:46 AM 11/30/2005, you wrote:
Laurie,
This is what I intended to send: Art's response, in bold and italics.
Bill
Mary G, Pam and I met with Bruce King today. Bruce was very clear with us that his report did not say that the ninth grade English class had failed. What he actually said in the report was there was no data to make any kind of judgement about the success of the course. They would need to talk to Bruce about what data he has. My understanding was that he has none.
Art
At 07:24 AM 11/30/2005 -0600, you wrote:
Bill -- I don't think you sent what you intended to send. This looks like my own message only. Thanks for sending Art's response again. --Laurie
P.S. We have Bruce's report. Do you mean contact him for the actual data?
At 10:38 PM 11/29/2005, you wrote:
Laurie,
Here is Supt Rainwater's response to your request for information. I encourage you to contact Bruce King for the report.
Bill
Dear Shwaw, Bill and Ruth --
>
>We are wondering about the status of our 11/21 request that the
>Performance and Achievement Committee obtain the West HS English 9 data
>that goes along with the comments in the text of Bruce King's report
>regarding the course's failure to impact the student achievement gap at
>West; make the data public; and hold a Performance and Achievement
>Committee meeting to discuss it?
>
>The update from our end is that we have not heard from Pam Nash since our
>11/18 meeting with her; we still have not heard from Ed Holmes about the
>answers to those questions we posed to him before the 11/7 PTSO meeting,
>but that were not answered at the meeting; SLC Evaluator Bruce King held
>two parent focus groups tonight; there is a 20-minute English Department
>meeting on Wednesday to discuss which English electives will be
>discontinued; and we understand English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer is
>working on an English 10 course catalog description.
>
>Please, time is of the essence. Please get back to us. Please get those
>data. And please slow down the process that is unfolding at West, even as
>I write this email.
>
>
>Laurie
>
>
>P.S. I heard about yet another West family looking to move further west
>today.
12/2/2005: I write an email to Madison Board of Education President Carol Carstensen that the Board discuss plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 08:32:36 -0600
To: ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West English
Cc: wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com,robarts@execpc.com,jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us,jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us,svang7@madison.k12.wi.us,arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,mgulbrandsen@madison.k12.wi.us
Dear Carol,
I am writing to request that you put a discussion of the plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
I believe it is time for the BOE to step in and take seriously its responsibility to students by insisting that the West administration make a sound, empirically-based decision.
SARAH JACOBS' son Jed, 9, has a learning disability. He's easily distracted and, if asked to do too many things at once, panics. At his former school, a private academy that cost $20,000 a year, his mother says Jed got into trouble daily ("kicking and even some biting") and stopped learning. "He was reading 'Captain Underpants' in kindergarten and he was in third grade and still reading 'Captain Underpants,'" she says.
So in September she switched him to a nearby public school, P.S. 75 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jed was a new boy. His fourth grade had two full-time teachers and the class was so well-organized, Jed moved smoothly from one task to the next. When Ms. Jacobs asked how he liked it, Jed said he thought his teachers must have a disability too, because they made it so easy to understand the work.
A federal judge in Michigan took exactly the right action last week when he dismissed a transparent attempt by the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, to sabotage the No Child Left Behind education act. The ruling validates Congress's right to require the states to administer tests and improve students' performance in exchange for federal education aid. Unfortunately, it will not put an end to the ongoing campaign to undermine the law, which seeks to hold teachers and administrators more closely accountable for how their schools perform.
Sessions each Saturday are 9:30 am - 12:00 pm; 12:30 pm - 3:00 pm, or 9:30 am - 3:00 pm. Students may participate in either a half day or full day experience. Students who choose to participate in a full day session should bring a sack lunch.
Newgate is a nonprofit organization that is completely self-supporting. It costs about $900,000 a year to run the program. Newgate gets all of its revenue from the sale of cars on which the students train. They buy some of the vehicles, and the rest are donated.
Instead of a traditional classroom, the students learn in the shop doing actual repair work. The students here don't take English and math classes, but they start with the basics of engine repair, then cleaning a car. Eventually, they start knocking out dents and dings, working their way up to more complex auto body work.
Newgate's been around for more than 25 years. More than 400 students have been through the 15-month program. About 20 students are enrolled at any given time.
So after more than two decades of underwhelming scholarly interest in this topic, I am delighted to report a surge of serious AP research, with four new studies in the past year and a fine piece by Andrew Mollison in the latest issue of the quarterly Education Next summing them up [see http://www.educationnext.org ]. One study in particular merits attention: "The Relationship Between Advanced Placement and College Graduation," by Chrys Dougherty, Lynn Mellor and Shuling Jian of the National Center for Educational Accountability.
Almost all the new studies show that students who get a good score on an AP test in high school do better in college than those who get a bad score or don't take AP. But I am also interested in how those students with bad scores did in college compared with students who did not take AP. Many AP teachers have shown me examples of students who did poorly on the exam but did well in college -- in part, they think, because struggling with AP gave them a useful dose of thick-reading-list-and-long-final-exam trauma.
From the MCAS test to the SAT, test scores have become the de-facto definition for achievement. There is evidence of girls scoring better than boys, or vice versa, or richer students outscoring poorer ones.
One longtime puzzle of the so-called achievement gap has taken center stage -- that gap between different races of students. In the past, the issue has rested in the laps of parents, but recent education reforms have pushed it firmly into the arms of teachers.
In the first of a WBUR four-part series examining the achievement gap, Audie Cornish visits one school that is trying to understand the problem and make changes.
The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena.
The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.
Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad - especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.
The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as "lesson study," allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom
By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges.
But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.
Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.
The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.
theodp writes "Over at Slate, Avi Zenilman has seen the real classroom of the future firsthand: Students use class time to read the Drudge Report, send e-mail, play Legend of Zelda, or update profiles on Facebook.com. But not to worry - replace laptops with crumpled notes, and the classroom of the future looks a lot like the classroom of the past." From the article: "... when Cornell University researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored students' browsing habits, they concluded, 'Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there's a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.' It seems a bit of a stretch to impute a causal relationship, but it's certainly possible that the kind of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the kind of brain that earns A's."
"Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms" is a book by Diane Ravitch. On September 11, 2000, the Brookings Institute invited Ravitch for a discussion and public forum. Introductory remarks by Donna Shalala, then Secretary of HHS, and William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, preceded Ravitch's presentation, and the question/answer session that followed. Here
The basic premise of the book, an in depth study of the history, is that the reforms moved away from traditional rigorous academic standards, into social reform, causing the schools to fail for all kids, and therefore society. She also illustrates the how political labeling such as "liberal" and "conservative", "reform" and "traditional" have played an important role in school's failures.
Shalala's opening remarks should be familiar to those of us who followed her tenure as UW-Madison Chancellor. She emphasizes "we are not fair or honest with American kids about how hard learning is", citing her view that teacher should learn from coaches, who understand the role that practice, repetition, and small corrections play in achievement and reaching perfection.
Bennet's remarks are, from my view, the typically political "liberal v conservative" tripe that he is famous for, even as the issue of political labeling in the reform movement has been a contributing factor in educational quality failures.
Missing and duplicate pages in test books, answers that were already filled in and other errors with the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations have been reported by school districts from Cudahy to Wausau as the state's testing period nears its end.
In all, 21 school districts have reported errors in 27 tests handed out to students since Oct. 24, the start of Wisconsin's five-week testing period for every third- through eighth-grader and high school sophomore enrolled in public school.
A spokeswoman for CTB/McGraw-Hill, which was paid $6.6 million in 2004 to oversee Wisconsin's testing program, blamed "printer-related problems" that affected test books given to a small number of students in fourth, eighth and 10th grades.
"The main thing to know is that the integrity of the student scores will be ensured," said Kelley Carpenter, director of public relations for CTB/McGraw-Hill.
Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years. He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia.
"China and India have a population a multiple of ours. They have natural resources. There is no reason they can't emerge as the superpower. The only way we can preserve that role for ourselves is through innovation. It's erroneous that we do high-level work here and send low-level work abroad. When our market is no longer the largest market in the world, the idea that we're going to be innovating and they're going to be copying is erroneous," Romney said.In response to the looming crisis, Romney pointed to some specific problems and proposed some remedies.
He said we must close the educational achievement gap between racial groups in the United States. "The education gap is the civil rights issue of our age." He also said all U.S. students must raise their standing compared with students in other industrialized countries. According to one study, U. S. students rank 25th out of 41 industrial nations. "Fewer and fewer are performing at the top level," he said.
He suggested paying teachers a $5,000 bonus for teaching Advanced Placement courses, as well as giving the top third of teachers a $5,000 bonus. He also suggested a bonus for teachers that teach in troubled school districts. Romney also favored giving secondary school students laptop computers.
The school district is continually working to build more rigor into the learning experiences that students have. Rigor is defined as commitment to a core subject matter knowledge, a high demand for thinking, and an active use of knowledge. When you think of a rigorous academic curriculum in the middle school, what would it look like?
After investing $1 billion in small high schools, the Gates Foundation has learned results are "mixed," according to a study commissioned by the foundation. The study found progress in reading and language arts, but not in math.
Among the most disheartening findings of that analysis -- and one the researchers said also applied to comparison schools in their study that do not receive Gates support -- was the lack of rigor in teacher assignments and student work, especially in math.
"[W]e concluded that the quality of student work in all of the schools we studied is alarmingly low," the evaluation says. "This is not surprising, however, because students cannot demonstrate high-quality work if they have not been given assignments that require deep understanding" and higher-order thinking skills.
Education director Tom Vander Ark said the Gates Foundation already is working on the problems cited in the study, emphasizing "districtwide measures intended to improve the quality of curriculum and instruction, as well as an emphasis on using proven school models."
New schools had better results than existing schools that had been redesigned.
Madison will build on Project Excel, a program started last year to identify promising eighth-graders and provide assistance as they begin their high school years. Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash said the grant focuses on helping those students in the ninth grade.
Memorial High School now has a large number of advanced placement courses, and the district will focus on increasing the advanced placement courses at the other three high schools. Advanced placement courses often provide college credits, and that's important in an era of high tuitions, Nash said.
"Advanced placement courses are wonderful opportunities for students to be challenged," she said.
The eight rural districts, all in southwestern Wisconsin, will expand their opportunities through distance learning, aided by the University of Wisconsin and the Cooperative Educational Service Agency in Tomahawk.
As I listened to the Pam Nash’s (Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools) presentation on the Middle School Redesign to the Performance and Achievement Committee last night, I was thinking of an academic/elective middle school framework applied across the district that would be notable in its rigor and attractiveness to parents and some next steps. Personally, I consider fine arts and foreign language as core subject areas that all students need and benefit from in Grades 6-8.
Have at it and comment with your wish list/ideas, education and support for students, developing a few more options/strategies.
Possible “common” structure in middle school that next year could look like:
6th – math, social studies, language arts, science on a daily basis plus two unified art periods (one is A/B phys ed and music plus 4 one quarter units). 7th – math, social studies, language arts, science, foreign language on a daily basis plus two unified art periods (one is a/b phys ed and music plus 4 one quarter units) 8th – math, social studies, language arts, science, foreign language on a daily basis plus two unified art periods (one is a/b phys ed and music plus 2 half semester units
In each of the 5 day subject areas, look at differentiation - narrower, but not isolated, ranges of ability grouping and heterogenous classes. In math there would be the opportunity to take geometry in 8th grade, say. Other different challenging/support options in other areas. This is basically the current schedule at Hamilton Middle School and some other middle schools.
For the study units that make sense to offer on a quarterly then half semester basis, look across the district and see what the mixes are and also look at WI Code PI 8.02 (standards) to see what is required and allowed to be offered in quarterly or half semester units.
Look at participation in each elective at each school, look at skills/objectives in each. Survey parents and kids and ask them to rank their top 4, 5 or 10 electives. Offer these units as quarterly or half semester units for the next year. Identify those units that might go to a multi-quarter, one year or 3 one year course that would be an a/b, a) be excellent for this age group, b) leads into further study in high school, c) other.
I also think it would be worthwhile to pay close attention to what districts in the surrounding school districts are offering academically. These school districts could increasingly become Madison’s competition if they haven't already.
From 2001 to 2004 1,200 new students are in school in Madison and the surrounding communities. From 2001 to 2004 Madison lost nearly 200 students. The economic value of 1,200 kids at $10,000 per student is $12,000,000. Losing 200 students loses $2,000,000 in revenue which equates to 40 teachers. Also, during that same time period approx 2,000 low income students entered the MMSD and 2,000 non low-income students were no longer in the MMSD. About another new 1,000 low income students are in districts surrounding Madison.
I’m pulling this data from DPI and will post soon. Low income children can require more support services – higher overhead. If we do not keep a mix of students, more of the overhead dollars (non-instruction costs) will go to support services. That’s less education for all – more parents will continue to go to the ‘burbs. This does not have to be but will continue to be so if the School Board does not factor in this issue.
Enough for now. I’d be interested in folks thoughts.
You might agree or disagree with poet Sharon Olds on the war in Iraq, but you have to be touched by her description of writing by patients with severe disabilities. Read the full open letter in The Nation.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.
New Wisconsin Promise Conference: Closing the Achievement Gap
The 2006 New Wisconsin Promise Conference, Closing the Achievement Gap, will be held at the Monona Terrace Convention Center in Madison on January 11-12, 2006.
The conference will focus on strategies for educators who are looking for help in meeting the progressively higher academic expectations of No Child Left Behind.
The Engagement in Learning track includes sessions on attendance, graduation, teacher involvement in learning, student motivation for learning, parent and community involvement in learning, classroom management, and best instructional practices.
The School Improvement tracks features information on needs assessment, data-based decision making, evaluation, school improvement planning, professional development, literacy including early childhood literacy, and literacy for elementary, middle, and secondary grades, as well as adult literacy, and reading across the curriculum.
The Mathematics track will consider approaches to early childhood mathematics, mathematics for elementary, middle, and secondary grades, and functional mathematics.
Early registration of $75 per person is available through December 9, after which registration is $100. On-line registration is available. Conference details are available on the DPI's Web site.
Pam Nash and the middle school committee are seeking input from parents and this is our chance to give them feedback. While I find the survey would be on the "How to Not Make a Survey" curriculum in my graduate school class on Effective Survey's, I say congrates to the BOE and administration for allowing the community to give some feedback and input on this development. While it seems a little forced, quick and for some reason I am unclear why this issue is being discussed for middle schools that are functioning at a high level,(in other words let's fix the problem's where they exist, even if it means more resources, and not mess with what is working) I want all parents and those in the community interested to voice their thoughts and opinions. Please print off this survey and let the district know we want great middle schools, that reflect their community, not carbon copies of mediocre education.
Wendy Kopp (President and Founder of Teach for America):
According to the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup survey, the most recent of which was released in September, most Americans cite a lack of parental involvement, as well as problems in students' home life and upbringing and their lack of interest and motivation as the most important reasons for the huge gap between the achievement levels of students in upper- and middle-class neighborhoods and those in poor neighborhoods. More than 75% of those polled said they believe that white students and students of color have the same academic opportunities.
In contrast, Teach for America corps members, who are in those poor neighborhoods every school day, say the key to closing that gap is to train and employ better teachers and improve the quality of the leaders who make decisions in schools and school districts -- while simultaneously ensuring that teachers, principals and parents expect the kids to meet challenging academic standards.
Funding, in itself, is not the answer. Teacher quality and expectations of students outranked funding as both causes of and solutions to the gap. And as corps members spend more time in the classroom, the priority they place on funding gives way to other factors, such as school leadership. While some of their proposed solutions may require further investment, corps members express skepticism about increasing funding without addressing current allocation of resources.
Thank you for publishing Katherine Esposito’s article about Madison’s middle schools (“Ed Lite,” Nov. 11, page 12). Please allow me, however, to correct some mischaracterizations in her piece.
On the contrary, my daughter Olivia did not “bail” from Sherman when she transferred to O’Keeffe. Her mother and I worked diligently during her entire 6th grade year at Sherman trying to get the school and teachers to address her unique academic and social needs. Throughout the year, we met with Olivia’s team of three teachers, the learning coordinator, the guidance counselor and administrators. Much was discussed, but little action followed.
During the second semester, the district’s TAG coordinator for middle schools suggested that grade skipping or transferring my daughter to O’Keeffe might be the best option for her. I thought these were radical ideas at the time. I thought there was no reason why her current teachers couldn’t differentiate the curriculum enough to keep her challenged. She already had the motivation to learn but wasn’t being given sufficient guidance or opportunity. So I continued to work with the Sherman staff. By the end of the year, I thought we were starting to make some progress — enough to give us hope that 7th grade would be much better.
Then the changes to Sherman’s curriculum were announced — specifically, the changes to band and foreign language — two subjects that offered challenging opportunities for my daughter without the school needing to differentiate the curriculum. When the changes were announced, my wife and I could see the frustration and despair in our daughter’s eyes, and we felt no choice but to transfer her. Even after that decision was made, I remained committed to working with other parents regarding issues at Sherman and spent much time over the summer meeting with other concerned parents and advocating for the needs of all Sherman students, regardless of academic aptitude. The goal was to ensure that every child was being challenged at a level appropriate to his or her abilities.
To characterize my daughter’s actions as “bailing” paints the wrong picture. It was the hardest decision we had to make regarding her education and it required a lot of strength and courage from my daughter. Her transfer prompted many other Sherman families to take a closer look at the curriculum, and more requests for transfers followed.
I also was appalled that the article describes Sherman’s principal, Ann Yehle, as appearing “disarmingly young, with sun-blond hair and a chipper smile.” Though it probably wasn’t the writer’s intent, such characterization implies that Yehle is too young for the job and … well, we all know the unfortunate stereotype about blonds. Though many parents and students disagree with the direction she’s taking the school, there is no doubt in my mind that Ms. Yehle is acting with the best intentions for the school and its diverse student body. It is fair to debate someone’s ideas and policies, but leave their age and hair color out of it.
Meanwhile, I’m encouraged that the assistant superintendent for secondary schools Pam Nash has assembled a team to study the Madison’s middle schools and how we can bring equity, enthusiasm for learning, and challenging experiences to every student in every classroom — regardless of academic ability, race or socio-economic status. I agree that heterogeneous classrooms are the ideal environment to ensure equal access to education. However, this dream might never become a reality. The amount of differentiation that must occur in such classrooms, as well as the tremendous amount of staffing required to meet students’ diverse learning and behavioral needs, is not something the district is even close to funding adequately. And unless that changes, parents and students are likely to see more “Ed Lite” in the future.
Diane Ravitch ("Every State Left Behind," Op-Ed, Nov. 7) hits the nail on the head when she suggests that we should not sacrifice our country's future for low academic standards and demands for good news.
A particular problem not addressed by most American schools is that our gifted youth are told to wait for their classmates to catch up with them and not to rush their learning. America is wasting precious talent because it keeps its gifted children from soaring.
Stringent federal standards are great, but why does No Child Left Behind have to mean "every gifted child kept behind"?
Mary Beth Miotto
Northborough, Mass., Nov. 7, 2005
The writer is vice president, Massachusetts Association for Gifted Children.
The District is currently conducting a Middle School Curriculum Review, lead by Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash (Formerly Principal of Memorial High School). Pam lead a Parent Forum Thursday evening, which I attended (one of about 28 participants). (7MB video clip of Pam kicking off the Forum). The goal of this event was to collect feedback from parents regarding these five questions (pdf version):
The school district is continually working to build more rigor into the learning experiences that students have. Rigor is defined as commitment to a core subject matter knowledge, a high demand for thinking, and an active use of knowledge. When you think of a rigorous academic curriculum in the middle school, what would it look like?
What experiences do you want your child to have in middle school to enhance his or her social and emotional growth?
What are your hopes and dreams for your child in middle school?
What are your greatest concerns for your child in middle school?
If you could design Madison middle schools in any way you wanted, what would they be like?
Pam mentioned that the parent comments would be posted on the district's website, hopefully next week. She also said that the district would post these questions online, in an interactive way so that parents who were unable to attend Thursday's event might add their comments.
My notes follow:
Superintendent Art Rainwater wants the middle school curriculum task force to report back to him by mid December (2005).
The task force "design teams" recently broke up into "work teams".
Recommendations will affect middle school allocations.
I asked Pam when this process began. She said it started one month ago.
Pam mentioned that they hope to pull the parent group together one more time, in December.
I was initially displeased that the group of 28 participants was broken up (I was interested in hearing all of the conversations). However, I thought that the format was rather effective in obtaining comments from all participants (at least those in my group). Kudos to Pam for collecting a good deal of information.
I spoke briefly with Pam when the event concluded. I mentioned that it appears to me, a layman, that it would be challenging to implement major changes via a two month task force. However, incremental changes occuring via the allocations are certainly possible (for better or worse).
I heard many useful suggestions on these questions and will point to them when available on the District's website.
Learn more about the "Middle Grades Design Team" via this Board presentation (800K PDF file) Email your comments on this initiative to the Madison School Board: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Helen Fitzgerald, Sherman parent and president of the school’s parent-teacher group, wants high expectations set for Sherman.
"My kids want to compete!" she says, clearly frustrated. "They want to go to Brown. They want to go to Yale, to UC-Berkeley. My daughter wanted to go to Harvard when she was in the fourth grade! That’s their eye on the ball. That’s their expectation. And Sherman ain’t teachin’ those kids!"
In the modern middle school, however, competition is barely a footnote. Cooperation is king.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as an antidote to a hierarchical and often violent world, American educators proposed a middle-grades school for preteens that would place a premium on their social needs. Such practices as cooperative learning, peer tutoring and heterogeneous grouping would be kinder, gentler substitutes for the traditional top-down form of classroom organization in these "middle schools."
Proposed West High 10th Grade English - The Male American Experience?
Meg Cooper, parent, gave permission for her observation of the proposed West HS 10th grade English curriculum to be posted:
Has anyone else noticed that 80% or more of the proposed new West HS English 10 curriculum consists of male authors? Perhaps it should be called The Male American Experience/Justice/Identity relating to The Male American Dream...! I was very shocked. It appears so traditional (in a bad way) and excludes half [the femamle's perspective] of the American experience. How can this possibly be a better program than the current English 10 electives at West HS?
Our school staff certainly cannot meet the needs of children with mental illness. As a society we need to staff schools with mental health experts or examine new alternatives for educating children who pose challenges beyond our schools' capabilities.
Read Andy Hall's troubling story in the Wisconsin State Journal from October 25, 2005.
This anonymous entry is from a current 9th grader at West who shares their thoughts about the proposed changes in 10th grade English as well as lets us know how the current 9th grade core is experienced by students.
I am writing from the viewpoint of a gifted and talented 9th grader at West High who is stuck in the core program of English and History 9. “Stuck” is the perfect word for my situation. I am stuck in classes where brilliance is not only limited, but discouraged. I have been reprimanded by teachers for exceeding their expectations. Does West want to be a school known for restricting its gifted students?
I have been a student in the core program for two months, and I refuse to be a part of it for two years. In these classes, learning plateaus with an “A”. There should be levels of education beyond an easy A, which is all the core programs have to offer me or my classmates. Following a rigid schedule of note-taking, book-reading, and discussions which fail to be in-depth or even comprehensive, English 9 is a class in which gifted students’ intelligence recedes, instead of grows. There is frequent homework, but it is busy work which only requires time, not brain power. I have not once felt challenged in one of my core classes, and I was looking forward to honors courses sophomore year, where I could thrive in a challenging environment among other gifted students. Instead I was informed that “English 10” would be invoked in West’s new core program. I fail to see the benefits of this. This means another year of all of West’s gifted and talented students being stuck in classes where they do not learn, where they do not grow, and where they do not excel. I urge everyone who cares about the freshman class of West, please protest the creation of English 10. All current freshmen will suffer because of this. I write not only to represent the gifted students of West trapped in English 9, but students of all intelligence. I have not met one person who enjoys English 9, and those who are challenged by it are not challenged by an invigorating curriculum or challenging, thought-provoking discussions, but instead by unclear directions or annoying busy work. There should be an alternative to the core program offered, whether it is a class students must test into or simply abandoning the idea of the 10th grade core program, a decision which I am confident to say most freshman at West would vote for.
The most recent information I obtained about the English core program was that there would be one honors class offered. I was not impressed by “assets” of this class, which seemed not to offer anything extra. Two days a week, half of the student’s lunches would be dedicated to working with the teacher, and more homework would be given to the students despite the similar curriculum. This seems like punishment to the honors students, and would discourage students from wanting to be in this class. I also doubt the effectiveness of giving more work, because the work would most likely be busy work similar to the homework in English 9. I cannot envision a class at west in which the homework given was challenging and thought-provoking. I believe English 10 honors would only be an English 10 class with more homework. I see no benefits of invoking the English core program at West.
By Michele Munz
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Sunday, Oct. 30 2005
The gap in academic achievement between black and white students in the St. Louis area has decreased in the past five years, according to findings released Sunday of the first comprehensive study of school districts' efforts to reduce the gap - but only because the academic performance of white students dropped more than that of black students.
The study concluded: "An alarming fact came forth: the decrease in the gap was not due to an increase in achievement by black students, but, instead, resulted largely from a decrease in achievement levels by both black and white students."
The study looked at 25 school districts that educate the bulk of the area's black students in St. Louis and St. Louis County. The study was done by the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable as part of the group's initiative launched in 2001 to eliminate the achievement disparity between whites and blacks.
"This was never designed to lower the academic achievement of any child," said Dr. Madye Henson, chairwoman of the Roundtable's education committee. "In addition to focusing on eliminating the gap, we also have to focus on overall academic achievement."
Henson spoke before releasing the 102-page study - 2005 Regional Report Card: Eliminating the African American Academic Achievement Gap - at a conference Sunday at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. It included administrators, teachers, parents and community leaders from the districts.
The report card looked at Missouri Assessment Program scores - which measure student progress at meeting state standards - in mathematics, communication arts and science and in elementary, middle and high schools for each of the 25 districts. The report also includes statistics such as each district's graduation rate, percentage of certified teachers, number of college-bound students and parent-conference attendance.
The report held each school district's strategic action plan to eliminate the gap. By last month, all 25 districts had submitted plans to the Roundtable.
"So you can also know what's working and share with each other," Henson said.
A telling conclusion of the report was that schools with the highest achievement levels among black students - such as Clayton, Webster Groves and Kirkwood - often also had the greatest gap in achievement levels between whites and blacks.
Less often did a school district have both high achievement levels among blacks and the smallest gap. The elementary schools showed the greatest promise, where Hancock Place, Pattonville and St. Louis had both in communication arts. Pattonville also had both in communication arts in the middle and high schools, and Lindbergh did in high school mathematics.
"Prior to this point, no one looked at those two things together," Henson said of the gap and achievement levels. "That's where we can dig in and really start to make a difference."
Another component in the Report Card was information on parental responsibilities and resources. Mary Jo Liberstein, a black parent with two children in the Clayton School District, said parental involvement was the biggest reason for the gap in achievement levels.
Don Senti, the Clayton superintendent, said eliminating the gap while maintaining high achievement levels for everyone was a challenge.
"We hope all students are getting better every year, but that means that African-American students have to do twice as better every year," Senti said. "It's going to get better; I just wish it was going to get better faster."
Some 70 parents were in attendance at Monday evening's PTSO meeting to hear about West High School's plans for 10th grade English. This was the largest turnout for a PTSO meeting in recent history. Approximately one-third of those there were parents of elementary and middle school students who will be attending West at some point in the future.
The consensus from parents was that they want more discussion of these planned changes, and given the school's timeline for formalizing next year's course offerings, these meeetings have to happen soon.
Parents heard from Principal Ed Holmes, English department chair Keesia Hyzer, and from teacher Mark Nepper. What follows is a brief summary of the presentation.
Mr. Holmes explained that the impetus for restructuring 10th grade English was the Small Learning Communities (SLC) grant that West High received two years ago. (West is currently in the second year of a three year grant). This grant has as its goals the improved achievement of all students and the simultaneous reduction of the achievement gap. That grant called for a core curriculum in both 9th and 10th grade. Last year the school implemented a core curriculum for 9th graders wherein students would take their core classes (math, English, social studies, and science) within their SLC. The English department began approaching the challenge of creating a 10th grade core this past January.
Ms. Hyzer reported that, as the English department approached this task, they had 3 areas of focus: their writing program, helping struggling students, and managing the department's workload. By creating a unified core 10th grade English, there is now an opportunity for teachers and students to spend an entire year together, a unified curriculum means that students won't be able to circumvent academic rigor in their course selection, and the common experience will provide a springboard for courses in the 11th and 12th grades.
The redesigned curriculum combines aspects of Fundamental and Intermediate Writers Workshop classes, Modern Literature, Writers in Their Times, and Justice.
The school firmly believes that heterogeneously grouped classes is the best way to meet the needs of all students, addressing the wide range of abilities through curriculum differentiation. Keesia Hyzer told parents that the English department will study differentiation over the summer and work to implement it in the classroom.
For students who want more challenge or a more rigorous English experience, West intends to offer the opportunity for an Honors designation. Students would be required to do extra work outside of class and would meet with the Honors coordinator twice a week during lunch for additional discussion/study sessions.
Many parents were skeptical that students would volunteer to do additional work and regularly give up portions of their lunch periods and the opportunities to participate in clubs and other activities for this designation. They questioned why students couldn't do this work in their daily English classes, and suggested that the school offer an honors section of English 10 within each SLC. They pointed out that students who enjoy literature and want more challenge in English are being punished by having to go outside the regular classroom to get their educational needs met, a situation that doesn't exist in math or science where academically advanced students can get their needs met in the classroom. While a number of parents were complimentary of the goal of integrating literature and writing within one course and the books that were on the proposed reading list, it was noted that the inclusion of challenging reading material does not automatically make a course rigourous. The speed at which the class moves through the material and the level of discussion can vary widely, depending on who is in the classroom. Also, as a 10th grader reminded us, there is no guarantee that all classes will read all of the books on the reading list.
Several parents also pointed out that no students get their needs met in a heterogenous classroom: Struggling students get discouraged when they compare themselves to high performing students, high end students report boredom and frustration as the class moves slowly so as not to leave students behind, and middle range students get ignored as teachers spend the majority of their time attending to either the high or low achieving students. Differentiation of curriculum has its limits, even for the most skilled teacher.
Mr. Holmes and Ms. Hyzer took questions for about 20 minutes and then left. Parents weren't ready to end the discussion and continued to talk about the presentation and raise questions for some 40 or so minutes afterwards. One of the biggest questions was "What can we do to get them to listen to us and genuinely take our concerns into consideration?" One answer is to contact the following district staff with your concerns and suggestions: SuperintendentArt Rainwater, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash, West Principal Ed Holmes, English department chair Keesia Hyzer, Director of Teaching and Learning Mary Ramberg, Language Arts and Reading Coordinator Mary Watson Peterson, the Instructional Resource Teachers for Language Arts and Reading in the Middle and High Schools - Sharyn Stumpf and Doug Buehl, District Talented and Gifted Coordinator Welda Simousek, and the Board of Education. Parents can also keep informed by subscribing to the West High PTSO mailing list.
Others who were in attendance are encouraged to add to this report.
From Gunpowder to the Next Big Bang by Thomas L. Friedman
There is a techie adage that goes like this: In China or Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered, while in Silicon Valley the nail that stands up drives a Ferrari and has stock options. Underlying that adage is a certain American confidence that whatever we lack in preparing our kids with strong fundamentals in math and science, we make up for by encouraging our best students to be independent, creative thinkers.
There is a lot of truth to that. Even the Chinese will tell you that they've been good at making the next new thing, and copying the next new thing, but not imagining the next new thing. That may be about to change. Confident that its best K-12 students will usually outperform America's in math and science, China is focusing on how to transform its classrooms so students become more innovative.
"Although we are enjoying a very fast growth of our economy, we own very little intellectual property," Wu Qidi, China's vice minister of education, told me. "We are so proud of China's four great inventions [in the past]: the compass, paper-making, printing and gunpowder. But in the following centuries we did not keep up that pace of invention. Those inventions fully prove what the Chinese people are capable of doing - so why not now? We need to get back to that nature." Nurturing more "creative thinking and entrepreneurship are the exact issues we are putting attention to today." But this bumps head-on against Chinese culture and politics, which still emphasize conformity.
But for how much longer? Check out Microsoft Research Asia, the research center Bill Gates set up in Beijing to draw on Chinese brainpower. In 1998, Microsoft gave IQ tests to some 2,000 top Chinese engineers and scientists and hired 20. Today it has 200 full-time Chinese researchers. Harry Shum, a Carnegie Mellon-trained computer engineer who runs the lab, has a very clear view of what Chinese innovators can do, given the right environment. The Siggraph convention is the premier global conference for computer graphics and interactive technologies. At Siggraph 2005, 98 papers were published from research institutes all over the world.
Nine of them - almost 10 percent - came from Microsoft's Chinese research center, beating out M.I.T. and Stanford. Dr. Shum said: "In 1999 we had one paper published. In 2000, we had one. In 2001, we had two. In 2002, we had four. In 2003 we had three. In 2004, we had five, and this year we are very lucky to have nine." Do you see a pattern?
In addition, Microsoft Beijing has contributed more than 100 new technologies for current Microsoft products - from the Xbox to Windows. That's a huge leap in seven years, although, outside the hothouses like Microsoft, China still has a way to go.
Dr. Shum said: "A Chinese journalist once asked me, 'Harry, tell me honestly, what is the difference between China and the U.S.? How far is China behind?' I joked, 'Well, you know, the difference between China high-tech and American high-tech is only three months - if you don't count creativity.' When I was a student in China 20 years ago, we didn't even know what was happening in the U.S. Now, anytime an M.I.T. guy puts up something on the Internet, students in China can absorb it in three months.
"But could someone here create it? That is a whole other issue. I learned mostly about how to do research right at Carnegie Mellon. ... Before you create anything new, you need to understand what is already there. Once you have this foundation, being creative can be trainable. China is building that foundation. So very soon, in 10 or 20 years, you will see a flood of top-quality research papers from China."
Once more original ideas emerge, though, China will need more venture capital and the rule of law to get them to market. "Some aspects of Chinese culture did not encourage independent thinking," Dr. Shum said. "But with venture capital coming into this country, it will definitely inspire a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. I will be teaching a class at Tsinghua University next year on how to do technology-based ventures. ... You have technology in Chinese universities, but people don't know what to do with it - how to marketize it."
A few of his young Chinese inventors demonstrated their new products for me. I noticed that several of them had little granite trophies lined up on their shelves. I asked one of them, who had seven or eight blocks on her shelf, "What are those?" She said the researchers got them from Microsoft every time they invented something that got patented.
How do you say "Ferrari" in Chinese?
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
November 4, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
West PTSO Meeting to Discuss Changes in English Curriculum
The November 7 meeting of the West High PTSO will feature a presentation by members of the West English department on the administration's plan to create a uniform 10th grade English curriculum beginning in the fall of 2006-07. This change will mean that -- beginning with the current 9th grade class -- West 10th graders will no longer be allowed to choose from the wide array of electives offered by the English faculty, a list of courses that vary by both content and degree of difficulty. Instead, under the proposed plan, all 10th graders will take the same English curriculum,
delivered in heterogeneously composed classes, much as West 9th graders do currently. 11th and 12th graders will continue to choose from the list of electives. If you are a current or future West parent and would like to know more about this plan or have concerns about its implementation, you are encouraged to attend the 11/7 meeting. West PTSO meetings are held in the West LMC and begin at 7:00 p.m.
Note: Parents of all age children within the West HS attendance area are welcome at this meeting. Background links.
If the United States is to preserve our system of free public schools, teacher unions are going to have to stop accepting the status quo and making excuses for the poor performance of our students. Most of us know that contrary to all of the talk about how we are raising our standards, in most of our schools they continue to decline. The low scores on the so-called high stakes tests are testimony to the fact that large numbers of students leave school knowing next to nothing and ill equipped for any but the most menial of jobs. While many of our most talented young people spend their days in so-called accelerated courses with curricula once thought more appropriate to the college level, too many of them have whizzed right by basic skills and cannot string together three coherent sentences or know to any degree of certainty if they have received the correct change in a store. We must face the fact that some of the right-wing critique of public education, particularly their criticism of the ever inflating costs of public education, resonates with the American public because it is true, or at least truer than some of the blather put out by the people who run the schools and the unions who represent the people who work in them. If it is true that our freedom is ultimately tied to our being an enlightened and educated citizenry, we are in terrible trouble.
Excuse number one – We don’t have enough money to meet the educational needs of our students. While too many of our school districts do need more financial resources, resources that many find impossible to raise trough the regressive property tax, the fact of the matter is too many of them also waste a substantial portion of what they have, a good piece of the waste mandated by state and federal law. I’ve written elsewhere about the administrative bloat in school districts where level upon level of bureaucracy insures that teachers and educational support staff are over scrutinized and under supervised to the point where teaching innovation and imagination are increasingly giving way to the routines of educational programs, particularly in math and English, that are intended to make teaching thinking-free.
Pam Nash (Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools) emailed this notice:
Many of you have expressed an interest in participating and discussing the changes to our middle schools. There will be a middle school focus group meeting for parents on Thursday, November 10, 2005, 7:00-8:30 p.m. at the Doyle Building, 545 W. Dayton Street in Room 103. [Map]
At this meeting, we will be gathering thoughts of what parents would like to see in the middle schools in Madison. There will also be an on-line survey available for parents to complete if they were unable to attend the meeting.
See "Will Testing Be Right Answer for Schools?" in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . The interesting story is about NCLB and testing time throughout Wisconsin. Coming Monday in the Journal Sentinel is a follow-up story about testing special ed students.
You may be interested, also, in reading "Cheating Our Kids -- How Politics and Greed Ruin Education," by Joe Williams, who writes about education for "The New York Daily News." Joe is a former education writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . According to a reviewer, Joe Williams shows how parents can use consumer power to put children first, shining light on the special interests controlling our schools, where politics and pork infuse everything and our children's education is compromised, . He argues that increased accountability and choice are necessary, and shows how the people can take back the education system, enhancing responsibility inherent in democracy. The solution is a new brand of hardball politics that demands competence from school leaders and shifts the power away from bureaucrats and union leaders to the people who have a the greatest reason to put kids first: concerned parents. With practical steps and uplifting examples of success, this is a manifesto to action.
Finally it meant I wasn't the crazy mom who was pushing her kid to do things. I was a mom of a kid who had extraordinary abilities," Alicja says.
Jacob Komar was the epitome of what the Davidsons were looking for and the Davidson Institute was just what the Komars needed. First, the Davidsons helped pay Jacob's tuition to a private middle school for gifted math and science students.
I am Greatly Distressed About La Follette High School's Four Block System
Dear La Follette Parents & Taxpayers,
I am writing because I am greatly distressed about conditions at La Follette High School under the 4-block system. I strongly believe that as parents and taxpayers you have the right to be included in the debate about your child's education. Because I believe the future of the 4-block will be decided in the near future I am compelled to provide you with some information.
Students in the traditional MMSD high schools are required to spend 50% of the credits required for graduation in academic areas. La Follette students are required to spend only 42% of their time in academic areas. Why does the district believe that La Follette students need less time in academic areas? Do the taxpayers support this decision? I understand that this is a debatable question. What I do not understand is why there is a different answer for La Follette students.
The 4-block is intended to deliver a “comprehensive” education. What does this mean? From my anecdotal experience, I have concluded that less than 25% of our students are able to take 8 credits per year. If the district can't provide the funds to deliver 8 credits per student, if most students are forced to take unwanted study halls and unwanted elective classes, what is the point of the block? Teachers have asked the district to provide data to refute this anecdotal conclusion.
Approximately one year ago, teachers requested that the district provide statistical data on a variety of questions. The MMSD School Board agreed that this information was necessary. To date, I have not received any data. Scuttlebutt informs me that the data gathered is both incomplete and inadequate. I hope the rumor mill is incorrect.
Under the 4-block, a La Follette student is one of 166 students assigned to a teacher of a full-credit class. In the other high schools, an individual child is one of 135 students assigned to a teacher of a full-credit class.
(In ½-credit classes the ratio is 332/1 at La Follette and 270/1 at traditional schools.)
This circumstance presents two questions:
A. Does a La Follette student receive equivalent attention from their teachers?
B. Can a La Follette student receive equivalent attention from their teachers?
4. La Follette full-credit classes are 18 weeks long. All other MMSD full credit classes are 36 weeks long. Do La Follette students have sufficient time to internalize knowledge and practice academic skills? As an academic teacher I do not understand why music is so important and difficult that it requires a year-long schedule, but academics do not. Why has it been concluded that academic knowledge and skills are easier to acquire or less important?
Under the 4-block, a La Follette student's full-credit classes have 15 fewer hours of instruction (direct teacher contact) compared to the other Madison students attending traditional high schools with the year-long 7-period day schedule.
(La Follette- 90 minutes X 90 days = 8,100 minutes; 7-period day schedule – 50 minutes X 180 days = 9,000 minutes).
This lack of instructional time has, historically, been exacerbated in the fall semester. In the fall semester instructional time is lost due to orientation activities associated with the beginning of school, WKCE testing, and Homecoming events.
This year (2005), MMSD has scheduled the fall semester for 88 instead of 90 days. This schedule places fall semester, 4-block, academic students at a distinct and measurable disadvantage. La Follette students must absorb all of these activities in an 88 day, 7920 minute course. In all other MMSD schools, operating in the traditional 7-period system, these activities would be absorbed in a 180 day, 9000 minute course.
Can a La Follette student learn as much content or as many skills with 15+ fewer hours of instruction? What content and skills are teachers forced to eliminate under these conditions?
Under the 4-block, many students do not have equivalent prerequisite knowledge and skills. Administrative/organizational concerns appear to be driving the schedule (see #9). Thus, it has been decided (for what reason?) that students will be grouped by half-year. It has been decided to group history with science and math with English.
This situation forces me to cope with serious pedagogical and ethical questions.
My fall semester Advanced United States History students have not had 9th grade English, my spring semester students have had English or are concurrently enrolled. The standards for Advanced United States History require critical thinking and extensive writing experience. My fall semester students do not and cannot have the same amount of instruction or experience in thinking or writing skills.
How, and to what extent, am I supposed to adjust the grading standards? How much time (which doesn't exist, especially in a shortened semester) can, or should, I spend on teaching grammar and writing? In the traditional system these subjects are taught concurrently which provides the student with continual and supporting instruction from both classes. This lack of consistent exposure to writing instruction also impacts the opportunity for La Follette students to succeed in the sciences.
My husband is a civil engineer and my son is working on his PhD in Chemical engineering (3rd year); both support my contention that writing skills are very important for all students.
Maturational development is also a problem under the 4-block. "Slow starters" struggle in the fall semester. Concepts and critical thinking skills that students can’t master in the fall may be possible six months later. However, under the 4-block these students are no longer in my class. Six months later they may be enrolled in foods, art, social dance, etc. These classes, while self-fulfilling, practical and hand-on, do not offer constant opportunities for the practice of critical thinking skills that are so necessary for success and active participation the 21st Century.
La Follette is an open enrollment school. How many of the transfers, to La Follette, enroll because they are credit deficient and are told that a semester or a year at La Follette is an easy way to make-up credits? In 2004-05, La Follette had to accept 262 new students. Additional allocation was not provided until teachers spoke directly to the MMSD School Board. Additional allocation was not provided or implemented until the end of the first ½-credit (semester class) grading period. Can La Follette students or teachers functional successfully under these conditions?
The scheduling at La Follette has been historically troubled. Historically, students have easy and difficult semesters. Teachers have grossly imbalanced workloads. This term I teach two sections of "America Since 45". One section has 10 students, the other section has 28. This course requires a substantial amount of class discussion and it is impossible to keep the two classes coordinated. Therefore, I confront three undesirable choices:
a. I plan 270 minutes every day (2 different sections of Am. S. 45 and one section of Adv. U.S. 9) – this is not logistically or intellectual possible.
b. I give the small class a significant amount of free time, camouflaged as enrichment.
c. I eliminate various topics/experiences from the larger class.
I have been informed that next semester I will have the full complement of students. It is impossible to deliver equivalent instruction under these circumstances. There are always injustices, but I believe that the 4-block exacerbates these problems.
The workload of 4-block teachers is significantly more than the teachers in other MMSD high schools (I can provide statistical data to support this statement). I believe this increased workload has a detrimental impact on the educational opportunities of La Follette students.
I promised myself that this letter would be short and to the point. Obviously, I could not keep my promise. Yet, there is so much more that I believe you, as parents and taxpayers, need to know. If you are interested, I am eager to provide more information. I hope you will contact La Follette and MMSD administration to ask questions and demand answers (supported by data).
Despite everything, I promise that I will work as hard as I can (a 60+ hour week) to help your child (every child). I have two children of my own (24 & 25 yrs old). I know it sounds stupid (corny), and that you may not believe me, but, I see my children’s "baby faces" reflected in your child. I deeply and truly want to help each and every one of my students. I am angry because I believe that the 4-block forces unnecessary and unjustified obstacles to my mission.
In the interest of honest disclosure, I must inform you that I am a Madison Teachers, Inc. building representative. I have taught at La Follette for 15+ years. I have taught under the block since it was implemented (8 years ago). I became a union representative, for the 1st time, this year. I campaigned for a position as an MTI building representative when I could no longer avoid or tolerate MMSD policies that, I believe, are hurting my students. From my perspective, insufficient time-on-task, adolescent brain research on attention span, lack of funding, scheduling problems, alterations in start and end times (we no longer have the ½ hour after school to help students) and MMSD's continual demand that teachers increase their workload is unacceptable (hence, this letter & my MTI campaign/position). I regret that I did not speak out on this matter several years ago.
Please ask questions. Please become involved. Please feel free to contact me (cgredell@madison.k12.wi.us) if I can provide any assistance or information.
Sincerely,
Cecelia Gredell
Teacher: Advanced United States History - 9
America Since '45 – 11
Advanced Placement United States History – 11 & 12
But we don’t make much progress for our kids when we constrain ourselves like this. It appeared for a brief moment that the President, working with leaders like Senator Kennedy understood this, and many of us were initially encouraged by the passage of No Child Left Behind. It may not be popular to say in Democratic circles, but there were good elements to this bill – its emphasis on the achievement gap, raising standards, and accountability. Unfortunately, because of failures in implementation, particularly its failure to provide adequate funding and a failure to design better assessment tests that provide a clearer path for schools to raise achievement, the bill’s promise is not yet fulfilled.
The shortcomings of NCLB shouldn’t end the conversation, however. They should be the start of a conversation about how we can do better. Yes, it’s a moral outrage that this Administration hasn’t come through with the funding for what it claims has been its number one domestic priority. But to wage war against the entire law for that reason is not an education policy, and Democrats need to realize that.
Poverty and Education Forum: Audio and Video Archive
Rafael Gomez organized an excellent Forum Wednesday evening on Poverty and Education. Participants include:
Tom Kaplan: Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty kaplan at ssc.wisc.edu
Ray Allen, Former Madison Board of Education Member, Publisher - Madison Times
Maria Covarrubias: A Teacher at Chavez Elementary mcovarrubias at madison.k12.wi.us
Mary Kay Baum: Executive Director; Madison-Area Urban Ministry mkb at emum.org
Bob Howard: Madison School District rhoward at madison.k12.wi.us
Listen to the entire event (70 minutes) via a mp3 file on your ipod/mp3 player or watch the entire video here. Individual presentations are available below:
Maria Covarrubias: A Teacher at Chavez Elementary describes her journey from a California migrant worker to a UW Educated Madison Teacher. Video
Statistics show half the students at South Beaver Dam Elementary fall into the disadvantaged category.
Yet the school scored 100 percent on reading, knowledge and concept exams and more than 96 percent in attendance.
"There is no child left behind," said parent Amy Grunst. "No child who can't go. Everybody goes."
"Our expectations are high," said Principal Dan Rikli. "We are sensitive where they came from, but we expect just as much from every kid who walks into this school."
The unusual spat has put a prominent economist in the awkward position of having to defend one of her most influential studies. Along the way, it has spotlighted the challenges economists face as they study possible solutions to one of the nation's most pressing problems: the poor performance of some public schools. Despite a vast array of statistical tools, economists have had a very hard time coming up with clear answers.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist known for his free-market views, proposed 50 years ago that to improve schools, parents could be given vouchers -- tickets they could spend to shop for a better education for their kids. He theorized that the resulting competition among schools would spark improvements in the system. Free-market advocates loved the idea. Teachers' unions hated it, arguing that it could drain resources from some public schools and direct resources to religious institutions.
Five years ago Harvard's Caroline Hoxby, a rising star in economics, wrote a paper that reached an unusual conclusion: Cities with more streams tended to have schools with higher test scores.
Today her work is a widely cited landmark in the fierce national debate over free-market competition in public schools. And it's at the center of a bitter dispute with another economist that is riveting social scientists across the country.
Her adversary is Jesse Rothstein, a young professor at Princeton, who says her study is full of flaws. In a rebuttal to her critic, Dr. Hoxby wrote of his work: "Every claim is wrong." She has also accused him of ideological bias. Dr. Rothstein, in turn, says she resorts to "name-calling" and "ad hominem attacks" on him.
The unusual spat has put a prominent economist in the awkward position of having to defend one of her most influential studies. Along the way, it has spotlighted the challenges economists face as they study possible solutions to one of the nation's most pressing problems: the poor performance of some public schools. Despite a vast array of statistical tools, economists have had a very hard time coming up with clear answers.
"They're fighting over streams," marvels John Witte, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of political science and veteran of a brawl over school vouchers in Milwaukee in the 1990s. "It's almost to the point where you can't really determine what's going on."
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist known for his free-market views, proposed 50 years ago that to improve schools, parents could be given vouchers -- tickets they could spend to shop for a better education for their kids. He theorized that the resulting competition among schools would spark improvements in the system. Free-market advocates loved the idea. Teachers' unions hated it, arguing that it could drain resources from some public schools and direct resources to religious institutions.
Research on these programs turns up evidence of benefits from school choice. But it hasn't proved strongly convincing, and testing the hypothesis is anything but simple. In the mid-1990s, researchers battled over how to interpret studies of voucher use in Milwaukee. In 2003, they tried to evaluate voucher experiments in New York and ended up squabbling over the right way to decide if a child was African-American. Last year, in assessing charter schools -- institutions that are publicly funded but not bound by traditional rules -- they argued over how to take into account differing backgrounds of the children who attend.
Analysts have searched as far away as New Zealand for evidence about the effects of competition in education -- and disagreed about what was found there, too. Now there is Hoxby vs. Rothstein.
Dr. Hoxby, 39 years old, is one of only two women tenured in Harvard's economics department, a distinction she achieved just seven years after earning a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Other universities, such as Stanford, have tried to lure her away. Harvard, in turn, has given her a prestigious endowed chair.
Although her father, Steven Minter, was an official in the Carter administration Education Department, she has become a favorite in Republican circles for producing statistical evidence that competition improves schools. "This is a person who is smart, who is logical, who is committed and who is dedicated," says Rod Paige, President Bush's first Secretary of Education. Dr. Hoxby also is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the right-leaning research center affiliated with Stanford.
Dr. Rothstein, 31, is the son of Richard Rothstein, a former textile-union organizer who's now a lecturer at Columbia. Father and son have both worked closely with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The son got interested in the streams paper while studying for his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is now an assistant professor at Princeton, not yet eligible for tenure. His Berkeley thesis adviser, David Card, describes Dr. Rothstein, who had majored in math as a Harvard undergraduate, as "tenacious" and having "very good technical skills."
In her 2000 paper, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, Dr. Hoxby explored competition among public schools. She noticed that some metropolitan areas, like Boston, had dozens of school districts, while others, such as Las Vegas, were dominated by just one. She reasoned that if pro-competition economists were right, school systems with many districts should produce better results, because parents in those cities would have more choices about where to live and educate their children, creating a more competitive environment.
To test this notion she might have simply counted the number of school districts in cities. But there were factors that muddied the waters. Sometimes the quality of the school districts influenced their number. That is, in some cases, it appeared cities had numerous districts partly because some were bad -- so bad they couldn't be closed or merged with others. It was the kind of chicken-and-egg problem that often trips up economic research.
Dr. Hoxby tried to find a way around this. She noticed that the number of school districts seemed related to geography. Streams were natural boundaries around which districts were formed many years ago. Cities with lots of streams had more school districts than cities with few streams.
An Opportunity
Testing a hypothesis in economics isn't as straightforward as, say, testing a drug, where researchers can randomly assign some subjects to receive a placebo. Many economists believe they can approach scientific rigor, however, by taking advantage of random events like draft lotteries and judicial assignments. For Dr. Hoxby, streams offered such an opportunity: Cities with lots of streams had been randomly chosen by nature to have more school districts and more school competition, while cities with few streams were naturally home to fewer districts and less competition.
"By using the variation in the number of school districts in a metropolitan area that is driven by streams, we can isolate the effect that interests us: the causal effect of more districts on achievement," she said in an interview via email.
When she found that metro areas with more streams tended to have more districts, and also higher student achievement, many academics thought she had come up with an ingenious way of testing Dr. Friedman's competition thesis. "Caroline had a great idea with that paper," says David Figlio, an education economist at the University of Florida. "It is incontrovertible that it was a brilliant insight."
Dr. Rothstein says it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. He makes several technical challenges, but his main attack is on the way the author counted streams.
A problem she faced at the outset was that some streams can affect more than school-district borders. Large, navigable ones affect commerce and wealth in an area and the kind of population it attracts -- influences that could distort her test. Small streams wouldn't have this problem, Dr. Hoxby said. She divided her streams into larger and smaller ones and entered them into her equations separately to make the distinction clear. Studying detailed maps published by the U.S. Geological Survey, she measured dimensions of water bodies in hundreds of metropolitan areas.
Dr. Rothstein said Dr. Hoxby never laid out exactly how she measured a stream's width, which, he noted, can vary at different points in its course. In the case of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which she found to have five large streams, Dr. Rothstein said when he tried to count them her way in the map room at Princeton's Fine Hall Library, he came up with 12. His research assistant got 15, he wrote in "A Comment on Hoxby," which the National Bureau of Economic Research published in March (Read an abstract). The American Economic Review is now preparing to publish a version of that paper.
"The exercise makes clear that Hoxby's larger-streams variable is subjective and unverifiable," Dr. Rothstein's paper added. In an interview, he says more bluntly: "Fort Lauderdale is a swamp. The idea that streams were a relevant thing in this area is just crazy."
He tried other ways to count streams. Using government databases, he distinguished between larger and smaller ones by their recorded length, and also by whether they flowed through more than one county. With these other measures, he wrote, he found a link between streams and school performance, but too small to be statistically significant.
Dr. Rothstein also complained that for years Dr. Hoxby ignored his requests for the data she used. Economists frequently argue about the availability of data. In this case, Dr. Hoxby said her ability to circulate all her data was limited because some came from the National Center for Education Statistics, which restricts public access to some of its information to protect the identities of students and school districts. Dr. Rothstein contends that the data she ultimately made available don't match up to the data used in her paper.
Dr. Hoxby responded in a National Bureau paper called "Competition Among Public Schools: A Reply to Rothstein," also slated for publication in the American Economic Review. By tossing aside her hand counts of streams, Dr. Hoxby wrote, Dr. Rothstein was proposing "the destruction of important information" and "promoting less informed measurement." (Read an abstract)
She added that "it is dismaying to see a great deal of my work (with strategic changes made by him) appearing on Rothstein's Web site, presented as though it were mainly if not wholly his work." And she wondered: "Why, especially when he has the benefit of hindsight, careful explanations, and nearly all of the data work done for him, does he make bad decisions repeatedly?"
It may be, Dr. Hoxby wrote, that Dr. Rothstein "was determined to generate results that would contradict those in [her original paper] at whatever cost."
Defenders Irked
The rejoinder irked his defenders. "Her nasty, vicious response is really about shutting down debate," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. The group has sparred with her before. A book co-written by Dr. Mishel and Richard Rothstein, Jesse's father, dedicates a section to challenging her work on charter schools.
In an email, Dr. Hoxby responds that "EPI's work is funded by unions, and the teachers' unions are openly opposed to charter schools for reasons of self-interest." EPI says it gets 29% of its funds from unions.
In July, Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, quoted Dr. Hoxby, whose father is African-American, as saying that "there is a lot of race and gender bias going on here."
In an email, Dr. Hoxby says that the paper misrepresented her views and that she had made no allegation of racial or gender bias. The Crimson's president, Harvard senior Lauren Schuker, says the paper stands by "a fair story [that] covered all sides." (Read the Crimson article)
Writing to the Crimson, Dr. Hoxby accused Dr. Rothstein of "ideological bias." He says allegations of bias are "absurd" and unhelpful "name-calling."
In the background of the fight is the broader attempt by some economists to adopt the scientific convention of repeating, or "replicating," studies as a way to verify them. "Unfortunately, economics lacks a strong tradition of scientific replication," Dr. Hoxby wrote in her reply to Dr. Rothstein. She added: "Some economists even seem to believe, confusedly, that replication is not worthwhile unless it upsets a previous result. Rothstein may suffer from such confusion."
Dr. Rothstein: That's "ad hominem" criticism. An economics Web log called "The Lowest Deep" (thelowestdeep.blogspot.com) sums up the squabble as a "nerdy Celebrity Death Match."
The author of the competition thesis, Prof. Friedman, hasn't weighed in on the spat, but his enthusiasm for free-market approaches in education is undimmed. "The case for vouchers is so simple," the 93-year-old Dr. Friedman said to a crowd at New York's Mandarin Oriental Hotel in June, at a gathering to mark the 50th anniversary of his idea. "In area after area, things the government does, private enterprise can do at half the cost." In an interview, he describes Dr. Hoxby as "a very intelligent gal" whose papers "impress me favorably."
At the American Economic Review, editor Robert Moffitt says the journal wouldn't publish Dr. Rothstein's paper if its editors thought it had no merit. But he adds that the decision to publish isn't an endorsement of Dr. Rothstein's critique. "It's like we're saying, 'It's a good question,' " he says.
Meantime, he adds, the Review is trying to get the professors to dial down the language. "Editors make a lot of changes to assure that both parties are meeting an academic and civil tone," he says.
Interesting stuff: Stanford posts lectures, interviews, music and sports via itunes. One of the interesting lectures appears to be Denise Clark Pope's "Getting Ahead in School: How we are creating a Generation of Stress-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students". Perhaps the UW will follow suit (and the MMSD?)
UPDATE: Jeff Henriques points out in the comments that the UW has a resource page up here.
A recent posting from the Tomorrow's Professor listserve looks at the importance of being a demanding teacher, and while the author is reflecting on his experience in the college classroom, the message is just as relevant for students at all grades.
Teaching is serious business. We have wonderfully bright and talented students here at Richmond. They have almost unlimited potential. For most, this is their one shot at college; they deserve nothing less than an excellent education, an academic experience that challenges them to excel from their first day to their last.
Faculty members have a responsibility to the world to coax the very best from their students because they will certainly become the next generation of leaders. Where they go from here, what they accomplish, how they impact the world, depends in large part on how much we are able to push and nurture their development. I want every student to leave my class at the end of the semester saying, "I didn't know that I could work so hard, and I didn't realize that I could learn so much." Anything less is unacceptable.
If a teacher challenges students to think and do their best, word gets around campus quickly, but having a tough reputation is both good and bad. When students walk into my class on the first day, they tend to be very quiet and pay attention right away. On the other hand, I am always so disappointed when a student says to me "I hear you are a good teacher, but I didn't take your class because I know you are very demanding." Isn't that just incredibly sad? I think Richmond will be a better school when students sign up only for classes where teachers push them each day to do their best.
Many times during each semester, I point out to my students that the grade of A, according to the University catalogue, reflects "outstanding" work. A student does not earn the grade of A for a good effort, only for consistently outstanding work. Grade inflation has hurt college education across this country and could be fixed simply by faculty members saying, "You earn an A when the work that I see is truly outstanding." Don't fool yourself; students are well aware of the difference between "good" and "outstanding."
I use the Socratic method. I call on every student every day in class. I don't ask them to regurgitate material; I ask them questions that I believe will cause them to think and reason-on the spot. That is what adult life is like, especially in the business world. I then follow my initial question with others based on their answers. If I don't get good replies from a student, I don't just nod and smile; I demand better of them. A student once compared my class to a contact sport. Richmond students should be ready, willing and able to discuss and debate issues. This is college, not high school.
I want a reasonable effort from my students because students get back based on what they put in. I expect them to study four to six hours each week outside of class so they'll be ready to participate in class discussions. I use carrots and sticks. I say, "Good job!" when a student gives me a thoughtful, well-conceived answer, and I say, "Listen, you can do better than that!" when a student gives me a bad answer. I don't view that as being disagreeable, although I do realize that it injects a bit of tension into the class. But this is not Sesame Street; a bad answer is a bad answer. There is only one primary goal in my class: to improve each student's ability to think, reason and understand. Our students realize how capable they are, but human nature loves to take the easy path.
A good basketball coach adapts to the talents of his or her players. A good teacher does the same. You cannot take an identical approach with every student. Some love to be pushed and pushed hard. They enjoy "in-your-face" challenges. Others are more fragile. You have to coax and nurture them. So toughness comes into my class where toughness is necessary. You teach each student, not each group. However, every student needs to be willing to prepare and to think. That is not negotiable.
One of the keys to becoming a good teacher is learning to walk into a room of students and "see" what is happening to the individual members: Billy needs a few extra seconds to formulate an answer, Susan loves to be called on, Andy doesn't know what is happening right now, Ellen is not prepared. You have to be able to adapt to your students on the spot every day.
Our students can do amazing things, but if we don't challenge them fully, they will never realize what marvelous talents they truly possess. Signing up for demanding classes might hurt a student's GPA, but which is more important: developing a good mind or a good GPA?
Observers say boosting reading scores isn't likely to get any easier, given the rapidly changing demographics in the nation's schools where, for many students, English is a second language. Indeed, English was a second language for 10% of the fourth graders who took the NAEP reading test this year, up from 3% in 1992.
The lack of progress may also reflect divisions in the philosophy of how reading should be taught. Educators and political partisans have waged a long and sometimes bitter battle over how to handle the subject, as conservatives championing basic phonics-based teaching have clashed with liberal backers of "whole language," which revolves around making English instruction exciting by reading stories.
Last spring a longtime parent at West HS was asked to write a description -- content area by content area -- of the curriculum changes that have occurred at West HS in recent years that have affected the academic opportunities of West's "high end" students. Below you will find what she wrote. It includes changes that have actually occurred; changes that may and probably will occur; and important questions about what else may happen in the future.
This summary was then forwarded to two other longtime West parents for their comments. Excerpts from those comments may be found just after the original description. Next, the description of each content area was sent to the appropriate department head at West, for their comment with the goal being to produce a brief, descriptive document that everyone would agree was factually accurate, for educational and advocacy purposes. Unfortunately, none of the department heads responded.
Here is the original description:
1. English
a. A few students gifted in English used to be permitted to begin taking upper-level English courses beginning 2nd semester of 9th grade, based upon their English teacher's recommendation, outstanding performance during their 1st semester at West, and the availability of open slots in appropriate courses that fit the student's schedule. (Note: this option involves no monetary cost.)
b. The two sections of integrated 9th-grade English/Social Studies were eliminated as of the 2003-2004 academic year. The primary purpose of these experimental courses -- very similar in philosophy to the SLCs -- was to provide an opportunity for one English and one social studies teacher to pair together to partially integrate their curricula and get to know the same group of students, along with the students having the same set of classmates for both classes. "TAG" students were among the ones who self-selected into these courses, creating cluster grouping within mainstreamed classrooms.
c. 10th-grade English core curriculum will likely be introduced in 2006-2007. This change will prevent highly motivated and capable students from having the opportunity to take appropriately challenging courses in English until 11th grade (currently, students get to start choosing from among the English electives in 10th grade). Ultimately, the effect will be a reduction in the number and variety of upper-level English courses West is able to offer.
2. Social Studies
a. 9th-grade Integrated English/Social Studies course was eliminated (see above).
b. The British version of 10th-grade European History was eliminated as an option a couple of years ago when the teacher of this course officially retired. (Note: this teacher still teaches some sections of 10th-grade European History at West.) As with Integrated English/Social Studies, "TAG" students were among the ones who self-selected into this variant of 10th-grade social studies, creating high ability cluster grouping within a mainstreamed classroom.
c. West's Social Studies Department decided this year that underclassmen will no longer be permitted to take 12th-grade elective courses prior to 12th-grade, not even on a space-available basis that would involve no monetary cost. No other department has this restriction. Might they follow suit?
3. Science
a. 9th-grade Accelerated Biology is restricted to one section despite there being approximately four classrooms worth of students who desire each year to take on the extra challenge this class entails (i.e., over 100 students choose to take the optional test for admission into Accelerated Biology each year, some years, many more than that). Budget constraints will likely lead to the elimination of even this one section in the near future unless West is willing to assign all of the students in this class to the same SLC (or have one section per SLC).
b. Will the implementation of a 10th-grade Core include science as well? If so, will everyone take the same Chemistry course in 10th grade, eliminating the variety of science options currently available to 10th-grade students? (Note: at the March 2005 West PTSO meeting, West HS Science Department Chair Mike Lipp stated -- in response to a parent question -- that they would not eliminate the regular Chemistry class because the lack of math content/rigor in Chem Comm ("Chemistry in the Community") would leave West graduates unprepared for chemistry at the UW and other universities.)
4. Math
a. West used to have a course called "Precalculus." It covered Algebra 2/Trigonometry Accelerated and Algebra 3 Accelerated in one year. It was eliminated last year (2003-04). The math staff were needed, instead, for "Algebra I Extended." In addition, it was a controversial course, in that there was disagreement as to how many students could really handle and benefit from it. All of West's remaining "accelerated" math courses are really honors classes, that is, they are not accelerated in pace, as exists at many high schools of excellence in the US. (Important note: the "new" class that will be called "Precalculus" next year is simply Algebra 3 Accelerated with a new name, not the old Precalculus.)
b. With old Precalculus gone, will West now end up having too few students to justify continuing to offer Calculus II starting in 2006-2007? (Note: in order to take Calculus II in high school, a student must take geometry before 9th grade or take a year of math over a summer.) If so, West could end up the only MMSD high school not offering Calculus II.
c. In the future, will most students at West be mainstreamed into "Core Plus" starting in 9th grade? (Note: this would fit well with the plan to have an SLC-based core curriculum in 9th and 10th grade; that is, to have all students take Core Plus from the beginning would make possible a 9th and 10th grade core curriculum in math.) If so, will none of these students be able to take Calculus in high school?
Here are excerpts from the comments of Person #1:
The institutional history corresponds well with my experience and my children's experiences at West.
One other point that is not made is that it used to be easier to take an Independent Study course for credit if you were a high achieving student. ... Also, the school people will point to the option of going to UW as a way of providing for high end kids. [Although this works well for some], I think it is a bad option since the calendars [and daily schedules] do not in any way correspond with one another -- on a daily basis, the UW offers courses on a MW, TR, or MWF schedule, while West offers their courses on a MTWRF schedule. The transportation time and the differences in the class start times means that, essentially, taking a single course at UW makes a massive hole in a student's schedule.
Here are excerpts from the comments of Person #2:
As for science, 10th grade students either take Chemistry acclerated or Chem Com. In 11th grade, there are two physics offerings, Advanced Math Physics or General Physics. In 12th grade, the advanced topics courses in these two areas -- as well as in biology -- are fairly subjective, dependent on teacher interest. By contrast, Memorial students have AP Chem, Physics and Bio, as well as a 9th grade earth science class; additionally, the sequence is taught in the more accepted order, chem, physics and finally, biology. Many Memorial students graduate with 25-45 AP credits; very few West students take any other than calculus, foreign language and/or statistics--10-15 credits. This can make a huge difference in college, either for placement and/or early graduation with its attendant reduction in cost.
Fundamentally, the problem lies with the SLC program. Its primary purpose, despite the social rhetoric, is to homogenize the student body across all variables, including academics. Most of the features that made West a haven for TAG students are eliminated. Taking courses out of the normal sequence will be very difficult and the clustering of students, unless it happens de facto as the result of changes in the middle school curriculum, will disappear. It was this menu of options and flexibility that offset West's weak to non-existent AP program. I would also be very concerned whether a student will be able to participate in UW's Youth Options program; coordinating the university and high school schedules is difficult under the current arrangement with West's variety of courses and times. Youth Options has been a tremendous opportunity for gifted students to expand beyond the typical constraints of the high school curricula. (Note: the State now limits the number of college credits for which a District must pay to 18 per student. Also, the Youth Options Program may well face threat of extinction again in the near future.)
I said it in the comments section attached to Marcia's original post. Now is the time for pre-high school families to get involved at West. Don't wait.
This will be like turning around the Titanic, however--there is a great deal of momentum to disassemble much of what was strong about West for high achievers. And what the district seems to be ignoring is that many of these families make up the backbone of support for the school, from PTO, to athletic and drama boosters, etc, both in terms of hands-on involvement and financial contributions.
The safety valve of attending UW classes is also being shut off, too. If a course is offered ANYWHERE in the district, MMSD won't pay for a West student to take it at UW. In addition, there is a "residency" requirement, i.e., to be considered a full-time student, a certain number of credit hours have to be taken at West or be approved to be taken elsewhere. So even if your family can afford to pay for UW courses and can get approval from UW for your student to take more than one class per semester, your student might still run afoul of the residency requirement.
Of course, home schooling is an option. Some families have quilted together classes at West, UW and home or on-line. One of the "West" national merit scholars this year has done just that.
As discussioncontinues over the lack of AP courses at West High School relative to the other three Madison high schools, West prepares to further reduce the course opportunities for students.
Many West parents wrote this past spring and summer to Principal Ed Holmes, Science Chair Mike Lipp, and District Science Coordinator Lisa Wachtel advocating for more not fewer sections of Accelerated Biology. Parents have also written to express concern about plans to homogenize the 10th grade English curriuculum, eliminating the options currently available to 10th graders, and requiring students to wait until 11th grade before they can take elective courses in English.
There had been no response to these concerns until a recent letter went out at the end of September from Principal Ed Holmes.
Dear Interested Parent:
As we continue to improve and expand our curricular program to meet the needs of a very diverse student population, I want to assure you that we are working with best practice models and some of the most informed professionals in the field to make sure we offer a quality academic program for your child. Our goal is to do our absolute best to provide a challenging rigorous curriculum that meets the needs of every student that we serve at West High School.
The following information represents the work that has been done over the summer and at the outset of the 2005/06 school year in the areas of science and English. The people involved in the work in biology have been Welda Simousek, Talented and Gifted Coordinator for MMSD, Lisa Wachtel MMSD science coordinator, Mike Lipp, West High, science Department Chairperson, and members of the West High biology teaching team. Work in the area of English has been done by Keesia Hyzer, West High English Department Chairperson, Ed Holmes, Principal, West High School and members of the West High English teaching team.
Science
There was over 25 hours of district-supported science professional development this summer focusing on quality instruction and differentiation at the high school level. Members of the West biology staff participated in this professional development opportunity along with high school science teachers from all the other MMSD high schools.
There are eight professional development days scheduled during the 05-06 academic year to continue the work begun over the summer and further develop the honors designation in science.
While there has been initial work over the summer on the honors designation in science there remains a lot of work to be done by the West science staff
We are keeping in mind the following critical components as we plan:
More work is not the goal. Qualitatively different work is what will be expected.
Not all of the work can be done inside of class. There will be homework assignments just as always, but again, the work expected will be qualitatively, not quantitatively different.
We are looking for ways to enable students working toward the honors designation to spend some time together as a group as well as to work with other groups of students.
English
Over the summer, members of the English Department worked to create an English 10 curriculum. We will continue to fine-tune this curriculum over the school year. During the summer of 2006, English 10 teachers will meet to plan and differentiate particular units. Criteria for an honors designation in English 10 as well as additional attention for struggling students are both specified in the curriculum.
All students have the option to elect or drop the honors designation.
Honors designation does not guarantee an A.
One English teacher, as part of her allocation, will be assigned as Skills and Enrichment Coordinator. This teacher will meet with those students who have elected honors twice weekly during lunch to lead discussion of the enrichment literature. This person will also grade honors exams and papers.
The Skills and Enrichment Coordinator will meet twice weekly during lunch with students needing additional help. Books on tape, as well as reading and writing assistance will be provided.
The English Department meets at least once monthly; professional development days will also be used to continue our work on planning English 10. We plan to present information regarding grade 10 English curriculum at the November 7 PTSO meeting. All parents are invited to come to hear about the work the English Department has been doing over the last few months. We will continue to keep parents involved in the process as we determine the future of curricular and academic programming at West.
AP Courses Taught in Four Madison Public High Schools
Here is a listing of the AP courses taught at each Madison high school:
East (8 AP courses) -- Calculus I, Calculus II, French, Macro Economics, Micro Economics, Music Theory, Psychology, Spanish
LaFollette (13 AP courses) -- Calculus I, Calculus II, Chemistry, Computer Science, European History, French, Literature and Composition, Macro Economics, Micro Economics, Psychology, Spanish, Statistics, U.S. History
Memorial (16 AP courses) -- Biology, Calculus I, Calculus II, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Science, European History, French, Language and Composition, Literature and Composition, Macro Economics, Micro Economics, Physics, Psychology, Spanish, World History
West (8 AP courses) -- Calculus I, Calculus II, Computer Science, French, Latin, Music Theory, Spanish, Statistics
The Department of Public Instruction web site includes data on AP courses offered going back to 1996-1997 through 2003-2004. (I apologize in advance for the long URL) The data is presented on statewide and individual district and school levels, which makes comparison possible:
The page also has a utility that allows comparisons between districts and schools using pre-defined sets (ex. Big Eight) or user choice.
The user will need to use the links to view data for individual subject areas (math, foreign languages, English, etc.). The menu pick for statewide data is in the left hand column of the page. If I read it correctly, the number of AP course offerings is going up across the state, down in the Madison Metropolitan School District. At least in English AP offerings.
I note that haven't had time to do a thorough analysis and have some questions about the data, and encourage others to do the same. I believe that there is some useful information through this source.
As blogging enters the classrooom and takes its place alongside reading, writing and 'rithmetic, adult Web surfers have the chance to relive the trials and tribulations of the wonder years.
A Few Notes on the Superintendent's Evaluation & Curriculum
Severalwritershavementioned the positive news that the Madison Board of Education has reviewed Superintendent Art Rainwater for the first time since 2002. I agree that it is a step in the right direction.
In my view, the first responsibility of the Board and Administration, including the Superintendent is curriculum: Is the Madison School District using the most effective methods to prepare our children for the future?
There seems to be some question about this:
Language: The District has strongly embraced whole language (Troy Dassler notes in the comments that he has been trained in balanced literacy). I would certainly be interested in more comments on this (and other) point(s). [Ed Blume mentions that ""Balanced literacy" became the popular new term for whole language when whole language crumbled theoretically and scientifically."] UW Professor Mark Seidenberg provides background on whole language and raises many useful questions about it. Related: The District has invested heavily in Reading Recovery. Ed Blume summarized 8 years of District reading scores and notes that Madison 3rd graders rank below state wide average for children children in the advanced and proficient categories. (Madison spends about 30% more than the state average per student)
Math: The District embraces Connected Math. UW Math Professor Dick Askey has raised a number of questions about this curriculum, not the least of which is whether our textbooks include all of the corrections. A quick look at the size of the Connected Math textbooks demonstrates that reading skills are critical to student achievement.
"Same Service Budget Approach": I think the District's annual same service approach reflects a general stagnation.
Many organizations live on the fumes of their past. Is this the case with the Madison School District?
Superintendent Rainwater visited with the Capital Times on the day the Board released the report on the his evaluation. Matt Pommer briefly summarized the discussion and closes by mentioning that state budget controls prevent new programs from being developed. This statement reflects the "same service mantra". The District could certainly change expensive programs like Reading Recovery and invest in a different approach. The District could also strongly adopt virtual learning tools. Weyauwega-Fremont School Board President Steve Loehrke has spoken and written extensively on these questions. The District could also change the way in which it delivers information (there's a little movement on this).
I've not seen much, if any discussion of curriculum issues at the Board level, or the Performance and Achievement subcommittee, which has not met since 1/31/2005. I seem to remember (but can't find the quote) that Board President Carol Carstensen said at a District event, that "we leave the curriculum up to the staff". I could not disagree more with this approach.
I think it's time for a serious Board curriculum discussion. Madison is fortunate to have some fabulous resources just down the street at a world class University. Let's work with them, before they move on.
Madison third graders rank BELOW the state-wide average for children in the advanced and proficient categories.
Nearly one-third of the African-American third graders read at basic or below. (And basic is below grade level.)
African-American third grades still trail white students by a substantial margin.
Schools at the bottom in 1978-79 are still at the bottom in 2004-2005.
Click here to view an Excel file with eight years of reading scores.
Reading isn’t just something nice that kids should learn. It’s critical. Based on the most recent third grade reading test results, we can say with absolute certainty that one-third of the the tested third graders will not succeed in school! That’s unacceptable.
The Board of Education should include among its goals an immediate review of the MMSD's reading programs to throw out the unscientific practices and replace them with curriculum based on research outlined by Professor Mark Seidenberg below.
Many good things are happening in the Madison Metropolitan School District! This viewpoint and the things we see conflict with the stated concern by some families as they tell us that they will be leaving the district rather than attend West high school. The one reason common to families is that they want their child to have a chance to take AP courses (limited numbers offered at West, in contrast to the other MMSD high schools) for the academic challenge offered to prepare their child for application to competitive colleges. (This viewpoint seems to be paired with a concern that the Small Learning Community approach at West may result in decreased opportunities for other challenging course work). It seems so sad that these families are choosing to leave the district. The contributions that children and parents have made to the district will be greatly missed.
AP offerings seem to be the norm across the nation, yet at least one West staff member opposes these offerings. Can we have an open discussion about issues of concern??? What are the pros and cons of increased AP offerings? Is it important to attempt to retain families currently attending our schools? What do you think? If you have a special interest in this issue, you may want to check below for additional information. . . .
Today was a good day at our school. Our son participated in a “Reader’s theater” in which the 6th graders did a wonderful job of entertaining a room full of supportive parents. Our daughter participated in one of the 3 bands (sponsored by the school), to which she belongs. A great principal welcomed parents and commented on their children, whom she quickly came to know well, shortly after the start of a new school year. My email message to a teacher thanking him for completing some extra paperwork for our son resulted in him taking additional time to send another message of support and compliment. In a discussion about people who have earned our respect, our son immediately identified a teacher. There are so many good things happening that we appreciate at MMSD!
However, in conversations with families, we hear information that indicates that several are concerned that the high school within their boundary area will not meet the needs of their kids and they will therefore be placing their children in school in another district or sending their child to Edgewood or considering Madison Country Day school (OR have already moved from the district). Can it be the same district?? Indeed, these concerns have been shared about West high school. Parents reported a variety of reasons for leaving. There was, however, one common reason among ALL of the families; that being the limited number of AP courses offered at West high.
My original concern about students leaving the district led to a search for information on AP as a central factor impacting their decisions. I fully expected to find that their perception was in error or that there was surely something simple that could be done to add AP courses to meet the needs of more children or that there was clearly something better available to better meet that stated need for challenge and a strong college resume.
As an attempt to gather the complete story about the AP/West issue, I was in contact with the following by email or phone:
and 2 members of the Board of Education. Additional information was obtained from written reports of the work by Valencia Douglas and Donna Ford, both supportive of AP courses offered for minority students.
A variety of comments were received:
“I’m not opposed to AP courses”,
“I think we should increase the number”,
“We want the schools to meet the needs of all students”,
“Nearly all schools offer a significant number of AP courses. DPI is working to help rural and poor schools provide these courses so that their students aren’t at a disadvantage when applying for college”.
“I am not on board with adding AP classes. I would be very depressed if that were to happen”.
“I don’t understand why the other MMSD high schools have so many AP offerings while West does not”.
“That can’t be right. West used to have such a good reputation”.
“Teachers at West do not want to teach these courses, as they find them boring”.
“Your kids will surely want to take AP classes”.
“Most applicants to college do have AP courses and we expect to see them on their transcripts, although we don’t penalize West students, as we know that few AP courses are offered there”.
There are many differing and contradictory viewpoints, within this group of district staff, posing a challenge in trying to determine the most valid viewpoint. Several asked me not to reveal their name out of concern for conflict with others. I heard the word “arrogant” twice as staff described others.
Jan Davidson, author of “Genius Denied” responded to my question (at her presentation regarding gifted education) “What would you say to a school official who opposes AP courses?” I had hoped for some words of wisdom. In fact, she was speechless, as she couldn’t understand why this would be the case. Following the presentation she said that she had heard such good things about Madison that she expected something much different with regard to education here.
To gain a broader perspective, I checked for additional information on AP offerings outside the district. I sent messages to 20 families who live elsewhere in the state or nation, asking them to identify the AP course offerings at their schools. I persisted until those same households responded. ALL 20 noted that their child’s school offered AP classes in
literature/writing,
history,
calculus,
at least one foreign language,
several science options,
as well as others, with several offering 30 such courses.
In a class that I teach on the UW campus, I asked students to tell me about their AP course background. Out of 38 in attendance, 37 had four or more AP classes. The one student who did not was over the age of 40 and didn’t have an opportunity for those courses when she attended high school.
It seems that AP courses appeal to a wide range of students, including many who plan on post-secondary education. Certainly AP courses are not a panacea for all who are concerned about challenging work. West does have some challenging and very well respected courses (although it was a bit difficult to locate that information). Some families who have very bright children are looking for courses even more challenging than the AP classes. In any case, we weren’t asking about “watered down” AP courses, but were hoping for consideration of courses to meet the need for challenges at the high school level. It is hoped that we could address the concern of families who may choose not to attend West for that reason and have an open discussion about any misunderstanding and work toward any needed changes as a team. Many of us believe that all students and families are valuable to the district and that we should actively work to meet all needs and consider all input. When a family who supports and contributes to a school chooses to leave, that seems so sad. I was hoping that representatives of the district may feel the same way. As for me, I was told “West is not in competition for your children”. Ouch!! I suspect that many in the district do not agree with the spirit of that statement.
There’s a great deal more information out there about AP courses and I’ve developed a special interest in that area. My primary concern though, is for families who may leave the district. I know that there are many in the district who DO care about these and all families. Let’s have a discussion about both sides of the AP issue as well as other issues that may result in families leaving the district.
More than two-thirds of students who were high school seniors in 2004 expected to complete a bachelor’s degree, and 35 percent planned to get a graduate or professional degree. But nearly two-thirds of the students who expected to get a four-year degree had not mastered intermediate level mathematics concepts as 12th graders, and nearly a third could not consistently solve simple problems based on low-level mathematical concepts, according to a study released Friday by the U.S. Education Department.
I left the Dominican Republic to come to the United States in 7th grade. I was put in a special education class. I wasn't slow, but I was quiet - you know different culture? I was very introverted. I'll always remember that class. Other kids used to tease all of us. It's interesting how people can get lost that way.
I befriended a teacher who took me under his wing. He encouraged me to participate in class. It was just a matter of confidence. If we were going to do something in science, he would encourage me to do a project and present it. He helped me come out of my shell.
Maya Portulaca Cole posted the following thoughts on the listserve of MAFAAC:
Reading through a recent article about the Portland, OR school system from In These Times, titled, "All for One, None for All: Schoolchoice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom," I'm reminded of our own city and worry for its future.
On one hand, I think of Asa Hilliard's words that remind us that, The relative 'wealth' of the relatively small numbers of Africans in the middle-income level obscures the gross poverty of the masses of low and no income Africans. Satisfied personally, the higher income Africans may even become a buffer, silencing the voice of the masses by being in a broker position to cool out the masses, and earning money for that containment of their brothers and sisters. These brothers and sisters are usually not clear at all. Many seem not even to seek clarity. They seek entertainment."
I would argue that school vouchers may satisfy the needs of the lucky few, but it in no way will it provide for the needs of the children living in poverty - either black or white. It perpetuates the haves and the have-nots.
More than once I've heard folks remark how Madison is trending toward a smaller version of Portland (one of those supposed hip, creative, progressive, environmentally-aware communities). This makes me think of how we need to revisit No Child Left Behind and how it may change our school system as it expands.
More debate should be given to the topic of NCLB because it really captures the reality we face due to the current GOP's push for "accountability" and "school choice".
And given the context of the school board creating task forces on boundary changes and school expansion; along with Mr. Rainwater's evaluation, we could ask the board to predict where we are heading with NCLB which is essentially an unfunded mandate.
For two decades, policymakers have decreed that seventh grade should be a time when children have a chance to adjust to puberty and cliques and the other annoyances of turning 13. Lessons should be engaging and enriching, middle school advocates have said, but not put too much emphasis on mastering subject matter and passing difficult tests.
That attitude is changing, at Kenmore Middle School and in much of the rest of the country. Middle schools have "overemphasized emotional development at the expense of academic growth," said Mike Riley, superintendent of Bellevue, Wash., schools
Wisconsin's Student Achievement Tests: Are our kids doing as well as we think?
A recent New York Times article, "One Secret to Better Test Scores: Make State Reading Tests Easier" by Michael Winerip (10/05/05) reported that changes in k-12 achievement tests are the reason for substantially improved scores. The reporter argues that easier tests--not improved reading--account for much of the improvements claimed.
The Education Trust, a national non-profit organization, has published a study that compares student scores on state-created achievement tests with scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress for each state. The most recent edition of the report covers 2003. The data support the conclusion that Wisconsin's tests may be overstating our students' achievement. For example, in Wisconsin 80% of students statewide scored at grade level or better ("Proficient or Advanced") on the Grade 4 Overall Reading and English Language Arts tests. However, only 33% of the Wisconsin sample taking the NAEP test scored at this level.
Carol's school in China is sharply focused on math and sciences. In one day she takes math, two physics classes and three chemistry classes. In Emily's school in Maryland, interest in these subjects is dwindling.
It is perhaps the final chance for Smith to impose his vision, and his will, on a school system he set out to transform three years ago. He has built much of his reputation in Anne Arundel by importing or expanding rigorous programs such as IB, on the theory that an infusion of challenging coursework would benefit all.
Smith acknowledges that completing the trio of IB schools is "a very important piece" of his plan, and his legacy, in the county.
The third most students in Madison history — 60 — have qualified as semifinalists in competition for the 2006 National Merit Scholarship Awards. Three Madison students earned National Merit Achievement semifinalist status. This is the sixth straight year that at least 56 Madison students have achieved semifinalist status, a number not reached by any of the previous classes. That's quite remarkable because the National Merit Corporation says that about 1.3% of test-taking students become semifinalists. Based on that percentage, the Madison district should have about 10 semifinalists. Only last year and the year before did Madison have more semifinalists, 69 and 67 respectively.
Young, Gifted and Black, by Perry, Steele and Hilliard is a little gem of a book. (Hereafter, YGB). The subtitle is “Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students”. Though specifically addressing African-American kids, the descriptions and proscriptions proposed can be applied to all – important, given the continual poor showing of U.S. students generally on international tests (OECD PISA, TIMSS).
It is the section written by Asa Hilliard, Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, that addresses the real “gap” and real “reform”. The following attempts to summarize his positions and arguments:
The real gap for all students, not just Black, is the gap between student performance and excellence. Where does one start to close the gap? – by relying on the experiences of teachers who do not fail to achieve excellence in all their students, regardless of background – these experiences have always been around, but few educators want to acknowledge. It is in this protected environment of excellence in education that the theories of curriculum, and excuses of deprivation, of language, of failure can be unmasked.
Absolute, instead of relative, standards of excellence can start with the 1983 College Board “Green Book”, detailing what students should know and be able to do upon high school graduation. Though there can always be improvements in standards, and differences about standards may exist around the edges, there is often little debate as to real accomplishments at some schools.
In mathematics, Project SEED and the Marcus Garvey School in Los Angeles represent such excellence. At Marcus Garvey, teachers are able to teach higher level of mathematics to traditionally low-performing student groups, and at ages earlier than more privileged groups. At Marcus Garvey, students are prepared in earlier grades and then are taught calculus during 5th grade. It can be done anywhere. As we will see, there is no magic, just good teaching.
That these excellent teachers succeed is to fundamentally challenge the conventional wisdom in teacher education, and educational research, theory and practice. These teachers worked, applying old methods, in old school facilities, without Ritalin, without vouchers, using rudimentary theoretical notions, with low technologies, and with no standarized cookie-cutter “research-based” programs or centralized micromanagement of the instructional process. For them, IQ scores did not predict achievement, cultural deprivation theory did not explain achievement, sociological theories about the correlation of socioeconomic status with achievement were irrelevant.
Current educational research has been, and continues to be rife with cultural deficit theories, demographic explanations of failure -- reflecting a terrible pessimism about the power of teachers, parents, and students. Educational researchers prefer controlled, large-scale experiments, comparing one cookie-cutter approach to others, and ignoring the many, single instances of atypical high performances with typically underachieving children – treating them as statistical outliers – errors outside the clean Bell curve of their expectations.
The education professions popular opinions for low performance of students, poor and/or black help and encourage the approaches to educational service that ultimately succeed in limiting the achievement of students. Each of these popular opinions needs to be submitted to those teachers and schools who have achieved excellence – the “gap closers” – for validation.
One such popular explanation is “acting white” – an explanation that even Black researchers have become enamored with – a simple explanation that fits the preferred paradigm of many educational consumers. Another popular explanation is internalization of teachers’ expectations of inferiority – again this fits the preferred paradigm of some. A third popular explanation is socioeconomic status and crime. And finally, the “critical periods” explanation – a generalization of ideas of imprinting of birds and rodents to human beings – that says if certain achievements do not occur at a certain age, then failure to close the gap is virtually certain.
In each of these cases, the experience of the “gap closers” is significantly different. Their experience, to the person, is that the above explanations and hypotheses are false. The acceptance of these false hypotheses exists only because there is a desire to have it persist. There is no excuse for the failure to accept, failure to understand, failure to study and emulate the “gap closers”.
There is now sufficient published evidence in the literature to demonstrate just how easy it is to produce high achievement in typically low-performing schools: Schmoker, 1999; Haycock, 1999; Sizemore, 1988; Sizemore, Brosard, Harrigan, 1994; Saunders, Rivers, 1996; Comer, 1980; Hughes, 1995; Jones, 1981; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Levine, Lezotte, 1990; Watson, Smiterman, 1996.
What makes gap-closing success possible? What features do such programs and teaching share? What do they look and feel like?
Project SEED at Berkley High School in California, is taught by Bill Johntz. Unlike most commercial educational programs that claim high achievement with low-income, cultural minority students, many of which actually produce less achievement, Project SEED works. Project SEED teaches children algebra, trigonometry, and recently calculus. Evaluation studies of the program show that the children gain two (2) years in arithmetic scores on standardized tests for each year of instruction. This translates not only into high mathematics scores, but significant increases of self-concept and self-esteem, and improvements in communication and social skills.
Bill Johntz teaches using the Socratic method. The class is alive with questions, probing, explanations, reasoning, excitement, high level content and thinking by children – results which confound those whose paradigms reject the notion of such children, or any children, displaying such skills.
However, it was quite clear from the outset, watching this class in action, that the teacher would have to possess a deep knowledge of mathematics, something that is very rare among public school teachers.
There is no way that the line of questions in response to students’ responses could be framed in an instant if the teacher did not know his or her subject in depth; many teachers teach outside their fields or receive most of their preparation in methodology rather than in content, and would be unprepared to engage students at the level necessary to achieve such excellence.
It is a wonderful sight to see – to take students who perform typically two or three years below grade level in arithmetic and engage them in high-level conceptually oriented mathematics within a few days. It challenges a whole host of common assumptions among educators about teaching and learning – assumptions about methodology, student mental capacity, student mental health and behavioral characteristics, and so on.
Though Project SEED and other successful gap-closing examples, and even whole successful schools have demonstrated excellence, they are frequent targets of school leaders. They are often seen as “not team players”. They do not fit the programs that are “research-based”. They are almost always ignored in typical research studies. The feeling seems to be that these teachers and these schools are unique or charimatic, and that what they do is beyond other teachers and schools. Nothing could be further from the truth. These examples lead where we should go.
What do we do? The public policy paradigm is fatally flawed and misguided. The common misguided policies and reforms include manipulating test scores in high-stake testing, using school vouchers, using school charters, purchasing commercial programs, bureaucratizing the educational processes, especially remedial and special education, such as Individual Education Plan team assessment and micromanagement of the educational process.
In general, educators have pursued “decoy issues”, such as testing, the preoccupation with “child capacity”, and school “reform”. However, as illustrated above, the essence should be approaches that encourage high-quality teaching. We, now, focus most of our attention on the children and little on the quality of the services and equity in its distribution.
Schools of Education, instead, must begin turning out gap-closing teachers and principals. But this is unlikely unless the Schools of Education contain gap-closing faculty, especially those in charge of clinical experience for teachers and school leaders.
A tug of war over students and state aid could be shaping up in Dane County. News 3's Toni Morrissey has been looking into plans for a charter school that's making waves in the public school community. . .
"We agree with the concept of charter schools," said Joe Quick, legislative liaison for Madison School District. "We embrace it. But we've got grave reservations about setting up a charter school that there's no oversight and accountability from locally elected officials.
"An uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors' average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.
Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle - the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C's, the assignment to a remedial "basic skills" class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school."
Parents at Hamilton Heard that Students Cannot Perform Basic Math Calculations
Last night was parent night at the MMSD middle schools. My daughter is in 8th grade at Hamilton Middle School, so I spent the evening going to her different classes to learn about what the syllabus was for each of her five academic classes - algebra I accelerated, english, history, Spanish and science. She also takes music theater, physical education and family and consumer education.
All was going well - lots of emphasis on content and organization. Then I got to her Algebra I class, which is also her homeroom. Her teacher said he had good news and bad news. Bad news in the third week of classes? Yes. He gave all his 8th grade algebra classes a pre-test that was an assessment of basic math calculations - percentages, fractions, decimals, etc. The average score - 40%!
How could this be one parent queried the teacher. Her child had gotten As last year in math class. His answer: children are lacking facility with the basic math skills necessary to be successful in algebra. Students did not know these basic skills and could not calculate answers without using a calculator.
If you don't know basic math facts and know them well by the time you begin algebra I, a student will stuggle to be a successful learner in algebra and more advanced math classes. You have to have the basics down. The teacher recommended the book "Algebra To Go" as a review text.
Hamilton Middle School - Two Years of Foreign Language Taught Daily, 7th Grade Algebra I Accelerated and 8th Grade Geometry, Children Select Music Option (Not a Pull out Curriculum)
Hamilton Middle School offers five academic classes per day in 7th and 8th grades. Hamilton offers its students choices in math, foreign language and music. What do other MMSD and Dane County middle schools offer children? I'd be interested in seeing posts with this information.
Hamilton MS Foreign Language:
In 7th and 8th grade, children choose either French or Spanish. Classes meet every day all year for two years.
Hamilton Middle School Math
Connected math is taught at this school. However, there are accelerated math class choices for students. Algebra 1 accelerated is offered to 8th grade students (based upon teacher recommendation, student interest). There are a number of classes of 8th grade Algebra 1 accelerated. Children completing this course in 8th grade successfully are ready for Geometry or Algebra II in 9th grade at West High School.
There is also one 7th grade class of Algebra I accelerated and one 8th grade class of geometry.
Hamilton Music
All children in grades 6, 7, 8 are required to take a music class - options offered are general music, chorus, band and orchestra. Also, in 8th grade music theater is offered. The schedule for all three years is an A/B schedule with physical education. Children have music three times one week and two times in the next week for an average of 125 minutes per week. The MMSD School Board approved music education curriculum calls for 200 minutes of music education per week (50 minutes per day).
My 7th Grader's Lost Year at Sherman Middle School?
On Monday, August 29, Kate McWhirter, Kari Douglas, Helen Fitzgerald and I met at Sherman Middle School with Ann Yehle, Principal at Sherman, Barb Brodhagen, Learning Coordinator at Sherman, Maria Brown, Spanish Teacher at Sherman, and Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
Foreign Language Issues
At this meeting, where we were pressed for time, Maria spoke about the foreign language classes for 6th, 7th and 8th grade. In past years, 6th grade students received 4 1/2 weeks of French and 4 1/2 weeks of Spanish. This year they will be receiving 9 weeks of each class (A/B schedule). In seventh grade the students only receive one semester of class. This is due to the block theory that they are trying to implement at Sherman. The Foreign Language teachers prefer this type of schedule because they have more consistancy with the students for a greater amount of time. Meeting every day the pronunciation of words would improve vs. every other day with more students. Working with a student everyday helps the teacher becomes more familiar with the student. Unfortunately, for those students who have it first semester, they will receive no foreign language again until 8th grade. That year, those students will take foreign language all year, every other day. All Sherman students are required to take a foreign language.
Algebra
We spent most of the time discussing foreign language so we didn't get a chance to go into an in-depth discussion of other areas that we're concerned with. One of course, is Algebra. More information will be available tomorrow, and I'll update you as to what was decided. But just to keep you up to date on the situation, only 5 students "qualified" to participate in Algebra. After a letter was sent out from Superintendent Art Rainwater's office, 48 students are now opting for the Algebra class, with one teacher. This will change asap. However, students now can choose to participate in algebra, which conflicts with Sherman Principal Ann Yehle's plan for heterogenous classes.
Music
We are still concerned about the pull out program for music. Nick Lane is the new band and choir director at Sherman. Levi Olson, hired back at Sherman after being pink-slipped last year from his orchestra position, is now the General Music teacher. His responsibilities include orchestra along with teaching general music for all students (students must take general music even if they are in another music class). Students are pulled out of their exploratory classes including foreign language to participate in band/orchestra and choir. My daughter has selected both band and choir and as a result is missing spanish two days a week. This week she will miss only one class since she has just one day of band. This is not acceptable and I have informed both Pam and Ann about it.
Pam saw that there was a need for us to get back together after a few weeks of trying this new schedule. We are meeting in October.
We also suggested that each team designate a person as the "go to teacher" for accelerated students. Pam and Ann thought this was a great idea, and are going to look into it, but we've heard nothing on this suggestion.
Summary
Principal Ann Yehle is going ahead with her plans to make changes at Sherman, regardless of the number of parents who have expressed their concerns. Students are being forced to participate in classes, and no longer have the option to choose. The afterschool classes are still being called the 8th hour, but are not considered a gradeable class.
My opinion is that the Madison School District Administration is going into these heterogeneous classes without considering the implications to Sherman students, this year and into the future. I see Sherman students falling far behind the other middle school students that feed into East, along with the entire MMSD. The downtown Madison School District Administration is allowing these changes to take place and ignoring the parents who are concerned about these schedules.
Experimenting on the children
I stated at a School Board meeting this summer, and have repeated over and over: "While Sherman tries to figure out what they want to do as far as education, and make changes year after year to "get it right", my children only have these three years of Middle School education and cannot get them back. How can I as a parent allow my children to be guinea pigs while they figure it out? And what can I do to finally get the Administration to sit up and realize that they can't mess with my children's education?"
I am counting on this year as being a lost year for my 7th grade daughter. Do I give up the fight and send her to another school? Do I pull her out of a neighborhood school where all her friends are, so she can get an education that is superior rather than a substandard education at Sherman?
When did we begin to consider mediocrity acceptable?
Two new books on how to teach students of divergent abilities seem at first to have been written on different planets.
But Deborah L. Ruf's "Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind" and a new edition of Jeannie Oakes's "Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality" eventually reveal a similar frustration. Both want children to be given more individual attention and more of an academic challenge than they are getting in most schools.
· Oakes, a UCLA professor, has studied the results of putting children of different achievement levels in the same classrooms for several decades (the first edition of this book was published in 1985).
· Ruf, based in Minneapolis, is the national gifted-children program coordinator for American Mensa, an organization for people with high IQs, and works with families of gifted children.
· Oakes focuses on the problems of students considered below average. She argues that they are labeled slow learners for reasons that have little to do with careful assessment and often have much to do with the fact that their parents are poor or are ethnic minorities. She says such students should be given a chance at challenging lessons and such college preparatory classes as Advanced Placement. If they are kept in tracks reserved for low achievers, she says, that will not happen. The book includes results of work she has done since the first edition with schools that were persuaded to disregard the old tracks and give such students a chance to learn at higher levels.
· Ruf works on the other end of the spectrum, with students so quick and so bright that they are bored with the pace of most classrooms. But Ruf does not devote much space to defending tracking systems that put those high-achieving students in classes by themselves, since her research seems to indicate that school systems cannot be trusted to teach as well as many of them need and deserve. Instead, she says, schools have to treat all students as individuals and find ways to accelerate their learning as much as they are capable, by skipping grades or providing independent study or, if nothing else works, home schooling.
· Oakes, in turn, wants to get rid of the gifted label, but she promises worried parents that the school "will also find ways to accommodate any child whose intellectual 'gifts' are so extreme or whose disabilities are so severe that they require different schooling arrangements on a case-by-case basis."
The two-day event at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union will include sessions Wednesday on the future of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) at 10:30 a.m., high school redesign at 11:20a.m., and the “New 3 R’s for the UW-Madison School of Education” at 1:15 p.m. Sectionals that begin at 2:30 p.m. will include changes in special education law, open enrollment, rural schools and communities, NCLB in Wisconsin, and virtual education. Dennis Winters, vice president and director of research for NorthStar Economics Inc. of Madison, will present research on the economic impact of 4-year-old kindergarten (4K) at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. (Media have been invited to this briefing.)
During the four centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could be carried across time and distance, everyone engaged in politics, education, religion, and literature believed that reading helped to shape the minds, opinions, attitudes, and ultimately the actions, of readers. William St Clair investigates how the national culture can be understood through a quantitative study of the books that were actually read. Centred on the romantic period in the English-speaking world, but ranging across the whole print era, it reaches startling conclusions about the forces that determined how ideas were carried, through print, into wider society. St Clair provides an in-depth investigation of information, made available here for the first time, on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives. He offers a picture of the past very different from those presented by traditional approaches. Indispensable to students, English literature, book history, and the history of ideas, the study’s conclusions and explanatory models are highly relevant to the issues we face in the age of the internet.
The first study of actual reading using quantification and economic analysis
Sheds new light on aspects of reading and its effect on the nation
An indispensable resource for scholars working on literature, reading, and the history of publishing and printing
The Governance Divide: Improving College Readiness and Success
The Governance Divide: A Report on a Four-State Study on Improving College Readiness and Success authored by The Institute for Educational Leadership, The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, The Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research. Foreword, Executive Summary, Full Report (345K PDF):
The report also offers recommendations to help states transform ad hoc approaches into sustained action and institutionalized, long-term K-16 reforms. Every state needs to increase the percentage of students who complete high school and finish some form of postsecondary education; existing governance structures and policies cannot meet this overwhelming need. For most states, these structures and policies must be revised in significant ways.
Currently, K-12 and postsecondary education exist in separate worlds in the United States. Policies for each system of education are typically created in isolation from each other-even though, in contrast to the past, most students eventually move from one system to the other. Students in K-12 rarely know what to expect when they enter college, nor do they have a clear sense of how to prepare for that next step. Particularly now, in the 21st century, when more students must complete some postsecondary education to have an economically secure life, the need for improved transitions from high school to college is urgent. This need for some postsecondary education extends beyond individual aspirations. In this global economy, businesses and communities-and our nation as a whole-must have residents who have achieved educational success beyond high school.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction acknowledges there is a problem and said the department is working to improve the situation with new programs.
“In Wisconsin, there is a tremendous amount of coordination to ensure that students are prepared for college,” DPI Communications Officer Joe Donovan said.
This coordination comes in the form of a program called PK16, which stands for pre-kindergarten through grade 16. One of the program’s goals is to focus on keeping students motivated and challenged during the transition from their senior year of high school to college.
1) In science and math, the U.S. is ahead of only the really poor OECD countries -- Turkey, Mexico, etc. So yes, there is reason to worry.
2) The poor performance is not because of a downward trend -- in fact, if you look at chart A7.1 ("Differences in mean performance of eighth-grade students from 1995 to 2003"), you discover an interesting fact: the United States showed the greatest improvement in science and math scores of the sample -- including Korea.
3) The poor performance isn't because of a dearth of funds -- table B1.1 shows that, Switzerland excepted, the United States spends the most amount of money per student in the OECD. You get a similar result if the metric is education spending as a percentage of GDP. Indeed, the OECD comments:
Lower expenditure cannot automatically be equated with a lower quality of educational services. Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands and New-Zealand, which have moderate expenditure on education per student at the primary and lower secondary levels, are among the OECD countries with the highest levels of performance by 15-year-old students in mathematics.
"McDonald's Passport to Play" will launch in 31,000 schools this fall, reaching an expected 7 million children in grades three through five, the company said.
The move is part of McDonald's (Research) so-called "Balanced Lifestyles" initiative, an aggressive effort to promote physical activity and nutrition and deflect harmful claims that its food is unhealthy and fattening.
Washington, D.C. – In a letter to Department of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, U.S. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), are calling on the administration to help schools across the nation that are taking in the thousands of students displaced by the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina by increasing funding to those schools while relaxing the accountability standards mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.
The posting below, by Lloyd Bond, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) looks at the importance of the evolution, as opposed to revolution, of ideas in teaching and learning.
Bond points out that research shows that cognitive development occurs in stages. Certain fundamentals or skills must be mastered before higher level abilities can develop. In the continuing debate on how best to teach subjects like reading and math, extremists on both sides of the debate overlook the role that the other approach needs to play in helping students develop the appropriate skill set.
In his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, physicist Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific revolutions are characterized by a completely new world view that is incompatible with what it replaced. In this sense, scientific revolutions are non-cumulative; rather than build on what has gone before, they jettison completely the assumptions and premises of the theories they replace. Darwin's theory of evolution did not tweak the prevailing notion of a static, instantaneously created natural world not essentially different from what we see today. The Origin of Species threw out the notion entirely and replaced it with a living world evolving over eons of time through natural selection. The heliocentric structure of the solar system proposed by Copernicus (and refined by Kepler and Newton) did not build on Ptolemy's elaborate geocentric model; it dismissed it out of hand, and in so doing changed forever the way we view our place in the universe.
On a less lofty scale, educational reforms often propose similarly radical new world views. In its original incarnation, the "whole language" movement in reading instruction dismissed "phonics" as a misguided way to introduce young learners to the written word. It was argued that children should be immersed in actual text with associated visuals and discussion. The ability to spell and read with understanding would come in due time. The "new math" reform of the 1960s rejected practice and drill on the "times tables" as a mindless activity that turned young learners off from mathematics. Tom Lehrer, the professional mathematician turned occasional cabaret performer, summed up the entire approach with his quip that the important idea underlying new math is "to understand what you are doing, rather than to get the right answer."
"Traditionalists" were deeply skeptical of these reforms, and with good reason; many of the innovations were based on faulty premises. There was precious little hard-nosed, empirical evidence to buttress the exalted claims on behalf of the new approaches to instruction. Moreover, the vast majority of elementary school teachers were ill-prepared, especially in mathematics, to handle the innovations. The net result, if one believes the traditionalists, was a generation of young people, the majority of whom could neither spell, read, nor perform simple mathematical operations. And the reaction by the public, the press, and elected officials was predictable: a call across the nation during the 1970s and 1980s for "back to basics" instruction and a proliferation of minimum competency standards for promotion and high school graduation.
Over the past quarter century, cognitive scientists, working closely with teachers in actual classrooms, have introduced a measure of sanity to the sometimes vitriolic debates. Studies of the development and nature of expertise in an ever-increasing variety of areas-from reading and writing to mathematics and electronics, from physics and piano playing to baseball knowledge and chess-indicate that with proper instruction and practice, proficiency develops from novice to expert in an orderly way and is characterized by a sequence of more or less distinct stages.
Briefly, these studies demonstrate that proficiency and expertise are predicated upon five fundamental principles: (1) newly learned information is processed through a series of "memory registers," each of which is subject to different limitations and each capable of different kinds of storage and processing; (2) proficiency depends critically upon the acquisition of "automaticity," the capacity to respond automatically to certain components of complex tasks, such as number facts and words in context, thus reducing the processing load of working memory; (3) problem-solving ability and the ability to read with understanding are not mysterious competencies that some persons possess and other do not, but rather depend upon a specific, prerequisite knowledge base that can be acquired by most people; (4) expertise in a given domain (mathematics or chess, for example) depends crucially upon how relevant knowledge is organized and stored in long-term memory; and (5) proficient performance is either retarded or facilitated by how problems and text are represented internally.
It turns out that traditionalists and reformers were both right in their own way, but both were overzealous in their devotion to a particular mode of instruction and in their blanket dismissal of the competing point of view. The drill and practice advocates of early mathematics instruction, and to a lesser extent the phonics advocates of reading instruction, appreciated the importance of the second principle above, that certain, "low level" skills must become second nature in order for higher-level performance to emerge. But they often failed to follow through with tasks that engage and challenge. For their part, the new math and whole language advocates failed to fully appreciate the critical enabling role of automaticity, sometimes with disastrous results. Nor did they fully accept what we now know to be true-that automaticity develops only through continued practice distributed over appropriate intervals.
Throwing out the baby with the bath water may well characterize scientific revolutions, but in the world of education and schooling, where new claims must be tempered with the wisdom of practice, progress is rarely made in such spectacular fashion.
Lee Kuan Yew Interview on the Rise of China & India
Singapore's first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew speaks with Der Spiegel on Asia's rise to economic power, China's ambitions and the West's chances of staying competitive:
Mr. Lee: Right. In 50 years I see China, Korea and Japan at the high-tech end of the value chain. Look at the numbers and quality of the engineers and scientists they produce and you know that this is where the R&D will be done. The Chinese have a space programme, they're going to put a man on the Moon and nobody sold them that technology. We have to face that. But you should not be afraid of that. You are leading in many fields which they cannot catch up with for many years, many decades. In pharmaceuticals, I don't see them catching up with the Germans for a long time.
CNN: What will surprise us about the future evolution of the Internet?
BERNERS-LEE: The creativity of our children. In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted. The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future. I look forward to seeing what the next generation does with these tools that we could not have foreseen. ...
The great achievement of No Child Left Behind is that it has forced the states to focus at last on educational inequality, the nation's most corrosive social problem. But it has been less successful at getting educators and politicians to see the education problem in a global context, and to understand that this country is rapidly losing ground to the nations we compete with for high-skilled jobs that require a strong basis in math and science.
American taxpayers have heard a fair amount about the fact that their children lag behind the children of Britain, France, Germany and Japan. But American students are also bested by nations like Poland, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Worst of all, they fall further and further behind their peers abroad the longer they stay in school.
An article by Claudia Wallis in the August 8, 2005 issue of Time asks the question.
IT'S 10 A.M. ON A BRIGHT May day, and the arts wing at Gustav A. Fritsche Middle School in Milwaukee, Wis., is hopping. In a band room, 21 members of the jazz ensemble are rehearsing Soul Bossa Nova with plenty of heart and impressive intonation, in preparation for a concert downtown. In another room, woodblocks, timpani and bells are whipping up a rhythmic frenzy as the 75-member Fritsche Philharmonic Orchestra tackles Elliott Del Borgo's Aboriginal Rituals. In an art room, eighth-graders are shaping clay vessels to be baked in the school kiln. Down the hall, students are dabbing acrylic paints on canvas to create vivid still lifes à la Vincent van Gogh. At 10:49, when the 82-min. arts period ends, kids of all sizes, colors and sartorial stripes pour out of classrooms, jostling and joking, filling the hallway with the buzz of pubescent energy. Then it's off to language arts, math, social studies and the array of other subjects offered at this sprawling arena for adolescents.
A few blocks away, at Humboldt Park Elementary School, which serves kindergarten through eighth grade, a charming scene unfolds in Karen Hennessy's classroom. Her kindergartners are enjoying a visit from their eighth-grade "buddies." All around the room, big kids sit knees to chest in miniature chairs or cross-legged on the alphabet carpet. Each little kid has chosen a picture book to share with a big buddy. Some lean on eighth-grade laps as they listen. Logan Wells, a strapping 14-year-old, reads The Little Engine That Could to Alec Matias and Jacob Hill. Jacob, 5, seems mesmerized equally by the bright illustrations and by the eighth-grader turning the pages. He presses against Logan as if to absorb some bigkid magic. The older boy reads on with gentle forbearance.
If you were 13 years old, where would you rather be? Big, frenetic Fritsche, with its thrilling range of arts classes, bands, Socratic seminars and TV studio, all aimed at 1,030 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders? Or calm and cozy Humboldt Park, where the teachers seem to know the names and histories of all 585 students, ages 4 to 14? If you're the parent of a 13-year-old, which would you choose for your child? The two schools represent two sides of a debate that has ripped through Milwaukee and other U.S. cities. For the past decade, middle schools have been the educational setting for roughly two-thirds of students in Grades 6 through 8. But increasingly, communities are questioning whether they really are the best choice for this volatile age group.
In Milwaukee, both Fritsche and Humboldt Park have fine reputations, but the district has decided to place most of its bets on the likes of Humboldt Park. Since 2001, it has expanded the number of K-8 schools from 12 to 48, with 14 more on the way. Meanwhile, the number of middle schools in Milwaukee has shrunk from 23 to 14. "Once young adolescents get to the sixth grade, the achievement level begins to decline a bit and disruptive behavior increases," says William Andrekopoulos, the superintendent of schools. "We're providing a number of different options," including some big middle schools, he notes, "but we know that a small learning community is going to make a difference."
A surprising number of other U.S. cities have come to the same conclusion, reversing the trend that created thousands of middle schools in the 1970s and '80s. Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio; Minneapolis, Minn.; Philadelphia; Memphis, Term.; and Baltimore, Md., are in various stages of reconfiguring their schools away from the middle school model and toward K-8s. Some suburban districts, including the wealthy Capistrano School District in Orange County, Calif., are also making the switch.
While issues such as crowding and cost cutting were factors for some of these districts, the change is driven largely by a series of studies that depict U.S. middle schools as the "Bermuda Triangle of education," as one report put it. It's the place where kids lose their way academically and socially-in many cases never to resurface. The most comprehensive report, a review of 20 years of educational research, was released last year by the Rand Corporation, the nonprofit research group in Santa Monica, Calif. Cheerfully titled Focus on the Wonder Years: Challenges Facing the American Middle School, it offered a harsh critique of the middle school record. Among its findings:
* More than half of eighth-graders fail to achieve expected levels of proficiency in reading, math and science on national tests.
* In international ratings of math achievement, U.S. students rank about average-ninth out of 17-at Grade 4, but sink to 12th place by Grade 8, setting the stage for further slippage in high school.
* Reported levels of emotional and physical problems are higher among U.S. middle school students than among their peers in all 11 other countries surveyed by the World Health Organization. The same "health behavior" survey found that U.S. middle schoolers have the most negative views of the climate of their schools and peer culture.
* Crime takes off in middle school. Statistics from 1996-97 show that while 45% of public elementary schools reported one or more incidents to the police, the figure jumps to 74% for middle schools-almost as high as high schools (77%).
* While not many studies directly compare K-8 schools with middle schools, those that do suggest that young teens do better both academically and socially in K-8 schools.
Most significant, the Rand report questioned the very idea of having separate schools for preteens: "Research suggests that the onset of puberty is an especially poor reason for beginning a new phase of schooling." Jaana Juvonen, the UCLA psychologist who spent more than 18 months crunching data for the report, believes that 11- and 12-year-olds are already dealing with so many changes that it makes little sense to pile on a change in schools. "Right around the time that most kids are transferring to middle school, everything starts to happen," she says. "There's physical development: you're starting to look different. And because of that, people's expectations of you are changing. In addition, there's cognitive development and new reasoning abilities. It is a very fragile period."
In Milwaukee, school vouchers and a policy of choice put a lot of decision-making power in parents' hands, and pressure to keep vulnerable sixth-graders in their familiar grade schools has sprung up from the grass roots. "I don't care if you have world-class middle schools, parents just don't like moving their children from the elementary school," says Andrekopoulos, who used to be principal at Fritsche. Pressure to score high on the math and reading tests mandated by the No Chad Left Behind Act also seems to favor K-8s. "Elementary schools have done a better job of organizing themselves around math and reading," he observes.
Boosting achievement in math and reading is a big factor in the drive to reshape schools in Philadelphia, where reform has come from the top down. A 2002 study found that eighth-graders at the city's K-8 schools typically score 50 points higher on state tests than peers who attend middle schools. Under Paul Vallas, the energetic CEO of Philadelphia's schools, the district is pruning the number of middle schools from 46 in 2003 to eight by 2008, while upping K-8s from 10 to 120. "I haven't seen anything to support the creation of middle schools, especially the way they work in large urban areas," Vallas says.
How did middle schools, which were ushered in with such fanfare 25 years ago, fall into such disrepute? The answer, many educators say, has less to do with the philosophy behind the middle school movement and more to do with how it was executed. Coming after a period of youth unrest, when juvenile crime and drug use were rising, middle school proponents argued that old-fashioned junior highs, which usually served Grades 7 and 8 and sometimes 9, were not meeting kids' social and developmental needs. Instead, they were providing a watered-down version of high school, literally a junior high. Reformers proposed that schools for this age group needed to educate "the whole child," addressing social and emotional issues as well as building academic skills. Sixth grade became the usual entry point for new middle schools, both because of crowding at grammar schools and because puberty was occurring earlier.
Among the key tenets of the middle school movement are these: fostering a close relationship between teacher and child so that every student has an adult advocate, having teachers work across disciplines in teams (example: students read Johnny Tremain in English while studying the Revolutionary War in social studies), creating small learning communities within larger schools and stressing learning by doing. "Young adolescents learn through discovery and getting involved," explains Sue Swaim, executive director of the Ohio-based National Middle School Association. "They're not meant to be lectured to the whole day."
Some critics contend that the whole movement was soft in the head. It "had as its ideological antecedent the notion that academics should take a back seat to self-exploration, socialization and working in groups," writes Cheri Pierson Yecke, a former education commissioner in Minnesota, in a forthcoming report for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation titled Mayhem in the Middle: How Middle Schools Failed America and How to Make Them Work. "A disproportionate regard for student selfesteem and identity development," Yecke argues, yielded a "precipitous decline" in academic achievement.
But many educators believe that ideology was not the problem. "There were some very good middle schools out there, but middle school reform never got fully implemented," says Jacquelynne Eccles, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a member of a task force that issued Turning Points, a landmark 1989 report on middle schools funded by the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation. Many districts created big warehouse-like middle schools to address crowding and courtordered busing but without embracing the pedagogy of the movement. "They ended up looking very much like the junior high schools they were designed to replace," says Eccles.
In urban areas, middle schools often became the antithesis of what reformers had intended. Instead of warm incubators of independence and judgment, they became impersonal, oppressive institutions. "In many urban schools," says Juvonen, "you can't help but notice that there are security guards around. There's someone expecting you to misbehave." That's especially destructive, she says, because young adolescents need their independence to be guided and nurtured, not squashed. "This is when kids start challenging social conventions. They say things like 'Why do I have to make my bed?' It's proof of their cognitive maturity, and it's all good." Sadly, this cognitive development isn't well supported by the middle school curriculum either, according to several studies. "It doesn't help students see the bigger picture or to understand abstract concepts," says Juvonen.
Ironically, K-8 schools are in some ways better positioned to implement the ideas of the middle school movement. Not only do these more intimate schools tend to foster strong teacher-student relationships, but they often put their older students in positions where they can exercise judgment and leadership. At Humboldt Park, for instance, seventh-graders have worked with the third-graders to write letters to U.S. soldiers in Iraq. "The older grades become mentors and tutors to the younger kids, giving them a sense of responsibility that may not happen in middle school," says Milwaukee parent Tina Johnson, who has two kids in a K-8 school. "All these raging hormones are kind of directed in a positive way." Some administrators believe there are fewer behavior problems in K-8s, where your old first-grade teacher-and her current pupils-are watching. Says Humboldt Park student Savannah Bracero, 14: "You have to be much more careful here so the little kids don't pick up bad behavior."
Along with grownup responsibilities, K-8s tend to offer the occasional-and still wanted-hug from a teacher, says Dr. Lottie Smith, a K-8 principal in Milwaukee. "In middle and high school, that's a no-no. We don't touch," says Smith. Middle schools were originally intended to be nurturing places, but it hasn't been easy to pull that off, says Harry Finks, a veteran middle school teacher and principal, who wrote one of the first handbooks for middle school staff: "You want to create a dialogue, so that an eighth-grade boy can come up to you and say, 'Man, my guinea pig died and I'm really upset.' Most schools don't have that atmosphere."
Those who champion middle schools, however, say that done right, such schools offer leadership opportunities, a caring environment plus a rich variety of courses, facilities and subject-matter specialists that K-8s can't begin to match. Fritsche, for instance, not only has its elaborate program in the arts but also offers an extensive library, a graphics and electronics lab, three gymnasiums and many extracurriculars. While the best of Milwaukee's K-8 schools have adopted such middle school features as lockers, science labs, changing classes throughout the day, they can't equal a program like Fritsche's. At Humboldt Park, for instance, Spanish is taught by a paraprofessional using computerized lessons; the only gym doubles as the cafeteria.
Milwaukee parent Jeff Wagner decided to send his daughter to Fritsche instead of keeping her at Humboldt Park past fifth grade. "There was no comparison," he says. Fritsche "had activities after school from forensics to track-plus the quality of teaching and the tough curriculum." Middle school fans also question the impulse to shelter young adolescents . "You're not in some sort of cocoon. You need to evolve," insists Fritsche eighth-grader René Espinoza. And what happens when it comes time to go to high school, asks Fritsche band teacher Joyce Gardiner: "To go from a little-bitty K-8 school to a high school that has 2,000 kids? I can't even imagine that."
But educators on both sides of the debate tend to agree that how the grades are packaged ultimately matters less than what's happening inside the school. "The exact configuration is a distraction," says Anthony Jackson, a middle school expert and co-author of the Turning Points report. What counts, he says, is good instruction and caring relationships. "You can make that happen in a stand-alone middle school or a K-8 school," Jackson adds, although he believes that schools with more than 100 kids per grade should be broken up into smaller units. Hiring qualified teachers and giving them time to plan and upgrade skills is also critical. Nationally, only about 1 in 4 middle school teachers has special certification for teaching middle school grades.
Educators watching the flight from middle schools are worried that school districts will see the K-8 building as a solution in itself, without devoting the resources needed to support good education. And there's reason to be worried. Because that's precisely what happened 25 years ago, when administrators rushed to abandon nasty old junior highs for those nifty new middle schools. -Reported by Carolina A. Miranda/New York and Betsy Rubiner/Milwaukee
The most disturbing development in the world of PowerPoint is its migration to the schools -- like sex and drugs, at earlier and earlier ages. Now we have second-graders being tutored in PowerPoint. No matter that students who compose at the keyboard already spend more energy perfecting their fonts than polishing their sentences -- PowerPoint dispenses with the need to write any sentences at all. Perhaps the politicians who are so worked up about the ill effects of violent video games should turn their attention to PowerPoint instead.
In the meantime, Tufte, who's now doing consulting work for NASA, has a modest proposal for its new administrator: Ban the use of PowerPoint. Sounds good to me. After all, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the perils of PowerPoint.
I exchanged e-mails with Superintendent Rainwater about two new classrooms at Marquette. I'll simply post the e-mails at this time and late add commentary, not on the program per se, but the budget process (or lack thereof) that created and funded it.
Art,
The rumor mill says that the administration moved the existing NEON program to Marquette or created a new one to be located at Marquette Elementary School.
The exiting NEON (New Educational Options and Networking) program serves "middle school-age students with an emotional/behavioral disability (EBD) who have not been successful in a full-day program at their home school despite numerous and varied interventions."
Could you please provide details of any program changes or moves?
Ed Blume
The Superintendent responded:
Ed
Thanks for the email. I am always glad to clarify rumors. The NEON Program has not changed or moved. It still exist at Hoyt with the same staffing, etc. that we have had in the past. We did, however, establish two elementary ED alternative classes that will begin at Marquette this year. They are similar in design to NEON but serve primary and intermediate age EBD students who need a more structured, alternative service delivery model. Many of these kids are active with PBST [Postive Behavior Support Team] as well. Both classrooms are staffed with a teacher and two SEAs [special education assistant]. This is a "district" program serving students from any elementary school who meet the criteria and need this type of alternative, structured setting. We also have a full-time school psychologist allocated to this program. Jim Hassely, Coordinator Behavior Support, has been working closely with Joy Larson to set this program up in the Marquette/O Keeffe space. It will have minimal impact on Marquette, though, as the students will be served outside the general education classroom for the much of their school day.
Art
I then posed a number of questions to the Superintendent and Jack Jorgensen, head of special ed, kindly responded in a detailed memo.
The Madison School District announced that the 24% of eligible Madison students taking the SAT scored the highest ever and remain significantly above state and national averages:
Madison students' composite score is 1266, up 37 points from four years ago (1229) and up 16 points from last year's results (1250). The 1266 Madison composite is well over the state average composite of 1191, and significantly over the national average of 1028. (See tables below for details.)
The 16 point improvement is attributable to higher scores on both the verbal and math portions of the exam. The average verbal score for Madison students is 624, up from 615 the previous year. The average math score is 642, up from 635 in 2003-04.
First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school.
Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college.
Don't even bother to ask how many are proficient enough in math and science to handle college-level work. It's not pretty.
Of all the factors combining to shape the future of the U.S., this is one of the most important. Millions of American kids are not even making it through high school in an era in which a four-year college degree is becoming a prerequisite for achieving (or maintaining) a middle-class lifestyle.
The complete report can be found here (PDF). Campaign for America's Future Website.
JUST as she did during the school year, Jeong Hye Jin, 15, spent the long, sweltering summer commuting to her high school by day and to private classes in the evening.
Summer school was mandatory, not for students who had fallen behind, but for those who, as she put it, "have a chance of getting into good universities." Not attending was never an option for Hye Jin, who is ranked 17th out of 430 students in the 10th grade at Young Hoon High School, in a working-class neighborhood here in the capital.
The hope is that this first, small school will turn into a statewide system of high schools linked to businesses and hell-bent on preparing Michigan kids for the best colleges, the best jobs, the best futures.
"We know from research that small high schools are making a big difference in the lives of young people across the country," says Granholm, who approached Apple about coming to Detroit during a visit to Silicon Valley several months ago. "When a global corporation like Apple makes a commitment of this magnitude to education in Michigan, it underscores how critical it is that we prepare all of our children for the 21st-century economy."
Michigan certainly isn't doing that today. You've read these statistics before, but they are so bleak, so disturbing, that they bear repeating at every opportunity, lest parents forget how greatly their children are being cheated:
I think Madison should also explore smaller high schools (including smaller facilities).
In an August 4, 2005, an MS-NBC Report indicates tutoring firms (for profit, and non-profit), because schools and districts are ailing under the NCLB law, are doing well. Public schools are going to be funneling $900M to these private companies to tutor kids from schools that are not making adequate yearly progress. And, there are no standards that such firms need to maintain to get these funds, according to the article.
Among other issues:
"One sore spot is that some of the most troubled public school schools systems like Chicago’s have been forced to shut down their own after-school tutoring services because of federal rules that apply to failing districts.
Beth Swanson of Chicago Public Schools figures that means only 25,000 students will get services in the coming year, down from 80,000."
Underheim argues that technology could save schools money if they used it more creatively. Instead of funding two classes of 10 students apiece with both an algebra and a geometry teacher, he asks, why not combine the classes, give every student a computer with software for the specific subject they are trying to learn and keep just one math teacher available to help with special problems?
Yet in less than five years, that entire market has come undone. By 2004, sales of educational software - a category that includes programs teaching math, reading and other subjects as well as reference works like encyclopedias - had plummeted to $152 million, according to the NPD Group, a market research concern.
"Nobody would have thought those were the golden days," Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review, said of the late 1990's. "Now we're looking back and we're saying, 'Wow, what happened?'"
Troy Dassler, Larry Winkler, Tim Schell and Ed Kowieski posted a number of useful comments and links regarding Technology & Schools.
UPDATE: Hetzner posts the 3rd and last part of her series on Technology & Schools here:
University Lake School in Delafield has enough wireless laptop computers for every student and teacher in grades six through 12 — a 5-year-old venture that is part of an experiment known in education circles as one-to-one, or ubiquitous, computing.
"We don't have a lot of proof that this works," said Neah Lohr, the former director of the informational media and technology team for the state Department of Public Instruction. "Certainly students like the technology. That's not the question."
Research results are mixed. But most studies conclude that for computers and other technology to have much effect on student performance, a number of conditions are necessary: Teachers have to be technologically adept; classroom assignments have to allow for exploration; and curricula have to abandon breadth for depth.
Although schools have made changes in some of those areas, particularly increasing teachers' technical proficiency, the predominant uses of computers remain word processing, heavily filtered Internet searches and the occasional PowerPoint presentation. In addition, with pressure rising to improve test scores, more schools have embraced skill-drilling software that contributes little to long-term student learning, observers say.
My view is that technology is simply another tool that may be part of a successful learning process. Critical thinking, rigor and general inquisitiveness are far more important than learning Word 2003 (which will be obsolete by the time our students reach the workforce). Successful technologists are capable of learning and using any tool. I was reminded of our priorities yesterday while visiting Sun Prairie's CornFest: a teen could not make change (1.50 change was given for a 2.50 purchase from a $5.00 bill). More posts on this subject.
Madison students who took the 2005 ACT college entrance exam continued to outperform their state and national peers. MMSD students' composite score was slightly higher overall on the ACT compared to a year ago, 24.3 vs. 24.2 (scale of 1 to 36), while the average ACT score this year for Wisconsin students was 22.2 and nationally, 20.9.
Almost 74 percent of the MMSD students in the Class of 2006 took the ACT, a record number. Generally, when more students take the test, scores drop. However, the average MMSD ACT participant scored higher than roughly 72% of all Wisconsin ACT participants and higher than 78% of all ACT participants across the country.
Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.
The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.
2005 ACT Scores: Minnesota #1, WI Minority Achievement Gap Increases
Alan Borsuk (69% of Wisconsin's Class of 2005 took the ACT):
Wisconsin kids in the Class of 2006 averaged 22.2 on a scale of 36 on the ACT, the same score for Wisconsin for the sixth straight year. But the average score in Minnesota moved up a tenth of a point to 22.3, breaking last year's tie for the best record among 25 states where the ACT is the dominant exam.
Wisconsin officials said 10.2% of the 45,700 students in the Class of 2005 who took the ACT were from minority groups, up from 9.8% in 2004.
However, the gap between white students and some minority groups, particularly African-Americans, remained a major concern, both Ferguson and Burmaster said, and the new results presented little evidence that the gap was closing.
The composite score of black students in Wisconsin was 16.9 this year, compared with 17.2 a year ago. The composite score of white students stayed the same at 22.6.
ACT officials also report results based on whether students took what is considered a "core curriculum" for getting ready for college - at least four years of English and three years of math, natural sciences and social sciences.
Wisconsin students who did that had an average score of 22.9 while those who took less than the core program averaged 20.9. Both figures were a point or better than the comparable national averages.
Werner, who is 17, was one of seven Wisconsin high school students who posted a 36 on the ACT during the 2004-'05 testing cycle, according to data released by ACT Inc. on Friday. They were among 251 students nationwide who averaged a top score on the battery of English, reading, science and math tests during that time.
In addition to Werner, Astrid Stuth of Divine Savior Holy Angels High School in Milwaukee and Kent Rosenwald of Waukesha North High School represent the Milwaukee area. Corey Watts of Madison West High School and Dan Gerber of Onalaska High School got perfect scores, too. All of the students, except for Gerber, were juniors when they got their 36s. Gerber was a sophomore.
68% of Wisconsin students took the ACT (national average is 40). Those taking the test scored slightly higher than the national average composite score (22.2 vs. 20.9). State comparisons can be found here and here.
From the Associated Press and the Wisconsin State Journal:
A Survey Finds High School Students Want More Demanding Coursework To Prepare For Work And College.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
BEN FELLER Associated Press
WASHINGTON
The campaign to make high school more demanding seems to be picking up support from the people who have the biggest stake in the matter: the students.
Almost nine in 10 students say they would work harder if their high school expected more of them, a new survey finds. Less than one-third of students say their school sets high academic expectations, and most students favor ideas that might add some hassle to their life, such as more rigorous graduation standards and additional high-stakes testing.
"The good old times in high schools are being replaced by good old hard work," said Peter Hart, whose Peter D. Hart Research Associates conducted the survey for the "State of Our Nation's Youth Report," released Tuesday. "There's a recognition among students that they have to be more ready to compete."
The nonprofit Horatio Alger Association, which provides college scholarships and mentoring to needy students, issued the annual report on youth attitudes. The findings are based on a phone survey of 1,005 students in high school last May.
Improving high schools has become an urgent topic in education, as mounting research shows many students aren't ready for college or work after graduation -- if they get that far. The call for change has come from President Bush, governors, employers and college faculty. Now students are saying it, too.
Julie Hetcko, 16, of Lincoln, Neb., who will be a senior in the fall, has taken three Advanced Placement courses and is looking for other ways to prepare for college. High schools that don't offer some type of advanced coursework, she said, are holding students back.
"Times are changing," she said. "I don't think people realize how much students are trying to excel, trying to get into college. It's important that adults and parents know that it's not just a walk in the park. We want to work for our grades."
When given options for improving high schools, 95 percent of students agreed that more real-world opportunities, such as internships, would help at least somewhat. More than 90 percent also favored two other ideas: earlier counseling in high school about how to prepare for college, and more opportunities to take college-level courses for free.
Majorities of students said other changes would help, too, including increasing the availability of after-school and summer school, requiring students to pass math and English exams to graduate and requiring four years of math and courses in biology, chemistry and physics.
The students' call for more rigor comes as 41 percent of them said the pressure to get good grades is a major problem for them, about the same level as the last two years. One-third of students said getting good grades is very important when it comes to fitting in with their friends -- a factor cited more often than having a car or being involved in sports.
More than three in four students plan to go to a four-year university. A total of 83 percent said high school is preparing them "adequately" for college, although a smaller number, 71 percent, said high school is getting them sufficiently ready for the work world.
Most of the students surveyed were enrolled in public schools, with the rest attending a private school, home school or another type of school. Students age 13 to 19 took part.
The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Among other findings:
More than two in five students say at least half the students they know cheat on tests.
More than six in 10 students say they have a cell phone.
Nine in 10 students say they have at least one family member whom they can confide in.
Some great letters to the editor of the Independent, a London newspaper, on the phoney debate over including the "teaching" of "intelligent design" alongside evolution in our school curricula.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article304598.ece
What next in US schools? Alchemy?
Sir: George Bush wants intelligent design, a.k.a. creationism, to be taught in American classrooms, side by side with evolution, so as to give students "both sides of the debate". Why stop there? Children could be taught medieval alchemy along with modern chemistry, flat-earthism together with cosmology and Aristotelian physics together with relativity.
Why is one particular laughable scientific fallacy being given such prominence and other equally deserving candidates being neglected?
JOE WALMSWELL
LONDON E7
Sir: Intelligent design is not science; it is a strategy used by creationists of the religious right to try and get their religious ideas into the classroom. If their ideas had any merit, they would have gained acceptance by the scientific establishment.
The aim of intelligent design is to spread confusion about evolution without being too overtly religious. This will not fool scientists: the danger is that members of the public may be tricked into thinking that there is a controversy where none exists.
The same strategy is used by the economic right to spread doubt about the causes of (or even the existence of) global warming.
The problem with intelligent design is that it is defeatist and intellectually bankrupt, its proponents say, "Here is a biological structure that we can't understand, so God did it." Scientists say, "Here is a biological structure that we can't understand; how can we find out about it?"
PETER FOSTER
BRISTOL
Sir: Could someone please ask George Bush (and now it seems, also the Pope) why, if everything was so intelligently designed, it was necessary to crash a Mars-sized planet into the earth in order to create the moon, which could then slow our rotation sufficiently to allow any life to develop?
And could they also ask why, as intelligent design initially led to the domination of the dinosaurs, it was then necessary to crash a New York-sized meteorite into Mexico in order to kill them off and allow tiny mammals to develop into men?
Does science not come into "intelligence", or was God just making it up as he went along?
GRAHAM RANKIN
ALES, FRANCE
Sir: Alan Howe (letter, 5 August) makes an erroneous judgment, common among proponents of both "intelligent design" and creationist theories: he implies that the fact that Darwin's theories are "under attack" within the scientific community is somehow anti-evolution.
Scientific rigour demands the continual questioning and "attack" of all current theories - it is the basis of scientific method that no idea is allowed to stand without question, and that new data demands new applications of logic. In other realms, such as religion and politics, questioning might constitute an attack, but in science it is without stigma.
ROSALIND RILEY
FRITTENDEN, KENT
Sir: It's surely no coincidence that the majority of exponents of "intelligent design" are men. Any woman will tell you that the female reproductive system, with its monthly difficulties and risky, painful childbirth, has been anything but intelligently designed. Or maybe it just proves that God is male?
The quality of Advanced Placement programs is coming under scrutiny at a time when educators are pushing to strengthen the academic level of high school class offerings.
Come February, the college prep classes at high schools across the nation will be audited amid concerns that some schools may be offering watered-down versions of AP courses. Full descriptions of every AP course, syllabus, sample assignment and sample exam for the 2007-08 year will be reviewed.
"Administrators are under pressure to create advanced-type classes. Parents want them. Policy-makers want them. If I'm being told to teach Advance Placement, I can put AP in front of any course name," said Jim Ballard, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals. "Of course, it's more than simply adding the name, and that's where the College Board is crying foul."
The College Board, which sets AP curriculum standards and conducts nationwide exams each spring, is reviewing the courses in response to calls from colleges and universities about ensuring the rigor of AP classes, officials said.
If colleges are to retain and graduate more students, the state needs to do a better job of educating them long before they set foot on campus, lawmakers and educators said Thursday.
New research presented by the Illinois Education Research Council at a meeting of the Senate Committee on Higher Education showed many Illinois high school graduates are simply not prepared to go to college.
More than one-third of Illinois graduates are not ready for college, said Jennifer Presley, director of the council, which is tracking nearly the entire class of 2002. Another 28 percent are only partially ready, she said. Yet 43 percent of the least ready students go to college, and 58 percent of minimally ready students do.
"It's shameful the number of people that are not prepared coming out of our high schools,'' said state Rep. Kevin McCarthy (D-Orland Park), chair of the House Committee on Higher Education.
That means when they get to college, they are forced to make up what they failed to learn earlier. Carol Lanning, senior director for program planning and accountability at the Illinois Community College Board, said one in seven community college students -- or 100,000 people -- are enrolled in remedial classes, often to get help in one or two subjects. But the 10 percent of students who need help in three subjects "rarely succeed no matter what,'' Lanning said.
Racial disparity decried
At City Colleges of Chicago, many students find themselves taking 1-1/2 years of remedial courses before they can even start earning college credit, officials said. Often, when students learn how long it will take, "they vote with their feet'' and leave the school, said Perry Buckley, vice president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and an English teacher at City Colleges.
Officials with the Chicago Public Schools said they were trying to do more to prepare students, such as more Advanced Placement courses.
Still, Senate Assistant Majority Leader Miguel del Valle (D-Chicago) thinks the colleges need to focus more resources on programs that help students make it through. He said schools needed to do a better job tracking students and determining why graduation rates for Latinos and blacks are so much lower than for whites and Asians.
"Why are we today still falling short of answering that critical question?'' he asked. "We've lost a lot of students over the last two decades. If we don't fully answer that question, how do we put together a plan to change those numbers?''
Much of the national progress reported for 9- and 13-year-olds was driven by gains in the South. For example, while 9-year-olds in the Northeast gained 10 points in reading achievement (the equivalent of a grade level) over the past 30 years, the South gained 24, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). While reading scores for 13-year-olds barely budged in most of the United States, the South gained 12 points, more than a grade level.
It's vindication for a generation of Southern governors, business groups, and educators who launched the standards movement in education a decade before it was picked up by the rest of the nation.
The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.
In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.
I just wanted to add one little note to today's post, based on an excellent philosophical question Diana Hsieh asked yesterday about my views on free knowledge. While I do, in fact, think that it is wonderful that each of the ten things I will list will be free, the point of naming the list "will be free" rather than "should be free" or "must be free" is that I am making concrete predictions rather than listing a pie in the sky list of things I wish to see.
Physical education is one of 27 online courses now offered by the Minneapolis Public Schools, which had none four years ago. Thousands of other districts nationwide are adding online courses, said Susan Patrick, director of educational technology at the federal Department of Education.
"We're seeing just tremendous growth," Ms. Patrick said, "in enrollments and in the kinds of courses offered."
In a survey, the department estimated that there were 328,000 student enrollments in online courses offered by public schools during the 2002-3 year. Ms. Patrick said enrollments had probably doubled since then.
This is a great example of the "out of the box - non same service thinking" that is required today. Johnny's post illustrate's the District's same service financial challenges:
Revenue caps limit spending growth (though Madison spends $13K+ per student, among the highest in Wisconsin)
A "same service" budget approach has reached its' limit.
Choices need to be made, one of which could be growth in virtual tools.
Virtual programs may, in some cases and for some students, be far more effective. We all use virtual learning tools daily. I believe our children will increasingly do so as well.
Just as we teach our children “right from wrong” in the physical world, we must ensure that the same lessons are taught in the cyber world as well.
What is missing here is a focused and organized national effort to teach children cyber security, cyber ethics, and cyber safety with national security in mind. These elements of cyber awareness are vital because pervasive use of the Internet also poses risks that may harm the emotional and personal safety of children. The technology, unfortunately, enables devious and unethical behavior toward people, organizations or information technology underpinning critical infrastructure. The cyber education our children receive does not go far beyond how to turn on the computer and use a mouse. It is incomprehensible that we are not teaching cyber security, ethics, and safety at an early age. Poor awareness by children about cyber security may cause inadvertent damage to their own PC, other electronic devices or personal information, and could ultimately threaten the fabric of our nation’s critical cyber infrastructure.
You can do a good paint job that makes a poorly performing car look good, but it's still a poorly performing car. That's true too often of MPS diplomas. For kids to get to graduation, they sometimes take courses that aren't as demanding as what should be expected. Graduation comes, "but it's at the expense of content." The student goes to college and finds other kids are way ahead. Jude's response: "You were doing the A section of the book while they were doing the B and C sections. You covered a lot of material but it was very shallow. They covered a lot of material but it was in depth."
Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Study shows that Direct Instruction is successful, particularly with hard to reach students. The study is on-line at http://www.wpri.org/Reports/Volume18/Vol18no4.pdf
Summary:
Education That Works in the Milwaukee Public Schools:
The Benefits from Phonics and Direct Instruction
by Sammis White, Ph.D.
A phonics-based teaching technique (Direct Instruction) is proving successful in some Milwaukee Public Schools. This study of 23,000 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students in the Milwaukee Public Schools showed that “among low-income students tracked between third and fourth grades 2002-03 to 2003-04, those with five years of Direct Instruction (DI) increased their math scores by 6.6% whereas non-low-income students increased their scores by 4.7%. This difference is statistically significant and is evidence of substantial progress.”
Direct Instruction in the Milwaukee Public Schools is creating real progress for hard-to-reach students.
* Students exposed to DI were even lower income, on average, than other MPS low-income students, but those individuals with long-term exposure to DI (defined as five years) did better, on average, than all low-income MPS students.
* In schools with DI in every grade and continuous professional development for the staff, students did even better, on average. Among low-income students, with a mix of regular and special education, students scored six points higher in reading and 25 points higher in math versus other low-income students. These differences suggest that with full implementation of DI at more schools, MPS would produce even greater academic gains.
_________________________________
The conclusions are less obvious from this article, but it is worth reading:
How best to teach reading?
Study of MPS students provides no clear answer
By ALAN J. BORSUK
aborsuk@journalsentinel.com
Posted: July 21, 2005
A controversial reading program called Direct Instruction is helping some Milwaukee Public Schools students, particularly those on the short end of the achievement gaps that are such an urgent issue here, a study of test scores of thousands of MPS students concludes.
But the comparison of students who have been in schools using the highly scripted program with those who haven't been taught by that method leaves room for argument that the increasingly popular approach is not having much impact, at least not the way it is being done in many schools.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress as been periodically testing a representative sample of 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds since the early 1970s. This year's report contained two striking results. The first is that America's nine-year-olds posted their best scores in reading and maths since the tests were introduced (in 1971 in reading and 1973 in maths). The second is that the gap between white students and minorities is narrowing. The nine-year-olds who made the biggest gains of all were blacks, traditionally the most educationally deprived group in American society. .....
They need to have. The poor quality of America's schools is arguably the biggest threat to America's global competitiveness, a threat that will only grow as the best brains from India and China compete in an ever-wider array of jobs. And the growing gap between the educational performance of the rich and the poor, and between the majority and minorities, is arguably the biggest threat to America's traditional conception of itself as a meritocracy. The test results are thus doubly good news. They suggest that America may be able to improve its traditionally dismal educational performance. And they suggest that sharpening up schools can especially help minority children.
Four letters to the editor in response to Michael Winerip's recent article on teaching to the test:
Ms. Karnes learned all sorts of exercises to get children excited about writing, get them writing daily about what they care about and then show them how they can take one of those short, personal pieces and use it as the nucleus for a sophisticated, researched essay.
"We learned how to develop good writing from the inside, starting with calling the child's voice out," said Ms. Karnes, who got an A in the university course. "One of the major points was, good writing is good thinking. That's why writing formulas don't work. Formulas don't let kids think; they kill a lot of creativity in writing."
And so, when Ms. Karnes returns to Allendale High School to teach English this fall, she will use the new writing techniques she learned and abandon the standard five-paragraph essay formula. Right?
"Oh, no," said Ms. Karnes. "There's no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to teach to the state test" (the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, known as MEAP).
Read the full article here. Read the letters to the editor by clicking on the link:
To the Editor:
Re "Study Great Ideas, but Teach to the Test," by Michael Winerip (Education page, July 13):
It is argued that standardized writing tests hurt the teaching of writing because teachers are forced to use the five-paragraph formula to help students pass even though it kills creativity and doesn't let them think.
Scott Stowell
The five-paragraph formula is not ideal; it's not even the ideal formula, but it's better than nothing. So, too, with standardized writing tests.
Let's be honest: Because of the No Child Left Behind Act's testing requirement, kids are writing more, the key to improving writing skills, because if they don't, they fail the standardized test.
American society places great emphasis on individual liberty and intellectual creativity, but students can't be great creative writers if they are not technically competent.
Strong writers don't need to use the five-paragraph formula; low-proficiency writers, and most school students, are better off using the defective five-paragraph formula than nothing.
Matt White Swarthmore, Pa., July 13, 2005 The writer is director of the Writers Lab, a company that offers resources, books and training to improve results on the essay section of standardized tests.
•
To the Editor:
Michael Winerip cites the dilemma that many teachers face when they think they must teach the five-paragraph essay format for their students to be successful on standardized tests that include essay writing.
The College Board believes that students who follow this format may be denying themselves opportunities to write to their full potential.
The SAT essay is carefully designed to measure a student's mastery of many different elements of writing, with prompts to stimulate critical thinking about complex issues.
Critical thinking involves dealing with the complexity of an issue, not oversimplifying in the rush to produce an introduction, three "fitting" examples and a conclusion in 25 minutes.
In fact, students may be more likely to demonstrate critical thinking if they give one or two extended examples, taking the time to explain interactions between ideas.
Students will be better prepared for college writing success by learning formats that go beyond the five-paragraph essay.
Kathleen Williams V.P., Office of Academic Initiatives and Test Development The College Board New York, July 13, 2005
•
To the Editor:
"Study Great Ideas, but Teach to the Test" illustrates a dilemma: the needs of students to learn standard forms of communication sometimes interfere with what teachers love to do (teach creative writing).
But just as there is a place for dessert in a well-balanced meal, there is a place for creative writing in a well-balanced curriculum. In both instances, that place is usually toward the end - after the part that is less delicious but more nutritious.
The point is furthered by the fact that creativity by definition involves playing with conventions. Therefore, one cannot be creative without some level of mastery of the conventional.
K-8 may be a time during which the educational needs of children allow for less creative writing than some might like, especially for those children who have not yet been properly nurtured with regard to constructing the standard five-paragraph essay.
Paul Strand Richland, Wash., July 13, 2005 The writer is an associate professor of psychology at Washington State University.
•
To the Editor:
Michael Winerip is concerned that formulaic writing strategies impede the development of students' thinking skills. I share his concern but question his diagnosis.
The "five-paragraph essay" is not the root of the problem; in fact, it's a reasonably good way to develop a little facility handling supporting evidence.
Like training wheels, the five-paragraph essay has its place. The real question is how to help kids move beyond it.
Creative departures from the five-paragraph formula should be encouraged, but there is little evidence that creative flights, as such, impart clarity, depth or cogency of thought.
The ability to organize and evaluate reasons (logic) was once the centerpiece of a good education. Sadly, it has been displaced by content-centered courses: courses that teach kids what to think rather than how to think. The solution is a return to thinking-skills instruction.
Andrew Norman Pittsburgh, July 14, 2005 The writer develops thinking-skills curriculums for high school students.
The National Governor's Association, as part of their "Redesiging American High School initiative" recently conducted a survey of over 10,000 American students, ages 16 to 18. Major findings include:
Less than 1 in 10 say high school has been “very hard.”
More than one-third say high school has been “easy.”
32% “strongly agree” they would work harder if high school offered more demanding and interesting courses.
71% think taking courses related to the kinds of jobs they want is the best way to make their senior year more meaningful. (they also mention taking courses that count as college credit)
The survey also collects information from those who dropped out or are considering dropping out of high school.
Survey Conclusions:
It is critical to communicate to students that they need to seek out and take rigorous courses to be prepared for the future
Educators and parents must do a better job of encouraging students to find meaning in senior
year by emphasizing its importance to their futures.
The message “you too can benefit from a high school education,” if continually reinforced, can work because a majority of teens who dropped out
or who plan to drop out want to finish high school.
Susan Black on the "Trouble with Classroom Competition":
How much competition is too much?
I asked myself that question some years ago when I was appointed director of curriculum and instruction for a Midwestern city school district. Making the rounds of the district’s 12 schools I found competition everywhere.
In a 10th-grade English class, I found kids writing essays on citizenship for a local bar association’s contest. Moving on to a middle school, I saw seventh-grade science students drawing posters for a county humane society contest in hopes of winning stuffed animals. That afternoon, I watched third-graders hop around a gym as part of a national charity’s pledge drive. The kids who hopped the longest won crayons and coloring books.
When I counted up the number of competitive activities in classrooms -- more than 200 in one school year -- I knew it was time to put on the brakes. It wasn’t easy, but with the school board’s support and principals’ cooperation, we reclaimed the instructional program. Competitive activities were still allowed, but they were held after school for students who wanted to sign up.
Goodbye, Class See You in the Fall: Looping in Ardsley NY Public Elementary School
The New York Times
July 11, 2005
Goodbye, Class. See You in the Fall.
By ALAN FINDER
ARDSLEY, N.Y. - Even though it was his last day of kindergarten, Zachary Gold, a bright, enthusiastic 6-year-old, said he wasn't scared about moving up to the rigors of first grade. Unlike most kindergartners at the Concord Road Elementary School in this Westchester County village, he already knew who his first-grade teacher would be.
The New York Times
July 11, 2005
Goodbye, Class. See You in the Fall.
By ALAN FINDER
ARDSLEY, N.Y. - Even though it was his last day of kindergarten, Zachary Gold, a bright, enthusiastic 6-year-old, said he wasn't scared about moving up to the rigors of first grade. Unlike most kindergartners at the Concord Road Elementary School in this Westchester County village, he already knew who his first-grade teacher would be.
In September, Zachary will come right back to room P8, his 18 classmates from kindergarten and his teacher, Leslie Cohen.
"I feel, like, not scared, because it's going to be the same," Zachary said. "Well, different work, but the same teacher. She's a nice teacher. I love Ms. Cohen."
Having a teacher stay with a class for more than a year - or looping, as it is known - is on the rise, according to many experts. As educational innovations go, it is remarkably simple. So are its benefits, proponents say. Teachers get to know their students, and the students' parents, extremely well. They know each child's strengths and weaknesses, and the children know the teachers' expectations and methods. This familiarity can save a lot of time at the beginning of the school year.
There is little hard data on the frequency or effectiveness of looping, but classes in hundreds, if not thousands of schools across the United States have adopted it.
"As schools try to improve their standardized test scores, this appears to be catching on," Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said.
It is most common in elementary schools, though some middle schools do it, too. Schools in Colorado Springs have tried looping, as have those in Attleboro, Mass., and Antioch, Ill. In New York City, hundreds of classes stay together for more than a year, most of them in the lower grades.
"In New York, it's a lot more prevalent than we think," said Carmen Fariña, the city's deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. "It's becoming more popular."
The decision on whether a teacher will loop with a class is left to principals, teachers and parents, said Ms. Fariña, who herself stayed with a class through third and fourth grades four times in her teaching career. "In the city, there are hundreds of classes doing it," she said. "In a lot of schools there are four or five classes looping."
The big payoff from looping appears to be in the fall, when teachers typically take time to assess each child, trying to figure out their skill levels and how each student learns. But when Ms. Cohen and her class return in September, she said, "we can basically pick up where we left off."
"I've always felt the first six to eight weeks of the school year are extremely chaotic for kids," Ms. Cohen said, "and not a whole lot of learning takes place."
Spending two years together as a class also reassures young children, she said. "Both at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety in kids," she said. "And I think the anxiety makes it more difficult for them to learn."
The potential disadvantages of looping are also clear-cut. If parents think a teacher is inadequate, they would surely oppose having their child spend an additional year in his or her class.
Advocates of looping say options need to be built into any program, so that parents and teachers can decide to place a child in a different class if remaining with a teacher would be detrimental.
Research into looping suggests that it can pay substantial dividends. The school district in East Cleveland, Ohio, experimented with looping from 1993 to 1997. A class in each of four elementary schools stayed with their teachers for three years, generally from kindergarten through second grade. The teachers worked extensively with parents to reinforce lessons in school, and the classes also met for five weeks each summer.
After three years, students in the looped classes scored an average of 25 percentage points higher on standardized tests in reading, language arts and math than other students in the school district, said Frederick M. Hampton, an associate professor of education at Cleveland State University who oversaw the research project.
"Everything about the children's lives is pretty much in constant motion," said Professor Hampton, who described East Cleveland as poor and predominantly African-American.
"It had occurred to me over a number of years that children, particularly from inner-city areas, need a different model of school, a more family-oriented model, in order to be successful," he said, "something that would allow them to see familiar faces, familiar teachers."
Many educators think middle-class children also benefit from a more prolonged relationship with teachers. Daniel L. Burke, the superintendent of the Big Foot Union High School District in Walworth, Wis., became an advocate of looping after experiencing it during his first years as a teacher. Dr. Burke taught seventh-grade English in Alsip, Ill., in 1970; at the end of the school year, he and two other young teachers were told they would have the same classes the following year, because of scheduling problems caused by construction.
"Those kids came in the door the first day and they knew me and I knew them," he said. "I knew their parents and they knew me. They knew what my expectations were. It was just wonderful."
Twenty years later, when he was a district superintendent in Antioch, Ill., Dr. Burke convinced a first-grade teacher to try looping. She liked it and word spread. By the time he left the district in 1999, he said, 85 percent of the elementary school teachers were staying with classes for at least two years.
Given the enthusiasm for looping in pockets of the country, many educators said they were surprised that it is not more popular and that it has not been studied more rigorously. The roots of looping trace back to the one-room rural schoolhouse and to educational innovations in Europe in the early 20th century.
The East Cleveland school district stopped looping once Professor Hampton's experiment ended in 1997, in part, he said, because the district was reorganized, with new schools opening and some old ones shutting down.
Professor Hampton said he thought the primary reason more schools have not adopted looping "is because most administrators have this one concept, this one paradigm of the word 'school.' And anything that does not fit into that, they don't bother with."
Some other educators said many teachers might be unwilling to stay with a class for a second year because it would involve learning the curriculum of a new grade.
That was not a problem for Ms. Cohen at the Concord Road School, because she had previously taught first and second grade, as well as kindergarten. Ms. Cohen said she liked the variety. She first suggested looping to her principal after an outside expert mentioned it in a talk given to Concord Road teachers two years ago, and the principal agreed to allow her to try it with her kindergarten class last year.
Would she loop with a class again? "I'll let you know," she said with a laugh. "Right now I love it. I love the connection I feel with the class. I think both for myself and for the parents, there's been a palpable sense of commitment. I'm really, really excited to start the school year again with them."
So are Zachary and many of his classmates. But not all of the children completely understand the arrangement. "I heard one of them say to another, 'We're going to have her again next time,' " Ms. Cohen said. "And the other child said, 'What about high school?' "
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We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us - as surely and perhaps as terribly as we've been redefined by broadcast television.
"Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of Burroughs' work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us.
DPI Letter - Optional Class Hours are NOT Part of the Regular School Day
In his letter to a Sherman parent, Michael George, Director of Content and Learning Team wrote:
"The requirements for regular instruction in 121.02(1)(L) are to be scheduled within the regular school day which is defined as “the period from the start to the close of each pupil’s daily instructional schedule.” Times of the day or week during which student attendance is optional are not considered part of the regular school day."
In May Sherman principal Ann Yehle sent a letter to Sherman parents telling them band, orchestra and vocal music classes would be offered in an optional 8th hour. Parents wrote to DPI for clarification of the state law regarding regarding regular school day.
There will still be an optional 8th hour class with some form of music, but the newest proposal is to offer orchestra, band and vocal music education courses as pull-out classes, pulling students from other classes who want to study band, orchestra or vocal music. I'm left to wonder why students who want to study band, orchestra or vocal music continously have to "double up" their studies - seems like they are being penalized. Why wouldn't this put additional and, perhaps, unnecessary, pressure on these students.
The entire content of the DPI letter follows:
June 15, 2005
Dear [Sherman Parent - name and address omitted for personal privacy],
I’m writing in response to inquiries from you and others at Sherman Middle School regarding course offerings and scheduling. I’m aware of the considerable planning and collaboration that has already taken place. As you know, staff, parents and students have also contacted this department about proposed changes.
The following excerpts from Wisconsin school law are the most applicable to the questions about middle level course offerings and definition of the school day.
Wisconsin Statute 121.02 (1) (L) and related Administrative Rule
In grades 5 to 8, provide regular instruction in reading, language arts, social studies, mathematics, science, health, physical education, art and music. The school board shall also provide pupils with an introduction to career exploration and planning... In grades 7 and 8 provide regular instruction in foreign language.
Regular instruction means instruction each week for the entire school term in sufficient frequency and length to achieve the objectives and allocation of instructional time identified in the curriculum plans.
Wisconsin Statute 121.02 (1) (F) and related Administrative Rule
Annually schedule … at least 1,050 hours of direct pupil instruction in grades 1 to 6 and at least 1,137 hours of direct pupil instruction in grades 7 to 12. Scheduled hours under this subdivision include recess and time for pupils to transfer between classes but do not include the lunch period. The school hours are computed as the period from the start to the close of each pupil's daily instructional schedule. No more than 30 minutes per day may be counted for recess…
…Music instruction including general music, vocal music, and instrumental music shall be available to all pupils in grades 7 through 12 and shall be taught by a licensed music teacher.
Text of the Wisconsin Statutes and related Administrative Code as referenced above can be found on the DPI Web site at http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlsis/cal/calmidle.html and
http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlsis/cal/dayspi.html.
The requirements for regular instruction in 121.02(1)(L) are to be scheduled within the regular school day which is defined as “the period from the start to the close of each pupil’s daily instructional schedule.” Times of the day or week during which student attendance is optional are not considered part of the regular school day.
You also asked about mirroring some electives during both the regular school day and your optional 8th hour. As long as instruction offered during the regular school day meets the requirements in Wisconsin school laws, additional electives offered after school are a local decision.
As you examine schedule options for the future, it is important to verify that your school will continue to meet the minimum annual hours of instruction referenced above: at least 1,050 hours
of direct pupil instruction in grades 1 to 6 and at least 1,137 hours of direct pupil instruction in
grades 7 to 12. In calculating hours of instruction, time for lunch is excluded and you must factor in early release days as well as other days that do not qualify for calculating hours of instruction.
I’m confident your planning team will develop ways to sustain a balanced curriculum and meaningful opportunities for the students at Sherman Middle School while also meeting the basic requirements in Wisconsin school laws.
Sincerely,
Michael G. George, Director
Content & Learning Team
cc Ann Yehle, Principal, Sherman Middle School
Tony Evers, Deputy State Superintendent, DPI
On Friday, the state Department of Public Instruction ruled that under Wisconsin law, instrumental music instruction must be available to all students in grades seven through 12 during the regular school day.
"It is unusual to pull students from one class to meet instructional time in another class," said Michael George, director of the Content & Learning Team for the state Department of Public Instruction, who issued Friday's ruling. "Clearly, they're not getting the same experience as other students."
Besides music instruction, Sherman parents are concerned that few students have the opportunity to take 8th grade algebra and that no child will have the opportunity to take a full year of foreign language prior to high school.
Yehle said middle school is a time when students should be sampling many subject areas to gauge their interests and skills, and should be introduced to what it's like to study a foreign language, rather than develop proficiencies.
It's hard to see where Sherman Middle School's curriculum is not being dummed down for its students compared to other Madison middle schools and to school districts surrounding Madison WI.
Much afoot at Sherman Middle school. MMSD will look at developing a district-wide middle school curriculum. While that might improve the mess at Sherman, it might also mean watering down the curriculum, eg. math, throughout the district.
"School Board President Carol Carstensen, who made it one of her priorities to examine how the district's 11 middle schools are structured and to consider proposals for changes, said that questions and concerns about middle- school curriculum existed before the situation at Sherman boiled over.
"It came to a head around Sherman," Carstensen said.
Among the concerns is whether the kind of preparation students receive for high school varies depending on which middle school they attend, she said.
In one of her first jobs as the new superintendent of secondary schools, Pam Nash will focus on designing a middle school system that is consistent across the district, Rainwater said.
"Each of our middle schools has developed in a very different way," Rainwater said, adding, "It provides a tremendous amount of flexibility."
Carstensen said that while a more centralized model would sacrifice some autonomy and creativity in a school's ability to meet the needs of its specific student population, she believes that all students should have the same opportunities in certain areas, including instrumental music and advanced math classes."
Sandy Cullen Wisconsin State Journal
June 28, 2005
With continuing controversy over curriculum at Sherman Middle School prompting some parents to transfer students to other schools, School Board members and administrators will review the district's model for all of Madison's middle schools.
Sherman Principal Ann Yehle said she knows of three students who are leaving the school because of the controversy ignited last month when she announced that band and orchestra classes would be moved to an optional eighth hour after the regular school day. On Friday, the state Department of Public Instruction ruled that under Wisconsin law, instrumental music instruction must be available to all students in grades seven through 12 during the regular school day.
Prior to DPI's ruling, Yehle had agreed to offer band and orchestra during the regular school day as well as during the optional eighth hour next year. But some parents are still upset after learning that students might have to miss other classes, such as foreign language or art, on the days they have band and orchestra.
"It is unusual to pull students from one class to meet instructional time in another class," said Michael George, director of the Content & Learning Team for the state Department of Public Instruction, who issued Friday's ruling. "Clearly, they're not getting the same experience as other students."
Superintendent Art Rainwater, who said he will send a letter to Sherman parents today, said that students taking band and orchestra would miss another exploratory class one day a week, where in the past they missed the opportunity to take another entire class. Exploratory classes include music, art, foreign language, gym, healthy living and technology.
Rainwater also said Sherman will begin allowing students to take algebra at their parents' request, addressing another issue of contention at the school.
Many parents are upset that the number of Sherman students eligible to take algebra has dropped dramatically in recent years. They say that Sherman has required students to attain higher scores on an assessment test than other middle schools, preventing many students from taking an advanced math class before high school.
Yehle said she expected eight students to take the advanced math class in the coming year, down from a high of about 25 in years past.
School Board President Carol Carstensen, who made it one of her priorities to examine how the district's 11 middle schools are structured and to consider proposals for changes, said that questions and concerns about middle- school curriculum existed before the situation at Sherman boiled over.
"It came to a head around Sherman," Carstensen said.
Among the concerns is whether the kind of preparation students receive for high school varies depending on which middle school they attend, she said.
In one of her first jobs as the new superintendent of secondary schools, Pam Nash will focus on designing a middle school system that is consistent across the district, Rainwater said.
"Each of our middle schools has developed in a very different way," Rainwater said, adding, "It provides a tremendous amount of flexibility."
Carstensen said that while a more centralized model would sacrifice some autonomy and creativity in a school's ability to meet the needs of its specific student population, she believes that all students should have the same opportunities in certain areas, including instrumental music and advanced math classes.
Many parents have expressed concerns about differences between Sherman and other middle schools in the district, including the way Sherman schedules foreign language classes. Some parents also are dissatisfied with the opportunities Sherman provides for talented and gifted students.
Parent Alan Sanderfoot said those factors prompted him to transfer his daughter Olivia from Sherman to O'Keeffe Middle School, and that other parents are considering doing the same.
As a seventh-grader at O'Keeffe, Sanderfoot said, Olivia will have foreign language classes throughout the year. At Sherman, French and Spanish classes for seventh- and eighth-graders are concentrated into half of the school year, causing concerns among some parents about a gap in learning.
George said foreign language and music are two areas in which "continuous progress is very important."
"Many foreign language programs in Wisconsin begin in the elementary school and have opportunities for continuous progress," he said.
Rainwater said he does not believe the Sherman students experience a disadvantage in foreign language instruction.
Sanderfoot, who has another daughter headed for Sherman, said parents' concern is not just about opportunities for their own child.
"This is people worried about the whole middle school model and what it's going to mean in high school."
School Board member Lawrie Kobza, who was president of Sherman's parent group prior to her April election to the board, agrees that there is a bigger issue behind the Sherman controversy.
She said it appears that only Sherman and Sennett middle schools do not allow students to take a full year of foreign language in eighth grade.
"There's a lot of advantages to it," Kobza said, adding that foreign language looks good on college applications and can save money if students test out of college classes.
Yehle said middle school is a time when students should be sampling many subject areas to gauge their interests and skills, and should be introduced to what it's like to study a foreign language, rather than develop proficiencies.
But Sanderfoot and other parents are concerned Sherman's curriculum is being "dumbed down," which Yehle denies.
There is concern about parents' criticism of Yehle, Carstensen said, adding, "Everything that I've heard prior to any of this is very enthusiastic."
When she became principal 4 years ago, Sherman was considered a school in crisis, and Yehle has been credited with reversing the school's downward spiral.
"Ann has done a lot of good things at Sherman," said Kobza, who worked with other parents and Yehle to turn the school around.
"It's just heartbreaking to me to see this," Kobza said of the current controversy. "It's really just bringing the whole school down."
This fall, Sherman will be entering the third and final year of a comprehensive school reform grant, which has involved examining everything the school does and making changes, which are starting to be implemented.
Carstensen said she also is concerned that parents feel that they are not being listened to, adding that parents need to be involved in the process of change.
What criteria does the district use to select SAGE schools?
The board has before it on Monday, June 27, a motion to drop SAGE at Lapham/Marquette (37/24% low-income) and Crestwood (23% low-income). Huegel (41%) and Sandburg (42%) will replace them. The agenda also lists all of the schools scheduled to be designated SAGE schools.
The following schools will be SAGE schools though they have a lower percentage of low income students than Lapham’s 37%: Chavez (29%), Muir (29%), Shorewood (28%), Stephens (32%).
The following schools with particularly high percentages of low-income students do not appear on the list: Glendale (67%), Lincoln (70%), Mendota (73%), Midvale (65%), and Nuestro Mundo (45%).
The MMSD Web site has a list of low-income students in all schools.
Here are the schools with the percentage of low-income students in 2004:
i had to retire before i could talk about this stuff!
Charles Eliot was the president of harvard 1869-1909 is the most evil man in the history of harvard -- he set up the high school curriculum that is still in place TODAY.
If you ever wondered why you took algebra in high school, is because the guy in princeton was selling a textbook on algebra, so he put algebra on high school curriculum!
i'm a math major and a computer science prof, and algebra has never come up in my life, maybe it has in yours.
Jay Matthew has updated his list of the top 1000 US High Schools. The list, known as The Challenge Index, uses a ratio: the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at public high schools in 2004, divided by the number of graduating seniors at the schools in 2004. Newsweek says that although the list "doesn't tell the whole story about a school, it's one of the best measures available to compare a wide range of students' readiness for higher-level work, which is more crucial than ever in the postindustrial age."
Here's a list of Wisconsin High Schools included on the Challenge Index. Verona (710) and Madison Memorial (598) were the only Dane County schools included. Milwaukee Rufus King was the top ranked Wisconsin school on the list at 215.
Tom Kertscher takes a look at a recent addition to the list, Grafton High School.
From this week's iLaw conference: "Teach the kids to code. Teach the artists to code. Let them control their own culture." Are we fostering consumers or creative types? Follow the discussion here.
I thought she was merely endorsing the anti-war position. But my son set me straight. This student actually believed that if she had lived at the time, she might have been drafted. She didn't understand that conscription in the United States has always applied to males only. How could she have known? Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth. They teach history as if males and females have always played equal roles. They are propaganda machines.
Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmate
n high school, I was a 3.8 (grade-point average) student. It was simple for me to get by with the bare minimum. I just got lazy," says Andrea Edwards, 19, a graduate of Inglewood High. "Now that I'm here, it's embarrassing -- there's so much I just don't know."
"You kind of feel left behind -- like, why is my report card lying?" adds 19-year-old Kiwanna Hines, who was in the top 10 percent of her class at Junipero Serra High in Gardena. "I have my grandma, my auntie, my mom, my cousins -- all of them are depending on me to graduate college. It's a lot of pressure."
The story notes that 8 out of 10 first-time freshman enrolled at Dominguez Hills last fall needed remediation in English and 7 in 10 needed remediation in math. Throughout the 23-campus CSU system, only 43% of the entering freshmen were proficient in both classes. Dominguez Hills president James Lyons summed it up: “There’s a disconnect between what they’re doing in high school to earn that GPA, and what is required and expected at the university level.” Via Eduwonk and Joanne Jacobs
At the beginning of the 21st. Century, all educators and all educational institutions, at all levels of education provision, are faced with the greatest time of possibility for change and evolution or stagnation and regression. Barker, 1978 in New York, stated that “action with vision can change the world” and the authors, based on their many years of experience working in both traditional and managed or virtual, E-Learning, lifelong-learning environments contend that the promotion of critical thinking is a key element in meaningful, responsible and soulful learning. Our ‘raison d’être’ as educators is to prepare our students for the society which does not yet exist and in doing so, provide them with opportunities to critically assess and transform their experiences into authentic learning experiences (Ó Murchú, 2005). This article explores the thought processes, realities and perceptions of the authors’ on-going experiences in on-line classes and gives their insights into promoting critical thinking in these Managed Learning Environments (MLEs).
Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.
The obvious way to deal with this is to use the education system to guarantee a level playing field. Improve educational opportunities for the poorest Americans, make sure that nobody is turned away from university on grounds of financial need, and you will progressively weaken the link between background and educational success. Alas, there are at least three big problems with this.
The first is that the schools the poorest Americans attend have been getting worse rather than better. This is partly a problem of resources, to be sure. But it is even more a problem of bad ideas. The American educational establishment's weakness for airy-fairy notions about the evils of standards and competition is particularly damaging to poor children who have few educational resources of their own to fall back on. One poll of 900 professors of education, for example, found that 64% of them thought that schools should avoid competition.
MINDING ABOUT THE GAP
Jun 9th 2005
America worries that it is becoming a class society. With reason
FOR a people who pride themselves on ignoring social class, Americans are suddenly remarkably interested in it. The country's two leading newspapers are winding up blockbuster series on the subject. The NEW YORK TIMES's, in ten parts, is called, simply enough, "Class matters". The WALL STREET JOURNAL's offering, which will stretch to "at least seven parts", is ostensibly about social mobility. But the series' conclusion is that social mobility has failed to keep up with widening social divisions: in other words, that class does indeed matter.
America, of course, is rife with social distinctions, but it has always prided itself on the assumption that talented people are free to rise to their natural level. The country's favourite heroes have been Benjamin Franklin types who made something out of nothing. (The 15th child of a candle-and-soap maker, Franklin retired a wealthy man at 42.) And its favourite villains have usually been Paris Hilton types, who combine inherited wealth with an obvious lack of talent. "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs", said Thomas Jefferson, "nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them."
There was more to this than self-flattery. Foreigners have also been struck by America's social fluidity. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the average American's "hatred" of the "smallest privileges". In the 1860s, Karl Marx remarked that "the position of wage labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term". In the 1880s, James Bryce noted America's talent for producing self-made men. Joseph Ferrie, an economic historian at Northwestern University, has crunched the census numbers from 1850 to 1920 and discovered that there was something to all this: more than 80% of unskilled men in America moved to higher-paying occupations, compared with less than 51% in Britain.
Today's America gives every impression of being more classless than ever. Shops such as Restoration Hardware and Anthropologie cater for the mass middle class in much the same way that Woolworths once catered for the mass working class. And Ivy League students dress more like rappers than budding merchant bankers. But beneath this bland surface, social divisions are getting wider.
There is little doubt that the American social ladder is getting higher. In 1980-2002 the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% of earners more than doubled. But there is also growing evidence that the ladder is getting stickier: that intergenerational mobility is no longer increasing, as it did during the long post-war boom, and may well be decreasing.
This is hardly the first time that America has threatened to calcify into a class society. In the Gilded Age, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the robber barons looked like turning into an English upper class. But this time round it could be much harder to restore the American ideal of equality of opportunity.
The reason for this lies in the paradox at the heart of the new meritocracy. These days the biggest determinant of how far you go in life is how far you go in education. The gap in income between the college-educated and the non-college-educated rose from 31% in 1979 to 66% in 1997. But access to college is increasingly determined by social class. The proportion of students from upper-income families at the country's elite colleges is growing once again, having declined dramatically after the second world war. Only 3% of students in the most selective universities come from the bottom income quartile, and only 10% come from the bottom half of the income scale.
CLINGING TO PRIVILEGE
The obvious way to deal with this is to use the education system to guarantee a level playing field. Improve educational opportunities for the poorest Americans, make sure that nobody is turned away from university on grounds of financial need, and you will progressively weaken the link between background and educational success. Alas, there are at least three big problems with this.
The first is that the schools the poorest Americans attend have been getting worse rather than better. This is partly a problem of resources, to be sure. But it is even more a problem of bad ideas. The American educational establishment's weakness for airy-fairy notions the evils of standards and competition is particularly damaging to poor children who have few educational resources of their own to fall back on. One poll of 900 professors of education, for example, found that 64% of them thought that schools should avoid competition.
The second is the politics of education reform. The Democrats have much deeper roots in poor America than the Republicans; they also have much greater faith in the power of government. But they are too closely tied to the teachers' unions to push for sensible reforms, such as testing and school choice. Their notions of improvement seem limited to pouring in more money.
The third reason is the most powerful of all: that the educated classes still do such a superb job of consolidating and transmitting their privileges. This goes far beyond the NEW YORK TIMES's "Sunday Vows" section, which lovingly chronicles the pairings of Princeton-educated bankers with Yale-educated lawyers at the very top of the tree. America's college-educated class is now a much larger share of the population than it was.
The NEW YORK TIMES has supported its series on class with editorials condemning Mr Bush's tax cuts. But even if the paper's argument is correct, it ignores the basic fact that so many people have become so good at passing their educational privileges on to their children. That is not something that is going to go away with a mere tweak of tax policy; after all, they are only doing what comes naturally.
See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4055607
Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.
Music Education in MMSD Needs Help from the Madison Community
Music education in Madison's public schools has been on the chopping block for the past four years, beginning with the Superintendent's proposed cut to Grade 4 strings. All the proposed cuts were made without any planning for changes, and the harshest cuts came this year, again without any planning for change among the key stakeholders and those most affected by the change - our children. This past year, in the absence of a fine arts coordinator, a team of teachers was to be put into place to oversee fine arts education - this did not happen but an interim fine arts coordinator was hired in the spring. Perhaps it's time for the community to form a task force to collaborate on future directions and an educational framework for music education in our public schools?
This spring 60% of the elementary string staff was cut - 4 FTEs will teach nearly 2,000 children in 27 schools next year, 10% of the elementary music staff was cut and instrumental and vocal music were proposed for afterschool at Sherman Middle School.
All these cuts and changes were proposed by the Superintendent to the School Board without first directing his staff to undertake any curriculum planning with key stakeholders. None of his proposed cuts followed any curriculum evaluation and redesign of curriculum plans to minimize the impact of cuts on a) children's learning and b) teachers. Nor are there any current plans for an assessment of music education in grades K-12 for the district since these cuts were put into place. Perhaps it's time to take this planning step.
Music education, along with challenging academics, sports, foreign language and other fine arts education, are found in schools of excellence. Any changes in light of financial constraints need to be made following a careful process that includes key stakeholders so that we make decisions that will keep our students and their families in our schools and provide the best education for our children we can under the current challenging financial environment. Administrators are needed in that process but they are not sufficient to ensure an outcome that is best for our children's learning.
Despite increasingly tough standards, the number of Wisconsin schools that will be flagged this year for failing to meet federally mandated reading and math goals will be less than half what it was last year - 51 as opposed to 108 - but not because things are getting better.
Rather, it is the state's controversial calculation method that allows schools to miss the goals by substantial percentages without having it count against them.
For the same reason, only one school district in the state will be flagged for failing to meet the federally mandated standards, whereas last year 30 school districts were listed as failing to make enough progress.
The dramatic shift is due to the use of a statistical tool known as confidence intervals.
HOW LAPHAM ELEMENTARY ACHIEVED SUCCESS BY BUCKING THE DISTRICT'S FAVORED APPROACH
By Katherine Esposito
"At Marquette Elementary, Lapham’s 3rd through 5th grade sister school, skillful use of Direct Instruction has resulted in reading scores for Marquette third-graders that are virtually unsurpassed district-wide. Scores for black students particularly stand out.
In 1998, just 9% of Marquette black third graders were considered “advanced” readers, as measured on the third-grade state reading comprehension test; by 2003, 38% were “advanced.” District-wide, only 9% of black children scored as “advanced” in 2003."
On the day Dante Hamilton came to Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary School on Milwaukee’s North Side, he was like most African-American children who enroll in urban school districts in the United States. He was already behind. . . .
Fortunately for Dante, he had what the Chinese call the luck of time and place when his mother enrolled him at Hawthorne. Today, at age 10, he is a fourth-grader who reads at a sixth-grade level.
The article continues for several pages and insightfully covers a wide range of relevant topics on schools.
Robert Slavin of John Hopkins reports on current educational models that are supported by scientific evidence, and makes recommendations.
Despite some recent improvements, the academic achievement of American students
remains below that of those in most industrialized nations, and the gap between African
American and Hispanic students and White students remains substantial. For many years, the
main policy response has been to emphasize accountability, and No Child Left Behind has added
further to this trend. There is much controversy about the effects of accountability systems, but
they have had little impact on the core technology of teaching: Instruction, curriculum, and
school organization.
This paper argues that genuine reform in American education depends on a movement
toward evidence-based practice, using the findings of rigorous research to guide educational
practices and policies. No Child Left Behind gives a rhetorical boost to this concept, exhorting
educators to use programs and practices “based on scientifically-based research.” In practice,
however, programs that particularly emphasize research-based practice, such as Reading First,
have instead supported programs and practices (such as traditional basal reading textbooks) that
have never been evaluated, while ignoring well-evaluated programs. The same is true of the
earlier Comprehensive School Reform program, which was intended for “proven,
comprehensive” programs but has instead primarily supported unresearched programs.
This paper reviews research on programs that already have strong evidence of
effectiveness. Programs with strong evidence of effectiveness fell into the following categories.
1. Comprehensive school reform models, which provide professional development and
materials to improve entire schools. Research particularly supports Success for All and
Direct Instruction, but smaller numbers of studies support several additional models
including the School Development Program, America’s Choice and Modern Red
Schoolhouse.
2. Instructional technology. Research supports integrated learning systems in mathematics.
Word processing has been found to improve writing achievement.
3. Cooperative learning programs engage students in small groups to help each other learn.
Many studies support this strategy in elementary and secondary math, reading, and other
subjects.
4. Innovative mathematics programs. The first What Works Clearinghouse report supported
research on two technology-based programs, Cognitive Tutor and I Can Learn, in middle
schools. Elementary programs such as Cognitively Guided Instruction and Project SEED
also have strong evidence of effectiveness.
5. Innovative elementary reading programs having strong evidence of effectiveness include
Success for All and Direct Instruction, as well as Reciprocal Teaching and Cooperative
Integrated Reading and Composition.
6. Tutoring programs in reading, especially Reading Recovery, have rigorous evaluations
showing their effectiveness.
7. Dropout prevention programs, such as the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program and Alas,
have good evidence of effectiveness.
John Seely Brown (Brown was Chief Scientist at Xerox PARC, where many of the technologies we use today, including, ethernet, Laser Printers and the GUI were invented):
My interest here today is in looking at the notions of learning, working and playing in the digital age and how today's kids—growing up digital—might actually be quite different from what we might first think. But, more particularly, how by stepping back and looking at the forces and trends underlying the digital world, we may have a chance to create a new kind of learning matrix, one that I will call a learning ecology.
I became interested in learning ecologies because of their systemic properties. We need to view higher education from a systemic perspective, one that takes into consideration all of the components—k-12, community colleges, state and private colleges and universities, community libraries, firms, etc.—that make up a region. This, in turn, raises additional questions about how we might create a regional advantage such as in the Research Triangle in North Carolina or in Silicon Valley. For example, is there a way to extend science parks, that typically surround universities, into also being learning parks and from there into being learning ecologies by combining the knowledge producing components of the region with the nearly infinite reach and access to information that the internet provides? And, if so, might this provide an additional use of the internet in learning—one besides just distance learning. But first, let's consider what the Web is and see how it might provide a new kind of information fabric in which learning, working and playing co-mingle. Following that we will then look at the notion of distributed intelligence which has a great deal to do with the social basis as well as the cognitive basis of learning, and how those fold together. Then we will look at the issue of how one might better capture and leverage naturally occurring knowledge assets, a topic as relevant to the campus as to the region or to the firm. Finally, we will come to the core topic of how all this folds together to lead to a new concept of a learning ecology.
An honors program beset by ethnic tensions and strained relations between parents and administrators at Lincoln Middle School is being eliminated.
After three months of public debate, trustees for Vista Unified voted 4-1 late Monday to eliminate the Gifted and Talented Education program, which supporters said promoted Lincoln's brightest students. School administrators, however, said the GATE program was closed to most students.
The board's decision will open honors classes that have GATE students to everyone.
School and district officials said putting GATE students in classes with those of mixed abilities would help improve test scores.
Spurred by President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, educators across the nation are putting extraordinary effort into improving the achievement of minority students, who lag so sharply that by 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic student can read and do arithmetic only as well as the average eighth-grade white student.
Somit Basak's tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students' interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.
Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students — he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.
The headline is that MMSD students generally scored lower than last year on the state standardized tests at the same time as state performance either held steady or showed slight improvement. The data on individual Madison schools are available here
The brightest spot in the tests statewide appeared to be reading for eighth- and 10th-graders. The results show that 85% of eighth-graders were proficient or better in reading, up six percentage points from a year ago, while 74% of 10th-graders cleared the proficiency bar, up five percentagepoints from a year ago.
But for fourth-graders, the percentage proficient or better went down in math and science, stayed the same in reading and language arts and went up one point in social studies.
And an eight-point jump in the percentage of eighth-graders who were at least proficient in math only reversed an eight-point drop among the eighth-graders in the prior year - a sign both of the way scores can change from year to year and of how little things have changed in recent years.
The gaps that leave low-income and minority students scoring far below other students remain large and in some instances were worse in this school year's testing. There have been some instances of the gaps shrinking, but it remains as much as 50 percentage points in some cases (78% of white 10th-graders and 28% of black 10th-graders were demonstrated proficient in math.
Students once saw computer-science classes as their ticket to wealth. Now, as more technology jobs are outsourced to other countries, such classes are seen as a path to unemployment.
New data show students' interest in the discipline is in a free fall. The number of newly declared computer-science majors declined 32 percent from the fall of 2000 to the fall of 2004, according to a report released this month by the Computing Research Association, which represents computer scientists in industry and academe. Another survey, from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, shows that the number of incoming freshmen who expressed an interest in majoring in computer science has plummeted by 59 percent in the last four years.
Professors say the creation in the last five years of new degrees in information technology or information systems may also be offering more-attractive alternatives to computer science. Computer science focuses on how networks are engineered -- the theoretical aspects of computing -- and on writing software, while information technology focuses on applied work, such as building Web sites, adapting systems to a business's needs, and maintaining networks.
George Mason University started an information-technology program in the fall of 2002, and this year has 726 students in the program. The number keeps growing each year, with students particularly interested in computer-security courses, says Anne Marchant, an information-technology instructor at the university. Only 550 George Mason students are computer-science majors. A few years ago the department had about 800 students who majored in the field.
Ms. Marchant blames the shift partly on what she sees as students' deteriorating mathematics aptitude.
"Information technology is the right home for an awful lot of students who do not have the math skills and do not really have the interest in becoming programmers," she says.
Jesse J. Rangel, a senior at California State University at Bakersfield who is a computer-science major, says some of his classmates avoid computer science because it involves advanced mathematics and physics. "The sad fact is that many students are not up for the challenge," he says.
With a critical shortage of Information Technology workers projected in the coming years, it's crucial that university computer science departments do all they can to attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said Tuesday.
At IBM University Day in Research Triangle Park on Tuesday, leading IBM officials and university professors from across the region gathered to discuss new ways of marketing computer careers to up-and-coming students.
The May 2, 2005 Madison School Board meeting included a statement & discussion from a parent whose child was denied open enrollment in the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. 9MB Video. More on open enrollment: Clusty | Google
From the Huffington Post: Mike Piscal, founder of the very successful View Park Prep charter school in the low-income, minority Crenshaw District of LA names names in analyzing why 3,950 ninth graders at South LA's four major high schools turn into 1,600 graduates, 900 college freshmen and 258 college graduates. More here.
This is related: Shanghai Jiaotong University won the recent ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The US hasn't won since 1997. The University of Illinois finished 17th, CalTech,Duke and MIT finished 29th while UW-Madison earned an honorable mention.
I mentioned to a few friends recently that I think the Madison School's "same service" budgeting approach (year after year) needs to be replaced by a new, largely curriculum based process that recognizes globalization, changing demographics and the fact that we should not simply compare our performance and curricula with those of Racine, Green Bay or Ann Arbor. Rather the comparison should be with Helsinki, Bangalore, Shanghai, London, Nagoya and (insert your city here).
Parents have a growing number of choices these days (some don't realize that they have them - yet). Homeschooling appears to be the elephant in the room along with the slow rise of virtual schools.
Julie Leung sent a timely bolt of lightning to the blogosphere with her essay on education, including a discussion of her reasons for homeschooling:
Our desire to preserve our childrens' organic curiosity plays a large part in our desire to homeschool. Too often the school system crushes curiousity out of a kid. Kids have a natural desire to learn.
Read Doc's post for more background & links along with Gatto
Jeff Henrique, a Madison Schools Parent and a writer on this blog is featured in a UW Madison News Release regarding classroom clickers (personal response systems) as instant assessment tools.
Bersin's departure provides an opportunity to ask what we have learned from his highly visible and often contentious tenure. To explore that question, and with the district's full cooperation, last year I assembled a team of analysts to examine the San Diego reform push. For me, five key lessons emerged from their appraisal.
First, the centralized, "managed instruction" model of improvement depends critically on the presence of a personnel and managerial infrastructure and on quality curricula. Alvarado gave unstinting attention to his centerpiece "Institute for Learning" training program for principals and faculty, and to building a corps of "peer coaches" to assist teachers. But his single-minded focus on these activities resulted in a lack of attention to infrastructure and curricula. As a result, the coaches, the Institute, and attempts to assign faculty where needed most ran afoul of the collective bargaining agreement's provisions on professional development, staffing, and teacher transfers. A balky human resources operation reliant on outdated technology inhibited district efforts to speed up hiring or promote more flexible staffing.
Finally, perhaps the most important lesson from San Diego is how limited the prospects are for radical improvement in urban public education absent structural change to personnel systems, technology, accountability, leadership, and compensation. For all their sweat and struggle, Bersin & Co. found their efforts to build the workforce they wanted stymied by statute and contract language. An outdated information system meant the district had to try to build on the fly the tools it needed to enable serious improvements to school accountability, human resource management, and budgeting. Bersin began his tenure with multiple advantages, including dazzling local and national contacts, personal charisma, a facile mind, polished negotiating skills, impeccable public service credentials, and a deft fundraising touch. If the legacy of his seven-year run is in doubt, the San Diego experience illustrates, above all, that even the boldest attempts to overhaul urban schooling are today undermined by the same institutional and organizational failings that they are intended to address.
In "What, Me Worry?", Tom Friedman holds forth, as he so often does, on a speech Bill Gates gave on the antiquated way we educate our high school students. Gates warns that the future belongs not to those countries rich in natural resources but rather to those who "mine" their populace's intellectual power. China and India will soon propel many more of their students ahead of ours, and with the flattening of the globe, Tom's latest book's thesis, these students will no longer have to come to the US. Thus the brain drain will be from within and without.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/opinion/29friedman.html
"One of America's most important entrepreneurs recently gave a remarkable speech at a summit meeting of our nation's governors. Bill Gates minced no words. "American high schools are obsolete," he told the governors. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded. ... By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they are working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.
"Training the work force of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. ... Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year."
Let me translate Mr. Gates's words: "If we don't fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids." I consider that, well, kind of important. Alas, the media squeezed a few mentions of it between breaks in the Michael Jackson trial. But neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress - or even a daytime one - to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don't even believe in evolution..."
American Association for the Advancement of Science Report on Math and Science Learning
New AAAS Report Explores How Schools Improve Math and Science Learning
A System of Solutions: Every School, Every Student
Ten U.S. school districts have achieved significant improvement in science and mathematics performance by developing ambitious programs that set high standards and then closely tracking what works and what doesn't work in helping students learn, according to a new AAAS report.
The 22-page report, "A System of Solutions: Every School, Every Student," identifies 10 U.S. K-12 school districts, serving some of the nation's major inner-city areas, and discusses the systemic practices that helped them improve student performance and close the gap between minority and non-minority students.
U.S. school districts examined as part of the AAAS report are: Atlanta; Boston; Brownsville, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; Portland, Ore.; and San Diego.
Madison High Schools AP (Advanced Placement) Comparison
A reader forwarded this 4 page (17K PDF Document - 17K) that compares and discusses Advance Placement classes available at Madison's four high schools.
Several interesting letters to the editor in Sunday's NYT in response to this article: The Schools Under Bloomberg: Much Tumult, Mixed Results, including this comment:
Too many have held low expectations for Harlem's children. We have a mayor who not only seems to care about reforming the schools, but also is holding himself accountable for raising the expectations of our children. While I do not agree with every single one of his reforms, I believe they should be given more time before they are dismissed.
"The Schools Under Bloomberg: Much Tumult, Mixed Progress" (front page, April 18) looks at the status of school reform and mentions Public School 92 in Harlem in particular.
I am a graduate of P.S. 92 (and an alumna of Bronx Science, Barnard and New York University Law School). I am also a parent with children in District 5 schools, and I disagree with the idea that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's reforms have accomplished little.
Too many have held low expectations for Harlem's children. We have a mayor who not only seems to care about reforming the schools, but also is holding himself accountable for raising the expectations of our children. While I do not agree with every single one of his reforms, I believe they should be given more time before they are dismissed.
The mayor should be commended for putting education front and center on his agenda.
Juliet Folks
Bronx, April 18, 2005
•
To the Editor:
As principal of the School for Human Rights in Brooklyn and a former teacher, I believe it is unrealistic to think that New York City school reforms would drastically improve test scores and achieve system stability within two years, given the fact that the system has been dysfunctional for decades. Nevertheless, there have been improvements.
My school is one of many new, small schools that opened within the past couple of years. In mine - and those like it - you can see the hope for the future of the small schools movement: weekly attendance rates of 90 percent or better, high parent participation and teachers' designing a curriculum that engages students.
Smaller schools, along with many of the chancellor's other reforms, are meant to improve the quality of education where it matters most - at the school level.
Kevin J. Dotson
Brooklyn, April 18, 2005
•
To the Editor:
The Bloomberg record on education comes up short in two crucial yet related areas: rigidity and class size.
A "one size fits all" curriculum does not allow teachers to adjust their instruction to individual differences among children. Flexibility is essential, yet the mayor tries to hold teachers in lock step.
At the same time, classes are much too big, especially in the early grades. One of the very few proven, but expensive, methods of improving educational outcomes is smaller class size. The mayor should be focusing on smaller classes instead of press releases.
Daniel Millstone
Bronx, April 18, 2005
•
To the Editor:
According to your article on the schools (front page, April 18), city officials have said that "more children are eating breakfast and lunch prepared at school and that those meals are more nutritious."
This part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's educational reform does not get much attention, yet research tells us that adequate nutrition - specifically, participation in school meal programs - is strongly tied to academic performance.
Improving access to school food and its quality is easily a 10-year effort, but the very fact that this issue is on the mayor's and chancellor's radar screen is impressive.
Richard Murphy
Executive Director, FoodChange
New York, April 18, 2005
•
To the Editor:
A parent in your article on schools is quoted as saying she hasn't seen a difference in her child's school. Well, she won't see any difference until Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg can distinguish between the value of aiming money directly at the schools to reduce class size and attempting to build a memorial to himself in the form of a West Side stadium.
Howard Sage
New York, April 18, 2005
•
To the Editor:
I have been stunned by the extraordinary expectations the New York City public school system places on my daughter in kindergarten at Public School 150. She has at least an hour of homework each night in reading and math. Her reading and math skills far outstrip what mine were at her age.
I have also been impressed by the role parents play in the system. As a member of the Community Education Council for District 30 in Queens, I've been empowered to a degree I wouldn't have thought possible. I've helped to get a leaking roof repaired and am organizing a seminar on asthma at P.S. 2, among other initiatives.
Jeffrey Guyton
Long Island City, Queens
April 18, 2005
•
To the Editor:
For the last three years, I have worked as a substitute teacher in many New York City public schools. There seems to be no discipline or order in the typical urban public school classroom. Disruptive students are difficult to remove.
Until discipline and order return to the public schools and the academic basics are taught, scholastic achievement will never be attained.
The Lesson: Minority Achievement in Two Milwaukee Schools
Mary Van de Kamp:A fascinating article in Milwaukee Magazine compares two elementary schools with black principals and low-income black students. At one school, students outperform the district's white students; at the neighboring school, students do far worse.
Last year, 81 percent of Hawthorne�s black fourth-graders scored proficient or above in math and 79 percent proficient or above in reading, compared to 34 and 63 percent, respectively, at Thurston Woods.....
At Hawthorne, the principal works closely with teachers. Reading is the top priority; there's no time for frills.
Teachers and assistants are expected to hone their craft, and (principal Bettye) Washington provides a steady stream of coaching and advice from experts. Each teacher is also assigned a buddy, and if any of a teacher�s students are struggling, it�s the grade-level committee of their peers and the school learning team�s responsibility to step in and help.
With literacy coach Carolyn Wesley (twin daughter of TV weatherman Paul Joseph) and math specialist Annette Perry, Washington studies the tests students take after every five lessons to identify any child who hasn�t mastered 80 percent of the material, then gets them help.
. . . Hawthorne�s efforts are paying off. Last year, 93 percent of the school�s African-American fifth-graders scored at or above proficiency in math � 48 percentage points higher than the district average for African-American students and 16 points higher than the average for white students.
Hawthorne�s black fourth-graders scored at 80 percent proficiency or better in every subject area, beating the district average for black students by as much as 36 percentage points. Ninety-eight percent of the school�s black third-graders scored proficient in reading.
At nearby Thurston Woods, where the principal doesn't like sharing power with teachers, morale is low, and so are test scores. Both schools use the Direct Instruction curriculum. It works at Hawthorne, where teachers get coaching and support; it doesn't at Thurston Woods.
MPS does not have a history of celebrating excellence in its midst. For a long time, a culture of mediocrity prevented praising the exemplary for fear it might make the inferior feel bad.
But Hawthorne, the highly effective school, didn't make a list of schools closing the black-white achievement gap, because the district decided schools didn't qualify without at least 10 percent white enrollment; comparing to the districtwide average for whites wasn't considered. Meanwhile, the ineffective school is being expanded; the principal will get a raise.
The cover story in today's Isthmus (dated April 15) includes new praise for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction for teaching reading.
For example, the article says, "Among the beneficiaries . . . are special ed students, who receive an especially intense form of Direct Instruction. One-third of Marquette's special ed kids were 'advanced' readers on last year's third-grade test, while over one-half were 'proficient.'
The article continue, "Meanwhile, at Franklin-Randall, the district's other paired elementary schools, the third-grade scores for special ed students are the inverse of those at Lapham-Marquette: Whereas Marquette has one-third of its kids at the top and 8% at the bottom, Randall has 8% at the top and one third at the bottom. At Hawthorne Elementary, one of five schools formerly eligible for the Reading First grant, no special ed children register as 'advanced,' and most perform poorly."
Unfortunately, most Isthmus articles are not posted on-line. When an electronic copy become available, I'll post a link to it.
Below Jeff Henriques posted a response from the MMSD to a letter criticizing Reading Recovery.
The critical letter concludes:
"Reading Recovery has not met the needs of these lowest performing students. Most significantly, its excessive costs can make it more difficult for a school to provide help for all students in need, especially those who are behind in the upper grades. Thus, Reading Recovery is not a productive investment of taxpayers� money or students� time and is a classic example of a �one size fits all� method."
Read the full letter letter on Reading Recovery's flaws.
The New York Times on April 13 reported on a study by the Northwest Evaluation Association that shows there is a decline in the improvement of students in schools since the enactment of NCLB. To quote the article in part:
"Since No Child Left Behind, ... individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle.
The practice may leave teachers with less time to focus on students who are either far below or far above the proficiency mark, the researchers said, making it less likely for the whole class to move forward as rapidly as before No Child Left Behind set the agenda."
The following link is to the actual report from the NWEA site, for your reading pleasure.
Direct Instruction frequently enters discussions of reading in Madison's schools.
Strictly speaking, Direct Instruction (with a capital D and a capital I) is a copyrighted program. Direct instruction (little d, little i) refers to a variety of programs that use direct systematic instruction and other principles of Direct Instruction.
Additionally, direct instruction works to teach other subjects, math, science, history, and more.
Dr. Martin Kozloff, professor at University of North Carolina-Willmington, prepared a long list of direct instruction cirricula. Click here to read a short description of each.
The United States has historically viewed public education as a local issue, so the federal government has looked the other way when the states have damaged the national interest by failing to educate large swaths of the population. That approach has left us with one of the weakest educational systems in the developed worl
No Child Left Behind takes credit for Madison Schools reading success (No Joke)
A message to Madison School Board members from Superintendent Art Rainwater:
Attached is a press release from the Federal Department of Education in which they use our closing the gap in third grade reading as the example for Wisconsin of what NCLB and the Reading First grants have accomplished. The other interesting thing is the data they use to show how successful they have made us is the same data we used to show them why they should fund our Balanced Literacy program.
Larry Winkler, Candidate for Madison School Board Seat 7, Madison School Board forwarded his presentation to the Madison Rotary Club. (PDF Version) Learn more about the candidates here.
We need significant change on the Board of Education.
There is no real and consistent leadership. Having watched the Board up close for a couple of years now, that is my perception. That is the perception of many in the public who follow the Board�s activities. That is the perception of former Board members � you can supply the names -- you know them.
The Board does not listen. Yes, there have been some election-time conversions; and yes, when the public is so outraged by the decisions made by the Administration or the Board that they protest en mass, they sometimes listen; and, yes, they too often listen when asked to take on more responsibilities than we can afford. But, when ideas are presented to the Board in times of quiet with the goal of improving how the district does its business, those ideas and suggestions are ignored.
I don�t like to be ignored. I don�t like to see good ideas from others ignored. I do not like to waste my time. I do not like to whine. I like to get things done. That�s why I�m running for School Board.
I have the knowledge and experience.
I have a BA in Psychology, with emphasis on child psychology, and heavy dose of statistics and experimental design. I worked for almost 10 years at UW�s Research and Development Center for Education involved with the design and analysis of research into curriculum and teaching.
I have a Masters degree in Computer Science and I have taught advanced certificate courses at MATC. I�m currently a project manager at the University of Wisconsin.
I also have a Law degree from UW.
I have a 16 year old daughter who is a sophomore at West, and has been on the honor roll every semester. I, and especially my daughter, understand the hard work necessary to succeed. We adopted her from Peru when she was 5 years old. She spoke Spanish and Quetchua. She had never seen a book, crayon, or a pencil.
I, my wife, and especially my daughter understand what is required to close the gap. But I�m not referring to the gap you keep hearing about, the gap that tells you the percentage of minorities reaching advanced or proficient on tests vs whites. I�m talking about the real gap � the gap between where she was and where she could be. She�s not there yet, not close enough.
However, the District would consider its job done, and count her in its �success� column � the column that says 80% of the students are performing at the advanced or proficient level. I keep forgetting she is a minority, and, for some statistical reason, that is important. So, she�s in another column showing the percentage of minorities performing at advanced or proficient.
The Board has not been doing its job. The Board�s and the Administration�s processes must change.
The Board has to evaluate the effectiveness of each program and service it provides. It must account, on its books, for the cost, by program and service. It must ensure that the curriculum is moving everyone forward � that everyone is getting a year�s worth of education every year -- closing the real gap: between where the student is and where he/she could be in a year.
It is important that students be reading at the first grade level at the end of first grade, or the goal is reached that third grade students be reading at third grade level, but it is also crucial, that a child entering first grade reading at third grade level, must be reading at the 5 grade level at the end of first grade. If they are not, then the curriculum must be adjusted.
I�ve had parents tell me their children came into first grade already knowing how to add, subtract, multiple and divide, but by third grade were back to counting on their fingers, having lost previous mastery.
And there is a research paper by one of the teachers in the District who recounts, in a self-satisfied manner, how the most perturbed and angry parents are engineers, architects and math Ph.Ds who are no longer able to guide and help their kids with fractions, because of the new methods of teaching fractions, and further the teacher makes the claim that these same parents really don�t understand fractions.
There is another reason we need to look at curriculum effectiveness. The recent report by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that United States students were significantly below average compared to 40 other nations in problem solving skills. The majority of our 15-year old students have only basic (level 1) skills, with only less than 10% scoring as proficient compared to 30% from the top countries. The Madison School district is not going to be much different as it compares its achievements to other U.S. schools, which we now know, should not be the gold standard.
For the $13,000 per student per year, we need to get better results. But the Board keeps repeating it�s not the process that is the problem, they don�t have to change anything significant, perhaps just tweak a little around the edges. That the problem is money. We simply need to spend more money.
The problem is not money. But that�s what we hear. From the movie Jerry Maguire it�s �Show me the money�. �Show me the money�. The staff say �Show me the money�. The Board says �Show me the money.� (Or education will be cut). I say, �Show me the results!�
I would lay a bet, that no one here, regardless of finances or political stripe, would be bothered by the money, if there were the results.
That�s what I intend to do on the Board. Get results.
Using a new rich source of data, researchers Katherine Magnuson, Christopher Ruhm, and Jane Waldfogel conclude in Does Prekindergarten Improve School Preparation and Performance? (NBER Working Paper No. 10452) that early education does increase reading and mathematics skills at school entry, but it also boosts children's classroom behavioral problems and reduces their self-control. Further, for most children the positive effects of pre-kindergarten on skills largely dissipate by the spring of first grade, although the negative behavioral effects continue. In the study, the authors take account of many factors affecting a child, including family background and neighborhood characteristics. These factors include race/ethnicity, age, health status at birth, height, weight, and gender, family income related to need, language spoken in the home, and so on.
In Pursuit of Excellence: Jerry Brown on Arts Schools
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown (who is wisely blogging):
From today's Oakland Tribune: The arts high school opened by Mayor Jerry Brown in downtown Oakland 2.5 years ago is now officially one of the best schools in California, at least according to the latest rankings assigned to all public schools by the state.
The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.
The findings raise questions over the Government's decision, announced by Gordon Brown in the Budget last week, to spend another �1.5 billion on school computers, in addition to the �2.5 billion it has already spent.
Several westside PTO's hosted a candidate forum Wednesday evening. The candidates discussed a wide variety of questions, including referendums, the budget process, strings, local education media coverage and differences with their opponents. Listen to the entire event (34.6MB mp3 audio file), or click on the links below to review specific questions & answers.
Q1: Referendums: Where do you stand? All four candidates Video
Q2: Do you agree with the proposed cuts? All four candidates Video
Q3: What can you do to protect TAG, arts and other programs due to the continuous funding changes? Bill Clingan & Carol Carstensen Video
Q4: How would you respond to a parent who said that they were leaving the Madison Schools because their child would have better AP, arts or sports opportunities in another district? (Larry Winkler & Lawrie Kobza) Video
Q5: For the incumbents: What specific initiatives have you taken to raise math scores particularily with low income & minority students? (Bill Clingan & Carol Carstensen) Video
Q6: For the challengers: What are the substantive differences between you and your opponent? (Lawrie Kobza & Larry Winkler) Video
Q7: Will you promise to evaluate the Superintendent annually, as his contract calls for? (Bill Clingan) Video
Q8: You said you would vote for a 3 year operating referendum at the recent MAFAAC Forum, now you say you won't. Why have you changed your mind? (Lawrie Kobza) Video
Q9: Does the Administration's budget document reflect School Board priorities? (Carol Carstensen) Video
Q10: Do you think we should be fund raising from corporations, and asking them for money? (Larry Winkler) Video
Q11: Do you feel the media covers school issues and how do you feel about the fact that there are no media representatives here tonight? (Bill Clingan) Video
Q12: Comment on the proposed reduction in Program Support Teachers? (Carol Carstensen) Video
Q13: How important do you think no-cut freshman sports are? (Lawrie Kobza) Video
Q14: How do you propose to address growth in extended parts of the Madison School District? (Larry Winkler) Video
Q15: Strings is part of the Board approved standards. Why is the Administration proposing to eliminate it? What are your views on this issue? (All 4 candidates) Video
Candidate Closing Statements (All 4 candidates) Video
A note on local media coverage. Indeed, no members of the traditional media were present (perhaps this explains why?), but several internet writers were there, and have written about the event on this site.
Wikis have made their way into the classroom at Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon. Students working on writing projects are accessing their teacher's wiki from their Safari bookmark toolbar on their Macs via Apple's Rendezvous. The wiki is installed on the teacher's iBooks and is an adaptation of Instiki, which in combination with SchoolTool, an open souce management information system, streamlines the entire process. Apart from a couple of problems,--when the laptop is asleep or is outside the school the system breaks down--it gets the thumbs up from the students who use it. It takes away the burden of navigating file servers and word processor interfaces and lets the students focus on their writing.
I like wiki's - they seem quite useful for the classroom.
Failing the Wrong Grades (cont'd) - Needs Better High School Preparation
Diane Ravich It makes no sense to blame the high schools for their ill-prepared incoming students. To really get at the problem, we have to make changes across our educational system. The most important is to stress the importance of academic achievement. Sorry to say, we have a long history of reforms by pedagogues to de-emphasize academic achievement and to make school more "relevant," "fun" and like "real life." These efforts have produced whole-language instruction, where phonics, grammar and spelling are abandoned in favor of "creativity," and fuzzy math, where students are supposed to "construct" their own solutions to math problems instead of finding the right answers.
These are the exact same points Professor Seidenburg, UW Madison, made to the MMSD School Board earlier this year. He also critized the MMSD Superintendent for turning away $10+ million over several years of Reading First federal grant money.
While the problems of low achievement and poor high-school graduation rates are clear, however, their solutions are not. The reformist governors, for example, want to require all students to take a college-preparatory curriculum and to meet more rigorous standards for graduation. These steps will very likely increase the dropout rate, not reduce it.
To understand why, you have to consider what the high schools are dealing with. When American students arrive as freshmen, nearly 70 percent are reading below grade level. Equally large numbers are ill prepared in mathematics, science and history.
It is hardly fair to blame high schools for the poor skills of their entering students. If students start high school without the basic skills needed to read, write and solve mathematics problems, then the governors should focus on strengthening the standards of their states' junior high schools.
And that first year of high school is often the most important one - many students who eventually drop out do so after becoming discouraged when they can't earn the credits to advance beyond ninth grade. Ninth grade is often referred to by educators as a "parking lot." This is because social promotion - the endemic practice of moving students up to the next grade whether they have earned it or not - comes to a crashing halt in high school.
Nearly 1,000 students statewide have applied to attend the Waukesha School District's virtual high school, raising school administrators' expectations that enrollment could hit 750 in the school's second year.
I find this fascinating - a public district going for new business via the net (money follows the students). An education professional recently suggested to me that every student should be required to take one virtual class. Seems like a good idea. After all, we all learn a great deal online these days.
Wisconsin needs to boost graduation rates among blacks and other minorities, the state superintendent of instruction said Sunday as a two-day national summit on the future of high schools ended here.
�We have an achievement gap and we need to ensure every child is graduating from high school,� Elizabeth Burmaster said. �That�s the issue.�
Although Wisconsin boasts one of the highest high school graduation rates in the nation � 92 percent overall in 2002-2003 � only 63 percent of blacks, 76 percent of Hispanics and 78 percent of American Indians complete high school in four years.
From a post on the atrios website:
No Child Left Behind - Football Version
1. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held
accountable.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL.
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in
football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don't like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.
5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.
BOOK REVIEW: School Champion
A consensus has grown over the last 20 years that for sustainable school reform to occur, the public?not just parents?must be engaged, as instigators of change and as watchdogs to ensure that reforms are put into practice.
Another interesting link: The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence is a statewide education advocacy organization. We work to improve education for all Kentuckians.
he most blunt assessment came from Microsoft chief Bill Gates, who has put more than $700 million into reducing the size of high school classes through the foundation formed by him and his wife, Melinda. He said high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college, with classes that are rigorous and relevant to kids and with supportive relationships for children.
"America's high schools are obsolete," Gates said. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools _ even when they're working as designed _ cannot teach all our students what they need to know today."
I am no fan of Bill Gates. [Slashdot discussion] He does, however raise some useful points, including the biggest obstacle: political will.
Ask teachers, administrators and students why such discrepancies exist in these classes, and they will say it has nothing to do with ability. So what explains it
In a letter to the editor of Isthmus UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg wrote, "There�s something deeply wrong here. The educational establishment has embraced methods for teaching reading that have a weak scientific basis and are counterproductive for many beginning readers. They then develop a very expensive remedial reading program to fix the problems created by these instructional methods. Why not do it right the first time?" To read the full text of the letter go to Dr. Seidenberg's letter
Ruth Robarts Letter to the Isthmus editor on MMSD Reading Progress
Ruth Robarts wrote:
Thanks to Jason Shepard for highlighting comments of UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg at the Dec. 13 Madison School Board meeting in his article, Not all good news on reading. Dr. Seidenberg asked important questions following the administrations presentation on the reading program. One question was whether the district should measure the effectiveness of its reading program by the percentages of third-graders scoring at proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT). He suggested that the scores may be improving because the tests arent that rigorous.
I have reflected on his comment and decided that he is correct.
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT---like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades--- measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the proficient and advanced levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence.
However, there are reasons to doubt that high percentages of students scoring at these levels on the WRCT mean that high percentages of students are very proficient readers. High scores on Wisconsin tests do not correlate with high scores on the more rigorous National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the WCKE in reading. However, in the same year only 33% of Wisconsin fourth graders reached the proficient or advanced level in reading on the NAEP. Because the performance of Madison students on the WCKE reading tests mirrors the performance of students statewide, it is reasonable to conclude that many of Madisons proficient and advanced readers would also score much lower on the NAEP. For more information about the gap between scores on the WKCE and the NAEP in reading and math, see EdWatch Online 2004 State Summary Reports at www.edtrust.org.
Next year the federal No Child Left Behind Act replaces the Wisconsin subject area tests with national tests. In view of this change and questions about the value of WRCT scores, its time for the Board of Education to review its benchmarks for progress on its goal of all third-graders reading at grade level by the end of third grade.
Ruth Robarts
Member, Madison Board of Education
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT---like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades--- measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the �proficient� and �advanced� levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence.
However, there are reasons to doubt that high percentages of students scoring at these levels on the WRCT mean that high percentages of students are very proficient readers. High scores on Wisconsin tests do not correlate with high scores on the more rigorous National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored �proficient� or �advanced� on the WCKE in reading. However, in the same year only 33% of Wisconsin fourth graders reached the �proficient� or �advanced� level in reading on the NAEP. Because the performance of Madison students on the WCKE reading tests mirrors the performance of students statewide, it is reasonable to conclude that many of Madison�s �proficient� and �advanced� readers would also score much lower on the NAEP. For more information about the gap between scores on the WKCE and the NAEP in reading and math, see EdWatch Online 2004 State Summary Reports at www.edtrust.org.
Next year the federal No Child Left Behind Act replaces the Wisconsin subject area tests with national tests. In view of this change and questions about the value of WRCT scores, it�s time for the Board of Education to review its benchmarks for progress on its goal of all third-graders reading at grade level by the end of third grade.
TALKING OUT OF SCHOOL / Jason Shepard / Isthmus, December 16, 2004
Not all good news on reading
Writing in the Isthmus weekly newspaper out on Thursday, December 16, 2004, Jason Shepard notes, "One reality touts the district [MMSD] as superior to any other known district in the country at nearly eliminating the gap among the lowest performing readers in the third grade. The other reality shows that minority third graders continue to lag far behind whites at higher levels. While nearly 94% of white third graders read at or above grade level this year, only 66% of black students do."
Reading Recovery reduces overall performance for African American kids
American-American students fare badly in Reading Recovery. Only 43% successfully discontinue, compared to 49% for Asian students, 56% for Hispanic students, and 57% for white students.
According to one of the district�s report on Reading Recovery (p. 14), �Discontinued Reading Recovery students [that is, students who �graduate�] outperform the comparison group by 1.2 text reading levels while all other Reading Recovery students score almost 4 text reading levels less than their comparison group.�
In other words, for every 43 discontinued African-American Reading Recovery students who advance 1.2 text reading levels, 57 fall behind by 4 text reading levels relative to their comparison group. The net impact of Reading Recovery reduces overall reading success for the African-American students in the district.
Mary Watson Peterson Presents MMSD's Elementary Reading Curriculum
Mary Watson Peterson, MMSD Reading Coordinator, presented the theory behind the design and development of MMSD's Balanced Literacy Program. Her professional presentation noted the significant progress in reading that the District has been reporting publicly during the past month.
Ms. Peterson mentioned that several teachers are trained in Direct Instruction and that some teachers use this method. However, no information was presented on the results using this approach as a core curriculum or as an intervention method.
Examining Student Scores for Opportunities for Academic Improvement
Jay Mathews, Washington Post staff writer, wrote an article in the December 14, 2004 Washington Post (Mining Scores for Nuances in Improvement) about using value-added assessments, which "...use test scores to compare each child's progress to predictions based on past performance..." Not everyone is pleased with value-added assessments. "Value-added assessment has also become a political irritant because some school boards and superintendents want to pay teachers based on how much value they are adding, as measured by individual student test scores, for students in their classes. In Ohio and most other states, the system is being used only to diagnose student needs, leaving the question of teacher pay for later." Value-added assessments, which can be done by principals or teachers, is one approach that attempts to bring analysis of student data closer to the school/teacher.
U.W. psychologist, Mark Seidenberg, wrote an editorial in Sunday's (12/12/04) edition of the Wisconsin State Journal critical of the way that the district is presenting its reading data. He also points out that although Superintendent Rainwater would like the public to believe "that accepting the Reading First funds would have required him to "eliminate" the district's current reading curriculum - the one used throughout the district. ... The acceptance of Reading First funding has no bearing on the curriculum used in other schools."
Madison schools distort reading data
12/12/04
Mark S. Seidenberg
As a taxpayer who believes in the importance of reading, I'm having trouble understanding why Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater turned down $2 million that was supposed to be used to help educationally disadvantaged children in five Madison schools.
The superintendent and Assistant Superintendent Jane Belmore have offered explanations that don't wash. The district accepted funds for the first year of a five- year award under the federal government's Reading First program. After the first year, the program was assessed by an educational consultant hired to evaluate how the funds were being used. The evaluator found that reading programs in the target schools were not adequately documented. She asked for information about "scope and sequence" (educationese for "what will be taught when") and daily instructional activities. The school district in its wisdom decided that rather than comply with these conditions it would give back the money. Why?
Rainwater's explanation of this precipitous decision - echoed in published comments by Belmore and school board member Carol Carstensen - is that accepting the Reading First funds would have required him to "eliminate" the district's current reading curriculum - the one used throughout the district.
These assertions are unequivocally false. The acceptance of Reading First funding has no bearing on the curriculum used in other schools. The evaluator clearly requested changes in the Reading First program at the five schools, not the district as a whole. If the school district administrators were confused about this, they could have requested clarification. If they felt the conditions were unreasonable, they could have appealed.
Rainwater's explanation also emphasized the fact that 80 percent of Madison children score at or above grade level. But the funds were targeted for students who do not score at these levels. Current practices are clearly not working for these children, and the Reading First funds would have supported activities designed to help them.
Madison's reading curriculum undoubtedly works well in many settings. For whatever reasons, many chil dren at the five targeted schools had fallen seriously behind. It is not an indictment of the district to acknowledge that these children might have benefited from additional resources and intervention strategies.
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.
Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It's true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 - bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.
Belmore's attitude is that the current program is working at these schools and that the percentage of advanced/proficient readers will eventually reach the districtwide success level. But what happens to the children who have reading problems now? The school district seems to be writing them off.
So why did the school district give the money back? Belmore provided a clue when she said that continuing to take part in the program would mean incrementally ceding control over how reading is taught in Madison's schools (Capital Times, Oct 16). In other words, Reading First is a push down the slippery slope toward federal control over public education.
Parents and educators are right to be concerned about the incursion into local school districts via legislation such as "Leave No Child Behind." However, the place to make a stand was not refusing monies that could have been used in many ways to help children in need. Our school administrators placed their politics above their responsibility to educate all of our children.
This is my first post to this blog, so I�ll start by introducing myself. My name is Bill Herman. I have two kids at Crestwood ES, and a third will start in the fall. Also, I work in K-12 education; I�m the technology director for Monona Grove Schools.
I read �Paper #1,� criticizing MMSD for declining $2 million of federal money for reading, with interest and some dismay. With interest because it does seem odd that the district would reject such a sum even if some strings are attached. With dismay because neither side in the debate had a good way to weigh the district�s key claim�that the existing program has improved student reading.
Both sides used WKCE scores to support their claims. Unfortunately, the WKCE is not a useful tool to assess the effectiveness of programs at MMSD or anywhere else, because it isn�t designed to measure student progress over time, or to compare scores from one year with scores from another year. This means that we have a bigger problem than not knowing if elementary reading instruction is effective in MMSD. We are not able to decisively assess the effectiveness of any instructional program in the Madison schools.
It may be hard to believe that state-administered tests in reading, math, and language arts can�t show whether students are doing better or worse over time, but DPI has warned that this is the case:
�It is very difficult to accurately compare [02-03 WKCE] scores with past years for two basic reasons. First, the tests are different. New test questions were added at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels and the tests were entirely customized at the tenth-grade level. Second, the cut scores for each proficiency category are different based on the bookmarking process conducted in February [2003] by 240 educators.� (http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/oea/pdf/profnewq&a.pdf)
That is, there is no way of knowing whether previous WKCE tests were easier or harder than today�s, and also, DPI has changed the curve. For both reasons, we can�t use WKCE to gauge student progress (or lack of it) over time.
Pause and think about this. DPI says WKCE cannot tell us whether the academic skills of Wisconsin students are improving, staying the same, or getting worse over time.
This means that WKCE cannot answer the questions that are required to judge program effectiveness: Are student skills in the program area greater now than they were when the program was introduced? Can students read better? Can they do math better? Is this true of kids across the spectrum? High achievers? Low achievers? All grade levels? Different socioeconomic levels? Different ethnic groups? If we can�t answer these questions, we have no way of knowing where we are doing well and where we need to improve. We are in the dark.
There are standardized tests that can pinpoint gains or losses in student learning over time. An excellent one is NWEA�s MAP test (www.nwea.org), used by 1,200 school districts nationally. Like WKCE, MAP is a set of standardized tests that students take at least once a year. But unlike WKCE, MAP reveals where curriculum is effective and exposes where it is not, by measuring students� growth over time�and comparing it against local and national norms--in subject areas, grade levels, quartiles, and ethnic groups. MAP, unlike WKCE, can be used to gauge program effectiveness, because it is measures growth over time, and not merely current proficiency.
Currently 70 districts in Wisconsin use MAP, including Monona Grove and several other Madison suburban districts. I anticipate that MMSD would be reluctant to adopt MAP, in part because it would mean even more testing. However, DPI could alleviate this by allowing districts to give MAP instead of WKCE.
DPI recently signed a 10-year contract with McGraw-Hill to provide the �state assessment� (the test Wisconsin schools use to show they are meeting the requirements of No Child Left Behind). This means that for the next 10 years, WKCE is the official Wisconsin No Child Left Behind test.
However, No Child Left Behind does not require states to choose a single test; only to develop an �assessment plan� that ensures that all students� proficiency can be accurately determined. And Wisconsin statute authorizes the state superintendent to determine which test or tests can be used to determine proficiency. It is within the power of DPI to include alternatives to WKCE in its No Child Left Behind assessment plan. That is, DPI can approve alternative assessments, and then school districts could give MAP instead of WKCE.
DPI does not want to do this, because it would mean extra work for them and it would create risk for them by adding one more thing to Wisconsin�s assessment plan that might get rejected by the feds. DPI�s official position is that MAP is great for measuring growth but no good for determining proficiency as defined by USDOE, and they have discouraged us at Monona Grove from trying to get MAP approved as an alternative state assessment.
So I think the battle, if anyone is interested in joining it, is on two fronts�one, convincing officials at MMSD of the need to give a test that measures academic growth over time, and two, pushing DPI to approve MAP as an alternative state assessment. This would make it possible for MMSD and all Wisconsin schools to give a single test to satisfy the feds while measuring student growth.
Until we start giving tests that accurately show where students are gaining academically and where they are stalling, MMSD officials will be able to believe whatever they want to about the effectiveness of their programs, because no one will have a way to substantiate or refute their claims.
A Parent's Thoughts on Learning to Read - Next Step Considerations
MMSD District Administration will be making a presenation on the MMSD Literacy Program Research tomorrow during the Performance and Achievement Committee meeting. I hope significant time is spent discussing a) results and next steps for MMSD's Balanced Literacy approach to learning to read and write b) an analysis of alternative reading interventions and c) analysis and reasons that led the Superintendent to turn down Reading First grant funds.
If there are teachers who are using teaching methods/curricula that are not part of the current Balanced Literacy approach, but are effective with the student population who is not at the proficient and advanced reading levels, board members need to ask to see the results.
Why look at the results? All teachers want each child they teach to be successful learners. If teachers are being successful in their teaching approach, the District Administration needs to learn from these efforts and incorporate them into their existing curricula. Continuous change to improve best practices through various feedback mechanisms is an important part of a successful change in an organization.
Should Madison be celebrating?
MMSD has cause for celebration, because a) 80% of the student population is reading at the proficient and advanced reading levels and b) the achievement gap for Madison's students who are not low income has been closed.
What do these results mean?
Annually, the Superintendent reports results on meeting board priorities. One of the board priorities is that every student needs to be reading at grade level by 3rd grade. A third grade reading test (WCRT) is given in the spring of a child's 3rd grade education.
Some reading professionals, District administrators and board members believe that the results presented last week mean that what MMSD is doing is working - just fine, thank you very much. Others believe that the District needs to look more closely at alternative reading intervention approaches or even different core curriculum approaches for the 20% of the student population who are not proficient and advanced readers and are mostly low income students.
Reading the press on the various positions, you wonder if there is any common ground among the disperate views. I believe there is common ground - each and every teacher/administrator wants each child to be a successful reader. Without a solid reading foundation, a child will find it difficult to learn more, falling further and further behind over time.
How Can the Board Decide What Steps Need to be Taken next?
Board members are not reading experts. Yet, if you look at the District's materials and you look at DPI's discussion of a reading framework in its Reading First grant proposal, one comes away with the impression that there are reading professionals who have come to very different conclusions all the while using SBRR (scientific based reading research).
Board members can ask a series of questions that will provide them with the informationnecessay to make decisions that are in the best interest of the student. Examples of questions to ask include:
What's working/not working for different socio-economic groups?
What do teachers say about the current curriculum's ability to reach the 20% who are not proficient and advanced? What do teachers need to be more effective? Do teachers feel they have a choice in how children are taught to read?
What have we learned from the data about two talked about intervention strategies - direct instruction and reading recovery?
Over the past 6 years or so, there have been signficant strides made in reading at a third grade level in third grade. Curricula used and teacher experience are important variables to this success,but over this time we've also seen more SAGE classes instituted and the Schools of Hope that provides volunteers to help with teaching reading. Where we have SAGE and Schools of Hope in place, what have we seen with the reading results.
Why did Madison turn away Reading First grant money? The reasons given by the Superintendent are incomplete. Saying Reading First is too scripted is not entirely accurate and is an oversimplification of the State's approach to Reading First. When reading the grant submitted to the Department of Education from the WI DPI, the approach they describe appears to be developed and woven into WI's standards of academic excellence.
Board members need to know what's working for our kids in a more successful manner than what DPI's model is.
Reading First is a part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Title I, Part B, Subpart 1). Reading First is designed to assist schools in establishing reading programs for students in kindergarten through grade 3. These programs must be founded on scientifically-based reading research and aid in ensuring every student can read well by the end of third grade.
State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster has articulated a New Wisconsin Promise to ensure quality education for all Wisconsin children. Key strategic priorities of the New Wisconsin Promise that are consistent with Reading First include reading as a fundamental skill for all children, early learning opportunities, quality teachers in every classroom, and strong leadership in every school. Recognizing the critical importance of these key priorities in a child�s education, Wisconsin�s Reading First plan is designed to improve student reading achievement in grades K-3.
Implementation of this plan focuses on reading programs based on scientifically based reading research (SBRR); reliable and valid screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring and outcome assessments; high quality professional development to ensure that K-3 teachers and K-12 special education teachers develop the expertise to help students become successful readers; a sound evaluation design conducted by an experienced and highly qualified outside evaluator; and leadership that results in improvement in reading performance.
Findings from the National Reading Panel report indicate that effective instruction can help children become good readers. As envisioned by Wisconsin�s Reading First Leadership Team, our Reading First classroom will be a model classroom for meeting the needs of diverse groups of students. Classrooms will be staffed by highly qualified professional teachers who are well-versed in SBRR and able to share their expertise to best meet the needs of all children, regardless of the severity or complexity of their learning needs. Wisconsin�s Reading First Goals Statewide Impact Goal
To ensure that every Wisconsin student can read at grade level by the end of their third-grade year.
Objective 1: Each year narrow the achievement gap between the low income children and their peers in terms of percentage and number of low income students who score in the proficient and advanced levels as measured by TerraNova Reading and WI Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT).
Objective 2: Each year narrow the achievement gap between children of color and their peers in terms of percentage and number of children of color who score in the proficient and advanced levels as measured by TerraNova Reading and WRCT.
Objective 3: Each year narrow the achievement gap between Limited English Proficient (LEP) students and their peers in terms of percentage and number of LEP students who score in the proficient and advanced levels as measured by TerraNova Reading and WRCT.
Objective 4: Each year narrow the achievement gap between special education students and their peers in terms of percentage and number of special education students who score in the proficient and advanced levels as measured by TerraNova Reading and WRCT. irst Page 1WI Reading F 12 May 03
Visions Of Violins For Christmas - Shortage of String Instruments for Low Income Elementary Students
Leopold Elementary Needs Donations Of Violins, Violas And Cellos So That All Of The Students In Its Popular Strings Classes Can Take An Instrument Home To Practice.
Read Sandy Cullen's full article:
Wisconsin State Journal :: LOCAL/WISCONSIN :: B1
Visions Of Violins For Christmas
Thursday, December 9, 2004
Sandy Cullen Wisconsin State Journal
Montana's former state fiddle champion is something of a Pied Piper at Leopold Elementary, where so many students have enrolled in his strings classes that the school needs more musical instruments.
"I've got only 20 that are playable," said Pat Kukes, who is seeking donations of instruments for the school's 54 fourth- and fifth-graders learning to play violin, viola and cello.
Last year, about 35 students participated, said Principal Mary Hyde.
Most of his students are low-income, Kukes said, adding, "There's no way they can rent" their own instruments.
The school has enough instruments for students to play in classes that meet three times a week in a hallway foyer in the overcrowded school. But there aren't enough for all students to take one home to practice, so they are taking turns having an instrument on weekends.
"They're frustrated. Little kids are going home and playing on their fingers," Kukes said. "We're struggling simply because we don't have the instruments to take home."
Kukes has shown his students how to practice their fingering on a pencil or another finger.
"It's kind of hard to do it just with a pencil," said fourth-grader Emily Somberg, 9.
The instruments the school has are rundown, said Kukes, who hopes to refurbish some over the holiday break.
"My wish for Christmas is that I can send an instrument home with all the students so they can play for grandpa and grandma," he said.
Kukes is hoping people or businesses will donate instruments. His students need - and -size violins and cellos, and violas that are 14 inches or smaller. Full-size violins also can be used.
"In other years, we had $70,000 of district money to replace instruments," said district spokesman Ken Syke. "As part of our budget cuts this year, we put a moratorium on that."
This year's budget includes $11,000 for music workbooks and $17,000 for instrument repairs, he said, adding that schools have some flexibility in how they address needs not funded by the district.
Schools try to supply every fourth-grader in the strings program with an instrument they can take home to practice, Kukes said. More than 40 of his Leopold students are fourth-graders.
Fifth-graders usually rent their instruments, he said. Four of the school's fifth-graders have their own instruments.
Kukes has enough instruments for his 82 students at Chavez and 38 students at Huegel.
For the first time this year, the district is charging a $50 annual fee for students in the elementary strings program, in addition to rental fees of $20 a semester for fourth-graders and $35 a semester for fifth-graders. Fees are waived for low-income students.
More than 1,800 students participated in the district's strings program last year, Syke said. This year, more than 1,700 are enrolled, he said, adding that two schools, Emerson and Stephens, are in the process of hiring a strings teacher and haven't begun their programs.
\ Longtime teacher
A Montana native, Kukes, 52, taught strings for 25 years in Helena, where he also conducted a youth symphony. But the state's former fiddle champ doesn't consider himself a "typical orchestra person."
He's played in bands that were opening acts for Marshall Tucker, Pure Prairie League and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and he appeared as a violinist in the film "Return to Lonesome Dove."
"I went to my first jam session when I was 5 days old," said Kukes, whose mother played accordion and piano and father played bass guitar in country bands.
A "cowboy poet," Kukes recently shared his poem about a bronco-riding Santa with students.
"He has a very good way with teachers, kids and parents," Hyde said.
Kukes started in late October, recruiting students by going class to class, playing "little ditties." Students followed Kukes to his hallway classroom he calls "the fishbowl."
Fourth-grader Luis Rangel, 10, said he was "tired of soccer and baseball" and finds playing the violin more fun than sports.
Natalia Lucero, 10, said she hopes to play in an orchestra, and Becky Xiong, 9, said simply, "I wanted to learn."
Most students said they just thought playing an instrument would be fun.
Kukes believes it's that and more.
"If you get kids in music, it's amazing how much they succeed," he said. "It really helps with their reading. It really helps with their math."
It also develops self-discipline, Kukes said. "Some of these kids, it might be the thing that keeps them out of trouble. I've got so many kids on the fence."
"For some kids, this is a wonderful opportunity to excel," Hyde said.
\ Spring music festival
The School Board is expected to seek a funding referendum this spring to build a second school at Leopold, which has 680 students -- about 20 more than its capacity.
Kukes would like his Leopold students to participate in the district's spring music festival, but he said, "With 20 instruments and 54 students, how do I pick who goes and who doesn't?"
"We can't even do much with a school concert because they can't all play together," he said, adding, "That's what's cool. That's what's fun."
Despite the challenges for Leopold's students, Kukes said, "I haven't lost a single one."
He doesn't even mind the parade of third-graders walking though his hallway classroom.
"It's good recruiting for next year," he said.
\ To donate
If you have an instrument you would like to donate to the strings program at Leopold Elementary School, contact Pat Kukes at 204-4240.
The MMSD Board of Education has established three priorities aimed at improving student achievement:
1. All students reading at grade level by third grade
2. All students completing Algebra and Geometry by the end of 10 th grade
3. All students attending school at least 94%
Each year the Superintendent reports on progress toward these goals. This year's presentation was made on December 6, 2004.
MMSD Theory of Action for Change and Continuous Improvement
Superintendent Rainwater told MMSD board members Monday December 6, 2004 that some of the District's goals are directed to educate teachers to do the right thing...support and train teachers...provide various levels of interventions for students that are not successful with the core curriculum.
In the case of reading, Balanced Literacy is the core curriculum and Reading Recovery is a first grade intervention teaching tool/approach that is used to help certain students be successful with reading.
The Superintendent commented that he believes the recent controversy surrounding reading is due in part to a misunderstanding of what the various definitions of Balanced Literacy, Reading First, Reading Recovery and Direct Instruction are.
From what I've read and understand about the debate and controversy, there are different approaches being used in the district when intervening to help a student who is not being successful with the core reading curriculum. Direct Instruction, which is a stand alone reading curriculum, is used by some reading teachers in the district as an intervention tool rather than Reading Recovery.
If results are available for both these interventions, I hope that the School Board takes the time to ask questions about what results we are seeing with different intervention approaches. Now that we have 80% of our children at proficient or advanced reading levels, the last 20% are likely to be particularly challenging for educators.
As I listened to the presentations last night, I couldn't help but be impressed with two things regarding reading - strong community support and involvement through the Schools of Hope and other volunteers and continued reinforcement at all levels of the organization, beginning with teachers' commitment to the students. When my daughter was in elementary school at Franklin and Randall Elementary Schools you knew that the principals and teachers were strongly committed to the Board's reading priority.
Art Rainwater's comments to the School Board can be viewed by clicking on the following link:
Jenny D posts a transcript of RFK's (Robert F. Kennedy) 1965 Senate testimony on school performance:
Some may wonder, why on earth is Jenny D. wasting her time copying down 40-year-old Senate testimony? Because it so closely mirrors the conversations today about No Child Left Behind. NCLB didn't fall out of the sky as some evil Republican plan. It was first hatched, albeit crudely, in 1965 by U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I think it's important to know where we came from
Madison School Performance Series: Reading Instruction
The Madison School Performance Series of issue briefs will offer parents and others accessible information and analysis of critical school program and funding issues. The first paper on Reading Instruction is attached. In a question and answer format it discusses the failing Reading Recovery program and how the District�s commitment to the program is costing us more per student than other more effective programs. Upcoming papers will address issues such as fine arts, programs for talented and gifted students and administration funding.
Life Way After Head Start - Innovative PreSchool Programs Have Decades Long Effects for Low Income and Minority Children
Madison's preschool leaders are advocating for an innovative K-4 program that involves a public/private partnership with the Madison Metropolitan School District, City of Madison and Madison preschools. There are proposed options that will build upon current preschool programs and entry into public school.
As the article below states, innovative pre-school programs can have decades long positive effects on children who participate in them as they grow into adults.
David L. Kirp, writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (November 21, 2004:
"The power of education to level the playing field has long
been an American article of faith. Education is the
''balance wheel of the social machinery,'' argued Horace
Mann, the first great advocate of public schooling. ''It
prevents being poor.'' But that belief has been undermined
by research findings -- seized on ever since by skeptics --
that federal programs like Head Start, designed to benefit
poor children, actually have little long-term impact.
Now evidence from an experiment that has lasted nearly four
decades may revive Horace Mann's faith. ''Lifetime Effects:
The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40,'' was
released earlier this week. It shows that an innovative
early education program can make a marked difference in the
lives of poor minority youngsters -- not just while they
are in school but for decades afterward. "
The complete article follows:
Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start
November 21, 2004
By DAVID L. KIRP
The power of education to level the playing field has long
been an American article of faith. Education is the
''balance wheel of the social machinery,'' argued Horace
Mann, the first great advocate of public schooling. ''It
prevents being poor.'' But that belief has been undermined
by research findings -- seized on ever since by skeptics --
that federal programs like Head Start, designed to benefit
poor children, actually have little long-term impact.
Now evidence from an experiment that has lasted nearly four
decades may revive Horace Mann's faith. ''Lifetime Effects:
The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40,'' was
released earlier this week. It shows that an innovative
early education program can make a marked difference in the
lives of poor minority youngsters -- not just while they
are in school but for decades afterward. The 123
participants in this experiment, says David Ellwood, dean
of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and an
architect of the Clinton administration's original welfare
reform plan, ''may be the most powerfully influential group
in the recent history of social science.''
The life stories of the Perry students have been tracked
since they left preschool in the 1960's. Like so much in
education research, the findings have been known mainly in
professional circles. But this latest dispatch from the
field, confirming the remarkable and enduring impact of a
long-ago experience, should alter the way we understand
preschool and, maybe, the way society invests in the
future.
The study began without fanfare in the fall of 1962,
several years before Head Start was conceived. In the
mostly blue-collar town Ypsilanti, Mich., 21 3- and
4-year-old children started preschool. All of them, as well
as 37 more youngsters who enrolled over the next three
years, were black. They came from poor families, and the
South Side neighborhood, with its rundown public housing
and high crime rates, was a rough place to grow up.
Based on past experience, it was a near certainty that most
of these kids would fail in school. During the previous
decade, not a single class in the Perry elementary school
had ever scored above the 10th percentile on national
achievement tests, while across town, in the school that
served the children of well-off professionals, no class had
ever scored below the 90th percentile.
The reformers who developed the High/Scope Perry model
hoped that exposure at an early age to a program
emphasizing cognitive development could rewrite this
script. Most children attended Perry for two years, three
hours a day, five days a week. The curriculum emphasized
problem-solving rather than unstructured play or ''repeat
after me'' drills. The children were viewed as active
learners, not sponges; a major part of their daily routine
involved planning, carrying out and reviewing what they
were learning. Teachers were well trained and decently
paid, and there was a teacher for every five youngsters.
They made weekly home visits to parents, helping them teach
their own children. ''The message was, 'Read to your
child,' '' one woman, whose daughter went to Perry in 1962,
remembered. ''If you read the newspaper, put your child on
your lap, read out loud and ask her, 'What did I just
read?' When you take her to the grocery store, have her
count the change.''
Even though prosperous children had thrived in similar
settings for well over a century, 3-year-olds from poverty
backgrounds had never had the same chance. Leading
developmental psychologists cautioned against the idea.
Such an intellectually rigorous regime, they argued, could
actually harm such children by asking too much of them.
David Weikart, the moving force behind Perry Preschool, was
not convinced. The experts had a theory but no evidence,
and Weikart decided to conduct an experiment. From a group
of 123 South Side neighborhood children, 58 were randomly
assigned to the Perry program, while the rest, identical in
virtually all respects, didn't attend preschool. Random
assignment is the research gold standard because the
''treatment'' -- in this case, preschool -- best explains
any subsequent differences between the two groups.
Early results were discouraging. In reading and arithmetic,
the preschoolers' achievement scores at 7 and 8 weren't
much better than the control group's, and while the
preschoolers' IQ scores spiked, that difference soon
disappeared. Those results were consistent with the
dispiriting conclusion of a 1969 nationwide evaluation of
Head Start. That study's key finding -- that the boost in
test scores recorded by Head Start children faded by second
grade -- was widely interpreted to mean that Head Start
and, by implication, most other early childhood education
programs for poor kids, were a waste of time.
But in Ypsilanti the researchers didn't give up. They
collected data every year from age 3 through 11, then at
ages 14, 15, 19, 27 and now 40 -- an astonishingly long
time span in the research annals. Just as astonishingly,
they have kept track of 97 percent of the surviving group.
''I've found people on the streets, gone to crack houses
where there were AK-47's,'' said Van Loggins, a gym teacher
who coached many of the participants when they were
teenagers and who has been interviewing them for 25 years.
''I'm bilingual -- ghetto and English.''
Not only has the Perry study set records for longevity, but
it also asks the truly pertinent question: what is the
impact of preschool, not on the test scores of 7-year-olds
but on their life chances? The answer is positive -- a
well-designed program really works.
As they progressed through school, the Perry children were
less likely to be assigned to a special education class for
the mentally retarded. Their attitude toward school was
also better, and their parents were more enthusiastic about
their youngsters' schooling. Their high-school grade point
average was higher. By age 19, two-thirds had graduated
from high school, compared with 45 percent of those who
didn't attend preschool.
Most remarkably, the impact of those preschool years still
persists. By almost any measure we might care about --
education, income, crime, family stability -- the contrast
with those who didn't attend Perry is striking. When they
were 27, the preschool group scored higher on tests of
literacy. Now they are in their 40's, many with children
and even grandchildren of their own. Nearly twice as many
have earned college degrees (one has a Ph.D.). More of them
have jobs: 76 percent versus 62 percent. They are more
likely to own their home, own a car and have a savings
account. They are less likely to have been on welfare. They
earn considerably more -- $20,800 versus $15,300 -- and
that difference pushes them well above the poverty line.
The crime statistics reveal similarly significant
differences. Compared with the control group, fewer
preschoolers have gone on to be arrested for violent
crimes, drug-related crimes or property crimes. Only about
half as many (28 percent versus 52 percent) have been
sentenced to prison or jail. Preschool also seems to have
affected their decisions about family life. More of the
males in the Perry contingent have been married (68 percent
versus 51 percent, though they are also more likely than
those who didn't attend Perry to have been married more
than once) and almost twice as many have raised their own
children (57 percent versus 30 percent). These men report
fewer serious complaints about their health and are less
likely to use drugs.
The newest report attaches a dollar-and-cents figure to
this good news. Economists estimate that the return to
society is more than $250,000 (calculated in 2000 dollars)
on an investment of just $15,166 -- that's 17 dollars for
every dollar invested.
There are no miracles here. Not everyone who attended Perry
became a model citizen -- the crime figures alone make that
plain -- and some of those who didn't attend preschool have
fared well. But because their opportunities are so
constricted, the odds are stacked against kids who grow up
in neighborhoods like Ypsilanti's South Side. Bluntly put,
these are the children of whom we expect the least -- and
overall, the life histories of the control group confirm
those expectations.
By contrast, many of those who went to Perry found their
way to more stable lives. One graduate, a sales manager,
has moved back to the South Side neighborhood, where he
devotes much of his time to his church group, ''giving
back'' to the community. ''I'm still using the discipline
of school,'' he said. ''The harder you work in school or in
life, the more you get out of it.'' One Perry alum said
that when she was in her mid-20's, living on welfare and
''borrowing'' from her mother, she ''woke up one day to
decide that was just wrong. I apologized to my mother and
went to work in the factory. When I had the money, I bought
Mom all new living-room furniture. I stopped dating the
wrong kind of guys, and eventually I got married.'' Now
she's a union leader, and when she had children of her own,
there was no doubt they'd go to preschool.
Why did Perry have such an impact? Though the data can't
provide a definitive answer, a plausible interpretation is
that the experience proved to be a timely intervention,
altering the arc of these children's lives. Preschool gave
them the intellectual tools to do better in school. When
they succeeded academically, they became more committed to
education, and so they stayed on. Then, because a diploma
opened up new economic opportunities, crime proved a less
appealing alternative.
The strategy first developed at Perry is now packaged as
the High/Scope curriculum and is widely used across the
nation. Other well-conceived preschool initiatives have
also generated impressive long-term results, including the
Chicago school district's Child-Parent Center Program,
which brings mothers and relatives into the schools, and
the Carolina Abecedarian Project, in which intervention
begins during the very first weeks of an infant's life and
carries on until kindergarten.
These successes have given ammunition to those who champion
expanded preschool opportunities -- not just for poor
children but for all children. Oklahoma and Georgia have
been leaders in the movement for universal prekindergarten,
and two years ago, Florida became the first state to pass a
constitutional amendment requiring ''high quality''
preschool for all 4-year-olds. ''I testified in Florida,''
said Evelyn Moore, one of the original teachers at Perry
Preschool, who is now president of the National Black Child
Development Institute. ''The research has been vital in
getting people to understand why early childhood education
matters.'' Give us the child to age 7, the Jesuits say, and
we'll give you the man. Give us the child at age 3, these
findings suggest, and with quality preschool it's possible
to work wonders.
David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and the author of
''Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing
of Higher Education.''
At one level, the debate is over current controversies in public education: Many parents believe that their children, mostly in elite schools, are being pushed too hard in a hypercompetitive atmosphere. But other parents are complaining about a decline in programs for gifted children, leaving students to languish in "untracked" and unstimulating classrooms. Some critics of education believe that boys especially are languishing in schools that emphasize cooperation instead of competition. No Child Left Behind, indeed.
But the basic issue is the same one raised four decades ago by Kurt Vonnegut in "Harrison Bergeron," a short story set in the America of 2081, about a 14-year-old genius and star athlete. To keep others from feeling inferior, the Handicapper General weighs him down with 300-pound weights and makes him wear earphones that blast noise, so he cannot take "unfair advantage" of his brain.
That's hardly the America of 2004, but today's children do grow up with soccer leagues and spelling bees where everyone gets a prize. On some playgrounds dodge ball is deemed too traumatic to the dodging-impaired. Some parents consider musical chairs dangerously exclusionary.
Fascinating look at the tyranny of low expectations....
"Buenos dias," says Senor Morris, the instructor featured in the DVD set "Elementary Spanish" - a program the Maple Dale-Indian Hill School District is using for the first time this year to teach Spanish to first- through third-graders.
In Spanish, the phrase means "good morning."
But the days of Spanish instruction for students at Indian Hill may not be as good as they once were, educators say.
Last year, a teacher stood in the place now occupied by the TV set and DVD player. Budget cuts brought on by declining enrollment led district officials to say adios to Spanish teacher Mara Malloy - called Senora Malloy by her students.
She has been replaced by the DVD Spanish instruction package produced by Northern Arizona University.
The district saved thousands of dollars in Malloy's part-time teacher salary and benefits. The DVD package cost $3,000.
But educators and students say there is a deeper cost associated with the switch from live teacher to technology that transcends dollars. They lament the lack of interaction between student and teacher, and worry that will lead to less academic success.
Reading program not worth cost; Rainwater pledges that it will continue
This week's Isthmus includes a damning internal assessment of Reading Recovery, "a remedial first-grade reading program considered a cornerstone of Madison's school iteracy efforts."
"The district would be 'well-served to investigate other methods' to reach struggling reaaders, says the report."
One of those other methods will be presented Sunday, at 1:00 p.m., at the Madison Community Center.
The notice of Sunday's meeting follows.
Could Madison Use Milwaukee�s Successful Reading Programs?
Norm and Dolores Mishelow
1:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 7
Madison Senior Center
330 W. Mifflin
Madison
Principal Norm Mishelow will discuss how academic achievement excels at Barton, because the school teaches reading using Direct Instruction (DI), a program that provides a detailed script for teacher-student interaction. The program focuses on small group learning and emphasizes phonics. The school also uses a math curriculum that focuses generally on building basic arithmetic skills.
Norm�s wife Dolores is a former principal of 27th Street School which was a failing school before she took over. She started DI, and their test scores soared. She used to believe in all the whole language and warm fuzzy teaching until, of course, she saw the light with DI. Norm was not using DI until Dolores nudged him to try it (after she retired) and his scores, though decent without DI, hit the stratosphere once DI got humming.
The same curriculum in MMSD elementary schools could help close the achievement gap, cut instructional costs, reduce special ed referrals, and raise achievement overall.
Insights into Rainwater's comment on MMSD's 80% success in reading
Ruth Robarts wrote, "In his memo [to reject $2 million in Reading First funds]Superintendent Rainwater argues that MMSD should refuse to make the proposed changes at the five schools because we are a "successful" district. He states that our reading program is a success because more than 80% of all third graders score at grade level or above ("proficient or advanced") on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test. Unfortunately, that's not true for the schools that qualified for Reading First grants. As Rainwater admits, more than 30% of the third graders in these schools fell below "proficient or advanced" scores in recent years. See "Madison Superintendent Declines $2M in Federal Funds Without Consulting the Board" below."
The superintendent's interprestion of the 80% success rate doesn't seem to appreciate what Reading First consultants recommend for the other 20%.
The presentation on the Center to Improve Reading Competence Using Intensive Treatments Schoolwide is especially revealing in showing how a reading program can address 80% of a school population, but the program needs a secondary prevention program to assist 15% of the school's kids and a tertiary intervention for the 5% with severe, sustained reading difficulty.
From my experience, the MMSD does not appear to have consistent, effective intervention for either the 15% or the 5%.
Could Madison Use Milwaukee�s Successful Reading Programs?
Please plan to attend a presentation by two principals of Milwaukee elementary schools that use a curriculum that won Barton Elementary federal recognition as a Blue Ribbon school, the only one in Wisconsin:
Could Madison Use Milwaukee�s Successful Reading Programs?
Norm and Dolores Mishelow
1:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 7
Madison Senior Center
330 W. Mifflin
Madison
Principal Norm Mishelow will discuss how academic achievement excels at Barton, because the school teaches reading using Direct Instruction (DI), a program that provides a detailed script for teacher-student interaction. The program focuses on small group learning and emphasizes phonics. The school also uses a math curriculum that focuses generally on building basic arithmetic skills.
Norm�s wife Dolores is a former principal of 27th Street School which was a failing school before she took over. She started DI, and their test scores soared. She used to believe in all the whole language and warm fuzzy teaching until, of course, she saw the light with DI. Norm was not using DI until Dolores nudged him to try it (after she retired) and his scores, though decent without DI, hit the stratosphere once DI got humming.
The same curriculum in MMSD elementary schools could help close the achievement gap, cut instructional costs, reduce special ed referrals, and raise achievement overall.
Interesting timing, given Jeff's post below about West's intention to drop advanced biology.
Doug Erickson on Madison Country Day School's expansion announcement:
Madison Country Day School broke ground Thursday on a $4.8 million expansion that will add a gymnasium, a performing arts stage and 13 classrooms.
The addition, which will house the private school's middle and high school, is expected to be done in August.
Opened in 1997 with 22 students in five lower grades, the school has grown to 252 students in grades pre- kindergarten through 10th. It reached capacity two years ago and is now using two portable buildings, said Adam de Pencier, head of school. "We're absolutely jammed."
The school at 5606 River Road is in the town of Westport near Waunakee. It is a non- religious, independent school that was designed to incorporate the best curriculum from around the world. The school wants to be seen as a research facility whose teaching practices can be used as a model for other public and private schools, de Pencier said.
The school was founded by Christopher Frautschi, nephew of philanthropist Jerry Frautschi, whose $205 million donation is paying for construction of the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison.
As always, there are options for people willing to spend the money. A challenging and proven curriculum is vital to our community.
I recently emailed a bit with Bill Keys, Madison School Board President, thanking him for the BOE's support of Lapham's English program and two school's exploration of Singapore Math. Here's the email message.
Friends of the school already have pledged $2.8 million to the $4.8 million capital campaign, de Pencier said. The Frautschi family foundation has pledged an additional $1 million, to be matched by the final $1 million raised in the community.
The school hopes to increase its high school enrollment to about 50 students per grade, at which time a separate high school building would be needed, de Pencier said. There are eight sophomores and two freshmen this year.
Total enrollment is up about 25 students from last year, he said. High school tuition at Madison Country Day School is $10,400. That compares to $6,730 at Edgewood High School and $4,740 at Abundant Life Christian School, two private, religious schools in
LaFollette School Staffing - Special School Board Meeting - October 11, 2004
On Monday, October 11, the MMSD School Board met in a special meeting to review the request for additional staffing for La Follette High School. The District Administration was requesting an additional 1.65 FTE. Rather than hire new staff, District Administration was proposing to provide the additional staffing through existing teacher overloads. Requests for teacher overloads would be done on a voluntary basis.
Three teachers from La Follette spoke during public appearances at the meeting. They believed that staffing needs at La Follette were more than requested by District Administration. These teachers were concerned that too many students were spending nearly half their school day in study halls due to in adequate staffing needs and that teachers were feeling overburdened with existing staffing levels.
Since 2000, teacher FTEs at the high schools have decreased by 7 FTE, and the number of high school students has increased by 679 students.
Following is the video of one of the teachers who spoke during public appearances - Peggy Ellerkamp, LaFollette librarian.
A study published this year in Psychological Science by April Bleske-Rechek and colleagues highlights the importance of Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Students who took AP courses in high school were much more likely to go on and obtain an advanced degree after graduating from college than similar students who did not take AP courses. This suggests that if we want students to make the most of their intellectual abilities, and if we want society to benefit from this intellectual capital, we need to provide these students with appropriate levels of challenge in their school coursework.
The following is from the abstract of the paper (with emphasis added) We evaluated the Advanced Placement (AP) program from the point of view of intellectually precocious youth and their subsequent educational-vocational outcomes, analyzing normative and idiographic longitudinal data collected across 30 years from 3,937 participants. Most took AP courses in high school, and those who did frequently nominated an AP course as their favorite. Students who took AP courses, compared with their intellectual peers who did not, appeared more satisfied with the intellectual caliber of their high school experience and, ultimately, achieved more. Overall, this special population placed a premium on intellectual challenge in high school and found the lack of such challenge distressing. These findings can inform contemporary educational policy debates regarding the AP program; they also have general implications for designing and evaluating educational interventions for students with special needs.
Lucas, 60, is the father of three, but his interest in education dates back to his own school experience, as a boy in Modesto.
In an interview in the premiere issue of Edutopia, Lucas said, "I had a very hard time with education, and I was never described as a bright student. I was considered somebody who could be doing a lot better than I was doing, not working up to my potential. I wish I had known some of these (new methods) back then."
"The way we are educating is based on 19th century ideas and methods. ... Our system of education is locked in a time capsule. You want to say to the people in charge, 'You're not using today's tools! Wake up!"
A new report from ACT reveals that the vast majority of America's high school students have not taken the courses they need to be successful in college or in the workforce. The report Crisis at the Core found that only 22% of the 1.2 million 2004 high school graduates who took the ACT exam in 2004 met all three of the ACT's readiness benchmarks in science, math, and English. The report highlights the importance of taking high level courses in math and science.
The report urges schools to strengthen the high school core curriculum to help improve students' readiness for college and the workforce. Students in K-8 who are not learning the foundational skills for rigorous high school coursework should be identified earlier and provided with supportive interventions, thus preparing them for higher level math and science courses such as trigonometry, pre-calculus, chemistry, and physics.
ACT's research shows that certain courses such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and advanced math courses beyond Algebra II have a strong impact on student performance and college readiness. ACT refers to these as Courses for Success.
"Our study clearly shows that not only is the number of courses important, but the quality and intensity of these classes will determine if a high school student is ready for college and work," said Ferguson.
The benefit of taking these courses can be seen in the ACT test scores for the national class of 2004. Students who took trigonometry in addition to the math core�Algebra I, Algebra II, and geometry�scored 2.6 points higher on the ACT Mathematics Test. Similar gains were seen on the ACT Science Test for students who took physics in addition to the science core�biology and chemistry.
Those who took trigonometry and another advanced math course scored even higher, as much as 4.4 points higher over those who took the math core. Score increases were seen for both genders and all racial/ethnic groups. The full report can be found here.
Assistant Superintendent Valencia Douglas assured East High parents that a national search would be conducted to find a replacement for removed Principal Catherine Tillman. East High parents might want to talk with members of the West High PTSO since West went through a principal search this past spring.
Forget the anecdotes and assumptions. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, federal education dollars are supposed to fund only programs proven effective by "scientifically based research." That's spotlighting a problem: A lot of what passes for education research isn't reliable or rigorous, and many education professors aren't keen on the scientific method.
Education has a "dirty little secret," writes Jeffrey Mervis in the June 11, 2004 Science Magazine:
"No program has yet met that rigorous standard, because none has been scientifically evaluated and shown to be effective. (A related secret is that there's no consensus on the type of evaluation studies that are needed.)"
Bush's Education Department wants controlled studies, like the tests that determine whether a new drug is safe and effective. Is Panacea Z more likely to cure ignorance than Brand X? It would be nice to know before investing millions of dollars. And yet the research often provides no guidance.
Accelerating the best students helps them intellectually and socially, says A Nation Deceived, a new report from the University of Iowa. The Des Moines Register reports:
A new University of Iowa report seeks to debunk myths that accelerated learning for gifted students is unfair, expensive for schools and causes students to be social outcasts, gifted-education experts said Monday.
Time recites the fears about children pushed too fast, but concedes there's evidence many very smart students are very bored.
For the smartest of these kids, those who quickly overpower schoolwork that flummoxes peers, skipping a grade isn't about showing off. Rather, according to a new report from the University of Iowa, it can mean the difference between staying in school and dropping out from sheer tedium. "If the work is not challenging for these high-ability kids, they will become invisible," says the lead author of the report, Iowa education professor Nicholas Colangelo. "We will lose them. We already are."
. . . In a 2000 study for Gifted Child Quarterly, Joseph Renzulli and Sunghee Park found that 5% of the 3,520 gifted students they followed dropped out after eighth grade. Astonishingly, that's almost as high as the 5.2% of nongifted kids who dropped out. Untold numbers of other highly intelligent kids stay in school but tune out. "When we ask exceptional children about their main obstacle, they almost always say it's their school," says Jan Davidson, a co-author of the new book Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds. "Their school makes them put in seat time, and they can't learn at their own ability level."
The number of Wisconsin schools and districts that failed to make enough progress to satisfy federal law rose, according to statistics released Friday, prompting renewed concern over whether schools can meet the increasingly tough standards of the "No Child Left Behind" era.
According to state Department of Public Instruction figures, 123 schools were on the list of schools that failed to make "adequate yearly progress" - a 12.7% increase over last year.
Retention Rates & Comparative Performance - ACE White Paper
Don Severson: Active Citizens for Education's Retention Rate White Paper: [64K PDF]
The Madison Metropolitan School District has one of the highest costs per pupil of any school district in the state ($12,500, 2004-05). Madison District officials state that the high cost per student is needed in order to achieve success in many of the important academic areas. This paper compares retention rates of the Madison School District, (the number of pupils who were not passed to the next grade level) with fourother districts: Appleton, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine. Retention occurs when a student has not made progress in a prescribed course of study. A pupil is consideredretained if:
a pupil needs an additional year to complete a prescribed program
a pupil in grades kindergarten through eight must repeat a grade
a pupil in high school (freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior years) does nothave enough credits equal to or more than one-seventh of the district�s high school requirement
This 40K PDF compares the Madison School District with Appleton, Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine and Milwaukee.
Last spring, nearly 4.8 million students in grades 2 through 11 took the exam, which is considered tough because it measures the students' knowledge of what the state says they need to know about English, math, science and history.
Statewide, 36 percent of students scored "proficient" or "advanced" on the English portion, up from 35 percent last year. The remaining students scored below par, at "basic," "below basic" or "far below basic."
In math, proficiency inched up from 40.5 to 41.6 percent of students in grades 2 through 7 since last year. Older students, tested in a variety of math subjects, slipped in algebra and geometry.
Only 20 percent of low-income students were proficient in English, while among wealthier students, 50 percent were proficient. The rates were identical last year.
Student Photography: 117 pupils at John B. Dey Elementary School, armed with disposable cameras were sent to photograph the alphabet. Here's a look at the project, from A to Z.
The WSJ Editorial page, in a wide ranging piece, discussed social promotion and the utility of summer school:
That's because the get-tough approach - flunking students - isn't realistic: Repeating a grade does more harm than good. Such students are much more likely to cause behavior problems, skip school and eventually drop out.
And simply advancing students to the next level - called "social promotion" - with no extra help only ensures the children will fall behind even faster the next year. Wisconsin law now prohibits social promotion out of fourth and eighth grades.
With both social promotion and grade retention discredited as phony strategies that harm, not help, student achievement, summer school starts to look like a good investme
Caroline Hendrie writes in the June 16 edition of Education Week
As a strategy for reforming secondary education in America, small schools have gotten big.
Prodded by an outpouring of philanthropic and federal largess, school districts and even some states are downsizing public high schools to combat high dropout rates and low levels of student achievement, especially in big- city school systems. For longtime proponents of small schools, the upswell in support for their ideas is making for heady times.
Despite the concept�s unprecedented popularity, however, evidence is mounting that "scaling up" scaled-down schooling is extraordinarily complex. A sometimes confusing array of approaches is unfolding under the banner of small high schools, contributing to concerns that much of the flurry of activity may be destined for disappointing results.
"It�s very, very difficult to do this well," said Tom Vander Ark, who heads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation�s mammoth initiative to create small high schools. "Small is not a panacea. It�s a platform that helps you do the things you need to do to help kids succeed."
Whether that platform becomes a springboard to higher student achievement on a broad scale and for a sustained period remains an open question. Even in places where small schools have won strong support, educators are being hard pressed to take what has been essentially a succession of experiments and move them to the mainstream.
"Whenever you have a reform that has been successful in some places and then it�s scaled up quickly, with a lot of people who only understand it superficially, there�s a lot of danger that some people will do it poorly and that the idea will go down in flames," said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University who is an expert in small-school design.
�Culture Change�
Well aware of that risk, advocates of scaled-down schooling have been working overtime to put supports in place for educators to combat a host of emerging challenges. At the same time, they are scrambling to put their ideas into practice before the interest and money run out.
"We�re talking about a culture change, not just an institution change," said Deborah Meier, the progressive educator and author who has founded small public schools in New York City and Boston. "The trick is how to sustain interest in a reform that requires a generation to complete."
For the moment, that interest is running high.
During the past few years, calls have intensified for reinventing what many education leaders see as an outmoded institution: comprehensive high schools that do a better job of sorting students into academic tracks than of educating all students to the levels needed in today�s knowledge-driven economy.
Pressure to act on those calls has mounted as new demands for higher graduation rates and test-score gains have kicked in, thanks to the federal No Child Left Behind Act and state accountability systems. School safety concerns, heightened by the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, have contributed to a sense that the contemporary high school is in crisis.
Against this backdrop, more educators are buying into the notion that less may be more. Private foundations and the federal government are offering aid to spur the downsizing of public high schools. Across the country, educators are taking the bait.
In the 1.1 million- student New York City school system, city leaders have launched a major initiative to phase out the lowest-performing high schools and replace them with small schools. Poised to open 60 more small schools this year on top of the 42 that opened last fall, officials see those new schools as central to a broader push to ratchet up performance systemwide.
Statewide efforts are taking root from Maine and Rhode Island to Oregon and Washington state. Some districts, such as Houston, Kansas City, Kan., and Sacramento, Calif., have committed to districtwide strategies of small high schools and learning communities. In many others, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, San Diego, and Oakland, Calif., district leaders are in the midst of major efforts to start new small high schools and restructure existing ones.
Influx of Funding
In some places, early indications are that efforts to rapidly scale up smaller, more personalized learning environments are meeting with success. In others, though, ambitions for widespread change seem to be outstripping results. And that reality has some small-school proponents asking themselves questions:
Is the movement growing too fast? Are people jumping on the small-schools bandwagon for the wrong reasons? Was it wise to pour so many resources into scaling up small schools before a consensus emerged on how to do it right?
Two major funders, often working with local and regional foundations, have been helping to spread the small-schools approach over the past four years at the national level: the federal government�s Smaller Learning Communities Program and the Seattle-based Gates Foundation.
Since 2000, the foundation started by the Microsoft founder and his wife has pumped nearly $650 million into efforts to establish small high schools that embody a set of attributes it believes are conducive to high achievement. (See chart below.) The foundation stresses that small size is necessary, but not sufficient, to create such schools, and that structural innovations must be accompanied by instructional ones. To serve students well, foundation officials say, small high schools must offer what they call the new "three R�s": rigor, relevance, and relationships.
Headed by Mr. Vander Ark, the Gates initiative has fostered the start-up of a potpourri of small schools as well as the conversion of large high schools into complexes of compact campuses. The foundation has poured millions of dollars into small-schools efforts in two dozen large cities, as well as into statewide initiatives in a half-dozen states. It has also financed more than two dozen organizations that are working on building networks of schools based on existing models at a regional or even national level.
By its calculations, the foundation has so far helped support the start-up of more than 740 new small high schools� typically defined as no larger than 400 students�and the redesign of 460 existing large high schools.
"Our goal is not to create more small schools, although that has certainly been an outcome of our early grantmaking," said Mr. Vander Ark. "Our goal is to help more students graduate with the skills they need for work and citizenship."
While the Gates initiative has garnered widespread attention, the U.S. Department of Education has been quietly running a Clinton-era program that the Bush administration has consistently urged Congress to eliminate, so far without success.
With funding that climbed from $45 million annually in fiscal 2000 to $174 million this fiscal year, the Smaller Learning Communities Program has doled out 542 grants worth nearly $275 million to hundreds of districts since 2000. The program is now reviewing applications for its fourth grant cycle, which is expected to yield another 140 one-year planning grants and 144 three-year awards for implementation. The grants are targeted to high schools with at least 1,000 students.
Projects that qualify for the federal grants can fall far short of breaking up large campuses into independent or semiautonomous schools, usually the minimum degree of restructuring that is required under the Gates Foundation�s grants for existing schools. Opening career academies, assigning students to advisory groups, and even revamping the schedule to allow for longer class periods are among the changes that can qualify.
Given the expansive criteria, some critics see the federal program as contributing to a fuzzy sense of just what the small-schools movement is or should be about. Mr. Vander Ark, for one, thinks the Bush administration is right to question the program�s effectiveness.
"Schools need very clear guidance, quality outside assistance, sufficient multiyear resources, and a support network to draw on," he said. "The federal Small Learning Communities Program�s insufficient in all four of those areas."
Still, the program has defenders, including Michael Klonsky, a co-director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Klonsky, who provides technical assistance to many schools that have received the federal grants, said the program�s lack of stringent criteria is preferable to the approach taken by some private funders who, in his view, seek to micromanage the change process when they "dictate a certain model�a certain degree of autonomy, a certain governance structure."
"At least the [Department of Education] grant is a public grant," he said. "It�s not like 12 rich people sitting in a room and saying, �This is how we do it in our business � and if anybody gets in our way, we�ll fire them.� "
Staying Power Questioned
Mr. Klonsky is among a group of small-schools proponents who are concerned that the boom in the approach�s popularity is driven primarily by the availability of funding, particularly from the Gates Foundation.
"You really have to ask yourself whether these big districts would be doing this without the Gates money coming in," said Jon Schroeder, the coordinator of Education Evolving, a nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minn., that promotes new forms of schooling. "It remains to be seen how genuine this is, and whether it�s really something that�s emerging from the system itself � or whether it�s funder-driven and just sort of the �in� thing to do."
Whatever the impetus, it�s clear that policymakers are taking the small-schools idea seriously. A recent report synthesizing the themes to emerge from seven national conferences last fall on redesigning secondary education concludes that "the concept of smaller, more personalized high school learning environments has moved from the sidelines of high school reform to center stage."
But the report by the National High School Alliance, a partnership of more than 40 national organizations interested in high school redesign, also argues that education leaders have yet to devote enough attention to the many practical problems "of bringing innovation to scale."
Among the most pressing of those systemic challenges is finding enough principals and teachers with a deep understanding of the complex features of successful small schools. Researchers studying the Gates Foundation initiative have found, for example, that many small schools are struggling to put into place strong curricula and instructional practices, in part because their "detracked" classrooms include youngsters of widely varying skill levels.
"To really use this money wisely, we really need people who understand why small is better," said Bill Klann, who teaches 11th grade humanities at the 340-student Vanguard High School in New York. "It can�t be because it�s a fad. It can�t be because there�s money. It can�t be because there�s less kids to get to know in a small school. It must be to significantly change how people interact and how learning takes place."
Retrofitting old buildings and securing new ones at a time of overcrowding and tight budgets pose other serious roadblocks in many places. Altering district practices to support small schools is a heavy lift. Ensuring that successful small schools will thrive after their founders and funders move on is yet another problem, particularly because of the hard time many small schools have in making ends meet on per-pupil funding allocations in some states.
Beyond those and other systemic challenges is the often-fierce resistance that arises from teachers and administrators, and sometimes from students and parents, when districts set out to convert big high schools into smaller units or separate schools.
Amid such difficulties, a split has emerged between those who see value in creating smaller learning communities within jumbo schools, and those who see such efforts as largely pointless.
"There�s a big debate in the reform community on whether it�s even worth the effort to try to convert large high schools as they are, or whether the only useful strategy is to go to new, small, completely autonomous schools," Ms. Darling-Hammond said. "Those are very different approaches to the change process that seem in many cases to be producing very different results."
To date, no one has conducted a major comparative study on the benefits of converting existing schools versus starting new ones, she said.
Even anecdotally, examples are scarce of large high schools that have seen dramatic learning gains after restructuring into smaller learning communities or schools-within-schools, Ms. Darling-Hammond said. That has led some veteran small-schools proponents to conclude that the approach may be misguided.
"Too many people are saying, in Wizard of Oz fashion, to a bunch of teachers, �You are now School A, you are School B,� " said Ms. Meier. "The odds are it won�t work. I think it�s a waste of energy."
Bush administration officials, for their part, regard the smaller-learning- communities approach skeptically. When it comes to raising student achievement, said Susan Sclafani, the Education Department�s assistant secretary for vocational and adult education, whose office oversees the Smaller Learning Communities Program, the technique of "taking a large school and turning it into small learning communities � has almost no research behind it."
Yet other veterans see breaking down big schools as a critical element in the scaling-up equation. Questions about which approach is better are at best premature, some say.
One Best Way?
"I don�t think one way is easier or better. I think there are trade-offs," said Joe Nathan, a University of Minnesota-Twin Cities professor who is helping both to start new schools and restructure large ones under a grant from the Gates Foundation.
Although he�s seen efforts to break up big schools go bad, Mr. Klonsky says they can succeed, provided that the impulse for reform comes from those most affected. For that reason, he regards much of the debate among elite observers over the best way to downsize as beside the point.
"I don�t think all these great ideas about small schools, including my own, are sustainable without community engagement," he said. "It�s got to be rooted in people�s prior experience and concrete conditions."
In Los Angeles, where top school officials are drawing up plans for smaller learning communities, Superintendent Roy Romer has yet to publicly weigh in on the debate over how downsizing should proceed. But as he reviews five-year plans for high school restructuring drafted by the heads of the system�s 11 subdistricts, admonitions about community engagement are being taken to heart.
"It has to start at the school, and it has to involve the school community, because if Superintendent Romer said, �OK everybody, we have to do this,� it wouldn�t work," said Rosa Maria Hernandez, the director for small learning communities in Local District F, a subdistrict of the 775,000-student school district. With help from a federal grant, the subdistrict is planning the redesign of three large high schools, including one with more than 5,000 students.
As debate continues over whether and how to scale up scaled-down schooling, Mr. Vander Ark of the Gates Foundation urges decisionmakers to keep their eyes on the big picture.
"What we�re doing today is a disaster, particularly for low- income and minority kids," he said. "We need to come to grips with that."
"There's a lot of latitude for teachers to do what they think is right, and there's not a lot of commonality, consistency, across classrooms." David Schmidt, Waukesha school superintendent in an article by Amy Hetzner.
"Charter Schools: A New Vision of Public Education in Wisconsin."
Date: July 7, 2004 (Wednesday morning)
Time: 9:00 am to 11:30 am
Site: Madison - Concourse Hotel (Capital Ballroom A - 2nd Floor) Concourse Hotel
Purpose: Discuss the significance of the evolving charter schools sector as an institutional innovation within Wisconsin's public education system. You and your colleagues are invited to participate in the discussion, sponsored by the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, along with:
JOHN WITTE --- John Witte bio
John is a UW-Madison Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs. He directs a major study of charter schools in Wisconsin --- LaFollette Insitute
JOE GRABA --- Joe Graba bio
Joe is a Senior Policy Fellow at Education/Evolving in Saint Paul. His
career in public education spans forty years and an impressive array of leadership positions including teacher, union leader, state legislator and higher education administrator.
PO Box 628243, Middleton, WI 53562
Email: sennb@charter.net Tel: 608-238-7491
Barbara G.
608.836.0616
Madison Area Family Advisory/Advocacy Council
MAFAAC~Closing the achievement gap through information, advocacy & support
mafaac@aol.com
Join MAFAAC and be part of the solution
Amy Hetzner writes that school finance reform is necessary, but no one agrees on the formula. Hetzner points out the strange nature of this issue: spending, in many cases has gone up significantly despite "spending controls". Excellent article. Steven Walters writes a followup today on the proposed sales tax boost.
The State Journal has posted four more editorial pieces on schools:
A strongly substantiated rumor has it the Ed Holmes, the current principal of Wright Middle School, is all but certain to be selected as the next principal of West High School. People who are more informed and more involved at West than I am believe that Mr. Holmes would be a very bad match for West High.
Holmes has previously been turned down for two high school principal positions in the district. Assistant Superintendent Valencia Douglas had assured the West High community that a national search would be conducted for a new principal. However, this was not the case. The search, which began on March 31, was only a local search and some members of the search committee felt that none of the applicants were qualified to move on through the hiring process. The high school is going through a period of tremendous upheaval and change: the student demographics are very different from what they were 5-10 years ago presenting new challenges to teachers and staff, the school is being reorganized into small learning communities in an attempt to increase acheivement among low income and minority students, and there are the continuing issues related to budget issues and allocation of limited instructional dollars. West High needs a highly qualified high school principal at this critical juncture. Parents have been asked to contact Superintendent Art Rainwater and tell him that Ed Holmes is a bad match for West High and ask him to reopen the search process. Perhaps someone could be brought in to serve as an interim principal for a year while a more thorough search is conducted.
Two fascinating posts at former SJ Mercury writer Joanne Jacobs blog:
National Spelling Bee results, commentary from the American Literacy Union, who picketed the event (debt vs dette among other useful comments). Jackobs also writes about single mother Ashley White, a former spelling bee contestant featured in the film Spellbound.
School Finance Post, with some interesting comments and links (California Finance and a recent Economist article).
Wisconsin�s public school system is arguably the most important component
of our high quality of life. It has historically been part of the �village�
that raises intelligent, motivated, and successful participants in both
public and economic life.
The quality we have known for decades, however, is under siege. Unless we
act soon to change the way we fund public education, more schools will
close, school districts will begin to disappear, communities will wither,
and our children will lose sight of the future we promised them.
How do you know if your kids and their schools are under attack and at the
mercy of a funding system that no longer works? First of all, answer these
seven questions:
1. Is there more crabgrass on the playground than last year or is that leak
in the roof getting larger?
2. Do you have enough librarians, nurses, and school psychologists to meet
the needs of all of the children in your district?
3. Are you paying more in fees or, perhaps, paying fees where you never
paid them before?
4. Does your child still have access to music, art, and physical education?
5. Have teachers in your district been laid off, or have retiring teachers
not been replaced?
6. Can your children take the classes that will get them into the college
of their choice?
7. Is your school district facing consolidation, not because it is
educationally sound but because it will have to shut the doors if it does
not consolidate?
If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, chances are pretty
good you live in a school district that is suffering thanks to Wisconsin�s
school-funding system. In most cases, children are at risk and, in many
cases, communities face uncertain futures at best.
You are not alone. Virtually every district in the state is suffering,
through no fault of its own, because the system is too complex, unequal,
and inadequate to give all children, no matter where they live or what
their special condition, an opportunity to meet Wisconsin�s rigorous
academic standards.
It is worth repeating: Yes, bad things are happening to you, but the
problem is not in your school district. Classes are not too large because
of your administrators. Teachers� salaries are not capped because of your
school board. And your students� textbooks do not still refer to the Soviet
Union because of bad parents.
The problem is the statewide system used to fund public education. It is a
system that pays no attention to the real needs of young people, has no
relationship to the goals and standards of our communities, and uses a 19th
century measure of wealth to deliver state aid.
And because the problem is statewide, the only way to solve it is at the
state level: Throw out the entire school funding system and replace it with
one that links resources to the needs of children and the standards of our
towns, cities, and villages.
That system exists and it is called �adequacy.� It is a nationwide
school-finance reform movement that is growing at the grassroots level in
this state through the work of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools
(WAES), a diverse, broad-based coalition of more than 60 teachers� unions,
school boards, parent groups, and faith-based and civic organizations.
Under the adequacy model, funding levels are based on the actual amount
required for the infrastructure and resources schools need to educate
children to reach state and federal educational goals. It means determining
the actual cost of providing a sound, basic education, including staff,
materials, and facilities, and creating a structure to deliver it.
Partners in WAES worked together to put this theory into practice in the
Wisconsin Adequacy Plan embodying these six principles:
1. Property tax relief for virtually every district in the state;
2. Long-term growth toward full adequacy goals;
3. A foundation level of general funding for every student in the state;
4. An increase in all categorical aid?special education, English Language
Learners, transportation, and poverty;
5. A revenue adjustment to offset the economic and educational
dis-economies of scale in small, rural school districts; and
6. Maintenance of local control with the option for school districts to
spend above adequacy levels with a school board supermajority vote.
If you appreciate this kind of common sense approach to funding our public
schools, you need to work for school-finance reform. And you need to do
that work with other people who appreciate quality public schools that
offer a future full of opportunities to all our children, not just the few
whose families can afford it. You need to become a partner in the Wisconsin
Alliance for Excellent Schools.
(Editor�s note: You can join the alliance through the WAES website or by
contacting Beebe at (414)384-9094 or iwf@wisconsinsfuture.org.)
Alan J. Borsuk writes about efforts to close the education gap between black & white students:
In Wisconsin the gap is so wide that black eighth-graders and white fourth-graders had almost identical scores in math on a national standardized test given in 2003. The gap between white and black eighth-graders was larger in Wisconsin than in any other state in both reading and math on that set of tests.
The biggest problem in moving ideas from the lab to the marketplace, said Greenwood, is a massive drought of brainpower looming in the United States' near future. As the National Science Foundation's recently released Science & Engineering (S&E) Indicators 2004 report revealed, the number of U.S. jobs requiring science and engineering skills is growing at nearly 5 percent annually, compared with a 1 percent growth rate for the rest of the U.S. labor market. Yet there are not nearly enough qualified U.S. scientists and engineers to meet the demand. In the past the nation has relied on skilled foreign-born workers, but many are choosing to work in other countries in response to increasingly strict U.S. visa requirements and burgeoning global demand for their skills.
With Asian countries now conferring more science and engineering bachelor's degrees and Europe more such Ph.D.'s than the United States, "our biggest national security problem is the number of students interested in science and math," said Greenwood.
Community Involvement Before District Proceeds with Full Implementation of Multi-Age Classroom Model
Multi-age classrooms were the norm in education in this country 100 years ago. Bedford, Massachusetts, a small community outside Boston, MA, will begin a pilot program on multi-age classrooms next year. The recommendation was made by the Davis School Multi-Age Committee to the Bedford School Committee (School Board).
Multi-age classrooms were the norm in education in this country 100 years ago. Bedford, Massachusetts, a small community outside Boston, MA, will begin a pilot program on multi-age classrooms next year. The recommendation was made by the Davis School Multi-Age Committee to the Bedford School Committee (School Board).
The recommendation is for a pilot program first before wider implementation is undertaken. The Committee report includes section on the benefits and concerns of multi-age classrooms and the steps for implementation and evaluation of this teaching approach.
There are many ways to press forward this kind of systemic reform, Mr Pritchett argues. Vouchers and a �market� for education might work well in some circumstances, but other approaches could achieve good results too in some cases: school autonomy (as granted to �charter schools� in the United States, for instance), decentralisation of control, community management, and the use of non-government providers, could all, Mr Pritchett argues, serve the goal of structural reform that he regards as necessary if the application of extra resources is to succeed.
One striking indication of how easy it is to spend money fruitlessly in education comes from the rich countries. According to one study cited by Mr Pritchett, Britain increased its real spending per pupil by 77% between 1970 and 1994; over the same period, the assessment score for learning in maths and science fell by 8%. Australia increased its real spending per pupil by 270%; its pupils� scores fell by 2%. Extra spending by itself is likely to be no more successful in the poor countries than it has been in the rich.
On 5/11/04 the Elvejhem Elementary School held an informational meeting about its decsion to proceed with all multiage classrooms
(combined grade classrooms) for grades 2-5. There will not be any single grade classrooms for these grades.
The MMSD Lead Elementary Principal Jennifer Allen announced that multiage classrooms are the model the school district is moving to. She complemented Elvejhem for holding this meeting as many of the schools that are moving to this model will be doing so next fall without any such informational meetings.
Many parents were upset by their lack of options and the lack of consultation on the part of the district. Eleven teachers attended this meeting in addition to the shcool prinicpal and the district lead principal. The teachers presented a united front in favor of the multiage classrooms. However, there are other teachers who privately oppose this move. Twenty five parents attended the meeting.
From Dave Farber's[IP] List (Farber is Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon): Guru Parulkar writes:
I read this posting with a lot of interest because I also grew up in India and have been following changes in US and in India (as an ordinary interested citizen) for the past 20 years since I came to this country. I was a bit surprised with the generalizations about both India and US suggested in the email from Slashdot.
India is a big country with a lot of diversity. The type of value system as well as exposure to science/engineering implied in the Slashdot posting (children writing essays about getting Nobel prize, children growing up aspiring to be pioneers in science and technology) apply to a small cross-section of the society. I don't think it applies to India in general or even to the majority in India. It is definitely true that the large middle class in India puts tremendous emphasis on education. However, the reason for this emphasis has been that careers in engineering and medicine have been the only way to make descent living. Right or wrong (like it or not) at a very early age kids recognize (because parents and society drill it down) that unless they do well in academics, they wouldn't be able to get into engineering or medicine and thus not have a descent life. And so kids get serious about education and they start to respect other kids who do well in the school. It is not the "love of science or innovation" that has been making people serious about education. It is simply the financial rewards down the road. A lot of us Indians here in US wonder if this academic pressure on kids in India is appropriate because this means kids study and study and don't have time to learn, enjoy, and experience other stuff that matter too in life.
Interestingly enough India has been importing the culture and value system from US, good and bad, at a phenomenal rate (thanks to globalization, Internet and all those 200+ TV channels and Hollywood movies that are easily accessible in India). The changes are amazing. On the positive side: entrepreneurship is encouraged and getting rewarded; kids have other careers besides engineering and medicine that would pay descent money; quality of production of TV programs, movies, and performing arts in general has gotten much much better, and more (btw, it is a pleasure to see (good) Indian movies these days). But at the same time, there is many fold increase on the screen of violence, nudity, sex, and everything that we don't want to see here in US. Similarly kids' and people's obsession with the TV, movie, and sports super stars has been going up and up. Needless to say a cricket star or a TV star gets more respect than a reputed scientist even in India. And so not that much different from here in US.
It is possible that US is losing its dominance in science. I cannot be sure. However I believe the changes in US over the past 20 years in terms of the value system or culture haven't been as dramatic as they have been in India. For more than 20 years that I have been here in US, I believe that kids/people are encouraged to excel and excel in something: sports, academics, performing arts, business, social service, or whatever. And there isn't a strong bias in favor of or against academics. Excellence is rewarded in terms of attention as well as financial returns. Kids understand the system and are well informed about the odds of making it big (e.g. in a sports vs business major) and associated financial rewards. Most importantly, kids do respond to that. For example, when high tech was booming during 90s, computer science enrollments grew at a record pace and when the bubble burst and outsourcing moved the jobs away, the enrollments dropped. Now enrollments are on the rise in bio majors because that is considered hot. So I am ok with the encouraging excellence in all aspects of our lives and rewarding it rather than putting too much emphasis just on academics.
Of course there are a lot of things that we can do better here in US and that list is long ...
In summary
The contrast between US and India in terms of the value system suggested in the email from Slashdot is highly overstated
India is a large and diverse country and emphasis on education for the love of science and innovation may apply to a very small cross-section of population. For rest it is mostly driven by financial well being.
US emphasis on "excellence in something" appeals to me as opposed to too much emphasis on just academics.
Denver is the first major city to approve a salary structure that rewards teachers for the progress of their students, according to this article by Diana Jean Schemo.
As a teacher of emotionally disturbed children, Jeremy Abshire sets goals for each of his students. Geronimo, 14, an American Indian who knew only the letters for "Jerry," will read and write, and sign his true name. Shaneesa, a meek 12-year-old reading at a first-grade level, will catch up to her middle-school peers and attend regular classes in the fall.
Under a proposal approved by teachers here and to be considered by voters next year, if Mr. Abshire's students reach the goals he sets, his salary will grow. But if his classroom becomes a mere holding tank, his salary, too, will stagnate.
"The bottom line is, do you reward teachers for just sitting here and sticking it out, or for doing something?" said Mr. Abshire, who has been teaching for four years. "The free market doesn't handle things that way, so why should it be any different here?"
In March, Denver's teachers became the first in a major city to approve, by a 59 percent majority, a full-scale overhaul of the salary structure to allow "pay for performance," a controversial approach that rewards teachers for the progress of their students.
At a time when more and more superintendents are supporting moves away from the traditional salary structure for teachers, and finding their efforts stymied in an atmosphere of suspicion and financial austerity, Denver teachers' vote is a major breakthrough.
A new study of remedial programs for students with dyslexia shows "that more aggressive treatment can make dyslexic brains work the way normal brains do, activating a region that plays a vital role in reading fluency".
April 27, 2004
VITAL SIGNS
Learning Disabilities: A Clearer Path to Reading Fluency
By JOHN O'NEIL
Remedial programs for students with dyslexia often succeed only in making bad readers into slightly better bad readers. Now a new study shows that more aggressive treatment can make dyslexic brains work the way normal brains do, activating a region that plays a vital role in reading fluency.
Good and bad readers handle tasks differently, brain scanning research has shown, from the processing of sound to the recall of vocabulary. Last year, a study showed that dyslexic students who were tutored with typical methods made limited gains but continued to use cumbersome mental pathways.
The new study, to be published in May in the journal Biological Psychiatry, was the first to compare the effect of standard and aggressive treatments before and after pupils received them.
One group of 37 poor readers, ages 6 to 9, received an average of two hours a week of instruction using a systematic, phonics-based curriculum. A comparison group of 12 poor readers continued to receive their school's normal remedial help: about an hour a week.
Testing showed that in one year the intensive teaching group made up about half the gap between their initial scores and those of a control group of normal readers, while the other students fell further behind.
The brain scans showed that the children who received the intensive remedial tutoring had begun to activate an area of the brain known as the word-form region the way the average readers did.
Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz of Yale, an author of the study, called that change crucial. "The word-form region allows a child to look at a word and to automatically know how to pronounce it, spell it and know what it means," she said. "If a child is not a fluent reader, he or she will avoid reading; it's too effortful."
The Madison TAG Parents Group has an extensive website www.tagparents.org that covers the direction of the district's math curriculum, the current budget crisis, the restructuring of West High School, as well as resources and research articles on issues related to students performing well above grade level. It's worth checking out.
Intel CEO Craig Barrett on US K-12 Math & Science Education
In a USA Today interview, Intel CEO Craig Barrett discusses outsourcing, competition and US K-12 Education: "We do not send our basketball teams to compete against the rest of the world, saying the other teams have to play slower because our folks aren't fit enough to run as fast.":
Q: In K-12 education, what would you like to see that you are not seeing?
A: If we could capture 1% of the hot air that has gone out on this topic and turn it into results, it would be wonderful. The results are how our kids compare to their international counterparts, particularly in math and science. The longer kids stay in the system, the worse they do compared to their international counterparts. In fourth grade, our kids are roughly comparable. By eighth grade, they are behind. By the 12th grade, they are substantially behind other industrialized nations.
Q: What are the hurdles?
A: One is very simply the teachers. I'm not criticizing teachers, per se, but 25% to 30% who teach math or science in K-12 are not educated in the math and science they teach. If you are going to be an engineering major, you are going to need 12 years of solid math. What are the odds of getting 12 consecutive good teachers in a row if 30% of them are not qualified?
While MMSD hasn't had to deal with this issue directly, yet, it's worth noting what's out there with regard to creationism. (A recent poll found over 63% do not accept evolutionary theory.) As a former biologist, I'm stunned at the effort to shackle children's ability to think critically. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/arts/01DINO.html
So, rather than the storyline of an unfairly maligned school caught up the unfair rules of an ill-conceived law, instead we have a school where about only half the kids are proficient in reading and math overall, few can write at grade level, and special education and black students are doing very poorly. Though the school does appear to slowly be making progress, a lot of children are being shortchanged right now. NCLB was designed precisely to ferret out these inequities which are easily obscured by overall averages.
In Belmont, a huge high school with 5,500 pupils, security guards at the door, gangs in the classrooms and a 40% graduation rate, it is hard to imagine how children could ever learn anything in such a forbidding place. Yet even the better schools seem overrun. Placencia Elementary School, for instance, is full of smiling pupils, but like many other schools it does not have proper terms; instead, it follows a �year-round� schedule, with the students being rotated through the classrooms (three groups in, one out). But at least the pupils are being taught close to home. Every day, 6,000 children from the Belmont area are bused out to other districts. �Can it be good,� Mr Alonzo asks, �for a five-year-old to be woken up at 6am to travel two hours for a half-day of education?�
District F demonstrates what one leading Democrat calls the �these-are-not-our-children� attitude of white voters. With their own children now either educated privately or safe in smaller suburban districts, they have not stumped up the cash to build the schools needed to educate the new browner-skinned arrivals. As Roy Romer, the head of the LAUSD, points out, the same community found the money to build the sparkling Disney Concert Hall and the Staples conference centre.
If you visited these classes and didn't look at the sign over the door of the school, you might think you were in an elementary school, or a middle school at best. But such classes are not atypical in large urban high schools, where, except for the Advanced Placement (AP) and honors classes, much of the classroom work is below grade level.
On one trip to a Midwestern city, I found one out of eight assignments at grade level in two high schools. A colleague popped in on about 40 English classes in the course of a day at a West Coast high school and found one -- just one -- class where real learning was going on.
This is the dirty secret in the wars over teacher quality: the low level of academic work at all levels in far too many schools. The consequences of low-level work are seen in poor test results: Students given only work that is below their grade level cannot pass standardized tests about material they have never seen.
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WRITING about the same analysis of Los Angeles public school teachers my colleague 
It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's 
I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via 
A Math book for "High Schools and Normal Schools by S.Y. Gillan [
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
The 
Neil Heinen hosted an interesting conversation Sunday morning with editors and writers (Andrea Gilmore, Ashley Crawford) from the Simpson Street Press on the achievement gap. Video and audio, available: (
